Leaving the Church of St. Robert E. Lee

Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: a Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

Imagine a young White boy, raised practically in the shadow of Robert E. Lee’s antebellum mansion. He attends Robert E. Lee Elementary School, and later, Washington & Lee University. He learns to read with illustrated Lee biographies, and shouts the “rebel yell” when his football team scores a touchdown. His entire childhood is suffused with Lost Cause mythology. Only as an adult does he think to wonder: “Why?”

Ty Seidule, a former West Point history professor, gained fame for a 2015 PragerU video speaking the uncomfortable truth: the Civil War was about slavery, nothing else. He claims this video earned him hate mail, even death threats. This baffled him, since he provided documentary evidence (something usually missing at PragerU). His wife pointed out that facts are frequently ancillary, and he needed to share his own intellectual journey.

This book represents Seidule’s journey out of Lost Cause mythopoesis. (I’m unsure what title to call Seidule. Mister? Professor? Colonel, his rank in the PragerU video, or Brigadier General, his rank at retirement?) Readers seeking a thorough history of the Civil War and its aftermath shouldn’t expect that here. Instead, it’s Colonel Seidule’s intellectual autobiography, describing how he gradually shed beliefs he once held deeply.

Seidule describes growing up in Alexandria, Virginia, and Monroe, Georgia, both cities deeply entrenched in racist myth-making. His schools presented a polished, morally cleansed version of history, where Lee represented the paragon of American virtue— Seidule uses the words “Christian gentleman” extensively— and Jim Crow wasn’t that bad overall. He didn’t just believe a sanitized history; adults around him willfully peddled that history, usually for clearly defined purposes.

The outline of Seidule’s narrative unfolds broadly sequentially, but the facts don’t. His adult self, with an officer’s epaulets and a doctorate in American History, frequently intrudes upon his reminiscence of a sheltered childhood. Seidule realizes now, as he couldn’t then, that he marinated in racist mythology, and his education was unofficially segregated; he scarcely knew any Black people until adulthood. It isn’t his fault, but it’s definitely his responsibility.

Ty Seidule, U.S. Army (ret.)

Moving into his collegiate years at what he half-affectionately calls “W&L,” the mythology Seidule internalized crosses a line. Though he doesn’t recognize it then, his college is a religious pilgrimage site, with Lee’s remains entombed beneath the chapel, his office preserved as a holy site for viewing, and his image engraved upon the chapel altar. Beginning in this chapter, he describes the Lost Cause narrative as explicitly religious.

The word he uses, though, is “cult.”

Throughout the narrative, Seidule uses Lee as a synecdoche for the Civil War, the Lost Cause hooey, and White Supremacy generally. Sometimes, as when discussing the arcane processes that got ten permanent Army bases named for Confederate officers, he addresses the war in larger terms, and moves away from individuals. Other times he focuses specifically on Lee, and the choices Lee made that steered the war and its aftermath.

Only well into adulthood, when he stands wondering at the number of Robert E. Lee memorials on West Point’s campus, does Seidule have what he calls his “aha moment.” He already had his doctorate, and had commanded troops in combat, before he reinvented himself as a Lee scholar. Once he realizes how deeply the Lee myth permeates, however, Seidule can’t stop seeing what he deems a false history wherever he goes.

Please understand, though Seidule is a respected scholar and textbook author, he doesn’t pretend to maintain scholarly neutrality. This story recounts Seidule’s encounters with Lee’s myth, and Lee’s written record. His purposes are unambiguously political. As Seidule writes: “Americans have a duty to better understand military history so they can hold their military and political leaders accountable.”

In his concluding pages, Seidule becomes demonstratively emotional. He describes how the Army has defined his adult life and continues molding his values even in retirement. Robert E. Lee abandoned the pledges he made as a soldier, Seidule contends, and did so for morally repugnant reasons. For him, there’s no coming back from the disfigured reputation of fighting for the slave republic. Once a Lee worshiper, Seidule now offers no forgiveness.

Seidule’s language is frequently emotional, always pointed. For him, this isn’t just American history or Lee’s biography. Seidule believed a mythology he now disavows altogether, and that brings his feelings to the forefront. Fundamentally, this is Seidule’s intellectual memoir, not a history, and he invites us to share his journey. It’s one that many readers have already made ourselves, and hopefully, others will willingly make soon too.

Live Theater and the Yearning For Revolution

Christopher Barksdale as the Emcee in Musical Theater
Heritage's production of Cabaret (source)

I just got back from a regional production of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret. Not being a particular fan of stage musicals, this is an outlier for me; but Cabaret’s incisive themes and jazz-influenced score remain timely in ways that many other musicals just don’t. Especially now, when forces of inclusion battle with small-F fascism for control of America, this play’s commentary on descent into violent intolerance remains painfully current.

For anyone unfamiliar, Cabaret features an American writer who travels to Weimar Germany to enjoy the libertine bacchanalia between the wars. He has a passionate but possibly loveless affair with Sally Bowles, a dancer at the Kit-Kat Club, a seedy jazz den and probable brothel. But while Sally desperately tries to hold her apolitical, shameless life, Berlin descends into reactionary backlash around them, and the Nazis emerge.

Producers at Musical Theater Heritage, a middle-range professional venue inside a Kansas City shopping mall, staged their performance to spotlight the contemporary American parallels. Weimar Germany was arguably the most permissive society that’s ever existed for queer people, had a reasonably relaxed attitude about abortion, and mostly let people be. But beneath this surface, ordinary resentments fermented into outrage and bigotry.

Leaving the theater, I experienced conflicting emotions. I appreciated the company’s willingness to engage with current themes in a 56-year-old play. Casting a Black actor as the amoral Emcee, the play’s Greek Chorus role, against a racially mixed ensemble of Kit-Kat Girls, was a good modernizing touch. In Musical Theater Heritage’s capable hands, Cabaret became an insightful commentary on the American battle between libertinism and paranoia.

However, I also realize the audience is deeply self-selecting. People who attend theater run generally progressive, and the audience is narrowed further by the admission price: with taxes and fees, this show ran $65 per seat, a luxurious indulgence for working-class audiences like me. In attempting to engage today’s political themes, the producers strive to induce revolutionary impulses in already committed audiences like… well, honestly, like me.

Julie Pope as Sally Bowles in Musical Theater
Heritage's production of Cabaret (source)

Film critic Lindsay Ellis has noted elsewhere that theater people often consider ourselves revolutionaries. We want to engage our society’s moral center and provoke change, which we attempt by showing humans going through outrageous scenarios. In Cabaret, young writer Clifford Bradshaw’s political engagement contrasts with Sally Bowles’ refusal to believe anything is changing. Those who care, pay the price of watching those they love living to be tortured and murdered.

However, as Ellis rightly asserts, in a culture characterized by passive entertainments, theater is a poor channel for revolution. Not because it doesn’t engage the audience’s sentiments; it definitely does that. But for an audience to transport themselves to a theater building, buy tickets, and sit down for engagement with the show, that audience already has a level of investment. Preaching revolution to that audience is preaching to the converted.

Contemporary American society provides constant entertainment. One can watch television, stream movies, and download books without getting out of bed. These entertainments require little moral investment from audiences: much as I enjoyed Sandman, I didn’t pour my emotional weight into the experience. I watched the show in bed from my tablet, lying flat on my back, in my jammies. The experience was smart and complex, but also very, very passive.

Cabaret required me to already care enough to buy tickets, get dressed, and travel into Kansas City. In other words, it required me to already care. Surrounded by low-cost streaming services that reward me for not caring, who can blame most people— tired, underpaid, and constantly surrounded by images of widespread American injustice— for not wanting to care? Honestly, most of us don’t have much to show for caring anyway.

In Shakespeare’s day, audiences paid a penny to crowd around a sweaty, overpopulated center pit with no air conditioning or restrooms. In those days, Hamlet and King Lear were popular entertainment, consumed as eagerly as television. No wonder the Jacobites invented the concept of “theater etiquette,” of staring silently forward and applauding only at designated intervals. Because back then, attending the theater really could spur revolutionary impulses among the unwashed.

But today, advancing technology has invented new ways to encourage passivity. Plays written for the unlettered crowds now seem impossibly dense. Even shows like Cabaret, with its message that “it really could happen here,” require an investment audiences don’t have to make unless they already care. And why should they care? Amid our constant push-pull of injustice against entertainment, I can’t blame most people from avoiding that depth of feeling.

Shirley Jackson and the Shadow Self

Ellen Datlow (editor), When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired By Shirley Jackson

When I was in high school, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” was part of the standard AmLit curriculum, though it’s apparently fallen out of favor. Jackson combined mystery, psychological realism, and gothic themes into a specific hybrid that’s often marketed, lazily, as “horror.” Her most-loved works occurred in settings so familiar, they could’ve been Anytown, USA, until the moment they weren’t. American audiences loved and feared Jackson in equal measure.

World Fantasy Award-winning anthologist Ellen Datlow collects eighteen new stories inspired by Shirley Jackson. No other theme unifies this collection, and different authors understand differently what it means to be “inspired by” Jackson. Thus the collection is a wild and uneven journey, through several different authors and their relationships with Jackson and the uncanny. Expect only that your expectations at the beginning will be overturned by the end.

Not that no commonalities exist among these stories. They share Jackson’s dedication to the shadow side of ordinary American experiences. The settings could be anywhere; the characters could be your neighbors, clinging desperately to rational explanations amid extraordinary circumstances. Some stories feature monsters and phantoms, others don’t, but most stories share viewpoint characters failing to adequately address the uncertainties and unspoken violence of their lives.

Datlow’s gathered authors are well-known within the world of fantastic, dark, or “weird” fiction. Stephen Graham Jones’ story “Refinery Road” features a man revisiting a memory of troubled youth, only to discover the memory is still growing. Karen Heuler’s “Money of the Dead” similarly has characters trapped in remembrance and regret; given a Monkey’s Paw-like chance to make things right, each character finds unique ways to fatally compound their situation.

Richard Kadrey sets his story, “A Trip to Paris,” during Jackson’s lifetime, and apparently tries to create something Jackson herself would’ve written. Other authors, like Kelly Link in “Skinder’s Veil,” use a contemporary setting, but impose Jackson’s principles of shadow and repression onto our world. Kadrey did well, I think, but the stories least obviously beholden to Jackson herself generally have the greatest depth of feeling. For me, anyway.

Shirley Jackson

Perhaps the best-known author in this collection, Joyce Carol Oates, offers one of the shortest stories. At only four pages, “Take Me, I Am Free” critiques the modern fondness for disposability by asking: where does it stop? Is anything worth saving? She also follows Jackson’s most fundamental precept, that good authors ask questions, but don’t answer them. Literature is something we live with, not something we turn to for guidance.

One hallmark of Shirley Jackson’s writing is that she explained little. She’s one of the few writers under the broad rubric of “horror” to consistently tell successful stories where the monster remains unseen. Scholars continue arguing what, if anything, actually happened at Hill House. Many authors have attempted to recreate Jackson’s talent for withholding the horrible truth, and few have succeeded. Not reliably, anyway.

Carmen Maria Machado’s “A Hundred Miles and a Mile” starts well, full of dark foreboding, but her conclusion feels grafted from another story. Elizabeth Hand’s “For Sale By Owner” likewise has a disquieting set-up, but only the outlines of a pay-off, kept at arm’s length. Seanan McGuire has a resolution matching her premise, but they’re so close together that she resolves her tension before we have time to feel it.

These are highly respected authors, award winners, among my favorites. Unfortunately, they fumble when trying to write in Jackson’s oeuvre rather than their own. I appreciate them for trying, and these stories have seeds of something exciting, which hopefully will germinate in their own stories. They just don’t match Jackson’s almost unique ability to keep the boogeyman visible to the characters but hidden from the audience.

Don’t misunderstand me. Though not every story successfully twigs my sense of the uncanny, this collection has enough stories to keep dedicated weird fiction audiences engaged. The best stories are perhaps influenced by Jackson’s ethos, but aren’t pastiches of her voice. Though no stories feature Jackson directly, some of the best, like Genevieve Valentine’s “Sooner or Later…,” serve as metafictional critiques of Jackson’s work and influence.

Shirley Jackson remains relevant because her works speak to her time and ours. Like now, Jackson wrote amid social upheavals, when family roles and economic principles looked outdated. She forced Americans to directly face our shadow self, collectively and individually. These stories demonstrate how Jackson’s themes remain timely, the questions she asks very current.

These eighteen writers find ways to ask Jackson’s questions in their own voice. How are we going to answer?

A Tale of Two Sons

Hunter and Joe Biden

I doubt I could pick Hunter Biden from a police lineup. I know I’ve seen photos of him, frequently with his father, but they haven’t penetrated my consciousness. In the last nine days, as the predictably partisan fallout from the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, I’ve noticed the recurring theme of “what about Hunter Biden?” Loyalists to The Former President keep trying to make Hunter-related scandals happen.

Lead among these voices has been Donald Trump, Jr. For eight days now, Don-Don has feverishly urged anybody who’ll listen to him, to please kick-start more media outrage surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop, Hillary Clinton’s emails, and Paul Pelosi’s insider trading. I’ve personally witnessed Don-Don’s performative indignation from his Twitter feed (joining that bird-shit site is maybe my life’s biggest error). He’s also appeared on Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN.

Don-Don certainly isn’t alone here. Fellow conspiracy theorists include Laura Ingraham, Lauren Boebert, and Nick Adams. But Junior uniquely has skin in the game, as his father and namesake is actively accused of unauthorized document hoarding. If The Former President falls behind his mishandling of official government documents, it isn’t simply Don-Don’s reputation that falls with him; it’s his literal flesh and blood.

Therefore Don-Don has apparently decided the likely target is another person in similar straits: Hunter Biden. The current President’s only surviving son certainly has benefited from paternal connections. Hunter Biden attended Georgetown University and Yale Law, went straight from graduate school to a high-powered finance career, and became Executive Vice President of MBNA before turning thirty. To Don-Don’s eyes, the two sons maybe appear essentially similar in situation.

However, distinct differences between the two families exist. The Former Guy clearly considers all relationships, even those within his family, essentially transactional. Just as renters in Trump properties receive prestigious, centrally located housing in exchange for cash, Trump family members receive family connections in exchange for services. Ivanka, Don-Don, and Eric have been career business partners and campaign advisors for their father.

(Poor Tiffany’s face could be on a milk carton, for all I know.)

Donald Trump Jr. and Sr.

In other words, The Former President values his family to the exact extent that they provide him with wealth and power. Like a medieval French aristocrat, paternal love always carries an asterisk. Love serves the dynastic ambition. Should The Former President pop a rivet tomorrow, we’d probably see his three favored children immediately scrambling for advantage, much like Charlemagne’s sons fought over the empire their father rightfully stole.

Because Trump family love is transactional, Don-Don can’t imagine another well-connected family doesn’t work similarly. He’s conditioned to see economics, politics, and family as equally beholden to feudal prestation. Every Trump scion’s family position depends on their willingness to contribute to the business. Therefore, to Don-Don, the Biden family must have sordid connections, because unconditional love is for suckers and the poor.

Don’t mistake me; I’m no Biden apologist. Hunter Biden probably could’ve advanced as fast or as far as he did without extensive family connections. The investigation of his financial entanglements has progressed glacially, I won’t disagree. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the investigation has been politicized; it only proves that there’s insufficient evidence for a dramatic Florida-style search.

But there’s a difference between saying fathers help their sons out, and saying fathers buy their sons influence. Just as working-class fathers teach their sons work ethic, military fathers teach their sons discipline, and famous fathers teach their sons “da bidness,” it’s not unreasonable for powerful fathers to teach their sons the avenues of power. For Don-Don, that means the avenues of Manhattanite business. For Hunter Biden, that means Washington.

Admittedly, family connections create ethically squishy areas. Hunter Biden left MBNA to become a lobbyist while Joe Biden was a Senator, which makes my skin crawl. And not only mine; National Review referred to Joe Biden as “the Senator from MBNA” because Hunter was a finance-industry lobbyist while Joe co-sponsored a bill partially deregulating the credit card industry. So don’t misunderstand me; I don’t believe anybody has clean hands here.

However, I believe there’s a categorical difference between saying fathers try to encourage their sons to emulate their values, and saying fathers and sons have transactional relationships. Don-Don’s desperate flailing to make last week’s Mar-a-Lago search be about Hunter’s laptop demonstrates a massive lack of vision, one which Don-Don learned from his father. Because some fathers love their sons, and some fathers use their sons.

And when you’re in one kind of relationship, it’s impossible to see the other kind.

The Art Machine, on Netflix

Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer and Tom Sturridge as Morpheus in Netflix's Sandman

I can’t binge-watch TV shows online like some people can, so it took me an entire week to watch Netflix’s new blockbuster Sandman adaptation. Not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because I needed to sit with each episode and ruminate over it, like a poem. Like art. Because that’s what it was, with its intricate sets, elaborate costumes, and lush Pre-Raphaelite background vistas: it was self-consciously art.

Like Stranger Things 4, which I also required longer than average to watch, Sandman is notable for its massive, sweeping visual design. Whenever Morpheus, the Dream of the Endless, walks through his Borges-inspired library, or stands on the beach outside his palace to survey his domain, the artistic accomplishments of the landscape behind them is awe-inspiring. Same with Vecna moving through the Upside-Down: it’s plain visual beauty.

For a while.

After the third or fourth scene on that same dreamland beach, I started to notice something: all the action took place very close to the camera. Despite the huge, sweeping vistas behind them, Morpheus and his major-domo, Lucienne, stayed very front-and-center. While the Dreaming moved with the wobbly, fractal energy of human dreamscapes behind them, the principal characters never strayed more than a few feet apart— or a few feet from the camera.

Same with Vecna’s Upside-Down. When Steve’s intrepid heroes wander through immense Dali-inspired forests and dry lakebeds, they’re never pictured more than a few feet apart. In the season’s final, feature-length episode, young Henry Creel, the future Vecna, stands on a hillock in the foreground, constructing the Mind Flayer in the background from raw material and his own will. Both shows have massive landscapes, with which the characters scarcely interact.

The longer I watch, the more conscious I become of actors performing on sound stages, against featureless backdrops, expecting landscapes to be matted in later with chromakey separation. Our screen image presents awe-inspiring landscapes, but eventually, I start noticing that characters don’t look at anything specific in them. They simply gaze into the middle distance, because they’re actually in a twenty-foot room with a greenscreen backdrop.

Matthew Modine and Millie Bobby Brown in Stranger Things 4

Anybody who’s been to the Rocky Mountains, or Oregon’s Pacific Coast, knows the visceral emotional reaction which the show creators want to recreate. Standing away from humankind’s built environment and watching, in silent awe, the grandeur of creation, can change us. Not for nothing did Buddhist monks, Taoist mendicants, or Christian Desert Fathers seek divinity and enlightenment in wild places, separate from civilization.

But anybody who’s actually visited these wild places knows the vast sweep isn’t the grandeur. It’s also the climate and breezes, the grass or sand between one’s toes, and even the unglamorous parts, like mosquitoes and sand fleas. Vast grandeur is built from thousands of individual moments, countless sensory experiences. It isn’t unitary, and just as important for digital landscape artists, it isn’t physically separated from us individually.

Consider other famous landscapes from genre fiction. Did Tatooine, Middle Earth, or Planet Vulcan appear less real because they were shot in, respectively, Tunisia, New Zealand, or Utah? I’d say not. Furthermore, actors could interact with the space: Luke Skywalker could drive his landspeeder through streets that actually existed. The Fellowship could ascend mountains and sail rivers in the middle, not the foreground, of the shot.

If I’m being completely fair, the creative teams behind these series knew that, too. Though I criticized shots of Morpheus’ library, which, in long angles, are composited together to look even more vast, close-in shots were done at Lincoln’s Inn Library, London. Indeed, nearly all city scenes (even those nominally in America) were shot in London, mainly Canary Wharf. Real places allow actors to interact with the space.

Throughout both Sandman and Stranger Things 4, the digitally composited shots I’m complaining about were relatively rare, and probably expensive. Even locations like Vecna’s exploded house, which could only be completed on a soundstage, were large enough to move around in. Only a small minority of establishing or payoff shots, intended to make the audience reel back and mutter “Woah,” were digitally composited in this way.

However, enough such shots exist that, at least for me, the awe and grandeur wore thin. The longer these shots continued, the more conscious I became of the process, slipping outside the moment. In actual dreams, only the lucky or skilled few ever achieve sufficient awareness to realize they aren’t real. In digital landscapes, though, the observant quickly become aware of the design. And soon, like a drug, we become immune to it.

The “Rule of Law” and the Death of a Euphemism

P.J. O’Rourke

In my younger, more conservative days, much of my political understanding came from humorist P.J. O’Rourke. I liked O’Rourke because he reduced complex, highly contested political concepts into bite-sized maxims, backed by jokes that ingrained his precepts in my memory. As an adult, I realize that O’Rourke, who passed away earlier this year, excessively simplified his concepts, erasing nuance and complexity. But his oversimplifications were what I needed at that stage.

O’Rourke’s 1994 collection All the Trouble In the World includes this libetarian platitude:

Property rights, rule of law, responsible government, and universal education: that’s all we need. Though no society has achieved these perfectly.

Throughout the book, O’Rourke repeats the expression “rule of law,” my first exposure to that phrase that penetrated my long-term memory. Surely I must’ve encountered it in high school American civics classes, though not sufficiently to recollect it. “Rule of law,” in political theory, means that every law covers every citizen and legal resident equally. Nobody arbitrarily has more power, and nobody has constrained autonomy; we’re all subject to the law.

I honestly believed O’Rourke’s list of right-libertarian principles governed conservatism. The idea that I and my property are equally protected by a government which answers to an informed populace: what could be more grand and idealistic? Sure, as O’Rourke concedes, this is more strived-after than achieved. But with this shared objective, surely we could strive together, chasing political goals that empowered everyone equally. God bless ’Merica, amirite?

That’s why the collective right-wing flip-out over the FBI executing a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago this week initially confused me. The FBI presented a judge sufficiently persuasive evidence that the judge authorized a search warrant for documents at the former president’s residence. In my Republican days, partisan rhetoric asserted (and I believed) that, when challenged in a lawful way, the best defense is truth. That means giving up the papers.

My initial confusion passed quickly, though. I left American conservatism, in large part, because I realized that “lawful” isn’t a synonym for “just.” Laws are frequently written in ways that nominally cover everyone, but pragmatically only influence certain people. As the Nobel Prize-winning poet Anatole France wrote: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

In this light, watching America’s organized Right come unhinged this week makes sense. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, nobody’s idea of an abolitionist, tweeted “Defund the FBI!” on Tuesday, then began selling branded t-shirts boasting the same logo. Dinesh D’Souza, who did a hitch in the pokey for campaign finance violations, has repeatedly referred to the FBI as “organized crime” this week. Steven Crowder, who wears two shoulder holsters on YouTube, referred to this as “war.”

DEFUND THE FBI!

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) August 9, 2022

Anatole France

What they’re admitting, without using the words, is that laws aren’t supposed to apply to them. They believe laws exist to constrain outsiders: the poor, non-White, immigrant, and other disfavored groups. And, as Kyle Rittenhouse demonstrated, also any White person who makes common cause with these groups. Anything these groups do is perforce criminal; anything “insiders” do to constrain these groups is lawful.

Organized conservatives have concealed their motives for generations by insisting that the law supports them. It’s okay to target certain neighborhoods, certain populations, or certain activities, because “the rule of law” applies equally to everybody. The fact that certain transgressions have higher set points than others—that stealing money from the till is a felony, but withholding wages is a civil matter—doesn’t change anything. Law is still law for everybody.

We’re watching that logic disintegrate live on CNN. Bomb-throwers like Marjorie Three-Names and Steven “Mug” Crowder aren’t even pretending anymore; they’re admitting aloud that law is supposed to wrap powerful, well-off White people in coccoons of innocense. “Rule of Law,” that rhetorical shield that protected conservatives for generations, has been exposed as pure political theatre, a meaningless action faux conservatives use to justify themselves retroactively.

I’ve asked myself whether this corruption has always existed in American conservatism. Maybe. But P.J. O’Rourke, the man who provided my post hoc justifications, wouldn’t have agreed. He openly opposed Donald Trump, considering him a stain on conservative values. Therefore I’m willing to entertain the idea that true conservatism is simply in abeyance, awaiting better conditions to come back.

But what we have now isn’t conservatism. It isn’t justice. And it doesn’t even pretend the law means anything. It’s shown its ugly face, and we need to kill it.

Stranger Things and the Screams of Children

Dr. Brenner and Eleven trying to recapture her powers in Stranger Things 4

Not much terrifies horror movie audiences anymore. The apparition of Death in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal became a seriocomic plug in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. When male deaths became banal following horror classics like Psycho and Jaws, female deaths became the mainstay of the slasher movie boom in the 1980s and early 1990s. But children’s deaths still have the power to stir deep-seated horror.

Stranger Things 4 released on May 27th, 2022—three days after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting. When the first packet of episodes dropped, the Blue Wall of Silence was still out-and-out lying about what happened inside Robb Elementary. Episode Seven featured series protagonist Eleven walking barefoot on broken glass through a bloodstained corridor while dying children wailed for mercy offscreen. Uvalde police refused to release body-cam footage.

I’ve written before that I can watch horror flicks and sleep like a baby. I actually found A Nightmare on Elm Street tedious and dated. So when I say Episode Seven, entitled “The Massacre at Hawkins Lab,” kept me awake, I’m not exaggerating. Not only because of its content, but also its real-world relevance. The show’s creative team couldn’t possibly have anticipated the most chilling words to emerge from Uvalde:

“The screams of children have been edited out.”

A recurrent theme this season is the suffering people endure when they don’t take responsibility for their actions. The first victim, Chrissy Cunningham, dies while attempting to purchase cannabis to numb the vicious criticisms in her head. The second, Fred Benson, is literally running from public judgment when the still-faceless monster catches him. Ensemble member Max’s secrets, concealed carefully even from herself, dribble out slowly.

Most importantly, as Dr. Brenner explains in Episode Five, “The Nina Project,” Eleven herself blocked the memories of the broken-glass incident. She made her subsequent life all about denying responsibility for the numerous deaths, the suffering inflicted on other children, deaths and suffering for which she does hold partial responsibility. She denies this event so thoroughly that she forgot everything in life to that point, even her ability to speak.

The moment Eleven discovers the truth

While America watched Stranger Things on evenings and weekends, facts dribbled out about Uvalde incrementally. Official statements claimed the shooter was, then later was not, impeded by school staff. Similarly, early press releases claimed that police rushed boldly into the building. We now know that, though police endered the building only three minutes after the shooter, they dithered in the hallway, permitting the shooter 77 minutes of unrestricted access to children.

As a more comprehensive narrative emerged from Uvalde, Twitter users leapt onto one iconic image: one police officer apparently answering his phone, which had a Punisher logo lock screen. The entire Punisher mythology derives from a post-Vietnam reactionary narrative that America is rotting from within, and needs a muscular, morally untainted superhero to save it. Punisher mythology isn’t necessarily racialized, except yes it damn well is.

Stranger Things 4 has a massively braided narrative, and several characters never meet face-to-face until the final episode. But one narrative strand spotlights Eleven, possessor of massive psionic abilities, striving to regain the superpowers she lost last season. Like Neo in The Matrix, Eleven is already the Chosen One; she simply needs to claim her abilities. Mike and Will do their part, sure, but they’re essentially Eleven’s cheerleading section.

Contrast this with Steve, Nancy, and Robin, who literally venture into Vecna’s lair, bearing Molotov cocktails and a sawed-off shotgun. While the officially designated Chosen One lingers in an off-books desert laboratory, struggling to regain her powers (and Dr. Brennan wants to keep her there even longer), those who actually live with the carnage show courage enough to confront it. The question, then: is rescue (salvation) something you have?

Or something you do?

Throughout, a continuing subplot features golden-haired, exquisitely Aryan basketball captain Jason Carver seeking someone to blame for the murders. Faced with the evidence that the violence in Hawkings is systemic, not individual, Jason chooses to ignore this, placing responsibility individually upon Eddie Munson. Fixing Hawkins would require rooting out corruption throughout the down, but that’s just too hard.

Stranger Things 4 couldn’t have possibly been commenting on Uvalde, because Uvalde happened later. Yet the parallels are remarkable. Which leads me to conclude that the cultural threads underlying both stories already existed in American culture, and probably aren’t expunged yet. Watching Eleven walk across bloodstained, broken glass, I felt legitimate terror. And I suggest I felt that because the monster is still in the room right now.

What Kansas Teaches Us About Looming Deadlines

Campaign yard signs before last week’s Kansas elections

I honestly didn’t expect the results we saw in last week’s Kansas abortion rights referendum. Just two days before the August 2nd election, polls in Kansas, a conservative Republican stronghold, showed the “yes” vote leading by four points, though neither side held a clear majority. When polls closed on August 2nd, though, the “no” vote won by a blowout eighteen points.

(Because the vote represented a constitutional amendment, the anti-choice vote was “yes,” an ambiguity which conservatives allegedly exploited.)

Pundits of every stripe have spent the subsequent days interpreting the results like sacrificial entrails, looking for guidance for the upcoming midterms and beyond. Why did Kansas, a state that hasn’t supported a Democrat for President since 1964, and which has only five abortion clinics, return such a resounding outcome? What does it forecast for future elections where the parties are hidebound on major issues?

Much pro-choice campaigning turns on rhetoric of freedom, civil rights, and obviously, choice. These displays of individual autonomy are widespread in American discourse. We love talking up the virtues of freedom and liberty. However, as Toni Morrison once wrote, American “freedom” is often defined oppositionally. We espouse “freedom” by highlighting those who are profoundly unfree, be they Black, or poor, or stateless, or whatever.

And frequently, we’ve used law to reinforce that unfree population. As Delgado and Sterancic write, legislators have frequently written laws targeting ordinary activities which disfavored populations do. Most well-off White people never realize that their states have extensive laws against “loitering” or urban camping. Racially differentiated policing is extensively documented, meaning Black people are more likely to have criminal records.

This demonstrates a moral binary in American social ethics: we individually want freedom to make decisions with autonomy and dignity. We collectively want authority to enforce our decisions on designated out-group members. Freedom for me, not thee. This duality looms large in abortion debates, because we know that women who vocally oppose abortion are no less likely to actually have an abortion.

Americans have historically maintained this equipoise between individual autonomy and collective authority by simply not looking at it. Historians like James Loewen and Ibram Kendi note that, before the Civil War, Presidents and Congresses punted on Abolitionism because, they contended, it would impinge on others’ freedom. The fact that enslaved persons’ freedom was already impinged mattered little; White slaveowners’ freedom mattered greatly.

Freedom for me, not thee.

We could continue. Dr. King’s nonviolent bids for increased freedom were perceived as impinging on existing, racially defined freedoms. Defenders of the status quo condemned permitting Black students into historically White public schools as government overreach. In 2020, an Omaha businessman claimed his freedom to defend his bar justified him killing an unarmed BLM protester; he committed suicide after a grand jury disagreed.

Last week’s Kansas election differs from these examples for one important reason: it had a deadline. Actual voting forces citizens to pick one position over others, and sign their names to it. Without a looming deadline, ordinary people can hold morally incompatible positions basically forever, by simply refusing to address them too directly. Once voting imposes that limit, though, they must make the decision they’ve actively avoided, and stand by it.

Certainly other forces similarly require binding decisions. In a civil war or revolution, for instance, everyone must pick a side, because the only thing happening in the middle ground is crossfire. Americans love myths of the Revolution and Civil War, and some want to revisit those times. But the histories of Shays’ Rebellion and the Freedmen’s Bureau reveal that the price of domestic war is always paid by those at the bottom.

When forced to choose between concrete, narrowly defined freedom for themselves, or vague, abstract authority over others, Kansans chose their own freedom. My nearly twenty points, they’d rather make their own decisions than impose decisions on the designated out-group. In practice, this is heartening, because it reveals what we need to do to resolve other important problems looming in America: economic injustice, climate catastrophe, and more.

Slap a binding deadline on it.

Don’t ask me what that means. Our government has policy specialists whose entire job is to envision technical details for elections, bills, and referendums; let them design the particulars. But let them do so with pending, material consequences, because punting down the field hasn’t worked. As we discovered with the summer 2020 George Floyd protests, Americans under pressure will explode.

Either we set a deadline to do something, or a deadline will explode upon us.

Jesus and the Long Shadow of Racism

Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

Circumstances have changed little since 1963, when Dr. King described 11 AM on Sunday morning as “the most segregated hour of Christian America.” But Robert P. Jones, social scientist and Baptist minister, thinks the situation is worse than that. Segregated Chrsitianity isn’t a symptom of persistent American racism, he claims; it’s a cause. And American Christianity is long overdue a reckoning for its participation and leadership in racist institutions.

Pastor Jones founded the Public Religion Research Institute to study American Christians and their relationship with power. What he’s found is frequently grim. He brings his multiple backgrounds to bear in considering how White Christianity has provided moral justifications of violence and injustice. Now, even as increasing numbers of Christians want restorative justice, White churches continue handling the situation with silence and evasion.

Recent attempts at demystifying American history mean we’re all more aware of how deeply rooted racism has been. It’s tainted politics, art, commerce, and everything it touches. Jones unpacks how a legacy of racism at the top of Americans largest denominations created moral systems that justified bigotry among ordinary Christians. What’s more, though most churches’ leadership now rejects such belief, it’s much harder to shake among rank-and-file believers.

Jones devotes the most pages to his denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC was founded on justifications for chattel slavery, and though it’s verbally disavowed this purpose, its attempts to seek reconciliation have often been rushed, with little time dedicated to meaningful atonement. The SBC is hardly unique in this history, however. Jones shows how the Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopal, and Catholic traditions have been structurally enmeshed in racism.

Moving into the present, Jones uses his social science research to demonstrate how these historical forms persist into the present. Asked how they perceive Black Americans, most White Christians express positive feelings—in the abstract. On more practical details, daily life, and attempts to atone for past violence, White Christians are more likely to demonstrate racism than the general population. This includes Evangelical, Mainline, and Catholic Christians.

Robert P. Jones

This doesn’t, however, mean Christians are uniformly racist. The magic ingredient is seemingly Whiteness. Black Christians show beliefs on race and public life similar to religiously unaffiliated White Americans. The junction of Christianity and White identity apparently encourages believers to defend race-based privileges and the existing order. Significant numbers of White Christians don’t defend racism, certainly; but the combination of White Christianity correlates powerfully with racist beliefs.

Such history and social science accumulates powerfully in Jones’ telling. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, and Jones himself admits sometimes feeling that way too. But in the culmination, Jones looks at ways that some American Christians have taken steps to face history squarely and work toward a better future. The ways Jones describes begin simply with getting to know others, as they are, without defensiveness or pride.

Easier said than done, certainly.

Finally, Jones calls for a “reckoning.” To him, this means a full account of the transgressions American White Christianity has performed, and frequently continues performing. Once we’ve made such an accounting, it will be possible to plan how we’ll fight against the injustices we’ve lived with for generations. Such a reckoning won’t be easy; Jones calls it dying to the old self. But it’s consistent with the love demonstrated by Christ.

Implicit in Jones’ plan is the “born again” experience. Though he doesn’t state it directly, as a Baptist, Jones’ theology prizes the conversion experience, wherein with God, one dies to sin and becomes a new creation. That, Jones declares, must happen to American Christianity overall: the institutions which built and defended an unjust order must be born again, and with God’s guidance, must live renewed.

Jones takes his book’s title from James Baldwin, once among the foremost Black voices calling America to account. Like Baldwin, Jones attempts to speak from a position of love, but that love means abandoning our own ego and living authentically. Jones admits not only his church’s historic racism, but his own, as the starting position for future reconciliation. Only after we’ve stopped defending ourselves can we love our fellows equally.

This book isn’t light reading. Some chapters are haunting; others are detailed, and require patience to comprehend. However, I’d say this book is necessary. We White Christians have participated in some of history’s worst injustices, and we need to take steps to undo the harm our ancestors caused. Ignoring it or verbally apologizing haven’t brought atonement any closer. Only hard work and patient honesty have any hope of making progress.