What Cornel West Means To Me

Dr. Cornel West

I understand the appeal of Cornel West’s long-shot Presidential candidacy. He’s a dynamic speaker and deep thinker, with decades of activism regarding American domestic power. Yet in his career as public intellectual and activist, West has never held elective office, with the compromises that entails. He’s never performed the kind of back-room logrolling that Lyndon Johnson used to pass the Civil Rights Act, or Obama used to pass Obamacare.

I’ve noticed two recent center-left political trends. On one hand, Democratic Party loyalists excoriate Cornel West voters and other idealists for stealing votes from the established party, and demands that everyone who opposes today’s Republican Party just shut up and fall in line behind Democratic leadership. On the other, massively online political gadflies claim supporting the Democratic Party means supporting the moribund duopoly that has controlled American politics since 1856.

Cornel West is morally and intellectually superior to literally every single government official in Washington and it's not even remotely close.

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 22, 2023

Therefore I find myself in a difficult position. I appreciate those who condemn the Democratic Party and its willingness to concede almost everything, while the Republicans have become more rock-ribbed, doctrinaire, and intolerant. President Biden has accomplished more than I thought he would, but he also hasn’t accomplished enough, and he squandered the two-year window when Democrats controlled Congress, and could’ve raised the minimum wage or written down unjust debts.

My disgust with the duopoly, though, doesn’t translate into willingness to accept change for change’s sake. West’s idealistic presidential campaign doesn’t pass practical scrutiny for one reason: his party has no down-ballot strategy. West is currently the only declared candidate, at any level, for the newly founded People’s Party, which, like West himself, has no electoral experience whatsoever. The People's Party is the political equivalent of a toddler’s tantrum.

Left-wing and progressive protest parties love running complete political novices for President. Gus Hall ran four times on the Communist Party USA ticket in the 1970s and 1980s, despite, like West, only having experience as an activist. At least two-time Green Party nominee Jill Stein served one-and-a-half terms in the Town Meeting of Lexington, Massachusetts, so she wasn’t a complete neophyte. Stein is now a volunteer for Cornel West’s campaign.

Not that I can blame progressive candidates for focusing on the presidency. The broad center-left coalition notoriously doesn’t bother voting in midterm elections, though that trend might be reversing. Democratic voters often can’t be arsed with campaigns for school board, city council, and mayor. Republican-aligned paranoia, meanwhile, has made local elections, particularly school boards, influential doors into power—though again, that trend maybe faltering.

President Joe Biden

But while this trend is understandable, it’s no less troubling. Progressives want a unitary national executive, while ignoring the nuts-and-bolts aspects of local administration. They embrace a charismatic candidate who speaks their opinions back to them, unsullied by anything as secular as a voting record. Does this sound familiar yet? Not to besmirch Dr. West’s academic reputation and good name, but his supporters clearly want an antimatter Donald Trump.

Or, dare I say, Barack Obama. Like many of my generation, I believed Obama’s high-minded campaign promises. Candidate Obama, like Candidate Trump, campaigned aggressively and stirred up high feelings among True Believers. But Americans keep forgetting the wide gulf between the campaign trail, where candidates speak their truths, and holding office. Besides Obamacare, accomplished in his first eighteen months, Obama’s legacy is mostly sad trombone noises from the West Wing.

Again, don’t misunderstand: I appreciate these supporters’ motivations. It’s discouraging watching former outsider candidates and firebrands like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turn into water-carriers for the calcifying establishment. But we have four years of evidence demonstrating what happens when Americans put a political neophyte in the Executive Branch. While I believe Dr. West has better judgement than Trump, both lack operatives skilled enough to enact their legislative agenda.

Without a down-ballot strategy, this campaign will only split the center-left coalition. Consider Britain, where the Conservative Party has held power continuously for thirteen years, despite remaining massively unpopular with the electorate. This happens, partly, because Britain has several third parties, mostly left-wing. In several constituencies, the center-left vote splits among up to seven candidates, letting Conservatives win with as little as 35% of the vote.

If Dr. West’s supporters could channel their energy into serious candidates, or even bother to show up to county-level Democratic Party meetings, they could sway the political landscape. Both mainstream American parties are dominated by septuagenarians, in no small part, because twenty-somethings don’t much participate in ground-level organizing. Unless it’s the presidency, young voters apparently don’t much care. Nothing will get better unless everyone starts caring.

Gender and Morality in Horror Fiction: First Thoughts

Victor LaValle

I enjoyed Victor LaValle’s latest novel, Lone Women, with its unromantic tone toward the American frontier, and its themes of pervasive loneliness. But the longer the story percolates within my memory, the worse the novel’s resolution sits with me. (Spoiler alert.) Having overcome the Montana community’s narrow-minded attitudes and its easy recourse to violence, the titular women decamp upriver. Their reputation moves beyond them, though, and soon, they’re the nucleus of a women’s prairie utopia.

According to LaValle’s acknowledgements page, this resolution comes partly from his wife, Emily Raboteau, who asserted that women paying for men’s egos has become cliché. Which, in fairness, it has. I appreciate the sentiment, yet the outcome is awkwardly moralistic. The villains, who behave in patterns we recognize as villainous because they’re basically lynchings, pay for their transgressions. The heroines, having passed through mortal terror, emerge baptized in purity, offering to fix society for us.

I don’t want to disparage uplifting or redemptive endings. In a world where justice and deliverance often seem painfully rare, fiction often reminds us that the possibility still exists, and remains worth striving after. But simultaneously, horror fiction often reminds us that injustice still exists, that outcomes don’t reflect our deserving, and life is frequently outside our control. And I’ve noticed an unexpected pattern: the authors most willing to embrace horror’s injustice are often women.

Catriona Ward

Please don’t misunderstand: this judgement comes, I confess, from a place of ignorance. Though my generation grew up with the 1980s slasher movie boom, my parents strictly enforced age-appropriate content bans. As children do, I worked to retroactively justify that I myself didn’t enjoy horror, until even I believed it. Though I dabbled in Stephen King or movies like Near Dark in my twenties, I didn’t embrace the horror genre until well into my forties.

So I probably have an excessively small sample for broad generalization. From my perspective, however, women not only seem more willing to put readers through a more aggressive gantlet, but also have courage enough not to walk back the pain. I remember that, in Stephen King, the dead stay dead, and he doesn’t offer Jack Torrance or Margaret White easy redemption arcs. But he usually concludes with family-oriented bonding, and a sense of “lessons learned.”

Authors I’ve enjoyed recently, like Ania Ahlborn and Catriona Ward, avoid this. Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street features several alternating viewpoint characters, most of whom have their stories resolved, though not necessarily happily. Ted Bannerman gets a shot at healing, but only after his beloved cat Olivia must disappear, and he must forcibly restrain his daughter Lauren. And Ted’s neighbor Dee, whose story runs on obsessive, vindictive illusions, doesn’t receive a proper funeral.

Ania Ahlborn

Ahlborn doesn’t even offer her characters that. In Brother, Ahlborn’s protagonist Michael is meek, amiable, and endearing, and we want him to wind up with the girl who clearly loves him. But we also realize Michael doesn’t deserve redemption. He’s been complicit in his family’s crimes for over a decade. Ahlborn’s bleak, apocalyptic conclusion is almost poetic in its justice, at least for Michael, if not for everyone he’s hurt through childlike malice or inaction.

Perhaps my first deep dive into horror cinema, Leigh Janek’s Fear Street trilogy, adapts this loosely. Trilogy protagonists Deena and Sam get their happy-ending kiss, eventually, after enduring constant supernatural abuse. But in the first film, Kate and Simon suffer gruesome onscreen deaths which reset the trilogy’s tone. The second film features a scene where the killer corners a roomful of children, and we’re sure director Janek will somehow spare the kids. But we’re wrong.

Stephen King and Victor LaValle apparently think the horror their characters endure must “mean something,” that despite the pain, the survivors gain something from the experience. We could continue: The Exorcist’s Father Damien Karras dies, but Chris McNeil gets her daughter back. People must suffer, but things ultimately end “well.” Ward, Ahlborn, and Janek seemingly don’t agree. Though Ted Bannerman or Deena and Sam have their “happy endings,” their trauma isn’t redemptive, it’s just awful.

At present, I have only thoughts, no explanations for this apparent divide. Perhaps some difference in how women experience a society that centers men’s pains and sacrifices. Perhaps a natural ability to absorb physical pain lets them not minimize psychological pain. Perhaps there’s no explanation, and I’ve simply observed a coincidence. Time and familiarity with the literature might explain everything. Or maybe I’ll discover a better class of confusion. Either way, I’ll have fun learning.

Some Thoughts on Oliver Anthony

Oliver Anthony playing live (source)

It’s been barely two weeks since singer-songwriter Oliver Anthony burst onto America’s national scene, and already we’re fighting over his legacy. Watching the political left (broadly defined) embrace him, then drop him when they listened to his lyrics, was both amusing and terrifying. He’s since been embraced by professional right-wing bomb-throwers like Jesse Watters and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who see Anthony, like countless country singers before him, as a conservative emblem.

Yesterday, August 25^th, Anthony released a YouTube video specifically rejecting his song’s partisan embrace. “It’s aggravating seeing certain musicians and politicians act like we’re buddies,” Anthony says, from that perch that’s become the White YouTuber political pulpit: behind the steering wheel of a parked vehicle. Anthony disparages both the conservative embrace of his song, and the progressive backlash. He sees himself as essentially centrist, and his song as a moderate anthem.

I strive to avoid partisan allegiances, because they frequently result in people starting with their preferred answer and seeking out the question. Nevertheless, American polarization has made “caring about others” and “protecting the weak” political litmus tests, so apparently I’m broadly leftist. I’m certainly leftist enough to balk at Oliver Anthony’s characterization of “the obese milkin’ welfare,” a stereotype Ronald Reagan simply invented to attack America’s most defenseless.

However, I also appreciate Anthony’s attempt to disaffiliate himself from conservatism’s ugliest proponents. American conservatives have repeatedly attempted to appropriate protest songs like “Fortunate Son,” “Born in the USA,” and “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and turn them into right-wing battle cries. This lack of critical listening has forced numerous artists like Tom Petty and the Dropkick Murphys to aggressively distance themselves from certain politically-minded fans.

What, then, to make of Oliver Anthony? He excoriates conservatives in Verse One, then resurrects Reaganite stereotypes from 1976 in Verse Two. His song names and shames those he believes are harming America, rich and poor alike, but without suggesting a community response, or indeed any stabilizing moral core. There’s no response, in Anthony’s world, except standing on a dock, shouting his grievances in a “high lonesome” accent.

Journalist and pastor Justin Cox finds a possible solution on Anthony’s YouTube page. Anthony has a curated playlist entitled “Videos that make your noggin get bigger.” The list includes Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, Billy Graham, and an awful lot of Jordan B. Peterson. Rogan and Peterson both disavow being conservative themselves, but their mostly White, mostly male audiences are frequently dominated by outspoken conservatives, making both men right-wing icons.

Rather than strictly conservative, both Rogan and Peterson are primarily individualists. Both want their audiences to think deeply, feel widely, and have profound experiences, but they want their audiences to go through this as individuals. Peterson frequently disparages collective action, and pooh-poohs any application of his own principles to concerns of class, race, and other collective identity. They see humanity as atomized individuals, not groups with shared interests.

Similarly, historian Kevin M. Kruse identifies Billy Graham as a primary proponent of a politically libertarian, aggressively pro-capitalist Christianity that originated in the 1940s, and achieved political ascendancy by the 1970s. Of the thinkers to receive multiple citations in Anthony’s playlist, only Andrew Huberman isn’t tied to an individualistic ideology—and even that is only because he prefers an exceptionally credulous attitude toward science.

Briefly, Oliver Anthony represents an individualistic worldview. To him, all circumstances arise from bad choices, and though that doesn’t necessarily make others bad people, it also kind of does. Whether it’s politicians choosing to behave corruptly, or “obese” people choosing cheap, starchy foods on EBT, everything is a matter of individual action. No matter how many individuals make he same bad choice, it never adds up to a damaged system.

This manifestation of radical individualism corresponds with something I’ve avoided saying until now: race. Specifically, Whiteness. Black Americans have a history of communitarianism, and collective response to injustice, which White Americans lost somewhere around the time Ronald Reagan functionally legalized union busting. Radical individualism is an essentially White phenomenon, as many of us discovered in the BLM protests of 2020, for which White Americans arrived supremely underprepared.

I’d argue, therefore, that Anthony’s lament is neither progressive nor conservative. Rather, it’s the cri de couer of atomized White loneliness, the awareness that, without communities or unions or church ties, we’re truly alone against a massively brutal world. Within my and Anthony’s lifetimes, White Americans have become so lonely that we can’t imagine not being isolated. So, despite my qualms, Oliver Anthony is the voice of his generation.

But What If the Bible Doesn’t Say That?

Adam Hamilton, Half Truths: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves and Other Things the Bible Doesn't Say

We mainline Christians certainly love our platitudes. No matter what curveballs life throws, we inevitably have a ready-made cliché available. The problem is, we frequently think our preferred platitudes come from the Bible, which they most certainly don’t. Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor from suburban Kansas City, collects five beloved platitudes which he believes impede Christians’ most direct experience of God, and God’s love.

Reverend Hamilton identifies the following five shopworn cliches, including several variations on their themes:

• “Everything Happens for a Reason”
• “God Helps Those Who Help Themselves”
• “God Won’t Give You More Than You Can Handle”
• “God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It”
• “Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin”

These common expressions provide handy, nugget-sized servings of Christian layperson theology, which believers can deploy in nearly all circumstances. Each one, Reverend Hamilton admits, contains some amount of truth. As canned responses to life’s ever-changing happenstance, they’re broadly unsatisfying. Sometimes, things happen because they happen; or God’s word exists in context and doesn’t apply here; or we get so busy hating sins that we forget to love our neighbors.

Worse still, in Hamilton’s estimation: entirely too many Christians believe these bromides come from the Bible. He cites a Barna Group survey suggesting that as many as eight in ten Christians believe “God Helps Those Who Help Themselves” is biblical, which it isn’t. (I have a love-hate relationship with Barna research, but let’s accept it provisionally.) These clichés first substitute Man’s wisdom for God’s guidance, then elide the wisdom, leaving only cold comfort.

For instance, when telling hurting people that “God Won’t Give You More Than You Can Handle,” we attribute everything that happens to God’s will. That’s pretty horrific, if you consider what catastrophes ordinary people face daily. Reverend Hamilton directly disparages Calvinist predestination, with its presumption that God planned everything you face before Creation. Scripture promises God will provide us tools to withstand life’s calamities, but not that God either gives or limits those calamities.

With each platitude, Hamilton similarly unpacks their theological meaning, and the harm they perpetuate. He admits each one has some element of truth, but that isn’t enough. When we limit our truths to easily memorized bromides, we miss God’s mission, and Christ’s love. The listeners for whom we deploy these platitudes need something deeper, so in relying on simplistic sayings, we not only short-change God, we miss our audience’s needs.

Reverend Adam Hamilton

Hamilton writes for a Christian audience, one which already believes Christ’s message of comfort and salvation in an unjust world. He writes to offer Christians necessary tools to convey that comfort to those suffering—which may, often enough, be ourselves. Too often, we Christians become so comfortable in our salvation that we reduce others’ spiritual struggles to Sunday School simplicity. Reverend Hamilton encourages us to unpack life’s difficult, subtle aspects.

If Reverend Hamilton has one overriding theme, it’s “nuance.” He expresses frustration with these platitudes because they’re unsubtle, and prevent Christians from thinking deeply about life’s most important topics. The questions which most deserve our scrutiny, get papered over with sayings we probably learned from our grandparents. Hamilton invites us to recognize that while these sayings aren’t necessarily wrong, they also seldom meet our own or anybody else’s spiritual needs.

This book began as a sermon series at Hamilton’s suburban congregation, and it retains the simple, breezy tone common in Protestant homiletics. (The publisher offers supplementary materials for adult Bible studies.) Large type and wide line spacing conceal the fact that, though over 160 pages, this book is short, barely more than a pamphlet. Hamilton offers discussion starters, not deep dives into major theological questions. That’s all some people need.

Therefore, this book whets my appetite without satisfying it. People who read voluntarily, generally want something more detailed and contemplative. Adults participating in Bible study might or might not read Hamilton’s short chapters; in-class videos, and the resulting conversation, will be the study’s heart. Hamilton briefly introduces how poets, saints, and ministers have addressed these difficult questions, then walks away, providing neither in-depth analysis nor sources for further independent study.

Don’t misunderstand me; as an introductory survey, I enjoy Hamilton’s points, and hope more Christians take his advice to heart. This book is a great beginning. But Christian bookstores are stuffed with great beginnings on important questions. Reverent Hamilton raises important points and debunks Christian myths that prevent us showing God’s love wholeheartedly. I just hope Hamilton has a follow-up pending to go deeper into the themes he raises herein.

On a similar but not completely identical theme:
How To Give Real Advice, In Ten Easy Steps

The Life and Afterlife of a Macho Government

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

Imagine a wealthy plutocrat with a history of media manipulation and an insatiable appetite. Now imagine he runs for head of state, despite having no political experience. His electoral base loves him, though he has no legislative accomplishments to name, and he has an ugly tendency to snuggle up to Vladimir Putin. Eventually his appetites overtake him, and he’s forced from power in disgrace, though he refuses to accept it.

Of course, I’m describing three-term Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

This book’s back-cover copy promises a “blueprint” for strongman leadership in one-man states throughout history. This is, however, somewhat misleading. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, admits unitary male leaders generally aren’t crafty men, and don’t necessarily have a shared playbook. They mostly roll with the punches, though their rapid adaptation tends to follow reliable patterns, which we, the socially engaged, can study.

Ben-Ghiat examines Twentieth and Twenty-First Century strongman autocrats. She defines strongmen as national leaders, usually though not necessarily male, who achieve power through exaggerated displays of traditionally masculine behaviors. Once in power, they rule through force of personality and brook no disagreement; most have no exit strategy, and leave power in disgrace, or worse. Ben-Ghiat doesn’t study Communist dictators, whose power machines behave, she says, differently.

Between the World Wars, strongmen generally achieved power through threats of violence. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini ever won elections, but both achieved power by stirring up angry crowds and threatening to turn them loose. Later, during the Cold War, strongmen like Augusto Pinochet, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Colonel Gadhafi led military coups. Recent strongmen, like Berlusconi, Putin, and Trump, have maintained the veneer of democracy, while disparaging its substance.

Strongmen generally gain their people’s acclamation and support (though not necessarily trust) by displaying strength and masculinity. Though only Mussolini and Putin regularly pose shirtless for photographers, coup leaders’ love of military uniforms and elaborate medals reflect their love of power displays. Many like to project images of themselves as brawlers, from Gadhafi issuing threats on state TV, to Trump fantasizing about punching protesters at campaign rallies.

This hypermasculine display results in contradictory relationships with women. Both Hitler and Saddam Hussein kept their private lives private; Hitler concealed his mistress, Eva Braun, from public view for years. Mussolini, however, pursued multiple women, whose brief assignations often turned into years-long surveillance operations. Gadhafi kept a brothel on a military base, often trafficking in arrested dissidents.

(Ben-Ghiat never mentions Stormy Daniels; she doesn’t have to.)

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

These strongmen love touting their economic credentials. From claims that Mussolini’s trains ran on time, to supposed wealth generated in Pinochet’s Chile, to Mobutu’s lavish lifestyle, the centralized strongman state putatively creates unmatched wealth. Ben-Ghiat follows the actual money trail, however, and finds that these claims are mostly fictional. Economic gains, if there are any for anyone outside the strongman’s circle, are usually funded by catastrophic debt.

Mercifully, though the strongman projects a façade of invulnerability, he invariably faces massive opposition at home. Hitler survived multiple assassination attempts, and Mobutu regularly shuffled opposition politicians between his Cabinet and prison. Fascists and military strongmen generally leave office in chains, or else in a hearse. Elected strongmen like Berlusconi are more likely to be simply humiliated. Only Francisco Franco actually held power shrewdly enough to lie in state.

Though she avoids commenting on current events, except to provide historical perspective, there’s little doubt Ben-Ghiat writes this to highlight current power dynamics. Donald Trump repeatedly appears in direct parallels to historical strongmen in Ben-Ghiat’s narrative. Though his critics regularly call Trump a small-f fascist, in Ben-Ghiat’s telling, he more closely resembles Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi. Like them, he doesn’t realize how ridiculous he looks on the world stage.

Ben-Ghiat’s narrative focuses on finding parallels between strongman leaders, living or dead. She doesn’t perform deep dives into any individual. (She’s written previous books on Mussolini’s power techniques.) Late in the book, though, Ben-Ghiat admits these parallels are more coincidental than strategic. Strongmen govern in an improvisational style that manifests certain patterns, basically because humans respond to despots in reliable ways, and strongmen respond back.

Both the strongman’s supporters, and his critics, feel like the strongman’s reign is never-ending. Sometimes it indeed drags on. But the strongman inevitably falls, both from power and from his supporters’ good graces, and when he does, he invariably leaves his country poorer and more vulnerable, according to Ben-Ghiat. This final message is both optimistic and bleak, and citizens should plan accordingly.

The Fable of the King Who Would Not Die

Bryan Johnson: Meet the multi-millionaire trying to reverse ageing
—Headline on the BBC News website, 13 August 2023

Bryan Johnson

Once there was a certain king—a stupid ruler of a stupid kingdom, in a nation stuffed chock-a-block with stupid kingdoms and their useless kings. Every king in the nation, and many of the queens, thought themselves very important, because the nation had many town criers willing to ballyhoo the supposed importance of their particular monarch. These kings, and many subjects too, heard the ballyhooed fables so often, they came to believe their own mythology.

Like the myth of the king who ruled the kingdoms of lightning chariots and bluebirds. This king believed himself so important that, one day, he unilaterally declared he had renamed the bluebird kingdom, and henceforth, everyone had to honor his kingdom’s name. But every subject knew it was the kingdom of bluebirds, and called it such, ignoring what their king commanded except when his vast, and easily bruised, ego needed appeased. Which was fairly often.

Likewise, our certain king believed himself terribly important, and when he began hearing creaks from his vertebrae, and snaps from his knees, this king boldly proclaimed: “I shall not die!” The king gathered thirty physicians from throughout his kingdom and began dispensing gold generously, demanding research into diet and exercise, and into whatever alchemical potions the king could consume which would prevent his body from aging, and would keep Death, that eternal unwanted visitor, away.

Meanwhile this king’s subjects—we no longer call them “peasants,” though “peasants” is surely what they were—continued their labors. Some subjects hoed rows so they could plant and harvest wheat. Others smelted iron and brought the metal to the kingdom’s foundries, where blacksmiths forged implements so the field workers could hoe rows. The subjects needed little regular direction from their king, and besides, the king’s goldsmiths signed their pay slips, not the king himself.

Within the castle, the king continued demanding miracles from his physicians. “Make the potions stronger!” he commanded, for surely he saw grey beard hairs in his shaving mirror. His physicians bit their knuckles and wondered what more they could do. Saltpeter in his morning alchemical broth? Magnets on his free weights? Artists painted the king’s portrait with square jaw and bulging chest, but the king was not deceived, and knew he had not stopped age.

Elon Musk

Outside, town criers recounted breathlessly the accomplishments which the king and his physicians made in repelling death. Some subjects believed the stories, and repeated them widely, even unto the kingdom of bluebirds. But other subjects held aloft their iron implements and grumbled: “I care not. If he lives or dies, I must still gather the harvest. And look at this hoe! Barely had it, and already it’s rusty. No quality control in this kingdom anymore.”

Several of the king’s guards, watching from the castle, saw subjects raising their iron implements and grumbling, and this made them worry. The king waved away his guards’ concerns, however; what cared he for discontented peasants, when death still encroached? The captain of the guard wasn’t dissuaded, though, and prudently hired more guards, granting them more armor and more swords, because you cannot be too careful. And the stonemasons made the castle walls slightly higher.

All throughout, the king’s subjects continued improving their skills. The blacksmiths made ever-sharper hoes, which the field workers used to make ever-straighter rows, and thus the kingdom saw ever-increasing yields of bread. Admittedly, nobody had more gold to buy bread, so it rotted uneaten, but the bread existed, and surely that merited some celebration. The king permitted the goldsmiths to sign pay slips worth an extra ducat, or whatever, couldn’t everyone see he was busy?

Eventually the day came, which surely everyone must have expected, when the town criers announced that the king had died. Though they carried portraits of the king as square-jawed and muscular, everyone knew the magnets had made him addled, and the saltpeter had made his pecker drop off. Throughout the kingdom, sad-faced subjects agreed this was a most tragic day, then they turned back to their forges and their fields, because work still needed done.

Throughout our nation stuffed chock-a-block with stupid kingdoms, the death of one king mattered little. Workers still worked, and goldsmiths still banked, and everything carried on much as it had before. And somewhere, in a distant castle, the king of the bluebird kingdom struggled to invent another reason to postpone his cage match against that other weird king, Mark Zuckerberg, who, even in the world of allegory and fable, still looks like a pasty-faced android.

The Monster That Lives On the Homestead

Victor LaValle, Lone Women: a Novel

Adelaide Henry carries her family’s oldest secret in a steamer trunk when she hurriedly leaves California’s Lucerne Valley in 1915. Her parents’ sudden deaths leave Adelaide unmarried, Black, and a woman during a time in America’s history when these are among the three worst things a person could be. So she packs only what she can carry and flees to the one place that will take a fugitive like her: the rural northern Montana plains.

This novel began when author and Columbia University professor Victor LaValle discovered that Montana didn’t discriminate in distributing lands under the Homestead Act. Where most states and territories required a male head of household, and usually only accorded land to White people, Montana took anyone who could sign the paperwork. What, LaValle wondered, would drive a woman to Montana’s severe, dry climate? His apparent answer is: everything that’s the opposite of the traditional Western genre.

The Montana which Adelaide encounters doesn’t jibe with the enthusiastic railroad pamphlets that enticed her here. It’s dry, austere, and weatherbeaten. But word gets around quickly about the young Black woman living alone, and allies begin making themselves available. Seems Adelaide isn’t the only “Lone Woman” homesteading these prairies, which have offered a semi-warm welcome to outcasts of all kinds. As long as her deadly secret stays inside her steamer trunk, Adelaide should be fine.

LaValle upends the stereotypes of Western literature. The classic genre authors—Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour—praised White, male individualists who didn’t need anybody else, invented their own rules, and survived by violence. Many Westerns, including Wister’s genre-defining The Virginian, feature the protagonist losing their baggage, whether by having it stolen or by abandoning it along the Trails. By contrast, Adelaide’s baggage is the most important treasure she owns, and she’ll die defending it.

Adelaide’s baggage is both literal and metaphorical. She’s terrified of whatever lives inside her steamer trunk, and sings it lullabies to keep it mollified. But she also carries paralyzing guilt. From page one, we know Adelaide feels responsible for her parents’ violent deaths, which she flees in a literal blaze of fear. We don’t know who or what killed them, because she won’t tell us, because she won’t accept what really happened and face up.

Victor LaValle

But underneath Montana’s ceaseless skies, Adelaide discovers she isn’t alone. All the “Lone Women” have secrets they’d rather bury. But they also need each other—another stark reversal from the Western genre, which usually preaches radical self-reliance. Nobody in this Montana can survive alone. But that mutuality takes two different forms. While the homesteading Lone Women learn to trust one another, exactly as they are, the townspeople close ranks against those they regard as outsiders.

Meanwhile, whatever lives inside Adelaide’s steamer trunk dominates her life. Here, LaValle takes on Jungian subtexts, as we increasingly suspect Adelaide is harboring her shadow self. Though we don’t get a glimpse inside the steamer for eighty pages, the Thing We Don’t Talk About becomes larger and larger, until we know, with doomed inevitability, that Adelaide’s big secret will come crashing out. And when it does, it’s guaranteed to hurt everyone she’s dared to trust.

In this, LaValle acknowledges something traditional Westerns ignore: that the people who settled the American West weren’t heroes. They were mostly people without a homeland, often fugitives, who took land stolen from Native peoples because they’d lost everything else. (LaValle addresses the land theft only obliquely, but it’s there.) The West was alienating and lonely, and it destroyed American illusions of class and race. White America celebrated the first settlers only after they were dead.

Traditional Westerns feature protagonists, often nameless (“The Virginian”) or mononymic (“Lassiter”), who never completely tell their stories. The past, to Western heroes, doesn’t matter. By contrast, in LaValle’s Montana, the past is all-important. Adelaide and her allies try to bury their past, but in keeping their secrets, the past becomes all-encompassing, threatening to destroy any present they might have. Their epic becomes a matter of determining who they can trust, and what they can share.

This novel starts out as Adelaide’s story, and early on, hews closely to her. But our ability to see through others’ eyes blossoms outward to the exact extent that Adelaide learns to trust others. As she starts seeing other Montana homesteaders as equals, so do we, and we begin receiving their stories of heartbreak and recovery. We begin seeing how everyone has their own steamer trunk, literal and metaphorical. And we, too, learn to trust.

See also: You Should Be Reading Victor LaValle

The God of Justice, and the Justice of Humankind

Jesse Watters

“He just believed the election was stolen,” Jesse Watters said last week on his recently minted prime-time Fox News show. The “he” in this statement is, of course, former President Donald Trump, arraigned last week for his part in fomenting the January 6^th, 2021, insurgency. According to Watters, if Trump sincerely believed his legitimate reelection was stolen, violence was justified. As Watters and Greg Gutfeld both state, proving Trump didn’t believe this is nigh-on impossible.

Hearing this last week, I mentally time-traveled to President George W. Bush’s second term. As Operation Iraqi Freedom dragged on, suffering terrible mission drift and causing incalculable harm, a right-wing talking point arose that President Bush didn’t necessarily lie in falsely claiming Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction. Calling it a “lie,” conservative prognosticators claimed, implied Bush knew his statements were false. A “lie” wasn’t necessarily a false statement; lying required intent, which is unprovable.

In both cases, we witness conservative pundits defending Republican Presidents based not on actions, but belief. If President Bush believed, in the chambers of his heart, that WMDs existed, then he wasn’t morally culpable for deceit; he was as misled as the American people. (We now know this is measurably untrue.) Likewise, if President Trump legitimately believed the 2020 Electoral College outcomes were insidiously doctored, then his sincerity morally shields the legality of his actions.

We should immediately reject this argument. If one’s moral state protects the legality of one’s actions, then Americans would never prosecute minors as adults, even for violent crimes. Yet American prosecutors do this frequently, asserting that the heinousness of crimes committed by minors, especially Black minors, overrules the diminished moral capacity of youth. In these cases, action defines morality. But pundits claim that Presidents—America’s most morally culpable people—are somehow shielded by their sincerity.

Even beyond this prima facie contradiction, foregrounding belief unearths a vipers’ nest. It introduces a twisted variation on the Christian doctrine that only God knows the contents of a human soul. Despite what we’d sometimes prefer to believe, humans can neither let somebody into Heaven, nor condemn somebody to Hell; these options belong exclusively to God. Shifting the parameters away from what Bush or Trump did, to what they believed, makes justice a divine prerogative.

The Accused

At least nominally, jurisprudence focuses not on the defendant’s morals, but upon actions. Did the accused actually hurt, steal, or kill? We may consider aggravating factors, such as whether the violence seems disproportionate. Prosecutions for first-degree murder may consider whether the actions demonstrated “depraved disregard for human life,” as by elaborate advance planning or coordination. But even in these cases, we don’t question the impurity of the defendant’s soul, but the severity of their actions.

Using these standards, we can evaluate the Presidents’ actions, without considering their mental or spiritual state. Even if President Bush believed, with the solemnity of church, that Iraq possessed WMDs, members of his administration stated unequivocally that no such weapons existed. Bush notoriously overruled their objections. Likewise, Jack Smith’s indictment of President Trump takes Trump’s beliefs of the table in Paragraph 3; Smith spends 45 pages unpacking Trump’s actions, not his mental or spiritual state.

These right-wing pundits negate all questions of action by asking: do they know they’re committing a legal or moral crime? Even laying aside the base hypocrisy of the fact that they only apply this question to Presidents, they also replace a legal question with a theological question. They declare Presidents, or at least Republican Presidents, as members of the Elect, saved from earthly sin by God’s inscrutable movement. Their only judgement is the Final Judgement.

Earthly courts obviously cannot judge human hearts. That’s why jailhouse conversions usually don’t create thorny legal issues: if the incarcerated is legitimately penitent, well, the penitentiary has done its (supposed) job. Keep up the good work. Legitimately run courts, in the English Common Law tradition, care only about the accused’s actions—and, in Trump’s case, those actions played out on live television. Bad actions for benevolent reasons are still, in the court’s eyes, bad actions.

Even if this premise wasn’t bad-faith partisanship, we should still resist this intrusion of spiritual judgement into the earthly justice system. The law does not, indeed cannot, judge what happens inside a person’s heart or mind. Though courts have some latitude to judge purposes, for instance self-defense, these conditions should remain exceptional and rare. Once courts start judging anyone’s beliefs or intentions the state assumes God’s role. And that fact alone should cause bipartisan concern.

Neil Gaiman and the Road to Truth

Michael Sheen and David Tennant as Aziraphale and Crowley in Good Omens 2

This essay contains spoilers.

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s novel Good Omens specifies that Aziraphale and Crowley, the angelic protagonists, don’t have a sexual relationship. Though Pratchett passed away in 2015, Gaiman maintained this parameter when adapting the novel for the 2019 BBC/Amazon joint production. Though he didn’t deny anybody their personal headcanon, he rejected the idea that Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship was anything but platonic.

Therefore it’s sudden and jarring in the final minutes of Good Omens 2 when (seriously, spoilers) Crowley grabs Aziraphale roughly and kisses him. This becomes the first moment that concretely sexualizes the characters. Throughout the season, Aziraphale and Crowley struggle to create a meet-cute between their neighbors, Nina and Maggie. But they’ve failed miserably because their knowledge of human romance comes entirely from Richard Curtis movies and Jane Austen novels.

Understanding the change requires understanding the context. Though Gaiman and Pratchett share billing on the original novel, Pratchett did most of the actual writing; Gaiman, a novice prose writer, wasn’t equipped to write an entire novel. Pratchett wanted to remain faithful to the Abrahamic mythology their novel satirized, which meant that transcendent beings lacked binary gender. To pinch a Kevin Smith line, angels are as sexless as Ken dolls.

Although Good Omens 2 is co-written by Gaiman and John Finnemore, it’s the first time the setting reflects exclusively Gaiman’s vision. And it bears noting Gaiman’s other recent streaming success: Sandman on Netflix. Not only does Sandman contain a noteworthy number of same-sex couples, Gaiman even gender-swaps John Constantine, a longstanding DC Comics character, to create increased Sapphic tension. Same-sex partnerships mean something to Gaiman.

In Sandman episode 5, Bette, a diner waitress, expresses purblind views about sexual identities. She claims Judy, a regular customer, is too pretty to be a lesbian, and engineers a meet-cute (another theme) with another customer, Mark. But when John Dee, empowered by Dream’s magic ruby, stops everyone lying and sheds their inhibitions, Bette and Judy find themselves entangled in a passionate embrace. That, the story implies, is their truth.

Throughout Sandman, Gaiman uses same-sex relationships as shorthand for characters who follow their own moral code. Johanna Constantine, Bette and Judy, Hal Carter, and Chantal and Zelda are all depicted as characters unbeholden to convention, free of judgement, and wholly alive. This freedom isn’t necessarily “good” in any moral sense, as The Corinthian’s ravenous sexuality is second only to his murderous impulses. But it does mean one is unbound.

Shelley Conn and John Hamm as Beelzebub and Gabriel in Good Omens 2

Good Omens depicts a world deeply bound to binaries. Good and evil, Heaven and Hell. We glimpse both eternal realms: Heaven is orderly, brightly lit, and aseptic, while Hell is noisy and cluttered, and several denizens show signs of gangrene. Both realms also keep demanding transcendent beings, like Aziraphale and Crowley, and their human allies, make binding declarations for one side or another. They demand complete moral absolutes.

Crowley and Aziraphale, however, spend the entire series finding ways to thread the moral needle. Both beings balk, for instance, at the biblical Job’s predicament, with its requirement to kill, and gradually devise a workaround. When they find an urchin robbing graves to escape poverty, Aziraphale learns that humans face degrees of wrong, while Crowley decides that death doesn’t resolve his sympathies. Broken moral bromides litter this story like flies.

Therefore, reaching the series culmination where (again, spoilers) the Metatron offers Aziraphale command of Heaven’s forces, this pushes the limits of Gaiman’s disdain for moral absolutes. By accepting the offer, Aziraphale must accept Heaven’s moral straight jacket, something Crowley can’t do. Crowley would rather continue mapping his own moral landscape, something both powers have done successfully for millennia. But, as Aziraphale notes, they have little to show for it.

Gaiman believes, from the textual evidence, that all absolute morals eventually collapse. But that doesn’t mean seeking one’s own moral resolution makes everything better. Johanna Constantine, John Dee, and now Aziraphale and Crowley have manufactured their own moralities, evidenced by their rejection of sexual identity myths, but they’re also terribly lonely. They occupy society’s margins, with only a few friends. Their stand requires courage and durability that most people lack.

Where Crowley kisses Aziraphale, therefore, it’s arguable whether the action is sexual. Maybe the characters remain, as both authors assert, essentially sexless. But Crowley demands, with his kiss, to know whether joining Heaven’s moral absolutes will, as Aziraphale claims, make a difference. Does morality, without context, mean anything? Neil Gaiman seemingly thinks not. Truth may be a lonely road, Gaiman suggests, but it’s the only one worth walking.