THREEDOM! (#2) M L Clark's Monthly Miscellanies
THREEDOM!
(#2)
M L Clark's Monthly Miscellanies
Preamble
I crack myself up, truly. This newsletter was supposed to be a way to reroute nervous energies from the usual social-media fray, but there's a lot here that still relates to how we converse on social media (and in general). I also didn't skimp on the "big" and "heavy" issues this month, but I hope there's plenty of joy to be found in sections here, too. I mean, there's cake, so there's that, right?
...Right?
Table of Contents
Three articles or interviews:
"Hysterical Empathy" (A1)
"I quit: Peak indifference, big tobacco, disinformation and death" (A2)
"Gore Vidal & Roy Cohn: A Classic Interview, 1977" (A3)
Three storytelling pet peeves:
"Dumbing down" the world (a.k.a. The Psych phenomenon) (PP1)
Communication breakdowns (PP2)
When the writer gets bored with the premise (PP3)
Three books:
Becky Chambers' A Psalm for the Wild-Built (B1)
Alicia Elliott's The Mind Spread Out on the Ground (B2)
Rabih Alameddine's The Wrong End of the Telescope (B3)
Three (related) thoughts on gender:
Butler, The Guardian, and bad-faith arguments (G1)
Core premises on the "other side" (G2)
Gendered Trouble (G3)
Three miscellaneous items:
A quotation (M1)
A recipe: whole-orange cake (M2)
Lil Nas X's pop-rap album, Montero (M3)
Three reflections on current events:
September 11 (CE1)
Gaza (CE2)
Afghanistan, again (CE3)
Three mental flips
Reckoning with personal weakness (MF1)
"9 Things" (MF2)
A series of opportunities to fail (MF3)
All entries below are in a different order to avoid a repetitive slog, and hopefully to stimulate broader connections between topics. There's also a code next to each sub-section, to make for an easy “find on page” experience, for those who might like to skip around. I learned, after the first newsletter, that you cannot access the source of a published post for easy copy-and-pasting, so if you consider starting a TinyLetter newsletter of your own, leave a basic template in your Drafts folder.
Thank you for reading, if you do!
M1. A quotation
"We now* live in a world where counter-intuitive bullshitting is valorized, where the pose of argument is more important than the actual pursuit of truth, where clever answers take precedence over profound questions."
-- Ta-Nehisi Coates (US author, journalist, and educator, 1975-)
*But was it not ever and always thus?
B1. Becky Chambers' A Psalm for the Wild-Built
As an avid fan of Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series, which explores speculative xeno-ethnology and society-building in four distinct and splendid contexts (a mixed-species crew, a twinned story of awakenings to personhood, an idealized colony in the stars, and a group of stranded aliens), I was looking forward to her next venture, the Monk and Robot series. A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a novella, just the right size for its exploration of a fairly utopic future where all the robots gained consciousness and walked off, and where humanity learned to live without them. The book has been called a hopeful or "cozy" work of SF&F, and when I reached the end of the piece, I too felt a thrill of satisfaction in the alluring calm of its conclusion.
However, unlike my reaction to work in the Wayfarers series, that sense of satisfaction, of meaningful discovery, quickly flickered out after reading. This is not to say the work "failed"—it's filled with lovely prose, and has a good, calm, assured rhythm that constructs its meditative mood well—but rather, that it trips into a common problem with utopic fiction. It's a "dangerous" problem, too, because the book's major philosophical reveal is robust only within its context; we need to be exceedingly careful about applying it to our own.
Some of the basics first: Our protagonist, Sibling Dex, is a monk for one of the book's Sacred Six gods—three parents, for the "cycle", the "inanimate", and the "thread"; and three children, for "constructs," "mysteries," and "small comforts." Dex is a monk for Allalae, the child-god of small comforts, who provides people with the strength to "do both"—to abide by the constructs of the world, while also exploring and learning from its mysteries. For years, Dex was a garden monk, but they were drawn to a sudden change in vocation by their longing to hear real crickets, a set of species lost to their part of the world after humans carefully divided land for their own, solarpunk-designed use, away from the wildlands where most of the planet's creatures roam.
Dex becomes a self-taught tea monk, travelling around "Panga" to offer specialized tea and comfort to suit the differing needs of citizens throughout the human realm. After two years, Dex excels to the point that they are at the peak of their craft, their usefulness to their community, and their receipt of attendant gratitude.
And still, they feel empty. So, again, they set out in search of cricket-song and, in the process, manage to trip into becoming the first human to meet a robot in hundreds of years. Splendid Speckled Mosscap was on its way to meet humanity, to "check up" on the species on behalf of robot-kind, and to learn what humans needed. Mosscap and Dex converse as they travel together, and in the process of exchanging insights and experiences in the world, Dex achieves the understanding and self-acceptance they were looking for all along.
It's a "simple" tale, then, but not altogether "simplistic." There are meditations here on what constitutes value in sentient life, how we navigate the "remnants" (instincts) from our species' preceding lives, and how not to impose personal hierarchies on different ways of being. And there is, of course, tea, along with discourse that anyone who has ever set out on their own (big "travelling tiny home" vibes here) will appreciate, too.
But now we're going to come to the book's philosophical revelation—which I suppose is a "spoiler" from a fiction perspective, although philosophy (good philosophy, at least) cannot be ruined by reveals. Dex has been restless because they want purpose in life, and Mosscap points out that this questing for purpose is a kind of remnant, too, because "[y]ou're an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. ... You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don't know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. ... You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do."
Dex will ultimately embrace this perspective, but first they push back by arguing that they do need more, because "[s]urvival alone isn't enough for most people. We're more than surviving now. We're thriving. We take care of each other, and the world takes care of us, and we take care of it, and around it goes. And yet, that's clearly not enough, because there's a need for people like me. No one comes to me hungry or sick. They come to me tired, or sad, or a little lost." This, the story goes, is why Dex feels justified in their restlessness, their ache and quest for greater purpose—until they defer to Mosscap's existentialism, and let go.
Can you guess what the problem with this might be?
I was certainly swept up in the affirmational language at first. I resonated deeply with Dex's original conviction that one needs to prove themselves with work and a pursuit of purpose, and the anxiety that this conviction created. I too delighted at the text's invitation to set down that load and simply revel in the wonder of being.
But here's the issue: The world of the reader is not the utopia of the text. And the problem that the protagonist faces in A Psalm for the Wild-Built, that anxious need to do something or amount to something, has very clear contextual underpinnings when it emerges in the world beyond the author's text. My world—our world—is not one where "we take care of each other, and the world takes care of us, and we take care of it, and around it goes." Rather, the vast majority of us either perform aspirational class-status, fighting to prove our worthiness to exist at specific levels of comfort in societies of blatant disparity and relentless socioeconomic precarity... or we suffer daily in the struggle just to get by.
And so, yes, there is a class of person who can "afford" to let go of a purpose-performing life. A person who, in their immediate communities, might not even see the full scope of work that remains to be done. But we do ourselves and our world no favours in thinking that we can all just as easily lay down our loads.
Unfortunately, as is the case with much utopic fiction, A Psalm for the Wild-Built offers a beautiful moral in a carefully curated vacuum. It's easy enough, that is, to learn to enjoy the fruits of "arrival" in a society that already has fruits abounding. Life has no intrinsic purpose! Free yourselves from seeking purpose! Just enjoy!
But if we take the moral too much too heart, it leaves those of us still struggling in the real world responsible for our own misery in unjust systems—and it treats the suffering of others here as simply part of the "cycle" of things, the way of the world. Isn't death beautiful, as Mosscap believes? Isn't it simply an honour to watch things on their way out? Dex, too, offers a carefully framed but ethically troubling anecdote about the necessity of some animals feeling fear so that the whole ecosystem's balance may be preserved. We know that, in the real world, we have to keep working to find solutions where no one has to feel fear so that others may thrive.
Existentialist, this book most certainly is. Existential humanist, it is not. No, there is no intrinsic purpose in life, but humanism celebrates meaning-creation, and not in a neutral way. The guiding metric for humanistic practice is improving agency for fellow sentients, so that all may bear the best possible witness to the cosmos while they're living in it. Perhaps the world of Panga is close to that ideal—but ours most certainly is not.
And so we continue to have a responsibility to choose and pursue our purpose well.
(I recommend Chambers' Record of a Spaceborn Few, the standalone third in her Wayfarers series, as a more grounded approach to ethical living and problem-solving within a pragmatic utopia.)
A1. "Hysterical Empathy"
Let's also consider the other extreme. In "Hysterical Empathy: On identification and interventionism," published early in September by The Point, Shaan Sachdev explores the human impulse for "hysterical" or even "recreational" empathy, along with his direct experiences with forms of humanitarian aid that require more dispassion or even disinterest. Sachdev is someone who both raged to hear tell of Myanmar's genocidal atrocities as a news editor and also worked under Médecins Sans Frontières' "commitment to independence, impartiality, and neutrality[, such that they] will provide assistance to anyone who needs it." He also found himself impressed by a conversation with one of his past college professors, in which:
He told me that, for the first time in nearly fifteen years, his students’ interests had begun to pivot away from the large-scale international issues on which his curriculum is based. Even when violence in countries like South Sudan, the Central African Republic, El Salvador and Somalia was addressed, he’d noticed an insistence upon looking at it through lenses that are more familiar, more personal, to the young, ardent American left. Like Kristof’s readers, the students, once a body of guiltily impersonal consciences, now sought the allure of Americanization, where even the remotest and thorniest conundrums were squeezed for overlaps with American conventions of injustice. They were happiest, it seemed, when issues could be linked to catchwords like white supremacy, racism, colonialism and patriarchy—when the students themselves could, in some fashion, be included in the suffering (or the culpability).
“Happiest” was the word my professor used, and while he undoubtedly meant something more like “most engaged,” I walked away with a portrait of this new style of empathy. It was anchored in the sorts of outrages that had fueled humanitarian interventionism, but the outrage now also appeared to be personalized, applicative and, to some degree, recreational.
But before one leaps to the assumption that this essay is meant to condemn this shift in attention, in the tedious vein of "the kids aren't all right" generational criticism, Sachdev is much more interested in how many different pressure points are shaping today's approaches to advocacy, and the ways in which we can all be dehumanized by how easily our outrage is stirred up on social media and through mainstream news. There is deep empathy in this article for our struggle to perfect our outreach in a digitized world, because, as he puts it:
All of our virtual shoe-sharing, moreover, is incumbent upon our immobility—we do a great deal of traveling through time and space, through gunfire and bombings and earthquakes, from our armchairs. There's something disproportionately heartrending about this vividness, given our stationary vantages, the negligible distances between our screens and beds, and the ease with which we can make it both start and stop. It seems to throw traditions of guilt, immersion, and certainly empathy off-kilter. A desperation for catharsis, driven by quiescent rage, can bring about the compulsion to emotionally overreact while keeping oddly idle.
And as such,
Inside the United States, where our humanitarian imperatives have evidently shifted, we are also prone to distilling our fellow citizens into emblems of adversity. Sometimes, we even do it to ourselves.
This is the commodification culture, the never-ending work of neoliberalism, that I often wax on about—but always with a similar empathy. We want to do more, we really do, but whole industries have been crafted to benefit from the profound disconnect between our longing and our limited agency. Our everyday helplessness, and how vulnerable it makes us to any form of activism that seems to provide us with more immediate results, is not far removed from the reactions of many in the US on the "other side" of the political spectrum: the ones who watch their own forms of outrage-oriented media, are frightened by it, and decide that they need to do something—buy a gun, vote for retributive justice, anything to make that overwhelming feeling go away.
(In other words, right-wingers aren't from Venus, and lefties aren't from Mars. We need to remember that we share an underlying biochemistry and related mechanisms for behavioural patterning.)
Sachdev's conclusions in this piece are by no means new, but I admire that they are drawn from self-awareness of his personal transformation over the years. Rather than become staunchly prescriptive, he offers a healthy skepticism even about how well he understands his own motivations, when he writes:
But this is one of the ways in which I’ve changed. It’s not that I became disenchanted in the predictably nihilistic, post-collegiate vein (though maybe this played a small part). It’s that my experiences of animated, plural selfhood evinced conceptions of the individual as complex and irreducible, making me more prudent with my language and less eager to overidentify or project onto the struggles of others. With these changes, the politics of justice naturally sundered from the outrages of injustice.
The article does not go far enough into those "politics of justice" for my liking, but that's only because it's busy analysing the ways in which our responses to injustice often divert us from a full understanding of the factors most urgently in need of redress. All the same, the piece serves as good reminder not to let empathy do all the heavy lifting, when we're deciding how best to respond to injustice in the world.
MF1. Reckoning with personal weakness
The problem with exploring two ethical extremes, though—the detached existentialism of A Psalm for the Wild-Built (B1), and the possible over-investment of one's empathetic energies (A1)—is that, together, they give the impression of an author sitting in perfect equilibrium between the two.
I most certainly am not.
These past few years, I've been shaking off lousy behaviours left and right while living in a new(-to-me) social contract, only to find—like an old Louis Sachar story from Wayside School Is Falling Down, the one with a smelly student who's really just a heap of coats hiding a dead rat—harder and uglier truths as I go.
This year in particular, I thought I was simply dealing with a significant dose of an old favourite: the issue of "being a fraud," of being someone who should never have been given any sort of platform, or had the audacity to seek one out, while moral nightmares in their own backyard had yet to be squared away (an impossibility, since the nature of my subject-position, my background, and what I've stumbled through in my efforts to make a home for myself, keep tying me up in new complicities).
And yet, I came to realize in these last few months that there is another important limiting factor for me:
I am not good in positions of authority, because of how much I worry myself to the point of neurosis over screwing them up. (And then, in a glorious fit of self-fulfilling prophecy, I do screw them up!) I don't micromanage. I micro-empathize. And I am endlessly uncomfortable with folks looking up to me for anything.
There is, of course, another way to spin this. I was never happier than when I got to be in assistive roles this year, quietly providing aid and counsel to help others cultivate their voices, see success in the industry, and otherwise support major events taking place. Love that work. Love being that sort of peer.
But from what I've learned this year, I also just don't have what it takes to be a leader or even a key decision-maker in more traditionally centralized roles. Let me collaborate, let me contribute behind the scenes, but do not let my neurotic micro-empathies reign.
Will that ever change? Do I want it to? I don't know. But self-awareness of this weakness at least means I know to be a heck of a lot more judicious with respect to the invitations I accept, and the ones for which (so long as they offer clear value to their participants) I will offer a list of more capable alternatives instead.
G1. Butler and The Guardian (Part I)
Whenever I think about all the discourse done no favours by social media, our way of grappling with sex, gender, and related societal roles is always high on the list. In good-faith discussion, we look for the most robust version of a given position and explore why it does or does not hold. In more common forms of online argument, we screencap the most ridiculous, provocative, or ignorant "take" that we can find, and hold it up as a testament to the intellectual bankruptcy of a whole other "side".
Often, this "take" comes from an average person who has aligned themselves with a given point of view from a less-than-academic examination of the topic. They hold a given belief because it "feels" right; and so, they are less concerned with the precision of their argumentation than with the act of affirming that they are on the "right" side of history. However, sometimes people with significant and relevant social platforms also indulge in "bad-faith" versions of other points of view—versions that mislead, versions that misinform, versions that leap to conclusions not present in the premise—but of course they do, because they're human, too. When we're frustrated that our point of view isn't already universal, it can feel downright therapeutic to dismiss and caricature different perspectives. Why waste more energy arguing carefully, especially if you have every reason to believe that the other side is arguing in bad faith, too?
So, I had a sinking feeling this past month, when The Guardian published an interview with prominent gender-studies scholar Judith Butler, and it came to the light that one answer, an answer aligning "TERF"s with fascism, had been cut after publication. At bare minimum, The Guardian had made a very poor editorial decision with respect to how to handle what it regarded as an interview question containing potentially misleading facts, but you can easily imagine (if you didn't see it yourself) how the online community received this editorial decision: namely, by talking about censorship.
It's not just the gender-discourse community that does this, mind you: Online argument frequently reduces to "whose 'side' gets to be heard?" and "how is 'my' side being framed?"—and with good reason, because we know that social-media and search-engine algorithms are making critical decisions about who gets to have the largest impact on our discourse and democracy. But the removal of this interview answer without adequate explanation was also satisfyingly ironic for people who believe that "TERF"s are shouting over everyone else about how their own views are being silenced. The content of the cut segment, Butler's alignment of "TERF" views with fascistic thought, only added fuel to this conviction of hypocrisy. Many felt that The Guardian's excision of a Q&A segment on this very topic only confirmed what could be inferred from Butler's claims: that "TERF"s were doing the censoring while claiming themselves victims of it.
(And at this point, I should note that I'm writing "TERF"—"trans-exclusionary radical feminist"—in quotations because the semiotics are overloaded: some people use the term proudly for themselves; others use "gender-critical feminist"; many on my "side" [i.e. with views on gender closer to mine] claim "TERF" as a neutral descriptor; and others use it as a complete, exclamatory sentence, "like calling a Nazi a Nazi." But since the difference between language prescriptivism and descriptivism is at the heart of gender discourse, I prefer the de-stabilizing use of this term in quotes, as a reminder to myself of how many terms are truly contested here.)
Now, some "TERF"s did celebrate The Guardian's decision to take out a question they felt was misleading with respect to a real-world event. Many others, though, quickly signal-boosted a restored version of the original interview, because they felt that everyone should be able to see Butler's failings for themselves. And there was indeed at least one major failing in Butler's answer: an all-too-human failing, the kind that emerges when we grow frustrated that others don't already accept the manifest truth of our own point of view.
Butler reduces her opposition to the point of caricature, that is, when she states that "[t]he anti-gender movement circulates a spectre of 'gender' as a force of destruction, but they never actually read any works in gender studies." That line is an example of bad-faith argumentation, and one that dangerously serves to flatter those who share similar views to Butler, by inviting them to consider themselves intrinsically "well-read" by contrast. The reality, though, is that many who would proudly call themselves "anti-TERF" have not "actually read any works in gender studies"; they are simply anti-"TERF" because it feels self-evidently correct to be pro-trans-rights. Conversely, there also exists a whole body of literature by "TERF"s, which often operates in direct conversation with gender-studies literature by Butler and others with similar points of view.
No one is well-served by argumentation that shows such a poor understanding of what makes someone either a "TERF" or anti-"TERF" by ideological perspective.
But, oh, it feels so good sometimes, doesn't it?
To diminish other points of view to caricature, until our own win by default?
Whatever the heck else we are, we are in this way all of us human, through and through.
PP1. "Dumbing down" the world (a.k.a. The Psych phenomenon)
In light of my annoyance with bad-faith argumentation—especially when used to defend ideas I hold dear—it will surprise no one that I had a reaction bordering on disgust recently, when watching a few episodes of a crime show that I had seen recommended off and on over the past few years. Psych, which aired from 2006 to 2014, is often presented as a buddy-comedy case-of-the-week procedural, and while I could go on at length about how the protagonist is nobody's "buddy, guy," toxic genius detectives are fairly standard for the genre—so, complaint on that accord would be a waste of all our time.
Instead, I want to talk about what was more irksome from both a writer's and a humanist's perspective, especially since this show lasted eight seasons and has two movies (with a third on the way!). I know, I know, mainstream culture also gave us The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, and Two and a Half Men, but this one's problem still manages to be distinct in a widely toxic "comedy" category. "What if," the show asks us at every turn,"...instead of the protagonist actually being 'smarter', everyone else was just deeply ignorant?"
The whole conceit of Psych, after all, can be summed up as follows: A man who has successfully used inductive reasoning to identify culprits for unsolved cases gets hauled in as a suspected accomplice, because he "knows too much," and because the world of this show seemingly never had a Sherlock Holmes, let alone anything resembling a comprehensive education in forensics. The detectives are ready to book him until he "admits" that he's actually psychic, which explains all his excellent hunches. He then ropes a childhood friend into the scam of a freelance psychic business, and the vast majority of the show follows the two of them outwitting the police and culprits at every turn together—or, sort of "together," because Shawn also routinely belittles his "best friend" Gus for any body of knowledge that the latter might also contribute along the way.
Honestly, I think I would have enjoyed Psych even a bit if its most avid fans had at least demonstrated awareness of this core worldbuilding premise: if they pitched it to others, that is, as a detective show set in the future of, say, Idiocracy, another place where secondary characters are all dull-witted by design. Would the show still be mean-spirited? Absolutely. But at least it would have been upfront about its aims.
For context, I should mention that I watch crime- and puzzle-solving shows often, because I feel like one can get a solid sense of how notions of justice are being shaped for the general population through these genres. (Answer: Not well, although I do recommend Unforgotten, a British cold-case series that explores, among other things, the secondary impacts of criminal investigations with great sensitivity.) I grew up with reruns of Columbo, Quincy M.E., and Murder, She Wrote, along with active procedurals like C.S.I. and Law and Order. When House, Elementary, and Sherlock showed up, I glossed over the toxicity of their main characters to enjoy the storytelling structure and illusion of intellectual mysteries set before viewers to solve before the protagonist. When more recent and eclectic offerings, like Brooklyn Nine-Nine's police-procedural/"found-family" comedy, played around with what constituted a mystery in the first place, I was similarly intrigued.
All of these shows, of course, had distinct strengths: Columbo was the rare gem that gave us the culprit from the outset, which allowed us to delight in the thrill of the chase to find enough evidence to prosecute, while House M.D. benefitted (if to the point of "Is it lupus?" parody) from almost always having a non-human "culprit," and Quincy M.E. was often as much about understanding social context as the crime itself.
Most significantly, though, all of these shows celebrated a shared explanation of process, and even when an absolute jerk was at the helm of proceedings, deriding the supposed slowness of those around him, we were given solid reason not to consider those around him as unintelligent just because they weren't at his "level."
Psych, though, belongs to a style of Marty Stu wish-fulfilment that offers no meaningful challenge to our protagonist, their point of view, and the consequences of their actions with respect to how they treat others. This is because everyone else in the script is essentially serving as an NPC (non-player character), saying and doing precisely what the "game" requires for our protagonist to win, and not actually reflecting what the characters would be saying and doing if they had interior worlds of their own.
I'm not trying to pick on one show, though; I've seen plenty of examples of this sort of writing in short- and long-form fiction, too. Granted, Psych is more blatant in its disdain of the world than I usually see in such stories (many of which simply reveal a novice writer), but the fact that Psych was successful for so long suggests that this sort of representation resonated with many people. And that definitely gives me pause.
I'm a strong believer that people are shaped by their storytelling contexts, and that TV, film, and publishing execs are often "passing the buck" when they claim that the market always wants the lowest common denominator, as an excuse to change or cancel anything more nuanced. I think growing a more humanely justice-seeking world requires huge changes in the storytelling climate of our cultures. And I suspect that the existence of popular and toxic worldbuilding like Psych's reveals to us just how far we still have to go.
CE1. September 11
In a few circles, I recently posed the question of whether or not we needed new holidays in the Western world. The question arose because Colombia's version of "Valentine's Day" happens in September, and as this version is called Día del Amor y la Amistad (day of love and friendship), it's also a lot less oriented around romance than ours in Canada and the US. In general, too, Colombia is more engaged in days that celebrate doctors, teachers, and children, while national strikes are also given the "holiday" spirit, with ample write-ups in the media to outline march routes, protest events, rerouting plans, and goals for these movements in advance.
One common response to my question was to suggest a secular day for atonement: something in the vein of Yom Kippur, but outside religion, and absent any related appropriation. In Canada, there is now a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, which was first marked yesterday, September 30, in honour of Canada's ongoing need to reckon with the past and present traumas visited upon Indigenous persons and their communities. This federal holiday has already received some push-back, though, on a provincial level, and many worry that it won't go much further than people wearing orange shirts and imposing on Indigenous persons to perform their trauma, in surface "solidarity," without taking meaningful action. The idea that the right commemorative act for this painful issue is to give people employed by the federal government (and participating provincial governments) a paid day off is... also not exactly a great look, for the work of Indigenous reparations.
And yet, putting aside all the official holidays, we do have other, potent days of remembrance and action. The trouble is that, while there may not be Hallmark cards for D-Day or September 11 (good grief, I hope not, and I refuse to look this up so that I can retain both plausible deniability and a bit more hope for our species), those days are no less at risk of being packaged to help sell specific points of view.
In Latin America, September 11 has a dual meaning, because in 1973, the CIA-backed military staged a brutal coup of democratically elected Chilean president Salvador Allende, a socialist, and ushered in an era of terror and massacre under General Augusto Pinochet. Thousands of leftists were murdered, including by the "Caravan of Death," 40,000 were imprisoned in a stadium, and 130,000 were arrested in the first few years. There are "casas de memoria" in Chile today, "memory houses" to honour the horrific number of lives lost or devastated because the US (which had already been meddling in Chilean elections for decades, partly to sustain control to key resources like copper) could not stand the thought of Chile becoming another Cuba. Nixon signed the order to overthrow Allende before the latter even came into office, and he pursued these ends with the strong support and encouragement of Richard Helms and Henry Kissinger. Chile had no chance.
Some have rightly suggested that 9/11, as most Westerners know it, wasn't really about the number of casualties; it was about the spectacle of some other world power demonstrating an ability to make US citizens feel helpless and afraid on their own soil. Like Pearl Harbor, the US (and Canada, too, watching everything from a highly proximate, also vulnerable position) underwent a great unmooring of tacit social expectation. War was something that happened elsewhere. Political games with drones, bombs, and troops, terrorizing average citizens and throwing worlds into upheaval, were for other places. Until, one day, they just... weren't.
9/11 in the West is therefore a very delicate sort of day of remembrance—because it was a trauma, absolutely; because many people died, and because those who did not die immediately, like the incredible first responders, would die many other deaths by political neglect and 9/11-related medical conditions in the ensuing decades. But it was also a shock to our systems precisely because unspoken expectations of Western imperialist supremacy were being torn down. Our 9/11 trauma was in part the trauma of realizing that the "world apart" in which we'd been living—at terrible cost to other parts of the world—had been illusory all along.
I do wish, then, that this rude awakening into our complicity and culpability had not been so much in vain. I wish that the US and its military coalitions in Afghanistan and Iraq (and in Northern Pakistan, where US drones also engaged in covert operations, and where US operations have killed over 23,000 civilians since 2001) had not compounded initial atrocity with whole decades of similarly unconscionable acts of violence.
But twenty years on, I know that, if September 11 has "taught" us anything in the West, it's the resilience of Western imperialism. After that day in 2001, we could have opened into a much greater empathy with places in the world where the skies more routinely rain fire down upon civilians, and where military/paramilitary/terrorist groups more frequently inspire terror. But we did not—because the West does not atone, not even when the "receipts" of our egregious government trespasses have never been easier for us to access.
We need days of proper reflection, humility, and calls for accountability. The ones we already have—official and involuntary alike—are clearly not enough.
A2. "I quit: Peak indifference, big tobacco, disinformation and death"
Long before the internet, long before the current wave of social-media discourse, companies and whole industries were already spectacularly good at shaping the algorithms underpinning our decision-making, and our overall approach to received knowledge. I missed Cory Doctorow's June 3 post on Medium, "I quit: Peak indifference, big tobacco, disinformation and death," when it was first making the rounds, but I was pleased to have stumbled on it while writing related parts of this newsletter. That's because slices of history like this one, which explores how Big Tobacco's approach to countering statistics laid the groundwork for subsequent campaigns of denial, help me from falling prey to the presentist belief that today's arguments are somehow worse than they've ever been. Consider, for instance, denialism's core aim from another era:
Denial thrives on epistemological chaos: a denialist doesn't want to convince you that smoking is safe[;] they just want to convince [you] that it's impossible to say whether smoking is safe or not. Denial weaponizes ideas like "balance," demanding that "both sides" of every issue be presented so the public can decide. Don't get me wrong, I'm as big a believer in dialectical materialism as you are likely to find, but I also know that keeping an open mind doesn't require that you open [it] so wide that your brains fall out.
That second sentence is by no means novel, but it raises an important question about how well we understand the difference between writing that recognizes the underpinnings of a different point of view, and writing that gives opposing views equal air-time unchecked and unchallenged. The former reflects one's personal integrity when engaging in formal discourse, and lends the speaker greater accuracy when developing a rebuttal, but the latter turns the act of discourse into little more than a sparring match—and not neutrally, as Doctorow points out in his comments on related themes. There is a significant social cost to encouraging individuals to cultivate a sort of "informational nihilism"; and worse yet, to believe that weaponizing informational nihilism will allow them to resist what they perceive to be an attack on personal autonomy and agency.
How do we roll back the clock on a culture like this? How do we create pathways of safe return for those who have bought into informational nihilism? And how do we provide these radicalized citizens with that safe return without further endangering those who were careful about the informational path they've walked all along?
We are not well-equipped to talk about the sort of justice-work that this scope and scale of cultural healing now requires. We are angry, understandably, over what informational nihilism has cost us, in the way of lives lost to COVID and to ever so many other avoidable societal disasters. We are frustrated that we cannot even change the minds nearest to us, the people with whom we share neighbourhoods and bloodlines, but who no longer feel like kith and kin. And yet, for all our anger, all our absent vocabularies of restorative and rehabilitative justice, we still need to move toward better framings of society. We still need to rebuild as a whole.
And so, recognizing the depth of what has been done to us as a culture, as this post by Doctorow sets out to do, becomes a vital part of that work. We simply have to stay informed, even and especially when all about us despair of truth's value; and we have to take any opportunity that arises, to use that information well.
G2. Butler and The Guardian (Part II)
I've read and followed quite a bit of "TERF" discourse. I don't recommend most of its online variants to folks who share subject-positions similar to mine (specifically, I've identified variously as genderqueer, agender, and now nonbinary, as the terms have shifted in popularity over my lifetime), because it is emotionally draining to read bad-faith arguments and accusations about oneself ad nauseum. However, I also cannot stand bad-faith arguments in favour of positions I hold dear; and so, I read carefully, and broadly, and try to understand the coherence of differing points of view. (And by "coherence" I mean, the thread of argumentation and prioritized evidence that makes differing points of views logical to those who hold them.)
In the course of following "TERF" discourse, I quickly came to recognize three foundational premises, which I rarely see addressed effectively—by which I mean with a mind to building better political discourse. You'll note, I hope, that I haven't laid the responsibility for "building a better discourse" on any one "side": Yes, I rarely see folks with views closer to mine address these foundational premises, but "TERF"s do not always articulate a clear awareness of their starting points, either. Far more often, we are all reduced, in theory and in practice, to arguing over the surface-level results of these different foundational points of view.
The three premises are as follows:
One of the best ways to protect people from sex-based violence is through the development and maintenance of sex-exclusive spaces in the public sphere.
The best organizing principle for this division is the defense of spaces exclusive to the largest demographic vulnerable to sex-based violence: those humans who have an embodied experience, established via chromosomal genetics and attendant biological features (i.e. a vulva at birth; reproductive and hormonal outcomes thereafter), which has historically been defined as "female" with respect to the biological components across species, and as "woman" or "girl" in the context of human society.
Changing the definitions of "female," "woman," and "girl" to include people with chromosomal make-ups that yield different reproductive and hormonal outcomes poses an immediate threat to the maintenance of sex-exclusive public-sphere spaces, and thus, to our ability to reduce the incidence of sex-based violence.
In one very important way, then, it is reasonable to ask if there are possible overlaps between "TERF" discourse and the foundational premises of a fascistic worldview, as was messily alluded to in The Guardian interview. Both ideologies are on the spectrum (though not alone there, by any measure) of small-c conservative thought, by which I mean a risk-averse approach to understanding the world and our place within it, which values the use of clear boundaries, and concerns itself greatly with the threat of boundary-crossing.
I disagree with all three of the aforementioned premises, but I also understand the data that leads people to accept them, and why people who accept these premises feel that they are being attacked for simply trying to reduce sex-based violence for the largest number of people susceptible to it, in the way they consider to be the most effective. I think many of the folks who agree with these premises do incredible damage with their approach to these issues; I think they all too easily end up endorsing and reinforcing traditionally moral-conservative sources of sex-based oppression; and... I also understand the power of the anecdote—the deep human suffering in specific, horrifying case studies—that leaves them feeling as though "society" is letting predators brutalize the most vulnerable in ways that a simple, sex-divided public sphere could easily resolve.
One potent example of our ideological divide is the question of prisons, which offers perhaps the most complete overlap of legal definition and occupation of real-world space, with consequent threats of violence. Gone is the (awful) guesswork of, say, civilians "policing" restrooms; how state officials apply legal definitions in prisons determines who exists where—full-stop. The issue of assault in prison divides people in general, with some viewing such violence as an unspoken but vital part of the sentence ("Don't like it? Don't do the crime!"), and sexual violence in particular as a fitting "justice" for people whose transgressions involve sexual harm, or other forms of harm to a minor. Sexual violence among women's prison inmates is even often fetishized in our media. But when an understaffed, underfunded, high-gen-pop women's prison experiences sexual assault at the hands of a trans inmate, one major difference emerges in how our info silos respond.
I'm part of the info silo with deep concerns about why so many people, of all sexes, are incarcerated in the first place. I want better policies for a) reducing prison occupancy, b) increasing the quality of staff and monitoring systems, c) improving rehabilitation-oriented resources, and d) phasing out the use of carceral "justice" for non-violent transgression entirely. (Diverting low-chance-of-recidivity "violent" offenders is a more complicated affair: no less important to the work of healing our world, but best saved for another newsletter.) I don't want assault in prisons, period, and I want our media cultures to stop treating prison rape, between anyone, as a punchline or ever-justifiable act. And so, for me, the attention that the "TERF" silo places on specific, isolated cases involving a person identifying as trans committing sexual assault in a women's prison feels disproportionately misdirected to one of the many possible (and concurrent) end-of-chain disasters stemming from the shameful state of our justice systems writ large.
But to many of them, banning the transfer of all trans inmates to women's prisons, irrespective of the quality of alternative housing solutions for a trans person in a men's prison, seems such an easy, obvious, and actionable way to protect the largest population vulnerable to sex-based violence, that many cannot fathom why anyone would be opposed to it... unless, perhaps, "society" is being manipulated by predators and their abettors, into creating more opportunities for violence against women? When such a seemingly easy and obvious "fix" for sex-based violence is flat-out refused, and when those advocating for this easy and obvious "fix" are criticized for making the demand itself, it seems clear to many in their info silo that something far bigger is at stake in winning this particular fight for prison reform—even if other fights, for more sweeping changes to the carceral system, would far more substantially improve the quality of life for women in general.
Similar disagreements emerge in other political spheres, such as how differently people react to end-of-chain disasters like an undocumented immigrant committing a violent crime in their new host country. Some would say here, too, that the easiest and most obvious way to protect "citizens" from violence is to make it even harder for any undocumented immigrant to live among them. Others, however, would range from positions like "an undocumented immigrant is also now an undocumented citizen, inasmuch as they now share part of the experience of life in this landscape, and they deserve the same dignity as anyone else here," to "the entire nation-state system as it operates in higher-GDP countries—which routinely de-stabilize other state governments in the first place—is the true perpetrator of violent crime, and we must diminish the nation-state-system's power to do harm in part by changing our approach to the concept of borders itself."
(I think you can guess which "side" I'm on there, but that's a conversation for another month, too.)
One of the problems with trying to address the aforementioned foundational premises of "TERF" discourse, though, is that small-c conservative thinking is never all-or-nothing, not even in individuals. We are all susceptible to it from time to time, and from issue to issue—and for coherent reason, too, because a fear or at least aversion to contamination has been endlessly useful to our survival as a species: eat this, not that; touch this, avoid that; this is safe, that is not. And so, many in "my" info silos (that is, the ones with people whose views on gender are closer to my own) are also concerned with protecting territory from "infiltration": safe spaces for trans persons, obviously; safe spaces for the rest of LGBTQ+; and spaces that are safe in general* from people who think they have the right to argue over the validity of your inner truth (let alone to advocate for policies that sanction concrete limits on how you move through the world) without social consequence.
*To some extent: Folks on "my" side do draw lines at, say, a white person claiming a BIPOC inner truth; and we have also seen significant dissent over which presentations of queer and trans identity are "safe" to share in various forums. But this doesn't undermine my thesis in the slightest, as subsequent lines address.
There are, in other words, abundant contradictions and rigid delineations of thought and allegiance here, too—because we are human, and because we contain multitudes. Because, as much as small-c conservative thinking has kept "the animal" in us safe to a point, so too has our ability to sustain cognitive dissonance. And also, because most of us—on all "sides" of this—adopted our opinions without ever having opened a textbook. For most of us involved in these conversations, we just "know" what feels right, and what seems the most likely not to do harm to the people whom we love; and so, we lean into the data-points and silos that match.
Thus, the real question posed by Butler's lazy answer in that Guardian interview, her in-group-flattering claim that "TERF"s just "never actually read any works in gender studies," is something quite different. Specifically:
Do we have it in us to confront the foundational premises that divide us, in this as in so many other policy fields where we fundamentally dissent over the utility of rigid boundaries in shaping a more just world? Or should we resign ourselves to the usual cadence of online discourse, with all its bad-faith reductionism and self-flattery amid righteous fury over worldly harm, for... oh, at least another social-media platform, or three?
MF2. "9 Things"
Habits are tough to break for a few reasons, not least of which being the fact that you first have to recognize when a given habit no longer serves you in a healthy way. You have to accept that this part of who you are, and how you have been moving through the world, is no longer working. And you have to be able to believe that there is a version of "you" beyond the loss of that habit in your life, or despair will set in.
None of this is easy. All of this, perhaps, is why I enjoy the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking, wherein a wide range of guests talk about the stories they've told themselves at various points in complex lives, and what they did—or at least, tried to do—when those narratives of Self collapsed. When someone they loved died. When they lost a job, or gained an illness. When all their happy-endings turned out to be miserable after all.
I have a few quibbles with the show, one being that I think the host, Nora McIrnerny, tries a little too hard to "protect" listeners ahead of guests whose experiences have a spiritual component, as if we're going to think that this show has suddenly become the Gospel Power Hour without her content warning. But she's also quite receptive to and always growing with the work—so, that's a selling point for me, too.
In any case, one of my recent listens was "9 Things", an episode with Laura McKowen, a woman raised in a culture of drinking who had to do a lot of work to realize that an inability to control her alcohol consumption was her "thing": the habituated part of her life that she had confused with her whole self. At one point in her process of confronting and transforming her "thing," she wrote a list of hard but necessary truths for herself.
Now, maybe it's because I'm also grappling with some hard truths about myself, but I think it's a good list, and I think it's a good list because it doesn't go down easily. There's one item on here, for instance, that I simply cannot accept—but even though I can't, the sheer fact that it irritates me every time I read it gives me a good sense of why I'm struggling to fix my "thing." (I'll leave you to guess which of the nine items it is.)
If you have a "thing" in your life, too—by which I mean, a habit that is no longer serving you well, be it concrete or cerebral—I'd encourage you to take a moment to think about that "thing," and then go through these lines and see where you find yourself arguing with them, too.
I don't believe that self-help exercises "fix" us. I do believe that some of them, the ones that make no easy promises, can help us to find a better vocabulary for the stories we've been telling ourselves all along.
Laura McKowen's list to herself, from We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life, reads as follows:
1. It is not your fault.
2. It is your responsibility.
3. It is unfair that this is your thing.
4. This is your thing.
5. This will never stop being your thing until you face it.
6. You cannot do it alone.
7. Only you can do it.
8. I love you.
9. I will never stop reminding you of these things.
What would you add to yours?
B2. Alicia Elliott's A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
One form of social-media activism that I find tedious and destructive is the proclamatory rhetoric of "This is an experience of being [X] that people who are [Y] have never had and can never understand!" I know why it's so popular. I recognize the social power that its use immediately grants the person who first makes such a declaration. But it's also a form of bad-faith argumentation that also manages to deflect from the central point (that is, to share a unifying experience of being [X]) by inviting an immediate derailing of the conversation from people who are [Y] and who have had similar experiences, if from wildly different points of view.
It's also just not necessary. It is, rather, 100% possible to talk about the experience of [X] on its own terms, and in doing so, to allow people from all subject-positions to recognize on their own any possible resonance points, along with the massive chasms of lived experience, in someone else's story. This is how we get closer to coalition-building. This is also how we refuse the neoliberal interest in dividing human experience into rigidly distinct identity categories, so as to make the individuals who inhabit them better marketplace commodities.
For all of these reasons, and plenty more, it was an honour to spend some time this month with Alicia Elliott's collection of essays, A Mind Spread out on the Ground. Elliott is a writer who has experienced life from many vantage points: as a lighter-skinned Indigenous person in the US and then in Canada; through the common deprivations of reservation life and in marginalized school systems; as the daughter of a father struggling with alcohol and a white Catholic mother with bipolar disorder; as a young mother; as a person with mental health struggles of her own; and as a writer seeking something more nuanced in the work.
In a few essays, she talks about times when she was relieved to "pass" as something other than Indigenous (sometimes white, one time Puerto Rican), then ashamed to want to pass, and above all else, weighed down by the knowledge that "passing" has its limits, which someone else is always framing. In "Not Your Noble Savage," Elliott explores how often Native writers in Canadian literature have been pigeonholed when they seek to write about their experiences, and she comes to the following observation about the complexity of having and "owning" a given set of labels:
So where does that leave an Indigenous writer like me right now: a half-white, half-Tuscarora woman who writes about whatever she pleases and has, mournfully, never danced in a pow-wow? There are already three strikes against me, yet there's still this persistent belief that I'm somehow at an advantage because I'm a Native writer. Richard Wagamese best summed up my feelings on this idea: "I'm not a native writer. I'm a fucking writer....I don't want to be compared, I don't want to be ghettoized, I don't want to be marginalized....I just want [people] to read my work and go, 'Wow.'"
Don't misunderstand me. My hesitation to be labelled a "Native writer" isn't a hesitation to be labelled as such by other Native people. That is a point of pride, a sign of kinship and solidarity. Being labelled a "Native writer" by non-Native people, however, is more often than not an act of literary colonialism, showing paternalism, ownership[,] and a desire to keep us inside a neatly labelled box where they deem us a non-threat. A continuation of the fairy tale.
Elliott has had significant success with her writing in the Canadian magazine system, in part due to the door-opening work and guiding counsel of trailblazers like Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Anishinaabe journalist Tanya Talaga—folks, that is, who themselves had to navigate white-dominant publishing, and did so well enough to gain a different sort of institutional wisdom, which has helped make the transition a bit easier (or at least a bit less lonely) for others come after.
This deepened depth and breadth of Indigenous persons acclaimed in mainstream English literature, such that no one writer needs to carry the whole experiential load, is a key step in the right direction. The more voices that one hears from traditionally marginalized communities, the more that individuals within specific subject-positions can hope to be heard on their own terms. For Elliott, the fruits of this generational shift are certainly clear in her prose, where employs an eminently polished, confident, and meditative non-fiction style that deftly weaves personal anecdote into broader social issues surrounding mental health, Indigenous trauma, general familial trauma, anxieties of place, class, and belonging, and their implications for child- and motherhood.
(Personal favourites were "On Seeing and Being Seen," "Dark Matter," and "34 Grams Per Dose.")
There were a wealth of resonant experiences in this collection for me, right down to descriptions of the foods that Elliott ate in a struggling household, how mental-health trauma manifested and had to be carefully curated for outsiders, and how shame shaped various lies she used around others. Alongside these resonance points, though, were plenty of differences: no Catholicism for me, for one; and no experience of Indigenous marginalization; and no motherhood. As it should be, though—because Elliott's life path, and the insights she shares with us from that life path, are ever and always her own, as an individual.
And when we meet each other as individuals first and foremost, we engage in some of the healing work that was first created by the categorizations over which we had no control. Some would like to think that this, however, that means we should never talk about categories, never try to find pride in any identities given to or adopted by us—but this is a complete misunderstanding of our journey to a better world. Those categories play significant roles in our lives: politically, legally, culturally, and personally. The key is not to deny those roles entirely, but to prioritize what it means for us as individuals to exist within those broader subject-positions.
Only then, by recognizing and treating our categorical identities as leaping-off points to something far deeper and more nuanced, can we ever hope to naturalize more storytelling forms, and storytelling cultures, that will allow us to imagine what a world of equal dignity, security, and opportunity could look like for us all.
M2. A recipe: Whole-orange cake
In my last newsletter I mentioned that I like to reduce the fanciness of recipes wherever possible, especially when it comes to specialty ingredients and equipment. Alack, this recipe requires one key kitchen appliance: a blender. And so, right out the gate, I'm going to suggest this back-up citrus loaf recipe, super simple, for those who do not have the equipment for this one. (You'll note, mind you, that all of those professional baking blogs tend to call for a stand mixer, but I promise you, your loaf will turn out fine if you mix it by hand!)
Why do I like this recipe, despite the blender? Because it produces a more balanced citrus treat, thanks to the inclusion of the orange's pith. This cuts back on the sweetness of the whole. You can use all manner of citrus for this recipe, save one: the lime, alack, has a pith and peel that just comes out too bitter. Also, obviously, whatever citrus you use, you want a healthy peel for robust flavour. This is not a recipe for pulping bruised fruit!
Also, a general note about citrus-y cakes: They are so sweet and sticky and soft, as a rule, that most recipes also call for another "essential" tool, the "springform" pan, which allows you to pour in the batter and remove the sides from the pan once the cake has baked. This is logical, because a soft, spongy, sticky cake can easily fall apart if you try to remove it from the pan without support, but, ah... there is another option:
Parchment paper!
Not wax paper. Not aluminum foil (which will tear if you try to pull the cake out). Parchment.
Ironically, in Colombia parchment paper is a bit of a luxury good, too, inasmuch as I've only ever found it at the Dollarcity stores here (and only then, because many major North American companies don't bother to change their inventory when shipping to other countries). It's still cheap, though, and it's definitely more accessible than springform pans for me, so parchment it is!
Also, here's a key trick for parchment and foil: Sprinkle a bit of water on the pan or tray first, before laying either down. The water will help the sheet stay in place, so that you can focus on evenly pouring or dropping the dough or batter without everything slipping and sliding about.
Beyond that, you'll probably notice one weird feature in this recipe: the mixing order. But don't be afraid to mix the eggs and sweetener first, then add in the butter with the flour! This produces a lighter cake, and when you're dealing with a dense and sticky batter like this one, you want lightness on your side.
Final note: Don't do what I did at first, and try to cut the orange like an apple, unless you really want to be assailed by juice-spray. Slice once, then squeeze out all the juice from both halves before chopping them into smaller chunks of pulp, pith, and skin for the blender. (And of course, remove the darned seeds!)
Okay. Ready now? Ready!
WHOLE-ORANGE CAKE
Ingredients, in addition order:
3 AA eggs
1/2 cup sugar substitute (or double for regular sugar)
1 3/4 cups flour (not necessary to use cake flour for this)
2 1/2 tsps baking powder
+
1/3 cup (100g) butter, at room temperature (about an hour out of the fridge)
1/3 cup buttermilk (or whole milk + a splash of vinegar + 5 minutes to interact) or plain yoghurt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 big ol' orange with a nice peel, cut up with seeds removed, and blended to tiny bits
Also, depending on your sweetness preference, here's a nice, easy glaze:
1 extra orange's worth of juice
3 tbsp sugar substitute (or 5 of regular)
Instructions:
1. Heat up that oven! (350 F or 177 C) And check the middle rack, to ensure a level cooking surface.
2. Blend the eggs and sweetener in one bowl, and the flour and baking powder in another.
3. Introduce the dry mixture to the wet mixture a bit at a time, along with the butter. (Doing this step in stages reduces the chance of all your powdery ingredients flying while you're mixing them in!)
4. When all are well-blended, add the dairy (buttermilk, yoghurt, or substitute) and vanilla.
5. Now the fun part: Add that whole mess of blended orange pulp, pith, peel, and juice!
6. If you're using parchment paper, tear a loose square and (using the sprinkled water trick) position it in your cake pan. When ready to bake, pour in the batter!
7. You're looking at about 50 to 60 minutes' baking before you test with a skewer (sticky crumbs are okay, but it shouldn't be wet). HOWEVER, this cake is fascinating. You see the two cakes in the above picture? I baked them at the same time, in the same oven, from the same batter. The difference was the size of the pan: a narrow, taller tin created a firmer surface, whereas the wider pan was far spongier. So, to preference!
8. [Optional] GLAZE: If you want the full whole-orange experience, cook the juice and sugar together on the stove while the cake is baking. You want to get it to a simmer and then ensure the sugar is combined, but if you cook it for too long you're going to get a much different, hard-candy texture from the final product.
9. When you take the cake out to cool, drizzle the glaze all over (if using), so that it can seep into the whole product as it rests. I recommend 15 minutes in the tin, and then a careful lifting of the parchment paper's ends to transfer the cake to a rack or a serving tray.
10. No matter what? WAIT UNTIL IT IS COOL TO CUT. I don't care how divine it smells. You wait, or you face the wrath of a sticky-soft citrus cake. (Also, I recommend cutting with metal, not plastic, for added precision.)
11. I'd tell you to enjoy, but honestly, how could you not?
PP2. Communication breakdowns
Some of the most frustrating storytelling emerges when a good idea is over- or ineptly used. One excellent example of this is the "If only someone had said something sooner or listened better, none of this would have happened!" move. Absolutely, there are situations in life when people just can't manage to say or hear what they need to, when they need to. When storytelling relies too heavily on a failure to communicate, though, the device not only eats away at character consistency, but also paves the way for poor ultimate messaging.
One recent example, for me, was the first season of The Owl House, a much lauded Disney+ children's show that many folks were happy about because it features queer relationships: an owl-lady and a nonbinary partner, along with two teen girls in a relationship, and normalized queer parents. (And that many folks were unhappy about for the same reasons, along with the majorly witchy world in which it all takes place.)
The show finds its groove in the second season, but in the first, the main character routinely gets into trouble due to impulsive choices and a failure to communicate. On their own, these motivations for story-action are fine—this is, after all, a children's show, so modelling developmental challenges, and how we grow from them, is to be expected. What's not okay, though, is that once folks realize that Luz's heart was more or less in the right place all along, they apologize to her for not understanding sooner, and that's usually the end of things. Intentions, in much of the first season, win out over the consequences of our actions.
"If you'll just let me explain!"
Ah. No. (And if Luz were a male character, there would probably be a lot of discourse about how this show's first season enables the development of toxic masculinities.)
The Owl House, Season 1, is but a drop in the bucket for this kind of storytelling: the easiest and laziest way to "up" narrative stakes across genres and media forms. But it does raise a significant question about whether we realize the damage done by stories told in excess this way, because what this device also does is cultivate the belief that it's not important that we learn to communicate better with one another. All that matters is that, after a heated collision of poorly communicating participants, the protagonist's gut intentionality is vindicated by subsequent events, and that others then accept how wrong they were to fail to understand in the first place.
Is it any wonder that our media landscapes are rife with bad-faith argumentation, when this is the kind of developmental lesson we think will best serve people just coming up in our mess of a world?
(I do like Season 2, though; there's a huge shift in the maturity of its scripts and their messaging.)
CE2. Gaza
Six Palestinians escaped a maximum-security Israeli prison this past month, and in a show of support, militants fired rockets at Israel. Israel started bombing Gaza again in retaliation, while also pursuing escapees in the region. All six have now been recaptured, and for now the bombing has abated.
When I think about a recent report on trauma experienced by children in Palestine, as well as in Israel, I'm reminded that it's not enough to think of "good-faith" discourse only in terms of one's ability to engage directly with other people's formally articulated positions. Rather, our starting premises are shaped by a myriad of incidents outside of our direct control, incidents that nevertheless shape our sense of self and how we perceive the greater world. The words we use to describe our lived experiences are never equal to the experiences themselves, and therein lies the biggest challenge to pursuing meaningful paths to social change.
I'm reminded, then, that these children are being wounded today in ways that will shape their future words and actions; and though those future words and actions might seem clear enough on the surface, the wounds behind them can only ever be intuited and inferred. The same is true for all of us, to an extent, but we adults often get so caught up in the words we use, so utterly lost in the elegance and performative moral superiority of powerful speech, that we forget how little they ever reflect the sum total of our subject-positions.
The "arguments" we're all being asked to respond to, then, when debating how best to reduce worldly harm, are not simply talking points; they're manifestations of active history: the merest and flimsiest summations of sensory experiences happening all around us and to us. The very idea that we should be able to argue our way with words alone into better worldbuilding, better policy construction, is a deeply privileged point of view.
What might take its place? That's a question that the complex intersection of state and carceral politics in Israel and Gaza this past month asks us: a situation in which a few prisoners' actions sparked a state-wide, state-on-state response, which led to trauma and deprivation being revisited upon people who were not at all involved in the original cause of dispute. But while the question is complex, the answer is not: Change. Actual change, in lieu of simply hashing out the ethics and culpability of X, Y, and Z from our armchairs.
The human desire to be "right", in other words, needs to be subordinated to the human need to be heard, and to have the means not only to engage in the work of rehabilitative and restorative justices, but also to envision a set of concrete paths to better personal futures.
The "simple" answer is not the "easy" answer, of course. Generations' worth of trauma make that clear.
But we outside the immediate horror of situations like Gaza's can still do our part to change the surrounding culture, and especially to diminish the political importance of "saying exactly the right thing" (and with it, the game-ification of global politics, the moment someone says something even slightly "wrong"). So long as "gotcha" spin cycles still dominate our approach to political discourse, how can we ever focus on enacting the policies that will actively create a better world?
The children in this situation do not need us to be "right," after all. They, like many other suffering populations around our stricken planet, just need us to care about their rights—to safety, to dignity, and to a future, too—more than we care about perfecting the eloquence and the nuance of all our conversations about their lives.
G3. Butler and The Guardian (Part III)
When I wrote that it was emotionally draining to read bad-faith arguments and accusations about oneself, I should have been a touch more specific. Putting aside all the extreme pathologizing of trans persons as predators, pervs, and mentally ill that emerges in abundance on their slice of everyday social media, I tend to laugh when I see even milder variants of "TERF" discourse treat nonbinary feminized persons, like me, as simply trying to "escape" sex-based violence. I laugh, that is, and then I feel wearied anew by the whole argument. My lack of inner gender identity changes nothing when it comes to my immediate vulnerability to violence, because the most important "gender" in my life is the prescriptive gendering that others enact when they see me, based on acculturated responses to visible and presumed physical features; and that act of gendering leaves me susceptible to violence everywhere I go, public-sphere or otherwise.
As I've often described the phenomenon—and not just for gender but for orientation, too—the perpetrator of sexualized violence does not pause, before doing harm, to decide what kind of -phobia they're going to enact on another person. They don't tend to quibble over whether a masculinized person identifies as homosexual, pansexual, or asexual before beating them unconscious for existing as whatever they are, as whatever the perpetrator has decided to be in violation of an abstractly rigid socio-sexual order. Likewise, no one stops to ask me if I identify as a woman or nonbinary before sexual harassment and/or assault ensues.
So, yes, I am a "woman" inasmuch as randoms on the street see me as a biological arrangement that belongs to [X] position in our social hierarchy, and respond accordingly. Over that act of gendering, I have little control (especially in Colombia, where my choice lies between performing normative femininity and fitting in better, or looking more gender-neutral and thus, like a tourist: pick your poison). Similarly, external forces establish what people with an F or an M on official documents can expect in the way of political protections and oppressions in any given era, based on whether doctors saw a vulva or penis at birth.
I can acknowledge and advocate against the oppressions that come with others' responses to my physiology without accepting the terms my culture imposes—especially since the terms do not figure into my sense of self until I'm around others who use them to describe me. And when they use such terms, I'm then on high alert to figure out just what kind of gendering is afoot. What do they expect to be true about me, or expect from me? Are they saying "Easy, woman" as in "Settle down, you hysterical harpy"? Or maybe "Ladies first" as in "Allow me to do you this courtesy I've decided you need, or I'll get angry at you for refusing my gift"? Or maybe my commentary on a given film, TV series, or book is about to be hit with the breezy "Oh, yeah, but that's to be expected—'women' just don't get [X]"? Or I'm about to be told, "As a woman, you should do [Y] with your life"?
I know there are people who feel to their core that they are "women": people for whom the word means something deeply clarifying and internally resonant. I'm just not one of them.
Unsurprisingly, then, I love using terms like "people with uteruses" and "people with penises," because to me they not only better reflect how I view myself, but also get around one of the biggest sites of sex-based oppression: namely, the blurring of "girl" and "woman," and "boy" and "man," to gloss over sexualized harm done to minors due to their arrival at puberty before full mental and legal maturity. Furthermore, such terms allow for greater precision and dignity when it comes to advocacy and healthcare. If a "woman" has lost her breasts to cancer, had a hysterectomy, or gone through menopause, and a service or campaign is specifically for people with breasts, uteruses, and/or menstrual cycles, I'm absolutely in favour of not making her feel "less than" for no longer having all the elements that we've traditionally grouped under that label.
Yet when I watch and read "TERF" discourse about these same terms, the idea that there could be coherent arguments advanced by fellow XX-ers in favour of greater biological specificity is rarely entertained. There is, rather, a great deal of outrage that an announcement pertaining to sex-organ-specific services would use, say, "menstruating person" instead of "woman." They genuinely seem to think they speak for every "real" XX-er when they claim that something is being stolen from them. What they see as stolen, though, I see as imposed: a descriptive term made prescriptive. And that's a profound divide in our lived experiences, difficult to bridge.
When I encounter this divide, then, I need to remind myself that these folks see political power in embracing the word "woman" prescriptively. To them, "woman" is a state of being inextricably linked to a general set of biological features that are also sites of violence that we cannot address without first giving inviolate name to the condition they encompass. This is also why one often sees "TERF"s arguing that the fight to have different gender identities legally acknowledged is a "first-world" (i.e. affluent, comfortable) feminism: because the basic terms "woman" and "man" do have a greater linguistic scope in their simplicity, and as such are often more accessible ways of responding globally to many forms of sex-based violence and oppression.
But is that response proactive or reactive? Does it play by the rules of the historically dominant sex-based society we inhabit, or offer meaningful alternatives?
Time and again, the site of my dissent from "TERF" discourse comes down to a disagreement over those aforementioned starting premises (G2), which together argue that the defense of sex-exclusive spaces in the public sphere, through prescriptive, state- and culturally enforced terms for populations "sexed" by traditional biological frameworks, is one of the best ways to reduce sex-based violence. Biology cannot be escaped, their argument goes: "women" will always be potential victims; "men" will always be potential predators; and as such, any "woman" who thinks there is value in naturalizing a more fluid approach to gender/sex identification is only making things worse.
Theirs feels like an exhausting world to live within, a world where edge cases routinely keep a body focussed on guarding the "borders" and less on improving the landscape for inhabitants within (although many "TERF"s would disagree with this assessment, arguing that keeping intruders out is the best thing for improving the interior—so, we disagree on this accord, too). But when this division most exhausts me, when I can't decide whether to laugh or cry at all the bad-faith argumentation in such info silos, I have to remind myself that "TERF"s are also citizens of my humanist world, also living within my sense of the borders that matter most.
Furthermore, their small-c conservativism, their hyper-focus on "border-crossing" as the most urgent crisis in our gendered world, is not so different from a vein of political argument that impedes our ability to build a better discourse across many policy spheres—and so, it behooves those of us who want to tackle all of these massive, systemic issues, across the board, to meet the river of such rebuttal at its source.
We need to name this perspective for what it is, then, because it is not fascism, not intrinsically, not even if this sort of thinking very easily ends up politically aligned with the advancement of extreme moral-conservative politics. Rather, theirs is a deeply entrenched conviction that a public sphere replete with rigidly sex-exclusive spaces is the right path to a safer world. This is a conviction that I most vehemently do not share, but also one that I choose to dissent from, in part, by refusing any bad-faith argumentation about its origins. The humanist issues at stake here are simply too serious, too sweeping, and too urgent for any feel-good and self-flattering caricature of other info silos to be enough to help us break through.
B3. Rabih Alameddine's The Wrong End of the Telescope
"What is life if not a habituation to loss?"
How do I explain what Rabih Alameddine's work has meant to me? He is Gore Vidal without the vitriol, a man both erudite and attentive to the lessons that only trauma teaches. He is part of a generation of gay people that many today like to claim was "lost" because so many within it died of AIDS. Jordanian by birth and Lebanese by ancestry, growing up in Kuwait and Lebanon before moving to the US, Alameddine wrote in The Angel of History about the agony of survivor's guilt at the intersections of immigration and queerness; and he is still here, still telling the stories that, in their overwhelming horror and urgency, often feel impossible to tell well.
If there is anyone that I would trust with a novel about displaced people, and in particular about refugees from all over Africa and the Middle East arriving in Europe in these past few years, it would be Alameddine. And so I did—and I was well-rewarded for the leap.
You might see this novel summarized as "a trans Lebanese lesbian visits Lesbos to help with the arriving refugees, only to have her life transformed by the arrival of one refugee, Sumaiya, who is dying of cancer." But that's just the way publishing works; we need to check off the identity boxes that make a work seem distinct, to sketch out the loose and overarching categories that our characters inhabit. However, the book itself is a much more expansive, patient, and nuanced experience, and it achieves this effect by refusing to act as though the best way to tell stories about brutal migratory realities is by providing hagiography for those who are uprooted, those in desperate search of refuge and eventually new homes. The whole point that we miss, ever so often in our mainstream representation of "the refugee crisis," is that those doing the migrating are neither holier nor more "criminal" than the rest of us. They are simply human beings.
One of the best moments in this book, then, with respect to illustrating how misguided our political focus often is, comes when Dr. Mina Simpson (our protagonist) is asked by Sumaiya's eldest daughter if she is a man.
Mina responds to this question the way she's used to around children, by saying, "I was born male, but that wasn't who I was," only to discover that this wasn't actually what Asma was asking. And why not? Because Asma's experience with doctors, under the oppressive rule that her family knew, was limited to a male doctor who would visit the town once to see the men, then return in a woman's fully covered apparel, to bypass security forces and provide care to the women, too. Little Asma was asking if Mina was like that, a doctor who swapped roles to reach all their patients. There are many border-crossings in life, and many reasons for them, and this interaction perfectly illustrates how much of the world we leave out when we fixate on just a few.
I do this book such a disservice, though, in trying to pin it down to singular moments, when what really makes the work successful is the even-keeled way in which it moves through a wide range of subject-positions and backstories, as if all belong to the same weave (because they do). But perhaps it will help to note that the author, too, is a character here—one referenced by our protagonist in splendidly self-effacing descriptions of the man and his work, in epistolary chapters explaining why she (Dr. Mina) is not the right person to tell this story, a story about the week on Lesbos when she helped her friend with new arrivals to its shores.
The author's inclusion addresses a serious challenge for all "refugee stories": the question of how to write other peoples' stories with integrity, and not simply to exploit them as many frontline humanitarian aid workers do, for our own betterment and acclaim. Mina insists throughout the novel that she is not a writer, but she also still spends many sections narrating her "mysterious" correspondent's most intimate past experiences, as a queer brown immigrant who lived through the height of the US HIV/AIDS crisis. At the same time, though, the writer she's addressing has clearly resisted the work of narrating this book "alone" by creating her in the first place—because he knows that the lives of these refugees and those who help them are not really his stories to tell. Between the two of them, then—between the author and the imagined crisis-worker, between her world and his page—the book invites us to feel as though we are always at the "wrong end of the telescope": always unable to look at the most problems in our world at quite the right scale; and yet, always compelled to make the attempt just the same.
And yes, absolutely, Alameddine does more than equivocate between all of these perspectives held in balance. In The Wrong End of the Telescope, he absolutely advocates for some views over others—but without ever forgetting the humanity of all involved. There's a performance to everything we do, after all, and so the trick lies less in avoiding the fact of performance, and more in finding the performance that feels truest to us. The person addressed in epistolary sections, for instance, is described as a man who once tried out more effeminate performances of queer identity, until "[o]ne day you realized you could transform into the diva without putting on a dress or high heels. You never really needed lipstick. It was merely training wheels."
For writers, this is often true as well. We never stop performing in our prose, no matter how sincerely we want to write about the most urgent of worldly affairs. If lucky, though, we sometimes find the right performance for the moment, the right embodiment of our own and other lives, with which to strut and fret our hour upon the stage—and I believe that, in his latest novel, Rabih Alameddine most certainly has.
CE3. Afghanistan, Again
Obviously, for a newsletter in which I have elsewhere explored gender(ed) politics in terms of bad-faith argumentation, and in light of "TERF" premises about the tantamount importance of sex-segregated public spaces for safety (G1, G2), I would be remiss if I did not revisit Afghanistan, where women's rights plummeted under Taliban rule this past month, also under the guise of "safety concerns."
But I want to be clear here, that I am not revisiting Afghanistan to prop up argumentation with respect to the state of gender politics in anglo-Western discourse. Quite the opposite. We all saw enough of that bull-pucky when Richard Dawkins infamously wrote his "Dear Muslima" letter, which imagined a fictional oppressed Muslim woman—genitally mutilated, at risk of stoning, unable to leave the house alone—as a backhanded way of mocking Western women for expressing concerns about, say, safety in elevators or other pseudo-public spaces at secular conventions. (It's an ugly letter, and I'm not going to reproduce or link it here.)
Instead, this is again a space where I want to call in people on "my" side, by which I mean those closer to me in their views on sex and gender and related societal roles: Do not prop up another context's horror to score points in our ongoing and painful sociopolitical standoffs. I really wish I didn't feel compelled to say this, but when US Evangelical Christianity fostered the creation of perhaps the most retributive system of anti-abortion legislation possible in Texas this past month, a lot of folks leapt straight to Taliban and Islamic state analogies, as if they were at all useful or relevant in combatting the horror of the new US "bounty" system put in place.
Similarly, "TERF"s are not "like the Taliban," even if both ideologies draw in part from a similarly conservative conceptualization of borders as sacrosanct, and border-crossing, as ruinous. It is not only simplistic to argue in this manner, especially when the vast majority of positions on a wide range of political issues stem from similar fixations on in-group and out-group; it is also damaging to our efforts to be better humanists, and better international allies in the face of global human-rights challenges.
Just as Sachdev's old professor noted with respect to the shifting empathies of his students (A1), there is a significant compulsion to talk about suffering in other parts of the world through vocabularies of struggle and categories of trauma that we already understand; to re-centre global issues to serve crises closer to home.
But we must resist this gravitational pull. When the Taliban announced that it was not "safe" for high-school-aged girls to return to their studies, and that university-aged women could only return if there were segregated classrooms (which would require a doubling a resources overnight); when it announced that no woman whose position could be taken up by a man would be allowed to return to work in government office; when it changed the name of the Ministry for Women's Affairs to the "Ministry for Preaching and Guidance and the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice"... those were nightmares for women's rights—full-stop.
Oddly enough, though, that Dawkins letter of yesteryear also illustrates how many other discursive entry points already exist, for countering "TERF" starting premises as they relate to legislative solutions for public safety concerns. Should elevators be sex-segregated, too, based on how many dangerous interactions women have in them? How about hallways between hotel rooms? And apartment-building stairwells? Street car and train sections are already divided in many parts of the world. How much of a top-down, regulatory, policed approach will satisfy us in the West? (And policed by whom, when many groups of law-enforcement officers have disproportionately high rates of domestic violence, and an horrific track record for sexual abuses of power?)
Women's bathrooms are also a fairly recently regulated phenomenon, and they only existed in the first place as part of a fight created incidentally in the fallout of another epidemic. Cholera in the 19th century encouraged the replacement of outside, single-use stalls with cleaner interior designs—and then, as with any site of change in human history, the very fact of change created new opportunities to oppress. (The same was seen when a common anaesthetic was switched out for a better one in the 1850s; women had been given anaesthetics for childbirth before, but the sheer fact of a new protocol invited male doctors wax on anew about how women shouldn't receive anaesthetics, both because of a risk that it might increase the chance of sexual pleasure during childbirth, and because suffering during childbirth was Eve's God-given punishment for sin.)
When bathrooms went indoors, they were men's bathrooms, and their existence was leveraged in part to discourage workforce and political participation by women. The subsequent, more elaborate design of women's bathrooms was similarly meant to reinforce the view that women were "weaker" and required the comforts of their "natural" sphere, the domestic sphere, whenever they set foot in the greater world. In the late-Victorian era, the presence of interior bathrooms that women could access in the workplace gained legal mandate through excellent women's-rights advocacy—and this was done to compel employers not to gender-discriminate via claims that they couldn't hire women because they didn't have the correct facilities for them.
Sorry, folks: The past 19th-Century scholar in me got excited there. My point was not to hash out our discourse all over again, but to illustrate that there really is no excuse for appropriating active and ongoing traumas for women in other parts of the world, just to serve local moral outrage. Afghanistan women's rights have collapsed almost overnight—and those women, along with the children of all sexes growing up in this stark distortion of healthy human society, are bearing witness to and being shaped by unconscionable wrongs.
And the queer and transgender people of Afghanistan are in mortal peril; and the religious minorities, and the educated, and the political dissenters, and anyone who had extensive dealings with Western countries, and any men who will not serve (or who get in the way of nepotistic rule), and any found guilty of low-level crimes.
It is a nightmare unfolding before our eyes. And it is a nightmare on its terms—not fodder for our own "wars."
A3. "Gore Vidal & Roy Cohn: A Classic Interview, 1977"
I was a very queer queer child, inasmuch as I didn't look for the usual affirming representations in mainstream media, and I didn't see much value in the use of many labels. I would often say in my early twenties that there were too many other, more pressing concerns in my childhood for me to make a big "to-do" about coming out. And yet, I cannot deny that a level of fear and shame was built into the equation: Would people think I was bisexual/queer because of my family background? An extension of trauma that I just needed to work through? I knew that the girls in high school were uncomfortable with queer women, even though they adored the gay men in our groups, and I knew that I would never be accepted by members of my family for who I am.
I also knew, though (precocious twerp of a reader that I was), that I found the work of Gore Vidal fascinating, and I took great comfort in the idea that someone with an orientation like mine was reluctant around labels. He refused, for instance, to call himself a "homosexual," because the word was a constructed category, only emerging in 1892 in a work on sexual pathologies, and because "heterosexual" wasn't in popular use until the 1930s. And yet, he would use this term to discuss other people, and often people who would feel deeply uncomfortable (for homophobic reasons) to have the word associated with themselves. These positions are not at all in contradiction, either: to Vidal, "homosexual" was a medicalized weapon of a word, and he felt that it was perfectly possible to advocate for equal rights and dignity within society while also refusing mainstream society's initial compartmentalizations. While the next generation saw the reclamation of negative terminology as a radical step toward changing social and political cultures, Vidal just saw an embrace of more boxes.
Unlike Vidal, of course, I do use labels more often—at least, whenever the shorthand is necessary to help others figure out my subject-position, and to demonstrate that I'm aware of the responsibilities and complicities that my subject-position affords me. This is because I think that Vidal was misguided in his approach to ally-ship (especially with respect to his milquetoast response to the HIV/AIDs crisis). To be sure, I disagree with many forms of activism that arise in communities whose justice-seeking intentions I share... and yet, I also think that sustaining healthy dissent and supporting a range of approaches is part of the path to improving the world. The "form" of our advocacy, that is, needs to be in lockstep with its "function"—and if that function is to create a richly variant future under the shelter of equal dignity, safety, and opportunity, then we have to expect (and celebrate!) the fact of variation in activist approach along the way.
Unsurprisingly, then, I found myself thinking of Vidal thrice in the course of writing this newsletter, so I'd like to share a classic example of his discursive style (a less acerbic version of it, granted; he could be quite caustic when he wanted to be)—and with it, an uncanny reminder that "The more things change...!"
In this Bill Boggs interview from 1977, Gore Vidal was placed in conversation with Roy Cohn, a McCarthy-era lawyer who had written a book in heated defense of McCarthy after what he regarded as a hit-piece of a documentary about the man whose career was memorialized around the "fight against Communism." It's a remarkable interview in many ways, not least of which including the measured civility, precision of language, willingness to concede to specific points made by the other, and store of ready knowledge that both subjects employ. But, well... I also invite folks to consider the following two excerpts:
GV: What we're talking about is smearing other Americans, preferably members of the Democratic Party, and trying to pretend that they are Communists when indeed they are not ... This country is divided about evenly between conservatives and reactionaries. I mean, the idea that there is any "far left" in this country is madness.
RC: Fortunately, that's one of the good signs of the common sense of the American people. And I agree with you: The country is basically conservative today. (9:12-9:33)
And,
BB: Did you see this show in question, Gore?
GV: No, and I must say I have a sense on this programme slightly of being 'had'. I read in the paper that I'm to have a great debate with Mr. Cohn and here I didn't even know he was going to be on the programme.
RC: I didn't even know you were going to be on either. I'm sure we're both pleasantly surprised.
BB: Well that's an illusion we create. (19:35-19:52)
Boggs went on, during a commercial break, to apologize to Vidal for any confusion—and said as much on-air, once they returned—but these two excerpts serve neatly as reminders that not much has changed in the last 50 years, with respect to the shaping of public discourse. Online communities may be able to whip us faster into a frenzy, and eloquent and informed speech might look a little different to us today, but our media histories also make perfectly clear that a propensity toward framing mainstream discourse around stark, contrived extremes and imposed in- and out-group categories is by no means new.
(And for those now wondering if anything really separates humanity from other species in the animal kingdom, when so much of our argumentation reduces to who is "in" and who is "out," well... at least our capacity to weaponize language at the level that we do has to be high on that list, right?)
PP3. When the writer gets bored with the premise
In PP2, I noted that a good storytelling device can be put to poor use, as is often the case when it comes to the "failure to communicate" motive for story-action. Another poorly used device involves the story that changes focus partway through. I've watched a few movies this past month that fit this category, but rather than dwell on their failings, I want to talk about why this is a misused device—not, intrinsically, a "bad" one.
The world is a horrifying place at times. (Okay, at many times.) One of the dangers of the stories we tell ourselves in Western discourse, not just in fiction but also with respect to how we argue, is that our stories tend to train us to expect decisive victories and endings. We can see in our politics how destructive this narrative lie has been, when a single favourable election or change in government mandate often leaves us with more disappointment and disillusionment than full-blown relief. Did the world of politics really let us down, though, or was it our own hope that a single decisive "victory" would ever yield an end to the work? Likewise, many people struggle with the "story" of their lives, when getting married or landing the dream job or having a child fails to provide the immediate sense of completion they were hoping for. (In other words, the "Levin" problem, if you remember Anna Karenina's less-celebrated but just-as-potent other half.)
This is because, on one really important level, the sort of pat, all-strings-tied-up storytelling that our markets prefer is majorly out of whack with our neurobiology, which instead rewards us for striving far more than it ever gives us a "hit" of good feelings for the act of achievement, of "arrival," itself.
Stories where the plot keeps changing well (for instance, in the films of Pedro Almodóvar, where life has many phases, few of which can be predicted) do us a great kindness in training us not to expect a sense of finality from any single pit-stop on the journey. We can love where we are to the fullest; we can hate where we are to the fullest; but in either case, low is the likelihood that we will stay where we are forever.
The difference between this sort of storytelling and the "moving on!" affected randomness of many films and fictions where it's clear the writer simply tired of their initial premise, or ran out of things to say, is that the device still does work whenever it's used, even if the writer doesn't care about using it well. And so, instead of showing us that the universe sometimes drops entirely unexpected new challenges in our wake, it almost does the opposite in careless hands: it cultivates the idea that we always have the power to just "bounce," to move on to something new, whenever we want to. This is another kind of cultural wish-fulfillment—and it, too, can leave us frustrated when we turn from that exposure-set to a world where the exact opposite is often true.
We need more stories without pat endings, absolutely: more stories that will take us where we never expected that we might go. But we also need work that prepares us for the many derailments that personal and societal adversity will inevitably impose: to allow that life, the world, and our most urgent sites of political debate will sometimes change overnight. And we don't just need this for ourselves, as individuals, but also for each other, to build a better world writ large, because this kind of storytelling is part of how we create the pathways to greater healing that our culture needs. This is the acculturation that will let people walk themselves back from radical points of view, from informational nihilism, from stark, superficial, bad-faith argumentation, and from absolutist political end-games derived from deep bodies of unarticulated real-world trauma.
This is how we tacitly train ourselves and each others to say, "This is who I was in this moment—but it needn't be who I am in the next. The world changes. I can change, too."
To achieve this, though, we need more storytellers making conscious and careful use of this powerful device.
Because, otherwise? Inadvertently? Any bored or whimsical use of this device is also reinforcing the idea that a "good" story is one that never gets derailed, reframed, or abruptly transformed at all—one, that is, in which we always have control over how the world turns, and not just how we (eventually) respond when it does.
And what a deep loss for better worldbuilding, if we ever fall prey to believing such a fairy tale to be true.
MF3. A series of opportunities to fail
When my podcast launches with my new column in November, it's going to celebrate something I've also been trying to implement in my personal life: the importance of the "mental flip".
We human beings are brilliant meaning-makers, fantastic at seeing patterns in chaos and using those patterns to establish action pathways in our lives. But the patterns we name, the habits we form, the labels we embrace, and the "meanings" we choose to dwell upon are not always the ones best suited to our thriving, or even to our surviving. Recognizing when a pattern of meaning-making in our lives is not serving us anymore is agony enough; trying to act on that knowledge is even harder.
What it requires is the ability to take a step back from the dead-end we find ourselves in, and to imagine other ways entirely of navigating the "maze of our lives." (Okay, I promise, that's the end of the corny self-help stuff.) But how does one actually set about doing this? Well, like anything else in life, with practice.
Painful, frustrating, one-day-at-a-time practice.
For me, the place where I have been in direst need of a "mental flip" has been around the idea that I have tried so many times to build a life for myself—a life of care, and community, and safety, and collaborative purpose—and that none of them has worked out well. Without rehashing all of those attempts (see: Issue #1, where I discuss the problem of memoir), I recognize in myself a great deal of exhaustion at the idea of having to "start over" again, along with the shame of never being "enough," of having a life marked by failure and mistake and fear—so much fear!—of accidental complicity in further trespass. I hate that I can never fully extricate myself from systems of harm, and so I keep wondering, when I struggle, who I am to keep using up all these resources in yet another start-over attempt.
The obvious mental flip, of course, is to learn to revel in how many opportunities I've had to fail. To look back and marvel at all that I've attempted, and how much those attempts have illustrated resourcefulness and a range of talents along the way. But it's not easy to get this mental flip to "stick", because my greatest talent, truly, is the ability to feel terrible about all the "opportunities," too. Who am I to have had all these chances? Who the heck do I think I am, to have allowed myself to "waste" them by failing every time?
And yet, there really is nothing else for it right now, except to try to make this mental reframing stick. I have to focus on training myself away from despair and toward a more consistent practice of gratitude for having had so many chances to learn and to grow and to try; and I have to be willing to allow that it's okay to need yet another opportunity still. That maybe I'll always need such opportunities, because life is nothing if not change.
I've been writing throughout this newsletter about the need for us to be more mindful of the way we shape the world around us when we argue, and when we tell stories about ourselves, our lives, and our obligations to the challenges of our times. But as I noted in MF1, none of this has been asserted from a position of perfect equilibrium, by a person who has a complete "handle" on the plot themself. Rather, I am still struggling with my own, personal, dead-end storytelling. More than anything, then, I suppose I'm asking here for solidarity in that struggle, wherever it might find you: solidarity, in the hope that maybe, just maybe, we can live to see enacted more of the sociopolitical changes, the real stories of our shared world, that we know we've needed all along.
M3. Lil Nas X's Montero
Oh, are you surprised to see this review here? Does it not exactly jive with my brand? I am large, I contain multitudes.
And honestly? Lil Nas X's first album, Montero, is pretty gentle and goes down easy. I listened to it three times without fully realizing that I'd done so. I'm on my sixth round now.
There are, of course, plenty of tracks that might initially knock out the "I don't like songs with n- and b-words" crowd, but I'd encourage those folks to read the lyrics first, because the songs that make use of that language, like "Dead Right Now" and "Dolla Sign Slime", are expressly dealing with the frustration of objectification amid success. Mostly, they reflect how Lil Nas X feels that others have treated him, and the relationships of mutual toxicity that he feels he has constantly been drawn into, as a person first living in precarity with a set of marginalized identities, and hustling his tush off on All the Socials, who then skyrocketed to immense success with his record-breaking trap-country chart-topper "Old Town Road" in 2019, and thereafter had to cope with a different side of unhealthy relationships close to home.
(The ol' "You ain't shit" to "Oh, you think you the shit, now you famous?" pipeline of domestic toxicity!)
Lil Nas X came out as gay in the middle of his country-music cultural peak with "Old Town Road," which Billy Ray Cyrus defended and helped remix when Nashville decided that a trap-styled country song didn't contain enough "country" elements to exist on its charts, and tried to have it banned: a choice that rightly sparked a lot of discourse around the ways that white cultures remain insular and continue to shore up institutional power. Major performers are also present in this first album, including Miley Cyrus, Megan Thee Stallion, and Elton John, and it's in "One of Me" (the one with Elton John) that one again hears this 22-year-old reflecting on the estranging way in which a person is quickly "claimed" by various groups when they become prominent, along with how other people think they have the right to tell you what to do once you're a commodity.
It's no surprise, then, that back-half songs like "Sun Goes Down" (non-explicit), which grapple with suicidal ideation and the agony of shame ("But there's much more to life than dyin' / Over your past mistakes"), not only resonated with me, but also left me with a sincere hope that our culture will do better by folks like Lil Nas X than we have tended to do by people who shoot young and fast from hardship into fame.
I certainly think, for instance, that we could stand to take at least one lesson from Lil Nas X's first album, because he did something quite wonderful with his promotional campaign around Montero: He created a "baby registry" for this production: a cute enough gimmick, but also a powerful one, because each song has been given its own non-profit advocacy group for fans to support. And that's just beyond fantastic. Here's a person for whom life has not been easy, and who has had a slew of personal marginalized identities challenging his rise every way, and yet, what has he chosen to do with the fame his music has brought him? To extend the platform. To bring others' needs to the table, too.
I ended my last newsletter with a few of my own, favourite and far-reaching non-profits, along with a link to my Patreon account, for anyone who appreciated the reading. Today, in honour of a young man doing his best in a dizzying life of externally imposed expectations, with a body of guilt and shame he's still wrestling with as well as any of us can, here's the full list of organizations tied to Montero's track-list.
Whatever rhythms are guiding your own lives at present, may you be kind to yourselves in the journey; avoid easy argumentative outs as much as you're able; and of course, as always, seek justice, wherever you can.
M
LIL NAS X'S "BABY REGISTRY" OF NON-PROFITS FOR MONTERO
1. Montero (Call Me By Your Name) [E]
Transinclusive Group*
Advocating and working collaboratively with community partners in efforts to "Build Trust and Relationships" within the transgender community; by ending discrimination, mistreatment, and racial disparities in healthcare, employment, education and housing.
2. Dead Right Now [E]
Ch-Pier*
Creating a platform for rural communities to decrease the vicious cycle of health disparities through education, intervention, and research.
3. Industry Baby (Feat. Jack Harlow) [E]
The Bail Project
The Bail Project is a national nonprofit organization on a mission to end cash bail, one of the key drivers of mass incarceration and structural racism in the U.S. criminal legal system.
4. That's What I Want [E]
Bros in Convo*
Providing comprehensive, multicultural sexual health and wellness education and peer support that empowers, promotes, and protects the healthy well-being of young men of color.
5. The Art of Realization
Compassionate Atlanta*
A grassroots community-building non-profit which seeks to raise awareness about the benefits of compassionate action throughout the Greater Atlanta area by teaching and encouraging people of every persuasion and walk of life to channel their concern for the wellbeing of others into tangible action.
6. Scoop (feat. Doja Cat) [E]
Relationship Unleashed*
Fighting inequality through comprehensive programming including HIV/AIDS, Domestic Violence, Mental Health, and Holistic Therapy. We strive to build productive relationships, partnerships, and to make a positive impact with all of our pursuits.
7. One of Me (feat. Elton John) [E]
Central Alabama Alliance Resource & Advocacy Center*
Leading positive health change in Alabama and empowering communities through education, advocacy, and service.
OLTT*
Somos una organización de base comunitaria, conformada por mujeres Trans para personas Trans (Transexuales, Transgénero e Intersex) y nuestrxs aliadxs, mantenemos nuestro enfoque de trabajo para la visibilidad y elegibilidad los derechos humanos y el bienestar de nuestra comunidad, mediante el empoderamiento, la organización comunitaria que permita fomentar una incidencia política en equidad e igualdad.
---
We are a community-based organization, made up of Trans women for Trans people (Transsexuals, Transgender and Intersex) and our allies, our work approach is focused on the visibility and protection of human rights and the well-being of our community, through empowerment, community organization to promote advocacy in equity and equality.
8. Lost in the Citadel
Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference*
Represents a cross section of progressive African American faith leaders and their congregations to build the capacity of faith leaders’ understanding of and engagement with the social determinants of health uniquely impacting African American trans and queer communities and African American cis-gendered women in the Southern region of the United States (in partnership with Historically Black Institutions of Higher Education).
9. Dolla Sign Slime (feat. Megan Thee Stallion) [E]
Arianna Center*
Engages, empowers and lifts up the trans community of South Florida with a special emphasis on the most marginalized, including the Trans Latinx community, undocumented immigrants, people living with HIV and AIDS, and those who have experienced incarceration.
10. Tales of Dominica
Thrive SS*
Working to improve health equity for Black gay men living with HIV through direct support, advocacy and building collective power.
11. Sun Goes Down
What’s in the Mirror*
What’s in the Mirror is a non-profit organization and social movement that uses art and advocacy to end the stigma of mental health.
12. Void
Cade Foundation
The Cade Foundation is a nonprofit that supports families with infertility with Grants ( for fertility treatment and adoption) and with information so that they can learn about the different ways to become a parent.
13. Don't Want It [E]
The Counter Narrative*
An organization that works to build power among black gay men and work in coalition and solidarity with all movements committed to social and racial justice.
14. Life After Salem
The Normal Anomaly*
An organization that works to build power among black gay men and work in coalition and solidarity with all movements committed to social and racial justice.
15. Am I Dreaming (feat. Miley Cyrus) [E]
Happy Hippie*
The Happy Hippie Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded by Miley Cyrus. Our mission is to rally young people to fight injustice facing homeless youth, LGBTQ youth and other vulnerable populations.