Laughter From the Ninth Circle of Hell

Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx, That's Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work For Them

It’s become a doctrine among American progressives that conservatives just aren’t funny. The Left has SNL, Jon Stewart, and the whole late-night crew. What does the Right have? [Insert list of failed right-wing comedy franchises here.] This conviction, though, crumbles on one important fact: Greg Gutfeld, Fox News’ late-night anchor star, regularly outscores leftist network programming in ratings. Leftists don’t find conservative comedy funny, but it definitely exists.

Media studies professors Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx admit they aren’t funny. Their purpose isn’t to entertain, but to lead a Left-minded audience through the frequently labyrinthine conservative entertainment industry. They describe it as “the Right-Wing Comedy Complex,” and compare it to a shopping mall. There’s the big-box store for mainstream buyers, the cigar shop for men looking for hetero chest-thumping, and a basement full of terrifying, violent wares.

Leftists frequently describe Fox News stalwarts Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters as unfunny, and Watters particularly as often racist. But they’re secure ratings winners; by 2021, Gutfeld had more viewers than Stephen Colbert. In our authors’ telling, their comedy appears to be an out-and-out satire of TV comedy itself. (I seldom watch the idiot box anymore, so I trust the authors’ narrative.) This satire invites viewers to consider themselves “in on” the joke.

Where Gutfeld makes an explicit point, even if Leftists don’t get it, more conventional right-wing comics just exist. Dennis Miller and Tim Allen appeal to conservative audiences, our authors claim, because they basically haven’t changed much in twenty-five years. These comics create a familiar atmosphere that consumers can snuggle under like a weighted blanket. Allen does this explicitly, structuring his current TV persona around nostalgia for bygone social roles.

From this mainstream, highly visible perch, Sienkiewicz and Marx descend into a more self-contained, and sometimes ugly, lower depth. One can question Ben Shapiro’s or Stephen Crowder’s comedy bona fides, for instance, but they use humor to convey messages— although those messages are sometimes freighted with old-school racism. And while not everyone likes The Babylon Bee, its writers have mastered social media manipulation for vast, lucrative clicks.

Matt Sienkiewicz (left) and Nick Marx

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Conservative and right-libertarian podcasters corral young, mostly White audiences into networks where they can disguise sometimes repellent opinions as “just a joke.” As our authors write, analysis and nuance aren’t very profitable at this level; inflammatory or hateful sayings sell. Professional trolls like Michael Malice and Gavin McInnes don’t even pretend to express convictions; they only want to make po-faced progressives lose their composure in public.

Spectators like me wouldn’t find this “comedy” funny. But they come together, Voltron-like, to create a media landscape which holds its audience, provides its content creators with a successful living, and gives the conservative political movement an identity. After all, Evangelical Christians, conventional libertarians, and White nationalists don’t have much in common; but they can laugh at similar jokes, and that’s almost like being unified.

Much as I appreciated our authors’ analysis, I found something missing: the audience. Who consumes conservative comedy? Only fleetingly, in one anecdote in the conclusion, do they describe an audience. Gutfeld and Tim Allen are supported by advertisers, but many of these subjects rely on direct subscribers and Patreon backers, especially the podcasters they exhaustively dissect. What’s their relationship with the product? I still couldn’t quite say.

They also briefly, in the introduction, touch on something they never quite return to: the American media landscape has changed rapidly. Twenty years ago, someone like Jon Stewart could command massive audiences nightly just by showing up, because there were considerably fewer media outlets. The rise of à la carte media changed not only how audiences consume, but also how creators make, their platforms. This seems relevant.

Our authors’ willingness to subject themselves to media products that their chosen audience would find repellent matters. Most readers couldn’t spare the time necessary to consume this many TV episodes, streaming videos, and podcasts. They consider a broad cross-section of conservative comedy, and analyze it for a mainly progressive audience. This lets us understand the right-wing comedic viewpoint, without having to get lost in it. Thanks.

Perhaps my greatest takeaway from this book is that comedy isn’t unitary. My dad doesn’t appreciate Monty Python, and never will. Likewise, I’ll never find Ryan Long or the Legion of Skanks podcast, two conservative “comedy” sources detailed herein, funny. But that doesn’t mean, as long-faced progressive scolds claim, that their content isn’t funny. It means we need to take opposing positions seriously, even when we don’t enjoy them.

The Pale, White Truth About Injustice

The 2021/2022 Supreme Court (official photo)

Within minutes of last week’s Dobbs ruling, I wrote the words which have haunted me for days since: “There is nothing ‘Christian’ about giving the government the authority to look up a woman's cooter and make decisions about her medical treatment.” I meant this statement to argue against the religious justifications for overturning fifty years of American abortion protections. I thought this was a statement of complete and utter fair-mindedness.

Almost immediately, good friends reminded me that America has been looking up women’s dresses for years. We subject poor, disabled, Black, and Brown women to “welfare checks” and have massive carve-outs for their medical privacy whenever they get pregnant. We pester women constantly for their prenatal medical decisions, both officially and unofficially (many women recall having waiters and baristas self-righteously deny them coffee). Micromanaging pregnant women’s choices isn’t new.

What’s new is subjecting White women to these standards. Women who share my skin melanin levels will, for the first time, find their privacy constantly invaded, their gynecological records scrutinized by bureaucrats, their diaries and period tracker apps made public record. These actions always have moral, frequently “Christian,” justifications. The situation isn’t new for millions of American women; we’re just forcing White women to endure this treatment now.

(Aside: I’m using the word “woman” very loosely. Broadening gender definitions, difficult cultural gaps, and a long history of state medical malpractice against Black and Indigenous women make this word loaded. Please accept this nuance as written; I’m trying to stay concise.)

There is nothing "Christian" about giving the government the authority to look up a woman's cooter and make decisions about her medical treatment.

— Kevin L Nenstiel (@KLNenstiel) June 24, 2022

The rulings trickling from this session’s heavily conservative Supreme Court have followed this pattern. The very fact that Miranda rights are named for Ernesto Miranda recall how heavily racialized American criminal justice is, but this court made such rights virtually unenforceable. But they’ve always been unenforceable anyway, unless one could afford a competent civil rights attorney, which those targeted by law enforcement generally can’t.

Likewise, the ruling making it difficult to sue federal agents simply puts White Americans on equal footing with Black and Brown Americans who’ve watched those who target their communities go unrestrained for years. Nobody’s ever been held responsible for the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, or Michael Brown. Now, nobody will be held accountable when federal sweeps catch White people in traps long set for Black and Brown people.

One could continue down the line. Though these rulings are nominally colorblind and apply to all Americans equally, they simply codify treatments the government has applied to poor, disabled, and BIPOC Americans for decades. The only difference is that the state no longer needs flimsy euphemistic work-arounds, and therefore can start applying them to everybody, ahem, equally. The Court simply invalidated the euphemisms which law enforcement no longer needs.

The U.S. Supreme Court Building

Justice Clarence Thomas caught heat for his concurrence in Dobbs, stating that the Court should now reconsider precedent in Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. That is, he disagrees with the 14th-Amendment reasoning that the state can’t place limits on contraception access, gay or extramarital sex, and same-sex marriage. But again, that isn’t new to Black or Brown Americans, who have their sexual choices strutinized, officially or unofficially, all the time.

Following Dobbs, Texas Senator John Cornyn posted a tweet which ambiguously appeared to challenge desegregation. Cornyn’s defenders hastily utilized that ambiguity to defend him against charges of racism. Because of course they did. That ambiguity, and the defense it justifies, are the very definition of dog-whistle politics: say the thing without saying it, so you can deny it later. It’s good to know that at least one euphemism remains necessary.

Progressives complain that this week’s rulings signify disappearing standards, unwritten rules that have circumscribed governance for generations. Maybe. But the longer I watch, the more I realize the largest standard disappearing: the standard of invading people’s privacy under standards of “welfare” and “public safety.” Six years ago, bureaucrats needed to formulate justifications to invade private space. The Court has signaled that such dissembling is no longer necessary.

Under these rulings, the federal government can invade White Americans’ homes, invalidate our 4th- and 5th-Amendment rights, and overrule our medical decisions, all with impunity. Just as the government has done to BIPOC Americans since before I was born. The only difference now is that, with the veil of euphemism lifted, White people have to see it for the first time— and, just as importantly, have to live with it.

We can’t legislate ourselves out of this. We Whites can only pause our egos, give BIPOC communities the lead, and simply listen.

What Even Is “Plagiarism”?

Kevin M. Kruse

My first hands-on experience with plagiarism happened in 2004. I’d recently reviewed T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain glowingly on Amazon. A complete stranger emailed, offering me $40 cash to write his five-paragraph essay on that novel. A quick-n-dirty Google search discovered that this writer was a Southern California honors student with multiple STEM awards. I emailed his high school, notifying them of this attempted academic dishonesty, and never heard back.

Last week, Princeton historian and minor Twitter celebrity Kevin M. Kruse was accused, with some credibility, of plagiarism. Several passages from Kruse’s 2000 doctoral dissertation too closely resemble books by Ronald H. Bayor and Thomas Sugrue. Kruse’s public positions are broadly Leftist; his accuser, Phillip W. Magness, has right-wing think-tank ties and frequently publishes in conservative magazines like National Review. The accusation appears in the right-Libertarian magazine Reason.

Not surprisingly, the cross-talk surrounding this accusation breaks along partisan lines. Left-liberal defenders claim the accusations are overinflated. Right-wing accusers claim this evidence not only undermines Kruse, but higher education overall. Both sides assign intent, not only to Kruse himself, but to the other side of the argument. Within minutes, every argument comes unmoored from Kruse’s work, and becomes about wider moral concerns in educated society.

Five years after being solicited to write somebody’s five-paragraph essay, I was working as a graduate teaching assistant. Two students turned in “annotated bibliography” assignments that were virtually identical. Google revealed both students copied their one-page assignments, with minor amendments, directly from the New York Times. Admittedly, I didn’t handle it well; I commenced a high-handed rant about the morality of originality, and the evils of plagiarism.

T.C. Boyle

One thing appears clear: Kruse definitely plagiarized. The sentences from Bayor and Sugrue which Magness finds in Kruse’s dissertation are too numerous, too close together, and too verbatim to be coincidental. Kruse’s most prominent defender, L.D. Burnett, tries to construct a viewpoint wherein Kruse’s copying might be merely coincidental. But actually placing Kruse’s words and his sources side-by-side, as Magness does, makes this defense look anemic.

Understand, Magness never challenges Kruse’s conclusions, only his prose. And the sentences Kruse plagiarized, if removed from his books, wouldn’t change his overall message. Magness only challenges Kruse’s academic rigor, a standard Kruse himself has used to undermine others. He catches Kruse committing the kind of errors he regularly denounces in others, knowing Kruse’s Left-liberal audience prizes consistency as part of their definition of fairness.

The more I encountered plagiarism in student work, the more forgiving I became. When students filched from Wikipedia, Reddit, and other ubiquitous sources, I realized they weren’t malicious. They were busy. I expected them to reach unique conclusions, and arrange entirely new sentences, around topics they knew little about, and cared even less. Plagiarism became a classic teachable moment, not a crime; I started clamping down only on habitual offenders.

Watching the Kruse controversy unfold, I’m reminded of Jonah Lehrer's public collapse. Rather than plagiarism, Lehrer fabricated evidence. Like Kruse, he told an eager audience what it already wanted to know, and the publishing world rewarded him richly. Like Kruse, Lehrer’s fabrications didn’t contradict the evidence, and Lehrer’s scholarship largely holds up. But, like Kruse, Lehrer’s disregard for industry standards sidelined his career at the peak of his popularity.

Jonah Lehrer

Since leaving academia and becoming a professional technical writer, I’ve spent countless hours hunched over my computer, repurposing my own and others’ words for new uses. Complete originality is important for authors and academics, who need to own their writings to get paid. But other kinds of writers—technical writers like me, ad copywriters, attorneys drafting legal briefs—regularly recycle words and sentences, in ways I once reprimanded students for.

I gave Kruse’s 2015 book One Nation Under God a glowing review, and I wasn’t alone. But like my students, Kruse is busy. As Jerry Z. Muller writes, lucrative rankings from US News and Princeton Review tally faculty members’ publications as part of their algorithms. Thus scholars like Kruse must publish prolifically, not only to receive tenure, but to keep top-tier students coming through the doors. Quantity beats quality.

This isn’t to forgive Kruse. He got caught committing the very transgression he’s spent two decades excoriating conservatives for, as Magness writes. He’ll need to spend time outside the limelight, and muster some persuasive apology, at minimum. (Kruse’s Twitter feed has been silent since Magness’s story dropped.) But maybe it’s time for academia to find some yardstick other than originality. In today’s media-saturated world, original words are hard to find.

The Dark Kentucky Horror That Almost Was

Christopher Rowe, These Prisoning Hills

In the deep dark hills of eastern Kentucky, a military dropship has just landed. Weird, since the Federals have ignored the countryside since the war. Marcia (no last name), war veteran, county agent, and the closest her area has to a government, doesn’t want these soldiers infiltrating her genetically engineered, overmanaged hills; she’s built an uneasy peace here, thanks. But apparently an unfinished battle from the war remains in the countryside.

This novella postulates a world transformed by violent technology, where the dead don’t stay buried, because they’re never really dead. Author Christopher Rowe, a highly esteemed but little-known short story specialist always on the cusp of a mainstream breakthrough, has crafted a masterpiece of dark foreboding and grim atmospherics. Unfortunately, in the final pages, it appears he’s written checks he doesn’t quite know how to cash.

The nameless Federal captain conscripts Marcia for a rescue mission into the hills. Problem is, the hills are lifeless and desolate, following the war’s nanoware devastation, and the government’s ill-considered attempts to reseed with genetically engineered sludge. But there are lives at stake, and possible unexploded ordnance in vital areas. So Marcia walks with them into the mouth of the holler, knowing they’ll never leave the hills alive.

Much of Rowe’s storytelling will feel familiar to veteran genre audiences, though with a twist. The invasive mosses, the vast deathless enemies, even the culminating cosmic horror of communion with an amoral higher intelligence, all mirror patterns HP Lovecraft perfected nearly a century ago. Human pride, which in this case means military precision, must ultimately bow before a meaningless, uncaring universe.

In Rowe’s telling, however, these horrors don’t arise from the primordial sludge; they’re the aftereffects of a high-tech war between a government with no conscience, and the artificial intelligence they couldn’t control. For Rowe, the horror arises, not from humanity’s meaningless place in the universe, but from our tendency to create systems intended to serve us, but which we ultimately wind up having to serve. Lovecraft as Marxism, perhaps.

Christopher Rowe

As Marcia leads the military through a rural landscape transformed by war’s aftereffects, her viewpoint alternates with the war. Flashbacks to forced marches through similar hills, formerly beautiful landscapes forever blighted with bombs and nanoware pollution. We witness Marcia fighting the old war as a young woman, and revisiting its scars in her age. The war exerts an eternal pull on her consciousness, and Marcia knows what she’ll do to survive.

One suspects, reading this novella, that Rowe wanted to write something longer. He introduces a grand sweep of social forces which drive nations into violence, and the different narratives people use to justify taking sides during war. But Rowe never delves deeply into anything. Like William Goldman, who used an intrusive narrator to scrub the parts he didn’t feel like telling in The Princess Bride, Rowe uses nonsequential storytelling to minimize backstory and exposition.

Worse, though he introduces darkly complex atmospherics, he does almost nothing with them. He introduces nanoware-driven invasive foliage, for instance, that human soldiers must constantly expunge, lest they take over everything; or airborne nanoware that causes hallucinations and permanent psychological trauma. But, having mentioned them, he walks away again, never expanding on the consequences for his characters. Once introduced, he loses interest.

Then, in the final scenes, Rowe drops the ball entirely. Rowe spends so much time describing massive, almost indestructible, Cthulhu-like technological terrors, that when we finally see one, it isn’t as shocking for us as it is for the characters. We know Marcia will have a moment of transcendent communion with the cosmic monstrosity that’s haunted her dreams for thirty years. But Rowe does nothing with it; the story just ends.

Rowe clearly wants to retell a Lovecraft-like story, but for our modern era. Like Cthulhu, Rowe’s cosmic terror lies buried, awaiting human intervention to be reborn. Where Lovecraft’s monsters were sweaty, fish-like, and organic, Rowe’s stainless-steel monster emerges from technology so vast and powerful that it consumes its builders. But fundamentally, both monsters emerge from the same primal fear that, deep down, nothing humans do can ever matter.

Unfortunately, one gets the feeling that Rowe hasn’t finished thinking through his monster. Instead of primal cosmic horror, Rowe offers us the first shreds of discomfort, then flinches. I wanted a deeper taste of whatever bitter brew his characters are drinking. I got fleeting whiffs of something profound and unsettling, but never enough to truly feel much. This should’ve been longer, slower, more detailed than the abridgement we got.

(Acknowledgements to Darrell Scott)

Life at the End of the Petroleum Age

It’s become a staple of office banter in America and internationally: “Holy moley, I had to deplete my retirement fund for a tank of gas!” Stickers on American gas pumps showing a pointing Joe Biden and the caption “I Did That!” have become so ubiquitous, we no longer see them, even though gas prices remain up worldwide. Politically diverse groups join together in the shared commitment that high gasoline (petrol) prices suck.

Some solutions are arising, though not everyone will like them. While several auto manufacturers have pledged to discontinue gas-burning cars by the year 2035, they only make such pledges in “leading markets.” Meanwhile, an increasing number of large-market cities are banning new gas station construction, citing declining demand and long-term environmental costs. Clearly the days of cars burning gasoline- and diesel-burning cars are rapidly coming to an end.

Sounds great, right? But I have my doubts.

This commitment to discontinuing petroleum sounds wonderful in theory. But our economy remains committed to a vehicle-dependent structure. American cities, with their single-use land development practices, are so huge and difficult to navigate, you need military-grade satellite technology to visit most neighborhoods. This while we continue underfunding public transit. If you lack car access in most American suburbs, you’re truly trapped.

It’s even worse in America’s rural areas. Most farmers rely on diesel-burning tractors and combine harvesters to work increasingly vast patches of land, then require diesel-burning trucks to haul their crops to market. Their daily lives are no better. Despite the diverse crops on Old MacDonald’s storied farm (E-I-E-I-O), most American farmers practice monocropping, and therefore don’t grow their own food. They’re frequently twenty miles from the nearest decent grocery store.

This rural-urban divide matters. Many commentators have recently observed that the Democratic Party has essentially cut rural America loose, leaving the rural electorate that once powered FDR’s New Deal coalition to Republican domination. Anti-environmentalism has been a staple of Republican policy since Newt Gingrich made it a shibboleth of his 1994 “Republican Revolution.” For many rural Republicans, disdain for the environment has become part of their personalities.

While many cities (reluctantly) build electric car infrastructure, designed to preserve the car-centric model we’ve built since World War II, rural areas just aren’t. Where I live, some private homes might have electric car plug-ins, but for working-class people and renters, the only car charging station is outside a grocery store at the edge of town. If gas cars are discontinued in 2035, rural poor will continue driving increasingly aged, inefficient beaters, because they have to.

Oil prices today: $115.83 a barrel
Gas prices today: $5.01 a gallon

Oil prices in April of 2008: $116.50
Gas prices in April of 2008: $3.51 a gallon

Gas prices are $1.50 a gallon higher than they should be because of the greed of big oil. It's time for a windfall profits tax.

— Warren Gunnels (@GunnelsWarren) June 15, 2022

That’s to say nothing of global industry. We proletarians might stop driving gas-hogs, someday, but we continue depending on shipping and distribution networks that consume vast quantities of petroleum. Most of the electronics that make American middle-class life possible are manufactured in China, and transported in massive diesel-burning container ships. Most of the globe’s medical PPE comes from a small number of factories, as we learned with grief in 2020.

Transferring to electric-powered cars will only serve to defend, even expand, class-based divisions. Those who can afford the rapid transition, not only to a new car, but the electric plug-in necessary to power it, will do so promptly. Urban poor, and rural-dwellers on the periphery of the distribution network, will wait indefinitely. And large corporations, which don’t use the pumps us groundlings use, will keep burning Texas Tea.

Because fundamentally, the problem isn’t cars, or even petroleum. The problem is that modern, technological society is founded on presumptions that no longer hold, if they ever did. American economic expansion has been grounded on cheap land (once we chase the Indigenous population off), cheap energy, and cheap labor. All of these are running out in real time, and when depleted, won’t come back soon.

Switching to electric cars only tinkers around the edges of a fundamentally decrepit system. Another Prius or Tesla might make individual buyers feel personally virtuous, but the problem isn’t personal, it’s structural. The problem is resource-hoarding billionaires who devalue land and labor, in order to keep their stock returns high. They don’t care what costs the rest of us must shoulder, because they don’t have to care.

Cars, and their related technology, have contributed to fat guts, heating climates, and cities that are massively unpleasant to live in. But they’re a symptom, not a cause. Our entire economy is premised on the idea that our world and its resources are, in some way, infinite. We’re living through the proof that this just isn’t so.

Edit: in the hours after I wrote this essay, President Biden floated the idea of a summer-long hiatus of all federal gas and fuel taxes. This is, of course, a bandage, not a solution. The poorly planned cities, sweltering-hot highways, and unsustainable globalized industry will still be there when the temporary reprieve ends.

Hey, Remember When the News Wasn't Fun?

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO)

Scandal this week has enveloped Lauren Boebert, the Freshman Representative from Colorado, not for the first time. I won’t repeat the uncorroborated accusation, because it’s needlessly salacious, bordering on character assassination. I’ll say, however, that America’s organized Left has embraced this story with amazing alacrity, because they want the poetic symmetry. Boebert, who endorses using legislation to enforce sexual morality, is accused of exactly the sexual transgressions the usually inveighs against.

The accusations against Representative Boebert coincide with three other news stories: the televised January 6th Committee hearings, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the recently closed Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial. News sources haven’t treated these very different stories interchangeably. But in all cases, the response has been driven by how journalists, and the news-buying public, perceive the narratives. We aren’t looking for the facts, we’re looking for the story.

Each story holds different narrative forms. The Boebert proto-scandal relies on the parallelism of her being accused of the exact behaviors she wants to proscribe. Left-wing critics, in recounting the story, feverishly remind audiences that they don’t condemn the sexual actions of which she stands accused; they only condemn the hypocrisy Boebert shows in wanting to legally forbid anyone repeating the acts she (supposedly) committed. They’re looking for moral continuity.

From the beginning, coverage of the Ukraine invasion looked for the Freytag’s Pyramid in the story. Mass-market coverage created a charismatic protagonist in Volodymyr Zelensky, and a Snidely Whiplash-like villain in Vladimir Putin. Multiple op-eds predicted the coming climax any minute now—and, when that climax and subsequent resolution weren’t forthcoming, their coverage went quiet. Without the melodrama, apparently, there wasn’t much of a story.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

The less said about Depp/Heard, the better. During the trial, audiences announced their loyalties like superfans dividing into Team Edward vs Team Jacob, or maybe Team Captain America vs. Team Iron Man. After the verdict, commentators began scolding America for taking sides and supposedly overlooking the important issues underlying the case. But seriously, the underlying issues were no deeper than typical YA romance novels or Marvel movies.

And January 6th? Nobody disputes what fundamentally happened. The only controversy is which narrative we use to understand what happened: were the Capitol rioters merely peaceful protesters and harmless tourists? Were they equivalent to sansculottes storming the Bastille? Or were they more like Taliban looking to execute dissidents and heretics? The unifying narrative, more than the facts, define how we want to handle the rioters, and the politicians who abetted them.

Please understand, I appreciate why we need narrative unity to follow a story. Even under ideal circumstances, humans think in narrative; but these aren’t ideal circumstances. Today’s social media-driven news landscape encourages short attention spans, a tendency worsened by so many catastrophes happening simultaneously. Without the story guiding us, we’d be incapable of comprehending these massive, possible world-changing events. The narrative keeps us grounded and attentive.

But I seriously fear the narrative has overtaken the facts. Journalists have been swayed by the spectacle of storytelling: gleefully recounting every time Amber Heard’s attorneys biffed courtroom procedure, for instance, or treating Zelensky walking the streets of Kyiv like a celebrity sighting on Rodeo Drive. News audiences, meanwhile, race ahead of the facts, as they’re currently doing with Representative Boebert, to pronounce moral lessons we ought to receive.

Nostalgia for bygone days is obviously useless, here and elsewhere, but it bears recalling that journalism was once perceived as a moral good, not a commodity. During the Cold War, journalists stuck with stories that unfolded over the course of years, with no hope of forthcoming resolution. Serious-minded newshounds like Walter Cronkite and Ted Koppel kept Americans informed, not entertained, by stories with potential to steer their lives.

Walter Cronkite

News sources could perform this diligence for various reasons. A well-informed public was considered a national asset, and TV networks willingly lost money because they considered it their patriotic duty; most newspapers were owned by rich dilettantes willing to break even at best, to be seen as responsible citizens. Today, FaceTube and InstaTwit demand returns that would make cocaine kingpins blush, and long-term investment in stories is a non-starter.

I acknowledge that entertaining stories with a through-line and pat moral resolution are tempting. I enjoy reading novels that ascend, reach their point, and resolve neatly too. But citizenship requires commitment to stories that aren’t necessarily fun, or complete. Sometimes people we disagree with don’t receive their symmetrical comeuppance. Sometimes wars drag without clear heroes. And we need to stick with them anyway.

Who Says You Can't Go Home Again?

Erin Bartels, The Girl Who Could Breathe Under Water: a Novel

Kendra Brennan has returned to the upstate Michigan cabin where she spent her childhood summers, in order to write her overdue second novel. Her first was a runaway success, and she fears she can’t match it. This fear is exacerbated by a “fan letter” she’s received, accusing her of exposing years of deeply buried secrets in her literary breakout. Whoever wrote this letter must know Kendra’s personal story. Whoever it is must know this Michigan cabin.

The back-cover copy on Erin Bartels’ fifth novel somewhat implies a twisting thriller, perhaps a Gone Girl about early traumas and the platonic bond between women. What we get is quieter and more nuanced, less Gillian Flynn, more Thomas Wolfe. Not that Kendra’s return to the site of childhood trauma (which Bartels basically admits is semi-autobiographical) isn’t thrilling. But the journey is more internal that I would’ve anticipated.

Kendra retells her story in the form of a letter to her childhood BFF, Cami, who spent summers in a similar vacation home across the lake. Kendra grew up with a single mother, and a very old-school grandfather who mastered the art of stuffing his emotions. Cami’s father, by contrast, was a star novelist who embodied the phrase “mo’ money, mo’ problems.” These girls came from different worlds, but in Kendra’s telling, her lakefront summers were her real life.

As an adult, however, she’s confronted with the realization that she saw Hidden Lake through a child’s eyes. She didn’t understand what her fast-paced, glamorous BFF might be enduring when the world wasn’t looking. And when she suffered a life-changing trauma on the water, one she finally exorcized ten years later in her first novel, she didn’t realize that it wasn’t her trauma alone. It’s difficult to see how one’s choices inevitably influence others.

One of Kendra’s summer goals is to confront Cami’s brother, who caused her life-changing trauma. And yes, that trauma is exactly what you expect it is. I feel comfortable spoiling this revelation, because the confrontation which Kendra expects to solve everything actually happens less than halfway through the book, and actually creates more confusion than it resolves. Especially as further old family secrets continue percolating toward the surface.

Erin Bartels

In many ways, Bartels’ message with this novel, is that life doesn’t work like a novel. Healing from adolescent trauma isn’t like Freytag’s Pyramid; there’s no climax, followed by morally pat resolution. Instead, each question Kendra answers invites three more. Before long, she realizes that her childhood summers, which looked straightforward to a child’s eyes, concealed a Peyton Place-like nest of lies, secrets, and damaging escapades.

Full disclosure: Erin Bartels is generally known as a Christian novelist, and this novel comes from a dedicatedly Christian publisher. There’s no cussing or violence, and one subplot involves a romance that remains remarkably chaste. Even as Kendra pursues her childhood trauma—and, piece by piece, that of others—Bartels never uses language you would feel uncomfortable repeating in front of your grandmother. Bartels’ writing is simultaneously frank, and demure.

This isn’t, however, a “Christian novel.” In over 300 pages, Bartels references church twice, God three times, and one transient reference to prayer. None drive the plot. Instead, this is a novel about facing, and moving beyond, the trauma that once seemed monolithic, a novel of psychological depth and complexity, which just happens to have been written by a Christian author. Bartels’ moral code is present, but it isn’t what the book is about.

Indeed, if this novel contains a Christian message, it’s that there’s a difference between fairness and justice. Kendra returns to the lake, expecting that her childhood tormentor will be thunderstruck with guilt, she’ll receive recompense, and the universe will restore balance. Instead, she learns that every terrible act comes from somewhere; and while her tormentor should’ve made better choices, it’s still not her place to pass judgment.

That’s sometimes a bitter pill to swallow, for us as much as Kendra. I almost stopped reading this novel because there’s an extended passage that, to modern progressive readers, sure looks like victim-blaming. I’m glad I kept reading, though, because Bartels reminds us that context matters. She also reminds us that one transgression, even one that causes trauma, doesn’t make individuals evil. We all have to atone for something, to somebody.

This isn’t an easy novel, but it’s a gripping one. Bartels’ message is bracing to Christian and non-religious readers alike. And I can pay no better compliment than that stayed up past my bedtime to finish reading.

White Christians and the Triumph of This World

From the final few frames of the January 6th Committee video

You already saw the ten-minute supercut of the January 6th, 2021, insurrection which the investigating committee broadcast during their prime-time hearings last week. Even we who couldn’t stomach it live, saw it anyway the next day, when the committee shared the video on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—sites that are, with Amazon, basically the Internet now. The only way to have not seen it, is to consciously take steps to avoid seeing it.

Different viewers reacted to different parts of the video. I’ll focus today on one aspect: the final few frames. This snippet shows clusters of insurrectionists atop the Capitol’s parapets, waving two flags. One flag reads “Trump 2020,” the other a white flag with a red cross on a blue union: what’s become called “the Christian flag.” For many in recent days, this use of Christian imagery in a violent situation has become the public face of American Christian nationalism.

Respectfully, I want to direct viewers’ faces away from the symbols these insurrectionists hold, however, onto the insurrectionists themselves. The faces below these flags, brandished in a manner probably deliberately modeled on Iwo Jima, are mostly male, and entirely White. These insurrectionists are vocally Christian in their beliefs and imagery, and tied entirely to Donald Trump’s person; I won’t diminish that. But I contend Whiteness matters most here.

Gorski and Perry write that Christian nationalist beliefs aren’t uniquely White in America. Belief that America has historically Christian responsibilities, that American nationhood is founded on Christianity and has a prophetic mission, is held by Black and Hispanic Protestants at roughly the same rate as among White Protestants. But Black and Hispanic Christian nationalists haven’t stormed public buildings or attempted to overturn elections. Yet.

What’s more, many Christian nationalists aren’t even united by religion. Though belief in what researchers call “Evangelical Christianity” unifies these nationalists, that’s a fig leaf. Not only do many Christian nationalists not hold theological positions consistent with Evangelicalism, as many as fifteen percent aren’t even Christian. And not in the “Oh, you’re not really Christian” sense; fifteen percent of “Evangelical Christians” hold some other religion, or no religion at all.

pic.twitter.com/Po7qA3xecf

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 10, 2022

The defining trait that pushes Christian nationalists into violence to defend their beliefs, insofar as they have beliefs, is Whiteness. White Christian nationalists are more likely to believe their culture is under attack, more willing to endorse violence to defend it, and even though it’s difficult to corroborate race-based breakdowns of who actually performs violence, the footage from January 6th reveals an overwhelming sea of Whiteness.

This arguably shouldn’t surprise anybody who reads American history. Since colonial times, when racial distinctions were first codified following Bacon’s Rebellion, White Americans have had an implicit social compact allowing them to enact violence on Black and Brown bodies with impunity, a compact that doesn’t go both ways. History of America’s lynching era records that African Americans could be ritually murdered for muttering under their breath at White people.

Religion always provides justification for this violence. As James Cone writes, racialized violence serves the same role in America that crucifixion served in Rome, establishing for subject peoples that we own your lives. Such violence could never be justified without state-based religion, because taken strictly on its face, such violence is obviously unconscionable. Only a God-given social order could ever require such naked violence against resistant subjects.

Arguably, that’s why Christians felt compelled to design a flag in the Twentieth Century. We recognize, then and now, that Christianity’s role as America’s unofficial state religion, compromises our faith. Note that the flag is mostly white, the color of surrender in military operations. The Christian flag, waved on January 6th, was designed to refuse participation in state roles. The Kingdom of God is separate from human law.

But, like all symbols, people in power found ways to suborn that flag to support the already well-supported. And, citing Gorski and Perry again, America’s White power structure has performed rhetorical sleight-of-hand to conflate state power with racialized power. To challenge America’s powerful people in high places, is always to challenge American Whiteness. A racialized social order backed by an illusory state religion.

Don’t misunderstand me; as a Christian, I believe Christianity has done great good. But whenever religion gets entangled in state power, the outcome is terrible for people perceived as outsiders. Extermination of Indigenous nations and racialized slavery under the guise of “missionary” zeal is just one example. America hoards power along racial lines, and justifies itself using religion. And it’s unlikely to stop.

The Fellowship of YEE-HAW!

Bishop O’Connell, Two-Gun Witch

The Elves and their fiercest allies, the Lakota Nation, fought fiercely against the American settlers, but history already records that they lost. Now Talen, one of the Elven nation’s greatest warriors, lives the life of a colonized person. She hunts outlaws for a government that systematically oppresses her people, a paradox she’s all too aware of, thank you very much. So taking another bounty on a White settler doesn’t ruffle her moral feathers. At first.

Bishop O’Connell’s fourth novel reflects two authors whose novels influenced my heady youth: Lloyd Alexander and Zane Grey. Both authors, in their way, wrote about almost-historical lands that sort of existed, but not really, nations of moral clarity and larger-than-life conflicts, where survivors tested their mettle and emerged stronger. O’Connell’s novel treads similar ground, though he updates the moral symmetry for our more fraught times. The product is familiar and strange at the same time.

Talen is a Shadow Warden, a guardian of magical purity for her people. But after the war, when the Elves and Lakota alike were forced onto reservations, Talen bought herself a measure of freedom by becoming a U.S. Marshal, bringing in “the stained,” people whose souls have become so suffused with black magic, they can’t be saved, only killed. In the bleak desert southwest, Talen is terribly effective. This doesn’t save her from racism, though.<

In O’Connell’s telling, the Elves lived in harmony with nature and Indigenous society before White settlers came, partly because fighters like Talen kept evil away. But White society and its technological terrors brought something worse than colonialism: they brought moral complexity. This longing for supposed long-lost virtue is common to both fantasy and Western literature, a belief that people once knew right from wrong. Talen, more than most, understands the difference between “right” and “lawful.”

Though mostly centered in New Mexico, big money tempts Talen to pursue a bounty in the Dakota Territory. A White woman there has supposedly gone stained, leaving a wake of destruction behind. But even before finding her prey, Talen realizes something doesn’t smell right. Her supposedly morally rotten prey is a soft-spoken farm widow who loves horses and doesn’t handle a firearm correctly. Talen suspects she’s been sent after a false bounty for nefarious purposes.

Bishop O’Connell

Unfortunately, Talen isn’t the only half-official lawman pursuing Margaret Jameson. The Red Right Hand, a fanatic religious sect, hates the stained almost as much as it hates Elves and Lakota. And unlike Talen, who remains bound by her people’s unjust treaty with the federal government, the Red Right Hand has official standing. Talen is an accomplished warrior, but that matters little as she finds herself outmanned, outgunned, and fighting a second war against White colonialism.

It possibly isn’t coincidental that Talen’s name resembles Lloyd Alexander’s protagonist, Taran. Both heroes believe naively that they understand the moral implications of the outside world, but leaving their comfort zone, they quickly realize the world is a thicket of compromise and ambiguity. They also both become dependent on friends they didn’t know they had, much less needed. The outside world is a scary, murderous place, after all. Nobody should have to face it alone.

Despite the backward-looking nostalgia common to both Westerns and fantasy, though, there’s a distinctly modern component to O’Connell’s narrative. He populates his frontier America with groups like Elves, Dwarves, Native Americans, and White religious nuts, who all perceive the world in strictly binary terms: everyone believes they’re standing fast against implacable evil. Only when these groups come into friction does anybody realize things are possibly more complex—or that they themselves might not be heroes.

Talen begins the novel thinking that evil is an individual transgression, a single soul tainted by darkness. But Margaret Jameson’s plight forces her to rethink everything she believes. Soon she must gather a fellowship of others like her, survivors who, for various reasons, no longer believe their governments and the official story. In chasing the true source of corruption, they must soon leave their safe wilderness and venture into that darkest of unknown lands: Chicago.

O’Connell’s novel is both a continuation of the fantasy and Western genres, and a subversion. Readers find his initial language and imagery familiar, as genre audiences seek. But then O’Connell subverts genre expectations, not once or twice, but time after time. Each new revelation reveals deeper ways our characters, and therefore we, have believed widespread lies. We finish the book realizing, with Talen and her fellowship, that only one truth is sacred: your own conscience.

A Tale of Greek Love and Greek Fire

Kae Tempest, Paradise: a New Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes

On a nameless island in the remotest sea, Philoctetes dwells marooned. He sleeps in a cave, hunts birds for food, and laments injustices done to him. One day, General Odysseus arrives with a promising young lieutenant, determined to fulfill a prophecy that requires Philoctetes return to the front. Unfortunately, Philoctetes doesn’t believe in the unending war anymore. Odysseus and Neoptolemus must decide how far they’ll go to get the old veteran back into the fight.

The Greek playwright Sophocles is best known for his Oedipus plays, staples of high school and undergraduate literature courses. His play Philoctetes isn’t as famous. Perhaps that’s because, unlike the Oedipus plays, it presents humans as passengers in the story, which commences with a prophecy, and ends with the demigod Herakles demanding a resolution. Or maybe because, unlike Sophocles’ Oedipus, his Odysseus and Philoctetes are one-dimensional characters arguing the age-old debate between glory and individuality.

British performance poet and White rapper Kae Tempest updates Sophocles’ play, resetting it in modern war and removing the literal deus ex machina ending. Tempest also gives these characters more to do, especially the Greek chorus behind the men. These characters and their modern setting, pitched against a war that’d dragged on literally for decades, bespeak the weariness of a generation which has grown up with interminable war in distant lands and poverty at home.

Philoctetes was once among Greece’s greatest warriors. (The homeland in Tempest’s retelling is studiously vague.) But a festering injury now leaves him largely crippled, and as the injury never heals, he emits an offensive odor; nobody can stand to be around him. Sometimes he wants to return to civilization, and laments how his sons have reached adulthood in his absence. But he no longer trusts the homeland he left behind, and almost loves his exile.

Odysseus, sometimes mistaken for noble and valiant, is the consummate general. His only ambition is victory, and he’ll lie, cheat, and steal to achieve that. This isn’t the Odysseus you read in grade school. Odysseus abandoned Philoctetes ten years ago when the great veteran’s wound became too noxious; now, knowing that only Philoctetes and his bow can secure victory, he’s come to reclaim what he previously abandoned. Unfortunately for Odysseus, Philoctetes isn’t ready to forgive.

Kae Tempest

Between Philoctetes and Odysseus stands Neoptolemus. Son of the late, great Achilles, Neoptolemus was bred for war, but has little stomach for it. Unlike Odysseus, Neoptolemus has a conscience, and hates being ordered to lie. But he does what he’s told, and almost succeeds. Throughout the play, Neoptolemus arbitrates between Philoctetes’ strong martial backbone, and Odysseus’ willingness to do whatever it takes to win. He never quite decides how to reconcile the two conflicting forces.

Tempest keeps the foreground story mostly intact, though updated for the War On Terror generation. Their contribution to the experience is the Greek chorus behind the men. In the original, the chorus mainly comments upon the action, providing clarification and moral guidance where it’s needed. Tempest transforms the chorus into a collection of women living on the island, whose efforts to survive the war contrast with the men’s deliberate attempts to make the war worse.

Some of Tempest’s women were born here; others are refugees, driftwood washed ashore after something terrible happened elsewhere. While Philoctetes mentally rehashes the war and laments the injustices he’s endured, the women have built a functioning society out of male civilization’s discards. They regard him with a range of attitudes, from contempt to pity to misplaced romanticism. We, the audience, aren’t sure whether he can even see them, except when it suits his perverse needs.

The resulting hybrid both is, and isn’t, Sophocles’ original Greek tragedy. Because Tempest, unlike Sophocles, believes humans have something resembling free will, Tempest changes the ending, condemning the characters to repeat their situation infinitely. This interpretation is pessimistic, but not wrong, given the current climate. (This play debuted approximately as America was finally withdrawing from Afghanistan.) No longer do spiteful gods define human choices in theatrical tragedy; humankind is terrible enough without questionable divine intervention.

Tempest’s play premiered in 2021 to mixed reviews. Some critics liked how Tempest handled the Greek characters, but felt confounded by the chorus; others had the opposite reaction. This was heightened because all parts, male and female, were played by women. But I think this misses the point: true tragedies resolve not in death, which is optional, but in disappointment, which is eternal. We humans are as small and regrettable as the gods we worship.

A Manichean Guy With a Gun

President & Dr. Biden at Robb Elementary, Uvalde, TX

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre popularized this bromide in the days following the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012. Like its close compatriot, “thoughts and prayers” LaPierre’s saying quickly became unmoored from its roots and warped into a caricature. It’s just another piece of faux morality clogging American rhetoric now.

But it’s also a demonstration of how American public morality has become meaningless. The division of humanity into “good guys” and “bad guys” is a form of Manichaeism: the belief that the universe is divided into the altogether good, holy, and virtuous, against the altogether bad, godless, and depraved. In traditional Christianity, Manichaeism is considered a heresy. And for good reason, too: because it makes us insensible to the world around us.

As usually happens following mass shootings, the narrative surrounding last week’s massacre in Uvalde, Texas, has turned on identifying the menace, the crime, or the “evil.” The shooter is described as a manifestation of ultimate evil—or perhaps of “mental illness,” which is frequently a sloppy shorthand for evil. Likewise law enforcement who dithered outside the school for an hour are described in terms from a medieval morality play: “cowardly,” “shameful,” “dishonorable.”

These attempts to define “evil” situate it externally, and in absolute terms. These people are defined by one overwhelming, Aesopic moral trait and, by implication, so are we. We’re reassured that we, mercifully, didn’t kill anyone, didn’t stop parents from rescuing children, didn’t cause or enable the violence. Therefore we can confidently condemn those whose actions or inactions violate our code. Calling others “evil” defends our perceived goodness.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, site of the Parkland, Florida, shooting

Problem is, things are never that absolute. The Uvalde police join a host of security professionals, school resource officers, and other armed guardians who protected their lives over those of schoolchildren. In schools from Littleton, Colorado, to Parkland, Florida, school police fled, and civilian teachers who resisted the violence were the first to die. Armchair strategists love claiming they’d rush into the fire, but few of us really would.

(On a personal note, I have personally rushed into violent conflicts between people better prepared than me. These conflicts only involved fists, though. I doubt strongly I’d ever have rushed optimistically into an active crossfire. That’s why I scoff whenever somebody says “I would’ve taken the risk.” No you wouldn’t, and neither would I.)

I remember taking exception to the “good guy with a gun” narrative when it first appeared. How do we define good guys and bad guys? One acquaintance, an NRA life member and gun rights advocate, insisted we could identify good guys by their licensure. He believed that good guys had training, certification, and permits to handle and carry weapons. Goodness, for this person, is bestowed by official declaration by esteemed professionals.

Sadly, I lost contact with this individual long before last week’s shooting. I wonder how his inner narrative of goodness as accord with authority has survived the knowledge that official local, state, and federal law enforcement did nothing while civilians died. If we’ve learned anything from COINTELPRO or Ruby Ridge, it surely must be that authority and goodness aren’t synonyms—yet many people, evidently, forget quickly.

The quest for external, measurable evil has produced terrible outcomes. By imputing “evil” to others and making that characteristic their defining being, we have, at different times, segregated people by race, economic class, national or regional origin, and the kitchen sink. When we believe that evil lives in cities, or has a certain skin color, or prays a certain way, we make it acceptable to keep others at arm’s length.

The now-infamous photo of concert-goers fleeing the shooter
at the country music festival in Las Vegas, 2017

One needn’t be Christian and believe in Original Sin, though, to realize that humans aren’t neatly symmetrical. We all have the inner capacity to do tremendous good or epic evil, depending on the choices we make, the influences we let inside, and how we react to how others treat us. Moral Manichaeism lets us assign blame, and most importantly, lets us assign it away from ourselves. But that’s always false.

People who quote the Manichean heresy inevitably see themselves on the good side of the split. Wayne LaPierre’s division of humanity into “good guys” and “bad guys,” or anybody’s reliance on good vs. evil, innately ignores that these words have no external meaning. Goodness and evil aren’t things we are; they’re descriptions of things we do. And as such, they’re completely meaningless in defining how we respond to external calamity.