The Piece of Me That Died in the Plague

Caleb Wallace (left) and Phil Valentine

Caleb Wallace, the Texas COVID-era anti-mask activist and sometime border vigilante, died of COVID on Saturday morning. He leaves behind a pregnant widow and three daughters under age six.I can’t imagine the excruciating months and years Wallace’s family now faces, in a world where pandemic restrictions make direct assistance to others more difficult than ever. I want, as a Christian and decent human being, to feel bad for them.

Yet reading myself, I feel, not sympathetic grief, but a towering, weighty vacuum. A nothingness that weighs my limbs like slabs of granite, urging me to surrender to paralysis. The effort necessary to care about others’ suffering feels wasted in situations like this, where that suffering is created by a cause not only widely known, but easily preventable. I feel drawn by the temptation to surrender to bitterness and blame-laying.

Wallace’s death comes one week after Nashville talk-radio icon Phil Valentine, who used his regional pulpit to mock and belittle mask mandates and vaccine drives. August alone has seen three right-wing radio personalities die, all of whom espoused anti-mask and anti-vaccine positions. At least two of them tried to retract their anti-vaccine positions from their deathbeds, adopting a technique beloved of the status quo: repenting after it’s too late.

Of everything this pandemic stole, I miss my ability to care the most. Sure, the illness itself was bad; I had COVID in November. I spent entire days terrified to move, knowing that the slightest disturbance would result in gastroenteritis symptoms. Even now, months later, I wake every morning feeling queasy, needing to wait out the symptoms. But I can adjust. I haven’t adjusted to my newfound inability to care.

Valentine, Wallace, and those like them weren’t merely deceived. They didn’t believe a false narrative; they took leadership roles in peddling disinformation and lies. I can accept that some people distrust the vaccine, as it’s new, the rollout is unusually fast, and change is often scary. But these men actively distributed claims they knew were unsourced and false, to a public hungry for some authoritative-looking figure to verify their fears.

But like drug dealers, the local, street-level guys have little power. They’re playing in a market primed by international cartels and an economic machine. While Phil Valentine tried to retract his antivax statements, and Caleb Wallace’s soon-to-be widow urged people to embrace the vaccine her husband opposed, a national consortium of opinion brokers continued coaching their market to distrust science and embrace weird technocratic wizardry.

Fox News's prime-time stars, l-r: Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity

Fox News has essentially been Ground Zero for the Ivermectin conspiracy, telling gullible patsies that government scientists are liars, and we should take off-label livestock medications. If local talk-radio conservatives tried to pivot away from these conspiracies, they’d lose their audiences, which have accepted the top-level myths of how mysterious forces want to curtail your liberties. Phil Valentine might’ve regretted his statements, but he’d never compete with Tucker Carlson.

Like the drug dealer analogy, though, the peak peddlers don’t believe their message. While Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and others actively tell audiences to distrust science and embrace their cargo cult, we now know that Fox News requires vaccine credentials to enter the building. In other words, Fox News knows they’re lying, that they’re paying telegenic talking heads to repeat those lies; they either don’t care, or… something.

I say “something” because I’m bereft of other explanations. Fox, and regional Fox mini-me types like Valentine, spout the party line because, whatever motivation they might have to clarify and speak truthfully, they find those motivations less compelling than the impulse to spread a profitable, camera-friendly lie. They know the truth; they simply don’t care. And they encourage audiences to not care likewise.

The claims emerging from conservative spokespeople are flat wrong and counterfactual, and belied by their own policies. We know many prominent conservatives, including the former President and every Republican governor, are vaccinated. Many have been for months. Yet they continue encouraging their adherents to reject the minor inconvenience necessary to arrest the pandemic, causing many to put themselves in positions where they will risk sickness and death.

I’ve spent eighteen months trying to care. Trying to convince myself that, even when people reject the one thing that will save their lives, they’re still humans, made in God’s image, deserving of respect. But I just don’t feel that anymore. These people encourage others to risk their lives, and every life they come across, then weep crocodile tears. I can’t care anymore, and for that, I can't forgive them.

The Truncheon of Forgetting, the Hand of Remembering

Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police: a Novel

On a nameless island in a nameless sea, people just periodically forget important things in their lives. Emeralds, perfume, photographs. No, the items themselves never disappear; but sweeping, population-wide amnesia strips the items of meaning in human brains. Our protagonist, a writer, simply takes these disappearances for granted. But some people remember, and their memory is a threat to the island’s deeply bureaucratic social order.

Novelist, essayist, and science journalist Yōko Ogawa is persistently prolific in her native Japanese, but her works have only trickled into English translation. This book, first published in 1994, has only newly appeared in English, rendered by her most frequent translator, Stephen Snyder. Having read one previous Ogawa novel, I awaited this one with great anticipation. Then, sadly, I made a good-faith attempt to read it.

Our protagonist makes her living writing literary novels. (Hmmm.) She writes about people having realistic experiences, which she attempts to analyze, or at least make romantic for the reading populace. But around her, as playing cards and roses and birds become meaningless artifacts which most people remember distantly, if at all, the range of realistic experiences is becoming painfully circumscribed. She struggles to muster ideas and make a living.

A flippant comment forces a realization on our protagonist: her beloved editor doesn’t forget when everybody else does. Our protagonist realizes this makes him a target for the Memory Police, whose ham-fisted but consistently polite raids quietly remove anybody who remembers what the social order deems forgotten. Unique knowledge, or an informed understanding of history, makes people dangerous to life on the island.

You might notice something missing from this synopsis: proper nouns. There’s my first problem with this book. My previous Ogawa experience, her novel The Housekeeper and the Professor, used this expressionistic vagueness to its advantage. But that novel was less than half the size of this one, with far fewer characters, set in a favorably genericized Japanese university city. This larger, busier novel needs some names just to keep the ensemble organized.

Yōko Ogawa

The novelist decides to protect her editor by building a secret annex inside her house. To survive the Memory Police, the editor will have to live inside a tiny basement cube with minimal light, occasional food, and a prison-style toilet. This description combines the most non-specific elements of the Freudian id and Anne Frank’s notorious squat. The product seems both impractical, and artificially constrained.

Meanwhile, the Memory Police stage periodic raids throughout the island, but apparently disappear between times. Our protagonist cycles the city with only momentary twinges of discomfort. This form of intrusive fascism seems uniquely Japanese, in that no matter how meddlesome, destructive, or scary their actions, their behavior is still polite, simply part of a background of social conformity that everyone accepts as necessary and normal.

Even when members of the novelist’s network, actively complicit in her efforts to preserve her editor from kidnapping, get seized by the Memory Police, they simply accept this as preordained. Ah well, they seemingly say, such is the price of stability. Even knowing they’re breaking the law, harboring a fugitive, and keeping him alive through Rube Goldberg-like schemes, they seem largely unperturbed by the ubiquity of the polite fascist state.

Brief reminder, this novel debuted in 1994, during the long hangover from Japan’s hypercharged 1980s economy. As Japan’s industrial state pulled its claws in and waited to see what happened next, people simply accepted their high accrued debts and diminished lifestyles. Japanese capitalism has, for decades, rewarded hard work and self-abnegation, creating that icon of post-boom malaise, the sararīman. Sticking your neck out isn’t considered heroic in Japan.

Therefore, I assume Ogawa’s parable of enforced technocratic blandness must’ve made sense to its intended audience. But that context has gotten lost. A quarter-century later, across the Pacific, the story just feels curiously low-stakes. The Memory Police’s atrocities don’t seem to elicit an emotional response, even from those who perpetrate them. This isn’t helped by the dreamlike lack of specificity; I cared more about Ogawa’s contradictory geography than her characters.

This saddens me. Having enjoyed Ogawa’s writing in the past, my inability to connect with her characters or plot this time around feels disappointing. Ogawa tells us something catastrophic is at stake in her story, but she holds everyone at arm’s length, discussing them with the courteous emotional detachment of an after-church picnic. I care more deeply about my inability to care, than I do about the novel.

I expected so much, but sadly, I feel so little.

OnlyFans and the Anti-Democracy of Sex Work

OnlyFans' business model has, until now, tacitly depended on user-made porn

Last week’s announcement that pay-to-play social network OnlyFans will discontinue hosting “sexually explicit” material, is creating some controversy. First, OnlyFans hasn’t yet provided a meaningful definition of “sexually explicit,” on a site whose entire financial model until now has centered on women with their blouses off. Second, what motivated the change? OnlyFans claims that credit card companies brought the hammer down; MasterCard has responded (I’m paraphrasing) “Nuh-uh!”

OnlyFans launched by promising to exclude the intrusive advertising content that often slows social networks like Facebook or Twitter. But its customer base quickly drifted to the one commodity that people are consistently willing to pay for in today’s media-saturated environment, sex. Like pay-cable TV, people are willing to pay out for content that ad-based mainstream media won’t supply. And like drugs, the economic driver for sex work proves persistent.

We’ve seen this happen before recently. CraigsList famously shuttered its “erotic services” personal ads because it feared the federal government would use anti-human trafficking laws to act against them. This fear wasn’t unfounded, since the Department of Justice used exactly such laws to seize and dismantle BackPage, a resource sex workers used to find and pre-screen customers. Both actions were taken to assuage fears of “human trafficking,” a notorious bugbear.

Historically, conservatives have objected to sex work generally, and prostitution specifically, because they believe sex workers and their customers are just bad people. Progressives take a more nuanced approach, expressing concerns about coercion and exploitation, which aren’t entirely unfair. But progressives reflexively lump all sex work with human trafficking, which aren’t synonyms. The reasoning from Left and Right differ; the outcomes, for most sex workers, are indistinguishable.

Internet marketing promised to break this Left-Right duopoly. Remembering the giddy effusion directed toward the nascent read-write Web in the 1990s, I recall advocates like Howard Rheinggold gushing that, because nobody owned the Internet, it diffused authority to individuals. Many early Web advocates were aging ex-hippies, pleased that technology had finally fulfilled their long-dormant promise to seize authority from The Man and distribute it with egalitarian fervor onto the masses.

OnlyFans, like BackPage before it, represents a breakout in economic democratization. Individual women, needing income during the pandemic’s economic shakeout, seized their destinies by offering their services online. The Internet gave them the ability to screen customers, to set the terms of their labors, and to decide when or whether they were prepared to work. Internet sex work is almost Marxian in its dedication to individual empowerment.

If, like me, you internalized a narrative from childhood that sex work is degrading and shameful, this might not seem ennobling. But sex work has low barriers to entry, a legitimate economic expression, and a character of work. You, individually, may disapprove, but that doesn’t matter. Like alcohol, tobacco, and other vices, the economic drivers behind sex work don’t await popular acceptance. These drivers already exist for women needing work.

The MindGeek cartel controls so many adult sites that the market is essentially not free

Equally importantly, when OnlyFans, CraigsList, and BackPage stop supporting self-employed sex workers, the work doesn’t go away. Like with narcotics, large cartels step into vacuums created when governments squelch independent operators. The largest cartel, Montreal-based MindGeek, already controls such a large fraction of online sex work that it essentially sets the terms for smaller companies; like Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, startups have to compete directly with MindGeek.

Moralists may applaud OnlyFans’ willingness to deplatform “sexually explicit” content, despite the pledge’s vague wording. But by taking away self-employed women’s ability to flash their tits for pay, OnlyFans has created a backdoor subsidy for MindGeek and other “adult content” oligarchies. Like Standard Oil, DeBeers Diamonds, or Harvey Weinstein, MindGeek has an extensive list of abuse accusations, and because of their market share, nobody dares challenge their misuses of power.

Though OnlyFans sex workers used the corporate-owned platform to find their markets, and paid OnlyFans for the access, the company nevertheless gave women (and others) who needed income an opportunity to set their own terms. It helped democratize sex work. Reducing the number of opportunities to find work, doesn’t make either the sellers’ needs or the buyers’ demands disappear. It simply channels the economic pressures onto MindGeek and other monopolies.

MindGeek is the Al Capone of Internet sex work. Removing a platform honest, hardworking women use to score lucrative sex work, doesn’t encourage them to find other employment, especially in times like these, when other employment is scarce. It simply increases the power of the cartel to exploit, and profit from, the work of disfranchised laborers. OnlyFans’ anti-porn stance makes everyone less free.

The Benefits of Becoming a Psychopath

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 45
Peter Weir (director) & Rafael Yglesias (writer), Fearless

Business executive Max Klein (Jeff Bridges) has become a media icon after being photographed walking unharmed away from a major airplane crash. Other survivors extol his bravery, his calming influence, and his leadership under pressure. But questions start surfacing: why is Max averse to answering FAA investigators’ questions? Why is he reluctant to contact his wife and son? What’s with his strange obsession with fellow survivor Carla Rodrigo (Rosie Perez)?

Australian filmmaker Peter Weir’s American career has fluctuated wildly. At times, he’s made critical and commercial darlings like Witness and Dead Poets Society; other times he’s favored more hermetic content, like The Mosquito Coast, or this strange outing. Based on a novel by Rafael Yglesias, who also adapted the screenplay, this movie became a critical darling, but went almost unwatched by general audiences. Which is a crying shame.

What’s the opposite of a traumatic reaction? Because that’s what Max has. Surviving a catastrophe against all odds, he suddenly becomes convinced nothing can hurt him. He contacts an old girlfriend and reopens old wounds; to showcase his perceived invincibility, he eats a strawberry in front of her, despite a lifelong allergy. Both events prove him right. Despite risking further hurting himself, physically and psychologically, he emerges unscathed.

The people around Max don’t share his enthusiasm. His wife Laura (Isabella Rossellini) watches his showboating antics with increasing perplexity. The widow of Max’s business partner (Deirdre O’Connell), who didn’t survive, demands answers, but Max proves evasive, refusing to explain his actions during the crash. People who once loved and trusted Max watch him behaving like a stranger and can only watch, tearfully, as his grandiosity becomes dangerous.

Only Carla continues to enjoy Max’s confidence. Though strangers before the crash, their survivor status creates a bond that transforms them both. Except, where Max believes himself invincible, Carla has become paralyzed with near-constant terror. And with good reason: though she walked away without a scratch, her baby, flying unsecured before child safety seats became mandatory, was killed. Carla believes herself a failure as a mother and a woman.

The airline’s pet psychologist, Dr. Perlman (John Turturro), begins shadowing Max and Carla, trying to understand their perverse bond. There’s no indication these two, who are both married, have a romantic connection; they seem more like brother and sister. But as they become more engrossed with their shared trauma, and their reactions become more like images in a funhouse mirror, Perlman worries they’re compounding one another’s injuries.

Jeff Bridges walks nonchalantly away from disaster in Fearless

Critics have acclaimed Jeff Bridges’ performance in this movie. As Max, he moves from mere confidence, to aplomb, to almost messianic grandiosity, his faith in his own indestructibility making him loud and swaggering. Paradoxically, the more unbreakable he believes himself, the less empathy Max has for others. He simply can’t see how his reckless actions impact others. He is becoming, in short, psychopathic.

Weir and Yglesias’ storytelling turns on the failure of absolute moral thinking. Max thinks he doesn’t need to fear anything anymore, which makes him destructive to anyone around him. Meanwhile Carla, plagued with survivors’ guilt, sees reason to fear in every circumstance. Both become extreme versions of their former selves, and importantly, each thinks they need to “cure” the other. They’re unable to find balance between their moral extremes.

Throughout most of the movie, we don’t see something very important: the crash itself. Though the moments before and after transform everyone involved, and their families, we don’t see the actual event. Because we only understand the catastrophe through its survivors’ reports, we wonder who to trust. (This is only compounded when Max’s attorney encourages him to exaggerate what happened, to extract a lucrative settlement from the airline.)

Only when Max and Carla address the catastrophe directly do we see what happened—and, in that moment, we finally see the truth our protagonists can’t admit to themselves. We finally start seeing Weir and Yglesias’ themes emerge, of how human life is balanced between destructive extremes. Fear and bravery, individual and community, control and luck. Our characters have flailed badly because they’re unable to find the balance between extremes.

Again, this movie collapsed on release. Its weird, philosophical premise didn’t permit TV-friendly marketing, and admittedly, its final three minutes flinch from their possible conclusions. Yet artistically, it remains a high point for its participants’ careers, a moment they committed themselves to something ambiguous, even dangerous, and stridently uncommercial. It pushes its characters to the poles of human limit, then encourages us to help them work their way back home.

Horror Movies, Community, and the Power of Stories

Sisters Cindy and Ziggy face off, in Act One of Fear Street Part 2

Near the beginning of the second installment in Netflix’s Fear Street teenage horror trilogy, principal characters Ziggy Berman (Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink) and her goody two-shoes sister Cindy (relative unknown Emily Rudd) have a quarrel. Cindy, who has worked hard, gained some level of respectability, and hopes to someday attend college, sees Ziggy as a malcontent and heel-dragger. Ziggy sees Cindy as a sell-out. We’re all trapped, Ziggy reminds her sister, by the witch’s curse.

Watching this exchange the first time, I had no problem. The entire Fear Street trilogy deals with the ways community patterns, whether healthy or dysfunctional, repeat themselves across generations, and the question of whether individuals can break the cycles of inheritance. It’s a sort of funhouse mirror version of the Small Town America myth, pitting the bucolic town of Sunnyvale against the rusticating despair of Shadyside. The “witch’s curse” myth simply symbolizes that dismal inheritance.

Then, the personality behind the widely watched YouTube channel “Scaredy Cats” weighed in. Like me, series host Matt (who also goes by Mildred) views art and literature through a political and economic lens. Mildred sees Ziggy and Cindy’s argument as a nihilistic surrender to capitalist forces that want to keep the working class beholden; Ziggy’s claim that some centuries-old disembodied witch tale holds Shadyside back, is emblematic of the ways workers internalize a poverty narrative.

I initially balked at Matt’s characterization. How dare this big-city interloper, an urbane media creator from Toronto, Ontario (of all places), tell me how to interpret small-town American malaise! Ziggy and Cindy’s Manichaean dichotomy perfectly describes my experience with small and small-ish American towns, where some people try to escape by working hard, “improving” themselves, and following the rules; while others try to drag the ambitious down with mockery, derision, and accusations of rank disloyalty.

On further consideration, though, I realized Mildred may be partly correct. Ziggy has internalized a colonial campfire boogeyman narrative of pessimistic resignation, while Cindy has internalized a modernist, cheerful narrative of success through conformity. In this movie, narratives don’t just explain events, they create identity. Which, thinking about it, is essentially what much American rah-rah boosterism does: it aligns individuals with whichever story makes them most comfortable with the circumstances capitalism makes available to them.

About the time Cindy and Ziggy quarrel about individual identities, their doomed summer camp prepares for an annual tradition, the Color War. Campers from Sunnyvale battle campers from Shadyside in an elaborate capture-the-flag which, apparently, Sunnyvale has won for forty consecutive years. Calling it the “Color War” makes it sound racial, which it isn’t (both communities are essentially integrated), except yes it is. Both camps muster enthusiasm with songs and speeches “othering” the opposing camp.

Watching these adolescent war conclaves, I couldn’t help remembering the stories used in small Nebraska towns where I’ve lived for thirty years. Towns, schools, and workplaces constantly encourage local loyalty through tales of cowboys, sodbusters, and the Oregon Trail, stories of supposed ancestral persistence, often stripped of real history. By contrast, capitalism, higher ed, and mass media tempt youth with narratives of shiny modernist counter-conformity, narratives that often involve walking away from your hometown forever.

Stories unify groups, while also making opportunities available to individuals—and, importantly, also closing other opportunities. People who want to escape small-town life have to choose how they’ll achieve that, which forecloses the chance to find the niche where they’ll successfully serve their community. Likewise, those who have loyalty to their community, choose careers and family paths that make moving out insuperably difficult, ensuring they’ll stay put forever. Just remember, you can’t serve two masters.

In the movie’s culmination, Ziggy and Cindy, having overtaken an axe-wielding maniac to find each other, both reject their internalized narratives. Cindy realizes her devotion to “escaping” Shadyside blinds her to local responsibilities, while Ziggy realizes she’s valued her community over the people in it. Both of them have, temporarily, transcended the narratives they once accepted unquestioningly. Then the slasher returns and, without a guiding narrative for their actions, they both wind up dead. (-ish.)

So yeah, Matt’s actually correct, these narratives—Ziggy’s inherited narrative, and Cindy’s imposed one—are artificial and constricting. But, like money or race, the fact they’re artificial doesn’t make them any less real. American small towns tend to stay rich or poor, conservative or progressive, healthy or dysfunctional, across several generations. And they stay this way because of the stories their people tell each other. This, I believe, is the central message of Fear Street.

See Also:
Fear Street and the Illusions of Community

The First Great American Coup

David Zucchino, Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

On November 10th, 1898, just two days after rigging statewide elections by literally stuffing ballot boxes, White supremacists overthrew the government of Wilmington, North Carolina. They provoked a riot by claiming a Black journalist said something hurtful in a local newspaper. By the end of the day, the mob had decimated the local Black middle class, and driven the racially integrated city government out at gunpoint.

It remains the only time violence has overthrown a legally elected government in American history.

Veteran New York Times correspondent David Zucchino has built his career covering civil wars and apartheid-style governments. Importantly, like William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Zucchino is a journalist, not an historian. He specializes in context, facts, and nuance, delivered in terms which general audiences understand. This means his writing is copiously sourced, but written in plain English, without scholarly allusions.

White Wilmingtonians, including many who fought in the Civil War, thought themselves natural inheritors of power and prerogative. But as former slaves and their descendents migrated to Wilmington seeking work, they soon became the city’s majority. Wilmington became rich and populous, the largest city in the state, and the Governor of North Carolina was a Wilmington moderate. But despite the rewards, White Wilmingtonians nursed their grudges.

Zucchino describes the years before the insurrection, when former Confederates attempted to maintain White supremacist dominion. But swelling populations of Black Wilmingtonians began working hard, amassing savings, and owning their own homes. To the White population’s chagrin, Black Wilmingtonians (and, increasingly, their poor White allies) began voting their economic interests. This, the Confederates and Klan wizards agreed, must not stand.

Alex Manly, owner and editor of North Carolina’s only Black-owned daily newspaper, provided the trigger White supremacists needed. He wrote an editorial condemning myths of the oversexed Black man, a mandatory part of White justification. The White supremacists were outraged. How dare this Black entrepreneur refute our racialized paranoia! Why, let this go unchallenged, they suggested, and White dominion might have to change!

David Zucchino

The victors would later present events of November 10th as spontaneous, Black-caused, and unexpected. But Zucchino demonstrates, through the copious letters, diaries, and newspaper articles that the print-suffused era left behind, that Wilmington’s “race riot” was orchestrated for months in advance. White Wilmingtonians wanted this conflict to serve their political ends. Then they massaged the historical record afterward to maintain their positions of privilege.

History, Zucchino tacitly acknowledges, isn’t only about what happened. It’s also about us, the readers, trying to understand how we reached the moment we live in. As America has become more racially polarized than any time in the last three generations, as many progressives believe police persecute minorities and conservatives believe only vigilance protects against incipient anarchy, Zucchino pays attention to these themes in North Carolina’s history.

Explicitly racialized paranoia justified both aggressive policing and White vigilantes. (Rich Whites organized their working-class allies into a brute squad nicknamed the Red Shirts, whose tactics were every bit as autocratic as that name implies.) Whites stockpiled state-of-the-art weapons, many from the recent Spanish-American War, behind claims of “self-defense,” while Blacks were denied arms, owing to fears of crime. It starts to seem chillingly familiar.

Having ousted the city’s coalition government, Red Shirts began chasing prominent civil rights leaders from the city. They claimed they were removing the city’s lawless elements and malcontents. But the Blacks targeted for removal were overwhelmingly middle-class, and included several prominent entrepreneurs and business owners. Wilmington’s economy contracted following this racialized purge, and has never fully recovered its former dynamism and entrepreneurial vigor.

In the aftermath, White supremacists seized the state legislature, and an interracial coalition of progressives fled North Carolina, fearing the rifle or the noose. Legislators instituted measures designed to keep Blacks from voting, and admitted their motivations in doing so. Terrified of the spectre of “Negro rule” (Wilmington had sent America’s only Black Representative to Congress), the legislator strengthened Jim Crow laws and legalized racial crackdowns. These laws would stand for another seventy years.

History is never truly a dead letter, despite the lifeless lists of names and dates which state education standards expect students to memorize. The Wilmington insurrectionists provided a blueprint from which White supremacists continue to learn. Zucchino lays out the history of Wilmington’s violence with the breathless pace of a thriller novelist, and the scholarly research of an academic. But most importantly, he holds a mirror up where readers can see ourselves.

Because history is always, ultimately, about us.

Snapshots From the Heyday of the Resistance

Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s

In the first half of the 1960s, the promise of “nonviolent resistance” fueled the Civil Rights Movement and helped prompt long-overdue reforms. But the backlash against these changes led to police crackdowns, vigilante violence, and other harms against America’s Black population. Cities began boiling over into outbreaks of violence, which contemporaries called “riots.” It’s more helpful, though, to think of these outbreaks as rebellions against injustice.

Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton makes no bones about her purpose in this volume: she wants to reevaluate the “race riots” of the later Civil Rights Era. Contemporary accounts, mostly taking police and civic authorities at their word, regarded these outbreaks as inexplicable outbursts of Black anger, a narrative encouraged by racist stereotypes of unaccountably angry Black culture. Hinton wants to situate this violence in its historical context, and maybe shed light on its causes and legacy.

In Hinton’s first part, she considers the violence that swept American cities in the later Civil Rights Movement. Covering the years between approximately 1968 and 1972, she looks at the waves of race violence that swept many American cities—though such violence was widespread, Hinton selects a few representative cities, and Cairo, Illinois, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, loom large. The scars from these years remain visible on the urban landscape.

This violence was depicted, in contemporary news accounts, as uncaused and mystifying. But Hinton finds substantial causes. Usually, White vigilante communities with chillingly fascist names like the White Hats would attack Black neighborhoods in backlash against Civil Rights gains, prompting Black community groups to organize against them. The police then used this organization as justification for high-handed crackdowns on suspiciously localized “crime.”

Violence wracked mostly Black neighborhoods, but other minorities also suffered friction, particularly Hispanic communities, as Puerto Rican populations were growing throughout America. The state refused to leave communities of color alone. The combination of White vigilantism and aggressive policing created unsustainable tensions in minority communities. In many cases, police departments and White backlash groups actively provoked confrontations in hopes of creating camera-friendly violence.

Both sides saw the cyclical confrontations as essentially without cause. White people considered Black populations as innately violent, and therefore practiced preemptive crackdowns, while Black communities didn’t perceive the police as agents of peace. Tensions multiplied through means that seem, historically, ironic. As lethal violence against minority populations became impolitic, police responded through heavy use of tear gas and attack dogs, powerful tools that nevertheless compounded hostile feelings.

Elizabeth Hinton

In many cities, vigilante gangs and White supremacists had explicit police support. Many operated as almost extensions of the state. The structure of federally subsidized public housing projects, like Chicago’s notorious Cabrini Green, aimed to accustom Black residents to constant police presence, a presence aimed not at maintaining the peace or preventing crime, but at cracking down on resident organizations. Sadly, over time, such preemptive crackdowns worked.

Hinton’s second part considers the legacies this generation of violence created. Black violence was briefly commonplace, but police succeeded in cracking down harshly, sapping community groups’ will to resist. These crackdowns included police, with federal backing, stockpiling weapons once common in war. The instruments of state continued treating Black violence as a counterinsurgency, and not surprisingly, Black populations responded much like chronically occupied populations of enemy nations.

Instead of responding to high-handed policing with armed resistance (and justifying further crackdowns) after 1972, Black communities began bottling up resentments. Forceful resistance began happening only after exceptional cases of egregious injustice. Hinton describes outbursts that happened in Miami in 1980, Los Angeles in 1992, and Cincinnati in 2001. Hinton also situates these outbursts in historical context which we, who lived through these times, often lacked.

A careful historian, Hinton mostly avoids commenting on events too recent for more global comprehension. Only in her conclusion does Hinton connect over fifty years of violence to the events of 2020, when the George Floyd killing prompted an interracial alliance into the largest sustained protest actions in American history. In her final pages, Hinton brings her historical narrative up-to-date through Fall of 2020. But observant readers will recognize hints of the present throughout her history.

This book isn’t a sociological analysis of themes and psychology behind what happened. Hinton instead writes a straightforward narrative history of events, using the participants’ own words where possible, to show a straight line of violence through the late Civil Rights era, to our own time. As the best history generally does, Hinton presents us, her audience, to ourselves. Because history isn’t about the dead past, it’s really about us.

The Plural “You” in the Individualistic Society

At what point to they stop being individuals, and become a swarm?

Eight months ago today, we witnessed civilian attackers swarm the U.S. Capitol with singular determination, smashing windows and climbing walls. Their eagerness to invade America’s bastion of federal authority, and thereby seize decision-making power over our government, has remained part of our political discussion ever since. Many of us watching had flashbacks to common 10th Grade American Civics fears, of some charismatic firebrand overturning the Constitution.

But it also channeled deeper fears. Watching insurgents scale the walls, I had flashbacks to a recurring childhood nightmare, of vermin invading my house. Some breach usually opened behind my bed or in the back of my closet, and creatures, usually shiny beetles, swarmed out, overtaking everything I treasured and turning my home disgusting and uninhabitable. The insurgents literally looked, to my eyes, like the stuff of juvenile nightmares.

We who traffic in words often lament a gap in English grammar: the second-person pronoun, “you,” is both singular and plural. This means that, without contextual clues, it’s difficult to discern whether a speaker or writer saying “you” means one individual being addressed, a group of persons, or an entire class being addressed collectively. Some informal words, like the Southern “y’all,” offset this, but not completely, and not in ways portable to common English.

The former president’s long, rambling January 6th speech, urging his adherents to “stop the steal,” included the word “you” several times. “We will not let them silence your voices,” he said near the beginning. “Many of you have traveled from all across the nation to be here…. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” In context, these “you” uses clearly mean the plural, the crowd gathered to express loyalty to the outgoing president’s mission.

But then his tone turned. “You're stronger, you're smarter, you've got more going than anybody,” he told the crowd, and later: “You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” These references clearly still signal everyone gathered, but the tone doesn’t seem plural. He’s started speaking to a collective “you,” a “you” not comprised of separate individuals gathered together, but of a collectivized mass acting unilaterally. A singular plural.

Groups and populations are, of course, comprised of individuals. Religious congregations or labor unions are made of people, with names, personal histories, and individual aspirations. But there comes a point where preachers or trade unionists stop speaking to the individuals assembled before them, and start speaking to the collective group. The individuals encompassed in the plural “you” stop being individuals, and become part of something larger.

A battle between two Greek hoplite phalanxes, the ultimate collective unit,
depicted on an ancient Greek krater vase.

That arguably happened on January 6th. The crowd, assembled to support the outgoing president, certainly had memorable individual members, like low-rent cosplayer Jake Angeli, or the camera-friendly weeper, Elizabeth from Knoxville. But, motivated by fervorous belief and their leader’s encouragement, they voluntarily relinquished their individuality. Like my hypothetical religious congregation or trade union, they willingly became a collective unit.

This experience was hardly unique. All last summer, we witnessed protestors, unified by belief that George Floyd’s death exposed widespread injustice, voluntarily paused their individual identities and became part of a collectivized call for reform. The police who met these protestors frequently linked their riot shields and marched against the crowds like a Greek hoplite phalanx, maybe the ultimate expression of individuals who voluntarily become a unit.

Political journalist Adam Serwer wrote yesterday that the Fraternal Order of Police, America’s largest police trade union, has offered only salutary, mumbling condemnations of the insurgents who attacked the Capitol. This is remarkable. The FOP represents two of the most effective “collective you” groups, the police and trade unionists. As Serwer notes, their inability to condemn the Capitol attackers reveals which collective they’re most loyal to.

But recognizing this “collective you” phenomenon creates a problem. When individuals relinquish their unique identities, to become the singular mass, can we hold individuals accountable? The FBI and DOJ currently have manhunts on for individual insurgents. But like my nightmare beetles, chasing individual vermin with cans of Raid does little good. They’re still procreating in the walls; this infestation isn’t a matter of discrete individuals.

Not that stopping individuals doesn’t matter. If a beetle crawls across my sandwich, I’ll definitely squish it. But that one isn’t the problem; the breeding grounds, and the structural cracks that let them enter the house and return food to their nest, matter more. Likewise, pursuing every member of the “collective you” wastes time and energy. We need to find where they propagate, where they feed, and then fumigate.

Miss Marple for a Darker Time

Brianna Labuskes, A Familiar Sight (Dr. Gretchen White, Book 1)

Whenever the Boston PD can’t solve a mystery, they contact Dr. Gretchen White, behavioral psychologist and amateur sleuth. Like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Dr. White, who mostly goes by “Gretchen,” asks the questions the fuzz isn’t allowed to ask. Unlike Miss Marple, Gretchen is a clinical psychopath, and may have killed someone twenty-five years ago. This means the Boston PD needs Gretchen, but they don’t trust her.

Brianna Labuskes’ sixth novel, and first series title, ties me in knots as a reviewer. It’s fast-paced, cinematic, and establishes a mind puzzle so intricate, I felt myself swept along. But Labuskes also trafficks in genre and regional clichés that drive me bananas. Repeatedly, I found myself so enrapt by Labuskes’ writing that I forgot myself and vanished into the book, then she dropped some banality so glaring, I jolted back to reality with whiplash.

Attorney Lena Booker left Gretchen an enigmatic voicemail before dying, in an apparent accidental overdose. But Gretchen refuses to believe her tightly wound friend (one of Gretchen’s few real friends) did something so careless as die accidentally. She persuades her PD handler, Detective Patrick Shaughnessy, to postpone a final ruling until she gathers every loose end. Shaughnessy agrees, provided Gretchen lets his partner, Det. Lauren Marconi, ride along.

Start right there. Labuskes names her police characters “Patrick Shaughnessy” and “Lauren Marconi,” about the most formulaically ethnic names you could give Boston characters. Shaughnessy is fat, ugly, and ill-tempered, a vintage Irish Policeman burnout character. Marconi is described as attractive, but makes herself as sexless as possible for professionalism’s sake. She reads like a Law & Order casting call notification. Major low-hanging fruit.

Gretchen zips through Boston with Marconi in tow, in her shiny, sleek Porsche, a metaphor for Gretchen’s hastily mobile mind. The late Lena Booker’s final case involved Reed Kent, a bereaved husband whose clinically psychopathic tweenage daughter stands accused of stabbing her mother, Reed’s wife, to death. But Gretchen discovers the case goes deeper. Lena, Reed, and Tess Murphy were thick as thieves twenty years ago… until Tess mysteriously vanished overnight.

Thus, Gretchen and Marconi vanish down a rabbit hole of overlapping mysteries. Solving Lena’s death means solving Claire Kent’s murder, which requires solving Tess Murphy’s disappearance. These difficult cases get compounded when Tess’s brother, a Congressman running for reelection, and Reed’s sister, a nurse specializing in troubled youth, both stonewall the investigation. Seems everyone has something to hide, including Lena, whose secrets remain locked even in death.

Brianna Labuskes

If this sounds Byzantine, don’t feel intimidated. Labuskes spins these cantilevered mysteries out through short, mostly dialog-driven scenes, where characters lie or disclose, slinging accusations at others or defending themselves. Labuskes, and her viewpoint characters, don’t indulge in philosophical maundering or long soliloquies. Gretchen, holder of multiple advanced degrees, sometimes pauses to explain complex concepts, but she always keeps it short.

Sometimes in reviews, I contrast “fully realized characters” with “authorial sock puppets.” By this I mean characters who have complex, nuanced motivations, versus those who do what the author’s outline requires. Reading Labuskes, I realize this is false. All characters, no matter how refined, exist entirely in the author’s head. Labuskes lets her characters feel as realized as she requires, while signposting that this is a story, a human-made contrivance, written by a person.

This comes across most directly in alternating chapters. In odd-numbered chapters, we see the present investigation unfold through Gretchen’s detached, analytical eyes. As both a psychologist and a psychopath, two groups famous for reading people, Gretchen spots lies and small details. Indeed, she sometimes comes across as a mind-reader. Because she is, indeed, the author’s narrative device, and someone needs to explain her finer points in plain English.

In even-numbered chapters, Reed Kent’s backstory unfolds in reverse. We watch him gradually realize he’s an unreliable narrator in his own life, possibly even a villain, whose stunted emotions drive people away. Thing is, as two mysteries unravel in Gretchen’s chapters, they become more constrictive in Reed’s. He knows the truth about Claire’s murder, and Tess Murphy’s disappearance, but he can’t tell us, because he can’t admit it to himself.

How you receive Labuskes’ story depends on the expectations you bring into the reading. Like a Hollywood thriller, she presents a tightly constructed, fast-moving narrative, where every character and action proves ultimately relevant. Like an Agatha Christie mystery, this story is remarkably bloodless and sexless (occasional vulgarity). Yet it’s also complex, even if the psychology is underdeveloped. It’s a new take on the time-honored thriller form.

Some Musings From a Horror Movie Skeptic

Jason Voorhees

My parents didn’t let me watch horror movies growing up. I imagine lots of parents didn’t “let” my friends watch horror either, for what that’s worth. But the cultural saturation of slasher flicks in the 1970s and 1980s, and those occasional parents permissive enough to turn a blind eye, meant I grew up surrounded by horror iconography anyway. My mother thought my sensibilities were too tender to withstand the emotional onslaught of horror.

This weekend, I binge-watched Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy in one long, caffeine-fueled evening and, to my surprise, slept like a baby. Not because the movies weren’t good, mind. I thought them remarkably well-done, often genuinely scary, with several well-earned jump scares and characters crafted with enough depth that, when they died violently, I had a justified emotional response. And yet, though I was occasionally startled, I was never out-and-out afraid.

I wondered… was my mother, perhaps, wrong?

Fear Street accurately pastiches prior horror franchises. Part One reshapes Kevin Williamson’s Scream into a commentary on the horror mindset. Part Two channels Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp, but with more emphasis on the price characters pay to survive such stories. And Part 3 is like a police sketch of an M. Night Shyamalan period psychodrama. Although I wrote yesterday that writer-director Leigh Janiak misses the sociopolitical point, these movies are genuinely well done.

So why, in retrospect, was I not terrified? I remember jolting awake from deep black terror many nights, having dreamt I was pursued by Hollywood’s favorite big-ticket monsters, usually Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees. These nightmares helped verify my parents’ opinion that I felt things too deeply, that my emotions ran too wide, to ever safely watch horror movies. As an adult, I now consume remarkably similar content recreationally, then go to sleep.

Freddy Kreuger

Except, looking back at those nightmares, I didn’t really have bad dreams about overhyped movie monsters. Sure, I had fleeting images of Freddy’s disfigured face and gloved hand, or Jason without a face, swinging a nine-pound maul like a toy. But those were secondary; to pinch Hollywood parlance, they were set dressing. Having never seen those movies, my brain couldn’t replay their storylines; it used their images to express my personal fears.

Growing up in a military household, I didn’t have an extended social net. Every two years, Uncle Sam uprooted my family and shipped us elsewhere; schools, friends, after-school jobs, religious congregations, and other forms of human connection were transitory until I reached adulthood. My family was everything, a view I’ve heard expressed by others who grew up similarly rootless. It becomes difficult to nurture other social relationships when you grow up seeing friendships as temporary.

In my nightmares, Jason and Freddy generally leapt out to take my family away, leaving me alone. Either they killed my family, before pursuing me into a house that assumed labyrinthine properties; or, less often, they made alliances with my family over my objections, leaving me morally adrift. Either way, these monsters didn’t have personalities, only roles, and their roles left me alone in a hostile world without certainties, either moral or, in dreamland, physical.

Maybe that’s why one of the few horror movies to genuinely frighten me, in a way that persisted beyond the watching experience, was Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark. The small-town cowboy protagonist, Caleb, gets abducted, or perhaps adopted, by a “family” of vampires wandering America’s Great Plains. The remainder of the movie develops into a contest between Caleb’s natural family, who wants to return him to the old homestead, or his adoptive family, who repeatedly threatens to kill him.

Bill Paxton as Severin
in Near Dark

Where Fear Street genuinely scares, it does so in moments when it upends characters’ ability to trust. In the first movie’s prologue (half ripped-off from Scream), when Heather realizes the killer who’s just murdered her is the slacker friend who promised a ride home. When Cindy’s excessively nice boyfriend Tommy grabs an axe and goes berserk. When Sarah Fier realizes the friend she’s trusted throughout, has turned against her, I experienced a moment of genuine fear.

But the more I consider which stories scare me, and which don’t, I’ve realized why horror movies don’t bother me like my parents feared they would. The circumstances that genuinely scare me are difficult to depict onscreen. True, protracted isolation, lack of trust, and moral rootlessness, aren’t very visual. The gore in slasher films might’ve traumatized me when I was a child. But they couldn’t compete with the terrors that originated from within my own brain.

“Fear Street” and the Illusions of Community

Promo posters from Netflix's Fear Street trilogy

Every few years, somebody in the generic Back East city of Shadyside snaps and goes berserk, leaving a trail of bloody dead. Deena and Sam, teenagers struggling to express their same-sex romance in judgemental 1994, consider themselves lucky survivors of the latest onslaught. Then, to their horror, dozens of past psycho killers return from the grave and target our heroines. Seems they’ve broken the rules of the slasher-movie universe.

Leigh Janiak’s feature trilogy, originally intended for cinematic release but probably better suited to streaming viewing, leaves me with conflicting reactions. On one hand, Janiak treats her source material with great respect. Our characters are self-aware enough to realize they’re slasher-pic characters, and respond accordingly. Where lesser writer-directors might’ve reduced this self-awareness to jokey camp, Janiak treats her characters’ struggles and fears with complete seriousness.

On the other hand, Janiak misses a powerful opportunity. In Part One, Deena and Sam think their trauma is a one-off, that the repeated violence that shakes Shadyside a couple of times per generation is something that just happens; across parts Two and Three, they discover their torment is systemic, that violence and insanity are simply endemic in Shadyside. Which is great, except that Janiak misses what that system is.

I grew up with monsters like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Kreuger as cultural touchstones: moral blank slates who killed teenagers because that’s simply what they did. In today’s horror movie landscape, where cerebral content like Get Out, A Quiet Place, and Hereditary have become runaway critical darlings, deliberately throwing back to outdated slasher tropes seems retrogressive. The genre has moved away from inexplicably violent, but morally vacant, slashers.

Shadyside’s development across three movies shows this moral vacancy is illusory. What seems, to Deena and Sam in Part One like an isolated incident of freak insanity, gets proved in Part Two to reflect a pattern that precedes their birth. In Part Three, we learn how that pattern dates to Shadyside’s colonial-era foundations. As someone writing a novel about history and inherited guilt, I like what Janiak has attempted here.

Except that, throughout, Janiak’s interconnected world turns on individuals. Psycho killers who bear a not-coincidental resemblance to Jason, Michael Myers, Norman Bates, and Leatherface, are presented as atomized individuals who go berserk and kill people. Violence starts from nowhere, and ends when the individual dies, a death which, in slasher movie tradition, usually takes seven or eight tries. Violence may paralyze Shadyside, but it starts and ends abruptly.

The Skullface Killer, one of Fear Street’s willfully self-referential monsters

Not that it has no origin. Throughout the trilogy, Deena and Sam seek to exorcise the spirit of Sarah Fier, a colonial woman hanged for witchcraft. Sarah’s curse bifurcates the community into poor, hopeless Shadyside, where violence simply happens occasionally, and Sunnyvale, the safest, least violent town in America. Our heroines believe Sarah Fier’s mythology so absolutely, that veteran audiences know everything they believe will be upended by Act III.

When Act III happened to occur in Shadyside’s English colonial past, I really expected we’d see something about America’s original sins. Throughout this trilogy, Shadyside proves remarkably immune to certain stereotypes: racism scarcely exists, religion is present but ancillary, and sexual trauma, that hallmark of teenage horror, never gets mentioned. (Deena and Sam catch grief as lesbians, but their mixed-race relationship goes completely unremarked.)

Colonial Shadyside stands on stolen Indian land, yet beyond an orphaned reference to “the natives,” Native Americans don’t appear. We see Black people strolling the unpaved streets and arguing in the meeting house, but no mention of slavery. We see the ways colonial Shadyside bequeathed its character to the present, as small towns often do, but racism, Native genocide, and slavery don’t exist. Homophobia is Shadyside’s only structural vice.

The trilogy demonstrates how small towns with long histories develop characters that outlive their founders, something anybody who’s lived in farm country can attest. But that character ultimately doesn’t involve anything definite. Evil happens over and over, yet always arises from some individual. Even in the M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist ending, we witness our protagonists’ belief in evil individuals subverted… then dumped onto another mere individual.

Don’t misunderstand me. Communities are comprised of individuals, and individuals can resist the system, even transform it. But history and experience teach that this happens rarely; towns, companies, and organizations develop communal habits, and most people go along to get along. I thought Janiak would acknowledge this, when habits of spontaneous, shocking violence characterize life in Shadyside. But nope, in the end, evil arises from bad people. It’s a missed opportunity.