In 1973 the organization 9 to 5 was founded as a national association of women office workers advocating for their rights. Organizing women against workplace discrimination and harassment, 9 to 5 brought a new generation of white-collar women workers into the labor movement, and remains one of the largest organizations of women workers in the United States. Their experiences inspired the 1980 film 9 to 5, starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton. Now, almost half a century since 9 to 5’s beginnings, founder Ellen Cassedy joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss her new memoir, Working 9 to 5: A Women’s Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie.
Ellen Cassedy was a founder and longtime leader of 9 to 5, the national association of women office workers. Working 9 to 5 is her first-person account of this exciting movement, which began in the early 1970s, mobilizing women across the country to organize for rights and respect on the job. Ellen is also the award-winning author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust.
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As a country founded on the violence of racial slavery and genocide, the United States has yet to overcome its historical dependence on the ideology of white supremacy. In his new memoir, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness, author Baynard Woods reflects on the influence of racism and the meaning of ‘whiteness’ through the lens of his own life. Born and raised in post-Jim Crow South Carolina, Woods assumed he had left the prejudices of his home behind when he left the South—until he was accused of discriminating against a Black student at the university he taught at. The experience propelled Woods on a journey to investigate his own roots, leading to the revelation that his own family had claimed ownership of more than 700 human beings in the 19th century. On this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Woods discusses his new memoir and the ways white supremacy survives intergenerationally, often hiding in plain sight from those who benefit from it most.
Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Monday on TRNN, and subscribe to the TRNN YouTube channel for video versions of The Marc Steiner Show podcast.
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Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s great to have you all with us.
Whiteness and the power of it. Racism, the insidious power that defines this country. And in our society, it seems to permeate everything. But what happens when you wrestle with that on a personal level? When you know your family not only were enslavers, but took part in lynchings, and who were power brokers who instituted segregation in the wake of Reconstruction’s demise in the uncertain future after the end of slavery. Well, my friend and colleague Baynard Woods did just that in his new book Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness. He grew up in South Carolina. He’s a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications, and co-wrote with Brandon Soderberg the book I Got A Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad. And he joins us now to talk about his book Inheritance. Baynard, welcome, good to have you with us.
Baynard Woods: Great to be here, and great to be back. You left out that I also worked at The Real News in the past.
Marc Steiner: Did I leave that out? You worked at The Real News? I’m just kidding.
Baynard Woods: Yeah, but it’s great to be back in here.
Marc Steiner: It’s good to have you here.
Baynard Woods: Yeah.
Marc Steiner: So let’s begin with the obvious question everybody asks about your cover.
Baynard Woods: Well, yeah. So I cross out my byline on the front of the book, and then throughout the book on the top of the page, and whenever I have control over it, because I’d been writing for a long time and realized in reporting this that my name stood above every story that I ever wrote like a Confederate monument. I’m reporting on Black Lives Matter and here is a Confederate monument above it. The Baynard family in 1860 believed that they owned about 700 something people, the Woods family also believed that they owned people at that time. And this goes back for hundreds and hundreds of years with both of those families, and then with other really shameful history that we’ll get into after that. And so I thought, there’s no way that I can continue to use that name like that. On the other hand, it’s my name, and I didn’t feel I could change it without continuing the cover up that made me be unaware of it anyway.
It would be like going in disguise and sneaking out of town. So instead, what I did was I crossed it out as something like crime scene tape, to draw a line around it as full disclosure of the crimes involved in the name and the way that they may have infected me. And I also did it using the tools of French deconstruction. They have a technique called, putting a word under erasure, or sous rature, where they cross it out like that. And it says that it’s a necessary word, but it is inadequate to deal with what it’s trying to deal with. Being, for instance, a word can’t capture that, so they cross through it. And so I wanted to put that in at the ends of American Reconstruction and how we can try to create a multiracial democracy out of this white supremacist, oligarchical country we have.
Marc Steiner: It is a slight digression, but I was really thinking about this this morning again as I was going through the book again and taking some notes again. We talk about racism in America a lot, some of us do anyway, and really wrestle with that. But the term and the notion of whiteness seems to have grabbed especially your generation and generations that came after the Civil Rights Movement, to wrestle with this notion of whiteness. Well, why do you think that is? What do you think that means?
Baynard Woods: Yeah, it’s a fascinating question and I think… So in your generation, my parents grew up in South Carolina, about the same age, and every door they walked in in a public space said “white” or “whites only”.
Marc Steiner: Right.
Baynard Woods: And then right about the time I was born, after the Civil Rights Act, those signs were gone, and so they said, we just don’t talk about that anymore. That’s just not something we’re going to say. And then you have people like Donald Trump saying, I don’t have a racist bone in my body. And so instead of having Bull Connor and George Wallace saying, segregation now, segregation forever. You have people saying, oh, I’m not racist, while still enacting racist policies. So saying racist allows someone to say, I’m not racist.
Marc Steiner: It was just like that woman that you talk about in the book. You went to this, maybe it was NASCAR, it was a rally, I forget which exact moment. When she was clearly a racist and showed you this picture of her Black grandchild, right?
Baynard Woods: It was at the Tea Party rally.
Marc Steiner: Tea Party rally, that’s where it was. Right.
Baynard Woods: Where a bunch of people almost assaulting an interracial couple sitting there with a sign that said, outlaw white supremacy. And then, yeah, she was very intent on showing me that she had a Black granddaughter and that meant she wasn’t racist. But the thing is whiteness was only invented as white supremacy. There’s never been a notion of whiteness separate from white supremacy. So if we talk about whiteness, you don’t have Donald Trump saying, I don’t have a white bone in my body.
Racism isn’t just a thing that happens when you’re a Bull Connor or a Klansman being actively and openly and intentionally racist. It’s a larger conspiracy that structures our entire society. And so in order for me to figure out the ways in which I am racist, then I had to figure out the way that whiteness worked in me. I think Kwame Ture had that line that, when you look at a Black man, you see a Black man. When you look at a white man, you see the army and the navy and all this behind him. And so I wanted to see how that army and navy had its tentacles in my own thinking.
Marc Steiner: And for folks who are not sure who Kwame Ture is, he used to be Stokely Carmichael then he changed his name to Kwame Ture.
Baynard Woods: Since we’re talking about changing names and stuff.
Marc Steiner: Yes.
Baynard Woods: I had to go with the rather most to the name.
Marc Steiner: Yeah, absolutely. Just wanted folks to know who you were talking about to be clear, because many folks don’t know.
So I’m going to read a few things in this book as we go through this and this kind of fits what you were just saying. You wrote earlier in the book, “I’d come to see whiteness—the system of power governing Mom and Dad’s idea of success—as a way to cheat, a false criterion of value. But whiteness is also a lie we tell ourselves to save face when we have failed. Whiteness is the willingness to replace reality with a myth in order to protect our perceived worth.” Each piece of this book was fascinating to me because at the end of almost every chapter there’s a different aspect of you struggling with this notion of whiteness. It’s your progression and figuring out who I am as a human being, and why do I think this way, and what does this legacy of the Confederacy and slavery and what my family did over these hundreds of years really mean?
Baynard Woods: Yeah. And for most of my life I didn’t have to think about it in terms of race or whiteness. I think the first one of those that ends at the first chapter is, “For most of my life, whiteness was the freedom not to think about race”. And only in rare instances you would feel, oh, I’m white, I’m different than people around me or whatever, and then almost immediately we’d be able to go back into the not thinking of it. And that’s, again, why I wanted to use the word whiteness rather than racism, is that we’re so uncomfortable to talk about our own whiteness. And even white people who are progressive can talk about, oh, those Trumpists and stuff are racist, but not us.
Marc Steiner: No.
Baynard Woods: It’s only in down South, and it’s only people whose family were here in the Civil War and it’s only… But thinking about the way that we become so uncomfortable every time we have to think about it was just on display every day with the backlash to 1619 Project, the backlash to critical race theory. Forever when we had Black history month, you always had some white jerk in prospect, well, when are we going to have white history month?
Marc Steiner: Right.
Baynard Woods: And what ends up happening, we have white history and they immediately outlaw it, because what we actually don’t want is white history month. We do want white mythology month, but that’s every month in America. So what we end up with is outlawing talking about whiteness at all.
Marc Steiner: So let’s talk in a broader frame about this one question we’re going to get into a little bit more detail. You are wrestling with your shift in consciousness, all the forms it took, especially you. I mean, I didn’t mean you necessarily, Baynard Woods. But especially you, Baynard Woods, because you grew up in South Carolina, because you have this family history. I mean the legacy of I. M. Woods, your great-grandfather, permeates the book. Even when his name’s not mentioned, you feel him throughout the entire book. And what that is like, I mean, because we’re both white, but we come at this from very different places. So talk a bit about that. How difficult it was and what it meant for this opening to happen in its own way, slowly but profoundly.
Baynard Woods: Yeah. Now when I think back on it, it’s such a strange world to grow up in. So I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, or right outside of Columbia, South Carolina, in the ’70s and ’80s. And I heard far more about the Civil War than Civil Rights, which had been very recent, but all of the talk now, I think, about the Civil War was very much of what was code about Civil Rights. And we never talked about race when we talked about it, the enemy was the Yankees. And so that had this sort of thing of people migrating to the South from the North also, and all the Yankees came here and ruined everything, but also like, oh, they ruined everything in the 1860s. They ruined everything again in the 1960s, states’ rights, the Confederate flag flapped above the state capital. There are these gold stars on its dome showing where Sherman’s cannonballs hit it.
And one of my earliest memories is my mom telling me, I was there with her as a kid, feeding the squirrels and whatever. And there’s a statue of George Washington in front of the statehouse and it’s holding a cane, and the cane is broken. And my mom told me, well, the Yankees who came, they hated freedom so much that they stoned the father of our country. And I realized that she was getting that from the plaque, as I later learned, that was on the plinth of the statue, and it’s completely false. The cane was broken moving the statue, just a complete lie. And so you have that going on mixed with this weird counter-cultural thing with my favorite shows, The Dukes of Hazzard and Smokey and the Bandit, where you see this counter-cultural distrust of authority being merged and melded with rebellion of the Confederacy.
And so the rebel flag marking rebellion of the dope smoking variety or whatever. Also, our moonshine running or whatever. And so it was a really weird false world, mythological world, that they tried to bring me up in. And yet my dad was also the biggest company man you could imagine, and the biggest proponent of the system in America, and you have to work hard, and it will pay you off. And so it was just full of contradictions
Marc Steiner: Well, let’s go through some of these. I mean, let me find this analogy here, which I really liked a lot.
Baynard Woods: Maybe while you look, because I didn’t quite answer the question in the full past of my family. So there was never a time that I didn’t know that my family were enslavers. I always knew that. But much of my life, I didn’t know what that meant and how utterly horrendous and totalitarian and truly evil that was. And yeah, that was something that’s been a really… The real discovery was having to think through – And I think we all are still needing to do this – What that meant for the white people who felt like they somehow deserved to own people, and that in order to do that they were willing to use any means necessary: extreme, extreme force, extreme control, extreme surveillance. And all of that I didn’t know while being talked to about the Civil War and the Antebellum period and all of that stuff all the time.
Marc Steiner: So this might be a good time, since I mentioned his name earlier, and what you just said, to bring in your great-grandfather. Let’s talk a bit about him before I go back into reading from the book. I. M. Woods, and the legacy he left, and who he was, and why he played such a powerful role in the psyche of your family and yours.
Baynard Woods: Yeah. So my great-grandfather was named Irvin McSwain Woods, I. M. Woods, and he’s so fascinating to me because he was born in 1842.
Marc Steiner: 18. You said 1942?
Baynard Woods: 1842.
Marc Steiner: 1842. It’s okay.
Baynard Woods: 1842, and he turned 18 the year the war started. He had a chance to change. He had an ability to see differently. It wasn’t even a generation, two generations before living in some small isolated place. You could maybe make more of an argument, he was a man of his time, and that kind of stuff. But this guy, the times were a-changing and he could have done any number of things as people did, scalawags in the South who supported… But instead he went and fought for the Confederacy. He came back, became a Klansman terrorist. Was involved in the assassination of a Black county commissioner named Peter Lemon in 1871. Had to flee the state of South Carolina and hide out for a while, came back and was elected to the state legislature, and helped pass Jim Crow laws, was in the legislature for a while. And the laws that created the Jim Crow system and segregation.
And so I was taught to revere him like, oh, you had family who fought in this big historic event. He was wounded at Gettysburg. He was a legislator. There’s a plaque to him in a courthouse. And there was nothing more complicated that was shared with me about what his legacy was. And until I was 25 and my dad told me, oh, well, he ran away and had to hide out for a while because he killed a Black man. And that’s the only details he had. And so for me then, I had a mystery story that was I knew the culprit, and I didn’t know the victim. And it became important for me to find out who he had killed, partly because the mask crimes of enslavement were so vast that I didn’t know how to get my head around it.
The way that enslaving families would marry enslaving families back and back and my family came in the 1600, so thousands and thousands of people. And then after that, the mass harm of Jim Crow in South Carolina and the generations of that. So this one brief period, during the Reconstruction period, these acts that he did were considered crimes. And in the period before and after, they weren’t considered crimes. And so by focusing on the crime of that period, I hoped it would help me find a way into the greater miasma of criminality that created their entire lives.
Marc Steiner: I think that you’re wrestling with that, the journey you took in this. It’s amazing and it blew my mind to read it, because at the end of each chapter, the way you bring it to a place where, this is what I have to wrestle with, this is what we have to wrestle with. You have this great thing in here when you are… The woman you were with, I guess, before you met the incredible Nicole, who is your wife, also from South Carolina, and it takes place in a strip club. And you said, I’ll just read this piece I’m talking about, all right?
Baynard Woods: Sure.
Marc Steiner: “Me and Candy, a white girl, and Syreeta, who, you know, is Black, were talking at work one night. Candy said her parents weren’t racist, because her mom had been raised by a Black woman, Blake,” who was your girlfriend then, “said. Syreeta laughed so hard she spit out her drink. ‘Your mama is just like the men who come in here and believe we love them.’ I laughed, but I recognized something I’d not noticed before, something about how the strip club worked. The men who went in there weren’t paying for a naked body, they were paying for a flattering fantasy. They wanted to believe the woman would want to spend time with them even if they hadn’t been working as strippers. It reminded me of my Grandmother Woods’s illusion that Africans were happy to have been enslaved; she’d tell me how lucky they were to have been brought to America and how much they loved Ole Marse. The fantasy of love in this sort of racism is not incidental, it is an essential feature. If we can tell ourselves that the people we oppress love us and are happy about it, then we can justify that oppression.” I mean, the idea of taking a strip club and making and showing the analogy between oppression of women and a strip club and that of Black folks in America was really interesting. And as you answer that, talk about that, talk about when you really came to that realization.
Baynard Woods: Man, I guess I came to the realization in that moment of when I first heard the story. But as with so many things in this book, you have a brief realization, and then the way whiteness works, like a tide, it washes it away quickly. And so you’re no longer aware because my own sexism and racism and stuff was what I’d been raised in and felt safer than something other than that. But it did really strike me. My mother always would tell me stories about having been raised by a woman named Slim. And her mother was generally a very pretty cold person, and I started to realize that my grandmother outsourced the love of her children to this Black woman. But my mom then gained something else through that. That was also part of what I think my grandparents were paying for, this sense that like, oh, well I understand Black people and things weren’t hard for them then, really, Slim told me that.
And it’s like, well, they weren’t in a position to tell you the truth. How many employees tell their boss how much they hate the job? Why was “Take This Job and Shove it” such a big hit? Because everyone wants to tell their boss to go to hell. And it’s the same in that situation, but the power dynamics were even so much different and so much worse. I mean, things that we don’t think about in that period. My mom would say, in Greenville, when they tried to make Slim go to the back of the bus I insisted on going with her, but she wouldn’t let me because it would make it worse for her. And it’s not like I don’t believe her with that, but I think she had no way to have an accurate view of what was happening.
And I think they’ve blocked out. I asked her, there was a TV movie last time I saw her about Emmett Till. And so I asked her and my mother-in-law, so what do y’all remember about this? Oh, nothing, absolutely nothing at all. And I do find that hard to believe, but I feel like they block it out because they don’t want to see it or they didn’t have to see it. That every person of color would have to step off of the sidewalk to let a white person pass in their town. I think they didn’t even notice that.
Marc Steiner: Of course not.
Baynard Woods: Unless someone didn’t, and then they’d noticed it.
Marc Steiner: Then they’d noticed it. Right.
Baynard Woods: But as long as it happened according to the way it was supposed to happen, they didn’t notice it. And similarly, so for instance, I was living off of Blake in that situation, she was paying me the money she was making. I got to go off and be a romantic Percy Shelly writer or whatever while she was a better writer than I, and she was working, and it was really in my interest to not think too deeply about the dynamics of that situation.
Marc Steiner: But you have thought about it now, obviously.
Baynard Woods: Yeah. Certainly.
Marc Steiner: It’s in the book. There’s so much here, and it is really difficult sometimes to [figure out] what to read. I could read the whole book, but then you wouldn’t read it yourself, which you need to do, people who are watching and listening to this. But I was thinking about how these legacies symbolically never leave us. And I thought about it in terms of the ring that I see on Nicole’s hand all the time and realizing when you wrote about this ring, the legacy of that ring, how the engagement ring itself is wrapped up in enslavement, wrapped up in the history of America, and is wrapped up between the two of you, and it’s wrapped up in your lives as South Carolinians and that ring is there. Talk a bit about that. I mean, to me, that was the screaming symbolism of everything that connects us to that madness, to this madness.
Baynard Woods: Yeah. And especially it being gold, and it highlights the role of wealth in all of this. So when I was proposing to, then my girlfriend, Nicole, my mom gave me the ring that my dad’s mother had given him to give to her, my mom. And the story was it had been in our family for seven generations, and that was like, oh, a thing of pride, that was cool. It was made before there were machines, it was made before… But as I learned in reporting the book, only three generations ago – Because my grandfather was sort of a generation older than my grandmother, and so at least on one side of my family only three generations ago – They were involved in Klan terrorism, and four generations ago were slave holders. And so seven generations, what was the horrendous abuse and violence and control involved in the production of that ring and in the giving of that ring? And it symbolized, as I was saying, the way that enslaving families would marry enslaving families.
It was a union between these, also at a time when women had very, very few rights. And so there was also, as I did my rough math, sometime around seven generations ago would’ve been around the time that Mary Wollstonecraft was writing A Vindication of the Rights of Women. And so it was a symbol of this woman agreeing to be the property of this man as well, to some extent, a lesser extent than those other people that she was considering property. And so it was this whole chain of the illusion of ownership of other people and the way that that creates social bonds and also then distorts all of our social bonds, and all of our… When people say, well, my family were kindly slave owners, I believe. That is just impossible.
Marc Steiner: Right.
Baynard Woods: That’s just not a possible situation that one could have because you believe you own someone. That is in itself an unkind relationship.
Marc Steiner: What you’re just saying now, you describe it with another point in the book, enslavement as a concentration camp and living in the midst of a concentration camp. Not just living in the midst of a concentration camp – It was horrendous enough for my family who was killed there for a period of 10 years, whatever that number was – But for generations. Generations living, running in a concentration camp. What that does to your consciousness, what it does to the people that you kept in that concentration camp.
Baynard Woods: Yeah. I mean, and I don’t want to in any way diminish the unique evil involved in the Holocaust and the concentration camps in Europe. But I do think that what you said is really important. That was a very, very short-lived regime of ’33 to ’45. And this was from 1660 in South Carolina, officially, and they were mainly enslaving Native people before that. But so from early, we’ll say 1619, up through 1865, and then you create this heavily, this apartheid system, which was itself too extreme for the Nazi jurists. When they were trying to come up with their race separation laws, they looked at Arkansas and they said, whoa, that’s too much. We can’t have that kind of –
Marc Steiner: [crosstalk] Right.
Baynard Woods: Because they thought that some German blood would help purify Jews racially, whereas Americans had the one drop sort of thing. But we’re still so different now, the problem is we need to adopt more of the model that Germans have had since then of never again, and of really trying to memorialize it and recognize that evil to make it happen. But we had a 400 year totalitarian regime, and we say the South will rise again instead of never again. And like you said, we think of the evil of listening to some beautiful classical music while the concentration camp’s going on around outside you. This was the daily life for centuries of my family and of so many of our families. And people still go to these places to get married today because it’s a beautiful sight. Monstrous.
Marc Steiner: I can’t even imagine that.
Baynard Woods: Monstrous.
Marc Steiner: I can’t even imagine that. So there’s another piece later on in the book, and it’s a few paragraphs long, but I really want to read it. You alluded to, and we talked a bit about the history of your family and the enslavement and Reconstruction and instituting segregation, and this is something you wrote, and you were reflecting on what happened in Baltimore, and I’ll just start here.
“I felt silly, aware of all the things that people go through, whether reporters covering rural war zones or Black people attacked by police in West Baltimore or women terrorized by the sexual violence of men. I knew my trauma was nothing in comparison, and I didn’t want to think of myself as the kind of wussy white guy reporter who sees the violence of racism and gets all weak at the knees. But I was. Something was wrong with me.
“The furies of whiteness were haunting me. I had to expiate the sins of my family, I felt, even while recognizing the absurdity of this quest. At the least, I had to know more precisely what atrocities my family had committed so I could make an accounting of what they had bequeathed to me.
“In this reflection, I realized that my own name was like a Confederate monument perched above every story I wrote, and I had to, at the very least, know the miasma the names bore.
“Online, I started looking through the so-called slave schedules, census and tax documents for slavers and the people they held in bondage. In 1860, I quickly learned, the Baynards had held 781 people in bondage.
“The Woodses, at the time, held only about twenty-three people in bondage. Then the absurdity of my own formulation struck me: in comparison to the eight hundred people that my Grandmother’s family, the Baileys, had enslaved, I found myself using the word ‘only’ to limit the twenty-three people the Woodses felt entitled to control in every respect.”
I could go on, there so much here about thinking about the horrors of slavery. But I’d like you to really explore here for everyone, what you do in the book as well, what it means for somebody like you, coming from that legacy to wrestle with this, to come to the changes you came to and how you got there, and how that could translate into something you think may be larger than that. It goes beyond Baynard Woods but into society, given everything we’re facing, given January the 6th and more.
Baynard Woods: Yeah. Maybe I’ll walk through a little bit of –
Marc Steiner: I threw a lot out there, I’m sorry.
Baynard Woods: Yeah. No, I’ll walk through a little bit. So that passage came immediately after Charlottesville. And I had been with my co-writer on I Got a Monster, Brandon Soderberg, who was working as my editor at the time. We were in the march that the car drove into and killed Heather Heyer five years ago this month. But the amount of violence we saw that day was just extreme and unrelenting from the minute we got there to the minute we left and it was over the statues, the same statues that I was taught to revere. Statues of Lee and Jackson. My doctor diagnosed me with PTSD. But that was the second stage. And when Dylan Roof went to Charleston right after the Baltimore uprising here in 2015 and massacred nine Black churchgoers, that broke something open in me and made me realize that the way that I thought I had escaped South Carolina and all that, that I hadn’t and that I couldn’t. That we had to confront it and couldn’t escape it.
He grew up 10 miles from me, Dylann Roof. That bowl cut he had, like every kid on my street had that haircut when we were growing up. So it almost felt like that Jordan Peele movie, Us, where part of you gets left behind. You try to repress it and it becomes a distorted monstrous version of yourself that tries to destroy you. And that was what that felt like, seeing him go to all of these places that I’d seen as a kid. Historical sites, but he was treating them as pilgrimages. To go to these Confederate sites and plantation sites before committing this murder and assassination of a public official, Clementa Pinckney, the preacher in the church was also a state senator. And so I saw the face of my great-grandfather for the first time in Dylan Roof’s face. And I saw my own face in other ways for the first time in that face. And I knew it was something that was going to continue to haunt us unless we tried to deal with it. And we have to, in a larger political way.
And so the third thing then that happens after those two is I’m already writing the book, deeply involved in the process, and I’m researching the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1876, in which a group of people called the Red Shirts, who’d previously been the Klan, and after that was disbanded by federal law enforcement, they became Rifle Clubs, essentially the Oathkeepers, the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys. And then they all united with these Red Shirts to storm the Capitol, occupy it, and overthrow the government. And they were successful in a way that they weren’t successful yet on the January 6th attempt to do exactly the same thing.
But seeing the ways that these repeated, there’s the famous Seamus Heaney line that Obama liked a lot, sometimes history and hope rhyme. And I was like, history and hate also rhyme. And we’re seeing this happening right now. And so I do think that we need to find larger ways to… White people who want to be better can’t just say, we’re done with it, we’ve moved up North, we’ve moved along, everything’s fine. We’ve got to find ways to dismantle whiteness, which is essentially a criminal conspiracy to afford power to us over other people. Afford power based on a racial category that was purely invented. And thinking of it as a criminal conspiracy helped me, because when people say, well, my family didn’t own slaves, I’m not like you, yeah, you South Carolina people are weird.
Marc Steiner: Right.
Baynard Woods: Or, I wasn’t around then even if my family did. In federal law to be part of a criminal conspiracy you don’t have to have been there at the beginning. You don’t have to have been an instituting member of it, and in fact, you don’t even have to benefit. Think of all the mobsters who thought they were going to benefit by a conspiracy and are instead at the bottom of a river or whatever. And so it’s not saying that white people have had perfect lives, as a lot of people have sort of asked, but it’s saying that we hold onto a hierarchical system that is intended to benefit us. In fact, it is intended to just control all of us.
And so that’s the other thing that can maybe, if we start to try to abolish whiteness, the way that it works in our own psychology, we might also see that it doesn’t benefit us at all. If we look at it as a zero sum, are we better off than Black people are under this? Then sure, maybe. But if we look at it, actually, are we being benefited? We’re being greatly harmed every day. Here in Baltimore, imagine what the city would be without the racist drug war and all of the racist policies that divide our city, spend all of the funding on police, on imprisonment. When I got arrested in South Carolina for smoking weed in the late ’80s, I got off a lot easier than a person of color would’ve.
But had it not been for the racist drug war, I wouldn’t have been arrested in the first place, and those resources could have been used to make our community a much better community.
Jonathan Metzel writes about this in Dying of Whiteness, and Heather McGee in The Sum of Us. And her example’s great, how the white people would rather fill in a swimming pool than share the swimming pool, and so the white kids aren’t able to swim either. And that’s what whiteness does to us, but we have to see it clearly and think about what it’s done to our psychology in order to have any hope of overcoming it. Because we have to fight it directly rather than just say, I’m moving on from it.
Marc Steiner: So I was thinking about you presenting this book and the places you presented this book and the conversations you have about this book. And I was thinking about a good friend of mine who I actually sent this book to, his name is Hy Thurman.
Baynard Woods: I’ve spoken with him before, on our old podcast.
Marc Steiner: Yeah. Right. So Hy is an old friend. He was one of the leaders of the Young Patriots, which is a Southern white movement in Chicago in the ’60s. They made alliances with the Panthers, the young Lords, and Brown Berets, and the Red Guard in the original rainbow coalition. And he’s now back in Alabama and organizing in Alabama and in the white community and across racial lines. When you write this book and I think about Hy’s life and your life, they’re different. I mean, he grew up as a poor working-class kid in Appalachia, and you grew up in South Carolina, very different ways, but embedded in that culture. So taking a book like this and these ideas and taking them beyond us having these conversations with “kindred spirits,” how do you think that would play? How does it play in your family?
Baynard Woods: Yeah. Those are great questions. And I mean, what I’m hoping for, who I wrote the book for is somebody like Dylan Roof, or my friend in the book, who gets sent white supremacist pamphlets from David Duke, and whose family was worse off than mine. And so he is like, yeah, of course you don’t have to see this because you’re getting the benefits, but I’m not, and I want them. And by holding onto whiteness as a way to get them. And I think that it’s absolutely necessary. I mean, I put a lot of sex, drugs and rock and roll and stuff in the book.
Marc Steiner: You did. We didn’t talk about that yet.
Baynard Woods: Partly because that’s the contours of my life. And also partly because I want the kids of the people out there who are banning CRT to be sneaking the book under the covers at night and reading it. And that’s who I want to get, is Tucker Carlson’s kids. Hi Tuck. I do think one of the huge problems of the left, or the so-called left, and the centrist Democrats and whatever too, is you don’t see a lot of organizing at NASCAR races and at gun shows. There are a couple of things like John Brown Gun Club, The Redneck Revolt that are really doing this kind of organizing and work, because the reality is that there’s the situation of the people who are so angry and that Trump has got does suck. It isn’t a great situation for them, and Trump and the Trumpists are able to tell them that it’s people of color, it’s immigrants, it’s women, it’s affirmative action. All these things are what’s making your life suck instead of income inequality. The Democrats are giving them nothing there. They’re telling them, well, the world doesn’t really suck.
And all they hear them saying is, look, it doesn’t suck for you because you’re the one with the privilege. And so we’re giving them nothing to believe in, nothing to fight for. The Democrats have become purely managers for the most part. And it’s self-serving. I mean the reality is Biden and Pelosi and stuff, I think, would infinitely rather have Trump than Bernie. Because if they have Trump, then –
Marc Steiner: Interesting.
Baynard Woods: …They’re hashtag resistant instead of just being career hacks who have done nothing but start wars and lock people up all of their lives. And so now they’re suddenly heroes and like the French resistance. Whereas if they have Bernie, then they just look like corporate hacks. And so they’d infinitely rather get to cosplay resistance than have to actually address their own and their corporate interests and all of that.
And so just by saying, we’re just not going to let anything get worse. The Democrats have become the party of, we’re not as bad as those guys. And we have to offer something that says we can get beyond this. And this is where white people shouldn’t be scared to talk to your families about this. Although, someone asked me the other day, do you have any tips on talking to your family after writing this book? I said, no, I had to write a book because I’m terrible at talking to my family. It’s hard to talk to your family, even without race. Talking to your mom can suck sometimes, and especially having hard conversations. And it’s so much harder than talking to someone else.
Marc Steiner: True.
Baynard Woods: But you’re able to free them from an ideology that they’re not even aware that they have. And so it’s like talking to them about the vaccine or something. It is a deadly thing that will kill them and we have to do it, and it’s not that we’re doing it to school them. I always come to everyone, I’m coming to you from a position of deeply flawed… I’m a tremendously flawed person, and this isn’t white fragility, it’s not a human resources manual. White fragility has great ideas in it, but it feels a little bit like you’ve been taken to the principal’s office, and there’s a lot of people that’s just never going to reach.
Marc Steiner: It’s not going to work.
Baynard Woods: And the great academic work that people are doing on race is also a lot of things, is the kind of thing that is not going to reach a lot of people. And so that was one of the reasons I did this, wrote the book like this as a story, was to really try to come to you from where you are.
I’m also fucked up, and we have to acknowledge that we’re fucked up and that we make mistakes. Because it’s the same with men with sexism. If we just pretend that we’re better and harbor all of the stuff in us, we’re not actually going to get better ourselves, but we’re also not going to provide models for the people who are younger than us of how to move forward. How to come out of this place in your life where you’re part of this ideology, and how to move beyond that ideology and go through the really difficult work of trying to dismantle it in yourself.
Marc Steiner: Phew. I have a dozen worth of things we could talk about, but after that riff, man, we should just shut up.
Baynard Woods: All right.
Marc Steiner: No, that was good. No, I think it’s important people realize this book also is this personal journey. It’s about you and your father, you and your family, and his passing from Lou Gehrig’s disease and his becoming a Trump person, and you’re wrestling with him about all this. And also your deep love for him at the same time. And I think that’s the complexity of our existence, which this book really does touch upon, and makes us [inaudible] with our whiteness, but our own humanity. And I think that’s really important. And what you said earlier about fragility a moment ago. I argue with people about this all the time, fragility is not a way to organize people.
Talking about fragility, but talking about the stuff you talk about, which is the reality of what racism does. And this line you have, your line, “Whiteness is a moral pollution that demands expiation. I had to unravel the details of the murder my great-grandfather had committed.” And all of how it’s wrapped up in where we are now, the end of Reconstruction and what that brought to us, but wrapped up in this personal story, is a really unique way of doing it.
Baynard Woods: Yeah. And I mean, it’s such a tough thing when you’re dealing with people that you love. One of the things I noticed was that when white people talk about racism now, we talk about structural racism. Again, because people aren’t generally as willing – Although they’ve become much more so in recent years – To be the Bull Connor types or whatever. So we talk about how it’s structural, but then that lets us off the hook. So we have to realize that it’s structural, but we can’t just be like, oh, it’s structural racism. But that’s what most white people do is then go on with their business. But that structure means that it intersects with all of the love in your life. So many people that you care about. So many of the fond memories that you have. So many of the people that you do love, and you can’t just abandon those people because you disagree with them, unless that might help to sway them over, because those people can then aid to and cause harm to others.
Marc Steiner: Right.
Baynard Woods: I mean, once my dad was on his deathbed – And he died while I was writing the book – I gave myself a caring for him and then working in his hometown of Clarendon County to try to figure out what I could do to undo the murder of Peter Lemon, recognize my great-grandfather’s murder of Peter Lemon and memorialize it and care for my dad. But when he was still able to cause harm and he was still able to vote for Trump or whatever, it was my job to argue with him as much as I could. Because I had to play defense to try to stop that harm in the same way that the anti-fascists in Charlottesville, to come back to that, when the car drove into the crowd, they’d already driven the racists out of town, the white supremacists out of town, for the most part.
And there was a rumor that they were going to regroup and attack a Black apartment complex. And when they marched over, there was a discussion like – And it wasn’t about, you needed white saviors to go save this apartment complex from the Nazis, you didn’t. But it was like these people who live in this apartment complex should get to enjoy their Saturday without having to worry about the Nazis coming there, so we’re going to go get in the middle. And that’s a role we can play with our families. And that moral pollution that needs expiation line, I desperately wanted the book to be called Miasma, which in ancient Greek was an inherited curse. The curse of the house of Atreus that goes down, and a curse that’s passed on from generation to generation. And it was also the word that the slavers in South Carolina called the mists that would rise up from the marsh –
Marc Steiner: Because they were into Greek culture, Roman culture, they were deeply into it.
Baynard Woods: …And they thought that was what caused malaria, bad air, mal air, and they didn’t know about the mosquitoes. So they would leave their plantations in the summertime, leaving the Africans there, often under Muslim overseers, which was an interesting sort of dynamic that allowed African culture to remain more intact. But it seemed like the perfect symbol of the inherited curse that I had gotten. And so trying to figure out that curse and how it worked was an important part of the book. And I mean, one of the things I was most horrified to notice was the slave codes of 1740 in South Carolina after the Stono Rebellion in 1739, really delineated two purposes of law: That law protected white people without binding us, and bound Black people without protecting them.
And when I saw that logic permeated my own psychology. When I was young and was driving drunk and crashed into the car of an older Black driver, and my grandfather got me off because of knowing the cops, I was enacting the same logic of the slave codes of 1740. When Amy Cooper was breaking the law in 2020 by walking her dog without a leash in Central Park, and Christian Cooper was following the law watching birds there, and he asked her to obey the law, she immediately called the police on him because her unconscious belief was the law was supposed to protect her and bind him. And that comes directly from the slave codes of 1740. And so we have to really think about the way that these centuries of totalitarian rule have warped our own sense of the world and made us see the world in really inaccurate ways. And so no wonder we have people clamoring for authoritarian rule, wanting authoritarian rule, because we still have not ever addressed this kind of totalitarian mindset that we maintain.
Marc Steiner: All I can say right now is thank you. I really mean it. And this is a really important book, folks. It’s a really important book. And one that I would encourage folks to read, wrestle with, with family and friends and more. Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness by Baynard Woods. And it is of the moment, what we all have to wrestle with and think about what we’re facing. So Bay, thanks for coming here, really good to see you, man.
Baynard Woods: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me Marc. It’s great to sit here and talk with you. I love it.
Marc Steiner: Always. With or without a beer.
Baynard Woods: Yeah, indeed. Thank you.
Marc Steiner: Good to have you here. And once again, Baynard Woods, thank you so much for being with us. It was a really great discussion. And the book is well worth your read. Again, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness. Check it out, and share it with your friends and talk about it. It’s a really very serious and important piece of work.
So please write to me here at mss@therealnews.com, let me know what you thought about today’s program and what you’d like us to cover, and I will write you right back, and we’ll go back and forth and see what we can do about all that. And so with the folks here at The Real News, Dwayne Gladden, Kada Rivera, Stephen Frank, who make this show hum, I’m Marc Steiner for The Real News Network. Thanks for joining us, and take care.
Where did all the good tunes go? Have millennials just gone the way of Gen X and Boomers before them, pining nostalgically for gilded memories of a past that never glittered? Or has the music business—and music along with it—really changed? In this episode of Art for the End Times, Lyta Gold explores the unsavory reality of the capitalist music industry with special guest Torquil Campbell (AKA Torq), co-lead singer of the acclaimed indie pop/rock band Stars. Torq guides us on a journey to understand the contemporary music industry, and how streaming platforms and usurious music-industry capitalists have built an environment hostile to creativity with their relentless fleecing of artists and consumers alike. To take back the culture, we’ll have to take back the means of artistic production, and Torq offers some thoughts on what that might mean for cultural workers. Torq Campbell is a socialist musician, songwriter, co-lead singer of the band Stars, and co-host of the Soft Revolution podcast. Stars have released nine studio albums—including, most recently, From Capelton Hill—and have been nominated for multiple Juno and Polaris awards
Studio/Post-Production: Dwayne Gladden
Transcript
The transcript of this story is in progress and will be made available as soon as possible.
The venerable Star Trek universe is really the only major pop culture property that can be claimed as certifiably leftist. But how do the newest batch of shows hold up? In a special crossover episode, Lyta Gold of Art for the End Times teams up with a lively panel of fellow podcasters and Trekkies—David Banks and Britney Gil (Iron Weeds), Leslie Lee III (Struggle Session), and Aaron Thorpe (Trillbilly Workers Party, Struggle Session, and Everybody Loves Communism)—to discuss the most recent Star Trek show to hit the airwaves, Strange New Worlds. Drawing on decades of collective Trekkie experience, they debate Paramount’s increasingly cynical approach to making Trek, and how the whole series succeeds (or fails) in imagining fully automated luxury space communism while still being created by capitalists.
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, is among America’s greatest novels. It is a prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a nation and perhaps a species. Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness, and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. Melville’s description of the ship’s captain, Ahab, is a description of the bankers, corporate boards, politicians, television personalities, and generals who through the power of propaganda fill our heads with seductive images of glory and lust for wealth and power. We are consumed with self-induced obsessions that spur us toward self-annihilation. Melville is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.
Joining Chris to discuss Melville’s novel is Nathaniel Philbrick author of Why Read Moby Dick? as well as books such as In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleboat Essex, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War, Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy and The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and The Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Watch The Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET.
Resistance is everywhere, but everywhere a surprise, especially when the agents of struggle are the colonized, the enslaved, the wretched of the earth. Anticolonial revolts and slave rebellions have often been described by those in power as “eruptions”—volcanic shocks to a system that does not, cannot, see them coming. In his new book, Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance, Geo Maher diagnoses a paradoxical weakness built right into the foundations of white supremacist power, a colonial blind spot that grows as domination seems more complete. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez interviews Maher about his book and what understanding the dynamics of anticolonial eruptions, past and present, can tell us about the historical moment we’re in and the task ahead of us.
American society is the most violent of any nation in the industrialized world. Nothing we do, from administrating the world’s largest prison system to militarizing our police, seems to help. Dr. James Gilligan argues that childhood abuse, and the shame it engenders, is the engine that fuels America’s deadliest epidemic. This abuse and shame, he argues, fosters a dangerous numbness that breeds a deep self-loathing and inchoate rage. It is only by understanding the causes of our national epidemic, and addressing those causes, that we will have any hope of stemming the nihilistic violence that grips American society. Dr. Gilligan grounds his writing not only in case studies of the violent patients he works with, but Greek myths and Shakespeare.
Dr. James Gilligan is a professor of Clinical Psychiatry at New York University. Formerly, he served as the director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts. He is the author of Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, and Holding a Mirror up to Nature: Shame, Guilt, and Violence in Shakespeare, which he co-authored with David A.J. Richards.
Watch The Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET.
Chris Hedges: American society is the most violent of any nation in the industrialized world. Nothing we do, from administering the world’s largest prison system to militarizing our police, seems to help.
Dr. James Gilligan, the former director of the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School and the former director of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, argues that childhood abuse and the shame it engenders is the engine that fuels America’s deadliest epidemic.This abuse and shame, he argues, fosters a dangerous numbness that breeds a deep self-loathing and inchoate rage.
It is only by understanding the causes of our national epidemic and addressing those causes, that we will have any hope of stemming the nihilistic violence that grips American society.
Dr. Gilligan grounds his writing not only in case studies of the violent patients he has worked with, but Greek myth and Shakespeare. Joining me to discuss his book Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, as well as his book Holding a Mirror up to Nature: Shame, Guilt, and Violence in Shakespeare, which he co-authored with David Richards, is Dr. James Gilligan, professor of clinical psychiatry at New York University.
You argue that the usual dichotomies between life and death, this world and the other world, rationality and irrationality, pleasure and pain, reward and punishment, the body and the soul, self-preservation and self-destruction, have broken down for those who commit violence. Can you explain this dichotomy?
James Gilligan: One of the first things I started hearing from, really, the most violent of the prison inmates I was working with was that they would tell me that they had died, even before they started killing other people. What they meant by that was they felt dead inside. They felt empty. They felt numb. They lacked the capacity for emotions or even physical sensations.
They would refer to themselves with terms that refer to the living dead, like zombie or vampire or robot. They would mutilate themselves to see if they could have feelings. They weren’t doing this as an act of penance. They didn’t feel guilty about their crimes. What they found was that their feeling of numbness and deadness inside was more tormenting than even physical pain would be. So, they were trying to see, could they feel alive? Could they see blood flow? They cut themselves to prove that they had blood, rather than being filled with straw or other lifeless matter.
Now, what struck me was these people were willing to go to their physical death in order to try to resurrect their soul death, their psychological death. There’s a very good book that a psychoanalyst at Yale wrote called Soul Murder. The most violent people I saw in the prisons were victims of soul murder.
Now, what I discovered with them was, when most of us talk about self-preservation, we take it for granted that we mean both the body and the soul. You don’t survive if your body dies. I mean, your soul goes with it. In the prisons, the most violent inmates had disassociated the body from the soul. They were willing to sacrifice their bodies in order to try to save their souls or to resurrect their dead souls.
I heard from the most violent ones that their goal in life is to go to their own death, physical death, but in a blaze of glory. A hail of gunfire in which they would kill as many other people as possible before they themselves got killed by the police. In many actual cases in the community, you see mass murderers who kill themselves after they have killed as many people as they could.
The Columbine High School boys, the mass shooting there. The guy in the hotel room in Las Vegas, I mean, you can’t read the newspapers without seeing it.
Of course, we see this with the suicide bombers in the Middle East. When people feel so desperately, overwhelmingly humiliated, it causes the death of the self. And they’re willing to sacrifice their bodies in order to try to reclaim some sense of agency, of power, of revenge, these things that they feel will undo the shame and humiliation that they have suffered all their lives.
Chris Hedges: This is the point Emile Durkheim makes, that people who seek the annihilation of others are driven by a desire for self-annihilation.
I’m just going to stop and ask you about the word soul. That’s a religious term. You’re a medical doctor. I went to Harvard Divinity School. I’m curious how you define a soul.
James Gilligan: Well to me, I mean, it’s the English translation for the Greek word psyche, which really is the root of the words psychology and psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
But I think it makes sense to use the word soul. The human person has something I think you can only describe as a soul. It’s more than just a mind. It’s what it means to be human. I mean, other animals have minds, to one degree or another, but only humans have a soul. To me, but I would actually go further. I would say this. To me, I was approaching trying to understand the causes and prevention of violence as a psychiatrist. But actually, for me, this was really a religious vocation.
I’ve felt every major world religion has put the problem of violence very much at the center. I’m thinking in the Old Testament, one of the first of the Ten Commandments is thou shalt not kill. And then you think that the iconic symbol of Christianity is the most cruel form of murder ever invented, the cross, the crucifix. I mean, the problem of violence is absolutely central to religion itself.
My approach to the prisons was to… I quote something I used as an epigraph in my first book on violence, a statement that from a religious point of view, none of us humans are good, but all are sacred. When I say none are good, I mean that we have all committed harm to people we love and who loved us. There are none of us who do not stand in need of forgiveness. But on the other hand, every human being, even the worst, has what I would say is a soul that is sacred.
I took that attitude with the worst murderers that our society produces. They were still human beings. They had a soul. It was our obligation, my obligation and that of my colleagues, to reach that soul, to try to bring it to life after it had died on them. We were trying to resurrect their dead souls, or help them to resurrect them.
So to me, the word soul is the only word that has a large enough meaning, a large enough capacity to describe what I thought we were really working with when we worked with the most violent people that our society produces.
Chris Hedges: One of the consequences of PTSD is numbness. Is that the numbness that these people endure, or is it different from the numbness one gets from PTSD?
James Gilligan: Well I mean, I’d say both. When I would ask people about their feeling of being dead, they could often tell me what had happened. They could describe an event in their lives in which they felt totally unloved, treated like dirt. Our word humiliation comes from the Latin word humus, which means earth. To be humiliated is to feel like you’re treated like dirt, that you can just be stepped on. That is how the men that I saw in the prisons felt. I’d say this feeling of deadness had been caused by experiences of total rejection and humiliation and having it made clear to them how unloved they were, beginning at home, beginning in the family.
Chris Hedges: You talk about murder as an attempt by these people to bring back one’s dead self, bring it back to life. You say, of course, that fails, but can you speak about that process?
James Gilligan: Well, actually, their method of trying to resurrect their dead soul does fail. I compare it to, it’s like they’re drinking salt water to try to quench their thirst. It’s really counterproductive. They only provoke more loss of love. They provoke hatred from other people.
But I’ll tell you what would happen when I would work with these guys in the prison. When they first came into the prison, after some of them having committed terrible crimes, murders and rapes and so on, they would feel absolutely innocent. They would feel they were the victims. When I would ask them why they had assaulted somebody in this way, they’d say because the person had disrespected them. So, they were trying to gain respect by being violent. But it was, as I said, like drinking salt water.
When they’d been in the prison for a couple of years, working with the prison mental health service that my colleagues and I ran, where we treated them with respect. We didn’t put them down. We showed an interest in them and in their life history, their life story. We engaged them in psychotherapy. We offered them opportunities for education. After a couple of years or so, these impossible people often became capable of empathy toward other people. They began to realize how much pain and suffering they had caused others. And they developed the capacity to feel guilty about that. Up to that point, they were noticeably incapable of feelings of guilt.
For example, Freud said once that nobody feels guiltier than the saints. I mean, guilt feelings inhibit people from hurting other people. I mean, saints feel too guilty to hurt a butterfly. But I would add something that Freud did not know because he never worked with violent people, and that is that no one feels more innocent than the criminals. That’s why they’re capable of committing crimes, because they lack the capacity to feel guilt or remorse about hurting other people.
But after they’d had an experience of being treated like a human being and responded to as a human being with dignity, they developed the capacity to empathize with other people and realized that they actually were guilty of having committed horrible pain and suffering on other people. Then they would feel so guilty they would become suicidal. They would make serious suicide attempts. Our struggle then would be not so much to prevent them from committing homicides, but to prevent their suicides. That might take another couple of years.
However, then something happened that I had not anticipated. I hadn’t read about it anywhere. It took me by surprise. They discovered something that enabled them to transcend both the shame and guilt. That is, they discovered that they could be useful and helpful to other people. They could teach the illiterate prisoners – And many prisoners are illiterate – They could teach them to read and write. They could help them to write letters home. They could help them navigate the law library in the prisons, and so on.
Once they had discovered that, they had something that enhanced their own self-esteem, but also enabled them, actually, to care about other people and to care for them. To me, that was the resurrection of… Maybe resurrection’s the wrong word. Maybe it was the coming to life for the first time of a soul. People who had really just been treated in a way that was inhuman and had become what we use the word inhuman to describe, they became human.
Chris Hedges: Yeah. I think that point is correct and matches my own experience teaching in the prison.
You write about capital punishment. You say, correctly, that more prisoners are killed by other prisoners than are killed by the state. You even say that for this reason, perhaps no group is more strongly and widely in favor of capital punishment. And then you say, you just find it risible, these people who argue that capital punishment deters murder and other violent crimes. Can you explain that?
James Gilligan: Well, one thing I’d mention is that more murderers killed themselves than were ever killed by the state, even when capital punishment was the default punishment for murder. I think the biggest mistake that our criminal justice system makes is to make the assumption that punishment will deter violence or crime. On the contrary, punishment is the most powerful stimulant of violence that we have yet discovered.
If you’ll remember what I just said about the childhood history of the violent criminals I worked with, they had been punished by their parents, as severely as it is possible to punish somebody without actually killing them. As I said, they were often the victims of attempted murder. I saw one multiple murderer whose mother had thrown him out the window, on another occasion set him on fire, on another occasion attacked him with an ax. He said to me, more in a state of confusion than bitterness, I guess she wanted to kill me, but I just didn’t die.
Then the thing is that so many of them do kill themselves after they have killed other people. Or, as I mentioned earlier, many of them want to kill as many as they can even though that will mean going to their own death. So the notion that the death penalty will deter them is just based on total ignorance of the psychology of people who commit serious violence, and precisely the people that we need to be most concerned about. I mean, the most violent.
We know this from developmental psychology. Psychologists who study child development have found that the more severely children are punished, the more violent they become, both as children and as adults. As I said, if punishment would prevent violence, then the people I saw in the prisons would never have become violent in the first place, because they had already been punished so severely.
I would see this also on a day-to-day basis in the prisons. The more a prisoner was punished by prison guards, the more violent they’d become until there would be an endless vicious cycle between the prisoners and the guards. They would punish, the prisoner would become more violent. They’d punish more, the prisoner would become more violent, and on and on. Until finally the officers would ask me to see people like this, just to help them figure out how to get out of this vicious cycle of punishment stimulating violence.
I remember talking to one man who finally wound up in solitary confinement with the door closed. He was in darkness. The light was turned off. He was deprived of a mattress. The toilet was a hole on the floor, and so on. I asked him, what is it you want so badly that you’re willing to give up everything in order to get it? Because that’s what he was doing. This guy, who was usually so inarticulate, he usually just talked to his fists, he stood up tall and looked at me and said, pride, dignity, self-esteem. And then he went on, more in his usual way, and said, I’ll kill everybody in this cell block if I have to in order to get it.
Again, my point is the idea that punishment deters violence is totally the opposite of the truth. I think it’s very important, particularly for Americans but really for all human beings, to know this, when America has the most punitive criminal justice system in the developed world. As you mentioned, we have the highest imprisonment rate in the world, even of the non-developed countries. We have more prisoners in our prisons on a per capita basis than the countries we call police states.
Yet, despite that, or I’d say because of it, in part, we have the highest murder rates in the developed world. Our murder rate is seven times as high as the murder rates in the political democracies and social democracies of Western Europe, and roughly five times higher than the other English-speaking democracies of Canada, Australia.
Our violent criminal justice system, including the death penalty, it only stimulates violence, to the extent it has any effect at all. There is no Western European country or English-speaking democracy that still has the death penalty. The US stands alone on that. And it’s not surprising, since punishment only stimulates violence, that there would be this correlation between our violence and the violence of those that we punish.
Chris Hedges: Before we get into Shakespeare in the last five minutes, you write, “Actions are symbolic representations of thought.” What do you mean by that?
James Gilligan: I mean that violence doesn’t occur at random. One reason I wrote about Shakespeare, and I refer to him often in describing the prisoners I see, is because he described what I saw in the prisons. In King Lear he describes how Edmond, the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, has his father’s eyes gouged out after having been humiliated repeatedly by his father. That helped me to understand a criminal that came into the prison who had killed and gouged out the eyes of his victim. He made it clear. He had the same motive that Shakespeare’s character did. He said, he didn’t like the way she was looking at [him].
He had felt he had also been bullied, been called humiliating words, a wimp, a punk, a pussy. He felt overwhelmingly humiliated. The way to undo his humiliation was to destroy the eyes of a person, because, as Aristotle put it, people experienced shame in the eyes of others. We experience shame as we’re being in front of an audience that is witnessing our shame and seeing how weak and shameful we are. So, attacking the eyes is not an accident.
I could give you many other examples of the part of the body that inmates attack, the violent criminals attack, it is not chosen at random. It has a real emotional meaning. I just saw this over and over.
Chris Hedges: I want to ask you about Antony and Cleopatra, where Antony says to the soothsayer, “Say to me, whose fortunes shall rise higher, Caesar’s or mine?” The soothsayer says, “Caesar’s. Therefore, Antony, stay not by his side: Thy demon, that’s thy spirit which keeps thee, is noble, courageous high, unmatchable. Where Caesar’s is not; But, near him, thy angel becomes a fear, as being overpowered: Therefore make space enough between you.” I’m asking whether love is a helpless force against those who have been rendered numb.
James Gilligan: You mean giving them love, is that helpful?
Chris Hedges: Well, that Antony, in a way, his strength and his weakness is that unlike Caesar, he can feel love.
James Gilligan: Yes.
Chris Hedges: He loves Cleopatra. That, of course, leads to his downfall, at least in the play. While Caesar, who feels nothing but a cold lust for power, rises. There’s that moment in the play that said, in a way, your greatest strength is your greatest weakness. Other students in the class, in the prison, would caution me about trying to care for people who couldn’t care for themselves.
James Gilligan: Well, when I think of Antony and Cleopatra, I think of Antony as having… His love for Cleopatra was so deep that it made what Caesar did to him relatively irrelevant. Remember when he said, “Let Rome in Tiber melt.” My world is here with Cleopatra. There’s a sense of, she didn’t even care what Caesar did. He had achieved, I think a sense of personal immortality in his love, his love for Cleopatra was so deep. I’d say he had transcended the difference between life and death, not dissociated himself from it.
I think that if people can develop the capacity for love… Well, first of all, as I mentioned earlier, when prisoners learned they could be helpful to other people, that was a form of loving other people. It was not personal intimacy, but it was transpersonal. It was just helping people because they needed help, responding to other people’s needs. I think that once people develop that capacity for love, that they lose the incentive for violence.
Now, what I do think Shakespeare showed in the play Antony and Cleopatra is that there was no room in that world of ancient Rome and the Roman Empire. That was a world based on violence and on the denial of love. So in that sense, I think Shakespeare correctly was showing that there was no room for love between people in that kind of world. I thought it was a powerful indictment of the world that he lived in, that Shakespeare lived in, and that Antony lived in.
Chris Hedges: Yes, I think that’s right. But it’s an understanding, I think, of the attributes that, in many ways, are required for power, certainly autocratic power. It’s really those who objectify and dehumanize others who have many of the characteristics, the numbness that you write about.
James Gilligan: Absolutely. I think that Octavian, who later became Emperor Augustus, exemplified the kind of person who does not have the capacity for love and whose life is really, frankly, dull and empty and not fully human compared to Antony’s. Yes, Antony becomes the victim who dies in the play. I mean, he kills himself, but in order to stay with Cleopatra and be loyal to her.
He’s much more human, and I think had a much fuller life,even though he died young, or relatively younger than necessary. He had a much fuller life than I think Augustus could ever even imagine or ever realize existed.
Chris Hedges: Great. That was Dr. James Gilligan speaking about his book Violence. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, and Kayla Rivera. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
Marilynne Robinson established herself through some of the most biting critiques of neoliberalism written in her time. Since being identified as Obama’s “favorite novelist,” she’s taken political positions more aligned with the powerful than her readers might have once thought possible. Nevertheless, the searing insight and aesthetic magnificence of Robinson’s ornate prose can’t be denied. Phil Christman, author of How to be Normal, joins Lyta Gold on this episode of Art for the End Times to discuss Robinson’s oeuvre, its impact on his own writing, and what the left can still recover from her work.
Transcript
The transcript of this podcast will be made available as soon as possible.
A licentious, money-drenched, morally bankrupt and intellectually vacuous ruling class—accountable to no one and free to plunder and prey on the weak like human vultures—rises to power in societies in terminal decline, where the rule of law has collapsed and desperate human beings have been reduced to commodities. This class of parasites was savagely parodied in the first-century satirical work Satyricon by Gaius Petronius, written during the reign of Nero when Rome’s Republican values were abandoned for unbridled greed, hedonism, and narcissism. Jeffrey Epstein and his cohorts, drawn from the ruling political, academic, and financial elites, for years engaged in sexual perversions and exploitation of Petronian proportions. Sex, as in the late Roman Empire, has been transformed in the twilight of the US empire from a private act of intimacy to one of public entertainment. In her book Satyricon USA: A Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier, author Eurydice Eve set out to look, with remarkable understanding and empathy, at the sexual landscape of the United States, spending time with BDSM practitioners, celibate Catholic priests, and even necrophiliacs. In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Chris speaks with Eurydice about her portrait of America, which, carried out below the radar, exposes a nation desperately seeking catharsis and, as she writes, a “need for continuity and safety and uniformity—and love.”
Eurydice Eve is the author of Satyricon USA: A Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier and F/32, a novel that won a national fiction contest before its publication and has been translated into several languages. She writes a monthly sex column for Gear magazine, and her non-fiction has appeared in Spin, Harper’s, and other national magazines. She lives in Miami, New York City, and Crete, Greece.
Chris Hedges interviews writers, intellectuals, and dissidents, many banished from the mainstream, in his half-hour show, The Chris Hedges Report. He gives voice to those, from Cornel West and Noam Chomsky to the leaders of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who are on the front lines of the struggle against militarism, corporate capitalism, white supremacy, the looming ecocide, as well as the battle to wrest back our democracy from the clutches of the ruling global oligarchy.
The writer Mark Kurlansky, by a series of coincidences, spent his life as a journalist and author in the shadow of Ernest Hemingway, starting with his presence in Idaho on the day Hemingway died. Kurlansky would reside and work during his career in Paris, the Basque region of Spain, Cuba, and Ketchum, Idaho—all places where Hemingway lived, and where his myth remains firmly implanted and celebrated. Kurlansky struggled to free himself from the haunting presence of Hemingway, whose life—starting with the tales he told of being an ambulance driver in Italy in World War I—was a confusing blur of fact, exaggeration, hyperbole, and lies. There is much in Hemingway’s life and writing to admire, and much to reject. Mark Kurlansky joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his new book The Importance of Not Being Ernest: My Life with the Uninvited Hemingway.
Chris Hedges interviews writers, intellectuals, and dissidents, many banished from the mainstream, in his half-hour show, The Chris Hedges Report. He gives voice to those, from Cornel West and Noam Chomsky to the leaders of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who are on the front lines of the struggle against militarism, corporate capitalism, white supremacy, the looming ecocide, as well as the battle to wrest back our democracy from the clutches of the ruling global oligarchy.
Watch The Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET.
Chris Hedges: The writer Mark Kurlansky, by a series of coincidences, spent his life as a journalist and author in the shadow of Ernest Hemingway. Starting with his presence in Idaho on the day Hemingway died. Mark would reside and work during his career in Paris, the Basque region of Spain, Cuba, and Ketchum, Idaho, all places where Hemingway lived and where his myth remains firmly implanted and celebrated. Mark struggled to free himself from the haunting presence of Hemingway, whose life, starting with the tales he told of being an ambulance driver in Italy in World War I, was a confusing blur of fact, exaggeration, hyperbole, and lies. And yet, Hemingway was undeniably one of the most gifted writers of the 20th century. More importantly, he believed that writers should go places and do things, living with the writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn in the hotel Florida during the siege of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, hunting big game in Africa, fishing for Marlin off the coast of Key West and Cuba, or joining in American combat units as they fought in France and Germany in World War II.
Mark and I pursued this life as foreign correspondent for newspapers, something Hemingway also did throughout his career, although badly. Hemingway could never disentangle fact from fiction in his life and his writing, including his journalism. There is much in Hemingway’s life in writing to admire and much to reject. Joining me to discuss his new book, The Importance of Not Being Ernest: My Life with the Uninvited Hemingway, is Mark Kurlansky.
So Mark, in your book you have some, I thought, very wise comments about writing. I want to ask you about that. You say that writing is about establishing rhythm, and rhythm is often established by repetition. If a writer seems flat and without appeal, the problem is usually not that he or she does not use the right words, as is often believed, but that the writer is arhythmic. And I thought that captured the essence of Hemingway’s power as a writer. It’s not the [parody] of the staccato sentences. It’s that almost jazz-like rhythm. And I wondered if you could talk about that.
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. I mean, establishing a rhythm and setting up the line. I found it very rewarding that once in an interview later in his life, he listed Bach as one of his great influences. And I was thrilled to see that because I’m a classical musician, not a very good one, but I regard Bach as a tremendous influence on [writing], a tremendous influence on everything. And [inaudible], that’s what we do. We have a theme, we set it up against another theme. We have rhythms. Sometimes you change the key, but then you get back to the theme. Musicologists say that Bach did theme in variation, both horizontally and vertically, which is a very complex thing. But if you really study what Bach was doing, you can learn a lot about writing.
Chris Hedges: Well, you even say in the book, don’t listen to music while you write.
Mark Kurlansky: Oh, absolutely. It’s a terrible mistake. Because you have to establish the rhythm of what you’re working on. If you’re listening to music, you don’t want your piece to come out sounding like Motown. Although Motown’s nice, but it’s not what your piece is supposed to be.
Chris Hedges: You write in the book that you are very influenced by the [Beatniks], Alan Ginsburg. Poetry of course, like great writing, is, I think, a form of music. And you say for this reason, when you write, that poetry should not be completely understandable, that it expresses the truth that we can sense, but is slightly beyond us. I thought that was a wonderful insight. And I wondered if you could just talk about that.
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. You know, William Carlos Williams, one of the great modernist poets, was giving a reading somewhere and somebody complained. They didn’t understand the poem. And he said, I’m not asking you to understand it. I’m just asking you to listen. And this is actually very much in line with Hemingway’s thinking about prose, which has famously become known as the iceberg theory, where he didn’t believe that everything should be explained. I think this is a very important idea, a very counterintuitive idea if you’ve spent time as a journalist. Newspapers like you to explain things. If you’re recreating the experiences of life, everything in life isn’t explained, you don’t understand everything, you see.
Chris Hedges: You say in the book, don’t go to school to learn how to write. That if writing is any good, it’s too personal an endeavor to be taught by someone else. I also thought, especially with the proliferation of all these masters of fine arts, this was pretty wise advice.
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. On the rare occasions when I find myself giving a writing course, I always begin by talking about a conversation I once had. I used to know Isaac Bashevis Singer, and he taught a course at the University of Miami. And I said to him once, what is it you teach there? And he said, I teach what can’t be taught. That’s it, you can’t really teach writing. So when I give a writing course, I mean the worst thing you could do to somebody who’s struggling to become a writer is to tell them how to write. They have to find it in themselves. What I do in a writing class is that I ask everybody to write something and read it and everybody else to criticize it. And what I’m doing is I’m trying to teach critical thinking and how you evaluate criticism that you receive. But also just how you regard things critically. And I think that’s all you can do. I mean, you can’t, you can’t tell somebody how to write.
Chris Hedges: But would it be fair to say that you can teach someone to write clearly, but to write lyrically would be a difference?
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. You don’t want to teach… I mean, lyricism is something… If you’re not Irish, forget it. But yeah. What you shouldn’t do, and what is done a lot in writing classes, you cannot teach people how to develop their prose style. Your prose style is your voice, and everybody has their own. Some voices are better than others.
Chris Hedges: And yet I think all writers, like many artists, begin by imitation. In your case, I think it was Hemingway, in mine it was Faulkner. I was trying to write a lot of drivel that sounded like Go Down, Moses. And it’s a kind of trap. I mean, you need to break free from it. But talk about those initial stages, because I think that is how you learn how to write and how you learn, perhaps, any artistic expression, is beginning through imitation.
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah, I suppose so. And I suppose when I was really young, I mean was in something like third grade when I decided I wanted to become a writer. And when I was young, well, I mean, Hemingway was a huge influence. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a huge influence. But you eventually just have to find the voice that’s within you. And a good way to do this is don’t try to write, just tell somebody the story, listen to how you’re telling it. Because for some reason we almost always use our own voice when we tell a story, when we speak. But we have this, if we’re novices, and experienced people have this tendency to imitate great writers when they’re writing, if they just listen to how they speak. Basically, most people do write the way they speak. Hemingway did, if you ever heard recordings. You read Hemingway and it’s sort of odd the way people are talking, but he talked like that.
Chris Hedges: Well, Hemingway was a very stilted public speaker.
Mark Kurlansky: He didn’t like public speaking, no.
Chris Hedges: But he wasn’t very good at it.
Mark Kurlansky: No he wasn’t. And it’s funny because he worked so hard at having a public persona, but he just hated getting up and speaking. He claimed ill health and not going to his Nobel Prize speech. But I think he just didn’t want to do it.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about Hemingway, who is this kind of shadow character in your book. He began very early on to turn himself into a myth, into a celebrity. He came back, he was 19 or something. And as you point out in the book, by the way, he only spent a week, I believe, in the front lines in Italy –
Mark Kurlansky: Not as a combat soldier.
Chris Hedges: And not as a combat soldier, although he rapidly inflated his role. And you write that he essentially made himself a fictional character. And what dogged him throughout his life as he became more famous, in the same way that I think it did a figure like Hunter Thompson, I want to speak about that idea of artists becoming myth, because I think it’s very dangerous.
Mark Kurlansky: Well, it is. And it doesn’t make you happy. Hemingway, towards the end of his life, was complaining a lot how nobody knew who he really was. And well, whose fault was that, Hem? But he did create this mythical person that wasn’t him. But he was also a very complicated person, which becomes clear when you talk to people who knew him, which there are not many around, but there were still a few when I was working on the book. And they’re all talking about a different person. The Hemingway who hunted in Idaho was not the Hemingway who hung out in Nevada. Who was the real Hemingway?
I think he was an intellectual. [Dorothy Dugby] who was his secretary and later his daughter-in-law said, when you really got to see the real Hemingway, as if you get him to sit down and talk about writing and painting, that’s who he was, an intellectual. He talked about these things. The Hemingway who talked about fishing and hunting and boxing, that wasn’t who he was.
Chris Hedges: Right. Well, it was this kind of hyper masculine myth. And yet if you read, I think some of his best stuff was written in his early 20s, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, these are incredibly – Cat in the Rain – These are very sensitive stories that I think show exactly what illustrate the point you’re making.
Mark Kurlansky: He wrote a story that, the title escaped me at the moment, he wrote a story, one of his earlier stories about this guy who comes back from the war. It’s one of the Nick Adams stories. He comes back from the war and he makes up all sorts of stories about his bravado and his war experience. And they’re all lies. And he can’t face himself or deal with his guilt over the things that really happened because he lied so much. Isn’t it interesting that Hemingway wrote that story?
Chris Hedges: Right. So you and I both worked as newspaper reporters, and you write in your book that newspaper writing can crush creative expression. And that’s why, as you say, the prose of many fine journalists, if stretched to book length, induces real pain. And then you quote the novelist William Kennedy, who also worked as a newspaper reporter, who says that while journalism gave him entry into a world he had no right to enter – Which I think is one of the reasons to be a journalist – It also pounded into him the voice of literary objectivity, which he calls “a journalistic virus that paralyzes the imagination and cripples the language.” So I think there are benefits to having worked as a newspaper reporter. Part of it is being able to go places and do things as Hemingway correctly points out. It also teaches you to write cleanly and quickly. But I think that transition to being a book writer, also that newspaper ethos, as you correctly point out, can cripple you. Just talk about that.
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. I mean, when I was writing for newspapers, I mean, I loved it, but I never intended to remain a newspaper writer. It was more formulaic then than it is today; it was like the lede and the nut graph. And then I always felt like if I wrote a good lede and a good nut graph, then the other 600 words would just be there and you were done.
Chris Hedges: Well, we used to call it B matter. It was just vomiting up what you’d written a few days before.
Mark Kurlansky: Right. And I remember once talking to my editor, foreign editor of The Chicago Tribune, who was one of my favorite editors. He was a really great editor, and an experienced foreign correspondent, and a good guy to work with. And he called me up one day and said, you have just written a 50 word lede. And the only thing I could think of to say to him was, have you never read Proust?
Chris Hedges: Right. Proust did not write for newspapers I believe.
Mark Kurlansky: No, I don’t think he did. Writing for newspapers, exactly like Bill Kennedy said. It teaches you how to get in places and talk to people you’d never get to meet otherwise. And it’s a great experience, but the writing part is not a great experience.
Chris Hedges: Although, a clever lede, I mean, we used to spend a lot of time on our ledes because it’s a hook, and it’s something that Graham Green would always do at the front end of his novels, is use a very clever, well thought-out lede to hook you into the novel.
Mark Kurlansky: Hemingway too. Look at Hemingway’s short stories. Every one of Hemingway’s short stories has a great opening line. Really understood the idea that you hook them in the first line. “In the fall, the war was [always] there, but we didn’t go to it anymore.”
Chris Hedges: Yeah.
Mark Kurlansky: [The opening line of] In Another Country. And you know, it’s often said there’s a lot that’s been written about what Hemingway learned from writing for newspapers. I don’t think he learned much from writing for newspapers. If you read his newspaper copy, he didn’t even learn how to write for newspapers.
Chris Hedges: No, it’s pretty bad. That’s the interesting…
Mark Kurlansky: And I mean, I don’t know how he got away with it. No editor I ever worked with would’ve taken copy like that. But what he learned from that is that he was an avant-garde writer part of the modernist movement. And it’s modernism that made him so clean and concise. It’s not this cable [inaudible]… It’s how they say that how he cabled stories to newspapers is how he got his style. It’s not true. He got this style from Ezra Pound and even Gertrude Stein. He had an interesting relationship with Getrude Stein. He thought that her writing was really interesting but hopelessly unreadable, and he kind of admired the way she didn’t care that she wasn’t commercial. But of course, she came from a wealthy family, so she could do that. But Hemingway wanted to be that experimental modernist, but do it in a way that he would be popular and have readers. And that is really what shaped his writing style, not newspaper work.
Chris Hedges: Well we forget that he was quite close to Joyce, and they would all go out drinking. And Joyce loved drinking with Hemingway because he was a big guy, so when they both got obnoxious in some French bar, people would leave them alone. Although, as you point out in your book, his bravado as a boxer, again, was a myth. He used to fight Ezra Pound, of all people, because Pound knew nothing about boxing. And he liked to knock people down, but he couldn’t actually fight anybody who was a boxer. You and I, by the way, both boxed.
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. I boxed enough to know he wasn’t, I wasn’t either. I was not a great boxer. I was the opposite of Hemingway. I really didn’t want to hurt anybody.
Chris Hedges: That’s the whole point of boxing, Mark.
Mark Kurlansky: I know.
Chris Hedges: That was the difference between you and me.
Mark Kurlansky: No, if I planted a good punch, there’d be a part of me that might pull back [inaudible]
Chris Hedges: Okay. So you make the point in the book that I thought was also really true and interesting that Hemingway really didn’t know Spain or Cuba, but that he created these powerful fictions of these places that we’re still grappling with, in many ways we still can’t overcome.
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. You know, he may have known Spain, what he didn’t know is the Basques.
Chris Hedges: Right. That you were specific about that. Yeah.
Mark Kurlansky: He had no idea who the Basques were. And as someone who spent a lot of my life around Basques, I read Hemingway, and it’s a little strange, that’s not who Basques are. Never met a [inaudible] He was a fiction writer, and he created fiction. But you know, as you say, For Whom the Bell Tolls, pretty good portrait of what Spain was like in the Civil War. And you know, one of the interesting things for me, I mean, I didn’t go to Spain because of Hemingway. I went to Spain because it was an incredible experience to see the last 1930s fascist dictatorship still in power.
And it was a fascinating place. It was very different from any place else in the world because it was in this time warp, but it was… The Paris that I went to was completely different than the Paris Hemingway went to. And the Cuba I went to, his Cuba was pre-revolutionary, mine was post. Everything was different except Spain, the Spain I went to, because I went to Spain when Franco was still in power. And the Spain I went to was really the same Spain that he left.
Chris Hedges: I want to talk about Spain. So he had a rupture with John Dos Passos in Spain, Jose Robles Passos he had taught at Johns Hopkins. He translated Dos Passos. He was a Colonel in the Republican army during the war. He was arrested in December of 1936 by the principal communist hatchet man and homicidal maniac Andre Marty. He was the political commissar of the international brigades, credited with the executions of 500 people that he suspected of being spies. Hemingway knew about the executions.
And he knew about who Marty was in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. He said that “his face looked as though it was modeled from the waste material of his victims that you find under the claws of a very old lion.” And yet during the war, Hemingway would not denounce the crimes in the way that Orwell did, because of course it would’ve made him a pariah, and he was feted and a celebrity in Spain. It would’ve shattered his privileged status. And he turned his back on Robles, he turned his back on Dos Passos, and I want to talk about that dishonesty, that cowardice, and that betrayal.
Mark Kurlansky: Well, I mean, let’s be honest about this. I mean, so there’s all these reporters there, and he is getting better information, better sources than anyone because he’s a celebrity. Most of his sources are from communists. And if he reported on the bad stuff they were doing, he’d lose his sources. Now you and I both know this is not a unique thing. It’s often without naming names in every war, in every difficult situation, there are reporters who gloss over truths so that they won’t offend the people who are feeding them information. It’s actually, in a way, it’s the most journalistic thing he ever did, unfortunately.
And then he wrote a novel and told all, revealed all the truth, because he didn’t need his sources anymore. It is completely dishonest. It’s interesting, because he was around a lot of good reporters like Herbert Matthew, and they sort of accepted that he would do this. But you know, [inaudible], the Civil War was covered. The New York Times had Herbert Matthew for the Republic, and they had somebody else for the fascists. And Matthew who worked his side, this other guy worked his side, and they filed stories. And I think it must have been extremely confusing for New York Times readers to try to figure out what was going on in Spain. Because you’re getting two different versions all the time. They won the battle, then they lost the battle. I mean it was just completely opposite.
Chris Hedges: Well that’s how The New York Times works. So as a foreign correspondent, I’m writing one thing in El Salvador and the Washington Bureau’s writing another based on administration sources, and it’s that old IF stone line that people who have sources to the powerful, he said they know more than I do. Unfortunately, most of it’s false, and Hemingway spewed propaganda. I mean he talked about how they were winning the war on the Eve of the Republican defeat.
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s the whole thing about journalism. But one thing I always struggled with was the reporters who took everything the US government told them. And sometimes the US government had their own propaganda reasons. Sometimes they were just completely misinformed, but these guys would just take what they were being fed. There’s laziness. You know, you don’t have to go out and find a source.
Chris Hedges: Right. Well that’s the difference, because most reporters in a war zone, the war zones I’ve been in, they don’t want to go out. They want to get the handouts, and they’re used against the rest of us that do go out. And Hemingway wrote a lot of his stories at the bar. He didn’t go out.
Mark Kurlansky: No, he did go out. He did both. He did both. I mean all the material for For Whom the Bell Tolls was from a story he reported on. There’s things that actually happened about blowing up the bridge and stuff. And it was this story that the Communist Party put him up to. You know, they said you go to this place and you’ll get a good story.
Chris Hedges: But did he go or did he interview the people who did it?
Mark Kurlansky: No, he actually went, he went, he went out a lot. He’d go out with Herbert Matthews and they’d go to places. You’ll appreciate this having been in Nicaragua, that he had a great advantage that he had a car and plenty of gasoline. When I was in Nicaragua, I mean, it was pathetic. I just couldn’t get anywhere unless I’d befriended somebody who had a car and a tank full of gas. I was noticing in your new book, you talk about how you avoided working with people who were green and didn’t know what they were doing. In principle, I agree, but the truth is in Nicaragua, I would work with anybody who had the gasoline.
Chris Hedges: So I want to talk about World War II. Hemingway blurred the line between correspondent and combatant, and you and I both know that that’s exceedingly dangerous for those of us who attempt to report in a war zone. He, because Hemingway of course carried a weapon, and perhaps used it, and it’s already dangerous enough.
Mark Kurlansky: Right. Don’t shoot at me, I’m not a combatant. Oh, but this guy over here is. Really bad, but it’s not clear how much of that he actually did.
Chris Hedges: Well, that’s the other thing we can’t tell, which I think you acknowledge in your book, since he’s an unreliable source.
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. I don’t think he had nearly the role in the liberation of Paris that he claimed he did. They know he didn’t liberate the rips. There were no Germans in the Ritz by the time he got there. Which, if you think about it, the allies have come down from Normandy, they’ve [inaudible] Paris, the troops have come in, and the Germans are sitting around in the Ritz hotel. Really? So he would just make these things up. But one of the interesting things is that the other correspondents got fed up with him doing this stuff and having weapons and acting like a combatant. And they complained about it. And they had a hearing, they examined him. They were considering throwing him out of the front for violating the rules of correspondence. And he denied everything, said, oh, I never did this stuff. You never know when Hemingway was telling the truth.
Chris Hedges: I want to talk about – This is from Hemingway and he is dead on, in the book. This is from your book. He said, “Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle.” I thought that was kind of brilliant.
Mark Kurlansky: It is. And as a writer who lives in New York, I have to tell you that my saving grace is that I live in Manhattan, whereas all the other writers live in Brooklyn.
Chris Hedges: I want to talk a little bit about his fiction. And I think before we went on the air, you said the only time he’s honest is in his fiction, what do you mean by that?
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. Well, I mean, he had this code about his fiction, about it being true and honest that he didn’t have about his journalism. So you see in For Whom the Bell Tolls, he talks about the atrocities on both sides. He has this book that was published posthumously in which they’re game hunting, big game hunting in Africa. And there’s this character named Hemingway who was talking about how really awful it is, these white guys going to Africa and killing all their natural resources, and really questioning the whole role of hunters. And he would bring up lots of issues and lots of points of view. And he really, in his fiction, he wasn’t really trying to indoctrinate you. He was trying to just show how it is.
Chris Hedges: Would it be fair to say that’s because he wasn’t writing about himself? That when he wrote about himself, in a way he was building this kind of mythic idea of who he was, but when he stepped out of himself, he could be honest?
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. I don’t know. You know, it’s not clear when he was writing about himself because in his fiction he has all these characters, Nick Adams, for example, all these characters that clearly seem to be Hemingway, or some aspect of Hemingway. And then he writes about them in ways that are often critical, big and small ways. Jake Barnes, who you really feel is Hemingway, cheats as a fly fisherman and uses bait, something probably Hemingway wouldn’t have done. He was just very complicated.
Chris Hedges: Well, you capture it in the book, which is a great read. That was Mark Kurlansky on his book, The Importance of Not Being Ernest: My Life With the Uninvited Hemingway. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Grenadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
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The leaked majority draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—which suggests the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, returning the question of abortion to the states—is part of a broader assault against women. The COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, has seen an estimated 30% increase in violent attacks against women, along with the curtailment of their rights. This assault, writes author and activist V, is “the most severe setback to women’s liberation in my lifetime.”
Much of this abuse, including an increase in sex and labor trafficking, is driven by the loss of work, further disempowering women. “In the US, more than 5 million women’s jobs were lost between the start of the pandemic and November 2020,” V writes in The Guardian. “Because much of women’s work requires physical contact with the public—restaurants, stores, childcare, healthcare settings—theirs were some of the first to go. Those who were able to keep their jobs were often frontline workers whose positions have put them in great danger; some 77% of hospital workers and 74% of school staff are women. Even then, the lack of childcare options left many women unable to return to their jobs.”
In this installment of The Chris Hedges Report, Chris speaks with V about how the expected overturning of Roe and the attacks on LGBTQ+ rights are part of a global, reactionary, theocratic war for patriarchal domination. V (formerly known as Eve Ensler) is a Tony-award winning playwright, author, and activist. Her new book is The Apology.
Chris Hedges interviews writers, intellectuals, and dissidents, many banished from the mainstream, in his half-hour show, The Chris Hedges Report. He gives voice to those, from Cornel West and Noam Chomsky to the leaders of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who are on the front lines of the struggle against militarism, corporate capitalism, white supremacy, the looming ecocide, as well as the battle to wrest back our democracy from the clutches of the ruling global oligarchy.
Chris Hedges:The leaked majority draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health which suggests the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, returning the question of abortion to the States, is part of a broader assault against women. The COVID-19 pandemic has seen an estimated 30% increase in violent attacks against women, along with a curtailment of their rights. “This assault,” writes V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, “is the most severe setback to women’s liberation in my lifetime.” Much of this abuse, including an increase in sex and labor trafficking, is driven by the loss of work, further disempowering women.
“In the US,” she writes, “more than five million women’s jobs were lost between the start of the pandemic and November 2020. Because much of the women’s work requires physical contact with the public: restaurants, stores, childcare, healthcare settings, theirs were some of the first to go. Those who were able to keep their jobs were often front line workers whose positions have put them in great danger. Some 77% of hospital workers and 74% of school staff are women. Even then, the lack of childcare options left many women unable to return to their jobs.”
Joining me to discuss the assault on women’s rights, as well as her new book The Apology, is the Tony Award-winning playwright and author and activist V, formerly known as Eve Ensler. So V, let’s begin with the expected Supreme Court decision with this leak. Number one, were you surprised? And number two, where do we go from here?
V:I was surprised it was leaked, that’s for sure. I just want to say how happy I am to be with you, Chris, to be talking to you. And I was not surprised in that I think we’ve all been waiting to hear that this was coming. I think there are so many feelings that I’m having about this and so many… I just got off a call with many women, who all of whom on that call were clear that this ruling will never be accepted by many, many women across this country. And it is coming out of a theocratic court. It is coming from judges who perjured themselves on the stand when they talked about Roe v. Wade.
It is coming from sexual predators on the court, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, and by people who were appointed to that court by a sexual predator president. So we can’t at all trust them to… Women would not only not want to go near these men in terms of their bodies, but we certainly wouldn’t accept laws from them. And I think one of the things we all need to be thinking about, and I’ve been thinking about this so much this last week, is when our institutions fail us as the Supreme Court is doing, 70% of the people in this country support abortion, support reproductive justice, support reproductive rights.
When our institutions fail us, it’s not just our right, it is our duty to not obey those institutions. And I think what we have to communicate now to the Senate, to the courts, is that women across this country are not going back in the bottle. We’ve been freed for 50 years. We’ve had choice. We will never give those rights up, that’s not going to happen. And we’re not going to accept this, period.
Chris Hedges:I want to talk about the Democratic Party, because the Democratic Party had 50 years when it could have codified this into law. You had Jimmy Carter, you had Clinton, and you had Barack Obama, all of whom had majorities, at least at the inception of their presidencies. Barack Obama said, I think it’s called the Freedom of Choice – I can’t remember the title of it – Act that would’ve codified Roe v. Wade into law. It was the first thing he was going to sign when he took office. He said this as a candidate. And then, in his eight years as president, never signed it. Talk a little bit about the failure of the Democratic Party to stand up and do what it should do.
V:Well, I think it’s exactly what the Democratic Party is doing right now. What was Biden’s message that he put out? When this happens, this is what we will do. You don’t lead people into battle already claiming defeat, right? As you’re moving into it, you say, we will stand up and we will fight to make sure this never happens. And I think that attitude, that commitment to women, to people with pregnancies, wanted or unwanted, has never been there in the Democratic Party. It has never been with the rigor, with the devotion, with the commitment that is necessary to codify a law.
And I think we’re seeing the results of that now. And I think one of the things we all have to look at is the people have to be clear that this is not what the people want. And we have to go to any lengths to show we will not accept this as law. We will not. Because I believe, as many people believe, once the chips start to go, every right is going to start to go with him. This is essentially a theocratic Christian right-wing takeover of the courts. And we’ve already seen what it’s done with voting rights. It’s going to keep going one right after another right after another right.
So I don’t even know if it’s about pushing the Democratic Party anymore, because I think we have pushed and pushed and pushed. I think it’s more of people saying, at this moment, the state is no longer serving us in ways that are necessary to protect our basic rights.
Chris Hedges:I mentioned before we went on the air that I covered Romania, where abortion was illegal. It didn’t stop abortions. It meant that those who had resources, the wealthy, the mistresses of the party bosses all had access to safe abortions, and poor women died in back rooms. That’s what happens when you outlaw abortion.
V:That’s exactly right. And we know that the people who are going to suffer most in this country from these laws are Black women, and Brown women, and poor women, and Indigenous women, and immigrants, and people who don’t have access to resources and money. And this will be devastating. And the idea that we think we’re going to go back to those times where women’s bodies are destroyed, or women are forced to have children against their will, this is just unconscionable. It’s not possible. It’s not something we can accept.
Chris Hedges:And we should be clear, Biden supported the Hyde Amendment, which stopped the federal government from paying for abortions. And he supported allowing states individually to overturn Roe v. Wade. So that’s Biden’s track record on this issue.
V:Right. And I think what we need right now, one of the things we were talking about is, we need leadership in this country that has the commitment to women’s rights, and commitment to LGBTQ rights, and commitment to voting rights that are matching the times that we are living in with the energy, with the thinking, with the imagination, with the creativity, and with the commitment. And we see that completely lacking in the Democratic Party. I’m sorry, it’s just not there.
Chris Hedges:Before we talk about the response, why? What is it about patriarchy that is so obsessive about abortion?
V:Well, I think one of the things we have to look at is like a history of going back and back and back to when did the idea of controlling women’s bodies start? In my piece in The Guardian, I wrote, what is it about women’s bodies that make the patriarchy so afraid and insecure and so cruel and so punishing? And I think it has to do with our autonomy. And I think it has to do with our mere existence. I think it has to do with our capacity for pleasure and unending pleasure. I think it has to do with our strength, which is able to bend and carry and birth and lift and isn’t reliant on weapons and violence, but it has an inherent strength. It has an inherent energy of strength.
And I think that patriarchy is insistent that there are certain men that rise, that control, that dominate, that have the goods, that have it all, that that hierarchy is maintained. And I think when women have a right to their bodies and have access to their bodies and know that they can have children if they want them and don’t have children if they want to, if they can have sex when they want to or not have sex when they want to, we’re living in a completely different world. And I think there is a huge pushback against that world because, essentially, the few very, very white men who have the power will be disabled of that power, and they are not giving it up.
Chris Hedges:So where do we go? What’s the response? So you’re right, there’s a kind of fatalism on the part of the Democratic Party leadership that it’s already going to happen. What should we do?
V:I think what we have to do, first of all, is believe that we can do something. My feeling the last few days is talking to people and hearing just this feeling like there’s nothing we can do. I’ve been reading so much about the early days of Germany when they were banning books and the Nazis were beginning to evolve. And there was time in those moments for people to really make change and for people to fight back and for people to say, this is not my country anymore. I don’t recognize this country anymore. And I think part of what we have to do is be willing to be more bold, more daring, go further out to actually shut this country down if it means that all of our rights are entangled in one right.
Like the fact that we keep separating out voting rights from abortion rights from gay and LGBTQ rights, but all of this is the same story. There is an attempt to keep the world that is trying to emerge from emerging. The world where we, for example, reckon with our history and look at the history of white supremacy in this country, and teach critical race theory, and look at what this history of this country has done to Indigenous people, to Black and Brown people. It’s pushing back against gender liberation. It’s pushing back against workers’ rights liberation. It’s pushing back against a deep and powerful concern for the earth and for protecting the world.
All of these things are one for all and all for one. And what patriarchy and what capitalism has brilliantly done has divided us into these silos. So we all think we’re fighting for this issue over here and this issue over here, when in fact this is one story. And when we go out to fight for one issue, we need to fight for all issues. And I think first it’s believing that you can change things and standing up and joining forces and becoming unified with others in fighting that. And then it’s being willing to say, I’m just not going to accept this as law, period. That’s not going to happen. So when I don’t accept that, what’s going to happen as a result of me not accepting that? And I think that’s what has to emerge over these next days.
Chris Hedges:I want to talk about what you write about in The Guardian, the COVID crisis being manipulated and used by patriarchy. And you had some staggering figures – And these are global figures – Of violence, disappearance. With that lockdown, with COVID, with the law, with the economic consequences of the pandemic, you’ve also seen a reassertion of very dark patriarchal figures. Speak about what’s happened.
V:Yes, it’s been really, really terrifying. I wrote this piece called. “Disaster Patriarchy,” which was based on Naomi Klein’s idea of disaster capitalism, when capitalists used a disaster to impose measures they couldn’t possibly get away with in normal times, generating more [inaudible] for themselves. And disaster patriarchy would be a parallel and complementary process where men exploit a crisis to reassert control and dominate and rapidly erase the hard-earned rights of women. And all over the world, patriarchy has taken full advantage of this virus to reclaim power on one hand, escalating danger and violence to women everywhere. And then on the other then kind of stepping in as this supposed controller and protector of women.
I have to tell you that working on the front lines of violence against women, we have seen an explosion of violence towards women across the planet, and cisgendered, gender diverse violence, intimate terrorism. I mean, first of all, the fact that people were locked in their homes with partners with their children, no one even considered what kind of violence that would generate when men weren’t working, when no one was working, when people were panicked about how they were going to live, when people were getting sick. We’ve seen unbelievable violence, and we don’t even know what that is yet.
And then of course at the same time, they were shutting down shelters and places that people could escape to, and not lifting up women and protecting women. And I think we’ve seen the spread of revenge porn as the world was pushed online and digital sexual abuse has escalated. I hate to be the bearer of really bad news, but confinement, it was a perfect storm with economic insecurity, fear of illness, and excessive alcohol, all of these combined to make violence disturbing everywhere.
I’m in contact with sisters around the world from Italy to the Philippines, to all across this planet. It is the same thing across the world. The statistics of violence against women during the pandemic are absurdly high. And I think as we come out of the pandemic, what’s being done to support those women? Because so much of those shelters and so much of those systems that would be there for women have gone away because there’s no funding for them. And I think we’ve also seen the rise of rape. We’ve seen the rise of sex trafficking because of poor families around the world.
One of the things that deeply concerns me is how many girls have been out of school and the ending of education for young girls. Because we were seeing a progression of that and a movement forward on that in the world. And to see millions of girls out of school. There’s pushbacks on so many things. For example, if you look at the issue of female genital mutilation. When girls were going to school and they weren’t being cut, they were becoming doctors, they were becoming teachers. They were becoming people who could provide for their families.
And so their families weren’t cutting them anymore, because they were bringing income and they were bringing food back to their family after they’d been educated. Now with girls not being able to go to school, we’re seeing a rise again of FGM. We’re seeing a rise again of families selling off their daughters. A rise again of being pushed into child marriage. And I think this isn’t even being taken up on a scale or being addressed on the scale that it needs to be addressed on, because it’s really happening in real time. And then as you said at the beginning of the show, in the US, more than five million women have lost their jobs.
And because of that, women are now home, they’re back inside the house taking care of children all day long, taking care of their families all day long. We can’t even estimate how exhausted women are as a result of the pandemic and how panicked they are about what’s become of their lives that they had before the virus.
Chris Hedges:Let’s talk about women on the front lines. You write about the nurses, for example. But it is a disproportionate percentage of women who, in the midst of this pandemic, are on the front lines. Talk a little bit about what’s happened to them.
V:Well, I think I really want to talk specifically about both nurses and restaurant workers. As we all remember, at the beginning of the pandemic, no one even thought about what was going to happen to our nurses and to our care workers in hospitals. Remember, women were being forced to wear garbage bags as protective uniforms, and they were reusing masks, which were obviously going to get them sick. The way nurses have been treated throughout this pandemic, who are the fundamental people on the front lines, has been simply outrageous and, in my opinion, profoundly inhumane.
And I did a piece called “That Kindness,” where I interviewed lots of women who were on the front lines to ask them what it was like during the pandemic. And nurses become nurses because they want to heal and they want to make people better. And to put nurses into conditions where they are on these front lines but really cannot help people get… At the beginning of the pandemic, nurses were just flooded with patients. They weren’t able to help anyone. They were doing their best to heal and do this. But with no support, with no backup from the government, from the hospitals.
And that is across the board in terms of women’s work. If you look at women in restaurants who are still fighting, most of them are making $2.13 an hour, and are fighting for the basic fair wage. Those women have been forced to work in restaurants where there’s even a new development called “maskular” harassment, if one can believe this, where, when you’re serving a man, they were asked to take down their mask so the man could see if they were pretty enough to get a tip. And obviously this puts women at high risk of getting sick. It puts them at risk of… Obviously it’s humiliating.
It’s degrading. But there was nothing women could do to fight that, because there was no one backing them up during the pandemic. And I think the more we erode women’s rights in the workplace, the harder it gets for women to stay well, to do their jobs well, to even keep those jobs because they’re so working against their basic human rights.
Chris Hedges:You write about women farm workers as well, pesticides, poisoning, sexual abuse, heat stress issues. I want to read a little passage you wrote and then have you comment on it. You said, “COVID has revealed the fact that we live with two incompatible ideas when it comes to women. The first is that women are essential to every aspect of life and our survival as a species. The second is that women can easily be violated, sacrificed, and erased. This is the duality that patriarchy has slashed into the fabric of existence and that COVID has laid bare. If we are to continue as a species, this contradiction needs to be healed and made whole.” I thought that was a really prescient point.
V:Thank you, Chris. I feel it so deeply, and I feel it particularly around everything that’s going on with abortion too. Women are expected to do basically all the labor and all the work that keeps this culture together and keeps the world together. Whether it’s parenting, or teaching, or caring for people, in restaurants, or taking care of the elderly, or working as nurses, or working in the field, just go down the list. The world would absolutely stop in its tracks if women withdrew their labor from it. Who would rear the children? Who would teach the children? Who would nurse people? Who would care for people?
Who would clean? Who would do everything that is essential to our lives? And yet we are the most undervalued, unpaid, unrecognized, uncherished and most easily disposed off. And I think one of the things I think we have to understand as women and people who are doing this work is that we actually have power. We hold the power. And if we make a decision to withhold that power and stop doing all these things, the world would actually stop. That we have essential value, that we are critical to the evolution of the human race and the continuation of the human race.
And if we make a decision to say, we are no longer participating in this until the world changes, it will change. But part of it is getting us together and unifying us with our male and LGBTQ allies so that we are all joined in this understanding that there are only some people who are valued in this culture. The rich, the billionaires, the white men, the people with power are valued, and everybody else is not. And so part of it is, how do we all come together to understand that we are in a struggle to fight for the majority, to fight for majority rights, to fight for what is basic and human, and to stand for the people who keep this world together?
Chris Hedges:I want to close by talking about your book, which I read, The Apology. Beautifully written, hard to read. It’s essentially written in the voice, you wrote it, but written in the voice of your father who sexually abused you as a child. Talk about why you wrote it and why an apology is so important.
V:Thank you for asking me about the book. I think as a child, I always thought there would come a day where my father would wake up and come to consciousness and realize what he had done, that he had sexually abused me, that he had beaten me, that he had almost murdered me, and that he would come to his senses and say, I was wrong, and I want to make amends to you, and I want to look deeply in my soul for what I’ve done. And that didn’t happen. I waited all my life. And then my father died. And somehow, even in his death I had this fantasy for 31 years that I would go to the mailbox and there would be this apology letter, and he would finally have sent it to me from some other realm.
And I don’t think I’m alone. I think there are millions if not billions of women waiting for those apologies. And then Me Too happened and I saw so many men being called out for their behavior, whether it was sexual harassment, whether it was rape, whether it was abuse, whatever it was. And I kept waiting for men to be accountable, to make apologies, to do self-reflection, to look at themselves, to say, this is what I’ve done and I’m doing self-investigation and I’m trying to understand, how did I become a man who was capable of doing those things? What in my family, what in the culture, what in the society made me like this?
And to do the work enough so that apologies could be made. And to be honest with you, I didn’t hear one single apology. Not only that, we see men who have done terrible things going to prison briefly and then getting out, or never going prison, or never having any ramifications. And so I realized, I’ve been waiting for this apology my whole life. I’m just going to write it. I’m going to write the apology to myself and say the words to myself that I needed to hear so that I could be transformed and I could go on with my life. And to be honest, writing this book was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
I had to kind of climb into my father, who’s been dead for 31 years. But to be honest, as soon as I made the determination to write the book, he felt very much present through the writing of the book. And I had to kind of go into him to try to understand – Not justify, let me be clear. There’s a difference between understanding and justification – To understand what went into my father. Who was he that he was capable of attempting to completely destroy his child? His daughter. To sexually abuse her, to put her down, to beat her, to eviscerate her on every level, to make her feel stupid, to make her feel unworthy.
And doing that was a very, very profound thing, because I began to understand patriarchy on a level I had never understood before. And I began to understand that one of the columns of patriarchy, one of the things keeping it, supporting it, holding it up is the non-apology. Is men having joined in some kind of unspoken, unconscious decision that they will never say they’re sorry. Because one man says he’s sorry, the whole system begins to crumble. The whole idea. And I think what I discovered is that apologies are a pathway for all of us in a lot of different areas.
Look, we have a country with a completely unexamined history. Deny, deny, deny, whether it’s how this country began with the destruction and the genocide towards the Indigenous and the stealing of their lands and the eviscerating of their culture, going towards 400 years of slavery and destruction of African Americans and Jim Crow and all that’s come after. And all of that has been buried. There’s been no apology. There’s been no reckoning. There’s been no accountability. And I think part of this country, one of the reasons we’re here is we have diabolical amnesia. It’s diabolical.
And that is countered with an apology. Because an apology forces you to remember, forces you to go back, forces you to look at the details of what actually happened and what you are responsible for. And then gets you to actually say to the person you’re apologizing to, I understand what my actions did to you. I see the impact of it on you. I see the long term effects it’s had on you. I actually get that I am responsible for that, and I take responsibility. So that you’re not gaslit for your entire future. So you understand you didn’t make this up, that you’re not insane. This really happened, and you can be free of those crimes. As well as the perpetrator beginning to be free of those crimes.
Chris Hedges:Well, if there’s no honest reckoning with the past, there’s no capacity to have a dialogue.
V:None.
Chris Hedges:Because you have to begin grounded in a truth, however unpleasant. In the book, you talk about its ramifications, very self-destructive ramifications that it had on you. The kind of reverberations of that abuse are awful. Can you address that?
V:Thank you for asking that, because I think one of the things we do is we talk about “gender violence,” and we keep it very abstract, and we don’t look at, what is the impact of sexual abuse on children and girls and on boys? And what is the impact of violence? I was an outcome of violence. I was a consequence of violence. My daily existence was threatened by being beaten, and that came after the years where my father was coming into my room at night and invading my body, and taking me and doing with me what he wanted to do with me.
So I grew up in a state of terror, anxiety. I couldn’t think. I lost my ability to think. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t concentrate. I had to start basically erasing everything that had been done to me, because it was so intolerable. So I began to erase my memory and my capacity for memory. My body got sick. It got all kinds of strange infections. It became vulnerable in ways it would never have become vulnerable if somebody hadn’t invaded me. I lost my capacity for intimacy. Whatever relationships I was in, the closer I got to whoever I was involved with, I had to withdraw myself because it was too frightening, because intimacy meant a form of takeover and violence and invasion.
And it’s interesting. 12 years ago, I had stage three/four uterine cancer. And I started to really do research about how many women have gotten reproductive cancers. And I have to say, I know – I haven’t been able to prove this scientifically yet, but it will be proved eventually – There is a direct link between trauma towards the body and cancers that develop in the body. I think one day we will come to call cancer trauma. There is a direct link with that. So the kind of impact that sexual violence has on children, on women, on our mental health, our ability to believe that we are worthy.
I have fought my entire life not to believe I am nothing. Not to believe I am stupid. To fight to believe I have a right to be here. Because that right was eviscerated from the time I can remember. And I’m a fortunate person. I’m a white person. I grew up in an upper middle-class environment where at least I was exposed to resources that could help me. But I’ve spent time in prisons. I’ve spent time in homeless shelters. I spent time where there are poor people who haven’t access to those resources, and they simply disappear. They simply are broken. They simply are drug addicts. They end up doing crimes because at some point, all of the trauma that’s been done to them is explosive, and eventually there’s a reaction to it. And we don’t treat any of this, although there are millions of us who are in this position, because one out of three women will be beaten or raped in her lifetime.
Chris Hedges:I did a book on the Christian right American fascist, The Christian Right and the War on America. I didn’t put it in the book, but I interviewed dozens and dozens of women in the movement and every single one had spoken about domestic or sexual abuse. Every single one.
V:Yeah. And I think it’s one of those things where when you… Look, I’ve been doing this work to end violence against all women and girls for, it’s going to be 25 years. And I sat with women everywhere in the world and all over this country. And there are so many women who have been beaten, who have been raped, who have been cut, who have been incested. And yet it’s the underlying thing that’s determining so much of our existence and still has not been confronted in a way that is measurable, that is comparable to the severity of the crimes. And I think that’s all part of this way of minimizing women and erasing women and making women feel they don’t have a right to their voice and a right to their body and a right to their basic worth.
Chris Hedges:Great. We’re going to stop there. V, I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
From relentless war, militarism, and apartheid around the globe to climate catastrophe and reactionary attacks on civil rights and basic freedoms, the world is a scary place right now, and it is perfectly reasonable to feel despondent about it. It’s at times like this that we need art the most—not as some utilitarian salve for the pain we’re feeling, but because art connects us to the most joyful, beautiful, and human aspects of being alive. In this special all-recommendations episode of Art for the End Times, Lyta and a raucous panel of guests share their top recommendations for art that will make you happy and remind you why life is worth living.
Heroic dissidents are demonized, marginalized, physically and psychologically destroyed, or assassinated by the American ruling class. Before the persecution of Julian Assange, before the FBI assassination of Fred Hampton and Malcolm X, before the murder of Martin Luther King, there was the relentless campaign to silence the activist, actor, and singer Paul Robeson. Robeson, the most internationally known and revered Black American of his day, was a socialist and a militant who stood with the crucified of the earth.
Historian Gerald Horne is author of the biography “Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary,” and is the Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, he joins Chris hedges to discuss the life of “the most blacklisted performer in America,” linking the persecution of Paul Robeson directly to the persecution of Julian Assange, held today in a high security prison in London where his mental and physical health—like Robeson’s at the end of his life—is in serious decline.
Chris Hedges interviews writers, intellectuals, and dissidents, many banished from the mainstream, in his half-hour show, The Chris Hedges Report. He gives voice to those, from Cornel West and Noam Chomsky to the leaders of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who are on the front lines of the struggle against militarism, corporate capitalism, white supremacy, the looming ecocide, as well as the battle to wrest back our democracy from the clutches of the ruling global oligarchy.
Watch The Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET.
Studio: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino, Dwayne Gladden Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
Chris Hedges:Welcome to the Chris Hedges Report. When you defy the imperial capitalist American state; When you denounce the crimes done to its own people, especially the poor, immigrants, and African Americans, as well as the crimes it commits abroad; When you have a global audience in the tens of millions that admires you and respects you for your courage and integrity; When you cannot be intimidated or bought off; Then, you are targeted for destruction.
Heroic dissidents are demonized, marginalized, physically and psychologically destroyed, or assassinated by the American ruling class. Before the persecution of Julian Assange, before the FBI assassination of Fred Hampton and Malcolm X, before the murder of Martin Luther king, there was the relentless campaign to silence the activist, actor, and singer Paul Robeson. Robeson was a socialist and a militant who stood with the crucified of the earth. He was fearless, confronting then president Harry S. Truman in a face to face meeting in the White House and berating him for failing to halt the reign of terror and lynching that afflicted Blacks.
He famously filed a petition with the United Nations charging the US government with genocide against African Americans. Robeson, who had a law degree from Columbia University, was multilingual. He had a global appeal that has perhaps never been matched by another Black American, even by figures such as Muhammad Ali or Malcolm X. W.E.B. Du Bois called him, without doubt, the best known American on earth. He was a stalwart member of the radical left, an active defender of trade union movements. But he was to become, in the words of Pete Seeger, the folk singer who was also persecuted in the United States, the most blacklisted performer in America. By the end, stripped of his passport, subject to relentless character assassination, denied the ability to make a living, he would end his days in 1976 a virtual recluse in his sister’s home in Philadelphia.
His life illustrates the lengths to which the American empire will go to destroy and silence its most powerful critics. Linking the persecution of Paul Robeson directly to the persecution of Julian Assange, held today in a high security prison in London where his mental and physical health, like Robeson’s at the end of his life, is in serious decline.
Joining me to discuss the life of Paul Robeson is his biographer Gerald Horne, the Moores professor of history and African American studies at the University of Houston. So in your book, you write that Robeson pioneered the struggle against Jim Crow throughout the ’30s and ’40s. It was only with Robeson’s fall that King and Malcolm could emerge as they did. The undermining of Robeson created a vacuum that these two leaders filled. I wondered if you could talk about his battle against racial segregation, racial terror, and this legacy that you highlight.
Gerald Horne: Well, the great Paul L Robeson was born in central New Jersey in 1898, passed away in Philadelphia in 1976. In between, he is an All-American football player at his alma mater, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He’s also a stalwart on the basketball court and on the baseball diamond. As you suggested from there, he moves on to Columbia University, and seemingly is en route to a comfortable life, or as comfortable as a “negro” could be under the savage ravages of Jim Crow.
But his life is diverted. His life is diverted in part because of the fact that he was friendly with another Black lawyer, speaking of William Patterson, who eventually becomes a leading Black member of the US Communist Party. And also his life is diverted by his spouse, Eslanda Robeson, who encourages him to express his artistic and cultural talent as a singer, as an actor. And he’s finding it difficult – This is in the early 1920s, or in the post World War I era, post 1918 – To pursue that kind of career in New York City where all three, Patterson and Robeson and his spouse, were living.
And so he decides to go into exile, like so many Black Americans before or since. For example, the great James Baldwin, for example, spent a good deal of his most fertile years as an artist in France and in Turkey, for example. Robeson decided to choose exile in London, where he found things a bit more comfortable than he did in New York City. And he quickly becomes a star of stage and screen, on stage as a singer and as an actor. His Othello is still considered to be the definitive performance of that Shakespearean tragedy. And as well, because of the influence of Patterson, he is encouraged and decides to move even further to the left than he had been to that point.
What I mean is that as you suggested, Robeson was multilingual and that allowed him, for example, to perform in Germany, since he was fluent in German. But he was performing in Germany at a time when fascism was rising. And this was perhaps the definitive episode in Robeson’s life. That is to say, coming face to face with the ugliness and horrors of fascism in the 1930s. He of course was fluent in Russian, and winds up educating his only son, Paul Jr., his only child, in Russia, in the Soviet Union because he wanted him to escape the pernicious nature of Jim Crow in the United States and his homeland. And another turning point comes as well in the 1930s, indeed, when he performs on the battlefield of Spain. Recall that a democratically elected government in Spain was then under siege by fascism. That is to say, the eventual victor, Francisco Franco, and his fascist supporters in Rome and Berlin, Robeson performed there.
And that too was a turning point in his life. And it’s fair to say that he would have likely resided in London indefinitely but for the coming of World War II in Europe. By the late summer of 1939. Feeling that he and his family might be trapped in a war zone, they all decamped back to the United States across the Atlantic. And this was a kind of propitious moment, because the United States was egging itself on towards entering the antifascist war. Robeson, as a result, was on the same page as his homeland and initially was lionized. He was able to perform Othello on Broadway, for example, where he was applauded heartily. Although I should mention that when performing Othello in New York, he was nervous about embracing, as a Black person, his leading lady, Desdemona in the Shakespearean play, for fear that some racist in the audience might storm the stage and slap him, for example, or worse.
But in any case, that sort of New York spring or US spring lasted until the conclusion of World War II 1945, when the political climate shifted towards anti-communism, the new Cold War, the Red Scare. Robeson was becoming a non-person as a result. He had an infamous face-to-face confrontation with the then US president Harry S. Truman, with Robeson reading the Riot Act to the US president because of Washington’s seeming inability to do anything or lift a finger with regard to the lynching of Black people, with certain Black soldiers in particular, coming home from the war and being attacked in their uniform.
One notorious case of Isaac Woodward in South Carolina has his eyes gouged out by racists, which obviously inflames the ire of Robeson. But what’s inflaming the ire of the White House is the fact that the Red Scare is underway and Robeson refuses to turn his back on his comrades in the US Communist Party, among which, as noted, is William Patterson, Ben Davis Jr., the eventual spouse of W.E.B. Du Bois, speaking of Shirley Graham Du Bois, and many others.
And so Robeson finds himself on the so-called blacklist. That is to say, he finds it difficult to perform. He finds it difficult to find a venue where his records could be sold. His income plummets from the six figures to the low four figures. He becomes a kind of non-person. The All-American Football Squad of which he was a member decades earlier at Rutgers University, his name is stripped afterwards during the Red Scare so that there were only 10 players on that All-American Football team instead of the requisite 11. And there is an attempt to drive Robeson into the ditch. In fact, there are attempts on his life, most notoriously when he gives a concert in 1949 where Pete Seeger performs, amongst others. A fundraiser for the Civil Rights Congress led by his friend William Patterson, which is raising money so that they could file that petition at the United Nations that you mentioned, charge The United States with genocide against Black people.
A mob amasses, they are baying for blood. They are apparently in league not only with neo-Nazis, but with the police authorities as well. Robeson barely escapes with his body in one piece. And that is the case for a good deal of the 1950s. That is to say, attempted marginalization, attempted isolation, being hauled before congressional committees, being interrogated and brow beaten as to whether or not he is a member of the US Communist Party. Until finally in the late 1950s, as a result of a global campaign – Where, by the way, the leaders of independent India, speaking of Prime Minister Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi, play a leading role – Robeson’s passport is returned. He speedily departs the United States of America. But he tends to overdo it in terms of his travel. He travels down under to Australia, for example, and engages in solidarity with other victims of racist persecution, speaking of the Indigenous population, which are referred to as the Aboriginal population on these shores.
What happens as well is that his spouse who is also his manager, Eslanda, also kind of over does it. She passes away by 1965. Robeson by then is in a kind of decline. He returns to live in West Philadelphia with his sister, where he spends his declining years, although he is in touch with many of the strugglers and fighters in the anti-Jim Crow movement, particularly the younger strugglers and fighters and SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the shock troops of the anti-Jim Crow movement in Dixie, before passing away in 1976. Where, interestingly enough, he is celebrated in the pages of the Black Panther Party newspaper.
Chris Hedges:One of the things in your book that you highlight is that while living in London, he has a very close relationship with anti-colonial movements and many future leaders of independent countries in Africa. And that is a very important part of his education, that he was accused, I think, at one point of espousing communist or Soviet ideas. And he said, well, all of my political education came in London.
Gerald Horne:Yes, that’s true. Because London, although it may be difficult to imagine today, had a very strong left-wing movement. Not only comprised of those who had escaped colonialism, such as C.L.R. James of Trinidad and Tobago, who wrote the still worthy book The Black Jacobins about the Haitian revolution, still consulted. Or Jomo Kenyatta, the founder of independent Kenya, who was once as close to the organized left as Robeson was before deciding to make his peace with London for various reasons. But in the 1930s, as noted, he was part of the left as well.
And that’s not to mention the now forgotten stalwarts of the left in London itself. Speaking of R. Palme Dutt, D-U-T-T, for example, whose works on fascism are still worthy of consultation, or other leaders of that stripe. And so Robeson correctly suggested that it was in London that he received this fundamental education. And so perhaps instead of pinning Moscow on his lapel, as Congress sought to do, they should have pinned London on his lapel.
Chris Hedges: I want to talk about his role in Othello. So he said that playing Othello gave him a more profound understanding of white supremacy and that it was his art that helped drive him to revolutionary understanding. “Performing Othello,” he said, “has taken away from me all kinds of fears, all sense of limitation. Quite simply, it has made me free.” I thought it was fascinating. I wonder if you could speak about that.
Gerald Horne: Well, of course, as you recall, Othello deals with the very striking period in the late 1500s early 1600s, that is the time when it is written by William Shakespeare. Interestingly enough, London at that time is on the verge of surpassing Catholic Spain as the leading European power, and also surpassing Protestant Holland as well, in part because opportunistic London cuts the deal with the other major European power, speaking of Ottoman Turkey, which is a leading, if not the leading Muslim power.
And so in telling this story of Othello, the Moor hailing from North Africa, a predominantly Muslim territory, in some ways, Shakespeare like Othello himself, is performing a service for the state. That is to say, he’s helping English and London audiences become more comfortable with Queen Elizabeth’s defacto alliance with Muslim powers, which is seemingly at odds with a Christian ethos, which suggested that Islam was as antagonistic to Christianity, as many people centuries later thought communism was antagonistic to capitalism.
And so Othello happens to be a character who also is done in by gossip, by the fact that Iago is whispering in his ear and driving him to the depths of despair. And I think that Robeson thought that in order to perform that character of Othello, he had to understand that character psychologically. In fact, when he was playing the role on Broadway in New York, he suggested that in order to work himself up psychologically to generate the kind of rage that audiences would find perhaps comprehensible and help them to understand what he was trying to convey as Othello, he would imagine that he was being betrayed. Of course, betrayal is a central concept of Othello, as you know. He would imagine that he was being betrayed by one of his communist colleagues, speaking of William Patterson or Ben Davis Jr., another Black leader of the Communist Party.
And so I think that that quote that you mentioned also helps to expose and reveal the fundamentals of acting, which many spectators tend to take for granted when they see someone on stage or the silver screen: trying to convey a character. But if you’re going to convey that character adequately and move the audience emotionally, it’s very important for you as the actor to understand the character emotionally and psychologically. And I think that that’s what he was driving at in that quote that you referenced.
Chris Hedges: I want to read another quote. He writes, “Every artist, every scientist must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights…. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.” What was the role of the artist for him?
Gerald Horne: Well, the role of the artist was to inspire. The role of the artist was to convey eternal truths. And, given his imminence, the role of the artist was to be a fundraiser, which he did quite successfully for anti-colonial movements, for union movements. For example, he was quite close to another Black communist leader, speaking of Ferdinand Smith, a founder of the National Maritime Union, a once powerful union that had control, to a degree, over imports and exports on vessels, before he was subjected to the Red Scare and chased back to his homeland, speaking of Jamaica.
And so I think that Robeson was one of the early victims of the so-called blacklist which swept through Hollywood, which has been the subject, as you know, of many different films and plays and novels and memoirs and all the rest. And I think the fact that Hollywood was so deeply impacted by this anti-communism, by this Red Scare, betokens and bespeaks the fact of how the rulers of the United States fundamentally were afraid of artists. They were afraid of artists like Paul Robeson because the ruling elite were aware of the kind of popularity that he held, the kind of esteem in which he was held, and they were aware that he could move millions. And so it’s no accident that A, Robeson is subjected to a vicious persecution, and B, artists more broadly and more widely were treated similarly.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about that persecution. So the FBI follows Robeson’s every move. They mount an extensive and a covert campaign to destroy him, including of course, as you mentioned, his ability to make a living. I think in 1947, he’s making about $104,000 a year. In 1950, it’s fallen to $2,000. I want to speak about what they did to Robeson. And then, talk about how they used Black celebrities, figures like the great baseball player, Jackie Robinson, to attack Robeson and his supporters.
Gerald Horne: Well, as you suggested, Jackie Robinson at one time, particularly in the 1940s, was quite popular, broadly being depicted as the man who helped to break the color line. Actually breaking the color line for the second time circa 1946, of course, Major League Baseball, such as it was, was desegregated in the late 19th century before the onset of the 1890s and the rise of a very vicious Jim Crow and racism.
And so Jackie Robinson was importuned to come before the house Un-American Activities Committee and denounce Paul Robeson. This is in the wake of Paul Robeson quite famously speaking in France, casting doubt on whether Black Americans would be up for a nuclear war against the former Soviet Union. Of course, he doubted it. And that created a firestorm of protest which led to Jackie Robinson coming before the QAC to castigate him.
Of course, subsequently Jackie Robinson apologizes. But by then it’s a bit too late for that kind of apology. And interestingly enough, baseball fans might recall Jackie Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers teammate, the fastballer Don Newcombe, who went further than Jackie Robinson in denouncing Paul Robeson. And that’s the way as a Black celebrity, or as a celebrity in general, or as a US national in general, you kept your head above water. By denouncing Paul Robeson, who was thought to be, believe it or not, the “Black Stalin.” That is to say there was a devious plot to somehow have Paul Robeson be in league with domestic and global communists to somehow take over the United States of America.
I know that some of your viewers and listeners might be tittering at this point. But if so, that suggests that they do not necessarily comprehend the kind of hysteria that was sweeping from the Atlantic to the Pacific at that particular historical moment.
Chris Hedges: I want to talk about… His physical, as you mentioned, and psychological health deteriorates under this constant campaign against him. And in 1961, his son finds him in the bathroom of a Moscow hotel attempting to slit his wrists. And until the death of his son, he argued that his father was a victim of the CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb’s MK Ultra program, which secretly administered synthetic hallucinogenics to dissidents, leaving many to have mental breakdowns or even commit suicide. And of course, one of the tactics was that after that hallucinogenic trauma – Which is not explained to them, they don’t know why they have it – They funnel them into electroshock therapy, which happened to Robeson. And they never really recover. And his son always argued that this was orchestrated by the CIA. And I wondered if you could address that.
Gerald Horne: Well, interestingly enough, his son, Paul Robeson Jr., writes a two volume biography of his father which is actually quite interesting, and he deals with that point. Likewise, at New York University at the Temement Library at NYU, under Paul Robeson Jr.’s name, you can find details and files that help to substantiate the point that Paul Robeson Jr. makes. Likewise, as history proceeds, new documents arise, which is one of the reasons why many historians speak to history as argument without end, because as time passes, new documents arise. As you know, there’s a 30-year rule with regard to the United States government releasing documents.
And so now we can expect documents as recent as, what, 1992 to be coming forth. And so you see in this new book, White Malice, which just came out recently, a very thick tome, the author takes advantage of some of these records to talk about Sidney Gottlieb, and actually to talk about the CIA malfeasance on the African continent, with the same kind of dirty tricks that were directed against Paul Robeson also directed against African leaders as well. Which helps to give sustenance and credibility to the charges that Paul Robeson Jr. makes.
And interestingly enough, the author of the book White Malice, who brings out this new evidence that I was just alluding to, also suggests that recent regulations and legislation with regard to files on the Kennedy assassination, which as you know takes place in 1963 – Well before the 30-year rule, now we’re talking about a 60-year rule – That documents are still emerging that are shedding light on Africa, shedding light on the US Red Scare. Interestingly enough, the current US president, for various reasons, has put a hold on coming releases of documents. I take it that hold will be lifted soon. And so we can expect to receive more documentation that no doubt will help to substantiate the charge that not only was Paul Robeson likely subjected to dirty tricks of the most malevolent variety, but many of his comrades, there are a lot of unexplained deaths in this country. As the book White Malice points out, there’s this really striking coincidence of so many people committing suicide by jumping out of skyscrapers, for example. That’s a very curious trend.
And so once again, the lesson is that historians need to keep researching. Journalists need to keep researching. Journalists and historians need to keep writing.
Chris Hedges: Well, there was a whole unit set up to terrorize Black artists like Billie Holiday and destroy their lives. And Billie Holiday is another example, perhaps, of that.
Gerald Horne: Well, certainly, and in fact, there was a recent movie that did not do very well at the box office, perhaps fortunately, that tries to depict the kind of dirty tricks that Billie Holiday was subjected to. But alas, I think that the salacious aspects tend to overcome the creativity of the screenplay writer and the director.
Chris Hedges: Great, we’re going to stop there. That was professor Gerald Horne on the great Paul Robeson. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, and Kayla Rivera. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
If you didn’t enjoy Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic book Station Eleven, you’re not alone—Lyta didn’t like it either. However, the HBO Max mini-series, starring Mackenzie Rio Davis and Himesh Patel, brings a powerful, unique, and deeply human quality to St. John Mandel’s story of a devastating global flu pandemic and societal collapse. In the latest installment of Art for the End Times, Lyta talks with writer and podcaster Aaaron Thorpe about why Station Eleven, an underrated and brilliant TV show in its own right, is one of the few contemporary examples of anticapitalist utopian storytelling.
JK Rowling, the now-infamous author of the Harry Potter series, has been rightfully condemned for her stances on trans people and gender identity. But what are we supposed to do with her still-popular and influential books and the deep attachments we have to them? It would be easy to condemn Harry Potter and all its fans as neoliberal trash, but, as Lyta and her guests discuss, that’s a reductive framing that doesn’t address the complex ways that readers, not just authors, define literary works and their meaning.
In the latest installment of Art for the End Times, Lyta speaks with Jessie Earl and Aja Romano about fandom, the deep problems with the Harry Potter franchise, and how we handle “The Death of the Author” in a social media era when the author is very much alive and spouting bigoted opinions. Jessie Earl is a writer, editor, producer, and host of the popular YouTube channel Jessie Gender, where she talks about “the nuance in the nerdy,” focusing on “issues facing the LGBTQ community, transgender specific community, women, nonbinary and autistic folks as well as other social and political issues through and within geek topics, with an eye to the most vulnerable.” Aja Romano is a culture staff writer for Vox reporting on internet culture. For Vox, Romano wrote a widely shared piece titled “Harry Potter and the Author Who Failed Us.”
As the Russian military invasion of Ukraine enters its second month and diplomatic relations between the US and Russia are at their most strained point in decades, seven-time WNBA All-Star Brittney Griner is being held as a political prisoner by Russian authorities. As famed sports analyst and journalist Dave Zirin recently wrote for MSNBC News, “While Griner’s detention has received a measure of media attention, the fact that she was in Russia in the first place demands its own examination… Like most professional women’s players, who make a microcosmic fraction of what the men make in the NBA, this kind of international play is essential for supplementing their income.” TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Zirin about the current status of Griner’s detention, why sports media hasn’t made Griner’s case a bigger story, and what can be done to bring her home safely.
Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez Studio/Post-Production: Adam Coley
EDITOR’S NOTE: When referencing Sue Hovey, former ESPN executive editor and co-author of Brittney Griner’s 2015 memoir In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court, Alvarez mistakenly states that Hovey is the former ESPN “executive director.”
Transcript
Maximillian Alvarez:Welcome, everyone, to The Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. It’s been one month since Russian military troops launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and diplomatic relations between the US and Russia are at their most strained point in many decades.
And yet, as we speak, seven time WNBA all-star Brittney Griner is being held in detention by Russian authorities. And that detention has reportedly been extended until May 19, according to the Russian state news agency TASS. As famed sports analyst and journalist Dave Zirin recently wrote for MSNBC news, “Griner was detained at an airport near Moscow reportedly in mid February for the alleged possession of vape cartridges containing oil derived from cannabis. Aside from a mugshot that circulated in early March, she hasn’t been seen since, and reports on her status have been sparse. A drug offense could get her up to 10 years in a Russian prison.
While Griner’s detention has received a measure of media attention, the fact that she was in Russia in the first place demands its own examination. Besides playing for the Phoenix Mercury, the 6-foot-9 Griner is a basketball titan overseas, where she plays for the Russian league, UMMC Ekaterinburg in the WNBA off-season. In 2021, she helped the Russian team win its fifth Euro League Women’s Championship. Like most professional women’s players, who make a microcosmic fraction of what the men make in the NBA, this kind of international play is essential for supplementing their income.”
As Sue Hove, former executive director of ESPN and co-author of Brittney Griner’s 2015 memoir In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court, told Zirin in an email exchange, “Brittney’s detainment in Russia also once again shines the spotlight on an unfortunate truth: that the vast majority of WNBA players earn their living overseas. A lot of casual sports fans still don’t know this, which kind of blows my mind. But that just shows you how much more work needs to be done when it comes to raising awareness around equity issues in women’s sports.”
To talk about the immense international injustice of Brittney Griner’s detention, what it says about the state of professional women’s sports that Griner was in Russia to begin with, and what can be done to bring the WNBA star home safely, I’m honored to be joined by Dave Zirin himself, who is sports editor for The Nation, where he also hosts The Nation‘s Edge of Sports Podcast. He is an internationally renowned sports analyst, a frequent guest on ESPN, MSNBC and Democracy Now, and he is the author of 10 books on the politics of sports, including most recently The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World. Dave, thank you so much for joining me today, man.
Dave Zirin: Oh, it’s great to be here, Max. Thanks for having me.
Maximillian Alvarez:So you’ve been doing a lot of really crucial reporting on this, and I’m really grateful to you for coming on. And I wanted to ask if you could first help us break down, maybe expanding on the quotes that I read from your MSNBC report, just what exactly is happening or what we know right now about Brittney Griner’s detention in Russia.
Dave Zirin: Well, since I wrote that article over at MSNBC, a member of the US consular’s office has been able to visit Brittney Griner and has reported back only that she is in “good condition.” Now that is a relief because since the February arrest we’ve really known nothing. Absolutely nothing. All we’ve known for sure is that Brittney Griner’s mugshot was paraded in front of Russian state media and all sorts of pronouncements were made on Russian state media about the importance of this trial and prosecution, already speaking about Griner as if she was guilty. And of course, you can’t separate what Griner is going through from the larger, as you put it, the geopolitical situation right now with diplomatic relations being all but broken off between Russia and the United States. That makes Brittney Griner a political prisoner. And that’s my argument in this.
I mean, even though there’s a part of me that believes that anybody who’s wrapped up in the international war on drugs, particularly the international war on cannabis, is inherently a political prisoner. But in this particular case, I think you have to look at the charges with a real sort of side eye. And yet I see so many people saying things like, well, she shouldn’t have been carrying those hashish cartridges through the airport, and things like that. And it’s like, I don’t know why we’re assuming that Brittney Griner is guilty. We shouldn’t assume that about anybody. You’re innocent until proven guilty. That’s a fundamental principle. Yet in this case I think too many people on this side of the pond in the United States are quick to write Brittney Griner off.
I mean, what I’ve been saying over and over again is that if this was Tom Brady in a Russian prison, every single day on ESPN there would be updates and the amount of international pressure to get Brady home would be tremendous. But Brittney Griner: WNBA, disrespected. Black woman, disrespected. A queer woman, disrespected. And it’s almost like they don’t even have a language – And when I say they I mean US sports media – Don’t even have a language to speak about Brittney Griner and speak about her condition and her plight at this point. I mean, can you imagine facing 10 years behind bars in the context of what is going on right now anyway between the United States and Russia? I mean, we should be raising all kinds of holy hell right now. But we’re not. And I think the reasons for that very much lie in the issues of race, gender, and sexuality, and the disrespect that we have in this country for women’s sports.
Maximillian Alvarez:Yeah. I think that’s very well put. And as someone who has been navigating that sports media scene from a principled, progressive place for many years, I was curious if I could just quickly follow up on that and ask, what maybe do folks watching this not know about what goes on behind the scenes when folks are determining whether or not this is a story worth covering that extensively?
Dave Zirin: Well, the first thing… That decision is made, honestly, [by asking] does this have anything to do with the National Football League? And if it doesn’t have anything to do with the National Football League, I don’t care what month it is, immediately it goes on a second tier. Then on that second tier: does it have anything to do with LeBron James? If it doesn’t have anything to do with LeBron James, all of a sudden it goes to a third tier. Then there’s the question of women’s sports. Is it women’s soccer? Is it women’s gymnastics? Oh, it’s not that? Then it goes lower to another tier.
And then finally it’s the WNBA, which has a completely committed fan base. It has fans in cities across the country. It has higher ratings now than it did. And yet it’s something that, in the sports media, it doesn’t get nearly the equitable coverage that it possibly could. I hear people say all the time, well, the WNBA players shouldn’t be paid because their sport’s not very popular. But it’s like, if all anybody ever gives you is Coke and Pepsi, how are you supposed to judge whether or not orange juice is good? The WNBA is the orange juice. And yet we’re fed this steady diet. It’s a monochromatic diet of the kinds of foods that we’re told to eat. And those usually rely around the National Football League, LeBron James, and the rest.
Maximillian Alvarez:Yeah. I do even just personally, when I saw your first story about this, which was how I learned about it, I immediately thought back to the first time I saw Griner slam at home. I think it was maybe in college or something. I was like, yeah, why isn’t this a big story? This is absolutely bonkers. And I know that’s been essentially the story of the struggle of the WNBA since and even before it began. And I wanted to sort of build on that. Because one thing that you made very clear in your piece for NBC and your writing for The Nation is that there’s a larger issue that’s made very clear here that has to do with why Brittney Griner was in Russia in the first place. Could you talk about that a bit?
Dave Zirin: Yeah. I want to talk about that. And then if I could, I’d like to talk a little bit more about the silence that’s accompanying her case, because I feel like I’ve given a half picture about why there’s so much silence. And I’d love to give the full picture if I could. First and foremost, the exact number is 50% of all WNBA players, in the off-season, go overseas. And they do that to supplement their income, which is usually around like mid five figures to low six figures. And for a lot of people listening, that might sound like a heck of a wage. But when you’re usually done playing by the time you’re in your mid twenties that money goes away very quickly.
So to supplement that income, they go overseas. And some of the countries they go overseas to are not very friendly to some of the democratic norms that they might be used to in the United States. Although, we could do a whole show about how those democratic norms aren’t necessarily always worth the paper they’re printed on. But when you go to Russia, when you go to Turkey, when you go to Jordan, you have to watch your Ps and Qs a little bit or you can get in a lot of trouble locally. That being said, one of the perks of going overseas for these players is that oftentimes you’re under the protective wing of the owner of whatever team you’re playing for, and that’s usually an oligarch of some sort. They usually make sure that you have a pretty nice life while you’re over there making more money than you could ever make in the WNBA.
And that factors into this too, because it says, I think Brittney Griner was targeted at the airport when she was brought to the side and said, let’s check your bag. They said it was because the dog smelled the oil in her bag and that’s why it happened. I look at that with a real side eye. Because remember, Brittney Griner is 6 foot 9. It’s not like she’s wearing a baseball cap and nobody knows who she is. Women’s basketball is a big deal in Russia. People knew who she was. People knew she was a prominent American. And at the time, she’s trying to get the hell out of Russia because it’s clear in mid-February that the war clouds are forming all over the place. And for them to put her in custody right at that moment where relations were that delicate and balancing on the head of a pin, it just stinks to high heaven to me, top to bottom.
Now about the silence though, because I do believe that the reason why the sports media has been silent has to do with racism, sexism, homophobia, all the things that we discussed. But then there’s the other silence. And that’s the silence from the WNBA, silence from teammates, and silence that’s been called for by Brittney Griner’s partner, who has just asked for privacy and silence. Now, this is also problematic, I want to say. Why are they being silent? And I know this for a fact, that they’re being silent on the advice of the State Department and on the advice of attorneys who are saying that to negotiate getting Brittney Griner home, we have to not make too loud a stink about this. Because if we make too loud a stink, then Brittney Griner is going to be seen as some sort of trophy for Vladimir Putin and it’ll make it more difficult for her to come home.
I’m a believer that whether you’re silent or whether you are loud about getting a political prisoner out from behind bars, these are tactical questions. And I know folks, Maximillian, around you who worked on the case of Marshall Eddie Conway, not to mention numerous other cases of political prisoners in the United States, know that there is a tactical question. Like, do you let the lawyers do their work, or do you raise hell? And maybe at the beginning, those first couple weeks in February where, frankly, nobody really knew where Brittney Griner was, maybe that could have been a time for quiet negotiations. But the time for quiet negotiations has passed. I mean, Russia is breaking off diplomatic relations with the United States. What’s the State Department supposed to do then? Then our only choice is to hold Brittney Griner’s name up to the light.
So I’m beyond sympathetic with Brittney Griner’s friends, colleagues, certainly family. And I feel like they’re being led in an incorrect direction by the State Department and by the attorneys who are working on this. I mean, I’ve been interviewing people who do this for a living, people who do this kind of high stakes, let’s call them hostage negotiations, to get prisoners extradited from countries that have difficult relations with the United States. And one of the things that they say to me over and over again is that, look, if we’re still exercising with silence as a strategy to get Brittney Griner home, then we don’t really understand what we’re doing.
And that strategy, it may help the government, the United States. That’s more of a strategy for what US foreign policy is right now. They don’t want Brittney Griner’s name to be such a big deal because they want to make sure that she doesn’t turn into that kind of bargaining chip that Putin can use. But on the flip side, if we raise hell, then we can actually embarrass, humiliate Putin at a moment where his situation is very delicate, at a moment where he’s losing, at least militarily. And he’s certainly losing politically and ideologically in this war. All he has is overwhelming firepower and the ability to destroy at this point. And that seems to be the only strategy that they have left.
In this context, we can raise up Brittney Griner’s name and turn her into a headache for Vladimir Putin at a moment where he has many headaches, at which point he can just send her home. With a word he could send her home. So that’s where we are right now. And I just think that the strategy of silence is one that we need to get beyond. Because, tactically, at this point it makes no sense.
Maximillian Alvarez:Man, man –
Dave Zirin: I know that was a lot. I apologize. It’s just, these are complicated questions. It’s not like if I call a rally then Brittney will come home. Or if I don’t call a rally then the lawyers will do their work. I mean, I know Real News dealt with this around Marshall Eddie Conway. It’s like what you do, there’s not like a kit that tells you what to do. You have to debate it. You have to discuss it. And then you have to fight for it.
Maximillian Alvarez:No, man. No apologies necessary. I thought that was very powerfully put, and one of the many reasons I wanted to get you on to educate our viewers about this. Because I think what you’re saying is very important. And ultimately, we’re talking about a human being’s life at stake right now, and her family and her friends. Like you said, I get the kind of urging for silence while the people behind closed doors do their work. But enough time has passed. And the State Department is dealing with a lot of other stuff right now, so there’s also the very real possibility that they’ll just say this isn’t a priority like the media has done. And so, what do we get for all that silence? We potentially get nothing. And I guess I wanted to fold that into a final question before I let you go. I guess, for people who are watching or listening to this, are there any directions that you think we could point them into, any efforts that are ongoing to raise that noise a little bit in defense of Brittney Griner?
Dave Zirin: Well, there’s an online petition, easily found through Google. People should seek it out and sign it. There actually are several online petitions. I would argue to sign them all. Keep Brittney Griner’s name alive however one can, whatever access one has to social media. And continue to push her name into the light, because I think that’s our strategy right now. One positive thing about social media and its relationship to the sports media – And anybody who watches sports media on the regular knows this – Oftentimes the cues for the stories that are told come straight from social media. It’s one thing if there’s a huge story that drops.
Remember, sports media is a 24 hour a day, seven day a week beast. And it either feeds upon the individual or the individual provides something for it to feed upon. And so, I think pushing forward the idea on social media to free Brittney Griner, to say her name, I think these are very important steps to make sure her name stays in the limelight. And maybe it can push sports media to acknowledge what’s happening right now. And, frankly, not to hide behind the State Department, which is what they’re doing.
Because I’ve pushed some people and been like, why aren’t you reporting on this? And it’s always behind the State Department, which is what they do. They hide behind the State Department and say, well, they’re doing their thing. It’s not our job to pressure the State Department. And it’s like, well, if I’m Brittney Griner, I’m saying it is your job to pressure the State Department because I don’t want to have to wait here until mid May and sleep in a bed that’s not big enough for my body. Because that’s something else we know about her conditions right now. And I don’t know what else we can possibly say other than shouting it even louder from the rooftops to bring Brittney home.
Maximillian Alvarez:So that is Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation, where he also hosts The Nation‘s Edge of Sports Podcast, which everyone should listen to. Dave is the author of 10 books on the politics of sports, including most recently The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World. And if you guys haven’t already, you should listen to Dave’s interview with our own Marc Steiner about that book, because it was really incredible. Dave, thank you so much for coming on. And thank you for doing this important work.
Dave Zirin: Oh it’s absolutely my pleasure, Maximillian. Anytime.
Maximillian Alvarez:For everyone watching, this is Maximillian Alvarez at The Real News Network. Before you go, please head on over to therealnews.com/support. Become a monthly sustainer of our work so we can keep bringing you important coverage and conversations just like this. Thank you so much for watching.
This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on March 10, 2022. It is shared here with permission.
Israel’s war on Palestinian sports is as old as the Israeli state itself.
For Palestinians, sports is a critical aspect of their popular culture, and since Palestinian culture itself is a target for the ongoing Israeli attack on Palestinian life in all of its manifestations, sports and athletes have been purposely targeted as well. Yet, the world’s main football governing body, FIFA, along with other international sports organizations, has done nothing to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against Palestinian sports.
What took the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa decades to achieve was carried out against Russia in a matter of hours and days.
Now that FIFA, along with UEFA, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and others have swiftly joined the West’s anti-Russia measures as a result of the latter’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Palestinians and their supporters are puzzled. Years of relentless advocacy to sanction Israel at international sports competitions have paid little or no dividends. This has continued to be the case, despite the numerous documented facts of Israel’s intentional targeting of Palestinian stadiums, travel restrictions on athletes, the cancellation of sports events, the arrest and even killing of Palestinian footballers.
Many Palestinians, Arabs and international activists have already highlighted the issue of western hypocrisy in the case of the Israeli military occupation of Palestine by apartheid Israel within hours of the start of the Russian military operations. Almost immediately, an unprecedented wave of boycotts and sanctions of everything Russian, including music, art, theater, literature and, of course, sports, kicked in.
What took the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa decades to achieve was carried out against Russia in a matter of hours and days.
Palestinians are justified to be baffled, since they have been informed by FIFA, time and again, that “sports and politics don’t mix.” Marvel at this hypocrisy to truly appreciate Palestinian frustration:
“The FIFA Council acknowledges that the current situation (in Palestine and Israel) is, for reasons that have nothing to do with football, characterized by an exceptional complexity and sensitivity and by certain de facto circumstances that can neither be ignored nor changed unilaterally by non-governmental organizations such as FIFA.”
That was, in part, the official FIFA position declared in October 2017, in response to a Palestinian request that the “six Israeli football clubs based in illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories should either relocate to Israel or be banned from FIFA-recognized competitions.”
Two years later, Israel callously canceled the FIFA Palestine Cup that was meant to bring Gaza’s top football team, Khadamat Rafah Club, and the West Bank’s FC Balata together in a dramatic final.
Palestinians perceive football as a respite from the hardship of life under siege and occupation. The highly anticipated event would have been a moment of precious unity among Palestinians and would have been followed by a large number of people, regardless of their political affiliation or geographic location. But, and “for no apparent reason,” as reported in the Nation, Israel decided to deny Palestinians that brief moment of joy.
Even then, FIFA did nothing, despite the fact that the event itself carried the name ‘FIFA.’ Meanwhile, outright racist Israeli football teams, the likes of Beitar Jerusalem Football Club, are allowed to play unhindered, to travel unrestricted and to echo their favorite racist cheers, “Death to the Arabs,” as if racism in sports is the accepted routine.
FIFA’s double standards are abhorrent, to say the least. But FIFA is not the only hypocrite. On March 3, the International Paralympics Committee (IPC) went as far as denying athletes from Russia and Belarus the right to compete at this year’s Winter Paralympics held in Beijing. The decision was justified on the basis that having these athletes participate in the Games was “jeopardizing the viability” of the events and, supposedly, making the safety of the athletes “untenable,” despite the fact that the Russian and Belarusian athletes were, due to the political context, set to take part as ‘neutrals.’
Not only are Israeli athletes welcomed in all international sports events, the mere attempt by individual athletes to register a moral stance in support of Palestinians, by refusing to compete against Israelis, can be very costly. Algerian Judoka Fehi Nourine, for example, was suspended along with his coach for 10 years for withdrawing from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to avoid meeting an Israeli opponent. The same course of action was taken against other players and teams for displaying symbolic solidarity with Palestine, or even fans for merely raising Palestinian flags or chanting for Palestinian freedom.
Mohammed Aboutrika, the former Captain of the Egyptian National Football Team, was censured by FIFA in 2009 for merely displaying a shirt that read, in both Arabic and English, “Sympathize with Gaza.” For that supposedly egregious act, the Confederation of African Football (CAF)–a branch of FIFA–warned him against “mixing politics with sports.”
About the double standards of FIFA, Aboutrika recently said in a media interview that the “decision to suspend Russian clubs and teams from all competitions must be accompanied by a ban on those affiliated with Israel (because Israel) has been killing children and women in Palestine for years.”
It must be stated that the hypocrisy here goes well beyond Palestine and Israel, into numerous situations where those demanding justice and accountability are often affiliated with poor nations from the Global South, or causes that challenge the status quo, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, among others.
But there is much more that can be done aside from merely delineating the double standards or decrying the hypocrisy. True, it took the South African Anti-Apartheid movement many years to isolate the racist Apartheid government in Pretoria at international sports platforms around the world, but that seemingly impossible task was eventually achieved.
Palestinians, too, must now use these channels and platforms to continue pushing for justice and accountability. It will not take days, as is the case with Russia and Ukraine, but they will eventually succeed in isolating Israel, for, as it turned out, politics and sports do mix after all.
As the horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine continues and anti-Russian sentiments are boiling over, Americans have found themselves hearkening back to the moral and narrative frames that defined Cold War-era cinema to make sense of this moment and our role in it. From Red Dawn to Rocky IV, Hollywood depictions of the pitched battle between the scrappy, freedom-loving West and the cold, monstrous Other in the East made for great movie watching, but it also had curious and long-lasting effects on the American psyche.
In the latest installment of Art for the End Times, Lyta speaks with writer and media critic Adam Johnson about some of their favorite ‘80s Cold War action movies, how they shaped the ways we think, how they’re problematic, and how sometimes we like them anyway. Adam Johnson is the cohost of Citations Needed, “a podcast on the media, power, PR and the history of bullshit,” and author of The Column on Substack.
The election of Donald Trump and the insurrectionary violence at the US Capitol on Jan. 6 are a bad dream that many desperately want to forget. But the political, economic, and cultural forces driving far-right political movements in the US and around the world have been brewing for decades, and they are not going away—quite the opposite, in fact. We need to understand where these forces come from, how they have given rise to a wide variety of different far-right factions that are converging into a dangerous coalition, and what anti-democratic, authoritarian futures they are fighting to impose on society. We need to know what we’re up against—and, most importantly, we need to know how to fight it.
In this special series of The Marc Steiner Show, co-hosted by Marc Steiner and Bill Fletcher Jr., we will examine the rise of the right in the US and beyond, we will explore the different tendencies and motivations fueling today’s surge in far-right politics, and we will engage with a range of critical voices who can help us understand how we got here and what we can do about it. In Episode Zero of “Rise of the Right,” Marc and Bill introduce the series and establish the stakes of understanding and soberly addressing the threat today’s far right poses to what remains of democratic society.
Tune in every Monday over the next month for new installments of this special series ofThe Marc Steiner Show on TRNN.
Pre-Production: Dwayne Gladden, Stephen Frank, Kayla Rivara, Maximillian Alvarez, Jocelyn Dombroski Studio: Dwayne Gladden Post-Production: Stephen Frank
Transcript
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. Good to have you all with us. And I’m here with my co-host for this very special series, Bill Fletcher Jr.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Glad to be here, Marc.
Marc Steiner: Who I’ve interviewed over the years and now we’re doing some work together.
Bill Fletcher Jr: And it’s interesting Marc. I remember the day that I proposed doing this to you. It was after you had interviewed me on something. I don’t even remember what the interview was, but it was good. I mean, you’re a great interviewer. And I said, Marc, you need to do a series on the rise of the far right. And that there is, out there in the media, it’s either denialism about how bad it is, or people are apocalyptic. But there’s this lack of real in-depth analysis. And so when we started talking about this I got very excited and I’m really happy the way this is turning out.
Marc Steiner: Me too. To me, when you said that to me, I had been obsessed about the rise of the right for a while, with Trump’s election, seeing what led up to that, but also from the ’70s through the ’90s to now and that whole arc that brought us to where we are. And for me, I must admit that I was getting extremely pessimistic seeing this powerful group of people that are much more highly organized than other sectors of society and well-armed with political power, controlling 26 states in the country. Completely controlling 26 states politically.
And what that means for everything people have fought for from the ’30s to the ’70s in the movements from the left that helped change the face of America, and it’s a reaction to that. And for me, it’s also personal. I’m thinking about my daughters, I’m thinking about my grandchildren. I’m thinking about my great grandchildren, I have those too, what they’re going to inherit and how we can’t be defeatist. We have to figure out what is going on around this and how we stop it.
Bill Fletcher Jr: No, absolutely. I’m not someone that’s prone to fatalism or determinism. But there is something about the history of this country that, in a very odd way, makes what we’re going through feel that it was almost inevitable, in the sense that inevitable that we would face a moment of truth, that when you factor in settler colonialism, racial slavery, Jim Crow, annexations, imperial conquest, all these, they have an effect on the consciousness of millions of people. And then you add to that mark when the living standard stagnates and then starts to decline for masses of people, the question then becomes, well, why is that happening and who’s the enemy? Leaving fertile ground for the left or the right, but particularly the right because they have the advantage over us because of the way that they’ve constructed the historical narrative. And part of what we’re up against is that historical narrative.
Marc Steiner: And I think also in that historical narrative, the history of this country is one of major contradictions. You have those we call the Founding Fathers, many of whom were slaveholders, but they built a democratic system. They wrote about a democracy and wrote about freedom and liberty in ways that appeal to everyone on the planet. But it was only meant for a small group. And that contradiction launched the battles this country has fought internally –
Bill Fletcher Jr: Correct.
Marc Steiner: …From the beginning. The genocide with the Indigenous people and the resistence to that, the resistance to the enslavement by Africans when they were brought here, to the workers who had no right to vote until Andrew Jackson, who was one of the worst racist settler colonial presidents we’ve ever had despite his image in this country, and so it lets all those contradictions. And I think that when you look at the way the governments have run in this country, for the most part they’ve been very conservative, and there have been periods of radicalism on the left and where people’s voices were actually heard and things began to change.
The battle around reconstruction in the 1860s and ’70s, and the struggles from the 19th and the early part of the 20th century with the union movements and the socialist party, and then from the ’30s to the ’70s, and real progress was made. And that’s the root of the right-wing pushback now, is the progress we made in pushing back.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Yes. And I’m often reminded, and we’ve discussed this, that very eloquent saying by Martin Luther King about the arc of history is long but it bends towards progress, is eloquent but it’s not correct. I mean, that’s the problem. The arc of history is long, that is true. But it bends in a lot of different ways.
I mean, when I think about metaphor, I think that we progressive people are the ones that are walking up the declining escalator, and that escalator keeps going down. So for us to get to the top means that we have to be moving faster than the declining escalator. That the moment we stand still, we go down, so this was one of the problems, I think, in the beginning of the ’70s when many people thought we had won, we had succeeded, and we had arrived at a point where continued progress was inevitable. To me, those were people that stopped trying to walk up the escalator.
They thought, we’ve made it. But the escalator was pulling us down, down, down. And so A, we can’t be fatalistic. We can’t be defeatist. We’ve got to put the energy into walking faster than the declining escalators so that we actually can get to the top and then shut the escalator down.
Marc Steiner: [laughs] I love it. That’s great. I love it. I also like the metaphor because I was one of those kids growing up that always ran up the declining escalator when I was a kid.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Me too, me too.
And I remember showing off with my daughter doing it. And I’ll tell you the way I thought about this once was when I was in the Service Employees International Union. And I was talking to folks about this challenge, and all of a sudden the imagery came to me, and so I think that it’s really important that we understand we’re always going to have to put more energy into it. The other thing that we have to keep in mind, Marc, in going against the right but also going against the more traditional establishment folks, is that they’re always going to have more resources than we do. I don’t know any time in history that the oppressed have ever had more resources than the oppressor. I’ve studied history. I don’t remember that time. And so therefore our struggle is one in which the other side seems to always have the advantage, which means that we have to think in a very different way.
Marc Steiner: And I think that when you think about where we are today, that it’s a really tough place to be in, a very strange place to be in. I mean, I think that people do not seem to be thinking through, at least in large part, about how you confront it and how you defeat it, what that means. And I think part of it is that, as you were alluding to earlier, that people who are in the movement of the struggle for the ’60s and the ’50s and the ’40s, once it began to open up in Congress, people became part of that establishment and they were invested in it.
And that stagnated everything, and then we lost the fight. As you can see now with Biden, he doesn’t know how to fight the right. He has no idea what he is doing when it comes to fighting the right, none. And then there’s always debates on the left. How do you approach this? Is this something you do narrowly on your own? Do you build this broad coalition of people that you wouldn’t necessarily always agree with to stop what we are facing in this future? And how do we do that? And sometimes I feel like the right has organized effectively, and they learned how to do it from us.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Oh yeah.
Marc Steiner: And we have to re-learn how to do what we started.
Bill Fletcher Jr: We do. The other thing is that what I think hamstrings the Democratic Party establishment is a belief that the pendulum will ultimately even things out. That yes, you’ve had maniacs like Trump and these other folks in Congress, but that ultimately the democratic small D system will work things out. And the problem is, I think particularly when we look at Jan. 6, 2021, and how close, I would argue, we came to a coup, a successful coup, there’s no reason to believe the pendulum will even things out, that it’s going to be up to us. Because the other side is not interested in playing the game anymore. That’s what they’re making clear.
That what they’re doing with the electoral manipulations, the turning a blind eye on paramilitary, they’re basically saying, you suckers can play whatever game you want, but we are not playing the game. We’re going to do what we have to do to win. And the thing is that this is true not just in the United States, but it’s true around the world when you look at these far right actors.
Marc Steiner: Right. And it all, I think, comes down to a bunch of realities. One is that the capitalist system itself has failed, even its most progressive moments, to answer the needs of people long term and of the planet long term. They’ve not been able to do it. And so that erupts anger in people. And when you add to that mix the anti-immigration feeling in the world, the racist feeling in the world, the fall of the [Leninist states], all these things together have allowed the right to erupt, because it’s expressing anger. The anger is very real.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Right.
Marc Steiner: Is just also laced with racism and laced with the most negative aspects of our society. And that’s something that is sometimes hard to get around. But as somebody, as you have in your work all these years in unions and as I have some in unions, but mostly in community organizing and issue organizing around the country, is that you can build a coalition that puts a giant dent in that, because people will come across the line. I remember Chicago in 1968 and the Young Patriots who made an alliance, the first rainbow coalition, with the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, the Red Guards, and the leadership of the Young Patriots? Many of them were former members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Right?
Marc Steiner: It can be built.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Which is why we did the show.
Marc Steiner: Yes.
Bill Fletcher Jr: And to our listeners and viewers, we welcome you to join into what I think has been and will continue to be a fascinating exploration of this virus in the US system, what it is, what it’s about, and what we can do to fight it successfully. And I’m glad to be doing this with you.
Marc Steiner: I am too. I am too.
And so along with my colleague and co-host Bill Fletcher Jr., I want to invite you to join us for our five-part series looking in-depth at the rise of the right. In our first episode, we’ll explore the real danger the rise of the right poses. How did we get here, and why now? What really happened on January the 6th? What is its significance and how do we fight it? And as my co-creator in this series Bill Fletcher says, we’re going up the escalator. Because we have to get to the top of a declining escalator and shut it down.
From the moment Russian troops invaded Ukraine the entire corporate media apparatus in the US moved to 24-7 coverage, filling airwaves with talking heads relentlessly beating the drums of war. Combined with Big Tech’s sophisticated means for silencing and punishing dissenting voices, the increasingly hostile and propaganda-filled discourse that is taking shape today is eerily reminiscent of the “Russiagate” fervor and the cultural hysteria that permeated the post-9/11 years. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with longtime journalist and activist Abby Martin about how the media’s manufactured “bloodlust” for war makes us all less safe and how we must use independent media to advance the cause of peace.
Abby Martin is an American journalist, show presenter, activist, and artist. She helped found the citizen journalism website Media Roots and is the host of the investigative documentary and interview series The Empire Files. Martin has been involved in numerous film projects, including producing the recent feature documentaries Gaza Fights for Freedom, and she is currently producing another feature entitled Earth’s Greatest Enemy.
From the push to turn more of the workforce into precarious “gig workers” to the ways profit-seeking digital platforms condition how we act and think while extracting free data from us, we can see and feel everyday the creeping evidence that we are living in a new reality. As world-renowned Greek economist, author, and politician Yanis Varoufakis argues, “This is how capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously, until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism.”
In their latest interview for TRNN, co-hosts of THIS IS REVOLUTION Jason Myles and Pascal Robert speak with Varoufakis about how this “techno-feudalist” system emerged, what sets it apart from the global capitalist system that preceded it, and what it will mean for humanity if we don’t stop it. Yanis Varoufakis formerly served as the finance minister of Greece and is currently the secretary general of MeRA25, a left-wing political party in Greece that he founded in 2018. He is a professor of economics at the University of Athens and the author of numerous books, including The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy and Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present.
Pre-Production/Studio: Jason Myles Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.
It’s been said many times, many ways before: If our public library system didn’t already exist, there’s no way we could create it in today’s society. But for all the good libraries do, and for all the necessary services they provide, they have been under attack for many years—and the staff who make our library system work, as well as the people who depend on them, need help. As Emily Drabinski, who is running to be president of the American Library Association, argues in her campaign platform, “Decades of disinvestment in public institutions coupled with deep inequalities at the core of our profession have left our libraries without the resources necessary to advance our common mission of providing access to information in all its forms to everyone in our communities.”
In the latest installment of Art for the End Times, Lyta speaks with Drabinski about her campaign, the decades-long assault on libraries as a public good, and the internal struggle to make the library system a more just, equitable, and socially progressive institution. Emily Drabinski is an Associate Professor and Critical Pedagogy Librarian at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center library, where she is also serving as interim chief librarian.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and live-action productions in the entertainment industry were put on pause, animated productions carried on, providing millions and millions around the world with entertainment, as they have for over a century, while life as we know it was turned upside down. Many of Hollywood’s most beloved, highest-grossing movies and series, in fact, are animated productions. But it may shock many to learn that the talented workers who make Hollywood animation happen have long struggled with gross pay inequity, limited opportunities for advancement, and fewer crediting and residual compensation guarantees than their live-action counterparts represented by the Writers Guild of America (WGA). This is why many in the industry are calling for a “New Deal for Animation” as The Animation Guild (TAG) returned to the bargaining table on Feb. 14 to continue working out a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers after talks stalled in December of last year.
In this interview, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with David Shair, Rachael Cohen, and Joey Clift about the vital work Animation Guild members do, the glaring disparities in how they are treated and compensated in comparison to their live-action counterparts, and the fight for a “New Deal for Animation.” David Shair is a storyboard artist and writer with eleven years experience in the animation industry, working on such projects as Looney Tunes, Fish Hooks, and Spongebob Squarepants. He was part of the team that shaped the Storyboard Proposal in this year’s contract negotiations. Rachael Cohen is a cartoonist and color designer who worked in collaboration with the TAG Color Designer Committee to raise awareness about wage inequity and unfair working conditions for Color Designers. Joey Clift is a comedian, TV writer, and Animation Guild volunteer. He created the hashtag #PayAnimationWriters, which trended #1 on Twitter in the state of California leading up to negotiations.
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on Jan. 26, 2022. It is shared here with permission.
Sometimes a single image or episode capturing triumph, tragedy, or disaster sums up the spirit of a moment better than prose ever could. In pondering the most iconic frames in American history, several obvious candidates come to mind: the flag raising on Iwo Jima; the beaming face of a relaxed John F. Kennedy seconds before he met an assassin’s bullet; Neil Armstrong moved to tears in the cockpit of Apollo 11 following communion with the infinite on the surface of the Moon. Though it may never be elevated to the same illustrious perch, it’s difficult to think of anything quite so evocative or emblematic of our own stupendously stupid time than this week’s sublimely bizarre segment of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon featuring Paris Hilton.
True to the genre, most of the conversation between Hilton and Fallon is classic late-night schtick, the kind of mindlessly innocuous banter you idly catch out of one eye while falling asleep or stumble upon after giving up on Netflix for the third time in two hours. Things then quickly take a turn for the weird when Fallon asks about Hilton’s NFT hobby (Hilton, incidentally an early pioneer in the postmodern commodification of the self, is currently ranked at #7 in Forbes’ NFT Top 50), and the two carry out what can only be described as a sort of a scripted infomercial somewhere between low-effort celebrity ad read and probable hostage video.
im almost convinced that someone has dirt on every celebrity getting into NFTs because this clip is just WEIRD.
genuinely feels like they're being held hostage lmfao wtf is going on
As vaguely dystopian mad libs go, “Paris Hilton Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT” is already about as emblematically 2022 as it gets. Channeled through Hilton and Fallon’s hilariously strained delivery, however—watch the clip for yourself and you’ll see it’s easy enough to imagine that the host is taking his cues from masked gunmen holding placards just off screen—the whole thing soon passes into an entirely new realm of the bizarre. Here’s a short sample:
FALLON: [Since you were last on the show] Forbes has named you one of the top 50 most influential people in the NFT space, so congrats on that.
HILTON: Thank you, I’m so proud. I love being a part of this community and being a voice and sharing my platform and just getting the word out there. Cause I think it’s just such an incredible thing to be a part of.
FALLON: Yeah, I jumped in.
HILTON: I know, I heard. I’m so happy I taught you what they were.
FALLON: You did, you taught me what’s up and then I bought an ape.
HILTON: I got an ape too, because I saw you on the show with Beeple and he said you got on MoonPay so I went and I copied you and did the same thing.
There’s plenty more in this vein, the two showing off their respective ape JPEGs before Hilton announces an Oprah-style giveaway for the blockchain era and gifts everyone in the audience with her latest NFT, declaring the moment “iconic” as the show cuts to break.
Non-Fungible Bullshit
Beginning at some point in 2021, the Non-Fungible Token—the latest cryptocurrency-adjacent fad to sweep the nation — was suddenly everywhere. As if by way of some unknowable alchemic process, it seemed, people were somehow turning a profit by trading thoroughly unremarkable clip art images while others were inexplicably shelling out big to claim their title deeds.
Celebrities and social media influencers can’t shut up about them. From Serena Williams and Logan Paul to Matt Damon and William Shatner, the NFT craze quickly transcended generations and swept up an eclectic cavalcade of the rich and famous in its wake. (Jimmy Fallon, incidentally, spent more than $200,000 on the Bored Ape NFT that now graces his Twitter profile.) Beeple, name-dropped by Paris Hilton in her Fallon segment, fetched more than $3.5 million in an NFT auction. Ape NFTs have been “stolen” in digital heists. One B-list reality star has even gotten in the action by monetizing her own farts (these NFTs, incidentally, come with the tagline: “Be part of history with the first ever generative Fart Jar NFT collection—Imagine the smell!”)
NFTS are the latest symptom of a decadent and increasingly post-democratic consensus resting on little more than predatory rent-seeking and boundless commodification.
If you’re not already immersed in this glorified Pokémon card ponzi scheme, it’s all a little perplexing, and you may be wondering what any of it actually means. In essence, an NFT gives you exclusive ownership over a digital object of some kind (images, songs, tweets, and virtually anything else can be turned into an NFT).
On its face, buying one can be a bit like buying an original artwork, though with digital usage rights and stored on a blockchain. You can’t, in other words, actually hold it in your hands like a poster or painting. The NFT market being a kind of property rights Wild West, some have been converted into tokens without their author’s knowledge or consent. Still more incredibly, the original media object almost always remains totally accessible to anyone online—essentially rendering the whole premise of exclusivity moot (except in the abstract sense of “bragging rights”).
In a word, NFTs are bullshit. And, like most forms of bullshit in America—think WeWork, the Fyre Festival, or any number of other venture capital-hatched disruption rackets—they’ve come packaged in a phony populist language of community and an even phonier rhetoric of innovation.
Like cryptocurrency, it’s hard to make a case for their actual use value and, like the very dumbest Silicon Valley startups and multilevel marketing scams, they’re best understood as speculative investments in which a privileged few can wring money from something of no redeeming social benefit. The majority, in fact, are about as useful as trash. As Vulture’s Rebecca Alter put it, most NFTs “are about as valuable as a QR code on a Coke bottle cap that sends you to a dead link to an mp3 download.”
Value in any recognizable sense, suffice it to say, is not really the point.
Decadence and Boundless Commodification
The NFT boom, fittingly enough, has coincided quite directly with a period of particularly grotesque collective hardship and surging inequality. As both a threat to public health and an historic economic disruption, the COVID era has been an extraordinarily difficult time for many working and middle-class Americans, but a veritable land of milk and honey for its corporate overlords and lumpen bourgeoisie.
Like most forms of bullshit in America, NFTs have come packaged in a phony populist language of community and an even phonier rhetoric of innovation.
Events of recent years have been the best occasion in decades to reimagine the fundamentals of American society and transform the economy into something other than a handful of hedge funds and tech monopolies sitting on top of each other inside a trench coat. Instead, the country’s bipartisan ruling class opted to greet mass death with a dollop of inadequate and temporary social protections while its criminally undertaxed ultrarich were left to seek out novel ways of profiting from their own money and new totems of their elite status.
Nothing has been more symbolic of this trajectory than NFTs, the latest symptom of a decadent and increasingly post-democratic consensus resting on little more than predatory rent-seeking and boundless commodification. As the New Republic’s Jacob Silverman put it last year:
NFTs reflect a view of the world in which anything can be monetized, even if its value is entirely specious. Having exhausted traditional investments like property and stocks — as well as boutique services like concierge doctors or privileged access to the COVID-19 vaccine — the country’s idle elites are now seeking to expand their financial footprint to cover, well, anything to which they wish to lay claim. . . . It’s the financialization of everything, with practically anything eligible to be tokenized, chopped up into tranches, converted into securities that intrepid day traders could buy and sell.
In effect, a political economy that has eschewed even the thinnest notions of social contract or public good in its elevation of the market—along with a manufacturing base that once actually built things—is laying the groundwork for a new and more expansive kind of post-materialist commodification.
In this latest incarnation of our second gilded age, speculative bubbles based in the digital ether will help affix an ersatz sheen of innovation and progress to a top-heavy economy structurally incapable of delivering the real kinds. As digital commodities, NFTs thus signal the ongoing descent of capitalism into pure simulacrum and the growing remove of its greatest beneficiaries from anything even resembling productive activity.
As a civilizational metaphor on the other hand, they’re perhaps the perfect symbol of a political order so dismally unjust and a regressive culture so thoroughly exhausted that even the rich people brandishing them on late-night TV struggle to do so with any conviction.
The giant wave is coming, folks—but not on the big screen. In this all-climate art panel episode of Art for the End Times, Lyta sits down with journalists and podcasters Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt, as well as climate fiction writer Sim Kern, to discuss the climate change allegory blockbuster Don’t Look Up, the relative lack of compelling climate stories in movies and books today, and what we’d like to see art become in an era of impending planetary collapse. We also ask the blunt question: Is “climate fiction” a meaningful artistic category, or is it just brutal realism at this point?
Mary Annaïse Heglar is an accomplished climate justice essayist whose work has been integral to getting the climate movement to understand climate change as a justice issue that intersects with every other justice issue. She is the co-host and co-creator of the Hot Take newsletter and podcast, and her work has been featured in a range of outlets, including Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe. Amy Westervelt is an award-winning investigative journalist who has contributed to The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and many other outlets. She is the co-host and co-creator of the Hot Take newsletter and podcast, the founder of the Critical Frequency podcast network (named AdWeek’s 2019 Podcast Network of the Year), and author of the book Forget ‘Having It All’: How America Messed Up Motherhood, and How to Fix It. Sim Kern is an environmental journalist and speculative fiction writer, exploring intersections of climate change, queerness, and social justice. Their quiet horror novella DEPART, DEPART! debuted from Stelliform Press in 2020, and their writing has been featured in a range of outlets, including Salon, The Independent, and Out Magazine.
Lyta Gold:Hello and welcome to Art for the End Times. As always, I’m your host Lyta Gold. We have a really exciting episode today. We’re going to talk about one of my favorite topics. It’s also a really important and appropriate topic for this podcast. We’re going to talk about climate fiction. Climate fiction, it’s stories that are about or that take into account climate change, that thing that’s happening all around us all the time. When you think about it, it’s actually really weird that climate fiction isn’t the dominant aesthetic preoccupation in books and movies and other things.
We do have Don’t Look Up which just came out and you may have seen it, but it’s really an anomaly in mainstream pop culture. We don’t have too many movies like that. We are going to talk a little bit about Don’t Look Up but not too much because I’m sure you’ve heard it dissected to death on other podcasts. I’m not going to do that here. Here I want to use it more of a jumping off point to talk about climate fiction in general. Why is there still so little climate fiction? What are the barriers to making it? What do we expect climate fiction to do? Because some people expect it to serve a political purpose. Also, what kinds of climate fiction would we like to see in the future? Joining me today I have three very, very special guests. First up we have Mary Annaïse Heglar.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Hi.
Lyta Gold: Yeah, hi Mary. So excited you’re here. Mary is a podcaster and a journalist, also a terrific Twitter follow. If you are not following her, you absolutely should. Just the co-host and co-writer of the Hot Take podcast and newsletter. Mary, I’m just so glad you’re here.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Lyta Gold: Next up we have Amy Westervelt. Amy is the other co-host and co-writer of the Hot Take podcast and newsletter, as well as being the producer and generally involved with a ton of other climate podcasts and projects. Amy, I am so glad you could make it here.
Amy Westervelt: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Lyta Gold: Last but not least, we have Sim Kern. Sim is a writer of climate fiction and a journalist too. Their debut novella is called Depart, Depart! It is wonderful. I read it today like all in one gasp. It’s so great. Sim, thanks for being here.
Sim Kern: Yeah, it’s great to be here.
Lyta Gold: Hey. Yeah, I did want to start off talking about Don’t Look Up, even though everybody’s a little tired about talking about Don’t Look Up. I have strong feelings about it. I’m sure other people have strong feelings about it too. It is one of the only pieces of mainstream climate fiction that we have. It’s apparently done really well on Netflix, they’re saying something like 321 million hours streamed. That’s Netflix’s own numbers and you should never, ever trust Netflix’s own numbers, but it’s got a lot of big celebs and a lot of whatevers. People probably did see it. It’s meant to be an allegory for climate change though it’s technically about a comet. But yeah, I just want to start by going around and asking what did we think of it as a piece of climate fiction, if we can call it that?
Amy Westervelt: Mary, I know you have thoughts.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: I do. I do, and I’m actually not tired of talking about it. I refuse to talk about it much on Twitter because Twitter is where nuance goes to die and my feelings about the film are quite nuanced. I didn’t love or hate it. My overall feeling about it, if I have just one, is I appreciate the fact that it was made. I see it as something that needs to be built on. Of course, I think a lot of the criticisms of the film are actually criticisms of Hollywood as an industry. We wanted the film to do all of the things because it’s the only film trying to do any of the things. That is an indictment of Hollywood. That’s not an indictment of the film.
What also it says is that, something I kind of already knew, which is that the climate movement doesn’t know how to deal with art. Art isn’t perfect and it’s messy. It’s never going to do all of everything that you want it to do because, honey, that’s called propaganda. I think we need to make room for art to make mistakes. Also, I don’t think that film was made for people in the climate movement. I don’t think that movie was made for me. A lot of those jokes were crazy stale to me because I’ve been living and breathing this work for a while, but to someone who’s totally new to it then maybe it works.
Those are some of my more complicated feelings about it. Some of the clearer feelings to me, I love that it tried to use humor. I think that that was a major step forward because human beings don’t engage with things that they can’t be humorous about. We make jokes about racism. We need to be able to laugh with our pain. I thought that, even if I didn’t find all the jokes funny, I appreciated that it tried. I appreciated that in the ending the bad thing was allowed to happen. In so many disaster movies there’s always they find that back door and they avert catastrophe at the very last minute and it lulls people back into this false sense of security. Those were two things I actually did really like about the film. Two things I did not like. I did not like that the rest of the world was just missing in action.
Lyta Gold: Where were they? There was like one reference.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: You mean to tell me that Russia ain’t going to be ringing the phone off the hook, that Europe ain’t going to be calling, Japan? Israel’s got a whole missile deflection situation going on, you mean to tell me they’re not going to be trying to talk about this? That drove me crazy. I also did not super like the fact that it relied on the allegory convention, because that’s what we always get when it comes to climate. You could just talk about climate change. You don’t need an allegory. That was probably way more than you were expecting. But that’s just to start.
Lyta Gold: No, that’s great. Yeah, allegory is interesting because it’s a form that isn’t used very much. It’s pretty rare to see. It’s like a very medieval form. It is weird. Why not? The meteor is different qualitatively. If it had been a meteor made out of space junk I think it might’ve worked. Space junk we’d fired out. But that was not the case.
Sim Kern: The fact that it’s a comet and not climate change leads me into the thematic issues that I had with it. I think like Mary-Anais, there was a lot that I loved in it. There were moments where I felt validated on screen in a way I’ve been waiting my whole life. The scene where Jennifer Lawrence’s character – Did I say the right celebrity name? I’m terrible at –
Lyta Gold: [crosstalk] every celebrity, so that’s very hard.
Sim Kern: Her character, when she shouts on the talk show, maybe the end of the world should be terrifying and we should be spending every single night crying ourselves to sleep, I’ve felt that way since eighth grade. Then the rest of the world responding to her in this completely gas lighting way of, you’re crazy, that was very validating. I’m sorry for the police sirens. I hope that doesn’t screw up the audio.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Oh, I thought that was here.
Lyta Gold: Yeah, I thought that was here too. I’m used to it.
Sim Kern: So yeah, I really liked feeling validated. The gaslighting especially of the activists like when the president says, you’re with the grownups now Randall, even though all of the grownups supposedly are just these really rich, selfish people, loved all that. But the fact that it’s a comet and not climate change leads it to the ending. Is it okay if I spoil the ending here? Are we assuming…
Lyta Gold: Oh yeah.
Sim Kern: There’s an end. There’s one chance. Then they get to the point where there’s no more chances and they’ve run out of options and so give up. Eat your salmon dinner. I think that is a very comfortable place for privileged, comfortable, liberal people to get to, and they get there really fast. They have a freak out about climate change, they read a couple articles, and really quickly they find their way to this climate nihilism and this, well, politics is screwed. There’s not going to be good solutions out of this. Eat the wild caught salmon and enjoy your dinner because there’s no point in fighting.
That’s really frustrating for me, and I’m sure a lot of climate activists, as people who keep showing up to the fight and knowing that every day is a chance. Every tree is worth fighting for. This isn’t a point where we ever get to a place where there’s nothing left to fight for and it’s time to just give up and enjoy your dinner. That was really frustrating for me. I loved it as a movie, but as a piece of climate fiction it didn’t quite have the radical politics behind it that I really find exciting, a lot of climate fiction that’s coming out now.
Amy Westervelt: Yeah, yeah. I had that same feeling about the dinner. I was like, this reminds me of everything a rich white person has said to me about climate in the last 10 years. I enjoyed it just as a piece of entertainment. I felt very connected to the Jennifer Lawrence character. I agree with Mary that I’m glad that they let the bad thing happen in the end because I do think that tying it up neatly in a bow would also be annoying. I also am really glad that it got made and that it’s been successful, because of course the only way any other climate thing is ever going to get made is if there’s a big blockbuster movie. This did that. It’s been successful.
It’s definitely being seen by more than just climate people to have the kinds of numbers that it’s posting. It had a celebrity cast and it’s gotten just an endless amount of press. Everyone’s still talking about it. All of that is just, I think, so helpful for any kind of climate action, climate art, all of it. That’s all great. I shared Sim’s exact concern with the precise ending that they went with, which was this sort of kumbaya, let’s have salmon and forget the world’s ending thing.
Then my other issue was that what I think Adam McKay in particular has done really well in all of his other films is include so many random details about this very particular community of people that you can tell there’s major insider knowledge there, and I felt like that was missing here. Everyone felt really two dimensional to me. Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like they kind of phoned it in on character development a little bit. Like all the time was spent on coming up with the allegory and how they were going to make sure everyone knew it was about climate without saying it was about climate. I feel like, I don’t know, there are so many little tiny details that I think could have made it feel actually funnier. That’s the thing that I feel gets the comedy going in a lot of his other films.
I will end on another positive, which is that I am so glad that they skewed the media in this, because somehow the media constantly gets off the hook for its role in delaying action and being a major, major part of the political will problem. I’m glad that they took full aim at the media. I also think it was smart in terms of their attempt to appeal to a broader audience because the pool of people who like to hate on media is much larger than the pool of climate people.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Well actually, I think that’s a really interesting thing about the film and an interesting thing about the use of an allegory of a comet. The comet is imperfect. There’s a lot of ways in which it breaks down as a metaphor for climate change. It’s not an industry-made wound. It’s just this random thing that comes out of nowhere. But by not having it be this industry-made thing, they didn’t have to create an analogy for the fossil fuel industry. That allowed them to villainize politicians and the media in a way that I’ve never really seen done in the scant bits of climate fiction or climate movies, rather.
Climate fiction does all sorts of stuff, but climate movies generally don’t do that, and especially one that’s aiming to reach the type of broad audience that this film was aiming to reach. It allowed them to lay the blame at the feet of the media and the politicians in a way that I really think more people need to understand. I also think that that scene at the end where they’re having that dinner and they introduce the importance of community and spirituality, which I think there is something to that. A lot of people do point to that as a solution for dealing with your climate grief. It doesn’t work perfectly because it’s a comet, and like that’s just a wrap for your planet right there. That’s kind of it. That’s why we need more climate films.
Amy Westervelt: Totally, yes.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: We’re in desperate need of them, and I’m not going to get mad at this film for not being all things.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: We can talk about it. We can critique it. But I just can’t fix my mouth to say I hated it. Yeah, no. I don’t think anyone here is saying that. No, I don’t think anybody here does, but on the social media where most of us are having all of our conversations outside of our household these days because of the pandemic, every opinion gets flattened. People are really enjoying skewering this film. I know we’re saying that we’ve talked about the film to death, I don’t know that we have in any real sort of way. I don’t think we’ve had nuanced, messy conversations about this film. I think we’ve had a lot of virtue signaling, holier than thou, sanctimonious conversations about it, again, on social media, but I don’t think we’ve had the types of conversations we need to have about this film.
Amy Westervelt: Then unfortunately the most visible makers of this film have been extremely defensive about any sort of criticism, whether it is nuanced or not. I don’t think that has helped because it’s like, well, why can’t we have –
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Shouldn’t be making art.
Amy Westervelt: Why can’t we have a messy conversation about this? It should be, you know… I don’t know. Yeah, exactly. You can’t make creative stuff and then be extra sensitive about any kind of feedback. That doesn’t work.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Right.
Lyta Gold: Yeah, I wanted to get into that, because I think my viewing of the movie was colored by the reaction that Adam McKay and David Sirota were having on Twitter where they were getting very upset at any… Because on Rotten Tomatoes it’s something 50 some percent approval from critics and the audience is more like 70%. They were getting very, very upset and talking about how the critics don’t get it. I think one of the things that’s happening here, which is kind of an interesting problem maybe in climate fiction in general, is that if it’s a piece of art, you can criticize art and people have opinions about it, whatever. But if it’s a piece of politics and it’s meant to serve a political end then it’s a huge problem to dislike it and to disagree with it, because then you’re not getting the point of the ideas. You don’t respect the ideas. You don’t care about the climate. [crosstalk]
Amy Westervelt: [crosstalk] social impact thing, then it’s like, oh, well.
Lyta Gold: Exactly.
Sim Kern: See for me though, that’s what I’m saying. I liked it as a piece of art and I really don’t have much criticism of it as a piece of art. I do criticize its politics because I think they’re very neoliberal. The reason there are no solutions at the end is because I think – Perhaps it’s Adam McKay – But the driving vision behind the movie is the kind of person that was counting on COP26 to solve climate change and then was surprised when it didn’t, that sort of thing.
Amy Westervelt:Zing.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Even though it was the 26th try.
Sim Kern: Yeah. If you’re that kind of person, then yeah, you look at climate change coming like a meteor that we don’t have a chance of stopping. The moment I felt most betrayed by, I think, in the entire movie was when Jennifer Lawrence gets on a table at a bar and she tells everyone the story and then the people just riot. There’s a riot. Then it’s like, oh, that was a bad thing that happened, and it gets shut down and the plot moves on. I’m like, wait, but rioting is kind of good. Rioting and people power.
Then there’s another brief clip of there’s some, they’re doing some protesty thing. There’s some kind of people power thing going on and organizing, but it’s just a clip of the three main scientists phone banking or something. Being in the climate movement where I am, that’s actually the only way any change happens is through people-powered movements, and this movie just didn’t engage with that at all. That was a let down for me. There are climate fiction writers like Aya De Leon, for example, who are writing really amazing books engaging with the grassroots climate movements and stuff.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Yeah. I think there’s a lot to be built on. There was a lot in the film that it could have been made into a whole series in so many different ways. What I hope is that there are so many other creatives in Hollywood looking at the film and going, hmm, I would’ve explored that storyline, and then they go explore it. Then we get this whole Renaissance of people being like, okay, it’s safe to talk about this in public, but what I also thought was really interesting about that scene that you just mentioned where Jennifer Lawrence’s character, Kate is her name in the film, which I love, because of Kate [inaudible], a friend of ours and also a scientist.
So she gets up and she tells people how bad it is and they freak out. I can’t even tell if they were being nihilists at the moment, but they riot. For so long in climate spaces, ever since I can remember, we were told that if you told people how bad it was they would give up or they would panic. Therefore we didn’t tell them how bad it was. Instead, we just let shit get worse to where they can see with their own eyes how bad it was. I was thinking about that when I saw that scene of like, we’ve been told since the ’90s that you can’t tell people how bad it was.
I really, really, really wish people had told people how bad it was in the ’90s and let them go through that process of freaking out about it. Which brings me to the other thing that people have been talking about about this film is like how is it going to make audiences feel? There’s this fear that this film is going to make audiences give up and just decide that there’s no point, there’s no hope, and just completely give up. I think that to a degree that might be true, because that’s the first cycle of climate grief. It’s called the depression. We have all been through it. I think we need to let go and let people grieve, and let people come out on the other side.
Sim Kern: Yeah, let people cycle through it. I’ve felt like that 100 times.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Yeah. I go in and out all the time. Amy and I joke about this. Our climate grief cycles are synced. All of a sudden, one of us will text the other.
Amy Westervelt: [crosstalk].
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Yeah. One of us will text the other and be like, I don’t feel like doing shit right now. What’s wrong with me? Dude, me too. It’s like, oh, it’s our climate grief cycle. There we go. I say all of that to say we can’t control how people feel about this big, terrifying thing that could very well, and is, changing the world as we know it. Then tell them, but you can’t freak out. You can’t get sad about it. You have to get to work. I’m sorry, we’re humans.
Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Yeah. Agreed.
Lyta Gold: Yeah. The presumption that what needs to be done is that people need to keep going to work but protest in some peaceful ways. There’s the whole scene in the movie with the Ariana Grande song talking about this… Which is a funny song. It’s funny because it’s very contradicted in the movie. She said in the song, listen to the god damned scientists, is one of the lyrics. Then earlier in the movie we saw how the scientists, the other scientists, have been co-opted, these other highly credentialed scientists have been co-opted by the tech industry. It’s like, oh, okay. It didn’t even seem to, at times, even be coherent with itself.
Sim Kern: I don’t like billionaires. That’s how I got a big Twitter following, was ranting about Elon Musk. I really loved that they connected the dots. The character of the one billionaire was so good.
Amy Westervelt: Yes, so good. That whole, I’m for the jobs the comet will create thing. I was like, that is actually really, really well done.
Sim Kern: Yeah, but they connected why the space race is a problem to climate change through the allegory. I think it’s enough that people can connect the dots to why the space race is also a problem to real climate change, not just the comet situation.
Lyta Gold: Yeah. I thought the tech part of it, that was the sharpest critique that I thought landed the best. I wish it’d been more of the movie and earlier. I thought they could afford to be a 90 minute movie, like I was saying.
Sim Kern: Even a little editing.
Lyta Gold: Editing doesn’t hurt. Got to say, I’m a big fan.
Sim Kern: I started watching with my teenager and my husband. They both went to bed. Then I was left at the end like, oh my God, I’m always alone with my climate grief. At the end of the movie, I’m just alone at the end of the movie. Y’all didn’t stick it out.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Well, they could have done without that whole narrative about the scientist sleeping with the female journalist. No one needed that. It plays into those harmful tropes about female journalists sleeping with their sources. Yeah.
Amy Westervelt: Yeah, that’s true.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Yeah. [crosstalk]
Lyta Gold: That was weird. That whole storyline was really weird, it’s true. Now that I think about it I’m like…
Sim Kern: That was his arc. It served to make the ending more emotional.
Lyta Gold: Right, because he comes back home to his family.
Sim Kern: He comes back home to his wife. But that’s sort of a cis male redemption arc that I’m not super… My 15 year old, that was the reason she gave first. She was like, alright, I might have kept watching but this affair is weirding me out. I think she really liked the scientist character, and then… Yeah, anyways.
Lyta Gold: Yeah. I did kind of like though that he was this narcissist and he was super into the attention. Then he kept accidentally taking credit for the female scientist’s work or just not correcting people when they gave him credit for it or whatever. There were definitely some little things in there where I was like, oh, I’m pretty sure I know who this character is modeled after.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Yeah, because there’s a lot of guys like that in the climate world. There isn’t this beautiful harmony where if you believe in climate action you’re immediately a good person. I kind of like that he sucked.
Amy Westervelt: Yeah, yeah. I’m sure you wanted to talk about other things.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Are you tired of talking about this movie? Because I’m not, Amy.
Lyta Gold: Again, this is why my podcast always runs so long. There’s enough to talk about in all these topics, but we can use Leo here, because that’s Leonard DiCaprio’s character, use him as kind of a jumping off point, because he’s a big climate action guy. He’s partying on yachts with Jeff Bezos which is a whole thing, but he and a lot of the actors involved in this movie, they care very much about climate and they really want to do stuff. They think of themselves as being activists. Yet, this is one of the only climate movies. When we talk about Hollywood’s resistance to making climate movies, it’s interesting. Because again, I’m sure there’s producers and such who think of themselves as climate people and climate activists, yet there is this resistance. It seems to be a material resistance to making fun of [crosstalk].
Sim Kern: It’s not just in Hollywood, too. It’s in publishing. I was on sub this past year with my young adult novel which ended up selling to a small press. If you look at who’s publishing climate fiction, it’s almost all small press, but we did get into an acquisitions meeting with an editor at a much larger publishing house. He really loved the book. His acquisitions, the sales team told him, we won’t buy YA with climate themes. This is a major publishing house. Just straight up that was the only reason. Nothing about the book. We won’t buy YA with climate themes. This was in 2021.
Amy Westervelt: Wow.
Lyta Gold: Did they say why? YA is so huge. You’d think that that would –
Sim Kern: That’s the email that I got from him. He liked the book so much he even sent me editorial notes. Just, I hope you get this out there. He believed in it. The people that control the media, the Hollywood executives, the sales teams of publishing companies, they still don’t want to touch climate. When you look at big publishing houses that do put out climate fiction, it’s from Barbara Kingsolver and Overstory, Richard Powers, these people who are already best sellers are allowed to write about climate themes, but you don’t see debut, young adult, cli-fi books coming out from the top five publishers.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Right. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that climate does not allow for neat endings, at least not about climate change. The few times I’ve tried to promote these types of stories people are like, well, how do we reverse it in the end? How do we end it? It’s like, you don’t. You don’t reverse it. You learn how to live in a new world. I think one of the best films to ever do that was Beast of the Southern Wild, which came out in 2010, and is just such a powerful, powerful climate movie, if you’ve never seen it. And it is very, very directly about climate change.
I did not clock that in 2010 because I thought climate change was still theoretical at that point. But anyway, it doesn’t create this neat ending where the big thing gets reversed. Those are the types of stories that publishing and Hollywood like to see because as much as these are supposed to be places for creativity, they don’t like to do things that haven’t been done before, which I don’t know how that allows for creativity. They like to have a model for it. Unfortunately, there was this tweet heard around the world that created this notion that climate stories are not sellable. I will let Amy pick that up because she knows all about that.
Amy Westervelt: I was just going to say, I think at an even more basic level, they could even agree with the creative direction of a story but they just fundamentally have this belief that it won’t sell. That it won’t sell books. It won’t bring eyeballs. And then yeah, Chris Hayes, I can’t remember if it was a tweet or he said it on his show. Maybe it was a tweet.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: It was a reply to a tweet.
Amy Westervelt: Okay, yeah, because people were complaining, why doesn’t MSNBC do more climate coverage, or something like that. He was like, it’s a ratings killer. Every time we do climate week it’s a ratings killer. But my contention with that is, well, if you relegate it to climate week and you promote it with a bunch of fucking videos of melting glaciers…
Mary Annaïse Heglar: And polar bears.
Amy Westervelt: …And extreme weather events and whatever else then yeah, of course people might tune out. I don’t know. Actually, that’s an interesting thing to think about, because I think Don’t Look Up very much never never mentions climate, didn’t market itself as a climate movie. Then in all the interviews that they were doing were kind of like, yes, it’s an allegory for climate, or whatever. I have found that smuggling climate into stuff is a helpful way to do it. But I also am frustrated by that, because seriously, it’s 2022 and we can’t just directly talk about this? It’s ridiculous.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Yeah, yeah. Also that tweet reply from Chris Hayes, people have held that up in interviews to be like, that’s why I don’t talk about climate, Chris Hayes said it was a ratings killer on Twitter that one time.
Amy Westervelt: I think he said that three or four years ago at this point, too.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Oh no, it was like five years ago. It was long before the pandemic. I think a lot of people don’t want to talk about it and they’ll say that they don’t want to scare their audience, but the truth is they don’t want to scare themselves. They’re scared. When you talk to them about it directly, about how does it affect their lives, they talk about being debilitatingly depressed about it, but that’s real. That in of itself is a story that you could tell.
Sim Kern: There’s room for so many different types of stories in climate fiction. I just want people to know more about what’s out there. I do hope this movie sparks new kinds of climate stories. This is our first climate comedy, mainstream climate comedy. That is a huge deal. We need stories that help people grieve climate. That’s a lot of what has been published in some of those more mainstream things like Richard Powers. I really like Richard Powers and Barbara Kingsolvers, but a lot of it’s just elegies to a natural world that’s passing away.
But on the other hand you also have really optimistic climate fiction coming out, a lot of times called solar punk or African futurism, or afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism. Where people are trying to tell stories that aren’t just imagining worlds where climate change has been largely resolved, but also imagining the decolonized, anti-capitalist, anarchist organizing that would allow those societies to happen. It’s a very new and exciting genre. It’s kind of defying the overarching cynicism of our times. It’s very energizing for me to read that stuff and just imagine these other options. I do hope that this movie will be a launching point to all kinds of different climate fiction that is out there.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Right. I want us to do away with the term climate fiction at some point because if you’re writing fiction that’s supposed to be analogous to this world and it doesn’t include climate change, you’re not writing about this world. That’s just not reality. I see it every time I watch some of my favorite shows. I loved Insecure, but I feel like they would’ve had to deal with a wildfire or two.
Amy Westervelt: Like come on, I know, I know.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: At least come up in conversation.
Amy Westervelt: Yes, yes. How is no one ever evacuated for a fire in that whole show?
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Right. Y’all didn’t have to worry about no droughts. Or even Queen Sugar based here in Louisiana. The only hurricane they know by name is Katrina? Word? That doesn’t make sense. I don’t know what New Orleans you’re talking about, but…
Sim Kern: The same denialism too is being applied to COVID in fiction. Increasingly, fiction that’s serious fiction is only fiction that takes place in this reality that doesn’t exist anymore. A pre-COVID, pre-climate change reality where there aren’t wildfires, where the days follow along predictably and you’re not dealing with rolling catastrophes and everyone isn’t wearing masks. The guiding advice right now in publishing from agents and publishing professionals is still, don’t talk about pandemic. Don’t put the pandemic in your stories. We’re three years now into a pandemic that has completely altered the world but our writers and our artists aren’t being allowed to grapple with that.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: I actually think that’s super fucking dangerous because they didn’t deal with the 1918 flu in their art. The next thing you knew it had the Holocaust, because they didn’t process it. Art helps us to process how we feel about these things. If we don’t do that I am terrified of where we’re heading. I’m already terrified of where we’re headed. It doesn’t look good. We got people storming the Capitol.
Sim Kern: Not a lot of bright signs right now.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Exactly.
Lyta Gold: Yeah. It’s something that’s actually very interesting, this sort of division that we’ve historically had with realism and genre fiction. Whenever you bring that up, people are like, oh no, there’s no more division whatsoever. You tell that to publishing houses, that market, and think of these books totally differently. But there’s an idea in realism of the eternal present, and this is sort of the standard novel. The serious novel is one with the eternal present. It takes place at a time where nothing really changes. It doesn’t feel right anymore. It doesn’t feel real. I agree with you completely, Mary. All fiction should be climate fiction. It should be realism. It should have its own term, yeah. [inaudible]
Mary Annaïse Heglar: You know where’s an interesting place where you do start to see climate butting into the narrative on the screen is reality TV. I have a thing for Mob Wives. Actually well, I had a thing for it. I don’t know if it still comes on anymore. I stopped watching reality TV when Donald Trump got elected because I was like, I am the problem. But on Mob Wives, they had to deal with hurricane Sandy on Staten Island. It was just interesting to see it just butt its way in and had to have them talk about climate change and how it was affecting their lives in a way that they couldn’t deny. But when you see Sex and the City reboots set in New York City, not a single mention of how absurdly hot it is compared to when they were in their 30s or anything like that.
Lyta Gold: It’s funny, because it doesn’t have to be that every story is now a disaster story where people are running from a catastrophic event. But I was reading the new Sally Rooney novel and her characters in it are sending each other long emails, and they talk about climate change.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Because of course.
Lyta Gold: Because of course, it’s very realistic and very viable. Of course they’re talking. It would be weird if they don’t. It has to come up in some way.
Amy Westervelt: Right, sitcoms and stuff too. I’m like, how are there people grappling with whether or not to have children, say in this time, and not one mention of climate change? Like, come on, that’s fantasy.
Sim Kern: What I want people to know is you’re going to feel better. You feel better when you go through the grief. It seems so scary to look at it head on and engage with it, but I have been doing this a long time. When you’re pushing it away and you’re trying to ignore it, it creeps up on you. The despair you feel at the back of your mind is really worse than if you could just stare it in the face and grieve and get your cries out and then find some way to feel you’re being useful, perhaps.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Yeah. I think a big part of the reason TV is afraid to depict environmentalists, so to speak, or have their characters talk about climate, is because they don’t know how to do it without seeming corny. A big part of the reason that that’s such a threat, and Amy can talk about this way better than I can, is the way that the fossil fuel industry has created this image of environmentalists as these hippie-dippie, super corny, super sanctimonious type of people that everybody hates, like Lisa Simpson, basically.
Amy Westervelt: Yeah, that’s true. The idea that environmentalists care more about trees than anything else and we just want to take everything away from everybody and all of that stuff. The other thing, I’m going to say the most on-brand thing in this entire conversation, which is that there’s a shit load of oil money in Hollywood. Hollywood was built on the oil industry. Los Angeles wouldn’t exist without oil. There’s a very clear connection there, too, that is very long-standing. Again, people always get really weird about that.
Like in print media too people are like, I’ve never had anyone from an oil company tell me to change my story. I’m like, yeah dude. It’s not as fucking obvious as that. I don’t think there’s some villain in a top hat turning up at Hollywood studios twirling his mustache telling you to kill a movie, but this shit be [inaudible]. I know for a fact that several development funds in Hollywood are funded by Saudi wealth funds, or Abu Dhabi is another one. There are several, several pots of money that are used to develop new films and TV series that are 100% funded by oil money. I’m sorry, I just don’t believe that has nothing to do with it.
Sim Kern: Oh, for sure. And, in a very direct sort of almost villain in a top hat kind of way, the CIA – I always end up talking about this story, but I always want everyone to know about it in case there was one person in the world who hasn’t heard about how the CIA infiltrated creative writing programs. [Inaudible] the country and helped found the Iowa Writers Conference and instills in us an aesthetic. And this is all public record. This is not some wild conspiracy theory.
They purposefully created an aesthetic in American literature that considered political writing to be gauche and not literary and not serious. You and I, Lyta and I went through the same creative writing program at Oberlin where your writing was supposed to be just completely personal and navel gazing and not engaging with these political, broader ideas because the CIA was afraid of communism spreading through the art because communism does great at spreading through art.
Lyta Gold: Sim, how long did it take you to get over the trauma of Oberlin creative writing classes? Because it took me years.
Sim Kern: Oh, it took about 11 years, yeah. [crosstalk].
Mary Annaïse Heglar: This is why I stayed in the English Department. I did not take creative writing classes.
Sim Kern: I was an English teacher for 11 years before I started writing again. It took a long time.
Lyta Gold: They made it very clear that anything genre was not allowed, that literally anything that was outside of naval gazing, sort of baby auto-fiction kind of style was not allowed. It wasn’t done out of any particular malice. It wasn’t anybody taking money. The CIA wasn’t hiding in a bush. I would’ve had more respect for them I think if they were getting bribes directly, but that’s another story.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: They might have been in a bush.
Lyta Gold: In a bush. I didn’t see.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: There were a lot of bushes.
Sim Kern: I don’t think the CIA was still involved in the 2000s, but they were super involved when the Iowa Writers Conference was founded, and all those professors that became the professors that became the professors that founded all these programs, they went through this training.
Lyta Gold: The CIA also funded a number of journals. They did a lot of work overseas too, especially in Latin America.
Sim Kern: The Paris Review. Yeah, the Paris Review.
Amy Westervelt: Right.
Lyta Gold: Yeah, the Paris Review. And then in Latin America they pushed some great writers too, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and people like that, but they pushed sort of leftish writers at the expense of really leftist writers. They founded these magazines that published them. They really shaped a lot of culture in Latin America. That was a big deal for them. People dispute a lot over how much influence they actually had and how much of –
Amy Westervelt: Well yeah, but the thing is at the same time that that was all happening the PR industry was working extremely hard to shape ideas about how the economy should work and how politics should work and what society should look and what you should want. It was like the CIA. You have the Powell Memo coming out around this time. You have all of these industrialists and their propagandists all freaking out about this all at the same time. Pretty much as World War II comes to a close all of the top executives in the US are going, oh shit. People got used to the government being functional. Also, people were okay with the government putting price controls on things and messing with the “free market.” Guess what? Actually their lives got better. We need to do something. It’s like, well yeah, you have all of that shit happening from the ’50s into the ’60s and ’70s. Anyway, I actually didn’t know that about the Iowa Writers Workshop. That makes so much sense.
Sim Kern: Yeah, it was 1967. I dropped a link in the chat. There’s an Eric Bennett article, “How Iowa Flattened Literature.” It was this guy called Engle who was the director of the Iowa Writers Program. He was working directly with the CIA to talk about what types of writing would be considered good American writing.
Amy Westervelt: Wow.
Lyta Gold: This actually leads into the question of art versus propaganda as separate qualities. Then the way climate fiction, how we want it to function because we have an aversion because we’ve been taught to have an aversion to things that are political, because if something can carry on the dominant politics of society, like all the copaganda shows that are on TV, and unless you name them as copaganda people don’t really see them as that. There’s this interesting question of, well when you’re writing climate fiction or when you’re trying to create climate fiction, how do you walk that line between you have a political point of view and you’re trying to express it, but radical politics are seen as propagandistic rather than artistic?
Sim Kern: I write climate fiction, you know, and I’ve stopped caring. I’ve accepted that I am a very political writer and my fiction is going to be very political. At the same time, I am aware that storytelling conventions are a certain way that people are comfortable with. I want to engage with a wide audience. I want my work to be really readable. It can’t just be a diatribe. There needs to be tension and plot. You have to have intimate character internal feelings and relationship drama going on. It needs to be funny, ideally, in places.
You can use humor. You can use science fiction. My young adult trilogy, the first book of it, Seeds for the Swarm, is coming out in the fall. It’s set in 2075 so climate change has advanced quite a bit. But there’s a lot of cool sci-fi, future-tech elements involved in the storytelling and all those are things you can get to hook people’s attention as you’re trying to very deliberately, if you’re me, impart a radical politick and also communicate some climate science at the same time.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: I think the devil is in the character development. Novels have worldviews, right? Art has a worldview. That doesn’t necessarily make it a piece of propaganda. It can become that when it becomes really bad art. I’m thinking of the work by Toni Morrison, for example. She definitely has a worldview. She has a message, well maybe not necessarily a message, but she has her own political mindset, as did James Baldwin, as did all of these other writers. They were staunchly anti-racist writers. That comes through in their work. But it’s still art because they have fully formed characters. They have fully formed human beings telling these stories who are imperfect and messy and all of these other things.
I think you get into propaganda when you start going down the route of… Richard Wright fell into a lot of this. I’ve got a deep affection for him as a Black Mississippian, but a lot of his stories were just like there’s no character development here, homie. You just phoned that shit in and went with the talking points on this one. I think that’s very possible on climate in the same way that it is when the main devil you’re dealing with is racism or sexism or any of these other things.
If we start thinking about climate change as a systemic thing like the same way that we talk about racism or sexism or homophobia or any of these other big bads then I think the path to creating good art about it becomes a lot clearer. Because you just talk about it the way that you talk about it in any of these other ways or any of the ways that it shows up in your life. I am interested to see what this new world of climate fiction – Or hopefully, as it will soon be called, fiction – Because we don’t have to create a whole other world to show you climate change. You used to have to do that. You used to have to create what the world will look like in 2050. I can talk about climate change in 2010 now. I can write about the past.
Amy Westervelt: You actually have to create a whole nother world to not talk about it. That’s the weird thing. That is so much more speculative than talking about it.
Sim Kern: I think what leans into feeling like propaganda for me, too, is climate fiction that offers up very easy, tropey answers and does not deal with complexity and stuff. Like the story that ends with, and then all the kids got together and cleaned up the park. That’s how most children’s fiction is. I understand the impulse to talk to children about, you can change it. It’s not a giant terrifying unsolvable comet, just recycle. But then that becomes insidious when you know that the plastics companies created the push for recycling. Oil and gas companies created the concept of the carbon footprint. The fact that the motivation behind it, you can solve it. Just change what you’re doing. That’s the main message that children are getting in any kind of kid lit that deals with environmental stuff. It’s really insidious. It’s not fair to them.
Amy Westervelt: It’s something that I hear from editors all the time where they’re like, it’s really disempowering if you don’t give someone an action that they can take. I’m like, oh my God, I hate you.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Yeah. That’s crystallizing to me. What marks propaganda is when you really try too hard to control how your reader reacts to what you write. You try too hard to control how they feel and what they do. If we can write fiction about climate change or write about climate change in such a way that treats our readers like adults and doesn’t try to control how they feel, doesn’t give them a 10-point platform for what to do after this book, because you’re grown. Figure it out. I don’t know what you’re good at. Go do something.
Amy Westervelt: That’s super interesting. I feel like that about non-fiction too. I constantly get asked what I want people to do after they listen to Drilled, for example.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Kick rocks. I don’t give a shit.
Amy Westervelt: Yeah. I mean, I do care. Of course. I have my own opinions on how I wish people would be acting about the climate crisis in general, but in terms of making stuff with the purpose of trying to drive someone’s ideas or actions or whatever, like no, I just feel people should all have the same information and then what they decide to do with that information I can’t really do anything about.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: It comes back to me the quote I love from Toni Cade Bambara which is “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” It’s not to tell you what to do once you’re in it. It’s just supposed to make you want to join it. It’s not supposed to tell you to join it. It’s just supposed to make it look the sexiest place on earth.
Amy Westervelt: That totally reminds me of that essay that you sent from Amitav Ghosh, actually.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Big fan, big fan.
Lyta Gold: Oh yeah, if you haven’t read this essay, Amitav Ghosh wrote it in 2016 and then he later wrote a book based on the ideas in it, but the essay itself is just in the Guardian’s free to read. It is so good if you just Google… We’ll put in the show notes too, but it’s Amitav Ghosh’s name and then climate fiction Guardian. You’ll find it. He talks about the apparent difficulty of writing climate fiction. What he really gets into is that it really requires thinking about literature in a really different way than people have been doing. Part of it is this CIA inflicted thing. It does go back a little earlier. He points out the origins of the bourgeoisie novel, but regardless you really have to conceptualize it differently.
It’s only when you conceptualize it differently, because he says, for example, the realist novel was really designed to conceal what is real. Events that are unusual or remarkable, those are things that you have to bury under tedious details because otherwise people will be surprised. You don’t want people to suspend disbelief too much, essentially is the idea. You have to keep things boring so they don’t suspend disbelief too much. But when you’re dealing with climate then suddenly remarkable things are happening. Surprising things are happening. You can have things like revolution. You can have things like riots. You can have things like tornadoes in the middle of the street.
He has an interesting point which I don’t totally agree with where he talks about how in magical realism or surrealism that happens, the remarkable happens all the time. But he’s a little bit against the idea of using that as a metaphor for climate because there’s nothing magical or remarkable about climate. That being said, and this is something that, Sim, you did so well in your novella, sometimes bringing in those magical or not-quite-real elements, it makes it make more sense. It’s like an older form of storytelling and it brings it back to, again, whether it’s not strictly logical, it’s not strictly logical, but it’s a heart place and you really feel it. But anyways, a long way of going about everybody should read this essay because it’s really, really good. Everybody should read Sim’s novella also because it is extremely, really good.
Sim Kern: Oh, thanks. I want to plug, talking about the Ghosh article when he is talking about we need new kinds of art, that’s where I do get so excited about solar punk because it’s like we’re watching the birth of a new genre in real time. Speculative fiction is figuring out how do we write a better world. You had Ursula K. Le Guin trying to write some anarchist science fiction decades ago, but utopian writing has been so suppressed. Utopian writing is perhaps the least popular and acceptable kind of speculative fiction. Now there’s this huge surge of people who are like, we’re sick of COVID. We’re sick of despair. It’s not even whether or not it’s realistic. No, I don’t think we’re going to get to the solar punk future necessarily in 20 years.
It’s not about that. It’s about just the act of imagining the world has come to feel like such a rebellion. There’s a couple different journals and solar punk magazines if you go searching. Solarpunk Magazine is one they just launched, Multispecies Cities, Sunvault. But last year Grist, which is a really great climate reporting site, they ran a short fiction contest trying to get people to send in, this was called Fix 2200, it’s all short stories set 200 years from now imagining optimistic futures, and just trying to get people to create a vision of something better.
For their first year of the contest, some of the stories were really great, but Jacobin wrote a pretty scathing critique saying, y’all weren’t anti-capitalist enough. You didn’t decolonize enough. You need to keep going. I’m really excited. I’m actually going to be a reader for them this year for the same contest. Hopefully they’re going to continue pushing further into that space. But when I was reading that article you sent us that just made me really excited. I wanted to encourage people to read more solar punk and check out what’s in that space if you’re interested in a not-bleak and very new kind of climate genre that’s emerging.
Lyta Gold: Awesome.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: For anyone listening who has never heard of solar punk, who may or may not be me, what’s solar punk?
Sim Kern: Sorry. I thought I had defined it earlier. Solar punk, it’s a utopian, it’s optimistic stories. Solar coming from writing sci-fi where there’s solar panels. Generally, it’s like they’re often very queer stories. It’s giving yourself also permission to write some utopian science fiction, basically. There’s a lot of decolonizing, anti-capitalist, queer liberation, clean energy. Some people’s ideas of their solar punk future is a very agrarian, anarchist life out on the goat farm commune. But I really like this book, Multi-Species Cities, because it was really exploring neo-urbanist type, how could we have cities that are also green and lush and not with all this bad stuff?
Amy Westervelt: It’s world building. It’s the world building thing, right?
Sim Kern: And just short stories. There aren’t too many novels out. I haven’t found a solar punk full length novel that I really love yet. There are a few. But I’m really enjoying seeing the short stories happening and seeing how much the genre is evolving just year by year.
Lyta Gold: One thing I wanted to close out with was recommendations. Part of the trouble with recommending climate fiction is it’s still such a burgeoning genre. There’s still relatively little of it. We’re seeing it in short stories. Do people have things that they would recommend that you think is worth reading and getting into?
Mary Annaïse Heglar: I would recommend The Politician, which is a Netflix show. The entire second season is about climate change. I think they do a really interesting job with telling the story of climate change and how it shows up in local politics. It is hysterical. You are supposed to hate all of the characters, which is an important thing to remember when watching it, but it does show all of these different ways that many, many different people get involved in climate change.
Yes, there are perspectives missing because it’s one show, but it’s a really interesting attempt to tackle it. I’d also recommend, of course, Octavia Butler’s Parable series for anyone who wants to get into it. It will creep you out because I believe she wrote those in the 90s and it feels like something that is happening right now. It feels like reading the news. I’ve already mentioned Beast of the Southern Wild. It’s my favorite climate movie of all time.
Amy Westervelt: I have two small children and like 10 jobs. I don’t actually get to consume a lot of art of any kind. But I will recommend this one movie that always pulls me out of climate grief, which is called Woman at War. Have you seen this? It’s like an Icelandic movie. It’s very quirky and strange. I don’t know, it just makes you feel like, yeah. We’re going to beat these guys. Yeah, caveats of this is like one very small story. It’s not the end all be all of every climate film, yada yada, but yeah, I quite enjoyed it. I watched it one night when I couldn’t sleep because of climate anxiety and it made me feel better. Now I’ve done that more than once. I think it’s on Hulu for free, or at least it was. Yes.
Sim Kern: I already obviously plugged Solarpunk. I’ll plug myself. My contemporary novella, Depart, Depart! is set in the very near future, any day now type of thing. Where I live in Houston, Texas, there’s a massive hurricane based a lot on my trauma and experiences from Hurricane Harvey that wipes out the city. A trans man, Noah Missioner is evacuated to Dallas. He’s being literally haunted by one of his ancestors and grappling with his Jewish identity and his trans identity in the context of this basketball arena-turned shelter surrounded by all of his Texan neighbors, which is always super fun.
Love those guys. That’s Depart, Depart! I think about climate books in lots of mini genres. Climate fiction is being written in a very contemporary way, and grappling with very contemporary movements. Aya De Leon has a book called A Spy in the Struggle, which is really cool about a Black CIA or FBI. Which one does US stuff?
Mary Annaïse Heglar: FBI.
Sim Kern: FBI, and she infiltrates a Black, radical climate movement to try to spy on the FBI, but she ends up getting involved. That one’s very cool. If AWP happens we’re going to be on a panel with Julie Carrick Dalton who wrote Waiting for the Night Song, also about contemporary activism. There are books that just help you grieve. I already mentioned Richard Powers. I think that Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were is about a fictional African village that’s being targeted by a fictional oil company, Exxon, and going through generations of pollution and effects from that and their struggles.
That one’s really heavy but definitely a good book for helping you grieve. Then there’s also, like I said, these optimistic solar punk stories coming out. I would encourage people to check out the Fix 2200 contest. All the stories are free to read online if you’re interested in solar punk. All of the winners from last year’s contest are free to read online. That’s a cool way to check out that genre as well.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: That reminds me, just to plug Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement. It was really good. I was drawn to that book just by the title alone. I had no idea it was about climate change. I was like, this is what I’ve been waiting for. I also read his first novel, really bringing climate to fore, Gun Island, which I thought was really good and really interesting. He just wrote another book called The Nutmeg’s Curse. I own it. Haven’t read it. Very excited for it though.
Sim Kern: I should also mention, I have a climate fiction book club on YouTube and Instagram. It’s me and two other… We’re all non-binary white people. We’re all thems. We read a different climate book each month. We just pick them, and that’s been good. It’s been keeping me regularly keeping up with what’s happening in the genre.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: What are some of the books you have coming up?
Sim Kern: Right now we’re reading Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, I think it’s called.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: That’s for January?
Sim Kern: Yeah. That’s for January. We’re excited about that because we haven’t really talked about food and climate, which is going to be interesting. Then we’re reading… I forget the name of the next one. I’ll have to look it up for February, but I think it’s a young adult one that Sage picked. Then I haven’t picked my pick for March yet. I’m thinking I might do a solar punk anthology though.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Okay. Watch this space.
Sim Kern: Yeah.
Amy Westervelt: That’s awesome.
Lyta Gold: Couple of recommendations I would do. I think people should absolutely read Sim Kern’s, Depart, Depart! So good. Sometimes climate stuff hides in plain sight, like Mad Max: Fury Road. Great climate movie. All the Mad Max movies are, arguably. Fury Road is so wonderful.
Sim Kern: All the Studio Ghibli movies too.
Lyta Gold: Yes. Oh, that’s a really good point, yeah. Yeah, a lot of them. [inaudible] Nausicaa, yeah. Another one I’d recommend, there’s kind of a weird book, J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. It’s from 1962, but it’s about a future where everything is very hot and very wet. I don’t even know if it’s a good book. It’s kind of dated. It’s written by a white guy in the ’60s, but it’s vibes, as the kids would say. It’s very atmospheric. Has a feeling of the oppressiveness of it. I think it’s interesting. But yes, climate fiction doesn’t always have to be fun. Solar punk’s great. We can tell all kinds of different stories.
Sim Kern: I just thought of one more thing I wanted to plug, which is my publisher, Stelliform Press. They’re a Canadian publisher. They only publish speculative fiction about climate change. I’ve read everything they put out so far, and it’s all good. They’ve only been around for two years, but they’re doing great stuff.
Lyta Gold: Yeah. Maybe it’ll just take one breakout story, one that’s just really fun, and maybe something that gets turned into a movie or TV show, and everything’s getting adapted all of the time. Maybe it’s just going to take that one and really kind of open the dam for all of the other climate stories and really prove that they can sell, I think is what we’re all really hoping for. All right. Well, thanks everybody for joining me. This has been so much fun.
Sim Kern: [crosstalk] thanks for having me.
Lyta Gold: Yeah. Let’s see. If you’re listening to this, you are maybe subscribed to the Real News Network. If not, you absolutely should be. We have lots of other wonderful shows that are about really, really important things. You should also, of course, subscribe to the Hot Take podcast, which is currently on hiatus but will be coming back. Anything else you guys want to plug before we head out?
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Hot Take has a newsletter.
Amy Westervelt: We do have a newsletter.
Lyta Gold: Hot Take newsletter. It’s a newsletter and a podcast so however you want to consume your hot takes, they’ve got the form for you.
Sim Kern: When’s it coming back?
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Probably the spring. That’s the current plan. But yeah, watch out on Twitter. We’ll announce it when we’re sure. Because Amy’s not going to do it, folks should also follow the Drilled podcast. It is one of the things that made me really open my eyes to the roots of the climate crisis. It’s really masterful. Start at season one and just keep going. Then Amy is launching a new podcast. Amy, is it Damages?
Amy Westervelt: It’s called Damages, yeah. I describe it as law and order meets the climate crisis. It’s sort of a narrative podcast following all of the many, many legal cases that are being brought in an effort to address climate change. I feel like there’s good stories, actually, behind most lawsuits, and they don’t really have a place anywhere in the media. A news story might drop when something gets filed and then when there’s a ruling, and then kind of that’s it. So yeah, it’s digging into the drama of litigation.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: When does it launch, Amy?
Amy Westervelt: Feb. 17, thank you very much.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Soon, real soon.
Amy Westervelt: Yes.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Okay. I’m excited.
Amy Westervelt: Yes, yes.
Mary Annaïse Heglar: Okay.
Amy Westervelt: I should also plug the most recent season of Seen on Radio. It’s called “The Repair.” It’s about the historical roots of the climate crisis and it starts with Aristotle, and goes all the way to now. It’s a deep dive, but it’s good. It’s good. I co-hosted that season with John Biewen who’s a total documentary podcast genius. Yes, that’s it. Okay, I’m done for reals.
Lyta Gold: All right. Thanks everybody again for joining us, and we’ll catch you next time.
This story originally appeared in The Tourist on Jan. 16, 2022. It is shared here with permission.
The news of the firing of Mark Schlissel, my university’s president, brought joy to many households last night, not least my own. (He had a relationship, apparently consensual though who even knows, and definitely against regulations, with a subordinate.)
Franzen himself could not have better arranged the details: an anhedonic rich man, trying to pursue a little self-indulgence, who scandalizes his university and tanks his career, as well as, presumably, destroying his marriage (though you have to figure that was tanked a while ago, and this was the outward manifestation), in order to have what sounds like the lamest affair ever. He shares his Hulu password with her; he sends her gifts from Etsy; he flirtatiously forwards racy New Yorker articles. I have way more swag than this guy. You have way more swag than this guy.
The system selects for blandness. Increasingly it selects for incompetence: just look at the current and previous administrations.
The insulting part of Schlissel’s presidency was always that: the evident mediocrity of the man whose job it was to tell you that the university was safe to reopen when it wasn’t, that wildly aggressively sex pest professors were being dealt with when they weren’t, that the new rules which work to endanger the job of every employee ever accused of a felony were a necessary early-warning system against those same sorts of sex pests when they weren’t. (We had lots of early warnings about Philbert, Daniels, Conforth and the rest. The new rules will be very helpful if the U ever wants to fire a woman who kills her abuser in self-defense, though.) For a guy who I never once heard say a single interesting thing, neither in his public statements nor in his private emails to a lover (where you’d at least expect a little show of personality), to bring my union to the brink of striking twice in four years, and to inspire an actual strike by grad students, because he truly believes that if we mattered, we’d have tenure and he’d know our names already: you could start to think he must be right. There is nothing interesting about this guy, and yet he can make everyone’s life worse. There must be some other scale of interesting/not interesting, valuable/not valuable, significant/not significant that I am too dumb to see, to explain such a person’s proximity to power.
There never was, though. This guy is so stupid that he doesn’t even know how to properly wreck a career (and, in the process, tear up a golden parachute so lavish that his petty-cash account in retirement was higher than my 2013 starting salary). The system selects for blandness. Increasingly it selects for incompetence: just look at the current and previous administrations. (I could pick on any number of moments from the visibly sundowning Joe Biden, but there’s just such greater poetry in Kamala Harris’s “It is the time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.” It’s like a bit imitating Ashbery.) Even the people who maintain this machinery seem to realize how little of themselves the machinery needs, how little are the selves it needs. They aren’t having that much more fun than we are. (Kamala and Joe both used to know how to be, if nothing else, floridly cruel. Now they just sound depressed.) They’re lonely.
The system will promise you a little more power in exchange for a little more compromise, but by the time you have enough personal power to run anything, you’ll be so compromised on the inside that you’ll forget how to want anything interesting, let alone anything morally beautiful.
It depresses me that Schlissel loses his job for writing “lonely. m” on company time to a subordinate, and not for ignoring his own public-health specialists or alienating the people who do the bulk of the teaching. It also gives me hope that my undergraduates are seeing the emptiness of his life. We like to talk about “mediocre white men” (or we did a few years ago), as though white people were actually a race and mediocrity were carried in germ-plasm. But the reality is that even Mark Schlissel is a child of God, and he had it in him, at one point, to be much more interesting than this. If you ever forget this, just spend some time in a kindergarten classroom. Children who will grow up to be the blandest functionaries on earth act as strange and alien as the kids who will grow up to be outsider artists. Mark Schlissel probably cared about public health at one point. He probably really did have intellectual problems that made him curious. He has stuffed his face behind this mask; he has learned to be this boring, because that’s what success is now, and he was told, or told himself, that no other goals exist.
And every student at University of Michigan, from sheer rubbernecking prurient curiosity, is now seeing the details of how boring it is behind that mask. At just the moment when the process really accelerates, the process of lopping off bits of aspiration and curiosity and anger so that you can find a place within the system where you can work your way toward your goals, my students are seeing that at the end of that process is nothing. The further down that road you go, the less you are. The system will promise you a little more power in exchange for a little more compromise, but by the time you have enough personal power to run anything, you’ll be so compromised on the inside that you’ll forget how to want anything interesting, let alone anything morally beautiful. You’ll be trying to woo your mistress with knishes, or (as in Jeff Bezos’s case) sexting “I love you alive girl” like some kind of robot. My students are getting a chance to see that, and maybe it will inspire them to think harder about the compromises they make, to name the things that will not be worth trading away because without those things there’s nothing left. Maybe it will inspire them to doubt personal power, and to look at forms of collective power—after all, it was union power that finally checked Schlissel, despite his confidence that we had no forms of influence that he was bound to respect. Maybe it will inspire them to want to live somewhere besides the U of Lonely M.
We were all kids once, and time forces all of us to grow up sooner or later, but not all coming-of-age stories are the same. In this episode of Art for the End Times, Lyta sits down with superstar writer Bertrand Cooper to discuss coming-of-age films, class, the politics of pop culture representation, and whose stories get told—and who gets to tell them—on the silver screen.
Bertrand Cooper is a writer whose work focuses on the intersection of poverty, Black America, education, and popular culture. Read Bertrand’s seminal essay, published in 2021 in Current Affairs, “Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?”
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