The New Dark Age of the Fake Self

Buffy Sainte-Marie

News broke last week that multiple award-winning folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie isn’t Native American, as she’s claimed for sixty years. Since breaking into the Greenwich Village folk scene alongside Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, Sainte-Marie’s public persona has included her putative claim of Canadian birth, to the Piapot band of the Cree nation; she was subsequently, she said, adopted by a Massachusetts couple. New documents claim she was born White, to an Anglo-Italian family outside Boston.

Sainte-Marie’s public career has focused heavily on breaking boundaries for generations. She was supposedly the first Native American to win an Oscar, and has won Grammy and Juno awards for Indigenous music categories. If the current accusations stand, that means she received accolades intended for legitimately marginalized persons. It means she’s participated in expropriating other groups’ stories, reselling them at a profit, and claiming the honors accruing thereunto. It makes her, morally, a common thief.

This is especially vexing in the music industry, where we expect professionals to speak from experience. “Authenticity” is the watchword among pop singers, poets, and dramatists. Nobody expects this of, say, actors; when Gillian Anderson played Margaret Thatcher on The Crown, nobody bellyached because she wasn’t really a Prime Minister. But whenever Kid Rock rehashes his “plain folks” redneck persona, somebody hastily reminds us that he grew up rich in Michigan, just cosplaying working-class roots.

Recently, the internet’s population of full-time professional offense-takers has become particularly militant around policing racial boundaries. Rachel Dolezal set the pattern eight years ago, but she’s gotten lost amidst the tide. More recently, netizens have pushed themselves into a tizzy about whether BLM firebrand Shaun King might be secretly White, or that MAGA glamour queen Kari Lake might be concealing Black parentage. Whatever the truth, we clearly expect politicians, like pop stars, to be authentic.

Yours truly, right, as an angel (there’s a stretch) withJeff Ensz, left, as George Bailey
in the 2017 Kearney Community theatre production of It's a Wonderful Life

The demand for authenticity sometimes produces strange effects. Actor Jussie Smollett’s case is almost comically extreme, but representative. Being both Black and gay, Smollett evidently believed he needed some categorical oppression in his backstory; but he comes from a middle-class background and a relatively low-friction life. So he paid two brothers to fabricate a hate crime. While most participants in the “oppression Olympics” don’t go nearly so far, lies and street theatre are depressingly common.

But simultaneously, I fear that “authenticity” creates siloes that restrict our ability to participate in culture creation. As a trained actor myself, I can’t entirely manufacture my stage identity. I can’t, for instance, use blackface. Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder will probably be the last mainstream actor in my lifetime to use blackface on camera. Even then, he played a satire, a character too lacking in self-awareness to realize the harm in his actions.

I have, however, played characters dissimilar to myself. Onstage, I’ve been Jewish, gay, a veteran, and dead—none of which I’ve ever been offstage. I’ve affected Southern, Bostonian, Yiddish, and British accents. Okay, I’ve never discolored my skin to affect another racial identity, but I’ve adopted other external signs of groups I don’t belong to. Exactly how far from my “authentic” identity can I stray before I stop being an actor, and become something harmful?

A friend suggested Buffy Sainte-Marie could take a 23andMe test to determine her genetic quotient. Laying aside that she’s already done so, and found nothing, this testifies to the prevalence of pseudoscience in racial debates. As Richard J. Perry notes, these tests promise results they can’t possibly deliver. They only identify genetic markers existing in statistically significant concentrations in certain geographic areas. Race isn’t genetic, it’s social; did anyone treat Sainte-Marie as Indigenous growing up?

Please don’t misunderstand. I recognize why it’s important for public figures to not misrepresent themselves when speaking for their (putative) heritage. To quote one egregious example, political operative and notorious bigot Asa Earl Carter fled Alabama, moved west, and rechristened himself as Cherokee Forrest Carter. His fictional memoir The Education of Little Tree has actively preserved harmful stereotypes about Native Americans. Jamake Highwater and Hyemeyohsts Storm have similarly falsified their heritage and kept stereotypes alive.

However, ours is a time of shifting standards; formerly acceptable modes of imitation have become verboten, and the new boundaries haven’t solidified. While Buffy Sainte-Marie has her defenders, most reasonable people will agree she crossed a line, pretending to be something she isn’t. But most artists pretend, at least occasionally, and some forms of pretend are more acceptable than others. Some of us will certainly choose wrong; others will choose correctly, but be judged later.

Barbie, Disability, and the Death of Formal Rhetoric

Ben Shapiro expresses his well-thought-out opinion in a totally reasonable manner.

Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the capacity to discover the possible means of persuasion concerning any subject.” Pointy-headed and abstruse, yes, but a reasonably concise description of what I tried to teach in Freshman Composition. When structuring our language around contentious issues or painful controversies, we must think in terms of what will persuade our intended audience. That standard is often subjective, and moves almost whimsically.

Two recent events have re-centered this difficult process for me. I recently witnessed an unpleasant online dispute quickly spiral out of control. A disabled person noticed that a friend’s anecdote about helping a disabled stranger contained certain ableist prejudices. The story was well-intentioned, but fit a genre of short narrative sometimes disparaged as “inspiration porn.” All such stories mean well, but misfire by showcasing able-bodied generosity over disabled autonomy.

As sometimes happens when disadvantaged persons ask for consideration, some observers saw this criticism as personal attack. Like The Former President, who saw kneeling football players as disloyal “sons of bitches,” the OP’s friends closed ranks defensively, lambasting the critic for “attacking” their friend and “ripping him to shreds.” The defensive posture became so energized that they persisted even after the OP cautioned them to back off and cool down.

When Ben Shapiro, the massively online full-time professional offense-taker, protested Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie this summer by lighting two Barbie dolls on fire, he apparently thought he was making a serious point. The entire internet, however, responded with aggressive disdain. Shapiro evidently thought this fire was an appropriate synecdoche for his internet-friendly outrage. But even his staunchest allies had little support for a petulant boy destroying his sister’s toys.

Shapiro makes most of his living doing personal appearances on college campuses, engaging undergraduates in “debate.” He organizes his public persona around the motto “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings.” Superficially, Shapiro seems to advocate Aristotelean rhetoric as persuasion through evidence. Yet the Barbie incident demonstrates something Shapiro’s critics have long noted: he cares only about winning, usually by personally demolishing anyone who disagrees with him.

Proof of the standing stereotype
of what constitutes a disability

The disability debate pushed me into an awkward position. Both the OP and his critic are friends, whom I respect dearly. I struggled to triangulate a position where I supported both while clarifying that I considered the criticisms justified. This meant finding ways to say “you’re wrong” without making the statement personal, and managing the feelings of defenders whose emotions already ran high. Therefore my participation mainly consisted of overthinking and extended paralysis.

Rereading the debate afterward, I noticed something I missed in the moment: the critic and the defenders kept talking past one another. The critic offered copious evidence, including cited sources and hyperlinks. The defenders hand-waved all the evidence, focusing on the perceived personal slight in the original callout. Because the critic intended no personal slight, she never addressed it. Therefore, both sides’ core concerns never got addressed.

When Ben Shapiro mistakes destroying toys for pitching an argument, the core problem probably resides in who he thinks his audience is. Shapiro has garnered acclaim by performing stunts designed to embarrass progressives and dissidents. Such displays help unify his hard-right audience and create a base primed to listen (and, importantly, to buy his advertisers’ sketchy products). But it’s more likely to alienate anyone who doesn’t already agree.

In other words, Ben Shapiro, his Daily Wire media company, and similar massively online conservative outlets like Daily Caller and The Blaze, create loyalty to an ideological brand. As I’ve noted before, these outlets generate an almost religious sense of unity. Sure, the ideological sense of aggrieved White masculinity coaxes new converts through the door. But once inside, the politics generally matter less than the sense that we’re traveling together.

That, I realized (with some pain), happened with the disability debate. While the critic attempted to structure a formal argument supported with evidence, the OP’s defenders formed a perimeter around group loyalty. Rereading the previous sentence, I realize it sounds pejorative. Not so; when disadvantaged groups face systematic challenges, group membership enables them to organize and support one another.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not here to call out or condemn anyone individually. Rather, to return to classical rhetoric, I believe the two groups had “mixed stases,” that is, they were having two different arguments. But that’s become the problem with online ideology. Too often, we care more about defending the group than seeking the truth; that goes double for us White able-bodied cishet males. The group becomes paramount; the truth gets lost.

...and the Dogs Licked His Sores

The Rich Man and Lazarus (undated Orthodox icon)

Two friends, in two completely different circumstances, have quoted Jesus’ parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) at me recently. This forces me to turn inward and contemplate one of Christianity’s more opaque passages. This narrative, which only appears in one Gospel and has no explanatory text, doesn’t easily admit one-to-one interpretation. It reads more like modern literature than religious text, meant more to disquiet readers than enlighten souls.

The rich man—nameless in the text, but christened Dives in the English theological tradition—lives comfortably inside a fortress-like enclosure, never having to see the squalor around him. Jesus contrasts Dives’ comfort with Lazarus’ suffering. Not only is Lazarus hungry, he is “covered in sores,” presumably leprous, which makes him ritually unclean under Jewish law. He’s so unclean, in fact, that “dogs came and licked his sores.” Dogs, under Abrahamic law, are filthy scavengers.

In other words, Jesus doesn’t contrast here between rich and poor. He contrasts between a man so rich he never needs to touch the ground, and a man so poor he can’t get off the ground. One lives so richly rewarded by this world’s standards that he never needs to participate in this world, and the other must plead for crumbs so he doesn’t leave this world prematurely. Despite this, they’re separated by one thin door, and when the time comes, they seemingly die simultaneously.

Read from a conventionally middle-class moral position, the story seemingly culminates in rewards for earthly suffering, and punishment for earthly indifference. That’s how my childhood preachers interpreted this story. Lazarus ascends to heaven, not because the poor are particularly righteous or deserving, or because pain creates holiness, but because God favors the poor, and casts away those who don’t use God’s earthly blessings to assist the needy. Seemingly straightforward.

Except, as I’ve recently become conscious of widespread systemic ableism in Western society, the story has unwelcome creases. Jesus doesn’t only make Lazarus poor, he also makes Lazarus sick, and so thoroughly sick that he’s vulnerable to scavenging bottom-feeders. But Jesus seemingly offers the ultimate counsel toward patience. Wait your turn, he seemingly says; in the afterlife, God will comfort the afflicted, and consign everyone else to Hades. Just shut up and wait.

The Rich Man and Lazarus
(Sir John Everett Millais, 1864)

In practice, that’s how Christian theologians have utilized this story. Shut up and remain patient, countless bourgeois ministers have asserted, and eventually, God will reward your patient suffering. Those same ministers counseled Dives’ luxurious descendants to gift charity from their surplus, an attitude that still survives whenever you hear anybody say, “charity belongs to the church, not the government.” But an economy based on resource hoarding never gets truly fixed.

Because of Lazarus’ leprous sores, lepers’ hospitals in Victorian England were termed “Lazar-houses.” Mostly run by religious charities, these hospitals let professional Christians scoop lepers off the street, so they wouldn’t beg at the gate. But they walled lepers inside massive, fortress-like sanitoriums. Where Dives lived inside his palace, and Lazarus begged on the street, wealthy Victorians walked the street unmolested, while lepers lived inside their Lazarettos. The upshot remained unchanged: Get them out of sight!

These aren’t historic oddities. Nancy Isenberg describes the degrading language America’s founders, including Thomas Jefferson, used to describe chronically impoverished and ill White people. America’s last “Ugly Laws,” which saw people jailed for being poor, disfigured, or unpleasant to look at, weren’t repealed until 1975. P.T. Barnum built his entertainment empire by displaying disfigured, congenitally disabled, and otherwise outcast persons in his “freak show.” Barnum’s “freaks” accepted this treatment because, otherwise, they had no means to earn a living.

Conventional bourgeois interpretations of the parable focus on Dives’ earthly prosperity, and everything he loses. Middle-class pastors warn parishioners to remember the poor, and to provide sustenance from their worldly excess. Perhaps this interpretation isn’t unfair, since Jesus himself focuses his greatest word count on Dives, and everything Dives lost. But Jesus himself isn’t neutral. Jesus does something disability rights advocates deplore: he reduces Lazarus to a mute prop, with no agency, in his own story.

Jesus undoubtedly intended this story for rich audiences. Luke’s Gospel is uniquely blunt in scolding the wealthy: where Matthew’s Beatitudes promise blessings to the poor, Luke’s parallel passage promises punishments to the rich. These warnings remain as relevant today as when Jesus spoke them. Yet in targeting the rich, Luke’s Jesus strips agency from the poor. Jesus makes Lazarus an object of rich people’s pity, and disability advocates know, pity is one step removed from contempt.

The House of Usher and the Fall of Capitalism

Promo photo from Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher. (the pic is deliberately off-center)

Near the climax of Netflix’s new adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher, Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell) delivers a monologue almost directly at the camera. Half-mad with grief, Madeline rants about the American condition, taking in almost everything synoptically: runaway consumerism, prescription drug abuse, wage stagnation, the Dodds decision. Then she asks her moon-eyed brother Roderick (Bruce Greenwood): are we culpable for this? Or do we just provide services which market forces demand?

The ”we” in this question is the rich. In Poe’s original short story, the Usher family’s wealth is poorly defined, the inheritance of a waning feudal aristocracy, and Madeline barely speaks. But in this adaptation, the Usher family’s wealth is very specific: they own Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, which aggressively markets an opioid drug to pain sufferers worldwide. This unsubtle dig at the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, which manufactures OxyContin, is just one anti-capitalist theme.

First, the overview. This is filmmaker Mike Flanagan’s fifth Netflix limited series, and the third adapting American horror properties, after The Haunting of Hill House and The Turn of the Screw (as The Haunting of Bly Manor). Like the previous two, this one samples liberally from the source author’s collected works, adapting the spirit of the text rather than the words. It’s beautifully paced, somber, and elegiac, but also gory enough for seasoned horror fans.

Flanagan’s previous adaptations have frequently commented on contemporary society. Midnight Mass has called out religious intolerance, for instance, and the ways that outward piety invite moral rot into communities. Usher, however, is distinct for not only having one-to-one criticisms of contemporary issues, but also for calling those issues out by name. In later episodes, several characters deliver monologues like Madeline’s, sounding suspiciously like courtroom closing arguments. Fitting, since the frame story is Roderick Usher’s “confession.”

The Usher twins have achieved earthly power by selling consumers what they think they want. Early on, in flashback, young Roderick (Zach Gilford) pitches the motivating opioid drug, Ligadone, by promising “a world without pain.” It’s unclear whether he knows, making that pitch, that his drug doesn’t cure pain, only defers it until later. In later episodes, he clearly does know this, eventually. But he tells regulators and corporate execs what they want to hear.

Carla Gugino as Verna, a mysterious presence hovering over the house of Usher

Roderick’s six children represent different forms of vice. None grew up with Roderick as primary caregiver, and he bought their affection by showering them with money, and the appurtenances money can buy. Therein lies an important difference between Poe’s world, and Flanagan’s. In Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” fat aristocrats have their party to flee a plague-ravaged world. Flanagan’s Prospero Usher has the same party, but flees a world of excess, not lack.

Of Roderick’s six children, three explicitly abuse drugs. Two others indulge bizarre, distorted sexual appetites. Of the six, only Victorine, a surgeon, lacks conventional vices; but she’s a workaholic. Just because an addiction isn’t illegal, doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful. As addiction specialist Dr. Gabor Maté writes, addictions are almost always manifestations of the abuse and neglect we’ve suffered, either as children or adults. The Ushers got rich selling substance abuse, while indulging covertly themselves.

In other words, the Ushers endure the same capitalist “win or die” mentality they’ve exploited to harm others. They simply game the system sufficiently to defer their suffering onto the future. Money grants the family an illusion of control, and encourages Madeline’s frequent exhortations that the Usher family is destined to change the world. (Madeline’s unflattering parallels with Hilary Clinton’s post-hippie idealism grow increasingly pointed.) But the Ushers never fix the system, only exploit it.

The series’ conclusion implies a just universe, where the more pain the Ushers have deferred, the faster it rolls over them. Flanagan, an atheist, doesn’t believe the Ushers will face consequences in “the next life,” but he declares everyone will answer for their transgressions. The script compares the Ushers to Donald Trump, the Koch brothers, and Mark Zuckerberg, all facing greater or lesser consequences for their actions. Flanagan apparently believes our universe is ultimately just.

I must acknowledge Netflix, which has recently demonstrated a willingness to platform blunt anti-capitalist messages. Black Mirror’s recent sixth season is tightly self-referential, with episodes tied together by “Streamberry,” a media platform so obviously modeled on Netflix that one can only laugh. As the Disney model of conglomerate media has grown increasingly silly, Netflix has shown a willingness to laugh at itself. Evidently Reed Hastings can do something Roderick Usher can’t: change with the times.

The State as Enemy of the People

The “Apartheid Wall” separating Israelis from Palestinians

One early scene in Emily Raboteau’s memoir Searching For Zion helped crystalize my understanding of race in America. Raboteau, who is biracial, recalls a discussion of race issues in her grade school classroom. Her best friend Tamar, who was Jewish, was horrified to hear how thoroughly bigotry is baked into American history. Raboteau recalls her best friend turning to her and exclaiming, “I’m not White.”

As an adult, Tamar performed Aliyah, the ritual immigration of diasporic Jews to the Israelite homeland. Raboteau visits Tamar while researching the elusive concept of “homeland” for Black Americans. She finds her childhood friend living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, dwelling in a house which had been expropriated from a Palestinian family. She recalls listening in horror as Tamar spews talking points about why Palestinians deserve expelled from the land.

In Israel, Raboteau realized, Tamar had become White.

We’ve watched this week as the longstanding hostilities between the Palestinian Hamas government and the Israeli state have boiled over into war, again. Both sides are committing atrocities, including targeting civilians, and justifying their action by defending their own civilian populations, as states do. Ordinary Palestinians and Israelis, with little influence over their governments’ actions, watch helplessly as powerful states replay the grievances of ages past.

Outsiders struggle with how to respond. American spokespeople weighing in on Levantine affairs hasn’t gone well recently. Representative Ilhan Omar was famously called “antisemitic” for criticizing the Israeli state, an accusation that has subsequently spread to colleagues like Rashida Tlaib and AOC. That accusation was specious, however, spearheaded by Margorie Taylor Greene, the candidate endorsed by the Charlottesville fascists who chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

Well-meaning politicians, journalists, and others fear that, if they criticize Israel or Hamas, their opposition will tar them as smearing Jews or Palestinians. Because that does happen. Yet in neutering their critiques, they appear willing to accept war crimes. Hamas targeted air strikes on civilian populations; Israel responded by giving Palestinians 24 hours to flee northern Gaza, a logistical impossibility, since there are over a million people and no place to go.

American right-wing Christians are historically willing to excuse every Israeli excess, despite a longstanding antisemitic streak through their politics. The Israeli state looms large in their theology, because if Israel rebuilds the Temple in Jerusalem, Jesus will (their script says) come swiftly. The End Times aren’t scary for conservative Evangelicals; they believe Jesus will vindicate them, punish everyone else, and let them live justified in God’s light.

Sort of like Tamar, who needed justification for living in a stolen Palestinian house.

Hey, Israel? Those “terrorist targets” sure look like neighborhoods

Powerful states seldom really represent their citizens’ interests. The English Puritans who settled in Massachusetts were legitimately oppressed by the English ethno-nationalist state; but upon bivouacking in America, they began recreating that oppression on Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and Anabaptists. Similarly, the Israeli state and the Jewish people apparently learned different lessons from the Shoah.

Saying this doesn’t mean Jews, individually or collectively, bear responsibility for the current violence in Gaza. Much like individual Americans, living today, aren’t culpable for African slavery or Indian genocide. Indeed, Israelis or Americans who resist their authoritarian state and its bigoted history often get knocked down first. The state, ultimately, always preserves itself—not its people, and certainly not its people’s morals.

States always oppose free thinkers, dissidents, and reformists. Because the state wants only to preserve itself, and has no other moral goal, it always dispenses rewards to those who support the state, and punishments to those who challenge it. This describes states of all kinds: the history of the Cold War reveals that the Eastern and Western blocs found proprietary ways to punish dissidents, but punish them it did.

The powerful Israeli state provided Tamar the protection from antisemitic hatred which she’d lacked in America. It only demanded that Tamar relinquish her morals to the state, and agree with the state’s rationale. America saw something similar, when it originally rejected Italians and Irish as murky, Latinate foreigners. America eventually accepted these groups as White, if these groups would become wholehearted defenders of American state morals.

So it follows that one can challenge the Israeli or Hamas state without condemning the Jewish or Palestinian peoples. Indeed, we can only protect all peoples equally, without prejudice, by condemning and challenging the state. States, by their nature, reward conformists, and punish those who pursue justice. States always preserve an in-group and try to kill an out-group; the current war is between two privileged in-groups, not between peoples.