The Terminator, the TechNoir, and the Scars of a Generation

When I say “the TechNoir scene in The Terminator,” every GenX reader knows exactly what I mean. Sarah Connor escapes Kyle Reese, whom she mistakes for a violent stalker, by hiding inside a neon-fronted dance club. She sits uncomfortably at a table, awaiting police intervention, while dancers kick up around her, their brightly colored party clothes to the dimly lit club. Unfortunately, her patiently waiting makes her a sitting duck for her real attacker, Arnold.

This weekend, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s semi-elected dictator-for-life, put Russia’s nuclear arsenal on “special alert.” Putin pulled this move, not in response to his army’s inability to take smaller, less populous Ukraine quickly, but in response, he said, to Western rhetoric surrounding his invasion. That is, Putin probably won’t nuke Ukraine, with its valuable farmland and mineral resources, but any NATO countries which come to Ukraine’s defense. He’s put the world on a Cold War footing.

It’s impossible to separate The Terminator from the Cold War. Though the United States had dropped the feel-good maneuver of duck-and-cover drills, with their illusion that one could survive a nuclear blast, by the time I hit elementary school in 1980, we were still daily conscious that the bombs could fall at any minute. Reagan-era rah-rah confidence was double-edged: hard work and determination could take us anywhere, but we were also constantly about to die.

American youth handled this fatalism in divided ways. Much recent 1980s nostalgia, like Netflix’s Stranger Things and ABC’s The Goldbergs, focus on the brightly colored flamboyance that got captured in a lot of photographs. But smarter critics than me point out that bright colors and garish prints were the exception, not the rule; much of the 1980s was brown, from cars and restaurant decor, to the clothing adults wore daily. It was a drab-colored era.

We see this spotlighted in the TechNoir scene. The characters are dressed ostentatiously, the colors bright and the prints vibrant. But the room itself is poorly lit, a problem accentuated by the low-hanging pall of cigarette smoke. Several dancers prance around, doing a strange pony trot in place, bent at the waist so they’re studying their partners’ shoes. Almost like, in the midst of the party atmosphere, the dancers are fleeing something dark and terrible.

This weekend’s nuclear alert pushes the world closer to full nuclear conflict than at any time since Able Archer 83. In 1983, NATO forces held a joint preparedness wargame effort in the North Sea, between Scotland and Norway. The only problem was, nobody bothered to warn the Warsaw Pact. Viewed from Moscow, the wargame looked like forces organizing for an amphibious assault. Moscow prepared to defend itself from the anticipated attack, with nukes if necessary.

It’s possible to find 1980s movies about nuclear war caused by Malice, and in most cases, it’s presented as Soviet malice. Red Dawn or The Day After showcase military forces ranging from incompetent to downright evil. But following Able Archer 83, other movies depicted a military machine unprepared for rapidly changing technology. The Terminator, like WarGames, depicts an American military arsenal hijacked by intelligent computers, and humans unprepared to stop the terror they had created.

Faced with this reality, American youth split. Consider The Breakfast Club, and particularly the collision between Claire Standish and John Bender. Twho over-the-top personalities, they represent respective responses to the times. Claire dresses garishly, lives for sensual pleasure, and skips school to go shopping. Bender wears muted colors, dresses like he’s preparing for a street fight, and antagonizes others. Both manners are nihilistic responses to the expectation that, in nuclear-armed times, there is no future.

The fact that Claire and Bender kiss at the movie’s culmination serves the same purpose that dancing in the TechNoir provides. Of course these two share an attraction; notwithstanding Bender’s abusive behavior, they share fundamental values. Bright colors dancing in the dark, or the brawler and the princess exchanging saliva; it comes to the same end either way. To the extent that the 1980s were garish-colored, it was because those living then expected to die.

The Terminator, with its 1980s collision of party culture and violence, gave way to Terminator 2, in which John Connor starts the movie zooming around, looking for a purpose. The threat of nuclear annihilation was terrible, certainly. But at least it gave us something to live for right now, which the subsequent peace didn’t. The grouchy snarling of 1990s pop culture represented a culture cut loose. Unless something happens, it’s the future we now have.

War Is Not the Answer (Except When It Is)

Saddam Hussein in 1990

I find myself thinking lately about the autumn of 1990. For history mavens, that’s the year Saddam Hussein’s Iraq crossed the border and illegally seized Kuwait. Not coincidentally, that’s also the year I first identified as conservative. Amid the saber-rattling rhetoric and rising nationalist sentiment for a swift American intervention, I began seeing myself as part of that push, as somebody contributing to a great coast-to-coast effort.

The rhetoric surrounding Operation Desert Shield (later Operation Desert Storm) was pure national security state mythology. After ten years of presenting Saddam Hussein as America’s proxy hero during the Iran-Iraq War, our national story immediately flip-flopped. Suddenly he became a world-class tyrant, head of a rogue state with Third Reich-ish ambitions and, potentially, a nuclear bomb. Worst of all, his illegal occupation of Kuwait targeted women and children.

I believed everything. When I heard Iraq had 630,000 troops in tiny Kuwait, enough to invade Saudi Arabia, I embraced an immediate American counter-force. Government spokespeople claimed Iraqi troops heedlessly slaughtered Kuwaiti civilians in their homes, I responded with outrage. Like millions of Americans, I react with horror to learn that Iraqi soldiers had stolen Kuwaiti baby incubators, leaving 231 preemies on the linoleum to die.

There’s only one problem. As we now know, all that was a lie.

The legal and moral justifications for Operation Desert Storm were almost entirely fabricated by American PR firms, mostly Hill & Knowlton. These agencies provided lurid content that grabbed ratings on nightly news. It was pure gold for networks; audiences old enough to remember, will recall how Desert Storm turned CNN into a mainstream source, and Wolf Blitzer into a celebrity. To achieve these ends, sources needed only to baldly lie.

This week, after promising for weeks, Russia’s Putin Administration finally crossed the border into Ukraine. Having successfully annexed the Crimea in 2014, and watched NATO balk, Vladimir Putin apparently decided to repeat the escapade once successfully accomplished by tsars and Supreme Soviets before it: seize Ukraine’s abundant farmland on a specious pretext. Like Kuwait before it, and Anschluss before that, it created waves of refugees.

Watching from my armchair, this looks like an unprovoked, illegal invasion, a clear violation of UN standards of national sovereignty and secure borders. Putin used glaring anti-semitic language to belittle Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is ethnically Jewish. Putin also used claims of protecting ethnic Russians from mistreatment abroad, a justification similarly used in Germany to justify repeated unethical invasions. This feels very Third Reich-y.

Vladimir Putin pictured with his favorite lapdog

As a believer in peace, I don’t encourage war anymore. Learning how readily I swallowed lies in 1990 and 1991 partly contributed to my politics shifting several years later. That shift was confirmed when America decided Gulf State entanglements were fun, and we should do that again. I slapped a “War Is Not the Answer” bumper sticker on my car, marched in local peace parades, and started attending a Quaker prayer circle.

But I acknowledge too that no one-size-fits-all policy response exists: Vladimir Putin sure looks evil, and he’s demonstrated that a stern finger-waving won’t discourage him. Having already rabbit-punched Ukraine, he now promises similar treatment in Scandinavia. This isn’t America getting involved in another country’s internal affairs, like happened in Vietnam. This is clearly a toxic mixture of imperial ambition and unchecked power, and peer pressure won’t stop it.

As a dedicated amateur follower of history, I watch with dread, knowing this happened once in Germany. But it also, let’s admit, also happened in the Persian Gulf, twice. Our media uncritically regurgitated fables of murdered babies, of WMDs, of connections to global terror described in clearly racialized terms. And we pedestrians, including me, swallowed it. (The first time; by 2004 I’d grown skeptical.)

If we’re witnessing what authorities say we’re witnessing, this looks like a legitimate case for intervention. Viewed from afar, the Ukraine situation appears clear-cut, the desperate gasp of an aging despot aware that, if he doesn’t do something soon, he’s likely to lose power and die in prison. Even recognizing that we’re pitting two nuclear-armed powers against one another, this appears to be a case of justifiable war.

This appears so. But within our lifetimes, we’ve been lied to, both by our own national security apparatus, and by paid propaganda hustlers. In a world where we know evil exists, and we must confront it courageously, we’ve swallowed so many lies that we can’t tell who’s truthful anymore. I find myself paralyzed. Because, God forgive me, I never want to be that wrong again.

Our Lady of Grace in the Snow

Peter Manseau, The Maiden of All Our Desires: a Novel

The distant convent at Gaerdegen has a secret. The Benedictine sisters gather to work and pray like mendicants throughout Christendom for centuries. But between their ancient prayers, they possess a more intimate connection with God. Mother Ursula, their chapter’s founder, bequeathed them a substantial trove of mystical insight. In a world still reeling from the Black Death, Mother Ursula’s words hint at secrets hiding behind Christian mortality.

The dust-flap synopsis on Peter Manseau’s eleventh book, and second novel, seems to promise something similar to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. A distant abbey, a heretical book, a secret the episcopate will move mountains to keep hidden. But Manseau offers a different book. It’s much more intimate and humane, a portrait of sinners trying, where their limited vision permits, to glimpse the purpose tying their lives together.

Mother John, the convent’s second abbess, has spent twenty years preserving Mother Ursula’s vision of prayer, work, and simplicity. Under pressure from other convents, which increasingly run like businesses, Mother John preserves her abbey’s traditions, and personally sweeps the cloisters daily. But even her sisters don’t know her secret: she joined the convent to flee her family obligations, and didn’t really convert until spending years inside the convent.

Father Francis, the abbey priest, resents his posting. Exiled to Gaerdegen to conceal his indiscretions, he feels slighted, a thinker and craftsman who could’ve brought Christ to the masses. But his solemn words conceal his unwillingness to own his past transgressions. His sins, both of commission and of omission, leave a trail of destruction, which renders him distrustful. He foresees destruction in the plague-ravaged land, with nothing to offer but fear.

On one level, this novel describes one day within Gaerdegen. As the sisters await a vindictive bishop, who promises a church trial to expunge veneration of Mother Ursula, a blizzard descends. Trapped in close proximity, the sisters and their resentful, authoritarian priest begin voicing old resentments, and engaging in political posturing. Nothing less than the future of their honored abbey hangs in the balance.

Peter Manseau

But while this surface story unfolds, the characters travel back along the paths that brought them here. Father Francis remembers the entirely human passions, the capacity for love, that defined his early priesthood. Francis created art from the thickly forested land around them, but also from his personal relationships within the community. When those relationships embarrass the bishop, Francis finds himself exiled, unable to either preach or practice his art.

At Gaerdegen, Francis clashes with Mother Ursula. He finds a woman capable of great holiness, but also great rage. As the plague decimates the cities, leaving many sisters with no earthly family, Francis and Ursula have very different ways of facing this tribulation. Both visions are founded in a mix of Christianity and hard experience. Yet, faced with the same evidence, these two professional holy people reach completely opposite conclusions.

Manseau mostly avoids truth claims about the religious controversies driving his characters. A professional scholar of religion, he’s written extensively about the collision between faith and doubt before, and apparently has few ready-made solutions. Instead, he foregrounds the personalities, the lifetime of influences that steer how people of open hearts and mystical souls can disagree so wholeheartedly. Manseau dares ask: what if nobody is right? Or wrong?

To these characters, words have power. Encouraging homilies written years ago by thoughtful mentors can change the course of lives. Words spoken in anger create clefts not easily mended. Worst of all, words spoken carelessly can have consequences far beyond the moment. Words give true believers courage against a world turned grim and bloody, while powerful people fear the authority words of love can have.

It’s tempting to find contemporary references in Manseau’s heavily symbolic story. Metaphors of money and disease, of walls and doors, seem timely, and that probably isn’t coincidental. But Manseau isn’t talking about us, or not only about us. His characters, like his readers, keep seeking beauty and certainty in a world driven by fear and doubt. They never entirely find it, but maybe the seeking matters more than the finding.

Again, the synopsis implies a political thriller in a time of historic uncertainty. But the actual book is more gripping simply because it’s driven by honesty. Good people of upright character wonder which anointed leader to trust. What happens when two incompatible choices, both supported by God, force us to pick sides? Maybe it’s better to do something, even if it’s wrong, than to get lost in philosophy.

But Someone’s Gotta Do It

Eyal Press, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality In America

Few Americans have seen an untrimmed chicken carcass with our own eyes, but we know such things exist. Somebody, somewhere, turns living livestock into the styrofoam-backed meats Americans consume in such quantities. Similarly, somebody has to push the “kill” button on unmanned military drones, someone has to house the prisoners created by America’s “tough on crime” policies, someone has to extract hydrocarbons from the mine.  We sure won’t do it.

Journalist and NYU sociologist Eyal Press gathers the term “Dirty Work” from Everett Hughes, whose post-World War II research dealt with how citizens of totalitarian nations dealt with shared culpability for government atrocities. Ordinary citizens, Hughes determined, created a mental barrier. Some work was necessary, but innately dirty. Therefore a designated underclass handled the distasteful responsibility of, say, conducting pogroms and prosecuting wars of conquest.

Dirty Work, Press emphasizes early, is different from dirty jobs. Some jobs, like construction, agriculture, or infrastructure maintenance, are widely regarded as somewhat crummy. But Dirty Work is morally tainted, and that moral condemnation transfers onto those who do it. But that work remains necessary, because the population wants the work done. Workers performing Dirty Work become agents of society’s collective id, and we reward them with our disgust.

Press focuses mainly on three categories of Dirty Work in America: prison staffers, military drone pilots, and meatpackers. Combining a broad statistical survey of each field with close, intimate stories of people doing the work, he guides readers through these fields’ intricacies. He unpacks the sorts of people who accept, even seek, these jobs. And he demonstrates how they express our collective will, even as we publicly disown them.

Prisons suffer a paradoxical push-pull influence. Like schools, Americans see prisons as necessary means of enforcing laws and creating order. Candidates campaign on pledges to build, and fill, new prisons. But also like schools, prisons are first on the chopping block when budgets get cut. This becomes especially dangerous because, with the mass closure of state-funded asylums in the 1970s, prisons are now America’s leading warehouse for the mentally ill.

Eyal Press

America’s military became reliant on drones because we still expect to maintain global military dominion, but distrust committing troops. Drone pilots, working from bases in places like west Texas or northern California, save the Administration the PR headache of deployments, while keeping America active in stopping militants and terrorists. But because of their technology, individual drone pilots kill far more targets than soldiers ever could. And many suffer catastrophic PTSD.

Industrial meatpacking plants satisfy America’s appetite for cheap, plentiful meat, but at great cost. Animal rights activists love showing footage of how livestock suffer on the killing floors. But plant workers are inordinately likely to be maimed, even killed, while those who emerge physically unhurt suffer PTSD symptoms, including nightmares and hair loss. Like prison guards and drone pilots, they’re despised in their communities, underpaid, and punished for speaking out.

These workers have significant commonalities. Ruralism, for one: prisons, drone bases, and meatpacking plants are built well away from population centers. Prison workers and today’s military are also likely to come from rural areas, where often, these secure government jobs are the only reliable source of income. The workers, and their work, are easily ignored because they remain isolated on the periphery of “polite” American society.

They’re also subject to bipartisan contempt. Whenever whistleblowers in these industries come forward, conservatives ridicule them as crybabies who don’t appreciate the opportunities these jobs offer. But progressives, who historically attribute poverty and crime to systemic, rather than individual, causes, make exceptions for workers doing Dirty Work. Progressives hold these workers individually, not their employers or the laws which regulate them, culpable for their industries’ worst excesses.

Press delves into other Dirty Work, like immigrations enforcement and hydrocarbon mining, though in less depth. For comparison, Press has a chapter on “dirty tech,” high-tech innovations that make society less free, like Google making alliances with Communist China, or Facebook selling personal data to Cambridge Analytica. But, Press notes, dirty tech workers aren’t personally tainted. They’re free to quit with minimal penalties, and seldom held individually responsible.

Overall, Press describes a stratified economy where despised workers get thrust into despised work. This exposé channels historically respected journalists, from Upton Sinclair to Eric Schlosser, who have revealed the two-tiered rot in American society. The product is chilling. And maybe, this time, we’ll learn enough from the lessons Press offers that we won’t repeat these mistakes in the future. Though admittedly, the precedent isn’t good.

Is Jesus Running For Governor Of Georgia?

Click to enlarge

Behold, please: the wonder that is Kandiss Taylor’s campaign bus. Taylor is one of three Republicans challenging incumbent Georgia governor Brian Kemp in the primary. (Stacey Abrams is running in the Democratic primary apparently unchallenged.) Taylor, a grade-school counselor in rural southeastern Georgia, has no prior electoral experience, but apparently enough Georgians support her to afford a large, diesel-burning coach bus.

I can find embarrassingly little information on Kandiss Taylor’s campaign online. Described as a GOP activist, Taylor has alliances with Georgia hard-right icons Marjorie Taylor Greene and Herschel Walker. Her campaign website rehashes comfy conservative standbys: election “integrity,” aggressive immigration enforcement, and opposition to Critical Race Theory. It’s a Mad-Libs of right-wing talking points, overseen by Taylor’s admittedly photogenic face.

Except: Taylor’s website, like her bus, extols the three-legged stool of her campaign: Jesus, Guns, and Babies.

This roughly corresponds with the three conservative “wedge issues” identified in Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter With Kansas?: “God, guns, and gays.” Since Frank’s book dropped in 2004, it’s become political suicide to be openly anti-gay, just as being brazenly racist once became toxic. However, since Taylor’s website says she opposes both abortion and comprehensive sex education, “Babies” clearly serves the role of signalling restrictive sexual values.

However, by yoking Jesus together with Guns and Babies, Taylor makes visible something only implicit in Thomas Frank’s formulation. Speaking as a Christian, I must begin by admitting: Jesus isn’t here. We may believe that Jesus, with the wide-sweeping agape of saving love, dwells in our hearts, but Jesus isn’t physically present. We have Christ’s words, and guidance from ministers, and (arguably) Christ in our hearts. But Jesus isn’t here.

Therefore, campaigning for Jesus is easy. Jesus won’t disagree, won’t muster counter-arguments, won’t say “Hey! I never said that.” When candidates promise to crack down on welfare cheats and undocumented immigrants, Jesus won’t inconveniently remind them of the Sermon on the Mount or the Parable of the Sheep and Goats, where Christ said the mark of salvation was feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and welcoming the stranger.

Kandiss Taylor

Thinking about it, I realized Jesus has something in common with guns and babies: they’re all incapable of asking for help, or expressing gratitude. They’re all ideologically inert. All three serve important roles in political discourse, but they serve those roles passively, as mute recipients of political beneficence. Jesus, guns, and babies never ask anything of anyone, at least not directly. You can “be for” Jesus, guns, and babies without having to ask their permission.

By contrast, the people Jesus told Christians to support have needs. The hungry and the naked require our assistance and support, but just as importantly, they require our dignity. That’s why Jesus told us to give alms freely, but not let our left hand know what the right was doing. In seeking personal glory for our generosity, or electoral position, or résumé filler, we don’t uplift the poor; we only gratify ourselves.

While Republicans, like Taylor, have positioned themselves as champions of smiling babies and big, scary guns, Democrats have badly fumbled the effort to empower populations. A heavily White contingent of Democrats loves dispensing government largesse to Black, Indigenous, gay, and other beloved populations. But the Democrats remain focused on being seen as generous, and in so doing rob their favored groups of dignity.

In other words, Republicans ignore populations able to express their own needs, while Democrats ignore the words those populations say about their own needs. Republicans embrace the existing power structure, and promise to preserve it against meddlesome do-gooders. Democrats prefer to see themselves as White saviors, even those who aren’t necessarily White themselves, rescuing the poor by dispensing patronage plums.

Kandiss Taylor loves Jesus, guns, and babies, because loving the passive is easy. Much easier, certainly, than praying for those who curse you, as a certain Galilean said. Also easier than forgiving debts, which Jesus considered pretty important, and which Democrats promised to do, before reneging. Taylor has embraced literally the most passive campaign pledge possible, promising to do nothing, while shifting the responsibility onto God.

As a Christian and a citizen, I want a candidate who shares my values. But the problem is frustratingly reflexive: the more loudly a candidate proclaims her Christian bona fides, the more likely those credentials are false. And both parties are avoiding the difficult work of listening to “the least of these” where they actually are. I fear conditions will only get worse before there’s any chance of getting better.

You Have the Right to Remain

Jamal Greene, How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart

The most important controversies of my lifetime seemingly turn on questions of rights: civil rights, reproductive rights, voting rights, gay rights. Yet as rights have become increasingly well-defined and codified, American society has become increasingly polarized and vitriolic. Rather than settling debates, rights considerations leave us more confused and disappointed. Where did our quest for rights get so thoroughly lost?

Columbia University constitutional law professor Jamal Greene thinks the American tradition frames rights incorrectly. Our rights regime entrusts rights enforcement to judges, not legislatures, and construes rights as a zero-sum equation. Instead, Greene suggests, we should frame rights as relative and situational, not absolute, and the solution as arbitration, not enforcement. Greene’s argument is definitely not simple, but is at least intriguing.

Constitutional rights seem immutable: our Bill of Rights is, as the NRA and ACLU assert, pretty transparent. Not so, says Greene. Our conception of who holds rights, and how, has evolved through history. The rights inscribed were held collectively, not individually. But the Founders’ definition proved unsatisfactory and led directly to the Civil War. Since then, Reconstruction, two World Wars, and the Civil Rights Movement forced further reevaluations.

Americans historically demand rights by a combination of public protest and court challenge. Several rights cases remain historic: Brown vs. BOE, for instance, or Roe vs. Wade. But these cases create or reify rights by appeals to absolute truth. Greene makes hay extensively over abortion rights, noting that in codifying a woman’s right to control her reproductive choices, the court nullified embryonic rights: since both cannot be absolute, one must be negated.

Greene contrasts this with Germany, which faced an abortion rights challenge approximately simultaneously with the United States. Rather than seeing rights as absolute, Germany saw reproductive rights and embryonic rights as positional, and sought to mitigate them. (Greene uses the word “mitigate” often, sometimes in a confusing technical sense.) Notably, as America’s abortion rights debate has become increasingly violent, Germany has remained remarkably calm.

Jamal Greene

This, Greene says, is only one outcome of American-style rights. When every case is a question of absolutes, it encourages litigants to paper over their common ground and paint the other side in the worst possible light. Every Supreme Court case becomes, not an opportunity to see each suit on its own terms, but an existential crisis dividing America’s power base into winners and losers. We stop seeing others as human.

Worse, every case becomes a slippery slope. America remains one of Earth’s few democracies that doesn’t consider food a right, versus, say, weapons. Courts historically fear granting some rights will lead to ballooning demands, and therefore courts, even nominally progressive ones, remain reluctant to redress demonstrable harm. Notwithstanding the occasional celebrated rights win, our absolutist vision of rights makes courts generally timid.

Greene’s prose is dense, but not impenetrable, and sometimes his illustrations need some solemn contemplation. He regularly contrasts American judicial precedent with international courts, mostly European, to demonstrate how different traditions see rights. A certain variety of American conservative might dislike this: the hard right often hates subjecting America to global standards, But an international eye shows that circumstances aren’t inevitable, in court or in life.

I enjoyed Greene’s explication of American case law, though I sometimes needed to read his illustrations more than once to grasp their import. Greene tries to strike a difficult balance, writing for generalist audiences, without condescending to them. Sometimes he errs on the side of being too erudite, not explaining sufficiently for non-lawyers. To his credit, he avoids jargon, so his writing is frequently complex, but never opaque.

Further, Greene does something I’ve seen too infrequently. He has three lengthy chapters on how absolutist thinking obscures important questions for certain population groups. This includes a detailed chapter on disability rights, a field often neglected behind more photogenic race and gender rights. As someone who’s recently become conscious of how pervasive ableism remains, I appreciate this contribution to an often-overlooked debate.

Greene’s position will ruffle many feathers. Rights discussions have loomed large in controversies where America has made improvements, and reframing rights will mean re-litigating several important civil rights victories. But if Greene’s right, that isn’t entirely awful; we’ve missed several opportunities for more nuanced solutions because our love of moral absolutes has clouded our vision.

No solution is perfect, Greene admits, and he doesn’t have every answer. But he attempts to present a better viewpoint for finding those answers, one which escapes absolute moralism. This book won’t solve everything, but hopefully it’ll advance the debate.

Migrant Life in the New North American Dreamland

Brenda Peynado, The Rock Eaters: Stories

A religious order is formed around preserving teenagers from sin, and the greatest sin is falling asleep and dreaming. An aging Dominican socialite throws away her keys and spends her waning days communicating with her favorite niece through a tiny crack in the door. A toymaker is the only one left standing between a race of lace-winged extraterrestrials and the racist punks who come for them.

Brenda Peynado’s debut collection swings wildly among genres, but her short stories share one thematic question: what if the metaphors that drive our lives were real? What if the stones of sadness that tie us to a place were literal stones we could hold? What if the “thoughts and prayers” we sent up after tragedies went to an actual, listening being? What if radiation turned loyal people into superheroes?

Latin American literature gave us a nearly unique genre, Magic Realism, driven by images of the surreal or supernatural being treated as ordinary. Authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende gave us stories where the seemingly paranormal is as ordinary as rain. As Hispanic culture becomes increasingly widespread in Anglo-America, American-born Latin writers like Peynado are creating a North American equivalent to Magic Realism.

Peynado’s narrative voice is thoughtful and ruminative, without getting self-consciously “literary.” Most of her stories are told by a first-person narrator, usually female, frequently the young daughter of first-generation immigrants. This youthful, unjaded viewpoint lets us witness a world where wonder and anomaly roam the earth unhindered. Her narrators are too innocent to realize the things they witness are bizarre, or that their lives have been upended.

Several of Peynado’s stories resemble the high-minded fiction published in glossy quarterlies, but with paranormal elements as part of their background. In the title story, “The Rock Eaters,” a generation of ambitious young Dominicans learns how to fly, and uses that ability to flee to America. In “The Man I Could Be,” Peynado’s only story from a male viewpoint, a teenager’s raw potential literally lives in his house, constantly disappointed.

Two stories are out-and-out science fiction. “The Kite Maker” features a woman seeking penitence for the violence she participated in, when the first scared, dying extraterrestrials crash-landed on Earth. “The Touches” asks: what if the machines built The Matrix for benevolent reasons? This story directly, unabashedly nods to Plato, Descartes, and Robert Nozick, while also speaking directly to life in plague-infested America.

Brenda Peynado

Only a few stories don’t directly involve supernatural themes. “Yaiza” deals with a working-class tennis savant whose natural talent upends the posh hierarchy. “We Work in Miraculous Cages” addresses the plight of a young professional, trapped in jobs beneath her capability, because the economy urged her into usurious student debt when she was too young to understand the commitment. Even without magic, these stories describe how reality changes their protagonists.

Though Peynado’s approach is usually sidelong and fantastic, calling these stories “fantasy” is misleading. She doesn’t toss us headlong into another world; instead, she addresses the fears and aspirations everybody has, which we usually keep at arm’s length by discussing them in metaphors. The religious image of staying awake and watchful against sin, in “The Dreamers,” for instance. Or the ghosts living in our basements, in “True Love Game.”

I don’t always like short story collections anymore. Short stories are frequently an afterthought in today’s publishing industry, where the real money comes from novels. Yet the stories Peynado offers are well-thought-out, with remarkably detailed settings; we can imagine how the small changes she offers could have profound impacts on our world. We see one moment in her characters’ lives, usually something catastrophic, but these never feel like orphaned occasions.

The frequency with which Peynado uses children or teenagers as narrators might reflect something in herself. Maybe. Her characters are fumbling with important questions. They haven’t learned to rely on shopworn platitudes like adults do (platitudes made painfully literal in “Thoughts and Prayers”), but they also lack experience necessary to address their problems directly. Again, this is a debut collection; like her narrators, Peynado is still finding her way.

Not that these stories lack sophistication. These aren’t apprentice-level finger exercises; Peynado already has a distinct voice, and an approach that stands out in today’s crowded publishing field. Even in pieces lasting less than ten pages, where the narrator might not tell us her name, it’s still easy to care about what she’s created. I look forward to seeing what she’s able to accomplish as she continues refining her craft.

The Day I Discovered Time Travel

Ani DiFranco

The Ani DiFranco song ambushed me at a moment when, too sure of myself, I let my mind sprawl like a lover on a divan. I had a channel of women singer-songwriters on my preferred streaming service, playing a regular selection of Dar Williams, Indigo Girls, Patty Griffin. The channel played Ani regularly, but mostly her late-nineties stuff, when she was pushing thirty, tracks like “32 Flavors” or “Untouchable Face.”

Instead, the channel played “Both Hands,” from her eponymous debut, recorded when Ani was only nineteen. I hadn’t heard that track in nearly twenty years. I still have my CDs I bought before college, though like most people, I only blow the dust off them occasionally. They’re part of a world I no longer occupy, a world I occupied only loosely even then. A world I frequently intend to revisit, temporarily, but never quite do.

Until I did. That song played, and I was instantly transported. Like Marcel Proust’s famous macaroon, the song had magical powers. I didn’t just remember being twenty-three, frustrated and disappointed while waiting for my life to commence; I was literally there. I was sitting on a concrete porch in a small Nebraska town, with a battery-powered boombox, watching kids play soccer on the schoolyard across the street and thinking: now what?

“Both Hands,” a lament of self-discovery in a poorly chosen relationship, could only have been written by a teenager. But the recording I first heard, from Ani DiFranco’s first live album, was recorded when she was twenty-six, deep in the thicket of what we euphemistically call adulthood. I’ve seen this before, though with DiFranco, I was too young to understand. Songs by youth, about waning adolescence, hit harder from older, wearier voices.

I grew up surrounded by images of Baby Boomers extolling their lost youths. The first generation to grow up in the embracing womb of pervasive television, Boomers have icons that let them time-travel the way I did. One of my earliest memories of TV is a PBS documentary about how cushy the idiot box was for boomers. It ballyhooed diverse nostalgic images, from Leave It To Beaver and Felix the Cat, to Woodstock and Cronkite at Da Nang.

The blogger as post-adolescent
hippie wannabe. Probably age 25,
somewhere around the year 2000.

I wanted that connection. I wanted to exist on a continuum of nostalgia like I saw praised on public broadcasting between Big Bird and Doctor Who. When I finally rebelled against my parents’ performatively countrified upbringing, I embraced a hippie-era ethic of crunchy rock, long hair, and groovy vibes. I’ve written about this before. But I wasn’t really time-traveling then, because the world I glommed onto involved only filmed images and photos, which I’d witnessed fairly recently.

Things have changed, though. I’m at the age when I can say “twenty-five years ago” and refer to something that happened when I was already an adult. After passing through a long, lingering hippie-dip adolescence, Ani DiFranco was the first contemporary artist I landed on, recording for a mass audience right now. She ushered in my fondness for indie rock and folk music, contra my parents’ country & western, or the classic rock with which I rebelled.

So there I was, simultaneously in my office, doing my grown-up job, and also on the porch of my first house, listening to Ani and feeling smothered by ennui. Powered only by my brain, I’d slipped outside the bonds of present responsibility, the beige-tinted walls of adult sobriety, and traveled into a version of myself that both somehow was, and wasn’t, considered an adult. But I wasn’t there in the past; I could only watch from outside.

Suddenly, those PBS documentaries praising Boomer childhoods made sense. The intended audiences, then pushing forty, weren’t gleefully watching their younger selves; they were coming to grips with the choices they’d made. Watching myself from outside, I realized I was seeing someone whose life appeared empty of direction, but only superficially. I had millions of choices ahead of me, but I could only live in one direction. Once made, those choices were forever.

As the song ended and I returned to myself, a thought struck me: God and healthcare willing, I’ll someday look back on this moment the same way I just looked back on myself. And I’ll ask myself the same questions: did I make the right choices? Did I do something to make my future self proud? The only difference is, this time I’ll know I’m being watched.

Sorry, Doctor Who: time travel is overrated. It only makes me aware of the present.

The Winter of Someone Else’s Discontent

John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting

Four fugitives gather in a snowbound inn on the fringes of northern Italy. All live in constant fear of the encroaching Empire. Though they share a goal, they have their own motivations, their own closely guarded secrets and unhealed wounds. With little else in common, they agree to work toward their one ultimate desire, to stop Byzantium from gaining any more ground in Western Europe. To do that, they look to their one hope, the beleaguered English king, Richard III.

John M. Ford, “Mike” to his friends, had little patience for the commercial niceties of genre writing. His novels broke new ground in space opera, cyberpunk, and literary fantasy, and fellow authors adored him; he was a celebrity on the convention circuit. But other than two successful Star Trek tie-in novels, Ford found little recognition in his lifetime. Then he abruptly died, aged only 49, without a will. Nobody knew who owned his novels, which disappeared from print.

This 1983 fantasy, Ford’s first novel pushed back into print after his passing, bridges the gaps between Tolkein’s heroic fable-making, and George RR Martin’s cynical political chronicles. Like Tolkein, it features a fellowship of sworn brethren (though one’s a woman) seeking to restore justice to a wounded world. Like Martin, Ford’s disenchanted antiheroes prefer to work behind the scenes. The hybrid result will undoubtedly excite and confound dedicated genre fans.

Ford’s circle of bloody-minded revengers includes a Welsh wizard whose exceedingly long life has rendered him distrustful of his own power, and an Italian doctor, who counters her Welsh counterpart in youth and veracity. A Greek-speaking mercenary, a descendant of Emperors, who fled his Empire when court intrigue became more highly valued than honor. And an exiled Bavarian artillery commander who fears himself, and his unnatural thirst for human blood.

Even beyond Ford’s characters, though, his world-building will excite and challenge his readers. Ford postulates an alternate history where Emperor Julian, “the Apostate,” survived his battle at Ctesiphon and reigned long enough to prevent Christianity from becoming Rome’s state religion. This results in a world where tolerance and religious pluralism reign supreme. Equally important, the Byzantine Empire didn’t dwindle to insignificance; its intrigues continue growing as it reconquers long-lost territory.

John M. Ford

Therefore Ford’s world contains chilling contradictions. Though its civilization seems welcoming and broad-minded, it also keeps the Imperial government alive and growing. At a moment when the Italian Renaissance should begin blossoming, the greedy, undead corpse of Late Antiquity is instead spreading its intrigues throughout Europe. Julian’s rejection of parochialism, instead creates a perfect climate for ancient fears and paranoias to flourish in the shadow of modernity.

Our quartet of anti-Byzantine protagonists thus wades into a world where dynastic struggles and royal governments are merely proxies for ancient resentments and worship of the state. (Maybe not so fanciful, sometimes.) Our protagonists’ unique skills let them attempt to pull the levers of complex political machinations, though they often can’t see the outcomes of their actions. Nor do we; once laid, our protagonists’ plots may not see fruition for over 100 pages.

Ford has essentially crafted the John le Carré novel of epic fantasy. His characters maintain the public face of piety (without the bonds of shared religion), but their actions amorally aim toward desired outcomes. They consider these moral compromises acceptable, however, because the alternative is Byzantine reconquest, with its pitiless armies and its wizard enforcers. As someone, I’ve forgotten who, wrote of le Carré, this story features the pretty bad standing up against the truly awful.

And just as le Carré’s espionage classics featured generous doses of real-world politics, Ford salts his story with just enough familiarity to keep us hooked, even if we don’t always agree with his postulations. Ford presents Richard III and Lorenzo de Medici as flawed but remarkably sympathetic rulers, paternalistic despots who must govern harshly to control the wild, unlettered masses. In Ford’s world, religion is vast and all-enveloping, but somehow never controlling.

This novel was immensely popular with writers and critics upon release; it won the 1984 World Fantasy Award, and acquired the loyalty of several marquee authors, particularly Neil Gaiman. But it never found a mass-market audience, and twice fell out of print for nearly twenty years. Gaiman has suggested that it could’ve become a success if Ford had spun it into a series. But that was just one of many aspects of genre publishing that Ford regarded with distaste.

It may disappear again; don’t neglect this opportunity to grab an influential but seldom-read classic.

How To Change Your Mind (Maybe)

Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

America is arguably plagued with a crisis of overconfidence. Politicians, business professionals, and pundits can’t be shaken from their opinions. Everyone from bankers to athletic coaches keeps supporting their investments, even after they’ve proven themselves unreliable. Why are so many people unwilling to change their minds? And is there any way to reverse this apparently culture-wide aversion to basic rethinking?

I had two different opinions about Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant’s latest book. While reading, I felt very genial toward his message, that constantly reëvaluating our own beliefs strengthens our position, and makes it more likely that we’re ultimately correct. He uses the latest research from psychology and behavioral economics to justify his position, but he restates that research in plain English, so us ordinary readers grasp the import of his message.

However, I took few notes while reading, and when I sat to write this review, I realized I couldn’t remember very much of what he’d said. Grant made what felt, as I was reading, like several important and substantive points. However, he made them in ways that had no mental adhesion, that slid off my recollection like bugs off a windshield. If I can’t recall them, just two hours later, have his points really changed my mind?

Not that Grant says nothing memorable. Throughout his book, he emphasizes the importance of “thinking like a scientist.” This means using knowledge, not as absolute truth, but as the foundation for hypothesis and experiment. Good scientists test all knowledge against emerging evidence, and when the evidence requires it, they change their minds. To scientists, being proven wrong isn’t evidence of weakness; it’s a sign that they’re still growing.

Grant contrasts thinking like a scientist to the other roles our thinking often falls into: preacher, prosecutor, and politician. That is, we preach the truth of our own understanding, prosecute supposed flaws in others’ understanding, and politically hedge between these extremes to make our understanding useful. All these, Grant admits, are useful roles, in their place. But too often, we let them dominate us, and we pay for it.

Adam Grant

This broad outline makes sense. The extreme intellectual and political intolerance which dominates modern discourse comes from people seeing their ideas, not as tentative expressions of the best evidence, but as extensions of their own identity. Too many people respond to friendly intellectual challenges like they’d respond to a bear attack. This individualistic approach is personally harmful, and it prevents us getting any closer to resolving our differences.

In justifying this outline, however, Grant caroms wildly. In an early chapter, he draws an analogy between rigid, hidebound thinking, and the way the once-popular Blackberry Corporation collapsed because it couldn’t adapt to changing tides. It’s a valid analogy. Except he lays the premise, then leaves for so long that, when he returns to it, I’d forgotten the premise, and had to skip backward to remember what he was talking about.

He repeats this hit-and-run technique with multiple examples: Apple Computer, Pixar Animation, the anti-vax movement, his own cousin’s medical career. He dips in, makes his point, and zooms away, in a manner that arguably would work well in a TED Talk or other oral format. In a book, where audiences expect thoughtful authors to unpack weighty topics with appropriate gravity, the product just looks chaotic.

Maybe it’s the format. Like multiple scholars writing nonfiction for a general-interest market (Malcolm Gladwell and Naomi Klein come to mind), Professor Grant feels obligated to make his narrative fast-moving, concise, and peppy. However, he’s addressing a topic where his audience has precast opinions, and where he often has to overcome deep intransigence. As Grant himself notes, “There's a fine line between heroic persistence and foolish stubbornness.”

I found plenty in Grant’s writing that stuck with me. His chapter on Motivational Interviewing, a technique of persuasion through asking questions rather than making statements, gave me plenty to consider. Particularly since I formerly struggled to overcome my students’ ingrained beliefs by making statements, which they found easy to ignore, I really enjoyed Grant’s insights into this topic, and will definitely read further and utilize this technique.

On balance, I’m glad I read this book. Professor Grant gives readers important insights, encourages us to reframe our own thinking processes, and shows us how successful rethinkers have made their approach systemic. Perhaps I’ll reread the book, taking more notes the second time. But this book didn’t really change me, ironically. In today’s busy, time-crunched environment, most readers won’t give books that second chance.

How I Learned That I Haven’t Learned Much

Before I even finished reading Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, about the modern plague of short attention spans, I began plotting how to apply Hari’s insights. There wasn’t one single answer to this question. Hari rejects the individualistic attitude, that dwindling focus is each person’s moral failing, believing instead that evidence shows this is a product of policy choices and commercial greed. We’ll only address this problem, Hari insists, by banding together to confront the source.

Nevertheless, Hari agrees individuals can take certain steps to begin the process of evicting the corporate squatters from our brains. One such step he calls “precommitment,” deliberately deciding on a specific step and applying it consciously. Precommitment isn’t something vague; it doesn’t mean declaring “I won’t spend four hours noodling on my phone after work.” After all, though that’s a fine-sounding sentiment, it lacks concrete steps: how will I avoid getting sucked into that routine?

For me, it involved a simple vow: I wouldn’t let my phone into my bedroom anymore. My reasoning was simple. On getting home from work, tired and incoherent from a day’s exertions, and changing out of my work clothes, I’ve developed a habit of flopping onto my bed and browsing my phone to decompress. This inevitably descends into a doom-spiral of FaceTube and InstaTwit, and though I always promise myself otherwise, it lasts for hours.

Hari singles out bedtime phone-scrolling as a major contributor to insomnia and mental health struggles. The light levels on phone screens, especially in darkened rooms, disrupts our circadian rhythms. He doesn’t acknowledge that phone manufacturers know this; most smartphones anymore come with night mode, a setting that filters light, particularly the most disruptive blue-wave light. If the physiological complaints were the only problem with in-bed phone browsing, well, the technology mavens already fixed that problem.

For me, though, the problem ran deeper. My body, my eyes, don’t respond to the phone; it's my sense of time. The suffusion of social media into my private time creates the expectation that something will happen imminently. As a sprout, I hated being ordered to bed, because I thought something exciting would happen after I fell asleep: something fun on TV, or guests stopping by, or whatever. My phone fills that role in adulthood.

Johann Hari

Here’s the thing: it worked! It didn’t solve the problem of coming home fatigued and incoherent, certainly. But when I did, and flopped on my bed in t-shirt and jeans, I was confronted with the present. Instead of the expectant promise that something fun would happen soon, I existed right now. As I wondered what to do with that present, my eyes landed on the pile of books I’ve bought and hoarded without reading them.

I read Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel, How High We Go In the Dark, in under 48 hours. I don’t believe I’ve read anything that fast since the pandemic began. Without my phone to create distractions that somebody might say something funny, uplifting, or personally meaningful on social media, I was present enough to read an entire book. I felt refreshed. My mind felt cleansed of the detritus from ten years of instantly available brain candy.

Then I did whatever anybody, flush with the heady excitement of secular enlightenment, does: I got smug about myself. I began preparing my presentation about my life-changing insight. In my head, I was already writing my self-righteous TED Talk about making small changes and achieving great outcomes. I patted myself on my back, told myself I’d done it, and began planning my new sideline career evangelizing the power of small lifestyle changes for big results.

So smug was I, that I stopped enforcing my precommitment. Having banned my phone from my bedroom, I started doom-scrolling in the living room. Then, because I was listening to an audiobook on my phone, I decided that this time doesn’t count, and carried it into the bedroom. While listening, I opened a game, to occupy my eyes while my ears listened. Next thing I knew, three hours passed, and I remembered nothing I’d heard.

My problem, I’m realizing, isn’t my phone. Though my phone channels my human tendency toward passivity, it’s secondary. My problem begins because, like most humans, I desire to minimize resistance in life, to coast on momentum. When jobs, social connections, and hobbies provide momentum, our passive time is, in some way, creative. But when technology substitutes present reward for an undefined future, I passively miss the present. Clearly, I still have so much to learn.

The Ordered Mind in a Disordered Society

Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—And How To Think Deeply Again

It’s not just you: people worldwide are reporting increased difficulty paying attention to deep ideas and ordinary tasks. Though it’s impossible to precisely quantify, copious circumstantial evidence reports that populations don’t stick with ideas as long as we once did, and while customers are buying more books than ever, they’re finishing far, far fewer. How did this happen to so many people simultaneously? Just as important, how can we reverse it?

Anglo-Swiss journalist Johann Hari mixes autobiography with investigative reportage to uncover answers to these questions. He noticed his beloved nephew, once an energetic child, had become entranced by his handheld technology, spending literally hours without looking up from his phone. But sure as every doctor is a patient, Hari realized he could see, in his nephew, his own sins; his own life was increasingly circumscribed by his phone.

Like many critics, Hari assumed our handheld technology caused the problem. After all, we started staring at phones, and experienced shortened attention spans, right? Not so, he quickly discovers. First, though the data isn’t ironclad, there’s reason to believe human attention spans have been getting shorter since the Victorian age, and the reasons are reasonably comparable to what’s happening around us today.

Not that mobile technology, and the companies that make it, are innocent. Using insider testimony and industry documents, he provides persuasive evidence that Silicon Valley cultivates a business model based on keeping users hooked. They know their devices produce cocaine-like dopamine jolts, and they know some modest tweaks could fix that without hurting their balance sheets. But nobody can afford to be the first to make the responsible choice.

So smartphone makers and social media enterprises are disincentivized to act responsibly. That’s hardly a shocker, though Hari feigns astonishment. Hari also finds several less obvious contributors to modern users’ abbreviated attention spans. Heightened levels of economic stress trigger a human tendency to look for threats, like paleolithic hunters on the bushveldt. Lousy processed food leaves our brains undernourished, and environmental pollutants disrupt the functions of our endocrine system.

Taken together, Hari finds a socioeconomic structure that wasn’t necessarily designed to disrupt human attention spans, but definitely has that effect. What’s more, the wealthy and well-connected already know these effects exist. To the extent that they’re able, the people who profit from this disruptive economy, don’t participate in it. The rich eat organic unprocessed foods, send their kids to Waldorf schools, and frequently don’t use the technologies they manufacture.

Johann Hari

Healthy mental states aren’t difficult to define. Robust psychology and neuroscience have demonstrated what well-rounded brains do. From children running and playing, to adults achieving what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called a “flow state,” we have extensive science showing what healthy minds do, and how such health contributes to creativity, emotional balance, and social well-being. We know what’s gone wrong, Hari writes, and we know what “right” looks like.

Hari occasionally sweeps into breathless narration where he claims to have personally discovered something really well-known. For instance, he claims he uncovered evidence that Facebook and Google make most of their money, not providing services to ordinary end-users, but by packaging end-user data for resale to advertisers. That’s not exactly a closely held secret. His wide-eyed narrative in these moments, sadly, makes him appear less than wholly serious.

Which is a shame. Though most of what Hari discovers isn’t original to his investigative research, he does make a meaningful contribution by organizing it into a unified story. I like the structure of abuse and dependency Hari has uncovered, and wish he would’ve resisted the temptation to make himself the center of the story. Because ultimately, what he finds here isn’t about him, it’s about us.

Throughout the story, Hari hints at something he spells out explicitly in the conclusion. Despite the individualistic Western myth, this widespread attention failure isn’t an individual problem; it was created systemically, and can only be fixed systemically. Hari outlines several steps individual readers can implement to regain some of their attention span, some of which I’ve already implemented. But ultimately, like racism or homophobia, this collective problem requires collective solutions.

I’m not blind to the irony that you’re reading this review online. Without social media, I never would’ve discovered this book. But Hari doesn’t advocate tossing the baby with the bathwater; networked mobile technology serves an important social role. The goal, rather, is to master our technologies, instead of letting them master us. We can achieve that goal, working together. Hari provides the first organized tools to do so.

Also by Johann Hari:
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs