The New Sartre

Lorcan Finnegan (director), Vivarium

A young couple looking toward adulthood have decided they’re ready to purchase a home. Gemma (Imogen Poots) teaches kindergarten, and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) is a tree surgeon; they have no last names. Curiosity brings them to an estate agent, Martin (Jonathan Aris), who lacks social skills but is persuasively pushy. Martin shows them a manicured, hastily erected suburban tract home… and leaves them there.

Writer-director Lorcan Finnegan claims he found inspiration in his native Ireland, where land developers built ugly, soulless suburbs in the middle 2000’s, then abandoned them when the market cratered in 2007. Ireland’s urban margins are full of ghost towns which have never been occupied. The houses, like in this movie’s Yonder development, are virtually identical, built on flat quarter-acre lots. The streets are impossible to navigate without GPS.

Alone in the Yonder suburb, Gemma and Tom try to leave, but can’t. Every road returns to the same house. The house is already furnished, so they reluctantly spend the night. Come morning, they find a box stuffed with enough bland, flavorless food for one day. Also the next morning, and the next. Then, one morning, they find another box. This box contains a baby, and a promise: “Raise it and be released.”

Judging by several previous reviews, this movie must divide audiences starkly. Many people complain that it’s slow-moving, atmospheric, and circular. Yet other viewers, including me, believe that’s the point. Gemma and Tom find themselves thrust into a Sartre-esque human hellscape where past and future don’t exist, yet dominate their every moment. Apparently some audiences wanted monsters, but this movie offers the greatest horror: adulthood under Late Capitalism.

The house divides people into roles. Tom, a gardener who hopes to become an entrepreneur someday, digs a hole, looking for escape, because it’s the one thing he can control. Every day he leaves the house and resumes digging, while Gemma stays inside, raising The Boy. The community forces them into preassigned roles, segregated according to gender, granting only as much freedom as the house and land permit.

Therefore Tom keeps digging, deeper and deeper, because the work is the only thing that gives his life any shape. He sees himself constantly on the brink of breaking free from the imprisonment of his future: he lives entirely for what’s going to happen around the next bend. There’s nothing in his present, including Gemma, that gives his life meaning anymore; posterity has sucked all meaning from his life.

Imogen Poots (left) and Jesse Eisenberg failing to escape the suburbs, in Vivarium

This is a movie about futility. It’s about how everything Gemma and Tom do comes to nothing: the work of digging turns into digging your own grave, and the effort of maintaining a house becomes an effort at creating something worth abandoning. (The symbolism is hushed but overt.) Everything the characters do comes to nothing, because they’re doomed to uselessness. Because, let’s be honest, that’s the dream sold to us.

We spend a child’s first eighteen years telling them their dreams can take them anywhere, and the next fifty years relentlessly demanding they wake up and earn a living. We tell adults to keep their aspirations small: the house is basically a traditional London-style two-up, two-down; the wall art is images of the house. The aspirations are limited to what we already have and what we can’t take with us.

Partway through, Gemma screams: “I want to go home.” Meaning, she wants to reclaim the dreams she had before suburban mediocrity claimed them. But she can’t: she’s indebted to the future, which already owns everything she creates. Her dreams are subordinated to somebody else’s dreams, which will eventually be subordinated to somebody else’s. The future owns her, leaving her, paradoxically, trapped in the present.

If this isn’t a movie about capitalism, it’s certainly about not controlling your choices. Gemma and Tom don’t own their effort; everything they build belongs to someone else. Late Capitalism creates the illusion that we’re working for the next generation, but we’re just going through the motions. Gemma and Tom might escape if not for The Boy, but probably not: even before, they lived entirely on promises of the future.

We’ve been conditioned to accept diminished expectations, because it’s all we’ve been shown. But, Finnegan insists, it’s a fake life. The suburban promise is a reality we didn’t choose and didn’t create. Only when Tom and Gemma physically can’t escape the ’burbs, though, does this reality become visible. Their life becomes brooding, atmospheric, and granular; but, the denouement suggests, it already was. And so, implicitly, is ours.

There Is No Opioid Epidemic (Part 2)

Three years ago, I wrote an essay entitled “There Is No Opioid Epidemic.” It got several positive responses and, when shared by a popular Colorado yoga practitioner, became my first essay to go viral. So I assume it must’ve struck a chord with readers. Almost like, in a one-note media chorus of professional chin-waggers complaining about the opioid epidemic, readers were happy to hear somebody say their suffering wasn’t invalid.

When I re-shared it yesterday, on its three-year anniversary, a friend contacted me with her story. She suffers a chronic disability with symptoms which include immobilizing chronic pain. (This friend, and the stories she’s shared recently, have made me aware how pervasive disability-based prejudices are in American society.) She told me she’d been prescribed opioids, but had the prescription yanked, fearing she might, in the future, become addicted.

Not, please note, that she’s currently addicted; rather, that she might become addicted in some hypothetical future. Her doctor admitted that, under pressure from the DEA and other authorities, she’d been forced to restrict the number of opioid prescriptions she wrote. So my friend got handed a prescription for another drug that doesn’t work as well, leaving her in a constant state of pervasive, low-level pain—not debilitating, but restrictive.

Thinking about this, I’ve struggled to comprehend the reasoning. Clearly, the authorities responsible for regulating American drug behaviors believe chronic addiction is a worse affliction than chronic pain. We’ve certainly been conditioned to believe this through generations of “This Is Your Brain On Drugs” messages, coupled with police interventions and DARE programs. We’ve heard for years that becoming addicted is always, innately, a fate worse than pain.

British journalist Johann Hari writes, in Chasing the Scream, that Harry J. Anslinger, America’s former top narcotics officer, had a personal aversion to addicts. Owing to a complex and nuanced experience in childhood, he believed addicts weren’t just suffering, they were actively bad people. Because Anslinger had a hand in negotiating the end of World War I, President Wilson gave Anslinger a blank check for his post-war public service career.

Anslinger chose to dedicate his life to punishing addicts. He chaired the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (forerunner to the ONDCP) for thirty-two years, one of the longest public appointments in American history. Using this leverage, he pushed legislators to enact laws intended to punish addicts, enforce private morality, and force people to be, in Anslinger’s view, good. All because Anslinger had an inflexible moral attitude.

Harry J. Anslinger, near retirement in 1962

Even this explanation doesn’t really satisfy. Though the unprecedented power Anslinger enjoyed (if that’s the word) allowed him to enforce his moral prejudices, President Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971, nearly a decade after Anslinger retired, and years after abundant science demonstrated that many illegal drugs, particularly cannabis, aren’t that dangerous. Clearly the prejudice persists beyond one person’s preconceptions.

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s former deputy, admitted to a journalist that the administration turned hostile to drugs, in brief, because they needed camouflage. Busting drugs became a convenient legal condom that allowed Feds to harass Civil Rights leaders and anti-war demonstrators without contracting the taint of racism or war-hawk-ism. In other words, for Nixonites (and Reaganites after them), addicts were bad people because they were different.

This has been extensively documented. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander records that, though it’s illegal to stop somebody simply because they’re Black, race is nevertheless an acceptable qualifying condition. In other words, police can randomly stop somebody because they’re Black and something else. The law is so inclusive that “something else” can include basically anything that a reasonably healthy imagination could conjure. And it’s almost always something drug-related.

So basically, when drug enforcement officers force my friend’s doctor to take her off pain control medications that work, and put her on something marginally better than a placebo, they say they’re preventing her from becoming an addict. But really, they’re preventing her from becoming a nonconformist. Our drug regulations, which doctors must comply with to remain licensed, are based on moral fears of hippies and African Americans. We can’t let a White woman become… that.

It boggles my mind that, in 2020, these prejudices remain so persistent. Worse, the moral panic surrounding opioid “abuse” has been perpetrated by media forces marching in lock-step. The same newsrooms that want congratulations for holding Donald Trump to account, continue reinforcing Harry J. Anslinger’s class-based prejudices, and Nixon’s racism. Eighty years later, it’s time to show some moral independence, and let these old, outdated ideas finally, mercifully, die.

America’s First Racist President™

Joe Biden

Earlier this week, I awoke to read the strangest news: presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden had called Donald Trump America’s “first” racist president. Though the quote makes marginally more sense in context, it still left me scratching my head. Surely a seasoned politician like Biden doesn’t forget that America has produced presidents like Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson. Racism isn’t new in this country.

But then I thought about it. What if Biden’s right? Jackson and Wilson were products of their times, ages when slaveholding and segregation were seen as economic necessities, backed with government authority. They fell into racism ass-backward, and were richly rewarded for it. Trump, however, resists the larger cultural narrative. Official, outspoken, bigoted racism isn’t standard anymore; Trump must choose daily to be, and remain, racist.

In the 19th and early 20th Centuries, America’s Left and Right were unified in two bipartisan positions: environmentalism, and racism. Our political parties linked arms to defend clean water and White supremacy. But after Lyndon Johnson threw the Democratic Party’s weight behind the Voting Rights Act of 1965, our political climate changed. By 1968, Richard Nixon was already reduced to dog whistles, an art later perfected by Ronald Reagan.

Donald Trump’s undisguised racism is a conscious, deliberate throwback. He could choose another course, as indeed his predecessors have, straddling the aisle, but he doesn’t. More importantly, he doesn’t disguise his positions. He exists entirely as he is, insensible to changing values around him. He divides people into in-groups and out-groups, sustaining an older moral system, which he has to feed daily because it isn’t the cultural context anymore.

In other words, Trump is America’s first president to choose racism. He supports racism willfully, not because America expects it, but because it’s his motivating option. He isn’t a product of our time, and doesn’t belong to our collective guilt (except insofar as he does). Rather, he makes a willful stand against the larger world, especially against his immediate predecessor, because it’s the only thing that makes him special.

As an entrepreneur, Trump’s business model turned on making himself, and his name, exclusive and rare. He defined himself, and those who bought into his buildings and other ventures, as separate from the population, and therefore valuable. And, like prior business models organized around exclusivity, he divides customers into insiders—those wealthy enough for the buy-in—and ousiders—the hoi-polloi. His enterprise depends on creating systems of winners and losers.

Donald Trump

This contradicts America’s changing standards. Within Trump’s lifetime, our collective worldview was divided into moral binaries: rich and poor, White and Black, male and female. Today, we increasingly recognize that class, race, and gender exist along spectra, and just as important, we acknowledge these spectra as artificial. Our shared definition of what makes someone human, and worthy, is becoming more inclusive. But Trump and his supporters consciously reject this change.

And the longer they reject this change, the more effort it requires. They not only must consciously choose hostility, bigotry, and binary thinking, they must also reinforce this thinking daily, because our cultural context won’t reinforce it for them. As society generally becomes more welcoming, those who perceive themselves as an exclusive elite must defend their standing with increasing force. As with all things governmental, “force” ultimately means “violence.”

Which leads to the Gestapo tactics our government is currently utilizing to crush dissent. Organized state violence is frequently the rear-guard defense of a dying structure, from the Whiskey Rebellion to Bull Connor. Trump knows he’ll lose if applying logic or appeals to common values, because America broadly welcomes African Americans, trans people, and immigrants, for one simple reason—he can’t appeal to common values that aren’t common anymore.

So yes, Trump and his supporters are racist in ways America hasn’t previously seen before: racism as willful, even countercultural, choice. Trump’s business model, and his supporters’ dwindling self-figuration, are dying. Scared, powerless, and lacking larger support, these regressives resort to violence, because otherwise they’ll lose the sunk cost of daily choices. This is racism as conscious deliberation, as massive cross-cultural reversal, as willful retreat from the present.

Admittedly, reading Biden’s words, this isn’t what he meant. Biden, like Trump, doesn’t think before he speaks, and therefore says unbelievably dumb things sometimes. But taking his words into our cultural context, I suspect Biden has accidentally landed on a larger truth we’d previously missed. Trump’s violent bigotry isn’t a show of strength, it’s an admission that he’s losing. That’s a truth we can carry boldly into the future.

Disability Chic and Toxic People

Don't be fooled, this badge is a lie

Check out this masterful piece of PR. According to circulating reports, two women are selling these lanyards around Gretna, Nebraska, a small town between Lincoln and Omaha. They purport that wearing this badge gives wearers liberty to enter public places without masks. Gretna mayoral candidate Angie Lauritsen reports that the makers actively sell their lanyards by claiming their magic powers derive from the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

I won’t waste time debunking this claim; smarter reporters than me have done it already, and extensively. Briefly put, it’s complete bullshit. More interesting to me is the attitude that these vendors, and the people who buy from them, have about disability. They apparently believe that, first, disability is something you can assert, like joining a church, or supporting a political party. And second, that claiming disability gives them some kind of super-rights under American law.

The underlying philosophy behind these lanyards, and other similar scams sold by online hucksters, is that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) permits blanket exemptions from private rules, public laws, and common decency. If you simply assert you have some disability—which, the vendors say, you needn’t justify with evidence—private businesses must play dead. Voilà, you’re instantly special; you have rights other people don’t.

Functionally, this attitude is identical to people who believe that African Americans, LGBTQIA+, and other designated groups have “special” rights simply because their rights are protected. When groups who have historically been marginalized start having their rights recognized and defended, those who’ve been protected by the status quo have a pathetic tendency to whine. They apparently can’t imagine others having rights, except at the expense of the majority.

I’m reminded of Mitt Romney, Senator and former Presidential candidate, who in 2012 appeared on a smuggled video recording claiming that, were he Hispanic, his election campaign might be easier. This statement was, admittedly, ambiguously phrased. He might’ve simply meant that more Hispanic voters, a growing and lucrative voting demographic, might support him. But he might’ve also meant life is easier for protected minorities, which Romney isn’t.

This insistence that protected people groups live on the gravy train achieves a particular level of silliness with disabilities. Unlike African Americans, Hispanic Americans, or women [sic], people with disabilities often look remarkably similar to the general population. Though our stereotype of disabilities remains stuck on paraplegia, a stereotype reinforced by the wheelchair-using parking spot, we’re increasingly aware that many disabilities don’t have obvious external markers.

Proof of the standing stereotype
of what constitutes a disability

Respiratory problems like pulmonary fibrosis or extreme asthma may diminish a person’s ability to perform routine mechanical tasks. Same with movement disorders like Huntington’s disease or dyskinesia. I’ve recently become aware of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which erodes a person’s connective tissues, leaving them progressively fatigued from even minor exertion. All these conditions leave sufferers severely disabled, without the photogenic disfigurements of traditional disabilities.

Briefly put, we’re aware, in ways we weren’t just fifteen years ago, that not all disabled people look disabled. This means a gold rush for people who want some form of protected status. White, male, heterosexual Americans who feel aggrieved that their rights don’t need spelled out (because the deck isn’t stacked against them), now believe they can claim protected status, just by asserting they have some undefined “disability.”

Which returns us to the Gretna lanyards. I called them a “masterful piece of PR,” and I meant it. The rhyming slogan makes them memorable and lets them occupy a piece of your head rent-free, like “birds of a feather flock together,” or “if the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Stating “please be kind” makes it look like they’re seeking mercy. The final tag, “disability rights are human rights,” ties the lanyards’ lie to a verifiable truth.

But that doesn’t make it any less odious. Healthy, able-bodied people attempting to circumvent science-based prevention measures, by pretending to acquire disabilities, disgusts me. Not only do they think they have some God-given right to inflict their infectious microbiome on everyone around them, they’re ultimately damaging the infrastructure of protections for people with actual disabilities. This will create long-term consequences for vulnerable people.

If you think asserting a “disability,” which you don’t have, makes you glamorous, or that there’s anything sexy about falsely claiming membership in a historically dispossessed people group, you’re worse than wrong. You’re a garbage person. Because any ill-informed or misguided wingnut can be wrong. But it takes a special self-infatuated asshat to go from merely not knowing the facts, to actively hurting others. That’s what this lanyard does.

COVID-19 and the Trust Economy

Who takes responsibility when somebody drops their COVID-positive child at daycare or school? I’ve heard two basic answers. Libertarian individualism holds that we, individually, take responsibility for our choices, and when faced with a situation like this, responsible parents will take one on the chin, socially and economically, by staying home with the invalided child. Yes, that’s two weeks or more, but we’re all responsible for our actions and circumstances.

The more communitarian response shifts blame off the individual. Parents, especially poor and working-class parents, need to make rent and buy groceries, and our economy, organized around strict regulation of ownership, won’t let them survive on trust. Parents need to work, and therefore schools and daycare centers absorb the economic uncertainty which children create. Maybe, if parents weren’t penalized financially, they wouldn’t offload responsibility onto others.

Months ago, I would’ve fallen into the second camp. (There are other positions, more subtle and nuanced, but these two dominate.) It seems obvious that, if parents are forced to choose between threatening other families with Coronavirus, or finding their own family homeless, they’ll choose protecting their family. After all, our economy functions by threatening swift, life-altering consequences on non-conformists. Even libertarians will admit this.

Watching the economic consequences of COVID-19 unfold, I’ve come to question many of my existing beliefs. Both libertarian individualism, and soft-Marxist collectivism, leave me dissatisfied now. Because I’ve come to believe both subsume an important point: all social and economic systems depend on people to trust one another, and we can only trust other people if their future actions are reasonably predictable. Put another way, individual freedom is an illusion.

American values extol individuals who exist entirely as they are. Our movies and TV shows praise men of action and women of spontaneity, from Jason Statham-style action heroes, to romantic women who beg to be portrayed by Jennifer Anniston. But notice how these characters consistently disrupt and inconvenience others. The movies never hang around to watch cleaning crews rectify the messes Statham and Anniston leave behind, because stability is boring.

That level of individuality absolutely requires other people willing to behave in consistent and reliable ways. Somebody has to stay behind, cooking meals and extinguishing fires. Even the free spirits we romanticize, necessarily assume everyone else will behave in reliable ways, that bankers won’t pocket our deposits, that cooks won’t spit in our rigatoni, that farmers will plant every spring and harvest every fall. We rely upon everyone else to be reliable.

And everyone else relies upon us likewise. We often chafe at impositions made upon us by work: to show up at regular intervals and do nitty-gritty tasks that seem beneath our dignity. Or is that just me? Yet we cannot accomplish anything larger than ourselves without the ability to collaborate productively: from Amish barn-raisings to multinational corporations, we need to divide labor so we can act cooperatively. That means we need reciprocal trust.

Old-fashioned liberalism tells people to simply unionize, that workers increase their dignity by joining forces to resist overweening management. And indeed, unions can provide protections. But as the Soviets discovered, if we overthrow one network of oppressive socioeconomic roles, we’ll have to adopt another one, because we still need to trust others, and they need to trust us. Living together makes us reliant, at least somewhat, on repetitive, robotic actions.

I realize it appears I’ve gotten off-topic. This isn’t about schools and COVID-19 anymore. But respectfully, it is. Because we’ve structurally abandoned the idea that one person’s income should support a household, we’ve necessitated outside childcare. Since we cannot return to pre-1972 economic conditions, somebody needs to take responsibility for our children, whether it’s private professional daycare, state-funded schools, or unpaid grandparents. Childcare becomes another trust-based role.

COVID-19 hasn’t revealed that childcare workers are superheroes, as our memes in April implied, or work-shy cowards, as our July memes say. Instead, it reveals our trusted social roles, in a massive technological society, have become so interconnected that our façade of civilization is brittle, shattering under the slightest pressure of predictability. We absolutely trust others to behave in reliable ways, which is impossible in unreliable times.

As Slavoj Žižek writes, COVID demonstrates our globalized society’s vulnerability to nature. I’d go further: it shows how vulnerable trust makes us. I rely upon my neighbors, colleagues, and strangers around the globe to behave in consistent, reliable ways, regardless of their individual circumstances; they rely upon me likewise. Now we have to re-learn our own, and everyone else’s, roles.