Zack Snyder’s 300, like the Frank Miller/Lynn Varley graphic novel on which it is based, loves fascism with a campy, bare-chested, manly love. The film about the storied Spartan stand against Persia at Thermopylae opens with a fanboy tribute to Spartan eugenic culling—Spartans threw unfit babies into a pit to die, isn’t that awesome and manly?

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The rest of 300 goes out of its way to assure you that no, really, eugenics is awesome—the villain of the piece is a grotesquely prosthetically enhanced hunchback who betrays the Spartan cause, showing that he should have been murdered as an infant because disabled people are disgusting and servile and can’t be trusted. In addition to loathing disabled people, the film also hates the Persians, who are presented as an unholy amalgamation of Black people, Arabs, and decadent homosexuality. They are a debased “Asian horde” (they literally use the phrase “Asian horde) through whom the white, upright, muscled Spartans cleave a bloody, cleansing path. The whole film is essentially a latter-day riff on the hyperbolically racist scene in Birth of a Nation in which one white man beats the crap out of an endless stream of inferior, hapless Black antagonists until at last one member of the duplicitous, inferior mob shoots him in the back.

300‘s racism, its hatred of the disabled, its militarism, its fascination with homoerotic bonding and its hatred of homosexuals—all of this add up to a fascist fever dream. It even includes a stabbed-in-the-back narrative; a greedy politician in the pay of Persia teams up with the inbred, diseased Spartan priests to try to undermine the nation’s will to war.

But there is one element of the story that seems, at first, to push against one of fascism’s most treasured ideologies. 300 is anti-imperialist.

Hitler believed Germany had a messianic destiny of expansion; he wanted to kill and deport millions of Poles and Slavs so the Germanic peoples could spread east into the newly denuded territory. He was inspired in part by America’s history of native displacement and genocide, which he saw as an inspirational blueprint. Hitler loves war, conquest, and subjugating others.

300, in contrast, is resolutely anti-imperialist. The bad guy Persians are an immense, imperial aggressor. King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is portrayed as a power-mad dictator, demanding fealty and obeisance. The Spartan’s King Leonidas (the inevitable Gerard Butler) fights in the name of freedom, reason, and the self-determination of Greece. He is the nobly be-loined father of Western enlightenment and democracy, a last barrier against the “mysticisim” and tyranny of the onrushing internationalist conquerors. Xerxes invades; Leonidas defends. Conquest is bad; liberty is good. That’s not fascist. Right?

The thing is, fascism does have a place for anti-imperialism. It’s just a kind of mirror-image, topsy-turvy anti-imperialism, in which the victims and the perpetrators of imperialism are switched. Hitler believed that the Jews were determined to conquer Germany and the world; from his perspective, the German people were engaged in a valiant last stand against the oncoming, sneaky, duplicitous decadent Orientalist horde. Similarly, the proto-fascist government of the Confederacy saw the Civil War as a story of Northern aggression; the Union was trespassing onto the south’s inalienable right to hold in bondage its own imperial spoils.

Classic imperialism, in the Spanish or British mold, generally rested on missionary zeal— a belief that one’s religion and culture was manifestly superior to that of the conquered, and that the conquered therefore benefited from subjugation. Fascist imperialism is certainly built on a conviction of racial superiority. But it’s also energized by resentment. Fascists claim to be victims; they say that they have been cruelly humiliated, enslaved, and violated. They unleash violence against their inferiors not to save infidel souls, but to punish fiendish iniquities.

300 portrays a scrappy Western democracy invaded and besieged by a massive Orientalist army with vastly superior firepower and armament. In doing so, it neatly reverses the actual conditions of America’s then-ongoing war in Iraq, in which the United States military was bogged down in a fight against an exponentially less well-equipped insurgency. The film presents the Spartans as the enlightened ancestors of the American polity. But it could just as easily see us as the heirs of Xerxes, the bloated would-be world ruler, whose decadent lust for power leads to his humiliation in the sands of a should-be insignificant backwater.

Alas, the film is not, and is not meant to be, a rebuke of American imperialism. On the contrary, the vision of noble enlightened white heroes besieged by tyrannical, disgusting, irrational vaguely Arabic/Islamic others is clearly meant as an endorsement of US militarism, and of US invasion. Liberty is under existential threat. Those who urge peace are diseased, lascivious, mystics or slimy politicians in the pay of the enemy. The only true path is the road of blood. The more non-white people who fall to the sword, the more the cause of liberty and truth is advanced. Piles of dead become a symbol of virtue and bravery—which is how you get to Auschwitz, I suppose.

Reverse imperial stories are quite common in science-fiction and other venues. The War of the Worlds imagines Britain invaded by Martians, and compares this directly to British invasion of Tasmania. The Handmaid’s Tale puts a white woman in the position of black people enslaved by European colonizers. You could even argue that white savior stories use a similar dynamic; in A Dry White Season, the noble white South African is placed, or places himself, as an ally with the subjugated black Africans. In doing so, he too becomes the target of racism and of the colonizer’s vengeance.

Reversing the position of colonized and colonizer like this is often done consciously as a way to create sympathy or solidarity with the oppressed. Viewers—generally conceptualized as white—are asked to put themselves in the place of those who are oppressed. It’s an anti-fascist tactic. If you empathize with the marginalized, the thinking goes, then you will be moved to dismantle oppression.

Sometimes though, 300 suggests, empathizing with the marginalized, or putting yourself in their position, can just be another excuse for fascist violence. Fascist ideology is built upon a fictional history of oppression. In the past, fascism tells its adherents, we were betrayed, conquered, ground in the dust. And because of this, we now have the duty to kill the evildoers in the name of revenge and righteousness. Anti-imperialism is perfectly consonant with fascism—as long as you always see yourself as Leonidas, and never as Xerxes.

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This first ran on Splice Today. It seemed like a good time to reprint it, given our current imperial war.

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And here’s what I published this week.

Politics

Democracy requires religious pluralism. (Revealer)

Trump’s colonialist Venezuelan fever dream. (Public Notice)

Whataboutism in defense of genocide is bad. (EIH)

Trump’s 9/11 lies are a moral failure, not a cognitive one. (EIH)

Cultural criticism

Refusing to make the Holocaust present in Shoah. (EIH)

Nightmare Alley sells you a dream. (Splice Today)

Revocation makes technical death metal to destroy our tech overlords. (EIH)

Why you shouldn’t think for yourself. (EIH)

Cheers: do your really want to go where people are all the same? (EIH)

Poetry

Politics and bees. (Eunoia)

Spring

after Tu Fu

In an occupied city
the bees still wander
from flower to flower.
They know no border.

The crows on branches budding
clack their fearless beaks.
The river in calm ripples
flows on and does not weep.

Spring speaks and we are silent.
I would pay bee, river, or crow
for the news of all their travels
where we no longer go.

For news of where they travel
through summer and through fall,
and of when they may return
to some other winter thaw.

Hippie inspiration. (Five Fleas)

A Poem Beginning With A Line By Bob Kaufman

In remembrance of certain lights I have seen go out
I have decided to fall in love with my own disease,
And trade my last sick days for infinite cloud storage.

On the cusp of morning I have posted my best cat pics
While Stalin-flavored bubblegum melts in the mawkish caecum.
Thought-leaders polish the algorithm for you, my love.

Fading summer poem. (Five Fleas)

Mosquitoes

Little drops of my blood
flit around the yard.

From the archives

Track of the week

Indie Christian baroque pop outsider music.

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At the beginning of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Holocaust documentary Shoah, Szymon Srebrnik, a Polish survivor, stands on the peaceful grounds of what was once the Chełmno extermination camps and says, in bleak wonder, “No one can describe it. No one can recreate what happened here.”

Srebnik’s words serve as a kind of thesis, or statement of purpose, for the documentary (or at least for the first 150 minutes of it which I viewed.) Lanzmann spent eleven years assembling his nin- hour documentary, interviewing survivors, bystanders, and war criminals, asking careful questions about dates, times, logistics, reactions. But his goal is not really to describe or recreate the experience or the horror of the Holocaust. It is more like the opposite—to show the inability of words, or images, or imagination, to make the experience and the horror present. The documentary documents, at great length and with meticulous sadness, its own absence, which is also the absence of meaning, and of those who were killed.

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No images, no words

Shoah is composed almost entirely of interviews. There are no reenactments. But there are also no photographs from the period; no audio or period radio broadcasts; no quotations from letters or memoirs written by people at the time. This is not a Ken Burns series which tries to give you a flavor of the period or puts you in the moment. You are trapped, with Lanzmann and his interviewees, relentlessly in the aftermath; there is no going backwards. What has happened has happened and cannot be recaptured.

Instead of images from then, the visuals focus on the camps in his own now of the early 80s. The camera pans across empty fields, follows abandoned railroad tracks, gazes at quiet woods. Polish men stand and gesture to show where Jewish people disembarked, or walk Lanzmann and his translator into the former grounds, showing exactly where the border used to be. One survivor, Filip Müller, describes the Auschwitz crematoria while the camera moves through the empty but still standing building. The main impression is that the gas chamber is much smaller than you might imagine, and that there is nobody there.

The film visuals refuse to show you the past. The words are similarly alienating. Interviews are conducted in English, German, French, and Polish; almost anyone watching is going to face a language barrier at some point, and there is no voice-over translation, only subtitles. Lanzmann himself does not speak Polish, and you hear him interacting with the interpreter; her words are translated on screen, rather than the words of the Poles who are speaking, so there are substantial stretches where you are simply watching someone speak who you cannot understand, waiting for someone to tell you what they mean.

Those meanings are also contested and uncertain. Lanzmann clearly doubts the testimony of some of his sources. Did some wealthy foreign Jews shipped to Treblinka actually travel in luxury passenger cars rather than cattle cars, as some Polish informants insist? Did Poles risk their lives to give water to Jewish people on the trains? When Poles drew their fingers across their throats, signaling to Jewish peopel on the trains, were they trying to warn them of their fate or were they mocking them? Did Germans guards actually weep at the fate of those they were murdering, as Nazi guard and convicted war criminal Franz Suchomel claims?

There is no omniscient narrative voice to answer those questions; you simply have to weigh motive and evidence as best you can. The Nazis killed most witnesses, and many of those who remain have a vested interest in not telling you the whole truth about the crimes in which they were implicated. The truths the victims could tell died with them; they can not be recuperated.

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What is not there

Jacques Derrida, a French Jew, like Lanzmann, is a philosopher whose (post-Holocaust) work breaks apart the logic of representation and presence. In his inquisition into the meaning-making of writing, he argues that writing is defined by the absence of the writer and the reader from each other and themselves.

To write is to produce a mark … which my future disappearance will not in principle, hinder in its functioning… . For a writing to be a writing it must continue to ‘act’ and to be readable even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written… . The situation of the writer is, concerning the written text, basically the same as that of the reader.

Or to put it another way, writing (or film) assumes, and is built upon, the distance between writer and reader; the whole point of writing is that when you write, what you write can be read by someone who is not there. Writing communicates even when writer and reader are apart, which means it communicates also when the writer is dead.

Writing in one sense makes writer and reader present to each other; here I am, Noah Berlatsky, right now, speaking to you. But in another sense, the writing presupposes the absence of the writer; what writing says is that I, Noah Berlatsky, am not here. In writing, in film, presence is always absence; absence is present. Representation is always representation of the dead.

Holocaust Hollywood films like Schindler’s List are obsessed with bridging this gap—with overwriting absence with presence, and making the Holocaust live. That means bringing the dead to life and insisting on their ongoing existence in the world.

This is why Hollywood gentile savior Holocaust films always end with a list of the number of the saved, and an insistence that those survivals outweigh and out-mean the 6 million dead. Representation is salvation is breathing next to you; you are there in the past as the black-and-white images show you the ghetto being cleared, and you are here in the present with the survivors in full color brightness putting stones on Schindler’s memorial in Israel. The movies present themselves as an unmediated experience of presence which means, often quite explicitly, that the dead are not dead, but are risen to be with you and to thank you for saving them.

Lanzmann, quite rightly, thinks that this assertion that the dead of the Shoah are not dead is morally and aesthetically despicable. Shoah’s refusal of representation is a statement about the impossibility of describing or recreating the Holocaust. But it is also a way to honor the dead by treating their death as having moral weight. “Everything I refrained from showing in Shoah is shown in Spielberg,” Lanzmann writes in his devastating critique of Schindler’s List. And he adds, “Shoah is a film about death, not about survival.”

In Shoah, you do not see the Jews who were killed because the Nazis engineered their erasure, both from the present and from the past. Their absence is the tragedy of the Shoah, and that tragedy cannot be healed by film or by words or by representation. It can only be not said and not shown.

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We love independent thinking. Culture heroes like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are celebrated for their contrarian, innovative, genius; Hollywood heroes are encouraged to follow their dreams as the music swells, regardless of quibbling pragmatic detractors. And in politics, we sneer at partisan shills who take their cues from party talking points. Voters should be self-directed; they should carefully evaluate the pros and cons of each individual candidate, and make a determination on merit, regardless of R or D. Don’t be a sheeple!

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Everybody agrees—you should think for yourself. But do you really want to follow that herd insisting that you follow the herd? To be a truly independent thinker, maybe you have to think about the virtues of not thinking for yourself after all.

The ideal of thinking for yourself sounds appealing. Shouldn’t you become informed about important issues, weigh the evidence, and make up your mind accordingly? In theory, maybe. But in practice, there are problems. Each person is only one (1) person with one (1) brain. It’s simply impossible to be an expert on everything, or even on a small portion of everything. If you’re knowledgeable about Syria, you’re not necessarily also going to be knowledgeable on women’s health care. If you understand the ins and outs of NAFTA, you won’t necessarily be deeply knowledgeable about net neutrality.

Chances are that, like me, you are not an expert on any of these things. And if you work a 50 hour week or more, you probably don’t have the time or energy to study up on all these issues. You probably don’t even have time to keep up with the latest stupid thing the president did.

Even if you could research every subject intensely, doing so wouldn’t necessarily lead you to good conclusions. Dedicated anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, and Charles Murray fans are very well versed in their particular niche; they can cite you figures and statistics all day long. Yet, someone with minimal knowledge who simply accepts the scientific consensus and the word of experts is actually infinitely better informed about each of these topics.

When you insist on listening only to yourself, you as likely as not end up listening to a fool or a conspiracy theorist or both. Most times, you’re better off taking cues from people you trust and respect. Everyone I know who broadly agrees with me on political principles says getting rid of net neutrality is bad; I’m willing to accept that getting rid of net neutrality is bad. That’s a perfectly reasonable way to make decisions.

In fact, this isn’t just a reasonable way to make decisions; it’s the only way to make decisions. Even experts rely on other experts; to be informed is to be informed by other people. Shakespeare listened to Marlowe; Einstein got ideas from Faraday; Bill Gates got money from his daddy. Humans are social creatures; we’re apes that form nests like bees. Other humans teach us language and how to use the toilet and why it’s good to share. Other people teach us how to be people—and then we turn around and declare that it’s a weakness to be shaped by other people. It’s not very gracious.

Everybody learns and takes moral guidance from others. When people tell you that you should form opinions independently, that’s other people telling you to form opinions independently. Your friends, your neighbors, and even your enemies make your brain; you’re formed of bits and pieces of other people. People wail about call-out culture as if it’s some form of mob rule—but the only rule we have is the mob one. Sometimes the mob is evil, and shouldn’t be listened to—but those standards are set by some other, better mob. This isn’t to say that all morality is relative. It’s just to say that we learn how to be good from our communities and friends. So choose the folks you associate with wisely—by, for example, looking with skepticism on people who say that ideally you would associate with no one.

For the most part, people de facto recognize that you can’t really think for yourself, even when they pretend otherwise. When someone says, “think for yourself!” they usually mean, “listen to me, and not that other person!” If we really thought everyone should think for themselves, though we’d all fall silent forever. So here’s my (contrarian! daring! individual!) conclusion: we should admit that letting other people think for us is good, and that contrarian daring individualism is both impossible and undesirable.

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This first ran on Splice Today.

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Donald Trump lies on every day ending with day. Yesterday, he chose to lie about his actions on 9/11 while addressing a gathering of first responders. He claimed he had gone himself with a crew of workers to try to assist on the day of the attack, and that two firemen who thought he was in danger because of a rickety building picked him up and ran with him to safety.

There is no corroboration from witnesses or public records. It sounds like nonsense, and it is nonsense.

Inevitably, Trump’s remarks have led many to reiterate accusations that he is in mental decline due to his advanced age. At 80, the argument goes, he can no longer tell lies from truth. He is senile and therefore makes self-aggrandizing claims, conflating what he wants to have happened with what is true.

Trump does constantly mistake his own inner heroic monologue with truth. But this is not a new phenomenon for him. Mental decline did not create Trump’s moral failures. Rather, his moral failures have destroyed his cognitive capacity. He is a fool because he is evil, not the other way around.

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9/11 claims

Trump’s claims about his role in 9/11 are an especially good test case. That’s because he has been lying about his role in 9/11 from the moment it happened 25 years ago.

Trump was 55 years old when the towers came down; he was not senile, and no one really believes he was in cognitive decline at that point. Nonetheless, when he was interviewed on the day itself, he rushed to do what he does best, which is tell disgusting self-aggrandizing lies. In a telephone interview just after the attack, Trump boasted that his property at 40 Wall Street was the tallest building still standing in Manhattan. That was a lie; it was the second tallest. And it was an incredibly fucked up thing to say while the bodies were still being counted.

Two days after 9/11, Trump uttered the first version of his lie about being involved in clean-up efforts. He told a German reporter that “I have a lot of men down here right now…over 100 and we have about 125 coming.”

Nor was that Trump’s last falsehood. In 2015, when he was 69 years old and running for President, he claimed that he saw “thousands and thousands” of Muslims cheering the fall of the World Trade Center in New Jersey on television. He did not; it never happened. It was just a racist lie.

And in 2016, Trump lied again about being involved in clean up efforts on 9/11, insisting he had “helped clear the rubble.”

Trump, has, then, told multiple lies about 9/11 over 25 years, starting when he was 55, continuing when he was 70, and now, at 80, elaborating further. That doesn’t suggest someone who is in cognitive decline and has suddenly started having trouble telling truth from lies. It suggests someone who has lied consistently, remorselessly, gleefully, for decades.

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Trump believes what he wants

Does Trump believe his own lies? Does he really think that his 2017 inauguration crowd was massive when you can look up video and see it was not? Does he believe he did not sexually assault E. Jean Carroll, even though a jury held him liable for doing just that? Does he actually think he was at Ground Zero and saved by burly and deferential firemen? Or what?

Trump’s relationship to his own statements is I think best described by Harry G.
Frankfurt’s philosophical term “bullshit.” People who lie, Frankfurt argues, are intentionally trying to deceive; they know that the truth does not benefit them, and so they attempt to mislead others about what the truth is. Bullshit, in contrast, is a statement made by someone who has no interest in whether the statement is true or false. Trump bullshits; he says whatever he feels will benefit him, without examining, or caring, whether the statement is true.

You would think that Trump would know, somewhere, in some part of his psyche, that his crowd size is small, that he raped a woman, that firemen did not whisk him from danger. But as a committed, fervent, religious devotee of bullshit, Trump refuses to believe in an objective world in which facts, or people, exist outside his skull. It isn’t that Trump can’t tell truth from lies. It is that he has made a deliberate choice to only believe, and only know, what he wants to. Truth and falsehood are irrelevant categories; all that exists is what benefits the greatest and onliest man on earth, Donald Trump.

Trump is so great, and so important, that the truth should bend around him. He is entitled to his own bullshit. If people insist on pointing out the bullshit, he becomes enraged and aggrieved. His minions are well aware of this reaction and have adopted it as their own—which is why White House Spokesman David Ingle spouted faux outrage when questioned about why his boss was telling transparent lies again. “The fact that the failing legacy media is using this to try to attack him is a disgrace and yet another reason why Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low,” he burbled. (If you want to see an all-time low, you can look at Trump’s approval numbers.)

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Ignorance is a choice

Trump doesn’t just refuse to know where he was on 9/11. He refuses to learn how tariffs work, insisting on treating them like magic dominance beans that force other countries to pay you. He refuses to understand how windmills work. He refuses to recognize that Venezuelan oil won’t fix his disastrous Iran war, which he refuses to acknowledge he has lost. He won’t read intelligence briefings because he would rather have his “human binky” Natalie Harp run alongside him and print out positive right wing bubble coverage of his awesomeness.

As president, Trump is at the center of the greatest information network ever developed on earth. He could speak to experts on every and any topic; he could learn about tariffs, or windmills, or Venezuelan oil, or the Strait of Hormuz if he wanted. He doesn’t learn about these things because he does not want to, just as he did not want to know that his was not the tallest building in Manhattan, or just as he did not want to know that no one in New Jersey was cheering the 9/11 attacks.

People do get more like themselves when they get older. But I think it’s important to recognize that Trump has always been this asshole snorting his own bullshit, high on his own entitlement and motivated reasoning. He is not an intellectual vacuum because his brain is decaying. He is an intellectual vacuum because he long ago made the moral choice to know only that Trump is great and right, and to know absolutely nothing else ever.

There’s an impulse to medicalize Trump’s lies, because a diagnosis of cognitive decline seems objective and, I think, because a diagnosis of cognitive decline feels stigmatizing, and therefore powerful. But the truth is that most mentally ill people do not turn into gravity wells of bigotry and ignorance. Trump’s mental failures are the result of the studied moral choice for bullshit that he made as a young man, and has kept choosing, over and over, year in and year out, no matter the circumstance, no matter the stakes. He is a moral monstrosity, and that monstrous morality has eaten his brain. Thanks to the moral failures of his country, it may eat the rest of us as well.

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Zionists sometimes flat out deny that Israel is committing genocide or war crimes. That argument has become less and less tenable as Israel’s grotesque body count has mounted in its latest round of wars and atrocities.

So Zionists sometimes fall back on another argument. Yes, they say, Israel may have committed some excesses. And yes, maybe, technically, an apartheid state which openly grants those of a certain religion and ethnicity more rights than others is bad. But don’t lots of states embrace ethnonationalism and genocide? Why does the American left focus on Israel rather than on Saudi Arabia or Iran or China? If you care about one ethnonationalist genocide, you should care about all ethnonationalist genocides equally. Ergo, if you’re social media feed doesn’t spend as much time denouncing Mynamar as you spend denouncing Israel, then you must be antisemitic. QED.

This argument is not really deployed in good faith, and cannot therefore be refuted in good faith. But I think it’s worth thinking about the underlying issue. Israel does loom large in US discourse, on all parts of the political spectrum.. But the solution is not to refuse to discuss Israeli crimes. The solution is to disentangle American identity—and not coincidentally American military and diplomatic resources—from the political program, crimes, and identity of a genocidal ethnostate.

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Bad Faith

Again, it’s worth emphasizing that whataboutism in this instance is simply not in good faith. If you actually believed that ethnonationalism was wrong, you would not respond to criticism of an ethnonationalist state by saying, “Well everyone is doing it.” If you think genocide is evil and must be stopped, you do not argue that all genocides must end simultaneously or else criticism of one genocide is illegitimate.

It’s pretty easy to see the bad faith if you look at, say, advocacy for Ukraine. People who are trying to get the US to direct more resources to prevent Putin’s horrors in Ukraine do not say, “You should stop talking about Israeli war crimes and talk about Putin’s war crimes instead.” Nor do they say, “Talking about Israel’s war crimes instead of Putin’s war crimes is antisemitic and illegitimate.” Instead, they argue something like, “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an ugly imperialist fascist colonial power grab much like Israel’s actions in the Middle East; we should consistently oppose fascist genocide everywhere.”

If you actually care about Ukraine (and you should!) you argue that people should focus on Ukraine more, not that they should focus on Israel less. If you believe that we should not be funding Saudi Arabia (we shouldn’t!) you say, “We shouldn’t fund any antidemocratic dictatorial regime”. You don’t say, “Well, if we’re funding Saudi Arabia, we should fund Israel too.”

Zionists who deploy whataboutism don’t care about the injustices they are whatabouting. They are not committed to helping the people of Ukraine or of Saudi Arabia. They are committed to deflecting criticism of Israel. This is why when you say, “Yes, we should give more aid to Ukraine and none to Saudi Arabia”, they mostly shrug or insist that you’re a hypocrite. They do not want the US to have better policies across the board; they approve of America’s cynical and ugly support for dictatorships (from Putin to the Saudis) because that support shores up the status quo support of Zionism.

This is why opposition to Zionism is in fact opposition to colonial and fascist foreign policy everywhere. Zionism creates powerful incentives and constituencies for colonial and fascist policies. It is vital to oppose Putin and the Saudis. But opposing Zionism is a necessary part of doing so, because Zionism and the worst aspects of American policy and identity are intertwined.

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The US offers a staggering amount of support to Israel

There are ideological reasons for the importance of Zionism in US foreign policy. But before getting to those, I want to underline that US support for Israel, over time, is in fact orders of magnitude more sweeping and more substantial than our support for basically any other country or regime.

In 2024, Israel received $6.82 billion in aid from the US, just beating out Ukraine at $6.51 billion. The third largest recipient was $1.74 billion to Jordan—a country which we prioritize in part because of its relationship with Israel.

US aid commitment to Israel is not a one year thing. Since 2001, Israel has received $100.5 billion in aid—second only to the $150.1 billion to Afghanistan, a country in which we were fighting an actual war.

Go back further and Israel’s share of aid balloons. Since 1946, the US has given Israel $244 billion in military aid. That is vastly more than the amount given to Egypt in second place at $83 billion—and again, aid to Egypt has been in part meant to shore up Israel’s position and power in the Middle East. The amount given to Israel is more than the total military aid given to Afghanistan and South Vietnam, the countries in which the US had the longest sustained wars of the period. (Israel received the second most non military aid at $86 billion, narrowly outpaced by India at $87 billion.)

These figures are stark. US military commitment to Israel outsrips its military commitment to any other country in the post-war period. The US should absolutely stop selling weapons to (for example) Saudi Arabia, which has used those munitions to exacerbate horrific human rights abuses in Yemen. But, in the first place, these weapons sales are sales, not aid. And in the second the scale of military support over time is simply nowhere near what the US provides to Israel. And that’s even before you get into the US incessantly providing diplomatic cover by blocking Security Council resolutions designed to reign in Israel or censure it. And it’s also not taking into account the fact that the US and Israel just this year launched an illegal war of aggression jointly against Iran at a cost (so far) of around $40 billion.

Americans are closely focused on Israel’s warmongering because Israel’s foreign policy is uniquely backed and subsidized by US aid and diplomatic power. No other country in the world has received as much US military aid as Israel. That means that the US is uniquely complicit in Israel’s actions, and it means that Americans have a moral duty to advocate against military aid to Israel when that aid is being used to commit a genocide.

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Israel is central to American identity

The focus on Israel (by all parts of the political spectrum) is in part a reaction to the enormous American financial and military investment in Israel. But it’s also true that the financial and military investment in Israel is caused by American interest in and focus on Israel.

Many Americans feel intensely connected to Israel. This is the case, obviously, for many Jewish-Americans. Jewish-American institutions are very Zionist, and many (not all! but many) Jews are committed to Israel, which they see as righteous reparations for the Holocaust, as a necessary refuge from the antisemitism of the rest of the world, and/or as a way to create a strong, virile ethnonationalist Jewish identity in contrast to the weak, alienated stereotypically Jewish limpness of the diaspora.

Jewish people only make up about 2.3% of the US population, though, and (contrary to antisemitic propaganda) we (for better or worse) control neither the media nor the weather. America’s unique investment in Israel is something that American Jews can contribute to, leverage, negotiate, and/or try to survive. But it isn’t primarily driven by American Jews.

Instead, Zionism in the US is driven mostly by gentiles. There are several strands of this support; the most discussed is Christian Zionism. Many evangelical Christians believe that the land of Israel was given to the Jewish people in the Bible, and so support for Israel is viewed as a religious duty. This is sometimes connected to millenarian beliefs that the end times will occur once all Jews have gathered in Israel, ushering in the second coming. More recently, evangelical Christian hatred of Muslims has powered support for Israel’s exterminationist and genocidal policies.

This evangelical Christian support for Israel is extremely powerful and consequential, especially in Republican politics. Christians United for Israel, a Christian Zionist organization, is by far the largest Zionist organization in the US with more than 10 million members. Evangelical Christian Zionists—like ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and former South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham—have held key positions from which they have influenced and driven Israel policy.

Christian Zionists are not the only gentile Zionists, though. In addition to this kind of religious Zionism, there is also a secular, liberal Zionism. Liberal Christians like former president Joe Biden and former representative Haley Stevens do not believe that Israel is Biblically ordained. But they do believe that Israel is a moral liberal necessity. To quote my recent discussion:

This is why President Joe Biden—a longtime Zionist, who disgracefully facilitated Israel’s genocide in Gaza—talks about Israel not only as a security ally, but as a moral calling. “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist,” Biden said in 2024, “and a Zionist is about whether or not Israel is a safe haven for Jews because of their history of how they’ve been persecuted.” Similarly, former Michigan Senate candidate Haley Stevens in 2023 declared, “America is a place for the Jewish people….Israel comes to me in my dreams, I see Israel’s future and I know that Israel will continue.”

For Biden, Stevens, and many others, the Jewish people have been uniquely persecuted throughout history. The United States therefore showed itself uniquely virtuous and liberal by defeating Hitler and liberating the camps. America’s hold on virtue is secured by its historical role in freeing and sheltering Jewish people. To fight for Israel is, from this perspective, to fight for the best in America. The billions in aid to Israel is in part a pragmatic investment in securing influence in a crucial (oil-rich) region. But it’s also an investment in American values and goodness; America pays Israel to validate and secure its own liberal self-regard and its right to rule the world virtuously.

The overlap of these ideological currents—liberal American, Christian American, Jewish-American—has created a powerful bipartisan American identification with Israel, and a powerful bipartisan Zionism. For many Americans historically, and still today, to be Zionist has been part of being American.

This was not a dual loyalty (for either Jews or non-Jews) but a conviction that American identity meant support for Israel—that Zionism was the truest American patriotism, because Israel represented the truest part of America, whether Christian or liberal. When behind closed doors in December 2023, weeks into the genocide, Biden said, “We’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process,” he was expressing his core belief that liberal virtue and Zionism were continuous. Israel’s war crimes and genocide were regrettable, but they were a small price to pay for the patriotic liberal sacrament of Zionism.

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Contesting Zionism is contesting a certain vision of America

American foreign policy, and American identity, have been built on military support for Israel for decades. That means that Israel is not just another country committing bad actions among many. It is a country in which America is uniquely invested, and a country which, Americans are told, we should especially reverence.

Israel’s example, and Israel’s defense, are cited as a rationale and a blueprint for broader Middle East policy, from the invasion of Iraq to the bombing of Iran. Israel’s experiences are used to justify Islamophobic policies and attacks in the US. Its defense rationalizes attacks on freedom of speech, including silencing professors, sending police to crack the heads of student protestors, and fascist takeover of legacy media. Through its training of US police, Israel provides know-how for disciplining dissidence and subjugating minority populations in the US.

Protestors in the US focus on Israel not because of antisemitism, but because Zionism has become a core part of illiberal ideology in the US—not least because it has sway with many who consider themselves liberal in other respects. Zionism offers a fascist ethnonationalism that feels liberal; it offers a liberalism that is racist, violently colonialist, Islamophobic, and intolerant of dissent. That creates an extraordinarily dangerous fascist/liberal coalition. It is vital for liberals and leftists of goodwill to reject that—and yes, Zionism’s unique position in American life means that it is going to generate, and require, more pushback than authoritarianism in Myanmar or Saudi Arabia (though we should condemn US support for or indifference to violence in those countries as well!)

Antizionism and Jewish identity

As a last, personal observation, I think it’s important to note that Jewish antizionists have powerful reasons to speak against Israel.

Many Jews (including me) see opposition to Israel as a core part of our Jewish identity. “Never again,” for many of us, means never again for anybody. It is a particular, personal betrayal to see Israel embracing the ethnonationalist ideologies and the genocidal violence that have in the past been unleased against Jews in the diaspora. It is horrific to watch Netanyahu bolster and propagandize for a fascist antisemitic American regime which hates and is attempting to exterminate immigrants—a group which has historically included, and been conflated with, Jews.

In addition, American Jews can’t help but notice that our identities and our safety are constantly used by Zionists (Jewish and non-Jewish) as a justification for hideous fascist action, in the US and abroad. It is in my name, supposedly, that the IDF murders Palestinian journalists; it is my name, supposedly, that my friends and colleagues in the US are attacked by police, ejected from their jobs, and blacklisted. When fascists say that they are murdering people in your name, to protect you, personally, as a Jew, many of us who are Jews feel like we have a responsibility to speak out.

This is in part because it is the right thing to do. But it’s also an act of self-preservation. It is not safe to find yourself in the mouths of fascists for any reason. If fascists want to use you, and you do not allow yourself to be used, or you cease being useful, you will often be the next target. Trump has repeatedly said that Jewish people who don’t vote for him are “disloyal.” Zionists—Jewish and non-Jewish—cheerfully refer to antizionist Jews as “kapos” or traitors.

The main victims of Zionist violence and hatred are Palestinians and Muslims. But antizionist Jews are also targeted, and may be targeted further if we don’t speak up. Solidarity with Palestinians is vital because Palestinians are being attacked in horrific ways and they deserve our support. But solidarity with Palestinians it’s also necessary for antizionist Jews because solidarity with Palestinians is essential if we are going to show solidarity with ourselves.

The fact that Americans devote attention to Israeli crimes is often framed by Zionists as unfair and antisemitic. But this inevitably means that the criticisms of Israel from antizionist Jews are also framed as illegitimate, even though (again) those criticisms are based in Jewish ethics, Jewish history, and a very Jewish recognition of shared oppression and shared threat. To tell Jewish antizionists that they cannot speak to Israel unless they also talk about Saudi Arabia, or Mynamar, or what have you, is telling Jewish antizionists that they have no right to speak as Jews or from their Jewish identity. That’s antisemitic.

Similarly, to tell American antizionists, Jewish or non-Jewish, that their focus on Israel is illegitimate is to tell them that they cannot criticize core American policy and ideology. But it’s also to tell them that they are not allowed to stand in solidarity with Palestinians, with Muslims, and with American antizionist Jews. That’s not taking a stand against antisemitism. It’s taking a stand for fascism, for silence, and for genocide.

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Cheers was a remarkably gentle show.

Rewatching the first few episodes of the venerable sitcom from 1982, the writers’ aggressive refusal to be aggressive is positively startling. Today, the aesthetics and approach of television and film have largely fused; sitcoms like Santa Clarita Diet and The Good Place (also starring Ted Danson) are high concept, sexually frank, foul-mouthed, and not infrequently gory. The giant giraffes on the loose in The Good Place, or the projectile vomit erupting from Drew Barrymore in Santa Clarita Diet seem to have escaped from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, rather than from sitcom history past. Even the studiously unadventurous network comedy The Big Bang Theory exists in a post-Seinfeld, post-Simpsons world, where comedy is expected to make some pretense at hipness, no matter how feeble.

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Cheers, though, leaned into its stodginess. The Big Bang Theory‘s theme music is a goofy, witty, fast paced song by alternative rock icons the Barenaked Ladies. In contrast, the famous opening jingle for Cheers by unapologetic hack Gary Portnoy is saccharine easy-listening, and it played over an opening montage of retro-images from the 1920s. “You want a place to go where everybody knows your name,” the inoffensive vocal warbles. That place you want to go isn’t just a location but a time. When you go down those stairs into Cheers, you’re stepping into your grandpappy’s shoes.

The plots and gags of Cheers are resolutely low key and heartwarming. The first skit in the series shows an obviously underage kid trying to buy a drink from Sam Malone (Danson.) Sam rebuffs him, establishing his bona fides as a responsible quasi-patriarch. In the fourth episode, actor Harry Anderson shows up as “Harry,” a friendly con man who pleasantly fleeces bar patrons out of ten or twenty dollars at a pop. No one tries to call the police on him or punch him in the face. Instead, his shenanigans are treated as a friendly eccentricity. He’s a lovable rogue—and you can tell he’s a lovable rogue and not a scary gangbanger or a superpredator because he’s white and dresses like he’s strolled out of a Frank Capra film.

It’s not just Harry who’s white. There are no black people in the main cast, though the bar is located in Boston, and though Sam is supposed to have been a pitcher in the major leagues, where he presumably would have had many black colleagues. One of the gags in the early episodes involves a father upset because his son is marrying a Black gay man. Coach (Nicholas Colasanto) encourages him to be tolerant and accepting, but that advice apparently doesn’t extend to the show’s own hiring practices.

The one source of tension in this idyllic retro rest spot is gender politics. New waitress Diane (Shelley Long), is a well-read intellectual and an (aspirational) member of the upper crust. Sam, as the bar owner, is wealthier than her, but anxious that her accomplishments mean that she’ll look down on him and on the less accomplished women he tends to date.

Enlightened women are out of place in Cheers‘ nostalgic milieu, and that disconnect provides much of the show’s ongoing tension. In the show’s fourth episode, Sam kisses Diane for the first time. She immediately tosses him onto the billiard table in a karate move. She explains, sheepishly, that the reaction was automatic; she learned it in a course on “Practical Feminism.” Feminism stands in the way of the show’s romantic plot arc—which is unfortunate insofar as Diane seems to wish she hadn’t acted so hastily, but fortunate, since otherwise the series would have ended almost before it began.

The series did not end; it went on and on and on—with eleven seasons and 275 episodes, it remains one of the longest running sitcoms in history. It’s easy to see the show’s appeal. Watching it is restful and undemanding; all the characters are likable and nothing too bad ever happens. “You want to go where people know, people are all the same,” the jingle says. We all empathize with each other; we all share a common humanity. It’s nice.

The niceness, unfortunately, is predicated on the sameness, which in turn requires that people who aren’t the same are ignored or forgotten. Way back in the early 1980s, when Boston was roiled by racist riots and protests against school desegregation, Cheers was nostalgic for that time when America was great, friendly, and untroubled. There was never such a time, of course. But the dream that there was sells “Make America Great Again” baseball caps, and everything that goes along with them.

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This piece first ran on Splice Today.

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Goose will love you anyway, but if you value my writing and would like to become a paid sub, that will also allow me to keep feeding her. It’s $50/yr, $5/month.

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Here’s what I published this week.

Politics

Democrats in array. (Public Notice)

Jon Ossoff is the centrist who has figured out how to unite the party. (The I Paper)

Dolly Parton was political but not partisan. (EIH)

Cultural criticism

A guide to fun with algorithms and uncreative writing. (EIH)

Homme fatale vs. femme fatale in Born To Kill. (Splice Today)

Billy Strings mourns his mother on his great new album. (No Depression)

Backrooms is put together wrong, which is a good thing. (EIH)

The nutty Jewish professor. (EIH)

Poetry

100 lyrics that start with “We’re all”. (EIH)

Tribute to our time. (Oddball)

America

America was walking down the street minding America’s own business
when America came out of an unmarked van in a mask
and threw America on the ground, pepper-sprayed America in the face,
zip-tied America and shipped America off to a holding facility
where America was denied medical care, spit on, and sexually assaulted
by America.

None of that is true. It wasn’t America.
It was just people.

Tribute to hero economist. (dadakuku)

Free to Choose

Paranormal infodumpsters sashay
like liberal Zionism. Please unbutton your oafish
millennium and bend towards the arc of
Milton Friedman.

Tribute to summer. (Synchronized Chaos)

The Eternal Question

Bug bite
or zit?

From the archive

Track of the week

Great early crip post punk by a disabled artist who was censored by the BBC.

Read more

“You might as well like yourself. Just think about all the time you’re going to have to spend with you,” Julius F. Kelp (Jerry Lewis) says in his nasal voice at the end of The Nutty Professor (1963). “And if you don’t think too much of yourself, how do you expect others to?” It’s a fairly standard Hollywood moral about self-love, self-acceptance, and self-empowerment. And, as with most such Hollywood morals, it’s deeply hypocritical, since the range of selves that are acceptable is much more circumscribed than the narrative is willing to admit.

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—

On the surface, The Nutty Professor is about a nerdy, geeky intellectual who wants to become a cool he-man hipster. Kelp is a buck-toothed, bespectacled, whiny-voiced egghead at a local university, who stumbles and stutters from one humiliation to another. He is bullied by the college president, by his own students, and by just about everyone except for his va-va-voom student Stella Purdy (Stella Stevens.) To become more manly, and court Stella, Kelp develops a Dr. Jekyll formula which transforms him into a smooth-voiced, stylish, cigarette-smoking teen idol named Buddy Love. Love bullies other guys and fascinates Stella. But ultimately she prefers the cringing, kind-hearted Kelp. The professor decides to scrap his formula and embrace his nerdiness; for his honesty and self-affirmation, he, inevitably, gets to marry Stella.

Lewis-enthusiast Jonathan Rosenbaum sees The Nutty Professor as a mockery of Americanism, which “shows the world just how embarrassing being an American can be.” More specifically, the film can be read as a parable about the dangers of assimilation into the much-vaunted American melting pot.

Kelp is a hyperbolic portrait of the emasculated Jewish male intellectual—weak, cringing, and sexually repulsive. Buddy Love, on the other hand, is an image of all-American masculinity—brash, self-confident, and sexy. But Lewis, the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants, presents the white assimilated American as a mean-spirited bully, and the Jewish nerd as sympathetic. Stella breathily tells Kelp that intelligence is the most attractive quality in a man; ultimately, the professor is not only kinder, but sexier than his alter-ego. How could any Jewish intellectual argue with that?

The film’s ostensible admiration of Kelp, though, comes with a lot of not-very-buried caveats. One of the running gags in the film is that Kelp carries around with him a watch which plays the Marine’s hymn at deafening volume. The nerdy intellectual has he-man Americanism in his pocket. It’s a joke because it’s incongruous, and it’s making fun of loud American patriotism, at least in part. But it’s also a joke because Kelp isn’t a rough, tough Marine, and is therefore ridiculous.

Along those lines, it’s never exactly clear whether Buddy Love is despicable because he’s an ugly American, or whether he’s despicable because he’s an American with an ugly ethnic background. The film delights in showing the instability of the Buddy persona. He’s just about to sweep Stella off her feet, when he starts croaking and whining like the sniveling Kelp. Or else he’s on stage singing “That Old Black Magic” when his voice changes and he has to scurry for the exit. Scenes like this seem less like a condemnation of Buddy as jerk, and more an expression of anxiety about Kelp’s inability to pass as Buddy. Buddy is condemned off to the side for being a jerk, but the real energy of the film goes into sneering at him because his transformation into a jerk is incomplete. He’s still haunted by a nerdy Jewishness he can’t cast off.

Nor is the film very convincing when it half-heartedly makes the case for that nerdy Jewishness. Yes, Buddy Love is kind of awful. He’s conceited; he mocks waiters; he punches out a student who accosts him.

But is Love really more terrible than Kelp? Lewis has said that Love was meant as a portrait of obnoxious hipsters—but he also noted that fans seemed to like the character, and that he didn’t end up being all that evil. The professor, meanwhile, conducts unauthorized experiments, resulting in a schoolroom explosion which threatens the lives of his students. He also conducts experiments on himself, without any oversight—again, a serious breach of scientific ethics. And he pursues a relationship with a student in his class, even explicitly treating her with favoritism (he lets her retake a test).

This is all supposed to be funny and cute because Kelp is such a powerless loser; when he imagines Stella with a skimpy bikini and a come hither stare, it just shows how ridiculous he is. But the truth is Kelp is not powerless; he’s a professor with considerable ability to wreck Stella’s school career, if he wants.

Kelp’s actual actions are a good bit more reckless and immoral than those of Buddy; he’s not ethically superior to his alter ego. But he’s such a caricature that he doesn’t have any ethical standing; you can’t condemn a cartoon. But neither can you point to a cartoon as a strong statement of self-affirmation.

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In any case, that strong statement of self-affirmation starts to look less and less structurally sound the more you put pressure on it. Kelp’s abandonment of Buddy isn’t really an abandonment of the ethos of assimilation. Kelp gets rid of his formula when he realizes that he has a better path to mainstream masculine status and success than the one that Buddy offers. The whole point of Buddy was to woo Stella, the all-American young blonde.

Stella is the American dream in herself—and one that the film treats with a good deal of reverence. She’s innocent and kind, but also cool and popular. In wooing her, Kelp woos America, and wins it. Kelp is supposed to accept himself and so achieve happiness. But the dream of wedding a stunning younger blonde starlet is so thoroughly conventional it rather reverses the putative moral. Kelp achieves self-confidence in the conventional Hollywood manner, by possessing the icon of non-ethnic Americanness. Once he’s done that, why wouldn’t he love himself?

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with Jewish men marrying non-Jewish women; it’s worked out for me. But predicating the humanity of Jewish men on exogamy is something else—not least because it treats women as status symbols rather than as people. Kelp hates and pities himself; Stella is there to soak up his lust and abuse and insecurity and turn him at last into the man he wants to be—which is to say, into a man who is validated by catching a woman like her.

Kelp’s Jewishness is never explicitly spelled out, and you could make an argument that he stands in for a different kind of outsider. He might be an immigrant, for example, or a gay closeted man, with Buddy Love as his fabulous velvet-suited secret identity. The ambiguity is intentional and necessary. If the film was about a specific kind of not belonging, rather than a generalized failure of masculinity, it wouldn’t be funny (to the extent it can be said to be funny in the first place.) The nutty professor can’t be too nutty; he can like himself only so far as he doesn’t really tell you who it is he’s liking. And as long as he marries the blonde.

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Kane Parsons’ hit debut feature Backrooms exists somewhere between David Lynch and the Blair Witch Project, with vivisected bits of creature features, slashers, and maybe Hitchcock scattered around the flickering interior landscape. The bricolage effect can feel a little unfocused and unfinished—but that also seems very much the point. The movie’s eerie thesis is that our world, our dreams, our fears and ourselves are composed of half-remembered flashes of somewhere and something else. To go into the backrooms is to find your life just where you left it, lying around with its strings cut and its heart replaced with a desk lamp.

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Inspired by internet creepypasta memes and Parsons’ web series, the film makes a (deliberately) half-hearted attempt to provide a more coherent narrative than the source material. Clark (the always compelling Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a failed architect and furniture store owner whose marriage has collapsed. Wandering around the store’s sub-basement after a power outage, he stumbles through a wall into another dimension consisting of endless oddly off spaces—furniture is stacked in the middle of a room; a stop sign with mirror lettering stands in a door; lamps are attached to ceilings; shoes and desks are half-submerged in the flooras if mired in concrete; stairs lead up to nowhere.

Clark tells his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), about his find, and she doesn’t believe him. But inevitably she finds herself following him through into the backrooms as well, and in the space where nothing is put together right, everything falls apart.

The backrooms are stalked by entities you don’t see, and there are some hand-held camera horrors as Clark tries to record his discovery with his employees Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and Bobby (Finn Bennett). The space also though seems like a metaphor for Clark’s dead-end life—and perhaps for Mary’s as well. Mary tells Clark that his choices, his alcoholism, and his bitterness have left him alone and isolated, but she herself seems equally disconnected. The only relationship we ever see of hers is through flashbacks to her childhood in which she remembers traumatic experiences with her mentally-ill mother.

Part of the power of the movie is in fact the way in which both Clark and Mary lead lives that seem to exist in backroom spaces even when they are not in the backroom. We see Mary in her empty house, and then we see her watching workmen knock down her childhood home, turning a place she loves into a broken nonplace. The only thing left of her past is her handprints in the driveway from when she was a child and the concrete was new; an incongruous blot that the workman will eventually blot out.

For his partClark’s wife kicked him out of his house, so he lives in his store. He sleeps surrounded by furniture trying to look like it’s in a home, watching a television set propped at the foot of his bed which keeps going on the fritz. Clark also films ads for his store—Ottoman Empire—in which he dresses like a pirate with a wooden leg attached to his left knee. His clearly functional left leg is bent up behind him; when he sits down on a chair, it snaps.

Even on the supposed right side of reality, nothing works. Clark describes the backroom as a place that seems to have been constructed by someone who never saw a dog and tried to draw one from a verbal description. But that applies to his imitation of a pirate too (on television and in its monstrous backrooms incarnation), and to his life. And it also applies to Backrooms the movie, with its ill-fitting parts. No wonder Clark says he feels like he belongs in the backroom—with the human head in the fridge and his therapist tied up in a chair—as he belonged nowhere else.

Mary, and to some extent the film, claim that Clark is trapped because he keeps following the same mental patterns or enacting the same behaviors. It’s unclear how seriously we’re supposed to take that, or what exactly it’s supposed to be telling us about Clark’s alcoholism, or his misogyny, or the racism that it seems plausible may have helped derail his architecture career. The thematic material, like the detached pipes in the backroom bathrooms, never seems to quite connect; meanings are left partially constructed and buzzing like the lights. Genre markers provide some structure, but they too tend to erode or meld into each other like the chairs and desks and walls. The indie story about broken lonely people gets kidnapped by the psychological horror gets eaten by the slasher which gets gassed by the government conspiracy which gets abruptly cut off.

That cut-off ending too is unsatisfyingly detached. Parsons gives you a series of imagistic and imperfect memories of what we’ve just seen rather than a concluded plot or character arc. That feels like a cop out in some ways, as literary fiction “let’s just stop here” endings often feel like a cop out. But when credits start to roll it also leaves you thinking about how movie themselves are imperfect, weirdly-joined memories of memories, and how maybe you, sitting there watching in a weird space dedicated to flickering lights, have also stumbled into the wrong end of the wrong office building. In Backrooms, we’re all imperfect copies.

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As some of you may know, I am not only a middlingly-successful political pundit and arts critic; I am also an even less successful poet! I do not write much about my poetry or my process here because—well, no one cares about poetry, and even people who care about poetry don’t care about my poetry.

But! A professor friend asked me to talk to their class about my verse—and especially about my interest in algorithmic poetry and uncreative writing. To prepare I was going to write out my thoughts, and I figured why not share them in the newsletter where all my thoughts go?

So, this is going to be a brief discussion of what algorithmic poetry is, how to create it if (like me) you have no programming knowledge or aptitude, and why you might want to bother creating it. Feel free to skip and/or enjoy, depending on your level of interest in weird soulless art!

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I’m going to start by reading a poem made up of the first words from the last few text messages between the friend who put me up to this and myself.

This Is Awesome

I sent

I saw

question while

I’ve had a

it really

oh Jesus

ah well

so what

instructions for

aha!

Now, you may read that and say, “What?.” or “Aha!” or, “Why on earth would anyone write or read such a thing?” These are all valid reactions, and I hope to address some of them.

But what I want to point out first is that this is an example of very, very low-tech generative art, or low tech algorithmic art. I didn’t write it by letting divine inspiration flow through me and reveal my deepest truest self. Instead, I set up an algorithm—the algorithm being, “take a couple of words from the beginning of each text between you and your friend”—and then I just listed what I found. Revealing that my truest deepest self is a cut apart text message chain.

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Constraints for everyone

A lot of people think this is a weird way to do poetry because it’s not personal, doesn’t use flowery language, doesn’t rhyme, doesn’t attempt to make sense. But I think there are a lot of ways in which this is very much in the poetry tradition. That’s because much of the poetic tradition relies on algorithms, or constraints.

By constraints I mean that poetry is often written by setting up rules (algorithms) or limitations. For instance, the poet Robert Herrick, wrote this poem in the 1600s.

Upon His Departure Hence

Thus I
Pass by,
And die :
As one
Unknown
And gone :
I’m made
A shade,
And laid
I’ th’ grave :
There have
My cave,
Where tell
I dwell.
Farewell.

The poem has only two syllables to each line, and every three lines rhyme. “Thus I/ Pass By/And die.” That’s a lot of constraints; he’s showing off.

Here’s another example by twentieth century poet Richard Wright.

With a twitching nose
A dog reads a telegram
On a wet tree trunk.

Wright was using the Japanese form called the haiku; in the first line, there are five syllables, in the second seven, in the third five. Again, the fun is to try to fit your thoughts into a rigid container—or to let the demands of the constraint push you towards finding something to say.

Starting in the early twentieth century, artists and poets started to experiment with less traditional constraints which drew more attention to themselves, or pushed poems towards more absurdity or certain kinds of randomness. The movement was called oulipo. One common oulipo technique was to write poems excluding certain letters, or only allowing the use of certain letters. An amazing example is Christian Bok’s 2001 book Eunoia, which consists of five chapters, in each of which he uses only one vowel. Here’s a bit from Chapter I.

I bid girls bring stiff drinks—gin fizz which I might sip whilst finishing this rich dish, nibbling its tidbits: ribs with wings in chili, figs with kiwis in icing.

Bok used a whole bunch of other constraints too; he wouldn’t use “y” because he felt that was cheating, and in each chapter he tried to use every single possible word that included only the vowel in question and to use each of those words only once (though he admits he missed some.)

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Constraining yourself into uncreativity

The point of constraints, or of an algorithm, is to restrict the possible choices the author can make. The tighter the constraints, the less forgiving the algorithm, the fewer choices the writer has to make. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you reach a point where the only choice is what constraint you’re going to put yourself under.

As an example, a poet named Rory Macbeth decided he would write a poem composed of every word in the Bible in alphabetical order. There are eight pages which read just

be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be be

Claude Casky’s “The First Thousand Numbers Classified in Alphabetical Order” is exactly what it sounds like; it’s a list of the numbers from 1 to 1000 in alphabetical order , starting with, “Eight, eight-hundred, eight hundred and eight” and ending with “two-hundred and two.” (That inspired me to create a poem listing all the Roman numerals in alphabetical order from I to M.)

Poet Craig Dworkin calls this kind of writing “uncreative writing” because the constraint squeezes out all creativity. Or you could also think of it as writing in which all the creativity comes in figuring out the constraint or in setting the prompt; once that’s done and your algorithm is “alphabetize every word in the Bible” the rest is just listing a bunch of be’s.

These poems could also be seen as conceptual art; the pleasure is in the idea rather than the execution. You don’t have to read every number from 1 to 1000 in alphabetical order to get the joke. (Though I kind of enjoyed doing so.) In that sense, you can really just make up constraints and call that the poem—which means you can call for impossible constraints if you want. Here is a poem I wrote made of instructions for eleven more or less impossible exercises in uncreative writing. (It first appeared in my book Meaning Is Embarrassing from Ranger Press.)

Instructions for Eleven Poems

1. Take your favorite sonnet. Remove the third line.

2. Find the book nearest you. Write down the first word on each page. Start a new line with each capitalized word.

3. Take the Mary Oliver poem “The Swan.” Remove every word that does not include a letter in your first name.

4. Buy a physical copy of the second book on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Open the book to page 84. Take a quarter cup of flour and shake it evenly over the page. Write down the words that are still visible.

If no words are visible, shake off the flour and try again until your poem has at least three words. If the book does not have 84 pages, wait a week and try again with a different book.

5. Find the last spam email sent to you. Arrange the words in the email in reverse alphabetical order.

6. Save a document called “3:13 PM.” At 3:13 PM, paste whatever text you last copied into your document. Do the same at the same time each day for a month.

You can choose to copy text deliberately to paste at the appointed time. Or you can just paste whatever you happened to copy. The only rule is that you must paste the text every day at the same time. No other work on the poem is allowed.

7. Take a poem you dislike. Write it backwards; that is, the last word is the first word, the second to last word is the second word, the first word is the last word. Title it “Bad Poem.”

8. Keep a record of the wordcount of every web page you visit over a 48-hour period. Write out the name of the page and then write out the number next to it.

9. Go to a library. Write down the call number for every book of poetry. Exclude books by John Ashbery.

10. Retype these instructions. Do not correct any errors.

11. Write down the last line of each of the 11 poems you wrote following these instructions.

And here’s another example I wrote just recently. I went to Genius.com, which is a site that archives song lyrics for a huge range of popular songs. I put the phrase “We’re all” into the search engine, and then arranged the first 100 results I found (more or less) into a poem.

Here’s the first few lines

What Are We All?

We’re all sensitive people with so much to give

We’re all in the mood for a melody.

We’re all making love.

We’re all stars and we see that.

We’re all chemicals, vitamins, and minerals.

We’re all impressed by this.

We’re all in line for the throne.

We’re all back together and stuff.

We’re all the things that we do for fun.

We’re all chasin’ after all the same.

We’re all livin’ in the same shit sandwich.

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Lyrics sourced from genius.com, artists in order are:

Marvin Gay

Billy Joel

BLACKPINK

High School Musical

Lupe Fiasco

Message Man

Lorde

Weezer

Lorde

Frank Ocean

Read the whole thing here!

There you go. We’re all writing poetry! Or compiling poetry anyway.

Why would you do this?

Again, some of you may be wondering, why would anyone want to do this? What’s the point of creativity without creativity? Why alphabetize the Bible? What’s wrong with you?

There are a few reasons to do this (or a few things wrong with me, depending on how you look at it.)

First of all, constraint-based poetry is fun. It’s a lot like a distraction game such as tetris, except when you’re done you have a collection of more or less entertaining word things rather than a score. Poetry doesn’t have to be a huge statement or a deep confession of inner truth; it can just be an enjoyable way to challenge yourself to make sense and/or nonsense out of the words and not words around you.

Second, constraints can push you to write more interesting, more adventurous, more satisfying poetry. Poetry is a form of language which is meant to be heightened, self-conscious, or special. Constraints—rhyme, oulipo, collaborating with genius.com—is a way to get yourself into a space where you’re paying attention to language in new or odd ways. You’re counting syllables, or looking for words with only the letter e, or trying to alphabetize one, two, three. That’s poetry.

Finally, I think algorithmic and uncreative poetry feels meaningful right now—especially perhaps if you’re using genius.com, or taking lines from your text messages, or from your spam folder. With the internet and now with AI, we’re all inundated with text all day every day, some of it interesting, some of it weird, some of it meant to confuse us or insult us or scam us. A lot of my experiments with algorithms and constraints is intended to talk back to what feels like an onslaught of voices, or to talk with them, or near them. I find that meaningful. I hope after reading this some of you will as well.

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Try it!

As I said, I just recently stumbled on the idea of using Genius.com to write poetry. The process is straightforward.

1. Come up with a favorite lyric.

2. Type a portion of that lyric into Genius.com’s search.

3. List the results, one lyric per line.

So, for example, I could start with the Jimi Hendrix lyric “Excuse me while I kiss the sky.” I’m going to try just the phrase, “Excuse me while” and see if that works.

Here’s a poem with the first ten results (more or less.)

You’re Excused

Excuse me while I kiss the sky.

Excuse me while I kill myself.

Excuse me while I break my own heart tonight.

Excuse me while I drink myself to death.

Excuse me while I find myself

Excuse me while I cry.

Excuse me while I count all these hundreds.

Excuse me while I bite my tongue.

Excuse me while I feel my nuts.

Excuse me while I sympathize.

Jimi Hendrix

Sentenced

Whiskeytown

Spent

Sentenced

Zeph

Kevin Abstract

Lil Uzi Vert

Reneé Rapp and Megan Thee Stallion

Eminem

Mike Shinoda

I guess you wouldn’t have to keep track of the original artists, but I’m a little obsessive, so I do.

Note that constraints don’t have to be a suicide pact. If you search a phrase and there aren’t enough examples to make a poem, just search something else, or shorten what you’re searching for. If there’s a lyric you don’t like because it seems boring or irritating, you can just skip over it.

Or you can decide you must skip nothing and write down everything in exact order. It’s up to you. One fo the things you discover as you work with uncreative writing is that you are actually left with a lot of creative decisions even when it seems like you should have eliminated them all. Words and language are tricky; they keep demanding that you think with them, or near them. That’s part of the meaning of poetry too.

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If you’ve made it this far…

…and want more poetry from me, you can find links to my books and chapbooks and poems and lots more here.

My most recent publication is from sider0xylon press; it’s a chapbook called “Summaries Are Positive On Some Level,” with text collaged from a bunch of debased bestsellers, including J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Hope some of your are inspired to check it out!

Dolly Parton, universally beloved singer, songwriter, and philanthropist, died earlier this month at the age of 80. Virtually everyone with a platform lined up to (rightfully) mourn her passing. Rap star Eminem shared a heartfelt message from Parton congratulating him on his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer praised her, as did Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.

And in his usual fashion, Donald Trump made Parton’s death all about him, musing that Parton, “really liked me.” But, he insisted, she “wasn’t a very political person.”

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Many people have weighed in to point out that Trump’s comments are nonsense. Parton was not apolitical. Nor could she be said to have “transcended politics” as the Washington Post claimed. On the contrary, and just for starters, she was a tireless and passionate advocate for LGBT people and a major donor behind development of the Moderna Covid vaccine. As writer Charlotte Clymer said on social media, “Parton’s art and life’s work were about interrogating power + amplifying the powerless.”

Clymer added, “You only think she wasn’t political because she did this by example, not bullshit slogans.” And while I think this is true in some sense, I don’t think it’s the whole story. Rather, what I would say is that Parton’s politics don’t register as politics because she was not partisan. She did not endorse candidates; she did not criticize presidents or political figures. Her political statements were couched in terms of universal acceptance and uplift for everyone. As a result, she called everyone—Democrats and Republicans and people who don’t care about Democrats or Republicans—to their better selves.

Parton is an important demonstration of why nonpartisan political engagement is valuable and powerful. But she also shows why it is very difficult to negotiate politics in a nonpartisan way—and why it is impossible for many people.

Dolly was amazing, and to understand why she was amazing we need to understand how she leveraged her identity and her commitment to politics in very specific ways. Those ways are unique and valuable. But I think we should also be careful not to toss partisanship aside altogether for everyone, as practice or as idea. Especially, and perhaps unfortunately, not right now.

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What’s the difference between politics and partisanship?

In common usage politics and partisanship are often treated as indistinguishable from each other. Politics is partisanship is elections and advocating for electoral victories. Politics is partisanship is the people who run for office and the people who support them. People who care about politics are partisan and vote, donate to candidates, run for office, and/or advocate for issues in a partisan electoral context by pushing Democrats and Republicans to pass or block legislation.

But, as Parton shows, partisanship is not in fact the entirety of political life. Politics can also involve advocating for issues and pushing for change in ways that don’t intersect directly with political parties or elections.

For example, in 2011, a lesbian visitor at Parton’s Dollywood theme park said an employee made her turn a marriage equality t-shirt she was wearing inside out. Parton quickly apologized and sent the woman a refund, stating that “Everyone knows of my personal support of the gay and lesbian community.” She reiterated that everyone was welcome at Dollywood.

This is obviously political; LGBT rights have been a major partisan issue in US politics for decades. But Parton’s stance wasn’t really partisan. She didn’t condemn Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter). She didn’t call for legislation. She made a statement about her own views and about the policy of her park and business. She was leading by example, not by electoral advocacy, and certainly not by anti-Republican talking points.

Parton’s philanthropy was also determinedly political but non-partisan. One of her biggest initiatives was the Imagination Library—an initiative founded in 1988 which provided free books to children. She also offered $500 to every 12-14 year old student in Sevier County, where she grew up, if they graduated high school. Drop-out rates dropped from 35% to 6%.

Parton’s most recent commitment was to fighting Covid. She rewrote the lyrics of her iconic song “Jolene” and sang, “vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, I’m begging of you, please don’t hesitate.” She did television spots filming herself getting the shot. “I’m old enough to get it and I’m smart enough to get it,” she said.

Vaccines are (not coincidentally!) an almost classic example of the crucial important of non-partisan politics. Public health requires mobilizing people in large numbers. It requires cultivating a commitment to the public good. It requires government action and it requires government propaganda—people need to understand that vaccines are trustworthy and they need to be disabused of disinformation and conspiratorial nonsense. All of that is highly political.

In this case, though, political ideally would not be partisan because vaccination requires the participation of everyone. You do not want a pro-vaccine party and an anti-vaccine party, because that means that suddenly you have millions of people whose partisan identity requires them not to get vaccines, which endangers their lives, the lives of their children, and everyone else’s lives as well. The fact that the right has turned public health from a political issue into a partisan issue is a public health disaster, which is killing children and will likely do untold harm for decades, or longer.

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Parton is nonpartisan in ways few could be

Parton’s non-partisan politics were aimed, specifically, at trying to encourage everyone, regardless of party, to protect themselves and their neighbors from a horrific pandemic. And she was uniquely positioned to make that argument for a range of reasons. First, she was a remarkable person, who did really seem to want to help and protect everyone. Second, though, her partisan identity markers allowed her to speak for virtue to communities whose partisan affiliations have unfortunately become increasingly fascist.

Parton grew up extremely poor in a rural white community. She became a star at a young age—she was performing on radio at age 10 and recorded her first single at 13—and remained a visible and beloved country music icon for the next 70 years. She kept connected to her Tennessee roots through philanthropy and through her songwriting even as she became a Hollywood star and recorded crossover material. Like few other figures in US culture, she belonged to the whole country even though (or because) she continued to belong specifically to the Smoky Mountains and to white (though never for her just white) rural America.

As a result of her background, her history, and her careful and passionate commitments to particular communities (very much including LGBT people), Parton was in a unique position to endorse political issues like LGBT acceptance, education for the poor, and vaccines in a non-partisan way which could reach people who, as partisans, opposed all those things.

We need partisanship too

Parton’s non-partisan politics are vital and incredibly important; there is no doubt (as just one example) that her vaccination advocacy saved the lives of many people from families who might have otherwise listened to asshole elected Republicans and refused vaccination.

However, understanding how Parton managed her non-partisan politics also, I think, makes it clear that not everyone is in a position to do what she did. That’s partly temperament. But it’s also about identity.

Beyoncé, for example, is a very different person than Dolly Parton in a whole range of ways. She does, however, contribute a good deal to philanthropic causes; she’s donated school supplies to low income districts and provided millions in mental health relief during the pandemic.
She’s also tried to reach out to country music audiences—not least by covering Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” with an assist from Dolly herself.

But the country music industry not very subtly snubbed her, and she is very much not seen as a bipartisan figure. That’s in part because she has not tried to be; she is friends with the Obamas and endorsed Kamala Harris. But it’s also because she’s a Black woman, who no doubt realizes that non partisanship is not really an approach that Republicans will let her choose.

Another example is Lady Gaga. Like Parton, Lady Gaga has made LGBT acceptance a core part of her public advocacy. Her Born This Way Foundation is committed to advancing the mental health of young people (a non partisan political goal!) and provides grants to LGBT orgs as well as other causes.

Like Beyoncé, though, Lady Gaga is a partisan figure who has endorsed Democratic politicians and has denounced Trump repeatedly. To some degree that is her own choice. But it’s also true that as an out queer woman, Gaga’s advocacy for LGBT people was always going to be perceived in a much more partisan context than Parton’s statements—even when that advocacy is framed around something as nonconfrontational as mental health help for young people.

This is not to take away from Parton’s accomplishments, which are, again, numerous and inspiring. But I think it’s important to realize that stepping outside partisanship is not possible for many people because many people’s identities are seen as partisan statements in and of themselves.

More, recognizing that for many people partisanship is inescapable helps to show why non-partisan political action—as powerful and admirable as it can be—cannot unfortunately be the only approach to politics in our present moment. As I’ve discussed before, non-partisan politics, or bipartisan politics in the US has often in the past meant a broad bipartisan agreement on white supremacy, in which (at least for white people) Black subjugation was viewed as a common sense measure, not to be seriously debated in elections or between the parties. In a country where the nonpartisan default has been white supremacy, creating an antifascist partisanship is an absolute necessary (though not sufficient) step towards equality and freedom for everyone. When Bad Bunny or Bruce Springsteen denounce Trump and Trump policies, they’re using their celebrity for partisan purposes, and that’s admirable and good.

Parton’s achievement, then, wasn’t in pursuing nonpartisan politics over partisan politics; simply refusing to be partisan is not a virtue in itself. Rather, the reason she did so much good is that she identified areas where her resources and her carefully cultivated position as a nonpartisan figure would allow her to advance particular causes—LGBT acceptance, children’s literacy, vaccine development, vaccine uptake—in a way few others could. That took decades of unwavering commitment, careful strategy, and moral commitment. Everyone can’t be Dolly, and I don’t think everyone should be Dolly. But everyone can be inspired by a public figure who figured out her path and used it to do so much good.

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As I have mentioned, I’m having a sale; it’s 40% off, $30/yr. If you value my writing, please consider coming on board!

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To encourage you I thought I’d share a few posts from my archive that you may have missed.

1. On Goebbels and how Nazi policies were not that popular…but killed millions anyway.

2. Success in dating is not linked to moral worth and we shouldn’t tell people it is.

3. One of my few paywalled pieces because I find it too embarrassing to make public. But become a paying subscriber and witness my humiliation!

Hopefully you find pieces like this valuable. Help me continue to scribble them!

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Gusgus has just been told that the sale is ending soon, and he is startled! Don’t be startled like Gusgus! Become a supporter! Feed the kitty! Support my scribbling!

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Okay, this is what I published this week.

Politics

Trump endorsements don’t have the old juice. (Public Notice)

The white collar jobs crisis. (The I Paper)

Canada’s resistance benefits the US. (EIH)

Peter Gay and how not to be Weimar. (EIH)

Cultural criticism

Racial erasure in The Postman Always Rings Twice. (Splice Today)

The Wrong Girls is a slacker comedy gone wrong, & not in a good way. (Chicago Reader)

The Stupids is stupid about conspiracy theories. (EIH)

Watching ourselves watching Big Trouble In Little China. (EIH)

Outland vs. High Noon: quick draw duel. (EIH)

Poetry

Wistful interior. (Five Fleas)

I would like to go outside
but I am writing this poem.

Little bug poem. (Five Fleas)

chuuurrrrr chuuurrrrr cicadas say
they want to have sex
before they die

From the archive

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Track of the week

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The first big martial arts set piece in Big Trouble in Little China flagrantly doesn’t involve any of the film’s stars. Anglo trucker Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) and his Chinese-American friend Wang Chi (Dennis Dun), are trapped in an alley in Jack’s truck when they witness a huge martial arts fight between good-guy yellow headbands and bad guy red headband—a fight eventually disrupted by three flying magic fighters with preposterously wide-brimmed hats shooting blue lightning plus a seven foot tall intangible evil magician. Jack and Wang stare open-mouthed at the gun battle, the martial arts stunts, and the special effects, appreciating the spectacle along with the audience. You view the action along with the protagonists; it’s a movie in which the real heroism is watching movies.

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Big Trouble in Little China is a tribute to Hong Kong cinema, much like the previous year’s The Last Dragon. Where The Last Dragon celebrated the cross-cultural possibilities of black kids cheering on Bruce Lee, Big Trouble director John Carpenter treats the contact between West and East less as celebratory melting pot, and more as post-modern train wreck. Jack doesn’t learn how to be a martial arts master by watching martial arts masters; instead he’s locked in his own Western movie tropes, as Kurt Russell channels John Wayne for basically the entire film. When he and Wang set out to rescue a damsel in distress and/or Jack’s truck, Russell turns to those they’ve leaving behind and declares, “Okay. You people sit tight, hold the fort and keep the home fires burning. And if we’re not back by dawn” —and here he gives a knowing, cocky wink— “... call the president.”

The delirious joy of the film is both the mash-up of cowboy and martial arts tropes, and the way in which the movie nonchalantly shuffles back and forth between treating the heroes as heroes and treating them as cinemagoers ineptly pretending to be heroes. Wang and Jack wander through the plot to rescue Wang’s fiancé Miao Yin (Suzee Pai) from the nefarious demon ghost David Lo Pan (James Hong). Facing an array of martial arts experts and evil monsters, Wang and Jack’s fighting competence varies wildly from moment to moment. Sometimes they’re cinema stars; sometimes they’re just average joes who are cinema stars only in their dreams.

Early on, Wang bets Jack that he can cut a bottle in half with his knife; he fails ludicrously, and starts babbling about how his spirit and mind were not in alignment, while Jack looks on skeptically as if to say, “you’ve been watching too many martial arts movies, doofus.” But later (maybe because of a magic drink, but not necessarily) Wang displays miraculous martial arts abilities, leaping into the air to fight on the wing, doing multiple astonishing backflips, dodging bullets and wreaking carnage, pausing only to raise his eyebrows to declare, “yes, of course, I do this all the time.”

Jack’s combat prowess vacillates even more wildly. Mostly he’s comic relief; a helpless white guy trivially dispatched by even low-level martial arts functionaries. In his first fight scene he asks in bewilderment what nunchucks are before his legs are swept out from under him and he lands on his butt. He can’t even be a leading man right; after he kisses Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall), he runs around for ten minutes with her lipstick on his face until she wipes it off him. Before he throws himself into a melee, he shoots his gun in the air, dislodging a giant chunk of masonry, which lands on his head and knocks him out for most of the battle.

And then, in the climactic battle scene, he throws his trusty knife at David Lo Pan…and misses by a mile, hitting a giant Chinese gong. Lo Pan picks up the knife, and smugly hurls it back at Jack—who unexpectedly snatches it out of the air, throws it again, and kills the evil Chinese demon spirit dead, much to everyone’s surprise (especially Lo Pan’s.) “It’s all in the reflexes,” Jack explains with broad John Wayne nonchalance.

One of the film’s most memorable special effects is a giant bloated floating head critter with eyes on stalks around its face and even an eye on the end of its long, disgusting sinuous tongue. The monster is supposed to be a spy for Lo Pan, but it’s also a (multi-eyed) winking metaphor for the viewer, and for the film’s characters who are always self-consciously watching themselves. Jack constantly refers to himself in the third person, but everyone else in the cast also performs like they know they’re in a performance. Kim Cattrall plays Gracie Law like a pastiche of spunky heroines past, chin always up and exposition always breathless, while Dennis Dun’s Wang Chi is a pastiche of earnest sidekick. “I’ve got a very positive attitude about this,” he says jovially before a big fight. Earlier he proposes a toast: “Here’s to the Army and Navy and the battles they have won; here’s to America’s colors, the colors that never run.” To which Jack responds, “May the wings of liberty never lose a feather.”

American heroism in Big Trouble in Little China is mostly a pratfall and a joke, as for that matter is Chinese heroism. The film presents a cultural clash in which both cultures are mostly a put on; the John Wayne accent is no more real, and no more convincing, than the borrowed Bruce Lee poses. Like the one hapless villain in the denoument, all your heroic myths will swell and bloat up, shouting incoherently before exploding in a glorious shower of green gunk. “The best of two worlds!” Lo Pen declares with lascivious delight as he contemplates marrying both green-eyed heroines, one Chinese and one American. For Big Trouble in Little China, those worlds are best in part because they aren’t worlds at all, but movies.

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John Landis’ 1996 The Supidsis supposedly about a family of stupid suburbanites. It isn’t really, though. Instead, it’s about a family of suburban conspiracy theorists. The disconnect there renders the film largely inert. It doesn’t know what it’s about and doesn’t want to know what it’s about. As a result, it ends up spinning in nervous circles trying to avoid the implications of its own pallid gags.

The sort-of plot involves the Stupid family who are stupid (get it?) Suburban patriarch Stanley Stupid (Tom Arnold) believes that someone is stealing their garbage when they leave it on the stoop; he sets out to track down the culprit. His kids then think he’s disappeared; they leave a poorly written note which causes their mom Joan (Jessica Lundy) to think they’ve been kidnapped by the police.

That’s the way it goes throughout the movie. Sometimes the Stupids are stupid because they miss the obvious or fail to make obvious connections—as when a gas attendant tells Stanley that he’s got a hole in his gas tank and he replies that he knows because that’s where you put the gas in. But these vaudeville moments are by the way. The main driver of the plot is a different kind of stupid—a stupid where the Stupids construct elaborate conspiratorial explanations to explain why the garbage is being taken from their front lawn, or what happens to letters marked return to sender.

The Stupids, in other words, are conspiracy theorists. The thing about conspiracy theorists, though, is that they’re not stupid. Often, on the contrary, conspiracy theorists are too smart for their own good. They put a ton of thought and effort and even genius into researching and cogitating about their theories. But the theories are built on poor assumptions or just wrong information. Anti-vaxxers know a ton about vaccines and can engage in long, abstruse, complicated discussions about them. Their brains work fine; they just work on the wrong things.

Conspiracy theories can be funny because they’re so divorced from reality. But they’re not funny the way it’s funny to mistake the meaning of a hole in the gas tank. They’re funny in a more nervous, bleaker way, because passionately losing touch with reality can lead to real violence and real cruelty. If you think that nice museum curator is a threat to the world and only you know, what will you do to him? Now, more than ever, when we’re ruled by conspiracy theorists, it’s clear that this is not an idle question.

It’s not a question The Stupids wants to have anything to do with, though. Hatching elaborate plots to identify and track down enemies of the people is treated as equivalent to forgetting your car keys. The joke is “look how stupid they are” over and over. They made a mistake, ha ha.

The best moments in the film, not coincidentally, are when the movie toys with the idea that the Stupids aren’t just harmless dopes, but maybe possibly are something a little darker. Stanley disguises himself as a bush and becomes drunk with the potential power of being a man-bush; his son Buster (Bug Hall) thinks he’s traveled back in time to the prehistoric age and writes his name on the wall boasting about how he’ll be the most famous and mysterious person in history. Those gags flirt with the way conspiracy theories and megalomania are one and the same; to think you are the one true knower is a desperate and often menacing empowerment fantasy.

In that vein, the real highlight of the movie is a sort-of fantasy sequence where Christopher Lee as a devilish supervillain explains his evil scheme for stealing garbage and destroying mail using killer bees. Or something like that; the details matter less than Christopher Lee swaggering around and cackling while tossing invitations into the fire and exclaiming, “I guess no one will go to that wedding!”

Lee is funny and ridiculous and flamboyant. But he’s also Christopher Lee, which means that even with the funny ridiculous flamboyance there’s an undertone of actual menace and actual meanness. He wants to ruin weddings; he wants to prevent lovers from meeting. His elaborate plots make no sense, but that doesn’t mean they just effervesce. The nonsense is twisted into a hook with a barb.

Landis doesn’t want his main characters to have that kind of barb. But he’s made them conspiracy theorists. The only way to resolve the contradiction is to drain them of all individuality. The Stupids are all blandly, happily airheaded, with no individual quirks or interests. They don’t argue or even really have discussions not because they’re stupid, but because they have no personalities.

A movie determined to avoid thinking about its own topic, themes, and characters is not going to be a good movie—not even a good funny movie, not even a good stupid movie. Landis wanted to make a light distraction but stumbled into material with some weight. Watching him back away from what he’s done for 90 minutes is a tedious exercise.

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Peter Gay’s classic 1968 study Weimar Culture: The Outsider As Insider is, as you’d expect of a story about victorious fascism, a bleak read. But its very bleakness feels, in our current nightmare, at least a bit hopeful. We are facing some of the same dangers as Weimar did, and we have made some of the same mistakes. But we also have resources that Weimar didn’t.

Weimar Culture, then, is in some ways a warning. But it’s also hopeful, in that some of the things it warns against are pitfalls we have avoided—or at least, pitfalls we can see our way around from here, though the steering is, at best, likely to be rocky.

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Coups then, coups now

Before we get to the potentially good news, though, we should grapple with the bad. Gay points to several failures that led to the collapse of Weimar, and they all sound chillingly familiar.

The first and perhaps most important mistake of the defenders of Weimar’s Parliamentary democracy was their treatment of the forces of reaction—a treatment that Gay characterizes as “suicidally indulgent.”

The German Empire’s collapse after World War I was chaotic and frightening. The organizers of the Weimar Republic were desperate to legitimate their rule and quickly stabilize the nation. Towards that goal, they negotiated with the army and with elements of the old regime, leaving broad numbers of the old guard in their positions in hopes that the prestige of the past would prop up the fledgling democracy.

The problem was that the holdovers remained in most cases implacable enemies of the newfangled democratic system, and pined for a return of autocracy, oligarchy and empire. This was the opposite of stabilizing. As Gay writes, the judges, prosecutors, and juries “had little pity for accused Communists but suave forbearance for ex-officers.” Violence by the left was treated with brutal severity by the courts, while violence by the right was coddled and all but encouraged. As Gay writes:

between 1918 and 1922, assassinations traced to left-wing elements numbered twenty-two; of these, seventeen were rigorously punished, ten with the death penalty. Right-wing extremists, on the other hand, found the courts sympathetic: of the 354 murders committed by them, only one was rigorously punished, and not even that by the death penalty. The average prison sentences handed out to these political murderers reflect the same bias: fifteen years for the left, four months for the right.

The most notorious, and most consequential, example of this right-wing bias was the treatment of Hitler. After his attempted putsch in 1923, Hitler was allowed to use the trial for propaganda purposes, loudly denouncing the government from the courtroom in a way designed to raise his profile and encourage his followers. He was eventually sentenced to only five years of easy detention; he was released after less than 12 months. The court also declined to deport him, as they should have by law since he was an Austrian.

The parallel here with Trump is hard to miss. The Weimar government refused to hold Hitler accountable for his coup; just so did Merrick Garland slow-walk Trump’s prosecution. The motivations were perhaps different—Weimar courts were themselves rightist, while Garland was afraid of looking partisan or provoking a backlash. But whatever the reasons, the results were the same. The government colluded in protecting fascist plotters, allowing them to regroup and smash the state which had coddled them.

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Disarray back then…

The fascists and the reactionaries were determined and relentless in their efforts to bring Weimar democracy down. In contrast, Weimar’s defenders (or potential defenders) were disorganized and half-hearted.

The socialist workers parties were hopelessly divided between a Spartacist Stalinist far left which wanted to make Germany a Soviet Republic and a centrist wing that hoped to establish Parliamentary democracy. The feud between them was bitter and often violent. Per Gay:

Spartacists and moderate Socialists fought in Berlin and in the provinces, in politicians’ meetings and in the streets, in workers’ councils and at funerals for victims of right-wing thugs. There were many harsh words, words never forgotten or forgiven, and words were not all. Everyone was armed, everyone was irritable and unwilling to accept frustration, many had been trained and remained ready to kill, the widespread disorder encouraged irrational mass action and offered protective cover to political adventurers.

Centrists accused leftists of being Stalinist stooges; leftists accused centrists of selling their leaders out to rightwing assassins. On both sides, those accusations had enough truth to make unifying against the fascists virtually impossible.

Coordination was one problem; a related, and perhaps bigger one was the fact that virtually no one was passionately committed to Weimar as Weimar. The reactionaries had an inspiring dream of past glories and bloodshed. The left had a dream of social transformation and (at least to the considerable extent it was Stalinized) bloodshed. In the middle, Gay argues, Weimar’s strongest supporters were “rational republicans” who thought Parliamentary democracy wasn’t perfect or inspiring, but believed it was the least bad option. These rational republicans, Gay says,

acknowledged that nostalgia for the Empire was ridiculous, but they could not see that the Republic might deserve wholehearted support—or, rather, that it might become deserving if enough deserving persons supported it.

Gay himself is drawn to this vision of wholehearted rational decency, even as he acknowledges that this kind of passionless institutionalism is ill-designed to ignite the emotions that are required to defeat determined and vicious foes. Fascists claim that democracy is too vacillating and bloodless to survive. Gay doesn’t agree. But he doesn’t have a vision of unvacillating, unbloodless democracy to offer instead.

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Maybe less disarray now?

Gay’s book does hint at a path to a more passionate democratic commitment, even if he doesn’t make the connections himself. The key is in the subtitle to his book: “The Outsider As Insider.”

Gay does not, surprisingly, explore that idea in great detail. But he does note that Weimar was a time when people normally excluded from society—Jews, avant-garde artists, and queer people— gained standing and status as culture workers, bureaucrats, and voters. Weimar was not a Jewish Republic, he argues, but it was a Republic in which Jews and gentiles worked together for common goals.

For the Nazis, obviously, this coexistence was anathema. The fact that Jews, queer people, women, and intellectuals could gain acceptance and even authority under Weimar was an attack on natural Christian Aryan hegemony, and fueled a passionate nationalistic hatred. Hitler insisted, with the force of long prejudice and violent status anxiety, that Jews should not replace Germans. And against that Weimar quietly insisted that Jews were just like us anyway and why shouldn’t they be? The energized advocacy for Jewish people as part of a liberal state does not seem, in Gay’s telling, to have been part of the intellectual landscape of Weimar. Germany did not have a Dreyfuss Affair; diversity and multi-racial democracy were abstractions, rather than commitments around which deeply felt German identity could coalesce.

In contrast, the US does have a long tradition of enthusiastic commitment to multi-racial democracy and equality, located most obviously in the long, ongoing Black freedom struggle. Obama’s election in 2008 was a movement for, and celebration of, a dream of multiracial democracy. The George Floyd demonstrations in 2020 brought millions of people into the streets to demand justice and racial equality. The 2022 Democratic overperformance was powered in large part by voters’ deeply held commitment to women’s bodily autonomy. Anti-ICE direct action in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities has been built on antiracist solidarity with immigrant neighbors.

In Weimar, in Gay’s telling, outsiders became insiders through a kind of accident rather than out of determined ideology. In the US, in contrast, we have seen again and again that multi-racial democracy, and a determined commitment to equal rights and equal justice for people deemed “outsiders,” has stymied and defeated the forces of fascism and reaction. Those victories have been difficult and they have not been decisive. But they weren’t accidents either.

Of course, the fascists and their allies would like you to think that 2020 was an overreach, that Minneapolis isn’t really meaningful, that what we need is dispassionate weighing of polls to defeat fascism, rather than those much-smeared “identity politics.” Don’t organize around or for marginalized people, we’re told. Don’t demand solidarity for outsiders in ways that make bigots uncomfortable. Be calm; be cautious. Don’t overdo it. Don’t be divisive.

But the lesson of Weimar, from reading Gay, is that the actual cause of division is not too much enthusiasm, but not enough.

You can see that in our own time too. Hakeem Jeffries is generally thought of as a centrist compromiser; he’s certainly not a leftist. But he’s been calling for radical blue state gerrymandering to defeat Trump and counter fascism. That’s because he, like most of the Democratic party, is invested in Black voting rights and power as a core expression of democracy and American identity.

Trump’s efforts, buttressed by the Supreme Court, to disenfranchise Black voters in the South is an attack on the republic which enrages both centrists and the left. The particularist commitment to Black voters pulls the foes of fascism together. Part of the reason that the various lefts in Weimar couldn’t coordinate is because they did not prioritize the rights of Jews and queer people. Because they did not extend solidarity explicitly to the fascist most direct targets, they ended up not being able to extend solidarity to themselves.

Again, none of this means that multi-racial democracy is assured of victory. Multi-racial democracy has lost many times before, and there’s no guarantee it will triumph, short term or long. What it does mean, though, is that we should see commitment to civil rights struggles—to freedom and justice for outsiders explicitly—not as distractions which undermine victory, but as an absolutely crucial prerequisite for antifascist victory. If we win, it will be because we are trained in identity politics and in solidarity in a way that Weimar was not.

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Back on June 5 2025, Donald Trump had what is for him a typically grotesque exchange with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Merz was trying to encourage Trump to aid Ukraine. To make his case he pointed out that June 6, the next day, was the anniversary of D-Day. That was a moment when America fought against fascism. Trump, Merz suggested, should follow Roosevelt and Eisenhower, who took a stand against fascist Nazi invaders, and take a stand against fascist Russian invaders.

Trump, unsurprisingly, didn’t get the point. Instead—because he loves humiliating his interlocutors—he fixated on what he saw as his interlocutor’s humiliation. “That [D-Day] was not a pleasant day for you?” he said with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Then he turned to the cameras and said, “This was not a great day.”

“Well,” Merz responded, “in the long run, Mr. President, this was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship.”

Merz’s point is very clear. Hitler was not the representative of the German people; Hitler was the oppressor of the German people. Like Pol Pot, or Stalin, or even King George III, Hitler seized power and used that power to torment and terrorize his own people—not least those of his own people who were Jewish, disabled, Roma, or leftists.

Germans today do not, and should not, see World War II as a loss for Germany and Germans. This is the case even though German influence and power was reduced after the war—even though Germany was divided and many of its people faced ongoing oppression under Communist rule. The war was horrible for people in Germany (and especially for Jewish Germans) in many ways. But Hitler’s defeat was not horrible. It was, as Merz says, liberation.

I’ve thought about Merz’s comments a lot in the last year. The application to the US is obvious, and yet in the public sphere it remains difficult to articulate, especially perhaps in foreign policy. Media, analysts, and the public in general are used to thinking of presidential victories—military and diplomatic—as the country’s. To the extent we are in conflict with other nations, we want to win, which means wanting the president to win. You don’t root for the president to fail because that is rooting for the country to fail.

That calculus was always dicey in cases where the US pursued unjust wars, from Vietnam to Iraq. But it is completely broken now that Trump is sending gestapo into the streets to murder his own people, denying disaster relief to blue states, and attempting to destroy our democracy. His administration is a war on Americans. And that means—as Merz understands—that when he is defeated abroad, or when he is resisted abroad, we benefit. We’ve seen that clearly in both Iran and Canada.

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Iran

Trump’s war with Iran has been a devastating failure. He launched a reckless and illegal attack without considering Iran’s most likely response (seizing the Strait of Hormuz) and without any effort to bring foreign allies, partisan opponents, or the US public on board.

Most discussions of Trump’s loss have, understandably, focused on the ugly long-term consequences for the US and the world. Around 20% of the world’s oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz. Now that Iran controls the waterway, it can push up prices at will, creating global oil shocks around the world. The US has been affected as gas prices soar, but nations like China, South Sudan, and Mauritania have been even more painfully hit and have had to institute rationing.

Iran’s control of the Strait, if it persists longterm, also allows the regime to charge tolls. An enriched and empowered Iran could threaten its neighbors and certainly would tighten its grip on its own people, who live under a brutal and misogynist theocracy.

These are all terrible outcomes. But I think there is a strong case that a Trump win would have been even worse. Successful military action, we know, leads Trump to want more and bigger military action. He loved the rush of victory he got when special forces kidnapped Venezuela’s authoritarian dictator Nicolas Maduro. That “win” led him to turn his eyes to Iran.

And if Trump had in fact forced Iran to buckle quickly, what then? We know Secretary of State Rubio wants to overthrow the government in Cuba. We know that Israel’s genocidal Prime Minister Netanyahu has been trying to seize portions of Lebanon, and would probably take the whole country, and more, if he could. Trump has also threatened to invade Greenland and Canada. Every military victory creates the conditions for more ambitious and more reckless military adventures—military adventures which put innocent people at risk, definitely abroad, but also at home.

Germans did not benefit when Hitler conquered other territories; his victories just meant their own oppression was screwed tighter and was destined to last longer. His military defeats, on the other hand—even at the hands of the despicable Stalinist Soviet Union—meant that the day of liberation was brought closer. We are in a similar situation. Ideally, Trump would stop his senseless and grotesque wars. But if he pursues them, we all benefit when he is resisted—even when the resistance comes from other grotesque regimes like Iran.

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Canada

Trump has not attacked Canada militarily. But he has started a trade war which is likely to cause extreme pain for both the US and our northern neighbor. The US has put 50% tariffs on $20 billion of Canadian imports; Canada’s Prime Minister, Marc Carney retaliated with 50% tariffs on $20 billion in US goods.

A proposed deal to avoid the trade war disintegrated this week for a number of reasons. But a major one is that Trump demanded a sweeping veto power over Canada’s trade deals with other countries. Carney correctly identified this as an attack on his nation’s sovereignty. Trump has been saying for over a year that he wants to annex Canada and turn it into the 51^st state. He appears to have seen the trade deal as a step towards forcing Canada to submit to his authority, rather than as a mutually beneficial agreement between neighbors. “They asked too much and they offered too little,” Carney said of the US negotiators. “You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked.”

Again, the trade war will be painful. No one wants to pay more for goods; no one wants people on both sides of the border to lose their jobs. But Carney believes that knuckling under to Trump would put Canada at the mercy of an erratic dictatorial regime with no accountability to Canadians.

And Americans should support his decision, because the more people fold to Trump, the more Trump demands that others fold. If he can steamroll Canada and force them to bend the knee, that will encourage him to redouble his efforts to force blue states to bend the knee. The attack on Canada’s sovereignty is, after all, an extension of his efforts to erode US state sovereignty by, for example, withholding public safety grants to force blue states to allow federal election interference.

Trump believes that he is and should be the sole authority on earth for everything. Each victory encourages him to seize more, demand more, expand the limits of his power. In contrast, each defeat makes him look weaker and easier to defy. In this case, Canadian resistance will directly stiffen resistance in states with longtime ties to Canada, like Maine and Michigan—both of which, as it happens, are the site of major Senate elections.

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Resistance to Trump benefits America

Canada is a democracy which, whatever its flaws, is much less fascist than our regime. Iran is a vicious theocracy, and its empowerment is bad for its people and the world. In resisting Trump’s grotesque power grabs, though, they both reduce his power and make it harder for him to oppress his own people—just as Trump’s plummeting polls and weakening influence at home restricts his ability to bomb and bully people abroad.

Trump successes are not America’s successes. On the contrary, every Trump success allows him to tighten his grip on Americans—to steal from us, to terrorize us, to deny us rights to vote and to bodily autonomy, to imprison us and murder us. He is our enemy, and it is right and good to want him to lose. When he is defeated, it is not our defeat. It is, as Merz understood, a step towards liberation.

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Both Westerns and science-fiction can be relevant and up-to-the-minute because they’re dislocated in time. George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, and many other writers have found it easier to write about their current dystopias by projecting them into the future. By the same token, High Noon, released in 1952, was able to make its criticism of the Hollywood blacklist because that criticism was shoved back into an imaginary past.

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Space westerns, though, look forward and backward at the same time, which makes it hard for them to speak quite as pointedly to their own day. The 1981 film Outland is a case in point: it’s a movie with stylish futuristic special effects, a love of the Western genre, and a garbled, ambivalent relationship to its own Reagan/Thatcherite present.

Outland‘s director, Peter Hyams, originally conceived of the film as set in the old west. “I wanted to do a Western,” he explained in an Empire interview.

Everybody said, ‘You can’t do a Western; Westerns are dead; nobody will do a Western’. I remember thinking it was weird that this genre that had endured for so long was just gone. But then I woke up and came to the conclusion – obviously after other people – that it was actually alive and well, but in outer space. I wanted to make a film about the frontier. Not the wonder of it or the glamour of it: I wanted to do something about Dodge City and how hard life was.

Rather than being set in a town on the American frontier, Outland is set on the remote moon of Io, circling Jupiter, where Marshal William O’Niel (Sean Connery) has just been assigned as the chief police officer on the mining colony. The position is remote, difficult and miserable. O’Niel’s wife finds it unedurable,and leaves with their son to make a home back on earth. The miners themselves suffer from depression and isolation, and not infrequently kill themselves in dramatically gruesome ways. With the help of station doctor Marian Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), O’Niel discovers that the miners are being pushed into psychosis by a synthetic amphetamine supplied by station bigwig Mark Sheppard (Peter Boyle) to encourage productivity.

O’Niel disposes of Sheppard’s goons, but the chief sends for two hired killers who arrive on a shuttle. O’Niel tried to enlist aid from his deputies and other people on the station, but they all refuse. But he and Lazarus’ manage to kill the assassins, defeat Sheppard, and restore order and harmony before O’Niel leaves the station to be reunited with his wife.

That last bit of the plot, with the hired killers, is a direct lift from High Noon, one of the most critically acclaimed and popular Westerns of all time. As mentioned above, High Noon was seen at the time as a comment on the Hollywood blacklist, and the general moral collapse and abnegation of America in general and the film industry specifically. Writer Carl Foreman, a former member of the Communist party, refused to identify fellow members before Congress, and producer Stanley Kramer forced him to sell his partnership share in the film.

Gary Cooper as Marshall Will Kaine strides through the movie, his face lined with worry and betrayal, as his deputy, his neighbors, and even his wife abandon him, some out of personal animosity, some because they think his failure will advance their careers, some out of fear. He wins, because the good guy always wins in Hollywood, but rarely has a victory ever looked so much like defeat. He throws his star in the dust and rides out of town, as Foreman left for England, all too aware that the place he’s tried to save would rather fall to the jackals.

High Noon takes place in real time, as Kaine waits minute by minute for the vicious outlaw Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald) to arrive on the noon train; the movie’s 85 minutes tick by like the painful grinding of an accelerating wheel. Outland in contrast, doesn’t even start its clock till more than halfway through its 110 minutes; a lot of plot churns by before the goons set out for the moon on the space shuttle. O’Niel doesn’t spend most of the movie searching for aid in vain. He spends most of it investigating drug trafficking.

Drug use and trafficking were a major issue in 1981, when crime rates were rising and cocaine and crack were often blamed for the spike. So Hyams shoehorns the drug war into the place occupied by the blacklist in High Noon—with odd results. The blacklist was supported by the conservative government of the 1950s; High Noon is an indictment of that government’s moral weakness. In contrast, the conservative US and UK governments of the 1980s were rabidly anti-drug.

Hyams creates an alternative reality in which exploitive capitalists provide their workers with addictive substances to increase productivity. But in real life the exploitive capitalists used antidrug policy as a way to intimidate and police marginalized populations and the workforce. High Noon excoriated America for its reactionary failure to defend its values, including free speech. Outland excoriates America for—not cracking down on drugs enough at the height of the drug war? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

It doesn’t make much sense because it’s not necessarily supposed to make much sense. Hyams isn’t really focused on contemporary commentary. He’s focused on trying to get the feel of those old Westerns—and especially of High Noon. His science-fiction film is a nostalgic effort to recapture the grit, the despair, the isolation, and the hard-hitting political allegory of an earlier time.

An earlier time’s hard-hitting political allegory doesn’t necessarily speak to one’s own moment, though, and so ceases to be quite as hard-hitting. Science-fiction is well-known for its politically resonant dystopias, but it’s perhaps no accident that the best known space western, Star Wars, is politically incoherent (what else can you say about a film that nicks its happy ending’s iconography from Triumph of the Will?) High Noon is one of Hollywood’s great movies because despite being set in the past, or thanks to being set there, it always knows exactly what time it is. Outland, vacillating between yesterday and tomorrow far out among the stars, never quite figures out what it has to say to its own today.

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This first ran on Tor.com some years back.

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The sleepy pit bull is always a comfort.

Here’s what I published this week.

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Politics

The plight of the USS Lincoln shows Trump hates the troops. (Public Notice)

There’s no evidence El-Sayed is a bad GE candidate. (EIH)

Cultural criticism

Schindler’s List and gentile liberal Zionism. (EIH)

Hopkins’ poetry as an alternative to Christofascism. (EIH)

The Killers is almost a great noir…but gets distracted by patriarchy. (Splice Today)

The gentle erasure of grief in My Neighbor Totoro. (EIH)

An American Werewolf in London refuses to moralize. (EIH)

Poetry

Walking around outside poem. (Five Fleas)

electric city sounds
car alarm
cicadas

From the archive

Track of the week

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