“She knew better than to envision any further: the future was a room with a warp on the floor.” – Tiffany Morris, “Night in the Chrysalis”
Happy New Year. All of the years there ever have been, 2024 certainly was one. 2025 certainly promises to be one. We take care of each other.
In general, like, for the planet, 2025 does not promise to be a good year. I sort of hate when people think like that, though. 2024 was a good year for me and many people I know. Politics is necessarily going to suck up a lot of the oxygen in the room. We should not let it suck up all the oxygen—especially people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who actually die a little if you don’t pay attention to them. So really—gear up, steel yourselves, hold your loved ones close—but also take walks, stare at bodies of water, listen to music, see your friends, go to a museum.
I’ll go ahead and spoil Friday’s books, because they’re something of a theme for this column: I’m reading Anarcho-Indigenism: Conversations On Land and Freedom edited by Francis Dupuis-Deri and Benjamin Pillet. I’m also reading The Book Of Delights by Ross Gay.
The theme I’m starting the year with eyes open to the horror, but having a good time as much as you can.
Beauty and joy continue even when the jagoffs and assholes don’t want it to.
The idea for this post has been percolating since a little before Christmas, and I’m still unsure what exactly to say. The genocide in Gaza rages on, even as reports of Israeli soldiers indiscriminately killing Palestinian civilians collide with reports of the last hospital in northern Gaza being destroyed. We are coming up on the one-year anniversary of Aaron Bushnell self-immolating in an attempt to get the Biden administration to come to its senses and stop arming the bloodthirsty, racist, and settler-colonial regime in Israel. Others have followed his example. Crickets.
It’s been months since Luigi Mangione—sexy ab-haver, back pain experiencer—triple-tapped a drunk driver who happened to be the CEO of a health insurance company. To underline his motives, Luigi wrote “delay, deny, depose”—a play on the book Delay, Deny, Defend by Jay M. Feinman—on the shell casings the police would recover from the insurance CEO’s body, which United Healthcare investors stepped over to start their meeting on time. People in this country are so mad at the healthcare system that America’s Librarian, aka Your Aunt Who Is Okay With You Never Calling Her But Does Like To See You Occasionally, Elizabeth Warren, said: “yooooo, I get it!”1
It will be 10 years this year since Donald Trump descended an escalator without taking a step—exercise takes years off your life, says the man who eats Big Macs without buns—and called all Mexicans rapists and killers. Literally every non-billionaire’s life has gotten worse since then. Even the car dealership-owning Klansmen who support him are worse off, they just don’t realize it. Trump’s life? Only gotten better since then.
I often feel like I am out of step with most people. I freely admit to being a weirdo. Hell, I relish it. But at my core, I feel pretty uncomplicated: I want to be a good dad and husband and friend and brother and son, read and write books, play music, eat good food, have a little adventure, watch movies, and most importantly, I want everyone to have a good time. So many people seem to be completely oriented toward other people not having a good time, or shit, even everyone having a bad time. I can’t understand it. I don’t get people who work in the insurance industry or defend it. I don’t get people who work in the military industrial complex, or people who relish war—including the broadcasters who salivate over bombs dropping. I am not a person of violence or dramatic action, but I completely understand Luigi Mangione and Aaron Bushnell. I am also a voter—Jesus Christ forgive me, but I have voted Democrat my whole life. But after the DNC’s response to ceasefire demonstrations—literally, fingers in their ears and complete denial of a voice, even when a powerful union calls for it—I completely understand people who do not participate in the electoral process. I don’t think either of those things—murder, self-immolating, nonparticipation—are particularly productive. But there is clearly a time for every tactic.
Over at Defector, Tom Ley asks “what comes after the gun?” (maybe a spiritual sequel to Nicholas Russell asking “what comes after the post-crisis reading list?”) Tom points out that Liz Warren (or any other politician) hasn’t exactly come out with a megaphone yelling about passing Medicare For All. In fact, as Tom says, “It wasn’t so long ago that we witnessed a populist presidential campaign premised on [healthcare for all], and then watched it be swept aside by a political order that neutralizes insurgency just as swiftly as it metabolizes violence. ‘Medicare for all’ went from being one of the most urgent and prominent political slogans of my lifetime to a relic of a dead language over the course of a few short years.” In the grocery store parking lot the other day, I saw a Harris/Walz bumper sticker that read “democracy or dictators?” Well. What kind of democracy do we have, when the people make such increasingly desperate cries for help, and the powers that be continuously respond with “suck it up?”
This year, I promise to offer no answers to these questions. But I think you know what you’re getting from this blog. We’re going to be reading with an eye toward these questions, problems, potential solutions. But we’re gonna be reading, like, werewolf sailor stories. It’s gonna be a year.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
actually, she said this, and it’s worth rehearsing again, because this isn’t even opinion. This is analysis of how human nature has always worked: “The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system. Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.”