Out with the Old

A year-end miscellany: Resentment, Irony, Gratitude, Dystopia, Barbarism

While I wrote last week about why I have no intention of making this newsletter a paying concern, I don’t want to downplay how much I enjoy it. No assignments, no deadlines, no editors—that part is great. But, accordingly, there’s also nothing stopping me from just giving up on something if I don’t have the time or focus to finish it.

This is an ambivalent thing. But as this is a free newsletter that I do for fun and hope people read for fun, too, there’s nothing stopping me from cooking up the leftovers to clear up some emotional fridge space for the new year. The most-read actual posts from the last year were Solidarity (on the problem of clergy lamentation), Dallas Diarist: Three Days on the Advent of the Son of Man Anniversary Tour Bus (on Liz Phair and helping asylum seekers catch a bus), and The End of History and the Last Pundit (on the mid-air balancing act of Ross Douthat during the crisis of liberalism). A couple ones I liked that didn’t get as many readers were The Silver-Tongued Devil and I (on country music and Romans 7) and the most over-the-top, weird thing I did this year, Sweet Home, 2000-2019 (a chronology and discography of living in Chicago). If you’re new, or you just missed them, they come recommended.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and for sending kind words when you liked something. I want this to be edifying and I’m always happy when I hear that it has been. Maybe there will be a Christmas sermon post this week and maybe not, but I’ll see you next year.

And now, on to the leftovers:

Prometheus Bummed

[This was supposed to be about how online culture warriors come up with ways to avoid what Joan Didion calls “self-respect” but the structure got too big and it seemed easier to give up than make it work.]

At the age of nineteen, Joan Didion suffered a crushing setback. She was not elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the same cause-effect relationships which hampered others.

This disappointment marked the end of something, in her telling:

I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale.

With this sharply rendered embarrassment, Didion opens her 1961 essay “On Self-Respect.” Starting with this youthful, ridiculous trauma, she assembles an argument about the stoic habits and mature clear-headedness that might, if embraced, replace a misguided dependency on test scores and shallow adult approval. Self-respect is a “separate peace, a private reconciliation with reality” that people can make when they “know the price of things.” It is not a virtue of its own nor a defense against misfortune, but having “the courage of [one’s] mistakes.”

This is one path open to the bright young test-taker who discovers that the world will not yield to their innate brilliance. Another is portrayed, with less style but roughly equivalent eloquence, by the donor-supported pundit of “race science” Richard Hanania, whose violently racist pseudonymous blog posts and comments were recently connected back to him.

“What is interesting to me is whether there are a lot of high IQ people who simply CAN’T do manual labor,” Hoste [the pseudonym for Richard Hanania] wrote in the comment section of a 2009 blog. “As a teenager I tried working at a pizza place and MacDonalds [sic]. I was the worst employee there. I actually felt sympathy for low IQ kids, knowing that this is what they must’ve felt like in school. Blacks and Mexicans shook their heads at me. It was really traumatic...”

Hanania’s story, of an ill-disguised bigot being exposed as an undisguised bigot, is common this year, as certain views once considered unacceptable have become gradually laundered into the mainstream. But the accounts people like Hanania make of others are never very interesting. The accounts they give of themselves, on the other hand, as they stumble into the internal and external barriers of their lives, fascinate me.

I failed at making pizza because of my high IQ: put it on our cultural tombstone. You can’t encounter this online world without seeing the pattern over and over again. I am a steppe warlord chained by wokeness. I am a high-T special forces killer made incongruously stout by the people who mysteriously poison our food. I am a god-king gasping for air under a pile of bugmen.

Underneath it all, there’s a very human vulnerability that few of us are ever exempted from. I’m good at tests but can’t do normal stuff, I can’t lose weight, I’ve read all the books but can’t win respect. If a person is capable of stopping there and acknowledging the wound, they might gain, from themselves and perhaps their friends, respect for their honesty. They might earn, or grant themselves, sympathy for their struggle. This opportunity is offered to them, as it was to Joan Didion in her post-PBK despair, but they resolutely decline. They do not believe themselves to be thwarted by their own limitations. Rather, they conclude that those limitations are evidence of their innate superiority. Their rightful dominance is simply being frustrated by the lesser people, the NPCs, the low-IQ peanut gallery.

This is what happens when one does not cultivate even the kind of self-respect that is available to wicked people who hold evil views. Anyone who does not share your premise that you are being punished for your own greatness will laugh at you. But if you can execute the substitution of outer oppression for inner failure—an easier feat than learning how to consistently make good pizza—and if you are even a little bit clever about it, you can gather a larger audience of people who will bathe you in the approving belches of their own resentment.

To really face our limitations forces us either to work on them, or to accept them and try something else. But this does not salve wounds. It may even make them worse, in the short run, without any guarantee of eventual healing. And it offers no mirrors of online affirmation while doing it. Rather than accept that the lights turn green in a pattern entirely indifferent to your needs, you may insist that the Jews are manipulating the pattern to slow you down.

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On the Exhaustion of the Strategic Trope Reserve

[I really liked Bottoms but hated the way people wrote about it, so I started writing this.]

In the course of defending his surprise hit “Short People,” Randy Newman reports going along when prompted, as a public relations strategy, to say the song was a satire about prejudice. But the song "wasn’t about anything. It was about a lunatic.”

It is in a way reassuring to know that context collapse and basic comprehension were problems even in the 1970s, and that schoolmarmish re-interpretations could be offered even then as a defense. I thought of this moment when I read the stupefying critical-notebook take on Bottoms in The New York Times this week. I only read it because I’d seen the movie and enjoyed it, and I got to the end of the piece wondering if I’d seen the same film:

For decades the school scrap was a prevailing coming-of-age trope in movies and TV. The ’80s produced some of the most memorable scenes, whether it was Clifford versus Moody in “My Bodyguard” or Ralphie versus Scut in “A Christmas Story.” Then in 1993, Richard Linklater gave us the memorable freshmen versus the paddle-swinging Fred O’Bannion and his cohort of sadistic seniors in “Dazed and Confused”; and in 2002, Sam Raimi offered Peter Parker decking Flash Thomspon in high school. Even SpongeBob has found himself caught in a boating school scuffle with a classmate.

There have been, it is hereby established, school-aged fights in live-action entertainments as recently as 2002. But you may have noticed that all this violence is a wee bit…problematically gendered? Someone has decided to fix that.

But teen brawling onscreen has since evolved to becoming more than just a metaphor for boys at the cusp of adulthood learning to assert their masculinity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the queer sex comedy “Bottoms,” which de-genders and subverts the boorish maleness of the school tussle as a male developmental milestone, ultimately making it about young women asserting their identities and pushing back against convention.

Bottoms does a lot of things, many of them well. One thing it absolutely does not do is subvert any tropes or push back on any conventions (women doing kicking and punching on screen is, if anything, its own convention at this point). Yes, it references some of these bygone high-school movie beats, though it made me think of American Pie more than the sweet, emotionally textured Dazed and Confused. But it is at most a parody of the now-lost “high school guys trying to lose their virginity by doing dumb stuff” genre. All the references, political, cultural, cinematic, or other, are just fuel for a gag engine that happens to produce lots of good gags. It is a funny, successful movie. It features a delightful turn by former NFL running back Marshawn Lynch, who “subverted” the “athlete at a press conference” trope by saying “I’m just here so I won’t get fined.” And it is defiantly un-edifying. The “ugly, untalented gays” who scheme up the fight club aren’t ennobled by their marginalized status, the actors are all implausible as high school students, and these things need to be true because the ending is so ludicrous that the smallest hint of earnestness along the way would make it horrifying. No one, least of all the audience, is improved by this story. It’s a movie about lunatics. It’s fun and you should go see it, but it is not designed to make you a better person or ally.

But it gets worse:

PJ specifically models the concept of the extracurricular on “Fight Club,” which also works as a meta-commentary: The girls in “Bottoms” are flipping gender in the same way “Bottoms” itself is reworking the testosterone-pumped, fist-bumping, male-targeted genre of fight movies like that much-worshipped film. (“I love David Fincher,” one of the girls gushes about the “Fight Club” director in passing as she walks into the first club meeting.)

Whereas that Brad Pitt vehicle rewards the savagery of its virile men with sex, violence and destruction, their aggression brimming with homoerotic undertones, “Bottoms” offers its girls the same gratification, but with more comedy and explicit queerness.

Granted, it’s been a while since I’ve seen Fight Club, but I genuinely do not remember the emotional payoff of that movie being “it’s fun and cool and good things happen when guys beat each other up out of boredom.” I don’t think there’s any real thematic connection between the two movies at all. It just seemed like a convenient gimmick (if there’s a cinematic “trope” at work in Bottoms, it’s the long-established exploitation value of women beating each other up).

On one hand, this is just a tragically, needlessly dumb way to understand a movie that exists to get you to pay money in exchange for laughs, which it provides abundantly. It expresses the weird, monastic mindset among progressives that anything not actively edifying is suspect and probably bad. Therefore everything we enjoy must somehow be edifying. It’s a mindset that makes for bad viewers and, taken too far, inevitably leads to bad products too. Maybe every culture writer at the Times, NPR, etc. should start the day by writing “The movie is not praxis. The movie does not subvert the trope” on a chalkboard a hundred times before sitting down to crank out a review or thinkpiece.

Because—and I think this is actually more important than just dumping steamed broccoli all over your sundae—what happens when we run out of tropes to subvert? If we’re rummaging around in the forgotten catalogue of teen movies with fight scenes (plus one legitimate big hit from a quarter-century ago), what does that suggest about the future of storytelling, let alone the critical enterprise? The rich veins of tropes are already played out, so we’ll be left extracting less and less trope weight from larger and larger quantities of cultural ore. The time is soon coming when no one will have encountered an unsubverted trope outside of a museum, and old-timers will talk about the great trope-rush of the 1990s.

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Choose You Own Dystopia

[A while back, Ross Douthat wrote a column about euthanasia in Canada, saying that it was a dystopian scenario unfolding in real time. I tried to think through the implications of that understanding but didn’t get to the end of the thought.]

Here’s my proposal: when we talk about a dystopian scenario, we are talking about a situation where the failures or excesses of a power structure end up enhancing its power. Consider unregulated gun use, an issue where, unlike medically-administered death, the impulse for change has come from the political right and the impulse to preserve has come more from the left. In Texas, it is now legal to buy and publicly carry any firearm without a license or any training in the rights and responsibilities of gun ownership. This also means that it is functionally legal to shoot and kill anyone (say, a nine-year-old girl) as long as you are aiming at someone else.

Or to take a less politically freighted issue, there are no meaningful regulations on vehicle size or safety for the sake of other road users in America any more, and no meaningful consequences for killing someone (say, an eight-year-old boy) with a vehicle in a quiet residential neighborhood. What may once have been considered reckless disregard or at least gross negligence is increasingly just the way things are—the ambient terrors of a world whose hostility we can aggravate but never seem to tame. And the answer to the abuses of the right to bear arms or the customs of car-dependent development is never correction, but only further acceleration. It’s never stricter licensing, traffic calming measures, liability for infractions, but always more guns, bigger cars, more retreating from public spaces and the ordinary rights of being a person out of doors.

It is commonsensical to imagine political and cultural change as thermostatic and, so to say, self-correcting. Excess or abuse feeds into backlash, which gives policy makers an incentive to try to align themselves with public opinion and correct obvious outrages. Douthat himself has argued that states with strong abortion restrictions have an incentive to create effective and transparent rules for dangerous or non-viable pregnancies. But this is akin to saying that Canada’s medical establishment has an incentive to tightly restrict the use of euthanasia. When women are forced to the point of sepsis before being given adequate care, or people with chronic illnesses are left with medical suicide as the only feasible option, the power of these systems is all the more terrifyingly demonstrated. A state attorney general or a medical ethics board can, if they wish, say “this is not the intention of the rules,” without having to lift a finger to change them. The state of Oklahoma, far from needing to protect its capital punishment system from the scandal of torturing a very possibly innocent man to death, pushes all the harder to get it done because victory—not justice or social peace or human health and welfare—is the only imperative. A state that can be forced to spare an innocent man, or refrain from experimental killing techniques, is a state that can be forced to stop killing people altogether.

I admit, I myself find these processes demoralizing and demotivating. They appear not as arguments shifting incrementally one way or another, but as forms of sovereignty taking root and dominating everything in their reach. “Crime is out of control and our cities are hellholes” is something one hears not from people who are arguing that policing needs reform and oversight, but from the very people already responsible for ensuring public safety when they are demanding more public funds and legal deference. It’s a very strange situation, but once you notice it, you see it everywhere (even, lest I forget, in churches, though our sovereignty tends to be very weak these days).

And the exact wrong way to respond to these miserable little imperiums is to divide them into culture-war camps. “I’d rather have euthanasia for chronic illness than Texas-style shootouts in the ATM lane,” or vice versa, is the impulse that puts these forms of power beyond any outside control. No one needs to cheerlead for any of this stuff. But then what should we do instead?

***

I wonder if “apocalypse” isn’t a simpler, if not actually easier, religious and psychological problem than “dystopia.” A shoot shall come out of the stump of Jesse, the Scripture says, and who cannot take some comfort from that image? The worst may come; all our sacred places and monuments be sold for condo developments or ground into dust, the books ignored, the languages forgotten, the names of the holy ones all lost to time. But if a seed is buried, it can grow after any fire or flood. And it can sprout at an unexpected time and in an unimaginable form. The fathers and mothers in faith did not receive the promises, the author of the letter to the Hebrews says, but they saw and greeted them from a distance. We may stipulate any distance, and any intervening disaster, without changing the image.

The slow imprisonment of normalcy is different. What if the building keeps standing and the form of community remains recognizable while the content becomes alien, even opposite, without anyone particularly objecting or burning things down or trying to start anew? Would we not prefer destruction and the indefinitely deferred hope of fresh shoots to the slow but irreversible internal warping of a sturdy tree?

When we are telling stories (or constructing religions), the answer seems to be that we prefer disaster and renewal. When we are living our lives, the answer seems more often to be that we prefer normalcy at pretty much any cost. And taken altogether, this is rational enough. “Making the best choices you can with the available information under the constraints of the present circumstances” is a good mindset whether you are ten minutes from an eschatalogical crisis, halfway down a persistent trend curve, or gently swirling a dystopian drain. Life doesn’t give us stories. That’s our job.

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On Gratitude

[This was going to be a Thanksgiving post, probably.]

Gratitude is so emotionally compelling because, in these cases at least, it follows from resetting one’s baseline expectations of existence to zero. “I thank you God for waking me up this morning,” we used to pray at a church I served, which, leaving God to one side for a moment, simply reminds us that existence itself is a gift, not a given and not to be taken for granted. I am alive to feel the sting of the March wind on my face. I am sober and present in this moment, however else I may be miserable. I never felt great about singing “Count Your Blessings” at the nursing home every month, amid so many people who were stuck in a permanent form of suffering. But the therapeutic power of gratitude suggests that my intuition was wrong: it’s exactly people in objectively unhappy circumstances who benefit most from identifying and feeling grateful for the good things in their life. Here are the birds flitting about in their little glass aviary. Here is a sweet old lady playing an electric piano. Here is a nice young man talking about Jesus, or something. After all, I did not let it bother me that they so often gripped my pastorally-offered hand as if it were a buoy in a storm. So are we taught to hold on in this world.

There But for the Grace of God

Jesus tells a story about two men, one of whom is a Pharisee, going to the temple to worship. “God, I thank you that I am not like other people,” he prays, specifically rogues, adulterers, thieves, or even the tax collector who was in the crowd that day. Against him, Jesus contrasts that tax collector, who can’t even bring himself to go inside the temple but stands far off, beating his breast and saying “have mercy on me, a sinner.”

In Christian interpretation, this has become a potted story about self-righteousness or “legalism,” often put in implicitly or explicitly anti-Jewish terms. But if you abstract from the context just a little bit, and perhaps find an analogy that is less exotic—our “Pharisee” may be just a generically observant or serious religious person—we see something rather obvious and ordinary. We see a good, upright, respectable person saying “there but for the grace of God go I.” The Pharisee is expressing gratitude as, in a phrase I’ve heard attributed to a prominent evangelical preacher, “backward-looking dependency.”

The primary theological problem with gratitude rhetoric, and the folk or pop wisdom that promotes it, is determining what precisely we are to be grateful for. In Jesus’s telling of the parable, it is clear enough that we are not to be grateful for a real or imagined margin of morality between ourselves and anyone else, even if we humbly attribute that margin to God’s work. We might also consider whether we are grateful for things we ought not to have at all, or that have been granted to us unjustly, or that we have to the harm of others. The pious robber baron is simply hiding the truth from himself when he thanks God for the material blessings he enjoys only through the labor of others.

This ideological function of gratitude is pronounced and urgent in a society built by conquest and settlement. Americans are, generally, raised with a default image of a more or less empty landscape that our ancestors took possession of and improved: “fruit of the earth and work of human hands,” you might say in liturgical language. That anyone had to be dispossessed in order for these blessings to fall to us is acknowledged and remembered only with intellectual and moral strain. And what is true of the blessings of land is only compounded when we consider the benefits accruing to capital and the systems of production and exchange in which we are all embedded. Displacing the immediate products of human arrangements onto the work of divine providence is a way to avoid reality.

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On Barbarism

[I think my plan here was to talk about civilization as an effect not of material or intellectual progress but of sublimation and the control of desire. Which is why Freudianism rather than Christianity is the basis for actual social conservatism, because Christianity devolves into cruelty and special pleading when it tries to conserve things.]

A passenger at the airport terminal light rail stop approached a man dressed in a pilot’s uniform wanting to know, based on the pilot’s firsthand experience, whether the Earth was actually round. The pilot affirmed it most definitely is. Well, you would know. You’ve been up there. You’ve seen it, his questioner allowed. I was trying to mind my own business and read my book, but I was captivated by this exchange. I thought back to a song I heard a few weeks ago when I was clicking through the AM band looking for football and decided, yielding to the corrosive weakness of piety, to listen to the local gospel station for a few minutes. One of the demo-quality tracks opened: They tell us the world is round, and we just believe them. What does this have to do with Jesus, I asked myself, like a baby who was drawing his first breath on this round earth. Then I asked myself: what the hell is this?

I am nutpicking, it’s true. Kyrie Irving plus a random song on a local AM station plus a guy waiting for a train is not enough even for a media trend piece. Then again, we live in an increasingly nut-based information system:

Germ theory is taking water now, too. It’s always had its detractors and outright deniers, of course (just as there have always been flat-earthers, I suppose). But not long ago they had to reel in converts through free newspapers at the co-op market or, if it came to it, in-person connections. I’m guessing, for the modal convert to germ-denialism, it was a long process involving some social cost and counterweighted by mainstream institutions and voices that made it harder. Now there are apps for this that will wrap you in a gauze of clip after clip “asking questions” and raising bogus statistics or just playing on normal cognitive vulnerabilities so thick that no lame boring normal voices telling you “it is important to wash your hands because germs are real, we’ve seen them just like pilots and astronauts have seen the curvature of the Earth” will get through. It’s a quick plunge with no net.

There are many diagnoses for the civic tragedy we seem to be drifting into. There’s dehumanizing rhetoric, a lack of trust in fellow citizens and institutions, a lack of civility, partisan polarization, cultural stagnation, escalating “procedural hardball” in politics and the subordination of actual questions of governance to whatever issues will motivate the sad and lonely people of the internet to donate money or show up at the election office with guns. There is an unmistakable self-infantilizing impulse, right and left, in social media—“life should be like kindergarten where everyone gets graham crackers and a nap;” “I’m going to hit you with my toy truck because you’re not real.” All of that is real and bad.

But I can’t help thinking that something deeper and maybe worse is going on here, something I can only call barbarism. This isn’t just a matter of believing bad and cruel things, as most people do to some degree, or of being generally irrational and emotionally disordered, as most people are. It’s a matter of structures falling away, of regressing in the more literal psychological sense. I used to imagine this in material terms—we’ll all be poorer after the big bad thing happens, at least those who survive—but now I imagine it much as I do the economic inequality of highly developed capitalism. Some, perhaps most, will keep getting vaccinated against measles and washing their hands and enjoying more-or-less stable life expectancy even as an ever-larger share of the rich world simply opts out of long-established methods for not dying of a routine injury or illness and fires off weapons at demons.

I don’t know how many flat-earthers or germ-deniers are really out there, but I’ve seen another barbaric development up close and often, and that is the widespread belief that the world is thick with human traffickers who are kidnapping women and minors into sexual slavery. This belief is the functional equivalent of the medieval Christian belief that Jews poisoned wells. It is often paired with a new iconography targeting pedophiles (“kill your local pedophile,” a bumper sticker in the Memphis Bass Pro Shops parking lot exhorted me this summer, with a line drawing of a person on his knees, apparently hands bound, before an executioner holding out a handgun). The sexual abuse of minors is, of course, all too real, and most commonly committed by the family and household members of the victims, along with some other trusted figures and professionals. The belief that it is the work of a mass of perverts waiting to pounce from the shadows is not just wrong, it’s an antic act of misdirection. Cultivated by vicious or at least profoundly cynical people and believed by gullible ones, the trafficking panic is a lurid fantasy spun from vapor. It can have lethal, if implausibly stupid, consequences.

This refusal of the helps and consolations of civilization is fascinating. Why would we rather believe these delusions? A sincere convert to germ denialism should be a person shattered by the tragedy of human misapprehension and the avoidable danger in which deluded hand-washers revel every day. Why do they seem to be enjoying themselves?