Hold Your Horses
Avoiding buyer's remorse as you subscribe to this free newsletter
Something small but weird happened: my subscribers went up.
Small: it looks dramatic on a graph, but the numbers we’re talking about here are, well, still the kind that leave rural school districts wondering if they can keep the lights on.
Weird: I have no real clue why the graph shows a swoop up and to the right.
Possibilities:
People just looooved my recent, endless, rambling meditation on Luigi Mangione, my own chronic depression, injustice to trans kids, and why I don’t yet personally go out and kill people. This seems…unlikely?
I recently praised and “re-stacked” (re-tweeted, re-posted, shared, re-skeeted, whatever) an essay by Elad Nehorai, which got some attention, I suppose, reminding me that Substack is a social media platform, algorithmically ruled. That is, complete strangers showed up to deliver summary dismissals of Nehorai’s 5000+ word essay along the lines of I got as far as ‘fascist’ or Pure Marxist drivel. Some seemed to argue with me as if I had written Nehorai’s piece, which was weird, but many suffer challenges in the reading comprehension department. Others hailed from the “monocausal” faction: those who believe that there is only or mainly One Thing that explains the recent election, and since (((Nehorai))) didn’t parrot their explanation, he’s trash and stoopid and yucky. I praised his piece because it captured something with a wide net that I hadn’t seen others try to gather up, something I think is valid as hell, and what it scooped in said net was a good assortment of examples. The writing itself didn’t blow air up my skirts, but who TF am I to talk? If I collected every election post-mortem point that I considered valid and important and present them here, the result would look like, “We lost because we were clean-shaven and because people hated our long beards.” (Which is actually kinda accurate, given the gross misunderstandings of many voters.)
Weirder still, based on glances at some of the other Substacks some of these new subscribers also read, mine seems like a…strange fit.
I’m not knocking folks who seek out many viewpoints, nor folks who haven’t yet copped to certain bad-faith actors out there, but whew—“eclecticism” may not cover it. Maybe y’all are watch-dogging some sketchy actors.
Anyway, not to yuck anyone’s yum, but if you’re looking for right-wing, reactionary, center-right, status quo apologetical, Manospheric, conspiracist content here, well, you treed the wrong critter.
Whatever happened, some folks are likely to be bummed out. Yes, this newsletter is free, so I’m not grifting anybody out of social security checks. But we live in an attention economy, so it behooves me to be clear about what attending to Know Your Place is likely to entail.
Know Your Place is not a command I’m giving, nor is it advice I’m offering. It’s the command and mindset against which I rebel. Which isn’t the same as rejecting humility and veering from lane to lane grabbing the mic on every topic under the sun. It’s a rejection of the snooty or supremacist notion that certain types of people have predetermined places they must know and remember and from which they must never stray. If you got a vibe of the Great Chain of Being and slotting yourself in to just the right spot in the lord-serf hierarchy, wow, definitely, um…the wrong place.
The subhead for this newsletter is “Rejecting Essentialized Hierarchies Since 1969.” This is a nod to my age: 55, and my belief that hierarchies of certain people over others, if ever absolutely necessary, should be ad hoc, situational, based on competence, consensus if possible, democratic processes if consensus isn’t possible, accountable regardless of all else, temporary, and contingent on task or mission or project. Any hierarchy that gets entrenched is suspect because it speaks to the weakness or absence of one or more of the above qualifiers. (Hell, I think even popular incumbent politicians should actively encourage primary challenges for the health of the system: folks get comfy with a popular elected—they need a challenger to remind them that nobody’s entitled to an office, ever, and even popular pols owe everyone an account of their actions and decisions.) If a hierarchy gets essentialized, we’re talking big-time evil, because we’re now in the realm of these people should be on top because of who or what they are by nature. Race, sex, gender, creed, income, other signifiers: that shit is at the root of just all the bad stuff in the world. Or so I maintain.
Which does NOT mean I am a crusader against “identity politics.” I am firmly in the camp of history here, I believe. That is, I maintain that we constructed identity groups at certain times in history for crass and base reasons, usually greed, theft, plunder, to make it easier to justify fucking people over and taking their shit.
“We” here varies depending on locale, but I’m a white cis-straight male American, so I’m pretty comfortable in saying my people are the prime creators of outgroups we could denigrate and dehumanize, all the better to take their shit (property, rights, land, labor, lives, and so on). Having been bullied, I came to hate bullies. Learning that people of my demographic have been the leading bullies on my continent has made me increasingly inclined to side with the historical outgroups, yes, because they are outgroups. Because I was born into a smidgeon of the power dynamics of the people who made them into outgroups. You don’t get to create outgroups through ostracism, then turn around and insist “groups” are bad and only “individuals” are good when you’ve kinda defined “individuals” as “members of the only group we refuse to admit is…kinda the most important group around.”
The very least I can do is give marginalized folks the benefit of a lot of doubts (about my own inherited and socialized views), try to listen to what they’re saying, try to learn from them, try to support them when I think they’re onto something true and right, and fight against the same old tired and evil themes and ideas that make outgroups in every age and place.
So “cancel culture”? “Woke mind virus”? “Political correctness”? I see them all as smear campaigns to re-denigrate the historically denigrated. Moral panics by people who are essentially afraid of the world, of change, of difference. Vastly inflated anecdotes supercharged by bad-faith amygdala-hijackers out to monetize outrage and bitterness. Reactionary bullying, fascistic preludes. As much as I make fun of us Americans, for ample reasons, these things offend me as an American: as naive and ahistorical as it may be, we should be better than this. We should have learned better by now.
Other things, in alphabetical order…
A
Abortion. I believe in bodily autonomy. For a very, very long time, I took anti-abortion folks at their word and believed they sincerely cared about babies. As such, I thought all the stuff about the ur-motive of controlling and punishing women was hyperbolic. Not anymore. I’ve seen too much and read too much. The anti-abortion folks themselves convinced me that this was—conscious or not—their driving motive.
D
I think we need to defund police. Yep. Communities keep us safe. Healthy ones nip social pathologies in the bud and help those with individual struggles access and get the kinds of help they actually need. Funding things that make for healthy communities more heavily than we fund after-the-fact, reactive, punitive, only sometimes investigative institutions that rely on threats and violence and which have built up politically and socially powerful cultures of impunity in contradiction to Constitutional guarantees (with Supreme Court blessings) and which have notoriously poor solve-rates anyway—is a sensible direction to go. How quickly we should go in that direction, what the specifics will entail, how we negotiate trade-offs—these things aren’t insane to talk about, but hyperbolic distortion of the defund position is unhelpful and slanderous. We have to choose between a fear-based culture and a care-based culture. Fear-based cultures ratchet in only one, bad direction, and are inherently irrational. Care-based cultures can be rational, and since the inertia is against them now, the danger of going too far toward care is small. We can and should be working on these kinds of changes.
From this flows decarceration and prison abolition, though it’s hard to conceive of, and probably much further away. I urge you to study it, sincerely, by reading its most serious advocates.
E
The election, as in 2024. If you are of the persuasion that One Thing explains Harris’s loss and Trump’s win, well, I’ll disagree. Perhaps mildly, perhaps vehemently. “It’s the ______, stupid!” is the bane of, well, solidarity, organizing, analysis, reading comprehension, and probably all good things. If you cannot hold multiple, valid ideas in your head at the same time, I don’t know what to tell you. There’s that story about the blind guys groping the elephant (no, not the Rule 34 version—the original). The best I can say is that if you’re adamant about a particular cause, a particular lens, then advocate for it in a multi-faceted, multivocal coalition of people doing some real, concrete work, and don’t get too full of yourself or your beliefs. Be the voice of your framework or lens—that’s fine—always bring that POV into play, but don’t be an asshole crapping on the valid views of others. Nobody knows what the Original Sin of society was—patriarchy, capital, racialization, [insert Fall from Grace narrative here]—so nobody has a lock on the Singular Key that will unlock Utopia and Success for All Our Endeavors Forevermore. If you don’t buy something, lay out your sticking points as reasons why you struggle to get behind an analysis. That allows someone with a different POV to know what’s standing in your way and clarifies the barriers that will need to be whittled down to get you more on board or less averse to their way of seeing things. If you cannot conceive of a universe in which you ever buy an alternate explanation or ever buy a different analysis as even part of the problem or path to solution, well, you probably aren’t suited for being in coalition or community with others. Good luck with that, but that way usually leads to radicalization (the bad kind), distortion, mutation, and icky things.
For my part, I lean toward the following on Election 2024:
that it happened thanks largely to a public that is astonishingly disconnected from and ignorant about stakes and realities of Trump and Trumpism
that this is due in huge part to right-wing media
that this media has been a problem for decades and decades with little but head-in-the-sand denial and gun-shy timidity by libs and Dems and institutions, increasingly out-of-step with lived realities of folks on the ground
that it was powered by appeals to the still-strong fascistic, racist, misogynist ur-vibes we have always struggled with, which are getting laundered and fed and watered
that all of this has roots going back decades and decades, meaning that a whole lot of “takes” about “the problem” are valid and at least partly right, but then we’re no longer talking about the 2024 election, the upshot of which is that we’re either screwed or that, structurally and systemically, a whole shit-ton of stuff we’ve normalized and taken for granted needs to get chucked and redone.
F
Fascism. Or illiberal democracy. Or post-constitutional order. Or authoritarianism. Or whatever mileage you prefer. I have, at some point, a limit to my tolerance for semantic disputes. I follow them a while for my own edification, to clarify where the parties are coming from, and then I usually make my own personal call. This is a treasured privilege of the powerless, by the way, and one that should never be underrated. (A much more dumbed-down version of it is probably what motivated a lot of Trump voters in 2024, except they didn’t bother to look into any of the issues or controversies beyond what Joe Rogan said or what the dudes who listen to Rogan said or the dudes who just catch Rogan’s vibe from the ether resonated in close proximity.)
Anyway, fascism. I approach it as a moralist, so if you have a mental picture of Evil, fascism’s mine. I was well-indoctrinated as an anti-fascist American by the propaganda that said WWII was a “good war” and why it was a good war. Indiana Jones movies almost certainly cemented this. What I learned about the Holocaust absolutely did. But then, I was also raised to believe in the first amendment as a guarantee of absolute freedom of conscience for a country where any and all fool-ass religions could bloom, but none could take over the instruments of state. I know, quaint.
But fascism, to me, is the root supremacy, at least as it manifested in the 20th century, the century of my birth and key socialization. As such, I project its Evil backwards in time to slavery (before we had industrial capacity to weaponize this Evil at Nazi Germanic scales) and forward (now that we have algorithms and post-truth and a billion YouTubers and platforms to echo dehumanizing propaganda to a checked-out populace) to whatever this shit is. The belief that some groups of humans are less than, objects for use or discard by “more human” humans, based on any criteria. My use of the term may be idiosyncratic, may water down some academic sticking points, but I’m not an academic.
I
What Israel is doing in Gaza sure looks genocidal to me. Sorry, folks. The G-word has been writ. If you prefer, I could soften it to “ethic cleansing,” which doesn’t seem all that soft, really, or “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity” or something else, but those all look pretty horrific to me, too.
Does my opinion matter here? Not at all. I’m a more or less life-long Kansan who met his first out-Jew in high school (from another town at a forensics meet). I’ve read enough over the last 30-some years to be loosely acquainted with Judaism (hopefully more so than the average Kansan), and I came away from that deeply appreciative and respectful.
But more intense reading more recently (like, since October 7, especially), has opened my eyes a great deal on how much division there is within Judaism on the question of Israel’s place and meaning, its modern history, the contingency of that meaning depending on one’s upbringing and socialization within communities or strains of Judaism, and, unfortunately for my admiration, the schism between what I seems a more universalistic inclination in Judaism vs. a more ethno-nationalist one.
I think I received a fairly positive, and monolithic, gloss on Judaism and on Israel as well, which was—despite my efforts to resist Islamophobia as a civil libertarian alive well before and throughout the 9/11 events—relatively intact for many years afterward. A big part of this was my refusal to associate in any way with anyone remotely connected to denigration of Jews, Judaism, or Jewishness. I knew where that led, and I eventually learned what a lingua franca or skeletal structure or blueprint antisemitism tends to be in all fascist and racist conspiracies.
Today I come away with an appreciation of just how deep (some of) the debates go, so me trying to enter them seems suicidal—someone will swoop in with claims I have no ability to answer (whether to reject, debunk, qualify, acknowledge as valid, contextualize and parse, or agree with) without making practically my whole life about the study of Israel, Judaism in all its facets and histories, and probably much else besides. International affairs has never been a love of mine; I have trouble enough trying to come to grips with my own, deeply messed-up country, and that damn animal keeps stomping around the globe, making my efforts harder. So my feelings of responsibility in ethical debate and discussion, of case-making, of good-faith evaluation of claims—all these conspire to tell me not to wade into the waters of strident pro-Palestinian advocacy, although that is where I land, politically, morally, and otherwise.
This is me confessing that I do not know with as much native, personally-earned, confident information and context that Israel is in the wrong here, that “antisemitism” is now a problematic label used in a lot of quarters to blur criticism of a nation-state and its policies and behaviors with a religious bigotry, that the ethical pedestal I had placed Judaism upon is really nowhere near as monolithically consensual as I had naively imagined.
My position is thus very American, perhaps. If it looks, walks, and quacks like a genocide, well…. I’m sadly prepared to entertain some cynical, realpolitik argument that says the US must continue to send Israel weapons for their exterminationist effort because of some larger geostrategic or intelligence aims in the region, but that’s not the message that the Biden administration nor the campaigning Kamala Harris gave, and even if it swayed me somehow, I’d feel like I was swallowing poison in hopes of killing an aggressive cancer. And I do believe that Donald Trump and his cronies care not a damn about Palestinian lives and in fact admire and want to replicate the illiberal democratic ethno-statist model Israel sure seems to be pursuing.
I refuse to broaden these views into a condemnation of a religion or a culture or ethnicities/heritages. In America at least, I’m seeing far too many diasporic Jews, often young and thus insufficiently socialized into Zionistic insistence that Israel’s behavior must never be criticized, much less opposed; but also many who are not-so young, and by no means manichean in their arguments, to categorically associate Jewishness or Judaism with what another government is doing to the people of Gaza and the West Bank.
So please miss me with “THE JEWS!” and also miss me with “YOU’RE PRO-HAMAS!” I don’t know enough to meaningfully and responsibly engage as I believe an interlocutor or discussant should, and I regard these kinds of attitudes, these kinds of responses, to be pretty fucking dumb and evil. It looks to me like Israel is lost to the dark side, that the only truly safe place for world Jewry is a world where everyone is safe because a critical mass of people embraces the kinds of universalistic notions of justice and right and care and humanity that I once thought all of Judaism championed. Sequestering oneself in an armed bunker does not strike me as an effective long-term strategy for anyone’s safety and prosperity, even if that bunker is a nuclearly-armed nation-state.
J
Is for Janitor. That’s what I am, folks. A custodian and light-maintenance guy. I used to work in a non-union food factory, night-shift, cleaning big industrial tanks and such, running Programmable Logic Controlled systems to flush miles of pipe for the next day’s production run. Before that, lots of gigs, including stay-at-home dad when our kids were small because my wife made the bigger bucks and it just made sense that way.
I’ve no academic credentials to speak of. I’ve no professional resume worth envying. I was probably ruined at an impressionable age by Lloyd Dobler’s dinner table explanation of his future aspirations in Say Anything. Or by Eric Hoffer’s mythology as the “longshoreman philosopher.” What I’ve seen of rat races and climbing and striving and hustle, to say nothing of the stats on upward mobility in these United States, make me wonder about my fellow Americans, but one doesn’t yuck another’s yum. I have to earn and pay bills, and I don’t like the notion of taking a job from a plucky youngster with a degree and some hope in their eyes, especially as they’re on an upward life trajectory while I’m winding down, so I am perfectly okay in the job I have.
Plus, there are perks to powerlessness and low status. Most of my life, I’ve been pretty free to say what I think (helps to be a dude also), whereas I’ve been asked to ventriloquize sentiments folks much higher on the status and economic hierarchy felt they couldn’t say for fear of their jobs or face or clientele or whatever. Nobody cares what a janitor or factory plebe thinks.
Coincidentally, the late, great Kris Kristofferson popped up on my work shuffle the other night singing about how “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” and while I certainly still have a lot to lose (a threatened SLAPP suit after Jan. 6 to the contrary), I have less to lose, and a lower profile than many. I have a computer and a phone, and I’ve trimmed my life (or had it trimmed for me) such that I can bang out some words, and I’ve read some books, and I may be a little…off…but I think I still have a somewhat dinged moral compass, and if that’s all, it’s still more than a lot of folks have, and I’m not going to waste it or hide it under a bushel while my country and my planet go to shit at the hands of the worst people alive.
Anyway, if you’re a class snob, this is probably goodbye. I’ve no letters behind my name. I am not rich, even for the hinterlands of Kansas. I’m not unionized; I’m at-will employed like everybody in my state and not even salaried. If a mortgage counts as owning, not renting, then I’m better off than a lot of folks, but I’m still what they call the white working class. But in a country where “elite” now means anybody whose beliefs run anti-MAGA, you have an out on those grounds as well. Elon Musk ain’t “elite,” nor is the Supreme Court majority, but a bunch of public school teachers are, I gather, and folks who believe “all people are created equal.”
K
I live in Kansas. Almost always have. (Spent about a year in southern Ohio experiencing, if you can believe it, culture shock, then came back.) Anyway. Folks know Dorothy and Toto. But they should also know this Will Averill poem:
FUCK YOU, I’M FROM KANSAS
now in Norwich and this city shuts down.
“There just isn’t enough grit!”
Fuck You, I’m from Kansas
Where grit comes from the inside
Where blizzards bury children in as little as eight minutes
And you just deal with it.
Socialized health care?
Fuck You, I’m from Kansas
If you get cut, you die. Simple as that.
Sure, we’ll pray for ya’ll, but that’s about it.
We buried pa in a field by the Kaw River after the rustlers came,
And ma died while trying to birth that calf, kicked in the head to death,
Little sister was bitten fifty-two times by a rattlesnake before she managed to bite off it’s head, and we couldn’t afford the antidote cause the cattle died of blight.
The poison still courses through her veins today. Makes her mean.
And when the well ran dry, fifteen kids tripped and fell into it
Cute little blonde-haired blue-eyed kids,
Like the kind you save in movies
Movies that are never set in Kansas
And as they fell to their tiny deaths
We just watched.
Health and Safety?
Fuck You, I’m from Kansas
I went to school in a class of four hundred
Only eight of us are still alive
We couldn’t find Billy Ray after that twister got him.
He’s probably somewhere in Missouri
Or Ohio
Or maybe Iowa.
Or maybe bits of him in all three.
Did we miss him, yup,
But Fuck You, I’m from Kansas
It’s just part of God’s plan
We just got color in ’94, before that, everything was black and white
Except the people, they were just white.
I’m not racist, Fuck You, I’m from Kansas.
When the Indians come
You’ve got to circle the wagons to survive
I learned to dodge arrows from an early age
In the grim light of the campfire and smoke signals.
The smoke signals crying out “Get the fuck outta Kansas.”
Because Kansas was named after the Kansa Indians.
Before we shot them.
Fuck you, Indians, this is our Kansas.
Nineteen of my friends died of dysentery,
Cholera got the other six
My Facebook page reads like the book of the dead
The dead of Kansas.
I cried once, when I was two, and pa punched me in the face
Fuck you, son. We don’t cry. Not in Kansas.
Nothing tastes better in Kansas than pain.
We like our women to have teeth
But it doesn’t always work out that way
You don’t always get what you want in Kansas.
In the Kansas winter people freeze to death, and in the summer they die of heat stroke
The spring brings tornadoes which kill thousands and destroy our livelihood and our precious trailer homes.
Fall’s cool, though, in Kansas, fall’s cool.
If you don’t drink a case and a half of Pabst Blue Ribbon a day
Fuck you, get out of Kansas.
If you don’t stop at the titty bar along the highway
Fuck you, get out of Kansas.
You can’t be queer in Kansas, or that’s a shootin’.
Our capital, Topeka, is built of sticks and mud.
We added a brick once, and the whole thing fell over.
Forty thousand people died.
So we just started again.
Fuck you, I’m from Kansas.
I graduated at the top of my class in Kansas because I went to the library and read the book.
Now I’m governor. Governor of fucking Kansas.
So when the snow comes next, and ya’ll English are trying to push your faggoty French cars out your ever-so-slightly frosted over roads, don’t come whining to me.
I’ve seen it all. On the cold, cold prairie.
Fuck you, I’m from Kansas.
That’s kinda the Kansas vibe. Or at least one of them. We contain multitudes. Because we ate them. In the cold, as we starved. But we said nice things about them as we dined and complimented the chef.
Anyhow, if you manage to grow up here, stay here, love and hate it here, imbibe and absorb the good, bad, and ugly, you might catch what Averill is slinging above in his rant about “hearing people in England complain about two to three inches of snow.” It’s also about more than that.
L
This Substack is unabashedly pro-LGBTQIA+. Emphasis on the T, because trans folks are so heavily targeted. I wish I felt more confident and assured in my knowledge base to speak more stridently on trans issues, but I’m probably too cis and too behind the knowledge curve for that. I can try to imagine, of course, but I also don’t have to understand the precise nature of someone’s subjective experience to stick up for their right to determine their own lives. WTF is wrong with people when we choose—instead of simply believing people who want self-determination—to concoct or buy into a vast, civilization-destroying conspiracy at the hands of teens who simply want to live comfortably in their own bodies? There are so many smart, fierce, badass trans advocates out there, and if you don’t follow them, you should. I am satisfied with my level of understanding of trans issues to say that mainstream and influential pundits or journalists “just asking questions” is no longer a good faith position if it ever was. Jesse Singal and Pamela Paul and the rest of those shitheels can go hump cacti.
Another thing, while we’re here: I’m the most boring, balding, milquetoast middle-aged white guy imaginable, but I believe that queer is revolutionary, that the end-all-be-all of queerness is not necessarily “inclusion” in my boring, balding, milquetoast, middle-aged white guy normalcy, but a continual challenge to norms and assumptions and complacency. Not integration into a burning building. A sociological perspective from the excluded can grant folks a unique vision of what’s messed up about the community as a whole. I will always tend to be unable to see what’s outside my assumptions. As a member of a slew of intersecting, dominant normalcies, that makes for a lot of blind spots. We dominant folks need the queer outliers (in all senses of the term) to make and live their exceptional, countercultural truths, if only so that we don’t become sick from our own inbreeding and ignorance. We dominant folks need injections of unorthodox insights that challenge our assumptions to alert us to pathological and arbitrary tendencies we may and do lock in to our own detriment. There’s incalculable social value—even and especially to us squeamish normies—in the challenges that queerness historically brings. (Big reason I was never a Mayor Pete fan.)
M
Monetization. This thing’s free for you. Probably always will be unless the national taste suddenly swerves to something like the reader’s version of “dad bod.” And I hope it doesn’t because there are so many, better people to be reading with your precious time. People who make their livings doing things I can’t. That said, I’ve spent much of my life being told that the columnists at major legacy newspapers know things and are worth reading, and, well, a whole passel of them have been blatantly phoning it in since they got their sinecures. I have no concept of what makes a person’s opinions and analysis “worthy” of compensation. I have an inkling of what makes a person’s reporting or research worthy of compensation, and I can’t make time to do that stuff, even if I thought I was qualified. I do a job that strikes me as worthy of pay: stuff starts out messy, and after my labors, it is less so; ergo, I should be paid for what has manifestly been achieved. Don’t get me wrong: in a system where even the necessities of life cost money, people should get money regardless of “productivity.” I’m just saying my needs are as covered as much as is reasonable right now, minus chronic anxiety about something untoward happening and all that. I haven’t yet had to do a GoFundMe, and the existence of GoFundMe is proof the planet-killing asteroid is well-deserved. Fingers crossed.
N
Nazis. By which I refer, at least in the present context, to Substack. The platform has a Nazi problem, which I knew about before I started this newsletter. I started this newsletter largely to spare my friends on Facebook from having to endure rants on that platform, and Substack seemed like an easy starter platform. In my brain, I view Substack as a kind of centralized WordPress blog aggregator, which is stupid and old-school, but that’s my brain for you. By continuing to use it, I know I am drawing people to the platform where they might encounter and get sucked in by awful human beings spewing bad-faith content that gets monetized and rewarded and promoted and profiled (cough—Bari Weiss—cough) by this platform, which seems to have no spine or principles, based on the weaselly excuses and bullshit it offered when the Nazi problem was first forced into the spotlight.
Here come the “buts.”
But the above description really seems to describe, well, damn near everything everywhere these days. I know there are good alternative platforms, especially for those who monetize. I don’t. I were terribly popular, I might try to ask for some good-will donations, but let’s not kid ourselves here. I have little of great value to offer that can’t be got from smarter, more professional specialists in their own fields, and you should read them and pay them for their work. As long as I can keep my lights on doing my regular job, if you have spare coin, you should donate it to transfolk or to the down-and-out or to good causes doing more than just symbolic, performative horseshit. They need it more and/or can do more with it than I.
But I also started writing this with an audience I primarily thought of as radiating outward from my space here in Kansas. Not to dis you if you’re from, like, Jersey or Norway; it’s just how I conceived of things. And ‘round here, I mainly talk to/at aging libs who have the occasional naughty lefty thought they have to keep on the down-low for fear of losing their jobs, or congregations, or clients, or whatever. They’re the demo that’s known (of) me long enough and still reads long-form, even when the “form” part is debatable. Oh, and maybe some of my Gen X cohort who aren’t slamming beers and voting for Trump and bitching about the kids these days. The former group are barely inclined to try Substack because it’s not exactly like Facebook’s UI, and the latter are anybody’s guess. I want to feed to the radical wolf inside the Boomer types, if only so they don’t slide further into reaction.
Finally, I’ve been playing around with the fact that this newsletter stuff has no established form. Oh, sweet baby jeebus, YES, I could use an editor, but time-wise, work-wise, the way a piece barely connects with a news “hook” on a good day (and my lingering inclination that relevance to something fairly salient might be a good thing)—it all conspires against, well, quality, especially the kind that shows up best in concision. So for the time being, I’m playing with the form in the context of my working life, trying to figure out what’s doable, what I think is apt for me to attempt and settle into, given the resources I have, the vices I’m prone to. Let that messy experimentation happen on Substack, which profits off and funnels money to Nazis, and if I can find a groove I like, maybe then I’ll move off to cleaner pastures if they’re still clean by then, and maybe by that time, readers will know for sure what to expect and be more comfortable or committed to follow.
P
Is for partisan politics. All my life, Republicans have been fighting against what I’ve been gravitating more and more to believe. I struggled to grasp this, and eventually came down on the side that said, more or less, that the Republican brand commanded loyalty it never deserved from some otherwise okay folks who didn’t know better, but overall, the GOP were, ideologically, proto-supremacist pretty much all along, and since Trump’s first nomination, I’ve been unable to see any path to reform or rejection of supremacism for them at all. It can be the rigorous supremacism of a theocratic nativist illiberal democracy or the might-makes-right supremacy of a Mad Max world after they’ve gone full nihilist and wrecked it all. I thus tend to view Republican electeds in much the same way I view police: there may be some decent humans among their number—if we abstract these folks from their roles as either Republican electeds or cops—but insofar as they are acting as agents of those institutions, I don’t trust them. We need two or more parties battling it out on a bedrock of consensus about the desirability of multiracial, pluralistic, egalitarian democracy.
The Dems usually make me wanna barf. I view them as wishy-washy, too willing to capitulate, too chickenshit to take stands, too short-termist and too focused on individual electeds’ specific fiefdoms of influence, too consultant-driven, too median-voter minded, too stuck in the political lessons of yesteryear, too, too, too. It’s one of the reasons I’d be terrible at politics myself, probably. I’m not exactly a purist, because I’m old enough to understand that compromises and screwings-over often happen, sometimes even “have” to happen, that palatability and pandering are kinda required to win elections, but their brand is toxic where I live, and in many other places, and Dems almost allowed it to become so by not fighting back savvily against decades of efforts to ruin it by orchestrated right-wing campaigns and media empires. I vote for them usually as the lesser of the evils, but also because they still have a toe in the world of sanity and normalcy that I understand, so it remains theoretically possible to influence them to do better or at least not crush people as we try at small scales to build alternative structures to meet our own needs.
Overall, the partisan dichotomy is seeming more and more outdated, given the ignorance of history and ideology among the populace. Electoralism leaves me cold in general because I don’t think it’ll save us, but it has to be watched and participated in. I hate that I have to focus on it as much as I do when it should be the floor, not the ceiling, for most exhortations these days. I don’t invest emotionally in presidents or other electeds. I don’t relate to those who do, really. I get that enthusiasm is required for GOTV efforts, and parasocial tribalism has to be met with more of the same it seems, and the nationalization of politics in America has eaten everything, but jeez, all of that sucks, big time.
Generally, I hate it here, and by “here,” I mean planet Earth.
As for “Independents” and “Free Thinkers”? When everybody wants to claim labels like those, how many can justifiably do so?
Look, I get that my profile of traits and viewpoints puts me on a slope that inclines towards certain unpleasant things. I could slide into Shaking My Fist At Clouds, into Woman- or Insert-Ethnicity-Here-Hating, into Polarization Is The Problem, into Monocausal Explanations 1, 2, 3, . . . , into Status Quo Apology, into Cynical Centrist Elder Telling the Youths to Calm Their Tits or—gawd—into Just Asking Questions Wormtongue-ism.
Those are the risks of where I come from. The risks of folks who self-define as independent thinkers or intellectual dark webslingers or I-Dare-You-To-Cancel-Me types—are just as numerous. Slippery slopes to really ugly shit everywhere. If you’re drawn to that kinda stuff or their purveyors, it’s good to know what sort of catchment bin most of it leads to. I go with Vonnegut here, his concept from Cat’s Cradle of the wrang-wrang: a person who embodies a belief system or way of life in such a way that their example convinces you that the belief system is not for you. The Manosphere is a great source of wrang-wrangs. If dabbling with some heterodox views has a nasty slope down toward becoming one of The Worst People Alive, then I will eschew such dabbling and worry for those who seem to be engaged in it.
S
I think we need socialism. Democratic socialism. I just can’t figure out how to get human beings’ long-term well-being served by capitalism so long as capitalism isn’t, and really can’t be, inherently informed by some kind of communitarian wisdom. Will it happen? Beats me. Probably not in time (climate catastrophe, dissolution of the US, eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, [insert your favorite cataclysm here]), but I’ve been on the losing side of practically everything in my life, so this ain’t my first rodeo.
I dunno. What else can I do to tank my own Substack follower numbers?
I will probably always have a soft spot for Billy Joel.
Okay, that one probably did it.1
For the witty trolls, let me make it easy: “You skipped __ for ______!”
B for Bullshit
C for Crap / Cuck / Cope
G for Garbage / Groomer / Gay
H for Homo / Hopium / [hell, I dunno]
O for OMFG this is stupid
Q for [I got nuthin]
R for [r-slur]
T for Trash
U for Unreadable
V for Vagina In Profile [or something?]
W for WTF
X for [I got nuthin]
Y for You Suck
Z for Zachariah, Robert C. O’Brien’s 1974 sci-fi novel about a post-apocalyptic world in which a traumatized young woman encounters a stranger who tries to dominate and r*pe her, which is what your stupid entry did to my brain. In this essay, I…