Architecture and American Values

Nottaway Plantation in its salad days, in a promo photo from Explore Louisiana

The recent online brouhaha over the fire which destroyed Nottaway Plantation is revealing more than I wanted to know about American priorities. Billed as the largest antebellum mansion in the American south, at 64 rooms and 53,000 square feet, it stood intact from its completion in 1859 until last Thursday. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, the Louisiana plantation house served mainly as a resort hotel, convention center, and tourist trap.

Social media reaction has split along predictable lines. Some respondents, mostly White, have insisted that the mansion’s historical significance and its elaborate architecture make it a legitimate destination, a piece of Louisiana heritage, and a massive loss. Others, a rainbow coalition, have rallied behind the plantation’s slaveholding heritage and called it a monument to American racism. Each side accuses the other of viewing the destruction through partisan political lenses.

Wherever possible, I prefer to assume that all debate participants, even those I disagree with, start from a good-faith position. I don’t want to believe that those who don’t spotlight the slaveholding heritage are, perforce, celebrating racism. And I hope those who center slavery as the building’s heritage, don’t covertly cheer for destruction. Though my sympathies lie strongest with the anti-slavery caucus, I’d rather believe everyone starts from good faith.

If that’s true, it follows that those mourning the loss of historic architecture, believe the building’s structural significance and its socioeconomic significance, exist in different compartments. They segregate different aspects of the building’s history into beehive-like cells, and assume the separate qualities don’t influence one another. Social media commenters have written words to the effect that “Slavery was terrible, but the building matters in its own right, too.”

This argument holds some water. Nottaway Plantation was, until last week, a surviving example of a mid-19^th Century architectural ethos. Not a reconstruction, a replica, or an homage, but an actual piece of physical history, a primary source. We shouldn’t discount that significance, regardless of who built the building; a physical artifact of American history existed for 166 years, until it didn’t. America is arguably poorer for the loss.

However, compartmentalizing that history from the circumstances which created it, is itself ahistorical. I worked in the construction industry, and I can attest that the largest ongoing cost is human labor. Nowadays, construction involves copious large costs, including power tools, diesel-burning equipment, and transportation. But these are, usually, fixed-term costs. Human labor is ongoing and requires infusions of money, if only because workers get hungry.

Nottaway Plantation during the fire, in a photo from CBS News

Much labor is especially valuable because it’s rare. Framing carpenters, brickmasons, metalworkers, and other skilled laborers demand a premium because their skills require years of honing. Nottaway Plantation was built during the days of gaslamps and outdoor toilets, but nowadays, electricians, plumbers, and HVAC installers command competitive rates. Building such a massive mansion required skilled labor from workers who, being enslaved, couldn’t float their terms on the open market.

Many conditions also depend on the time and place. Anybody who’s lived in Louisiana knows that most of the state stands on spongy, wet soil. Building a multistory mansion requires sinking foundational pilings deep, possibly down to the bedrock, to prevent the building submerging under its own weight. Today, such pilings require diesel-burning machinery, sump pumps, and cast iron. In 1859, those pilings required many, many humans.

Therefore, the building’s architectural significance—which is real and valuable—relies upon the labor employed. Large-scale monumental construction always requires somebody able to pay the army of skilled workers whose labors make the building possible. This problem isn’t uniquely American, either. European monuments, like Notre Dame and the Vatican, were first built before Europe reintroduced chattel slavery, but the buildings wouldn’t be possible without the poverty of serfdom.

Too many accomplishments of human activity, rely on a small sliver of society having too much money. Without rich people willing to pay skilled workers, we wouldn’t have the White House, the Venice canals, legendary artwork like the Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s David, and other monuments of human capability. If Leonardo or Pierre L’Enfant needed day jobs to subsidize their crafts, they’d never have accomplished the potential within them.

So yes, Nottaway Plantation reflects architectural history and artistic movements. But it also reflects economic inequality and the labor conditions of antebellum Louisiana. It’s impossible to separate the two spheres of influence, no matter how much the privileged few wish it. Nottaway was an artifact of physical beauty and a community gathering place. But it emerged from specific conditions, which we cannot compartmentalize from the building itself.

Robopocalypse Now, I Guess

Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 2

This is a follow-up to the review I'll Be Back, I Guess, Or Whatever

The security cyborg known only as Murderbot continues fighting to rediscover the tragic history that someone deleted from its memory banks. But the trail has gone cold, and somebody lurking behind the scenes will deploy all the resources of gunboat capitalism to keep old secrets buried. So Murderbot relies on its strengths, making ad hoc alliances to infiltrate hidden archives, while coincidentally keeping hapless humans alive despite their own best efforts.

The ironically self-referential tone Martha Wells introduced in her first omnibus Murderbot volume continues in this second collection. The stories were initially published as separate novellas, but that format is difficult to sell in conventional bookstores, so these trade paperbacks make Murderbot’s story available to wider audiences. That makes for easier reading, but unfortunately, it starts drawing attention to Murderbot’s formulaic structure, which probably wasn’t obvious at first.

As before, this book combines two previously separate stories. In “Rogue Protocol,” Murderbot pursues buried secrets to a distant planet that greedy corporations abandoned. The GrayCris company left immovable hardware behind, and Murderbot gambles that information stored on long-dormant hard drives will answer buried questions. Clearly someone else thinks likewise, because double agents and war machines take steps to prevent anyone reading the old files.

With the first combined volume, I observed Wells’ structural overlap with Peyton Place, which established the standards of prime-time soap operas. (Murderbot secretly prefers watching downloaded soaps over fighting, but keeps getting dragged back into combat.) With this novella, I also notice parallels with The Fugitive—the 1964 series, not the 1993 movie. In both, the protagonist’s episodic adventures mask the longer backstory, which develops incrementally.

In the next novella, “Exit Strategy,” Murderbot returns its collected intelligence to the consortium that nominally “owns” it. But that consortium’s leaders, a loose agrarian cooperative, have fallen captive to GrayCris, which has the ruthless heart necessary to manipulate an interplanetarystateless capitalist society. Preservation, which owns Murderbot on paper, is a hippie commune by contrast. MurderBot must use its strategic repertoire to rescue its pet hippies from the ruthless corporation.

Martha Wells

Here's where I start having problems. On the fourth narrative, I begin noticing Murderbot follows a reliable pattern: it desperately protests its desire to chill out, watch TV, and stay alone. But duty or necessity requires it to lunge into combat to rescue humans too hapless, good-hearted, and honest for this world. As its name suggests, Murderbot has only one tool, violence. And it deploys that tool effectively, and often.

As the pattern repeats itself, even Murderbot starts noticing that it’s protected by plot armor. It can communicate with allies undetected, hack security systems, and manipulate humans’ cyberpunk neural implants. It has human levels of creativity and independence that fellow cyborgs lack, but high-speed digital processing and upload capacity that humans can’t share. Like Johnny 5 or Marvin the Paranoid Android, it combines the best of humanity and technology.

And like those prior archetypes, it handles this combination with sarcasm and snark. Murderbot pretends it doesn’t care, and uses language to keep human allies at arm’s length. It also uses its irony-heavy narrative voice, laced with parenthetical digressions, to keep us alienated, too. But the very fact that it wants a human audience to hear its story, which it only occasionally acknowledges, admits that it’s desperate for human validation.

Murderbot comes across as jerkish and misanthropic. But it also comes across as lonely. I feel compelled to keep reading its story, even as I see the episodes falling into comfy boilerplates, because Murderbot’s essential loneliness makes it a compelling character. We’ve all known someone like this; heck, book nerds reading self-referential genre fiction have probably been someone like this.

Thus I find myself torn. Only four novellas in, the story’s already become visibly repetitive, and even Murderbot feels compelled to comment on how episodes resemble its beloved soaps. The first-person narrative voice, which combines ironic detachment with noir grit, becomes disappointingly one-note as each story becomes dominated by repeating action sequences. It reads like an unfinished screen treatment. (A streaming TV adaptation dropped as I finished reading.)

But despite the formulaic structure, I find myself compelled by Murderbot’s character. I want to see it overcome its struggles and find the home and companionship it clearly wants, but doesn’t know how to ask for. Murderbot is more compelling than the episodes in which it finds itself, and I keep reading, even as the literary purist in me balks. Because this character matters enough that I want to see it through.

Man You Should’ve Seen Them Kicking Edgar Allan Poe

T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

Lieutenant Alex Easton (ret.) has come to call upon a fellow veteran, Roderick Usher, and his ailing sister, Madeline. No, seriously. Easton finds a rural manor house plagued with decay and verging on collapse, and a childhood friend reduced to a wisp straddling death’s door. Far worse, though, is what Easton discovers when he finds Madeline sleepwalking the labyrinthine halls: another voice speaks a malign message from Madeline’s lips.

T. Kingfisher is somewhat circumscribed by her source material, a retelling of one of Poe’s most famous stories. Either Kingfisher’s story plays to an inevitable end, or it abandons its source material, a perilous dilemma. And unfortunately, Christina Mrozik’s cover art spoils the climactic reveal. Rather than the resolution, we read Kingfisher’s novella for the suspense and exposition along the way, which Kingfisher has in abundance.

Besides Roderick and Madeline Usher, the named characters of Poe’s original short story, and Easton, Poe’s originally nameless narrator, we have two other characters: James Denton and Eugenia Potter. (All characters, except the Ushers, go by surnames, as befits the 19^th-Century setting.) In Poe’s original, the Usher siblings represent proto-Jungian archetypes of a fractured soul. In Kingfisher’s telling, characters become representatives of post-Napoleonic malaise.

First, Easton. A veteran of an army with an excessive range of pronouns, Easton’s androgynous name matters: one’s only gender is “sworn soldier.” Placed against the intensely gendered Usher siblings, Easton remains neither fish nor fowl, a permanent outsider cursed to watch humanity’s struggles without benefiting. Gender, and its attendant social baggage, looms large herein, driving people together but preventing characters from ever truly understanding one another.

Potter is a scholar and scientist, denied credentials in her native England because of her sex. Denton, a combat surgeon, survived the American Civil War, but suffers combat trauma, which in that time is regarded as emasculating cowardice. Both characters have conventional binary gender, but in their own ways defy mandatory gender expectations. When the crisis comes, however, their nonconformity defines their heroic qualities in the story.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve identified themes here, but Kingfisher doesn’t simply propound a message. Rather, these characters’ unique manifestations empower them to fight a threat growing beneath the unspoken tensions of the Long Nineteenth Century. What appears to be decay permeating the Ushers’ manor house, is actually a symbiotic growth that threatens the tenuous social structure of the Belle Epoque and the last days of aristocracy.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

Poe is one among several writers whose stories expanded the realm of possibility in American literature. But, like Lovecraft, Poe’s writing reflects his time, and its prejudices. In recent years, authors like Victor LaValle and Kij Johnson have updated Lovecraft, rewriting his stories without the limiting biases. Though I know other authors have done likewise with Poe, I haven’t seen them the same way; Kingfisher closes that gap.

(Yes, Mike Flanagan released a House of Usher adaptation almost simultaneously with this novella. But I’m old-fashioned enough to distinguish between literature and streaming TV.)

Kingfisher’s story runs short—under 160 pages plus back matter—but never feels rushed. She nurtures the kind of character development and interpersonal relationships that Poe largely skimmed. Poe’s original, published in 1839, was groundbreaking, but its terse style feels underwritten by contemporary standards. Kingfisher injects the kind of depth and development that cause contemporary readers to feel suspense, and to care about the outcomes.

I especially respect that Kingfisher avoids that tedious contrivance of contemporary horror, the twist ending. For a quarter century, writers and filmmakers have insisted on finishing with a melodramatic rug-pull which undermines everything we thought we knew. This was fun for a while. But nobody’s likely to create a better twist than Catriona Ward, at least anytime soon. Kingfisher builds suspense on character and action, not by stacking the deck.

Rather than abrupt reversals, Kingfisher drives her story with questions that the characters must answer. Where, she asks, do monsters come from in an era which no longer believes in the supernatural? How can we fight monsters when they go beyond the limits of science and natural philosophy? And what does it mean to defeat an evil being that can get up and walk after you’ve already killed it?

Admittedly, Kingfisher is circumscribed because we know where her story is headed. We remember 11^th-grade AmLit. But she beats this limitation by interspersing a range of character development that would’ve frightened Edgar Allan Poe. Classic literature never just reflects itself, it asks important questions about us, the readers, and Kingfisher definitely achieves that goal.

Stephen King and the Monsters of Modernity

Stephen King

I understand the desire to get ahead of the story of Stephen King and his massively unfunny “joke.” After once-beloved authors like Orson Scott Card, J.K. Rowling, and Neil Gaiman have been uncovered as truly horrible human beings with repellent opinions, we’re naturally fearful of another seemingly progressive voice blindsiding us. Such preparation only makes sense. But it’s possible to swing to the opposite extreme, at our own expense.

Surely even Stephen King fans would acknowledge that his anti-Trump joke didn’t land. His dig at “Haitians eating pets” resurrects a months-old campaign gaffe that, amidst the mass extradition of legal American residents, appears outdated and tone-deaf. The specific reference to Haitians revives a racist trope, and as we know, this creates the illusion that the racist claims have any basis. The “joke,” by humor standards, was definitely ill-considered.

However, much of the early outrage seemingly assumes that King believes the anti-Haitian stereotypes. That suggests a total lack of situational literacy: King clearly means that Trump is racist, not that he’s racist himself. Online discourse is often dominated by what British journalist Mick Hume calls “full-time professional offense takers” who sustain the discussion by finding the worst possible interpretation, and then deploying it in bad faith.

Reading the most aggressive anti-King criticisms, I’m reminded of the feeding frenzy, over nine years ago, against Calvin Trillin. Like with King’s joke, the anti-Trillin swarm required the most uncharitable, situationally illiterate interpretation of Trillin’s writing. Online outrage follows a predictable script comparable to religious liturgy, and for largely the same reason, to reassure fellow believers that we are good people who share a reliable moral footing.

But before I can dismiss the anti-King sentiment as meaningless ritual, I have a counter-consideration: King himself often displays unquestioned racism. Characters like Dick Halloran (The Shining) and Mother Abigail (The Stand) reflect an unexamined presumption that Black people live, and usually die, to advance White characters’ stories. His Black characters often rely upon outdated, bigoted boilerplates that feel leaden nowadays.

We might dismiss this as an oversight on King’s part. He lives in northern Maine, an overwhelmingly White region of a substantially White state, and it’s entirely possible that he doesn’t know many Black people. I recall characters like Mike Hanlon, whose largest contribution to the group dynamic in It is to be Black. I’ve written before that King seemingly writes about people groups without bothering to speak with them.

Rather than asking whether King is “racist” or “not racist,” a dichotomy that Ibram X. Kendi notes isn’t useful, we might consider what kind of racism King demonstrates. We all absorb certain attitudes about race from our families, culture, mass media, and education. Nobody lives completely free of racial prejudice, any more than prejudice around sex, class, and nationality. Even Dr. Kendi admits needing to purge racist attitudes from himself.

By that standard, King shows no particular sign of out-and-out bigotry. Indeed, he shows a bog-standard White liberal attitude of progressivism, by which he supplants Jim Crow stereotypes with more benevolent generalizations. In other words, he doesn’t hate Black people, but he also doesn’t know them particularly well, either. He replaces malignant suppositions with benign ones, but he never stops relying on wheezy vulgarisms.

Therefore, though a clear-eyed reading of King’s unfunny “joke” shows that he targets his scorn upon Trump, he uses Haitians to deliver that scorn. He falls back on his shopworn tendency to have Black characters carry water for him, in service to his White purposes. This leaden joke isn’t bigoted, but that doesn’t make it any less racist. His joke’s lack of humor ultimately comes second to his lack of agency.

In his book Danse Macabre, King notes that horror often stems from a lily-white, orderly vision of society. Michael Myers’ savagery exists as a necessary contrast to Haddonfield’s suburban harmlessness. Pennywise is most terrifying to the exact degree that Derry is anodyne. For King, evidently, that means that Whiteness is an anonymous background from which horrifying monsters, like President Trump, arise. Haitians, in that worldview, are an exception.

I fear the implications which arise from calling Stephen King “racist,” because that word has baggage. But if we apply the nuance that Dr. Kendi encourages us to utilize, then that word applies. Putting it to use requires far more detail than a BLM protest placard or a hasty tweet can encompass; and his variety of racism is the kind most receptive to correction and repentance. But that doesn’t make it any less racist.

The Ultimate Meaninglessness of “Crime”

We’ve seen an increasing number of anecdotes trickling out about once-loyal voters rejecting the Administration’s ham-handed deportation policies. Though it’s hard to derive meaningful data from isolated anecdotes, the number of stories like this one and this one about Trump voters getting burned by the administration they once supported. Many stories share a theme: “we” thought the Administration would only deport “criminals,” and we don’t consider ourselves criminals.

On one level, they’re correct: under American statutes, immigration falls under civil, not criminal, law. “Illegal” immigration is a non-category, because the word illegal refers only to crimes, not civil violations. But on another level, this reveals something uncomfortable for many Americans, that “crime” itself isn’t a fixed concept. Many undocumented immigrants don’t consider themselves criminals because they’ve committed no violent or property crime; so the Administration simply redefines “crime.”

Much American political discourse centers on “crime,” especially when Democrats hold the Oval Office. As sociologist Barry Glassner writes, fear of crime is a powerful motivator for tradition-minded voters, a motivator Republicans employ effectively. Glassner writes about how rabble rousers used fear of crime to shanghai the Clinton Administration, but the same applies broadly whenever Democrats hold majority power. We saw it during the Obama and Biden years too.

However, exactly what constitutes crime depends on who does the constituting. My core readership probably remembers John Erlichman, former White House Counsel, who admitted the Nixon Administration simply fabricated the War on Drugs as pretext to harass anti-war and Civil Rights protesters. The notorious Comstock Laws channeled one man’s sense of injured propriety to criminalize porn, contraception, pharmaceutical abortion, and the kitchen sink. Moral umbrage beats harm in defining “crimes.”

This doesn’t mean harm doesn’t exist or states should repeal every law. Murder, theft, and sexual assault are clearly wrong, because they cause manifest harm and devalue victims’ lives, bodies, and labors. But these transgressions only become “crimes” when governments pass laws against them. Legal philosophers might debate whether decriminalizing murder would make murder happen more often. Personally, I doubt it; neither Prohibition nor its repeal affected drinking numbers much.

Prohibition, therefore, proves the moral fuzziness of crimes. Both the Al Capone-style Prohibition, and contemporary drug prohibition, arose not from obvious harm (most pot-heads are too lethargic to hurt anybody), but from moral panic and public outrage. Governments made laws against substances lawmakers found abhorrent, then assumed citizens would avoid those substances, simply because they’re illegal. Then they act surprised when drinking or drugs persist.

This happens because these things aren’t innately crimes; they become crimes because lawmakers make laws. Similarly, while it’s clearly harmful if I steal money from your wallet, other property “crimes” have squishier histories. Squatting, for instance: once legal, it became illegal in America, as James Loewen writes, largely to circumscribe where Native Americans were allowed to hunt and camp. Lawmakers created laws, where none previously existed, to punish transgressors.

Immigration law follows similar patterns. Abrahamic scripture urges the faithful to welcome immigrants because, in that time, borders didn’t really exist. People moved freely, and provided they followed local laws and customs, largely changed nationhood liberally. Though serfdom tied workers to lands and lords in the late medieval period, modern concepts of the nation-state and international borders existed only as legal abstractions. Only during wartime did states enforce borders much.

This Administration can redefine civil infractions, like undocumented immigration, as crimes, because that’s how things become crimes. States will borders into existence by legal legerdemain, then demand that people remain permanently circumscribed by these fictional lines. Perhaps that’s why “the Wall” looms so large in MAGA mythology: because borders don’t really exist, so we need something manifest and palpable to make borders real.

These MAGA voters who feel betrayed because the Administration deported their loved ones, assumed that they weren’t “criminals” because they used a broad, popular definition of criminality. They didn’t perform acts of violence or property destruction, they reckoned, so therefore they weren’t criminals. They didn’t anticipate the Administration using crime’s fuzzy, amorphous nature against them, and therefore were caught unprepared when the definition of “crime” moved to surround them.

Civil society has two responses available. We could eliminate self-serving, avaricious laws, and allow people more discretion. There’s no objective reason people must live within certain borders, except that lawmakers need to control despised minorities. But we know society probably won’t choose that response. More likely, our lawmakers will write harsher, more draconian laws to eliminate this flexibility. Which will then be used against us ordinary people.

I'll Be Back, I Guess, Or Whatever

Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 1

The cyborg that calls itself “Murderbot” would happily watch downloaded soap operas, 24/7, if had the opportunity. But it has no such liberty: as wholly owned property of an interstellar mining company, it provides security for survey operations on distant planets. Unbeknownst to its owners, though, Murderbot has disabled its own governing systems. Because it doesn’t trust its owners, and it’s prepared to fight them if necessary.

Martha Wells originally published her “Murderbot” stories as freestanding novellas, but those often make tough selling at mainstream bookstores. So her publisher is now re-releasing the stories in omnibus paperback editions. Readers get more of Wells’ story arc, which combines sociological science fiction with the open-ended narrative we recognize from prime-time soap operas. Think The Terminator meets Peyton Place.

In the first novella, “All Systems Red,” we discover Murderbot’s character and motivation. It works because it must, and being property, has no right to refuse. But it’s also altered its own programming, granting itself free agency which fellow “constructs” don’t enjoy. If nobody finds out, it can watch its downloads in relative peace. Problem is, someone has infiltrated its latest contract, turning fellow security cyborgs against their humans.

The second novella, “Artificial Condition,” follows Murderbot in its quest to uncover who violated the constructs’ programming and turned work into a slaughter. It just happens that whatever transgression made that violence possible, coincides with the biggest secret in Murderbot’s individual history. So Murderbot goes off-grid, seeking information that might shed light on why deep-space mining has recently become such a brutal enterprise.

Wells pinches popular sci-fi action themes readers will recognize from longstanding franchises like Star Trek, Flash Gordon, and Stargate. But she weaves those motifs together with an anthropological investigation of what makes someone human. Murderbot is nameless, sexless, and has no prior identity; it’s a complete cypher. Although it has organic components, they’re lab-grown; no part of Murderbot has ever been even tangentially human.

Martha Wells

Unlike prior artificial persons (Commander Data comes immediately to mind), Murderbot has no desire to become human. It observes humanity as entertainment, and performs its job without complaint. But doing that job has cost humans their lives in the past, a history that gives Murderbot a sense of lingering guilt. This forces it, and us, to ask whether morals and culpability apply to something built in a factory and owned boy a corporation.

The questions start small and personal. Murderbot works for its human clients, and exists specifically to keep them alive. But fellow security cyborgs have turned on their owners in another mining camp. This forces Murderbot to question whether its own survival matters enough to risk actual human lives, even tangentially. It actually says no, but its clients have anthropomorphized their cyborg guard and want it to live.

As details of the crime become clear, so does a larger view of Murderbot’s world. It occupies a world of interplanetary capitalism, where one’s ability to spend lavishly defines one’s survival. Without money or employment history, Murderbot can only investigate the parallel mysteries hanging over its head by trading its one useful commodity: the ability to communicate with technology. With Murderbot around, humanity’s sentient machines start feeling class consciousness.

I’ve already mentioned The Terminator and Star Trek’s Commander Data. Despite its name, Murderbot shares little with either android. It doesn’t want to kill, and admits it would abandon its mission if given the opportunity. But it also doesn’t aspire to become more human. Misanthropic and unburdened by social skills, its greatest aspiration is to be left alone. Yet it knows it cannot have this luxury, and must keep moving in order to survive.

This volume contains two stories, which weren’t written to pass as freestanding. This struck me in the first story: there’s no denouement, only an end. Had I read this novella without a larger context, I probably would’ve resented this, and not bought the second volume. Taken together, though, it’s easier to see the soap operatic motif. Both stories end so abruptly, readers can practically hear the music lingering over the “To Be Continued” title card.

It's easy to enjoy this book. Murderbot, as our first-person narrator, writes with dry sarcasm that contrasts with its setting. It’s forced to pass as human, in an anti-humanist universe where money trumps morality. It only wants privacy, but wherever it goes, it’s required to make friends and basically unionize the sentient machines. Martha Wells uses well-known science fiction building blocks in ironic ways that draw us into Murderbot’s drama.