Silent Night

This year, for the first time in twelve years, I won’t be playing the organ for Faithful Savior Lutheran Church’s holiday services—just as I haven’t been there for any services since the pandemic hit.

An agnostic from my twenties, I initially took the Faithful Savior gig in a professional capacity. But I grew to love it, too. Though I never became a believer, at times, the music, the people, and the moment all lined up just right, and I’d feel, if not the pull of faith, then something like Wordsworth’s “intimation of immortality”—a strong impression that I was part of something larger than myself. The Christmas Eve candlelight services, which always concluded with the hymn “Silent Night,” particularly tended that way.

That hymn turned out to be more resistant to cliché than I expected. Playing it for the Lutherans, I’d think not of Bing Crosby, but of World War I—the “war to end all wars” that didn’t—and its 1914 Christmas truce, when, after months of pointless, bloody stalemate, the shooting briefly stopped, and along the western front, soldiers of both sides ventured into No Man’s Land, exchanging cigarettes, chocolate, and unexpected small kindnesses. Many songs were sung during those thirty-six hours, but the high point may have been the “Silent Night” performed by German officer Walter Kirchhoff, who had been a tenor with the Berlin Opera.

A hundred years later, when I listened to the voices of the elderly congregants striving to fill the dark, glimmering church sanctuary, I’d wonder how Kirchhoff had sounded, standing under the cold December moonlight, in the thick mud, amid the stink of rotting corpses. The truce hadn’t lasted, of course. But I’d try, in my own “Silent Night,” to summon its spirit of hope in the face of hopelessness, toward the transmutation of grief.

I’m trying to summon that spirit again this year, even if we can’t have the music. And even in my unbelief, I pray that you find it too. Happy Holidays, friends.

Gratitude

 

While responding to accusations that she’s a tyrant lying about the dangers of COVID, Renae Moch, public health director in North Dakota, asked a pertinent question: “Why would I want to do that?”

This, to me, is the strangest thing about the resistance to common sense that is now making a bad situation much worse. It’s stranger than the argument about freedom, which lacks the self-awareness to notice its own compliance, evident in the belief that a retweeted meme counts as independent thought. It’s stranger than the argument about not living in fear—with its deep anxiety about masks, vaccines, and governments. And it’s stranger than the argument about inefficacy, which somehow concludes that because recommended measures are not guaranteed to eliminate spread completely, they can’t greatly mitigate it.

In fiction, I obsess about characters’ motivations. Maybe that’s why Ms. Moch’s question jumped out at me. If public health officials, hospital spokespeople, and (most of all) nurses and doctors are trying to put one over on the rest of us, the obvious question is: why? What’s their motivation? What are they getting out of it?

I’ll tell you what they’re not getting out it. Sleep. Comfort. Safety. Respect. Empathy. Peace. Decency. Gratitude.

It being the season for the latter, I know where I’m directing mine this year.

Remembrance

Life is so easy when you don’t have to make room for the experiences of other people. Theory of mind and the rhetoric of empathy can seduce us into thinking we fully understand what’s going on in each other’s heads. As a parent, I’ve seen the millions of ways—incremental, usually innocent, often problematic ways—we impose identity on children, before they’re even born, and before they can think and speak for themselves.

I wish we could sit more with the uncertainty at the beginning of each life. To value each person for who they might become rather than how they are categorized by a pregnancy ultrasound, or a cultural expectation. After all, we are all always becoming—even if that’s only to become more of what other people thought we were to begin with.

Today is the International Transgender Day of Remembrance. Let’s make those losses matter, and make the losses stop.

(Image from Peter Boag’s Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, a highly recommended account of gender nonconformity in the American West.)

Jan's Sign

My neighbor Jan has been updating this sign every day for the past 250+ days. (I only know the figure because, on the other side, he’s also been tallying the number of days in quarantine.)

 

Mostly, I’ve appreciated this countdown. Whenever the shitstorm got too big to see, it was good to have a small, undeniable number to focus on—if only for a moment, during my morning walk with the dog. “November 3 is election day” turned out to be one of the few real-world truths that couldn’t be corrupted by delusion, woo-woo, or conspiracy-mongering.

 

It’s surreal, though, after four years of hell (maybe five, since COVID-time ages you twice as fast) to finally be here, on the eve of whatever’s going to happen tomorrow. I’m guardedly optimistic, in a don’t-hold-me-to-it kind of way. The data is certainly more encouraging than it was in 2016. And while the man in the White House and his crew may be good at being bad, they’re not superhuman—their luck will eventually run out. Still, facts are not feelings, and I’m more anxious about the torrent of emotion that’s coming. 

 

This past weekend, I was surprised to awaken from the kind of deep sleep I hadn’t experienced since I was a kid. The morning light glowed burnt-orange and red—colors that had come late to the trees in our part of town. I let myself sink into bed for a while, immersed in what I now suspect was something like the “oceanic feeling” that Romain Rolland once spoke of—exhausted but energized, and with no sense of separation from the world. But I couldn’t tell if my heart was healing, or steeling itself.

 

So many people have lost so much in such a short period of time. We have so much work to do, and to un-do. But I’ve been thinking of MLK’s famous phrase, and reminding myself that, even if the moral universe is less of an arc than a zig-zag, he was absolutely right—it moves toward justice. Let’s move it that way tomorrow.

Cemetery Boys (review)

As my middle-grade manuscript continues to wander through what is turning out to be a longer-than-expected submission process, I’ve tried to stay on top of my reading, grateful that it has included Aiden Thomas’s fun, powerful YA novel, Cemetery Boys.

There are so many things to recommend this book. Strong, clear writing. Carefully paced plotting, and its corollary—tension built with fine-grained control. And the genre—“paranormal romance,” or a love story folded into a ghost story—makes it perfect for Halloween. (Though I’m down for a good ghost story any time of year.)

Of course, one also has to recognize what this novel does for queer trans Latinx visibility. The protagonist, Yadriel, has all three of these identities. Even in 2020 (or especially in 2020), the publishing industry continues to suffer from a lack of diversity—a fact that most of us within it know, but do too little to address. Cemetery Boys is an inspiring example of how that industry could be—a bit of good news during this otherwise bad-news year.

It would be good-enough news to feature a type of character that readers don’t usually get to see, but Thomas goes further by cultivating meaningful connection with that character, regardless of where the reader is coming from. I suppose I’m a great argument for the book’s success in that regard. I do love paranormal fiction, but I don’t read a lot of YA, and even less romance. More to the point, I’m white, heterosexual, cisgendered, and male. And yet in Yadriel, I easily recognized struggles I’d felt in my own youth—especially in terms of figuring myself out and then wanting to be accepted for that. 

In other words, the experience of adolescence depicted in Cemetery Boys is both unique in its details, and tending toward something shared. That's no mean writerly feat. There’s a moment right before the novel’s climax, where Yadriel and Julian (his love interest, who also happens to be a ghost) race a stolen Corvette Stingray to a beach along the Pacific Coast Highway, reggaeton blaring through open windows, to crash a party thrown by the popular kids. I couldn’t help but think of the last-night-on-earth abandon near the end of Rebel Without a Cause, that 1950s white suburban teen-angst archetype with the hidden history. James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo—playing characters raucously, transiently living out their own domestic fantasy in an abandoned Los Angeles mansion, both different and not so different from Thomas’s Yadriel and Julian. 

Yet even as Cemetery Boys reminds us of feelings we’ve all contained at some point, it contains something new and compelling. As Rebel’s mansion—a haunted house of sorts—and countless teen slasher films have made clear, there’s a natural narrative symbiosis between adolescence and horror. That tradition doesn’t prepare you for the masterstroke of placing a trans teenager in a ghost story, in which the relationship between body and soul (or spirit, or consciousness, or identity) is already foregrounded, and also somehow not determinative. Indeed, the novel’s focus on ghostly bodies kept bringing me back to a simple, infuriating contradiction that causes so much grief for all of us, but perhaps especially for trans kids. We live in a culture that encourages us to become who, in the deepest, least tangible parts of our being, we know we are. And then, all too often, that culture does everything in its power to stop us.

Anyway, five stars for this book.

The Lost Souls of America

I guffawed when I saw this ad. It’s from Berlin, but even if you don’t speak German, you can probably tell who the middle finger is aimed at. So punk! I doubt the campaign will be effective—most studies suggest that shaming doesn’t change minds or behavior—but who cares? Sometimes you just need an excuse to vent.
 
Shaming might not change minds or behavior, but here in America, it feels like shame is all we’ve got. I avoid conversation with conspiracists—as Lauren Kerby put it, you can’t “bring facts to a feelings fight.” Still, you can protect the facts, holding them in your palm like a hurt bird. And then fight for them with your ballot—when mine came in the mail last week, my whole body trembled with a fury to cast it.
 
“We’re about freedom and respecting the freedom of the American people,” Pence said during the VP debate, defending the administration’s pandemic negligence. I guffawed at that, too. So you mean freedom is free after all? I’m a patient man, but my patience for willful ignorance is as low as it’s ever been. As the days get shorter, and All Saint’s Eve approaches, I imagine the lost souls of America sitting with themselves, facing a mirror—no Twitter, no chatter, eyes open. Even attempting introspection, how many would only continue to see a middle finger thrusting back at them, out of the endless darkness?

The Year We Lost Our Breath

 

During the worst days of the September wildfires, as I struggled to take my mind off the low-level perma-headache, I read an article in the New York Times, about how a group of scientists might have found life on Venus. The evidence—a chemical marker for anaerobic microbes—wasn’t exactly made for Hollywood. Just the filigree of a possibility, invisible to the naked eye. But something in me was desperate to hold onto those slim odds. 

The article was accompanied by a painting of the Venusian landscape. But that felt like a hallucination left over from the nineteenth century, and I craved something more objective. A search led to surface-level photographs taken by a Soviet lander a few decades back. In them, everything, even the sky, seemed to be made of radioactive leather. 

I nodded. That was the sepia glow I was now seeing outside the window I couldn’t open. 

In that same outside, the birds, who had disappeared when the smoke first slunk in, were back, but not to fly, or even to sing. They hopped around the yard, looking confused—little dinosaur descendants. Modern-day Venus is a descendant too, but its dinosaur was its gentler self—maybe covered in oceans, and maybe earth-like in other ways, before some unknown event turned it into an acid-cloaked waste. 

It boggles the mind: how much damage can one planet take? As a kid, I was fascinated by the pop-culture spectacle of exploding worlds—Alderaan in Star Wars, or Superman’s Krypton. A stupendous burst of light and sparks, like a fireworks display. I doubt our destruction of Earth, assuming it continues, will be that flashy—and I doubt Venus’s toxic transformation happened that way either. Even dying, a planet keeps doing its thing in space—it just gets confused, like one of those birds in the yard.

No one should have to raise kids on a dying planet. In Portland, the summer was stressful enough before the poisonous air. Quarantine-crazed, we’d spent as many evenings as we could in the backyard, occasionally catching a more distant view of Venus. One of the brightest things in the sky, it was easy to mistake for a star, guiding the way. But toward what?

A Memphis Memory

Twenty-five summers ago, my friend Jodie and I drove my overstuffed Cutlass Ciera from New Jersey to California. I was relocating to Los Angeles for grad school. She was along for the ride. I’m not sure I could have done it without her, but our friendship almost didn’t survive that trip. America can have that effect on people, I guess.

By car, it’s possible to get from coast to coast in four days—but we took two weeks, lingering in my favorite music cities throughout the South. On a hot night in Memphis, we sat on the Ciera’s hood outside Sun Records, trying to soak in the magic of Howlin’ Wolf and Jackie Brenston, and others

long gone. The next day, it rained, and we went to the Lorraine Motel, where, in 1968, Martin Luther King had been assassinated. Recently converted into the National Civil Rights Museum, that building, with its marquee and decor preserved, seemed to silently loop that infamous moment. 

Of course, history in general seems to loop, whether we put it in a museum or not. The rain got heavier as Jodie and I left Tennessee and entered Mississippi. But scenes of Memphis kept playing in my mind. I cued up a Public Enemy mixtape. “Elvis was a hero to most,” Chuck D. rapped, backed by the rhythm of the windshield wipers, “but he never meant shit to me.” I nodded. I loved Elvis’s early records, but never got why other white people called him “king.” We’d toured Graceland a few days earlier. We’d seen the TV with the bullet hole. We’d seen the stone wall, covered in pointless graffiti. A mad king, maybe, driven there by the privilege of skin.

Down I-55, and then toward the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, I thought about other kings. Martin Luther, yes, but also Rodney, beaten nearly to death on camera a few years earlier, in the city I would soon call home. That almost accidental recording is sometimes heralded as the start of a new citizen journalism. But hatred adapts. How many Rodney King-type videos (and worse) have there been so far this year? This month?

The night before MLK’s murder at the Lorraine, he gave a transcendent speech. He spoke of a mountaintop, and a promised land, and how “I might not get there with you.” I suspect he knew the Buddhist story of the three men, dying of thirst in the desert—the one where they find a wall, and the first two climb, and see an oasis on the other side, and jump over, saving themselves. The third man, the bodhisattva, remains behind. He’s still thirsty, of course. But he’s more concerned that strangers, as lost and parched as he, might come along someday, and need help getting to the oasis hidden behind the wall.

In 2020, such selfless compassion feels increasingly elusive. What kind of promised land is premised on centuries of suffering? Maybe history doesn’t have to loop. If you’re lucky enough to be at the foot of the wall, who are you going to help over it?

The Jingle Dress Dance

When I worked at Willowbrook Arts Camp a few summers back, the Native American Arts specialists—Harold and his daughter Harmony—would always treat the kids to a performance of the Jingle Dress Dance. We all gathered under the main tent to watch and listen. Harold struck a big drum, and it rang deep as he sang. Harmony danced in a skipping motion, her dress layered in metal cones that shook like sleigh bells—incongruous and beautiful in the July heat.

Apparently, the Jingle Dress Dance originated around the time of the 1918 influenza pandemic. A man from the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe had a recurring dream of four women dancing in differently colored dresses, covered in “little metal pieces.” He told his wife, and the dresses were made, and the dance learned—and a young girl who’d been struck ill rose from her fever to dance along. A healing ritual was born from tobacco-can lids, radically repurposed to make the first jingle cones. 

A virus is invisible, and silent. So we look and listen more carefully. Walking through my neighborhood, my ears tune to every footfall. I sense the slightest break in my peripheral vision—if you’re walking, too, I might feel your presence before we’re even on the same street. Everything is fainter, but there is still sound and movement. Music is vibrating air, and dance its engine. Its waves travel to touch us, even when we can’t touch each other. And for now, that has to be enough. The beating drum. The ringing metal. The remembered connection through space, tangible in its intangibility, as we all move through this together.

[image c/o Smithsonian]

What We've Become

There was an article in National Geographic a few months ago, about “the largest single incident of mass child sacrifice in the Americas—and likely in world history.” According to the piece, that event occurred in Peru, almost six centuries ago, at the hands of the Chimú civilization.

The coverage had all the National Geographic hallmarks. The outsized, colorful photographs (in this case, of cinnabar-smeared skulls and sternums). The passive-aggressive distancing between observer and observed. “What could possibly have been the reason?” the author mused.

In the context of the last eighteen months, that voyeuristic outrage seems almost delusional. One could argue that child sacrifice is alive and well and happening in the United States—on a scale the Chimú could never have imagined. Sure, the mechanisms are different. And sure, the damage takes a variety of forms. But snatching babies from their parents is just a different way of getting the same result. As is letting kids shoot each other to death in schools. As is wrecking the planet they will have to inhabit longer than you.

There’s an exquisite gratuitousness to this conspiracy of old against young. Scanning the channels last night, I saw CNN do its knee-jerk Trumper-in-the-wild thing—elderly white folks, sitting in a diner so brightly retro it burned through the screen. They looked unhealthy and unhappy, as they complained that they shouldn’t be made to feel guilty because of crying toddlers in internment camps. I wondered if any of them read National Geographic. 

It’s a form of terrorism, really—this ransoming of innocence. On the day Thandie was born, she came out with the umbilical cord around her neck, and the entirety of my being hung by a thread as the nurses whisked her away and coaxed her into breathing. Most of us are hanging together, now, for these other kids, desperately hoping they will breathe too, and unable to fathom this cult of adults that must have its tribute. 

Please: fight back.

Getting Better

[image by Drew Coffman]

Last week an important conversation about sexual harassment happened in the world of contemporary children’s literature, and I’m so grateful I got to hear it. Over the weekend I celebrated the majesty of an all-black superhero movie and was inspired by high-school students seizing the reins of the gun-control conversation. Through it all, I’ve been thinking about voice and representation and ethics, and my own commitments and responsibilities as an unproven white guy trying to write fantasy books for kids.

Honestly, I wouldn’t want to be doing this at any other time. It’s a gift, this opportunity to learn how to be a better human through writing. Part of the charge, of course, is obvious: the golden rule, more or less. As Ishta Mercurio points out in Publisher’s Weekly, “It is such a low bar to expect decent behavior from people who create books for children.” Indeed—this industry should probably be leading the way.

But there is more to it than just behaving decently. There should be answers in the writing itself. I agree with Martha Brockenbrough: “We need new stories.”

Yes, stories are ways of documenting reality, and sometimes that means documenting its horror. But sometimes simply documenting horror is a way of re-inscribing it, whether intentionally or not. I couldn’t make it through Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why precisely because a version of that story seems to be told about powerful men and their victims all the time lately—just as now, with what I guess would have to be called poetic justice, it is being told about Asher himself.

Stories, in other words, should also be ways of thinking about what could be—and not just in the cool Tomorrowland-and-jetpacks way. Stories can be like friends who poke at our inhibitions until we try something new for a change—enduring grief for it at first, but receiving heartfelt thanks later. Stories can be the existential tricks a culture uses to remake itself against collective bad habits, or to shake off the muscle memory of evil. Creating a good one, I remind myself as I struggle with my own work, is an act not just of basic empathy, but of well-tuned imagination.

Of course, the empathy part is important too—and complicated. Write what you know—but also throw out what you know. After all, some of what you know is bad. Adam Rex, in a great Twitter thread that I mostly agree with, spoke of being “too selfish”—reminding me of something else Mercurio said, about how the book industry in general is hampered by “‘rockstar’ culture (and egos), driven both by society at large and by the economics of publishing (in which one blockbuster book often pays the bills for the entire slate of books being published in a given year).”

I come from the world of music, and wrote a book critiquing the idea of musical genius. I know something about the toxicity of rock star culture, and how there’s a fine line between aesthetic and political authority, and a finer line between authority and power. And the stubbornness of that dynamic makes me think that maybe the white male writer’s job right now is to find an elegant way to write himself into the background. Not as a gesture of false modesty or performative woke-ness, but more subtly, with fairness and generosity and respect.

Write what you know. But expand your knowledge. I keep telling myself: if you’re writing a story that comes easily, maybe that is part of the problem. As a writer, I want to take a cue from the best musicians, who understand what space is—how to be silent, how to support others in an ensemble, how to listen. It’s not that they squelch their sound when the time comes. It’s that they know when their time comes—and when it’s someone else’s time.

If that sounds easy, it’s not. It may be the hardest thing. In some ways, writing (and art in general) is inherently selfish. But my favorite writers seem to have learned how to modulate between creative selfishness and something broader and more inclusive—like modulating between drafting and revising, or between reverse and first gear. I’m trying to learn it too.

Montavilla 2017

I was honored to be a part of the Montavilla Jazz Festival yesterday—the Quadraphonnes, as always, made my music sound so much better than it is. 

I wish I could have stayed longer, but I’m thrilled that I at least got to hear Ezra Weiss’s sextet. Everyone knows the brilliant writing, arranging, and playing of this group. But what really got me this time was the inspired programming; beginning with Charles Mingus’s “Fables of Faubus,” and closing with John Coltrane’s “Alabama.” The latter performance brought the audience to tears, and I won’t soon forget it.

The cliched dig against jazz is that it has become “museum music.” There’s some truth to that, although museumification is not particular to jazz—it’s what happens to any art that loses its narrative. The thing is, given the volatility of human history, narratives have a way of coming around again. An electoral college absurdity here, a Russian hack there, and suddenly “Faubus” and “Alabama” sound utterly contemporary, even in their particulars.

Lord knows Donald Trump didn’t invent hate in America. Still—although I wasn’t naive about his chances this time last year, I’m not sure I thought he was capable of bringing back the D. W. Griffith-era, torch-burning kind. As a musician, I’m endlessly proud that music can beat back such ugliness whenever it recurs. As a human being, I hate that it still has to.

Once more this year

(photo credit: Newcastle Libraries)

For the past eight Christmas Eves, and the past eight Christmas mornings—except for the year we had that haymaker of a snowstorm, and everything was closed—I’ve trekked out to Parkrose to play the holiday services at the Lutheran church where I am the resident agnostic organist. I’ll be doing it again this year. 

It’s a not-quite sketchy part of town, but it’s not Multnomah Village either (and it definitely isn’t the Pearl). There are these quaint little colonial cottages with metal bars on the windows, and chain-link fences enclosing yards where broad-browed dogs prowl around abandoned Big Wheels and Barbies. Down the street from the church, someone once spray-painted the word “SNITCH” in huge black letters on the wall of a carport. I’ve always felt that it’s a neighborhood with lots of hidden stories. 

It was just before Christmas a few years back when the pastor I work for finally got the funds to purchase a new organ for his congregation—folks mostly in their seventies, who had been asking for the old hymns the way they were meant to be heard. I had a key to the church, and after the instrument was installed, I would sometimes go at night, when no one else was there, and let myself in to practice. That’s when I discovered that the building that could seem empty on a sunny Sunday morning—since the pews were never more than half-full—felt like the abyss of eternity when it was deserted and dark. 

The first time I was in the church alone at night, I turned on as many lights as I could—even the ones that were nowhere near the part I was in. But that didn’t help. It was as if the brightness only invited the ghosts out of the walls. So I turned most of the lights off again, and climbed the stairs to the choir loft, where, after feeling my way to the organ bench, I started playing in the near-dark. 

The first things I played on that brand-new instrument were centuries old—from an Advent and Christmas repertoire that had been brought to life under countless fingers before me. “Once in Royal David’s City.” “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.” “Savior of the Nations, Come.” “Lo! He Comes With Clouds Descending.” Beautiful, sad pieces, with melodies that were vivid once you blew the dust off. And as I played, and despite my lack of faith—which I prefer to cast as a faith in my own fallibility, or as a faith in the possibility of many truths—the music did what music does. Almost instantly, I felt at home and at peace, sitting there in the gloom, alone and listening. 

People keep saying we’re entering a dark time. I try to stay optimistic, but it’s probably true. I think a lot about the work ahead. But for tonight and tomorrow, I’m going to play the old hymns again, with all my might. And I’m going to hope for the best, for all of us. 

Happy Holidays, friends.

Perspective

Fact: Pauline Oliveros was 49 years old when she had her first solo album released.

— UbuWeb (@ubuweb) November 27, 2016

At last

Now available for pre-order: Breath of Fire, my first album in eight years. Check out the free streaming track: "Flower Gun Song."

I'm honored to have been able to work on this music with David Valdez, Tim Willcox, Ryan Meagher, Andrew Jones, Todd Bishop, Dennis Carter, and Brad Boatright.

Loving Hillary

She’s never gonna make you love her. In fact, she’d probably be offended if you tried—she has grandchildren for that.  

(Samantha Bee)

During my brief and bitter foray into post-doctoral academic life more than a decade ago, I had a friend and colleague who swore by the mantra “the best ideas win.” I liked that, though I always worried it was a little naive. Not only did it not come to pass at the institution where we worked, but we were living through the presidency of George W. Bush, who had some really bad ideas, many of which won. 

     I remember spending a lot of time trying to figure out how the Bush phenomenon happened. Pundits kept offering the same explanation: people elect the person they want to have a beer with. I was still a drinker back then, but I don’t think a lifetime supply of the best microbrews in the world could have gotten me to vote for him. Still, I understood the point, in the abstract: apparently the man offered voters some kind of emotional engagement, as compared with his more “wooden” opponents, Al Gore and, later, John Kerry. Whatever ideas were at stake were subordinate to that dynamic. It was stupid, but what could you do? At least we wouldn’t have to deal with it again, once he was out of office.

     Little did I know! Fast-forward eight years, and Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, is treading the proto-dictator’s path, and has much, much worse ideas than Bush (to the extent that he has “ideas” at all). I’m not sure how many people want to have a beer with him—especially since he doesn’t drink, either—but he is very good at stirring a wide range of emotions. And that may be all he needs to do.
     Perhaps that sounds paranoid. I know most Democrats are still riding high from Monday’s debate, and the polls are definitely moving in the right direction—but to quote Han Solo, “Don’t get cocky, kid.” This has been a year of surprises, and it could be a tightrope walk all the way to the end. Trump still has his supporters, and they still adore him—although fanatically enough to make me think he may end up in front of a firing squad if he actually becomes president, because he’s certainly going to fuck them over someday too. 
     But I don’t believe Trump is only interested in the enthusiasm of people who love him. He must know he cannot win if he relies on it. His bigger goal is to damage Clinton (“lock her up”) and the electoral process in general (“the system is rigged”), all while depicting the US as some kind of Boschian nightmare. Hate and anger and fear: that’s how you get Democrats and independents to stay home, or vote third party.     

     Hillary voters have to be careful about contributing to that. We know that her opponent is the horror film phone call coming from inside the house. But every time we say we are resigned to vote for her, or bemoan her as the lesser of two evils, or vow to hold our noses in the voting booth, or complain that doing the right thing makes us throw up in our mouths a little, we’re getting closer to being the schmucks who don’t survive that scene. In this era of electronic communication, those cliches (“tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse,” as Orwell once put it) reverberate around the polity, collaterally shoring up the rationalizations of those who are flirting with Stein, or Johnson, or writing someone in, or staying home. They betray a failure to understand that, in this election, outrage against Trump won’t get us over the hump. It’s just more oxygen for his fire. Hatred for him might not matter if it isn’t accompanied by love for her.

     Yes, you read that right.    

Really, it shouldn’t be so hard. Hillary Clinton has, by far, the best ideas in this election—and many of them would be good ideas in any other election, too. Compared to other mainstream politicians, she is some distance from the lesser evil benchmark. Kevin Drum calls the progressive case for her “pretty overwhelming.” FiveThirtyEight says "Clinton has always been, by most measures [i.e., voting record, public statements, and fundraising] pretty far to the left." Ezra Klein points out her unusual-for-a-politician skill at listening and relationship-building. Jill Abramson, who made a career of investigating Clinton scandals, concludes that she is “fundamentally honest and trustworthy”—a view corroborated by Politifact. 

     Yes, she’s hawkish, and yes, she’s not afraid to go into the lion’s den—which can sometimes make it seem as if she’s a lion herself. But weigh those things against SCHIP, for example, which provided health care for millions of poor kids and mothers over time. Weigh them against “Hillarycare,” which, though defeated, established a bulwark for the Affordable Care Act, insuring millions of more Americans (note too that she wants to implement the longed-for public option). Weigh them against a statement like “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights,” which she once publicly and controversially uttered in front of the leaders of a country where female infanticide had been the norm for two millennia. Weigh them against her platform: a $12 minimum wage, comprehensive immigration reform, taxing the rich, tightening banking regulations, moving to renewable energy on a tighter timetable, nominating liberal Supreme Court justices, fighting for equal pay for women . . .

     The inevitable caveat—that Clinton is also flawed, and has made mistakes in her long career—is true, but it seems to proceed from the assumption that there are politicians who are not, and have not. I wonder: where do these mythical beings live? Even Bernie Sanders once voted to dump toxic waste in a poor Latino community thousands of miles from his home state. Hell—Sanders once helped to fund the most expensive bomber in the history of the world. 

     Not that I’m here to re-litigate the primary, or to ding Sanders’s reputation. (As I once wrote, I love the guy.) The point is that in a pluralistic democracy, political careers should be understood as cost-benefit analyses. You always get the good with the bad. Maybe, if you’re smart and careful and patient, you get a gradual move toward more of the former. 

     Smart and careful and patient: is there any better way to describe the Democratic nominee?

     

So why do so many people have such a hard time supporting her, and why do so many of her supporters have such a hard time being emphatic in their support? Especially now that the wolf is at the door? Defeating incipient fascism: what’s not to love about that?   

     Hating Hillary isn’t hard, because hate in general isn’t hard—it’s reactive, like a leg cramp, or the rake handle coming up to hit you in the face. Love is the real challenge of human existence. Not the infatuated rush of erotic or romantic love, maybe, but the more serious and beneficial kinds—whether the deep root system of a family, or a long-term partnership; or the give-and-take between best friends forever; or the more mundane, workaday social glue that we need to peacefully co-exist in a large and complex society. Voting should be prompted by something like the latter. Instead, it has become a consumerist transaction, which, as Michelle Goldberg has argued, assumes “an act of individual self-affirmation, a kind of lifestyle choice” by “atomized individuals whose personal experience is paramount.”  

     And so there is enormous discursive pressure against loving Hillary in even the most pragmatic ways. Consider how she and Trump are consistently held up together as “historically unpopular candidates,” without context. Stephen Colbert riffed on the idea a few weeks ago, in response to NBC’s “Commander-in-Chief Forum.” As you may remember, the back-to-back interviews with each candidate had taken place on the aircraft carrier Intrepid. Colbert remarked that

it was a great night. Once the two of them were on board, a lot of people were tempted to just cut the lines and let it drift out to sea. Bon Voyage! Bye-bye! Say “Hi” to the Somali pirates for us!

     

I like Colbert (who doesn’t?), but this is madness. If an aircraft carrier drifting out to sea is a metaphor for unpopularity, there’s no way that Clinton and Trump are in the same boat. 

     Here’s the difference. Trump is historically unpopular because of what he has said and done. Clinton’s unpopularity is more literally historical—it has the weight of history behind it. Sure, it is underscored by her prosaic speaking style, her tendency to overcompensate (personally, I think that’s the source of her hawkishness), and a defensive posture all too easily construed as compulsive secrecy. But given her obvious qualifications for the job, the underlying cause is no mystery, as Michael Arnovitz, Caroline Siede, Larry Womack, and others have shown. To wit: it’s the sexism, stupid. 

     People act as though it’s cheating to point this out. Nonsense. It’s the alpha and omega for why we are where we are. Explain why we’re supposed to care about Clinton’s bout with pneumonia, if it isn’t because of the same paternalistic mania about women’s bodies that suffuses the abortion debate. Explain why we’re supposed to indict her for the sins of her husband, if it isn’t because of the assumption that women are mere extensions of men. Explain why Trump, for so long, got away with genuine scandals, while Clinton buckled under fake ones, if it wasn’t because of a glaring double-standard against powerful women, in a culture that hasn’t yet succumbed to the charm of anti-heroines.

     It is no response to say that some of these barbs are being thrown from the left, as if that validates them. Sexism among progressives is a good example of how insidious bigotry can be: of how it works in part by shutting down the bigot’s self-awareness. The irony is that many progressives who have a distaste for Clinton would recognize their behavior if they saw it in others—for it is a variation of one of the central tenets of misogyny, in which women must be either Madonna or whore, but never anything in between.

The salt in the wound is that this election is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The presidency of Barack Obama did not usher in a utopia, but a lot of the groundwork for more extensive change has been meticulously laid over the last eight years. Indeed, I suspect that part of the reason we’re so hungry for change is that we’ve had our appetite for it so effectively whetted. Before Obama, the idea of an African-American president, while appealing to many, seemed impossible. And now that we know that impossible things are possible, we want them all. 

     As well we should. The world is not a Boschian nightmare, but there is a lot that is wrong, everywhere around us. Yet I suspect we won’t get where we want to be, ever, if we hamstring the whole enterprise because we’re not getting there now. The most idealistic candidate in the 2008 election, Dennis Kucinich, was practically laughed off the stage—but he got farther than the idealist who came eight years before him, Ralph Nader. This time, Sanders got farther—much farther—than either. In other words, we’re approaching the real ideal. Next election: who knows? Again: good things happen when you’re smart and careful and patient.

     When you’re not smart and careful and patient, Trump happens. Stopping him—not just stopping him, but causing him to face-plant, beating him by wide margins and electing Democrats up and down the ticket—is another once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Trump’s very existence as a candidate suggests that his party is in its death throes. If he goes down hard, maybe Republicanism goes down hard, and maybe someday soon we'll be looking at a two-party system of center- and left-Democrats. That would be nice. If he wins, however, Republicanism may just morph into something more obviously obscene—different in degree if not in kind from what has been going on with the party since Reagan, rising again like the old South it came to embrace after it stopped being the party of Lincoln. The hunger of the other side has been whetted too.

     So: loving Hillary . . . or at least liking her more forcefully. If you’ve never thought of this election that way, try it—if only for the next thirty days or so. If your vote is already a given, someone who is on the fence might be swayed by your enthusiasm. And maybe the best ideas will win this year.

The Disaster Gambit

[photo by Matt Brown]

And so another presidential election is upon us. I really hope I get to vote for a Sanders-led ticket in November. I would do it wholeheartedly: I have loved that guy since he was a regular on Thom Hartmann’s radio show. I want him to win the nomination. He still might. I guess we’ll know more on Tuesday.

     But this post isn’t about Sanders. It’s about what some progressives are threatening to do if he isn’t the nominee. It’s about an argument that goes back at least to 2000 (when it enticed me into voting for Nader, an act I will always regret), and is now resurfacing again. It’s about the “Bernie or Bust” movement, and this odd prose-poem by Michael E. Sparks (“Imagine that I have to vote for her just to keep the GOP out / I still struggle to do it / It’s like asking me to choose between death by burning or death by drowning / I choose neither / I would choose to vote for Jill Stein if it comes to that / At least then I could live with myself”), and especially these comments by Russ Belville:

Picking the lesser of two evils allows the evil to become more evil and entices the good to become less good . . .

If Donald Trump wins the presidency over Hillary Clinton, it’s not the fault of people like me who won’t vote for Republicans. It's the fault of the Democratic Party for nominating a Republican. For me, the horror of a four-year Trump term is less frightening than cementing in the Far Right / Center Right corporate duopoly in American politics created since Hillary's husband sold out Democratic principles on welfare, crime, race, labor, trade, drugs, and media.

Remember the tale of frogs in the pot of water? You turn the heat up slowly and they'll boil to death, but put them in an already boiling pot and they'll hop out. Donald Trump is the boiling pot and Hillary Clinton is the slow heat. A President Trump in 2016 equals a President Warren in 2020. A President Clinton in 2016 equals a re-elected Clinton in 2020 and the next milquetoast Obama-like speechifier in 2024 . . .

    

     Belville’s take is the most disturbing to me. I call it the disaster gambit. The disaster is the election of the most egregious candidate, and the gambit is the idea that by passive-aggressively facilitating it, progressives will prompt a national anger so profound that we will finally have a revolution.

     I suspect that disaster gambit thinking—whether explicitly articulated or not—informs much progressive rejection of Clinton. It’s a way of rationalizing away the consequences of a bad choice made under difficult circumstances. But it doesn’t change the fact that if Clinton really is the lesser of two evils, the lesser of two evils is still, by definition, less evil. Let’s be clear: those who embrace the disaster gambit are saying that they’re willing to contribute to an outcome that will cause more suffering for more people. And in order to justify that, presumably as collateral damage, one has to ignore the possibility that the imagined revolution may not happen, no matter how hot the pot of water gets. The truth is that a President Trump doesn’t guarantee a President Warren any more than a President Bush guaranteed a President Kucinich. And if the revolution doesn’t come, the suffering will have anyway.

* * * * *

    

The disaster gambit is especially problematic in this election, because it seems blind to the kind of disaster it is inviting. Numbed by a political discourse that has been eroding for decades, it overlooks the genuinely apocalyptic implications of a Trump presidency. It assumes the maintenance of a status quo such that there will be another election in 2020—at which time we can right whatever wrongs have been committed in the meantime.

     With other Republicans, bad as they are, that assumption might at least have been reasonable. With Trump, it isn’t. The threat he presents is more historic.

     For months now, Trump has been compared to Hitler, and—with apologies to Mike Godwin—for once, the comparison is not unwarranted. It’s not that Trump is sitting on a carefully thought-out program for world dominance and genocide. But there’s an American form of fascism lurking in him—something rougher, sloppier, more off-the-cuff. Trump is the ugly id of America; the distillation and amplification of everything that was merely worrisome about Sarah Palin; the return of the Republican repressed. His psychopathologies, on display for decades now, are quite breathtaking. He seems not to believe in a world outside his own head, or that it is populated with other people who have their own feelings and desires and aspirations and experiences. It’s as if, to him, we are all avatars in a video game, and he wants the cheat codes.

     That’s pathetic, but it’s also urgent. Trump is mercurial and unthoughtful enough to take us past the point of no return before the end of a first term. As commander-in-chief, supreme court appointer, veto maker, bully-pulpit occupier, and wielder of executive orders, he will have no greater opportunity to perfect his violent, bullying brand of politics. By putting all that power in his hands, we will have opened up the possibility of something much worse than the politics-as-usual we have longed to escape. Environmental catastrophe. Race war. Nuclear deployment. Martial law. Internment camps.

     Some of those outcomes may sound unlikely. But the point is that “it can’t happen here” is no longer a viable rejoinder to the problem of Trump. His candidacy has been a series of events that conventional wisdom did not anticipate. His words and actions, offhand and kooky as they may have seemed at first, have accumulated such that they now disqualify him from the benefit of our doubt.

     The thing about American fascism is that it won’t happen until it does.

* * * * *

    

And what about Clinton? In its distaste for her—certainly understandable, even as it piggybacks a little too gleefully on a culture of misogyny, and condemns her a little too blithely for the sins of her husband—the disaster gambit presupposes politics in a vacuum. It fails to recognize that even a President Sanders would have to reckon with forces that Clinton has taken for granted her whole career—forces that have pulled every other Democratic president to the right since Reagan: Republican intransigence and irrationality, the anti-intellectual impact of corporate media, the depredations of capitalism, the aging of baby boomers, the spread of evangelical Christianity, the shortcomings of our educational system, and so on.

     The disaster gambit misses the fact that influence works the other way, too. Indeed, Sanders’s unexpectedly and unprecedentedly strong showing in the primary means that a President Clinton will have to be impacted, to at least some degree, by the ideas Sanders is known for—just as President Obama was impacted by the ideas that Clinton was known for (health care reform, for instance). If she’s the quintessential of-the-system politician, that also makes her susceptible to pressure from the loudest voices—and (thankfully) there may be no voice louder than Sanders’s right now.

     In any case, there’s a way in which supporters of the disaster gambit are flirting with the kind of glibness that composer Karlheinz Stockhausen displayed when he referred to 9/11 as a work of art: seeing the disaster only in terms of how it is most personally useful. I don’t doubt that their hearts are in the right place. The problem is that in politics it’s not enough to have your heart in the right place. Politics, as we have construed it and as we have to live with it, is inherently dirty, and it will be until that glorious day when we don’t need politics any more. Until then, we are all implicated in its results. If you are voting to make yourself feel good—if you start from the proposition that “it’s not my fault”—you have already misunderstood how this works.

* * * * *

One final thought: if Trump is the Republican candidate, and he not only loses in November, but loses resoundingly and dramatically, it could mean the repudiation and collapse of the Republican party as we know it. If he wins, thanks in part to the defection of Sanders-purists, then it certainly won’t.

     Are we progressives really going to trade that opportunity for a long shot at utopia?