2.9.21 - Love in the Time of Cholera

“It is life, more than death, that has no limits.” (348) 

Utterly magnificent. A rich, orchestral swell of romance that rises at once and does not cease its torrent of wit and beauty until it climaxes at the last word. Love in the Time of Cholera might be the best novel I’ve ever read. I’m pretty sure it’s the best-written. Without a doubt it is the most beautiful. I don’t quite know how to describe what Gabo accomplishes here. With effortless flow, we are led in a dance that celebrates human life and love, and that takes place everywhere — inside individual souls across time and space; in society; through personal lenses that color the omniscient narration; floating like a satellite between the planetary movement of our bodies. The exercise affirms the root of love, and joy, in pain. It also affirms that in the end, it is worth it.

[Florentino Ariza] remembered Ángeles Alfaro, the most ephemeral and best loved of them all, who came for six months to teach string instruments at the Music School and who spent moonlit nights with him on the flat roof of her house, as naked as the day she was born, playing the most beautiful suites in all music on a cello whose voice became human between her golden thighs. From the first moonlit night, both of them broke their hearts in the fierce love of inexperience. But Ángeles Alfaro left as she had come, with her tender sex and her sinner’s cello, on an ocean liner that flew the flag of oblivion, and all that remained of her on the moonlit roofs were a fluttered farewell with a white handkerchief like a solitary sad dove on the horizon, as if she were a verse from the Poetic Festival. With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: “My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.” He wept copious tears at the grief of parting. But as soon as the ship had disappeared over the horizon, the memory of Fermina Daza once again occupied all his space. (270)

As an object of craftsmanship, this novel is astounding. There are no seams or dead ends. It’s not just the writing on a sentence-to-sentence level, though I’m not sure I’ve read better prose. It’s also the way he makes ordinary descriptions of human life seem like glints of divinity, like how rippling water looks like a bed of jewels. When Florentino Ariza shits his brains out in the backseat of his own car, “It was like being reborn.” (305) Fermina Daza is “Thinking while she slept” while in a state of processing grief. (50) In the poor area of town, “two thirds of the population lived in shanties at the edge of the swamps and relieved themselves in the open air. The excrement dried in the sun, turned to dust, and was inhaled by everyone along with the joys of Christmas in the cool, gentle breezes of December.” (109) Florentino’s shabby attire is “worthy of a rabbi in disgrace.” (129) This passage killed me:

[Juvenal Urbino] was the first man that Fermina Daza heard urinate. She heard him on their wedding night, while she lay prostrate with seasickness in the stateroom on the ship that was carrying them to France, and the sound of his stallion’s stream seemed so potent, so replete with authority, that it increased her terror of the devastation to come. That memory often returned to her as the years weakened the stream, for she could never resign herself to his wetting the rim of the toilet bowl each time he used it. Dr. Urbino tried to convince her, with arguments readily understandable to anyone who wished to understand them, that the mishap was not repeated every day through carelessness on his part, as she insisted, but because of organic reasons: as a young man his stream was so defined and so direct that when he was at school he won contests for marksmanship in filling bottles, but with the ravages of age it was not only decreasing, it was also becoming oblique and scattered, and had at last turned into a fantastic fountain, impossible to control despite his many efforts to direct it. (30)

The book is written the way I’d like the gods to look at us: empathetic and sympathetic, as exploding parts of a whole, with all time as one point in space.

[Fermina and her cousin, both young] smoked long, thin highwayman’s cigars that Hildebranda had hidden in the lining of her trunk, and afterward they had to burn Armenian paper to purify the rank smell they left behind in the bedroom. Fermina Daza had smoked for the first time in the Valledupar, and had continued in Fonseca and Riohacha, where as many as ten cousins would lock themselves in a room to talk about men and to smoke. She learned to smoke backward, with the lit end in her mouth, the way men smoked at night during the wars so that the glow of their cigarettes would not betray them. But she had never smoked alone. With Hildebranda in her house, she smoked every night before going to sleep, and it was then that she acquired the habit although she always hid it, even from her husband and her children, not only because it was though improper for a woman to smoke in public but because she associated the pleasure with secrecy. (128)

One important stylistic device is to describe an event that links up with the plot, and then digress naturally into the backstory of that particular quirk or scar or habit or appearance. It gives the sensation of being immersed in an eternal river and exploring the rounded edges of the stones. It’s a world-building device I’ve seen in Wes Anderson movies but never knew the origins of.

The city’s first electrical plant’s vibration was a constant earthquake. Not even Dr. Juvenal Urbino, with all his prestige, could persuade them to move it where it would not disturb anyone, until his proven complicity with Divine Providence interceded on his behalf. One night the boiler in the plant blew up in a fearful explosion, flew over the new houses, sailed across half the city, and destroyed the largest gallery in the former convent of St. Julian the Hospitaler. The old ruined building had been abandoned at the beginning of the year, but the boiler caused the deaths of four prisoners who had escaped from the local jail earlier that night and were hiding in the chapel. (230)

The blend of the intense and the quotidian — and the good and the bad — is what grounds García Márquez’s baroque language in the soil, and keeps it from ever feeling pretentious, or a reach.

In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the satiable lovers kissing on the open terraces, and still he told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. (106)

With effortless fluency, Gabo alights on the evil and the sublime with the same tenor, the same mosaic calm, as if to say that they are the same thing. They’re both simply what life feels like. His joy is flecked with pain, and vice versa. After a trying period in their marriage:

They knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other’s thoughts without intending to, or the ridiculous accident of one of them anticipating in public waht the other was going to say. Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore. (224)

At the root of García Márquez’s wisdom is the constant presence of death. “A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.” (170) “Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.” (276)

From that moment on, Florentino Ariza began to see her with different eyes. The years were passing for her too. Her abundant sexuality was withering without glory, her lovemaking was slowed by her sobbing, and her eyelids were beginning to darken with old bitterness. She was yesterday’s flower. (200)

This passage, one of the few that dealt in real horror, goddamn knocked me out.

It was a demented trip. The first stage along the ridges of the Sierra Nevada, riding muleback in a caravan of Andean mule drivers, lasted eleven days, during which time they were stupefied by the naked sun or drenched by the horizontal October rains and almost always petrified by the numbing vapors rising from the precipices. On the third day a mule maddened by gadflies fell into a ravine with its rider, dragging along the entire line, and the screams of the man and his pack of seven animals tied to one another continued to rebound along the cliffs and gullies for several hours after the disaster, and continued to resound for years and years in the memory of Fermina Daza. (83)

Interestingly, he never really employs gallows humor. That would be too preferential towards life; too afraid of oblivion. The voice in which he creates this summary waterfall of human life is beyond death. It is the voice of nature itself, taking the shape of an old costeño ghost, turning its gaze on our world and issuing a romance of epic familiarity. A god shooting the shit. 194 long section on chinese This is a parable of human history. Rejected due to tribalism, appreciated with rancor, and eventually discarded as part of the past. One of the most salient themes of the novel is old age: its humiliations and its joys. (I loved this: “Without realizing it, he was beginning to defer his problems in the hope that death would resolve them.” (316) Gabriel García Márquez wrote this book in his late fifties, and it’s clear that he was coming to terms with what life would be like as an old man.

Dr. Urbino Daza made several digressions on the subject of aging. He thought that the world would make more rapid progress without the burden of old people. He said: “Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.” He foresaw a more humanitarian and by the same token a more civilized future in which men and women would be isolated in marginal cities when they could no longer take care of themselves so that they might be spared the humiliation, suffering, and frightful loneliness of old age. From the medical point of view, according to him, the proper age limit would be seventy. [Ari Emanuel!!] But until they reached that degree of charity, the only solution was nursing homes, where the old could console each other and share their likes and dislikes, their habits and sorrows, safe from their natural disagreements with the younger generation. He said: “Old people, with other old people, are not so old.” (312)

We the reader see no questioning about old age, though, or depressive wrestling: the author has his answer. And his answer is a resounding affirmation that old age is just another phase of life, full of unique challenges and joys like every other — to those who are open to them. “Human beings are not born once and for all the day their mothers give birth to them. Life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” (165) The plot of the novel itself is a simple, beautiful story. In the late 1800s, in an unnamed city that resembles Cartagena, a young firecracker named Fermina Daza snatches the attention of the hopelessly, melodramatically romantic young man named Florentino Ariza. (His childhood in a whorehouse and his penchant for high romantic writing makes him a likely stand-in for the author.) The two briefly carry on a correspondence, until her bootlegger father, Lorenzo Daza, conspires to end the affair so she can marry up. In a sit-down with Florentino Ariza, he tells the young man to lay off.

Lorenzo Daza leaned back in his chair, his eyelids reddened and damp, and his left eye spun in its orbit and stayed twisted toward the outside. He, too, lowered his voice. 

“Don’t force me to shoot you,” he said. 

Florentino Ariza felt his intestines filling with cold froth. But his voice did not tremble because he felt himself illuminated by the Holy Spirit. (82)

After Fermina Daza is sent away, she comes back and realizes she’s grown out of her infatuation with Florentino. She goes on to marry Dr. Juvenal Urbino, the town’s most prominent citizen and a genuinely good man, even though, hilariously, we get glimpses at people’s true feelings about him and they’re not always great. When Urbino dies in old age, Florentino Ariza — having done nothing with his life but prepare for the moment when he could court Fermina Daza again — is there to try to win her heart for good this time. Ultimately, he succeeds in wheedling his way into her graces with his profound love letters.

It was the first time in half a century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity, and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death [of Fermina Daza’s husband], who had nothing in common except the memory of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren. (305)

But eventually, when Florentino Ariza succeeds in convincing a bored, lonely, infuriated old Fermina Daza to go on a riverboat trip with him, where they gloriously consummate his lifelong efforts:

He reached out with two icy fingers in the darkness, felt for the other hand in the darkness, and found it waiting for him. Both were lucid enough to realize, at the same fleeting instant, that the hands made of old bones were not the hands they had imagined before touching. In the next moment, however, they were. She began to speak of her dead husband in the present tense, as if he were alive, and Florentino Ariza knew then that for her, too, the time had come to ask herself with dignity, with majesty, with an irrepressible desire to live, what she should do with the love that had been left behind without a master. (329)

The book’s closing is one of the most gorgeous I have ever read. I’m not crying, you're crying!!! I can’t say enough about the majesty of this work. It is a simple and true pleasure to dip into the stream of García Márquez’s words and let the power of human life — and its continuing joy, as long as we are alive — wash over you. 

 “Human beings are not born once and for all the day their mothers give birth to them. Life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” (165)

11.19.20 - Acceleration

Acceleration applies to opinions too. Unless something moves you one way or the other, you won't feel it. Hence the pleasure-seeking impulse to demean or disregard things that align too closely with opinions you already have. Unless they accelerate or decelerate you, they don't really exist.

10.6.20 - Boredom Killing

This morning I read a NYT article suggesting that one reason murder rates have risen during the pandemic, even as overall crime rates have plummeted, is that social institutions are less able to provide services to communities during the crisis than they usually are. One line stuck out to me: "The pandemic has frayed all kinds of institutions and infrastructure that hold communities together, that watch over streets, that mediate conflicts, that simply give young people something to do."

However true this explanation might be (a more uncouth observer than I might settle for pointing out that a massive movement to delegitimize the existence of a police force could cause the spike shootings, a theory suggested by the charts above) the line that hit me was about the need to "simply give young people something to do." Is it really true that murder is wracking poor communities out of boredom?

Murder-preventing diversions, according to this article, are programs like "libraries, parks, rec centers, pools, free internet," etc. It makes sense to me that these community resources help divert some of the young, aggressive energies of kids to the point that they reduce violent crime rates. (They also happen to be macro-scale programs visible to the bird's eye view of government and non-profits. I'm sure they're joined by lots of informal community efforts.) But violence filling in the cracks left by these programs' absence also makes me ask the inverse question: does anyone care that the default use of time in these communities is apparently engaging in violent crime?

Before this gets boilerplate racist, I should pivot to expressing a belief I hold about that whitest of violence problems: school shootings. While gun control / background checks would definitely make a difference in who is able to get guns, I really honestly think the problem needs to be viewed in psychic terms. (This is where I go Marianne Williamson.) Guns have existed freely in this society for centuries, but it's only recently that assassinating children has become a tensional release. To me, the era of school shootings represents something much more like a social sickness than a problem for the administrative state. 

I think liberals see everything as a grounds for a public / legal / administrative / regulatory solution because they generally come from a class that feels it has control of that lever of power. These are the descendants of the Prohibition wagoners, the moral scolds, the Million Moms, who live lives comfortable enough to donate spare energy to the problems they see in society. Passing laws titled with the names of victimized kids is a real skill they have. Moreover, they know the world and its problems not necessarily through direct experience, but through data and reporting. They are the upper management of society and they want splashy C-suite solutions. Moreover, problems that exist outside the impact of that lever of power are really uncomfortable to liberals because they feel like it's an affront to their status. Imagine telling a manager that they're unequipped to solve a problem in their department.

But honestly, they are. Both the problem of modern teenagers shooting up their peers and the problem of young black kids growing up in eternal war have huge psychic, social dimensions outside the brusque touch of the law. In my opinion, it's important to admit this limitation of the administrative state and start farming answers in a more organic way.

I have no idea what would solve either problem. All I know -- well, what I believe -- is that it's a dereliction of the social responsibility liberals feel to act like the polizeiwissenschaft is capable of the cultural shift necessary to really address these problems. In the case of curbing black violent crime, it has the capacity to provide economic opportunity and has never done so. But that's a long-term solution.

7.17.20 - Clementine's Hair is a Timeline

The other day I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the first time. This icon of proto-hipster thousands culture had eluded me until now, and having finally seen it, I got what the buzz used to be about when I was entering college. It is a gorgeous movie that uses technically impressive structure and visuals to create something extraordinarily human.

I watched the movie with my friend Annie Dailey, a visual designer by trade, who just a few minutes into the movie posited a theory about Clementine's hair that not only held throughout the rest of the movie, but actually became a critical tool in watching it: Clementine's hair color is a timeline.

Clementine has four colors of hair throughout the movie: red, orange, green, and blue. When they first meet on the train (spoiler alert!) which we soon deduce is actually them meeting post-memory erasure, Clem's hair is blue. When Joel starts reliving the early days of their relationship, she has fiery red hair in those memories.

Annie, who is an amazing movie watcher because she picks up stuff like this all the time, pointed out that, you know those are the two ends of the color spectrum. ROYGBIV. The idea blew my mind, but it made sense: the movie features such a complicated braiding of time that it would be sensible of Gondry to give us a clue as to when in the relationship each memory took place.

Annie and I got pumped up by this idea — which I could find no support for on the internet, hence this blog post — and resolved that the key would be whether we ever saw Clementine with something like yellow or green hair. Because for most of the film, she's either red (early, passionate, happy memories) or orange (later in the relationship, when the passion starts to die down). In the present-day intercut scenes with Elijah Wood, she has blue hair, confirming that these most-recent interactions sit on the terminal, "BIV" section of the rainbow. All we needed was some yellow or, more probably, green to wrap the theory up.

When the green hair finally showed up, nearly at the end of the movie, my lord, we both got up and cheered. It's the scene where Joel and Clem sit on the wooden steps leading to the beach, reminiscing about the day they met. And knowing that the green hair indicated that the memory took place in the third, final phase of their relationship adds a ton of depth.



Most of the scene is a reenactment of their meeting, with a little bit of annotation spoken by the two characters. Without the hair color cue, it's not clear what exactly we're watching. Throughout the movie, Clem is a partner in helping Joel deal with her own erasure, and offers commentary on the memories throughout. So in this beach scene, we don't really have any reason to see any deeper into the fact that the two ex-lovers sit there, commenting on the day they met. With the hair cue, we immediately know what we're watching: two people in the end days of their relationship timeline, doing that thing where you sit next to one another and try to summon the memory of when you were in love. Notice how distant they are from each other despite the fondness with which they speak. We're not just watching Joel's memory; we're watching a memory of when he sat with Clem, trying to conjure up a memory. Ultimately, they break up, sending her into her post-relationship Blue hair.

I searched online a little bit after this movie, assuming someone else had posted this ROYGBIV-hair-timeline theory, but I couldn't find anything. Eternal credit to Annie and her amazing film-watching skills for picking this clue out the depths of her design-addled brain.

7.12.20 - The Cause of SJW Obediance

I'm shocked to find that Fredrik deBoer, dissident leftist blogger and extremely online figure, has deleted a post of his that I really thought was an essential distillation of our current moment of ideological chauvinism. I'll salvage what I can still find on search engines and Twitter: "For God’s sake, let go of the pretense... Social justice politics are plainly opposed to free speech. That is the most obvious political fact imaginable."

Basically, he's reacting to the neo-Maoist conformity movement on the Left that is being lamented by white guys across the political spectrum, from Trump to Taibbi. The impulse to protect free speech — meaning ending the impulse to police thoughtcrime — manifested recently as the infamous Harper's letter signed by tons of Illuminati lizards in media and culture, and which was roundly criticized by people who think that, in fact, thoughtcrime should be punished and re-education camps are good.

Here's what I want to record. I obviously agree with Freddie deBoer on this: the social-justice-oriented fundamentally cannot tolerate dissent, and they would like it done away with. There have been lots of theories why this is, but I have a pretty simple explanation.

When you're trying to achieve something, you cannot tolerate dissent. That's why even in a democratic society, the military is not remotely democratic. Because they are there to achieve objectives. Dissent beyond a confined debate about tactics is not helpful; what they need are soldiers to carry out orders, some of whom will sacrifice themselves, and generally to become a superorganism. This is how big things are accomplished.

Social justice is the most worthy objective in our society. Its pursuers have to slice through all forms of inertia, structural opposition, laziness, rising economic inequality, etc in order to achieve their aims. There are so many forces arrayed against it. And so with a great need for momentum comes a very low tolerance for debate.

Society, on the other hand, is an endeavor set up outside the realm of objectives. A teleological project ends; a project of process and sustenance endures into perpetuity.

For society, openness is beneficial because openness is stable. Openness prevents energies from getting too built-up in any one quadrant, delivering flow to blockage and dissipating stagnation. But if you're trying to achieve something that requires the buildup of energy, preventing that dissipation is exactly what you want to do. So you need to build walls and enforce a reverberation of that energy, presumably so it can focus into, whatever, another Million Mom March or something.

The result is that for Social Justice Warriors, a term I use in more affinity than it was coined in, the kind of speech that dissipates energy is not tolerable. If you're trying to abolish the police behind a slogan about the importance of Black lives, for example, pointing out the realities of Black murder, if they contravene the main objective of the group, is not desireable.

It's worthwhile to dig into what it is about "free speech," exactly, that saps so much energy from social justice efforts. I think, basically, it's that the work of social equality relies on imagination more than it relies on fact.

I don't say this dismissively at all. I mean only that the reality of history, especially in the US, is unremittingly bleak for anyone trying to achieve equality. We are a viciously racist country and the facts on the ground reflect that. In other words, objective reality is not where you turn to envision something better than objective reality. It might be where you start if you are trying to diagnose a problem, but it's not where you start if you're creating a counterfactual reality.

One massive benefit of free speech is that it demands truth, because untruth gets called out and cut up quickly. That's good in almost every sphere of discourse, but it's not necessarily good here. A world in which Black people and trans people have the full social legitimacy they deserve will look very little like our own; therefore, that imaginary has little relationship with "truth" as it is observed today. The end result, as before, is that this truth and its carrier, free speech, are not helpful.

But here's the problem: this "unhelpful" speech transpires in a society built on the values of openness. Moreover, the people opposed to this speech aren't very powerful, so that even if someone is in a position to unilaterally place some speech outside the Overton window, it isn't them. The SJW is left no choice but to invoke the only clauses in the free speech social contract to which it has access. They claim that the undesired speech is actually violence. They say that it's "hate" speech, which moves it outside an eristic framework and makes it simply harmful. They say they are the victims of this speech, and its perpetrators are not permitted inside the walls.

The end result is this cancel culture shit that we are, all of us, so fucking tired of talking about.

So that's my generous theory about why free speech is not appreciated from a social justice framework: because it robs the buildup of rage and indignation needed to mobilize a big movement.

I'll offer three more observations outside this framework.

One is that conservative people fundamentally misunderstand free speech. I'll never forget the incident of Jeremy Joseph Christian, the white supremacist who fatally stabbed two guys on a train in Portland when they tried to defend two Muslim girls Christian started assaulting. In his trial, Christian shouted "Get out if you don't like free speech. Death to antifa!"

Christian was fucking nuts, obviously. While he may be a better illustrator of my continued support for the death penalty than for the state of rhetorical debate in the US, the fact that he even thought to invoke his hate-fueled murders as free speech signal how far the term has fallen on the right wing. Mistaking society's disgust with their politics for a campaign against their rights, perennially aggrieved white supremacists are always shouting 'free speech' in places like murder trial courtrooms and online forums. Fuck them.

Second, turning my ire back to the left, I think one reason free speech gets a bad rap is because it takes work.

The most frequent statement you tend to hear from SJWs is that they are tired. "I'm tired of explaining to you, I'm too tired and exhausted to lay this out for you..." this is the primary mode of discursive engagement among people who characterize themselves as "fighting" for a different reality. Part of it is that I think there's a fetish around all the modern manner of mental health issues, such that having those ailments, and needing everything from constant medication to reassuring attention on social media, is seen as a good and strong characteristic in a person supposedly carrying out the "fight." But suffice to say, these warriors do not feel they have energy to expend actually convincing the unconvinced about very much. So that's probably another reason free speech is annoying to them: because after a long day of hating the system and fantasizing about a politics that is allergic to realization, you just don't have it in you to log on and convince someone, even someone raising questions in good faith, about the rightness of your beliefs.

Finally, I think the Left has a really bad tendency to want to cut down tall trees. Given that most of Leftist politics is just resenting the wealthy and powerful, the habit of hating anyone more powerful than you becomes the lens through which you view anyone with any power or clout or cachet. These people, even if they're struggling online writers who happened to go viral, deserve to be savaged by the mores of an ideology that, honestly, justifies the denigration of exceptional people just because they're there. Plus there's professional jealousy. Anyone making a statement is making it a little different than I would, and in my hyper-educated, envious fog, deserve to. It all adds up to the specter of a mob looking for something wrong with a person instead of grappling with their statements on a nuanced level.

Course it doesn't help that social media reverberates instant hot takes. Maybe this is all it is, but I think some of these dynamics are at play.

Regardless of what it is, I really think answering for "cancel culture" is incumbent on the Left. So far, the response I've seen on Twitter is, "Don't they have anything else to write about?" Or, "Fretting about cancel culture is simply formerly privileged people grudging to lose any power, that's all." I don't really think it's that simple. (I don't have any power and I do see plenty else wrong with our society, and yet this seems like an immediate cultural problem in my own backyard.) Moreover, I don't think any of those are good responses to the allegations.

The reason Lefties need to deal with this crisis is that, essentially, it plays into the warnings that come from people trying to dismiss socialism or socialist policies out of hand. When a conservative pundit cries "we are on the road to serfdom!" at the mention of Medicare For All, an eminently reasonable policy prescription, leftists laugh it off. Obviously the two are not related. But given that the anti-elite impulse that founds redistributionist politics seems to dovetail with an impulse for rooting out impurity and punishing it, mercilessly, there might be something to that conservative critique. "Don't they have anything better to write about" when I sense that, literally, an NKVD or Cuban CDR could form if these people were in charge and purge the counterrevolutionaries.

7.4.20 - The Fourth of July to Me

Before the Fourth of July gets cancelled, I want to offer a quick defense of what I see in this founding holiday.

Right now, during this moment in which lots of racial tensions and realities are boiling to the surface of society, I'm feeling trapped. I'm stuck between people who feel a USA without white supremacy wouldn't be worth it, and people who think the USA is an irredeemably bad idea to begin with. Between people who've either shut their minds to the laments of hundreds of years of subjugation and people who only see America as a criminal enterprise.

I am about to head out to a march, one of the dying embers of this summer's explosive Floyd / BLM moment, and I'm steeling myself for a lot of criticism of the Fourth of July. I get defensive around this topic. I don't really identify as a "patriot" — I don't think "patriotism" is necessarily a good thing, I refer you to Emma Goldman — but I have an immense pride in what the United States represents as a paragon of Enlightenment statecraft and human cooperation. For all the talk of revolution and revolt and rebellion and liberation and all the cant you hear at these marches, very few people actually pull it off. The Founders did.

I understand that to people at the permanent bottom of this country's social hierarchy, America is an abuser. A criminal. Celebrating the founding of a country that has always hated you and condemned you to generations of being fodder for their enterprises is not only unnatural, but painful. It's made more painful, yet, by the mocking name "Independence Day." Whose independence? Whose freedom?

OK. But what is Independence Day celebrating? That's the key question to me.

Is it celebrating white supremacy in North America? No, that preceded 1776 by a few hundred years. If any holiday memorializes that, it's Columbus Day, which should be abolished. Is it celebrating militarism or any of the predations that define this empire in the modern era? No, we have other holidays for that shit, and with any luck, it will not continue to define America forever.

What Independence Day commemorates is the ratification of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: a document that, radically, established the new nation not as the culmination of a power struggle but as the beginning of a moral struggle. 

Independence Day, for all its triumphalist overtones, is a challenge to be better. We know that America has never lived up to its founding promise — we do not treat all people as though they are created equal — but we are challenged, to borrow a line from the Constitution, to become "more perfect."

Moreover, what the Declaration enshrines is a government made up of people, with legitimacy derived from the consent of the governed. Not of institutions, not of systems, but of people. The people.

I read a book once by Frank Wilderson, a film theorist who called himself an "afropessimist." He held that the United States was a "structural antagonism," a system in which racial reconciliation was no more possible than a chess game in which the black queen and the white queen formed an alliance.

I disagree. I think progress is possible.

The main reason for my hope is that, thanks to the Declaration, the core of the United States is people. And people can change.

People can be made to understand the humanity of fellow people. Improvement is part of the narrative of human life, even if it is not necessarily part of institutional life. Typically, institutions crack and crumble before they change. And to that reality, the Declaration of Independence says: good. Crumble away. Dissolve the bonds that don't serve you. Revolt in perpetuity until the government serves you, not the other way around.

The holes you can poke in the Fourth of July are obvious. These sentiments were written by a slaveholder and enshrined the rights of a very small slice of the population, namely, white property-owning men. Moreover, I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that, yes they fought a war for their political independence, but also, who doesn't want to create a new thing if you'll be the one to control it? The goals of every Founding Father were probably more venal than pure. In that imperfection, they join every other human being. In being born with original sin, the United States resembles all of us.

But to me, the Declaration's challenge stands outside of time and the incidents of history. It is a command to do, basically, what the protesters are doing. Actually, it's a command for them to do way more. By the Declaration's standard, walking around with cardboard signs is weak in the extreme, if the laments about the insufficiency of this country to meet their needs are true. 

In other words, I have never felt more American than I have during these protests, and that construct — the legitimacy of opposing oppression — is here today because of what the Fourth of July commemorates.

Acknowledging the hypocrisy of the United States' founding moral command is necessary. No one captured it better than Langston Hughes in "Let America Be America Again." But as he says in that poem, "America never was America to me / And yet I swear this oath / America will be!"

It is possible. And as long as people keep fighting, the challenge of Independence Day, piece by piece, will be met.

6.22.20 - Conspiracy's Comfort

I think the reason people gravitate towards conspiracy theories, aside from being beyond stupid and with less than nothing going on in their lives, is that a conspiracy theory provides a complete fact set.

We live in a world in which the "denominator" of information is skyrocketing. I'm referring to the idea that a person sees their knowledge as a fraction, the numerator being what they know and the denominator being the totality of what's out there. In the information era, the denominator of your knowledge increases geometrically while your numerator increases arithmetically, if you are someone who cares about learning. It can be disorienting how ignorant you are, if you're not prepared by a good solid Socratic education to understand that admitting ignorance is the root of all knowledge.

Try to understand the world as it is, and what do you encounter? Textbooks. The fucking Wall St Journal. A bunch of jargon and successful people you'll never meet talking about shit you couldn't hope to understand. Living lives you'll never have, by the way.

But dive into a conspiracy theory and within a half hour of scrolling, you're caught up on a school of thought that is both closer to you — its founders likely posting to the same forum you're reading — and smaller of epistemic footprint. Suddenly you're not studying long-running arguments people had without you; you are on the front lines, gathering information. What's the primary action of the conspiracy theorist? It's building the conspiracy: connecting dots, pulling threads, collecting evidence. You're suddenly a pioneer exploring an intellectual frontier, doing what Louis Pasteur or Linus Pauling or Archimedes did for real (meaning, provably useful) bodies of knowledge.

And the reason you're already on the frontier is that he area you need to master to get there is super, super small. A minimum of facts and knowledge of the world and ideology are all that's necessary for an undereducated consumer of information to go from deep anxiety at their own ignorance to suddenly, back in complete control of a body of knowledge.