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.

Autopsy for an Institution

Vice President Kamala Harris

Conventionally, political parties conduct postmortems following every Presidential election. These self-reflections especially matter after a loss. If parties and their voters can accurately identify what led to the outcomes, they can reverse their losses later. When Mitt Romney failed to unseat Barack Obama in 2012, the Republican National Committee determined their message was insufficiently inclusive. How that led to the pugnacious, bigoted Donald Trump, I cannot figure.

In 2024, Democrats lost the Presidency and the Senate. The House of Representatives remains uncalled, but a Democratic upset appears unlikely. After a campaign anchored on promises to hurt POC, queer people, and dissidents, American voters decided they preferred that over a Democrat with a proven, but workmanlike, track record. With a stranglehold on American government, Republicans stand poised to unleash epoch-making pain on ordinary citizens.

Democrats probably won’t begin their postmortem until January, between the Congressional and Presidential inaugurations. However, I believe it’s necessary to commence now, while feelings remain high. Why, with so much at stake, did millions of Democratic voters stay home? Trump gained almost no absolute numbers following 2020; his majority margin apparently consists of Biden voters who sat out the Harris campaign and didn’t vote at all. How did that happen?

(There’s no concrete evidence of voter fraud; the difference apparently consists entirely of voter apathy.)

Edit: in light of new evidence, it appears that Trump did not win an outright majority. Though he came first in the popular vote, continuing counts indicate that he fell short of the 50% threshold.

Though every election has its own character, one recurrent thread remains evident throughout my lifetime: Democrats desperately want to prevent another 1968 Democratic National Convention. Bipartisan anger at Lyndon Johnson’s mishandling of the Vietnam War, coupled with Hubert Humphrey’s general unpopularity, caused streets to erupt in violence. The brutality made the Democrats look slovenly and dangerous, which handed the general election to Richard Nixon.

Former President Jimmy Carter

Beginning arguably with Jimmy Carter, the Democrats began fleeing their legacy with FDR’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Teddy Kennedy primaried Carter from the Left for exactly this reason. Unfortunately, this challenge fractured the Democratic coalition and helped hold the door for Ronald Reagan. In autopsying their 1980 drubbing, Democrats decided their lesson was that they needed to tack harder to the center and abandon the New Deal.

Thus commenced the Democrats’ centrist fixation, beginning with Walter Mondale’s historically milquetoast 1984 campaign. 1988 should’ve been Gary Hart’s year, until he imploded following the notorious Monkey Business photo, kicking the nomination to Michael Dukakis. But Mikey-D proved inept and subjected himself to multiple humiliations, giving us the only time since World War II that the same political party won three consecutive Presidential elections.

Dukakis, a self-identified “liberal,” tanked in 1988, but centrist Bill Clinton won in 1992. To this day, many Democrats insist that this proves voters prefer centrists. Democrats decided they needed, again, to chase the center and abandon the New Deal. I’d contend that Democrats’ 1992 victory reflects less a centrist at the top of the ticket, than the absence of Lee Atwater from inside the Republican National Committee.

Moreover, though Bill Clinton won twice, he never carried a majority. He probably wouldn’t have carried the plurality if Ross Perot, a former leading Nixon donor, hadn’t split the fiscal conservative vote twice. Facing a visibly fatigued George H.W. Bush in 1992 and an unsmiling Bob Dole in 1996, Clinton was less the popular choice of the 1990s than the candidate Americans could live with. Which isn’t saying much.

Failed candidate Michael Dukakis

Al Gore won a razor-thin plurality in 2000, but lost the procedure. But like Clinton, Gore never got the majority. Both Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 appeared starchy and joyless on camera, which shouldn’t matter, but does. Since campaigns today are highly visual endeavors, driven by television and YouTube, candidates need visual dynamism, which Barack Obama, for all his many faults, had.

Obama, another centrist, won two straight majorities, the first Democrat to do so since FDR. But consider his opponents: John McCain and Mitt Romney, who ran two of history’s greatest room-temperature campaigns. Hillary Clinton, another centrist, got more airtime for her frequent verbal gaffes than her policies. Clinton lost to the more entertaining Donald Trump, who only lost reelection after shitting in the metaphorical swimming pool on national TV.

2024 could offer Democrats the opportunity to shed the illusion of the phantom centrist voter, but it probably won’t. The party squandered precious momentum chasing crossover voters who have probably never existed. So here’s my postmortem, not only for the Democrats, but also for the entire United States:

Doing what we’ve done for fifty-six years hasn’t worked. Let’s change course before it’s too late.

Manufacturing Armageddon

This essay is a follow-up to two previous essays: The American Armageddon Factory and Another Product of the Armageddon Factory

Historian Betsy Hartmann’s book The America Syndrome identifies shared belief in imminent catastrophe as the underlying American public morality. From Puritan Christianity in the 17^th Century, to Utopian social engineering in the 19^th Century, to Global Warming in the 21^st Century, Americans have always believed the world will end tomorrow. Corollary to this belief, Americans—or anyway a subset of us—have always believed America will survive Armageddon.

Most important for Hartmann, this impending apocalypse always has a moral implication. This is obvious in Puritan Christianity, which believes a Triune God is preparing to distribute justice, in the form of payback to unbelievers. But even in the less aggressively religious 20^th and 21^st Centuries, this moralistic judgement never abates. The defining apocalypses of those eras (nuclear war, Malthusian overpopulation, and global warming) always reek somehow of karmic consequences.

Viewed thusly, the movie Leave the World Behind both does, and doesn’t, continue the “America Syndrome.” It similarly presents a secular present stretched to its limits, and a population that clothes its awareness of imminent collapse in a crazy quilt of misanthropy, denialism, and on-demand entertainment. This world requires only light pressure to snap. As Mahershala Ali explains in his culminating monologue, America has enemies willing to apply that pressure.

However, the movie lacks the moral component Hartmann identifies in prior apocalyptic predictions. Some characters attempt to retroactively construct an explanation which makes the events a payback for Americanism, but this is ramshackle and unconvincing. Ultimately, as Julia Roberts and Myha’la watch New York burn from across Long Island Sound, we’re left to conclude that sometimes, things happen because they happen; justifications are flimsy, selfish, and meaningless.

Thus far, I’ve attempted to avoid spoiling the movie’s irresolute resolution, like a faithful reviewer. But the movie’s closing three minutes color how we perceive everything that’s happened before. The story’s youngest character, 13-year-old Rosie, has abandoned the main house, where adults or near-adults squabble for control and explanation. The grown-ups want meaning; Rosie has spoken Delphicly about wanting something else, which she now pursues.

We find Rosie in a neighboring mansion, gorging herself on starchy processed snack foods and fizzy water. Hearing her mother’s panicked cries outside, Rosie instead flees deeper into the house, where she discovers a fully equipped luxury fallout shelter, including a massive home entertainment system. She activates the TV and scours the DVD racks to find the Holy Grail she’s pursued throughout the movie: the final episode of the sitcom Friends.

Rosie, the movie’s youngest character and therefore the one most definedly possessing a future, instead flees into a low-friction sitcom that ended nearly twenty years ago. In case the symbolism seems too subtle for streaming audiences, Myha’la’s character Ruth previously derided Friends as “nostalgia for a time that never really existed.” Facing the world-altering consequences of… well, something, Rosie flees from meaning and buries herself in mass-media anesthesia.

This movie’s moral backbone, to the extent it possesses one, certainly deserves criticism. It suggests that, deprived of our technology and entertainment, Americans will descend into base impulses, racism, and paranoia. Rather than moral payback, as Hartmann postulates, this movie suggests Armageddon will expose our near-complete moral vacuity. There’s no karmic retribution, this movie implies, when Americans don’t hold anything holy anymore anyway.

Yet as bad as this moral lesson is, the final takeaway, delivered by Rosie, feels worse. Given a blank slate to look forward and reinvent society on firmer moral footing, Rosie instead seeks resolution in a sitcom’s concise narrative arc. Not just any sitcom, either, but Friends. Sure, the show ended in 2005, during America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; but it began in 1995, the decade colored by America’s brightly-hued Cold War hangover.

Clear back in 2009, Mark Fisher wrote that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” The pre-catastrophe world this movie depicts resembles ours: fashionably pessimistic but convinced we need one long family holiday to restore our morality. Yet we, like this movie, face an historical inflection point: some socioeconomic change must happen soon, or everything will break without a safety net.

But instead of moralistic challenge and opportunity, the defining traits of past apocalypses, this movie shrugs and retreats into nihilism. With no vision of the New Jerusalem, or something compatible, the creative team simply can’t imagine another future. Therefore, the narrative threads they introduce don’t deserve resolution. Everything is ultimately meaningless, and ordinary humans are too vacuous to deserve rescue.

Fuck it, let’s go watch TV.

The Beatles and the Past That Never Ends

The Beatles, photographed at the peak of their star power

When the surviving Beatles released two new songs in 1995, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” built around John Lennon’s home demos, I was giddy. I bought the CDs promptly, and listened to them repeatedly, with the devotion a better-connected audiophile might’ve dedicated to finding a lost 78 by Billie Holliday. I mean, okay, the Beatles were never going to tour again, and these two tracks were in-studio novelties. But c’mon, man, it was the Beatles!

This week, a third and final post-breakup track dropped, “Now and Then.” This time, instead of whirling anticipation, I felt a gut-clench of dread. The landscape has changed since 1995. Just as important, though, I have changed. Yet despite my trepidation, I listened when the track dropped. Of course I did; millions of people worldwide listed simultaneously. And while the overall response has been positive, I heard the new track and felt… nothing.

“Now and Then” reads like a sweeping homage to everything the Beatles recorded post-Sgt. Pepper. The combination of psychedelic guitars, lush strings, and tight vocal harmonies, all reflect the forces driving the Beatles’ late-stage sound. It’s a perfect Beatles encomium—too perfect. The track sounds like something a particularly skillful Beatles tribute band might’ve composed after too many all-night benders, striving to unlock that elusive Lennon-McCartney magic.

I’ve written before about my efforts to become a baby boomer. I styled myself according to hippie peacenik conventions, listened to boomer rock, and told anyone listening how much I disdained the sounds of my generation. I imagined myself quite the activist, fighting the battles of 1968 with committed aplomb. The battles of my generation? Meh. By committing myself to the causes and culture of my parents’ youth, I convinced myself of my innate goodness.

Classic rock radio was the mass-media manifestation of this commitment. By hearing the great songs and great songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s repeated constantly, with new music never treading upon my consciousness, I convinced myself that I was a branded soldier for civil rights. “Branded” turns out to have been right, too. Only years later would I realize how thoroughly classic rock radio curated a well-scrubbed, anodyne version of that generation.

America has over 2,000 “classic rock,” “classic hits,” and “oldies” stations. Together, that’s more than any format except country music, and all three formats play the Beatles at least occasionally. Both separately and together, the Beatles continue to steer the sounds of Anglophonic pop culture, their repertoire ransacked by countless rock and pop bands, their style mimicked by acts eager to recapture their mojo. All these acts sound distressingly the same.

Since radio ownership regulations came down following the Telecommunications Act of 1996, radio has become monolithic. Three conglomerates control almost eighty percent of America’s radio broadcasting: iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), Audacy, and NBC. Likewise, three conglomerates dominate the recording industry, and three conglomerates control music publishing. These conglomerates almost don’t matter, though, since half of all music gets heard through one outlet: Spotify.

In other words, the music industry has become less diverse, more concentrated, and less receptive to public taste since the Beatles’ last new recordings in 1995. While the occasional Justin Bieber squeaks through, recording home cover versions for YouTube, most hitmakers’ careers are tightly controlled. Olivia Rodrigo and Selena Gomez, who appeared to emerge from nowhere, were cultivated by Disney for years before their breakthroughs.

In past generations, most music executives were musicians. George Martin, who produced every Beatles recording except the final three, was a jazz keyboardist who released several sides which went nowhere. Nowadays, music executives are bean counters with MBAs, monumentally risk-averse and beholden to what’s worked before. Therefore, today’s new releases persistently sound identical. New rock music is risky; let listeners re-hear the same “classics” their parents and grandparents loved.

From this milieu emerges a Beatles recording that sounds like a perfect amalgamation of everything the Fab Four recorded after 1966. And yes, it’s indeed perfect. It’s exactly what the band created in their notorious overnight sessions after they’d stopped touring and began investing full-time in their passion projects. Beatles fans like me should gobble it up; most will.

Yet I feel cold. George Harrison died twenty-two years ago, and John Lennon has been dead longer than he was alive, but their bandmates, and their label, won’t let them rest. The demand to produce a capstone song, which nobody knew was missing, sixty years later, has resulted in a paint-by-numbers product. Some things are just supposed to end.

The Wheel of Time After Time After Time

The main ensemble from Amazon's Wheel of Time, season one

The Amazon Studios adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time has obtained largely warm reviews, but mostly from critics who haven’t read the novels. A minority of critics have lambasted the adaptation for its lukewarm fealty to the source material; they’ve accused showrunner Rafe Judkins of not so much translating the source, as nesting inside it. I have a different problem. This series demonstrates the greatest problem of media in the streaming era: content bloat.

On one level, the series shows Peter Jackson’s influence on screen-based epic fantasy. Beautiful arboreal landscapes and rushing rivers, frequently viewed from high above with cameras in motion, create not only a sense of intricate world-building, but that real characters occupy this world, moving through space and time. Sprightly theme music underscores the lushly colored visual palette. The young, attractive ensemble cast wears vibrant, prismatic clothes, unsullied by dusty agricultural work or unpaved village roads.

These visuals call attention to themselves. Presumably the creative crew intended this, as they use many long, lingering shots of The Shire Two Rivers, the White Tower, elaborate medieval streetscapes, and primordial terrain. As shots linger, however, making the scenery itself the center of audience engagement, we start paying attention to the design. We start analyzing which shots were created on location, which virtually in 3D modelling, and which are composites, matted together in postproduction?

Like Jackson’s LotR movies, the series premiers with a wizard’s arrival in a bucolic village, followed by a party. This provides an opportunity to introduce characters through dialog and interaction. Lots and lots of dialog and interaction. Again, these scenes are beautifully designed, but they continue interminably. The introductions of character relationships, larded with soap-operatic detail, mount up relentlessly. When the Uruk-Hai Trollocks finally attack the village, we’ve grown bored waiting for something to happen.

Maybe Judkins and the creative team watched Jackson’s “long-expected party” scene and felt they needed one of those, except it occupies the entire first episode. That’s an hour of content. What Jackson completed in twenty minutes, Judkins extends for almost sixty. Each season of The Wheel of Time contains eight one-hour episodes, meaning that together, each season is longer than the theatrical release of the full LotR trilogy. (At this writing, there are two seasons.)

This pattern continues. Having fled the monsters, our ensemble of protagonists journeys with Gandalf and Aragorn Moiraine and Lan to meet destiny. The characters keep demanding explanations, but their self-appointed mentors keep answering: “Now is not the time.” Somehow, despite months of travelling together and long nights spent huddled around the campfire, now is never the time. The characters have identity-building encounters, and make occasional meaningful discoveries, but real exposition remains punted down the field.

Our ensemble remains mostly unified throughout the first season, though briefly separated for… purposes. They then spend the entire second season pursuing side quests, before unifying atop a wizard’s tower. Along the way, they encounter an ageless monarch, a lost nation, and an enemy thought destroyed three thousand years ago. Though the story arc doesn’t slavishly copy Tolkien, it’s nevertheless one giant spider away from matching the beat sheet in his first two LotR novels.

Some of this overgrowth comes from the source material. Full disclosure, I haven’t read Robert Jordan’s original novels; but I have it on authority from friends who have, that his writing often rambled, and later novels particularly suffered lack of firm direction. Yet the transition between media should’ve resolved some of this. Traditional broadcast or cable television would’ve forced the creative team to make hard decisions, because airtime is limited, and advertisers’ patience isn’t infinite.

With no requirement to fit into scarce, valuable airtime (or to empty the cinema for the next showing), Judkins and the creative team apparently feel authorized to keep creating more and longer scenes. Again, in fairness, these scenes are often beautifully designed, and individually, introduce interesting, thoughtful character moments. But as they accumulate, we increasingly see the story as constructed. We desperately wish we could tell the creative team to just make something happen, already!

Streaming distribution removes many limitations forced on traditional television. The one-hour format, advertisers who need appeased, and network Standards & Practices are out; graphic language, sex, and violence are in. But traditional limitations forced creative teams to make choices; what they omitted often mattered as much as what they included. Streaming doesn’t force them to cut anything. As content gets longer, with interminable exposition and vague resolutions, we start wishing someone made them make choices.

The Dark Side of the Street, Part 2

This essay is a follow-up to The Dark Side of the Street.

Catriona Ward

In Catriona Ward’s novel The Last House on Needless Street, major protagonist Ted Bannerman is abjectly terrified of “Mommy.” Ted tiptoes around the house, afraid of transgressing Mommy’s many unwritten rules, or damaging anything that belongs to Mommy. Though he assures us that Mommy’s wrath is sudden and direct, he also doesn’t describe her actions; he only reports her dialog through the filter of carefully edited memory.

So be warned, this commentary will include spoilers for The Last House on Needless Street.

Ted Bannerman draws immediate comparisons to another notorious mama’s boy, Norman Bates. Like Ted, Norman performs elaborate rituals to appease his mother, whose love is contingent on Norman remaining permanently childlike. For Ted and Norman alike, adulthood and the outside world is frightening and uncertain; staying home is infantilizing, but at least it’s reliable. So both accept their mother’s violent control as the adequate compromise.

Cultural critic Sady Doyle writes that mothers frequently get blamed for sons’ violent behavior. Besides Norman Bates, Doyle cites evil mothers in the Texas Chainsaw franchise, the X-Files episode “Home,” and real-life weirdo Ed Gein. Unlike evil daughters in franchises like The Exorcist, who are presented as solely culpable for their own actions, evil sons are ostensibly molded by their mothers, who are responsible for their sons’ choices.

Doyle wrote before Ward published her novel, so I’m left to speculate how she’d handle this “evil mother” fable. Considering how Ward demonstrates familiarity with horror standards, and subverts them to serve her own mission, she probably wrote the Norman Bates parallels deliberately. We watch Ted struggle to refer to “Mommy” using adult language, despite his age, and we’re coached to expect a Bates-like snap in Ted’s psyche.

Alfred Hitchcock (working from Robert Bloch’s novel) presents a mentally ill man as a ticking time bomb, a perpetrator of violence who leaves a carefully orchestrated trail of bodies behind. Sixty-two years later, I’m probably breaching no confidence to reveal that the “Mother” Norman constantly appeases, lives entirely inside his head. He’s created an entire secondary identity, and invested it with his own insecurities and terrors of the outside world.

Sady Doyle

Catriona Ward has done something similar. “Mommy” lives entirely inside Ted Bannerman’s head, reinforcing his fears. But Ward subverts that paradigm twice. First, from the beginning, first-person narrator Ted acknowledges that Mommy isn’t present. He knows already that her persistent voice is a self-made delusion, one he attempts to control with pharmaceuticals and beer. Mommy’s exact whereabouts are one of the novel’s lingering mysteries.

Second, Ward acknowledges something other writers either don’t know or don’t admit: the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Both Alfred Hitchcock and, more recently, M. Night Shyamalan have presented mentally ill people as incipient monsters, who assuage their tortured inner lives by inflicting that torture outward. Ted, by contrast, desperately wants to be normal. He just doesn’t know how.

American culture shuns mental divergence. While Hitchcock and Shyamalan have presented people with mental disorders as violent masterminds, our mental health community has long marginalized even minor mental illnesses. As Oliver Sacks writes, in the 1960s, simply admitting to “hearing voices” was sufficient legal grounds to forcibly institutionalize people—even though most people hear disembodied voices occasionally.

Meanwhile, a growing body of Americans, fueled by what’s derisively called “mommy blogs” (paging Sady Doyle!), have avoided vaccinating their children. Their stated motivation is avoiding autism, a poorly understood developmental disorder. These parents, derided as “mommies,” have permitted recent recurrences of polio and measles, diseases once nearly extinct, to recur in modern America. Sure, the diseases are real, but the conflation of mental illness and mother-phobic language is concerning.

Ted Bannerman demonstrates how mentally ill people are regularly acted upon by a world that fears them. Rather than monsters and manhunters, the mentally ill are usually traumatized, and that trauma usually happens in childhood. In the final reveal, we discover that Mommy has done literally every crime for which the world blames Ted. Mommy is crafty, capable of elaborate planning and terrible violence. Ted is small, weak, and traumatized.

I suspect Sady Doyle wouldn’t appreciate the stereotype of shifting blame onto Mommy. In our post-Hitchcock era, that smacks of laziness. Yet Doyle might appreciate how Ward subverts that stereotype by using it to demonstrate the consequences childhood abuse has on actual children. Unlike Norman Bates or Ed Gein, Ted Bannerman reflects how the outside world continues repeating the adult child’s trauma. Unlike Norman, Ted Bannerman just wants to heal.

I Am Vengeance, I Am the Night—And So Much More!

It’s been touching to watch tributes roll in for American voice actor Kevin Conroy, following his passing this past Thursday at age 66. Fan loyalty to an actor they knew almost entirely through his voice speaks volumes to how important that symbol remains for so many who were young in the 1990s and early 2000s. I suspect Conroy knew his importance to a generation; his enthusiastic reception at fan conventions is the stuff of legends.

Live-action superhero actors come and go; cinema is currently on its sixth or seventh Batman, depending how you count. Fans greet every new Batman actor with hostility, though public sentiment usually adjusts quickly (pipe down, George Clooney). Behind them all, Kevin Conroy has persisted; he portrayed Batman from 1992 to 2019, when he finally portrayed the character in live-action on an episode of Batwoman. Twenty-seven years associated with the role.

However, I can’t help noticing how every tribute focuses on one role. Besides Batman, Conroy played a handful of other television and movie roles, particularly supporting roles on daytime soaps and crime dramas; few got any particular traction. But his theater career was extensive, and focused heavily on Shakespearean roles. Conroy studied at Julliard, under John Houseman, and his classmates included Robin Williams and Kelsey Grammar.

As a sometime actor myself, I wonder the implications of being so closely associated with one role. Like Jeremy Brett, whose once-storied career collapsed entirely into the role of Sherlock Holmes, every eulogy for Kevin Conroy remembers one role. His entire career has been compressed into something that happened in a sound studio, while the mostly anonymous animators worked around the needs of his voice.

I don’t want to disparage Conroy, or the influence his raspy, war-torn performance had on his intended audience. For two generations, his performance encapsulated not only Bruce Wayne’s willingness to fight for his beliefs, but the price he paid for continuing that fight. Conroy was the first gay actor to portray Batman (though this fact wasn’t initially known), and with his hard-chisled features and intense stare, it’s amazing he didn’t get live-action screentime sooner.

Kevin Conroy pictured with frequent co-star Mark Hamill

But actors with diverse range and untapped capabilities often get their careers reduced to one iconic role when they die, or even retire. When Ian Holm passed away in 2020, dozens of obituaries named his appearance in only two franchises: Alien and Lord of the Rings. When David Letterman retired from nightly TV, The New Yorker ran an illustration of him throwing pencils at the camera—which he hadn’t done in over twenty years.

Likewise, Kevin Conroy’s Shakespearean career largely vanished. So did his dedication to public service: following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, Conroy cooked and served meals for first responders sifting the rubble of the World Trade Center. In an era dominated by public attention-seekers like Kanye West and Elon Musk, Kevin Conroy happily worked hard, gave back, and let the results speak for themselves.

Conroy persistently remained conscious of his public role as an actor. As a gay man performing during a time when being publicly out could submarine a man’s career, Conroy took seriously theatre roles like “Peter” in Richard Greenberg’s Eastern Standard, a closeted entertainment executive who didn’t dare live his truth, for fear of imploding his career. In interviews, Conroy described such roles as an important moral statement.

Therefore I find myself torn. Like everyone, I think it’s fitting to celebrate the role that had such wide-ranging influence on a generation, and mourn the fact that this role has now ended. Yes, some other voice actor will certainly portray Batman, and probably mimic, to some degree, Conroy’s performance; but it’ll never be Kevin Conroy. Like Adam West before him, Conroy’s Batman mattered, and now it’s over.

Yet that isn’t Conroy overall. Like Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, or Harry Corbett as Harold Steptoe, Conroy’s career has largely vanished into one role. I don’t suppose Conroy minds, considering his active embrace of the organized fan community. (Unlike Corbett, who despised his iconic role and tried to distance himself from it.) Fan tributes to Conroy are remarkably one-note, and though it’s an awesome note, it isn’t a symphony.

Batman’s message matters, and the animated performance, uncluttered by the studio interference that reportedly hamstrung Tim Burton, conveys that moral complexity. Kevin Conroy will always be vengeance and the night for an entire generation, and he rightfully should be. But he was so much more than that and, actor to actor, I fear that getting lost.

Some Incomplete Thoughts on Elon Musk

Elon Musk

Elon Musk has reportedly completed his hostile takeover of Twitter. This joins companies like PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX that he has burrowed into, tick-like, to nourish himself off the product other people have previously built. But Twitter has a distinct character, an identity that makes it different than those other companies. Twitter doesn’t just provide a product or service; Twitter is a platform. Which opens very different implications.

PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX need customers to do business. If customers withhold their business, the business dwindles—though, admittedly, it’s rare for large businesses to dwindle to zero. Twitter doesn’t need customers; it needs content. Without users constantly creating content, and the lucrative controversy that content often provides, there’s no business, regardless of how many advertisers and daily viewers the site retains.

Social media networks essentially exist to resell user-created content to other users. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok all exist to the exact extent that somebody keeps creating content, and if content creators start withholding their words and images, the business model dries up. Recall, advertisers kept pumping money into Friendster, Bebo, and MySpace for some time, but the business models all collapsed because ordinary people stopped creating content.

However, that content isn’t neutral. Musk has garnered right-wing support for his high-profile buyout by championing “free speech,” a coded term for loosening Twitter’s anti-hate speech rules. Likely beneficiaries of such loosening include Donald Trump, who used Twitter to incite violence; Jordan Peterson, who persists in aggressively deadnaming transgendered public figures; Alex Jones, who peddles lies for profit; and David Duke, banned for being David Duke.

As a free speech absolutist myself, I realize why being absolute is conditional. In my hometown, a bar owner needed to ban a handful of people for their language. They used hate speech, including the N-word, quite loudly, and picked needless arguments regarding politics. Any business owner knows that, if you don’t ban Klansmen and fascists early, other customers start avoiding your store; before long, you find yourself running a store for Klansmen and fascists.

Mark Zuckerberg

The same underlying principle drives social networks. Twitter and Facebook banned Donald Trump, not because his words were hateful and incited violence, but because they knew that if they didn’t, other users would leave. Content creators won’t create content if their content rubs elbows with Trumpist bullshit. And again, no matter how many code-writers or advertisers the parent company has, without content, there’s no company.

Serial entrepreneurs Alex Moazed and Nicholas Johnson describe Twitter, and similar businesses like Facebook and Etsy, as platform businesses. That is, these businesses don’t sell anything specific; they sell platforms users can utilize to tell stories, connect with friends, or simply air opinions. Moazed and Johnson regard these businesses as cash cows because they aren’t limited by warehouses or shelf space; given sufficient server storage, they’re hypothetically infinite.

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Moazed and Johnson’s description sounds remarkably naïve. Even beyond knowing that social networks profit by selling customers’ metadata, and customer contacts’ metadata, the hypothetically infinite business isn’t infinite. Without people posting thoughts, pictures, and petty quarrels, social media has no business model. This gives users greater authority than standard business models—though that authority often isn’t readily visible.

Other business models favor gigantism and consolidation. Five publishing conglomerates now control the book industry, except they don’t really, because all five do fully half their business through one vendor, Amazon. That’s why boycotts seldom work, because they require such massive commitment by millions of people over vast amounts of time that they usually stall faster than a Model A. It’s hard to fight monopolies of that magnitude.

The same doesn’t apply to social media. Sure, there’s a similar monopolist impulse; Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has bought out so many other social properties, including Instagram and WhatsApp. But it’s much easier for smaller numbers of customers, working concertedly, to submarine the business model. It took only two years of Rupert Murdoch’s total mismanagement to transform MySpace from Earth’s biggest website, into the Mary Celeste of the whole internet.

Therefore, I contend, Elon Musk will reverse his entire course within weeks. The very “free speech” he purportedly supports, will become economically toxic if not subjected to certain minimum restraints. Sure, Twitter is sometimes morally toxic, encouraging petty squabbles and polarization, but Elon cares more about economic toxicity. The minute content creators start jumping ship to avoid being contaminated by fascist twaddle, he’ll become as authoritarian as anybody.

Because rules exist for a reason, even for the rich.

Disneyland is a Fortress and a Temple

When I was small, my father took up latch-hooking as a hobby, to keep himself at home and responsible for his family. I remember one of his largest projects, a three-by-five-foot wall rug with an image of Donald Duck. He made it when I still slept in a cradle, and I kept it on my wall, through multiple moves and homes, until I was eighteen. It was a talisman, not only of the innocence Donald represented, but also of the knowledge that my dad loved me.

Last week, Nevada writer Jonathan VanBoskerck published an op-ed in the Orlando Sentinel whining that “I love Disney World, but wokeness is ruining the experience.” (The Sentinel moved it behind a paywall after its viral flare-up passed, but it’s available on other websites.) I wasn't inclined to write about VonBoskerck’s entirely predictable, formulaic whimper, because frankly, we’ve heard it before.

Then I remembered my Donald Duck rug.

To his credit, VanBoskerck doesn’t assume Disney used to be apolitical. He contends the massive media conglomerate bearing Walt Disney’s name is drifting from it’s founder’s vision. A vision which, coincidentally, ratifies his own as “a Christian and a conservative Republican.” Uncle Walt, an ardent capitalist and flag-waving patriot, apparently made GOP voters feel good about themselves; today’s company makes them feel bad and picked on.

This claim stumbles when studying anything about media history. Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse writes that Uncle Walt founded his company as a New Deal Democrat, and gave FDR unpaid advertising in his early featurettes. Only during World War II, and the subsequent Cold War, did Disney’s personal and business philosophy drift right. By 1955, Disney was, with Billy Graham and Ronald Reagan, part of America’s triumvirate of mass-media Christian Conservatism.

Therefore, VanBoskerck isn’t championing Uncle Walt’s vision as it existed, pure and unchanging. He wants to trap Disney, to veritably cryogenically freeze him, at the moment which gives VanBoskerck most comfort. Judging by VanBoskerck’s photo, he was probably born after Disney, the man, passed on; so he’s free to select any moment from the abundant buffet of political positions Disney expressed throughout his career.

The illusion of an apolitical past presumes that what you grew up with is simply normal, a neutral and stationary baseline immune to change. VanBoskerck’s vision of Disney, the man, drips with unspoken prior assumptions. Somehow, the decision to stop circulating Song of the South, for instance, was a sort of act of God. Now he has to see the desire for change as motivated by humans, which he identifies as political.

VanBoskerck fundamentally wants to retreat into childhood innocence, to resume never having to know about injustice and suffering. Like me, hanging my dad’s Donald Duck rug long after I’d outgrown its literal significance, he requires a place of moral neutrality where he needn’t take positions, or feel shame for failing to do so. That’s why he inveighs against Disneyworld specifically, over the Disney Corporation: he wants a physical destination without moral weight.

But this assumes the beatified past was simply natural, that his view matched that of children everywhere. That young kids of all eras were driven by the same motivators that he was, that things simply existed. It’s a definition of “political” that makes certain groups, like women and children, innately apolitical, even when they’re demonstrably not. That isn't a base for making good, meaningful decisions. It’s a reliance on ignorance.

I sympathize with VanBoskerck’s views. I’d love to revisit a time when music and TV and movies and books simply existed, with no need to be aware of the conditions from which they arose. We White people have this idea that everyone widely shared our innocence, and everyone wants to return to that. But we can’t go back, neither as individuals nor as a nation, because that time never really existed.

We all come from a background based on our parents’ economic standing and the choices our forebears made. White people didn’t have to see that when we were kids: we simply saw our families, schools, and neighborhoods, and considered them normal. The mere fact that we, as adults, have material evidence they weren’t, doesn’t change some people’s belief that the past was a morally blank slate.

This desire to flee the present makes perfect sense, of course. But once you can witness the world through another person’s eyes, you can never again fail to see that, for instance, Song of the South was pretty offensive, that Dumbo’s crows were aggressively racist, that Donald Duck was never neutral. My father’s love shielded me for years. But I’m an adult now, with all the burdens that entails.

Piers Morgan, and Why Nothing Ever Gets Better

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's now-famous interview with Oprah

Watching Piers Morgan walking offset on Tuesday, walking out the Good Morning Britain door, and apparently keeping on walking, was deeply satisfying. British TV audiences, or Anglophile foreigners like me, have watched him use his national platform to spout bilge for decades. Co-host Alex Beresford named and shamed Morgan’s history of attacking Meghan Markle, which apparently irked Morgan so thoroughly, he quit the most secure media job in Britain.

Morgan, a master of coded language, has frequently used his highly-rated breakfast news program to pooh-pooh Meghan Markle in ways that aren’t necessarily racist, in isolation. Honestly, watching him from across the Big Pond, I suspect Morgan doesn’t think of himself as racist, despite dedicating thirty minutes on Monday to airing his personal grievances. He’s just mastered navigating Britain’s top-tier media landscape, and doesn’t want anyone changing the map.

We’ve recently witnessed cheap spectacles like Morgan’s walkout frequently. The backlash against America’s Black Lives Matter movement pushed carpetbagger Marjorie Taylor Greene and high-school dropout Lauren Boebert into Congress this year. It took sixty complainants to make law enforcement take the Bill Cosby accusations seriously. And any woman who’s ever tried filing a stalking or sexual assault complaint knows she’ll find herself in the hot seat long before the man.

Why don’t we believe people? We seemingly believe that, if we take women’s and minorities’ accusations seriously, they would lie flagrantly. They’d supposedly falsify information and demonize White, cisgendered men for no reason but cheap thrills and short-term gain. The fact that this keeps not happening doesn’t dissuade anyone. Powerful people keep believing that humans are innate liars and undeserving of trust, especially the chronically powerless.

This manifests primarily in how society regards the “lesser,” the outsider. That is, we generally believe White people over Black people, heterosexuals over homosexuals, and men over women. Given the choice, we’ll bury the outsider group’s narrative until someone of sufficient power comes along and speaks up. Only when someone exceptional says something, the actress who married royalty perhaps, do we give these claims any credence.

Power defends power. Surely nobody reading this will disagree. Piers Morgan has defended execrable human beings like Donald Trump, and the sweat-free moral Shop-Vac that is Prince Andrew, because the existing system treats him pretty well. Maybe he isn’t bigoted; he just doesn’t want to fix the broken system, because its brokenness redounds to his benefit. If things got better, he might need to pound sand with us plebeians.

Piers Morgan quits

That isn’t a great excuse, but still…

People who work hard, follow the rules, and reap the rewards, have a disincentive to fix broken systems. Because doing so acknowledges they’ve benefited at others’ expense. To participate in more than token reforms means admitting they’ve profited from structural injustice, which might, arguably, make them bad people. Nobody likes to admit they’ve done wrong; we react to such challenges similarly to being punched in the nose.

Because I did okay, didn’t I? I followed the rules and won. So anyone else could, hypothetically, do the same. If I’m a good person, and the system did well by me, then good people should profit from the system. But if the system is wrong, it follows that I’m maybe not a good person. That’s a conclusion I can’t stomach, so I have to defend the system.

Religion and philosophy warn us this isn’t necessarily so. The knee-jerk emotional response, modeled in generations of fairy tales and Hollywood blockbusters, tells us character equals merit, which equals ultimate success. But we know that isn’t so. Good people of exemplary character can do everything right and still lose. This doesn’t make anyone “bad people.” But it also means we have to extricate ourselves from the system, even if we’ve profited from it.

That’s why Piers Morgan needed to throw a tantrum, because he knows the system reflects on him. He knows he must either separate himself, or get the lingering stench of rot all over himself. He remains tainted while he stays put, because the system which rewards him is entirely broken. That isn’t his fault, it’s just a manifestation of living in a broken world. It becomes his fault, though, when he remains there, knowing it’s corrupted.

Harry and Meghan exposed a corrupted system; Alex Beresford called Piers Morgan out for participating. Morgan defended himself by leaving, not just the situation, but ITV altogether. Given the opportunity to repent and improve the system, he chose to quit. That happens to everyone who profits from systemic corruption, eventually. As abolitionist William Wilbeforce said, “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”

Too Many Channels, Too Few Ideas

Game of Thrones, while it was in the process of collapsing

CBS All Access, the American network’s online-only second channel, is producing a series of Stephen King’s The Stand. Um, wait, didn’t somebody already do that? Yes, a quick Google search reveals ABC, another American network, broadcast a The Stand miniseries in 1994, to warm reviews and a robust sweeps-month audience. We’ve already seen The Stand on TV, to some success. Why on earth is it worth remaking?

I’m among the last generation which grew up with limited TV options. Most American markets had three network affiliates, two unaffiliated local channels, and PBS. The widespread adoption of cable TV corresponded heavily with my grade-school years. But even then, cable granted us twenty or thirty channels, not the hundreds in today’s market. For a small fee, you’d also get HBO, the only source that piped cusswords directly into our houses.

After Netflix switched from mailing DVDs, to streaming original content, we had a brief Wild West period where streaming services performed stunts to attract customers. Your favorite shows, now available on Hulu! Or Sling, or Amazon Prime, or YouTube TV! All for a nominal rate. Studios, like Disney, began skipping networks and cinemas, sending their content directly into our networked devices. Apple and AT&T became content creators.

The result, paradoxically, has been a strange two-pronged paralysis. While I’m loath to subscribe to any fee-demanding streaming service, content creators have become fearful of creating anything terribly new. Besides The Stand, CBS All Access includes two Star Trek series. Netflix has the third Chronicles of Narnia adaptation. Warner Bros. has announced the third adaptation of Dune. Doctor Doolittle, Call of the Wild, and Stephen King’s It have been multiply remade recently.

The protagonists of The X-Files, looking as tired as I feel

With the massive profusion of media markets, the studios have become massive content recycleries. They seem afraid to create anything that hasn’t already shown success as a comic book, classic novel, or previous movie. Importantly, if Internet buzz is reliable, most of these adaptations aren’t very good. Dismal responses to The Invisible Man and Artemis Fowl, and negative advance responses to Terry Pratchett’s The Watch, speak volumes.

I’ve never watched The Mandalorian. As someone who grew up amid the generation which defined itself according to Star Wars, this confession feels almost shameful. But I’ve also never seen The Walking Dead, Modern Family, or The Masked Singer. Numerous fans tried to steer me onto Game of Thrones and Lost, right up until both franchises collapsed into flaming heaps of widespread disappointment. Suddenly, my aversion seemed justified.

But, in today’s near-constant online connection, barraged with social media, we all receive messages daily, encouraging us to adopt some new TV phenomenon. Baby Yoda pictures and “This Is the Way” memes keep me largely abreast of The Mandalorian, without ever needing to watch it. I imagine you, like me, find yourself constantly immersed in media you’ve never actually consumed. We’re simultaneously trapped in media silos, and flooded with media.

Certainly innovative ideas exist; working writers produce new ideas, or new spins on classics, constantly. My friend Bishop O’Connell produced a damned good novel trilogy recently, but without PR support, it’s gone out of print. With a little skillful location work and minor CGI, Netflix or Disney could translate his novels into streaming TV content and make a mint. Instead, they keep rehashing content first popularized in the 1970s.

One of many attempts to keep Star Trek alive and relevant

Maybe it reflects my age (okay, definitely), but the more TV options exist, the less TV I watch. Other than Doctor Who and PBS Masterpiece, I watch virtually no TV anymore. As content becomes both ubiquitous and timid, and streaming services confuse using cusswords for being edgy, nothing draws my attention anymore. The profusion of choices keeps growing faster than the market does. I find myself withdrawing, reading books.

Admittedly, I recognize the contradiction between my recent praise for different takes on Arthur Dent, and my aversion to different takes on Stephen King. Perhaps I’ll reconcile the difference later. I just know that, while Arthur Dent evolved with his creator, Stephen King’s remakes keep happening without him; he’s busy creating new content, while studios limply revisit his back catalog. He gets rich, while corporations get lazy.

This disconnection, between too many content sources and too few ideas, leaves me pessimistic. The gatekeepers of American (and international) culture have created gates so narrow, that ambitious and original writers can’t get through. Perhaps that’s the paradox of modernity. In art, politics, business, and economics, the more venues there are for marginal voices, the more blandly restrictive the mainstream inevitably becomes.

Anonymity and Modern Illness

Itzhak Perlman teaches music appreciation
to a notoriously grouchy audience

Itzhak Perlman, the Israeli-American classical violinist, was a regular guest on Sesame Street in my childhood; a quick Google search reveals he still is. The show invited him aboard to help teach child audiences classical music appreciation. His frequent character arc included an encounter with somebody, often Oscar the Grouch, who vocally disliked classical music. However, after a few bars of Paganini or whoever, the designated Muppet inevitably came around.

Perlman visibly wasn’t able to walk unaided, though. This quality sometimes went unremarked. For the Muppets of Sesame Street, Perlman’s disability mattered little; his demonstrable violin skill held their attention. However, I remember one occasion where Big Bird questioned Perlman’s crutches and leg braces. Perlman set his violin aside that day and explained the lingering scars left by his childhood battle with polio, a battle that left his legs depleted.

Then as now, violin soloists traditionally performed standing up; seated was for ensemble players. Perlman’s inability to carry his instrument onstage with the panache of Andre Rieu or Jascha Haifetz, his necessity to sit while playing, like just another contract player, made him visibly different. Sure, his violin is virtuosic, and perhaps because of my childhood exposure, Perlman remains my yardstick for violin playing. But he also just looked different.

I couldn’t help remembering that during a recent discussion about COVID-19. Like polio before it, COVID’s social and economic effects have become the dominant factor of our era. Just as parents weigh the odds of children contracting and spreading COVID today versus the long-term social development costs of keeping them isolated from peers, parents performed such cost-benefit analyses in 1952. Culturally, the difference between the diseases is vanishingly small.

One important difference, however, grabs my attention. Like Perlman on PBS in my childhood, or wards full of iron lung patients, a sight still distressingly common in my lifetime, COVID patients haven’t been particularly visible. We don’t have widely circulated images of patients on respirators, immobilized by the weight of technology keeping them alive. And we don’t have celebrities teaching children the consequences of diseases that seem like ancient history.

A pediatric iron lung ward—an image my parents' generation
would've been intimately familiar with (click to enlarge)

Because if Perlman appeared on Sesame Street recently enough to lodge in my long-term memory, it must’ve happened after America’s last case of wild-caught polio, in 1979. It took 24 years from Jonas Salk’s invention of the polio vaccine, to the disease’s eradication in the United States, and polio’s long-term effects were something my generation needed to understand. Also, unlike smallpox, wild polio still exists on Earth, and could resurge.

Equally important, Perlman’s visibility as disabled, and his willingness to discuss his disability, influenced how my generation perceived disability. I remember some third-grade bully trying to instigate taunts against a girl with cerebral palsy and, in a rare show of childhood solidarity, several of us closed ranks around her and drove the bully away. I can’t speak for others, but my response originated partly because her crutches resembled Perlman’s.

Simply put, the visibility of people with significant scars and disabilities influenced how my generation perceived health concerns. Veterans of World War II and Vietnam in wheelchairs still steer how I perceive war, and war-making policy. Itzhak Perlman’s public persona as an entertainer and children’s TV personality, probably influenced why I don’t recall any organized anti-vaxxer culture before the middle 2000s. Representation, the slogan reminds us, matters.

But we live in different times. Modern medicine has made disfiguring illnesses rare, so we seldom see people with smallpox scars, diphtheria lung, or other pathogen damage anymore. Media consolidation has marginalized people with disabilities from public view, particularly those caused by severe, visible injury. We just don’t see people suffering long-term health effects of serious disease like my generation saw on Sesame Street.

Itzhak Perlman more recently

It’s impossible to prove without long-term longitudinal studies, which it’s too early to have yet, but perhaps the popularity of anti-vax conspiracy theories and anti-mask sentiment stems from this tunnel vision. Without the visibility of people who survived past terrible outbreaks, and patients currently hoping to survive COVID, it becomes easier to rationalize risks away. People want to believe the world they see perpetuated through glossy media images is reliable.

Americans perhaps don’t respect COVID risks, and other illnesses, because we don’t see those risks portrayed widely. We don’t experience illness as real, imminent risk, as our ancestors did with polio or smallpox. What we cannot see, becomes easy to dismiss. We need ways to foreground real, living people with real consequences from illness, to remind people the risks of complacency.

Right-Wing Radio and the Lonely White Voter

Alex Jones

We have this provocateur at work who brings his stereo to the jobsite every day so he can listen to hours of talk radio: Alex Jones, Limbaugh, Hannity. I call him “provocateur” because, when he and I have to work in close proximity, he locks eyes with me while cranking the volume to truly disruptive levels. He knows I'm a red-state progressive, and he blatantly wants me to say something, so he can claim he's being oppressed by the “lib'ruls.”

So I've learned more about talk-radio politics than I've ever wanted to know. I’ve observed the way these bomb-throwers manipulate anger to retain listeners’ loyalty. I witness the elaborate rituals involved in creating and designating “others” who need loyal right-wingers to control and muzzle them. But of all the lessons I’ve gleaned from this unwanted immersion in the echo chamber, none has struck me more than how friendly it is to insiders.

Recently, Alex Jones paused between enraged rants over “the wall” and scripted plugs for protein shakes and testosterone supplements, to remind listeners how beloved they are. “I’m not the InfoWars,” Jones purred into the microphone, in a tone downright fatherly, though retaining his trademark growl. “You are the InfoWars. I’m just the spokesperson. You make this possible, you and your loyalty and your willingness to go to the barricades.”

In that moment I recalled something Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber wrote, that Christian media companies like Trinity Broadcasting Network often make people feel welcome and loved at times when traditional congregations don’t. They came into people’s homes, shared the Good News, and offered a loving embrace, through the television. Churches, by contrast, have often fallen short in their outreach to shut-ins, the sick, and the poor.

Nadia Bolz-Weber

This willingness to make people feel welcome during their lowest times, correlates strongly with where people spend their money. Bolz-Weber notes that many Christian parishioners write TBN and its member ministries into their wills, excluding the congregations that stood by them during times of good health, but vanished during their convalescence. Likewise, conservative radio lets certain groups feel included when the political mainstream has apparently turned deaf.

We could enumerate various reasons why populations which once served as the backbone of the progressive movement have thrown their lot in with conservatism and the status quo. Republicans do a better job at message management than Democrats, who often lose interest in outreach between election cycles. Certain progressive mainstays, like labor unions, were outright racist and haven’t changed with the times. Et cetera.

Yet I find these explanations unsatisfying, simply because I spend significant time around the demographics which have been abandoned by progressivism. The traditional explanations for progressivism’s decline—both parties’ active courting of Wall Street money, the big-tent coalition sundering into feuding identity groups, old-school racism—are all ancillary to working Americans’ biggest issue. And that is, I propose, that they feel lonely.

Donald Trump’s campaign turned heavily on promises to re-enfranchise “the Forgotten Man,” a vaguely defined figure who, somehow, felt adrift in contemporary politics. He never explained who this “man” was. But judging by the electoral coalition that supported Trump, the largest number of people who threw their weight behind him were White, heterosexual, and predominantly male. Honky dudes believed themselves abandoned in today’s politics.

Georgetown law professor Sheryll Cashin notes that, if you disaggregate the very rich (who, in America, are mostly White), the average wealth disparity between Black and White Americans falls to just $5,000. Now of course $5,000 is lots of money if you don’t have it, but it won’t buy you penthouse access on 5th Avenue. Poor White people in America probably aren’t bad off by international standards, but by American standards, things are pretty poorly.

Donald Trump

In today’s politics, you seemingly have to be already rich to run for office as a Republican. Meanwhile, Democrats have thrown their weight behind identity politics. If you’re White and poor in America today, you feel left behind. No wonder White union-style voters substantially throw their weight behind candidates like Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, political bomb-throwers who basically promise to be different from anything you’ve seen before.

Right-wing radio, like Christian television approaches people who already feel lonely and dispossessed, and offers to welcome them unconditionally. Of course, both are money-driven instruments, whether they seek tax-deductible donations or sell you erectile dysfunction tablets. But they clothe themselves in the robes of righteousness and welcome. Those who would counter their influence, should ask themselves why they haven’t welcomed the lonely yet.

The Hanging Judge in the Court of Public Opinion

A photo showing someone, who may be Nick Sandmann,
face to face with Nathan Phillips of the Omaha Nation

I admit, the handheld cell-phone video could've been designed to activate my childhood prejudices. The tight-lipped smirk on the teenager, tentatively identified as Nick Sandmann, sure looks like the face middle-school bullies used to taunt and provoke me. The angle made it look like multiple teens surrounded the Native American elder just like bullies formerly surrounded me. And the red MAGA hats? Dammit, they're like jackboots these days.

Then, amid the outcry, further video began emerging. Progressives claimed the teens chanted “Build that wall!”, but it's almost impossible to discern exactly what they were chanting. Sandmann claims they chanted school spirit slogans to drown out vulgar insults coming from Leftist protesters already on-site, which longer video shows is clearly true. The story wasn't as cut-and-dried as we initially believed.

Most important, video shows the teens didn't approach Omaha elder Nathan Phillips, he approached them. He claims latterly that he hoped his drumming would diffuse tension between protesters and counter-protesters. But how he thought already-agitated teens, unfamiliar with his traditions and prone to snap judgement (as teens are) would know that. In school psychology terms, it seems Phillips, not Sandmann, is the initiator here.

Like millions of Blue Facebook users, I got bilked by a story that couldn't have punched my buttons better had it been scripted in Hollywood. I dislike crowds, distrust Redhats, and despise bullies; this story provided, or appeared to provide, all three. But in the Hollywood style, a sudden twist proves the story doesn't fit my good-versus-evil narrative. Worse, I'm proven vulnerable to the same moralistic binary thinking I condemn in others.

It gets worse. Nick Sandmann and his family are currently shunning media, purportedly because they've received death threats. When Christine Blasey Ford reported she needed to hire a security detail and relocate several times after voicing her sexual assault charges against Brett Kavanaugh, we progressives acted offended. Death threats over politics? For shame! Yet clearly we don't have the moral standing we've tried to claim.

Not every progressive threatened Sandmann, just as not every conservative threatened Dr. Blasey Ford. Yet both ideologies overall have to answer for the climate of violence we've fostered. Violence seems like a viable option to the beaten and the dying, not those who have control or solid moral standing. And when (not if) conservatives threaten a progressive whistleblower next, we Leftists won't be able to claim clean hands.

Other Native Americans present at the Lincoln Memorial that fateful January day

I don't know how many threats Sandmann has received, either in absolute numbers or compared to Dr. Blasey Ford. Nor is it my business. I believe Sandmann, because I've seen the frankly ugly language emerging from social media. I've seen the calls for vengeance and payback directed at a teenager, at a child, and also against his entire high school, all because of a four-minute cell-phone video taken completely out of context.

We're adults, y'all. If I know my readership at all, virtually everyone reading this essay is older than Nick Sandmann. Personally, I'm nearly three times Sandmann's age, and I'm less equipped to evaluate and judge his situation now than I was forty-eight hours ago. I cannot rightly expect a junior in high school, limited by a still-growing body and brain, to face a noisy, chaotic, overwhelming situation like that and make the right decision on the fly. I still don't understand it with rhe benefit of multiple viewpoints.

I take two lessons from this experience. First, I need to police my reactions. Next time I feel myself rising into high dudgeon, I need to pause and ask: do I have enough information to evaluate this situation? One handheld phone video, which begins after the situation commenced, isn't sufficient. Sometimes I need to postpone my reactions while data trickles in.

Second, is my reaction appropriate? Am I condemning someone who just needs mature guidance? From Baraboo, Wisconsin, to the Lincoln Memorial, social media warriors have recently hastened to condemn children for transgressions less severe than many I committed at that age. But adults took me aside, patiently corrected me, and forgave a headstrong kid's sins. Surely I owe today's children at least that much latitude.

I could be wrong again. Sandmann could be guilty of everything we previously accused him of. But knowing what I do now, I doubt it. Evidence says I hastily condemned a child when I should have extended him a classic teachable moment. I'm currently ashamed of my moralistic assumptions. And I hope fellow progressives will join me in working to avoid this mistake in the future.

When the Fires of Anger Burn Out

I had intended to write today about the notorious Baraboo, Wisconsin, high school photo, which shows nearly the entire male class of 2019 flashing a straight-armed Nazi salute. I wanted to discuss how teenagers think asshole behavior is funny, and lack latitude of view to understand actions in historical context. I wanted to say we could demonize these children, possibly for the rest of their lives, or have a classic teachable moment and maybe improve society overall.

Then something happened I didn’t expect: America forgot the story.

Seriously. Two days ago, you couldn’t move on Blue Facebook or Blue Twitter without tripping over a half-dozen reposts of the photo, usually with captions of undiluted rage. How could anybody, especially in a post-Charlottesville environment, think such behavior was funny? Then it stopped. As I write this, another story hasn’t erupted sufficiently to really replace Baraboo as headline fodder, yet somehow, this story just petered out.

What happened? The story didn’t go anywhere. Baraboo police still promise a thorough investigation, which I applaud, since it clearly means all real violent crime in Wisconsin has been resolved. (C’mon, is this really the best use of police resources.) A Google news search reveals new details dribbling out about the story, mostly in regional outlets. But in the collective memory emblazoned on social media feeds, this story has already found a quiet corner to die.

Has our communal attention span become so brief that stories burn this quickly and vanish? Yes. This isn’t news to me. I’ve written before about how our capacity for outrage has become not only short-lived, but weirdly selective. We burn white-hot with indignation, spew largely crinkum-crankum bile in public places, and exhaust ourselves within, apparently, minutes. We lack capacity to keep stories burning low and constant long enough to actually do anything.

This causes further problems because it depletes our common capacity to keep real stories alive. While Baraboo sucked all the oxygen from the room, mainstream media apparently forgot, say, Jamal Khashoggi, whose murder, apparently ordered at the highest levels by one of America’s biggest trading partners, demonstrates just how dangerous the truth-telling industry remains in today’s world. Yet that developing story has become page-eight filler news.

(Yes, that’s a newspaper reference. I’m old.)

Yet perhaps that’s the problem. The American President has openly daydreamed about physically attacking journalists, called them “the enemy of the people,” and lavished praise on politicians who enact his violent fantasies. While the worst his administration has directly done is yank a journalist’s credentials over bullshit accusations, the implication nevertheless remains: we retain the option of capping your ass, Khashoggi-style, if you step out of line. We can make you wish you were dead.

This photo, by contrast, is safe. Everyone from MSNBC to Breitbart has covered this story, because they know moral outrage sells, but also because the story is low-risk. Disparaging American Nazis has been low-hanging fruit at least since The Blues Brothers used them as doofus villains in 1980. Media know they can gin outrage by thrusting stock villains under our noses, which accomplishes what they really want: to sell advertising space to the highest bidder.

And Baraboo itself serves a bicoastal narrative. A small town in a small state that few outsiders ever visit, Baraboo, Wisconsin, has under one-tenth the population of Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, and is primarily famous as the former headquarters of the defunct Ringling Brothers organization. National corporate media waving around the youth of a small city in an outlying province of “flyover country” reminds coastal city-dwellers of their unique privilege and its accompanying noblesse oblige.

I get frustrated when people tell me certain stories are mere smokescreens. Two years ago, it chapped my ass when pundits told me not to worry my pretty little head about the President-Elect’s theatre tweets. Yet that exact response is appropriate now, because the widespread popularity of the Baraboo story right now, when journalists are dying for telling the truth and an accused rapist sits on the Supreme Court, is the epitome of a smokescreen.

If social media means anything, we politically engaged citizens must start being more discerning in what stories merit our scrutiny. Truth isn’t criterion enough anymore. Humans’ ability to pay attention is finite, and if we expend it on low-stakes stories that burn out overnight, taking real journalism with them, the people who dominate our culture will eventually be able to get away with murder. Which, if current events are any guide, isn’t a mere metaphor.