Alex Has Opinions 1/29/21 Alex Has Opinions 1/29/21

How to Write at the End of the World

The how-to guide for being an ethical writer on this burning planet

It sometimes feels like it’s both the best and worst time alive to be a writer. If you have a computer connection, it has never been easier to publish your thoughts to the semi-public space known as the Internet (though your mileage may vary depending on an array of factors). You hit publish, and the possibility of hundreds, maybe even thousands of viewers, suddenly appears on the horizon.

Simultaneously, we live during a time period where so many looming problems, both within the industry and outside of it, are on the horizon. We not only have to juggle predatory digital platforms, terrible pay, long hours, and waves and waves of spam, but also navigate a planet with a deteriorating climate and political system. It’s difficult to get out of bed some mornings, let alone produce words that are both ethical and profitable.

As the world burns around us, we have to decide how to use our words to make it better. We may not be able to change society in a single keystroke, but we can use them to care for those around us.

Writers are often removed from “the action.” There are, of course, journalists on the ground during tumultuous periods in history, but even they have to set aside hours at a time putting down their words. The act of writing involves hunkering down and being alone with your thoughts (and hopefully research), and that’s a very isolating feeling. Ernest Hemming wrote, perhaps with a bit too much certainty, that “writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”

When there is so much bad happening around us, that disconnect can make it seem like we are removed from the work that really matters. I constantly have this gut impulse to drop everything I am doing to join a nonprofit or couch surf while spending the rest of my life volunteering on political campaigns. Volunteering, of course, does matter. However, since this activity is action-oriented— or at least it is in my head (nonprofit work and volunteering truthfully involve a lot of downtime as well) — I tend to overinflate the importance of this labor and devalue my own work.

The writer Jame Baldwin in his unfinished work Remember This House — which famously was used in Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016) — talked in length about how he felt removed from the activism of the Civil Rights Movement. He was not involved in the planning or organizing of that era but instead emphasized acting as a witness to them, saying: “…part of my responsibility as a witness was to move as largely and as freely as possible to write the story and get it out.”

This concept of bearing witness to a truth and disseminating it to larger society certainly has been effective in the past. There are works such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), which spoke of the pesticide DDT and the meat-packing industry, respectively, that led to profound policy changes in American society. The public’s reaction surrounding Silent Spring is widely cited as the reason DDT was eventually banned. The Jungle led to new federal food safety laws (though it’s important to note that no one action is ever solely responsible for any political change).

Meaningful work also doesn’t have to be about “hard-hitting” subjects either. One of the largest cultural battles of the 2010s was Gamergate, which initially was a harassment campaign against high profile female journalists and designers in the game industry, and quickly morphed into a battle of what types of messages can be in media. As Aja Romano wrote in Vox:

“The hate campaign, we would later learn, was the moment when our ability to repress toxic communities and write them off as just “trolls” began to crumble. Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable.”

A cottage industry of reactionaries and progressives alike sprung up to critique our media's values (most famously Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series), and that debate had direct political consequences for our world. Video game forums became staging grounds for recruitment and featured prominently in the commentary of white supremacists such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Banon.

Any subject can change our culture for better or worse. In one often repeated example, Martin Lurther King Jr. famously told actress Nichelle Nichols not to quit the show Star Trek because her character Uhura was, in his mind, one of the few instances of equality on American television. There are so many instances of people reading or watching a fictional character, and that character then inspires them to follow a certain profession or path.

The works we consume can profoundly impact how we perceive the world, so it’s naive for me or anyone to claim that some writing doesn’t matter simply because it’s not winning awards or directly shaping policy. The important question is not whether it matters, but rather if we are putting in that work to make the world better.

It’s a difficult thing to know what work will inspire change. Some people spend their entire lives laboring on novels and scripts that, for various reasons, both personal and professional, never see the light of day. We cannot control if we produce the next prolific piece of art that everything one is talking about, and even then, we cannot control how our work will be received. Still, we can try to make it a habit to care about the world around us and infuse that care into our writing.

When we talk about giving back, a lot of the conversation focuses on grand acts of charity. The web hones in on big-name writers such as Nora Roberts, who give millions of dollars annually to charities or writers like Sylvia Day, who actively encourages her fans' input to see what organizations she should contribute to. Charitable giving can seem almost like a publicity stunt as authors such as Shannon M. Parker and Amber Smith donate a part of the proceeds they make from their novels to nonprofits. These writers may be genuine in their philanthropy, but it also acts as good press to up their book sales.

As writers of the Internet, though, such extravagant giving may not always be a possibility. We are constrained by very toxic systems (i.e., social media, poor labor laws, contract law, etc.) that are too numerous to get into here. This has never been a lucrative profession. I understand that often we do not get to focus on everything that we want to write about. Many of us are freelancers with tight deadlines, and sometimes, hell, most of the time, you have to take the contract that focuses on boosting the SEO of a travel resort or a finance website.

However, there are small ways that we can try to add acts of care into what we do. One of my favorite blogs on Instagram is an astrology account called Bitch Rising. In between funny posts about big Libra energy and Capricorn mood boards, they are plugging handles for Native-owned businesses and encouraging people to vote.

This signal boosting proves that you do not have to be a James Baldwin to have an impact. We can do thousands of small things with our platforms and our words to make the world slightly better: we can plug the efforts of other businesses or organizations; we can promote policy; we can even uplift the work of other artists.

Another type of care goes back to the act of being a witness. While we may not always have the privilege to publish hard-hitting news or the next great American novel, bearing witness to someone gives them the luxury of feeling seen. There are plenty of people who feel unrepresented by society, and there is a certain power in giving them a vehicle to be heard.

For example, the concept of pride within the LGBTQIA+ movement was so important because mainstream society had made many queer people feel worthless. A lot of effort was placed in building a community of acceptance as a strategy for political power — hence Pride becoming a rallying call for queer people across the US and the world. As one of the original organizers of this movement remarked in an interview with The Allusionist in 2015:

“People did not have power then; even now, we only have some. But anyone can have pride in themselves, and that would make them happier as people, and produce the movement likely to produce change.”

Representation matters a great deal in these instances, and the characters you create don’t have to have a widespread appeal. They really only have to make one person feel less shitty. If your words lessen the anxiety and dread of a single person who feels hurt and gaslit by this broken society, then you are doing something pretty damn special.

And so I ask again, are you doing the work to write things that make the world slightly less shitty?

Are you trying to challenge the power of others?
Are you advancing the material conditions of those around you?
Do you try to uplift voices or make people feel less alone?

It would be unreasonable to ask anyone to grapple with all these questions simultaneously, but it's fair to demand that all of us work on at least one of them.

We are facing unprecedented challenges as a species. If you have somehow managed to capture the eyeballs of thousands, maybe even millions of people, and you use that moment to advance an unhelpful discourse, and maybe even a false one, then you should feel guilty. You are not a helpful writer, and that realization should sting a little.

The job of a writer has always been a complicated one. We feel the weight of being both removed and connected. Our words touch people’s lives, but we rarely understand how far they travel or their full impact on the world. It’s sometimes difficult to assess whether what we are doing matters at all, especially if what we write about seems so far removed from the “big questions” plaguing our society.

It all matters, though, because people do not choose what words impact them. They take in all the content they run across, and that means everything from the grandest essay about human nature to the smallest review on a video game can influence what someone believes. We have to care about what we focus on, but simultaneously we need to recognize that we do not have complete control over our impact.

While the toxic systems we exist within prevent us from having full agency over our lives, and a few of us have far more agency than others, most of us can do something. We might not be able to mitigate the majority of the harm in our work — because many times we have to take a harmful contract or job to eat (that’s life) — but we still should push at the margins to advance work that helps the world. It’s our moral imperative to do so.

Otherwise, we become passive witnesses in the world's destruction, and that’s not an ending worth writing about.

Alex Has Opinions 1/22/21 Alex Has Opinions 1/22/21

How Psychological Mechanisms Undermine Movements On The Left

The roots of leftist infighting and the path towards healing.

Recently, there was a heated disagreement in leftist spaces over how to vote for the Speaker of the House. Some leftists wanted leaders such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to threaten to withhold votes from incumbent Nancy Pelosi unless she promised to hold a vote on Medicare for All legislation during the 2021 calendar year.

AOC disagreed with this strategy for a variety of reasons we are not going to be going over here (read Paul Blest’s A Medicare for All Vote Isn’t Worth the Risk as well as Briahna Joy Gray’s The Case for Forcing a Floor Vote on Medicare for All to inform yourself on the pros and cons). She instead voted to affirm Nancy Pelosi’s Speakership, and that earned her a lot of criticism. While some of that criticism was tame, other remarks were far more pointed. “AOC just voted 4 Pelosi as Speaker without getting anything in return… She is not our friend, just another corrupt politician,” tweeted one user. Leftist commenters felt so betrayed by AOC’s position on this issue that they were willing to label her an enemy.

There is a joke in leftist circles, told a million different ways, but the punchline basically comes down to this: there is nothing the Left hates more than itself. The joke is about how fractured some leftists can be when they actually come together to coordinate. Disagreements that seem small to some can spiral into large ordeals for others and vice versa.

Now, of course, not every leftist organization and group is this dysfunctional. It should be noted right from the onset that many leftist organizations have formed robust coalitions with countless different groups, which will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. The prevalence of this meme speaks more to a feeling than an absolute reality. The fact that so many leftists routinely complain about this “problem” highlights something that is far more psychological than ideological.

While some of these disagreements are genuinely political, many of them appear to be defense mechanisms against past and current trauma.

Leftists spend most of their time being an ideological “other.” The percentage of people who identify on the left in the United States is far less than self-identified moderates and people on the right. The same trend remains true in Western Europe. The further left of the political spectrum someone goes, the more likely they will be a minority even within the Left. When we talk about groups such as self-identified communists or anarchists, they are so small that in most countries, we don’t really have good data around how many of them there are.

We often hear rightists lament about being a persecuted minority in America, but the data doesn’t support that conclusion. Republicans still hold a disproportionate amount of power at every governmental level and continue to dominate the judiciary and state legislatures. We are in many ways still living under the Reagan alignment that came to fruition during the 1980s. It’s common for Republican and Democratic leaders alike to preach the value of market-based solutions and limited government intervention.

While people on the right occasionally get penalized for their opinions (via losing their jobs or platform), this isn’t because of some leftist conspiracy. The ability to fire someone for a political opinion is actually because of our political landscape's right-leaning nature. We have undermined workers' rights so much so that businesses can terminate their workers for trivial things such as hairstyles, clothing, and of course, political statements made outside of office hours.

In fact, many leftists have been consistently de-platformed over the last few years, and this trend has not garnered nearly as much attention as the de-platforming of right-wing actors. A recent study out of Harvard stated that social media increases social disparities, which is something that ultimately benefits online actors on the right. As sociologist Jen Schradie wrote for NBC:

“Platforms heavily favor conservatives, who not only have war chests of funding but also a swath of digital boots on the ground. And they will marshal their forces if they perceive a threat to that advantage”

On top of the material disparity, many leftists concepts are also viewed negatively by the larger population. For example, most Americans hold an unfavorable perception of the term socialism (although favorability is far higher among Millenials and Gen Zers). Democrat Joe Biden secured support during the 2020 presidential election, in part, by disavowing socialism. It’s common for many Democrats to hold that position as well. In the words of a concerned Democratic parent writing into the Madison newspaper the Isthmus about their son's leftist radicalism:

“I’ve tried to talk our son out of his extreme positions, but he has a well-thought-out argument justifying his new radicalism. It’s been impossible to make any headway, intellectually or emotionally. Did we create a monster by politicizing him at too young an age?”

Even when people do not decry their leftist children as “monsters,” the language can get quite nasty. “You, Mr. Greiner, are the scum of the earth and a part of the reason that there will be a civil war in this country in your lifetime,” reads the line of an email sent to writer Michael Greiner, ultimately inspiring them to write the article On Being Unapologetically Liberal. Rude and demeaning language is by no means the worst outcome either. Leftists have been the victims of doxxing, harassment, and physical violence for expressing their opinions publically.

This unpopularity means that many on the Left have had to defend this provocative identity all of their lives against both outward detractors and alleged allies. It’s not easy being hated by the political majority, and that can take its toll. You inevitability develop defense mechanisms for dealing with that intense rejection.

Those trauma responses are understandable, but when you spend your entire life trying to prove that your political identity is valid against practically everyone, sometimes it becomes hard to sort out your critics from your enemies.

A popular meme about trauma is that it gives you “thicker skin,” or that it lets you not get “offended” by language and actions that bother you. This line of thinking can be partially true. Some people develop “mature defense mechanisms” (i.e., ones that don’t distort your feelings or reality) to deal with triggers. For example, they learn to sublimate the stress into an action that is considered “constructive” by society or use humor to de-escalate a situation.

The sad reality ignored by people using the “thicker skin” meme is that trauma often translates into defense mechanisms that are “neurotic” (i.e., they distort your emotions) or “immature” (i.e., they distort your perception of reality). Just as many people are as likely to repress their feelings or dissociate entirely when exposed to stressful situations. For example, “The Sunken Place” — the otherworldly realm Black people sink into in Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017) — was such a powerful metaphor because it tapped into a real feeling. Many Black people have described using dissociation as a tool to deal with the ongoing white supremacy in America.

Although the trauma is not the same, leftism brings with it its own sort of baggage. As we have already established, many leftists experience stigmatization and other penalties for expressing their views, leading to the same neurotic and immature defense mechanisms. It’s normal to hear how leftists repress the way they feel on a day-to-day basis. “I don’t even want to open the box,” describes someone referred to as Dev in Psychology Today on why they don’t speak politics with their parents. “It’s more than normal, totally off-limits. In 2012, we did have some conversation, and I don’t want to go there again.” Dev reportedly had been kicked out of his parents' house at 18 years old because of these political differences and now refuses to bring the subject up.

There are many ways people react to this kind of trauma. Some people don’t develop “thicker skin,” but rather a greater sensitivity to the perceived threats around them. Trauma gives them “thinner skin.” They are on high alert all the time, which can create a tendency to pounce on even the smallest of threats.

This “thin skin” happens with many different types of groups, especially those exposed to a lot of trauma. For example, it’s been written about how many queer people are cruel to one another because trauma has given them defense mechanisms that flatten interactions into either all good or all bad, referred to in Psychology as splitting. When someone in their community does something “bad,” they are swift to roast that person as awful. As author Kai Cheng Thom writes for Daily Extra in their brilliant piece Why are queer people so mean to each other?:

“This, I believe, is why traumatized communities struggle so profoundly with loving one another. We have been hard-wired for suspicion and terror of betrayal, which in turn feeds into the logics of disposability and incarceration: we come to believe that making a mistake — any mistake, whether big or small — makes someone bad and dangerous.”

You see this same dynamic play out again and again in leftist spaces, especially anonymous spaces online. Spend a couple of hours persuing Twitter or Instagram, and you will see two users with roses in their bios tearing each other down over a disagreement an outside viewer can hardly understand. Eventually, someone blocks the other person, and they brag about how they have happily burned a bridge with someone more ideologically aligned to them than 90% of the country.

An infamous example of this comes from a series of minor snafus YouTuber Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints) made in 2020. She Tweeted something mildly insensitive about nonbinary people. She also gave an eight-second voice-over clip to a transgender person named Buck Angel, considered by some to be enbyphobic (i.e., discriminatory towards trans people outside the male-female binary). These decisions upset many people and caused a scandal she attempted to address in a video entitled Canceling.

Now maybe Wynn does have some mild internalized transphobia —a lot of trans people do (raises hand awkwardly). This article aims not to claim who is right or wrong but rather to highlight how quickly the situation escalated. There were a lot of people who not only criticized her actions but labeled her trans or enbyphobic. As one trans user put it:

“weird how im 30 and trans and managed not to be a truscum. maybe im just some kind of anomaly. or maybe contrapoints is a conniving ratfucking kapo who could do with a fully wound backhand to the mouth idk lol.”

Those are are some intense words for an indiscretion that is ultimately minor, and truthfully they are remarks that sound very similar to the comments leftists have received from people on the Right. While Wynn definitely deserved to be held accountable for saying something problematic (we all do), there is a world of difference between someone who says something problematic (i.e., everyone) and someone such as the author J. K. Rowling who has made transphobia an active part of her identity. The first one requires accountability while the latter needs to be defended against.

Yet this escalation makes perfect sense when you look at it from the lens of trauma. These posters are not necessarily invested in Wynn as much as they are interested in defending their in-group from perceived threats. They are treating a minor indiscretion as an existential threat because they are conflating conflict with betrayal.

Most people are protective of their identities, and leftists are no exception. A quick Google search will reveal thousands of semantic arguments about whether someone is a “true” leftist. Many commenters will take pains to distinguish between a liberal and a leftist, and the disdain between these two groups is palatable. “…when push comes to shove,” writes Ted Rall in Rasmussen Reports, “liberals will ultimately sell out their radical allies to the powers that be. And they will run away at the first sign of state oppression.”

This visceral reaction to preserve one’s identity from outside threats exists with any in-group, but something that needs to be acknowledged is that much of leftist anger is valid. There has historically been a lot of effort to squash leftist discourse in a way that doesn’t exist for conservative and centrist movements. The FBI has targeted a wide range of entities, from civil rights leaders to the communist party to independent black-owned bookstores. The CIA has infamously tried to suppress leftist movements both in the United States and abroad. Even now, there is compelling evidence that the US government is spying on the latest wave of activists, especially Black rights activists. This history has translated into an ironic and sometimes not so ironic paranoia as leftist posters joke about “CIA psyops” and other government infiltration.

Furthermore, while the Left is large enough to help the Democrats swing elections, they are typically not so large a voting bloc to dictate policy. This state of affairs will lead to situations where many US politicians will use progressive rhetoric, only for them to refuse to back progressive policies. For example, during the 2020 campaign trail, Senator Jon Ossoff would tweet statements critical of insurance companies, but in an interview with Axios, he affirmed that he was against policies such as the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all. He had a digital persona of a progressive, but the moment you dove a little deeper, it was apparent that he was more politically moderate.

Many leftists feel that a minority of politicians actively mislead them to gain clout in progressive spaces, which has fostered genuine distrust. It’s not uncommon for a public figure to claim to be progressive, only for them to try to paternalistically undermine that position once they are in power. For example, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has stated that she believes healthcare is a right for all Americans. Whenever advocates try to push for more expansive coverage through Medicare for All, however, she typically warns caution instead. As she told the Washington Post:

“Show me how you think you can get there. We all share the value of health care for all Americans — quality, affordable health care for all Americans. What is the path to that? I think it’s the Affordable Care Act, and if that leads to Medicare for All, that may be the path.”

Yet reporting from the Intercept shows that Pelosi worked behind the scenes to reassure healthcare executives that Medicare for All or single-payer would not make it to the floor. The problem is not that she disagrees with this position but that she pretends that these disagreements are merely political (i.e., what legislation can pass) when it’s evident that she is personally against such policy for either material or ideological reasons. It’s disagreement masquerading as concern. Many leftists consequently have a low bar for what they perceive to be “pretenders” because they have had to sniff them out their entire lives. As user barberwarren13 tweets:

“the reason i’m more critical of typical democrats than republicans is coz dems act like they’re the party of the ~compassionate guys~ but they don’t even believe in socialized healthcare lmao”

You might think that these defense mechanisms wouldn’t fire within more inclusive leftist spaces, but the Left is a paradoxical place of both acceptance and rejection. The Right’s reverence of hierarchy and tradition causes it to reject anyone who doesn’t adhere to mainstream norms. This tension means it’s common to see many Leftists hold various marginalized identities because the Left offers the bare minimum of tolerance.

The Left is not free of discrimination, though. Leftists can still express biases such as racism, sexism, and transphobia. There is an entire subset of people, referred to as class reductionists, who believe that “identity politics” are a distraction that undermine support in leftism from the working class. Leftists can be just as discriminatory as conservatives, but their hatred can sting more because they are supposed to be allies. In the words of Roqayah Chamseddine in her fantastic essay Who are you actually fighting for?:

“Our leftist communities are not immune to this brutality — there are even times in which the political associations of our comrades are used against us in a way that absolves them of their wrongdoings. We are told that they are pillars of the community, that they’re admired, they didn’t mean it, that we must have misunderstood, and on it goes. The excuses are as reactionary as those coming from any other space, and we are forced to combat them just as other women, to prove our humanity.”

This anger and hurt we see in leftist spaces come from a place of real trauma. It’s not wrong for people to want accountability and boundaries from those who have hurt them — those things are never wrong. Our sensitivities developed for a reason. The people who assert otherwise are engaging in emotional manipulation.

For many valid reasons, we are so used to sniffing out potential threats that our defense mechanisms are working on overdrive, and in the process, they can hinder our ability to move past disagreements. It’s an understandable hurdle, and one thankfully many people on the Left have been working on diligently for years.

Over a year ago now, I was at a political meeting where we decided which candidate our local chapter would endorse for city council. There were three major contenders, and conversations were heated. People had intense ideological disagreements over who to pick: some wanted the more established leftist contender; others wanted a promising up-and-comer; more still, campaigned for a middle-of-the-road candidate they claimed non-leftists might be more attracted to.

Surprisingly, however, the conversation never broke down. The moderators took steps to ensure everyone could talk, including weighting questions so more historically marginalized identities had the ability to speak first. People who took too much time were reminded swiftly that they were running over. We then voted for a candidate anonymously, giving plenty of opportunities for people to air grievances.

While ultimately not everyone was happy with the decision we ended up making, we grew to understand everyone’s perspective. It motivated us to address the concerns our members were saying about their preferred candidates. Working groups were established to address some of those gaps — and that work is still ongoing to this day. It is possible to become stronger from disagreements, not to be divided by them.

In political coalitions, disagreements are healthy. They indicate that your movement is large and robust enough to explore the multiple intersections of an issue. Calls for unity are ultimately signs of a movement in decline — one so anemic that it cannot handle everyone inside its tent. We should always want accountability when problems arise within a movement. The banner of free speech becomes problematic when it's used to shield hateful language and actions.

Still, someone disagreeing with your political plans is not in the same vein as someone wronging you personally. Natalie Wynn or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez disagreeing with your opinions on strategy is not the same thing as Nancy Pelosi gaslighting you over single-payer or Donald Trump signing away protections for trans rights.

Many leftists have undergone a lot of trauma — too much for what is fair for one lifetime — but that trauma is not an excuse to dump out all our rage onto the people who activate our well-honed defenses.

I wish I could hold tightly onto everyone this broken society has hurt and shield them from the people seeking to do them harm. It would be nice to block out all the harmful people and only be surrounded by a flawless family of acceptance.

Sadly, no armor is strong enough to block out all that pain, and no family is so perfect.

We, instead, as an act of survival, are given the task of having to make a fairer society — and we will have to do things differently than the oppressors who ruled before us. If we want to build a world better than the one that hurt us, we need accountability over punishment, healing over retribution, and justice over vengeance.

Alex Has Opinions 1/11/21 Alex Has Opinions 1/11/21

Ryan Murphy’s Obsession with Likable Monsters

The creator of Glee and American Horror Story’s problem with centering awful characters

When you think of the word prolific, filmmaker Ryan Murphy is probably not the first person who immediately comes to mind. He likes to discuss how he arrived in Hollywood from Indiana with just $55 dollars in his pocket. With over a dozen shows and movies under his belt and a lucrative deal with Netflix, prolific is exactly what he has become.

The creator of American Horror Story (2011 — present) and Glee (2009–2015) is known for making campy, over-the-top works with a distinctive flair. You can recognize the hallmarks of a Murphy production before his name ever appears on screen: his characters have larger-than-life dialogue; his costumes and set designs have dazzling palettes; his characters’ motivations and desires are all intense as they claw their way to fame, mayhem, and maybe even a little murder.

Another quality often gets overlooked, though, and that is his obsession with glamorizing sociopaths. His most famous and endearing characters are figurative and sometimes literal monsters he lovingly renders for the viewer. Murphy has long been a proponent for uplifting marginalized voices both on-screen and off, but his fixation with highlighting awful people says something unsettling about his sense of priorities as a filmmaker.

Monsters are everywhere in Ryan Murphy’s work. They can be found directly in series such as American Horror Story — an anthology series that deconstructs a different set of horror conventions every season — and metaphorically in crime dramas such as American Crime Story (2016 — present). He tends to focus on people who would normally be the villains in a story and gives them portrayals that, although not always redemptive, are at the very least empathetic. As Willa Paskin writes of the serial killer Andrew Cunanan in the second season of American Crime Story:

“The Assassination of Gianni Versace does not justify Cunanan — he is, always, self-pitying and lazy, unwilling to choose a better course — but it does more than simply try to comprehend him. Occasionally it has compassion for him…Criss, [the actor who plays Cunanan], is brilliant, fully self-pitying, the loneliest, saddest psycho in America.”

We see this theme of empathy for the outcasts in most of his work. American Horror Story has a literal season called Freakshow. The series Pose (2018 — present) is all about queer, mainly trans New Yorkers, trying to thrive in the underground ballroom scene of the 1990s. Even Glee, his arguably tamest work, is about a group of high school outcasts and self-described “losers” (see the song “Loser Like Me”), struggling to find acceptance in the world of singing competitions. In a Ryan Murphy production, there is usually one sappy monologue about love and acceptance for every scene of gore and trauma.

This fixation on “freaks” is not that unusual for a queer man to have, especially for one devoted to film. There is a long history of queer people in media being branded as villains. The Motion Picture Production Code (1930 — 1968), also referred to as the Hay’s Code, and later the Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (1952 — 1983) or the Television’s Code, infamously banned positive portrayals of “sexual perversions,” which LGBTQIA+ people were definitely considered at the time.

If a director wanted to have an LGBTQIA+ character in their production, they had to rely on stereotypical, queer-coding, and cast that character as a villain. This era of Hollywood is filled with wicked queer-coded characters such as the criminal Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the serial killer Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho (1960). Long after the Hays and Television codes were laid to rest, the image of queer villainy remained in roles such as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) in The Silence of The Lambs (1991) and Doctor Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) in Dressed To Kill (1980).

The connection between queerness and horror has another more psychological foundation. Many queer people are also intimately familiar with the feeling of rejection that comes from greater society labeling them as monsters. When everyone treats you poorly, so much so that your own stories cannot even be shown with humanity, then you develop a sort of empathy for the disturbed and rejected. As Advocate editors wrote on why many LGBTQIA+ viewers have an affinity for horror:

“Since many of us have been demonized in our lifetimes, we have a special place in our hearts for the demons, monsters, and other outsiders who wreak havoc and revenge upon heteronormative society…Due to this dynamic, there are some horror films in particular that speak to LGBTQ folks.”

This love for dastardly figures can be seen as a defense mechanism for dealing with trauma. Numerous queer people have arguably embraced wicked characters such as Disney villains and the Babadook because many of them have felt unloved and reviled. It’s a decision to give out the love you were denied to people who also have been refused the benefit of the doubt. “That’s how it works for us freaks. We get blamed for everything,” says the character Pepper (Naomi Grossman) in American Horror Story: Asylum.

For this reason, there is a certain voyeuristic pleasure in watching Ryan Murphy unapologetically reclaim this space. He takes horror — which is this genre that has had a decidedly queer subtext for over half a century — and places its queer messaging front and center. He dresses up his murderous ghosts in leather fetish suits (e.g., American Horror Story: Murder House) and gives his serial killer nurse a steamy tryst with lesbian icon Cynthia Nixon (e.g., Ratched). It can be cathartic to see the monster you have felt yourself to be for so long spotlighted and normalized in episode after episode of prestige television.

However, not all of his monsters serve these purposes. There are characters such as Sue Sylvester in Glee, who are only cruel and vindictive. While it's certainly fine to have one-dimensional characterizations of monsters, Murphy seems to have a fixation, not just on the ostracized but also on people who are irredeemably mean.

In glorifying these awful people and creatures, his works can sometimes come at the cost of obscuring the message of why many of us were drawn to monsters in the first place.

The thing about queer people is that they obviously aren’t monsters. They were made to feel that way by a cruel society. Queer people’s rejection meant that they often had to find acceptance in the margins, which in the case of media, meant latching onto subtextual representation like horror movie monsters. It was never about the monsters themselves, but what they represented — e.g., ostracization, rejection, and in some cases, vengeance.

A great example of a film that makes this subtext text is Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water (2017). The movie is a reference to the 1954 horror film The Creature from the Black Lagoon, in which the climax has a group of scientists rescuing a woman (Julie Adams) abducted by a menacing Gill Monster. In Guillermo del Toro’s quazi-retelling, it's the monster who is abducted. The U.S. government has captured the Amphibian Man (Doug Jones) and placed them inside a secret facility. A cleaner there named Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) falls in love with him.

The Amphibian Man is not really a monster, but a person being held against their will. The true villain is Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), who is in charge of studying the Amphibian Man to help America in the Cold War. Strickland terrorizes the Amphibian Man and intimidates the film’s queer, disabled, and BIPOC characters. He ultimately represents a cipher for the harm inflicted by U.S. imperialism on the marginalized groups represented in the film. As an outcast of the world Strickland represents, the main character Elisa identifies with the “monster,” and as the film comes to a close, she grows gills so she can be apart of the Amphibian Man’s world.

There are other interesting ways to utilize the “monster” angle. They can sometimes be figures of righteous anger enacting vengeance on a cruel society. The character Cassandra (Carey Mulligan) in Promising Young Woman (2021) may be hellbent on revenge, but she is one specifically targeting “nice guys” (and female enablers) who take advantage of women sexually. The mom (Kathleen Turner) in Serial Mom (1994) is also a serial killer, but her entire characterization is designed to skewer the norms of white, suburban America.

Ryan Murphy does have characters throughout his filmography who do hit upon these themes. The Assassination of Gianni Versace has a running theme about how the homophobia of the 90s contributed partly to the murderous entitlement of serial killer Andrew Cunanan. American Horror Story: Hotel (2015), conversely ends warmly with the Hotel Cortez's ghosts killing the character Liz Taylor (Denis O’Hare) so that they can stay together in limbo for all of eternity as one big, weird family.

This empathy, however, extends to a lot of ‘lovable’ villains as well. Ryan Murphy is also known for creating monstrous characters who we still like despite their awfulness. These are monsters who serve no other point than to be monstrous. They are not rejected by greater society like the Amphibian Man or enact vengeance like Cassandra. Like Colonel Strickland, they berate the marginalized, and they usually look cool as hell doing it.

One of the main characters for American Horror Story: Asylum is the domineering Sister Jude Martin (Jessica Lange). She is a person who takes a certain glee in torturing the inmates of the asylum, and yet we were not supposed to dislike her. She has some of the series most stand-out moments. When she ironically becomes trapped in the very asylum she once served, the other main characters go to great lengths to save her. “But Jude, whatever she was, she didn’t belong there any more than we did,” the character Kit Walker (Evan Peters) says to Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson) — a reporter Sister Jude had committed to the asylum to hide the negligence occurring there.

Another terrifying example is cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) from the show Glee. She is remembered for being devilishly funny when the show first aired, but a lot of her comedic lines are simply hateful in retrospect. “I’ll often yell at homeless people. Hey, how’s that homelessness working out for you? Give not being homeless a try, huh?” the character remarks on their fictional talk show. This line is supposed to be a joke and is by no means an anomaly. Sue uses her influence as one of the most powerful people in the school (and the state of Ohio) to bully the Glee club members. The series ends with her winning the Vice Presidency of the United States.

Likewise, the show The Politician (2019 — present) is centered on a rich trust fund kid named Payton Hobart (Ben Platt) as he tries to navigate his school’s election for class president (and later local politics) in a single-minded attempt to eventually be president of the United States. Payton has structured his entire life to reach that goal, and he does some truly detestable things in that pursuit of power, such as threatening to out a closeted classmate, culminating in that student's suicide. The narrative briefly punishes him for these indiscretions, but ultimately he skyrockets to political success. In fact, after one of his campaign operatives tampers with ballots, the story goes out of its way to tell the viewer that he would have received those votes regardless.

There are so many of these characters in Murphy’s filmography— Emma Roberts from Scream Queens (2015 — present), the doctors in Nip/Tuck (2003–2010), Evan Peters in nearly every one of his characters in American Horror Story. These villains are typically white, usually rich, and almost always hold more power than those beneath them. They may not be fully redeemed by the time their story ends, but they are often framed in a way that makes them desirable to the viewer. They have the most memorable moments or lines and are usually fan favorites.

Even when they lose, they look damn amazing doing it, and unlike figures such as the Amphibian Man, they are not empathetic to those around them. They are all mean, powerful white sociopaths, inflicting harm on the marginalized characters around them.

We should question the trend of making them “likable.”

People often identify with monsters because of what they represent in the narrative. When monsters are unfairly rejected by society, they can represent a cipher for various oppressed identities. We see this theme in works such as American Horror Story: Hotel or, far more directly, in The Shape of Water. Monsters can also represent the spirit of vengeance, satire, and a host of other useful things in a story. In the case of many Ryan Murphy works, they chiefly serve the purpose of being fun.

It would be unrealistic and unfair to say that no one should ever use monsters in their narrative unless they are perfectly well-rounded. Sometimes your story needs a one-dimensional villain, which is fine, perhaps a tad boring, but fine. We cannot dictate to people that they must only portray “the other” if it fits a certain function in the story. However, when you start to develop a pattern of awful “likable” characters who actively inflict misery on those around them, that speaks to your sense of priorities as a filmmaker.

Ryan Murphy is not a terrible person. He has uplifted many marginalized voices both on and off the screen, and that is worthy of praise. The creation of Pose — one of the most trans-inclusive shows in history — is an achievement that far exceeds what most of his powerful white peers in the industry are trying to accomplish. Still, at the same time, he is no longer that broke 20-something who has just moved to Hollywood from Indiana. As one of the most powerful people in his industry, he has blind spots that merit criticism, and what characters he decides to center and provide empathy for is one of them.

There will always be monsters in our stories, but as we come to reckon with our country’s past abuses, we should question uplifting abusive monsters for the sake of light entertainment.

Alex Has Opinions 1/4/21 Alex Has Opinions 1/4/21

‘Star Wars’ Made Us Unprepared For Fascism

The Galaxy Far Far Away set the bar too high for evil.

At the core of the decades-spanning space opera Star Wars, sits a cosmic battle between the Light and the Dark Side of the force, the latter of which is led by the evil Sith who have terrorized the galaxy in their pursuit of total conquest.

Sith like Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, and Kylo Ren have captivated the popular imagination as ciphers for absolute evil. We have watched in cruel fascination as these men have demonstrated what being the worst truly means, staging master plans laid out months, if not decades in advance, only for them to be undone at the last possible moment.

However, these examples have had the unfortunate effect of setting the bar far too high for our conception of evil, and conversely, too low for good’s triumph against it. While some people undoubtedly fit inside the Sithian mold quite comfortably (i.e., that of a sociopathic murderer who outlines every second of their master plan years beforehand), evil often is done by incompetent showmen inflicting untold harm as they go. They lie, cheat, and steal without any cackling monologues or Chessmaster finesse — all with unearned privilege, bravado, and a smile.

Emperor Palpatine has been a fixture of evil for over four decades. He was first popularly introduced as a hologram in the movie The Empire Strikes Back (1980) as he directs his subordinate Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones) to stop Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) from becoming a Jedi, killing him if necessary. He is the picture of ultimate evil, someone so malicious that even Vader eventually turns on him by the end of the original trilogy. He is a fascist of the highest order — someone who has created an entire Empire devoted to serving his will alone.

The picture we have of Palpatine is that of the perfect manipulator. He rose to power by creating a series of galactic incidents (e.g., an armed trade dispute over the planet of Naboo, an intergalactic Civil War, etc.) that he secretly orchestrated behind the scenes while serving in the Galactic Senate. He somehow managed to mobilize hundreds of systems into open rebellion without anyone ever being the wiser about his involvement. He then sidelined these former allies at the first available opportunity to declare martial law within the Galactic Republic and become Emperor.

He accomplishes all of these evil machinations while serving in one of the galaxy's most powerful and scrutinized institutions, and again, very few people walk away with a thorough understanding of what happens until years after the fact. All his enemies are either coopted (e.g., Anakin Skywalker becoming Darth Vader), exiled (see Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi), or killed by the time the prequel trilogy comes to a close. His power so cemented that the Galatic Senate dissolves at the start of the original movie, A New Hope (1977).

In pop culture, there is a name for this trope: “The Chessmaster.” The designation is in reference to how chess is often used as a visual shorthand in film and television to convey the cunning and manipulativeness of a character. It’s quite common to see scenes where two characters play chess and for that interaction to represent a battle occurring between them metaphorically. Sometimes this metaphor can be quite literal such as when Hades (James Woods) in Disney’s Hercules (1997) places monsters on his board to represent the hero’s twelve labors or when the spy Control (John Hurt) in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) tapes pictures of suspects onto chess pieces. These Chessmasters move characters about on a board to symbolize plots occurring in the real world.

Mostly, though, this trope is less about the game of chess and more about how the characters are portrayed as cold and calculating figures able to stay multiple steps ahead of everyone else in the story. We see Chessmasters a lot in fiction because, unlike in reality, an author has the power to decide that a single person really can organize a series of events singlehandedly. The Emperor conquers the galaxy because George Lucas wills it so. It’s easier as a writer to pin all of your narrative choices on a single entity than the series of inter-connected causes that affect real-life events.

We tend to retrospectively do this with real-world people as well. It’s typical for people to argue that historical figures, even terrible ones such as Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler, grew to prominence because of their political genius. Part of this has to do with the intense propaganda machines they led during the height of their power. Stalin and Hitler were both built up into almost Superman-like figures by their people, yet that narrative found itself even in outlets beyond their control. As professor Frederick C. Barghoorn wrote of the former Soviet leader in their 1953 New York Times article What It Takes to Be a Stalin:

“Stalin’s role as political intrigue and boss is well known. He was able to crush opposition both in high party circles and among the masses because he was a brilliant and ruthless totalitarian politician. This means that he knew how at any given time to command the loyalty of the party and state bureaucracy and to avoid pushing the masses so far that the morale and cohesion of the ruling apparatus might be seriously affected.”

To this day, we still see people praise the genius of dictators such as Stalin or Hitler, even as they decry the horrors they committed. When, for example, the blog Leadershipgeeks.com penned an article on what could be learned from Hitler’s leadership style, they focused on the “positive lessons” you could emulate from him, saying:

“…Hitler was a captivating public speaker. He would enrapture crowds with his vision and sense of purpose of the nation. His words moved a country, even the church to believe that they were killing in the name of God. That was the extent of his charisma.”

This frames his charisma almost as an otherworldly force that acted upon the German people. It portrays his will as something so strong that it overpowered God-fearing people's senses to the point of making them murderers. It also coincidentally absolves the German people of all responsibility by placing the source of that evil in one bad person's hands.

In truth, real fascism does not work like the Galactic Empire. It cannot come about because of the manipulations of a single individual, or even a group of individuals, but rather because an in-group has been given the social permission to enact beliefs they already have.

Fascism is a group sport.

When we look at men like Hitler, the trauma they helped cause was so terrible that it understandably left a scar on the public imagination. Hitler’s name, and really Nazism in general, has become a sort of boogie man used to personify the worst kinds of evil.

In pop culture, Hitler often shows up to bolster some of the worst causes throughout history: his regime is what gives rise to the fringe science organization HYDRA in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU); he’s seen shaking hands with the devil in horror, B-movie Faust: Love of the Damned (2000); and cloning and replicating his upbringing is the primary plot point of the book and film The Boys From Brazil (1976/1978).

From this lens, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that fascist leaders were real people unable to foresee all the events that brought them fully to power. They may have made plans intended to last decades only for them to fall apart spectacularly in real life. Hitler’s first major grab for power, for example, was a failure. When the Nazi Party attempted a coup in 1923 in the German province of Bavaria, it was ultimately foiled by the region’s military forces. He would eventually gain power through political means (and force), but that didn’t mean his regime was flawless. He had an almost childish demeanor with an overly inflated sense of self. He did not respond to feedback well, which caused him to make strategically poor decisions — most infamously, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Trump also fell into this category, especially during the earlier parts of his first term when many people tried to paint him as a master manipulator. It was common for detractors to warn us not to “get distracted” by his antics and instead be on the lookout for what he really intended. Debates were waged in columns across America on whether he was figurative or literal with his words. It took months, and in some cases years, for people to realize there was no higher point to his rhetoric — there was only ever what he wanted at the moment.

The rebranding of fascists leaders as brilliant Chessmasters ignores the fact that some authoritarians lack political finesse. It also ignores how their hold on power relies initially on support from the larger populace. Authoritarians certainly use violence to grab and maintain power, but they also try to convince their followers that all problems can be solved by worshipping a single authoritarian figure. They can only achieve their nonsensical aims when the greater population passively accepts it.

In his essay Ur-Fascism, commentator Umberto Eco, who grew up during the fascism of Benito Mussolini, listed fourteen qualities defining fascism. Many of these involved a fascist gaining buy-in from their own people, such as by fostering a fear of difference, creating a culture of hero-worship, and appealing to a frustrated middle class. To that last point, he wrote in this essay that people have a habit of scapegoating disenfranchised political groups, writing: “In our time, when the old [working class] are becoming [richer] (and the [dispossessed] are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.”

In essence, it’s not the downtrodden who fuel that rise to fascism, but the people just above them. While the exact number of people susceptible to authoritarianism is widely disputed, the simple truth is that, if presented with the right set of arguments, a percentage of any population at any time is amenable to that style of leadership. It’s something many people are primed to believe already, and they don’t need an evil mastermind to make that happen.

This reality fails to show up in a lot of pop culture, especially in the Galaxy Far Far Away, where the opinions of regular people are largely omitted for narrative convenience.

Star Wars is a brand where fascism is a core facet of its mythos (e.g., the Sith, the Empire, the First Order, etc.), but somehow it has villains so far removed from our empathic understanding that its possible as an audience member to walk away not really understanding how fascism works.

While the Expanded Universe (now Star Wars Legends) has some works that examine the propaganda and anti-alien xenophobia that helped give rise to the Empire (see the Thrawn trilogy and the video game Knights of the Old Republic), most of the films are a simplistic battle between good and evil. Emperor Palpatine's cruelty can be witnessed within a vacuum, never challenging viewers to seriously comprehend how they might fall within the equation.

This failure to truly contextualize fascism affects how a lot of fans perceive the work itself. A quick search online reveals dozens of articles and videos of fans claiming that the Empire was actually right all along because it provided stability to the galaxy. YouTuber Allen Xie (Generation Tech) talks extensively about this issue on their channel. In his video Imperials Are People Too, he highlights all the times the Rebel Alliance killed members of the Empire military. He remarks of character Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) decision to blow up the planet-destroying Death Star as the following:

“…any other situation, we would question the morality of a man who has killed over a million people, but what did the rebellion do? Give him a medal. History is written by the victors, and the Empire had its flaws. But the next time you go to celebrate the destruction of an Imperial ship or victory of a Rebel hero remember that there are living breathing people behind those blast doors and plastic helmets. “

This is obviously a bad take. The Death Star destroyed nearly 2 billion people when it blew up the planet of Alderaan in A New Hope. Maybe the author is not genuine. The Internet is filled with so much irony and meta-humor that it's sometimes difficult to tell if someone is serious (see Jim Huss’s parody video series). Still, there are so many videos on this subject it speaks to the failure of the text itself. The franchise failed to delineate between what is and what is not fascism so much that an entire subgenre of videos has sprung up arguing that the text validates the very thing it appears to be disproving — that fascism is bad.

Star Wars is not the only franchise that has this issue. The MCU stumbled into the same problem with intergalactic Space Tyrant Thanos (Josh Brolin). As with Emperor Palpatine, Thanos is also portrayed as a manipulative Chessmaster hellbent on dominating the galaxy. In this case, he works behind-the-scenes of all the movies to gather magical infinity stones with the power to rewrite reality. His ultimate plan is to randomly wipe out half of all sentient life in the galaxy.

This plan comes to fruition at the end of Avengers: Infinity War (2018), but not in the way we would expect a fascist to achieve their ends. While he does have a small band of committed followers fighting to cull the galaxy, Thanos’ goals are achieved through space magic. He snaps his fingers, and half of everyone we know flutters out of existence.

Unlike with real fascism, the galaxy is a spectator in his horrors, not a participant.

As with Star Wars, this refusal to take a hard stance ultimately made Thanos’ brand of meritocratic Malthusianism sympathetic to many viewers. His simplistic, authoritarian solution was not called out in a way that would challenge viewers' assumptions. #Thanoswasright flooded Twitter and other social media shortly after the film’s release. Soon we had a bunch of bad hot takes espousing the very ideology that a responsible movie would have taken the time to disprove. As JV Chamary wrote in Forbes in his article The Science Of ‘Avengers: Endgame’ Proves Thanos Did Nothing Wrong:

“The Avengers are guilty of putting the grief of survivors above the health of our world. From the planet’s point of view, it’s the superheroes who are the bad guys. Reversing Thanos’ actions is a selfish endeavor…”

Overpopulation’s contribution to climate change is a contentious idea that has been hotly debated elsewhere. Climate change is believed to be exacerbated by other issues, such as overconsumption and wealth inequality. These would not be fixed by removing half of all people at random.

The movie never bothers to have this debate, though. When the second part of the Thanos saga, Avengers: Endgame, aired in April of 2019, the film attempted to disprove the tyrant’s plan by demonstrating the tragedy of all the lives lost, not by tearing apart the fascist ideology Thanos represented. As with Alderaan's destruction, the snap became divorced from its totalitarian ideology to represent a “bad” viewers could consume without getting uncomfortable.

Some works do put viewers in that place of unease, but they are usually Oscar-bait and Indie films, not pop culture hits. The last major time Star Wars attempted to be pointed in its commentary was The Last Jedi (2017), which was arguably a meta-commentary on the Star Wars fandom's toxic masculinity. This film was not idly consumed but instead was widely polarizing among viewers. It became a topic of intense debate precisely because you knew it was trying to say something.

Conversely, Emperor Palpatine’s ideology is too vague and amorphous to be rejected. We don’t understand what the Emperor really wants other than power itself, and because that power has not seriously been scrutinized by the text (merely the person holding it), the viewer doesn’t have to question their political beliefs.

Much of our media has made people think they understand fascism when really they are more familiar with a caricature of fascism: that of an all-knowing, evil Chessmaster who manipulates people into doing things they don’t really want to do from behind the scenes. This type of story-telling does not seek to challenge the viewer's complicity in that evil, which is why so many people can comfortably wrap themselves in Storm Trooper or Thanos paraphernalia without ever feeling awkward.

It’s not bad for a film to talk about fascism. Art reflects life, so artists would inevitably want to talk about an issue so pressing to human culture. This ideology is worth talking about, but a lot of media is employing an overly-simplistic understanding of it — one where the viewer is always blameless.

In real life, people are not tricked into following fascist leaders such as Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump. They follow those monsters willing, and while we can debate the reasons surrounding those decisions, we must not compartmentalize that evil into something only evil masterminds can accomplish. It is sadly not hard to get people to abandon everything in pursuit of hatred.

If we want to prepare people for how to avoid the next fascist regime, then we need media that explores how everyday people can fall to the Dark Side too. Responsible media is not afraid to make its viewers defensive over their capacity to inflict harm, especially when discussing one of the darkest ideologies in human history. It brings them into the text and does not let them look away.

Alex Has Opinions 12/18/20 Alex Has Opinions 12/18/20

The Imperialist Fantasy of Going to Space

Tech’s obsession with leaving the Earth behind and conquering the stars

When the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, gave his final state of the union address before Congress, he invoked the spirit of the frontier to describe his desire to push America into space. He told them: “In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation. Now we must embrace the next frontier: America’s manifest destiny in the stars.”

Manifest destiny has always been a loaded term. It was initially used to describe the belief that America had a right to expand westward — the rights of the people who already lived there be damned. Our leaders used its as a justification to settle the frontier, and displace millions.

Many people on the left saw this comment as yet another racist remark in a presidency that has embodied them. Yet, it actually struck at something far deeper: how our conception of space travel was built upon an imperialist fantasy of conquest.

Our mythos of space flight often supposes not only that we should leave our planet behind, but that for the betterment of humanity, we must expand outwards into the frontier of space. This expansionist vision of progress has nothing to do with helping humanity, and everything about the powerful grabbling with a settler’s mindset older than America itself.

When entrepreneur Andrew Yang ran for president during the 2020 election cycle, he did so with the slogan: “not left, not right, but forward.” He advocated for an approach to politics not linked to one side of the political spectrum, but one instead backed by “the data.” Yang repeatedly talked on the campaign trail of crunching the numbers, and his supporters often carried around the slogan MATH or Make America Think Harder. He proposed technocratic, “innovative” solutions such as giving every American $1,000 a month to mitigate the effects of automation or to use giant space mirrors to reverse climate change.

Silicon Valley, the community to which Andrew Yang spiritually belongs, has long evangelized that technological progress is both apolitical and a supreme good — a philosophy sometimes referred to as “technological optimism.” We see this sentiment harkening back to the beginning of this country, with some of our nation’s imminent thinkers expressing it. In a letter to Joseph Priestley, scientist and inventor Benjamin Franklin lamented that they sometimes regretted being alive at that moment in history because 1,000 years from then, science would be that much more advanced.

This march towards progress has included space as well. President John F. Kennedy famously told Congress over 60 years ago in his speech on why we must go to the moon that “…it in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.” JFK painted traveling to space as yet another step in our inevitable march towards progress.

However, space goes far deeper for tech than simply nostalgia for this Cold War-era ambition. The innovations from that initial investment in the space program (i.e., technologies such as computing) formed the future tech industry's foundation. Many people within that field trace a throughline from the Space Race directly to the rise of Silicon Valley. As Basil Hero, reporter and author of the book The Mission of a Lifetime, told CNN Business on the space Apollo program that led the US to the moon: “Without [Apollo], I don’t think the computer revolution would have happened as quickly and on the same trajectory. It would have taken an extra 10 or 20 years.”

The Space Race is an integral aspect of Silicon Valley’s lore. Many of its most successful continue to hold onto the belief that the secret to human prosperity lies within the stars — that expansion is the best way for us to survive. When asked to defend his space venture Blue Origin at the Living Legends of Aviation awards ceremony in 2019, Billionaire Jeff Bezos remarked:

“What sounds like freedom to me is moving out into the solar system, where we have, for all practical purposes, unlimited energy, unlimited resources. We’d have a trillion humans in the solar system, and then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. That’s the world I want my grandchildren’s grandchildren to live in.”

If you were to believe the words of people such as Jeff Bezos, then we have been apart of an unending, unquestionable progression. Our reach for space is the next step in that journey — the final frontier. These entrepreneurs tell themselves it's for the good of humanity — that the gains reached from the stars will trickle down to the rest of us in the years and generations to come — and yet our recent history tells us this has not been the case.

Progress can be a very dubious word. Technological optimism comes with it a refusal to address the morality and politics of technological developments. Most tech is at best value-neutral, with people being able to repurpose it for both “good” and “bad.”

The Wright Brothers, for example, famously pitched that planes would bring about an end to all war because scouts would be able to detect advancing armies and halt their approach. Less than three decades later, bombers were used to level countless cities and towns worldwide in WWII. “We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth,” said inventor Orville Wright shortly before his death in 1948, “But we were wrong. We underestimated man’s capacity to hate and to corrupt good means for an evil end." When we only are willing to discuss the good that can come from technology, we become blindsided by its more terrible effects.

The Tech Industry was likewise portrayed during the last decade as a force for good, “disrupting” sectors of the economy such as media and transportation to better the consumer and society. However, this portrayal flattened all criticisms as either advancing technology or halting it, even when that tech was as ridiculous as a $400 juicer or as malicious as an all-encompassing surveillance system. It allowed tech companies to rebrand practices such as wage theft and union-busting as innovative when, really, they were taking advantage of gaps in the law, as well as precarious insecurity in the labor market, to extract wealth. As Nitasha Tiku wrote in Wired:

“It is only now, a decade after the financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction — -of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.”

When men of industry talk about space, they often do so with the same deceptive branding of progress. The kings of Silicon Valley often see our expansion into the stars almost as a prophecy. When Jeff Bezos spoke in 2016 at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, he framed space travel as an ultimatum, saying, “We need to go into space if we want to continue to have a growing civilization.”

These men are confident in a future that has not yet come to pass. They speak of the Earth’s destruction without space travel as a near certainty, which is an ethically fraught thing to do for the people directly responsible for how our planet’s policies are shaped. By framing leaving the Earth as something that must and will happen, these men never have to contemplate whether they should or even if they have the right to — it simply is.

They use the mythos of technological optimism to avoid responsibility, so they can instead fantasize about being masters in space.

Billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have desired to go into space for decades, if not their entire lives. Bezos allegedly once considered naming Amazon MakeItSo.com after the catchphrase of Star Trek captain Jean-Luc Picard. Elon Musk once said in an interview that he wants to make “Starfleet happen.” It’s clear from multiple interviews that the technological aesthetic of that future has inspired them greatly in their work.

However, these two men run businesses that, while technologically impressive, are utterly divorced from the egalitarian principles the Star Trek universe claims to represent. It’s doubtful that the Federation (i.e., the main polity in the Star Trek franchise) would approve of the union-busting and hazardous working conditions present in both of their businesses. The progress narrative is something they cling to as a rationalization. If men like Jeff Bezos truly want to create a solar system with “a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einstein’s,” then we need more housing, food, education, and healthcare on Earth, not more spaceships.

The part of the Star Trek mythos that Silicon Valley kings want to replicate is not the Earth of the Federation — which is a democratic, post-scarcity society that has long moved past capitalism — but rather the endless exploration and conquest of space. When Marketplace asked Elon Musk to provide the reason for why we should go to space, it ultimately came down to excitement:

“…if you think about and sort of look ahead and see about a future where we’re out there exploring the stars and understanding the universe and the kind of things that you see in science fiction books and movies and reading books; that’s an exciting future and much more exciting than one where we’re just forever confined to Earth until our eventual extinction.”

Note that he’s not really talking about saving humanity — that’s simply the feel-good finish that’s put in a TedTalk presentation. The thing we should focus on here is this desire to explore the unknown and to make it your own. While that may sound harmless, the idea of laying claim to the frontier is a narrative that historically has had a very racialized and imperialist tinge to it.

When Europeans came to the “New World,” they found a continent ravished by the diseases they brought with them. We will never know the exact number of Native Americans that existed here before the European conquest. Still, some estimates place it as high as 112 million in 1492, with 90% succumbing to diseases by the time we reach 1650. European settlers conquered the lands on this slightly less occupied continent, and overtime, pre-First Contact America became reimagined by many white Americans as a pristine wildland untouched by man. As John Bakeless wrote erroneously in his book The Eyes of Discovery (1950): “the land seemed empty to invaders who came from settled Europe…that ancient, primeval, undisturbed wilderness.”

Of course, this perception was untrue with millions of Native Americans still existing on the continent, many of which became violently displaced in the process of Westward “expansion,” but that was not how countless White Americans portrayed their exploitation of this place. Many believed they had a God-given right or a “Manifest Destiny” to expand westward. Public figures such as President James Monroe made it a matter of US policy, addressing to Congress in 1823 that the US would “consider any attempt [by a European power] to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

The continent of North America was the U.S.A’s to claim, and the U.S.A’s alone.

The cultural hero often seen depicted in this era was the cowboy, which, although based on a far-less glamorous, far-more diverse profession, has since been reimagined to be a white savior whose job was to create order in a lawless, savage land. Cowboys were played by men like John Wayne, who made a career portraying gunmen who protected white Americans from the outlaws and Indians “occupying” the West. The movie Stagecoach (1939) ends in a climactic battle where our white protagonists, led by John Wayne, have to shoot down attacking Apache forces until the U.S. Calvery ultimately saves them.

As a people, we never lost sight of the idea that exploration requires wiping away old paradigms and people to claim something as “new.” When we think of Space exploration, our go-to heroes are often captains such as Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) in Firefly (2002) or the rogue Han Solo (Harrison Ford) in Star Wars (1977)— all of which are updated Cowboy archetypes that spend their time with bounty hunters or making deals in futuristic, yet retro-looking saloons.

Similarly, back before the Mariner 4 flyby in 1964 revealed Mars to be a dead world, it was widely speculated that it was teeming with life. Some scientists even believed that Mar’s color on the infrared spectrum mimicked that of vegetation. This captured the popular imagination, and we were bombarded with stories of a lawless landscape tamed through brave exploration. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter franchise, for example, was about the titular hero and his adventures on Mars as a heroic warlord. The late 40s and early 50s were likewise littered with Mars-themed B-movies such as Invaders from Mars (1953) and Battle Beyond the Sun (1959).

Our evolving understanding of space has made it seem colder and less vibrant than our image of the cosmos sixty years ago. Still, that spirit of conquest and limitless possibility remains. Admirers of space no longer talk as much about encountering alien life, but, instead, how they can shape the vastness of space to their dominion. When, for example, Jeff Bezos laid out his vision for building out O’Neil colonies throughout the solar system — basically gigantic space stations with independent ecosystems — he talked less about how to create an ideal society and far more about how that environment would be shaped, saying:

“…these are really pleasant places to live. Some of these O’Niel colonies might choose to replicate Earth cities….These are ideal climates. These are shirt sleeve environments. This is Maui on its best day. All year long. No rain. No storms. No earthquakes…”

Much has been written about how rich Tech entrepreneurs are attempting to buy themselves a segregated society in the stars — away from our deteriorating planet's dangers. There may be some truth to that worry, but ultimately it’s far easier to build a bunker underground in New Zealand than it is to jumpstart a delicate, spinning deathtrap in space.

This is about control.

Space, by its very nature, must be a heavily regulated environment. The void is dangerous, and one poorly planned decision can lead to people being jettisoned to their deaths. Everything from the water these future citizens consume to their air they breathe will be tracked and logged by necessity. Every move a person makes can easily be monitored because, unlike on Earth, there is no elsewhere to run off to.

Space is also simultaneously lawless in the sense that the governments and regulations of Earth are very far away. All laws are only enforceable as far as your employer or owner wishes to acknowledge them. It’s an inherently authoritarian environment as citizens are now under the whim of someone who can rightly define dissent as illegality. In this situation, the outlaw isn’t some mercenary alien or rogue AI, but any person threatening the delicate ecosystem the rich control, as all challenges can be conflated into existential threats.

Space offers the rich the final frontier of ultimate control.

Tech heroes love to talk about Science Fiction. They gush about Star Trek and Star Wars and how that technology is just within reach. They claim it's our right to expand outwards into the stars. They tell us that we will be there soon— if only we give them the reins to get us there. However, when we look at those futures more closely, it doesn’t always bode well for the humans left stranded on Earth.

In science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, the Earth is a radioactive backwater that has long been abandoned for newer and better colonies. The planet has fallen so far into obscurity that no one in the galactic community even remembers that it’s the origin of humanity. The twenty million or so people who continue to live here endure increasingly harsh circumstances, with all citizens undergoing mandatory euthanasia by the age of sixty.

The idea of having to abandon Earth is a common one in science fiction: in Frank Herbert’s Dune series, the planet is thought to be uninhabitable; Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming Saga takes place millions of years after catastrophic wars caused humanity to flee the Sol system; in the cult classic Firefly our planet is referred to as the Earth That Was. The prevailing narrative in the cultural zeitgeist is that we will eventually destroy this planet and will have to spread ourselves into the ever-expanding void of space to survive.

As someone living on Earth, this template has me quite concerned. It might seem as though this essay is trying to dissuade you from supporting space travel, but this is not a call for technological pessimism anymore than it’s an endorsement of blind optimism. We very well could reach for the stars in a responsible and good way for the majority of humanity, but that would involve caring about the policies used to shape that future. It would involve looking to shows like Star Trek for more than just their ship designs.

The Federation did not achieve a peaceful polity through Faster Than Light travel (known as warp on the show). It started when the creator of the warp drive, scientist Zefram Cochrane, chose to peacefully make First Contact with the alien race, the Vulcans. Even before the invention of transporters or replicators, Earth expanded the Federation by prizing policy that uplifted peace and exploration over cold, merciless value extraction.

That world is also within our reach.

If we want Earth to be like the Federation and not like the radioactive wasteland in the Foundation or the abandoned surface of Dune, then we will have to prioritize the Federation’s goals. It will not only mean setting the opinions of men like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk aside (and redistributing their wealth and influence to more people) but also creating a world where everyone has the potential to be an Einstein or Mozart, not just a couple thousand.

We all have the potential to be extraordinary, not only a few rich men struggling for control.

Alex Has Opinions 12/14/20 Alex Has Opinions 12/14/20

The Men Who Sold the False Hope of Stimulus Checks

Online influencers who cashed in on people’s fear and desperation

When the pandemic hit America in March, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to assist the millions of Americans and businesses facing hardships due to the ensuing recession. The law, among other things, set aside grant money for small businesses, temporarily increased unemployment benefits, as well as distributed a one-time stimulus check of $1,200 to all Americans earning under $75,000 a year.

Since the passage of the CARES act, no new major relief has come on the federal level. It’s become a meme at this point for commentators to remark that Americans were only left with less than $5 a day to get through both a recession and a pandemic (that figure comes from $1,200 divided by the number of days since March 27th, 2020). People are desperate. Millions of Americans having already lost their jobs and their homes — many facing rampant food insecurity or worse.

Sadly, this desperation has given rise to a cottage industry of online influencers who promise “updates” on a second stimulus check that, until very recently, had little chance of being passed. Americans might finally get a second relief package this winter — an effort long overdue — but we should pause and reflect on the men who took advantage of that hope for ad revenue.

It’s important to note that there have been several moments during these past nine months, specifically during July and early October, where negotiations between Congressional Democrats and Republicans were ongoing. The early October negotiations, in particular, briefly had people somewhat hopeful. In late September, Nancy Pelosi remarked that she believed an agreement was possible, which made people think relief was finally on its way.

These moments, however, always had deep ideologically and political hurdles to overcome. The first package was passed under the threat of tanking the entire economy, and without that same incentive, negotiations stalled. As we got increasingly close to November, it became clear that lawmakers preferred to settle the matter until after the election. This outcome was tragically always a high possibility. As the staff of Radio.com hypothesized all the way back in May:

“For now, the status of whether Americans will receive a second stimulus check is up in the air. If a second wave of relief does come to pass, it might not be soon enough for the Americans who are facing down bills, mortgages, and more.”

If you were active on the Internet during this time, though, that might not have been the impression you received. There were scores of YouTubers and other influencers who captured a lot of traffic by making hundreds of videos, all promising to have a vital update on a second stimulus check that would never arrive.

“Minutes ago,” begins YouTuber Kevin Paffrath in a video posted to their channel Meet Kevin “the president has just met with Mark Meadows, and treasury secretary Mnuchin…Donald Trump has apparently, allegedly…approved a revised package and he would like to do a deal.” Kevin goes on to say that “this is incredible,” and while he doesn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, you can sense the excitement in his voice. “This is not a bad progression,” he exclaims while holding up a stuffed animal of the Super Mario Star.

For context, this video was released on October 9th, several days after the President, over Twitter, scuttled weeks of negotiations that had gone into a second relief package. Trump then suddenly reversed this decision on the 9th by offering the $1.8 trillion counteroffer Kevin is referring to. Still, the deal would not go anywhere because the President neglected to get buy-in from either party. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi alleged that the offer failed to address key policy concerns (and was reportedly peeved at how Trump had ruined earlier negotiations). Congressional Republicans, on the other hand, were uncomfortable with the larger price tag.

A cursory search online would have told the influencer that we were not close at that time, but that apparently doesn’t soak in the eyeballs, or in Mr. Paffrath’s case, the affiliate marketing. While he has been doing some notable fundraising on his platform (a portion of his ad revenue for stimulus videos allegedly goes to the nonprofit No Kid Hungry), he also spends a lot of his time plugging links to applications such as Webull, encouraging viewers, many of whom seem to be there because they are desperate, to drop $100 to get free stock. He also offers online classes on his website that begin in the $300 range and go upwards to nearly $6,000, which is not affordable for a group of people desperate for another $1,200 check.

Mr. Paffrat has done at least one of these videos per day since mid-April, making a minimum of 235 and counting. They have all been a variation of the same theme: they take an inconsequential update from a public figure and inflate its importance. If reporting from CNBC is accurate, this has made him a fortune. He’s on track to make millions this year from his YouTube channel, and this is not a hustle that he is the only one doing.

Another YouTuber engaged in this activity is Brian Kim, an accountant belonging to the tax preparation business Clear Value. At one million subscribers, his YouTube Channel similarly puts out a minimum of one video per day about the possibility of a second stimulus check. This content likewise exaggerates updates about policy and commentary. “This has a high probability of passing because the Democrats always want to include more people into the recipients of the stimulus checks,” Kim said in a video on July 26th about Congressional Republican’s introduction of a $1 trillion COVID-19 aid package.

As with the situation in October, though, the path forward for adoption was not as straight forward as Kim implied in this video. There were serious disagreements with Republicans and Democrats about both the package's cost (the Democrats were at the time shooting for $3 trillion) and about the policy inside it. The Republicans, for example, were insistent that employers have something called a “liability shield,” which would give employers immunity from Coronavirus-related lawsuits. The President also pushed to remove or cut the payroll tax, which earned him criticism from members inside his own party.

Again, all of this information was readily available at the time online.

Kim does not have affiliate links or classes to plug. Still, he is making these videos on behalf of his tax preparation business, which means they all serve as an implicit, albeit less direct, advertisement for Clear Value. His videos can get views in the hundreds of thousands, and undoubtedly some of that attention has translated to added business.

It cannot be overstated how many influencers are engaged in this game. They range from larger players such as Kevin Paffrath (Meet Kevin) and Brian Kim (Clear Value) to smaller outfits we haven’t yet talked about like David Clark (The TEC Show) and Michael Wrubel — the latter of who also plugs the stock app Webull.

These products are ultimately being marketed to people who need financial relief, not stock advice. “This is crazy….weve waited long enough for a stimulus. I just lost my daughter and have to make a Christmas for my 2 year old grandaughter (s.p.). How am I supposed to do that without a stimulus?” remarks one user under one of Michael Wrubel’s videos. “Right now, I am still barely able to pay my rent. I pray that rental/mortgage relief is granted for those who are very close to being homeless. Praying 🙏🙏🙏,” writes another in a Meet Kevin video.

It’s a desperation that these influencers are well aware of and occasionally admit to in those fleeting moments of honesty they have with their viewers. As YouTuber Stephen Gardner told viewers in his December 9th video: “Here in my community, I know people that would really really love to get a stimulus check. I know others that follow me because they really need unemployment [benefits].”

Yet this honesty never led anywhere. Their viewers watched in the hope that this information would give them more than simply false hope, yet it never came.

The trend we see here of influencers taking advantage of people’s desperation for fame and fortune deserves the utmost scrutiny. There is a difference between reporting on the stimulus negotiations happening in Congress and taking advantage of people’s misery.

News outlets and commentators followed the negotiations' ups and downs because they were (and continue to be) important. Congress’s failure to provide Americans true relief has led to millions of Americans losing their businesses, jobs, homes, and for far too many, their lives. Honest reporting told people how far away our leaders were from providing them relief from that suffering, even when it was frustrating. They focused on the reasons that made a second stimulus package’s passage so difficult (e.g., electoral politics and ideological differences).

The men who preached stimulus updates on the Internet could have done that as well. They could have said that a second stimulus was months away. They maybe could have even scrutinized the specific political leaders who held up negotiations and told their followers to bother them.

Instead, they instructed cash-strapped viewers to buy stock and to sign up for get-rich classes they couldn’t afford, and we should never forget it.

Alex Has Opinions 12/9/20 Alex Has Opinions 12/9/20

PS5 Scalpers & the Bots People Hate

Gamers’ hell today might be shoppers’ nightmare tomorrow

(This story was originally published on Medium).

Sony’s PlayStation 5 hit stores on November 12, 2020, and yet many customers have struggled to obtain a console for themselves. Retailers across the planet have been releasing steady opportunities for customers to purchase one. Still, despite this steady trickle of supply, consumers have experienced by crashing home pages, glitched carts, and in some cases, long nights in line during the height of a pandemic.

Part of this delay has to do with the novelty of the situation. A new console has only been released roughly every seven years, with the PlayStation 4 first dropping in the US on November 15, 2013. The coronavirus pandemic created a time where many people are stuck at home wanting something to do, leading to a massive demand for the console. There were over one million global pre-orders placed before the product even launched.

Overwhelmingly, though, the number one complaint that has surfaced is not of too much demand, but that “scalpers,” people who purchase scarce products in bulk and then sell them at a marked-up price, have been using automated scripts or “bots” to constrain supply. Comments decrying scalpers have garnered wide reactions all across the web. In one of several instances, it was speculated that a scalper was robbed at gunpoint during a sale in Toronto, Canada.

This bot crisis is emotionally pressing because many people are stuck inside and are looking for escapism. Still, it’s also part of a longstanding problem plaguing the retail space for a while now. The world of online shopping has become like the Wild West for those with the programming know-how and the willingness to seize it.

When we start to explore the world of online scalping, the first thing that becomes apparent is how brazen many people are with this activity. There was another internet rumor, first seen on the discussion forum GameFaqs, that one user named M (we are omitting their name for privacy) was also robbed at gunpoint for bragging about their huge haul of PS5’s on social media with the caption “f@ck your feelings.”

They allegedly failed to conceal their location in the picture’s metadata, or, in another telling, bragged about where they lived, and someone allegedly came to their house and robbed them, also at gunpoint.

This story has not been substantiated, and as far as we know, it's another example of internet telephone (though similar cases have been reported in Chicago and New York).

Still, the idea that a scalper would brag about their haul of goods is quite believable because many of the most successful ones do it all the time. The YouTuber Gunner Tierno has an entire channel dedicated to botting goods online. In a camo hoodie and sunglasses, they tell users in their November 19th video on botting the newest generations of consoles that in the latest restock, he “…got seven X-boxes on [Walmart’s website] and…one PS5.”

Tierno is hardly an exception to this game — though he is one of the few willing to show his face online. A quick YouTube search shows dozens of influencers trying to gain clout by instructing viewers on how to buy a new console.

For example, a video put out by Andrew2007 on November 11th — the day before the PS5 launched — has over 150,000 viewers, and that attention is hardly a rarity. “We’ve done it again…members have secured another 2000 consoles in the past 48 hours,” bragged the group CrepChiefNotify to their followers on Instagram. Nearly 400 liked it, and the account has over 30,000 followers.

Most of these influencers are pretty adamant that they are doing nothing wrong, with opinions ranging from “look how awesome I am” to “well someone’s going to do it.” As YouTuber Mr. Pr33m told viewers in their November 21st video:

“I know many people are getting mad at people using bots, which totally makes sense…obviously in a perfect world nobody uses bots and nobody resells it. But that’s just not the case…if you want the PS5 to play or to sell, you’re gonna have to do your best, and everything you can to buy it, or else you’re just not going to.”

This attitude can occasionally be a detriment to some of the more vocal scalper communities. When CrepChiefNotify, for example, publically bragged about those 2,500 PS5’s for resale, telling people that “reselling isn’t going away,” it generated an intense backlash from the gaming community. When the group tried to create a similar order of over 1,000 Xbox Series X consoles a couple of days later, they were denied by the retailer Very due to “technical difficulties.”

With these short-lived victories aside, groups like CrepChiefNotify are correct that reselling will probably continue for the foreseeable future. This practice is not illegal, and retailers have so far shown little incentive to constrain bot usage on their end.

Online retailers may have taken some simple steps, such as limiting traffic from a single IP address. Still, such solutions have easy workarounds like IP Proxies that even novices can implement.

The developers behind the bot CandyPreme 2.0, for example, have a Beginner Guide that is very user friendly. When that fails, most scalpers belong to “cook groups,” which are online forums (e.g., typically discord or slack channels) that share the latest information and strategies.

Scalper groups may be annoying to the consumer, but, arguably, they are not detrimental to the original brands they resell. The scalpers we are referring to here are often tied to the acquisition of luxury goods, especially sneakers and tickets.

When you examine what most cook groups bought before Sony and Microsoft released the latest generation of consoles, they were overwhelmingly devoted to self-proclaimed “sneakerheads,” using bots to snag shoes such as Air Jordans. AIObot, for example, is specifically devoted to corning the market on rare sneakers and has a logo of a robot carrying a shoe.

These luxury brands ultimately benefit from scalpers because they are not trying to sell through quantity alone, but instead from the price markup that comes with prestige. Sneakerheads bring with them fervent demand, and Nike makes the object of their obsession a rarity by constricting supply.

Companies such as Nike could stop scalping by merely increasing the supply of their limited editions to make the markup less desirable, but in many ways, that’s beside the point. Fans are paying for the allure of scarcity (real or imagined), and they are using bots to do it. As Felix Salmon writes in Splinter:

“…Nike knows better than anybody that use of bots is a sign of fandom. Show me a fan who managed to get his hands on one of these sneakers at launch, directly from the website, and I’ll show you a fan who used a bot.…Nike could put the bots out of business tomorrow, if it wanted — and so when it attacks them with mere words, that’s a clear sign that the company is actually OK with their existence.”

The same can be said of next-generation consoles. The early adoption of consoles is a difficult process. They are notoriously released with many bugs and few exclusive titles, which, if current reporting is to be believed, remains true with the PS5 as well. Players are not obtaining a PS5 due to it being an optimal gaming experience — that’s months, if not years away — but for the prestige of having the thing before everyone else.

Even if retailers are not getting the profit from a scalper’s resale, they still benefit from increased anticipation and demand. When the market rate for a console online is $1000, you will think the retail rate of $399 for the digital (and $499 for the hard disk) is a steal by comparison.

The press generated over its perceived scarcity might have even piqued your interest in it in the first place. As one frustrated shopper, who was unable to secure one of two PS5’s at a California GameStop during Black Friday, told ABC News: “…there’s a huge craze, people are fighting and murdering each other, everyone’s going crazy. And then all of a sudden: Media! Press! Free advertising for this console.”

We could not find any occurrences of someone in the U.S. being killed over a PS5 sale, but the frustration in that statement, though maybe not the reality, is clearly felt by consumers. People are frustrated by the constraint in supply, and the majority of that hatred has fallen on scalpers. While men such as Tierno like to style themselves as slick entrepreneurs or even self-proclaimed Robin Hoods, the dominant narrative is that they are to blame.

The scalping craze with consoles may have hit the news with the PS5, but it actually started months earlier with the Nintendo Switch in April. When millions of Americans lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 recession, thousands flocked to the reselling space to supplement their income.

The beginning of the pandemic created a huge demand for entertainment. Reporting from Vice indicates that an emerging community used a bot called Bird Bot to snag Nintendo Switches and resell them at a markup, sometimes even relying on their stimulus checks for liquid capital.

As of right now, this field is largely focused on reselling high-end luxury goods and electronics such as sneakers, next-generation consoles, and graphic cards. These goods may be necessary for a minority of professions, but they are not essential for most Americans. It’s an annoyance (in some cases, one perpetuated by some truly desperate people) that most consumers will be able to wait out.

However, we are quickly entering a space where bots could potentially hamper people’s access to things such as food and healthcare. When, for example, developers released add-ons in April that allowed people to secure timeslots for grocery or meal delivery services, there was widespread concern that these tools would be abused.

It was straightforward to see how people could take advantage of these bots and make booking appointments more costly for those who don’t have the technical expertise or resources to use them. As Joseph Cox wrote in a separate article for Vice:

“Some of those most at risk of the coronavirus, such as the eldery, who are staying inside and may need to use food delivery services are not going to be able to use bots or scripts to help them order food, or even know that this is a technical possibility. Instead, these bots may disproportionately benefit those who do have the technical know-how to do so, leaving others behind.”

As essential services become more online — both because of COVID and due to our world’s increasingly interconnected nature — scalping might turn into price gouging. We could be headed for a world where firing up a bot becomes the cost of doing business online, but that terrifying future remains within the realm of conjecture. Its inevitability or avoidance will depend on the practices of businesses, consumers, and governments.

Alex Has Opinions 12/3/20 Alex Has Opinions 12/3/20

The Rise & Fall of Evil Paddington

The Twitter handle that blew up & the company that ignored it.

(This story was originally published on Medium).

“oh btw pay no mind to that person in my basement. i took care of them,” tweeted out Evil Paddington on November 23, 2020. In another tweet, they would later clarify that by took care of, they meant murder.

The account, which is run by actress Elsie K. Fisher, tweeted out dozens of similar comments, many of which earned tens of thousands of likes in a matter of hours. This humorous bit may seem like some harmless fun (and it is). Still, the tweets also signify a much larger pattern of a parody account using the clout of another brand to up their engagement while that original brand sits cluelessly on the sidelines.

Fisher was parodying the character Paddington: The sweet bear that was first introduced in the Paddington book series by writer Michael Bond and later made even more popular by StudioCanal’s 2014 and 2017 movies. Paddington's persona is that of an overly saccharine bear who solves his problems through kindness. His mantra to the world is that “if we’re kind and polite, the world will be right.”

This affable personality is rumored to extend to their official Twitter account as well, where an allegedly leaked image of their guidelines instructs posters to avoid cursing, to not talk about politics, and never to insinuate that Paddington doesn’t actually like marmalade. A typical Paddington Bear tweet is of “innocent” things such as the question, “Shall I have a sprinkling of pumpkin spice or cinnamon on my hot cocoa this afternoon?”

It seemed only natural that this brand would eventually be subverted — this is the Internet after all — and soon Elsie K. Fisher of “Eighth Grade” (2018) fame spent the day of November 23 posting expletives and political statements in direct contrast to the alleged guidelines. “the k in my follower count stands for kill,” they tweeted sardonically.

Some people loved the tweets calling them the funniest thing they’ve seen, while others were upset that it disrupted their image of the Paddington brand. As Twitter user Grogu Lucas claimed of their mother’s reaction: “This is horrible. Absolutely not okay. No. No no. Paddington is a nice boy!!”

Ultimately, Elsie K. Fisher would ax the Evil Paddington persona a day later, uploading a facetious in memoriam of all her best tweets as the personality, but not before upping her follower account in the thousands, possibly even in the tens of thousands. According to the Wayback Machine, her follower account was sitting above 43,000 followers in mid-October and jumped up to nearly 74,000 followers on November 24 — the day they retired the Evil Paddington bit.

Parody accounts are not new on Twitter and have been well-documented. Nihilist Arby’s (founded in 2015), for example, is an account dedicated to making unruly humor while pretending to be an official Arby’s handle. In a tweet made on June 24, they joked about how a recent protest had burned down an Arby’s, writing: “Hi everyone. How’s the week going? pls enjoy burning the arbys.”

Elsie K. Fisher’s Evil Paddington replicated a very similar type of humor, except her bit was only for a brief period of time. She monetized the attention coming from the leaked slideshow for all its worth by creating some funny, albeit narrowly focused, content.

There is a term for a small-scale brand in business that only applies to a narrow scope of people — it’s called a “micro-brand.” This term has traditionally been used to refer to high-end products such as watches that only have a limited customer base. However, the rise of micro-targeting through social media has allowed any good to be marketed as a micro-brand, and that applies especially to IP. Twitter is filled with people adopting fake personas that only fill a small niche and then dropping them the moment they outlive their usefulness.

Sometimes these brands are serious. It’s quite common for people to change the name of their profile to reflect the latest moment in politics or the news. Following the death of George Floyd, many users, for example, added the phrase “Black Lives Matter” to their handles. The same can be seen with many conservative influencers who in the 2020 election cycle added the phrase “Stop The Steal” to their handles, which was in reference to their so-far unsubstantiated belief that Joe Biden has stolen the election.

Often, however, these microbrands are on the funnier side. Another common trend during the most recent election was for users to claim they represented “The John Wilkes Booth Project.” This naming scheme was not glorifying the assassin of the United States’ 16th president, but rather parodying the bipartisan “Lincoln Project,” which was a political action committee aimed at stoping the reelection of Donald Trump.

These microbrands are notoriously short-lived, but they can be extended when the parody account receives attention from the original IP. In the case of Evil Paddington, the original Paddington brand (owned by Vivendi) did not interact with them, and they have so far not responded to any of our requests for comment. However, it’s not uncommon for major brands to engage with parody handles or stan accounts to make a story go viral.

When Nihilist Arby’s was hacked in 2018, for example, the company used their contacts in Twitter to assist the profile owner, Brendan Kelly, in getting control of their account again. It earned the company a lot of good press and positive engagement that is hard to purchase from advertising alone.

From this perspective, the Paddington brand’s refusal to engage with Evil Paddington seems like a missed opportunity. One comment from their evil counterpoint garnered over 100,000 likes, which is well above the engagement the Paddington account manages to achieve in a typical month or even the last six months combined.

The differing tones of these two accounts probably generated a fair amount of hesitancy from the brand manager, but with that indecision came lost engagement as well as a missed chance to preach the “kindness through adversity” doctrine that Paddington is all about. It’s so rare for a company to be able to talk about kindness and for it actually to be on-brand.

The fact that Vivendi missed this moment speaks to the priorities (or lack thereof) that exist among many of our favorite brands.

Alex Has Opinions 11/16/20 Alex Has Opinions 11/16/20

Gently Ripping Apart ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’

Just a click to the left and the queer classic unravels

(This story was originally published on Medium).
I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) in high school as a closeted queer. I did so at the dead of night on the family computer. It was one of those films I would secretly watch over and over again. I loved it all — the outfits, the songs, the red lipstick. I was enamored with the villain Dr. Frank-N-Furter (played by Tim Curry) as they terrorized a suburban straight, white couple out of their heterosexuality. It was a powerful experience for me, one of many on my gradual road towards recognizing my own gender dysphoria.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not so much a movie as it is a phenomenon. The campy science fiction musical has been a facet of queer culture since the late 1970s. The movie and the play, the latter of which is referred to as The Rocky Horror Show, have had a deep impact on pop culture. The movie has enjoyed repeated midnight showing for over forty years, and unlike a lot of cult classics, it is one surrounded by audience participation and ritual.

As LGBTQIA+ representation has increased, people have started to criticize this movie’s more problematic elements. Dr. Frank-N-Furter has started to be seen less as a figure of sexual awakening and exploration. Instead, he falls more into a larger trope of trans “deviancy” that ties directly into decades of discrimination on the Silver Screen and off.

The world of Rocky Horror clearly matters to many people, and this appreciation has much to do with its context. The original play came about in London in 1973, when there wasn’t as much acceptance for either LGBTQIA+ people or sexual empowerment. Same-sex marriage wasn’t legalized in either the US or the UK until the 2010s, and the concept of monogamy was very much the dominant cultural narrative (and remains so today).

The Rocky Horror Show cut across these tensions by boldly talking about sex and queerness — all within a fun, campy package that satirized the B-movies of the 1950s. Many of the songs were overtly sexual in a way that doesn’t blame the characters for “giving in to temptation.” Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon), a straightlaced couple from the burbs, each have their own sexual awakenings that remain intact by the time the film closes. “Touch-a touch-a touch-a touch me, I wanna be dirty,” belts out Susan Sarandon in the middle of the film, advocating for an assertive form of sexuality that was by no means commonplace in 70s America.

Also, the film has a lot of subtle and not so subtle nods to queer culture. When the character Rocky (Peter Hinwood) and Dr. Frank-N-Furter go to “bed” for the first time, wedding bells ring in the background. The idea of same-sex marriage was not widely accepted in America during this time. In the 1972 case, Baker v. Nelson, Americans Mr. Baker and Mr. McConnell infamously had their application for marriage rejected by the Supreme Court in a one-sentence dismissal. It would take decades for same-sex marriage to receive political recognition, making the allusion to queer marriage in Rocky Horror a radical act for the time.

There is also Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who is first introduced to the audience as a bold, gender non-conforming individual in the song Sweet Transvestite, singing “I’m just a sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania.” Dr. Frank-N-Furter's unabashed confidence was, at the time, a rare type of representation for a trans character in mass media. Their commanding presence made them a fixture in pop culture that many people have since wanted to replicate. As trans writer Alice Collins wrote in Bloody Disgusting of their own experience with Rocky Horror:

“The first depiction of a trans person I ever saw was Frank. I never thought they were freaky or weird. They looked like fun, and I enjoyed that they didn’t care what anyone else thought and how they were unabashedly themselves. I thought it was so cool and wanted to be like that: giving zero cares as to what anyone thought of me. It gave me strength to grow a thicker skin and try more things out of the ordinary; I looked up to Frank. For the longest time before seeing the movie I’d always wished I could switch between gender at will and it was really cool to see someone who could at least on the surface do so before my eyes.”

The text was something countless queer people gravitated towards, and that sense of belonging created a safe space for some members of the LGBTQIA+ community. While the film initially flopped, it became a cult hit shared in Midnight showings across America. People regularly attended screenings where audience members spoke back to the characters on the screen. It was also common for fans to cosplay as their favorites. Rocky Horror acting troupes likewise formed with the job of repeating the dialogue of the characters' on-screen. This further facilitated a conversation between the audience and the film.

This festive veneer gave people social permission to dress up in gender-nonconforming clothing, a rarity in US culture outside of Halloween. As Larry Viezel, president of The Rocky Horror Picture Show Official Fan Club told the BBC:

“I know of a lot of people whose lives were saved by this movie. Especially for those in the LGBT community, it’s a place where they could be themselves and find people who were their family. I don’t want to give that up. I want people to still have a place to be.”

For the longest time, there were many parts of the country where this ephemeral production was one of the only queer spaces that existed. For example, I went to a college in upstate New York, where the nearest queer bar was a fifty-minute drive away. Still, every month the local movie theater would put on a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was much more accessible to me. That was in the 2010s, and this sentiment only held more true in the 80s and 90s.

I think it would be shorted-sighted to dismiss these spaces when they have been key in helping many people assert their identities. This fact is especially true when the LGBTQIA+ community has traditionally had so few non-bar-related scenes for queer people to explore.

Simultaneously, however, we must recognize that the Rocky Horror Picture Show is not a flawless text. It’s a wholly transphobic movie, and many people have felt excluded from it rather than accepted.

Rocky Horror relies on a lot of cultural touchstones that are antiquated to many of us now. Some of these still linger in the cultural memory, such as drive-in movie theaters (i.e., the song Science Fiction/Double Feature) or how Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s name is a reference to a movie theater hotdog.

Other references, though, don’t land anymore. When Dr. Frank-N-Furter unveils his creation Rocky — a muscular man he Frankensteined together through “science” — he tells his guests that Rocky has “the Charles Atlas seal of approval.” This was in reference to a real-life bodybuilder of the same name. Frank-N-Furter then sings an entire song (i.e., I Can Make You a Man) that lampoons the body-builders exercise program adverts. Although well understood to the viewers of the 70s, this reference doesn't make sense to the modern-day viewer.

Part of this slapdash of memes has to do with the fact that the movie’s writer, Richard O’Brien, really was not trying to make a serious plot. He created several of the play’s songs first and then organized a plot around them with stage director and friend Jim Sharman. O’Brien retrospectively admits he drew heavily upon pastiches of US Pop culture.

Some of these tropes, however, were far more insidious than the satirizing of old commercials. One of the biggest problematic tropes in the film has to do with consent, which at the time had just started to enter the popular lexicon. The year The Rocky Horror Picture Show aired, the concept of “date rape” entered the national conversation via Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. It would not be until 1993 that marital rape became a crime in every state in the Union. This cruel reality meant that it wasn’t considered unusual in the 1970s for consent to be murky in US pop culture and real-life (side note — most of history has been garbage).

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a product of its time in the sense that it often lacked consent in many of its scenes. For example, Brad and Janet first come to Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s castle to use the doctor’s telephone, and instead, he has them stripped down to their undergarments. Brad “decides” to accept this situation, but only as a transactional means to an end.

Later, the mad scientist separately visits both Brad and Janet in bed under the guise of pretending to be the other’s partner. He effectively tricks each member of the couple into having sex with him, and although they do later consent, the initial engagement is quite predatory. This point is particularly troublesome as Trans people are often falsely accused of “trapping” their partners into a sexual relationship.

Frank-N-Furter’s relationship with Rocky is likewise extremely problematic. Rocky is born halfway through the film and is only 7 hours old by the movie's end. He only has “part” of a human brain and moves throughout the world in a child-like way. The power dynamic of a creator and their created makes it inappropriate for Frank-N-Furter to bed Rocky under any circumstances, but Rocky’s young mindset makes their relationship borderline pedophilic. Again, conservatives frequently conflate transgender people with pedophilia. As recently as this year, conservative political activist Angela Stanton-King tweeted about how she believes the LGBTQ community “sexualizes children.”

These tropes in Rocky Horror are hurtful because there is a long, bitter history of depicting gender-nonconforming people in pop culture (and in real life) as deviants and even murderers. Some of this legacy goes back to the Hays Codes, which was a policy that sanitized American media and, among many other things, prevented LGBTQIA+ people from being portrayed positively in films. Queer people were often cast as the villains, such as Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho (1960). Even after the code was axed in 1968, these tropes continued in texts such as Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995).

As a predatory, cannibalistic murderer, Frank-N-Furter definitely fits into this mold, and this representation did hurt people. As Caelyn Sandel wrote in The Mary Sue on their feelings of seeing Rocky Horror:

“That’s not what young-me saw when I looked at Frank and characters like him. I saw a cruel, unapologetic gender-nonconforming person, grossly over-sexualized and inconsiderate to others, and I said, I can’t try to be a woman — people will think I’m him.”

This is by no means a minority opinion, with dozens of writers making similar statements throughout the years. It’s great that so many queer Rocky Horror fans were able to carve out space for themselves with this film, but we have to recognize that the text itself was not always the shining beacon of progress that we imagined it to be.

Writer Richard O’Brien wrote Rocky Horror as someone with a fair amount of privilege. While his text has reverberated with many people with gender dysphoria, his own position is rather dismissive of gender identity. When asked in 2016 of their opinion of Germaine Greer’s anti-trans comments, they said:

“…feminists [who] say that because someone has surgery that doesn’t make them a woman…I think I agree with that. I agree with Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries. You can’t be a woman. You can be an idea of a woman.”

O’Brien, who describes themselves as third gender, then goes on to explain that binary trans people are “in the middle” of the gender spectrum. This comment was supposed to be comforting to fans, but ends up sounding detached and somewhat cruel. Again, these comments were made in 2016. In 1975 — an age far less progressive than today — it’s doubtful that a not-yet-out O’Brien put as much sensitivity into making the original Rocky Horror Show.

The film certainly created a space for LGBTQIA+ people, but I am not convinced that the original text was intended as such in all the ways it is remembered. There is a lot of ink spilled on this film’s queer subtext. Some of it seems genuine, such as Frank-N-Futer’s lab coat, which has a pink triangle on it, symbolizing the persecution of queer people during the Holocaust.

Yet, some of this imagery may have just been coincidental. The birth of the character Rocky, for example, takes place inside a vat Dr. Frank-N-Furter fills with each color of the rainbow, which has been linked by many critics and commentators to the pride flag. Rocky Horror, however, originally aired in 1975. Artist Gilbert Baker created the first Pride Flag several years later. It debuted in San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza for Gay Pride Day on June 25, 1978. It seems very doubtful that the film’s set designer, an Australian named Brian Thomson, who was versed with American culture through film tropes, was keyed in enough to American gay culture to understand a symbol three years before it debuted. It’s far more likely that the rainbow was referencing the peace movement of the 60s and earlier.

It’s also not clear that Dr. Frank-N-Furter was written from a place of empowerment. We already discussed how they fall into a problematic trope of trans villainy. Writer O’Brien described them in an interview as “a cross between Ivan the Terrible and Cruella de Ville of Walt Disney’s 101 Dalmatians.” These are two people effectively remembered in the zeitgeist as monsters.

And yet, Dr. Frank-N-Furter is not entirely hateable either. He is a fun and witty character, and that makes them a great watch. Sometimes this is done voyeuristically by straight, cis-gendered people who want to gawk at the gender-nonconformity. Still, the murder and cannibalism aside, Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s character is also constructed quite empathetically. In the song I’m going home, they describe how they were rejected from their original birthplace. They have since then been drifting aimlessly through the cosmos, singing:

Everywhere it’s been the same, feeling
Like I’m outside in the rain, wheeling
Free, to try and find a game, dealing
Cards for sorrow, cards for pain

This feeling of isolation is a very familiar feeling to queer people. Its inclusion makes sense, given that writer O’Brien probably had to grapple with a fair amount of dysphoria as a genderfluid person. It’s just not coupled with the self-acceptance we have grown to expect in modern media now that LGBTQIA+ people have become more integrated into society.

It’s a transphobic characterization written by a self-hating trans-person longing to be accepted but not finding it, even within the confines of his own imagination. This dissonance creates an interesting subtext about what the trans experience has been like for many people throughout recent history. As Cáel M. Keegan writes in Flowjournal.org:

“If we look closely, we find that what at first glance looks like a nonsensical film about an insane cannibalistic transgender scientist who tortures innocent people is simultaneously a story about a transgender alien (Dr. Frank N. Furter) who has left his home planet looking for a place where his queer desires will be accepted. He travels from planet to planet, but they are all the same, and he is consistently rejected. Finally, he lands on Earth and discovers how to create life. He uses these powers to create a human companion for himself, Rocky Horror, but this cross-species relationship offends the aliens from his home planet, who kill him.”

Dr. Frank-N-Furter is born and then dies in a world that hates him. Those emotions of self-pity and despair are buried underneath the light “fun” of the entire movie. They are feelings O’Brien was undoubtedly very familiar with when he wrote the film. He has repeatedly described himself as someone who clung to humor and flair as a defense mechanism. As he told the New Zealand Magazine Stuff about growing up as queer:

“If you were gay, you couldn’t tell anybody — you’d get prison time for getting a bit of rock and roll. And being transgender was worse because you don’t fit into anything, you couldn’t explain it to anybody. So, I lived in my head and developed my imagination, to some extent. And now, here we are.”

This sense of isolation may have been demanded in the 70s when self-hatred in queerdom was the status quo, but frankly, we do not have to accept that state of affairs anymore.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter never seems able to return home. They die when the movie’s true villain, Riff Raff (also played by Richard O’Brien), guns down not only Frank-N-Furter but also characters Columbia and Rocky. This is done because these characters never “gave” him enough attention. “They never liked me,” screams Riff Raff — as Frank-N-Furter becomes yet another gender-nonconforming person gunned down by a repressed incel’s rage.

When Fox updated the movie in 2016 under the title The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let's Do the Time Warp Again, the same thing happens — Frank-N-Furter still dies under the same circumstances. The thing I found the most strange with this mostly inferior sequel was how little was changed about the overall narrative: Brad and Janet remain a straightlaced, heterosexual couple from the burbs, the dialogue and musical scores are largely unaltered, and, again, Frank-N-Furter still dies.

It seems odd that so much reverence is paid to this text when the original creators never had it for their source material. They didn’t bother to tell a faithful story that tapped into a realistic understanding of 70s Americana. They drew upon misremembered tropes. The film was made on a shoestring budget and shot within a period of only six weeks.

Why do we have to treat this flash-in-the-pan like some sacred, unalterable text?

There are a lot of changes that could be made — both of the stage production and in any future film adaptations — that would easily make this text more inclusive: you could cast all of the characters as genderfluid (and have them played by trans actors), which would certainly alter the subtext of Brad and Janet’s journey; you could tweak the dialogue to make it more centered on consent; you could very easily make Frank-N-Furter more sympathetic by shifting the primary villain role over to Riff Raff; and finally, you could make it, so at least one of your textually trans characters finds community and acceptance at the end of the film, not just being gunned down by an incel.

Cinema has gone through a lot of changes since the 1970s, and while the acceptance of Frank-N-Furter may have been seen as an impossibility then, even among its queer creators, that certainly isn’t the case anymore. Spaces have been created for such representation, making The Rocky Horror Picture Show antiquated by comparison.

We need a story where a trans character doesn’t need to resort to villainy to find acceptance, and if we aren’t going to find it in Rocky Horror, then we need to look elsewhere on this planet filled with meaning.

Alex Has Opinions 11/10/20 Alex Has Opinions 11/10/20

Letting Go of Your Problematic Faves in Pop Culture

The art of loving problematic things.

(This story was originally published on Medium).

For years, I have watched the 2007 film Stardust about a man named Tristan Thorn (Charlie Cox) and his fantastical journey to retrieve a fallen star and give it to a woman in his village named Victoria (Sienna Miller). The movie was something I repeatedly watched during some of the darkest moments of my life. In high school or college, whenever I would have a particularly bad day, I would put on Stardust and get whisked away to the kingdom of Stormhold.

Stardust is a work I nostalgically love, but it has also aged terribly. The film doesn’t treat the women in it particularly well. Victoria is portrayed negatively as a woman who is simply “using” Tristan for his possessions. The shooting star, which in the land of Stormhold turns into a woman named Yvaine (Claire Danes), is chained up by Tristan. He still intends to bring her to his love Victoria as an object even though Yvaine clearly has sentience. Stardust also has a cross-dressing character named Captain Shakespeare (Robert De Niro), who I have begun to perceive less humorously as I have acknowledged my own gender dysphoria.

I criticize films a lot as a culture writer, which generates a fair amount of defensiveness. People can get attached to the products they consume, and I am no different in that equation. There are films that I love, which produce a lot of anxiety in me once I realize how problematic the text is or how malicious their creators were to those around them.

How do you love a film like that?

The answer, like a lot of things in life, comes in embracing the dissonance. You have to accept your feelings for the text, while also recognizing that it is deeply hurtful to those around you. I think once you accept this tension, not only will you figure out a lot of strategies to feel less anxious, but you’ll open yourself up to new creators and works of art.

When texts are discovered to be “bad,” there tends to be a lot of strict lines drawn in the sand between whether someone can continue to enjoy that thing or not.

There will be those who say that you should be able to separate the text from its original environment and authorship. This approach is sometimes referred to as “Death of The Author” after the essay La mort de l’auteur by critic Roland Barthes.

Others allege that such a separation is impossible. Some will go even further and assert that by supporting a problematic author’s work, you contribute to the material oppression of those they discriminate against. This argument is especially compelling when the author is still alive and actively harming communities who are marginalized.

When the movie Ender’s Game came out in 2013, for example, there was a major call to boycott it by pro-LGBTQIA+ activists. The author of the book Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card, had been overtly discriminatory towards the LGBTQIA+ community for years: he wrote an op-ed threatening to “destroy” the government if it legalized same-sex marriage; he alleged that most gay people were the product of grooming, and so much more. Given that the movie increased the sales of Card’s novel (Ender’s Game sat on the New York Times best seller’s list for weeks in 2013), many were understandably not convinced by the Death of the Author argument. They encouraged people to cut ties with both the author and the text.

The problem with the “cutting ties” approach is that it doesn’t honor our emotional reality. As much as we might want to banish all things problematic, the feelings we have for a text do not go away simply because we have started to see the dilemmas it creates more clearly. This difficulty compounds when it’s not merely about the products we consume but also a core facet of our identity.

For example, countless people invested years in the Harry Potter franchise by the now problematic author J.K. Rowling: these fans organized annual parties, wrote fanfiction rooted in the world, and even ran organizations and nonprofits themed around the Harry Potter-verse. The divestment question becomes very difficult in these circumstances because if it is an all-or-nothing proposition, then groups like the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) have to undo years of organizing that, before this moment, might have been doing a lot of tangible good.

It’s not as simple for everyone as just reading another book. This dissonance is why many fans of problematic works push away all criticism and instead draw on the “Death of the Author” theory as a source of comfort. They are looking for an excuse that lets them still love their problematic favorite, but what they really need is an off-ramp.

Itcan be emotional to cut ties with a problematic work because the bad we see in it seems so pressing and overwhelming. In the case of J.K. Rowling, many would argue that ignoring the author’s bigotry is unacceptable and that you, as a consumer, have a moral imperative to boycott her work. Rowling is currently spreading very toxic transphobia, and every purchase you make of her work increases her ability to continue to do so.

This road can seem scary because if we care about stopping bigotry, it becomes very easy to spiral about all the things we must do. We start to cut ties before we have really processed why or how.

However, I would argue that starting the process of divestment does not have to be a binary choice. There are ways for you to start building yourself an off-ramp with a problematic author or text while still going back to it for the sake of nostalgia.

Some practical examples include:

Stop buying the book, especially popular ones like Harry Potter and Ender’s Game. These works have sold millions of copies worldwide. I guarantee you that a copy is sitting on a friend’s bookshelf somewhere or that you can rent it out from a local library.
Divest from the author. Please don’t amplify their platform: unlike their public profiles, unsubscribe from their channels, and cancel their newsletters. These actions will go along way in reducing their influence.
Stop buying official merch. There are plenty of indie creators who are selling fantastic things under that author’s IP, and they need your money more than a problematic creator (see the vendor Man up). For organizations, this also applies to licensing agreements with the main IP. You do not need to support branding that bolsters the resources of a bad creator or text.
Look for better work. Your favorite author did not invent many of the tropes you enjoy. Someone out there has made a work that isn’t so cringeworthy.
And finally, stop making excuses for the author and the problems people point out in the text itself.

These are only suggestions, and it’s best you pick the ones that work for you rather than trying to accomplish all of them at once. However, in starting to give yourself this space, you are learning to process a life beyond this work. This allows you to grieve for the loss of an identity that is now transforming.

When you recognize that a text is problematic, what you realize is a tension that usually has always been there. For example, while J.K. Rowling is being called out for her problematic opinions now, that subtext has existed in the Harry Potter-verse for a while. She has repeatedly been called out for how her characters’ often fit bad stereotypes (see Native American wizards, Nagini, etc.). As Shubhangi Misra wrote in The Print:

“The wizarding world first created by Rowling is of, for and by White people. I don’t think there’s much to argue there. The few non-White characters she does introduce in the books are underdeveloped lazy additions that highlight her prejudice.”

This recognition can be painful because it forces us to embrace the reality that our devotion to this text has harmed other people. Countless people have consumed an American classic only to witness stereotypical representations that make them feel lesser than for watching it. We, the fans, helped perpetuate that pain, and reevaluating a text is, in many ways, grappling with that reality.

The defensiveness that comes with shouting down criticism is usually, in part, from a kneejerk reaction to preserves someone’s sense of purity. They think of themselves as a “good person,” and, by acknowledging that a thing they like is “bad,” they are being pushed to embrace a complexity that challenges that sense of self. In Naomi Slater’s fantastic essay about decoupling white maledom from open-source tech culture, they framed this identity crisis as a battle between an in-group and an out-group:

“This is about who these people believe open source is for, and by extension, their own self-identity. Indeed, when people are challenged to explain themselves, you get nonsense and cognitive dissonance. People are being openly hypocritical, with no apparent awareness. The closer they get to confronting the truth, the more likely they are to break down in anger and confusion.”

She uses this to talk about tech, but this can apply to really any subculture, especially nerd culture, which thoroughly intersects with tech. Criticism generates these responses because it asks people to expand their group to others who have been historically excluded, and by extension, to acknowledge that their previous identity was (and probably still is) exclusionary.

However, if you want to have a relationship with a problematic text, then it means that you have to embrace that dissonance and accept that these new truths are valid. You have to start recognizing the flaws in the work, and as you do this, you will strangely become less interested in how this work makes you a good or a bad person.

The text just is.

The good news is that the deconstruction of its flaws, ones you had, and hopefully are learning to shed, creates the space for new art. We learn to see what was wrong with the earlier work and strive to do better. We strive to have a wizarding novel that actually validates its queer romances in the text (e.g., Carry On, In Other Lands); a magical epic that doesn’t rely on played out racialized stereotypes (e.g., Children of Blood and Bone, Black Leopard, etc.); and a story that embraces the trans characters J.K. Rowling scorns (e.g., Dreadnought). We break tropes and create new ones — all in the hope that the next iteration will be different.

And soon, you can hardly remember the last time that you have gone back to consume that old, flawed, beloved title of your youth because your love for it has transformed into so many other things.

I forgot to watch Stardust last year. It was the first time in a decade that I had not watched it during Halloween, but skipping the film was not part of a concerted effort to watch another movie. I just started consuming other things because criticizing Stardust gave me the incentive to look for better art that didn’t frustrate me when I consumed it.

I don’t feel like I am a “bad” person for mining enjoyment in the past from this deeply flawed movie. I have started to see my love for cultural products less like a dichotomy and more like a spectrum that waxes and wanes over time. You can both grow to dislike a text and simultaneously embrace that it had a major impact on your life — one that you still think back on fondly.

In the end, you love a problematic thing with open eyes as you put it down at your own pace.

For some people, it’s the first time a problem becomes perceptible. For others, it’s more gradual. You watch it over and over again, noting flaw after flaw until eventually, you don’t want to do it anymore because something even more precious has taken its place.

It has exploded like a shooting star in the atmosphere, shattering to the far corners of the Earth for all to admire.

Alex Has Opinions 11/8/20 Alex Has Opinions 11/8/20

The Secret to Dealing with Political Uncertainty

How to make the future slightly more bearable.

(Photo by Jonathan Sebastiao on Unsplash)

(This story was originally published on Medium).

I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died. I was sitting inside the AMC movie theater in Georgetown. I had just finished watching the 2016 meta superhero comedy Deadpool, and everyone in the audience was turning on their phones.

From behind me, several students gleefully announced that “Scalia was dead.” I remember walking slightly behind them as we exited the theater. They were speculating how much this was going to change society. Obama would pick this seat now, and then when Hillary Clinton became president, she would replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg with someone forty years younger. These turn of events, they cheered, would secure the Court for progressives for almost a generation.

Four long, painful years later, we know that the exact opposite has happened. Mitch McConnell refused to nominate Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, and now a president Trump has been allowed to nominate three Justices. He has consequently pushed the court so far right that even moderate Senators are talking about removing the Filibuster and stacking the Court.

I can guarantee you that the political reality you are so certain of at this moment will not come to pass — at least not exactly as you imagine it. The secret to surviving to that hazy, indeterminate future involves learning to separate fear from legitimate worry, to freak out when necessary, and to plan accordingly.

Yes, Freak Out

The first mistake people often make with drastic events is to assume everything will continue as normal. It’s a cliche at this point to talk about the Holocaust-inspired passage First they came by pastor Martin Niemöller. The poetic passage discusses how people’s indifference to the Nazi Party’s targeting of various groups allowed them to divide and conquer. By the time they went after the author, there was no one left to speak out for him:

“First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

The poem is semi-autobiographical as Niemöller was a fervent anti-Communist pastor who was initially supportive of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power but eventually ended up in a concentration camp himself.

This desire to minimize threats and assume everything will be okay is often referred to in psychology as “normalcy bias.” It is a prevalent feature during looming moments of crisis. As war reporter Janine Di Giovanni wrote in her article America Shows Troubling Warning Signs of a Slide Into Civil War:

“I always ask people caught in conflicts the same question: “Why did it take you so long to leave?” Or “Why didn’t you leave when you had the chance?” The answer is nearly always the same: because we never thought it would happen.”

Bad things occur when people assume everything will go back to normal. So overreacting politically to disruption is not actually an unwise strategy— it is better for your fears of fascism to retrospectively be proven silly than correct.

There is a compelling body of evidence that the U.S. public’s early reaction to Trump’s Muslim ban delayed its implementation. Outrage to the Republican Party trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act likewise slowed its destruction — though efforts are still underway. The same can be said of the public toppling dictatorial leaders such as Park Geun-hye in South Korea and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran. Effective political mobilization does curb and sometimes even reverses unwelcome changes.

The problem comes, not from volunteering too much, organizing in the streets too vehemently, or donating too many dollars to progressive causes you believe in (continue to do those things), but when we over-inflate the initial response. You see, normalcy bias can work in the other direction too. When there is a political upset (and we have been livening in one for the past four years), many tend to initially succumb to “catastrophic thinking,” where we imagine that a bad scenario will rollout immediately, but then go back to our baseline went that doesn’t happen.

This scenario played out following the election of Donald Trump, where there was an understandable fear that the country would devolve into outright fascism. Since this didn't happen immediately, many started to downplay his administration’s more terrible aspects because the reality they were experiencing didn’t meet the apocalyptic scenario they’d built up in their head. In the middle of his first term, the common talking point came to be that he was more or less a traditional Republican.

‘Once a populist, Trump governs like a conservative Republican,’ starts an article by John Wagner and Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post.

‘Trump isn’t changing the Republican Party. The Republican Party is changing Trump,’ is the title of another charged, WaPo editorial. This time by Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins.

Yet, as his response to the coronavirus has shown, there are many areas where his leadership was catastrophic. It just took us longer than 100 days to reach that point. The assumption that politics would go forward more or less as usual allowed the administration to advance some truly terrible policies that did not receive a whole lot of attention, such as the dismantling of an EPA regulation that protects the nation’s rivers from coal waste, the dissolution of a committee meant to safeguard America’s voting systems, and the dismantling of the White House’s pandemic response team.

Again, it is less dangerous to overestimate a political problem than to underestimate it, but “freaking out” cannot be done indefinitely without proper management. To avoid burnout and thought distortions such as catastrophic thinking, you have to go further than merely worry about an impending problem. You have to assess where you stand in this equation as well.

Understand Your Privilege

Not everyone is affected by a bad scenario equally. When the Coronavirus first swept the world, it was a common talking point that we were all in this together. Yet as the pandemic worsened already existing inequalities, people quickly began to sour on the idea that celebrities and wealthy business people were experiencing this problem at the same capacity as everyone else. Some people were out of work and without healthcare, while celebrities sang John Lennon’s Imagine in their mansions, and Kim Kardashian planned an island vacation for her birthday.

This is what liberals refer to as a privilege, which essentially means that when the “shit hit the fan,” on average, you are not as impacted as other groups of people. For some people, these last four years under Trump have been a hellish nightmare. They have involved the deportation of their loved ones, the uprooting of their homes, and the loss of their rights. For others, it has only been an affront to their sense of decency. Trump's actions have hurt their conception of what America is, but not really impacted them financially or physically.

In the context of America in 2020, where do you stand in this equation?

Have you been materially affected these last four years, or has your financial standing increased?
Are you imminently at risk of getting deported or imprisoned?
Do you currently work for a company that will back your health insurance, regardless of changes in national legislation?
Do you rely on a political right that has only been awarded to you very recently (i.e., within the last ten years)? And if so, are there political rights you currently lack?
Do you belong to a minority group that receives ongoing acts of harassment and brutality within your community?

I ask these questions because if you are not materially affected, this doesn’t make the political moment any less bad, but it does mean that this probably isn’t about you directly. If you are a rich white woman worried about the prospect of losing your right to an abortion, I agree that that is rightfully terrifying, but the people who will be denied the most access are women of color. If you are a wealthy gay man consumed by the dread that the state may nullify your marriage, I agree that that is unjust, but you probably will be able to afford healthcare regardless.

As we have briefly mentioned, there is a type of thought distortion known as “catastrophizing.” This is when you assume the worse will come to pass or that you falsely believe that you are in a worse situation than you really are. I see very privileged people do this when they talk about the future, especially when it comes to social media. The phrase “dooms-scrolling,” or the habit of obsessively researching bad news on your feed, has become popular to describe a type of catastrophizing that leads to self-harm. You aren’t researching the news to help yourself in the political battle against fascism. You are doing it to increase your sense of dread. As psychologist Dr. Amelia Aldao told NPR:

“Our minds are wired to look out for threats. The more time we spend scrolling, the more we find those dangers, the more we get sucked into them, the more anxious we get.”

Your anxiety over the future might be drowning out the concerns of people whose lives are impacted in the here and now. Please dial back the calls to move to Canada or to buy a bunker and realize that you are in the monetary position to help a lot of people. The act of reducing your anxiety will give you the space to share your resources with those who really need them.

In the end, you need to develop a plan for action that is not linked to your fear of what will happen to you specifically, because as a privileged person, by the time that happens, it will already be too late. In this situation, you are Niemöller, not the trade unionist fearing the Nazis will knock down their door.

Reducing Anxiety Is a Must

If the risks I mentioned are real to you (see the bullet list above), then I think trying to reduce your anxiety and fear is still a must. There are many tools out there that can assist with mitigating anxiety, though they admittedly are constrained significantly by cost. Selfcare applications such as Headspace and Betterhelp can get into the range of hundreds of dollars a month, though there are some slightly cheaper alternatives such as Wysa.

These tools, however, are not a substitute for success in the realm of politics. As you are well aware, meditation and self-care cannot replace healthcare and rent. It would be the height of arrogance to assert that one person’s actions can ever be enough to mitigate unforeseen events — that is, the delusion of the privileged. People cannot change their circumstances like you would a piece of clothing.

For example, it has become a common question in the cultural zeitgeist to monolithically ask why “the Jews” did not simply leave Nazi Germany before the Holocaust ramped up? Many paint the Jewish people during this time as susceptible to normalcy bias. Numerous Jews attempted to wait out the Nazi Regime, as they had done for oppressive regimes throughout European history, and this time things did not go their way.

Obviously, this framing is an oversimplification of the social, monetary, and political barriers that existed. While some Jews did leave the country, especially after a pogrom known as Kristallnacht (or the Night of Broken Glass), the majority were trapped because they possessed neither the money nor the documentation to go to another country. It is not so easy to pack up your life and leave, especially when “civilized” countries such as the United States and Great Britain neglected to process the paperwork for thousands of Jewish immigrants and limited the number of refugees overall.

The same can be said of the current situation when rich people talk about moving to Canada or New Zealand in response to climate change or increased political instability. They are ultimately engaging in a very privileged form of catastrophizing, as they hoard resources to prepare for the worst possible scenario playing out inside their minds. Most people cannot afford to do that, especially right now, when the world has closed many of its borders in response to the coronavirus.

The majority of people cannot individually plan to protect themselves from all of the world's problems.

Yet it would be best if you still planned, and there is plenty of research saying the act of making a plan has huge benefits, but we need to recognize the inequity present in uncertainty. Some people's presents are uncertain, not just their futures. And while very privileged people may be able to bemoan every bad thing coming in the future, that is only because they have an inordinate amount of time and resources to do so. For everyone else, that amount of fear and anxiety is dysfunctional. How could anyone have the capacity to worry about a problem ten years down the line when they struggle to pay their bills now?

While a rich person reducing their anxiety allows them to maximize their gains (and in some rare cases, their philanthropy), I maintain that it is an act of defiance for everyone else. It is perfectly rational to be consumed with dread in an age where so much is going wrong. We live in a collapsing country on top of a dying world, and yet to continuing going on with your life is an implicit commitment to solving those problems.

Yet the solution will not come by building a bunker in your backyard or stockpiling mountains of toilet paper — again; only the privileged can maintain the fantasy that an individual can prepare against the future’s onslaught alone. The solution comes when we strengthen our bonds with one another. Through community, not by building a wall or boarding up our doors, we will solve this dire predicament.

I could point to the countless articles and studies indicating that we feel better when involved in a community, but I don’t think that is necessary. You know that the world feels less dark when you are not alone.

The truth is that we will never have enough information to face the future. We are not only swamped by too much information, but we are on the precipice of so many scary and exciting changes. I briefly mentioned climate change, but there is also automation, genetic-engineering, artificial intelligence, and the half a dozen other shifts in society that neither I nor anyone else, can fully anticipate how they will alter our world until after the good (or bad) has been done.

I talked about how giddy those Georgetown students were when they first heard that Scalia had died, but I was giddy too. I could also visualize the world they imagined. I was excited about this vision of a future where we moved towards genuine progress. The Court would turn leftward for a generation, and everything would be better.

Then everything changed, and now we are here.

To live is to be certain about the present only in retrospect.

It is good to be anxious — that means you care. It signals that you are paying attention to the problems around us, and a problem cannot be solved if it is not first seen. When I give into my anxiety fully, however, it pushes me away from the people I care about. I become more withdrawn, and I stop being able to participate in the world.

The good we will experience in the future will come from collaborating with others and building communities that empower us to act. We need to focus less on how we as individuals can fight the most pressing problems of our time — we can’t alone — and instead focus on how we can do so as a community, people, and perhaps even a nation.

The future is only scary when you are fighting it alone.

Alex Has Opinions 10/30/20 Alex Has Opinions 10/30/20

Elites Don’t Want You To Vote

The powerful have always been afraid of your ballot

Every election cycle, men and women reemerge to tell us that our vote has no value. They insist that the public is generally misinformed about the issues and that we should instead let ourselves be led by smarter, more objective rulers who understand how the world really works.

Every time this advice is offered to me, I cannot help but think of the character Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) from Game of Thrones (2011–2019). When the medieval fantasy show ended in the summer of 2019, the answer to who would sit on the Iron Throne and rule over the fictional continent of Westeros was finally answered: Bran Stark was appointed King because he was a dispassioned ruler who would not succumb to the petty impulses of the late King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) or the genocidal ones of the Mad King.

All-knowing and singularly focused, Bran is cold, rational, and “perfect.” He does not get bogged down by the whims of his predecessors because he has transcended the person he used to be. He delegates most of the actual governing to the realm's technocrats, such as Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) and Samwell Tarly (John Bradley). He instead spends his supernatural abilities on larger tasks such as hunting down dragons.

I remembered being incredibly frustrated when the series finale ended, in part, because Bran didn’t seem like a good leader. He was unfeeling in his outlook, withholding his future sight to let thousands die during the battles of Winterfell and King’s Landing. Wasn’t this cold Machveiallian outlook no worse than Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) or the dozens of other ruthless leaders dotting the history of the show?

And yet, the idea of a cold, benevolent ruler has existed in the world of philosophy for generations. The shadow of this utopian figure has haunted our discussion of politics as commentators scoff at consensus-building and point to this mythical figure as the person who should lead us. We shouldn't listen to our own thoughts about justice or governance. No, we should rely on the Brans of the world.

Vote for them, or better yet, don’t vote at all.

This paternalistic outlook is as old as democracy itself. It has nothing to do with proper leadership, but rather, it is about convincing everyone else that they are better off not questioning those in power.

Democracy is a historical anomaly. While anthropological evidence suggests that some pre-agricultural societies were more egalitarian in the past, most of our recorded history has been one of tyrants, kings, emperors, high priests, and committees leading over their subjects. The idea that citizens should elect their leaders, and, in some cases, craft their own laws, has only enjoyed popularity very recently. It’s a sadly novel idea, and one that has faced immense resistance from our society’s most educated and celebrated minds.

One of the first recorded Democracies was ancient Athens during the late 6th century BCE, and it was slightly different from the representative democracies of the modern world. While citizenship was constrained only to free men (women, slaves, foreign residents, and children were not considered citizens), it was far more active than simply choosing a representative. Some political positions were chosen by lot (see the Boule), and their legislative Assembly (see the Ecclesia) was opened to all citizens who qualified.

Critics of this system emerged from men we widely celebrate today. Prolific philosopher Plato (428/427 — 348/347 BCE) wrote disdainfully of ancient democracy. He was deeply impacted by his mentor Socrates's prosecution and execution (470–399 BCE) in the Athenian justice system. Plato thought that this decision was indicative of majority rule in general. He advocated for leadership, not dictated by the majority's will, but through men skilled in governing. In book six of The Republic, he analogized a country's stewardship to the captain of a boat singularly focused on his craft — a metaphor popularly referred to as “Ship of State.”

A grim example of the Ship of State principle is the dystopian science fiction movie Snowpiercer (2013) by director Bong Joon-ho. The film takes place after geoengineering has created a new Ice Age that makes the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. The last surviving remnants of humanity live aboard a train that circles the globe indefinitely and is heavily stratified by class. This straightforward metaphor for capitalism has the poor living in the cramped tail section, while the rich live it up in first-class. The train is helmed by their leader Mr. Wilfred, and they have an almost God-like reverence for his leadership. As a teacher explains to a classroom full of children:

“If we ever go outside the train? We’d all freeze and die. If the engine stops running? We’d all die. And who takes care of the Sacred Engine? Mr. Wilford!”

The picture we have here in both Snowpiercer and Plato’s original Ship of State metaphor is of an educated man knowing what’s best — the inputs of his “lessers” be damned — which is an awfully convenient position for a powerful person to take when arguing for who should command a society. Plato’s conception of a good leader would go on to be called a “Philosopher King.”

This viewpoint would impact “Western” thought for thousands of years: Plato’s pupil Aristotle would argue that governments were best led not by the many, but by virtuous men; Nietzsche detested the “mob” of democracy in favor of a more virtuous Übermensch; John Stewart Mill suggested that extra votes should be given based on citizens’ education level; and even in the modern era, academics such as Jason Brennan argue that our government would be better off under the rule of knowledgeable technocrats and academics (known as an “epistocracy”).

Brennan labeled his ideal class of political participants “Vulcans,” after the aliens in Star Trek, for their ability to gauge facts dispassionately. As Writer Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote favorably of Brennan’s work in Reason Magazine:

“Encouraging more ignorant people to vote is not just pointless, argues Jason Brennan; it’s morally wrong. There is no duty to vote, but many people may have a duty not to vote. Boosting turnout among citizens who are young, uneducated, or otherwise less likely to be engaged — the primary targets of get-out-the-vote campaigns — is likely to have the unintended consequence of encouraging people to fail in that duty.”

Time and time again, the narrative is for common “ignorant” people to stand aside as more “sensible” minds take the helm. Yet, whether you are calling your objective, unfeeling leader a Vulcan, a Philosopher King, an Übermensch, or a Bran Stark, these figures are striking for their detachment from reality. Bran Stark could lead Westeros because he was a demi-God connected to a system of magical trees spanning the continent.

That type of person doesn’t exist in real life.

Despite this anti-Democratic critique's prolific nature, there is no concrete evidence that more “educated” people are better at making decisions. Educated people make poor decisions all the time. So much so that the question “Why are smart people so dumb?” has become a meme.

This oversight applies especially in politics, where educated people don’t seem to be more objective in their political decision-making. One widely cited study titled Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government suggests that your ability to solve math problems is impacted when said problem contradicts your political preferences. There are also historical events such as the war in Iraq, the election of Donald Trump, or the early spread of the Coronavirus, where educated people were confident about a decision that would later turn out to be calamitous. To that last point, as late as March, I, a person who researches for a living, still thought the Coronavirus was no worse than Influenza.

Smart people don’t know everything.

The idea of intelligence itself is a highly contentious and poorly understood concept that changes radically depending on your cultural context (see the racist history behind the concept of Intelligence). It’s common in the United States to associate more education with liberal thought. Still, a conflicting 2011 study by academics Rindermann, Flores-Mendoza, and Woodley found that education was linked to center-right and centrist ideology in Brazil and the United Kingdom.

Our perception of intelligence is based on subjective values that change greatly depending on where you are in the world.

Smart people are just like us in the sense that they have cognitive biases that prevent them from seeing the full picture. If we only listened to the educated unquestioningly, we would not have advanced in areas where they were wrong, and they are wrong a lot. For example, Charles Darwin, the person described by many as the Father of Modern Biology, was adamant in public that women were inferior to men and should exist within separate spheres. The fact that he was highly educated and knowledgeable about biology didn’t mean he was any better at handling the political question of female emancipation.

The idea that regular people shouldn’t participate in politics has less to do with the superiority of the knowledgeable and more about powerful people’s fear of what comes after they stop captaining the boat.

The powerful have always been terrified by the will of the majority. Plato believed that a pure democracy was one step away from tyranny. Philosopher Hobbes described in his seminal work the Leviathan that our state of nature outside of society is a “war of all against all.” There is this widespread fear amongst elites that if you remove the constraints of “civilization,” then the people will descend into an unruly mob.

In disaster studies, there is a name for the upper classes' widespread fear to assume the worst from people. It’s called “Elite Panic.” Coined by Caron Chess and Lee Clarke of Rutgers University, the term describes a phenomenon in disasters where the rich and powerful use this worldview as a justification to panic, and in some cases, preemptively punish the “mob” they fear will inevitably form in the aftermath.

A quintessential example of this is the response effort to Hurricane Katrina. The image portrayed by those in power was a dire situation of uncontrolled mayhem, depicting a scene of over ten thousand dead. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin infamously went on The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986–2011) and claimed that within the Superdome (the place refugees from the storm were being housed), evacuees were hurting each other. Mayor Nagin saying:

“They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”

These statements would later be deemed exaggerations, but this perception of looters would have a detrimental impact on the response effort. The private security force company Xe (now merged with Triple Canopy, and formerly Blackwater) was contracted out immediately by the federal government to “secure the city.” As if during wartime, they were armed with automatic rifles and deputized by the Governor of Louisiana to make arrests. The number of armed forces occupying the city would only increase as the National Guard and private security forces hired by the wealthy entered the fray. According to ProPublica, the police were also given orders to shoot looters on sight, and by many accounts, they did. As one community organizer told The New York Times several years later of the violence in the Algiers neighborhood:

“I done seen bodies lay in the streets for weeks. I’m not talking about the flooded Ninth Ward, I’m talking about dry Algiers. I watched them become bloated and torn apart by dogs. And they all had bullet wounds.”

This hodgepodge of local, state, federal, and private forces would be an active detriment to the relief efforts in the days and weeks to come: officers would detain and in some cases harass citizens distributing supplies; vital space on boats and helicopters was often reserved for armed escorts, and very early into the recovery the Mayor ordered the police to deemphasize search and rescue efforts to prioritize an end to the looting. The Mayor would later admit that reports of looting were exaggerated (and years later would eventually be convicted of corruption for an unrelated kickback scheme).

Not only did “the mob” in New Orleans not devolve into chaos, but it was also followed by a lot of spontaneous mutual aid and charity. In one example, a group of activists and healthcare practitioners came together to form the Common Ground Collective, which formed a makeshift medical clinic as well as distributed food and other supplies to thousands of residents. In another, a makeshift flotilla of boats dubbed “the Cajun Navy” rescued thousands of people from their stranded rooftops.

While humans are not perfect during a crisis, much like our misconceptions about the Philosopher King, they don’t always devolve into chaos either. In fact, moments of crisis are often filled with examples of strangers coming together for no other reason than that they want to help each other. In her book A Paradise Built in Hell (2010), author Rebecca Solnit highlights dozens of examples of people preserving during moments of disaster. The early days of the 1906 San Franciso Earthquake are known for makeshift community kitchens. Londoners during The Blitz are routinely cited as being more unified following the bombings.

The mob that men like Mayor Nagin fear often doesn’t come, and yet we see this fear everywhere in our culture. You cannot turn on a movie, show, or briefing without some authority figure justifying why they won’t relay information to the public. “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.” says the character Agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) in Men In Black (1997) as his justification for why their secretive organization doesn’t share the existence of aliens with the public. “Telling the public we might all be dead in eighteen days achieves nothing but
panic,” says the president (Stanley Anderson) in Armageddon (1998) shortly before he instructs our protagonists to board a spaceship to blow up an asteroid heading towards Earth. In both of these situations, the public might have benefitted from this information, especially in Armageddon, where bits of the asteroid break off and end up decimating cities. The fear of public unrest, however, was seen as a higher priority than harm reduction.

In a more serious, real-life example, Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo refused to take more drastic steps to curb the Coronavirus out of the same concern. He said at a press conference in February: “We have to keep this in perspective. There is no reason to panic. There is no reason to have an inordinate amount of fear about this situation.”

We see this same fear of the mob built into the very bedrock of our government. James Madison in Federalist Paper Number 10 discussed a concern about curbing the influence of an “overbearing majority.” When we look at our political institutions, such as the Senate or the Electoral College, they are built on the premise that the government must be insulated from the people's will. For example, the presidency is not decided by the popular vote alone, but by electors who are awarded to states in a way that deflates the influence of more populous ones.

Like with disasters, however, this fear has not insulated the United States from the rise of right-wing populism but exacerbated it. The anti-populist Electoral College assured President Donald Trump’s victory. Hillary Clinton famously secured the popular vote, but because of the Founding Father’s fear of the people, an obviously incompetent authoritarian was put into office.

There is an argument to be made that the over-inflation of rural interests via the Senate and House of Representatives has likewise undermined our democracy. When it comes to voting overall, Democrats routinely outperform Republicans nationally in elections. Still, the federal legislature's structure means that the Democratic Party has to win by huge majorities to take hold of either chamber. Rather than form a coalition represented by the nation's interests, this disparity has incentivized the Republican party to rely on voter suppression to win elections, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the Founder’s fear of the public.

Anti-populism has not inoculated us from demagoguery, and it, in fact, ignores successful movements in history, such as FDR’s New Deal, that have given us noteworthy reforms. There are plenty of examples throughout history of leaders who have the public’s ear and do not use it to become tyrants.

This intrinsic fear of “the people” has less to do with our state of nature and more about the elite's cruelty.

From Plato to Nietzsche, most of the philosophers and academics we have referenced today were supporters, or in many cases, members of the upper class. Plato was born into a prominent Athenian family, and John Stuart Mill’s father was a famous philosopher who rubbed elbows with the likes of Jeremy Bentham.

As our values have progressed, we have had this desire to cauterize these thinkers' outdated views from the ones we consider useful. Plato is routinely cited as an influential political thinker, even if his views on women and slavery are rightfully deemed antiquated by today’s standards. We preface our most lauded thinkers with calls to place them into their proper historical context, ignoring that maybe their cold outlook is foundational, not ancillary, to their worldviews.

For example, when it comes to Plato’s understanding of human nature, we should recognize that his idea of slavery cannot be viewed in isolation. Plato, who also owned slaves, tied his justification of slavery into his aristocratic belief that certain people are just superior, writing in the Gorgias:

“…nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior.”

This is the logic of a fascist who does not value human life. There’s a scene from FX’s TV show Archer (2009 — present) where the secret agent protagonist Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) is confronting a South American dictator named Caldarone, and the latter provides a very similar metaphor to Plato’s when justifying the violence of his leadership:

CALDARONE: Meat is whatever the tiger says is meat. Because God made him the boss and all the other animals his food.”

To which a sarcastic Archer replies:

“ARCHER:…thank you, George Bore-well, for that clunky analogy in defense of totalitarianism!”

I watched this episode very close to when I read Plato’s Gorgias, and it struck me because it was the same logic. Plato, like Caldarone, was a slave owner rationalizing his cruelty. He thought that slaves were just naturally meant to be slaves, and in a move very similar to chattel slavery, even advocated that the offsprings of slaves should belong to their masters. It should be noted that Plato and his student Aristotle stood against an ancient Athenian movement to abolish slavery. If they were transported to our time, then they probably would align more closely with far-right reactionaries than anyone we associate today with political freedom.

However, buried underneath this justification of a “natural order” was panic that the status quo would become disrupted. Plato was fearful of slave revolts and wrote in his work titled Laws a series of prescriptions to avoid them, including to make sure your country’s slaves do not have a shared heritage or language. He would go on in Laws to describe the various ways owners should treat their slaves to avoid insubordination.

Likewise, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, although occasionally critical of the institution of slavery, was also fearful of the possibility of revolt. When it came to his own slaves, he would only free 10 out of the 600 enslaved people he held in bondage throughout the course of his life. Part of the reason for this hesitancy came down to fear. He once described owning a slave as holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”

These men were terrified that the people they had enslaved — the people they had denied their humanity — would rise up and kill them. It was not an irrational fear. History is filled with slave revolts and uprisings. American history has at least 250, and Jefferson was aware of them — the Haitian Uprising generated particular concern for him.

However, these moments in time were not lawless masses of people descending into mayhem the moment their bondage was lifted. They were reacting to injustice and fighting for their freedom against the people who had robbed them of their humanity. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: “Riots are the language of the unheard.” Slaves revolted because they were in bondage — not because of the savagery of human nature.

We saw similar sentiments from elite academics in response to the French Revolution. People such as Edmund Burke claimed that it was destroying French society. In his seminal work Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), he discussed the tyranny of the mob, writing:

“If I recollect rightly, Aristotle observes that a democracy has many striking points of resemblance with a tyranny. Of this I am certain, that in a democracy, whenever strong divisions prevail (as they often must in that kind of polity), the majority of the citizens is capable of cruelly oppressing the minority, and that this oppression will extend to far greater numbers and will be carried on with much greater fury than can almost ever be feared from a monarchy.”

This claim that the majority is to be more feared than the monarchy may be true for someone of Burke’s standing (he was a famous writer and his father was a successful solicitor). Still, the fact remains that the French peasantry was suffering due to the monarchy’s political incompetence. The price of bread, the primary food stable for the peasantry at the time, had increased significantly after two years of failed harvests up to an estimated 88% of a worker’s wages. People blamed the aristocracy for that, not simply because of politics, but because they were starving.

It’s telling that the powerful choose to see these moments in isolation from the larger, systemic problems that caused the populace to revolt in the first place. Their labeling of humanity as a mob allowed them to uncritically sidestep all accusations of cruelty and mismanagement inflicted by those in charge. When you see all humans as potential barbarians-in-the-making, it becomes really easy to justify any violence against them.

The privileged have employed this belief as a shield to preserve their own power. They were and are continuing to project their fear of losing power onto humanity as a whole, and it has tainted how we perceive society and human nature itself.

The finale episode of Game of Thrones ends with Westeros' surviving lords and ladies deciding who will lead them. The character Samwell Tarly meekly stands up and suggests that maybe the people should elect their leader, to which the nobles respond with uproarious laughter. Lord Edmure Tully sarcastically remarking: “Maybe we should give the dogs a vote as well?”

They then elect Bran Stark — the unfeeling Vulcan and Philosopher King — who seems disinterested in bettering the lives of the average Westerosian. The series ends much how it started, with nobles arguing around a table about how to lead the country, all promises of broken wheels, and reform left to the wayside.

This is a form of propaganda thousands of years in the making. The elite have held disdain for those beneath them for as long as we have debated who holds power. Every year people — who are either wealthy or uplifted by wealthy interests — tell you paradoxically that not only does your vote not matter but that it is a dangerous thing worthy of being feared.

But dangerous to whom?

If we truly valued all voices, then those uplifted by wealth might have more to worry about than “too many voting.”

Alex Has Opinions 10/19/20 Alex Has Opinions 10/19/20

Pop Culture Has Never Understood Politics And Voting

Our belief that voting is hopeless, as seen on tv

I remember casting my ballot for the first time as a newly-minted 18-year-old growing up in Northern New Jersey. I was a senior in High School who was filled with so much enthusiasm for the process of voting. I had binged several episodes of the show The West Wing the night before, and I incessantly couldn’t stop quoting lines from the sequel to Legally Blonde — Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Blonde.

As Elle Woods would say, “I was there to speak up!” I had researched all the positions beforehand, and I knew exactly who and what I would vote for on the ballot. I marched into the cubicle, filled in my ballot with a blue pen I had brought with me, and dropped it into the ballot box, confident I had made the right decision. My candidate would go on to win, and for a fleeting moment, I believed in the electoral system as a magical force for good.

He would turn out to be a terrible political leader. Many of his campaign promises were lies or outward exaggerations, and I lost all faith in his administration a mere month into his leadership.

I remember not only feeling betrayed by this candidate but also feeling silly for ever believing that I could make a difference.

Years later, I became disinterested in the entire political process. I decided after watching one too many YouTube videos that voting was pointless. I was going to sit this one out. It didn’t matter who I voted for anyway, and besides, the person I wanted to win was probably going to lose to a spoiled rich person, or at least, that’s what the videos told me.

Still, I made my way to a watch party and drowned out my sorrows with a glass of wine as I watched the results on a giant projector with my friends. The results came in. The person I wanted to win did, and we all cheered.

Maybe this whole election process wasn’t so bad, after all?

For many people, their view on elections seem to vacillate between these two extremes — you are either an eternal optimist who thinks that we must trust in the process or a political nihilist scoffing as the powerful do as they please. These two viewpoints are all too common within our media. The optimist is the lawyer on the silver screen telling you to believe in the system, and the nihilist is rolling his eyes two theaters down as the latest conspiracy theory unfolds.

These dominant political viewpoints are radically different from one another, yet they are two extremes built on inaction. Whether you support the story that believes we must honor the process no matter what, or you binge the hit television show with a lead monologuing about how politics is merely a cold exercise in power, both options reduce your electoral participation to a simple true-false statement. You either vote, or you don’t — never mind the thousands of other forms of participation you can and must do in addition to voting.

These stories have been a constraint on how many of us perceive democracy — myself included — and it’s time we tore them apart.

In pop culture, these two viewpoints are built on a reductive analysis of “the system” — a wishy-washy bit of shorthand used to describe literally all power structures within which a person exists. The system includes but is not limited to:

government
capitalism
patriarchy
white supremacy
imperialism

…and so much more.

Some argue that “the system” — although it has some problems — is ultimately a force of good for humanity. One of the better examples of this in pop culture is Aaron Sorkin’s optimistic drama The West Wing (1999–2006), which involves the antics surrounding the fictional Bartlet administration. President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) is a moderate Democrat who frequently monologues about how we must simply have faith in the process.

For example, in the pilot episode, there is a background plot about a group of Cuban refugees heading to America and whether or not the US government should assist them. The administration ends up doing nothing, and 350 Cubans go missing and are presumed dead, while 137 end up being taken into custody in Miami. President Bartlet says of this whole ordeal:

“With the clothes on their back, they came through a storm, and the ones that didn’t die, want a better life and they want it here. Talk about impressive.”

From President Bartlet’s example, we can see one of the biggest problems with process-oriented optimists' perspective: it's an extraordinarily privileged and deluded position to take. It’s easy for President Bartlet to wax poetically about the American dream because he’s in one of the world's most secure positions. There are, however, 350 Cubans in this fictional world who will never experience that reality because they are dead.

The West Wing brought up many tone-deaf examples throughout its run, and in some cases, it could get outright hostile to anyone who opposed “the system.” When character Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) has to meet a “mob” protesting the World Trade Organization in the season two episode Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail, he is indignant about what he believes to be their erroneous stance on free trade. He bemoans to a police officer about how the protestors are nothing more than “philistines” on “activist vacation.” The two even joke about assaulting the protestors — a moment that has not aged well in an era where police officers are violently suppressing protestors across the country.

Source: episode ‘*Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail’ — character* Toby Ziegler jokingly tells an officer to fire her gun at protestors.

It bears emphasizing that there was and continues to be a lot of media like this — not just the 155 episodes of The West Wing — but shows such as Madame Secretary (2014–2019), whose main character Elizabeth McCord (Téa Leoni), a former CIA agent, helped broker peace between Israel and Palestine in a single episode.

As yet another example, Kevin Costner’s Swing Vote (2008) had an entire movie that focused on how a fluke in electoral politics left the fate of an election in the hands of one apathetic man who doesn’t have a firm grasp on the issues. The movie does not end with him taking a particular stance, but with him casting his ballot — his ultimate decision left unknown. We are meant to conclude that the process working is enough.

This framing is far from simply being a fictional dilemma. It was not too long ago that Francis Fukuyama declared in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) that humanity had reached its final ideological evolution and that Western liberal democracy would expand indefinitely. It’s still too common to see technocratic optimists point to declines in statistics such as the world’s absolute poverty rate as a justification for why we simply have to stay on course, and everything will sort itself out. As Dylan Matthews wrote for Vox in 2018 for the article 23 charts and maps that show the world is getting much, much better:

“Under the radar, some aspects of life on Earth are getting dramatically better. Extreme poverty has fallen by half since 1990, and life expectancy is increasing in poor countries — and there are many more indices of improvement like that everywhere you turn. But many of us aren’t aware of ways the world is getting better because the press — and humans in general — have a strong negativity bias.”

Even if these numbers were correct in making this case, however (and rising ecological instability and increasing wealth inequality tell us that they are not), this perspective is still a call to not address the problems in the here and now. When your response to immediate suffering is that people in the long-run will benefit, then what you are really doing is dismissing that person’s suffering under the banner of progress — you are telling people that they don’t matter.

Again, things are not okay with our world. Only privileged people can maintain the illusion that progress is inevitable. And so process-oriented optimism tends to turn a lot of people off from politics. They stop believing that their participation matters and they become political nihilists.

On the other end of the pop culture spectrum is the belief that “the system” is bad. There is a common dogma that the corrupting influence of power taints all politicians, no matter how good and pure a person starts. The people who have the most success within it are believed to be unscrupulous sociopaths with a suit fetish. This can be best summed up in the words of Lord Acton when he wrote to Bishop Creighton in 1887 that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The quintessential pop culture text that underscores this ideology is the Netflix show House of Cards (2013–2018). The show depicts House Majority Whip Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey), who plots to take the presidency after being denied Secretary of State from the incoming administration. Francis or “Frank” is so unscrupulous that he kills a dog within the show’s opening scene. Throughout the series, he kills his enemies and former allies alike and destroys Democratic norms to stay in office one more day. He has a very Machiavellian conception of power. As Frank says at the beginning of season 2:

“For those of us climbing to the top of the food chain, there can be no mercy. There is but one rule: hunt or be hunted.”

Another example is Lord Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish in Game of Thrones (2011–2019), describing “chaos as a ladder” one uses to gain more power. It’s easy to see how people disillusioned with the “process is good” argument can gravitate towards this mindset because it’s everywhere. Many people either can no longer maintain the illusion of infallible progress or never had the resources to do so in the first place, and here comes this dominant culture narrative validating their fear that it doesn’t matter and that life is inherently cruel.

I don’t want to pretend like there aren’t people in the world who believe in the naked pursuit of power and power alone. Recent history has taught us that this is very much the case, but history is also filled with martyrs and communities willing to sacrifice for what and who they believe in. Chelsea Manning didn’t leak US secrets and go to jail for seven years to get a book deal (there are easier ways to do that). There are political dissidents across time and place who altruistically sacrifice their material interests to advance their conception of the greater good.

To assume that our world of politics is just about accumulating power, you would have to ignore these dynamics of faith and belief. The simplistic narrative of an all-encompassing “system” seems to be more about shielding people’s psyches than a general desire to understand politics.

Sometimes when people argue for their disinvestment in “the system,” they are doing so from a position of extreme privilege. Lonely Island’s comedy song Threw It On The Ground is probably the pinnacle of this position. A privileged Andy Samberg perceives all attempts to interact with him as indoctrination into “the system:”

You must think I’m a joke
I ain’t gonna be part of your system
Maaaaaaaaaaan!

Source: Fashion Maniac — Andy Samberg throwing an item on the ground in his hit song.

Mostly, though, I see a lot of pain and fear when people declare to the world that their participation in “the system” is pointless. There are many people rightly bitter about our society’s failure to give them a good life. While I understand this perspective, it often seems to be a defense mechanism to innoculate yourself against the worst. As Redditor Do_GeeseSeeGod remarked on the 2020 election cycle in the thread unpopularopinion:

Do you really think rich people are just going to pack it in if Bernie or Warren or whoever gets elected? “Well, fellow billionaires, we had a good 7000 year run, but it looks like the poors are going to get healthcare and living wages now. We’re going to have to settle for having a little less money.” Seems highly unlikely.
Even in your local elections, the people with money run shit. They always have and always will. They’ll placate us just enough to avoid a riot. That’s it. If your bank account is less than 8 digits, you have zero control over political policy.

We see here that this rationalization acts imperfectly as a shield. The person is trying to forecast that the rich will always maintain control over our government, but saying that the system is bad doesn’t seem to make them feel better. It is an attempt to hurt yourself before the world can do it first (if it hasn’t already), and sometimes this defensiveness can get quite dark.

Doomerism, for example, generally describes a philosophy where the fall of humanity is heralded as an inevitability either due to ecological or economic collapse. It is best known by the Doomer meme, which is a Wojak character that originated on 4chan. The meme depicts a depressed 22-year old wearing a black hoodie and beanie while smoking a cigarette.

Source: Know Your Meme — a graphic of the Doomer character with accompanying text.

I can’t say everyone who prescribes to doomerism is actively depressed, but when you look at the r/doomer subreddit, that sentiment comes up a lot. “I will kill myself tonight,” writes one user. “NEED [Playstation Network] FRIENDS STAT!!! I need someone to [game] with. In a really dark place right now and need companionship,” calls out another user.

Depression and burnout are obvious causes for a lot of people’s loss of faith in the system. “The system,” though, is not a singular force. It is a multitude of intersecting and contradictory institutions imperfectly benefiting some individuals while denying others their humanity. The truth is that some systems are terrible, odious things that do need to be torn down, but that transformation cannot happen by people sacrificing some of the little power that they possess.

We must remember that those in power would love nothing more than for you to throw all your hope away.

The fight for enfranchisement in America has been a bitter one. It’s a common talking point in political circles about how originally the only people who could vote consistently were white men with property. This is true — though that standard was a little murky, depending on your state. Yet, something that we sometimes lose sight of is that even voting secretly was a hardwon victory.

Ballots used to be public, and citizens faced severe, sometimes violent consequences if they voted for their local opposition. In the middle of the 19th century, Americans were killed going to the polls during Election Day riots. Corruption was rampant, and party bosses used the visibility of people’s ballots to pressure local elections. In the words of Harvard professor Jill Lepore:

“…if I see you at the polls and you are bringing a blue papered ballot to vote for Smith as opposed to a green one to vote for Jones, I can know that you actually voted the way I paid you to vote. Therefore, I can buy your votes, and you can sell your votes. Or I can beat you up if you don’t vote for Smith. Or, if I am your boss, I can say, ‘If you don’t vote for Smith, I can fire you.’”

Source: Wikipedia — Louisville Bloody Monday Election Riots of 1855

Reform in this area was difficult, and the concept of private voting faced heavy opposition on multiple fronts. Virginia orator John Randolph claimed that a secret ballot would “make any nation a nation of scoundrels.”

Yet, electoral progress is never linear. When the private ballot was finally widely adopted in America, it was not only because of its efficiency but because it helped some states discriminate against Black people. At a minimum, the private ballot required voters to know how to read and write, which disadvantaged the poor, the uneducated, and former slaves who were often both. States began to use the written ballot as a pretext to establish literacy tests to disenfranchise Black voters. In one Virginia District, for example, all ballots were written in Gothic Lettering to make it harder for uneducated Black men to read them. The year after Arkansas passed its private ballot law, the percentage of Black men who managed to vote dropped from 71% to 38%, and similar drops were seen all over the country.

Literacy tests would eventually be overturned by the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, but enfranchisement is still a struggle for countless people across the country. The Supreme Court struck down section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 ruling Shelby County v. Holder. Section 5 had formerly granted the Department of Justice the ability to veto what it considered bad state voting laws, leading to greater enfranchisement. Unfortunately, the overturning of section 5 has allowed states all over the country to pass Voter ID laws, which have been likened to modern-day literacy tests because certain racial groups are statistically less likely to have such identification.

From denying former prisoners the ability to vote to the purging of voter rolls, our right to vote is in a precarious position, and sometimes we aren’t aware of how. The act of registering to vote — the legal process of declaring your eligibility to vote in a certain state— is itself a form of voter suppression. In countries such as Canada, this process happens automatically. In other countries, voter participation is mandatory. Yet in America, our system is so dysfunctional that we spend a lot of our electoral efforts convincing Americans to overcome the logistical hurdles to vote in the first place.

This is all by design, but again, the solution to overcoming these hurdles is not to make it easier for the people trying to oppress us. Voting matters a great deal. We know this because if voting were such a useless thing, then racist, rich oligarchs wouldn’t have spent so much of their time taking it away from the people they wished to dominate.

We know it matters because the wealthy still have higher voter participation than the lower classes. There is unsurprisingly emerging evidence positing that states with a wealth gap in voter participation are less likely to enact minimum wage increases and other liberal policies. The wealthy would like nothing more than for you to stop caring and let them continue to be over-represented in politics.

However, we must simultaneously remember that voting is not itself a divine good that will automatically lead to an ideal society. Process-oriented texts such as The West Wing and Swing Vote are frustrating because they gloss over the messy realities of politics. Not everyone has the luxury of waking up one day and deciding to suddenly engage in politics and then seeing that opinion being honored by larger American society. Some people have died trying to cast their ballot, and others have faced arrest because of oppressive laws — some of which are still on the books and leading to the arrest of Black people.

Source: The Guardian — Lanisha Bratcher was arrested under a Jim Crow-era law for voting while on probation.

Voting is a tool, and it is one of many that is needed to institute actual reform. Some of those tools include protests and marches. Others involve mutual aid, civil disobedience, and some sadly include mobilization of force and strategic violence.

It’s not popular to talk about now, but how many unions received policy concessions in the 1800s was through such mobilization. Much like now, capitalists used to hire guards to maintain active surveillance (and worse) over their workers to prevent them from unionizing. Workers responded with civil disobedience and marches, yes, but things could sometimes get downright violent. The 1800s are dotted with the massacres of workers at the hands of police and hired guards, and understandably in this shuffle, workers started to fire back (literally).

Political mobilization is far more complex than a yes or no choice. It’s a series of interlocking actions: sometimes they involve compliance, and other times outright resistance. Your decision to vote does not bar you from other activities, and we need people to feel this reality both on and off the silver screen.

I had to unpack many toxic narratives on my way to believing I could participate in politics. It involved unsubscribing from channels and learning to put away authors I had once loved, but it also meant realizing that politics was more complex than I once perceived it to be.

We need cultural narratives in pop culture that reflect the complexity of voting and political mobilization. I see glimpses of it starting to emerge in some titles. The video game A Night In The Woods (2017) ends with the main character’s father announcing his intentions to fight to form a union.

Likewise, the movie Suffragette (2015) chronicled women freedom fighters in the United Kingdom who employed violent action (i.e., bombing mailboxes, cutting telegraph wires, etc.) in their call for emancipation. This history, however, is removed by 100 years. It is also overwhelmed by pop culture texts that either describe politics extremely optimistically or nihilistically.

These stories are great starts, but mostly we need more of them.

There is so much more to do besides voting. You can vote for a candidate you only marginally like one day and then protest them in the streets the next. You can volunteer, and provide mutual aid, and participate in coordinated strategies online with comrades you meet on Reddit. You can donate to local candidates across the country who share your values and badger the ones who do not. You can write and share articles like this one that try to capture the truth, and you can prepare yourself and others for more direct action.

There is so much more to do than just voting, and none of it is made lesser through the act of casting your ballot.

Alex Has Opinions 10/12/20 Alex Has Opinions 10/12/20

The Subtle Copaganda of ‘The Legend of Korra’

Peeling back the nostalgia surrounding the hit Nickelodeon TV show.

I loved The Legend of Korra when it first aired (2012–2014). The show is the sequel to the hit animated series Avatar The Last Airbender (2005–2008). The series takes place in a world where people can master a form of martial arts that allows them to manipulate one of the four elements (i.e., Earth, Fire, Air, and Water). Only one person, the Avatar, can master all four elements. There is only one Avatar at one time, and when they die, they are reincarnated as someone else in the element cycle, and he and she is the core protagonist in both of these shows

Avatar The Last Airbender focused on the plucky Aang (Zach Tyler) as he traveled the world with his friends. In contrast, The Legend of Korra focuses on the brave and steadfast Korra (Janet Varney) as she spends most of her time in the metropolis known as Republic City. The show’s decision to center a strong woman of color when the Internet was far-less forgiving of such things hooked me right away (note the voice actress, Janet Varney, is white). Korra ended before the Gamergate scandal even happened. Yet swimming within such a toxic Internet culture, it tackled so many important issues: Korra had to recover from PTSD; she combatted figures representing diverse political ideologies; and in the show’s closing moments, she walked into the interdimensional sunset with her romantic partner, Asami Sato (Seychelle Gabriel).

This show has a lot of important firsts in pop culture. Korra’s relationship with Asami is personally very special to me. The love I have for this particular aspect, however, doesn’t mean I am not going to point out other things I find wrong with The Legend of Korra. From its handling of whitewashing to an uneven development schedule, the show had some problems. Its relationship with the police is no exception.

While the series is progressive on many laudable fronts, it’s ultimately regressive in how it views power and policing. It often places the police of its world in an uncritically favorable light, and more than that, it emphasizes the need for order and stability over the fight for social change.

While Aang traveled the world with his friends to stop the evil Fire Lord Ozai (Mark Hamill) from taking over the world, Korra tries to safeguard a mostly “stable” world from arising threats. With a few exceptions, she often ends up as a force protecting the status quo. She spends most of her time with titans of industry, heads of state, and police officers.

The first introduction we have to Republic City’s metal-bending police is telling. It features a series of beautiful shots as the officers descend elegantly onto the street below. Korra actually gushes about how cool they are before they arrest her for vigilantism. This framing of police as “cool metal-benders who dispassionately enforce the law” is the primary way they are portrayed on the show. We only ever see the metal-bending police portrayed negatively when the corrupt councilmember Tarrlok (Dee Bradley Baker) manipulates them for his own nefarious purposes.

In fact, the show doesn’t stop with cool police background characters. Many of Korra’s immediate influences are kickass police officers. The most obvious example is Chief of Police Lin Beifong (Mindy Sterling), a reoccurring character, who first meets Korra in an interrogation room. Korra has been arrested for attacking members of a crime syndicate known as The Triple Threat Triad, and Lin has come to give the Avatar a talking to. She has faith in the system and believes that Korra should have let the police handle the situation:

LIN: Oh, I am well aware of who you are, and your avatar title might impress some people, but not me…You can’t just waltz in here and dole out vigilante justice like you own the place.

Lin believes in the system, even if the Triple Threat Triad members probably would have succeeded if Korra hadn’t intervened in this particular instance. This tension means that it takes episodes for these two characters to develop an actual rapport. Their friendship does build, however, and we are meant to see Lin as redeemed when it happens. She saves Korra from a great fall in the Pro-bending Arena, and then later, heroically sacrifices her bending in a bid to give Tenzin and his family the chance to flee Republic City from a violent separatist movement. Lin may be cold and stubborn, but ultimately the show emphasizes that she cares deeply about the world around her.

Our love for Lin is further accentuated by the fact that she is the daughter of Toph Beifong (Kate Higgins) — a fan favorite from the original series — who single-handedly discovered metal-bending. She was also the original Chief of Police for Republic City, which adds further credence to the entire organization.

The other major police officer character in Korra’s life is her dear friend and former romantic partner, Mako (David Faustino). Partly to atone for his past as a former gang member, he joins the police force as a beat cop in season 2 and remains more or less attached to it for the remainder of the series. His faith in this system is strained at several moments, but never breaks, and sometimes that faith can cause him to unfairly judge people in dire straights. When a teenage petty thief and an orphan named Kai (Skyler Brigmann) joins the cast in season three, Mako cautions him with some pretty harsh words:

“I just want you to know, I’m going to be watching you kid. I know exactly what you’re all about because I’ve been there before. You don’t have me fooled.”

To reiterate, Kai spent his entire life as an orphan. He was then adopted by a rich family, and stole their possessions and went on the run, which is a very realistic response from someone who has never known any security in their life. Why would you trust someone after a lifetime of vulnerability?

Mako looks upon that history, one he should understand as a former poor orphan, and treats it with distrust and disdain. He doesn’t think Kai should be trusted partly because he is ashamed of his own past as a wayward youth, and sadly, that distrust is proven right in the narrative. Kai goes on to do many morally questionable things (e.g., stealing Mako’s wallet, trapping Mako and his brother in the lower ring of Ba Sing Se, etc.). While Mako eventually grows to accept Kai, it’s only because the latter proves himself through heroics on the battlefield and the air nomad lifestyle, not out of any empathy for Kai’s former circumstances. His apology towards the end of season three reflects this:

Mako: Hey, I appreciate you coming back for us. Sorry for ever giving you a hard time.

Kai: That’s okay. I probably deserved it.

Mako: Yeah, you kinda did.

I personally found it frustrating that Mako, as a police officer, learns to like Kai only after the teen proves themselves to be of value. It’s a troubling framing, and while I don’t think the creators intended it this way, it's the message that bleeds through regardless.

Mako may be a little bit of a doofus when it comes to communication, but like with Lin, we aren’t meant to dislike him. He is one of the show’s leads, and he turns out to be another gruff-yet-likable cop. There may be the occasional inefficiency and corruption within this world's police system, but there are always people like Lin and Mako to pick up the slack and make sure that Team Avatar beats the bad guys.

It may be easy to dismiss this world as pure fantasy, but the cops in The Legend of Korra often draw parallels to the cops of our world. Season 2 involves introducing two characters — Lu (Mark Allan Stewart) and Gang (Rick Zieff) — who appear to be direct spoofs from old buddy cop movies. Except for the magical-bending, there is no attempt to institutionally distinguished the police officers of this world from the ones of our world. So the fact that their portrayals are so positive and sympathetic undeniably enters the realm of copaganda.

However, the situation in The Legend of Korra is actually far worse than the police officers in her life. Her character is fundamentally the manifestation of the copaganda trope, and to talk about why we have to dive a little more into the specifics of what copaganda even means.

Korra is not a police officer. She is a kickass bender from the Southern Water Tribe who spends most of her time butting heads against authority figures such as President Raiko (Spencer Garrett), Chief of Police Lin Beifong, and Councilmember Tarrlok. She went against everyone's better judgment and opened the portal to the spirit world, and she has never been shy to assert her voice above her peers.

By Avatar Kyoshi’s war fan, how can this show be anything close to copaganda?

When we talk about copaganda, it’s important to distinguish between the word and the phenomenon it describes. The term is a portmanteau of the words “cop” and “propaganda ” We can find traces of it stretching back over a decade in liberal activist circles. The word generally describes media that favors the police and depicts them as a supreme good in our society. This type of media existed long before the term itself and it’s problematic because it ultimately ends up creating an ideology of “Law and Order” that flattens the nuances surrounding crime and justice.

Cops are good. Criminals are bad. End of story.

We have a widespread belief in America that this simplistic ideology is not only necessary, but that it is the only thing that stands in the way between us and “evil.” When, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, then-Governor Ronald Reagan blamed the assassination on the Civil Rights Movements’ campaign of civil disobedience. He remarked on the day of Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral that it was “…a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they’d break.’’

The desire for “Law and Order” is something so baked into our society that it infects nearly every aspect of the zeitgeist. As you are probably well aware, there is a popular crime genre franchise literally called Law & Order (1990–2010) with four spinoffs (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999 — present), Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001–2011), Law & Order: Trial by Jury (2005–2006), Law & Order: True Crime (2017; hiatus)) that all total over 1,174 episodes and counting, with two more shows in the works (Law & Order: Organized Crime and Law & Order: Hate Crimes). Nearly every episode of Law & Order involves a hardboiled group of detectives locking up a criminal in 45 minutes or less to avenge a victim who has been wronged, which dovetails very succinctly into our working definition of copaganda — the police catch the bad guys, and that makes everyone safe.

Law & Order is by no means an anomaly in popular culture. Crime shows reached their lowest point in the 2019–2020 television season by making up only one-fifth of all scripted shows on network TV. These shows have historically been told from a white perspective (e.g., they have little or no minority representation on screen or in the writer’s room or directors chair) and that biases their overall construction.

This problem with perspective is a trend dating back over half a century. The NBC show Dragnet (1951–1959), for example, was a widely influential police procedural during the 1950s that began every episode telling its viewers that the story they were about to see was true. The show worked closely with the LAPD to obtain that veneer of authenticity, a partnership that led to police officers' depiction as objective dispensers of justice. As the character Frank Smith says in episode 28, season 7 (The Big War):

“You know Joe, you have to be absolutely factual in your reports: factual, brief, and accurate.”

Even though such a characterization glossed over a more brutal history of racism and corruption within the department, it quickly became the standard for most procedurals. It’s nowadays difficult to find a show that doesn’t try to depict police officers' heroics in the crime-show genre through the lens of authenticity. Law & Order likewise began every episode with a similar theme that told their viewers that they were seeing the stories of investigators and prosecutors. We even see the relatively progressive buddy cop show Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013 — present) depict most cops as good people inching towards incrementalist reform. As Captain Holt (Andre Braugher) states in episode 3 of season 3 (Boyle’s Hunch):

“All the headlines are about the bad cops, but there are good cops, too.”

This trend of portraying the police as “the good guys” who solve society’s most heinous problems has been going on for a long time, and yet, it doesn’t align with reality. We have seen from multiple reports on policing across the United States that most officers' time is not spent solving “serious” crimes, but more mundane activities such as traffic and noncriminal calls. When officers are involved with solving rape and murder incidents, it doesn’t necessarily lead to the heroics of your favorite crime show. In a recent article in the New York Times, four victims of sexual assault discussed how police downplayed and dismissed their claims. Other reporting has sadly revealed that cops themselves often use their position of privilege to commit sexual assault.

This more complicated reality is why progressives and leftists routinely categorize shows such as Law & Order, Dragnet, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine as copaganda. These shows maintain a fantasy that actively gets in the way of our discussions on justice. There might genuinely be people in police forces who believe they are doing good. Still, they end up enforcing a system that routinely punishes poor people of color for minor offenses. In fact, recent reporting from The Atlantic and NPR indicates that cops who try to hold their fellow officers accountable are disproportionately censured or even fired. Cop shows bury this reality by making people believe in a version of policing that is a lie.

The copaganda label doesn’t stop and end with TV series’ either, and can expansively be applied to any media that uncritically glorifies police officers as heroes. News articles that overemphasize police officers' perspectives are also commonly placed into this category, as well as social media posts that depict police officers positively for the sake of clout.

Again, copaganda is about the false mindset of glorifying our society's watchmen without criticizing their authority. Its impact is far-reaching and has pervaded our very notion of what a hero means.

We exist in a moment in pop culture where a lot of divergent trends (e.g., our ideas of crime, heroics, and nerd culture) have collided together in film and television to say something unique about heroes. Some of the highest-grossing films of all time are superhero films (e.g., Avengers: Endgame, and Avenger’s: Infinity War). A lot of these cultural products are rooted in source material that intersects with or, in some cases, directly embraces copaganda.

Many of us are familiar with the two largest comic book publishers in the United States — DC and Marvel — but what might be lost to history for some fans is that many comic-books originally started in the crime genre. DC is actually short for Detective Comics, and during the comic-book boom of the 1940s and early 1950s, crime stories were some of the highest-selling stories. Popularity in this genre has since wained, in part due to regulation and a reactionary backlash. Children and adults alike are now far more likely to read stories of caped crusaders than grizzled detectives. The DNA of that history, however, remains in the stories that we read.

When we look at Batman and Spiderman, they often have a close working relationship with the police. The game Spiderman (2018) on the PlayStation 4, for example, depicts hero Peter Parker (aka Spiderman) idolizing the police so much that he has a goofy alter ego called “Spider Cop.” Superheroes, in many ways, embody the values copaganda says our cops should possess. They are frequently righteous defenders who defeat bad guys for the betterment of society. This connection caused Eliana Dockterman to write in Time:

…most superhero stories star straight, white men who either function as an extension of a broken U.S. justice system or as vigilantes without any checks on their powers. Usually, they have some sort of tentative relationship with the government…And even when superheroes function outside the justice system, they’re sometimes idolized by police because they are able to skirt the law to “get the job done.”

Many of our most fantastic heroes can sadly fall within the realm of copaganda, including Avatar Korra.

Korra can master the four elements because the spirit of light and peace, Raava (April Stewart), embodies every Avatar reincarnation. The Avatar’s job is explicitly to bring “balance” to the world, but what that balance looks like is highly contingent on her privileged upbringing.

The daughter of the Chief of the Southern Water Tribe, Korra was born into a world built by Aang’s victory against the Fire Lord 70 years earlier. She was isolated at a young age by her father and the Order of the White Lotus to protect her from a rogue anarchist group known as the Red Lotus. This insularity made her independent and headstrong with a desire to rebel against authority figures such as her father, Tonraq (James Remar), or her teacher Tenzin (J.K. Simmons). The show wants us to believe that Korra is balancing out different perspectives on her journey of self-discovery (and she does in part), but she oftentimes ends up reinforcing the power structures she has always known.

Each season has her battling against a foe that represents a distinct political ideology: season one has her fighting against the anti-bender Equalist Amon (Steve Blum) as a cipher for communism; season two is against religious fundamentalist Unalaq (Steve Blum), season three, she fights the radical anarchist Zaheer (Henry Rollins), and season four she wages war against authoritarian dictator Kuvira (Zelda Williams).

These ideologies are never presented in good faith. The villains are frequently power-hungry and, in some cases, are just lying about their intentions. Amon, for example, pretends to carry a scar inflicted upon him by a fight with a fire bender, and Unalaq gaslights Korra for most of the second season. We never seriously see someone besides the villain advocate for their beliefs, and it undercuts their credibility. The closest exception comes in season four by fan-favorite Toph Beifong.

While in the Great Swamp, Toph lectures Korra about the wisdom of her enemies:

“You said you saw your past enemies…you ever consider maybe you could learn something from them?…Listen what did Amon want? Equality for all. Unalaq? He brought back the spirits. And Zaheer believed in Freedom. The problem was that those guys were totally out of balance and they took their ideologies too far.”

Toph argues that all the show’s villains had fair points, but their methods went too far, yet this viewpoint is nonsensical.

The ideas of anarchism, communism, religious fundamentalism, and authoritarianism— although they can overlap in some areas — are widely contradictory. It’s not possible for all these viewpoints to be “correct.” Toph’s and, by extension, the show’s worldview belies an understanding of “progress” that focuses less on the beliefs people are fighting for and more on preserving institutionality.

The major reforms that take place in this world happen because good institutions let them happen. The United Republic Council — an unelected group of representatives appointed from each of the world’s five major polities, that governed the United Republic in the first season— dissolves itself sometime offscreen between the first and second season. The equalist movement “proved” to the council that they were unnecessary, and they then voluntarily choose to dissolve themselves in favor of a democratically elected president.

Likewise, Prince Wu (Sunil Malhotra), who was slated to take over the Earth Kingdom before Kuvira staged a coup, decides at the end of the fourth season that he is going to turn the Earth Kingdom into a democracy. This transition happens suddenly because he just decides it’s the better decision for his people. As he says nonchalantly in the series finale: “I really think the Earth Kingdom would be better off if the states were independent and had elected leaders. Like The United Republic.”

These changes happen because powerful people eventually see the error of their ways, and not because of political movements fighting for power. Change is institutional. The main characters fight to preserve harmony between the nations of the world, and progress sorts itself out.

When that harmony isn’t maintained, such as when Zaheer assassinates the Earth Queen in season three, it leads to general anarchy that places the whole international system into jeopardy. The Earth Kingdom capital of Ba Sing Se, for example, descends into a disorganized riot upon the queen’s death as looters begin to steal possessions from the upper rings. The following years then involve a brutal struggle for control as the Earth Kingdom is thrown into general chaos.

If that description sounds like a bunch of dog whistles, well it’s because the overarching philosophy on The Legend of Korra can at times be strangely conservative.

The idea that a lack of institutionality can lead to dangerous anarchy is itself a political assumption about human nature that is highly contentious. The belief that order is all that stands in the way between us and barbarism is one that has been debated in philosophy for centuries, and directly ties into our current cultural battle over the police. The Defund the Police movement is based on the principle that “mutual aid,” or the voluntary exchange of resources within a community, not order, is what lessons crime. We have seen a myriad of public figures argue recently that if you invest in things such as mental health, housing, food security, education, and so forth, you will actually build a more stable society.

We even see this within the fall of Ba Sing Se. The city was a heavily stratified society with poverty everywhere in the lower rings. The fall of the Earth Queen prompted rioting, not because it was inevitable, but because people were starving and needed the resources to eat. The Earth Kingdom’s government was a threat to its people's standard of living, and so its collapse makes perfectly logical sense. Why would people stay committed to a political organization that does not serve them? That’s not chaos, it’s a natural chain of events in response to a long chain of abuses.

The rise of the dictator Kuvira occurred because the international community, however, assumed that that anarchy was inherently dangerous. They tasked Kuvira with reuniting the Earth Kingdom, and ended up creating a political order that threatened their stability — Kuvira turned her sights on the world. Her dictatorial impulse, however, was not itself the problem. If Prince Wu had returned to his throne at the beginning of season four, it’s doubtful that Korra would have ever butted heads against Kuvira or Wu. The harmony between the Five Kingdoms would have been restored — the citizens of the Earth Kingdom be damned.

It’s only when Kuvira decided to disrupt that institutional balance that she was cast as a villain, and that conception of harmony strikes at the core of why I think this show is copaganda. The Legend of Korra is not just copaganda because of it’s many positive police characters, but because Korra herself is the physical manifestation of the status quo. She is like a living, breathing NATO willing to scorch the world’s enemies with whatever element is required.

I loved this show growing up, and part of me still does love it. I had to rewatch this series several times to make this article and much of what I adore about it is still there. I love the beautiful way this world is rendered, the stunning choreography of the fight scenes, the intergenerational dynamics between Tenzin’s children and his siblings, and the budding, albeit subtle, relationship between Korra and Asami.

When I think of this show’s larger themes, however, I can’t help but cringe. The show undeniably fits some of the worst aspects of copaganda, and it unsettles me. It feels like staring into a time capsule of another life — one where people honestly believed they could solve their problems by just trusting the process. I don’t know if such a belief was ever actually real, but the world I live in now makes it hard to even go through the notions of such a false idea. Bad faith actors have ravished my world, and I don’t have a spirit of light to protect me or the ones I love.

I instead have had to see politics for the reality that it is — one of asserting your beliefs for survival. We don’t have the luxury of having to pretend like all sides are equally valid, and many never did.

Korra wasn’t able to make that distinction because she existed within a privileged worldview — one that made it difficult for her to make hard stands against people. She would have had to declare that people such as Lin or her partner Asami of Future Industries are in the wrong, not simply situationally, but systemically.

She would have had to oppose the systems that some of her cherished friends upheld, and they probably wouldn't have been friends anymore.

Criticism hurts because it’s seeing the harm that has always been there. It can be a painful process because it means you can’t look upon something the same way again. Hard as I might, I am not going to be able to return to The Legend of Korra’s world with enthusiastic eyes. I don’t believe in this show’s foundational principles anymore, and that makes me want to weep for the illusion of progress I thought I had, but that our society never really went through.

The good news about criticizing the things that you love, however, is that it makes space both personally and societally for new things to cherish. We open up the conversation for new cultural products to better tell the truth as we see it, albeit imperfectly, and the cycle joyously begins anew.

Alex Has Opinions 10/4/20 Alex Has Opinions 10/4/20

The Unexpected Radicalness of ‘Jupiter Ascending’

It’s quite frankly a rare analysis in an age where texts praising rugged individualism and hustling are all too common. Critics' failure to capture this very transparent theme says something worrying about the state of media criticism — that we focus on aesthetics over a text’s substance and maybe, that our definition of a hero might very well be systemically flawed.

The movie Jupiter Ascending (2015) is known for being awful. It’s a story that’s brought up as an example of how creative endeavors can just so utterly fail. The Wachowski sister’s project cost anywhere between $179 and $200 million, and that doesn’t include the cost of the film’s robust marketing campaign. However, it only made $183 million, which means that financiers did not get a return on investment.

It was also critically panned for being campy, overly saccharine, and ridiculous. Half the film takes place in a space cathedral tucked away beneath the surface of Jupiter, and that tipsy-topsy setting was enough to turn a lot of people off.

Underneath the questionable dialogue and fights scenes that drag on just a bit too long, however, is a fascinating treatise on the exploitative nature of mega-conglomerates and tax law (yes, I did write that sentence). It’s quite frankly a rare analysis in an age where texts praising rugged individualism and hustling are all too common. Critics' failure to captures this very transparent theme says something worrying about the state of media criticism — that we focus on aesthetics over a text’s substance and maybe, that our definition of a hero might very well be systemically flawed.

This movie is one of those subjects you can spend hours explaining and still seem like you’ve gone nowhere because it sounds utterly bonkers. The bare-bones premise is that a woman named Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) learns she is the genetic reincarnation of an intergalactic space monarch who died tens of thousands of years ago. Jupiter is now involved in a family turf war over who owns Earth and its inhabitants. Her three children named Balem Abrasax (Eddie Redmayne), Titus Abrasax (Douglas Booth), and Kalique Abrasax (Tuppence Middleton) are each vying for her attention, or in some cases, trying to kill her outright, so that they can secure a better standing in the intergalactic stock market (we will get to that).

And that’s just a summary. We haven’t even gotten to the fact that some humans are part dog or that space vampires are a thing. The aesthetic of this movie comes greatly down to taste. You either think Kunis’ acting as a disgruntled housekeeper who hates her life is believable, or you don’t. You either love the Warhammer meets Guardians of The Galaxy style choices, or you think that they are childish and derivative, and at the time, most people gravitated towards the latter.

To reiterate, the critical consensus surrounding this movie was not just that it was terrible, but that it was one of the worst movies of the year, or even of all time. Gus Lubin hyperbolically wrote in Business Insider that the film “…[was] so bad it made [him] want never to go out to the movies again.” Eddie Redmayne earned a Razzie Award (from a spoof award ceremony which claims to honor the worst actors, directors, and films in Hollywood) for his performance as Balem.

*Source:* *Razzie YouTube Channel* *— Razzie presenter Thushari Jayasekera announces Eddie Redmayne is the “winner” for that year’s worst supporting actor.*

Before we address these criticisms, I want to emphasize that this film has noticeable issues that go back to its production. According to reporting from Deadline, the Wachowski sisters' closest ally at the company Warner Bros., president Jeff Robinov, left shortly after signing off on a lot of the film’s expenses. This situation meant that the ever-insular Wachowskis had the go-ahead for filming, but not a good contact person to represent the studio's interests.

While the Watsoskis have done great works, they are not infallible, and such insularity has impacted their decision-making in the past. When they made the 2012 flop Cloud Atlas, they received financing from dozens of sources to keep the filming going, including the mortgaging of their homes. This position again gave them the freedom to be really innovative. It also controversially allowed them to include the use of yellowface for some of their characters. There were arguably narrative reasons for this decision, but it has not aged well and is an example of how belief in an uncompromising vision can hurt the end product.

The insularity in Jupiter Ascending likewise means that some scenes, especially the action sequences, drag on a little too long, and many characters are poorly made. For example, Sean Bean’s Stinger Apini has a daughter named Kiza (Charlotte Beaumont), who is frustratingly underdeveloped. Jupiter first meets Kiza while a fight is happening in the background between Stinger Apini and Channing Tatum’s Caine Wise. Caine asks to speak with Kiza, and she tells the two of them: “Don’t drag me into your male mating rituals.” She then goes up to Jupiter and shakes her hand.

This introduction says everything that I need to know about Kiza — that she’s cool-under-pressure, funny, and confidant — and it's also the last major scene we see her in. She is sidelined several minutes later to focus on her father, Stinger. When I watched this film for the first time, I kept waiting for Kiza to return, but she never did. This type of mistake frequently happens in this film. There are very interesting characters in this universe we know next to nothing about, from talking space lizards to double-crossing bounty hunters.

I do not think Jupiter Ascending is a great film. It is not a Parasite (2019) or Sorry to Bother You (2018). I don't want to pretend like its this misunderstood gem whose flaws are secret strengths. It is structurally flawed on many levels, and any good critique should address them.

Its problems, however, are no worse than any other action movie, such as Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), that dotted the era. It seems strange that this film received so much hatred, especially when, unlike many other action films, it does address some truly thought-provoking themes and concepts that were rare for the time.

Regardless of your palette, this movie's philosophical foundations are much more complex than the “shoot the bad Decepticons” logic of the Transformer franchise. The central theme in Jupiter Ascending is not some trite observation about how how “good triumphs over evil,” but how commoditization can be harmful to society.

Yes, this movie is about the corrosive effects of capitalism.

In this world, our species’ origin is not Earth, but the planet Orous and the human race has settled most of the galaxy. The majority of these holdings, however, are not colonies, but biomass farms. Corporations such as Abrasax Industries grow their various worlds to the point where they are almost unsustainable. Then they harvest the humans on them to create an elixir called RegeneX, Nectar, or Abrasax, which is used to extend the lives of more “advanced” humans. Time has become the ultimate commodity. As Kalique Abrasax tells Jupiter:

“In your world people are used to fighting over resources like oil, or minerals, or land. But when you have access to the vastness of space, you realize there’s only one resource worth fighting over, even killing for. More time. Time is the single most precious commodity in the universe.”

The Abrasax have used their production of the elixir to refeudalize much of the galaxy. They are corporate monarchs or “Entitled,” leading a vast, planet-spanning empire and business. The children of the House of Abrasax have consequently become so far removed from the concerns of everyday people that they can literally shape their realities: they own planets like the rich own second homes, on a whim, they can construct thousands of robots to act as guests for a wedding ceremony, and all of their servants are biogenetically engineer to be in whatever form that their masters wish.

This removal from their fellow man is highlighted in how they view “less developed” humans as no more than cattle. The scene the Abrasax siblings are first introduced literally has them discussing harvested humans in much the same way we talk about the animals we consume here on Earth.

TITUS: “Have you ever seen a Harvest?
KALIQUE: “No. Never! But I’ve heard they feel no pain. It’s all quite humane from what I’ve been told.”

The movie uses the language of ethical meat production to emphasize how far the upper class will justify the exploitation of their fellow human beings. This sci-fi element allows the Wachowskis to literalize the horror that comes about when a business commoditizes other humans, and it's hard to ignore. During the climax of the film, the viewer is hit over the head with this message when the big bad Balem monologues to Jupiter about how our state of nature is consumption:

“Life is an act of consumption. Jupiter, to live is to consume. Now the human beings on your planet are merely a resource waiting to be converted into capital. And this entire enterprise is just a small part in a vast and beautiful machine defined by evolution, designed to a single purpose — to create profit.”

In case you missed the entire plot, this theme is also constantly related to our world through Jupiter. Our capitalist system also devalues her worth. She is a maid on Earth who no one appreciates. She is even pressured at one point by her cousin to sell her eggs for cash, yet he tries to take the majority of the profits from this exchange, telling her: “That’s capitalism babe. Shit rolls downhill. Profits flow up.”

None of this is subtle.

It should be noted that this is not an alien opinion, either. We exist in a world where just a handful of people controls a disproportionate amount of our global wealth. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made headlines recently by becoming the first person with a wealth of over $200 billion. We are well on our way to experiencing a refeudilization here on Earth, and just like with the Abrasax, some of our “Entitled” hold contempt for the “less-developed” humans serving beneath them. Poor people who rely on social safety net programs are routinely derided as lazy or worse.

The anti-capitalist themes in Jupiter Ascending, while not a rarity in film history, were certainly a novelty with 2010 blockbusters. The anti-capitalist, sleeper-hit Snowpiercer (2014), for example, was not given a wide release in the United States because movie producer Harvey Weinstein (yes, that Weinstein) didn’t think it would be palatable to US audiences. We have only within the past few years, reached a point where films such as Parasite (2019), Ready or Not (2019), and Knives Out (2019) with capitalist-critical or, at the very least, anti-rich messaging have been widely celebrated.

Jupiter Ascending’s unabashed themes should have merited some wider discussion when this film first aired, but overwhelmingly, critics were instead bogged down in a sophomoric debate about the text’s “originality.”

The critics who mentioned Jupiter Ascending’s anti-capitalist messaging were far and in between. The largest outlet that did so was probably Emmet Asher-Perrin’s article ‘Jupiter Ascending is A Chilling Look at Our Possible Future, in More Ways Than One’ in the well-regarded online publication Tor.com. All other examples I can find which survived the test of time are small players such as WordPress and Tumblr blogs and a community post on the left-of-center website The Daily Kos.

The more professional critics did not touch this theme and instead focused on the film's “originality.” During the 2010s, we were in the middle of a reboot and sequel-mania, spurred by projects such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the recent Disney live-action films — a trend that still hasn’t ended. There was a fear among critics that “original” works would be harder and harder to come by if we didn’t support innovative directors such as the Wachowskis. Writers Brent Lang passionately penned an article in Variety titled ‘Jupiter Ascending’ Flops: Why the Wachowskis’ Failure Is Bad for Movies.’ In another example, Angela Watercutter made this message a call-to-action, writing:

“The script is uneven, the editing is weird, the performances are weirder, and, for added measure, it all lacks focus. Now shut up and go buy a ticket.”

This argument generated a backlash as some critics argued that no actually Jupiter Ascending was not original. Writer Ryan Britt, again from Tor.com, argued that Jupiter Ascending’s mishmash of various aesthetics made the text derivative and that its harvesting people plot was recycling elements from other texts such as Soylent Green (1973) and The Matrix (1999). On the site TV Over Mind, writer Aiden Mason even argued that the movie would have been better if it were based on a book.

*Source:* *Martin Graupner* *YouTube Channel — the famous scene and meme where the protagonist realizes his primary food sources is made of corpses.*

To be blunt, both the pro and the con sides of this debate are vapid. No story is completely original. All stories are remixing old themes and narratives to say something contemporary about the society they exist in. Soylent Green and Jupiter Ascending may both have plot elements about consuming people. Still, in Soylent Green, it's used to talk about themes of environmental degradation and overpopulation, while Jupiter Ascending is discussing consumption and alienation inside capitalism.

In many ways, this form of criticism treats originality like a commodity that someone can plug into a spreadsheet. (Take 2 Wachowskis. Add $170 million. Bam original work!). The vampire story Dracula, as another example, is also about consuming people, but that doesn’t mean Jupiter Ascending lacks artistic merit simply because Bram Stoker did it first. If story-telling were only about the plot, then we would never tell new stories again because all major plot elements have sort of already been done in one form or another.

Even the critics that tried to examine this work’s messaging often were unable to escape the lens of treating it like a commodity. To many, Jupiter’s actions were frustrating not because they were unrealistic, but because they cast aside the illusion of choice.

A common criticism of this film was that Jupiter Jones starts the movie as a maid scrubbing a toilet and ends the movie as a maid scrubbing a toilet. There was a general frustration in feminist circles that Jupiter lacks “agency” or the ability to impact the story. Channing Tatum’s Caine often has to rescue our protagonist. We often see Mila’s Jupiter wait patiently in an elegant dress, or as she’s falling, or sometimes even both. People wanted her to take charge and fulfill this conception of agency. This viewpoint is perhaps best summed up by Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post, writing:

“…But she’s also apparently not good enough to take on real stewardship of her own planet. Defying Balem’s insistence that she’s superior is a way for Jupiter to let herself off the hook for any responsibility she might have to raise Earth’s level of development or its standing in the galaxy, which has a lot more to offer than just an eternal-youth fixation.”

This mindset wants Jupiter to take on her mantle of power and use it to guide Earth in the “right” direction. It’s a desire for her to take control — to make a choice.

The thing about this interpretation is that it affirms the very same power structures Balem and his siblings upheld — that certain people deserve to rule. Yet, the film suggests that there is something wrong with placing yourself above others. When Jupiter confronts Balem in the climax about how she’s nothing like his mother, the idea of class is front and center in their conversation:

Balem: You should have stayed dead.
Jupiter: I am not your mother.
Balem: No, my mother never cleaned a toilet in her life.
Jupiter: Maybe that was her problem.

Our culture tends to create heroes that are not only the arbiters of their own realities but fit roles of extreme physical prowess or privilege. They are the knights, scholars, or kings of their world, and never the maids or dry cleaners. When I think of the most outstanding feminine heroes of pop culture, they are usually extraordinary, such as Furiosa (Charlize Theron) in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) or Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) in the Harry Potter series (2001–2011).

They more than just survive: they kickass.

In the multiple interviews I have read; however, it's clear that the Wachowskis wanted to craft a different kind of hero. They wanted to make a lead who was empathetic, flawed, as well as someone who used negotiation instead of violence to resolve her problems. Someone who was a very small part of a much larger universe. As Lana Wachowski remarked in an interview with Uproxx:

“That’s one of the biggest pieces of mythology offered up by the film, this idea that we are very young and we are not the center of the universe. We are made very small by the world imagined in this film, insignificant, and our entire history is rendered a footnote in something much bigger.”

If you, a normal person, were thrust into the strange, fantastical world of Jupiter Ascending, then you wouldn’t have the ability to topple the House of Abrasax or the Intergalactic Commonwealth. You’d barely be able to understand the rules of this new universe before being eaten alive by space lizards. I would too.

Jupiter imperfectly makes her way through this movie because she’s a human struggling in a corrosive system far larger than herself, which in a nutshell, is the story of most people struggling within our system. She makes decisions, but they often boil down to whether she works within the system (i.e., does she sign this contract or get married) or does she work outside of it. Her biggest choice is to go to a fortress beneath the planet of Jupiter to rescue her family, and tactically, it’s a flawed plan. She would have died without Caine’s heroics.

Her character upsets our classic model of agency. She is a hero who upsets the false belief that one person can heroically overcome and dismantle a bad system.

Jupiter Ascending is a flawed text that has many structural issues with its narrative and characters. By all means, dump on the zany fight scenes or Eddie Redmayne’s raspy voice.

Yet, the inability of critics to pick up on themes and messages that were very transparent to the plot, at times frustratingly so, reflects a gap in our ability as a society to recognize realistic heroes in our media, especially when those heroes our criticizing a system integral to our daily lives.

Nowhere is this point made more transparent than in the film's closing. The film ends with our lead, strangely happy. She has come to understand more about the universe around her, and she no longer wakes up in the morning, telling the viewer that she “hates her life.” Critics like Alyssa Rosenberg thought this made the narrative regressive because Jupiter has not changed her economic circumstances. She’s still at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Yet as she rides off into the sunset, the text suggests that this is a transitionary period. Caine asks her what she will do with her title as ruler of the Earth, and she claims that she’s still sorting it out herself. “Maybe,” says a smoldering Channing Tatum, “it just means that your majesty’s planet has a different future than the one that was planned for it.”

Often in science fiction, we like to think that a certain future is inevitable — that we will be like the planet Orous and spread humanity (and capitalism) to the far reaches of the galaxy. In its closing moments, Jupiter Ascending screams to its audience with all the subtlety of a bus crashing through your window, that maybe we can push for a different future.

In the meantime, we have to handle the dissonance of the here and now. Your shitty 9-to-5 (or increasingly, your 7-to-9) doesn’t go away simply because you have become cognizant of the oppressive nature of your reality, but that doesn’t mean you stop fighting for a better future anyway.

You put up with what you must and muster yourself to fight a battle that might last longer than the House of Abrasax itself.

Alex Has Opinions 9/15/20 Alex Has Opinions 9/15/20

We Probably Shouldn’t Teach Kids Hangman Anymore

You might never have heard this game described in such exacting terms before, and that’s because it represents a dark part of American history that our society would prefer to forget. It’s one of the small ways we teach children to be silent on our nation’s past sins, and if we want to heal as a society, we probably shouldn’t have them play games like this anymore.

If you are like me, then you might have fond memories of the childhood game Hangman. This game starts with a teacher, counselor, or guardian drawing the abstraction of an empty gallows on a chalkboard. This sketch is followed by a crossbeam with a narrow line hanging down from it, representing a noose.

Dashes are placed beneath the gallows representing the letters of a word or words, and children go around the room guessing letters. If they guess accurately, then the adult fills in the dashes with the correct letter. If they guess incorrectly, then a stick figure is filled in one body part at a time, beginning with the head down. When and if all the body parts are filled in, then the game ends, and implicitly, the figure on the chalkboard (metaphorically) dies.

The person often accredited for Hangman’s earliest iteration is Alice Bertha Gomme (probably because they are referenced to in the Wikipedia entry) in her compendium of children’s games titled The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland. This collection of games was released in two volumes during 1894 and 1898, respectively. Gomme was a famous folklorist, and she allegedly compiled this list from both her own observations and other interviewees. In Volume One, there is a game called Birds, Beasts, and Fishes that is somewhat similar to the quintessential Hangman game, except there are no gallows on the chalkboard, and the word a player can choose is limited to that of a bird, beast, or fish.

Source: The Project Gutenberg — the cover to ‘The Traditional Games of England’

As a student of folklore, Gomme wasn’t making up this game. She was recording something that already existed. Somehow the DNA of that game transmuted into a far darker variant called Hangman, and like with much of folklore, this transition isn’t well-documented. We can only see the after-effects and retrospectively have to fill in some of the dots, or in this case, the executions.

The concept of hanging may seem unsettling to us now, but during the time immediately before The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland’s publication, it was a common occurrence. The legal system between the 17th and early 19th century is known retrospectively in the United Kingdom as “The Bloody Code,” which prescribed the death penalty for countless offenses, some of which were relatively minor (i.e., stealing cider, cutting down young trees, etc.). Hangings were a public spectacle that could draw a huge crowd. The last “official” public execution in Great Britain took place on May, 26 in 1868. This execution was the hanging of Irish nationalist Michael Barrett and it allegedly drew in a crowd of thousands.

Source: The Irish Times — an after the fact illustration of Fenian Michael Barrett’s execution.

It’s easy to see how children might bring such a dark activity into their games. Public executions may have been banned three days after Barrett’s death under the 1868 Capital Punishment Amendment Act. Still, the practice was not abolished outright in Great Britain until 1965 and 1973 in Northern Ireland. Following the capital punishment reforms of ’68, children below the age of 17 were no longer executed, but dozens of young adults above that age were hanged.

America may have been a sea away, but it shared many similar cultural elements, including hangings. Since the year 1700, there have been 9,183 recorded hangings within the United States, and in 1895, when The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland was published, there were 109 alone. These were similarly public spectacles that sometimes drew large crowds. When Rainey Bethea became the last person to receive a public execution in August 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky, his death reportedly drew in 20,000 people. Rainey’s hanging was by no means an “adult” affair, and there were children in the audience. As reported by The Louisville Courier-Journal:

“The crowd came in automobiles, wagons and by hundreds of freight trains. . . . Hotels were full. In some of Owensboro’s homes all-night “hanging parties” were in progress. At the gallows, located in a vacant lot, hundreds of men, women and children had slept under the gallows’ shadow. . . .”

Source: The Boston Globe — picture of Rainey Bethea’s execution.

Public executions have fallen out of favor in most countries across the world, including the United States. We now consider them to be barbaric, yet the legacy of that trauma continues to echo in our culture, and it is mostly unresolved. The debate over state-sanctioned executions or “Capital Punishment” is still ongoing, with 22 people executed last year, and unsurprisingly that trend cuts unevenly along racial lines.

You may think that Hangman is just a game — a harmless few lines drawn on a chalkboard — but games are often how we teach children what to value, and more importantly, what behavior they should ignore. When we look at our society’s most troubling trends, it is partially through games that they are reinforced. The “boys will be boys” line in response to male aggression, for example, has often been linked to rape culture and sexual assault. The idea that male violence is natural has become a meme we are still grappling with as a society, and such a problem begins with what types of play we condone.

Hangman is a similar, albeit subtle, reminder of the types of violence we consider permissible, and the kinds of lives we think matter. As with many things within America, hangings have a very racialized context.

For many people, the noose is not an abstraction on a chalkboard, but rather an enduring symbol of terror.

The United States has executed many people during its short history (about 16,000 according to information compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center). When you comb through that data, a disproportionate amount of people who have been executed were (and are) Black. There is a famous study done by academics M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smykla (commonly called the “Espy file”) that attempts to chronicle all government-sponsored executions in the United States from 1608–2002. Of the executions recorded, 7,353 of those executed were Black.

That’s 50.5% of the total. Black people are roughly 13% of the current population, and even at their height, never surpassed more than 21% (note that accurate estimates remain challenging because of stigmatization). The disproportionate amount of Black people executed is a reflection of historic dehumanization. Two hundred seventy-seven instances in the Espy file come from slave revolts, which were retrospectively never justified. Even more come from the charges of murder, theft, and rape against white Slave Owners and Landowners.

Accusations of rape are particularly contentious because there is a long, bitter history of white womanhood being weaponized against Black people, particularly Black men. There is profoundly-ingrained propaganda within our culture that frames Black men as a hyper-sexualized and dangerous threat to white women. The OFTA Film Hall of Fame movie The Birth of A Nation (1915), for example, features a Black “predator” who lusts after an “innocent” white woman who our “heroes” try to valiantly save. This movie was seen by millions and is considered to be one of America’s first blockbusters.

Source: Roger Ebert — still of the film ‘The Birth of A Nation.’ — Source: Roger Ebert — still of the film ‘*The Birth of A Nation.’*

The hanging we discussed earlier of Rainey Bethea ties into this trend because he was a Black man accused of rape. Rainey allegedly raped an elderly white woman and then suffocated her. We will never know if the official summary of events were what happened (though given our history, I have my doubts), but we do know that the spectacle of white womanhood was one of the reasons the hanging drew such a substantial crowd. The previous sheriff had died, and his wife Florence Thompson had inherited his job, making her the first woman executioner in United States history. As written in The Los Angeles Examiner:

“Much as she abhors the job, Mrs. Florence Thompson, Daviess County’s woman sheriff, is going to spring the trap that sends Rainey Bethea, Negro murderer, to his death…”

The attention given to Mrs. Florence for this execution is both a subversion and enforcement of the fragile white woman trope. She is defending her fellow white women against a perceived injustice, but she’s not deferring that punishment’s enforcement to a man. This context is why the emphasis is made on her “abhorring” the job because its a thing that goes against her alleged white femininity.

While Rainey’s execution happened within the confines of the United States’ perverted justice system, there were also extrajudicial murders known as “lynchings” throughout the 19th and 20th centuries (which continue to this day). These were killings perpetrated by multiple people outside the justice system — though members of the law often condoned them outright. The NAACP notes that from 1882 to 1968, there were 4,743 recorded lynchings and that 3,446 victims, or 72.7% of the total, were Black. From 1920 to 1938, the lynching of Black people was so prevalent that outside the NAACP’s headquarters was a banner with the text: “A man was lynched yesterday.”

Source: Library of Congress — the text “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday” hanging on a banner outside NAACP HQ.

For rape allegations, the white womanhood trope was the bedrock for many of these lynchings, and it was common knowledge. As activist Ida B. Wells documented extensively in her analysis, The Red Record (1895), which was one year after Gomme’s The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland was published:

“In numerous instances where colored men have have been lynched on the charge of rape, it was positively known at the time of lynching, and indisputably proven after the victim’s death, that the relationship sustained between the man and woman was voluntary and clandestine, and that in no court of law could even the charge of assault have been successfully maintained.”

Lynchings were not just limited to rape allegations. They had an array of “justifications” — all of them rooted in instilling racialized terror among Black Americans. While lynchings took numerous forms, from burnings to gunfire, hangings remained viscerally attached to the practice, and because of this fact, the noose has left a scar in our collective memory. All across the United States are stories of hanging trees where lynchings, both real and imagined, took place, and many have even become the subject of modern-day folklore.

For example, in Brazoria, Texas, a tree still referred to fondly by some as the Masonic Oak is the alleged site where two slaves were hung to death. As a ghost story, people continue to claim these slave’s spirits haunt the surrounding landscape. Ironically, the story of the Hanging Tree (and the two slaves who were unjustly killed there) has been overshadowed by another tale about the Masonic Lodge’s founding. People prefer to remember the Lodge’s story, while the former account has been obscured by legend. There are thousands of stories like this across America. We may have ignored much of this history in school, but it still reemerges in our ghost stories and childhood games.

Source: Yan Lee’s Big Tree Studio — an ink illustration of the 400-year-old tree.

The noose is burned into the American consciousness as a symbol of terror, and to this day, people will use it as an act of intimidation against Black people. Shortly after the National Museum of African American History opened in 2016, several nooses were left on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Laminated cards of Black victims of police brutality were recently found tied to nooses on a tree in Milwaukee’s Riverside Park. And of course, lynchings still happen both at the hands of the police (e.g., George Floyd) and private citizens (e.g., Ahmaud Arbery).

The grim history represented in Hangman is fresh, and so it seems a little strange that we would reenact this trauma as a game in classrooms across America.

Children are not oblivious to their history. I was struck the other day when a teacher remarked on Twitter (under the handle @queenyennifer_) how their 8-year-old student was aware of much of the history I have just addressed, writing:

“Today I was left speechless by an 8 year old, who politely told me that it was inappropriate to play hangman with them because of the lynchings of black men and the current state of the world and you know what? He was totally correct. I’m bringing him a prize tomorrow.”

We should not pretend like children are ignorant of the more pernicious aspects of our culture. Games can be both “light” diversions as well as the enforcers of social norms. Children are taught concepts such as responsibility, marriage, or beauty norms on the playground (or Zoom chat) well before being taught the history surrounding them.

What socials norms do you think Hangman enforces?

I loved playing Hangman as a kid. I must have played this game hundreds of times throughout my life. I also didn’t learn about the history in this article until well into adulthood, and if you are like many white Americans, then you probably didn’t either. Hangman seems to be more indicative of our ability to trivialize and ignore our cruel past than to learn from it. This form of behavior hasn’t helped us grow as a society, and it’s time to set it aside.

If you are considering playing this game, maybe think of something else instead. Some teachers currently employ a version where they draw an apple tree instead of a gallows and erase an apple for each incorrect letter. In another version, the teacher draws a snowman one piece at a time.

It’s not difficult to rework this game into literally anything other than a man hanging to their death from a rope.

This point might sound like a small criticism to make given the more massive battles we have to fight, but if we want to build a more tolerant future, we should not trivialize these lynchings and hangings. We should place them in their proper historical context, and part of that work means removing the tools we have used to ignore our past.

It’s only through this work that we can honestly face the weight of history.

Alex Has Opinions 8/1/20 Alex Has Opinions 8/1/20

You Are Not Crazy for Hating the Idea of Work

Few people I know have admitted to liking what they do at first, if ever, and that speaks to something profoundly disturbing about the nature of work: it’s a deeply unhealthy way to organize our society, and you are not crazy for hating it.

About a year ago, my friend texted me at two in the morning: “I hate my job. I am going to do it. If I don’t quit soon, then I am going to blow my brains out.”

A natural worrier, I asked her to call me, and we entered into a conversation that lasted well into the early morning. She had been at this position for over three years, and she claimed to have hated every single day. She couldn’t stand it anymore, and in her mind, the decision before her was to either off herself or quit.

“Is this all there is?” she asked tearfully.

I was able to talk her off that ledge, but this has been by no means a one-off experience. I have been receiving a lot of these calls recently, and they have been happening, paradoxically, when millions of Americans are unemployed and need a job more than ever.

If you are like me, then you probably blame yourself for your work-related unhappiness and anxiety. This is a facet of the human condition, you tell yourself, and so there must be something profoundly strange and irregular about you. Everyone else is doing fine. You are the one who cannot get your act together.

The more I have read about work and talked to other people about it, however, the more I have learned that this feeling isn’t an irregularity, but a normal condition of working. Few people I know have admitted to liking what they do at first, if ever, and that speaks to something profoundly disturbing about the nature of work: it’s a deeply unhealthy way to organize our society, and you are not crazy for hating it.

The first thing I want to validate is that your feelings of hatred, anxiety, depression, and alienation towards your job are entirely normal. There is a lot of shame surrounding this topic because unemployed people are often considered lazy, parasitic or worse, but your dissatisfaction with your work is a common one. This trend has been going on for the majority of the American workforce for decades.

As early as 2019, Gallup released a report titled Not Just a Job: New Evidence on the Quality of Work in the United States that claimed that 60% of Americans believed themselves to be in bad or mediocre jobs. This type of finding was not new for the polling organization. In 2017, Gallup released its annual report titled the State of the Global Workplace, which found that only 15% of employees worldwide (and closer to 30% in America) were engaged at work. “Low engagement” is defined here as either having a negative view of the workplace or only doing the bare minimum to make it through the day. Half a decade earlier, in 2013, that same annual report found engagement was similarly at 13% worldwide, and 29% in the US and Canada.

To say that Americans dislike their jobs would be an understatement. We have had a disengaged and unhappy workforce in this country for a long time, and it’s not a phenomenon confined to the 2010s. We have seen similar headlines resurface every decade or so. The release of a 2001 report by the Families and Work Institute found that 70 percent of Americans wanted a different job, with many expressing burnout and stress. The ‘90s had rising complaints of downsizing, burnout, and an overall loss of meaning. The ‘80s saw headlines such as the LA Times article Survey Finds Ambivalence on Workers’ Satisfaction.

Overall satisfaction was reportedly higher before the 1980s, but this was an era of even more pronounced work-related nationalism in daily life than today. It was during the Cold War when critiques of work could very quickly get you called a communist or worse. Elites routinely depicted labor organizing as the first step towards communism and chaos.

Source: New York Evening Telegram — Cartoon “Step by Step” by Sidney Greene (1919)

This had a chilling effect because dissent could be conflated with a failure to uphold fundamental societal ideals. There was a lot of pressure to conform to the life script of the working man (and honestly, there still is). And yet even during this period when job satisfaction was reportedly high, many specific complaints still lingered. As Bob Baker wrote in the LA Times in 1989:

“Every poll since the late 1950s has found job-satisfaction levels between 81% and 92% despite simultaneous responses indicating that only about one-third of all workers are satisfied with issues like job autonomy or the assistance they receive from supervisors.”

The whispers of dissatisfaction have been there for those willing to look, and it is not something simply found in polls and reports. We can observe it in the bedrock of our culture.

Popular songs about hating your job, for example, have existed for over half a century. Singer Lee Dorsey lamented about the soul-crushing work of a coal miner back in 1966, singing: “Five o’clock in the mornin’. I’m already up and gone. Lord, I’m so tired. How long can this go on?” We would see this musical trend of grieving work reoccur throughout the decades: such as with Johnny Paycheck’s Take This Job and Shove It in 1977, Lou Reed’s Don’t Talk to Me About Work in 1983, The Flaming Lips’ Bad Days in 1995, the Cursive’s Dorothy at Forty in 2006, JbDubs’ I Hate My Job in 2011, Twenty-One Pilots Stressed Out in 2015, and many, many more.

The bad workplace is an entire genre in media. The most prominent example in the modern era is The Office (2005–2013), which is primarily about the aimless shenanigans of employees at the Scranton Pennsylvania branch of a paper distribution company called Dunder Mifflin. The underlying humor centers on the utter pointlessness of the work being done there, and the incompetence of the branches’ boss Michael Scott (Steve Carell). The Office is itself a reboot of a British show of the same name, and there are many similar ones lampooning off work such as The IT Crowd (2006–2013) and Workaholics (2011–2017). There are also movies and musicals about the absurdity of corporate culture such as Office Space (1999), Horrible Bosses (2011), How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), and Promises, Promises (1968).

Of course, the most prolific cultural gripe is the “I hate Mondays” meme, perhaps best personified by the cartoon character Garfield. While this meme is sometimes used to reference the cartoon cat’s own distaste for the weekday, more often than not, it’s brought up in offices around the world to complain about the start of the workweek.

Source: Teepublic — this is a fast-fashion shirt design you can buy online right now.

At this point, ‘I hate my job’ might as well be our national anthem (followed closely by ‘why aren’t you employed yet, you bum’ and ‘how dare you be so ungrateful with the complaining’). Your feeling of dissatisfaction over your wage job is not unusual or strange. It is part of a mundane, albeit ill-spoken of tradition in American life. We talk about it through whispers, jokes, and asides, but never directly.

Millions of people have struggled with this feeling, and yet we still often believe ourselves to be unique in experiencing it. We think that we are crazy for thinking this way because we have been led to believe that the alienation of our working lives is a solitary burden.

Worse, when we finally dare to tell people we are unhappy with working, the answer we receive is that our thoughts go against the very fabric of reality.

Defenders of the working order will often wax poetically about how this system of work is the best way to structure society. Everyone from Pope Paul II to Benjamin Franklin has praised the dignity of work. It was President Bill Clinton who famously extolled the virtual of wage jobs as a justification to sign a piece of legislation that rolled back safety net programs in favor of work requirements.

“We all know that there are a lot of good people on welfare who just get off of it in the ordinary course of business but that a significant number of people are trapped on welfare for a very long time, exiling them from the entire community of work that gives structure to our lives.”

The problem, and the reason so many of us feel crazy, is that this conception of work is a fabrication. Humans didn’t walk out of Africa with a suit and a desire to meet their scrum targets. Many hunter-gather societies weren’t performing the long sprints typified by modern work. An analysis of the Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia found their workweek to be around 15 to 20 hours, and its not the same type of labor we are familiar with. Academic Peter Gray. for example, described in his Play Makes Us Human series for Psychology Today how a lot of these societies engaged in work that was complex, community-driven, and self-directional.

Modern work can, in many ways, be more taxing and limiting by comparison. One study out of the University of Cambridge found that when hunter-gathers in the Philippines converted to farming, they worked an average of 10 hours more per week (i.e., they moved from 20 to 30 hours on average). This workload is far less than the packed schedules of fully “developed” societies. The average American employee works 44 hours per week, and some Americans can get up to 70, 90, or even 100 hours a week.

Source: MotherJones — illustration by Mark Matcho for article ‘Harrowing, Heartbreaking Tales of Overworked Americans’

We see here how societal progress has not necessarily led to greater leisure. We have, in fact, largely moved away from the less stressful work environments of pre-agricultural societies towards ones that are more atomized and laborious. These more demanding schedules, as we have already seen, have led to a lot of workers being depressed and unhappy with their jobs.

I want to stress that this is not a call to return to that state of “pre-civilization.” I happen to like penicillin and cat memes. Life then was hard (though if you could make it past adolescence, not as short or as brutish as some assume), but I bring up this research to highlight that our ideas of work have very much been in flux over the millennia. The modern job, in particular, is somewhat new. Some people trace it to the chemical corporation DuPont during the 1910s.

The era of the modern wage job is tied to Industrialization. The loss of leisure and independence that came with a paycheck was something that greatly concerned many self-employed, predominantly white Americans during the 19th century. Labor was primarily seen by that segment of the population as a transitional activity you did until you had the capital to open up your own shop. As Abraham Lincoln said at the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee in 1859:

“In these free States, a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families — wives, sons, and daughters — work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other.”

We are now far removed from that world — and it’s essential to bear in mind that it was one never accessible to many women, people of color, and poor whites. As Industrialization started to take root in America, the people who did live that life, however, became bitter about its end. Organizations such as the Knights of Labor would sometimes refer to a waged position as “wage slavery” because you were tied to the capital of your employer and not your own.

To be fair, Industrialization did make the life of the average worker a lot worse before it got better. Workers in American factories could be expected to pull ten or twelve-hour days, six or seven days a week. The labor of the standard American factory worker was often done in appalling conditions where accidents and even deaths were alarmingly common.

During Industrialization, this exploitation was based heavily on the classist idea that work was the proper place of all men. As Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle summed up in his inaugural speech as the new Rector of the University of Edinburgh on April 2, 1866:

“Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind — honest work, which you intend getting done.”

This rhetoric was more than an inspirational quote to put up on posters. Elites in both the United Kingdom and America believed it was their proper place to push back against the overly entitled poor. This often meant scaling-back protections to hold the poor “responsible” for their lot in life, and in some cases, sent to prison for their debts (see Debtor’s Prisons).

Source: Department of Justice — A building in Accomack County, Va., which served as a debtor’s prison from 1824 to 1849.

While the fight for better working conditions and benefits is retrospectively depicted as a march towards higher productivity, the truth is that the early twentieth century was a time of intense mobilization from the working class. Henry Ford, for example, is often given credit for the five day work week because he standardized it for his employees on September 25, 1926, but the history of the Ford Motor Company was filled with violent clashes against its workers. One of the darkest periods in its history occurred six years later when a ‘Hunger’ March led to a confrontation with police and security guards that claimed the lives of four protestors. Ford Motors would end up being one of the last major automotive manufacturers to recognize the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, or UAW for short, and let its employees unionize under them.

As we can see, the movement towards unionization was not an ‘objective’ attempt to wrangle more productivity out of workers, but an intense series of engagements — both physical and political. These efforts (and the countless like them by other organizers in sectors across the country) led to many of the labor protections we enjoy and know today. Everything from the eight-hour workday to employer-sponsored healthcare can be traced back to the labor movement. By the 1950s, their efforts had become an ingrained part of US society. As President Eisenhower said of unions in 1952:

“Today in America, unions have a secure place in our industrial life. Only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”

For a long time, there was an uneasy truce between the employer class and their fortunate employees. This state of government-backed, employee-protections, however, was not any more natural than the classist worldview of Carlyle or the Libertarian mindset of Lincoln. These were rights hard-won through political mobilization, and over the past couple of decades, we have seen them chipped away. Unions have been on the steady decline due to both anti-union legislation like right-to-work laws as well as companies engaging in regular union-busting. The very welfare reform legislation Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996 detrimentally added more stringent work requirements to those Americans drawing on the government for help.

For the longest time thought to be backward and archaic, the Victorian work norms of the 19th and 20th centuries have once again permeated our culture. We right now exist in a time of a scaled-back safety net, and insecure employment. Conservatives now want to undo the employee-employer bargain entirely, and they aren’t subtle about it. During a segment for the Fox Business Network about how many Americans can no longer afford to retire, Chief Investment Officer for Trend Macrolytics, Donald Luskin, had this to say:

“What a great country where we have the opportunity to keep working … This is a great blessing! You should embrace it.”

If Thomas Carlyle were alive today, then it would take little imagination to see him calling America’s insecure state of employment a blessing as well. Luskin would go on in that interview to mock leisure activities done during retirement as uninteresting and dull when compared to work. We see here how the managerial class is more than willing to call you crazy for wanting to be protected from their exploitation.

In fact, it’s their first line of defense against all dissent.

When employee engagement or happiness is discussed, employers often point out superficial justifications for why so much of the workforce has been dissatisfied for over half a century. For example, when considering that widely read State of the Global Workplace report we mentioned earlier, the Chairmen of Gallup, Jim Clifton, blamed ill-equipped bosses as the primary cause, writing:

“Employees everywhere don’t necessarily hate the company or organization they work for as much as they do their boss. Employees — especially the stars — join a company and then quit their manager. It may not be the manager’s fault so much as these managers have not been prepared to coach the new workforce.”

In other words, it’s middle-management who’s to blame, not the system.

Listicles and opinion pieces are very keen to keep workplace dissent in the realm of individual reform. The conversation tends to never go beyond learning how to up-manage your boss or polish your resume. When breaking down a similar Gallup poll two years later, for example, the HR website StaffedSquare listed five major reasons why employee engagement was so low. These were: your boss, your colleagues, type of work, commute, and stagnant career growth. Notice that none of these points touched upon systemic problems such as poor pay or diminishing labor rights, and some of them were downright demeaning. In one suggestion, the editor mentioned that worker attitude could be a factor, writing:

“A poor attitude from the employee can create a bad air at work. If they aren’t willing to try to be happy, they never will be.”

These suggestions make it sound like most workers are suffering from an individual misalignment issue. If only they got the “right” job, boss, or weren’t such sticks-in-the-mud, then they could indeed be happy.

The reality though, is that many times the employer, not the employee, is to blame. There has been, for example, a lot of reporting in the last couple of years about how bad warehouse jobs can be. Amazon, in particular, came under fire in 2018 when it was discovered that some employees were peeing into bottles to meet tight deadlines. We have since learned that the floors of Amazon warehouses can be a grueling environment where workers are pushed to meet punishing quotas in exchange for meager pay and little benefits.

Source: MarketWatch — JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Amazon is by no means the only type of company with such a terrible environment for its employees. Warehouses across the economy receive similar complaints. Similarly, many fast-food settings are also negligent in treating their employees, who, on top of erratic schedules and non-livable wages, routinely receive burns and other preventable accidents. The underclass of Americans who have “low-skilled” jobs (a derogatory term used to devalue certain work) often have to endure terrible pay, irregular shifts, and mediocre benefits.

Even Americans with “good” jobs are still suffering longer hours, stagnating wages, and decreased benefits when compared to their peers in other developed nations. Paternity leave and robust, government-financed healthcare are privileges enjoyed in nearly every industrialized economy on the planet, but not in America, where two-thirds of all bankruptcies cite medical issues as a chief financial reason.

We should want to improve upon these sub-optimal conditions, but rather than systemically address them the number one response from employers is to blame employees for their own suffering. Companies such as Amazon will routinely deny the complaints of employee organizers as being directed by outside influences. Some entities will be far more direct. Warehouse consultant Rene Jones wrote a condescending article titled Career Advancement Tips for Warehouse Employees back in 2006 in Electrical Wholesaling, and his advice was:

“No one wants to be miserable at work. If you feel you have been slighted by the organization, that is your problem. Either do something about it, talk to your supervisor, or leave.”

To suggest that someone’s unhappiness with their warehouse job is because they are professionally misaligned is insulting to their humanity. Yet, that’s the first and only piece of advice most people receive. Many of these workers are experiencing subpar or even abusive working conditions, and that cannot be resolved by a simple heart-to-heart with their manager.

This solution obscures the real problem at hand. A company does not stumble into longstanding, abusive workplace practices. It’s a purposeful choice, and changing it is something that often has to happen in spite of leadership. When Amazon workers recently staged a strike on May 1st, this year, they weren’t protesting better lines of communication with their bosses. They wanted materially better protections and benefits, and Amazon denied there was even a problem. The company blamed the strike on the “irresponsible actions of labor groups spreading misinformation.”

By individualizing systemic problems, this mentality blames many workers for their own oppression, and it makes a lot of us feel crazy. When breaking down her personal experience as a warehouse worker, Emily Guendelsberge, talked extensively about how such jobs impact your mental health: “It’s making us sick and terrified and cruel and hopeless.”

As workers, it’s not enough to overcome the gaslighting of our employers. That’s the easy part. We also have to silence the oppressor inside our minds.

When you start to critique the state of work, the first thing you notice is how hesitant people are to engage in this topic at all. Many workers do not feel like they can even have this conversation. During the 2008 recession, for example, Gallup’s Lydia Saad released an article with the title US Workers’ Job Satisfaction Is Relatively High, which strangely placed complete job satisfaction among US workers at almost 50%.

When looking at this data more closely, however, something peculiar happens. Workers in that 2008 study may have indicated a high amount of general job satisfaction. Still, as the article would go on to note, the same could not be said about their “job stress (only 27% completely satisfied), pay (28%), company-sponsored retirement plans (34%), chances for promotion (35%), and health insurance benefits (40%).” Everything was okay, except when it came to the little things like being stressed, and having enough pay, and proper health benefits. (Note: in the survey, most workers still noted some satisfaction in many of these areas.)

There is intense pressure to always express gratitude for having a job in the first place. When describing his work-related angst in the article 3 Things You’ll Only Understand if You’re in the “I Hate My Job” Club, the writer Richard May repeatedly expressed feeling “lucky to be employed at all,” and mind you, this was for an audience of people dissatisfied with their employment. This internal monologue is ever-present for most people, and yet as we have seen, it exists alongside a reportedly growing dissatisfaction with the nature of work.

Source: idlehearts — a widely circulated quote of actress Cameron Diaz from an interview she did on the 2006 film ‘The Holiday.’

There are many reasons for this dissonance. I have written in the past about the social stigma that occurs from even broaching this topic (see The Stigma of Not Working). Another thing that deserves to be highlighted, however, is that employers hold a lot of leverage over their employees’ standard of living. As Lydia Saad described condescendingly in the Gallup article above:

“To some extent, this [high satisfaction] may reflect a heightened appreciation on the part of some workers for having a job at a time when they realize good jobs are hard to come by, and when being out of work is no picnic.”

It’s only alluded to here, but that “no picnic” is the starvation and homelessness that results from a loss of income. While some people do genuinely enjoy what they do, many more are afraid that tomorrow will be the day this all ends, the day they will be left starving on the street. When describing the view of his career in the video Moving to LA during a nervous breakdown, breakup, BLM protests, & a pandemic, YouTuber Tarek Ali had this to say:

“I am just a huge planner, and I have the worst anxiety when it comes to making decisions because I feel like nobody is there to catch me, and if I mess up, I’m going to be on the street.”

I see this fear reflected everywhere, and it can cause people to enter into terrible working relationships. A 1993 study released by the Families and Work Institute found that: “conflicts between work and family tend to be resolved in favor of the job, usually to the detriment of the family and the worker.” A 2009 Pew Research poll found that the primary reason nine-in-ten Americans’ work was to support themselves or their families. When reporter Emily Guendelsberger talked about her experiences at several fast-food jobs, she remarked on how providing for one’s families was how many workers found themselves trapped in dead-end situations. Her manager at a McDonald's told her to ignore the harassment, saying:

“You have a family to support. You think about your family, and you walk away.”

If you don’t have a job, then you and your dependents are denied the tools to live. I think we have to be honest with ourselves about how that hold over our subsistence plays a massive role in why we take a job in the first place.

One of the best descriptions of this bind might come from Heike Geissler’s autobiographical novel Seasonal Associates (2018). Early on in the book, Geissler describes her justification for taking a Holiday shift at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig, Germany, in 2010.

“You don’t want this job but you’re sensible and you have kids who want things every half hour, and your boyfriend wants things occasionally, and you want things of your own as well, although you hardly ever want anything and you usually pretend you need the things you want. You simply need money regardless of the time of year, you’re just like everyone else in that respect…”

This is the paradox of a lot of jobs. They are unhealthy. Your body physically and mentally wants to be someplace else, but you cannot leave because you need the money to survive. You are torn between the cruelty of having to stay and the psychological desire of wanting to go anywhere else. You dream of leaving, but in your mind, there is nowhere else to go free from exploitation. You start to go crazy because everywhere people tell you that this is normal, and yet everything you experience tells you that it is not.

This leaves you in the precarious position of not only having to fight for better labor conditions and a more livable salary, but also having to fight against the oppressor inside your own head.

You find yourself asking: Is that all there is?

The famous jazz singer Peggy Lee released the song Is That All There Is? (written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and originally performed by Georgia Brown) in 1969. The song is about a narrator reflecting on her life, and her amazement that there is nothing more to major milestones such as marriage that she has been told hold intrinsic significance.

Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

Leiber and Stoller’s lyrics reflect a deep nihilism with social constructs. Under this interpretation, the things we think matter do so more because of the psychological power we as a society give them. Marriage is only a big deal because people say so, and the same can be said of work.

I bring up this song because I see this feeling a lot with new workers. Many people will enter the labor force after being told grandiose or even mythological stories about how meaningful their participation will be, only to realize that that vision does not align with reality. You are not doing some intrinsic duty. You are filling out spreadsheets or lifting boxes to pay the rent.

After a fair amount of anger and depression, they will start to ask the question, ‘Is that all there is?’ and something that saddens me is that for many people, the answer is yes. I have known too many friends who have lost people to depression and anxiety over the past few years. Suicide is, by some accounts, the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, and among Millenials and Gen Zers, it’s far higher. I have been there myself, standing on the roof, asking myself if it really would be so terrible to jump.

For me, it took taking a break from work to get a better hold on my mental health. When I hear people dismiss other’s criticisms of work, my experience tells me that they are making a call on whose lives they think do not matter. I hear a match being lit as the word crazy is formed before it’s ever spoken.

And some people do end up jumping.

There has been a lot of talk about burnout and depression these past few years. Our work culture has been called unhealthy everywhere from The Atlantic to the ever-business friendly Forbes, and I think its time to start asking if the status quo is worth it.

Do we really think the current system is truly worth all of this unhappiness?

Is it worth us doubting our own sanity?

Is it worth all the lives of those we have lost?

Is that all there is?

Yes, people do like doing “things.” People wrote, farmed, made art, built buildings, advanced science, and created communities before the emergence of the modern nine-to-five. Those tasks, however, are not the same thing as earning a wage for labor you may or may not want to do, on a schedule you may or may not control, with people you may or may not like, for a person who dictates what you can and cannot do.

A job is not the same thing as your labor.

I do not doubt that a minority of workers are happy. I am friends with a few of them. I see their Instagram posts. I read their comments on my articles as they complain that I just don’t see reality as they do. They do seem content.

I also do not doubt that these people are a minority. They are the winners of this bizarre system. They are often more prosperous and more powerful than everyone else, and we should not pretend like their satisfaction is a thing experienced by the majority of humanity.

It is not.

We must embrace that this is a bad system. It is something that actively makes many around us unhappy.

And you are not crazy for hating it.

Alex Has Opinions 7/7/20 Alex Has Opinions 7/7/20

The Pain of Revisiting ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’

A lot has changed since the 90s, both for me and society-at-large. And so when I recently revisited the family comedy, I did so with apprehension. I had the sneaking suspicion that it would not hold up to the nostalgia of my youth, and sadly, I was right.

When I was a teenager, I had a habit of rewatching movies over and over again on my bulky Dell Laptop. These movies were often awful. I obsessed over Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) or the slap schtick shenanigans of Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton in The First Wives Club (1996). I didn’t realize at the time that all of these movies were campy and often had a gay or queer subtext.

Of all the movies I watched, no film was I obsessed with more than Mrs. Doubtfire (1993). The Robin William’s comedy about a man cross-dressing as a nanny to secretly spend more time with his kids was a movie I delighted in, although, at the time, I didn’t understand why.

In retrospect, it was one of the few mainstream movies that had actual queer representation, and in the smallest of ways, I felt seen.

Mrs. Doubtfire was a smash hit in the early 90s. It grossed over $441 million worldwide, which would be almost $790 million today. The film’s success was the result of several simultaneous factors. There was, first and foremost, the star appeal of the late Robin Williams, who had impressed the world with his comedic chops in the Disney film Aladdin (1992) a year prior.

There was also the fact that this film normalized a contentious issue in American culture — divorce. The protagonist Daniel Hillard (Robin Williams), goes through a messy breakup with his wife Miranda Hillard (Sally Field) in the movie, and a big takeaway is that it doesn’t make that family unit inferior. As Daniel’s female persona Mrs. Euphegenia Doubtfire says at the very end of the film in response to a little girl’s letter:

“You know, some parents, when they are angry, they get along much better when they don’t live together. They don’t fight all the time, and they can become better people, and much better mummies and daddies for you….There are all sorts of different families, Katie. Some families have one mommy. Some families have one daddy or two families…But if there is love dear, those are the ties that bound. And you’ll have a family in your heart forever.”

We have retrospectively come to praise this film’s take on the modern family, but that perspective wasn’t a given. When no-fault divorce became an option for Americans, starting with California in 1970, there was this irrational fear that the family unit would implode, especially after the divorce rate rose dramatically throughout that first decade. Conservative organizations like Marriage Savers (1996) were founded in the 90s with the intended purpose of lowering the divorce rate, you know, for the children.

These fears proved to be unfounded. The divorce rate rose mainly because, well, people finally had the option to, and ever since then, it has slowly lowered. This decline is especially true for Millennials and Generation Zers. For a variety of reasons (cough, cough, wealth inequality, and changing gender norms), they have not been marrying at the same rates. Mrs. Doubtfire was a cultural touchstone pushing to normalize divorce, which at that point was a common but ridiculed trend for decades.

Another thing in this film’s favor is its large queer following. Author Tim Teeman described the film in the Daily Beast as the “opening salvo” in a pop culture war that led to LGBTQIA+ acceptance. Writer Derrick Clifton mentioned in Mic how the movie inspired them to dress in drag for the first time.

Mrs. Doubtfire would arguably be classified as camp, which is a loose term for a genre of over-the-top works that usually focus on marginalized voices laughing in the face of mainstream society. They are works full of what Susan Montag would describe as “artifice and exaggeration,” and Mrs. Doubtfire certainly has a lot of that. This film is chock-full of references to various things in queer culture. When Daniel is “transforming” into Mrs. Doubtfire for the first time, for example, he goes through a serious of impressions from Barbara Streisand singing Don’t Rain On My Parade, to the song Matchmaker from the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, to Norma Desmond’s “I’m ready for my closeup” in Sunset Boulevard.

There is also the fact that the lead’s brother Frank (played by gay icon Harvey Fierstein) is heavily implied to be gay, which was sort of that actor’s entire schtick (see Independence Day, Mulan, etc.). Frank lives with a flamboyant man named Jack (Scott Capurro), who Daniel openly refers to his children as their aunt. Frank and Jack are presented as asexual in that 90s way queer characters were portrayed back then (see also To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar), but their presence would be hard to dismiss simply as two friends living together.

It was sadly daring during the 90s to have any gay representation, let alone, a couple in a film purporting to claim how family structures should work. To give you an example of how homophobic society was back then, the year following Mrs. Doubtfire’s release, Democratic president Bill Clinton signed the policy Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which banned openly queer people from serving in the military. The closing monologue given by Mrs. Doubtfire might not mention queer families, directly, but the subtext was definitely there.

From this perspective, Mrs. Doubtfire is a progressive movie. By many respects, it still is, and yet, these relatively positive portrayals come at the expense of a text that is pretty openly transphobic.

The painful thing about Mrs. Doubtfire is that it’s a movie uplifting so much (e.g., gay people, varied family structures, etc.) at the expense of trans people. When you comb through the narrative closely, a lot of the humor is centered around how peculiar it is for Daniel to be in a dress, and that is not a perspective that honors varying gender identities but lampoons them.

When Daniel, for example, sees an image of himself in the mirror while in a dress without Mrs. Doubtfire’s facial prosthetic, he casually calls himself Norman Bates. This comment is in direct reference to the movie Psycho (1960), where the character Norman adopts the persona of his mother to kill occupants of his motel. It may seem like an off comment, but trans people have been likened to serial killers for decades (see Silence of the Lambs), and it ties into a long, bitter history.

In another example, Daniels’s wife Miranda puts out an advertisement for a nanny, and Daniel calls in as various “eccentric” voices to make his bid as Mrs. Doubtfire seem better in comparison. Amongst people advocating for corporal punishment and putting their children in cells, we have someone say: “I don’t work with the males because I use to be one.” Based on the horrified look on Miranda’s face as she ends the call, this is portrayed to the viewer as a bad thing.

When Daniel’s kids discover Mrs. Doubtfire is not a cisgendered woman, their first response is to threaten to call the police and assault her. “You are going to get it in the balls,” Daniel’s son says. Keep in mind this is before Daniel’s deception is revealed. The only they know at this point is that Mrs. Doubtfire has a penis.

That response (although common for the 90s) is still transphobic, and the text doesn’t bother to refute this position. When Daniel comes forward with the truth several moments later to his two eldest children, the response from his son is telling. Chris Hillard (Matthew Lawrence) refuses to hug his father, and Daniel shrugs it off by saying, “It’s okay. It’s a guy thing.”

None of this has aged particularly well, and that is especially true for the plot itself. One of the most common transphobic arguments is that trans people are pretending to be trans so that they can have access to “vulnerable” people. The bathroom debates of the 2010 culture wars, for example, were centered around the erroneous assertion that men would use trans identity to sneak into bathrooms to rape women and abduct children. This type of thinking was prevalent even before the 2010s (note a huge reason why the Equal Rights Amendment was killed during the 70s was that opponents such as Phyllis Schlafly argued that it would lead to the mandating of unisex bathrooms).

This characterization is false on multiple levels that have been thoroughly debunked elsewhere (see some here and here); however, within this very liberal movie, we have this same talking point reenacted uncritically. The plot of Mrs. Doubtfire is that of a cisgendered man who has been barred from the courts from parenting his children because of his gross negligence, only to use cross-dressing to circumvent that order secretly. Daniel uses the gender identity of Mrs. Doubtfire — one he is only voyeuristically attached to — to manipulate and spy on his family.

This plot is a narrative right out of the conservative imagination, and one very much rooted in 90’s culture.

When we talk about older works, and yes, 1993 was almost 30 years ago, the phrase that often gets trotted out is that you have to place the work within its proper historical context. I have always struggled with this justification because, for me, it has often seemed like an excuse. People who ask you to place something into a historical context are many times trying to sidestep discussions of discrimination that occur within a text, and by extension, the discrimination that occurred within that time period at large.

Acts of transphobia do not happen in isolation.

The 90s were extremely discriminatory toward LGBTQIA+ people, especially trans and gender non-conforming people. The right to not be fired for your gender identity was only just affirmed with the Supreme Court ruling Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, in June of 2020. In the 90s, it was very much a possibility (and for many, an ongoing reality) that you could be fired or denied housing for your gender identity.

There were also the physical acts of harassment, assault, and outright murder that occurred. We don’t have the exact number of hate crimes committed against trans people during this time. The FBI only started recording such things as recently as 2013, and even then only unreliably so, but we know it happened. The same year Mrs. Doubtfire came out in theaters, a trans man named Brandon Teena was raped and murdered in Nebraska (his story would become the basis for the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry). We will probably never have an accurate number of such assaults because that would rely on law enforcement to gender trans people correctly, and even now, that does not always happen (see Jayne Thompson).

When I watch Mrs. Doubtfire, I cannot help but see how this context of transphobia is mostly ignored. A viewer can watch this film and walk away wholly ignorant of the outright discrimination trans people experienced during that time. Yet, the same cannot be said about the affirmation of their own transphobia.

A great example of this happens near the climax of the film. After Mrs. Doubtfire has been outed to the Hillard family, a judge solidifies Daniel’s custody arrangement because he thinks he is fundamentally unwell:

“The reality, Mr Hillard, is that your lifestyle over the past month has been very unorthodox. And I refuse to further subject three innocent children to your peculiar and potentially harmful behaviour…I am suggesting a period of psychological testing and perhaps treatment for you.”

While the judge may not say outright that he finds Daniel’s gender non-conforming behavior to be an act of mental instability, that is definitely the subtext there. If you are unaware, queer identities have often been conflated with mental illness. It was all too common during much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century for people to send queer loved ones to conversion therapy or reparative therapy so that they could be “cured.”

It’s only been very recently that this harmful practice has been banned in many states across the country, and its legally still allowed in numerous regions throughout the US. During the 90s, the idea that queerness was a mental affliction was even more common than now, and many Mrs. Doubtfire viewers would have held it.

Daniel having his children taken away from him is depicted as a sad moment. Still, I never felt like they refuted the transphobic subtext woven into the judge’s final remarks because narratively, the judge is kind of right. Daniel’s behavior was extremely inappropriate. He was a negligent caregiver who manipulated his way back into his children’s lives through cross-dressing. This duplicitousness fulfills a lot of negative stereotypes about trans people, and it can be seen as hurtful. As a recent Change.org petition remarked on why they wanted to cancel the 2019 musical adaptation of this film:

“Violence against trans people, especially trans women of color, is on the rise, and this is due in part to our culture’s assumptions that trans people are sneaky, lying, or perverted. We can’t change the ideas that were propagated by our industry in the past, but we can keep them from existing in the future.”

By voyeuristically using the veneer of transgender identity to talk about a cisgendered relationship, the film unintentionally says some pretty offensive things in the process.

I loved this movie as a kid, and in many ways, I still do. It does so many things right: Robin Williams is a great actor, even if many of his jokes no longer land for me; I admire what is being said about all family dynamics being acceptable, and now that I am in an actual queer relationship, Frank and Scott’s dynamic is actually funnier to me. I have had many similar catty conversations with my husband.

I do not think the creators purposefully intended to lambaste trans identity in the way that I have described. I have found no evidence that suggests director Chris Columbus or writers Randi Mayem Singer or Leslie Dixon set out to be maliciously transphobic.

In fact, I don’t think it was even a consideration.

That doesn’t mean the jokes I described above sting any less. While we could say that the creators were working within the confines of their society, I think that gives them too much of a pass. Many times people make bad films and jokes not because they are carefully weighing what polite society will permit them to say, but because they agree with the prevalent norms of “polite” society. Their hatred comes out, not willfully so, but instinctually, almost like breathing, and retrospectively, we don’t need to give that subtle hatred the benefit of the doubt.

We are not required to be kind about the past’s mistakes.

While we can recognize the historical context of a work (and we should), that does not mean we need to ignore its flaws for the sake of other’s comfort. It’s true that Mrs. Doubtfire, as well as other films such as In & Out (1997) and The Birdcage (1996), went a long way in cementing queerness in popular culture. It’s also true that many of these films drew upon stereotypes that we would not find appropriate to replicate today.

Mrs. Doubtfire conformed to some norms while flaunting others, and both that good and bad deserves to be highlighted.

Rather than lament this fact, we should celebrate this film’s datedness. We are no longer in the 90s anymore — with all the hatred and hurt that came with it — and I couldn’t be happier.

Alex Has Opinions 6/9/20 Alex Has Opinions 6/9/20

“Daenerys was Wrong” & Other Lies We Tell Ourselves About Violence

In focusing on how the show failed her, however, we ignore what making her into a villain says about the state of entertainment. Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) wanted to change the world, and the quickest way she saw to do that was to kill countless people. That framing says something about how the privileged view progress: you either bend to the worldview of your oppressor in favor of incrementalism, or you light the match that causes it all to burn down.

Daenerys of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, The Unburnt, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons, and Queen of, etc., etc., was wrong.

Near the end of season eight, the “Mad” Queen sacks the capital of King’s Landing with her mighty dragons. She storms the gates and tries to conquer the Iron Throne through cruel and violent means and kills thousands of people in the process.

She was also a hero who freed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of slaves from captivity. She destroyed imperialist lineages everywhere she went and made a concerted effort to listen to those “beneath” her. The populace of the Medieval continent of Westeros — although indeed not its nobility — might have been better off if she had succeeded in her conquest.

So was she a hero, or was she a villain?

There has been a lot of ink spilled on why the series finale from the hit TV show Game of Thrones (2011–2019) was so terrible. Some have argued that it was sexist to depict one of the most powerful women in media as a genocidal monster. Others have asserted that her characterization makes no sense in the context of her arc and the larger story. These are all excellent points that have been written about extensively and merit wider discussion.

That framing says something about how the privileged view progress: you either bend to the worldview of your oppressor in favor of incrementalism, or you light the match that causes it all to burn down.

For the privileged, there is no in-between.

For many, talking about the Game of Thrones (GoT) finale is an emotionally charged ordeal — even almost a year after it aired. Many people were invested in how the show would end, and not just because the HBO network released a ubiquitous ad campaign across the country. GoT was one of the most-watched shows in the world at the time. It averaged over 40 million views per episode in season eight (a number that doesn’t include illegal streams).

This attention had as much to do with its characters as it did with the notorious twists and turns in the narrative. Daenerys, or Dani, as she became affectionately called by fans, earned so much attention that many named their children after her. As one fan told the Ringer about their decision to name their daughter Khaleesi (the Dothraki word for Queen):

“What I liked about [Game of Thrones’] Khaleesi is that she was strong. No matter what happened to her, she always found a way to survive and come out on top.”

This love often had to do with what she stood for. She not only assembled an army to assert her claim to the Iron Throne but attempted to right injustices wherever she saw them. She dismantled slavery and uplifted former slaves as advisers to her court.

In a world full of men (and a couple of women) monologuing about power and honor, she was one of the very few who unapologetically wanted to undo the status quo. As she remarked to Tyrion Lannister about the Westerosian nobility in Episode 8 of Season 5, Hardhome:

DAENERYS: Lannister, Targaryen, Baratheon, Stark, Tyrell: they’re all just spokes on a wheel. This one’s on top, then that one’s on top, and on and on it spins, crushing those on the ground.
TYRION: It’s a beautiful dream, stopping the wheel. You’re not the first person who’s ever dreamt it.
DAENERYS: I’m not going to stop the wheel, I’m going to break the wheel.

Daenerys wanted to change the world, and she wasn’t afraid to do so through steel and flames.

Source: Nerdist — a shot of Daenerys after she has burned the Dothraki leadership alive.

The decision to make one of the few characters fighting for social justice an insane tyrant seemed like a betrayal of the type of change Game of Thrones implied was possible. People like Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) and Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon) may be the ones who hold actual power in the system of Westeros (and ours as well), but for a fleeting moment in time, we were led to believe that dissidents like Daenerys and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) could organize for the greater good. They built a coalition to combat the White Walkers (i.e., the evil, zombie-like horde threatening the world) and coordinated many of the Kingdoms against the leadership of the much-hated Cersei.

In the penultimate episode The Bells, however, all of this hope came crashing down. The writer’s decided Daenerys would have a “mental” breakdown during the battle, and she turned her dragons on the citizenry of King’s Landing. She incinerated men, women, and children alike, and the show implies that this was the inevitable outcome of her worldview. As Tyrion said to Jon Snow shortly before the latter stabbed her to death:

TYRION: When she murdered the slavers of Astapor, I’m sure no one but the slavers complained. After all, they were evil men. When she crucified hundreds of Meereenese nobles, who could argue? They were evil men. The Dothraki khals she burned alive? They would have done worse to her. Everywhere she goes, evil men die and we cheer her for it.

This monologue is remarkably similar to the Holocaust speech “First They Came…” by Martin Niemöller. In the speech, Niemöller talks about how he accepted the Nazis as long as they didn’t target his preferred group, but by the time they went after him, there was no one left to speak up on his behalf.

Source: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

It’s a famous and well-studied speech about the dangers of ignoring the early warning signs of totalitarianism, and I guarantee you that many Americans had to read it in school. The prolific nature of this framing means that Daenerys is not-so-subtly being compared to Adolf Hitler in this scene. Her efforts to undo the status quo of slavery and aristocracy are consequently flattened to be no better than the Third Reich targeting marginalized groups such as the Jews.

This flattening has a name — “moral equivalency,” or the concept that one stance is just as bad as another. We see this type of argument a lot in pop culture whenever a protagonist or group dares to take up arms to challenge the status quo, and it has some real-world parallels as well.

There are countless examples in media about freedom fighters and revolutionaries descending into terrifying authoritarianism. The famous video game BioShock Infinite (2013), which has sold over 11 million copies, has a notorious example in the way of minor antagonist Daisy Fitzroy (Kimberly Brooks). She is a black, anti-racism advocate who leads a revolution against the violent, white supremacist state of Columbia only to be depicted as going mad with power.

“Cut ’em down, and they just grow back,” Fitzroy said as she held a terrified white child in her arms, pointing at his head with a gun. “If you wanna get rid of the weed, you gotta pull it up from the root.” The NPC character Elizabeth (Courtnee Draper) then guns Fitzroy down several seconds later.

We find another example in the Star Wars film Rogue One (2016). Protagonist Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) has to track down former Rebel General, and father figure Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) — a not so subtle nod to controversial Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Guevara de la Serna or Che Guevara — because he is holding a critical person hostage. Saw Gerrera, at this point, has been kicked out of The Rebellion because his tactics are considered too extreme. As Senator Mom Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) describes him to Jyn:

MON MOTHMA: Saw Gerrera’s an extremist. He’s been fighting on his own since he broke with the Rebellion. His militancy has caused the Alliance a great many problems. We have no choice now but to try to mend that broken trust.

In story after story about revolutionary movements or dissidents, we see the “good guys” distinguish themselves from the “bad guys” not only through their ideals but through their nonviolent methods as well (see The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Brazil (1985), etc.). Protagonists may take the law into their own hands, but at least they don’t kill innocent people — that is “bad guy” territory.

When violence does come out, it is either the product of lawless mobs or reserved in the narrative to a morally justified individual or small group fighting against an entity that doesn’t respect the same code of nonviolence towards innocents. The line between good and evil in our media is often drawn by who is willing to inflict “unjustified” harm on others: Batman doesn’t kill civilians, but the Joker does; the Star Wars Rebels always keep collateral damage to a minimum, and the X-Men only ever target evil mutants.

In real-life, this aversion to violence manifests in a norm that emphasizes peaceful disobedience at all costs. We uplift idealized versions of nonviolent political activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi because that is seen as the “right way” to do things. You can see this outlook in the wake of the recent Black Lives Matter protests incited by the murders of black Americans such as George Floyd at the hands of the police. As Governor Jay Inslee said of the protests:

“I applaud every Washingtonian standing for what they believe in, but we must do so in a way that allows space for these important and necessary discussions, not in a way that inspires fear. If you choose to protest today, please be safe and peaceful. These are important issues that deserve our full attention, without distraction from violence and destruction.”

This caution arguably comes from the horrors of our past. We have seen through history how promises of freedom and equality can spiral quickly into Trails of Tears, Killing Fields, Gulags, and Plantations. Not every revolutionary figure keeps or even intends to keep their promises. We should not automatically accept revolutionaries such as Daenerys without holding them accountable to the ideals they claim to fight for.

The problem with hyper-focusing on how revolutionary movements can spiral into mass killings and despotism, however, means that we have a dearth of media explaining how movements can successfully use violence to achieve their goals. This tunnel vision has us look at the massacres committed by Daenerys as acts of inevitable insanity, which consequently ignores the political reality upon which they were built.

Let us get one thing clear: violence is and has always been a successful tactic in politics.

If you are reading this article right now within a democracy, then chances are your past is one of a people violently overthrowing an imperialist aristocracy, or imposing one, or both. Britain required a significant amount of force to transition from an Absolute Monarchy to one where Parliament was calling the shots. The violence surrounding the French Revolution is infamous the world over. The United States did not peacefully secede from the British, and its territorial expansion westward was not one of peaceful acquisition from Indian Country.

The infamous painting ‘American Progress’ by John Gast with some notes.

To decry violence committed by groups as extremism, especially marginalized groups, is paternalistic. It ignores the history of violence the powerful have used to get their way. Figures like Martin Luther King Jr., although firm believers in their nonviolent tactics, were operating within a system that actively squashed all armed dissent. There have been at least 250 attempted slave uprisings throughout the United States’ history, and even today, Black groups deemed to be too “militant” have actively been spied upon and infiltrated (note: this has included entities as innocuous as black-owned bookstores).

It seems naive to assume that violent oppression has not played a role in what types of dissent we consider to be possible in America, and by extension, in American pop culture. As King himself said when describing the riots of ’67 to a mostly white audience at the American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) annual dinner in Washington, DC:

“The policy makers of the white society have caused the darkness; they created discrimination; they created slums; they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society…Let us say it boldly that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.”

This history is what makes the extremist label in media so frustrating because it’s a decision to ignore power dynamics. When we insist on nonviolence at all costs, it has the effect of silencing the immediate violence being inflicted upon more disprivileged groups. This can manifest in the form of the slums King was describing above or outright shootings, but the effect is the same — people die.

It would be easy to remove the sacking of King’s Landing from its greater historical context, and to just focus on the awfulness of the deaths Daenerys caused in battle. She killed a lot of people, and under the norms of the “good guy” code, killing innocents is bad. Tyrion tries to bring this point home by claiming that you could “pile up all the bodies of all the people [his sister and father] ever killed, there still won’t be half as many as our beautiful queen slaughtered in a single day.”

Yet, the world Daneyrs lived in was one where a cruel aristocracy regularly killed those beneath them through both armed violence and neglect. While the various Houses were fighting “The War of Five Kings” to see who would succeed Robert Baratheon, it’s speculated that thousands died due to food shortages and increased instability.

Source: Hollywood Reporter — the Great Sept of Baelor being blown up with wildfire by Cersei Lannister

Later, Cersei Lannister blew up a holy building within her own capital called the Great Sept of Baelor to squash a populist religious movement. She brutally suppressed all rivals and refused to send troops up north to fight the White Walkers, even though they threatened the stability of the world.

Tyrion may be brilliant, but he occupies a privileged perspective that prevents him from seeing the indirect harm those in his class have caused to literally everyone else on the continent. He has had the privilege to be emotionally uninvested in the turmoil his sister and family have caused. It is telling that the crossed line for him was the sacking of his home, and not that of Winterfell, Highgarden, or any other destroyed town or city in the series.

Daenerys, on the other hand, is a character who is aware of the power dynamics at play here because she is one of the few characters who has bothered to listen to the counsel of everyday people. She has appointed former slaves as advisers and listened to the petitions of ordinary citizens, and yet, somehow, she is the one pushed into the villain role.

In the final episode (The Iron Throne) Daenerys rationalizes to Jon Snow her recent slaughter of innocent civilians by arguing that she is doing so to build a better world, saying:

“We can’t hide behind small mercies. The world we need won’t be built by men loyal to the world we have…It’s not easy to see something that’s never been before. A good world.”

This reasoning is the all too familiar “the ends justify the means” argument that we have seen used everywhere in pop culture (and history) from wizarding eugenist Grindelwald in Harry Potter to Thanos in the MCU. This is “bad guy” logic. We are meant to think that she has become a cold, heartless person who is willing to break the world to achieve her vision of utopia.

She has become a Daisey Fitzroy, a Saw Gerrera, or worse.

Stories are not recorded histories, however, but choices made by the story-teller. The person the viewer is being asked to hate here is the social justice warrior, and the person we are meant to empathize with, as he walks through the charred streets of King’s Landing, is Tyrion Lannister.

We have a story that makes the wealthy aristocrat the victim.

This fixation on Tyrion’s privileged perspective says something about whose voices we prioritize in our stories, and because art is an imagining of what’s possible, it’s a fixation that has real-world implications as well.

Later in the final episode, after Jon Snow kills Daenerys and her armies are assuaged, the remaining nobility of Westeros is deciding how they will rule themselves. Character Samwell Tarly (John Bradley) meekly suggests to the council that the people should govern themselves, and all the main characters laugh in his face.

The mere idea of equality is laughable to them.

The nobles take Sam’s idea of elections and apply it only for themselves. The aristocracy will nominate their ruler democratically while keeping titles and serfdom very much intact. Judging by the history of the world’s lore, this is an unstable system likely to implode the next time a new ruler has to be appointed, taking the lives of thousands of people ground beneath the still-spinning wheel.

And so, who is worse here? Who is right? The tyrant who wants to genocide the nobility and doesn’t care who gets in her way to do it, or the nobility willing to continue the suffering of untold millions to preserve its privilege?

I don’t think this answer is supposed to be easy, and I never hope it is because that would imply an utter lack of empathy for all those involved. We can talk about how Daenerys was wrong to willfully incinerate civilians (and she was). Still, there is something deeply unsettling to me about portraying the oppressive aristocracy as “the good guys.” We can label the character Daenerys’ actions wrong, while still decrying the broader trend of depicting all revolutionary movements as inherently extremist and volatile.

We live in an inequitable world. Some people are so steeped in their own privilege and power that they are not capable of seeing how said positions of privilege harm others. It would be nice if all we would need to change their minds were a kind word, but more often than not, powerful people are more likely to laugh in the face of progress than accept it.

History has shown us that force is sometimes necessary to push for change, even if it’s only the implied force from that of legislation and greater organization. We need media that shows us how to actually hold those above us accountable, but right now, we are hindered by stories that fixate on the privileged at the expense of everyone else.

We need stories that don’t make us feel crazy for wanting to change the status quo, or otherwise, the feudal world of Westeros will quickly become more than a mere fantasy.

Alex Has Opinions 4/30/20 Alex Has Opinions 4/30/20

Tiger King Proves We’ve Learned Nothing From Trump

We are a nation that not only uplifts awful people for the sake of our entertainment but equalizes everyone in their orbit as “the same” so as not to ruin the fun.

Tiger King mania has swept the nation.

The reality show masquerading as a documentary is about the “crazy” world of exotic pet handlers. The story centers explicitly around Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage (stage name Joe Exotic). He owned the Greater Wynnewood (GW) zoo in Oklahoma and had an intense hatred for Carole Baskin — a woman he tried to kill because she wanted to regulate his industry.

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness is a text that delves into a lot of complicated intersections. Joe Exotic is a gay, polyamorous, conservative, gun-toting private zoo owner who desperately and shamelessly wants to be famous. There has been a lot of ink spilled over what this text represents for the various identifiers to which Joe Exotic contradictorily clings too, but today, we are going to focus on why the show is so popular with Americans.

Put simply, it’s popular because we do love our drama. We are a nation that not only uplifts awful people for the sake of our entertainment but equalizes everyone in their orbit as “the same” so as not to ruin the fun.

It’s a formula that creates binge-worthy television and a broken political system as well.

A sickening trend in Tiger King is that the majority of the exotic pet owners on the show are not just bad people, but active sexual predators (note — that I am not referring to the handlers who manage the day-to-day maintenance of these zoos, but owners like Joe Exotic). The show explicitly details how these players used the lure of baby tigers to bring women and men into their orbit to have sex with them, and often these relationships were abusive.

The Myrtle Beach Safari owner, and mentor to Joe Exotic, Mahamayavi “Doc” Antle, for example, is described in episode Two (“Cult of Personality”) by a former staff member as controlling and manipulative. He allegedly selected staff members on attractiveness and then had them work long hours with little pay. This staff member further claims that Antle used his position to sleep with many of the female staff members there and that she was personally pressured to get breast implants and to change her name to something more exotic (“Bala”).

Antle has denied these claims, though his accuser has further expanded her position in her own words in an essay released by Elle. We may never know the extent of his abuses, but it’s clear that Antle is manipulative. It’s hard to trust a man with an ego so inflated that he describes himself as such a popular person that animal rights activists are jealous:

“I am popular. I am so well known as ‘big cat guy’ around the world, that people who are against having relationships with animals, period, want to destroy me because I am out there in the forefront so known of being this guy that is in love with big cats and has them love him back.”

There are other sexually abusive players on the show as well. Trainer Tim Stark admires Doc Antle’s set up, or as he puts it, “the way he had them women trained.” Jeff Lowe, the man who would take over the zoo from Joe, used baby tigers to set up a penthouse in Las Vegas for him and his wife to swing. He is the person who says the Intenet meme: “A little p*ssy gets you a lot of p*ssy.”

Joe Exotic, like the rest of the players here, is also quite predatory. He traps several men on his compound — men that are described as aimless with nowhere to go — and ropes them in with the allure of his lifestyle and drugs. As employee Joshua Dial says of his boss Joe:

“There are people out there. They will look at a person who is in desperate, dire need of something. In Travis’s case, he was addicted to meth, and they take that need and they fulfill it until they become the only person that can fulfill that need.”

All of Joe’s three husbands would leave him by the time he entered prison. His husband John Finlay ends up partnering with another woman, and Dillion Passage silently fades away into the background (after one or two TV appearances). His partner Travis Maldonado feels so suffocated by Joe’s abusive behavior (he is not allowed to get a job or leave the compound) that he ends up shooting himself in the head while cameras were rolling nearby.

Joe Exotic is not a good person. He ended up hurting a lot of people in his life, both on and off the screen. Rather than highlight the intersections of poverty and power that trap people like Travis into abusive relationships, the show wants to keep its focus on the eccentric behaviors of Joe Exotic. As a reporter covering the story, named Sylvia Corkill, said of his persona:

“Joe Exotic was someone that makes good TV, makes good news. Even if it’s a train wreck, you can’t help but look.”

Tiger King revels in Joe’s perspective, often letting Joe or his closest supporters speak their minds, unchallenged in closeup monologues. This focus on the spectacle of Joe’s unsubstantiated, hate-filled ramblings leads the show to explore some very uneven dead ends. Every demonization of Joe’s rivals is taken seriously, such as the unfounded conspiracy theory that Carole Baskin killed her former husband in the 90s.

Everyone gets dragged down in the mud, which means bedazzled Joe Exotic looks stunning by comparison. We are left with a perspective that is ultimately quite humanizing of him. Tiger King ends with characterizing him as an empathetic person who used to care about the animals but somewhere along the way lost his direction. As JoeExoticTV producer Kirkham lamented in the last final minutes of the closing episode (“Dethroned”):

“I truly believe that Joe started the zoo for good purposes, good reasons. But as the money rose, I think his care for the animals declined.”

We have no evidence that he ever cared, but the humanization of Joe is vital to the show’s success. It’s doubtful that anyone would binge Joe’s antics or make plans to cosplay him for Halloween if he had been described as a malicious sexual predator from the getgo (which, again, he is).

This alchemy of transmuting awful people into bingeable trainwrecks has been happening a long time in America, and it is not a harmless process.

We can pretend like the worship of characters such as Joe Exotic is a new phenomenon that began when we all got trapped indoors by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s been happening for a long time.

In America, we are willing to forgive someone for a lot as long as they are entertaining from afar.

An example of this is the cult classic The Room by director Tommy Wiseau. This B-movie is beloved by a lot of people for being “so bad that it’s good.” Much like the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), fans enjoyed the 2003 film in midnight screening decades after its initial release. Tommy Wiseau played the lead character Johnny, and part of the fun watching the movie comes from reveling in the bad dialogue and acting. As Jusef Conesa writes in Why I Love Movies:

“Wiseau didn’t set out to make this a cult classic, “so bad it’s good” movie, but watching the fandom grow and the joy spread has a been a treat. The Room is one of the few movies of its ilk that has been cemented in our Zeitgeist and after you finish watching it you will know why.”

Tommy Wiseau was a real person, though. He was a man of unknown origins with seemingly bottomless wealth, and that insulated him. The reason the script and dialogue were so bad is that he was such a flagrant narcissist that he didn’t listen to any of his colleague’s suggestions (a fact parodied greatly in the movie The Disaster Artist (2017)). He went forward with a suboptimal script to make a film that, despite spending over $6 million (maybe?) of his own money, gives the impression it cost only $600.

There are a bunch of so-bizarre-they-are-funny scenes in The Room, but it starts to become uncomfortable when you dig into the history. Wiseau yelled at actors on set, showed up late consistently, and reportedly refused to pay for air conditioning, which led to one cast member (Carolyn Minnott) to faint from heat exhaustion.

The character Lisa (Juliette Danielle), the person who comes closest to being the film’s villain because she cheats on the main character, is, in retrospect, framed in a way that is quite misogynistic. She has an infamous and uncomfortable sex scene in the film, and her character is routinely mocked in screenings for it by fans, some of which contact her about it over social media.

In an interview with Uproxx, Danielle described the fallout from this film as “a very negative part of my life. It’s something that forced me to hide.” She was diplomatic in saying that not all fans contributed to that sense of dread, but it cannot be ignored that Danielle took a break from acting while Wiseau has continued to make admittedly bad movies. Wiseau is by no means considered the auteur he imagined, but he has continued to thrive, and fans' reaction to The Room is part of the reason why. As Aja Romano wrote in Vox:

“Had The Room not come packaged with so much internal befuddlement, a legendarily strange production experience, and a mysterious man at its center, it would have been destined for obscurity.”

We like movies such as The Room because of their backstory, but we are careful to never dig too deeply.

From the works of Woody Allen to Alfred Hitchcock, there are plenty of texts that are only enjoyable if the viewer ignores the awful reality underneath. Reality television was built on the foundation of treating real people like fictional characters, and Tiger King is no different. We have to ignore a lot to enjoy the spectacle of Joe Exotic.

We talked about how abusive Joe was to his partners, but that applies to pretty much everyone in his life. He paid staff so poorly that they scavenged a Walmart expired meat truck meant for the tigers for food. The trailers that staff lived in had no running water. He placed the park in everyone’s name, including his parents, which put them in the middle of a contentious court battle that drained their savings.

Yet, on the show, Joe is narratively depicted as someone who falls from grace, or a tragic hero, which means his enemy — animal rights activist Carole Baskin — is the villain. The editing of the show takes great care to depict Carole and her husband maliciously. Whether it’s ominous music playing in the background as they pose with cat ears or the fact that they brought out champagne and brie to celebrate Joe going to prison, Tiger King wants us to associate Carole Baskin with elitism and manipulation.

While she is far from perfect, Baskin is not in the same league as the other players on the show. She is a noted activist whose facility, Big Cat Rescue, is accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries. Joe not only fails to meet these standards but his facility was, by all accounts, atrocious to both the animals and people inside it.

He is also a well-documented harasser of Carole’s and played plenty of cruel pranks on her. He, for example, mailed to her (either directly or through his followers) live snakes. He has made multiple videos threatening to kill her, and in one, he shot a sex doll he named Carole with a gun.

He also, you know, unsuccessfully hired someone to kill her.

Of course, she’s popping champagne bottles when he goes to prison. I would too if I were in her position. And yet by the time the series comes to a close, we are meant to think that she is just as bad as the other private zoo owners on the show. When GW zookeeper Saff (who is misgendered by everyone in the series) describes the situation in the last episode, he paints the battle between Carole and Joe as a pointless endeavor that was detrimental to the animals involved.

“Nobody wins. Everyone involved is a so-called animal advocate. Not a single animal benefited from this war. Not a single one.”

This flattening of morality for the sake of entertainment should sound very familiar to anyone who has paid attention to recent history. When we glorify entertaining people, it doesn’t just harm those in their orbit but also gives them power too.

In episode five (“Make America Exotic Again”), we learn that Joe Exotic ran for President, and then when that failed, governor. His race was treated like an oddity, and he ran a campaign that highlighted that spectacle. He passed out condoms that said things like “vote for me or you need this cause you’re screwed.”

In the end, he failed to win the Libertarian Primary, finishing off in a distant third. We would like to think this is where people like Joe naturally end up — that the American public chooses sanity over absurdity — but that doesn’t always end up being the case.

In fact, we are a nation that’s obsessed with the idea of awarding entertaining people with public office.

The state of California — the entertainment capital of America — has elected several former-actors to the office of mayor, governor, and even President. Actor Clint Eastwood was elected mayor of Carmel, California in 1986. Ronald Reagan rode to high office after being a famous actor as well as serving as President of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) — a union for actors. Arnold Schwarzenegger of Terminator fame was governor of the state from 2003 to 2011.

Other famous celebrities turned politicians include singer Sonny Bono in the House of Representatives (1995–1998), former wrestler Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota (1999–2003), and Law & Order actor Fred Thompson as a US senator for Tennessee (1994–2003).

Joe Exotic’s desire to pivot his celebritydom into high office is very much rooted in recent history. If you are a man, especially a conservative white man prone to saying outrageous things, then it’s not far-fetched at all to expect to be able to turn that social capital into political power.

The most obvious example of this rule is the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump. The real estate tycoon-turned-reality TV star built up a persona on the NBC show The Apprentice as America’s businessman. He was the person that yelled “you’re fired” at people, and then returned home to gaudy rooms laced in gold and inlaid with marble. He may have been a terrible person who lobbied to have the Central Park Five executed and falsely accused President Obama of not being a US citizen, but he sure was an entertaining person that always made the headlines.

Post-2016, there was a lot of time spent analyzing why he was elected president over Hillary Clinton.

Did he tap into some legitimate economic or racial angst?

Was he a political savant?

Is he a symbol or cipher for some burgeoning political movement?

The most obvious explanation was that he was entertaining. He ran a subpar campaign with a lackluster ground component, but according to a study from mediaQuant, he received billions of dollars in free media attention. This coverage was overwhelmingly negative, often in reaction to something ridiculous he said, but it didn’t really matter. As one author wrote of Trump’s negative press coverage for a study released by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy:

“The news is not about what’s ordinary or expected. It’s about what’s new and different, better yet when laced with conflict and outrage. Trump delivered that type of material by the cart load. Both nominees tweeted heavily during the campaign but journalists monitored his tweets more closely. Both nominees delivered speech after speech on the campaign trail but journalists followed his speeches more intently. Trump met journalists’ story needs as no other presidential nominee in modern times.” — Source

The attention he gave them was enough, and while no single factor ever determines an election, it was a huge one.

We must remember that the attention that reality TV stars gain while wooing America does not always start and end on the small screen. Reality TV stars have capitalized on their 15 minutes of fame to become wine entrepreneurs, start fashion lines, create health empires, and in the case of Donald Trump, become President.

In early April of 2020, a reporter asked President Trump if he would consider pardoning the Tiger King, who is currently serving a 22-year sentence in prison. Trump, who at that point had not seen the show, joked in his typical “maybe-I’m-not-joking” fashion that he would look into it.

It’s unlikely that Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage will receive a presidential pardon (though stranger things have happened), but it underscores how far-reaching cultural moments like this can become. Our celebrities wield a lot of raw power in their hands — a fact that Donald Trump is at least partially aware of every time he rants on Twitter.

We don’t know yet who, if anyone, will be able to translate Tiger Mania into actual political power. These things do not always happen the way we think they will. If you had asked me four years ago who the first reality TV president would be, I would have guessed either Omarosa or Kim Kardashian.

That was then.

Now the one thing I can say with certainty is that we have to be more careful about whom and to what we give our attention to. History has shown us that yesterday’s funny idiot on TV could be tomorrow’s dictator.

Who will you spend your time watching?