The Piece of Me That Died in the Plague

Caleb Wallace (left) and Phil Valentine

Caleb Wallace, the Texas COVID-era anti-mask activist and sometime border vigilante, died of COVID on Saturday morning. He leaves behind a pregnant widow and three daughters under age six.I can’t imagine the excruciating months and years Wallace’s family now faces, in a world where pandemic restrictions make direct assistance to others more difficult than ever. I want, as a Christian and decent human being, to feel bad for them.

Yet reading myself, I feel, not sympathetic grief, but a towering, weighty vacuum. A nothingness that weighs my limbs like slabs of granite, urging me to surrender to paralysis. The effort necessary to care about others’ suffering feels wasted in situations like this, where that suffering is created by a cause not only widely known, but easily preventable. I feel drawn by the temptation to surrender to bitterness and blame-laying.

Wallace’s death comes one week after Nashville talk-radio icon Phil Valentine, who used his regional pulpit to mock and belittle mask mandates and vaccine drives. August alone has seen three right-wing radio personalities die, all of whom espoused anti-mask and anti-vaccine positions. At least two of them tried to retract their anti-vaccine positions from their deathbeds, adopting a technique beloved of the status quo: repenting after it’s too late.

Of everything this pandemic stole, I miss my ability to care the most. Sure, the illness itself was bad; I had COVID in November. I spent entire days terrified to move, knowing that the slightest disturbance would result in gastroenteritis symptoms. Even now, months later, I wake every morning feeling queasy, needing to wait out the symptoms. But I can adjust. I haven’t adjusted to my newfound inability to care.

Valentine, Wallace, and those like them weren’t merely deceived. They didn’t believe a false narrative; they took leadership roles in peddling disinformation and lies. I can accept that some people distrust the vaccine, as it’s new, the rollout is unusually fast, and change is often scary. But these men actively distributed claims they knew were unsourced and false, to a public hungry for some authoritative-looking figure to verify their fears.

But like drug dealers, the local, street-level guys have little power. They’re playing in a market primed by international cartels and an economic machine. While Phil Valentine tried to retract his antivax statements, and Caleb Wallace’s soon-to-be widow urged people to embrace the vaccine her husband opposed, a national consortium of opinion brokers continued coaching their market to distrust science and embrace weird technocratic wizardry.

Fox News's prime-time stars, l-r: Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity

Fox News has essentially been Ground Zero for the Ivermectin conspiracy, telling gullible patsies that government scientists are liars, and we should take off-label livestock medications. If local talk-radio conservatives tried to pivot away from these conspiracies, they’d lose their audiences, which have accepted the top-level myths of how mysterious forces want to curtail your liberties. Phil Valentine might’ve regretted his statements, but he’d never compete with Tucker Carlson.

Like the drug dealer analogy, though, the peak peddlers don’t believe their message. While Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and others actively tell audiences to distrust science and embrace their cargo cult, we now know that Fox News requires vaccine credentials to enter the building. In other words, Fox News knows they’re lying, that they’re paying telegenic talking heads to repeat those lies; they either don’t care, or… something.

I say “something” because I’m bereft of other explanations. Fox, and regional Fox mini-me types like Valentine, spout the party line because, whatever motivation they might have to clarify and speak truthfully, they find those motivations less compelling than the impulse to spread a profitable, camera-friendly lie. They know the truth; they simply don’t care. And they encourage audiences to not care likewise.

The claims emerging from conservative spokespeople are flat wrong and counterfactual, and belied by their own policies. We know many prominent conservatives, including the former President and every Republican governor, are vaccinated. Many have been for months. Yet they continue encouraging their adherents to reject the minor inconvenience necessary to arrest the pandemic, causing many to put themselves in positions where they will risk sickness and death.

I’ve spent eighteen months trying to care. Trying to convince myself that, even when people reject the one thing that will save their lives, they’re still humans, made in God’s image, deserving of respect. But I just don’t feel that anymore. These people encourage others to risk their lives, and every life they come across, then weep crocodile tears. I can’t care anymore, and for that, I can't forgive them.

The Truncheon of Forgetting, the Hand of Remembering

Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police: a Novel

On a nameless island in a nameless sea, people just periodically forget important things in their lives. Emeralds, perfume, photographs. No, the items themselves never disappear; but sweeping, population-wide amnesia strips the items of meaning in human brains. Our protagonist, a writer, simply takes these disappearances for granted. But some people remember, and their memory is a threat to the island’s deeply bureaucratic social order.

Novelist, essayist, and science journalist Yōko Ogawa is persistently prolific in her native Japanese, but her works have only trickled into English translation. This book, first published in 1994, has only newly appeared in English, rendered by her most frequent translator, Stephen Snyder. Having read one previous Ogawa novel, I awaited this one with great anticipation. Then, sadly, I made a good-faith attempt to read it.

Our protagonist makes her living writing literary novels. (Hmmm.) She writes about people having realistic experiences, which she attempts to analyze, or at least make romantic for the reading populace. But around her, as playing cards and roses and birds become meaningless artifacts which most people remember distantly, if at all, the range of realistic experiences is becoming painfully circumscribed. She struggles to muster ideas and make a living.

A flippant comment forces a realization on our protagonist: her beloved editor doesn’t forget when everybody else does. Our protagonist realizes this makes him a target for the Memory Police, whose ham-fisted but consistently polite raids quietly remove anybody who remembers what the social order deems forgotten. Unique knowledge, or an informed understanding of history, makes people dangerous to life on the island.

You might notice something missing from this synopsis: proper nouns. There’s my first problem with this book. My previous Ogawa experience, her novel The Housekeeper and the Professor, used this expressionistic vagueness to its advantage. But that novel was less than half the size of this one, with far fewer characters, set in a favorably genericized Japanese university city. This larger, busier novel needs some names just to keep the ensemble organized.

Yōko Ogawa

The novelist decides to protect her editor by building a secret annex inside her house. To survive the Memory Police, the editor will have to live inside a tiny basement cube with minimal light, occasional food, and a prison-style toilet. This description combines the most non-specific elements of the Freudian id and Anne Frank’s notorious squat. The product seems both impractical, and artificially constrained.

Meanwhile, the Memory Police stage periodic raids throughout the island, but apparently disappear between times. Our protagonist cycles the city with only momentary twinges of discomfort. This form of intrusive fascism seems uniquely Japanese, in that no matter how meddlesome, destructive, or scary their actions, their behavior is still polite, simply part of a background of social conformity that everyone accepts as necessary and normal.

Even when members of the novelist’s network, actively complicit in her efforts to preserve her editor from kidnapping, get seized by the Memory Police, they simply accept this as preordained. Ah well, they seemingly say, such is the price of stability. Even knowing they’re breaking the law, harboring a fugitive, and keeping him alive through Rube Goldberg-like schemes, they seem largely unperturbed by the ubiquity of the polite fascist state.

Brief reminder, this novel debuted in 1994, during the long hangover from Japan’s hypercharged 1980s economy. As Japan’s industrial state pulled its claws in and waited to see what happened next, people simply accepted their high accrued debts and diminished lifestyles. Japanese capitalism has, for decades, rewarded hard work and self-abnegation, creating that icon of post-boom malaise, the sararīman. Sticking your neck out isn’t considered heroic in Japan.

Therefore, I assume Ogawa’s parable of enforced technocratic blandness must’ve made sense to its intended audience. But that context has gotten lost. A quarter-century later, across the Pacific, the story just feels curiously low-stakes. The Memory Police’s atrocities don’t seem to elicit an emotional response, even from those who perpetrate them. This isn’t helped by the dreamlike lack of specificity; I cared more about Ogawa’s contradictory geography than her characters.

This saddens me. Having enjoyed Ogawa’s writing in the past, my inability to connect with her characters or plot this time around feels disappointing. Ogawa tells us something catastrophic is at stake in her story, but she holds everyone at arm’s length, discussing them with the courteous emotional detachment of an after-church picnic. I care more deeply about my inability to care, than I do about the novel.

I expected so much, but sadly, I feel so little.

OnlyFans and the Anti-Democracy of Sex Work

OnlyFans' business model has, until now, tacitly depended on user-made porn

Last week’s announcement that pay-to-play social network OnlyFans will discontinue hosting “sexually explicit” material, is creating some controversy. First, OnlyFans hasn’t yet provided a meaningful definition of “sexually explicit,” on a site whose entire financial model until now has centered on women with their blouses off. Second, what motivated the change? OnlyFans claims that credit card companies brought the hammer down; MasterCard has responded (I’m paraphrasing) “Nuh-uh!”

OnlyFans launched by promising to exclude the intrusive advertising content that often slows social networks like Facebook or Twitter. But its customer base quickly drifted to the one commodity that people are consistently willing to pay for in today’s media-saturated environment, sex. Like pay-cable TV, people are willing to pay out for content that ad-based mainstream media won’t supply. And like drugs, the economic driver for sex work proves persistent.

We’ve seen this happen before recently. CraigsList famously shuttered its “erotic services” personal ads because it feared the federal government would use anti-human trafficking laws to act against them. This fear wasn’t unfounded, since the Department of Justice used exactly such laws to seize and dismantle BackPage, a resource sex workers used to find and pre-screen customers. Both actions were taken to assuage fears of “human trafficking,” a notorious bugbear.

Historically, conservatives have objected to sex work generally, and prostitution specifically, because they believe sex workers and their customers are just bad people. Progressives take a more nuanced approach, expressing concerns about coercion and exploitation, which aren’t entirely unfair. But progressives reflexively lump all sex work with human trafficking, which aren’t synonyms. The reasoning from Left and Right differ; the outcomes, for most sex workers, are indistinguishable.

Internet marketing promised to break this Left-Right duopoly. Remembering the giddy effusion directed toward the nascent read-write Web in the 1990s, I recall advocates like Howard Rheinggold gushing that, because nobody owned the Internet, it diffused authority to individuals. Many early Web advocates were aging ex-hippies, pleased that technology had finally fulfilled their long-dormant promise to seize authority from The Man and distribute it with egalitarian fervor onto the masses.

OnlyFans, like BackPage before it, represents a breakout in economic democratization. Individual women, needing income during the pandemic’s economic shakeout, seized their destinies by offering their services online. The Internet gave them the ability to screen customers, to set the terms of their labors, and to decide when or whether they were prepared to work. Internet sex work is almost Marxian in its dedication to individual empowerment.

If, like me, you internalized a narrative from childhood that sex work is degrading and shameful, this might not seem ennobling. But sex work has low barriers to entry, a legitimate economic expression, and a character of work. You, individually, may disapprove, but that doesn’t matter. Like alcohol, tobacco, and other vices, the economic drivers behind sex work don’t await popular acceptance. These drivers already exist for women needing work.

The MindGeek cartel controls so many adult sites that the market is essentially not free

Equally importantly, when OnlyFans, CraigsList, and BackPage stop supporting self-employed sex workers, the work doesn’t go away. Like with narcotics, large cartels step into vacuums created when governments squelch independent operators. The largest cartel, Montreal-based MindGeek, already controls such a large fraction of online sex work that it essentially sets the terms for smaller companies; like Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, startups have to compete directly with MindGeek.

Moralists may applaud OnlyFans’ willingness to deplatform “sexually explicit” content, despite the pledge’s vague wording. But by taking away self-employed women’s ability to flash their tits for pay, OnlyFans has created a backdoor subsidy for MindGeek and other “adult content” oligarchies. Like Standard Oil, DeBeers Diamonds, or Harvey Weinstein, MindGeek has an extensive list of abuse accusations, and because of their market share, nobody dares challenge their misuses of power.

Though OnlyFans sex workers used the corporate-owned platform to find their markets, and paid OnlyFans for the access, the company nevertheless gave women (and others) who needed income an opportunity to set their own terms. It helped democratize sex work. Reducing the number of opportunities to find work, doesn’t make either the sellers’ needs or the buyers’ demands disappear. It simply channels the economic pressures onto MindGeek and other monopolies.

MindGeek is the Al Capone of Internet sex work. Removing a platform honest, hardworking women use to score lucrative sex work, doesn’t encourage them to find other employment, especially in times like these, when other employment is scarce. It simply increases the power of the cartel to exploit, and profit from, the work of disfranchised laborers. OnlyFans’ anti-porn stance makes everyone less free.

The Benefits of Becoming a Psychopath

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 45
Peter Weir (director) & Rafael Yglesias (writer), Fearless

Business executive Max Klein (Jeff Bridges) has become a media icon after being photographed walking unharmed away from a major airplane crash. Other survivors extol his bravery, his calming influence, and his leadership under pressure. But questions start surfacing: why is Max averse to answering FAA investigators’ questions? Why is he reluctant to contact his wife and son? What’s with his strange obsession with fellow survivor Carla Rodrigo (Rosie Perez)?

Australian filmmaker Peter Weir’s American career has fluctuated wildly. At times, he’s made critical and commercial darlings like Witness and Dead Poets Society; other times he’s favored more hermetic content, like The Mosquito Coast, or this strange outing. Based on a novel by Rafael Yglesias, who also adapted the screenplay, this movie became a critical darling, but went almost unwatched by general audiences. Which is a crying shame.

What’s the opposite of a traumatic reaction? Because that’s what Max has. Surviving a catastrophe against all odds, he suddenly becomes convinced nothing can hurt him. He contacts an old girlfriend and reopens old wounds; to showcase his perceived invincibility, he eats a strawberry in front of her, despite a lifelong allergy. Both events prove him right. Despite risking further hurting himself, physically and psychologically, he emerges unscathed.

The people around Max don’t share his enthusiasm. His wife Laura (Isabella Rossellini) watches his showboating antics with increasing perplexity. The widow of Max’s business partner (Deirdre O’Connell), who didn’t survive, demands answers, but Max proves evasive, refusing to explain his actions during the crash. People who once loved and trusted Max watch him behaving like a stranger and can only watch, tearfully, as his grandiosity becomes dangerous.

Only Carla continues to enjoy Max’s confidence. Though strangers before the crash, their survivor status creates a bond that transforms them both. Except, where Max believes himself invincible, Carla has become paralyzed with near-constant terror. And with good reason: though she walked away without a scratch, her baby, flying unsecured before child safety seats became mandatory, was killed. Carla believes herself a failure as a mother and a woman.

The airline’s pet psychologist, Dr. Perlman (John Turturro), begins shadowing Max and Carla, trying to understand their perverse bond. There’s no indication these two, who are both married, have a romantic connection; they seem more like brother and sister. But as they become more engrossed with their shared trauma, and their reactions become more like images in a funhouse mirror, Perlman worries they’re compounding one another’s injuries.

Jeff Bridges walks nonchalantly away from disaster in Fearless

Critics have acclaimed Jeff Bridges’ performance in this movie. As Max, he moves from mere confidence, to aplomb, to almost messianic grandiosity, his faith in his own indestructibility making him loud and swaggering. Paradoxically, the more unbreakable he believes himself, the less empathy Max has for others. He simply can’t see how his reckless actions impact others. He is becoming, in short, psychopathic.

Weir and Yglesias’ storytelling turns on the failure of absolute moral thinking. Max thinks he doesn’t need to fear anything anymore, which makes him destructive to anyone around him. Meanwhile Carla, plagued with survivors’ guilt, sees reason to fear in every circumstance. Both become extreme versions of their former selves, and importantly, each thinks they need to “cure” the other. They’re unable to find balance between their moral extremes.

Throughout most of the movie, we don’t see something very important: the crash itself. Though the moments before and after transform everyone involved, and their families, we don’t see the actual event. Because we only understand the catastrophe through its survivors’ reports, we wonder who to trust. (This is only compounded when Max’s attorney encourages him to exaggerate what happened, to extract a lucrative settlement from the airline.)

Only when Max and Carla address the catastrophe directly do we see what happened—and, in that moment, we finally see the truth our protagonists can’t admit to themselves. We finally start seeing Weir and Yglesias’ themes emerge, of how human life is balanced between destructive extremes. Fear and bravery, individual and community, control and luck. Our characters have flailed badly because they’re unable to find the balance between extremes.

Again, this movie collapsed on release. Its weird, philosophical premise didn’t permit TV-friendly marketing, and admittedly, its final three minutes flinch from their possible conclusions. Yet artistically, it remains a high point for its participants’ careers, a moment they committed themselves to something ambiguous, even dangerous, and stridently uncommercial. It pushes its characters to the poles of human limit, then encourages us to help them work their way back home.

Horror Movies, Community, and the Power of Stories

Sisters Cindy and Ziggy face off, in Act One of Fear Street Part 2

Near the beginning of the second installment in Netflix’s Fear Street teenage horror trilogy, principal characters Ziggy Berman (Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink) and her goody two-shoes sister Cindy (relative unknown Emily Rudd) have a quarrel. Cindy, who has worked hard, gained some level of respectability, and hopes to someday attend college, sees Ziggy as a malcontent and heel-dragger. Ziggy sees Cindy as a sell-out. We’re all trapped, Ziggy reminds her sister, by the witch’s curse.

Watching this exchange the first time, I had no problem. The entire Fear Street trilogy deals with the ways community patterns, whether healthy or dysfunctional, repeat themselves across generations, and the question of whether individuals can break the cycles of inheritance. It’s a sort of funhouse mirror version of the Small Town America myth, pitting the bucolic town of Sunnyvale against the rusticating despair of Shadyside. The “witch’s curse” myth simply symbolizes that dismal inheritance.

Then, the personality behind the widely watched YouTube channel “Scaredy Cats” weighed in. Like me, series host Matt (who also goes by Mildred) views art and literature through a political and economic lens. Mildred sees Ziggy and Cindy’s argument as a nihilistic surrender to capitalist forces that want to keep the working class beholden; Ziggy’s claim that some centuries-old disembodied witch tale holds Shadyside back, is emblematic of the ways workers internalize a poverty narrative.

I initially balked at Matt’s characterization. How dare this big-city interloper, an urbane media creator from Toronto, Ontario (of all places), tell me how to interpret small-town American malaise! Ziggy and Cindy’s Manichaean dichotomy perfectly describes my experience with small and small-ish American towns, where some people try to escape by working hard, “improving” themselves, and following the rules; while others try to drag the ambitious down with mockery, derision, and accusations of rank disloyalty.

On further consideration, though, I realized Mildred may be partly correct. Ziggy has internalized a colonial campfire boogeyman narrative of pessimistic resignation, while Cindy has internalized a modernist, cheerful narrative of success through conformity. In this movie, narratives don’t just explain events, they create identity. Which, thinking about it, is essentially what much American rah-rah boosterism does: it aligns individuals with whichever story makes them most comfortable with the circumstances capitalism makes available to them.

About the time Cindy and Ziggy quarrel about individual identities, their doomed summer camp prepares for an annual tradition, the Color War. Campers from Sunnyvale battle campers from Shadyside in an elaborate capture-the-flag which, apparently, Sunnyvale has won for forty consecutive years. Calling it the “Color War” makes it sound racial, which it isn’t (both communities are essentially integrated), except yes it is. Both camps muster enthusiasm with songs and speeches “othering” the opposing camp.

Watching these adolescent war conclaves, I couldn’t help remembering the stories used in small Nebraska towns where I’ve lived for thirty years. Towns, schools, and workplaces constantly encourage local loyalty through tales of cowboys, sodbusters, and the Oregon Trail, stories of supposed ancestral persistence, often stripped of real history. By contrast, capitalism, higher ed, and mass media tempt youth with narratives of shiny modernist counter-conformity, narratives that often involve walking away from your hometown forever.

Stories unify groups, while also making opportunities available to individuals—and, importantly, also closing other opportunities. People who want to escape small-town life have to choose how they’ll achieve that, which forecloses the chance to find the niche where they’ll successfully serve their community. Likewise, those who have loyalty to their community, choose careers and family paths that make moving out insuperably difficult, ensuring they’ll stay put forever. Just remember, you can’t serve two masters.

In the movie’s culmination, Ziggy and Cindy, having overtaken an axe-wielding maniac to find each other, both reject their internalized narratives. Cindy realizes her devotion to “escaping” Shadyside blinds her to local responsibilities, while Ziggy realizes she’s valued her community over the people in it. Both of them have, temporarily, transcended the narratives they once accepted unquestioningly. Then the slasher returns and, without a guiding narrative for their actions, they both wind up dead. (-ish.)

So yeah, Matt’s actually correct, these narratives—Ziggy’s inherited narrative, and Cindy’s imposed one—are artificial and constricting. But, like money or race, the fact they’re artificial doesn’t make them any less real. American small towns tend to stay rich or poor, conservative or progressive, healthy or dysfunctional, across several generations. And they stay this way because of the stories their people tell each other. This, I believe, is the central message of Fear Street.

See Also:
Fear Street and the Illusions of Community