58. On idiocracy
Or, actual propaganda via functional illiteracy.
I'm feeling quite accomplished because I've officially finished reading my first book of the year—Jinwoo Chong's Flux, but as I piece together this sentence I suddenly remember that I finished Ocean Vuong's Time is a Mother last week—and it means something to me that the refrain in my head as I barreled through its pounding finale was: I could never have written this. Chong's writing is sharp, deliberate, and meticulous in ways that make me envious, but—if time is an arrow—I suppose there's solace in knowing that I will almost certainly never produce anything in this vein. For better or for worse, it simply isn't in my nature to do so, although I wonder how much this resignation is resultant of the writing I've been doing outside this little webpage of mine on the topic of grappling with my own mediocrity.
I like to use Goodreads as my literary Last.fm, and I reflexively assigned five stars to Flux before amending it to four; five was an impulsive decision engendered within my fugue caused by the novel's emotional denouement, from which I emerged to immediately venture over to Goodreads, whereas four is, I think, much more measured and fair.
Flux holds up a fun house mirror to our contemporary world—a too-busy time of reading headlines and pretending to know the full story, when everything we say is also a reference to something else. Daily life is disorienting, especially online and when following the news cycle. Perhaps that is Chong’s point: as we emerge from our era of collective panic, of sickbeds and funerals, home offices and odd hobbies, we find a world that looks like the before-times, but something’s off.
—Nichole LeFebvre for Salamander
Flux is a constrained tour de force that also capably uses itself as a vehicle for social commentary, so I was a bit surprised as I scrolled through the Goodreads reader reviews to see dissent from those who I assumed would have been among its most ardent supporters, chiefly fans of Asian American literature, LGBTQ representation, and so on. My statistically insignificant sample size criticized Flux's narrative structure for being disorienting or labyrinthine, but I found it to be no more complex than N. K. Jemisin's excellent The Fifth Season. I must have forgotten that some prefer to have everything cleanly and plainly laid bare.
I'm in the final stretches of time before 2026 becomes too real to deny. The first few weeks of the year are forgiving all the way through Chinese New Year, after which I can no longer hide behind my flimsy excuse of holiday stupor to explain away my lack of productivity. I have a screenplay to draft and essays to write and secret books to self-publish, yet I've been dragging my feet. There's too much to do and not enough structure to make it happen, but it's all my fault, of course. I can admit that with ease.
I love to feel prolific. I relish the sensation of words pouring out of me through my fingertips into a digital document like an unstoppable torrent—flow state. There's an acute satisfaction that I derive quite keenly from the process of relieving myself of sentences and piecing them into paragraphs with narrative logic, with such deliberation that I lose track of time. In this way, I disassemble and reconfigure myself. Honestly, its completion feels almost as good as…well, you can probably guess. When I've unstoppered myself, when everything tumbles out of me easily, that's when I feel like I'm at the apex of my abilities. Powerful.
In the past, I've mentioned my sudden inability to immerse myself into new stories, to read, and consequently to write. It's been like this for the past few months, but Flux (and Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage, which laid the groundwork last year) intrigued my brain enough to jolt it back into action. For that, I'm thankful.
I was recently in Los Angeles, where I was born, for the second time in two months. The frequency was unplanned, owed to successive birthday celebrations for which my presence was very kindly requested, which is meaningful to me because I typically don't like to be in that city. Since I have a lot of difficulty with my immediate relatives, Los Angeles is far too close to home.
So, there I was one evening, at The Grove. It's a nightmarishly lurid outdoor mini-mall, populated with name brands and the likes of the Cheesecake Factory, and it's where my friend chose to host his birthday dinner. I sat at one end of the table, arduously reaching for any and every topic to make conversation with people I didn't know. Maybe half an hour passed at a snail's pace before I realized I was sitting down for a meal I didn't intend to eat. I had no real issue with the people seated by me—the awkwardness was simply due to the fact that we were extremely peripheral acquaintances, united by our one mutual friend—but I just couldn't get myself into the mood. I was a bit jet lagged and bloated and feeling insecure about my physical being, and I also wanted to preserve my energy for the big party I knew I'd be attending the following night. As such, I begged off from the dinner table, pretending to need to find the restroom. (To be fair, I did intend to at least look for it. I'm a habitual hand-washer, almost to the point of drying out the skin of my fingers, but I couldn't stay in that restaurant for a single minute longer.) I needed to get out.
When I stepped outside, I felt a bit better. Nobody was looking at or for me, and there was solitude as well as solace within the jostling crowds of shoppers. I decided to savor the bit of private free time that I'd created for myself and to do a cursory loop around the promenade. Since I've only ever been to The Grove less than a handful of instances throughout my entire life, I thought it would be reasonable.
That’s how I ended up at Barnes & Noble. I’ve always had an affinity for bookstores, big or small, because a lot of my childhood was spent at them and libraries. I liked to get lost among the bookcases, discovering the contents within. As I moved through the crowds, I was torn between directly entering Barnes & Noble and walking down what looked to be an alleyway of candy shops; I knew that I’d eventually go into the bookstore, but it was a question of how long I’d delay the inevitable. After a split second of hesitation, I decided to cut out the middleman.
The staff at Barnes & Noble had laid out some books across the arrays of tables stationed in the foyer, and I slowly made my way through them, glancing at each title in passing. I remember wryly and silently acknowledging the authors in the rows of new memoir arrivals, thinking to myself: war criminals. Here and there were career retrospectives written by people who'd wrought havoc across the globe in fawning, self-fellating prose. Punctured between the shelves were windows that looked out at The Grove and I caught sight of my reflection multiple times in the uncovered glass, ruminating on how the shape of my face has mutated over these past few years as I’ve aged. I felt sick.
I've been thinking a lot, lately, about the genre in which I've chosen to make my home (creative nonfiction). I enjoy the freedoms it allows me, but its chief contradiction is that I absolutely loathe myself. I abhor talking about myself over and over again, but it's myself with whom I'm in conversation, and so the voices in my head are incessant. They do not stop. I am annoying, irritating, unreliable, lazy, rude, and selfish, and yet I cannot extract myself from my own thesis. If it's a double-edged sword, the blade edge facing me is the sharper side, and I cut myself, wound myself, innumerably so. I'm no better off than I was before I ever began, yet still I continue, still I cannot stop. I am Narcissus, drowning in my own reflection.
Books have always been a respite for my brain, but I couldn't remember the one(s) I'd most recently purchased for myself. I was perusing the selection at Barnes & Noble because I had time to spare, but it was also because there was something comforting about being surrounded by all the literature, war criminals notwithstanding. I rode the escalator and went upstairs, stopping to pick through more familiar territory: Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Christopher Isherwood. Goodbye to Berlin caught my eye and I picked it up, unable to properly recall whether I'd read it decades ago or if that was merely a false memory. I flipped through it, stopping to read first at the end of "A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-33)" and next at the start of Alan Cumming's foreword.
It’s no use trying to explain to her, or talking politics. Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new régime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about “Der Führer” to the porter’s wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatizing themselves. After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.
—Christopher Isherwood, “A Berlin Diary”I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have been there to feel the turn in the public conscience, to actually see the beginning of the violence and the acceptance of Nazism as a mainstream political alternative and finally a national edict. But I don’t need to.
—Alan Cumming, foreword to Goodbye to Berlin
Of course, I've cherry-picked these two passages because they're what caught my eye during the scant minutes I spent with the book, and it's a very surface-level analysis because I'm not actually engaging with the meat of its contents, but I was stricken by the cyclical nature of human history. Absent the German, Isherwood's paragraph describes exactly what's been taking place this month in Minneapolis, while Cumming's musings reflect verbatim the contemporary mainstream liberal voices that were silent until they themselves were threatened.
I can't, in good conscience, not mention what has been happening. It is my position that Americans must bear witness to the atrocities, both abroad and at home, that our tax dollars fund and shoulder our fair share of the blame. People are being abducted by our secret police, and they are being executed point blank. Minneapolis is a city rich in cultural diversity, spanning communities including Somali, Hmong, and myriad other ethnic identities, yet it's precisely within these neighborhoods where U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) operatives have set up camp, where they detain, pepper-spray, shoot, kidnap, and disappear. More eloquent writers will find ways to incorporate here mention of Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), which in essence affirmed that the police do not have a legal responsibility to protect the public, the continued enshrinement of qualified immunity within American legal doctrine, and the chain of logic that demonstrates the practical nonexistence of First, Second, or any Amendment rights if the state can commit murder without recourse, as it has been, as it continues to do.
Isherwood’s book is in my hands and I’m thinking of what I cited in Nineteen:
Over 20% of Americans are illiterate. Not only do their mental facilities not include critical reasoning skills, one in five Americans cannot adequately parse written words. Over half of American adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level.
This is how we got here. This is what has sustained the far right’s march towards power; this is the natural result of a profoundly incurious society whose citizens are functionally illiterate. There is no parsing of information, no critical thought. There is only reactionary violence, easily-stoked division, and those who would foment these conditions for their own gain. This is the outcome of the United States’s decades-long slog towards idiocracy.
People can’t handle the reality that we have such broken institutions that an idiot boy-king that is dumber than every one of the most deformed Habsburgs can rule without challenge because he serves the interests of a political party that has control of every institution that is supposed to check his power… None of it matters. It’s a machine that carries forth of its own momentum with no actual civic will behind it. The spirit has totally deserted it. You people thought these institutions work because they have inherent legitimacy and were good institutions, tried and true. No. They work because they serve people in power. And if the dumbest man in the history of the world can just get into the cockpit and start moving the gears around, and if the plane keeps going in the same direction, maybe they’re not actually hooked up to anything.
—Matt Christman (Chapo Trap House)
Federal agency operatives have been given de facto blanket immunity because they know they won't be prosecuted, whether due to legal loopholes or (a lack of) political will. This is how it happens, and this is what I meant when I commented in previous writings that we don't have a true opposition party.
Nobody is coming to save us—certainly, not the Democratic Party, whose cast of rotating villains always seems to muster just enough votes to push key funding packages over the line, ensuring that the never-ending nightmare that is the United States Department of Homeland Security has the financing to keep going. Similarly, just 3% of Democratic voters support increases to military spending, yet 70% of House Democrats voted for that increase. Schumer and Jeffries, vaunted leaders of the Democrats, are indeed whipping votes, but it's being done to guarantee passage, not blockage.
What does it mean to be right wing? What does it mean to be left and right? Are these just two global cults and you kind of just join one or the other, is that it? I say maybe I’ll join the left because I’m left-handed or—what is it? What are they? What does it mean to be left? To be left means that you want to affect changes in the economic structure of a country, in the class structure of that country. To be right means you want to keep the existing status quo where 80% of the country is owned and controlled by 2% of the population (plus foreign investors).
—Michael Parenti, “Images of Imperialism: Media, Myths, and Reality” lecture at the University of Colorado DenverWe are at a moment right now where people are asking themselves why can’t the Democratic Party defend this assault on democracy…and I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, in conversation with Angela Davis at the University of Michigan
I'm not feeling exultant, standing there in Barnes & Noble. Those of us who didn't turn a blind eye to the (renewed) horrors of these past two years aren't surprised that this has come to pass, but having accumulated that knowledge doesn't make it any less miserable to witness its continuation.
I make no oblique references—I am explicitly reflecting upon what the United States has done to Palestine, to Venezuela, to all the sovereign nations and peoples who have borne the brunt of our brutality, done in service of capital. There is no vindication in watching the imperial boomerang coming home to roost and hearing the upset furor of a public that was silent as we committed our barbarism abroad.
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
—Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
I returned Goodbye to Berlin back to its designated shelving spot and moved on, walking with no intention of purchasing anything until I was suddenly confronted by a table populated with books that I've been wanting to read as well as those that I've already read and loved. I came face-to-face with Bliss Montage, whose opening short story captivated me, a book lent to me by someone else. I'd since given the borrowed copy back to its owner, but here it was again, poised to re-enter my life with a buy-one-get-one-50%-off sticker affixed to its cover. It was as if the universe was screaming at me to take it home. However, adjacent to Bliss Montage were two other books that I felt compelled to read, to own, each proudly sporting the same discount tag. I thus found myself trapped in a love triangle of my own design, struggling with the agony of having to release a guaranteed comfort in exchange for an unknown wildcard. Both books were short story collections composed by authors of East Asian descent, of whom I'd seen mention in passing over the years but never had the direct opportunity to read. Yet here I was, presented with that very opportunity and a decision. I'd arrived there purely by wandering.