Survivor's Guilt

I try not to watch the news from America anymore. The abject horror simply becomes too much, and I've come to realize that basically, the country that I still, at least in a formal sense, call home, has completely given up. I saw, like a lot of people, the chart where four of the deadliest days in American history were in the previous week – exceeded only by 9/11, the 1903 San Francisco Earthquake, the Battle of Antietam, and the (weirdly forgotten) 1900 Galveston Hurricane. Which apparently excluded Gettysburg and the Spanish Flu, but point taken all the same. Meanwhile, my Iowa hometown has frequented among the most pandemic-ridden places in America, and thereby on Earth.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting poolside with a cucumber Italian soda, reading A Dance to the Music of Time, wondering whether to go to the little French bistro with the white tablecloths, now that it's the season for game and white truffles, or whether to keep it simple and just go to the sushi place down the street. And darling, do we have enough Campari for a round of Negronis?

It might (will) sound melodramatic, but I imagine that this is not too different a feeling from that experienced by the great wave of European intellectuals who wound up in Los Angeles in the years leading up to World War II, ready to be recruited by Hollywood and by the newly wealthy universities of the West Coast. Their home countries were ripped to shreds and turned to headlines, even as they had martini-lunch meetings with MGM.

I'm in this weird blank spot on the planet that's been relatively unaffected, despite a recent outbreak in a distant industrial suburb. My job continues unabated. I actually lost weight during the lockdown. Sure, I can't travel, and that's something of a raison d'etre for me, but really, how much of a complaint is that? Does it have any validity? “What a DRAG, I can't go to Sri Lanka this year...” This is where I'd tell myself to fuck right off.

So I tell myself to feel gratitude. But the flipside of that is that with everything I'm grateful, for there is an inevitable sense of survivor's guilt.

I've often been accused of fatalism, owing to the fact that I generally believe that we as individual, atomized humans are tossed about by grand physical, biological, historical, and economic forces that we have more or less no control over, and that the true horror and despair occurs when we are forced to confront our own essential powerlessness.

Meaning that even though I myself have escaped unscathed, what does that mean, when I look around and see nothing but prospects getting progressively dimmer and dimmer? If I were to return to America anytime soon – as I'd been seriously considering before – what would there be to return to? A diseased, economically depressed landscape, riven with political strife, operating solely for the enrichment of a callous ruling class. And then, this is compounded with the horror and the sneaking suspicion that most places aren't that much better off right now.

I try to donate to decent causes, to perform random acts of kindness. All of which ultimately feels less like I'm expressing any kind of agency and more like I'm paying indulgences.

And then I go back and repeat the cycle. I fetch my towel and my sunglasses, and my copy of A Dance to the Music of Time. Iced Americano, this time, though.

I close my eyes, the patterns of the tropical sun dance around beneath my eyelids. The sun's fangs drip with blood.

Ozymandias at Arecibo

It's remarkable how much of my education I can attribute to my childhood/teen habit of watching late-night television. Before the Internet, this was where the mystery lay.

I was seven or eight years old, watching the X-Files – a habit that helped instill in me a lifelong love of the weirdness and darkness lurking around the American fringe. There was a lot of snide talk about “little green men,” a lot of cagey dialogue, gray sky.

Agent Mulder ran along the edge of what was identified as the Arecibo Radio Observatory – white guy-wires criss-crossing the elegant curve of a massive, concave satellite dish, precise lines contrasted against the verdant Puerto Rican jungle.

 

Nothing seemed more indicative of the modernist idea of the future. It was the same impulse I'd registered in old atlases from the 1950s and 1960s, with their breathless prologues proclaiming exploration as the... dramatic pause... destiny of man, at a time when such grand notions could be contemplated. I'd registered this impulse in diagrams of orbital paths, the ocean depths, cloud patterns. Nothing seemed to be a purer representation of the human will to enter communion with the stars.

On December 2^nd, as I scrolled through the headlines of the day – continued political fracas and pandemic spread across America (expected, miserable), the transitioning of a pint-sized Canadian actor (and pausing to wonder, over my coffee, if any nerdy dudes were no longer able to masturbate to Kitty Pryde) – there it was.

My childhood image of scientific progress lay there shattered,the jungle lurking beneath the cracked concrete.

 

In 1960, construction began on the Arecibo Radio Telescope, designed to study the ionosphere as part of a DARPA project to allow for more effective scanning of ballistic missiles. As with so much American science of the mid-20^th Century, the spirit of discovery was facilitated by Cold War interests. And yet it became known not for any defense against the ICBMs that never came, but for its pivotal role in astronomical observation. This was where solid evidence of the neutron star was found, where the binary pulsar was first observed, and where, in 1974, Carl Sagan and others transmitted a radio frequency towards the Hercules Global Cluster in the impossible hope that some alien species would find it, decode it, and nod towards us as an intelligent species.

That kind of optimism seems, in 2020, to be so damn naive. And it's not just the fact that it's been a shit year (not helped by Facebook Boomer “2020 duhr huhr huhr” memes). It's the fact that this was a once-mighty site of scientific endeavor, slowly defunded as the American public sector was strangled to death by increasingly fiscally hawkish governments over the '90s and '00s, until it was a mere shell of its former self. In 2016, Arecibo lost its position as the world's largest single-aperture telescope to the new Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou Province, China, and in 2017, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, leaving millions of Puerto Ricans without power and water for months, even years, fully revealing the colonial nature of the island's relationship to the mainland. Cracks had begun to appear, and by the time Arecibo collapsed, plans were already underway for decommissioning.

It would be a hack metaphor if it was in a movie, wouldn't it be? The proud American institution crippled by the neoliberalizing state, before final humiliation by Chinese competition, a hurricane in all likelihood exacerbated by climate change, before finally giving up the ghost. Insert undertones of militarism and colonialism that existed since the beginning.

But if there's one thing I've learned over the last year, it's that things that would be hack metaphors in sci-fi movies are depressingly close to the reality we have, the reality of deepfake videos, Silicon Valley choked in orange haze, major news leaks coming through Tiktok, the Internet being dominated by clips of braying idiots demanding their right to not exercise pandemic protections at Yankee Candle, and Belle fucking Delphine.

Perhaps that's why I mourned Arecibo more than expected.

And perhaps that's why Sagan's hopeful message of 1974 seems more like a retelling of a certain Shelley poem:

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Pyrrhic Victory

“If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”

- Pyrrhus of Epirus after the Battle of Asculum, as reported in Plutarch's Lives

I have learned, over the past few years, to brace myself for the dumbest possible outcome in the world of politics. This isn't, I should stress, the worst possible outcome. It is the dumbest. If the worst possible outcome is goose-stepping fascists and a highly motivated cabal of elite operators relentlessly assassinating dissidents, the dumbest possible outcome is a neoliberal government in which austerity is accompanied by vague hand-waving towards social justice issues and performative identity politics, and some fat piggly-eyed pasty fuck with delusions of military grandeur in an improvised flak jacket spraying Sunday shoppers with automatic gunfire in an act of stochastic rage at a suburban CVS.

And this is what my crystal ball has been telling me for months – a wave of blue mail-in votes, followed by a wave of red votes on election night itself, followed by a narrow, tooth-and-nail Democratic victory. Presumably to be followed by weeks of protracted court battles, bursts of occasional right-wing violence, and four years of utter fecklessness (not to mention a probable repeat of the Republican backlashes of 1994 and 2010).

A summation from someone more educated than I:

“Right now, what we are facing is a catastrophe. A Republican Senate, a narrow Democratic house majority, and a Democrat president who did not win by a big margin, who will be reviled for various reasons from day one by Trump supporters and adherents to the opposite side, who has conservative instincts, who will now have both a scapegoat in Mitch McConnell for his refusal to do anything that might move the country to the left, anything that might improve the lot of the most vulnerable in this society, should he even have that inclination. Not only provide a scapegoat, but he will also have the opportunity to enforce what could be a brutal austerity regime in the midst of a continuing pandemic in the midst of an economic crisis. I mean, before this election, I had pretty much no hope for the Democratic Party, and after it, it's pretty much the same deal.” 

- Virgil Texas in conversation with Briahna Joy Gray, Bad Faith podcast

We live in a time when more Americans than ever before believe in, at least to some degree, what I believe in: universal healthcare, some form of UBI, a higher minimum wage, an end to military misadventures, the overhaul of the criminal justice system, a Green New Deal, and support for unions and worker co-ops to help resolve the contradiction between labor and capital. Let us be reminded, that no matter what the mealy-mouthed editorial boards of the New York Times and Atlantic tell you, it was pro-Medicare for All Democrats who managed to carry swing House districts, and that while Florida went for Trump, Florida also went for a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage.

And yet the gap between political will and political representation has rarely been starker. The ostensible party of the left is led by a senile puppet for the donor class and a fucking cop, advised by all manner of Wall Street cronies and liberal war hawks – people who would have been called “Rockefeller Republicans” in another era (and even Nelson Rockefeller was in many respects more liberal than these fucks). While the world burns. Literally.

OK, I voted for Biden, regrettably. It seemed like it wouldn't hurt, and I didn't see how a Biden presidency could be worse than a Trump presidency, even if I doubted it would be much better. A bit like the French communists in the Chirac-Le Pen election of 2001, who walked into the polls with clothespins on their noses.

I'm sure plenty of nice center-lefties would tell me – and I hear this dull wording again and again – that Biden had “the most progressive platform of all time.” Well, were his policies anywhere near memorable enough to excite voters? Or were they the sort of means-tested nonsense pushed by DC wonks? Were there even any attempts to convince anyone of these policies, or was the sole form of messaging “not Trump”? Do you even trust this putative platform? Or should I believe that Biden's and Harris' records speak for themselves?

And so we're left, as I said at the beginning, a serious case of the dum-dums. The notion that those of us on the left can in any way “push” Biden leftwards or have any leverage to do so (versus a well-organized apparatus to maintain the Democratic Party in its post-Clinton form as a neoliberal entity, and one willing to capitulate to Republican excess instead of actually building working-class politics) is absurd.

I'm sure I'll get people saying that this sort of doomer mindset is a product of my own privilege. To which I respond that standpoint epistemology is pearl-clutching masquerading as empathy, and is indicative of a gray-faced Protestant ethos suffused with late-capitalist narcissism.

So what is to be done? I really don't know. Fuck.

Death in the Age of Twitter

When I first heard about the not-untimely but decidedly time-unfortunate death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I did the worst possible thing – I went to social media. This is akin to checking WebMD when you experience an innocuous discomfort of one kind or another, and come out thinking you have lymphoma.

A depressingly large number of Twitter liberals' automatic response was (natch) to blame the left. The name “Jill Stein” was trotted out yet again as a reason for why the world sucks (much like Nader back during the Bush years), because instead of actually, you know, interrogating why people don't trust a party that has walked back every attempt at economic justice it's made by cozying up to Wall Street. Because if there's one thing you need in an election year, apparently it's by wagging fingers and alienating potential allies. If Trump is reelected, I'm fully expecting the Blame Bernie Brigade to come back in full force, and I'm expecting to be nagged for my lack of party loyalty.

And of course there were weird, angry takes (second stage of grief and all that). One that struck me as particularly bizarre was a seemingly widespread finger-wag against people using the phrase “rest in power” for white people. If you believe this, you have a stupid opinion. I hold you in a certain measure of contempt for having that opinion. Your entertaining this opinion and other associated flavors of histrionics and umbrage is a symptom of a broader problem with the American left. You might still be a lovely dinner guest though.

But ultimately, the depressing fact is that the Supreme Court was already lost for a generation ever since Brett Kavanaugh slithered his way into the chamber.

I also had to ask myself what Justice Ginsburg really did for the left, and I suspect many of her most ardent supporters would be hard-pressed to name actual policies she pushed through during her tenure (there were some of note, but they were relatively few). Rather, people are more familiar with her jeremiad dissents, which while eloquently phrased statements of purpose, are at the end of the day the rallying cry of the defeated.

And this is perhaps mirrored by the fact that, given the recalcitrant American right, the center left's response has been to less eloquently screech “THAT'S NOT FAIR!” at every repugnant thing McConnell and Co. do.

At the end of the day this is another reduction of politics to bien-pensant aesthetics. Lacking real victories, nice American liberals have simply been content over the past 20 years to rest on their own smugness. I remember the feeling of paralytic horror at watching The Daily Show in my teens, during the Iraq War, and the general attitude of “Well, look at THOSE dumbasses” towards the local yokels baying for Arab blood while ignoring the fact that the New York Times editorial staff and their colleagues (Frum, Friedman, and the rest) attempted to provide intellectual scaffolding for imperialist idiocy. At my most cynical moments, it's an attitude that seems to represent an almost Weimar-level phobia of and disgust towards mass politics, with results that invariably bite liberalism in its ass.

Putting one's faith in an unelected court is cheering on your champions rather than taking part in the process of mass politics (not that I'm a model, I just do my best to fund where I can when I can... oh, and join the DSA, folks). Indeed, Ginsburg herself was critical of the process of Roe v. Wade, pointing out that by settling the matter of abortion in the courts during a time of liberalizing abortion laws rather than in the democratic sphere, a backlash was invited without sufficient public consensus to act as a counterbalance. Unsurprisingly, Jacobin published a fair amount of good analysis on this subject.

But to be a leftist is, unfortunately, by and large, setting yourself up for disappointments. Consistently. As someone who believes that working towards a socialist society is the necessary fulfillment of the mission of the Enlightenment, I have to accept that I will be unhappy more often than I am happy with the world at large, and it's because I know how much better it could be.

Political engagement is, to a certain degree, an utterly quixotic mission that will drive you fucking insane. Even those conservatives who have scored so many global victories over the past several years can't escape. Their worldview is fraught with a wild loathing of the world as it has become, as it has transformed into something that deviates from their myopic perspectives. At the ground level, American conservatives seem in particular seem far more occupied with stomping their feet at the perceived transgressions of liberals and socialists (and being completely unable to differentiate the two) than actually forming anything like a coherent perspective.

A sheriff, spitting through his mustache: “You know if you'd told me 20 years ago I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair, bones in their noses, I just flat out wouldn't have believed you.”

Tommy Lee Jones: “Signs and wonders.”

And so my conclusion is that an old lady who worked hard and did some good things has died. She will doubtless be replaced by some cross-clutching fuckwad who in any decent society would be stripped of their judicial power and forced to walk the streets wearing a barrel with shoulder straps holding up a sign saying “Will adjudicate for food.” But I can't perceive it as the apocalyptic event that so many liberals perceive it to be.

At this particularly stupid time in history, that baseline annoyance is to a certain degree something I expect. I had thought Trump and Hillary were the two worst presidential candidates of my lifetime. Nope, Trump and Biden. It can always get worse. I know that I will have a materially worse life than my parents. That sucks. But as it is something I have no control over, I accept it.

My only irrational hope left is that things will get better before the seas rise... too much... and that I can leave the world with it pointed in a different direction. Somewhat.

T.S. Eliot on the Subway

Sunset. The rainy season, Bangkok, walking through the crowds of masked commuters. A rope is lifted, and a certain number are let through the electronic gates and onto the subway platform. As we board, the announcement is polite and almost cooing in Thai, stilted in English “Please refrain from talking.”

It's a line that has haunted me since I first read it, and I had to look it up again.

    “Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

     And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

    And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

    Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.”

I was around 12 or 13 when I first read that, an early winter twilight falling over the prairie states, around the time I truly internalized how tawdry and depressing the world around me could be. T.S. Eliot wrote those lines from East Coker in 1939, fully aware of the much greater darkness the world was settling into once again.

I didn't know that then. I knew it from context. Paul Theroux was quoting it in a bit from The Old Patagonian Express, using it to describe the New York subway of the pre-Giuliani days – and even that, I only knew from transmitted experience, from reruns of The Equalizer and from cable viewings of the Death Wish movies, that showed New York as an ongoing turf war between gangs which somehow admitted both black-nationalist kids in leather jackets and sunglasses and white punks with pink mohawks.

I didn't know anything about T.S. Eliot's life, and nothing of his poetry other than bits of The Hollow Men and The Waste Land that I'd found in my parents' books. I didn't know that he'd written East Coker to expound upon his belief that science and material progress and art had failed to make people happier in any fundamental way. He was the scion of industrial wealth, his family owning a Saint Louis firm with the gloriously Victorian-positivist name of the “Hydraulic-Press Brick Company,” affiliated with the sunny, inclusive, progress-affirming Unitarian Church. And none of that really seemed to matter after 1,000,000 men got vaporized at the Somme. I didn't know about his stuttering attempts to turn himself into an English country gentleman, I didn't know about his bomb-dropping effect on literature in the English language, his fully-formed modernism signaling the rise of a new literary idiom.

I did know, though, that it resonated. Hard.

And it's a line that I think about in my darker moments, when the things that sustain me – whether that's art, travel, experience, hedonistic abandon – fail to suffice. When I am forced to confront my own atomization.

And I reflect on this line in particular because it seems so absolutely of the moment – the faces on the train, the growing terror of nothing to think about, the fear of not being entertained. All the new Netflix series look like garbage. You're scrolling through your phone when you're taking a shit.

It's an easy out to look back to a time -- around Eliot's own time -- when people often presume things were simpler, less alienated. But Eliot was looking back much further, to a time before the Industrial Revolution, when all reasoning was analogy, every moment was imbued with symbolism, and the notion of physical laws separate from the watchful eye of God verged on the inconceivable. To the time of the Medieval passion play and the charivari and the tales of the fisher king, when the sun rose and set through divine will.

It was a path already trodden by people like Henry Adams and D.H. Lawrence. Like H.P. Lovecraft, like Aldous Huxley, like Ezra Pound he saw the malaise of the present, mass destruction and new forms of totalitarianism, but lacked the confidence to move forward into the future, and instead fetishized the mythic past.

Lovecraft died, forgotten, a miserable incel avant la lettre a little before East Coker was published. Huxley quickly became a weird sort of proto-hippie, writing dull panegyrics to Hinduism and LSD. Pound disappeared down the rabbit hole of Mussolini worship and mental illness.

I read the full text of East Coker several years later as a college student, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Eliot's portent-laden avant-garde babblings suited the worldview.

But rereading the thing, I don't know how I missed the point. Eliot, having spent the interwar years saying fuck it all, seeing the rising tide of fascism, finally realized the world he lived in was worth fighting for, and he closes the text with uncharacteristic hope – I got the uncertainty of it, the dissociation, the clutching at straws. But then I read the last line as the train left the Sirikit Center station.

    “We must be still and still moving

    Into another intensity

    For a further union, a deep communion

    Through the dark cold and the empty desolation

    The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

    Of the petrel and the porpoise. The end is my beginning.”

A flower in a bomb crater, as it were.

I emerge from the subway at Asok, the electronic billboards leering, rain spitting. I shut my eyes, and I can almost hear the crash of waves all around me.

Falling Down in Contemporary America

In light of the recent death of serious candidate for Hollywood's bitchiest queen, Joel Schumacher, I embarked upon a sort of Schumachathon, encompassing a revisiting of three of the man's best films – 2002's Colin Farrell Shitting Himself in a Phone Booth, 1987's The Coreys vs. Vampire Kiefer Sutherland, and a film that was held in high renown when it came out, but has seemingly fallen out of favor. This is 1993's Falling Down.

For those of you who haven't seen it, which is honestly probably most people under 35, it's a rather remarkable tale centering on Michael Douglas getting fed up with traffic one day and proceeding to go beast mode on the citizens of Los Angeles. Identified at first only by his vanity plates, “D-FENS,” he takes out his anger at a mix of petty injustices, failures to comply, and perceived unfairness, merrily shooting and baseball-batting his way en route to his daughter's birthday barbecue.

There is a list of zeitgeist-defining films out there – The Deer Hunter, Do the Right Thing, Taxi Driver, Jaws, The Apartment – but you don't see Falling Down on those lists. It should be.

Who is D-Fens, a.k.a. Bill Foster? In his black plastic glasses and flat top haircut, he's a relic of Eisenhower's America more than anything else, a former cold warrior and missile engineer laid off from one of the many California defense contractors for reasons that are kept mysterious, apparently even to him. His ex-wife has a restraining order on him, and what we see of their home movies informs us that he was more interested in maintaining the image of a HAPPY AMERICAN FAMILY than actually trying to make his wife or child feel happy, loved, or valued. He's moved back in with his mom, whom he yells at for minor transgressions. Starting to sound like a familiar type in 2020?

SPAHLER AHLERT SPAHLERS AHEAAAAD (although they're very, very minimal, but if you're a purist, skip down a couple paragraphs) and all that.

And when we look at his cross-city rampage, it starts with the petty, understandable frustration of a traffic jam (oh how I've wished I've had a steamroller...) and slowly escalates through his litany of complaints: overpriced sodas, a Korean grocer's broken English (with some fucking hilarious bits from Michael Douglas – Simmeringly. “Do you have any idea how much money my country has given your country?” Pause. Sheepishly but still simmeringly. “I don't know, but it's gotta be a lot, you can bet on that.”), a lack of honor among thieves, the time that fast food restaurants stop serving breakfast (a bit of r/fuckyoukaren over here), cosplayer Neo-Nazis, the inconvenience of public works projects, the selfishness of golfers, the salaries of cosmetic surgeons, family court judges being family court judges... you get the idea, all the complaints of a white guy who never quite made it.

In other words, he still lives in his American dream-image, unable to reconcile the fact that the America he is experiencing bears little in common with the America he was promised, and he proceeds to behave like a jilted lover. It doesn't take too much imagination to figure out how his story ends.

What makes so much of the film so uncomfortable is that in many of his encounters, he's not wrong. The system is rigged. Hard work is rarely rewarded. Life is increasingly dog-eat-dog. And anger is a natural response. He'd never be self-aware or intelligent enough to use a term like “neoliberalism” and he'd probably call me a dirty commie and airhole me if I said anything like that, but like so many reactionaries, he has horrifying solutions to real diagnoses. If Travis Bickles in Taxi Driver was the natural (and therefore insane) response to the decay and urban crisis of 1970s New York, then D-Fens is the natural (and therefore insane) response to the 1990s Los Angeles of O.J. Simpson, rooftop Koreans, and City of Quartz.

Furthermore, the grimly sweaty SoCal summer visual vocabulary and ominous pacing, intercutting Michael Douglas' gore-spattered quest with retiring cop Robert Duvall's attempt to catch him (a cliché to be sure, but a well-executed one) perfectly match the misery and anxiety expressed by every single character.

And so I have come to believe that this is a movie that defines American society, particularly in its moment, in a way few other films – Network, Sunset Boulevard, and Apocalypse Now being three other particularly perfect examples – have.

Now there are critics and cultural commentators who make the case that there's no call for such movies in 2020, in a world in which stochastic terror attacks by aggrieved white men plague American life, with a tacit carte blanche from the fat authoritarian fuck inhabiting the Oval Office. A world in which people like living alien skinsuit Stephen Miller and totem spirit of Olive Garden Mike Pompeo have their hands on the levers of power. To these critics, a film that doesn't make hard-line moral prescriptions about D-Fens (even if it doesn't outright glorify him like Death Wish or Dirty Harry), and presents him in a light that is at times sympathetic, is fundamentally problematic. These are the same people who underrated Joker as a fundamentally immoral piece of film (although, credit where credit is due, they're not near as obnoxious as the people who overrated Joker).

And yet I would argue that these same woke critics by and large are stupid people with stupid ideas. Ignore them. They operate on this sort of faux-Brechtian notion of film studies in which movies must illustrate GOOD BEHAVIOR and GOOD MORALS, and if they show anything else, these must be understood as BAD BEHAVIOR and BAD MORALS, rather than understanding the historical, economic, and cultural context in which such attitudes and behaviors arise.

By reducing everything to morality, they, despite their protestations, actually arrive at a remarkably conservative stance, in which everything boils down to individual attitudes rather than systemic realities. And they themselves are therefore symptoms of an atomized culture.

And it's Schumacher's refusal to let these contexts go unnoticed, his refusal to completely castigate any individual (other than the squirrelly neo-Nazi, whom everyone pretty much agrees got what was coming to him), his visual examination of a protagonist who, while sympathetic, is at the end of the day a pathetic, angry mess that makes Falling Down an imperative film, not just a brilliantly made one. Now go watch it.

A Note From Someone Far Away From South Minneapolis

It's always strange seeing one's country from the outside in, now more than ever. And that goes double when the places you see flashing across the news are places you once knew so intimately.

George Floyd was murdered outside the shop I used to go to on the regular on 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis, and when I saw the burning of Lake Street, I saw the corners where a middle-aged man tried persistently to scam me out of a few bucks, where I got yelled at for refusing to give a girl coming out of the club a ride on the handlebars of my bike on a stoned dawn ride home, where I happily ate tortas on curbsides.

And what seem awfully like violent, right-wing attacks keep occurring at the corners in Seattle where I once drank a bottle of wine in the bucket of a front-end loader, where I spent afternoons reading on the grass, where I once had a long kiss goodbye.

I know now is not the time for dreamy musings, but I still have them, and other than monetary payments to righteous groups – my sole attempt at praxis – it's been my way of dealing with the insanity of America. Endlessly musing on my patio in the monsoon rains far, far from the action. A brief scroll through social media is filled with exhortations to do a something, to educate oneself, and I don't know what to say – I've done a fair bit of my due diligence, I've read Angela Davis and Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver and bell hooks with admiration. I've tried to be a good listener, as someone who grew up in a remarkably white-bread town and didn't really understand the concept of privilege in my heart, through and through, until I saw a Seattle bus driver let me through on an expired transfer before examining the transfers of a group of black teenagers like a gem dealer trying to spot a fake. That being said, I don't participate in the conversation, really, because my voice isn't worth much of a damn.

But despite my best attempts to keep up my odd, perhaps irrational, optimism of the will, my delight at the realization that I'm witness to the largest civil rights movement in America in half a century, my pessimism of the intellect keeps pushing through.

In addition to my fear of reprisals, whether by white stochastic terrorists or by sitting senators, I'm just as terrified that any kind of real change will ultimately be elided in lieu of individual therapeutic guilt among the white professional classes and pure symbolic gesture by the levers of capital.

My first worries began with the Thai celebrities proclaiming that “black lives matter” even as they gleefully cheer on the jackboots who run their own country, and thereby making a statement that says more about their attempt to identify with the first-world metropole than any kind of real compassion or concern for workers or the poor. It wasn't exactly helped by Senate Democrats who had enthusiastically signed onto the Clinton crime bill donning kente cloth like they're in Arrested Development (the '90s R&B group, not the Bluth Family), or by Mitt motherfucking Romney joining a march in a sorry attempt to redeem himself.

Furthermore, as more and more people have signed on to the premise of, you know, actually taking the experiences of black Americans into consideration, I keep seeing more and more attempts by large corporations and the capitalist state to attempt to exculpate themselves. It's the litany of brands trying to woke-ify and blackwash themselves, despite their rapacious greed, union-busting, and rent-seeking. It's the campaign to rename Fort Benning in Georgia (named for proud defender of the Peculiar Institution and generally worthless human Henry Lewis Benning), and ignoring the fact that it hosts the Western Hemisphere Institute, which has spent the past 70 years training nun-raping Latin American strongmen as one of the single vilest apparatuses of American empire.

These are simply new manifestations of old fears. In the struggle for Irish independence, James Connolly spoke of his trepidation that any kind of revolutionary change would be co-opted, phrased with a Hibernian charm and a Victorian flourish that I cannot hope to match:

“England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause you had betrayed.”

Like I said, I'm far away from the metaphorical England and the metaphorical Freedom. And hope is not dead in me yet – if it was I wouldn't be at my laptop right now, I'd have the windows blacked out and a freezer bag full of Burmese heroin on my coffee table – but I need to bear witness to a certain degree.

To that end, I am heartened to large degree. I'm glad that people seem to recognize that not-even-half measures don't cut it, I'm glad the black-square Instagram thing got all the derision it deserved, I'm glad a certain inflection point has been reached. Even as I'm terrified that white moderates who fill Twitter with GIFs of clapping black women are going to derail shit and become active hindrances the moment more serious changes become the next pragmatic steps.

Keep pushing on. Eyes on the prize, motherfuckers.

The Mask of the Red Death

As an American abroad, it's again one of those times when I'm expected to explain my countrymen.

This usually isn't asked out of any genuine concern, but out of bemusement. After all, it's understandable why there's a certain schadenfreude in seeing the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world suddenly brought to its knees. But as someone who is at the end of the day an American, what it means is greater immiseration for those with whom I share a passport and a flat accent, and after the bodies are swept away, as a man more perceptive than I once said, “everything stays the same, but worse.”

I try to stay off social media, but I couldn't help but notice the ongoing arguments over masks that are apparently the topic du jour back home. Given the social stratum of which I am a part, the opinions I see are naturally far more pro-mask. I will say up front, that this is a complex issue, and I don't see one side or the other as explicitly, 100 percent right – rather, it's dependent on a lot of material-world questions, all revolving around what mask you use, how you use it, and what other measures you're taking – but that kind of nuance doesn't translate online. What seems worth interrogating as a layman, rather, is the social climate surrounding the issue, which can be as interesting as the scientific and epidemiological reality.

When I see pro-mask Facebook posts and memes, the touchstones are the standards of liberal discourse – the importance of looking out for one's neighbor, “believing science,” a nod towards success stories in other countries, and a palpable disgust at those for whom convenience = freedom. Now, those are basically good sentiments. I, too, like being kind and educated and cosmopolitan, and I, too, dislike puerile American conservatism.

The reason shit like this drives me absolutely nuts is that it is – yet again – the American reduction of what should be a cold-blooded and scientific issue to yet another goddamn, motherfucking culture war.

Like all culture wars, it is predicated upon individual and ultimately consumer action (paired, of course, with plenty of online scolding) rather than any kind of collective effort. As far as I'm concerned, if you think that consumption choices can function as a form of activism, you're as big a fucking rube as the upper middle class cunt who goes to a protest so he can take his wife to The Cheesecake Factory again – the difference being is that the plastic straw-eschewer and the mask-reminder don't do active harm.

I can empathize. You're probably stuck at home, either laid off or working from the living room, stuck with your family members who grate on you, or stuck alone, trying desperately to stay positive, trying to not feel helpless, trying not to feel like you're on a rocket to the sun, and no one is offering any valid solutions. Whether you're aware of it or not, the complete neoliberal evisceration of public services has probably fucked you, and the political and executive classes as a whole don't give a shit about you. So you click a button in the vague hope that something, anything will happen, and it feels like a measure of taking control.

The desire to act, even if your actions are purely performative, is of course not limited to American soil. At my neighborhood market in Bangkok, staff were diligently requiring masks and temperature checks. Never mind that people were rubbing their mitts all over their faces, that the cheap thermometers were likely unreliable (and irrelevant for incubating cases), that there wasn't even a semblance of social distance, and that people were, y'know, eating. The performance was to be followed.

For what it's worth, given that it's a social norm in this part of the world, I've been wearing a mask in enclosed spaces, even though I know that given the way that the humidity accumulates and the fact that it's an ordinary cloth mask, it's probably more of a risk than wearing nothing, and even though I'll probably have to remove it to communicate with a cashier (you try speaking your third language through a thick cloth mask, my dudes). I follow the performative role, simply to reduce friction. Which is why we do a lot of things, really.

The sudden spike in popularity of Contagion points to the fact that in trying times, people need metaphor systems and structures in order to not feel like their clawing at the padded walls. I haven't watched it, and I don't particularly care to.

However, I did watch Roger Corman's 1964 masterpiece, The Masque of the Red Death, with gorgeous cinematography by Nicholas Roeg (who would later go on to direct, fucking my mind with the one-two punch of The Man Who Fell to Earth and Don't Look Now), and starring Vincent Price as the leader of a coterie of wealthy perverts who try to lock themselves behind palace walls doing shits-and-giggles Satanism and having weirdly joyless orgies, trying to hide from the plague ravaging the countryside. Villagers seeking refuge are shot, plots are made, survivors are few, and the Red Death comes for everyone.

This is the metaphor I prefer. Death stalks us all – you are fundamentally powerless as an individual in an impassive universe, and to deny the existence of death is to make yourself a grotesque. The illusion of control is a great lie, and the courtiers, merrily letting the people die, concerned with saving their own skin, suffer the same fate. Salvation is a fool's errand, whether from God or Satan, and heavens and hells are human creations.

Granted, this is pretty much textbook existentialism – something conspicuously absent from contemporary film, when you come to think of it – but it was somehow comforting to feel a bit less insane. Which, in turn, means that this was my own balm, my own narrative comfort. As was writing this.

On Rewatching Mad Men

And you thought you were binge-watching before.

I've been, too, but I've been focused on re-watching Mad Men, a show I've held pretty close to my heart since I was introduced to it by a remarkably shitty ex-roommate. I watched it, episode-by-episode, week-by-week, as we always used to, and finally got around to watching the whole thing again, the first time I've re-watched a drama in full (which like binging in general, is something the general populace as a whole does that I've never been very good at).

So I was treated to a dual experience, both the standard experience of revisiting a work from a previous stage of one's life, as well as the experience of viewing something in a completely new way, in this case in a condensed version, where the themes that Matthew Weiner and Co. chose to underline were starker, more obvious.

Spoiler alert, and all that.

Some things, of course, remained wonderful – the richness and depth of the characters and the very specific ways in which they change and evolve, the gorgeous cinematography informed by 1950s and 1960s American cinema, the dreamy montages presenting the characters' mundane lives in counterpoint, the occasional streaks of dark humor, and perhaps best of all, the slips into the surreal – dead characters reappearing, a suddenly empty elevator shaft.

(That's right, I used a gif from a popular TV show in its own right instead of using it as a pointless throwaway gag)

And simultaneously, I cringe even more at the glibly self-congratulatory moments were we the audience are reminded how much better the present day is than the past – the arrogant tobacco execs, the scene where a young Sally Draper wears a plastic dry-cleaning bag to play astronauts, and her mother stops her, only to tell her the laundry better not be on the floor, the way the camera lingers over trash left behind by the Draper Family after a picnic.

I can't speak to the historical accuracy of the show. I obviously wasn't in a New York office space between 1959 and 1970, and increasingly few people were. And since art trades in vibes more than facts, I hesitate to apply any kind of data-based analysis to what the show is or isn't, what it does or doesn't portray. What interests me is not the era itself, but the lens the showrunners chose to examine that era through.

One can be forgiven for thinking of the show as possessing a fundamentally progressive worldview. The script champions women taking a more assertive role within the office, and all of the major characters seem to be more or less on board with the Civil Rights Movement. By the end, they've all become sickened by the Vietnam War, and the struggles of the show's few gay characters are treated with real empathy.

But yet upon second watching, it all seemed like window-dressing.

The version of feminism that is proffered is the Lean In variety, one in which, being a girl-boss is seen as the transcendental goal, and the status quo is in no way meaningfully questioned. The characters often find themselves shattered by the contradictions in their own life, but those are problems resulting not from any kind of structural failings in the society in which they live, but by their interior psychodramas. And when each major character resolves those contradictions in the end – Peggy Olson finally opening her heart up to love with the dopey artist down the hall, Joan Harris starting her own company, Roger Sterling finally settling down with a woman his own age instead of chasing 20 year-old secretaries, Pete Campbell accepting a gilded corporate gig and returning to his family – they do so with a full commitment to the machine.

In probably the most noxious version of all, our hero, Don Draper, a man whose entire life is built on lies, finds salvation at a commune presumably modeled on the Esalen Institute (look it up, it was a major force for the boomer generation but has largely been forgotten), it is by saluting the sun on a cliff over the Pacific. The final scene closes. He smiles as he chants an Om, and the scene cuts to the famous 1971 Coke ad with the teenagers singing on the hilltop in Italy, the presumed message being that he returned to work at McCann-Erickson and thought it up.

“I did hear rumblings of people talking about the ad being corny. It's a little bit disturbing to me, that cynicism. I'm not saying advertising's not corny, but I'm saying that the people who find that ad corny, they're probably experiencing a lot of life that way, and they're missing out on something.” – Matthew Weiner, in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter

Nah, fuck that.

The end message is further evidence that only the worst parts of the '60s survived – the half-baked spirituality and Westernized version of Eastern religion, the mask of inclusivity covering up rapacious capitalism, a Whiggish faith in the inevitability of human progress, and the reduction of all human endeavor to individual choice and self-expression.

A sort of mediocre liberal centrism, the kind long since de rigueur in Oscar-noms, has become the standard perspective of American scripted television, at least in its “prestige” sector (reactionary programming now being confined to reality television and the sorts of fucking dumb “SALUTES TO OUR ARMED FORCES” that I skip over whenever I torrent an NFL game). Few are the shows – The Wire and Deadwood being two magnificent examples – that take an honest look behind the curtain.

With the first episode, featuring lots of idiotic old boys' club joking designed for the audience to be horrified by, I was afraid that Mad Men would become another thing, like so many others, that was ruined for me. I may have liked The Breakfast Club when I was 16, but it's fucking unwatchable now. I've been told not to re-watch Dead Poets' Society, and I have no intention of doing so.

But here's the thing – regardless of the many eye rolls, Mad Men is still a joy to watch. Each character is treated with real empathy, even at their worst, and I'm rooting for them, dammit! Certain sequences still took my breath away as much as they did when I first watch them. I take far more umbrage at the notion that art must contain a correct perspective (I'm listening to Wagner right now, for the-Christ-I-don't-believe-in's sake), than the various sins of the showrunners

 

The Flight of the Black Swan

Chances are that when you hear the word “tropical breeze,” you think of the rustle of palm fronds, the billow of a floral-printed skirt, white sand, a sun-dappled sea, distant laughter.

You're not likely to think of a Saturday night on Sukhumvit Road, an abnormally strong wind thick with tropical humidity, doing nothing to ameliorate the heat, nothing to refresh. It's a couple of hours before all malls, restaurants, and bars are ordered to close, and quite a few places are still open, trying to get a last bit of trade before the tough times begin.

The staff at the malls are dejected, trying to shutter their shops. The escalator stirs to life as I place my foot at the base.

In August, the katabatic wind known as the Foehn blasts out of the Alps, turning people – according to legend, at least – to migraines, wifebeating, suicide, murder, a phenomenon known as the Foehnkrankenheit. It is a meteorological brother to the Santa Ana winds of Southern California, shown to lead to the dispersion of the spores of the fungus Coccidoides, which grows in the lungs, primarily asymptomatically, but causing pneumonia in those with weakened immune systems.

The trains have emptied, traffic is reduced, the Chinese tourists are gone, and if it wasn't so damn ominous, you'd say, on this Saturday night, that Bangkok had never been more livable.

A go-go bar plays pounding music, neon lights flashing for no one, a woman in a gold lame and pancaked skin whitener pouting desperately for me to come in.

I step into an izakaya around the corner where the staff are mostly milling around, a handful of customers remaining. Sitting next to me, a chubby Japanese man shares a mackerel and a beer with a transsexual hooker, the two attempting to banter in equally broken English, each dropping a few lines of the other's native tongue in. She gets a bit frustrated as the price negotiations begin. She manages to get him to agree to 7,000 baht, and then gives him her bank account number for him to transfer money to.

Camgirls must be making a fortune right now.

The nice woman in my bed turns over under the duvet and puts a Taylor Swift song on her phone, and threatens to cough on me if I change it. “It was fun,” she says, and gives me a perfunctory kiss on the way out the door. I still drink the last of the bourbon she wanted in her morning coffee that she'd left in the mug on the patio table.

I was going to go to China to see my sister, tuck into Sichuan hotpots, climb holy mountains. That obviously got canceled. I was going to go to Sri Lanka to explore tea plantations and colonial alleyways. That got canceled too.

“War, war, war. This war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this Spring, I get so bored I could scream!” – Scarlet O'Hara

I hunker down. I'm supplied with gin, frozen duck breasts, dried lentils, and jasmine tea. My Internet connection is good, and there's relatively little work to do from home – something that will change in a few months as every company in the world will be passing liabilities around like a hot potato. In the hot season my pool is cool in the depths and warm at the surface.

At night, every light in the Banyan Tree Hotel is off. It stands there like the black monolith from 2001 at the end of the bed.

I shut my laptop and collapse into a restless sleep, only to wake up the next day, my sheets twisted, my heart pounding, to the chirps of the orioles.

On Losing Friends

Years ago, I heard a comedian – no memory of who it was, for years I thought it was Bill Burr, but I couldn't find a record of Bill Burr saying it – that aging was like a program that ran behind Windows that you didn't notice.

It's something I've been thinking about as it becomes increasingly difficult to justify myself as a “young person” in any meaningful way. Not that I ever found youth all it was cracked up to be, but it was at least a reassurance, a reassurance that something could change, that no matter how shit things were right now, they could somehow be better.

And the cult of youth is, of course, one of the major myths of late capitalism, the idea that no matter how old you are, you have the ability to feel young. Ask your doctor if Cialis is right for you.

Everyone knows, intellectually if not intuitively, about the downsides of getting older. About the wrinkles, the expanding waistlines and sagging cheeks and breasts and ballsacks, the introspection, the hangovers, the sense of failure and unhappiness with one's own success, the realization – another quote I can't attribute – that one will never play the Prince of Denmark.

But what I wasn't told was how many people you'd wind up no longer talking to, and the odd realization, one night when you're at home, alone, and you hear a certain song from five, ten, fifteen years ago, and you thought about a party you'd gone to, a camping trip you'd gone on, a dumb thing you said in class in high school and their response, and the first thing that comes to mind in your internal monologue is “what the hell happened to them?”

You lose friends to marriages and kids, to the difficulties of trying to make two lives into one, to the need to keep those kids clothed and fed.

You lose friends to addiction, whether they've OD'd and departed this planet or simply disappeared into the ether, last heard talking about their new demo tape somewhere in Portland.

You lose friends to mental illness, because maybe they disappeared into their parents' basement in Kansas City, only emerging to pick up a pack of Pall Malls at the Kum and Go, or an eighth from a guy they knew in community college, or maybe you just lose them to a garage filled with monoxide fumes.

You lose friends because you were an asshole to them and still think you're in the right, at least to the extent that you don't forgive them, and you can tell your current friends when you show up to the same party that “it's a little awkward.” The two of you had both had too much Bushmills that night when you'd fallen out, and neither of you were on your best behavior.

You lose friends to ideologies and religions, to their newfound faith in the Pentecostal Christ or anarcho-primitivism, and their Facebook wall is suddenly filled with oddly interpreted scripture quotes or something about how a keto diet saved their life.

You lose friends to careers as financial analysts and psychiatric nurses, their 14-hour days eating through their free time, and you wonder if they're happy with these arrangements, and maybe they are and maybe they're not, but on the rare occasions you see them, you realize that the two of you have nothing left to talk about, and you see in their eyes that they know it too.

You lose friends, probably not many, to fame and/or fortune, and you realize that you represent a past step in their life, a step on the way to somewhere else.

You lose friends to what you call “drifting apart,” but which is you really just being bored with or pissed off at one another, and neither of you being able to expend the energy to call the other out on it, both of you ultimately subject to your own inertia.

You lose friends to their moving back to Idaho Falls to take care of their aging father, all of their social connections drying up as they pay more attention to long calls on hold with insurance companies and the arrangements of feeding tubes.

You lose friends to a boyfriend you consider to be abusive, but she says he's just insecure and that deep down, he 's really a good guy. You didn't want anything to do with him after the last time you saw him, his last post-midnight blowup at an Uber driver.

You lose friends to an eyeroll from your wife after you say you're going over to his house to play video games and smoke weed, and however that judgment plays out in terms of your self-loathing, your love for your wife, your occasional contempt for your friend.

You lose friends to not being able to face another night out, and looking in the mirror at the lines that will eventually become the crow's feet around your eyes.

You lose friends to the look the snide look they gave you when you said you'd done too much coke last weekend.

You lose friends because of the fucking werewolf they turned into when they'd done too much coke last weekend. Or the vodka-soaked mess you left them in the last time you saw them, and the apologies you had to make to the waitress. Or the way you saw them after they'd had a vodka-soaked mess, hungover and having a cigarette on the corner outside a cafe with $4 Bloody Marys at brunch, and their incomprehensible rant about every fucking asshole in this town.

You lose friends to suddenly realizing they've deleted their Facebook account and you didn't have another means of reaching them, even though you have enough mutual friends that it wouldn't be too much effort to find another means of contact.

You lose friends because the only reason the two of you were friends in the first place was because you were stuck in the same shitty little town and roughly the same age, so fuck it, might as well hang out.

You lose friends to the 50 bucks they promised to pay you back, and the fact that the next time you saw them they were ordering 15 dollar cocktails.

You lose friends to the fourth lie you caught them in.

You lose friends to the way they tried to kiss you that one night. Or the way you tried to kiss them. Or the way you kissed, and then fucked, and then went for brunch, and that was it, and you don't know what to make of it.

You lose friends to prison, and the military, and the way they are when they come back from prison or the military.

You lose friends even when they're still in contact, and you wonder if it would be awkward to contact them out of the blue.

You lose friends because they picked up rugby or homebrewing or samba dancing, and that's all they do now, and all their friends do the same, and their Instagram is only rugby or homebrewing or samba dancing.

You lose friends because they went back to school, and their life now consists of long nights working on their night-school undergraduate degree or their dissertation and the vague hope that all of this might someday be worth it, when they have to somehow have to help the kids with their homework and do their own homework.

You lose friends because they messaged you too much and you internalized the Will Rogers line about how you'd never want to be part of a club that'd have you as a member.

And, perhaps most of all, you lose friends because you were never really friends to begin with, and the thinnest of barriers was enough to separate you.

***

And then you're back to those memories of them, of the things that separated you, almost as much as what connected you to begin with, maybe more.

This of course supposes that this was an act of agency on your part, when it quite likely wasn't. You only know your perceptions. You only see an unanswered message, only hear an unflattering remark. And you wonder how many boxes on the list of rationales for distance you tick, and for how many people.

A quick glance through social media reveals the ghosts of your past, transfixed in present time.

I should point out that I'm generally terrible at keeping up with people over electronic means, which at the end of the day seem all too ephemeral to form anything other than a tenuous connection, even if I know that if I was to see a certain person face-to-face, five years after we'd seen each other, that within half an hour it would be as if no time had passed at all.

And I know that if I was to see other people, it would be like the two of you looking at distorted versions of one another. We slowly change, until, like photocopies of photocopies, we are no longer recognizable as such. We could be in the same room, invisible to one another.

But at the end of the day, I mostly feel like the same person, even as the rest of the world blurs and shifts.

And so I have to wonder will I ever become unrecognizable to myself?