Marty Embry—an American chef, a former professional basketball player, a Black man, and a Democrat—donned a MAGA hat and walked around in it for a week as a “quiet social experiment.” In the short essay he wrote about the experience (which has gone viral on Facebook and other social media) he says that the reaction to the hat “on both sides shook me to my core.”

But the reactions to the hate, by MAGA and not MAGA, are not surprising. For that reason, and others, Embry’s shock, and his glib moralizing, feel bizarrely divorced from our current reality and from the mechanics of fascism and hate.

Embry doesn’t really tell us anything new about MAGA or about MAGA’s targets, victims and opponents. He does demonstrate, though, the ways in which centrist both sidesing of fascism is based in a fundamental misunderstanding of what fascism is and of how it functions. Hate is not, primarily, an ineffable internal state that requires deep understanding. It’s what people wear on their heads more than what they feel in their hearts.

—

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Wear a bad hat, win bad prizes

Embry is clear throughout his essay that MAGA is a fascist, racist movement built on lies and led by a violent abuser. “The MAGA hat is not a neutral piece of clothing,” he says, with welcome clarity. “It carries the weight of family separations, of ‘very fine people on both sides,’ of voter suppression, of January 6th, of Project 2025.”

And yet, even as he notes that “very fine people on both sides” is a fascist dogwhistle, he rather helplessly defaults to the rhetoric of both sides being fine people.

Embry starts off by noting that MAGA voters and Trump fans were eager to welcome him when he wore the hat. He is very disturbed when one man calls him “brother.” Another tells him “’Blacks who get it’ are the most important people in the movement.” Though the man intended it as a “compliment,” Embry says, “I sat with it like a stone in my chest.”

Embry finds the welcome from the fascists painful. But he also is powerfully affected by the disdain from those in his own community. Black people who do not know him, and Black people who do, treat him like a tragedy and a traitor. “Black fathers that I have mentored kids alongside, men I respect deeply, were visibly cold. One pulled me aside and said quietly and directly: ‘What are you doing, man? You know what that hat means to our kids.’”

Embry acknowledges that this father was right about what the hat means; it represents a movement that wants to rob Black children of the right to vote, of the right to pursue the careers, of the right to exist safely in public. “[The Black father] wasn’t wrong. Not even a little,” Embry says. “But he didn’t ask me why either. And that assumption, even when it comes from love, from history, from real pain, is still an assumption.”

This is an especially odd passage because Embry has just told us that the man did in fact directly ask him why. The man walked up to him, and according to Embry, he said, “What are you doing, man?” He wasn’t rejecting Embry out of hand; he was calling him in, not calling him out. But somehow, this becomes for Embry an iconic example of the intolerant left—an incident on which to pin a right/left equivalence narrative. The problem in America, he concludes, is not fascism, but “The willingness on BOTH sides to stop seeing a person the moment they saw a symbol.”

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People are allowed to believe you when you tell them who you are

The fact that Embry’s story about the Black father so completely contradicts itself suggests that Embry went into his “social experiment” with some major preconceptions. Chief among those preconceptions, I think, was a powerful belief in his own innocence and his own distance from his own actions.

Embry assumes, in all his interactions, that his real self is not the self that puts on the MAGA hat. He is a Democrat, a good person, and not a fascist. He wears the hat as an experiment; he is not wearing it, he insists, for the same reason that everyone else is.

That’s part of why he has such sympathy for the people he meets who vote Republican but disavow Trump. He mentions an army veteran who hates Trump as an example of moral complexity: “He voted for Trump twice. Would likely do it again. But he had zero illusions about who the man was.” He also mentions a woman who says she can’t vote for someone who would raise taxes or take her guns, so she supports Trump—though she hates that she does so.

Embry concludes:

This is the piece the left often refuses to see. There is a significant portion of the Republican coalition that is not MAGA, does not worship Trump, cringes at his cruelties, but calculates that their policy interests are better served by staying inside a broken house than building a new one. You can disagree with that calculation. I do. But dismissing those people as fascists means you never understand them and you never get a chance to reach them.

To be a fascist, Embry believes, you have to “worship Trump”; you have to support everything he does, even, presumably, unto the White House ballroom. Only those who are utterly devoted in their hearts to his every burp and nap are truly in the club. It’s not enough to wear a hat, to donate to him, to vote for him, to work for him. Actions, ultimately, don’t matter, as long as you have a reservation in your heart.

That’s why Embry reports that the father asked him what he was doing and then insists that the man did not ask him what he was doing. His colleague was demanding that he account for his actions, but Embry believes he shouldn’t be judged on his actions, but on the purity of his heart—which he believes people should intuit, or at least assume.

But nothing works like that. Fascism isn’t a secret code written on your soul. It is a brutal pragmatic political program of hate, subjugation, and extermination. People sign onto that program not through some internal communication with the orange god, but by taking specific actions to align themselves with the program. This was the case in Hitler’s Germany too; there were many “yes, but” Nazis who (like Webern) disliked the extermination of Jews, but liked the idea of Germany conquering Europe. We refer to those people now as “Nazis”, because their reservations were irrelevant to their support of Hitler’s horrific imperial and genocidal projects.

When you wear a swastika, or a MAGA hat, you are publicly aligning yourself with a hate movement. You are telling Black people, and women, and Jewish people, and trans people, and Muslim people, and Arabs, and immigrants, that you believe in and want to work with the regime that is attempting to subjugate and/or exterminate them. And when you say that you are so aligned, people are allowed to believe you.

Indeed, people would be foolish not to believe you. If you say you’re a fascist, I’m not going to (for instance) tell you about the status or whereabouts of friends who are immigrants, friends who are pregnant, friends who are trans. Fascists are an active threat at the best of times, even when they don’t have the support of a massive state apparatus. Letting self-declared fascists into your community and your family puts you and those around you in danger. And putting on a MAGA hat is in fact declaring yourself a fascist, as surely as putting on a swastika armband.

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You are what you do

It’s very Protestant, and therefore very American, to believe that your actions and your moral state are largely divorced from one another. Judge us, Americans say, on our own sense of ourselves as good people, not on the bombs we drop, the atrocities we commit, or the apartheid we institute. Those are, after all, only transient works; why must you insist on attributing malice when, for all you know, I exterminated your people with great internal regret?

Embry of course was a somewhat special case; he wore a MAGA hat not because he supports Trump, but to better understand support for Trump And yet, he makes himself less special by insisting on generalizing his experience. People, he insists, shouldn’t judge people by what they do, but should assume good faith. But how is that different than saying that people shouldn’t judge Elon Musk for making a Nazi salute? Isn’t this ultimately just a way to blame people who express distaste for Nazis rather than blaming the Nazis themselves?

I don’t doubt Embry’s good intentions. But the point here is that intentions don’t count for much. He put on a MAGA hat, delighted fascists, horrified those who oppose fascism, and then wrote a piece shaming fascist opponents and apologizing for a bunch of fascists. I don’t think that makes him history’s greatest villain, but it does suggest that what you do makes you who you are, regardless of what you mean to do or what you think you’re doing. Embry decided to wear a fascist tool, and became—not entirely, but still—a tool of fascism. Especially in times like these, very often, for better or worse, we are who we pretend to be.

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Hey, so this month has been pretty grim in terms of new subscribers. That makes it harder for me to keep scribbling. So…if you value my writing, please consider becoming a subscriber? It will feed the cats also!

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Okay! Here’s what I published this week.

Politics

Todd Blanche is a fascist sycophant. (Public Notice)

Why Sam Moyn’s Gerontocracy in America is a bad book. (Washington Monthly)

Incompetence makes fascists more dangerous. (EIH)

Cultural criticism

Edward Said and neurodivergence. (EIH)

Kraken is a great monster creature feature. (Splice Today)

Samantha Fish’s new live blues album is great. (No Depression)

The Christophers and mediocre art by aging artists. (EIH)

Hokusai and natural disability. (EIH)

Why reading doesn’t make us human. (EIH)

A Dry White Season and white saviors. (EIH)

Poetry

A surreal stream of consciouness. (Shine Poetry)

Poem Beginning With a Line By Vasko Popa

One is the nail, another is pliers.
One is the ocean, another is a vast web of plastic.
One is the pliers, another is rust.
One hammers and hammers on the roof of a bat’s head.

The bat is shrieking until all the rust flakes off.
And at last there is no ocean, only the plastic
breathing and breathing in its smooth and pulsing tides.
The shark is caught in it. The shark with teeth like nails
that are not really like nails, but built out of
someone else’s petroleum, reflecting
someone else’s colors. Pull them out of the wood.
Steal them for yourself.

A poem appearing here for the first time!

Dada Bird Call

Tzara! Tzara!

From the archive

Track of the week

Read more

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—

In 1707, Mt. Fuji erupted for one of the last times in recorded history. The great Japanese artist Hokusai (1760-1849) included his own fanciful vision of the event in his first volume of 100 Views of Mount Fuji, published in 1834.

That image of chaos is (rightfully!) famous. Slightly less well known is the subsequent illustration, which shows the results of the blast. The eruption occurred not through the top of the mountain, but through the side, leaving a crater (called Hoeizan) behind. In all his drawings of the mountain, Hokusai never depicted this blemish—except once.

In the background, you see the familiar sweep of the mountain and its characteristic rough peak. But you also see, off to the side, the hump of Hoeizan, forming a kind of doubled head.

As often in the foreground of his images, Hokusai here depicts a group of people—in this case travelers chatting and joking. In particular, they appear to be laughing at one man on the lefthand page who suffers from a facial disfigurement; he has a massive growth obscuring his cheek and neck.

In his monograph Disability Aesthetics, critic Tobin Siebers argues that the depiction of disability (mental and physical) is central to the aesthetics of modern art. Perfect form and perfect health has for the last 150 years or so been perceived as kitsch. Portrayals of disability and imperfection, in contrast, are seen in modern art as a sign of individual and realistic vision.

For example, consider how Toulouse-Lautrec—who was disabled himself, and who was hugely influenced by Japanese prints—handles disability in his famous At The Moulin Rouge.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s legs were deformed, and as a result he was very short. He shows himself in the background of the scene next to a tall companion, emphasizing his difference. He is not the focal point of the picture though; that is the woman at the right, whose face, garish in the green light, is cropped off by the picture frame. The rest of the figures are mottled and posed so you can’t see them full on; the view is from behind a balcony which is itself cut off, giving the room an off-kilter sense of cramped wrongness.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s disability can be seen as a metaphor for the entire scene. Alternately, the air of decadence—the sex workers, the drinking, the intimations of lesbianism, the whole disreputable milieu—is one in which Toulouse-Lautrec’s body fits, or is accepted, as one sign of difference or otherness. The picture is “modern,” realistic, powerful, because it rejects an older notion of ordered composition, ordered sexuality, ordered bodies.

Hokusai is certainly a source for Toulouse-Lautrec’s dramatic cropping and for his idiosyncratic organization of space. I don’t think Hokusai uses disability as a modernist aesthetic in the same way, though. The image of the disfigured man isn’t defiantly imperfect, or even matter-of-fact in a realist imperfection.

The laughing bystanders suggest a sharp line between abled and disabled—and of course the sweeping landscape here is very distant (in various senses) from the sweaty interior of the Moulin Rouge. Hokusai does not show us a tumult of wrongness and difference hustled together in a valediction of (various meanings of) queerness. Disability in this view is simply one blot on the face of a great vista.

But of course it isn’t just one blot. It’s two. The mountain itself, with its odd hump, echoes and mirrors the man’s growth; disability is literally part of the landscape. And while most of the men in the foreground laugh and gesture at the human disability, there is one man, his back to us, his posture relaxed, who looks contemplatively at the mountain with its hump, appreciating nature’s perfect imperfection. Perhaps he is struck (as the viewer of the print is) by the way that even the mountain’s disfigurement is echoed in the humans who pass before it.

Throughout his art, Hokusai portrays Fuji as an unchanging symbol of immortality—a steady, silent presence in the background of humanity’s bustle and swirl. The Hoeizan images, though, and perhaps especially this second one, suggest that even the mountain itself can alter, its perfection worn down, or blown apart, by time and nature. Rather than a defiant celebration of wrongness, a la Toulouse-Lautrec, the image suggests that wrongness and rightness are part of the same landscape and the same sweeping, energetic, faultlessly lumpy line. If Fuji is disabled, then disability itself is a kind of perfection—a mountain that overlooks us all.

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Euzhan Palcy’s 1989 drama A Dry White Season is a painful film. In part because of its subject matter; racial injustice in 1970s South Africa is not a cheery topic. But it’s also because of the framing of the film, which, in a necessary but still disheartening bid for mainstream impact, focuses its attention and emotional energy on white people, white goodness, and white redemption.

The film is set in 1976 in South Africa during the Soweto protests in which schoolchildren demanded better education and were then shot and beaten by South African security forces. The main character Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland) is a former rugby star and secondary school history teacher who’s largely oblivious to the racist terrorism on which apartheid and South African society is built.

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He’s rudely awakened, however, when his gardener’s young son, Jonathan (Bekhithemba Mpofu) is beaten and killed by police. The gardener, Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona), asks for help, and is then himself murdered. Ben decides to seek justice at all costs, and aided by other whites of conscience played by A-list actors, as well as by some grateful black people, he gathers evidence and transmits it to the newspapers before being heroically martyred.

Director Palcy, a black woman from Martinique, was by all accounts passionately committed to the cause of dismantling apartheid, as system still in place when the film was released. She took risks in traveling to South Africa to research the film, and got major stars to participate, including Sutherland, Susan Sarandon, and in a striking coup, Marlon Brando, who came out of retirement to turn in a schtick-heavy performance as a noble lawyer speaking truth to the corrupt government.

Roger Ebert praised A Dry White Season for showing more of the experience of black people than had been common in South African message films up to that time. It’s true that the scenes of protest in Soweto, with children singing as the security forces stare them down, are vividly presented—a scene in which a girl begs the police to shoot her after they’ve killed her sister is almost unbearable. A man named Stanley (Zakes Mokae) functions as a sort of bitter conscience, escorting Ben to Soweto and popping up to utter pointed accusations at Ben’s Christmas party. Still, Ebert’s comparison mostly serves to underline how utterly uninterested in black people earlier films were. Black South Africans are in A Dry White Season, but considering the story is supposed to be about their plight, they hardly get much screen time.

Instead, the vast majority of the film’s thematic interest, is devoted to Ben, the white liberal experiencing a moral awakening. Ben’s a good guy; he gives Gordon money for Jonathan’s education, and is even-tempered and humane. At first he tells Gordon that there’s “nothing to be done” for his son, but as he recognizes the cruelty of the society in which he lives, he dares more and more. He alienates his wife, loses his job, and risks his own life as the white community closes ranks to declare him a traitor. He is, in short, a model for the audience, which, it is hoped, like him will see the pain and brutality on screen and be radicalized.

The audience is, insistently, figured as white—and mostly male. Sometimes films by women directors present stories that center on female protagonists, and/or on a female gaze. Belle, Bend It Like Beckham, Clueless, Bound, and Don’t Worry Darling, aren’t necessarily radical in form or intent. But their worlds aren’t default-centered on white guys either.

A Dry White Season presents no such alternate vision or alternate protagonists. Emily Ngubene (Thoko Nitshinga) should be the star of the film. She’s the one who loses her son and husband, and she’s the one who, with little except her courage and her fierce belief in justice, manages to move the white people in the film to make her husband’s death their cause. But Emily is hardly onscreen; we know almost nothing about her. Even her death at the hands of security forces while defending her children is told only in glimpses in flashback. Brando gets the important lines; it’s the white guy who understands how South Africa really works. “Justice and law, Mr. Du Toit, are often just... well they’re, I suppose they can be described as distant cousins. And here in South Africa, well, they’re simply not on speaking terms at all.” White people are profound. Emily, on the other hand, says little, and then she dies, mostly to spur Ben on to further sacrifice, and to his own much more fully-visualized and consequential end.

Palcy knew her options, and made her choices. Films by women directors, and especially by women directors of color, are difficult to fund, and often disappear quickly once released; the work of Rea Tajiri and Ngozi Onwurah, for example, are extremely difficult to track down. Palcy wanted to bring attention to the racism of South Africa, and so she had to acquiesce, and utilize, the racism of the United States and the film industry. She had to convince major white actors to appear in the film, which meant giving them large roles. She had to flatter white audiences and give them white saviors to identify with and embrace. She had to frame a black woman’s story as the emotional and spiritual journey of a white man.

Palcy’s film insists that injustice must be fought, truth is worth dying for, and that all human beings must be treated with dignity and compassion. It rejects the logic of “nothing to be done.” But to deliver those messages, the movie’s director had to kowtow to the prejudices and the limitations of an audience that could only hear a message couched in racist tropes and racist terms. South Africa has become less racist since 1989, and perhaps in some ways the United States has too, though the current administration is trying to reverse that. Tactical compromises are often necessary for progress, and you can’t condemn Palcy for doing what she needed to do to get her message across. But watching A Dry White Season now, its rhetoric of courage seems like a thin veneer over a deep institutional cowardice.

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This first ran on Splice Today some years back. Between then and now I read a discussion of A Dry White Season (which I can’t find now!) in which the critic argued it was not a white savior film because Ben is singular, while most white people are portrayed as racist and evil. The movie does not forgive white people en masse, but elevates one particular white guy for being better than his peers.

I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how white savior films work. White savior films are always about one exceptional white person (or about at most a few exceptional white people.) The goal of the films is generally to show white people in the audience that they can do better than their peers—and/or to assure them that, by identifying with a white savior, they are already better than their peers.

The problem with white savior films isn’t that they fail to condemn racism or prejudice. They often condemn racism and prejudice quite strongly. The problem is that they also reproduce prejudice by showing that only white people are worthy of narrative centrality and by suggesting that change must come—morally and pragmatically—through the transformation of the souls of oppressors, rather than though the organized power and resistance of those who are oppressed.

A Dry White Season is somewhat ambiguous in this regard, since Palcy is herself Black, and so her movie is, in itself, arguably, a form of Black resistance—just as you could argue that Spielberg’s gentile savior film Schindler’s List is complicated by the fact that the director is Jewish.

I certainly like A Dry White Season a lot more than Schindler’s List. But I think that both negotiate a white liberal Hollywood system by in large part capitulating to white liberal pieties which undercut the moral message, and the aesthetic power, of the films.

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Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a hackneyed and stagey two-hander in which a crotchety asshole first abuses and then is redeemed by a younger interlocutor. It is familiar and sentimental, with every twisty surprise falling into place with the dull thud of heartstrings being relentlessly pulled. If you needed confirmation that Soderbergh’s inspiration has burnt out, this is it—though there is, still, a lingering spark provided by the fact that the film is about an artist whose inspiration has burnt out.

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—

That artist is one Julian Sklar, played with maximum irascible ham by Ian McKellen. Sklar was an art star once, especially noted for a series of paintings featuring his then-lover Christopher. When Christopher left him, however, so did inspiration. He ceased to create for the last 20 or 30 years of his life; for income he eventually was reduced to appearing on a crappy television reality show where he insulted the art of young hopeful’s for laughs.

Julian’s venal, useless, and estranged children Sallie (Jessica Gunning) and Barnaby (James Corden) hope to make up for the shamble of their inheritance by hiring artist and sometime forger Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) to “finish” the remaining nine Christophers in their father’s style. They will then sneak them back into the attic where they have languished for years, and when they are discovered after his death, the family will be able to sell them for millions.

To advance the plot (in various senses), Lori takes a job as Julian’s assistant. Much of the film from there is the two of them talking, with Julian spiraling off into rhapsodies of self-regard interspersed with revelations of pained self-hatred while Lori responds with quietly dignified amusement, irritation, and/or hurt.

Part of the conceit is that Lori was herself inspired to paint by Julian, and she is essentially the foremost (unacknowledged) expert in the world on his work. The two share a knowledge of art and a sensibility that connects them and elevates them above the gross banality of Julian’s children. By appreciating and admiring their emotional journey, you the viewer join them in connoisseurship. The film is in part about how Lori and Julian grow by appreciating each other, but it’s also about how you, as the viewer, grow by appreciating both of them.

This is all itself incredibly stock, not least in the way in which the hoary tropes and the maudlin celebration of the life of the artist are meant to tantalize audience members with the idea that they are participating in high-art appreciation rather than middle-brow schlock. The film itself has little real interest in art—either visual or filmic. You see only brief glimpses of Sklar’s work (actually painted by talented mimic Barnaby Gorton) and even less of Lori’s—certainly not enough to appreciate it on its own merits outside of its narrative position. Nor is the movie shot with the verve or experimentation that Soderbergh sometimes brings to his films; the cinematography is neither scrappily inventive as in Schizopolis, nor visually arresting as in Solaris. It’s efficient and competent, and that’s pretty much it.

And yet, it’s hard to miss the way that the movie’s failures are (intentionally or otherwise) thematized. Soderbergh is much younger than Julian, and his career has been much more consistently lucrative. But it’s also true that his young insouciant promise has been, if not squandered, then at least diluted by his (lucrative) compromises with Hollywood and (especially) by his apparent lack of interest in quality control over his scripts or projects. As I mentioned when I did a series of Soderbergh retrospectives for Splice Today, the director seemed like he could have had a career like the Coen Brothers or Tarantino, where his movies became a genre in themselves. Instead, he’s made some good movies (including last year’s Black Bag) and some bad ones (like the recent Presence) never settling on any one style long enough to really make it his.

The musings in The Christophers about what art is fake and what is real and who is the real painter are all pretty banal; the art world’s been exploring that discussion for over a century at this point, and yes, Andy Warhol (insulted in a brief aside in the film) has more interesting things to say about it than Soderbergh does. The question of what art is good, and of how you can even tell when you’ve sold out your own genius, on the other hand, takes on a certain poignance when it appears in a movie directed by a guy who is, arguably, while you watch, selling out his own genius precisely by hectoring you with no particular insight about the virtues of art. Equating inspiration with love, and its disappearance with the end of romance, allows Soderbergh to neatly circumvent any consideration of the kinds of career decisions and artistic choices which might lead you, at the end of a storied career, to blithely invest your time and effort in a film which lies about art-making in ways that you have to know are tedious and clichéd.

All of which is to say, The Christophers isn’t good, and it certainly isn’t so bad it’s good. But if you’re a Soderbergh completist, you might be somewhat diverted by a film that is arguably about the director’s failure to make a better movie—and about his failure to grapple with the better movies he could have made, and maybe still could if he wanted to. Which, this film indicates, he does not.

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Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein often points out that Trump is extremely bad at presidenting.

This week, as an example, Bernstein highlighted Trump’s effort to charge employers a $100,000 tax when they try to hire immigrant workers for specialized roles. A federal judge ruled against him.

“Most presidents do not want a reputation of being easily defeated, so they don’t bull ahead with this kind of thing,” Bernstein writes. But, he adds, “There’s real cumulative damage to the rule of law *even if* Trump is defeated…Trump is a losing loser who loses…but the nation as a whole winds up severely damaged.”

I think Bernstein’s insights speak to a discussion which pops up in fits and starts around Trump—namely, is it better to have a competent fascist in power or an incompetent one?

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Incompetence bad

The argument that you’d prefer an incompetent fascist is pretty straightforward. Fascists want to do bad things. They want to silence, subjugate, imprison, torture, and exterminate political enemies and marginalized people. They want to enrich themselves with widespread corruption. They want to go to war to expand the sphere of their subjugating and exterminating.

Given those goals, you would rather have someone in power who was bad at achieving their goals. A fascist who is a brilliant strategist and efficient administrator would be able to do more mass murder and conquest. A bumbling fascist who constantly overreaches and loses, like Trump, will in theory be worse at achieving his goals of mass murder, subjugation, and violence. Given the choice, therefore, you should choose the bumbling fascist. Right?

Well, not necessarily right, as it turns out. Trump has been an object lesson in why incompetence can multiply the horrors of fascism and authoritarian rule rather than mitigating them.

The most obvious example here is Covid. When there is a natural disaster, you want there to be someone in charge who will at least make a good faith effort to respond to the natural disaster by trying to prevent huge numbers of people from being killed.

Trump, of course, mostly tried to pretend Covid wasn’t happening as long as possible. One early estimate suggested that if Trump had responded more like his peers in other Western democracy, some 100,000 American lives could have been saved. Global pandemic response also pre-Trump was predicated on the idea that the US would be a global leader, rather than a giant fascist barrier; it’s likely that the pandemic would have been much less destructive around the world if we had not elected a fucking fool to rule us.

But Covid is really only the beginning. Crisis response is part of presidenting. But another crucial part, as Bernstein notes, is canny assessment of risks and rewards.

A good president would know, for example, that staging a violent coup in the capital and attempting to murder the vice-president was unlikely to be successful. A good president would know that invading Iran without any preparation or rationale or effort to build public support could lead to extremely bad outcomes. A good president would know that bizarre vanity White House construction projects would be very unpopular. A good president wouldn’t just let Elon Musk make whatever decision he felt like about government funding. And so forth

But Trump is a bad president. He knows nothing and refuses to know anything. He is a giant orange globular bolus of entitlement and id. As a moral choice, he always believes that whatever he wants should be and is, and that he will be applauded for bringing it about. Other people either agree with him or else are traitors and demons deliberately thwarting his righteous progress. And so he barrels ahead with the coup, or the war, or the ballroom, insisting “it will all work out in the end” —because he simply refuses to imagine that he could ever be thwarted in any way.

The coup and the war and the ballroom all damaged Trump badly. But they also damaged the Constitution, the country, and the world. Trump’s failed coup lost him the Senate and turned the nation against him for a while. But it also led to a Republican party that is ready to double down, seemingly infinitely, on election denial and anti-democratic bullshit. The war in Iran has destroyed Trump’s popularity and the Republican brand—but it also led to the horrific murders of Iranian schoolchildren and to an apparently endless global energy and trade crisis. Elon Musk’s actions were an embarrassment that damaged Trump’s credibility in numerous ways—but that’s not much comfort to the 14 million people expected to die from malnutrition and preventable diseases thanks to the shuttering of US AID.

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Don’t be afraid to get rid of him

One way this argument about competent fascists vs. the other kind still comes up is in discussions of impeachment. If Trump is actually removed, we would of course be faced with a president J.D. Vance.

Vance is a fool and quite incompetent in his own way. But he also seems more focused on fascist goals as fascist goals and less likely, at least, to fall asleep in meetings. You could argue that he would work towards certain evil outcomes—abortion and trans criminalization for example—with the greater fervor of a true believer.

I think Vance is an extremely dangerous figure, and he would be a horrifically awful president. But I also think he’s shown an ability to take in new information and to try to navigate other’s politics in a way that suggests he has a theory of mind that Trump just doesn’t seem to possess.

The most obvious example here is Vance’s decision to embrace Trumpism after his initial Trump skepticism. Initially Vance thought Trump was an evil ignorant clown. He was right! But then Trump won the presidency, and Vance figured out that licking Trump boot was the best way to advance his career. He was, unfortunately, right about that as well.

This does not make Vance a moral human being or a good human being. It makes him the opposite of those things; he’s a craven Nazi bigot. But it does at least suggest that he is able to figure out which way the wind is blowing, and that he attempts to adapt his views and his approach based on what is possible and what other’s thingk, rather than simply blundering forward.

If Trump is somehow removed from office by the Senate, Trumpism is going to be extremely unpopular to put it mildly. I think Vance will still try to do as much evil as he can—but he will probably be able to figure out that mass arrests of partisan enemies would, in such a situation, damage his popularity and isolate him. Whereas, whether Trump will recognize that that is the case after he loses the midterms is anyone’s guess.

This is not to say that Trump is the worst possible president, and that his Republican successors will all be better. The US is on a very ugly trajectory, and I think it is quite possible that we get a worse president that Trump absent real, sweeping transformations of our government and society.

But I think in opposing Trumpism, it’s important to understand why Trump is such a uniquely terrible president. It’s not despite his incompetence; it’s because of it. His incompetence—his ignorance, his refusal to learn in office, his contempt for allies and enemies alike, his blundering certainty that he knows best and that all his decisions are perfect—is inseparable from his evil. His evil is manifested, in fact, in his enthusiastic embrace of an ethos of incompetence.

Unfortunately, there are some who find that ethos appealing. There is an anti-establishment fandom for candidates who lack conventional credentials, who behave in unconventional ways, who demonstrate that they don’t know what they are talking about and don’t care. Certain people (especially on the right, but not just on the right) believe that maybe being bad at the job of presidenting is good.

But it is not. Trump’s failure at his job is a moral failure, as is his fascism. Indeed, they are, in him, the same moral failure. We must reject both.

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The title of Edward Said’s 1999 memoir, Out of Place, refers, most obviously and most directly, to his Palestinian heritage and to the history of Zionist, colonialist dispossession which shaped him and his scholarship. To a contemporary reader, though, and perhaps especially to a neurodivergent one, it’s hard to read the memoir without concluding that Said’s displacement involved, not just ethnicity and race, but disability.

Said did not identify or recognize his own neurodivergence, and (as far as I’ve been able to find) no other scholars seem to have discussed it either. But that only makes the pretty obvious markers of autism in his memoir more poignant, and at many points more harrowing.

Said was one of the greatest, most penetrating cultural critics in history, and he devoted much of his work to analyzing the intellectual tools with which the West dispossessed Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians of their land, their rights, their heritage, their stories, and their humanity. He wrote out of a powerful belief that to right wrongs, you must first name and understand them. But his memoir makes it clear that he was never himself able to name or understand certain aspects of his own marginalization and of his own dispossession and abuse.

This does not make Said’s achievement less. On the contrary, I hope that discussing Said’s autism can help make that achievement clearer, and perhaps in a small way help to expand it.

“Some deep flaw in my being”

Again, in his memoir Said explains his sense of displacement in part through his unique family background. His parents were Protestant Christian Palestinian Arabs living and working primarily in Egypt; his wealthy father also had American citizenship. He grew up equally fluent in Arabic and English. These criss-crossing identities and allegiances left Said feeling removed from his peers and his milieu—and ever moreso in his tweens and later as Israel became established and cut his family off from his relatives and from his homeland.

But while Said highlights these factors, he also says, with ambivalence and confusion, that they do not seem to entirely account for his own sense of displacement. The opening of the memoir is typical in the way it emphasizes his alienation not from his nation or country or people, but from his own parents and siblings.

All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in with the world of my parents and four sisters. Whether this was because I constantly misread my part or because of some deep flaw in my being I could not tell for most of my early life. Sometimes I was intransigent, and proud of it. At other times I seemed to myself to be nearly devoid of any character at all, timid, uncertain, without will. Yet the overriding sensation I had was of always being out of place.

Said returns again and again, obsessively, to this “deep flaw in [his] being”—the sense of failing to perform his self correctly for his family, for his peers, for his teachers. He struggles to articulate what that flaw was or what it means, but its presence is the inescapable, painful defining fact of his life—an unspeakable, unseeable wound.

There is a great deal of evidence that that wound is neurodivergence or autism. Some of this evidence is straightforward. Said laments his poor posture and his insomnia—both very common among neurodivergent people. He also mentions in passing that he is extremely averse to looking in people’s eyes.

To be looked at directly, and to return the gaze, was most difficult for me…. When I began to teach as a graduate student in the late fifties I found it imperative to take off my glasses in order to turn the class into a blur that I couldn’t see. And to this day I find it unbearably difficult to look at myself on television, or even read about myself.

Other indications are perhaps less clear cut, but they take on an inexorable weight over the course of the memoir. Chief among these are Said’s special interests—areas of fascination which constantly distract him from his studies and his supposed social duties.

My ability to appear to be studying, reading, or practicing the piano and at the same time to be thinking about something completely different and completely mine… was one of the features of my life that irritated teachers and parents but impressed me.

Some of the things Said thought about, privately, where no one could see, were various, goofy—and often, for those familiar with neurodivergence, recognizable. While he was irritated and bored with his piano lessons, for example, he was increasingly fascinated and obsessed with classical music, listening to his few recordings over and over and scouring newspapers, printed matter and his one dog-eared encyclopedia for hints about the backgrounds and history of conductors and opera stars. just

Similarly, a book of Greek myths set Said off on a years-long fugue of private Greek myth fan fiction.

I thought about them when they were not killing lions or monsters. I released them for a life of easy grace free of obnoxious teachers and hectoring parents, Perseus talking with Jason on some airy patio about what it was like to see Medusa in his shield, Jason telling Perseus about the pleasures of Colchis, the two of them marveling at Hercules’ killing of the serpents in his cradle.

Said even turned his own isolation into opportunities for fantasy. He had few friends and rarely visited other’s houses; that led him, he said, to “One of my earliest and most long-lasting passions”— daydreams about how other people’s houses were organized, including meticulous speculation about what they kept in their drawers, how their night tables were arranged, what was on their bookshelves.

This inner life, for Said, was interdicted; he knew he was not supposed to express it or acknowledge it. He had to hide it—or, in neurodivergent terms, he had to mask. He describes this process with merciless clarity.

I began to notice the almost absolute separation that existed between my surface life at school and the complicated but mostly inarticulate inner life I cherished and lived through the emotions and sensations I derived from music, books, and memories intertwined with fantasies. It was as if the integration and liberty I needed between my selves would have to be endlessly postponed, although I subliminally retained the belief that one day they would somehow be integrated.

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“Remember what Miss Clark said”

Perhaps the most convincing testimony to Said’s neurodivergence, though, is the way in which he is treated by others. His family, his teachers, and his peers all subject him to grinding, relentless, emotional and physical abuse.

In Said’s milieu (as in ours, unfortunately) corporal punishment—that is, physical abuse of children—was standard and accepted. That doesn’t change the fact that Said was beaten by both his father and his teachers specifically for neurodivergent sins—failure to focus, failure to observe social cues, failure to fit in. Said notes that his father’s physical attacks in particular “instilled a deep sense of generalized fear in me, which I have spent most of my life trying to overcome.” In other words, his PTSD lasted into adulthood and even into old age.

The physical abuse lasted into adulthood too. Said notes that his father had a “near obsession” with his posture, and that the elder Said was still attempting to straighten his son’s back in 1957, when Edward had just graduated from Princeton. Said writes that his father took him

to a brace and corset maker in New York in order to buy me a harness to wear underneath my shirt. What distresses me about the experience is that at age twenty-one I uncomplainingly let my father feel entitled to truss me up like a naughty child whose bad posture symbolized some objectionable character trait that required scientific punishment.

This was of course framed as an issue of health and correction. But it is also a literally corporal punishment for neurodivergence, which sparked in Said traumatized feelings of guilt, humiliation, self-recrimination, and regression.

Physical abuse was accompanied, as you’d expect, by emotional abuse. Said was very close to his mother, but he feels that she often used that closeness as an emotional lever to isolate or manipulate him. Much of that manipulation involved her telling him, over and over, in various ways that he was broken, wrong, and inadequate.

One particularly ugly example involved a middle-school teacher named Miss Clark. Clark watched Said during a field trip and noticed that he was distracted and inattentive. On the class return, she singled him out (to his complete and utter surprise), lambasting him mercilessly: “I have never seen anyone so unable to concentrate, so inconsiderate, so careless and sloppy.” Said, still obviously stung decades later as an adult, sums up the incident:

The power of what Miss Clark said about me was that it collected all the negative and critical comments that had loosely surrounded me at home and at [school], and concentrated the whole lot into one unpleasant steel container, into which I was placed, like Jell-O poured into a mold.

Miss Clark also contacted Said’s parents. They did not defend their child. Instead, they embraced her view of him, not just in the moment, but for all time.

What exactly was said about me I never knew, but it resonated in my mother’s speeches to me for years and years. “Remember what Miss Clark said” was the refrain used to explain both my lack of proper focus and concentration and my chronic inability to do the right thing. So in effect Miss Clark’s awful opinion of me was prolonged and given additional reach by my mother. It never occurred to me to ask my mother why she allied herself so unskeptically with someone who seemed to be moved not by pedagogical but by sadistic, instinctual imperatives.

One plausible reason for his mother embracing Miss Clark’s perspective is that she felt it codified and weaponized her own amorphous but deeply felt ableism. Said’s parents, like his teachers, saw that he was different, and that difference presented itself to them as inadequacy, immorality, perversion, failure. They were angry and disgusted by Said’s neurodivergence, and they wanted him to know they were angry and disgusted, perhaps to correct him, perhaps to distance themselves from him and position themselves as superior to him. They were keeping their autistic son in his place in that Jell-O mold—a place that he knew was not his, but that he could not ever fully escape.

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“I began a lifelong struggle”

Said’s memoir is not (solely) an indictment of his parents. He is careful to acknowledge their support and influence, financial and emotional, even as he expresses bewilderment as to why that support was mixed with such vicious, sustained cruelty.

Recognizing Said’s autism can’t of course explain his parent’s behavior. But it does put it into a more coherent context. Neurodivergent children are often misunderstood by their families; they are often bullied by peers, teachers, and students alike. Said’s description of his encounter with Miss Clark—the way that her hatred and cruelty seemed to come out of the blue, framing him as a failure and a delinquent according to rules he didn’t understand and didn’t even know existed—is going to be very familiar to a lot of neurodivergent people.

Said’s responses to that bullying are also familiar—both in his bewilderment, and in his growing sense, across his life, of righteous rage. Neurodivergent people often struggle to navigate social cues and rules, in part because they feel that those rules should be equally or logically applied, and are acutely aware that they are not.

Said, for example, recounts how on the tennis court he was told never to give quarter and to force the other player to work for everything. Then, during one game, when he refused to pick up a ball which may have been closer to him, he was reprimanded for not picking it up and being a good sport.

This injustice—and other’s much more serious—filled Said with fury. He explained:

I began a lifelong struggle and attempt to demystify the capriciousness and hypocrisy of a power whose authority depended absolutely on its ideological self-image as a moral agent, acting in good faith and with unimpeachable intentions. Its unfairness, in my opinion, depended principally on its prerogative for changing its bases of judgment. You could be perfect one day, but morally delinquent the next, even though your behavior was the same.

It is easy to see how this passage is rooted in both Said’s experience as a neurodivergent child, and in his experience as a colonized subject. This is the boy whose father insisted he wear a truss to conform to his definition of normality. It is the man who brilliantly exposed the hypocrisies of centuries of Western Islamophobia and bigotry.

Thinking about Said’s neurodivergence also helps us see how the bigotry he (and not he alone) faced may have been intersectional or overlapping. During his time at Mount Hermon high school in the US, Said had one of the highest grade point averages, and should have been declared valedictorian or salutatorian. But he was not. He explains the school’s unfairness. He say on the one hand that he was discriminated against because he did not have “the right attitude.” And on the other, he suggests that at a white institution, at a time of rising prejudice against Arabs, he was “marginal, non-American, alienated, marked.”

Neither of these explanations need exclude the other. On the contrary, they are interlocking and reinforcing. Mount Hermon officials probably did not say to each other explicitly, “Edward Said is an odd guy and an Arab; he can’t represent the school.” Instead, they probably said something like, “Edward Said is not right to represent the school”—and by that they meant both that he was neurodivergent and that he was not sufficiently white. Perhaps if he had been neurotypical, and had fit in more seamlessly, they could have forgiven his Arabness; probably if he was white they could have forgiven some eccentricity. But someone who transgressed the boundaries of both whiteness and neurotypicality was simply beyond the pale (in various senses.) Disability here, as often, serves as an excuse and a trigger for racism. At the same time, racism, serves as an excuse and trigger for ableism.

Or, to put it another way, Said’s neurodivergence made him unable to successfully deploy respectability politics. His parents were upwardly mobile; Said’s father was an extremely successful businessman who had obtained American citizenship. His family attempted to leverage their social standing to combat and offset increasingly dire colonial and racist dynamics targeting them and their milieu. That’s perhaps why they were so frustrated with, and so abusive towards Said when he failed to jump through the hoops that were supposed to lead him to status, just as they were frustrated with and frightened by his increasing engagement with politics and anti-Zionism.

That engagement grew out of his own background and history—his child’s eye view of relatives, friends, and acquaintances left destitute and desperate by the nakba; his witness as his beloved aunt devoted her money, time, and life to aiding refugees; his sadness at being unable to return to his family’s home in Palestine; his own encounters with racism and condescension in British and American schools. It also, though, I think, grew out of a sense of displacement, and a hatred of injustice, rooted in his neurodivergence. As he says in the quietly defiant concluding line of his memoir, “With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.”

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Priests tell us we need religion. Therapists tell us we need therapy. Writers, with a parallel enthusiasm, insist that we need reading. “The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy,” says Flaubert. “There is no friend as loyal as a book,” announces Hemingway. “Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul,” insists Joyce Carol Oates, who has apparently never seen a movie or had a conversation.

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One salvo in this tradition of self-advocacy is Karen Swallow Prior’s piece at the Atlantic, in which she claims that reading — or at least the right kind of reading — has important spiritual and moral implications. Reading sensitively and carefully and deeply, Prior says, “unleashes the power that good literature has to reach into our souls and, in so doing, draw and connect us to others.” She concludes, “The power of “spiritual reading” is its ability to transcend the immediacy of the material, the moment, or even the moral choice at hand… Even so, such reading doesn’t make us better so much as it makes us human.”

Which raises some unfortunate questions, it seems like. Prior dutifully lists the books that have influenced her and made her more spiritual — Jane Eyre taught her to be herself, apparently, and Gulliver’s Travels taught her to see the limitations of her perspective. Okay…but what if what I learned from Gulliver’s Travels is that a giant pissing on a fire is really funny. Does that make me less human? If I read Twilight instead of Jane Eyre, does that make me less spiritual?

I’m pretty certain that this is not where Prior intends her argument to go. Explicitly she advocates a particular kind of reading, rather than a book list, and she doesn’t say that the lessons she took from the books should be normative. But there’s a good deal of rhetorical force behind listing books from the canon and framing them as weighty moral goods — and that rhetorical force gets upped substantially when you start talking about who is human, and, by implication, who is not. When Prior makes distinctions between deep spiritual reading and “mere decoding”, and then references her own article about the common core, she appears to be saying that reading some things is better than reading others. And the way she frames that “better” is through language about what is more or less human. Which takes her, no doubt unintentionally, right up to a place where those who read 50 Shades of Grey aren’t as human as the rest of us.

Nor are those the least pleasant implications. There are, after all, people out there who read neither Madame Bovary nor 50 Shades. Some people, especially in the past, lived in non-literate cultures. Some people simply don’t learn to read. Some people have developmental disabilities. Some people are infants or small children.

Many of these groups are in fact often considered marginal to what we think of as “human,” and are treated accordingly. The poor, the disabled, and the young tend to be outside circles of social and economic power; they’re easy to ignore. But is it really a great idea to codify that marginalization through an appeal to spiritual truth or ontological absolutes? It’s a delight to see my daughter read, but I don’t think she is “more human” now than she was when she was four. I don’t think she’ll be “more human” in ten years when she starts to read literature than she is now that she’s reading the not-especially-canonical Secret Series.

Again, I’m certain Prior doesn’t mean to suggest that she’s more human than my daughter. The problem is that the language she’s using has a force and a history and an intention of its own. Linking humanness and virtue to cultural attainment is a trope of very long standing. Here, for example, is poet and critic Allen Tate, demonstrating that a lifetime of deep, spiritual reading in the classics really does not in any way prevent you from being a racist shithead.

The enormous “difference” of the Negro doomed him from the beginning to an economic status purely: he has had much the same thinning influence upon the class above him as the anonymous city proletariat has had upon the culture of industrial capitalism….

The white man got nothing from the Negro, no profound image of himself in terms of the soil…. But the Negro, who has long been described as a responsibility, got everything from the white man.

Tate’s disdain for the cultural attainments of Black people slides easily into an erasure of them as human beings. Humanity is a function of culture; ergo, generations of enforced labor is as nothing to the gift of white upper-class culture, which is the only thing that counts as culture. Apportioning human worth on the basis of cultural attainment is, in short, one popular, well-traveled way in which people get to racism. Which is not at all to say that Prior agrees with Tate, which I’m sure she does not even a little bit. But is to suggest that it’s a good idea to think hard before blurring the distinction between what is cultural and what is human.

One book I read recently which I think taught me how to be more human is Nora Olsen’s lesbian YA novel Swans and Klons. The narrative is set in a far future in which a disease has left all men with chromosome damage that renders them mentally and physically incapacitated. The main female characters, Rubric and Salmon Jo, come from a society where people reproduce by cloning, and there are no men. When they leave their land, though, they find that their neighbors, the Barbarous Ones, have children, and care for their male babies. Rubric is horrified…but not Salmon Jo. Instead, for her, the disabled men are a revelation.

You know how before we left home I said I didn’t know what human was? I know now. The Sons taught me what it means to be a human being. Even if they’re sick or not brainy, they’re just as human as us. I think they make you learn more about yourself, and that’s why the Barbarous Ones think they’re such an asset.”

You learn to be human, you learn to be spiritual, not by reading, but by treating others as human — especially others who are not like you. Books can, perhaps, teach you about that. But to make books themselves the measure of humanness is implicitly to restrict that measure to the brainy, the well, and the privileged. If books make us more human, then some of us are less human that others — which is the same as saying that all of us are less human.

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This piece ran at Splice Today years back. I think it still seems relevant in our current miserable moment, so I have reshared.

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Eustacia and Gusgus with a little sibling tension there.

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Okay! Here’s what I published this week.

Politics

Zionist identity is built on the erasure of Palestinians. (Revealer)

Republicans go all in on toxic masculinity in Texas. (Public Notice)

Centrism means helping fascists. (EIH)

Musk is lying even when he seems to be confessing. (EIH)

Donald Trump is bad at lying. (EIH)

Cultural criticism

Rodrigo Toscano’s Deck of Deeds and poetry for concussed HR bots. (Splice Today)

Corporate Retreat is a pretty fun portrayal of CEO as sadist. (Chicago Reader)

On Pink Floyd’s best album. (EIH)

Split is boring Hollywood mental health exploitation. (EIH)

Poetry

Poem beginning with a line by Muriel Rukeyser. (Eunoia)

Super short poem. (smols)

two words

About being stuck with your poems. (Five Fleas)

away from home
can I find different poetry?
alas, I carry the same sack

From the archives

Track of the week

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Hollywood loves abuse. Assault, and especially sexual assault, provides surefire prurient content, which is dramatic, meaningful, and voyeuristic. More than that, though, abuse is an easy substitute for character building. A tragic, painful backstory tells you everything there is to know about a person on screen. You don’t need personality when you have trauma.

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M. Night Shyamalan’s 2016 film Split takes abuse-as-character to a logical, absurd extreme. The movie is about Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a man who was abused by his mother as a child, and developed dissociative identity disorder. Kevin has 23 distinct personalities. Some of those personas have embraced a kind of reverse Nazi ideology, in which the mentally ill are stronger and eugenically superior, and have the right to wipe everyone else out. Kevin’s evil personalities kidnap three high school girls, so that a 24^th personality, known as the Beast, can literally feed on their impure purity.

Split wallows in preposterous pseudoscience burble about how Kevin’s personalities are actually different people. Trauma can,we are told, unlock the power of the brain to change the body—the Beast has super-thick skin and can climb walls. But the real innovation of the film is not any of this silliness, but its blatant equation of abuse, not with power or purity, but with interestingness.

This is most obvious in the portrayal of Kevin. Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley), constantly tells various Kevin personas that they are wonderful, special, and fascinating. In this, she’s meant to speak not just for herself, but for the viewers, who are to admire the multiple-personality gimmick, and, especially, the actor at the center of it. McAvoy’s performance is a hamfest of massive oinking proportions; he switches back and forth from an OCD janitor named Dennis, to a gay fashion designer named Barry, to a lisping awkward 9-year-old named Hedwig. Each is over the top in its own way, laden with schticks and tics, and of course there are inevitable opportunities in the script for him to switch rapidly from one to the other. Performers are often lauded for portraying mental illness, and Shyamalan clearly wants you to cheer this acting exercise, not because it is believable or subtle or nuanced, but simply because it is abnormal. And abnormal psychology is awesome.

It’s not just Kevin’s (multiple) character which is defined by fascinating trauma. Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy), one of the kidnapped girls, also has a tragic backstory. Through flashbacks, we learn that she’s been sexually abused throughout her life by her uncle, who is also her guardian.

The abuse explains her acting out at school. It’s also, again, why she’s presented as more worth watching and sympathizing with than her co-captors. Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) are pampered popular kids, who have never really suffered. They fantasize about fighting Kevin with karate, but Casey sneers at them for their cluelessness. “Everything is so easy for you guys,” she spits. “You do one thing, you can predict the next thing. It’s not the way it’s gonna be in this situation.” (Though the truth is that the Hedwig persona is not very imposing, and with three on one it seems reasonable that they could in fact overpower him…. But never mind the plot holes.)

Casey, for her part, is practiced in manipulating abusers; she gets Hedwig to let her out of the locked room, and almost manages to make contact with the outside world. Her life skills, though, are less important overall than the fact that her traumatic past means that the film is invested in her. “Those who have not been torn have no value in themselves and no place in this world! They are asleep!” the Beast rants. It’s supposed to be a sign of his insanity, but it’s also the ethos of the film. After murdering her pure, happy companions, the Beast spares Casey when he sees that she’s cut herself, and is therefore an abuse victim like Kevin.

If you wanted to be generous, you could see Split as a plea for compassion for people with mental illness or a history of trauma. Kevin and Casey (the parallel in their names is no doubt intentional) both feel shunned and mocked by their peers. The narrative focus on them is validating; Shyamalan is insisting that their stories matter and that they are wonderful, interesting, and valuable. From this perspective, Split is the unusual Blumhouse film with a conscience.

Alternately, you could just see Split as a cynical exercise in exploiting mental illness and abuse for voyeuristic thrills. Shyamalan is obviously indebted to Psycho, and the driving impulse behind the movie seems to be, “Hitchcock had a murderer with only two personalities; I can do six times better than that!” McAvoy’s impossibly varied expressions and Casey’s blank stare both signal trauma, and nothing else. Their characters are simply what happened to them. Shyamalan, despite his protest, doesn’t care about the people who have been torn. He just likes looking at the wounds.

—

This first ran on Splice Today a while back. Someone on social media mentioned it was one of their favorite piece of mine, so I thought I’d reshare.

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Everything Is Horrible is entirely funded by readers. If you value my writing, please consider becoming a subscriber. It’s $50/yr, $5/month. (and/or tip me at Paypal!)

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I wrote about Elon Musk yesterday and how his apparent confessions are often just lies that he thinks advance his goals of hate, abuse, and genocide.

Recognizing that fascists lie is important. I think it’s also important, though, to realize that fascist lies aren’t always part of a dastardly plan—much less part of a successful dastardly plan. Consider, for example, Trump’s lies about his slush fund—the $1.8 billion he wants to hand out to supporters who helped him stage his (ultimately successful) coup.

The money would likely go to people who participated directly in the January 6 insurrection, including people who targeted or assaulted police officers. This was too much for Senate Republicans facing a grim midterm season; they revolted en masse, derailing an already long-delayed vote on ICE funding. The pushback was so intense that Trump’s sycophantic, worm-like Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche oozed up to a microphone and announced that Trump had abandoned the idea.

That should in theory be that. But! There are doubts. First of all, Blanche refused to put in writing the promise to drop the insurrection fund. And then, when Trump was asked about the fund in a White House interview, he refused to disavow it. Instead, he said, “I love [the fund]. I think it’s so important,” and insisted that the only reason it wasn’t moving forward was that “a radical left judge ruled against it.” He also said that he was going to release information in the coming weeks showing that the insurrectionists had been unfairly prosecuted and demonstrating that they should be compensated.

Obviously Trump is lying here. Either he (through Blanche) is falsely telling Congress that he has abandoned the weaponization scheme in order to get the Senate to pass his ICE funding. Or he is falsely telling reporters that he has not abandoned the weaponization scheme because he wants to sound tough.

Either way, if he is attempting to reassure Congress and get them to pass his budget, issuing garbled contradictory statements like this is incredibly counter-productive. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, a hard-core Trumpist and dingbat, said on Monday that, to get the bill moving, “the president has to say very explicitly that there’s not going to be a weaponization fund.” And instead, the president had his spokes-turd half disavow it, and then Trump himself started babbling about how he loves the weaponization fund the way he never loved his stupid children. That’s not going to cut it.

Trump has no commitment in any way to the truth. So why not just respond to reporters by saying, “You know Congress wasn’t willing, so we’re not going to do that,” and then attempt to find the money elsewhere, or come back to it in six months, or whatever? Why babble about how you’re going to release evidence when there’s no evidence to release? Why derail your own bill?

The thing about Trump is he does not really lie strategically. He just spews what philosopher Harry Frankfurt terms “bullshit”—speech intended to persuade without regard to truth. But where Frankfurt sees this persuasive speech as directed at others, Trump’s speech often seems intended to persuade himself.

Sometimes Trump will say things that he hopes will convince others. But his primary audience always seems to be his own brain, as he ceaselessly repeats to himself that he is the greatest and the best and that everything he does is perfect. We are always tuning into the same internal monologue, issuing forth from the same orifice like noxious fumes from a gaping abyss.

Trump’s people told him he had to tell the Senate what it wanted to hear, and he did because he’s happy to lie or have other people lie for him. But when asked about the fund directly, he just asserts that all his ideas are great and that his people are persecuted and that he will win, because that is what he’s always asserting and he has no interest in stopping.

These lies aren’t strategic—in some sense they aren’t even lies, since Trump probably doesn’t exactly know, or even care, whether he’s going to move ahead with the weaponization fund. He wants it to happen but more than that he just wants to believe it’s going to happen. He wants his ICE funding to move ahead in the Senate, but even more than that he wants to tell himself it’s moving ahead in the Senate. If these are irreconcilable goals, he just shrugs and asserts whatever is most convenient or comfortable for him in whatever venue he happens to be, even if everybody can watch him contradict himself in real time.

Being willing to lie all the time can sometimes confer some advantages; you can argue that Trump the lying campaigner benefited from the fact that people would just pick and choose among his lying statements to convince themselves that he would do whatever they happened to want him to do on (for example) Iran.

But there are also obvious downsides when your own allies and negotiating partners (in, for example, Iran) know they can’t trust anything you say. And there are even more downsides when you are so mired in your own fantasies of revenge and persecution and power that you think those fantasies are all there are, and that the world conforms to your whim because you say so. That’s how you lose Congressional support. It’s how you lose wars.

People tend to believe that Trump has cognitive deficits which lead him to do evil things. But it’s the other way around. His moral choice to live in a world of lies, to refuse to listen to or learn from information that doesn’t flatter his ego, has left him disconnected from reality and unable to make elementary intellectual deductions like, “If we attack them, Iran might fight back,” or, “If you tell Senators that you are lying to them, they may not trust you.”

Fascists like to boast about their mastery of propaganda and their ability to sway the masses. But often the main people they are propagandizing are themselves, as they convince themselves they are masterful and powerful and flush with the support of the masses. Constantly telling yourself lies—about your own perfection, about the inferiority of those who aren’t as white and male as you, about the fact that you’re winning every war—can backfire. That’s how Hitler ended up shooting himself in a bunker. Even when he was finishing himself off, I’m sure that he, like Trump, was telling himself that he was awesome, impervious to the truth that he was a losing loser who had lost.

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Last week, Rihanna announced that she had hired Vivian Wilson, a trans woman, as a model for her Fenty lingerie line. This should be a win for Wilson and for trans representation. Unfortunately, however, as is his wont, Nazi tech billionaire Elon Musk chose to make the announcement all about him.

Wilson is Musk’s daughter. He has said before that he was radicalized when his daughter came out as trans (or in his words when she was corrupted by the “woke mind virus”). The Fenty announcement inspired some asshole on twitter to reiterate those claims.

We should never forget that if not for Vivian, Elon Musk never would have gotten involved, never would have purchased Twitter, Kamala Harris would be President and the Left-wing would have total instrumental control over construction of Skynet.

Musk, pleased at the chance to once again insult and send harassment at his daughter, responded by boosting the post and declaring, “True.”

Matthew Rodriguez at Them an LGBT outlet, wrote about the exchange because he believed that it showed Musk in a poor light. “Sometimes, a villain origin story is really just that simple,” Rodriguez said. Comedian and actor George Wallace weighed in with a similar framing: “Imagine being so unable to love your child that you set fire to the whole damn world instead.”

I agree that Musk’s vocal, public, vile hatred for his trans daughter is but one reason that he is an evil Nazi piece of shit. But I think it’s important to recognize that Nazis lie absolutely all the time—not least about their own motives.

When Musk says that his daughter turned him into a Nazi, or that his daughter pushed him into politics, he isn’t confessing some unmediated truth about his inner life. He is framing his actions in a way that he believes advances his goals. Those goals being abuse, hate, violence, and genocide. As Elon Musk’s ex Ashley St. Clair has said, whenever Musk posts about Wilson, he (intentionally) “endanger[s]” her. (Wilson has said that she does not feel unsafe—which doesn’t mean that St. Clair is wrong.)

Musk wants to blame his daughter for his own actions

Specifically, when Musk says that Wilson made him go Nazi, he is using a very standard Nazi talking point. Nazis always blame their hate and violence on the people they hate. Hitler, for example, said he was forced to commit a genocide because Jewish people orchestrated World War II.

If international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the…victory of Jewry but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

Hopefully it’s clear that Hitler is not providing an honest and forthright explanation of his own motives. Just to begin with, Jewish people were not responsible for World War II—Hitler’s program of obsessive territorial expansion was.

More, Hitler did not embrace genocide as a goal in January 1939; his desire to murder all Jewish people was quite clear in Mein Kampf, which was published in 1925, a decade and a half before he claimed that Jewish people made him do it. When Hitler said Jews made him do it, he was not explaining his violence, but justifying that violence—and perpetuating it, inasmuch as demonizing Jewish people was sure to result in attacks on Jewish people.

Similarly, Musk says that Wilson made him buy twitter and intervene in the election because he believes that justifies his abuse and because he knows it perpetuates that abuse. By targeting his daughter on social media, Musk is encouraging people to send her death threats and worse than death threats. And he’s also mocking her and taunting her; it’s the equivalent of saying, “Why are you hitting yourself?” or “Look what you made me do!” Musk is an abuser, and part of the way abusers inflict psychological abuse is through gaslighting and victim-blaming. When Musk denies his own agency as an abuser, he is not explaining the abuse; he is inflicting it.

Wilson is well aware of this. In an interview with Teen Vogue (and in quotes that Them itself reproduced), Wilson said, “It’s such a convenient narrative, that the reason he turned right is because I’m a fucking tr*nny, and that’s just not the case. That’s not what that does to people.” She added:

Him going further on the right, and I’m going to use the word ‘further’ — make sure you put ‘further’ in there — is not because of me. That’s insane.

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And more lies

There are many other examples where fascist confessions—even apparently damning fascist confessions—are in fact fascist lies.

There’s another example right there in Musk’s attack on Wilson. Musk’s sycophant asserts, as Musk often has himself, that Musk single-handedly defeated Kamala Harris by spending millions on Trump’s campaign in 2024. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk boasted in June 2025.

Some on the left have taken these claims as a confession that Musk cheated or stole the election—an admission of guilt. Yet (as I explain here) there is precious little evidence that Musk’s intervention helped Trump, and a fair amount that the campaign he orchestrated was so ineffectual that it actually damaged his candidate.

Musk is not admitting guilt when he claims credit for the 2024 win. He is lying about his own perspicuity, power and influence. Musk boasted about winning the election initially when he was feuding with the president; he was advancing his own grievances as Trump forced him out of the government.

Similarly, when Musk asserts that his daughter is responsible for Harris’ 2024 election loss, he is blaming his trans daughter for being trans and therefore blaming her for harming trans people, including herself. Again, these are not statements of fact but lies designed to promote Musk’s own megalomania and to promote his own campaign of abuse.

It’s not just Musk who uses these tactics. In his 2012 divorce deposition when he was separating from his wife Mary Richardson Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr. claimed he was cognitively impaired because a tapeworm had infested his brain. The New York Times headlined the story “RFK Jr Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm In His Brain,” and Democrats have ever since been joking that RFK has brain worms.

RFK may well have had a parasitic infestation. But he disclosed that, and played it up, because he was attempting to make the case that his expected lifetime earnings were going to be negatively affected by his health issues, and that he shouldn’t have to pay much in support to his ex-wife. With help from his powerful family, Kennedy—who was relentlessly unfaithful to Mary for 20 years—pressured her to agree to brutal custody restrictions and circumscribed support. When Mary committed suicide in the middle of the divorce proceedings, her family blamed Kennedy.

It feels fun to mock Kennedy for a supposed cognitive impairment. But taking his confession at face value erases the way in which he used his supposed diagnosis as a tool to harass and abuse his wife. Even if he did have a health condition, health conditions are not a sign of moral iniquity and do not necessarily indicate long term impairment. But using your health condition to torment your ex and perhaps push her to depression and suicide—that is in fact evil.

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Don’t believe them

Most people on the left do know that Trump and his sycophants are all lying liars who lie all the time. Yet, when those lies are colorful or seem fun or confirm certain biases, it can be hard not to take the bait.

Them, which is committed to supporting LGBT people, published a story which amplified Musk’s lies and helped him target his daughter, even when they printed quotes from that daughter saying explicitly that those lies were in fact lies. The New York Times headlined their piece with brain worms, even though the real story is not the brain worms, but the fact that RFK subjected his ex-wife to intensive psychological abuse.

Fascists and antisemites, Sartre wrote, “delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.” He also said, “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies.” The absurdity is in fact, for fascists, part of the fun—per Sartre, “They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.”

Sartre could have added that the ridiculousness of their arguments can be seductive. Fascists spin out conspiracy theories and nonsense, and that nonsense is arresting, exciting, funny. It makes good headlines. It’s more fun, and feels more objective and newsworthy, to say, “Musk turned evil because of his daughter” than to just say, “Musk is still abusing his daughter.” It’s more interesting to say, “RFK has brain worms” than to say, “RFK abused his wife.”

The dynamics of hatred and cruelty are often banal. Fascists work to make them seem more exciting and interesting. That can seduce even those who hate or oppose fascists.

But it shouldn’t. If fascist evil is framed in a way that seems interesting or exciting—even if the framing seems to damage fascists—you should take a second look. Because fascists aren’t interesting or colorful. They are cruel in tiresome and predictable ways. They lie, often, not to cover up their evil, but to cover up just how tedious that evil is.

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Democratic centrists generally portray themselves as common sense pragmatists, dedicated to meeting the electorate where it is. “Democrats running in red and purple place…must define themselves as moderate and normies…” Jon Cowan, president of centrist org Third Way declared in March.

But is centrism really for normies or moderates? What does centrism look like in practice when one political party is dominated by open fascists? How do you triangulate with Mussolini?

The answer is both obvious and unfortunate. Centrist politicians who attempt to compromise with fascism inevitably end up helping fascists and boosting fascism. If you attempt to meet fascists halfway, you are pushing the country towards fascism—and betraying your allies and marginalized people in the bargain.

In recent weeks we’ve seen two depressing illustrations of these truths by Democrats who entered office with high hopes in 2025. The first is Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger. The other is New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill.

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Centrist Spanberger helps fascists eliminate voting rights

Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer has a reputation as a moderate; she attacked Biden for being too progressive as president and has often castigated Democrats for running too far to the left. However, in her 2025 campaign, she ran hard against Trump. “To those across the Potomac who are attacking our jobs and our economy, I will not stand by silently,” she declared. After winning with nearly 58%, she started her first year by demanding the resignation of right-wing apparatchiks on the University of Virginia board of directors and rescinding her Republican predecessor’s order requiring local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws.

Things went downhill from there, though. As part of her centrist ethos, Spanberger vetoed legislation allowing Virginia public workers the right to unionize and legislation preventing ICE from making warrantless searches in state facilities. She also blocked legislation to prevent purges of voters and legislation meant to protect universities from free speech restrictions pushed by the Trump administration.

Perhaps her most painful, and direct gift to the Trump administration, though, is her approach to redistricting. In response to Republican efforts to mid-decade gerrymander their way to a federal House victory, Virginia’s legislature (like California’s before it) drew new maps which would have flipped four seats blue. Spanberger’s support was lackluster, because she wants to be seen as nonpartisan and there’s not much that’s as partisan as partisan redistricting. But she deferred to the party, and voters approved the redistricting in a referendum.

Unfortunately, the right-wing State Supreme Court invalidated the map. At that point, Spanberger simply surrendered. She shot down a proposal to force Supreme Court judges to retire, which could have saved the blue map, or at least would have given Virginia a Democratic court going forward.

Even more depressingly, she’s signaled that she wants to prevent further redistricting efforts for the 2028 election. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries—a centrist figure who has nonetheless figured out you can’t really centrist your way out of fascism—has been pushing for “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time” going into the 2028 elections, including sweeping blue state redistricting. Spanberger in contrast has insisted that she’s “not going to focus on some hypothetical in the future.” She insists that Democrats need to concentrate on the elections they have in front of them, without strategizing for 2028. In other words, Democrats should just vote harder, even as Republicans undermine the republic and make voting pointless.

Jeffries believes (correctly!) that vowing to fight will energize voters and make them feel like they still have a stake in their party and their democracy. Spanberger, in contrast, is desperate not to look too partisan or too committed to fighting fascism. She believes that partisan battles have caused her approval to crater—even though a more obvious reason for her falling numbers is that she was elected to fight Trump and she keeps fighting Democrats instead.

In any case, she’s turned to appeasement, declaring that she doesn’t want to fight as Republicans steal seat after seat in the House. You could call that centrism. Or you could call it a huge gift to fascists.

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Centrist Sherrill helps fascists brutalize protestors

Like Spanberger, Sherrill, a former naval officer and federal prosecutor, won a commanding victory in November 2025 by promising to oppose Trump and Trumpism. In February, she signed an order barring ICE from performing civil immigration enforcement on state property. She’s also been focused on affordability issues, and she’s had solid approval numbers.

Last week, though, Sherrill embraced her centrism in an extremely ugly way when she took the side of DHS against protestors.

Said protests were centered on Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark run by the GEO Group. In late May, inmates in the center began a hunger and labor strike to protest inhumane and brutal conditions, including lack of medical care, inedible food and overcrowding. At least one detainee in the facility has died in custody.

The hunger strike inspired courageous protests outside the facility. ICE has reacted with violence; in one incident, Senator Andy Kim was caught in a pepper-ball attack. Democratic officials, including Kim, have been attempting to force ICE to allow inspection of the facility; Sherrill herself has said she wants it closed. A week ago, Sherrill attempted to gain entry and was turned away.

Sherrill, then, has been signaling solidarity with protestors and support for their goals. But this sort of firm stance was apparently too firm for her centrist instincts. After denouncing the facility, Sherrill decided that the real problem, somehow, was people objecting to a concentration camp. She ordered State Police to disperse protestors or force them into designated protest zones.

The result, as Will Bunch reports at the Philadelphia Inquirer, was brutal.

For two nights now, a battalion of Sherrill’s New Jersey State Police — who the first-year governor had claimed would “lower the temperature” in Newark — has turned up the heat to 11 by firing rubber bullets, tear-gas canisters, and flash-bang grenades while violently pushing back the demonstrators, both with mounted officers on horseback and with riot shields and batons.

Sherrill has claimed that the protests are being spurred by “outside agitators”—suggesting that somehow it’s illegitimate or a scandal for Americans to come to New Jersey to protest a federal concentration camp! She’s also imposed a curfew.

Sherrill seems to be motivated by a fear that Trump will send a surge of ICE agents into Newark, brutalizing the population there as Minneapolis and Chicago were brutalized earlier in Trump’s term. Those escalations were horrific, and it’s understandable that Sherrill does not want to see a repeat in her state.

But to avoid federal attacks on her people, Sherrill has decided to do the brutalizing herself. She has lent bipartisan credibility—and actual weaponry—to lawless fascist violence. Rather than resisting, she has chosen, in the tradition of Vichy, to aggressively capitulate. And so instead of another public relations disaster for Trump, Sherrill has destroyed her own credibility and physical harmed her own constituents.

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The quisling core of centrism

It’s not surprising that Spanberger and Sherrill have struggled to respond to an aggressive fascist federal government. The federal government has a huge amount of power and can impose great costs on those who oppose it. It seems to make sense to try to negotiate or finesse the issue—to seek a middle ground where you don’t capitulate entirely, but also don’t draw fascist ire.

But the thing about fascists, as Neville Chamberlain discovered, is that they aren’t interested in compromise. They see any capitulation as weakness and as a chance to simply seize more territory. Spanberger hopes that she can retreat and just win elections, rather than having to actually declare herself a partisan willing to fight. Sherrill wants to tear gas some protestors so the feds realize that she’s on their side against the radicals and then reach an amicable agreement on how bad concentration camps are allowed to be.

But what actually happens when you knuckle under to fascists is that your allies abandon you while fascists kick you again. There is, maybe, a centrist approach to taxation or to environmental regulations. These are cases where finding a middle way may be cowardly and may be bad policy, but could still be recognizable as a compromise between two poles. But when you are dealing with a fascist takeover of the United States, there is no moderate, median policy. You are either opposing the fascists, or you are helping them.

Spanberger and Sherrill both, after some vacillation, decided to provide material help for Trump’s fascist movement because opposing that movement seemed too hard. That doesn’t make them tough and pragmatic. It doesn’t make them normies. It makes them quisling betrayers. They, and centrists like them, can still change course. And they better do it fast, for their own sake and for the sake of the country, or we’ll all find out just how little fascists care about the distinction between centrist Democrats and progressive Democrats when they are shooting pepper balls, or worse.

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Pink Floyd as a band was most interesting when it was least sure what it was doing. I very much like the original incarnation Floyd, when the band was guided by Syd Barrett’s vision of psychedlia-for-more-than-half-cracked children. And I also enjoy the later Floyd, where the band was guided by Roger Waters’ bloated and embarrassing concept album profundities. But I pledge my heart to those albums in the middle, where Waters and company were wandering hopefully from gimmick to gimmick in a stoned, hopeful daze, searching vaguely for commercial or artistic success, half pretending to be avant garde, half pretending to care about pop.

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One of the best, and most scattered albums from this mid-period is the 1969 Soundtrack from the Film More. It was the band’s third album, and the first entirely made without Syd Barrett, whose increasingly erratic behavior had prompted the band to jettison him. Roger Waters had taken over much of the songwriting, and David Gilmour had moved in as guitarist and lead vocalist — but neither had established the style (or if you prefer, the rut) that defined them for the later 70s.

Admittedly, several songs do point ahead to Pink Floyd’s languidly tuneful future. “Cirrus Minor,” starts with meadow sounds and then Gilmour lazily sings about willow trees while plucking a Flamenco sounding guitar and Richard Wright’s organ quivers profoundly before taking over the track. “Crying Song”, “Green Is the Colour,” and “Cymabline” all follow a similar blueprint, with slightly different details (electric guitar instead of organ on “Crying Song,” piano and flute on “Green Is the Colour.”)

Other parts of the album, though, wander off in unexpected directions. “Up the Khyber”, for example, is a stomping, Middle-Eastern inflected slab of fusion, with drummer Nick Mason asserting, for perhaps the only time in Pink Floyd’s career, that he can play funk, damn it, while Richard Wright throws down percussive discordant keyboard figures. “Main Theme” harks back to the psychedelic space explorations on Pink Floyd’s first two albums, but with Mason creating a stronger, Spanish-tinged rhythmic foundation, and the rest of the band making like Iberia is somewhere between Mars and Pluto. “Quicksilver” is 7 minutes of clangs and squeaks and drifting drones — pleasant highbrow posturing. “More Blues,” on the other hand, is an almost parodically earnest blues instrumental, with Gilmour’s guitar dripping emotion all over the pristine, echoey production, like Jimmy Page dropped in a cleanroom.

Perhaps the two most bizarre tracks on the album are “A Spanish Piece” and “The Nile Song.” A Spanish Piece” is one minute of Flamenco guitar, with Gilmour adopting a terrible Spanish accent to mutter lascivious come-ons in the background. Looking at the later day professional time server that Gilmour would become, it’s hard to believe he ever had a sense of humor, much less a brain. But this song remains as evidence that once, anyway, something was happening in there — the man sounds genuinely demented, sniffing and lisping and muttering about Tequila as if that has anything to do with Spain. For once it’s Gilmour who gets to play the eccentric genius, rather than Barrett or Waters.

It’s “The Nile Song,” though, that is the highlight of the album, and possibly of Pink Floyd’s entire career. It’s built around a giant head-banging riff that sounds as if it’s been dragged through granite. Off to the side, Nick Mason smashes away at the drums like the grand-daddy of Dale Crover and Gilmour shouts incongruously about falling in love on the banks of the Nile. This was 1969, remember — Black Sabbath was barely up and slogging, and Deep Purple’s Machine Head was still several years in the future. Yet here’s mellow Pink Floyd with an honest-to-God slab of metal wedged in between dreamy odes to cloudbanks and faux Flamenco fusion. From track to track on More, you never know what you’re going to get — which has made this one of Pink Floyd’s least popular albums, and also perhaps its best.

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This ran on Splice Today years back. I still love the album, though, so thought I would reshare.

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So, once again sister floofs are asking you to become a subscriber so I can feed them and they can continue to expand.

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This sale has kind of been a dud, but…it’s almost over, and I keep hoping? Consider helping out?

Okay, here’s what I published this week.

Politics

Trump has no way out of Iran. (Public Notice)

Procedural radicalism is an electoral strategy. (EIH)

Musk attacks Nyong’o for the same reason Hitler attacked Jewish art. (EIH)

Why I don’t think Musk is a political genius. (LOLGOP)

Cultural criticism

Marisa Anderson’s Anthology of UnAmerican Music makes music for the world. (No Depression)

The Boys fights Christian Nationalism. (Religion Dispatched)

Emily Dickinson may have been neurodivergent. (EIH)

10 lesser known anti-totalitarian novels. (Observer.com)

On Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulattica and Black art in unexpected places. (Splice Today)

Detroit’s Arab-American radical noise-rock band Prostitute. (Chicago Reader)

Concrete Blonde feels all the feelings. (EIH)

The quick and the dead defeat Sam Raimi. (EIH)

Poetry

Two little poems. (Five Fleas)

in an alternate universe
I imagine that this
is an alternate universe

The Poet’s Lament
no one is buying
my soul

From the archive

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Track of the week

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One of the (many!) quick-draw shoot-outs in Sam Raimi’s 1995 The Quick and the Dead features the villainous town despot Herod (Gene Hackman) vs. a hired gun Sgt. Cantrell (Keith David) paid by the townspeople to take out said despot and relieve them of their misery. Herod’s quicker on the draw, though, and Cantrell staggers and almost falls—but tries to keep shooting. Herod aims his gun again, fires—and the camera swings around behind Cantrell as the bullet opens a huge hole in his head. Through that gaping ragged circle in the brain matter you can see Herod standing triumphantly before Cantrell falls.

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It’s a quintessential Raimi moment—the speed and slapstick of a Warner Brothers cartoon but with much, much more explicit gore. The sequence is brief, but for the seconds it last, it holds up well next to the Ash-vs.-his-hand battle in Evil Dead 2 from 1987. If you asked me what I wanted from a Sam Raimi western, this would be it.

There’s only one problem; the death of Cantrell is almost (not quite, but almost) the only time in the film that Raimi strips off his bloody gloves and pulls on that ravenous clown mask. For the most part, the film is a much less over-the-top endeavor, relying on Hollywood tropes and standard storytelling rather than on Raimi’s particular unhinged genius. There’s a revenge narrative; there’s an evil badman; there’s a heroine who must find herself and self-actualize. The film’s central conceit—a round robin one-on-one quick shooting (and quick killing) contest, is pleasantly goofy, but is mostly played straight and with few surprises. You can figure out who’s going to win each fight pretty easily based on narrative primacy and whose name appears higher on the marquee.

That doesn’t mean that The Quick and the Dead is bad exactly. Raimi is obviously a fan of Sergio Leone, and with the help of cinematographer Dante Spinotti he captures some of the master’s magic, complete with sweeping vistas and extreme close-ups. Hackman is in his element as a megalomaniac sadist with an odd sense of honor and even the occasional scruple about murdering his son, the Kid (an impossibly young and insouciant Leonardo DiCaprio.) Russell Crowe as Cort, a former outlaw turned preacher, smoulders on cue, and other fine character actors (Lance Henriksen, Mark Boone Junior) are scattered about.

Sharon Stone struggles in the lead, though that’s more a problem with the writing than with her talent. “The Lady” is supposed to both be an iconic force of nature like Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” and a frightened, traumatized young woman coming of age to learn how to kill and how to renounce killing. Sometimes she seems utterly reserved and unstoppable; other times she seems to be coming apart, and the tension seems like it has less to do with her internal state and more to do with the film being unable to make up its mind. Her final plans seem both thin and unnecessary; her final victory more a default than an actual measure of her grit or skill.

The movie also is unsure how to navigate The Lady’s ladyness. Her romance with the Kid really makes no sense—a fact which the film itself seems to nervously recognize, since it shuffles most of it off-screen. Similarly, her brief switch out of dusty cowboy attire to high glam femme gown seems meant to remind you that Sharon Stone is hot, rather than to illuminate character. There are some gendered insults and some references to the way women are exploited in this milieu, but they never really cohere into a critique of toxic masculinity or a quasi-feminist statement. The movie flirts with the idea that maybe heroism is not about having the biggest phallic gun—but then shrugs and decides it is after all.

It’s not exactly unusual for Raimi to bury his Raimi-ness in mainstream genre. Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness from 2022, for example, is a mostly terrible Marvel movie with one spectacular scene, in which the Scarlet Witch murders her way through Mr. Fantastic, Black Bolt and a bunch of other Marvel heroes in spectacular and, again, gloriously cartoonish fashion. The films in which the director lets his warped perspective rip for the entire run time—like this year’s Send Help—are comparatively rare. In his career long duel with the industry, Raimi ends up lying in the dusty road as often as not. It’s always worth cheering when he gets a shot or two in, though.

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We also talked about Musk’s horrific genocide via the destruction of USAID and why demanding more from Republicans is good and necessary even if Republicans rarely will respond.

And other things! It was a fun talk. I hope some of you check it out.

Also! My sale is still up! It’s 40% off, $30/year. I can only keep writing/commenting with your support—so please consider coming on board if you value my work.

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Goth as a genre is mostly supposed to be for broody teens with black eyeshadow, hunched posture, and outsized emotional turmoil. It’s a Dracula cloak you’re supposed to grow out of, not into.

And yet. I was no goth in my misspent youth, but the music has since gotten its fangs into me—mostly via my wife, a broody moper from way back. In particular, she’s introduced me to the joys of Concrete Blonde’s 1990 classic Bloodletting.

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As the title of their signature album indicates, there’s nothing subtle about Concrete Blonde. Johnette Napolitano has a stentorian, operatic soprano expressly designed to raise the ghouls from their crypts and shatter the car windows of traitorous (and no doubt mopey) exes. And on track after track, she shatters those exes and raises those ghouls. Napolitano had suffered a miserable break-up in the run-up to the album, and the songwriting is about as subtle as having your heart broken with a pick-axe and assorted other hand tools. “Love is the leech, sucking you up/Love is a vampire, drunk on your blood/Love is the beast that will suck out your heart,” she bellows on “The Beast” as Paul Thompson’s drums stomp remorselessly ahead like the evil Terminator and James Mankey’s guitar growls like—well, like a beast.

There’s some variation in pace and tone. “The Sky Is a Poisonous Garden” ramps up to rockabilly speed and swathes its feral doom and gloom in jittery cool, tossing in an impressively distorted classic rock guitar solo. “I Don’t Need a Hero” is a slow burn, with Napolitano willfully restraining herself so her voice takes on a smokey tinge. When she declares “I don’t need a hero,” she sounds like she’s trying to convince herself and not really succeeding. It’s “I Will Survive” for those who don’t really expect to.

The album’s big hit is “Joey,” and it’s no wonder. It’s an anthemic tribute to a confused, messy relationship soaked in nostalgia, addiction, and heartbreak. Napolitano is all seduction as she whispers, “Joey, honey, I got some money”—and then unleashes the full power of her battle station as she wails “And when you said I scared you/Well I guess you scared me too.” It is a song which feels all the feelings with such bombastic determination that your mascara is left in a sad little puddle on the floor.

Great as “Joey” is, though, “Tomorrow, Wendy” is better. It was originally written by Andy Prieboy as a tribute to one of his childhood friends—a woman who became a sex worker to support an addiction and ended up contracting AIDS. The song lyrics are her conversation with herself before her suicide.

Napolitano provided a vocal assist on the original, extremely affecting, version. But there’s really no substitute for having her sing the whole thing. It’s probably Napolitano’s greatest moment on record; her vocals are an oceanic tide of rage, despair and regret. “Don’t count on any second coming/God got his ass kicked the first time he came down here slumming,” sounds arch in Prieboy’s original. Napolitano, though, puts it across like a bitter triumph—a victory for godlessness and grief in a world that wants you to turn your eyes away from both.

Goth isn’t a particularly subtle genre in general, and “Tomorrow, Wendy,” in particular, is a big ball of hyperbolic pain. We tend to see that as a hallmark of adolescence, when every setback seems like the end of the world and every failure seems like the last. Then you grow up and realize that, yeah, sometimes life really is just that hard. Napolitano was in her early 30s when Bloodletting was released; I’m over 50. I don’t know how old Wendy was when she died. But Concrete Blonde’s best album is ageless. You never grow out of moping, which is just another name for sorrow.

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This first ran on Splice Today some years back. I still love this album though, so I thought I’d reshare.

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Last week, Christopher Nolan confirmed that Lupita Nyong’o is going to play Helen of Troy in Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey. Most people thought, “Helen of Troy was supposed to be incredibly beautiful; Lupita Nyong’o is incredibly beautiful—this seems like a reasonable choice.”

But a handful of people on the right, led by Nazi billionaire Elon Musk, were enraged. Lupita Nyong’o is Black. Racist pseudo-intellectuals like Musk believe that the Greeks were not just white, but transcendental icons of white culture. Casting Nyong’o, therefore, is, supposedly, an insult to whiteness, and a sign of Hollywood’s assault on Western purity and honor.

Many people have pointed out that Musk is a disgusting gutter racist. Some, like the Atlantic’s reliably left-punching befuddled reactionary doofus Thomas Chatterton Williams, have argued that Musk was playing into the identity-obsessed politics of progressives; the problem is not so much racism as the failure to embrace the race-blind talking points which have formed the basis of the massive disenfranchisement of Black voters over the last month (and years.)

Williams is a fool; Musk is a racist. But beyond that, I think it’s important to recognize that this attack on Nyong’o is not (just) ridiculous, trivial bullshit led by an irrelevant clueless wealthy asshole and spun as the left’s fault by elite media platforms for contrarian click and billionaire donations. It is part of an ongoing genocidal agenda—and, indeed, part of an ongoing genocide.

Culture war arguments can seem like silly distractions. But racism exists in culture; it is an ideology built through propaganda and even through aesthetics. Elon Musk is a fool. But he is also a racist mass murderer. His public statements should be read in that context—as deliberate efforts to enable him to slaughter more non-white people in the name of white supremacy.

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Hitler: genocidal culture warrior

It may seem odd or overblown to link art criticism and genocide. One person who saw the connection clearly, though, was Adolf Hitler.

Hitler is obviously best known for his deliberate racist genocide of 6 million Jewish people. For Hitler, though, genocide was not just about eliminating and murdering human beings. It also involved a thoroughgoing effort to remove, destroy, and discredit art which he believed was “degenerate”—especially art by Jewish, Communist, and avant garde artists (groups which Hitler indiscriminately and compulsively conflated.) Under the Nazis, the work of Jewish composers like Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Schoenberg were banned. Jewish musicians were barred from performing. Jewish artwork (or art that Hitler claimed was Jewish-influenced) was ridiculed in an infamous “degenerate art” exhibition. Jewish directors and actors were expelled from German cinema.

Hitler’s attack on Jewish art, and on modern art in general, was in part simply a dictator imposing his preferences on his own people—the dictator was a failed artist in a blandly realist style, and he seems to have viewed abstraction and modernist approaches as a personal insult. But the moral panic over decadence was also a part of a broader, deliberately genocidal strategy.

“The idea of the [degenerate art] exhibition was not just to mock modern art, but to encourage the viewers to see it as a symptom of an evil plot against the German people,” as Lucy Burns of the BBC explains. Jewish artists (or those supposedly embracing degenerate Jewish modes of culture) were portrayed as working deliberately to undermine the German spirit of virtue, cleanliness, vigor, and as scheming to dilute and destroy German culture—as epitomized by Hitler’s beloved Wagner. The Jewish culture worker, Hitler said in Mein Kampf, “contaminates art, literature, the theater, makes a mockery of natural feeling, overthrows all concepts of beauty and sublimity, of the noble and the good, and instead drags men down into the sphere of his own base nature.”

For Hitler, a painting that didn’t appeal to him was not just a painting that didn’t appeal to him. It was a deliberate, violent attack on his nation and all that he held dear. Decadent art, Jewish art, was framed as an essentially genocidal assault on Germany, its culture, and its people. The destruction of such art was part of the effort to erase Jews from Germany, but it was also a justification of that effort. The ridicule of Jewish cultural production, and the framing of Jewish visibility in culture as an existential threat, served to dehumanize actual Jewish people and to legitimize their mass murder.

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Musk: genocidal culture warrior

Musk (who has on several occasions signaled his admiration of and sympathy for Hitler) has followed the Nazi blueprint in his approach to culture war issues. In attacking Christopher Nolan for casting Nyong’o, he said that the filmmaker was “desecrating Homer.” He also approvingly retweeted a post by rabid right-wing racist Matt Walsh who claimed that people on the left would “literally riot in the street” and would be driven “to murderous violence” if a white woman were cast as “the most beautiful woman in Africa.”

Nyong’o’s casting is, then, framed as a sacrilegious assault on Western culture and as an insult perpetrated by violent, murderous opponents. Musk is not merely engaged in a debate about art; he is (not very subtly) suggesting that Nyong’o’s appearance in the role is a deadly insult to white people, and that it is reasonable to respond to that insult with violence. When Thomas Chatterton Williams claims that Musk’s arguments are equivalent to those of progressives who objected to Scarlett Johansson playing a Japanese woman in Ghost in the Shell, he is eliding the difference between the argument that non-white heroes should get a chance to appear in Hollywood films and the argument that non-white people should be erased and exterminated wholesale.

Williams would probably say that it is unfair to accuse Musk of wishing to commit genocide. That is because Williams seems largely oblivious to the fact that Musk has already committed a genocide.

Musk led the DOGE initiative supposedly tasked with reducing waste and inefficiency in government at the beginning of Trump’s term. Musk—as you’d expect from a Nazi obsessively worried that non-white people outnumber white people—believed that aid to non-white people globally was wasteful and inefficient. So he unilaterally and illegally shuttered USAID and other global aid programs.

As a result, in the last year and a half hundreds of thousands of people—mostly children—have died of malnutrition and preventable disease. The end of aid has also contributed to a dangerous increase in violence across Africa. If aid is not restored, researchers believe preventable deaths because of Musk’s genocide will reach 14 million by 2030.

Musk is not just some asshole complaining about Hollywood casting choices. He is one of the most horrific mass murderers in history. He hates and fears non-white people, and so—like the Nazi leader he admires—he took deliberate steps to kill as many of them as possible.

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You don’t have to assume good faith

Hitler called for the erasure of Jewish art from public life, and we all understand that as part and parcel of his efforts to exterminate Jewish people. Similarly, when Musk says that Lupita Nyong’o should not be allowed on movie screens, we should see that as part and parcel of his horrific and ongoing campaign of mass murder of Africans and non-white people across the globe.

Individuals who commit genocide should not get the benefit of good faith; we do not have to pretend that Musk is just expressing a trivial, narrow opinion on art any more than we need to pretend that Mao’s views on art, or Stalin’s, or Hitler’s, were somehow separate from their political programs of terror and genocide. Musk has murdered hundreds of thousands of Black people; when he says he wants to erase Lupita Nyong’o, he is expressing and attempting to advance his program of absolutely literal, horrific genocide.

When commenters like Williams ignore that genocide, they are not (just) expressing their ignorance or cowardice—they are complicit, just as Holocaust deniers are complicit. When we erase the blood on Musk’s hands, we are empowering him to continue to advance his genocidal goals—by stigmatizing and delegitimizing Black people, by targeting Black people for racist abuse and death threats, by making studios and directors nervous about promoting Black actors and Black artists. Musk wants to exterminate Black people. He has exterminated hundreds of thousands of Black people. That is vital background to understand what he means when he says Lupita Nyong’o should not appear on film.

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The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —

I’ve known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

Was Emily Dickinson neurodivergent?

There is, of course, no way to know for sure. Neurodivergence, or autism, wasn’t recognized as a condition until the early 20^th century, decades after Dickinson died in 1886. Even now, autism is often misdiagnosed, especially in women. Doctors often fail to recognize autism in patients sitting in front of them; you can’t read someone’s letters and poems and biography and expect to get a definitive read on the state of someone’s sensory processing.

Some people argue that, in the absence of certainty, it’s wrong to speculate at all. We can’t test Dickinson, so we should just assume she’s neurotypical—just as biographers tend to default to the assumption that everyone in the past was straight unless there is actual evidence of them saying, “I had sex with someone of my own gender today” (and sometimes not even then.) Everyone must be considered “normal” and part of the majority; most people are neurotypical should be changed to all people are neurotypical, lest we insult someone by suggesting they were unusual or didn’t fit in the expected boxes.

I think the problems with this approach should be fairly clear. And if they aren’t, you can see them illustrated in Alfred Habegger’s exhaustive and still standard 2001 biography of Dickinson, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books.

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Chronicling oddity

Habegger’s book is rightly celebrated for its sweeping erudition and close attention to the events (or non-events) of the life of Dickinson, her family, and her circle. In his chronicle of Dickinson’s day-by-day existence over her 55 years, he inevitably chronicles her famous reclusiveness and her spurning of publicity and public life.

The poet rarely left her home in Amherst, and not at all as she got older. She had intense correspondence with many people—especially her sister-in-law Sue—and some flirtations by letter. But she never married, and her physical intimacy was probably quite circumscribed. Indeed, she increasingly as she aged avoided physical face-to-face meetings with anyone not in her immediate family, and sometimes even with them. Her life was focused on a narrow range of intense interests—her poems, collecting and pressing flowers, baking bread, playing with the neighborhood children, her correspondence, her dog—and she decisively backed away from any encroachments. During the Civil War, for example, she refused to make bandages for soldiers, as many northern women did—not out of anti-union sentiment, but seemingly just because she didn’t want to.

Emily also famously refused, with rare exceptions, to publicize or publish her poems. She sent individual verses in letters to friends, and they would sometimes press her to allow them to anonymously submit them to papers or publications. Dickinson rarely agreed and when she did she seems to have regretted it. Habegger recounts one incident in which Sue recognized published lines as Dickinson’s. She casually identified them, outing Emily who

went “so white” her sister-in-law regretted having spoken. This strong and instantaneous reaction suggests there was more to her refusal to publish than a fastidious objection to the regularities of print or to the sprucings up of editors, as is often asserted.

Emily never showed anyone the 40 notebooks of fair copies of her own poems she put together herself, for herself; they were only discovered after her death. Here again, creation, preparation, collection all were done as a kind of private ritual, without interest in—and indeed with antipathy for—public or audience.

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Rationalizing oddity

Habegger sees Dickinson’s fierce privacy, and her resistance to publication as a reaction to and a strategy for dealing with her difficult and sexist father, Edward Dickinson. Edward was opposed to women’s right and his writings suggest he was especially set against women expressing their opinions and ideas in the public sphere. Habegger concludes that Dickinson’s shyness and privacy were a response to her father’s views and strictures.

Edward’s…fixity helps us understand why his daughter could not assume an ordinary adult female role consistent with the exercise of her genius and why she made common cause with the neighborhood children. Yet to think of her as a victim is to exaggerate Edward’s control and belittle her ingenuity. Accepting, embracing, her exclusion from the public world, she redefined it as the freedom to do and to be whatever she chose at home. Her way of living with Father was to create a private domain of friendship, thought, and art he could not enter. What this meant, however, was that certain doors could not be opened as long as he lived.

It’s certainly possible that Dickinson was trying to cater to and negotiate around her father when she kept her poetry and her life private. But there are counterindications as well. Edward encouraged and facilitated his daughter’s education, and he didn’t restrict her reading. She was an enthusiastic fan of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and other women writers. She didn’t censure them for having public profiles. And her shyness also seems too visceral to be seen primarily as a strategy.

Habegger doesn’t discuss or mention neurodivergence. But autism, or something like autism, fits quite well with what we know of Dickinson. It dovetails with her passionate, intense interests and hobbies (not least her poetry). It fits with her mix of hypersociality and intense shyness; she loved talking to people through letters or sometimes even in her house when she could speak through a door from another room. But (like many neurodivergent people) she found face-to-face social interactions painful and difficult, and she gradually seems to have phased them out altogether.

Neurodivergent people are also disproportionately likely to be queer—a suggestive connection in Dickinson’s case. Habegger is skeptical that Dickinson and Sue were romantically or sexually involved, but other historians believe they were—or at the very least that Emily was in love with her friend and eventual sister-in-law.

Queerness can also mean asexuality. We don’t know whether Dickinson ever consummated any of her relationships in any respect. But based on what evidence we have it’s plausible that she had intense romantic feelings for both men and women (which she expressed sometimes in quite sexual poems) but was not necessarily all that interested in physical intimacy.

Wild Nights!

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!

Again, there’s a limit on what we can know about someone who lived as private a life as Dickinson did. Acknowledging neurodivergence as a possibility doesn’t violate that privacy though; instead, it gives Dickinson more space to be herself.

Habegger assumes that we need to identify psychological or family causes to explain why a genius like Dickinson forswore public recognition. But the truth is that different people have different priorities and interests. Maybe Emily Dickinson was just like that because she was just like that, in the mysterious way that different people can have different mixes of talents, interests, and ambitions.

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Another shy genius

Habegger brackets queer, autistic, and non-normative possibilities; in contrast, Susana M. Morris’ Positive Obsessions, a biography of Octavia Butler, address them head on.

Like Dickinson, Butler was an extremely shy and private person, who found social interactions painful and who was intensely focused on her own internal life and writing. Like Dickinson, too, Butler’s relationship to queerness was ambivalent and ambiguous—as a six-foot tall Black woman, she was generally perceived as gender nonconforming. She seems to have questioned her own sexuality at various points, though she eventually rejected lesbian identity. Her novels, however, circle obsessively around alternative sexualities and kinks—third genders, sex with aliens, sex with vampires, sex with insects, dolphin sex, tentacle sex, polyamory, queer sex—even as she seems to have had (like Dickinson) few intimate relationships in her own life.

Unlike Habegger, Morris speaks about autism directly. She notes that Butler, like Dickinson, had difficulty with formal schooling. Morris explains that:

It wasn’t that she was undisciplined, lazy, or unproductive; instead, [Butler] was what today we would call neurodivergent. She processed information and completed tasks in a way that made little sense to some of her teachers. But she was neither uninterested nor disrespectful. She was just different. [italics mine]. Over time she was able to develop hacks that allowed her to function in a world that prizes neurotypical minds, but this was a battle for much of her life.

Morris doesn’t feel the need to look for reasons to explain why Butler was like that. She simply notes that she was—and then talks about how being different affected her and how she negotiated a world that was not especially interested in cultivating difference.

Butler, unlike Dickinson, did want her work to be read and did want public accolades; she worked hard all her life to overcome her antipathy for public speaking, rather than organizing her life around avoiding face-to-face contact. Neurodivergent people aren’t all the same either; most neurodivergent people aren’t (like Dickinson and Bulter) among the greatest American authors in history, just for starters. To say that Dickinson is neurodivergent doesn’t explain her genius any more than you can explain her genius by noting that her father was a sexist jerk.

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The brain away…

So neurodivergence isn’t a skeleton key. But it is a light that helps you see some possible contexts. Dickinson was unusual in many respects—but (as the biography of Butler suggests) she wasn’t that unusual. Recognizing the existence of neurodivergent people means recognizing that, yes, there are a lot of us who don’t like social interactions, who have special interests, who are motivated by the logic of obsession rather than or in addition to, the logic of fame.

Dickinson may have been influenced by her father’s ideas; she also may have just been a really private person. Neurodivergence isn’t a way to reduce Dickinson to a diagnosis; it’s a way to remind ourselves that people are complicated and strange and that enough people behave in enough different ways that you don’t necessarily need an explanation for why someone isn’t “normal”—beyond the observation that a lot of people aren’t.

If ever the lid gets off my head
And lets the brain away
The fellow will go where he belonged —
Without a hint from me,

And the world — if the world be looking on —
Will see how far from home
It is possible for sense to live
The soul there — all the time.

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