Category Archives: Politics and Culture

December Links Roundup: Living in Boxes

As a very strange year comes to an end, and a disruptive and destructive one is likely to begin, the question with which I begin this links roundup is: why can’t we Make Architecture Great Again? Megan Gafford’s Substack newsletter Fashionably Late Takes laments that “America was supposed to be Art Deco”. Iconic early 20th-century skyscrapers married ornamentation and the machine-age aesthetic to produce a distinct American style. But soon the Bauhaus style of flat, featureless prisms took over, responding to a postwar malaise that was suspicious of beauty. Gafford’s historical essay explains why, “for a hundred years, Modernist architects have been stabbing the world’s cities repeatedly with their glass shards.” Nostalgia has been weaponized by the Right, but the average person’s sense of alienation is not wrong.

A couple of related stories came to my attention this fall about crackdowns on political speech. Since the election, lots of social media users have shared On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder’s first directive, “Do not obey in advance.” Authoritarianism advances when people preemptively try to placate the dictator. Sometimes I’m glad I grew up in an abusive home, because I already know that this never works. There is no moment when the Dear Leader will say, “Thanks a lot. I guess I owe you a concession now.”

I would like to tattoo this message on the forehead of every mainstream cisgender pundit (I’m looking at you, New York Times) who’s suggested that Democrats should abandon transgender human rights in order to build a winning centrist coalition. What are you winning for? Once you concede that one minority group can have their children taken away, their healthcare criminalized, their jobs and housing dependent on the goodwill of the majority, and the very mention of their existence expunged from school curricula and libraries, you’ve created a repressive state apparatus that could chew up anyone next.

At LitHub, Gabrielle Belliot reflects on the Kafkaesque sensation of “Waking Up Trans in Trump’s America”.

America’s rigidity about categories betrays the conservatism that underlies much of it, and with conservatism comes an obsession with ideas about how families are supposed to look and how men and women are supposed to behave. Conservative outlets repeatedly broadcast to men, in particular, that they will be lesser, weaker, somehow more “effeminate” if they are queer, and they turn this toxic idiocy into homophobia and transphobia—both of which were darkly alchemized into votes for a man who wishes to end our existence.

To accept us, by contrast, is to accept wider possibilities of being. To embrace the idea that binaries are too restrictive, that life, at its core, is a curious flowing thing that cannot fit our simple human categories. To accept us is to reject a frighteningly powerful myth.

At Xtra, Jude Doyle tries to sort out facts from improbabilities: “Could the Trump administration criminalize queer speech online?” Infamously, Project 2025 seeks to redefine any positive portrayal of queer identities as pornography, whether or not it has literal sexual content. Doyle is less worried about book bans than about erasure of LGBTQ internet archives.

One way Trump has already moved to enact Project 2025 is in his pick of the FCC chair Brendan Carr. Carr wrote the chapter on the FCC in Project 2025, and as chair, he would be in a position to enact at least some of the criminal sanctions proposed—specifically, the bit about shuttering telecommunications firms that allow queer and trans voices to proliferate. The way he could do this is to gut Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which would make it an intolerable legal risk for internet platforms to host content by queer and trans people.

The article links to some guidelines for saving your materials offline and protecting your digital privacy. Remember that you don’t actually own the books on your Kindle. Save those paper books!

Meanwhile, some of our universities have already lost sight of their mission to protect free expression and teach critical thinking. This blog is a Harvard haters safe space. My alma mater makes it pretty easy to bash them, with increasingly absurd interpretations of its conduct rules in order to stifle pro-Palestinian activism. Max J. Krupnick reports for Harvard Magazine:

Last December, approximately 100 pro-Palestine students filed into Widener Library’s Loker Reading Room, taped flyers to the back of their laptops, and read for an hour. This “study-in,” billed as “silent” and “non-disruptive” by the student organizers, was not the largest or highest-profile protest of the year. But that event set the scene for this semester’s most significant challenge to the University’s efforts to curtail disruptive student protests.

Throughout this fall, groups of students and faculty members have again taken to libraries with taped signs and coordinated reading lists. These demonstrations—direct challenges to Harvard’s protest restrictions—have ignited campus discussions on what defines a protest, when free expression obstructs learning, and how to introduce new regulations meant to sustain both academic operations and speech…

That ambiguity was put to the test on September 21, when approximately 30 pro-Palestine students sat in Loker wearing keffiyehs and displaying signs protesting Israeli strikes in Lebanon…In response to the study-in, Widener Library banned participating students from the building for two weeks. “Demonstrations and protests are not permitted in libraries,” Widener Library administration wrote in an email to punished students that was obtained by The Crimson. The email specified that the recipient had “a laptop bearing one of the demonstration’s flyers.”

…The University response angered some faculty members. What made this study-in a protest? Why did a silent action merit punishment? Three weeks after the initial student action, approximately 30 faculty members followed suit. The participants read texts about dissent (ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau to materials published by Harvard itself) and displayed placards quoting the Harvard Library Statement of Values (“embrace diverse perspectives”) as well as the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities (“reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part in [our] existence”).

These faculty members, too, were banned from Widener for two weeks following their study-in. Participating professors were especially upset to be punished for speech that was not controversial—in some cases, for displaying quotes from sources published by the University itself.

A similar faculty solidarity action took place at Northwestern University in Illinois. The campus newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, reported Nov. 21:

Around a dozen Northwestern tenured faculty members rallied by The Rock on Wednesday afternoon in protest of the University’s new demonstration policies. The demonstration drew a small crowd as faculty members marched with signs and spoke out against the new policies.

In September, the administration rolled out the new demonstration policies, which prohibit protests at The Rock before 3 p.m. on weekdays and the use of amplified sound in the area before 5 p.m.

…English Prof. Sarah Schulman, who is the faculty advisor for NU’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, condemned the University for disciplining students for putting up two “Gaza Solidarity Sukkah” on campus.

This policy “criminalizes” and “alienates” students from the University, Schulman said.

“Instead, we should be listening to our students, supporting them and praising them for having the integrity to stand up against this violent status quo,” Schulman said to the crowd.

Follow queer historian and AIDS activist Sarah Schulman on X because she doesn’t seem to have jumped ship to BlueSky yet.

Resources for Resistance

Well, well. America woke up and chose fascism. Again.

The day after the election, I wrote a lot, because fury is a great creative motivator for me. In the following days, I had unwise quantities of boba tea in order to fuel myself with pleasure. I bought a new hat that is not as good as my old hat, which I lost in a taxi in NYC on my way home from a nude gay spiritual retreat last month. I cried when I needed to cry, and fought the twin temptations of denial and anxious proliferation of strategies.

Abuse, dysphoria, and the pandemic taught me something about staying present in a crisis I can’t control. I’ve learned not to talk myself out of the future I want, even when it seems impossible. Yes, it is going to be that bad, and no, I don’t know what to do about it, except keep being queer and making art until it’s really obvious that someone will kill me for it (and maybe even then). That’s my version of not obeying tyranny in advance.

At least I will die as the hottest version of myself.

I’m rereading Stephen Dobyns’ 1996 poetry collection Common Carnage, a stoic yet compassionate book about finding beauty in a cruel world. My favorite poem in this book, not available online as far as I can tell, is “Indifference to Consequence”, in which the speaker contrasts the resilient peacefulness of wildflowers in a sidewalk crack with the bloody, miserly competitiveness more typical of human nature. An excerpt:

…What does it mean to be joyous,

to transform one’s frailty into flower?
But even that judgment must be wrong.
To you the image of weakness is a wolf
offering its neck to the pack. Such
sacrifice is beyond your comprehension.

Effortlessly these flowers bear the gifts
that remain to you a mystery. Think
of the boots that will crush them here,
trash cans and car tires yanked over the curb.
Even in life their death couldn’t scare them.

A poem I wrote last year, “These Characters and Themes Cannot Exist”, takes its title from a memo from a Charlotte County, FL education official directing schools to remove all books with LGBTQ content. It’s found a home at The Garlic Press, Issue #3. An excerpt:

…Emily is Nobody
and Abe never shared
his bearded honesty with Speed
in his bed.

Don’t snap
your fingers, butterfly
boy bestie, your whispering sisters
will have to get along

without

your paper to copy
the unspeakable thing
Claggart was willing
to die to say to Billy.
…

At Electric Literature, Bareerah Ghani interviewed Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who has emerged as a leading voice of artistic resistance to Israeli occupation. Knopf published his second collection, Forest of Noise, last month.

When I write poetry, I’m not trying to humanize Palestinians. I’m an artist. This is how I perceive things. I see details. When I write about the people I love, or the people I see and care about, my students, my neighbors, my house, the garden in our house, the sunset, the clouds, the birds, I don’t see the frame of the picture. I see the picture itself. I’m not trying to humanize Palestinians, so that people in the outside world would say, Oh, you know these people are really kind, oh they deserve to be alive. No, this is another function of the poem. I, as an artist, care about the details of everyone’s life. Not because I’m Palestinian, and I want to humanize my people. But this is the way life is. When there is an airstrike, I don’t see the victim. I don’t see the baby who was beheaded by the Israel airstrike.

I see the pacifier, I see the cot, I see the blanket. It’s visible there as much as the baby is visible. These details indicate that there used to be a life before death happened. I see the full picture. I don’t only see what happened after the airstrike. I also see what was happening before that, which is equally important.

Torrey House Press, a literary publisher with an interest in the cultures and environmental issues of the American West, has revived its blog series “That Thing With Feathers: Hope & Literature in a Time of Upheaval”, which was launched in 2020-21 during the pandemic. Their goal is to publish nature writing that is spiritually replenishing and reminds us to fight alongside our allies in the nonhuman world. In a recent installment, Laura Pritchett shares this advice from Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius:

“Whatever anyone does or says, for my part I’m bound to the good,” Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. “In the same way an emerald or gold or purple might always proclaim: ‘whatever anyone does or says, I must be what I am and show my true colors.’” Whatever happens in life, in world events, in politics, our job is our job, our duty is our duty. How does this stop you, Marcus asks elsewhere in Meditations, from acting with courage, discipline, justice and wisdom? In fact, it may well be that these election results present you with an incredible—and urgent and critical—opportunity to act with virtue.

In case you missed it, this post-election pep talk from Rachel Maddow is good for reviving your fighting spirit (12-minute video).

Boundary-setting queen Captain Awkward is on fire in her latest post about your right to distance yourself from Trump-voting relatives.

…The longer you stay invested in trying to extract accountability or persuade the un-persuadable, the more you expose yourself to people who hurt you. So, do you want to win the argument, or do you want to be free?

You can have space and peace and healing, with time.

You can re-invest all the effort and resources that you spent on them into building community with people who don’t make you feel this bad.

You can have the last word, sort of, in that you can say your piece and then stop responding to whatever they say back.

You can try to maintain a strictly superficial relationship that requires the least possible amount of effort and engagement from you. (Often useful or necessary when the problem person is the gatekeeper to relationships with other family members, like children).

But no matter how hard you try, you can’t fix other people’s hearts for them. These bogus calls for “unity” and “not letting politics distract us from what’s really important” are the same trap they’ve always been: “I get to treat you like shit, and you have to love and forgive me forever no matter how I treat you, and if you ever decide to stop playing this terrible game, I get to play the victim and blame everything on your supposed lack of empathy and commitment. Who wants a hug?”

Le sigh. Patriarchy is nothing if not boringly consistent, and you’ll notice that these articles about “how to coexist peacefully at holidays despite contrasting politics” are always about the concessions and compassion we owe them, and never about the basic human fucking decency they owe us. Continuously debating your own humanity with abusive people is a fruitless project that maintains the illusion that your safety and happiness are something they grant you, and not something that has always been yours. Sometimes all you can do is divest, disengage, and go somewhere safe to lick your wounds and rebuild a life that doesn’t revolve around them.

Finally, I enthusiastically recommend the website Waging Nonviolence for resistance ideas that don’t depend on naïve trust in our institutions, but don’t wholly destroy them either. Daniel Hunter’s article “10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won” encourages us to work on our mental health, avoid despair and isolation, give mutual aid, and remember they can’t execute their plans unless ordinary people cooperate…so what if we just don’t?

Distrust fuels the flame of autocracy because it makes it much easier to divide…

This is a social disease: You know who to trust by who they tell you to distrust.

Trust-building starts with your own self. It includes trusting your own eyes and gut, as well as building protection from the ways the crazy-making can become internalized.

This also means being trustworthy — not just with information, but with emotions. That way you can acknowledge what you know and admit the parts that are uncertain fears nagging at you.

***

We’re not going to convince him not to do these things. No pressure on Republicans will result in more than the tiniest of crumbs (at least initially). We’re not going to stop him from doing these things just by persuasive tactics or showing that there are a LOT of us who oppose them.

It will be helpful to have a power analysis in our minds, specifically that’s known as the upside-down triangle. This tool was built to explain how power moves even under dictatorships.

The central tenet is that like an upside-down triangle, power can be unstable. It naturally topples over without anything supporting it. To prevent that, power relies on pillars of support to keep it upright.
Casually, the left often focuses on pillars of support that include governments, media, corporations, shareholders and policy makers. Describing the pillars of support, Gene Sharp wrote:

“By themselves, rulers cannot collect taxes, enforce repressive laws and regulations, keep trains running on time, prepare national budgets, direct traffic, manage ports, print money, repair roads, keep markets supplied with food, make steel, build rockets, train the police and army, issue postage stamps or even milk a cow. People provide these services to the ruler though a variety of organizations and institutions. If people would stop providing these skills, the ruler could not rule.”

Removing one pillar of support can often gain major, life-saving concessions. In response to Trump’s 2019 government shutdown, flight attendants prepared a national strike. Such a strike would ground planes across the country and a key transportation network. Within hours of announcing they were “mobilizing immediately” for a strike, Trump capitulated.

“Our grief can help direct us toward what is ours to tend”: check out this 5-minute meditation on post-election grief from the spiritual wellness site Wild Heart.

November Links Roundup: Counting Down the Days

Well, it’s November. Yay. Tonight we turn the clocks back an hour, and Tuesday we find out whether America will turn the clock back to 1850.

In case you’re Jerry the Vampire and only just woke up from a 50-year nap, don’t burst a blood vessel trying to read all 900 pages of Project 2025 before Election Day. Instead, consult the Stop Project 2025 Comic, an online anthology of graphic narratives that summarize the Trump team’s plans to destroy fair elections, internet freedom, reproductive and gender rights, the environment, and pretty much every other good thing in America.

Read Susan Perabo’s devastating flash fiction “The Life of the Mother” at Fractured Lit, inspired by the many real-life news stories about women dying from pregnancy complications after Dobbs. For some resistance vibes, read G.H. Plaag’s poem “Televised” in the journal ANMLY:

…we are posting this
to TikTok so the Chinese government knows
that we are hot and young and slutty
in our artificial cages, in our handcuffs,
in our straps. we need the spies
to learn about femdom and
the Wednesday Dance. we know,
we know—this could threaten everything
that makes this country great, our security
could be at risk, but we don’t care. we don’t believe
in borders or in anything. you have taken that
from us, belief. and you only have
yourselves to blame.
…

Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn’s feature essay “Ghosts of the Groves”, from the Summer 2024 “Florida” issue of Jewish Currents, takes a deep dive into the political history of orange cultivation, connecting the crop’s rise and climate-change-induced decline in the Sunshine State to Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian orange groves. With agriculture worldwide under threat from global warming and new insect-borne diseases, Florida looks to Israeli technology as a savior. Meanwhile, Palestinians saw their former cash crop being recast as a symbol of Israeli “improvement” of their land.

This budding partnership is a natural extension of the parallel histories of Israeli and Florida citrus. In both places, generations of settler colonists have valued oranges not only as a source of wealth, but also as a treasured part of their mythology. Early Zionist settlers in Palestine saw their agricultural output in morally and socially redemptive terms; their famous promise to “make the desert bloom” positioned cultivation as a route toward seizing the land, and oranges, in particular, became a narrative device to scaffold claims of rightful occupancy. In Florida, where oranges were likely introduced by Spanish colonizers in the 16th century, they came to represent the idea that the terrain was a potential paradise that only Europeans could bring to fruition.

As far-right political projects have consolidated power in both Israel and Florida—with Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration openly working to push leftists, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and other minority groups out of Florida’s social body, and Israel currently perpetrating a genocide in Gaza, seeking to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that it embarked on more than a century ago—shared politics have become the basis for an agricultural alliance.

And what are our preeminent universities doing in this time of crisis? Telling teachers and students to STFU about anything controversial. “Faculty Members Suspended From Harvard’s Main Library After ‘Study-In’ Protest,” The Crimson reported on Oct. 25.

The faculty study-in protested the library’s decision to similarly suspend student protesters who conducted a pro-Palestine study-in last month. The University’s decision to suspend students from the library had already come under fire from free speech groups, including the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.

During the faculty study-in, professors silently read materials on free speech and dissent while placing signs related to free speech and University policy on the tables in front of them. As they did so, Securitas guards noted down their names and ID numbers…

…Though the University has previously disciplined faculty members for academic misconduct or violating policies on sexual harassment, the decision to suspend professors from a library for protesting appears to be unprecedented. The Crimson could not identify any past cases where Harvard barred a group of faculty members from entering a specific campus space as a result of their activism.

Along the same lines, “Yale College admin direct Women’s Center to institute policy of ‘broad neutrality’,” The Yale Daily News reported Oct. 15. Staffers are understandably concerned that this vague, sweeping directive would interfere with their choice of invited speakers and their advocacy for women’s issues like reproductive rights.

The News spoke to three Women’s Center board members about the “broad neutrality” directive. The students were granted anonymity for fear of losing their jobs as board members are employed by Yale College.

The three board members all emphasized that a policy of “broad neutrality” would be a drastic change from the Women’s Center’s feminist mission since its founding.

“The Yale Women’s Center was founded in 1970 when a group of the first women undergraduates staged a sit-in, occupying a space of their own. At the time, their feminist demands were divisive. What is divisive changes over time, and through the decades, the Women’s Center has continued to be a feminist space on campus, working towards collective liberation,” one board member wrote to the News. “Neutrality would contradict our purpose and compromise our daily functions.”

What could possibly have prompted this policy? Three guesses:

Last year, an annual event planned by the Women’s Center titled “Pink-washing and feminism(s) in Gaza” was indefinitely postponed by the board amid threats of disciplinary action from administrators, following their failure to respond to a Jewish student leader seeking to “meet with a representative from the Women’s Center to talk about how Jewish women can feel included and represented in our Yale community,” per the student’s email.

Doubling down, Yale’s Committee on Institutional Voice has extended the gag order to deans, top administrators, and faculty who head up departments or programs. “Yale leaders advised to refrain from statements on issues of public significance,” the Yale Daily News reported Oct. 30. While there’s something to be said for caution and humility in speaking for an ideologically diverse intellectual community, this move feels to me like preemptive compliance with authoritarianism. Yale leaders may fear retaliation from a Trump administration, similar to Jeff Bezos blocking the Washington Post from endorsing Harris. It’s still cowardly. If America’s most powerful individuals and institutions knuckle under to the Mob, who’s going to help the rest of us stand firm?

How about Trans Godzilla? Jude Doyle at Xtra Magazine playfully explores the monster’s many gender possibilities. A gem in this article is the link to Cressa Maeve Ainé’s “Coming Out,” a stop-motion short in which a Godzilla couple affirm their child’s transition.

For more trans joy, read the story “Circles, Triangles, Squares” by Charlie Sorrenson at Electric Lit. My favorite part is towards the end, where the narrator realizes that mutual oversharing isn’t the same as a trusting friendship.

Britney Spears GIF - Britney Spears ...

Mourning Gaza During the High Holy Days

My Jewish cultural heritage remains important to me despite not practicing the religion. Simple at-home rituals, like eating apples and honey with my mom-of-choice last night for Rosh Hashanah, add a sacred continuity to the life of our multi-faith household. After Hamas’ murderous attack and kidnapping of hostages on October 7, and the Israeli government’s violently disproportionate response that continues to kill thousands of Palestinian civilians with US-funded weapons, I’ve also felt responsible to reclaim Jewishness as a political identity. In an ideal world, I shouldn’t need an identity card to legitimize opposing the genocide in Gaza. But if being tangentially in the lineage of Holocaust survivors makes my protest more likely to be heard, I’m going to mention it in every email to Congress and the White House.

The High Holidays, which began last night (Oct. 2) with the Jewish New Year on the new moon, and conclude with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on the evening of Oct. 11, are a time for moral self-inventory and repentance. Tradition has it that this is when God decides whom to re-inscribe in the Book of Life for another year. I guess he knocked over his ink bottle in Israel-Palestine in 2023. Latest reports suggest that 64 hostages remain alive, out of the 251 taken by Hamas; the rest were either killed by their captors or by Israel’s own military actions. Meanwhile, Palestinian health authorities estimate that Israel’s war on Gaza has killed over 41,000 Palestinians since last October, the majority of them women and children.

I feel less safe as a person of Jewish origins in America since Israel started this war of “self-defense”. Rather than loosen their grip on Zionism, mainstream Jewish institutions are being seduced into alliance with the American Right, whose political candidates and pundits include actual Nazis. My local food co-op is debating whether to boycott Israeli hummus, which sounds to me like a Portlandia sketch.

In my opinion, a Jewish state should mean a place where it’s safe to be Jewish, not where it’s unsafe to be anything else. Making Palestinians live under apartheid is not congruent with the Jewish values of justice and mercy.

Here are some links that I found valuable for this period of mourning, reflection, and action.

At Vox Populi, an online journal of writing about social justice, Richard Hoffman has a new poem called “Mourning Gaza”, which begins:

And yet we think we can go on,
our earlier weeping this morning need not
bleed all over the day with its innocent and growing
receptivity to sunshine.

What does the naked soldier take off when he puts on that uniform?

What does the pale infant turning to dust
in the gray light deep in the powdery rubble know
of the torn hands of her parents digging to find her?

Nothing. Nothing is the answer.

And when the soldier takes off his uniform what does he find?

Nothing. Nothing is the answer. And it is the same nothing.

And what is it we put on when we dress for the day?

And how do we know
our tears will still be there when we come back for them?
What if they aren’t? What will wait for us instead?…

Alex Skopic, writing for Current Affairs, explains why we should all be concerned about Israel turning pagers into bombs in Syria and Lebanon:

Needless to say, Hezbollah has been linked to various acts of terrorism (successful or attempted) itself over the years. But even defending oneself against terrorists, as Israeli leaders would doubtless characterize their actions, cannot justify using terrorist tactics in return. (Perhaps Benjamin Netanyahu and Co. skipped “two wrongs don’t make a right” day in kindergarten. It would explain a lot.) Importantly, the New York Times notes that “the explosions had little strategic purpose,” as Israel is “hardly about to force Hezbollah’s leaders to give up a cause they have battled over for four decades” simply by blowing up pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to its rank-and-file members. Instead, writer David E. Sanger says that “the chief effect is psychological,” as this kind of attack “makes everyone fearful that ordinary devices can become an instant source of injury or death. It gnaws at the psyche.” In other words, it creates terror. It is terroristic in nature. Sangerdoesn’t call it that, opting for the word “sabotage” instead, but he does mention that “there is nothing new about sabotaging phones or planting bombs: Terrorists and spy agencies have done that for decades,” tacitly admitting that Israel’s actions are no different from those of prior “terrorists.”…

In fact, there are multiple international laws that specifically forbid what Israel has done. As Nikki McCann Ramirez points out for Rolling Stone, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (not the catchiest name) bans “booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.” That language is completely unambiguous. Pagers and walkie-talkies would both qualify as “apparently harmless portable objects,” and Israel is a party to the Convention. Likewise, Rule 80 of customary international humanitarian law, as recorded by the Red Cross, forbids “booby-traps associated with objects in normal civilian daily use” or “objects that are likely to attract civilians.”

In the wake of last spring’s campus protests, universities have largely responded by cracking down on students’ political expression, sometimes with life-altering consequences. “A Cornell Graduate Student Faces Deportation After Pro-Palestine Action,” Aaron Fernando at The Nation reported on Sept. 25.

Momodou Taal is a PhD candidate in Africana studies and a graduate student worker, attending Cornell under the F-1 visa program. In the last academic year, Taal joined student-led actions demanding that Cornell divest from industries complicit in Israel’s attacks on civilians in Gaza…

…On September 18, a group of students from multiple Cornell student groups under the umbrella organization Coalition for Mutual Liberation disrupted a career fair that was taking place at The Statler Hotel, which is located on campus grounds. The students disrupted this event because Boeing and L3Harris had tables at the fair—companies which, according to the students, are connected to the flow of military supplies being used by Israel to commit atrocities against civilians.

The university says that protesters forcibly entered the job fair by pushing campus police officers. Taal, who is a British national, was present at this action. When asked if the university had accused him of pushing police officers, Taal responded, “Yes, which is not true. I can say categorically that I shoved no police officer, nor did I not listen to a lawful directive, like they’re claiming.”

“They’ve identified who they think are leaders [of the pro-Palestine movement on campus], and therefore [they] are trying to make an example out of me.”

Now, Taal may need to leave the country because of his presence at the protest.

The F-1 visa program allows foreign nationals to reside in the United States if they are enrolled in an academic educational program, a language-training program, or a vocational program. Those with F-1 visas can also work on campus and in limited off-campus training positions. According to the Department of Homeland Security, suspension from an academic program is a valid reason for the termination of a record, which changes the immigration status of someone holding a F-1 visa…

…Jawuanna McAllister, of CGSU-UE’s bargaining committee…was unequivocal about the university’s singling out Taal, who appears to be the only student, among the more than 100 protesters at the September 18 action, to face suspension. “The university’s targeting of Taal, a Black, Muslim, international grad worker, is a calculated and shameful attempt to intimidate workers who are protesting the atrocities in Gaza and stifle free expression on campus,” said McAllister.

Rabbi Shaul Magid teaches Modern Judaism at Harvard University and is the author of The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (2023), a book on reconsidering Zionism. In this essay for Religion Dispatches, “Is ‘Western Self-Hatred’ the Problem in the Gaza War Protest Movement?”, Magid disputes the Orientalist lens through which Israel’s supporters view the pro-Palestine Left.

This isn’t to say that antisemitism plays no role today in the campus protest movement. It certainly does. The question is: what role? Antisemitism often latches onto different elements of the Left’s anti-Westernism—in this case the war on Gaza. This isn’t especially new. And while the Left has traditionally opposed antisemitism (one reason so many Jews in Eastern Europe and America were attracted to socialism in the early 20th century), it certainly also rears its head in Leftist circles. Everyone from Max Horkheimer to Hannah Arendt to Jurgen Habermas claim in different ways that it was the Enlightenment that gave us modern antisemitism.

In this case, however, the “eternal antisemitism” argument, and the argument that anti-Israelism is anti-Westernism, are self-serving and to my mind unsustainable. Let’s not forget, women and children are dying, innocent people are starving, and children are drinking from puddles because (in “self-defense”?) the IDF bombed water purification plants. Gaza has been obliterated, the devastation arguably one of the worst since World War II. Those are incontestable facts, reported by reputable news and relief agencies. What’s happening in Gaza may or may not in the end be understood as genocide (I do not think it is), but it’s clearly sociocide, the intentional destruction of a society including infrastructure (schools, hospitals, universities), resources (water, electricity), and services (garbage collection etc.). To claim that protests against decimation like this are primarily about “anti-Westernism” and not starving children is as I see it no better than blaming eternal antisemitism…

…Not surprisingly, Palestine solidarity was at the very center of this spring’s graduation ceremony at Harvard Divinity School (where I teach). There were calls for Harvard to divest from military arms, mixed with calls for a “free Palestine” (though I heard no chants of “from the river to the sea” and there was no mention of Hamas). Keffiyehs were ubiquitous. And yet a student who’s suing the university for antisemitism and an outspoken critic of the campus protests was duly applauded by his classmates as he rose to receive his diploma.

So what was really happening at the graduation? I submit, this wasn’t only about Israel/Palestine, or the war—though it was certainly also about that. This was about what one graduate called a referendum to end “carceral states.” Claiming Gaza is a “carceral state” may not be quite right, but it’s also not unreasonable. The term usually refers to the expanded and unequal criminal system in the US functioning through the dehumanization of people of color. To many, the people of Gaza and the West Bank have come to represent “carceral states” globally. And if Israel weren’t the ruling power embodying that “carceral state” I think many of the same Jews who today deplore the protesters would be with them. Think of significant Jewish opposition to China’s treatment of the Uyghurs or Jewish support for civil rights and the boycott of apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

So, yes, the Palestinian Solidarity Movement is the latest symbol of the Left’s ongoing critique of the West, in the tradition of its support for abolition, women’s suffrage, civil rights, an end to the fighting in Vietnam, the dismantling of Apartheid, and BLM. It’s not a movement principally in support of Hamas or of October 7.*

It’s a sad irony that the State of Israel was founded as a state of the oppressed and has now become a state of the oppressor. As a Jew, and an Israeli citizen, that is painful to me as it is to many of us. But that doesn’t make it untrue. History is nothing if not a deep pool of irony where the unexpected often becomes the law. It’s not antisemitic to oppose those who dominate others, or to resist those who claim that they are the real victims of those they dominate.

Literary journal Tin House offers a podcast, Between the Covers, hosted by David Naimon. This transcript of his interview with British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad, author of Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, is a worthwhile longread, or you can listen to the audio on their website. (Hat tip to Jessica Dore’s Tarot Substack, Offerings, for the link.) I won’t even attempt to summarize all the ground that this conversation covers. Here are some quotes that stood out for me, mainly about the impossibility and necessity of making art when unspeakable things are happening.

But the significance is huge for everybody on the planet. The fact that a population can be so disposable is terrifying. To me, it’s very linked with the ways in which we’re destroying the planet as well. It’s this kind of savage removal of any boundaries or any pretenses or the pretenses have been worn away. That’s really frightening and should frighten people very seriously for themselves.

****

I don’t know if this is inherent to the novel form, if the novel is inherently tied to its bourgeois aesthetic origins if it’s hard to unshackle from that. I don’t think that’s true because there are lots of novels that are politically committed that do engage with struggle in direct ways and are galvanizing as well. I think that we shouldn’t close down how readers respond to texts. We can’t actually control how they read novels, how they respond to them, what they take from them. That wildness and that uncontrollability is part of their power and it’s part of what’s magic about novels. It’s a category error to suggest that the novel is going to itself, someone’s going to read a novel and then go into the street and march, but it can be part of a developing political education that allows them to take action. I think that it’s not so clear, but I won’t lie that that fear that revolutionary fervor is sapped by the well-being feeling that comes after watching something or reading something terrible, it is a counter-revolutionary emotion. But another counterargument is that it’s very tiring to fight the fight. We’re all exhausted at the moment. I mean, I’m exhausted and I know everybody’s exhausted. You can’t expect us to remain at that high tenor all the time. It’s a kind of multifarious process that requires also contemplation, it requires also moments of calm. They all feed each other in different ways.

****
What Palestinians have done for a very long time to try to prove that they are human, to humanize themselves, to write stories that humanize Palestinians. I think it’s insane to me that human beings should constantly have to humanize themselves. I mean, it’s not on us to prove that Palestinians are humans. It’s up to the other to overhear. I think that purely rhetorically, live aside the ethics of a politics of persuasion, but rhetorically, it’s much more effective to overhear than to feel like someone is trying to persuade you. It’s actually much more effective to hear dialogue, to hear different points of view, and to develop your understanding that way.

****

I was just saying the other day to somebody, “I just don’t feel any optimism anymore, there were points at which I felt really like we were going to see liberation in our lifetimes, that the uprising had set something in motion,” and the person I was speaking to said that on a macro level, they remain optimistic that the genie’s out of the bottle. Popular opinion has changed so dramatically, not at the higher echelons, but there’s no going back from this because everyone has seen it. That is no small thing. It’s hard to cling to that when so many people are being killed on a daily basis to feel that any such slaughter is worth it. But something’s happened and something’s changed. I think we have to have some faith in that, however long it takes that we’re on our way. As for advice about how to have faith in language, I mean there are people who are speaking, there are people who are speaking and writing and I think you just have to keep going basically.

Check out the Jewish Voice for Peace resource guide to the High Holidays for virtual and in-person services at synagogues around the U.S. that “have self-identified as non or anti-Zionist in their orientation as a congregation and/or in their practice. This means that it is absolutely understood that all people are equally valued: No nation state prayers are practiced, no Israeli flag is present, and a public statement calling for a permanent ceasefire is a baseline for all.”

October Links Roundup: Hermit Crabs and Other Art Forms

Pagan god or Eastern States Exposition parade float? You decide!

Welcome to spooky season, readers. This month there will be two links posts, this catch-all literary and cultural one, and a forthcoming one to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the war in Gaza.

To start the Halloween pumpkin rolling, let’s appreciate Taisiya Kogan’s flash fiction “Mrs. Morrison Proofreads Her Obituary” in Electric Literature. This is known as a “hermit crab” piece because, like the crustacean who lives in other species’ discarded shells, the author borrows a non-literary writing template to contain emotions and occurrences that don’t normally belong in that template. The disjunction between form and content, used brilliantly here, is a way to restore honesty to language instead of allowing received forms to numb our perceptions.

Also from Electric Lit, this horror-satire by Mary Heitkamp takes the metaphor “House Hunting” completely literally. While competing offers aren’t usually settled with crossbows in real life, the gore in this story forces us to feel the life-and-death desperation of our scarcity-based economy, which  makes us crazy no matter how many resources we have at the moment.

My 12-year-old son wants to be John Wick for Halloween, but you know what’s really scary? School bureaucracy! FYI, I love his new school and I have nothing but awe for the number of state-required IEP forms they must complete every year. But McSweeney’s understands the dread we parents feel when we receive an email like “A Note from Your Child’s School About Its Apps and Websites”:

Sports Apps
Register for athletics on SportsStarter but pay for the activity on PayBall. Message team parents/guardians on CrowdChat and coaches on CoachBabble. Find your team’s regular season schedule on YouthSked and its playoff schedule on TourneyTime. Buy tickets to athletic events on GameTix, but only after you’ve topped off your recently hacked School Wallet.

I recognized my own complicated gender feelings in essayist Oliver Radclyffe’s “The Sum of My Parts” at The Gay & Lesbian Review. A midlife transitioner, like me, he talks about the difficulty of forming a “cohesive narrative” that would include his female-presenting history, his gender role models, and the body he chose for himself now.

I always knew that “acting like a girl” felt wrong, but in order to compensate for the parts of my body which were still female, I was now trying too hard to “act like a boy.” It seemed that performative masculinity felt just as inauthentic as performative femininity. I wanted to stop performing, and just be.

It was only after a year of obsessing about whether or not I should start testosterone that I began to wonder if the problem was my sex, not my gender. Perhaps it wasn’t my femininity that caused of my dysphoria, but the fact that my body still retained traces of the female sex. Irrespective of how nonbinary my gender felt, my body wanted to be fully male.

At CRAFT Literary, Jennifer Springsteen’s speculative story “Corpse Washer” is a surprisingly tender and uplifting post-apocalyptic narrative about people caring for each other, medically and spiritually, in a time of plague. Race and class inequalities are not elided here, but neither are they insurmountable.

That’s it for now. Enjoy the season!

Date night at the Big E.

September Links Roundup: Boobs Week and Dad Caps

Autumn is on the way! Soon it will be time to switch from my closet of 50 short-sleeved button-down shirts to my closet of 50 long-sleeved ones. This makes me not-so-nostalgic for a problem I had from the ages of 12 through 50: Boob Gap! I’m talking about that awkward pulling between the second and third buttons that anyone not built like a supermodel or a washboard has likely experienced. As part of “Boobs Week” at Slate Magazine, Shannon Palus wrote this feature on Aug. 15 about clothing companies that are trying to, well, fill that gap.

Left adrift by most (though not all) major clothing retailers, some women, like Allen, are taking matters into their own hands. A decade ago, as an adult, Allen started her own brand, Exclusively Kristen. Using herself as a fit model, she created a pattern for a button-up shirt that would neither pop open at the top nor leave extra fabric hanging around her midsection: a shirt that would just fit. The design achieves this with princess seams, which trace the body in a curve from the armpit, over the breast, and down to the hemline. This, Allen said, accentuates the figure, “without being inappropriate for work.”

…Even if you are a pro at shopping, finding clothes for an ample rack can be impossible. Alice Kim, another fashion entrepreneur, spent years employed as a buyer for major brands like Victoria’s Secret and Prada, working her way up to be a vice president of merchandising at Diane von Furstenberg. “And I still can’t find clothes that fit my body off the rack that I don’t have to tailor,” she said, recalling her frustration. In 2020 she founded PerfectDD, pronounced “perfected.” (Kim said that she is a 28I—but that she often refers to her own cup size as “DD” because “that’s what people understand.”) PerfectDD’s offerings, which include button-downs, scoop-neck tees, a lace corset top, and a jumpsuit, are designed for the titular DDs to M cups. The first time she tried on a sample of PerfectDD clothing, she “literally cried,” Kim said. Not having to size up into something baggy just so the clothes fit her breasts was a huge relief. “I was like, I look my size. This is the actual size of my body.”

If you’re not following Menswear Guy (@dieworkwear) on Twitter, you are missing some of the shadiest shade on the Internet, not to mention an entire education about men’s fashion history and the elements of a good fit. At Politico on Aug. 8, he explained why “Tim Walz’s Camo Cap Is More Important Than You Think”. Unlike a lot of politicians who dress down in an inept attempt to appear like Regular Joes, Walz comes by his “remarkably unremarkable look” naturally.

Walz’s avuncular outfits are visually successful because they are culturally coherent — teaming workwear with workwear, rather than mixing suit jackets with jeans, as DeSantis was wont to do. They also rely on classics from American heritage labels, such as LL Bean’s barn coat, Carhartt’s utility pants, Filson’s Mackinaw and Red Wing’s work boots. But most of all, they possess a quality that style writers have spent generations trying to dissect: authenticity. Walz grew up in small town Nebraska, where his high school graduating class included about 25 students. He earned his bachelor’s degree from a small public state college before going on to serve in the Army National Guard and then working at Mankato West High School, where he taught geography and coached football. His hunting get-ups don’t look contrived because he’s an actual hunter.

This critical dash of authenticity is why Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, who served in the military, looks natural in his bomber jackets; why former President George W. Bush could convincingly pull off cowboy boots; and why New England-raised John Kerry and Mitt Romney look at home in preppy barn coats.

It’s also why former President Donald Trump stands as a unique figure in today’s dressed-down environment. Except for when he’s on the golf course, Trump is rarely, if ever, seen in anything but a navy worsted suit, white spread collar shirt and crimson, satin tie. The uniform burnishes Trump’s reputation as a successful businessman.

Walz is doing the same, but for the opposite effect.

I got a kick out of this flash fiction by Karen Heuler in Electric Literature, “So Much to Know”. The narrator’s deadpan observational humor creates a perception of her as a dotty older lady, which works to her advantage when confronting a mugger.

I’ve learned that new experiences keep the aging brain on task. I don’t worry about myself as long as I stay interested in life. Actually, I think I worry less than most people do, and that’s reassuring.

I was robbed one night, at knifepoint, and the knife interested me. I asked about it.

“Forget the knife. Don’t ask about the knife. Or I’ll use it,” my assailant said. He was getting nervous.

“But isn’t it a kitchen knife? Can you really just grab a kitchen knife and run out the door like that? Won’t it cut you just as likely as it cuts me, for instance? You should have a holder.” That was obvious, and the obvious deserves recognition.

“Give me your money,” he said.

“Of course,” I said. “I certainly will. I have a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, but I’m afraid that’s it. I was just going to the drugstore to get some soda. Funny isn’t it, that we go to drugstores now instead of delis? I grew up when there were delis.”

Daniel Lavery mashes together two of my special interests in this 2020 article from his Substack archives, “Which Misconception About Testosterone Therapy Does Each Character from the Popular TV Show ‘The Sopranos’ Subscribe To?”

PAULIE: T, all due respect — all due respect — the Bada Bing is a women’s space, and I think you at least gotta take that into consideration before you make a decision.

TONY: You saying I can’t come into the Bing? I created the Bing.

SILVIO: No one’s saying anything, Ton. You go wherever you feel led to go.

PAULIE: You just gotta be mindful, T.

At LitHub, Gabrielle Bellot’s essay “The Joys and Fears of Trans Motherhood” reflects with humor and poignancy on her own mother as a model for the devotion she will show to her future child, and their subsequent estrangement when she transitioned. Some of the obstacles faced by Bellot and her partner are familiar to couples coping with the uncertainty and cost of IVF, and some are unique to queer folks surrounded by right-wing propaganda that we’re a threat to “The Family”.

When we first became serious about trying, my wife and I decided to go through sperm banks. I hadn’t imagined just how much like online dating sperm bank sites could be. I also never imagined I would say the word sperm more than a certain chapter of Moby Dick.

I didn’t realize how unprepared I was until our first try, when we received the sample in a heavy luggage-like shipping container that had the distinct appearance of biohazardous cargo. When we opened it, we found another container inside, this one arctic from dry ice; frigid air unfurled when we unlocked it. We then had to thaw the sperm and, nurse-like, prep a long syringe to transfer the sample into, which ended up being the trickiest part.

Everything, we quickly learnt, had to be clinically precise: when you order the sample relative to when you assume you’ll be ovulating, when you open the inner container, how long you let the sample thaw, how you transfer the semen to the insertion tube, how you lie on your back and for how long after the insertion, how you repackage the imposing shipping container to be returned.

We tried a few times, and although we thought we got everything right—minus the unfortunate time that I dropped most of the sperm on the kitchen floor—it felt like stumbling in the dark, hoping for the best. We switched to IUI, which involved a doctor performing the whole, slightly more in-depth ritual, but even then, we had to deal with mishaps and ignorance, including a doctor seemingly shunning the advice not to thaw the sperm in water, while another seemed cavalier about missing an ovulation window or differed sharply about how to position your body after insemination.

The whole process soon started to feel horribly biased against queer couples, in part because the language in almost every fertility guide we read was explicitly tailored to straight couples who could keep trying even without the donor material. For us, though, each expensive effort was the only shot we had, so it mattered to get it, well, right. And while the odds for IUI are never sky-high, it’s hard not to blame yourself (and differing doctors) each time it fails. The pregnancy test has become a sort of scrying pool, a future-reflecting thing you approach as much with dread as hope.

Speaking of parent-child relations, novelist Jessica Pegis (The God Painter) sent me this provocative essay from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America/Metropolis of San Francisco website, after she read the queer midrash on the Binding of Isaac in my novel Origin Story. Rev. Fr. Seraphim Ivey, the writer of “Blessed Abraham: The Troubling Narrative of Abraham, Isaac, the Sacrifice, and the Missing Bits Between”, observes that there are problems with reading this Genesis 22 story as a prefiguration of the Crucifixion:

First, Abraham is known for seeking counsel and talking about his plans with those closest to him – Sarah, Lot, the Lord, etc. For him to not enter into discussion about anything God has asked him to do, even in passing with his wife or the Lord Himself in depth, is challenging to say the least. This is especially so in light of how much Abraham loves them both. Didn’t Abraham dialogue with the Lord over Sodom and Gomorrah and about Lot’s fate? Why would he not have done so over Isaac’s even more so? What about Sarah? Isn’t Isaac Sarah’s son as well? Where is the love being expressed between the two of them?

Second, if Isaac is the prefigurement of Christ, then shouldn’t there have been dialogue between the father and the son about the impending sacrifice? If the sacrifice is to be the proper and right kind of sacrifice, then it must be voluntarily given. This is not an animal being offered up, but a human being. So it can’t just be Abraham offering to sacrifice his son. Isaac too must be given the opportunity to voluntarily lay his life down. For this to happen there must be some informed dialogue. This is seemingly absent from the text. Even the ending is challenging. Rather than the son returning home with the father, the father comes home alone.

I was impressed to see this priest bringing up the issue of consent, which is so often sidelined in Bible stories as compared to its centrality in modern psychology and ethics. Fr. Ivey hints that perhaps not everything in the Bible should be read straightforwardly as a go-and-do-likewise: “We might also look to extra-biblical texts, including Jewish sources, for commentary on these texts, trusting God will help us discern which are from Him and which are not.”

Sources, perhaps, like the book reviewed in this 2012 article from The Times of Israel, “When Abraham Murdered Isaac”. Biblical scholar Tzemah Yoreh believes that the happy ending of the ram in the thicket was tacked on later, to an original narrative where Abraham did in fact sacrifice his son.

One eye-opening hint at what he believes is the original story lies in Genesis 22:22. Previously, in verse 8, Abraham and Isaac had walked up the mountain together. But in verse 22, only Abraham returns.

…That strange contradiction, Yoreh says, may be why a few ancient midrashim, or rabbinic homilies, also assumed Isaac had been killed.

In one homily quoted by Rashi, the revered 11th-century French rabbi and commentator, “Isaac’s ashes are said to be suitable for repentance, just like the ashes of an [animal] sacrifice.”

Yoreh also relies on the widely accepted hypothesis that the Torah consists of several narratives from different time periods braided together, identifiable by the different names they use for God, e.g. YHWH or Elohim.

The Biblical text calls the God who instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son “Elohim.” Only when the “angel of God” leaps to Isaac’s rescue does God’s name suddenly change to the four-letter YHWH, a name Jews traditionally do not speak out loud.

Elohim commands the sacrifice; YHWH stops it. But it is once again Elohim who approves of Abraham for having “not withheld your son from me.”

…Indeed, Isaac is never again mentioned in an Elohim storyline. In fact, if you only read the parts of Isaac’s life that use the name Elohim, you don’t have to be a Bible scholar to see the story as one in which Isaac is killed in the sacrifice and disappears completely from the Biblical story.

You won’t find that on a flannelboard in Sunday School, kids. (At least I hope not!)

 

Cat Pee Hegemony

In my capacity as cat-sitter to the literati, over Labor Day weekend I shared my home office with my orange nephews Rilke and Lorca, as well as my furry son Theodore. Much hissing and pissing ensued while the three lads jockeyed for territory. I alternated separating them into different rooms and allowing them supervised free-range interaction.

Theodore “Big Pussy” DiMeow approaches a sit-down with Li’l Ril from the Jersey Mob.

“You come to me…on the day of my daughter’s wedding…and you didn’t bring cat treats?”

From my superior (?) perspective, the boys’ squabbles seemed wasteful. Guys, I would say, you’re all cats! The most lovable creatures on earth! There are enough snuggles and kibble for all of you. Why can’t you get along?

The gingers’ dads are card-carrying members of the Communist Party. (Do they even have cards now? Probably codes in your Apple Wallet.) When I asked whether their cats needed a refresher course in communal ownership, they reminded me of the difference between personal and private property. Technically, I own the means of production, so the cats should band together to redistribute the contents of the kibble bag. Good thing they don’t have opposable thumbs.

The feline Game of Thrones taking place in my office led me to recall my unease during parts of Kamala Harris’ Democratic National Convention speech. Why does America need, or deserve, to have “the most lethal fighting force in the world”? Why should any country treat this as a prime objective or source of pride? I imagined folks in China probably listening to similar speeches from their politicians, promising that they would and should win the competition with America for global economic hegemony. The moral worth of this approach to international relations was simply assumed, as it always is in our presidential candidates’ and leaders’ speeches, Democrat or Republican.

Related to this, a Christian friend last month sent me a video of her favorite theologian, Greg Boyd, describing his “Warfare Worldview” as an ethical alternative to the idea that every event is part of God’s plan. He made a pretty convincing case that spiritual warfare between a good God and demonic forces explained the problem of evil better than the traditional theodicy that preserves God’s omnipotence by minimizing the importance of human suffering. As Ivan Karamazov famously argued, even one innocent child’s pain is too high a price to pay for “free will”.

Yet these two options felt like a false alternative imposed by an unexamined winner-take-all attitude to the cosmos, not unlike my cats’ competition to be Lord of the Office. Once we posit the existence of multiple spiritual entities, we should be able to imagine them coexisting and cooperating, not only fighting to wipe each other out. Evil and suffering could then be a consequence of the messy and imperfect business of sharing power. Intentionally malevolent spirits can be part of this worldview but you needn’t see bogeymen under every bed.

With the obvious caveat that human beings can warp any worldview to justify primitive monkey-brain status fights, I propose that there’s a connection between our cultural legacy of monotheism and American imperialism. As a survivor of abuse and gaslighting, I used to be comforted by the idea that someday everyone would agree on the same reality, on earth as in heaven. But Bible passages anticipating Jesus as sole acknowledged ruler of the earth hit me differently in this era of resurgent Christian nationalism.

Richard Beck’s trenchant essay “Bidenism Abroad” in New Left Review (March/April 2024) clarified why the Democrats’ version of American supremacy troubled me so much. Beck critiques how the foreign policy establishment prioritizes competing for superpower status with China even though this leads to decisions that could doom the planet for us all, like trade restrictions on Chinese-made electric cars and semiconductor technology. The Biden administration was caught off guard by October 7, and continues to enable the genocide in Gaza, because they didn’t want the Middle East to distract them from this objective. The problem is that our role in this human rights catastrophe destroys whatever remaining claim we had to deserve world leadership. Beck concludes:

Biden didn’t just promise to ensure that America’s economy remains the world’s largest, or that America’s military remains the world’s strongest. He promised to do what Giovanni Arrighi said is required of a hegemon in The Long Twentieth Century. Hegemonic power, Arrighi wrote, is ‘the power associated with dominance expanded by the exercise of “intellectual and moral leadership”’. What distinguishes it from its non-hegemonic competitors is that only the hegemon can plausibly claim to be advancing global interests other than its own. ‘The claim of the dominant group to represent the general interest is always more or less fraudulent’, Arrighi writes. ‘Nevertheless . . . we shall speak of hegemony only when the claim is at least partly true and adds something to the power of the dominant group’.

American hegemony certainly lives on for now in Europe, where compliant nato allies continue to fall over one another in their rush to hollow out social services and buy American arms. And the us may be able to retain economic dominance in a relative sense even if it never manages to reverse the slowdown in global growth, so long as its own economic power weakens less than that of its rivals. But after Gaza, America can no longer credibly claim global ‘hegemony’ in Arrighi’s sense. Biden’s support for Israel, motivated both by strategic considerations and what appears to be a real inability on his part to see Palestinians as fully human, flies in the face of both American and global public opinion. Europe may hold on to America’s coattails for a while yet, but in the rest of the world, continued American supremacy will be based primarily on coercion. Arrighi identified the catastrophe of America’s invasion of Iraq as the turning point: ‘The unravelling of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century’, he wrote, ‘has for all practical purposes resulted in the terminal crisis of us hegemony—that is, in its transformation into mere domination’. If it is true that Iraq marked the point at which American hegemony actually changed into domination, then perhaps Gaza marks the point at which Americans finally realized it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still voting for Harris in November, but I am not joining a cult of personality around any politician. Hoping for a political savior, be it a nation or a president, is part of the winner-take-all worldview that got us into this mess.

I’ll close with this Beatitudes hot take by singer Jon Guerra, “American Gospel”. Hat tip to historian James R. Moore for the link.

“Not So Sorry”: Christian Journalist Probes the Limits of Forgiveness

Do I forgive my abusive mother? No, but I don’t spend any significant time being angry at her either. A dozen years into conscious recovery, my focus in on noticing and extracting what my old psychoanalyst called my mother’s “introjects” and my trauma therapist called “false beliefs”. They feel like psychic shrapnel. They’re leftover bits of programming from things she said and did to me, or from my own survival adaptations to those assaults. They interfere with my ability to accept love, feel safe in my home, and be satisfied that my creative work isn’t futile. The point is that de-worming myself from these mental parasites has very little to do with her as an individual, anymore.

When she dies, I’ll feel sad, but I feel sad anyway. And all of this can coexist with my telling affectionate jokes about her malapropisms (she insisted that “six of one, half a dozen of the other” should be “half a dozen of one or the other”) and remembering her well-stocked bookshelves of Golden Age mysteries and Native American activist memoirs.

I don’t need “revenge” because (through her own choices, and despite many chances to do better) she’s alone and miserable in a nursing home that I will never visit. Nobody really denies what happened to me or how bad it was.

Vindication by events is key here. I don’t need to ruminate on how she tried to sabotage my adoption home study, because I have a kid now and she’s never going to meet him. But I do entertain vengeful impulses toward the social workers who gaslit me into thinking I had a “personality disorder” instead of PTSD, because I have to look at their agency’s shingle on the building at the end of my street. I can’t go to my favorite movie theater without flashbacks of taking compulsory psychological tests in the building next door. There’s no mechanism, except perhaps hexing, to hold them accountable for causing my nervous breakdown.

I slowly dis-identified with Christianity for a lot of reasons I’ve chronicled here. One of them was that it hadn’t prepared me to recognize when I was being abused. Another was Christian communities’ discomfort with family stories that don’t end in reconciliation or forgiveness.

Liberal Catholic journalist Kaya Oakes‘ brand-new book, Not So Sorry: Abusers, False Apologies, and the Limits of Forgiveness (Broadleaf Books, 2024) critiques popular Christian beliefs about the duty to forgive. It’s a really important addition to the conversation because it doesn’t stop at recommendations for better pastoral care. Oakes actually spends most of the book discussing institutional failures such as clergy sexual abuse, colonialism, rape, and abortion access. American Christianity and popular psychology have blended to promote a shallow, individualistic theology of forgiveness that unfairly puts the onus on survivors to be peacemakers in a broken institution. When abusive clergy and community leaders are quietly shuffled around from one institution to another, leaving survivors with a lifetime of damage, “forcing someone to forgive can become a form of spiritual abuse.” (pg.xix)

“[T]he problem with the idea that Jesus was asking people to forgive those who abuse them is that it is not necessarily a correct interpretation of Scripture. Jesus asked us to forgive those who know not what they do. But what do we do about the people who knew exactly what they were doing?” (pg.xvii)

Oakes sees our cultural appetite for revenge-fantasy entertainment as the flip side of sentimental religious redemption stories. Neither track teaches us much about accountability and communal healing, which is what Oakes thinks Jesus really intended. In America, “we fetishize forgiveness to the point of insisting on it–yet in many concrete ways, we are among the least forgiving societies in the world,” Oakes observes (pg.19), pointing to our high incarceration rate, torn social safety net, deadly border-control policies, and insufficient abortion access for rape and incest victims. Preachers love anecdotes about murderers who become Christians and accept God’s forgiveness–but their victims aren’t around to give their opinion. (The book’s epigraph is a quote from Bonhoeffer about cheap grace.) Mass incarceration and the death penalty meanwhile do nothing to heal the community’s wounds.

“Restorative justice and prison abolition movements go even further, encouraging criminals to speak to the families of victims, work on atonement, and bring the community into the process rather than over-relying on often-biased courts. In this scenario, for a person to be forgiven by their community or the families of victims, it’s more than a one-on-one conversation between a person and God.” (pg.28)

Moreover, Oakes emphasizes that this peacemaking process doesn’t require victims to offer a forgiveness that is unhealthy for them or unearned by the perpetrators. The work of death penalty opponent Sister Helen Prejean, for example, is not about mandatory absolution, but about bringing killers back into “reconciliation with themselves” as complete human beings who can face what they did and repent. When Jesus spoke about forgiveness, Oakes notes, he was using a Hebrew word that described people who’d already atoned for their sins and now sought to be brought back into right relationship with God. Notably, Judas tried to do this by giving back the 30 pieces of silver, and was refused. Forgiveness is not infinite nor automatically granted. One can forgive and still refuse further relationship. And one can withhold forgiveness without being vengeful.

Subsequent chapters delve into institutional failures that enabled sexual abuse by leaders in the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and L’Arche, the intentional community where Christians live alongside people with intellectual disabilities. In all these situations, demands for reconciliation put too much responsibility on victims to excuse egregious failures of pastoral care. Oakes is a journalist rather than a theologian but she has certainly begun an important conversation that should be taken up by Christians in other disciplines.

August Links Roundup: Plastic World

Hello August! Like a closeted Republican politician, I have acquired a comprehensive knowledge of airport men’s rooms this summer, having traveled to the Bay Area for a family vacation. The San Francisco airport was actually a highlight of the trip. I was impressed not only with the food selections but the thorough commitment to recycling, composting, and phasing out single-use plastics. Water is sold in aluminum cans, and when you have to spill out your liquids to go through security, there’s a bottle refill station right at the other end so you don’t have to buy another one.

This NPR feature by Michael Copley, “Creating a throw-away culture: How companies ingrained plastics in modern life”, delves into the failed promise of consumer recycling and how plastics manufacturers always knew it wouldn’t solve the pollution problem. Even now, manufacturers are fighting regulations that would require sustainable packaging.

Synthetic plastic was patented in the early 1900s. It was known as Bakelite, and it sparked a boom in durable and affordable consumer goods. Soon, companies started selling different kinds of plastic. At first, most of it was marketed as sturdy and reusable. One television ad from 1955 — about a made-up homemaker named Jane in a made-up place called Plasticstown, USA — touts how plastic containers are ideal for families because they won’t break if kids accidentally drop them.

But soon, the messaging started to change. In 1956, the industry learned about a new way to boost sales — and profits. At the plastics industry’s annual conference in New York, Lloyd Stouffer, the editor of an influential trade magazine, urged executives to stop emphasizing plastics’ durability. Stouffer told the companies to focus instead on making a lot of inexpensive, expendable material. Their future, he said, was in the trash can.

Companies got the message. They realized they could sell more plastic if people threw more of it away…

…“It was a really difficult sell to the American public in the post-war period, to inculcate people into a throwaway living,” she says. “That is not what people were used to.”

A solution companies came up with was emphasizing that plastic was a low-cost, abundant material.

A 1960 marketing study for Scott Cup said the containers were “almost indestructible,” but that the manufacturer could still convince people to discard them after a few uses. To counter any “pangs of conscience” consumers might feel about throwing them away, the researchers suggested a “direct attack”: Tell people the cups are cheap, they said, and that “there are more where these came from.”

Barbie begs to differ: “Life in plastic, it’s fantastic”. Now she’s available in more inclusive styles. CBS News reports that “Mattel introduces its first blind Barbie, new Barbie with Down syndrome”.

The company worked closely with the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) to ensure the blind Barbie doll accurately depicted individuals with blindness or low vision, while making sure that the doll was still accessible…

To that end, the doll’s fashions are tactile with a satiny pink blouse and a textured ruffle skirt with a brightly colored hook and loop fasteners for closure on the back of the doll’s top. The new doll even has accessible packaging with “Barbie” in Braille.

Accessories include a white-and-red cane with an identifiable marshmallow tip and includes stylish and functional sunglasses. The doll also reflects the sometimes-distinct eye gaze of a blind individual: facing slightly up and out.

In partnership with the National Down Syndrome Society, Mattel created a white Barbie with common physical characteristics of this genetic condition: “a rounder [face] shape, smaller ears, and a flat nasal bridge with her body also featuring a shorter frame with a longer torso and a single line on her palm”. This year they’ve added a Black version with “braided hair texture, one of the key features requested by the Black Down syndrome community.” She’s really charming!

Do you speak whale? Project CETI, a novel interdisciplinary collaboration among engineers, linguists, biologists, and machine learning experts, is discovering complex language patterns in the click vocalizations of sperm whales. Harvard Magazine reports:

In the past, sperm whale codas have been analyzed principally in terms of the number of clicks and the intervals between them. A representative discovery, for example, deemed in shorthand by the researchers as the discovery of a “whale phonetic alphabet,” as reported last September by a team at MIT, detailed detection of “fine-grained modulation of inter-click intervals relative to preceding codas,” as well as the addition of an extra click to existing codas, that changed depending on the context in which the whales were vocalizing. The researchers also documented independent changes in rhythm and tempo. When combined, these elements suggested complexity of the click communication that is an order of magnitude greater than previously suspected.

The paper generated tremendous excitement among the scientists because simultaneous work by Shafi Goldwasser had suggested that the more complex a system of animal communication, the more likely that a machine learning algorithm might succeed in translating the clicks into something humans could understand.

Then, in December, Project CETI’s linguist, Gašper Beguš, Ph.D. ’18, took the understanding of click complexity further, revealing the presence of acoustic properties in codas that are analogous to the vowels and diphthongs in human speech. Beguš, whose studies under professor of linguistics Kevin Ryan focused on animal communication, argued that the number of clicks and their timing correspond to human vowel duration and pitch, and that properties such as click timbre and harmonics correspond to the resonant frequencies formed by the human vocal tract in speech and song. These previously unobserved qualities and characteristics of click sounds, in the context of associated patterns of whale behaviors, Beguš wrote, appear not to be artifacts, but rather are under the whales’ control.

Read the whole piece to find out about the creative technologies they’re developing to monitor the communications and try to translate them.

In January, the humor magazine Cracked interviewed magician Penn Jillette about comedy, politics, and leaving Libertarianism behind. The Right’s turn toward conspiracy thinking, suggests Jillette, is a product of our craving for quick fixes and constant entertainment:

So much of trying to live our lives to do it right is tedious. And truth is very tedious…

Einstein comes up with this idea E = mc² — a profound, powerful, mind-blowing idea — and he has to work forever to make people understand that and to share that reality. Woodward and Bernstein are pretty sure the president of the United States committed crimes, and they work their asses off to try to prove that. But if you’re deep in the MAGA movement, you can just type that Biden went to China and set up a secret nuclear arsenal, and you get this incredible amount of praise with seven-minutes work.

…I don’t think we’ve ever experienced a time in human history where there wasn’t a shared reality, even if that reality was false. I’d rather everyone believed in Christianity than what it’s turned into.

We should always be striving to agree on what reality is. A bunch of people have decided that it’s easier and more fun to not worry about that part of it.

…What we do in live magic, it’s constantly dealing with that subject. Recreational epistemology is what stage magic is — we play around with that. And if you want to get heavy about it, you can say that every magic show is an exploration of how we determine what’s true.

When you do a live magic show, (lying) does not enter into it. A live magic show in Vegas cannot include deepfakes. It cannot include false news. Everybody in our theater must agree on the reality — it’s the reality they’ve been agreeing on since they were in the crib. Gravity, time, objects, persistence — it’s all we deal with.

In the March/April 2024 issue of Mother Jones, Madison Pauly reports how “independent” sexual abuse investigation firms prioritize damage control for the organizations that hire them, instead of justice for survivors. It’s painful but essential reading. The feature focuses on Tania Culver Humphrey, the daughter of a prominent missionary who co-founded Mercy Corps, a Christian humanitarian aid organization. She claimed that Mercy Corps knew and did nothing as he molested and violently abused her for many years. Then, when she sued them as an adult, bringing up additional evidence that he was part of a child-trafficking ring with others in the Mercy Corps network, the group commissioned a so-called independent probe as part of their settlement with her.

Mercy Corps hired Freeh Group International Solutions, a risk management firm run by former FBI Director Louis Freeh, to conduct a probe. Over the summer of 2020, the firm’s investigators grilled Humphrey, sometimes in full-day interviews, for about 100 hours, leaving her distraught and suicidal. Yet when the report was released the following year, it concentrated on the mishandling of her claims in the 1990s—something the ­organization had already acknowledged and apologized for. If the hired sleuths had uncovered any new information about the circumstances under which the abuse took place, Humphrey says she was never informed of it.

In September 2022, Humphrey, then a 51-year-old art teacher and mother of two, sued Mercy Corps. The lawsuit calls the probe a “whitewash” and alleges the ­organization used the process to gather information about potential threats to itself—of which she was one. Mercy Corps had “manipulated and deceived [her] to gain exclusive access to her explosive information,” and had used “systematic intimidation and bullying” and “the guise of an independent investigation” to control reputational damage, her lawsuit says.

Humphrey’s experience of betrayal is not an anomaly, according to the article:

Freeh helped define this line of work in 2011, when a task force of Pennsylvania State University trustees had hired him as a “special investigative counsel” amid the explosive revelations that former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky had sexually abused young children for more than a decade. Many of the victims were participants in a charity for troubled youth that Sandusky had personally founded. Sandusky was charged with dozens of felonies, and two administrators were indicted for failing to report him.

Freeh’s mandate was to determine who at Penn State had been aware of Sandusky’s abuse, and when. The probe took eight months, included 430 interviews, and cost more than $8 million. When it was done, the task force waived attorney-­client privilege, allowing Freeh’s team to publish its “essential findings.” Their report concluded that legendary head football coach Joe Paterno, university President Graham Spanier, and the two indicted administrators had concealed Sandusky’s child abuse, acting with “total disregard” for the victims amid a “culture of reverence for the football program.”

The report was widely seen as vindicating the board’s decision to fire Paterno. But it also generated endless debate about whether Freeh’s investigation was truly independent. In 2013, Spanier sued the Freeh Group and its founder for defamation, arguing the report had served the trustees’ interest by making him a scapegoat. Freeh had “developed a lucrative business model—predicated on Freeh’s name recognition and FBI credentials—that depends on conducting so-called ‘independent investigations’ and producing ‘investigative reports’ custom tailored with preconceived storylines to meet his clients’ objectives,” Spanier’s lawsuit claimed. The suit was ultimately dismissed, but the controversy continued…

Even as the field grows, there are few rules governing how independent investigators carry out their work…And there are virtually no resources available to help survivors understand what they’re signing up for when they agree to participate in a probe, making it hard for them to spot potential pitfalls—especially if they don’t have an attorney.

…Timothy Lytton, a Georgia State University law professor who has authored books on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the dynamics of self-policing industries, is mindful of the ways that companies can exert influence on a seemingly independent investigation, for reasons other than getting to the facts. Not only do institutions set the scope of the probes, they control what evidence they disclose to investigators. Lacking any subpoena power, he adds, investigators are “dependent on the information that they’re provided, which they don’t have any particular legal or economic muscle to ferret out.”

As Freud’s incest survivor patients could tell you, the person who pays the bills determines the narrative. I’m not sure what the answer is, but industry self-policing never works.

July Links Roundup: Surviving Without Heroes

Summertime, and the living is…not easy.

Many book-lovers are heartbroken over new revelations that the recently deceased fiction writer Alice Munro, a Nobel Prize for Literature winner, covered up her husband’s sexual abuse of her daughter. Andrea Robin Skinner’s July 7 essay in the Toronto Star describes how her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, began molesting her when she was nine. When her PTSD started taking over her life in her 20s, she attempted to tell Munro. It didn’t go well:

One day, during that period, while I was visiting my mother, she told me about a short story she had just read. In the piece, a girl dies by suicide after her stepfather sexually abuses her. “Why didn’t she tell her mother?” she asked me. A month later, inspired by her reaction to the story, I wrote her a letter finally telling her what had happened to me.

As it turned out, in spite of her sympathy for a fictional character, my mother had no similar feelings for me. She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity.

She called my sister Sheila, told her she was leaving Fremlin, and flew to her condo in Comox, B.C. I visited her there and was overwhelmed by her sense of injury to herself. She believed my father had made us keep the secret in order to humiliate her. She then told me about other children Fremlin had “friendships” with, emphasizing her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed.

Did she realize she was speaking to a victim, and that I was her child? If she did, I couldn’t feel it. When I tried to tell her how her husband’s abuse had hurt me, she was incredulous. “But you were such a happy child,” she said.

…My mother went back to Fremlin, and stayed with him until he died in 2013. She said that she had been “told too late,” she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.

“Alice Munro Was Hiding in Plain Sight,” Michelle Dean writes in The Cut, observing that Munro’s fiction about repressed Canadian families takes on a new resonance now. “All the stories, every last one, are about secrets the people in them keep because they are constrained by personality or, more often, by their ‘quiet’ social order from expressing any kind of inner life.”

This story feels like a gut punch to a lot of readers because Munro wrote so insightfully about the psychology of families other than her own, and because she wasn’t a typical literary bad boy. (For instance, the sexual assault accusations against Neil Gaiman don’t seem inconsistent with the porny misogyny of some of his comic-book scripts.) If she could have a secret like this, anyone could be next. I remember my disillusionment on learning about similar behavior by Marion Zimmer Bradley, whose novel The Mists of Avalon was revered in my childhood home for its positive model of feminist and pagan spirituality.

But human beings can be willfully ignorant a lot of the time–just look at “What Were We Thinking? The Top Ten Most Dangerous Ads” from Collectors Weekly, reprinted on Pocket Worthy. Did we really believe that women should douche with Lysol, or that children should eat Vitamin Donuts? I’m guessing that the “Vi-Rex Violet Rays” self-shock machine was a tactfully disguised sex toy, like the Relax-a-Cizor weight loss belt that Peggy Olson tested on “Mad Men”. You’ll love the way it makes you feel!

Ijeoma Oluo, author of the NY Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race, has a bracing but optimistic post on her Substack called “How We Get Through This”—this being the rise of fascism entailed by end-stage capitalism. The government’s not going to save us. Oluo says, “start supporting real, revolutionary work happening outside of our systems…Build friendships and connections based on community care.” Meditate, get therapy, make art, and give yourself permission to stop doom-scrolling. Hobbies are a survival skill, not frivolity.

You’re going to need something you enjoy doing, something that is accessible and affordable, that can really take up your time and attention when you need it, and is completely unrelated to organizing work. You need that thing that you can do while your internal systems regulate and recover from the near constant state of panic and attack that these external systems want to keep us in. This is not escapism, this is crucial to our survival. We absolutely cannot survive in constant states of fight or flight. You need to be deliberate about cultivating activities that you can always access that will allow you brief moments of rest.

Charlie J. Stephens’ exquisite novel A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest, released this spring by Torrey House Press, is about that kind of survival. A nonbinary tween in 1980s rural Oregon, abused and neglected at home, takes refuge in their mystical connection with nature. Orion Magazine interviewed them in this piece, “Beyond Binaries in Ecological Writing”. Stephens says:

I particularly love the work that queer ecology does in questioning our human assumptions about what is “natural” and what is “normal.” I wrote a recent personal essay specifically on the binary, and I appreciate how queer ecologists/thinkers have made links between that mindset and climate collapse. I’ve been particularly interested in the past few years in studying and practicing animism, which overlaps with queer ecologies in terms of envisioning a world where human and non-human beings are given equal consideration and where, ideally, one day, our mutual interdependence is made clear to the masses…

…I have long found it uncomfortable that the earth is so often depicted as female, and as a mother. I’m not familiar enough with the ways other cultures hold this, but in the specific, largely white middle-class, American environmental movement of the 1970s it was a strange (but unfortunately, completely predictable) decision to feminize the earth as a strategy for its salvation in a country that is thoroughly misogynist and systematically punishes women. If the leadership of that movement had been in the hands of other cultures here, I believe we would be in a much different place now.

One of my animist teachers, Daniel Foor, talks about the importance of not continuing to unconsciously project our societal ideas about gender onto the planet, and in having historically done so, we can see where this has led us. He also talks about the problem of seeing Earth as a woman who needs to be protected and saved, and how that opens the door to patriarchal chivalrousness—and savior mentalities—instead of just seeing our mutual interconnectedness.

For more fresh perspectives on healing, I recently discovered the site Mad in America: Science, Psychiatry and Social Justice. Leah Warren’s June 19 article “Madness, Utopia and Revolt: An Interview With Sasha Warren” talks with the founder of the project Of Unsound Mind, which examines the links between the mental health industry and the carceral state. Warren recounts excavating the archives of old asylums for inmate-produced publications that reveal not only suffering but self-advocacy, humor, and even appreciation for their treatments. From these surprising findings, Warren concluded that both psychiatry and anti-psychiatry movements trade in oversimplified binaries and false promises of cure-alls for the evils of the past. “In a sense, every founding gesture of psychiatry is also an anti-psychiatric gesture. Psychiatry requires anti-psychiatry so that it doesn’t get stilted and stuck and frozen in place. It needs this negative gesture to break it up and allow it to flow more freely into other spaces.”