In Orbit Around the Impossible World

Stanisław Lem, Solaris: the Definitive Edition

The distant planet Solaris shouldn’t exist; its orbit defies all known laws of physics. And that’s not the only impossible thing happening there. The planet’s single inhabitant is a massive global organism, which researchers have variously described as a “plasma” and an “ocean,” though both metaphors are imperfect. Precepts of science and human understanding break down near Solaris. Not that this has stopped researchers from trying to understand it.

Polish novelist Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel is perhaps his most famous work, not only in its own right, but also through Antrei Tarkovsky’s notoriously inscrutable Russian-language film (which Lem disparaged). Like Tarkovsky’s film, Lem’s novel rejects conventional structure and practically dares audiences to follow the bumpy ride. Even Lem’s fans will admit this novel is rough sledding, though arguably worth it when you reach his strange, arcane culmination.

Psychologist Kris Kelvin is one among a branch of scientists called Solaricists, an interdisciplinary movement dedicated entirely to studying Solaris. Once the rock stars of deep-space science, Solaricists have become pariahs because their “science” persistently fails to produce answers. After years spent studying Solaris remotely, Kelvin finally gets assigned to the planet’s only space station, which is nearly abandoned and moldering. Except it proves far less abandoned than he expected.

The first English-language edition of Lem’s novel, in 1970, wasn’t translated from Polish, but from a prior French translation. Lem, who could read English fluently but not write it, hated that translation. But then Lem, like the American author Philip K. Dick, with whom he had a love-hate relationship, notoriously hated everything. His hatred wasn’t unfair, though. The first English edition sanded off many of Lem’s more recondite, philosophical maunderings.

Lem was, after all, a trained philosopher. Like Olaf Stapledon, Lem used science fiction novels not primarily as either stories or character studies, but as field tests for philosophical insights. In this case, Lem places highly trained men of science (and they are, indeed, men) in an isolated environment where reason and empiricism disintegrate. How, Lem asks, can humans communicate with alien intelligence, when we can’t communicate with one another?

Stanisław Lem

Once ensconced in the research station over Solaris, Kelvin wants to debrief the skeleton crew. Crewmembers, however, are reclusive and unwilling to communicate. It’s like they’re all protecting secrets. Kelvin’s old mentor, Gibarian, commits suicide rather than admit whatever bleak secret he’s kept on Solaris. However, Kelvin spots that secret walking the vast, depopulated halls, and it’s apparently a woman.

Before long, Kelvin has his own secret: Harey, his college girlfriend, appears in his cabin. She can’t possibly be here, however. Not only did Harey not join the long, arduous interstellar journey to this distant planet, but in a moment of overwhelming despair ten years ago, she also committed suicide. Yet here she is, as alive and unblemished as the last time Kelvin saw her. She’s impossible, but also real.

Tarkovsky’s movie (and Steven Soderburgh’s 2002 remake) focus on Harey, the impossible woman, and the guilt she inspires in Kelvin. But that focus is why Lem disliked the film adaptations. This novel isn’t about human guilt and culpability; it’s about… what? Critics dispute furiously how to interpret this recondite novel. Lem took especial pains to make it inscrutable, immune to any algebraic interpretation. You don’t understand Solaris, you experience it.

Personally, I see Lem talking about the futility of human reason. Every “law” human intellects devised around experimental science falls flat around Solaris. The scientists find themselves reduced to Aristotelian guesswork and mysticism. Throughout the novel, he both uses and scoffs at religious symbolism (Lem himself was agnostic), but finally, even Kelvin admits we apprehend the truth only through that proverbial glass, darkly.

Bill Johnston’s English-language translation is deemed “the definitive edition” because Lem’s estate considered it the most satisfactorily accurate to Lem’s philosophical ambiguity. However, rights issues have tied up publication for years. It’s currently only available in ebook and audiobook editions, not print. Canadian actor Alessandro Juliani expresses the depth and complexity of Lem’s characters, and beautifully captures Kelvin’s journey beyond reason and evidence, into acceptance of a fundamentally absurd universe.

This novel admits multiple interpretations based on available evidence. That, I’d contend, is Lem’s point: no explanation is ever complete and universal, we can argue the evidence endlessly without reaching exhaustive conclusions. In the end, our questions define us, not our answers. Kelvin, and perhaps Harey, don’t resolve their story, they only achieve a higher and more meaningful order of question. And hopefully, after reading this book, so will we.

What Tucker Carlson Means to Me

Tucker Carlson, corporate puppet

I’ve never watched an episode of Tucker Carlson. While we’re at it, I’ve never watched Don Lemon either, and it’s been five years since I’ve watched Rachel Maddow. Cable “news” is an intellectual wasteland that can’t tell the difference between information and knowledge. The entire business model behind the 24-hour news cycle functions by flooding audiences with an information firehose, and letting them select whatever most justifies their pre-existing beliefs.

Therefore, watching Tucker ride into the sunset again (he’s been fired by all three major cable news channels), I find myself reacting not to Tucker himself, but a gestalt being called Tucker Carlson. It’s clichéd to note how American politics have become more polarized, adversarial, and off-putting, or to blame the departed for deepening that division. Instead, I’d like to praise Tucker for making people care enough to get angry.

Tucker’s firing grabbed my imagination, while Don Lemon’s simultaneous dismissal barely creased my awareness, because Tucker’s commentary generates more outrage. People share snippets to FaceTube and InstaTwit because his rock-ribbed rhetoric and us-vs-them mindset energize friend and foe alike. Tucker’s allies feel deeply enough to go vote, while his opponents feel outraged by what they perceive as his sublimated racism, and his undisguised classism.

This means Tucker has, in essence, two audiences. While one audience gets angry at his routine targets— immigrants, college students, protesters— the other gets angry at Tucker himself. We don’t parse Tucker’s statements to discover whether they’re really racist (they are). Tucker matters because he got people to feel emotions, strong and complex ones, passion sufficient to get off their couches and do something. Not everyone can say that.

Admittedly, Tucker motivated people to do things that were frequently awful. The laundry list of Tucker’s outright lies becomes overwhelming, particularly when we know that his intended audience was more motivated to vote and participate in civic life than the broadly aggregated Left. Watching the recent news about screaming outbreaks at school boards, town halls, and Alt-Right marches, it’s impossible to ignore that we’re watching Tucker Carlson’s disembodied influence.

Rupert Murdoch, Corporate Puppetmaster

Meanwhile, as Tucker unifies the Right in outrage over some unwanted change, and unifies the Left in outrage over Tucker, America’s anemic, disorganized excuse for left-wing activism continues doing nothing. Anarchists, Communists, small-S socialists, and big-S Socialists spend more energy fighting one another than ever fighting “the system.” Despite occasional outbursts like the George Floyd protests, America’s Left seemingly can’t organize a two-car funeral.

Much as I love investigative journalists like Greg Palast or Sarah Kendzior, they don’t motivate populations the same way. People don’t finish these authors’ books with the motivation to storm the Capitol Building. The emotional fire necessary to drive the largest number of voters to the polls doesn’t come from knowledge, accuracy, and nuance. Being engaged from the Left means being informed, which, for most people— let’s not kid ourselves— is boring.

If America’s electorate is divided, as the commentariat tells us, it isn’t divided between Right and Left. It’s divided between those motivated enough to participate in politics, and those who would rather sit on their couches, with their families, watching Netflix to mollify the moment. Right and Left don’t compete with one another; they compete every day with entropy and inertia, the two forces keeping most Americans from voting.

The mere fact that Tucker Carlson lies flagrantly, that even his employers admit he lies, comes second. Because of the Dominion voting machines lawsuit, we now know that Tucker and his cohorts don’t even believe their own messages. But their lies, outrage, and slander motivate people to leave their couches and, if not storm the Bastille, at least show up to vote. The other side can’t say that.

Evaluating Tucker Carlson’s legacy (it’s likely he’ll reappear on another, skimpier network), we must reckon with a contradiction: his message was lousy, but it worked. He successfully energized one segment of America to vote, by providing a cogent narrative vilifying another segment. While the Left continues infighting and false appeals to a non-existent center, Tucker, the most popular voice on the Right, got people to actually participate.

This isn’t to excuse anything about Tucker himself. He’s been pretty effective at what he does, but what he does makes America a worse place. He trades in hatred, resentment, and vitriol, and our world is more toxic for his presence. Yet the fact that even he didn’t believe his own message, proves that doesn’t matter. He made people care enough to participate, and that’s pretty rare anymore.

One Man's Walk Through Armageddon

Zack Hunt, Unraptured: How End Times Theology Gets It Wrong

You ever notice how it seems some people really, really want the world to end a week from next Tuesday? Pastor Zack Hunt used to be one of them. A youth spent studying end-times theology convinced him that Jesus would return promptly, if you read the signs. He admits having been one of those eschatological enthusiasts who steered every discussion to Christ’s imminent return. And he apologizes for that.

This book is half memoir, half deep-dive into Biblical literacy. Pastor Hunt unpacks the moral certainties that defined his youth, and the growing complexity that forced him to amend his beliefs. For a time, he apparently questioned whether he could remain a Christian without the absolute conviction of end-times theology. It took time and growth before Pastor Hunt realized faith is about the here and now, not the great hereafter.

Starting in his teenage years, Hunt found himself torn between two religious extremes. He grew up in the Church of the Nazarene, part of the Holiness tradition in American Christianity, a faith that requires “total sanctification.” In theory, this means that relationship with Jesus makes your soul as spotless as new Victorian lace. In practice, it often means that you spend your life tallying your own sins to make sure you haven’t strayed from God’s path. Hunt describes himself answering lots of altar calls and getting saved every Sunday.

Such constant soul scrutiny led, Hunt describes, to embracing a theology of vindication. The end-times eschatology described by theologians like Hal Lindsay and Tim LaHaye let Hunt rest calmly on the expectation that, when Jesus returns quickly, He’ll exonerate the righteous. In order to “win,” he needed only to memorize the right prooftexts, perform the prescribed rituals, and evangelize to anyone and everyone.

Hunt walks us through his spiritual journey, one he admits remains incomplete. Like many young Christians, he accepted his parents’ religion, not only without question, but also without restraint. He became a more absolute, more performative version of whatever his parents told him to believe, to the point where, in his telling, his own pastors and spiritual mentors rolled their eyes at his extreme certainties.

Zack Hunt

His encounters with Scripture as a young adult, however, forced him into impossible situations. He attended college to become a “youth pastor,” a title often associated with the worst excesses of populist Christianity. But his exegetical professors and Bible mentors showed him a scriptural reading that didn’t accord with his moral absolutes. He found himself backed into a corner: change his beliefs, or admit he favored preachers over Christ.

Although Hunt does use extensive personal narrative, and centers his own spiritual journey, he doesn’t pooh-pooh scholarship. He quotes extensively from prior theologians on topics like eschatology, exegesis, and homiletics. Augustine and Origen, C.S. Lewis and Barbara Rossing, all serve to bolster Hunt’s position. He passed through his crisis of faith and became a pastor, obviously, bringing all the scholarship that title implies.

But simultaneously, he realizes most people don’t believe in end-times theology for scholarly, scriptural purposes. They believe because it satisfies a need in their personal spiritual journey. Facts seldom persuade people from their religious or philosophical beliefs; if they did, most people would be paralyzed by the doubt stemming from conflicting facts and moral ambiguity. True Believers need a vision, and that’s what Hunt’s memoir provides.

As an adult, Hunt basically believes that end-times theology provides adherents a fast pass out of life. By believing the world will end soon, and one’s only solution is to individually get right with God, Left Behind readers are exempted from boring old requirements to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Why band together to relieve this world’s suffering, when this world won’t exist next week?

Jesus Christ, though, doesn’t support this position. Hunt notes that Jesus ties the Parable of the Sheep and Goats to his “Little Apocalypse,” his only direct end-times narrative. Jesus’ own explication of how to face the eschaton directly ties to how we live this life. Salvation, Hunt writes as an adult, isn’t an escape from this life. It’s a new life, a new kingdom, a new way of living in this physical world.

Not everyone will appreciate such conclusions. Hunt admits his teenage self would’ve hated them. But they’re no less real despite some believers’ resistance. Salvation and grace, Hunt believes now, are about being more fully alive right now. And we can’t find that, Hunt now insists, by fleeing from the real and messy life God gave us.

 

See also: The End Is Nigh (Again)

“Mean World Syndrome” In Modern Culture

Ralph Yarl

This week’s news hit so rapidly, it became incomprehensible. On Monday, America learned of Ralph Yarl, a Black Kansas City teen shot by a White man when he rang the wrong doorbell. (The shooting happened the prior Thursday, but details emerged on Monday.) Then Tuesday hit with Kaylin Gillis, murdered in upstate New York for turning into the wrong driveway, and Payton Washington, a cheerleader critically wounded near Austin for trying to get into the wrong car.

We’d barely grasped these assaults when Wednesday provided a one-two punch. First we learned about a mass shooting at an Alabama Sweet Sixteen party that left four youths between ages 17 and 23 dead, and thirty-two injured. Thirty-two! Before I’d even processed that, in Nebraska, where I live, the state legislature passed a controversial “constitutional carry” bill, a shitty Orwellian euphemism for basically allowing anyone, anywhere, to carry live firearms without a permit.

Basically, after three days of national news coverage driven by armed individuals—mostly older, mostly White, and entirely male—shooting strangers on lousy pretenses, the Nebraska legislature decided we needed even more of that. Okay, sure, the Nebraska Unicameral didn’t actually say they wanted more shootings. But what other outcome did they expect from authorizing more unrestricted carrying? They know at least the potential definitely exists.

Exactly what motivated the Alabama shooters remains murky as I write. They’ve been arrested, but more details aren’t currently forthcoming. But Andrew Lester, the 85-year-old White man who shot Ralph Yarl, explicitly said he was “scared to death” by a Black youth’s presence at his door. And Kevin Monahan, the 65-year-old man who murdered Kaylin Gillis, was apparently famously incensed at “trespassers,” like an unnamed character from Deliverance.

Both Lester and Monahan perceived themselves under threat within their own houses, and apparently kept weapons ready. Lester’s own description of the incident features him answering the door already carrying a gun, which indicates that he perceived the mere presence of unannounced company as a mortal threat. And Pedro Tello Rodriguez, Jr., who shot Payton Washington while she was running away, apparently had a gun in his car.

Kaylin Gillis

Normal, healthy people don’t answer the door carrying heat unless they expect to need it. And they don’t expect to need a firearm unless they already perceive themselves as under threat. These people apparently see their worlds as so chockablock full of menaces that their only response is to kill the other guy before the other guy kills you. Private firearms are the chosen weapons in a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes.

Worse, this isn’t new. Sociologist Barry Glassner wrote over twenty years ago that older Americans, flooded with constant images of crime, violence, and terror, come to believe the world is more violent than it actually is. Glassner cites media researcher George Gerbner, who described the “mean world syndrome,” wherein people who stay indoors and watch copious television believe that murder, violence, and crime are more prevalent than the evidence indicates.

Wednesday’s blanket legalization of permitless carry in Nebraska isn’t coincidental. Former state legislator Suzanne Geist, currently running for mayor of Lincoln, has anchored her campaign to claims that crime has become more common under the incumbent Democratic mayor, a claim that’s just not true. A candidate is willfully creating the “mean world syndrome” among Lincoln voters, while her legislative colleagues authorize more unlabelled guns.

American violent crime statistics have trended downward for over thirty years, notwithstanding the occasional limited uptick. We’re currently more threatened by wage theft than auto theft, and our life savings are more jeopardized by banks than by bank robbers. But prime-time television, a medium mainly supported by older audiences, continues churning out crime dramas, while the 24-hour news cycle lives and dies by dramatic crime narratives.

Payton Washington

Therefore, older Americans are likely to believe they’re in significantly more danger during routine interactions than they really are. The presence of a Black youth—the coded enemy in many crime dramas—is enough to make older people feel threatened, and react accordingly. Thus we witness the underlying flaw of the Castle Doctrine: just because you feel threatened doesn’t mean you are threatened.

I realize “the plural of ‘anecdote’ isn’t ‘data.’” These four shootings aren’t necessarily representative. But in some ways that doesn’t matter: Andrew Lester perceived himself as threatened by a Black youth existing, and Americans perceive ourselves as surrounded by guns, just waiting to see who draws first. In that environment, paranoia is the smart decision, even if that environment only exists in your head. Or in campaign ads.

White Americans and the Death of Rhetoric

Rep. Justin J. Pearson
(campaign photo)

When the pastor approached me after my first time attending an African Methodist Episcopal church service, he didn’t address me in his “pulpit voice.” Though still wearing his liturgical robes, and a sheen of sweat still visible from his aerobic ministerial performance, he nevertheless spoke to me in measured, even tones, like the college-educated professional he is. He expressed genuine avuncular curiosity at my White presence in his Black church.

Before this encounter, I had book-learning awareness of Black religious tradition. I’d seen enough video recordings of Dr. King to know that he didn’t always speak with the heightened bluster he demonstrated at the March on Washington. But there’s something different when sitting in the pews, watching and listening as the pastor modulates his tone. The rise and fall aren’t incidental; the pastor, you soon realize, is leading you on a journey.

Late last week, an edited video emerged of Tennessee State Representative Justin J. Pearson. After the Shelby County Board of Supervisors unanimously reappointed Rep. Pearson to the House of Representatives, reversing spectacularly partisan expulsion from that house, the Representative, little known outside his Memphis district, suddenly became a national figure. And his personal history became subject to tedious media scrutiny.

The video spliced together two moments in Pearson’s life. As a 21-year-old undergraduate at Bowdoin College, Pearson ran for student government. His campaign video shows Pearson with close-cropped hair and a charcoal suit, speaking softly and gesturing directly into a camera. Then a jump-cut leads to Pearson, now 28 and sporting a prominent Afro, shouting with a revival preacher’s gusto during the week between his expulsion and his reinstatement.

Prominent conservatives jumped on this juxtaposition. If Pearson speaks differently to different audiences, the claim goes, then he’s fake and a political liar. Trumpist spokesman Ali Alexander, who is himself of African-American descent, described Pearson’s two voices as signs of “a serious mental illness” in a since-deleted tweet. Right-wing activist Greg Price accused Pearson of “acting like a character from a Madea movie.”

There's being a southern preacher and then there's being a guy who graduated from a $60K per year college in Maine a few years ago acting like a character from a Madea movie.https://t.co/1fyzLtsRCX

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) April 12, 2023

We might excuse this pig-ignorant and unabashedly racist statement dribbling from White boy Greg Price’s mouth, since he’s probably unaware of America’s Black rhetorical tradition. But Alexander, a former ministerial candidate, should know better. He should know that Black pulpit speech uses rhetorical devices which are so time-tested, they’re literally described in the ancient writings of Aristotle and Cicero. Rhetorical devices that White people have forgotten, at great cost.

White Americans have long pined for the perceived authenticity demonstrated by our Black brethren. Perhaps that’s why we honkies have appropriated blues music, hip-hop culture, and FUBU couture. But somehow, in longing for Black authenticity, we’ve abandoned our commitment to Black people. We watch our favorite rappers perform onstage, and never hear them speak. We cherry-pick our favorite Martin and Malcolm sermons, and never glimpse the breadth of their delivery.

It’s easy to forget that, while White people increasingly get our worldviews mediated through television and streaming video, Black Americans receive much more of their contact verbally. Therefore, White public figures modulate their speaking style according to the microphone’s needs, and according to the loss compression caused by the broadcast signal. Black rhetoricians care more about how the sound carries in the available space.

Rep. Justin Jones, also of the Tennessee
Three (news photo)

If Rep. Pearson delivered his campaign video like he delivered his public exhortations, he’d blow out your computer’s speakers. Notice how his impassioned public speech gets distorted in the medium you’re probably using to watch it, your smartphone or laptop. Streaming simply can’t handle that degree of variation. I’ve seen similar technical degradation when my favorite Black preachers stream their sermons on YouTube and Facebook. Technology changes how we speak.

But as I say, these rhetorical flourishes aren’t uniquely Black. The great rhetorical pioneers like Aristotle and Cicero preached the importance of modulating your tone, emphasizing key words through repetition, and baring your emotions onstage. Black public speakers didn’t invent this performative style; White public speakers abandoned it. And then their mostly White audience forgot these techniques ever existed, and now act shocked to see them still being used.

White rhetoricians once loved these techniques. John Wesley, Abraham Lincoln, and William Jennings Bryant were all famous for getting so agitated during their speeches that they began weeping. Patrick Henry declaimed “Give me liberty, or give me death,” then reportedly fell down and played dead in the Virginia House of Burgesses. If we’re invested in authenticity, then running down Rep. Pearson isn’t the way. He’s using techniques our White ancestors perfected, and we forgot.

The Women of the American Revolution

Amy Harmon, A Girl Called Samson: a Novel

Deborah “Rob” Samson grew up as an indentured servant in colonial Connecticut, surrounded by farmer boys and their dreams of war and glory. So when the American Revolution started, she watched her foster brothers enlist, and she watched the condolence letters come home. But Deborah believes the high-minded Revolutionary ideology, and memorizes the Declaration of Independence. It only makes sense for her to eventually run away and enlist.

The first thing to remember when reading prolific author Amy Harmon’s latest historical novel is that Deborah Samson (or Sampson) was a very real person. She really enlisted near the culmination of the Revolution, serving for seventeen months as Robert Shurtliff. Therefore, Harmon’s story is circumscribed by history, and often lacks the unity and panache of wholly fictional stories. Life often lacks a plausible through-line.

Rather than inventing the story, Harmon invents Samson’s untidy inner turmoil. She creates a heroine who reads the Bible and Thomas Paine, and believes their exhortations. What Samson doesn’t believe is the narrative given her, of the importance of finding a husband and assuming domestic duties. She doesn’t want a colonial woman’s limited options; she wants the life promised to the men surrounding her, and she’ll lie to achieve it.

Harmon presents this novel as the memoir Deborah Samson never wrote. (She spoke prolifically, but left few texts.) Samson describes the various lessons learned from authority figures around her: the parish pastor who encourages her literacy, the employers who treat her more like a daughter than the help, and her foster brothers. She learns to trust her own capabilities, and shows little patience with social niceties foisted upon women.

But when she hits adulthood, something changes. Everyone around her begins pressuring her to marry; by colonial standards, she’s considered an old maid at twenty. Modern audiences will surely sympathize, as authorities spend a child’s first eighteen years encouraging them to dream, then the rest of their lives telling that former child to wake up. To us, Samson’s refusal isn’t rebellious, it’s a reasonable response to unreasonable expectations.

Amy Harmon

That collision between the story’s historical context and the audience’s expectations is where I begin having problems. Harmon trusts our instinctive reactions, which makes sense in reading a contemporary setting. When several men (including one of her foster brothers) make fumbling attempts to court Samson, she dismisses them flippantly, as we would; she doesn’t linger on them. And she doesn’t emphasize what an act of moral rebellion this refusal is.

Our story unfolds from there, more a series of episodes than a unified narrative. Samson progresses from bucolic agrarian childhood, through the relationship pressures of adolescence, to adulthood and enlistment, with remarkably little friction. Along the way, Samson has various encounters with historical figures; though Harmon creates a fictional array of enlisted men to annoy Samson, the officers in Harmon’s narrative are actual people taken from the record.

One example should emphasize my disappointment. When Samson finally enlists (on the second try), she’s rostered with a battalion of locals who josh her for being young and pretty. They don’t know she’s marching in drag, obviously. These local regulars are one-dimensional, and identified entirely by their surnames. One youth shows some glimmerings of complexity, just before they’re all killed in a skirmish with De Lancey’s Brigade.

This narrative arc is taken directly from countless war movies. Bigger, more aggressive recruits haze our timid protagonist, but the arrogant swashbucklers are ill-prepared for war, and die quickly in front of our protagonist. The hero must then face the survivor’s guilt. Once again, Harmon relies upon our familiarity with the narrative trope, because she doesn’t return to it, or dive any deeper into the consequences.

Such problems abound. Samson has various encounters, which are isolated and seldom plumbed deeper. She acquits herself admirably in battle, and eventually becomes General John Paterson’s personal aide. Harmon ramrods in a Twelfth Night-ish implication of sublimated romance, then largely abandons it. Any of these might’ve been profitably expanded to a full-length novel, or deep-dive short story anyway. But Harmon mainly name-checks the war movie tropes, then blithely moves on.

The historical Deborah Samson was eventually discovered. In an unusual twist, she received, not a reprimand, but an honorable discharge, for her distinguished service; she later became the first woman to receive a U.S. Army pension. She was among her era’s few women to resist gender roles, and win. Samson was admirable, and Harmon clearly admires her. But admiration isn’t enough; this low-friction version of Samson’s story is ultimately lukewarm.

Reality Has a Lousy Plot and a Slovenly Editor

There was no thunder and lightning the day my mother fell and injured herself, which, as a writer, I found anticlimactic and disappointing. We writers are always taught that we need appropriate foreshadowing before a big plot event, but life isn’t so obliging. My mother’s injury—a frustrating reversal of all the progress she’s made in a year of physical therapy—wasn’t heralded by meaningful story elements. It just happened.

It was Easter Sunday, April 9th, 2023. She was headed to church, where her daughter, my sister, was scheduled to play with the bell choir; my sister’s music has made her a small-time local celebrity. Mom stepped out of the truck, something that would’ve been impossible for her a year ago as her joints were becoming increasingly brittle, but which she’s been handling with grace and ease, supported by only a telescoping trekking pole.

There was no pavement crack to trip over, no surging crowd pushing her back. Nothing in the plot to justify her falling backwards. She simply lost her balance and fell against the truck’s bumper with sufficient force to break three ribs, one pretty severely. Lying on the emergency room gurney later, she wracked her brain for explanations why she fell so suddenly, but explanations weren’t forthcoming. It just happened.

In writing, as in other mass-media arts—filmmaking, game design—storytellers need justifications for life-altering events. If somebody falls, shattering bones and becoming paralyzed, we need somebody to first portentously say, “Y’all better fix that sidewalk before someone gets hurt.” Because in storytelling, we recognize the existence of a storyteller. There’s a genuine person present, making decisions, and those decisions need support.

Roland Barthes called this tendency to value the author’s choices “theological.” Centering the storyteller’s choices too closely resembled looking for God’s mission in life, and like many mid-20th Century French academics, Barthes pooh-poohed the idea of a personal God. But Barthes replaced the storyteller’s choices for those of the audience. He disparaged theology, while arrogating theological power to the reader. This, to him, seemed a reasonable trade.

Roland Barthes

Thus, even as the literary world has moved away from its belief in a just and ordered universe, it nevertheless persists in believing in human agency. Whether we believe that God ordained universal values, or humans make values where we find them, we still look for an orderly world, because we recognize that there’s a storyteller and an audience, and both of them make choices.

Early novelists believed that, because they were making choices in writing, they needed to have a moral thrust. Before the Twentieth Century, the novel’s denouement needed to reward the virtuous and punish the culpable. Moving into the modern era, novelists increasingly recognized that the universe is seldom so just, and made their stories reflect this change. But they often followed the opposite extreme, visiting sadistic cruelty on the innocent.

Modern audiences have become savvy to these authorial choices. We recognize that authors are either moralistically pious, or nihilistically savage, and instead of traveling where the storyteller takes us, we often start the book, movie, or game by looking for clues. We don’t want to undertake a journey, we want to “beat the game,” anticipating whatever twist or convoluted conspiracy we assume the author has buried in the story.

Then we act surprised when some people seek those same clues in the outside world. QAnon cultists and Flat Earthers look for fiddling, insignificant signs of an organized universe in frivolous word choices or inconsistencies in flight plans. They’re engaged in a pattern Barthes would disparage as “theological,” looking for concealed truths of an underlying storyteller making choices. And their behavior is every bit as silly.

As Christian as I am, I can’t help laughing at people looking for God (or a God analogue) in worldly clues. It’s about as nonsensical as making offerings to Babylonian water spirits to propitiate the rain and create a bountiful harvest. Even if you believe that God exists, faith doesn’t exist to ballyhoo evidence in the past; that’s arrogant and self-justifying. Faith doesn’t justify the past, it helps you make the next right choice in the present.

My mother’s injury is a frustrating, disappointing setback and loss of progress. But it wasn’t foreshadowed, because reality isn’t a story. Maybe there’s a God, but that doesn’t mean every life event represents a choice. Sometimes things happen because they happen, and humanity’s vainglorious tendency to look for purpose is ultimately disappointing. For us writers, that’s a very bitter pill to swallow.

Notes From a War With No Front Lines

Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War

The rhetoric of Civil War was definitely present on January 6th, 2021, when a contingent of Americans tried to reverse an unfavorable election. But journalist Jeff Sharlet believes such rhetoric percolated long before and after that day. Sharlet believes Americans have long harbored a strange bipartisan longing for a violent purgation of our body politic. Maybe, he implies, it’s already begun; we just haven’t noticed yet.

So Sharlet seeks the front lines of that elusive conflict. He seeks them in history and art, including a rare sit-down interview with Harry Belafonte, focusing not on his epoch-making music, but on his political activism. He seeks the front lines in politics, embedding himself in Trump rallies in 2016, when Trump was new and exciting, and in 2020, when even his followers didn’t bother denying his racism.

But most importantly, from a journalist most famous for award-winning investigations into the dangerous intersections of religion and power, he seeks America’s front lines in places of faith. This usually means churches, especially White Evangelical Christian churches, many of which have entrusted their message to American power. But it also means anything Americans treat religiously, not only believing its truth, but speaking its liturgy.

Sharlet sees religion in places one wouldn’t necessarily consider sacred. He’s hardly the first observer to notice that Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric resembles Prosperity Gospel preachers like Joel Osteen. But Sharlet parses Trump’s verbal cadences to find their tent-revival origins. Trump’s speeches baffle outsiders while leaving True Believers energized because, Sharlet insists, that’s what they’re designed to do. Like a snake-handling preacher, Trumpian language separates insiders from The World.

He also sees irreligion in places ordinarily associated with belief. He finds churches unwelcoming places, dominated by Trump apologia and calls for uprising. An armed security guard threatens Sharlet outside an Omaha storefront congregation. (Here, Sharlet’s choices shine through. Though he assertively notes the Omaha congregation is integrated, students of religious history will notice the thread unifying the churches Sharlet targets for scrutiny: not Christianity, but Whiteness.)

Jeff Sharlet

Religious language and religious analysis come naturally to Sharlet. Though culturally Jewish, and having no particular personal faith, he’s immersed himself in American religious discourse for twenty years or more. He sees the tacit patterns within language and action which, to outsiders, appear like meaningless word salad. He shows readers how the moments that appear disconnected are actually part of a whole. And what he shows is pretty disconcerting.

If he were louder and more frenetic, like Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, we might easily mistake Sharlet for a Gonzo journalist. Like those famous personalities, he inserts himself bodily into the unfolding narrative. He also doesn’t flinch from candidly taking sides. While observing Occupy Wall Street, he sleeps in a Zuccotti Park encampment. When investigating Pastor Rich Wilkerson’s made-for-TV ministry, he meanders from a boring service.

This book’s centerpiece is a 120-page travelogue that combines journalism with memoir. Sharlet starts at a memorial rally for Ashli Babbitt, the January 6th casualty whom critics call a domestic terrorist, and True Believers call a martyr. Then he drives back across America, stopping at various churches, monuments, and sites of conservative pilgrimage, including Representative Lauren Boebert’s now-defunct open carry restaurant. He interviews anybody willing to talk to a journalist.

Partway through the travelogue, though, Sharlet admits he has ulterior motives for this journey. In his glove compartment, he has his own sacred talisman: his stepmother’s ashes, which he wants to distribute at various key locations. For Sharlet, this journey is a contrast between the America which his stepmother (and tacitly, he himself) loved, and wanted to be part of after her death, and another, uglier America, pugnacious and vulgar.

That duality permeates Sharlet’s book. There’s an America of great natural beauty and community solidarity, an America where youth eagerly organize to defend their rights following the Dobbs decision, even at great personal cost, simply because it’s right. Then there’s a counter-America, which mounts counter-protests against the organized youth, because their entire identity revolves around identifying enemies who need to be beaten. Even when those “enemies” are their neighbors.

Sharlet’s narrative seems disconnected at first. Some incidents he relates are almost a decade old and tangential to his themes. But ultimately, he brings it together, mostly. His narrative contains both national importance and personal struggle—as, indeed, does everybody’s anymore. His closing chapters leave some loose ends unresolved, in a most un-journalistic way that leaves me itchy. But overall, he brings us through an America with a freighted future.

The End Of the End Of the World

The TV series Doomsday Preppers ran four seasons on the National Geographic Channel, and while I never looked for it, I somehow always found it. The series aired during the years I worked third shift at a local car-parts factory, and when I staggered home, too tired and unfocused to read, second-run episodes always seemed right there on cable. Like a bloody car wreck, I couldn’t look away.

Though that series gave apocalyptic survivalists a national platform, the movement predated the show. Back in the 1990s, when I was significantly more conservative, I received the Loompanics catalog, that pre-Amazon shopping extravaganza of violent Libertarian paranoia. Mixed in with guidebooks for home gunsmithing and paperwork-free tax dodging, the catalog always included topics like building your own bomb shelter, canning veggies without electricity, and how to raise and slaughter goats.

I’ve read claims that apocalyptic survivalism gained mainstream traction with the movie Red Dawn, in which plucky teenagers armed with assault rifles and camping gear staved off a Soviet invasion. But while that perhaps made many people aware of survivalism, it certainly didn’t invent the field. We could arguably trace survivalism to the Essenes, the isolated Jewish sect most famous today for preserving the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran.

These preppers, and other doomsday narratives like LaHaye and Jenkins’ Left Behind, share an important prior supposition: Somebody is going to survive Doomsday. It might as well be me. The exact nature of Doomsday keeps shifting, of course. Nuclear war, pandemic, the Mayan calendar, and malignant AL will hasten the Final Judgement. But the end of the world isn’t really an end, but a pause, a societal bottleneck.

The post-apocalyptic theme goes back generations. The science fiction narrative dates back to Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, though surviving the cataclysm is older than that. Even Noah, in the Hebrew Bible, is arguably a post-apocalyptic narrative, and that story is even older. Like much of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, the Noah narrative was probably repurposed from Sumerian myth, wherein Earth has been destroyed and recreated multiple times.

Both the Christian Apocalypse and secular doomsdays share an agreement that Earth is not eternal. It had a beginning; it must therefore also have an end. The only difference lies in what different sources consider that end—meaning end both in the sense of “conclusion,” and in the sense of “ultimate purpose.” In theological terms, we consider this dual end “eschatology,” though that term serves equally well for secular considerations.

Perhaps it helps to consider the actual meaning of the word “Apocalypse.” Because of its Biblical usage, we’ve grown accustomed to considering the meaning as Doomsday, the end of the world, the final cataclysm. But in Greek, “Apocalypse” literally means removing a shroud, making visible that which was previously concealed. Apocalypses, like the Hebrew Daniel or the Christian revelation, promise to reveal the true forces driving our world.

Such thinking gets a bad rap. “Conspiracy theorists” peddle everything from the Blood Libel to QAnon, moonshine narratives describing a world beset by constant wickedness. The only solution, these theories claim, is to huddle together under the protection of a unitary king (or pope or president) who will protect against that wickedness. The enemy is supposedly both pervasive, and so entrenched that only a strongman can actually kill it.

But another version of that narrative exists. The Biblical Revelation describes a faithful remnant surrounded by an Empire which appears both powerful and eternal. Appeasing the Empire’s injustice sometimes looks like the only way to survive. But the Empire, the Bible tells us, is transitory, and will ultimately destroy itself through infighting. In the First Century CE, that might’ve appeared impossible, but history has proven it true.

Therefore the question becomes: What truth does your Apocalypse reveal? What force does your Revelation glorify? The apocalyptic thinking behind QAnon sees a world beset by evil which is distinctly female, non-White, and religiously other. QAnon can only propose one solution: bestowing god-king authority onto a unitary President. The occasional Ashli Babbitt is a small price to protect that White Supremacist truth.

All doomsday narratives assume, on some level, that somebody will survive. They also assume that some people have to die because their eyes are so clouded that they’ll never see the truth. Though QAnon is particularly visible, this willingness to let the ignorant die (or even hasten their deaths) isn’t unique or partisan. Whenever anybody embraces an apocalyptic narrative, they tacitly admit whom they’d willingly let die.