The Week America Finally Surrendered

Yes, Oprah, I agree. This shit needs to stop.

Oprah for President, a pastor getting a standing ovation for admitting statutory rape, and “shithole countries.” The second week of 2018 really feels like the week America went off the rails. I’ve tried processing everything that’s happened in the last seven or so days, and been unable to do so. It seems too radical, violent, and spasmodic to permit definition. Until I recognized the overarching theme: a willful embrace of unreason.

It’s become commonplace over the last two years for the punditocracy to claim we’ve finally crossed a bridge too far. Donald Trump has finally alienated his base. Coal-burning companies have finally overloaded the climate. Papa John’s comments about NFL kneelers prove the far-right’s moral vacuity. Look!, the pundits scream. Proof, proof I say, that we’ve hit rock bottom and are prepared to reverse course! Somehow it keeps not happening.

Yet somehow, things feel different this week. We didn’t just see somebody doing something awful. Despite left-wing pledges one year ago, we’ve already permitted truly awful behavior from public figures to become sufficiently “normalized” that we’re not shocked anymore. But this isn’t awful behavior. These three incidents represent America completely abandoning historical precedent, moral foundation, and common decency, to embrace… well, I’m not entirely sure what.

It began with the “Oprah for President” outcry following her Golden Globes speech. Though probably well-meant, this push is the exact leftist equivalent to Donald Trump’s overthrow of Republican hierarchy. Pinching concepts from linguist George Lakoff, if Donald Trump is America’s “strict father,” Oprah is our “nurturing parent.” But both share an ideological core of rejecting expertise and routine competence, in favor of giving the political establishment a massive middle finger.

Pastor Andy Savage received a standing
ovation when he admitted a "sexual incident"
with a parishioner. He was 23. She was 17.

Before Oprah’s dust settled, Pastor Andy Savage confessed a “sexual incident” in a Sunday sermon, a confession that garnered a twenty-second standing ovation. Like David Letterman before him, Savage confessed his indiscretions to forestall his accuser taking her accusations public. But he sought forgiveness without repentance; he sought what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace,” the forgiveness we bestow upon ourselves. Importantly, he hasn’t relinquished his liturgical authority.

The collapse culminated (hopefully—the week isn’t over yet) with President Trump’s “shithole countries” comment. I’ll avoid my temptation to condemn these comments on Biblical “least of these” grounds, because this won’t persuade anyone not already persuaded. However, Trump’s comment actively spit upon American commitments going back at least to the Marshall Plan, when Americans agreed we have obligations to poorer, bleaker, less fortunate nations globally. It’s an abandonment of history.

These three incidents demonstrate a certain subset of America has come unmoored from the principles it claims to represent. By embracing Oprah, the American left has admitted commitment, competence, and dedication no longer matter in governing Earth’s most powerful nation. By not needing to undertake some form of penance, or surrender authority, Andy Savage proves even Christians prefer established power over moral foundation. And Trump has essentially relinquished America’s claim to morality on the world stage.

Somebody staging a counter-argument might observe that, in all three cases, only a minority actually believes that. Oprah ginned a strong reaction, but the Democratic party remains committed to process and organization. Andy Savage represents only one congregation, and has received massive Christian pushback. And Donald Trump has the lowest approval ratings of any President ever, at this stage in his administration.

I respond: yes, but it doesn’t take a majority. Donald Trump only got approximately one-third of his party’s primary votes, and came second in the general election. What matters isn’t the majority, but the process. Wing-nuts and lunatics can seize the process without actually winning the debate. And that’s what we’re seeing happening: because Democrats now have to answer Oprah fanatics rather than creating policy, for instance, Oprah has appropriated the system.

Irrationality isn’t entirely bad. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely has demonstrated humans’ irrational tendencies have firm foundations, which actually drive a just-minded and functional society. Indeed, complete rationality, of the homo economicus model, is both untenable and potentially downright harmful. But I’m not discussing ordinary, moment-to-moment irrationality. I’m describing a deliberate, long-term rejection of reason, and the lessons of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

No, the problem isn’t irrationality, which is inevitable, even beneficial. The problem is defiance of what we know, an active retreat from thinking, preferring animal-level gut reactions over evidence and proof. American public discourse now apparently prefers stupid over smart. We’ve relinquished our past, sat on our asses, and forgotten our identity. I seriously question whether we’ll now ever get it back again.

The Grammar Police State

“Irregardless isn’t a word!”

So began a diatribe at work recently. During an idle moment, when we had briefly outpaced the amount of work we had available to actually do, and therefore had to wait around somewhat impotently for something to happen, a guy opened his phone and began watching YouTube videos. As so often happens anymore, his attention drifted onto politics, and he began watching a comedian baiting protesters.

To judge by my co-worker’s rant, the comedian had targeted liberal and progressive activists; I later learned he’d found this video on Breitbart. But the specific content was immaterial to this particular response: caught in a minor logical inconsistency, the protester responded with the verbal equivalent of a shrug, saying “Irregardless.” The comedian began a lecture, which my co-worker repeated mostly verbatim, that “Irregardless isn’t a word.”

We’ve probably all heard this somewhere. “Irregardless isn’t a word,” lecture schoolteachers, newspaper editors, media pundits, and amateur scolds. I’ve always found this argument baffling.  What is “a word,” other than a unit of vocal sound which native speakers agree conveys some concept of meaning? If somebody says a thing, and another person understands the intent, where’s the lack of a word?

But I noticed something more nefarious here. The comedian, and my co-worker who passively received everything that passed through his head which ratified his existing opinions, wanted to shut protesters down because they used “incorrect” English. Unless you speak the Queen’s English as well as me, the argument goes, you have no right to express opinions publicly. Or, put another (possibly more accurate) way, you’re too dumb to do anything but shut up.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the word irregardless “dates back to the 19th century, but is regarded as incorrect in standard English.” Merriam-Webster identifies the word being used in 1795. So it’s hardly a neologism. It’s probably overkill; people who use it presumably want the extra “ir-” syllable for verbal emphasis which their point doesn’t need. So yeah, as verbal filler, it’s sloppy, demonstrating somebody is probably thinking on their feet. But is it really “wrong”?

Before anybody accuses me of liberal propaganda, this isn’t an isolated example of conservatives attacking progressives. We saw liberals belittle George W. Bush on similar grounds for “misunderestimated,” a supposed Bushism which Merriam-Webster actually tracks back to 1913. Sarah Palin’s “refudiate,” an apparent actual neologism, received broad mockery, even though audiences clearly understood her intent.

All these cases demonstrate a tendency, among both the punditocracy and ordinary people, to claim the opposition cannot have legitimate arguments until they savvy “acceptable” English. This standard of acceptability usually means “my English.” We won’t address the substance of your position, this argument goes, until you address my concerns about your vocabulary. Anybody can see the flaw here: my concerns will never be truly satisfied.

It's a joke. Except when it's not.

We can consider this a form of “whataboutism.” This idea, deflecting serious questions by tossing out “but what about X” questions, has gained currency because President Trump uses it frequently. But rhetoricians have known about this technique for decades, and consider it a logical fallacy. Political scientists consider it something far more insidious: a propaganda technique.

“Whataboutism” and grammar policing share a similar goal: to steer discussion away from the stated topic, onto something the other debater better understands. By crowing “Irregardless isn’t a word,” the comedian doesn’t have to address the protester’s serious sociopolitical concerns. By harping on “refudiate,” commentators avoided actually calling the question underlying Sarah Palin’s original tweet. Both techniques attempt to illegitimately steer the conversation.

Thus, both whataboutism and grammar policing serve to create the appearance of public debate, without moving toward a solution. They give the punditocracy the opportunity to talk about things going on, fill otherwise vacant time in the 24-hour news cycle, and maintain their high public profile, without actually doing anything. They don’t have to address one another on actual data, ensuring nobody feels attacked, because they’re not actually saying anything.

Further, it allows citizens to join the public “debate” without having to know anything about the issues. My co-worker, already cruising self-identified partisan sources, doesn’t have to become informed about issues, because he already knows that “Irregardless isn’t a word,” and therefore he’s smarter than the protesters getting demeaned. This secures his justification to continue as he’s always done, without needing to understand anything or stage an argument.

We often treat grammar police behavior as cute, quirky, or a necessary nuisance. But recent events prove it isn’t really neutral. At root, grammar policing is an attempt to silence others. When that applies to important public issues, we can see its more nefarious ends: the grammar police want to regulate the marketplace of ideas.

The End Is Nigh (Again)

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part XX
Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

The Apocalypse is coming. Every sign points toward the End of Days, as Four Horsemen (actually motorcyclists) crisscross the countryside, leaving devastation behind. Armies of angels and demons stalk Earth, and their march appears headed toward a cataclysmic confrontation. Only a small number of True Believers follow the signs, watching as everything appears headed towards… a suburban back garden in bucolic Oxfordshire, England. Are the prophecies off-kilter, or has God simply lost His eternal mind?

British novelists Terry Pratchett (“Discworld”) and Neil Gaiman (American Gods) wrote this strange, fast-paced comedy as a labor of love. Both grew up with lightly held spiritual values, which they largely abandoned later. But religion, and the near-universal belief among religions that the current age will pass away, colored their thinking; Satan has been a recurrent image in both authors’ works. A vaudeville retelling of the Book of Revelation played into both authors’ shared interests.

Aziraphale, Heaven’s least-virtuous angel, and Crowley, Hell’s least-vice-ridden demon, have established a truce, enjoying one another’s company in Aziraphale’s used-book shop. They like humans, and human company; they’re probably the last true humanists. So when they realize the Last Battle has begun, neither wants everything to end. They track the last known address of the Antichrist, whom they believe is the American ambassador’s bratty, self-satisfied son. But apparently, somebody has misplaced the son of Satan.

Behind this supernatural farce lies a book. In the 17th Century, soothsayer Agnes Nutter published a book of Nostradamus-like prophecies covering three centuries. (Because the word “nutter” doesn’t exist in American English, imagine she’s named Agatha Wingnut.) Nutter’s predictions are completely and wholly accurate. Unfortunately, they’re so specific that they’re not particularly useful, and they describe only her own descendants. Agnes’ last heir, Anathema Device, races to save humanity using Agnes’ strange, bleakly inscrutable aphorisms.

This novel works in its own right, as a slapstick “idiot plot” device where Heaven could avoid Armageddon if somebody just spoke up. The frenetic comedy reflects more Terry Pratchett’s classic style, infused with hints of Gaiman’s drier, more erudite wit. (This was Gaiman’s first novel; he hadn’t perfected his prose voice yet, working primarily in comics and graphic novels.) Readers can let the authors’ comedy wash over them in waves of broad, cutting laughter.

Terry Pratchett (left) and Neil Gaiman

But the satire draws on apocalyptic mentalities more broadly, too. Apocalypse, from the Greek, “revealing the concealed,” demands believers accept the hidden truth behind apparent reality. This novel reeks of concealed realities: the Antichrist reshapes reality to reflect what he reads in conspiracy theory magazines. The Witchfinder Army continues a “deep state” crusade officially abandoned centuries earlier. An order of Satanic nuns has cultivated the Dark One’s coming… but gotten bored and secularized from waiting.

Fashionable apocalypse cults want, ultimately, to understand hidden narratives behind apparently inexplicable events. They drag everything together to create a narrative through-line, as though a cosmic scriptwriter controlled everything. These authors satirize that mentality, while also tacking a second-order speculation onto that desire: what if the cosmic scriptwriter, too, doesn’t understand everything that’s going on? What if the cosmic order is so complex, that even God no longer understands everything He has set in motion?

Years before David Foster Wallace, Pratchett and Gaiman pioneered the technique of packing their prose with smug, self-satisfied footnotes to display their (putative) erudition. This novel’s narrative voice desperately wants you to know it knows how smart it is. Yet as plot points accumulate faster than backslaps in Three Stooges stories, even that voice becomes increasingly harried. Theology, prophecy, and reason all become increasingly useless. The smart voice becomes detectably harried; caution, nervous breakdown ahead.

In ancient times, humans ascribed human-like intent to thunder and lightning, wind and soil. Modern humans describe these same forces in rational terms and scientific equations. Both efforts serve the same purpose: to make reality comprehensible to human intellect. But Pratchett and Gaiman suggest a different thesis. What if things simply happen, dragging humans and our high-minded intellectual explanations along helplessly? Behind the comedy, there lingers an unstated horror that reality is indifferent to humanity.

Like the best comedy, this novel succeeds because it isn’t just silly. It addresses real fears people have. Believers and unbelievers alike know the anxiety of lying awake at night, wondering, what if I’m wrong? Pratchett and Gaiman dare push the question one step further: what if I’m wrong for the wrong reasons? This trajectory can only end in comedy, because taking it seriously would create a tragedy so pervasive, we couldn’t possibly endure it.

Reviewer's Note: This essay was formerly part of my 1001 books series. However, in light of the revelation of Neil Gaiman's crimes, I have removed this book from the list and replaced it with Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel, Guards! Guards!

The Decline and Fall of the Space-Faring Nerd

"Captain" Daly (seated) and the bridge crew of the USS Callister

Two different social outcasts saunter into fake worlds of their own creation. In spring 1990, Lieutenant Reginald Barclay enters the holodeck of the USS Enterprise-D on Star Trek: TNG’s episode “Hollow Pursuits.” In the closing hours of 2017, Captain Robert Daly enters the bridge of the titular ship on Netflix’s Black Mirror episode “USS Callister.” The twist is, both characters enter fake worlds of their own creation. But they reflect two very different visions.

By now, dedicated fans already know about “USS Callister,” so I’ll be frank. Spoiler warnings ahead. Where Lieutenant Barclay has created a world of swashbuckling men and gentle women in diaphanous Roman robes, “Captain” Daly has created a retreat into Great Society-era science fiction, with high-minded declarations about human potential, but massive subsumed racism and sexism. Both retreat into the past. And both populate that past with people they know.

Barclay has created duplicates of the Enterprise bridge crew. He’s made Commander Riker a short, comical character, and turned Doctor Crusher into some strange nymph of fantasy. The bridge crew is justifiably horrified to discover how they’ve been shanghaied into a lesser crew member’s fantasy life. But as the story unfolds, Barclay proves himself a highly competent, but risk-averse, scientist, who’s created a fake world to shed his inhibitions. He’s essentially harmless.

“Captain” Daly, by contrast, is malevolent, power-hungry, and arrogant. Like Barclay, he’s an underappreciated genius in real life; he created the base code for America’s most popular online role-playing game. But others get fat off his creation. So he creates a parallel world to exact the revenge he cannot have “outside.” His genius masks an underlying rage. Daly wants recognition for his accomplishments, so he creates a pocket universe where he can demand, and receive, it.

Side-by-side comparisons of these episodes could yield interesting studies. Toxic masculinity versus social emasculation, for instance, or evolving attitudes about escape into space. (The “Callister” ends with gamers engaging in dick-swinging displays despite standing little to lose.) I care more about both episodes’ retreat from the present.

The Callister’s obvious debt to Star Trek doesn’t bear comment. But which franchise Daly pilfers does. Rather than TNG, which fans consider the gold standard for Trek, Daly recreates the bobbed bouffants and scenery-chewing acting of the original series, from the 1960s. Despite being a technological genius, with a finger on America’s game-playing pulse, he voluntarily retreats from the present. His game happens on a non-networked computer, away from humans and, y’know, reality.

Lieutenant Barclay asleep on Doctor Crusher's lap, on Star Trek

When Star Trek aired “Hollow Pursuits” in 1990, fan culture wasn’t boosted by the popularity of the Internet. Fans were mostly in-groups sharing mimeographed magazines with hand-drawn illustrations among their own members. Mass culture could easily pass over nerds, and nerd culture, as essentially harmless, because it was inward-turning and private. Mainstreamers mostly disliked nerds because they kept their own company, which makes natural joiners uncomfortable.

But the Internet’s linking ability emphasizes nerds’ ability to organize. No longer fringe elements yoked by geography, nerds have global reach. By its simple ubiquity, nerd culture has become mainstream, which has revealed a seam of malice as destructive as the “squares” who formerly tortured nerds. From Gamergate to the Great Szechuan Sauce Meltdown of 2017, the malice lingering under at least some of my beloved nerd culture has become visible.

It’s tough to avoid comparisons to people who claim amendments to their favorite franchises “ruined their childhood.” If women can be Ghostbusters, or James Bond could be Black, then the world we comprehend—because it’s oriented toward people who look like me, and reminds us we’re normal—isn’t static. Despite its language of the future, toxic nerd culture has a past orientation. Let’s retreat to when things used to be good.

Around the same time “USS Callister” distributed online, BBC aired the Doctor Who 2017 Christmas special. The 12th Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi, had a face-to-face encounter with the First Doctor subbed in by David Bradley (original actor William Hartnell died over forty years prior). Confronted with his past, which included bluntly misogynistic attitudes and white arrogance, the Doctor had self-awareness enough to feel embarrassed about his prior principles.

That’s why Robert Daly is so scary. Not that he dominates others; hell, we’ve all seen that. Nor that he spouts bromides about humanity’s best impulses to justify his domination. Rather, like dictators and petroleum despots, he clings to power most furiously, and punishes opponents most brutally, when he realizes he’s most critically vulnerable. People like him matter less and less.

Gunslingin' Queen of the Dystopian Frontier

Lyndsay Ely, Gunslinger Girl: A Novel

Serendipity “Pity” Jones has nothing to live for on the Commune. Days are filled with work and patriotism, then she comes home at night to an all-male family that despises her. Rather than face encroaching adulthood on those terms, she and her best friend pull a runner into the technological wasteland of the new American West. But she quickly discovers that, on the outside, a woman’s value matters only by her product in the moment.

Debut author Lindsay Ely combines Pat Frank’s apocalyptic classic Alas, Babylon with Owen Wister’s The Virginian for a product readers will find familiar, if they’ve ever watched Firefly. This is both good and bad. Over the last two decades, frontier sci-fi has become so commonplace, readers can slip into this book like a favorite pair of jammies. It requires little effort to immerse oneself in Ely’s world. But like those jammies, the comfort may be sleep-inducing.

The Second Civil War left the American East controlled by the Confederation of North America. CONA believes in hard work, stability, and order, so it built the Communes. But wartime bioterror left a paucity of fertile women, and Pity’s father sees dollar signs in her uterus. Pity wants more from life. Her late mother, a former Patriot (think “Browncoat”), taught her marksmanship, so she steals Mommy’s guns and heads for the frontier seeking her fortune.

Out there, she quickly loses everything: scroungers loot her goods, murder her friend, and torch her truck. Left with only her guns, Pity falls in with mysterious strangers from Cessation, the last free outpost in America. With nowhere left to go, she follows their lead. Her impeccable aim and recognized beauty make her a desirable commodity in Cessation, where she becomes a star of the Theatre, half Annie Oakley, half circus freak.

Ely’s futuristic setting has high-tech gewgaws, but they aren’t much expounded upon. Audiences will recognize her world from Tatooine, the Eavesdown Docks, or Deep Space Nine: it’s Dodge City with shinier chrome. Cessation’s street violence (which is mostly just mentioned; Pity doesn’t much go outdoors) contrasts with the glamorous but morally odious order enforced by Casimir, the casino/whorehouse/sideshow that rules town. Some science fiction happens, but at heart, this story is a western.

Lyndsay Ely

Frontier myth looms large in American science fiction. Han Solo can get goods into the home territories without Imperial entanglements; Commander Adama plots a course “beyond the red line.” Americans see space as territory ripe for conquest, and even NASA press releases are often redolent of Manifest Destiny. Even YA dystopias from major publishing conglomerates pit suffocating civilization against the pioneering spirit. We’ll all become free, if we leave home, and become willing to kill.

This trend has problems, certainly. HBO’s Westworld used Indians as set dressing; not one Native American character had lines. We see something similar here: the boundary between CONA and Cessation is populated by Dissidents and Scroungers, landless and chased pillar to post by CONA military and paid mercenaries. But like Indians, other characters mostly speak for these oppressed groups; they seldom speak for themselves. Even when it’s their own story they need to tell.

Readers could make a drinking game of recognizing the prior stories which influence Ely’s narrative. Though I’ve mentioned mass-media science fiction franchises, the two stories I see harvested most liberally are Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage and Louis L’Amour’s The Quick and the Dead. Both novels, considered classics, feature Easterners needing to quickly unlearn civilized ways to survive beyond the frontier line. That theme, of counter-conformity and bare-knuckle survival, resonates strongly in Ely’s novel.

Ely presents us, essentially, a story of subjugation. Pity could accept her father’s iron-fisted dominion, but she requires autonomy CONA’s patriarchal structure won’t allow. So she flees, only to find the frontier has its own requirements. Cessation offers decadent luxuries (in both the popular and Marxist senses), but Pity quickly learns that, to embrace these luxuries, she must—well, spoilers. Let’s say, whether it’s the comforts of civilization, frontier lawlessness, or whatever, she must conform.

Rereading what I’ve just written, I realize it could sound like I hated this book. Not so. I devoured it in one frenetic weekend, and I can offer the best compliment available from a blue-collar worker: it kept me up past my bedtime. It’s a good story, well-written, with engaging characters and humane plot. Just don’t expect it to change your life, or upend your genre expectations. Take it for a fun story, and it won’t disappoint.