“Colonizers write about flowers. / I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks / seconds before becoming daisies.” – Noor Hindi, “Fuck Your Lecture On Craft, My People Are Dying”
& this isn’t a column only for Gen X. Inter-generation fights and generalizations are stupid and mostly a waste of time. BUT I do feel like “sunlight is the best disinfectant” was an idea that was really prominent in the arts before Millennials came along, talking all that “fuck your lecture on craft my people are dying” shit.
(Semi-related: did you see that trend piece in New York about “the cruel kids’ table” or whatever? Did it make you panic for the younger generations? Don’t let it. They ran the exact same piece in late 2016, only it was about Richard Spencer. Remember what happened to him? If not, read to the end. Point is, giving those people the time of day or any space in your mind isn’t worth it. Go read Mariame Kaba or get involved in your local mutual aid group.)
GET TO THE COLUMN ALREADY CHRIS
Legendary Chicagoan Steve Albini—gone too soon, may he be at peace—had a change of heart late in life. He’d cultivated a personality that mostly involved being an abrasive jagoff and an asshole. Today, we’d call him an edgelord. One of his bands was (satirically) called Rapeman. Get it? This is all an act, he’s really a good guy with a heart of gold. Yeah yeah, that shit wears thin fast. Albini realized it, too. He spent the last public years of his life—when he wasn’t recording bands or playing shows—as a passionate advocate for social justice issues he had previously thought were already solved. Forgive the extended quote:
I admit that I was deaf to a lot of women’s issues at the time, and that’s on me. Within our circles, within the music scene, within the musical underground, a lot of cultural problems were deemed already solved — meaning, you didn’t care if your friends were queer. Of course women had an equal place, an equal role to play in our circles. The music scene was broadly inclusive. So for us, we felt like those problems had been solved. And that was an ignorant perception.
This type of thinking was around a lot in the ‘90s (the “End Of History” decade) and into the 2000s and 2010s (“I’m saying offensive things to show you how much I don’t think that way”). Steve deserves a lot of credit for repudiating it. Do we have enough evidence now that “the marketplace of ideas” is a bullshit notion? Do we have enough evidence now that “show people how awful X is so they make better choices” doesn’t work? Eddies Norton and Furlong made American History X and now half the US Cabinet has swastika tats.
No, I am not arguing that art has to be prescriptive. That we all need to start making Soviet Realist paintings. Art isn’t obligated to be an apple, art is only obligated to conjure the feelings of eating an apple in a new or thought-provoking way. Can art that centers bad people, or even antiheroes (particularly white men antiheroes), conjure any new thoughts in us? Will another poem about how sad we are stop another bomb from falling on Palestine? Will one more Raymond Carver short story—Gordon’s chopped it up real fine this time—end domestic violence? Or are we just picking up our little books, flipping on our too-big TVs, and wallowing in muck because we don’t know what else to do?
Remember the Torment Nexus Problem? What about the Don Draper Problem? I’ll tell you a quick story that takes place in late 2010-early 2011. It’s pretty embarrassing, so just remember that I’m a Cool Guy, okay? I was working on the boats, so I was drinking a good deal and smoking cigarettes. Tobacco has never been my drug—the smell is unbearable, the high is basically nothing—but cigarettes 1) were a great excuse to get five minutes of shore leave between tours and 2) look cool. So, after working my minimum wage job, in which I had to wear a uniform that I had to pay for myself, which got sweaty and yellowed in the summer heat, I would go home to my 600 square foot studio, sit on my bed, and watch Mad Men. Never without a whiskey rocks or an Old Fashioned nearby. Sometimes with cigarette in hand (windows wide open, of course). Sometimes, I’d even take off my deckhand/bartender stripes, shower, and put on a suit and tie, just full-on playing dress up while watching a TV show as a 23-year-old college graduate. It was a way to feel cool, like I wasn’t where I was—until a cockroach or a bedbug skittered across the floor. That’s just the show’s aesthetics seeping into my consciousness, forget about whatever Silent Generation values I accidentally internalized.
If there’s no good way to make a war film because war always looks cool as hell on film, what should we make films about? I’m not gonna repeat what I wrote two weeks ago about types of antifascist writing, but I will link to it. Nor will I argue that we shouldn’t make art about bad people. Most of my favorite art involves bad people, and if your movie or book has a masked slasher slicing people as easily as ripe pears? All the better. That said, can we get some depictions of mutual aid on television? Can we get a Parks and Rec that isn’t “literally everyone in this town and the next one over are completely insane except for one lone city official and her nurse friend, and poor them?” I see poets of color talk sometimes about pressures to turn trauma into poetry, as opposed to celebrating what makes their heritage/community/culture wonderful. How can anyone think life is worth living if the artists never show them that it is? If none of that sounds like your cup of tea, of course, we could simply make The Departed Except With Black Panthers Starring Two Of Our Greatest Living Actors. That’d be a good movie. Full of action and intrigue and deception and SPEECHES ABOUT HOW WE FIGHT RACISM WITH SOLIDARITY AND WE FIGHT POVERTY WITH SOCIALISM.
Because, see: The Sopranos didn’t stop organized crime. A couple decades after that screen went black on Tony, the U.S. government and all major corporations morphed into organized crime rings. The Wire didn’t stop the war on drugs. Police have even more funding now. Mad Men didn’t teach the world to see through advertising, or inspire gender equality in the workplace. The open rapists are in charge of everything now, instead of the ones who have the decency to be ashamed. Breaking Bad didn’t teach a generation of men to listen to their wives or usher in a new era of socialized healthcare. Instead, we have a mess of grindset hustlers hawking supplements on Instagram instead of unionizing LA Fitness.
Vonnegut said “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be” in Mother Night. I’ll take it a step further. We need to be careful about the company we keep, the stimuli that fills our brains, and the ways we occupy our time. We can’t define our values by the things we hate. We have to define our values by articulating what we love.
Here’s what happened to Richard Spencer:
Sorry you got an email,
Chris