Monday, January 31, 2022

Existentialism and Hope in the Time of Plague

Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go In the Dark: a Novel

Deep beneath the melting Siberian permafrost, an archeologist makes a chilling discovery: dozens of perfectly preserved Neanderthal bodies, laid out with precision. As global warming thaws what the millennia have guarded, something wakes up. Despite the scientists’ best efforts, a long-dormant microorganism escapes the site. Before long, the “Arctic plague” threatens the very foundations of human civilization.

It’s slightly misleading to call Sequoia Nagamatsu’s first novel “science fiction,” though it uses time-honored genre staples to launch its story. I wouldn’t even necessarily call it “a novel,” as it’s basically a short-story sequence, the Winesburg, Ohio of mass-market fiction. Nagamatsu has crafted an experimental form, a postmodern rejection of literal through-line storytelling in favor of immersing yourself in a whirlwind of speculative experience.

The Arctic plague first strikes children. Global civilization (but, in this book, mostly America) struggles to maintain its cultural suppositions about childhood innocence, even as childhood becomes the number-one indicator of mortality. Scientists perform increasingly daredevil experiments to keep children alive, to preserve the illusion that humanity has a future. Some of these experiments test the limits of what defines “humanity.”

It’s exceedingly difficult to synopsize Nagamatsu’s story because, as I’ve already said, it lacks a through-line. Main characters in one chapter emerge as principal protagonists several chapters later; others disappear without explanation. Rather like life, that. The story jumps years, sometimes generations, as Nagamatsu moves onto whatever most interests him. Most stories are set in America, mostly California, though three take place in Japan.

Rather than a straightforward narrative, Nagamatsu focuses on creating a mood. As you’d expect from a novel about a plague, themes of mortality and loss abound. Though one chapter focuses on disembodied souls in limbo, that’s an outlier; nearly every chapter deals primarily with survivors, those forced to watch helplessly as their loved ones slip away. These days, many readers may find these themes disconcertingly familiar.

But despite these themes, Nagamatsu’s storytelling is remarkably optimistic. His protagonists find meaning in survival, in facing a world characterized by bereavement. His characters face the existentialist reality that all human endeavor ends in mortality, sooner or later; then they shoulder that burden and continue. Death, to Nagamatsu’s characters, isn’t the end, it’s their reason to persevere, though they sometimes require several chapters to accept this.

Sequoia Nagamatsu

Even with his cast of thousands and his international scope, Nagamatsu’s storytelling has a personal edge. Several characters are, like Nagamatsu himself, Japanese-American; more than a few are aspiring artists whose parents consider them a disappointment. (Hmmm…) The recurrence of this generational, cross-cultural conflict underlines several stories. During the plague, humanity needs more doctors and scientists; but it also needs artists to make chaotic times meaningful.

Nagamatsu’s story overlaps heavily with current events, but don’t read too much into that. According to the copyright page, this book’s chapters have dribbled out in literary journals and anthologies since 2011, long before COVID existed. Parts of Nagamatsu’s story eerily predict the fear and uncertainty we witness daily, though he probably rewrote portions to remain current. This book is about us, without necessarily being “ripped from the headlines.”

Not everyone will like Nagamatsu’s technique. He frequently uses the MFA workshop trend in ironic distancing, holding his characters at arms’ length. Though all but one of these chapters are told by first-person narrators, Nagamatsu’s storytellers maintain a dry, dispassionate tenor. Faced with dying children and desperate parents, with global warming in the background, and humanity’s brightest fleeing the Earth, his protagonists remain coolly detached, weary of their own emotions.

This approach takes some getting used to. Anybody hoping to read a conventional science fiction potboiler will find this book disappointing. It requires attentive reading, and a willingness to suspend our love of genre conventions. His writing reflects familiarity with Kierkegaard and Sartre, but also Star Trek and Japanese anime. (Seriously, there’s a Starship Yamato.) He uses science fiction parts without really writing a science fiction novel.

However, for readers willing to let Nagamatsu guide their attention, he tells a story both dark and humane. He writes in a near-future setting that’s all to plausible, about themes that are part of our everyday loves; but he doesn’t surrender to cynicism or let despair run his story. He writes about us, with all the disappointment and optimism that entails. He reminds us that, no matter how bleak our present seems, there’s always still a future.

Through it all, through the grief and art and isolation and love, he reminds us that we become human when we believe.

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Did Jesus Wear Spurs On His Cowboy Boots?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Maybe you’ve noticed a certain kind of man—mostly White, definitely American, and outspokenly Christian—has become widespread and visible. This man feels compelled to demonstrate masculine credentials, through displays of guns, worship of military and police, and showing dominion over women. This man proclaims Christian faith constantly, but demonstrates few of Paul’s “fruits of the spirit.” Maybe you noticed one such man got elected the 45th President of the United States.

Calvin University historian Kristen Kobes Du Mez begins her investigation of Christian masculinity at Dordt College, her undergraduate alma mater, where Donald Trump famously delivered his speech claiming he could shoot somebody on camera and not lose votes. A devoted Christian herself, she wondered at the appeal of somebody who claimed Christianity while showing so little familiarity with Christian virtues. So, like a serious scholar, Du Mez began investigating the question further.

Her discoveries begin in the late Victorian era, when establishment White Christianity prized decorum, and the industrial economy rendered many traditionally male skills obsolete. Feeling abandoned by church and economy, blue-collar men sought masculine identity through the most commonly available avenues: soldiering and sports. Evangelist (and former outfielder) Reverend Billy Sunday seized upon this unfilled want in American manhood, promising an athletic, muscular role for Christian men.

This masculine identity took root most, however, under Sunday’s indirect heir, Billy Graham. Graham’s tent revivals didn’t just offer Americans salvation; they offered armaments to fight a pervasive, global enemy. As prior scholars have noted, Graham’s movement coincided with the Cold War, and he demonized global Communism as surely as Christ demonized Satan. Graham was arguably progressive on racial issues, but his mission explicitly baptized America to save humanity.

With Graham, the fundamentals were established; but Du Mez follows Graham’s successors through seventy years of cultural trends. The specific expressions of male Christian militancy change, certainly. As global Communism wanes, for instance, hypermasculine Christians muster a chain of enemies: feminists, Muslims, homosexuals, the Democratic Party. Unsurprisingly, though Christian masculinity constantly protests its spiritual credentials, its manifestation is explicitly secular and partisan.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Du Mez follows not only the leaders and their ministries (or, in some cases, “ministries”), but also their symbols. These authoritarian male leaders manage to uncover a succession of metaphors for men to admire, especially cowboys, police, and soldiers. They also make emblems of actors who play these rugged, macho roles, particularly John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and Mel Gibson, though none of them actually roped cattle or served in combat.

Over the generations, this subset of Christainity becomes ingrown and extreme, as movements often do. As explicitly male, the movement’s figureheads become terrified of being mistaken, even momentarily, for women; therefore anything that could be perceived as even tangentially feminine gets dropped. Paradoxically, the more assertively male this movement becomes, the smaller the masculine domain its followers are allowed to occupy. The trend is familiar, but no less noteworthy.

Similarly, as the movement becomes more authoritarian, more unwilling to brook challenges to the (male, White) figurehead, the more vulnerable the movement becomes to top-level abuse. The two most aggressively masculine Presidencies of my lifetime have corresponded with massive shake-ups in hypermasculine Christian ministry: the televangelist die-off during the Reagan years, and widespread revelations of ministerial abuse and cover-ups during the Trump administration.

Despite her emphasis on conservative, White, male Christian ministries, Du Mez does dedicate space to the more progressive Christian counterforce. Reverend Jim Wallis, for instance, gets some mention. The BIPOC Christian opposition also gets some space too. But Du Mez isn’t really interested in the byplay of Left and Right, White and non-White; she really only discusses these counterforces when they push hypermasculine Christians into giving some kind of response.

Unfortunately, Du Mez doesn’t accomplish all her title implies. Her secondary title pledges “How White Evangelicals Corrupted Etc.,” but the “how” doesn’t come up much. A scholarly historian, Du Mez appears reluctant to indulge in speculation or interpretation, mostly limiting herself to textual evidence. She pledges to explain how White Evangelical Christians drifted so far from their Biblical origins, but ultimately, she doesn’t much explain, primarily just describes.

Nevertheless, she provides attentive readers with the tools and information necessary to formulate our own explanations. Her work overlaps with recent religious historians, like Kevin M. Kruse or Obery Hendricks, but provides a specifically gendered interpretation of recent Christian history. The narrative duMex describes is nuanced, and often dark. But by putting the message in its historical context, she offers hope that engaged Christians can challenge the trend and present a coordinated counternarrative to the world.

Friday, January 21, 2022

Mitch McConnell and the Stupid Freudian Slip

Back in Twelfth Grade, my writing teacher had us perform a LitCrit exercise where we minutely analyze a poem. The subject poem, now sadly lost to me, described a First Contact scenario between humans and extraterrestrials. In that fleeting moment of contact, the superior aliens have one chance to decide whether to be benevolent or aggressive. Whatever choice they make cannot be undone; it’ll define their identity forever.

Called upon to perform an extemporaneous close reading, I noted language comparing First Contact with European imperialism. White “discoverers” could’ve been cooperative, friendly, and egalitarian with the peoples they contacted; they just weren’t. Except that isn’t quite what I said. Trying to think and speak simultaneously, my words got garbled, as they do, and I said “First Contact between aliens and humans resembles first contact between Indigenous groups and humans.”

I caught my mislocution (spoken before an integrated class of White, Black, and various Asian American students) and apologized immediately. Most students nodded sagely, letting me continue. But one mixed-race Asian American youth wouldn’t forgive, and kept muttering “Great, so now we’re not human” from the back. After the third or fourth time, I angrily barked: “I said I was sorry, dammit!” The class gasped audibly at my anger.

This week, a 19-second clip from C-SPAN circulated on social media. Journalist Pablo ManrĂ­quez asks Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) if he’s concerned about voting rights and voter suppression in various states, including his. McConnell replies: “The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” The clip then cuts out mid-word.

I don’t often feel sympathy for Moscow Mitch McConnell. His underhanded tactics held one Supreme Court seat open nearly a year under President Obama, only to help rush-confirm Donald Trump’s final nominee days before the election. He regularly submarines popular legislation which would help his constituents, just because Democrats sponsored it. He’s stonewalled investigations into the January 6th insurrection, the closest America’s come to a coup d’etat.

Yet this week, watching McConnell struggle to give a consistent answer while still formulating it, I felt great sympathy. I felt transported back to Twelfth Grade, being held to impossibly high standards of accurately parsing somebody else’s statement, and giving my response, on the fly, while also not making mistakes that classmates would find objectionable. Then McConnell, like me, stumbled in his high-wire act, and that’s all anybody remembered.

Those who dislike Republican policies and practices love finding camera-friendly symbols. Remember President Trump’s famous struggles to drink water? Or teenager Sailor Sabol’s inability to hit the high notes while singing The Star-Spangled Banner, one of the most difficult songs to sing? Liberals and leftists love magnifying ordinary, banal cock-ups into metaphors for their opponents’ political failings, maybe because it’s easier than formulating counter-arguments.

Just one time, I genuinely feel for McConnell. He committed a routine error anybody might commit, one I actually have committed. But it’s not the same. Every classmate but one immediately forgave my mistake, perhaps because I caught it unprompted and apologized. McConnell’s opponents, by contrast, edited the clip to remove any context. Did he apologize? Did he even realize what he’d said? I dunno, and you probably don’t either.

Worse, there’s no viable response. Such mistakes can’t go unaddressed in politics, or they’ll metastasize. But what response is available? I had my classmates’ sympathy, and they probably regarded the one guy as a malcontent, until I yelled. That turned me into the bully, and I felt the room’s loyalty abandon me. If your grade-school experience resembled mine, you learned that answering bullies in kind cost you any accrued compassion.

Moments like this, I’m embarrassed to occupy the same approximate ideological terrain with the online left. As with President Trump’s water-glass struggles, we’ve chosen to magnify a trite human error into a crisis, because addressing the underlying problem requires hard work. It’s true, as McConnell says, that African Americans vote in high percentages. It’s the rest of the statement that matters: “No thanks to your party, Mitch!”

Worse, by focusing on an insignificant Freudian slip, the online left has made themselves easier to dismiss later. Next time they muster a substantive accusation, based on facts and evidence, Republicans will hand-wave them away, saying: “These are the juvenile bullies that can’t forgive a routine verbal fluff.” And journalists, famous for their softballs and both-sides-ism, will go along with that. This makes us easier to ignore in the future.

Thursday, January 20, 2022

Okay, Maybe Panic a Little

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Primary Phase

You already know the basic story: the Earth is destroyed by the galactic Planning Council, to build a hyperspace express route. The only human saved is Arthur Dent, a sniveling wet rag of a man whose response to the grandeur of galactic civilization is to moan constantly. Arthur and his fellow hitchhikers have a string of slapstick misadventures, which never fail to end with them taking a sudden, humiliating pratfall.

Like I imagine happened for most American audiences, I first encountered The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy based on Douglas Adams’ 1979 novel adaptation. (Younger audiences’ first experience might’ve been the 2005 movie.) Released in the shadow of that other science fiction extravaganza, the original Star Wars, that novel must’ve been bracing and electrifying on release. It took sci-fi’s founding principles seriously, without being po-faced and somber about them.

But it’s notably different, hearing Adams’ original radio series. Though it contains the same characters enacting the same jokes, the radio series’ auditory qualities guide listeners through the story in a different way. It’s difficult to encompass how fast-moving the original series was without hearing it. Propelled along by Adams’ frenetic pacing, Arthur Dent’s feelings of helplessness suddenly make more sense: we, too, feel overwhelmed and small.

Adams’ picaresque writing doesn’t really feature a through-line, just a succession of characters who face whatever situations Adams’ fertile mind can throw at them. He draws on shopworn science fiction stereotypes, but also on what were, in 1978, cutting-edge scientific and technological hypotheses. Perhaps surprising for a comedy series, Adams makes a more concerted effort to explain faster-than-light travel than either Gene Roddenberry or George Lucas ever did.

Simon Jones as Arthur really captures his character’s feckless desperation. He starts the story pugnacious and willful, famously eager to lay himself in front of a bulldozer to protect his house. But across six episodes, his essential inability to fight the tides of a mechanical universe becomes impossible to ignore. Like postwar British culture overall, Arthur’s illusions of Churchillian aplomb prove worthless, and worse, silly.

Geoffrey McGivern as Ford Prefect has the debonair swagger to which Arthur aspires. But through the series, his puffery proves as useless as Arthur’s whinging. Ford believes himself a wise Cicerone showing his bumpkin friend around a galaxy heady with wonder and light. But as we watch him from outside, he’s clearly just more willing to be wrong. He doesn’t let one humiliation stop him from being equally cocksure next time.

l-r: Simon Jones, Mark Wing-Davy, and Geoffrey McGivern
(Arthur Dent, Zaphod Beeblebrox, and Ford Prefect) at a 2014 cast reunion

Equal to Adams’ actors, his soundscapes really sell his story. Aided by the pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Adams and his team created innovative audio effects to depict a lush, crowded, entropy-filled galaxy. Seriously, when a console computer in this story chimes, it does so with enough panache that you virtually see an Apple IIe monitor kicking over. This is a universe teeming with life and technology.

But Adams doesn’t confuse “life” with “meaning.” A lifelong atheist who rejected the anthropic principle, Adams despised writers who felt obliged to shoehorn moral lessons into their writing. Life, for him, was a series of absurd accidents, and some people emerged from that okay, I guess. That comes across in his storytelling: every time his characters appear poised for a moral breakthrough, they inevitably slip on a banana peel.

If Adams’ story has a moral lesson, it’s this: we’re all bound for disappointment. The more assertively his characters make plans, the more certain their eventual failure. Adams rejects both Christian morality, which separates people into saints and sinners, and Nietzschean ethics, which separates people into powerful and powerless. The only distinction Adams makes is whether characters face defeat with composure, or go down whining.

Before creating his Hitchhiker franchise, Adams already had a robust science fiction media career. He’d written or co-written two Doctor Who serials, and after this series, he became Doctor Who showrunner for a year, writing in-jokes into the episodes. His disgust with the technical limitations of broadcast technology comes across in this series. He abandons all pretense of “realism” and lets himself have as much fun as the medium allows.

Audiences who have read Adams’ Hitchhiker novels won’t find the contents of this series new. Everything contained in these six episodes made it into the first two novels, except one ancillary scene that was probably written by script doctor John Lloyd. The benefit of hearing it isn’t the content, but the experience of complete loss of control, being swept along at somebody else’s pace, which was what Adams probably intended.





On a related topic:
Will the Real Arthur Dent Please Stand Up?

Monday, January 17, 2022

Standing Bear and the Nebraska Revolution

1001 Books to Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 110
Joe Starita, “I Am a Man”: Chief Standing Bear's Journey For Justice

Chief Standing Bear didn’t want to upend American legal principles or found a new Native American nation; but he did both these things anyway. When he packed his meager belongings and left the badly organized Ponca reservation without permission, he wanted only to bury his eldest son on his ancestral homeland, overlooking Nebraska’s Niobrara River. He might also, perhaps unconsciously, have hoped the United States Army would kill him.

As a journalist rather than a credentialed historian, University of Nebraska professor emeritus Joe Starita brings a distinctive approach to this account. Like a historian, Starita prizes primary sources, which this case provides in abundance. But he also incorporates oral history from Ponca people, many directly descended from Standing Bear. He focuses not just on describing events, but also contextualizing them for audiences not necessarily familiar with one of American history’s most contentious cases.

The Ponca Nation probably originated east of the Mississippi River, but by the time they encountered White colonists, they were a settled, agrarian people overlooking the Niobrara River. Like other nations, they had contentious relations with Whites, but by the 1870s, they lived peacefully with their White neighbors. That wasn’t good enough for the Department of the Interior, though, which imposed a forced resettlement program.

Thus a succession of Indian Agents from New England, and infantry officers unfamiliar with Nebraska, forced the Ponca off their land. Force-marched to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), the Ponca found inhospitable terrain, neighbors who didn’t speak their language, and malaria. Many Ponca, including several members of the council of chiefs, died. When sickness took Standing Bear’s teenage son, he left one dying request: bury me in our people’s homeland.

Many Americans know, and lament, our history of forcing Native Americans off their land. But Joe Starita stresses how slapdash and poorly organized this practice was. American generals signed Indian treaties hastily, without bothering to check whether they might contradict existing agreements with other nations. The United States promised Ponca land to the Ponca and also the Lakota, and because the Lakota were better-armed, the Ponca had to move.

Besides being internally consistent, it had become unpopular with many Americans. By 1879, when Standing Bear defied the Indian Agency and walked back to Nebraska with about thirty followers, the local White population favored the Ponca’s claims. General George Crook, a decorated “Indian Fighter,” was ordered to arrest Standing Bear, but even he didn’t support the action. Soon the nascent wire services grabbed Standing Bear’s story and took it nationwide.

Chief Standing Bear (left) and General George Crook

(The Ponca’s popularity wasn’t entirely without White judgment. White settlers liked the Ponca because they wore European-style trousers, lived in timber-framed houses, and worshiped in an Episcopal church. Unlike their warlike neighbors, the Lakota, the Ponca reassured White settlers that White civilization was popular and desirable, and their settlements in formerly Native lands served a Christian mission. Starita describes, but doesn’t judge, these facts.)

Standing Bear made his real breakthrough, though, when his White supporters convinced him to do something no Native American had ever done: sue his arresting officer, General Crook, for the writ of habeus corpus. Before 1879, Native Americans had no legal standing in American courts. Standing Bear’s supporters believed something had happened to change this condition: the 14th Amendment had redefined citizenship. But they needed a court case to test this belief.

Starita’s account changes at this point, shifting from a tragic history of racist actions, to a courtroom drama. The Omaha federal court preserves copious records of the trial. But, as even Starita admits, the outcome wasn’t entirely certain; American courts had historically been self-serving in dispensing justice, and under the original Constitution, “Indians not taxed” weren’t legally human. Standing Bear’s lawsuit wasn’t small change for a tumultuous, barely unified nation.

The case unfolds through evidence, testimony, and public sentiment. But Starita, an engaging storyteller, knows something the original 19th-Century audience wouldn’t have known: General George Crook, the named defendant in Standing Bear’s lawsuit, actually supported the prosecution, and actively helped their case. Like many frontier Americans, Crook had grown discouraged by ceaseless Indian Wars, and wanted to force a change.

History records that Standing Bear won his case, forcing the United States to recognize Native Americans as legal persons. History also records that Standing Bear led the Northern Ponca back to Nebraska, where their descendents remain. But Starita demonstrates, through evidence and compelling storytelling, that this outcome wasn’t certain. Then as now, America required brave individuals and groups to stand against power, to force America to be free.

Friday, January 14, 2022

Lindsay Ellis, Steven Crowder, and the American Doom Spiral

Lindsay Ellis (promo photo)

I was baffled and frustrated when, late in 2021, popular internet personality Lindsay Ellis quit YouTube, her primary platform. And not just because I’m a fan, either. Ellis’ retreat from a controversy that never should’ve happened feels misplaced. I mean, I understand Ellis’ personal pain at the vitriol dedicated against her for a single misplaced tweet. But considering that Lindsay Ellis is gone, and Steven Crowder is still working, something seems deeply misguided here.

For those who don’t follow internet pissing contests, in March of 2021, Ellis posted a flippant tweet noting that Disney’s Raya and the Dragon followed the same beat sheet as Nickelodeon’s Avatar: the Last Airbender. Because both properties feature Asian protagonists, this statement was construed as anti-Asian racism on Ellis’ part. Never mind that both properties were developed by American companies for primarily White audiences. Tweeters know racism when they see it.

By contrast, Steven Crowder, a failed actor and part-time stand-up comedian who mainly makes his living as a conservative podcaster and vlogger, has literally donned yellowface and a conical hat to shill anti-Asian feeling on his YouTube channel. This is in addition to having been censured (but not de-platformed) by YouTube for racism, homophobia, and other forms of undisguised bigotry. He consistently excuses his inappropriate behavior with “Hey, it’s just comedy!”

Again, I understand Ellis taking the Twitter outrage personally. The swarming behavior that followed her casual tweet was ugly and, in her telling, persisted for months afterward. We know this happens: in 2013, a similarly flippant tweet submarined a private citizen, Justine Sacco, who still apparently can’t find work. In 2016, netizens likewise mobbed poet Calvin Trillin for a silly poem about food hipsters, because he mentioned Chinese cuisine. Swarming behavior is the norm, not the exception.

Initially, I thought Ellis retreated, while Crowder absorbs the outrage directed against his racist behavior, because Ellis cares what others think, and Crowder doesn’t. But I’m not sure anymore. Watching their respective platforms over time, I think Crowder cares deeply about the anger directed against him. In recent months, he’s donned yellowface, claimed the only crop Black farmers grow is cannabis, and aimed a stereotypically “faggy” voice at gay journalists. Crowder wants people angry.

Steven Crowder demonstrating his usual benevolent, uplifting views
on race in America (click to enlarge)

No, the difference isn’t that only one cares, it’s that anger, for one, is a desired outcome. Lindsay Ellis’ entire internet presence, from her work with Channel Awesome and PBS to her own long-form video essays, has focused on helping people consume arts, literature, and current events more carefully. She wants people to read for greater nuance, to savvy complexity, and to sit with difficult art before having strong emotional reactions. She cares about subtlety.

Steven Crowder, by contrast, gins up anger. He doesn’t much distinguish between directions or nuance, the very issues that define Ellis’ critiques. Whether his True Believers share his performative outrage at minorities, women, the poor, and other out-groups, or his opponents direct their rage at him, it doesn’t matter much. Crowder gets paid by subscriptions from True Believers, and opponents voicing their outrage are money in his coffers. It’s all the same to him.

Lindsay Ellis wants audiences to slow their thinking, consume more carefully, and pay attention to fine details. Steven Crowder wants people to swarm like yellowjackets. Notably, however, this has a paradoxical effect. Ellis, whose work is often lumped together with “LeftTube” despite not being overtly political, believes that more thoughtful individuals will collaborate in building a better society. Though Crowder preaches conservative individualistic ideals, he wants audiences to sacrifice their individuality.

Thus, as critics before me have stated, individualism is the enemy of individuality.

Ellis believes society benefits if more people think more deeply about difficult situations. Crowder wants masses to surrender to pre-conscious anger, fear, and rage. Therefore, when one poorly received tweet turned into gut-level wrath, it wasn’t just that they directed that anger against Ellis, it was that Ellis’ entire philosophy failed. Crowder gets similar incensed responses to his racist, sexist, homophobic behavior regularly, and he’s never going to stop, because it feeds his roots.

Besides Justine Sacco and Calvin Trillin, similar Twitter-based rage has turned against Ellis, Laci Green, and Natalie Wynn. (Huh, that’s a lot of women.) Most have gone, at least temporarily, into retirement; Sacco is reportedly still living in hiding eight years later. This continuing saga calls into question the Leftist belief that we can fix society by good people doing the right thing. It appears too many people are one trigger away from complete surrender.

Tuesday, January 11, 2022

The Fable of Modern Industrial Ruin

Scott Cooper (director), Antlers

An idealistic schoolteacher returns to her Oregon hometown, a move more optimistic than smart, given the trauma baked into the landscape. One of Julia’s middle-school students is a talented artist and storyteller, but his stories are dark, and his drawings are in shades of blood red. Julia projects her childhood abuse onto young Lucas, and makes him her personal project, perhaps seeking her own redemption. But things are secretly far, far worse.

Writer-director Scott Cooper’s latest, which languished in post-production for two years, isn’t quite sure what it wants to be. He populates his economically bereft mountainous setting with characters who would’ve been better served by a character drama. Its Native American-inspired horror makes for engaging allegory, without being particularly scary. Cooper’s heart was clearly in the right place, but watching this movie, his storyboard apparently wasn’t.

Young Lucas Weaver retreats from bullies, studies his lap during class, and hurries home every afternoon. The local sheriff acknowledges the apparent open secret: Lucas’ junkie father operates a meth lab, which everyone quietly tolerates. Except, his father Frank hasn’t been seen outside in weeks. We, the audience, see what locals never see: Lucas keeps his father and younger brother locked in the attic, dopesick and howling impotently.

Julia Meadows left Oregon when she turned eighteen, but has returned, for reasons never explained. She shares her childhood home with her brother Paul, who became sheriff largely because nobody else wanted the job. She hates the house, though; every shadow contains traces of childhood abuse, which is never specified, but clearly sexual. (If Julia and Paul didn’t explicitly declare themselves siblings, you’d assume something closer. Call it trauma bonding.)

Therein lies an important problem with this movie: Julia’s lingering unresolved trauma gets explored in some detail, causing audiences to feel strongly for her, but beyond this exploration, nothing comes of it. Her flashbacks maybe justify her disproportionate investment in trying to understand and protect Lucas. But the trauma serves the movie’s themes, not its story, and Julia never clearly indicates whether she’s achieved anything by revisiting old wounds.

The real story is Lucas and his family. Lucas is smart, sensitive, and artistic, a fish-out-of-water in his blue-collar hometown. His junkie father has become an eating machine, diseased by years of using substances to dull the pain, and Lucas feeds him by throwing roadkill and wild-caught game into the attic where Dad lives. Now Lucas’ little brother Aiden also shows signs of the family disease, and Lucas risks having to watch the cycle repeat.

Jeremy T. Thomas as Lucas and Keri Russell as Julia in Antlers

This allegory of rural anomie and generational anguish should’ve been the entire movie. Julia might make an engaging protagonist in a Bergman-style drama about someone trying, and failing, to overcome her personal demons, but in this movie, she feels like a supporting character who received way too much screen time. Because Julia fails to achieve closure, or at least progress, she leaves us frustrated. Lucas carries the real story.

Lucas’ painful myth unfolds against an atmospheric background. In several shots, the Oregon landscape dominates the characters. One chain-link fence might separate virgin forest from roads once paved but now abandoned, a labyrinth of ruts and cracks. Lucas, walking home, is dwarfed beside a clear-running stream, and the mountains beyond. Every shot is dreary and overcast; never once does the screen picture include enough sunlight to cast a shadow.

I’m reluctant to say what comes next, but it needs said: Scott Cooper, and maybe Nick Antosca’s short story which inspired Cooper’s movie, shouldn’t have used Native American mythology. An introductory title card includes narration spoken in Ojibwe, and the monster, once revealed, comes from Algonquin legend. These nations are nowhere near Oregon, which Cooper presumably chose for its evocative landscape shots. There is no pan-Native culture or religion.

Cooper has, sadly, conscripted Native American fable into telling a story of White spiritual dislocation. That’s frequently an effective technique, because White American culture has long recognized that Natives have a connection with land, medicine, and spirit that colonists lack. But getting the details right matters; transplanting a Great Lakes myth into Oregon shows ignorance of both Algonquin religion and Oregon.

I enjoyed plenty about this movie, particularly the way Lucas attempts to appease the father who increasingly becomes monstrous. (“I’ll feed him,” Lucas whispers with eyes wide, “and he’ll love me.”) But that could’ve been accomplished, probably in more depth, if the movie had jettisoned the unnecessary grown-up characters and misplaced Indigenous myth. This movie’s heart got lost in the bells and whistles.

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Challenging the American Heresy

Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Christians Against Christianity: How Right-Wing Evangelicals Are Destroying Our Nation and Our Faith

Christianity, a faith founded by a country preacher who called followers to feed the hungry and challenge the powerful, has become the religion of American dominion. Jesus called the lowly and disfranchised to band together and raise one another up; but the loudest, most media-savvy portion of American Christendom has thrown its weight behind militarism, White supremacy, and anti-egalitarianism. White Evangelicals are the demographic most likely to have voted for Donald Trump. So what happened?

Obery M. Hendricks, an ordained elder and sometime seminary professor, wondered exactly this. How could people calling themselves Christians believe principles so clearly unaligned with Christ’s message? His answers will cause discomfort among many Christians, including those like me, who don’t support today’s Evangelical message. He ties political Evangelicalism with Christian Nationalism, a philosophy that supports American aims, right or wrong, and believes in the saving person of Jesus, but not in Jesus’ recorded teachings.

To begin, Hendricks creates meaningful definitions of Christianity and Evangelicalism. Both share common roots, and sometimes represent conflicting visions. Christianity begins with Jesus Christ, but not every Christian reads Jesus’ message equally. Likewise, Evangelicalism has historically been tied to progressive values, including abolition and women’s suffrage. During the Twentieth Century, though, Evangelicalism has drifted politically rightward, and is frequently associated with retrogressive, even repressive values.

With his scholarly foundation in Biblical history, Hendricks emphasizes that our Christian message derives from not only what Christ, the Apostles, and the Prophets said, but what they meant to their original audiences. Conservative Evangelicals love quoting orphaned Bible verses, like Mark 14:7 or 2 Thessalonians 3:10. Hendricks puts these and other verses in their Judaean context, demonstrating with evidence that withholding food, clothing, asylum, and other support is never in accord with Christian principles.

The Evangelicals whom Hendricks describes share one important trait: they’re White. Hendricks, and several religious scholars he quotes, agree that Black Evangelicals believe oppression and injustice happen in America, and exercise their liberties to challenge the forces of repression. White Evangelicals, by contrast, believe oppression happens elsewhere, or inflate insignificant incidents (cake) to the level of Herodian tyranny. Though America’s racial delineations aren’t as ironclad as in the past, this racial distinction still matters significantly.

Obery M. Hendricks, Jr.

Different narratives have emphasized different origins for right-wing American Evangelicalism. Historian Kevin M. Kruse, whom Hendricks quotes, connects Evangelicalism with pro-business libertarian economics. Hendricks finds much compelling about this hypothesis, and spends an entire chapter on Evangelical economics. Meanwhile, Evangelicals claim the Roe v. Wade decision galvanized their movement, but Hendricks uses documentary evidence that it actually took fifteen years to push that to prominence.

Instead, Hendricks associates Evangelicalism with Green v. Connally, the case that stripped tax-exempt protections from private schools, and other church-owned operations, that practiced racial discrimination. A slurry of right-wing religious and political leaders, like Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, and Pat Robertson, organized behind opposition to this change. In other words, issues like libertarian economics or anti-abortion politics are latecomers to the Evangelical story. This movement first gelled around White Supremacy.

Many Christians, including both clergy and congregants, reject this Christian Nationalist violence. Hendricks contrasts Christians who still believe loving our neighbor, and protecting “the least of these” are foundational values, with Christians who support guns and borders, and seek an earthly King. (Hendricks quotes generously from the Parable of the Sheep and Goats; parables loom large in his theology.) Not all American Christians support the Trumpist wing, Hendricks emphasizes, though anti-Trumpists often haven’t been media-savvy.

Throughout his work, Hendricks has frequently emphasized Christianity as a community, and Christian action as cooperative solidarity. He contrasts this with right-wing Evangelicalism, which is individualist and egocentric. In Hendricks’ reading, Christianity focuses on how we live this God-given life, not whether we get to Heaven after death. This means always remaining conscious of how we treat our neighbors and how we greet strangers, something right-wing Christianity has completely abandoned.

Throughout this book, Hendricks attempts to reawaken the Evangelical Christian conscience. This isn’t easy, since he describes demagogues who haven’t always shown they have a conscience. In his final pages, Hendricks describes himself finishing his manuscript in December 2020, believing he’d seen the lowest depths of American Christendom. We can only imagine how he received the following weeks and months.

Christianity has served diverse purposes for diverse people; some purposes have been, sadly, harmful. Hendricks encourages Christians to remember not only the person of Jesus Christ, but also His message, of comforting the bereaved and finding the lost. Hopefully Christians still have time to remember.

Monday, January 3, 2022

No More Hot Takes

J.K. Rowling

Nobody likes to admit they’ve been wrong. Neuroscience has shown that being proven wrong triggers your brain’s pain receptors, shifting recipients into self-defense mode. We will defend our beliefs as violently as we’ll defend ourselves against somebody chopping off our arm. I haven’t encountered anybody researching from the other angle, but I suspect the reverse is also true: taking down somebody’s cherished beliefs makes us feel like avenging knights.

I started this blog because people started sending me free books, because they determined my opinion was worth something. Some bean-counter deep within the catacombs of Corporate USA decided that well-written opinions from non-professional critics could move product, and my reviews were sufficiently well-written to be worth money. This made me, perhaps, a bit big-headed, convinced that the world deserved my opinions published in a centralized location.

To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, the internet is great because it gives every pissant their own anthill to piss off of. Popular blog platforms like Blogspot, which hosts me, and other sites specializing in user-created content, like YouTube, are full of people who review books and other products. Opinions written by dedicated amateurs are gold for parent companies like Google (which owns both Blogspot and YouTube). To say nothing of publishers.

Most such opinion-mongers aren’t subtle. Though I try to keep my reviews to 750 words—conventional newspaper length—many will spew thousands upon thousands of words per book. YouTube reviewers, who seemingly review mostly self-published books by other YouTubers, often make “reviews” longer than feature films, criticizing on a line-by-line basis. I wonder who actually reads or watches these reviews, many longer than doctoral dissertations.

William Shakespeare

If you actually have consumed these reviews, however, you’ve probably noticed something I have: these reviewers make bank by hating everything. Apparently the key to success at online opinion marketing is to hold disdainful views and practice fine, granular fault-finding. The negative Hot Take, in which reviewers offer proof—proof I tell you—that whatever you like is secretly terrible, and you’re probably terrible for liking it.

Consider the recent dogpile on J.K. Rowling. Lord knows I have. Her Harry Potter novels still engage and enthrall children because they address an otherwise unmet storytelling need. But as she’s descended into her own mean-spirited id, multiple critics, professional and amateur, have swarmed her, nitpicking her writing. Most home in on two claims, that her writing justifies slavery, which I would refute, and that she’s frequently antisemitic, which I can’t deny.

However, I find this swarming deeply thorny. When this many people claim moral and intellectual superiority to the author of the bestselling novels of our generation, they aren’t just deconstructing Rowling. Like anti-Stratfordians, who claim they uniquely have insights proving that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare, they’re claiming to be smarter than the author whose works have uplifted audiences of millions. They’re also, by extension, claiming to be smarter than you.

Billboarding our ability, as critics, to find fault with very popular works, is a form of self-aggrandizement. We want to establish our credentials on the bones of more popular, more established creators. The Internet, where Hot Takes and “you won’t believe this” listicles make bank, has proven itself a great host for this self-aggrandizement. Internet reading rewards surface-level literacy, short attention spans, and grandstanding at other people’s expense.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m frequently guilty of this tendency too. As a critic, it’s fun to offer Hot Takes where we ballyhoo ourselves. I’ve complained about this recently. By proclaiming how I’ve uncovered the shortcomings in some unbelievably popular novelist, playwright, songwriter, or whatever, I gleefully declare I’ve triumphed over that person. But tacitly, I also claim I’ve triumphed over you, for enjoying their product, you philistine.

Stephen King

Mean-spirited reviews are fun to write, and sometimes, they’re justified. Sometimes, professional creatives get so suffused in their field that they lose contact with regular audiences; consider how many novels Stephen King wrote in the 1990s about novel-writing and novelists. But when attacking powerful people, it’s necessary to remember that it’s not only about bringing down misguided potentates; their fans also trust them, for their own reasons.

We’ve reached the annual cycle where everybody takes stock of their lives and makes plans for the future. I must acknowledge that, at this life stage, maybe I’ll have a creative career, and maybe I won’t. But I can use the platform I have, however limited, to raise up others. Not just fellow creatives, but those who love and trust them. And I must use that platform responsibly.