The Women’s Odyssey

Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1,001 Faces

What do women do while men leave to vanquish dragons and cross trackless seas? Is it possible for a woman to be a hero? Joseph Campbell, whose major work The Hero With a Thousand Faces popularized the ides of a “hero’s journey,” believed heroism was a singularly male pursuit (while teaching at a women’s university). In Campbell’s precepts, femininity is womb and grave, wife and temptress, a heroic man’s original source and his ultimate destination.

Maria Tatar, professor of German and children’s literature at Harvard University, sees a second track running under mythology. While men become heroes by leaving home and swashbuckling through the world, women often become heroic in how they resist. Put another way, heroism is something men find; it’s something women have thrust upon them, sometimes bodily. Tatar unpacks threads of feminine heroism from classical mythology and medieval folklore to modern Hollywood, sometimes with decidedly mixed results.

In the oldest mythology, Tatar finds women struggling to maintain an identity when men try to constantly control them. Helen of Troy finds herself passed, hot potato-like, between the hands of male heroes, her story getting lost along the way. Philomela literally loses her voice to her rapacious brother-in-law, who severs her tongue after violating her; but she reclaims her voice through embroidery. “Women’s work” becomes how she reclaims her voice and receives deferred justice.

Similar themes recur in Tatar’s telling, but importantly, when women find their voices, others take those voices away again. Arachne, the famous weaver whose skills challenge the gods, is a good example. In Ovid, the goddess Athena punishes Arachne, not because her weaving is excessively superior, but because she uses her weaving to call out the injustices of the Olympian gods. Modern mythologists reverse this, though, turning her into a moralistic warning against simple pride.

Nor are the connections to modernity incidental. Then as now, women seek the autonomy to tell their own stories, which they can frequently only achieve through subversive means. Consider how the #MeToo movement won its incremental successes despite, not because of, conventional media. Women fight a system designed to preserve the status quo of power and freedom, even when the existing system rewards the already excessively rewarded, and silences those who call injustice by name.

Maria Tatar

Tatar especially appreciates women who bring the ancient unresolved questions into the modern world. She extensively unpacks authors like Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, and Madeline Miller, who rewrite the classical myths from a woman’s viewpoint. In the Homeric traditions (which Joseph Campbell considered normative), women are either largely voiceless, like Penelope or Briseis, or downright villainous, like Circe. Tatar loves when women writers return to the ancient well and give silenced women their own voices.

Continuing into medieval folklore, Tatar examines the same themes as they recur—or, just as importantly, as they’re silenced. French fairy tale author Charles Perrault writes in “Bluebeard” of a woman captive to a terrible husband, who discovers the truth, and is rescued by her brothers. But when the same story reappears in the oral tradition, usually by women, as in the Brothers Grimm’s “Fitcher’s Bird,” the beleaguered bride rescues herself, because there’s nobody else.

Tatar’s explanatory skills work best in the classical and medieval myths that mostly inspire her and Campbell. Moving into the modern era—which, since the middle Twentieth Century, mostly means movies and TV—her critical skills become more synoptic and brief. Maybe she expects her audience to already be familiar with the Hollywood stories she mostly just mentions and briefly describes. But the product feels rushed; she doesn’t so much unpack Hollywood as name-check it.

That said, she does describe the thread of women’s resistance to worldly injustice. From Cassandra, who gets mocked and derided for speaking the truth, and Scheherazade, who tames the destructive monarch by telling tales, to modern mythic tales like Little Women and Wonder Woman, Tatar sees something continuous. Women through literary history have established themselves by telling their counter-narrative, keeping their stories alive against men. Women survive by preserving and by passing along their stories.

Maria Tatar is hardly the first scholar to postulate a feminine analogue to Campbell’s “hero’s journey.” This book’s Amazon page links to at least two books entitled “The Heroine’s Journey.” Tatar brings her contribution, a knowledge of classical and medieval mythology as capacious as Campbell’s own, arrayed thematically to demonstrate that women are no less heroic, just because they don’t conquer. Women, arguably, do something more heroic: they face an unjust (male) system, and survive.

Also by Maria Tatar:
Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood

Jason Aldean and the Nashville Outrage Machine

A still from Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” video

Most mainstream country music artists don’t write their own songs. I didn’t know this, growing up listening to Nashville’s Finest. While some artists, like Willie Nelson and Loretta Lynn, write much of their own material, most mainstream country is written by contract songwriters, much like how most rock music was written by Brill Building songwriters before the Beatles popularized the idea that rockers should write their own material.

This includes Jason Aldean, whose latest lukewarm yodel, “Try That in a Small Town,” polarized music fans recently. With its thinly veiled hints of violence against both criminals and protesters, and its music video shot at the location of at least two lynchings, has drawn enough ire for CMT to discontinue airing the video. The battle, however, has driven the song up some charts, because come on now, controversy sells.

Except, again: Aldean doesn’t write his own material. Four Nashville contract writers scribed “Try That in a Small Town”: Kelley Lovelace, Neil Thrasher, Tully Kennedy, and Kurt Allison. The latter two are members of Aldean’s backing band, and probably appear in the controversial video (I couldn’t pick them from a lineup). Of the thirty-eight singles Aldean has released to date, he has writing credits on exactly none.

Aldean isn’t the first Nashville artist to release songs described as pro-lynching. Without Googling, I can quickly name Charlie Danels’ “Simple Man,” and several songs by Hank Williams, Jr. Daniels and Williams are arguably worse, because they do write their own material. Aldean could defend himself by claiming he’s just parroting contract writers’ words (though he hasn’t). Daniels’ and Williams’ violent fantasies are decidedly their own opinions.

Jason Aldean live on stage last week

The longer I live with this, though, the more I realize: that makes Aldean’s position less defensible, not more. Because Aldean signed away much creative control over his stage persona, he must surely live surrounded by corporate bureaucrats who vet decisions. Production management, record company executives, PR professionals, and others must’ve read they lyrics sheet, heard the studio rough mixes, seen the video storyboard, and said: “Let’s run with it.”

Giblin and Doctorow write about how tightly controlled today’s music industry generally is. The Big Three music conglomerates—Universal, Sony, and Warner—are completely controlled by bean counters and MBA graduates, not by musicians, like in Johnny Cash’s heyday. Output is tightly controlled, and no single gets released without extensive human and software scrutiny to ensure it sufficiently resembles past hits, which is probably why most “hit” music is repetitive.

“Try That in a Small Town” must’ve endured countless layers of scrutiny before being released, and the chance that nobody heard or read the lyrics without realizing they were racially coded is infinitesimal. The chance that nobody on the creative or technical team didn’t know that the Maury County Courthouse, where the video was shot, saw two lynchings, is laughably small. Somebody, probably several somebodies, green-lighted it anyway.

(As an aside, Aldean, like Daniels and Williams before him, never directly references race. He uses racially coded terminology; “carjack” in particular has been a racially coded term since at least the 1990s. But none of these artists directly mentions race. That’s how dog whistle language works: they use jargon they know their audience will interpret racially, but only obliquely. Then they blame their opponents for directly mentioning race first.)

For that many people to ratify shipping a sundown town anthem, the decision must’ve been conscious. Somebody within the bowels of the corporation must’ve deliberately decided to sell a song guaranteed to evoke anger. The corporation, therefore, must’ve willfully decided to poke a wasp’s nest, presumably because controversy sells. The polarizing conflicts arising from this song aren’t incidental; they’re almost certainly calculated and intentional.

This just demonstrates that old saw, that the rich aren’t your friends. They’ll pick your pocket while telling you that “other” over there—that immigrant, that anti-police protester, that Hollywood hillbilly—is your real enemy. They’ll burn your house down to collect the insurance, then act dumbfounded when you ask who struck the match. I believe that’s what happened here: they provoked a fight for the money.

And the longer the story continues, the more free publicity it receives. Given what we know about how money moves in the music industry, very little probably goes to Aldean himself, or his contract songwriters. The beneficiaries of this controversy are his record company, a BMG subsidiary, and his concert promoter, which is probably LiveNation. This fake controversy is a cash subsidy to billionaires. And we keep supplying it.

Two Faces of the American Prison

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 114
Chris Hedges, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison, and Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

At approximately the same time in the early 2010s, two very different journalists walked into two prisons a thousand miles apart. Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent and Presbyterian minister, began teaching an extension course for Princeton University at East Jersey State Prison in Rahway, New Jersey. Shane Bauer, from Mother Jones magazine, went undercover as a corrections officer at Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana.

Hedges’ and Bauer’s experiences weren’t identical. The two journalists didn’t meet prisoners and prison administration in comparable ways. One prison was privatized, the other state-run. And one raised prisoners’ aspirations, while the other found himself drawn into the system breaking prisoners down. Yet their stories are similar enough to highlight the structural problems with American criminal justice, and to remind readers that prison changes both the incarcerated, and the jailers.

Chris Hedges carried an armload of books and boundless ideals into Rahway, informed by James Baldwin and Michelle Alexander. He wanted to equip his students to understand their situation, and make better choices. But he discovered students who overcame significant barriers just to qualify for his class. Rather than teach them their own social conditions, Hedges realized he’d been placed in this classroom to empower his students to tell their own story, both to each other and to the world.

Shane Bauer chose Winn Correctional Center basically because he submitted several job applications, and Winn answered first. He received four short weeks’ training before Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) entrusted him to safeguard some of Louisiana’s most violent chronic offenders. He found an entire prison, staff and prisoners alike, short-handed, cash-strapped, and demoralized. No university extension classes at Winn; money had run out for rehabilitative services.

Besides being journalists, these two authors share significant background experiences. Both covered the overthrow of Saddam Hussein; Hedges lost his prestigious Times job because he insisted on calling out Bush administration injustices by name. Both were held prisoner in Iran’s notorious prisons—Bauer describes his imprisonment in some detail, and wrote a previous book about it, while Hedges fleetingly mentions his imprisonment, raising more questions than answers.

But both authors share a dedication to letting the story unfold in its own terms. They let their subjects tell their own stories, in their own words, without imposing a preexisting narrative arc onto them. They describe letting prisoners—and, in Bauer’s case, prison administration—get into their heads and change their minds. Humans adapt ourselves to systems, even when those systems are toxic.

Hedges’ students mostly lack academic backgrounds, so rather than papers, he has them write dramatic scenes. He bolsters this with readings from playwrights like Amiri Baraka, Miguel Piñero, and August Wilson, who have distinct experiences with segregated society and state incarceration. To Hedges’ surprise, his students prove themselves excellent writers, with distinct voices and a strong personal spin. He realizes this class is destined to collaborate and write a play.

CCA is supposed to provide Bauer with four weeks of police-level training. However, he finds himself having to assist behind the wall before his training is up. Head counts, contraband searches, and other nickel-and-dime rules procedures mount up. His job mostly involves enforcing rules which prisoners must obey because they’re rules. Once inside, Bauer finds himself horse-trading favors and overlooking infractions, because keeping order matters more than ensuring justice.

Despite their significant overlap, these authors don’t tell identical stories. Hedges describes almost no interaction with prison administration, while Bauer almost entirely recounts conflicts between the incarcerated and the system. This means they have very different experiences. Hedges emerges from class with a more refined, more nuanced understanding of prisoners, eager to return and continue teaching classes to the disfranchised.

By contrast, Bauer recounts himself becoming less tolerant and forgiving, more inclined to bring the hammer down on prisoners for infractions, real or imagined. Early on, he remains progressive-minded and eager to help prisoners rehabilitate. As he remains in authority, however, and maintains the delicate balance between the state’s rehabilitative mission and CCA’s profit motive, he becomes increasingly violent. His loved ones become frightened of him.

Both journalists match the personal with the structural. Hedges describes the social forces, like poverty and overpolicing, that drove his students into prison. Bauer describes the history of American incarceration, which has often been privatized and profit-driven, usually with disastrous consequences. But both authors have the greatest impact when their stories are personal, intimate. Broken systems consist of broken individuals, and vice versa. Their stories are haunting and powerful.

Those Who Walk Away From Tinseltown

While the multi-union strike promises to halt Hollywood for months, a parallel story is emerging: the box-office success of Sound of Freedom. The true-ish story of Tim Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad attracted massive advance buzz, and tapped into an already-popular theme to debut at #3, behind major-studio franchise giants. At this writing, it’s cleared six times its published budget, without major-studio backing or distribution.

Much coverage has focused on how accurate the movie is, or isn’t. But that’s another discussion. More interesting, the studio behind the project, Santa Fe Films, made the movie, found a distributor, then found another distributor after the first one bailed, and printed and shipped for under $25 million. In a movie landscape dominated by surefire blockbusters, where mainstream studios won’t dust their shelves for that money, the return on investment is huge.

Compare the major-studio blockbuster returns. Avatar: the Way of Water cleared over $2 billion for 20^th Century Fox, but on a budget of at least $350 million (reports differ) before distribution. That’s more absolute dollars, but largely the same rate. The latest Marvel movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, grossed $850 million on a $250 million budget, a narrow-enough rate to constitute a virtual loss. Disney executives have announced tightening Marvel and Star Wars releases behind dwindling returns.

The Big Five studio conglomerates rely on franchises to remain afloat. Sound of Freedom came third in its opening weekend box office; first and second were the fifth Indiana Jones movie and the seventh Mission Impossible. Conglomerates keep returning to franchises like the Transformers, John Wick, Fast and Furious, and James Bond. (Okay, James Bond is an MGM property and therefore not Big Five. Stick with me.)

Then there’s sequels that nobody actually wanted and fans despised, like a fourth Matrix movie, every attempted Predator sequel, and the entire Jurassic World trilogy. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: the Hollywood mainstream is so creatively bereft that they can’t even breathe new life into existing successful properties. Only through constant saturation marketing have they persuaded audiences to view the pablum they keep dribbling out.

Meanwhile, Sound of Freedom is only the latest movie from Christian-themed indie production houses to draw returns well beyond its budget. Prior pious hits like Courageous, Fireproof, and Same Kind of Different as Me have attracted large audiences and robust returns despite their art-house budgets, narrow target audiences, and often unreliable distribution. They go outside the Hollywood mainstream for their funding and promotion, and audiences reward them for it.

Don’t misunderstand me. Several recent Christian mockbusters have been real stinkers, like the God’s Not Dead quartet, or Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas. Kirk Cameron in particular needs to realize he’s outlived his Eighties sitcom popularity, and reconsider his life’s choices. And the Christian mockbuster industry leans heavily conservative, parroting the existing moral and religious views of its largely sectarian audience. My opinions here are not uncritical.

However, a certain subset of right-wing Christians have successfully reverse-engineered an alternative Hollywood structure to make, distribute, and showcase their artwork. Their smaller studios must compete for talent, and their margins are narrow enough that they can’t waste the audience’s time with piffle, meaning they have to know their audience, and both give them what they want, while also denying them what they think they want.

Mainstream Hollywood has become highly vertically integrated. As Giblin and Doctorow write, the major agencies, talent scouts, and studios have merged. Therefore making a mainstream movie pitch means entering with a screenwriter, star, director, and designer already signed. Without competition for talent and content, the resulting returns (such as they are) don’t roll into the next movie; they go into executives’ and shareholders’ bank accounts.

Hollywood has become an unfree market. Striking for better conditions and improved contracts will bandage the wound, but it won’t fix the underlying problem, that under the current system, prices don’t float, and the major studios are more likely to collude than compete. In this one circumstance, however, participants have a solution that other mistreated groups don’t share: they can walk away and build their own system.

Our society has other underlying problems which participants must work to fix; poverty, racism, and corruption come to mind. We can’t just walk away from these problems, because we have only one government, only one nation-state. In this unique case, however, walking away is possible. There’s already a model of how others have done it. Hollywood’s mistreated grunt laborers should grab their tools and go.

An English Curriculum that Freshmen Might Read

First edition jacket art

A fellow worker pointed at my t-shirt and smiled. “The Great Gatsby! That’s the only book I actually finished reading in high school English.” We were working the assembly line, and I’d shown up wearing a t-shirt featuring Francis Cugat’s iconic dust-jacket painting for The Great Gatsby. Our assembly line team had a whole range of education levels, from high-school dropouts to postgraduates who’d never found a job.

I’d heard people admit they didn’t read before. As a former college adjunct, I heard a panoply of excuses for long-term aversion to reading, which mostly boiled down to: I never learned to appreciate it as a child, and now that I'm grown, it’s too difficult to develop the habit. But this broke the pattern, because the person didn’t highlight his non-reading, he spotlighted the one book which penetrated his armor.

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has become one of those books, like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which we simply expect high schoolers to read. Someone possessing an American diploma should understand allusions to this handful of celebrity books. Yet as my co-worker pointed out, not everyone reads every “great” book. Whether from overwork, or unfamiliarity with dated language, or just plain disinterest, many students skim or skip books altogether.

My co-worker couldn’t finish most “great” books because English was his second language. Most important literature was written in language that, to his limited English, looked looping, ornate, and Yoda-like. The Great Gatsby, by contrast, was plainspoken, notwithstanding its luxurious milieu, and didn’t demand a dictionary to parse ordinary sentences. My co-worker could concisely describe his relationship with that novel, and reading in general, and eventually felt free to ask how to improve his reading goingforward.

Yet he also made me reconsider how we choose our literary canon. In Freshman English, I remember being assigned Homer’s Odessey, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Important words, definitely, but not works which most freshmen are prepared to savvy, not even highly literate ones who already enjoy reading. These works left students climbing the walls, desperate for validation that we weren’t stupid for failing to understand.

First edition jacket art

F. Scott Fitzgerald stands in an unusual position within the literary canon. Though famous now for his novels, he made his early living publishing for glossy magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker, which were read then by mass audiences. After the 1929 stock market crash made Fitzgerald’s hymns to nouveau riche excess seem tasteless, he relocated to Hollywood and became a script doctor. He wrote, that is, for mass audiences, in vernacular English, with an eye toward images.

You know who else wrote for mass audiences with image-friendly prose? Dashiell Hammett. His classic The Maltese Falcon, arguably his career peak, is in many ways the anti-Gatsby. Jay Gatsby is chummy with New York’s fiercest gangsters; Sam Spade has an adversarial relationship with the police. Gatsby romanticizes women, especially Daisy Buchanan, without really knowing them; Spade enjoys women, but doesn’t revere them, and surrenders his latest lover to the gumshoes.

Perhaps most importantly, Jay Gatsby has no moral code, except perhaps whatever makes him rich enough to court Daisy Buchanan. Spade, by contrast, is so hog-tied by his own unique, self-written moral code that it costs him lucrative paydays. He’s forced to live in squalor, sleep on a Murphy bed, and eat his beans from the can. He’s almost the diametrical opposite of Gatsby—while still being written in simple, imagistic language that high schoolers can understand.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve written before about the importance of students reading books beyond their immediate comprehension, and how that changes their brain circuitry for the better. But too many teachers—underfunded, short-staffed, and hurt for time—lack the resources necessary to guide students to higher comprehension. I remember my Ninth Grade English teacher telling the class explicitly that we could tell Ernest Hemingway was deep because we couldn’t understand him.

Pairing The Great Gatsby and The Maltese Falcon would provide Freshman-level English teachers the opportunity to discuss important themes in American literature, while speaking an English that most students understand. Other “literary” writers tend to be hermetic, like Hemingway; abstruse, like Eliot; or simply outdated, like Mark Twain. Yes, Hammett writes about unseemly themes, like infidelity, racism, and violence, but so does Faulkner. Students have seen worse on TV.

And if it means more working-class students glowing up for their favorite book, well, that’s a win for everybody.

Hollywood Is Awful, and It’s Getting Worse

Annie Murphy in Black Mirror S6E1, “Joan Is Awful”

If you watched entertainment news this week, you saw two weird events almost simultaneously. SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, voted to strike, the day after a spokesperson for the affiliated studio heads announced Hollywood’s intent to simply endure the Writers’ Guild strike until the writers were too broke to negotiate. In response to SAG-AFTRA, a press release postulated several possible studio responses, including performing digital scans on background actors, preserving and reusing their image, uncompensated, forever.

For those playing the home game, this is the premise of “Joan Is Awful,” a Black Mirror episode which distributed on June 15^th—not even thirty full days ago. Though the episode is more complex, the pivotal premise is that everyone, from Hollywood A-listers to seeming nobodies, has signed away their names, life stories, and images. Hidden in “Terms and Conditions” contracts so abstruse that literally nobody can read them, the ironclad clauses prove humiliating.

Simultaneously, my online feed became jammed with the same ad repeated endlessly: trailers for the upcoming Wonka movie. Timothée Chalamet, who recently became the third actor to play Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune, now becomes the third actor to play Willy Wonka, Roald Dahl’s wacky chocolatier and slave-owner. My long-time readers know I despise how risk-averse Hollywood has become, recycling the same piddle while serious writers beg for work. This only proves my point.

When writers demanded pay commensurate with the value they create, defenders of the status quo warned that studios would simply replace writers with artificial intelligence. They weren’t dissuaded by the fact that AI hasn’t yet produced much worth reading, and requires human editors to force the product into a shape. Because AI text generators can currently only create grammatically correct sentences, and cannot judge their own writing holistically, their product is generally rambling and mushy.

Further, AI only outputs what its algorithm generates from its inputs. Text generators like ChatGPT, and image generators like MidJourney, scrape the internet for representative samples, and reassemble the product into something that looks just different enough to sail under copyright guidance. At least currently, writers and artists can maintain their advantage by creating conspicuously new content and constantly breaking new ground, something AI just can’t do. Easier said than done, yes, but still possible.

But I can’t tell whether audiences want anything groundbreaking and innovative. Thanks to Timothée Chalamet’s memorable face, Dune and Wonka currently embody slick franchise redundancy. But Disney, the largest entertainment conglomerate, makes most of its substantial bank on two lucrative properties: Lucasfilm and Marvel Comics. Meanwhile, the second-largest conglomerate, Warner Bros. Discovery, is trying to salvage its would-be tentpole franchise, DC Comics. Studios are banking everything at least for now, on reliable, uncontroversial franchise content.

Timothée Chalamet in an advance promo image from Wonka

Whether audiences want that, however, is questionable. Without Chris Evans and Robert Downey, Jr., recent MCU box office numbers havebeen lackluster. Lucasfilm properties have been hit-or-miss, especially anything outside Star Wars; the Willow relaunch fared so poorly that Disney flushed it down the memory hole to avoid paying outstanding taxes. Studios create the appearance of demand for lucrative franchises through saturation marketing and media monopoly, but in practice, audiences seem something other than impressed.

The digital solutions which studios propose to overcome this loss don’t look particularly promising, either. Consider the difference between 1994’s Jurassic Park, and the Jurassic World sequels. Though Park was ballyhooed in 1994 for its pioneering CGI imagery, the movie only used about six minutes of digital art, mostly in long shots. By contrast, the latest films consist almost entirely of pixel illustrations. Nearly thirty years later, the original remains eminently watchable. The sequels don’t.

I’ve complained about this before. Much current science fiction and fantasy places human actors centrally, very obviously inside a studio before a chromakey background, then digitally mattes in the surrounding environment later. The product looks exciting when it’s new, but doesn’t bear repeated watching. When studios promise digital actors and AI scripts, they pledge stories stapled together from the undead remains of past success, performed by actors you can’t stand to watch more than once.

Things don’t have to be this way. If studio executives accepted a smidgeon less money, and paid their creative and technical personal commensurate with the value they create, everyone could get back to creating art, and everyone would be happier. But, like President Bush before the second Iraq war, Hollywood execs think technology has made human labor obsolete. President Bush found out how wrong he was, and soon Disney and Netflix will find out, too.

Here’s One Problem Americans Can Easily Fix

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)

Kevin McCarthy, the 55th and current Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a notorious deficit hawk, represents a California district. This may surprise outsiders who associate California politics with progressivism, even downright hippie-dip utopianism. But California’s 20th Congressional District, covering most of the Central Valley, is gerrymandered to ensure conservative outcomes. It’s not only California’s most rigorously Republican district, it’s among the most conservative in America.

This matters because voters in McCarthy’s district might as well not vote for Senator or President. Because these offices are determined by statewide vote, in a state with a population approaching forty million, large population bases can distort electoral outcomes. And of course, there’s no larger population base in America than Los Angeles, a Democratic stronghold. Joe Biden won California by nearly thirty points in 2020, and California’s Senatorial delegation has been unbrokenly Democratic since 1993.

Every few years, national news media, driven by bureaus headquartered mostly in Manhattan and Los Angeles, repeat the perennial whine about how America’s Senate, and the Electoral College because of it, are innately unfair. And they’re not wrong. The system, unchanged since 1788 and specifically immune from amendment under the Constitution, provides strong protections for sparsely populated rural states, in a nation where the economy is increasingly dense, centralized, and urban.

California, with nearly forty million people, has the same Senate numbers as Wyoming, with under 600,000. Superficially, this seems unfair. But as I’ve written before, the Senate is the only place in American politics where large urban states have to meet small rural states as equals. The Framers of the Constitution intended this deliberately. But they couldn’t have anticipated how that intent would unfold.

In America’s first decennial census, in 1790, New York, the nation’s most populous city, had a population of approximately 33,000. That’s smaller than the Nebraska town where I now live, a town so fiddling that most Americans haven’t heard of it. The megalopolises which have emerged around Manhattan and Los Angeles are only possible because of steel-frame building technology and internal combustion engines, which Washington and Hamilton might’ve dismissed as science fiction.

Besides the infrastructure, the economic concentration driving demographic concentration is entirely new. The Great Migration, that brought millions of Southern rural African Americans into Northern cities for industrial jobs, surrendered to the technology boom that created millions of jobs (but far fewer houses) in California’s Silicon Valley. Today’s wildly unequal population distribution simply wasn’t conceivable when fifty-five White men in powdered wigs and knee breeches convened in Philadelphia.

But although the Constitution forbids amending the Senate, there’s another redress, one which doesn’t involve changing the Constitution in today’s hostile political atmosphere. Article IV, Section 3, makes dividing existing states a matter of state legislation. If Californians feel they’re underrepresented in the Senate, California could subdivide into four equally populous states, and all four would still be among the ten most populous in America.

America’s existing states are beholden to state lines written in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although four states were admitted in the 20th century—Oklahoma, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii—all four are circumscribed by existing state and national boundaries, and the natural boundaries created by shorelines. California’s state lines were drawn in 1853. 180 years later, they have no relationship with the existing population distribution.

Inland districts, like Kevin McCarthy’s 20th Congressional District, are militantly reactionary, in part, because they believe state and federal governments ignore their local needs, favoring coastal cities. Again, they’re not wrong. As Sarah Smarsh writes, the federal government boosted America’s rural inland after the Civil War. But since World War I, it has largely dropped rural concerns, favoring cities until the 1960s, then actively subsidizing America’s suburbs into the present.

Disaggregating existing large states won’t solve every problem. To cite just one, the State of Jefferson movement, active in Northern California and southern Oregon, is dominated by a weird streak of cowboy libertarianism. That region could elect Senators with strange, Lauren Boebert-like beliefs which would need reined in. Considering that small states have already elected loose cannons like Tommy Tuberville and Mike Crapo, power devolution isn’t a magic panacea.

But then, large states elected Ted Cruz and Rick Scott, so… yeah. A republic will always elect legislators as wacky as the voters electing them. If we can eliminate the unfairness caused by tenaciously holding onto state lines drawn in the covered wagon era, maybe we can begin the process of weeding weirdos from the congressional garden. No guarantees, but maybe.