The Terminator, the TechNoir, and the Scars of a Generation

When I say “the TechNoir scene in The Terminator,” every GenX reader knows exactly what I mean. Sarah Connor escapes Kyle Reese, whom she mistakes for a violent stalker, by hiding inside a neon-fronted dance club. She sits uncomfortably at a table, awaiting police intervention, while dancers kick up around her, their brightly colored party clothes to the dimly lit club. Unfortunately, her patiently waiting makes her a sitting duck for her real attacker, Arnold.

This weekend, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s semi-elected dictator-for-life, put Russia’s nuclear arsenal on “special alert.” Putin pulled this move, not in response to his army’s inability to take smaller, less populous Ukraine quickly, but in response, he said, to Western rhetoric surrounding his invasion. That is, Putin probably won’t nuke Ukraine, with its valuable farmland and mineral resources, but any NATO countries which come to Ukraine’s defense. He’s put the world on a Cold War footing.

It’s impossible to separate The Terminator from the Cold War. Though the United States had dropped the feel-good maneuver of duck-and-cover drills, with their illusion that one could survive a nuclear blast, by the time I hit elementary school in 1980, we were still daily conscious that the bombs could fall at any minute. Reagan-era rah-rah confidence was double-edged: hard work and determination could take us anywhere, but we were also constantly about to die.

American youth handled this fatalism in divided ways. Much recent 1980s nostalgia, like Netflix’s Stranger Things and ABC’s The Goldbergs, focus on the brightly colored flamboyance that got captured in a lot of photographs. But smarter critics than me point out that bright colors and garish prints were the exception, not the rule; much of the 1980s was brown, from cars and restaurant decor, to the clothing adults wore daily. It was a drab-colored era.

We see this spotlighted in the TechNoir scene. The characters are dressed ostentatiously, the colors bright and the prints vibrant. But the room itself is poorly lit, a problem accentuated by the low-hanging pall of cigarette smoke. Several dancers prance around, doing a strange pony trot in place, bent at the waist so they’re studying their partners’ shoes. Almost like, in the midst of the party atmosphere, the dancers are fleeing something dark and terrible.

This weekend’s nuclear alert pushes the world closer to full nuclear conflict than at any time since Able Archer 83. In 1983, NATO forces held a joint preparedness wargame effort in the North Sea, between Scotland and Norway. The only problem was, nobody bothered to warn the Warsaw Pact. Viewed from Moscow, the wargame looked like forces organizing for an amphibious assault. Moscow prepared to defend itself from the anticipated attack, with nukes if necessary.

It’s possible to find 1980s movies about nuclear war caused by Malice, and in most cases, it’s presented as Soviet malice. Red Dawn or The Day After showcase military forces ranging from incompetent to downright evil. But following Able Archer 83, other movies depicted a military machine unprepared for rapidly changing technology. The Terminator, like WarGames, depicts an American military arsenal hijacked by intelligent computers, and humans unprepared to stop the terror they had created.

Faced with this reality, American youth split. Consider The Breakfast Club, and particularly the collision between Claire Standish and John Bender. Twho over-the-top personalities, they represent respective responses to the times. Claire dresses garishly, lives for sensual pleasure, and skips school to go shopping. Bender wears muted colors, dresses like he’s preparing for a street fight, and antagonizes others. Both manners are nihilistic responses to the expectation that, in nuclear-armed times, there is no future.

The fact that Claire and Bender kiss at the movie’s culmination serves the same purpose that dancing in the TechNoir provides. Of course these two share an attraction; notwithstanding Bender’s abusive behavior, they share fundamental values. Bright colors dancing in the dark, or the brawler and the princess exchanging saliva; it comes to the same end either way. To the extent that the 1980s were garish-colored, it was because those living then expected to die.

The Terminator, with its 1980s collision of party culture and violence, gave way to Terminator 2, in which John Connor starts the movie zooming around, looking for a purpose. The threat of nuclear annihilation was terrible, certainly. But at least it gave us something to live for right now, which the subsequent peace didn’t. The grouchy snarling of 1990s pop culture represented a culture cut loose. Unless something happens, it’s the future we now have.

War Is Not the Answer (Except When It Is)

Saddam Hussein in 1990

I find myself thinking lately about the autumn of 1990. For history mavens, that’s the year Saddam Hussein’s Iraq crossed the border and illegally seized Kuwait. Not coincidentally, that’s also the year I first identified as conservative. Amid the saber-rattling rhetoric and rising nationalist sentiment for a swift American intervention, I began seeing myself as part of that push, as somebody contributing to a great coast-to-coast effort.

The rhetoric surrounding Operation Desert Shield (later Operation Desert Storm) was pure national security state mythology. After ten years of presenting Saddam Hussein as America’s proxy hero during the Iran-Iraq War, our national story immediately flip-flopped. Suddenly he became a world-class tyrant, head of a rogue state with Third Reich-ish ambitions and, potentially, a nuclear bomb. Worst of all, his illegal occupation of Kuwait targeted women and children.

I believed everything. When I heard Iraq had 630,000 troops in tiny Kuwait, enough to invade Saudi Arabia, I embraced an immediate American counter-force. Government spokespeople claimed Iraqi troops heedlessly slaughtered Kuwaiti civilians in their homes, I responded with outrage. Like millions of Americans, I react with horror to learn that Iraqi soldiers had stolen Kuwaiti baby incubators, leaving 231 preemies on the linoleum to die.

There’s only one problem. As we now know, all that was a lie.

The legal and moral justifications for Operation Desert Storm were almost entirely fabricated by American PR firms, mostly Hill & Knowlton. These agencies provided lurid content that grabbed ratings on nightly news. It was pure gold for networks; audiences old enough to remember, will recall how Desert Storm turned CNN into a mainstream source, and Wolf Blitzer into a celebrity. To achieve these ends, sources needed only to baldly lie.

This week, after promising for weeks, Russia’s Putin Administration finally crossed the border into Ukraine. Having successfully annexed the Crimea in 2014, and watched NATO balk, Vladimir Putin apparently decided to repeat the escapade once successfully accomplished by tsars and Supreme Soviets before it: seize Ukraine’s abundant farmland on a specious pretext. Like Kuwait before it, and Anschluss before that, it created waves of refugees.

Watching from my armchair, this looks like an unprovoked, illegal invasion, a clear violation of UN standards of national sovereignty and secure borders. Putin used glaring anti-semitic language to belittle Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is ethnically Jewish. Putin also used claims of protecting ethnic Russians from mistreatment abroad, a justification similarly used in Germany to justify repeated unethical invasions. This feels very Third Reich-y.

Vladimir Putin pictured with his favorite lapdog

As a believer in peace, I don’t encourage war anymore. Learning how readily I swallowed lies in 1990 and 1991 partly contributed to my politics shifting several years later. That shift was confirmed when America decided Gulf State entanglements were fun, and we should do that again. I slapped a “War Is Not the Answer” bumper sticker on my car, marched in local peace parades, and started attending a Quaker prayer circle.

But I acknowledge too that no one-size-fits-all policy response exists: Vladimir Putin sure looks evil, and he’s demonstrated that a stern finger-waving won’t discourage him. Having already rabbit-punched Ukraine, he now promises similar treatment in Scandinavia. This isn’t America getting involved in another country’s internal affairs, like happened in Vietnam. This is clearly a toxic mixture of imperial ambition and unchecked power, and peer pressure won’t stop it.

As a dedicated amateur follower of history, I watch with dread, knowing this happened once in Germany. But it also, let’s admit, also happened in the Persian Gulf, twice. Our media uncritically regurgitated fables of murdered babies, of WMDs, of connections to global terror described in clearly racialized terms. And we pedestrians, including me, swallowed it. (The first time; by 2004 I’d grown skeptical.)

If we’re witnessing what authorities say we’re witnessing, this looks like a legitimate case for intervention. Viewed from afar, the Ukraine situation appears clear-cut, the desperate gasp of an aging despot aware that, if he doesn’t do something soon, he’s likely to lose power and die in prison. Even recognizing that we’re pitting two nuclear-armed powers against one another, this appears to be a case of justifiable war.

This appears so. But within our lifetimes, we’ve been lied to, both by our own national security apparatus, and by paid propaganda hustlers. In a world where we know evil exists, and we must confront it courageously, we’ve swallowed so many lies that we can’t tell who’s truthful anymore. I find myself paralyzed. Because, God forgive me, I never want to be that wrong again.

Our Lady of Grace in the Snow

Peter Manseau, The Maiden of All Our Desires: a Novel

The distant convent at Gaerdegen has a secret. The Benedictine sisters gather to work and pray like mendicants throughout Christendom for centuries. But between their ancient prayers, they possess a more intimate connection with God. Mother Ursula, their chapter’s founder, bequeathed them a substantial trove of mystical insight. In a world still reeling from the Black Death, Mother Ursula’s words hint at secrets hiding behind Christian mortality.

The dust-flap synopsis on Peter Manseau’s eleventh book, and second novel, seems to promise something similar to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. A distant abbey, a heretical book, a secret the episcopate will move mountains to keep hidden. But Manseau offers a different book. It’s much more intimate and humane, a portrait of sinners trying, where their limited vision permits, to glimpse the purpose tying their lives together.

Mother John, the convent’s second abbess, has spent twenty years preserving Mother Ursula’s vision of prayer, work, and simplicity. Under pressure from other convents, which increasingly run like businesses, Mother John preserves her abbey’s traditions, and personally sweeps the cloisters daily. But even her sisters don’t know her secret: she joined the convent to flee her family obligations, and didn’t really convert until spending years inside the convent.

Father Francis, the abbey priest, resents his posting. Exiled to Gaerdegen to conceal his indiscretions, he feels slighted, a thinker and craftsman who could’ve brought Christ to the masses. But his solemn words conceal his unwillingness to own his past transgressions. His sins, both of commission and of omission, leave a trail of destruction, which renders him distrustful. He foresees destruction in the plague-ravaged land, with nothing to offer but fear.

On one level, this novel describes one day within Gaerdegen. As the sisters await a vindictive bishop, who promises a church trial to expunge veneration of Mother Ursula, a blizzard descends. Trapped in close proximity, the sisters and their resentful, authoritarian priest begin voicing old resentments, and engaging in political posturing. Nothing less than the future of their honored abbey hangs in the balance.

Peter Manseau

But while this surface story unfolds, the characters travel back along the paths that brought them here. Father Francis remembers the entirely human passions, the capacity for love, that defined his early priesthood. Francis created art from the thickly forested land around them, but also from his personal relationships within the community. When those relationships embarrass the bishop, Francis finds himself exiled, unable to either preach or practice his art.

At Gaerdegen, Francis clashes with Mother Ursula. He finds a woman capable of great holiness, but also great rage. As the plague decimates the cities, leaving many sisters with no earthly family, Francis and Ursula have very different ways of facing this tribulation. Both visions are founded in a mix of Christianity and hard experience. Yet, faced with the same evidence, these two professional holy people reach completely opposite conclusions.

Manseau mostly avoids truth claims about the religious controversies driving his characters. A professional scholar of religion, he’s written extensively about the collision between faith and doubt before, and apparently has few ready-made solutions. Instead, he foregrounds the personalities, the lifetime of influences that steer how people of open hearts and mystical souls can disagree so wholeheartedly. Manseau dares ask: what if nobody is right? Or wrong?

To these characters, words have power. Encouraging homilies written years ago by thoughtful mentors can change the course of lives. Words spoken in anger create clefts not easily mended. Worst of all, words spoken carelessly can have consequences far beyond the moment. Words give true believers courage against a world turned grim and bloody, while powerful people fear the authority words of love can have.

It’s tempting to find contemporary references in Manseau’s heavily symbolic story. Metaphors of money and disease, of walls and doors, seem timely, and that probably isn’t coincidental. But Manseau isn’t talking about us, or not only about us. His characters, like his readers, keep seeking beauty and certainty in a world driven by fear and doubt. They never entirely find it, but maybe the seeking matters more than the finding.

Again, the synopsis implies a political thriller in a time of historic uncertainty. But the actual book is more gripping simply because it’s driven by honesty. Good people of upright character wonder which anointed leader to trust. What happens when two incompatible choices, both supported by God, force us to pick sides? Maybe it’s better to do something, even if it’s wrong, than to get lost in philosophy.

But Someone’s Gotta Do It

Eyal Press, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality In America

Few Americans have seen an untrimmed chicken carcass with our own eyes, but we know such things exist. Somebody, somewhere, turns living livestock into the styrofoam-backed meats Americans consume in such quantities. Similarly, somebody has to push the “kill” button on unmanned military drones, someone has to house the prisoners created by America’s “tough on crime” policies, someone has to extract hydrocarbons from the mine.  We sure won’t do it.

Journalist and NYU sociologist Eyal Press gathers the term “Dirty Work” from Everett Hughes, whose post-World War II research dealt with how citizens of totalitarian nations dealt with shared culpability for government atrocities. Ordinary citizens, Hughes determined, created a mental barrier. Some work was necessary, but innately dirty. Therefore a designated underclass handled the distasteful responsibility of, say, conducting pogroms and prosecuting wars of conquest.

Dirty Work, Press emphasizes early, is different from dirty jobs. Some jobs, like construction, agriculture, or infrastructure maintenance, are widely regarded as somewhat crummy. But Dirty Work is morally tainted, and that moral condemnation transfers onto those who do it. But that work remains necessary, because the population wants the work done. Workers performing Dirty Work become agents of society’s collective id, and we reward them with our disgust.

Press focuses mainly on three categories of Dirty Work in America: prison staffers, military drone pilots, and meatpackers. Combining a broad statistical survey of each field with close, intimate stories of people doing the work, he guides readers through these fields’ intricacies. He unpacks the sorts of people who accept, even seek, these jobs. And he demonstrates how they express our collective will, even as we publicly disown them.

Prisons suffer a paradoxical push-pull influence. Like schools, Americans see prisons as necessary means of enforcing laws and creating order. Candidates campaign on pledges to build, and fill, new prisons. But also like schools, prisons are first on the chopping block when budgets get cut. This becomes especially dangerous because, with the mass closure of state-funded asylums in the 1970s, prisons are now America’s leading warehouse for the mentally ill.

Eyal Press

America’s military became reliant on drones because we still expect to maintain global military dominion, but distrust committing troops. Drone pilots, working from bases in places like west Texas or northern California, save the Administration the PR headache of deployments, while keeping America active in stopping militants and terrorists. But because of their technology, individual drone pilots kill far more targets than soldiers ever could. And many suffer catastrophic PTSD.

Industrial meatpacking plants satisfy America’s appetite for cheap, plentiful meat, but at great cost. Animal rights activists love showing footage of how livestock suffer on the killing floors. But plant workers are inordinately likely to be maimed, even killed, while those who emerge physically unhurt suffer PTSD symptoms, including nightmares and hair loss. Like prison guards and drone pilots, they’re despised in their communities, underpaid, and punished for speaking out.

These workers have significant commonalities. Ruralism, for one: prisons, drone bases, and meatpacking plants are built well away from population centers. Prison workers and today’s military are also likely to come from rural areas, where often, these secure government jobs are the only reliable source of income. The workers, and their work, are easily ignored because they remain isolated on the periphery of “polite” American society.

They’re also subject to bipartisan contempt. Whenever whistleblowers in these industries come forward, conservatives ridicule them as crybabies who don’t appreciate the opportunities these jobs offer. But progressives, who historically attribute poverty and crime to systemic, rather than individual, causes, make exceptions for workers doing Dirty Work. Progressives hold these workers individually, not their employers or the laws which regulate them, culpable for their industries’ worst excesses.

Press delves into other Dirty Work, like immigrations enforcement and hydrocarbon mining, though in less depth. For comparison, Press has a chapter on “dirty tech,” high-tech innovations that make society less free, like Google making alliances with Communist China, or Facebook selling personal data to Cambridge Analytica. But, Press notes, dirty tech workers aren’t personally tainted. They’re free to quit with minimal penalties, and seldom held individually responsible.

Overall, Press describes a stratified economy where despised workers get thrust into despised work. This exposé channels historically respected journalists, from Upton Sinclair to Eric Schlosser, who have revealed the two-tiered rot in American society. The product is chilling. And maybe, this time, we’ll learn enough from the lessons Press offers that we won’t repeat these mistakes in the future. Though admittedly, the precedent isn’t good.

Is Jesus Running For Governor Of Georgia?

Click to enlarge

Behold, please: the wonder that is Kandiss Taylor’s campaign bus. Taylor is one of three Republicans challenging incumbent Georgia governor Brian Kemp in the primary. (Stacey Abrams is running in the Democratic primary apparently unchallenged.) Taylor, a grade-school counselor in rural southeastern Georgia, has no prior electoral experience, but apparently enough Georgians support her to afford a large, diesel-burning coach bus.

I can find embarrassingly little information on Kandiss Taylor’s campaign online. Described as a GOP activist, Taylor has alliances with Georgia hard-right icons Marjorie Taylor Greene and Herschel Walker. Her campaign website rehashes comfy conservative standbys: election “integrity,” aggressive immigration enforcement, and opposition to Critical Race Theory. It’s a Mad-Libs of right-wing talking points, overseen by Taylor’s admittedly photogenic face.

Except: Taylor’s website, like her bus, extols the three-legged stool of her campaign: Jesus, Guns, and Babies.

This roughly corresponds with the three conservative “wedge issues” identified in Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter With Kansas?: “God, guns, and gays.” Since Frank’s book dropped in 2004, it’s become political suicide to be openly anti-gay, just as being brazenly racist once became toxic. However, since Taylor’s website says she opposes both abortion and comprehensive sex education, “Babies” clearly serves the role of signalling restrictive sexual values.

However, by yoking Jesus together with Guns and Babies, Taylor makes visible something only implicit in Thomas Frank’s formulation. Speaking as a Christian, I must begin by admitting: Jesus isn’t here. We may believe that Jesus, with the wide-sweeping agape of saving love, dwells in our hearts, but Jesus isn’t physically present. We have Christ’s words, and guidance from ministers, and (arguably) Christ in our hearts. But Jesus isn’t here.

Therefore, campaigning for Jesus is easy. Jesus won’t disagree, won’t muster counter-arguments, won’t say “Hey! I never said that.” When candidates promise to crack down on welfare cheats and undocumented immigrants, Jesus won’t inconveniently remind them of the Sermon on the Mount or the Parable of the Sheep and Goats, where Christ said the mark of salvation was feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and welcoming the stranger.

Kandiss Taylor

Thinking about it, I realized Jesus has something in common with guns and babies: they’re all incapable of asking for help, or expressing gratitude. They’re all ideologically inert. All three serve important roles in political discourse, but they serve those roles passively, as mute recipients of political beneficence. Jesus, guns, and babies never ask anything of anyone, at least not directly. You can “be for” Jesus, guns, and babies without having to ask their permission.

By contrast, the people Jesus told Christians to support have needs. The hungry and the naked require our assistance and support, but just as importantly, they require our dignity. That’s why Jesus told us to give alms freely, but not let our left hand know what the right was doing. In seeking personal glory for our generosity, or electoral position, or résumé filler, we don’t uplift the poor; we only gratify ourselves.

While Republicans, like Taylor, have positioned themselves as champions of smiling babies and big, scary guns, Democrats have badly fumbled the effort to empower populations. A heavily White contingent of Democrats loves dispensing government largesse to Black, Indigenous, gay, and other beloved populations. But the Democrats remain focused on being seen as generous, and in so doing rob their favored groups of dignity.

In other words, Republicans ignore populations able to express their own needs, while Democrats ignore the words those populations say about their own needs. Republicans embrace the existing power structure, and promise to preserve it against meddlesome do-gooders. Democrats prefer to see themselves as White saviors, even those who aren’t necessarily White themselves, rescuing the poor by dispensing patronage plums.

Kandiss Taylor loves Jesus, guns, and babies, because loving the passive is easy. Much easier, certainly, than praying for those who curse you, as a certain Galilean said. Also easier than forgiving debts, which Jesus considered pretty important, and which Democrats promised to do, before reneging. Taylor has embraced literally the most passive campaign pledge possible, promising to do nothing, while shifting the responsibility onto God.

As a Christian and a citizen, I want a candidate who shares my values. But the problem is frustratingly reflexive: the more loudly a candidate proclaims her Christian bona fides, the more likely those credentials are false. And both parties are avoiding the difficult work of listening to “the least of these” where they actually are. I fear conditions will only get worse before there’s any chance of getting better.