Are Elections Truly Democratic or Just an Illusion?

Photo by Janine Robinson on Unsplash

I will start this article—like I do most ones about elections—by saying that you should vote during this upcoming election if you want to. Elections take, at most, only a couple of hours, one or two days a year. A far more significant barrier is that for the states that don't have automatic registration, your name has been removed from the rolls before you vote (so please ensure you are properly registered before voting).

That said, I have shifted my opinion on how I perceive elections. They are less a forum where all ideas can have their day and more like a jousting match, where candidates—and the rich backing them—gauge applause (i.e., votes) to see the best way to rule. While I think it's fine to participate in that ritual, these jousting matches are not democratic in the sense that the public has a say in policy.

Instead, they are a form of consensus-building among elites purposefully used to insulate their rule from the will of the majority.

A brief recount of the elitist origins of elections

My position may sound confusing because elections (i.e., where people vote, often via ballot, to choose a representative or other public official) are often seen as synonymous with democracy. David Van Reybrouck mentions in his book Against Elections how we have all become electoral fundamentalists, writing:

“Electoral fundamentalism is an unshakeable belief in the idea that democracy is inconceivable without elections, and elections are a necessary and fundamental precondition when speaking of democracy. Electoral fundamentalists refuse to regard elections as a means of taking part in democracy, seeing them instead as an end in themselves, as a holy doctrine with an intrinsic, inalienable value.”

And yet, when founding fathers such as James Madison argued for elections, which at the time were rare in Europe except for maybe the election of the Pope, they were doing so because they thought such a process would have explicit political outcomes. Madison, in particular, feared both minority and majority control, writing in Federalist Paper 51: "If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure."

As a result of this concern, America created institutions such as the Senate (i.e., a chamber in the US legislature where each state has two representatives) and the Electoral College (i.e., a method of electing the president that tends to inflate votes from less populous states) to insulate American leaders, at the time often composed of the slave-owning elite, from the majority's will. As a result, we now regularly elect presidents and congressional bodies that are not representative of what most Americans want.

This anti-public, pro-elite bias becomes even more transparent when you look at the anthropological roots of elections. David Graeber and David Wengrow mention this tension in The Dawn of Everything, writing:

“The political philosophers of later Greek cities did not actually consider elections a democratic way of selecting candidates for public office at all. The democratic method was sortition, or lottery, much like modern jury duty. Elections were assumed to belong to the aristocratic mode (aristocracy meaning ‘rule of the best’), allowing commoners — much like the retainers in an old-fashioned, heroic aristocracy — to decide who among the well born should be considered best of all; and well born, in this context, simply meant all those who could afford to spend much of their time playing at politics.”

We spend so much time in our society heralding the democratic virtue of elections, but as we can see, elections were never intended to be democratic. They were always a tool used by elites to control the masses.

Elections are still for elites

When we talk about "reforming democracy," we ignore this history, often instead focusing on narrow electoral reforms: e.g., abolishing the electoral college, automatic voter registration, mandating everyone vote, changing how ballots are cast via Ranked Choice or Approval, etc. It's always about shifting electoral procedure and never whether we should select another democratic method entirely.

However, we have been experimenting with elections for over a century, and many countries have implemented these reforms, but it hasn't lessened the central problem with elections. Australia mandates voting for all its citizens, and corruption and declining trust in government are still the norm. California was the first state to adopt automatic registration, which did not significantly affect public trust. The world over has likewise adopted "secret ballots" (i.e., the voter's identity is not revealed to the public), and it has not lessened the crisis of modern democracy.

Why is this?

Graeber and Wengrow theorize that there are three ways to gather power: a right to violence, control of information, and charisma. Elections are about this last point, i.e., selecting charismatic leaders. These are people who have the training, skills, knowledge, and social capital to get other people to like them, and that leads to potential moral hazards. As the two anthropologists write:

“…it is worth recalling that ancient Greek writers were well aware of the tendency for elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. This is why they considered elections an aristocratic mode of political appointment, quite at odds with democratic principles...

With elections, the inherent focus on likeability leads to an unstated focus on selecting individuals with privilege because those are the ones who generally can afford to acquire such skills and/or are awarded for them. It's not a coincidence that many people deemed "worthy" of electoral leadership come from wealthy backgrounds, receive prestigious schooling, or, often, both. This fact is evident in America, where over half of the people elected to the Senate and House are millionaires, and a not-so-insignificant amount have attended prestigious universities. These politicians also usually need significant investment to even run a campaign (we are talking potentially millions or billions of dollars), which often beholden them to more wealthy interests.

Yet it's hard not to find a part of the world where this focus on the privileged isn't the case with electoral politics.

• In South Korea, the Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice estimated recently that the average wealth of lawmakers was 3.33 billion won or $2.44 million USD per person (note: this includes real estate and securities assets).

• In the UK, it's hard to acquire this estimate as members of Parliament are not required to disclose their personal financial information to the House of Commons, but given the rampant wealth accumulation by those in the Tory party, we can speculate that it is significant (note: current prime minister Rishi Sunak has a net worth of over 600 million pounds or north of 800 million USD).

• In India, the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) found in 2022 that the upper (Rajya Sabha) and lower (Lok Sabha) houses of Parliament possessed, on average, ₹20.47 core (over $2 million) and ₹79.54 crore ($9 million), respectively.

• In France, the pathway to power in government often involved attending the recently closed (circa 2021) grande école (ENA), which schooled four French presidents, including Emmanuel Macron.

Furthermore, individual concentration of capital is not the only issue. There are also concerns about nepotism and cronyism, where charismatic people in power tend to give preferential treatment to their friends and family. This is a problem in even countries known for their functioning democratic institutions.

When we look at the Scandinavian social democracy of Norway, for example, there has been a well-documented culture of giving, receiving or asking for bribes. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store has received steady criticism for appointing personal friend Jens Stoltenberg to a high-profile NATO position. Former Prime Minister Erna Solberg has long been suspected of assisting her husband with stock trades.

As we can see, this focus on the privileged in politics is not because of Citizens United (i.e., campaign finance laws), the Electoral College, or whatever your US-specific justification might be, but a more general trend found in most electoral democracies. Elections tend to prioritize the privileged, with even self-proclaimed socialist politicians often being quite wealthy themselves.

If someone manages to get elected who is both working-class and has not received elite schooling, they are navigating against a system not meant for them. Many such politicians struggle to swim upstream and either get gobbled up by established interests to keep their power or quickly lose pace and become one-term candidates.

Politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an excellent example of this. She entered office as a disruptive influence, but as her tenure matured, she quickly softened her approach to be slightly left of the (American) center. Some of this was undoubtedly due to the pressures she faced from Democratic Leadership, as it's widely speculated that the party establishment wished to gerrymander her out of her district following her upstart victory in 2018.

Despite the rhetoric we often hear, this system is not designed for the common man or woman to enter office, and elections are a huge reason why.

How to engage in true democracy

The natural question becomes, if elections are so bad, how should we govern? Should we revert to a monarchy or some benevolent form of authoritarianism? Am I arguing for technocracy?

No. It must be stressed that I am not against democracies. I believe democracy is the best way to govern, but I think there are better ways to reach a democratic consensus than through an election. We have already briefly talked about one method, which is aleatoric democracy, or selecting leaders through lot or sortition (i.e., choosing leaders at random). This system has been used throughout history, from ancient Athens to parts of South Asia.

One thing that speaks in this method's favor is that we already use it in America to decide whether or not someone is guilty of a crime (i.e., jury duty)— literally life and death in some cases. This is done as a call toward impartiality by getting as large a slice of the public as possible.

It's easy to imagine the same system being used to select our leaders. Imagine a world without elections and career politicians. Someone devotes one year of their life to office and then moves on. And that person is far more likely to be statistically representative of their actual country than the elite representatives elections are designed to give us. In the words of Alpa Shah in What if We Selected our Leaders by Lottery?:

“This idea of leadership prioritizes the notion of service and duty to the collective, and devalues merit, status, wealth or power acquisition by individuals which create political and economic inequalities between people.”

Lot could be used in combination with other methods, such as direct democracy, which was also used during Ancient Athens. The assembly of Athens allowed any citizen (regressively constrained by class and sex) to decide magistracies and other important political matters. Many small towns and cities aren’t that much bigger than Ancient Athens, which had upward of 60,000 citizens at its height.

It's often argued that sortition would be inefficient for larger political bodies such as the US Senate, and maybe that could be true (again, lot could be used for these larger roles), but this criticism also assumes a level of efficiency that doesn't exist with the modern system. The American Congress is so dysfunctional that it often struggles to do basic tasks such as passing a budget or repairing vital infrastructure. By this logic, elections aren't a valid method either.

More to the point, our electoral system already has a robust history of state-wide referendums, where citizens vote for the passage or rejection of laws. We have technology in place that far surpasses that of ancient Athens. Consequently, we can assess public opinion on a range of issues on a massive scale. It does not take much imagination to adapt this process — which often requires legislative approval in many polities — and allow referendums to be passed into law when the public ratifies them.

In essence, removing the electoral intermediaries from the equation.

Whether our society advocates sortition, direct democracy, or some combination of aleatoric, direct, and electoral methods, there are clearly many worthwhile paths ahead.

A political conclusion

Elections are not democratic—they never were. Their roots come from an elitist fear of majority rule, and over time, they tend to favor those already at the top of the economic and political hierarchy. The United States has helped import electoral democracy worldwide, but it has not lessened the class-based stratification we see in nearly every modern country.

To end our current era of instability, we must abandon elections in favor of greater democracy. We must implement a combination of lot and direct democracy that allows our modern governments not just to survive but to thrive.

For once, let's leave it up to chance.

I’m Trans & Society Removed My Comfort Around Children

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

I used to love looking after children. I found it fun to invent games and run around (and still do), and that made me a really good babysitter. I was once, unprompted, paid a $50 tip at a family event (this was before inflation) and offered a babysitting gig on the spot.

I liked looking after the kids. At one point, being a parent was all I wanted. It was something I dreamed about, part of my life plan whenever I talked about the future.

However, that dream slowly got displaced by a deep discomfort with being around children. While I liked the idea of childrearing, over and over again, I was presented with the idea that queer people like me were inherent pedophiles. "They're giving kids porn and telling third graders that they should masturbate," Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik lied in a now infamous interview with Taylor Lorenz. "They're giving middle school children guides to gay sex, anal sex, sex toys."

The message I hear — the one I unwittingly internalize — from false statements like this one is that queers are dangerous around kids and, even more than that, that we are unfit to be parents. As anti-LGBTQ politician Rick Santorum remarked in a Pew Research Center interview in 2008 about same-sex child rearing:

“What society should be about is encouraging what’s best for children. What’s best for children, we know, is a mother and a father who are the parents of that child, raising that child in a stable, married relationship, and we should have laws that encourage that, that support that.”

This sentiment from anti-LGBTQIA advocates has ruined my comfort around children, and I wanted to talk about this meme's deep, unsettling roots and how it affects the queer community’s psyche today.

A history of being called groomers

Conservatives (and I mean this more broadly than just Democrats or Republicans) didn't just start calling us "groomers" (i.e., accusing queer people of training children to be susceptible to sexual exploitation) when Chaya Raichik came onto the scene. It's an old meme that we see pop up time and time again. I always think of the infamous 1961 "educational" film Boys Beware by Sid Davis Productions, made to be shown in schools, which depicts homosexuality as a sickness where adult men prey on kids. In the words of the film's upbeat narrator, describing the Groomer character Ralph:

“Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox but no less dangerous and contagious: a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual. A person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex.”

The story goes on to depict Ralph grooming a young boy to provide favors (it's implied they are sexual) in exchange for money, gifts, and attention. That film repeats the same stereotypes as modern-day conservatives such as Chaya Raichik, and it was delivered over half a century earlier.

As we can see, this has been going on for a long time. Academic Michael Bronski wrote in the Boston Review that this may be part of a larger moralist trend within Christian theology. As he argues in that piece:

“Gays are in good company, not that it is much comfort: Christians have a long history of accusing religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities of abusing, molesting, and killing children. In medieval Europe, Jews were frequently accused of ritually killing Christian children — the blood libel — often to use their blood to make matzah. Fictitious victims…were even canonized as saints to drum up fervor for pogroms. The accusation that queer people are “grooming” children to be gay or question their gender is just the modern equivalent of the blood libel: the molestation libel.”

And so, from this perspective, it's best not to think of this anti-LGBT+ moral panic as something unique to queerness but one linked to religious backlashes overall — moral panics that reemerge from time to time, albeit with sometimes different political targets (see the D&D scare, the daycare hysteria, etc.).

Even if you accept that premise, we can see that an anti-queer sentiment has been building for over a century. James Kirchick argues in his piece for New York Magazine that the conspiracy theory of queer people trying to indoctrinate and subvert not just children but entire governments can be traced back to several high-profile cases in the early 1900s. This era was when homosexuality started to be classified as not just an act people did but a prescribed identity (see Debating the Morality of Heterosexuality).

He initially cites the early 1900s "Eulenburg Affair," where Prince Philipp Eulenburg, the advisor and friend of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II, had their alleged correspondences revealed to the public via the press by muckraking journalist Maximilian Harden. The press spun up a narrative allegedly showing that the "pacifist" tendencies of the Kaiser were the result of this gay clique. As Kirchick writes:

“Homosexuals were confederates in what one Swiss journalist termed ‘a new Freemasonry’ transcending national borders, covert enemies of the state who advocated cosmopolitanism and diplomacy over nationalism and martial virtue.”

We can see here a direct link between the conspiratorial thinking of then and today. The gays here, like the Jewish people in similar conspiracy theories, are seen as a plot undermining the German state. Homosexuality was not only linked with deviancy but was potentially treasonous. Kirchick would go on to describe several more political scandals in his essay, including the outing of Massachusetts Senator David Walsh for attending an all-male brothel salaciously alleged to have nazi spies.

Meanwhile, in the background in America, but very much connected to how the public would come to view homosexuality, the academic Michael Bronski describes a wave of "sex crimes" in the 1930s. These were vastly exaggerated by conservative politicians, who used the moment to scapegoat sexual deviants, which queer people were considered to be. This fearmongering led to the passage of “sexual psychopath laws” under the pretext of protecting women and children. These laws committed suspected offenders indefinitely to mental institutions, and queerness was often linked to this trend. As Bronski argues in that Boston Review piece:

“…in practice, sexual psychopath laws were often used, particularly postwar, against homosexual men who were engaged in consensual same-sex activity, even as they were continually portrayed as preying on young boys.”

Over time, that pathologization of homosexuality linked queerness in many conservatives' minds to degeneracy and pedophilia. To the point that, in the 1970s, Anita Bryant infamously campaigned against a queer-friendly law in Florida under the conservative Save Our Children coalition. She pushed the insidious conspiracy theory that LGBTQIA+ people cannot reproduce, so they must "recruit" — in essence, the modern-day grooming narrative.

As you can see, anti-queer people have been calling us pedophiles forever. There have been decades of this meme that “queer people preying upon kids,” and, as we shall soon see, it affects how queer people see themselves.

How it f@cks with your head

To this day, I cannot walk past a playground without feeling dirty. I push past them quickly and keep my interactions to a minimum because I am worried that others will perceive me as a monster for merely being in the same space as kids. That causes me to look at children and see them as people you cannot interact with and cannot parent.

Where did this disgust come from?

In no small part due to the history we have already cited, the mental health of the queer community is not great. It's well-documented at this point that LGBT people, particularly trans and nonbinary youth, have experienced, during this latest moral panic, an increase in suicidal ideation, as well as mental health issues such as substance use and depression.

Likewise, childrearing and queer identity are a dicey intersection. Studies have routinely reported a stigma among queer parents, which can affect their mental health. In the words of authors Rachel H. Farr and Cassandra P. Vázquez in their article for the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology: "Stigma felt by parents about their family composition may in turn negatively affect their mental health as well as perceived competence in parenting through internalized homophobia."

And so, if queer parents are already reporting a disproportionate amount of stigma, both externalized and internalized, that comes with having a "non-normal" family structure, it should surprise no one that many opt out of that process entirely. According to the census, same-sex households are much less likely than opposite-sex households to have children. When we look at user information from places like Reddit, stigma is often cited. "I don't want kids either genetically or adopted," goes one Reddit commenter. "It's just too much work, and LGBT parents face more discrimination even still in the 2020s than their straight counterparts."

Reddit has many subreddits devoted to this topic — a treasure trove of good qualitative information. Some of the reasons the commenters give for not wanting children are bureaucratic and financial. It's still not exactly easy to engage in surrogacy or adoption, even today, and the costs for such procedures and applications can get pricey pretty quickly. With the exception of cis gay men, LGBTQIA+ people are poorer on average than straight, cisgendered people, so it makes sense that financial barriers would be a significant factor.

There is also the political reason of not wanting to participate in normative life scripts. "There isn't the same societal pressure on gays to have children as there are straight people," one user declares, "…I know way too many straight people who've had children just because 'it's what you do.'"

Yet buried amongst these points is a deep discomfort around kids. "I despise children," goes one user, "and I am glad that I'll never have to worry about having one accidentally." Another writes: "I hate children, so gay or straight, I wouldn't want one either way." "I am wildly uncomfortable and annoyed around children," declares one user, "I never know what to say to them, and they give me anxiety."

There is this tension over queer identity as it relates to children, and I believe a part (though certainly not all of it) relates to this internalized anti-queerness. We are told over and over again that we are a danger to children, and for some, that pushes them to maintain their distance. As one Redditor commented on why some gay men avoid having kids: "Some are scared of the old stigma [where] some people have this insane mindset that they believe gays are Paedophiles [sic]."

You get called a pedophile over and over again, and eventually, even though the claims are baseless and cruel, a dark part of yourself starts to believe it.

It's psychological warfare

Society was not kind to queer people growing up (in some ways, it still isn't). I remember how the headlines used to go in my childhood. Politicians would be interviewed about their anti-queer views, and they would paint LGBTQIA+ people as almost aliens incapable of doing the things “normal” Americans can. Organizations like the Westboro Baptist Church would make all sorts of ridiculous claims like homosexuality being responsible for hurricanes and soldiers' deaths, and they would get air time and attention from the media (they are still active, by the way).

This background noise taught me a lot of unhealthy things about my queer identity: that I was sinful, that I should be ashamed, that I was dangerous. It's hard for that kind of stuff not to seep in. I have done a lot of work to unlearn these messages, but the one drilled into me still is my profound discomfort being around children. I do not think I belong around them — a belief reinforced by conservatives all throughout my life.

I hate this, and more to the point, I hate the people who made me think this way. I know I'll eventually unlearn it, and given the number of queer parents out there, many already have, but f@ck those who made that unlearning necessary.

Calling someone a groomer or a pedophile just because they are queer is not a victimless crime. It is a profound type of psychological warfare that warps the minds of the intended targets, and I wish all those who do this a lifetime of uneasiness.

Blockout 2024: Why People Are Done With Celebrity Culture

Image; TikTok/haleyybaylee via MSN

Nicknamed the "digital guillotine" or "operation blockout," people are calling for a boycott of all celebrities, many of whom attended the 2024 Met Gala. "Block them, block them, block them all," the user thelifeof__ recommended to her millions of followers. "The only way this works is if we go in as a collective," continues user Alexis Nicole, "Us in District 12 need to fight back."

The origin of this digital movement is simple. This year, outside the Met Gala, influencer Haley "Baylee" Kalil, who was not invited to the Gala herself, lip-synced (and posted online) a phrase that would infuriate many: "Let them eat cake." It immediately garnered criticism and morphed into a more general anti-celebrity sentiment.

The backlash, like with the phrase's infamous origin, has been brutal, with many boycotting not only Kalil herself but celebrities in general, who have lost millions overnight.

The Met Gala as detached

Historically, "Let them eat cake" has been attributed to French Queen Marie Antoinette, who became a symbol of aristocratic greed. She was beheaded via the guillotine during the French Revolution for allegedly conspiring with foreign powers as well as other crimes such as incest (note—although utterly detached, as most nobles were, from the plights of French peasants, she probably didn't say this particular phrase).

Over time, this statement has since come to represent the meme of an out-of-touch elite that fixates on opulence while the peasantry starves. It was this framing that many online used when Haley Kalil lip-synced, "Let them eat cake." As user Beck Berwick remarked shortly after the initial video:

“When you say ‘Let Them Eat Cake’…as you are going to the Met Gala dressed like that. It feels like you're looking down on other people. It feels like you are disregarding what other people are going through and the suffering others are trying to bring awareness to. It’s not you're intention, probably, but its how it comes across.”

While Kalil, again, did not go to the Gala, she was still representing it as a host for E! News, interviewing celebrities about the event. According to Kalil, her comment (allegedly) was not meant to remark on elitism — a joke that would ring hollow anyway since she is an influencer, met gala invite or not.

It's ironic this reaction was not anticipated as the theme for the dress code that night was The Garden of Time, based on J.G. Ballard's short story of the same name about the "masses" or "rabble" overtaking the estate of an aristocrat, who uses magical time flowers to halt their advance (and possibly extend his lifespan). Designers used the theme to create ephemeral outfits of "fleeting beauty" — some of them too delicate to ever be worn again — but the story implies the very reaction that Haley Kalil received. It is ultimately about an aristocrat burning extra resources — in this case, magical flowers — to maintain their privileged position.

It speaks to the comfort of the wealthy that they not only feel comfortable hosting such a party during a moment of great wealth inequality — this is your reminder that the price for a single ticket is $75,000 — but that they could not perceive that such an ostentatious display would not earn such hatred.

After all, it's in the very story they referenced.

Boycotting Hollywood

This was not the first time Hollywood elites had done something that earned such ire in recent years. From the song Imagine sung by Gal Gadot and other A-listers, to Kim Kardashian's 40th birthday party during the pandemic, the climate against celebrity culture is noticeably shifting. As Brian Moylan wrote in an editorial for NBC about the Imagine fiasco:

“The general consensus was that a bunch of rich celebrities imagining a world with “no possessions” while people around the country suffered a social, health and economic crisis wasn’t what the world needed at the time.”

It's that sentiment we are seeing a lot these days— and although hatred of celebrity culture and the rich more broadly is nothing new (see the "Eat the rich" meme), the nature of social media means that often these celebrities benefit directly from our clicks, views, and attention. A relationship we are all painfully aware of at this point. As commentator Elaine Lui told The Ringer during the early stages of the pandemic:

“These are entertainers, ultimately. And whether or not we want to admit it, we created them. We enable them. We make it possible for them to exist.”

It's for this reason that the Blockout movement is calling on people to divest from celebrity culture. "Block celebrities so they don't earn ad revenue from you," comments one user. "You know the last time Kim Kardashian made money from me? It was December 13th of last year. It's when I blocked her."

From Ariana Grande to Britney Spears, the names of celebrities vary depending on the user, but they are generally highly influential A or B-listers who either attended the Met Gala or, in some cases, who have not spoken out on issues believed by users to be necessary, such as the genocide in Gaza.

It's no coincidence that this movement is emerging side by side with the pro-Palestine movement, which has made Boycotts, Divestments, and Sanctions (BDS) of the state of Israel one of its primary goals. Even before "Operation Blockout," there has been a widespread effort to engage in consumer boycotts of companies such as HP and SodaStream for their support of Israel, as well as more targeted divestment campaigns (see more details here).

Returning to the Beck Berwick video, one of the things that horrified so many was that a Pro-Palestine protest was occurring nearby, and in fact, attempted to get close to the event before being halted by police. There was an attempt to get these celebrities to use their influence — the thing we give them through our attention — to talk about this issue, which was met with silence.

And so now (some) people are trying to take that influence away. In the words of the user theluncheonlawyer:

“When we talk about [Palestine], we are getting arrested. These protesters are getting carted off to jail…People are getting fired for talking about this. Celebrities, what’s happening to you? You losing a couple of sponsorships but you still get that movie deal. I doubt you're losing views as to where you're going to be destitute and not have another job. But we, as regular people, are. We are putting more on the line than you. So yeah, you gonna have to get catch the smoke.”

The blade falls down

It remains to be seen whether this movement will be successful. Most boycotts do not work, even when they are very targeted and do everything the "correct way." Some believe that algorithms and marketing teams are too adaptable for this type of action to work anymore (see user thisisharlie's criticism on this matter). Others have commented that this feels performative. As user Chrisitan Divyne remarked:

“To me, it feels a little, ‘where’s your black square?’ It feels a little superficial. The hallmark of any good protest or boycott is a direct and specific goal…[while here] we’re blocking and unfollowing any influencer who isn’t using their platform to talk about Gaza, wide net, unclear aim.”

There will always be those who remain skeptical of an action at the moment, and that’s healthy. We should never uncritically accept a type of action because others say it’s "the right thing to do." Our time and attention are being pulled in many directions, and it’s worth debating the intentions of those asking for our time, even from allegedly good people.

However, as the genocide in Gaza continues and our culture of rampant inequality exacerbates, it is worth noting that the anger people are feeling right now is warranted. Things are indeed f@cked.

If the elites are worried about a digital guillotine, they should be afraid of what else remains on the horizon if these calls go unlistened to yet again.

Fallout Made Me Sad for the End of Liberal Democracy

Image; Kilter Films, Big Indie Pictures, Bethesda Game Studios, Amazon MGM Studios

Fallout (2024) is a series about the end of the world. Most of the action takes place over 200 years after the "Great War of 2077," a nuclear Armageddon that has irradiated the planet, permanently changing the flora and fauna on the surface. Our heroes navigate a wasteland scarred by decisions made hundreds of years ago, the context of which has been warped by time.

If there is one message drilled into the viewer, it's that liberal Democracy does not and cannot stop this fate from coming to pass. Fallout is a show about how Democracy failed to prevent corporate forces from taking over (and ending) the world and how it's utterly incapable of stopping history from repeating itself.

A thought that makes me incredibly sad.

The End of America

The show wastes no time skewering the meritocracy so often associated with American Democracy — i.e., the "American Dream," the idea that if you work hard, you will succeed. There is a scene where protagonist Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a vault dweller living in a self-proclaimed meritocracy, tells a wastelander (Dale Dickey) that the vaults will save America. Ma June, the woman Lucy is talking to, sardonically quips: "And when exactly were you planning on saving America?"

It's a cutting line meant to highlight the nonsensical nature of this meritocratic sentiment — at this point, America is already gone.

As the scene progresses, we learn that the vaults are where the rich fled when the bombs dropped. Ma June goes on to say that, "The vaults were nothing more than a hole in the ground for rich folks to hide in while the rest of the world burned." It had nothing to do with helping people. Saving the American Way was simply the propaganda Vault-Tec, the company that made them, used to extract further profits from anxious Americans and make them feel less worried about liberal democracies' race toward collapse. Propaganda that has survived to the present day.

Over and over again, we see Vault-Tec, a stand-in for corporate America, co-opting these emotions for control. It's learned that Lucy's vault, number 33, is not actually a functioning democracy as she believed but a front controlled by the post-apocalyptic successors of Vault-Tec. Cryosuspended employees from before the Great War secretly manage the vaults, ensuring that their people are always elected into positions of power.

Vault 33 provides the illusion of Democracy and nothing more.

Even before the apocalypse in 2077, Vault-Tec had hollowed out American Democracy. The American government exhausted itself with a jingoistic resource war against China, and so the company picked up the pieces, becoming one of the largest employers in the US. Pieces that the company was not interested in putting back together again.

It's initially believed that either America or China launched the first bombs that led to the devasting Great War, and maybe one of them officially did, but Vault-Tec engineered that collapse. We are told this point-blank at a boardroom meeting that the company intended to drop the bomb all because they believed that the ensuing destruction would benefit them.

Part of this logic was short-term thinking. As the character Charles Whiteknife (Dallas Goldtooth) says of capitalism's perverse incentives to maintain bad situations indefinitely for profit:

“The US government has outsourced the survival of the human race to Vault-Tec. Vault-Tec is a private corporation that has a fiduciary responsibility to make money for its investors. And how does it make money? By selling vaults….[but] they can’t sell vaults if these peace negotiations go through.”

Vault-Tec sabotaged that peace to maintain its competitive edge. But it also wanted more than profits; it wanted control.

To do that, the company's leadership reasoned that they had to drop the bomb and destroy the remnants of American Democracy so a new society they could mold from scratch would emerge. In the words of Vault-Tec employee Bud Askins (Michael Esper) in a pre-War flashback:

“Time is the Apex predator. And in the event of an incident, time is the enemy with which we will defeat all of our enemies. That is how we will win the great game of capitalism. Not by outfighting anyone, but by outliving them.”

As we shall soon notice, this wait-and-see approach is integral to Vault-Tec’s plan to dominate the world after the Great War.

Culling the wasteland

While the wasteland was (and is) a bad place for most former Americans to live, even in the company's early planning stages, they were aware that humanity might survive the fallout of nuclear armageddon.

And indeed, people did survive. Democracy rose from the ashes. The New California Republic (NCR), a liberal polity established in the wake of the games that inspired this series, became one of the dominant forces in the wastelands by 2241. One of our protagonists, Maximus (Aaron Moten), grew up in their capital, Shady Sands, only for it to be blasted into oblivion by Vault-Tec so that they could have their sought-after "fresh slate."

We only see the destruction the company left behind: a giant crater where the NCR capital used to be. "That's how Vault-Tec deals with competition," one character monologues. "Just like they did 200 years ago."

There is a cycle here where Vault-Tec destabilizes the wasteland to maintain control, waging a shadow war against the surface, so its vaults are the only places of comfort and safety. They may be running vicious experiments on most of their occupants to see which idea will create the "perfect" society, but at least you can get good food, hot water, and shelter.

In the meantime, as the company slowly whittles away at its competitors so it can control the future, the only forces that can survive in the wasteland up above are grifters exploiting you for resources and fascists that shoot first and ask questions later.

The most prominent example of the latter is the Brotherhood of Steel, a militaristic theocracy that hoards weapons built before the Great War and uses them to maintain control. In the closing moments of the season one finale, it's this organization that crushes a nascent revival movement for the New California Republic.

The NCR Revival movement was headquartered in an egalitarian commune in an old observatory up in the hills. Their goal was a noble one: to make nuclear fusion — a technology Vault-Tec had hoarded since before the war because it would have crushed their business model — and give it to the wasteland so that society could restart. The Brotherhood of Steel, envious of what that technology could do for military expansion, destroyed that NCR compound and took cold fusion for themselves, once again killing any hope for Democracy in the wasteland.

When the NCR was destroyed (again), it felt like learning a dream you thought had died was killed again. Democracy tried to thrive, and instead, it was destroyed by the world corporate America created: a war of all-against-all, curated by unseen, trigger-happy managers.

A downer of a conclusion

It's hard to walk away with a positive message from this show. Fallout is deeply cynical about capitalism's anti-democratic nature, which is a strange message for Amazon to perpetuate. Vault-Tec, an Amazon-like company that can arguably be seen as a stand-in for capitalism more broadly, repeatedly throughout the series destroys liberal Democracy (the ones it can't control anyway), and it always succeeds.

There is a touching last line in which the dying NCR revolutionary Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) preaches to lead Maximus to keep fighting his fascist organization, saying, "Maybe you can stop them. Maybe you can't. Maybe all you can do is try." It's a love letter to liberal Democracy—one in which we are meant to believe that if we keep up the fight, eventually, the dream of the NCR will manifest somewhere out there.

And yet, this optimism feels naive. Moldaver fails, and her life's work is crushed by an authoritarian regime that will co-opt her most significant scientific discovery to oppress the wastelands.

The only positive society in season one is Vault Four, a former science-led technocracy violently overthrown by its test subjects. They kill their oppressors and establish a pluralistic, arguably communist society where all resources are shared. Yet even this society is one bad day from collapse, as seen when Maximus steals their primary power source.

Taken altogether, Fallout seems to suggest that liberal society is utterly incapable of fighting the forces of fascism and corporatocracy that seek to undermine it. It's a depressing thought to consider. As we potentially hurdle toward that outcome ourselves, hopefully, we will move past the failures of liberal Democracy and find a middle ground between being overtaken by corporations and letting them annihilate us for profit.

If time is the apex predator, we'll find out eventually.

The Way We Think of the Collective in Science Fiction is Changing

Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash

In her 1938 novella Anthem, objectivist writer Ayn Rand, horrified by the Soviet Union she fled, imagined a dystopic, collectivized society where even preferences and friendships were frowned upon. This rejection of individuality was so pronounced in this world that the pronoun "I" had left the popular lexicon in favor of "we," "our," and "they."

Rand's work is not unique in its thorough disdain for the collective. Cold War fears of the Soviet Union led to all sorts of demonizations of this kind. The most prominent in the popular imagination is probably the villainous Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994, "Q Who," Season 2, Episode 16), a hivemind that forcibly integrates other races into their collective, with their catchphrase: "We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own…resistance is futile."

There were many similar examples. The Cybermen from Doctor Who (1963–1989; 2005–present) were a group of former humans turned androids intent on turning all of society into identical versions of themselves. We can also look at the Master from the video game Fallout (1997) trying to create a race of super mutants, the "IT" hivemind in A Wrinkle in Time (1962), and the sameness created by the dystopic society in The Giver (1993). These collective projects are always depicted as the erasure of individuality and often are a terrifying evil that must be fought against at all costs.

However, in recent years, we have seen a shift in the popular conception of how the collective is being portrayed in science fiction. Where once it was an idea of ridicule and fear, it's increasingly being depicted more positively.

The collective as benevolent

Before we discuss more recent changes, it's important to note that counternarratives about the collective have always existed, even if they were not as readily embraced as the critical narratives we have already mentioned. Although constrained by the prejudices of the time, Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End (1953) concludes with all children becoming a benevolent superintelligence known as the "Over-mind." Arguably, this transformation is not depicted in a menacing way: an evolution that's more bittersweet than evil.

The same can be said with the last two books in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986), where it's learned that the future of humanity will not be the precise mathematics of psychohistory or the behind-the-scenes meddling of the Second Foundation but led by a planetwide hivemind called Gaia. This superorganism has interconnected all organic and inorganic matter on its surface and is what our protagonist chooses as the default state of humanity.

These depictions run counter to the dystopic Randian conception of "equality" in Anthem that she so despised, but like the Borg and Cybermen, they are still top-down approaches. These collectivist outcomes for humanity are decided as the best course of action by either an outside force, such as the alien Overlords in Childhood's End, or, in the case of the Foundation series, a single individual.

They are not bottom-up movements but rather brought on by a benevolent authoritarianism.

When the collective is framed as one totalizing entity like this, the horror behind people's reactions makes sense. Whether the assimilating superorganism in question is kind or cruel, beings like the Borg and the Over-mind run counter to how we operate as human beings. We are individuals just as much as social creatures, and imposing another will on top of those identities can almost seem like dying. With the Borg and the Cybermen, your body and memories may continue to exist after they assimilate you, but it isn't "you" anymore, and that's terrifying.

Yet it's important to remember that the mere act of coming together doesn't automatically lead to that outcome. There is more to collectives than just the individual or ego death. As we have moved beyond the Cold War period, writers have begun to shift away from the dichotomy of a collective in science fiction being either all good or all bad.

New storytelling has started to depict the joining with other beings as a unique form of existence worth celebrating.

The collective as multi-faceted

Interestingly enough, Star Trek is an excellent example of this. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, three years after the episode that introduced the Borg, Q Who (and in real life, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall), we are introduced to the Trill, a symbiote-host species where at least two beings merge to permanently create one consciousness ("The Host," Season 4, Episode 23). The joining process between these two beings is not depicted as evil or malicious but simply another type of existence.

By the time we get to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–1999), these beings are so regular for both the Federation and the viewer that one of our leads, Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell), is a Trill.

In the cyberpunk film Ghost In The Shell (1995), cybernetics have advanced to the point where human consciousness can leave its body, or “shell,” and interface directly with the Internet. Ghost has become the slang term for consciousness itself, and our protagonist, Major Motoko Kusanagi (Atsuko Tanaka/Mimi Woods), in a process very similar to the Trill, decides to merge her "ghost" with an Artificial Intelligence to create something beyond either of them.

A counterexample of dual consciousness, where two or more entities merge to create something new but do not lose their individual parts, is the cartoon show Steven Universe (2013–2019). Crystalline aliens called Gems can "fuse" with each other to create a new being.

However, these "fusions" do not erase the previous identities. The new form is depicted as an ongoing conversation between the organisms, which, in the case of the fusion Fluorite (Kathleen Fisher), can include many beings. Unlike the Trill, this new existence never subordinates the previous beings, and if consensus is ever broken, one or more can choose to leave. Ruby and Saphire — two gems that make up the fusion Garnet — do this multiple times throughout the show when they encounter disagreements.

The thriller Sense8 (2015–2018) showcases the premise that groups of eight people can telepathically and empathetically be connected through a "cluster." Fellow sensates both maintain and do not maintain individuality. The characters go about their regular days as individual consciousnesses, but at any point, they can talk with each other telepathically and swap feelings, sensations, and abilities.

As viewers, we empathize with the sensates, who are hunted by the individualist humans. The latter fear clusters for the changes they can bring about to human society.

Returning to the Borg, their totalizing image has softened by the time we get to Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001). Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) comes across a group of former Borg in the season three episode "Unity," which provides a more nuanced conversation on the ethics of joining a hive mind. Officer Chakotay (Robert Beltran) disagrees with a Borg "co-operatives" plan, not because it’s a unified intelligence but one created by force.

From Star Trek to the Culture series (1987–2012), we could list many examples that show us this synthesis model, where the merging or joining of consciousness is not force-driven but instead done by consensus.

A new frontier in how we think of the collective.

A collected conclusion

Star Trek: Picard (2020–2023) depicts the Borg even more emphatically. We see many ex-Borgs reintegrating as individuals, and in Season 2, the Borg superorganism itself goes through a cultural transformation when lead Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) becomes the new Borg Queen. Borg Agnes leads her race not to conquer but, in a surprise twist, to create a society based on cooperation rather than assimilation — a society which petitions to join the Federation.

This recontextualization of the collective is happening all throughout science fiction. As we move away from the totalizing demonizations and praises of the collective that the Soviet Union inspired, our depiction of it has become more nuanced. It’s not always benevolent or evil; it’s often just a new form of being, with all the advantages and pitfalls that entails.

And as we become more comfortable with the collective and shed the atomization of the previous era, how we depict it in our media will continue to evolve.

Let's make it so.

How Right-Leaning U.S. Press Weaponizes the Anti-Trans ‘Cass Review’

Image; Front page of Cass Report

For years, the scientific consensus on puberty blockers for children has been relatively straightforward. They cause no significant harm, and most of their effects are easily reversible.

As recently as last month, a study presented at the American Physiological Society's annual American Physiology Summit found:

“…that the short-term developmental delay of the uterus and ovaries caused by the puberty-blocking treatment in young female rats was reversible. A majority of reproductive function also recovered immediately after puberty blocking withdrawal. This study can help inform adolescents and their families in the decision to take puberty-blocking medication.”

While more research is always welcomed in replicating this study (especially when confirming these results in humans), this is just one drop in decades of literature on this subject. The research on this topic seems to suggest that such care increases positive mental health and that the effects of puberty blockers are again reversible.

Additional concerns, such as a decrease in bone density and neurological changes, are still not well understood. The prior might be caused by things such as lack of exercise, not from the medication itself, and there is a reported “bone density catchup” when people start taking hormones, but again, more research is needed. These drawbacks don’t seem to outweigh the many benefits.

In the past, anti-trans advocates have cited single studies to counter this consensus, but for a long time, these have been easily dismissed by citing the statements by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology, and the many, many other medical organizations that recognize the overall positive impact a gender-affirming approach has on development for transgender adolescents.

However, one new review may challenge this viewpoint — not because its methodology is particularly robust — but because it has the backing of a nation’s health service (i.e., the NHS). We are talking about the Cass Review — a meta-study that claims that existing literature is “remarkably weak” despite ultimately not finding any evidence to conclude that puberty blockers create significant harm. The British press has uncritically shared this claim that the Cass Review has disrupted decades of medical knowledge, and that reaction has started to spread to American media as well.

We are seeing a troubling trend as those on the right use this review to dismiss decades of established research so that care for trans people can be chipped away.

This is bad science

From the outset, it should be noted that the Cass Review is flawed. The report applied a highly rigorous standard that did not fit the context of transgender pediatrics. One hundred of the studies it reviewed were labeled as having “low-quality evidence,” which is not a moral judgment, despite how the report may frame it, and means something different in science. The “gold standard” for a study has always been randomized controlled trials, but because of the nature of puberty, doing RCTs for blockers would be entirely unethical and, in some cases, pointless.

As Dr. Sam Wong, president of the pediatrics section of the Alberta Medical Association, told the CBC:

“Within a few months, it’s obvious to the person that they’re on puberty blockers or they’re not on puberty blockers. So … they have feelings and they have impressions of what they should be going through. So that’s going to influence the study itself.”

Additionally, because of the limitations of pesky things such as ethics and subjectivity, there are many situations — not just with endocrinology — where there is only “low-quality evidence” to support care routines. A physician, Dr. Jake Donaldson, continues in that CBC article:

“[Even something as routine as treating a kid’s ear infection with antibiotics or painkillers may not have robust evidence]. That doesn’t mean we just every time we see an ear infection we turn around and walk the other way. Sometimes, an ear infection needs to be treated, sometimes it doesn’t.”

A standard is being applied here that we do not apply to other areas of medicine — one that is transparently discriminatory.

One would think that pediatrician Hilary Cass, the head of the infamous Cass Review, would be aware of this, but it’s clear that her bias is shining through. For example, Cal Horton notes in The Cass Review: Cis-supremacy in the UK’s approach to healthcare for trans children that the report had many biases, including a source bias, writing:

“…[it does not] cite or engage with an existing body of literature on anti-trans prejudice amongst healthcare professionals…Within Cass Review reports however, quotations from interviewed healthcare professionals do display indications of potential ignorance, bias or anti-trans prejudice. These include healthcare professional quotes that express concern about trans children being created by peer pressure or social media, or the dismissal and belittling of trans children’s identities. All healthcare professional views, including those demonstrating ignorance, dismissiveness or hostility to trans children are presented as valid and valuable inputs to the Cass Review, with no discussion of the potential for anti-trans prejudice or ignorance amongst healthcare professionals.”

This refusal to engage in the existing literature, as well as to screen professionals who hold anti-trans biases, has led to a skewed situation on the solutions recommended in the Cass Review. There is a significant emphasis on advocating for the language of “exploration,” something commonly associated with “Gender-Exploratory Therapy,” which has been likened to conversion therapy. The preferences and comfort of professionals, even ones who are actively discriminatory, are valued over the autonomy of the children in question. The report relies on the language of caution, which, according to Horton, ignores that “conversion therapy can be veiled under a banner of caution,” pathologizing transness as something that might be solved given enough time rather than an identity to be respected.

There is a huge double standard here where the affirmative model is depicted as ideological and aggressive, while non-affirmative models (i.e., conversion therapy) are considered objective. As Horton continues:

“Cass Review commentary positions non-affirmative approaches as ‘neutral,’ contrasting them to affirmative approaches that are framed as ‘ideological.’ There is no recognition of the ideology underpinning approaches that deny the existence or validity of trans children.”

The report is advancing an anti-trans bias while using the language of objectivity to launder those opinions. Dr. Cass has gone on record as being firmly against conversion therapy, so it’s difficult to tell the intent of this language. This may be merely unconscious bias seeping into the report's authors — although, given the apparent gaps we have mentioned, that feels almost too charitable. Her disavowal could also be political cover meant to discourage criticism. It might even be both. Most conversion therapy, after all, is not labeled as such due to the stigma currently attached to it, and that rhetorical distancing may have tricked some authors.

Regardless, this language, whether unconscious or not, is discriminatory and is currently being weaponized by the far-right press.

The response of traditional conservative media

Since the Cass Report is not framed hyperbolically, many believe it to be the height of scientific rigor. “Calm discussions of transgender medicine are rare,” writes The Economist. “With incredible courage,” goes David Brooks in The New York Times, “[Cass] shows that careful scholarship can cut through debates that have been marked by vituperation and intimidation and possibly reset them on more rational grounds.”

These reactions represent a disturbing trend in media, where journalists and other media writers conflate a position being pronounced unemotionally as said position being rational and correct. If something sounds reasonable, few assess whether it actually is.

The aesthetic of moderation is more important to many of these writers here than actual reporting.

However, the truth doesn’t change no matter how loudly and angrily someone says it. The Cass Review is willfully disregarding the science at play, and many trans people are angry about that because they understand how it will be used to take away their rights. If a journalist ignores the truth because it doesn’t always come at them nicely, well, that’s just bad journalism and indicates a profoundly reactionary bias.

Yet the narrative of many conservative opinion writers and journalists is that all the criticisms against the Cass Review are merely coming from over-sensitive activists (and their allies). “In a world without partisan politics,” quips Helen Lewis in The Atlantic, “the Cass report on youth gender medicine would prompt serious reflection from American trans-rights activists, their supporters in the media, and the doctors and institutions offering hormonal and surgical treatments to minors.”

Lewis is insinuating here that it’s the bias of the trans community and their allies that has warped the medical establishment. She is advocating for a conspiracy theory that has no solid basis in reality.

Columnists such as David Brooks and Helen Lewis like to think that they are separate from the conservative, anti-trans movement because they are “nice” about their unexamined bigotry. Brooks even calls Republican-led anti-trans laws “brutal,” but when he advances the same talking points and half-truths as the anti-trans movement, the separation is in aesthetics only. Brooks goes on in his article to promote the widely discredited idea that social contagion could be responsible for the increase in trans youth, writing, “[One theory] is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity.” He may not think he’s as harmful as the Republican legislatures passing anti-trans laws, but by advancing this misinformation, he is walking alongside them.

Someone kindly telling you your rights should be removed is no different than someone doing it cruelly.

In the meantime, while these journalists are laundering bad science because they like the vibes of this report (and left unsaid, they like how it validates their biases), the far-right media is taking that acceptance and running wild with it.

Right-wing people foaming at the mouth

This report had an immediate effect on the confidence of the right in pronouncing the supposed “dangers” of gender-affirming care. Mia Gingerich noted this in her report for Media Matters for America, writing: “Right-wing media were quick to use publication of the Cass Report to claim vindication for their pervasive and politicized anti-trans coverage and to push further extreme rhetoric.”

Gingerich, for example, discusses how Fox News co-host of The Five, Greg Gutfeld, said the report was proof that “people” had purposefully deceived parents and children. He concluded this was a sign of a “proactive attack on vulnerable humans” based on “nonscience.” This comment is a sort of fascistic dog whistle, telling viewers to be worried about the transgender “other” waging an alleged war on their children.

Anti-trans narratives use this misrepresentation to justify and encourage severe “backlash” against trans people and gender-affirming care providers.

With this information, we are seeing even more extreme pronouncements on what should be done next. For example, an article from the Deseret News, which the Church of Latter-Day Saints ultimately owns, said that the report justified the consideration of conversion therapy, writing:

“The concept of ‘conversion therapy’ also needs to be rethought, according to the Cass Review. Given the significantly higher rate of mental health comorbidities of gender dysphoric children compared to controls, it is important that mental health professionals be allowed to investigate whether a child’s gender dysphoria may be relieved through psychological interventions. Proposed bans on ‘conversion therapy’ might stifle such needed therapy.”

For any who doubts the end goal isn’t conversion therapy, here’s the quiet part being said out loud. We see the subtext of the report, which alluded to conversion therapy through indirect talk of Gender-Exploratory Therapy, being made transparent.

And make no mistake, the thing being challenged is the acceptance of transgender people in public life, regardless of what level of medicalization they pursue. “[The Cass Review] should embolden government officials and policymakers to put a halt to the pseudoscience of gender transition,” John Stonestreet and Jared Hayden write in Breakpoint, a publication for an evangelical think tank bent on spreading Christianity. “Not to mention allowing revolutionary gender ideology to influence things like the rewriting of Title IX.”

Far-right commentator Scott McKay goes even further in The American Spectator, comparing those who support gender-affirming care to a father sexually molesting his child. He claims a wife would be justified in murdering her husband for this and, left unsaid, that people would be justified in murdering supporters of gender-affirming care. “…how is ‘transing’ a kid, not an abuse worse than sexually molesting him or her? We’ll let that hang for a while.”

It’s a call to unalive people.

We are seeing this report used as a pipeline where “concerns” over transitioning, most of which are medically unfounded, get used as justification for further discrimination and violence.

A sobering conclusion

The Cass Review has already profoundly impacted trans people in the United Kingdom. Even before the full report was released, the interim one was used as a justification to “restrict” care for transgender people. A quasi-black market for hormones is now emerging, and unlike the exact dosage and regular blood screenings that come from legitimate prescriptions, this will undoubtedly lead to unforeseen medical complications and maybe even deaths.

The danger of the report for Americans is that this will lay the foundation for a counter-narrative for trans care. Republican state legislatures have needed very little evidence, much of it outright fabricated (all of it misconstrued), to begin stripping away trans rights. The perceived legitimacy of the Cass Report provides them even more ammunition.

After all, New York Times op-ed writers are not the only ones who value the aesthetic of moderation over the actual substance and information on an issue. Plenty of Americans pride themselves on being at the center of an issue, even if one of the poles they are moving closer to is an outright lie.

The Cass Review is one block in an emerging, fabricated consensus. Let us hope there is enough time to dismantle it before it ever bears fruit.

The Delicious Villany of ‘Blue Eye Samurai's" Abijah Fowler

Image; Blue Spirit

Blue Eye Samurai (2023) is a combination of an anti-Mamma Mia (2008) and Kill Bill V.1 (2003). Our lead is Mizu (Maya Erskine), the child of an interracial "pairing." She is derogatorily referred to as a "white devil," an "Onryō" (i.e., a vengeful type of spirit), or worse, and goes on a mission to kill her father, whom she blames for her "cursed" existence. She has four contenders to track down and kill, as because of Japan’s closed borders, there were only four white men in the entire country when she was conceived. She now wants revenge and as a trained sword fighter, Mizu just might have the skills to accomplish her goal.

The antagonist for the first season — and one of her potential fathers — is Abijah Fowler (Kenneth Branagh), a weapons smuggler who wants to bend the Japanese Shogunate to his will. Fowler is an evil man, but he is self-aware of his evil, providing a fascinating foil for the viewer to observe how colonialism works in action.

A cruel, detached, transactional evil

We first meet Fowler cloaked in shadow. Casually reclined in a chair, he orders that Mizu be tailed (and killed) by a band of mercenaries called The Four Fangs. "Double their price and be done with it," he orders, very used to ending the lives around him, both from afar and up close. He spends the series killing, mangling, and destroying all those who displease him.

To Fowler, most everything is a one-sided transaction. "You pay money for a job you don't wanna think about, so you don't have to think about it," he tells his partner-in-crime, Heiji Shindo (Randall Park), while painting an illustration he will soon burn. "It's the whole point of money," he proclaims.

Fowler is driven by the belief that money entitles him to other people's time.

This belief in deals even applies to the divine. There is one telling scene where he enters a chapel and tries to bargain with God Himself. Christianity is something that he does not believe in. The chapel was only built because the architects of the Tanabe Island fortress assumed all white people were devout Christians, and it shows in how he negotiates:

“We’re not friends. I haven’t, uh, spoken to you in some time. Wouldn’t do you the dishonor of asking for a favor. But I believe there’s something I can do for you. They’ve been godless here as long as they’ve been…Heathens, surely, these Japanese…I plan to cut that shogun’s head from his shoulders and reimagine this nation more to my liking. Now, normal days, I’d imagine you're indifferent to that outcome…But I’ll tell you this, though. If this all goes my way, I will go ahead and take it for a sign that you tilted the wind to my back, and I will, in kind…I will send for your priests to bring them your Word and hand you a nation of souls. My thanks, if you see fit. It’s no matter to me either way.”

He is essentially upselling God to help him conquer a nation, and it's chilling.

Outside of this transactional logic for control, there seems to be little he believes in. He is not driven to take over the Shogunate out of any ideology or religion. The only things that guide him are resentment, entitlement, and a desire for personal enrichment.

He does not like being confined to a fortress on Tanabe Island, as he cannot leave the entire year except for his yearly pilgrimage to Kyoto to pay tribute to the Shogun. He believes that his smuggling operations have entitled him to gratitude from this country he is illegally staying in, telling Shindo: "The shogun lets us operate so long as he can deny I exist. Soon, he won't have that luxury."

His whole bid for power is one gigantic tantrum to leave Tanabe Island.

Yet, despite holding no values beyond his own supremacy, Fowler is self-aware. He comprehends how colonialism works in reality. "No one murders as much as the British," he says with a wry smirk. "It's our number one export." And he knows this because he is a victim of British imperialism. He describes to Shindo how he lived through an artificial famine created by the Tudors, who burned food crops in Ireland to squash a rebellion (presumably, he's talking about the Tyrone Rebellion).

With almost prophetic knowledge, he explains that if successful with his coup, he will have a profound impact on Japan's culture, saying in a monologue to the now-defeated shogunate:

“I couldn’t discover a new world, so I’m gonna reveal one. My new shogun will break open your welded borders. Open Japan wide to the West. We’ll flood your land with our people, our music, our shame, bread, and milk, until you think an ugly face like mine more beautiful than your own.”

This speech is poignant because he is right, of course. White Supremacy has done all of these things. As a tiny example, skin whitening creams remain popular throughout Asia, including Japan, even though such practices not only detrimentally affect people's self-esteem but arguably negatively impact their skin too. From beauty norms to religion, the shame and sensibilities of the West have been imprinted on everyone.

Fowler is saying the quiet part out loud about what the West will do (and, in the present, has already done) to Japan—a rare level of self-awareness among colonialism's villains. He is a baddie who knows precisely what destruction he is reaping.

A blue conclusion

In many ways, we have never recovered from the imperialism of this period. Western powers, driven by their superior weapons and supremacist ideologies, expanded around the world, not only taking and killing but also leaving devastating cultural imprints on the people they changed. Everything from the criminalization of homosexuality in numerous countries to conservative notions of gender can be traced to the norms forcefully established during this period — an era some would argue has never truly ended.

But before we got that self-hatred and shame, it began with men like Abijah Fowler, who spread the doctrine of white supremacy around the world because it benefited them.

With Blue Eye Samurai, we get a villain who is still evil but self-aware—a decolonialist's colonialist—one who can push aside the propaganda and flattery of the past and show us the horror just beneath it.

Chants of Sennaar: How AI Can Fracture A Society

Image; Rundisc

The 2023 game Chants of Sennaar is, first and foremost, about language. You play an unnamed traveler moving up a Tower of Babel-esque structure. Each level is host to a different society with a different language, and it's on you as an outsider to decipher the many words and phrases you encounter.

Described in its marketing as "the Dark Souls of language games," Chants of Sennaar expects you to learn its many languages by observation. While there are words littered about everywhere, it's through actions and context that you learn the ones you need to advance the story. The game forces you to piece these words together, writing down your best approximations in its internal notebook until finally, like learning any language, the rules click into place, and you understand them.

Like the Tower of Babel story itself, the people of this world are divided, and this is reflected in their language. For example, the religious society you start in refers to themselves as "Devotees," and the militaristic society above them as "Warriors." Those Warriors call the Devotees below them the "Impure" and the society above them the "Chosen." Those Chosen, an artistic society, call themselves "Bards" and the warriors below "Idiots." These words are not simply one-to-one swaps but indicate these societies' differing values: ones that mock and revere the people above and below them.

As you progress, you learn the source of that disconnection: an AI that has taken over everything.

The fictional ways AI can oppress humanity

There are many doomsday examples of what happens when actual artificial intelligence emerges (something that might never happen). The most common is the apocalypse. We see through examples such as the film Terminator (1984) of an artificial intelligence managing to destroy most of humanity, usually through a fiery, nuclear armageddon.

Another is enslavement. The Matrix (1999) is perhaps the most famous example here, where a robotic society has forcefully plugged humanity into an alternate reality to take advantage of their collective body heat. A more recent example is the last season of Westworld (2016–2022), where the "hosts" repurposed our dependency on screens to make us more obedient (see Westworld and the Limits of White Imagination).

However, in Chants of Sennaar, we get another rarer example — pacification.

The AI in question has not enslaved or exterminated the society the player has come across, the "Anchorites," but curated a virtual world where residents have voluntarily plugged in. When you reach the uppermost level, you come across citizens detached from the other societies, both socially and physically. These beings, called "Fairies" by the prior level, are so disconnected from those beneath them that they have become myths, but their removal is less fantastical and more depressing — they have given up on interacting with the physical world.

Your character walks the rain-soaked streets — an almost cyberpunk aesthetic bleeding in — as you observe row after row of plugged-in Anchorites slumped in their chairs for such long periods that some might be actual corpses.

The entity facilitating the Anchorites's disconnection is an AI called "Exile," which does not want you to end its people's isolation. An Anchorite sends you on a scavenger hunt to restore the communication arrays throughout the tower, and Exile blocks your progress with killer robots you have to sneak past. When this fails, Exile envelops you into a distorted virtual reality, a heightened one similar to what the Anchorites occupy themselves in. It tries to stop you from letting language flow freely between all the tower's levels.

It may seem strange for a language game to have an AI antagonist, but it's pretty topical. Modern AI is not generalized intelligence — we do not have a working definition of intelligence, let alone the ability to recreate it — but rather a predictive algorithm fed an Internet's worth of data. It's through these examples, as well as the human labor used to weed out errors, that language models like ChatGPT can function. It makes sense that the villain of this Game is an AI because the way such models work is the opposite of Chants of Sennaar. AI does not struggle through contextual examples but is fed every iteration of an answer key, infinitum, hoping to use that data to predict a distinctive iteration. Modern AI replaces the frustrating and exciting elements of language learning with a voice telling you an answer.

Of course, the easiest way for an AI to give you that answer is for a language to stay predictable and static—to stifle the interplay between cultures that leads to new words and rules. That is the very thing that has happened in the game.

Yet, again, Exile was not some master plan of a robotic overlord seeking conquest but something the Anchorites brought on willfully in reaction to human difference. As one of the Anchorites tells your character: "Foreign [people] came to the tower. [We] stopped talking [with each other]. [Everyone] feared [each other.] My people left in exile."

In response to contact with other humans, the Anchorites wanted to remain static and not change their society. So, they created Exile, which ensured that would happen, allowing a rigid caste system beneath them to fall into place.

A nuanced conversation on AI

Chants of Sennaar is a beautiful game. Progressing through the various levels is like taking those first steps into a new land. You see a window into small, intimate moments that feel all too real in the way only some of the best fiction can do.

This game also symbolizes what happens when we stop talking to one another. When we let the fear of human difference alienate us from our fellow man. It is a cautionary tale against the screens and machines we have put in front of us to block out our contact with the world and from the people who make us uncomfortable.

Many of our previous conversations about AI in pop culture have been quite simplistic. Creators have often depicted it as a force apart from humanity—something seeking to destroy or enslave us. AI is an "other" that we cannot relate to. Skynet and the central intelligence of The Matrix are so anti-human that they might as well be aliens conquering us from beyond the stars.

However, as AI's development accelerates, the reality of its depiction in media has become more nuanced. We are not dealing with aliens that will turn us all into paper clips but a tool that can be designed to amplify some of our worst impulses. From this perspective, AI is not something separate from us but an extension of humanity and, in the current context, our capitalist system.

In Chants of Sennaar, an AI is used to block out the world. We decide how its application will unfold in our future.

Final Fantasy Rebirth: Let Us Kiss Barret, You Cowards

Image; Square Enix

I recently played Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024) and found it to be a fun treat. The Final Fantasy series has always had a campy aesthetic detached from reality that I genuinely love, and Rebirth is camp on overdrive. Players can ride giant birds called Chocobos, transform themselves into frogs, and perform as characters in a theatrical Shakespearean play.

The game continues Square Enix’s 2020 Final Fantasy VII Remake, in which a splinter group of eco-terrorists try to stop the monopolistic Shinra Electric Power Company from draining the planet dry. This time, the main protagonist, the mercenary Cloud Strife (Takahiro Sakurai/Cody Christian), an ex-Shinra soldier and genetic experiment, is traveling the world with his environmentalist friends to try to stop the misanthropic and narcissistic alien-hybrid Sephiroth (Toshiyuki Morikawa/Tyler Hoechlin) from destroying the world. Rebirth is a profoundly political text that often has challenging conversations on environmental activism, capitalist exploitation, and the role violence plays in revolution.

There is a lot of good here. And yet, while I did love this game, I was frustrated by its dating mechanic, which I felt went out of its way to ensure we knew that the protagonist was totally “not” gay.

Briefly examining queerness in Final Fantasy Rebirth

First and foremost, it needs to be noted that there were queer non-playable characters in this game — although, with the exception of the fabulous Andrea Rhodea (Tomokazu Sugita/Trevor Devall), they were not prominent. Many viewers have also written about an alleged queer subtext surrounding our lead characters. For example, Cat Bussell in TechRadar argued:

“Rebirth makes it very easy to form a homoromantic reading of Cloud and Sephiroth’s relationship. Cloud’s thoughts, intrusive or otherwise, are consistently occupied by Sephiroth. Tracking him down to prevent his plan to destroy the world makes for the main crux of Rebirth’s story, after all. However, the intimate body language and conversations between the two are consistently loaded with subtext.

In a scene toward the end of the game which is teased in a trailer, Cloud charges at Sephiroth, only for the silver-haired villain to pull our protagonist close and embrace him, cradling him in his arms in a manner that’s somehow both tender and deeply sinister. While Sephiroth’s actions are undoubtedly controlling and creepy, they starkly challenge traditional gender norms about how two male characters interact. Cloud and Sephiroth’s relationship is consistently colored in this way, infused with this transgressive closeness.”

And yet, it must be emphasized that despite the game’s queer background characters and its campy aesthetic, none of the leads are textually LGBTQIA+. As in, there is no spoken dialogue, direct romantic or intimate actions such as kissing, or written text that tells us that Bussell’s interpretation, and the many like it, are anything more than headcanons (i.e., what a viewer believes or wants to be true about a work that is not “officially” confirmed by its creators).

This non-queerness with our lead characters would be fine — I don’t think every game has to have LGBTQIA+ leads — if not for a strange dating mechanic that goes out of its way for Cloud to go on several “non-date” dates with its male characters.

The femme dates

Throughout Rebirth, the lead, Cloud, can interact with his other compatriots during key plot points, which contributes to a hidden scoring system that allows him to eventually go on a date with one of five characters (or a fabulous boys’ night that is entirely platonic) near the climax of the game. Cloud returns to the Golden Saucer — a Disney World spoof — to have a romantic evening of attending a show of the play Loveless and, finally, a ride for two on the Skywheel.

Three of the characters you can take on this date are femme-presenting: Yuffie Kisaragi (Yumi Kakazu/Suzie Yeung), the Wutai revolutionary and ninja who wants to find materia to save her people; Aerith Gainsborough (Maaya Sakamoto/Briana White), the last-of-her-kind sorceress with a heart of gold; and Cloud’s childhood friend Tifa (Ayumi Ito/Britt Baron), who is a kickass fighter committed to ending Shinra. These characters all have nuanced backstories that I think were written adequately.

When it comes to their character models, they are “traditionally attractive.” They are skinny, pretty, and beautiful in all the ways that would appeal to the white supremacist, cisgendered, heteronormative gaze.

Two of these femme dates are romantic and arguably the most rewarding from a courtship perspective. The highlight of Aerith’s arc is the Loveless minigame, where her character sings a beautiful solo (No Promises To Keep, sung by Loren Allred), and depending on how high your score is with her, you either end the night with her head on Cloud’s shoulder or holding his hand. Tifa is even more explicit with either a passionate hug or kiss.

Even Yuffi gives Cloud a peck on the cheek on the Skywheel and appears as the love interest in the Loveless minigame, where she comes into your cell to rescue you.

However, the two other characters, the masc ones, have no such romantic overtures— they are the villains of the play and utterly undateable.

Gay, non-date dates

When it comes to the two masc-presenting characters, the dates are not framed romantically within the text. One of the characters, Red XIII or Nanaki (Kappei Yamaguchi/Max Mittelman), is an anthropomorphic dog-like creature whose relationship is entirely friendly. In his scene with Cloud on the Skywheel, he talks about his concern for his friend Aerith. It’s not about him at all, and I am not sure how you can read anything more than an entirely platonic relationship from it.

The only other male character you can go on a date with is Barret Wallace (Masato Funaki/John Eric Bentley), the leader of a splinter cell of the eco-terrorist group Avalanche. Barret is a controversial and rich character whose backstory was extensively elaborated on in Rebirth. We learn about his modest roots from a coal mining town that Shinra economically ruined when the company’s power reactor melted down—a reactor he initially campaigned for, only to regret his decision years later. Barret is a complex character who, unlike Cloud, has emotional depth.

His date with Cloud begins sweetly. Barrett knocks on Cloud’s door, saying, almost flirtatiously, “Well, well, I wake baby from his nap?” Cloud, though, does not bite, acting thoroughly disinterested the entire time. “Are we really doing this?” he says, bored at one point in the night.

As we get to the minigame during the Loveless play, where Cloud must take on the persona of a Shakespearean-esque character, Barret is not portrayed as the love interest in the story, like the femme leads are. He is not dressed as a prince or even (subversively) as a princess, but rather, in every iteration of the minigame, he is depicted as the villainous Varvados, a man who calls your love a charade if you select him.

In fact, from what I can gather, when you go on your “date” with him, Aerith takes on the princess role every time in the minigame (though please correct me if your research says differently).

When Cloud and Barret go on the Skywheel, no hands are touching. There are no heads leaning on shoulders. No almost kisses or hugs. Instead, Barret takes the time to open up to Cloud in a heart-wrenching monologue about his former love interest, Myrna. He tells Cloud that “once you find your soulmate, you never let ’em go…” Yet Barrett, as the lack of action at that moment makes clear, is not this person. Barrett scolds Cloud for not being direct enough and passing up on his true soulmate, who is implied to be one of the other characters — i.e., Aerith or Tifa.

This scene frustrates me because I would have been okay with Cloud just dating Aerith or Tifa. I didn’t need a queer dating option, but the gendered way the game handles the femme and masc dates is strange. Why let us go on a date with a masc-presenting person only to harangue us for not choosing the femme people?

The original 1997 game also had these date scenes. Barret’s date was platonic then, too, and I would assert, unlike this adaptation, blatantly offensive. There’s a scene where they enter the event square, and the announcer claims they are the 100th couple to enter that day, only to see that both of them are men and say: “Oh, wait….no, you’re not.” The homoeroticism was played for laughs then, and I am glad that was left behind in this remake.

But now, 27 years later, I wanted more than not to be offended. I wanted to hold Barret’s hand. So much has been updated about the original game—why not this?

A fantastical conclusion

This gripe is especially prominent since I know these creators have no problem with queer inclusion. One of the things I loved about this game’s predecessor, Remake, is that they updated a cross-dressing subplot from the original Final Fantasy 7 that was utterly offensive and made it less so. As Matt Kamen says of that original quest:

“One of the more legitimate concerns surrounding the FFVII Remake was how it would update the notorious crossdressing subquest. In the PS1 original, players could complete a number of objectives in Wall Market — the red light district of the sprawling Midgar City setting — to gather items that would help Cloud masquerade as a girl, in order to trick crimelord Don Corneo and help rescue your ally, Tifa. In 1997, it was played as a gag, making Cloud a “trap” while also making the very idea of two men in a bedroom together a punchline.”

In Remake, however, we don’t get a retread of that homophobia and transphobia. Cloud dressing as a woman is not seen as an oddity or punchline but as a joyous expression of gender. “True beauty is an expression of the heart. A thing without shame, to which notions of gender don’t apply,” the character Andrea Rhodea says after a fantastic dance minigame.

We don’t quite reach that level of queer excellence again in Rebirth, but we could have — if only we had been able to kiss Barret.

All in all, I liked a lot about this game, especially with Barret. Unlike the 1997 game, he was a more fleshed-out person. Emotionally, it felt like he had range, showing us when he was in pain and crying when he felt sad. But not being able to show Barret affection bothered me. I was there, in the booth of the Skywheel, waiting for the moment to come when Cloud would realize that he was that person, the soul mate Barret was lecturing about, and it never came.

With a sequel on its way, hopefully, we don’t have to wait 27 years this time to get that.

America's 'Bread and Circus' Society Is Not What You Think

Photo by Wesual Click on Unsplash

Many of my fellow Americans love entertainment. We talk about it during group chats and family dinners, post about our favorite shows on social media, and spend long periods glued to a screen—over seven hours a day, according to DataReportal. If one thing is more American than apple pie, it's telling colleagues they have to watch the latest show.

As we shall soon learn, the US government also spends an extraordinary amount subsidizing this and other forms of entertainment. As our society experiences several crises that we might not recover from (e.g., climate change, rising authoritarianism, fascism, etc.), it's clear that we, at least within the heart of the US empire, are living through a doubling down of the “bread and circus” approach to pacification.

In other words, the longstanding joke, "Everything is falling apart, but there sure is good TV," exists for a reason. It relates to how our government has decided to use distraction and comfort as a means of control while denying us the resources we need to survive.

The ye olden circus

By bread and circus, I mean the Latin concept of "panis et circenses," where a government is accused of subsidizing diversionary affairs, such as entertainment and cheap food, over fostering a more robust public life. The phrase is often attributed to the Roman poet Decimus Junius Juvenalis or "Juvenal" (born roughly from 55 CE to 128 CE) in his work "The Satires," specifically number ten.

Some context is probably needed here. For the bread part, Rome, as a Republic, started to subsidize grain at low to no cost under a "Grain Dole" for a significant part of its (citizen) population. The dole was first passed via a law introduced by Gaius Gracchus (154 BCE — 121 BCE), whose tribune was in 123 and 122 BCE. Most grain, not just the grain for this dole, was largely imported abroad from colonial holdings and client states such as Sicily, North Africa, and later in the time of the Empire, Eygpt. The government's management of the "Annona," or food supply, was so vital that it was named after the literal Goddess of said grain stockpiles. It required such a massive amount of investment that, at the time of the Empire, there was a “praefectus annonae,” an official tasked with overseeing it, who had officers throughout the empire.

For the circus element, the Roman government put on elaborate public games and performances called "ludi" that often coincided with major religious festivals. These would occur in all sorts of places, including grand locations such as the Circus Maximus, a massive chariot racing stadium in Rome. These weren't the circuses as we know them today. The Latin meaning of the word references merely "a ring or circular line," talking more about the stadiums and arenas where chariot races and other games were held (note: this is why "bread and circuses" is sometimes referred to as "bread and races" or "bread and games"). The state (as well as wealthy individuals) would host elaborate ludi to appeal to the public, often serving as the Roman people's primary type of entertainment.

Juvenal criticizes the decadence of these festivities, specifically of the rich in his Satires, but also how the aristocracy is bending to the weight of immigrants and “New Money.” He holds a nostalgic, reactionary framing when he introduces bread and circuses, writing:

“[The people] shed their sense of responsibility

Long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob

That used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything,

Curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only,

Bread and circuses.”

Juvenal believes here in returning to an earlier time, in this case, the glory of the old Roman Republic, which he thought was a time when people cared more about civic life rather than just subsistence and entertainment. As articulated in the Literature and History podcast:

“Juvenal, especially in the earlier satires…the deeper concern is that Rome’s social order is transforming, that pedigree and education no longer count for anything, and that the old aristocracy, putrefying under the influence of new money, immigrants, and grotesque conspicuous consumption, is hoarding all the wealth while hardworking artists and tradespeople starve on the street.”

It's an opinion filled with half-truths. The Roman Empire was vastly unequal, with many, indeed, starving on the streets. Poor people in the city were frequently crammed into tenements called "insulae." This housing was made of less sturdy materials, making it prone to collapse, as well as a host of other calamities ranging from flooding to disease. As mentioned in the World Atlas: "The first couple of floors [of an insulae] typically were the best to live on. They had larger rooms, windows, balconies, and running water. This was a luxury compared to the upper floors, which usually had one room for an entire family to fit into. These upper rooms often had no natural light, no water supply, or bathroom facilities."

As one of the most populated cities in the world at the time, keeping this down-on-its-luck population in check was vital for any regime's political survival. And yet, to assert, as Juvenal does, that this pacification was also not a defining aspect of Roman democracy during the Republic is ahistorical. Bribing the public for political influence was not a new practice that suddenly came about in his lifetime. As mentioned, it dates back to the Republic when politicians tried to buy voting blocs with grain allotments — a practice that ambitious emperors were keen to adopt.

The wealthy, charismatic, and powerful often tried to leverage the food supply and entertainment for political clout. Juvenal's comments come off as your typical conservative blaming the "masses" for systemic problems—an issue that has remained with us in the modern day.

Modern-day bread

Conservatives today tend to liken programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and other welfare programs to this same "bread and circus" critique, casting them solely as individual moral failings. As Conner Tuttle lectured on the conservative The Tuttle Twins podcast:

“When we think about the political problems that we have today, so often, I think it comes down to bread and circuses as well, that so many people are dependent upon the government for their income, food, the benefits. They’re getting subsidies, they’re getting tax benefits, they’re getting food stamps [i.e SNAPs], they’re getting welfare…And so in that sense, the government is giving them bread. It’s giving them money basically, which is the equivalent. They need it to sustain their life.”

The Tuttle Twins are misinformed about the ease of this relationship for the lower classes (more on the upper classes later)—both now and in ancient Rome. Conner Tuttle seems to think that SNAP and other welfare programs are "free money" the government hands out with little thought. However, American Welfare programs are notoriously hard to get on, including SNAP, which is means-tested, meaning, according to the House Budget Committee, the program only "benefits individuals and families living at or near the federal poverty level."

In 2024, that's an income of $15,060 a year for individuals.

There are furthermore work requirements attached to the program, and — barring some exceptions such as homelessness, having a small child, or having a federally recognized disability, etc. — you aren't going to be eligible for too long unless you start working. SNAP also remains heavily stigmatized, both in what you can use to purchase with it (e.g., no hot foods, pet food, alcohol, etc.) as well as there being a gap between the number of people eligible for the program and the number enrolled.

The Roman system also had barriers, particularly for poor people. Under the Roman Empire, the Grain Dole became both more institutionalized and much more limited. The Empire lowered the number of eligible citizens to restrict the overall cost to something around 200,000 citizens (although the number varied depending on what period of history). An enormous bureaucracy was involved in this grain's transportation and distribution, as detailed lists were deemed necessary, so only “qualified” Romans would be entitled to such resources. These positions had long waitlists, and later, since they could be sold or inherited, they tended to bias more established Romans. As written in the Oxford Classical Dictionary:

“The grain distribution was not aimed at curbing poverty in Rome. Recipients who died were replaced by others, but one had to be on a waiting list in order to become a recipient. So it does not seem that the most marginal of Rome’s inhabitants would have been particularly represented on the lists. On the contrary: the lists were probably dominated by those who were settled and well integrated in the city, who had a permanent job or profession, a skill or stable employment. Non-citizens and newly arrived migrants from the Italian countryside were not among the plebs frumentaria.”

This fact may go against our more modern, conservative association to liken such welfare programs to "handouts" for the poor and marginalized. However, as we have just seen, that was not the case in Rome. These programs were about stopping political revolts, not about eliminating systemic poverty. Why would a highly stratified slave state like Rome care about something like that?

America's system is different from Rome's in the sense that programs such as SNAP are generally geared toward more marginalized Americans. Many of its recipients are elderly, disabled, or children, and it goes up when unemployment increases. However, like any program with hurdles, the most marginalized, such as undocumented immigrants, people with drug-related felony convictions in some states, and individuals on strike, are not eligible at all. You can't just be below the Federal Poverty Level and need help to get on this program.

Just like in Rome, proper citizenship (however it is nebulously defined) is demanded.

Given its requirements, SNAP is not geared toward ending systemic poverty either. It has now been whittled down to the point where it is a small part of the budget. All economic security programs are around 8% as of 2023, including everything from SNAP to the Earned Income Tax Credit to school meals to unemployment insurance. Recipients are not given that much — in many cases, less than $10 a day — and that's very hard to live on, let alone move beyond one's class.

It also bears emphasizing that the rest of the welfare system is not much better. Horror stories about the application process surround programs such as Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) to the point where hiring a lawyer to navigate it is often a must. Regular Social Security can also make huge mistakes with how it calculates payments, and years later, demand that money back once it "corrects" its mistake. Free money is not just being handed out on purpose. Most of these programs require ongoing contributions to the economy for all, but the direst of circumstances and the money provided hardly allows people to "live large" when they do get it.

From where I stand, this difficulty with accessing care is integral to both the American and Roman "bread and circus." True redistribution would place the peasantry and the aristocracy, or in our day, workers and capitalists, on equal footing and is just as dangerous to the upper classes as providing no resources at all. A highly mobilized, cared-for population with tons of leisure time starts to ask fundamental questions about how power is concentrated.

Conversely, the point is to make the minimum investment possible for enough people so that the "masses" do not have the energy to engage in anything but diversions. Rome was not a utopia where poor people lived off the largesse of the government—a vast segment of the population was enslaved and not eligible for such benefits—and the ones who were eligible competed for them on long waitlists they might never get on.

Yet benefits aside, they were more than able to see the games — and, in this regard, America does not seem to be much different.

The modern-day circuses

Unlike the ludi of the Roman Empire, our entertainment today is mainly in the private sector. There are fireworks in the capital of Washington, DC, along with free festivals and museums on the National Mall, but they pale in comparison to the light shows of Disney World or Macy's Fourth of July fireworks. Our “decadence” certainly exists — and we'll get into it — but it's much more enmeshed with corporate actors, and boy, do we have a lot of it.

A great example is sports stadiums. Private entities own the overwhelming number of American sports teams. However, public funds are still used in their construction. According to Clark Merrefield in The Journalist's Resource, summarizing a paper in The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management:

“Across [the MLB, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League] there have been eight new stadiums or arenas built since 2020, at a total construction cost of roughly $3.3 billion, according to a September 2023 paper in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. About $750 million in public funds went toward those construction projects.”

That's only over three years. We are talking about tens of billions of dollars across the last three decades, where state and local governments have subsidized anywhere from a quarter to over fifty percent of each of these projects. Many of these efforts were and continue to be financed by municipal bonds that are exempt from federal taxes (and often state taxes), which means that we, as taxpayers, ultimately lose out on paying for these constructions while having very little control over them—projects that studies routinely find to be not good public investments. As Roger Noll at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research told Stanford News of one particular construction: "SNFL stadiums do not generate significant local economic growth, and the incremental tax revenue is not sufficient to cover any significant financial contribution by the city."

Stadiums are not the only privately held diversion the American government is investing heavily in, either. Where the Romans had their games, now we have TV. According to Nielson's 2023 State of Play Report, over 1 million unique titles are available to the typical US consumer across all "linear" and "streaming" services, with nearly 100 streaming services and over 30,000 channels. This figure does not include the billions of YouTube videos or the billions more videos across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc. We are a nation inundated with a boundless amount of choices regarding the content we can watch, and the cost is only that of an Internet subscription — something that most Americans have.

Although most of this programming is not owned directly by the government, our state and federal governments are more than willing to foot the bill, often through the tax system. The state of New York, for example, offers hundreds of millions in tax incentives to the film industry every year. We are talking about billions of dollars when we look at the incentives across every state each year. There is a straightforward transfer of wealth happening directly from the taxpayer to the film industry, and it's not clear that we benefit much from it. Our government gives these industries our money for such entertainment, and these firms then turn around and charge us for it — all based on the economically dubious concept that that money will trickle down to us.

We could spend the rest of this article detailing how the US government subsidizes our entertainment, or at the very least, the rich who own it. However, I want to emphasize that these "decadences", while subsidized so us plebes can theoretically access them, are much more in the domain of the affluent than the "poor." It's the wealthy who spend their fortunes on entertainment and travel more than any demographic.

They also spend their money on things you or I can hardly ever do, such as lavish parties, mansions, yachts, private planes, and luxury goods. Last year alone, billionaire Michael Rubin threw a massive 4th of July white party at his $50 million beachfront mansion. Attendees ranged from Jay-Z to Tom Brady, with impromptu performances from Usher and Ne-Yo. Pizzas were transported from the elite Brooklyn restaurant Lucali, and guests sipped on the ever-expensive Ace of Spade Champagne and Dusse Cognac. It was one of many such private parties that year.

Such elaborate celebrations also happened in Rome — they probably happen wherever inequality intensifies. While the Empire put on large games and festivals, poor people could hardly compete with the elaborate banquets of the rich, where the wealthy allegedly ate to such excess that they vomited. As written by Nina Martyris in NPR:

“The Roman banquet evokes voluptuary images of men in togas reclining on couches and glutting themselves on wild sow’s udders and stuffed snails, while servants stream in bearing platters heaped with heavily sauced and delicately spiced foods from all over the world: ostrich from Africa, pepper and sugar cane from India, cumin from Ethiopia, sumac from Syria, olives from Greece, and that perennial Roman favorite, the fleshy homegrown fig. Wine is drunk in copious amounts from double-handled silver cups, while a lyre plays in the background. There are performing troupes, poets, even the occasional leopard, and sometimes rose petals flutter down from on high. One sadistic host, the Emperor Elagabalus, built a banquet hall with a false ceiling that tilted open, allowing a torrent of flowers to rain down upon his unsuspecting guests, smothering to death those unable to crawl out from under the floral deluge.

Or so the story goes. As with many wild stories retelling Roman debauchery, this one, too, comes to us heavily sauced — or heavily perfumed in this case. What is beyond dispute, though, is that gastronomy was fetishized and raised to the level of a fine art by the Romans, and its apogee was the banquet.”

When people talk about Rome, there is this myth of universal decadence. Conservatives paint this picture that everyone was f@cking and partying all the time, and that's why the Empire declined. As the patriarchal meme goes: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times."

This feeling is perhaps best summarized by Edward Gibbon in his wildly inaccurate epic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where he universalizes Romes's collapse into one about human nature, where the empire's alleged prosperity leads to a devastating decadence. As Gibbon writes:

“The long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated. The natives of Europe were brave and robust…their personal valour remained, but they no longer possessed the public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of danger and the habit of command.”

Yet this poorly defined "poison," what many conservatives would call "decadence," was not universal to all in Rome, and I can hardly see what it has to do with something as complex as the unraveling of an empire. Rome collapsed because it was an imperialist power that relied on client states and colonies to supply much of what it needed for its operations, including its grain supply. It had an overextended bureaucracy, and as it lost the ability to control such territories for reasons that are still widely debated, it fractured. The intricacies of this decline are certainly up for debate, but even if "decadence" were one of the many reasons — and there has been no serious evidence that this is the case (see The Modern Cultural Myth of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) — it would be a decadence enjoyed by a narrow minority, and caused by vast inequality.

And, like then, America now has people lamenting about decadence and moral weakness, and it is also a lie meant to cover up a more sobering truth.

A declining conclusion

Modern-day conservatives often want to point to Rome and use it as an example of how poor people engaging in entertainment, as well as society's increasing acceptance of social minorities, are the causes for the supposed decline of American Empire. And yet, everything I have seen points me in the opposite direction. Bread and Circus is not a moral failing caused by poor people playing too many video games or watching too much TV, nor is it a sign of inevitable collapse, but rather merely a policy of control meant to pacify a culture of vast inequality.

Rome was not a place where everyone had equal access to its affluence. Those considered "non-Roman" received constant discrimination and even bigotry. If you read Juvenal further, you will come across some of the most bigoted comments toward Greek people and other ethnicities of his day (SatIII:58–125):

“That race most acceptable now to our wealthy Romans, That race I principally wish to flee, I’ll swiftly reveal, And without embarrassment. My friends, I can’t stand A Rome full of Greeks, yet few of the dregs are Greek! For the Syrian Orontes has long since polluted the Tiber, Bringing its language and customs, pipes and harp-strings, And even their native timbrels are dragged along too, And the girls forced to offer themselves in the Circus.”

Rome was a highly stratified society brimming with prejudices, and I know that dynamic exists in America, too. We are a culture of great material wealth, but that's hardly shared with everyone. Many people struggle to capture the tenuous benefits offered by the US system if any are received at all. We must navigate a Byzantine bureaucracy while the wealthy experience things almost beyond imagining for the rest of us. In place of systems of care, we have been given the means to dole the pain: our entertainment. We spend money on TV, phones, and video games because there is hardly anything else to cling to. Care is not guaranteed in this system; only pixels on a screen.

If we can survive the Anthropocene, future descendants will undoubtedly have a morbid fascination with our current fixation with television and other forms of entertainment. Our escapism is evident in the present, and as long as the historical record survives, it will probably be apparent to the future as well. It remains to be seen, however, how this fascination will be interpreted — will the future chastise the masses like Juvenal for allegedly being complicit in their own suffering, will they place their ire on the rich, as I have done, for architecting that pacification, or will some new unforeseen dichotomy arise (as they tend to do)?

I don’t know, but in the meantime, I'll see you around, staring down at your screen.

Camp (Usually) Doesn't Win Awards & It's Homophobic

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

One of my favorite films of this year has been one most people hated or, at the very least, ignored: Lisa Frankenstein (2024), a lovechild of Oscar winner Diablo Cody of Juno (2007) fame. I saw it near midnight in a practically empty theater and enjoyed every minute. There is an inside joke from this movie, my partner and I still say, months later, and reflecting on it is almost bittersweet because most people don't know what I am talking about even when I explain the reference.

Critics hated this movie (mostly). With a 51% on Rotten Tomatoes (though a much higher audience score), it was grilled for being unserious and disjointed. "It will come as no surprise that the new movie 'Lisa Frankenstein' is a real monster," laments Mark Kennedy in the Associated Press.

"It's messy and chaotic, and while that makes the movie a fun horror-comedy, it isn't a fully satisfying experience," remarks Molly Freeman in Screen Rant.

This overly negative reaction felt strange because, from the perspective of a campy pleasure, the film set out with everything it was trying to do. It had that topsy-turvy sense of humor that you often see in beloved camp classics such as Serial Mom (1994), But I'm A Cheerleader (1999), or Rocky Horror (1975). These films are cult classics now, but they often bombed at the box office when they initially premiered. Like then, it felt like critics were judging Lisa Frankenstein to a different, straighter, less queer standard.

And I see that a lot with Hollywood — what is considered serious and professional is coded as masculine, straight, and often white, and everything else must either conform to that box as best it can or push against it, frequently in vain.

Camp is indecent

The word camp is thrown around a lot these days. In her seminal essay Notes on Camp (1964), Susan Lee Sontag summarized it as the "…love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration." Campy films are like a mirror universe where the motivations and sensibilities of "traditional" society are not prioritized. We focus on characters who experience the world in ways that "normal" people find abhorrent.

As a consequence, camp films are usually not "serious." Humor is not grounded in traditional sensibilities, and therefore, it may seem off-kilter to the uninitiated. We see this with the campy drag queen Divine, whose character would say and do all sorts of unhinged things. As she remarked in the absolutely filthy Pink Flamingos (1972): "Condone first-degree murder. Advocate cannibalism. Eat shit. Filth is my politics. Filth is my life." It's an absurdist framing meant to seem darkly humorous to the viewer, and this statement is, by far, one of the tamer things in that movie.

Furthermore, camp is frequently coded or directly about queer people, Black and Brown people, and anyone else who is otherized. It resonates with identities and viewpoints that are not only marginalized by the status quo but actively reject it. Camp figures are loud and abrasive, and they hold values that are entirely antithetical to straight, cisnormative, white society for a reason.

They are willfully choosing not to conform, even when it's dangerous, even when it's absurd.

In Serial Mom, for example, the main character is a serial-killing mom whose targets are those who violate the norms of suburban society, and she is worshipped for it. While fleeing the cops near the climax, she briefly becomes a figure of adoration at a punk show. They let her in, knowing who she is, and later, post-chase, as she is being dragged out of the venue by the cops, the crowd starts chanting "serial mom." Her eventual exoneration receives intense applause from her new morbid fans, who love her because of her murderous rage.

Going back to Lisa Frankenstein, the morality of the characters was one of the significant contentions with a lot of the criticism I saw. The two leads, Lisa (Kathryn Newton) and her "Creature" (Cole Sprouse) go on a killing spree, all so Lisa can build the "perfect" boyfriend. It's an entirely unhinged and campy motivation, and some reviewers simply did not get it. As Richard Lawson writes in Vanity Fair:

…Lisa Frankenstein does a lot to alienate even those most susceptible to its appeal. It’s a gross movie, a squelch of reeking bodily fluid and severed limbs and creepy crawly bugs. The film asks that we, too, fall in love with Lisa’s monster, the magically revived corpse of a lovelorn young man who died hundreds of years ago. As played by Cole Sprouse, the creature is a lurching ghoul, hideously awkward in his own body.

Yet that love for the disgusting was the entire point of the film. We are being asked to identify with the unhinged outcasts and their murderous obsession. This love for filth is what camp is all about. If you want a nice film where the monster turns out to be sweet and hot, then go watch Warm Bodies (2013) or some other straight fantasy.

Camp is "unserious" and "repugnant," and occasionally, despite what the title of this article suggests, it even wins awards. Everything, Everywhere All At Once, the 2022 Oscar winner about a mother named Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh) traveling across the multiverse to rescue her tyrannical queer daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) from her own nihilism, was campy as hell. It had an entire subplot where characters had to do unusual things to their bodies, including inserting a dildo-shaped object up their butts. This film was queer and loud, and it won widespread acclaim (though there is a massive caveat that we will discuss later).

At the time, I thought this was the beginning of a reorientation of the kinds of films we as a society decide to praise, but that's not what has happened — at least not as quickly as I would have hoped. The Oscars came and went this year, and, unsurprisingly, the moody and male Oppenheimer (2023) swept the awards. It's like when Moonlight (2016) won Best Picture, only for us to snap back to white saviorism two years later with Greenbook (2018). A film can break the mold, but it doesn't mean we stop using the old mold altogether.

While I am starting to see more camp-like contenders receive more significant acclaim (see Poor Things (2023), arguably Barbie (2023), etc.), the old mold still exists, and it's stronger than ever.

Camp and war

Oppenheimer is the antithesis of camp, falling into what I loosely refer to as "Great Man Films." Where camp actively rejects society's current hierarchies, Great Man Films are all about reaffirming the status quo through the celebration and adoration of patriarchal figures (see The King's Speech (2010), Braveheart (1995), etc.). These are films about great men of history, both real and imagined — films that focus on their concerns and worries.

For example, in Oppenheimer, based on the biography American Prometheus (2005), named after the myth about the God who gave fire to humanity, the eponymous character is depicted as uniquely special. We start the movie by glimpsing the magical quantum world that J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) sees. We are constantly shown not only how smart he is but also how he adheres to his principles at a significant personal cost.

Oppenheimer is a man who tells a racist President to give land back to the Indians and flirts with the communist party during a time of increasing anti-communism. He is a maverick, a genius, and arguably, a hero.

Great Man Films are also, as opposed to camp, entirely "serious." They have somber tones, heavy subject matter, and, most importantly, idolize trauma and loss. These men suffer, and that suffering is rarely joked about or trivialized. Oppenheimer loses his lover, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), and has to soldier on with his work. He grapples with the weight of his tremendously vital decision to build the atomic bomb, often alone. The film ends with him moodily proclaiming that he has "ended the world" with his creation. The moments of exhilaration and tenderness we might see in camp are few and far between.

Finally, these films are about perseverance. Even when Oppenheimer loses his battle against nuclear proliferation, the narrative is based on his triumph. In this case, the film is structured around several political hearings — a hearing for Oppenheimer's security clearance as well as the Senate confirmation hearing of Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) for Secretary of Commerce.

Strauss is the closest the film gets to a villain, and when Oppenheimer's allies manage to scuttle his nomination, the hearing also serves the double purpose of singing Oppenheimer's praises. He may have suffered, but he has pushed forward all the same.

As we can see, these two genres are vastly opposed to one another. There is what we may dramatically call a war between the Great Man perspective and camp, with the Great Man one currently reigning supreme. When it comes to awards, how we think of "serious" often fits these archetypes around Great Man Films— about male trauma, greatness, and perseverance — and that reflects the titles that even get made. When you think of award seasons, you think serious, and when you think serious, these traits are what films get made around, even if white men are not your subject matter.

For example, Moonlight was a great film about a Black queer man named Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert/Ashton Sanders/Trevante Rhodes) struggling to make space for himself in a world that actively hates such intersections. Its awards are well-earned, but I also cannot help thinking that it might not have received such accolades if its emphasis had not been so overwhelmingly on trauma.

Chiron endures a neglectful environment where even those who love him can't help but hurt him a little. It's heartbreaking, the type of pain often viewed as awards-worthy. Yet plenty of films deconstruct White Supremacy and Blackness in America, including brilliant campy satires such as Sorry to Bother You (2018), that don't win Oscars (or even snag a nomination).

Even with Everything, Everywhere All At Once, there is a caveat to its campy success. The entire film centers on a conservative mother's struggle to effectively come to terms with her daughter Joy's queerness — an identity that is rooted in so much pain that she wants to wipe herself from existence. Everything, Everywhere All At Once ends, not with the campy celebration of Joy or Jobu Tupaki's power, but assimilating into the traditional conservative family structure.

Evelyn accepts Joy and her girlfriend (Tallie Medel), and they become regular members of the Wang family. Jobu Tupaki consequently abandons her attempts to move beyond this singular dimension, focusing on imperfectly staying in place like her mother.

There is usually a conservative foundation amongst the most successful campy films. Hell, Diablo Cody's most famous movie, Juno, is about a white woman who ultimately decides to go forward with her pregnancy and ends up in a relationship with the man who impregnated her.

It's non-traditional in the sense of her not keeping the baby, but an acceptable type of non-traditionalism that manages not to offend conservative, forced-birth sensibilities. It would be hard to believe a fun romp about a young woman getting an abortion would win an Oscar, and I know that because it's called Grandma (2015), and few saw it.

There is a type of otherization that happens in filmography but also in society at large. Serious things are in the domain of the masculine, the rich, the straight, and often the white. Unserious things, well, they just so happen to be pushing against the norms of our society, and they are tacky for it. I am reminded of a quote from Jo Weldon's book Fierce: The History of Leopard Print (2018), writing:

Tacky, as a concept, refers to the lack of cultivation or the resistance to taste, and more often than not refers to tastes that are not suitably conservative….Tacky doesn't respect gatekeepers, and tacky tries too hard.

Furthemore, tacky is likely to be feminine, ethnic, queer, deviant; not manly, not practical, not businesslike, not serious. Tacky, like hell, is always other people.

I feel this in my bones. There is a hierarchy to taste. I cannot merely say that Lisa Frankenstein was one of my favorite films of the year and be respected as a critic because that movie is tacky. That film is queer. It is loud, unhinged, and unserious.

A Tacky Conclusion

Hierarchies of taste have been built around the world of cinema. They assert that certain styles deserve acclaim, and as someone whose identities often do not meet the more conservative values of Great Man Films, I tire of this mold. It's okay for a film to be about trauma, perseverance, or even greatness, but for these values to dominate as they currently do is intolerable.

I would like to see cinema go more in the direction of Everything Everywhere All At Once, or even Pink Flamingos, and away from Oppenheimer. I want camp to be respected for the art that it is and not merely an anomaly that wins because it manages to make the appropriate concessions to normative culture. Otherness should not have to be dressed up to seem valid. It should be allowed to break the mold, to shatter expectations, and to be praised for doing so.

I want filth to be king, and I don't care if that makes me unserious.

Dune: Part Two — The Story of How to Be a Colonizer

Photo by Jeremy Cai on Unsplash

Denis Villeneuve's Dune series is based on the 1965 book by Frank Herbert of the same name. It's about a neo-feudal society that has regressed away from automation after a war against machines in the distant past called the Butlerian Jihad.

Human-powered computation is now a necessary component for every aspect of life, including, most importantly for this space opera, faster-than-light travel. A substance known as "spice" gives the Spacing Guild's almost machine-like Navigators temporal prescience so that they can do the calculations necessary to make FTL work, and it can only be found in the desert world of Arrakis.

Dune involves the royal houses of this feudal society as they attempt to wrest control of Arrakis from its lethal environment, the native population, and each other. Our main protagonist is Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), whose family is assigned stewardship of Arrakis by the Emperor, only for most of them to be betrayed and executed by the evil House Harkonnen. By the end of the first film, Paul Atreides and his mother, Lady Jessica of Atreides (Rebecca Ferguson), are forced into hiding in the desert amongst the native Fremen.

Dune: Part Two involves Paul's comeback, as he teams up with the Fremen to win what he has lost. Yet underneath this fairly traditional tale of a disgraced noble winning back his title, is a horrifying story about how to colonize others. This domination is done through violence, yes, but more importantly, the message of Dune is how colonizers convince the colonized to control themselves.

How colonizers control

Upon initially watching Dune: Part Two, one could be forgiven for thinking this is a modern Lawrence of Arabia (1962) where a white colonizer masters a native people's ways and then organizes them against their oppressors better than they can (referred to sometimes as the "Mighty Whitey” trope). This is what some have criticized the original Dune book for. As Noah Berlatsky wrote in The Escapist in 2019 about both David Lynch's 1984 movie and the original book more broadly:

“… in Dune, as in other Mighty Whitey stories, there’s a bit more going on. Paul’s whiteness makes him an object of worship for the Fremen. But his time with them also gives him access to his full prophetic abilities, ultimately allowing him to defeat the Emperor and become the effective ruler of the universe…

…Paul’s divinity and power comes from his ability to capitalize on the resources and pain of others. On the surface, Mighty Whitey characters are superior because of their whiteness. But dig a little deeper, and their powers are borrowed or, more accurately, stolen. They are godlike because they’ve appropriated the labor and wealth of others. Paul claims to be wracked with guilt because he sees a future in which he leads the Fremen in a path of bloody destruction across the universe. But really the guilt is for his present glory, built on blood and a deceit that the story won’t, and can’t, quite acknowledge.”

And yet, director Denis Villeneuve's retelling doesn't take that direction (at least not totally). Dune: Part Two isn't a decolonization story at all, despite what the initial first half of the film and its freedom-fighting antics might suggest. It's not even really a colonizer wish-fulfillment fantasy, as the original book most certainly was, but a film about how colonizers use ideology to conquer people.

This fact is shown most prominently via a mystical prophecy the Atreides family has used — specifically Paul's mother, Lady Jessica, and the forces she represents — to indoctrinate the native Fremen. Jessica is a member of the Bene Gesserit (a pseudo-religious order of all women who have the power to manipulate people with their voices).

They are the closest this series gets to true villains, and for a long time, they have been planting the idea amongst the Fremen that a stranger who fits the description of Paul will come to lead them as their mythical Mahdi ("the Fremen's savior") or Lisan al Gaib ("the One who will save Arrakis"). Multiple characters state over and over again that this prophecy is a fabrication being used to control the Fremen. As one character says: "If you want to control people, tell them a messiah will come, then they will wait for centuries."

Religion has been one of the primary tools of colonization. We don't even have to stray from our own world to understand this fact. It's a sentiment that should be familiar to anyone who has studied Christianity, whose recent history is that of imperial powers spreading this religion to others as a method of control. From the role of Christian missionaries in usurping the Kingdom of Hawaii to State Boarding Schools in Canada and the United States used to strip native people of their culture and language, Christianity did not spread naturally around the globe but was perpetuated by force. As written in the Emory Scholarly blog on Christianity's role in African colonization:

“Essentially Christianity was a guise by which Western governments justified the exploitation and conquest of African nations….Denouncing the religious practices of Africans as witchcraft and heathenism, European nations sought to convert, and then exploit the indigenous peoples of Africa.”

The use of religion in Dune is a prelude to conquest, and it's a bloodless conquest at that. The Bene Gesserit have refined their violence, moving away from swords and other direct weapons that they leave to the realm of men, and focusing instead on the spoken word. Their Voice, magic enhanced by spice (and consequently stolen from the people of Arrakis), has been weaponized to control the actions of anyone they choose. Resistors don't need to be killed by the Bene Gesserit—they merely need to be commanded to worship, as Chani (Zendaya) is, when she is forced via the power of Jessia's Voice to give Paul Atreides her tears to fulfill some arcane prophecy.

Yet, it's not just force alone that makes such indoctrination so insidious. Colonizers cannot be everywhere all the time unless you choose to let a version of them inside your mind, and that requires a far more subtle touch of persuasion and charity.

There is a very telling line halfway through Dune: Part Two, where Lady Jessica, who has now become a Reverend Mother for the Fremen, telegraphs to the viewer how she will sway the less dogmatic North, and it has everything to do with pinpointing vulnerable people in Fremen society. She says: "Convert the non-believers one by one. Start with the weaker ones. The vulnerable ones. The ones who fear us."

Courting vulnerable populations is one of the first things a rising group will do when it tries to gain power, and religion almost always plays a part in this. If we are being cynical, it is the reason why Christianity has so many orphanages and hospitals. In anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow's book The Dawn of Everything, they discussed how the legitimacy of many monarchs might be directly linked to claims of looking after the "weak." As they write:

“It is possible to detect something of this logic in almost all historically documented royal courts, which invariably attracted those considered freakish or detached. There seems to have been no region of the world, from China to the Andes, where courtly societies did not have such obviously distinctive individuals; and few monarchs who did not also claim to be the protectors of widows and orphans.”

First, as Reverend Mother Jessica of Atreides says, you go after the weak and vulnerable.

The colonizer's choice

Paul feels conflicted by his mother's machinations. For most of the film, he does not want to go to the more religious South because he feels he will be swept up in the messianic image that she has cultivated for him. The Fremen in the North are depicted as being more egalitarian than the feudalism of his world, and he wants to hang on to that image— what earlier, more racist text would have referred to as "going native."

Paul sees clearly that the entire mythology built around him is a lie. He knows that the mystical powers that he possesses are not divine but a predictive power combining genetic engineering (i.e., eugenics) and spices' unique temporal properties.

Yet this truth does not matter, even when it’s said out loud by him. When he tells a group of dogmatic Fremen, led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem), that he is neither a messiah nor interested in ruling them, that makes them believe he is "humble" and even more worthy of his role. Unlike past Mighty Whitey texts, it's the indoctrination around Paul, not anything unique about Paul himself, that makes him such a force to be reckoned with.

However, these forces are not ones Paul has much control over. His insurgency in the North ends catastrophically when his hit-and-run tactics push House Harkonnen to launch a strike against Fremen strongholds, killing thousands and forcing the entire population to migrate to the safer, more extremist South — the one outcome he wanted the least. He may be the mythologized head of this new messianic movement, but he isn't a God. He is not able to control the tides of history any more than anyone else can — he can merely ride them out.

In truth, the only thing he can decide in the film is whether to embrace the role of colonizer or let another noble take his place. Paul is oblivious to this fact, but we, as the viewers, know that the Bene Gesserit have been training another royal, Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), a member of House Harkonnen, to take on Paul's role if he does not succeed in coming to power. They are always playing "games within games" and have no problem leaning on the Harkonnens — the previous stewards of Arrakis who almost succeeded in exterminating House Atreides — as long as they can be controlled.

It should be noted that the Harkonnens are a hyperviolent, imperial power. They are also subtextually coded to be White Supremacists.

There is one scene in a massive stadium where, at the center, Feyd-Rautha is killing people for his birthday, and the viewer is treated to throngs upon throngs of enraptured white people cheering on this man's brutality (it's not subtle). Feyd-Rautha is depicted as being the pinnacle of his people's white supremacist rage. He does not just kill men and women in anger but carves them up to consume, giving the parts he does not want to his cannibalistic harem.

For the Bene Gesserit, there is no difference between Feyd-Rautha and Paul Atreides, and as the movie progresses, we start to understand why. While Feyd-Rautha ruling the Empire would be truly awful, we come to understand that Paul will be no better.

He starts to bend under his messianic role, browbeating the Fremen into following him into battle and embracing his newly discovered Harkonnen roots to better take control of the imperial throne. "We must be Harkonnens," he tells his mother coldly. In seconds, any sympathy built up for him is erased.

Ultimately, he pushes the Fremen into a Holy War across the galaxy, distorting their somewhat egalitarian culture into a theocracy that gives them "freedom" from oppressors as long as they are willing to be tools for this white colonizer's bid for power.

An imperial conclusion

There is no good outcome in Dune, either in part one or two. It is a deeply cynical text in which Paul Atreides realizes that in order to "win," he has to fight fire with fire and out-colonize the colonizers. He declares himself emperor, taking the war of all-against-all on Arrakis and thrusting it onto the galaxy.

If there is one major criticism of these films, it's not that they are white saviorist texts—this latest outing is a thorough rejection of that perspective—but that they are texts that do not see a way past colonization. It is the air Paul Atreides breaths, and its dominance is seen as inevitable, even if its players shift ever so slightly. The Fremen were occupied, and now, under the orders of a new white overlord, they shall occupy the galaxy, but the Bene Gesserit and even the dominance of royal intrigue will not change (at least if the book Dune Messiah is any indication).

Denis Villeneuve has indicated that he is interested in continuing the story, and based on this movie's success, he most likely will get that chance.

The temptation of spectacle might push him to embrace the very Mighty Whitey trope he rejected, but maybe he will continue to toe the line and deconstruct Empire again. Perhaps we might even get a glimpse beyond it — only the spice can tell us for sure.

The Vapid Spectacle of Netflix's 'Avatar: The Last Airbender'

Image; Albert Kim Pictures, Rideback, & Nickelodeon Productions

The original Avatar: The Last Airbender is about a pan-Asian society where some genetically predestined individuals can learn a type of martial arts that allows them to manipulate the four elements (i.e., Earth, Fire, Air, Water). Each society specializes in an element-bending martial arts, and our series follows the Avatar, the only person who can master all four elements. The Avatar, who in the reincarnation is an airbender named Aang, is a cosmological figure who has been charged with the metaphysical task of keeping "balance" in the world.

The live-action Netflix series is retelling the exact plot beats of the original cartoon but in a hyper-condensed fashion. The original first season of the cartoon was twenty episodes long, while the live-action one only has eight. So, although the overall plot structure is the same, things have been understandably shuffled around. Most of the on-the-road aesthetic of season one has been abandoned for visiting some key locations, such as the Earth Kingdom fortress city of Omashu or the Northern Water Tribe's fantastical capital of Agna Qel'a.

The Netflix series isn't a good retelling. I honestly found it to be a struggle to get through. That's not a shocker to anyone following the critical reaction to the first season. While the original cartoon has a critical aggregate of nearly 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, the live-action reboot currently has one below 60%. It's just fine, the definition of 'mid,' 'meh,' or whatever your generational slang for mediocre may be. It's the perfect show to keep in the background while doing other things because it requires nothing of the viewer at all.

And yet, despite being critically panned, Avatar remains an intriguing spectacle. In fact, spectacle is at the heart of what makes this series so entertaining and such a disappointment.

Spectacle reigns supreme

For a pop culture commentator like myself who is interested in the political and philosophical messaging of media, we could spend a long time picking apart this series' supposed flaws. Maybe, like Jenna Scherer in AV Club, you find the pacing and dialogue to be off. Perhaps the defanging of the political content offends your sensibilities, as argued by Jessie Gender in her video essay The Avatar Remake Doesn't Understand Avatar.

Yet I hesitate to do so because I don't think the creators of the Netflix series put much effort into this show beyond ensuring it was bingeable. It's been a blatant cash grab from the start. The original creators of the animated series, Konietzko and DiMartino, left as showrunners of the live-action one in 2020 due to "creative differences" — Hollywoodspeak for not wanting your name attached to a bad project. And now that we've seen the final product, it's clear those concerns were valid.

For all its faults, the original show cared deeply about what it was trying to say, so much so that its creators had a sometimes hostile relationship with Nickelodeon executives. By the time the sequel series The Legend of Korra came around, the condensed last season didn't get an actual premiere on Nickelodeon but was dumped on their streaming service with little promotion.

However, the live-action show's number one focus has been on spectacle, by which I mean a product that is more concerned with being seen than about what it is. The point of a spectacle is not to think about what you are looking at but to be enraptured, transfixed, and almost taken over (see Society of the Spectacle).

Sometimes, these examples are small. For example, there is a slight pause with the introduction of Firelord Ozai, played by Daniel Dae Kim, a famous actor (see Hawaii Five-O) who long-term fans will recognize as voicing General Fong in the original Avatar cartoon. The pause is for the fans to comment on his appearance, and it's a common practice for modern blockbusters such as the MCU. Still, to those unfamiliar with who Firelord Ozai is, the scene lingers too long — a moment of spectacle that overtakes the filmmaking.

Overall, the text has a lot of similar exciting moments. It is very good at creating fantastic (though sometimes mixed) CGI and fight scenes, but there is no interest in the actual substance of what it says: it's just a vehicle for spectacle. The influencer Jessie Gender, in her commentary of the series, mentioned how this was reflected in one comment made by the actor who played Aang (Gordon Cormier), who had this to say on the Fire Nations genocide of the Air Nomads: "I think the Airbender genocide is really cool… Well, no! No! Not like that…I mean, yeah, my whole family's dead, of course. It's not a good thing, but watching it is going to be sick!"

Like Jessie Gender herself, I bring this up not to express how uniquely awful Cormier is (he's a teenager; don't harass him) but to point out that presenting the psychological horror of the Air Nomad genocide was not a priority. In the episode "The Southern Air Temple" of the cartoon, which deals most directly with the Air Nomad Genocide, Katara (Mae Whitman) and Sokka (Jack De Sena) spend a lot of the episode hiding the remnants of the genocide from Aang, so he can hold onto his childlike excitement of returning home after 100 years. This plan inevitably fails, and the viewer is left to see the horror on Aang's face as he stares at the sun-bleached bones of his massacred comrade, a "subtlety" described by its successor as tame.

But for all of showrunner Albert Kim's talk about wanting to show the horror of this genocide in real time, the emphasis of the Air Nomad genocide in the live-action series is clearly on the special effects and fight scenes — hence Cormier's reaction. We see charred corpses but also fantastic fire-bending and explosions that are a wonder to behold. The scene ends with an epic fight between an air-bending monk and a fire-bending warlord—fascistic violence that, from a cinematic perspective, feels more like we are supposed to be enraptured by than horrified.

That focus on spectacle impacts not only the subject matter but also how this show was made. There was an intense effort to manage old and potential new fan expectations. Sometimes, this care was immensely positive, such as making sure that this Asian and Indigenous-inspired show actually starred Asian and Indigenous actors (something both the "M. Night" Shyamalan movie and the original series were not always the best at).

And yet other times this emphasis on expectations was an active detriment to making good art, or even a good product. For all the talk of "actor fit," there appears to have been little attempt to connect actors to the actual material in the auditioning process. Showrunner Albert Kim talked in depth about how, like many current tentpoles, he had to write fake scenes for actors to audition because "this whole project was conducted under top secrecy." As Kim tells Hollywood Reporter:

“A lot of times they were reading off scenes about being in math class or playing basketball, stuff like that. I often joked with my producers that I wished we just compiled all of my fake scenes and we could create a whole new pilot by itself….A lot of times we weren’t, or at least I wasn’t, even listening to the lines being spoken, because they had nothing to do with Avatar. It was more about trying to envision these actors as the characters.”

When it comes to leads Aang (Gordon Cormier) and Katara (Kiawentiio), this approach painfully shows, as the acting is simply not there. They might have shined with different material, but in this show, their acting was often stale and lifeless. The decision to manage fan expectations (by building hype and preventing draft leaks to the public) was clearly more important than connecting with actors who were good fits. And no, it's not because there are not "good" Indigenous and Asian actors out there. I have seen enough works to know that justification to be a racist lie.

Everything about how this show was made feels backward. The series was created almost in a Frankenstein fashion, where the creators worked hard to ensure that Avatar's main plot remained unchanged and, from there, stitched together a story. As Albert Kim described to The Hollywood Reporter:

“Yes. The first thing I did was lay out all the episodes of the first season on a big whiteboard. We [the writer’s room] wrote them all out and what each was about, and then took a look at them, and sort of unraveled all of them. Then we looked at which of these threads go together where we find some thematic parallel between characters and storylines and scenarios, and how we could weave them back together to create something that felt more serialized.”

The focus was on keeping as many original plot beats intact as possible. And yet, while the plot elements remain more or less the same, the emotional arcs of the original series are distorted to the point of being virtually unrecognizable. In the cartoon, Aang spends seasons grappling with his role as Avatar, a plot point that is more or less resolved in a single episode. Sokka must overcome his sexism in the first season to become a better strategist, which in the live-action show is recast as not being a "good enough" warrior for his father, completely sidelining Kyoshi Warrior Suki in the process. The plot may be intact, but often, the soul of what made the cartoon so poignant does not make the transition.

However, you can be sure that all the nostalgic beats of the original series did make it. Fans will not miss characters like Jet or the Mechanist or renditions of the song Secret Tunnel. Even fan favorites such as Princess Azula and her friends are introduced a season early (cramming in more arcs in a series where, according to Albert Kim, one of the most significant constraints was time) so that OG fans could get excited about their introduction and say things like: "ooh, remember Azula? Remember Secret Tunnel? Remember this other series you loved?"

Again, what mattered more to this show's current creators was that this product was a spectacle to watch, and the show suffered (artistically, not commercially) as a result.

An unbalanced conclusion

We can spend all day bemoaning this show's mediocrity, but I hope you realize that this critique is about more than merely arguing "thing bad." If you take away anything, it's that the series' focus on spectacle above all else led to a frustrating product.

Yet, in the end, I don't know whether such criticisms even matter regarding this show's success. After all, the show's negative critical response has not dampened its prospects. Netflix's Avatar is allegedly the streamer's latest hit. According to Gizmodo: "the new series debuted on the streamer's English-language TV list with 21.2 million views and reached the top 10 in 92 countries." Although not officially announced by the time of writing, the greenlighting of a second season at this point is inevitable.

For all my complaints, this focus on spectacle exists for a reason. It's what our capitalist society runs on, a point you hopefully don't need the power of all four elements to understand.

The Brothers Sun & The Crisis of Conservative Motherhood

Image; Brad Falchuk Teley-Vision

The Brothers Sun is, in many ways, a vehicle for Michelle Yeoh to kick ass and look fabulous doing it. It’s about the matriarch of the Jade Dragons crime family, Mama Sun, who is fighting to protect her two sons from both internal and external threats. Yeoh is the star and highlight of the series, and there are definitely scenes where Mama Sun walks into a room with a stunning outfit, and the whole point is to go “damn, she is a boss."

Yet the show has more to say than merely showing off how amazing Michelle Yeoh can be. At its core is a text dissecting the misogyny that holds Mama Sun and her children back from a more fulfilling life. The "power" given to conservative mothers such as Mama Sun for maintaining patriarchy is cast aside for the illusion that it is, and we, as the viewers, are left questioning what remains in its place.

Mama bears, powerful or caged?

Michelle Yeoh's role as a mother comes front and center in this series. Mama Sun has sacrificed everything, including her entire life in Taipei, for the chance to protect her children. It's learned that she developed an elaborate contingency plan that involved her having to go into hiding in America with her son Bruce (Sam Li). She is the ultimate "Mama Bear" — the longstanding trope of typically passive women going into attack mode when their children are threatened that you can see everywhere from Demeter to "The Bride" in Kill Bill — and we are at least initially meant to see strength in that presentation.

Much of the initial thrill of The Brothers Sun comes from honoring the aspects of motherhood that our society normally devalues. For example, while her son, Charles (Justin Chien), briefly derides her regularly going to play mahjong with the aunties as mere "gossip," we learn that that gossip is partially the source of her power. Her triad name is "Rolodex," and those ladies hold essential information in her community, providing information that gives her an easy edge over her competitors.

In fact, there is one endearing scene where the aunties come to the rescue. A rogue group has captured Mamma Sun, and Bruce brings the aunties into a heavily armed warehouse, using them as human shields and, in effect, weaponizing how society undervalues oldness. Through this scene, we are meant to see the utility in this disregarded and "gossipy" group of conservative mothers.

However, the powerful institution Mama Sun is a part of is inherently conservative. The Triads are surrounded by arcane rituals tied to traditionalistic (and conservative) power structures. The triads depicted in the show take pride in having their roots allegedly in ancient monarchy. As her husband, Big Sun (Johnny Kou), says: "I'm reminded of our forefathers who stood against emperors," drawing on that perceived history in his bid to become a sort of Triad Emperor known as the "Dragon Head."

Yet, for all the alleged power Mama Sun has accrued, Triad society doesn't respect women that much. Her husband is the head of the Jade Dragons, even though she is the brains of his operation, and her son Charles, in episode four, expects to take over if her husband dies, despite her being very much alive. When the Jade Dragons try to meet face to face with another Triad group (an event referred to as a "square"), the head of said Triad insists that Mama Sun shouldn't come, saying: "…it would be an insult to have a woman at the center of such a historic meeting."

For most of the series, Mama Sun tries to claw her way to the top of the Jade Dragons and eventually the entire Triad hierarchy to lean in, if you will. And at least initially, no one believes in her, not even her son Bruce, who she has arguably sacrificed the most for. This complete disregard especially applies to her husband, who makes it abundantly clear how little he respects her, saying:

“You were a privileged, spoiled brat. And I convinced you that you were sacrificing for a larger purpose. But the only purpose you were serving was… me."

In this scene The Brother Sun beautifully illustrates how she was never serving herself. As with every patriarchal institution, Mamma Sun can only be seen as powerful in relation to the men above her. She can do incredible feats on behalf of these men, whether that be her husband or her children, but never for herself — and that's a shame because, as we shall soon see, conservative motherhood isn't even able to protect the very children it claims to protect.

Patriarchy hurts everyone

For all the talk of protecting her children, Mamma Sun can do nothing to stop the men she is bound to serve from harming those she loves. For example, despite it not being something she wanted, she is powerless to stop her husband from turning her eldest son, Charles, into an unrivaled killing machine for the Jade Dragons. This is because her desires are secondary to those of her husbands, who sees his family members as tools, extensions of himself to be used as he sees hit.

Charles goes through profound psychological trauma in becoming a killing machine — trauma that is not unusual for our patriarchal society. It was Bell Hooks, in her book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004), who wrote:

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

At least initially, Charles deadens himself emotionally in order to enact violence. He is stoic and passive, clinging to concepts such as family to justify the horrors he perpetuates. And as Hooks suggests, this is not just an internal process but one continually reinforced by the male influences in his life. As Charles says of his father, Big Sun's, reaction to the first time he killed people en masse: "Ba said it was the emperor inside of me, the need to protect my family. [He] told me to embrace it."

As we can see, Charles's violence is not only reinforced by the male characters in his life, but men like his father link the violence of the Triads to their ancestral legacy. There is no separation between the violence these men wield and the "mantle of heaven" they claim to represent. Its legitimacy built on the domination of others, and we, as the viewer, are meant to be conflicted by it.

As the show starts to grapple with the f@cked-up nature of the Triad patriarchy, the coolness factor behind their violence starts to fade. After all, The Brothers Sun can only be considered cool and fun when it mostly separates the violence of what the Triads do — human trafficking, sexual exploitation, etc. (activities that are often backed by literal violence and slavery) — from the Sun family itself. It would be hard to find Charles as sexy and endearing if we saw him rounding up the enslaved people the family keeps in line for profit.

That edgy facade is ripped to shreds once the family's initial enemies are revealed to be young radicals called the Boxers, who resent these activities the Triads profit from. With the mantra "the riddance of evil must be thorough," the Boxers are a group that wants to tear down the triad system and replace it with something more ethical. As the Boxer member Grace (Madison Hu) tells Bruce Sun:

“The original Triads were rebels, organized to fight against corruption and oppression. Not anymore. Now they’re the oppressors. The Boxers were formed to push back against them. We’re a faceless collective fighting against the suppressors of our people. A mandate of heaven. And right now, protecting our people means destroying the Triads completely….”

Bruce knows that the Boxers are in the right, supplying them with information several times to aid in their efforts, but he understandably doesn't want to see his family die. The emotional pull of his fraternal relationship with Charles overrides his ideals as he tries, almost impossibly so, to find a way forward. Mama Sun, Bruce, and Charles spend the rest of the season being torn between these two poles of regressive patriarchy and radical revolution. We are left with a painful pulling away from the conservative ideal of family, even as the Suns must fend off from this new radical faction. Family members and friends are killed. Trust is broken. All to claw away from the Triad patriarchy and try to make something new.

We don't quite know what the Suns will settle on, but the deconstruction of the patriarchal system is at the forefront of it. The Triad system is depicted as something that actively hurts all those involved and whose principles are nothing more than padding meant to rationalize the violence it doles out. As Charles says to his father in the final episode of the first season: "We aren't an idea. We are just gangs of men fighting over property."

As the show comes to a close, the best thing we are told to do is to leave patriarchy and all the violence used to reinforce it behind, and nowhere is that more salient than the path set forward by Mama Sun.

When the yoke is broken

What happens when the conservative mother's submission is broken? What replaces it? In the final episode, Mama Sun appears to be taking over the Jade Dragons. Perhaps all The Brothers Sun will offer us next season is a neoliberal type of lean-in politics where the spurned mom gets the power she "deserves," ignoring the morally despicable reality of Triad politics: an institution that cannot be reformed and only abolished.

Yet, even if that is all we receive, the rebuke of the conservative mother in this first season has been a treat to watch. The crisis of conservative motherhood is something that has more far-reaching consequences than just the empowerment of one individual or even a group of individuals because, in many ways, a mother's silence is what keeps the entire conservative family together. Men are not the only ones to psychically mutilate themselves in support of patriarchy. Conservative women provide a vital service to this system, reinforcing it as much as they are oppressed by it. The men they support require their care, aid, and sometimes even violence to dominate at all.

There would be no Jade Dragons without Mama Sun, even if she was not directly acknowledged for all of her efforts, and there would be no patriarchy without the many women who conform to and oppress other women in the name of the men they serve.

I Will Never Forgive Vox for this One Abortion Article

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

Let me set the scene. It's Apr 3, 2019, three years, two months, and twenty-one days before the federal right to abortion enshrined in Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court ruling Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (or Dobbs for short). Some, especially in the abortion space, see this grim reality unfolding on the horizon. Others believe it's impossible.

The media company Vox has commissioned 15 writers for their "Hindsight 2070" series, all answering the question, "What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?" No methodology is posted for how these writers were selected, so it seems to be just a list of the most click-worthy topics about the future they thought would gain traction. In between condemnations of eating meat and kids playing tackle football, they produce one claiming that the right to an abortion will be unthinkable in 50 years, and it still makes me furious.

We are going to talk about this article, but more to the point, we will treat this text for the relic it is —the belief in a time that Roe could never end.

A brief look at liberal, anti-Roe articles

This abortion article was written by Karen Swallow Prior, who I would classify as a more "center-leaning" conservative. She may be pro-forced-birth and pro-religious "liberties," but she did have a scandal a couple of years ago where she was removed as a fellow from the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for effectively supporting same-sex relations. She has also been pretty transparent about abusive dynamics in this space. As Rick Pidcock writes in Baptist News of her perspective:

“One might wonder, based on her speaking truth to power through the years, if she is secretly a progressive Christian. But Prior remains committed to conservative theology and pro-life politics, despite the conservative men who have hurt her.”

She is a commentator adjacent to more liberal circles, even if she does not fully embrace them. Consequently, Karen Swallow Prior takes an interesting rhetorical stance on abortion. She doesn't provide a different argument for why abortion should be illegal. She, like many others, claims that fetuses should have a right to life and that right should not be infringed by the autonomy of the mother. I have talked about why this logic is dehumanizing before (see When It Comes To Abortion, Humanity Is Stripped Away Until Only A Womb Is Left), but what makes her unique is that she links the forced birther movement to the liberal condition, saying:

“As we enter late modernity and recognize the limits of the radical autonomy and individualism which have defined it, the pendulum will correct itself with a swing toward more communitarian and humane values that recognize the interdependency of all humans.”

Although this point is easily debunked by bringing up the counterpoint that such "humane values" rely on the subjugation of the mother to the fetus (and consequently the often conservative arbiters of said fetus' rights), it's an argument that has all the right talking points for the then-contemporary liberal audience to view it as clever. It is the sort of piece that "makes you think," despite itself being relatively short and doing nothing to summarize the existing literature in the field or thoroughly explain why this trend will happen other than just a vague appeal to humanism. As one "Go Blue" Twitter profile commented at the time:

“Vox did a fascinating series asking experts, “What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?” And the responses, on subjects ranging from sex work to abortion, were really, really interesting.”

The liberal consensus on debating Roe before its nullification was often one of amusement. Yes, the ruling was considered important, but it was also settled and safe to pick apart. It was not uncommon to see liberals and the "moderates" they loved to court in the name of fairness, to position their opposition to the ruling on purely academic lines, utterly detached from the real-world circumstances on the ground. "Let Roe go," went the title of an article Megan McArdle wrote in 2018 in the Washington Post, arguing that the decision was poorly reasoned and that if the ruling was nullified, we could somehow get something better, saying:

“Somewhat paradoxically, the way to make abortion less contentious is to throw the matter back to the states so that people can argue about it. Debating the difficult decisions regarding gestational age and circumstances would force people to confront the hard questions that abortion entails, which tends to have a moderating effect on extreme opinions.”

This reasoning (and McArdle was by no means unique in believing it) was a sort of topsy-turvy logic that pretended that Roe's would-be nullifiers were not conservative reactionaries intent on making it illegal across the entire country. Pro-forced-birth conservatives are not satisfied with constraining their activities to state lines. Although the right to abortion continues to be popular, that has not stopped conservatives from pushing through unpopular policies before (see also the partial repeal of the ACA, less taxes on the wealthy, etc.). Public opinion is wholly divorced from the passage and repeal of policy.

Despite there being mounting evidence that the ruling was in genuine danger and would be supplanted by a more reactionary status quo, the majority of the liberal establishment, including Democratic Party leadership, was not very motivated to preserve Roe. There were and continue to be a lot of forced birth Democrats (see Democrats For Life of America), and the Democratic Party has never been interested in enforcing a hardline on this issue. As recently as last year, the Democratic Party's House leadership endorsed the House's last forced-birth Democrat for the 2024 cycle.

Before Dobbs, there was largely indifference from all parts of the establishment to mobilize on this issue, and that's because many people thought it was impossible for the ruling to be overturned. "By the numbers, why Roe v. Wade will probably stand," Eric Zorn lectured to us in the Chicago Tribune in 2018, convinced that it would be "political suicide" for conservatives. "No, The Supreme Court Is Not About To Overrule Roe v. Wade," argued Evan Gerstmann in Forbes, literally commenting on the Dobbs case, one year, one month, and six days before it repealed Roe.

For some, it really did seem like the status quo would go on forever. It didn't matter if someone pushed for theoretical objections to abortion in liberal circles on legal or even moral grounds because Roe was a wall that could not be moved. That sense of invincibility probably caused all of these articles to get greenlit in the first place, including, I suspect, this Vox one.

Yet this invincibility was always a lie, one that then imploded, and like Roe v. Wade itself, the rest is history.

The path forward

Karen Swallow Prior was ecstatic when Roe was overturned. "Called it!" she posted, linking to her Vox article, the day Politico published a leaked draft of the Dobbs ruling. She has not been commissioned to write for Vox since this piece. I don't see any pro-forced-birth pieces when I comb through Vox's archives either. The air of how we talk about abortion is entirely different in a post-Roe world. The sense of invincibility that Roe gave some commentators was removed, forcing many to come to terms with the cold reality that their rights were not as solid as they once believed.

Yet some were screaming about this before it was repealed. Some people were not surprised by the Dobbs ruling because they could see it coming, forecasted for decades by the conservative movement's war on bodily autonomy. I remember reading Gabrielle Zevin's novel The Hole We're In (2010), which is about a family suffering from the fallout of the 2008 recession. In the final chapters, one of the main characters is trying to get an abortion for her daughter in 2020, and it's difficult because Roe has been overturned. Gabrielle Zevin was able to predict this fate over a decade ago, only off by about two years.

Activists were aware of this trend and tried to stop it for decades, but rather than listen to these valid concerns, many instead chose to publish (and greenlight) condescending think pieces. The reason I am still angry at this Vox article is because of the complacency of it all. The editorial staff at the time amused themselves imagining what the future could look like, oblivious that Roe was going to be dismantled much faster than I doubt they imagined. This article (and many like it) represents a dangerous amount of complacency, softening the American public during a time when they needed to be even more vigilant.

There is no shortage of things that need to be screamed about. Some are pointing even now at new lines conservatives, other reactionaries, and even liberals are trying to cross, and we (as a society) don't need to be caught unprepared next time. We can listen instead of sticking our heads in the sand and stop treating every warning as an overreaction simply because the forecasted problems are not immediate.

Now, on the precipice of so many wide-sweeping changes (not just with bodily autonomy but also the environment, the militarization of the police, and so much more), we cannot remain ignorant of such warnings and still be surprised when they come to pass.

The Beauty of Maestro's Unforgotten Wife

Image; Lea Pictures, Sikelia Productions, Amblin Entertainment, Fred Berner Films

The biopic Maestro is about famous queer composer Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) as he navigates his marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Bernstein was a talented man who was probably most famous for his musical contributions to West Side Story, among others, but he was also a bisexual man in an age where that wasn't the most accepted of things. The biggest tension arguably revolves around the weight of that stigma on Bernstein's wife, his career, his family, and his sense of self.

Like Bernstein's music, Maestro is an acquired taste. The film matches his frantic energy. It moves from scene to scene in a way that is chaotic and, at times, unhinged. Bernstein will be talking about some sudden and vulnerable subject, and then in the next moment, he will pull back, rhetorically, commenting on his own abrasiveness. Almost every scene is filled with his high-speed, overbearing wit, which the viewer either acclimates to or doesn't.

Yet unlike in many texts where the wife of the rich gay man languishes in obscurity and neglect, Maestro gives us something that, although not new, is exceedingly rare in media — an actual partnership.

A brief summary of the wives ignored

When films recount gay men in the past, particularly white, rich gay men, the wife often suffers in the background. She is the person he, at best, lies to as he hooks up with other men on the side, clinging to his fabricated heterosexuality so that he doesn't lose his middle-to-upper-class privileges.

A good example of this is the graphic novel turned musical Fun Home, which is an autobiography of queer writer Alison Bechdel and her tumultuous (and abusive) relationship with her closeted father, Bruce. He does not have a harmonious relationship with his wife, neglecting her and giving her profound anxiety about the status of his queer entanglements. "And boys," his wife Helen sings in the song Days and Days, "My God, some of them underage." Later in the song, she laments why she resigned herself to this bad relationship, claiming that it was a gradual process of compromise over time: "That's how it happens. Days. Made of bargains, I made because I thought as a wife I was meant to. And now my life is shattered and laid bare."

We see this process of compromise also in Brokeback Mountain (2005), where the main characters, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), both enter into heterosexual relationships for most of the film's runtime, even though they both have deep affection for one another. Jack does not confide the secret of his sexuality to his wife, Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway), but it hangs in the background. She knows his lover, Ennis, as "the fishing buddy." As she informs Ennis of Jack's death on the phone in a heart-wrenching monologue, sparring him of the details of his gay bashing, you can see the acknowledgment of their relationship in her eyes, unstated. Ennis' relationship is even less stable. His wife Alma (Michelle Williams) inadvertently witnesses him kissing Jack, further straining the marriage until it breaks, though the kiss itself is not mentioned well after the two's divorce.

Sometimes the wife is not just neglected but abused. In Dance of the 41, which is a film about the son-in-law, Ignacio de la Torre y Mier (Alfonso Herrera), of Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz (Fernando Becerril), the main character is actively cruel to his wife Amada Díaz (Mabel Cadena). Ignacio ignores her calls for intimacy, gaslights her, and creates an entirely adversarial relationship. When the gay society and found family Ignacio is part of (i.e., The Dance of the 42) is violently shut down by the government, and its members are shamed in public and sent to prison, he is spared from this fate because of his marriage to Amada. She has no sympathy for him, telling Ignacio that his lover, Evaristo Rivas (Emiliano Zurita), is dead while indifferently sipping her coffee. She is now firmly in control of the relationship both of them are resigned to.

Dance of the 41 provides us with the most visceral reason why these men were distant and neglectful. The exposure of their secret could end them — their careers, their reputations, and in the case of this film, their freedom, and their lives. It's an understandable (if not still cruel) reason for such marital neglect, a trope repeated in film after film around the globe.

Yet in Maestro, Bernstein's wife Felicia is loved, accepted, and there —a type of representation that is rare in cinema.

The Maestro's open secret

Leonard Bernstein's bisexuality was an open secret during his marriage to Felicia Montealegre. He would flirt with men and women alike everywhere, from a large gathering at his apartment to a simple New York City street. "Can I tell you a secret? Do you know I've slept with both your parents," he says wryly to a baby being pushed along in a stroller.

His wife seems to accept his sexuality, as well as the larger-than-life spotlight he maintained. There is one scene where Felicia is talking to Leonard's sister, Shirley Bernstein (Sarah Silverman), who asserts that there is a "price" for being in her brother's orbit (i.e., that both his personality and his sexuality will never make it so he's just hers). Felicia claims to be unbothered by it, saying:

“I suppose I do understand what you mean. You know, it’s very strange, but I do believe there is that in everybody. One wishes to make adjustments to one’s self but having this imposition of a strong personality is like a way of death, really. Yet the moment I see that that is making him suffer, I realize that it’s not worth it. No, what for? It isn’t going to kill me, really, and if it’s going to give him pleasure or stop him from suffering and it’s in my power to do it, then what the hell, you know? But one has to do it completely without sacrifice. And if it is going to be a sacrifice, then I disappear.”

In other words, she wasn't going to make herself miserable for her husband's comfort and vice versa. Instead, she established boundaries and worked on her own career as well. As Carrie Mulligan says of her characterization to NPR:

“…she’s not going to do [the marriage] in a typical meek-woman-by-the-great-man manner. She’s not going to do it and begrudge him. She’s going to do it wholly because she refuses to be the kind of whingeing wife. And I think you see that in the film. And the moment that she actually can’t handle his narcissism or the focus on him or the way that he views the world, she jumps into a swimming pool.”

She doesn't sacrifice herself for her partner — at least not more than she can tolerate. They have, in other words, a partnership. There is both a frankness and a tenderness in how they talk with one another that is worlds away from Brokeback Mountain and Dance of the 41. When she doesn't like how Leonard is going about things, she tells him. "No, I just… nothing. I thought we were having a conversation," she says bluntly after Leonard tries to railroad through yet another important conversation.

This connection did not mean that their relationship was perfect — it was, of course, deeply flawed. Leonard had a habit of trying to "fix" (i.e., force) every conversation with his bombastic main character energy so that it went his way. Felicia was also mortified by Leonard's queerness getting out to the public. There is one heartbreaking scene where she insists on Leonard keeping his queerness a secret from their daughter, Jamie Bernstein (Maya Hawke), even though rumors about it abound. When he does lie to her about it, Jamie sounds relieved, the camera panning on the heartbreak on Leonard's face.

Yet the film also makes clear that, like Leonard, Felicia is navigating strict societal expectations. "And don't forget you are a man," she lectures Leonard on one of the reasons for his success, trying to bring the point home to the audience that the stakes are high for her, too. She also has a career in the entertainment world and does not want to be stigmatized by conservative America for her husband's sexuality.

However, even as this tension pushes against the foundation of their relationship, with them having long periods of separation and distancing, it does not fracture it. The two of them do reconcile eventually, and when Felicia's health starts to collapse from cancer, Leonard is there for her to the very end. There is no question whether the love is there, even if it's not always enough to keep them together for long, and that is a refreshing change from the "dead marriage" trope we see so often in queer cinema.

A ringing conclusion

With pop culture trends, it's intriguing to observe when a film comes along to highlight our collective gaps in representation. If mainstream cinema is to be believed, then the gay men of the past were confined to cold, loveless marriages that suffocated all parties involved. While these relationships did and do continue to happen (Fun Home was based on real events, after all), they have never been the only type to exist. There have always been partnerships where people manage to find happiness in less-than-ideal circumstances.

Maestro shows us an example of a queer man in a loving relationship with a heterosexual woman. It's a complicated and messy one, which makes for excellent cinema, but the tenderness is there, and that is sadly too rare in the media looking back on our queer past.

The Problem Was Never Burnout

Photo by Tangerine Newt on Unsplash

It's hard to talk about burnout because, in many ways, it's the conversation that will never die. I remember a viral article that was published in 2019 by then-Buzzfeed writer Anne Helen Petersen about Millennial burnout, titled How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. At least in my small circle, it became the talk of the town. "Have you read this article," the refrain went. And to this day, many of my friends still reference it.

This conversation on burnout has been part of the backdrop for my entire adult life. "4 Steps to Beating Burnout," goes the title of an article in the Harvard Business Review that ultimately suggests prioritizing self-care, shifting your perspective, and so forth. "Burnout isn't just exhaustion. Here's how to deal with it," runs the title of an article that tells you to be mindful of the signs of burnout and for your managers to do better.

We are all tired, and the supposed remedies for it are everywhere. Therapy has started to move from the realm of stigma to acceptance — though its actual usage remains in the domain of a wealthier, more privileged minority. Meditation has moved past being a fad to a lifestyle for many people, with even some businesses recommending it to keep their employees sane. If the advice I see around me is to be believed, I can "solve" the problem of burnout for myself.

Yet the framing of burnout as a problem has always bothered me because I see it as a distraction from the more prominent concern at hand: a society that keeps us exhausted.

The definition of burnout

Something I want to stress is that burnout is not a mental diagnosis — something that may confuse people since it is often referenced side by side with other mental health problems such as depression or anxiety. The World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon, meaning it's specifically related to circumstances surrounding your work (note — the DSM-V does not have an official diagnosis for it at all).

According to the ICD-11, burnout has three stated dimensions:

• feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;

• increased mental distance from one's job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and

• reduced professional efficacy.

This framing is important because, definitionally, it is not about the individual but their environment within the workplace. It is all about "chronic workplace stresses" that are not being "managed." The definition is explicitly not geared toward "experiences in other areas of life." Anne Helen Petersen talked about not being able to do basic tasks such as filling out personal forms, which many people do when they refer to burnout, but that would not fall within this definition at all.

And so, we meet several hurdles when we start picking apart what burnout is. Even when we focus on this narrow definition, it's not an individual problem. A worker may meditate or go to therapy, but that will only change how they perceive and process a bad situation at work. If a worker is "burnt out" because their workload is too much, their boss is abusive, or some other terrible combination, then they aren't really in a position to change it, short of just leaving (and even then, financial realities do not always make that option practical).

I remember my first "real" job. I was an executive assistant at a major conglomerate. It was not a good job. It mainly involved explaining how to troubleshoot to old men who didn't seem to know what they were doing. My direct boss would call me late into the evening to complain about her divorce (something she would not stop doing even when I asked her to), and the company itself was actively trying to squash a union — a practice I considered unethical.

Yet I "stuck it out" because the logic of perseverance had been drilled into me since birth. You do not quit your first job — you stay there for a year and let it become the foundation for the rest of your career. The job worsened as I obtained even more responsibilities, and my health deteriorated. I remember having to work during New Year's Eve to help with a big audit and texting a friend to complain, and he told me I was burning out and that I should meditate and breathe. I would continue doing that throughout my time at this job. I also went to therapy, gratitude journaled, and a host of other "solutions" that did not work because the job itself was bad. What I needed the most was to reduce my workload and get a new boss (and maybe collective representation), but of course, those solutions were never brought up to the people I confided in.

In the end, I didn't have the reserves to "willpower" through an environment that was actively harmful to my mental health, so I quit, but that's not an option everyone can just do — sometimes, there isn't an individual solution. You have a terrible job, and the abuse doesn't go away no matter how you frame it within your mind.

This reality is what makes treating burnout as an individual issue so damaging to the working class because it completely ignores the solutions that would help — i.e., reducing workload, increasing pay (without increasing said workload), changing management, collectively organizing, etc. — and only focuses on the end result — i.e., the worker being unproductive. It's essentially reclassifying abusive situations as some unique problem to the individual when what needs to change fundamentally is the working relationship. Many “burnt-out” workers don't need therapy (though some still might); they need a union.

The things that allegedly aren't burnout

And with this conversation, there is everything outside the occupational definition—people overwhelmed by everyday tasks like filling out forms and folding their laundry. We can call this exhaustion "burnout" if we want. Language, after all, is fluid and doesn't get to be decided by an official body, but I think that ignores the central problem, which is that our society is toxic. When we only focus on the byproduct of something as the problem —i.e., that our emotional reserves are constantly being depleted — I think it sidesteps discussion on the things doing the depleting.

Recently, I "burnt out" of the volunteer nonprofit the DSA (see Being A Part of Metro DC DSA Broke Me), and the number one thing that frustrated me about this whole process was how people treated it as an issue of mental health. The way people talked about my dissatisfaction was that I had assumed too much work and should take a break. However, my biggest problem was with the leadership of my Chapter, some of whom I considered pretty mean. Dealing with these leaders was the biggest source of my frustration and exhaustion. And yet, the conversation of burnout was routinely used, albeit well-intentioned, to reframe an issue of imbalanced power dynamics into an individual problem.

And I see this happening a lot where issues of abuse get exclusively narrowed to the realm of mental health. For example, one of the contributing factors to why small tasks are so exhausting is not just perception but that, societally speaking, we don't have as much time to do things, so even simple tasks can feel Herculean. I mean this quite literally. Americans spend more time working, less time eating, don't take as many breaks, and take less vacation time than a lot of their European counterparts. There are just fewer hours in the day to do what needs to be done and not feel exhausted.

Part of this is again a labor issue predicated by America's lack of unions and other protections, which has led to ultra-precarity. The number of total union members has plummeted to just 10% of the workforce in 2023, and we don't have any indication that that is reversing. It's no coincidence that trends such as wage stagnation correlate with this decline.

Yet this exhaustion is also just a component of neoliberal capitalism itself, which locks people into more difficult systems to navigate so that firms can extract further profit. Cory Doctorow has referred to this problem on digital platforms as "enshittification," saying:

“Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.”

Yet, while he used this term to talk about how online platforms manipulate incentives to lock a critical mass of users into them, this process is far more wide-reaching than that. We are constantly being locked into systems that harm us for others' benefit. Everything from our tax system to the nature of the law itself has been made more difficult, so we must fork over money to predatory institutions to deal with the problems they helped create. Seriously, when you have a chance, look into the history of the tax system. The tax industry has lobbied the government to purposefully make the tax system more confusing, so Americans must pay for services such as H&R Block and TurboTax to navigate it (see Do NOT Use TurboTax to File Your Taxes).

And since the only solution many of us are taught is to deal with our problems by "hustling through them," to sacrifice our emotional and psychological well-being for a chance at success, we don't have any good options to deal with systemic abuse. We are constantly trying to optimize ourselves to overcome our own precarity, even when the reality is that many of the circumstances contributing to said precarity are simply outside of our individual control. So, all we are doing is setting ourselves up to settle for a bad situation longer in the pursuit of future success that may never come. As Anne Helen Petersen writes of Millenials, but I believe can be extrapolated more broadly:

“To describe millennial burnout accurately is to acknowledge the multiplicity of our lived reality — that we’re not just high school graduates, or parents, or knowledge workers, but all of the above — while recognizing our status quo. We’re deeply in debt, working more hours and more jobs for less pay and less security, struggling to achieve the same standards of living as our parents, operating in psychological and physical precariousness, all while being told that if we just work harder, meritocracy will prevail, and we’ll begin thriving. The carrot dangling in front of us is the dream that the to-do list will end, or at least become far more manageable.”

Navigating inadequate systems on low time with a "hustler's mindset" is exhausting. I understand why people are "burnt out." How could managing toxic systems with little time, all while trying to get ahead of your own precarity, not drain you?

But if that is the case, it's not burnout that is the problem — that's a natural response to circumstances that are draining. The problem is the structural issues that have eaten away at our time. This distinction is important because the solutions for dealing with, say, emotional depletion are entirely different from the ones needed to deal with abusive institutions and systems. One requires a meditation app, and the other a match.

Burning burnout down

I think it's perfectly fine to express exhaustion with a bad situation. We should be allowed to communicate our emotions, and I don't want people to walk away with the message that we need to bury our feelings in the name of "fighting the good fight." But for the stressors that are outside of our individual control, and that's a lot of them, it's essential to call out the reasons for that exhaustion. If you only focus on managing the byproducts of a terrible situation — i.e., your exhaustion, increased cynicism, and reduced productivity — and never the causes for said byproducts (i.e., the people and institutions f@cking you over), then that's a dynamic that calls for your permanent marginalization.

Even in our own minds, we must be clear about where the blame lies because burnout is not the problem. Burnout is a natural outgrowth of dysfunction. The problem is that a lot of people's institutional relationships are actively abusive. People have no bargaining power, shit pay, and very little time to do anything outside of work and familial obligations. That's what needs to be worked on — f@ck your therapy apps.

While the frequently suggested solutions to burnout are therapy, meditation, and, most importantly, toughing it out and working on yourself, the solutions to imbalanced power dynamics require the opposite: for you to cause problems. If a workplace or other institutional relationship is abusive, leave it. If you can't, start trading salary information and ask about unionization. Start asking questions about people who have left and where they have gone. Start asking questions, even if only at a whisper, when your boss or leader has left the room.

Because when an organization or system robs you of your time and leaves you so exhausted that life starts to lose its color, don't fret about burnout — leave, organize, or f@ck shit up.

There Sure Is A Lot of Ecofascism In the MCU Recently

Image; Captured on Disney+ for The Marvels

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) used to have a villain problem. Phases one and two were frequently characterized by bland villains such as Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) in Thor: The Dark World or Alexander Goodwin Pierce (Robert Redford) in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, who wanted to conquer or destroy the world (or the universe) for often poorly defined reasons that failed to resonate or even really make much sense.

Starting in phase three, we got more multi-dimensional villains such as Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan) in Black Panther, who wanted to enact harm for emotionally poignant reasons that resonated with viewers. Stevens’ final line, “Just bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from the ships because they knew death was better than bondage,” still gets me when I think about it because there is a deep emotional core to his cruelty.

We are still in that age of emotionally resonant villains for the MCU, where the antagonist is often a fascist or disgruntled activist enacting violence for an understandable (if not still evil) reason. Recently, no other philosophical justification has taken center stage in the MCU as much as eco-fascism or the belief that you must preserve an environment for a narrow group’s benefit.

Fascists who love the environment (sort of)

The representation of fascism in media is something I have talked about quite extensively (see Andor Is One of the Few Disney Shows to Get Fascism Right). In a nutshell, it can be best described as a concentration of power, often by right-wing actors, using mythmaking and scapegoating to cement control over a population.

Eco-fascism is a subset of this dogma, where a supremacist group forms its identity around exclusive access to environmental resources. As Elaina Hancock writes for the University of Connecticut: “It is basically environmentalism that suggests that certain people are naturally and exclusively entitled to control and enjoy environmental resources. Some types of people, in other words, are ‘native species’ and others are ‘invasive.’”

This definition may have some viewers naturally go to Thanos (Josh Brolin), the space tyrant who used the Infinity Stones at the end of Phase Three to wipe out half of all sentient life in the galaxy. He held a neo-Maltheusian philosophy where all problems with our society (e.g., pollution, overconsumption, wealth inequality, etc.) were the direct result of overpopulation. And so by culling this “contagion,” he can save the rest of society — literally killing half the universe so it can be enjoyed by the other.

This viewpoint has been criticized frequently, not just Thanos's perspective, but the idea that overpopulation is responsible for our most pressing problems because, generally, it ignores the power dynamics at play. Some individuals are way more responsible for the decisions that lead to systemic problems such as wealth inequality and climate change, and randomization is unlikely to solve that problem because it ignores who is responsible for them. As Hancock further adds:

“These arguments about population are often implicitly about how the speaker doesn’t want to acknowledge the economic arrangements that benefit them while contributing to rapid ecological changes, leading them to demonize the people who do and will continue to suffer the most from those changes (and have also, generally speaking, contributed the least to the problem).”

However, even if this viewpoint held by Thanos is bogus, it's a logic that has resonated with many people (including Avatar Director James Cameron). The phrase “Thanos was Right” became a common rallying call on the Internet, with many writing annoying reviews trying to defend the claim.

Thanos is not the only example of eco-fascism within the MCU either. The movie The Eternals was also about an authoritarian and arguably ecofascist empire — though you do not learn this fact till the middle of the film. Our protagonists, the eponymous Eternals, are unknowingly preparing Earth to be a birthing ground for one of their overlord’s young, a celestial named Tiamut. The Eternals have been “conserving” and “protecting” Earth’s environment, but only so it can be used for their overlord's benefit. The people of Earth, who in this context are a necessary component of the celestial birth, are nothing more than crops that must be harvested so the more “superior” being, Tiamut, can survive.

We can also look at The Marvels, where the main villain, the Kree warlord Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), is literally tearing holes in space and time so she can steal resources from other planets. Following the film Captain Marvel, hero Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) destroyed the Kree’s authoritarian Supreme Intelligence, spurring a brutal Civil War that ruined the environment of their Homeworld, Hala. Dar-Benn is now stealing the atmosphere, oceans, and in one instance, the sun of former Kree colonies so that her people can benefit, literally protecting her people's environment at the expense of numerous others.

There is even a wonderful ecological metaphor where the explosion of jump points (the MCU’s name for FTL) is compared to the ecologically damaging practice of hydraulic fracking — where a compound of liquids is pumped underground to push out fossil fuels. More specifically, how fracking can result in earthquakes, or in this case, destabilization to space-time. The Marvels beautifully makes the case that while ecofascism may claim to be preserving one people's environment, it often does so at the expense of the entire system’s ecology.

If we want to expand our definition of ecology to include the stability of space-time, we can likewise look at the character Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), who has so far appeared in both the TV series Loki and the movie Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Kang is perhaps the most narcissistic ecofascist we have seen so far. Each Kang we have met is a highly advanced, militaristic genius who perceives the other Kangs as a threat, an invasive species that must be removed.

The Kang in Loki has built an entire organization (i.e., the TVA) devoted to eliminating other timelines in an effort to stop other versions of himself. Specifically, he has constructed a temporal Loom that deletes all other timelines as needed (see Loki Season 2 & The Dismantling of Fascism). The rest of sentient life doesn’t even factor into the equation. We are weeds that can and do get pruned in the process.

An eco conclusion

Starting with Thanos at the end of the Infinity Saga, we have seen the emergence of eco-fascists in the MCU, who are destroying people, environments, and, in some cases, entire timelines to preserve their preferred ecosystem. This type of theme makes sense when you consider just how impactful climate change has been on all of our collective psyches. It’s the problem we all know is coming (and truthfully has already arrived), and that anxiety has and will continue to inevitably make its way into pop culture.

If you recognize that the environment must be preserved, it makes sense to imagine how that impulse can be twisted to benefit authoritarians in power. It’s a fascinating idea for fiction and one that is quite relatable. The plans of these villains, while utterly fantastical, are motivated by a desire to protect a chosen people from harm at the expense of others, and that is something you don’t have to examine too hard to understand how it can emerge in the real world.

All in all, there sure have been a lot of eco-fascists in the MCU recently, and with ecological instability on the rise, it seems unlikely that this theme will be going away anytime soon.

Decoding Pop Culture Battles: Navigating the Clash Between Canon and Kayfabe

Source: Death Battle YouTube Channel; Rooster Teeth Network

There is an exciting phenomenon you see on the Internet: pop culture battles, where two fictional characters from different narrative universes, like Superman and Goku, are pitted against each other. Sometimes, they are more comedic, such as The Joker and Pennywise facing off in Epic Rap Battles of History. Other times, they are raw 1v1s like the channel Death Battle, where two characters fight to, well, the death.

These videos are fascinating because they are a very brand-centric way to tell a story. Rather than storytelling being an activity where anything can happen, in these videos, it is often depicted to be more like physics or history, where fictional narratives are treated as living records that one must simply decode — and in the case of death battles, where one winner is inevitable.

When canon is real-ish

I want to really highlight how peculiar this activity is — not because nerd stuff is weird or I dislike character-driven mashups (I love all of these things), but because of how these videos are often framed — i.e., with a "correct" answer. A channel like Death Battle will present its arguments and facts for why its character has triumphed, and it's usually a mini-thesis, where in their own cheeky words, "they've' run the data through all possibilities."

Yet, I want to step back and focus on what these channels' creators are doing here. They are telling a story where characters from one narrative universe suddenly exist within another. There is nothing wrong with this whatsoever. Fictional retellings and reimaginings are the bread and butter of many stories, and pretending to be documenting a "real" history is a solid storytelling conceit. However, we must still acknowledge that what is being done here is storytelling rather than an exact science. The creators of Death Battle can make any character "win" because stories are not confined to the rules that came before them. Superman beats Goku or vice versa because that's the reality these storytellers have decided upon.

However, often, these creators are still combing through comics, movies, books, video games, and more to make these arguments, measuring the accomplishments of these various characters like they are real people. Superman or Courage the Cowardly Dog does a feat in one of these mediums, and that is treated as a reference point to prove how fast and tough these characters really are.

Take the channel's death battle between Darth Vader and Obito Uchiha, characters from the properties Star Wars and Naruto, respectively. The creators reference how a droid in one book tries to kill Darth Vader with a laser gun firing just under three hundred thousand kilometers per second and how he easily blocks it. That feat of perception and reflexes becomes the upper limit for his ability simply because an earlier text claimed it was so.

There are limitations to this approach. One is that these brands are not the work of a single creator and often have inconsistencies as a result. Vader's perception varies dramatically from story to story and that's the case with nearly all fictional brands. As a Trekkie, I will frequently see lore content creators spend a lot of time stitching together disparate stories that were never really meant to be viewed together in that way. And so when you try to treat these works as "historical" references, you quickly come across the reality that they do not always mesh well. As the handle Andrew Plotkin writes in their article, Canon is kayfabe for writers:

“It’s kayfabe! It’s exactly kayfabe. The writers are selling us a meta-story that their story conforms to a great and glorious master plan, a beautiful aperiodic crystal of harmony. And we pretend to buy it — even though we know the writers are making it up as they go. They’ve been making it up as they go for sixty years. (For the DC and Marvel (multi-)verses(-es), even longer.) We know perfectly well that the story will change the next time someone has a better idea, and we’re fine with that. But we are united in the pretense.”

When we look at pop culture battles and, to an extent, all lore theorists, what we are really seeing is an exercise in Intellectual Property synthesis, where fans are engaging in that collective kayfabe (i.e., a wrestling term for the fake authenticity of a staged performance) trying to pretend that they can stitch all of these different works into one cohesive reality. While that can be a fun and entertaining exercise, it's still a performance — a type of storytelling constrained by Intellectual Property law itself because the only thing genuinely uniting all of these stories is that one entity owns them all and has decided they belong together. Often, there is no real intentionality connecting these stories other than, again, ownership.

The creators of Death Battle are not combing through fanfiction and other unauthorized stories to make these comparisons. They are looking at "canon" works that the holders of these brands, companies such as Disney, have deemed valid. There are millions of Star Wars stories, after all, but only a couple hundred of them are considered legitimate, and that's what the emphasis is on when creators such as Death Battle examine the feats of "fictional" characters. It's a fascinating practice that says a lot about how many of us now perceive stories in our society, not as a fluid collection of works that can be radically retold and reconceived, but at least, in theory, as rigid histories whose legitimacy is contingent on the entity that owns them.

This, of course, is not how storytelling truly works. You can't stop people from reimagining, recontextualizing, and retelling existing characters. I mentioned the millions of fanfiction stories out there, but we can also look at breaks in canon where companies try to delegitimize existing stories only for fans to reject such a move. A famous example is Star Wars, where a lot of stories set after the 1983 movie Return of the Jedi, collectively called the Expanded Universe (referred to now as Star Wars Legends), were suddenly decanonized following Disney's acquisition of LucasFilms in 2012. It was a move not well-liked by many fans then, and many are still bitter about it.

The video essayist Jared Bauer, using the framework of philosopher Jürgen Habermas, referred to this backlash as a "legitimization crisis" akin to the Protestant Reformation, where suddenly, fans of Star Wars were questioning the decisions of the brand's IP holder, when it came to how to best interpret it. It may seem strange to compare disagreements over a brand's direction to a schism in a religion, but I assure you that people can get quite devoted to the brands they follow. As one user responded to one of my pieces:

“I have no church. I worship no gods. Fiction is my religion. Stories are my scripture. Character development is my holy communion. It’s not just entertainment for me. It’s something sacred.”

However, instead of the printing press giving more adherents of Christianity access to the bible, Bauer argued, it was because modern technology like the Internet had collapsed the difference between consumers and producers, turning all of us into what philosophers Alvin & Heidi Hoffler called "prosumers." We are all now active makers of meaning with media, and so when a company tries to push against the common consensus, it can lead to a schism. As Bauer says:

“Star Wars fans are not just consumers of this canon. They have helped make the meaning of the Star Wars universe. Like the Catholic Church, Disney now faces the wrath of the educated masses. Except now the problem isn't just that people can read: they blog, tweet, make video essays, produce their own cartoons, and stream content to millions of viewers…the age of the prosumer allows people to criticize the few anointed successors of Lucas.”

To this day, when I see content creators making a "historical" analysis of Star Wars, many still draw upon Legends sources and, in the process, refute the official Disney "canon." In fact, we do not have to stray from the channel Death Battle to see this happen. That example we brought up early of Vader blocking a high-speed laser comes from the book Coruscant Nights II: Streets of Shadows, a Star Wars Legends book outside of the current canon.

Clearly, there is tension with this form of storytelling, as what is considered a "legitimate" source is not as stable as many believe. Even with a creator or "prosumer" like Death Battle, who generally tries to treat the canon of such brands as gospel, we see the kayfabe inevitability break.

A deadly conclusion

The phenomenon of pop culture battles unveils a fascinating intersection between storytelling, brand loyalty, and the fluidity of narrative interpretation. These battles, whether lighthearted or intense, reflect a deeply ingrained desire among fans to engage with beloved characters in novel ways.

However, beneath the surface, they also reveal a complex interplay between canon and kayfabe — i.e., the accepted truth of a fictional universe versus the staged authenticity perpetuated by its creators. While channels like Death Battle may present their matchups as definitive showdowns with a "correct" outcome, it's crucial to recognize that these narratives are not only constructed, but constructed within the constraints of intellectual property laws and the whims of corporate ownership.

Moreover, the tension between canon and kayfabe underscores a broader shift in storytelling dynamics, where fans no longer passively consume narratives but actively participate in their creation and interpretation. The democratization of media through modern technology has empowered individuals to challenge established canon, question the authority of brand owners, and assert their own interpretations of beloved stories.

Ultimately, pop culture battles serve as a microcosm of our evolving relationship with storytelling — a testament to the enduring power of fictional universes to inspire passion, spark debate, and unite communities. As fans continue to navigate the ever-shifting landscape of canon, they not only celebrate the characters they love but also contribute to the ongoing evolution of storytelling in the digital age — one death battle at a time.

When It Comes To Abortion, Humanity Is Stripped Away Until Only A Womb Is Left

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

In the forced-birth debate, by which I mean the argument over whether people must be mandated to give birth once they are pregnant, we spend a lot of time arguing over the humanity of the clump of cells that eventually become a baby. "At the moment of fertilization, an unborn baby possesses all the DNA-coded information it needs to be a totally separate person," lectures the forced-birth nonprofit Choices.

I find arguing this point tedious because trying to find the moment where a clump of cells becomes a person is an entirely arbitrary process with far more wide-reaching conclusions than the typical forced birther even cares about. This argument about DNA literally applies to all organisms with DNA. Suppose you think that we can pinpoint the exact nature of sentience in the gradation from zygote to embryo, to fetus, etc., and believe that such life deserves protection. In that case, I have bad news for you about the animals we eat, the plants we mow down, and the microbiome in your gut because, depending on the stage of development, a lot of that life is equally as complex.

While these philosophical conversations can be interesting, organizations like Choices don't give a flying f@ck about them. Their arguments are usually more teleological — i.e., that such life is destined to become sentient, or if we are being religious, it has a soul and, therefore, must be protected from harm.

It's an argument that values the idea of a child over a sentient person in the here and now. And even if we take this logic seriously and concede the argument of the zygote, embryo, fetus, etc., being considered a person, we still find that this rhetoric is fundamentally dehumanizing to the pregnant person involved. The starting assumption that the autonomy of a pregnant person must be sacrificed for another being goes against foundational principles of human liberty and freedom and ultimately conceives pregnant people as wombs, not people.

Let's concede the argument

The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson highlighted this tension in her thought experiment about the unconscious violinist, where she literalized the argument by turning that dependent person into an adult (see her 1971 piece, A Defense of Abortion). You awake to find that you have been hooked up against your will by the Society of Music Lovers to an injured, unconscious violinist because you, and you alone, have the right blood type. You are now plugged into his circulatory system and cannot be unplugged for another nine months. As Thomson asks:

“Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. “Tough luck. I agree. but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him. I imagine you would regard this as outrageous.”

Pro forced-birth conservatives have struggled with this thought experiment. It's not that conservatives have not tried to refute the "unconscious violinist" argument. It is one of the most debated ethicist papers in the last fifty years, but their counters almost always rely on appeals to nature and authority that ignore the central claim in this thought experiment — i.e., that the right to life allows you to make unjust claims on other people.

For example, a typical counter is that the woman created the child (i.e., became pregnant), so she must take care of said child — i.e., that the person's "natural" function as an incubator means they owe the child said incubation. As forced-birth philosopher Trent Horn writes: "Since children are helpless, their well-being is possible only if adults — making sacrifices if necessary — ensure it. This should be no different for unborn children, created in a consensual act designed to bring about their existence, who have a right to live in the wombs of their mothers, which are naturally designed to accommodate them."

However, Horn's example about communal norms is almost a non sequitur. Parents aren't forced to raise the children they have, even if it's a great kindness to do so, and it can be gratifying. Parents give up their children all the time. That's what makes the act of adoption possible. Further, suppose a parent does a lousy job of childrearing. In that case, the community ultimately doesn't force said parent or parents to raise those children indefinitely, but rather, they take the children away and give them to another family unit. Horn's imposing a mandate that doesn't exist in most areas of our society: one that undervalues pregnant people as mere wombs because, according to him, nature and society say so.

Additionally, his argument doesn't deal with the autonomy point at all. Let's amend the unconscious violinist example and say that you initially agreed to the plan to hook yourself up to them but now want to back out. It doesn't change the fact that your body has been attached to the violinist for nine months. You may have agreed to such a thing out of kindness, but that is not something they are owed. If everything your past self committed to about your own body couldn't be challenged by your future self, then you would likewise not be able to back out of sexual intercourse, leave a job, or end a marriage. Autonomy means doing things to your body as you see fit, at any time.

The other main conservative counter to the unconscious violinist argument is equally unconvincing, believing there is some meaningful distinction in this case between killing someone through direct action or passivity. The argument is that there is somehow a difference between purposefully killing something (i.e., how forced birthers conceive abortion) and just passively "letting it die" (i.e., watching the violinist's organs fail). This is a philosophical distinction that is not settled. Whether letting someone die through inaction absolves someone of responsibility is hotly debated in philosophy.

It also ignores the issue at hand — i.e., the bodily autonomy of the person attached to the violinist. Let's say that you don't have to simply unhook the unconscious violinist but physically separate them from your body. You have to tear the stitching out in a way that causes them to bleed out, killing them in the same way that forced birthers claim abortionists are killing "children." Again, it doesn't change that it's your body the unconscious violinist is dependent on, even if this situation is now emotionally more difficult. Likewise, the experiment doesn't change if the unconscious violinist is now your spouse, mother, or child. In what way is that person owed your very flesh? As Thomson writes:

“…certainly the violinist has no right against you that you shall allow him to continue to use your kidneys. As I said, if you do allow him to use them, it is a kindness on your part, and not something you owe him.”

In claiming that a fetus is owed a womb, what forced-birthers are asking us to do, philosophically, is to create a hierarchy between a sentient person and a clump of cells inside said person, with the latter being positioned above the prior. And if we are engaging in this hierarchy, then it is my sincere belief that the pregnant person's life is higher within it. It's their body this other organism is reliant upon, and I don't believe we should subjugate an entire class of people (i.e., women and other pregnant persons) on the grounds of this other organism's theoretical prosperity.

The logic of forced birth leads to a situation where you are valuing the life of the pregnant person less (who is, again, the sentient organism in this equation). We are seeing this fact play out in real-time with these emerging forced-birth and anti-abortion laws across the country, where the health of pregnant people is increasingly compromised to preserve the future health of the child. In one chilling example in Texas, a woman's terminal fetus could not be aborted because it still had a heartbeat. The woman in question developed sepsis from having to bring the child to term. Her uterus was scarred from the infection, hindering her ability to give birth in the future, and she almost died.

As forced birth laws solidify across this country, these examples are increasingly more common. The heartbeat law we mentioned has been challenged in a lawsuit with over a dozen women who have been likewise denied similar care. Whether we are looking at a woman in Louisiana who was forced to give birth to a baby without a skull or, in Florida, where another woman was forced to go home to give birth to a fetus that would not survive, and she almost bled out from complications, these incidents show us the disposability of pregnant people under this hierarchy.

Even in the most charitable situations where you concede the "is it a baby or fetus” argument, we see how this logic devalues pregnant people on a fundamental level.

People, not wombs

Ultimately, I don't think a lot of pro-life or forced-birth conservatives want to acknowledge these arguments because they don't seem to care about the bodily autonomy of women and other pregnant people. The "child's" life, or at least the idea of a child, always seems to matter more — logic that is rooted in the subjugation of wombs. Politicians and philosophers alike have been pretty consistent in their stated beliefs that pregnant people must sacrifice their bodies for the development of the fetus.

However, if forced-birth conservatives respected pregnant people as people and not just wombs, they wouldn't constantly be asserting that they must sacrifice their bodies for others, but that would require empathy. It would require saying, "Hey, even if other people suffer, you shouldn't have to automatically give yourself over to another person because you are entitled to agency as a human being."

At the core of the forced-birthers belief system is rhetoric that dehumanizes pregnant people. A worldview that doesn't see them as people but as wombs that must carry the fetus through its development to the very end.