Stormy Daniels and the Evils of “Purity Culture”

Content Warning: This essay includes discussions of sexual assault, exploitation, and—obviously—Donald Trump's criminal accusations.

Stormy Daniels

I can’t imagine the widespread trauma and lingering hurt that Stormy Daniels’ testimony last week must’ve reawakened in some people. As key to the prosecution’s case in Donald Trump’s criminal indictment, she garnered national attention. Newscasters, commentators, and comedians hungrily consumed, and relentlessly regurgitated, salacious details of Daniels’ sexual encounter with Trump—an encounter that, on testimony, sure sounds like rape.

Yet I also can’t imagine the damage done by repeated mention of Daniels’ former longtime career. Even sources sympathetic to Daniels reflexively describe her as an “adult film actor” or “former porn star.” Journalists persistently describe the source of this story as one of Trump paying money to conceal sex with a porn star, as though her paying career matters. They even persist in using her stage name over her government name, Stephanie Clifford.

This bespeaks the importance of purity in American culture. From the Puritans to the present, Americans have believed that anybody sexually stained must forever bear that stain. Daniels joins the ranks of other would-be serious actors, like Traci Lords and Belle Delphine, whom nobody can ever write about without mentioning their previous “adult film” careers. They wear their sexual histories like Hester Prynne’s notorious scarlet letter.

Sex work is the only occupational category I know where a perfectly legal activity becomes criminal because money changes hands. Making adult films is perfectly legal, as millions of couples who’ve recorded themselves in the throes of passion already know. But making money from adult films makes participants into criminals, and worse, taints their ability to pursue future above-the-table employment. Once a sex worker, always a sex worker.

I remember once discussing with a loved one why prostitution is illegal. For clarity’s sake, I was younger and more libertarian back then; I believed prostitution should be decriminalized for free-market reasons. My loved one responded, with audible indignation: “Women are forced into prostitution because of poverty and systemic injustice!” I responded by asking who’s helped when we criminalize a commodity they have, that others willingly pay for.

Former President Donald Trump

Looking back at that conversation twenty-five years later, from a more progressive and justice-minded worldview, I realize that conversation cuts to the heart of society’s attitudes toward sex work. When our society classifies sex work as “crime,” it isn’t really about sex; it’s about finding more punitive ways to prevent poor people escaping poverty. Like laws against gambling, loitering, and drugs, anti-sex work laws are mainly enforced against the poor.

American society prizes purity. This overlaps heavily with something I’ve written before, about Mary Magdalene, but it bears repeating: once you’ve compromised your purity, Americans frequently refuse your return to polite society. The phrase “purity culture” comes from White evangelical Christianity, which fetishizes virginity, especially female virginity. But it also reflects the Temperence Movement’s attitudes toward alcohol: you’re either Wet or Dry, and once Wet, you’re never Dry again.

Thus you see not only the vilification of Stormy Daniels, but also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Some conservative commentators seemingly have a knee-jerk need, when discussing AOC, to describe her as a former bartender. If you’ve ever done bar work, or even sat at one for any length of time, you know the work is poorly paid. But women working in bars also face constant sexual come-ons, catcalls, and requests for dates.

Stormy Daniels, like Monica Lewinsky before her, has become a synecdoche for male sexual malfeasance. Both Daniels and Lewinsky were exploited by powerful men who made promises of future networking and career opportunities which never materialized. Following her public disgrace in the 1990s, Lewinsky retreated into years-long seclusion, while the President who exploited her took a victory lap. Daniels, presumably more prepared for public scrutiny, has remained visible.

To be completely fair, we’ve witnessed some revision in public perception. Some men who traded sexual favors for insider access, like Ryan Adams and Joss Whedon, have faced consequences in recent years. Yet those examples remain outliers, and the prosecution of chromic exploiters like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein have chugged on, producing minimal outcomes, for years. Culpability still resides mostly on women, especially poor women.

The simple fact that Donald Trump is only now facing any charges for a sexual assault which occurred in 2006, speaks volumes about who faces consequences in American society. Stormy Daniels will probably forever remain a “former adult film performer,” while Trump flourished for decades after his assault. He had to fuck the entire country before anybody thought he deserved meaningful consequences for entrapping one woman and lying about it.

Those Who Don’t Learn From History

Vladimir Putin and friends, in a still from Netflix’s
Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War

College-educated progressives might have a natural tendency to sneer at the 2024 Netflix docuseries Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War. The entire series has a ponderous, intensely self-serious tone, backed by a Philip Glass-inspired soundtrack that emphasizes the series’ intended Great Deeds of Great Men themes. Letting political insiders like Robert Gates and Condoleeza Rice narrate history risks letting the guilty write their own exoneration.

So sure, there’s a knee-jerk desire to impose a Noam Chomskian interpretation of the series as pro-American propaganda. Yet series creator Brian Knappenberger doesn’t let America off lightly either. Knappenberger’s sources are preponderantly American, yet many willingly doubt America’s official story spotlighting the country’s culpability in constant geopolitical escalation. American policy provides the precedents now bearing fruit in places like Ukraine.

I don’t mention Ukraine lightly. Each of the nine episodes begins with a teaser relating to Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion, casting that event in light of Vladimir Putin’s Cold War history. Though Knappenberger avoids anything as high-handed as a thesis statement, his comparisons of current events with Twentieth Century history emphasizes that there’s an arc of continuity which we ignore only at our peril. Sadly, ignorance is something we certainly have.

Despite the series’ title, Knappenberger doesn’t get into the Manhattan Project until episode 2, or the Cold War until Episode 3. His account begins during World War II, when the Allied Powers combined to fight global fascism, but only reluctantly. The “enemy of my enemy” arrangement forced Roosevelt and Stalin to sit down together, despite openly opposing one another politically. Both leaders exposed one united face to the world, while plotting separately in private.

Knappenberger’s style demonstrates influence from legendary documentarian Errol Morris. Like Morris, Knappenberger centers interview subjects largely front-and-center, narrating heir interpretation of events to an interviewer just slightly off-camera. Despite the dramatic importance of the subjects’ narrative (underscored by the soundtrack), they remain largely static. Visual drama comes from the intercutting of archival footage of historical events as they actually happened.

Early episodes involve mostly scholars and historians. As events like the Potsdam Conference, the Trinity test, or Hiroshima largely pass from living memory, we’re left with experts’ interpretations. Not that we’ve entirely forgotten these events. Knappenberger interviews two Hiroshima survivors, reminding us that history isn’t a collection of numbers and heuristics; it’s the combined story of what actually happened to real, living people.

The closer Knappenberger brings us to the present, the more he involves those who participated. Sure, he asks military and academic historians to interpret, say, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. But he also interviews a Spanish-speaking participant who banked everything on American support, then got captured in Cuba. The horror etched on that survivor’s face speaks volumes to history’s human impact, and America’s opportunistic betrayal of its international allies.

Beginning around 1980, Knappenberger relegates historians and scholars to a supporting role. The narrative kicks over to those who participated in, and often caused, history. Archival footage of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev intercuts with interview subjects, including Defense Secretaries, global journalists, and Gorbachev’s official English-language interpreter. Taken together, we receive a working view of how the late Cold War unfolded.

It's possible to raise objections to Knappenberger’s historical lens. He accepts the notion of history as the Great Doings of Great Men—and we indeed mean men, as only in the last twenty years do women drive the story, except as wives or survivors. Knappenberger sees history as happening mainly inside the corridors of power. He includes archival footage of, say, the demolition of the Berlin Wall or the Orange Revolution, but only overlaid with scholars’ and politicians’ exegesis.

Nevertheless, it’s impossible to escape Knappenberger’s final resolution. He wants us to understand that current events don’t exist in a vacuum; specifically, Putin chose war in Ukraine to reverse massive humiliations which the Cold War forced on Russia. The series’ final two episodes deep-dive into Putin personally, and how he views history through the humiliations which collapse of the Soviet Union forced on his people. Putin’s Ukraine invasion makes sense in that context.

In the final ten minutes, Knappenberger finally allows interview subjects to spell out his intended lesson: Putin’s military adventures aren’t unprecedented. America’s continued post-Cold War interventions in other nations provide political justification for Putin’s invasions in Ukraine, Georgia, and elsewhere. History didn’t happen only in the past, and contra conservative dogma, history didn’t end. Only when we know history, and use it proactively, can we prevent the disasters continuing around us.

The Matrix and the Messianic Lie

Much of the advance publicity surrounding The Matrix Resurrections focused on Act One’s satirical nature. The movie mocked the production house, Warner Bros., by name, for their demand for a lucrative sequel, whether the art demanded it or not. Warner, in a remarkable show of grace, leaned into that mockery and included it in the PR packet. Sounds cool, I remember thinking, but not compelling; I’ll wait for home video.

Now that it’s streaming, I find myself struck by what the PR omitted: a much more fatalistic tone, admitting that the original trilogy’s prophecies fell flat. The original movie remains relevant and talked-about a quarter century after its release, but its messianic promise of deliverance from corporatized autocracy seems naïve now. We haven’t escaped the machine, this movie warns us. If anything, it’s stronger now than it appeared in 1999.

The movie begins with Neo, having returned to his pre-liberation name of Thomas, working a soulless corporate job, like he did in the first movie. Instead of toiling in the anonymous cube farm, however, he now occupies the corner office, and has personal confabs with the corporate straw-boss. But he’s profoundly dissatisfied, treating his malaise by chronically overdosing psychiatric medications. Then word comes that Warner wants a sequel.

Fans embraced the first movie for two defining characteristics: cutting-edge visual effects, and long, maundering philosophical monologues. We who are old enough to remember the first movie, without the historical baggage that followed thereafter, probably remember feeling almost vindicated by the Wachowskis’ take on the decade between the Cold War and 9/11. That decade was slick, shiny, and frequently fun, but also stultifyingly boring in its safety.

Thereafter, some aspects of the first movie seemed downright prophetic. Scenes of urban destruction and gun violence looked eerily like footage of both 9/11 and the War on Terror. It’s hard to watch Neo and Trinity piloting a helicopter gunship into a skyscraper, without remembering the street-to-street fighting of the Siege of Fallujah. The videogame-like violence would become only worse as footage of American drone strikes became cable news fodder.

Unfortunately, if the first movie evidently recognized the boredom of safety, and the violence which boredom begets, the sequels fell flat. They pushed heavily on images of neo as messianic deliverer, whose unique person promises to challenge the system. As Agent Smith increasingly possesses everyone and everything, remaking the Matrix in his self-serving image, the movie promises that Neo, operating alone, will reset the changes and release the captives.

Christians worldwide have, certainly, believed their singular messiah would bring that promised deliverance. But often, instead of acting boldly in trust that Christ would vindicate the just, Christians used the promise of future deliverance to sit idly by, expecting Jesus to fix everything. Christians tolerated, if not outright participated in, war, slavery, exploitation, and empire. Molding ourselves to the world is okay, if the Messiah will triumph eventually.

Mass media in the post-Matrix decades has embraced the Chosen One myth. Rey Skywalker, Captain America, Katniss Everdeen, and even Keanu Reeves’ own John Wick have raced headlong into pits of vipers which seems insuperably large, and emerged triumphant. Despite occasional interludes, like the cinematic Les Misérables, American corporate media keeps promising a singular messiah that will redeem us from… well, from America, mostly.

Meanwhile, The Matrix Resurrections acknowledges directly that conditions have gotten worse. English-speaking conservative parties repeatedly promise to actively make oppression more oppressive, while progressive parties limply pledge that, under their supervision, things won’t get much worse. War, disease, and poverty have gotten worse, not better, since 1999. As Ian Haney López writes, the machinery of oppression proves infinitely capable of adapting to every direct challenge.

This movie takes that adaptability literally. A machine learning heuristic seizes the heroes that previously challenged the Matrix, and turns them into the Matrix’s driving engines. It uses the very human embodiment of justice to fuel injustice—shades of Republicans appropriating one orphan MLK quote to proclaim themselves the real arbiters of fairness. This movie admits that we who believe in freedom must adapt faster than the oppressors.

Hovering over San Francisco streets, Neo realizes something the original trilogy missed: if he hoards the power of salvation, then he’s already failed. The messianic impulse may begin with one individual, but unless it radiates outward, unless others join the kingdom as priests and kings themselves, messianic deliverance will never arrive. Humans, even messiahs, eventually die. The final shot abjures the sequels, and restores the “we”-centered salvation the first movie promised.

Kristi Noem and the Changing Definitions of “Justice”

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem
(NBC News Photo)

Audiences who read my blog without knowing me personally, might be surprised to learn that I used to be outspokenly conservative. You wouldn’t know it from my current positions, obviously, and I never cottoned to bomb-throwers like Rush Limbaugh, whom I repeatedly caught voicing opinions in areas where he clearly lacked accurate information. But I pinched political viewpoints extensively from thoughtful, information-based conservatives like Thomas Sowell and P.J. O’Rourke.

Therefore, when stories like the Kristi Noem scandal grab national attention, I don’t just read the reports as they exist. I also test the narrative against the person I used to be. My current progressive self reads Noem’s slaughter of a disobedient hunting dog, for the unforgivable transgression of behaving like a puppy, as pure cruelty. Yet my conservative self, thirty years ago, would’ve seen what Noem probably saw, a transgression of established moral authority.

As a conservative, I believed the Chestertonian myth that the existing order exists for a reason, and all change must prove itself to exceedingly high standards. If existing power dynamics disadvantage certain groups, then the established order must somehow recognize such disadvantage as the price of stability. The existing moral authority might be heartless to individuals, and might create disruptions in localized communities, but it harmonized society overall.

Humans tend to believe the universe is essentially just. Prior generations saw justice descending from God, that life’s rewards and consequences represented the manifestation of what Adam Smith called “the invisible hand.” Even non-religious people frequently see universal justice. Karl Marx’s belief in the Grand Synthesis, which would overthrow capitalism and establish economic utopia, remarkably resembles the Christian Book of the Revelation, without recourse to theism.

P.J. O'Rourke

People like Governor Noem define moral authority reflectively. As parent, provider, and giver of moral instruction, she has broad authority to impose her will on those deemed subordinate. But she has that authority, basically, because she has that authority. Having children makes her the final authority for those children’s moral upbringing. Buying a dog gives her power to impose her will on that dog. Children and dog exist, morally, to obey.

In using words like “justice” and “morality,” I’m deploying concepts that lack absolute, agreed-upon definitions. For brevity’s sake, let’s accept Michael J. Sandel’s definition of justice, as not just payback for crimes, but also the distribution of life’s necessary resources to maximize the good. Sandel road-tests several definitions of justice, never completely landing on one. However, even without resolution, his terms feel useful here.

Aristotle’s definition of justice, filtered through Sandel, might read: every person has a role, and justice prevails when every person finds and completes that role. But Friederich Nietzsche wrote a codicil for our postmodern world. In Freddy Nee’s mind, social roles exist to corral the peasantry. The morally developed man (and, for Nietzsche, moral development is male) doesn’t conform to such roles. The morally autonomous Übermensch makes his own.

Moral authorities like Governor Noem, therefore, aren’t subject to the rules they impose on others. One doubts Noem, a mother and grandmother, would tolerate a minor under her moral authority torturing an opossum in a trap, and would recognize animal cruelty as a frequent precursor to hurting humans. Indeed, according to Noem’s excerpted account, she considered killing her dog, Cricket, acceptable, because Cricket first killed domesticated poultry.

Michael J. Sandel

In other words, Noem has the unique authority to kill the disobedient. Cricket only has killing authority when granted by Noem, who reputedly tried, and failed, to train Cricket as a hunting dog. Specifically, a bird dog. Noem expected Cricket, only fourteen months old, to make the moral distinction between game birds, whose deaths became acceptable under Noem’s guidance, from farm poultry.

It’s almost enough to turn me vegan.

American conservatives often disdain Nietzsche because he disparaged Christianity. (Nietzsche’s father, a Lutheran clergyman, died when Friederich was only two. One wonders which Father little Freddy actually rebelled against.) Yet conservatives embrace one key Nietzschean principle, that moral authority comes from imposing the strong person’s will on subordinates, not from transcendent forces one might call “God.” Might, as Aesop taught us, makes right.

Taken together, Governor Noem probably wouldn’t accept the slogan “the cruelty is the point.” For her, the action wasn’t cruel, it was just. Yet her definition of justice differs from Chesterton or Aristotle, both of whom wanted to defend an existing order. Instead, Noem imposes justice from above, as an extension of her ordained moral authority. That represents a massive and unexplainable cleft from the conservatism of my childhood.

Netflix Presents: the New, Improved Jimmy Carr!

Jimmy Carr in his newest special, Natural Born Killer (Netflix photo)

Content warning: this essay will directly address the vulgar, transgressive, and sexually violent themes common to Jimmy Carr's stand-up comedy.

Jimmy Carr’s latest Netflix special, Natural Born Killer, features an extended riff on the fatuousness of the phrase “date rape.” He suggests that the qualifying prefix is a nicey-poo addition that makes the crime less horrific, mainly for the perpetrator. This sounds particularly weird coming from Carr, whose content has often featured sexually transgressive themes. Carr’s stock character is a shitty, libidinous satyr. This is just the first time he’s felt compelled to justify himself.

I have a particular fondness for one-liner comics. Milton Jones, Jack Handey, Gary Delaney, Steven Wright. Jokers who don’t require lengthy contexts to understand their punchlines, they just zap us with abrupt reversals or insightful wordplay. Short, incisive jokes often reveal deeper truths. With Jimmy Carr in particular, whose routine involves teasing audiences’ bottom limit, his transgressive themes often reveal that his audience, no matter how jaded they think themselves, still has a bottom limit.

Carr loves jokes he knows defensive interests will hate. In past one-hour specials, he’s lobbed out what he calls “career-ending jokes”; this time, he boasts of his intent to get “cancelled.” Not for nothing, either, as his routine has involved jabs at the disabled, the Holocaust, religion, and women. He’s previously told rape jokes, and jokes which imply he’s a drug-addicted pedophile. The above-mentioned “date rape” diatribe comes only after delivering a trademarked rape one-liner.

To his credit, Carr’s transgressive jokes make himself the bad person, never the victim. Unlike, say, Louis CK, Carr doesn’t use his aggressive tone to garner audience sympathy or wallow in self-pity/; you’re supposed to hate his stage persona. But Carr has always played that persona with winking acknowledgment that, like us, he’s in on the joke. His character knows what an awful human being he is, and invites us to participate in the pile-on.

This time, Carr doesn’t do that. He delivers a lewd joke, then counters with an explicit explanation of why we shouldn’t find such content funny. Not just once, either: he breaks character multiple times, sometimes for several straight minutes, and culminates the performance riffing extensively on the importance of consent. As he lectures viewers why we shouldn’t have laughed at the joke he just delivered, we wonder: who is this guy wearing Jimmy Carr’s face?

Louis CK

Perhaps there’s an autobiographical reason for Carr’s reversal. He became a father for the first time in 2019, aged forty-seven. At approximately the halfway point of this performance, he includes a nearly three-minute narrative of how he feared his child’s premature birth might’ve blunted his edge. The story ends with him realizing he still had it, apparently deaf to the irony that a one-liner comedian just took nearly three minutes to establish one punch line!

I’m reminded of Jimmy Kimmel, another Jimmy famous for working blue who attempted to reinvent himself. Kimmel, previously co-host of the basic cable raunch-fest The Man Show, turned into an advocate for radical empathy when he transferred to broadcast TV, frequently turning weepy-eyed at expressions of injustice. His former co-host Adam Carolla, meanwhile, has become a Fox News and right-wing podcast staple, doubling down on his basic cable persona. Again, audiences seek the authentic Jimmy.

Please don’t misunderstand, I believe both Jimmys could have their secular “come-to-Jesus moment.” As a former basic White conservative myself, I know irreligious conversions happen. Yet Carr attempts to do double duty, delivering the transgressive joke before lecturing us on why our laughter makes us bad people. His fatherhood narrative ends with a coat-hanger abortion joke. His consent riff is him lecturing a young audience member on when it’s okay to “get your dick out.”

Because there’s definitely a place for such content. We laugh at Carr’s blue material because we recognize something of ourselves. No matter how enlightened or empathetic we’ve become, we possess the same vulgar, libidinous id; becoming an adult doesn’t mean we’ve defeated those tendencies, only that we’ve learned to conceal them in public. Carr is funny because when he delivers his raunchy content, he helps us compartmentalize that side, and leave it in the theater.

This time, I’m left confused. When I laugh at Carr’s blue material, then he lectures me directly on why his own content wasn’t actually funny, I wonder: have I changed? Or has he? Previously, Carr encouraged us to leave the unrestrained id with him, onstage. Now, he lectures us, and I feel compelled to conceal my laughter. I can’t relinquish my id, because I can’t admit I have one. So it comes home with me.

Hold Onto Sixteen As Long As You Can

John Mellencamp

Classic rock radio stalwart John Mellencamp got an unwanted attention boost this week when a month-old video of him abandoning the stage went viral. Apparently Mellencamp paused to speak directly to his audience, something musicians frequently do, but an audience member heckled him to shut up and resume playing. An outraged Mellencamp quit playing partway through “Jack and Diane,” leaving an arena audience in the lurch.

Several sources, including Fox News, spun this event as Mellencamp feuding with the audience over politics. Like most “heartland rockers,” including Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, and John Fogerty, Mellencamp’s politics skew left. This should surprise nobody who’s listened to Mellencamp’s lyrics—but apparently, several audience stalwart haven’t done so. Listeners are often gobsmacked to discover that their favorite heartland rockers are progressives who don’t just love being rural.

This spotlights a growing rift between artists like Mellencamp, and the largest number of their fans. We saw something similar when former New Jersey governor Chris Christie mentioned his love of Springsteen, and Springsteen responded by duetting with comedian Jimmy Fallon to mock Christie’s performance as governor. These rockers maintain the leftist, anti-establishment passions of their youth, while their audiences have become more conservative and revanchist.

Pop history tells us that “heartland rock” emerged in the middle 1970s: Springsteen’s first hit, “Born to Run,” hit the Billboard Top 40 in 1975, while Tom Petty’s first hit, “Breakdown,” barely creased the Top 40 in 1977. However, this ignores that both artists never developed legitimate star power until the 1980s. It also disregards both Bob Seger, and John Fogerty’s original band Creedence Clearwater Revival, which had their first hits in the 1960s.

Bruce Springsteen

From its origins, heartland rock bore a contradiction. Though its chief songwriters have pressed progressive politics and a disdain for capitalism into their lyrics, their musical stylings were persistently conservative. Fogerty deliberately channeled musical stylings from Delta blues and Memphis soul, while Petty’s sound grew, like Spanish moss, from the swampy slumgullion of influences in his inland northern Florida upbringing.

Thus, conservative audiences who don’t listen deeply have always thought their favorite heartland rockers spoke directly to them. The most famous example, of course, must be Ronald Reagan’s attempt to conscript Springsteen into his 1984 reelection campaign. But my personal favorite comes from TikTok. A whyte-boy in a backward ballcap and a pick-em-up truck shouts “Thank God my mom didn’t raise no f**king liberal!” before tearing off scream-singing with CCR’s “Fortunate Son.”

The complete failure to understand the left-leaning message in these lyrics might seem baffling, except that I once shared it. I’ve written about this before: listening to classic rock radio during my rebellious teenage years allowed me to consider myself forward-thinking because I engaged with the injustices of the Vietnam era. By pretending to care about injustice back then, I allowed myself to passively participate with injustices occurring right now.

There’s nothing innately conservative about consuming media shallowly, but in my experience, people who don’t parse for greater depth usually have conservative politics. Conservatives love surface-level readings. My lifelong Republican parents encouraged me to reject deeper textual analysis of literature, even when high-school English teachers graded me for doing so. Listening to classic rock at the surface level often rewards conservative readings of its time.

Heartland rockers were classic rock before the “classic rock radio” category was invented.

John Fogerty

Surviving heartland rockers like Mellencamp, Springsteen, and Melissa Etheridge continue recording, but they haven’t had Top 40 hits since the middle 1990s. Fogerty, who’s always had a contentious relationship with the recording industry, hasn’t meaningfully charted a single since 1985. Though they all continue touring, they’ve become oldies circuit staples, their concerts consisting primarily of songs first heard forty, fifty, or more years ago.

Like the artists themselves, their audiences have continued aging. The greasers and slicks who got energized for Springsteen’s fight against small-town malaise in 1975, now have mortgages, student debt, and children. Such material investments in the status quo encourage, if not principled conservatism, at least a desire to ensure they didn’t invest themselves in hot air. The audiences have grown away from the artists they admire.

Perhaps the most telling fact is whom these artists now influence. Jake Owens’ “I Was Jack (You Were Diane)” and Eric Church’s “Springsteen” were massive country hits, channeling the artists they name-dropped. But both songs reduce their tribute subjects to mere nostalgia for whyte audiences. These artists, now in their seventies, have become the thing their teenage selves rebelled against. There’s no coming back from that.

The Weird-Enough Wizard of Odds

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 51
Ralph Bakshi (writer/director), Wizards

In a post-nuclear future, humanity has become a visitor on a fairy-covered Earth. But that hardly means everything has become peaceful. The wizard Avatar serves as advisor to the president of Montagar, a bucolic forest nation where citizens teach children to husband the soil and distrust technology. But Avatar’s twin brother Blackwolf rules an autocratic kingdom and yearns to conquer his brother’s lands. He’s discovered a tool which may make that possible: literal Nazi propaganda.

Animator and writer Ralph Bakshi made his name in the 1960s and 1970s creating films that pinched the Disney aesthetic, but were adamantly not intended for children. His 1972 comedy Fritz the Cat became the first animated feature to be rated X. But he always dreamed of returning to the science fiction and fantasy themes which first propelled his interest in drawing. 20^th Century Fox shared his vision, at least hypothetically, but flinched upon release.

Blackwolf sends robots to invade Montagar, causing chaos and destruction throughout the forest. Avatar and his bodyguard, Weehawk, capture one robot and recondition it to serve the interests of peace. Because Montagar has neither army nor weapons, Avatar and Weehawk commence a quest to find and stop Blackwolf inside his own lair. Accompanied by Avatar’s apprentice and love interest Elinore, they must seek an enemy who has learned how to bend masses to his will.

Bakshi worked mostly without support from mainstream studios. Though he regularly got distribution deals with companies like Fox or Warner, he assiduously avoided working for them directly. He especially hated Disney’s influence which, after Walt’s passing, had become ingrown and moribund. (Disney’s decline wouldn’t reverse until the middle 1980s.) This gave him remarkable creative freedom, like fellow indie animator and Disney refugee Don Bluth, but forced him to work within shoestring budgets.

This freedom results in a big, sloppy product which revels in its excesses. Bakshi’s team clearly had oodles of fun creating this movie. Its disco-era morality is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and shows distrust not only of the nuclear weapons looming over the Cold War, but also the technology which made such weapons possible. It also emphasizes that, no matter how enlightened True Believers think their society has become, violence always looms around the horizon.

Perhaps Bakshi’s upbringing contributes to this. Born in Mandatory Palestine, he grew up mostly in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and Foggy Bottom, Washington. These East Coast cities were rife with bigotry, including both antisemitism and legal segregation. Though Bakshi’s family made it to America in time to avoid the bloody excesses of World War II, he grew up seeing the ideology that had been crushed in Europe, making its nest and laying its eggs over in America.

left to right: Weehawk, Elinore, Avatar, and the robot Peace in Ralph Bakshi's Wizards

Bakshi’s world reeks of moral binaries. He depicts the forests of Montagar as bucolic, lush, and stranger to violence. Blackwolf’s kingdom of Scortch is sooty and industrialized, occupied by orcs and trolls. (If this sounds familiar, well spotted: Bakshi would direct the first big-screen Lord of the Rings adaptation in 1978, a failure upon release.) When Blackwolf’s modernity forces a confrontation with Montagar, only Avatar’s small adventuring party upholds Montagar’s deep anti-modernist conscience.

20^th Century Fox gave Bakshi a distribution deal for this movie at the same time it bankrolled an ambitious young director named George Lucas. Struggling after a string of bad decisions, Fox was willing, post-1975, to support riskier ventures. But it kept both Bakshi and Lucas on tight budgets, forcing both to pay out-of-pocket to complete their projects. Bakshi created fantasy crowd scenes by rotoscoping vintage Swedish historical epics, and intercutting snippets of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.

The finished produce horrified Fox and drew lukewarm responses from critics; Fox accorded Wizards a limited release. Unlike Star Wars, Wizards never overcame this limitation, and though it returned a profit, the outcome was small enough to sour Fox’s relationship with Bakshi. This movie never found its real audience until home video, when college-aged audiences started getting high and gawping at the movie’s Technicolor spectacle. It was, in that sense, a product of its time.

Sadly, Bakshi’s lurid adult style never found its mainstream breakthrough. His only big-studio production, Cool World, died so horribly, it ended his career; he mostly does illustrations and comix now. Yet periodically, new audiences discover this forgotten gem, and seemingly admire how unashamed it is. Wizards is overblown, messy, unsubtle, and garish. It’s also dated fun, and audiences apparently never get tired of its unapologetic energy. This movie embodies everything Bakshi ever did right.

Modern Economics as a Moral Instrument

Nick Romeo, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy

Most wage-earning workers with house payments and bills know the current economy cannot survive much longer. People working overtime cannot afford groceries, and housing prices are more exorbitant now than immediately before the 2007 collapse. But with Cold War rhetoric still discoloring all economic discussions, what alternatives exist? What, importantly, has worked in real-world scenarios?

Nick Romeo is a journalist, not an economist; he doesn’t postulate alternative economic models from dust. Instead, he travels to places which have implemented economics beyond the dictates of neoclassical capitalism, to report on what works, and what doesn’t. This may mean cooperative models, like the Mondragon Corporation of Spain’s Basque Country, or the direct democracy of Cascais, Portugal. Everything described here has worked somewhere, and could hypothetically work elsewhere.

In his first chapter, Romeo briefly stops through American postgraduate economics programs, examining how academicians teach contemporary economics. The discipline he encounters is self-righteous and exclusionary, with a strong historical disdain for history and the humanities. It assumes humans are rational and amoral, and mathematics can describe economics better than anything else. But an increasing number of academic economists are recognizing how purblind this approach is.

Only in this first chapter does Romeo engage in abstruse theorizing; everything else focuses on real-world accomplishments. But this theorizing helps establish Romeo’s thesis statement, further expounded throughout the book, that economics isn’t a science (he uses the term “pseudoscience” generously). Economics originated a moral enterprise and a branch of philosophy, and Romeo aims to recapture that humane foundation.

Not for nothing, Romeo writes, was the Mondragon Corporation founded by a Catholic priest, not an economist. More a federation than a centralized corporation, Mondragon deploys the skills of diverse workers, who have democratic control over their employers. Mondragon eschews love of money or worship of hero CEOs, both hallmarks of American capitalism, preferring to empower workers to take ownership of their work and workplace.

Despite his talk of morality, and his lavish praise of Mondragon’s Father Arizmendiarrieta, Romeo’s economics isn’t religious. It is, however, humanist, prioritizing workers whose labors turn raw material into wealth, and not either money or economic “laws.” For Romeo, economics should focus on getting food, shelter, and necessities to humans, and protecting the natural environment. Mathematical models fail if they don’t achieve these goals.

Nick Romeo

Romeo’s moral calculus emphasizes economic outcomes excluded from textbook considerations. Are jobs merely a nicety provided by the ownership class, he asks, or a social entitlement? When workers’ productivity and ingenuity create corporate wealth, should workers own equity? Does “making a living” mean mere subsistence, or does the economy owe workers something more? These aren’t theoretical questions, and Romeo boldly proffers field-tested answers.

However, this creates some fuzzy outcomes. Romeo admits that morally minded economic models, like True Cost, must make flying decisions about what constitutes meaningful externalities, and therefore its titular “truth” remains open for interpretation—and, sadly, misinterpretation. Likewise, he praises purpose-driven corporation models which protect workers’ rights, housing access, or environmental restoration. He politely elides the idea that corporations might harbor bad purposes.

Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), a democratic model Romeo describes across several chapters, he finally admits isn’t a single system. Some ESOPs give workers complete ownership over the companies their work has created, but others grant only nominal equity, less than a 401(k). Economic liberty, Romeo admits, comes from diligence, not from assuming the monied classes care about your outcomes.

Also, approaching his denouement, Romeo admits that economic circumstances change, and responses must change commensurately. He began writing during and immediately after the pandemic (mostly written thus, “the pandemic,” as though afraid of its scientific name, like saying Macbeth). As pandemic furor dissipated, the economy moved from stagnation to inflation, and he admits it’s necessary to back-construct responses from the models he’s previously explained.

Consistently, morality matters first. Throughout the Twentieth Century, politicians and economists have sought economic models they could deploy and ignore, like a well-oiled machine. Romeo instead describes economics as a moral instrument, to be nurtured, tended, and when necessary, replaced. I’m reminded of Distributism, a similar morally-minded economic model, which uses agrarian metaphors. We farm the economy, not grease its wheels.

Romeo shows economic models which prioritize care, cooperation, and human dignity. He doesn’t invent new systems from cloth, though he admits countless further untried systems exist. Instead, he encourages us to read economics as an opportunity to increase human flourishing, build stronger communities, and preserve the environment. We only need to treat economics as a liberal art, as it is.

See also: Why We Need Liberal Arts in the Business World

Trump’s Bible, Part Three

This essay is a follow-up to Trump’s Bible and Netanyahu’s Smiting and Trump’s Bible, Part Two

Howard Thurman

Growing up in White Protestant Christianity, I remember hearing how Jesus never preached against Roman occupation of Israel. This seemed strange, my teachers said, because Jewish leaders of the First Century CE definitely unified around opposition to Roman dominion. But Jesus never said “boo” against Rome, which proved—proved I say!—that Christianity is apolitical, and Jesus wanted to save souls, not start a revolution.

In adulthood, I recognized this belief as specious. As Howard Thurman writes, Jesus wasn’t a Roman citizen, and therefore couldn’t speak freely under imperial dominion. Then as now, empires crushed agitators, and though violent imperial death was probably Jesus’ original intention, he couldn’t risk it happening ahead of schedule. The Apostle Paul, who was a citizen, felt no such circumspection, when he wrote to the Ephesians:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

My teachers hand-waved the statements against “this dark world” by claiming it meant either demonic powers or “secularism.” But in context, Paul clearly means political, economic, and military forces which dominated ordinary residents’ occupied lives. We fight the forces of poverty, conquest, and subjugation, the same soul-destroying powers which Dr. King called “the giant triplets”: racism, materialism, and militarism.

Early Christianity flourished behind this revolutionary ideology. Where kingdoms brought war, Christians brought meaning. Where empires fled from turmoil, Christians ran into the worst domains, carrying blankets and cold water for the afflicted. Where Rome reduced women entirely to their childbearing capacity, the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla record that women embraced Christianity because it gave them individual, autonomous meaning.

James H. Cone

Then the Constantinian Shift happened. Organized Christianity threw its support behind the Emperor, and reorganized itself to support imperial values. It became the very things its founders inveighed against: imperialist, hierarchical, phallocentric, middle class, and violent. When Christian authority became insufficient to support the putrefying empire, popes and patriarchs stepped into that role, investing kings with earthly authority and blessing campaigns of military conquest.

Yet speaking broadly of “Christianity” overlooks the fissures within. While Romanized Christianity survived, through its alliances with kings—and, not coincidentally, through its near-monopoly on written texts—dissident groups nevertheless arose to challenge human political authority, and also the Church that clothed human kingdoms in religious vestments. Groups like the Albigensians, Bogomils, Waldensians, and Dulcenaeans threatened Roman hegemony, and Rome crushed them violently.

This pattern repeats throughout religious history. Prophetic voices which arise in opposition to state power, eventually ally themselves with human states. Hebrew prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah railed against kings, before their books got sewn into the state religion. The Buddha rejected his (half-legendary) princely upbringing, but Emperor Ashoka granted Buddhism imperial authority. Luther and Calvin skipped the interregnum and raced straight into relationship with princes.

Italian semiologist Umberto Eco, though an atheist himself, explicated this pattern cleanly. His authorial self-insert, the skeptical Brother William of Baskerville, explained that in attempting to purge Catholicism of heresies, the Church became exactly what the heretics accused: imperial, power-mad, and brutal. Dissident groups that survived did so by compromising their founding principles; those that couldn’t compromise, died in fire.

Donald Trump so badly wants us to see him as
religious that he shared this AI image which,
if you look closely, shows him having six fingers
on his right hand (source)

Which returns us to Donald Trump. His revolting “God Bless the U.S.A. Bible,” apparently actually compiled by Lee Greenwood, represents yet another attempt to sacralize state power. Those Christians who benefit from the existing social order, mostly White, middle-class, and heterosexual, will gobble this trifle up eagerly, despite whether they actually buy the Bible. Because for them, as James Cone writes, Jesus came to bless the old order.

Meanwhile, Christian dissidents who oppose this beatification of power go largely unheard. Like the Cathars and Dulcenaeans which Eco describes, they provide a welcoming refuge for spiritually-minded citizens who reject the power structure; but, like their forebears, they lack necessary access to challenge the state. They provide localized, narrow relief, but are unlikely to change the religious landscape, unless, like Luther, they become willing to partner with princes.

If Trump wins reelection this November, Christian history will certainly remember him alongside the Emperor Constantine. Christians, or anyway White middle-class Christians, want the power which potentates can distribute, and they’re willing to squander their unique spiritual claims to achieve it. We Christians who disavow such Whiteness and conservatism, don’t know how to organize to resist this historic sell-out.

And, like the Bogomils, we’re on track to be crushed by “the powers of this dark world.”

Trump’s Bible, Part Two

This essay is a follow-up to Trump’s Bible and Netanyahu’s Smiting

R.J. Rushdoony

Let’s assume that most readers outside certain theological circles probably haven’t heard of Christian Reconstructionism. This Protestant sect, with roots in strict Calvinism, deals with relationships between religious truth and political power, in a mostly American context. Reconstructionists believe secular power derives from Christianity alone, and therefore Christians should have political dominion over, well, everything.

R.J. Rushdoony, the theologian who pioneered Reconstructionism, specifically demanded that the law of Leviticus be enshrined in American law. He used rhetorical hand-waving to ignore Levitical laws his modern audience found reprehensible, like the death penalty for disobedient sons. Rushdoony remains little-known outside narrow circles, but his strict dominionist theology has tainted swaths of American Christianity, including the Religious Right and the homeschool movement.

Many Christians find the Levitical law tempting because it provides ironclad definitions of right and wrong. I don’t want to seem unsympathetic, because in today’s morally fraught, pluralistic world, the desire for God-given absolute rules makes sense. Many people might want to follow the law, and therefore avoid making decisions, blind to the long-term consequences; but that’s only possible when we think the law itself is morally right.

However, I also think that’s the attitude religious leaders showed in Jesus’ time. They assumed that, by keeping the forms of law, they necessarily did right, regardless of their actual actions or their inmost intentions. Obeying the Law of Moses, which God purportedly handed down verbatim, allowed them to only shallowly understand the situation directly before them. One simply obeyed, and then succeeded, much like a dead fish floating downstream.

(I realize this statement heavily attributes intent. The First Century CE is a poorly documented time in Jewish history, and Christian scriptures the only source. Let’s stipulate their reliability for this argument.)

Jesus, an observant Jew who did significant teaching inside temples and synagogues, rejected this hierarchical interpretation. No longer could the law apply only inside Israel’s borders, real or metaphorical; the law convicts the contents of your heart, demanding right action even at personal cost. The tax collector Zacchaeus, for example, followed ritual law precisely, but he flourished by taking from others, until Jesus convicted his heart.

Donald Trump

Christianity, therefore, requires a moral order beyond this world. Like Plato, Jesus believed capital-T Truth wasn’t circumscribed by heavy matter, but exceeded this world. God’s Kingdom is perfect, clean, and free of this world’s conflicts and moral compromises. But that world lies somewhere beyond, and we won’t comprehend it or the truths it empowers until we escape this burdensome flesh. We see through a glass darkly, indeed.

We cannot know capital-T Truth, therefore, by following the law. Humans write rules in response to past conditions, but doing right means facing the present, and its future ramifications, without blinders. I must observe the source of Truth, fluid and dynamic, to answer this world, with its frustrating tendency to change. Even in Jesus’ time, Israel had changed into a settled nation with iron tools, no longer the hill-dwelling herdsmen for whom Moses wrote the Law.

Donald Trump was baptized and confirmed Presbyterian, but the church hasn’t much influenced his morality. His actions have equated “right” with “what the law allows,” and his fondness for lawsuits demonstrates an elastic attitude toward even that morality. He’s spent his life pursuing his appetites, at the expense of consequences for others. His pandering Bible salesmanship, forging American law into a Third Testament, reflects this strictly make-do ethic.

The devout must exceed the letter of the Law, and observe the Spirit. As I’ve written before, Levitical law has multiple provisos addressing how we treat the poor, disfranchised, and weak. Our treatment of the poor isn’t hypothetical; it bespeaks whether we honor the spirit of the Law, or only its letter. Merely obeying the Law as written is lazy, passive. Doing right means actively engaging with the Law’s purpose.

Trump’s legalistic morality inevitably gets deployed to hurt those already disadvantaged by human systems. His maltreatment of immigrants, dissidents, and minorities is extensively documented; he’s promised to exceed this, and actively make life harder for the indigent and unhoused. Christians who equate devotion with obedience will go along to get along, as many already have. The consequences for “the least of these” will be dire.

Rushdoony wanted to engrave the Bible into American law. Trump wants to bind American law into the Bible. Both cases reject Jesus’ mission which taught that we must know God intimately, and then act accordingly. One can use Biblical language, these men prove, and still lack a Christian core.

Follow-up: Trump’s Bible, Part Three

Trump’s Bible and Netanyahu’s Smiting

Donald Trump, Bible salesman

Throughout my Christian life, I’ve struggled to wrap my had around Psalm 137, which usually gets used liturgically in abbreviated form. The first several verses, written during the Babylonian exile, lament the experience of alienation from homeland, nation, and God. We see here beginning traces of the “foreigners in a strange land” ethos which undergirds much modern Judaism and Christianity. Then verse 9 veers abruptly:

“Happy is the one who seizes your infants / and dashes them against the rocks.”

The earliest Hebrew scriptures describe a national religion and an explicitly Israelite deity, not a universal one. The G-d described in the Pentateuch of Moses sides with Israel and aids Israelites in murdering “foreigners.” Not until the prophet Amos does Judaism begin embracing the idea that worshiping G-d is about honoring principles. Moses never intended the Levitical law to govern everyone, everywhere; he wrote the laws of a hill-dwelling agrarian nation in the Late Bronze Age.

Which brings us to two important current events. Israel’s ongoing pummeling of Palestinians in Gaza has reached a threshold which UN officials are willing to tentatively consider genocide. The Netanyahu administration’s continued strafing of civilian targets is merely the inevitable conclusion of Israeli policy which protects Israelis (as distinct from Israelites) at everyone else’s expense. Amnesty Internation has termed the Israeli government’s longstanding policies as “racism.”

Meanwhile, to cover mounting legal debts, former President Donald Trump has begun hawking Bibles online. This salesmanship doesn’t surprise me, as his core voting bloc conflates being Christian with being American. Rather, I take profound exception at the contents of Trump’s Bible. According to press reports, the King James translation comes bound together with the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Pledge of Allegiance, and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”

In other words, Trump’s Bible includes American national law and an American patriotic psalm—erm, I mean “song”—bound together as a rudimentary Third Testament. American conservatives have long considered the Declaration and Constitution as divinely inspired documents, a position that’s literally Mormon doctrine. Yet in literally binding American nationalism into the Bible, Trump is dragging Christianity backward into a proto-Hebrew Bronze Age.

Netanyahu and Trump share a theological worldview founded in the Levitical notion that whatever benefits the nation, and especially whatever benefits the nation’s oligarchs, necessarily benefits the faith. It bears noting, as Obery Hendricks writes, that the High Priesthood of Solomon’s Temple, described in both Jewish and Christian scriptures, wasn’t merely an airy-fairy religious grouping. The priesthood governed the nation, often on behalf of conquering empires.

Benjamin Netanyahu, acolyte
of his country's secular Priesthood

Let me state, before I continue, I realize my “Judeo-Christian” language is sweeping. Though Judaism and Christianity germinated in the same Levantine soil, they historically parted ways following Bar Kochba’s Rebellion, and are substantially different now. Yet because both religions share common ancestry in Moses, Amos, and Isaiah, we can, for convenience, address them syncretically for the moment. Because we’re seeing both being degraded right now.

Isaiah and Jesus shared the recognition that worldly empires can break the body. Kings anointed by G-d die, whether through violence or through age and entropy. Investing religious sacrality in human governments means placing trust in something which inevitably rots. Rather, the deity extoled by prophets and Christ wasn’t bound to any nation or land (though Third Isaiah still called Israelites to come home). Ha-Shem dwells, instead, among the believers.

In this regard, global Judaism has perhaps handled the prophetic call with greater integrity than Christianity. Since the days of Nehemiah, global Judaism has recognized that one becomes Jewish by honoring Jewish heritage and maintaining Jewish practice, even when resident in strange lands. To be Jewish, in today’s Judaism, means accepting the world as transitory. Don’t conform to kings and kingdoms, but stand fast in Truth.

Christianity, by contrast, regularly conforms to kingdoms. Though conservative Christians think themselves pure because they dump on out-groups like Muslims or LGBTQIA+, they nevertheless seek worldly power, something Jesus abhorred. Ever since Emperor Constantine, Christians have thought themselves worthy to govern, and to enforce their moral code on everyone. Or anyway, as Gorski and Perry write, White Christians have thought that.

Netanyahu’s Israel has something global Judaism hasn’t had for over two millennia: state power. Therefore Netanyahu makes the same mistake which Trump and other nominal Christians have made throughout those same ages, thinking state power comes from G-d. Whether through adding new Biblical texts, like Trump, or ignoring the prophets’ convictions, like Netanyahu, the effect is similar: both leaders drag their nations backward into the Bronze Age.

Follow-up: Trump’s Bible, Part Two and Trump’s Bible, Part Three

Radium, Capitalism, and America

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 117
Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women, and D.W. Gregory, Radium Girls

In the early 20^th Century, American industry was all a-flutter over this new-fangled mineral the Curies discovered in France: radium. Rare and expensive, but highly charged, radium had early commercial uses in patent medicines, cancer treatments, and even cosmetics. But it had its most lucrative boom in luminous paint. Radium paint appeared in wristwatches, dashboard instrument dials, and other technical processes. The women who hand-painted those dials were paid well.

When British author Kate Moore started reading about the radium fad, which happened mostly between the World Wars, she discovered that nearly everything published dealt with the science and the scientists. Nobody ever compiled much about the dial-painters, who were almost exclusively women in their teens and twenties. But the dial-painters paid the highest price for industrial radium, which caused sarcomas, osteoporosis, and a revolting disorder called Radium Jaw.

So Moore decided to close the gap. She pored through countless documents, many of which had remained in storage for decades or never seen outside the family, to reconstruct the lives of blue-collar women frequently overlooked by mainstream historians. Moore reveals a handful of young women whose modest ambitions included the desire to become wives, mothers, artists, or entrepreneurs. History had other plans, turning them into spokespeople for the changing times.

Radium dial-painters in Orange, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Illinois, used techniques first pioneered in painting expensive bone china. The painters mostly started work around age fourteen or fifteen; Moore says one started painting aged only eleven. They used camel-hair brushes, and to accurately paint small numerals, they got their brushes to a fine point by putting the bristles in their mouths. Thus they ingested microscopic amounts of radium.

But saying “microscopic amounts” does the poisoning an injustice. Radium bonded with calcium in their bones, where it emitted constant radiation with a half-life beyond a millennium. Years after leaving their jobs, many women began experiencing the first common symptom: tooth decay. But their teeth were only the external symptom. Their entire lower jaws, exposed directly to radium, were rotting out of their mouths. Many witnessed their mouths crumble.

Though the women had were fortunate to find doctors who believed them, and helped them seek treatment, the medical establishment refused to believe radium was dangerous. Not just medicine, either—their employers, backed with armies of attorneys, stonewalled the legal system to prevent having to accept responsibility for their former workers. Using legal maneuvers that sound suspiciously familiar a century later, they abused the courts to remain rich and untouchable.

The companies, U.S. Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company, shared a common technique: deny and stall the proceedings until the women died, almost all painfully and ignominiously. If they outlived the women, the cases lacked a plaintiff, and culpability went away. Thus these companies pioneered the literal process of privileging their profits over workers’ lives, an approach that remains commonplace today.

Grace Fryer, unofficial captain
of the New Jersey radium girls

Dial-painters, who were again almost entirely women, began working as teenagers around 1917; nobody was held legally responsible for their suffering and death until 1938. The decades-long slog through medical and legal delays presaged the hurdles faced by many working-class Americans in subsequent decades, suffering injuries caused by silica, heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and other pollutants. The dial-painters simply came first, thus paving the way for others.

Worse, industrial stonewalling techniques remain commonplace today. Though the dial-painters’ ordeal led to America instituting worker safety regulations, many companies now simply move manufacturing to unregulated economies in Latin America or the Pacific Rim. There, they repeat the pattern of hiring teenagers with slim, lithe fingers, working them to capacity, then denying responsibility for their workplace injuries, which sometimes manifest only years later.

Playwright D.W. Gregory recounts the New Jersey dial-painters, whose suffering came first, and whose legal struggles captivated an American public basking in the glow of that other innovation, the wire service. Gregory presents a snappy, fast-paced memory play, depicting one painter, Grace Fryer, and her struggle to receive her day in court. Backed by volunteers and her fellow dial-painters, Grace militarizes national media to get public opinion on her side.

Despite what you’d expect, Gregory’s play was produced fifteen years before Moore’s book appeared; Moore cites Gregory in her bibliography. Gregory’s version is both quicker and more intimate, eschewing the technical details and knowledge Moore lavishes. One could read these as two versions of the same story: one personal and close, the other inclusive and exhaustive. They’re two ways of looking at an event that changed America’s relationship with the moneyed class.

Living in the Liars’ Economy

Elon Musk

It’s become a truism, at least in certain circles, that money doesn’t exist. That is, it doesn’t exist apart from our belief in it. Money, as a numerical representation of value, gains its worth from law, tradition, and our willingness to accept it. Kurt Vonnegut teased, in his 1985 novel Galápagos, what might happen if humans worldwide accepted money’s fictional nature. He posited that society would collapse, and take humanity with it.

Watching Donald Trump’s inability to pay his legal debts unfold in real time, I’ve reconsidered exactly what that means. The obvious position, long favored by progressives and reform-minded citizens, holds that because money is fictitious, our economy holds people artificially in poverty, and nothing but political will prevents us from fixing that. Yet we see now that Trump lied money into existence—and that, as his lies unravel, the money also vanishes.

When Trump lied to banks to collateralize his capital, that money came into existence. That’s how money originates: not through the Federal Reserve printing more currency, but through banks loaning promissory notes. Because well-off banksters saw Trump as trustworthy, they bestowed such promissory notes on his corporation, bringing money into existence. Had his lies remained covert, that money would probably remain in circulation today.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to Trump. America watched Elon Musk, purportedly a centibillionare in his own right, muster others’ financial backing to seize Xitter and transform it into his personal vanity platform. Now he’s paying interest installments on a massive underwater loan as the platform retains only hard-core users and White Nationalists. Worse, his high-profile mismanagement spills onto his other properties; Tesla and SpaceX have black eyes by proxy.

Mark Zuckerberg

Similar lies cascade down the tech-economy chain. Mark Zuckerberg lied about video engagement on Facebook, creating increased business and market valuation, which he reinvested. Then the lie came out. Innumerable video creators lost their shirts, and Facebook stock temporarily pitted. Again, had the lie been better managed, the money Zuckerberg fibbed into existence would’ve remained in circulation. In these cases, money is literally a lie.

I’ve casually observed elsewhere that supposed centibillionaires like Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos don’t really have the money their supposed net worth implies. Their “worth” is mostly bound up in stocks, securities, and other financial devices. Though these devices have putative market value, the owners can never sell them, because they gain value by the illusion of scarcity. If they sell, the devices become less scarce, and their value will tank.

Because banks loan money into existence, loan practices are necessarily zero-sum functions. Banks loan rich people money at bargain-basement prices, and often renegotiate debt at a loss to keep rich people’s business coming. But borrowers with limited capital, fixed incomes, or a short borrowing history—the poor, the young, and the elderly—pay above market value for home, business, and student loans. Just another way it’s expensive to be poor.

This is ironic, because anybody who knows real poor people knows they’re scrupulous about repaying debts. Unless they’re truly destitute, actual working poor will work themselves into medical collapse to remain current on their mortgages, car loans, and person-to-person handshake debts. I’ve seen friends living hand-to-mouth, reduced to tears because they believe their insuperable student debts reflect their personal moral value.

Jeff Bezos

Thus, when wealthy people sink money into illiquid assets, like land or market futures, they don’t just bind money; they bind society’s trust. We invest our collective belief in the idea that capitalists know how to manage machines they’ve never operated, or coordinate teams they’ve never met. We believe it, and therefore it becomes true. Then they demand the law enforce their absentee title on capital they can’t physically possess.

Maria Konnikova writes that con-artists prey upon the very morals of trust and community which make organized society possible. Despite what high-handed moralists claim, falling victim to swindlers doesn’t make you weak; it actually means you possess an abundance of the morals which built modern society. That makes it especially important to arrest grifters, because they’re manipulating not individuals, but the very foundations of industrialized civilization.

When bad-faith actors like Trump, Musk, or Zuckerberg lie money into existence, they do so by manipulating our trust. Those who have faced such manipulation know that, when trust is severed, it grows back only slowly, only painfully. We gain human value—including financial value—only from the human community. Therefore these liars don’t just hurt themselves or the financial markets they manipulate. They scorch the roots of modern, settled civilization.

Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen, Part 2

This essay follows my prior review, Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen. In the review, I attempted to avoid spoilers. In this essay, I make no such effort; if you would like to watch the movie, please do so before reading any further here.

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) has had it with your myths, in Damsel

When Prince Henry tosses his bride, Princess Elodie, into the dragon’s chasm, on one level we witness a conventional myth. Like Jesus or Orpheus, Elodie must pass through the grave, defeat the chthonic monster, and return bearing the truth. On another level, we witness an uncomfortable reality that past myths elided: that the truth our hero brings from beyond the grave isn’t what we want to hear. And we don’t know how that truth will change us.

Tolkien and Lewis aggressively embraced fairy tales in a specific context, following the degradations of two world wars. Both fought in World War I before becoming scholars, then sat helplessly through World War II and the Blitz. As Christians, both men believed true morality existed, but they couldn’t see it around them. So they sought moral certitude in distant lands and times, an evasion of the present which Lewis himself acknowledged outright.

Today’s fairy tales, like the movie Damsel, emerge from a different context. Where both Tolkien and Lewis yearned to restore divinely anointed god-kings to their fairylands’ thrones, we live in the backwash of colonial empires, unable to pretend the past we admire consisted of unadulterated goodness. No matter where we live, our land was seized from another people, maybe recently, maybe centuries ago. But literally everyone lives on stolen land.

Damsel enacts this myth in stark realism. Queen Isabelle of Aurea and her superficially charming son, Henry, live on land stolen from the dragon. They admit this during the closing rituals of the marriage ceremony. They must propitiate this distant past through continual sacrifice, through the blood of those descended from the original settlers. Aurea’s continued glittering prosperity relies on someone reënacting that original conquest.

Here we might benefit from consulting prior religious scholars. Émile Durkheim believed that religion begins by extoling the people’s innate virtues; God, Durkheim believed, came late to religion. What Durkheim called “primitive” religion simply preserves the people’s shared virtues by ritualizing them. Mircea Eliade went further, seeing the liturgical calendar as a continuing reënactment of the religion’s founding moments. We walk forever in our prophets’ shoes.

In this regard, Queen Isabelle acts not as her nation’s political leader, but its priest. (No commoners speak in this movie; every character is aristocratic, or an aristocrat’s courtier.) She enacts her nation’s founding sacrifice, preserving peace and stability through blood. Sure, she uses a technicality to weasel out of the actual sacrifice, making beautiful foreigners pay Aurea’s actual blood debt. But the forms matter to national religion, not the spirit.

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) and Prince Henry (Nick Robinson)

Passing through the grave, Princess Elodie returns with the capital-T Truth that Aurea’s founding myth is a lie. Aurea’s founding king attacked the dragon, not to preserve his people, but to enlarge his own glory; he slaughtered the land’s original inhabitants, the dragons, purely for spite. The dragon appears monstrous to living humans because mythology has created this terror, but Truth says humans must abandon this belief and confront their own guilt.

The parallels with modernity are so stark, they need acknowledged but not explicated. As an American, I realize my Anglo-Saxon ancestors seized this land from its prior inhabitants. But that’s what Anglo-Saxons do, as they also previously conquered Britain from its Celtic inhabitants. Not that those Celts were innocent, as their mythology describes seizing Britain from Albion, a terrible giant whose exaggerated evil resembles that of Elodie’s dragon.

Every human nation sits on conquered land. Every nation also has founding myths to justify that conquest. Virgil invented a conquest myth to justify Roman military might, and India’s earliest Vedic poetry is a fight song in praise of seizing a neighboring tribe’s women. Only recently has public morality evolved to consider conquest unsavory, mostly after two World Wars, when technology made conquest both visible and grisly in wholly new ways.

Damsel ends with Aurea’s capital in flames. Though the camera lingers on Queen Isabelle’s death, we know nothing of the civilians caught in that conflagration. Because although every myth and fairy tale agrees that exposing the Truth will liberate the oppressed, we don’t know what comes next. The Bible claims that the triumphant Truth will simply conclude this Age. This movie follows the scriptural precedent, burning human kingdoms down and sailing into a vague future.

Lewis and Tolkien loved fairy tales because they believed their mythology could address modern questions without modern moral blurriness. Damsel arguably takes the same tack. However, it proceeds from an assumption that the mythic past wasn’t as pearly as prior generations believed.

Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen

Millie Bobby Brown as Princess Elodie in Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Damsel

What is it with filmmakers chopping off Millie Bobby Brown’s hair? The haircuts are explicitly gendered, too, or anyway counter-gendered. In her first featured role, Intruders, she gave herself a weirdly genderless half-bob to emphasize the show’s supernatural themes. Stranger Things obviously involved her learning how to be a girl. Now, in Damsel, another self-inflicted haircut signposts her transition from “princess” to “warrior queen.”

Any analysis of Damsel necessarily involves admitting this is a movie for mainly young audiences. Grown-ups will almost obsessively notice the prior media products this movie pinches from. This includes obvious borrowings from LotR and Game of Thrones, and less widely viewed fare, like 2019’s Ready or Not and your nephew’s latest Dungeons & Dragons campaign. There’s even a helpful map carved into a wall, guiding player characters to safety.

Younger viewers, unburdened by prior experience, will probably enjoy this movie, simply for MBB’s character. Princess Elodie spends nearly half the movie onscreen alone, sometimes accompanied by a CGI dragon. She’s dressed inappropriately for the environment, still wearing her wedding dress, and has no tools, weapons, or food. She extemporizes survival gear from whatever comes to hand. Princess Elodie is, admittedly, gripping to watch.

Queen Isabelle tempts Elodie from her icy, impoverished homeland by promising her son, Prince Henry, as a groom. Elodie, though a princess, is reasonably self-reliant, and chops wood herself to provide for her subjects during an unusually bitter winter. But Prince Henry and the Kingdom of Aurea offer Elodie the opportunity to see a larger world and live without constant fear. Despite her youth, Elodie acquiesces to this arranged marriage.

Unfortunately, the movie’s trailer already spoiled the twist that caps Act One: the marriage is a lie. Isabelle and Henry need Elodie as a sacrifice for a nameless dragon whose mountain overshadows the kingdom. Cast headlong into the dragon’s lair, Elodie must struggle not only to escape, but to uncover the long-simmering ancestral lie that makes her sacrifice necessary. Because her survival doesn’t matter if Queen Isabelle sacrifices Elodie’s sister.

Robin Wright, who kick-started her career playing a similarly betrothed ingenue in The Princess Bride, portrays Queen Isabelle with the same oily deceit she probably learned from her co-star, Chris Sarandon. (Yet another cinematic borrowing.) Meanwhile the dragon, voiced by Iranian-American actor Shoreh Agdashloo, seems transplanted from Shrek—yes, seriously. Because Elodie’s and Shrek’s dragons share character motivations entirely female in nature.

Yes, that’s a stereotype, but a useful one.

Robin Wright as Queen Isabelle in Damsel

Elodie’s character arc isn’t new, or even particularly recent. The “Princess Rescues Herself” trope certainly predates my awareness of fantasy literature: almost from the moment Tolkien solidified the genre’s standards, fans began rewriting Arwen-type characters into greater self-reliance. But MBB invests this road-tested story arc with the gravitas she brings to characters like Eleven. Elodie is strong, not because it’s a genre boilerplate, but because she has no other choice.

Brown conveys her internal transformation externally. She’s thrown into the dragon’s pit still wearing her satin wedding dress, without tools or weapons. The more determined Elodie becomes to survive, the more pieces of her elegant gown tear off. She fashions bandages from her skirts, a glowworm lantern from her sleeves, a climbing piton from her corset stays. Piece by piece, the emblems of luxury transform into the tools of survival.

This results in an outcome that may give some parents pause: the more resilient and self-assured Elodie becomes, the more naked she becomes. That’s also where the hair-chopping comes in, as her long, elegant tresses become an impediment to survival. Elodie emerges victorious and muscular, but also showing plenty of skin. She saunters into her triumphant scene reduced to torn, scorched undergarments, looking like a Frank Frazetta splash panel.

Given the movie’s primarily young target audience, this nakedness, coupled with some Game of Thrones-ish violence, will give some parents pause. It doesn’t rely on explicit sex or coarse language, and anyway, most middle-grade viewers have probably seen content more graphic online anymore, so tweens and early teens will undoubtedly enjoy it. If your kids are grade-school-aged, though, maybe consider watching beside them, just in case.

Some prior critics lambasted this movie for unrealistic standards. Eldie outruns fire, survives catastrophic injury, and handles a sword correctly the first time she grabs one. Apparently some people find this implausible in a movie with an immortal fire-breathing dragon. Picky, picky, picky. The movie’s intended audience will have no such qualms; they’ll simply enjoy watching Elodie survive. And parents will enjoy watching their kids enjoy it.