I hereby stake a claim to the world’s quickest solution to the video game Asteroids. That’s right, I should be in the Guinness Book of World Records. I solved the cabinet version of Asteroids at the tender age of Fourteen. I don’t stake a claim to the highest score of Asteroids, because that’s an absurd achievement. Far more important is the discovery of a solution to the game, which allowed for that ridiculous feat of physical endurance otherwise known as a “high score.” I was certainly one of, if not the, earliest human being to hack Asteroids. I discovered a way to exploit an unforeseen loophole in its design, to be able to play in perpetuity on one quarter. Allow me to explain.
With a black and white, low resolution, and highly pixilated screen, Asteroids was one of the earliest cabinet video games that joined pinball, air hockey, and foosball at bowling alleys and arcades across the United States beginning in 1979. I was fourteen-years-old then and along with some junior high school chums, we frequented a bowling alley in Ashland, Oregon. There we would flirt, cause mischief, and play our favorite games. Everyone had a three-letter digital signature used to immortalize our achievements until they were superseded by ourselves or someone else. My signature was MOZ.
Unlike other early video games and those since Asteroids was solvable. What I mean by that is not that one could achieve a high score that ended the game, or exceeded the numerical capacity of the game to record, or that there was an exit to a maze that one could discover, but that given the way the game was constructed it was possible to play on one quarter in perpetuity for as long as one could stand there. To illustrate this I need to describe the game and what my successful strategy was for solving it.
At the beginning of a game one quarter purchases the obligatory three ships or “lives” that are initially allotted to a player. An additional ship can be earned every 10,000 points. To get 10,000 points a player must shoot asteroids that come in sizes from large to medium to small. If you shoot a large one it breaks into two, then those two, if shot, each split again. The smallest asteroid, if shot, disappears. Each size of asteroid has a corresponding point value, the smaller the asteroid the more points. When a screen is cleared a new level is accessed characterized by a greater number of asteroids on the screen that travel at higher speeds. The screen is open-ended on all four sides such that if you fly your craft through one side you will appear coming out the other. It is a two-dimensional field, no depth. The asteroids follow the same logic. In addition to these asteroids flying around in a seemingly random way, a space ship will appear at various intervals and attempt to shoot your ship.
A player’s ship is rendered as a triangle that shoots from the apex and is controlled by five buttons: left and right rotation, thrust, shoot, and a hyperspace button that makes your ship disappear and reappear instantly at a random spot elsewhere. The new spot might be safe or directly in the path of an asteroid.
These then are the essential elements of the game.
I remember the day I solved Asteroids because I played on one quarter from 10 AM until 11 PM (thirteen hours) at one point peeing into a bottle. I had to stop when the bowling alley closed; I could have played longer. I did this in 1980 or 1981. I could play forever and therefore solved the game.
I had three advantages over my classmates:
First, I managed to secure lots of quarters. Not all kids my age had access to enough money to play the game as much as I did. In this sense, I just played the game more than most, and thereby became a better player.
Second, I was built for video games: I had razor-sharp reflexes, Olympic level reaction time, superior pattern recognition skills, and strong hand-eye coordination. My brain was wired tight.
Lastly, I hit upon an approach to successful play that was somewhat counterintuitive and very difficult to master. Move! Instead of being cautious and moving slowly to avoid being hit by asteroids, I would almost immediately begin flying through screens — usually up through the ceiling to emerge from the equivalent spot through the bottom of the floor. I would hold the thrust down and fly at near maximum speed. This maneuver was very difficult to master and took hours of practice, but once perfected something odd happened. Asteroids began to “slow down” much like the frequency of a siren shifts downward as it passes away from you, producing the Doppler Effect. Objects on the screen appear to slow as a thrown football does in mid-air if you are running in the same direction as it is traveling. Finally, patterns began to emerge in the way the asteroids were released at different levels together with how they behaved once struck by a shot from my ship.
There is a similar principle at work in today’s First Person Shooter (FPS) games. All things being equal it is better to be moving among enemies rather than stationary and having them move to you. This is behind what is arguably the most hated insult a player can be on the receiving end of in a FPS game, being called a “camper,” someone who just sits in a spot waiting to kill other players. This approach to play can yield results — for instance, if you are a sniper — but again, all things being equal, “movement is life.”
Aside from these three advantages, there were two structural elements incorporated by developers into the game of Asteroids that made a solution possible. First, there was no cap on the number of ships a player could have in reserve, so if a player was good enough at staying alive through multiple rounds that player could continue to accumulate ships. I would often fill the entire screen with extra ships — thirty, forty, even fifty — which allowed for hours of play.
Second, therewasa cap to the complexity of asteroids released at successive levels. At some point the number of asteroids that appeared for a new level did not breach the threshold for my effective play; the complexity was daunting, with asteroids all around and a small spaceship that would quickly appear and attack my ship followed by another in rapid succession, but it didn’t keep increasing. It plateaued. It was difficult, but with enough of the right kind of play, I could handle it.
Was this a flaw in the design of the game? Probably. I think programmers either didn’t anticipate players would be able to function at that level of complexity or they wagered only a very small number would and that that was not a barrier to the game making money. The game did make money, with some 60,000 units sold by the early 1980s, but at some point the company recognized the flaw in their design. The Wikipedia entry for Asteroids notes that arcade owners began complaining to Atari about players (like me) costing them money. Atari released Asteroids Deluxe soon after as a fix. On the other hand, perhaps the very fact kids like me were able to solve asteroids after (but only after) hundreds, perhaps thousands, of quarters also contributed to making the game a hit. Whatever the case, I don’t think any subsequent cabinet video games allowed for players to dominate them such that one could play them for hours on one quarter.
I glean two lessons from playing Asteroids as a kid: First, Big Tech can be beaten. There is always a hack, always a way around their code. Second, beating Big Tech is a pyrrhic victory unless one shares the spoils of that victory. Soon after I was able to accumulate ships I began sharing them with friends so we could all save quarters. I would like to think I was a budding socialist even at the tender age of fourteen.
The contemporary Amerikan liberal is a specimen of political animal whose greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The roly-poly toy Weebles captures perfectly the broad but shallow political tradition that narrowly defeated Donald Trump in the recent presidential elections: “Tipping an egg-shaped Weeble causes a weight located at the bottom-center to be lifted off the ground. Once released, gravity brings the Weeble back into an upright position.” (Weeble–Wikipedia Retrieved 11/10/20). The weight is fidelity to private property and markets as the sine-qua-non of democracy; the “wobble” constitutes repeated attempts to solve the intractable and recurring crises that this unstable marriage of democracy and capitalism produces. The key here is that Weebles are very kinetic, but only over a very limited terrain. They move a lot, but not very far nor very quickly. They are remarkably stable, but also inflexible. To stop fascism and replace capitalism with a political economy that serves the many and not the few, we need to move. Weebles only move slowly, in a haphazard manner, and never in a predetermined direction. Push a Weeble one way, and it will lean the other, while its fulcrum will shift in an altogether different direction. Kinda frustrating. Indeed, they don’t fall over, but we should not mistake such leaning to and fro as movement toward any destination other than where they already reside.
Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook executive and faux feminist, is generally credited with popularizing the term “lean in” as a meta concept for contemporary progressives. The core operating principle behind “lean in” Democrats is the Weeble wobble. If one is standing still, to lean in is to initiate a deviation from a perpendicular position; it is to begin an inclination as one tips the body into a slope. Above all it signals a state of readiness to move in a particular direction. Such a maneuver does not, however, fully commit one to moving in that direction. When one leans there is always an element of hedging; always an aspect of waiting, of anticipating, and therefore the possibility of staying put or even reversing the lean and heading off in another, even opposite, direction. To lean is also by definition to be a bit off balance. Bill Clinton was the consummate practitioner of the political maneuver known as triangulation, something similar to the Weeble wobble, but with one major difference. Clinton’s triangulating was always a form of political calculation; the Weeble wobble is a function of the limits of the liberal philosophical horizon.
This Weeble wobble is almost always well-meaning but also ineffectual; it is earnest and committed waffling, passionate virtue signaling and much celebrated but empty representational politics. Hence, its popularity amongst liberal ideologues. They lean a great deal, but go nowhere. They are perpetually “leaning” towards justice, yet never actually moving to it. Everything is about intention, not results; opportunity, not equality. It’s no wonder so many people hate them. Conservatives, by the way, practice much the same politics. In times of social quiescence such middle-of-the-road centrism anchors capitalism by bracketing out radical solutions to systemic problems.
These are not those times.
Liberals always link political freedom to private property and markets; economic opportunity to the capitalist ship of state. This means they necessarily undermine struggles for economic equality, anti-racism, gender liberation and anti-fascism. To uphold the universalism and exceptionalism claimed by the United States of Amerika involves punching downward in an effort to thwart popular revolutionary struggles. When the political center no longer offers solutions to the recurring crises endemic to capitalism, people look elsewhere for an exit. They will look to fascism or socialism. The first is a door that opens to a cliff. The second must not be a door that binds us to more of the Weeble wobble. Our class solidarity and mutual aide is the only guarantee of a different future. That means we must break decisively with liberalism in the direction of radical democracy and equality.
This is a deliberately splenetic critique of an Intercept Podcast hosted by Glenn Greenwald that aired on June 25, 2020, entitled “Should the Populist Left Work With the Populist Right Where They Have Common Ground or Shun Them?” Along with Greenwald as a not-so-disinterested-host, the podcast features Krystal Ball and Nathan Robinson. Since 2018 Ball has promoted a left-right “populist” convergence through the television show Rising, which she co-hosts with right-winger Saagar Enjeti. The two debate topical fare “Crossfire” style (arch-paleoconservative Pat Buchanan was an original “Crossfire” host in the 1980s, a noteworthy historical reference here). Ball and Enjeti also co-authored The Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Are Rising, released in February 2020. Robinson is the editor-in-chief of the socialist magazine Current Affairs, arguably the most unfortunately named socialist magazine in the history of socialist magazines, but a socialist magazine nonetheless. He wears funny outfits but is an articulate reform-minded socialist.
This debate was ostensibly prompted by Robinson’s article in Current Affairs “Isn’t Right-Wing Populism Just Fascism?” but has been ongoing ever since Greenwald first appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight a few years ago. Given Carlson’s growing status as a more authentic neo-fascist alternative to Trump, it’s of no small importance that we try and understand how efforts to engage with him are utter folly. I think both Greenwald and Ball argue for what amounts to a ‘pink-brown’ alliance, a potentially disastrous response to the ongoing collapse of the center in American politics. Robinson’s critique of Greenwald and Ball is largely correct, although because he upholds much of the language and theoretical framework of “populism” rather than discarding it altogether, his response is somewhat misguided. I think there is an alternative to all three of these pundits, but it can only be conceptualized by challenging the basis from which Greenwald and Ball base their politics. Robinson doesn’t quite do this; hence the need for this essay.
To Robinson’s question “Isn’t right-wing populism just fascism?” the short answer is: Fascism is fascism; populism isn’t anything at all (at least not in 2020). That means the short answer to Greenwald’s question “Should we work with or shun them?” should be: We should crush them.
But I’m fond of long answers.
Glenn Greenwald is a litigation attorney; his worldview is steeped in laws, constitutionalism, and abstract theories of rights. This bourgeois legalism can provide powerful critiques of the political economy of capitalism, but too often in America it is also blind in the white eye. For instance, Greenwald the activist helped found and lead The Intercept, an important investigative journalism project. But, Greenwald the attorney has also represented in court neo-Nazis such as Mathew Hale. Anti-fascists understandably have a problem with this. Greenwald thinks such professional conduct is a testament to his fidelity to equal access under the law. We think it’s collaboration. This contradiction is not unique to Greenwald, it is the case with all celebrity intellectuals, entertainers, and liberal idealists. On principle we should figuratively hammer those who would sacrifice lives on an altar of abstract rights.
Greenwald is also preternaturally clever. If one accepts his premises (sometimes unstated) it’s difficult to argue his conclusions. Therefore, we need to challenge the foundation of his framework to show why the coalition-building he and Ball are proposing involves a disastrous politics of the pink and brown.
It’s important to note that “pink” here means blue-dog, liberal or social Democrat, not LGBTQ+. “Brown” means far-right, white nationalist, and fascist. Red is far-left (not Republican) and denotes revolutionary socialist, communist, and anarchist politics. With me? The dangerous overlap here is not “red-brown” but “pink-brown”; between disaffected (white) Democrats, and far-rightists. In terms of historical precedence think George Wallace or Reagan Democrats. Greenwald and Ball want to break out the beer and bratwurst and discuss “legitimate grievances”; I want to destroy their organizations, from the top down, and thereby their capacity to organize, even function. By doing so we can also make space for a good many of their rank and file to become anti-racists, anti-fascists, even raging leftists.
Part of what Greenwald will not accept is that many radical conservatives have moved into a more revolutionary camp and prefer an eliminationist form of actually existing capitalism. Such a radical turn means that when they inveigle against “elites” or “foreign wars” they are not reinvigorating “populist” democracy or helping constrain American imperialism. This is not an opportunity for cross-class coalition building, nor is it a component of a “popular front” against fascism. It is one important aspect of a burgeoning 21st-century fascism in formation. It must be fought, not finagled.
Greenwald’s TINA (There Is No Alternative)
Greenwald introduces the podcast exchange as follows:
“For me, the starting point has to be the current state of left-wing populism. I don’t think that it can be reasonably disputed that left-wing politics in the United States does not claim a majority of people which support it. By which I don’t mean that left-wing populism has no views which garner the support of a majority of people. Left-wing populism does have key views, such as medicare for all and raising the minimum wage and even to some extent universal healthcare that garner substantial support among the entire U.S. population if not a majority which means it has broad appeal beyond its left-wing precepts. But, left-wing populism as a movement, as an ideology, as a philosophy, does not claim anywhere close to a majority–nowhere near a majority among people in the United States claim to be leftists or left-wing populists…That means in order for it to implement its policy goals–which has to be the ultimate objective of politics, otherwise, politics is like art or poetry, something one does for the art of it, or the purity of it, or the self-enjoyment of it, but not actually to change the world for the better in meaningful ways through legislation and reform. If that is the goal (which it has to be) it means that left-wing populists have to form coalitions and alliances with other people in order to form majorities. And the question becomes, in those numerous instances where left-wing populists can’t form a majority with democratic corporatists and democratic imperialists and democratic centrists–and oftentimes they can’t, which is why there is such a cleavage…the fact that there are so many instances where there is no way to form a coalition or a majority with democratic centrists because they oppose the agenda of left-wing populism prompts the question: With whom are left-wing populists going to form coalitions and alliances on an issue-by-issue basis–not permanently, not for every issue, but on an issue-by-issue basis where there is common ground, if there is a prohibition, as Robinson argues there should be, in that article at least, where he said: “the left should have nothing to do with that movement?” With whom is the left-wing going to form alliances and coalitions if not right-wing populism?”
This is a clever, but fatuous, elevation of congressional politics at the expense of other forms of political struggle. Social movements like Black Lives Matter are expected to reach their apex of development when politicians are all in Kente cloths; anarchist mutual aid networks, worker militancy, housing occupations, teacher and health care worker strikes, and much more are completely ignored here. Nothing exists outside “serious politics.” Greenwald is trying to defend a sweeping claim about how power functions in a capitalist society by reducing that power to a very narrow expression of it: legislation in the congress between donkeys and elephants. Furthermore, the American political spectrum is notoriously tilted to the right, at least in part because there has never been a labor party here; just two capitalist parties. That’s a long-term, built-in, structural disadvantage to working-class, multi-racial, movements that must be overcome. We can overcome it, but not through elections. Social movements often drive and move beyond electoral politics, as is now the case with the uprising following the murder of George Floyd. Greenwald and Ball seem to think the best response to cops murdering Black people is making tactical alliances with Rand Paul and Josh Hawley.
So Greenwald’s first premise is that electoral politics is the only form of politics; everything else is just art or self-expression. Notice also that throughout this debate so-called ‘left-wing populists’ are limited to two choices: pacts with corporate democrats or those with right-wing populists.
Anti-fascists refuse both options.
My central argument is that one cannot practice what Greenwald and Ball are proposing and expect to defeat fascism and build an alternative to capitalism. Of course, if one’s goal is majority control of both chambers of Congress, then none of this applies. If you accept his premise here, it’s hard to reject his conclusion. Don’t accept the premise. Greenwald and Ball inhabit a thought world with self-limiting horizons. Our politics are excluded from their world of “There Is No Alternative”; what is hardly ever acknowledged is that this engenders a built-in preference for and susceptibility to the siren songs of the far-right. When the center of what is acceptable debate between the two capitalist parties has moved so far to the right that it includes fascist ideas, the solution is not to accommodate such ideas, but to reject them. Fascist ideas have moved from the margins to the mainstream of that electoral consensus precisely because the “dead center” of liberalism and conservatism is bereft of solutions to today’s crises. They fear the Black-led uprising more than they do fascism.
One of the strongest arguments to be made against cooperating with the far-right is this: forging alliances with them — tactical or otherwise — precludes movement building that is genuinely multi-racial, working-class, and that promotes left-unity. The far-right is so steeped in eliminationist and accelerationist politics as to make the tactical alliances Greenwald and Ball so cherish a fool’s errand. To court allies among fascists is to court disaster for people in their crosshairs.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Greenwald poses a hypothetical union member who believes in workers over management, medicare for all, raising the minimum wage, and is against free trade agreements because of offshoring. On the other hand, this worker is also a social conservative — pro-life, not LGBTQ positive, and favors restrictive immigration policy. Are they to be shunned? Greenwald doesn’t mention anti-Black racism, police brutality, or the carceral state in his convenient equation. He doesn’t mention this hypothetical (white) worker’s support for “law and order” expressed through “Back The Blue” bumper stickers. I think the omission is instructive. This podcast aired on June 25, 2020, while protests were still ongoing (as they are now) across the United States. While statues to confederate generals and colonialist masters were being hauled down throughout the country, Greenwald and Ball persisted with their fantasy of building a multi-racial, working-class movement without confronting racism and white supremacy while one was underway all around them. Instead of turning to that movement, they mistook a phantom constituency for a new “agent of history.”
Greenwald’s Exemplar of Right-Wing Populism
But Greenwald isn’t just talking about breaking bread with regular white workers; he’s got something very particular in mind when he uses the term ‘right-wing populist’:
“For this discussion to be profitable we need to have an understanding of what right-wing populism is…To me, the most vivid and comprehensive expression of right-wing populism in the United States is the rhetoric and the branding of the 2016 Trump campaign. Not the reality of the Trump presidency, which deviated radically and abruptly from what the rhetoric and branding of what the campaign was, but the campaign itself. What did the campaign in 2016 say that it stood for, particularly when engineered by Steve Bannon in order to attract enough voters, particularly in the industrial Midwest, in order to win the election…?”
What it stood for then, as now, is “America First”: a reinvigorated racist nationalism that is the core of a 21st-century fascism-in-formation. Greenwald argues that Trump “deviated radically and abruptly” from Bannon’s authentic populist program. This amounts to a distinction without a difference. Here, both the thing he is trying to measure and evaluate together with the ruler and criteria which he uses to measure it, are both flawed. Bannon and his ilk engineered Trump’s campaign from largely the same template Trump is now governing, setting aside the wild card of the global impact of COVID-19. In other words, there has been no substantive break between promises and results that don’t always occur when either capitalist party secures the executive. Far more important is the continuity that persisted from campaign to governing regime: building the wall and ICE raids, vicious anti-Black racism, organized misogyny, hyper-nationalism, more advanced forms of kleptocracy and cronyism, together with an iron-fisted fidelity to the economic imperatives of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and corporate America. Even if one were to hold that there is a meaningful difference between Bannon’s “populism” and that of Trump, the proposition that the former offers viable terrain for cooperation is reprehensible.
There should be no need for a quote here from Bannon to demonstrate his moorings in the white nationalist, alt-right political universe.
The question becomes, what are Greenwald and Ball up to?
Greenwald’s Pink-Brown Alliance
Many leftists are accustomed to hearing about “red-brown” alliances, the most dreadful example captured in the slogan “After Hitler, Our Turn,” popularized by the Stalinized communist left in 1930s Germany. There was, of course, no “turn” for the left “after Hitler” because the left, then everyone else, was obliterated, literally; this being perhaps the single most important lesson learned for what happens after fascism attains state power. That slogan flowed from the equally disastrous Stalinist slogans of “socialism in one country” and “social fascism,” the former a betrayal of proletarian internationalism and the latter a refusal to distinguish between routine capitalist rule and that of a fascist dictatorship. Today there are numerous examples of some radical leftists adopting a political framework that involves much overlap with far-right and even neo-fascist movements. One has only to look at the degenerated publication of the U.S. Socialist Worker’s Party organ The Militant, or the bizarre syncretic monstrosities like Spiked Magazine and Russian “National Bolsheviks” to see such overlap. When anti-racism and anti-fascism are discarded as central principles that should guide revolutionary praxis, such alliances become possible. The term ”campist” comes to mind here, a largely anarchist critique of socialists and communists who allow their political praxis to be overly influenced by states, many of which are not on the left (e.g., Russia, Syria). Geopolitical priorities become over-determined by conflicts with the United States; “anti-imperialism” devolves into a reflexive “anti-Americanism” itself enmeshed within the priorities of those reactionary states, where they risk becoming nothing but a creature of them. Max Blumenthal and The Greyzone come to mind here. This political tendency on the left is real and needs to be countered, but what we are addressing here is different.
Together with vigilance against such developments, we need to be equally aware of “pink-brown” alliances. After all, it was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) that carried out the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibnicht in 1919. From then on the leadership of Germany’s largest worker’s party would periodically forge its own alliances with right-wing reaction which also contributed to a failure of the left to unite against Nazism. The leadership of the social democrats considered there to be no appreciable difference between Nazis and communists, a political stupidity that was epitomized in posters from the Iron Front that featured three arrows targeting the Conservative Franz von Papen, NSDAP leader Adolph Hitler and Ernst Thälmann, leader of the German Communist Party (KPD). The Iron Front was demobilized by the SPD leadership in the run-up to the Nazi ascension to power while at the same time the communists considered there to be no appreciable difference between social democrats and Nazis. Any front against Nazism — popular, united, or otherwise — became impossible.
Today’s purveyors of the “populism” thesis for understanding political power have learned nothing from history. Their attempts to forge an impossible unity between fascists and social democrats will only demobilize constituencies that cannot possibly benefit from such a project.
Greenwald thinks there is a realignment underway within the American body politic that has permanently rejiggered the familiar right-left spectrum. This realignment now pits “populists” of the right and left against the “establishment” or “insiders” of the center. Such claims are not new. They are, in fact, stock and trade of the far-right. While Greenwald doesn’t argue that all politics is now “populists” vs. “elites”, he does argue that many things can be grasped through this lens and that now is the time for leftists to forge alliances with what amount to fascists on the right. He’s wrong.
The Dead Center
For all his radicalism, Greenwald is committed to liberal, constitutional, democracy as he understands it. The problem he faces, and it is the same for everyone in the “dead center,” is that the ground underneath him is shifting, although not in the ways he thinks. Greenwald outlines what he thinks has changed in American politics over the past few years and how his political analysis accounts for that change:
“What all of this illustrates to me is that while there are some political debates that are still best understood by Republican vs. Democrat, or left vs. right — things like social issues, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ rights, crucial political issues to be sure–and more substantive policies such as the environment and climate where there are still differences (meaningful ones) that are understood best by the division between Republican vs. Democrat, there are numerous issues where the establishment wings of the Democrat and Republican parties have more in common with one another than they do with the populist wings of either party; where left-wing populists have more in common with right-wing populists than they do with what has long appeared to be their closer allies in each party. And what this illustrates is that while some politics is still best understood and Republican vs. Democrat, much of it is not. Much of it is better understood as pro-establishment vs. anti-establishment, insider vs. outsider.”
Here Greenwald doesn’t use a race-class-gender framework to guide his analysis of political struggle, and it shows. This leaves him susceptible to pitchfork and torch rightists like Tucker Carlson. The American far-right has always framed their politics as “anti-establishment” and “outsider vs insider” but there should be an unbridgeable gulf between what they mean and what we mean by those terms. Greenwald thinks otherwise.
“… Is it the case that the views of right-wing populists on immigration, on race, and on other issues that are so pernicious and odious and anathema to left-wing populists that working with them ought to be morally impermissible? If that is the case, the question becomes: Number one, how is the left-wing ever going to implement its agenda or even attract converts if it refuses to engage constructively with [them and instead] scream at them and call them Nazis and fascists and racists but actually engage with them and try and find common ground? And it leads to the [second] question: Why is it that the pernicious views of the populist right render them off-limits for engaging with them in any kind of constructive or issue by issue alliances or coalition but that the hideous and horrendous views of the corporatist and imperialist democrats doing regime change wars in other countries, serving the interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley at the expense of workers–why are those hideous views that so many Democrats have [not off limits]?”
No. 1: These “populist” Republicans Greenwald is so enamored with are pockmarked by pathological fetishes for private property, racism, and fascism. If it waddles like a pig, oinks like a pig, and roots like a pig, it is probably a pig. Stop calling it a duck.
No. 2 The left will never implement its agenda through congress. We fight for a revolution, not a bill.
No. 3. Both fascists and capitalists are our mortal enemies. Greenwald is trying to render what is a structural deformation of the American political system into a moral failure practiced by progressives: a double standard for which he offers the opposite as a solution. The corporate Democrats are worse! It’s lesser evilism in reverse. But Greenwald knows the Democratic Party is a capitalist party and therefore prefers to make alliances with the business class. Only someone who doesn’t understand this would be vexed by the altogether routine and inflexible pro-corporate policies and legislation favored by Democratic party elites. Congressional politics is generally limited to disagreements among capitalists that are structured to exclude arguments put forward by movements that challenge this. See: Sanders Campaign for president 2016, 2020. The only question is why someone would continue to try and make a “dirty break” with the Democratic Party so as to smuggle in democratic socialism. That will have to wait for another time.
It is also important to point out that what Greenwald calls “right-wing populism” is really an American hybrid of libertarianism and Christian nationalism. It is the worship of private property and the Cross wrapped up in the American flag. These two ideologies constitute the most important pipelines that convey raw political material to a more toxic refinery called 21st Century fascism. The most dynamic center of gravity for this emerging fascism is precisely what Greenwald thinks is “right-wing populism”. It is right-wing, but it is in no sense an expression of “the people.” For example, Peter Thiel is by no stretch of the imagination a “populist”; he’s a powerful tech billionaire inspired by ubermensch, dark enlightenment elitism. He believes capitalism and democracy are antithetical, and that the former should vanquish the latter. Yet Thiel is an important, even central, figure within the “populist” firmament. If that’s the case, then how can one argue for tactical alliances with that political tendency? So too with Rand Paul, the Senator who has repeatedly opposed anti-lynching legislation. Paul is a tea party libertarian — a crypto-fascist by any other name. Wouldn’t such an alliance be predicated on a rupture with other constituencies (immigrants, Black people, undocumented workers) because their very existence is at stake? Yes, it would.
Greenwald always uses the term “populism” in ways to favorably contrast it with “establishment” centrism. What he won’t acknowledge is that the term has its roots, and not a small amount of limbs and branches, within Cold War sociology and political science and the singular contention that all politics can be understood as an eternal contest between democracy, on the one hand, and totalitarianism, on the other. This political tradition argues that democracy is fundamentally compatible with capitalism; fascism, anarchism, and communism are not. There is no anti-capitalist option according to these precepts, only a defense of liberal democracy (capitalist democracy) through a never-ending war against “extremism.” A major problem with that framework is that by excluding left options to capitalism, the “anti-totalitarians” will often turn to right-wing authoritarians or outright fascists to solve the recurring problems that capitalism generates. They routinely sacrifice democracy and equality in favor of private property and inequality. While Jeanne Kirkpatrick articulated this best from the conservative right as a distinction between “totalitarian regimes” vs. “authoritarian regimes” and a marked preference for the latter, most Democrats sing the same song, if in a different key. When Greenwald argues that right and left “populists” need to work together he’s arguing against that long political tradition of corporate centrism, but in favor of alliances with fascism. His break with centrist orthodoxy, with the iron-clad hold of the two all-but indistinguishable parties run by and for the ruling class, is to appease the far-right in the interests of strengthening the liberal center. His alternative to the domination of the two capitalist parties is to empower the most reactionary, noxious elements of one in the hopes of stabilizing the ship of state. It won’t work and besides, we want to sink it.
“Populism” here is a term used by centrists as a cudgel against “extremists” of any political stripe. The term has no claim whatsoever to any analytical legitimacy and wherever one observes its use, be wary. There was, of course, a “populist movement” during the late 19th Century, but it has little if anything to do with either contemporary scholars who use the term as a weapon in defense of capitalist democracy, and even less with that vast cornucopia of political groups that have adopted it worldwide. The seminal text on the term is by Marco D’Eramo, in New Left Review (July-August 2013, No. 82) “Populism and the New Oligarchy.”
The Pitchfork and Torch Crowd
In discussing Tucker Carlson, Greenwald makes the laughable claim that it is often only Carlson who is willing to attack corporate Democrats. Greenwald plays an excerpt of a Carlson show where he rails against “banking” and “foreign wars,” “the private equity model” and “a ruling class”. This Greenwald believes to be a “questioning the fundamentals of capitalism” one can’t find elsewhere. But white nationalists and Christian Patriots would agree with these descriptions of ruling class power; they just believe such power is Jewish and arrayed against white people. Greenwald is too smart to be unaware of this fact; therefore he just dismisses it. He doesn’t think it’s relevant. But it is. His appearances on Carlson’s show are loathsome. Greenwald deliberately misrepresents Carlson’s “populism” by white-washing it; downplaying or disregarding altogether the vicious anti-Black racism that is a core value of all white nationalists. Greenwald also describes Carlson as an important voice against “regime change” in Syria, Iran and Venezuela. He apparently regards Carlson as an anti-imperialist, a complete denigration of the term Lenin developed a century ago. Of course all of this debate about American power abroad amounts to nothing more than counterposing the boots on the ground option vs. the Qassem Suleimani option; it is an argument among capitalists about how best to exercise that power abroad, not dismantle it. What Carlson articulates flows from the perceived interests of the one unit of analysis that for him rises above all else: the (white) nation. Carlson is best understood within this political tradition, and as such his brand of politics is beyond the pale because it implies the jettisoning of any meaningful antiracist praxis.
Robinson correctly points out that both Greenwald and Ball exaggerate areas of agreement between “populisms” to suit their argument, noting that in actuality such overlap is virtually non-existent. Greenwald, ever the attorney, then tries to pigeon-hold Robinson into supporting “cooperation on principle.” Robinson responds that on principle, yes, there can be cooperation; but it doesn’t matter because they are “on principle” too radically different. Our principles don’t overlap enough with theirs to justify cooperation. Rand Paul, Robinson correctly asserts, is not a “populist” but a “tea party libertarian”.
I find it remarkable that at this juncture of the podcast there is only mention of Black Lives Matter in relation to right-wing calls to invoke the Insurrection Act to crush the rebellion. Libertarians might well signal opposition to the state using the military to quell dissent, only to prefer cops, III Percent militias, and Oath Keepers do it instead. The three podcast presenters here evince no real apprehension of what is happening on the streets; they seem disconnected from the powerful protests underway and the attendant reinterpretations of social reality that go with them. This powerful multi-racial, poor and working class social movement is a threat to both traditional capitalist political control (liberal and conservative) as well as far-right alternatives to that consensus. A pink-brown alliance would serve to short-circuit our most advanced revolutionary forces and assist the capitalist state as it faces what could be a genuine existential crisis.
Greenwald gives Trump’s anti-NAFTA and anti-WTO political stances both too much and too little weight. He ascribes far too much importance for these policy stances as somehow “pro-union” or “pro-worker” and not near enough to the core constituencies Trump seeks to mobilize through them: white workers (Steel workers, cops, prison guards, etc.) For example, with prison and cop unions, Trump is not trying to gut them; he counts on them for support. Trump’s pro-union bonafides always run through his anti-Black racism, which is as a central a precept within his worldview. When we are crying for defunding and abolition, he is doubling down on Back the Blue. Our problem is with the existence of those unions and their role in anti-Black racism and generalized repression. Those white workers are not “duped” into supporting Trump, he is fighting for their real interests as they understand them. We have to dismantle those interests, not find ways to accommodate them. It will do us no good to deny agency to right-wingers; they know who butters their bread.
Greenwald cites Missouri Senator Josh Hawley as someone ‘genuinely’ committed to challenging corporate power. This hagiography of Hawley is only possible by stripping his right-wing, libertarian, Christian worldview from the individual legislation that he does or doesn’t support and ignoring the pipeline to fascism within which it all flows. Greenwald is intent on distinguishing between authentic and ersatz populists, then between right-wing populism and (classical) fascism. Robinson chimes in on the distortion of Rand Paul:
“Wait. If Rand Paul is a part of this…[then] the whole premise that…right-wing populism is a kind of combination of left economics and social conservatism just falls apart completely, because Rand Paul is a radical free market libertarian.” In other words there is no “economic populism” to work with there. As usual, one needs to add that he’s a fucking racist.
Greenwald believes that this “right-wing populism” represents a “serious ideological rift” within the Republican Party and conservatism in general and that this division can be capitalized on. Robinson thinks it is politics as usual — both are wrong. There is a rift within the Republican Party between corporate conservatives and a growing fascist wing. That divide can be capitalized on by attacking both and developing our movement but no element should be opportunistically engaged with. At least not without dire consequences for a revolutionary movement of the left.
Krystal Ball’s contribution to the debate revolves around more distinctions without differences: between leaders and a base, racists and non-racists, left economics and right culture. Ball states she is in favor of a multi-racial, working class coalition and is a social democrat. I take her at her word, and therein lies the problem.
Ball argues that too many Democrats are influenced by neo-liberalism and “identity” politics and hold up “representation” alone to keep their coalition active. The policies and legislation they support do not offer substantive change. For corporate and imperialist Democrats it is most important to keep the multi-racial working class in line following the dictates of Wall street and Silicon Valley. You will get no argument from me here, either.
Likewise her description of Trump deliberately fanning “white racial anxiety” as a continuation of the Southern Strategy from the Nixon years, geared toward keeping large segments of the white working class in the GOP tent where it does the bidding of their corporate masters, is also spot on.
It is in her prescription for addressing that division where we find the same intractable problem as that of Greenwald. How do we get them together? They ask. Why the fuck is that even a question? I respond. I don’t want to find common ground. To Ball there is the approach of the traditional, socialist left which she describes as “shunning and condemning” vs. that exemplified by her program, which is “debating and engaging.” Then she conflates our opposition to working with the far-right with that of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment. Ball makes the argument that the flip-side to leftist dismissal of poor whites is Mitt Romney’s “47% of the people will never support Republicans” elitist gotcha audible. Ball is arguing that there is a virtuous, populist (white) middle caught in between a crafty and comfortable corporate elite on the one hand and an out of touch, elitist, Bernie-bro group of professors who harbor disdain for poor whites on the other. The elitist leftists dupe people into hating racists and not capitalists. This, combined with platitudinous appeals to “honest dialogue” and straw-man denunciations of claims that all Trump supporters are Nazis, dovetails quite nicely with what I describe as the motor of fascism: that eternal struggle against ungrateful, cosmopolitan elites above and unworthy, racialized, parasitic masses below. The fire they are playing with here is the MARS (Middle American Radicals); it will burn all of us we don’t put it out. It is presently white hot and smoldering, even flaring up in places. Greenwald and Ball are playing directly into it.
Conclusion
At the very end of the podcast there is a brief discussion between Greenwald and Ball about “race.” Greenwald seeks to draw an analogy between Black civil rights and LGBTQ struggles. The passage, both breathtaking in its liberal naiveté and cringe-worthy in its historical illiteracy is worth quoting in full:
“As you mentioned, this is an amazing moment. Some incredibly significant shifts [are underway]: rapid, radical shifts in how people think about policing, how people think about race…One of the things I would compare it to is the very radical and abrupt and positive progress that was made in the course of a couple decades on how people think about same sex couples and gay rights and [how] that happened not because people were called bigots and homophobes enough times or because their churches were invaded violently enough but because just through humanitarian interaction; of people seeing that gay men and gay women weren’t these predators outside playgrounds but were their neighbors and their teachers and their relatives and their children did they start to break down those barriers that had been erected for them about how to think of their fellow gay citizens and that made them much more accepting and I think that that kind of human interaction and human engagement is always a prerequisite for finding common ground.”
He actually said “radical and abrupt and positive progress…in the course of a couple decades”. This is the pink-washing pablum issued forth by HR departments and the Human Rights Campaign as applied to Black liberation. Here, Greenwald does a triple disservice. First, his notion of LGBTQ+ rights having been won through increments accumulated over time as a feature of a generalized “progress” is an affront to all those radical activists in ACT-UP, among many others, who died for those rights in very militant ways. Secondly, the notion that such incremental progress is analogous to what is underway with the current Black uprising is painfully off base. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Greenwald does not believe it possible that those same rights “incrementally” won could be summarily stripped away. Like most liberals Greenwald believes such rights, once won as a matter of capitalist modernity, are not subject to a radical and abrupt reversal. They are.
Making common cause with fascists is precisely the kind of political suicide that makes such a catastrophic reversal of rights not only possible, but probable.
In addition to those geographical areas we call “food deserts” because they lack access to affordable and nutritious food, we need to consider the growth of “information deserts,” areas that lack affordable and informative news. I’ve been trying to follow the #Almedafire in Southern Oregon for the past 24-hours, only to repeatedly return to raw emergency feeds from first responders in the hopes of piecing together what’s happening on the ground. Traditional news outlets are practically useless–the Medford Mail Tribune, together with all other print media, took their usual ten-hour sabbatical last night right as the fire was raging through four Southern Oregon cities. The combined power of all network television managed to stream one stationary camera from atop a hill until it too disappeared due to a loss of power. Radio stations kept to their regularly featured programs of commercial advertising, interspersed with soft-rock, shock jock, and QAnon-talk; often the two were indistinguishable. Social media was only somewhat more useful. Facebook was wildly uneven. Instant live streamers captured flames devouring houses and gas stations, occasionally providing the “who, what, when, where, how and why” of basic reporting but more often than not cutting away for long segments about their shoelaces or pets. Facebook commentary, often the only source of news on any given live video feed, skewed toward that of a sewer spewing conspiracy theories that mostly blamed Antifa for fires from San Diego to Washington state. Twitter, while marginally better at providing on-the-ground breaking news, was also rife with whacky speculation and short on useful information. What is clear is that print, television, and radio are dead. It’s not clear, however, what, if anything, is going to replace them.
A basket-of-deplorables liberal or an ivory tower radical might attribute all this to a reactionary environment peculiar to Southern Oregon, but I don’t think that’s the case. The preponderance of Antifa conspiracy theories mixed with frantic calls to evacuate animal shelters and department stores is not unique to Southern Oregon; neither is the almost complete disregard for the wholesale destruction of mobile home parks and the health and safety of undocumented populations, the houseless, and other vulnerable populations. Such reactionary hand-wringing for the estates of the wealthy and vineyards of the well-to-do, together with a corresponding disdain for working people is not unique to Southern Oregon. It may be more pronounced in such liberal cradles of opulence as Malibu and Marin; Lake Oswego and Mercer Island, somewhat less so in timber towns.
Much like the new citizen streamers who cover BLM protests for platforms like Twitch, Periscope, and Facebook, alternative forms of ”news” are welcome, but also deeply problematic. Where such streamers are not advocacy journalists clearly on the side of Black Lives Matter and anti-fascism, they often provide footage authorities can use to prosecute comrades. Even when they are on our side, their quest for clout, clicks, and followers ($) inadvertently aids the powers that be. In their frequent attempts to emulate uncritically received notions of “unbiased” reporting, “fair and balanced” coverage, and a misbegotten heroic pursuit of the “Truth” they trammel on all of these values, and many more besides. But we need them; otherwise, we would be left with the corporate press and the underfunded and out-of-touch “old left” media.
In the case of local emergencies, like the firestorms raging out here in the west, our principles of solidarity and mutual aid demand that we find ways to fill the gap between the tendency of traditional forms of media to misinform us, and the emergence of new forms of (social) media for which it is hard to distinguish between information, misinformation, and disinformation. The reason both new and old forms of media are hapless in the face of local emergencies and disasters is due, of course, to the same trends that have left us so vulnerable to COVID-19: privatization, austerity, JIT logistics, and crumbling public infrastructures, especially health and welfare. Following the tenets of disaster capitalism, the predictable carnage that results is quickly followed by the savage depredations Wall Street and Silicon Valley engineer for profit.
We need a new “citizen” reporter network with the politics of Unicorn Riot but with the reach of Fox News; we need Woke.net but without the “Black Conservative Preacher” and anti-Semitic feeds it features. This will only happen if we take our cues from the decentralized, horizontal, anti-authoritarian BLM and anti-fascist demonstrations underway across cities small and large. If we focus on maximizing what’s great about new social media as a news provider, together with minimizing what’s rotten, we might be able to provide nutritious and delicious information for the masses and thereby fertilize these information deserts so that something beautiful can bloom. END
Anarchists are often at their best when they critique communists for unhealthy admiration of order and authority. This tradition is captured in the term of abuse “tankie”, which is anarchist shorthand for a communist who does not shy from bringing out the tanks to crush rebellion, like those deployed during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968 in then Czechoslovakia. Murray Bookchin, a social ecologist, and philosopher of libertarian municipalism whose writings continue to animate leftists from Rojava to Seattle, often wrote with a profound contempt for the more authoritarian traditions found in various expressions of Marxism and socialism. If he were alive today, he would not be a “tankie”. As an anarcho-communist, I am sympathetic to many of his views. For instance, the quote below is an effective broadside against the kind of Marxism that needs cops, commissars, and soldiers to keep everyone in line.
That’s great stuff. But there is another Murray Bookchin, a writer who, for whatever misbegotten reason, was a featured speaker at the 1978 national convention of the Libertarian Party USA in Boston, Massachusetts. The following year the party nominated the billionaire David H. Koch for Vice President. You can look up Bookchin’s presentation online. It is not his finest hour. He also contributed this to a right-wing journal.
“There was a period of time, indubitably, in Jefferson’s time, when the farmer, the yeoman—the American yeoman, standing on his land with his musket—represented a forward step for individuality. But today the millions that flow in and out of New York anonymously, through mass transportation, through the tunnels and over the bridges that lead into and out of the suburbs—these are among the most de-individualized people I’ve encountered in 57 years of living. Most of them are organization men and women and have become denuded of all personality and uniqueness. They’re figments; they’re creatures, in fact. They’re creatures of the mass media and of the corporate world that has rendered them totally homogenized and anonymous. Now already the attempt to preserve what we in America would call private property, the rights of US Steel and the rights of General Motors, has become literally a step in the direction of the de-individualization of the American people and their reduction to masses.” (Interview with Murray Bookchin Reason Magazine 1979.)
I have long maintained that libertarianism in the United States constitutes a deep reservoir of reaction completely antithetical to anti-fascist praxis. Together with Christian nationalism, American libertarianism functions as a political pipeline that transports the raw material of white reaction to the toxic refineries of 21st-century fascism. It has always had its center of gravity in the American South, where fetishes for private property and “individual liberty” run through so-called “states rights.” The entire philosophy and praxis of libertarianism are anathema to revolutionary anti-fascism. There is no bargaining with it, cozying up to it, or riding alongside it that doesn’t involve the wholesale betrayal of our principles.
Fuck libertarians.
That yeoman farmer was also a white settler, a slaveholder, a nascent bourgeois individualist, and a colonialist monster. This abstract individual is favorably contrasted with a de-individualized, homogenized, and anonymous “creature.” This contrast between the agrarian individual and the urban masses –New Yorkers in particular — between the inherent worth of the individual and the mind-numbing, worthlessness of the masses is not a part of any anarchist tradition I am very fond of. In fact, I find it repulsive. I am familiar enough with Bookchin’s later work, when he attempted reconciliation between Marxism and anarchism, to know this is not representative of his entire corpus. Perhaps he clarified such comments elsewhere? In any case, I think efforts on the part of leftists to find “common ground” with organized libertarianism are at best misguided and at worst potentially fatal to our revolution. Our time is better spent reconciling anarchism and communism, a project I think possible and worthwhile.
My problem with Bookchin is similar to my problem(s) with the late Alexander Cockburn. While Louis Proyect, the “Unrepentant Marxist” has posthumously conferred upon him secular sainthood, I’m less inclined to exalt Cockburn. His frequent attacks on the anti-racist liberal/left are now a matter of historical record; so too his veneration of the tea party as a welcome riposte to liberal identity politics. But he was blind in the white eye; he couldn’t see the bigotry at the heart of the Tea Party as anything other than unfortunate, and irrelevant, a holdover from another era. How wrong he was. As someone once noted: The past isn’t dead; it’s not even past.
One can find much in the vast body of work of Bookchin and Cockburn that is important to uphold today; there’s also a great deal there that was crap in the 1980s and 1990s and has only gotten stinkier with time. Had he lived to see the election of Trump in 2016 to the U.S. presidency, can anyone seriously doubt where Cockburn would now stand on the so-called ‘populist right’? I’m pretty sure that his anti-anti-racism and warm feelings for the so-called right-wing populists of the Tea Party era would have propelled him to make arguments similar to those now being made by Crystal Ball and Glenn Greenwald about the desirability of a right-left realignment across “populist” lines. That’s a fool’s errand.
Cockburn and his ilk could not grasp racism as anything other than labor market competition and a cynical ploy foisted on the white working class by clever elites. But racism has always been more than that, and always at the center of ruling class command and control in the United States, a structural feature of American capitalism and empire. It is a fundamental pillar of inequality, not a vestige of a bygone era.
All socialists, anarchists, and communists, whether of the “tankie” or “insurrectionist” varieties, are simultaneously anti-racists and anti-fascists; or should be. Any fundamental, lasting, and desirable change must run through Black liberation. That’s partly why we chant, “Black Lives Matter!” The other reason being, of course, that for so many people, Black lives so obviously matter so little, if at all.
Ever since the murder of George Floyd and the uprising that commenced shortly thereafter I half expected a groundswell of people of faith to begin non-violent civil disobedience and direct action in defense of Black lives. I thought that the video of Floyd’s murder was so horrific that the collective conscience of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others could not help but be moved to disrupt police departments from carrying out repression-as-usual. I thought it was clear that all previous attempts to stop the metastasizing growth of these militarized bunkers called “police stations” that squat in every major city throughout the United States had failed and that the uprising was a popular indictment of those failures. I thought it was beyond question that radical action was needed. But I was wrong — not about the failure of previous attempts to rein in police brutality or the popular uprising as an indictment of those failures. I was wrong to think people of faith would be moved enough to do something about it.
From the beginning of the uprising most civic, political, and religious leaders wanted us off the streets, preferring our activity to be limited to waving signs from sidewalks or parks. If they supported protest it was always confined to the uplift of voices rather than taking action. They pleaded, as they always do, for a tolerance of the intolerable. But their pleas for peaceful protest strike more and more people as scolding, and prescriptions for pointless protest. Increasingly no one is listening to their promises of pie in the sky if we will only get back to normalcy. Meanwhile, we break our teeth and soul against absolutely earthly truncheons.
So we took to the streets. Many of us have remained in the streets.
While there have been thousands of Black Lives Matter protests and marches across the United States, it seems civil disobedience has been generally confined to those of us who are ungovernable; those of us disobedient by default. We need some help. If one is serious about disrupting institutions that systematically kill Black people, there comes a time when raised voices are not enough; when a protest becomes but a parade; when a march merely follows the leader with the bullhorn to nowhere.
That time is now.
Recall that in Minneapolis, during a night of righteous fury, a police station was burned to the ground. Note that in Seattle a police station and adjoining streets were occupied for weeks. Now, in Portland, thousands are putting their bodies on the line between agents of repression and the Black people they target. Multiple cop shops have faced waves of demonstrators for seventy-five straight nights. The determination and bravery of protesters should be beyond question; so too the exposure of those institutions as the wasteful, reactionary, and unaccountable fraternities of extreme violence that they are.
The missing constituency of our rebellion is people of faith — especially white people of faith. Portland’s Wall of Moms gets it right when they risk arrest to protect protesters and use their bodies as shields. But where are those religious witnesses chaining themselves to entrances, blocking arrests, and shutting those buildings down? People of faith should lead with these tactics and perhaps link them to a bolder strategy of transformation: “No cops, no prisons, total abolition.”
While I am no longer a pacifist, I owe much of my political awakening to pacificism. My first action of non-violent civil disobedience and direct action took place in a Portland suburb in the mid-1980s. A tech company called FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) was providing their then cutting edge technology to the government of El Salvador which was, in turn, using that technology to expand their vicious aerial bombing campaign of campesinos and guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) from daylight-only hours to nighttime as well. A couple dozen of us physically blocked the entrance of the company to stop their normal functioning and were arrested. We directly stopped that company from delivering its technology to a repressive regime, if only for a time.
I bring this up because it occurred to me that if more people of faith were willing to join militant comrades in the streets and use their bodies to shut down bunkers of repression, perhaps we could extend our rebellion to a 24-hour affair and concretely begin to make Black Lives Matter.
Indeed, if this is the civil rights movement of our era, where are those tried and true, militant tactics that we know are effective? John Lewis didn’t just protest — he and other activists occupied buses, lunch counters and schools in defiance of the law and de jure segregation and spent countless hours in hellish jails and prisons. Our unfinished civil rights revolution runs through the abolition of those institutions that are beyond reform and redemption.
As the saying goes, those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.
Many comrades who root their activism in more secular traditions are already out in the streets risking their bodies, building barricades, getting arrested, and more.
Tatterdemalion (aka Lost Child) is a 2018 horror film directed by Ramaa Mosley from a screenplay by Mosley and Tim Macy. The film stars Leven Rambin and Jim Parrack. It is a welcome addition to horror films that consciously or unconsciously break with the reigning patriarch of horror, Stephen King.
I’ve written at length about my disdain for the novels of Stephen King. (See my King vs. Kubrick January 22, 2019 and Why I Hate Stephen King and Love Stanley Kubrick December 19, 2018 both available at Mozzochi.wordpress.com where I blog as Ghostsofantifascismpast.org). There is no single author more responsible for the infantilization of horror in literature and film than King. From the standpoint of a radical socialist his oeuvre is a cringe-worthy monument to bourgeois sentimentality and an unbearable whiteness of being. His book The Shining stands in sharp contrast to the Stanley Kubrick-directed movie of the same name. The movie, which King famously hates, is a work of art painstakingly crafted from the raw material of a serial typist. King’s approach to horror often involves a gratuitous use of racialized tropes that would shame a klansman, the ‘magical negro’ foremost among them. While we defenestrate confederate and colonialist monuments we should consider much of King’s work as fit for a toss, beginning with all those that anthropomorphize seemingly every object within the ersatz town of ‘Castle Rock’, satirized by the Family Guy cut-out below.
Thankfully, there is something of a cinematic movement afoot that is finally emerging from the dark, all enveloping shadow of Stephen King. It may be inchoate, but it is there. I’m not talking about the no-talent ass clowns Eli Roth and Rob Zombie, nor the talented Jordan Peele or Ari Aster, both of whom unfortunately have more in common with King than most of us would care to admit. No, not there. As is usually the case we have to ignore the big budget productions with all their shock and awe and turn toward the fringes, to a more punk rock -style of film making to find lasting value.
As a socialist, I am also interested in the capacity for such work to theorize proletarian collectivity — the only actually existing threat to our ruling classes, that force which sends a shiver up their spine, the one thing they really fear. Unfortunately, contemporary horror cannot do such a thing without first making a definitive break with the oppressive legacy of Stephen King. After a long, interminable wait, such a break is now underway.
That, and remember, we are always the zombies, they are the superheroes.
Horror Film Genres
Tatterdemalion is a film that moves in the direction outlined above, even if it is not self conscious about doing so. The film sits at the crossroads of four sub genres of horror:
Folk Horror–Often set in rural or de-industrialized hellscapes with poor whites as protagonists. We see abandoned, dilapidated, backwoods anthropologies here. They can be period pieces, like Robert Eggers’s 2015 The Witch, or, like Tom DeNucci’s Almost Mercy of the same year, more contemporary. The first film indulges in supernatural tropes with some finesse while the latter locates the horror humans face within traditionalist bigotries and economic dislocation.
Supernatural Horror–The threats our characters face and therefore the source of the fear and terror they express and we vicariously feel is of supernatural origins. Often these films have a religious element (The Exorcist, The Ring). In the Stephen King thought world it is precisely the reliance on the rational, in the form of a doctor, cop, social worker or politician that is the driving force of the drama, or the MacGuffin. The protagonist must reject conventional authority figures (not necessarily a bad thing) for something else. And here is where the wheels come off. The protagonist often has special powers of perception or a special capacity for violence that must engage with what is most often some form of absolute evil. The social here is reduced to the exceptional individual, a thoroughly bourgeois concept.
Psychological Horror–Here the reliability of the narrator and/or protagonist is questioned; frequently their sanity is suspect. Two excellent examples of this are Donnie Darko and Jacob’s Ladder. Part of the enduring value of both these films lies with the ambiguity of that question: Is it real or are they insane? As an aside, if you ever want to understand the value of a film editor, view the original theatrical release of Donnie Darko, then watch Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut. The editor of the original film essentially saved the director from himself by deftly maintaining the ambiguity of the psychological state of the protagonist; the director’s cut removes this ambiguity and (worse) inserts some dialogue about god, thereby completely ruining the film.
Horror Realism–We can identify the following elements of realism in literature and film and think about how Tatterdemalion stands within this tradition.
A focus on every-day-life, on the quotidian details of a community that lends an authenticity to the narrative.
The use of simple, transparent language, often local dialects.
The use of non-professional actors and scenes to emphasize the lived experiences of characters. A good non-horror example of this is my favorite revolutionary/anti-war film, The Battle of Algiers directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.
A social critique that eschews supernatural or psychological explanations for inequality and oppression yet still enjoys a good scare.
Realism is often closely related to ‘naturalism’, here meaning “the philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted.” (Wikipedia. Retrieved 6.9.20). There is a sub genre of horror films call “naturalist horror” which involves real animals (dogs, bees, ants, what have you) attacking humans, but that is not this.
WhileTatterdemalion blends aspects of all the sub genres above, it specifically mobilizes standard conventions of supernatural horror only to subvert those same conventions at the end of the film. There will be a plot twist. And because this film plays with those iconic supernatural tropes popularized by King, only to upend those tropes at the end, this makes it an anti-Stephen King film.
Taterdemalion, scene by scene with commentary.
1:00 A young female in army fatigues wakes up with a start from a bad dream/memory — we’re not sure which — on a bus in a rural area of West Plains, Missouri (Ozarks). She gets off the bus as a freight train roars by a crossroads near grain silos and warehouses.
She is white, about twenty-five years old, with red hair, wearing fatigues and carrying nothing but a duffle bag. Her name is Janella “Fern” Sreaves (pronounced “Shreaves”). Fern sees a woman across the street standing beside a run-down Ford truck. She is Florine, a family friend there to meet her.
Fern is coming back to this town after 15 years. We don’t know why she’s back, only that she is looking for her younger brother. Florine doesn’t say where he might be, but about the run down little house where she deposits Fern, she remarks, “Your daddy lived a hard life. Paid for it in the end.” So presumably her father has passed away, probably the occasion for her homecoming.
Florine warns her about the people who live nearby. Fern doesn’t “believe in guns” and has “no plans to ever use one again.” This suggests PTSD, a common trope of the psychological horror genre, where we are made to doubt the reliability and motivations of the main character, even question their state of mind.
The next day is a service for her deceased father. Fern and Florine are the only two people in attendance. As the pastor begins a prayer, Fern walks away. This further cements our protagonist as a skeptic who will presumably have their awakening later in the film. The director is deliberately leaning into familiar supernatural horror conventions here.
There is a tense encounter between Fern and a neighbor with a shotgun.
Fern is dressed in old jeans, boots, a white t-shirt under a flannel shirt. (Few costume changes for the female protagonist is appreciated here.) Later on at a local bar she drinks a Jack and ginger then hooks up with the bartender for casual, emotionally distant sex. She leaves in the morning, saying only “see ya.”
Through a local cop we find out that her brother is troubled (drugs, assault, stealing) and living on his own. Soon thereafter Fern glimpses a young boy (ten-years-old or so) in the woods near her house, but he runs away. Investigating further Fern finds an abandoned vehicle with a doll and plastic army soldiers inside, as though a kid had been living there. She has a memory of leaving her brother as a child.
14:34 In the middle of the night a man appears with a gas can (hereinafter Gas Can Man) and threatens to burn the house down. He asks if Fern is “Sreaves kin” and explains that “fire’s the only way to get rid of a demon.” Fern convinces him to go away.
The next morning Florine says that if Fern won’t get a gun for protection, then she should at least get a dog.
Fern visits a kennel where a worker asks her if the dog is “for protection against the living or the dead?” Fern says, dismissively, “the living.”
Back at home she opens her dad’s copy of The Living Bible. This is good attention to detail as this particular 1971 rendition of the Christian bible is a favorite among evangelicals and often considered by mainline protestants to be a ‘dumbing down’ of the King James. When Fern opens the bible she finds her dad’s flask in a hollowed out recess of its pages.
The next morning Florine is there with soup. She comments, “Ain’t exactly Little House on the Prairie, is it?” Fern is exasperated with Florine’s mothering and tells her to leave. Florine responds that “it’s bad luck to ask a person to leave before they’re finished eating. I’m doing you a favor by staying.”
The dog runs away. She pursues it to no avail, then while walking in the forest a timid voice says, “Hello.” It’s the boy from yesterday. He is dirty, dressed in rags and very skittish. His name is Cecil.
Fern asks him if he wants to “come over here.” He just looks. Then she says, “Do you want me to go over there?” He nods. She convinces him to allow her to bring him to her home.
20:00 Gas Can Man sees the two of them walking home and yells at Fern, “where’d you get that boy?” She and Cecil ignore him and continue to the house.
Fern tells Cecil the house was her Daddy’s. Cecil asks if a “Howler” got him. Fern says no, “unless it poured liquor down his throat.”
Fern calls social services. They can’t get there until tomorrow. Cecil picks some local flowers as a thanks to Fern for letting him stay.
23:00 Fern starts coughing that night. Cecil wakes Fern up holding two small birds he has caught saying, “I’ve got breakfast.” Fern replies, “What am I supposed to do with those?” Cecil responds, “I’ll show ya.” Cecil de-feathers and cooks the tiny birds in an iron skillet.
Fern does not feel well. She asks the boy if he has ever gone to school? He replies that he would like to. Can he read? “No ma’am,” he sheepishly replies.
A pickup truck pulls into the dirt yard. It’s the bartender from the other night, Mike, whose other job is as a social worker.
“Hey, Cecil. How is it you came to live in these woods all by yourself?” he queries the boy. Cecil doesn’t answer and physically recoils as Mike takes his picture. Mike shows him it is okay by lending him the phone.
Mike tries to convince Fern to keep Cecil awhile longer so as to avoid immediate foster placement. We learn that Fern knows all about foster care, because she was in it herself from ten to eighteen years of age. But she says Cecil is “a survivor” and besides, Fern describes herself as unfit to care for the boy. Mike says she is fit. He leaves Cecil in her care and says he will straighten out who Cecil’s kin are. Fern is not happy keeping him there. There is some tension between Fern and the boy.
Again Fern isn’t feeling well. Cecil says, “Maybe you’ve got a ghost. You oughta burn your daddy’s dress shirts. If that doesn’t work I’ll catch you a rattler and give you a bit to eat.” Fern says, “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Mike canvasses the local homeless population trying to find someone who knows Cecil. This is one of a number of scenes where the director does not use professional actors; instead the camera slowly pans across the faces of local inhabitants. It reminded me of the anthropological technique of ‘participant observation’, used in a good way. When he looks for the picture on his phone to show someone, it is gone. Cecil did have the phone for a few minutes, so it’s plausible that he erased it. Or, if he’s a ghost, perhaps his image cannot be captured by modern technology? Again, the director is playing with these tropes.
That night Cecil asks Fern if she believes in monsters. She says no.
The next morning Florine picks the two up so a local ‘country doctor’ can check Fern out. Upon meeting Fern the old doctor immediately says, “You’re a Shreaves.”
“How could you tell?” responds Fern.
“It’s in the eyes,” he says matter of factly. “Shame about your folks. Drugs sure have a way of hollowing people out.” An oblique, yet devastating comment.
Fern describes her symptoms: Headaches, can’t sleep, coughs, etc. adding that she can’t rest because she recently took in a kid. The doctor asks, with alarm, “You took in a boy? From where?”
“Found him in the woods,” Fern says.
The country doctor goes out to the waiting room and interrogates Cecil: “Who’s your lord and creator?” Cecil looks at him bewildered.
“Where’d you come from boy?” Cecil doesn’t respond. The doctor shakes his head.
Fern says, “What was that about?”
Doctor: “Old stories around these parts. Some lies, many true. You’ve got to take that boy back to the forest, Miss Sreaves…There are some sicknesses that medicine just cannot cure.” He gives her a slip of paper with the word “Tatterdemalion” written on it.
Later, back home, Fern asks Florine about the Tatterdemalion. Florine says, “that’s an old one” and tells a story about a boy banished to the trees who cannot come out unless someone carries him across a supernatural divide. “He’ll make you love him. The whole time stealing your health, life, years ahead. They say that’s how he stays young forever.”
“And you believe that?” asks Fern.
“This place is built on stories,” says Fern “some of them true, most of them horse shit. Folktales come from necessity. Kids like me was gettin’ lost in the woods; so they made up the ‘Howler.’ You know: they tell kids stories to scare ’em into staying out of trouble. Works, too.”
Fern responds: “Yeah, but why would anybody need a story about a Tatterdemalion?” Florine doesn’t answer.
This exchange is an important key to the film, and demonstrates the ability of the writers and director to transcend the limitations of this genre by providing effective social criticism. We find out the answer to this casual question near the end of the film.
Florine proceeds to tell Cecil to go to the bathroom and wash his hands, then pours salt on his chair. When Cecil returns he sees the salt and rather than sit on the chair with the salt or clear the salt from the chair, he chooses to sit on another chair altogether — further ‘evidence’ that he is a Tatterdemalion.
The next day Fern returns to the woods where she first encountered Cecil. She finds a crude hut made from tree branches and rags. Inside there is an old Life magazine with a mailing address on Old Hickock Road.
Fern is still not breathing well. She tries to trick Cecil into telling her the name of his mother. But he won’t say. He only reveals that, “Momma died when the baby came out. They both died.” Cecil adds that he can’t tell her why he was living in the woods because she doesn’t believe in monsters.
Fern’s hair is falling out.
She decides to go out to a bar and proceeds to get hammered. Inside a young tough asks Fern to go outside and she tells him, “No.” He then grabs her by the hair and drags her out the door, yelling at patrons, “this is family shit, alright!” Once outside we discover that it is her little brother, Billy. He pushes Fern, then knees her in the stomach while screaming that she ripped their family apart. Fern says she was just a kid. He says he doesn’t want anything to do with her. Social worker Mike intervenes, drawing a gun on Billy, who leaves.
45:00
Fern is drunk as shit, throwing up outside the house. She tells Mike he has two more days to find another home for Cecil. Cecil, overhearing this, throws a tantrum, runs out of the house and stops at the edge of the woods. He then turns and asks why Fern doesn’t want him. She says it’s complicated.
“I step in there [the woods] you’ll never see me again. Is that what you want?”
“I just want your family to know you are okay,” replies Fern.
“I don’t have any family anymore. I told you that.” Then he runs off.
Fern pursues him and convinces him to come home.
Later that night she visits the Gas Can Man at a makeshift campfire nearby. He’s burning a Pawpaw tree and talks at length to Fern about the devil and how fire is necessary to cleanse evil. He says, “Yer gonna keep getting sicker…We got a saying around here. If they ain’t yer kin, don’t let ’em in.”
Fern: “Have you actually seen a Tatterdemalion?”
Gas Can Man: “I ain’t never seen Australia either, but that don’t mean it ain’t there!”
This last is a delicious bit of logical fallacy. The Gas Can Man, a sorcerer figure, subtly shifts the burden of proof from the claimant back to the skeptic by asserting that a proposition (the boy is a Taterdemalion) is true simply because it has not yet been proven false (Australia exists even though he’s never been there). Then, this argument from ignorance is extended when Gas Can Man asks Fern, “Need a little proof?” He gives Fern three nails to place in a triangle above the doorway of her house. “A Tatterdemalion is a demon,” he says, “and a demon is a witch. There ain’t no witch that can enter when he sees this in the shape of a triangle. No ghost, no demon, nothin’ not of this earth.”
Here instead of Occam’s Razor we get Occam’s Broom.
60:20 The next morning Billy comes up the road.
Fern tries to express her regret to Billy. But he is still enraged and blames her for the dissolution of their family. Cecil physically protects her from Billy, who runs off when Cecil says “I needs her.” The director is milking the supernatural horror tradition here.
Fern asks Florine why she didn’t take the kids when their parents abandoned them. “My Red had a real taste for drinking. Beating on me. He would have been real nasty to kids. Besides, I didn’t want to sacrifice my life for someone else’s kids.”
Fern puts the nails above the doorway in a triangle. She tries to have Cecil go into the house but he stops at the doorway, looks at the triangle and, enraged, starts punching Fern and asking why she put the nails there. “Because I need to know what you are. You think I can’t see that my hair is going gray; that I’m sick?”
Cecil says, “You shouldn’t have done that,” and runs off.
66:00 Mike returns and dismisses Fern’s superstitions, telling her, “you got scared and tried to find another way out of it.” Fern responds, “Just take him away.” Mike takes Cecil to a foster home with other kids. Cecil is heartbroken.
Fern finds Billy in a homeless encampment down by a river and they talk about the night they were abandoned by their father. Fern, Billy and their mother were waiting for their father in a car. The father left and never came back. Their mother died, presumably of an overdose, in Billy’s arms. Fern tried to get Billy to leave with her, but he wouldn’t. They were both young children. Fern tries to give Billy the key to the house.
Billy asks, “What about that boy?”
Fern states, “I know what he was.”
“What was he?” asks Billy.
“Don’t act like you don’t know. I saw the way you ran off when you saw him.”
“I ain’t run from him. I ran from what he stirred up inside of me.”
Fern states, “That kid’s a Tatterdemalion.”
Billy explodes: “No! That’s a bullshit story made up so folks can justify not taking care of kids like me.” He adds, with complete assurance, “I used to visit our daddy now and then. You know he hated this time of year, when the Pawpaws are blooming [pointing to the same type of flower that Cecil brought Fern as a gift earlier in the movie]. Terrible allergic. He said it felt like they were stealing his breath.” The wheels in Fern’s head are now turning.
About the house, Billy, exasperated, tells Fern, “Four walls and a roof ain’t gonna fix what’s wrong with me. Someone should make a home of it. Start new… Go save someone worth saving…Get out of here!”
Fern goes home and throws the flowers and the vase they are in out into the yard.
Fern asks an old timer about “Old Hickock Road”. He says, “You’ve got to cross the river” to get there. The symbolism here is of the ferryman crossing the River Styx. Fern is crossing from the world of the living to the world of the dead. And indeed it is the world of the dead — we discover this is where Cecil’s family lived and there are wooden and nail triangles all over the place. It is a squalid and ramshackle collection of plywood and chicken wire hovels. Fern discovers a shack with the same old Life magazines she found in the woods along with some iron shackles, presumably where Cecil was confined. Going into the main structure she knocks, but no answer. She enters and finds a decomposing body inside. It is that of Cecil’s father.
The police are summoned. Fern goes to get Mike, telling him she made a terrible mistake. They both go to get Cecil. At the foster home Fern calls him by his full name: Cecil Philmont. Cecil says his dad was right to punish him, and that if he exposes “the family business” the ‘Howler’ would come for him. Fern says she will protect him from now on. Together they go back to his father’s house and burn it to the ground. (Cleansing).
At home, Cecil sings Fern a plaintive, heart wrenching song:
“I am a poor, wayfaring stranger
traveling through this world alone
there is no sickness, toils or danger
to that good world to which I go
I’m going there to meet my father
I’m going there no more to roam
I am just going over Jordan
I am just going over home.”
Later Mike tells Fern about the Killdeer bird and how the mother bird will fake an injury to its wing in order to lead predators away from her eggs, “babies she hasn’t even seen yet.” Protecting children is an instinct that everybody has, he says, but sometimes you just have to wake it up.
The penultimate scene is of Fern, Cecil and Mike at a community dinner. Lots of suspicious looks, including from the country doctor. Cecil, visibly uncomfortable, wants to leave.
At home that night Gas Can Man breaks into the home and drags Cecil out into the woods. Fern must decide whether to use her father’s pistol to get him back (background noise of helicopters and gunfire, again the PTSD trope). She takes the gun and runs into the woods after Cecil. Fern finds Gas Can Man at his fire, puts the gun to him and asks where he took Cecil. He points east. Off she goes. Fern finds Cecil in the woods, but Cecil firmly believes what everyone is saying. “You thought I was a demon. Other people think I am. My momma and daddy both died. I think there’s something really wrong with me. I’ll go away. Far away from here. Keep you safe.” The wind comes up.
“It’s the Howler!” cries Cecil.
Fern shoots repeatedly into the woods (at the Howler) then tells Cecil she’s got him. The Howler is gone forever, so too the Taterdemalion. They embrace.
End of film.
Analysis
Fern’s younger brother, Billy, becomes the unlikely, heart-wrenching and tragic source of Fern’s redemption. Her moral clarity is achieved only through the recognition of the lost child that is her little brother; her correct course of action can only be embraced when she frees herself of the self-loathing she feels for not having been able to save her brother as a child.
Tatterdemalion is a set up, brilliantly and deftly executed. The filmholds that superstition and the supernatural often serve to obscure social evils. But, that’s not all. The film also insists that much folklore is born from necessity, that is real lived-in communities with real life problems, and have logics that can be understood and overcome.
Tatterdemalion is also effective at executing thrills and chills without creating caricatures of poor people, nor glorifying rural poverty and superstition as the key to defeating evil. There is at least the outlines of a collective protagonist sketched here. This is something the Stephen King thought world can never supply.
Fern strikes me as from a region where fundamentalism is woven into folklore. Such passion and fanaticism can have both positive and negative aspects. For instance, both the Ku Klux Klan and the radical abolitionist John Brown were influential in these parts. These Scots-Irish, working class, close knit communities have long been subject to the vicissitudes of rural displacement and brutal poverty. It would have been easy for this director to disparage these people, as so many other film makers do, as ignorant and left behind, lumpenproletariat refuse who are unfortunate victims of dangerous superstitions. Thankfully, that’s not what takes place here.
Instead, Tatterdemalion works within supernatural horror conventions so as to subvert — through a plot twist at the end — those same conventions. We think we are watching a standard treatment of a Stephen King novel, only to find out that we are not, although we must wait until the end to discover how and why this is the case.
What about that key question Fern asks? Why would a community need to invent the story of the Taterdemalion? What necessity, what purpose would such a morality tale serve? Such a tale rationalizes child abuse and neglect. How do we go about preventing child abuse and neglect? The film answers this question through its participant observation, which is to say social, approach to poverty and addiction. The answer, the film seems to say, is altruistic service. Fern is in the military and while she suffered from her tour of duty she eventually uses the skills she learns there to protect Cecil. The other major institution that plays a positive role here is social welfare through the character of Mike. Add to these two institutions (the military, the welfare state) the family-in-formation that Mike and Fern represent and we have an answer as to how to overcome the obstacles Cecil faces. Pretty bourgeois, but still better than the crap on offer by King.
So the bit about how folktales come from necessity is crucial here, and wonderfully nuanced. The film reminds us that folk tales have many dimensions. They can serve to protect us from real danger, e.g. discourage children from wandering off into the woods; yet also injure us by walling off ‘outsiders’ who are not ‘kin’, and thereby justify child neglect.
I was waiting for the obligatory Native American trope, the dream catcher moment, but thankfully it never came. Unlike King, this director has a rootedness that is admirable; a respect for people, if you will, that feels real. The conflict that eventually comes into focus is that between those folktales of necessity rooted in an unjust social system that rationalize leaving orphans to the tender mercies of the Ozark woods and the real world efforts on the part of wounded soldiers and social workers to care for such abandoned human beings. Note also that the trope of the CPS social worker sent to separate a family is not present here; just the opposite. Would this film be as effective if set within a commensurate Black community? If not, why?
Conclusion
In a way, the Stephen King antihero horror movie has been born, a necessary precursor to the larger project of building proletarian collectivity. While Tatterdemalion does not offer us the only force which can offer true liberation, not least because there is no working class self organization and collectivity here, it does offer a break with a set of presumptions that are, in a sense, killing us. Of course, there can be no such thing within the Stephen King thought world (now, with Hulu’s Castle Rock, a thought universe like that of Marvel or DC Comics). First, one must break with that world. Then, one can begin to conceptualize proletarian collectivity. Tatterdemalion helps us do the former and, unlike much elsewhere, at least suggests the latter.
All that said, we should be mindful of this aphorism: ‘When you strike at the king, you must kill him.’
Last January Stephen King was criticized for comments he made about voting for the Academy Awards, something he is apparently entitled to do as a member of that august body. “For me, the diversity issue — as it applies to individual actors and directors, anyway — did not come up…That said, I would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong” he tweeted.
Well, Stephen King is anything if not consistent. From what I can gather his literary output reflects no concern whatsoever with ‘diversity’ other than as a license to express forms of racism so extreme they might shame a klansman.
Ava DuVernay, director of the 2015 film Selma (not nominated by the Academy for best director) described King’s comments above as “backward and ignorant.” I think that’s being charitable. Even by the standards of the 1970s and 1980s King’s novels have always trafficked in what can only be described as gratuitous bigotry. So why have his works always been so popular? How is it that so much of King’s work challenges even the Urban Dictionary in depravity and yet still rakes in millions of avid readers and millions of dollars? Why does he leaven so much of his writing with grotesque stereotypes?
The common defense takes the form of a non-denial denial, insisting that because what King writes is horror it should shock and sicken; nothing shocks and sickens like racism so that’s why there is so much of it in his novels. Implied here is that he uses such bigotries in a constructive manner; they serve a larger, more edifying purpose, or so the argument goes. But this is really the Tarantino defense: it’s just plot and character development, nothing more. The problem here is that so much bigotry in King’s novels so obviously serves no purpose. It is gratuitous; which is to say unneeded and unwarranted, therefore casual bigotries that do not forward plot or character development, or, at least go far beyond such development. There is just no way to excuse or explain away the naked racism peppered throughout King’s oeuvre (we will get to examples below).
So as to undermine the Tarantino defense, I’m going to quote a couple characters from a Tarantino film. Upholding King’s legacy sans his bigotry amounts to the position that John Travolta stakes out regarding eating bacon in Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction. You know the scene. Samuel L. Jackson holds that “Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I don’t eat nothing that ain’t got sense enough to disregard its own feces.” Travolta counters, “How about a dog? A dog eats its own feces.” Jackson quips, “I don’t eat dog either.” To which Travolta asks whether Jackson considers dogs a filthy animal. Jackson says a dog’s “got personality. Personality goes a long way.” Travolta counters, “by that rationale if a pig had a better personality it would cease to be a filthy animal.” Jackson famously responds, “We would have to be talking about one charming motherfucking pig!”
King’s writing is as that pig wallowing in its own shit; don’t eat the bacon.
Regardless of how one answers these questions, King’s comments should come as no surprise, as his output betrays an unbearable whiteness of being, something that remains pervasive within elite and popular culture. And in this sense, no matter how charming it may be, a pig is still a filthy animal. (That there is a literary device. For what it’s worth, I consider pigs adorable).
Do you need some evidence as to rank racism in Stephen King novels? In the unfortunately titled “Stephen King Needs More Black Friends” (Scott Woods, Medium, January 15, 2020) the image of Black people in the ‘Stephen King Universe’ is made clear. And mind you, this recounting is from a fan:
King writes almost all of his Black characters, magical or otherwise, in problematic ways. When they are not magical they are horrendous stereotypes: dope fiends and brutes (The Stand), jive-talking thugs (End of Watch), and worse (the short story “Dedication”). More, King’s characters never happen to be Black; he intentionally makes it clear that they are Black from the outset, usually with jaw-droppingly offensive descriptions: Mother Abigail in The Stand is “coal-black” and further described as looking like an “old black Everglades alligator.” The Black junta of The Stand are also Black, “huge,” nude (save for a loincloth, so sexualized to boot) and actively murdering White people with intent. The chief villain in The Running Man is a game show producer named Dan Killian who is “minstrel show” Black. The Green Mile’s John Coffey is hit with a litany of racist descriptors, including “monkey,” “big mutt,” and “big boy.” Some of these are character embellishments, insults provided through the mouths of virulently racist characters — aka the Tarantino Defense. But some of them come from the universal narrator of a given story.
Getting a bit more granular, this is from my essay “King vs. Kubrick” (Mozzochi.wordpress.com, January 22, 2019) where I compare King’s The Shining to Kubrick’s The Shining:
What the Ghosts Represent:
Book: All the ghosts are evil; all desire to continue their evil deeds–marital infidelity, gangsterism, murder, as a manifestation of their “single group intelligence”. The source of this evil is not institutional, structural, historical, political or otherwise outside of the individual. It is located within us, in our denial of the possessive individualism at the heart of the bourgeois family.
Movie: The source of evil is the hotel itself, which cannot be separated from its history, in part erected on the bones of indigenous peoples. It is rabidly racist and demands absolute servility on the part of inferiors, most pointedly workers and their families.
Racist, Homophobic, Classist or Misogynist Scenes That Contribute To Plot Or Character Development.
Book: None
Movie: Grady calls Dick Hallorran a “nigger” in the all important restroom scene. Elsewhere Jack says, “just a little problem with the old sperm bank upstairs. Nothing I can’t handle, though.” That’s about it. Sparing, short and devastating. But Kubrick doesn’t wallow in it as King does–as a teenager expressing unfiltered repressed emotions.
Gratuitous Racist, Homophobic, Classist or Misogynist Scenes That Don’t Contribute To Plot Or Character Development.
Book: an endless parade of cringe worthy and vicarious bigotries apparently pleasurable for some people to read. Emblematic is where King has a young Dick Hallorran fire a “Nigger Chaser” firework (bottle rocket) at a wasps nest. This makes no sense even on its own terms.
Movie: None
From Ben Goldstein, “Stephen King’s The Stand is Bloated, Racist and (Somehow) Still a Masterpiece” (Medium, May 10, 2015). Again, this is from a fan:
King didn’t invent the Magical Negro literary trope, but he’s spent much of his career coasting on it. Consider the psychic hotel caretaker Dick Hallorann in The Shining, who comes back to rescue Danny Torrance when Jack loses his mind. Or the hulking and simple-minded John Coffey of The Green Mile, who heals the innocent by absorbing their pain, and dies as a savior figure.
In The Stand, we’re presented with Mother Abigail Freemantle, a religiously devout beacon of benevolence…” Within the entire Boulder Free Zone community — which eventually numbers in the thousands — Mother Abigail is the only person who is described as black. That’s right, kids: Stephen King’s utopic Free Zone society contains exactly one (1) black person. Other than that, the Free Zone is a diverse tapestry, featuring white people from Maine, white people from Texas, white people from New York, and white people from Ohio.
Of course there are other black people in The Stand. You’ve got the jive-talkin’ Rat Man, who’s so creepy that even the nymphomaniac Julie Lawry wont fuck him. There’s Richard Hoggins, the young black drug addict from Detroit mentioned in the “second epidemic” section. (“He had been addicted to the fine white powder he called ‘hehrawn’ for the last five years.”) Hoggins breaks into a drug dealer’s house after the Captain Trips virus kills everyone and OD’s on the stash he discovers there. “No great loss,” King writes directly afterwards. But wait, it gets worse. I regretfully present the beginning of the aforementioned “black junta” scene:
Huge black men wearing loincloths! “Amazingly even and white teeth in his coal-black face”! Oh man, Steve, what are you doing here? And let’s not forget the “brown, smooth skinned” band of spear-carrying natives that Flagg encounters at the very end of the book. Savages. They don’t speak jive, but that’s only because they don’t speak English at all.”
…Every notable black character in King’s novels — Hallorann, Coffey, Mother Abigail, Mike Hanlon in It, Susannah Dean in The Dark Tower: Song of Susannah, Nan Melda in Duma Key, etc. — is referred to as a “nigger” at some point by another character. Usually, this is meant to signify villainy or ignorance in the character using the word. But you’d think a writer with as expansive an imagination as King would find different ways to make that point.”
No, I wouldn’t. It’s the liberal version of the unfiltered bile Trump spews. And again, the above is from Stephen King fandom. I’m not a fan of Stephen King. But I am a fan of tearing down monuments that glorify inequality, racism and reaction.
King’s comments about diversity and the Academy Awards above are classic meritocratic nonsense–the real ‘virtue signaling’ we hear so much about–that practiced by business elites, cultural influencers and celebrities designed to remind us how talented they are and how in awe we should be of that talent and the money and power it commands. Much of this ‘race blind’ and ‘post-racial’ narrative nonsense gets packaged with brutal class war attacks against the poor and vulnerable.
King stands in this artistic and political tradition, one that is thankfully under assault by antiracists everywhere. See that Robert E. Lee statue being taken down? How about the confederate flag being banned at NASCAR? Remarkable. But such atrocity exhibitions extend beyond statues and flags, to art and entertainment and government policy that goes from The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind through The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (aka The Moynihan Report) onwards through King’s The Stand and The Shining and Game of Thrones, which I have described elsewhere as a “blood and soil zombie soap opera that utilizes medieval fantasy conventions.”
This tradition needs to be hog-tied, pulled down and tossed into a river, just like those confederate statues.
King is not exceptional in this regard; but he is an exceptionally rich and prolific scribbler whose work should be a focus of criticism during this amazing period of resistance, rebellion and (dare we say it) revolution. Might we be in the midst of a Third Reconstruction in America? If we are, I expect this sacred cow to be sacrificed forthwith. For if we are in a Third Reconstruction, then how could we ever accept as penance King’s frequent twitter attacks on the psychotic flaming Cheeto? Or anyone’s, for that matter? That’s a bar set so low that a hedge fund vampire like Mitt Romney can step over it and march in a protest for George Floyd without a public shaming such as that endured the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey. That just won’t do.
Isn’t it past time we chucked the Stephen King monument into the Castle Rock River?
As protests over the murder of George Floyd continue across the country there are fresh debates among radicals about the best methods for social protest. I am in favor of a concept known as “diversity of tactics”, a set of ideas that accepts a wide range of activity from non violent civil disobedience to militant, and sometimes violent, direct action. Different situations require different means of resistance, rebellion and hopefully, revolution. When it comes to getting the knee off of the neck of Black people, ‘by whatever means necessary’ means all of those tactics. Over the past few days I’ve been fortunate enough to have been present at very militant actions in the San Francisco bay area. Like you, I’m sure, I’ve also been watching other protests across the country. And, like you, I’ve noticed that news coverage of these protests, be they passive or aggressive, tends to be somewhat frustrating. No, that’s not quite right. News coverage is abominable, a disgrace to the fourth estate. That’s better.
Now we all know that the mainstream media–fake and real news included–promotes unquestioning sycophants and only occasionally breaks free from self-imposed blinders to actually report on anything of value. So we don’t expect much coverage of militant resistance to the murder of Black people to be very accurate or informative. But still, even Noam Chomsky will argue that there is a nominally free press in the United States, however much this fourth estate is also complicit in manufacturing consent. But I’ve got to tell you, I’m not sure how free that free press is anymore. When covering these uprisings virtually every mainstream (and not a few alternative) reporters somehow feel it a necessary and good thing towhinge. You know what that is–when someone’s mouth is moving and they are complaining in a persistent and peevish or irritating way such that they end up not really saying anything of value at all. To this whinging is inevitably added moralizing. These guardians of the intolerable status quo not only complain about the inconvenience of their beloved Whole Foods being emptied of merchandise, they describe such activity as inherently wrong, even evil. You know what I’m talking about. In this case such reporters aren’t reporting so much as emoting.
This raises a question. Isn’t a basic function of the fourth estate to report? Shouldn’t that reporting include, if not be limited to, Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? How is it that every dip-shit with a microphone suddenly feels empowered to tell us, in cringeworthy and excruciating detail, how they feel about everything? What their opinion is? Perhaps an answer lies in the fact that reporters have become celebrities and thereby entitled to inflict their singular pathologies on us. Oh, I know. I can just choose not to watch and listen. But that’s not true, is it? If I want actual reporting that informs I have no real choice but to watch and listen to these narcissists because between Unicorn Riot, Redfish, and Democracy Now! there isn’t enough reporting. Our alternative media can’t get everywhere all the time. And whinging even intrudes on these platforms.
One can debate the effectiveness of marching in the streets and fighting cops at barricades so as to hold those streets, but we should all agree that plaintive cries for state and corporate power to “do better” are absurd. We need something more, and different. And look here! When comparing and contrasting previous uprisings (1969, 1992, 2014-15) with todays rebellions, isn’t it rather remarkable that so much direct expropriation is now centered not in ghettos and barrios, but on Rodeo Drive and Beverly Hills (LA), Union Square and Emeryville (Bay Area)? To me there seems to be a clear break with the dominant narrative about ‘senseless rage’ and self defeating masochism that poor and working people inflict upon themselves when they ‘riot’ and ‘loot’. But you wouldn’t know it from most reporters–they are too busy crying about people blocking traffic and how ‘mom and pop’ businesses like Target and Chase Bank are being needlessly attacked.
I haven’t found a single television report that isn’t saturated with these disgusting displays of shock and awe larded with denunciations of property damage and resistance to cops in our streets. A recent example is instructive here. I just watched a reporter and camera person covering some people engaged in expropriation at a Whole Foods in Santa Monica, California. The reporter was whinging ad nauseam and speculating wildly about how the “looters” must be “outsiders”. Then, the camera person purposefully focused on the license plate of a car being used to load liberated merchandise. The crowd noticed this and chased these “emoters” off. When one of these august members of the fourth estate gets killed, we will remember that they took sides and joined the battle–on the wrong side. They won’t be whinging then, because they weren’t actually reporting–they were being cops with press credentials.
