Outhouse Politics

This essay contains language and images which may not be suitable for all readers. Consider this your first and only trigger warning.

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Sometime back, I referred to Donald Trump as an expression of the worst aspects of America’s collective id. The description wasn’t entirely unique to me; after saying it, I learned pundit Sam Seder had recently said something similar. Me, I pinched the description broadly from British journalist Mick Hume's description of coarse behavior at Premier League football matches. But the point remains valid, whoever coined the idea.

That point returned, vibrantly, when I recently visited the outhouse at work. My city’s public high school, still only half-built, doesn’t yet have running water, and even if it did, we construction workers aren’t permitted to pee in the clients’ porcelain. We still use plastic porta-johns located strategically around the site. While voiding our bladders, we have the opportunity to glimpse the inner workings of our co-workers’ minds. The view isn’t always pretty.

Humans moving their bowels put ourselves into a strange position. Sitting down, britches around our ankles, we’re beholden to the most fundamental animal demands our flesh places upon us. We’re completing the final, unsavory arc of transforming undifferentiated nutrition into human productivity. We produce art, finance, cities, farms, and copious amounts of shit. But even while defecating, the human mind remains a place of constant, if disgusting, productivity.

>Reduced helplessly to Freud’s “anal stage” of psychosexual development, human minds run in various directions. Sometimes this manifests as the simple desire to do something orderly in an innately disordered, messy environment, like playing tic-tac-toe on the walls. Other times, this results in empty displays of power. For many subcontractors, even bowel movements—the first control most people learn—are strictly timed. So they assert whatever control they can.

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This results in graffiti. Surely nobody’s surprised by this. We’ve all seen toilet stalls defaced with slogans, doggerel (“Here I sit, broken-hearted”), and undying affections of “Jimmy + Kathleen 4EVA” above the toilet. Construction workers assert their existence using the tools most readily available, generally a Sharpie or a utility knife. They cuss, strut, declare themselves, and otherwise demand respect, while shitting without washing their hands.

Non-English graffiti tend to be the most simple. This may mean completely non-verbal symbols: swastikas and Confederate flags are dishearteningly common. Considering that the least verbal presidential candidate, a man who has publicly proclaimed “I know many big words,” has received the endorsement of white supremacist organizations, the correlation between bowel movements and racist symbols rings familiar. They’re both expressions of powerlessness, or anyway the feeling of powerlessness.

I’m less able to explain the crude illustrations of genitals. Nearly every outhouse includes at least one drawing of a scrotum and erect phallus, usually at a seated man’s eye level. One features the phallus with a smiley face and skinny legs, making it resemble a strutting ostrich, testicles standing in for fluffy plumage. Maybe the artists are compensating for their emasculating jobs by tagging everything with their dicks.

As I've written before, construction is undoubtedly the most segregated job I’ve ever held. The various subcontractors—brickmasons, electricians, roofers, concrete finishers—have very little interaction. They mostly only speak with us, the general contractor, and even then only when they need something done. This segregation has frustrating racial overlap: we have Black, Hispanic, and white subs, and almost no overlap. Races don’t speak, share, or cooperate here.

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So we have bilingual graffiti. Spanish graffiti runs very simple: the longest Spanish graffiti I’ve read says “Chinga tu puta madre.” Fuck your whore mother. That’s about as sophisticated as their graffiti gets. Sometimes there’s overlap. In one outhouse, somebody wrote: “El Chapo is watchin” [sic]. Below that, in bold block handwriting: “I hope he fucks ISIS up, that coward Obama isn’t doing shit.”

Then there’s plain English. Most isn’t overtly political (beyond the swastikas). But the mix of schoolyard name-calling (“faggot!”) and religious exhortations (“Jesus saves”) bespeaks a singular motive, to exert power over others. Whether by tearing others down or making converts, both messages convey the same point: I actually have the power my job superficially denies. I’ll use it over you. And I’ll exert it here, the one place I can.

Donald Trump talks like outhouse graffiti; there’s no other way to express it. His blunt sentences, short vocabulary, repeated slogans, and flippant vulgarity sound exactly like the language on plastic porta-john walls. Though he hasn’t done anything as blatant as draw swastikas on his venues, he hasn’t needed to. His appeal reaches two-year-olds sitting on the pot—and grown men grasping the one daily moment they have to themselves.

The Fine Line Between a Mystery and a Whiplash Injury

S.G. Redling, Baggage

What’s worse: when a book feels so predictable, you see where it’s headed from page one? Or when the author deliberately coaches you to consider her book predictable, only to pull the rug from under you on page 200? Asking for a friend. That friend happens to be S.G. Redling.

February 17th doesn’t like Anna Ray. That’s the day her father died violently when she was eleven years old. It’s the day her husband hanged himself last year. Anna and her cousin-slash-enabler Jeannie celebrate 2/17 annually by getting blackout drunk—which doesn’t differ much from other days. Except this year, Anna sobers up to discover a cloying, excessively affectionate co-worker has been murdered in a manner clearly targeted at her.

Two lessons I remember from college creative writing classes:

1. The longer you withhold your Big Reveal, the bigger it’d better be.
2. The more adamantly your protagonist believes X on page one, the more surely X gets proven false by the end.

Redling violates both. Her structure is complicated enough that explaining the violations is impossible without spoilers, so bear with me. I’ll try to explain without giving too much away.

Anna, an assistant ombudsman at a secluded liberal arts college, doesn’t want male attention. Her husband hasn’t been dead one year. But nerdy art professor Ellis Trachtenberg doesn’t know that; he keeps pressing her with unwanted gifts and attention. His on-campus murder one snowy midnight feels almost relieving. Until, that is, Anna discovers the killer disfigured Ellis’s remains in ways eerily similar to her father’s death. The police notice, too.

The story unfolds in two parallel paths. In one, Anna narrates her story in traumatized shoe-gazing alternating with bursts of juvenile drunken self-immolation. Despite being nearly thirty and employed, the circumstances surrounding her father’s death keep her from embracing adulthood. Her mother sends regular letters from prison, which Anna hides, unopened, in a shoebox. Jeannie, her cousin and adoptive sister, joins her for celebratory binges. Anna is a functioning alcoholic.

S.G. Redling

The second path flashes back to Anna’s history. In third-person, we approach Anna’s father’s death circumspectly (her husband’s death merits only one late, hasty chapter). A failed artist and raging drunk, nobody apparently feels bad when Pops’ remains appear. But Anna concertedly buries the circumstances, terrified to address them directly. This exclusion becomes pointed when Anna divulges the full truth to her troubled husband—but not us. We’re getting stonewalled.

Redling presumably knows seasoned mystery audiences have certain learned habits. Among these, we pay attention not only to what authors say, but what they omit. As Anna repeatedly discusses her history, particularly her father’s death, we notice she’s remarkably circumspect about the event itself. She never actually specifies the killer. Veteran readers can’t help ourselves: we start a suspect list, and quickly winnow it down to only one likely prospect.

I say she “presumably knows” because Redling subverts those habits. Her Big Reveal is that we’re wrong, the death happened exactly like everyone assumes, our suspect list was a waste of time, and… what? Redling outright lied to readers by omission? I don’t mind red herrings. Reading thrillers without them gets boring. I mind when the false path deposits me, not at some unanticipated conclusion, but back at the beginning.

My doubts began with the first flashback chapter, where Jeannie’s mother shows Jeannie a newspaper clipping about the murder. Jeannie has a suitably horrified reaction, especially to the accompanying photograph, and—chapter break! Without telling us anything about the text or photo, we leave that behind, not returning for 150 pages. That’s where I began feeling Redling was treating us unfairly, withholding information the characters have available from the beginning.

Mysteries thrive on hidden information, I understand. Authors cannot tell us everything from the beginning, because facts must be uncovered incrementally. But this isn’t really a mystery; the procedural element is scanty, the police characters thinly developed, existing to propel the plot and (not kidding) burst through doors in timely manners. The mystery is ancillary to what could’ve been a character novel. Redling just withholds information to deliberately mislead us.

I’ve previously reviewed one S.G. Redling novel, dubbing Damocles one of the best books I read in 2013. That novel’s slow, cerebral pace excited me, spotlighting an element often overlooked in genre fiction. So I had high expectations from this novel. If she’d skipped the mystery, focusing on a promising character destroying herself to evade trauma, this could’ve worked. But as genre mystery, it feels more like a chain yank.

How To Be Politically Incorrect

via the New York Times

With this week’s commanding Republican primary victories, frontrunner Donald Trump hasn’t outright secured the nomination, but he’s made anybody else getting a complete majority very, very unlikely. If we aren’t facing an inevitable Trump major-party candidacy, we’re certainly facing the humiliation of a lead political party having to second-ballot their presidential nomination, something unseen since 1952. Even if he loses, Trump has already made political history.

Whenever media pundits discuss this unfolding tragicomedy, they inevitably play one among a small handful of soundbites: somebody praising Trump for being “not politically correct.” Trump started that notion himself, repeating it with drum-like persistence, until his supporters have adopted the talking point themselves. It’s often coupled with the phrase “refreshing honesty,” with the implication that “political correctness” involves somehow lying. But that’s as far as formal definitions go.

Trump has used his rostrum to condemn Mexicans, Muslims, women, and journalists, creating several concentric circles of “insider” authenticity. In Trump’s case, political correctness clearly implies having no filter between his brain and his mouth. That couples especially darkly with how crowds at Trump gatherings behave. While praising their candidate for his divisive logorrhea, they’ve turned angrily, sometimes violently, on protesters, African Americans, dissidents, and students.

So. If Donald Trump says what I’ve been thinking, however ill-considered and contentious, he’s “not politically correct.” If somebody without money or microphone access says what they’ve been thinking, we’ll attack. Thus we encounter one basic problem with arguing from undefined terms: we can make them mean whatever we want. Politicians are often mocked for their vague rhetoric, certainly. But this exposes the violent potential in me-first language choices.

I first encountered the expression “politically correct” in a Reader’s Digest article in 1989. Though nominally nonpartisan, RD has frequently published articles praising Republicans, condemning solid climate science, and defending the status quo. This particular article presented “political correctness” as a legitimate complaint left-leaning ideologues used to shame and silence conflicting opinions. Raised Republican in that pre-Google era, I never doubted that article’s sound journalism and objectivity.

Except we don’t live pre-Google anymore. Five minutes of web searching reveals (really, try it) that “politically correct” was a term first used in Maoist revolutionary circles to maintain purity. Like most things Maoist, it imploded once the revolution became the state. The very concept became so embarrassing to leftist circles that by the 1970s, American progressives used the term to jokingly chide one another for drifting into doctrinaire thinking.

By 2000, sociologist Barry Glassner cited outspoken conservatives using the “politically correct” handle to belittle attempts to set public standards. As Glassner noted, most of the cases conservatives quoted actually consisted of attempts to define what constitutes polite versus rude behavior in public. Language that once sounded normal in public discourse, like using racial terms for minorities, or coarse, sailor-like language to describe women, probably shouldn’t survive in modern discourse.

That, though, was 2000. In some ways, the complaint has become more solid. Even Marxist writer Mick Hume openly complains that the desire to muzzle potentially inflammatory speech has reached dystopian heights. Comedians John Cleese and Chris Rock refuse to play the once-prestigious college circuit because “speech codes” have become so restrictive that they feel forcibly silenced. As Hume notes, good comedy is almost always cutting; nice people aren’t funny.

So maybe the Trumpistas have something. Maybe what sounds inflammatory from Trump’s mouth reflects an internalized self-censor. So what then becomes okay? That’s difficult to say. My heavily Republican father finds Donald Trump so offensive that he’s speculated on shooting the guy. Is that politically incorrect? Or is that something the Secret Service might investigate? And what makes that different from race-baiting and other trademark Trump behavior?

Billy Connolly

People embracing political incorrectness are basically inveighing against a term without real meaning. Comedian Billy Connolly, a self-described “hippie”, complains (in a video sadly unavailable in America) that “political correctness is destroying us all.” Connolly’s definition of political correctness: backup warning signals on garbage trucks. Categorically not the same as calling Mexicans rapists. Anybody can lump anything they dislike into “political correctness” and act vindicated for speaking against it.

Thus we reconcile the gap between Trump’s speech, and his attempts to silence dissent. Political correctness isn’t anything, or rather, it isn’t any one thing. It’s an attempt to control the discourse, not by the politically correct, but by their opponents. If you shush me, that’s political correctness. If I shush you, I’m a free speech hero. “I’m not politically correct” has become the new political correctness.

Those Legendary Belfast Vowels

Adrian McKinty, Rain Dogs: A Detective Sean Duffy Novel

Everyone assumes English journalist Lily Bigelow leapt off Carrickfergus Castle to her self-inflicted death. But autopsy reports confirm that, somehow, someone murdered her inside the locked and shuttered monument. Detective Inspector Sean Duffy can’t believe it: an actual locked room mystery. Those never happen, but he just received his second. Is someone gaslighting him? Or are grim forces conspiring to bury Northern Ireland’s darkest secrets?

Irish expat Adrian McKinty’s fifth Sean Duffy novel references prior novels, but is essentially freestanding. RUC Detective Sean Duffy solves crimes in Carrickfergus, outside Belfast, during the heart of the Troubles, that period when Northern Irish sectarian violence reached its historic peak. His police work is solid, but he picks unproductive fights, which keeps him from rising through the ranks. His approach, and career arc, resemble a Northern Irish Inspector Morse.

Lily Bigelow followed a Finnish trade delegation to Carrickfergus, hoping for juicy leads about international development in Britain’s most underdeveloped corners. But her questions seldom addressed the Finns. She seemed more interested in scaring up a controversy surrounding public figures in London, a controversy spanning leaders in media and government. But her notebook is missing. To chase down her killer, Duffy must re-investigate her story.

This investigation propels Duffy from Belfast to London to Helsinki, and finally unto Finland’s Arctic frontiers. He gradually unpacks a massive multinational conspiracy to re-victimize those already traumatized by the Troubles’ persistent violence, victims wholly unable to defend themselves. I daren’t spoil McKinty’s big reveal. Suffice to say, Duffy uncovers a (very real and historical) cabal, not unlike a British Bill Cosby, only longer, wider, and far more destructive.

McKinty’s prose style takes some some getting used to, especially for non-Celtophiles. He utilizes the frequently terse, telegraphic voice common among the Irish working class, a voice so distinctive that the familiar can almost hear those legendary Belfast vowels. Very lengthy passages and fraught discussions vanish quietly into three-word sentences. Newcomers may struggle somewhat with first-person narrator Duffy’s brusque style:

“Office. Window. Lough. Coal boats. Rain.
McCrabban and Lawson sitting there on the sofa, Gregorio Allegri’s comforting (for a Catholic) Miserere on the record player.
‘I don’t like it,’ I said.
‘What don’t you like?’
I pointed at Lawson. ‘He has put a seed of doubt in my head. A seed which has grown into a virulent little shrub of doubt.’”

Adrian McKinty

Readers unaccustomed to Gaelic dialects may find this off-putting. McKinty’s sentences, where they don’t run one or two words, are often purely subject-verb, sometimes giving his storytelling a feeling like he’s outlining something he hopes to complete later. Yet readers willing to persevere will adapt, finding his stylings absolutely correct for a character who thinks in an altogether unornamented style. Duffy speaks briefly because he thinks clearly.

Sadly, for his smart language and concise historical storytelling, McKinty paints himself into a corner. Having chosen a historical focus for his narrative, an event that wouldn’t actually get addressed for nearly a quarter century after this novel’s setting, McKinty can’t actually change history. Though Duffy solves the mystery to his own satisfaction, he cannot resolve things legally, nor bring closure to victims. Thus McKinty’s story less resolves then peters out.

Which is a shame, because before that irresolute ending, McKinty has crafted a first-rate character mystery. Besides the procedural circumstances, Duffy is a complicated character himself. A hipster before anyone invented that term, Duffy struggles to remain intellectually and aesthetically pure in a world of U2 and cheap television. He idolizes Muhammad Ali, accepting grunt duty just to meet The Champ. He numbs his powerful internal conflicts by smoking blunts in his off hours.

Throughout, Duffy struggles with issues of character. His much-younger girlfriend has moved out, but they give mixed signals about actually being over one another. His former colleague has entered the PI business, tempting him with a lucrative paycheck, if he’ll simply leave his scruples at the door. Paranoia runs so pervasive, he can’t get into a car without checking for bombs anymore. Circumstances repeatedly remind Duffy he could enjoy a cushy life, if he simply stopped caring.

Maybe McKinty set standards so high, so early, that any resolution would seem disappointing. Which goes double for a mystery where real life chose the resolution for him. McKinty crafts a novel that’s really, really good, right up to the “sad trombone” conclusion. A story this good deserves a better final page. Well, McKinty implies Duffy’s story isn’t over. Perhaps he’ll get the resolution he deserves in the next book.

The Rain Demons, Part II

Paige McKenzie, The Awakening of Sunshine Girl

This review follows the previous review The Rain Demons

Sunshine Griffith sees dead people. Since her sixteenth birthday, the constant press of souls demanding her ministrations has become downright massive. As a luiseach, a Celtic healing being tasked with guiding souls into the afterlife, her newly manifested abilities risk becoming a full-time job. But she’s still untutored. A new mentor offers her guidance, but his motivations appear mixed. She soon realizes, she’s less his student than his experimental subject.

Writer-actress Paige McKenzie (with ghostwriter Alyssa Sheinmel), with her second Sunshine Girl novel, takes her story in a surprising new direction. The first volume was a contemporary spin on classic haunted house stories, combining vintage Shirley Jackson-ish horror with coming-of-age urgency. This second volume pushes on themes of identity and calling the first book only implied. It’s truly a sequel, not a retread of the prior book.

Newly minted in her supernatural abilities, the previously orphaned Sunshine meets her stone-faced, purposeful father. Within pages, she’s whisked away to study her powers, only to discover a crumbling, mostly abandoned campus. Think Hogwarts if everyone just left. While Sunshine studies with the only luiseach she’s ever met near her own age, her father conducts strange lab experiments. His discoveries may save humanity, but may cost Sunshine her life.

Reading this book, it’s impossible to avoid acknowledging the debts McKenzie owes to older authors. Sunshine is both the lastborn of her kind and the most powerful, a recurrent theme in Orson Scott Card’s novels. Her apprenticeship in a distant, sultry land, coupled with the “No, I’m Your Father” leitmotif (is her father heroic or villainous? I’m still unsure) will inevitably draw comparisons to The Empire Strikes Back.

But McKenzie redeems this transparent borrowing by astutely incorporating Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth structure, which Card and Lucas also liberally appropriated. Volume One, I can say in retrospect, represented Campbell’s “Departure” pattern, with the Call, Refusal, and Threshold clearly signposted. This book explores the Initiation aspect, with Sunshine’s Trials, Atonement, and Apotheosis. Seasoned readers know what Volume Three brings—and Volume Three will happen, as the abrupt ending here demands.

Paige McKenzie, in a promotional still from
The Haunting of Sunshine Girl on YouTube

Sunshine’s father, Aidan, spirits her from cold, rain-drenched Washington, to his university in central Mexico. This represents both opportunity and threat for Sunshine, since he quickly admits she’s hunted. Seems Aidan’s first experiment blew up, creating massive unintended consequences, for with fellow luiseach hold Sunshine culpable. He leaves her two choices: study her powers and become mature, or let the predators among her own kind destroy her.

In parallel, Sunshine’s platonic boyfriend back home, Nolan, continues researching to discover whatever knowledge will unlock Sunshine’s abilities. A strange new woman enters Nolan’s life: youthful but possessed of uncanny knowledge, Helena steers Nolan’s researches in directions she admits serve her own ends. Helena serves the two roles Campbell reserves for “Woman”: Goddess and Temptress. But her connection to Sunshine pushes Nolan into corners he cannot possibly escape.

Some of McKenzie’s storytelling techniques will seem familiar to veteran YA audiences. Sunshine, as our first-person narrator, feels compelled to describe her awkwardness. Apparently her hair goes wild, and she considers herself clumsy. Her adorkable self-figuration stands at odds with her great confidence, poise, and having multiple young men wholly devoted to her. Apparently a tendency to drop things makes her more approachable to her intended teenage readers.

Like most “urban fantasy” novelists, McKenzie makes the most of the collision between her heroine’s ancient heritage and modern setting. The terrible cell phone reception at quasi-Hogwarts looms large in this story. The campus provides fortress-like protection for Sunshine during her adolescent vulnerability, like Dagobah. So the villains must threaten those she loves to draw her out voluntarily. The only question remains: will she, like Luke Skywalker, fall for it?

Of course she will. Like the Buddha or Ulysses, Sunshine is living out a primordial journey, a literal expression of the metaphorical transition we must all make into adulthood. (That’s why I like science fiction and fantasy, because they can address vast themes without being yoked to “realism.”) We don’t read books like this to be surprised or derailed, but to witness something classic re-enacted for a living generation.

Neither McKenzie nor her publisher make any bones about this being a bridge volume. She doesn’t dither introducing new readers to events from Volume One; there’s a brief refresher, then she jumps in with both feet. This energy continues throughout the entire novel. The story ends in motion, promising something even bigger. And I’ll be there. McKenzie pulls readers along with courage, grace, and aplomb.