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.
As it is April 16, 2020 I must make note of the ongoing collapse of the world economy at the hands of a tiny, but deadly, virus. As per usual here in the United States BIPOC, the poor, the working classes, the elderly, the weak and vulnerable are being hit hardest both by the spread of the virus and the resultant economic fallout. The rich are serenading one another across well-apportioned balconies and expansive vales, clapping while we die. We need immediate material support that in most places is not forthcoming. They need a fucking guillotine. Many of us have been waiting weeks for unemployment benefits, food aid, or that one-off-signed-by-a-sociopath-stimulus-check. If the pandemic has dramatized anything it’s the fragility of the neo-liberal consensus. But the left remains largely incapable of mounting a ‘counter-hegemony’. Perhaps the far right has a better angle on exploiting such fragility? I sincerely hope not, but that remains to be seen.
The most visible opponent to the current Republican Cult of Death is New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a soulless political prevaricator whose contributions to ending the pandemic include forcing Rikers Island prisoners to make hand sanitizer and scolding working class Americans to simultaneously ‘stay at home’ and ‘go get a job’–all without a hint of cognitive dissonance. Liberalism is dead. Don’t expect this sudden, half-assed, altogether pathetic expansion of the welfare state during the pandemic to revive it. Stick a fork in it already. The other Left Coast leading liberal light, California Governor Gruesome is no better. Behind every plutocrat and celebrity clapping on their doorstep for an essential worker risking their life is a lib-con telling us all to get back to work and appreciate the fact we have a job at all. We know the bar for humanitarian response is perilously low when these clowns are regarded as leaders. We leftists have always argued for re-valorizing essential work and the workers who perform it. This system of organized theft will cough up a begrudging acknowledgment of our humanity about the time there is no longer a humanity left.
The contrast between something so small having such a large impact is instructive here. Throughout human history radical political ideologies always, by definition, start on the outskirts of accepted public opinion. Then, that Overton Window we are all so fond of referencing suddenly and quite unexpectedly opens up, moves to another building or is shattered altogether by a projectile. Such ideas and the people who promote them grow in influence during times of major disruption. Twenty-six million unemployed in five weeks, mile-long lines at food banks and overflowing morgues are terrifying testaments to our current predicament. We just cannot say what is coming, only that it will likely be something different from whatever we have experienced before. The depth, breadth and velocity of the current economic upheavals are just too extreme not to produce some kind of political fallout.
The WWI era, for example, was characterized by a devastating inter-imperialist global war and was the hand maiden for both Bolshevism and fascism reaching for and grasping state power. However one chooses to understand and assess those radical ideologies, it is undeniable that they began among a few adherents and under certain circumstances became normative. So today, as we confront a pandemic driving an unprecedented economic contraction throughout the entirety of organized human life we should perhaps ask ourselves: What might be the character of any political upheavals that follow? What small group of conspirators–10 good comrades for Lenin, a handful of putschists for Hitler–might be waiting in the wings? How best to identify such actors so we can accurately assess their prospects and join or fight them?
By way of clarification, I don’t mention Bolshevism and fascism in the same sentence so as to suggest they are moral or political equivalents. That’s what lib-cons do–a fools errand that only perpetuates capitalist exploitation and domination or, worse, ensures the return of fascism. We need a revolution, but a deeply socialist, anti-racist and democratic one. My point here is that both movements came to power during times of extreme duress. We are now in the midst of such a global disruption, one without any precedence in human history. As the cliche goes, great peril is often accompanied by great opportunity. It’s a cliche because it’s true. For all its gruesome effects, this post modern plague has (miraculously) emptied out stadiums, office buildings, concert halls, NASCAR tracks, ocean liners, jumbo jets and golf courses. Behold: the bluest of blue skies and the brightest of stars at night, the re-wilding of diverse habitats, the disappearance of traffic overnight, the great grinding to a halt of capitalism and its ravaging effects on this habitat we call earth, albeit amidst great horror. One can marvel and dream of a different future without succumbing to eco-fascism. It might be possible to theorize an eco-socialism from the realization that the spread of this other plague (capitalism) can be arrested. Which brings us to my last point.
As working class, poor and vulnerable people struggle to survive this latest crisis of capitalism and the hollowed out democracy that provides its ever thinning legitimating narrative, we may find ourselves confronted with a choice that comes around only once every few decades. Whereas previous crises always involved some governmental intervention to temporarily discipline the capitalist casino class so as to reestablish an equilibrium of inequality that the poor and working masses could not find a way out of or around, today the shock is an exogenous one, although magnified a thousand-fold by wholly endogenous factors. It may be that no such equilibrium will be forthcoming in the aftermath. The wheels may have come off permanently. The center may not hold. Everyone is running for the exit. There are only two: socialism or barbarism.
Whatever consensus preceded this conflagration it will hold only on a steep upward incline such that it will be driven inexorably back toward fascism. If and when it slides it won’t slide half-way; it will smash back into the 19th century but with 21st century tools of repression to hold it there. Another way of putting this: if revolutionary socialists fail to effect a revolution this time we may all be doomed to fascism. Anyone who argues that that slide is already underway is probably correct; anyone who argues it is inevitable should be pilloried. The slide can be arrested, even reversed. Rosa Luxemburg wrote:
The “golden mean” cannot be maintained in any revolution. The law of its nature demands a quick decision: either the locomotive drives forward full steam ahead to the most extreme point of the historical ascent, or it rolls back of its own weight again to the starting point at the bottom; and those who would keep it with their weak powers half way up the hill, it drags down with it irredeemably into the abyss.
Neither the slide back to fascism nor a successful ascent to socialism are inevitable. It’s up to us.
Capitalism is the virus. To kill it we must enforce and extend the current shutdown. The only thing capitalism is congenitally allergic to is a limit on growth. It must expand. It must grow, preferably at exponential rates.
Our logic of revolutionary redistribution should be premised on a slowing down and de-commodification, on a decentralization together with a re-valorization, and on a democratization of equality. We must try and refocus our horizon from those narrow, two-party recapitulations of that which is possible forever chained to “There Is No Alternative” to the centrality of essential work and the essential workers who perform it: first responders, mutual aid providers, wage laborers, agricultural workers, gig workers, service workers, frontline fighters, etc. The only jobs worth protecting are those worked by essential workers. Think about that. What is the point of having ‘inessential’ jobs?Collectively, essential workers and the essential work they engage in comprise that which we cannot do without. In a collective sense such work is also desirable and, conversely, the work carried out at stadiums, golf courses, banks and so much more is inessential, that which we can (and should) do without.
What I mean here is that we should support social distancing and shelter at home policies not only because they are necessary to fight the pandemic at hand, but because they embody a better future. To that end, emerging from this crisis should be a robust challenge to the follies of perpetual growth and increased velocity that fuel inequality. We may have a unique opportunity to challenge, in a popular way, the commodity form and the logic of exchange value and pricing so central to it. In other words, the social distancing and stoppage of so much work is not only necessary to defeat the spread of Covid 19, it is necessary for any socialist future, perhaps any future at all.
He completed two tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan that included work as a grunt and later as a bomb technician, the latter earning him the nickname ‘Blood’, short for Bloodhound, in recognition of his superior bomb detection skills. After almost a decade of service, and as a result of his many physical and psychic wounds, his productivity declined. Finally he was honorably discharged, Purple Heart in hand. Subsequent his discharge his PTSD got worse, as did his many other physical ailments, and he slowly developed a debilitating addiction to OxyContin. Blood found it unconscionable that recent legislation made it difficult for him to obtain the medicine he needed to function. While no longer on the battlefield, he nonetheless understood that he had brought it home with him only to be denied the very thing he needed most to make it go away, if only temporarily. His family life deteriorated, punctuated by a divorce and homelessness. He wandered through a series of short term, menial jobs and omnipresent, terrifying loneliness. The most routine social interactions found him bewildered and often inexplicably angry. When he read an advert for a company that specialized in hiring vets (and convicts) for ‘elite’ canine care, he jumped at the chance to find some peace and affection with ‘man’s best friend’. But instead of a way out of his situation, that of a character wrongly condemned to some circle or another of Dante’s Hell, his introduction into the gig economy only plunged him deeper into the abyss. As is so often the case it all began innocently–even optimistically–enough.
The canine care gig was a quintessentially San Francisco startup– an ‘app based’ on-demand concoction that paired ‘charity’ with luxury. Blood was to be the primary ‘on-call’ guardian for three Bloodhounds housed on an estate in the Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco. Blood was from another neighborhood of San Francisco, Hunters Point, a mere three miles from Sea Cliff, but a world away. The mansion, a sprawling architectural hate crime of dubious English Tudor pedigree covering four acres was equipped with a vast surveillance system–a state of the art panopticon. It even had a capacious lawn, a super premium in that dense cradle of plutocracy, where the Bloodhounds could ‘do their doody’. As an independent contractor Blood was responsible for his own taxes, insurance, time off, etc. What he gave up in pay he could reap with flexibility. He could always say ‘no’, although the longer he worked as a contractor for the company, the narrower his flexibility became. And the money was terrible.
His time spent with the dogs began with walks on the beach, bathing, games and even social outings where the dogs could frolic with their own kind. His undoing, later to be covered breathlessly by a media slavering for sensationalism, was not at all the dogs per se, but their owner: a billionaire dowager who insisted that her “precious ones” receive three outfit changes a day, individual hand feeding and a meticulous monitoring and analysis of their bowel movements such that the animals, while pampered, were also in a constant state of anxiety. Blood did what he could to assuage their pain.
Whenever the dowager was away, usually at a philanthropic event centered on (you guessed it) rescuing dogs, her disembodied voice would pierce every room, from one to another. She needed instant empirical confirmation that the outfits were arranged and on the dogs, their dietary regime intact, their stool samples evidence of good gastrointestinal health. There was always a ‘dog whisperer’ or another at the ready whenever one or more of the dogs was sick or disturbed–which, given the depraved regime of ‘care’ insisted upon by the dowager, was often. Always exasperated the dowager ordered her many servants about as a boot camp sergeant might harangue new recruits. In this Blood found familiarity; later contempt. Whenever the voice of the master erupted around them he and the dogs would jump, as if at the crack of a rifle shot, to rapt attention.
At charity and business events, no matter the urgency of the issue at hand, the dowager was not to be interrupted while she was barking instructions to the help on her cell phone. She was regarded by her peers as eccentric, but a real champion of the underdog. A gilded philanthropist and influencer who routinely made or spade political careers. Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsome knew her well. And a feminist! The dowager would outlive her husband by more than thirty-years and grow their fortune more than five-fold. The origins of the family fortune were somewhat obscure, having roots in antebellum Mississippi. The family patriarch, a Southern lawyer and savvy investor, had always been associated with Bloodhounds. Blood thought it odd that someone would insist on outfits for a breed of dog such as Bloodhounds until he began to notice a recurring theme to the costumes. There was the Sherlock outfit, the Prisoner outfit, the Beauregard, the Kentucky Derby and finally the Birth of a Nation outfit, at least that’s how the dowager described it.
This routine continued for a few months before Blood came to the terrifying realization, as with so much in this world, that he could neither protect the dogs from their owner nor steal them away. He, and the dogs, were trapped.
After about six months into the gig, having found a breach not yet made ‘suicide proof’ on the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge, he plunged off, making sure the three Bloodhounds went with him, an act he considered a mercy killing. The dogs, like himself, were too damaged to go on.
He also left a deftly constructed IED at the dowager’s manse. In order to ‘sniff out’ and defuse bombs one must be intimately familiar with their construction. Blood hacked facial and voice recognition software programs so his C-4 device, planted under the dowager’s bed, would only detonate if she, and she alone, was in the room. The explosion took out most of the third floor of the mansion along with the octogenarian meat sack who owned it. Because the explosion occurred early in the evening there were neighbors walking their dogs in the vicinity. One You Tube video captured a King Charles Spaniel licking up brains from off the front lawn. It went viral.
In Dante’s hell the sin of suicide always resulted in irrevocable condemnation and therefore instant admittance to hell. In a hell constructed by communists (forgive such an absurd thought) Blood would undoubtedly receive a pass for having taken an oligarch with him.
Capitalism will not willingly fall into the grave it digs for itself; nor will it likely stumble in. It must be pushed, or in this case, dragged in by someone willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.
When we vote for anyone or anything, we should always do so with our head, heart, hands and feet.
Chileans who enthusiastically expropriated more than 60 (!) Walmart-owned department stores just last week voted with their hands.
The tens of thousands of Chicago teachers who defied yet another mayoral boss to go on strike for worker dignity and the kids they teach voted with their hearts.
When Carola Rackete captained the Sea Watch 3 to escort international workers and refugees to safe havens across the walls of fortress Europe, she voted with her feet.
Before being run out of town, Gregory Stevens, the queer First Baptist Church of Palo Alto pastor voted with his head when he declared: “The tech industry is motivated by endless profit, elite status, rampant greed, and the myth that their technologies are somehow always improving the world”
When we engage in multifarious forms of direct action, we are voting without ballots. What we do in our daily lives to strengthen revolutionary movements is our preferred form of voting.
In short, when we vote through direct action we demand nothing of our ruling class; on the contrary, we act so as to achieve everything. We say to them: everything we want is in the end of you.
In a capitalist democracy we also may vote as a ‘citizen’, but begrudgingly and with the full knowledge that this routinized, bought and paid for and largely symbolic act is still an act of will, however much it is diluted through representation. Then, if a particular candidate might be assessed as furthering our more important votes for direct democracy, then we vote in these bourgeois elections, for something greater than democracy many times removed.
In this presidential election there is only one candidate who passes such a litmus test: Bernie Sanders. It seems to me that the only presidential candidate worthy of our ‘vote’ is the one who has been leading a ‘political revolution’ within a political party (Democratic) that is itself quite at odds with such a revolution. One can criticize the Sanders campaign on a variety of fronts from the left and below, but we should bear three things in mind.
First, the Democratic Socialists of America is a member in good standing of our larger political family. Their strategy of organizing within the Democratic Party is Quixotic, but it is bearing fruit. It should garner our tactical support.
Sanders has been making the same speech for forty-years, a source of both consternation, because it hasn’t changed, but also consistency and reliability, as we know full well what his political philosophy and program are. He’s a known quantity. Sanders is no neophyte to the struggle against inequality, nor is he a triangulator or schemer. He is, for better or worse, a democratic socialist within the American tradition–what most elsewhere we might more accurately describe as a social democrat. We can reason from here what a Sanders presidency might look like, warts and all. And such a thing would be a political revolution of sorts.
Second, and of more importance is the DSA itself, and the 50,000 or so new members that have recently signed up. It is instructive to note that during its convention in August, 2017 the DSA withdrew from the so-called ‘Socialist International’. The SI has long counted such august ‘socialist’ parties as the PRI in Mexico, the French Socialist Party, and the SPD in Germany. As such it is neither socialist nor internationalist. While the DSA’s withdrawal was a positive development, it remains to be seen whether the Sanders Presidential campaign will amount to a net positive or negative for our movement. Has his campaign, replete with ad nauseam funding pleas and other trappings of capitalist electoral politics, inadvertently stalled the growth of membership and development of the DSA? Is the Sanders campaign both a source of growth for socialism but also a limit to its horizons? We can influence the answers to these questions.
Third, all other candidates are outspoken defenders of the capitalist order; they do not have a place within our political traditions. They cannot be trusted nor supported, at least not so long as an obvious better alternative is available.
Vote often, vote everywhere, vote as though our lives depended on it. Vote Sanders for President–at least while he represents a move towards our more full-throated revolution. But above all continue to vote in all the ways that will truly make a difference. Remember–direct action gets the goods.
