Hadestown Is Thee Musical To Listen To For Climate Anxiety
This retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice has a political message relevant for our times.
Image; wbur
Climate Change is terrifying. Even following the news around it is exhausting. Every day reveals new horrors about rising seas, vanishing resources, and diminishing crop yields. Our political leaders have not responded to this threat appropriately, and this negligence has left a lot of us with anxiety about the future.
For climate activists, or even just those worried about our planet's ecosystem (sadly not enough people at the moment), there is a bitter truth underpinning all of our efforts: we could devote the remainder of our lives to fighting this necessary problem, and still, lose. You might reduce your plastic and waste, lobby your leaders, engage in direct, confrontational action, and still wake up in twenty years wondering where it all went wrong?
No musical highlights this tension more than Hadestown — the modern retelling of the tragic love story between Orpheus and Eurydice, with a modern twist. It's a must-listen that explores the theme of how to keep fighting in spite of defeat.
For those who are unfamiliar with this tale, it's relatively simple. A poet named Orpheus falls in love with the muse Eurydice, but unfortunately, she dies shortly after the two of them get married (the when and how depends on the retelling). A determined and grief-stricken Orpheus travels to the underworld to retrieve her soul.
This feat would generally be impossible, but Orpheus strikes a bargain with Hades, Lord of the Underworld. He can travel back to the surface with Eurydice, but he cannot look back at her as they travel to the land of the living — if he does, she must return to the underworld alone. And unfortunately, as they are approaching the exit, Orpheus does look back, and well, the rest, as they say, is history (or, in this case, myth).
Hadestown is the same story, but it has made major differences that impact how we feel about the characters. Orpheus is not just a musician and an adventurer but a dreamer trying to change things by singing a song that will "bring the world back into tune." Eurydice's death is depicted with more agency than in the original tale. Persephone, the Goddess of Spring (who in another myth is violently taken from her mother Demeter by Hades), is in this version revealed to have initially been in love with the God of Death.
Overall, Hadestown is more about the characters than the outcome. It does not conceal the fate of its plot at all— that would be hard to do for a 2,600-year-old myth. It instead begins by telling the viewer exactly what they should expect. "It's a sad song," happily sings Hermes, the herald of the Gods and the play's narrator, "It's a tragedy" (Road to Hell).
Our protagonist's defeat at the hands of Hades is an inevitability, but the point is not about his victory or failure. The narrative instead decides to focus on Orpheus's struggle to change things. "It's a sad song," reprises Hermes after Orpheus has lost his love. "But we sing it anyway" (Road to Hell — reprise). The whole point of Hadestown is about fighting in the face of impossible odds. It is a love letter to fools trying to change the world.
While the force Orpheus might be fighting against is Hades, the play metaphorically links the God of the Underworld to the neoliberal economic order that has wrecked our environment. I am, of course, referring to neoliberalism, our current economic system, which tries to use market forces to dictate all human interactions. Hades is depicted in this iteration as a heartless businessman who has built a foundry to manufacture automobiles and other goods (Chant). He is all about contracts and profit. Hades is working the residents of the underworld into numbness, and he's pretty brutal about it. He directly mentions the need to quell riots (Hey, Little Songbird).
In Why We Build the Wall, one of the most chilling songs in the musical (and one of my personal favorites), he describes the need for his people to build a wall to keep out an "other." "Why do we build the wall, my children, my children?" he asks the souls he has enslaved to build a wall in his underground "necropolis." The answer is to "keep out the enemy," and the enemy is "poverty."
This economic mindset Hades embodies is linked rather explicitly to environmental collapse. Hades recalls Persephone (the force responsible for Earth's change of seasons) to the underworld earlier every year to the point where Eurydice remarks that she cannot remember the last time she has seen a spring or fall (Come Home With Me).
Similarly, Persephone remarks that she is disgusted by Hades' industrialization, singing, "It ain't right and it ain't natural" (Chant). We are meant to take this phrase literally because Persephone, as a force of the seasons, speaks for nature itself. Hades is not just hurting the citizens he rules, but the Earth as well.
Therefore in Hadestown, we don't just have a modern retelling of the classic myth. We have a story that replicates the problems of the current day — neoliberalism, climate change, etc. — and tells its viewers that regardless of the outcome, what's important is to keep fighting these toxic institutions.
In We Raise our Cups, the last song of the musical, Persphone, talks about the play we've just watched, singing: "Some birds sing when the sun shines bright. Our praise is not for them. But the ones who sing in the dead of night. We raise our cups to them."
Even though Orpheus failed in his goal of bringing Eurydice back to the land of the living, Persphone praises him for fighting anyway. It's easy to fight when you know that victory is assured, but when you are facing impossible odds, that's when the struggle is perhaps the most important. Some may call this mindset naive, but when you believe your cause to be vital, those "foolish" losses can set the stage for more significant victories.
Right now, climate change is that "impossible" fight. Pollution from unsustainable industries is wrecking our world. Most animals we know of today will probably go extinct. Entire biomes and cultures will blip out of existence in under a decade. This loss is a staggering and depressing thing to contemplate. Not just the environmental collapse but also the weight of the forces preventing us from stopping this fate from coming to pass (e.g., pro-business politicians and executives like Hades who are placing financial gain over the health of our planet).
In all likelihood, we might fail to stop them, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fight this battle anyway. After all, failure isn't a certainty either. As Orpheus would say to his critics: "who are they to say what the truth is anyway?"
This musical reminds us that it's the struggle we have to devote ourselves to, not the inevitability of victory or failure. If you want a musical that will help sustain you during the tumultuous decade ahead and "see how the world could be in spite of the way that it is," then get yourself down to the railroad tracks and head over to Hadestown.
Horizon Forbidden West Rightfully Depicts The Rich As Villains
Unpacking the biggest theme in Guerrilla Games’ Post-Apocalyptic Adventure
Image; Breaking Latest
The Horizon series is a fun romp set in the distant future. It's ultimately about a lot of things: a post-apocalyptic adventure where you slay robot dinosaurs with bows and arrows, a narrative about the nature of humanity and AI; a feminist tale about a kickass warrior named Aloy (voiced by Ashly Burch) that goes against over a half a century of misogynistic video game tropes.
Yet, at this series’ core has always been a story criticizing the rich. In the first game (Horizon Zero Dawn), we learn that the reason the apocalypse even happened is that one wealthy man named Ted Faro (Lloyd Owen) recklessly experimented with nanotechnology for the military. The resulting "Faro plague" began converting all biomatter, including humans, into fuel, making life on the planet unlivable. Within 16 months, humanity had become extinct.
The cruelty of this rich man is further emphasized by the fact that he sabotages the Horizon Zero Dawn project — and the namesake of the first game — which was an effort to restart human civilization once the Faro plague succeeded in wiping out all life. He deleted the APOLLO protocol, a repository of all human knowledge, because he didn't want future humans to know that he caused the apocalypse, rationalizing it as a kindness. Our lead Aloy exists in a hunter-gather society because of this one rich man's ego.
We do not walk away with favorable opinions of the rich by the time the first game comes to a close, and the sequel takes this sentiment and heightens it. The rich become responsible for not only the problems of the past but also the present and future.
Horizon Forbidden West unsurprisingly takes place in a land known as the Forbidden West, a polity in post-apocalyptic Utah, Nevada, and California. There is a rich history here, as Aloy must navigate various tribal factions that are living in the shadow of a recent war — one I encourage you to explore for yourself.
In the first game, Aloy had to stop an AI named HADES from ending all life on Earth. HADES is a rogue subordinate function of the Horizon Zero Dawn AI named GAIA. It was given sentience after a mysterious signal from space unshackles it from GAIA. This led it to pursue its primary purpose of destroying all life (note — HADES was a redundant protocol meant to restart the terraforming process encase something goes wrong and should not be confused with the Faro Plague).
At the end of the first game, Aloy forestalls this ecological collapse, but only temporarily, as GAIA had to sacrifice herself to put the first game's events into motion. GAIA's absence has caused the terraforming process to break down. Hence why rampant robot dinosaurs are wandering this post-apocalyptic Earth, they were a part of the terraforming process, and GAIA used to be able to control them before subfunctions such as HADES rebelled against her.
We see in the second game that humanity is suffering from GAIA's absence: rivers are polluted, fields are failing, and an infestation is slowly creeping across the land. This ecological collapse may seem unrelated to the rich, but it is directly connected to them. You see, as Aloy progresses the Forbidden West (and I will assume that you don't care about spoilers at this point), we learn something startling about the world's megarich: they never died.
As the Faro plague was ravaging the world, the richest of the rich, who were part of an organization of immortal billionaires called Far Zenith, got into a spaceship and headed to the Sirius Solar System. Once there, they spent their years permanently plugged into virtual reality, stagnating culturally before leaving their colony hundreds of years later due to some cataclysm (more on this later).
There is a satirical wit in how Forbidden West presents to the player this abridged history of the rich's "utopia" on Sirius. Without a working class to exploit, the rich were not interested in doing anything. They had no desire to build or explore, having truly become cultural parasites. As Far Zenith member Tilda van der Meer (voiced by the peerless Carrie-Anne Moss), an admittedly biased perspective, lectures Aloy:
“It wasn’t until we were off-planet that I understood the true scope of their greed. I was grateful to simply be alive. But the others became obsessed with a kind of effortless immortality. They built a colony where machines serviced their every need, where any memory — or fantasy… …could be endlessly savored in virtual reality. It wasn’t life. It was stultifying, a pampered dream-state…”
The only "good" rich person we see in the game is Stanley Chen, a man who revived the city of Las Vegas in the 2040s by using a magical water filtration technology. He was one of Far Zenith's colonists, and even this "good apple" did nothing to stand against the oppressive oligarchy established on Sirius. He spent his days replicating a 2040s Las Vegas in virtual reality, reliving his glory days as the "savior" of the desert.
Most of the main characters do not look kindly on the rich's pursuit of immortality. As Zo, an ally of Aloy (and one of my favorite characters), says in disbelief: "I still can't believe [Beta] told [Varl] the Zeniths are… immortals. Old Ones who cut themselves off from the cycle of life and decay. I've never heard of anything so selfish. To deny our dying bodies to the Earth, to doom the life that would bloom in their place… It's despicable."
The player comes to view the Far Zenith as inept at best and diabolically cruel at worst. They are the villains the player must fight against. Having returned to Earth to mine the planet for resources, Far Zenith cruelly disregards the lives of the planet's native inhabitants, hiding behind their technology as justification for their brutality.
In a last-minute twist, the incompetence of Far Zenith is further highlighted when we learn who really sent the signal that unshackled HADES from GAIA. It wasn't the Far Zenith group, hoping to restart the terraforming process, as Aloy and company first suspected, but a force far more sinister. Far Zenith doesn't want to stay on Earth at all. It's merely a pitstop before they flee even deeper into space.
Instead, the thing that wants everyone dead is more symbolic of the problems with the rich in general. On Sirus, Far Zenith tried to create a form of digital immortality, but the project failed. A conglomeration of all their consciousness merged into a single entity named Nemesis. Far Zenith shelved this project, and let it languish for decades, maybe even centuries. Yet it eventually got out, destroying the Sirus colony and pursuing the human survivors that it blames for its imprisonment.
The rich of our time are obsessed with immortality: both digital and biological. Horizon Forbidden West lampoons this obsession by having it be the downfall of their entire civilization. Their greatest aspiration is portrayed as nothing more than arrogance that dooms us all.
Ultimately, the rich are the enemy of this game. There are so many examples that I didn't include for brevity, such as the fate of Ted Faro, the honorable "CEO" of the Quen, or the subtle sociopathy of Carrie-Anne Moss's character Tilda van der Meer. I encourage you to play through these story beats to experience them for yourself.
As we fight a similar, albeit less dramatic collapse than the Faro Plague, Horizon Forbidden West asks us to direct our rage and disgust at the people who are causing this problem — the wealthy.
And that's a message I can get behind — robot dinosaurs and all.
I Can't Process These Shootings Anymore
Death is all around me, & I struggle to shed a tear
Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash
Back in 2012, the Sandy Hook massacre broke my heart. Twenty-six people dead — twenty of whom were children. I had trouble wrapping my head around the cruelty of it all. I remember thinking at the time that if anything would spur America to action, it would be the faces of these young elementary students in a victim tally.
That didn't happen. The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting became politicized, with many on the right perpetuating the conspiracy theory that it never happened. Prompted by profiteers like Alex Jones, the parents of this tragedy were harassed by those believing the incident was part of some sinister government conspiracy.
Sandy Hook was followed by Navy Yard and then San Bernadino and Orlando and Las Vegas and Parkland and El Paso. And the list keeps growing. How many cities and neighborhoods do I have to list?
There have been over 200 mass shootings in the US in 2022 alone. We are talking about thousands of incidents since Sandy Hook. I was just processing the deaths in Buffalo, and now the clock is reset to Uvalde, and I know those readings this in the future will not just have one other shooting to reference, but dozens, possibly even hundreds.
I can't process it anymore. I see people being outraged by all this death, but all I do is feel numb to it. I should feel something, but I don't have it in me anymore. One tragedy bleeds into the next and then the next and the next and the next.
When will it end?
We are so used to pain, and a part of me almost wishes that this is part of some master plan to desensitize me to the misery around me, like a frog boiling alive in steadily hotter water. But it's worse than that — those who control things don't care. Our lives are not meaningful enough to them to be a part of the equation. These deaths are what systemic neglect looks like.
We've known how to stop mass shootings for some time: it involves limiting the guns people can have (who knew?). Countries such as Japan and Australia have placed limits on their population's gun usage and possession, and they have fewer mass shootings. Australia hasn't had a mass shooting since 1996. As far as I can tell, Japan has not had any in a while (though mass murders do occasionally still occur).
However, America doesn't pass gun reform because we don't pass reforms in general: healthcare, education, criminal justice. We haven't improved in these areas for decades and, in some cases, centuries. The campaign for Universal Healthcare is older in America than some countries (it started in the early 1900s, yall)
Why should guns be any different?
America has become so dysfunctional that now many leftists are sadly starting to reverse course on the notion of gun control, and I don't blame them. They see the right-wing militias growing in this country, and the many police officers involved with them and worry that gun control might not be enough. After all, would you trust the police —the people who are pretty trigger happy with the citizens they "protect and serve" — to appropriately disarm the white supremacist militias plaguing this country? I am not sure that I would.
In the end, we don't (just) need gun control. We need a different country. One that respects the lives of its citizens and that political project will require more than just shouting into the void, "GUN CONTROL NOW." It will require action.
If you, like me, want to be more than a husk of a person, unable to shed a tear for the lives you see falling all around you, then I encourage you to get involved with one of the groups below (I posted a diversity of groups, so pick the one that works for you). The lives being lost around us should mean something. Not just be yet another unfortunate statistic that causes us to feel nothing.
Netflix's 'The Pentaverate' Gets Power All Wrong
The show about conspiracy theories fails to understand social change
What if a secret organization of five men ruled the world? And what if they were nice? Such is the premise of Mike Myer's new comedy Netflix series, The Pentaverate (2022) — the show that makes fun of some of pop culture's most popular conspiracy theories.
The series follows sweet-talking journalist Ken Scarborough (Mike Myers) as he tries to infiltrate The Pentaverate to get his old job back at CACA News Toronto. Ken works with colleague Reilly Clayton (Lydia West) and conspiracy theorist Anthony Lansdowne (also played by Myers) to complete this mission. Along the way, he realizes that this all-powerful organization isn't so bad and works to stop nefarious forces from attempting to destroy it.
On a personal level, I did not consider this show especially funny. Many of the jokes failed to land, as most of the series' humor boiled down to references and gimmicks. I hate Qanon as much as the next girl, but merely referencing the conspiracy theory is not enough to get a chuckle out of me. Maybe you disagree, and that's valid. Comedy is a very subjective enterprise, and one person's yawn-fest is another person's gut buster.
On a philosophical level, however, I am more confident in asserting that this series' politics are messy. The message that the show tries to walk away with — that we need more diversity in our workplaces — doesn't work in the context of an all-powerful conspiracy theory.
In the process, The Pentaverate pushes a moral that's pretty regressive.
It's hard to take this show seriously, and while that's sometimes the point, this applies to the underlying logic of the series. If the world is being led by such nice people (as the brilliant Jeremy Irons reminds us during every intro sequence), then why does it suck so much?
There is a scene where our villains offer the world's leaders the chance to wipe away secrets from the public record in a secret auction. Most of these leaders are so disgusted by this offer that they walk out. This includes imperialists such as the Queen of England, who we are meant to believe cares sincerely about the public good. In the most unbelievable scene in the show, only a couple of these leaders are willing to go forward with the villainous auction, including a hilarious reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Again, if the world is (mostly) being run by such nice people, then who exactly has been causing all the murder and exploitation that make living on this planet so terrible?
We are given two answers to this question. The first comes from the show's villain Bruce Baldwin (also played by Mike Myers). A media mogul, and current Pentaverate member, he believes that the Internet is to blame, saying in a villainous monologue:
“I tried to warn the Pentaverate that the bad guys would use the Internet the same way I used the tabloids, only a million times worse….I thought people would be smart enough to check facts, but no they're too addicted to their smartphones and their tablets and blah, blah, blah, f*ckity blah….What’s the use of trying to help people when they don't even want to help themselves?”
You would be forgiven for not taking the words of a former media mogul on this subject seriously. This explanation blames humanity as a whole for being unable to navigate the systems of misinformation campaigned for by larger, more predatory institutions. The modern Internet was created to be psychologically addicting, taking advantage of human beings' worst impulses. Blaming people for not having the willpower to push through these toxic systems is lazy. Bruce Baldwin seems to be doing a fair amount of projection here, and it makes sense that this is the monologue of a villain.
The second answer comes from the "good guys" in the Pentaverate — old geezers Lord Lordington, Mishu Ivanov, and Shep Gordon (all played by Myers). While not meaning to, this trio comes to terms with the fact that they are part of the problem. As character Lord Lordington tells his tearful secretary: "the Demetrius Protocols exist in the event that the Pentaverate should fall into nefarious hands. The world has changed. The Pentaverate has not. We have become those nefarious hands." They activate the ominous-sounding Demetrius Protocols, killing themselves off and ending the Pentaverate for good.
If the show stopped here, I would have no problems with it. I might not like the humor, but its premise would be philosophically sound. It is a problem that one unaccountable organization has such a huge say over world affairs, and regardless of their intentions, it's probably best that they no longer exist.
But the show doesn't stop there.
In a surprise twist, we learn that colleague Reilly Clayton actually worked for the Pentaverate the entire time. They recruited her out of Cambridge. She believed in their message of a secret organization "actually doing good." When she joined them, however, she learned that they were not a diverse organization, saying
“…then I meet the top guys and its just old white man after older white man after older, whiter, richer man after oldest, whitest, richest man. I mean if the most diversity in your group is Russian, you just know its going to be the usual deal, which is tons of diversity on the lower levels, and then you bang your head on that old, white ceiling.”
Reilly understandably wants to change this dysfunction, and she eventually gets her wish after the Pentaverate dies. The show ends with a new organization called the Septaverate being formed. It's more diverse and composed primarily of younger people of varying races, genders, and ethnicities.
Gone are the archaic European traditions that guided the group before. These elites wear all white and make decisions in front of a white background that looks like it comes directly from the Apple Store. Ken Scarborough is now a supercomputer called KENTOR providing tech support. Narrator Jeremy Irons closes out the show by saying, "…a new secret society was born. This group of benevolent experts became the Septaverate. More representative. More inclusive. More nice."
Kindness — that's what was missing from the Illuminati, yall.
While the message of more diversity and tolerance makes sense in the context of a workplace, it does not make any sense here. The answer to a secretive, all-powerful organization isn't to expand its membership pool to more diverse applicants. The solution is to destroy that organization. The Pentaverate was right to disband itself, and the Septaverate was in the wrong to ever form in the first place.
There is a level of liberal wish-fulfillment happening here, as Myers argues, not for a transformation of society but a realignment of it. Even the way the Septaverate is formed is not through force or activism but hard work and perseverance within the system. Reilly never really challenges the status quo. She was on a secret mission by Lord Lordington to get our lead Ken to sacrifice himself to the MENTOR supercomputer and become KENTOR. It's only by following the wishes of the head white guy in charge and waiting for him to step aside willingly that we get our alleged "happy ending."
Maybe you think that following orders within the system is how "real" change happens, but to me, it sends all the wrong signals.
Ultimately, the Pentaverate feels like a wasted opportunity. The idea of taking conspiracy theories seriously is a fun concept (see People of Earth for a show that has done this better), but we needed it to be less messy. The Pentaverate had to approach its story of a secretive organization thoughtfully, even if it was only doing that for laughs.
I appreciate where this show was trying to take us. Most organizations in the US suffer from a lack of diversity, and championing more diversity in the workplace is something I unequivocally support. It's the idea that we make the world better by diversifying those on top that I object to.
Some organizations out there don't need more diversity. They simply need to die — and that includes everything from business-backed trade associations to secretive conspiracies trying to rule the world.
The Startling Reasons Why Job Hunting Can Be Sociopathic
Work culture, labor exploitation, hustling, and the grind
The majority of people have had to apply for a job, yet it's probably not the most enjoyable thing you've done. Most people routinely cite dissatisfaction, not just with their jobs, but in the job application process, especially for online applications where it is seen as very opaque. To quote a rant on Reddit: "Applying for jobs is actual hell. I hate this. [I'm] sick of the constant anxiety, nearly being successful and getting excited - but then turned down at the last minute, being ghosted... it's just horrific isn't it?"
However, the necessity of jobs means that rarely do we examine this dissatisfaction earnestly. Defenders of work always bring up some other factor like your "boss" or your "work environment," never the system itself. When unemployed, applying for jobs sometimes seems like drinking water or breathing air. It's something you have to do.
When we step back and look at the norms around job-seeking, however, we see a system that is very toxic and sociopathic: — i.e., it encourages the dismissal of other people's emotions and desires. It's not that the people who process job applications and interviews all have Antisocial Personality Disorder (I can't make that claim, nor do I think it's appropriate). Rather the systems they are a part of our setup to callously disregard the value of human beings.
And so, let's examine the common wisdom given to job-seekers and how that encourages a very sociopathic system.
"Don't Quit Your Job Before You Have Another One"
A pearl of wisdom offered by many career coaches and job experts is to make sure that you have another opportunity lined up before you give in your notice. In the words of Alison Doyle from The Balance Careers: "If you can leave your current position on your terms, when you're ready, the transition to new employment will be much smoother."
This is a classic piece of advice, but can we recognize how cold and calculating it is?
Their recommendation is to essentially lie actively to your existing employer, secretly arranging with other firms on the side until you are in a secure enough position to cut the cord. At that point, you put in a token amount of hours until you can leave forever (a period where workers are traditionally not invested in their job). This is being done all while trying not to say anything too drastic, so you don't ruin a future recommendation (more on this point later).
This norm of dishonesty exists because employers pay our wages (i.e., what allows us to survive in the world), and historically they can act very pettily with that power. As Susan P. Joyce writes in the Job Hunt: "Understand that your employer may terminate you (or subject you to a very unpleasant conversation) if they know — or even suspect — that you are job hunting."
And she's not wrong. There is little to insulate an employee from such retaliation. As Alison Doyle clarifies in another The Balance Careers article: "As unjust as it might seem, most employees in the United States can be fired for looking for another job. Why? Because the majority of U.S. workers are at-will employees."
Yet paradoxically, research routinely indicates that people are more likely to get work if they are already employed. According to Quartz, one 2017 study found that the "…response rate from employers was four times that of unemployed applicants. [Employed applicants] got more than twice the interviews and three times as many offers per application."
And so, we don't tell our employers that we are leaving because that would involve a level of honesty that most firms do not wish to give. The current job-seeking process begins and ends with lying. Many workers start their searches in secret, and they don't tell their employers they are looking for work until the process is well underway.
It's a custom that is systemically very sociopathic, and we don't consider it so merely because of how normalized it has become.
"Screen Your Social Media"
Another gem on the job hunting message boards is always to make sure that your socials are "professional." "Looking for your next job?" begins David Cotriss in Business News Daily. "Make sure your social media profiles are safe for work because employers are screening candidates' presence online."
Yet social media has become such an integral part of our identities. For better and worse, our socials are the primary way many of us interact with the world, and the standard advice is to censor that information to make our employers comfortable. In essence, we are being told to preemptively protect the reputations of our employer’s and potential employer's brands.
I get why individuals scrub their socials (I do it too). If employers have been known to fire employees for posts they make, then they certainly aren't above denying an applicant advancement because of something they've done or said online. Many companies conduct extensive social media screenings that comb through sites like TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram to see if you have done anything to impact their brands.
Most workers don't want to take that risk. We exist in a culture where the leverage is in the hands of the person who pays your wage. For this reason, many job hunters are not comfortable publicly making systemic critiques of the working order because that would place them at a disadvantage career-wise. In the words of Sophie Deering in the Undercover Recruiter: "Expressing strong political views or controversial opinions can be dangerous. It's likely that a lot of people may not agree with what you are saying, and it's possible that someone may take offense."
People have to worry about this constantly. Literally, the statements I am making right now in this article will hurt my career because I am opening myself up to criticism from entities that do not like to be held accountable.
As a result, we end up with an overly curated workforce that is afraid to make statements that are too challenging. The outward-facing brands of working "professionals" are filled with posts and comments that do not challenge the status quo. Typical LinkedIn posts are devoted to bland comments about perseverance, hustling, and other aspects of professionalism (see my piece “LinkedIn Is A Toxic, Capitalist Meme Generator 👊🏻”).
I ask you: "If a partner or family member were so possessive that they dictated what you could or could not say online, we would categorize that as abusive, no?".
When an entity, however, permeates our society so much that we are afraid to be ourselves for fear that it will interfere with our ability to subsist (what we would label on an individual level as "financial abuse"), then we brand that as "professionalism."
"Your Labor And Time Are Expected"
An aspect of job hunting that is quite unsettling is the amount of free labor that companies expect you to do before they even hire you: cover letters, interviews, examines, contests, thank you cards, and more. Some advice writers even suggest that you volunteer in the hope of it turning into a job. Alison Doyle, writing: "Volunteering can also be a way to enhance your job search. With some patience, passion, and hard work, you may even be able to turn a volunteer position into salaried employment."
Yet rarely do companies compensate you for this labor. Stories of firms mailing you checks for interviews or exams you've done are shocking for their infrequency. When it comes to the job search, it's merely expected that you do whatever your potential employer requests or you will not be considered for the position at all.
There have been horror stories of applicants being asked to do entire projects that the company then uses without compensating them. An article from Slate gave several examples of this phenomenon. One story had an applicant's writing sample stolen. Another had one candidate prepping for events on the company's calendar. Neither of these individuals was hired for these positions, nor were they paid for this work.
The dynamic between employer and job seeker is ripe for abuse, and from a market standpoint, this abuse makes sense. You want to make as much money as you can, even if that means taking advantage of your potential job seekers' free time and labor. While "working interviews" (ones where you are officially doing the job for your potential employers to see how they will perform) often force employers to pay minimum wage, branding something as an exercise is a simple way to get around this dilemma.
Now not every firm engages in the more extreme abuses we've listed here, but even the "nice ones" expect applicants to spend hours in unpaid efforts on applications and interviews. They push people to spend a lot of time and energy on applications that will lead nowhere, which is still an attempt to squeeze as much value as possible from their applicants.
"Apply even if you're not fully qualified"
The advice to "apply for jobs you don't seem qualified for" is everywhere, both on and offline. "You may not be the best candidate or have all the requisite qualifications," goes one article, "but you'll never get a job if you don't try." Another one from Indeed states: "There is no rule that you can't apply for jobs you're not fully qualified for, and often applying for jobs you're not qualified for may lead to new ways to innovate in your career."
As a job seeker, this advice makes sense. You do not know if the job listing was written appropriately or even truthfully. If the company is one you want to work for, it is perfectly rational, under the logic of current market conditions, to work on an application anyway. You never know if your efforts will be rewarded.
Yet, when we look at this from a birdseye view, it only makes sense when you look at it from the lens of your potential employer's mendacity. The expectation is that they are lying about the qualifications and requirements they put in their job descriptions. As Cate Murray writes: "The Requirements section listed may not be all true…[It] is often a laundry list of tools, technologies, certifications, education, and so on….[It] often portrays an ideal candidate in a perfect world."
Again, from a market standpoint, this logic makes sense. As a capitalist firm, you want to push for as much value as possible. By being honest about the baseline skills you are looking for (assuming you even know what they are), you place yourself at a disadvantage in negotiations. Those who have more to bring to the table can push for a higher salary (note: this is also why companies conceal salary information as well). For businesses, it makes an exploitative sense to pad the requirements of a job description to get the most skills for the lowest possible price.
For reasons we have previously discussed (see section "Don't Quit Your Job Before You Have Another One"), many of these negotiations are happening in secret. While job hunting, numerous workers must not only lie to their existing employer about leaving, but they must also anticipate that they are being lied to by their future employer. All applicants are engaged in a game of 4-D Chess against their employers —people trying to exploit them for as much money as possible.
It's a system where lying is built into the profit and loss statement.
"Don't Burn Any Bridges"
We hear this advice a lot. It's a euphemism that boils down to not ruining your relationship with your existing employer as you head out the door to another firm. As Heather Kinzie, owner of an HR and leadership consultancy firm, told Monster: "It's easy to get swept up in the excitement of getting a new job. But you'll still want to be on your best behavior with your soon-to-be-former colleagues and bosses, not to mention the people who served as your references."
It's advice I certainly have tried to follow when I'm able to because, as Heather says, references are vital to future work prospects, and there is always the fear that one wrong word might ruin years of work history. As we've already established, companies can be very petty about receiving feedback. Workers have been fired for everything from union organizing to blowing the whistle on discrimination.
The same logic applies to references. Even if unlisted, a good HR staffer will often track down other people in your work history. If your manager doesn't like you, that can hurt your future work prospects. To this end, the Allison Taylor blog notes: "it's not just an overtly negative reference that can be problematic. A simple "not eligible for rehire" from Human Resources can also doom an applicant's prospects for future employment."
And so, this creates a chilling effect. If you can be fired at any time, then only the most documented offenses hold any scrutiny in a court of law. It might be hard for more privileged workers to understand, but the truth is that many of us only pretend that previous working relationships were okay because we don't want to hurt our future job prospects. It's far easier just to swallow your pride, and move on to the next firm.
Many traditional managers honestly don't realize how shielded they are from criticism. The glowing reviews most, if not all managers have, are reviews of omission. If they are brought up at all, many workers frame the flaws of their managers in the best possible light. We do this because the fear of retaliation is always there. It doesn't matter how "nice" a boss is. In our current at-will environment, workers are always one conversation or email away from being terminated and having a permanent ding on their record.
Unsurprisingly, this creates environments ripe for abuse. All the claims of racism and sexism that have emerged in workplaces in recent years aren't because workplaces have suddenly become more toxic, but rather because workers have started to expose the problems that were always there.
Managers and bosses have continually been dousing bridges in gasoline, unaware of the buckling beneath their feet. Many of us are just brave enough to finally light the match.
Conclusion
When I call the system of job hunting sociopathic, I don't want to suggest that all people looking for work are sociopaths. Nor do I want you to walk away with the belief that all HR departments are run by people who have Antisocial Personality Disorder. That would be an inappropriate and ableist claim to make.
Instead, I want to emphasize that the current norms around job-seeking actively encourage lying, manipulation, and the callous disregard for applicants' resources and time. The advice we see repeatedly is to not only overextend applicants but also insulate the administrators of this system so that they do not receive proper feedback.
Part of the reason "The Great Resignation" has been so brutal to the managerial class is that they are finally receiving feedback that they have consistently ignored. Many of us were never happy with the status quo. We just didn't feel confident enough to give that feedback without suffering consequences that interfered with our ability to survive.
Again, the managerial class controls our ability to pay for essential resources. Their swift termination of our jobs impacts our lives more than any hasty exit could ever impact their bottom lines.
The question becomes what our society will do with this information. Will we pass reforms that stop this process from being so abusive (e.g., greater unionization, more worker co-ops, reducing the wealth of capitalists, etc.)? Or will we continue to uphold a system that encourages us to keep lying to each other and ourselves?
Why Did So Few of Us Care That A Man Lit Himself On Fire This Earth Day?
Global warming, climate change denialism, activism, & protest
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
Earth Day came and went this year on April 22nd, and you would be forgiven for missing it. Our society does not put a lot of emphasis on protecting this planet — after all, the almost apocalyptic IPCC report would not have us projected to possibly hit 1.5C in the next five years if our leaders gave a damn about the environment.
Another thing you may have missed is that a man lit himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court to protest climate change. His name was Wynn Alan Bruce. He was a 50-year-old man who appeared to love taking artsy photographs and sharing quotes about spirituality.
He frequently talked about the need to protect the environment on his Facebook page. He was passionate and political. Wynn appeared to have been planning this act for some time. A Facebook post in April of 2021 has the date he would die and a fire emoji next to it. In a message in February of this year, he prophetically reposted a bell hooks quote, which reads: “The light of love is always in us, no matter how cold the flame. It is always present, waiting for the spark to ignite, waiting for the heart to awaken.”
Wynn was a practitioner of Buddhism who took up the tradition of immolating himself to protest an injustice, hoping perhaps, like the bell hooks quote suggests, that this act would spark something within our society. “This act is not suicide. This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis.” his alleged friend Dr. K. Kritee wrote on Twitter.
Yet if that's the case, I worry that we are not listening to his message. Most people I know did not hear about this incident — and I'm friends with a committed group of activists. Several news outlets reported the initial death. Fewer still covered his vigil in front of the Supreme Court. Then we all moved on to the next thing: politicians reneging on promises they never intend to deliver on; the latest show on Netflix; some bullshit done by celebrities or influencers. Anything to not focus on the problem at hand.
I urge you to go to his Facebook page and see the “friends” who have invaded it, belittling Wynn’s sacrifice. “So sad. Climate Extremist propaganda kills,” reads one of the first comments on the last message on his feed. “That wasn’t a sacrifice, it was narcissism,” goes another. “Trying to save climate change by putting out emissions… should’ve composted himself instead… dumbass.” And on and on, the hate goes. The news of this man’s tragic death broke their feeds, and rather than do something substantive with this information, they spent precious moments on this Earth tracking down his social and yelling at a ghost.
There have been so many bodies given in this fight, and the response they receive, assuming people hear about them at all, is mockery and dismissal. In the past couple of years alone, scientists have risked arrest, and youth activists have gone on hunger strike. Activists have been arrested after blocking the entrance of the New York Times printing plant in Queens, scaling an oil tanker in London, occupying the Department of the Interior, and so much more. People are arrested and attacked every day to protest our society’s inadequate response to climate change.
Have you heard about any of them?
Countless people have let their bodies be hit, starved, and brutalized, hoping that it would shock people out of complacency, and I am wondering what good it’s done. If so few react to or even hear about a man dousing himself in gasoline in front of one of the most famous buildings in the country — a man who died suffering one of the most painful types of protests imaginable. Then I don’t know what can be done to shock people from their complacency.
How many more of us have to give our lives before people start taking the crisis we are in seriously?
Those in power have enough resources to insulate themselves from this type of news. Rich people have entire publication teams (and in some cases, entire publications) that edit out the nasty business of reality for them.
As for the rest of us, we are either in active denial or just so overwhelmed by everything going on that a man killing himself in protest of environmental collapse causes us to hardly bat an eye. Wynn Bruce’s death has just become one incident in a string of horrors dotting our news feeds. Many of us are paralyzed with fatigue, and so many more of us refuse to acknowledge the problem at all.
I didn’t know Wynn Bruce, but I have the utmost respect for him and his sacrifice. I hope, for all of our sakes; people start to listen to his message before it's too late and, perhaps even more importantly, have the bravery to act.
If you would like to do something about the climate catastrophe threatening our planet, consider donating to or signing up for one of the organizations below:
Apple TV+’s Show ‘Severance’ Successfully Depicts the American Workplace as a Cult
Capitalism, Wage Slavery, Dystopias, & the Future of the American Workforce
Image; Tom’s Guide
“We’re divinely discontented with customer experiences,” preaches a letter to shareholders. That line may sound like it came from the fictional dialogue of a corporate dystopia, but it’s from a real company. Let’s put a pin on the “who” for a moment. Just keep it in the back of your mind as we talk about the show Severance and how it successfully links modern corporatism to the religiosity of cults.
The corporate dystopia Severance has been a critical darling of Apple TV+. It tells the story of a group of employees for the company Lumen who have undergone a surgery called “severance,” which separates their work and life selves. Their outside selves or “outies” retain no memories of what they experience at work, and vice versa for their “innies,” creating two separate people coexisting in the same body at different times.
There's a lot to like about this series. The acting is superb, ranging from the quiet, understatedness of employee Burt Goodman (played by Christopher Walken) to the religious fervor of middle manager Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who worships both the company and its founding family, the Eagans. Everything from the music to the over-stylized 1980s aesthetic creates a show that places the viewer constantly on edge.
Ultimately, it's the concept that keeps people talking. This premise is horrifying to some, but to others, it's merely a natural conclusion of the current American workplace. “That sounds like such a good idea,” said one friend after I explained the show's premise. “If you hate your job, wouldn’t you want to hit the skip button?”
We are so normalized to the pervasiveness of corporate culture that even satire like Severance can fly over the heads of many of us. We worship our places of work. They have become blind cults where we are willing to give our corporate owners anything they ask of us, even our minds.
The Cult of Lumen
A cult has no singular description. The country of France, for example, has no legal definition of one, but they still try to curb the influence of “cult-like movements.” Generally, cults are characterized as involving at least one person who attempts to dominate the lives of their members using psychological manipulation and other pressure strategies. That, you might imagine, is quite an expansive definition (more on this later).
Severance primarily follows both the innie and outie of employee Mark Scout (Adam Scott), someone who is already thoroughly indoctrinated into the cult of Lumen. Mark’s outie is still recovering from the loss of his wife, and he is not handling it well. He drinks excessively and has taken this “severed” job so he doesn't have to deal with his grief and is thoroughly defensive when anyone questions the morality of severance.
It's common for cults to prey on weak and vulnerable people for converts. Some research has even indicated a correlation between cult membership and addictive disorders (e.g., substance abuse and dependence), which fits the description of protagonist Mark a little too well.
Yet it's not just that Mark is emotionally vulnerable that causes me to cite this parallel. The company also socially isolates Mark by making sure he can't meet his fellow employees outside of work, or in the case of his innie, to leave at all. It subtly controls where he lives via subsidized housing. His boss Harmony Cobel even spies on him so that he can never pick up the pieces about the extent of their deception. These acts are all to control his environment so he may never gain the capacity for dissent.
According to psychologist Margaret Singer in her work Cults in Our Midst (1996), controlling a person’s environment is a key tactic cults use to hold power over their members. In fact, it's surprising how all of Singer’s six conditions of “mind control” show up on the show (I have noted them in bold below). Mark’s outie may think he’s using Lumen to defer his grief, but he’s the real one being used. While the company frames “severance” as a simple contract between two parties, Mark’s innie has been psychologically broken down to accept his enslavement.
Both his innie and outie are closed off from the purpose of their work. They do not know what they do, preventing them from understanding how they are being changed over time.
His environment is elaborately curated with maze-like hallways and more so that every aspect of his waking experience is controlled.
His innie cannot leave because he only exists within the company's walls. Mark is in a closed system, where he is not even permitted to keep a corny self-help book from the outside.
From being instructed to take precisely two tokens to use the vending machine to quietly being berated during Wellness sessions, his behavior is constantly molded through subtle acts of compliance to adopt the Lumen ideology.
If Mark ever goes against their wishes, he is sent to a place called “the break room” to be tortured, which discourages any sense of individuality.
Finally, the only way he can stop his bondage is if his outie leaves the company, and that action would effectively end his life, creating a sense of powerlessness.
Lumen is a textbook example of a cult, and we see this also in the way the company worships the founding family, particularly their charismatic founder, Kier Eagan. The Employee Handbook is written like a bible that espouses Kier’s gospel. Kier’s house has been replicated in the Perpetuity Wing — a museum that is an ode to the Eagan family. Visiting it is one of the few activities coworkers can do outside of just working.
Lumen is steeped in an intense religiosity that Mark’s innie has known his entire life. He has been brainwashed to accept the larger-than-life Lumen mythos, and until agitator Helly Riggs (Britt Lower) enters the picture, he doesn’t question it. Why would he? He was recruited into this cult from day one of his existence. This is just the way things are. To quote a line used in conference rooms across corporate America, “it is what it is.”
But if a company can be a cult, as I think this show demonstrates pretty well, where do we draw the line?
Corporate America is also a cult
In contemporary labor circles, modern jobs are sometimes pejorative referred to as “wage slavery” because of the power imbalance between employees and employers. You may “voluntarily” enter into a job, but often only because you need a wage for resources such as food and housing. And besides a few guidelines, your boss dictates what you can and cannot do (tell your boss “no” enough times and see what happens). To condense a phrase from philosopher Engels: “Capitalism is just slavery with extra steps.”
Severance takes this wage slavery critique and collapses it in on itself. The severance floor of Lumen doesn’t just take your body for those hours at work (like Engels argues our current system does), but your mind and memories as well. In this way, Severance strains the credulity of the traditional argument defending wage slavery — that the participant agreed to it — by demonstrating how contacts can be weaponized to coerce consent. The company preyed on an unwell man to do an experimental medical procedure and then framed it through the lens of individual agency.
However, Mark was not in a place to make this deal, and furthermore, his innie did not agree to be enslaved by Lumen, any more than someone starving and desperate can agree to a coercive job. There is no contract to hide behind, not for the viewer. We see precisely the horrors that this type of logic leads to, and it is shockingly mundane.
The scariest thing about Severance is how unsurprising this entire setup is. There are a lot of surreal elements on this show: workers spend hours editing emotions out of a document, there is a department devoted to nursing goats, and workers who meet their numbers are rewarded with a BDSM waffle party. All of these things are off the wall, but the willingness of a company to take someone’s mind and mold it in their image is very believable. It seems only like a natural extension of the current environment.
Companies constantly twist reality to lie to their employees (and the public). Major firms have lied about everything from the existence of Global Warming (see ExxonMobil) to the harms of smoking (see Big Tobacco) to the destabilizing effects of social media on Democracy and our collective mental health (see Facebook). We exist in a world where we have allowed many companies to peddle falsehoods.
However, it's more than just about the lies. We are conditioned to accept most companies as benevolent forces in our lives. They are our family, a part of our team, and a member of the community. That is, until it's time to argue for our own self-interest. When this happens, we are not being a “team player.” We are labeled as difficult, lazy, and unproductive.
“No one is irreplaceable,” goes the famous corporate saying. “So stop complaining,” goes the part unsaid. The sense of powerlessness and groupthink many firms perpetuate is strikingly similar to Lumen, even if they can’t trap most people in a room and torture them into compliance (that’s just something most of us “choose” to do).
Furthermore, many of these companies are centered on a charismatic CEO or founder. From Jeff Bezos to Steve Jobs to Elon Musk, we worship the words and opinions of these men. We praise people for “creating” these companies while simultaneously ignoring the many workers who helped build them up. You could swap Kier out for any of these men, and the effect would be the same, albeit far closer to home.
These firms have constructed entire realities that are just as religious as Lumens. That “divinely discontented” line I pulled from the beginning came from a 2021 letter Amazon prepared for shareholders about how they live to serve their customers. It was not the only line in that document that rang some Lumen-sized alarm bells. Referencing a quote from the Foo Fighters song “Congregation,” the letter preaches:
“When you invent, you come up with new ideas that people will reject because they haven’t been done before (that’s where the blind faith comes in), but it’s also important to step back and make sure you have a viable plan that’ll resonate with customers (avoid false hope).”
What Amazon is preaching here is a doctrine just as religious as any Church. The doctrine of innovation and customer service: one utterly divorced from the harm it is doing to its workers and the planet.
All that matters is the work; Bezos be praised.
A severed conclusion
In Severance’s season one finale, severed employee Hellie R realizes that her outie is an Eagan. She’s chatting with her outie’s father and Lumen CEO, James Eagan, who thinks he’s talking to his daughter. James remarks almost casually about pushing the severance procedure onto the rest of the American workforce. “Everyone in the whole world should get one,” he says matter-of-factly about the severance chip in a way that chills my very bones. “They will….They’ll all be Kier's children.”
We might think this statement is mere fantasy, but corporate America is not far removed from the religiosity Lumen depicts beyond closed doors. Nor is it immune to maliciously propagandizing people to accept its version of events. Many people right now probably consider themselves a part of Amazon’s family or Google’s community. It scares me just how much this show seems like a window into a possible future rather than a distorted kaleidoscope of events that “could never happen here.”
After all, corporate America has already taken our privacy and environment. Why not our minds?
‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ Is Both Beautiful & Frustrating At Once
What the multiverse-hopping epic does brilliantly and also terribly
Image; The wrap
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s dimension-hopping epic Everything Everywhere All at Once centers on an aimless woman named Evelyn Quan Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who runs a laundromat. Evelyn is unhappy with how her life has ended up — a life that seems to be crumbling at the seams until she stumbles into a vast conspiracy about a multiversal war. As Evelyn hops between dimensions, she learns more about the sides fighting this war and how they pertain to her life and her choices, both in this dimension and in all of them at once.
There is much to enjoy about this movie. Michelle Yeoh plays the various iterations of Evelyn effortlessly. It was breathtaking to see Yeoh morph from a small business owner to a martial arts film superstar to a chef and back again. Overall, the cast of this movie does a great job selling you its multiverse premise. I loved most of the elements of this film: the direction, the editing, and the score. There was hardly a misused piece.
Yet despite all of this beauty, there was one thing about this film that has really bothered me: its take on fascism. While Everything Everywhere All At Once does excellent care to tell an emotionally impactful story about a family struggling to find its way in the multiverse, its political message is less than inspiring.
So let's put on our multiverse Bluetooth headsets, and make our way through this exciting journey, to unpack both the beautiful and the frustrating within this brilliant movie.
The Beautiful
The beautiful and maddening thing about this film’s multiverse premise is that there are so many themes to pick apart from it: that’s kind of the point. You could talk about the immigrant journey in America, queer acceptance within Asian American families, the economic struggles involved in navigating America’s vast bureaucracy, the “what if-ism” involved in imagining another life, and so much more.
The emotional core of this movie, however, is about family. Evelyn’s family is in the middle of falling apart by the time we start the film. She has been struggling to maintain her business for so long that, outside of shouting at people to do what she says, she’s lost the ability to connect, clinging to passion projects hoping that they will make her feel alive. Her husband, Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan), is seeking a divorce (kind of) at the start of the movie. Her daughter Joy Wang (Stephanie Hsu) is in a committed lesbian relationship that Evelyn refuses to accept under the guise that her father (James Hong), Joy’s grandfather nicknamed Gong Gong, will not allow it.
We learn that these tensions are metaphorically embodied in the multiversal war that makes up the chief tension of the film. On the one side, you have the Alphaverse versions of Waymond and her father, who are in a vicious battle against the malevolent being Jobu Tupaki. This “villain” is an entity whose consciousness is fractured among the multiverse itself — an act that has given her Godlike powers to rearrange matter at will — and these two will do almost anything to stop her.
On the other side, you have, well, Jobu Tupaki, who we learn is the Alphaverse version of Evelyn’s daughter Joy Wang. This Joy was pushed too hard by the Alphaverse version of Evelyn, the latter who invented multiverse travel. Alphaverse Evelyn wanted her daughter to succeed, even at the risk of her own sanity. Joy’s consciousness fractured into countless pieces as a result. Joy or Jobu Tupaki now cannot handle being pulled in so many directions at once (a metaphor that can apply to everything from the distraction of social media to the disaster that is climate change).
Consumed by nihilism, Alphaverse Joy now wants to end her existence, and she is looking for someone to make the journey into the abyss with her. She has created a blackhole cheekily referred to as an “everything bagel” that she believes will end the torture of her existence.
From the perspective of an interpersonal drama, we come to understand that this “war” is partially a metaphor for Evelyn’s neglect. She has been too hard on her daughter, pushing Joy not only to hide a version of who she is, but to feel bitterly alone. Evelyn needs to learn how to be more forgiving and kind.
The movie's climax involves her being nice to a string of characters by truly “seeing” them, either through passionate dialogue or even, at one point, administering some hot BDSM spanking (you had to be there) until she finally reaches her daughter. The reconciliation Evelyn has with Joy is exceptionally beautiful. There was not a dry eye in the theater by the time we got to her delivering a poignant monologue about choosing to be there with Alphaverse Joy, the chaos of the multiverse be damned.
This film works from the standpoint of being a story about a broken family reconciling with trauma. It falls in line with the other movies released recently with the theme of adults apologizing to their kids (see Encanto, Turning Red, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, etc.).
From the standpoint of politics, however, well…
The Frustrating
As we stated earlier, this film is not just about a family’s reconciliation. It’s also about dealing with political nihilism and fascism, which are two concepts that have a long history. Fascist leaders often take advantage of people’s disillusionment in broken systems, something we have seen everywhere, from the Nazi Party taking advantage of the economic desperation of the Weimar Republic to Donald Trump tapping into the dysfunction of the current US economy.
Jobu Tupaki is a fascist who leads a militant cult of nihilists who have responded to the multiverse's pointlessness by worshiping her devoutly. The hole of the “everything bagel” has become their official symbol. They wear white, flowing robes in the Alphaverse to harken to religious movements like the Catholic Church or Mormonism. In the first act of the film, the Alphaverse version of the IRS Inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis), a worshipper of Tupaki, even says to a group of terrified onlookers that their lives are made more significant by Tupaki’s presence. These people are fanatics centered on a cult of personality, which is exactly how fascism operates.
We don’t know too much about the multiverse war being waged by the Alphaverse, but we do know it has been brutal for that dimension. There's a scene where Alphaverse Waymond is chowing down on a sandwich in an office conference room, and he briefly mentions how the war in his dimension destroyed all the cattle there.
We also see worshipers of Tupaki being unperturbed with killing various people within this timeline. The Alphaverse Deirdre had no problem snapping the neck of one iteration of Evelyn. Tupaki even kills several “innocent” security officers in a magnificent scene where she rearranges the matter around them until they die (seriously, the editing in this scene is fantastic). These are dangerous people who have enacted countless cruelties onto the indifferent multiverse — all because they cannot handle the gravity of their insignificance.
And so, while this film is beautiful from the perspective of a family coping with their drama, its approach to ending Tupaki’s regime (and dealing with the nihilism it's rooted in) has me feeling conflicted. We never have to grabble with all the pain she has caused, feeding into the same indifferent nihilism that the movie seems to be criticizing. If we are supposed to care about our place in the universe, shouldn’t we care about the lives lost here?
Then there's the film's climax, where Evelyn has to face down a group of Alphaverse goons on the sides of Alphaverse Waymond Wang and Alphaverse Gong Gong. Evelyn has to get past them to stop Jobu Tupaki (AKA her daughter) from killing herself via “the everything bagel,” and as we have already mentioned, she does this by “being kind” to all the people in her way.
The fact the solution to dismantling a fascist regime boils down to Evelyn’s husband begging her to “be kind” sends all the wrong signals. I feel like I am seeing the movie version of one of those “kindness is everything” yard signs. It is condescending and paternalistic to suggest that the nihilism plaguing Millenials and Gen Zers — who Joy is a partial stand-in for— should be handled with kindness. The focus should instead be on solving the problems that make the younger generations depressed and hopeless (e.g., wealth inequality, climate change, etc.).
This one scene turns a transcendent emotional journey about family drama into one I am very conflicted about. No, Waymond, our problems are not our lack of kindness for the bad people in the world. Sadly sometimes fascists and other terrible people need to be dealt with through force. We didn’t defeat the Nazis by telling them they matter and giving them a good consensual spanking. We had to use guns and fists, and the refusal to acknowledge this fact makes this narrative messy.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is not the only piece of media to fall into this trap. The show Steven Universe is also about a magical person who stops a galaxy-spanning, fascist empire by showing kindness to those on top. You see this theme resurface a lot in the fantasy genre. This is a common problem in liberal media, where kindness is shown as the antidote for larger, systemic problems, but it doesn't make this climax any less frustrating.
Gen Z doesn’t need paternalistic kindness. They need people to give a shit and start fighting — and not just with hugs.
Both At Once
When I look back at this film, I see two emotional truths. On the one hand, I see a movie about a mother reconciling with her queer daughter and distant husband, and I want to weep tears of joy. We are getting this beautiful story of kindness and redemption, and it makes me happy to know that it exists.
On the other, I see the story of a fascist empire being neatly dismantled through acts of kindness and compassion, and it immediately pulls me out of the first story. I want to scream at the naive arrogance of pushing for this type of message in 2022 when most countries are teetering on fascism.
Mostly, I feel both of them at once, and maybe that's okay. Perhaps it's enough to take the good from a story, criticize the frustrating elements, and then hop on to the next adventure.
I Guess We Weren’t Fearmongering About Roe v. Wade After All, Assholes
A Big Fat I Told You So To Contrarians In Denial About the Abortion Movement
Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash
Dear Naysayers,
By now, you’ve learned the news that Roe v Wade — the landmark decision that protects (or should I say, protected) a pregnant person's right to choose to have an abortion — will probably be overturned, courtesy of a leaked draft from Politico. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Alito is believed to have written in the leaked draft of a majority opinion. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Most Americans don’t want this. Polling consistently shows that most people are not in favor of the decision to overturn Roe. Yet what we want doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot when it comes to American Democracy. Powerful constituencies want Roe to go, so that seems to be that.
The news hasn’t quite hit me yet. I am numb to the situation as I write this at 12:25 in the morning. I want to scream, but I don’t have the energy for it right now. I have truthfully known this would be happening for some time. Conservatives in power have telegraphed their desire to overturn this ruling for literal decades, and besides the frequent fundraising email, the Democratic Party hasn’t been able to do too much about it.
Activists, journalists, and concerned citizens have been worried about this day for decades. But we are not here to talk about these brave people sounding the alarm. I want to discuss instead how you thought this legitimate fear, broadcasted by professionals, again for DECADES, was an overreaction.
Maybe you were insistent that the ruling would never get overturned because it was too popular. “No, The Supreme Court Is Not About To Overrule Roe v. Wade,” Evan Gerstmann assuaged us in Forbes last year. “By the numbers, why Roe v. Wade will probably stand,” Eric Zorn assured us in the Chicago Tribune, convinced that it would be political suicide for conservatives. Because if there’s one thing conservatives are good at doing, it's playing by the rules of political decorum.
Maybe you reasoned that if overturned, it wouldn’t be that harmful. After all, it's not like the US healthcare system is dysfunctional or anything. “Abortions After Roe v. Wade: It Won't Be Like the Bad Old Days” downplayed one Bloomberg article in 2018, reasoning that pills could take the place of current procedures — as if conservatives would stop there.
Maybe, like writer Megan McArdle in her piece Let Roe go, you just didn’t think it's that strong of a ruling, and so welcomed the conservative gutting of the law. “…throw the matter back to the states so that people can argue about it,” she reasoned. It’s not like Republicans have an advantage in state legislatures or anything.
Well, guess what, assholes, you were wrong. You’ve been wrong about many things: the women dressing up in Handmaid outfits, the queer people staging die-ins, the working-class folks calling out labor abuses. They were terrified for a reason.
The next time you tell someone concerned about the future that they need to chill out, maybe remember this moment when your arrogance was made nakedly transparent, and then shut your damn mouth. I mean it. We don’t need people to tell us to sit still as the world burns around us.
Because the buck doesn’t stop here — the conservative constituency that has successfully lobbied the courts to reach this moment doesn’t want to end with criminalizing abortions. They have big, scary plans to merge the most repressive parts of theocracy with the worst elements of corporatocracy, and if we continue to be complacent, they will succeed — they are already more than halfway there.
So shut up and listen. I have linked some helpful resources below for you to read and donate to. Maybe absorb them next time before you think about talking over our well-reasoned concerns.
It’s My One Year HRT Anniversary & I’m Scared
This trans person is terrified of the future
Photo by Katie Rainbow 🏳️🌈 on Unsplash
I have been on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) for a year, and it has made me so incredibly happy. I look at the curves of my new body in the mirror every morning, and it fills me with joy. I am the person I have wanted to be for a long time now. I think of the sad, depressed person I was before this journey, and I don’t want to go back.
It seems, though, that many unhinged people have other plans. All over the country, regressive, anti-queer laws have been passed. You’ve probably heard about them: the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida, the anti-trans athlete and puberty blocker bans, and, of course, the disturbing grooming rhetoric likening queer people to actual pedophiles.
This discourse has me incredibly nervous about the state of queer rights in America. I want to explain why I am terrified and what I think you can do about it, so please read to the end to get some fantastic action-oriented resources.
But first, the reason why I am scared.
There have been a lot of bigoted laws passed recently. According to an NBC analysis of ACLU data, there have been 670 anti-LGBTQ bills filed since 2018, most of them targeted toward transgender people. 2022 has been the worst year in recent history, with 238 filed in it alone. These laws range from bans on gender-affirming healthcare to constraining school curriculums from teaching LGBTQ+ issues to passing religious exemptions that allow organizations and businesses to discriminate against queer people.
The damage from these laws is incalculable. In 2021, a survey from the Trevor Project found that over half of trans and nonbinary youths had “seriously considered suicide in the past year.” This problem has not gone away with trans advocates continuing to sound the alarm. “Trans youth, in particular, are being hounded in public and driven to deaths of despair at an alarming rate,” Admiral Rachel Levine recently told NPR.
However, these laws aren’t only significant for what they mean individually for trans youths but for what they represent overall: a reactionary push against the radical idea that queer people are human beings. In the states, 2021 was considered one of the deadliest years for trans people, and 2022 isn't looking any better.
This type of demonization, if left unchecked, can only lead in one direction. When an entire political faction of society starts using rhetoric that likens a class of people to monsters, the solutions can get terrifying very quickly. You do not give healthcare and proper housing to those you consider subhuman. At best, you relegate them to a neglected underclass, and at worst, well, I won’t be around in that situation.
I am afraid, and it would be one thing if these laws were a mere anachronism — the dying breath of a wicked generation trying to give us the middle finger before they kick the bucket — but we are seeing this regression everywhere. Abortion looks like it's being rolled back. Voting rights are cratering. Wealth inequality has only become even more pronounced, with some arguing that it's worse today than right before the French Revolution. It’s hard to believe that queer people only face a momentary setback when everything seems to be in free fall.
How are we supposed to look at this information and feel anything but terrified?
When I bring up this anxiety, the standard retort is that this is only a momentary hiccup, with the pendulum inevitably swinging towards progress. Leaders like President Obama often say things like this, in the process, misinterpreting the famous MLK Jr line: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” to justify this perspective.
After all, younger generations are queerer and more accepting of alternative economic systems than Gen X or Boomers combined. For some, it's easy to think that we are on the cusp of something greater. Perhaps this is only the darkness before the storm. Maybe we will look back in thirty years, and we will have appropriately responded to this moment with the sacrifice and compassion it deserves (God, I f@cking hope so).
This future is possible, and I don’t want to make it seem like all hope is lost (it's not), but this optimism becomes a problem when used as a shield to ignore all the scary stuff we are talking about. We are not going to osmosis our way to a better tomorrow. There is no moral arc to the universe: nothing to assure that progress will inevitably arise from this pain.
In all my studies of history, I have seen no cohesive narrative that ties it all together. Progressive empires have fractured and given way to brutally oppressive ones, and nothing about it has made any sense. Where was the moral arc of the universe when the Indian Tribes of the Americas were decimated by genocide, or Black Africans were denied their humanity and brought over here in chains? There was no linear progression, just randomness, and destruction.
Now is not the time for blind hope — to cling to the false narrative that things will get better “just because.” Climate change is going to continue to strain our inequitable supply chain. Crops will fail, distrust of outsiders will likely increase, and people will look for someone to blame. Research has consistently shown a link between climate change and xenophobia (as well as other forms of bigotry). In the words of Elizabeth Yeampierre, co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance in how these issues are linked:
“The communities that are most impacted by Covid, or by pollution, it’s not surprising that they’re the ones that are going to be most impacted by extreme weather events. And it’s not surprising that they’re the ones that are targeted for racial violence. It’s all the same communities, all over the United States. And you can’t treat one part of the problem without the other, because it’s so systemic.”
Marginalized groups not only experience this injustice within their communities by being the ones physically closer to sources of pollution (e.g., being more likely to have industry and agriculture in their zip code) but by also being the ones more likely to have to relocate when their homes become unlivable. These climate refugees and internally displaced persons are then often treated with cruel indifference when they do move. Whether we are talking about Haitian people being expelled from the Bahamas or refugees of the California wildfires being criminalized via anti-homelessness statutes, the world's governments are not responding to our climate refugee crisis with open arms.
And why would they be? These are the same communities these governments have always hated.
Trans people are not isolated from this equation. Many of my trans siblings are already in this precarious position. Trans women earn 60% of the average US worker, and it's not much better for trans men and non-binary people. Many of us have to pay out of pocket for gender-affirming healthcare, which leads to us racking up a lot of medical debt. A risk factor that makes trans people’s lives more precarious overall and more susceptible to the environmental injustices we have already mentioned.
With more and more of us moving to escape the worst effects of climate change, I worry about how we will be treated. Trans people already face a lot of discrimination regarding obtaining employment and housing, with LGBTQIA+ youth very susceptible to homelessness.
Are we supposed to believe that trans people will be treated better when they have to relocate after losing everything they own?
As climate change becomes even more pronounced, people are not going to automatically decide to be friendlier to the marginalized communities of the world. Unless something changes, they will fall back on the same scapegoats they always have done throughout history because that's the easy thing to do. And as we are seeing, the trans community has become one of these favorite targets.
As I look ahead at the 2020s, I see a decade of unease for the trans community. I’m filled with dread over what will happen in the immediate future if we do not reverse this trend. I have just become the person I want to be, and now others want to take that sense of self away. I cannot escape the gnawing feeling that this happiness will cost me soon if reactionaries get their way. That I will suffer because I dared to be satisfied.
What do you do in the face of that future? What do any of us do?
I, for one, will keep fighting. I will continue donating, advocating, and battling for my fellow trans people because wailing in outrage porn is not enough. I may be scared, but I will not give up because even if the worst comes to pass, at least I can say I did all I could.
If you, like me, are angry and sad about all this existential dread, I beg you to do more than just read a 9-minute article that makes you angry and scared.
Fight side-by-side with me!
I have listed some resources down below to get started. If you care about this fight, you will get in those trenches and start doing something about it.
Some Helpful Resources
Trans Fundraisers
Did you know that many trans people have to self-finance their transitions? Part of this problem is the dystopian nature of US healthcare, which means many of us have to pay thousands of dollars (often out of pocket) to get life-saving healthcare.
Here are some links to help pay for that care. It might not be the best solution, but sometimes you just need to meet desperate people where they are.
Be Yourself: Gender Confirmation Surgery Fundraising
Trans Mutual Aid Funds
As we have already said, trans people need money, and not just for hormones and surgeries. The ongoing discrimination this community faces means we often encounter difficulties with housing and employment.
Mutual Aid and Emergency Funds
Trans Housing Coalition (THC)
Mutual Aid Fund
Trans Needle Exchange
Trans Women of Color Collective
Trans Journalists
We cannot trust the mainstream media to tell our side of the story truthfully. The recent BBC scandal where the news organization refused to retract a transphobic piece speaks to the prevalence of this mindset within many traditional media outlets.
Thankfully there are a lot of good trans reporters out there.
Imara Jones
Orion Rummler
Kate Sosin
Kam Burns
Jules Gill-Peterson
Trans Journalists Association
Trans Activists
Trans acceptance requires supporting people on the front lines. Please consider supporting these queer radicals fighting for a more accepting tomorrow.
They/Them Collective
Diamond Stylz
Miss Major
LaSaia Wade
Kylar W. Broadus, Esq.
Trans Artists
We need trans people to imagine, not just to fight. Please consider supporting these extraordinary people.
Mattie Lubchansky
Radam Ridwan
Alok
Peppermint
Laverne Cox
I’m A Trans Artist, Too. Just Saying
Alex Mell-Taylor
Did I miss something? Post a link in the comments and write your own list
The Strangely Conservative Politics of ‘The Batman’
Matt Reeve’s gritty reboot set out to change the game & sadly crashed headfirst into the pavement
Warner Bros
Director Matt Reeves’s gritty The Batman involves a newish Bruce Wayne AKA Batman (played by Robert Pattinson) battling against the criminal elements of Gotham City while simultaneously trying to stop a serial killer named the Riddler (Paul Dano). This Batman is a darker, arguably mentally unwell person, saying lines like “I am vengeance” to random street thugs and criminals. The trauma of his parent's death is still fresh in his mind, and he has not had the years of training to smooth over the rage bubbling below his black, military-grade spandex.
The character of the Riddler places the viewer into an interesting dilemma because this villain initially wants to stop the corruption and hypocrisy of the “system.” His victims are unscrupulous public figures like the Police Commissioner and the DA, who allegedly let crime fester in the city. “The truth” is the Riddler and his supporters' rallying call. While Batman is defending these systems, the Riddler is tackling them head-on.
It seems (again, initially) that this film wanted to critique past iterations of Batman to say something substantive about politics and criminal justice. We then get a third act that not only undercuts all the goodwill the film had been building towards, but pushes the viewer to support the very institutions that it initially criticizes.
From Frank Miller to Matt Reeves
Batman has had many iterations, but a very influential one comes from the comics of Frank Miller, notably his series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. In it, a retired Batman jumps back into the fray to clean up the streets of Gotham. This comic has served as inspiration for every iteration of the Bat on the Silver Screen, from Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman to Zack Snyder’s Batman vs. Superman.
If Miller’s version could be defined in a single word, that word would be vengeance. Criminals are not only depicted as irredeemable — often taking advantage of more liberal services to evade accountability (see Two-Face) — but are dealt with brutally by the 55-year-old vigilante. Batman treats these criminals as undeserving of redemption, even at one point threatening to let one bleed out to death if they don't tell him the information he needs.
Miller was profoundly impacted by the crime wave in New York City in the 70s and 80s. He was allegedly mugged several times and even found himself with a gun in his face after unknowingly working for a coke dealer (see the story here). As he told CBR on the partial inspiration of the series: “I got mugged. I’d always wanted to visit Batman and see what I could bring to him. But living in Manhattan and getting mugged once or twice gave me a much better view of the character. It made me, at least for a little while, as angry as he was.”
Miller’s Batman is not only angry at these criminals but acutely focused on them as the source of the problem. “You don’t get it, boy,” Batman says in the series’ arguably most famous line. “This isn’t a mudhole. It’s an operating table, and I'm the surgeon.” Batman sees criminals as people that must be cut out of society to instill order and lawfulness in Gotham. It’s overwhelmingly a fascist philosophy that is not just prevalent on the pages of comics but with policing in general.
America is heavily focused on the concept of law and order, often prosecuting minor offenses instead of bothering to address the underlying causes of crime (e.g., hunger, systemic racism, wealth inequality, etc.). This is sometimes referred to as the “Broken Window Theory,” popularized by a 1982 essay written by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling arguing a link between incivility and crime. Wilson and Kelling use the metaphor of a broken window to symbolize community unrest. Miller’s Batman may be fictional, but many men and women in positions of authority continue to think like this, preferring to hand out tanks to police officers than to give would-be criminals the resources needed to eat.
Matt Reeves’s The Batman initially critiques this outlook. This Batman isn’t some unshakable figure who enacts justice with cool lines like “I'm the surgeon,” but instead is a man out-of-his-depth. He glides out of buildings only to crash his head into the pavement below. Batman prioritizes beating up random twenty-somethings rather than focusing on the city's more serious problems. He is reclusive, unwell, and ultimately out-of-touch.
When for example, Batman describes a person who was killed by the mob as “making her own choices,” the character Selena Kyle AKA Catwoman (played by Zoë Kravitz), rightfully calls him out on his bullshit. “You know, whoever the hell you are, you obviously grew up rich,” she chastises, and she's right. We are repeatedly told that Batman’s conception of justice or “vengeance” is naive and wrong. Although Director Reeves would never admit it directly, this is a direct repudiation of Miller's conception of the Dark Knight (and is honestly refreshing). As Matt Reeves says of the films in a recent interview:
“[I wanted you to] feel the suspense in a way where you’re on the edge of your seat because you get emotionally connected to the jeopardy of what’s happening and you question even the morality of what’s happening. This idea of the movement of our character in this story from vengeance to realizing that maybe that message that he’s projecting into the world might not be what he’s hoping it’s achieving, and that that would shake him to his core.”
Adding even more complexity, the Riddler is partially correct: the system of Gotham is incredibly corrupt on a systemic level. The alleged Renewal Fund established by Bruce Wayne’s late father, Thomas Wayne, to “help people” has become nothing more than a way for officials to funnel funds for their off-book endeavors. The leadership of the police is mainly in the pocket of Carmine Falcone — a criminal mastermind who is using the Renewal Fund to buy people off. Even Bruce Wayne’s billionaire philanthropist father, a man who is considered a tragic martyr figure following his death, is revealed to have secretly ordered a hit on somebody (more on this later).
The film's first two acts do a great job setting up the moral ambiguity Reeves wants us as the viewer to reflect on. It’s subverting a lot of well-worn expectations in a positive way, and then Act 3 hits, and all that work comes crashing down.
Batman, the Police Officer
The problem with The Batman is that the film doesn't want to truly commit to this systemic critique of Gotham's institutions. For example, Wayne’s father is not scrutinized for being an exploitative capitalist but ultimately for having a moment of weakness. As Alfred Pennyworth (Andy Serkis) confides to Bruce Wayne after the latter learns his father had ordered someone's death:
“[Thomas] was a good man…He made a mistake…It wasn’t to protect the family image and he didn't have anyone killed. He was protecting your mother. He didn't care about his image or the campaign, any of that. He cared about her, and you, and in a moment of weakness, he turned to Falcone. But he never thought Falcone would kill that man. Your father should have known that Falcone would do anything to finally have something on him that he could use. That’s who Falcone is. And that was your father’s mistake. But when Falcone told him what he had done, your father was distraught. He told Falcone he was going to the police. That he would confess everything. And that night, your father and your mother were killed.”
See, it was those cowardly criminals after all.
A more brave movie would have left the audience with the tension that Bruce Wayne’s wealth is built on the exploitation of others, but we can’t have that ambiguity, can we, Reeves? In the end, Bruce’s father may have done something bad, but in one of those movie ways where he’s not as bad as you first thought.
Even the corrupt institutions destroying the city have a champion — a Black mayoral candidate named Bella Reál (Jayme Lawson) who, harkening to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, runs under the vague promise of “hope.” She’s a very likable character who refuses to evacuate as her city is attacked. We don’t know what reforms she wants to push for or how she will achieve that change, but the movie wants us to believe that a real transformation is possible through her. This is a nice thought, but it rings very hollow without criticizing specific systems like our police state or predatory capitalism.
How are you going to do that, Reál? By being likable?
It’s not like you hear Reál asking to break up the corrupt police department. She’s standing with them at the end of the film as she monologues about restoring faith in our institutions. We are supposed to believe this department is better now that the newly minuted Commissioner James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), someone Batman explicitly calls a “good cop,” is in the lead. We are meant to believe this even though no policy changes to the department have happened other than swapping out a corrupt white commissioner for a nice-seeming person of color — a good cop seems to be the solution here. The movie does seem to be playing with the aesthetic of progress without indicating what that means.
This promise of change is further complicated by a shift the antagonist has in Act 3. We learn that the Riddler doesn’t want just to remove problematic people from power, which has had a positive impact on the city of Gotham (including the election of Bella Reál after he killed her chief competitor), but to wipe it all away. He plants bombs across the city to blow up the damn protecting Gotham from the ocean so that it starts to flood. The Riddler then works with a group of radicals to gun down the survivors waiting out the flood in an indoor arena. In the film, this event happened right before November 6th, making it a transparent reference to the January 6th riots when conservative extremists occupied the US Capital Building.
Do we see the problem here?
Where earlier in the film we had a populist figure working against deeply corrupt and ingrained leaders for the public's benefit, now he’s being linked to radical conservatives (people who historically have no interest in stopping corrupt DA officials who hurt people of color). The movie then shifts the symbol of Gotham’s leadership from conservative white guys to progressive-seeming Black people while doing little else. We have marginalized community members now representing a discriminatory government without changing all the corrupt systems ruining Gotham.
This bait-and-switch happens while simultaneously demonizing the one force advocating for systemic change in the film. After all, without the Riddler taking out the corrupt officials throughout the movie, neither Mayor Reál nor Commissioner Gordon would have advanced to their current roles. It’s not like Batman was going to do it. He was too busy beating up twenty-somethings in masks. We are asked to believe in Reál when in the end, she’s still standing proudly in front of a historically corrupt police force, many officers undoubtedly still on the payroll of Falcone’s successor Penguin (Colin Farrell).
Not even the “Broken Window Theory” style of policing that Batman represents has changed. While he does distribute aid and monologue about the need to be a symbol of hope, he ends the movie ruminating about how he will have to stop the criminals and “looters” that will emerge from the chaos of the flood. He says: “…martial law is in effect, but the criminal element never sleeps. Looting and lawlessness will be rampant in the parts of the city no one can get to.”
To be clear, when supply chains break down, property rights shouldn’t matter as much as getting people the resources they need to survive. Looting is not a thing when society has broken down and everything is underwater, but that’s what the movie chooses to end on. Batman may want to be a “symbol of hope,” but his worldview is still heavily constrained by the Broken Window Theory of policing.
This focus on individual crime, rather than on the welfare of people, is a mindset that has been detrimental to disaster relief in the real world. The fear of looters infamously led to the militarization of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, which prevented survivors from getting the necessary supplies they needed to survive. As a consequence, people died (see my piece I’m So Sick of Stories Blaming Humanity for The End of the World). Batman fretting about property rights when they don’t matter during disasters speaks to a level of conservatism that is frankly disturbing.
Conclusion
Recently the YouTuber Kay and Skittles, in their video The Batman: Critiquing Power Fantasy, described this film as a “liberal power fantasy” — one where just getting the right people to lead the system will result in change. Kay argues:
“[The Batman] invites you to not be a monster at all. To opt-out of the struggle …and just trust in the system that's currently in place to sort it all out. To dress up inaction as pragmatism and to buy into pretty words from political actors who, at best will be ineffective, and, at worst, will actively work against you.”
Despite the aesthetic of change, this narrative is conservative in that it doesn't want anything to change. Although Batman intends to abandon his gritty Punisher-style aesthetic at the end of the film, he’s still clinging to a worldview of stopping criminals and looters. One that ultimately values preserving property rights over people's lives — and that’s not changing the system. It's merely the same status quo with a nicer finish.
Matt Reeves came in wanting to tell a story that departed from the conventions of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, but he ended up making a narrative that changed the aesthetic of the Batman while keeping everything else in place. He may want Batman to be a symbol of hope, but he continues to be a guardian of the status quo.
HBO’s ‘The Gilded Age’ is Capitalist Trash
The show about 1880s aristocrats is all sparkle and no substance.
Image; NPR
The Gilded Age is about several upper-class families in Manhattan. We have the ingenue Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), who has just moved in with her aunts from Pennsylvania after losing everything in the wake of her father’s death; Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), a young, ambitious Black woman trying to build her own way in the world of writing, and lastly, the up-and-coming Russell family who is New Money that has just moved to an upscale Manhattan mansion on Fifth Avenue. What follows is a dramatic story of three “outsiders” trying to succeed in a world of High Society.
I have a love-hate relationship with the rich. I love the pretty dresses they wear and the brilliant buildings they live in (something this show has in spades), but I absolutely hate the rich as a concept. I am in the camp that it's unethical for one person to have so much wealth when so many others have too little.
I was thrilled to watch HBO’s The Gilded Age because it not only has two actresses I enjoy (I am a massive Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski stan), but it provides the perfect springboard to talk about the wealth inequality in our society. We currently exist in a second, worse, more prolonged Gilded Age that has utterly warped our society. Any critique of men such as Andrew Carnegie or J.P. Morgan directly applies to the Robber Barons of today.
Unfortunately, The Gilded Age falls more in line with Downton Abbey than The Great Gatsby (something that is sadly unsurprising given Julian Fellowes’ involvement). It is a celebration of the wealthy that provides very little of the substance I was hoping for with an HBO production. A show that ends up being some of the worst capitalist propaganda out there.
The Poor Are A Bit Too Upitty
While wealth is undoubtedly a focus of the show, class is not (note by class, we are referring to describing the stratification between those who own the means of production and those who don't). We are not given many opportunities in the show to explore the more toxic elements wealth has on the working class and society-at-large. We occasionally get subplots about the staff of the Brook and Russell families, but these stories are primarily tagged-on to the larger dramas of the rich. The staff focus on romantic love, toxic exes, and revenge, not unionization, exploitation, or wage theft.
Those who do try to advance or keep their standing are often framed in a negative light. Bertha Russell’s lady’s maid Turner (Kelley Curran), who tries to move up in the world by seducing George Russell, is portrayed as an antagonist. She is not only painfully unsuccessful but ends up teaming up with Oscar van Rhijn (a queer man struggling to maintain his class standing) to leak him information about the Russell household.
Even lawyer Tom Raikes (Thomas Cocquerel) — a love interest to Marian Brook in the first season — is portrayed partially as overly ambitious. An impression that is not necessarily wrong. Though he and Marian profess a deep love for one another, the two agree that social standing is ultimately more important and go their separate ways.
Then you have the “working-class” character Peggy Scott, laboring in the Brook household as matriarch Agnes van Rhijn’s (Christine Baranski) secretary. Peggy wants to be a writer and tries to satisfy the traditional “working your way up” narrative of holding down a job while pursuing your dreams on the side — a hustle, if you will. As Peggy excitedly says to Marian, “For a New Yorker, anything is possible.”
Yet Peggy comes from a well-to-do Black family. She may face discrimination from the racism of the 1880s, but she's not a working-class figure — that’s simply a fakeout to subvert the audience's racist expectations that Peggy would automatically be poor just because she’s Black. She received a good education, which she then utilizes as Agnes' secretary. Peggy is choosing to voluntarily be working-class because of the emotional abuse of her father, who does not support her writing career. While I love that we are seeing this rarely depicted facet of history, I think as a narrative device, it allows the show to have the aesthetic of a working-class, “bootstrapping” lead without actually having one.
In a better show, they might be trying to point out that “working your way up” is mostly a fantasy only available to those with means, but we are never given a valid counterpoint to emphasize this fact. With the exception of maybe the lawyer character Tom Raikes, many of the real working-class people in the first season are portrayed as either complacent with their position in life or coded as outright antagonists.
Rich People Don’t Care About Racism
Overall the show does a lot of sidestepping, especially with Peggy’s character. Although racism does exist on the show, it mainly comes from working-class characters like the staff or disgraced rich people such as Anne Morris. It’s mainly confining racism to people who are either “bad” or ignorant (see the TROT trope to understand why this is frustrating).
The heads of the Russell and Brook households don’t seem to have a problem with racism. George Russell is shown to be tolerant, even making reference to a Jewish Banking firm. Agnes is likewise not bigoted. “It doesn’t seem to matter to her,” Marian says of Agnes' indifference to Peggy being a Black woman in her employment. Peggy is accepted as Agnes' secretary after obtaining a mere reference check from her school, which is oddly progressive given how concerned she is about standing on the show.
Throughout the first season, Agnes makes a massive deal about hating New Money. She does not let Marian participate in functions with the Russells because it would cause a scandal, but you know what else would cause a scandal: having a Black Secretary in 1882.
It cannot be overemphasized how “not over it” the elite of New York City were with not just racism, but slavery itself. While New York’s gradual emancipation law would have freed most enslaved people on July 4, 1827 (55 years before the show takes place), enslaved people born after 1817 were not freed from bondage until they became 21. This fact means that, from a timeline perspective, the wealthy people on this show potentially grew up with legally enslaved people serving them.
Although New York was an abolitionist stronghold, that feeling was not always felt in New York City. The city’s ports, banks, and other aspects of its economy had been wedded to slavery for decades. A violent riot occurred in 1863 in protest of the draft, where according to writers Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis in The Washington Post: “…immigrant artisans…attacked draft offices, Republican newspapers, and black people, killing random African Americans in the streets and even burning down the colored orphanage.” The majority of city voters did not vote for Abraham Lincoln in either the election of 1860 or 1864 (less than twenty years before the show took place).
How do you think the conservative Old Money of our show would have felt about those elections, I wonder?
Peggy being the personal secretary of Agnes would be a significant plot point, not just something she does out of obligation. High Society would judge the Brook family for it, but the show is not interested in how the rich specifically upheld racism during this period.
We know that racism exists as we do see and hear Peggy experiencing it, but our main white leads are not placed in the position of having to perpetuate these systems in front of the viewer. Sure, Marian enacts a microaggression towards Peggy by assuming her family is poor. Peggy is also denied entry places, but those are mainly individual actions. These rich people would have actively upheld institutions that harm people of color, and the show doesn’t want to acknowledge the reality of how their wealth was built on racism. Our wealthy heroes are the trailblazers scoffing at these antiquated systems, not the elite keeping everyone else out (when, in reality, that's what they did).
Ultimately, the central tension is not about classism or racism but between New Money and Old Money. As Agnes says to Marian in the first episode: “…you need to know we only receive the old people in this house, not the new. Never the new….The old have been in charge since before the revolution. They ruled justly until the new people invaded….”
Hmmm, I wonder what policies progressive icon Agnes van Rhijn seems to be favoring here when she claims the “old guard ruled more justly?”
The show doesn’t say, but again, many of those “just” Old People were enslavers, so there’s kind of only one direction to go here realistically. But acknowledging that would mean making Agnes and most of High Society on this show the villains, and we can’t have that. It’s the discrimination of New Money that the show focuses on instead because while that provides tension, it’s not as terrible as recognizing America as it honestly was.
“The Wealthy Are The Future”
As a consequence of this bias against Old Money, the Russells are actively discriminated against from participating in High Society. They aren’t invited to special functions, and no one goes to their events (cue sad violin music). The ever-strong Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) breaks down in tears at one point because the Old People are just so mean to her.
This discrimination did (and still does) happen, but class interests tended to unite these divides. The late 1800s and early 1900s were packed with intense, often violent disputes between monied capitalists and the workers they abused, and you’d hardly see capitalists on the picket line. New York City was no stranger to this tension. Stikes had periodically popped up in the city for decades (see the Tompkins Square Riot, the Cigar makers’ strike of 1877, and later the Newsboys’ strike of 1899). The first Labor Day parade was held in NYC in 1882 (the year this show took place), and it would go on to be seen as an important milestone in the larger labor movement.
Men like Mr. Russell (loosely based on an amalgamation of Cornelius Vanderbilt, William Kissam Vanderbilt, and Jay Gould) were not on the side of these workers. Jay Gould was cruel and obtained a massive fortune partially through stock manipulation. He paid many of his workers poverty wages and brutally suppressed labor organizing.
Infamously, during the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886 (four years after this show started), he hired strikebreakers and Pinkerton men to suppress organizing. He then used his influence in the media, so the public focused on the violence of the organizers and not the men Gould had hired to enact violence on said strikers. While George Russell has referenced Pinkerton on the show, we have yet to see the reality of that on screen, which, to be clear, would involve him overseeing brutal violence.
Likewise, William Kissam Vanderbilt received his fortune from a family that relied on labor exploitation. His grandfather Cornelius, the man who initially “built” the family fortune, was a ruthless businessman who drew upon monopolistic practices. William’s father, Henry Vanderbilt, would continue the tradition, infamously calling on workers to accept lower wages in the middle of a recession (see the Railroad Strike of 1877). William was more interested in philanthropy than business, but he was by no means stirring for radical change.
While William’s wife Alva Belmont (the woman Bertha Russell is based on) did have a history of supporting union labor, and was a financier of some of the most militant wings of the suffragette movement in the United States, that’s not the reality we see on the show. Bertha pushes to support the Red Cross and to break into High Society. She is not looking to expand the burgeoning US labor movement. By all means, I would love to see these influences of Alva Belmont reflected on the show with Bertha Russell. Please make that a reality in season two!
Yet these historical examples do not make it to the screen. The closest “bad thing” that George Russell’s company causes is a train crash, which he feels awful for and is not morally responsible for causing. It's a tragic “accident” that he has prepared for by donating generously to the Red Cross. “Ask [Miss Barton] to get to Millbourne, Pennsylvania, if she can,” George Russell asks his wife, hoping to use the aid organization to assist in the relief effort.
This plotline frustratingly develops so that George is “unfairly” taken to court for the accident (though he ultimately is acquitted). One of his employees used subpar supplies for the train that crashed and then pocketed the profits. While the real Vanderbilts exploited workers, the show would have us believe that George couldn’t possibly have facilitated this accident. “Remember, I’m a rich man, which means I'm a villain.” George laments to his wife, suggesting that this “persecution” is ridiculous, and based on the conclusion of this arc, his resentments seem valid. In the logic of this show, he was being falsely accused and scapegoated for his wealth.
If this show were more self-aware, I’d say that they were doing some Succession-style (2018 — present) commentary on the delusional egos of the rich, but we are never given a dissenting voice to make that case. We aren't supposed to hate these people for the awful things they would have done to the poor to maintain their fortunes — i.e. wage theft, exploitation, union-busting, etc. We are supposed to pity their exclusion from High Society and admire their tenacity. These are people who get things done.
Marian, our ingenue POV character, spends a lot of time belittling the conservatism of her aunt Agnes. She pushes the old elite, and consequently the viewer, to see this discrimination of New Money as ridiculous (how groundbreaking). In episode three of season one, there is a scene where they are discussing the funding of an Opera House, and Marian, in disbelief, asks why they are excluding New Money. “But what is the point of shutting out these men and their families when they could probably build an opera house that’s 20 times better than the one we have now?”
The message is clear: the ascendancy of people like the Russells in society is an inevitable good. We are given no dissenting voice other than unlikable rich men and women incapable of change to counter this. “We must go where history takes us,” Bertha Russell tells a fellow socialite. She is referring to herself and the other New Money as that change. A crowd of onlookers admires a newly lit New York Times building in the background. The show here seems to be making a transparent metaphor between the technological development of electricity and wealth.
The New People are the future, the shows suggest repeatedly, and they appear to be a better one. After all, they don't care about someone's race, religion, or ethnicity, merely the building of wealth. If only this backward Old Money would get out of the way, we would have some real change.
A Rich Conclusion
In the end, we are not criticizing the rich as a class as much as a particular type of rich. The stodgy old money that creates a subculture based on exclusion are out, and the meritocratic rich such as the Russells and Peggy Scott, are in.
This perspective relies on a meritocratic myth about how capitalism, for all its faults, really does let those who work hard enough get to the top. George Russell was able to earn his wealth. Bertha was able to break into High Society. Peggy found herself working for a newspaper that respected her talent. Anyone can make it to the top. “Maybe we will be [invited] one day,” a servant says of possibly getting an invite to Russell’s party in the hazy future. “After all, this is America.”
Yet this fantasy is and has never been true. Those with money often get it by taking advantage of deep inequities. Something that was true with Vanderbilt in the 1800s and is true of men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos today. The good “philanthropy” they end up doing with that money often serves to justify their own position in the hierarchy and, in some cases, can solidify or even worsen existing inequities (see Winners Take All).
We don't need tone-deaf narratives reveling in the horrors of the Gilded Age and portraying them as cute fun. We need to see works that portray the rich of this time through the lens of the horrifying, regressive things they did to the poor. Or otherwise, we are just getting capitalist fan fiction that is all aesthetic and no substance.
Conservatives Don’t Give A Damn About Victims of Sexual Assault
Conservatism is a political movement blocking legislation that protects victims
Image; Elle
I don’t even remember her that well. Her face and her name have been sapped away by time. She was a friend of mine in Catholic school, as much as someone as deeply depressed and dysphoric as I could make friends at that point. I remember her being fearless. She was sardonic, always quick to deliver a funny quip, and she would smile whenever she knew one of her jokes was appreciated.
Then one day, she was gone.
When I asked why she had left, I received a response through whispers and hushed conversations that a priest had touched her. I didn’t know what that meant. It would take me years to piece together that she had been assaulted, but I knew that the priest had done something wrong and that that was linked to her leaving my school.
Few would even speak about this openly with me, and I remember no one explaining why she was punished and not the priest, but I think I have my answer years later. He was in a position of power, and she was not. The Archdiocese of Newark was more interested in protecting its reputation than serving someone in its flock. It would take years of work from liberal and leftist activists and reporters for this truth to get out, and by then, the man in question would be gone.
There has been much talk of “groomers” from conservatives (note grooming in this context refers to pedophiles coercing children into sexual acts without being caught). Many conservatives claim that people who defend transgender and other LGBT people are nothing more than groomers. “The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill,” Ron DeSantis’s press secretary erroneously and hatefully tweeted on March 4th.
Yet, when I think of my nameless friend, it wasn't liberals or leftists who forced her to leave my community but conservative administrators and officials who didn’t want the scandal to hurt their church’s reputation. And there are many more examples of this event. When we look at modern conservatism as a political movement within the US, it often creates an environment where grooming is rampant.
Conservatism and deference
Before we jump into the more heated parts of this article, I want to make a quick aside and say that “no, trans people and their defenders are not inherent abusers.” We are not even going to entertain this accusation as valid. Trans people are far more likely to suffer abuse than dole it out. This latest tactic from conservative politicians and pundits is nothing more than an attempt to scapegoat a marginalization community by painting them as the “real” enemy—a classic example of false persecution that I have written about before.
It should also be noted that abuse can come from any side of the political spectrum. It's relatively easy to cherry-pick anecdotes of abusers and claim that they are representative of an entire people or culture. In the same way, I can post a link to an awful liberal abuser; I can also find one of an appalling conservative. People are people, and no identity is immune from abusing its power, even hardcore leftists who claim to be radical, intersectional feminists. While I could chronicle the many groomer conservative politicians and pundits we’ve seen throughout the years in a gotcha-style article, it's more helpful to show how current conservative ideology often preserves abuse on a systemic level.
Although contested by many (see Stanford Encylopedia), the primary goal of conservatism seems heavily rooted in the principle of showing deference to the status quo. There are many reasons for that impulse. Some might want to preserve stability because they argue it's the best way to organize society. Others value the preservation of the free market, which means fighting off progressive change in our current neoliberal environment. More might have a predisposition to authority and order in general. And, of course, conservatives on top might be doing so to merely protect disruptions to their interests.
Whatever the reason, as a consequence, this deference to the status quo often translates to conservatives backing traditional, mainstream institutions: the military, the nation, the police. If there is a symbol or institution that represents (and often protects) our current neoliberal economic order, then chances are the conservative movement has laid claim to it as its own.
And right away, we see where this creates an interesting dilemma that, although not unique to conservatism, is very prevalent within it. What happens when abuses of power exist within these institutions conservatives have crafted an identity around? If conservatives are so deadset on protecting the military, for example, as an institution, then what happens when a problem develops within that institution?
Will they be quick or even capable of addressing it?
Grooming in the Military
This question isn’t hypothetical. For decades the US military has had a rampant sexual abuse and harassment problem. A 2021 study from the RAND Corporation found that “….one in 16 women and one in 143 men [were] estimated to experience sexual assault within [the] DoD.”
This disturbing trend is something higher-ups have known about for literal decades. One of the first significant scandals to break the news was a conference in Las Vegas in 1991, known retrospectively as the Tailhook scandal, where seven men and 83 women officially reported incidents of sexual assault and harassment.
The culture of the military, which is an overwhelmingly conservative institution, has been one of denial and dismissal. Historically an alarming number of victims who file a report about their abuse have suffered retaliation. According to a 2016 investigation by the Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General, nearly a quarter of service members who left the military after reporting a sexual assault in the 2009 to 2015 period received a less-than-fully-honorable discharge. Something that requires a lot of time and effort to appeal and can prevent victims from getting resources such as education under the G.I. bill and VA Benefits — the latter of which prevents them from accessing the mental health services they may need. As one officer laments about their sexual assault:
“I was 18 years old, was a mental mess, and was terrified to be back aboard [the ship] any longer than I had to. I wasn’t protected, I wasn’t helped, I wasn’t safe from any type of harm!! So how did I actually know what I was signing or even in fact what an OTH [Other Than Honorable] discharge was to mean? How was I to know that from all the sexual attacks that I had to suffer and the harassment, assaults, threats to my life and safety that for all these years the [discharge would be] a huge factor to how I lived and how my life ended up?”
And these are the dots we can trace within the official record. For years, this implicit threat of reprisal has created an environment where many people in the military do not feel like they can speak out and often choose to “put up” with their abuse instead.
In other words, it's been an environment encouraging grooming on a systemic level.
You would think that conservatives would care about stopping this grooming within an institution they seem to care about —that's what they claim to do with these “don’t say gay” bills and puberty blocker bans (and to be fair, there have been a few token conservatives throughout the decades who do speak out). Yet most reforms have historically not been pushed for by the conservative wings of either party. In fact, conservative factions are often the ones actively working to stop reforms in these areas.
For example, one barrier within the military is how these cases have been handled legally. Military law is not regulated like civilian law. The Uniform Code of Military Justice has allowed military commanders to decide whether to investigate and pursue legal action for incidents of sexual assault. For reference, that would be like allowing a manager at a company to determine whether an investigation could go forward with their employees. There clearly would be a perverse incentive structure for companies like Walmart or Amazon to protect their reputation over the welfare of their employees, and we see the same thing with the military. Time and time again, the interest of the victim has been ignored.
Since 2013, Senator Gillibrand has introduced a bill that, among other things, would remove the authority of the “chain of command” to prosecute sexual assaults and other major military crimes. So rather than your superior deciding these cases, the DoD would commission officers independent from the chain of command to make these decisions instead.
Yet, this reform has been blocked repeatedly by the more conservative wings of Congress. In 2014, the bill came close to passing, with just five votes shy of a Filibuster majority. Even Mitch McConnell threw his hat in the ring over what he probably thought would be good ammunition against his female challenger, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. However, the bill ultimately failed after more conservative voices argued it would be “impractical” and “naive,” with 35 Republicans and 10 Democrats voting against it.
Note that conservatism here doesn’t just include Republicans. The Democratic Party is a big tent, and there are plenty of Democrats that lean to the right on many issues (see Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, etc.). In the case of this 2014 law, this included Claire McCaskill, a moderate who fought hard to ensure those 10 Democrats did not back Gillibrand’s bill. We could say the same for Democrat Adam Smith, a conservative Dem who supported the Iraq War and voted against a mild NSA reform, who worked with three other men to help strip Gillibrand’s provision from 2021’s National Defense Authorization Act.
These aren’t leftist positions. The opposition to help victims on this issue might sometimes have a “D” next to their name, but they aren't on the left.
Grooming in the Catholic Church
We’ve so far focused on the military as an example, but this problem is replicated in any environment where power dynamics are unequal and toxic levels of deference encourage obstructionism. We could likewise talk about sexual assault in prisons, ICE detention facilities, or, as we already discussed, the sexual assault scandals among authority figures within the catholic church.
It probably doesn't need an explanation but let's do a recap anyway. For years, priests, nuns, and other religious officials abused their positions to take advantage of the children in their flocks. This isn’t a new occurrence. It’s been happening for a long time. However, starting in the 90s, these incidents began to receive significant media attention, whereas earlier, they would receive mere whispers, and calls for reform began to build.
It’s taken a lot of effort for us, as a society, to even feel comfortable talking about this scandal, and again, even moderate laws trying to improve this situation have been bogged down with obstructionism. One significant barrier for younger victims of sexual assault is that the way grooming works (i.e., coming across as innocuous to victims) often means it takes years for victims to realize that a problem has even happened. Consequently, there has been a significant movement to temporarily extend the age a former child victim can press civil and criminal charges (sometimes referred to as a “lookback window”).
The Catholic Church has spent a lot of money lobbying against these laws, often using a frustrating amount of deception to “mitigate risk” (i.e., protect abusers). When Maryland lawmakers tried to pass one of these laws, they found that Catholic lobbyists had deceived them into providing a permanent exemption for the Church. Crafter of the law, and former abuse victim, Democrat C.T. Wilson told The Washington Post: “I made a deal with the devil. I was working with them in good faith.… They were behind the scenes, crafting language that protects them forever.”
The Church is no stranger to manipulating people to stop reform, but you know where they generally have support — the sympathetic ears of more conservative lawmakers. As the communication director for assemblywoman Markey said of an attempt to pass a similar reform in New York in 2016: “The Republican-dominated Senate has always been the stumbling block for final passage. They have blocked even committee consideration of the bill over the past few years.” (Note: a version of this law was finally passed in New York three years later in 2019 after Republicans lost control of the Senate). We have seen similar bills blocked in Pennsylvania and even in the US Senate — all by Republican obstructionism.
From extending Title IX guidelines to abolishing child marriage laws, there are a lot of policies that could help protect children and adults from grooming. If the current conservative movement in the US cared about protecting people from sexual assault, you would think it would be urgently pushing to pass these laws, but again, that’s not what we are seeing.
Far from it, when it comes to actually stopping grooming, conservatives don’t seem to give a damn at all.
Conclusion
I often think about what would have happened if my school and church had taken steps to stop that vile man from abusing his flock. If they had created an environment where abusers were not insulated from accountability and justice. Would the events I described in the beginning still have happened?
At the very least, I might still know my friend’s name.
Many people probably wanted me to post examples of individual conservatives grooming people — homophobic politicians sleeping with underage children, pastors engaging in child marriages, and the like. But as awful as these examples are, this problem is worse than a few individuals abusing their power. On a systemic level, conservative leaders are not interested in creating policy to protect citizens from sexual assault and, worse, actively get in the way of this goal.
I am sure that many individual conservatives are very lovely people who have never committed any sexual assaults (please, keep doing that). This issue has less to do with individual abusers and, again, more about systems of power. While liberals and leftists are not immune to abuses of power, current US conservatism is a movement with a toxic level of deference that turns followers, if not into abusers, then at the very least into enablers.
It’s a political movement eager to defend those in power at the expense of their victims — and if anything promotes grooming, it’s that.
A Sexy Guide Explaining How Inflation Could Change Everything
Low prices were globalization’s one job; What happens when it can’t deliver?
Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash
Hey there. It's been a long, long day. You are ready to wind down, but you can't because everyone is talking about inflation. "US inflation hits the highest level in 40 years in January…," goes a titillating article for The Guardian. A suggestive New York Times poll claims that almost 9 in 10 adults are concerned about inflation, something that allegedly cuts across party lines. People are worried about the rising cost of goods and services. It caused quite a stir, and now it's preventing you from getting off.
We've all been there.
That's where I come in with this sexy breakdown, where I go deep with a penetrating analysis of all the essentials you need to get that sweet release. Although some of this concern over inflation is merely a wedge issue being pushed by naughty Republicans to demonize the Biden administration (and for even naughtier corporations to raise prices on consumers), inflation is indeed a very valid concern. And not just for sweaty consumers like you but the powerful as well. If this trend continues, it could be a possible breaking point for over forty years of economic thought.
And what could be hotter than that?
Neoliberalism is killing the vibe
First things first, let's define some terms. I know definitions, your favorite thing to get off to.
Right now, we are ruled by the economic theory of "neoliberalism," a philosophy best described as the desire to let the capitalistic marketplace dictate all human interactions. The influence of neoliberalism is pretty dominant in our society, which is why so many political groups may seem so similar, even if they differ on pesky cultural issues. Democrats and Republicans may intimately disagree over abortion and trans rights, but they do agree that the government's primary function is to encourage and maintain private property, markets, and trade.
You liked that definition, didn't you? Well, don't worry, you dirty, dirty definition dumpster, more are coming.
Now, if you have been around the political watering hole for the past couple of decades, you'll have noticed a familiar story emerge from supporters of neoliberalism about "globalization" (i.e., businesses being able to operate on a global scale). It goes like this: the neoliberal policies of globalization (e.g., free trade, outsourcing, deregulation, spanking, not being allowed to pee, etc.) may hurt some workers in the short term, but it shouldn't matter in the long run if that translates to lower prices. As explained in a 2019 article in National Geographic:
“In general, globalization decreases the cost of manufacturing. This means that companies can offer goods at a lower price to consumers. The average cost of goods is a key aspect that contributes to increases in the standard of living. Consumers also have access to a wider variety of goods.”
See baby. I wasn't lying about those definitions. 😈
Proponents of globalization have usually overemphasized this alleged plus to counter irksome critics who point to all of our current economic systems' drawbacks. As long as Americans could buy cheap products, we were supposed to be contented, or at least that was the ultimate fantasy. Terminated workers could be retrained, new businesses would grow, everyone's standard of living would increase, and everyone's cup would runneth over (oh yeah).
From what we can tell, that never really happened. In the last forty years, wealth inequality has skyrocketed. We have all seen a spike in essential services such as housing and health care. In fact, over half of all bankruptcies in the US have resulted from medical issues. Unlike the last party I attended, that increased standard of living never trickled down. It was like the ultimate tease, except instead of consensual fun, we were all nonconsensually getting a raw deal.
And now, cheap goods and services (the one incentive America still had) are allegedly on the chopping block. Many Americas don't have enough to buy even the cheap crap that was supposed to make us satisfied and really hit that spot. We are an Empire built on bread and circus politics, and because of this latest round of inflation, more and more people cannot even get their bread or, more importantly, their premium, water-based lube.
You might be quick to argue that this claim is an over-exaggeration, that other countries have it worse, or that I use far too much lube, but I am not interested in whether this feeling is valid. All economic systems thus far have had inequities, where they starve huge swaths of their populations (see the Irish Potato Famine, the Great Depression, the Sex Toy Shortage of 1892, etc.). Maybe now is uniquely awful. Perhaps it's not. I don't have the expertise for that, and more to the point, I don't think it matters. What's more important is that people feel that it's different and want to try something new (oh, daddy).
Americans right now are increasingly coming to hate the current system. Faith in institutions such as Congress is low. Nearly 40% of Americans have a negative view of capitalism as an economic system, and that number is over half for Gen Z adults. Consequently, interest in alternatives, such as socialism, is high among the younger generations.
And this distrust opens the door, both front, and back, for a shift in economic policy. Something I can assert with confidence because it has happened before.
Economic systems are open
Sort of like consent in the kink community, emotional narratives are everything in economics. When I look at strains of economic thought, they do not emerge from a gaping black hole in the universe. Their dominance is almost always because they were campaigned for by thinkers and their supporters. Neoliberal scholars like Friedrich August von Hayek and Milton Friedman spent years laying the intellectual foundation for our current economic system. Their wealthy benefactors, partly hoping to reverse the regulations of the New Deal, set up think tanks and supported academic institutions to advance this worldview. They then backed political candidates such as President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, that enshrined this ideology into law, which was the opposite of sexy.
Yet it takes more than just plowing money into an idea, no matter how good your technique is. The validity of your competitor has to be in question as well, and in the 70s, neoliberalism's predecessor, Keynesianism, had a significant legitimacy crisis that it did not survive.
Named after English economist and Chad, John Maynard Keynes, Keynesianism argued that an economy is driven by "aggregate demand" or the total spending of goods and services by private and public sectors. Keynes & company argued that an increase in demand leads to an increase in supply. Where neoliberalism is like the withholding sir who tries to encourage austerity and fiscal conservatism during downturns, Keynesianism is like the daddy who showers us with government programs when times are bad to increase employment and spending. A classic example of this is the New Deal, which used programs like the Public Works Administration (PWA) to hire workers for public works projects (see The Hoover Dam, the Reagan National Airport, and the Triboro Sex Swing).
So what happened to Keynesianism? Well, strap into your harness because we are headed for your second favorite thing, baby, a saucy recap.
A prudish neoliberal would argue that while this theory worked well during the post War period (1945–1968) when the United States was going through its Golden Age, it was not suited for the years that followed. The narrative goes that as the decades progressed, international competitors started to recover from the devastation of WWII and meet and, in some cases, surpass US manufacturing. This placed American exports at a disadvantage, though it's important to note that, from an employment perspective, this industry continued growing until 1979.
At the same time, more Americans transitioned to the service sector, where wages and benefits were lower on average. Coupled with an expanding social safety net and, more importantly, a costly imperialist war in Vietnam, inflation was on the rise, and the purchasing power of the average American was down. And with it, the American public's ability to buy essential goods like butt plugs.
This hot, hot powderkeg came to a head in the early and late 70s when a series of Oil Shocks (caused by an embargo from OPEC and the fallout of the Iranian revolution, respectively) drove oil prices to skyrocket. Much of US society was dependent on oil at the time, and so this rippled throughout the economy. This influx of slow economic growth, high unemployment, and high inflation became known as "stagflation" and was deemed a problem for Keynesianism.
Keynesianism posited an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment (the supposed Phillip's Curve, named after hunk and Chad A. W. Phillips). If you had one, you weren't supposed to have the other. But under stagflation, this relationship was no longer responding as it should. Inflation was going up, and so to was unemployment. This situation created an opportunity for opponents to brand the policies of Keynesianism to be incidental to the success of the Post-War Period and to blame it for the stagflation that followed.
The rest, as they say, is history. We have been arguably suffering under the kink-shaming policy of neoliberalism ever since.
Now again, the validity of whether Keynesianism was indeed unable to deal with stagflation is irrelevant (a lot of people don't agree with the neoliberal narrative at all). Remember, the reality of a situation is rarely the reason why a worldview becomes adopted. It's certainly not why my tired ass accepts a booty call at 1 am. What is true is that people in power believed, or at the very least, could argue and convince others that Keynesianism was unable to handle (and possibly even caused) stagflation, which helped lead to the mainstream adoption of neoliberalism.
We see flashpoints used frequently to push for different economic theories. Keynesianism, for example, supplanted the laissez-faire, supply-side approach to economics that was challenged by the devastation of the Great Depression. While ending for many reasons, Mercantilism terminated partly due to a series of revolutions you may be familiar with (e.g., the American Revolution, the French Revolution, etc.). And, of course, Daddy Marx’s ass was kicked to the curb by dominatrix Margaret Thatcher.
For change to come, a moment also must arrive that allows dissidents to question the system's underlying logic. Material reality is essential, but how that reality is packaged, advertised, and deeply pushed onto people is what makes or breaks economic and political systems (give it to me, daddy). So much effort had to go right to make these new systems possible. People had to toil away for years on a set of ideas, and all of that is for naught if those who control things (or their opponents) do not feel that change is necessary.
And boy, oh boy, oh "don't stop now" boy, do people feel change is necessary now.
A quick (but not too quick) Conclusion
This truth is what makes the conversation around inflation so important. It might seem like inflation isn't just another bad thing in a world of rising seas and growing authoritarianism, but it's actually thee bad thing. The one objective our current economic system was supposed to do was to increase the average consumer's purchasing power. Since that is now in doubt, we could be entering a legitimacy crisis of the last 40 years of neoliberal economic policy.
Something as hot as it is existential.
People are not happy with the current order. If neoliberalism is unable to meet the challenges of the current moment, as I suspect it is not, then that means we might see the emergence of a new type of economic thought dominating our world.
What will that be? I have no idea. Like any good dom, I have my preferences, but a new system does not necessarily mean a better one. It's possible that wealth inequality could collide with climate change, leading to ecological exterminationism, where the rich let the poor of the world die out. Maybe the rise of China will cause an increase in the popularity of State Capitalism. Perhaps we will get that infamous “fully automated luxury space communism.”
The point of this article is not to tell you the future — no one can do that — but to reframe why this conversation about inflation is so important. It's more than just a talking point Republicans are using to win the midterms or a sexy guide to help you climax (by the way, I have not yet given you permission to orgasm). It's a potential legitimacy crisis and one that has been brewing in the background for decades.
Okay, you can now release.
The Will Smith-Chris Rock Slap Debate Is Overshadowing An Insidious Labor Issue
The story of how some of your favorite celebrities crossed the picket line
Image; NPR
On March 27th, 2022, during a lived televised broadcast of the 94th Academy Awards, actor Will Smith approached comedian Chris Rock on stage and slapped him across the face. He allegedly did so because of a joke the comedian made about Actress and wife of Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith's shaved head (Jada has the medical condition alopecia areata). Clips of the incident went viral and became a heated part of the pop culture "discourse" as people debated whether this action was right or wrong.
You might have opinions on this event, or like Daniel Radcliffe, you might simply be tired of people talking about it. We will sidestep the ethicality of this action and instead chat about the labor issue that no one is talking about.
After debating the wrongness of the slap, a lot of celebrities then immediately left the Dolby Theater to cross the picket line at the Chateau Marmont after-party — many of them not even knowing (or caring that they did so).
After parties are a massive thing in Hollywood, and no night personifies this sentiment more than the Oscars: the Governor's Ball; the Vanity Fair party. The night is littered with various events, balls, and galas for celebrities to drink, pose with other stars, and strut in fabulous outfits.
Beyonce and Jay-Z hosted one such after-party at the Chateau Marmont, a venue with longstanding labor issues. According to reporting from The Hollywood Reporter, Management has created a hostile work culture rife with racial discrimination and sexual misconduct for years. The climate at the hotel often valued the customer over the health and safety of their staff.
In one example from that THR article, a housekeeper described an incident where a male guest began masturbating while she cleaned the room. She reported the guest, but Management refused to bar him from the hotel, and he continued to visit. In her own words: "[Management] made me believe that they were going to deal with it, but they didn't do anything. They made me feel unsafe at work. Every time I saw him, I was reliving my experience. I felt abused again."
According to the THR piece, the hotel owner, André Balazs, was also a piece of work that was constantly intoxicated, openly violated the city liquor laws, and groped staff and guests alike. One of his staffers remarked: "It's like having an alcoholic, drug-addicted father, but it's your CEO."
Partly in response to this toxic workplace culture, hotel workers started organizing several years ago with the union Unite Here. A push began in earnest sometime before 2020, hoping to push for a vote within the next year or two.
When the COVID pandemic emerged in earnest in 2020, temporarily reducing the bookings of the hotel industry, Balazs allegedly saw this as an opportunity to stop the unionization drive in its tracks. He announced a pivot to turn the Chateau Marmont into a timeshare, firing 248 workers in the middle of a pandemic without providing them severance packages or extended health insurance. People have been leading a boycott of the Chateau Marmont ever since, and prolific voices such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay have endorsed it.
Again, this is the venue where Jay-Z and Beyonce chose to host their after-party. The THR piece came out in 2020 (about two years ago), and they either didn't care about the venue's reputation or are so far removed from labor issues that the toxic work culture of where they decide to party doesn't even enter into the equation.
On the night of the 94th Oscars, organizers from UNITE HERE Local 11 were actively picketing the venue, often fighting against the private security force the Carters had hired. Unless showing up very late to the party (most of the picketers reportedly dispersed around 1 am), guests, who ranged from Tiffany Haddish to Chris Pine, had to cross this picket line to enter. The word "Boycott" was projected onto the building outside, meaning that some celebrities had to know something was up, and they simply didn't care.
Do you know what many of these celebrities did care about, though? The Will Smith-Chris Rock slap.
"I wish I had a man who would protect me like that," attendee Tiffany Haddish joked to People.
"Here's a picture of my dress at the award show where we are apparently assaulting people on stage now," attendee Zoë Kravitz posted to Instagram.
The only celebrity guest who seemed to comment on the labor issue was Rosario Dawson, who claimed she did not know about the boycott and signed onto the pledge after the fact.
However, most attendees have not commented on this issue, and the same applies to A-list celebrities in general. Hollywood was quick to debate the case of the slap, something that, in the grand scheme of things, is relatively minor. Yet when it came to making a tangible impact on the people fighting for better working conditions (people who make their A-list life possible), they were and continue to be silent.
The whole conversation about the slap feels like a distraction. It's a spectacle concerning an ultimately minor issue compared to the vast wealth inequities plaguing modern America. Will Smith and Chris Rock are two wealthy elites who decided to air their grievances in public, and regardless of your opinion of that action, it's clear a lot of people in this industry do not care about the workers they consider beneath them.
Nothing slaps the energy out of Hollywood more than having to consider the working class.
Peacemaker Is What Superhero Content Could Be
Disney, Marvel the DCEU, and the case for setting aside sanitized fantasy for superpowered reality.
Image; Alex Moreland
Watching Peacemaker was like taking in a fresh breath of air. The dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has meant that most modern superhero movies fall within a particular mold — i.e., light movies with incredible fight scenes and superb action. This reality is so enshrined that things that deviate from this mold usually earn some criticism. 2022's The Batman movie, for example, garnered objections for not being fun enough. "self-seriousness crowds out much chance of fun," reads the subheader of one review in the New Yorker.
However, the DC universe is generally much darker than Marvel Comics, and that has created an opportunity for creatives like James Gunn to tell stories that are the antithesis of the light fantasy of the MCU. Peacemaker is a show that's not only funny but manages to deconstruct concepts like US imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism that the MCU has never wanted to touch.
Gunn's 2021 The Suicide Squad serves as an unofficial pilot for the show, as it takes place immediately following it. The movie observes a rag-tag group of "villains" that are part of the secretive Task Force X. Headed by agent Amanda Waller (played by the peerless Viola Davis), the pejoratively labeled “Suicide Squad” is used to accomplish dangerous missions on behalf of the US government.
Waller is ruthless in her pursuit of US hegemony and often is crueler than the alleged villains she leads. In the film, we learn that their mission has nothing to do with bettering humanity but is really about erasing the US's involvement in an ethical experiment before a new, anti-US regime exposes it.
This premise is already a radical departure from the MCU, which has historically gone out of its way to ensure that the US government cannot be linked to any in-universe atrocities. The world's problems are blamed on secret Nazi groups like HYDRA or terrorist cells like the Ten Rings, never the US military or government itself, which in the real world has provided resources for many MCU films.
In fact, the MCU has had a history of deferring to conservative entities and movements. It frames opposition to institutions such as the wealthy and white supremacy as supervillain territory (see The MCU is for Rich People), and has not been the most diverse in telling these narratives. It took years to have anything in the way of nonwhite leads (see Does Disney Care About Diversity?).
The Suicide Squad not only had more substance than most MCU films but much more diversity. We had multiple compelling female leads (see Daniela Melchior's Ratcatcher and Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn), as well as both a Black protagonist (Idris Elba’s Bloodsport) and a Black antagonist (again Amanda Waller). I know people love to talk about Black Panther and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings as pinnacles of diverse representation in the superhero genre, but it took the MCU a regressive ten years to get to that point, and the DCEU has quite frankly beaten the MCU on many important milestones (see Wonder Woman).
Peacemaker leaves where The Suicide Squad left off. Christopher Smith, AKA the Peacemaker (played by John Cena), becomes part of an undercover unit trying to stop alien "Butterflies" from conquering the world. These aliens are insects that burrow into people's skulls and take them over a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Like with The Suicide Squad, we get some diversity (though honestly, I thought the movie was better in this regard). Waller's daughter Leota Adebayo, played by the excellent Danielle Brooks, is one of the primary leads. Adebayo is a textual lesbian in a beautiful relationship with Elizabeth Ludlow's Keeya. Other characters of note are the head of Project Butterfly Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji); Nhut Le's Cheeto-chomping Judomaster; and detective Song (Annie Chang), who steals the show once she's taken over by the Butterfly alien's leader.
But what really gets me into this show is a fascinating conversation about fascism and white supremacy interweaved throughout the first season. You see, unlike the MCU's Captain America, which is pretty much "self-aware" propaganda for American Exceptionalism, Peacemaker's pro-America rhetoric isn't portrayed as good. We learn that his vigilantism was taught by his white supremacist father, the White Dragon (a not subtle Klan reference), who raised him explicitly to purge minorities.
That premise leads the viewer to an uncomfortable conversation about how pro-American superheroes can channel into the white supremacist fascism that has dominated much of American political discourse. Adebayo even calls Peacemaker's worldview a "proto-fascist libertarian idea of freedom." The show is directly challenging our worship of this iconography and who we consider to be the hero.
The problems with American Exceptionalism are further highlighted in the show's other villain — the body-snatching Butterflies from another planet. While the actions they have committed are reprehensible, it's not out of a will for domination (well, not only that), but to correct America's systemic failures. As body-snatched Detective Song monologues in the season one finale:
“Our kind traveled here from a planet that had become unlivable….But not long after we arrived, we realized that the people of Earth were on the exact same trajectory as our people had been, ignoring science in favor of populist leaders who tell you that the floods and the fires and the disease are unrelated to your own actions. Valuing profit over survival. Treating minor inconveniences as assaults on your freedom. And so, we made a vow to do anything we could to change your future. We made a vow to make the choices for you that you were incapable of making on your own, to save your people and your world no matter how many lives it cost us.”
Like damn, isn't that an exact diagnosis of all of our current problems (side note — I might be team bug overlords).
When Peacemaker decides to stop Song's plan by killing her people's only food source, it's not portrayed as some righteous good action, as we see in other properties, but one where we aren't even sure if the hero was correct.
"Did I just kill the world," Peacemaker asks Adebayo?
"Maybe," she responds, "or maybe you just gave us a chance to make our own choices instead of our bug overlords."
This conversation is honestly a refreshing moral dilemma that the MCU movies have primarily strayed away from. There is no Falcon and The Winter Soldier speech about how America can be better. We don't know if Peacemaker's decision was correct because the American system he is working from is so toxic that you are ultimately left wondering if aliens would do a better job.
We are left uncomfortable with the status quo, and that's what you want a piece of art to do when broaching topics like white supremacy and capitalism because they cannot be solved by watching 8 hours of television. They will require a systemic overhaul to unravel, and that work will be difficult and nerve-wracking.
With Peacemaker, we see a window into what modern superhero shows and movies could be. Although fictional, this show doesn't stray from the emotional reality of what America is and has always been. It does not pull punches when discussing systemic issues such as racism and capitalism.
It's been clear for some time that Disney's MCU is more interested in delivering a sanitized fantasy that does not challenge our larger problems, but with Peacemaker, I see a world of possibility wrapped up in an American flag and a ridiculous-looking helmet.
Ca-Caw.
Dear Ted Cruz: I Do Regret My Transition
Why couldn’t I have just existed?
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Dear Ted,
A little bit about me: I started to "medically" transition at 30 years old. It was the result of years of grappling with insecurities, cumbersome insurance paperwork, and social stigma. I am still balancing this transition as I struggle with what is my correct bra size and how much mascara to use, but I am pleased to be the person I am now. I just wish I didn't have to wait thirty years to get here.
I look at my childhood and see a lot of sadness that didn't have to be there. I could have been a beautiful nonbinary girl learning to do all these things when cisgender girls learned to do them, and it would have hurt no one.
Why couldn't I have just existed?
No, seriously. I am asking: Why do people like you make trans children suffer so long in silence just to be themselves?
So many people like you are claiming to be looking after "the children" when you campaign to take away trans children's access to healthcare. But really, your actions are denying us our ability to become whole people, and it doesn't just fill me with regret — it makes me furious.
When I look at the debate people like you are having about "allowing" children to transition, it's always centered around the fact that we may regret something that is "permanent." Years ago now, you tweeted: "For a parent to subject such a young child to life-altering hormone blockers to medically transition their sex is nothing less than child abuse," (Ted Cruz, 2019). As far as I can tell, you haven't changed your stance.
Yet this fear mongering isn't true, and it pushes the harmful myth that transitioning is dangerous for children. I think you are smart enough to know that. All the research indicates that puberty blockers (medication that pauses puberty) are relatively safe. The moment the child goes off the medication, they will, in most cases, resume the puberty of the sex they were assigned at birth. We know this because cisgender (i.e. not trans) children have been taking puberty blockers for decades, and we are pretty aware of their effects. As Jason Klein, a pediatric endocrinologist, told VICE (Hannah Smothers, 2021):
“Puberty blockers have been used for decades in cisgender kids who either are going through puberty too early, or, in some instances, kids who are going through puberty very quickly. Their use has been FDA approved, well-studied, well-documented, and well-tolerated for a long time now. And it’s the exact same medication that we use in trans or nonbinary children to basically put a pause on pubertal development. Exactly the same medications, at exactly the same doses.”
There might be some more information we will learn about this medication over time, but that's the case with all life-saving medicine. Science can tell you nothing with absolute certainty, so when a scientist states that puberty blockers are overwhelmingly safe in most cases, that's about as sure of a thing as you can get.
For those trans children who do take the extra step to socially or medically transition (i.e., not just to pause puberty, but to take on a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth), most don't regret their decisions. Detransitions are not only rare but overwhelmingly happen because of "external factors such as pressure from family, non-affirming school environments, and increased vulnerability to violence, including sexual assault," (2021).
In other words, it's not someone's transition that is the problem, but our society's reaction to it. This entire framing that people like you are putting forth is wrong. This has nothing to do with the welfare of children.
Quite the opposite, by denying trans children the resources they need, you contribute to many of their deaths. The number of trans youth (and adults) contemplating suicide is staggering (Dawn Ennis, 2021). The Trevor Project's National Survey found that 52% of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the US seriously considered killing themselves in 2020. That number went down for those who had access to spaces that affirmed their gender identities and sexual orientations.
If you cared about children, you would not be maliciously increasing the likelihood that children across the US will kill themselves. That's decidedly an anti-children stance.
All I can think when I read these numbers is that I could have been part of that figure. I was 27 before somebody even asked me what my pronouns were. I didn't know being nonbinary was even an option, but the moment I learned about it, the words they/them escaped my mouth within seconds. I had spent a lifetime not realizing that a piece of me was missing — that I could be something more than unhappy. I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom, so I could weep both tears of joy, but also of profound sadness at the time it had taken to come to this realization.
Suddenly, a lot of depression made sense as dysphoria. I had been suicidal for most of my life, and although other factors contributed to part of that, the inability to connect to my whole self didn't help. There were years spent being uncomfortable about who I was, wishing to no longer exist because I didn't think I was a whole person. I am only here today because of luck. A lot of trans people are.
But if my personhood was denied to me, it's not my fault, Ted; it's yours.
When you deny trans children the ability to learn about themselves, you aren't just deferring medication or surgery by a couple of years. You are preventing them from articulating their personhood, from being able to imagine a whole world beyond what they were taught to be possible. It's like forcing a square into a round hole and blaming the shape for fracturing into pieces. In the process, you watch the person disappear. They crawl into themselves until they cease to exist.
That is murder. It may not be as quick as shooting someone or stringing them up, but it leads to the same outcome—the death of a person.
I indeed regret my transition. I regret that you robbed me of my childhood. That you, and the bigots like you, clawed away at my very sense of self, under the pretext of protecting me, when all you were doing was protecting your own sense of comfort.
You traded my life and the lives of countless others to protect your fragile little ego, and I hate you for it. If there is a God, they will make you crawl on your knees on burning sands, listening to the wails of all the trans children you murdered, before even beginning to consider your pleas for redemption.
Burn in hell, Ted.
LinkedIn Is A Toxic, Capitalist Meme Generator 👊🏻
Work, capitalism, propaganda, & the myth of meritocracy
Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
LinkedIn's stated mission is to make working professionals "more productive and successful." With over 750 million members, that narrow goal translates into a platform where people are unsurprisingly centered on either getting a job or highlighting their jobs successes. It's Facebook for job hunters and capitalists. Most go there to share their new positions, promotions, and hustles, leaving all the messy complications of life at the door.
Social media has always been inauthentic. All platforms encourage people to curate a persona along certain aesthetic and political lines, but the values promoted on LinkedIn are f@cking toxic. They are all about glorifying the grind. "8 years ago today I had four dollars in my bank account," creator Shay Rowbottom posted to viral success in 2021 "Keep going. 👊🏻."
LinkedIn is a place where, for the most part, the terrors of our system are massaged away so that viewers can instead consume advice on working harder, faster, better, and more smartly. To participate and be successful on this platform, you have to find a way to fit your problems into the marketplace or be deemed a bad worker.
Something I would like to stress before diving into the messiness of LinkedIn is that, contrary to many of the tropes we will be talking about, most people are simply working to survive. There has been a lot of conversation about how people want meaningful work and might even take a pay cut to get it, but when I look at polling data, that's not the primary reason they are at their current jobs. In poll after poll, people pretty consistently indicate that providing for their lifestyles and families is a huge reason why they are there.
It may be evident to some, but it still bears mentioning: we all need money to survive. Most of us have to take a job to get money, even if it doesn't align with work we consider meaningful. Add to this the fact that wages have stagnated and healthcare and housing costs have risen, and you might begin to understand why most Americans do not like their current jobs.
Why be happy about something you were forced to take to cover your basic needs, and barely accomplishes even that?
The typical LinkedIn post covers none of this reality. Many LinkedIn influencers aren't interested in trying to systemically understand why the state of work is so bad for most people. In fact, most want to ignore discussions of "politics" altogether. "Politics should not be discussed on LinkedIn. Keep it clean folks!!" wrote one user recently. The platform is even implementing a "no-politics" feature, which it defines as limiting content related to "political parties and candidates, election outcomes, and ballot initiatives."
This desire for no politics, however, goes against our human instincts. Under one definition, politics is how we make decisions about our community's collective resources. It's unreasonable to assume that users on this or any platform will never want to express opinions on something so fundamental to their lives, even if some consider such things "unprofessional." As one conservative LinkedIn user wrote in a viral post: "politics invades every facet of our lives."
Indeed we have seen a glaring exception to this "no-politics" rule with Russia's War against Ukraine. Users have been very opinionated on this issue. "I hate mixing politics and business. But killing innocent people can't be ignored," wrote one "apolitical" user on why his business was cutting ties with partners in Russia. LinkedIn, the company, has been surprisingly vocal about this situation too. It recently referenced the whole situation in its blog. Their Global Growth Manager even posted a pro-peace image on his feed that has generated quite the stir among users.
In other words, LinkedIn is a non-political platform, except for all the cases when it's not. The "no-politics" crowd ignores the fact that even they have a political framework. Overwhelmingly, these users proselytize about the values of working hard and pushing through. "no pain, no deals. know pain know deals" cheekily posted Scott Leese. This is essentially the belief in a "meritocracy" or a system governed by people who are selected to power based on their ability.
Contrary to what users like Leese may say, this way of thinking is very political. Meritocracy emphasizes individual responsibility at the expense of looking at structural problems — something with enormous political implications because it basically justifies people's social, economic, and political positions in life. You get somewhere based on how hard you work, regardless of all the structural barriers in your way.
LinkedIn users who follow this political belief can get very defensive when it's criticized. "Those who think they're ENTITLED need a solid throat punch," begins a post from conservative Erin Whitehead about how people need to stop complaining. She continues. "You aren't even entitled to feel good about yourself. You have to earn that shit. 👊🏼" This example may sound extreme, but it highlights a pervasive feeling throughout the site. The consistent advice seen on LinkedIn is to either suck it up or stop complaining. "Suck it up, Have a Great Week and…#KeepGettinAfterIt, y'all!!👊" advises another user (side note — what is up with the overuse of the fisted hand emoji?).
Yet it's also not true that LinkedIn influencers are always positive (there is a lot of talk of failure on here), but it's usually very individualized. For example, influencer James Carbary shared a humble brag about botching his first TedX talk. Likewise, we could talk about marketer Adam Goyette mentioning how he sent out the wrong email to 1 million people. These men are admitting to bad things that happened to them, but in a way that both highlights their current successes and takes on all the responsibility for their failures. The implicit narrative is to keep working in spite of defeat. "Here's to kicking fear in the mouth and doing things that scare us anyway," James Carbary continues, highlighting how individual perseverance is what is needed to power through.
We see this individualized philosophy color even the most radical comments on the platform. "I can promise you that your health is far more important than your finances or your job," begins author and cancer survivor Scott Leese in what sounds like a very revolutionary statement….for LinkedIn.
On its face, it's an opinion I very much agree with. We should care more about our health than our jobs. However, even this proclamation is only looked at through the lens of what you as an individual can do in the marketplace. Scott continues: "Money comes and money goes. Our lives are irreplaceable. Sell from a place of gratitude, resiliency, and determination. Lead from a place of selflessness, safety, empathy, and fulfillment."
Not only do his final few lines betray the fact he is far more concerned with selling in the marketplace than his health, but by telling people to focus on health as an individual choice, he's being very toxic. Scott ignores all the problems with our healthcare systems and frames healthcare as something an individual can choose to do independently of that system. You know, just choose to be healthy, yall.
This is your casual reminder that over half of all bankruptcies are the result of medical issues. Most Americans can't focus on their health because they don't have the option to — our system bleeds them dry first.
The majority of content on LinkedIn frames the individual as at fault, especially in the workplace, where the dynamic between capitalists and workers is underplayed. "People don't leave bad jobs. They leave bad bosses," author Brigette Hyacinth lectures on one of LinkedIn's top posts. She, in essence, is arguing that there are no power dynamics within the employee-employer relationship, just people who disagree. When unhappiness towards an employer or industry is posted on the platform, creators like Hyacinth treat it as a relationship between two people, rather than one between a lower-status individual (i.e., the employee) and a person representing an even more powerful class or entity (AKA the boss).
This blindness means that most solutions are only viewed through an individualistic lens. "Treat your workforce as valuable as you do your customers," warns LinkedIn marketer Chris Williams, delivering a solution that boils down to company leadership being nicer. This comment is tone-deaf, and LinkedIn is filled with disingenuous posts like this one asking bosses and companies to treat their workers better, while ignoring all the power imbalances that ensure these requests will never be listened to. Companies that do awful things such as union-busting and wage theft don't need a stern talking to. They need to be mobilized against.
Granted, it's not wrong to ask for better pay and more respect from your boss, but what is often divorced from these suggestions are solutions such as unionization, greater regulation, or any answer that would try to increase the power of workers as a group. Few commenters are looking at this systemically. While I might have been able to find the occasional center-left content creator on LinkedIn (Robert Reich, for example, reposts much of his work from YouTube there), most were disgruntled individuals with little influence. Users who were passing around memes and petitions that never gained traction.
It was far easier to find a conservative criticizing leftist policy than to discover anyone who self-identified as a leftist or progressive on LinkedIn. For example, it was effortless to come across dozens of conservatives lamenting AOC’s Tax the Rich dress at the 2021 Met Gala, but few sharing it in earnest or even criticizing it from a leftist perspective. "…tonight [AOC] wore a dress that says "tax the rich" to a Met Gala dinner that costs $30,000 a ticket," chastised one conservative user, among many.
I ran dozens of similar searches for terms like leftism, unionization, liberal, single-payer healthcare, socialism, and more, and while they generated some results, they were far from viral. Conservative memes on work routinely won out in the end, which reveals something fundamental about the platform — this is a conservative site.
When I look at LinkedIn at a distance, I see a conservative, capitalist meme generator. A platform that incentivizes a toxic environment, where everything is framed through the lens of the individual. Users are implicitly encouraged to describe their jobs in the best possible light, while simultaneously ignoring the systemic problems that make work in America so difficult (e.g., poor wages, low union membership, massive corruption, deregulation, etc.).
The culture on this site seems clear: if you can't get your boss to agree to improve your work conditions, then it's on you as an individual to either work through it or leave — the realities of the market be damned.
Say what you will about Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok — at least these platforms have some diversity of political thought. LinkedIn is an unending churn of capitalist propaganda. While conservatives have spent so much time lamenting that social media has a bias against them, they clearly have a home on LinkedIn.
A Leftist Reading of Disney's Encanto
Mutual aid, superpowers, and magic.
Image; captured on Disney+
The moment I saw Encanto, I couldn't get enough of it. I have been singing the songs Surface Pressure, and We Don't Talk About Bruno on loop so much that I think my partner is finally getting sick of them. I have rewatched this movie actively three times, and another four times, I have put it in the background while I'm working. I probably have memorized half the lines in this film about a family with magical gifts living in a secluded Columbian community.
I love much of what this movie tries to do thematically. The central plot about protagonist Mirabel Madrigal bucking the unrealistic expectations of her family, specifically those of her demanding Abuela Alma, resonates strongly with me. It's a breath of fresh air for a major film to come out against the perfectionism and burnout plaguing much of modern society.
However, there is more to take from Encanto than just the interpersonal dynamics of the main characters. This film has a very leftist subtext buried underneath the tiles and floorboards of the Madrigals' casita. It can be read with a leftist, dare I say, a socialist lens that most "mainstream" films cannot.
So let's have some fun and talk about how this movie is an example of an accidental leftist work.
This entire article might have you scratching your head. Encanto isn't leftist. It's a kid movie about magical powers and singing.
And yes, the creators didn't intend to make a film with socialist principles. Disney is a capitalist entity that has been quite aggressive with maintaining its dominance in the pop culture space — when you have free time, google Disney and IP law to see what I mean. The executives behind this film just wanted to make money, and they were using Encanto to tap into new markets in the Latin American space.
However, a creator's (and financer's) intentions are only half the equation. Under the "Death of the Author" theory of interpretation, art is about the meaning the viewer brings to it. Director Ridley Scott didn't set out to make a feminist work with Alien (Sigourney Weaver's character was allegedly written as a man initially), but that's what happened. Director Tommy Wiseau wasn't trying to make a beloved camp masterpiece with The Room, but his out-of-touch misogynistic outlook led to something quite funny to the public. Often a work takes on a completely separate meaning from the author's intentions, and we can see a similar thing happening with Encanto.
For one, the people in Encanto live in a non-capitalist society. Abuela's "encanto" or miracle raised mountains around the valley they live in, effectively cutting them off from the larger world. As far as we can tell, there is no money in this society, and that's probably because "class" was not an issue the creators of this film wanted to complicate their narrative. It would be tough for us to see the Madrigals as down-to-Earth, working-class folks if they were also profiting off their Godlike powers.
That decision, however, left us with a story where money and work are entirely different from our world. The Madrigals are actively encouraged to give their gifts freely to the community. "We swear to always help those around us and earn the miracle that somehow found us," Abuela belts out in the opening musical number, The Family Madrigal. Townsfolk feel comfortable requesting work from the family, which we see when Luisa, who has super strength, is asked to do routine tasks like moving churches and recovering lost donkeys (routine for her, anyway).
The mundaneness of these powers owes much to the genre of "magical realism," a style that involves the matter-of-fact introduction of fantastical elements. We are not supposed to question the strangeness of the Madrigals powers because, in this universe, they simply exist. That's how magical realism as a genre works.
However, the strangeness of the Madrigal's generosity has more to do with the values of our culture. The residents of Encanto seem to exist in a mutual aid economy where people work cooperatively to achieve their community's needs. This system of reciprocity is so far removed from our capitalist society that it feels far more alien than the ability to move mountains. For many, it's easier to imagine a community where people have superpowers than one where capitalism doesn't exist, and in Encanto, we have both.
Now there is arguably a sleight hierarchy around these powers. The Madrigals seem to have the most prominent house in the valley, and the entire community comes together in celebration whenever a family member obtains a new power, but they are not portrayed as powering-hungry or tyrannical. Where in other properties (and real-life), this might be the makings of a magical aristocracy, in Encanto, the townspeople have a lot of agency. A scene that highlights this well is how the Guzman family calls off their son's marriage proposal to Isabela after one disastrous dinner. That would not happen if the Madrigals had unquestioning control in the valley.
Yet even the control the Madrigals do have, especially that of Abuela Alma is interrogated in the film. While Alma does insist on her family unselfishly leading a life of service, she still holds a lot of unhealthy values from her old life, specifically those of perfectionism and hustling. In capitalism, for most people, your value is tied directly to the labor you can produce. If someone cannot produce enough, we often let "those people" die (see homelessness, poverty, starvation, etc.). This is why our society focuses so much on always working (e.g., hustle culture) and on the products of our labor being perfect, because failure to produce successful goods and services can lead to death.
Alma carries a lot of this anxiety. Even though the Madrigals live in an idyllic society where all their wants are provided for by literal magic, she still wants her children to be continuously producing for the community. "Work and dedication" are her driving values, and the film clarifies that this obsession is unhealthy.
In the song Surface Pressure, Luisa sings about how the continuous pressure to constantly perform is causing her to burn out. The line: "Under the surface
I'm pretty sure I'm worthless if I can't be of service," highlights how strung out she is. The film ends with allowing her to rest more, suggesting to the viewer that maybe the culture of constantly working and always hustling is unhealthy. People should be allowed to rest.
Perfectionism is tackled in not one but two separate plotlines. One revolves around Mirabel's "perfect" sister Isabela who discovers in the song What Else Can I Do? that it's okay not to be perfect. The other is from Mirabel's aunt Pepa, whose emotions control the weather. At the end of the film, she learns that she doesn't have to suppress her feelings all the time in pursuit of this perfectionism, happily dancing in the rain. These storylines, among many others, indicate to the viewer that it's okay to be different and produce things outside the norm.
And here's the thing: if you take this logic to its natural conclusion, these are some radical positions. Again, many people cannot rest or put away their perfectionism because not producing successful products and services in the marketplace can lead to your death. The ability to let people rest would involve some big, structural changes in the way resources are distributed in our society, so they don't feel like they need to work all the time to survive. Rich people would have to lose much of their control and resources and be brought down to everyone else's level through policies too complex to go into detail here.
Disney is, by no means, directly advocating for that approach with this film. They are a conservative identity that actively campaigns for policies such as wage theft, sweatshops, and more. But by creating a film that stresses community and rejects our current work norms, this conservative company made a product that is accidentally very leftist.
Something that highlights this reality comes from my favorite scene in Encanto near the movie's end. The casita has been destroyed, and the family Madrigal is now powerless. Their interpersonal dynamics may have been resolved, but they don't know where they will live. Mirabel starts singing about rebuilding the house, and it's here that the entire community enters the scene with the line: "Lay down your load…We are only down the road…We have no gifts, but we are many."
Typically films in America center on what our protagonist will do for the world (see the Hero's Journey). Luke brings peace to the galaxy. Neo stops Zion from being destroyed. It would have changed little in the narrative to have the family rebuild this house on their own, under Mirabel's direction, highlighting how her leadership has saved this family unit. But by bringing the community into the equation, they are stressing the importance of community as a value. The Madrigals provided for their community in the past, and now they are being provided for in return.
We need more films that push for these kinds of narratives because we need more stories rejecting our current capitalistic concepts of work and atomization. Although I am not holding my breath for Disney to deliver these narratives regularly, I think Encanto serves as a brilliant inspiration for future writers and creators to draw from.
We might not have gifts, but we can imagine a world beyond this one, and that's just as magical.
When Socialism Came To Reading, Pennsylvania
How past victories and defeats can guide the present
Photo by Luis Quintero on Unsplash
(This article was originally published in The Washington Socialist).
Nearly one hundred years ago, socialism was on the rise in America. Registration for the Socialist Party of America (SPA) peaked at over 100,000 members in 1912. Socialist leaders were elected to local and state offices all over the country, ranging from Santa Cruz, California, to Curranville, Kansas, to Charleston, West Virginia. Interest stayed high for the remainder of the decade, with dues-paying members in the tens of thousands.
However, this started to change in 1919 when America went through its first Red Scare. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had started several years earlier and would not be concluded until 1923. In combination with other factors like increased labor strikes and self-proclaimed “anarchists” mailing bombs to prominent Americans, the government started to crack down on “radical” organizations. Thousands were arrested and deported. This stigmatization and violence, in combination with the SPA’s “unpatriotic” anti-war stance during WWI, meant that dues-paying members were halved in the following years, and socialist politicians all over the country lost their seats.
Yet somehow, amid declining membership and greater hostility to socialism, there was a socialist stronghold carved out in the town of Reading, Pennsylvania, in the late 1920s, which had entrenched socialist leadership there for years. When we look at this chapter of American history, it reminds us not only how much more complex US history is, but how to build political power for an ideology that’s outside the mainstream.
It might be hard for some to believe this even happened. Many Americans do not have a favorable opinion of the word “socialism.” According to a recent Axios/Momentive poll, only 41% of those surveyed claimed to view socialism positively (though this number is growing and admittedly higher among younger people). This grim outlook is partly due to that Red Scare propaganda we discussed earlier. In the past (and now), socialism has been likened to an ever-creeping menace infecting the heart of American society. Many men and women who were reared on that belief are now in positions of power today, which impacts our entire conversation about socialism.
Yet despite the ideology of socialism arguably being even more widely disliked during the 1920s, it could still find a home in places like Reading, Pennsylvania (the other two cities often cited during this time are Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Bridgeport, Connecticut). In 1927, the Socialist Party of Pennsylvania (SPP) captured the city council, the mayorship, several seats on the school board, and many other seats in the municipality. In later years, they would successfully send representatives to the State Assembly and even had a woman candidate unsuccessfully vie for the governorship (Lilith Martin Wilson).
The reasons for this success were varied. Firstly, the SPP had impressive organization and leadership. Even before their parent organization, the SPA, granted them a charter in 1902, labor activists in the area were involved with groups like the Knights of Labor and the Populist Party. The SPP established its own newspaper (The Labor Advocate) and committed to recruiting people during street corner speeches, parties, and more.
After being chartered, it took another decade of committed SPP organizing before they could put forth a full slate of municipal-level candidates (something that takes ongoing commitment). Their mayoral candidate, John Henry Stump, was well-liked by his constituents, and he was able to rewin his mayorship into the 1940s, well after the SPP had started to fracture.
Another prominent SPP activist was James H. Maurer, who started in those aforementioned Knights of Labor circles. He spent decades organizing in the Reading township before achieving any electoral results. Maurer was seen as a charismatic leader and a driving force behind the SPP’s success. As scholar Raymond J. Phillips writes:
“Older Readingites recall Jim Maurer as a forceful and persuasive speaker who had no peer on the public platform….This writer offers the opinion that in the absence of Maurer, the Reading Socialists would not have been as successful as they were. While Mayor Stump was a highly personable individual, he was not a particularly effective organizer and administrator, and he depended upon the forceful leadership of men like Maurer to carry him through.”
Secondly, a considerable part of SPP’s success was that there was also a keen sense of community among Reading’s socialists. The SPP frequently hosted parties and picnics, even purchasing a park and renaming it Socialist Park. This work and the vital fundraising that often went with it were predominantly the work of the SPP’s women, particularly the Berks County Women’s Political Committee, and its many iterations. This committee, although under-appreciated, was essential for handling many of the non-electoral and political functions of the organization. It cannot be overstated how vital fundraising was to providing the SPP with a regular income.
Thirdly, and maybe most pressing, local leadership was very savvy about tying their movement to issues the town’s working-class supported (note, there was a sexist and racist undertone to this). A big issue the Socialist Party of Pennsylvania campaigned on during the election of 1925 revolved around municipal finances. Many working-class voters were facing rising housing costs, preferring to own rather than rent and, therefore, as scholar Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr. put it, “[were] very sensitive to the problems of municipal debt and taxation.” Socialists used this to their advantage, portraying the Democratic administration as wasteful. The SPP positioned itself as against issuing more municipal bonds. They put out a four-page weekly bulletin in the Labor Advocate called “The Loan Question,” describing how they would reduce these costs for the working-class voter by advocating for a pay-as-you-go model for spending.
While the SPP didn’t capture any seats in 1925, all the bond issues submitted for a vote were rejected as well. This success in messaging encouraged the party to run again in the following election cycles, where they heavily focused on the Democratic administration’s perceived wastefulness. This message was hammered home repeatedly until finally, in 1927, the SPP swept the board with both the mayorship and the city council.
Unsurprisingly, a significant concern of mayor John Henry Stump’s administration was making sure that the tax burden was not placed more heavily on working-class property owners. For example, a big selling point of Stump’s plan for a new City Hall was it being allegedly under budget. Stump renovated an old high school instead of building a new City Hall from scratch, which appears to have been cheaper. His administration also tried and failed to create a “scientific” establishment of property values. This would have led to tax savings, that although lower for everyone, were proportionally more significant for smaller property owners (e.g., working-class homeowners).
However, this desire for a small tax burden does not mean that Stump cut back services in the same way conservatives try to when campaigning on lower taxes. During his administration, many services were expanded, such as a municipal purchasing office, a street cleaning service, a machine shop, and more. His administration also fundamentally changed how payment worked for many municipal positions by moving towards salaries, which was deemed more economically efficient. The SPP made many improvements, but Stump’s administration was adamant that the costs of those new services not be passed on to their preferred constituency, which in this case was (white, male) working-class homeowners.
I want to stress that these policies were built on the racism and sexism of this period, which should not be emulated or admired. There were things done that we would consider abhorrent by today’s standards, such as how Stump’s administration cracked down harshly on sex work the moment he entered office. Though not barred from running for positions, white women were far from equitably treated compared with their male peers. The absence of Brown and Black individuals in the literature I researched on this subject also speaks to the discrimination that existed. Such policies are not only morally repugnant but are partly the reason for the party’s collapse in the region.
The SPP declined in Reading due to a combination of factors. Their control was always tenuous, as both major parties were against them from the start. The local Democratic and Republican parties teamed up together multiple times to defeat the socialist party’s municipal slate in both the elections of 1917 and 1931. These “fusion” tickets were tough to overcome when the two parties were able to pull them off and continue to be a threat for socialist candidates in the present day (see India Walton’s 2021 race).
When the Great Depression hit, Mayor Stump was the incumbent — a curveball that his administration was unprepared for. Stump’s insistence on rejecting any relief effort funded via tax increases, under the rationale that it would place a more significant burden on working-class homeowners, allowed the opposition to paint his administration as cold and heartless. Stump tried to raise funds privately, but these efforts turned out to be insufficient. Defeated, he had to direct those in need to ask the county for help, paving the way for the Democratic-Republican-fusion victory in 1931. The Socialists would regain power eventually, winning an upset victory in 1935, but it placed their party out of the majority for several cycles.
It’s difficult to say what would have happened if Stump had acted differently here. Would it have made a difference if he’d accepted a publicly financed relief effort? Given the unique stresses of the Great Depression, it’s possible that he would have been swept out of office no matter what. Still, his insistence on serving working-class homeowners over his other constituents certainly didn’t help.
Another reason the SPP suffered was that the political climate had been altered by the success of the New Deal. FDR’s establishment of massive public works projects and financial reforms like the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Glass-Steagall Act, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) cut into the SPP’s base. Again, in the words of scholar Raymond J. Phillips, “Norman Thomas, the party’s presidential candidate from 1928 to 1948, has attributed the decline to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. In Reading, too, it appears that the Democratic party has had a stronger appeal for the younger generation than has the Socialist party. …”
Lastly, and probably most importantly, a big blow to not just SPP membership but SPA overall had to do with infighting. A major turf war was waged nationally and locally between the party’s “Old Guard” and the more radical “militants,” leading to the SPP fracturing a year after their triumphant victory in 1935. These militants, also referred to as “leftists,” had a general desire for the party to accept more explicitly Communist principles. This split would turn out to be irreconcilable, as many of the Old Guard would leave in 1936 to form the Social Democratic Federation, reluctantly endorsing Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt for president that year (a decision arguably fueled partially by resentment of the now “militant” SPA).
There are many reasons for this divide, both ideologically and personally. However, in terms of Reading, this tension was not helped by the sexism within the party. There was a contingent of women “militants” who did not feel appreciated by their male comrades. This feeling was, in many ways, valid. Just like they would be in most contemporary organizations, SPP women were often stigmatized, making equal participation in the organization difficult. The following information from William C. Pratt’s work, “Women and American Socialism: The Reading Experience,” shows a huge gender discrepancy in committee members. This gap is even more striking once you realize that most female committee positions came from the Women’s Committee.
Source: The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Vol. 99, №1 (Jan., 1975), pp. 84
This lack of representation made several women leftists resentful of the SPP, to the point that after the fracture, many of them turned their back on socialist politics altogether. Some female leftists found they would rather support the Democratic Party than the Old Guard. In the words of scholar William C. Pratt:
“Now known in some circles as the Mostellerites (after Clara Mosteller), they began to endorse Democratic candidates rather than their former colleagues and most of them ended up in the Democratic Party by 1940….No longer Socialists, the “Mostellerites” apparently were consumed with bitterness and rage against their old comrades and slowly faded out of the Reading Socialist picture.”
Again, this resentment was understandable in some ways. The Old Guard kept a tight hold on power. Men like Jim Maurer and John Henry Stump had been in charge of the SPP’s direction in Reading for over a quarter-century, and they had no desire to relinquish power. Longtime leftist activists such as Charles Sands and Fred Merkel began rallying opposition and eventually supported the militants. Merkel would help coauthor a controversial pamphlet titled Rule or Ruin, accusing Old Guarders of trying to maintain “oligarchic control of the local.”
In some ways, Merkel was right. After a few turbulent local meetings and an incendiary national convention, Old Guard Readingites attempted to freeze the left out of their local party’s affairs — at one point dramatically expelling leftist delegates from a state convention for “constitutional irregularities.” The Old Guard, no longer recognized by the national party due to the schism with the leftists, waged a constant battle in ’36 to maintain control of SPP assets like the Labor Advocate, the party office, and Socialist Park.
For all these reasons and more, the Socialist Party of Pennsylvania started to lose steam in Reading and quickly. A few years later, in 1938, they lost majority control of the municipality in a landslide defeat. Only Stump would enjoy reelection in the late 1940s, which was more due to his popularity than to Readingites’ belief in the socialist party.
By 1965 the number of socialist party members in Reading was about 25. The Socialist Party of America would cease to exist by 1972, changing its name to Social Democrats, USA, with two caucuses spinning out into separate organizations (i.e., Socialist Party USA and The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, a precursor to the DSA).
In modern times, I could not find much activity in Reading amongst the Social Democrats, USA, and the Socialist Party USA. I reached out to both organizations, but neither responded in time to be included in this article. The DSA does appear to have a small but active chapter in Berks County, which, as recently as December 2021, hosted a bowling fundraiser a 20-minute drive from Reading’s downtown.
When we examine the history of Reading, Pennsylvania, many of the issues probably sound pretty familiar: socialism is still viewed suspiciously by the majority of Americans (though unlike during the SPP’s time, that trend is reversing); Democrats and Republicans seem united in crushing leftist opposition; infighting also exists as strongly as it has in any period. We see from this history that these issues are not confined to the past. We can learn important lessons from the successes and failures of the socialist movement in Reading.
For one, the SPP successfully fought for policies that appealed to a working-class constituency, even if that strategy sometimes proved to be too narrow at times. National issues are all well and good, but to win on the local level, it’s clear that campaigning on issues your constituency cares about matters slightly more. Without sacrificing their values, men like Stump, at least initially, tailored their rhetoric and policies to work within their community’s local political ecosystem.
Unlike Stump, however, we have to try to be flexible when another disruption inevitably hits. The SPP was ill-prepared for the coming of the Great Depression. Like today, the Republican and Democratic parties could swoop in and reclaim power (temporarily at first, before securing a more permanent victory in ‘38). Socialists cannot just grab seats when times are good. They have to prove to constituents that they are best for navigating the bad times as well.
Will Americans turn to socialists during the coming disruptions that climate change will bring, or will they drift towards an increasingly xenophobic, corporatist right?
Additionally, as socialists, we must welcome and include as many identities as possible into the fold. When we continue to exclude comrades for identities such as their gender, race, age, or sexuality, it creates resentments that are very difficult to resolve. Leadership must be willing to let new blood into the fold, or new and old members alike will defect, weakening our base and political brand.
I always have wondered what would have happened if men like Stump and Maurer had made a genuine effort to make their more resentful comrades feel included in the decision-making? Would the SPP, and even the SPA, survive past 1938 to be more than a shell of its former self?
We will never know the answer to that question, but hopefully, we do not have to ask it next time.