The Great Dismissal: Memoir of the Cultural Demolition Derby, 2015-22 9781501392290, 9781501392283, 9781501392320, 9781501392313

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The Great Dismissal

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The Great Dismissal Memoir of the Cultural Demolition Derby, 2015-22

Henry Sussman

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2023 Copyright © Henry Sussman, 2023 Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover images; Supporters of President Donald Trump demonstrate at a ‘Stop the Steal’ rally in front of the Maricopa County Elections Department office on November 7, 2020 in Phoenix, Arizona © Mario Tama / Staff / Getty Images; Additional image © Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sussman, Henry, author. Title: The great dismissal : memoir of the cultural demolition derby, 2015-22 / Henry Sussman. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | “The present text is an improvised intellectual memoir of the ‘long year’ (it isn’t yet over) that brought us COVID-19 and galvanized U.S. society around and after the elections of November 3, 2020.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Blending memoir, cultural analysis, and reflections on a life in the humanities, Henry Sussman explores how we arrived at an era that is becoming defined by anti-intellectual belligerence”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022025112 (print) | LCCN 2022025113 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501392290 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501392283 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501392306 (epub) | ISBN 9781501392313 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501392320 Subjects: LCSH: Sussman, Henry,–Social and political views. | United States–Civilization– 21st century. | National characteristics, American. | College teachers–United States– Biography. | United States–Politics and government–2017-2021. | United States–Intellectual life–History–21st century. | United States–Social conditions–21st century. Classification: LCC E169.12 .G716 2023  (print) | LCC E169.12  (ebook) | DDC 973.933--dc23/ eng/20220712 LC record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2022025112 LC ebook record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2022025113 ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-9228-3 HB: 978-1-5013-9229-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-9231-3 eBook: 978-1-5013-9230-6 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Journalism— And the many who practice it with dedication and integrity

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CONTENTS

List of Figures  ix

1 November 18, 2020. Postal  1 2 October 6, 2020. Apocalypse Red, Apocalypse Blue  5 3 December 12, 2020. Confederacy of Zombies  9 4 October 18, 2019. Protests, Curtailment of Bus Service, Queens  15 5 June 7, 2020. Atlas of Vanished Places  23 6 February 10, 2021. Requiem to Disinterest  27 7 January 27, 2020. New Feudal Lords  39 8 Thanksgiving, 2021. Partisans of Writing: Mayer with Derrida  47 9 April 1, 2018. Welcome to the Great Dismissal!  79 10 August 15, 2020. Co-lateral Dommages  87 11 December 31, 2020. What on Earth to Do with the Bodies?  97 12 August 30, 2018. Midterm Enigmas for ­Progressives  99

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13 December 8, 2021. Partisans of Writing. Tobin Smith  105 14 February 19, 2022. Politics of Entertainment  117 15 May 24, 2020. Sikhs and Other Cabbies  137 16 November 15, 2020. Electronic Ticks and Leaden Bubbles  155 17 June 13, 2019. Three Deer in a Development Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania  171 18 Labor Day, 2021. Partisans of Writing. Shoshanah Zuboff  175 19 March 15, 2022. Partisans of Writing. Adam ­Serwer  189 20 February 14, 2022. University of the Street  201 21 May 15, 2022. This Thing That Dwells within Us  209 22 June 27, 2022. Dismissal Day. The Strange Loop of Identity Politics  247 23 January 23, 2023. I Was There  271 Bibliography 275 Acknowledgments 281 Index 285

FIGURES

4.1 Transportation Hub, 74th Street and Roosevelt Avenue, Jackson Heights, Queens  21 10.1 Co-lateral Dommages: Homeless Man, 17th and Chestnut Streets, Philadelphia  95 14.1 Senator Joe Manchin  130 14.2 Senator Krysten Sinema  135 15.1 Lingshet Monastery, Ladakh  138 15.2 Eye exam, Buffalo medical mission, Lingshet, Ladakh  148 15.3 Summer festival, Ladakh  153 22.1 Dismissal time, Martin King, Jr., High School and New York City High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts  269

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November 18, 2020. Postal

Up to the Ansonia Station branch of the New York City Post Office, 68th and Columbus—from the river. There is some urgency to get these letters out. They contain a cover letter; an Application for Absentee Ballot; and a stamped return mailer addressed to the Board of Elections in whichever Georgia County I and my fellow volunteers are canvassing by mail. I need stamps to get a batch of fifty of these letters in the mailbox, two stamps per letter. January 5, 2021, Georgia Senatorial Runoff election day, rapidly approaches. We are a mostly graying contingent of do-gooders trying to extend the franchise to citizens, who, like folks everywhere, are sometimes hard-pressed to show up at a certain time in a specific location, bearing particular documents—in order to cast their vote, whether in national or local elections. We volunteers reconnoiter in Zoom meetings. This is how a disproportionate share of productive collaborative work gets accomplished these days. What we offer to the official Georgia voters we canvass by mail is, in my vernacular, “a complete kit”—the materials that will, upon being filled out and returned, secure them a mail-in ballot. This convenience just might be the deciding factor enabling them to vote. More often than not, these are citizens sidelined by the normal stresses and strains of life, by the demands of families and livelihoods that can’t be staved off just because it’s election day. Covid-19 has only multiplied the risks and challenges of in-person voting. I’m familiar with this drill. Earlier this year, over the summer, I joined fellow volunteers in a similar mail-in initiative to get out the November vote in Pennsylvania. This is still before folks will be flocking to Ansonia Station, waiting in a socially distanced queue spilling out onto the sidewalk, to mail out their holiday greetings and presents. The ample main hall is virtually empty. The Plexiglas barriers between clerks and customers recall the better-equipped grocery markets, one of the “safer” environments we duck into, by calculated risk, to provide for our needs.

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I’m promptly greeted by the attendant, who isn’t impressed. I need five 20-stamp sheets of commemoratives; any general content will do. It’s been determined by the people who design mail solicitations that these are more effective than the generic US Flag Forever stamp. The flag somehow accentuates the impersonality and vast logistics of a mailing. So commemoratives it is: flowers, vegetables, or trains. Also, state celebrations, especially when the lucky state is the one the letters have been addressed to. The attendant finds me the stamp sheets I’ve requested. She’s not that happy to see me. I tell her the stamps will be affixed to canvassing letters destined for Georgia. No need to elucidate my hope that they have some infinitesimal small effect on the runoff elections, pivotal ones. She will have none of it. It’s close to closing time, and what she wants is to be done with me and my transaction. I want her to be on my side; to know that I share her concern for a currently underutilized Postal Service; for the people whose rights have been suppressed in countless explicit and inchoate ways; for whole classes of human beings in the United States confined to a holding area of lower expectation, poorer services, fewer resources, and options. Who have been corralled into the less desirable occupations. She has no need whatsoever of my cordial thank you. Her indifference shouts at me. Now I’m hurrying home to complete my task—to stuff return envelopes, also requiring stamps, into their “covers”; to enclose both the signed, personalized letters and the official Absentee Ballot Applications; to check recipients’ addresses against the salutations in the individualized letters. I allow myself a foretaste of the good feeling that this small civic act will release upon my disappearing them down the postbox’s protective gullet. And suddenly, halfway home, her coolness toward me becomes luminous. She belongs to those classes of folks who have shown up for work, day after day and week after week, throughout the pandemic. People who have had to throw to the winds well documented and publicized concern surrounding the public transport making work even possible. She and her family are only too aware of the risks attending workers who travel every day to their unusually stressful work environments; who dwell in multigenerational households; whose children are subject to all the intangibles that surround attending school, where and when it’s open.



NOVEMBER 18, 2020

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It will still be GRAND if Biden and Democratic legislators are not hampered at every step by the belligerent, backstabbing, and backsliding Republicans, with their tunnel vision. On a map that the postal clerk has studied far longer than I have, the gazette of US society, she and I have always walked our separate ways.

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October 6, 2020. Apocalypse Red, Apocalypse Blue

You know, it’s not that the Republicans don’t know that the end is coming. They’re not any stupider than the rest of us. It’s just that they approach these conditions in a slightly different frame of mind. First and foremost, they don’t want to run out of beer. We idealists respond to the data and admonitions furnished by Bill McKibben, James Hansen, and their ilk with a mixture of alarm and resolve. Lower CO2 emissions, clean industry, and green buildings—this is just common sense. Joining with other nations to address these problems, regionally as well as globally—an intuitive response to conditions knowing no boundaries, irrespective of who the major offenders and victims happen to be. Climate change is a phenomenon reverting to a time frame of cosmic history; its confrontation evokes a messianic response whose urgency is calibrated to this planetary scale. There have been multiple, deepseated cultural inputs to this idealistic fervor: the theology of social reform and renewal; the sciences of paleontology, geology, and evolutionary biology; and the politics of social commitment. The question at the very root of this knee-jerk reaction to environmental disaster is: In the face of such eventualities, how can we not undertake every potential solution? If not now, when? I have no doubt that the impending new realities of a planet in a state of man-made runaway warming compounded by such distressing realities as strategic resource depletion also penetrates to the mindset of Republicans and religious conservatives. It’s just that they maintain a checklist of core values that have to be satisfied before direct intervention into these crises can be mobilized. Indeed, this checklist: a program of very strong (if not absolute) values, predetermined, of a transcendental cast, and inherently resistant to revision by circumstance—regardless of cost—may well be the structure of the conservative brain accounting for so many

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entrenched positions, indeed for ideological intransigence overall. As many journalists and commentators have noted, the “cost” to the Trump base of certain of these pre-selected values, and their correlatives—whether resistance to the Affordable Care Act or flat-out rejection of facemasks and/or vaccination—has been and will continue to be prodigious and devastating. The social cost of this practice—decision by preordained checklist—has become a prominent strand in the running narrative. Is this not also a form of idealism? It is surely experienced as such by its practitioners. Prominently looming in the current value-set of Republicans and religious conservatives surely have to be the following: the protection of (human) Life as a transcendental value, particularly at its two extremities: with Life’s inception as an irreducibly sexual consequence indissolubly linked to a divine imperative to reproduce. And, at end-of-life, a transition to a superhuman state absolutely insulated from any and all interventions that would impact on life’s duration. Also high up on the conservative checklist is the moral equivalent to the physical Laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy: the target of a mathematical parity between what we add and what we extract. No one has been more acute in extrapolating an ideological constellation—whose points span debt, mathematics, repression, and violence—than David Graeber, taken from us much too soon. The “central question” of Graeber’s magisterial Debt: The First 5,000 Years runs as follows: “What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean to reduce moral obligations to debts? . . . A debt is the obligation to pay a certain amount of money. As a result, a debt, unlike any other form of obligation, can be precisely quantified. This allows debts to become simple, cold, and impersonal” [Graeber, 2012, 13]. Detached calculation is not only the modus of indebtedness, whether arising from specific transactions or a kind of metaphysical awe at what human existence extracts from nature; this facilitates the violence by which, going deep into the history of civilization, presumptions of indebtedness are settled: “For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors—of arguments about the rights and wrongs of credit payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of



OCTOBER 6, 2020

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debtors’ children into slavery” [Graeber, 2012, 8]. The coordinates of the debt system are courtesy of mathematical tools, but the system is enforced and perpetuated through violence: “Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons, whether these are swords and clubs, or, nowadays, ‘smart bombs’ from unmanned drones” [Graeber, 2012, 327]. Graeber, with a vast library of erudition at his disposal and an anthropological purview encompassing species-wide human behavior patterns over time, furnishes readers with nothing less than a detailed and compelling deconstruction of what might be termed “the metaphysics of debt.” Undergirded by the application of strictly mathematical programs, the metaphysics of indebtedness compulsively flattens complex human values and affairs to polarities between “haves” and “have-nots,” “winners” and “the vanquished,” and “masters” and “bondsmen.” This cognitive rigidity, also a digital reflex, preempts the indispensable broader query as to whether the human footprint on the ecosphere—with survival as well as culture contingent on relentless extraction—is even expressible as a spreadsheet of plusses and minuses. It may well be that the budget-balancers, for whom this equilibrium is prerequisite to any further initiatives that would ameliorate such impediments to human felicity as dire poverty and inequality in wealth and services distribution, misconstrue the debts that their otherwise laudable impulse would erase. In the Indian philosophy and religion of 500–400 BC, “roughly the time of Socrates,” Graeber accesses the paradigm for calculating what he terms “primordial debt.” “We owe our existence above all: To the universe, cosmic forces, as we would put it now, to Nature. The ground of our existence .  .  . To those who have created the knowledge and cultural accomplishments we value most .  .  . To our parents, and their parents—and ancestors .  .  . To humanity as a whole” [Graeber, 2012, 67]. Through religiosity, played out through ritual, culture, and in becoming ancestors ourselves, we make amends for our open-ended extraction. But in Graeber’s parlance, there is no literal repayment, in the case of the primordial debts accrued through human persistence. “The only way of ‘freeing oneself’ from the debt was . . . rather showing that these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with, and hence that the very notion of cancelling the debt and achieving a separate, autonomous existence was ridiculous from the very start”

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[Graeber, 2012, 68]. Our current predicament demands excruciating attentiveness to our ongoing impact on Gaia, but no ethos of reciprocity or balance sheet of expenditures will release us from our progressive exploitative impact. Zero-sum prepay becomes another instance of an a priori scruple in the service of denial and neglect. And so, the apocalypse is at hand. Those who would doubt it are few and far between. It’s just that like everything else, the apocalypse has got color-coded. Apocalypse Blue revels in an unprecedented jubilee of messianic reform under the best circumstances welded atop an under-chassis of innovation and profitable, ecologyminded industry, and investment. Apocalypse Red enables an orgy of private enterprise on the “free” market, profit-taking, and personal indulgence; but one that has been “cleared” in advance by an ideology whose screaming features are the sanctity of life, the restraint of debt in its mathematical expression, and the removal of “artificial” (i.e., unnatural) limits on behavior. And somewhere along the way, Apocalypse Red allows that capital punishment, both as retribution and deterrent, is just fine. Apocalypse Red boasts that nature already sits in its corner— and approves. Apocalypse Blue presides over a nature in whose salvation humanity races at full speed, applying every stopgap that science and industry have managed to devise. The timing of the initiatives launched under the aegis of Apocalypse Blue is invariably the same: hopelessly belated; the nanosecond before the bell has tolled. The apocalypse is indeed at hand—you better believe it. Planetary eco-entropy has entered its terminal phase. Select which color scheme best fits your décor. As for our idealism: I have yet to see the spreadsheet of what it extracts from the environment. I’d be curious to read that impact statement.

December 12, 2020. Confederacy of Zombies

The Electoral College, just this Monday, in keeping with prescribed protocols, and in the wake of multiple judicial denials prompted by Republican lawsuits alleging massive (and results-changing) voter fraud, completed the final implementation of Joe Biden’s election. This of course does not impede Trump’s staunch supporters, ideologues, and politicians who regard their fortunes as tied to his, and his enablers at Fox News, One America News Network, Newsmax, Parler, and other outlets from propounding the most bizarre claims and theories of “the steal.” A graphic opinion piece by Ann Telnaes in today’s Washington Post refuses to allow Trump’s most persistent facilitators to go unnamed. The cartoon, a throwback to the iconography of R. Crumb in his heyday but drafted in sleeker style, is a panorama of the rodents (lean and hungry rats) who pursued the overturning of the verified results, multiple times, in some states—all the way to the Supreme Court. This ploy induced 126 congressional representatives and 18 state Secretaries of State to sign on, who have all thus attained posterity as caricatures. This is merely the latest emanation of a cultural trope that has evolved over the past four years: Trump as the menace or bully who will not give up, whose attacks on government and the unwritten (as well as written) US laws of civility, due process, and goodwill will not die. No writer has caught the sheer creepiness of the death-inlife initiated by the multiple threats of Trumpian and right-wing retribution more acutely than Fintan O’Toole, particularly in his article, “Democracy’s Afterlife,” leading off the New York Review’s election postmortem issue (December 3, 2020). In strategically warning the American public away from any misguided postelection jubilation over Joe Biden’s victory, one popular as well

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as electoral, O’Toole brilliantly teases out the underlying cultural morbidity allowing for Trump’s 2016 win in the first place. In my own nefarious readings, I have twice felt my legs dragged under by the undertow of a massive cultural flirtation with death: in French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s elucidation of nomadic invasions and the imperialistic adventures of the “War Machine” as a “becoming-death”; also, in Slavoj Žižek’s controversial intimations, by the convoluted logic of psychoanalysis, of the Second World War Jews’ (and others’) unconscious collusion with their annihilators. A prevailing culture of death, whether the Republicans’ thirst for retribution against those who dismiss and devalue them or the Democrats’ sense of the frailty of their own nuanced positions, has pervaded the political arena ever since Trump barged onto the scene. This cult may be discerned in the Democrats’ own slightly odd death drive, whether expressed as Joe Biden’s sense of his administration as “transitional” or the outsized role that familial deaths and their mourning have played within his personal narrative. Even within the milieu of such publications as NYR and The New Yorker, which justly pride themselves on their commitment to memorable writing, O’Toole’s is a rare instance of a piece driven by deeply embedded figures of language, in this case, the “living dead.” Usually, at this point, we get the postmortem. But there is no body. The malignant presidency of Donald Trump seems moribund, but also vigorously alive. Trumpism, after all, is a narrative of death and resurrection, in which bankruptcy becomes The Art of the Comeback and American carnage becomes American renaissance. Life after death is Trumpism’s governing trope . . . We have, after all, already witnessed the Good Friday and Easter Sunday of Donald Trump. In a grotesque parody of the Christian narrative, Trump presented his contraction of Covid-19 not as a consequence to his own narcissistic recklessness, but as a Jesus-like self-sacrifice—he caught the disease on behalf of the people. . . . This fable seems to have worked for his supporters, electrifying them with evidence of their leader’s indefatigability. The deaths of 230,000 victims of Covid-19 by election day— did not prompt a turn against the president who presided over them. (p. 4)



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It was through a rhetoric of death and rebirth that Trump promised to restore the United States, as the interstitial zone where he successfully controverted long-standing values of democracy and as the status quo that Biden must yet confront “systematically” if majority rule in this country is to be afforded another chance. As a virtuoso instance of political exegesis distilled less by an agglomeration of research and fact-checking and more through the painstaking distillation of a “governing trope,” O’ Toole’s piece is also an encomium to the methods of close reading and exegesis to whose dissemination I and so many literary Humanists devoted lifetimes of classroom teaching. Something is dying, but we do not yet know what. Is it the basic idea of majority rule or is it the most coherent attempt to destroy the idea since the Confederacy? Something trying to be born, but we cannot yet say what it is either. Is it an American version of the “mangled democracy” or “electoral autocracy” that is the most rapidly expanding political form around the world? Or is it a radically renewed republic that can finally deal with the unfinished business of its history? The old is in a state of suspended animation; the new stands at a threshold it cannot yet cross. (p. 4) Trump’s 2016 victory caught me and my fellow Humanists traumatically short. It placed the values—of close exegesis, of acknowledging the intransigence, as well as the power of the language out of which all cultural artifacts and sociopolitical processes are constructed—in a limbo of their own. In one fell swoop, this “inconceivable election” tabled values and sensibility we had struggled to promulgate over decades in the classroom— in a vast panoply of different educational settings. Of course, this wouldn’t have been the first time these criteria were subjected to corrosive testing: readers of Jane Mayer’s Dark Money and others surely discerned abundant warning signs of the prestidigitation detailed in O’Toole’s article at play in the presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004. There is vast cultural “takeout” to be extracted from O’Toole’s essay. Above all, we have a severe ongoing literacy problem in this country. I knew this in 1989, when I published an obscure critical tract called High Resolution: Critical Theory and the

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Problem of Literacy. In those days, the all-pervasive sapper of widespread critical discernment, indispensable to a well-informed, alert, and responsive public, was network TV, in its multifarious formats and subgenres. Back then, a host of great thinkers, from Norbert Wiener to Anthony Wilden, from Douglas Hofstadter to N. Katherine Hayles, had projected the degree to which the digital universe had already antiquated TV. Network TV had saddled itself with calculated economies in erudition, intellectual content, and complexity. It was evident to masters of the earliest widespread programming languages and users of the first video game play stations that computers would dwarf TV—in pervasiveness and as instruments of social control. As recent events evidence, the current US populace is the product of a debilitated and outmoded educational system up and down the line. Polls and election results across the country document that large segments of the public have written off distinguishing accurate reportage from fabrication. This has engendered widespread cynicism and suspicion toward the bulwark institutions of our society more than the draconian wheeling and dealings, the virtuoso media manipulation, by our politicians. We need to incorporate the embedded rhetoric and procedures of digital technology into the basic Language Arts, so that students of all ages can discern a crucial connection as they frenetically shuttle between different media platforms countless times during the day. President Biden will hopefully make good on his commitment to wire top-flight, stateof-the-art educational oversight into his administration, perhaps with the good offices of Dr. Jill Biden. A careful national review of existing Language and Literacy curricula might play a decisive role down the line in nurturing an electorate of more discerning readers and cultural spectators. I wonder only too often how the long-term placement of an additional fifty literacy-committed and mediasavvy Middle School and High School principals in such locations as upstate Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina would have impacted on the electoral surprise of 2016. O’Toole’s zombie evocation leaves us in a sense of impending doom. Before us, we can envision the spreadsheet of unfinished business in our country—whose most common, everyday manifestation may well be the endlessly renewable familial squabbling whose insults and injuries have been frozen in time. The bones of contention always stretch back beyond immediate recall. In the instance of the



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racial politics and attitudes for which presidential and congressional elections in the Deep South still serve as proxies, the rights and allocations at stake go all the way back to the US Civil War. The dayby-day impact of current political brushfires is invariably traumatic. Another perspicacious pundit capturing this uneasy sense of an endlessly imminent collapse of social equanimity is William B. Edsall, in his New York Times opinion piece of December 9, 2020, “The Resentment that Never Sleeps.” In a laudable effort to encapsulate the current widespread politics of resentment and belligerence on the Right, Edsall steals a page from the Walter Benjamin playbook: he culls a mosaic of apt citations from recent studies and journalism all attempting to pin down, in specific terms, the bases for current dissatisfaction on the part of major electoral constituencies. So demonizing has been the current right-wing labeling of all distributive governmental programs of welfare and healthcare as “socialist” (just as often, “communist”) that Edsall, in summating the deep-seated resentments stoked by Trumpism, is forced to couch them as “social status” insults rather than as byproducts of anything so incendiary as “class.” Scrambling under the accelerated time clock of journalism, Edsall has done well to assemble a diversity of sources all speaking to the particular bitterness, in its obdurate persistence, aroused by social status insults. From a benchmark 2019 article coauthored by political scientists Peter Hall and Noam Gidron, “Populism as a Problem of Social Integration,” Edsall “clips” the following: The populist rhetoric of politicians on both the radical right and left is often aimed directly at status concerns. They frequently adopt the plain-spoken language of the common man, selfconsciously repudiating the politically correct or technocratic language of the political elites. Radical politicians on the left evoke the virtues of working people, whereas those on the right emphasize themes of national greatness, which have special appeal for people who rely on claims for national membership for a social status they otherwise lack. The “take back control” and “make America great again” slogans of the Brexit and Trump campaigns were perfectly pitched for such purposes. This joint position paper is laudable in acknowledging that both extremes of the current political polarization are mired knee-deep

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in rhetoric. The inextricable correlatives to what is being contested by both sides, “social status,” include public acknowledgment, appreciation for tasks honorably discharged, and deference, when due. This is indeed what today’s dissidents, from the Proud Boys to automatic-weapon-toting protesters at the Michigan state capital and French gilet jaunes, assail as lacking. Far more vexing about these attitudes than the fact that they could arise—particularly within economies promoting pay scale discrepancies and systematic gestures of corporate avarice—is how deeply entrenched they are, intractable. In Cultural Backlash, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart isolate the most severe estrangement among “the oldest (interwar) generation, non-college graduates, the working class, white Europeans, the more religious, men, and residents of rural communities.” Edsall, in asserting that social status discrepancies are at the root of the stupefying current social polarization, splices in Norris and Inglehart’s contention that these constituencies have “passed a tipping point at which their hegemonic status, class, and privilege are fading.” In addition to our long-accruing literacy deficit, we face a disabling communications problem in this country. In view of the Trumpian “transvaluation” of long-standing US democratic assumptions detailed by O’Toole, the designers and implementers of policy under the Democratic administration will need to choose very careful language and rhetoric in addressing the general public. In its public address, the Democratic administration will somehow need to negotiate the dense minefield of polarizing flash-terms that the Republicans have thickly seeded throughout the lexicons of US values, policy, and administration. Democrats will need to address those who were not enamored by their election—plainly, directly, and sympathetically.

October 18, 2019. Protests, Curtailment of Bus Service, Queens

It is one of the first cool autumn nights this year. The air is crystalclear. All over the neighborhood reigns a festive air. The six-story coop buildings in every direction have emptied out onto the sidewalks. We wait in long lines for seating space in packed meetings and to sign petitions. On short order and without prior notice, the MTA has given notice of termination of Q 49 service. This is a bus meandering through Elmhurst and Jackson Heights on its way to the transportation hub affording high-speed service all over the city, located at 74th Street and Roosevelt Avenue. The Q 49 is nothing less than a lifeline for the neighborhoods it serves. Withdrawal of its service will lengthen the commutes of thousands of neighbors. In order to make their connections, they will now have to walk half a mile or more to alternate bus lines. Or, they will depend on the Q 66, an oversubscribed route plying Northern Boulevard. This added encumbrance will stretch the schedules of workers already often the ones with the inconvenient hours, the ones stretching into the wee hours and deep night. Up and down the queues milling along the sidewalks people pass out slingers announcing upcoming town halls and officials to contact. Also, petitions to qualify candidates committed to running in upcoming local elections. Viva-voce, from one neighbor to the next, circulate the back stories of how the curtailment came about: the Q 49, it turns out, will be the budgetary casualty to a train shuttle that Governor Andrew Cuomo is keen to include in substantial renovations to LaGuardia Airport already underway. Neighbors bristle at the thought of their judiciously planned lives being in jeopardy to a contemporary airport embellishment. Particularly,

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an addition whose preparatory studies and rationale have not yet completed the stages of gaining public approval. Although a crisis brings us out to the pavement, the camaraderie of shared anecdotes and news gives a jubilant feel to this spontaneous event. I’m a relative newcomer to the neighborhood. I moved in fulltime at the outset of 2018, when I left the classroom behind. My turn had come to exit the protective domain of the college campus. The work, teaching literature and critical theory to undergraduates and graduate specialists alike, had been pleasant and deeply gratifying. It was utterly uplifting to set out compelling works of literature, along with the criticism, methodology, and philosophy that would help illuminate them, to a full panoply of students at a range of wonderful universities. Working with young people during the key transitional moment of their lives worked its own transformative magic. It created a compelling logic for all the activities surrounding classes and one-on-one mentoring: devising syllabi, publishing the more surprising outtake from courses, even the substantial administrative paperwork and logistical support that participation in academic departments demands. Along with these rigors came the pleasures of participating in academic colloquia, whether on the home campus or elsewhere, and travel in conjunction with work. There are as many architectural styles and footprints to colleges and universities as there are urban configurations and blueprints for habitation. Yet wherever it is situated and however it is set up, the academic institution is a preserve: it is a multidisciplinary laboratory for unimpeded inquiry into an encyclopedia of subjects as well as the first amphitheater for the results’ dissemination. In whatever form the college or university has been inlaid into its immediate surroundings, its “gates” remain a prominent feature. They distinguish its “inside” from its “outside”: those currently belonging to its complement of students, faculty, and staff from those who don’t. These boundaries are not limited to physical barriers, whether ornate gates or simple geographical separation; they involve electronic access to libraries and other intellectual resources; physical access to facilities of all sorts, often unique to the town or region in which they happen to be located. After decades of easy access to these cities of learning, with their astonishing accrued wealth in cultural capital and human treasures, leaving the campus behind is a major adjustment, a challenge. But one filled with excitement and major incentives to



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explore further and to grow. It is with astonishing ease that the New York and Queens Public Libraries, with a century of special collections of their own and in multiple branches, more often than not conveniently located, supplant the university libraries that have provided my work with indispensable materials. And they’re there for the entire citizenry of New York City! Now that I’ve moved off campus for good, the existential distinctions between being a denizen of a college or university and not one become a rich topic for my personal intellectual inquiry. Colleges and universities, deeply wired into the overall trends of the US and global economies and into the evolution of the technological base, experience parallel transformations to the ones undergone by government, major corporations, and off-campus cultural institutions. They are in no way exempt from these wider trends. They are—even at the scale of the traditional liberal arts college—the major, or at least one of the major employers and corporations in whatever city or locality where they are situated. And while no doubt still rooted in their core instructional mission, providing the best possible general education and disciplinary orientation to undergraduates and advanced professional training to graduate and professional students, the vicissitudes of the wider US economy play a decisive role. They force universities into behaving more and more like corporations, even if highly diversified ones. The cost of educating people is astronomical. It increases far more rapidly than the overall cost of living. Within this framework, colleges and universities not only step up their traditional role as sports franchises in a large array of athletic leagues but also become entertainment meccas; by arranging tours for staff and alumni, they branch into the travel industry. They franchise their mascots, logos, and “brand colors.” These generate income on their own, emblazoned on a host of garments and other products. Wherever they thrive, colleges and universities have become prominent patrons of the arts—everything from poetry readings to theater and dance to art galleries and their string of exhibitions. Given their organizational superiority and relatively stable funding, it’s understandable how the major institutions of higher learning might well achieve a de facto monopoly on arts offerings in their regions. But universities remain limited-access institutions; this fact impacts per force on funding available to arts organizations rooted in the community.

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Such “extracurricular” financial ventures do not, however, completely breach the boundaries between the institutional inside and outside that remain a ubiquitous trademark of universities. This enterprise may be thought of as strategic inroads opened to the general public both in the interests of PR and for needed financial gain. Existentially speaking, then, my leaving the campus behind for good, going cold turkey even if our national bird was not my university’s mascot, is a big deal. It makes me think, in fact, as I contemplate my new existential situation, that the university, despite its expanded role in sports and entertainment, increasingly demarcates a world apart. It has, by inexorable logic, settled in at a greater remove from the general public than before. It has become the target of outraged cries of “elitism!” on the part of those who, for a variety of motivations, dispute the laboratory and archival findings reached, more than anywhere else, on campus. Pitched resistance—in keeping with contemporary libertarian ideology—to evidence-based scientific findings, whether related to Covid-19 or the disturbing trends of global warming, has become a defining feature of the Trump administration. Brazen, nonspecific anti-intellectualism has become the rallying cry of the moment, and some of the rallies thus produced (e.g., “Unite the Right!,” Charlottesville, 2017) have been correspondingly horrific. We are living at a recent high point of local initiatives to expunge controversial books—precisely because they induce people to think—from school libraries. Hence the title of the current memoir: The Great Dismissal. A blanket dismissal of the meticulous research and intellectual work we once referenced as a society in a good-faith endeavor to achieve the best take currently available on daunting environmental and health issues and geopolitical problems. It turns out that many of the loudest current decriers of elitism are themselves products of the most competitive institutions, the ones with the most garish “world historical” patina. The intellectual search and destroy mission on which such senators as Tom Cotton (Harvard College; Harvard Law) John Neeley Kennedy (Vanderbilt, Oxford, UVA Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford; Yale Law), and Ted Cruz (Princeton: Harvard Law) are now launched is a true doubletake: both overstating the politicians’ creds as common men, grounded in populist commitment, and dissembling the formation of their political tools in the very institutions that they excoriate. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida (Yale; Harvard



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Law) is an outspoken comrade in this belligerent blanket dismissal. [Dana Milbank, “Ivy League Republicans’ phony rebellion against the ‘elites,’” WP, March 25, 2022.] A growing remove between institutions of higher learning and the general public, whether imaginary or inadvertent, turns out to be an underlying thread suturing several of the disquieting societal impasses chronicled in this book. Yes, scientists and other academics may well fall prey to a healthy amount of what I will call “bubbling”— self-enclosure in limited communities and vocabularies that is the professional correlative to our current segmentation into digital networks. But my decades-long location on a variety of campuses taught me that colleges and universities, if they run on anything, run on the idealism and self-sacrifice generated by their faculty and staffs of all stripes in the formidable task of distilling nothing less than the future, in its full complexity, for the people who will go on to inhabit it—precisely in their signature moment of becoming. Even after months of harried preparations for departure from a college town, I was left with a full setup of furniture and at least in the areas that had engaged me, a fairly comprehensive collection of books and papers. These seemed necessary for a number of projects I was still embarked on. And I still hadn’t attained the Buddhist detachment—or grounding in Marie Kondo—that would have enabled me to discard them. My wife and I agreed that my lifetime holdings, in volume and clutter, would destroy any sense of serenity in a Manhattan coop that she’d inherited. My retirement at the end of 2017, accompanied by our definitive relocation to New York City, launched me on a commuting life of my own. By way of the transportation hub at 74th and Roosevelt on the Q 49, I regularly shuttled between Manhattan’s West Side and that particular corner of Jackson Heights nestled between Elmhurst and Corona Heights, ethnically diverse to its core, with a downbeat on the Latinx. The 7 subway line—elevated from Court House Square in Queens to its terminus at Main Street Flushing—became the trunk line between my two lives, my domestic one and my aspirations, to complete the projects placed on hold by professional commitments and life events. The 7 is already one of the stock characters in the dramatis personae of my life. At one end of my route, I encounter a diversity of cuisines that would take most Americans an urban odyssey over months to assemble, available for in-house

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delectation or takeout at prices that Manhattanites openly envy. Along Roosevelt and 37th Avenues in Jackson Heights, I negotiate a variety of local and privately owned businesses and services now virtually extinct from shopping malls and brand-label merchandizing. Supermarket produce in Jackson Heights may not match Manhattan in freshness or variety, but then the district is a cornucopia of cut fruit, fresh fruit salads, and smoothies—nothing less than a local art form. The culmination of my structured work life spliced me in, unwittingly, into my personal Tale of Two Cities. My shuttles on the 7 are indeed a study in contrasts. In general, basic services are fewer and further between in the outer borough. Bus service, for instance. On the stately avenues of Manhattan—Avenue of the Americas, Fifth, Madison—entire fleets of buses, often multiple lines serving the same avenue, make regular passes for their passengers. Even service on the cross-towns is dependable. Service is far more iffy in Queens, often at the most importune moments—an attack of bad weather, over the weekend. Awaiting the next Q 49 at its hub on a Saturday night is often interminable, adding insult to the threatened withdrawal of the route. Even though such major health systems as Weill-Cornell and New YorkPresbyterian maintain satellite locations in the neighborhoods, they are relatively small and specialized. Comprehensive facilities are far fewer and farther between. Elmhurst Hospital, the mainstay in my Queens neck of the woods, is permanently overburdened. The pandemic brought this out in particular relief. This is an ongoing fact of life. Queens’s wealth is the richness of its cultures, the incalculable gain produced by their coexistence, and the determination of immigrant communities to secure a foothold in US society, even if the fruits of this striving are deferred to future generations. Its tapestry of spoken languages, close to 140 in Jackson Heights alone, is a laboratory of how languages evolved and disseminated themselves all over the planet, a showplace for the richness and inevitability of their hybridization and intermixture. Although Citi Stadium, home to the Mets, is one of several geographical hubs in the sprawling borough, Queens plays catch up in accessing the infrastructure and support redolent of more affluent areas of the city. Andrew Cuomo, whose plans to eliminate Q 49 service feel so high-handed, will go on to distinguish himself



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FIGURE 4.1  Transportation Hub, 74th Street and Roosevelt Avenue, Jackson Heights, Queens. Photograph by author.

as a calming, empathic presence and information source as the public struggles to take in the disquieting new realities initiated by Covid-19. This achievement alone will not protect him from the accrued histories of interpersonal and sexual aggression in the workplace, and his tenure in office will be another casualty of the pandemic.​

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June 7, 2020. Atlas of Vanished Places

1. Present you—this checklist, register, tran script—places I traversed. They welcomed me into their khōra, nurtured me— in that manner of receiving. X’ed in an instant or inhabited, months long— I was there. By what engrained laws of memory might— they persist? Gone viral, a playlist, entire universe, places once accessed with ease, backlit in cherished memory. Walled off now. In shut down, verboten. 2. Awakened into their patchwork with a start. Always overwrought,

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deep night. Always to the clatter of the 23 Trolley. Tentative along the cobblestones, Chestnut Hill, agonizing down Germantown Avenue into the City, missing steep decline on right @ Mt. Pleasant. Sweeping Memorial Lovett Library by . . . stupas, Angkor Wat ablaze, dawnlight corona, neonatal sunbath—day, month, decade, millennium, eon . . . Genova, lower city; only muted light filters down here— stunted labyrinths is what the Italians bequeathed to urbanity, nonetheless leading on . . . trattoria unremarkable, recessed, unleashing a sonata in a vitello tonnato . . . edging toward Chelten the 23, once Center City rhizome, cine-mecca, on its own! Orpheum! Bandbox! Chelten! Past 18th c. manors, School house Lane, rattling past Ashmead into Nicetown . . . entire glorious mountain, Ladakh, chipped amethyst! Having staggered past kindred mass in lapis-blue. . . . Phoenix Lounge, Ecke Kyffhäuser/Barbarossa, tankards high above the terrace, floating—Wagnerian servers ... 46th/Queens: gastro-cornucopia: dried pear, olives, strudel, Parrot; meze to die for, Sofra, Muglai Kebab; samosas, if called for— Cardamom . . . And on the far side, Jackson Heights, Que Rico Taco!, 89th/ Northern . . . routinely surpassing eponymous expectation! . . . greenspace, 34th/Junction, families congregated, lingering late weekend afternoon— before the plague—pure solicitude, intimacy. Social isolation? Hardly an issue. Endlessly patient 23 finally discharging. Washington Sq. morphing into Rittenhouse, with a swing SW into 21st over to the old Gilded Cage, coffeehouse legend, still plainly discernible, haunted,



JUNE 7, 2020

Odets, orchestra players—& shrine, Philly’s tenuous claim on lefty solidarity. Germantown Ave. Leitfaden through it all. 3. Hallowed, radiant, enshrined— tremulous altar, my memory— not yours, perhaps, my sacred topoi— but by this bill of lading. Inaccessible as my toothache— in Wittgenstein’s reckonings. May they be blessed— all your places my brothers & sisters of confinement all the odd corners, fellow internees— However you shunt them aside, returning, again & again. “Transitional objects” of the mind, reserved, prized— for memory’s display cases.

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Exhausting pilgrimage. Gaia rouses herself, another tenuous round— grappling— most recalcitrant herd ever to emerge.

February 10, 2021. Requiem to Disinterest

This Thing that ails us. It thwarts and befuddles us regardless of what we try, casting a distinctive pall of futility and doom. This Thing is still with us. It clings to us, in whatever new direction we strike, even when, to a significant degree, we replace a corrupt government, unprecedented in its contempt for the law and its belligerent anti-intellectualism. We roundly scan the intellectual horizon in quest of healing and affirmation. We consult our institutions of higher education, a disproportion of the world’s best-equipped and staffed—richly endowed and bristling with peripheral resources and services. These institutions, it turns out, were bubbled into competing schools, sub-disciplines, and specialized discourses, distributed into sedate leagues and pantheons—long before the Trump regime institutionalized brazen self-promotion. (A convenient dateline for the dramatic uptick in orchestrated narcissism in US public life may well be the confluence of corporate avarice and offshore impunity securing global dominance for the multinationals in the 1980s and 1990s.) We appeal to religion—in spite of our vaunted separation of church and state, it has remained a backbone of our culture since the nation’s inception. And what is only too evident across the spectrum of the traditional world religions—and their offshoots, creeds, denominations, and, in some instances, cults—in US society is the same polarization, the same stampede toward the apparent clarity of the extreme position that has hijacked our electoral system. On one flank is the fundamentalism espoused across the full spectrum of contemporary Abrahamic religions: Judeo-Christianity and Islam. By its powerful spiritual leaders and across the diversity of its traditional settings. Here, the individual’s rapport with state and community is a distant derivative of preordained traditional

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principles, whether pertaining to marriage and other transitional life events, religious observance, or extra-denominational relations. This thinking style is my primary interest here. It is the respective ways of thinking on the part of conservatives and progressives alike that will need to be deliberated, parsed in detail, before we’ll gain a handle on constructive deliberation “from both sides of the aisle.” This will in turn demand tolerance and making peace with complexity. The “top down” thinking by fundamentalists in no way precludes their taking the lead, on many an occasion, when it comes to the “little, unremembered” tasks of community support, feeding and housing the needy, and tending to the ill, so indispensable to communal persistence. On the opposing flank of contemporary US religion stands the enduring struggle for human rights and improved pay, working conditions, and human services for the poor and disenfranchised waged, among other denominational organizations, by the Catholic Worker Movement, the American Friends Service Committee, and the social justice wings of Unitarianism, Presbyterianism, the Episcopal Church, and Reform Judaism. While each component on the palette of US religion has struggled to emerge with unambiguous, trustworthy messages regarding the turning points and moral quandaries of existence, the composite picture is so at odds with itself as to preempt any popular broadband of instruction. Odd though it may seem, philosophy, with the continuous due diligence it has given an operating system of concepts, terms, and definitions it has painstakingly curated since antiquity, offers a more compelling take on the current national malaise than either higher education per se or organized religion. Revisiting the mature writings of that old chestnut, Immanuel Kant, many synthesized as the Founding Fathers were hashing out the blueprints for their own democratic experiment, proves richly rewarding. Writing in an interval when feudal and ecclesiastical authority, and the institutions that implemented it, are in serious default and disrepair, but also when revolution-fueled anarchy poses an immediate threat to civil society, Kant endows his systematic works, all titled “Critiques,” with an irreducible practical drift. Not only in his First Critique (of “Pure Reason”) will Kant, skimming the rich treasury of constructs evolved through Western ancient, medieval, and modern philosophies, extrapolate the underlying conditions for intellectual and creative achievement in immanent—“purely” abstract and



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philosophical terms. He insists on detailing, in his Second and Third Critiques (respectively, of “Practical Reason” and “Judgment”) the everyday workings and implications of the “transcendental” operating system wired into human cognition and with which, to a certain degree, the physical universe is itself in sympathy. In his mature work, Kant aimed at establishing a distinctly secular discourse, cut loose from religious sectarianism—of knowledge, public culture, ethics, and conduct. Like any writer writing in his moment, Kant could not help but be influenced by the prevailing political theology of his day. Of all the diverse voices and discourses of human culture, philosophy is unique—by dint of the continuous stewardship and diligence, it has lent a bounded set of concepts and operations, in the concision with which it summates human affairs. And in Kantspeak, if it is not too quixotic to invoke it, this morbid Thing that continues to benight and haunt our culture and the public sphere is nothing other than a devastating assault on disinterest, sending this core democratic value off with a blasé dismissal. The present text is an improvised intellectual memoir of the “long year” (it isn’t yet over) that brought us Covid-19 and galvanized US society around and after the elections of November 3, 2020. I needn’t belabor the multiple steps by which Kant establishes disinterest as an element both of art appreciation and judgment and, implicitly, as the indispensable bearing underlying the ethical comportment of law and political conduct. But they are interesting in their own right. I will summate. In the wider architecture of Kantian thought, beauty is a “soft” instance of the human discernment and judgment that marshal faculties and processes exercising considerable autonomy from particular people, from individuated subjectivity. The Critique of Pure Reason—Kant calls it a “court of justice”—is a meticulous blueprint of the faculties, modes of representation, and iterations of language—also the division of labor between them—involved in such human developments as the rise of science and the emergence of law and government. This First Critique details the troubled drama, say surrounding the derivation of geometrical rules on the part of Pythagoras or Euclid, between empirical data that can be gathered “on the ground” and the higher processing indispensable to the derivation of the principles, axioms, and corollaries establishing scientific (indeed, all) law. Kant is relentless in distinguishing

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understanding and reason from the rigorously “pure” versions of themselves that are hygienically cleansed of contamination issuing from material conditions and common sense; in extrapolating the appearances of the transcendental world to its mundane counterpart and vice versa. The Critique of Pure Reason, like Hegel’s Phenomenology, is a wonder of human invention; one exits its parameters in the astonishment that certain insights into the universe, hard-wired into its dimensions and constitution, “objective” in this fashion, could have been reserved for an infinitesimal human sample—geniuses including Pythagoras, Euclid, Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. Within the division of labor established in the Critique of Pure Reason, such individuals, by dint of a perfect attunement in their cognitive faculties, were privy to the very parameters of time and space and to the laws governing celestial bodies and matter; also thanks to their access to the language and conventions their investigations required. (This sublime domain of immense proportions and “big data” dwarfs conventional expectations and procedures. It is a natural habitat for unanticipated scientific discoveries and legal apprehensions on a systematic scale. Whether depicted as obsessed geniuses or mad scientists, its denizens are, with the rarest exceptions, male.) Disinterest, in Kant-speak, is the indispensable precondition for any semblance of objective and ethical procedure within the public sphere. In Trumpworld and, discernibly, in the years leading up to it, it became a rarity, virtually nonexistent—supplanted by improvised and unchecked self-assertion and aggrandizement cascading in ornate and contradictory arpeggios. Disinterest, oddly, within the terrain of Kantian Critique, enters the fray when philosophical scrutiny pursues the steps involved in art appreciation, particularly in the apprehension, and public deliberation on, beauty. For indeed, two very different but inextricable scenes are coordinated in beauty’s public acclaim: on the one hand, some formal proportions and harmonies (culturally determined, as Kant admits) carrying over from the intuition of mathematical and scientific laws; but on the other hand, consensus achieved in the sphere of public opinion, the stuff sociological surveys are made of. The backdrop against which beauty acquires its full relief when released on the stage of philosophical Critique is a strange construct that Kant dubs “purposiveness.” Its primary value is in



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cordoning off some margin for the assertion of free will within an overall framework of predetermination. The same freedom possibly leading to delusion and moral derangement guides us to what we take as consummately beautiful; the very process of selection may become an object of pleasure in its own right. Having a purpose, on the other hand, is an odd hybrid between subjection to something primal, like a Freudian drive, and on a more elevated plane, pursuing some ultimate value or goal. Like all breakthrough concepts in the Kantian universe, it is situated at a horizon of aporia; it toggles back and forth, endlessly, with its contrary, beauty, whose core definition pirouettes on its exemption from necessity. As I ventured years ago in something called The Aesthetic Contract: Beauty thus acquires a certain basic fickleness. In terms of longstanding Western stereotypes, it becomes female to the core. The other antinomies of beauty tinkle as well to this tone of playful, seductive almostness. “Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful.” The playful treachery here, of course, is that something that could arouse us would be represented in an “entirely disinterested way,” and that taste can dispatch dissatisfaction and satisfaction with equal disinterest. In its Second Moment, beauty is that which can please “universally” without requiring the universality (and formalization) of a concept. The nature of beauty is to hover, to retract its conceptual promises, but in exquisite witticisms, conceptual correlatives to Sir Henry Wooten’s enigmatic aphorisms in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. [Sussman, 1997, 143–4] Precisely in its non-momentousness, because nothing onerous hinges on it (it is, after all, female), beauty affords the first foothold of disinterest in public deliberation. There is some objective basis, in a Kantian universe, to what draws us to the “beautiful thing,” however this selection seems to epitomize our private volition and sensibility. Kant goes on to insist on the freedom surrounding this experience: “Among all these three kinds of satisfaction [the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good] only that of the taste for the beautiful is a disinterested and free satisfaction.” [Kant, 2000, 95]. The apprehension of the beautiful may well take place in a salon

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whose cloistered security is at an extreme from the sublime reaches of the universe, where monsters roam and male explorers dispatch impenetrable scientific mysteries. But in a canny “strange loop” that Kant wires into our fundamental conceptions of the public sphere, “disinterested and free satisfaction” morphs from art appreciation into certain attributes we deem most essential and indispensable to our courts, our conduct of foreign relations, our distribution of resources, and our electoral procedures. The discernment we expect to emanate from our courts and other public institutions of record is, of course, not entirely whimsical or “free.” (In his conduct of the US government, Trump consistently erred on the side of this whimsy; this may be one of the indelible fingerprints of his administration.) In art appreciation, what rings our bell may be grounded in some “objective” proportion of the artifact or accord between faculties, but our behavior, our selection, comes with complete impunity. Of strategic governmental institutions, on the other hand, we demand that they be rigorous and consistent in keeping with the highest principle. The correlatives to disinterest in the public sphere include the “checks and balances” prevailing within a configuration structured such that critical governmental components review and counteract one another; broad interactivity between governmental leadership and the sites and output of the authoritative science of the day; unrestricted journalistic coverage, in which ongoing fact-checking is built into the running account. It is by now engraved in the public record that there was a close correlation between the Trump ego’s wild fluctuations, the direction of his policies, and the behavior of his political enablers and the “base.” The emotional territory traversed by this imperial selfhood vacillated from rapture and uncontainable enthusiasm (at unprecedented economic growth or the attainment of ideal race relations, for example; or toward the Wall, the decisive bulwark against the Mexican hordes) to aggrieved disillusionment. The substitution of a Great Leader’s moods and whims for due process and meticulous judicial and legislative deliberation is, of course, the very antithesis of what Kant was driving at in designating disinterest as the indispensable working of the higher faculties within the social and public spheres. The Trump presidency and its characteristic side-effects among the officials and citizens who still follow him was itself merely the culmination of the widespread buildup toward alienated self-interest and cynical self-aggrandizement in play for



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decades, documented across the social sciences, from Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1966) to Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1978). The battering away of any firewall between autocratic willfulness and self-interest and the conduct of public institutions has become the hallmark of the Trump presidency and the Republican Party that it spawned. This dubious achievement has been aggravated by the confluence of two tangential but related mega-developments: the proliferation of personality disorders as the dominant psychopathology of our age, most striking among the elite and celebrity classes; and the stranglehold digital media and communications have seized on social and interpersonal personal interaction. Digital media, and the isolation in which they are by and large accessed and consulted, often described as a “bubbling,” have been nothing less than disastrous to, say, the modes of filtration (fact-checking, media transparency) that could be applied to print journalism and to TV network news during their heydays. It is precisely through the disabling of the mechanisms that would apply checks to digital technologies and social media that the lens of disinterest, in making sense of increasingly complex human affairs, has become hopelessly obscure. And it was a bevy of psychoanalysts, Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut, prominent among them, who felt compelled, during the 1970s and 1980s, to respond to transformations taking place in social psychology, by teasing out the underlying operating systems of what they termed “personality disorders.” Suffice it to say for now that those who have adopted “pathological narcissism” or “borderline conditions” as characteristic modi operandi or life strategies have little truck with the minimal preconditions for disinterest in the public sphere: persistent self-scrutiny and restraint; the critical capacity to modulate behavior even when proven impractical or harmful in some significant way. The assault on disinterest flourishing throughout a Trump presidency culminating in the Covid-19 pandemic may have indeed been grounded in certain managerial techniques, notably, the stalling of appointments and the killing of needed legislation, perfected by Mitch McConnell in his role as Senate Majority Leader under Barack Obama. It remains undeniable that the Trump presidency achieved a full flowering of what happens when a highly nuanced private language of crisis, privilege, prerogative, and

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reward/censure usurps the public sphere when it emerges out of one idiosyncratic sensibility to define the comportment of an entire political caucus. Especially when bolstered by mastery in newly available technologies and media for manipulating public opinion. Four categories of manipulation stand out in summating the composite strategy by which Trump disabused the public sphere of its remaining pretensions to objectivity and restraint: prevarications, denials, interferences, and dismissals. In the Renaissance of blatant self-interest in public administration that Trump ushered in, these strong arms of autocracy often overreached in combination. Trumpworld’s dispensing with dispassion and objectivity sets out humorously enough: with the president’s disputing journalistic estimations of attendance at his inauguration. (Trump’s Inauguration Committee will go on to face persistent accusations of misappropriation of public funds.) The impetus behind this prestidigitation is Trump’s wish to definitively cancel everything Obama—from the Affordable Care Act to the irrefutable fact, even in an age of Sandy Hook Massacre denial, that an American of mixed black and white heritage lawfully captured and successfully fulfilled the presidency—for two complete terms. Trump could simply not abide the “possibility” that attendance at Obama’s inaugurations exceeded his own. Underlying the frivolous vulnerability amply manifest in this episode, however, are leitmotivs that will become hard-wired elements—to the practices and ideology of the Trump presidency and in a Republican Party instantaneously refashioning itself in Trump’s image. Chief among these is a persistent suspicion, hyped up to the pitch of conspiracy theory when expedient, to hard numbers and scientific proof, to the firmest available substratum of truth, at least as ascertained by objective journalism and refereed research. There is a beeline between this knee-jerk antipathy to the numbers and everything that numbers import to objectivity and a denigration of the US electoral process that began well in advance of the 2016 election. Also, when Covid-19 barges on the scene, in the direction of denial, hesitation, and fanciful counter-theories in the face of the epidemiological realities. The substantial death toll attributable to these facile postures has been gauged by multiple calculi and borne out, among others, by Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump’s appointed Covid-19 czar. Trump’s at once ingrained contempt for the numbers and cynical manipulation of them reaches its sordid apotheosis in the muscle



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applied to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “come up with the votes” that would reverse the results of that state’s democratically held 2020 elections. Journalists in service to responsible (i.e., fact-checking) news organizations were well primed to the cultures of mendacity and hyperbole engrained in the pre-election campaign. In “Trump’s Rage Junkies,” Charles M. Blow summates a strand of his ongoing coverage as a play-by-play: “We are watching as a president of the United States openly lies, fabricates and exaggerates while twofifths of the population cheers him for it” [NYT, July 1, 2018]. The concern here is very much about Trump’s “base” as the president himself. The New York Times’s David Leonhardt and Stuart A. Thompson keep a running account of Trump’s fallacious assertions beginning on January 20, 2016, his first day in office. By November 11, 2017, when they publish “Trump’s Lies” [NYT, December 14, 2017], they’ve tabulated 178 lies emanating from Trump’s mouth and disseminated in tweets. (A significant number of these lie-events, such as “We’re the highest-taxed nation in the world,” were in fact repeat items.) In their precise tabulation, Leonhard and Thompson distinguish between the then-president’s “did” and “didn’t tell a public lie” days. Trump launched his presidency with “Public Lies or Falsehoods Every Day for his First 40 Days.” February, March, and October 2017 turn out to have been the most productive months in falsehood manufacture. The most magisterial news story summating the decimation of neutrality and disinterest during the Trump administration may well be David Montgomery’s “The Abnormal Presidency” [WP Magazine, November 10, 2020]. This extended article breaks Trump’s highly questionable tactics into twenty long-standing mainstays of principled government that the then-president violated with abandon. These include, most significantly, “Personally Profiting from Official Business,” “Refusing Oversight,” “Interference in Department of Justice Investigations,” “Politicizing the Military,” “Attacking Judges,” “Politicizing Diplomacy and Foreign Policy,” “Making Far More False or Misleading Claims than Any Previous President,” “Abusing the Pardon Power,” “Using Government Resources for Partisan Ends,” “Contradicting Scientists,” and “Undermining Faith in the 2020 Elections.” The free press in the United States and beyond distinguished itself during the Trump presidency for its detailed coverage of the masks and gags—up to

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the ceiling—applied by the government, of the events in real time corresponding to these and Montgomery’s remaining rubrics. Jack Goldsmith, a Justice Department official under George W. Bush now teaching at Harvard Law School, gets to enunciate Montgomery’s grounding premise: “the extent to which shamelessness in a president really is empowering.” The brash “norm-breaking” unleashed over these years, culminating in the planned and coordinated attack on the capitol by disgruntled right-wing hooligans on January 6, 2021, underscores the degree “to which the whole system before Trump was built on a basic assumption of reasonableness among presidents, a range of willingness to play within the system, a range or at least a modicum of understanding of political and normative constraints.” As voter suppression on a scale unmatched since the Reconstruction rears its head, moderates and progressives as a collectivity continue to work through the traumas occasioned by this about-face in the conduct of the presidency. Events with names such as “Charlottesville,” “the Russia investigation,” “the Mueller Report,” “the downplaying of climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic,” and “the dismissal of 2020 election results and ensuing rightwing mayhem” still evoke shock and trepidation on the part of those who rely upon government for due process and impartial deliberation. Trump’s constitutional antipathy toward constraint—whether characterized as norm, procedure, deliberation, or compliance—results in a culture of pervasive and unpredictable interference in the signature institutions and processes at the foundation of good faith under democracy. Interference is precisely what viruses initiate in the replication of healthy cells, as in the design of dependable software. Interference is the static in the machine. It scrambles hitherto broad-based meaning and the framework for orderly deliberation. The story of Trump’s unbridled proclivity for self-interested interference may well turn out to be the red thread linking the “big ticket” dramas and crises of his regime. Indeed, the starting point for impeachment #1 was Trump’s applying body English to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a dredging operation on Hunter Biden in his capacity as a (remunerated) board member of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine. Such preemptive “political capital” against Joe Biden, a formidable potential Democratic candidate for the presidency, is not only an



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“emolument”; it untracks strategic defense support to Ukraine, appropriated through customary Department of Defense procedure. Amid this climate of autocratic whimsy, the perfunctory dismissal of officials, irrespective of their qualifications or prior service to government, refusing to parrot the improvised positions or ideology of the day or taking issue with administrative decisions, becomes a weekly matter of course. Experienced public officials, like John Brennan, who headed the CIA, from 2013 to 2017, find themselves stripped of their security clearance for condemning Russian interference in the election of 2016. Trump’s term in office, particularly at the outset, is a seemingly endless gauntlet of abrupt dismissals: Rex Tillerson and James Mattis, for daring to imagine they had something to impart to the evolving direction, respectively, of statecraft and military strategy; Marie Yovanovitch, for pushing back against influence-peddling in the conduct of Ukrainian diplomacy; Lieutenant Colonel Alexander S. Vindman, top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, for confirming, in testimony, Trump’s damning telephone call to Zelensky. Influence upon undue influence; self-aggrandizing encroachment upon sphere after sphere of refereed procedural deliberation. What became of democracy’s prevailing operating system—grounded in disinterest, checks and balances, unimpeded journalism, and impartial elections—during the Trump regime? The jury’s still out.

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January 27, 2020. New Feudal Lords

The current bizarre time-lock—of zany and destructive events, fake news and impotent, because always belated incredulity, and punitive measures taken against the guardians of democracy, where making sense becomes an everyday struggle—is all the more exasperating for the lack of effective vocabulary. Words, above all, to capture a radically new set of financial procedures and governmental bearings conveniently lumped under “Trumpworld.” We’re incessantly reminded that the government has indeed slipped into a “new normal.” This by Mick Mulvaney—in his admission that aid to Ukraine, a viable US ally, did indeed hinge on a political quid pro quo—at the outset of an affair rapidly escalating into an impeachment investigation. Entertaining as the political circus invariably proves, we’re constantly behind the eight ball in articulating the wider phenomena of which Trump, his conspirators, his antics, and his too easily forgotten immediate predecessors are but the symptom. The beat that Jane Meyer established in her magisterial exposé of “dark money,” its sources, deployments, and devastating underthe-radar influence, and two French philosophers at their peak during the heyday of critical theory mark a convergence odd at the very least. So intimately did Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and Félix Guattari (1920–92) collaborate in their thinking and writing that they preferred the aggregate signature “Deleuze/Guattari” for their publications (most notably, their “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” diptych). Responding to a steep ramping up of capitalist administration and control in the postwar period, they attempted a bottom-up radical reformulation of the ideology undergirding the avarice, in its extractive environmental impact, endemic to capitalism and its underlying “psychology of everyday life.” (Hence, the complementary “wings” of their diptych were A Thousand

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Plateaus, projecting the postmodern configuration of capital, consumption, and exploitation; and Anti-Oedipus, an attempt to wrest psychology back from the Freudianism whose inextricable bond to bourgeois striving and metaphysics they acutely discerned.) The starting point, in D/G’s concertedly outrageous minority report on contemporary culture, was the body, in all its visceral turbulence, with its appetites and drives. They unveiled it as a constantly fluctuating field of intensities, reaching its aggressive apotheosis in the “War Machine” (in A Thousand Plateaus). Corporeal secretions, whether literal or symbolic—from blood, excrement, and sexual discharge to money, goods, and weapons— became the expression of desire, rage, and avarice in the engineroom of human existence. D/G had long had their fill of rationalism, whether in Descartes’ classical rendition or in Freud’s sexually besotted adaptation. No longer were such phenomena as war, addiction, and sexual frenzy tallied as transgressions or imbalances against a given Reason, intrinsic to our mental life, comprising its most precious legacy. Not only did D/G favor, rather, imagining the diverse continuum of human experience as a “Body without Organs.” They situated this corpus, akin to sexual frenzy or raw sadomasochism, at the zero-point from whence the odd coupling of reason, identity, and the logic of capital all set out on their extractive rampages. In collaborative bravado, D/G dabbled in the chemical substances that might deliver them to this antipodal philosophical address. What could such bizarre conceptual experimentation, conducted at the outer fringes of Montparnasse, in the 1970s and 1980s, possibly have to do with Jane Mayer’s sobering investigative pursuit of the dark money casting such a long shadow over American sociopolitical life? The primary ways in which D/G’s intellectual rough ride adds traction to the daily struggle to keep pace with Trumpworld’s endless distraction and static are two: (1) conceiving of cumulative phenomena and assets, whether money, profit, information, influence, political power, public opinion, or aggression as “flows,” with neither attributable sources nor ends; also, understanding that the exercise of power in the contemporary world is tantamount to the most accurate, technologically up-to-date tracking, management, prediction, and manipulation of these flows. (D/G termed this expertise “monitoring the flow.”) (2) In their characteristically



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idiosyncratic rewrite of the History of Civilization, D/G replace any progression or linear development in political formations with a cocktail or suspension in which outmoded forms, from “nomadic barbarism” to “feudal hierarchy” never quite fade away, even after they have been supplanted by alternative systems. The obsolescent regimes, however barbaric in the swathe they cut, hover at the margins of the human experience, ready for recall when the conducive conditions snap back. (This is not only a familiar riff from sci-fi; it also offers a precaution against “dialectical” complacency.) We remain in Mayer’s debt for an account of the dark money phenomenon both discerning the massive influence and undertow it exerted upon the US political system, and for the narrative coherence she succeeded in lending to a sequence of events otherwise experienced (and where registered journalistically) in a scattered, slipshod fashion. The dramatic climax of Dark Money may well be the moment, not until May 2010, when Barack Obama and David Axelrod get full wind of the fact that their best laid political initiatives (in this case, the Affordable Care Act) are being submarined, virtually demolished, by factors and resources hitherto hidden from view and missing from the spreadsheet. As late as this timeline, “Axelrod had barely known who the Kochs were” [Mayer, 2017, 317]. In tracking new, inexhaustible influxes of money and influence through the US political system—no longer conventional corporate profits keyed to the inevitable fluctuations of the market but continuous royalties accruing from energy, natural resources, patents, and other rights applied to indispensable technologies— in tracking the legacy of such families as the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Olins, the Coors, the Popes, and the Mercers, Mayer has willynilly stepped into the role of a “flow monitor” after D/G’s volatile scenario. On yet another crucial flank of her analysis, Mayer chronicles a stream of gifts to arch-conservative think tanks, campaignmeddling, and influence-mongering on the right wing of the Republican Party going back to the Goldwater debacle of 1964— her watershed moment for militant, coordinated insurgency on the part of an emergent political class. Under Mayer’s journalistic scrutiny, it emerges that a new kind of wealth, accruing, as it were, on its own, independently of the conventional corporate spreadsheet, has bankrolled a “who’s who” of initiatives on the right. We will encapsulate her detailed census of these initiatives later.

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In detailing how previously unimaginable contributions and distributions of additional resources and services, while gigantic within the framework of prior political giving, could not even dent the overall wealth of their donors, Mayer bears witness to the arrival of a new power broker on the political scene, now super-sized beyond the nation-state. There is a direct correlation in her account between the unlimited influx of profits and income available to the Kochs, Olins, Mercers, and so on and the subterranean location and impact of arch-conservative intervention. Though it took the fall of the Soviet Union for the verbiage to be coined, Mayer in effect chronicles the emergence of oligarchs both as a new class within the US social hierarchy and as a disruptive (in large measure because shielded) X-factor in the equations of political deliberation, public opinion, information, and social administration. And in her detailed reportage on a new, constitutionally fundamentalist US political plutocracy, one inherently at odds both with social welfare and economic regulation, Mayer, wittingly or not, takes another page from the D/G playbook. Extrapolating the machinations undertaken by a new, highly self-interested fragment-class of the superrich, it is clear that this cadre has scuttled democratic give-and-take in favor of a far more lucrative, influential, and self-aggrandizing posture. As a class, these superentrepreneurs are vaulted into contemporary lords hearkening back to an unusually rigid and entrenched prior political formation, what the historian William H. McNeill termed “the medieval synthesis.” They preside over a nouveau feudalism powered by “the divine right of resources, patents, and royalties.” The diversion of sublime flows of wealth, through ownership and rights accruing from irreversibly cumulative income sources, once the province of state agencies and publicly regulated corporations, into the hands of families and private individuals, instigates, across the board, radical new imbalance in the settling of social accounts and in social governance. For one, the viewfinder or frame in which the accrual and distribution of wealth take place is no longer the nation, state, or other public agency, but the supply chain of goods, services, and profits on a global scale, as operated, supra-nationally, by interests private to their core. The distinctive birthmark of contemporary oligarchs is far less the scale of the sums that their enterprises have accumulated than their direct, exclusive access to taps on supra-national flows of money, profit, and interest, even



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seemingly secondary ones. This direct, ongoing feed of income compounding on itself joins with the evasion even of corporate regulation and oversight in consolidating these “fortunate few” in an unassailable position. The burgeoning of offshore banks and the entities they serve is a phenomenon directly traceable to the new global aristocracy and the pooling of wealth and power over which they preside. [The consolidation of global networks of corporate organization, supply, production, and distribution in the 1980s and 1990s surely coincided with new frontiers in the evasion and usurpation of governmental regulation—in commerce, finance, and communications. But this will prove merely the pale foreshadowing of April 2022, when meteoric innovator and financier Elon Musk will launch a takeover bid for Twitter. This corporate acquisition, should it eventuate, will reinstate the strict service of a ubiquitous media platform already notorious for its volatility and skew to the service of naked oligarchic self-interest. Twitter, in its very architecture and format, veers sharply toward the sensational and is impervious to fact-checking and documentation. Musk will be handing back a medium whose destructive repercussions on the elections of 2016 and 2018 were tangible to the very interests, including Trump, that have already profited from it the most.] Welcome back, Charlemagne! History, as it has been reconfigured by the cocktail or suspension of political structures in D/G’s rewriting the standard World History textbook has looped, seemingly inexplicably, in one of its most retrograde directions. Yet through the sequence of sub rosa strategies arrayed chronologically in Dark Money—whether attacks on ecological and other industrial and commercial regulation, influencing election outcomes through gerrymandering and redistricting, or disseminating extreme economic and xenophobic ideologies via think tanks and political advertising—this bizarre systemic swerve back to a new medievalism has eluded public scrutiny, let alone explicit political deliberation. The new feudal lords of unabated financial flow are not particularly fazed by local conditions prevailing where their wealth is either generated or consumed. Yet they are keenly attuned to the underlying legal, legislative, commercial, and even diplomatic conditions requisite to its unimpeded further accumulation. The public policy for which they militate, buttressed by the opinionshaping and influence-mongering of the sort Jane Mayer has so

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acutely teased out, is a sleek companion to the economics and culture under which they hold court. Why, in heaven’s name, would plutocrats pay their taxes? In the political sphere, they would not even wish their taxation status known. For themselves and their families, they can amply afford the cutting-edge in medical and dental care that their superordinate economic status would warrant. All initiatives, of whatever stripe, toward widening medical coverage and the availability of reliable care can only hamper plutocratic selfenrichment, powered, in the labor market, by a general avoidance of full-time positions and accompanying benefits. The new feudal lords, by the same token, by and large, send their kids to private schools. What possible need would there be to update and reinvest in the public system? Does any of this sound familiar? President Trump and his administration are chided on a daily basis for inconsistency, incoherence, and incompetence. Yet when it comes to economic policy, taxation, foreign relations, and even education, this assumption is not necessarily a propos. What may well prevail, rather, is a coherence, a clarity, a sleekness, and even a “synthesis” of vision far in excess of what the public has yet discerned. Far beyond what US society, in its long-standing aspirations to openness and fairness, its presumptions of democracy, can bear. Philanthropy too figures prominently within the overall license exercised by contemporary aristocrats. As will be detailed in the following, the figure of the “donor” comes sheathed in dense ambiguity. Particularly on the PR front, gift-giving plays a crucial role in dramatizing “payback” for the monumental takeout—profit, natural resources, and in some instances, social welfare—extracted from the environment by plutocratic interests. We have crammed for exams and sweated out term papers in the Olin Libraries housing vital resources at Cornell, Wesleyan, and Rollins College. We thrill to balletic virtuosity in the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center; the David H. Koch Plaza adjacent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art serves as the foyer to the richness, inspired curating, and diversity of its collections. Whatever “secondary gains” motivate such princely behests, they constitute substantial enhancements to the public sphere; spires in our cultural life. Yet they remain discretionary—structurally if not temperamentally whimsical— remnants of an ethos of aristocratic noblesse going back, again, to the Middle Ages. Within this framework, it becomes understandable that Bill Gates, having established, in conjunction with Melinda



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Gates, a distinguished track record of progressive giving, lines up against Elizabeth Warren. Prosperous as his enterprises have made him, Michael Bloomberg did not start out as an oligarch. His income, even if generated by his “monitoring the flow” of capital across several journalistic media, channeled itself into a conventional, transparent corporate structure. The main draw of Bloomberg’s belated run for the Democratic presidential nomination is that one notable and extremely powerful capitalist takes on another, rendering a counterpoint in tone and drift. Bloomberg’s cultivation, erudition, restraint, and demonstrated integrity as a three-time NYC mayor are in sharp contrast to Trump’s politics of belligerence and flaunting: whether of legal precedent, civil contract, social convention, or democratic process. Yet in its precipitous timing, Bloomberg’s current initiative marks him as an outsider to the carefully planned and orchestrated exchanges and debates between aspirants—attenuated almost to the point of exasperation—on which the Democratic Party has staked its future. The philosophical ramblings of Deleuze and Guattari may seem an iffy, even weird detour in crystallizing the core issues facing politicians, their parties, and the electorate as US society lurches toward the 2020 elections. Yet in conjunction with Jane Mayer’s discerning eye, wide camera-angle, and unerring instinct for narrative, their scenarios of political regression, ill-considered desire, and overarching human avarice may be just the medicine the scorched political landscape cries out for.

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Thanksgiving, 2021. Partisans of Writing Mayer with Derrida

But then—even with the unprecedented accumulation of corporate capital, unrestricted and unchecked, fungible into dark money; levels of demagoguery and the cult of personality unmatched since the totalitarian rampages of the twentieth century; wholesale dismissal of painstakingly accrued conventions of disinterest and checks and balances within the public sphere; a breakneck dash into digital technology and culture favoring the binary, the twodimensional, the tribal, and the sensational in representation. These are the dominant tropes underlying the narrative of political subterfuge and manipulation, recharged nativism, racism, and know nothing dismissal; a vigilante militarization of the citizenry through an astonishing proliferation of weapons; and, extreme general disenchantment with public deliberation that captures the recent years. Not only is the natural landscape of the United States under siege by a full spectrum of bizarre climate events ranging from endless drought to massive forest fires of unprecedented scale to killer tornadoes emerging out of the blue in unaccustomed seasons. Our social landscape has become peopled by broken promises and abandoned social contracts: assurances that once underwrote the culture, however unevenly applied. These scrapped hulks of public idealism and social justice and service litter the roadside, beneath digitized billboards of politicians dead set on keeping their jobs, regardless of the compromises or prevarications demanded by thoroughly cynical ideology. The government has been commandeered by a political party gone borderline. And in full

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keeping with the psychology of the personality disorders, in which there are serious liabilities for the “straight men” or caregivers to these picturesque public personas, the colleagues of the belligerent, anything-goes demagogues are fleeing incumbency in droves. Whether the assurances of reliable information in the news, of politicians at the service of government and their constituents, or impartial elections. These are the X-factors that become the high magnitude stars in any “constellation” that would dare posit a semi-coherent snapshot of these turbulent times. Even in the face of daunting challenges that have pushed democracy and articulate public debate against the ropes, written accounts, reportage, and critique have persisted. They have not flagged in their scrutiny or articulation, even over the inaugural “long decade” of the present century, marked by Jane Mayer as the tipping point of the hegemony exerted by rogue sponsorship, dissembling philanthropy, and sub rosa funding of faux spontaneous movements, such as the Tea Party, themselves spawned within a universe of institutes, causes, and publications—on- and offline. By Mayer’s detailed accounting, over the intervening years and fueled by inconceivable infusions of profits, this universe of front organizations, influence-peddling operations, and purported research institutions has expanded—with astronomical acceleration. The pitched political warfare conducted in every available medium and the daily diet of dirty tricks seem galaxies removed from the staid and, under ideal circumstances, uneventful life I embarked on in the late 1960s. Teaching Hebrew and tutoring in a US government-funded Upward Bound program had played a crucial role in underwriting my education at Brandeis. My selecting the academy as my potential zone of operations was no doubt spurred by the wish to prolong the intense intellectual stimulation, mentoring, and camaraderie I rejoiced in during college. These were happy years, by a long shot, my happiest thus far. Illness in the family, on graduation, forced me to scuttle my plans to hang with my closest cadre and continue studying on the West Coast. Fall 1968 found me in the first year of an English Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, where earlier on I’d been wait-listed. In those days, a lingering veneer of Southern gentility worked a small wonder in masking the sharp racial divides and class boundaries defining Baltimore’s economy and mapping its inhabitants’ relative degrees of precarity and social mobility. The city seemed, at least to a naïve



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newly minted BA, a far cry from Boston, one of two major US home offices for the most fetishized youth generation in memory, whose protests, sexual and chemical experimentation, and outrageous fashions and antics passed under the banner of radicalism, if not out and out revolution. By that time literature had firmly established itself as my closest intellectual affinity and virtual “home.” (Had I come along three decades later, my quest for the dominant problems and motifs driving culture at any particular moment might well have directed me to cognitive science.) Back then, I was blissfully ignorant of how the Humanities configured themselves as one academic subprofession within the comprehensive directory of higher education. I had no idea that critical theory existed, or that Johns Hopkins, having in fall 1966 hosted the epochal international conference, “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” was its western hemispheric lightning rod. The field of critical theory had been devised in part to fortify and counteract the impressionism and unchecked subjectivity that could otherwise muddle cultural criticism—the challenge of elucidating productions streaming in from the full palette of art forms. “Critical Race Theory,” the current flaming anathema to right-wing talking heads and redstate boards of education alike, is one of the legion outgrowths attesting to critical theory’s vigor and viral relevance—far beyond the daunting literary and philosophical reviews where the latter was, a good while ago now, hatched. Critical theory was a European import. It mined the panoply of disciplines ancillary to literature for the constructs that could impart greater conceptual rigor and overall purchase to criticism. Philosophy itself was the primary operating system critical theorists appealed to in their shared effort to procedurally and conceptually upgrade the ongoing readout of culture. But cutting-edge work in contemporary linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, historiography, and sociology had also made decisive marks on this collaborative and big-gauge agenda of conceptual enhancement. By my second year in Baltimore, more advanced students, including the luminous theorist, writer, and teacher who was to become my life partner, had clued me into Hopkins’ ongoing arrangement with Paul de Man, a cutting-edge critic of Romanticism and twentiethcentury letters, who then shuttled between Baltimore and Zurich; and his close working relationship with Jacques Derrida, the man

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of the hour on Montparnasse, whose early publications were already scandalizing, fascinating, and irresistibly provoking the Parisian intellectual scene. In fields ranging from twentieth-century philosophical phenomenology, area of his formal training, to modernist and postmodern literary improvisation, to psychoanalysis, Derrida was already producing “must-read” elaborations that were not quite arguments, research findings, or definitive summations. He preferred to call them “texts,” and they arrived pre-packaged in notoriety. I was to meet Derrida the following Fall in Paris under the auspices of a graduate exchange program floated jointly by Johns Hopkins and Cornell. My personal circumstances and Hopkins’ largesse had made that possible. Orienting students from all over the world, even some as untutored as myself, into the surprisingly demanding, even contradictory rigors of cultural criticism had already become one of Derrida’s major preoccupations. What those under his tutelage encountered from the start was a deeply unsettling—but then inevitable—crossover between formal conceptual and poetic sensibilities and tactics indispensable to litup cultural commentary. That is, to critical output actively and creatively assuming the fullest possible responsibility for its own inevitable omissions, biases, and outright mistakes—as for its stunning insights and breakthroughs. Oblivious as I then was to the concurrent advances being made in Computer Science, I would much later, on the threshold to a new century, realize that the project of an ironic, self-aware, and wherever possible, self-correcting cultural criticism was “autopoietic” through and through. (“Autopoiesis” being the cybernetic term, devised by two philosophically oriented Chilean neurologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, for cognitive organizations with the capacity to regulate, reconfigure, and through these steps “teach” themselves. As a description for reconfiguration and upgrades happening in systems in real time, autopoiesis would be taken up by thinkers in a host of interrelated disciplines and projects.) Slighter than expected given the advance gossip; elegantly attired—suits casual, of the latest cut; distinguished mane, already graying; handsome features. Having devoted the Fall semester of 1970 to a sorely needed boot camp in basic French language, I attended a seminar that Derrida offered to American students the following spring. It was devoted to the experimental writer and



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proto-Surrealist of the early nineteenth century, Isidore Ducasse, better known as le Comte de Lautréamont. The primary literary remains left behind by this Parisian émigré from Montevideo were a novel, Les chants de Maldoror, and a sheaf of aphorisms, Poétiques. These works were ideally situated on both sides of a chasm, a chiasmus, that Derrida had staked out not only to serve as his theoretical base of operation but also as the generator for his prodigious writings. On one flank of this khōra or zone, reception area, and arena, stood an imposing toolbox of Western philosophical terms, figures of speech, and logical hardware that had undergone, in a vast array of settings, continuous tinkering, emendation, and addition at least since the pre-Socratics. The outer edge, or far shore of Derrida’s writing desk, was, though, a tradition of poetic play and improvisation, one demanding a full and unmotivated immersion in the etymological roots of current and historical usage. The poetic sensibility that Derrida infused into disciplinary philosophy was as old as language itself; his insistence was that a formal philosophy oblivious to the ambiguity and slippage intrinsic to its keywords and logical scaffolding was as futile as any literary enterprise utterly clueless as to the prevailing ideological platform and the enabling cultural concepts of its day. Derrida’s improbable project started out with the premise that the process of inscription itself—écriture, writing—encompassed and animated both of these theaters generative of informed public discourse, whether “substantive” or “artistic.” As Derrida’s own lifelong writing practice expanded at warp speed and ramified along unpredictable lines, the signature instances of poetic improvisation that were to prove key to Western ideology and its political and cultural offshoots included the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, Poe, Mallarmé, Valéry, Kafka, Joyce, Ponge—and of course, Lautréamont. Derrida’s seminars and public lectures were notorious for starting out, precisely, nowhere; as for seeming, for a good, sometimes uncomfortable stretch, to proceed nowhere else. They started off in a cloud of random references and observations. These were unsettling for asserting nothing, for ambling and rambling rather than developing. If anything emerged during these characteristic preambles, often labeled exergues, it would only be the hand of linguistic signifiers, the particular words, and their sub-components that the present disquisition would play out. From any number of Derrida’s literary inspirations, notably Mallarmé and Kafka,

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he easily gravitated to a practice of theoretical commentary and refinement as a conceptual hand of cards or dice-game, one oriented, however, to very specific and particular artifacts, whatever their provenance: philosophy, literature, jurisprudence, or theology. Anyone writing under the aura of deconstruction, within its increasingly multidisciplinary atelier, knew that their project could be emended, or rewritten, in countless ways. Furthermore, that homes awaited for the thinking scored in their script in genres and text formats far afield: abstruse reasoning into dramatic dialogue; etymological dissection into Language Poetry. It raises not a single deconstructive eyebrow that Stacey Abrams, one of our most idealistic, savvy, and compelling current political leaders, moonlights as a novelist. Not only did an act of deconstruction, for this neologism became, by Derrida’s own connivance, the moniker for his innovative practice of commentary; not only did such an event situate and tabulate the linguistic jewels of the clockwork on which a play, or a novel, or a constitution, or other founding political document hinged. (Such that each work generates its own, particular deconstructions, in the plural. There is no overarching procedural deconstruction that can be applied to one instance after the next.) The deconstructive performance, in its imperative to the fullest possible attentiveness, scanned the memorable artifact, trapping the decisive signifiers, even if seemingly accidental, on which it turned— pursuing them to their fullest lexical and etymological density. In its attenuated deliberation, it weighed the nuances of terms and concepts often of tremendous tangible sociopolitical impact (when deployed, for instance, in “classics,” or manifestoes), to the level of their etymological roots and the fragmentary sub-components of meaning. Derrida mined the funereal knell of nineteenth-century death culture that managed somehow to place Hegel and Genet into a paradoxical dialogue via Poe and Baudelaire. In this study, called Glas, he honed in on the subcomponent gl common to the French words for knell, gladiolus, sword, glove, and multiple other words pivotal to the patchwork of texts he had assembled for the particular occasion. The interpretative process of deconstruction, from its outset, coordinated a full follow-through between what a major computer scientist and cultural critic of the day, Douglas Hofstadter, would call “upper level” and “lower-level processing,” between the highest generalizations and the fragmentary shards



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of meaning. These demonstrations thus always fluctuated back and forth between the systematic architecture by which culture had conferred worthiness and significance upon a work of art, a canonical document, or a convention—and the etymological radicals and threshold semes that often detonated in unpredictable directions. The deconstructive intervention, for example, factored in the complexities and even double messages discernible when the biblical encomia to hospitality, in a section of this memoir to follow, will come up in the full levels of nuance attendant upon the figure and act of playing host. Being party, even in a tangential way, to the atelier of deconstruction in its formative years conveyed an excitement and awe that have lost nothing of their pitch over time. Derrida’s mind was the closest to the genius that I have ever encountered. This was less the genius that Kant set forth in his Critiques—intuiting, through mathematics and logic, the deep-wired laws of the universe—than the acuity and astonishing interconnectedness of an impeccable “flow monitor” freely shuttling between microscopic and macroscopic “grains.” Once again, I filch this term from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Amid the theoretical Renaissance of those years, these quirky iconoclasts could compete with Derrida while fully sharing in the panache of an emergent alternative universe. Derrida’s uncanny facility allowed him to endow the ambiguity, slippage, plasticity, and strange looping common to language, concepts, and even numbers to unprecedented depths of discernment with respect to systematic phenomena—communications, cultural masterworks, and political and theological formations. With resolute luminosity—the ethics inhered in the resolve—Derrida not only set out the tasks by which, through meticulous, but also a very particular attentiveness to language, systematic formations, the more absolute and unyielding the better, could be unmasked in their arbitrariness, their forced clarity and coherence, and their symptomatic short-circuiting of nuance and complexity. To a generation of students hailing from a diversity of disciplines, Derrida performed these tasks. And in his inaugural studies of Plato, Rousseau, Mallarmé, and Freud, he exemplified how a full-service approach to cultural artifacts compelling in some insistent way could be furthered. It was utterly life-affirming to a recent BA with a preexisting writing habit, who’d already traded in his poetic aspirations for a combo-plate of teaching and literary criticism, that writing (écriture)

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was Derrida’s broadest arena for the articulation intrinsic to all cultural acts and constructs. Writing, at deconstruction’s formative moment, was a process of articulation and notation that could not be pigeonholed to any interest, institution, genre, or discipline; least of all to literature, or letters. In Derrida’s singular parlance, writing is a medium of difference (différance). It is an arena of scrutiny and improvisation grounded, above all else, in nuanced, nonbinary distinction. This emerges through meticulous care to the particular usages and misuses of language, to the ambiguities and mutations that language systematically generates. Derrida makes certain to mark the intense working relationship between writing and difference in the eponymous title of his inaugural essay collection [Derrida, 1978]. And in the notorious lead article that both demonized Derrida and underscored his intervention’s inevitability, through a deliberate misspelling (différance), Derrida hijacked and repurposed a core philosophical construct such that it could pertain to and even summate a “general science” of writing. The upshot of a “science” of writing was seismic. The swerve in this direction signaled both a decisive sea change from metaphysics, with its core values, voice, presence, reflection, and consciousness prominent among them—as the primary motivation and rationale for culture. And toward registering the utter decisiveness of articulation, inscription, linguistic play, and improvisation—indeed, différance— within all diverse cultural, scientific, historical, political, and economic endeavors. Cultural discernment and critique through service to writing. Here was a calling a fledgling critic could sign on to! As so many of us did. In the overture to his Of Grammatology, his major treatment of Rousseau, one of three inaugural studies that he husbanded for 1967, Derrida took a detour in order to underscore the extension of writing to all systems, media, and notations of articulation and distinction. One of the most famous downbeats to a new modus operandi with which Derrida inaugurates the “End of the Book and the Age of Writing” [Derrida, 1976, 6] runs as follows: For some time now, as a matter of fact, here and there, by a gesture and for motives that are profoundly necessary . . . one says “language” for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectivity, etc. Now we tend to say “writing” for all that or more: to designate not



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only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible. . . . And thus we say “writing” for all that gives rise to inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural “writing.” One might also speak of athletic writing, and even with greater certainty of military or political or writing in view of all the techniques that govern those domains today. . . . And finally . . . the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts—including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion that writing, trace, grammè, or grapheme—would thus name the element. [Derrida, 1976, 9] While readers enchanted by the constant evidence and full range of linguistic play throughout Derrida’s prose often distance deconstruction from the quantitative processes and empirical bent animating Computer Science, it is clear from the above that machine languages and the work that computers perform with them are part and parcel of écriture from the very outset of Derrida’s megaproject. What is a disquisition on my early exposure to Derrida and the inspiration I’ve derived ever since from his work—my personal rendition of Tom Brown’s School Days—doing in a kaleidoscopic survey of the Trump-Covid years? I’d be so much happier if my retrospective glance, while the debris piles up all around our collective feet, were in the way of a postmortem. But the Covid-19 virus and its devastating socioeconomic impact mutate around us, eluding medical advances and extraordinary measures devised in record time against daunting odds. As to the political polarization and dirty trickery, the cult of an outsized personality, the devaluation of science and culture, and the complexities that intense scrutiny unearths rather than obfuscates. These disquieting aftereffects of misinformation, sub rosa political patronage and influencemongering, and cynical procedural prestidigitation in all venues of government have been long underway. Zombie-like, the distortion effects not only refuse to go away but also intensify as they breed.

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Any definitive postmortem on these turbulent times recedes farther from realization and likelihood. Yet if any enterprise has consistently stood in the way of these disturbing trends, monitoring them, teasing out their causes and rationales, and contradicting false claims and misinformation that would justify further usurpation and misuse of the political process, it has been writing itself. Writing, wherever it has assumed the form of unfettered, objective investigation and reportage, even if in its political drift it favored Trump and the Republicans. History will surely record that over these years, the predominant counter to Trump’s unfounded claims and self-aggrandizement, his wholesale trashing of the monitors and controls of disinterest, has been the daily snapshots of history—in the making and on the ground— supplied by journalism. The prospects for our continued democracy have critically ridden on writing resistance, if not exactly revolution, one coterminous with the excess it chronicles, hewing to it step by step. And indeed, a survey of the reportage that underwrote my sanity and shored up my spirits over these disconcerting years rises fully to the standards and specifications with which Derrida fitted out écriture. (Nota bene: the December 24, 2021 dispatch by its Editorial Board detailing “A Dangerous Court Order Against the New York Times” chronicles a New York court judge who “broke from precedent when he issued an order blocking the Times from publishing or even reporting further on information it had obtained related to Project Veritas, the conservative sting group that traffics in hidden cameras and fake identities to target liberal politicians and interest groups. . . . The order, a highly unusual and astonishingly broad injunction against a news organization, was issued by Supreme Court Justice Charles D. Wood.” Make no mistake: amid the current US political climate, writing itself—journalism along with literature in the schools, especially that broaching disturbing issues of historical subjugation, gender identity and relations, and the environment—is about to undergo unprecedented initiatives, not only to muzzle it but also to obliterate its traces. In all seasons a sympathetic judge can now be located to reinforce any draconian machination or crackpot position. “In Friday’s decision he [Justice Wood] ordered the Times to destroy any and all copies of the memos that it had obtained and barred it from reporting on the substance of those memos.” Unable to resolve our essential differences, or at



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least hold them temporarily in abeyance, we foist them off on a judiciary now pre-selected for its political sympathies.) * * * *  * This brief reprise to my amazing teacher gives me, in the guise of roving critic I assumed in response to reading Derrida and to being acquainted with him, the gumption to venture my personal short bookshelf of the works most conducive to some tangible grip on the current deep malaise of US culture. Not by accident, three of these books are by journalists who prepared their way by mastering the short forms of political, cultural, and investigative reportage. It is a matter for celebration that in an age when readership is increasingly under the sway of digital media and formats for communication and archiving, the short form, in the hands of the journalists who have mastered it, has proven equal to the involution and sheer complexity of the trends it needs to register. The fourth volume, by the distinguished economist and systems analyst Shoshanah Zuboff, achieved impressive lucidity, focus, and narrative coherence on a par with these three authors and their colleagues. It may seem an unfortunate disconnect for me to loop in one continuous film or tape writing so often abstruse, meandering, and delegated to linguistic minutiae as Derrida’s to hard-hitting journalistic prose—distilled from demanding hours in the archives as on the street. Rest assured though, that the patterns of wealth, communications, political influencing, corporate organization and self-interest, and “bubbled” peer networks grounding all four investigations achieve the density and involution of what critical theory deems a text. The four books in question, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, Adam Serwer’s The Cruelty Is the Point, Tobin Smith’s Foxocracy, and Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism each configure a rich and enlightening tapestry, precisely in fashioning themselves out of the intricate patterns of power, economic exploitation, and deep-seated historical traditions of xenophobia and racism serving as the foundational pretexts of the current constellation. Each one of these power (or honor) claims comes grounded in its own enabling rhetoric of tropes and metaphors. Far removed from the classroom, I remain the compulsive organizer of syllabi. This list of four will, to my mind, render the open-minded reader conversant in the chaotic events unfolding

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around us on a daily basis. That’s some achievement on the part of a tiny subset in the sublime daily and weekly flow of verbiage! Especially when the titles have been organized along completely different formats, “spoken” in strikingly foreign “voices” and styles, and “set” to radically divergent levels of detail and “grain.” It is the perverse, often reclusive joy of delivering books to readers that keeps the critics going. If there are overarching themes or tropes that could consolidate or “chunk” a diverse shortlist of books attaining “must-read” status in the arenas both of current events and sorely needed cultural psychotherapy, they are two: (1) a polarized US culture currently reveling in and in shock over the precipitous and belligerently unceremonious trashing of the fundamental social contracts, legislative and informal, that however questionable in themselves and inconsistently applied, once undergirded and fortified our society within the framework of its federal structure, at least to some minimal degree; (2) the “Faustian pact” that our culture and societies all over the world have made with digital technologies; this in blindness to their fuller impact. Whether this “blind” is shortsighted or intrinsic to the human predicament of existing in time. The phenomenon amounts to a massive cultural blindsiding in media, behavioral, cognitive, social, and political terms. To Jane Mayer, a strong political resolve (if not fanaticism) on the part of a small, ultra-conservative cadre of oligarchs motivated the funding of institutes, think tanks, and causes that in turn effected major transformations in electoral procedures and outcomes. One, among several watershed moments in the cascading influence of “dark money,” was the Supreme Court Citizens United decision of 2010. In one fell swoop, inconceivably vast sums, mostly contributed, gathered, and distributed under cover, were legally released for such purposes as attack ads and influence-peddling that would transform the conduct of politics in the United States and beyond. Needless to say, in the traumatic wake of dark money, an entire culture of shared understandings regarding political debate and procedure, including the leadership once furnished by the major parties, went by the way. Tobin Smith, an insider gradually pushed to the outside, reports on Fox News, his former employer. He chronicles a radical disruption to hitherto prevalent culture-wide understandings through this single corporation as it increasingly transformed itself from a news service into an entertainment outlet—but one



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attaining the status, during the Trump presidency (and since) of a conservative Republican propaganda machine and house organ. And the increasingly addictive brand of combative “entertainment” that Fox News opinion broadcasts “sell” to a targeted audience of disenchanted holdouts for “Retro” American culture Smith labels “white tribal identity hate-and-blame porn.” Shoshanah Zuboff finds the protocols developed by online service providers and major social media companies disturbingly at odds with the basic needs and best interests of their users. At the heart of her analysis of the current prevailing digital regimes of information and business in our society is the “mining” of our personal data, lifestyles, and online behaviors by such giants as Google and Facebook. These providers go on to sell this information to marketers as raw data for their merchandising strategies. Zuboff terms this overall attitude to people “instrumentarianism.” It bespeaks such an overarching corporate mindset of indifference that she renames the traditional set of understandings enabling people to conduct their affairs in some basic public and institutional good faith an “uncontract.” “In the dystopia of the uncontract, surveillance capitalism’s drive toward certainty fills the space once occupied by all the human work of building and replenishing human trust, which is now reinterpreted as unnecessary friction in the march toward guaranteed outcomes . . . Social trust eventually withers, a kind of vestigial oddity like a third nipple or wisdom teeth: traces of an evolutionary past that no longer appear in operational form” [Zuboff, 2019, 335]. Adam Serwer, in the rich historical backdrop he assembles to what is for him a disheartening current culture of cruelty, surveys a landscape littered with broken promises, most notably, the ones of human rights and universal suffrage following the Civil War. Yet Serwer is as much interested in double contracts as invalid ones. His racial contract is a codicil rendered in invisible ink, one stating that the rules as written do not apply to nonwhite people in the same way. The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal; the racial contract limits this to white men with property. The law says murder is illegal; the racial contract says that it’s fine for white people to chase and murder black people if they have decided that those black people scare them. [Serwer, 2021, 232]

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Though none of these writers par excellence is a war correspondent, all four have perforce filed their reports from a warzone. One whose operating principles border on anomie. The vestigial traces of social civility demand that we play by the rules. And to play by the rules we try. Biden certainly insists upon this principle, possibly to the almost certain detriment of his policies and aims. But the rules, increasingly, turn out to be in the hands of what Zuboff (following Lacan before her) terms the Big Other. If rules, in the current environment, prevail at all. By now we have all grown familiar with the whiff of anomie, that queasy pit-of-the-stomach feel. We experienced it in our first viewings of the Trump rally, all the more so when that new medium arrived at its denunciatory chants. And then, “Unite the Right,” Charlottesville, 2017. And then, “Stop the Steal!” And the ensuing events of January 6, 2021. And since our Republican legislators’ protracted non-cooperation with the committees and other bodies charged with coming to terms with this major attack on the democratic process as well as on its seat. And throughout, the belligerent trench-mentality on their part, born of an alternative reality, one in which rule of law is a matter of convenience, in which being in the spotlight (and remaining in office) is an end in itself, bearing with it no imperatives as to being well-informed, or reliable, or even consistent from day to day. Outrageous, simplistic bashing conducted on Fox News and other major outlets; outrageous attack ads at every level of electoral contest; outrageous invocations of QAnon and other conspiracy theories—“kayfabe” all the way—all subtended by landmark removals of Fairness in Broadcasting doctrines and additional standards of quality control on what is spewed out to a US public already besotted (for generations) by major TV network programming on an abysmal level [Smith, 2019, 48–50, 60–1, 123– 5; Zuboff, 2019, 169–72]. In the tenor of our public life, we have been party to—and swept along in—a stampede toward the sociopsychological borderline as clinically documented toward the end of the twentieth century [Kernberg, 1975, 246–7], instating deep-seated animus and belligerence. Conspicuous flaunting of the rules that bind the multitudes of those “little others” has now become standard procedure, defining the current “universal principles.” * * * *  *



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Although on a different register, perhaps, Mayer proves every bit the meticulous and inveterate flow monitor that Derrida is. She sets herself to the task of pursuing and reporting an unprecedented accrual of capital on the part of a new oligarchic class. This accumulation, grounded in outright ownership of natural resources, royalties generated by technology that has become indispensable, and finance on a scale inconceivable even to the inaugural US robber barons, manages to be both unremitting and unconditional, with astonishing autonomy from customary fluctuations in the markets. The narrative that Mayer assembles from a repository of documents seemingly sublime in scale is one of near-unlimited patronage, largely conducted under a cloak of secrecy, in support of securing political influence, generating and disseminating ideology, both deep-seated and improvised for the occasion, “selling” these ideologies to the electorate, and where possible, indirectly and surreptitiously contravening political process and outcomes. The ideological “payload” to whose public delivery the entire battery of institutes and publications, “spontaneous” causes, and prestidigitation at the level of national and local elections was and remains a customized version of post-Second World War Austrian free-market economics whose primary US avatar would be Milton Friedman: [Friedrich] Hayek’s genius was to recast the discredited ideology [Keynesian economics] in an appealing new way . . . Rather than describing the free market just as an economic model, Hayek touted it as the key to all human freedom. He vilified government as coercive, and glorified capitalists as standard bearers for liberty. Naturally, his ideals appealed to American businessmen like Charles Koch and the backers of the Freedom School, whose self-interest Hayek now cast as beneficial to all of society. Charles’s funding of the Freedom School was the first step in what would become a lifelong, tax-deductible sponsorship of libertarianism in America. [Mayer, 2017, 56] There is indeed an ideological foundation to a transformation of US politics, along with the overall tenor of the public sphere that in its specific developments, spread over time, has had a deeply disruptive effect on the conduct of government and public service in our country. Extreme libertarian thinking, both in its sociopolitical

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and its personal manifestations, is discernible in a host of unsettling recent phenomena. These extend from well-financed campaigns against all forms of governmental regulation, taxation, and social welfare, and such “social movements” as the Tea Party and the January 6, 2021 siege on the Capitol, all the way to fanciful QAnon conspiracy theories grounded in a “dial-your-own-reality” mentality and including anti-vax resistance. The latter clinically proven to have augmented Covid-19’s volatility, persistence, and mortality. Already consolidating a masterplan by 1992, Charles Koch, in the National Journal, declares: My overall concept is to minimize the role of government and to maximize personal freedoms. .  .  . By supporting all of these [nonprofit] organizations I am trying to support different approaches to achieve those objectives. It’s almost like an investor investing in a whole variety of companies. He achieves diversity and balance. And he hedges his bets. [Mayer, 2017, 177] This is a direct translation of the economic theory leading from Ludwig von Mises through Hayek and Friedman into the language of an exceptionally resolute and efficient entrepreneur’s business plan. In Dark Money, Mayer has produced not only a consummate work of investigative journalism—above all, in covering the infusion of vast sums of anything–but–disinterested money into the political sphere. She has furnished the textbook of record on the delivery of an ideological “payload” that has succeeded in transforming the US political landscape and facilitated the usurpation, by vested interests, of values and procedures that had sustained the ongoing, if troubled and deeply flawed equilibrium of US society. While the endpoint of Dark Money’s coverage may well be early 2015, the neoliberal epiphenomena that Mayer masterfully coordinates and documents only intensified under Donald Trump’s helter-skelter and tunnel-visioned presidency. Dark Money becomes an indispensable guidebook to the starting point from which Trump’s corruption, disregard for disinterested scientific and other intellectual work, and naked personal rapacity took off. Yet Dark Money is also a textured and multilayered work of narrative worthy of a Tolstoy or Zola. The acts, among others, of influence-peddling, ideological propaganda, and the veiled



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subvention of initiatives to tilt the electoral process in favor of conservative candidates and voters, all took place in real time. Many of the key players in the interventions that Mayer chronicles are known and identified. She rose to the daunting challenges that she faced from the outset: above all, in tracing out and reconstructing, into a compelling story, a gigantic, ever-expanding web of donors and funding sources that financed just as variegated an array of institutes, lobbying groups, publications, purported charities, and political actions. Be assured that as much artistry went into tracking the leviathan known as dark money and into connecting its notable dots—the plutocrats and the alternative universe of organizations that they spawned—as Melville called forth in the plotline of MobyDick. For those who might concur that US society as a whole has devolved into a malaise in which basic governance, let alone public and political deliberation on our collective best interest, has become excruciating, if not completely dysfunctional, the bright illumination cast by Dark Money disabuses us of certain of the myths whose proliferation and long-term impact might be further debilitating. Dark Money, in keeping with the prevalent standards of objectivity and verification guiding all legitimate journalism, establishes the vast accumulation and expenditure of funds that were able to finance the myriad of institutions, movements, and causes that have succeeded in dangerously deadlocking governmental agencies and electoral results. Also to unbalance and untether a Supreme Court whose deliberations had been previously perceived to be above the ebb and sway of party politics. A broad implication to be drawn from Mayer’s meticulous accounting is that all the excoriations against governmental regulation and service, the discrediting of climate science and the basic tenets of public health, the outpouring of the “original” patriotic fervor on the part of the Tea Party, the indeed scientific manipulation of voting populations and districts made possible by REDMAP (see later)—all of this unregulated, surreptitious torque or body English applied to our political system was bought and paid for—lock, stock, and barrel. There was, precisely, nothing “ground roots” about these movements (save the endemic racism, nativism, and xenophobia that Trump, especially, succeeded in reviving, stirring up, and riffing on. It is Adam Serwer who has, with wit and mastery, filled out this chapter and entered it into the record). The sprawling

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tapestry of organizations and movements were paid for—by the “dark money” whose ideological and social provenance Mayer monitors, along with its “flow.” In view of the naked economics underlying the seemingly “new” or “revived” attitudes that have radically recast public debate and electoral politics, the construct of the “undecided voter,” or the “suburban housewife,” who will, in her educated savvy, tip the balance—that is if addressed with proper delicacy and deference. In view of the underlying current dynamics that Mayer exposes to full view, this call for restraint, both in synthesizing and communicating the predicament that liberals and progressives now face may well be mystified, the product of what Derrida might call a certain metaphysics. In this case, the long-standing metaphysics of altruism, dispassion, and civility in public affairs. The state of affairs that Mayer has elaborated with such scrupulousness calls instead for greater franchise and fullness in communication and explanation, saving the politesse for a less turbulent climate. In launching her investigation, Mayer makes two strategic investments not only proving prescient in the end but also supplying the focus making Dark Money readable and comprehensible. Marking the book as an indispensable starting point to any concerted effort at gaining a tangible grasp on the current US political system, its ancillary media, and their current extremist drift. At the level of what serves as the book’s protagonist, Mayer selects two generations of the Koch family of Wichita, Kansas. By the 1930s and 1940s its patriarch, Fred, was established in the petroleum industry; he considerably consolidated his position by supplying strategic petroleum infrastructure to Hitler as well as to Stalin. (Fred’s virulent anticommunism, his horror completely justified, was born of Stalin’s liquidation of the Soviet colleagues with whom he had directly worked in constructing oil refineries. Here Stalin was simply holding to his own playbook: eliminating the doers and makers of one Soviet generation in order to preempt their influence on the next.) The projects, gifts, and interventions of two Koch progeny, in particular, Charles and David, coincide with the emergence of a coordinated, organized extreme far right on the political spectrum, one hell-bent on preserving and maximizing the free reign of US business and on resisting and circumventing any and all governmental initiatives at regulation, restraint, and taxation.



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Also lending Dark Money its considerable investigative punch is its division into timelines that were to prove pivotal to the emergent hegemony of a plutocratically financed far right. Mayer proves uniquely gifted in organizing vast bodies of reportage and commentary around such watershed dates as January 20, 2003 (a Koch brothers’ summit near Palm Springs, CA); a 1976 conference of the Center for Libertarian Studies in New York City at which Charles Koch laid out a cohesive outline of his future political agenda; April 20, 1969, the Black student uprising at Cornell, which galvanized the Olins, who had donated the library building and who were compeers of the Kochs in skirting environmental regulations, toward a philanthropy completely dedicated to libertarian interests; February 19, 2009, date of Rick Santelli’s famous “rant” on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange: a tirade against Barack Obama and financial aid for homeowners facing foreclosure ensuing from the 2008 real estate meltdown. Calling for a “Chicago Tea Party in July,” (Mayer, 2017, 204)— whether expressly or not, Santelli galvanized the Tea Party, one of the more picturesque non-spontaneous movements instigated by the Kochs and cohorts; January 21, 2010, date of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision, one striking down existing campaignfinance regulations and eviscerating “a century of reform” [Mayer, 2017, 281]; May 17, 2010, spring gala, American Ballet Theatre, “marking the official arrival of [David] Koch as one of New York’s prominent philanthropists” [Mayer, 2017, 278]; and far from last, November 2, 2010, date of midterm elections, Obama’s second term, a Democratic catastrophe, attesting to the success of longlaid machinations, financed by the Kochs and their “partners.” Most astonishing in Mayer’s account is the belatedness with which Democratic advisers up to and including President Obama had become aware of dark money’s subterranean workings and efficacy [Mayer, 2017, 29, 203–4, 227, 296, 316–7]. Mayer’s gravitation to the Kochs as the dominant players in the vast network of libertarian organizations and causes whose impact on the US political landscape, even if dragged out over decades, would prove transformative; and, her homing instinct for turning points at which dark money could either gauge its success or strategically regroup in the wake of miscalculation. This programmed the investigative viewfinder that in turn allowed Mayer to augment the Kochs’ pathbreaking initiatives with a Who’s

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Who’s list of fellow multimillionaires and billionaires advancing a shared class interest and willing not only to support their causes but also to embroider new ones of their own. And so, each at their own moment and in the context of their specific activity, the Kochs’ lifetime allies and collaborators make their appearance on stage. These include Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon, Alcoa, and Gulf Oil fortunes, whose role in devising foundations and institutes where libertarian ideology and strategy could be disseminated was to prove decisive. With the Olins and the Coors, the Colorado brewing family, Scaife would help launch such bedrock conservative bastions as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution (Mayer, 2017, 122). By their own initiative, the Olins, whose enterprises were based in chemicals, but who had profited from US defense contracts in the Second World War, established “beachheads” of influence and the legitimization of conservative thought on US campuses. Prestige universities were the preferred beneficiaries of their largesse. Contributions by the John M. Olin Foundation supported faculty, academic programs, and some curriculum at Harvard, Princeton, and at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Chicago [Mayer, 2017, 125–7]. The Olins’ academic “command central” so to speak, became George Mason University in northern Virginia, where they not only established the Mercatus Center but also strategically staffed the economics department. Their Foundation exerted an across-the-board impact on professional instruction in jurisprudence. It succeeded in moving what had been a fringe, free-market “Law and Economics” curriculum into the legal mainstream, bankrolling its instruction at Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Columbia, Georgetown, and Virginia [Mayer, 2017, 130–1]. Given the astronomical cost of educating students at institutions whose facilities and expectations for student life go hand in hand with their global reputations, the story of dark money on campus, especially the elite campus—with the distortion effects it imposes on staffing, instruction, and morale—is a warped saga still far from over. Enter as well the Bradleys, of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, whose interventions included the annual Bradley Prizes, “a glittering Academy Awards for conservatives;” and also wielding outsized political influence in Wisconsin, where it underwrote an extreme anti-social welfare agenda that would be spearheaded



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by Paul Ryan and Scott Walker [Mayer, 2017, 144, 378–9]. Enter Robert Mercer, an innovator in deploying algorithms in stock trading and also a venture capitalist (Renaissance Technologies); always in the ultra-conservative vanguard. Enter Philip Anschutz, heir and operator of vast western oil holdings and early militant on behalf of fracking; also, Corbin Robertson, his counterpart in West Virginia coal. Enter the DeVos family of Michigan, the Amway people. Betsy Prince DeVos, Amway founder Richard DeVos Sr.’s daughter-in-law, would rise to Secretary of Education in the Trump administration, her commitment to public schooling at best dubious. Enter James Arthur “Art” Pope of North Carolina, who became a trailblazer in twisting local politics, from the state house to the local Board of Ed to the tenets of libertarian ideology. Already mobilized by the book’s inaugural dateline, the Aspen summit of June 2010, enter the stalwarts of the burgeoning US finance industry: Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital Advisers, Paul Singer of Elliott Management, Steven Schwartzman of the Blackstone Group, Ken Griffin of Citadel, Ken Langone of Home Depot, by then operating on a large scale in investment banking, and John Childs, of J. W. Childs Associates. Enter the directors, presidents, and boards of the legion KochScaife-Olin, and peers-funded foundations and institutes, the inhouse facilitators. They would go on to make an impact on US society far in excess of their job titles. Notable among them: future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, who in 1971 issued “a seething memo that was nothing less than a counterrevolutionary call to arms for corporate America, warning the business community that its very survival was at stake if it didn’t get politically organized and fight back” against governmental restraint and regulation [Mayer, 2017, 89]; Edwin Feulner, Jr., Paul Weyrich, and Edwin Meese III (Heritage Foundation); Antony Fisher and William Casey (Manhattan Institute); David Abshire (Center for Strategic and International Studies); Ed Crane (Cato Institute); John Simon and James Piereson (John M. Olin Foundation); Michael Joyce (Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation); Richard Fink (Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, Mercatus Center); William Mellor III (Institute for Justice); Tim Phillips (Americans for Prosperity); Howard Rich (Sam Adams Alliance, Americans for Limited Government); Sean Noble (Center to Protect Patient Rights); William O’Keefe (George C. Marshall Institute); veteran Republican influencer, Ed Gillespi (Republican State Leadership Committee and also, crucially,

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REDMAP, a redistricting and reapportionment strategy generator); and, Michael Goldfarb and Philip Ellender (Koch Companies Public Sector). Few of the above may be household names, yet the collective impact exerted by these individuals on US culture and public deliberation has been monumental. The spiraling list of the operations that they guided, whose militancy they honed and coordinated, is nonetheless possessed of a poetic interest all its own. We won’t overlook it. Enter the academics and public intellectuals who would be only too eager to lend their names, bibliographies, and accrued authority to the phantasms of a completely free economy, one, however, that would end up amplifying economic disparity to an unprecedented degree while rendering unassailable the legal and political underpinnings to oligarchical privilege. Under the harsh culture of self-aggrandizement and due process anomie during the Trump presidency, some of these intellectual lights would pull back. But over the book’s window of coverage, they were either bankrolled by dark money, espoused its underlying ideological tenets, or both. Among them: Irving Kristol, William F. Buckley, Jr., Dinesh D’Souza, Allen Bloom, Harvey C. Mansfield, Samuel P. Huntington, John Yoo, John R. Lott, Jr., David Brock, James Buchanan, and Matthew Continetti. And to them must be added some of the notable Bradley Prize laureates: George Will, Roger Ailes, Robert George, Edwin Meese III, Edwin Feulner, Jr., and Bill Kristol. [Mayer, 2017, 145]. The political transformations already, by Mayer’s account, in high gear by 2008, transpired in individual acts culminating in massive public disaffection with governmental administration, electoral process, and scientific research; in cynical, often successful ventures to kill legislation responsive to pressing challenges on a human scale (e.g., climate change, tax reform); and to rig outcomes at all levels of the justice system. These acts were accomplished by real people, flesh-and-blood human beings, of whose names and organizations Mayer renders a remarkable, albeit necessarily incomplete census. (By the same token, Zuboff will highlight the underpinnings, design, and animation of “surveillance capitalism,” with all its questionable values and methods, on the part of “real,” identifiable human beings.) The concerted effort by the US plutocratic class to countermand govermental regulations, coopt electoral process, and rewrite traditional American values is a long-term war of attribution, waged



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on multiple fronts. It proceeds at a skew from the knee-jerk impulse to analyze electoral results in terms of microclimates of public opinion. The agonizing effort to win the electorate by pushing just the right ideological buttons at the right instant—to control elections through some uncanny grasp of the zeitgeist eluding the other interested parties— in view of dark money’s long-term tactics, this is a futile hope. It isn’t that tracing a stately procession of Great Ideas through the electorate, as they once traversed World History, is unworthy. But the long view simply cannot explain such recent weirdness as the wild proliferation of guns throughout our society accompanied by summary dismissal of efforts to curb their destruction; or the espousal of QAnon conspiracy theories, fanciful though they may be, by members of Congress; or a widespread laissez-faire approach to the Covid-19 vaccine proceeding from libertarian ideology and no doubt impeding efforts to curb the outbreak. Such developments call for detailed, ongoing, and empathic responsiveness to dark money’s truest victims, those duped into becoming standard bearers for causes systematically repudiating their best interest; those held in thrall to a virtual reality of binary choices and oversimplified solutions to the complex predicaments that challenge us all. Proceeding single-file through the overwrought backdrop of pivotal datelines and multitudinous donors and their facilitators and stratagems that Mayer somehow manages to assemble is a steady succession of interests and causes, from the 1970s on, that dark money bankrolled, whitewashed to the public, and to an astonishing degree, implemented. These rallying cries set off with the staunch opposition, on the part of the Kochs and Olins, to anything smacking of environmental regulation, enforcement, or penalty on the part of the federal government. The Olins had been stung early in the 1970s by the Department of the Interior, which had sued their company for falsifying records relating to the illegal dumping of mercury in Niagara Falls, NY [Mayer, 2017, 117]; the Kochs in 1995 for violating the Clean Water Act, “lying about leaking millions of gallons of oil from its pipelines and storage facilities in six different states” [Mayer, 2017, 154]; and then again, in 2000, for “covering up the discharge of ninety-one metric tons of benzene” [Mayer, 2017, 251]. Such pitched battle over the health and sustainability of the environment sets the stage for the opposition lying in wait for Obama as he takes office in 2008: “If there was a single ultra-wealthy interest group that hoped to see Obama fail as he took office, it was the fossil fuel industry. And if

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there was one test of its members’ concerted financial power over the machinery of American democracy, it was this minority’s ability to stave off government action on climate change as science and the rest of the world were moving in the opposite direction” [Mayer, 2017, 245]. Yet the red carpet that the “Kochtopus” rolled out for the Citizens United Supreme Court decision of January 21, 2010, might seem to counteract this negative effect. Not only did this single action on the part of the Supreme Court unleash vast sums of money— explicitly directed to using any and all means, whether through PR, media outlets, or even staged events, to influence electoral results. It also culminated the wish of “a tiny coterie of ultrarich activists who wished to influence American politics by spending more than the laws would allow who had been chafing at the legal restraints” [Mayer, 2017, 282]. The honor roll of causes surreptitiously funded and advanced by dark money only begins here. As the tide of like-minded political allies of the Kochs and their wealth and the know-how accruing from their specific experience gathers, the oligarchic right torpedoes, in any way it can, Obama’s signature legislative achievement, his Affordable Care Act. A signal anti-Obamacare group was formed when the Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR) was incorporated in Maryland. Physically, the organization existed only as a locked, metal mailbox, number 72465, inside the Boulder Hills post office at the edge of a desert road north of Phoenix. Later records would show that [Sean] Noble was its first executive director. The effort was surrounded in such secrecy that when Noble was asked in a 2013 deposition who hired him, he declined to answer [Mayer, 2017, 231–2; also, 233–43, 301– 6]. By the midterm elections of 2010, a widespread campaign to influence local elections in states with legislatures deemed flippable to conservative governance is already well under way, guided by intense polling and research conducted by REDMAP [Mayer, 2017, 298–302, 321–5]. The first Obama term is also a high-water mark for the longstanding initiatives to turn back taxes. [Mayer, 2017, 51, 85–7, 309–14].



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Fund-raising for Noble’s group, the Center to Protect Patient Rights, quadrupled by the end of 2010, to $ 61.8 million. As with all such “social welfare” groups, under the tax code the sources of its funding didn’t have to be publicly disclosed. The same held true for another Koch-tied group, something called the TC4 Trust, which raised an additional $ 42.7 million that year. . . . This brought Sean Noble’s kitty up to almost $ 75 million. Flush with cash, the Kochs finally had a political operation commensurate with their wealth. Previously they had given relatively small amounts to 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups. Before Citizens United, these nonprofit corporations, like for-profit corporations, had been restricted from spending money for or against candidates in elections. Some skirted the law by running what they claimed were issue ads. But legal danger hovered. After Citizens United, though, the Kochtopus essentially sprouted a second set of tentacles. [Mayer, 2017, 304] This relatively minor interlude not only details how the out and out resistance to Obamacare, and by implication, all governmental welfare programs, was mounted; but also the impact of Citizens United on existing tax law. These combined efforts not only rewarded plutocrats’ avarice with even greater fortunes but also released new tides of funding, already at inconceivable levels, to ultra-conservative initiatives. This period serves as well as an incubator and proving ground for the practice of political dirty trickery already operative under Bill Clinton. This in 1987, when “a suspicious shell company called Triad Management Systems . . . paid more than $ 3 million for unusually harsh attack ads against Democratic candidates in twenty-nine races” (Mayer, 2017, 175). On Obama’s watch, in 2010, a controversy surrounding the construction of a “Ground Zero mosque” is stirred up, among other “media ventures . . . in part by money from Robert Mercer” [Mayer, 2017, 320]. And then, close to home, is Mayer’s account of the efforts to besmirch her and her August 2010 article, “Covert Operations,” in The New Yorker, which became the starting point for Dark Money. “Their aim, according to a well-informed source, was to counteract The New Yorker’s story by undermining me. ‘Dirt, dirt, dirt’ is what the source later told me they were digging for in my life. ‘If they couldn’t find it, they’d create it.’” [Mayer, 2017, 346].

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The Tea Party, a highly vociferous and visible, if not multitudinous poster group for extreme right-wing causes, notably galvanizing itself around the putatively disastrous consequences of social welfare programs, claims a special chapter in Mayer’s running tally of concerted libertarian projects. Its ideology, if it has one, is summarized in Paul Ryan’s 2011 budget plan, “The Path to Prosperity”: In the name of fixing Medicare, it shrank it to voucher-like “premium supports,” with which senior citizens could buy private medical insurance. It also transformed Medicaid into a tattered patchwork of state-run block grants while cutting overall funding, Further, it repealed the Medicaid expansion that was a part of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. At the same time, it reduced income taxes into two rates, cutting the top rate down to 25 percent—half of what it was when Ronald Reagan was elected . . . The most shocking aspect was its radical rewrite of America’s social contract. To reduce the deficit, Ryan prescribed massive cuts in government spending, 62 percent of which would come from programs for the poor, even though these programs accounted for about a fifth of the federal budget. According to a New York Times analysis of a similar, later version of Ryan’s budget, 1.8 million people would be cut off food stamps, 280,000 children would lose their school lunch subsidies, and 300,000 children would lose medical coverage. [Mayer, 2017, 361] Ryan’s home base was Wisconsin, scene of the outsized influencepeddling of the Bradley Foundation. It is also where “the first-term governor, Scott Walker, had vaulted to national stardom by enacting unexpectedly bold anti-union policies” [Mayer, 2017, 377]. Walker might not ordinarily have been marked for high office,” specifies Mayer, “but Americans for Prosperity, which had a large chapter in Wisconsin, had provided him with a field operation and speaking platform at its Tea Party rallies when he was still just the Milwaukee county executive. The Kochs’ political organization had been fighting the state’s powerful employee unions since 2007. [Mayer, 2017, 379]



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In an account constantly weaving in dark money’s underlying enablement and logistics (relaxed taxation for corporations, cover from public scrutiny, accrual of vast sums from an expanding universe of donors), Mayer’s roster of ignoble libertarian and Republican causes mounts up. I cannot in good conscience cap it until one last initiative, accusations of “voter fraud” as a pretext for tighter restrictions on voting, appears on our screen. In the buildup to the presidential election of 2012, Mayer recalls, in Ohio, a crucial swing state, such accusations were flying from both major parties. The alarmism “resulted in legislative initiatives aimed at requiring voters to produce official photo IDs in thirty-seven states between 2011 and 2012. It also led to a national outbreak of citizen watchdog groups.” One of these, the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, “persuaded local election authorities to send summonses to suspect voters requiring them to prove their legitimacy at public hearings” [Mayer, 2017, 403–4]. One such incriminated voter, Theresa Sharp from Cincinnati, fought back aggressively. But precedents—to the increased voting restrictions proposed or enacted in no less than nineteen states in the wake of Trump’s falsely contested 2020 presidential defeat—had been set. “Beneath the surface there was a money trail that led back to the usual deep-pocketed rightwing donors. To target Sharp, for instance, the Ohio Voter Integrity Project had relied on software supplied by a national nonprofit, True the Vote, which itself was funded in different ways by the Bradley Foundation” [Mayer, 2017, 404]. What emerges from this cavalcade of libertarian causes celèbres around which the United States far right united and galvanized its resources and energies is a grouping (Walter Benjamin would call it a “constellation”) of key themes, or leitmotifs, emerging through the recent short-circuiting of democratic traditions and procedures on the part of special interests and the struggles to shore up a beleaguered democracy. Stepping into the role of cultural historian, Benjamin decided that the jarring innovations of urban modernity as nineteenth-century Paris became its “capital” demanded an entirely new scope or “panorama.” This would be a way of organizing the telling historical factors of the day that somehow also conveyed the moment’s “feel” or mood. The constellation of keywords and persistent themes that crystallizes during Mayer’s wide-angle take on the emergence of libertarian ideology as a defining force in US politics and culture

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surely encompasses the following “stars”: (a) the shadowy figure of the donor, ambling out of the pages of Joseph Conrad, now more in the role of the “secret agent” than of the philanthropist who redirects a portion of their gain to the public good; (b) US tax law, whose manipulation was crucial to oligarchs’ claims on the profits accruing from interests increasingly indemnified against market fluctuations; (c) the self-containment of the oligarchical network, specific measures put in place to assure its fullest possible free hand and the covertness of its operations; (d) the usurpation of conventional governmental functions and the end-running of the traditional political parties by rampantly selfinterested individuals and their agents under the cover furnished by corporate organizations and law; (e) the devastating belatedness with which dark money’s accretion, organization, and underground influence came into view—to Democrats and indeed to all those disadvantaged by its buying power. This a clear consequence of (c); (f) at each way station since the 1970s, the sheer magnitude of the sums now disposable for purposes not only of influencing elections and the judiciary but also, where possible, for polarizing US culture and undermining the social contracts in which faith in fundamental sociopolitical processes and institutions is invested [Mayer, 2017, 128, 179, 251–2, 304, 316, 333, 464–5]. The impactful play of all the motifs just discussed is set in particularly sharp relief in one of Mayer’s most trenchant summations—of dark money’s sway looking into the presidential elections of 2012: While amassing one of the most lucrative fortunes in the world, the Kochs had also created an ideological assembly line justifying it. Now they had added a powerful political machine to protect it. They had hired top-level operatives, financed their own voter data bank, commissioned state-of-the-art polling, and created a fund-raising operation that enlisted of other wealthy Americans to help pay for it . . . Secrecy permeated every level of the operation. One former Koch executive, Ben Pratt, who became a chief operating officer of the voter data bank, Themis, used a quotation from Salvador Dali on his personal blog that could have served as the enterprise’s motto: “The secret of my influence is that it has always remained secret.” . . .



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This consolidation of power reflected the overall national trend of increasingly large and concentrated campaign spending by the ultra-wealthy in the post-Citizens United era. The spending, in turn, was a reflection of the growing concentration of wealth more generally in America. As a result, the 2012 election was a tipping point of sorts. Not only was it by far the most expensive election in the country’s history; it was the first time since the advent of modern campaign-finance laws when outside spending groups, including super PACs and tax-exempt nonprofit groups, flush with unlimited contributions from the country’s richest donors, spent more than $1 billion to influence federal elections. And when the spending on attack ads run by nonprofits was factored in, outside spending groups might well have outspent the campaigns and the political parties for the first time. The Koch network loomed as a colossus over this new political landscape. [Mayer, 2017, 384–5. Also see 457–9] In this panoramic overview of where US society already stood during the buildup to the Trump presidency, dark money’s major building blocks and destination points, on a meteoric journey with yet-unanswered consequences, are, to a remarkable degree, fully present and acco­unted for. * * * * * The question remains: what could a journalistic tour de force, one tracing major transformations in the landscape and conduct of US politics, remotely have to do with the stately, erudite cultural analyses, down to the etymological roots, where language ambushes its patent messages and meanings, pioneered decades ago by Jacques Derrida, my unforgettable teacher? The answer lies no farther away than the carpet of organizational names accruing, slowly, perhaps, but attaining the density and scale of long pile, at Dark Money’s feet. These names mark the conduits of the ultra-conservative donors’ largesse. They also serve as labels, particularly for those in the know, concealing from deployment to deployment, dark money’s impact statement. As we have seen, the organizations that these “social handles” designate vary widely, from stalwarts of US public opinion, with massive permanent staffs,

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operating costs, and budgets, to shadow organizations, possibly operating out of a mailbox. In my own, no doubt slightly inaccurate census of Dark Money, I count no less than ninety names of foundations, institutes, and causes that became the social infrastructure for the exercise of the oligarchs’ collective political will. Lifted out of Mayer’s expert narrative of their rise and activity, the organizational names become the etymological foreground to a cultural exposé as Derrida might conduct it; or, they become the lines in a massive Language Poem, as composed, say, by Charles Bernstein or Ron Silliman. By and large, the labels of dark money’s organizational conduits shout out their integrity and overall innocuousness. What could, after all, be objectionable about the “Freedom School,” the “Institute for Humane Studies,” the “Heritage Foundation,” the “Institute for Justice,” the “Institute for Liberty,” the “Landmark Legal Foundation,” “Freedom Partners,” or the “Wyoming Liberty Group” and the “North Carolina History Project”? These names are grounded in the ideals their organizations purportedly espouse, homespun and uncontroversial ones at that, all-American. By means of an elaborate euphemistic nomenclature, the US extreme right oligarchy has deflected if not erased, the impact of its vast expenditures. Its monographs, its conferences and staged events, its attack ads, and its inroads into electoral process and into the judiciary are themselves organized into linguistic groups or families. Some, as we have seen, tout impeccable ideals. Others boost business, the cornerstone, the very lifeblood of US life and culture: the “American Enterprise Institute,” “Americans for Prosperity,” “Citizens for a Sound Economy,” “American Future Fund,” “American Family Business Institute,” “Club for Growth,” the “Competitive Enterprise Institute,” the “National Federation for Independent Business,” the “BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism,” the “Young Entrepreneurs Academy,” and the “Freedom Partners Chamber of Congress.” Still other organizational nametags claim their integrity by association with irreproachable figures from public life: the “Hoover Institution,” the “James Madison Center for Free Speech,” the “Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity,” the “George C. Marshall Institute,” the “Sam Adams Alliance,” and “Heritage Action.” One such group, the “John Locke Foundation,” even rides a philosopher’s coattails. Others ground their activity in a commitment to political engagement, but one so broad-gauged



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as to remain completely uncontroversial: “American Legislative Exchange Council,” “Freedom Works,” “Institute for Liberty,” “Public Notice,” “Civitas Action,” “American Commitment,” “State Government Leadership Foundation,” and “State Policy Network.” Still other of these monikers are more pointed regarding their political motivation: “Americans for Tax Reform,” “Americans for Limited Government,” “Americans for Responsible Leadership” (the latter assuming that much current governance isn’t), the “Republican State Leadership Committee,” and the “Conservative Action Project.” Striking about the more explicit political organizations is how many of them claim Americanism on their own behalf. Some of the hashtags extol the value of philanthropy, in and of itself, as if the giving it coordinates proceeds in a neutral and disinterested way: “Philanthropy Roundtable,” “Donors Trust.” All these agencies, organs of influence, and social settings are threads in the expanding network of dark money. The register of allegorical names goes on and on. It is a treasure trove for bemused critical puzzlement, even in the arcane, slightly standoffish atelier of deconstruction. The tsunami of names is, on its own, a prepossessing cultural artifact. All the legerdemain, the euphemism, the dissimulation, the obfuscation, and the usurpation making up the story are there, embedded in the organizational titles. In view of the ends to which the money and influence monitored in Mayer’s account was and is still applied, none in this cascade of names is more satisfying than the ones forged in pure cynicism and irony. These titles are the enduring poetic/philosophical payoff to the story that Mayer has so meticulously gathered. In view of subsequent history, as narrated, ground level, by the newspapers, radio, and wire services, these names with an irreducibly symptomatic resonance surely include: “Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment,” “Citizens for a Sound Economy,” “Coalition to Protect Patient Rights,” “Americans for Job Security,” “Generation Opportunity,” “the Ohio Voter Integrity Project,” and “True the Vote.” The expenditure that went into grounding and sustaining these organizations, movements, and incursions into legislative, juridical, and electoral processes attained a truly sublime scale. As have the challenges they pose to the restoration of rule of law, disinterested political deliberation, and good faith in the US public sphere.

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April 1, 2018. Welcome to the Great Dismissal!

Well in advance of the Cancel Culture—current right-wing whipping boy to various proposed updating to dominant cultural icons, particularly those sustaining our nativist past—there was the Great Dismissal. We live in an age when feedback loops—among which number cultural criticism—have accelerated so rapidly that they even anticipate the events ostensibly precipitating them. This plasticity or time warping is merely one manifestation of the polymorphous bizarreness that has held the United States in thrall ever since the serious buildup to the presidential election of 2016. It is natural, one and a half years into Donald Trump’s term of office, to reach in quest of an epochal label to encapsulate a radically different set of assumptions under which scientists, researchers, and intellectuals conduct their work. For Walter Benjamin, synthesizing his most experimental, radically cubist text in the mid-1920s, the perfect period label for the turbulent moment was a ready-made. His “Imperial Panorama: A Guided Tour through the German Inflation” is the segment of his One-Way Street (Einbahnstraβe) most deeply riveted to then-current economic reality. My favorite moniker for the new configuration we all contend with is “The Great Dismissal.” It might also be, I suppose (after Freud or Nietzsche) “The Great Denial”; or possibly, “The Great Withdrawal”; or, with even less pizzazz, “The Great Repudiation.” Surely what is at stake here is a strident, belligerent recurrence of US (and perhaps even more widespread) anti-intellectualism at the base. It is not merely that scientific research, social-scientific monitoring, and theoretical speculation have been driven aground (or “held askance”). The current actuality for which “The Great Dismissal” is a blazing caption is one in which sustained intellectual labor has even lost the meager ground on the agenda of US public

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deliberation it held under prior administrations. The activities of research, evidence and language-based speculation, and critique have been repudiated, in and for themselves. They have been dismissed by the powers that be, on an unprecedented, totalistic scale. On the broader palette of its nuance, “dismissal” also encompasses labor relations, specifically denoting the cessation or termination of employment. It is in this sense as well that under the current US regime, both “official” arbiters of knowledge, current affairs, and information and “civilians,” indulging in pronounced and structured thoughtfulness, have been dismissed. “Dismissed!”— also what is declared at the end of every school day. Under these conditions, learning, growth, “morphogenic” evolution (Anthony Wilden); “autopoietic” bootstrapping in knowledge (Umberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Niklas Luhmann) stop dead in their tracks. Let the abuse that a vast list of public officials, notably James Comey, James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Anthony Fauci, Fiona Hill, Marie Yovanovitch, and Alexander Vindman suffered during the Trump presidency, often under the public spotlight, serve as a defining case in point. The most egregious dismissal to have taken span over this span may well have been of Captain Brett Crosier of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, who had requested that his aircraft carrier “be allowed to disembark in Guam so he could isolate 90 percent of his crew” in view of the fact that “more than 100 of them had tested positive for covid-19” [Joe Krulder, “The dismissal of a Navy captain over covid-19 says more about the Navy than Donald Trump,” WP, April 6, 2020]. This particular firing in fact originated with Thomas Modley, Trump’s acting Navy secretary, but it was completely of a piece with the administration’s overall “off with their heads” approach to whistleblowers and naysayers. The painful realization that they are, for the moment, out of school, is incumbent on scientists, Humanists, professional intellectuals, and avatars of public taste. They have been dismissed. An omnibus of factors in the public sphere has dismissed them. In Human Resource terms, this is tantamount to a major “status change.” It has been perpetrated upon these literacy workers, upon us. Spearheaded by Donald Trump and his most opportunistic Republican enablers, the body politic has, to one degree or another, acceded. The deep-seated precedents to this fundamental incredulity and radical impatience may have been a long time in the making,



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but the quasi-official demotion has happened without public consultation or consent. As readers, we need to follow out the broader anti-intellectual drift of the current regime. This is surely an architectural fundament of its operating system. In this centrality to an ideology of aggravated belligerence toward modulation in the deliberation of public affairs, the current quasi-official anti-intellectualism joins a nowuncontained plutocracy powered by corporate mechanisms; the daily re-manufacture of the reality within which the public gauges its options; the dissolution of historical, political, and cultural memory through (among other factors) our rampant absorption in “real time” devices and media; the graphic apocalyptic vision common, in fact, to Left and Right, strong-arming thinking, at both extremes, toward urgency and absolutism; and, a panoply of “polarizing filters” preempting productive discussion of socioeconomic and ecological options among the people most crucial to setting a course into the future, namely ourselves. (Among the most undercover of agents in this multi-polarization stands the creeping professionalism that places entire classes and strategic social functions in contact only with themselves—society as a motor engaging multiple whirling tautologies. As divisive a force as rampant retreat under professional bubbles may be, this does not obviate the glaring need under current conditions for rekindled class-consciousness.) As is driven home by congressional special elections in Alabama, Pennsylvania, and most recently, Ohio, the two-party US political system is hopelessly deadlocked. So polarized have competing worldviews become that the electorate proves systematically incapable, at the ballot box at least, of making decisions. The US public, mesmerized as it is by the televised brew of crime fantasies, professional sports, and reality TV taking up a disproportionate share of our imaginary life that it can only treat electoral deliberation as a baseball game down to the 15th inning; an NFL divisional or league title in triple overtime. The most compelling recent decision that the US public has made regarding such core issues as immigration, healthcare, taxation, the widespread availability of deadly weapons, and the overall course of the nation (muddled social democracy versus aggravated plutocratic libertarianism) has been to waffle before any decisive consensus on these issues. A vast share of the commentary that has ensued from the presidential election has been driven by multiple incredulities:

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that Trump could have appealed to so many voters; that a politics of ressentiment among (even millennial) voters convinced that the status quo was passing them by was already deeply enough entrenched to decide the results; that Hilary played so badly in swing states where she was expected to reap her share of popular support; that a political system tricked by measures long conceived and implemented through conservative think tanks and institutes, seemingly tilted in Trump’s favor at every turn. It can be no accident, then, that the commentary issued by the pundits left to deliberate on a political status quo both hopelessly muddled and aggravated to the point of mania, is divided, even contradictory. And, it turns out, the vast preponderance of the prognostications regarding the nation’s short-term political future go back to issues of rhetoric and communications between progressives and hyper-Conservatives. Perhaps the pivotal one of these, still unresolved as of this writing, is the extent to which it is incumbent—or not—on spokespeople of the Left to modulate their rhetoric in their outreach to Trump supporters, other Republicans, and “undecideds” who might reverse the current trend of wholesale dismissal, both of long-cherished ideals and intellectuals. It is furthermore impossible for scientists, researchers, Humanists, and critics not to hear, subliminally or not, in the current journalistic deliberations, the collateral debate on their worthiness and relevance. Fundamental questions regarding the valuation of intellectual striving are embedded in the inquiries leaping out of the opinion newspapers and websites: whether the Democrats will retake the Senate in November’s midterm elections, or maybe even Congress. Whether the nation can regain the high ground conferred by a fairly consistent commitment to social welfare; by an interventionist posture in international affairs based on in our society’s past diplomatic, educational, judicial, scientific, commercial, and administrative achievement. Let the New York Times’s team of opinion writers furnish the sample. From Charles M. Blow’s broadside of November 23, 2016, “No, Trump, We Can’t Just Get Along” to Thomas L. Friedman’s recent “Keep Up the Blanket Coverage of Trump. It Hurts Him” (NYT, August 8, 2018), a significant component of the Times’s opinion staff has not cut the Trump administration a centimeter’s slack. Its coverage and analysis of the President’s legerdemain with truth and reality, his unapologetic promotion of the oligarchic



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class and its interests, and the overarching under-handedness of his tactics have been unrelenting since even before Day # 1. The sheer continuity of the transcript of the administration’s excesses and misdeeds will itself become a factor as official immunities fade away and juridical accountability sets in (even in the face of larding the bench at all levels, all the way to the Supreme Court, with judicial sympathizers to the regime). The fourth estate will have played the dominant role in the establishment and maintenance of this inventory—no mean feat given the administration’s appropriating Fox News as a de facto publicity agent, its privileging even more tenuous news outlets, and its explicit antipathy to news organizations maintaining professional standards of journalism and journalistic ethics. Under the New York Times’s umbrella, Michelle Goldberg, Gail Collins, and Maureen Dowd have joined Blow in spirited, courageous, and unrelenting calling out of an administration, and its supporters, who have now afforded unprecedented credence in US public life to racism, xenophobia, sexism, and other biases, misinformation, and betrayals—to sovereignty itself and the most noble of our national traditions. On the day after the election (NYT, “America Elects a Bigot,” November 9, 2016), Charles M. Blow signals, in no uncertain terms: Mr. Trump will become this country’s 45th president. For me it is a truly shocking fact, a bitter pill to swallow. I remain convinced that this is one of the worst possible people who could be elected president. I remain convinced that Trump has a fundamentally flawed character and is literally dangerous for world stability and injurious to America’s standing in that world. There is so much that I can’t fully comprehend. . . . My thoughts are now with the immigrant families he has threatened to deport and the Muslims he has threatened to bar and the women he has demeaned and those he is accused of assaulting and the disabled whom he apparently has no problem mocking. My thoughts are with the poor people afflicted with poor health who were finally able to receive medical insurance coverage, sometimes lifesaving coverage, and the fear they must feel now that there is a president committed to repealing and replacing it . . . and who has a pliable Congress at his disposal.

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When I think of all these people and then think of all the people who voted to make this man president—and those who didn’t vote, thereby easing the way for his ascension—I cannot but feel some measure of anger. I must deal with that anger. I don’t want to wrestle it to the ground; I want to harness it. Earlier this summer, Michelle Goldberg responded, not with contrition, to a spate of episodes in which prominent Trump administration officials were subjected to displays of shunning when they ventured into public space. In her “A Crisis of Democracy, Not Manners” (NYT, June 25, 2018), Goldberg is not constrained by civility and decorum when she ponders the less-than-hospitable welcome elicited in restaurants by Kirstjen Nielsen, overseer of family separations along the Mexican border, and Sarah Huckabee Saunders. Last year, the white nationalist Richard Spencer was kicked out of his Virginia gym after another member confronted him and called him a Nazi. This incident did not generate a national round of hand-wringing about the death of tolerance, perhaps because most people tacitly agree that it’s O.K. to shun professional racists. It’s a little more complicated when the professional racist is the president of the United States. The norms of our political life require a degree of bipartisan forbearance. But treating members of Donald Trump’s administration as ordinary public officials rather than pariahs does more to normalize bigotry than exercising alongside a white separatist. . . . Naturally, all this [incidents of Nielsen and Saunders’s public shunning] has led to lots of pained disapproval from selfappointed guardians of civility. A Washington Post editorial urged the protesters to think about the precedent they are setting. “How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?” it asked. Of course, this is not hard to imagine at all, since abortion opponents have assassinated abortion providers in their homes and churches. The Roman Catholic Church has shamed politicians who support abortion rights. . . .



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I’m somewhat agnostic on the question of whether publicly rebuking Trump collaborators is tactically smart. Progressives by the tens of thousands will have derived crucial affirmation and emotional sustenance at a moment of disquiet and disillusionment with our democracy from such dispassionate, frank appraisal. I know I have; just as Frank Rich’s columns and articles for NYT and NYR did so much to sustain me through the differently unsettling years of Bush fils. NYT’s opinion writers approach the very crux of the complexity embedded in the current national predicament precisely when they take on the daunting objective confronting midterm political rhetoric. These are, to say the least, troubled waters, beset by new double messages with each new week of political turmoil.

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August 15, 2020. Co-lateral Dommages

To my brothers & sisters, Corona, E. Elmhurst, fallen in earth not yet consecrated, sanctity, à la Passchendaele, Somme of battles, yet still our blood— unconditionally. However our Democracy, now rigged & perverted, Democracy once proclaimed and blessed amid upheaval, older brother to all of us toying, contending with poetry, elder sibling Walt & model. 1. Reduced to plasma screen, unitary field, what I’m allowed to engage with, everything Real (& then some)— it all checks in, instantaneously: communiqués in earnest; head lines issuing, remote steppes, collective unconscious; benign wishes, tinged pornographic; special deals, razorblades & mouse traps; florentine scandals & sandals.

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Line from nowhere alights, my spread sheet: “MyExcess: Join the Survey. U must tolerate cookies.” 2. Newly strewn, shallow graves, brothers, sisters, Astoria, Bed-Stuy, long-awaiting you: by-product, decades, feeding frenzy, omnivorous extraction, goods, profits, power to subjugate, dis enfranchise, gilt-framed, procedural im punity. Infinitely more sinister than fire-truck, not entirely urgent, U lavished, yr nephew; modest stockpile, xtra undies U set aside, case of emergency. Long attenuated, sublimely sinister, strip-mining the soul, open pit, discernment warped beyond revival. Social contracts thought weight bearing girders, detonated, by fiat. Reasonable expectations: bio-political citizenship; public schooling, literate fundamentals. Protection,



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loose guns, looser shooters— obliterated, single news cycle! Revolution by belligerence, exasperation; mass lobotomy, express delivery, social media; unchecked pro nouncements rising in fugue, delusional; involuted skeins, 2x self-aggrandizing logic. No crime, insanity, these U.S. Negotiating capitalism’s forbidding towers, cruising campus, I stumble upon the hunting ground, narcissist personality. Kernberg, 1970s. New character on the block. Borderline. Abrupt swings, engrained insecurity → bizarre megalomania. Revised format, subjectivity: leaping into flight, Birdman the model, flip-outs umpteen x daily. Character without character, driven, insatiable envy. Man fitted out to function actor to role. Perfect— capitalist tool. Stately cargo ships, overladen, bumper to bumper, identical, fleet skirting Venice, negotiating

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lagoon, witnessed, backbay Grand Canal, Spring ’97, far far too wide a berth to shoe horn historical channels, long-distance trade, once upon a commodity— when puny sails edged out these waters. Tankers glide by, in silence, thumb their prows, modern city-state, its very paradigm. Back from oblivion, the Doges. Stumbled out the morgue, super annuated political configurations, domination, thought safely archived, inaccessible warp of time. Direct 2 U— 1215 AD. New Global Lords. Zombie vestiges, medieval aristocracy, reruns, history’s horror-show, preserved—cocktail of the depassé in full brutality, flamboyantly posited, Deleuze/Guattari, borschtbelt duo, Montparnasse, Paris. Any schmo these days ingenious enuf— to wield a tap, a sluice, whatever gauge, to these SUBLIME flows, rare minerals, what have you, critical



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shortages, advanced technologies deemed INDISPENSABLE— prances in self-certainty— with or wo ball & chain. Wealth endlessly accruing—cash, shares, influence, bitcoin— accounted, administered, multinational corporate ENTITIES, bolting offshore, always. Beholden less & less, anything deliberate, say government, social agency, community. And any payback— prominent display— museum, hospital lobby, transpires thru magnanimity, nobility’s heraldic emblem, Philanthropy— Epoch of the oily gark. Heralding barbarism’s eternal return. Welcome back, Charlemagne! 4. U count yr Honor yr distinction. Tell me another. Yr honor too drains Gaia, valyous U profess, levitating U one nano standard deviation beyond swarm, grasping, stampeding human folk—desperate to distraction, yr neighbors.

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Honor stilting yr screw poles, whichever addiction yr personal mantra: power, sex, $, getting high, being pure, intimacy— all virtual states, grandeur, expansion, sloping down → substances— dependency’s hollow cousins. Honor, sexual probity, abstinence, transgression, honor, adultery, “marriage, true minds,” honor, advanced degrees, logical acuity, honor, drink: “Bottle cannot kill him . . . head, bloodied but unbowed,” yes, & “still captain of his soul” (Bateson). Honor, vengeance, daughter’s dishonor, honor, being white man, spreading carte blanche murder, honor, proud gun owner. Honor, imaginary suicide, secreted, w vintage



AUGUST 15, 2020

treasures, rear extremity of closet— breakwater, shame’s abrupt tsunami. “Give it up!” Mr. K. notoriously noted. 5. All leading back→ Cycle of Reproduction—sacred mystery, carnal joy & Spirit once cavorted, imbued w species’ fondest fantasies: prolongation, creative mutation. Midstream we’ve managed, en demic social un raveling— turning women into opportunities, some bonko twist, Protestant Ethic, laced with statistics, applied→office productivity. Urging on seduction, college sport, cottage industry, tourism, best laid reservations. These the carnal spoils, rewards— service extraordinaire, systems of accumulation,

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multi-tiered—tasks duly posted, spreadsheets collapsing years. 6. Side lined all, all in whispers from the wings, pronouncements— issued in high alert ←nothing less than a seer! Observing proper distancing, of course— impeccably. Hereby nominate myself—prophet of pastrami, scourge to the arteries, dripping, fat & peppercorns, lightning rod, human stupor, rebounding from fatality’s deepest recesses & piled high— surrealist cloudbanks in the sky. In what canon 2 come or B will this legend B enshrined?​



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FIGURE 10.1 Co-lateral Dommages: Homeless Man, 17th and Chestnut Streets, Philadelphia, December 13, 2021. Photograph by author.

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December 31, 2020. What on Earth to Do with the Bodies?

Approaching 400,000 deaths as the pandemic ravages the nation, and our society is awash in bodies. A glut of human corpses, in many instances stockpiled and cold-stored in trailers until proper arrangements can be made—unprecedented. As the papers and social media drive home every day, we are a hornet’s nest of political and ideological contraries. The bodies alone furnish compelling proof that US culture has not dispensed with organized religion. The vast majority of these bodies go on to receive some form of religion-sanctioned announcement, scripted communal enactment, and rites of burial. The precise role that religion plays in US society on the cusp of 2021 is, however, an issue very much up for grabs, worthy of the most earnest deliberation. For all the efforts on the part of various denominations to enshrine certain of their precepts into state or federal law (e.g., rejection of abortion, “birth gender” as the absolute determination of sex, one weekday or another as the “official” Sabbath), the contemporary United States is far from a theocracy. The downbeat in our Constitution is on open-ended and unconstrained multiplicity of religious beliefs and practices. When Walter Benjamin, in his consummate Baudelaire essay, observed that capital-driven modernity, as it emerged in the Paris of the Second Empire (1852–70), delivered the death knell to what he called the “ritual calendar,” he was referring to the precarity of close-knit religious communities under an emergent industrial and commercial nexus. He was suggesting that after cities like London, Paris, and New York industrialized, organized religion, even Christianity, no longer set the tempo for the daily and weekly unfolding of events. Religious communities observing a yearly cycle of festivals and rites at a remove from what established itself as the “secular” calendar, even one, by the way, “naturalizing” key holidays in one dominant religion or another, ran the risk of distancing themselves from the

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societal mainstream in crucial other respects—say in subscribing to public education or the practicality of entering certain commercial and professional pursuits. So even if the current prevalent version of secularity in the United States is jumbled, and even if our federal system lays down precious little in the way of dependable firewall “between Church and state,” organized religion does not set the calendar, on a 24/7/365 basis, for the operation of commerce, industry, and the delivery of human services. All the more so in the digital age. (These operations have by now been relocated, to an extraordinary degree, to what might be termed “functional electronic eternity.”) And yet, as the Covid-19 crisis has thrown into sharp focus, organized religion remains an unavoidable feature in our everyday landscape. In what sense could this be? The unassailable province of organized religion in the contemporary United States, I would argue, has undergone, like every other multifaceted social activity, specialization; it has shifted from the sphere of workaday communal practices to that of transitional life events, what French anthropology called rites de passage. Birth, establishment of permanent conjugal relations (it could also be called marriage), death. Possibly thrown in: naming, very early in life, and confirmation later on, of a definitive affiliation with one religious denomination or community or another. These earthshaking events represent crises, intensified by “fear and trembling,” as much as milestones. No doubt still for millions, attendance at monthly or weekly religious services (or ones even more often) is edifying and inspiring. It solidifies affiliation with a life-affirmative and sustaining religious community and its civic outcroppings. But in terms of what keeps US religion rolling onward—palpably—such attendance and membership have become optional features. With homing instinct, we about-face on the trail leading back to religion, to the hymns, proverbs, and precepts we learned as children—somehow undiminished in vividness—every time there’s a corpse to dispose of, Covid-related or not. And dependably— far more so than politicians, the entertainment industry, the stock market—religion is still there. In all its poetry and music. In the script it has devised, over centuries, for channeling overwhelming private affect into some communal formulation, acknowledgment, reconciliation. To withstand the tremors of our grief, to signpost a vaster reality than the local neighborhood of our suffering, to disarm the self-recrimination occasioned by survival and persistence.

August 30, 2018. Midterm Enigmas for Progressives

The question, in a nutshell, faced by New York Times opinion writers of refreshing diversity at the midterm reboot runs as follows: how do the Democrats retrofit their arguments such that they (1) regain, especially in swing states and entrenched red strongholds, their momentum in militating for the interests of working people increasingly marginalized, socially as well as economically; also, reclaim the moral high ground of empathic vision and purpose within the US political system? But (2) how do they also manage to eschew and purge their message of any note of cultural superiority or condescension only fanning the flames of belligerence among Trump supporters, including those who had once voted for Obama and/or supported Bernie? As has already become apparent in the first part of this expanding clipboard, profound philosophical attitudes are embedded in practical encomia regarding strategy and rhetoric. It may well turn out that the prognostications best attuned to human psychology, particularly crowd psychology, are the ones most receptive, at the back door, to what I’ve broached as the Great Dismissal—the repudiation of rigorous investigation and critique as conducted in whichever long-standing disciplinary atelier. Ironically, the most perspicacious commentary, reports issued by the writers most receptive to complexity, ends up the most tinged by suspicion toward the unapologetic application of intellectual standards and rigor toward the increasingly tenuous logic and claims issuing from Trump and his minions. Welcome as well, then, to Logocentrism, 2018! Nicolas Kristof, already within the first six months of the new government, put a fine point on this situation as he challenged his readers: So by all means stand up to Trump, point out that he’s a charlatan and resist his initiatives. But remember that social

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progress means winning over voters in flyover country, and that it’s difficult to recruit voters whom you’re simultaneously castigating as despicable, bigoted imbeciles. Commentators of various stripes wasted little time in taking up this conundrum: how to woo the very voters who give rise to righteous anger on the part of so many alongside Charles M. Blow? But when the pundits did, they found themselves willy-nilly enmeshed in the national double message vis-à-vis intellectual striving: ultimately directed at the scientists, Humanists, and researchers who both augment and rigorously test the manifestations of the truth as they emerge in context. By April 6, 2017 [NYT], Kristof is floating his “Most Unpopular Idea: Be Nice to Trump Voters.” With a humane exhortation to empathy as his rallying cry, Kristof specifies: One problem with the Democratic anger is that it stereotypes a vast and contradictory group of 63 million people. Sure, there were racists and misogynists in their ranks, but that doesn’t mean that every Trump voter was a white supremacist. . . . Of course, millions of Trump voters were members of minorities or had previously voted for Barack Obama. . . . The blunt truth is that if we care about a progressive agenda, we can’t simply write off 46 percent of the electorate. If there is to be movement on electoral reform, on woman’s health, on child care, on inequality . . . then progressives need to win more congressional and legislative seats around the country. To win over Trump voters isn’t normalizing extremism, but a strategy to combat it. Hand in hand with the appeal for empathy among progressives, at least according to the psychoanalytical theory of object relations, goes stringent misgivings toward superiority and condescension, the idioms of entrenched grandiosity. And the presumptions toward superior intelligence, lucidity, and perspicacity among Democrats and progressives serve not only Kristof but also, at different points, Frank Bruni, David Leonhard, and Bret Stephens, all seasoned op-ed page writers, as touchstones for dire prescriptions regarding viable political rhetoric at this juncture. Yet the politics of intelligence is already palpably at play in Kristof’s early salvo in this sub-literature: Maybe we need more junior year “abroad” programs that send liberals to Kansas and conservatives to Massachusetts.



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Hatred for Trump voters also leaves the Democratic Party more removed from working-class pain. For people in their 50s, mortality rates for poorly educated whites have soared since 2000 and are now higher than for blacks at all education levels. . . . Democrats didn’t do enough to address this suffering ... How acute of Kristof to point out that the United States has become so estranged from itself, to the point of needing foreign study programs to “resolve” the skewed images of reality—urban/ industrial versus “Big Sky”—in its collective viewfinder! Yet embroidered in his account, dismissive progressives have almost perforce undergone formal higher education and been credentialed; they witness current politics through the lens of frills lavished upon them such as junior year programs abroad. In negotiating the treacherous tides of political deliberation in an age of “dark money” and unverifiable social media, the training attained by the educated class is as much liability as beacon. It is precisely this train of thought that could prompt Gerard Alexander, a political scientist at UVA to taunt, albeit didactically, in his guest column, “Liberals, You’re Not as Smart as You Think” [NYT, May 12, 2018]. This title is a strong candidate for an overall moniker to the particular subliterature of opinion journalism over which the current post pauses. The pivotal Baudelairean irony of dandies on the verge (rather, in the wake) of a pratfall, of an elite stupefied and held prey within its privilege, tempers the admonition tendered by David Leonhardt on the first anniversary of Trump’s ascension to the presidency. On January 30, 2018 [NYT], he advises us on “How Trump’s Critics Should Respond”: Not all of Trump’s outrages can or should be ignored. . . . But people who are disturbed by his presidency should keep reminding themselves of the big goal here: persuading Trump supporters and Trump agnostics that his presidency is damaging the country. . . . The trouble of constantly disparaging him—as a person and as the Worst President Ever—is that it doesn’t win over many Americans. Hillary Clinton’s campaign took a version of this approach in many television ads, and it wasn’t a crazy strategy at the time, given how unpresidential Trump was and is. But given the campaign’s outcome, the strategy doesn’t seem worth rerunning.

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Leonhardt’s measured circumspect, in the aforementioned formulations, is itself the response to the strident certainty prompting him too to issue danger signals. Yet it is in the columns of Frank Bruni, notable over the years for the outspokenness with which he excoriates sexism, racism, and the abuse of power in its multifarious forms, where the dynamic (but also excruciating) tension between the competing exigencies of mass psychology and intellectual striving come to a head. By June 2018, Bruni is not nearly so indulgent as Goldberg when it comes to flamboyantly shaming Trump officials: It’s possible that public shunning will have no effect on voters’ feelings and decisions. . . . But it’s also possible that public shaming intensifies an ambient ugliness that sours more Trump skeptics than Trump adherents, who clearly made peace with ugliness a while back. [“Public Shaming Feels Good. That’s No Reason to Do It,” NYT, June 26, 2018] And in his response to such anti-Trump grandstanders as Robert De Niro and Samantha Bee, Bruni stresses, above all other values, progressives’ securing the high moral ground in the pursuit of their political aspirations: I get that you’re angry. I’m angry too. But anger isn’t a strategy. Sometimes it’s a trap. When you find yourself spewing four-letter words, you’ve fallen into it. . . . You’re right that Donald Trump is a dangerous and deeply offensive man, and that restraining and containing him are urgent business. You’re wrong about how to go about doing that. . . . When you answer name-calling with name-calling and tantrums with tantrums, you’re not resisting him. You’re mirroring him. You’re not diminishing him. You’re demeaning yourselves. Many voters don’t hear your arguments or the facts, which are on your side. They just wince at the din. [“How to Lose the Midterms and Re-elect Trump,” NYT, June 13, 2018] The responses of such writers as Kristof, Bruni, and Leonhardt are hardly categorical. Coexisting with their articulate dismay at how far our political system, civic ethos, and standing in the international community have degenerated is a pragmatic calculation of what it would take for Democrats to retake the Senate and maybe even



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Congress. The question of the rhetoric it would require to address Trump voters’ concerns in pivotal districts and states, convincing them to cast their votes otherwise this November and in 2020 is absolutely relevant and of central concern. The encomia of selfrestraint on the part of strident progressives hail from this rhetorical climate zone. Those who have been pondering the intricacies of theoretical deliberation these past several decades—distributed as these inquiries are over a spectrum of half a dozen or so truly telling paradigms—can surely imagine a political system more sensitive and responsive to contemporary sociopolitical, technological, and cultural developments than the one in which the Democratic Party is, by default, the available venue for political empathy and progress. As we lurch into a predicament in which our most progressive political commentators, in their calls for moderation and restraint, begin to echo, faintly, perhaps, or on a more moderate note, the rabid anti-intellectualism shared by plutocratic autocracy, libertarian anomie, and fundamentalist theocratic repression, we need to remember that, however we have been impacted by the academy, we also belong to a much broader collectivity, the sphere of literacy workers. Under the bizarre, Philip K. Dick illumination issuing from a still very strange—altered as well as alternate—“Trumpworld,” it is more urgent than ever for us to explore and articulate the commonalities of the professoriate and other university workers with journalists, librarians, school teachers and administrators, art curators, editors, theatrical directors, dramaturges, and managers, editors, therapists, and clinicians of various stripes, and even attorneys (in their capacity as “counselors”). What this rather amorphous conglomerate of vocations holds in common is the dissemination of literacy—the act of inculcating others into the articulate, differentiating, and modulating capabilities within the panoply of language systems and social codes. The combined effect of these varied roles and functions is nothing other than the distribution of empowerment— outfitting neighbors to full cultural enfranchisement. Though barely articulate let alone mobilized or organized, the manifold of literacy workers is something of a class. This may not quite be the “classical” social classes that to Marx were organizational vestiges (and models) of time-eternal aristocracy, feudal hierarchies, medieval guilds, and modern manufacture and

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professions. Yet literacy workers, extending from distinguished professors to beleaguered school teachers and theater managers, form a class. No political party—or governmental organization founded on parties—can fully reflect or implement their collective vocation and interests. It is from the perspective of the aggregation of these workers that no conceivable political prognosticator can get the exigencies of open-ended, rigorous, disinterested, and completely explicit scientific, humanistic, and critical investigation quite right. In the eternal shuffleboard of class prestige, it is the literacy workers, under the Great Dismissal, who have taken the big hit. There is no question that the social impact of such an aggregate, encompassing millions of colleagues, could be notable—could it only link in its diverse segments, loop its communications laterally, and begin to militate as a collectivity. In the interim, we—the diversified literacy workers making it up—need to follow responsible journalists’ suit in saying it as best we can; in fulfilling the most socially edifying potentials embedded in the languages and operating systems that we master; in articulating to our neighbors the ills that have beset our society; and in exemplifying in our outreach something that we know on a deep level could be vastly better.

December 8, 2021. Partisans of Writing. Tobin Smith

Dark Money, for all its in-depth investigation into the social and financial networks that secured conservative chokeholds on certain elections and dimensions of legislative, juridical, and electoral process across the country, does not assimilate the full degree of the transformations in technology and the media concurrent with its coverage. To be sure, there are glancing references to Fox News and the unprecedented political body English it delivers by conflating with TV journalism a brand of opinion so tilted, even parodic, that by many accounts, it doubles as entertainment [Mayer, 2017, 210–1, 224–5, 316]. But Mayer leaves to other chroniclers the big picture of how Fox News, under ownership by the Murdoch family, as a model for such outlets as Breitbart News, One America News, Parler, Newsmax, and the Gateway Pundit renounced informing the public in favor of proselytizing it. In his Foxocracy: Inside the Network’s Playbook of Tribal Warfare, Tobin Smith furnishes needed insider perspective on how the ideology and policy incubated in dark money’s institutes, academic strongholds, conferences, and publications are implemented, on the TV and video screen, to a growing constituency of viewers, and on an everyday basis. It is to Smith’s enormous credit that in keeping with his deepseated sense of journalistic integrity, he abandoned his lucrative roles as a Fox News Channel contributor and guest editor, regularly appearing on opinion panels as an economics expert, in favor of assuming the mantle of a reformer and activist, above all addressing contemporary broadcast and media practices and ethics. His fourteen years in regular and “special” Fox News broadcasting place him in an unassailable position both to report on its avowed values and broadcast strategies and to analyze their effectiveness and audience impact. What endows Foxocracy with a good measure of its historical moment and indispensability to the current debate

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is the fact that during the Trump presidency, Fox News functioned as a de facto house organ of the White House [Smith, 2019, 30, 42, 71, 152–4]. It still plays this role in relation to the remains of various myths and narratives that Trump seeded, and to the movers and shakers positioning themselves to replace Trump if they don’t succeed in reincarnating him. Fox News became the closest to an official governmental propaganda arm that the nation has ever had to contend with. Also deeply striking about Foxocracy is that Smith places its entire repository of background resources—his former position, his proximity to high Fox News executives and producers, his adeptness in the winning techniques of TV and print journalism, all at the service of his readers in his effort to correct social-psychological devastation engendered by broadcast news; to rekindle its fairness and objectivity. The book genre that Smith selects as the medium for effectuating these objectives is, more than any other, the self-help book. It is plain upon reading Foxocracy that Smith is sincere in his wish to “detoxify,” if not absolutely reorient the entrenched denizens of what he terms the “Foxhole.” “Don’t believe me? The American Psychological Association’s recent Stress in AmericaTM poll shows the United States at its highest level of stress ever. My message to you is this—I do care, and I know how to detoxify many of those 80 million people. But clearly much of this stress comes from the emotional power of Fox News’s huge digital mind share in Retro and parts of Metro America in 2019” [Smith, 2019, 36]. The voice that Smith assumes throughout his delivery is sympathetic, low key, and familiar. It’s the tone one uses when helping a friend sort out a complicated predicament. Smith drives his points home with the benefit of techniques deriving from his professional training and background. These include his folksy idiom, writing at times in bullet points, breaking up his argument, and offsetting transitional passages, especially those positing definitions, in boldface textwindows, a design borrowed from textbooks. Smith underscores his key terms by recombining them multiple times in an incantation exported to multiple contexts; in this way, their significance becomes at once broadened and entrenched. This vocabulary includes “the Foxhole spiral,” “tribal identity programming,” “porn,” “addiction,” “kayfabe,” “grift,” “media warfare,” and “adrenaline/dopamine rushes.” Not unlike an effectively deliberate philosopher, Smith greets his readers with an unfamiliar vocabulary



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in the understanding that his experience and insight will adhere as they adapt to its strangeness. Smith’s analysis of how a significant portion of the electorate, starting, but not stopping, with white senior citizens attuned to what he calls “Retro American culture” could be transformed into a staunch and volatile “base,” accepting and militating for all things Trump, is most notable for its comprehensiveness. It spans the entire trajectory from the public already in position to be galvanized by Fox News, its deep-seated values, aspirations, and resentments that movers and shakers including Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes knew well to play to. From this starting position, Smith’s “coverage” extends to the methodology by which the libertarian and at times conspiracy-tinged ideologies developed over the course of Dark Money could be successfully sold to target TV audiences that then proliferated. Smith’s exposé also does not shy away from a geography of the media-political universe that Fox News has left in its wake; and, by implication, from the ensuing social landscape in which objective news and information, confidence in public institutions, debate grounded in the best currently available scientific and social-scientific findings, an autonomous judiciary, and electoral process monitored for its fairness, once the foundations of US democracy, now face daunting challenges. As a “full follow through” analysis of one of the predominant current news media, Foxocracy becomes a single, but highly compelling case study for Shoshanah Zuboff’s overarching impact statement, The Age of Surveillance Media. In this magisterial and indeed systematic work, she details US society’s largely unchecked stampede into digital media and culture. By no means stretching the literary creds in an overall astonishing erudition, Zuboff aptly characterizes the current uneasy state of affairs as a “Faustian pact” [Zuboff, 2019, 171, 219, 339]. Here, tech and software giants, social media, and a host of the apps that they spawned, offer hitherto inconceivable services and convenience through an array of devices, many as inconspicuous as cellphones and watches— surgical implants loom on the horizon—only in exchange for “behavioral surplus”—the most personal, intimate data concerning our circumstances, habits, associations, and communications ultimately of use in marketing plans and other corporate strategies of accumulating profit.

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Look—the original audience engagement thesis when I was working inside Fox News between 2000 and 2013 was “what if we took the most emotionally powerful right-wing partisan issues of the day presented on right-wing talk radio and amplified their emotional impact by using Roger Ailes’s proven emotional manipulation format he pioneered for televised attack ads?”. . . No one had ever done that before. And because people watching TV got to see the facial cues of their beloved TV host/ partisan blood brother protagonist and the faces and ethnicity of their hated liberal antagonists in fully scripted and rigged outcome “opinion debate” segments, the emotional impact was ten times more powerful than radio. Of course we have had radio and TV partisan attack ads in America for decades—every two years. Fox News co-founder and tribal identity porn guru Roger Ailes’s former TV attack ad shop would create, test, and roll out TV attack ads to carpetbomb their right-wing client’s opponent. That opponent could be another conservative in a primary race, but most likely their target was a liberal in a congressional, senate, or presidential race. They used weaponized TV and radio ads during the campaign—but saved the most emotionally powerful TV ads for a saturation bombing run in the last few weeks of any campaign. [Smith, 2019, 37] From its downbeat in a folksy direct pitch—“Look—,” this exemplary passage indicates that while Smith, as few other commentators do, insists on addressing his audience in the broadest current idiom of US media, he is highly conversant in the deep underlying sociopolitical, media, and to a surprising degree, psychological preconditions of the current cultural deadlock. As a historian of the media in which he too has played, Smith has carefully traced the formats and tactics of Fox News back to attack ads whose decades-old roots were in talk radio. This passage sets out a number of the core themes—explored in meticulous journalistic detail—figuring throughout Smith’s analysis. The “carpet bombing” of opposed candidates by Roger Ailes’s original attack ads opens up the intriguing notion of an unspoken Civil War, waged in the name of extremist political positions, within the counterintuitive parameters of the civil sphere. Smith pushes us to acknowledge that this protracted conflict, with all the traumatic



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psychological damage inflicted by “analog” wars, has been conducted over the waves and on the TV screen for decades. Long in advance of the massive assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Smith’s overall sobriquet for this all-out, subliminal mass conflict is “tribal warfare,” per his subtitle for the book: Inside the Playbook of Tribal Warfare. Pro football happens to be the national sport phenomenon most closely simulating the rhythm, pace, and concussion between troops, at least on the conventional battlefield. So numerous and complex are the tactics demanded by football that each team—in this particular sport—was forced to compile its own “playbook.” To the degree that NFL football aestheticizes strategic violence on the ground, Smith’s invoking the sport underscores how deeply extreme political representation and misrepresentation have penetrated into the previously innocuous domain of popular entertainment. Indeed, the Trump presidency consolidated, if it were not obvious before, the US public’s insistence on politics as entertainment. Glancing though it may seem, the previous representative passage from Smith’s analysis bespeaks considerable depth both in the sociological and psychological spheres. In the former, Smith goes to considerable lengths in explaining the dynamics of what he terms “tribal warfare.” He explicitly inquires into the “mental and physical collateral damage” inflicted by the billions of collective hours spent in consuming “Fox News’s emotional weapons of mass cultural/ political destruction” [Smith, 2019, 21]. It is indeed intriguing to think of the components or constituencies of closed off, warring interest groups that US society has become as “tribes.” This in place of religions, ethnicities, professions, and indeed the most difficult and elusive category of all, classes. (Of course, what Smith ultimately signifies by “tribal” draws on the categorical thinking practiced in all these social milieus.) In extrapolating the current prevalent tribal mindset in US culture, Smith draws significantly on Richard Hofstadter’s political theory, particularly as invoked by Robert Brent Taplin, an emeritus UNC professor, on historynewsnetwork​ .or​g. Taplin particularly keyed into the broader cultural imprints of fundamentalist thinking, as Hofstadter invoked it in such a work as The Paranoid Style in American Politics. This mindset “was not confined to matters of religious doctrine. . . . Hofstadter associated that mentality with a ‘Manichean’ . . . and apocalyptic mode of thought. He noticed that right-wing spokesmen applied

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the methods and messages of evangelical revivalists to U.S. politics. Agitated partisans on the right talked about epic clashes between good and evil” [Smith, 2019, 72]. By this stage in the argument, Smith’s mapping of Foxocracy’s power and appeal has expanded into the rectangle whose points include extreme ideology, religion, professional sports, and entertainment. Further attesting to the artful depth of Smith’s analysis is his wider sense of how media backed by such binary thinking have devastated the US social fabric. He invokes the SIT (Social Identity Theory) of Polish social psychologist Henri Tajfel in his own wrapup of the media-spawned divisiveness now prevailing between the prevalent social “tribes”: Categorization of our “in-groups” as superior and “out-groups” as inferior is a big part of self-esteem and self-pride building from social identity. In short, you get a big dose of feel-good superiority and self-pride from the exclusion, demonization, and objectification of out-groups or “them.” But here is the key to the Fox News emotional tribal manipulation playbook: It’s the degree of contrast that counts most to your social identity based self-esteem boost. In other words, the greater and deeper the . . . contrast you see between your righteous in-group and your hated enemy’s out-group, the greater the shot of self-esteem and ego gratification your psyche gets. [Smith, 2019, 156] Binary thought is, inherently, digital thinking, as I’ve elsewhere argued. The “good bad, smart/stupid, righteous/unrighteous” distinctions that Fox News manipulates with such virtuosity bespeaks an overall historical transformation in the media—one as momentous as the dawn, five centuries ago, of the “Gutenberg galaxy”—in addition to a sea change, a dangerous regression back to a black/white screen, rather than modulation all along the spectrum, in the US political climate. Foxocracy’s dominant narrative may well focus on a national news organization’s outsized role in a presidency notable for its dismissal of due process, rule of law, scientific authority, and politico-judicial precedent. But Smith’s deeper investigation, its signature contribution, resides in the sphere of mass cognitive psychology, circulating around transformations ominous on several scores, in large measure because they are still underway.



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Smith’s concern for the nation’s psychological health, in addition to its thought patterns as adapted to the digital age, comes through forcefully in his scenario for what became the standard Fox News demolition derby. He identifies “FNC’s wall-to-wall coverage of the Hazelton, Pennsylvania ‘Immigration Act’ in 2006” as a watershed moment in its development of around-the-clock scare tactics to mobilize its targeted audience [Smith, 2019, 191–2]. Henceforth: In order to have an optimal ball game—a segment in which the left-winger comes off as a bleeding-heart liberal the Fox News viewers love to hate and watch us right-wing heroes mop the floor with the snowflake’s liberal tears—the producers manipulate a set of multiple outcome levers. The first lever of rigged opinion program production is the selection of the liberal crash-dummy prop du jour. . . . The segment producer at Fox News is not trying to find the world’s expert on labor economics or post-industrial economics to debate us right-wing tribal heroes. The producer actually does the opposite—trying to match the weakest and lamest but most stereotypical “libtard” crash dummy prop against the most reliable conservative contributor possible (or sometimes an unpaid right-wing guest . . .). This strategy is all about setting up the right tone and cadence for the choreographed emotional roller coaster of fear followed by tribal validation required to deliver the right-wing happy dance. It’s fair to say that one of the big differences between tribal identity porn on MSNBC or CNN versus that on Fox News is the quality of the opposition. . . . Remember, a big part of the Fox News opinion-panel scam is not just the strategy to never stage a fair fight: The strategy is to make sure the stereotypical liberal character is beaten before the segment ever airs. All political and business talk shows practice this protocol, but what was different at Fox News from the other networks I have appeared on was that my producer often asked me to “play ball,” meaning to take the side against the liberal. [Smith, 2019, 193–4] In the end, it’s Smith’s engrained morality as a journalist that phases out his career as a Fox News talking head. In the earlier passage, he does not exonerate MSNBC or CNN from deploying, in the

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name of dramatic stimulation, a straw man scenario to underscore the political differences. It is a truism of Media Studies that success in any single outlet generates simulation on the part of the others. But what Smith fingers here in the Fox News “product” is the utter cynicism predetermining a debate that might otherwise assist the public in weighing its alternatives. Particularly as of the present juncture, Smith’s humor here (“libtard crash dummy prop,” “right-wing happy dance”) is particularly welcome, possessed of a cathartic and healing quality all its own. But with a rigor that we do not necessarily expect from a self-help book, Smith has placed all the constructs subtending the earlier passage, from the programming’s emotional appeal and increasingly addictive quality, as emotional “porn,” to its tribal drift and social impact. His careful definitions, often highlighted in their own text-windows, assure the coherence of his account, however unsuspected or counterintuitive it may be. The lifestyle of expanding masses of viewers: long daily hours in front of a TV screen animated by scare tactics and looming apocalyptic outcomes; glued to a single channel consistently delivering an emotional roller coaster, one abruptly swerving between endorphin-fueled rages and serotonin-fueled affirmation. Under voluntary house arrest in “personal pan pizza” bubbles beset by encroaching social isolation and alienation. This is the bleak US social landscape emerging from Smith’s pages, and it is certainly not confined to towns like Hazelton and Reading, Pennsylvania, which, despite all the challenges and the negative Fox News PR, are managing to persist. The pervasive stark ideological and lifestyle polarizations dominating this land place our social and political institutions in a permanent state of deadlock, dialectical standoff, de facto shutdown. The overall stasis—and at a time when we are beset not only by Covid but by climate change and critical resource shortages—extends from the House and the Senate to the Supreme Court to the state legislatures. Its overall effect is to foreclose the creative innovation and bold planning required to address these documented, even quantified predicaments. Remember that the most anticipated apotheosis in the vast universe of US entertainment and sports, directly reaching over into politics, is a Super Bowl dead heat—going into overtime. Smith attends, in the earlier passage, to the “right tone and cadence for the choreographed emotional roller coaster of fear followed by



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tribal validation” in Fox News opinion journalism. The complex media broadcast, punctuated by a coordinated rhythm of events and emotional effects, programs a certain mindset. And it is indeed by creating this mindset, by barraging it with content incubated in Dark Money’s institutes, foundations, and academic centers, by illustrating it with images of left-wing generated portending doom, whether of social unrest or authoritarian repression, the masses of believers can indeed be motivated, directed—up to and including at the ballot box. At the widest horizon of his exposé, Smith is setting out the parameters of an unprecedented cognitive landscape, one powered by digital technologies and programmed by lurid content logically evolving along the vectors of polarization and sensationalism. (Zuboff backs Smith up on two crucial fronts: the landscape’s underlying digital platform and the propagandistic cast of its messages.) Key point: Fox News’ new audience was already fearful about the continuity of their jobs, their way of life, and their future when they discovered Fox News post-2008. Our job at Fox News was to give the audience members a name and face to blame for their economic trauma, their anguish, and their fears. When we did, Fox News viewers got the most powerful feeling and drug of all: permission to stop blaming themselves for the downward trajectories of their families’ lives. Ah, relief and endorphins. You know that great feeling you get when you find out you did not do that stupid or careless thing you thought you did (you know—like leave your kid in the car?). . . . Well—that feeling of relief actually comes from a rush of the brain chemical endorphin. Endorphin is nature’s pain relief chemical—it’s stimulated by physical or mental pain. . . . Neuroscientists tell us the addictive power of an endorphin rush is second only in power to the opiate-like power of serotonin (released when you feel your judgment and belief is proven right). Here is a perfect example of how Fox News produces a tribal fear-and-blame pornography segment. [Smith, 2019, 189] Dystopic as it may be, Smith’s wide-angle pan shot of the current body politic is one of a “bubbled” public held in thrall to rushes

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in its collective brain chemistry. These, it turns out, are of an addictive quality and can be calibrated to the second by self-serving media, themselves guided by profit margins, market share, and polling—emboldened when these spike. This cognitive “cadence” of endorphin-serotonin swerves is only too reminiscent of the minutely choreographed Two Minute Hates at the outset of 1984 [Orwell, 1950, 12–15]. One of the persistently disturbing features on this turbulent landscape that Smith isolates are the radical disconnects that it engenders, say between “the positive tribal feelings and validation [viewers] get from watching FNC (and by extension now a Donald Trump performance)” and “the delusional ideas and flawed assumptions presented as objective facts” [Smith, 2019, 202]. As an individual phenomenon, this pronounced mental splitting struck the psychologists and psychoanalysts of the 1970s and 1980s—Heinz Kohut along with the aforementioned Otto Kernberg. This was just as the personality disorders, pathological narcissism prominent among them, increasingly preoccupied their clinical practice. Surely the dissociation now evident on a daily basis in 2021 by Republican politicians—whether in insisting on the stolen 2020 election or in downplaying the insurrection in the Capitol of January 6—is another by-product of the dissonance that FNC viewers routinely overlook. They do so in the quest for “constant replenishment of [their] social capital” [Smith, 2019, 207]. Trump’s followers fall prey to the manifest prevarication at his rallies, by Smith’s account, because it emotionally feels so good to spend ninety minutes away from their lives of downward mobility cathartically yelling, chanting, and throwing their fists in the air. It feels great to dress up in the tribal uniform and put on the MAGA hats and T-shirts and blame faceless others for the economic trauma they feel every day of their lives, or their lost racial and cultural dominance. [Smith, 2019, 202–3] Smith’s preferred term for this dissociation—the ability to derive emotional catharsis and satisfaction from a situation even while maintaining disbelief or strong skepticism toward its premises—is “kayfabe.” In Smith’s parlance, kayfabe is a notion that could link such disparate phenomena as the spectacle of professional wrestling and Trump’s 2018 summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong



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Un. Notoriously, Roland Barthes, in 1950, in his game-changing primer of semiology, Mythologies, also seized upon wrestling as a signature theater for the intrinsic disconnect within signification, though without the convenience of an umbrella term for the phenomenon [Barthes, 1972, 15–28]. Ironically, homing in on Fox News—a single particular, although pervasive landmark in our everyday lives—affords Smith a wider screen on the cross-cultural malheurs currently benighting the United States than he might otherwise claim. It is particularly striking that Smith’s concern and empathy are as far-reaching as the distortion effects that he tracks in our political and communications systems. His transformation from media insider to cultural healer is notable. He fully earns the prerogative to issue his prognosis in his own distinctive, delightfully accessible voice: The disease that fuels the attraction and addiction to Fox News tribal identity programming is a toxic mix of corrosive traumas that are unfortunately prevalent and widely shared today in America’s twenty-first century. First, we have the widespread economic trauma incurred by the dysfunction of America’s twenty-first-century version of capitalism which no longer works for nearly two-thirds of America’s non-college-degreed working-class families, as it did in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Then we have the traumatic contempt for “elites” who got bailed out of the Great Recession and made out like bandits in the recovery while the working class suffered the stunning economic trauma of foreclosed homes and ruined small businesses. (BTW psychologists are united in declaring the emotion of contempt as the most corrosive human emotion, along with jealousy). Perhaps the most powerful and corrosive trauma in America today is the traumatic disassembly of our social support fabric. These are the nurturing family, friends, and jobs moving away from the regions of America still based on their past-their-shelflife twentieth-century economics that in many ways resemble failed nation economies. . . . The evidence of America’s running-on-empty social capital depletion phenomenon is unfortunately seen firsthand in Fox News’s America today. [Smith, 2019, 208–9]

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​ n the one hand, how can it be? Not a full year into the Biden O presidency we encounter such headlines as “How Has Joe Biden Become So Unpopular?” [Jamelle Bouie, NYT, September 4, 2021] and “The puzzle of Joe Biden’s unpopularity” [Fareed Zakaria, WP, December 18, 2021]. Biden emerged as the Democratic frontrunner of 2020 because he was the candidate who spoke to the broadest cross-section of a seriously fragmented party. He rescued us from a Trump presidency so riddled with corruption and naked self-aggrandizement that it cost many of us our basic good faith in the US government. Pollster and pundit Nate Cohn can only throw up his hands at “The Disconnect Between Biden’s Popular Policies and His Unpopularity” [NYT, November 27, 2021]. He finds this “a little hard to understand. After all, voters do care about the issues. They’ve proved it by gradually sorting into ideologically divided parties over the past two decades. And it’s clear that presidents can be punished for advancing an unpopular agenda. Just ask Barack Obama.” There’s something cloyingly familiar in this turnaround. We’ve been here before, in a universe where a reputation nosedives on a press photo, on an inadvertently “live” microphone. We are a nation both of shockingly short memory and insatiable appetite for media hyper-stimulation. By all accounts, Biden approached his new mega-portfolio cautiously; he took on its myriad demands methodically. Well in advance of the election, the stark contrast between the Trump and Biden styles had been duly scored on the journalistic record. “As the transition begins,” Matt Stevens noted, “the stark contrast between Biden and Trump persists” [NYT, November 10, 2020]. This was still at the outset of a rancorous and never fully resolved disputation of the election results by the Trump camp and GOP.

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“Just minutes after Mr. Biden held a press conference to address his plans for confronting the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Trump announced on Twitter that he had fired his defense secretary. And he continued to be active on his favorite medium platform on Monday, offering more unsubstantiated and false claims of election fraud, as news broke of additional coronavirus cases within his inner circle. . . . Even as Mr. Biden pushed ahead with his transition plans, the Trump campaign and its allies were continuing their frenetic fight to challenge the results of the election, which Mr. Trump has lost.” It is simply exhausting to keep up with the staccato tempo and nonlinear sequence of Trump’s actions, let alone to discern the rationale at their foundation. All on the same brief day, Covid surfaces in the White House, “Trump Fires Mark Esper, Defense Secretary Who Opposed Use of Troops on U.S. Streets,” report Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt, and Maggie Haberman [NYT, November 9, 2020]. And in unceasing communiqués, Trump categorically dismisses national elections in no substantial way deviating from their predecessors. In their very unfolding and tenor, the events themselves shout out their underlying ethos. “By contrast Mr. Biden and his team,” in the Stevens dispatch, “continued to offer measured statements as they began to sketch out their transition plan and build their team.” In the months prior to the election, “Trump Steps Up His Assault on Biden with Scattershot Attacks, Many False” [Katie Glueck, Adam Nagourney, and Maggie Haberman, NYT, July 17, 2020. Updated September 29, 2020]. Over the course of 72 hours, President Trump’s campaign accused Joseph R. Biden Jr. of plagiarism. Mr. Trump warned that a Biden presidency would lead to a surge of crime in the streets. He tried to link his opponent to socialism and to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leader of the Democratic left. And he said that Mr. Biden would eliminate the suburbs—and windows. Still a presidential candidate, Biden finds it incumbent to consistently maintain a conciliatory, non-polarizing stance. Indeed, Aaron Blake, accounting for “Joe Biden’s very un-2020 campaign” [WP, October 7, 2020], makes reconciliation and the disciplined avoidance of polarizing rhetoric and gesture the centerpiece of the Trump-Biden contrast that he draws. The event in the political arena triggering



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Blake’s update is Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Biden’s response to the candidate, according to Blake, hearkens back “to a time when such nominees were judged not necessarily on their judicial philosophy or litmus tests, but on basic qualifications for the job and character.” This “distinctly oldschool answer” flies in the face of other Democrats more preoccupied with casting Barrett as a dangerous ideologue who would undo not just Obamacare but also Roe v. Wade. . . . While Biden’s calls during the 2020 Democratic primaries for working with the Republicans often elicited groans—from his opponents and the media alike—it has remained a feature of his general election campaign. As President Trump dominates the headlines with fire and brimstone, Biden has taken advantage of his ability to run a quiet campaign more focused on reconciliation. He has stubbornly refused to take up the mantle of partisan warrior that many democrats pined for. In view of the fact that the US Supreme Court will, on June 24, 2022, rescind Roe v. Wade, history has already determined whether Biden should have been more alarmist in response to the Barrett nomination or not. But by his news conference of January 19, 2022, Biden will renounce his instinctive “senatorial” approach to the office of the presidency. “If I made a mistake, I’m used to negotiating to get things done, and I’ve been, in the past, relatively successful at it in the United States Senate, even as vice president. But I think that role as president—is a different role. The public doesn’t want me to be the ‘president-senator.’ They want me to be the president and let senators be senators” [Michael D. Shear, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Katie Rogers, “Biden the Negotiator Confronts the Cold Reality of Capitol Hill Gridlock,” NYT, January 20, 2022.] But the leading thread in the inevitable stylistic contrasts between candidates drawn by journalists is Biden’s immeasurably more tempered, studious, contemplative, and even “silent” bearing. As we have already witnessed, major advantages to the distillation and execution of national policy are conferred by restraint, discipline, and caution. But they don’t make for great late-night TV. Of course, Biden doesn’t leap out as a superstar. He’s too plain-spoken. His demeanor is, well, serious. He just won’t cut it as a buffoon. He

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stays on issue. This may push his audience beyond its customary attention span. Too pedantically, perhaps, he sticks to substance. He squints into the spotlights. This betrays that he’s thinking. Not even his aviator sunglasses can redeem him as the celeb we insist that he be. I was too young, in 1952 and 1956, to thoughtfully take in the woof and warp of Adlai Stevenson’s thinking. Over the years of my alternately bemused and horrified watch on the US political scene, Biden’s former boss and Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, was far and away the brightest and most articulate president or aspirant to that office I ever followed. Obama did not feel compelled to impress us, like JFK, by quoting Mme de Sévigny. A supremely attuned mind underwrote every public statement that Obama made. He evoked in me the unbridled excitement that lifetime knockout students evoke in classroom stiffs, the ones who constantly outstripped what was set before them. Sure, Obama’s distinguished double term in office was beset by its own blind spots, miscalculations, and missed opportunities. But the brutality with which Trump set about repudiating every single achievement and policy devised by his immediate predecessor—painfully already evident by Charlottesville, 2017—is an American tragedy on a global scale, incomplete though its damage toll remains. Given the biorhythm of my particular life, my incursions into daytime TV have not been frequent. Over the decades only two instances stand out. The first took place in 1974 when Carol Jacobs and I were surfing the outer space of local TV broadcasting in Buffalo, New York, and came upon “The 700 Club.” We got introduced to a youthful Pat Robertson already in full joviality, luxuriating in the intimacy he’d established with his far-flung audience of fellow believers. His playful smirk channeled the naughty boy next door, all the more lovable in his antics. This boyish playfulness is one manifestation of a masculine charm that can turn ugly, as it did on October 23, 2019, when “a gaggle of conservative House members . . . barg[ed] into the secure room . . . where members of three House committees were preparing to hear testimony from Laura Cooper, a deputy assistant secretary of defense” [“Why Did Republicans Storm the Capitol?” Editorial Board, WP, October 23, 2019]. More on this game-changing event later. Pat Robertson’s twinkle-of-an-eye complicity in his heyday was an expression of the kayfabe he was borrowing from minute-long infomercials,



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in their nascence, whether for the Vegematic or “Boxcar Willie,” drawing attention to themselves by disrupting the conventional adto-programming cadence. Barely concealing his mirth, Robertson related how the slippers of one of his TV congregants flew off as she approached her TV console to lay hands on it. “A miracle!” she had cried out. Decades later, in a dental office in New Haven, I was to experience a Proustian reprise of a character who had left a vivid childhood impression. This was Buffalo Bob Smith, who played MC and chief instigator on “The Howdy Doody Show.” This show, along with “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie,” was the formative TV watching of my life. By the aughts of the present century, Buffalo Bob might have slowed down a bit—it was going on half a century since I first encountered him. But his role had changed dramatically. No longer presiding over the unprovoked seltzer-bottle attacks of Clarabell the Clown and the innocence of Princess Summerfall Winterspring, he was leading a studio full of graying types like myself down memory lane in a nostalgic songfest. In this choir-master role, Buffalo Bob had managed to flip brands, away from “Howdy Doody” and its “Clarabell” ditty. He was leading a reverential, slightly lugubrious rendition of “The Mickey Mouse Club Song.” “Howdy Doody” had in fact been the first nationally franchised kids’ TV show, but by the mid-1950s, Walt Disney, with a daily after-school program on schooldays and a weekly nighttime excursion to the Southern California Disneyland (conveniently doubling as an infomercial) had radically upped the ante in children’s TV. Up until this time, kids’ shows had by and large been the province of local broadcasting. “The Mickey Mouse Club” was the imaginary organization called to order by the daily broadcast—as well as the show’s title. What I was witnessing at the outset of the millennium, in the dubious comfort of my dentist’s office, was a Buffalo Bob Smith raptured up from “The Howdy Doody Show” in order to intone, slowly, soulfully, “M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U-S-E” with his studio audience belonging to my age cohort. The studio camera panned to tear-stained visages. For us all, “The Mickey Mouse Club Song” had become the folk anthem of a village we’d never quite inhabited, nevertheless conveying our exile from childhood, and its sense, however illusory, of affectionately being taken care of. It can well be said of Trump that in preparing the US populace for an innovative recent form of softcore fascism—powered

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significantly by social media and their shattering us into selfcontained, paranoic, and unexpectedly efficient hives—he invented a new form of entertainment, the Trump rally. The rock concert setting of these, the C&W theme songs, the stand-up comedian, the onstage portion of the audience—these media tropes have been with us for decades. What is so unique about the Trump rally is the persistence and solidarity of the constituency it has galvanized, whose needs, within a mass spectacle, it uniquely addresses. Its chief elements are three: the music, underscoring that the happening is as much a form of distraction as discourse; the other-baiting, wethey homily, whose duration and rhetoric borrow not a little from a religious sermon; and the segment of the live audience repurposed as a backdrop to the charismatic leader’s pronouncements, projecting the fervor of Trump’s national “base” as only he can whip it up. (With respect to the Trumpian sermon, its pacing, refrains, binary logic, and adrenaline fluctuations between rage and elation steal multiple pages from the Fox News playbook.) Much as our reflex inclination would be to home in either on Trump’s adaptation of entertainment convention to his political ends or on the ideological content of his jabs, the indispensable element of the Trump rally is surely the enthusiasm, responsiveness, and mirroring radiating from the internal audience on stage. This extends back in the history of US TV broadcasting to the “peanut gallery” that became an integral part of the “Howdy Doody” set. This internalized mirroring audience worked effectively when the kiddie audience graduated to high school. It was assigned a crucial role on “Bandstand,” the long-running rock-and-roll show, also scheduled after school. The participants’ repeated breakout into performers and spectators established the creds of the regulars who were dancing at the state-of-the-art. Without a peanut gallery of amiable Trump followers, in the state of mild distraction accompanying a rock concert or similar spectacle, but enjoying themselves to the hilt, down to the deepest fiber, there is no Trump. Enjoyment is the crux of the Trump political message. A politics of rumination, deferred satisfaction, sequential deliberation—who needs it? A politics with a fulcrum of diversion and enjoyment was already in full swing during the presidency of Bush II. On the issues, Bush fils couldn’t hold a candle to Gore. But to millions of voters from both major parties, it would have been far preferable to hoist a beer with Bush.



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In keeping with the logos designed at different junctures by the International Olympic Committee and Ballantine Beer, the US entertainment sector is configured by a tripartite Borromean knot (an interlocking ring of rings): showbiz-sports-religion, in an “eternal golden braid.” Yes, in temperament or tone, perhaps, nothing could contrast more severely to a mass or service than a tight NBA game or a raucous Broadway show. Yet as a complex scripted behavior, the liturgy overlaps these diversions and more—film and opera as well— to an astonishing degree. The public devotion event coordinates recitation and music, sometimes in complex patterns of echoing or repetition. Its pulpit ritual was designed with theatricality in mind. It presupposes significant restraint and compliance on the congregation’s part. The US entertainment sector is forever passing seamlessly back and forth between the points of this triangulation. And all three of these elements—entertainment, sports, and religion, periodically steal the show in US politics. Whether in the form of campaign stops that are really rock concerts; displays of electoral results that are really baseball scoreboards; or increasingly, candidates and public officials who comport themselves as entertainers and professional athletes. Even in female politicians who deploy fashion in order to perform their message. From its deeply inlaid but surprisingly volatile strand of religion, US politics derives its aura of grand, momentous pronouncement and stark truth-saying, no qualification required. From its entertainment industry, it takes its gravitation toward spectacular excess—the stage trappings of TV game shows and beauty contests are relevant here—and its resignation to its own frivolity. Sport has imbued it with its lockstep marching order to create suspense, out of whatever materials (candidates, geography, legal infrastructure) happens to be available. What rapport could heightened uncertainty and suspense possibly have to the plush pleasure that Trump has made an in-built feature of US political experience? Aren’t shock surges of heightened anxiety in its pure form mostly painful? Tobin Smith, in the wild fluctuations between dopamine and serotonin rushes that he has discerned both as the design and the payoff of Fox News opinion shows offers us a compelling first take on this crucial question. The tension is the pleasure, an indispensable moment in the entertainment cycle, a crucial buttress to the political medium. The heart-rending “inconvenient truths” about our country— the shocking divides between haves and have-nots living side by

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side in our cities; a history rooted in slavery, whose aftershocks, among the descendants of the former rulers as well as of their victims, has been barely addressed, let alone rectified; despoilment of the environment and tilting of the economy in the name of voracious extraction and profit—all get mediated or dispatched, also dismissed—somewhere within the Bermuda triangle whose points are showbiz-religion-sports. This twilight zone, whether in its analog or digital manifestations, also serves as the authoritative current map to the US imaginary. Not only does US politics call for ever higher thresholds of shock and entertainment value in all political media, whether presidential or congressional debates, party conventions, or stump speeches. Correspondingly, there is a steep added political value to all kinds of public spectacles previously held at a remove from civic deliberation. It is already six decades since the innovative French philosopher Louis Althusser coined a term, “Ideological State Apparatus” (or ISA), for the political residue persisting within cultural manifestations, including religion, seemingly far afield and especially when inexplicit. In the age of the Trump rally, the term gathers new immediacy and nuance. A happening such as the seesaw, nail-chewing finale to yesterday’s NFL playoff game between Kansas City and Buffalo (January 23, 2022)—the lead changed hands three times in the last 2 minutes of regulation time—willy-nilly becomes a broadside delivered by a political system obstinately refusing to resolve pressing issues. We take all the hoopla for assertiveness, for focused vision at the societal level. All the static, whether in its glamour, sensationalist news, reality TV, or sudden death sports formats—a growing national addiction reflected in ever-increasing “screen-time” quotients—becomes nothing more than a gaudy camouflage for stasis, paralysis, possibly fatal inattention to crises in such domains as social injustice and the environment. A paralysis inflicted, at the macro-systematic level, by such bizarre epiphenomena as a Supreme Court refusing to acknowledge tangible historical change registered at ground level and senators so untracked by the myopia of personal political ambition that they cannot cross the aisle in order to bring about desperately needed legislative resolution. But as a symptom of our national culture, the overall message is something quite different. We particularly adore collegiate and professional football for the way its play-by-play, with the backfield



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directing the offensive line, simulates the organization common to factories, farms, and large corporations. Also, for a plethora of mechanisms, including timeouts, the 2-minute warning, and sudden death overtime (when this game, for instance, was finally decided) heightening the serotonin-charged tension. The hushed silence over a vast stadium of people, the deafening thunder erupting from seismic shifts in the score, are not the expression of a society in ongoing responsive deliberation but rather the colorful payback for an endemic loss of articulation also celebrated by the Trump rally. “Look, ma! Politics without agonizing choices! Power and control over people’s lives without convincing anyone! Public policy without those tedious scientists!” I have followed the Philadelphia Eagles, my hometown football team, raptly over a lifetime. Nothing is more thrilling to me than one of their hard-earned victories. On a deeper level even than the cultural analyses filling these pages, the talented players on the field become our symbolic fathers; their composite achievement becomes the prospects for our families. The gilets jaunes, the truckers in Ottawa, regardless of their personal plumbing, are our fathers too. In the sense that the stoker, at the outset of Kafka’s Amerika, accessed accidentally by Karl in the bowels of the ocean liner bringing him to American shores is, for all his gruffness and diffuse rage, Karl’s primal father too. As chronicled in the recent journalism of Thomas B. Edsall and Ross Douthat, these fatherfigures have become aggrieved. Their wise-ass progeny, who have overstayed their schooling, sneer down their noses at them, even while they contend with increased unemployment, marginalization, and their sense of reduced social status. It is time to take these self-appointed experts—as they swim in tight schools gathering complacency—down a peg. The all-pervasive spectacular dimension of contemporary life— we hover over our computer displays for untold hours in part because they stream a running spectacle in a nutshell—heightens the drama of attention in our society. Who grabs our collective attention? Who receives it often enough for it to make tracks in our wandering consciousness, to leave an imprint in something other than vanishing ink? Well in advance of his receiving the Republican Party presidential nomination in August 2016, Trump had gained notoriety for his virtuosity in seizing, dominating, and controlling the “news cycle.” In keeping with the configuration of

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media prevalent in US culture today, all politicians, regardless of their affiliation, need to be attention grabbers—across the media spectrum. Grabbing oversized public attention is nothing less than the lifeblood of contemporary politicians, and indeed of all celebrities and other public figures. It is the O2 they breathe, in whose absence their traces within our national “symbolic network” [Hofstadter, 2007] will fade into forgetting. In keeping with the prophetic wisdom regarding the global media universe that Marshall McLuhan had made available to us by the 1960s, the attention that political celebrities draw to themselves is far more important as a fact than in terms of the particular content that justifies it [McLuhan, 1969]. This explains how the more outrageous the claim, assertion, or transgression of conventional political conduct becomes the better—irrespective of the strain it may place on the archive of public information or even of civil order (cf., January 6, 2021). Any informed intellectual engagement with QAnon, or the politicians who espouse it, that stops in exasperation at its unfounded claims overlooks its rich media value as an attention-getter. There is one overarching motive among several candidates for all this frenetic attention getting: gaining an iron grip on incumbency, getting reelected. In step with the overall evolution of the professions in our country, all but the most depleted of our national legislators regard their senatorial or congressional seats as a calling quintessential to their identity and being, conferring power and prestige they will protect at all costs. Following in Trump’s footsteps, Senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio; Congressmen and Congresswomen Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and Lauren Boebert, are, among others, utter stars in fomenting new attention where the US public has become jaded to the emotional assertions, shell-shocked by the contrived sensationalism in which they are couched. Gone are the days—I can remember them—when a senatorial term or two and their equivalent in the House marked an interlude of national service crowning a lifetime marked by a diversity of commitments and achievements. The distinctive feature of today’s House and Senate campaigns—as evidenced in the unhinged invective of current negative political ads—is their utter desperation, a tawdry act of disguise with its unmasking built in. Here the bravado of a small but powerful class of national legislators papers



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over professional insecurity blatant to the point of pathos. No fate could be worse than blackballing by the Republican Party. It is in the avoidance of this dire eventuality that we find the minuets of repudiation and subsequent capitulation to Trump, his attitudes, and his practices that in different ways mark the careers of Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz. Even those anomalous moderate Republican senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski—whose high ideals are presumably at sharp odds with the Trump Realpolitik—succeed on this map. Precisely in not braving the brutal recrimination they would receive if, for example, they voted in support of impeachment and against the filibuster and the Supreme Court nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. In a celebrity universe, even this agonizing inconsistency, one expressing debilitating neediness, exerts a certain magnetic force on the iron filings of media attention. Collins, in particular, will go on to perfect the narrative of the girl from next door who signs onto arrangements she may find personally repugnant, only to be disabused after the fact of the false pretenses under which she exercised her vote. [“Mike DeBonis, Collins and Murkowski on the defensive after leaked Roe draft opinion,” WP, May 3, 2022.] In an insatiable quest for attention coinciding with a need for approbation preempting any consistency in commitment or vision, Senators Manchin, Sinema, Collins, and Murkowski have been outsized producers of the systemic static that has, again and again, thwarted Biden’s initiatives and edged his administration toward dysfunction. A frantic free-for-all for media attention on the part of elected officials sets in chilling context a defile of bizarre events that would have verged on the unthinkable prior to the time frame covered by this book. I’m thinking here not only of when a throng of Republican congressmen led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) decided to storm the proceedings of the House impeachment inquiry to highlight concerns about its process. They effectively shut it down for five hours and caused the testimony of Defense Department aide Laura Cooper to be delayed. . . . The impeachment inquiry depositions are held in a secure room, but some Republicans brought in their cellphones, which is against the rules, raising questions about whether the room had been compromised. [Aaron Blake, “A revealing 24 hours for the GOP and the ‘rule of law,’” WP, October 23, 2019]

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“In fact, Mr. Trump is said to have given them a thumbs-up the day before. On Tuesday, ‘he met with about 30 House Republicans at the White House to talk about the situation in Syria and the impeachment inquiry,’ at which time its members ‘shared their plans to storm into a secure room,’ Bloomberg News reported” [“Why Did Republicans Storm the Capitol?” Editorial Board, NYT, October 23, 2019]. The hard core of this happening, for all the playful bravado in which it’s couched, ends up being extreme Republican discomfiture and resistance to the first Trump impeachment proceeding. As a “mini spontaneous outpouring” conducted on the premises of the Capitol by no less than its elected lawmakers, this episode foreshadows January 6, 2021. The most disturbing takeout of this particular event may well be the routinization, what Zuboff terms “habituation,” of violent behavior, symbolic and actual, in the political sphere, both in its national and state venues. Outspoken young political outsider that she is, AOC attracts a disproportionate share of this incipient barbarism—on the Capitol steps, where she’s accosted by an intimidating and foul-mouthed Rep. Ted. Yoho (R-Fla.) [Luke Broadwater, “Ocasio-Cortez Embraces a Republican’s Insult,” NYT, July 21, 2020. Updated, July 22]. Also, in an “altered anime video” that Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) posted, “depicting him slashing Ocasio-Cortez’s neck and swinging swords at President Biden. Gosar, who has allied himself with white nationalists, refused to apologize” [Catie Edmondson, “The Politics of Menace,” NYT, November 22, 2021]. It is the seemingly inconsequential inconsistencies in our political system, whether implanted by design (e.g., the filibuster) or as the arcane gleanings that constitutional lawyers revel in unearthing— these are what prompt its catastrophic malfunction and stasis. It matters not whether these tragic flaws are encountered in process or at the level of substance. These inadvertent double messages haunt the system. They may assume the form of Republican senators who adhere to long-standing traditions of restraint and moderation in their party’s politics but who knuckle under to the whims of a demagogue; they may be Democratic senators who secure Republican objectives in undermining Biden’s initiatives. What these micro-adjustments applied to the political system as a whole amount to is “much ado about nothing,” insubstantial glitter sponged off the entertainment industry. Whose underlying purpose



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is to camouflage a government that, in its systematic architecture, stonewalls concerted response to massive recent transformations. Not only in the media. In ecology, climate, and demography—on a planetary scale. This is a political system that digs in its collective heels because, despite everything, there will be much to lose if change is precipitous or immoderate. There will be unfamiliar faces on all the boards; unaccustomed cash flow from production and employment; taxation moderating the current unprecedented “diffusion” in wealth-distribution annotated, for example, by Thomas Picketty [Picketty, 2014]. In the United States, current demographic transformation beyond a white majority will continue. There will be some amelioration of arcane legislation (the Electoral College, the filibuster) once designed to right imbalances (e.g., in demographic distribution) no longer the deciding factors they once were. By now, in fact, these skews installed into the system prove disastrous to the State’s efforts to responsibly mobilize itself. One perfectly reasonable blanket takeout from Jane Mayer’s Dark Money would be that it narrates the preemptive measures that the oligarchs and plutocrats took well in advance of the fact against the compelling corrections that have now emerged as salutary, even inevitable. In the shorthand of contemporary systems theory, what we are contending with as I score these words, is a liberal system currently treading water as closed system, through countless selfinterested micromanipulations. An impacted architecture, largely in a state of self-contradiction, biding its time, holding off in any way it can the momentous burden of working as a dedicated open system. Media attention may well be the very lifeblood indispensable to current politicians, appointed high public officials, and celebrities. But it also proves harsh and unforgiving. It punishes its successful seekers as much as it rewards them. Let Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema serve as cases in point. As pivotal “swing votes” in the assertion of the Democrats’ razor-thin Senate majority, their views and actions have taken on monumental significance. Recent news photos suggest to me that Manchin utterly revels in his newfound importance and centrality to the Biden administration’s agenda and functionality. He cranes into the limelight. By situating himself squarely on the tripwire between Democratic and Republican policy, he consolidates an utterly indispensable role

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FIGURE 14.1  Senator Joe Manchin. Courtesy Getty Images.

in lawmaking. He counts now—irrefutably. Behind him are the intangibles of a mere senator. He has attained the superordinate status of a meta-senator. Manchin’s gaze into the spotlight is more assured than ever, accustomed, at home with a momentous position. This is not quite the case with Sinema. In the close-ups of her that I access, she vacillates: self-assured in her most striking fashion statements; shots taken in the halls of power betraying some indecision and anxiety, a sense of being over her head. This is the emotional resonance I pick up from these photos. Her changing image becomes a microcosm of our government. Even though she is, as the current transcript attests, a far greater master than Manchin and all but very few male elected officials at making her appearance a medium for her political bearing and interventions. Some notable recent reportage in cultural journalism has been devoted to Sinema’s dress. It cogently argues that the fashion statements, particularly by female politicians in the public eye, double as policy statements. This is owing to the exaggerated importance attached to women’s appearance—in politics as over



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the entire spectrum of professional life. Articles about Sinema by Tressie McMillan Cottom and Vanessa Friedman tackle many of the uncomfortable theoretical questions raised by glomming onto a public figure’s dress all the while furnishing needed illumination on the Arizona senator as a political cipher and anomaly. To both commentators, the former a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Sinema’s dress is a deliberate artifact of her unrepentant position as a maverick, someone who willingly takes on preexisting expectation, whether stemming from her party affiliation or sartorial expectation (e.g., arm and shoulder covering for women on Capitol Hill). In Friedman’s words, “The senior senator from Arizona—the first woman to represent Arizona in the Senate, the first Democrat elected from that state since 1995 and the first openly bisexual senator—has never hidden her identity as a maverick. In fact she’s advertised it. Pretty much every day” [Vanessa Friedman, “Kyrsten Sinema’s Style Keeps Us Guessing,” NYT, October 18, 2021. Updated October 27]. “Maverick” here is a loaded term. Friedman deploys it in her placement of Sinema on the grid of identity politics, though she doesn’t specify whether Sinema’s wildcard status stems from being Dem from Arizona, bisexual, or a very “soft” party adherent at a moment when concerted action by the Biden administration is key to the Democrats’ retaining their tenuous hold on power. Richly illustrated, Friedman’s gloss on Sinema’s dress verges on the art historical. It encourages readers themselves to make sense of very different dress-messages that Sinema broadcasts at different times and in varying circumstances. In a diptych of commentaries centered on Sinema’s fashions filed two weeks apart, McMillan Cottom makes a powerful case for the persistence of wide-ranging cultural critique in the opinion pages. Yes, her takeout of the overall significance of Sinema’s dress lands not far from Friedman’s: Her style is easily the most accessible to her constituents. . . . Part of what makes Sinema’s style performance uncomfortable for many of us is how middle-class it is: She doesn’t seem to be trying to do better. But that does not mean her style story lacks aspiration. . . . Sinema stands out for trying to combine different aspects of multiple roles for female politicians. The tightfitting clothes whisper ingénue, innocent of the rules. The bright colors and wigs and accessories scream outsider, someone who knows the rules and ignores them. The bold patterns, in any other

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silhouette from the one she favors, could signal power broker or elite. But altogether, they communicate someone who may be aware of the roles that female politicians are boxed into but does not play into any of them all the time. [“How Kyrsten Sinema Uses Clothing to Signal Her Social Class,” NYT, November 12, 2021] In McMillan Cottom’s rendition, Sinema stands out in the fray both as a courageous iconoclast and as a message scrambler contributing, wittingly or not, to an overall governmental dysfunction whose disastrous consequences will only multiply as they persist. The dominant factor that McMillan Cottom seizes on in explaining Sinema’s wardrobe selections is her self-selected position midway on the social map of US society. The clothing and accessories that she selects, as opposed to Nancy Pelosi’s wardrobe, are attainable by a wide swath of the current population. McMillan Cottom follows her colleague, Ashley Mears, in characterizing Sinema’s style as “a middle-class kind of catalog look.” McMillan Cottom continues: “Middle-class” does not just mean that the fashion is accessible, that you can buy it from a mall or online store. It also means that it projects a middle-class image. The form-fitting dresses and retro color palette that Sinema favors are a way of broadcasting her bona fides as a middle-class politician and thus someone in step with middle-class values. One might laugh at how literal this sounds as political stagecraft but consider that almost all people in this country think of themselves as middle class, regardless of how much (or little) money they have. It is our cultural default, and we see it as normative. In McMillan Cottom’s swerve away from a definition of middle classness based on one set of empirical criteria or another, disposable income, educational attainment and aspirations, and life expectancy, being the usual suspects, she telegraphs her deft touch on the national pulse. To Americans, being middle class is tantamount to having attained a degree of material comfort and social security at which the direct threat of precarious existence has been averted, at least for a time. Being middle class is indeed a “default position” in which



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a moratorium has been called on immanent socioeconomic disaster. The residents of our most depleted towns and hamlets in the rustbelt and the rural United States are middle class in this broader sense, as are their compeers, in the most stressed and economically unstable urban neighborhoods. As are the homeless individuals and families, in ever-increasing numbers, making do in shelters and on cardboard pallets under all weather conditions in our downtowns. In this common yearning to fend off habitual economic disaster with its ensuing dire consequences, social marginalization, and the absence of income, housing, and medical care chief among them, we are indeed, as McMillan Cottom suggests, all middle class. McMillan Cottom’s read on Sinema’s significance and impact both as a politician and fashion plate is particularly notable for the wide swathe that she clears for cultural commentary on the “Politics” page. I particularly admire her two exploratory articles for the provocative questions that they do not shy away from. How could something as ephemeral as fashion be momentous to our struggle to make sense of the constantly developing political drama around us? How could direct address to a woman’s appearance be plausible in the face of feminism’s long-established damage report on the havoc wrought by anatomical objectification? How do fashion messages transmit gradations of social class, and how might these play out at the ballot box? McMillan Cottom’s temerity to comment on Sinema’s style (she’s written on AOC’s as well) comes indemnified by venerable tradition in the discourse of cultural critique. In chronicling the emergence of modernity in nineteenth-century Paris—this as a backdrop to the horror story of fascism whose encroachment he witnessed around him at every turn—Walter Benjamin had a host of obvious factors to contend with: industrialization, mass media in print and, later, radio; urban planning and transportation that facilitated military control as well as the circulation of goods; monumental ceremonial zones displacing mostly workers from the city center. And yet early on in his Arcades Project, Benjamin situates fashion center stage, indeed, just after his historical précis [Benjamin, 1999, Convolute B]. He had discerned that the fashions of the Second Empire convey, more graphically than anything else, the undercurrents of its material culture, the fluctuations in its prevalent sexualities, and its edgy rapport to death—one far closer to the surface than would make us comfortable today.

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Going out on a limb to assert the centrality of Sinema’s dress to her politics, McMillan Cottom is fully aware that she is flying in the face of “the message that good people simply do not comment on how people look because that can be rife with bias. The problem with that response is that the bias still happens” [“Why We Should Talk About What Kyrsten Sinema Is Wearing,” NYT, October 29, 2021]. McMillan Cottom has had to head off the injunction against even broaching her topic on three scores: the attitude that Sinema’s “politics are just so bad” that her dress doesn’t matter; a frivolous “masculinist strain of intellectualism” according to which no feminine trope, certainly not dress, rates “as a substantive form of discourse”; and the disastrous obsession, bemoaned by thirdwave feminism, “with women’s bodies as their only worth.” In spite of all this “negative press,” through her insistence on pursuing this inquiry in the name of cultural literacy—mulling over the manifold of the indicators and signs that will make sense of our chaotic, multidimensional muddle—McMillan Cottom delivers a KO punch: “When you ‘don’t comment on bodies,’ you lose the discernment to think critically about how some bodies move through the world at the expense of how other bodies can move through the world. In short, when out language atrophies, we lose the mental acuity to talk about how power operates in our everyday life” [“Why We Should Talk About What Kyrsten Sinema Is Wearing”]. In this powerful summation, McMillan Cottom registers the cognitive dysfunction, on the level of mass psychology, that happens when “our language atrophies,” when we are deprived of the very words for our predicament. We can only hope that McMillan Cottom’s running tabs on the political destruction and stunted societal potential wrought by nothing more momentous than the cancellation of language will persist and branch out. Rapt media attention leveled in sublime overdoses within a steamy political biosphere past the limit of its sustainability—this intense scrutiny, as I suggest, is as punishing as it may be rewarding. It alone may dissuade countless of our fellow citizens—the ones whose integrity and idealism would make them the most desirable elected officials of all, whose impact on the public sphere in its current state might be transformative—from entering the fray of US politics. And indeed, our inability to delineate between public service and high entertainment leaves us at an impasse, in a state of inertia only increasing in toxicity over time. And the precise



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location of this deadlock is in the blank column (and the time-lag as well, perhaps) between two recent contributions by two of our most seasoned and prolific columnists: “The media’s doomsday talk about Biden is greatly exaggerated” [Jennifer Rubin, WP, October 13, 2021] and “Can Dems Dodge Doomsday?” [Maureen Dowd, NYT, February 19, 2022]. Dowd, joining a chorus of voices fearful of a Democratic debacle in the 2022 midterm elections, bemoans Biden’s having gotten sidetracked from his signal campaign strengths. In David Axelrod’s words, cited in her piece, He is depriving himself of his strongest assets: empathy and an identification with the day-to-day of people. . . . One of Biden’s strengths is that, at his best, he speaks the language of America, not Washington. But he has been speaking more in the voice of government officials than he has of Scranton Joe. He needs to get back there. Where, exactly, Mr. Axelrod, to Scranton? Or back to a persona radiating the approachability, the personable bearing, the immediacy allowing certain of our sitcoms to outlive our presidents?

FIGURE 14.2  Senator Krysten Sinema. Courtesy Getty Images.

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Rubin does well to give us pause in assuming the worst for the midterm elections. In admirable circumspect, she would wish to head off a nightmarish self-fulfilling prophecy. And she is too astute a journalist to overlook the damage wrought to Biden’s approval ratings by a number of factors, including the precipitous US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the pandemic’s tenacity and cost, and the obstructionism (some emanating from Sinema and Manchin) that has dogged his domestic initiatives. Rubin would nonetheless ask that her readers bide their time and keep their perspective. “Think of it as though Biden is playing a tied baseball game delayed by rain. It may be frustrating, but it’s far from time to make hyperbolic predictions.” Play ball! This is a uniquely American circus!​

May 24, 2020. Sikhs and Other Cabbies

Murky​ clouds over the Kashmiri Himalayas. So that on three successive mornings in July 1999, I and the medical team from Buffalo, New York, I’m traveling with get sent back to the hotel from the airport. It’s a 6:00 AM flight. We’ve risen at 3 and each spent a good feverish hour cramming gear and supplies into our luggage allotment. Our destination is Leh, regional capital of Eastern Ladakh, the region occupying, along with Jammu and Kashmir, India’s rugged northernmost corner. The lands administered by Leh jut against the Chinese border; not far down the road to the west is Kargil, bone of bitter and long-standing Indo-Pakistani contention. As our medical trek will amply reveal, in thunderous light and inconceivable vistas, there are compelling reasons why this remote and pristine corner of human habitation would be multilaterally contested. This testimony is delivered by the roar of headwaters and perpetual winds whipping through the passes, testing the rainbow banners with which they’ve been festooned. By no less than four major water sources critical to the health and ecological stability of hundreds of millions of South and East Asians downstream, legendary to their cultures; by far-flung villages whose demographics and layout have been fine-tuned to crop production, notably of barley; by yaks managing to peer down at us from a couple of thousand feet—no matter how hard we’ve climbed this close to the sky. By entire vast mountains taking on the coloration of their predominant minerals. Leh, it turns out, is nestled in a narrow Himalayan valley. The only approach from the air is a steep hairpin descent. This is handson work for pilots, who require minimum thresholds of visibility. Sluggish clouds hugging the valley send us back to a hotel as much stage-set as lodgings three times before we launch our mission

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FIGURE 15.1  Lingshet Monastery, Ladakh, 1999. Photograph by author.

from Leh. In all of India, only four pilots are licensed to do the Delhi-Leh run. They are all, it turns out, Sikhs, famed not only for their impressive beards and turbans and their spiritual home at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. They are renowned for eminence in medicine and in transportation—by all means of conveyance devised by humankind. Our days in Leh are spent acclimating to the altitude. We make brief, then ambitious forays around town. We’re treated to day trips in the surrounding mountains: to the Buddhist temples at Thikse and Hemis. Wonders of cubical geometry on the outside somehow implanted into steep mountain slopes. Movement between levels indoors is negotiated by ladder. The public interior spaces to which we’re granted access are ablaze with color, this courtesy of thankas in fabric and large portraits of deities and maps of the spiritual universe painted on the wall or framed. These vivid hangings and paintings supply an antidote to the snow and ice dominating the vista for over half the year. The richest environments in these gompas by far, in sound as well as sight, are the interior sanctuaries. Not only are the sacred Tibetan scrolls preserved here in consoles divided into horizontal strata of cubbyholes. Musical instruments, drums, bells, and the



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horns notorious for their seemingly impossible length all find repose here between services and festivals. As do the fantastic hats setting abbots and other major players in these ceremonies apart. The sanctuary is itself a symphony: in sacred sculpture, fabric, wood, and brass. It begins resonating in chant, bell, and horn at dawn. On our fourth day in Ladakh we’re driven to the trailhead. We’re greeted by a group of fifteen or so men and perhaps a dozen horses. The men are our personal sherpas; they hail both from the Tibetan Buddhist and Muslim communities occupying the region. (The widely dispersed villages are predominantly Buddhist.) We call them “the horsemen,” but they are far more than that to us. They see to our nutrition, our location, and, most important, our safety. They are our hosts in the deepest sense, and our well-being is a point of their avid honor. The horses are mostly used for conveying tents, equipment, supplies, luggage, and food. Prominent among the horses’ burden are cages containing some chickens and guinea hens; carrying their own weight are a couple of goats tethered along for the ride. But not for the entire ride. The open-air kitchen wizardry of Yussef the cook sees to that. Two or three of the packhorses are always being rotated out of this detail to be available for trekkers who need a temporary lift. I am more or less their same size. Not accustomed to mountain hiking, I do occasionally require a ride. I haven’t been atop an equine for going on fifty years. The landscape of my previous rides was the alley behind our row house in Philadelphia. To my mother’s delight, I’d be captured on a pony in a cowboy outfit supplied by the ambient photographer who came through once a year. It is with no small trepidation that exhausted, and with a steep uphill climb to the mountain pass ahead, I’m boosted aboard a horse for the first time. We get stranded without our supplies one rainy evening not long into the trek. We’ve managed to cross a stream boiling with sudden runoff by means of a guideline held taut at both ends. The outcome won’t be nearly so favorable for the horses, burdened to capacity, if they follow suit. For the evening, we’re left with the hiking clothes on our backs, the trail mix in our pockets, and some tarps to protect us from the rain and the flat slate ledges beneath us. Upon reaching this spot, we’ve scoured the area for scraps of wood and branches for kindling. At least we have the wherewithal for a bonfire to warm us through the night. The horsemen will tend to it as they do to everything else.

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I manage a couple of hours of agonized tossing and turning under the tarp until it dawns on me that I’m awake for the night; my fellow Buffalonians hold out longer in this austere sleeping arrangement. I wriggle out of the tarp sandwich as deftly as I can, walk a brief way, and am greeted by Bashir, one of the Muslim horsemen. We have the bonfire to ourselves. Today’s rainfall has pushed the usual nighttime chill even closer to the bone. It’s been nothing if not an eventful day. Delivering basic medical services to a remote village, further progress through a landscape unsurpassed in its grandeur, even under overcast skies; the necessity of fording the stream in order to reach our campsite, at the cost of our customary routine. At an adequate distance from the sleepers, Bashir and I would have ample material for a quiet chat, but the linguistic common ground we share is nonexistent. His English, to be sure, exceeds my Pashtun, but not by much; not enough to fuel a conversation. In our own sign language, we gesture back and forth our responses to current conditions and recollections of a day still so vivid to us both. Perhaps precisely by dint of this absence of speech, Bashir and I lapse into a quiet vigil. Through glance and gesture, we settle into the intimacy residing at the baseline of human solidarity. For a good hour, as Bashir periodically replenishes the fire with a branch or two, we luxuriate simply in each other’s coinciding in this magnificent, challenging site by a seasonally volatile Himalayan stream. The thought flashes across my mind that this has to be what Heidegger is driving at with his neologism being-with (Mitsein)— the communication, in proximity, of what, in triumph, belongs to all humans and may in other relations exceed species boundaries. What Bashir communicates to me with perfect lucidity is his deep pleasure in hospitality: the personal affirmation he derives from introducing foreigners to his land, from keeping them in comfort and safety, from placing their well-being before his own. What I have for him in return is merely a quiet awe: at being in this utterly inspiring place; a wonder amplified at every turn of the trail we share. Also, the utter confidence and security I feel in being under his and the other horsemen’s vigilance and responsibility. Our watch, until the impromptu campsite begins to stir near dawn, is from my side a revelation in the dialect of sheer existence on which I’ve rarely if ever allowed myself to dwell. What has also been vividly communicated is the sense of honor with which Bashir and



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his colleagues, in every service they provide, approach the duties of the mountain guide. This perfect attunement I feel with the comprehensive life-skill, generosity, good will, and honor of a Muslim man is not exactly on a beeline with where my early upbringing was headed. We were denizens of the Philadelphia neighborhoods, our forebears in the immediate and previous generations having found their way, by different routes, from Ukraine and Romania. We were secular Jews, scrambling to maintain some footing in the “middle class,” firmly anchored in the synagogue (Conservative). We were rapt observers and sideline participants in Israel’s rise out of the Holocaust and in seemingly perpetual warfare with “her Arab neighbors.” Our inability, early in my life, to locate housing closer to the synagogue became a source of bitter resentment dividing my parents. My family’s trajectory through those neighborhoods followed the underlying illogic of race and class-driven Philadelphia herd demographics. By the age of ten I’d acquired a passable Hebrew, as lovingly instructed at that synagogue and in religious camp. This was my first substantial intellectual accomplishment; it marked study as an open avenue for fulfillment. By the time I was graciously invited along for the medical trek by my Buffalo colleagues and friends through our daughters’ schooling, I was primed, on multiple bandwidths, for its overall astonishment. I was by then teaching Comparative Literature at the formidable state multiversity in Buffalo. My graduate training, in particular, had succeeded in delivering the “cultural psychoanalysis” that so far as I’m concerned is the incipient mission of undergraduate and even advanced study. In parallel with the personality-infused drift of individual psychotherapy, for those who elect it, rigorous training, in any substantive discipline, ideally also confers the leverage to address, if not definitively obliterate, persistent bias held over from childhood orientation in the zones of race, ethnicity, class, and even family or group neurosis. My own advanced field, contemporary critical theory, with its focus on the distortion effects embedded in language, was particularly suggestive on this score. The Ladakh trek also becomes boot camp in certain skills so engrained as to seem unalterable. On narrow but still ancient trails above precipitous ravines, I’m relearning how to walk. Particularly on treacherous declines, the horsemen, not only Yussef and Bashir, but also Seiwan, Ismail, Juma, and Tashi, take me in hand.

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By the time we are clambering over passes with names like Kangila and Pingdon-la, to reach remote villages, with such names as Dibbling and Photaksar, either for drop-ins or medical clinics. I’ve already come to terms with pivotal suras of the Koran. This in conjunction with a lecture course on World Civilizations I’m offering to hefty groups of freshmen and sophomores in Buffalo. This course is a one-year General Education requirement, an expression of the university’s conviction, as of the turn of the century, in global cultures as a core component in its undergraduates’ general literacy. This teaching assignment furnishes me with a splendid opportunity for addressing any number of my gaping cultural blind spots: not only Islam, but also to Hinduism, African civilizations, and indigenous cultures around the globe. This teaching assignment furnishes a fortuitous occasion for my encounter with Jacques Derrida’s substantial writings on religion, with its correlatives—sacrifice, hospitality, pardon, blessing and curse, and the gift. (So prolific a writer was he—even in the close grain of his interventions at the etymological roots and sub-particles— that “keeping up with him” became a futile enterprise. Time after time, intermittent chapters would prove revelatory.) A celebrated philosopher with an unusually complex provenance—a Sephardic Jew by birth; raised in Muslim society, Algeria; educated in the upper echelons of the French academy, with its pronounced “Western,” i.e., Judeo-Christian, drift—Derrida would undergo repeated interrogation regarding his inspirations and affiliations. Two decades after his death, he is remembered far too prominently as the progenitor of deconstruction, somewhat to the detriment of his vast and multi-tiered contribution. Derrida read and dismembered the figments of systematic thought with the surgical dispassion of a master logician. But he wrote (and thought) with the hyperactive linguistic acuteness of a poet. Indeed, in the wake of the massive paradigm shift that he applied to the governing assumptions of Western philosophy, the presumption of pronouncing on any cultural artifact—the canonical pillar of a religion, a dramatic script, a law—without paying meticulous diligence to the etymological shift and multiplicity embedded in its language, is a multifaceted miscarriage. (By the buildup to the presidential elections of 2016, a cynical political operative such as Steve Bannon will be pirating “deconstruction” for its overall disintegrating effect on prevailing systematic formations.



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He and Trumpworld will be doing all they can to muzzle the ambiguity, complexity, finitude, and singularity emergent from rigorous philosophical close reading.) On that flank of deconstruction emanating in a relentlessly precise and skeptical system-critique, the core Western, “Abrahamic” religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) appear more as a unitary system, with notable variants, than as a minefield, forever fated to sectarian bloodshed. From the perspective of a shared systematic architecture encompassing the Western monotheistic faiths, the persecution so often prevailing between them is a provocation to incredulity and deep dismay. Not only are the sacraments of these three religions—prayer service around scripture, Sabbath, fasting, dietary restrictions, hospitality, charity—in common. So are crucial core principles, however, customized in keeping with the requirements of different religious communities: the one deity as opposed to the pantheon of anthropocentric immortals, deification as an embodiment of principle rather than superhuman power, revelation as the medium through which divine volition is transmitted, a collective mission to be achieved by the community of the faithful through human history. It is also deconstructive to the very core that beginning with the 1980s, Derrida would isolate a shared vocabulary of key values—pardon, sacrifice, responsibility, hospitality, blessing, and the gift prominent among them—making these seemingly antithetical religions highly interactive, looping them together in choral feedback. Not only this. It is completely indicative of a deconstructive approach that Derrida, plumbing to the deep roots of shared idioms, would excavate the slippage and double meaning embedded in these values, would register into the philosophical transcript that these fundaments of Western religion, however laudable, are not all they seem. The unrestrained hospitality that Bashir bestows on me during our late-night vigil is deeply uplifting and affirmative on the interpersonal level. It is the direct expression of a religiosity more common to our respective faiths than I could understand in the absence of Derrida’s theological intervention. Yet there is nothing simple or self-apparent about the acts, meanings, and aftermaths of hospitality in itself. At the level of the deep linguistic roots underlying Western culture as a system, including its three monotheistic religious subsystems, hospitality—in company

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with pardon, sacrifice, and responsibility—pulsates in multiple, sometimes self-contradictory nuance. As Derrida himself put it, in his essay “Hostipitality,” in an expression that afforded me decades of intense wonder and fascination: We know enough to tell ourselves that hospitality, what belabors and concerns hospitality at its core (ce qui travaille l’hospitalité en son sein), what works it like a labor, like a pregnancy, like a promise as much as like a threat, what settles in it, within it (en son dedans), like a Trojan horse, the enemy (hostis) as much as the avenir (future), intestine hostility, is indeed a contradictory conception, a thwarted (contrariée) conception, or a contraception of awaiting, a contradiction of welcoming itself. And something that binds, perhaps, as in Isaac’s pregnancy (la grossesse d’Isaac), the laughter at pregnancy, at the announce of childbirth. Abraham, of whom we’ll speak a lot today, laughs, like Sarah, at the announce of Isaac’s birth. [Derrida, 2002, 359–60] Readers daunted by Derrida’s reputation as a consummately abstruse, even impenetrable philosopher, may approach a passage such as the previous one with trepidation. Yet, the predicament it describes is familiar to any college student anxiously waiting for an obligatory family visit to be over; to the relatives or the officials perpetually saddled with Thanksgiving dinner or the company picnic. Particularly those readers encountering Derrida’s paradigmshifting prose for the first time cannot but be struck by the slip and slide governing his gloss on hospitality in the biblical sense. This laudable convention, in Derrida’s parlance, harboring so much in the way of expectation, promise, and fulfilment, barrels into alien linguistic territory. Through its etymological connection to the enemy, hospitality, however gracious its tangible offering may be, is branded with the indelible nuance of holding in captivity. In subtle ways, the host may indeed be a foe. And yet, because it is also the fundamental interpersonal embodiment of reception and embedding, hospitality is also a form of pregnancy. In the volatile cloud chamber of the earlier passage, there is a subliminal linguistic beeline from insemination to conception, contraception, misconception, miscarriage, annunciation, and binding. Pervasive though the encompassing Western value of hospitality may be, it is a matter of intense, sometimes desperate complexity.



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This composite elusiveness shrouding a core Abrahamic value inspires Derrida to conflate hospitality with deconstructive reading itself: “Hospitality, the experience, the apprehension, the exercise of impossible hospitality, of hospitality as the possibility of impossibility (to receive another guest whom I am incapable of welcoming, to become capable of that which I am incapable of)— this is the exemplary experience of deconstruction itself . . . that is, the experience of the impossible. Hospitality—this is a name or an example of deconstruction” [Derrida, 2002, 364]. Conveying this “experience of impossibility” attending what we, out of sedateness, intellectual laziness, and desire for security, routinely overlook in our basic assumptions about the world—this may well summate Derrida’s overarching and enduring cultural contribution. At the same time when multiple existing orientations of mine, religious as well as cultural and anthropological, are rapidly transforming themselves on a long journey among friends, Derrida is illuminating—as the intractability and multiplicity of language— the “fear and trembling” also endemic to religion. There is no fuller evidence of the responsibility—to Derrida, one of the key ethical components of religious faith—that he imbued into his readouts of the nevertheless tenuous pillars of Western civilization than the “full follow-through” with which he completed his most memorable elucidations. Hospitality, or in Derrida’s parlance, “hostipitality,” is thick with the complications that both frustrate our everyday transactions and embellish our highest intellectual realizations. Hospitality must wait and not wait. It is what must await and still (et cependent) not await, extend and stretch itself (se tendre) and still stand and hold itself (se tenir) in the awaiting and the non-awaiting. Intentionality and non-intentionality, attention and inattention. Tending and stretching itself between the tending (le tendre) and the not-tending or the not-tending itself (ne pas se tendre), not to extend this or that, or oneself to the other. It must await and expect itself to receive the stranger. Indeed, if we gather (nous recueillons) all these words, all these values, all these significations (to tend and extend, to extend oneself, attention, inattention, holding (tenue), withholding (retenu), the entire semantic family of tenere or of the tendere (Gr. teinô), we see this same contradictory tension at once working, worrying,

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disrupting the concept and experience of hospitality. [Derrida, 2002, 360] I and my compatriots have traveled to Ladakh from a mid-sized, up-to-date US city. Bashir resides year-round in a village in the vicinity of Srinagar. Whatever the disparities in lifestyle and material culture that separate us, Bashir and I merge in an experience of total engagement, mutual outreach, and Being-with. As Derrida reminds us, we share not only a particularly vivid and auratic moment: we are joined in complexities, often attaining the level of exasperation, even of madness, embedded at root level in the very platform of shared values and aspirations. Our ultimate destination is the monastery at Lingshet. It is at this mountain outpost, graphically remote, that we will hold, over several days, our most sustained medical clinic. This religious community is presided over by the inimitable Geshe La, an advanced monk of the Gelugpa Order, who divides his year between the Lingshet monastery and a camp for Tibetan Buddhists in Bangalore. We travel down to reach Lingshet, having crossed the Amuna-la pass earlier in the day. Geshe La and his colleagues, bearing long, gossamer welcome-shawls, have met us at the outskirts of the community. Much as it may invoke a cliché in the Eastern religion literature, Geshe La, wrapped in a golden robe, is a synthesis of prepossessing strength and rounded contour. From the moment of our encounter, he bowls us over with his vitality and the raptness of his attention. He loves a good joke. The leader of the Buffalo mission is Dr. Richard V. Lee, a Yaletrained internist but also renowned medical anthropologist, who has studied indigenous and mountain peoples since the years following medical training with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Montana. International medicine is in his blood: his grandfather was one of the original participants in the Yale-China Association, among the oldest academic exchanges with East Asia in the United States. At the University at Buffalo, Dick Lee practices and holds down the third-year clinical rotation in the Med School; he introduces students from all over the university to cyclical time, as it is pursued and embellished by remote peoples; to the preponderate role that ritual, whether through diet, medicine, or in worship, music, and dance, plays in their lives. He is particularly gifted in teasing out this cyclical worldview with Western medicine



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in mind. The summer medical trek out of Buffalo has been going on for a decade by the time I catch up with it. Ladakh has emerged as its favored venue. Dick, often accompanied by his wife Susan, has emerged as an expert in Ladakhi affairs. He has accessed Geshe La through his regular attendance at international Ladakh meetings. In spirit as well as stature, Dick is a perfect match for Himalayan valleys that take two days to cross and Buddhist monks and nuns who have magically brought their elements and dispositions into sustained equipoise. In his early 60s by the time the 1999 trek rolls around, he’s as hale and hearty as the much younger nurses and medical students who render such critical service. His devotion and bear hug extend to the patients he encounters along the way as to all the partners he’s welcomed into the trek. Held in an openair shelter just steps away from the Lingshet monastery, our clinics are, as always, impromptu affairs, beginning in late morning and going through the afternoon. The medical staff, an emergency room physician from Oregon as well as Dr. Lee, nurses and the students, handle a range of conditions ranging from lung infections to loss of hearing and vision to injuries sustained along the rocky trails. Prescriptions, whether for eyeglasses or prosthetic devices, are relayed to Leh. One dose of Vitamin E administered to an infant will have a lifelong effect. The small crowd slowly mills through the shelter.​ Lingshet monastery is a vision in gold and deepest blue. The services it renders to the outlying schools and hamlets in its immediate area, through its kitchen and its teaching nuns and monks, are quite concrete and practical. Yet inside, the structure is best described as a treasure house of spiritual artworks. A golden glow radiates from ubiquitous paintings of deities, demons, and spiritual landscapes, also from the countless wall hangings adorning, above all, the sanctuary. The radiant gold communicates enlightenment and inspiration. The black blue, often reserved for some of the most fearsome Buddhist spirits, is every bit as much delegated to human resilience and spiritual uplift. It issues in somber encomium, whether to circumspect or ethical resolve. It holds out protection from evil, whether in dream, thought, or deed. One full wall of the sanctuary is a repository of texts, a shimmering grid of the compartments where they’ve been enshrined. Swans and elephants dominate the paintings greeting visitors in the

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FIGURE 15.2  Eye exam, Buffalo medical mission, Lingshet, Ladakh, July 1999. Photograph by author.

foyer. In one particularly unforgettable rendition, elephants dot a spiral path winding up a sublime mountain; it is an allegory of the exertion, spiritual as well as physical, necessary to reach this very spot. Visitors to the monastery, from the instant of their entry into this foyer, whose wooden window frames bring distant mountains home, to their attaining the inner sanctuary, are regaled with occasions for spiritual deepening through art. Avalokiteshvara, Bodhisattva of compassion and mercy, presides over Lingshet. Geshe La, in his dealings both with the local community and the outside world, has calibrated his own bearing and interventions to extend as seamlessly as possible from this pivotal Tibetan Buddhist deity. Avalokiteshvara, and his protean manifestations, is a ubiquitous visual icon within the rich panoply of artifacts collected throughout the monastery. He is a tangible presence, in the welcome hall overlooking the Himalayas, also in the inner sanctum. But in the sacred neighborhood that is so clearly the model for Lingshet, Vajrapani, “wielder of the thunderbolt,” fierce, dark protector against evil spirits, dwells invariably close by—aesthetically as well as temperamentally. Avalokiteshvara animates paintings, thankas, and statuary. A seated, draped rendition in silver includes a cascade of his emanations, as heads, pouring upward from his own.



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Geshe La, with a stamina and resilience more often than not overreaching into ebullience, presides over the full palette of activities uniting this far-flung community: its communal meals, its festivals, replete with music, dance, and costume, its schools. When I first encounter him in 1999, his English acquisition is still at an uphill stage. Yet his orientation to the activities of Lingshet and his elucidations of Tibetan Buddhism are vivid. The gentle incredulity with which he laughs when his English crashes is in itself a powerful Buddhist lesson. It tempers the utter exasperation with which we tend to greet our inevitable wipeouts, whether in social comportment or communication, with dignity and humor. Lingshet is indeed the apotheosis to our journey. When I think back to my transformative encounter with Bashir, as I so often do, what stands out in my recollection is the pride he took in seeing to my safety and well-being—and that of all my companions on the trek; the palpable sense of honor infusing our guides’ (whether Muslim or Buddhist) extraordinary efforts on our behalf. Going back all the way to Allah’s unmistakable voice in the Koran, a more consistent divine idiom than one finds either in the Old Testament or the Gospels, honor is both a daunting criterion applied to all human interactions and a substantial burden, even for the ummah or community of Islam. The ideal of honor galvanizes and crystallizes it. As with any moral imperative, this code can be repressive as well as ennobling; it can impact on its adherents in excess as in its glaring lack. Because we in “the West” remain obsessed with our thus far ineffectual efforts to come to mature terms with the sexual drive, we tend to conflate the deep-rooted Muslim social code of honor exclusively with the debased position that we monolithically attribute to women in Muslim societies. We reduce a multidimensional surround of honor in Muslim transactions to futile and uninformed patriarchal measures to “preserve” the honor of women, relegated to the status of ineffectual wards. We cringe that in certain documented cases, women have been renounced by their families, and even murdered, when their only degradation has been their involuntary subjection to sexual violence. Honor is yet another of those Abrahamic principles—spanning three monotheistic religions—that Derrida would turn into a conceptual Moebius strip while teasing out its deep-seated double and even triple messages. Surely, the exaggerated protestation of honor

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meets up, at some subliminal level, with its diametrical opposite. Given the rich subtext of honor and heroism in the literature and canonical texts of Islam, and such as I witnessed firsthand every day on our Ladakh mission, I nevertheless cannot adequately underscore the utter disaster of conducting diplomacy with Muslim societies and political entities by repeatedly impugning the honor of their people. All the more so when this invective is obviously uninformed. Such entrenched, non-negotiable hostility was amply evident in the “Muslim ban” on travel to the United States that President Trump decreed by executive order in December 2016—it was already tremendously controversial. This measure would go on to secure affirmation by the US Supreme Court in response to pointed legal challenges in June 2018. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. would write in the majority opinion that “Mr. Trump had ample statutory authority to make national security judgments in the realm of immigration” [Adam Liptak and Michael D. Shear, “Trump’s Travel Ban is Upheld by Supreme Court,” WP, June 26, 2018]. Along with the image of a tangible wall to stop immigration on the US-Mexican border, the Muslim ban was part of a gift-pack proffered to Trump’s supporters by early December 2015, when he was still but one Republican presidential aspirant among several. [Patrick Healy and Michael Barbaro, “Donald Trump Calls for Barring Muslims from Entering U.S.,” WP, December 7, 2015]. By the time the election delivers its devastating rejoinder to the prevailing “smart money” in political camps spread up and down the spectrum, Abigail Hauslohner of the Post is reporting that “the party’s standard-bearer has borrowed heavily both in message and membership from far-right conservative activists whose pronouncements on Islam have long been denounced as dangerous zealotry by mainstream conservative and liberal policymakers alike” [“How a Series of Fringe Anti-Muslim Conspiracy Theories Went Mainstream,” WP, November 5, 2016]. Among the avatars selling rabid anti-Muslim xenophobia to Trump are Frank Gaffney Jr., a former Reagan administration aide now running a neoconservative think tank, and Steve Bannon, in his capacity as campaign manager of the 2016 Trump campaign. Through events mounted by organizations like Act! For America, with Gaffney’s direct involvement, or over Bannon’s Breitbart News, audiences learned “that Islam isn’t a religion but a political ideology that is inherently violent. . . . Those espousing such views present



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Islam as an inherently hostile ideology whose adherents are enemies of Christianity and Judaism and seek to conquer nonbelievers either by violence or through a sort of stealthy brainwashing.” “Borrowing from the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis of the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington,” Trump, in Youngstown, Ohio, on February 1, 2017, argues “that the United States faced a threat on par with the greatest evils of the 20th century. The Islamic State was brutalizing the Mideast, and Muslim immigrants in the West were killing innocents in nightclubs, offices and churches” [Scott Shane, Matthew Rosenberg, and Eric Lipton, “Trump Pushes Dark View of Islam to Center of U.S. Policy-Making,” WP, February 1, 2017]. Any and all efforts to make fine distinctions in US Middle Eastern foreign policy, say between the ongoing conflicting claims on US patronage and largesse by the Saudis and Iran, are doomed from the get-go under the onus of such umbrella xenophobia. In view of my own explorations of these complex matters, I’m utterly vexed by this destructive, uninformed oversimplification. Back to the Sikh pilots who initially flew us into Leh: by late May 2020, I’m counting myself lucky to have survived the pandemic. Spring weather is getting into high gear. From the outset, we’ve been informed by the doctors of CDC and NIH that the effect of drier weather conditions on the droplets so crucial to Covid-19’s transmission will have a salutary effect. Assuming the precautions now the daily if not hourly preoccupation of millions, venturing outside from self-administered isolation has become a better gamble. In New York City, it is the cabbies and limo drivers, Sikhs prominent among them, who do a disproportionate share of keeping the city open. Somehow, subways and buses keep running—this on the heroism of their conductors and drivers. And millions still depend on them, above all, for transport to critical jobs very much ongoing. But the logistics of Covid-19 also warn against public transport. The cabbies’ persistence enables me to attend my first followup appointment with my orthopedic surgeon. On February 23, when Covid-19 is still more an odd rumor than anything else, I’ve ruptured my right quadriceps coming down from an elevated subway platform in E. Elmhurst. Clinging to the banister, I somehow pull myself down the stairs to street level but can’t lift myself up to hail a cab. Supine on the sidewalk at 90th and Roosevelt, I manage the best I can. I’m asked repeatedly by passersby if I need assistance. Two of my neighbors wait by my side 45 minutes until

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the ambulance I’ve called arrives. I’m taken to Elmhurst Hospital, one of the epicenters of what will become the pandemic. While I await the orthopedist on a hospital cart adjacent to the Emergency Room, the sickest lady I have ever seen is wheeled in a couple of bays away. Until I receive my vaccinations, a year later, I test positive for Covid-19 antibodies. From this point on, cabbies not only allow my surgeon to review the results of his magic; they transport me to appointments with the ophthalmologist and dentist. They enable me to maintain whatever sporadic contact I can with my daughters and grandsons—always outside, smiles and waves having replaced hugs. The cabs I hail or order are, to a vehicle, meticulous. If not fitted out with a Plexiglas barrier to inhibit disease transmission, they sport, in these early days following the mandated shutdown, shower curtains, any material for devising a compartment. The formidable task of reopening street traffic in New York City, of course, does not fall entirely on the shoulders of the Sikh drivers. My cabbies, in those early days and since, include Dominicans, East Asians, Ghanaians, Haitians, Pakistanis. All men, it so happens. We chat, even if we’re not entirely supposed to, about the effect of the deep springtime shutdown on their routes and income; the health status of their families and mine; likelihoods for the reopening of the city. A Chinese American driver strongly touts the Naples, Florida, area, if I’m ever in that vicinity, where he has his second home (“It’s more appropriate to folks our age.”) These cabbies may not all be Sikhs, but they have worked collectively in a heroic brotherhood to keep the city open, at least for those who could pay for their services. Their story, no doubt from multiple points in the urban labyrinth, will continue to be told. This is of course a huge issue: in the densely packed epicenter, when prevention is still largely limited to masks, handwashing, and distancing, who manages to take the strategically lesser risks that we negotiate on a daily basis? Who can bypass the food and retail outlets and pharmacies where exposure to the disease seems likelier? Who, in insisting on venturing outside, can avoid conveyance by public transport? What puts me in the position to draw on cabbies when I travel out to Brooklyn and Manhattan? What could have permitted me, in 1999, to take a month out of my life for an amazing journey to Ladakh, as transformative as it turned out to be? We can all surmise the answers to these questions, and we have all, at one



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time or another, devoted time and our most intense puzzlement to them. What we are dealing with is a system so pervasive as to have achieved near-invisibility. It reinforces and perpetuates itself through a volatile capability to scramble its messages, substitute its terms, and camouflage itself almost instantaneously. It affects us all. We can all recognize its arbitrariness and injustice. We all devote some time, effort, and even disposable money (if we have it) to undoing its more obvious effects. But to no avail, so all-encompassing and deep-seated is it. It is impervious to our emotions, our attitudes toward it. In resisting its strictures, selections, and arbitrary distinctions, we even end up, unwittingly, reinforcing it. It happens to be the underlying and ultimate topic of these current scattered recollections.

FIGURE 15.3  Summer festival, Ladakh, July 2001. Photograph by author.

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When my cabbie happens to be Sikh, we seem to flow just that much more crisply and decisively toward my destination—however the traffic is moving in its ineffable cycle. The city flashes by, lit up one shade brighter than otherwise. If we venture on an open stretch, say the Ed Koch Bridge on a quiet day, our sudden burst of acceleration is that much more thrilling.​

November 15, 2020. Electronic Ticks and Leaden Bubbles

Among the memorable stopovers along my own lifetime packet voyage through reading—as weird and vivid as anything in Poe or Dostoyevsky—has been The Foray into the World of Animals and Humans by the Estonian-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944). From its first move, this erudite study stops us humans in our tracks. It takes off from a pair of unconditional demands the reader has never before faced: rethinking animals as the dynamic “subjects” of their variegated domains rather than as stationary targets for detached scientific study. Incumbent in these cognitive gymnastics is a jarring perspectival shift, one with ethical repercussions: imagining these habitats—Uexküll’s term is Umwelt or environment—as perceived and experienced by the nonhuman organism itself. Rendering to the animal-subject the fullest possible scope of its distinctive, irreducible otherness. Meticulous zoologist that he is, Uexküll goads us into thinking “bigger” by absorbing us into miniature-scale models. His Foray is a playfully meandering romp. It sets off with a coup that even his most incredulous readers will remember—reducing the environment and life experience of the common tick to a grand total of three factors. Combined, these life-thresholds, as momentous to a tick as any major transitional event to a human being, form the context indispensable to any further scientific research into this animal. Among the hundreds of effects that emanate from the animal’s body, only three become feature carriers for the tick. Why these three and no others? . . . The tick hangs inert on the tip of a branch in a forest clearing. Its position allows it to fall onto a mammal running past. From its entire environment, no stimulus penetrates the tick. But here comes a mammal, which the tick needs for the production of offspring.

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And now something miraculous happens. Of all the effects emanating from the mammal’s body, only three become stimuli, and then only in a certain sequence. From the enormous world surrounding the tick, three stimuli glow like signal lights in the darkness and serve as directional signs. . . . The whole rich world surrounding the tick is constricted and transformed into an impoverished structure that, most importantly of all, consists only of three features and effect marks—the tick’s environment. However the poverty of this environment is needful for the certainty of action, and certainty is more important than riches. [Uexküll, 2010, 50–1] In comparison with the barrage of stimuli and perceptions we humans take in every instant that we contend with our environment, the three “features and effect marks” making up the tick’s universe may indeed seem “constricted” and “poor.” Yet it is within this compass, however reduced, that the tick as subject acts with “certainty.” Discerning the tick’s true Umwelt, the domain of its bottom-line species sustainability, is a process of reduction. It is attained by disinterested extraction out of a myriad of features and stimuli. The tick’s pivotal life experiences are three: smelling the butyric acid marking the target-mammal as worthy nutrition; positioning itself and then releasing itself from its perch such that it attains its target; and then by moving within its host’s fur, accessing the relatively bare skin that will yield to its burrowing legs. The humble tick furnishes Uexküll with his limit-case for how each organism extracts or derives its environment out of myriad features and factors. This is, of course, decades before the deertick, as a primary carrier of Lyme’s disease and related conditions, will anticipate the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. Lyme’s serves us as a parallel instance of disease accelerated if not created by increased human encroachment on uncustomary habitats, by unprecedented biospheric liaisons of intimacy and codependency. By contrast, Uexküll’s stunning initial parry drives home the astronomical multiplicity of the environmental features and factors that the human species contends with, with which, “under normal conditions,” it is in communication, all bearing, in one dimension or another, “meaning.” And Uexküll’s practice of reducing an organism’s Umwelt to the baseline features underpinning its reproduction and sustainability



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furthermore facilitates the comparison between the human environment under Covid-19 and what prevailed in that now distant before. This was back when education took place in person and the school calendar reached its stately culmination; when those who could afford it traveled by air whenever and wherever, whether for frivolous or essential ends; when eating, attending art events, and praying en masse in public settings provided comfort and diversion. Does Uexküll’s counterintuitive approach to animals have something notable to offer us as we begin to reassess our prospects during an age bracketed by pandemics, climactic catastrophes, and the social turbulence generated by constant reminders of our precarious existence? Should our damage assessment of what has transpired and even accelerates set off from the assumption and practice of a reduced environment? If this is so, how many customary social settings and communal activities do we tick off the list? With an exuberance infecting the sober task of science writing with irrepressible glee, Uexküll climbs up the ladder of zoological complexity from the tick, factoring in new variables with each additional instance. The earthworm’s environment may or may not be expanded beyond the tick’s. Only by taste, and not by anything as developed as “perception marks based on shape” does this lowly creature manage to pull protective and nourishing “leaves and pine needles into its narrow tunnel” [Uexküll, 2010, 62]. The earthworm “knows,” apparently, which end of the leaf to tug on such that it will fold into the confining space. Out on the open meadow, bees, as they’ve demonstrated in the lab, “prefer to land on shapes that had a more opened form, such as stars and crosses; they avoid closed forms. . . . Only the blooms, not the buds, have meaning for the bees” [Uexküll, 2010, 84]. Not only does the bee’s perceptual apparatus make it responsive to such markers as shape. Bees are programmed—in Uexküll’s parlance, this is an attunement to “Nature’s plan”—to confer meaning exclusively on the shapes facilitating nourishment and their indispensable role in pollination. Out of an environmental surround literally pulsating with stimuli, danger, food sources, and protection, animals select out only those features of use in the wider scheme. This is meaning— to them. Along with horses and housecats, dogs may have, in their adaptation, reached an apex of symbiotic coexistence with humans. Yet, transplanted to human habitation, these longestablished companions make no bones about selecting between the

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accouterments useful to them—often involving surfaces and objects, such as chairs, floor space, and bowls involved in shelter, rest, and feeding—and the irrelevant ones, often smaller implements, that they relegate to the status of junk. Know the animal’s environment—the Umwelt it has both been endowed with and has retrofitted to its purposes—and you have discovered the true nature of the beast. This is, from Uexküll’s point of view, the compelling task before biology. The biosphere, or living space demanded by this purview, is complicated. It is populated with a gigantic hodgepodge of species-wide environments. These may in turn be interactive, at a complete skew from one another, or vacillating between these two positions. Within Uexküll’s intricate, animal-centered, and empathic bio-choreography, humans emerge in the trickiest position of all. By dint of tabulation on an astronomical scale, will it be possible to catalog every factor in the human environment, resulting in an inventory—no doubt far vaster than a tick’s—encompassing their full capability and experience? Are humans merely one species in the full complement? Or is existence so complex, with constant adaptation to transformations and turbulence, powered by hard-wired capacities for language, cognition, and reasoning culminating, among other achievements, in science, that we defy being reduced to an environmental checklist? Have we been typecast in the odd role of a species apart, a work in progress, whose bio-impact statement will never move beyond draft-stage? Uexküll characterizes the confined setting of a tick, or of any animal inhabiting the biospheric “meadow” as a “bubble.” While it may seem haphazard to encounter this latter term in a treatise of environmental biology, it is—both in the direction where Uexküll takes it and in arenas far afield—absolutely pivotal to our gaining a hold on the excesses, dismissals, and abuses of the Trump era. Within Uexküll’s “buzzing and blooming” meadow, the bubble marks out the peripheral limit on each species’ vision. “We must therefore imagine all the animals that animate Nature around us, be they beetles, butterflies, gnats, or dragonflies who populate a meadow, as having a soap bubble around them, closed on all sides, which closes off their visual space and in which everything visible for the subject is also enclosed” [Uexküll, 2010, 69]. The extent of the species-bubble coincides with the “farthest plane” of each animal’s vision. Uexküll is more than enough the philosopher to



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realize the wider cognitive, cultural, and ethical implications of bubbles, limits imposed on subjects’ perception, discernment, and, by implication, comprehension—by Nature. “Each and every one of us on all sides” is limited by the bubble enclosing our world, even though these human bubbles “effortlessly overlap one another” [Uexküll, 2010, 70] Launched on the book’s eponymous foray through the “flowering” meadow, Uexküll can only circumscribe bubbles around each life form entering his view. We make a bubble around each of the animals living in the meadow. The bubble represents each animal’s environment and contains all the features accessible to the subject. As soon as we enter into one such bubble, the previous surroundings of the subject are completely reconfigured. Many qualities of the colorful meadow vanish completely, others lose their coherence with one another, and new connections are created. A new world arises in each bubble. [Uexküll, 2010, 43] If Uexküll writes from the perspective of the anthropologist or explorer, replete with jingoistic bravado, free to roam from one bubble to another, then the sort of human potential that he embodies and fulfills cannot be limited to an inventory of “perception marks,” “effect spaces,” “effect tones,” and the like. This enables Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, one of Uexküll’s most astute readers, to conclude, “Yes, humans have an Umwelt but we can escape or transcend it” [Uexküll, 2010, 219]. And so while a new world may “arise” in each bubble, the phenomenon of bubbling involves selection, filtration, simplification, and even erasure. The price the bubble explorer pays, even in the name of science, is progressive de-familiarization, dis-orientation. Even we humans, as sapient as we pride ourselves as being, reduce the environment around us to what is useful, enabling, instrumental, self-serving, edifying. In these acts of selection whose purpose is to entrench species, clan, and community, we block out of the blooming surround far more than we admit into our sustaining bubble, or bubbles. For in our adaptation, we humans have devised multiple bubbles, each acting as a highly specific polarizing lens, focusing and limiting what we see, what we might be capable of discerning. We have evolved into creatures at once

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capable of subsisting in bubbles defined by location, language, trade, profession, kinship, religious tradition, political affiliation, wealth, and cultural inclination. Our membership in some of these focal milieus may be linked; some of our most intense affiliations float off into the social “meadow” oblivious to one another. This is an earth-shaking takeout from Uexküll’s instruction. The grim history of warfare and bloodshed from time immemorial records the galvanizing effect of habitation in these alltoo-human bubbles. But in the digital age, this almost predictable rhythm of “barbarian invasions”—violent shifts from the cultural periphery to the established centers, mega-shootouts between powers so similar in constitution and aspiration that they have become “mimetic doubles” hell-bent on mutual annihilation—gets ratcheted even higher. The endless human theater of permanent warfare mutates in unanticipated ways. The World Wide Web, with its all-powerful search engines and galactic databases replaced a congenital paucity of information and cultural resources that had reigned from the library of Alexandria to the twentiethcentury Library of Congress. A few taps on a keyboard now released gluts of material beyond assimilation by any individual or collective “reader.” Yet, social media platforms, which coordinated networking on a sublime scale with advanced research functions, ended up petrifying the walls of the bubbles into which species, of animal and human varieties, partition themselves out on Uexküll’s lush meadow. The innocuous figure of the soap bubble, ephemeral and indissolubly associated with childhood fascination and the solace of the bathtub, morphed into an unforgiving divider between warring human factions. The media bubble became a primary incubator and spreader of hate speech, inflammatory rhetoric, and ungrounded conspiracy theory, often blatant in its self-serving intent. I’m stunned, also enormously uplifted today to receive an email from an old college classmate asking me to join a weekly Sunday video conference with him and six or seven other buddies and acquaintances—folks all backlit in fond memory. NOTHING could be more energizing than a regular “live linkup”—amplified by seven discerning POV’s—to those irretrievable days. I can’t help recalling college both as a stunning series of intellectual and personal revelations and as an open bar dispensing an utterly enchanting brew. A cocktail whose main ingredient—guileless friendship—



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was liberally spiked with a bouquet consisting of frankness, play, experiment, skepticism, and visceral opposition to authority. These are without a doubt the most satisfying of the Zoom conferences I’ve been attending since April or May of the current year. By the vast commonalities in the foreground to our rambling Sunday group consultations—conferred by generation, educational background, historical and cultural memory, religion (to greater or lesser degree, Jewish), gender (male, though we are soon to be joined by some of our female classmates), class (middle), and political tendency. Amid the forced isolation imposed by the pandemic, the weekly affirmation and reinforcement coming through in these conversations on the deep register is simply transformative, addictive. But my overall dance-card of electronic meetings and conversations has only spiraled over the Great Dismissal, one of whose dominant features is a mass, nation-wide retreat from public life and space. And into a “social bomb shelter” of constrained relations, illuminated by information and reportage gathered haphazardly, and far more prone to idiosyncrasy in attitude and predilection than under pre-Covid-19 “normality.” The two heavy downbeats in the rhythm of my compulsive video conferencing accentuate poetry and the latest current version of non-toxic political activism. Over the years, I intermittently gave in to a sub rosa practice of inscribing, more accurately, pounding out, whatever phrases that came to me in condensed poetic shorthand. My odd incursions into this particular textual format amounted to a reclusive diversion. I gained little knowledge of how close-knit and interactive the poetic community, both as an encompassing literary institution and in its specific local offshoots, could be. I began to conceive of writing as a collation of diverse text-media, all in a mutual relation of contrast and supplementation. Within this complement, I situated poetry at an extreme both of textual shorthand and parsimony; but also at the outer horizons of the distribution of words in space. A variety of poetry readings and workshops broadcast over Zoom during the pandemic helped me, however belatedly, begin to make up my lifetime shortfall in poetry as communal experience. Digital conferencing technology, where it is available, has transformed humankind into a vast aggregate of electronic insect colonies. Insects, whether in the teleology of Eastern reincarnation or through Western taxonomy, may well be situated further down

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the ladder of sentient beings than, say, dolphins or deer. But the interactive swarming activity among ants, bees, and wasps at the crux of this metaphor are powerful manifestations of adaptation, persistence, and longevity. Hundreds of insect species will still be going about their communal if mechanistic business when nature finally succumbs to the Anthropocene, at least I’d heavily wager. To such an avatar of the cybernetic age as Hofstadter, ants, bees, and wasps, in their ability to communicate signals and information up and down the line, also in responding to input collectively, furnished instances of an external brain, a processor of some delicacy composed of countless insect bodies rather than metal, plastic, precious earth, and “smart materials.” These living instances of cyber-activity took up residence in trees, logs, and the earth. And we, severely restricted in mobility and overall activity during the pandemic, confined to a stripped-down miniature of our customary environment, regrouped ourselves cybernetically. We evolved into human counterparts to ant colonies and wasp nests. Creepy-crawlies cut a wide swathe through Hofstadter’s epochal Gödel, Escher, Bach. This may seem out of synch with an introductory manual to a science that most Americans associate, at the time of its publication, with impersonal number-crunching and remote bureaucracies. Yet, the crawlers, crabs as well as insects, come to Hofstadter by way of diverse sources: among them Bach’s fugues, Escher’s graphics, and Edward O. Wilson’s insect-grounded sociobiology. Choreographed into a stunning ballet of cultural synthesis on Hofstadter’s part, these artifacts, among legions of others, evidence a cybernetic sensibility on the part of humans and some animals—one well in advance and irrespective of actual computer equipment. By Hofstadter’s account, this embedded human and animal cybernetic capability manifests itself in a complex coordination of words, numbers, and symbols at the heart of computer programming. This capability culminates in acts of recursive looping and parallel isomorphic annotation, acts that can transform strings of numbers into programs that command machines. A series of breakthrough inventions and discoveries showcase a cybernetic capability in high gear centuries before computers are widely available. These achievements include the abacus; the machines of Leibnitz, Babbage, and Turing; ENIAC.



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What fascinates Hofstadter about ants, in line with Wilson’s exhaustive research into insect communities, is how signals emanating from their collective colony can divert them from random, individuated behavior and galvanize them into a mass. This ant-mass is physical, as a striking photograph from Wilson’s The Insect Societies illustrates. It is of hundreds of army ants congealed into a physical bridge connecting two separate trees or branches of a single tree. But this living mass is also, in the widest sense, political: it transforms individual ants previously content with their containment in their species-specific bubble, as this phenomenon has been summated by Uexküll, into a force capable of collective action and of achieving an array of purposes. These achievements serve a collective interest on a higher level than the individual’s survival. They promote the insect colony’s demographic, architectural, nutritional, and military needs. This achievement mode that the individual ants can get into when mobilized by a signal—a pulsation, a charge, a blast of information—propels them, as far as Hofstadter is concerned, into the “upper level” encompassed by all computer programs and operating systems. Taking off from the delicate equilibrium between ants’ ability to exist as individuals and to “form teams” working toward some strategic end, Hofstadter writes—or rather, the “animated characters” whose antics Hofstadter conjures up between his hardcore lessons—declare: Crab: The ants are free only within certain constraints. For example, they are free to wander, to brush against one another, to pick up small items, to work on trails, and so on. But they never step out of that small world, that ant-system, which they are in. It would never occur to them, for they don’t have the mentality to imagine anything of the kind. Thus the ants are very reliable components. . . . Anteater: There is some degree of communication among the ants, just enough to keep them from wandering off completely at random. By this minimal communication they can remind each other that they are not alone but are cooperating with teammates. It takes a large number of ants, all reinforcing each other this way, to sustain any activity—such as trail-building— for any length of time. Now my very hazy understanding of the

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operation of brains leads me to believe that something similar pertains to the firing of neurons. Isn’t it true, Mr. Crab, that it takes a group of neurons firing in order to make another neutron fire? [Hofstadter, 1979, 316] Hofstadter’s wise and witty Aesopean characters, Anteater, Crab, and above all Tortoise, invariably get the best of Achilles, the only “human” in the room, a mythological mascot consistently blindsided by the hurried literality of his inferences. The aforementioned repartee nevertheless manages to telegraph Hofstadter’s intense cybernetic interest in ants. Even if reduced to the confinement presided over by “Aunt Hilary,” these creatures, when jolted by information-bearing signals, achieve something on a larger scale. We can think of what mobilizes the ants either organically, as the successive pulsations that trigger a neuron in a brain, or cybernetically, as signals transmitted to various components along circuits of transmission and “meaning.” The signal, according to Anteater, is a “special kind” of team operating in the colony, somehow falling “in between the single-ant level and the colony level.” All the higher entities [in the ant colony] are collections of signals acting in concert. . . . Eventually you reach the lowest-level teams—which is to say signals—and below them, ants. . . . The effect of signals is to transport ants of various specializations to appropriate parts of the colony. So the typical story of a signal is thus: it comes into existence by exceeding the threshold needed for survival, and then it migrates for some distance through the colony, and at some point it more or less disintegrates into its individual members, leaving them on their own. [Hofstadter, 1979, 320] The “story” of the signal as it convulses, upgrades, and then abandons the ant colony of which it is part has some bearing on the catastrophes with which humankind is beset with increasing regularity. Each new stressor, whether a disease or an outcropping of climate change, momentarily galvanizes us into a collectivity, holding out the promise of decisive countermeasures, achieved in concert. The signal’s chief accomplishment within the ant colony, as Hofstadter elaborates it, is one of distribution: it “transports”



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the right cadres of ants into their optimal deployment. Every bit as striking as the “content” borne by each momentous “signal” is the ease with which it dissipates: “The typical ant in a signal is meandering around . . . in search of nothing in particular, until it finds that it feels like stopping. Its teammates usually agree, and at that moment the team unloads itself by crumbling apart” [Hofstadter, 1979, 321]. Wilson’s insect societies, rebooted with a pronounced cybernetic spin by Hofstadter, are forever fated to fluctuate between the stages of what the latter terms their “holism” and their “individualism.” In function and “identity,” the socialized insects toggle back and forth, according to the situation, between these states. The ants’ fluctuation between their particularity and their “holism” is inherently binary—they are already “prenaturalized” citizens in a digital universe. Following the trajectory of what Hofstadter elsewhere elaborates as the “strange loop,” the galvanizing signal leaves the ant colony more or less where it started. With the exception that some task of vital interest to the colony’s collective persistence has been accomplished. The insect community, for one crucial instance, never tallied on any transcript of historical record or memory, has thus transformed itself into something purposeful on the collective plane. Species and environmental survival is measured out in long periods of equilibrium punctuated by transformative “resets” in the systems of communication and meaning. Species, like human collectivities and interest groups, retreat into their bubbles. From the broad perspective of the ecosystem in which they interact, known in many circles as Gaia, their habitation in bubbles imposes blindness and obtuse self-interest upon them. Evolutionary biology and chemistry record many instances, however, when multiple species, endangered by a common threat, break their particularism and work, even on a subliminal level, in concert. Indeed, it is this capacity for interspecies cooperation that is now the basis for any scientific hope of ecological sustainability. Richard Powers, in his recent novel, The Overstory, provides a marvelous account of life-sustaining orchestration arising when the odious danger signal comes to trees. The evolutionary chemistry and biology in which this novel is grounded was supplied, among others, by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, whose findings provoked decades of pitched resistance by the established scientific community. The direst threat to humanity—and the multiple

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species, animal, plant, fungus, and microbe, with which humans have established co-symbiotic relationships, is some “signal,” whether arising from pathogens, climate change, or strategic resource depletion, that would utterly disable interspecies collaboration on Gaia’s part. The phenomenon of “media bubbles” into which communities and groups of all political stripes have sequestered themselves, however well-intentioned they once might have been, and out of which some disseminate wildly distorted, self-interested, and destructive pictures of reality, is in direct opposition to whatever healing potential is left in human demographic and ecological systems. “Bubbling”—if not too awkward a term—is nothing less than a phenomenon. Since the 1970s, it has played an outsized and utterly decisive role in shaping the public sphere and in deciding the dynamics that prevail between office holders, influencers, economic interests, political parties, celebrity, prestige institutions, and the public at large. “Bubbling” fragments and displaces the information base once supplied, in an age less digitized, by sources available to most of the populace: daily newspapers, flagship radio stations, three national TV networks plus PBS. There will never be any retreat back to these days; indeed, the informational “commons” then prevailing also doubled, unwittingly or not, as an instrument of social exclusion, a filter against marginal views and practices, a squelcher of diversity and dissent. The “bottom line” delivered by this dominant media matrix, nevertheless, was a knowledgebase disseminated and tested widely enough to launch a broad-gauged debate before a vast cross-section of US society, one setting the basic options into play. One of the correspondents in the weekly Zoom sessions with my college buddies cuts to the quick when he dubs the moment “the age of Walter Cronkite.” The media options in the digital universe are so legion; the degree of stimulation achieved by the websites, streaming, and podcasts is so high that we now select an alternate reality as casually as we once flipped the channel. Through the bubble phenomenon, mass media aspire to individualism once jealously limited to the domain of subjectivity and the uniqueness with which each personality is invested. The media bubble encourages the minority report, the conspiracy theory, the dire take on immunization, to take one compelling current example. Regardless of your personal skew on things, the major social networks can come up with something custom, just right for you, your unique situation, in your best



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interest. The accuracy or objectivity of the information you’re free to access poses no obstacle whatsoever. Social media, in the utter brilliance with which they simulate an individuality replete with unlimited choice and unbound freedom become major enablers of misinformation, polarized thinking, and fanciful conspiracy theory—primary ingredients in the toxic cocktail besotting the current public sphere. There was a crystallizing moment, above all in the 1980s and 1990s, when theories of narcissism furnished a compelling account of already pronounced tendencies toward social isolation, immersion in electronic media, with their unprecedented absorptive power, and a public sphere already overheated by partisan discord. Freud had certainly not neglected the phenomenon, which he encountered clinically in a rogue’s gallery of sexual dysfunctions. (For Freud, narcissism is but one more instance of the logjams squelching the happy release and consummation of the drive.) In the most delightful of his “Metapsychological Essays” from the teens, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), this category serves Freud as a wildcard that could bring common cause to such incongruous characters as monomaniacal 3-year-olds, comedians, gangsters, beautiful women, and the common housecat! To the psychologists of “object relations” of the 1970s and 1980s, narcissism betokened something far more ominous: the constant fluctuation between expanded (“grandiose”) sensibility, with all its potentials for transgression and excess, and the conventional circumspect guiding transactions in the civil sphere. The grandiose rampages came fitted out with unmistakable theatrics of contempt toward the everyday Joes and Janes lurking in the shadows of oversized achievements; indeed, an uncanny gift for putdowns, of the most injurious sort, became the narcissistic personality’s chief “tech-support” to its predictable melodrama. This style of interpersonal interaction, rolled out by such psychoanalysts as Otto Kernberg, Heinz Kohut, and Alice Miller, manifested grievous deficits of everyday empathy, simmering envy constantly on the verge of boiling over, and stunning obtuseness to any feedback conveying the environmental impact of these life strategies. The traumatic events unearthed in course of a psychotherapy specially geared to long-term incredulousness and resistance, that is, in those relatively few instances when people so afflicted commit to the clinical long-haul, invariably involved the withholding of empathic support by significant others at pivotal

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junctures in their personal evolution. The events of the 1980s and 1990s—financial scandals unfolding with almost expected regularity, the outsourcing of jobs and entire categories of work through an unapologetically “bottom line” espousal of new global labor markets and supply chains, the dismantling of Soviet-style socialism—drew me to what seemed a new “operating system” of contemporary subjectivity. More than the others, Kernberg had infused his clinical encounter with a new milieu of patients, one throwing down unaccustomed gauntlets, into the very prose of his case study debriefings. These patients present an unusual degree of self-reference in their interactions with other people, a great need to be loved and admired by others, and a curious apparent contradiction between a very inflated concept of themselves and an inordinate need of tribute from others. Their emotional life is shallow. They experience little empathy for the feelings of others, they experience little enjoyment from life other than from the tribute they receive from others or from their own grandiose fantasies, and they feel restless and bored when the external glitter wears off and no new sources feed their self-regard. They envy others, tend to idealize some people from whom they expect narcissistic supplies, and to deprecate and treat with contempt those from whom they do not expect anything (often their former idols). In general their relationships with other people are often exploitative and often parasitic. [Kernberg, 1975, 17] “Restless and bored when the external glitter wears off,”“narcissistic supplies”—Kernberg ushers in a new moment of psychotherapeutic intervention with a commentary disarming in directness; unusually frank in disclosing the therapist’s POV; admitting occupational hazards that come in the customary tug of war with patients, the “transference”—but exacerbated in the maladies of personality. This is indeed a creative response to interactions demanding an unusual degree of self-effacement and pitched caution on the part of caregivers. Kernberg’s cabinet is a far cry from “David and Lisa” and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. At the level of the cultural operating system, I can think of few lines more foundational to the astute journalism, beginning with 2015 and ongoing, that rose to the challenge posed by the



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Trump personality. It is but a brief step from these lines to Jennifer Senior’s dubbing us all “Miserable Children of the Narcissist in Chief” [NYT, October 11, 2019]; Charles M. Blow’s tracking the incipient rage driving so many of Trump’s followers [“Trump’s Rage Junkies,” NYT, July 1, 2018]; Maureen Dowd’s conducting a census of “Psychos on the Potomac, one reaching beyond the president to Rudy Giuliani, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Jeff Sessions, and Sara Huckabee” [NYT, June, 16, 2018]. Frank Bruni tracks Trump’s narcissism even to the doors of death. His “Death in the Age of Narcissism” [NYT, April 27, 2018] chronicles the then-president’s inability to process the passing of such American icons as John McCain and Aretha Franklin other than through the solipsism of self-reference. The Trump administration was profusely peopled with colorful figures taking off from the character type that Kernberg was among the first to tabulate. The list seems endless: Roger Stone, Mitch McConnell, Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, William Barr, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert—a gallery of psychoanalytical rogues. Comforting as the theory and rhetoric of narcissism may be, however, from a time frame already ramping up to the 2022 midterm elections, the image and process of bubbling may even offer us more. To be sure, the narcissist, as characterized by Kernberg, Kohut, Miller, and others dwells in a bubble of self-interest and selfaggrandizing strategies. And as suggested earlier, social media come already fitted out with features reinforcing social isolation and the disparate posses of vigilantes galvanized by isolation. Yet, the construct of the bubble is in sync with palpable developments in the history of media. And it addresses human cognitive capability such as it has evolved. It advances beyond the psychodrama in which the inevitably flawed subject continues in her quest for the Holy Grail of transformative realization. The bubble is an odd figure, indeed. At once lucid, crystalline, detached, and deeply vulnerable, it lifts us, at a moment when we have been saturated with polemics and sermons, beyond the moralism permeating all theories of personal remediation. Having toiled for decades in the somewhat demanding field of critical theory, I can think of no more trenchant a label for deconstruction—a cultural approach fusing intense circumspect in interpretation to a deep immersion in language—than as the bursting of leaden bubbles; the disruption of enclaves only feeding

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upon their tendencies to unfounded assertion, apocalyptic thinking, and belligerent complacency. The abuses of the Trump regime, the exceptional conditions imposed by Covid-19, and the accelerating encroachments of climate change and strategic resource depletion have combined to crystallize the consummate Zen kŌan of our moment: what is the “farthest plane” limiting our own vision and of the communities that we espouse? Which vision, sensibility, cultural artifacts, and sound political decisions will deliver us from the bubbles—whether by chance or design—we have hunkered down in?

June 13, 2019. Three Deer in a Development Near Harrisburg, PA

—Together, animals confer their powers of movement and perception on the biosphere, making it an organized collective, the largest organic being of all. —Rather, the conversion to waste to a surplus by one life form has biospheric precedents: far from impoverishing the planet, the waste of one may, in fact, create more wealth for another. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life? 1. Sauntering forth possessed under cover of dusk— family of deer ranging over habitat gouged free from meadows, high ridge— peopled, stately homes verging on the French provincial, buttressed— low, restraining decks, “natural” wood. Expanse peppered, occasional

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birdbaths, trolls, lawns seldom fenced in. Elastic ribbons of asphalt poured over greenspace, serried arbiters of order: lamposts, columnar property markers, street numbers. The deer pay them no mind. 2. Only by force, kismet do we drift— SLOWLY into one and same crossing, paralytic Augenblick, eye to eye, through alien coordinates, nuclear trio of deer and I. Conducted through a network of ties— community, decorum, family, rules of the road— am I. They follow the wind roused by sunlight from obscure hideouts in the woods, over protected clearings so down wind, as to have assumed a cloak of invisibility; random blasts flaunting all spatial compartments zoned, human habitation, custom



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turns a whisper in all directions an acorn at nano’s notice, shredding the top down by grace alone— power, dominion, territory— into smooth space. I and the deer, in our cabal, the biosphere they in uncanny fluidity, noble bearing, we in God-given ingenuity (major chimera). Ex-urban housing developments here we hold our parleys. obscure, unattended, both high-end products, Bambis and I, both conversant in the tangle, the still luxuriant margin: tall as the troposphere; submerged with volcanic rock, staining continental shelving at the base, Antarctica— wherever protists roam, bacteria prevail. Ivy-educated global managers, the deer and I, executors—the “Life” account. 3. High-tailing it over broad communal lawn, they couldn’t give a flying fuck, the deer. Disappeared, with flippant coda! Evolutionary co-symbionts, they fix us

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with that uncanny stare, Kafka’s kitten-lamb— egging us on— slash them, once and for all, into oblivion. We demur. Too many variables yet at play, this slow-simmering ragout, people and Gaia. We’ll long be gone the day the deer lay down their final say.

Labor Day, 2021. Partisans of Writing. Shoshanah Zuboff

Surveillance capitalism commandeered the wonders of the digital world to meet our needs for effective life, promising the magic of unlimited information and a thousand ways to anticipate our needs and ease the complexities of our harried lives. We welcomed it into our hearts and homes with our own rituals of hospitality. . . . Thanks to surveillance capitalism the resources for effective life that we seek in the digital realm now come encumbered with a new breed of menace. Under this new regime, the precise moment at which our needs are met is also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral data, and all for the sake of others’ gain. The result is a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment. . . . Surveillance capitalism appears poised to become the dominant form of capitalism in our time. How did this happen? . . . Over the centuries we have imagined threat in the form of state power. This left us wholly unprepared to defend ourselves from new companies with imaginative names run by young geniuses that seemed able to provide us with exactly what we yearn for at little or no cost. This new regime’s most poignant harms, now and later, have been difficult to grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by expensive and illegible machine operations, secretive corporate practices, masterful rhetorical misdirection, a purposeful cultural misappropriation. [Zuboff, 2019, 53] Shoshanah Zuboff may be best described as an expert in the analysis and tracking of vast interlocking corporate entities, in sequences and loops encompassing production and its utilization of materials and resources, the translation of goods and services into profits, the

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deployment and compensation of labor, and the financial imprint these institutions leave within the broader economy. The wideangle lens of her study perforce turns her into a systems analyst and thinker at the highest level. Yet as the epigraph demonstrates, her facility in the deployment and revision of concepts in no way preempts her from being a compelling writer. On this score not unlike Derrida, she situates herself on the “hinge” between systems critique and even a literary sense of the damage wrought by new technologies yet unchecked in their environmental impact and in the corporate avarice driving them. She demonstrates full cognizance that her medium, in disclosing a sociopolitical predicament already seriously out of hand, is language. In the opening passage, with an insight also indicative of a discourse we might label cultural psychoanalysis, she unpacks the pervasive ambivalence of living under the current prevailing operating system to have claimed dominance in our time—she calls it a regime—surveillance capitalism. The first paragraph in the passage characterizes our collective massive dependency on digital communications, transactions, and record keeping as a display of customary hospitality gone awry. We welcomed these new technologies, with all the convenience they readily conferred, into our schools, businesses, our homes, even our bedrooms. The book sets off with an analysis of the “Aware Home,” a Georgia Tech project at the millennium resulting, among other applications, in a thermostat that could also gather data “from cars, ovens, fitness trackers, and beds” [Zuboff, 2019, 5–6]. (The Nest was created by Google’s holding company, Alphabet, an entity that would merge with it in 2018.) In keeping with the plot of the cine classic “Teorema,” the guest, welcomed with a mix of hope and wonder, morphs into a “menace” that “plundered us” for our “behavioral data.” The Nest, as one single instance of a phenomenon that mushroomed into a cultural épistème, cruelly retracts an “empowerment” it dangles before us, abandoning us in an ultimate state of “diminishment.” US society, in establishing a relation of abject dependency on technologies it did not first master and could, therefore, not critically receive, has, with the full psychoanalytical import, regressed. Our current dwelling in a protracted state of “arrested development” helps explain the viral success, some years back, of a cable TV comedy series of that title. In the second paragraph of the chapter, Zuboff shifts her viewfinder from this infantilization



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to the usurpation—of functions and decisions conventionally assigned to government—that such digital service and software providers as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have implemented. She thus proceeds from a corporate case study to the widest possible critique of our society at the level of political theory. This “coup from above” [Zuboff, 2019, 495–512] is all the more disorienting and seemingly irreversible by dint of a fatal synergy between corporations that had successfully militated against governmental regulation for decades, operating increasingly offshore and under cover—as chronicled by Mayer—and the technologies whose machines, software, and services they now marketed and disseminated with astonishing acceleration. The corporations, combined with technologies “difficult to grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by expensive and illegible machine operations” formed a regime by now utterly insurmountable. And the disposition with which these major transformations transpired was retrospective, after the fact, already too late. We were, collectively, “completely unprepared to defend ourselves.” Seducing us to depend increasingly, to discover ever-new convenience and further deployments in a technology built out of programming languages, electrical engineering, and ingenious devices. Then turning this battery of tools against us: massively collecting and storing our collective electronic fingerprint so as to track, profile, and manipulate us. This state of affairs describes a double-whammy if ever there was one—and Zuboff’s narrative branches to encompass both facets of this massive systematic double bind. Her expertise includes unraveling complex arcs of industrial organization and technological process, rendering them intelligible by sequencing them. Not unlike Serwer, she does not shy away from history when it renders needed perspective. The burgeoning of Big Industry in the late nineteenth century and beyond furnishes Zuboff with a solid architectural foundation in turn lending indispensable context and contrast to the runaway, digitally powered hegemony of our own moment: There was a growing body of practical knowledge about the interchangeability of parts, precision machines, and continuous flow production. But no one had achieved the grand symphony that Ford heard in his imagination. . . .

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Much as with Ford, some elements of the economic surveillance logic in the online environment had been operational for years, familiar only to a rarified group of early computer experts. For example, the software mechanism known as the “cookie”—bits of code that allow information to be passed between a server and a client computer—was developed in 1994 at Netscape, the first commercial web browser company. Similarly, “web bugs” . . . were well-known to experts in the late 1990’s. These experts were deeply concerned about the privacy implications of such monitoring mechanisms. . . . By 1996, the function of cookies had become a contested public policy issue. [Zuboff, 2019, 86] Google brought new life to these practices. As had occurred at Ford a century earlier, the company’s engineers and scientists were the first to conduct the entire commercial surveillance symphony, integrating a wide range of mechanisms from cookies to proprietary analytics and algorithmic software capabilities in a sweeping new logic that enshrined surveillance and the unilateral expropriation of behavioral data as the basis for a new market form. The impact of this invention was just as dramatic as Ford’s. . . . Ford’s inventions revolutionized production. Google’s inventions revolutionized extraction and established surveillance capitalism’s first economic imperative, the extraction imperative. The extraction imperative meant that raw-material supplies must be procured at an ever-expanding scale. Industrial capitalism had demanded economies of scale in order to achieve high throughput combined with low unit cost. In contrast, surveillance capitalism demands economies of scale in the extraction of behavioral surplus. . . . In contrast, Google’s inventions destroyed the reciprocities of its original social contract with users. The role of behavioral value reinvestment cycle that had once aligned Google with its users changed dramatically. Instead of deepening the unity of supply and demand with its populations, Google chose to reinvent its business around the burgeoning demand of advertisers eager to squeeze and scrape online behavior by any available means in the competition for market advantage. In the new operation, users were no longer ends in themselves but rather became the means to others’ ends. [Zuboff, 2019, 87–8]



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This extended citation solidly grounds us in the heart of Zuboff’s matter, which is a set of currently irreversible transformations that have taken place in the relationships between businesses and the public, between corporations and government, and between consumers and commodities, and the companies that manufacture them. The chief operating principle of this digital hegemony is extraction: retaining the residue of ourselves that we unavoidably leave behind in our online behavior for explicit purposes of merchandizing and promotion. A resource whose viability is not in the least limited to commerce; its political and even psychological applications are obvious—to any interest discerning advantage in their deployment. The transition Ford-Google (or Apple, or Facebook) may furnish a sense of historical coherence, but what it most significantly underscores is a massive shift between analog and digital regimes—in sensibility as in production. Enshrined in the multifaceted hegemony regularly exercised by Google, Facebook, and Microsoft and their offshoots—and yes, by Fox News—this “digital stampede” has, by the end of the passage, decisively reshaped the behavior of companies and reconditioned their customers. Indeed, the most egregious carnage pointed up in the final paragraph is in the arena of human affairs. In the wake of surveillance capitalism’s plunder, any hint of “reciprocity” empowering users in their rapport with tech service providers and producers is gone. This is another instance of a voided social contract in our survey, the dirge of a denuded checkbook. “‘The invasion of privacy’ is now a predictable dimension of social inequality.” And, the asymmetry in what Zuboff will highlight as the “division of learning” has become “pathological” [Zuboff, 2019, 191]. Yes, the notable innovators in the history of the media and communications—this goes back to Gutenberg—were far more in the way of impresarios and coordinators than “original geniuses.” It is in this sense that Henry Ford, in Zuboff’s account, “heard symphonies.” But Ford operated out of a pre-cybernetic universe, even if his assembly line incorporated such mainstays of digital processing as looping and feedback. The Model T was a mechanical device fashioned by larger mechanical machines under the indispensable guidance and supplementation of humans. Even with unprecedented mechanical input, backup, and culture, early automobile production orchestrated analog process through and through. The vehicle spit out at the end of the assembly line was

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completely dependent on its human owner for its deployment, guidance, and maintenance. No feature of the Model T looped back to or communicated directly with Ford Motor Vehicle while circumventing the owner’s volition. Not so in the industrial universe with Ford in the background lending context if not intelligibility. The very regime that has opened us to the internet, online shopping and transactions, and innumerable services, from food delivery to Zoom conferences and psychotherapy, is peopled with two-way mechanisms of no loyalty whatsoever; and, therefore, with potentially deleterious application. At every turn in the digital universe, we may collide into a turncoat in the form of a digital mechanism. With the adroitness of a successful realistic novelist, Zuboff homes in on the cookie and the web bug as the telling, in more senses than one, bits of code that gave away the game, betraying personal self-interest at the very outset of the digital regime. At the operational level, Google shifted itself around, from “deepening the unity of supply and demand with its populations” to reinventing “its business around the burgeoning demand of advertisers eager to squeeze and scrape online behavior by any available means.” This is Zuboff’s way of saying that Google refashioned itself into a double agent. And then it turned rogue: “The corporation’s ability to hide this rights grab depends on language as much as it does on technical methods or corporate policies of secrecy. . . . Two popular terms—‘digital exhaust’ and ‘digital breadcrumbs’ connote worthless waste: leftovers lying around for the taking” [Zuboff, 2019, 90]. Google may tout itself, in the language of corporate euphemism, for its alchemy, turning the digital traces we cannot but leave behind—“breadcrumbs” and tailpipe exhaust—into gold. But such iterations also betray Google’s explicit self-casting as a scavenger. The rest is history, though one of the most disquieting sort, because the predatory dynamics and processes to which Zuboff would hope to bring some moratorium by meticulously charting and labeling them continue to mutate unabated all around us—pace Covid. Of all the panoramic overviews on which we may depend for lucidity amid near-daily incursions of the unprecedented, Zuboff’s may be the most disheartening. This is owing to the progressive steps by which, under the blinds of ignorance, obfuscation, and misrepresentation, consumers, government agencies, and the courts bought into first the technology itself and then into the rationales



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proffered by the major tech corporations legitimating their methods and avarice. This is a crucial element in Zuboff’s account—above all, a complex reconstruction of a new and unprecedented system of coordination: one that could wire our communications to databanks overflowing with information of vastly differing degrees of reliability; that could conflate data and information with our desires as materialized in our buying patterns; that could translate our cognitive habits and personal expression, whether of fact, opinion, or emotion, into profits accruing from myriad services and entertainment media and forms. Zuboff details the crucial turning points in Google and Facebook’s installing “the moat around the castle”: implementing, via legislation and the courts, the vision and tactics of surveillance capitalism. These impactful events include: installing, in Google’s initial 2004 public stock offering, a “dualclass share structure” that would leave its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in firm control, making it “harder for outside parties to take over or influence Google,” demanding, furthermore, that the public “simply ‘trust’” its founders [Zuboff, 2019, 101]; acquisition, at astronomical cost at the time, of seemingly inconsequential start-ups, but ones rich in data regarding their users and their utilization of these platforms (e.g., YouTube by Google; Oculus and WhatsApp by Facebook) [Zuboff, 2019, 102– 3]; and, legal battles, as of the 1990s, whether concerning the First Amendment or Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The effect of these deliberations was to set the stage for a long, ignominious history, whether in the name of “freedom of speech” or “surveillance exceptionalism,” of looking the other way at deliberate misinformation and defamation spewed “at scale” over these providers’ “waves” [Zuboff, 2019, 110–5]. Like other dominant corporate interests detailed in Dark Money, Facebook proved adept in securing political advantage, whether by furnishing the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns with insider media outreach capability [Zuboff, 2019, 122–3]; or, in “paving the way for the unusually crowded and fast-spinning revolving door between the East Coast and West Coast centers of power” [Zuboff, 2019, 124]. Pursuing this strand in Zuboff’s coverage perforce discloses an irremediable split. It is between the tech giants’ basic interests, now recast in their orientation toward the extraction and sale of “behavioral surplus,” and the furtherance of democracy, at least as widely understood until well into the present century.

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One outstanding weapon in Zuboff’s multifaceted skillset is extrapolating the driving logic undergirding vast systems of commerce, management, and labor. This is nowhere more apparent than in her summation of the major digital manufacturers and providers’ situation on the cusp of their yet unbroken chokehold in communications and administration: It is important to understand that surveillance capitalists are impelled to pursue lawlessness by the logic of their own creation. Google and Facebook vigorously lobby to kill online privacy protection, limit regulations, weaken or block privacyenhancing legislation, and thwart every attempt to circumscribe their practices because such laws are existential threats to the frictionless flow of behavioral surplus. Extraction quarry must be both unprotected and available at zero cost if this logic of accumulation is to succeed. . . . This market form must either gird itself for perpetual conflict with the democratic process or find new ways to infiltrate, seduce, and bend democracy to its ends. . . . The survival and success of surveillance capitalism depend on engineering collective agreement through all available means while simultaneously ignoring, evading, contesting, reshaping, or otherwise vanquishing laws that threaten free behavioral surplus. [Zuboff, 2019, 105]. It has now been sixty years since Marshall McLuhan compellingly informed the public with regard to the dominance that intrinsic media architecture and platforms exercise over media content. Zuboff poignantly characterizes the impasse at which the mediadimension of the internet, social media, smartphones, and interactive household conveniences and “smart” medical implants swerves radically away from democracy. Away both in the sense of unauthorized breaches of privacy and confidence; and, of the occulted falsification of verifiable information and data. As Zuboff reconstructs what she calls the “dispossession cycle” in surveillance capitalism’s stance to the public, she places yet another instance of her uncanny gift for unraveling and charting complex sequences of mass behavior at our disposal [Zuboff, 2019, 137–54]. The stages of the cross that we collectively bear as the major high-tech producers and service providers radically rewire



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the public sphere while transforming media, communications, and information archiving include “incursion, habituation, adaptation, and redirection” [Zuboff, 2019, 138]. The baton lifts on this operatic cycle of power-grabs and obfuscations (I’m thinking Wagner’s Ring Cycle here) in full Romantic style with an abduction: “dispossession operations,” relying on their “virtual capacities . . . kidnap behavioral surplus from the nonmarket spaces of everyday life where it lives.” The “undefended space” over which surveillance capitalism is thrilled to assert its newfounded control is situated in “your laptop, your phone, a webpage, the street where you live, your walk in the park, browsing online for a birthday gift, your interests and tastes, your digestion, your tears, your attention, your feelings, your face” [Zuboff, 2019, 138]. While the inevitable lawsuits and other procedures that such invasions of privacy unavoidably provoke transpire “at the tedious pace of democratic institutions,” the process of habituation is already under way: “The sense of astonishment and outrage dissipates. The incursion itself, once unthinkable, slowly worms its way into the ordinary. Worse still, it gradually comes to seem inevitable. New dependencies develop. As populations grow numb, it becomes much more difficult for individuals and groups to complain” [Zuboff, 2019, 139]. What Zuboff chronicles under this stage or rubric is how, by means of an amalgam of repression and denial at the level of mass psychology, we proceed with our lives as best we can with diminishing direct attention to the overall unprecedented state of affairs. The adaptations that Zuboff wires into the cycle are not ours but theirs (the dominant tech corporations’). In an astonishing balancing act at the mega-organizational level, the corporations “satisfy the immediate demands of government authorities, court rulings, and public opinion” while proceeding full steam ahead. These corporations, in their redirective performance by Zuboff’s account, have even outperformed the vaunted human capacity for mutation: “The corporation regroups to cultivate new rhetoric, methods, and design elements that redirect contested supply operations just enough so that they appear compliant with social and legal demands.” Zuboff not only wonders at the corporations’ “creativity, financial resources, and determination,” but also at their capability to improvise under “flexible and dynamic” conditions [Zuboff, 2019, 139]. Under the full rigor of journalistic documentation and fact-checking, Zuboff goes on to

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detail surveillance capitalism’s mechanisms and procedures at each stage of the dispossession cycle. When it comes time for Zuboff to declare in favor of the public’s “right to the future tense,” the unusual breadth of her field of vision, combined with her discernment of the systemic interrelations prevailing within an otherwise inchoate and disparate set of symptoms and manifestations, again comes to the fore. In response to her own repeated query into how it was even possible for the current predicament to emerge, she lists no less than sixteen enabling factors. Combined, these precipitating causes and perpetuating conditions amount, in a thumbnail sketch, to the “metaphysics of surveillance capitalism.” Their modest assembly as an inventory is in itself an act of deconstructive excavation: “1) Unprecedented; 2) Declaration as invasion; 3) Historical context; 4) Fortifications; 5) The Dispossession cycle; 6) Dependency; 7) Self-Interest; 8) Inclusion; 9) Identification; 10) Authority; 11) Social persuasion; 12) Foreclosed alternatives; 13) Inevitabilism; 14) The ideology of human frailty; 15) Ignorance; 16) Velocity” [Zuboff, 2019, 340–3]. Notably, under (3), Zuboff lists the same neoliberal ideology utterly foundational to the political transformations wrought by dark money as the major historical predisposition to surveillance capitalism. What she means by “Self-Interest” under (7) is the growing “networks of fellow travelers, partners, collaborators, and customers whose revenues depend on the prediction imperative” [Zuboff, 2019, 142]. Under (8), “Inclusion,” Zuboff taps the pivotal role also played by FOMO—“Fear of Missing Out”—in Smith’s explanation of Fox News’s outsized appeal [Smith, 2019, 171]. 9) and (10) directly follow—as inevitable corollaries to the overwhelming human need for social acceptance and its prevalent collateral damage in performance leveling. The most ideology-laden entry on Zuboff’s list may well be (13) “Inevitabilism,” the overwhelming conviction that technocracy, with its digital operating system, has been preordained. The composite effect of Zuboff’s systematic reconstruction and monitoring of surveillance capitalism is nothing if not sobering. Every hand in a sublime and overarching new techno-social deck of cards seems stacked against us. We seem destined to lose a crucially consequential card game we play with the very tools and media of communication that we invented and animated:



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Surveillance capitalist firms, beginning with Google, dominate the accumulation and processing of information, especially information about human behavior. They know a great deal about us, but our access to their knowledge is sparse; hidden in the shadow text and read only by the new priests, their bosses and their machines. This unprecedented concentration of knowledge produces an equally unprecedented concentration of power; asymmetries must be understood as the unauthorized privatization of the division of learning in society. . . . As things currently stand, it is the surveillance capitalism corporations that know. It is the market form that decides. It is the competitive struggle between surveillance capitalists that decides who decides. . . . Ours is not simply a case of being ambushed and outgunned. We were caught off guard because there was no way we could have imagined these acts of invasion and dispossession. . . . Why have we been slow to recognize the “original sin of simple robbery” at the heart of this new capitalism? Like the Tainos, we faced something altogether new to our story; the unprecedented. And like them, we risk catastrophe when we assess new threats through the lens of old experience. [Zuboff, 2019, 191–2] Surveillance capitalism’s successful claims to freedom and knowledge, its structural independence from people, its collectivist ambitions, and the radical indifference that is necessitated, enabled, and sustained by all three now propel us toward a society in which capitalism does not function as a means to inclusive economic or political institutions. Instead, surveillance capitalism must be reckoned as a profoundly antidemocratic social force. . . . Surveillance capitalism’s antidemocratic and antiegalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market-driven coup from above. It is not a coup d’état in the classic sense but rather a coup de gens: an overthrow of the people concealed as a technological Trojan horse that is the Big Other. On the strength of its annexation of human experience, the coup achieves exclusive concentrations of knowledge and power that sustain privileged influence over the division of learning in society. . . . It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people. In a surreal paradox, this coup is celebrated as “personalization,” although it defies, ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about you and me that is personal.

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“Tyranny” is not a word that I use lightly. Like the instrumentarian hive, tyranny is the obliteration of politics. It is founded on its own strain of radical indifference in which every person, except the tyrant, is understood as an organism among organisms in an equivalency of Other-Ones. [Zuboff, 2019, 512– 4] What The Age of Surveillance Capitalism sets on display with stunning lucidity and detail is nothing less than a seizure of control by an unprecedented épistème of combined communications, representation, and rhetoric (programming language). As both implemented and consolidated by the major tech giants. As in Mayer’s account of dark money, the movers and shakers in the invention and implementation of this takeover are real folks, with namable names. With reason, she prefers the name coup de gens for this upheaval. And, precisely as she has pursued the emergence of this state of affairs in increments, Zuboff’s widest aspiration for her own remarkable combined feat of technological exegesis, industrial history and analysis, and impact study, extending into the spheres of social behavior and political theory, would be to unravel the compromises, denials, and delays that have gotten us where we are, a collective despond bearing the overall imprint of “learned helplessness.” [The term derives from the condition that lab psychologist Martin Spiegelman was able to induce in dogs when he blocked their ability to move around in the experimental enclosures he placed them in.] The margin of hope that Zuboff affords us at the end of her masterful encapsulation of our age is palpable, but, unfortunately, neither substantial nor immanent. If the proliferating stumbling blocks that Democrats now negotiate as they endeavor to redress persistent neglect, restore rule of law, and reverse electoral suppression are any indication, any salutary upturn in Zuboff’s prophecy will be a long time in coming: The future of this narrative will depend upon the indignant citizens, journalists, and scholars drawn to this frontier project; indignant elected officials and policy makers who understand that their authority originates in the foundational principles of democratic communities; and, especially, indignant young people who act in the knowledge that effectiveness without autonomy



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is not effective, dependency-induced compliance is no social contract, a hive with no exit can never be a home . . . The decades of economic injustice and immense concentration of wealth that we call the Gilded Age succeeded in teaching people how they did not want to live. That knowledge empowered them to bring the Gilded Age to an end, wielding the armaments of progressive legislation and the New Deal. . . . Surely the Age of Surveillance Capitalism will meet the same fate as it teaches us how we do not want to live. It instructs us in the irreplaceable value of our greatest moral and political achievements by threatening to destroy them. . . . It demonstrates that power untamed by democracy can only lead to exile and despair. [Zuboff, 2019, 522–4]

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March 15, 2022. Partisans of Writing. Adam Serwer

Segueing to a markedly different synoptic overview of the current predicament—Adam Serwer’s, in The Cruelty Is the Point—we emerge with a panorama nonetheless very much in keeping with the prognoses delivered by Mayer and Smith: The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies and the ritual flaying of his targets before his supporters are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanagh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they’ve done but because they have done it together. We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. . . . There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse. Taking joy in their suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the atomization and loneliness of modern life.

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The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aids pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. [Serwer, 2021, 102–3] Nothing might seem less substantive—beside the point—than a prevalent mood, an emotional bearing. How could this be a handle, lending focus and traction to the current sinkhole where our nation’s culture has lowered itself? Yet as evidenced in the previous passage, Adam Serwer, in the recent compilation volume of pieces he dispatched to The Atlantic on the ground, homes in on cruelty, not only as a caption for the current bashing, wholesale dismissal, and stark binaries bombarding us on the airwaves and online. Serwer has teased out cruelty, as one single telling thread in a vast tapestry, a leitmotiv, in a continuous history going back to the United States’s inception in colonies, when it was always already dumfounded by slavery—especially by its radically counterintuitive arbitrariness and violence. How, indeed, could there not be fallout both profoundly disturbing and deranging from such an inherently flawed premise as slavery? The Cruelty Is the Point earns a significant share of its distinction from the fact that the multifaceted rebuke that it delivers to the entrenched US culture of cruelty—not only to US racism but also to nativism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism and their seemingly innocuous, domesticated correlatives—is in no way at odds with its trenchant analytical and explanatory fervor. Cruelty is not exactly a “feel-good” topic for a book of any genre. How could any investigation into the joy that presumably sane human beings can take in the suffering of others, of those relegated, say in Smith’s account of TV-mediated tribalism, to the otherness of the out-group? Yet cruelty, in the hands of a journalist as deft and subtle as Serwer, whose writing instrument is as fine-tuned as it is eloquent, proves a canny choice for an incision into the persistent, spectral malaise that hovers over US society. We try to escape it, to relegate it to some less formed stage in our cultural evolution, yet do what we may—whether by educational, legal, or economic remediation—we find ourselves delivered, again and again, to the aggrieved and violent climate of its racist and nativist base position. As if we have been perpetually condemned to the pestilence initially besetting Oedipus Rex’s Thebes, to the deep disenchantment that has already rotted Hamlet’s Denmark. Resigned to a perpetual state



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of “learned helplessness” artfully masked by the sensationalism and drama we insist upon from our media in their multifarious formats. As a label for this pervasive temperament, “cruelty” is provocatively suggestive and compact. Though by no means exclusive, it names the Ogre we all, collectively, contend with, this inchoate Thing that persists within us. The historical armory of US cruelty that Serwer assembles is as variegated as the instruments in a particularly comprehensive museum of medieval torture, say the dungeons beneath the Palace of the Doges. The passage cited immediately above careens from racially motivated lynching over a broader geographical swathe than some would care to acknowledge to the male subculture of sexual conquest and coercion that certainly greeted and disoriented me as I was growing up, to the fluctuating finitude of the filters guiding immigration and naturalization over the various decades. Serwer’s historical lens is significantly more telephoto than the perspectives staked out by Mayer, Smith, and Zuboff. In his running tabulation, Serwer artfully zigzags between his long-range historical perspective, with many of its notable homebred curiosities, and his diagnosis of a contemporary disease stunningly virulent in its contagion and mutations. It may well be Serwer’s uncanny syncopation between an embedded past and an overwrought present that earns The Cruelty Is the Point a disproportionate share of staying power, to my mind at least, as a memorable photomontage of our moment. In his Benjaminian panorama on the present juncture, with its outsized Trumpian torque, Serwer hits hard at the creeping trinity of entrenched US racism, nativism, and xenophobia. Anti-Black US racism, grounded in the benighted histories of slavery, the Civil War, and perhaps most disturbing of all, the measures of hypocrisy and regression normalized during the Reconstruction, justly earns a chapter in its own right. Nativism becomes the lens through which Serwer dissects and foregrounds the particularly disheartening current resurgence of white supremacy, whose malevolence is directed at a full spectrum of “non-Nordics,” and whose thrust is to disenfranchise unwelcome ethnic as well as national minorities. (In his own familial provenance, Serwer sits equally astride Black history and its counterpart in twentieth-century European-Jewish immigration. His account thrives on the complexity of this dual “residence” on two complementary flanks of US bigotry.) Ultimately, on the ethnographic map that Serwer’s chronicle

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implicitly charts, the anti-Semitism to which he also devotes full scrutiny is an outgrowth of the nativist strand that could have also sparked the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. The direct address that Serwer applies to xenophobia, third point in his “Bermuda triangle” in the current US Slough of Despond, is where he takes on the troubled history of US immigration policy, with all its underlying, categorical race-, religion-, and ethnicity-thinking. Particularly, as tangibly experienced by recent asylum seekers and other prospective immigrants on the US-Mexico border. Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration hitman, scion of Jews from Belarus who immigrated to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, comes into sharp relief. A significant, Venn diagram-like overlap prevails in an omnibus with a triple focus: this only makes the tapestry more compelling. Amid a culture completely mesmerized by yesterday’s scandal and today’s most outrageous Tweet, Serwer’s devotion to history, both as a viewfinder and as a discourse, lends his journalistic contribution a distinctive texture. History furnishes the lens through which Serwer sorts out the bizarre extremity of current disputes, impasses, accusations, and refusals to validate those claims or to participate in adjudicating forums and hearings. Serwer’s retracing the deep roots of contemporary racism, white supremacy, and US xenophobia encompasses not only the predictable (the enduring muddle of Robert E. Lee’s historical legacy). The Cruelty Is the Point also opens up a historical Cabinet of Curiosities, dusting off some of the obscure but nonetheless powerful forerunners to our current political mania. Let Madison Grant, patrician, conservationist, and outdoorsman of the early twentieth century, a leading (“but not the first”) proponent of “race science.” Grant was also a charismatic figure whose legacy includes the harsh discriminatory climate and legislation he succeeded in promoting: “It was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times . . . just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January, 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted,” that the United States “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects, America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state. . . .



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In part, this was spin, an attempt to legitimize fascism. But Grant and his fellow pioneers in racist pseudoscience did help the Nazis to justify to their own populations, and to other countries’ governments, the mission they were on. [Serwer, 2021, 124–5] It may be fascinating, but it is hardly edifying that the rhetoric of US nativists who were instrumental to the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s could have inspired the Nazis in their racial, antiSemitic, and ultimately genocidal policies. Not only is Serwer’s backward gaze productive in “filling in the dots” connecting today’s disheartening “returns of the repressed” in US public sentiment back to neglected historical precedents. Decisive historical context is furnished by Serwer’s spotlighting such personages and events from the archive of our past as Madison Grant; also, Alexander Stephens’s “Cornerstone Speech,” of 1861; the 1874 white supremacist riot against police in New Orleans (the “Battle of Liberty Place”); also, the most egregious happening of all, the destruction of the Black area of Wilmington, North Carolina, by white paramilitaries in 1878. Stephens’s pronouncement, by the vice president of the Confederacy, parroted the sweeping Hegelian generalizations regarding Africa, and specifically its Black people, attaining huge sway throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. This material, generated late, as Hegel assembled the scaffolding for a “Philosophy of History,” diminished a contribution of otherwise epochal scale [Serwer, 2021, 67–9]. The demolition of Black Wilmington elicited no response from President William McKinley: “A procession of black Republicans beseeched McKinley for intervention, but the president would offer nothing—not troops, not an investigation, not even so much as a sternly worded condemnation. . . . Wilmington showed Democrats in the South that the party of Lincoln would no longer stand in their way” [Serwer, 2021, 315]. Within the scope of Serwer’s pointed retrospective on US history, indifference and protracted neglect emerge as particularly egregious variations on cruelty. No single figure proved more destructive in entrenching a backlash pattern in US history than Andrew Johnson. The persistent legacy of the Reconstruction, endlessly replenished by what Serwer terms “historical amnesia,” is the systematic retraction of all progress in the spheres of civil rights, electoral suffrage, multicultural equanimity, protection from bigoted law enforcement, and enhanced social welfare—a reversal initiated as brusquely as

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each new situation would allow. The historical trail whose stationstops include the Know-Nothing gangs that intimidated immigrant voters in the 1850s; the 5,000 recorded lynchings in the United States between 1882 and 1968; David Duke’s respectable showing (43 percent) in his bid for J. Bennett Johnston’s Louisiana senatorial seat in 1990; Trump’s campaigning, in 2015–6, on tough restrictions on immigrants, especially those from the Middle East, and his malign ill will toward immigrants and asylum seekers along the USMexico border; and, the shootings and unjustified deaths, of among others George Ruby, Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery. All these events lead, by one theme or another, back to this deeply racist and divisive individual: Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, viewed the Radical Republican project as an insult to the white men to whom the United States belonged. A Tennessee Democrat and self-styled champion of the white working class, the president believed that “Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people” and that allowing the formerly enslaved to vote would eventually lead to “such a tyranny as this continent has never yet witnessed.” . . . Throughout the South, when freedmen signed contracts with their former masters, those contracts were broken; if they tried to seek work elsewhere, they were hunted down; if they reported their concerns to local authorities, they were told that the testimony of black people held no weight in court. . . . From 1868 to 1871, black people in the South faced a “wave of counter-revolutionary terror,” the historian Eric Foner has written, “one that lacks a counterpart either in the American experience or in that of the other Western hemisphere societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.” . . . The system that emerged across the South was so racist and authoritarian that one Freedmen’s Bureau agent wrote that “the emancipated ‘would be just as well off with no law at all or no government.’” [Serwer, 2021, 291–2] The historical backdrop to present-day demagogues, politicians, and groups with something to gain from maintaining the power and money status quo as charted in Dark Money is thickly laden with violence, prevarication, and dissimulation.



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Nowhere is Serwer more poignant than in articulating what I would call the “tragedy of manners” in US public life, constantly unfolding around us. When we should have learned better at least a century and a half ago. These are bad manners, through and through, bespeaking massive deficiencies, whether in upbringing or training. “Not the right way!” captions Serwer. Aggressively curtailing and stigmatizing voting, injecting terror into the already fraught process of immigration—these gestures bring nothing but shame and low self-esteem upon those who initiate them. And yet, they manage to persist and even renew themselves, in large measure thanks to the phenomenon known as backlash, from one generation to the next. (Not only for Serwer, backlash against advances in social justice, economic equity, and racial and ethnic pluralism is a palpable factor in contemporary US public life. The adrenaline rush that habitual Fox News viewers take out of its rigged pugilistic opinion slugfests is, in large measure, by Smith’s account, catharsis fueled by backlash.) The contemporary “cruelty of everyday life” in the United States lurks in the all-too conventional: the stocks in trade of mass communications, electoral politics, judicial disputation, legislative maneuvering. The term “cruelty” bespeaks a pervasive and underlying culture of resentment, vengeance, recrimination, license, and sadistic pleasure even more perverse than the explicit vocabulary of social aggression and repression allows. With the urgency of a journalist who has experienced Trump rallies firsthand, who has interviewed demonstrators in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2015, and participants in Charlottesville, 2017, but also with the acuity of a sensitive social critic, Serwer makes room on his map for the less tangible expressions of resentment, disaffection, backlash, and egregiously injured pride distempering the present moment. He reserves some of his most trenchant formulations for cruelties so ingrained as to blend in with the décor. Among these manifestations, he counts the cruelties “of the president” (no surprise here), “the lost cause,” “the lies we tell ourselves,” “conspiracy,” and “the code of silence.” Most tellingly, Serwer isolates cruelty even in certain social forms in which we’d otherwise invest good faith: the cruelties of “reconciliation” and “civility.” Of the latter, he writes: Civility, in other words, is treating Trump how Trump wants to be treated, while he treats you however he pleases. . . . The country is indeed divided today, and there is nothing wrong with wishing

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that Americans could get along. But while nonviolence is essential to democracy, civility is optional, and today’s preoccupation with politesse both exaggerates the country’s divisions and papers over the fundamental issues that are causing the divisions in the first place. [Serwer, 2021, 83] In delicately teasing “civility” away from “democracy,” Serwer underlines a major rhetorical stumbling block: the tendency to soften messages and obfuscate compelling political alternatives through a certain overeagerness not to offend. So egregious was the agenda that Trump in large measure rammed through, so solidly grounded in US history’s endemic cruelty, that civility in political debate, whether promoted by Republicans or moderate Democrats, is indeed “overrated.” Serwer is nothing if not an engagé journalist of the moment, writing out of deeply felt sentiment; yet, he insists on tempering his observations with the subtle cross currents that Paul de Man attributed to irony and Derrida to aporias, those captivating images on which whole discourses pivot, but that cannot help but counter themselves. A large measure of what distinguishes Serwer’s work is the resoluteness with which he seeks out the complexities of the outmoded blindness and cruelty that continue to haunt us—even while the thrust of his intervention is in the direction of sorely needed correction and systematic opening. “The code of silence” is what surrounds an entrenched tradition of police brutality in US life whose tide now turns only because Black Lives Matter and other organizations would not desist in crying out at the travesty of gratuitously wasted life. Addressing the mega-social problems posed by policing, Serwer by and large steers clear of punitive rhetoric toward policemen, whose outcomes might include the deeply contentious “defunding.” But he does, and powerfully, point out the submerged and formidable social cost of police unions and the cover and blanket approbation instigated by their unswerving advocacy. Taking on the “cruelty of conspiracy” places Serwer in the position both of acknowledging how deep and insidious the roots of anti-Semitism in US society have become; and, in exploring how significant activists in the current US Black community might simply overlook Louis Farrakhan’s historically stereotyped and most unfortunate anti-Semitism—in view of the wider social contribution the Nation of Islam has persistently made in neighborhoods where



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few others have deigned to tread. In view of Serwer’s personal history, this is a particularly painful predicament for him to write his way out of. And yet he negotiates this tightrope—precipitous both politically and rhetorically—because his beat takes him there. His first stop in a card house of interlocked complexities is those embedded in the very positionality of contemporary US Jews, who are predominantly secular. Most American Jews have found refuge in pluralism, many Israeli Jews in nationalism. Perhaps nowhere is this divide clearer than on the issue of West Bank settlements. Only 28 percent of American Jews believe Israel should dismantle none of the settlements, compared to 50 percent of Jewish Israelis. . . . . American Jews have typically resolved the tension between their universalistic principles and Zionism by seeing Israel as a necessary exception, due to thousands of years of anti-Semitism, the post-1948 expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, and the Holocaust. . . . But this vision of a more accepting Zionism is increasingly in tension with Israel’s political trajectory. [Serwer, 2021, 212] The divide between liberal American Jews and their right-wing counterparts at home and abroad is ultimately an argument over who is shirking their obligations. The Jewish American right sees its lefty co-religionists as kowtowing to Israel-haters, whose antiZionism is a thin cloak for anti-Semitism. The Jewish left sees the right as bolstering a right-wing nationalism that inspires the fanatics who gun down Jews at American synagogues and who are willing to ally themselves with anti-Semites all over the world as long as they support Israeli territorial maximalism. Trump has walked into the middle of this dispute with his characteristic sensitivity. [Serwer, 2021, 216] These formulations are grounded in an anomaly, a relatively recent wedge driven between a mainstream of US secular Jews and an idealization of the Holy Land pervasive throughout canonical Hebrew texts and culture. In this thumbnail sketch of its position, US Jewry is more beset by ambivalence than it has been. One encounters nothing but complexity in a right-wing hyper-nationalism that could both inspire fundamentalist Christians and instigate attacks on US synagogues. The surround of double messages in which it is enmeshed

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may even aggravate the Jewish community’s umbrage at such a divisive force as Louis Farrakhan. But a nuanced understanding of where the US Black community is currently positioned, amid the disturbingly “Retro” thrusts of Trumpism, acknowledges who bears the real cost of economic, educational, and health turbulence when Covid-19 has slashed through so many illusions. The act of taking this snapshot demands that Farrakhan, the current leadership of the Black community, and incipient undercurrents of anti-Semitism from this direction be included in the mix. And Serwer does not pale before going there. In illustrating the deep divisiveness that has coalesced around Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, Serwer profiles the work and positions of activist Tamika Mallory. Having personally borne testimony to the positive upshot of the Nation’s involvement in neighborhoods where she has also militated for progress, she has paid, in negative press and negative fallout, for example, from the Anti-Defamation League, for her refusals to denounce the Nation’s leader and the timeworn anti-Semitism that he openly espouses. Queried by Serwer as to why she has never taken this position, she replies, “I hear and understand that, and I hope that as I’m able to understand how they feel, I hope that they will also take the time to understand why I have partnered with the Nation of Islam and been in that space for almost thirty years” [Serwer, 2021, 175]. Indeed, it was by reducing street violence precisely “in that space” that the Nation established its credibility to Mallory. It was in this context that Mallory came into contact with the Nation of Islam. Mallory turned to anti-violence activism after her son’s father was murdered, eventually becoming the national director of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. “In that most difficult period of my life, it was the women of the Nation of Islam who supported me, and I have always held them close to my heart for that reason,” Mallory wrote in a statement published in News One . . . She soon realized that all the women she knew who had lost loved ones to gun violence had also lived in poor, segregated neighborhoods, and she concluded that the circumstances that led to their deaths were systemic and not just individual. And in those neighborhoods, the Nation was present when others were not. [Serwer, 2021, 171]



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The Nation of Islam has been an ongoing anathema to Serwer; interviewing Mallory serves in part as an ongoing occasion for working through the discomfiture it caused him early in life. The Nation, he recalls, in the lead-in to his reproduced piece of March 11, 2018, also significantly shaped my childhood. I can remember sitting alone in my D.C. homeroom on the day of the Million Man March and wondering if my classmates hated me. I can remember asking friends in the Nation if they could hear what Farrakhan said about Jews and reconcile it with what they knew of me. I remember feeling a tremendous loneliness in this separation from people I cared about and who I thought cared about me.[Serwer, 2021, 163–4] In an act of extraordinary journalistic generosity, Serwer places the pain issuing from his own complicated position in the US race and ethnicity system at the service of his reportage and his readers. The difficulty of his own circumstances, friendships, and outcomes becomes the lens through which we take Mallory in. She, in her own right, has served as constructive force whose project has not been derailed by ingesting, through her partnership with the Nation, a certain dosage of a poison generally deadly to pluralism. Serwer fully acknowledges this in his own language, through the lucid lens of his reportage. In “impoverished black communities,” the Nation champions not only the black poor or working class but . . . the black underclass: black people, especially men, who have been written off or abandoned by white society. They’ve seen the Fruit of Islam patrol rough neighborhoods and run off drug dealers, or they have a family member who went to prison and came out reformed, preaching a kind of pride, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurship that, with a few adjustments, wouldn’t sound out of place from a conservative Republican. [Serwer, 2021, 169] In the end though, even while acknowledging the Nation “as an invaluable source of help for formerly incarcerated black people whose country has written them off,” and its offering “a path to vent anger at a system that continues to brutalize, plunder,

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and incarcerate human beings because they are black,” Serwer concludes, “it may also be impossible to continue working with the Nation and at the same time lead a diverse, national, progressive coalition” [Serwer, 2021, 176]. With exquisite professional integrity, Serwer places himself in the eye of a hurricane that cannot but elicit strong emotions, unavoidable conflicts, and the impulse to issue spirited disclaimers. In his service as our man on the ground in contested terrain, he reminds us of the urgency and delight with which we would be done with the pitched rhetoric, the unsubstantiated claims, and the noxious pollutants currently poisoning the public sphere. Yet precisely in this atmosphere, conditioned by gross exaggeration and binary logic as it is, his insistence on unremitting fine modulation, whether in thinking through systemic racism or unrepentant tribal self-aggrandizement, is an indispensable encomium to see us through the overlapping storms.

February 14, 2022. University of the Street

I go down to the siren-screaming street, never knowing who or what I will encounter. The streets are the escape route from the enforced familiarity of interior space, from enclosure, from whatever fugue the channels of my thought and memories happen to be playing. The elongated, dual-faceted configuration of the city street, far more often rectilinear than curved, is by now more than accrued historical convenience. It has been implanted in my head as a deep cognitive structure. The four- and five-story skyline of Walnut and Chestnut Streets, Center City, Philadelphia, where I circulated as a teenager during every free moment I could steal, are scored as deeply in my spatial intuition as the high peaks of Ladakh or the Alps to any local shepherd or yodeler. The street guides my thoughts while it feeds my perception. Stimulation positively radiates from its two-sided extension, affecting a temporary fix from the claustrophobia built up indoors. Even the briefest alleyways of Chinatown, Manhattan, or South Philly offer slide, development. Street-ranging combines this with expansion. In its deep architecture the street becomes an echochamber of reverberation and mirroring, often imprecise if not jarringly discordant. The casual walker, whatever brings them here, has purchased a ticket to this synesthetic symphony. Whether they stroll a glittering downtown jewel box or a mile of postwar airand-light row homes. The street, in its cognitive architecture, issues forth in music as visual and olfactory as aural. Two years ago, my stretch of 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights was designated—during daylight hours—a walking street. Its extended concrete divider between the directional lanes made it an ideal candidate—along with four other locations disbursed throughout the boroughs—for this repurposing. The divider doubles as a planter; the bushes and other greenery along a narrow

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strip combine with the trees lining the sidewalk to create a verdant boulevard, ideal for street-side leisure and recreation. Ice-cream and empanada stands are strategically placed at intersections along my customary 34th Avenue stroll. Along this stretch I’m also traversing 140 spoken languages. Thirty-fourth Avenue has bustled with bicycling, pedestrian exercise, family solidarity, friendly conversation, and rest stops as the Covid pandemic has wound through its exhausting defile of stages. Westbound traffic between 90th and 89th Streets was barred in April 2021, when a massive fire gutted the seven-story apartment building on that block. Mask-wearing along the entire stretch—always rigorous—has fluctuated according to the disease’s progression. As in any high-density neighborhood, there are dire consequences to flaunting the basic precautions. Punctuated by bursts of vitality—during summer and at holiday time—Manhattan street life has subsided into constrained sobriety. This at least since March 2020. During the glorious weather of summer and fall, what knocks you in the face is the ghosts of the crowds customarily thronging the magnet zones: Washington Square, Times Square, Lincoln Center. What has reigned in these plazas of urban splendor has been, rather, the state of being subdued, as after a funeral or burial, or being chastened in elementary school. We have been party to collective human punishment. The sense of guilt is palpable; all that remains to be hashed out is the sin that brought this on. Our disbelief and recalcitrance in the face of conclusive scientific evidence when it came to remedial environmental measures? Our materialistic gluttony? Unsustainable overpopulation? Maybe, as in one of Kafka’s parables, nothing at all. Before the Covid vaccine became widely available, a higher percentage of folks along 34th Avenue sported masks than in the recreational spaces of Central and Riverside Parks. As an inchoate collectivity, a Deleuzian pack, we sought out desperately needed sensation and distraction in the street, the affirmation and enlargement of horizons that only it could offer. These became months of finely tuned calculated risks on a daily, sometimes hourly basis; these calibrations guided by a constant barrage of statistics in the news, as by the reality checks administered by Anthony Fauci. To venture inside a store for some minor purchase? Or maybe not. To bus between boroughs or hop the quickest subway express? Longer exposure on the bus, but better



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air circulation and, by and large, mask compliance. Dramatically shorter trips by train, but exposed nostrils in far greater numbers. (I’d launch into a disquisition on noses at this point, but it seems that Laurence Sterne beat me to it a while back.) Yes, such choices are mine to make. At least to a certain degree, I’m in a position to make them. This is no tangential detail. It is the very heart of the matter. . . . I launch myself upon that artery of polymorphous stimulation, unformed yet ardent desire, first and foremost, the “pleasure of merely circulating,” sheer passing by, yet once again. In whatever city I’ve been located, the rewards rapidly accruing from the street have been the same: anonymous observation, unrecorded participation in a spontaneous mass spectacle. The masked ball of Covid—is it Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” realized?—only heightens the drama of anonymity in the streets. Under cover on the streets, and in direct opposition to the tidal wave of oligarchic hegemony sweeping over US society, our underlying national culture of radical democracy jolts back into action. This is unexpected secondary gain emerging from blanket catastrophe. Yet every street voyage is a singular artwork, a collage of mini encounters in great preponderance without trace or consequence— between strangers, who are also fellow citizens. The composite image of these interactions is a Buddhist sand painting of relations too random and brief to become established, nevertheless reinforcing a social map so customary that we tend to forget its coordinates. In the random spectacle of passing by, through encounters too momentary to be called such, transacted in the disappearing ink of signals and gestures, a vast underlying social system is reincarnated and enforced. A nod yes or no, a downturn of the head toward the pavement, the suspicion of a smile in the corners of the eyes if unseen on the lips, the impromptu shrug—these become the microscopic acts conferring approbation, incredulity, alienation. “The man who whitewashes has epochs to move, even in his most insignificant gesture,” wrote Benjamin, trying to get a handle on Kafka [Benjamin, 1999, II, 795]. Even on the fly, deeply entrenched attitudes of affiliation, solidarity, indifference, and distrust find their expression and receive systematic buttressing. The street is a veritable cloud chamber for what the speculative German sociologist Niklas Luhmann dubbed relations of “double contingency.” What these relations boil down to is this: “As we

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cross paths on the fly, I can only guess as to how you apprehend me, take me in. And vice versa.” On this score, the street is nothing less than a laboratory, state-of-the-art. Out of a plethora of chance encounters in Luhmann’s parlance, designed to be conceptually memorable, emerges something like a principle of social order, were it not rooted in open-ended accident itself. Double contingency: articulates the question: “How is social order possible?” in a way that presents this possibility as above all improbable. If everyone acts contingently and thus everyone could also act differently . . . it is, for the moment, improbable that one’s own action will generally find points of connection (and with them a conferral of meaning) in the action of others. . . . Along with the improbability of social order, this concept explains its normality. Under the conditions of double contingency, every self-commitment, however accidentally arisen or however calculated, will acquire informational and connective value for the actions of others . . . Every accident, every impulse, every error is productive. [Luhmann, 1995, 116] These pivotal phrases explain, above all, the rapt attention I pay to the unpredictable encounters succeeding one another as I amble down the street. What reactions, instantaneous and for the vast part inconsequential, do I set off? What gestures, signals emanating from the countless others, are striking enough to emerge from my sensorium into my active thinking? These infinitesimal affirmations, repudiations, avoidances are tantamount to who I am, at least in this moment and frame. And yet, somehow, in the previous passage, with its full improbability highlighted, something akin to the “social order” in Luhmann’s lead question emerges. Through a butterfly effect starting out in chance encounters under the veil of double contingency, in the full uncertainty of its unavoidable guessing game, something like a social organization, or even movements, can set out. Enough sober questioning of a runaway US military operation in Southeast Asia can, percolated long enough on the street, eventually result in the 1967 March on the Pentagon. Enough ressentiment in Tobin Smith’s Retro America, whether toward jobs lost through globalization or in an overall sense of déclassement or neglect, amplified through Fox News, Second Amendment militias, and the new medium of the Trump rally, can indeed eventually



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achieve organization—whether of the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol or of the current Republican Party. It is crucial to recognize how much of the current mass repudiation of governmental administration and scientific authority is grounded, by convention, in the Vietnam War resistance that also percolated in the street. The beat from the great lovefest of the long 1960s may still go on, but there’s been a radical shift in the guestlist. The political thrust of the current Great Dismissal—the dissolution of agencies that would oversee and regulate monopoly and unprincipled profit-taking, environmental despoilment, and gun violence; which would also protect civil, voting, and reproductive rights—runs in a counter-vector to the anti-war movement of those days. Yet the 1960s remain a palpable ghost image behind the Trump and Fox News screens. Our more astute observers have not been insensible to these appropriations or thefts of what were formerly left-wing motifs and scenarios by the extreme right. My own class affiliations and history are what I drag with me as I negotiate the street, the social markings combining in a costume deceiving no one. Outmoded armor. This is my imprint. It mediates and in large measure determines the outcomes of the miniscule fraction of my ambient interactions to attain some structure or outcome. My precise location on a vast social GPS gets expressed—in everything I convey. Voice, posture, gait, let alone shoes, dress overall. I am but one bacterium in a vast societal petri dish whose laws of engagement and interaction we can only grasp at, even after centuries of learned investigation—from sociological, psychological, and anthropological points of view. And yet, whether by deliberative alchemy or crass sleight of hand, what begins as random passing by among the crowds, amid the human hive, eventually gets codified into life-and-death determinations: who gets educated and who doesn’t; who has access to healthcare, in all its arenas, including reproductive medicine; who has a roof over one’s head and dependable coin in one’s pocket. Who says these stratifications of class aren’t loaded? This may well be why, in an American vein, we avoid the topic; we grasp at palatable substitute terms (“social status”?); or we displace the entire discourse of class to the Stalinist outliers, on whatever scale: China, Cuba, Belarus. The concept of double contingency serves to grasp this problem [of social “conditioning”] both “from above” and “from below”

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for the emergent level of social systems, and it simultaneously channels the counter-question of what adequate complexity of reality means here. Thus the notion of double contingency combines—quite differently from what one had earlier expected from the concept of roles—a theory of self-regulation of social systems with a hint of biochemico-organico-psychical substrates. [Luhmann, 1995, 122] As the ubiquitous laboratory of social relations, literally at our doorstep, the street both throws us back upon our identities and their politics, and it nudges us in the direction of something far more ample and uplifting, even while yet undecided. The chemistry of double contingency throws us under the cloak of uncertainty. It makes us unwitting players in a double guessing game. Under this blind, the familiarity and convenience of the roles we have adopted by longtime custom are thrown into the air. What prevails on the street, at the intersection where chemistry joins physics and biology, is a science whose only shortcoming is that we can’t fathom its laws. Under this blind we proceed—through life’s expanding labyrinth. What was once a carpet of dark curls on my head has, in reduced volume, betrayed me in old age. A statement in silver: whiteness squared. White on white, like some experimental Russian painting of the 1920s. It makes me the unwitting bearer of everything this whiteness conveys. Amid the thrilling dynamism of one of the most diverse and pluralistic social environments on this planet, the significance of my personal color-coding changes from one block to the next. What is it, in any context, that my whiteness registers? Class privilege? The cruel US history of white supremacy, this only exacerbated in the aftermaths of slavery and nativism, by the ongoing suppression of minority communities, however defined, across a spectrum of histories and traditions. Entrenched discrimination. Across the board. Structuring, as the historical record has definitively established, our schools, our courts of law, even our institutions of art and culture. Where I roam, I cannot but register as a white man. Ein weißer Mann. Mr. Whiteman. M. Leblanc. In a discourse of color-coding by skin pigmentation, I can’t shake it any more than my fellows of color, though it may be that they have paid more for their pigmentation than I. Under a rigid schema of identity politics, the



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pigmentation sets off a cascade of reverberations according to the social frames we sequentially enter. From some we may emerge unscathed; in others, we may end up with a knee to our throat or staring down a pistol. White person that I have been in my time, my prospects in the social fishbowl have been unimpeded. Consistently, both “systematically” and not. This stark reduction to one’s social significance by skin color will persist until genetically we evolve into a society of halftones and composite colors. If only our assault on Gaia can be staved off long enough for our descendants to see that day! Whether on the color scale or through a set of bearings and attitudes, as manifest in posture, gait, and voice, attaching only to me, in certain of my transactions, I rapidly become “Sir!” I’m always flustered when this caption flashes up. What this address most palpably operates on me is to place me at a remove, at a greater distance, to move me outside the frame. What does it mean, I can’t stop asking myself, when suddenly I am “Sir!” Have I committed some faux pas? By what reflex gesture have I transmitted some ingrained attitude? How have I misread my interlocutors, the moment, the occasion? Is there an element of respect, or compassion, in this caption to my encroaching decrepitude? Does it somehow mirror my own lifetime effort, with its legion misprisions and letdowns, to be amiable? Or, perhaps, “Sir!” is an elocution in a language of deference deployed preemptively—in a shrewd liberation politics. Yes, “Sir!” says: “Within the frame of our current transaction, you may count on my respect and my commiseration. But there are differences at play in this field. Don’t presume for a moment that you can dissolve them—for all the good will you presuppose for your own position.” Yes, I’m caught short every time, in my urban ambling, when “Sir!” lights up in the network, a flash of arbitrariness. There’s no escaping the remove—whether one of deference or annoyance— that “Sir!” introduces. “And you’re telling me, Mr. Good Manners, what it feels like to arrive packaged, labeled, pre-sorted among the social cubby holes? Spare me the put-on familiarity! Save it for your genuine compatriots, if you still have any!”

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May 15, 2022. This Thing That Dwells within Us

The title originally devised for this panorama, or constellation, or throw of the dice, hopefully distilled into a provocative, if not definitive, mantra for our tumultuous times was “This Thing That Dwells Within Us.” The referent corresponding to “This Thing,” whose meaning would be disclosed over the course of discussion, was to be something pervasive and menacing. Something amorphous and for this reason hard to pin down. But also something whose consequences are tangible and even alarming—indeed, at the level of “red alert.” The news media, in whatever format they are processed, besiege us daily with the harsh eventualities proceeding from this concatenation of current conditions: whether new lows in cooperation and civility on the part of our public officials; a steady stream of calculated misinformation on all the waves at times befuddling our personal and collective senses of reality; a complacency toward aggravated corruption that was once the province of history books; at best frivolous overall subscription to the treatments developed against all odds for a virulent disease continuing to morph around us; as we undergo a one-after-the-next of extreme climate events vying with each other in their bizarreness. Whether we call this current horizon of expectation a mood or malaise, irreconcilable sociocultural dissention and unrest; or a concatenation of demographic and ecological downturns mirrored by the lack of logistical and administrative wherewithal to cope with them. Or perhaps our lapsing as a species, with the worst timing imaginable, into fatal paralysis, being caught in an impossible crossfire between urgently competing demands. All absolute. None resolvable, even to the bottom rung of “good enough.” Such issues as population growth, pollution, and near-adequate supply of energy, water and other critical resources, housing, food, and necessary commodities. And then, the dire problems posed by the disposal of these commodities when transformed by consumption into waste.

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This mega-bummer: it saps our equanimity; it drains our reflex tendency to hope and dream even under desperate circumstances. It has morphed us into thugs who punch out flight attendants if they have the temerity to enforce masking rules in keeping with the best that science has taught and that immunology has provided. This Thing occupies and preoccupies us. It positively haunts us. It dwells within us with no sign of remission or exorcism. This palpable mentality, or sensibility, if not a spirit or a ghost, conveys what Freud, in his famous 1919 essay, imbued into “the Uncanny.” In its full array of connotations and contexts. This Thing, having attained multiform creepiness, has invaded, zombie-like, the dwelling that Heidegger drafted with unremitting ambivalence. What is it, in the end, this Thing? With the persistence that we normally attribute to water damage, it seeps into every arena of public deliberation, into every public office. Its watermark is pitched contention, even in what were once the remote and innocuous bureaus of power—state legislatures, boards of election and education. As might well be imagined, this volatile and ubiquitous spirit of distemper is the bearer of 1,000 names (maybe not quite that many), with cynicism, ressentiment, rage, backlash, belligerent retreat to tribal bubbles, digitally powered social polarization, a pandemic of personality disorders on a magnitude of masses, or parties, neglect, burnout, inconsolable despair, and hopelessness prominent among them. As our guided tour of the Great Dismissal reaches its terminus—which was, as it happens, its starting point— I’ll hazard naming this most versatile Imp of the Perverse class. With its long history, the term comes macerated, on all fronts, in dispute and disrepute. Those in whose vested interest it is to skirt all redress and even mention of socioeconomic disparity chain it directly to revolution and abuses by the Soviet regime that were, on a vast scale, monstrous. So rightward has the substance of our public discourse drifted that even the mention of class, at present, is blatantly Commie. Since all this term does is highlight differences not soon to abate, let’s not go there, on any account! The question of class summons our internal all-American Norman Bates back from purgatory. Hitchcock’s tormented motel keeper remains the icon of our collective class bipolarity, extolling inclusiveness and equal opportunity as we so often do while legislating and institutionalizing a byzantine gauntlet of hurdles in the distribution of franchise and benefits. Our irreducible class



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ambivalence leaves its imprint on our endless, pitched legislative wars—over abortion, voting rights, guns, taxation, immigration, the environment—the ones almost destined to evade consensus of any durability. Our most dogged newsroom investigator on the score of class, destigmatized in his parlance as “social status,” continues to be Thomas B. Edsall. In a recent broadside on its precipitous decline among the Trump base, “There’s a Reason Trump Loves the Truckers” [NYT, February 16, 2022], Edsall attributes the dramatic recent rise of militant populist protest worldwide to a counterintuitive blend: “long-term decline in employment and population” plus “strong social capital.” What could strong social cohesion in towns and hamlets in disparate locations, ones increasingly marginalized and impoverished through a conflation of depopulation, industrialization in agri-business and the global outsourcing of jobs, white collar as well as in manufacturing, have to do with the appeal of demagogic politicians who promise to turn back the clock? His wide-ranging research goes as far back as the 1930s in explaining “that while most analysts view higher social capital as a healthy development in communities, it can also foster negative ethnic and racial solidarity.” Edsall cites a trio of political scientists, Shanker Satyanath, Nico Voightländer, and Hans-Joachim Vogt, who argue, in their “Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party”: “Dense networks of civic associations such as bowling clubs, choirs, and animal breeders went hand-in-hand with a more rapid rise of the Nazi Party.” This fascinating finding presupposes the capability for “analog” or “real-world” human networks to go viral—even during the long prelude to digital technologies “The paradoxical role of social capital in fostering far-right movements” becomes the leitmotif of a second article by a troika of authors (Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Neil Lee, and Cornelius Lipp, all of LSE) that Edsall highlights for his readership. It is “precisely the long-term economic and demographic decline of the places that still rely on relatively strong social capital that is behind the rise of populism in the U.S. Strong, but declining communities in parts of America’s Rustbelt, the Great Plains, and elsewhere, reacted at the ballot-box to being ignored, neglected and being left behind.” Strong collective sentiments of neglect, abandonment, and disregard make powerful catalysts. In the wake of globalization and corporate mergers into vast conglomerates with powerful local repercussions,

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social turbulence has become as much a matter of place conflict as class conflict. Edsall quotes Rodríguez-Pose, from his own paper, “The Rise of Populism and the Revenge of Places,” as saying: Populism is not the result of persistent poverty. Places that have been chronically poor are not the ones rebelling. . . . The rise of populism is a tale of how a long-term decline of formerly prosperous places, disadvantaged by processes that have rendered them exposed and almost expendable, has triggered frustration and anger. In turn, voters in these so-called ‘places that don’t matter’ have sought their revenge at the ballot box. This new notion, that communities have been galvanized toward militant populism en masse, and that this sea change, if not stampede, is indicative of superior social organization rather than preexisting fragmentation or anomie—this is powerful stuff, justly demanding major rethinking. One measure of this hypothesis’s power is the chain of seemingly disjoint phenomena that it meaningly places in relation. These include Trump’s implausible election and the obstinate, if not blind devotion of his enablers and base; the emergence of the gilets jaunes as a powerful voice in France; and the immediate prompt for Edsall’s article, the massive Ottawa protest by Canadian truck drivers, which Trump can only take as an affirmation of his own positions and policies. As the previous citations indicate, Edsall is among the current opinion columnists most receptive to current hard-core academic work in the social sciences. Not only does he seek this research out in refereed academic journals; he maintains “live” contact with his sources when their work has been suggestive to him. In private communication, one of these, Regina Anne Bateson, a public and international affairs professor at the University of Ottawa, captures the protest’s menacing cast, with “heavy elements of extortion,” a “hostage situation.” “The convoy has deployed tactics intended to harm local residents such as deafening horn-blowing, in an attempt to extract concessions from the government. More than 400 hate incidents have been reported to police.” And in the wings of this mass demonstration, egging it on, has been “significant international involvement, including political support, media coverage, and crowdfunding dollars from the United States. We are also seeing evidence of social media manipulation designed to increase



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polarization. This includes the use of fake and hijacked social media accounts, troll farms and bots, and inflammatory photos and messages being pumped out en masse.” Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, now in direct correspondence with Edsall, explains the eruption of the gilets jaunes as pushback against “a severe hike in diesel taxes in order to pay for the green transition.” The cathartic and widereaching movement becomes, for Rodríguez-Pose, an example of “the revenge of the places that don’t matter.” Both revenge and not mattering, in this knockout formulation, signal a situation, discursively as well as economically, that has gotten out of hand; already at a non-negotiable extreme. It is the rancor of unsettled accounts that animates all skirmishes along the perimeters of class—even the most momentary and inconsequential ones of the everyday owing to the intangibles of double contingency. “Places that don’t matter” are of course populated by people conditioned over long experience to the feeling that they don’t matter. How can the threshold between mattering and not mattering be experienced in any way other than bitterly? The resentment festers in keeping with the complacency and high-handedness with which the discrimination between mattering and not mattering is conducted. Bitterness is hardly a rational phenomenon. It can easily bleed over from exasperation at closed factories, corporate farms, outsourced jobs, and shuttered main streets into adamant refusal when it comes to masking mandates during a pandemic or crusades against school textbooks presumably touting blithe ideologies. Call it “social status” if you feel compelled to, but what is at play here is the mechanics of a class system whose settings exercise a profound effect on the lives of ordinary people. A conflation of forces driven past the brink of systematic madness when its false prophets and pretenders are factored in: the institutes and “causes” managing to dupe the groups victimized most abjectly by unemployment, unavailable health care, and substandard social services including schooling that the available means to improve economic and social equity are in their worst interest. Both in France and the United States, I have witnessed firsthand the devolution of towns initially encountered as compact wonders of commercial vitality and human services into “places that don’t matter.” This was along the old Route 17 corridor in upstate New York, both as it pressed westward toward Pennsylvania and as it wound northwest from Corning through the Finger Lakes.

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The impoverishment of such towns as Elmira, Bath, Dansville, and Hornell over the period 1973–2010, when I regularly drove between Buffalo and the East Coast, was palpable. And in 2002, I made a point of passing through Auxerre, a medium-sized town perhaps 90 miles southeast of Paris to relive a delightful stopover I’d made there in 1990. And I was struck by the decentering and impoverishment in social settings that had taken place in that venerable town over the course of a brief interval. As in so many locations throughout France, the placement of superstores such as Auchan and Carrefour on the outskirts had had a chilling effect on the main streets of regional towns and their small businesses. When it comes to the double vision prevailing between “Metro” and “Retro” America, we are clearly in Tobin Smith’s debt. But the social-scientific acuity and articulation channeled by Edsall to his readers bring needed depth to this contrast. For all its slipperiness and intransigence, it is inevitable that the spectral scaffolding of class plays a decisive role in our electoral process and deliberations. Yet given our nation’s deepseated, troubled history on the planes of race relations and ethnic pluralism, it often verges on the impossible to distinguish the workings of class from the wreckage left by fossilized stereotypical thinking. It is indeed a bewildering tango that the class system dances with the ongoing negotiations of identity politics: varying in briefest intervals from intimate contact to aggrieved incredulity. The question of access to educational resources, the basics as well as advanced professional training, both requisite to any robust social mobility in US society, is an inevitable arena where these deep-seated double binds come into relief. In the press of late, the debate has raged as to whether affirmative action provisions have now outlived their day. Observers as astute as John McWhorter and Jay Caspian Kang have recently issued position papers on this score. Affirmative action provisions are animated by an egalitarian ideal of diversity that should prevail where training and crucial skills are distributed. It may well be that the very value of diversity, whose absence and need in schools and on campuses were once patent, has itself become double-edged. McWhorter, in particular, teases this out. The problem of affirmative action is compounded in its complexity by different histories converging upon it. In Kang’s rendition, affirmative action impacts Asian Americans in a somewhat different way than it does other people of color. And even



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more profound than the specific understandings and arrangements for preferential admissions worked out over time is a tug of war taking place at the systemic level: as to whether the inequity crying out for redress by admissions officers is the product of entrenched class stratification or identity politics gone awry. The state of affairs that McWhorter, in “It’s Time to End RaceBased Affirmative Action” [NYT, January 28, 2022], above all wishes to fend off is the demeaning of his biracial daughters’ talent and hard-won achievements in the name of blanket “terms and ideas that make us feel cozy inside, like fresh-baked blueberry muffins.” I shudder at the thought of someone on a college admissions committee, in the not-too-distant future, reading [my daughters’] dossiers and finding their being biracial . . . and thus, officially “diverse” . . . the most important thing about them. Or even, frankly, interesting at all. I don’t want an admissions officer to consider the obstacles my children have faced, because in 2022, as opposed to 1972, they really face no more or less than their white peers do. . . . I don’t want the admissions officer to consider my children’s “diversity.” For one thing, their diversity from the other kids in their neighborhoods, classrooms and lives is something of an abstraction. They wear clothes from Old Navy, watch (and rewatch) “Frozen” and “Encanto,” and play a lot of Roblox, just like their peers. Assessments of academic ability and a fair distribution of academic opportunity are both isomorphic in that at some point the “tread” of qualitative judgment hits the “road” of quantitative ranking. McWhorter here is pushing back against a possible reductio applied to his daughters that in calculating diversity would overlook their unique qualities. The primary argument that McWhorter pursues in demonstrating the current obsolescence of policies pursued by admissions departments at elite schools throughout the country is a historical one. Given his daughters’ specific heritage and circumstances, he documents change that has taken place in the Black community since JFK’s original implementation of affirmative action policy. When affirmative action was put into practice about a halfcentury ago, with legalized segregation so recent, it was

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reasonable to think of being Black as a shorthand for being disadvantaged, whatever a Black person’s socioeconomic status was. In 1960, about half of Black people were poor. It was unheard-of for big corporations to have Black C.E.O.s; major universities, by and large, didn’t think of Black Americans as professor material. . . . But things changed: The Black middle class grew considerably, and affirmative action is among the reasons. Even while celebrating the social mobility among people of color in part facilitated by affirmative action, McWhorter insists on situations and populations for which affirmative action not only remains appropriate but also de rigeur. But to articulate these ongoing situations expressly demanding egalitarian sensibility and redress, McWhorter’s rhetoric perforce switches from the language of race relations to that of class. “I think a mature America is now in a position to extend the moral sophistication of affirmative action to disadvantaged people of all races and ethnicities, especially since as a whole, Black America would still benefit substantially.” The catchment group still calling for the correction of their endemic hardship is now “disadvantaged people of all races and ethnicities,” including the segments of “Black America” that have not yet been able to equalize educational opportunity and move up in the job market. Jay Caspian Kang’s recent coverage of the predicaments faced by various Asian American communities in this country [Kang, 2021] has proven particularly timely given the sharp spike in recent nativist-driven hate crimes against these citizens; most notably, the shootings at three Atlanta spas on March 16, 2021. In 2018 and 2019, he continued coverage of a 2014 suit brought by the Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard College, whose definitive adjudication is before the US Supreme Court. In a pair of recent New York Times articles, he has produced a spreadsheet of the advantages and obstacles to fair college admissions facing Asian American students. Paradoxically, in this instance, the very measures instituted to assure campus diversity may play a de facto role in unfairly suppressing the numbers of Asian American students on campus. In covering the Harvard case, Kang observed firsthand the fanciful logic and numbers deployed in the name of balanced diversity. He found that “reductive racial thinking” was part and



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parcel of how Harvard processed the Asian American applications. “Asian applicants to Harvard routinely scored lower on their ‘personal scores,’ a metric cobbled together from alumni interviews, essays and teacher recommendations. During the trial, Harvard’s attorneys did not really explain why this disparity existed, but only tried to prove that it did not come out intentional or even implicit bias” [“It’s Time for an Honest Conversation About Affirmative Action,” NYT, January 27, 2022]. Compelling evidence of antiAsian discrimination also emerged in that sector of the admissions process where geography joins the other determining factors: grades, test scores, recommendations, and so forth. In a preliminary round of soliciting applications based on PSAT scores, Asian applicants from “sparse country”—Harvard’s nomenclature for “regions that do not send a lot of students to the Ivy League”—had to score higher both than their Black and white peers. Harvard’s longtime Dean of Admissions expressed concern directed at Asian American applicants that they “let’s say, for example, have only lived in the sparse-country state a year or two.” From this particular elocution, Kang inferred that to Harvard, “Asian students from sparse country are Asian before they are Arkansan or Nevadan or Alaskan and that whatever diversity benefit they might bring to the school will be based on their ethnicity.” Kang’s immediate incentive for posting both recent articles is what may or may not be left of affirmative action when the Supreme Court, in its current ultra-conservative emanation, deliberates on Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. In the face of the very concept’s quite conceivable cancellation, Kang hazards, “Given the destruction that could come to all programs that resemble affirmative action in any way, perhaps Asian applicants and their families should accept a system that certainly seems to discriminate against them . . . but whose dissolution will also lead to a more inequitable world” [“We Need to Look Beyond Affirmative Action,” January 31, 2022. Also titled “The Path to Social Equity Doesn’t Lead Through Harvard”]. Even under conditions prompting certain elite universities to improvise ploys whose purpose is to keep the Asian American population down, Kang is not mystified by any collective overachievement in grades and test scores (among other achievements). “If you’re an immigrant with a distinct language barrier, zero connections to the professional workplace and very little understanding about how

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this country works, the academic grind is the only clear pathway for your child to move up in socioeconomic status.” Once again, as Kang teases out the double messages that Harvard is compelled to broadcast not only to the community at large but to itself in rationalizing its admissions policies, the broader issues of social privilege and class—however befuddling their manifestations at street level may be—occupy center stage. The naiveté of race thinking may well be the pretext for all affirmative action’s deliberations. But class is the zone where the long history of racist discrimination and violence can possibly be redressed. In the terminology of that genius French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose uncanny insight into human cognition could be both illustrated and obscured by his dazzling line-byline repartee, race thinking is a figment of the Imaginary. While in their socio-legal gradations, the negotiations of class belong to the Symbolic. And it is precisely in this connection that Kang will go on to write of his own alma mater, where, during campus visits over the years, he observed a salutary transformation in the student body in keeping with serious diversity initiatives. “But while the percentage of ‘students of color’ at Bowdoin has gone up to 35.1 percent in 2021 from an abysmal 7.5 percent in 1988, there has been little meaningful change in socioeconomic backgrounds. Twenty percent of Bowdoin students come from families who make $630,000 a year. Sixty-nine percent come from families in the top 20 percent of income earners in the country. Only 3.8 percent come from the bottom 20 percent. Increased racial diversity has not changed the fact that exclusive schools cater almost entirely to a wealthy population. And Bowdoin is far from being an outlier. A full 15 percent of Harvard students come from families who make $630,000 or more a year, and only 4.5 percent from the bottom fifth of income earners. Elite state institutions aren’t much better” [“It’s Time for an Honest Conversation”]. As Kang’s discussion of affirmative action shifts from the discriminations of race- and ethnicity-thinking to the privileges and disadvantages accorded by class, the particular cocktail of pain and crushing pressure imbibed by young Asian Americans becomes transmuted into a map of power and the flow of money and resources in US society. And although the motives and approaches behind McWhorter’s and Kang’s recent contributions may be markedly different, along with the “grain” of



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their respective inquiries, when it comes to matters of class privilege and geography, they are writing from the very same map. And when we assess the cumulative impact of some of the major social transformations folding under the umbrella of this book— including the carte blanche dismissal of advanced research in the arts and sciences launched by Trump; his administration’s flagrant disregard for due process and checks and balances in the conduct of governance; our wholesale stampede into digital technologies and protocols before weighing their disadvantages and risks along with their amazing convenience—we realize that the very coordinates of our preexisting social map have shifted drastically. This is the geographical component of the state of permanent seismic shift that we have entered. Putin’s inhuman incursion into Ukraine in late February of this year expresses, amid a plethora of messages, extreme exasperation at the coordinates of a preexisting map. In following this train of thought to its conclusion, let me hazard some of the major geographical features and boundaries in what we might term: THE NEW SOCIAL MAP OF THE UNITED STATES. And taking a page from the considerable self-help literature in US publishing, I might select as a subtitle for this section: HOW YOU CAN PROSPER HAND OVER FIST FROM THE GREAT DISMISSAL AND THE RUSSIAN INCURSION INTO UKRAINE. THE NEW SOCIAL MAP takes off from the conventional class boundaries that have been in effect at least since recovery from the Great Depression, and in multiple respects, in the preceding decades if not centuries. Within this framework, access to the overarching US middle-class ideal is vastly greater for those whose income level is adequate to spare them from precarity in monthly and yearly time frames; and allows them to put a certain portion of their income aside, even if the amount seems meager. To afford something in the way of disposable income. (In time, these savings will become significant, even transformative. This slight excess, if available to working people, is the economic manifestation of the supplement; one by one it fulfills every function embedded in the supplement’s job description as an indispensable element in parsing different systems.) Capitalism, the benevolent capitalism, begins where people of modest means can afford savings, something beyond dayto-day necessities and mandated salary deductions. Over decades, it is these savings that buy people their autonomy and prosperity. Capitalism is, among other things, a banker and superstore for

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funds liberated from essential expenditures. As one market or another (CDs, stocks, and bonds) becomes inundated and inflated, other markets queue up for the excess disposable income. This is when there is a steep rise in real estate values in a given region; or a bump in the art market; or when novel investment schemes (e.g., derivatives, bitcoin) appear so attractive that they vie with banking and traditional “safe” investment. From salary, the ur-negotiation of the labor market, emerge the other traditional markers of class: who can afford secure, stable housing; who can obtain health insurance and parallel coverage for catastrophic eventuality; who can provide education for their children requisite to current demand in the job market; who will bequeath inheritance in some form to descendants. The uproar and destructiveness unleashed by the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) took place above all because widespread health insurance would secure a vital perimeter on the map of social welfare. The prospect of this class achievement far overshadowed any substantial change Affordable Care would initiate in healthcare delivery. The subsequent vicissitudes of Covid-19 only reinforced the compelling need for this sort of safety net in the United States. As the works of Balzac, Brecht, Dickens, Zola, Dreiser, Norris, Larsen, Hurston, and Smedley among so many others attest, not only economics textbooks but also entire novels are situated at the critical class boundaries of volition, empowerment, and capability and their distribution within an economic operating system. The signposts in THE NEW SOCIAL MAP of class in the United States may seem more frivolous, arbitrary, and even perverse than these traditional indicators. Yet, they impact every bit as tangibly on the immediate and long-term prospects for vast segments of the population. People who own their own high-tech equipment. Elementary, you say. But if you were not, by some concatenation of circumstances, in this particular class of ownership, think of how desperate, let alone deeply inconvenient it would be for you to cobble together the interactivity enabling a vast majority of our population to maintain contact with friends and family, to perform basic business and service transactions, and to stay abreast of the news and other key developments impinging on our lives. As technologies have evolved and morphed, the basic unit of interactive capability has shifted



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from the computer, whether desktop or laptop, to the telephone—if a smartphone isn’t in the picture, then a cellphone at the very least. But even this entry-level appliance assumes extra-technological relationships turning out to be definitive of our status and capability within a techno-capitalist universe. For indeed, within this galaxy, debit and credit cards have taken over the roles once assigned to national or state ID, whether the French carte de identité or its semblables. Your truest identity is not where you reside, or your locus of origin, or even your most authentic name, but where you hold your bank accounts and how you channel and reimburse your financial assets. [Our Prevailing Operating System is capitalism, after all. Hence, the solution to our current unwarranted and overblown state-by-state battles regarding voter ID—in turn determining which voices will be counted in electoral contests: Where applicable, credit and debit cards and the accounts to which they are attached should establish ID and locality. The more analog versions of this documentation—photo ID, financial and utility snail-mail as proof of official address— should kick in when this proof of our credit ID, our truest identity, is unavailable.] With the exception of prepaid cellular subscriptions, your digital phone implicates you in multiple networks of finance, data, and legal responsibility. And it is merely the stepping stone to a multiplicity of digital relations you are then able to sustain using the technologies allied to your phone: above all, computers, iPads, smart TVs, and smartwatches. And as Zuboff adroitly points out, you may be more intimately connected to the expanding universe of accrued personal data through your vacuum cleaner or refrigerator than you ever dreamed. What is the life implicated by residing in the wilderness outside the conventional techno-capitalist grid? So forbidding that it has prompted the purchase of sophisticated equipment and assuming financial responsibility beyond millions of people’s means. It means getting the news by peering at flat-screens through a barroom window or catching the headlines of an analog newspaper as you pass by the newsstand. It means depending on libraries and other public sites for timed, occasional computer use: amounting to parttime membership in indispensable social institutions, whether of education and information or health and social services. These are the conditions to which you’ve been relegated if perchance, you do

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not maintain a fixed abode on the digital highway. If the equipment on which we all depend for our very being under a techno-capitalist regime is not your own. People who routinely retain lawyers. If you have a penchant for a very flamboyant, public lifestyle; if you love flaunting basic conventions of objectivity, restraint, and civility. As the TrumpCovid years have richly taught us: So long as you have the right attorney in your corner, ideally a Sidney Powell, an L. Lin Wood, or a Rudy Giuliani, you can get away with any libel, persiflage, or fanciful misrepresentation you might care to propound. And indeed, if you have suffered no particular offense, and in fact are bending the law very much to your own self-interest, you can absolutely count on your attorney, especially given the advanced training in interpretation and composition that came with law school and bar accreditation. In concert with your legal enabler, you are free to fabulate any narrative whatsoever that will serve your current outrageous assertions, whether involving aliens and UFOs, deepstate conspiracies, or visions and commands direct from God. You can, for example, retain one or more of the nine attorneys who filed the “Kraken” suit in Michigan and Detroit in the attempt to overturn the statewide results in the 2020 election. [Rosalind S. Helderman, “Sidney Powell, L. Lin Wood among attorneys ordered to pay $175,000 over Michigan ‘Kraken’ suit,” WP, December 2, 2021.] The more fanciful the accusations you make, the greater the share of the news cycle you will suck up. However illegal your intent, however outrageous your justification, the law has your back! And what your attorneys may not be able to spare you in punitive action for your excess and legerdemain with the law, they can buy you in time. In the seemingly endless delay between the tripping of the guillotine and the blade’s arrival at the bottom of the chute. Entire lives beset by legal turmoil can be suspended to their conclusions by natural causes through these means. Charles Dickens, who had obtained no satisfaction whatsoever from his own protracted legal appeals to reclaim some of his royalties, caught this deeper purpose of the law in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the farcical case framing the encyclopedic scope and cast of thousands bulking up Bleak House. The futility of resolving anything through the High Court of Chancery is signaled as the curtain goes up by



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the seasonal quagmires of mud and fog choking London. The court is not merely a body of inconsequential deliberations and arcane traditions, presided over by a bureaucracy of eccentrics vying with one another only in the myopia of their vision. It is a way of biding time, assuring that nothing happens. This is the conservative worldview as implemented by a vast contingent of Netflix series characters. No crumb of amusement ever falls from JARNDYCE AND JARNDYCE (the cause in hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of the newspapers, invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little old mad woman in a squeezed bonnet, who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favor. . . . Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire, and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day’s business, and who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the Judge, ready to call out “My Lord!” in a voice of sonorous complaint, on the instant of his rising. . . . Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. . . . Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps, since old

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Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out in a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the Court, perennially hopeless. [Dickens, Bleak House, 1977, 7–8] Picturesque as this verbal tableau surely is, it contains a cogent critique of the law as it functions, then and now, at the systematic level. A protracted legal case is defined as much by its involution and insolubility as for any streamlining it might affect in interpersonal transactions. The court rulings that scream out to us, whether in print or virtual headlines, result from deliberations engineered for stasis, for reinforcement of the status quo. The very legal system that would bring redress and moratorium to long-standing abuse becomes co-opted into a powerful agent of obstructionism. Staying au courant with Jarndyce and Jarndyce is all that’s necessary for divining the pace and resolution that all current legal actions against Trump, his companies, and his agents are on track to reach. And according to Dickens’s time frame, the likely parties to feel the full impact of these deliberations are the Trump grandchildren, having themselves attained advanced age. At the level of systems critique, a plodding, high-profile civil or administrative court battle is an ornate filtration device, designed to forestall change as much as to deliver needed remediation. In the terms of speech-act theory, a major lawsuit is a complex scripted behavior involving multiple parties and functionaries. What separates a lawsuit from other scripted events, say religious ceremonies and ritual, is the open-endedness of the data and contingencies impacting upon it. In increments, the contents and tenor of Jarndyce and Jarndyce undergo seismic shift over time. In turn, time itself adjusts to the continuous flow of input by attenuating its own progression—to such a degree that the case’s founding premises are now largely indecipherable. As Dickens frames Jarndyce and Jarndyce, his prototype for futile legal haggling, it becomes a multiple generator: of interpretations, so numerous and conflicted as to befuddle their contemporary stewards; of picturesque characters, all angling for some inexplicit gain (Roger Stone, the QAnon shaman, and Margery Taylor Greene would not at all be out of place in the Dickensian courtroom); of the generations of innocent bystanders, whether interested or disinterested parties, whose lives become



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collateral damage to the law’s glacial dysfunction, its arbitrary determinations, and its inflated moral pretension. [As Congress’s ongoing inquiries into the January 6, 2021, insurrection assemble a compelling narrative, the fully unhinged overall tenor of the Trump regime, the blatant venality motivating its reflex-action subterfuge, cannot but surface. Even within a hotly contested field of grifters in the hundreds, Roger Stone emerges as the poster child of a government whose systematic disregard for law and long-standing convention in the conduct of public administration galvanized it into a shouting match between multiple delusional grandiosities. See Dalton Bennett and John Swaine, “The Roger Stone Tapes,” WP, March 4, 2022.] Frivolous legal suits may well be animated by transgressions and issues very much at stake in the au courant. But as Dickens vividly illustrates, at the pinnacle of his narrative virtuosity, the composite effect of the protracted legal suit is Freudian sublimation gone awry. Extending to an afterlife of morbid resignation to the stratified conditions that prevailed on the eve of the entire scripted farce. Welcome back, dear zombies! It is not entirely by chance that Dana Milbank, on February 9, 2022, files “How Republicans learned to love frivolous lawsuits” in The Washington Post. Contemporary Republicans, by Milbank’s account, have turned away from their long-standing repugnance toward “junk and frivolous lawsuits,” bemoaned, among others, by President George W. Bush. Inspired by Trump’s polymorphous litigiousness, they now luxuriate, out of sheer perversity if nothing else, in the diversity of the lawsuits they file. At least 11 states, most of them GOP-controlled, have seen the introduction of bills by anti-vaccine lawmakers that would give the employees the right to sue employers who require coronavirus vaccines. . . . Republicans all across the country are introducing gag laws to ban the teaching of certain subjects involving race, and 15 such bills include a “right of action,” according to the free-speech group PEN America. This would give students, parents, teachers or ordinary citizens standing to sue schools and recover damages in court over lessons they find objectionable. A version proposed by Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, would even allow parents to collect attorneys’ fees if they win in court.

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Republican legislators have introduced “stop social media censorship” bills in roughly 20 states, and some of these include private rights of action allowing sponsors to sue social media companies that delete, censor or even use “an algorithm to disfavor” their posts. A Florida law, blocked in court, allows up to $100,000 in statutory damages per claim by individual users. . . . The American Tort Reform Association (ATRA) . . . has noticed a trend of more Republicans advocating laws expanding legal liability rather than expanding to rein in lawsuits. Federal judges often occupy the first-row seat in witnessing the obstruction, overall dysfunction, and carnivalesque theatrics initiated by frivolous legal cases. US district judge Linda V. Parker dubbed the Kraken suits to overturn election results in Michigan “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.” She deemed the substantial fees that she imposed on the nine attorneys who brought the suits in state and Detroit courts an “appropriate sanction . . . needed to deter Plaintiffs’ counsel and others from engaging in similar misconduct in the future” [“Sidney Powell, L. Lin Wood among attorneys to pay $175,000 over Michigan ‘Kraken’ suit”]. In responding to Judge Parker’s ruling, Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel embroidered on the perversity of seeking to secure legitimation of purposefully misleading narratives from the courts: “These attorneys demonstrated a flagrant disregard for the law and attempted to use the courts to further a false and destructive narrative. While there is no amount of money that can undo the damage they caused, I am happy to see these sanctions handed down.” While the full deleterious effects of conspiracy theories and other contrived and fanciful narratives on the conduct of democracy, whether in journalism or on social media, may not yet have fully penetrated to the current US Supreme Court, it is reassuring to see that they are clearly on the screens of the lower courts in our judicial system. [PS: And if the attorneys you hire to advance your interests can’t quite wipe you a clean slate, you can always divert some portion of the funds you lavish on their fees to damage control PR. Here as well your interests will be protected and even consolidated by the progeny of our legal academies.] People who brandish guns. The explicit public debate regarding gun ownership and use may well center on such historical and



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constitutional issues as the right to bear arms against tyranny and the related freedoms that this provision within our inaugural legal compact was intended to buttress. Also, on such commonplace and indispensable uses of guns—in hunting, agriculture, and ranching. But within the contemporary arena of politics and public debate in the United States, the primary significance of guns, in the rich panoply of their formats, gauges, and manufacturers, is as a social class-shifter, one whose impact is immediate. (Like, say, rolling into a peaceful sovereign country with an outsized battery of tanks, artillery, and air attacks.) Whatever my professional accreditation, educational attainment, political or corporate office, or personal wealth may be, and regardless of your position on the GPS of the US class system, which may well be superior to mine, if you are pointing a loaded lethal weapon at me, you have willy-nilly gained the upper hand. I am under your control. Their own prominence as St. Louis personal injury attorneys did not resonate most loudly for the McCloskeys, Mark and Patricia, the husband-and-wife team who trained their private gun collection on a group of nonviolent protesters on their way from a Black Lives Matter rally to the mayor’s house. This was on June 28, 2020. On July 20, 2020, the couple was charged with a gun violation for exhibiting a semiautomatic weapon “in an angry or threatening manner”; by August 3, 2021, they had been pardoned by Missouri governor Mike Parson. The McCloskeys justified their threatening behavior in terms of their sense of imminent danger and their right to defend themselves. “Outside the courthouse,” on the day the couple pleads guilty to misdemeanor charges, “Mr. McCloskey agreed with prosecutors that he had put the protesters in danger. ‘That is what the guns were there for, and I’d do it again anytime the mob approaches me’” [Azi Paybarah, “St. Louis Couple Who Aimed Guns at Protestors Pleads Guilty to Misdemeanors,” NYT, June 17, 2021. Updated August 3, 2021]. In a Tweet of July 16, 2020, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri affirmed the couple’s exercising their “constitutionally protected rights.” Yet what spoke even more definitively for the McCloskeys was their aggravated protection of their property in a restricted zone of the city; their right as gun owners to immediately transform themselves into an armed paramilitary unit and act accordingly, as much in the defense of privilege as of property. This is indeed how current Second Amendment interpretations resonate throughout

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the gun rights movement—as they animate armed militias and initiatives to permit concealed weapons in public. The McCloskeys’ actions also bespoke a severe lack of confidence in local law enforcement. In a one-sided armed confrontation, the advantage conferred by possession of a lethal weapon is absolute. This is the icon the McCloskeys left of themselves as he, with an AR-15 rifle and she with a Bryco handgun, performed before the camera as selfappointed urban vigilantes. People who don’t pay taxes. Detonated to a significant degree by an in-depth investigation by ProPublica, mid-2021 witnessed a spate of powerful journalism on the realities and long-term implications of US tax law, as it has evolved to the present. This in “The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax” [Jesse Einsiger, Jeff Ernsthausen, and Paul Kiel, June 8, 2021]. A “vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years,” made available to ProPublica, “Taken together . . . demolishes the myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most.” A point of demarcation that the three authors establish early in their exposé gains traction, particularly in view of Trump’s adamant secretiveness regarding his tax returns, as a pivotal dividing line on the NEW SOCIAL MAP: “Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more. . . . The confidential tax records obtained by ProPublica show that the ultrarich effectively sidestep this system.” The article focuses on income tax revenues, since these payments are a fait accompli to the vast majority of wage earners; it does not begin to assert that the wealthiest Americans avoid taxation altogether. This watershed achievement in contemporary investigative journalism proceeds on macro and micro levels. Its narrative line gathers momentum from detailed case studies on the specific tax compromises reached by five of the nation’s most influential billionaires (Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, and George Soros). Yet the article does not shy away from rendering a composite photomontage of the system and its impact. Particularly with respect to the mega-economic wealth disparity that these special arrangements exaggerate; also implicitly, through



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such factors as Citizens United, their seismic repercussion on electoral politics. The article pivots on its analysis of what it terms the “true tax rate,” established in the following way: “We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period.” “The results are stark,” the authors conclude. According to Forbes, those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%. It’s a completely different picture for middle-class Americans, for example, wage earners in their early 40’s. . . . From 2014 to 2018, such households saw their net worth expand by about $65,000 after taxes on average, mostly due to the rise in value on their homes. But because the vast bulk of their earnings were salaries, their tax bills were almost as much, $62,000 over that five-year period. The ur-skew allowing such disparities in the taxation of the superrich and ordinary salaried individuals derives from a long legal history, grounded in Eisner v. Macomber (US Supreme Court, 1920), establishing that “income comes only from proceeds—when gains are realized.” This means, as Binyamin Applebaum channels the ProPublica exposé in “The Real Tax Scandal Is What’s Legal” [NYT, June 8, 2021], “Many wealthy Americans live lavishly by borrowing against the value of their assets. . . . Assets can be siloed in nonprofit foundations whose main beneficiaries may be the people who run them. Assets can be passed on to children and grandchildren. Better yet, the government allows heirs to take ownership at the present value, erasing the accumulated tax liability.” As part of his prolific, sage beat on the economy’s workings and its sociopolitical repercussions, Paul Krugman surveys the broader damage wrought by billionaires who outmaneuver taxes on their increased wealth. “When a millionaire or billionaire evades taxes, this comes at everyone’s expense: a bigger budget deficit might mean less room for social spending, but it also means less room for legal tax cuts. So everyone should be in favor of cracking down on tax cheats—everyone, that is,

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except the tax cheats themselves” [“Should Only the Little People Pay Taxes?” NYT, July 22, 2021]. “Buy, borrow, die.” With this catchphrase borrowed from Edward McCaffery, a USC tax law professor, the ProPublica authors summate a life cycle in which the superrich multiply their advantage at every turn. So how do megabillionaires pay their megabills while opting for $1 salaries and hanging onto their stock? According to public documents and experts, the answer for some is borrowing money—lots of it. For regular people, borrowing money is often something done out of necessity, say for a car or a home. But for the ultrawealthy, it can be a way of accessing millions without producing income, and thus, income tax. The tax math provides a clear incentive for this. And at the far end of the life cycle, the prospect of death for billionaires need not be nearly as forbidding as it may be for the rest of us. In their creative estate planning, “they can readily escape turning over almost half of the value of their estates. Many of the richest create foundations for philanthropic giving, which provide large charitable tax deductions during their lifetimes and bypass the estate tax when they die.” The endgame that the current advantages enjoyed by the superrich, culminating a history of concerted tax reduction and anti-regulation advocacy going back to the Reagan years, is a dire one, with little relief in sight. The consequences of allowing the most prosperous to game the tax system have been profound. Federal budgets, apart from military spending, have been constrained for decades. Roads and bridges have crumbled, social services have withered and the solvency of Social Security and Medicare is perpetually in question. . . . The system works only as long as it’s perceived to be fair. Today’s plutocrats are not insensible to this predicament. It’s just that the soporifics that they offer—in the form of massive philanthropic infusions into their causes of choice, say Bill and Melinda Gates’s initiatives to curb infectious disease—are part and parcel of the



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system already advantaging them to an inordinate degree. As they go about righting the ecological destruction proceeding from a voracious, extractive capitalism in which they are expert players, “more and more billionaires swoop in to try to save the day. They seek to personally shoulder the world’s problems, big and small, in flamboyant fashion.” Indeed, the guise often assumed by the biggest winners on the gladiatorial field of mega-corporate conquest is often that of the superhero culled from the pages of action comics. In a stunning intervention on this topic in the wake of the ProPublica exposé, Jeff Yang, a real-life editor of Asian American superhero anthologies, in “Being Superrich Doesn’t Make You a Superhero” [NYT, June 20, 2021], puts the outsized heroic creds of present-day oligarchs to a road test: When not cranking out batteries and electric cars, hosting “Saturday Night Live” or planning to colonize Mars, the Tesla billionaire Elon Musk is jumping into Earth crises with wellintentioned but often unworkable solutions: trying to save children trapped in an underground cavern in Thailand with a sub built out of rocket parts . . . bringing power back to Puerto Rico after Hurricaine Maria (with mixed success, according to locals); and providing ventilators for Covid patients (a “fiasco” said the headline of a piece by the editorial board of The Sacramento Bee). Some of Mr. Musk’s fellow billionaires are taking on even bigger monsters. . . . These are worthy causes, to be sure. They’re also enormous, structural challenges that global governments have struggled with for generations. Yet these visionary metamoguls believe they can overcome them in their spare time, through the power of concentrated cash and “out-of-the-box,” “disruptive” thinking, nearly always involving technology. The problem with out-of-the-box approaches is that they tend to ignore the on-the-ground realities faced by actual people. The problem with disruption is that it’s by definition in conflict with existing systems—which means end-running or sidelining incumbent institutions and infrastructure in existing communities. The socioeconomic achievement credited to such innovators and inventors as Musk, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos is truly on a superhuman

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scale. But what Yang captures so brilliantly in his phrasing is the way the vast scale of such accomplishment bleeds into grandiose complacency when technology and super-efficient organization are mobilized, with last ditch super-heroics, in reversing extreme predicaments, whether of a long-standing or impromptu cast. Not only does being a billionaire allow you to legally evade taxation on your wealth’s often astronomical accretion. It assures that your story will end in a heroic glow. As Anand Giridharadas narrates the saga, this is the fate that Warren Buffett has reserved for himself. On the first take, “Buffett appears to be the safest kind of billionaire: the good kind. . . . He is, or seems to be, quiet, humble, indifferent to money, philanthropic, and critical of the system that allowed him to rise.” Our problem isn’t the virtue level of billionaires. It’s a set of social arrangements that make it possible to gain and guard and keep so much wealth, even as millions of others lack for food, work, housing, health, connectivity, education, dignity and the occasion to pursue their happiness. There is no way to be a billionaire in America without taking advantage of a system predicated on cruelty, a system whose tax code and labor laws and regulatory apparatus prioritize your needs above most people’s. Even noted Good Billionaire Warren Buffett has profited from Coca-Cola’s sugary drinks, Amazon’s union busting, Chevron’s oil drilling, Clayton Homes’s predatory loans and, as the country learned recently, the failure to tax billionaires on their wealth. [“Warren Buffett and the Myth of the ‘Good Billionaire,’” NYT, June 13, 2021] The villain of this story, more egregious than the most notorious bad faith billionaire on your personal list, turns out to be nothing more formidable than “a set of social arrangements.” Whether through oversight, resignation, or callous apathy, we have, incrementally, but also at key electoral junctures, acceded to modi operandi each tolerable if not justifiable in its moment, perhaps. But in aggregate, proving toxic and dysfunctional as the tilt in the political arena has gotten steeper owing to dark money and the influence that it buys; in a media universe systematically amplifying the messages at the extremes of the political spectrum while raining down a constant barrage of mutually cancelling messages. In their



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evolution, these “social arrangements” have progressed unabated through Democratic administrations as well as Republican ones. They encompass not only the tax understandings and breaks that have facilitated and entrenched the plutocrats’ escalating wealth and advantage. They include the retraction, already in the late 1980s, of fair broadcasting standards with enforcement by the federal government [Smith, 2019, 62, 64–5]. And the feeding frenzy in malicious and misleading political advertising and propaganda set off by Citizens United. Sexuality’s undecideds. The pitched effort on the part of an ongoing coalition of religious fundamentalists and political conservatives to withdraw the access to abortion and related women’s healthcare services stipulated under US Supreme Court Roe v. Wade has, of course, been with us for some time. Almost exactly five decades in fact, since the momentous decision was handed down, on January 22, 1973. And yet with the clear realization, sparked by a pending Supreme Court decision draft released on May 2, 2022, that the High Court is about to strike down Roe v. Wade, a seismic redistricting within the NEW SOCIAL MAP is also at hand. Above all, following a sustained, decades-long drive by US women toward parity to whatever degree still incomplete—in education, within the labor force, in professional and social advancement, in healthcare, and in financial compensation. Women once again find themselves at the foot of the table—in their distinct social class. They are once again the bearers of progeny and the helpmeets of their men. (It is in this connection that states hostile to gay marriage have endeavored to define the matrimonial state categorically as the union “between a man and a woman.”) Should women strive professionally, they do so at their own risk. In a post-Roe world, their employment is only a liability to the roles and duties bestowing their social and class identities. This story, fraught with struggles that have become part and parcel of women’s sociopolitical conditions and prospects in this country, unfolds in no less than three distinct gauges. There are the ongoing deliberations of the Supreme Court, on which the leak of the Alito draft decision opened a rare and unexpected window. No surprise here. The May 2, 2022, airing of the majority opinion in Politico only substantiates the well-known predilections of an ultraconservative supermajority on the Court. In different guises, this

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ideological saga has been simmering in its bureaucratic pot since the conclusion of the Second World War. Its outcome culminates decades of long-range planning, cynical legislative legerdemain (to wit, denying Obama, toward the end of his administration, the confirmation of his Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland), exegetical tunnel vision (“originalism”), and hypocritical judicial hyper-activism—specifically in the traditional bastion of disinterest, with all its restraint, among the US government’s major branches. During May 2022’s first two weeks, these juridical maneuverings, along with the torrents of dismay, consternation, disbelief, and elation that they unleash, are the brunt of what we encounter up and down the bandwidth of our media. No one gets the consternation brought to the fore by the retraction of decades of evolution and change in US gender politics in scores of reports and commentaries better than Bret Stephens, in his ongoing tongue-in-cheek dialogue with Gail Collins. Right now, I think it’s appalling to overturn Roe—after it’s been the law of the land for nearly 50 years; after it’s been repeatedly affirmed by the Supreme Court; after tens of millions of American women over multiple generations have come of age with the expectation that choice is a fundamental right; after we thought that the back-alley abortion was a thing of bygone years; after we had come to believe that we were long past the point where it should not make a fundamental difference in the way we exercise our rights as Americans whether we live in one state or another [Gail Collins and Bret Stephens, “Sometimes, History Goes Backward,” NYT, May 9, 2022] The medium-range backdrop to this bombshell, whose impact upon US women will be immediate and devastating, is a decades-long family melodrama, not the ongoing static supplied by late breaking developments, whether channeled over CNN or The Washington Post. And in this time frame, it is the conflation of an unprecedented influx of profits accumulated by diehard conservative extremists, an accretion amplified by tax breaks and the progressive removal of corporate regulation at the federal level that they themselves have underwritten, with an expanding universe of privately funded think tanks, lobbying operations, and institutions indistinguishable from their academic counterparts that have, over the same juncture,



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implemented the militant vision propounded by this new oligarchy. Amy Coney Barrett, the latest addition to the Court’s conservative supermajority, and surely a factor in the timing of Alito’s completed draft, is herself, alongside her conventional undergraduate education and legal training, a product of these overtly goal- and outcomeoriented privately funded institutes and political incubators. Already at the time of her nomination to the High Court by Trump, Elizabeth Dias and Adam Liptak highlight that “To Conservatives, Barrett has ‘Perfect Combination’ of Attributes for Supreme Court”: Judge Barrett has also been a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative and libertarian legal group. She has spoken at the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a program to train Christian law students that is run by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal firm that has successfully defended religious conservatives at the Supreme Court, including the Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for gay people. [NYT, September 20, 2020. Updated October 26, 2020] While “Legal scholars said Judge Barrett’s opinion on the appeals court have been models of juridical craftmanship,” this article clarifies, her extracurricular affiliations demonstrate her to be as much the creation of institutes and initiatives funded by dark money as the culmination of her own creativity and originality in jurisprudence. As of her Supreme Court nomination, this institutional history is not reassuring when it comes to future impartiality vis-à-vis Roe v. Wade. This mid-length narrative, encompassing a patient, detailed, and multifaceted coordination by the self-interested at the upper reaches of US finance, natural resources, and technology to implant and implement their values and strategies into the very fabric of US public life, coincides with the trajectory of Jane Mayer’s magisterial book. As suggested earlier, the network of interlocked interests, initiatives, and events that Mayer weaves into this work is a significant achievement of political and cultural history in its own right—regardless of the degree to which one shares Mayer’s personal stakes in the narrative. Among the Right to Life community as among the political movers and shakers who have assumed a vested interest in the general unavailability of abortion and other women’s health options, there was and will continue to

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be jubilation at the rescinding of Roe v. Wade, one in keeping with other triumphs on the ultra-right detailed throughout Dark Money [Mayer, 2017, 380–94, 439–65]. Yet, the widest panorama for the saga of avarice and carefully groomed piety and purity professed with zeal, powered by a procedural free hand wielded with cynicism if also craft, achieving an apex of non-empathy in the striking down of Roe v. Wade by judicial fiat, is nothing less than cosmic in scope, eternal in persistence. This is the steep and congenital challenge posed by the sexual drive, were we dare to speak in terms of sexuality, as opposed to reproduction, to all formats of human habitation, even those outside the pale of “full-service civilization.” The controversy surrounding Roe v. Wade is, in other words, perfectly at home in the landscape demarcated by Freud’s broader, and mostly later, meditations on the overall fate of human desire, creativity, and destructiveness amid the conventions and prohibitions of civilized life, a major generator of both the psychological maladies and insight he pursued for a lifetime in his cabinet. To whatever degree Freud may have been blindsided by the morality and gender biases of his own era, in such broad-gauged works as Totem and Taboo (1913 [1912–13]), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930 [1929]), he rendered inestimable service by highlighting not merely the sheer impact of our sexual desires and impulses upon sociocultural institutions and productions at a far remove from reproductive activity. Freud emerges from these more speculative overviews as the spokesperson of record for a modernity defined by the very impasses into which our sexual and creative drives lead us. Also, by the bizarre and unrecognized disguises assumed by our restricted yearnings. The austere regimen of legally sanctioned sexual behavior that the rescinding of Roe v. Wade would reinstate is not only, in the words of Gail Collins, “a Supreme Court that’s imposing the religious beliefs of one segment of the population on everybody else” [Collins and Stephens, “Sometimes History Goes Backward”]. The Supreme Court’s blanket retraction of decades of advances in women’s health and toward equality in socioeconomic achievement and conditions also amounts to an abrupt repudiation of the modernity, constantly evolving though it is, in which US culture has consistently placed itself at the forefront. From jazz to TV, supermarkets, and computers, the United States has disproportionately disseminated this modernity to the world,



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substantially easing the transition from a history of empires and world wars into one powered by economic cooperation and shared technology. (There are, of course, many serious hitches to this latter narrative—of the United States’s claim to originality and native rights within this latest, tech-driven hypermodernity.) Already by 1960, Hitchcock has dispatched Norman Bates as an advanced warning party heralding a deep-seated sexual malaise with a uniquely American twist. The receptive bystander to “Psycho” shuttles frenetically between naïve permissiveness and submission to sexual sensationalism and an equally lurid sexual aversion grounded in arrested development and misplaced incestuous desire. The draconian current incursion into the facts and complexities of human reproduction on the part of an unbalanced Supreme Court amounts to the ultimately futile effort to dislodge the entire US populace from its cultural moment. And along with it to summarily dismiss everything in the way of sexual awareness, shared understanding, and sympathy for opposed approaches that we have been able to achieve through decades of protracted scientific research and public debate. Welcome back, Norman! We never quite indulged ourselves in the delusion that you’d disappeared into the woodwork. As Gail Collins frames this particularly galling instance of the “return of the repressed”: Welcome to the land of my high school religion classes, people. The governor of Mississippi, when asked whether the state would move on a to ban on contraception, said, rather unnervingly, that it’s “not what we’re focused on at this time.” And the dreaded Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn has denounced the Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which covers the use of contraceptives for married couples under the constitutional right to privacy.” [Gail Collins, “Don’t Be Fooled. It’s All About Women and Sex,” NYT, May, 11, 2022] In such a passage from Civilization and Its Discontents as the following, Freud—outmoded dinosaur as he may strike us— evinces stunning relevance to the Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade as symptomatic of a culture-wide discomfiture with sexuality: The tendency on the part of civilization to restrict sexual life is no less clear than its other tendency to expand the cultural

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unit. Its first, totemic phase already brings with it the prohibition against an incestuous choice of object, and this is perhaps the most drastic mutilation which man’s erotic life has in all time experienced. Taboos, laws and customs impose further restrictions, which affect both men and women. . . . A cultural community is perfectly justified, psychologically, in starting by proscribing manifestations of the sexual life of children, for there would be no prospect of curbing the sexual lusts of adults if the ground had not been prepared for it in childhood. But such a community cannot in any way be justified in going to the length of actually disavowing such easily demonstrable, and indeed, striking phenomena. . . . The requirement, demonstrated in these prohibitions, that there shall be a single kind of sexual life for everyone, disregards the dissimilarities, whether innate or acquired, in the sexual constitution of human beings; it cuts off a fair number of them from sexual enjoyment, and so becomes the source of serious injustice. [Freud, 1930 (1929), S.E., XXI, 104] Thus Freud, even in the late 1920s, as he contends with the grave injustices that will inevitably ensue both from a blanket, top-down disavowal of sexuality in the sheer diversity of its thinking and behavior, earning its “phenomena,” among their many epithets, “polymorphous perversity.” Injustice and unnecessary suffering also inflicted in the name of “a single kind of sexual life,” arising from the ultimately gratuitous compulsion to boilerplate conjugal relations. The canonical building blocks of our civilization, from the Bible to the Kantian “moral imperative,” may well be invoked in the protracted struggle to subject sexual behavior and reproductive possibility to the whimsy of politics, under the US federal system, at the state level. But these noble works render little assistance in controlling the damage to public debate as to sexual conduct wrought by the sustained systematic gaming and trickery requisite to “imposing the religious beliefs of one segment of the population on everybody else.” No sooner had the bombshell leak of the Alito majority opinion detonated in Politico than journalists with ongoing scrutiny on the controversy annotated the sheer severity of this particular outcome. Several among them were quick to register the decided majority of the US citizenry, on both sides of the political aisle, who firmly support abortion’s availability so long as certain restrictions apply.



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Thomas B. Edsall, characteristically citing recent social-scientific research, demonstrated the remoteness of the pending decision from the attitudes held by the centrists making up the bulk of our population. In making his case, Edsall cites “Abortion and Selection,” an article by Elizabeth Ananat, Jonathan Gruber, Phillip Levine, and Douglas Staiger, all economists in eminent departments, whose evidence indicated “that lower costs of abortion led to improved outcomes in the form of an increased likelihood of college graduation, lower rates of welfare use, and lower odds of being a single parent”: Our findings suggest that improved living circumstances experienced by the average child born after the legalization of abortion had a lasting impact on the lifelong prospects of these children. Children who were “born unwanted” prior to the legalization of abortion not only grew up in more disadvantaged households, but they grew up to be more disadvantaged as adults. Follow-up material that Edsall elicited from Gruber, of MIT, specified that The very states that oppose abortion rights are the ones that engage in poorly designed tax cuts that leave them without the resources to support their neediest citizens. So ending abortion rights is basically imposing a large new tax on citizens to support millions of unwanted, and disadvantaged, children—a tax that these governments are then unwilling to finance. Again at Edsall’s request, Ananat, of Barnard, clarifies: We also know from recent research that has followed women who were unable to get an abortion under new laws—because they came to a clinic just after instead of just before a gestational cutoff in their state—that it is the case today that those who were unable to get a wanted abortion are much more likely to be poor in the years afterward, much more likely to get evicted, are in much worse mental and physical health, are much more likely to be in an abusive relationship. Their existing children—60 percent of women seeking an abortion are already mothers— end up with poorer developmental outcomes. All these results

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portend badly for their futures and their children’s. [Thomas B. Edsall, “If There’s a Loud Fight About Roe, ‘Centrist America Will Just Turn Down the Volume,’” NYT, May 11, 2022] These are, to say the least, dire tangible consequences emerging from a concerted Supreme Court U-turn whose rationale is couched in the highest ethical and theological terms. “The justices’ questions on the broader consequences of a decision eliminating the right to abortion were probing but abstract and conditional,” reports Adam Liptak, in “If Roe Falls, Is Same-Sex Marriage Next?” [NYT, May 8, 2022]. Liptak goes on to register the “conflicting signals” surrounding Justice Samuel A. Alito’s pending majority opinion’s “sweep and consequences”: On the one hand, he asserted, in a sort of disclaimer that struck a defensive tone, that other rights would remain secure. “To ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” he wrote. “Nothing in this decision should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” On the other hand, the logic of the decision left plenty of room for debate. It said a right to abortion cannot be found in the Constitution or inferred from its provisions. The same could be said, using the draft opinion’s general reasoning, for contraception, gay intimacy and same-sex marriage, rights established by three Supreme Court decisions that were addressed at some length in the argument in December. . . . Justice Alito, for his part, has made no secret of his hostility to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision on same-sex marriage. Since May 2, 2022, the journalistic record has been excruciatingly attentive to the broader fallout of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. This sudden reset of its assurances will drastically restrict the options and services available to pregnant women both in the short haul, even as certain states augment abortion availability and consolidate the resources necessary to implement it, and over the vast geographical sweep of the states that have in effect prohibited the procedure. “Half of U.S. Women Risk Losing Abortion Access Without Roe”



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report Weiyi Cai, Taylor Johnston, Allison McCann, and Amy Schoenfeld Walker within days of the majority opinion’s leak: Around 64 million women and girls of reproductive age live in the United States, and more than half of them live in states that could seek to ban or further restrict access to abortion if the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe. v. Wade. Many of the millions of people who live in these states would be able to seek legal abortions elsewhere, but the barriers to access—including financial resources, time off work and child care—may be hard for some to overcome. This analysis includes 28 states that could ban or further limit abortion if the Supreme Court were to end Roe v. Wade. . . . But there is a lot of uncertainty about which states would be able to enforce bans, and experts disagree about how quickly they could take effect. [NYT, May 7, 2022] Engaged journalists wasted no time in meticulously charting out the destructive ripple effects of rescinding Roe v. Wade: the tsunamilike tidal waves surely to crash, despite Alito’s assurances, on nonabortion-related questions of sexuality and their current conduct. The contentious issues and tenuous compromises now up for grabs range all the way from transgender medicine and counseling, the current red flag, to gay marriage, and even, if Marsha Blackburn gets her way, to the general availability of contraceptives, a matter thought to have been resolved in 1965 (Griswold v. Connecticut). The section heads to Aaron Blake’s “How far the GOP might go post-Roe on abortion, contraception and travel” [WP, May 9, 2022] form a map of further encroachments on sexuality in the United States likely to ensue, at least in some degree, from the Roe v. Wade reversal: “Eliminating exceptions,” “Criminalizing abortion—including for patients,” “Restricting contraception,” “Restrictions on traveling for abortions,” “Cracking down on medication abortion,” and finally, as Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has not ruled out, “A federal abortion ban.” This is at best far-reaching and traumatic fallout on the customary behavior of US citizens, rich and poor, black and white, residents of red states and of blue ones. This is the predicament where the precipitous outlawing of a procedure that has become critical to the self-determination of

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women’s lives and careers leaves us: in a never-never land. A biblical one where one specific hard line on the reproductive ideology embedded across the gamut of the three Abrahamic faiths has not yet evolved into sexuality. Well launched as we are by now into the twenty-first century, reproduction remains the only stake in our conjugal lives, its sole validation. The constituency that through long militancy and longterm planning has brought about the end to Roe v. Wade turns out also to be the deniers of modernity, in its extended time frame. The broader modernity has been with us, by different counts, for the last 400–500 years! Irrespective of whichever religious canons they quote, those hell-bent on extruding every margin of volition from the reproductive cycle hold out in their role as sexuality’s undecided, in the full political sense of the term. They are the voters who simply haven’t been yet won over to the position that sexuality, a many-headed monster indeed, one possessed of multiple inputs and outputs, is both the scourge and the redemption that continues to torment and tantalize civilization. Sexuality must therefore be engaged, at least to some degree, on its own terms. Both in its intimacy and in the sheer power of its allure, sexuality calls, if anything, for gentle and variegated modulation. Government can only function realistically and compellingly as a service and an accommodation to people such as they are. It cannot, on any sustainable basis, recast itself into the bludgeon of true believers, whatever their crusade, zealots oblivious to the collateral damage that unconditional assertion inflicts upon the public sphere. When it comes to sexuality, the coalition of religious fundamentalists and right-wing ideologues, and which now includes the US Supreme Court, simply hasn’t yet cast its vote. At very best, the Supreme Court’s upending of Roe v. Wade leaves us, with respect to our fundamental concepts of agency and connubial volition, under a thick volcanic dust-cloud of ambivalence. Even some who rejoice in the vastly reduced field of choice that will attend pregnancy and birth have registered that the realization of Right to Lifers’ most ardently pursued aims will entail social costs and obligations whose fulfillment is far from having been arranged. In “Overturning Roe Will Disrupt a Lot More Than Abortion. I Can Live with That,” Matthew Walther, editor of the Catholic literary journal The Lamp renders the service of connecting the dots linking



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the unimpeachable values militating for Roe’s disqualification to the pressing crises that this severe intervention will surely precipitate: I believe that those who oppose abortion should not discount the consequences that some of us would otherwise regret. To insist, as opponents to abortion often have that the economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt cannot be right about the correlation between Roe and the reduced incidence of crime two decades later strikes me as a tacit confession that if they were right, our position on abortion might have to be altered. For the same reason, opponents to abortion should commit themselves to the most generous and humane provisions for mothers and children (paid family leave, generous child benefits, direct income subsidies for stay-at-home mothers, single-payer health care) without being Pollyannaish. No matter what we do, in a post-Roe world many children who would not otherwise have been born will live lives of utter misery, and many of our fellow Americans will be indifferent to their plight. If we wish to dispel the noxious argument that only happy lives are worth saving, we will have to be honest about the limits of social policy and private charity in regulating the turbid ebb and flow of human misery. [NYT, May 10, 2022] And while Walther eloquently inveighs for what might be termed a “wide-angle impact statement” on an outcome achieved through cynical procedural chicanery guided by fanatical tunnel vision, Fernanda Santos, in The Washington Post, juxtaposes the problem of capital punishment to “the joyful fact” (in Walther’s parlance) “of hundreds of thousands of additional babies being born.” How is it, Santos inquires, that those who treasure each unborn life could so brusquely dismiss the lives of those who have transgressed? Clarence Dickson is scheduled to die on Wednesday. His execution will end Arizona’s nearly eight-year capital punishment suspension that followed the botched lethal injection of another murderer, who observers said “gulped like a fish on land” for almost two hours before finally taking his last breath. One day after the leaked draft of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion last week presaged the likely end to the national right to abortion, a county judge blocked one of the final attempts to halt

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the execution of Dixon, 66. Timing is everything, as they say, and this time, the back-to-back developments reminded me of the moral calculation that underlies so many people’s simultaneous support for the death penalty and opposition to abortion rights. Ultimately, it isn’t about valuing human life but about how much each human life is worth. And in Arizona, a convict’s life seems to have very little value.” [“Arizona Republicans have a serious disconnect on how they value life,” WP, May 10, 2022] The new take on Roe v. Wade by the ultra-conservative supermajority on the US Supreme Court renders an MRI both on the advances and stubborn sticking points in our culture. It leaves us with an exhilarating sense of the vitality that has allowed for the emergence of innovative life forms and new lifestyles—in response to techdriven and hyper-interactive variants of modernity—in recent decades. But also with a gnawing sense of scores that refuse to be settled and perennial grudges now being played out in the national arena, with all-or-nothing odds. It is the eminent constitutional scholar Linda Greenhouse who picks up the gauntlet of setting in its widest context the latest turbulence surfacing in the US farce of sexual coming of age: The court has a problem, no doubt, one that barriers of unscalable height around its building won’t solve. But if a halfcentury of progress toward a more equal society, painstakingly achieved across many fronts by many actors can be so easily jettisoned with the wave a few judicial hands, the problem to worry about isn’t the court’s. It’s democracy’s. It’s ours. [“Justice Alito’s Invisible Women,” NYT, May 5, 2022] People who don’t answer email. Truth be told, by now we have almost evolved into a species defined by our inability, whether by volition or sheer volume, to answer all our emails. Given the multiplicity of their sources, the slippery slope between those solicited and those unsolicited, who among us could possibly give them all their due? Back to the human hive. For all the arbitrariness of its protocols and its instrumentation by electronic devices, the current digital agora, in which so much of our business, information, public



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administration, and even thinking gets accomplished, amounts to a shared human undertaking on a planetary scale. Where it was once a challenge to fully realize our citizenship in any national or quasi-national entity, now we are perforce dual citizens of (at least) one nation asserting its political sovereignty alongside a shadow electronic government in planetary exile. For those of us fortunate enough to command personal hardware or customary access to the Worldwide Web, the impact of our digital franchise upon our state citizenship is both empowering and scary. When not arbitrarily filtered or jammed by the local jurisdiction, for instance, our access to information and data online may very well challenge and undermine what we are being fed by news media under the auspices of the state. The electronic lid being imposed on Russian citizens during Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is one case in point. [Anton Troianovsky, “Russia Takes Censorship to New Extremes, Stifling War Coverage,” NYT, March 4, 2022.] On a planetary scale, answering email becomes civilization’s daily dirty work—the chores keeping the vast cloud of transactions afloat. It is akin to the everyday neighborhood devotions, whether depositing the trash and recycling or keeping our stretch of the sidewalk snow- and ice free—our own miniscule but critical role in advancing the local habitation. Our email floats down to us in a daily blizzard. Even our most assiduous, disciplined digging out is fated to incompletion and clutter. Yet even amid this sublime overload of messaging, demands for attention, exhortations, and sheer put-ons, some of us, whether by privilege or divine right, have dodged the onus and burden of email. Those of us attaining this exalted status are often in a supervisory or administrative role. We may be prestigious academics. We are the Kafkan doorkeepers of the digital age. We are editors, agents, corporate heads, heads of honorific societies, program directors. Our work involves filtering out as well as receiving the likely winners of competitive bids. “We get letters,” as Perry Como crooned in the distant age of analog recording, “lots and lots of letters.” It is incumbent upon us to direct traffic where lots and lots of applications and submissions are at play. The mathematics is daunting, “sublime.” It is for this reason that Zuboff situates the data extraction and sales campaigns of surveillance capitalism “at scale,” by which she means in BIG NUMBERS. In their fundamental configuration, these ventures are low yield; in order

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that they succeed, the base of targets or correspondents must be huge [Zuboff, 2019, 161, 198–9, 337–8]. The vast majority of the folks tasked with solicitations at this scale brave poor posture, hypertension, emotional distress, and hemorrhoids just to keep up with their email. But then, there are those few who have drawn the bye from this collective labor. In what, specifically, does their exoneration consist? As to the particulars of attaining this status, I draw a blank. And yet I’m certain that a continental divide on THE NEW SOCIAL MAP neatly runs between those who find a crowded directory of e-correspondence facing them every day and those who don’t. The quintessential X-factor at play here is no doubt an ideal amalgam: the perfect cushion of social capital combined with non-accountability for broken communication. At the tail of yet another strange loop, I scratch my head at the imponderables of social class within the current constellation. Yet I know that we will achieve no reconciliation between aggrieved constituencies and counterforces in our population until two basic conditions are met: a more accurate, shared map of our fragmentation and fundamental political disagreements. Also, the consensus that can only emerge from restored good faith: in knowledge that has been vetted, verified, and fact-checked; in the public institutions where it is sought, deliberated, critiqued, and disseminated.

June 27, 2022. Dismissal Day. The Strange Loop of Identity Politics

We’ve made it to the end of another school year. Kids from pre-K to twelfth grade have been certified to move up a bump. They tread the threshold to untold growth and development, with sticker new skills and capabilities to bring to a future still open-ended and radiant with promise. The new summer is but a week old. In order to arrive at this day, the kids have had to push back their inbred resistance (pace Alice) to full-time, multifaceted regimentation and whatever personal resistances they encounter in their own learning curves. This is an interborough holiday of jubilation, a moment of celebration defying all boundaries—of neighborhood, community, ethnicity, heritage—that comes but once a year. Celebration this year, as at the end of the two previous school years, is particularly welldeserved: students of all stripes have had to endure unpredictable shutdowns, regimens of distancing, masking, vaccination, testing, and, in many families, grave illness and death—in order to make it here. Even today, this ominous Thing persisting within us refuses to pause. It plays its cruel string game with us, thrusting us forward and pulling us back at will. There are promising moments. A particularly draconian gerrymandering plan by a state legislature gets disqualified by a state Supreme Court. Despite dire predictions and constant naysaying, Biden’s economic policies are bearing fruit, on both the labor and financial markets. Yet the prospects for continuous social progress remain dim. One of our two major political parties—in a binary model of electoral opposition and choice itself increasingly crying out for fundamental rethinking—recast itself, under Trump and the legislative strategies of McConnell, as an instrument of systematic derailment of governmental policy and planning. With

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its rescinding of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court, once the last bastion of disinterest in a complexly cantilevered government, has devolved into the instrument of self-aggrandizing socioeconomic interest long in play. It has transformed itself into a naval destroyer of protections and assurances—to basic public safety and the sustainability of the environment as well as to reproductive health— and has cut core democratic sensibility adrift. It has jettisoned any constructive vision and aspiration as to how U.S. society might fulfill the flowering of its rare democratic experiment. The end result of the composite binary opposition is systemic stalemate, one sidelining and mothballing any and all collective idealism possibly ensuing from our collective striving, creativity, and achievement in such fields as science and medicine, the arts, media, industry, jurisprudence, and military conduct and administration. All this gets wiped out in the ubiquitous war game, all too often— regularly—involving real weapons, between disciplined striving in every sphere and belligerent nihilism elevated to the level of cult if not religion. Every May and June, we permit a brief truce in the culture wars in order to celebrate the graduates. But little forethought has been given to the tenor and the rules of engagement that will prevail in the world in which these people, still ardent in the state of their becoming, will strive and struggle to attain indispensable skills in the name of some viable future. This entire morbid, paralytic, death-seeking cat-and-mouse game owes its dynamic to one of two great, yet unresolved Original Sins of US society and culture, slavery and the particular brands of race suppression and race thinking that have proceeded from it. This is the premise of Adam Serwer’s luminous snapshot of contemporary US culture, in The Cruelty Is the Point, and he builds his vignettes on a distinguished tradition of critique going back farther than Douglass and Du Bois. That we continue falling, on a daily basis, into the pitfalls of such a crude, categorical, and implicitly violent thought matrix need only be attested by the plethora of voting restrictions and self-interested redistricting initiatives mounted and passed since the elections of 2020, and not only in the states color-coded “Red” by long precedent and history. Those recent elections themselves became the pretext for the Big Lie, the current continental divide in US politics, the presumption, on the part of a clear minority, to dismiss in their own favor electoral results as they emerge from conventional (and regulated) electoral procedure,



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as the rationale for dictatorial power, repackaged under whatever “new, improved” label. Upon every iteration of its current economic vulnerabilities and accrued social grievances, whether expressed as populist rallies, militia showcases, attacks on the Capitol, unprovoked mass shootings, or ingenious legislative and judicial manipulations, US society falls back upon its own particularly benighted, shopworn modules of identity politics. As a template for thinking and the cognitive homework indispensable to coexistence in a functional culture and society, identity politics is neither the most edifying nor constructive option available. But we keep falling back into it; as a cultural prototype, it won’t let us go. It is at the source of the grimmest, most “viral” spectacles of our national barbarism. Even in order to advocate for minimum thresholds of economic equity, universal distribution of educational opportunity and healthcare, the very bottom line of communal existence in other “advanced” technological societies, we have to delve into identity politics’ flattened a priori categories. If I can think of you only in terms of the tint of your skin; if I deduce from it your ethnicity, your community, your level of education, and a host of details regarding your personal narrative that I project, I am simply not relating to you on the most elevated level, one conducive to reciprocity or exchange. It is utterly degrading, far more so to myself than you, if I break you down, in my case if you happen to be a woman, into a number of separate “erogenous zones” and sex traits, both “primary” and “secondary,” in order to imagine performing sex acts with you and in comparing you to current paradigms of attractiveness broadcast by a host of media. And it becomes a disaster of major scale if, spurred on by these home offices of what Smith calls “tribal identity porn,” I act on this tenuous thinking. Yet the race and gender theaters of US identity politics have been prominent features on the cultural landscape over the decades of my lifetime. They have no doubt, at times, degraded me into a lesser person. So much so that I have come to regard the primary function of mass education through the undergraduate years, in addition to the necessary acquisition of primary literacies (in verbal, mathematical, artistic, and cybernetic scripts), as “cultural psychoanalysis.” This is the cognitive homework requisite to our coexisting in a pluralistic society. It demands a rigorous coming to terms on the part of each student

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with the personal baggage of identity politics that they trail with them—identities both thrust upon them and consciously espoused [Sussman, 1997, 179–81]. Our relationship to identity politics is ambivalent in the extreme. Its appeal is the simplicity with which it resolves complex questions of community and social cohabitation. But then, we shed blood, shout ourselves hoarse, and skirt despondency in our always belated efforts to dig culture out from under its seemingly patent solutions. This is so even when we have struggled from within to trick its assured determinations and judgments, by scrambling its messages. Pursuing our lives and loves, crafting our lifestyles and fashions in resolute defiance of its a priori categories to which it perforce grants credence—if only to withdraw it. Even in this instance, identity politics is neither the most vibrant nor creative level on which we think. Yet in redressing social ills seemingly endowed with lives of their own in their uncanny persistence, whether assuming the form of voter suppression and other civil-rights violations, cruel and inhuman sentencing, or wholesale mass murder powered by a completely irrational and unchecked proliferation of arms, we are perforce thrust back into identity politics’ mindset and rhetoric. Identity politics plays an indispensable role in responsively redressing the crimes and abuses committed in the name of its brusque and violent thinking. Simply to enunciate these categorical transgressions, the constructs of identity politics are already in play. In our on-again, off-again rapport to identity politics, struggling to transcend it but repeatedly falling back under its sway, we pursue the discontinuous and manifestly irrational track of what became a signature of the cybernetic age: the trajectory of the strange loop. To the pioneers of the cybernetic age, Douglas Hofstadter notable among them, this figure emerged as a graphic for the coordination between two antithetical challenges faced by all computer programs. These precipitously opened headway, on a sublime scale, for the gathering, tabulation, sequencing, and storage of unprecedented quantities of input, data, and information, once it could be transcribed into binary digital notation. Yet the sheer scale of the information that programming languages and hardware could access and assemble also challenged digital programs’ managerial and analytical capabilities. A prodigious upgrade both at the levels of scale and power was taking place every time a program



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popped into a new version. This expansion, which coincided with a breathless sequence of technological breakthroughs from the late 1960s to the present, transpired at both a cognitive and a lower level of processing. In stunning shorthand, the strange loop registers an uncanny coordination between expansion and retrospect. In 1979, when Hofstadter is unveiling cybernetic technology to an informed but apprehensive public, one of his primary strategies is demonstrating that cybernetics is not a takeover by some possibly malevolent Strange New World. Cybernetic operations were amply evident throughout the histories of music, literature, and art long before computer hardware, at least of any complexity, existed. He demonstrates his point on a stunning variety of fronts. This is how Bach and Escher claim such a wide berth of the creativity wired into the textbook that bears their names, Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid (1979). This particular stratagem of assuaging his public enables Hofstadter to argue: “You think computers are literally going to blow your minds. But in fact, Bach’s most beloved works, along with graphics by Escher seemingly rendering the impossible, have long delighted audiences, precisely with their inbuilt cybernetic structures.” Among these are surely canons and fugues repeating note patterns on multiple registers, inverting melody lines, and where beginnings and ends of compositions crisscross one another. Also, drawings and prints painted from multiple perspectives at the same time; often escaping from two-dimensionality into something beyond, but then retreating back into flatness. Once Hofstadter enlists such mainstays of contemporary culture into what might be called the “eternal-cybernetic” in thinking, he productively feeds in additional enduring instances of cyber-playfulness: notably, Aesop, Lewis Carroll, and Zen kōans. Among the legion accomplishments that Hofstadter makes on behalf of his late twentieth-century audience is synthesizing the rhetoric, the structures and operations underlying computer programs and, therefore, driving cybernetic devices. Prominent among these are recursion, programs’ capacity to circle back on themselves, consolidating prior data so as to put it to higher use; also, isomorphism, an extended parallelism between scales enabling states and qualities not normally associated with numbers to be quantitatively sequenced and coded. Isomorphism is a key

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architectural structure underlying all computer programs. Yet we encounter its impact every day of our lives. The parallelism between genetic traits, in their wondrous variety, and complex chains of amino acids, as unlocked by Watson, Crick, and Franklin, is an irreducibly isomorphic mechanism, revolutionizing genetics and medicine in the wake of their discovery. A third unmistakably cybernetic infrastructure implanted within compelling artworks as in computer hardware can best be characterized as critical. It mobilizes the constant checking and redeployment of the “raw” data at the “operational” level (as in “operating system”). This configuration is, in effect, a constantly self-correcting give-and-take, within the overall limits (or “power”) of the program, between the “lower level” (signals, sums, chemicals, colors, themes—the data) and the cognitive organization that contextualizes and interprets it. In the current rhetoric of cybernetics, this expansion, redirection, and even correction and learning that programs, in conjunction with devices, undergo is known as autopoiesis. The strange loop is a meta-trope that, within an overall momentum of sharpened critical apprehension, manages to coordinate such core cybernetic structures and operations as isomorphism and recursion; it also encompasses the customary jumping up and down between higher and lower levels of abstraction. (Hofstadter characterizes these movements as “pushing,” “popping,” and “stacking” levels, and “quining” sentences.) This terminology may well sound forbiddingly technical. But as citizens of a digital universe, fated, like Oedipus and the other major protagonists in the tragic literature to a cybernetic unconsciousness revealed to us only in shards, we encounter the tangible manifestations of strange loops on a daily basis. “What I mean by strange loop,” begins a particularly detailed one of these elucidations, from Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop (2007), one prompted by “Drawing Hands,” an iconic piece in which the two counterpoised hands resting on a surface, schematically two-dimensional at the wrists, attain astonishing depth and verisimilitude at the knuckles and fingers, precisely in the act of rendering one another. In one continuous arc, the hands rise from stark flattening and abstraction into a bravura performance of graphic realism, placing Escher in a tradition grafting him to his distant Flemish forebears, Memling and Van Eyck. And from



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the peak of their vividness, those exquisitely rendered fingers and knuckles conduct our eyes back to the schematic wrists again. What I mean by strange loop is . . . not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upward movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive upward shifts turn out to give rise to a closed circle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop. [Hofstadter, 2007, 101–2] “Paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.” In this caption, Hofstadter makes no bones about the strange loop’s bracketing several orders of tension—this in spite of its improbable sweep and continuity. In its expansive thrust, the strange loop offers a dizzying sense of unmooring and liberation, but then, in circular inevitability, in resignation, it conducts back to the status quo, in all its oversimplification and cloying familiarity. The strange loop’s fate is a dialectical tug of war between exuberance and utter stoicism. When Derrida, in the early stages of his minute, etymology-driven exegeses, encountered an inebriating release from some core Western philosophical concept or another (e.g., presence, immediacy, voice), however fleeting, he couched it as a joyride, a “swing” on a “hinge,” one breaking the gravitational field exerted by Western metaphysics [Derrida, 1976, 65–6, 69]. This was his iteration of the strange loop. But this sense of release is not exactly what commentators on the current scene contend with. On the short bookshelf of luminous “takes” on the deadlock haunting US politics and public culture, for instance, Adam Serwer has underscored a disheartening recursion, or return of the repressed, within our ongoing, always volatile “racial contract.” This manifest in tragic backsliding away from those few notable expansive and uplifting moments in our history when our society seemed to gain a grasp on the devastating consequences of slavery and xenophobia and their outcroppings: notably, the US Voting Rights Act of 1965. The narrative of The Cruelty Is the Point thus traces a strange loop in US society’s capacity to come to terms with its disturbed racial and ethnic histories.

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Another of Escher’s iconic trompe l’oeil engravings, “Dragon,” affords Hofstadter a vivid occasion for couching the eternal struggle between uplift and liberation and resignation in its cybernetic terms. Hofstadter cites Escher’s own comment on this graphic: However much this dragon tries to be spatial, he remains completely flat. Two incisions are made in the paper on which he is printed. Then it is folded in such a way as to leave two square openings, and in spite of his two dimensions he persists in assuming that he has three, so he sticks his head through one of the holes and his tail through the other. Seeing that Escher, in his theoretical as well as graphic rendering of the “Dragon” has lobbed him the ideal précis to a slam-dunk, Hofstadter comments as follows: The message is that no matter how cleverly you try to simulate three dimensions in two, you are always missing some “essence of three-dimensionality.” The dragon tries very hard to fight his two-dimensionality. He defies the two-dimensionality of the paper on which he thinks he is drawn, by sticking his head through it, yet all the while we outside the drawing can see his pathetic futility of it all, the dragon and the holes and the folds are all merely two-dimensional simulations of those concepts, and not a one of them is real. But the dragon cannot step out of this two-dimensional space and cannot know it as we do. [Hofstadter, 1979, 473–4] On the cybernetic side of things, the figure of the strange loop becomes both Rosetta stone and shorthand—enabling Hofstadter to compress any number of the wonders making computer technology possible. Among them: Gödel numbers, magical intersections between the quantitative and qualitative universes; the typographical annotation making the capabilities embedded in Gödel numbers isomorphic, and hence operational. Also, the crucial, irreducibly critical apprehension that no matter how comprehensive a system (or a program) may seem, it is inherently incomplete. Any potential upgrade demands input from somewhere else, some place outside the system (or government, or regime, or network) at hand.



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Why is a figure as arcane as a strange loop a graphic icon for the current cultural demolition derby? Because while identity politics ultimately reverts to the two-dimensionality of its intrinsic thoughtarchitecture or design, it is the preponderant language at hand for addressing current abuses and suppression in the areas of voting rights, sexual diversity and reproductive rights, and gun violence meted out arbitrarily to people, whether by law enforcement or fellow citizens. Identity politics is, furthermore, the primary language that people deploy in order to access and articulate their various states of being: under what conditions it is possible for them to pursue their aspirations, to actualize their potential, to consummate their sexuality, to meaningfully join the histories of their families and communities. There would have been none of the emancipatory movements succeeding upon one another in reasonably logical sequence since the Enlightenment without the constructs and discourse of identity politics. These movements, beginning with declarations of universal rights for humanity, proceed almost naturally in their logic and emergence. Often withheld, for decades if not centuries, from tangible self-assertion, from one historical social context to the next, the forces of emancipation sequentially counter the specific manifestations of repression and discrimination at play. Identity politics is the cultural zone where people gain recourse to the discourse giving expression to the anathemas denying the realization of their very being. It goes without saying that in the absence of identity politics, there would be no Black Lives Matter, itself a timely update, given disturbing trends in policing and vigilantism, of the principles of the US civil-rights movements from the 1950s on. Without identity politics, no #MeToo, a movement finally securing some legal traction in prosecution of sexual abuse within a culture in which it remains rampant and largely unchecked. In an earlier generation, without identity politics, there would have been no formation of the Anti-Defamation League, a pioneering innovator and prototype in the struggles against the persecution of diasporic minorities. Without identity politics, no ACT UP and related groups, whose boisterous interventions finally succeeded in placing the lifestyles and health issues of LGBQT people squarely on the US maps of empowerment and social welfare. Without identity politics, no articulation, let alone potential redress, to our nation’s second Original Sin: under the embroidery of Manifest Destiny,

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dispossessing the lands and freedoms of indigenous peoples. And scrupulously maintaining, wherever possible and by whatever means, their segregation, marginalization, and economic, medical, and educational disadvantage. Only by means of such violent contrivance did we grow a formidable landmass. The battles waged in the name of identity politics are always rear-guard in this crucial sense: the emancipatory platform interdicting the blunt application of force or the withdrawal of biopolitical franchise to whichever social group in question was an artifact of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conceptual framework prohibiting this persecution coincided with such developments, in Europe at least, as the decline of feudalism and the rise of towns and other urban centers. Any arbitrary scapegoating of populations in the centuries-long wake of these crucial ethical and conceptual breakthroughs is categorically, belated, outmoded, after the fact. Yet even today, as the plight of each new population victimized by a priori exclusionary thinking and its social administration comes to the fore, defenders of the preexisting order, whatever its legal buttressing, are already out in force. The Mothers of Invention, as was chanted at their legendary rock concert of October 1968, in the Berlin Sportpalast, are fated to be dogged, wherever they venture, by the Mothers of Reaction. (The Sportpalast had also been an important Hitler venue. On that particular occasion, the audience, enraged by Frank Zappa’s facile German-bashing and egged on by radical leader Fritz Teufel, made certain that the Mothers understood their gaucherie.) The latest instance of an eternal struggle as I write—Invention-Reaction—is the treatment of transgender people, most notably in Texas, but in other jurisdictions as well, that have yet to adapt to the widespread phenomenon of voluntary gender modification. The latest onslaught against undesirables is against people who make other folks uncomfortable in their quest both for the gender identity and physiology that makes them feel secure and comfortable. Their hostile audience finds these transformations unnatural, and worries that by some osmosis, this newfound fluidity in the “fact” of identity itself will corrupt bystanders at a complete remove from the issues, stumbling blocks, and treatments motivating transgender people. This is merely a most recent chapter in the long history of US xenophobia and the suppression of diverse minorities traced out by



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Serwer in The Cruelty Is the Point. And identity politics remains at the heart of this latest initiative to selectively retract the mandate for universal rights and suffrage by a multinational crew of eighteenthcentury philosophes. Identity politics remains center stage here, because the young people who seek out gender-modification treatment often feel their very being thwarted by the sexual identification they drew in the biological lottery. High suicide rates prevail among them. In chronicling the gratuitous shooting death of Kiér Laprí Kartier in Dallas, the New York Times underscored that “This year was the deadliest on record for trans folks. Kiér was only 21” [Jenna Wortham, in “The Lives They Lived: Remembering Some of the Artists, Innovators and Thinkers We Lost in the Past Year,” March 14, 2022]. There is a certain fatality in Texas’ selfselection as the corral for this dramatic showdown. A significant portion of the gunslingers are unmentionables who would trade their inborn male hardware in for something else. (Surgery is by no means indicated in all, or even a majority of gender-modification cases.) The first two volleys in this particular skirmish were fired in quick succession by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and Governor Greg Abbott in late February 2022. On February 18, Paxton issued an opinion to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services specifying that “providing medical treatments like pubertysuppressing drugs and hormones to transgender teenagers should be investigated as child abuse” [Azeen Ghorayshi, “Texas Governor Pushes to Investigate Medical Treatments for Trans Youth as ‘Child Abuse,’” NYT, February 23, 2022]. The following Tuesday, Abbott “told state health agencies in Texas that medical treatments provided to transgender adolescents, widely considered to be the standard of care in medicine, should be classified as ‘child abuse’ under existing state law.” The reporting necessitated by such investigation would extend to “all licensed professionals who have direct contact to children who may be subject to such abuse as doctors, nurses, and teachers.” The order provided “criminal penalties for failure to report such abuse.” These orders do not change Texas law. Their practical enforcement is questionable. Christian Menefee, the Harris County attorney, declared that he would not prosecute such investigations. “The position taken by the Governor and Attorney General,” he added, is “designed to make parents scared. It’s designed to make

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doctors scared for even facilitating gender-affirming health-care,” the umbrella of medical approaches applied in cases of gender dysphoria and possible modification. The stance taken by the high Texas elected officials flies directly in the face of current standard medical practice. “Gender-affirming care for transgender youth is essential and can be lifesaving,” said Adm. Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services [“Texas Governor Pushes to Investigate . . .”]. In the wake of the governor’s order, the Texas State Department of Family and Protective Services wasted no time in launching investigations of transgender families. By February 25, 2022, the family of one particular 16-year-old transgender child, identified as “Mary Doe,” had been visited by the agency. One of the parents, who works for a different state agency, had already been placed on administrative leave. In her words, “We are terrified for Mary’s health and well-being, and for our family. . . . I feel betrayed by my state and the agency for whom I work” [J. David Goodman and Amanda Morris, “Texas Investigates Parents Over Care for Transgender Youth, Suit Says,” NYT, March 1, 2022]. There are of course crucial questions stemming from the care itself as to the wisdom of taking irreversible steps prematurely in a young person’s development. The standards of care . . . therefore recommend that patients and their families be counseled on how to preserve fertility by delaying the use of blockers if having children is important to them. The standards also recommend that doctors and their families wait until the teenager has reached the age of majority, which is 18 in Texas, before pursuing irreversible genital surgeries. But medical experts, since they have openly addressed these legitimate concerns on their own, are taken aback by state intrusion into their practice. Indeed, state pressure and the intervention of conservative activists forced the closure of the only specialty clinic in the state, Genecis, at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, offering comprehensive care for transgender adolescents [Azeen Ghorayshi, “Texas Youth Gender Clinic Closed Last Year Under Political Pressure,” NYT, March 8, 2022]. As Erica Adams, “a clinical psychologist and former president of the United States Professional Association of Transgender Health” put it, “For



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legislators or politicians to weigh in on an area of medicine for which they have no background is preposterous” [“Texas Governor Pushes to Investigate . . .”]. As should be no surprise by now, the controversy over genderaffirming care in Texas, albeit on a miniature scale, quickly accelerates into the wider culture wars engulfing our country. (In crucial respects, gender-affirming care, in the choice and fluidity that it affords, becomes a proxy for abortion rights.) In 2019, the Heritage Foundation, along with the Family Policy Alliance, hosted discussions in Washington on transgender athletes and transgender children, including a panel on the “medical harms” of hormonal and surgical interventions. The groups formed a coalition, known as Promise to America’s Children, and pressed for new laws. . . . Major medical groups—along with transgender advocates— back what is known as gender-affirming care, which involves supporting a child’s gender identity and social transition, often through clothes and a name. Such care can also eventually include puberty blockers or hormone treatments, though genital surgery is not generally recommended for children. While acknowledging some uncertainty and risk, they cite evidence that the approach can improve children’s health and reduce suicide. Opponents—including some large conservative organizations—argue that children are too young to decide for themselves and must be shielded from potentially life-altering treatments that have only recently gained broader acceptance among the medical community. [J. David Goodman, “How Medical Care for Transgender Youth Became ‘Child Abuse’ in Texas,” NYT, March 11, 2022] As we know from the long history masterfully assembled by Jane Mayer, the Heritage Foundation and Family Policy Alliance are heavy hitters, well established and financed, on the political front and in the trenches of the cultural wars. Indeed, what initially prompted Mr. Abbott and Mr. Paxton to make such strong interventions in the field of gender healthcare and politics may well have been the forthcoming primary elections of March 1, 2022:

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The moves by Mr. Abbott and Mr. Paxton, both two-term Republican incumbents, came days before a primary election in which each faces significant and noisy challenges from farright opponents. Mr. Paxton, who has been indicted on securities fraud charges and accused of noisy challenges by his own former top aides, has been seen as particularly vulnerable. [“Texas Investigates Parents Over Care . . .”] It is above all in the field of identity politics that the Texas controversy over medical services for transgender patients jangles delicate nerves. Even when, at least temporarily, “Texas Court Halts Abuse Inquiries into Parents of Transgender Children” [J. David Goodman, NYT, March 11, 2022]. Identity politics persists as long as we identify with and participate in specific communities; so long as we imagine the imprint of our lives within certain longer histories. As the above hopefully helps ascertain, it is not only a crucial template for our thinking, individual and collective; it is a language indispensable to the realization of our very being. Identity politics is not going anywhere, now or in any foreseeable future. And yet, amid the greatest sociopolitical upheaval in recent memory, whose components now include Russia’s untimely, all-out incursion into Ukraine—alongside misinformation on a galactic scale and longterm effects of systematic environmental denial—we do not wish to think of identity politics as an end, or an endpoint, in itself. Indispensable platform that it furnishes, identity politics serves us best as a pretext to problems of a broader systemic gauge. Their solutions may even seem far afield: How balance the needs of major corporations and enterprises to grow by investing in themselves and the imperative to furnish workers with a living wage? How reconfigure a legal system, whose pinnacle remains the US Supreme Court, such that it reasonably accommodates demands issuing from conflicting institutions—these ultimately grounded in identity thinking? Such that religious freedom can coincide with a full palette of research-grounded approaches to medicine, including genetics and reproductive medicine? In full acknowledgment of US democracy’s experiment, often pursued at a high level of idealism, how update the law such that it can be equitable in the face of evolving scientific knowledge, radically new technologies of communications, information, and archiving, and broad recent trends in population growth and demography? How



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address historical abuses of the past, including slavery, genocide, and life-threatening biopolitical discrimination such that, even if generally relegated to the past, they continue to skew equal access to education, social services, and even safe environmental living conditions? How to perform this rectification without erecting yet another scaffold of discriminatory filters? How to acquit our nation honorably with respect to the particular stream of ongoing global migration that happens to arrive on our borders and shores? To treat migration as an endemic demographic phenomenon on a global scale rather than as a raid on the particular advantages offered by the United States? How to modulate and temper new technologies so that they don’t run amok—even if this was never in their design—over long-standing ethical traditions and values? Quite a wish list of imponderables, no? Even under peaceful conditions, enough to keep a galaxy of universities, think tanks, and national Supreme Courts fully occupied and out of trouble—into the foreseeable. It is precisely at this point where we can collectively address problems of a broader gauge on which the strange loop of identity politics pivots, radically increasing in depth, disinterest, and limberness. Even where these bewildering problems at the second-order level owe their occasion and very contents to identity politics. They are located at the systematic level—the place where that current scapegoat, critical race theory, swerves away from addressing the long defile of concerted abuses to people of color throughout US history, grim though they are, to discern and critique the “deep structure” supporting the entire edifice. In facilitating a dissection of how race thinking works, cognitive science has much to say here; as does, in a very different direction, analysis of the US Constitution from the perch afforded by critical legal studies. This, precisely, is the swerve at which the pronounced two-dimensionality of Escher’s counterpoised wrists, in his “Drawing Hands,” attains the density, detail, and even hairiness of the fingers and knuckles. This is the point at which the systemic scope of such crucial yet exasperating problems takes off from the essentials of identity politics, only to swing back when the investigation has exhausted itself. The fluidity of the strange loop pivoting on identity politics brings those who cope with imponderable problems of equity and fairness to that turning point where they can begin to imagine something of greater tolerance and amplitude. It brings John McWhorter to

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where he shrinks in horror at the reduction of his two daughters, so present to him in their full uniqueness, to points in a calculus of diversity. It brings Jay Caspian Kang to where he realizes that something is still amiss in the diversity of Bowdoin College even where, in recent visits, he’s uplifted by a discernible increase in the campus presence of Asian Americans and other long-suppressed minorities. Identity politics remains the motive, the trigger behind many of the insurmountable social conflicts and stalemates that preoccupy us. Yet persistence along the dimension-shifting and consciousnessraising path of the strange loop demonstrates, time and again, that something even greater is at stake. This is also the case with the current furor surrounding a combo-plate of cultural flash topics: what is known as “cancel culture”; the calls—for and against— “safe spaces” in schools and on campus for groups persistently targeted for aggression and intimidation; also, the sense shared by increasingly vocal students that open discussion itself has become the casualty of an environment stigmatized by intolerance and recrimination. This persistent state of affairs, coinciding with the time frame of this book, prompts an elegant recent lament from Emma Camp, currently completing her undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia: “I went to college to learn from my professors and peers. I welcomed an environment that champions diversity and rigorous disagreement. Instead, my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity. Students of all political persuasions hold back—in class discussions, in friendly conversations, on social media, from saying what we really think.” A self-avowed conservative freshman debater who shares this activity with Camp confided “that he has often ‘straight-up lied’ about his beliefs to avoid conflict. . . . When politics comes up, ‘I just kind of go into survival mode’” [Emma Camp, “I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead,” NYT, March 7, 2022]. Yet students on the left flank of the UVA political spectrum are no less stigmatized. Glacial unease confronted Camp herself when she critiqued the Indian practice of suttee in a course on feminist theory; and a close “progressive” friend experienced “‘a pile-on’ during a class discussion about sexism in media.” Ms. Camp concludes that she will be denied “the full benefits of a university education without having our ideas challenged, yet challenged in ways that allow us to grow.”



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The unstated but intractable divisiveness that increasingly defined Camp’s and her friends’ experience at UVA is a tripwire running through the heart of many a college and university. It is of major concern to administrators and faculty alike, who must, on the one hand, seek redress for insult and insensitivity long trained on campus minority groups with a crassness at times managing even to surpass itself. Yet in the name of the free and open discussion that should go hand in hand with excellent instruction and an innovative curriculum, administrators cannot go overboard in a preemptive defensiveness whose outcome is to quash controversy and debate. The catalog of recent instances of egregious abuse and intimidation on campus, motivating the call for such measures as “safe spaces”— even when this sensibility is then derided as “wokism”—is vivid. It surely includes the controversy ignited at Yale in 2015 by a residential college dean’s laxness toward students’ donning offensive costumes, including blackface, at residential hall Halloween parties. It includes the confrontation with security officers that Lolade Siyonbola, a graduate student at the same university, had to endure in May 2018, when she was discovered asleep late at night in a dormitory common room by a white student, who couldn’t quite fathom her being there. In this same time frame, as reported by Tariro Mzezewa in the New York Times, “Thomas Kanewakeron Gray and Lloyd Skanahwati Gray, Native American brothers who drove seven hours to tour Colorado State University, had their visit cut short after a parent on the tour called 911. She told the dispatcher that the two teenagers were ‘creepy’ and ‘they stand out’” [“Napping While Black (and Other Transgressions),” NYT, May 10, 2018]. Mzezewa goes on in this article to relate a long string of race-grounded insults that she was forced to endure simply to complete her undergraduate studies (at a US liberal arts college in Rome) and her professional formation (Columbia Journalism). The gauntlet included being “regularly asked if I was a prostitute in broad daylight, asked how much I cost walking to class. I was pushed off a bus twice by angry old men. I was spat at. I was once locked in a taxi and propositioned by the driver. I got out only when I started to scream and hit the windows” (in Rome). And a career counselor at Columbia Journalism told her “not to bother applying to Reuters, The Washington Post or the New York Times, even for internships.” Lolade Siyonbola, the napping Yale graduate student, had already “founded the Yoruba Cultural Institute in Brooklyn” and authored “a book about African

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history and diaspora migration.” Mzezewa extrapolates a clear message from experiences such as these, including her own: “Black and brown people seem out of place to some people when they encounter them in institutions of higher learning.” In view of such gratuitous abuse, it is only natural that initiatives including safe spaces would crop up on campuses—dedicated to fostering a sense of being protected on the part of multiple campus populations, not least women, regularly subjected to intimidation, insult, and even assault. These divisive episodes register, first and most clearly, on the seismograph of identity politics. They have inspired a thoughtful literature, contributed by nationally recognized college presidents as well as by education writers. Michael Roth, long-standing president of Wesleyan University, writes from the perspective of a highly diverse academic community as he inveighs his readers, “Don’t Dismiss Safe Spaces” [NYT, August 29, 2019]. Even against a current trend of sanctimonious “‘safetyism’—counterproductive coddling of students who feel fragile,” Roth militates for the availability of these protective campus enclaves. Safe spaces have been around us for a long time, he reminds us. They were an experiment initiated by the great émigré social psychologist Kurt Lewin at a family-owned textile factory in the United States, at a moment when female workers were thrust into jobs without adequate training. As the idea of safe spaces moved from industrial psychology on the manufacturing floor to the private, therapeutic setting, clinicians saw a key benefit to their patients’ being able to more easily change their minds, to “unfreeze,” if they felt safe enough to entertain criticism and alternate ideas. . . . This wasn’t overprotective safetyism—just an environment in which one could speak more freely and encounter different ideas. In the 1970s, feminist groups created their own “safe spaces” where women could come together and share accounts of life in a sexist society without fear or retaliation. In the gay liberation movement, the concept was equally important. . . . These arenas were not devoid of disagreement, but they were safe enough for the development of a political movement without interference by dominant or hostile groups. In his journalistic opinion pieces, Roth reveals himself as an educator unambiguously supportive of his students’ capability—in



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all constituencies—to fully realize their identities as well as their talents as they negotiate higher education’s upward ladder. “Calling for such spaces is to call for schools to create a basic sense of inclusion and respect that enables all students to thrive.” Roth vividly recalls the sexual predation and personal abuse to which female and gay students were routinely subject during his own undergraduate years. But he does not seek to isolate this imperative toward respect and inclusion in the academic community from the fragmentation and intolerance on the rise in the wider social surround: Throughout American culture, groups are enclosing themselves in bubbles that protect them from competing points of view, even from disturbing information; this siloing of perspectives is being exacerbated by social media and economic and cultural segregation. Universities must push back against this tide; our classrooms should never be so comfortable that intellectual confrontation becomes taboo or assumptions go unchallenged because everyone’s emotional well-being is overprotected. Instead, we must promote intellectual diversity in a context in which people can feel safe enough to challenge one another. And among the natural outtakes from an excessive comfort that Roth also admonishes here, one prompting easy complacency, is the need for voices on campus—assuming they emanate from a position of bottom-line respect—that raise some hackles and instigate spirited debate. By 2015, Judith Shulevitz, an opinion writer for the New York Times, had made an early sally in the debate concerning safe spaces (and implicitly “woke” culture). Shulevitz’s contribution covered roughly the same terrain as Roth’s would, but her takeout from the thought-experiment was on the contrapuntal downbeat. Contemporary hypersensitive students were, from her POV, “In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas” [NYT, March 21, 2015]. Young people need to tough out the incommensurate ideas that they inevitably encounter in college, even when they issue from such truly traumatic events as campus rape: People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar

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ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it. They’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled. What will they do when they hear opinions they’ve learned to shrink from? Compared to Roth’s accommodating approach to spaces and programming dedicated to aroused student sensitivities, Shulevitz’s approach may sound hardscrabble. Yet her position intensifies the “good enough” parenting approach cribbed from British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott that Roth also invokes—the parent “who enables a child to flourish by letting them experience frustration and failure within the safety of the family, not by coddling or overprotecting” [“Don’t Dismiss ‘Safe Spaces’”]. Only later in 2015 will the Yale controversy concerning the lecturer who openly questioned the administration’s appeal for extreme discretion regarding Halloween apparel at campus parties erupt. Shulevitz registers her opinion at a watershed moment for the subsequent culture wars that would surround political correctness and “wokeness.” These topics, frivolous though they may seem, have exerted a tangible impact upon our electoral deliberations: they certainly did in 2016, 2018, and 2020. In her contribution, Shulevitz takes on the X-factor that prior traumatic experience introduces into the debate, whether the searing personal trauma of rape or the historical racial trauma, say, of Tulsa, 1921. Is the utterly arbitrary and debilitating aftermath of trauma an absolute? Does it alone inveigh for protective measures whose side effect may be to stifle or at very least counteract salutary controversy? Shulevitz’s intervention surely enters the fray toward the extreme of “tough love.” She worries that contemporary students are “eager to self-infantilize” and to invoke “the quasi-medicalized terminology of trauma.” Shulevits achieves a remarkably sensitive articulation in view of the hardline position she has espoused. This as she maps the overall predicament in which the strategies and counterstrategies of free speech and reasonable expectations of a protected environment have placed the university. Shulevitz summons acute theoretical as well as legal savvy as she lines up both the attenuated sensibility and systematic retrospect prompted by identity politics:



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Universities are in a double bind. They’re required by two civilrights statutes, Title VII and Title IX, to assure that campuses don’t create a “hostile environment” for women and other groups subject to harassment. However, universities are not supposed to go too far in suppressing free speech, either. If a university cancels a talk or punishes a professor and a lawsuit ensues, history has taught that the university will lose. But if officials don’t censure or don’t prevent speech that may inflict psychological damage on a member of a protected class, they risk fostering a hostile environment and prompting an investigation. As a result, students who say they feel unsafe are more likely to be heard than students who demand censorship on other grounds. In the immediate context of her intervention, Shulevitz protests an undue advantage enjoyed by students who would presume to restrict campus speech and debate on the grounds of trauma rather than, say, decency, or other moral or aesthetic criteria. But a far broader takeout from her reasoning is that identity politics, by multiple pretexts and trajectories, places the university in a “double bind” from which there is no egress. There is no way out of the double bind, but then, there is that moment in the genesis of the strange loop when the exasperating stasis dissolves into systematic expansion. Into the expansive rebooting that happens when insults, acts of intimidation, and other products of stereotypical thinking experienced in the field, along with the bureaucratic impediments to their remediation, give way, even temporarily, to a crucial “secondorder” deliberation. It’s in the often-unanticipated moments of creative synthesis, episodes of “autopoiesis”—when the system renders what current societal or global transactions are most authentically about, that the strange loop of identity politics comes around. Cultural studies people begin to inquire, open-endedly, how race categories are generated and what they are all about, what steps their thinking entails. Cognitive scientists begin to ask when and under what conditions the affect of defamiliarization or alarm triggered by race categories or tribal boundaries is set off. Philosophers begin to inquire into the very base concepts of otherness: they pull out the entire baggage, especially the conceptual sub-particles, on which ideologies of sameness and otherness, belonging and exclusion, are grounded. (Emmanuel Levinas, working with core Judaic texts

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and with Martin Buber, contributed a lot of foundational work on this score in the 1960s and 1970s.) Cutting-edge work on the frontiers of multiculturalism and social pluralism still owes much to him. Systems theorists, as Niklas Luhmann did, inquire into the mechanism of selection by which a host of social negotiations, whether by governmental agencies or randomly, on the street, get decided. Sharing Luhmann’s impulse, critical race theorists grow exasperated at empirical explanations of specific instances of discrimination, disenfranchisement, and marginalization and they begin to inquire, with historical fact as well as social-scientific research on their side: they direct their inquest toward the how and the why it is that racism is literally installed, embedded into US economics, politics, urban planning, and healthcare. This bias is so endemic that it transpires at the systematic level. As it trickles down the hierarchy from the Supreme Court and federal law into state government, the very apprehension that white supremacy was installed within our foundational documents and institutions from the outset becomes a political bombshell. On its own, this thinking becomes a public menace from which the populace must be insulated at all costs. Our most conservative states currently, Texas and Florida prominent among them, enact laws that will stifle even the mention of critical race theory and that will expunge, from school curricula and libraries, those artifacts showcasing the tangible historical instances of white supremacy, the unique US brand of xenophobia, and equally pervasive homophobia as they impact on the ground. We have regressed to an age of book burnings. Thinking at the systematic horizons of society and culture has become as controversial as the objectionable material, in its presumed sensationalism or pornography. An indispensable recent contribution to this deliberation is Elie Mystal’s Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution. Under the current suppression of, of all things, a theory! Allow Me to Retort joins a rapidly multiplying list of banned books. Who said that such “boutique” questions as literacy, mediation, and intellectual work at the upper, cognitive level of processing were not urgent, indeed decisive political issues? These are the questions culture arrives at one twist along the strange loop of identity politics, at one small remove from all the suffering and pain inflicted by reductive, “small-souled” gestures of thought. At a single, hard-won pace from the cruelty invariably handed out by



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FIGURE 22.1  Dismissal time, Martin King, Jr., High School and New York City High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, December 9, 2021. Photograph by the author.

the closed system. The collateral damage left behind by arbitrary, fanciful thinking, by arcane national myths, will surely include the rubble mounting up in what were once viable Ukrainian cities. The future of US democracy is being decided as well, as I write. Amid unprecedented conditions of turbulence: environmental, demographic, geopolitical and geophysical. This above all, as so many have noted, remains a cultural war.​

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January 23, 2023. I Was There

So in the end, I was there—throughout this bleak and dispiriting moment, still with no end in sight. You were there too, concurrently, step for step. Now it may be that some of the more memorable experiences and readings that I completed over this period compelled me to jot down the reminiscences filling up the present volume. And perhaps you don’t presume, as I do, that this sort of material might be of some small value to somebody else. (You will surely be the best judge of this considerable pretention.) But with this minor difference excepted, that I was the one who scratched and typed out the annotations displayed here, your being there is far more significant and crucial to you than the happenstance that you and I may have coincided in space and time. You were there too, at least as much as I was, and as you negotiate such extraordinary developments as, for example, a country far more polarized and less committed, as a composite, to certain core democratic values and aspirations we grew up with; a media universe in which we exercise less control over content and our own rapport to it than we once did; and, an environment in rampant climate change—your takeout from these transformations is far more crucial than mine. Mine having been edited and affixed to these pages for any interested soul to examine and critique. I was there. My thereness is the directory of places where I spent time and that acquired, by dint of some quality or unique experience or another, lasting symbolic meaning to me. I spent substantial stretches of lifetime in Philadelphia, where I was born, around Boston, and in Baltimore, Berlin, Buffalo, New Haven, and now, New York City. I got to travel a lot in connection to work. Brief encounters with places left some of the most vivid impressions in my personal atlas, and that playlist includes, in no particular order, the Mediterranean, Ladakh, Anatolia, Cambodia, Bangkok, Beijing, Jerusalem, and Paris. One of the most traumatic transformations wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, with its lockdowns and overall constraint on

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major travel, was the transformation of places experienced earlier as physical settings, to which some ongoing access might still be imputed, into points on a virtual or cognitive map. This is an overwrought way of stating that the pandemic made us all place and settings deprived. Your thereness is at least as formative and definitive of you as mine is of me. Your personal atlas is as telling, resonant, and sacred as mine. It remains to be seen what will become of these reference points after the pandemic. Will the persistent places on our personal symbolic maps be restored as active settings for sojourn and exploration? Or are these transformative locations now bookmarks in a geography that has become “remote, serene, and inaccessible”? Just to have observed, intuited, been there, wherever that might have been. And to have been compelled to pass the wrenching surprises discovered at every turn down the line. By an obligation explicitly spelled out nowhere, its imperative installed in the momentary clearings that happen in thinking itself. The ongoing annotation is compulsive in the extreme. Summoning it forth demands detachment bordering on alienation. Obscurity is a best friend. No moral imperative motivates the compulsive relay of the endemic surprise down the chain of communication in the utterly questionable Morse Code of words. This impulse is surely what drove old Walter Benjamin. And it is also what left him stranded on the shoals of childhood. His precocity was no way at odds with his baroque thinking and phrasing. Benjamin’s youthful contributions are already lit up by a sophistication only recharging itself each time a project crystallizes, a new platform emerges amid the forest of books. Acute sensibility is what drove Benjamin, one nuanced by relentless, often random attentiveness. He held history at arm’s length. The personal consequences of this detachment would prove fatal. Benjamin had no purchase whatsoever in the newsroom; he was destined for the feuilleton. While Benjamin held history at a remove, history responded in kind by overlooking him, almost until it was too late. Yet, even with his tenuous grip on the historical moment and its expression in the event, Benjamin was still there. He witnessed his bellyful. Bern, Marseille, Naples, Riga, Moscow, Svendborg. Relics on his personal place-altar. Our greatest natural resource and unsolicited gift is the barrage of feedback constantly issuing from our peers, semblables, and



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fellow citizens as we go about the routine of living. As we negotiate the thoroughfare of aspiration, domesticity, and desire. This data, while we remain capable of taking it in, when it does not derail some critical coping mechanism we have evolved in order to survive, serves as an invaluable reality check. It is what, if anything, interrupts and deflects us in our internal Two Minutes Hates, our “grand flights,” our effusions of magnanimity, our starring roles in our imaginary adventures and melodramas. This rectifying data is offered casually, freely, by beloved family, longtime friends, as well as by strangers in the street. Again, in a fleeting glance, a downcast eye, an offhand remark. The discordant signal appearing in a flash—freely offered by a fellow, cohabiting whichever bubble where we happen to find (or lose) ourselves. Casually forthcoming with no strings attached—it sits in the jewelry box of the authentic gifts. If we’re lucky, and attentive enough, this message just might spare us an error, maybe an egregious one. It might save us from the nonrefundable, knee-jerk mistake. That is, if we’ve reserved enough energy and resilience to take it in. In these instantaneous flashes of a reality hitherto inaccessible, whatever the reason, reside the seeds of an ethics rooted in attentiveness. The attentiveness tutored as well by hours devoted to a single canvas, listening to a tune endlessly, to parsing one sonnet countless times, or re-viewing a film until its hidden motifs and cinematic gestures surrender themselves. To receive these messages issuing from the daily “world of animals and humans.” To take them in, accept them, in the fullest sense. Managing, even with the resignation to chance and our own capacity for stupidity to keep the self-system open, responsive. There are so many incentives, in an age of endless war, astounding regression in world affairs as well as in the political arena, and constant bad news from the environment to shut down the self, to batten down the hatches, circle all the wagons. The only thing ever at stake in this vast galaxy of interactions, the momentary as well as the momentous, is who comes out with the last word. When you have cleared the immediate obligation, do what you can to volley the final word to the other side of the net, to your multiple Others.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It may well be the fate of every book to arrive dated, affixed to a specific timeline, one also indicating the endpoint to its continuous coverage or accounting. And every book may be situated on the fringe or frontier to a very particular conflation of networks. In the case of a retrospective such as this one, which would aim at assembling a constellation, or composite photograph, of US culture during the turbulent years 2015–22, the resulting commentary is inevitably the intersection between several intertwined networks: of interpretation and cognitive processing; of reading, books, and the largely contingent reverberations that texts detonate among and between themselves; and, of long-standing interpersonal rapports and affiliations: collegial, friendly, and familial. No book at a complete remove from these interactive affiliations could ever coax itself into being. As an outgrowth of collegial partnerships, friendships, and familial nurturing, The Great Dismissal has been particularly fortunate. As a stylistic experiment attempting to cut some needed slack for the conventional academic study, early segments of The Great Dismissal appeared in a curated weblog called Feedback (www​ .openhumanitiespress​.org​/feedback). This was under the auspices of the Open Humanities Press—from its inception, a powerhouse among the online book and journal publishers in the Humanities. Feedback not only provided a theory-driven electronic clipboard for critique on literature, the media, ecology, gender, politics, and related topics. It offered a “safe space” for writers of different stripes to negotiate the at-times daunting transition from conventional print-medium academic prose into its online journalistic equivalent. From the outset, in 2013, Feedback took a disproportionate share of its contemporary purview, idiom, and interests from Prof. Jason Groves, with whom I cofounded it. With inexhaustible intellectual, logistical, and personal generosity, Prof. Sigi Jöttkandt and David

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Ottina of Open Humanities Press furnished the encouragement and support of every dimension that got Feedback off the ground and that sustained it. If The Great Dismissal can claim anything of “real time” engagement and interactivity, this is owing to Open Humanities Press’s radical democracy and innovation. Two long-standing projects have played a disproportionate role in keeping me engaged and thinking over a period that saw the end of my years in the classroom. One of these, the “Meaning Systems” series at Fordham University Press, has kept me in contact with Bruce Clarke, my longtime guide and partner-in-crime in the deliberations of systems theory. Under the impetus of his openended devotion to this field, Clarke has taken on every role requisite to its enhanced reception, dissemination, and comprehensibility. In addition to contributing his own luminous books and articles, these have included editing works and correspondence by the field’s seminal figures (e.g., Heinz von Foerster, Lynn Margulis, and James Lovelock), and also, organizing landmark meetings and conferences. “Meaning Systems” has also enabled me to continue a long-standing editorial rapport that began as I was blessed by Helen Tartar’s vision and collaboration, first at Stanford University Press and then at Fordham; persisting in the generous and informed support that Clarke and I receive for our initiatives from Thomas C. Lay, current Fordham Humanities Editor and Helen’s successor. This book has also benefited critically from a spate of projects emanating from the American Book Review, its editor, Jeffrey DiLeo, and Christian Moraru, his close collaborator, with whom he’s generated a treasure hoard of important theoretical overviews and reference works, several from Bloomsbury. I’m particularly grateful to Prof. Moraru for introducing me to the stunning conflation of critical theory, philosophy, linguistics, and literary invention as they coalesce in Romanian Comparative Literature as presided over by Prof. Mircea Martin of Bucharest—there and in other strongholds, including Cluj, Brasov, and Sibiu. Ongoing intellectual stimulation, input and challenge emanating from close colleagues and influences over the years, has proven indispensable: Profs. Günter Blamberger, Dietrich Boschung, Jonathan Culler, Cynthia Chase, Rudiger Campe, Peter Eisenman, Dirk Baeker, Michael Levine, Peter Fenves, Hannan Hever, Martha Helfer, Nicola Behrmann, Nicholas Rennie, Dominik Zechner, Susan Bernstein, Avital Ronell, Carla Locatelli, Eva Mayer, Eran

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

283

Schaerf, John Mackay, Jean-Jacques Poucel, Richard Deming, MingQian Ma, Tom Cohen, Mike Hill, Gary Stonum, Billy Galperin, Paul North, Kirk Wetters, Jim Bunn, Jim and Barbara Bono, Claire Kahane, Jan Söffner, Martin Roussel, and Julia Weber. While a certain skepticism toward tribalism and the electronic bubbles in which vast populations have sequestered themselves may persist throughout The Great Dismissal, such depredations as QAnon, the Big Lie, and an increasingly polarized populace have done nothing to blunt the redemptive thrill of friendship. Here I have been particularly blessed. Collectively, by the virtual Sunday conversations of the Brandeis group as convened by supersociologist Samuel Heilman; by the monthly literary deliberations of First Tuesdays, held now in person, if possible, at a coffeehouse in Jackson Heights. This has become my literary family. Our collective play in the sandbox of language has been transformative: the canny craft evinced every month by the “regulars” and the invariably surprising centos fashioned from our work by our convener and guide, Richard Jeffrey Newman. Also on a poetic note: my ongoing lifetime (and now rearguard) efforts to reserve certain formulations for poetic notation and display have been presided over, with endlessly generous diligence, patience, and creativity, by Andrea Strudensky of CEGEP, Montreal. Her gracious tutelage and invariably spot-on advice are particularly gratifying in reversing our roles from when she was a PhD candidate in poetics at Buffalo. Neither time nor current events have depleted the joy of ongoing friendship: Richard Netsky, Bill Marder, Jeff Newman, David Gerstel, Michael and Pam Rosenthal, Jim Margolis, Abby Robinson, Orly Lubin, Bronia Karst, Trey Dedecker, Tom and Martha Hyde, Susan Lee, Dr. Emily, Andy Ross, Arthur Chernoff, Ron and Amy Kronish, Everett Fox, Archie Ruberg, David Soloff, Nelson Obus, Judith Sachs, and Brooke Nesset. It means everything to know you’re out there. I was directed to Tobin Smith’s Foxocracy by Allan Goroll, to Adam Serwer’s The Cruelty Is the Point by Michael and Pam Rosenthal, and to the writings of Jakob von Uexküll by Philip Campanile. More impressive than anything I’ve written has been the Who’s Who of academic editors and production teams with whom I’ve had the remarkable fortune to collaborate. These have not

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only included the above-mentioned Helen Tartar, who imbued a theoretical sensibility as far-reaching as her aesthetics of book production but also, during their years at Johns Hopkins University Press, the legendary William Sisler of Harvard and Eric Halpern, later of UPenn Press. At SUNY Press, with James Peltz and, before him, with Carola Sautter, I enjoyed a multifaceted involvement in the publishing process. I had the unforgettable pleasure of working on Glyph 7 with Lindsay Waters when he was still at Minnesota. and on edited volumes with William Germano when he was at Routledge. My first venture at Bloomsbury was my 2014 Playful Intelligence. It was an all-London affair, presided over with flair by philosophy editor Liza Thompson. And this experience has, if anything, only been exceeded by the ensemble that has made The Great Dismissal possible: the redoubtable Haaris Naqvi at the New York editorial office, whose suggestions opened unforeseen dimensions. And, the London production team, headed by Ziba Talkhani and Vishnu Prasad, streamlined production by accessing the full gamut of digital capabilities. Carol Jacobs remains, as ever, a luminous, inspirational, “bigsouled” life partner, whose early guidance led me not only to Derrida but also, a bit later, to Benjamin and the Frankfurt School. This crucial impetus still animates much of my ongoing work. The family we were able to start together—our daughters and grandsons—remains an inexhaustible, multidimensional blessing. As is the ongoing branch of the family I was born into. Segment 6, “Requiem to Disinterest,” initially appeared in Playing with Reality: Denying, Manipulating, Converting, and Enhancing What Is There,” ed. Sidney Homan, (London and New York: Routledge, 2022). I remain most grateful to the editor and publisher.

Major Abbreviations NYR: NYT: WP:

The New York Review of Books New York Times Washington Post

INDEX

Abbott, Greg  257, 259–60 “Abrahamic” religions  27, 143, 145, 150–1, 242 Abrams, Stacey  52 Abshire, David  67 ACT UP  255 Adams, Erica  258–9 Aesop  164, 241 affirmative action  214–18 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)  6, 34, 41, 43, 67, 70–2, 83, 220 Ailes, Roger  68, 108 Alexander, Gerard  101 Alito, Samuel A.  240–1 Althusser, Louis  124–5 Ananat, Elizabeth  239 Anschutz, Philip  67 anti-abortion, see Roe v. Wade Anti-Defamation League  198, 255 anti-elitism  18, 115 anti-immigration, see xenophobia anti-intellectualism  18, 27, 62, 80–2, 99–100, 103, 213, 219 anti-regulation  43, 63–4, 67, 181–2, 234 anti-Semitism  192–3, 196–9 anti-vaxxers  6, 62, 225 apocalyptic thinking  5, 8, 81, 109–10 Applebaum, Binyamin  229 Arbery, Ahmaud  194 attack ads  43, 58, 75–6, 107–9, 127, 233

autopoiesis  50, 80, 267 Axelrod, David  135 Babbage, Charles  162 Bach, Johann Sebastian  162, 251 backlash  193, 195, 210 Balzac, Honoré de  220 Bannon, Steve  142–3, 150 Barbaro, Michael  150 Barr, William  169 Barrett, Amy Coney  119–20, 127, 129, 235 Barthes, Roland  115 Bates, Norman  237 Bateson, Gregory  92 Bateson, Regina Anne  212 Baudelaire, Charles  52, 97 Bee, Samantha  102 Benjamin, Walter  13, 79, 97, 133, 191, 203, 272 Bennett, Dalton  225 Bernstein, Charles  76 Bezos, Jeff  228, 231 Biden, Dr. Jill  6 Biden, Hunter  36 Biden, Joe  3, 5, 9–12, 36, 60, 117–20, 128–9, 131, 135–6, 248 Big Lie  9, 36, 73, 248 Birx, Deborah, MD  34 Black Lives Matter  196, 227, 255 Blackburn, Marsha  241 Blake, Aaron  118–19, 127–8, 241

286 INDEX

Bloom, Allen  68 Bloomberg, Michael  45, 228 Blow, Charles M.  35, 82–4, 100, 169 Boebert, Lauren  126, 169 Bouie, Jamelle  117 Bradley Family  66–7, 72 Brecht, Bertolt  220 Brin, Sergey  181 Brock, David  68 Bruni, Frank  100, 102–3, 169 bubbles, “bubbling”  19, 27, 33, 57, 81, 113, 158–60, 163–6, 169–70, 205, 210, 265, 273 Buber, Martin  268 Buckley, William F., Jr.  68 Buffett, Warren  228, 232 Bush, George W.  36, 85, 122, 225 Cai, Weiyi  241 Camp, Emma  262–3 Carroll, Lewis  251 Casey, William  67 Charlemagne  91 checks and balances  33, 37, 47, 219, 234 Childs, John  67 Citizens United  43, 58, 65, 70–1, 75, 229, 233 climate change  5, 18, 47, 68, 70, 112, 165–6, 209, 260 Clinton, Bill  71 Clinton, Hilary  82, 101 Cohen, Michael  169 Cohen, Steven A.  67 Cohn, Nate  117 Collins, Gail  83, 234, 236–7 Collins, Susan  127–8 Comey, James  80 Como, Perry  245 Conrad, Joseph  74 conspiracy theories  34, 69, 107, 160, 166–7, 222, 226

Continetti, Matthew  68 Cooper, Helene  118 Cooper, Laura  121, 128 Coors family  66 Cotton, Tom  18 Covid-19  10, 19, 29, 33–4, 55, 69, 80, 97–8, 112, 118, 151–2, 156–7, 161, 170, 180, 198, 202–3, 209, 220, 231, 271–2 Crane, Ed  67 Crick, Francis  252 critical race theory  49, 261, 268 Cronkite, Walter  166 Crosier, Brett  80 cruelty  83, 189–91, 195–6, 206, 232, 268 Cruz, Ted  18, 126–7 culture wars  248, 255, 259, 266, 269 Cuomo, Andrew  15, 20–1 cybernetics  12, 19, 47, 55, 80, 98, 110–11, 126, 162–7, 179– 80, 184, 215, 221, 249–55, 261–2 dark money  41, 47, 58, 62–3, 65–6, 68–9, 74–5, 77, 101, 105, 113, 184, 232, 234–5 “data extraction”  107, 175–6, 178–84 DeBonis, Mike  127 deconstruction  7, 52–3, 55, 77, 142–6, 149–50, 169–70, 184, 253 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix  10, 39–42, 45, 53, 90, 202 De Man, Paul  49, 196 De Niro, Robert  102 Derrida, Jacques  49–57, 61, 64, 75–6, 142–6, 149, 175, 196, 253 De Santis, Ron  18 De Vos Family  67

INDEX

Dick, Philip K.  103 Dickens, Charles  20, 220, 222–5 Dickson, Clarence  243 disinterest  29–33, 35, 37, 47, 56, 62, 77, 104, 224–5, 234, 261 Disney, Walt  121 diversity  97, 166, 193, 197, 199, 215–16, 218, 249, 262, 265, 268 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor  155 D’Souza, Dinesh  68 double contingency  203–6 Douglass, Frederick  248 Douthat, Ross  176 Dowd, Maureen  83, 135, 169 Dreiser, Theodore  220 Du Bois, W. E. B.  248 due process  32, 68 Duke, David  194 Edmondson, Catie  129 Edsall, Thomas B.  13–14, 126, 211–14, 239–40 Einsiger, Jesse  228 Ellender, Philip  68 entertainment politics  107, 109, 122–8, 134–5 Ernsthausen, Jeff  228 Escher, M. C.  162, 252, 254, 261 Esper, Mark  118 Farrakhan, Louis  196, 198–9 fascism  122, 192–3 Fauci, Anthony  80, 202 Feulner, Edwin, Jr.  67–8 filibuster  129 Fink, Richard  67 Fischer, Antony  67 Floyd, George  194 Flynn, Michael  169 Foner, Eric  194 Ford, Henry  179 Fox News  9, 58–60, 79, 83, 105– 15, 123, 179, 184, 195, 204

287

Franklin, Aretha  169 Franklin, Rosalind  252 Freud, Sigmund  31, 40, 53, 147, 167, 210, 225, 236–8 Friedman, Thomas  82 Friedman, Vanessa  131–2 functional paralysis  63, 81, 112, 125, 129, 209, 224–5, 232 Gaetz, Matt  127 Gaffney, Frank Jr.  150 Garland, Merrick  234 Gates, Bill and Melinda  44–5, 230–1 Genet, Jean  52 George, Robert  68 gerrymandering  43, 247–8 Geshe La  146–8 Ghoriashi, Azeen  258 Gidron, Noam  13 Gillespi, Ed  67 Giridharadas, Anand  232 Giuliani, Rudy  169, 222 Glueck, Katie  119 Gödel numbers  254 Goldberg, Michelle  83–4, 102 Goldfarb, Michael  68 Goldsmith, Jack  36 Goldwater, Barry  41 Goodman, J. David  258–60 Gore, Al  122 Gosar, Paul  128 Graeber, David  6–8 Graham, Lindsey  127 Grant, Madison  192–3 Gray, Lloyd Skanahwati  263 Gray, Thomas Kanewakeron  263 Green, Hannah (Greenberg, Joanna)  167 Greene, Marjorie Taylor  126, 169, 224 Greenhouse, Linda  244 Griffin, Ken  67 Gruber, Jonathan  239

288 INDEX

gun rights  34, 47, 69, 81, 205, 211, 226–8, 250 Gutenberg, Johannes  179 Haberman, Maggie  118–19 “habituation”  84, 128, 184 Hall, Peter  13 Hansen, James  5 Hauslohner, Abigail  150 Hawley, Josh  18, 126, 227 Hayek, Friedrich  61 Hayles, N. Katherine  12 Healey, Patrick  150 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm  30, 52, 193 Heidegger, Martin  140, 146 Helderman, Rosalind S.  222 Hill, Fiona  80 Hitchcock, Alfred  210 Hitler, Adolph  192 Hofstadter, Douglas R.  12, 52, 126, 162–5, 250–5, 261 Hofstadter, Richard  109 Huntington, Samuel P.  68, 151 Hurston, Zora Neale  220 identity politics  131, 206, 249–50, 255–62, 264, 266–8 Inglehart, Ronald  14 Jacobs, Carol  19, 49, 121 January 6, 2021  36, 62, 109, 114, 128, 205, 225, 248 Johnson, Andrew  193–4 Johnston, J. Bennett  194 Johnston, Taylor  241 Jones, Alex  34 Jordan, Jim  126 journalism  32, 34–5, 37, 41, 48, 56–7, 62, 82–5, 104, 106, 108, 168, 183, 199, 228, 241 Joyce, James  51 Joyce, Michael  67

Kafka, Franz  51, 93, 126, 202–3, 245 Kang, Jay Caspian  214, 216–18, 262 Kanno-Youngs, Zolan  119 Kant, Immanuel  28–32, 53, 238 Kartier, Kíér Laprí  257 Kavanagh, Brett  127 kayfabe  60, 106, 114, 121 Kaynes, John Maynard  61 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald  120 Kennedy, John Neeley  18 Kernberg, Otto  60, 89, 167–9 Kiel, Paul  228 Kim Jong Un  114–15 Koch brothers  41–2, 44, 61–2, 64–72, 74–5 Kohut, Heinz  167 Kondo, Marie  19 Kraken legal suits  222, 226 Kristof, Nicolas  99–103 Kristol, Bill  68 Krugman, Paul  229–30 Krulder, Joe  80 Lacan, Jacques  60, 208 Langone, Ken  67 Larsen, Nella  220 Lasch, Christopher  33 Lautréamont, Comte de  51 “learned helplessness”  186, 191 Lee, Dr. Richard V.  146–8 Lee, Neil  211 Lee, Robert E  192 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm  162 Leonhardt, David  35, 100–2 Levinas, Emmanuel  267–8 Levine, Phillip  239 Levine Rachel Adm.  258 Lewin, Kurt  264 libertarian ideology  18, 61–5, 68–9, 72–3, 81, 103, 107 Lipp, Cornelius  211

INDEX

Liptak, Adam  235, 240 Lipton, Eric  151 literacy  11–12, 14, 80, 103–4, 112–14, 142 Lott, John R., Jr.  68 Lovelock, James  165 Luhmann, Niklas  80, 203–6, 213, 268 McCaffery, Edward  230 McCain, John  169 McCann, Allison  241 McCarthy, Kevin  126 McCloskey, Mark and Patricia  227–8 McConnell, Mitch  33, 169, 241, 247 McKibben, Bill  5 McKinley, William  193 McLuhan, Marshall  126, 182, 278 McMillan Cottom, Tressie  131–4 McWhorter, John  214–16, 218, 261 Mallarmé, Stephane  51, 53 Mallory, Tamika  198–9 Manafort, Paul  169 Manchin, Joe  129–30, 136 Mansfield, Harvey C.  68 Marcuse, Herbert  33 Margulis, Lynn  165, 171 Martin, Trayvon  194 Marx, Karl  103 Mattis, James  37, 80 Maturana, Humberto and Varela, Francisco  50, 80 Mayer, Jane  11, 39–45, 48, 57– 8, 61–77, 105, 107, 129–30, 177, 181, 186, 189, 191, 194, 235–6, 259 Mears, Ashley  132 Meese, Edwin III  67–8 Mellor, William III  67 Melville, Herman  19, 63

289

Mercer, Robert  67, 71 #MeToo  189, 191, 255 “Metro”/”Retro” America  59, 106–7, 198, 204, 214 Milbank, Dana  19, 225–6 Miller, Alice  167 Miller, Stephen  192 misinformation  55–6, 83, 181, 209, 260 modernity  73, 133, 236–7, 242, 244 Modley, Thomas  80 Montgomery, David  35–6 Morris, Amanda  258 Mueller Report  36–7, 39 Murkowski, Lisa  127–8 Musk, Elon  43, 228, 231 Mystal, Elie  268 Mzezewa, Tariro  263–4 Nagourney, Adam  119 narcissism  10, 27, 32–3, 47–8, 100, 147, 167–9, 225 nationalism  63, 197 nativism  47, 63, 78, 191–3, 206, 216 Nielson, Kirstjen  84 Nietzsche, Friedrich  79 Noble, Sean  67, 70–1 Norris, Frank  220 Norris, Pippa  14 Obama, Barack  33–4, 41, 65, 69–71, 99–100, 117, 120, 181, 220, 234 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria  128– 9, 133 Odets, Clifford  25 O’Keefe, William  67 oligarchs  42–4, 58, 63, 68, 70, 74, 76, 82–3, 91, 103, 130, 203, 230–3 Olin Family  44, 66–7, 69

290 INDEX

Orwell, George  114 O’Toole, Fintan  9–12 Page, Larry  181 Parker, Linda V.  226 Parson, Mike  227 Paul, Rand  126 Paxton, Ken  257, 259–60 Paybarah, Azi  227 Pelosi, Nancy  132 philanthropy  44, 48, 65, 74, 77, 230–3 Phillips, Tim  67 philosophy  28–30, 39–41, 45, 49–51, 64, 76, 106, 140, 142–4, 158–9, 253, 257, 267 Picketty, Thomas  129 Plato  53 pluralism  97, 166, 193, 197, 199, 215–16, 218, 249, 262, 265, 268 Poe, Edgar Allan  51–2, 155, 203 Ponge, Francis  51 Pope, James Arthur  67 Powell, Lewis  67 Powell, Sidney  169, 222, 226 Powers, Richard  165 Pratt, Ben  74 professionalization  81, 160 pro sports  17–18, 81, 109, 112, 123–5, 136 Q-Anon  60, 69, 126, 224 Q-Anon shaman  224 racism  13, 47, 57, 59, 63, 83, 97–8, 102, 109, 141, 145, 191–4, 198–200, 207, 218, 248, 253, 256, 261–4, 266–8 Reconstruction  191, 193 REDMAP  63, 68, 70 religion  7, 27–8, 97–8, 103, 109–10, 124, 160, 224, 242, 260

“Retro”/’Metro” America, see “Metro”/”Retro” America Rich, Frank  85 Rich, Howard  67 Robertson, Corbin  67 Robertson, Pat  120 Rodríguez-Pose, Andrés  211–13 Roe v. Wade  84, 97, 119, 211, 233–44, 248, 255 Rogers, Katie  119 Rosenberg, Matthew  151 Roth, Michael  264–6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  53 Rubin, Jennifer  135–6 Rubio, Marco  126 Ruby, George  194 rule of law  60, 69, 186 Ryan, Paul  67, 72 safe spaces  264–6 Sagan, Dorion  171 Sanders, Bernie  92, 97 Santelli, Rick  65 Santos, Fernanda  243–4 Satyanath, Shanker  211 Saunders, Sara Huckabee  84, 169 Scaife, Richard Mellon  66 Schmitt, Erik  118 Schoenfeld Walker, Amy  241 Schwartzman, Steven  67 science  5, 8, 18–19, 29–30, 32, 34–5, 55, 62, 68, 79–80, 104, 107, 165–6, 219, 260 Senior, Jennifer  169 Serwer, Adam  57, 59, 63–4, 177, 189–200, 248, 253 Sessions, Jeff  169 Sévigny, Madame de  120 Shakespeare, William  51, 190 Shane, Scott  151 Sharp, Theresa  73 Sharpton, Al  198

INDEX

Shear, Michael D.  119 Shulevits, Judith  265–7 Silliman, Ron  76 Sinema, Krysten  129–34, 136 Singer, Paul  67 Siyonbola, Lolade  263–4 slavery  124, 190, 206, 253, 261 smear campaigns  71 Smedley, Agnes  220 Smith, Buffalo Bob  121–2 Smith, Tobin  57–60, 105–15, 184, 189, 191, 195, 204, 214, 233, 249 social class  2, 13–14, 41–2, 66–8, 81–3, 103–4, 109, 127, 132–3, 141, 153, 179, 199, 205–6, 210–46 social media  101, 160, 167, 169, 182, 212–13, 226 Soros, George  228 Spencer, Richard  84 Spiegelman, Martin  186 Staiger, Douglas  239 Stephens, Alexander  193 Stephens, Bret  100, 234 Sterne, Laurence  203 Stevens, Matt  117 Stevenson, Adlai  120 Stone, Roger  169, 224–5 “Stop the Steal”  9, 60, 114 strange loops  32, 53, 79, 143, 162, 165, 246, 250–5, 261–2, 267–8 surveillance capitalism  59, 68, 175, 178–87 Sussman, Henry  11–12, 31, 250 Swaine, John  225 Tajfel, Henri  110 Taplin, Robert Brent  109 tax evasion  44, 64, 71, 73–4, 81, 129, 211, 228–34 Taylor, Breonna  194

291

Tea Party  48, 62, 65, 72 Teufel, Fritz  256 Thompson, Stuart A.  35 Till, Emmett  194 Tillerson, Rex  37, 80 Tolstoy, Lev  62 tribalism  47, 106, 109–10, 112–15, 190, 200, 210, 249, 267 Troianovsky, Anton  245 Trump, Donald  6, 9–11, 13–14, 27, 30, 32–7, 39, 44–5, 55–6, 59, 62, 68, 75, 79–80, 82–5, 99–103, 106–7, 114–15, 117, 120–3, 126–8, 150–1, 169–70, 189, 195–8, 204, 212, 219, 224–5, 228 Trump rallies  122–5, 204 Turing, Alan  162 TV  11–12, 81, 107–9, 120–4, 166, 176, 190, 236 Uexküll, Jakob von  155–60, 170 “Unite the Right”  18, 36, 60, 121, 192, 194–5 U.S. Supreme Court  9, 58, 63, 65, 67, 70, 83, 112, 119, 124, 127, 150, 217, 226, 233–44, 248, 260, 268 Valéry, Paul  51 Vindman, Alexander S.  37, 80 Vogt, Hans-Joachim  211 Voightländer, Nico  211 voter suppression  1–2, 36, 63, 73, 186, 221, 248, 250, 253, 255 Wagner, Richard  183 Walker, Scott  67, 72 Walther, Matthew  242–3 Warren, Elizabeth  45

292 INDEX

Watson, James  252 Weiner, Norbert  12 Weyrich, Paul  67 white supremacy  189–90, 192–3, 206, 268 Whitman, Walt  87 Wilde, Oscar  31 Wilden, Anthony  12, 80 Will, George  68 Wilson, Edward O.  162–3, 165 Winnicott, D. W.  209, 266 Wood, Charles D.  56 Wood, L. Lin  222, 226 Wortham, Jenna  257

xenophobia  43, 57, 63, 82–3, 191–4, 211, 253, 256, 268 Yang, Jeff  231–2 Yoho, Ted  128 Yoo, John  68 Yovanovitch, Marie  37, 80 Zappa, Frank  256 Zelensky, Volodymyr  36–7 Žižek, Slavoj  10 Zola, Émile  62, 220 Zuboff, Shoshana  57, 59–60, 68, 107, 113, 128, 175–86, 191, 221, 245–6

293

294