Society Is a Machine To Be Broken (Part One)

Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn as Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese in The Terminator

Watching James Cameron’s first two Terminator movies back-to-back, it’s difficult to avoid noticing the biggest change. In 1984’s The Terminator, Kyle Reese quotes a message which John Connor putatively gave him to carry back in time to his mother, Sarah: “I can't help you with what you must soon face, except to tell you that the future is not set.”

By 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, that speech had evolved to its more famous form: “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” This isn’t a huge difference in terms of words, but the change in meaning is glaring: nothing, the franchise now states, is inevitable. We’re not subject to anyone else’s standards.

This matters because the first movie presents time as a flat circle. Events set in motion must come to fruition, created by the causal loop: the thing created sets itself in motion. Like the great Biblical prophecies, the act of prophesying causes that which is foretold. The fact that Kyle Reese and the Terminator traveled back to destroy John Connor, caused John Connor to be conceived. Then Sarah rides into the sunset, bearing the child of destiny.

But where, in the first movie, Sarah’s knowledge of the future causes that future to happen, by the second movie, knowing the future makes the future malleable. The first movie sees Sarah swept along by history’s tide, helpless to do anything but survive. The second movie sees her take a bold stand against destiny, seize command of fate, and, aided by a band of determined outsiders, change the trajectory of history.

These movies dropped at different times, certainly. Those of us who grew up in Reagan’s America had two overlapping experiences. We were encouraged to believe we could be anything, through hard work and perseverance. But we understood that, no matter our efforts or aspirations, there was a high likelihood, in Reagan’s Manichaean Cold War outlook, that we wouldn’t live to see adulthood.

By 1991, that threat had lifted. The Soviet machine was in eclipse, and America was apparently triumphant. Terminator 2 asserts we aren’t beholden to historical forces, and that humans, not systems, decide history’s greater arc. Anyone willing to resist history’s seemingly ineluctable movement, actually has the power to change history; society and culture are tractable in the second movie, not systemic.

Edward Furlong and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Put another way, these two movies represent two very different interpretations of society and history. The Terminator sees all society, and history as its longitudinal arc, as determined by systems. Kyle and Sarah cannot change history, they can only prevent a more horrible outcome. Terminator 2 sees society and history as composed of humans, as an accumulation of individual narratives. In that view, individuals really can change the arc.

Note, however, how every subsequent sequel has returned to the first movie’s grim inevitability. That’s because the franchise needs a marketable trajectory, of course. But also, the decades since 1991 have shown us that the systems around us aren’t dead just because the Cold War ended. If anything, society today is more technocratic, more adversarial, and more economically unequal than it was in 1984.

As the late legal scholar Derrick Bell pointed out, the forces that surround us have a seemingly inexhaustible ability to adjust to the pressures we put on them. Bell, who was Black, specifically meant racism. But class conflict, nationalism, and other bigotries have adapted to history broadly. The systems controlling our lives have never been successfully broken, only forced to adapt to massed individuals’ transitory outrage.

We’re all trapped, beholden to the social machine we’ve built. But though I say “we,” us individuals didn’t do it, and can’t control the machine once it’s in motion. Kings and priests gave primacy over to capitalists and politicians, proving the system survives by adapting. The Terminator’s violence might exaggerate the forces surrounding us, but we all experience this helplessness, this sense that we’re all feeding the machine.

We could argue that The Terminator, which ends with Sarah riding off into the storm, overstates our inevitability. The machine adapts because we press it to. But Terminator 2 overstates our control. Time isn’t a flat circle; our organized efforts can force the system to change. But that change means the machine adapting, not dying. We must fight the machine, not because we’ll win, but because the fight is right and necessary.

The future is not set. But that doesn’t mean we should be arrogant enough to think we’ve beaten our fate.

Society Is a Machine To Be Broken (Part Two)
Society Is a Machine To Be Broken (Part Three)

What Makes Powerful People Go Bad?

Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us

When powerful people use their official standing to enrich themselves at others’ expense, we frequently pretend we understand why that happened. Watching elected officials with their hands in the till, or captains of industry treating their companies as their personal piggy-banks, we may nod sagely, assuming there’s a simple explanation. We may quote Lord Acton’s bromide: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But is that really sufficient?

Dr. Brian Klaas, a UK-based American political scientist, salts his exegesis of official corruption with copious real-world headlines. Though he’s oblique in addressing today’s highly visible personalities, there’s little doubt he found inspiration in watching recent top-level corruption in American and British politics. Yet to his credit, he avoids directly addressing current personalities, or otherwise pushing hot buttons. He’d rather address root causes, than re-air the Anglophonic world’s dirty laundry.

There’s little doubt power correlates with abuse. Klaas finds evidence supporting this position, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Twentieth Century’s rogues’ gallery of military juntas, from fiddling local racketeers to the bigwigs who imploded Enron. But did power cause their corruption, or do corrupt people seek power? The answer, Klaas says, is something of both, and worse: lousy people flourish in power because we ordinary peons permit it.

Professor Klaas takes a remarkably catholic approach to understanding top-level corruption. One moment, he might cite recent laboratory discoveries in psychology, economics, or political science. The next, he interviews deposed former dictators, professional swindlers, and disgraced big-C Capitalists. There’s no shortage of evidence, from laboratories and the field, of how venal people flourish in power. But the through-line, Klaas discovers, isn’t necessarily neat or morally concise.

For instance, Klaas finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that power attracts bad people. But bad people keep achieving power, partly, because we reward them. We unwashed masses frequently mistake superficial charm, glib language, and success in unrelated fields as markers of deserving leaders. And we’re also frequently distracted when notorious personalities collapse, failing to notice that those personalities flourished in systems that discourage good people from seeking power.

Dr. Brian Klaas

Also, Klaas finds, though bad people seek power, power also provides situations where corruption is the easy choice, and sometimes the only choice. It isn’t that power necessarily corrupts individuals, but rather, power provides more opportunities to be corrupted—and more opportunities to get caught. Power also forces leaders into situations where they must get their hands dirty, often doing things they disapprove of, because it’s the least awful choice.

Corruption might not be inevitable, Klaas writes; but it’s arguably inevitable in the systems we have currently. Whether that means multinational corporations, federated nation-states, or secretive religious edifices, our current systems encourage and reward situations that result in corruption. So yeah, apparently, power does corrupt, even if the people it corrupts might’ve been vulnerable to corruption in any situation. On first face, the prognosis looks mighty dim.

Klaas isn’t satisfied with aimless doomsaying, though. The evidence that explains why corruption seems widespread, also provides guidance for resolving corruption at its roots. Klaas distills ten “lessons” in redressing corruption, and describes not only how they might work, but how they’ve successfully worked in the outside world. These aren’t moral abstractions invented from cloth; Klaas describes how governments, corporations, and other institutions have resolved corruption in the real world.

What’s more, Klaas writes his discoveries, and his lessons, in a conversational, easily readable voice. Don’t let Klaas’ political science bona fides intimidate you. He turns potentially chilling situations, like an interview with a confessed murdering despot, or a conversation with America’s most successful biological terrorist, into moments of relatable human insight. Corrupt people, he discovers, are still people, as conflicted and nuanced as anybody else.

Like most circumstances in real life, corruption proves too complex for easy explanation. Power does corrupt people, but the people it corrupts were (mostly) vulnerable to corruption anyway. We ordinary people could prevent prevent corruption by changing the systems, but that requires admitting we’re complicit in the current systems, which are themselves corrupt. Every time Klaas appears headed for a concise explanation, reality intervenes, making things complicated again.

Yet Klaas leads us to recognize that we aren’t powerless. Changing the systems that encourage corruption won’t be easy, but it’s certainly possible. Not only can companies and governments prevent corruption, but many have done so, in ways that could carry across situations and apply universally. The system, and the venality it encourages, looks monolithic. But straightforward, nonpartisan tools exist to fix that monolith, if we use them.

The Disappointment of Small Terrors

Brian Evenson, A Collapse of Horses: a Collection of Stories

An American tourist in rural France watches secrets unfold by starlight, getting drawn deeper in, until he cannot escape. A childhood game of dares causes lifelong consequences to flare up brutally. A possessed teddy bear appears to have stolen a stillborn infant’s soul, and now sets its sights on the grieving father. A wounded cowboy stubbornly refuses to die, keeping his pardner bound to an old promise.

Brian Evenson comes highly recommended by readers who consider themselves connoisseurs of horror fiction. As a recent convert to the genre, I wanted to experience different kinds of horror, beyond the well-hyped chestnuts of Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft. Evenson famously merges horror with the understated introspection of so-called “literary fiction,” a fusion that’s earned him loyalty from countless critics and fans. Perhaps I’m just missing something.

Though I wouldn’t call Evenson “formulaic,” his writings have a recognizable pattern. He begins by taking some well-loved genre—Westerns, family dramas, science fiction, slice-of-life vignettes. Then one character realizes something doesn’t add up. A path that should lead straight becomes labyrinthine, perhaps, or an ordinary item becomes somehow ominous. The complication is seldom strictly supernatural, though for Evenson, naturalism is usually optional.

Our protagonist, having realized the complication, chooses somehow to resist. That resistance may involve actively opposing chaos, by trying to kill someone or destroy an artifact. Or it may simply involve obstinately sticking with whatever the protagonist believes to be true, even despite massive evidence and social opprobrium. Whatever form that resistance takes, the protagonist is willing to stand by that choice, no matter the consequences.

Then, usually: nothing. Evenson generally pours energy into creating characters, situations, and narrative MacGuffins, but apparently gets fatigued and quits. His stories frequently suffer the curse of today’s short-story market: the author creates the foundations for something complex and promising, but decides that, because he’s already written the story’s major themes, he doesn’t need to waste time on such fleeting trivia as action, dialog, character, or plot.

Brian Evenson

In “Cult,” a man agrees to help his abusive ex-girlfriend, thinking that makes him the bigger person, only to realize he’s getting sucked back in. Sounds like a great premise, right? Except Evenson writes the relationship entirely in sweeping generalities, long on adjectives, so we never understand exactly what made their bond so compelling, much less why he’d return. They’re simply going through the motions of a paperback cautionary tale.

“Past Reno,” a family drama redolent of Stephen King’s influence, features a man driving back to claim his portion of his sadistic father’s inheritance. Except the protagonist only vaguely defines what he previously fled, what horrific reckoning might await on the old homestead. He neither knows nor cares, and therefore, neither do we. The story culminates in the protagonist smashing a bathroom mirror, basically to do anything besides idle woolgathering.

My favorite story, “The Dust,” reflects cinematic influences like Ridley Scott and John Carpenter. A mining platform on a distant planet, thousands of miles from civilization, becomes infiltrated with fine, powdery dust that seemingly overtakes everything. The skeleton crew becomes isolated and paranoid, forcing the security chief to take steps. Soon, it becomes impossible to distinguish allies from enemies, and reality from one’s own internal demons.

But even this, my favorite story, the one which most utilizes Evenson’s fabled talent for misdirection and unease, ends abruptly, like Evenson lost interest. Time after time, Evenson’s stories tease a Shirley Jackson-like sense of existential foreboding, we barely start to care, and then Evenson moves on. Our emotional investments come to nothing, and I’m left feeling, not scared or disquieted, but swindled. Like he took my money and ran.

In over half of Evenson’s stories, characters don’t have names. Protagonists are identified by pronouns: “he” or (less often) “she.” Supporting characters have titles based on roles: “the doctor,” “the other man,” “his father.” Entire stories happen with no proper nouns. In individual stories, this imprecision maybe induces dread, but as stories accumulate, the vagueness bleeds together, making it difficult to even remember which story we’re reading.

I began reading this collection with high hopes, based on Evenson’s reputation. Before long, reading became an act of rubbernecking, transfixed by the grotesquerie of a train wreck in motion. As my lack of emotional reaction accrued, I realized I was simply going through the motions. Then eventually, I didn’t even have energy enough to do that.

Maybe this book misrepresents Evenson’s corpus. Who knows. After reading this, I won’t be going back to investigate any further.

The Changing Definition of “Self-Defense”

Accused vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, captured on a cellphone video

I’m having difficulty describing the rage I feel watching the Kyle Rittenhouse trial unfold. The idea that anybody, especially a minor, could carry a military-grade firearm into a community where he neither lives nor works, kill two people, and claim “self-defense” boggles my mind. The fact that nobody in the justice system discarded that claim unilaterally makes me question the legal proceedings. If that argument isn’t discarded prima facie, that opens doors to unregulated vigilanteism.

American conservatives have rallied around Rittenhouse’s claims. The idea that he has legal authority to “defend” others’ property has become right-wing doctrine recently, a decision that actually makes sense from conservative history. Since at least the 1990s, American conservatives have valued the right for civilians to use violence to defend property as central to jurisprudence. Yet even salutary analysis of their rhetoric reveals something left unsaid. As a friend put it recently, regarding Rittenhouse’s case:

Rittenhouse was afraid of a kid with a skateboard...............

while he was carrying an AR-15.

— Agolf Twitler Slayer (@bblock29) November 3, 2021

I encountered similar logic previously. Writing about Trayvon Martin, killed by George Zimmerman, a vigilante who similarly claimed self-defense, I said that reaction seemed unmotivated by any reasonable definition of the situation. One (unsigned) commenter told me: “Once George was getting his skull bounced on the pavement, without some fantastic counter evidence, self-defense is clear.” Then as now, this struck me as flawed, because it relied on a lousy and legally sloppy definition of self-defense.

In both cases, George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse, the conservative response has revealed the unspoken supposition: self-defense happens with a gun. When a mysterious stranger pursues a youth through residential streets, and the youth responds with fists, what that youth does isn’t self-defense, even though the mysterious stranger caused the confrontation. Likewise, when a lawful protester sees a vigilante with a rifle, and aims to prevent violence, that isn’t self-defense. Self-defense happens with a gun.

Like me, you probably assumed initially that the Trayvon Martin killing was primarily racial. Martin was Black, while Zimmerman was a fair-skinned Hispanic man whom many commentators, including me, initially mistook for White. But if the Rittenhouse situation is essentially similar, then race isn’t the dominant concern, since both Rittenhouse and the three people he shot (two of whom died) are White. The commonality between these situations isn’t race or class, it’s only the gun.

Trayvon Martin

As an ex-conservative myself, I recall hearing, and occasionally even speaking, the core argument. We need civilian firearms, as people like Wayne LaPierre keep reminding us, to defend ourselves against common criminals and tyrannical governments. All guns, of all kinds. Everything from a pocket-sized Kel-Tec, to a hip-holstered Glock, to a Remington .30-06 deer rifle, to an AK-47. To the firearms true believer, we need guns to defend ourselves from a scary and violent world.

The arguments unfolding around Zimmerman and Rittenhouse reveal, however, that the rhetoric has skidded. At least among American conservatives, the correlation between firearms and self-defense has become reciprocal. Punching your pursuer, or clocking your pursuer with a skateboard, is an act of thuggish violence and mayhem. Shooting the person who punched you or swung at you with a skateboard is self-defense. This seems to apply even if the person carrying the firearm started the conflict.

This argument began among the police. The officer who shot Jacob Blake, kick-starting the Kenosha violence that entangled Rittenhouse, has evaded charges by claiming self-defense. This despite the officer, Rusten Sheskey, shooting Blake in the back while he was walking away. But wait, Officer Sheskey’s defenders hasten to claim: Blake had a knife in his car, and a warrant for his arrest! The mere fact that Sheskey couldn’t possibly have known that evidently doesn’t matter.

But what began among police has drifted into civilian law. Self-defense happens with a gun; anything involving hands or tools is not self-defense. I seriously fear this argument will empower more vigilantes, like Rittenhouse and Zimmerman, to deliberately provoke conflicts with anyone they personally dislike. If this defense holds any legal water—and Zimmerman’s acquittal suggests it does—then it’s only a matter of time before others misuse this premise to perpetrate cheap street justice.

Worse, if Rittenhouse is exonerated, you know it’s only a matter of time before some asswipe (that’s a legal term), giddy with culture-war self-righteousness, takes a firearm into a bar and picks a fight that turns deadly.. If Kyle Rittenhouse is permitted to excuse himself from shooting strangers by claiming self-defense, then the precedent is clear: self-defense is whatever happens with a gun. And someone, somewhere, will use that to make American life immeasurably worse.

Danté’s Epistle to the Hurting Americans

Danté Stewart, Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle

Young Danté Stewart discovered, in a college ministry, how easy it was to earn White Christians’ approval. Just don’t make waves, don’t tell them anything they don’t already believe, and perhaps most important, don’t ever, ever, talk about race in church. But then Stewart watched his White pew-mates treat highly publicized Black deaths with placid indifference. Soon he realized that, in the face of injustice, the greatest sin was silence.

This isn’t a book about Christians and our history with race, not in a global sense. If you want that, Jemar Tisby and Esau McCaulley have those bases covered. This is Danté Stewart’s autobiography of his journey to discover what being Black and Christian in today’s America really means. He describes the struggles he’s endured, the lies he’s needed to unlearn, and the discoveries he’s made to reach this point.

As an early breakout star on Clemson University’s football team, Stewart had people clamoring for his attention. That included both the school’s Gospel Choir, which reflected his Pentacostal upbringing, and the White ministries associated with suburban megachurches. In his telling, he occupied both worlds simultaneously for a time. He even married a pretty singer he met in Gospel Choir. But the White ministry showered him with surprisingly forthcoming praise.

Stewart adapted himself to ministries that provided him with rewards. He had himself rebaptized into the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition, and even preached to almost entirely White stadium congregations. But then something happened: he, like millions of Americans, watched Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, murdered on camera. Stewart wanted to speak with his fellow congregants about what happened. To his horror, his fellow believers appeared totally nonchalant.

Thus began Stewart’s painful reevaluation of what he’d come to believe. He questioned everything about his history as a Christian, as a Black man, as an American, that led to this moment. His road back to his family’s beliefs, described in his flowing, beautifully conversational prose, wasn’t short or easy. However, he had to admit, he could only walk with Jesus if Jesus walked with those who suffered.

Danté Stewart

Stewart writes with a personal, intimate tone, the language of prayer and trust. His rhythms reflect the poets and critics he quotes generously, especially Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, and the hip-hop and soul music which played large in his introspection. As with his heroes, one feels from Stewart’s writing the intimacy of casual conversation, even as he examines harsh truths his White audiences might prefer to conceal.

True to this book’s secondary title, most of Stewart’s writing resembles a Pauline epistle. He doesn’t use parables, and though he freely references moments in his life as a preacher, teacher, husband and father, these aren’t allegorical; like Paul’s tales, Stewart’s are autobiographical, a confession that reaching this point hasn’t been easy, and there’s still more mountain to climb. Stewart prefers the honest over the universal.

Not to say his “autobiography” hews close to life’s narrative. Like Ta-Nahesi Coates or Maya Angelou, whom he also quotes generously, Stewart (Mr. Stew to his students) organizes his life thematically. Then, within those themes, he flashes rapidly between his narrative of events, often conflicted and subjective, and a form of spontaneous poetry, which coalesces into a statement of the lessons he takes from each situation of blindness and struggle.

We journey with Stewart through the intense but transitory highs of suburban White Christianity. Through the lows of casual violence enforced upon young Black bodies growing up in South Carolina. Through the pain of realizing that the people you called your family in Christ don’t see violence against Black bodies as a Christian concern, and the pain of realizing how easy it would be to succumb to murderous rage.

Finally, we journey with Stewart to his realization that Christ dwells among the suffering, and therefore, there he must dwell too. The praise of well-off White people feels good, Stewart admits. But in the end, it’s more important to stand beside those made in God’s image, who face injustice for their skin tone. That, Stewart believes, makes for the true Christian witness in today’s deeply divided America.

Stewart’s telling ends in triumph, in a Psalm-like shout of praise; but implicit in that exultation, is the recognition that Stewart will face this struggle again, because the Empire isn’t in accord with God’s will. Stewart doesn’t believe the White Christian myth that suffering is ennobling, but he admits it’s probably inevitable. Our triumph against Empire isn’t of this world, Stewart acknowledges; the fight itself is good.