The Baffler Magazine Issue No. 32

No.
32
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No. 32
The journal that blunts the cutting edge

The journal that blunts the cutting edge
No. 32
EDIT OR IN CHIEF PU BLISHER
Chris Lehmann Noah McCormack

M A N AG I N G E D I T O R PR E SIDEN T
Lindsey Gilbert Hamilton Fish

A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R S EX ECU TI V E DIR ECT OR
Dave Denison Valerie Corts

Lucie Elven
9
A S S I S TA N T E D I T O R
W EB DE V EL OPER A N D C ON T E N T M A NAGER
Emily Carroll
James White
P O E T RY E D I T O R
AU D I E N C E D E V E L O PM E N T A S S O C I AT E
Nicole Terez Dutton
Hannah Gais
C ON T R I B U T I N G E D I T O R S
F I N A N C E M A N AG E R
Barbara Ehrenreich
Dolores Rothenberg
Susan Faludi
Evgeny Morozov 9
Rick Perlstein PA S T P U B L I S H E R S
Kim Stanley Robinson The MIT Press, 20122014
George Scialabba Conor ONeil, 20092011
Jacob Silverman Greg Lane, 19932007
Astra Taylor
FOU N DING EDIT OR S
Catherine Tumber
Thomas Frank and Keith White
Eugenia Williamson
John Summers, editor in chief (20112016)
9
D E S IG N A N D A R T D I R E C T O R
Patrick JB Flynn Acknowledgments

Kind thanks to Cassandra de Alba, Ratik Asokan,
P R O D U C T I ON A S S I S TA N T
Zachary Davis, Ben Hattem, and Daniel Moattar,
Joan Flynn who made the muzak possible.
No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.
The Baffler, 19 West 21st Street, Suite 1001, New York, NY 10010, USA
thebaff ler.com 2 0 1 6 T H E B A F F L E R F O U N DAT IO N , I N C .
2 1 the Baffler [no. 32]

Muzak
of the Spheres
R are it is that the careworn
American public casts its collec-
tive gaze heavenwardunless in
desperate prayer for debt relief,
affordable housing, non-extor- S T UA RT G O L D E N B E RG
tionate college instruction, or any
of the other fugitive comforts that our grand household gods that lord over the surpris-
neoliberal consensus has catapulted into the ingly totemistic cult of domestic order.
unreachable empyrean. In the hushed and Truly, we live in an epoch, and a New
reverent darkness of the Baffler observatory, World, of many fearful signs and wonders. As
however, we hew closely to the counsel of R. W. B. Lewis famously wrote in the middle
that great socialist bon vivant Oscar Wilde: of the last century, the American myth saw
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are . . . a divinely granted second chance for the
looking at the stars. human race, after the first one had been so
But what is it we see, exactly, when we disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old
take the measure of the cosmic vastness World. At the same time, the dismal specter
that engulfs us? Baffler 32, Muzak of the of Trumpism is poised to swallow the fragile
Spheres, is a mystic portal, yielding many civic-republican myth of the New Worlds
strange paeans to unknown worlds. In promise whole, with corruption, vice, and
Material Issue, Jackson Lears peers deeply reality-TV hucksterism spitting out only the
into the Western metaphysical past and rancid poison of Old World imperial decay.
rescues a neglected tradition of animistic For the beckoning American cosmos to
materialisman account of physical being translate into anything resembling a usable
that bristles with new possibilities of life past, we must resist all manner of authoritar-
and profound implications for how we think ian certainty, from truth-averse Trumpery
about our planet and our pinched allotment to the feckless and arrogant bromides of
of mortal time upon it. Barbara Ehrenreich, scientism. And thats why, in very diverse
in Displaced Deities, supplies a puckish registers of historical argument, Rick Perl-
headcount of the many godsgreater and stein, Ann Neumann, and Jessa Crispin have
lessersent rudely packing by the unwav- all tendered invaluable cautions against the
ering certainties of scientific consensus. enormous condescension of posterity, be it
Sam Kriss takes deadly aim at the allied the present, Trump-inflected quest for an
brittle dogmas of the New Atheist set, eternally recurring modern political past or
while Jonathon Sturgeon stalks the wild the sanitized vision of a predestined Ameri-
transcendentalist American raconteur who can empire. So join us, fearlessly Baffled fel-
is forever trying to eat the universe. Astra low adventurers, as we stir groggily up from
Taylor delves into the untamed properties of the gutters and scan the ever-shifting scene
nonhuman personhood, animal, vegetable, overhead, wondering all the while at the
and corporate. Youll even find your humble strange new worlds beneath our feet.t
head Baffler pondering the spick-and-span Chris Lehmann
the Baffler [no. 32] 1 3

T h e B a f f l e r ( no. 32) C on t e n t s
Th e Pat er n a l R e t u r n Mu z a k of t h e S ph er e s
Skopje, City On the Make 8 Material Issue 48
Alexander Clapp Reclaiming a living cosmos
from the dead-end tradition
Father Worship 15 of Western scientism
Hamiltons New World Jackson Lears
scripture
Peter Manseau Displaced Deities 62
A reply
Improv-da 20 Barbar a Ehrenreich
How Palantir has made
corporate orthodoxy out The Schmaltz in Our Stars 68
of experimental theater Talia Lavin
David V. Johnson
Village Atheists, Village Idiots 72
Sam Kriss
Th e L ong A r m
Thin Blue Spin 26 Divine Indigestion 82
The endlessly fabulized
How U.S. cops have
American self
raided social media
Jonathon Sturgeon
A aron Miguel Cant
Time Bandits 38
Why our political past
is rarely prologue
Rick Perlstein
S T UA RT G O L D E N B E RG

Mu z a k of t h e S p h e r e s
Househol d G ods Poe m s

Madam Prescient 96 Kirk Franklin Has to
Raising the spirit Be in Every Rap Song
of American radicalism from Now On 14
Jessa Crispin Hanif Willis-Abdurr aqib
Small Worlds 104 Incendiary Art:

The soul-deadening magic The Body 67
of tidying up Patricia Smith
Chris Lehmann
Ode to Lithium
The Shock of the Crazed 122 #419: Perfect 95
The hidden world Shir a Erlichman
of art brut
J. C. Hallman Long division at
the dinner table 133
A n i m a l M agn e t is m fr ancine j. harris
Who Speaks for the Trees? 134 Nothing Wrong

Astr a Taylor with a Maple 145
Matt Hart
Womb Up, America 146
Lucy Ellmann Song 159
Charif Shanahan
The Higher Happiness 152
George Scialabba
P ho t o gr a ph ic
Th e R e a l A m er ic a Afronauts 6
Cristina de Middel
Black Elk, Woke 172
On the remaking of
a Native American prophet E x h i bi t A
Ann Neumann Atlas Smudged 81
Danielle Chenette
S t ory
Dazzle Speaks Ba f f l om at h y 182
with the Dead 160
Scott Br adfield

Pho t o gra p h ic
Afronauts
3 Cristina de Middel
Remembering the National Academy of Science,

Space Research, and Philosophyi.e., Zambias
post-independence 1960s space program.

C R I S TI N A D E M I D D E L | I N S TIT U T E

T h e Pat e r n a l R e t u r n
Skopje,
City On the Make
3 Alexander Clapp
C itizens of Skopje have nicknamed Macedonias capital the dj vu

city. Visitors can instantly understand why. Everywhere former prime
minister Nikola GruevskiMr. Cut and Paste, as his compatriots
dubbed himtraveled on state visits, he would admire a particular
world monument, return to Skopje, and replicate it. When Gruevski
went to Paris in 2009, he was fascinated by the way islands of willow
trees interrupted the flow of the Seine. So he had three exorbitantly
priced trees dispatched from New Zealand and planted on specially
erected platforms in the Vardar River. Hope, Love, and Faiththe
names given to the trees at their dedicationslump weakly in the
Balkan spring. When Gruevski went to Sydney later that year, he saw
Skopje 2014 replicas of ancient galleons that had been converted into museums. So
back home in Skopje, two concrete pirate shipsone a restaurant, one
is a vast
a hotelare now parked on the right bank of the Vardar.A third ves-
money- sel, currently a set of cement stilts in the water, will eventually offer a
nightclub.Walk elsewhere around Skopje, and you can find an Epcot-
laundering
style assemblage of world landmarks: the Arc de Triomphe, the Lon-
project, and don Eye, the White House, the Pantheon, the Brandenburg Gate. We
pray that Gruevski doesnt go to Venice, one Skopjian told me. We
Macedonians
will be commuting to work in gondolas.
will be stuck Its never been easy to say exactly who the Macedonians are. The
Republic of Macedonia was established in 1991 after the collapse
with the debt.
of Yugoslavia. Bordered by Albania to the west and Greece to the
9 south, the republic contains a large Albanian minority and engenders
smoldering resentment from Greece, which claims the rightful use of
the name Macedonia for its northern region. But Gruevski spent his
decade in power trying to forge a distinct Macedonian identity. The
grassroots reconstruction of the Macedonian capital is part of a project
called Skopje 2014. As its name painfully reminds Macedonians, the
initiative is now two years behind schedule; whats more, its expected
to cost them approximately one-tenth of their GDP.
Gruevski saw Skopje 2014 as a way to erase the capitals
Communist past and boost the Macedonian tourism industry, but
the timing of the project was not lost on anyone: officials announced

VA N CO DZ A M BA S K I
Skopje 2014 just two years after Greece denied Macedonia a place Skopjes very own
at the 2008 NATO Summit. For twenty-five years now, Greece has Arc de Triomphe,
constructed in 2011,
refused Macedonia entry into both the EU and NATO, insisting colored by protesters.
that Macedonia belongs to the Greeks. Converting his capital into
a classical theme park was Gruevksis provocative attempt to show
Greeceand the worldwhich small southeast European nation is the
true inheritor of antiquity.
Empire Burlesque
Traditionally, Skopjes built environment has said more about its con-
querors than its inhabitants. A few years ago, Macedonian television
aired a documentary about an elderly woman who lived on what is now
Makedonia Street. Even though she never vacated the apartment, she
saw her address change four times in her lifetime: from Boulevard Petr
to Boulevard Czarov to Boulevard Marshal Tito to Makedonia Street.
The city around her, meanwhile, had been ravaged by the Second World
Warand, in 1963, flattened by an earthquake that destroyed 75 to 80
percent of its buildings and left the hands of the old railway station clock
stuck at 5:17, where they remain to this day. For a brief period, Skopje
became one of the largest construction sites on Earth. Belgrade and Mos-
cow and Washington competed to give aid. The task of designing new
Skopje went to a Japanese architect, Kenzo Tange, who left the city an
austere jumble of concrete cylinders and utilitarian housing blocks.

Only the best for Macedonia! Despite all this construction and recon-
struction, the gritty incongruities of the Bal-
a biker named Ivo said,
kans have never left Skopje. Walking at night in
gesturing toward a 1 million the suburbs, I watched teenagers race BMWs
under the desperate grayness of Commu-
statue of a groveling beggar.
nist-era apartment buildings. During the day, I
9 visited the old Albanian and Turkish neighbor-
hoods on the left bank of the Vardar. I crossed
the Stone Bridgea sturdy construction where, for three days in 1689,
the anti-Ottoman rebel Karposh was impaled, kebab-like, on a stake
until his insides dematerialized. Across the bridge, huddled beneath
crumblingJustinian fortifications, is arija, a slope of terracotta
roofs pierced with minarets and laced with stone alleyways. I passed an
antique shop that sells Yugoslav Army trench coats. Men in white skull-
caps played backgammon, plucked at a iftelia, chain-drank tea out of
hourglass cups, and put off their obligations until nesr, tomorrow.
Just outside Skopje, I visited Shutka, one of the largest gypsy
communities in Europe and the only one in the world that still uses
Romanithe traditional language of gypsiesas its official language.
Many Shutka gypsies still live in the corrugated iron shacks constructed
by U.S. Army engineers in 1963. Above them loom the stark yellow high-
rises of Amdi Bajram, the local strongman whose unorthodox methods
of securing votes were recently laid bare by WikiLeaks. Election morn-
ing, thousands of left-footed shoes were distributed to Roma voters with
the promise that if Bajram won the election by nightfall, right-footed
shoes would also be distributed. Everywhere in Shutka, I saw the gyp-
sies haphazard attempts at sedentary existence: the clothes hung from
a string and washed with a hose, the rusted-out truck bed doubling as a
vegetable garden, the scrap metal bartered for bread. On a nearby tele-
phone pole, posters advertised a Sunday goose fight.
Back in the city center, I met some of the new citizenry. Almost all
the Skopje 2014 statues were cast in pure Florentine bronze. Only
the best for Macedonia! a biker named Ivo said, gesturing toward a 1
million statue of a groveling beggar. Opposite the beggar, a 1.5 million
bronze shoe shiner polishes away. An actual shoe shiner here would need
to work thirty thousand days to purchase that, Ivo said, and then rode
away. I crossed back over the Vardar to the Archaeological Museum.
The Bridge of Civilizations is lined with legends from the Macedonian
past. What would Gabriel, the somber-looking Byzantine hermit on my
right, think of Paionia, the pagan priestess supplicating the Olympians
on my left? And what punishment would Alexander the Great mete out
to the men who cast the statue of him suckling at his mothers breast?

VA N CO DZ A M BA S K I
Free Fall in Marble During this springs

Colorful Revolution,
Next to the Prosecutors Officea spaceship structure that looks like
Skopjians took up
its ripped from the pages of VitruviusI encountered the nine muses their paint slingshots
idling beneath a glitzy Corinthian portico. Tiny speakers attached to to protest what they
call Gruevisma
their heads emitted intermittent high-pitch rings to ward off descend- regime of corruption,
ing pigeons. On top of the nearby government buildings, where the surveillance, and
rampant spending.
state decided against putting bronze Macedonians, I spotted the
clay Macedonians. Their exact identities are contested by the locals.
Surely its the stepmother of Saint Cyrils second-cousin. We havent
yet commemorated her, a Macedonian joked to me. Very few statues
in Skopje 2014 are of ethnic Albanians, who make up a quarter of
Macedonias population.
The centerpiece of Skopje 2014 is the Warrior on a Horse
an eight-story triumphal column featuring Alexander the Great
atop Bucephalus, his horse. From the circular platform on which
Bucephalus rears his front legs, a shower of rain falls into a basin that
simultaneously shoots water up in an elaborate choreography of jet
streams, some of them vomited out of the mouths of roaring lions.
During the day, police are assigned to the fountain to prevent gypsies
from using it as a bathtub. At dusk, as Skopjians retreat through the
square on their way home from work, gilded lampposts blare Wagner,
the theme score from E.T., and Bing Crosby Christmas tunes. At

night, the fountain doubles as a light show: Alexander charges atop a

revolving halo of rainbow skylights.
We know that Gruevski designed much of Skopje 2014 because
he has said so himself. In February 2015, opposition parties in
Macedonia revealed that Gruevski had been conducting the largest
illegal surveillance program in Europe since the dismantling of the
Stasi, East Germanys secret police. Over a four-year period, the
government recorded the telephone conversations of some twenty
thousand handpicked Macedonians. The beauty of the program was
that it also swept up Gruevski himself in the surveillance netand the
substance of his conversations led the European Union to intervene in
Macedonia last summer and force his resignation.
The wiretaps laid bare much of the xenophobia, criminality, and
corruption well known to the long-suffering citizens of the Balkans.
There were long discussions of rampant nepotism and Olympian-
scale kickback schemes. There was an exchange in which Gruevski
explained his decision to park his 600,000 Mercedes outside
Skopje, where reporters could not see it. There were racist rants about
Albanians and plans to falsify electoral ballotsand even a bid to cover
up a murder. But amid all this cronyism and mayhem, the wiretaps also
revealed Gruevski carefully pondering the architectural craft. No, the
columns we saw on our trip to Washington were Classical columns,
he reprimands an adviser at one point. I want Baroque for Skopje.
In another tape, he insists that all marble balconies in Skopje must be
no more, and no less, than two-and-a-half meters long. Behind the
Universal Hall, I want a fountain. Like that one from Rome, he says
in still another conversation. The new telecommunications tower, he
warns an underling, must be done with marble, not some plaster that
looks like marble.
Public Art, Without the Public

The wiretaps revealed, as well, what Gruevskis opponents had sus-
pected for years: Skopje 2014 is a vast money-laundering project.
Construction contracts were handed out to party loyalists. Gruevski
exploited a curious loophole to enrich himself. After all, how can you
really put a price tag on something so ineffably, and so subjectively,
beautiful as a statue of a shoe shiner? For almost everything in Sko-
pje 2014, the Macedonian state deliberately paid at least two or three
times the cost of construction and materials. Banks provided Gruevski
the loans; Gruevskis party will likely receive its duly appointed 5 per-
cent kickback on every construction project; Macedoniansand their
grandchildrenwill be stuck with the debt.

At the Radiobar Caf, I met a group called the Raspeani Skopjani,
the Singing Skopjians. Its fifteen members used to gather every Sun-
day morning to sing in protest against different aspects of Gruevskis
authoritarianism. To say that Skopje 2014 is ugly is to completely
miss the point. It completely defies the concept of public space, how
a community gathers. Many citizens here refuse to walk through their
own downtown. They feel insulted, one singer, Ivana Dragsiqi, told
me. Gruevski controls the papers and the news stations. His police
stomp out our rallies. We had to come up with an asymmetrical form
of protest. Raspeani Skopjani got their inspiration from Horkestar,
a chorus in Serbia that protests Aleksandar Vuis authoritarianism.
From Skopje, the idea has spread: nearly every former Yugoslav coun-
try now has a chorus of protesters. Theyve hosted one another on a
rotating basis.
Each Singing Skopjians ballad is tailored to a different complaint
against the government. To protest the Macedonian Churchs spending
habits, they gathered outside the Church of St. Clement of Ohrid and
sangJanisJoplins immortal refrain, Oh Lord, wont you buy me a Mer-
cedes Benz? When Gruevski began cutting down the trees lining Ilin-
denska Boulevard, they sang Monty Pythons Lumberjack Song. The
tragedy is that Skopje was a truly international city, Filip Jovanovski, a
singer, told me. At the height of the Cold War, in 1963, the world came
together here to help us rebuild. Poland gifted us an art museum. Lon-
don lent us double-decker buses. Romania gave us a hospital.
Together Filip and I walked opposite the government building
where Gruevski was building the headquarters for MEPSO, the Elec-
tricity Transmission System Operator of Macedonia. We watched as
workers laid a thin layer of gleaming white plaster over cold blocks of
rebar and concrete. The plaster, one of them told us, had tiny bits of
glass in it, so that the building glows when lit up at night. The fin-
ished half of the Electricity Transmission System resembled a Doric
Greek temple; the unfinished half resembled a prison complex. Our
government puts on a pluralistic, democratic face to the world, Filip
said. But underneath, were the same regime we were under Tito. Sko-
pje is Gruevskis Potemkin village.
In one of the final wiretapped conversations released to the public,
Gruevski is heard ordering his culture minister not to appear at any
parliamentary sessions that might attempt to prosecute the architects
of Skopje 2014. If were asked about Skopje 2014, he says, we will
lose the next election. Most Skopjians I met would be content with
thatand maybe another (nonfatal) earthquake thrown in for good
measure.t

Kirk Franklin Has to Be
in Every Rap Song from Now On
6 Hanif Willis-Abdurr aqib
I, too, have craned my neck / under a shower head that is not

my own / & let melodies from heaven rattle the tiles in the
bathroom of a stranger / like the tiles were gently placed there
/ by my own hands / & I insist on this small comfort / even
though I know I cannot sing / because my grandmother also
could not sing / & this did not stop her from shouting out Ms.
Mahalia / over a kitchen sink full of dishes / even after the
packs of cigarettes finally came to collect / & left with one of
her lungs in their palms / & even then she would still send us to
the corner store / where they knew our familys name / & have
us sneak her cigarettes back home / inside the Sunday paper /
so that my father wouldnt know / & with the change we would
buy cassette singles / & sing along to Whitney Houston on the
school bus out loud / during the gang war 90s / & last night I
went to the corner store to buy smokes / for a woman who was
waiting for me in a bed / with sheets that I could never afford /
& I do not know what it is to crave smoke / but I do know what
it is to crave the touch of a smoker / & want to hold them close
until morning / & this is how I know the holy ghost lives inside
of whatever is blown from the lips of the last person you kissed
/ & what Im mostly saying is that I know of no secular black
people / I know of no black people who are not being prayed for
by someone somewhere / & so maybe all of my skinfolk actually
are my kinfolk / if all I require is a meal to be shared / a bounty
to be praised in silence / but for the small choir behind us / of
everyone who we have loved / in spite of their singing / & I need
gospel wherever it chooses to come for me / nestled in between
two unholy verses / or in the harsh & scattered whistles of
breath running from a grandmothers lips in her last nights of
sleep / or in the small ashtrays found hidden under the bed upon
her leaving / & the small white mountains built inside, each
humming their own dying notes

Father Worship
Hamiltons New World scripture
3 Peter Manseau
Two years before he was shot in the chest, and two centuries before Even with
he became an unlikely pop icon, Alexander Hamilton wondered
a killer
how religion might be used to win elections. Suggesting that politics
could not rely merely on the reason of men, the nations first Trea- breakbeat,
sury secretary proposed the creation of a Christian Constitutional
biblically
Society designed to appeal to an emotion-driven electorate by unit-
ing a defense of Christianity and the U.S. Constitution. The passions sanctioned
incited by faith, Hamilton believed, could be harnessed to combat
social control
our political foes.
This plan may have been a sincere product of late-blooming piety could never
on the part of the embattled Founding Father, or it may have been a
be cool.
cynical ploy. Either way, one thing is certain: such sharp-eyed deploy-
ments of spiritual sympathies would not play as well on Broadway 9
as rap-battle policy debates. So its no surprise that the religiosity of
the ten-dollar founding father in Hamilton: An American Musical is
mostly limited to personal appeals in times of duress: a somber search
for solace through prayer after the death of his son, along with some
NSFW intercessory pleading when femme fatale Maria Reynolds
leads him to her bed. Lord, Hamilton croons in vain, show me how
to say no to this.
Theres just one other cameo for religious sentiment in Lin-Man-
uel Mirandas Pulitzer-, Grammy-, and Tony-winning blockbuster. It
comes as Hamilton is helping George Washington write his famed
farewell address. A quotation from the Book of Micah presages the
peace and hard-earned repose awaiting the retiring president, but
thats where the piety stops. Hamiltons real-life suggestion that
Washington make a case that national morality requires a gen-
erally received and divinely authoritative Religion ends up on the
cutting-room floor, just like the Christian Constitutional Society,
and for probably the same reason: it plays poorly with the kids. Reli-
gion and morality are essential props, Hamilton wrote in his draft
of Washingtons Farewell Address. In vain does he claim the praise
of patriotism, who labors to subvert or undermine these great pillars
of human happiness. Even with a killer breakbeat, this invocation of

Hamilton is an altar call
for would-be patriots
previously too burdened
by ambivalence to fully
embrace the American faith.
9
the awesome power
of biblically sanc-
tioned social control
could never be cool.
Much has been
said about how cast-
ing minorities as
icons of Indepen-
dence makes Ham-
ilton the story of
America then, told
by America now,
but its relationship
to belief is the more
subtle act of cultural
reimagining. Miran-
das ingenious retelling
of Revolutionary-era
U.S. history studiously
ignores common eighteenth-centurynotions of the role religion should
play in society, replacing them with the fully privatized faith of today.
Yet despite the plays stalwart separation of church and founding
statesmen, there remains something aboutHamiltonthat strikes a reli-
gious nerve: namely, the way that its various canny subversions of the
popular imagery of the Founding era ultimately reaffirm the Ameri-
can creation myth. The musicals off-the-charts popularity stems from
more than Mirandas catchy hooks and inventive lyrics. As Hamilton
continues to swell into a bona-fide reflection of the zeitgeist, one under-
lying factor seems most responsible for its rise: Mirandas fable of the
republics founding offers a way to take part in the cult of sacred history
without the usual birthright credentials and ritual obeisances. This is
no mere hip-hopera; its an altar call for would-be patriots previously

R E D U X P I C T U R E S | SA R A K R U LW I C H
too burdened by ambivalence to fully embrace the American faith.

The favored avatars of this faith may change with the times, but
its creed does not. The birth of the nation remains our One True God.
The Revolution, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers serve as
something of a trinity establishing the cultures unquittable cosmology
and incontestable truth. Seen this way,Hamiltonis less a new vision of
the past than a translation of the sacred stories of American civil reli-
gion into the vernacularin this case, the lingua franca of contempo-
rary pop culture, a mashup of hiphop, R&B, rock, and show tune sam-
ples. And like any vernacular rendering of a text considered holy and
immutable, it is at once radical on the surface and retrograde under-
neaththe best example in years of how a dominant worldview adapts
to survive social change.

In its marketing materials, as well as in the title of the bestselling

book about the show,Hamiltonis frequently called a revolution. A more
apt trope would be a Reformation. After all, the sixteenth-century reli-
gious upheaval that arguably gave birth to the American experiment
sprang forth from a vernacular shift in popular worship. And this shift,
too, was legitimized through a vision of wider access to the founda-
tional stories of a civilization.
Exactly five hundred years before Hamilton rewired the nations
mythology for the disaffected, the Dutch theologian and humanist
Desiderius Erasmus imagined a world in which access to sacred books
was not limited to the learned few.Would that they were translated
into each and every language so that they might be read and under-
stood not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Saracens,
Erasmus wrote in 1516. Would that the farmer might sing snatches of
scripture at his plough, that the weaver might hum phrases of scripture
to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveler might lighten with stories
from scripture the weariness of his journey.
Building on Erasmuss vision a few years later, Martin Luther
undertook his translation of the New Testament into German, first
published in 1522, knowing that replacing one language with another
was not enough. He believed that the meaning of the text had become
dangerously detached from the lives of common believers, and saw the
task of the translator as a gently didactic one: i.e., to encourage Chris-
tians to see themselves and hear echoes of their voices in the pages of
holy writ.
Defending his process of translation, Luther insisted that creat-
ing this sense of recognition was essential even when it departed from
the texts literal meaning.We must ask the mother in the home, the
children on the street, the common person in the market about this,
he wrote. We must be guided by their tongue, the manner of their
speech, and do our translating accordingly. Then they will understand
it and recognize that we are speaking German to them.
In the same fashion, persuading audience members that they
recognize stories and people from which they have become alienated
is Hamiltons not-so-secret sauce. Its creator sounds a lot like Luther
when he recounts the charged moment of recognition that set him on
the path to chronicling Alexander Hamiltons life in the light of con-
temporary immigrant experience. Heres Miranda, explaining to The
Atlantic his decision to undertake a Reformation-style recasting of the
Hamilton story as he read Ron Chernows 2004 biography: When he
gets to New York, I was like, I know this guy. Ive met so many ver-
sions of this guy, and its the guy who comes to this country and is like,

I am going to work six jobs if youre only working one. Im gonna make Like any
a life for myself here.
vernacular
And the show extends this same basic translation method to every
Founder it depicts. In the original Broadway cast, Leslie Odom Jr.s rendering
Aaron Burr was a smooth Mos Def. Christopher Jacksons George
of a text
Washington was John Legend crossed with Dr. Dre. When Dav-
eedDiggs made his second-act entrance as Thomas Jefferson in rock- considered
star purple, he was meant to evoke Prince. The point of all these asso-
holy and
ciations is not just to amp up the productions entertainment value. As
Diggs has described his earliest introduction to the showhis con- immutable,
version narrative, if you preferhe was jolted into recognition by the
Hamilton is
same mystic powers that imbued Luthers Bible translation: language
and characterization creating a set of associations allowing the text to at once radical
resonate with his experience of daily life.
on the surface
The first time I did a workshop of it, Chris Jackson was playing George
and retrograde
Washington, and it changed everything the first time I heard him sing
as George Washington. Because he was so clearly George Washington. underneath.
So all of a sudden, this guy that I know really well, weve been freestyl-
ing together for years, and, I know his family, I know his kids, I know
9
his wifethis is George Washington! A regular person who looks like
people who I know, who has many successes and many failures and is
not a perfect human being but is a great, great man. All of a sudden I
have a real connection to this Founding Father whos been the dude on
the money for so long... . If something similar to that is happening for
people who come see the show, the effect really is profound, because
that gives me a type of ownership over the history of this country that I
didnt have before.
But ownership of history can be tricky. Inevitably, Luthers ver-

nacular protest against ecclesial authority succeeded long enough
to undermine itself, coming over time to replicate many of the very
things it rejected. Luthers anti-papal vision of a priesthood of all
believers wound up ratifying the still-more exclusive doctrine of
predestination, and his disdain for literalism when it came to trans-
lating the Bible gave way to the rote fetishization of scripture itself.
Erasmuss dream of farmers and weavers singing snatches of scripture
at their ploughs and shuttles never made the benefits of faith equally
accessible to all.
And so, too, with the new civic faith enshrined in Hamilton: we
may have found a few new songs to sing about the gods of our troubled
history, but when it comes to the stories we count on to tell us who we
are, we remain caught in an endless refrain.t

Improv-da
How Palantir has made corporate orthodoxy
out of experimental theater
3 David V. Johnson
Palantir Technologies, the multi-billion-dollar Palo Altobased
data-analysis software company founded in 2004 with CIA seed
money, gives its new employees a reading list. One assignment is Law-
rence Wrights The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which
feeds directly into the companys mythology. Rumor has itthough
Palantir neither confirms nor denies the reportthat the companys
software helped locate Osama bin Laden. This distinction has earned
the private intel firm, as author Mark Bowden observes, a bad-ass lit-
eral claim to the industrys highest term of praise: Killer App.
Another book on Palantirs syllabus is, well, quite a bit differ-
ent. Its called Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, the 1979 classic on
improvisational acting by Royal Court Theatre director-guru Keith
Johnstone. The choice seems odd. True, improvisation happens to be a
huge fad for the business-managerial class. Blue-chip companies such
as PepsiCo, McKinsey, MetLife, and Google all have hosted improv
seminars, while improv-themed courses are now entrenched at top
business schools such as MIT, Duke, and Stanford, the alma mater of
Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp and cofounder Peter Thiel.
Improv training supposedly boosts creativity, spontaneity, com-
munication, teamwork, and a positive mental outlook. But what added
value do Palantirians, as company employees call themselves, get from
simply reading Impro as a sort of employee manual? Why should work-
ers merely learn the rules of improvisation rather than train under
them? Cui bono? As is so often the case in Silicon Valley, the benefits of
the freedom- and productivity-enhancing product dont go to the user,
but to the boss.
In an industry filled with companies dedicated to making the
world a better place, Palantir sees itself as the best and brightest: the
company that hires the smartest engineers to solve the worlds big-
gest problems, such as fingering terrorists, spotting fraud, negotiat-
ing underwater mortgages, and distributing humanitarian relief. For
todays world-conquering technologists, all these problems have to
do with Big Datahow to access its informational value for maximal

DAV I D S U T E R
human benefit. And if Big Data is the nail, Palantir is wielding Thors
hammer. The company custom-builds software platforms for com-
panies, government agencies, and the military to help them integrate
their enormous, disparate sets of data into a searchable whole. The
Palantirians carrying out this mission are known as forward deployed
engineers or FDEs, who work on-site with clients to build the soft-
ware platform through direct interactionlike a crack special-forces
Geek Squad, but wearing black Palantir track jackets. The companys
high-priced contract work also follows a hard corporate-right profile,
as when its FDEs infamously embarked on an elaborate data-driven
bid to discredit WikiLeaks supporters and left-leaning critics of the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Its not for nothing that Peter Thiel has
lately been in the news for bankrolling the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that
sent Gawker Media into bankruptcyand for attending the GOP con-
vention in Cleveland as a speaker and Donald Trump delegate.

To Rule Them All
The first thing to understand about Palantirs improv-inflected business
model is that, like Thiel, it seeks to practice innovation and radical dis-
ruption in an ultra-controlled environment. Indeed, before we circle our
way into the cult of Impro, lets acknowledge another key literary touch-
stone, one that neatly distills these seemingly contradictory corporate
impulses into a renowned geek fable of power won against remorselessly
organized adversity. Thiel named his company after the magical seeing
stones featured in J. R. R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings trilogyindis-
pensable devices that allow users to view far and secret places with-
out risk of detection. The idea for Palantir sprang from Thiels days at
PayPal; there, he soon realized that building a program to spot fraud
became an existential necessity for a company dependent on credit-card
transactions. Readers of the LOTR trilogy may recall that the Palantri
had ambiguous value and actually enabled the evil Lord Sauron to view
their users. But Thiel, a lifelong Tolkien enthusiast, argues for a more
generous interpretation: the stones were indisputably good in the first
two ages of Middle Earth, he insists, and though they were used for evil
in the third, that just reminds us that theres great responsibility that
comes with power and that anything can become corrupted if were not
careful. And sure enough, Palantir claims that it has embraced privacy
and civil liberties protections as a core engineering commitment that
is baked in to its platforms ab initio. Along with its legal ninjas and
philanthropic engineers, the company has a cohort of workers it calls,
with no apparent intended irony, civil liberties engineers.
Like Thiel, the company takes its Tolkien to heart: LOTR per-
meates its culture, and its offices around the world are named after
Middle Earth locales: Palo Alto is the Shire, home of the humble
hobbits; McLean, Virginia, where it does its government work for
the national security state, is Rivendell, the glorious city of the Elven
elites; Los Angeles is Gondor; Abu Dhabi is Osgiliath. And the compa-
nys world-rescuing motto, emblazoned on hallway signs and company
T-shirts, is Save the Shire.
Beyond such nerdy fandom, Palantir appears to surpass other tech
companies in its zealous adoption of hacker culture, down to the cots in
offices, special logos for all working groups, and its ball-pit conference
room. It is a mission-driven enterprise in which employees are so com-
mitted that they are willing to work horrendously long hours for less pay
than they could get at Facebook or Googlein the low six figures. (We
are a high-calorie, low-salary environment, says the CEO.) Every sum-
mer the company schedules a hack weekits very own Burning Man,
according to a former FDEin which employees, freed from every-

day Palantir obligations, spend their time coming up with a solution (a
hack) to a problem of their choosing.
The company also embraces its own version of the Valleys fabled
flat hierarchy workplacemeaning that, apart from a handful of
founders and directors, it operates without the benefit of an org chart
or a rigid management structure. There are no leashes at Palantir,
says a company statement about its engineering culture. We work on
flat, decentralized teams, each with decision-making authority, and
our people have the freedom to approach, own, and solve problems
creatively. Under this regime of rhetorical worker empowerment, for-
ward-deployed teams act autonomously, and engineers are entrepre-
neurs who sell clients on the product (instead of relying on salespeo-
ple). The idea, according to the companys managerial ethos, is for the
best idea, rather than the most powerful person, to win.
Zero title awareness also makes people more approachable,
Eliot Hodges, then a Palantir FDE, wrote in 2012 about the company
culture. I am as comfortable chatting with Dr. Karp, our CEO, as I
am talking to the product dev team as I am with the awesome folks at
kitchen ops who keep us well-fed and happy.We are all Palantirians, and
we are in this mission together!
Spontaneous Servility
Dr. Karp, as the CEO is known to all Palantirians in this zero title
awareness company, is the figure most responsible for fostering this
culture. He has no technical degree, and obtained his PhD from the
University of Frankfurt under the supervision of communications
philosopher Jrgen Habermas. He addresses employees on an internal
video channel nicknamed KarpTube on subjects as varied as greed,
integrity, and Marxism. Hes the one with books on improvisational
theater in his office, and he spends a good deal of time fretting over the
ways in which moneyfrom an IPO, say, which Dr. Karp has resisted
could ruin the unique DNA of the company.
The thing Alex worries about the most is they have a culture
thats hard to sustain as it grows, James Carville, the Democratic con-
sultant whos also a company adviser, told the New York Times. I take
walks around Stanford with him, and he talks about it: If we become
something besides Palantir, what are we?
This is where the lessons of Impro would appear to come into play.
Through much of the book, Johnstone reviews the formative experi-
ences of his actor-training life and recounts in vivid detail the failures and
successes of his long career in experimental theater. He also lays out the
connections he has found between his work in the directors chair and

key insights gleaned from psychological and anthropological research.

In the first autobiographical chapter, and then repeatedly
throughout the book, Johnstone rails against traditional education
in a vein worthy of Thiels renowned dismissal of college degrees. Our
compulsory school system produces rigid conformists who anxiously
seek to behave according to scripts furnished by their social betters,
Johnstone observes. Improvisational theater seeks to disrupt these
schooling-bred rituals of deference to allow the creative genie within
to emerge. In a normal education, everything is designed to suppress
spontaneity, Johnstone writes, but I wanted to develop it.
Curiously, though, hes not out to smash the underlying hierarchi-
cal system but to exploit it. In the following chapter, Johnstone explores
how knowing ones status relative to others is crucial to finding ones
character. Humans are pecking-order animals down to the tiniest
details of our behavior, so it should come as no surprise that status
awareness is crucial to acting, as in every other arena of life:
Although this short essay is no more than an introduction, by now it

will be clear to you that status transactions arent only of interest to the
improviser. Once you understand that every sound and posture implies
a status, then you perceive the world quite differently, and the change is
probably permanent.
In improvisation, Johnstone goes on to argue, the key to facilitat-

ing spontaneous and creative play is saying yes to those youre work-
ing with. That is, when your acting partner makes an offer by ask-
ing a question or suggesting a line of conversation, you should follow.
The rival impulse to say no is a nonstarter in a creative work setting; it
either blocks the prospective opening or deflects it to some other, pre-
sumably safer, agenda item. The best improvisers overaccept and roll
with it; the bad ones are naysayers and make other actors jobs harder.
Reading about spontaneity wont make you more spontaneous, John-
stone writes. But it may at least stop you heading off in the opposite
direction.
Masks of Deference
In his final chapter, Johnstone turns to the use of masks. In the ideal act-
ing situation, the personality of the performer fuses with the persona fur-
nished by the mask, so that improvisers finally achieve a trance state and
feel possessed, as if someone else is controlling them. When mask work
succeeds, students feel a decisionlessness and an inevitability, while
the instructor sees the naturalness of someone who doesnt appear to
be acting. Good drama teaching, Johnstone concludes, threatens to

DAV I D S U T E R
alter the personality and induces feelings of disintegration.

So here, in short, are the central takeaways of Impro for Palantirs
ambitious corps of FDEs:
Your education and upbringing have ruined your genius.

In every interaction, its crucial to know your status relative to others
and embrace that role.
The key to unleashing creativity is saying yes and overaccepting.
You have attained true creative genius when your personality has
been disrupted, you have a feeling of decisionlessness, and you are so
absorbed in the work that you feel possessed.
In other words, to become a great Palantiriana title-less, autono-

mous, creative bermenschyou have to leave your prior self behind,
embrace your role, know your status, and reconfigure your personality
to the core dictates of your work. We can perhaps now understand the
concern of the investor who reportedly asked Dr. Karp, Is this a com-
pany or a cult?
Insofar as Palantir is a cult like Scientology, Impro is its Dianetics.
Only here, the famed character audit isnt the recruitment tool that it
is for L. Ron Hubbards devoted minions. No, the central inventory of
your inner psychic assets comes later in Palantirs improvisational odys-
sey. And in contrast to the Scientology-branded version, it doesnt cost
you moneyexcept, that is, in foregone salary and stock windfalls.t

T h e L ong A r m
Thin Blue Spin

How U.S. cops have raided social media
3 Aaron Miguel Cant
N ot long after Micah Johnson mortally gunned down five Dallas-area

police officers and wounded nine others in July, the social media
mavens at the Dallas Police Department tweeted out a picture of a
man they identified as a suspect in the shooting rampage. They also
asked their social media followingat nearly two hundred thousand,
one of the largest on Twitter for police departmentsto assist in track-
ing the suspect down.
There was only one problem: they were after the wrong man. They
were targeting Mark Hughes, the brother of one of the lead organizers
of the Dallas protest that preceded the mayhem. The Oswald-esque
photo they used of him smiling for the camera with an assault weapon
at his side was nothing out of the ordinary for Texas, which adopted
an open-carry law for firearms in 2015. Followers of the Dallas PDs
timeline caught the error minutes after the tweet went out. But the
photo of Hughes, together with its incriminating caption (This is one
of our suspects. Please help us find him!) remained up for seventeen
hours after it was posted, even as Dallas cops questioned and released
Hughes. Not surprisingly, the maligned Black Lives Matter protester
reported that he received thousands of death threats during his day of
unearned social media infamy. Several hours after the departments
error was exposed, a reporter from Mashable asked a Dallas PD infor-
mation officer why the department had not yet deleted the offending
tweet. Because were keeping it on there, came the hostile, nonsen-
sical reply.
The Hughes episode highlights the predictable outcome of Amer-
ican cops recent lurch into the social-media-sphere. What started out
as an earnest public appeal for leads in the aftermath of a massacre piv-
oted instantly, and without explanation, into another bald assertion of
cop authority for its own sake: Because were keeping it there. The
social media arm of the law stigmatized an innocent black man with
the suspicion he could be a cop-killer. Meanwhile, Dallas cops had
obliterated the actual suspect, Johnson, with a bomb-disabling robot
loaded with C4 explosives. The tweeting thumb is attached to the
mailed fist.

A M E S P O LI C E
As it happens, digital-media professionals have long hailed the

Dallas PD as a model for savvy and engaged social media usage. Dallas
was the first U.S. police department to hire a full-time social media
strategist. It also has multiple social media accountsseveral on Face-
book and Twitter, as well as YouTube and Nixle. Last year, the depart-
ment won an award for its use of social media in crisis management; it
seems a safe bet that it wont be a repeat winner in 2016.

See the armed, beefy, The use of new media to bolster a cop-
sanctioned worldview is now so widespread
mustachioed peacekeeper
that you might call it viral. Just days before the
in the aviator glasses try Dallas events, when Baton Rouge police had
shot and killed Alton Sterling in an altercation
to communicate with
outside a convenience store, the Baton Rouge
the young and hip! Police Department used Periscope, Twitters
video-streaming app, to broadcast its press
9 conference on the shooting. Cellphone foot-
age taken by a shop owner had revealed that Sterlings hands were
empty at the time of his death. But as Baton Rouge chief Carl Dabadie
Jr. briefed reporters at the presser, he claimed that Sterling had been
armed before the confrontation started. Had the shop owner and his
lawyer not managed to get the cellphone video to a TV station, Baton
Rouge police (who confiscated in-store surveillance footage from the
scene) might have controlled the story.
Acting Cute
These kinds of cop struggles for meme supremacy have only recently
come to public attention. For the past several years, the conjunction of
policing, tweeting, and Facebooking has been a surefire prescription for
novelty human-interest coverage: see the armed, beefy, mustachioed
peacekeeper in the aviator glasses try to communicate with the young
and hip! Before its officers earned global condemnation for pointing
assault rifles at protesters, the Baton Rouge PD was a practitioner of
this social media strategy, offering genial and lighthearted fare on its
Twitter account. One tweet in May touted Touch a Truck, a commu-
nity event at which small children could cavort among the departments
impressive store of military-grade weaponry.
This trademark fusion of camera-ready cuteness and depoliticized
menace is straight out of the social media playbook of Lauri Stevens, a
specialist in police communications who has worked closely with the
police force in Dallas to enhance their social media game. Cops are no
longer complete strangers to social media, but they still need consid-
erable coaching when it comes to getting an intended message to con-
nect with audiences. Stevens, who says she doesnt know of anyone else
doing what she does full-time, is likely the first person cops turn to in
moments of online perplexity or duress.
As a result, Stevenss kitschy Midwestern sensibility is gradually
becoming the filter through which the law-enforcement world show-
cases its handiwork before digital audiences. And demand for Stevenss
expertise is spreading beyond her largely word-of-mouth network of

American clients: police departments from
as far away as Turkey, Brazil, and Switzerland
subscribe to her newsletter, which advises
police to spread a mood of chummy defer-
ence to cop prerogatives in the ostensibly
anything-goes forums of the social-media-
sphere. As your friendly neighborhood cops
are edging their way into your timelines,
theyre building public trust and cultivating
new reserves of sympathy they can tap into
during the next racially divisive shooting epi-
sode or abuse-of-force controversy.
Stevens, who is white, with no police in her
family, was first inspired to work with police
in her twenties, when, as a general assignment
TV reporter in Spartanburg, South Carolina,
she noticed that the officers she reported on NYPD
were poor communicators.
It struck me how none of them were really good at telling their
stories, she says. When they got the opportunity, they were too hung
up on what they really thought the reporter was asking.
She wanted to help cops craft more media-friendly narratives, but
she lacked experience in PR. Later, while teaching communications at
an art institute in Boston, opportunity knocked. Working with stu-
dents to build websites for nonprofits and government organizations,
she assigned a high-achieving group the task of building a site for the
Bellevue, Nebraska, police department. When they graduated, she
wound up the sites webmaster by default.
I got the [Bellevue] police into Facebook, and it was right about
the time I suggested they have a social media policy, because at this
point [2007 or 2008] the IBMs of the world were getting the word out
that you really needed to have a posting policy on social media. She
and the Bellevue police then created what may have been the first-ever
set of social media guidelines for police.
In 2009, Stevens started posting social media advice on her Con-
nectedCOPS blog, which she says quickly became popular in the
law enforcement world. By her count, the number of cops on Twitter
worldwide grew from four hundred that year to twelve thousand in
2010. The momentum eventually culminated in a conference series,
which adopted the Orwellian acronym of SMILECon (Social Media
in Law Enforcement Conference). At these annual gatherings, police
officials from across the country and the world learn how to use social

T h e L ong A r m
media for everything from community engagement to criminal inves-

tigations. The last conference was in April, where speakers included
police officers and representatives from the social media monitoring
industry. Around two hundred people showed up, but Stevens predicts
the next conference, which will be in Long Beach, will be even bigger.
In a chapter she contributed to a 2010 anthology called The Big
Book of Social Media, Stevens explained how digital branding could be
used by police to take back their narrative from the press:
For any police department, their brand is their reputation. Since they
previously had little if any control over what reporters said and had no
vehicles with which to respond, they now are in the envious [sic] position
to increase control by paying attention to whats happening online and
acting on it strategically.
Stevens recalled one example of especially positive cop branding:

the Seattle Police Department handed out bags of Doritos at a Hemp-
fest rally, after weed was legalized, which the press ate up (together with
the munchies-afflicted 4:20 crowd). This was indeed a classic tweaking
of the police departments public image, conveying the not-so-subtle
message that the same officers who might previously have cuffed and
charged you with possession of a controlled substance (particularly if
you were poor and nonwhite) were now, thanks to the recent change
in Seattles municipal drug laws, happy to cater to the appetites of the
Hempfest masses.
Shaking It Off
This kinder, gentler image of police work has proved to be a more com-
plicated and fraught social media commodity in other settings, such as
Dover, Delaware. The Dover Police Department initially touted some
big social media gains in its effort to win over the citys forty thou-
sand residents after Stevens helped engineer the rollout of a YouTube
video featuring police master corporal Jeff Davis singing like a big
ol goofball to Taylor Swifts Shake It Off. As I write this, the video
has logged nearly 40 million views on YouTube, and has been covered
almost everywhere in the mainstream media.
But Daviss song stylings werent enough to calm anger in Dover
last summer, after video footage showed local officer Thomas Webster
kicking twenty-nine-year-old Lateef Dickerson in the face as he lay
on the ground in surrender. Transparency is a professed part of Dover
polices brand, and leaders of the Dover PD communications team
apparently figured they could get out in front of the Dickerson story
by releasing the video themselvesa calculated risk given the outrage

they knew it could stoke. And then, as Dover
cops sought to calm local unrest over that
case, another damaging story got out in front
of them. On August 28, a white Dover police
officer shot and wounded twenty-one-year-old
Terrance Fletcher, a black man, for allegedly
pulling a gun.
A large crowd gathered around the crime
scene, and allegations quickly began leaking
onto the internet that Fletcher had been shot
in the back, that he was unarmed, and that he
hadnt been given immediate medical treat-
ment. Dover police officials kept their finger
on the pulse of the crowd by using software
developed by Geofeedia, a company that spe-
cializes in harvesting social media posts by geo-
graphic location. (Geofeedia has contracted
with police departments across the country, BATO N RO U G E P O LI C E
including Austin, San Jose, and Philadelphia.) Although the Dover PD
circulated its own version of events in a pair of press releases hours after
the Fletcher shooting, anger continued to swell, and reinforcements had
to be called to the scene.
As Dover News Journal reporters Jon Offredo, Jeff Montgomery,
and Brittany Horn covered the event, they interviewed a black Dover
resident who told them she saw the shooting as the latest abuse in a
longstanding pattern of police violence in Dover and throughout
America. Reporting such first-hand accounts is standard journalis-
tic practice, but to Mark Hoffman, the public relations officer for the
Dover police, the storywhich overwhelmingly quotes Dover police
sources, and follows the narrative of the encounter promulgated by the
copswas, in fact, anti-cop.
It didnt do us any favors, he complained: the story didnt men-
tion that the area where Fletcher was shot was a high-crime area, nor
did it cite statistics maintained by the Dover PD that document a
declining use of force. Worst of all, Hoffman said, the story did not
refute misinformation on social media that was picked up by several
media outlets. (Hoffman believes, in addition, that the flurry of social
media notices about the shooting was actually an orchestrated effort
among area leaders to sow popular discord.)
Hoffman called the paper the next day and asked for the story
to be corrected. After editors there declined to do so, Dover police
released a more thorough press release a few days later, laying out

When cops use social media, in greater detail the departments account
of the shooting. The follow-up PR notice
the tweeting thumb
also justified its proactive enforcement by
is attached to including a crime heat map of the downtown
area. The neighborhood where the Fletcher
the mailed fist.
shooting happened is shaded dark redthe
9 pseudoscientific implication being that any-
body shot there by police was likely involved
in some criminal activity or another.
After initially denying it, Fletcher later admitted in court that he
was carrying a gun before he was shot, and a Department of Justice
report said the cop who shot him did not commit a crime. To Hoffman,
who won a Connected Cops Social Media Leadership Award at Lauri
Stevenss SMILE Conference a little over a month after the shooting,
the report vindicated his police department and showed how it could
use social media to counter the press.
There are forty thousand people in Dover, and we have forty
thousand followers on social media, he said. Our local paper doesnt
have forty thousand subscribers. They probably dont even have a quar-
ter of that. If Im going to hold the media accountable, I can do it with
social media.
Community of None
Stevens believes that even police in Ferguson, Missouri, could have
avoided a major PR debacle if theyd only been more proficient at social
media messaging prior to the sustained protests in the wake of Michael
Browns killing at the hands of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.
I believe 100 percent that if the Ferguson and St. Louis police had
been on social media and put stuff about what they knew and when
they knew it, it would have gone a long way toward protecting them
from a lot of things even today, with lawsuits and so forth, she says.
But many police just cant avoid shooting themselves in the foot
with posts that betray a racial bias. On April 27, the Dover depart-
ments account sent a tweet that depicts a handgun next to a pellet gun,
with the text, One is real. The other is a pellet gun. Can you tell which
is which? Can you do it in less than two seconds?
Innocent question? April 27 was two days after the city of Cleve-
land announced it would pay a $6 million settlement to the family of
Tamir Rice, the black twelve-year-old boy slain in two seconds by cops
who allegedly mistook his pellet gun for the real thing. The Rice kill-
ing outraged many observers, from the New York Times editorial page
to Greys Anatomy star Jesse Williams, who delivered an impassioned

speech about the incident at the 2016 BET
awards. That Dover police thought it appro-
priate to send an unsolicited tweet justifying
Rices death indicates it is either not as good
at social media as Hoffman says it isor that
it is not connected with the part of the com-
munity that would have been outraged by the
tweet. In all likelihood, both things are true.
This sense of disconnect broadly char-
acterizes community policing in practice,
because police pursuing this mode of out-
reach tend to be most responsive to the needs
of more conservative constituencies, such D OV E R P O LI C E
as business owners, church leaders, and white residents. Most people

included in community policing do not bear the brunt of police vio-
lence and abuse, according to Justin Hansford, a law professor and Fer-
guson activist who testified before President Obamas Task Force on
21st Century Policing. Through arrest sweeps, the eviction of alleged
criminal offenders from public housing, and the use of informants and
other antisocial tactics, police have eviscerated communal bonds in
poor communities across the country, Hansford writes. In this sense
community policing is an oxymoronespecially with cops now
insert[ing] themselves into the vacuum of uncertainty around the
idea of community to generate a community in their own images (and
their own likeness), granting legitimacy only to community groups
who conform to state conceptions of law, order, and propriety, as
Hansford writes.
Dover police officials, whom black residents blame for a long his-
tory of harassment, are now upping their social media game beyond the
strict bounds of wired discourse. They are presently seeking to migrate
their community base from Twitter to real life, with the rollout of
Nextdoor, a private social network for your neighborhood. This ser-
vice, despite its ostensible disruptive new-media provenance, appears
to function like an old-fashioned snitch network. Nextdoor company
representatives touted the service at this Aprils SMILE Conference
and their presentations made it clear that the service is to be mediated
by and through the police, who place a premium on its crime-tip util-
ity rather than potluck invitations. With Nextdoor, which police in
Dallas also use, Dover cops arent just embedding in the community;
theyre creating the community itself, in much the same way that mili-
tary forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere use counterinsurgency
strategy to build constituencies sympathetic to their mission.

T h e L ong A r m
Influence Peddling
Maintaining a propaganda campaign requires keeping tabs on any-
body who might undermine it, including people with large follow-
ingsa.k.a. influencers, in the argot of the digitally hip. Jasmyne Can-
nick saw how this process can work when she discovered the LAPD
was monitoring her Twitter page. Cannick, a social commentator who
has shamed the LAPD with her blog, recently discovered through
inside sources that the police sent internal communications about a
tweet shed posted about a possible police shooting of a college stu-
dent. It turned out that no such shooting actually took place, but that
didnt deter the LAPD communications division. Officials there kept
a meticulous count of likes and retweets Cannicks post received. The
deluge of tweets sent this past summer about cops killing people prob-
ably outpaced police ability to keep up with the stream, but in all like-
lihood, frenetically wired cops tried their darnedest.
Cannick told me she was annoyed that police zeroed in on her
tweet rather than issuing a correct version of events sooner. And this
raises another troubling issue: we know very little about when or how
police monitor social media. Some departments, for example, use
an HTML script to scrape volumes of data from social media pages,
weaponizing years worth of forgotten Facebook rants in an instant.
Under the generous cop-empowering provisions of the American
surveillance state, this type of monitoring is perfectly legal, though
the jury is still out on whether evidence gathered via these methods
would be permissible in court. Since the ambush in Dallas, police
nationwide have apprehended people for posting alleged copycat
threats against law enforcement, and well likely see a number of legal
challenges against the practice soon. Arresting people for such posts
has a chilling purpose beyond deterring prospective acts of violence:
it tamps down digital anti-cop sentiment and makes space for more
pro-cop messaging.
To win the publics hearts and minds, police may not even need
to monitor and purge Facebooks cop critics, considering the positive
attention police can get from mainstream media. For example, Buzz-
Feedrecentlyran a featureabout an officer in Spartanburg, South Car-
olina, whose Instagram page features copious photos of puppies and
kitties. Pet photos are, of course, tried-and-true online clickbait
and so theyve been deployed eagerly by cops looking to come across
as sensitive souls. Indeed,the International Association of Chiefs of
PoliceCenter for Social Media recommends weekly Twitter fests fea-
turing cops and their critter pals, under sobriquets such as Furrever
Friday and Four-Legged Fridays. The police in Spartanburg, where

Lauri Stevens once lived, also used social media to humiliate shop- In one example
lifters at retail stories like Walmart by posting their pictures on the
of positive cop
departments Facebook and Twitter pages after their arrestbecause
whats more communal in America than laughing at the poor?but branding,
that story didnt get picked up.
police in Seattle
When cute cop posts take off at aggregation sites such as Buzz-
Feedas the Dover PDs Shake It Off dida synergistic spigot of handed out
monetized content opens up for the host sites, as priceless new reserves
bags of chips
of public good will likewise present themselves to the cops. The con-
junctive exploitation of Pokmon Go by police and the media cover- at a Hempfest
ing them was a viral media sensation of its own this summer. Whats
rally.
less clear, though, is whether police departments are pitching these
social media stories to reporters. Its certainly hard to see any organic 9
news hook for, say, DNAinfo New Yorks recent listicle 9 Reasons You
Should Be Following the NYPD on Twitter. The story featured the
ephemeral feel-good fare of kitty and puppy pics, as well as bullets
arranged as a happy face, the Easter Bunny in a squad car, and even
a coy reference to American cops weakness for doughnuts. DNAinfo
reporter Nicole Levy, who wrote the piece, got a friendly nod from
NYPD digital strategist Yael Bar-tur, who wrote: Dont ask me why
you should follow the #NYPD on Twitter, take it from @DNAinfo.
Levy did not respond to my request to discuss the story, and when I
asked Bar-tur whether NYPD flacks had pitched the listicle to an
obliging DNAinfo editor, she referred my question to the NYPDs
public information office, which didnt get back to me.
Bar-tur is certainly practiced in the art of flacking for security
forces imposing order on restive populations. Before becoming the
NYPDs digital strategist, she worked as the national marketing
director for the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, a fund for Israeli
soldiers and wounded veterans. She also consulted for the NYPD
as a public policy student at Harvards John F. Kennedy School of
Government. Yet for all her experience, her clients can still go disas-
trously off-message. In 2013, Bar-tur used her blog to shine a spotlight
on Brimfield, Ohio, police chief David Oliver, whom she praised for
chronicling his hilarious and insightful adventures as a way to build
up the departments public image. But Olivers off-the-cuff posts were
not especially insightful, and grew less hilarious over time. His politi-
cal and topical commentary tilted in a pronounced conservative and at
times subtly racist direction, particularly when hed offer enthusiastic
endorsements of the war on drugs. His big viral moment came after he
unleashed a tirade against Kanye West after the artist compared him-
self to police officers. Since you are accustomed to danger, from your

life as an international rapper, I am strongly encouraging you imme-
diately abandon you [sic] career as a super star and join the military,
Oliver wrote, racking up the likes and follows.
Chief Oliver was known around his department, apparently, as a
sexual predator, according to a lawsuit filed by a female officer in Brim-
field. He was also accused of stealing $500 of a charitable donation and
pocketing about $800 from what has been described as an illegal silent
gun auction. Oliver was stripped of his badge and sentenced to two
years of probation earlier this yearbut not before he defiantly vowed
to release information that will make the public, and particularly the
residents of Brimfield, very ashamed of their police department.
Back in the big time, NYPDs public relations engine remains
one of the most well oiled in the nation. Its well received #NYPD-
OutandProud campaign, for instance, after Junes horrific massacre
at a gay nightclub in Orlando, cheerfully touted openly queer cops
within the NYPD, even as the force at large continues to commit
homophobic and transphobic abuse. Such campaigns are buttressed by
the NYPDs massive Twitter presenceall precincts have accounts
but local reporters in New York have neglected to document just how
the departments growing digital prowess strategically downplays
the departments pattern of abuses and failures in its encounters with
marginalized communities. In the absence of such critical reporting,
a New York based radical collective called New York Year Zero has
filled the void, monitoring the departments more eccentric Twitter
users and viciously mocking their clumsiest tweets.
We read cop tweets because social media has become an import-
ant part of this community policing strategy thats been instituted
by big city police departments across the country, a representative of
New York Year Zero said over email.
Dozing Watchdogs
Its more than a little puzzling that the rest of the media industry cant
see the same logicregardless of whether it aligns with New York Year
Zeros digital-guerilla politics. At a panel on criminal justice reporting
during this years Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference, I
asked the panelists, all very accomplished journalists, how they bal-
anced their need to cultivate officer sources with their directive to
report impartially on police. I mentioned I was working on this story.
The panelists all assented in principle to the idea that reporters need to
hold police accountable with rigorous investigations even as they main-
tain good relations with sources at their local departments for more
mundane daily news assignments. (One of the panelists, Maya Lau of

Baton Rouges The Advocate, later did superb work covering the fall-
out from the Alton Sterling killing.) But as I sat down and took notes,
I couldnt help but remember Dover communications officer Mark
Hoffman gloating that his police departments social media following
was bigger than that of Dovers local paper.
Police ambitions on social media are totalitarian, in the sense that
departments are looking to establish further control over the produc-
tion of knowledge in order to secure more power. It may seem cute and
endearing for law enforcement personnel brandishing guns and tasers
to show off a cuddlier, more relatable side of their personalities via pet
pics. But if police PR teams can get more positive attention, whether
from a listicle gone viral or their own social media pages, thats a key
breakthrough moment in the broader effort to create a more loyal con-
stituency that will be less likely to righteously antagonize them. And
after the turmoil of this summer, departments are likely to channel
more tax dollars into their public relations divisions, even as (or per-
haps because) their enforcement practices remain racist and directed
primarily at the poor.
In spite of all the ways it has changed in recent years, journalism
is still one of the best defenses against the new vanity of the security
state. The answer to digital-era police hostility toward the media is not
less scrutiny and skepticism, but more of it. Everything else is public
relations.t
P. S . M U E L L E R

T h e L ong A r m
Time Bandits
Why our political past is rarely prologue
3 Rick Perlstein
I love my readers. But not unconditionally.

You may know my work: over the last two decades I have writ-
ten a series of books on the history of American conservatism since
the 1950s. The tale begins with every sensible political expert at the
time confident that America was fundamentally a liberal country, on a
glide path to social democracya society, as the marquee pundit Wal-
ter Lippmann said, that was far more united and at peace with itself,
except over the issue of Negro rights, than it has been for a long time.
And even so, Lippmann and his peers agreed, the Souths racial feu-
dalism was obviously a vestige melting away before our eyes as it suc-
cumbed to the healing solvents of modernity. Over some 2,480 pages
in three books, with one more on the way, I endeavor to explain how
and why things didnt quite turn out that waya complicated story, or
so Ive always thought.
So its a little frustrating to realize how many of my dearly beloved
readers, in this season of the Orange-Haired Monsters apotheosis, do
not see it as all that complicated after all. Rather, as one of the dear-
est among them put it, my latest book is a Rosetta stone for reading
America and its politics today. Frank Rich wrote that in a review that
appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. The
fact is, I believe I have written no Rosetta stones, no skeleton keys, no
guidebooks, no templates. But people keep on saying I havein wave
after wave of tweets, Facebook mentions, and appreciative emails
thanking me for helping them see how this presidential election is just
like 1968. Or 1972. Or 1964. Or 1976. (Though it cant be just like all
of them, can it?)
Some thank me for the comfort my work offers, the assurance
that if we got through all of that, which was so much worse, we can
certainly get through this. Others just as confidently point at books
with my name on the cover in support of the self-evident conclu-
sion that America is on the brink of possibly terminal civil chaos.
Still others, confoundingly, anoint me a prophet of eternal return.
I enjoy Rick Perlsteins books about the period but I sure never
wanted to live them, wrote one. This is Nixonland without any of

M I C H A E L D U FF Y
the good music, wrote another. During a Republican debate: This

is ... I mean ... holy SHIT. Is @rickperlstein watching this? This is
NIXONLAND in real-time. And after potential violence canceled
a Trump rally in Chicago: So thats what its like to live in a Rick
Perlstein book.

I want to scream, like an Return of the Repressive
So it is that I find myself this campaign sea-
imaginary Marshall McLuhan,
son in a guilty state of ingratitude: gritting my
Your praise just proves you dont teeth before reading fan mail, letting an expo-
nentially increasing number of media requests
understand my work at all!
languish in my inbox for days, wrestling with
9 the uncanny and frustrating experience of
watching everyone insist that Ive explained
what it all means. I want to scream, like some
cosmic Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall: Your praise just proves you
dont understand my work at all!
The ignorant are easiest to write aboutpeople like pundit John
Heilemann, who cohosts With All Due Respect, a nightly news roundup
on Bloomberg TV, reportedly for a seven-figure salary. (If your gift is
reducing Americas rich pageant to a cartoon fit for ten-year-olds, of
course youll be lavishly rewarded.) In December, after Donald Trump
had begun deploying the phrase silent majority, one of Heilemanns
producers invited me on the show to discuss the parallels between
Trumps rise and the elections I wrote about in my second book, Nix-
onland, which covers the years 1965 through 1972.
I peered into the blackness in my remote studio in Chicago as
Heilemann asked me in my earpiece, What parallels do you see
between Trump as a candidate and the way Nixon ran in 68 and 72?
I said there were some, but the demagoguery that marked Trump
should more accurately be traced to the broader context of Republican
electioneering going back to Joseph McCarthy. I suggested that the
genealogy of Trumpism runs not just through Nixon but also through
Reagan and Newt Gingrichs revolution of 1994, and really through all
previous Republican campaigns. I also cautioned that, in important
respects, the dunderheaded Trump was a very poor heir indeed to an
experienced and subtle political and geostrategic actor like Nixon. I
noted that the candidate in 1968 who really defined the Trump posi-
tion was this guy George Wallace, and suggested that we need to begin
broadening the discussion to encompass Europes experience with
fascism if we really want to understand Trump. Whats more, I said,
considering that the ur-establishment candidate Jeb Bush announced
that he, too, would consider a ban on Muslim immigration, we need to
think more about the Republican Party as an institution and less about
Trump as an individual. And, and, and; but, but, but ...
Wrong answer. The next day I watched the segment online.
Behind me on a massive digital screen was a photoshopped collage of
Nixon shaking hands with Donald Trump, a mlange of Nixon images

from different points in his career dancing onscreen in rhythm, under-
cutting my long litany of disclaimers and counterarguments to Heile-
mann about the limited utility of the comparison.
Its fair to say that I havent made much headway since. In July,
Trump began calling himself the law and order candidate. Trump
Is Tricky Dick Nixon, thundered one commentator, citing, of course,
me. And this particular line of just like is one of those that ends in
apocalypse; for did you know that Richard Nixon rode the law-and-
order message to presidential victory not once, but twice? Tweeted a
reader: Trump going full Nixon - read @rickperlstein Nixonland to
understand why it worked back then.
Yes. Please do read it (and my other books too). Back in March,
after the canceled Trump rally in Chicago, and then again in June,
when violence against Trump supporters at a couple of rallies became
the story, the tweeters again began taking my name in vain: Belatedly
reading @rickperlsteins incredible NixonLand and getting more and
more anxious about this election. #Dems need to read @rickperl-
steins #Nixonland. (#Liberalism gone amok leads to riots, causing
#conservative backlash.) I wrote an article in response: no it doesnt,
or not alwaysin fact, in 1964 and again in 1970, melees in the nations
streets ended up redounding to Democrats benefit, because the public
seemed to attach responsibility for the chaos to Barry Goldwater and
Richard Nixon.
Oh well, forget Nixon. Trump is just like Reagan.
@rickperlstein isnt Trump an awful lot like Reagan? Morning
in America/MAGA, both blithely reading lines & using Hollywood
glamour?
@rickperlstein yes! Before Trump there was Reagan who did
THE SAME THING... .
Or maybe the anti-Reagan? @rickperlstein sees the GOP mess as
the downfall of Reagan and the rise of Trump. The degradation began
in 1980, Trump is latest example.
Argh.
The Not-So-Eternal Now

No, not the Same Thing. History does not repeat itself. The country
is disintegrating, a friend of mine wrote on Facebook after the massa-
cre of five policemen by black militant Micah Johnson in Dallas. But
during most of the years I write about in Nixonland and its sequel cover-
ing 1973 through 1976, The Invisible Bridge, the Dallas shootings might
have registered as little more than a ripple. On New Years Eve in 1972,
a New Orleans television station received this message: Africa greets

T h e L ong A r m
you. On Dec. 31, 1972, aprx. 11 pm, the downtown New Orleans Police
Department will be attacked. Reasonmany, but the death of two inno-
cent brothers will be avenged. Its author was a twenty-three-year-old
Navy veteran named Mark James Essex. (In the 1960s, the media had
begun referring to killers using middle names, lest any random James
Ray or John Gacy suffer unfairly from the association.) Essex shot
three policemen to death, evading arrest. The story got hardly a line
of national attention until the following week, when he began cutting
down white people at random and held hundreds of officers at bay from a
hotel rooftop. Finally, he was cornered and shot from a Marine helicop-
ter on live TV, which also accidentally wounded nine more policemen.
The New York Timesonly found space for that three days later.
Stories like these were routine in the 1970s. Three weeks later,
four men identifying themselves as servants of Allah holed up in a
Brooklyn sporting goods store with nine hostages. One cop died in
two days of blazing gun battles before the hostages made a daring roof-
top escape. The same week, Richard Nixon gave his second inaugu-
ral address, taking credit for quieting an era of destructive conflict at
home. As usual, Nixon was lying, but this time not all that much. Inci-
dents of Americans turning terrorist and killing other Americans had
indeed ticked down a bit over the previous few yearseven counting
the rise of the Black Liberation Army, which specialized in ambushing
police and killed five of them between 1971 and 1972.
In Nixons second term, however, they began ticking upward
again. There were the Zebra murders from October 1973 through
April 1974 in San Francisco, in which a group of Black Muslims killed
at least fifteen Caucasians at random and wounded many others; other
estimates hold them responsible for as many as seventy deaths. There
was also the murder of Oaklands black school superintendent by a new
group called the Symbionese Liberation Army, who proceeded to seal
their militant renown by kidnapping Patty Hearst in February 1974.
Then, in May, after Hearst joined up with her revolutionary captors,
law enforcement officials decimated their safe house with more than
nine thousand rounds of live ammunition, killing six, also on live TV.
Between 1972 and 1974 the FBI counted more than six thousand bomb-
ings or attempted bombings in the United States, with a combined
death toll of ninety-one. In 1975 there were two presidential assassina-
tion attempts in one month.
Not to mention a little thing called Watergate. Or the discovery by
Congressional investigators that the CIA had participated in plots to
kill foreign leaders and spied on tens of thousands of innocent protest-
ers, as well as the revelation that the FBI had tried to spur Martin Luther

M I C H A E L D U FF Y
KingJr. to suicide. Or the humiliating collapse of South Vietnam, as the

nation we had propped up with billions in treasure and 58,220 American
lives was revealed to be little more than a Potemkin village.
And now? Were drama queens. The week after Dallas, the host
of the excellent public radio show The Takeaway, John Hockenberry,
invoked the Manson murders: Americas perilous dance with Helter
Skelter ... Individual feelings of fear and revenge do not ignite a race
waryet ... Yet.
There followed a news report about the civil war in South Sudan,
one side loyal to the president, the other to the former vice president.
Now thats a disintegrating society. The Baffler is a print publication,
and perhaps between this writing and its arrival in mailboxes well start
seeing, say, armed black militants in a major American city randomly
killing scores of innocent white people, as in an earlier agefollowing

which, I want to add, American society, no, did not disintegrate.
Our historical narcissism indicts us. Please dont drag my name
into it.
No Consensus, No Peace
On Twitter, beginning in December and at regular intervals since, a
phenomenon began to take hold that should have delighted me but
actually baffles methough apparently not anyone else.
A typical one: The past year+ of politics has felt like the first half
of a @rickperlstein book.
Another: When @POTUS ridiculed @realDonaldTrump 2 gales
of laughter. Like Chapter 1 of a @rickperlstein book.
Yet another: I feel like Im *inside* the first sentence of a Rick
Perlstein book c. 2042.
One reader linked to Trumps February comment that the Pope
had no business criticizing his proposed wall on the Mexican border
because, after all, Vatican City is surrounded by walls: Really looking
forward to this section of Rick Perlsteins book in like 20 years. Ezra
Klein wrote, Im really looking forward to reading Rick Perlstiens
2025 book on this era in politics. Charitably, Andrei Cherny gave me
more time: I cant wait to read the @rickperlstein book about all this
in 50 years.
Then there was a touching concern for my survival.
Still think we need to put rick perlstein into cryo-freeze just to be
on the safe side.
I am starting a petition at @WhenWeAll to keep @rickperlstein
alive forever to write the Trump Quadrilogy. You all should sign it.
I need to live at least 3040 more years to read the @rickperlstein
books on the GW Bush era and 2016beyond. But I also love bacon.
Rough.
There even is a @futurerickperlstein Twitter account, which col-
lects links to the strangest Trump sayings and doings in real time.
This all comes, obviously, from a place of praise, generosity, even
loveThe Rick Perlstein book on this all is going to be spectacular,
one sanguine future reader enthused. What writer wouldnt appreciate
that? Theres also some sound historical logic behind it: sharp analysis
demands perspective, and historical perspective comes only with time.
So why do I get the willies whenever I read these paeans to my far-see-
ing power?
I think its because I cant shake the feeling that they feed into
precisely the attitude toward America and its political culture that I
write my books to oppose. Its unquestionably true that what is hap-

pening now in our politics is surreal, danger- History, when done right,
ous, violent, disorienting, and terrifyingly
invites readers to tack between
conflictual. The feeling that 2016 has been
a break from politics past cannot be denied. finding the familiar in the strange
I certainly dont deny itin fact, when I
and the strange in the familiar.
began embarking on my own writing about
the Trump phenomenon, I felt like I had 9
to reconsider everything I thought I knew
about conservatism and the Republican Party in order to responsibly
handle the job. Please note that well, all of you writing me all those just
like, just like, just like messages.
But what I want my readers to grasp most deeply is that all of
American history is more surreal, more dangerous, more disorienting,
and more terrifyingly conflictual than we typically want to believe.
Focus on all the parts in my books where I dwell on the pundits, polit-
ical leaders, and other gatekeepers of polite opinion and their willful
insistence that America is fundamentally a society of consensus. Recall
that theyre never more insistent on the point than when signs of chaos
are all around them: Walter Lippmann was pronouncing his united
and at peace with itself celebration not long after Bull Connors fire
hoses and police dogs ushered in the most violent phase yet of the civil
rights revolution.
My first book, covering the years 1958 through 1964, was entitled
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Con-
sensus. The consensus in my subtitle referred both to historians com-
mon belief that in the period between World War II and the sixties
America was a remarkably placid place and to the deluded national
self-perception advanced at the time by people like Lippmann, heed-
lessly projecting the present into the past. In this view of things, Amer-
ica had always been a remarkably placid place. When violence began
breaking out on the 1964 campaign trail, the Philadelphia Inquirer edi-
torialized that presidential elections have been waged without untow-
ard incident until this yearwhat??and the historian Richard Hof-
stadter preposterously proposed that our sagacity and our passion for
the peaceful enjoyment of our national life were the essence of Ameri-
can politics. My subtitle, in other words, is tinged ironicallybecause
the supposed consensus was but an epiphenomenon, a brief idyll, an
illusion, as well as an ideological construct. It papered over the reality
of a society that has never been united and at peace with itself. It also
papers over the reality that millions of Americans have harbored dark
reactionary rage during every period of our historyand yet pundits
are always surprised every time it bursts into the political foreground.

America: What Happened?
I write all this and feel dirty. The longing to assimilate the strange
to the familiar is only human; who am I to hold myself aloof from it?
But its just not a good way to study history, which when done right
invites readers to tack between finding the familiar in the strange and
the strange in the familiar. History roils. Its waves are cumulative, one
rolling into another, amplifying their thunder. Or they become attenu-
ated via energies pushing in orthogonal or opposite directions. Or they
swirl into directionless eddies, with the oceans surface appearance as
often as not obscuring grander currents just below.
Its dispiritingly reminiscent of the consensus I sought to demy-
thologize in Before the Storm that some see Trump only in the ways he is
exceptional to the usual waves, currents, eddies of our historyexcept
for that time Rick Perlstein writes about in his books, when Americans
hated each other enough to kill each other. How Did Our Politics Get
So Harsh and Divisive? Blame 1968, was how one recent rumination
on the sixties-echo effect in the Trump movement got headlined in
the Washington Post. Why not blame 1776, when the nation was born
in blood and fire, brother fighting brother? Or 1787, when the Consti-
tution repressed the contradictions between slave and free states, with
all the core unresolved tensions slowly simmering until the nation had
to be born again, from the blood of the better part of a million Amer-
icans slaughtering one another? How Did Our Politics Become So
Harsh and Divisive? Blame 1860.
Heck, why not blame 1877, when an estimated one hundred people
were killed in railroad strikes that involved some one hundred thousand
people? Or the Red Summer of 1919, which set in motion race riots
and lynchings, killing hundreds by 1921, when as many as three hun-
dred died in the Tulsa riot alone? Or 1924, when it took the Democratic
Party 103 convention ballots and sixteen days to settle whether the
party would be represented by its pro or antiKu Klux Klan factions,
while tens of thousands of hooded Klansmen rallied across the river in
New Jersey? Or 194546, when almost two million Americans went on
strike? Or 1995, when a madman blew up a federal building and killed
168, including children in daycare? Why not start at the beginning and
blame 1492, or the year the English settled in Massachusetts Bay?
Whats it like to live in a Rick Perlstein book? I hope it at least
resembles what its like to live in America. Although I fully allow that
Donald Trump may end the world as we know it, if he does, it will hap-
pen in a way different from any other prospective end of the world as
we have known it. History will help us understand that. But not a his-
tory that leans on easy intellectual crutches.t

Muzak of t h e Sph er e s
K EIT H N EG L E Y

Material Issue
Reclaiming a living cosmos from
the dead-end tradition of Western scientism
3 Jackson Lears
S ince the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, we have

seen the resurgence of a Victorian economic ethos, tight-fisted and
pusillanimous. Whether tricked out in the technocratic jargon of
neoliberalism or the truculent bromides of the Tea Party, this outlook
depends at its core on the complementary assumptions that the poor
have no one to blame but themselves and the rich are rich because they
deserve to be. Such notions are rarely uttered out loud, but they ani-
mate the muddle of entrepreneurial fantasy, techno-utopianism, and
money-worship that governs our public discourse. We have reentered
the moral universe of Samuel Smiles (Self-Help) and Russell Conwell
(Acres of Diamonds). Put those Victorian success ideologues in
skinny jeans and untucked shirts and provide them each with a Fris-
bee and a few pat phrases about globalization and technology, and they
would be comfortable peddling their rhetorical wares in Silicon Valley.
Despite the endless chatter about innovation, our dominant ideas
about success and failure have returned to the nineteenth century and
remain stuck there.
But what is remarkable about our historical moment is that the
return to nineteenth-century modes of thought is not confined to the
ideology of success. We have not just resurrected the Victorian ages
moralizing homilies; we have also reconstructed its intellectual archi-
tecture, its habits of mind. Consider the New Atheism. Its chief
representatives are the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the geneticist
Richard Dawkins, and the philosopher Sam Harriswith political fer-
vor provided by the deceased Islamophobe Christopher Hitchens and
conceptual support by the psychologist Steven Pinker. These men have
revived a critique of religion worthy of any village atheist in Sherwood
J O N AT H O N ROS E N
Andersons Ohio or Edgar Lee Masterss Illinois. Their ideal is not sci-
ence but positivist scientismthe redefinition of science from a method
to a metaphysic, promising precise answers to age-old ultimate ques-
tions. In this view, science is a source of certainty rather than an exper-
imental way of knowing, and the only knowledge worth having is the

Positivists have always kind obtained by quantifiable measurement.
Scientistic thought is usually accompanied by
feared ambiguity. This visceral
a reductionist habit of mind, which ruthlessly
fear is a prescription for pares down complex events to a single mech-
anistic causal explanation. (Two playful dogs
reductionist explanations.
are merely establishing dominance and sub-
9 ordination; human institutions from politics
to marriage and childrearing are but fig leaves
covering the eternal battle for access to scarce economic resources, etc.)
Scientism reached its prior apogee at the end of the nineteenth
century, before its positivist certainties fell victim to challenges posed
by thinkers in disciplines ranging from psychoanalysis to physics.
But now scientism is back, coexisting comfortablyat times inter-
dependentlywith neoliberal capitalism and its promoters, whose
only standard of value is quantifiable utility. The positivist impulse
is most dominant in areas of inquiry that purport to illuminate the
mysterious workings of the human mind. In this popular discourse,
which infiltrates our public life at every pore, the most influential
idioms are pop-Darwinism (known to its adherents as evolution-
ary psychology) and cognitive science. Despite their differences in
conception and approach, these idioms have sunk in concert into the
morass of half-baked ideas and stale buzzwords that constitutes sci-
ence journalism.
Cognition, Ergo Sum

The resultant sticky mass is everywhere. Parts of it are available for
purchase: National Public Radio features programs sponsored by
Lumosity, the business that has promised to help you reach your full
potential in every aspect of life as well as stave off dementia, memory
loss, and even Alzheimers disease by selling you cognition-enhancing
exercises based on the latest discoveries in neuroscience. (Recently, the
company paid $2 million to the Federal Trade Commission to settle
with customers bilked by its bogus claims.) The internet, too, is awash
with smart pills and other cognitive breakthroughs. In the supposedly
more sober realm of public affairs, the taglines of reductionist neuro-
science provide faux-explanations of political events. At least once a
day, somewhere in America, Donald Trump is described as appealing
to the reptilian portion of his supporters brains. When the reporter
is applying a thicker patina of expertise, Trumps ability to hijack the
amygdala is noted. This is the reduction of politics to pathology, rem-
iniscent of Richard Hofstadters dismissal of the 1964 Goldwater cam-
paigns paranoid stylea favorite strategy ever since of self-styled

pragmatic centrists patroling the boundaries of responsible opinion.
Scientism depoliticizes political debate by bleaching it with bland
claims of neutral expertise.
But the greater dangers of scientism are subtler. It is an impov-
erished way of knowing, and the particular form the impoverish-
ment takes depends on the idiom that its practitioners deploy. At this
mass-market level, evolutionary psychologists reduce human actions
to their supposedly adaptive purposes by imagining what life was
like on the savannah thousands of years ago, while cognitive scien-
tists equate the brain with a computer and the mind with its software,
reducing thought to computation and intelligence to problem-solv-
ing. To be clear: these phrasings are the pet locutions of popularizers
and propagandists and constitute the language that makes it into the
background noise of conventional wisdom. This is not the discourse of
serious scientists. These methods seek the simplest, most easily quan-
tified answers to fundamental questions about human conduct; they
produce sweeping generalizations devoid of idiosyncrasy or history.
Consider Pinkers claim that Big Data has answered Big Questions
that have (he assumes) troubled historians for some time: Do democ-
racies fight each other? What about trading partners? Do neighboring
ethnic groups inevitably play out ancient hatreds in bloody conflict?
Do peacekeeping forces really keep the peace? Do terrorist organi-
zations get what they want? How about Gandhian nonviolent move-
ments? Are post-conflict reconciliation rituals effective at preventing
the renewal of conflict? This is a TED-talk version of Big Historical
Questions with either-or answers. Most serious historians would find
Pinkers to-do list of historical inquiry dualistic, formulaic, and stuck
in the utilitarian present. But Pinker has no use for historians. His-
tory nerds, he writes,
can adduce examples that support either answer, but that does not mean
the questions are irresolvable. Political events are buffeted by many forc-
es, so its possible that a given force is potent in general but submerged
in a particular instance. With the advent of data sciencethe analysis of
large, open-access data sets of numbers or textsignals can be extracted
from the noise and debates in history and political science resolved more
objectively. As best we can tell at present, the answers to the questions
listed above are (on average, and all things being equal) no, no, no, yes,
no, yes, and yes.
Well, thats a relief. In the face of Big Data, all the traditional tools
of humanistic inquiryarchival research, close reading, attention to
varietycan apparently be tossed aside. Particularity and contingency

are submerged by objectively measurable Forces that are potent in

general. This is what happens when scientism encounters history: it
creates what Bill Gates, following David Christian, calls Big Histo-
rya pseudo-discipline that disregards how human beings engage
with specific historical circumstances and remains indifferent to sub-
jective experience.
Whether they favor a biological or a computational theory of
thought, scientistic thinkers all depend on a behaviorist vision of con-
sciousness, which cannot account for the visceral longings, anxieties,
and aspirations that we call subjectivity. Behaviorists, in the positivist
tradition, reject any attempt to understand the mind through intro-
spection; inner life is simply off the table. Indeed, for Auguste Comte,
who founded the philosophy he called Positivism in the 1830s, intro-
spection was merely a way to get lost, as George Makari writes. The
formulation is revealing. Positivistswhether they embraced Comtes
philosophy or simply shared his intellectual stylehave always feared
getting lost, feared ambiguity. This visceral fear is a prescription for
reductionist explanations.
False Positives
Contemporary theorists of mind are squarely in the positivist tradi-
tion. They have taken to putting scare quotes around introspection,
as Dennett sometimes does. Such rhetorical tics betray a deeper unease
with the raw material of consciousness. As the philosopher Thomas
Nagel has written: All these [reductionist] theories seem insufficient
as analyses of the mental because they leave out something essential
. . . The first-person, inner point of view of the conscious subject: the
way sugar tastes to you or the way red looks or anger feels. From the
behaviorist view, consciousness is something that someone is doing,
rather than a state of being in which the conscious person may seem to
be doing nothing but is in fact engaged in anxious yearning, rigorous
logic, ecstatic fantasy, meandering reverie, or some or none or all of the
above. Consciousness has to be expressed as action; otherwise, it can-
not be observed, measured, and counted.
This behaviorist worldview is common to Artificial Intelligence
researchers as well as to computer scientist Ray Kurzweils cult of Sin-
gularity, which anticipates the overtaking of human minds by com-
puters in 2045. (Mark your calendars!) For the behaviorist, thinking
can only be inferred from observable action in the world: this is how
intelligence becomes equated with problem solving. When that trou-
bling subjective dimension of life drops out of the picture altogether,
it becomes easier to claim that computers can think. This is what

passes for the contemporary science of mind at the level of popular
discourse.
Thanks to books like Jessica Riskins The Restless Clock: A History
of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick
(University of Chicago Press, 2015), we are beginning to discover that
the propaganda peddled by Pinker, Kurzweil & Co. is not science per
se but a singular, historically contingent version of ita version that
depends on the notion that nature is a passive mechanism, the opera-
tions of which are observable, predictable, and subject to the law-like
rules that govern inert matter. This is the de-animated, disenchanted
universe Max Weber associated with the Protestant Reformation and
the rise of scientific rationality. It is also the universe inhabited in our
own time by pop-Darwinian evolutionists, whose strict adaptation-
ist program underwrites faith in automatic progress through natural
selectiona process that operates independently of any individual
organisms desire but always evolves toward greater fitness. (The
parallels this outlook shares with the Christian ideas of Providence
and the humanist ideal of progress are striking.) Passive-mechanistic
accounts of reality and experience did not mandate reductionist sci-
entism, but they did make it the only alternative to transcendental reli-
giosityi.e., the belief in an immaterial soul or mind. This either-or
assumption has characterized theories of mind down to the present.
The passive-mechanist worldview, by eliminating purpose and agency
from the nonhuman world, allowed Christians to cling to their belief
in the uniqueness of the human soul and humanists to cling to their
belief in the uniqueness of the human mind. Those beliefs die hard,
even among behaviorists.
But as Riskin shows, the tradition of passive mechanism was never
the only game in town, even after its triumph in the seventeenth cen-
tury. For her, the key conflict is not the familiar one between transcen-
dentalist and mechanist points of view but rather the tension between
passive-mechanist and active-mechanist perspectives. Recuperating
the tradition of active mechanismthe vision of an animated yet mate-
rial universeRiskin demonstrates what a powerful challenge it poses
to contemporary modes of thought that claim the authority of science.
Ultimately, The Restless Clock offers nothing less than an alternative way
of seeing the natural world, and being in it.
Machine Dreams
Riskin begins with a joke told by Thomas Henry Huxley, popularizer
of Darwin and enthusiast of positivist progress, at the height of pas-
sive mechanisms Victorian cachet in the late 1860s. Huxley was lec-

turing on protoplasm, the physical basis of life. We ought to be able
to understand its extraordinary qualities, he said, including its quality
of being alive, merely in terms of its component parts, without invok-
ing any mysterious force called vitality. After all, Huxley said, water
has extraordinary qualities too, but we do not explain them by assum-
ingand heres the jokethat something called aqueosity entered
into and took possession of the oxide of hydrogen . . . then guided the
aqueous particles to their places. Of course, he admitted, we have no
more discovered how waters properties flow from its chemical com-
position than we have determined how protoplasm becomes alive,
but when we do, the discovery will come from understanding how the
component parts of water or protoplasm work togetherjust as we
now understand how a watch operates by learning how its parts work
together. However amusing Huxleys audiences found the concept of
aqueosity to be, his main point was clear: there is no active power
that inheres in water and enables it to be watery. Nor is there any such
power in protoplasm that enables it to be alive. The nonhuman, nat-
ural world is passive; it lacks agency. This was the claim that active
mechanists rejected.
By agency, Riskin means something like consciousness, but more
basica thing cannot be conscious without having agency, but it
can have agency without being conscious. Expressions like self-or-
ganizing and self-activating and self-transforming catch aspects
of agency; the important thing is that the impulse comes from within
the organism, perhaps even from within the individual cell. Banning
agency in nature was the key to making a passive-mechanist model of
it, and this model, in turn, would become the foundation of both theol-
ogy and science in the modern West.
Passive-mechanist assumptions underwrote the British cler-
gyman William Paleys argument from design, which he made in
Natural Theology (1802), a book that remains a centerpiece of intelli-
gent design creationism today. Paley imagined a Watchmaker God,
whose existence could be inferred from the organized, clocklike
operation of the universe he had created. But, Riskin asks, what if
one had a more animated notion of clocks and of machines in general?
What if one believed, as the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz
had argued a century before Paley, that to be clocklike was to be
responsive, agitated, and restless? Riskin shows that, for centuries,
many scientists and philosophers shared Leibnizs view. The restless
clock becomes her key metaphor for understanding the tradition of
active mechanism.
From the active-mechanist view, machines were not mere inert mat-

ter; they could be self-changing and self-cor- The reductionist model
recting; indeed, humans and animals could be
of mind requires its devotees to
characterized as thinking machines. Cham-
pions of passive mechanism viewed the eye as reject any vestiges of vitalism
a lens; their activist counterparts saw it as a
they can sniff in the cultural
receiving, perceiving mechanism. The issue
was not materialism per se but the endowment atmosphere.
of matter with agency. Active mechanism was
an animist alternative to dualities of body and 9
mind or body and soulas well as an alternative
to traditional, supernatural animism. Yet this complex and influential
intellectual tradition has been rendered nearly invisible, as if in confir-
mation of the complaint that history is written by the winnersin this
case, the passive mechanists. Riskins great achievement is to revive the
active-mechanist tradition and demonstrate its relevance to the pres-
ent, deploying an extraordinary range of evidence, from philosophical
treatises and scientific papers to chess-playing automata and robotic
tortoises.
According to Riskin, the triumph of dualist ontology began with
the Protestant Reformation. Medieval Catholics used hovering angels,
howling devils, and other automata in churches as forms of religious
theater. These figures infused matter with spirit. In the medieval
imagination, they became holy machines and signs of human close-
ness to the spiritual world, sources of amusement as well as awe. Prot-
estant reformers, intent on separating the divine and material realms,
emptied the machines of spirit and made them targets of iconoclasm.
By the 1600s, machines were associated with dead matter, devoid of
spirituality.
Ren Descartes stepped in to save spirit from flesh, but not by
denying flesh agency. His notion of the body as an animal-machine,
Riskin writes, left it warm, fluid, responsive, mobile, sentient, and
full of agencyand yet wholly distinct from the soul. Aristotle had
postulated three souls: the vegetative, the sensitive, and the rational,
with only the last immortal and divine. Writing in the mid-1600s, Des-
cartes dismissed the first two souls and made the rational soul peculiar
to humans. This conceptual move created a modern, autonomous self
with an objective, Gods-eye view of the physical world. The severing
of soul from body marked a departure from the traditional Christian
doctrines of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, but the unintended
consequence of Cartesian dualism was even more significant: by stress-
ing the uniqueness of the human soul, Descartess followers drained
the vitality from the rest of creation.

Despite the rising prestige of passive mechanism, not everyone

was persuaded. Leibniz was one of the skeptics. To him, nothing
lacked a soul; what he called vis viva, or living force, was a metaphys-
ical principle, without which (he believed) nature was unintelligible.
Leibniz wanted a fully mechanical account of nature that included
this active force, anticipating a tradition in physics that culminated in
Hermann von Helmholtzs concept of energy in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Leibniz traced the source of matter to perceiving spirits he called
monads, which were brimming with life and sentience in every part.
As Riskin writes, for Leibniz the tiniest particle of matter contained
whole worlds of living beings. Everything in the cosmos was in a state
of flux, flowing like a river. Amid the flow certain souls rose to the
degree of reason and to the prerogative of minds. Leibnizs active
mechanism included the generation, over time, of a thinking mind.
Consciousness arose from animated matter.
To Voltaire and other dogmatic rationalists, this was all roman-
tic nonsense, but in fact, Leibnizs thinking was compatible with
some of the leading ideas in natural philosophy during the mid-
dle and later eighteenth century. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte
de Buffon, observed an active power at work in naturethe ten-
dency of living organic matter to organize itself. Erasmus Darwin,
Charless grandfather, advanced the notion of a vibrant, growing
cosmos where living organisms, including humans, could be the
result of a gradual process; nature could be a kind of self-renewing
machine; and humans had sentient self-development in common
with the rest of brute creation. Go, proud reasoner, and call the
worm thy sister! Darwin wrote in Zoonomia (1794). Neither he nor
Buffon nor their other proto-evolutionary contemporaries viewed
humans as the unique culmination of a linear, progressive process.
About progress, they were agnostic.
Life, Sciences
Perhaps the most famousor notoriousproto-evolutionist was
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who in 1802 adopted the word biologie to
describe the study of living beings and postulated an intrinsic pou-
voir de la vie that animated them. Enacting this life force, plants and
animals composed themselves, elaborating and complicating their
organization across generations. This process unfolded over an incal-
culable series of centuries, Lamarck wrote, beginning with an ani-
mated point that he, following Leibniz, called a monade. All plants
and animals developed and transformed as a result of the movements
of fluids within them, Lamarck theorized. The more complex animals

added will to the mix, forming habits and ways of life in response
to circumstance.
This was an essentially historical view of nature, in keeping with the
broader sense of history emerging during the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries: a secular, material transformation driven from
within by internal agencies, as Riskin writes, rather than by God. His-
tory was a way of knowing the natural world, as well as apprehending
the nature of past human societiesa focus on purposeful actions in a
web of interdependent contingencies.
For Lamarck, the habits adopted by humans and higher animals
led to changes in their bodiesincluding the brain, which, like any
organ, differed according to the uses and exercise it got, Riskin writes.
The brain of a man of labor, who spends his life building walls or
carrying burdens, was not inferior in composition or perfection to
that of Montaigne, Bacon, Montesquieu, Fnelon, Voltaire, etc., said
Lamarck: it simply had not been exercised in the same way. So living
beings were not quite like watches set in motion by a watchmaker, as
the argument from design held. The analogy between a living thing
and a watch made sense only if one viewed the spring as the exciting
cause of the vital movements, Lamarck wrote. Without the spring,
the mechanism would be useless; without the mechanism, the spring
would be useless. But together they composed an animated machine.
By the early nineteenth century, for Lamarck and his followers, any liv-
ing being was an agent, capable of constant, self-generated motion and
the transformation of its material parts.
For decades, if not centuries, these ideas have been consigned to
the dustbin of failed science. Lamarck himself has been dismissed as
not just wrong but absurd, laughable, beyond the pale, Riskin writes.
One of her great accomplishments is to go back to the sources and
demonstrate that Charles Darwin was a good deal more of a Lamarck-
ian than contemporary passive mechanists have acknowledged. He
was torn between the mandate to banish agency from nature and the
impulse to make agency synonymous with life. In key passages of his
On the Origin of Species, Darwin postulated an innate power of trans-
formation within organisms. Indeed, as Riskin writes, that power
forms a subterranean, dynamic presence periodically bursting up
through the limpid surface of Darwins prose. In Origin, he discussed
how difficult it is for breeders to maintain the traits they want in a
given population, describing what he called a constant struggle going
on between, on the one hand, the tendency to reversion to a less mod-
ified state, as well as an innate tendency to further variability of all
kinds, and, on the other hand, the power of steady selection to keep

Emphasizing what human beings the breed true. Later in the Origin he labeled
this innate tendency generative variability.
have in common with the rest
Darwins emphasis on innate variabil-
of the natural world does not ity intensified and grew more explicit as the
Origin moved from its fourth to its sixth and
reduce humans to passive
final edition. This tendency to vary was not
mechanismsnot if the rest something he could equate with development
in a particular direction, let alone a teleolog-
of the natural world is active.
ical scheme of progress. Instead, adaptation
9 was a haphazard process, dependent in part
on contingent circumstances that changed
over time. Yet despite Darwins persistent (if ambivalent) attachment
to active-mechanist ideas, he became the poster-boy for the pas-
sive-mechanist worldview.
Riskin traces this transformation. By the beginning of the twenti-
eth century, a new generation of biologists had turned their science into
a passive-mechanist, anti-historical enterprise. They held that nature
was rote and timeless; evolution involved a combination of random and
determined events, but no contingencyno limited agencies working
in particular, changing situations. As Charles Darwin was remade
into a passive-mechanist, Lamarck became a joke: a romantic, vital-
ist strawman to contrast with real scientists. The German biologist
August Weismann epitomized the new attitude, attacking a caricature
of Lamarck by ridiculing the inheritance of accidental deformations
(severed tails, twisted limbs, etc.) and ignoring the fundamental point
of agreement between Lamarck and Darwin: that the habits and cir-
cumstances of animals reshape their organisms over time. Weismann
debunked purposefulness in nature even as he insisted that variations
were not random but directed by utility and movement toward greater
fitness. If this sounded suspiciously like a Darwinian version of Provi-
dence, the resemblance was not accidental: like other German Protes-
tants in the early twentieth century, Weismann banished agency from
nature to make room for a supernatural agent, a divine designer.
The Grand Scheming of Things

Thus were the ideas of Providence and progress married to the strict
adaptationist program, which became the core of the twentieth-cen-
tury neo-Darwinian synthesis. Weismann also helped shape that
synthesis by distinguishing between somatic cells and heritable germ
plasm. (The word gene had not yet come into use.) This, the Weis-
mann barrier, appealed to modern geneticists like Watson and Crick:
for them, it meant that bodily changes could not inscribe themselves in

DNA. An anti-Lamarckian version of heredity became conventional
wisdom, based on the (allegedly) complete inability of the organism
to influence genetic material passed on to the next generation. It was
another nail (if one were needed) in the coffin of active materialism.
Yet some scientists still tried to restore agency to nature. The biol-
ogist T. H. Morgan theorized a power of self-adjustment in organ-
isms, a capacity that paralleled the work done by a thermostat or a
flywheel governor. The notion of internal feedback appealed to cyber-
neticists like Norbert Wiener, who were merging the new comput-
ing technology with robotics, exploring the manufacture of artificial
intelligence. What is surprising is how many of them thought they had
actually accomplished their goal.
As Riskin observes, cybernetics did not so much explain the
agency of a living creature as explain it away. Wiener, Alan Turing,
and their colleagues set about reducing agency to behavior that was
both observable and fully mechanistic. When they embarked on the
quest for how learning might be directed from the outside in, they
described the initiative of the purportedly intelligent machine in the
passive voice; it was, Riskin writes, not actual initiative . . . but rather
the appearance of initiative. Turings inability to conceive of inner life
was symptomatic of the shared cognitive style in the AI community.
He described thinking as a sort of buzzing that went on inside my
head. No wonder he was as lost in introspection as Comte had been;
no wonder he felt more comfortable with the view of the mind from
outside in, from the behaviorist vantage.
This is where the continuity between then and now kicks in. Most
contemporary theorists of mind, whether they view thought as infor-
mation processing or as physical engagement with the world (or both),
share a common passive-mechanist view of mental life. According to
Dennett and his philosophical compatriots, agency can only be appar-
ent. This is also true of intelligence, in the sense that it can only be
expressed in observable action. One had to equate appearance with
reality, Riskin writes, to accept the behaviorist modelto believe that
the problem-solving, chess-playing computer is more intelligent than a
human being, even a smart one.
The reductionist model of mind requires its devotees to reject
any vestiges of vitalism they can sniff in the cultural atmosphere. As
Pinker says, intelligence has often been attributed to some kind of
energy flow or force fielda point of view he derides as little more
than spiritualism, pseudoscience, and science-fiction kitsch. Pinker
is here playing the classic custodian of conventional wisdom, policing
the boundaries of responsible opinion with any ideological weapons

available, including the rhetoric of scientific expertise. But the reason
for Pinkers disdain, as Riskin observes, is simply that the view he is
dismissing violates the classical mechanist ban on agency in nature.
Pinker is a faithful servant of intellectual fashion.
The Heart of the Matter

It would be easier for the reductionist worldview if its defenders faced
opposition from a handful of New Age airheads, clinging to their ridic-
ulous ideas with sentimental tenacity. But in fact the notion of agency
in nature has gained extraordinary ground among scientists them-
selves in recent decades. The Viennese physicist Erwin Schrdinger
pointed the way in 1944 by asking What Is Life? He proposed a quan-
tum theory of evolution, and speculated that mutations were quan-
tum jumps in the gene molecule, rather than the millions of tiny
accidents imagined by neo-Darwinians. In this version of evolution,
natural selection worked in collaboration with the behavior of indi-
vidual organisms, which would reinforce and enhance the usefulness
of the mutation, leading to further physical change. Natural selection
was aided all along by the organisms making appropriate use of the
mutation, Schrdinger insisted. Selection and use go quite parallel
and are . . . fixed genetically as one thing: a used organas if Lamarck
were right. The complicating force at the heart of evolution was the
organisms inner tendency to use what it hadits agency.
Schrdingers as if Lamarck were right has acquired more
palpable meaning in recent decades with the rise of epigenetics.
This field emphasizes the whole context in which genetic material
functions, from the cell outside its nucleus to the organism and its
environment. Several decades ago, the biologist Barbara McClin-
tock discovered what she called transposons: mobile elements in a
cells genome that respond to stress such as starvation or sudden tem-
perature changes by rearranging the cells DNA. McClintock first
found transposition in maize, but it has turned out to be important
in other organisms as well. Current research suggests, according to
Riskin, that bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics not through
a purely random process of mutation followed by natural selection,
but in important part by moving their DNA around. James Shap-
iro, a bacterial geneticist at the University of Chicago, has extended
McClintocks work by showing that nearly all cells possess the bio-
chemical tools for changing their DNA, and they use them respon-
sively, not purely randomly. Epigeneticists are moving toward the
ideas of adaptive or directed mutation, but cautiously because such
notions breach the Weismann barrier between somatic and genetic

changea breach that in Dawkinss view Who knows? Maybe scientists
would open the floodgates of fanaticism
will have something to learn
and zealotry (by which he means Lamarck-
ism). Somewhere, Lamarck is smiling. from historians, as well as
In recent years, epigeneticists have begun
the other way around.
addressing larger ontological questions. Eva
Jablonka has emphasized the restlessness of 9
matter, while Gerd Mller and Stuart New-
man have gone further, arguing that random variation and natural
selection alone do not account for the presence of organic forms in
nature. Instead, they invoke an inherent plasticity in living matter,
an active responsiveness to the physical environment. Plasticity and
responsiveness combined to create the capacity for generating new
organic forms, though in more complex organisms these inherent
material properties may have ceded importance to genetic factors,
which have obscured the importance of earlier, more primitive epigen-
etic mechanisms. Given this possibility of change over time, the effort
to locate the sources of organic form requires an archeological, histori-
cal dimension. As Riskin concludes, Mllers and Newmans approach
to the history of life assumes inherent natural agencies whose action
over time has produced a history that is neither designed nor random,
but contingent.
The implications of this conclusion are fundamentally transforma-
tive. Emphasizing what human beings have in common with the rest of
the natural world does not reduce humans to passive mechanismsnot
if the rest of the natural world is an animated, active mechanism. And
a clearer understanding of our relationship to that world requires more
than masses of Big Data; it also demands a sensitivity to the ways that
organisms engage with the contingent circumstances of their environ-
ment in historical time. That environment includes religions and ide-
ologies and economic systems as well as air and soil and water. Who
knows? Maybe scientists will have something to learn from historians,
as well as the other way around.
The consequences of a fresh perspective might be political and
moral as well as intellectual. A full recognition of an animated mate-
rial world could well trigger a deeper mode of environmental reform,
a more sane and equitable model of economic growth, and even reli-
gious precepts that challenge the ethos of possessive individualism
and mastery over nature. Schrdingers questionwhat is life?leads
us to reconsider what it means to be in the world with other beings
like but also unlike ourselves. The task could not be more timely, or
more urgent.t

Displaced
Deities
A reply
3 Barbar a Ehrenreich
M odernism, Jackson Lears asserts, enthroned human consciousness

and drained the vitality from the rest of creation. The elements of the
natural worldrocks, trees, rivers, and nonhuman animalscame to
be seen as inert, passive mechanisms, acting only in response to outside
forces. Humans, on the other hand, possessed agency and were capable
of acting on their own. This is, however, a difficult proposition to prove
or disprove. How can one measure the amount of perceived vitality in
the universe and how it has changed over the centuries?
Throwing caution aside, lets give it a try. One measure of the
vitality of creation might be the number of gods or spirits thought
to exist at a given time. These are slippery, shape-changing entities
who do not lend themselves to an accurate census, so we need to be
content with the sloppy arithmetic suggested by anthropologists and
historians of religion. In the conventional view, the primitiveand
perhaps originalhuman picture was of a natural world crowded with
spirit-type beings: animals that spoke and understood human lan-
guages, mountains and rivers that encapsulated autonomous beings
and required human respect, etc. The nineteenth-century anthropol-
ogist Edward Tylor termed this view of an inspirited world animism,
and to this day, indigenous belief systems that seem particularly dis-
organized and incoherent compared to the great world religions
like Islam and Christianity are also labeledor perhaps we should say
libeledas animism.
It is the numbers, though, that concern us here. Animists have a
potentially infinite number of spirit-beings to keep them company,
amuse them, and sometimes threaten them. In practice, animists sin-
gle out only certain elements of the natural world as spirits, the ones
they feel a particular connection toor, as an animist might say, the
ones that call attention to themselves in some way. The Nayaka people
of Southern India include rocks among the inspirited beings in their
world but, as a local person informed an ethnographer, not all rocks.
Nor do all elephants make the cut to spirit-level status. Still, when you

S O FI A D R E S C H E R

include objects, bodies of water, and animals, there is no limit on the
number of entities charismatic enough to qualify as spirits.
Out of Many
I know that any talk of stages of civilization or religion sets off alarms
about possible biases toward Western ideas of progress. Still, lets
continue on our reckless attempt to count the number of deities and
spirits worldwide, and move on to the stage usually designated as the
one after animism: polytheism. How the multitudinous spirits of
animism congealed into distinct deities is not known, but the earliest
polytheistic religion is thought to be Hinduism, arising in about 2500
BCE and still bearing traces of animism in the form of animal deities
like Ganesh and Hanuman, as well as in rural shrines centered on rocks.
The religions of the ancient Mediterranean world, the Middle East, and
the southern part of the Western Hemisphere were all polytheistic,
made possible by stratified societies capable of erecting temples and
supporting a nonproductive priestly caste.
So to return to our count: If animism could maintain a spirit popu-
lation of hundreds or more, polytheismof the capital-intensive, tem-
ple-based varietygenerally accommodated only about a dozen major
deities, although these were accompanied by dozens of lesser deities,
demigods, and figures whose divine origin was contested, like Dio-
nysus. The next stage, which dates from roughly 2000 BCE to 700
CE, reduced the number of inspirited agents in the universe, outside
of humans, to one.
The rise of monotheism has been almost universally hailed by mod-
ern scholars as a great moral and intellectual step forward. Aesthetically,
the clean lines of monotheism are more congenial to Protestantism than
the baroque mess that is polytheism. The system is also ethically tidy,
at least in structural terms: all morally vexing questions are answered
by positing that the one remaining deity is the perfection of goodness.
In myth, the transition to monotheism sometimes occurred as a usur-
pation of divine power by a particular polytheistic deity within a larger
pantheon: Yahweh, for example, had to drive out the earlier Canaan-
ite gods like Asherah and Baal. Politically, the transition could occur
suddenly by kingly decree, as in the cases of the pharaoh Akhenaton,
the Hebrew king Saul, and the emperor Constantine. The single Gods
exclusive claim to represent perfect goodness (or in the case of Yahweh,
fierce tribal loyalty) proved, in turn, crucial in legitimating the power of
the king, who could claim to rule by divine right.
But from an animist or polytheistic point of view, the transition to
monotheism was a long process of deicide, a relentless culling of gods

and spirits until no one was left except an Aesthetically, the clean lines
abstraction so distant that it required belief.
of monotheism are more
Not everyone went along with the imposition
of monotheism. The Egyptians reverted to congenial to Protestantism
polytheism as soon as Akhenaten died, while
than the baroque mess
the Hebrew kings fought ruthlessly to sup-
press their subjects constant backsliding to that is polytheism.
the old Canaanite religion. Within the mono-
theistic religions, too, there was a steady drift 9
back toward polytheism. The Christian God
divided himself into the Trinity; saints proliferated within Christian-
ity and Islam; the remnants of animism flourish alongside Buddhism
(which, strictly speaking, shouldnt be considered a form of theism at all).
From the early modern era onward, reform movements rushed in
to curb these deviations. In Europe the Reformation cracked down on
the veneration of saints, downplayed the Trinity, and stripped churches
of decoration, incense, and other special effects. Within Islam, Wah-
habism suppressed Sufism, along with music and artistic depictions of
living creatures. The face of religion became blank and featureless, as if
to discourage the mere imagining of nonhuman agencies in the world.
Our Deities, Ourselves

It was the austere, reformed version of monotheism that set the stage
for the rise of modern science, which took as its mission the elimination
of the last vestiges of agency from the natural world. Lightning is an
electrical charge, not an expression of divine displeasure. The amoeba
does not move because it wants to, but because it is driven by chemi-
cal gradients in its environment. Science did not set out to destroy the
monotheistic deity, but it did push him into a corner and ultimately ren-
dered him irrelevant. When an iconic 1966 Time magazine cover echoed
Nietzsche by asking, Is God Dead? the word was out: we humans are
alone in a dead universe, the last conscious beings left.
There was one and only one candidate left for the status of con-
scious, active agent: ourselves (or more precisely, the European notion
of the self as an inner core to each personwhich notion was being
constructed at about the same time that science was condemning God
to the dustbin of history). Lionel Trilling wrote that in the late 16th
and early 17th centuries, something like a mutation in human nature
took place, which he took to be the requirement for what Frances
Yates called the emergence of modern European and American man.
As self-awareness took hold, the bourgeoisie bought mirrors, commis-
sioned self-portraits, wrote autobiographies, and increasingly hon-

ored the mission of trying to find oneself among the buzz of thought
engendered by a crowded social world. Today we take it for granted
that inside the self we present to others, there lies another, truer self,
and that it is fruitful territory for exploration, ideally with guidance
from a psychotherapist.
Already the language of self-regard has begun to take on a religious
quality. We are instructed to believe in ourselves, esteem ourselves,
be true to ourselves, and above all, love ourselves. It is even possible,
at least in Japan, for a woman to marry herself, vowing, for example,
to be my Beloved always and in all ways. Of course, here one enters an
endless hall of mirrors: How can the self be known to the self, and who
is doing the knowing? Other people can be annoying, as Sartre sug-
gested, but true hell is perpetual imprisonment in the self. The rise of
self-awareness in roughly the seventeenth century has been associated
with the outbreak of an epidemic of melancholy (depression) in Europe
at about the same time, as well as with the emergence of schizophrenia
as a recognizable condition.
It is too late to revive the deities and spirits that enlivened the
world of our ancestors, and efforts to do so are invariably fatuous. But
we can at least resolve to give some space to the nonhuman agents
that have managed to surviveanimals, for example, and yes, trees.
We need to shrink our habitat and re-wild large swaths of the world.
And we need also to make room in our minds for the uncanny when
it occursthe flash of sunlight that temporarily transfixes us and lifts
us out of ourselves. The possibility must be left open that it is a wink
from an entity or spirit that we know full well, from both science and
monotheism, could not exist.t

Incendiary Art: The Body
6 Patricia Smith
Ive nightmared your writhe, glum

fists punching their way out of your
own body, the blind stumble through
the buckled vein of your throat as
your nerve endings sputtered and blew.
Ive dipped my finger into a vaporous
pool of your skin. The heat blessed
your whole new self with horizon,
square-jawed boy. With such potent
intent, you blared illicit and just enough
saint. Now, with so many northern
days between us, you are much easier
to God. But they are looking for you.
They are wildly sloshing fuel across
the landscape and they are screeching
your name. Today, one said I sure would
like to burn a black man alive. So, yep,
you left us here with undulating acres
of fools and that particular stank leg
of gospel. You left us all this snuff,
hawk and proud little bowleg, you left
their brains stunned by dairy and fat
meat. You left us not much path, even
after your body was that brief beauteous
torch. They seem to remember you
fondly. And there are unstruck matches
everywhere.

The Schmaltz
in Our Stars
3 Talia Lavin
The Hayden Planetarium in the Rose Center for Earth and Space at
the American Museum of Natural History offers Space Shows every
half hour in its 429-seat Space Theater. Sealed under the mammary
swell of its 67-foot screen, the viewer is invited to enjoy a hyperrealis-
tic view of the planets, star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies emitted by a
custom-made Zeiss Mark IX Star Projector. Some years ago, I paid my
$22, entered the chamber, and settled beside my date into one of the
plush, reclining seats, tilting my head backas the stars rose.I lasted
approximately five minutes before I had a panic attack.
It turns out that being sealed in a dome of celestial blackness and
invited to contemplate eternity is a terrible date activity for an ago-
raphobe.
I have always hated space. While I dont harbor any particular ani-
mus toward astronauts, my childhood aspirations never involved learn-
ing to pee in antigravity conditions or eating freeze-dried sausages.
(NASAs most appealing adjective for its own space food is thermo-
stabilized.) In recent years, I have wantonly ignored the Matthew
McConaughey space movie, the Sandra Bullock space movie, and mul-
tiple Matt Damon space movies, because thinking about the pure wild
void feels like a fist at my throat.
As an American trained to think of the moon landing as one of
my countrys signature accomplishments, I experience my willfully
earthbound imagination as an acute kind of lack. Space-related imag-
ery bombards us as children, encouraging the young to dream higher
than the Krmn line (while conveniently failing to note that the sheer
nothingness of that black realm would rend tiny bodies, along with
their cosmos-conquering dreams and astronaut pajamas, to bloody
atoms). These days, space tourism is already within reach for select
multimillionaires, and our new millennial titans of wealthJeff Bezos,
Richard Branscum Branson, Elon Musk, et al.are building up their
own private space exploration empires, hoping to lure the merely very-
rich, too, into the cosmos. Via his pet project, SpaceX, Musk is build-
ing a fleet of nimble craft called Dragons, like a billionaire Daenerys
Targaryen with a receding hairline.

C H R I S TI A N VO LC K M A N A N D R A P H A L T H I E R RY
And what, after all, is American life if not a desire to ape the
whims of the wealthy? Nevertheless, I quail at the thought of following
in their footsteps. How can a girl who sometimes struggles to leave her
apartment access the infinite American dream?
Perhaps in response to the new influx of moguls into the solar sys-
tem, governments have begun to offer friendlier and more accessible
iterations of their space programs. The Cold War has ended at last,
and the final frontier now abounds with treacly mascots bent on prov-

If a tiny robot, a crisply ing that the universe can countenance kinder
beings than giant fireballs and black gravita-
designed penguin, and a cheerful
tional thirst-holes. For reasons best known
rabbit can conquer space, might to themselves, China, England, the United
States, and even Italy have created adorable
even a space-phobic soul like me
mascots for various aspects of their space pro-
dare to dream of it? grams: avatars waving, like the solitary Little
Prince, reassuringly from the wastes.
9 Perhaps the most dramatic example was
Chinas Jade Rabbit moon rover, named for
the being that Chinese mythos has placed on the craggy surface of the
moonpounding out the elixir of immortality with a mortar and pes-
tle, endlessly, for the lunar goddess, Change. The little Rabbit gained
a fandom millions strong, sending plucky, cheerful updates on the Chi-
nese microblogging platform Weibo into the ether, often addressed to
the masters that controlled it. Of an April total eclipse of the moon,
it asked, Why blush?
NASAs ICESat-2 project, in turn, gave us Paige the Penguin,
named by a class of Maryland second-graders, her sleekly drawn profile
befitting the nature of the project: studying the cryosphere (otherwise
known as ice). Paige has one navy-blue eye and a sharply hooked beak
and is pictured, in an artists conception, hovering above the Earth
bathed in a vague white glow; a paler, ice-blue wing gestures into the
blackness, her level gaze that of a reassuring guide.
And at the education-oriented National Space Centre in Leices-
ter, UK, a tiny, ottoman-shaped orange robot named 2.0 soared twen-
ty-one miles above the Earth hanging from a weather balloon, taking
aerial selfies with an even tinier Union Jack. Its minute, fixed smile
said: neither sun nor moon nor Earth itself shall set on my empire.
Teensy arms dangling, it almost Brexited the atmosphere.
If a tiny robot, a crisply designed penguin, and a cheerful rabbit
can conquer space, might even a space-phobic soul like me dare to
dream of it? Even on those days when the threshold of my apartment
seems as formidable a barrier as Earths atmosphere, can I, too, imag-
ine one day colonizing distant planets, wearing space suits that come in
plus-size, and shuttling through the galaxy accompanied by my happily
anthropomorphized space buddies?
The answer is still no.
The truth is that these space mascots are designed to lull us into
accepting the nothingness that swallows our planet whole, but I will
not accept it, much less come to love it. Consider this: In the insipid
autobiography of Paige the Penguin, the guileless second-graders who

ghostwrote it exposed the inherent lie in her symbolism. It is my
dream to be able to fly, however, I am not able to . . . My other dream
was to become the first penguin astronaut, but instead of letting me go
to space, NASA let me be the mascot, she says. Ultimately, is Paige
evidence of NASAs anti-penguin sentiment?
As for 2.0the uncharismatically named robot that kissed the
void in the name of BritainI will let the Leicester Mercury speak of his
ungraceful end: A video camera filmed the entire two-hour journey
and also captured the moment the balloon burst and 2.0 came hurtling
back to Earth.
Most famously of all, Jade Rabbit live-blogged its own demise, per-
ishing, powerless, on the barren face of the moon. Good night, Earth;
good night, humanity, it cried at the last, like a feebly beeping Hamlet.
The dark fable of the space mascots tells us not to venture beyond
the bounds of air, water, kin, abode; not to stray into the dark and
howling vacuum that surrounds us, flaring with ghastly nebulae. The
stars still make me cringe, delivery-food receipts clutched in my sweaty
fists. Let others dream of airless expanses, give years of their lives to
cramped journeys propelled by incalculable fuel and expense. Psychi-
cally and physically, I am lodged in the Earth like a tooth, and nothing,
save its total destruction, can shake me loose.t

Village Atheists,
Village Idiots
3 Sam Kriss
Something has gone badly wrong with our atheists. All these self-
styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen
horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling
lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter
neofascism. Superstar astrophysicist and pop-science impresario Neil
deGrasse Tyson is catatonic, mumbling in a packed cinema that the
lasers wouldnt make any sound in space, that a spider that big would
collapse under its own weight, that everything you see is just images on
a screen and none of it is real. Islam-baiting philosopher Sam Harris
is paranoid, his flailing hands gesticulating murderously at the spec-
tral Saracen hordes. Free-thinking biologist PZ Myers is psychotic,
screeching death from a gently listing hot air balloon. And the late
Christopher Hitchens, blinded by his fog of rhetoric, fell headlong into
the Euphrates.
Critics have pointed out this clutch of appalling polemic and
intellectual failings on a case-by-case basis, as if they all sprang from
a randomized array of personal idiosyncrasies. But while one eccentric
atheist might be explicable, for all of the worlds self-appointed smart-
est people to be so utterly deranged suggests some kind of pattern.
We need, urgently, a complete theory of what it is about atheism that
drives its most prominent high priests mad.
Whatever it is, it has something to do with a litany of grievances
against the believoisie so rote that it might well (or ironically) be styled
a catechism. These New Atheists and their many fellow travelers all
share an unpleasant obsessive tic: they mouth some obvious banality
there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beingsand
then act as if it is some kind of profound insight. This repetition-com-
pulsion seems to be baked right into their dogma.
Under the correspondence model of truththe one favored by
scientific rationalitya true statement is a thought-image that mir-
rors actual events; truth is just a repetition of the world. But as anyone
whos spent time with the mad knows, theres something dangerous
to ones sanity about doing the same thing over and over again. Freud,
who logged more hours in the company of the mentally ill than most,

MICHELLE THOMPSON

The real horrors of unearthed a strange dialectic here. Order,
regularity, and repetition form the taxonom-
the twenty-first century arent
ical basis of any civilizationand in repeating
superstition and unreason, patterns, Freud suggested, human beings find
a way to hold back the anarchy of the universe.
but those of a rationally
But these patterns also nourish the seeds
administered world we are of madness. People are doomed to repeat a
traumatic eventbe it the child flinging a toy
endlessly condemned to repeat.
from its cot or the armies of Europe slicing
9 each other up decade after decade. The wis-
dom and sanity of any society is founded on an
originary madness.
Just the Facts

Soren Kierkegaard, the great enemy of all pedants, offers a story that
might shed considerable light. In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
he describes a psychiatric patient who escapes from the asylum, climb-
ing out a window and running through the gardens to rejoin the world
at large. But the madman worries: out in the world, if anyone discovers
that he is insane, he will instantly be sent back. So he has to watch what
he says, and make sure none of it betrays his inner imbalancein short,
as the not-altogether unmad Danish genius put it, to convince every-
one by the objective truth of what he says that all is in order as far as his
sanity is concerned. Finding a skittle-bowl on the ground and popping
it in his pocket, he has an ingenious idea: who could possibly deny that
the world is round? So he goes into town and starts endlessly repeating
that fact, proffering it over and over again as he wanders about with
his small furious paces, the skittle-bowl in his coat clanking, in strict
conformity with Newtons laws, against what Kierkegaard euphemis-
tically refers to as his a--. Of course, the poor insistent soul is then
sent right back to the asylum.
The Postscript was Kierkegaards grand critique of Hegel, a thor-
ough and measured attack against what he saw as the blank madness
in Hegelianisms total systemization and its constant desperate striv-
ing toward the Objective. Subjectivity, Kierkegaard claimed, is truth.
The escaped madman was supposed to show that an objective fact can
abstract itself out of meaning, and that the subjective doesnt have any
monopoly on madness. His example was meant to be a commonsense
demonstration of how essentially stupid the truth can be, one that any-
one could instantly recognize. But what would happen if Kierkegaards
madman escaped from his asylum today?
Our world has changed considerably, but most of the story can stay

as it is. Our lunatic still escapes out the window of the asylum and still
wanders gibbering into townonly the town in todays fable is noisier
and more terrifying than nineteenth-century Copenhagen ever was.
Cars bark unexpectedly around privet-hedged corners, people watch
from their windows with suspicion and maybe even murderous intent.
The fleshy and terrifying faces of political candidates stare from lawn
signs; models seem to mock him from billboards. Everything in this
noisy world seems arbitrary and unforgiving; its deep grammar is one
of total sadism, and instead of feeling the mutual recognition of the
insane, our lunatic almost wishes he were back in his asylum, among
flat green and rounded edgesbut he has his truth, and it comforts
him, so he keeps on going. The world is round, the world is round, the
world is round.
Eventually, the madman walks past a bar. He hasnt had a drink in
years. But there are people inside: he has to be careful, or hell be found
out. So when he leans one nonchalant arm on the counter and the bar-
tender asks what he wants, he replies with that perfectly sane truth
that nobody could ever have any problem with. The world is round,
he says. Sorry? the barkeep asks. The world is round.
One of the other customers starts getting annoyed: Buy a drink or
piss off, why dont you? And because theres now suddenly the poten-
tial for violence, which is always interesting, someone else starts film-
ing the altercation on her phone. The customer, red and sweaty, with
little specks of rage frosting the corners of his mouth: I dont give a
fuck if the world is round, why you gotta be disturbing people when
they just want to drink in peace? The madman, smiling distantly,
because he knows that hes right and that the other man is therefore
wrong, continues his serene incantation: The world is round. We live
in humane times; nobodys being carted off to any asylum. Instead,
weeping with frustration, the angry customer punches the madman
right in the face, and he falls to the ground, fluttering like a gently
clipped blade of grass.
The video is quickly shared all over the world, and everyone
agrees: its terrible how, even in the twenty-first century, people
who believe in reason and science are oppressed by the stupid and
the superstitious. The battle lines are obvious: on one side, someone
putting forward objective facts calmly and sensibly; on the other, an
illogical flat-earther who cant back up his assertions with evidence
and so has to resort to violence. Once hes out of the hospitalall
bills paid for by a rationalist campaign groupthe lunatic is invited
to appear on TV with Bill Maher. The world is round, he grins, eyes
swerving frantically around this dizzy net of lights to avoid the cam-

era. The audience screeches its appreciation: this is real courage, to

speak the truth in the face of those who would silence you. He gets
a book deal. The World Is Round soon starts nudging its way up the
bestseller list. Yes, its just the words the world is round repeated
over four hundred pages. You dont get it, and thats the point: there
are essential truths that need to be restated; otherwise, the world is
lost to dogma.
This is a ridiculous, stupid, and unrealistic story. It also, with a few
minor variations, actually happened.
Falling Flat
The madman in this story is Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the frustrated
punter is the rapper B.o.B. Near the start of this yearheralded by
Tyson with the announcement that January 1 has no astronomical sig-
nificanceB.o.B. began insisting (on Twitter, of course) that for centu-
ries a vast conspiracy has existed for the purpose of convincing people
that the world is a sphere, when its actually flat. And for some reason,
Tyson immediately jumped in, skittle-bowl flapping noisily against his
ass, to repeat endlessly that no, its round. He even helped create a gen-
uinely unlistenable rap parodyB.o.B. gotta know that the planet is
a sphere, Gthat borrowed not only its backing track but its entire
lyrical structure from Drakes Back to Back. (See what I mean about
rationalists and repetition?)
That the world is round is, of course, probably trueas
Kierkegaard says of his madman, the cure would not be a matter of
getting him to accept that the earth was flat. But theres a wrong-
ness that doesnt simply consist in not having all the correct facts. It
doesnt matter that, unlike the escapee, Tyson was facing someone
who actually disagreed with his great and single fact; theres some-
thing really terrifying in just how obsessively he dwelt on this objec-
tive truth, before an audience who didnt need to be convinced. There
before the cable klieg lights, he was reenacting the paranoiacs manic
shuffling on his tiny square of the flat ground.
Both men were wrong, but despite having the relevant facts at his
command, Tyson managed to be more wrong than his interlocutor. He
ended the exchange by writing Duudeto be clear: Being five centu-
ries regressed in your reasoning doesnt mean we all cant still like your
musicbut five centuries ago, in 1516, absolutely nobody believed that
the world was flat. The flat earth movement is very recent: it started
in the 1840s, around the same time Kierkegaard was writing his Post-
script, when an amateur cosmologist named Samuel Rowbotham, writ-
ing under the pen name Parallax, began self-publishing anguished

screeds on the Satanic science of astrology and the evil deception of a
globular earth.
In fact, the two writers had a lot in common. Subjectivity is
truth, said Kierkegaard, and Parallax similarly disdained any indif-
ferent Hegelianism. Nobody in the 1840s had seen the roundness of the
earth: it was an objective and impersonal fact, relayed from above by a
clique of experts and administrators. And the administrators werent
just busy deciding what shape the world was; at the same time, they
were violently dispossessing millions of people of everything they
had, under a new rational system of social organization that seemed to
have, as one of its many crucial parts, the axiom of the worlds round-
ness. (All this was exhaustively theorized by another of that decades
great thinkers, one Karl Marx.) In this context, the flat earth hypoth-
esis was a way of resisting the plunder and snatching back some of the
subjects autonomy. My world is the world as I see it, Parallax and his
followers effectively intoned, and when I look at it with my own two eyes,
I see a flat plane.
In the time of Kierkegaard and Marx and Parallax, there was still
some resistance to the deadness of mere facts; now its all melted away.
Kierkegaards villagers saw someone maniacally repeating that the
world is round and correctly sent him back to the asylum. We watched

Tyson doing exactly the same thing, and instead of hiding him away
from society where nobody would have to hear such pointless nonsense,
thousands cheer him on for fighting for truth and objectivity against
the forces of backwardness. We do the same when Richard Dawkins
valiantly fights for the theory of evolution against the last hopeless
stragglers of the creationist movement, with their dinky fiberglass
dinosaurs munching leaves in a museum-piece Garden of Eden. We do
it when Sam Harris prises deep into the human brain and announces
that theres no little vacuole there containing a soul.
All these falsehoods are beautiful, tiny, glittering reminders that
the world can be something other than simply what it is; we should nur-
ture them and let them grow. Instead, theyre crushed, mercilessly, in
the name of a blind, stupid, pointless truth. But whos more wrongthe
person who droningly insists, jerking like an automaton, that the world
is round, has always been round, and will always be round? Or the one
who knows that this earth is not a given, and that we can imagine a
whole weary planet into new and different shapes?
All This Useless Beauty

The real cleavage, in other words, isnt between those who believe in
God and those who dont, but between those who want to change the
world and those who just want to repeat it. Watch one of those intermi-
nable debates between an atheist and a believeranything involving Bill
Nye is best, but theyre all on YouTube, endless stultifying hours of two
people babbling Aristotelian at each other and convincing nobody
and youll notice something strange. Both of them will, inevitably, enter
into some orgasmic rhapsody about how beautiful the universe is. The
theist, gazing upward to his heavens, will chant awestruck odes to the
majesty of Gods creation, His churning nebulae, His shining tapestry
of suns, all the wonders built from His cosmic perversion.
Meanwhile, the atheist, glancing down at his own miraculous
hands, will say something similarly soppy about mountains and rain-
bows and how incredible it is that all this came about by a happy acci-
dent of chance. When they encounter a poetic-humanist critique of
cold scientific rationality, the atheists will often argue a similar line:
Keats was wrong, science did not unweave the rainbow; the natural
world is all the more beautiful if you know how it works. (Dawkins
even published a book in 2011 called The Magic of Reality.) This accor-
dance ought to be very worrying. What it shows is that, for all their
fiercely expectorated differences, these two people are actually on the
same side.
Its sometimes charged that fundamentalist atheism has become

just another intolerant religion; here, at least, Whenever you hear a rapturous
religion as its actually practiced is only a
defense of the natural world,
minor species of atheism. What if you dont
think the universe is beautiful? What if you you should be on your guard:
wake up every morning in a tiny brick cell slot-
this is class power talking,
ted into a lifeless city under a gray and misera-
ble sky, and you think that the whole thing, as and its trying to kill you.
it stands, is utterly wretched? For most of his-
tory, religions have tended to hold the natural 9
world in various forms of contempt: its cursed
by sin, its the Devils playground, its Dunya or My. God, the great
theologian Karl Barth wrote, is a No to the world.
The doctrine that the world is bad can often be a way of excusing
some of its worst (and simultaneously, its more remediable) aspectsso
what if Im standing on your neck, all is vanity anyway?but it also has
revolutionary potential. A bad world can be redeemed. The dogma that
its good is rarely anything but evil. Every irrational social order has
declared itself to be in some way isomorphic with reality itself. Once,
the cosmos was etched into concentric spheres with God in the mid-
dle, a macrocosmic representation of feudalism. Now, geneticists like
Dawkins argue that what we see as animal life is really just a capitalist
free market in genetic code. Whenever you hear a rapturous defense
of the natural world, you should be on your guard: this is class power
talking, and its trying to kill you.
Hell on Autopilot
Atheism was once a genuinely transformative social movement; in a
few theocracies, it still is. But not here. There are two main planks of
contemporary atheisms social critique, such as it is. First, were plum-
mily assured the world that science and reason built is magnificent.
Look at our technological marvels, look at our shiny buildings, look
at the sheer volume of knowledge we now possess. Weve repeated the
entire human genome; telescopes are helping us map the senseless pat-
tern of the stars. People are living longer, eating better, fucking more
efficiently, and dying in more confusion and terror than ever before. Of
course, things still arent perfectbut were working on that.
The corollary plank maintains, of course, that where life is not so
great, its because of backwardness, pockets of existence that, despite
existing in the present, despite being produced by the same set of global
material circumstances, are somehow non-contemporaneous to them-
selves, as if theyd been held in some little bubble of recycled time. And
the chief agent and expression of all this backwardness is religion. The

problem is that, whatever the beliefs of the majority of the worlds pop-
ulation, atheism is the ruling doctrine: the one that sees the universe
as beautiful but not holy and the world as a vast collection of facts to be
appraised, analyzed, and instrumentalized. Even religion, if it wants to
function as anything other than a curiosity, has to pursue the general
trajectory of atheist thinking.
The atheists stand against unreason and untruth, and because the
least you could say about the world is that its all true, they find them-
selves taking on the same job as Hegelto defend reality against its
detractors. He wrote that philosophy is theodicy, and while to mod-
ern ears this identification has the tenor of a critique, his project was
entirely without irony. Whats more, it didnt really work: every stupid
shitty historical form is eventually upheld in its progression toward
absolute knowledge; merely understanding something under this
grand dispensation is equated with a justification of the object of your
understanding.
The modern variant follows a broadly similar line, and with more
success: it turns out you can do theodicy much more efficiently once
you remove that annoying cantankerous God from the equation alto-
gether. But as Kierkegaard showed, equating the good with the mere
possibility of knowledge can only drive you mad.
If our only problem were that we were backward, we could always
catch up. If the real challenge before us were a simple paucity of facts,
we could always learn them. But the real horrors of the twenty-first
century arent horrors of superstition and unreason, but the far more
deadly horrors of a rationally administered world we are endlessly con-
demned to repeat. Our spherical earth is increasingly organized like
one colossal factory, operating seamlessly and just in time, teeming
with millions of tiny and unwilling workers, slurping up the exper-
tise of ten thousand sharpened brainsand its not beautiful, its Hell.
Everyone is wasting their lives. Everyone is unhappy. Its not just you.
The world is insane, insane in a way that doesnt even require any of the
announcements from its administrators to be factually untrue.
If anything, the more facts we learn, the more of the universe we
manage to analyze, the more new space our colossally fucked-up social
order has in which to reproduce its idiocy. The atheists are the ones
who really love a bad and ugly reality; its mark is on them. They stand
on the trembling skin of this planet as it boils giddily through infinite
space, without any materials to critique this worldbecause the ratio-
nal is dogmatically identified with the good, and because theyve so
thoroughly trained themselves out of believing in Hell that they cant
see the real one right in front of them.t

E x h i b i t A Danielle Chenette
Atlas Smudged.

Divine
Indigestion
The endlessly fabulized
American self
3 Jonathon Sturgeon
America is not at any crossroads,

Perry Anderson writes in American
Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, his
2015 guide to the rise and scholarly
maintenance of the American impe-
rium. Anderson is challenging Francis
Fukuyama in particular, the end-of-
history theorist who, in his view, fails
to reckon with the staggering accu-
mulation of military bases round the
world, or the grip of the United States
on the Middle East, let alone symbiosis
with Israel. For Fukuyama and other
spinners of imperial-decline narra-
tives, Anderson reserves no sympathy.
Intellectual America, he concludes, is
just where it has always been, squaring
the circle of philanthropy and empire
to its own satisfaction.
When reading this bracing indictment, I find it disturbing and
laughable that few complementary accounts exist in the realm of
American cultural, aesthetic, or literary criticism (beyond the work
of Fredric Jameson, who is, more or less, German). The notion that
American literature might have an imperial bentthat it might be any-
thing other than a string of lightly co-influential works of imaginative
power, and might itself reflect our national desire to dominateis lost
on its critics, both right and left.
But the possibility of an imperial literature wasnt always lost on
our sly centrist critics, who helped to cultivate it across generations.
Throughout the twentieth century, many of the foremost critics, like,

C . K . WILDE
say, Alfred Kazin, mocked and discarded the leftist social novelists
of their time, favoring instead the cultists of a catch-all realism. In
Kazins view, the main obstruction to a strong national literature was
an amorphous naturalism, somehow a revival of the nineteenth-cen-
tury variety, whose despairs boiled down to a tedious anxiety about
the disintegration of collective promise. The virtue of realism was
twofold: that it celebrated idiosyncrasy as a form of individualist liber-
ation from social life, and that it came to dominate American fiction,
[sweeping] at will over every sector of American life. Over time,
the establishment of a Realist Imperium became retroactive proof
of its imaginative superiority. On this basis, Kazin deigned to praise

The possibility of an imperial the common talk of writers like Sherwood
Anderson and bestowed upon him the label
literature wasnt always lost
of realist, in recognition of the way the rural
on our sly centrist critics, writer had newly liberated himself from the
village virus. Urged forth by a fierce desire
who helped to cultivate it
to assert [his] freedom, the literary realist
across generations. becomes a reverse-Prometheus, stealing fire
from the people for the entertainments of the
9 critics on high by absconding from the village
with its language. For Kazin, it hardly mat-
tered whether the novelist in question actually went against the realist
typeif, perhaps, she was unduly preoccupied with social roles, or if
her politics leaned too far leftso long as she could be reshaped with
critical force. In On Native Grounds, Edith Wharton is only allowed
to be thought a penetrating writer of stratified cosmopolitan life
because she was bored with it. And Hemingway is extolled because
he triumphed against a society that served only to prey upon the indi-
vidual. (This is presumably why he moved to Cuba.)
Today, if a novel is accepted into the American canon, it is as a
masterpiece of individualism that subsumes material and social being
into the spirit of a lone genius. If a social world is present in a novel of
repute, our critics gobble it up and excrete it as imagination. In the early
twenty-first century, realism has come to be synonymous, in the blin-
kered American critical consensus, with a curiously antisocial novel. It
never occurs to critics that realism could only seem real because of the
dilapidation of collective dreams. Nor do critics worry that the social
issues presented in our novels rarely attain the complexity of cable
television. Or that a novel genuinely concerned with social life (or even
the social role of a single person) could itself, against this backdrop,
be idiosyncratic. Its sad, in other words, that the novels of Jonathan
Franzen register to most as sociopolitical literature. Freedom isnt a
social novel on the level of Wharton. Its a decelerated twenty-four-
hour news channel.
Kazin, at a time of crisis, helped ensure that later critics and novel-
ists would operate under the aegis of individualist orthodoxy. As a coda
to his project, you might consider the neopragmatist philosopher Rich-
ard Rorty, who, like Kazin, centered himself against radical parents.
Passing as a cautious student of the left, or at least as a public intellec-
tual who endorsed Scandinavian social democracy, Rorty nonetheless
pulled European modernists like Proust into his imaginative orbit and
turned them into liberal American ironists. In this sense, he became
American literary philosophys own Fukuyama. He hymned bourgeois

virtuesthe irreducible gulf between private language and social life
like an end-of-history muse.
But outside the ranks of derivative Foucauldian critics, there
was at least one critic of literary imperialism on the American liter-
ary scene, though he is largely forgotten. Ironically, Quentin Ander-
son, who worked alongside Lionel Trilling at Columbia, did not write
exhaustively about the rise of the social novel; he instead tracked the
formative impulses of our literary ideology back to writers like Emer-
son, Whitman, and Henry James. There he found the residue of what
he called the imperial self. Beginning with Emersons Naturethe
early Emerson whom Andersons academic peers largely overlooked
he examined the imaginative desocialization of American literature
at the hands of a radical individualism that was couched in the vernac-
ular of the combative, Transcendentalist self. There is no doubt that
Andersons best work, The Imperial Self, cuts against the grain of the
criticism of the time; even praise of the book, like Harold Blooms (in a
characteristically self-serving 1971 review), ignored its arguments that
readers should ground literature in social context in order to elevate its
idiosyncrasies. For all his labor, Anderson couldnt escape the strain
of post-social thinking he set out to attack. In the end, he was incor-
porated by Bloom, his generations premier Emersonian critic, into
the American literary dogma. The Imperial Self, Bloom promised, is
another Emersonian manifesto.
Star Child
A closer look at The Imperial Self reveals a critique of a literary intellec-
tualism that holds up because it is imaginative, yes, but also because the
condition of the novel has not changed much. Just as Perry Anderson
assured us that the American imperium is alive and well, the imperial
self it relies on is still kicking and screaming in contemporary Amer-
ican fiction. How else to explain why our social novels are curiously
antisocial? This is not to lament the totality of contemporary fiction,
but to argue that certain imperious authors descend from the Emerso-
nian anti-ethos.
At the heart of Quentin Andersons argument is the idea that
Emerson erected the archetype of the artist of incorporation; he
became the divine child who eats up the world and then, godlike,
restores it as the Word. He moved the task of self-validationa feat
previously achieved through social lifewithin. As Anderson wrote
in 1971, our prime business is no longer imagined as either generation
or action, but, ultimately, an exhibition of the power of the self to image
the world it has incorporated. The artist who chews up and digests

social and material life, who asks What world am I to possess? rather
than What role shall I be given? is now an undeniable mainstay of
American literary idolatry. For the first time since Aristotle, Ander-
son laments, the habitudes that accompanied the belief that we are
social animals were effectively denied on the plane of society itself. In
the place of a vast vacancy where the effective father state had been,
Emerson inserted his psychic projections, his imperial self. He vacu-
umed nature and society into his enormous ego-mouth. And ever since
we hitched our dreams to Emersons star, our ideas of a glorious collec-
tive life have run hollow.
The Imperial Self goes to great lengths to strike at Emerson as the
fount of pernicious individualism. At the same time, though, we should
affirm that this Emerson is brilliant: the talent and energy required to
manipulate his richly variegated strands of religiosity and ambition
were never found in the same mixture again. Still, there is the matter
of literary tradition. In Emersons wake, there was Henry James, who
swallowed European social life into his total imaginative order, seem-
ingly without learning anything, and brought it back home to America.
Its James whom Anderson, in an earlier book, credits with the hyper-
trophied selfor, as I like to think of it, a massively engorged ego.
Theres also no forgetting Walt Whitman, who transmuted the incor-
poration and gentrification of the social and material worlds into an act
of celebration. If you think that Anderson, by drawing out this lineage,
is being cruel, Id point to Ben Lerners recent essay, The Hatred of
Poetry, which, in its ambivalence, accuses Whitman of changing him-
self into a national technology that defeat[s] the language and value
of existing society, who express[es] irreducible individuality in a way
that can be recognized socially. Lerners description of Whitmans
parlor trickmaking individualism appear to be a social goodisnt
far from Andersons critique of the imperial self.
If theres a blindspot in Andersons argument, its in his complaint
that the cultural strain Emerson voices may be said to have won out
over the possibility of anything national. The opposite was true, and
this should have been clear to Anderson in the late 1960s, not least
because it would come to account for a mutation in the imperial self.
The devouring of social roles, in Andersons view, would preclude
the formation of a national consciousness that requires social individ-
uals who do their part. If everyone becomes an amputated transpar-
ent eyeballto adopt Emersons insane metaphor from Naturethe
nation-building of hands would give way to a glut of shoegazing. Of
course, we now know that an oligarchic American empire, crafted
from military and market dominanceand the cheap distribution of

Emersonian individualism to all corners of the Earthrelied on the
elimination of social life both at home and abroad.
Nor did Anderson predict that the Emersonian solipsist, drunk on
isolation, self-divorced from society, would become paranoid. If any-
thing, Emersons transparent eyeball is now a webcam hacked by the
NSA. Or maybe its a TV camera. Either way, its a technology at the
mercy of corporate and government technocrats.
Spirit Animals
Borrowing from Quentin Andersons technique, we can employ a
trusty shorthand guide for evaluating the imperial self in contempo-
rary literature: find the authors idea of nature. Take, for example, Karl
Ove Knausgaard, the self-hating Protestant who epitomizes the idea
that, in contemporary fiction, the oeuvre is the soul. The work of the
author, emptying out his life in the form of an epic act of autofiction,
will be judged accordingly at the end of daysbut by culture, not God
(who is dead). There is, to be fair, a bit of room between Emerson and
the Norwegianhes from Europe, after all. Where Emerson would
gorge himself on Nature, Knausgaard would deny it nihilistically, all
the better to make room for the self. And there is no mistaking Knaus-
gaards position on nature: I dont believe in Nature, he writes in vol-
ume four of My Struggle.
Elsewhere in Europe, there is China Miville, whose call for anti-
nomian utopia (in his journal Salvage) eschews Emersons formula of
nature as a shield against the social, one that he says results in envi-
ronmental injustice, in racism. But Mivilles world-building project
also rehearses a quasi-eschatological language and do-it-yourself-ma-
nia that recalls Emersons herculean promise that the sun shall rise by
his will. Maybe thats why Miville has the confidence to erect fully
realized non-places in his science fiction: if the world is ruined, just
pick up the pieces and build a novel out of them.
Whatever tensions arise in the ego-nature relationships of Euro-
pean novelists, they pale in comparison to the power of incorpora-
tion flourished by Jonathan Franzen, the one-man vanguard of the
twenty-first-century imperial self. A contradiction-machine worthy of
Emerson, Franzen cant help but chew up the social and natural worlds
and digest them non-dialectically. (And, like Emerson, he has a tor-
tured relationship with German thought.)
Since novelists are at their most transparent when giving speeches
to graduating college students, its worth looking at Franzens com-
mencement address to Kenyon College in 2011, which he later repack-
aged as Pain Wont Kill You in his essay collection Farther Away. In

Once you spot Franzens ego at the address, Franzen tells the kids of his strug-
gle to incorporate the pain of his divorce into
work, youll remember it forever,
the art of not merely liking nature but loving a
like a rare species of bird in specific and vital part of it. After the divorce,
Franzen felt alienated from the world:
the wild. It chirps in his every
When I was in college, and for many years after,
essay and short story and novel.
I liked the natural world. Didnt love it, but defi-
9 nitely liked it. It can be very pretty, nature. And
since Id been fired up by critical theory, and was
looking for things to find wrong with the world and reasons to hate the
people who ran it, I naturally gravitated to environmentalism, because
there were certainly plenty of things wrong with the environment. And
the more I looked at what was wrongan exploding world population,
exploding levels of resource consumption, rising global temperatures,
the trashing of the oceans, the logging of our last old-growth forests
the angrier and more people-hating I became.
But then something happened: Franzen fell in love with birds. He

began to see birds with his ego-eye. Little by little, in spite of myself,
he writes, I developed this passion, and although one half of a passion
is obsession, the other half is love. Once he absorbed birds into him-
self, he goes on, it became, strangely, easier, not harder, to live with
my anger and despair and pain. Before you know it, an Emersonian
doorway has opened upon universality:
How does this happen? I think, for one thing, my love of birds became
a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that Id never
even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my
life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my com-
mitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to
either straight-up accept or flat-out reject. Which is what love will do to
a person.
Franzen is up front, in the address, in affirming that the distribu-

tion of social roles, the life of a global citizen, was insufficient to drive
him toward his commitment. And at the end of the essay, this commit-
ment is reserved for two things: novels and journalism. The takeaway
of Franzens speech is that Kenyon students should find an object or
animal in the natural world to incorporate into themselves, to con-
front a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.
Once this aim is accomplished, no obstacle can stand in the way of your
career. And no one can call you out for demanding the slaughter of feral
cats.

Gobble, Gobble
This egoistic relation to nature is everywhere in Franzens novels,
although not in a way you might expect. In Purity, Franzen avoids
stretches of Tolstoy-esque landscaping that you know hed rather per-
form; he doesnt want to capitulate to his media stereotype. Still, he
cant restrain his feeling for Nature going full Emersonian universal:
Warm late-morning air currents were stirring the woods along the road,
creating a tapestry of light and shadow so fine-grained and chaotic in its
shiftings that no computer on earth could have modeled it. Nature even
on the most local of scales made a mockery of information technology.
Even augmented by tech, the human brain was paltry, infinitesimal, in
comparison to the universe.
There is much of the Romantic intellectual here, in his penetra-

tion (and enclosure) of natureits also fair to note, along these lines,
that the incorporation artist is usually (probably always) a man. Its
mesmerizing to behold, then, in the next passage, Franzen-man reach-
ing instinctively for the full incorporation gambit:
Matter was information, information matter, and only in the brain did
matter organize itself sufficiently to be aware of itself; only in the brain
could the information of which the world consisted manipulate itself.
The human brain was a very special case. He ought to have felt grateful
for the privilege of having had one, of having played his small part in
beings knowledge of itself.
Franzen cant help himself; the moment he recognizes the infini-

tude of naturejust seconds after he notes the incapacity of the self (or
the brain) to eat it up, he balks. His will to devour matter and informa-
tion melts into Emersonian self-knowledge, of having played his small
part in beings knowledge of itself.
In literature, the contemporary imperial self enjoys nothing more
than the imaginative disintegration of nature and social life into chew-
able bits of matter and information. The possessor of this self is a par-
anoid solipsist, a confused data analyst in service to a literary regime
that lacks critical oversight. Franzens own paranoia is the one expla-
nation I have for Puritys devolution from a social novel of austerity
and precarity into an espionage thriller. In the early pages, were intro-
duced to Pip, a debt-ravaged graduate (not from Kenyon) who struggles
to find her place in an America where less is not enough. But Pips name
should signal to readers that a Dickensian bevy of coincidences will
resolve her plot. Meanwhile, Franzen, the NSA of narrators, assumes
his paranoia. The novel surveils Andreas Wolf, a character somehow

unseen by critics as an extension of Franzens tortured sense of being

misunderstood, a character who can know only the emptiness and
pointlessness of being. Well, Wolf is just Franzen after the divorce,
but before he learned to subsume birds. Hes the Emersonian author of
How to Be Alone, and the imperial self who later wondered whether he
should adopt an Iraqi war orphan.
Once you spot Franzens ego at work, youll remember it forever,
like a rare species of bird in the wild. It chirps in his every essay and
short story and novel. Even his contract model of literary writing,
which privileges an easygoing partnership between the reader and
writer, one predicated on trust and an asymmetrical distribution of
goods, just seems like the Trans-Pacific Partnership of reader-writer
agreements.
Eating Contest
There is a befuddling joke in the middle of Purity, one that joins
Franzens humorlessness with his need to create psychic space by
munching on his literary descendants. That it comes from the mouth
of a disabled professor also hints at Franzens estimation of literary aca-
demics (or, as Emerson would have put it, the American scholar). The
wit, in this case, is Charles Blenheim, a teacher of writing, who reflex-
ively asks Pip about her reading habits:
Good. Good. And are you a big fan of Jonathan Savoir Faire? So many of
my students are.
You mean the book about animal welfare?
The very one. Hes a novelist, too, Im told.
I read the animal book.
So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the
New York Times Book Review, youd think it was the most common male
name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vital-
ity. He arched an eyebrow at Pip. And what about Zadie Smith? Great
stuff, right?
Youll recognize the target of the prank as Jonathan Safran Foer,

not least because Franzen douses him with so much red paint. And the
animal welfare book in question is Eating Animals, Foers guide to
better living through vegetarianism.
Now, its unwise to recommend Eating Animals either as a dietary
guide (too meandering) or a work of literary value (too meandering).
But as a pithy ars poetica for the contemporary incorporation artist,
the book is rivaled only by Franzens Kenyon speech, to which it bears
an uncanny resemblance; its as if the two authors are staring at each

C . K . WILDE
other in a mirror, licking their lips. Only the image is inverted: where
Franzen implores you to assuage your social anxieties by gobbling up
birds with your loving eyes, Foer offers absolution by preaching about
what not to eat. What is a book about not eating other than a moral
guide to incorporation? Heres the brunt of Foers case for selective,
self-improving ingestion, as it played out in his relationship with his
future (and later-to-be-separated) wife, the novelist Nicole Krauss:
Sounds and feels great, but better how? I could think of endless ways to
make myself better (I could learn foreign languages, be more patient,
work harder), but Id already made too many such vows to trust them
anymore. I could also think of endless ways to make us better, but the
meaningful things we can agree on and change in a relationship are few.
In actuality, even in those moments when so much feels possible, very
little is.
Eating animals, a concern wed both had and had both forgotten,
seemed like a place to start. So much intersects there, and so much could
flow from it. In the same week, we became engaged and vegetarian.
In Franzens case, a divorce is overcome with a resolution about

naturelove birds. In turn, a moral pronouncement about nature
dont eat animalscodifies Foers marriage. Yet both writers are pre-
occupied with using nature to make way for the self, and both choose to
expand the self at the expense of social concern. The impetus behind
Franzens unruly literary Jonathans joke is then nothing but the nar-

cissism of shrinking differences. There is no Bloomian swervethe
battle of influence between literary father and son, or between Jona-
than, aged fifty-six, and Jonathan, aged thirty-nine. The imperial self
in American fiction is more often revealed in the anxiety of incorpo-
ration. The soul is not twin-born, but the only begotten, Emerson
wrote in Experience. It admits of no co-life. At some point, follow-
ing the lessons of the master, these selves will have to merge.
And indeed Jonathan Safran Foers new novel is his most Franze-
nian. If you mixed The Corrections and Freedom, in fact, youd come to
something like Here I Am (with its self-asserting title). Billed as Foers
most searching, hard-hitting novel, its chiefly a family drama that
addresses, Franzen-like, a narrow run of CNN-quality political issues.
(Wolf Blitzer shows up several times to deliver the fake news.) Set in a
curiously despatialized Washington, D.C., it ponders the legacy of the
Bloch family, from the great-grandfather, Isaac, to the littlest, Benjy.
But the protagonists of this movie are the self-consciously bourgeois
Jacob and Julia, a divorcing couple, and their distressed son, Sam, who
is on the cusp of his bar mitzvah. Lingering in the background of Foers
claustrophobic therapy session is the destruction of Israel, a massively
incredible geopolitical scenario that has, for example, Hamas joining
the Islamic State. To make a six-hundred-page story shorter: there is
near-apocalypse and there is family. Forget the social world in between.
It should be no surprise to readers of Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Closeacquainted with its precocious Oskar Schellthat Here I Am
leans on a favorite Foer theme: the wisdom of children. Like Emerson,
who believed that the soul reveals itself as a child in time, child in
appearance, Foer privileges the transcendent power of gifted youth,
who can incorporate common sense lost to blind adults. As Jacob, his
father (a TV writer who once plagiarized Harold Bloom), scrambles to
find himself in the wake of a broken marriage, Sam drops knowledge at
his bar mitzvah. The scene is made all the more dramatic by its place-
ment between demagogic speeches delivered by adult heads-of-state:
We read Hamlet in school this year, and everybody knows the whole To
be or not to be business, and we talked about it for like three consec-
utive classesthe choice between life and death, action and reflection,
whatever and whatever. . . . And that got me thinking that also maybe
one doesnt have to exactly choose. To be or not to be. That is the
question. To be and not to be. That is the answer . . . I did not ask to be a
man, and I do not want to be a man, and I refuse to be a man.
For the imperial self, the incorporation artist, children have an

enviable advantage: theyve yet to mature into a social role.

After the End of History
Not all American fiction capitulates to the imperial self, but I would
argue that it is pervasive in contemporary literature, especially in
the growing number of literary novels that read like television, a
medium that churns social life into drivel, that takes for granted
a viewing public better described as a foam of isolated bubbles
human monads staring at screens. For every piece about sexual vio-
lence in Game of Thrones, for instance, there are a thousand tweets
about why a character didnt zigzag before he was shot with an arrow.
And for every TV novel, like Foers Here I Amwhose protagonist
tellingly writes for an HBO seriesthere is a thick layer of useless
bookchat.
And the imperial novel often adopts our Imperial House Style, the
free indirect discourse sanctioned by James Wood, our critic-in-chief,
who happens to be spiritually one-half Henry James. Im not the first
person in these pages to disparage Woods preoccupation with the
fate of the individual, which relies on conventionally individuated
characterslittle psychological units lifted painstakingly from Flau-
bertas the vertebrae of every decent novel. Whats worse, Woods
method for cultivating these gently varied individualists is a formal
technique stolen from the Emersonian playbook. A masked narrator
dips into the space of its characters, renditions them, steals their lan-
guage as intel, and abscondsnewly liberated, Kazin might say. Or,
if this is too dramatic, just think of free indirection as a transatlantic
treaty signed at gunpoint by Zadie Smith and issued by contemporary
American literatures most successful British colonialist. Either way,
free indirect discourse, the First Amendment of literary styles, often
feels more smothering than free. Its no wonder that one of the bet-
ter American novels of this year, Karan Mahajans The Association of
Small Bombs, a book that strenuously avoids free indirect discourse (by
its authors admission), came from a writer born outside of the United
States, who knows the style is just another convention.
There are strong contemporary American-born novelists who
challenge the ethic of incorporation. One of these offers what Franzen
would call a delicious irony. (He loves the word delicious, which
is probably the strongest evidence Ive offered for my argument.) Im
thinking of the work of Nell Zink, the would-be acolyte of Franzen
who firmly rejected his attempt to swallow her wholesale. The story is
now somewhat famous. Zink, after a birding adventure, began writing
letters to Franzen (and vice versa), which hinted at her wit and narra-
tive resources. After he failed to get her published, she found her way
to a small press and literary acclaim without his help. Later, in an inter-

view at Vice, upon the publication of Mislaid, her second novel, Zink
observed something about Franzen:
In a weird, contradictory sense, he feels like hes the avant-garde. People

look to the tall white guys to be our avant-garde because theyre the ones
who are not obligated to be political, in the sense of advancing some
agenda. Theres no great collective injustice that Franzen is trying to
right. You know, R-I-G-H-T. Hes the one who can say, OK, Im in good
condition. I can talk about the novel. Its easy for anyone to adopt that
pose. Its just a pose. Its an artistic position.
What separates this (what we can call, in shorthand, Zinks Com-

plaint) from criticisms you often hear about Franzen is the observa-
tion that there is no great collective injustice that Franzen is trying
to right. Hes not obligated to social problems. Hes self-absolved, an
authoran authoritywho is perilously untethered from the collective
good. And so hes always aiming at the wrong targets (like Twitter).
More, perhaps, than any American novel of the last two years
with the possible exception of Paul Beattys The SelloutZinks Mislaid
is pitched against the imperial self. The novel builds its story almost
entirely from shifting rolesnothing is sacred here: gender and race
and sexuality can change in a matter of pages. The selves in Mislaid are
fluid, but they dont absorb other selves, nature, matter, or information.
They exist instead in a near-Spinozistic web of pressured relationships.
By Mislaids final page, Zink has earned the right to aim her Complaint
at Lee, the novels resident Emersonian poet, paranoid solipsist, venge-
ful father to Karen, and engorged ego:
All his life he had been out of his depth. Sexual abuse, domestic violence,
a transparently evil social order, poets, academia, etc . . . In a world where
people have fixed limits, its safest to be an arrogant bastard and push
yourself and others to come out on top. But Karen was larger on the in-
side than on the outside. She had no boundaries. Anything might affect
her. She was significant everywhere, like one of those atom bombs that
fits in a suitcase. He began to speak and listen and care about the world,
and it made him a different person.
Karen, who is open to being affected by others rather than guz-

zling them down, is what Quentin Anderson would have called the
transitive person, one whose world is constituted by [her] ties to
other people. And the transitive person, it turns out, can smell nar-
cissism afar off, and perhaps can get so far as to say that it is always
repeating itself. Or you could just call her a social animal. The kind
you shouldnt eat.t

Ode to Lithium #419: Perfect
6 Shir a Erlichman
. . . I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between

seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse . . . and since I had an absolute belief that I should
be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse.
Kay Redfield Jamison
I didnt seek the horse. Didnt put out an advertisement. They

say it can smell you from sixty miles away, which means if Im in
Toledo & the horse aint she can smell black tea & more than a
dollop of shame. The way that one famous octopus could predict
the winner of the World Cup by putting a particular ball in a
particular basket, thats how much my horse loves me. Nine out of
ten times. & By love I mean nearly destroys me for the sake of her
own path. Shes yellow-eyed & insolent, my Perfect. I didnt name
her, she came that way. Her coat is Van Goghs Starry Night, oil on
canvas, post-impressionist, you know the one because youve seen
a tote bag. What most dont know is it depicts the view from the
east-facing window of his asylum room. What most dont know is
he added an idealized village. Only the villagers know why. Perfect
is the kind of bitch-horse to remind you Starry Nights moon is not
astronomically correct. I ride until shes raw & the moon chips a
nail on the dark. I ride until my breaths tie 0-0. Paul. That was
the octopus name. May we all deserve such simplicity & too many
hands. On Wikipedia you can find Pauls entire life story from his
egg hatching in England to present day affairs. But find me manic
& you cant find me. Im a knobless door. I cook meals for the
dead & they eat. I ride the casket like a car, step into traffic like a
car but Im a body. No body can look both ways simultaneously.
Except me. Im an eighteen-layer lust-cake. I prefer Perfect to my
own mother, begging. I prefer Perfects confetti plaque, raining &
raining. I ride until her jaw breaks off. Its a type of singing. Fire
follows me around like a pet sister. I should be able to handle my
own problems is something my mouth once said to my brain. If
my funeral hatches soon you can bet it will be well-attended by
horses. Muscular, mudslick, expertise sluts. Bucking, exquisite
& murderous. Perfect is a terrorist disguised as a horse. I prefer
choosing terror to a terror I didnt choose.

Hou se hol d G od s
Madam
Prescient
Raising the spirit
of American radicalism
3 Jessa Crispin
It was not, at one time, considered
so remarkable that a candidate for
the United States presidency talked
to the dead. That the candidate was
a former prostitute and an advocate
for free love was more worrying.
Whats more, her vice-presidential
pick was a former slave; that was
likely the surest sign that Victoria
Woodhull was not going to be the
next American president.
It was the election of 1872, and
Woodhull stood as the nominee
for the newly organized Equal Rights Party, with Frederick Douglass
as her VP. (Theres no real evidence to show that Douglass agreed to
this arrangement, and he certainly did not campaign with her.) Women
might not have had the right to vote, but they could run for office, and
Woodhull felt that the presidency was her destiny.
In the end, the first woman to seek the White House received no
electoral college votes, and her party made the ballot in only twen-
ty-two states. Her enemies pounced on her utopian call for sexual free-
dom for both men and women, and stirred up the fear of miscegenation
that white voters felt, with only minimal prompting, at the sight of a
white woman consorting with a black man. Meanwhile, Woodhulls
history of working as a clairvoyant and her vocal support of Spiritual-
ism were not much of a hindrance to her campaign. Go figure.
Of course, elections now are different. If Hillary Clinton started
summoning the spirits of the dead at her rallies, instead of merely
communing with undead monsters like Henry Kissinger, her run
would be over. Or if she started openly consulting with astrologers to
plan strategy, surely her numbers would drop. Someone on her staff

M E LI N DA B EC K
must have known how to guide her through Mars retrograding over
her natal Jupiter in Sagittariusjust look at the events of the last few
months!but they were smart enough to keep it quiet. Todays elec-
torate wouldnt stand for it. Instead, we focus on the issues that truly
matter, such as our candidates spray tans, summer reading lists, and
dick sizes.
We would like to think that we choose our politicians logically,
that we carefully review their policy proposals, coolly assess their his-
tories and temperaments, and then make sensible judgments based on
the facts. Yet if this election cycle has gifted us anything, its a reminder
of how deeply irrational the political process actually is.
The progress of reason may well march ever onward, but it hasnt
managed to kick absurdities like racial hygiene theory and skimpy suf-
frage into the gutter of history where they belong. Nor has it stamped
out clannish devotion to our chosen political parties, gut feelings
about who we like, or an overwhelming fear of the unknown. Fear
is such a powerful motivator in this electionfear of the other, fear of
terrorism, fear of changethat were Clinton to announce she has the

Someone on Hillarys staff power to assemble the dark forces to wage a
cosmic war against our enemies, Im guessing
must have known how to guide
her poll numbers would surge. Donald Trump,
her through Mars retrograding after all, has made that skill a central plank of
his campaign.
over her natal Jupiter in
Sagittarius, but they were The Spirit of Change
Accept the irrational when you fear, but not
smart enough to keep it quiet.
when you hopethis has been the sales pitch
9 of the 2016 election, with Democrats hawk-
ing pragmatism as idealisms one true anti-
dote while Republicans spurn both with shouts of Build the wall!
For her part, Victoria Woodhull (ne Claflin) proposed exactly the
opposite. She was the daughter of an illiterate woman and a con man,
born into poverty in a small Ohio town. Henry James might have
called her, sneeringly, a sensitive girl, an example of the kind of peo-
ple who take things hard, but in any case, she was surrounded by
death. Infant mortality rates in the mid-nineteenth century were
high, and diseases like cholera, typhus, and malaria came in regu-
lar waves. Around the age of five, Victoria had her first vision. After
Rachel Scribner, her next-door neighbor and sometime caretaker,
died suddenly of cholera, Victoria went into a trance and saw the
woman, her spirit released.
The gift of sight was shared by many of the women in the fam-
ily. Victorias mother, Roxy, also had visions, and her sister Tennes-
sees ability was so uncanny that her father, who neither spared the
rod nor spoiled his children, made her into a little child preacher.
They toured the countryside, Tennessee making her predictions, her
father selling snake oil cures. It was, according to Woodhulls biogra-
pher Barbara Goldsmith, a combination of swindling and truth. Ten-
nessee did, it seems, have an unsettling gift of revelation, of saying
out loud what people were keeping hidden, of seeing what no one else
could see. And when the gift didnt come, she relied on old con-man
tricks taught to her by her father to make people think shed spoken
to their dead relatives.
Something new was coalescing in the culture, which was sagging
under the rules of the hardline Calvinist church. The Calvinists, who
worshipped a fearsome Old Testament God rather than a compassion-
ate, loving savior figure, had little to offer women in the way of solace.
Worse, the church legitimized the subordinate position of women
with sermons on their God-given inferiority.
But there were cracks in the Calvinist dominance, and many of

those cracks were made by women and young girls. When Victoria was
around eleven years old, a pair of teens known as the Fox sisters began
communicating with ghosts and spirits in upstate New York. They
became a sensation. The spirits communicated with the girls by rap-
ping on the walls, and an audience quickly flocked to their house. Some
who came were believers, while others wanted to catch the sisters and
reveal them as fakes. They removed everyone from the room except for
the sister acting as medium, and still there were raps on the walls. They
held onto the sisters feet to make sure they werent creating the sounds
with their shoes. Still there were raps. They tied the sisters down. Still
the knocks came.
Much later, the Fox sisters disavowed their early performances,
and then disavowed their disavowal. But in the meantime, they had
touched off Spiritualism, a movement that went beyond faith in
an afterlife to propose that the living could communicate directly
with the dead. Spiritualism was more than sudden trances and eerie
knocks in the night. As Leah Fox (who published under her married
name Underhill) wrote in The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism,
the mediums not only console bereavement, snatch from death its
sting, and from the grave its victory, but through the concurrent
teachings of all good and advanced spirits they make us feel the real
reality of the brotherhood of mankind, and the common fatherhood
of that supreme, unnamed, and unnamable Infinitude of Love, Wis-
dom, and Power. The God of the Spiritualists was quite different
from the vengeful God being yelled about in the churches. Women,
who had suffered the loss of so many children, were His biggest
believers.
Hell? No!
When Victoria was fifteen, she married Canning Woodhull, and by
the time she left him after ten years of marriage, her radicalization was
well under way. Taking Woodhulls name, their two children, and not
much else, she did what she had to do to survive, as the saying goes.
Sometimes that was telling fortunes. Other times, that was working
as a prostitute. And as she established herself in the arena of social
reform, that was writing radical tracts about the importance of educa-
tion for girls and women, labor rights, and family planning.
Under the circumstances, trying to raise a mob of women willing
to fight and die for their rights was even harder than raising spirits.
Defying fathers and husbands meant defying God himself. (Wood-
hull was freer than most from the Calvinist hold. Neither her vision-
ary mother nor her criminal father could be described as God-fear-

Hou se hol d G od s
ing.) Though women like Mary Greeleythe wife of New York Tribune
founder, anti-womens-suffrage campaigner, and future presidential
hopeful Horace Greeleywould go on to become important allies, for
the time being they were stuck. Greeley was pregnant again and again,
and five of her seven children died young.
Spiritualism offered people a different story about both life and
death. Those dead children were not in hell; they were still within
reach. They could be communicated with. Perhaps more important,
Spiritualism got rid of sin. In the Spiritualist world, there was no fall
of mankind, and it certainly wasnt orchestrated by Eve. Preachers
had been using that old story since the beginning of the church to
express the devious nature of woman and warn against their rebellious,
destructive ways.
Determinism was another target. In Calvinism, everything is
already decided; you are marked from birth with damnation or salva-
tion. What, then, is the use of trying? Everything, including your own
suffering, is Gods will. The Spiritualists replaced this idea with the
concept of spiritual evolution. The more you progressed as an individ-
ual, the higher into the spheres of heaven you could ascend. That pro-
gression depended on your behavior here on earth, on how you treated
your fellow man and woman. That was something worth fighting for.
Spiritualism, in the words of Radical Spirits author Ann Braude, pre-
sented an extreme case of the rejection of Calvinism that pervaded
womens culture at the time.
And so is it any wonder that when the spirits began speaking
through mediums, the spirits said men and women were equal? Or
that they were loved by God and held in equal regard? The Spiritual-
ists would gather in a private home and join hands in a darkened room
while sitting in a circle. Mediums like Fannie Davis would go into
trances, and through them the spirits would speak of the importance
of the woman issue. What was important to the spirits, according to
the mediums, was equal rights for allin other words, the establish-
ment of universal suffrage, the end of slavery, and the spiritual pro-
gression of all of society and not just the individual.
Victoria Woodhull became a Spiritualist, as did Elizabeth Cady
Stanton. Susan B. Anthony dabbled, and she made references to her
experiences with spirits in her letters. Even Mary Greeley converted,
drawn in by the ability to communicate with a dead son. Greeley
became a suffragist, too, in public defiance of her husband. While Spir-
itualism and suffragism were not one and the same, there was signif-
icant overlap, and both were training grounds for female leadership.
Unlike traditional Christian church services, many, if not most, of the

Spiritualist gatherings were led by womena fact that is either lazily
ignored or pointedly invoked when todays historians write off Spiritu-
alism as a crude pack of magic tricks.
The Cunning of Reason

Ever since the purifying forces of the Enlightenment cleansed us
of our base superstitions, philosophers have been trying to pretend
that rationality is a stable, unflinching force. Whole branches of
economic and political theory rest on the assumption that people
behave in rational (and inevitably self-interested) ways that scholars
can predict. If these disciples of Homo economicus have to downplay
or deny large portions of human experience to arrive at their mod-
els, then so be itthey are nothing if not creative. The Enlighten-
ment, too, somehow gets all the credit for birthing what we now call
human rights. Never mind that appeals to rationality have been used
to justify pretty much every abuse in the book. That what is deemed
logical in one age is deemed illogical in the next is not, we are told,
rationalitys problem.
In 1872, Woodhull lost her presidential bid. And the one after
that. And the one after that. And though at its peak Spiritualism had
millions of followers, it mostly fell apart after too many hucksters and
charlatans used it to con the desperate. Now all we remember of the
movement that called for the abolition of slavery, marriage reform,
and education rights is the discredited image of flexible girls holding
sances to pick the pockets of the vulnerable and bereaved. What we
forget is that Spiritualism, with its mix of Swedenborgian and Gnostic
principles, had its own radical belief system, with its own rhyme and
reason.
Spiritualists were hardly the first to call for revolution by way of
the occult, or the last to see one of those things overshadow the other.
The emergence of Spiritualism in America coincided with that of mys-
tery cults in Europe and the United Kingdom, and the emergence of
American feminism coincided with similar social reforms across the
Atlantic. Maud Gonne, for example, was one such reformer. Those
who know only of her militant Irish nationalism might be surprised
to learn that she sold her soul to the devil when she was nineteen years
old. Meanwhile, those who remember her as the woman who tried to
resurrect the soul of her dead baby by having sex next to his coffin (or
worse, as Yeatss muse) may not fully grasp how intertwined her polit-
ical activism was with her occult practice. We accept that the occult
can spoil a woman, or sway or corrupt her. But radicalize her? Thats
beyond the pale.

Here Be Witches
Fast forward 140 years or so, and there is less room than ever in Amer-
ican elections for unorthodoxies, including and especially radicalism,
solidarity, movement-building, third-party candidacies, and spiritual
affiliations that begin with anything other than a capital letter C.
That said, even as we retain pride in our political skepticism
and reasonableness, our appetite for sensational tales about our cho-
sen candidates remains enormous. Back in the 1990s, investigative
reporter Bob Woodward caused a stir when he relayed the information
that then-first lady Hillary Clinton liked to summon the ghost of Elea-
nor Roosevelt for advice. Clinton was quick to correct the record: she
was role-playing Eleanor, not holding sances, and the whole affair was
supervised by a certified professional, namely her life-coach-cum-spir-
itual-adviser-cum-socially-acceptable-woo-wooist Jean Houston. At
the time, Clinton was working on her soppy ode to neoliberal educa-
tion, It Takes a Village, and she wanted Eleanors input. (Its unfortu-
nate for Hillary and her book that Eleanor did not pick up the call.)
Now that Clinton is all but set to return to the White House, cer-
tain corners of the internet have delivered us some even riper news:
Hillary Clinton is a witch! You may be surprised to learn that she par-
takes of the witch ritual, but apparently its true: take it from longtime
Clinton conspiracy theorist (and self-described former hit man) Larry
Nichols, who appeared on InfoWars last fall to reveal that Hillary was
once part of a witches church. Cue a hundred gifs of Hillary green
in the face and wearing a pointy black hat. This position was given a
weird legitimacy at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland
when former candidate Dr. Ben Carson, in what was either a very loud
dog-whistle or a messy act of projection, implied that Hillary Clinton
has a relationship with Lucifer.
Of course, Clinton is no more a witch than Delaware Tea Partier
and 2010 U.S. Senate candidate Christine ODonnell, or at least as far
as I can tell. ODonnell, you may remember, fended off a Bill Maher-
led witch hunt focused on her youthful dabblings by staring implor-
ingly into a TV camera and announcing, Im not a witch . . . Im you.
Nor, for that matter, is Clinton all that similar to Victoria Wood-
hull, despite sharing with her the good fortune of having run for high
office while female. But wouldnt it be so much more interesting if she
were? What if she ripped off the roof, called down the ghost of Emma
Goldman, and achieved a truly liberal platform of economic justice,
universal health care, strict environmental protections, and wide-
spread education reform? In March, Clinton made extraterrestrial
transparency a promise of her campaign; she told Jimmy Kimmel that

as soon as she takes office, she will open the Perhaps we should be wondering
governments top-secret files on Area 51. Its
not how long it will be before we
a start. But what if she also pledged to open
an investigation into our governments drone have our first female president,
warfare, which is an unexplained aerial phe-
but how long it will be before we
nomenon of an entirely different kind?
have our first witch candidate.
Spells, Not Prayers!
Well, lets be honest: none of that is likely to 9
happen. Perhaps, then, we should be wonder-
ing not how long it will be before we have our first female president, but
how long it will be before we have our first witch candidate.
The dominant religions of our time, including atheism, seem unable
to adequately inspire and sustain the revolutionary change that is needed
to address racist policing, mass murder by semi-automatic weapon,
and other everyday occurrences in America. After the massacre at the
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South
Carolina, or the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida,
preachers spoke of the power of the devil, the mystery of Gods ways, and
the meaning of suffering. In reply, many said that prayer is not enough.
Meanwhile, a 2001 study found that Wicca was the fastest-grow-
ing religion in America, and the nations traditional religion, Christian-
ity, has been losing American members in recent years. But to remind
us all how rare witches seem to be among our current crop of political
leaders, let me offer up this provisional definition: witchcraft involves
not only the belief that one can control the future via spells and rituals,
but also faith in the balance between humans and the natural world, in
the power of sexuality, in human equality and dignity, and in commu-
nity over hierarchical power or authority. When you put it like that,
this seems like exactly what we need right now.
This summer, a call went out online for witches to join together all
over the world and hex Brock Turner. Turner had been caught in the
act of raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, but still he was
sentenced to only six months in prison by a lenient Santa Clara County
judge. Instead of feeling disempowered and helpless, the witches
wanted action. Six hundred witches responded to the call, and they
hexed Turner for impotence and nightmares, constant pain and justice.
Its unclear what political or social change may come out of this
rise of witchcraft, or whether it will help to remystify our politics in
the best sense of the word, as Spiritualists once tried to do. I imagine
Victoria Woodhulls ghost would have some thoughts on the topic, if
any of our current political leaders knew how to ask her.t

Hou se hol d G od s
Small Worlds
The soul-deadening magic of tidying up
3 Chris Lehmann
When will America get its shit together?

No, I dont mean by this the sort of rhetorical plea that readers
expect as a matter of course in journals of opinionbe it the calls for
banking regulation and climate action in The Nation or Mother Jones, or
the periodic fever dreams of national greatness and shamefully atro-
phied civic and military duty that break out in the pages of the Weekly
Standard or National Review.
The shit of which I speak, rather, is of the prosaic (though not
quite literal) variety: Possessions. Housewares, clothes, and gadgets.
Relentlessly accumulating Amazon packaging. Stuff.
There is, it seems, a raging crisis of careless acquisition and cha-
otic storage afoot in the land, even eight years into the austerity-addled
recovery from the economic calamity of 2008 and in the wake of a
generations worth of wage stagnation and steadily worsening inequali-
ties of wealth and income. More precisely, theres a movement afoot to
orient us more serenely and mindfully (as the present mass-therapeutic
term of art would have it) amid our storehouses of stuffto coax forth
a Platonic balance between the things we love and the streamlined,
clean, and open domestic spaces we crave. They call it decluttering,
and true to its unassuming-yet-officious name, it has quietly set up
shop everywhere.
The lead prophet of todays decluttering movement is, oddly enough,
a youngJapanese clutter consultant named Marie Kondo. Her first
book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, was a surprise mega-best-
seller last year, toting up global sales of more than three million. Kondo
and the movement she represents seem incapable of generating any bad
press. The simple precepts of her decluttering approachcalled the
KonMari methodmake a truly restorative and meditative living space
seem eminently attainable and (yes) magical. She counsels, first of all,
that clutter-trapped consumers should liberate themselves in one huge
purgenot via the incremental, one-space-at-a-time bursts of cleaning
activity traditionally favored by professional organizers, life coaches,
and the like. If you tidy up in one shot, rather than little-by-little,
you can dramatically change your mind-set, Kondo avows in one

G E R RY B E RG S T EI N

The Life-Changing Magic of her many trademark bursts of bold-faced
imperative. A change so profound that it
of Tidying Up downgrades books
touches your emotions will irresistibly affect
to mere lifestyle accessories. your way of thinking and your lifestyle habits.
But for all her big-picture lifestyle cheer-
9 leading, Kondo also zeroes in on obsessively
detailed instructions for home maintenance,
such as optimal modes of toiletry storage and living-room feng shui.
She tutors her readers at great length in new canons of clothes storage
and folding: to spare wrinkles and unsightly garment sprawl, clothes
should be carefully formed into vertically cantilevered lozenge-shaped
parcels, plump in the center and narrow at the edges, and lined up in
standing sequence in their home drawers, boxes, and cubbies to save
space.
What really animates the KonMari war on clutter, though, is a
pronounced spiritual fervor. Kondos chief directive is that, when her
clients start to clear their homes of exasperating detritus, they should
hold each item under review in their hands. If they still feel a thrill of
possession surge through the object and into their personif it sparks
joy in the beholderthen it has earned the right to remain. Anything
failing the spark-joy test has to go.
And decluttering, by its own ineluctable logic, ushers its devotees
into a new life of spiritual introspection. When your room is clean and
uncluttered, Kondo writes, you have no choice but to examine your
inner state. ... From the moment you start tidying ... your life will start
to change.
This simple inward standard, by Kondos account, has yielded
amazing results: A dramatic reorganization of the home causes
correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective,
she announces in still more emphatic bold-faced type, and goes on to
cite former clients who found the courage, once they had decluttered,
to launch new careers, terminate miserable marriages (or revive flailing
ones), lose weight, and discover hidden reserves of energy and earning
power. Not surprisingly, her follow-up book, released in the United
States in January, is called Spark Joy.
But a closer look at the Kondo craze indicates that, like many self-
help gospels, it promotes the liberationist dogmas of the restless spirit
over against the disciplines of an engaged mind. In particular, Marie
Kondo has it in for the acres of space taken up by the inert, unsightly
display of books. In striking contrast to Kondos celebration of the
psychic liberations secured by serenely curated empty living space,
books are treated as nothing more than brutally functionalist house-

hold accessories in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. When books
come in for the spark-joy test, Kondo writes, its a mistake to assess
their life-changing value by picking them up and starting to read them.
The criterion ... is whether or not [the book] gives you a thrill of pleasure
when you touch it. Remember, I said when you touch it. Make sure you
dont start reading it. Reading clouds your judgment. Instead of asking
yourself what you feel, youll start asking whether you need that book or
not.
In fact, Kondo counsels, you should get out of the habit of think-
ing about books as books at all:
Books are essentially papersheets of paper printed with letters and

bound together. Their true purpose is to be read, to convey the informa-
tion to their readers. Its the information they contain that has meaning.
There is no meaning in their just being on your shelves. You read books
for the experience of reading. Books you have read have already been
experienced and their content is inside you, even if you dont remember.
This insight not only renders books in general expendable as mate-

rial objects, but also opens up the individual books that survive the ini-
tial spark-joy cut to further modification, since, having already been
read and mentally ingested, they can provide only moderate pleasure
anyway. Kondo is painfully specific about the measures to be taken
here, and about the claustrally narcissistic rationale behind the next
round of domestic book purging. Moderately pleasurable books, she
notes, are the hardest to discard. But not to worryyour joyful feel-
ings will guide you forward!
Although I felt no pressure to get rid of them, I could not overlook the
fact that they only gave me moderate pleasure, particularly not when I
was pursuing perfection in the field of tidying. I began to search for a
way to let them go without regret, and eventually hit upon what I call
the bulk-reduction method. Realizing that what I really wanted to keep
was not the book but certain information or specific words it contained,
I decided that if I kept only what was necessary, I should be able to part
with the rest.
A series of trial-and-error approaches to bulk book reduction

ensues. Kondo first thought she could compile a handwritten, com-
mon-reader-style anthology devoted to information and specific words
gleaned from her reading adventures. But that proved draining and
time consuming. So on to Plan B: Xeroxing the passages she wanted to
preserve from her home library and pasting them directly into a scrap-

Hou se hol d G od s
book. But this, too, was an irksome chore; better still, she found, to just
go ahead and disfigure the damn things: I finally decided to rip the
relevant page out of the book, whereupon she whisked the still-usable
snatch of text into a file folder.
But this was Kondos next surprise: after mangling her forty-book
library and carelessly filing the maimed bodies of text away, she discov-
ered two years later that in all that time, she hadnt consulted her file
folders even once. Presto, another epiphany brought about by the mira-
cle of tidying: All that effort had just been to ease my own conscience.
And if you want to know the truth, I have noticed that having fewer
books actually increases the impact of the information I read. I rec-
ognize necessary information much more easily. ... For books, timing
is everything. The moment you first encounter a particular book
is the right time to read it. To avoid missing that moment, I recom-
mend that you keep your collection small. (Emphasis, yet again, in the
original.)
And I recommend that you, Marie Kondo, fuck right off. What
our decluttering guru has declared here is not just war on my own
expansive penchant for lining all available living quarters with books.
Her breathtaking dictum amounts to a repeal of what the pioneering
early-modern interpreters of the classics referred to as the test of time.
In this view of things, artists and writers closely studied (and rever-
ently copied and translated) published, painted, and sculpted works as
a means of establishing contact with an uninterrupted cultural lineage
stretching back to the earliest ancient Greco-Roman and biblical civ-
ilizations. This durable sense of historical continuity was in large part
the point of a classical educationand the riot of stuff that came in
for this treatment encompassed everything from the literary salons of
London and Paris to the museums and ruins that marked the signposts
of the old continental Grand Tour.
We would do well to adopt a similar historically informed appre-
ciation of the more informal and makeshift accumulation of culture
and cultural objectseven in our rapidly dematerializing digital world.
Indeed, if anything, we need to reverse the bankrupt reasoning that
Kondo advances in support of the ritual banishment of a home library
to argue for the opposite outcome. The more gadgetry, social-media
groupthink, and vacant domestic spaces doubling as shrines to per-
sonal enlightenment crowd out the beleaguered stuff that makes up
our common literary, philosophic, theological, and historical tradi-
tions, the more we must stand our ground on our shifting housebound
snowdrifts of material culture.
Theres a reason, after all, that casually cutting out and filing away

selected passages from books (even only moderately pleasurable
ones) strikes our ears as just a short step away from the gruesome pub-
lic rites of totalitarian thought control. Indeed, one could well argue
that public book burnings, for all their horrific anti-intellectual spec-
tacle, at least respect the integrity of the book qua book, together with
the emancipatory promise of a life devoted to taking books seriously.
Kondo, by contrast, downgrades books to mere lifestyle accessories,
which will effectively spoil if not consumed promptly upon purchase,
and are far better being cut up and moved primly out of view than
being shared among friends, recommended to reading groups or book
clubs, or serving as the occasionas Kondos is herefor a critical essay
or opinion piece.
What Price Joy?

Extreme though it may be, Kondos philistine self-complacency opens
onto a whole curious other, dubiously spiritualized strain in the sur-
prisingly extensive literature on American domestic order. In a mar-
ket-dominated society rigidly organized around the continual titilla-
tion of consumer desire, its not unusual for your stuff to serve as a kind
of surrogate placeholder for your general system of valuesand indeed,
for your most intimate sense of who you are in the world.
This involves more than the shallow rites of conspicuous consump-
tion and pecuniary display (as Thorstein Veblen memorably dubbed the
leisure classs characteristic modes of material preening back in 1899).
Purchasing power is social power, and very often, the most durable form
of moral authority our culture recognizes. Its no wonder, then, that
Americans have long fetishized the careful arrangement of our domes-
tic sphere as the wellspring of the core values of our civilization.
So what does it say, then, that the new millennial domestic cult
now revolves around the near-total cessation of effort and the studied
retreat from public life? Here is how Kondo describes the steady-state
of perpetual tidiness that she has achieved and urges with true evan-
gelical fervor on her readers:
The many days I spent tidying without seeing permanent results now
seem hard to believe. In contrast, I feel happy and content. I have time
to experience bliss in my quiet space, where even the air feels fresh and
clean; time to sit and sip herbal tea while I reflect on my day. As I look
around, my glance falls on a painting that I particularly love, purchased
overseas, and a vase of fresh flowers in one corner. Although not large,
the space I live in is graced with those things that speak to my heart. My
lifestyle brings me joy.

My lifestyle brings me joy. This sentiment stretches far beyond the
self-help/home-improvement niche that Kondo now lords over. The
search for streamlinedyet also ostentatiouslifestyle simplicity has
become a culture-wide obsession. The tiny house movement has
drawn an ardent corps of environmentally conscious domestic tacticians
who cram an austere cache of possessions into houses averaging around
200 square feet. (The average American house, by contrast, is more
than ten times bigger, at 2,100 square feet.) While the people owning
these diminutive properties have drastically reduced their environmen-
tal footprint, both by slashing their domestic intake of resources and by
relying extensively on recycled construction materials, its a fallacy to
assume that tiny-home dwellers are out to create a vanguard movement
of responsible home construction, one that will eventually displace the
American cult of sprawl and McMansion development.
Instead, like Kondo, they have embraced their minimalist aes-
thetic as an endlessly self-flattering expression of their own joyful,
savvy, and problem-solving lifestyles. Thats one reason tiny houses
tend to thrive in the rural interior, as opposed to the high-density urban
neighborhoods that would benefit more directly from such space-sav-
ing contrivances: the enterprising genius of a tiny homeowner would
be rudely crowded out in a typical city setting. No one can appreci-
ate the quirky ingenuity of tiny-home dwellers when there are bigger,
denser human settlements towering over them.
And because tiny houses are typically single-family homesas
opposed to apartment dwellings or mixed-use structures, which must
of necessity be big, and functionally anonymous, spacestheir basic
blueprint of domestic reform is a conservative and individualist one:
They are confirming the status quo, if shrinking it a little, as the
critic Kriston Capps argues.
The main reason tiny-house enthusiasts are so wedded to the
status quo would seem to be that said status quo has been very, very
good to them. In the viral infographic touting the movement online,
the cubby-house cognoscenti proudly note that tiny house people are
twice as likely to have a masters degree compared to the members of
the clueless, large-house-dwelling American public; whats more, they
have better credit, higher savings, and a more generous average income
than the typical sap holding down a traditional mortgage on a spacious
American home.
One sees the same spirit of smug condescension in more overtly
politicized movements, such as the popular push to stigmatize ram-
pant consumerism. The left-wing culture-jamming cooperative
Adbusters, for example, promotes its annual Buy Nothing daya

rejoinder to the Black Friday battery of big- Tiny-home dwellers have embraced
box retail saleswith this set of countervail-
their minimalist aesthetic as an
ing directives: Draw something, sew some-
thing, cook something, sing something, build endlessly self-flattering expression
something, make something, buy nothing.
of their problem-solving lifestyles.
This body of lifestyle dictums fails entirely to
register that nearly all these alternative pur- 9
suits typically involve major investments of
time and resources that are in short supply for overextended Ameri-
cans who live and work outside the charmed precincts of the knowl-
edge economy (and are, into the bargain, given ample opportunity to
make or build something, only not on their own time, and all too
often for a pittance thats well shy of a living wage). The anti-consum-
erists arch ethos of class contempt was conveyed much more directly
in one of the posters that Adbusters promulgated for the 2015 holiday
season: it shows a blissed-out Santa in a lotus-style meditation pose,
serenely floating above a mall parking lot, over the smarmy, self-con-
gratulatory legend, This year, rise above it.
The Vulgar Hoard

The barely concealed class animus running through the vogue for
curated consumption stands out in especially high relief when the
placid dogmas of decluttering are laid beside another recent popcult
obsessionthe reality TV boom in wayward, uncontrollable, and over-
whelmingly lower-income hoarders.
The poor and downwardly mobile hoard, according to these voy-
euristic depictions. Serene knowledge professionals, by contrast, need
to be shown how to disencumber themselves of belongings as a spiri-
tual discipline. Hoarding is a deep failing of character, one that cant
be remedied in any way that doesnt involve a dramatic intervention by
a SWAT team of psychological experts, life coaches, and reality TV
crews. Decluttering, on the other hand, begs for a task entry on a
to-do list, alongside mate assortatively, shop artisanally, and pro-
cure AP tutors for the kids.
With this contrast in view, its especially instructive to compare
the way hoarders are depicted in reality franchises with the present
cable boomlet in tiny-house pseudo-documentaries. The latter bear
inspirational titles and correspondingly can-do story lines: Tiny House
Nation on FYI TV and the HGTV lineup of Tiny House Hunters, Tiny
House Builders, and Tiny House, Big Living. Check out the hoarding fare
on your cable providers viewing menu, and you could be forgiven for
mistaking it for a spinoff of American Horror Story or The Walking Dead.

Hou se hol d G od s
Theres Hoarding: Buried Alive on the TLC network; Hoarders: Family

Secrets on Lifetime; and even Confessions: Animal Hoarding on Animal
Planet. A&E retired the genre-launching Hoarders in 2013 after a six-sea-
son run, perhaps because the title just wasnt lurid and gothic enough.
(Either way, A&E couldnt stay out of the lucrative hoarder-voyeurism
niche for long; the networked re-upped Hoarders this year.)
Weirdly, though, if you examine the hoarding disorder more
closely, its the people on the extreme ends of the socioeconomic spec-
trum who seem most to be afflicted with it: the fabulously wealthy, who
have feverishly piled up pelf for so long that theyve lost any clear sense
of when to leave off or just why they began in the first place, and the
abjectly poor, who seem, amid all the cognitive travails associated with
their condition, to have lost sight of how value works. As a result of
their fundamental character impairments, poor hoardersat least as
theyre depicted in the voyeuristic annals of reality televisionno lon-
ger can discern just what goods can yield decent exchange value in the
market, and so begin accumulating junk indiscriminately.
The convergence of these hoarding reflexes was neatly captured
in the 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles, in which Jackie Sie-
gel, wife of a Florida-based real estate and time-share baron laid low
by the 2008 Great Recession, sought to modify her luxe shopping
lifestyle by venturing into a nearby Walmart. But instead of emerging
from this chastened shopping environment with a more modest roster
of goods appropriately scaled down to the rigors of life in post-melt-
down America, Siegel only bought that much more lower-end junk,
filling the garage in the familys Miami compound with useless bikes,
water-sports toys, and electronic gadgets. No longer held aloft by the
asset bubbles of the early aughts, Siegelherself a child of a modest
middle-class upbringingwas becoming just another hoarder in the
making: fair game to be stigmatized and ridiculed by the proper bour-
geois accumulators who still honor fundamentalist capitalist virtues
like delayed gratification, organizational prowess, and other modes
of subdued pecuniary display. Siegels Walmart binges, very much by
contrast, looked to be the Protestant spirit of capitalism run amok, no
longer tethered to any scheme of divine election or any residual conceit
of worldly asceticism or even productive laborand teetering on the
verge of the socioeconomic abyss. What else is there to do in such a
plight but to keep piling up the totems of the good life that you can
neither pay for nor use?
Perhaps a way to disentangle the curated consumption movement
from its uglier, unstated class antagonisms would be to apply to the
tasteful decluttered class some of the dispassionate and forensic psy-

cho-social analysis that we currently reserve for down-market hoard-
ers. For declutterers, it can be argued, are no less stuff fetishists than
the vulgar hoarding horde. Indeed, by rigorously editing and custom-
izing all the stuff that makes up their material lives, ardent declutterers
are imbuing objects with far more elemental power than the careless
hoarder who piles things up in precarious, ceiling-challenging towers.
This is why Kondo and her adherents in the decluttering world always
recur to the idea that tidying is much more than the thoughtful rear-
rangement of ones living space; it is a spiritual discipline, exercised
to bring about a life-shaking transformation, what Buddhists call the
revolution at the personality base.
Hoarders largely suffer under the delusion that they are piling
up stuff for future use. In this respect, hoarding, for all its obvious
and baroque physical excess, still expresses a core mentality of scar-
citya fear that, come an emergency run on shopping bags or wooden
spoons, ones storehouse of life-sustaining goods will give out. Clutter,
by contrast, doesnt hint at any such misguided provisioning impulses
or the specter of a total lapse of self-control. Its class provenance is
telegraphed, first of all, by the ease of the path toward its correction.
There are no film crews or omniscient psychological professionals
marshaled against the clutter scourge. You dont have to impose new
schedules or any flagellant curbs on your consumer lifestyle, as Kondo
purrs over and over again. The key is to make the change so sudden
that you experience a complete change of heart, she writes in a burst of
high-televangelist homiletics. From there on, the rest is simple: From
the moment you start tidying, you will be compelled to reset your life.
As a result, your life will start to change ... Tidying is just a tool, not
the final destination.
Decluttering, in other words, is a leisure pursuit. By its nature,
it presupposes an economic position of abundance, even luxury. But
it focuses not at all on the use-value of the objects under review;
rather, the sole criterion for ditching or retaining an object under
critical review is its capacity to expand the soulful energy reserves of
the bearerto spark joy, in Kondos pet phrase. Unlike more jaded,
on-the-make self-help hucksters, Kondo is very much in earnest when
she pledges that her method will produce life-changing magic in the
decluttering devotee. And she likewise preaches a reverent respect for
the spiritual lives of domestic objects themselves. Amid any given tidy-
ing frenzy, declutterers should pause to say thank you to the clothes
you are wearing, to your pen or computer, your dishes and quilts, the
bath and the kitchen, she counsels in her new book, Spark Joy. With-
out exception, the things in your home long to make you happy.

Try telling that to any practiced hoarder, locked into the mania
of acquisition-for-uses sakeor to the head of any lower-middle-class
household, scraping to get by on a raft of Walmart provisions far less
expansive and elective than Jackie Siegels wasand youll be greeted
with a bitter, disbelieving guffaw.
Faith Healing
For all its spiritual pretensions, the decluttering faith doesnt readily
fit into the most familiar templates that have allowed us to interpret
the intersection of capitalism and folk belief. Its tempting to call its
lovingly itemized ethos of the selfs enshrined material virtue ascetic
worldliness, flipping the polarity of Max Webers famous character-
ization of the Protestant spirit at the dawn of capitalisms first great
dizzying growth spurt, back in the seventeenth century. Or maybe
we should call it conspicuous nonconsumption, to update Thorstein
Veblens wry, pseudo-anthropological Gilded Age pronouncements for
the age of the tiny homeowner and diehard declutterer.
But neither of these coinages feels quite right. They dont get at
the weirdly antiseptic worldview at the heart of Kondos vision. At the
end of the prayerful rearranging of objects to please the joy-seeking
self, the self is transformed into just another objecta keystone indis-
pensable to the decluttered domestic sphere, perhaps, but still inan-
imate, ultra-poised, and instrumental, rather than an obstreperous
work in progress.
No, Kondos spiritual project actually harkens back to a different
strain of anthropological inquiry: the much-studied, and maddeningly
elusive, Melanesian tradition of the cargo cult. Stated in simplest terms,
Melanesian believers reacted to an influx of goods from the developed
Western worldand the United States in particular, during Melane-
sias early colonial era and then the Second World Warby imbuing
those goods with magical power. Subsequent crude caricatures of the
cargo faith served as a kind of colonial shorthand for the ostensible
religious backwardness of native populationsthink, for example, of
the immensely irritating and deeply offensive portrayal of the harum-
scarum response of African tribespeople to unexpected contact with
Western consumer culture, via a Coke bottle dropped mysteriously
from the sky, in the 1980 South African cult film The Gods Must Be Crazy.
Cambridge University anthropologist Joel Robbins, a leading
authority on Melanesian religion, observes that the longings expressed
in the cargo tradition have zero to do with the credulous, bug-eyed sim-
pletons of Western colonialist fable. Rather, Melanesians are people
who had long believed the material world is given by spiritual beings

ancestorsand that its abundance evidences good relations with At the end of
them, Robbins says. So the spectacle of Western material largesse,
the prayerful
rather than prostrating awed Melanesians before it, prompted them
to incorporate the shiny stuff deposited on Melanesian shores by the rearranging of
Allied powers into the existing framework of their faith. When con-
objects to please
fronted with Western material culture that seems superior, Robbins
says, Melanesians figure they must have disappointed their ancestors the joy-seeking
in the past, and need to find new, better rituals to get them to send the
self, the self
good stuffand sometimes, to get rid of the white invaders.
Those rituals embrace the bounty of globe-bestriding Western is transformed
capitalism over against the strictures of traditional Melanesian wor-
into just
shipand it is this ingenious brand of syncretism that affords a key
contact point between the cargo cult and the Kondo cult. Reinvest- another object.
ing the material world of manufactured commodities with the magical
powers of cosmic purification is also an act of self-recreationthe very 9
sort of sustained personal epiphany that Marie Kondo insists occurs
as a natural byproduct of a serenely ordered domestic sphere. As the
influential anthropologist Kenelm Burridge wrote in his 1960 study
of the cargo phenomenon, Mandu, cargo worships most significant
theme ... seems to be moral regeneration: the creation of a new man,
the creation of new unities, the creation of a new society.
There is, in addition to this crypto-revolutionary principle, an ele-
giac quality to the cargo cultone that overlaps with other religious
movements that process the stuff of cultural stress via ritualized
upsurges in religious revitalization, in the terminology of psycholog-
ical anthropologist Anthony F.C. Wallace. Here, too, theres a strong
and suggestive overlap with Kondos oddly brittle account of how the
self needs to be effectively quarantined from troubling and upsetting
material reminders of past distress. Where millenarian-style adher-
ents of cultural stress faithsthe Sioux Ghost Dance of the late
nineteenth century, most famouslysought to transmute their sense
of psychic displacement into a climactic (if doomed) confrontation
with the white European civilization that had marginalized them, the
advanced-consumer cargo cult of Kondoism never stirs itself from a
terminal defensive crouch.
Still, deeper psychic affinities abound, if one prods a bit beneath the
surface of both cargoism and Kondoism. Efforts to psychologize cargo
worship have been clumsy and misguided, but its still bracing to comb
through them and pick up the echoes of Marie Kondos incantations of
material enchantment. In speculating that cargo cultists suffered from
a mild form of undiagnosed schizophrenia, for example, psychologists
Ruth W. Lidz, Theodore Lidz, and Burton G. Burton-Bradley argued

Hou se hol d G od s
in a 1973 paper that cargo worshipers suffered from a deranging dou-

ble-bind that short-circuited their understanding of ancestor-driven
abundance: glittering images of material well-being, on the one hand,
and tradition-enforcing ancestors on the other. In the face of this
quandary, failing to receive the cargo becomes a rejection from the
Ur-parents of Melanesian native religionand the cargo believer seeks
to dispel the rejection via a regimen of compulsive ritual grounded in a
fantasy of infantile omnipotence, the psychologists suggested. The
origins of this repetition compulsion are probably found in circular rela-
tions of the sensori-motor period ... in which the child seeks to achieve
an effect by carrying out the movement that preceded the effect. In
other words: await the delivery of ancestor-sanctioned cargo; when it
fails to materialize, continue to adopt new ritual responsesand then
resume waiting. In the patois of American domestic consumer culture:
lather, rinse, repeat.
Shorn of the discredited rhetoric of deep-seated developmental
pathology, the Lidz teams core diagnosis could double as a review of
the Marie Kondo corpus: The schizophrenic in the ensuing perplex-
ity regresses to earlier types of egocentric cognition in which animistic
and magical beliefs come to the fore, and he again fails to differentiate
what is internal from what is external, and overestimates the efficacy
of the thought and wish.
As is the case for the idealized cargo believer, Kondos litany of
totemized, love-bestowing possessions freely intermingles with her
confessed frail sense of her own self and its fraught relationship to oth-
ers. For all her revivalist-style exhortations on the immense psychic
gains won by the tidying life, Kondo actually supplies a revealingly
depersonalized account of her own life experienceone that, like the
Lidz teams account of cargo-cult worships underlying psychology,
not merely hinges on the failure to differentiate between the spiritual
auras of living things and inanimate ones, but also grants explicit psy-
chic dominance to the world of stuff. I still prefer to do things alone,
Kondo pauses to observe in a remarkable excursis on how tidying func-
tions as a means of restoring decisiveness and self-confidence to the
experience-battered human soul. The key spiritual dilemma for the
declutterer, it appears, is not how to appease mercurial ancestors, but
how to conquer ones own sense of inner deadness. But in both cases,
the answer materializes in, well, the sphere of the material:
Because I was poor at developing bonds of trust with people, I had an

unusually strong attachment to things. I think that precisely because
I did not feel comfortable exposing my weaknesses or my true feelings

to others, my room and the things in it became very precious. I did not
have to pretend or hide anything in front of them. It was material things
and my house that taught me to appreciate unconditional love first, not
my family or friends.
And when it comes time for Kondo to conquer her debilitating

sense of inadequacy, the guiding message is conveyed via her mastery
of the object-world:
I do ... have confidence in my environment. When it comes to the

things I own, the clothes I wear, the house I live in, and the people in
my life, when it comes to my environment as a whole, though it may not
seem particularly special to anyone else, I am confident and extremely
grateful to be surrounded by what I love, by things and people that are,
each and every one, special, precious, and exceedingly dear to me. The
things and people that bring me joy support me. They give me confi-
dence that I will be all right.
It speaks volumes about the chill narcissism of the decluttering

faith that people are but an object-relations afterthought in Kondos
paean to the healing properties of the arranged material life. They are
always bringing up the rear in Kondos didactic evocations of the ways
in which the tidying regime works its life-changing magic, and they
always take the impersonal relative pronoun that, rather than who
or whom as a result: the things I own, the clothes I wear, the house
I live in, the people in my life... ; things and people that are, each and
every one ...; things and people that bring me joy. What could be a
stronger vindication of the Lidz diagnosis of distorted egocentric cog-
nition in which animistic and magical beliefs come to the foreto say
nothing of the distressing failure to differentiate what is internal from
what is external amid fantasies of infantile omnipotence?
Old and in the Way

But where Melanesians resolved their ambivalent feelings about
their ancestors by reimagining the reach of their material power, the
ever-efficient Kondo has a simpler fix: abolish the past altogether.
Nearly every object associated with the remorseless passage of time,
in Kondos books, is earmarked for rapid disposal. The idea of the past
is always Kryptonite to the practiced narcissist, bespeaking in vivid
terms both the gradual ravages that time visits on the sacred, inviolate
self and the stubborn endurance of an exterior world that has nothing
to do with the self. Hence, Kondos jihad against the claims of ones
personal history is every bit as ruthless as her war on the printed word.

The idea When you think about your future, she asks rhetorically, is it worth
keeping mementos of things that you would otherwise forget?
of the past
We live in the present. No matter how wonderful things used to be,
is always
we cannot live in the past. The joy and excitement we feel here and
Kryptonite now are more important.
to the The relentless presentism of the spark-joy test consigns nearly

every object bearing the taint of times passage to the developmental
practiced
dustbin. Personal correspondence, for instance, like every other form
narcissist. of reading, becomes unbearably disruptive once its consumed: The
purpose of a letter is fulfilled the moment it is received. By now, the
9 person who wrote it has long forgotten what he or she wrote and even
the letters very existence. Photographs, too, threaten to swamp the
officiously narcissistic declutterers life with extraneous data from
a dead and intrusive past: Photographs exist only to show a specific
event or time. ... Really important things are not that great in number.
Unexciting photos of scenery you cant even place belong in the gar-
bage. This crude functionalist relationship to the past, holding that a
failure to properly titillate us in the present is the permanent gauge of
historical worth, opens out naturally onto a vision of the self actuating
its own bliss in a historical vacuum:
It is not our memories but the person we have become because of those
past experiences that we should treasure. This is the lesson these keep-
sakes teach us when we sort them. The space in which we live should
be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in
the past.
Far from striking a resounding note of confident liberation, this is a

vision of the acquisitive self marooned on its own sense of diminishing
importance in the world. Kondo the cargo totemist is right, however,
in intuiting that the narrow palette of magical belongings possesses
special powers of self-preservation. In navigating the treacherous
strait of the selfs rapidly multiplying set of existential threats, certain
objects prove a key source of orientation. Psychologist Donald Woods
Winnicott famously explored the use of transition objects and the
symbolic importance they acquire in the developing selfs struggles to
individuate from the formative influences of family and infantile fan-
tasy. Yet in cases such as cargo worship, the critical moment of transi-
tion is blocked: objects themselves become a principal source of mis-
appropriated spiritual power in and of themselvesto borrow another
simile from Buddhism, the finger pointing at the moon rather than the
celestial body itself.

When interpreters of the cargo faith wed this psychological
account of its enduring appeal to the background struggles of native
peoples against white colonialism, a rough theory of developmental
progressin the political sense of the termensues. It matters little,
from this vantage, whether cargo believers are seen as members of a
putatively backward society incorporating the gaudy stuff of capitalist
mass production into a preexisting scheme of ancestor worship or as
proto-revolutionaries trying to reimagine the bounty of an industrial
economy without either the exploitation or appropriation foisted on
them by foreign white rulers. In either scenario, the same basic lines
of causation obtain: the stuff of white civilization, and the new rituals
contrived to enact the worship of the stuff, represent a key mediating
stage along a general arc of progress, either toward a spiritual accom-
modation to a colonialist status quo or a principled rejection of it.
But the decluttering vogue stands much of this reasoning on its
head, suggesting strongly that the lines of causation run in the opposite
direction: that rather than serving to school so-called primitive popu-
lations in how to be more spiritually and/or politically modern, the pro-
fusion of capitalist stuff is making the populations in its host societies
more spiritually archaic and ritually totemist.
Of course, the granddaddy of modern socialist revolution, Karl
Marx, suggested something of this nature was already happening in
1867, when he wrote, in the first volume of Capital, of the rampant
fetishism of the commodity under bourgeois capitalism. But obdu-
rate son of the rational Enlightenment that he was, Marx held that
commodity fetishism was a fast-obsolescing form of obscurantism that
took hold mainly among the intellectual acolytes of nineteenth-cen-
tury political economy. As such, it worked chiefly to conceal the core
defining features of exploitation that conspired in the commoditys
productionrelations that would, by Marxs own millenarian scheme
of historical succession, come to be spontaneously exposed, and just as
magically rectified, at the great moment of crisis resulting in capital-
isms overthrow.
Thanks, but No Thanks

Theres clearly no such master code of mass liberation locked some-
where deep inside the present American fetish of the mystic commod-
ity. Once its detached from these interpretive schemas of progress, the
new fastidiousness of the decluttering era doesnt obey any law outside
its own chosen canons of worship. Rather than eventuating in any
recognizable mode of modern liberation, the curated cult of Western
stuff seems to be leading back toward an animistic faith in the magical

Hou se hol d G od s
ability of selectively venerated totems to heal, to balance, and to express

core truths of the soul not otherwise available to unenlightened con-
sumers and life arrangers. This explains the overtly religious cast of
Kondo-ism. Toward the end of her new book, Kondo quotes a corre-
spondent who came to the end of a particularly difficult and time-con-
suming decluttering mission. I feel like Ive been reborn, the client
enthuses. Wherever I look, all I see are things that spark joy. I feel a
tenderness for everything in my life and am just so thankful!
And then comes Kondos homiletic gloss:
When I receive letters like this, my mind fills with images of the
senders future as they move on to the next stage of their lives. Living
mindfully in a beautiful space, they will now be able to give up any habits
theyve always wanted to quit, to see clearly what they really want to
achieve, and to do what it takes to get there.
Allowing for all obvious differences of gender and cultural prove-

nance, this could have been the wind-up to a positive-thinking semi-
nar from success guru Tony Robbins, or a positive-believing sermon by
the great smiling apostle of the prosperity gospel, Joel Osteen. These
prophets, too, harp on the fine points of personal presentation and
aspirational owning; they also stress that, by surrounding oneself with
the symbolic trappings of an earnestly striving and believing lifea
high-end McMansion or a power-wardrobeone can summon forth
the elusive soul-winning truths of the great trickster/bitch goddess
known as American success.
As well they might. Whats being fetishized, in the arena of cargo
belief, isnt the production of goods under capitalism, but rather the
charismatic aura theyre held to share at the point of their end use
their mana, to use another piece of sociological jargon cribbed from the
great mystic theorist of social organicism, mile Durkheim.
In this regard, its instructive to ponder just how different manuals
of hermetic self-improvement such as Kondos, or the overlapping gos-
pels of Messrs. Robbins and Osteen, would look if they were actually
to focus on a form of gratitude that could be reciprocatedon thank-
ing, that is, the workers who produce the precious goods that the self
chooses to surround itself with. Perhaps then a sort of mystic solidarity
could take hold among the possessors of material bounty that would
stretch beyond the dogmatically circumscribed boundaries of our
domestic sphere. Perhaps the self, and the objects that give it decisive
shape, could actually envision new ways for the mana of the consumer
marketplace to reverse its critical charge, and spurn the longstand-
ing scarcity-based cult of American cargo worshipincluding, most

emphatically, the austerity-minded rites of the decluttering self.
Perhaps instead of tortuously mythologizing all the objects and
possessions that we mistakenly intuit as the fount of our sacred indi-
vidualityinstead of fetishizing them as benevolent spirit-beings,
folding them just so, and stacking them so as not to injure their own
frail sense of self-worthwe could extend our imaginative sympa-
thies to encompass those things we hold genuinely in common with
the fellow citizens who make up our mass consumer republic: their
claimsand oursto less fastidiously individuated but infinitely more
valuable social goods such as health care, affordable housing, cheap and
abundant higher education, sustainable pension plans, and equitable
job training. That these social goods are now jealously stockpiled as
profit centers for our info-rentier classor theorized, just as ruinously,
as flat and interchangeable inputs of human capital by their retain-
ers in the neoliberal social science academystrikes me as a far more
consequential form of clutter-cum-hoarding than any riot of untamed
possessions now unspooling in any of our private living spaces.
Indeed, its rather breathtaking to take in the sheer volume of
self-improving handbooks and tidying tracts that will inundate your
browser the moment you type the phrase Marie Kondo into a Google
or Amazon search window, in contrast to all the blatantly deteriorating
public squalor that we are urged, over and over again (and especially,
it seems, during our presidential election cycles), to meekly take for
granted as the permanent order of things. You can always spark joy
(a phrase that, I confess, feels much too close to Arbeit Macht Frei
for my own personal comfort) as you chase down hundreds upon hun-
dreds of brave new approaches to rearranging your domestic space or
to conquering your untidy personal habits. But if you dare to dream of
freely accessible health care or higher educationor even, these days,
a unionized workforce, employee wages that keep pace with produc-
tivity, or a serviceable roads-and-bridges infrastructureyoure a wild-
eyed utopian, if not in fact a revolutionary.
None of this is to suggest that we carelessly substitute a shrill and
outward-looking Stakhanovite cult of the Soviet model worker for the
present, terminally inward-looking cargo cult of the decluttering class.
It is, however, to suggest that the magical thinking we now are frenet-
ically ascribing to the mystic arts of domestic space clearing is, among
other things, tragically misplaced. The last thing that our nation of
believers, schooled in the totalizing, doctrinaire battle against the care
and maintenance of an American public sphere, needs to heed is the
gospel assurance that the one true path to transcendent well being is
all about getting their own houses in order.t

Hou se hol d G od s
The Shock
of the Crazed
The hidden world of art brut
3 J. C. Hallman
Art brut auteurs are not artists, Im told. The champions of art
brutvariously translated as raw, rough, or outsider artstress
that the work of individual, untutored practitioners trumps all the
usual conventions of artistic legacy-building, including the analytic
categories of art criticism. Hence, those who write about auteurs are,
at best, critiques bruts.
Lucky for me. Im not even an art journalist, to be honest. I am
untrained, I have no knowledge of art history, and most art aficiona-
dos would probably find my taste pretty plebian. Like the irate mid-
dle-class philistines of modernist legend, I sometimes look at what
passes for art these days and think, What the fuck? (Im talking to
you, Cy Twombly.)
I heard about the recent art brut show at the American Folk Art
Museum in Manhattan from the New York Times. The show has already
closed. You cant go see it. Thats how crappy an art journalist I am.
But I went to see the show a few times, and what struck me at first
wasnt the auteurs at all, but French artist and art brut champion Jean
Dubuffets manifesto, Anticultural Positions, which was hung on the
museum wall in its original manuscript form, as though it were a piece
of art brut in its own right. Anticultural Positions was delivered as
a lecture at the Arts Club of Chicago on December 20, 1951. Marcel
Duchamp helped Dubuffet translate the speech into English.
Wait a second. I was struck by the auteurs. Thats why Id gone to
the show in the first place: because as a writer, on the subject of art or
anything else, I think of myself as sort of self-taught. I, too, shun the
familiar models of aesthetic and intellectual advancement via incre-
mental mastery and expertise. Instead, I prefer dramatic chronicles of
the shift from ignorance to knowledge, from innocence to experience.
In other words, I want every story to reinvent literature. I want every
drawing to expand the definition of art.
Thats what I found at the show, among the auteurs. But to my con-
siderable surprise, I couldnt fully embrace the chaotic mythos of art

C L AU D E B O R N A N D
Pascal-Dsir
Maisonneuve O LI V I E R L A FFE LY
Carlo Zinelli
C L AU D E B O R N A N D C L AU D E B O R N A N D
Heinrich Anton Mller Auguste Forestier
A RT R E P RO D U C TI O N S CO U RT E SY O F A M E R I C A N FO L K A RT M U S EU M | P O RT R A IT O F J E A N D U B U FFE T BY DAV I D J O H N S O N

Like the irate middle-class brut as a purely self-invented tradition. And
now, as I try to think up ways to characterize
philistines of modernist legend,
the pieces that came from some of Dubuffets
I sometimes look at what passes earliest expeditions to gather the elaborate
productions of madpersons who were locked
for art these days and think,
away in European psychiatric hospitals, I find
What the fuck? that my instinct is to place the works into pre-
established traditions or histories, if only so
(Im talking to you, Cy Twombly.)
that you might be able to picture them. How
9 else to account for their stories, which seem
calculated to undermine the steady commer-
cial march of art as depicted in high-end auc-
tion catalogs? In lieu of a stately succession of movements, schools, and
styles, art brut gives us an array of butchers and scientists and soldiers
and housewives who suddenly went crazy and then produced huge
bodies of workmost often for discrete periods of time, three years or
eight years or fourteen yearsbefore falling silent and eking out the
rest of their isolated, artless lives.
Take, for example, the case of Auguste Forestier, one of the first
auteurs Dubuffet stumbled across. Forestier spent his life in a psychi-
atric institution after causing a train to derail at age twenty-seven (he
had piled stones on the tracks). In sizing up his work, I want to say that
there is something vaguely Aztec about the small wooden statuettes he
carved with a cobblers blade from recovered wood and decorated with
scraps of fabric, leather, metal, and string. Of Augustin Lesage, a miner
from a family of miners, who began to work in oils on canvas when a
voice from deep in a mine told him he would one day be a painter, I want
to argue that his productions look like medieval portrayals of heaven
and hell, those crowd-clustered renderings of Christian afterworlds,
though there is also something Buddhist or Indian to the works obses-
sive intricacy. And of Berthe Urasco, who studied piano and voice as
a young woman before sinking into paranoid delusions and spending
seven years in the Bel-Air Clinic near Geneva, I would claim that her
drawings of huge-eyed figures staring out from bleak landscapes recall
the ancient statues that led psychologist Julian Jaynes, the great the-
orist of the bicameral mind, to conclude that early Homo sapiens had
not yet formed a complete brain.
But all of that is wrong, sort of. Because Dubuffets point is that art
brut auteurshis termwerent responding to anything at all when
they set out to create their works. They did not think of themselves
as artists, and they were part of no school of art. They belonged to no
tradition. Their work was in conversation with nothing. To describe

their productions by comparing them to anything elseeven to call
the work artwas to miss something essential.
That essential thingthe reason Dubuffet had gathered the fren-
zied works of madpersons in the first placewas what he attempted to
articulate in his manifesto, hanging on the museum wall in French and
in English, some of it handwritten, some of it typed. I was able to read
enough of it there on that first visit to be roused by it, to recognize the
hand of a kindred soul in some of Dubuffets claims, and to be outraged
by others.
Margins Incorporated
Anticultural Positions doesnt list the names Dubuffet tried before
art brutcrude art, marginal artand the lecture is, first and
foremost, an attempt to sketch out the borders of whatever he was
attempting to describe. To get at this, Dubuffet set about dismantling
all of Western culture, which he likened to a dead language and then
criticized for its contempt of nature, for having fetishized logic and
reason, for being overly fond of analysis, and for having too routine a
notion of beauty. Laudable points all. Despite the manifestos charms,
however, Dubuffet makes his argument more succinctly in a different
essay, In Honor of Savage Values, in which he claims that when an
artist reels off something that is not his, that he has received from
outside, I consider that we are looking at a counterfeit work, which is
entirely uninteresting.
Now, even I can tell you thems fightin words. In Honor of Savage
Values suggests more or less the opposite of what T. S. Eliot prescribes
in Tradition and the Individual Talent, which I understand to be the
proposition that art is always in conversation with other artand that,
yes, sure, the vision of the inspired individual is important, but its also
important, as you apply your individual vision, to understand the tradi-
tion to which your vision responds, and which it might tweak, bolster,
transform, or quash. Dubuffet disagreed with all thatI found I did
tooand he said a bunch of other exciting things as well, which I was
able to grasp even on that first day in the museum. For example, when
he claimed of his quirky auteurs that insanity is the term used for every-
thing that is distanced from the normal . . . and there are various ways
to distance oneself from the normal prototype, I experienced a thrill of
recognition and thought of Georges Canguilhems The Normal and the
Pathological, which predated Anticultural Positions by just a few years.
Even commentary about Dubuffet excited me. When an essay in
the book of the museums show claimed that Dubuffets own literary
productions demonstrated that the act of writing about a work of art

Hou se hol d G od s
should be a literary reenactment and re-performance of it, my brain

bloated with admiration; this approach was virtually identical to critic
James Woods claim, many years later, that criticism means, in part,
telling a good story about the story you are criticizing. By way of con-
trast, when Dubuffet argued that painting is more concrete than writ-
ten words and is a much richer instrument than written words for the
expression and elaboration of thought, I felt a bubble of bile rise in
my throat, and I wanted to travel back in time and hit him with James
Agee, who, again just a few years earlier, had cried out an anticipatory
retort: Words could, I believe, be made to do or to tell anything within
human conceit. That is more than can be said of the instruments of any
other art.
But nothing hit me harder or stuck longer than those first claims
about the borders of art brut, probably because it felt like theyd been
addressed to me personally, and because they tackled obliquely the
fundamental question of what art is exactly. For Dubuffet, it seemed,
art was mostly, or perhaps entirely, about what we understand con-
sciousness to be. Art addresses itself to the mind, he wrote, and not
to the eyes.
Almost a hundred years before Dubuffet, American psychologist
William Jameswho addressed the mind directly by coining the phrase
stream of consciousnessstudied to be an artist for several years
in the Newport studio of painter William Morris Hunt. Its unclear
whether it was an episode of depression or his fathers disapproval that
ultimately steered James away from brushes and canvases, but whats
known for sure is that some time later James outlined a polemical lec-
ture about schools of art. Enough remains of his notes to reconstruct
a thesis. Schools of art celebrate uninspired work, James wanted to
claim, because art conceived as a response to other art was the creation
of an artist knowingly borrowing from or mimicking or working in the
thrall of another artist, one who was the schools original visionary.
This work, he theorized, tended to lack a spark of inspiration that you
could see at a glance, the magical resonance that the beholder of art
craves without ever knowing that he or she desires some mysterious
nourishment. In other words, schools of art create watered-down art
and watered-down artists.
Dubuffets critique of counterfeit works might have been drawn
directly from James, had James gone ahead and written his polemic.
But that didnt happen, and in any event, whats substantially more
interesting is what James did with the core idea of his aborted lecture
decades later, when he penned what Robert Stone once described as
the most important work of nonfiction of the twentieth century, The

Varieties of Religious Experience. The book celebrated personal religion
in a highly secular time. More specifically, it argued for the truth of
mystical experiences: the fleeting and indescribable intervals that left
individuals transformed, convinced they had been touched by a divine
presence. James was struck by the uniformity of these experiences,
stretching across cultures and eras. He believed the reports indicated
something real and true. He was far less keen, however, on the move-
ments that tended to grow out of mystical experiences.
According to James, all organized religions followed a basic tem-
plate: a mystic has an experience and then becomes a prophet by dint
of communicating the experience to seekers who, disillusioned with
highly structured traditions, hunger for something new. A movement
grows as the message is disseminated, and the prophet is heralded as
an earthly divine presence. When the prophet dies, leadership passes
to a figure with no immediate experience of the animating vision, and
the groups core purpose shifts to growth and self-perpetuation; it
becomes corporate in nature. A now watered-down cosmology appeals
to a new laity, a different sort of seeker who longs to become attached
to something established and communal. Soon, not much remains of
the animating visionthe movement is no longer based on a tactile
experience of something believed to be otherworldly, but rather on an
organization that offers the corporate rewards of hierarchical advance-
ment and an association with institutional wealth.
Which brings us back to Dubuffet and art brut. An artist, it
seems to me, is one who attempts to receive at will the kind of vision
that arrived spontaneously in those who were once labeled mystics.
The creative process is an attempt to conjure inspiration. Art brut
auteurs, then, are mystics of another sort: the cultures soulfulness
locked away in asylums, desperately recording visions they mistook for
glimpses of other worlds.
A Brut Abroad
And inevitably, it seems, the solitary transports of art brut auteurs
became bound up with broader currents of political and commercial
madness in the modern age. As a result, like debutante globetrotters,
the works displayed at the American Folk Art Museum had to cross
the Atlantic three times before I had the chance to see them.
Their full story begins even earlier than that.
In 1923 a mentally ill French factory worker named Clmentine
Ripoche filled a ledger with visionary images of clouds and interpreta-
tions of cloud formations. She posted the notebook to the director of
Frances National Meteorological Office, which was headquartered in

Paris, in a weather laboratory on the third floor of the Eiffel Tower. The
notebook was given to then twenty-two-year-old Jean Dubuffet, who
had been assigned to the Meteorological Office to perform his obliga-
tory national service. Dubuffet had long nursed a passion for nontra-
ditional art, graffiti, prisoners tattoos, and so on. Intrigued, Dubuffet
met several times with factory worker/cloud interpreter Ripoche, but
it would be years before he would begin to amass his own collection of
works produced in psychiatric hospitals. Before then, Nazi Germany,
led by a different sort of madman, one whose own artistic sensibility
hewed far closer to tradition, led an attack on the art world that culmi-
nated in the infamous Degenerate Art show of 1937, in which the works
of the mentally ill were displayed alongside the work of modern artists,
presumably to suggest that they were all equally certifiable.
During the war, French surrealist poet Paul luard, a friend of
Man Ray and Pablo Picasso, spent time in a psychiatric institution
southwest of Lyon. luard wasnt crazy. His patriotic sonnet, Lib-
erty, had been reprinted thousands of times over and dropped from
British aircraft all across Nazi-occupied France. Hiding out in the hos-
pital, luard discovered among the institutions permanent residents
Auguste Forestier, the creator of the Azteckian statuettes, whoin
addition to having set up a makeshift craft studio in a hospital corri-
dorwas wont to strut the halls wearing military-style medals that
he had made himself. Forestiers completed statuettes were displayed
for sale atop the exterior wall of the hospital yard. luard promptly rec-
ommended the odd work to Dubuffet, who began to study Forestiers
work in May 1945, eight months after the liberation of France, just at
the time of Germanys surrender.
Now, it seemed, Dubuffets vision of a global art brut community
began to stir into fruition. Two months later, he traveled to Switzer-
land, accompanied by another writer friend and, more notably, the
architect Le Corbusier, to document the productions of psychiatric
patients and prison inmates. Psychiatrists in Bern and Geneva had
already begun gathering the work of their more remarkable patients in
modest museums. Soon, Dubuffet was not content simply to record the
works existence. He began to collect.
He opened a small museum of his own in 1947, in the basement
of the home of an art-dealer friend, and the following year Dubuffet
formed the short-lived Compagnie de lArt Brut, whose members
would number in the dozens and include artists and writers ranging
from Andr Breton to Wallace Stevens. Soon, however, the group
was beset by the usual organizational difficulties of limited financial
resources, disagreements over its mission and vision, and accusations

that Dubuffets managerial style was more Auteurs are the cultures
like that of a dictator than that of an equal
soulfulness locked away
member of a society of like-minded thinkers.
Dubuffet disbanded the group in 1951. in asylums.
Art brut might have died then and there, if
not for a peculiar Gatsby-like figurewealthy, 9
mysterious, tragic, and installed in a vast Long
Island estate that had become a common meeting place for the most
famous artists of mid-twentieth-century America. Alfonso Ossorio
was heir to a Philippine sugar fortune. Art was his Daisy Buchanan.
(Dubuffet and Ossorio died more than a quarter-century ago now, but
Ossorios long-time partner, Ted Dragon, died only in 2011.) A painter
and something of an auteur himself, Ossorio had independently devel-
oped an interest in works produced by untrained artists. His acquisi-
tion of unusual pieces predated his introduction to Dubuffet, which
came at the suggestion of Jackson Pollock, in Paris, in November 1949.
Dubuffet and Ossorio hit it off at once. Ossorio purchased several
of Dubuffets paintings. Years later, a number of Ossorios own can-
vases would be included in the exhibition at the American Folk Art
Museum (and Dubuffet would eventually write a book about Ossorios
work), but the truth is that Ossorios role in the story of art brut is that
of a benefactor, one whose longing to be accepted as an artist led to
great acts of generosity, but whose own work, at least to my eye, doesnt
quite fit with the inspired works of crazed geniuses. Its all too inten-
tionally random, too Cy Twombly.
Ossorio was a timely savior. Just at the moment when Dubuffet
didnt know what to do with the art brut collection, Ossorio turned up
as conveniently as a deus ex machina, sporting a collectors enthusiasm
and the resources of a magnate. The courtship lasted a couple years, a
period that included a vast correspondence, more meetings in Paris, and
once, a joint trip to a nudist colony with Ted Dragon and Dubuffets wife,
Lili Carlu. In late 1951, fifteen cases containing 1,200 art brut works were
shipped from Paris, embarking on a circuitous voyage that would end at
Ossorios fifty-seven-acre East Hampton estate, known as The Creeks.
During Ossorios lifetime, the Long Island compound would become a
work of art itself, the main villa stuffed with prized works, the grounds
littered with valuable sculptures. (Today, on Google Earth, you can spot
a couple Richard Serras on the grounds of The Creeks, but after Osso-
rios death the estate was sold to Revlon zillionaire Ron Perelman, who
vacuumed up many of the grounds sculptures, prompting one commen-
tator to observe that Ossorios collection had been so valuable that the
addition of New Yorks richest man only cheapened it.)

Hou se hol d G od s
Expert Tease
The Creeks was brand new in 1951, and there were delays before the
art brut collection could be displayed in a few rooms on an upper
floor of the house. Photographs of the eventual installation suggest a
nose-thumbing of the high-art past in both content and form. Unlike
the well-lit but curatorially anodyne presentations of museums, this
collection was pointedly ad hoc: pieces cluttered Ossorios walls and
crowded his shelves. It seemed like nothing so much as an effort to
embraceand thereby ownthe Nazi madmans didactic bid, in the
Degenerate Art campaign, to dismiss all modern art as a haphazard
miasma of raw, untutored expression.
Dubuffet followed the art brut collection abroadin fact, he made
scouting trips to prepare for the works arrival. He delivered Anticul-
tural Positions before his Chicago audience at just about the same
time the works were being hung in the Hamptons. The reaction was
mixed and curious: the artists whose work most closely resembled the
work of the art brut auteurs (e.g., Pollock) were the ones most likely to
kick back against itto argue that, even at The Creeks, the produc-
tions of auteurs should be presented separately from the works of, I
guess, true artists.
And this approaches the heart of what this entirely unschooled
essay is trying to get at. Because it seems to be the case that those old
conceptual artists, or abstract artists, or avant-garde artists, or what-
ever they wanted to call themselves, relied on an unarticulated defi-
nition of art emphasizing that, despite how random or rambling or
unschooled their work was trying to appear, true artists really knew what
they were doing. The similarity between the work of these artists and
the works created by wackos who had never studied anything, who
never read art history, who never apprenticed in some artists studio,
who never got a degree or drank whiskey with Pollock or Duchamp
well, too much emphasis on that vague similarity suggested that artists
werent really expert in anything. So how could the true artists sign on
to Dubuffets wild claims just at the moment when people were begin-
ning to pay vast sums for the product of their vision and expertise? Its
perhaps for this reason that the art brut collection stayed only a decade
in Osorrios storied chambers before retreating back across the Atlan-
tic to Paris, where it remained until 1976, when the Collection de lArt
Brut museum opened in Lausanne, Switzerland. At that time, there
were five thousand works in the Collection de lArt Brut. Today, the
collection boasts seventy thousand pieces.
Furthermore, shortly after the art brut show at the American Folk
Art Museum closed this past January, the New York Outsider Art Fair

celebrated its twenty-fourth consecutive year in operation. It might
seem paradoxical, one art magazine wrote of the fair, but Art Brut (or
Outsider Art) is increasingly moving from the art worlds margins to
become an emerging segment of the art market in its own right. 2016
marks the first Christies auction of vernacular art held in conjunc-
tion with the Outsider Art Fair. This sale included a piece by one of
Dubuffets original discoveries, Adolf Wlfli, who had been included
in the American Folk Art Museum show. Wlfli had been sexually
abused as a child, was himself imprisoned for attempted child abuse,
and was then committed to the Waldau Clinic, where he spent the rest
of his life. He produced thousands of works, trading finished pieces for
paper and pencils to produce yet more works. Christies sold Wlflis
Lagerfeuer, which resembles no tradition or school of art that I know
of, for $12,500.
Schools Out
The history of art brut is a history of contradictions. The greatest con-
tradiction of all is that its almost impossible to look at Dubuffets own
paintings and fail to conclude that he had worked in the thrall of his
auteurs, quite as if art brut was itself a school of art.
To backtrack: Its not inaccurate to say that Auguste Forestier
seems a bit Aztec, or that Augustin Lesage seems a bit Buddhist,
because Dubuffets real suggestion, it seems to me, is not that its pos-
sible to shed influence completely, but that what every artist should
attempt to do is shovel down into their own minds, excavate past the
sediment of Western civilization that amounts to yet another, larger,
school of art, and keep scraping deeper and deeper, all the way back
to the beginning. In this view of things, each and every artist crafts a
unique creation narrative, chronicles the birth of his or her own private
aesthetic. Hence, the best work is not adult, intellectual, and informed;
it is primitive, and childish, and raw.
Perhaps thats why its easy to recognize the influence of art
brut in the images that have been created for childrens literature
and cartoons ever since Dubuffet began showing his art brut collec-
tion. I have a hard time looking at the work of Maurice Charrieau
(identified only as a common man) and not seeing a rough draft of
Popeye the Sailor. One of the few works of actual children in Dubuf-
fets original collection, by Annie Chaissac, is a dead ringer for early
sketches of Charlie Brown. (During World War Two, Charles Schulz
passed through Europe with the 20th Armored Division, just as the
art brut collection was beginning to take shape.) The work of Albino
Braz (schizophrenic, institutionalized in Brazil) is deeply evocative of

The coffers Where the Wild Things Are and appeared in international shows just a
few years before Maurice Sendak began publishing. And the peculiar
overflow with
figures of Carlo Zinelli (a butcher and soldier, committed to the San
gold as the Giacomo Hospital in Verona at age thirty-one) bear a more than pass-
ing resemblance to the odd creatures that populate Matt Groenings
mystic dies,
early comic strip, Life in Hell.
the vision gets Regardless of whether this influence is direct or indirect, the fact
that these menSchulz, Sendak, and Groeningmade millions from
lost, and the
their work suggests that whatever happened to art brut long ago, and
mechanism whatever is happening now as those same original works begin to sell
for tidy sums, isnt anything so simple as another school of art. To
designed to
be sure, Dubuffets attempts to organize and promote art brut look,
record it evolves at a remove, a whole lot like someone trying to create a movement, a
school. The movement fell apart, but even soand ironicallythose
into something
original works now hang in the very museums that epitomize the West-
diabolical. ern civilization Dubuffet had hoped to undermine. In the end, it may
be impossible to identify a trend, to suggest that a trend has a value,
9 without that value sooner or later coming to correspond to economic
currencyto a dollar value that is sure to corrupt what was valuable
about the trend in the first place. In other words, the coffers overflow
with gold as the mystic dies, the vision gets lost, and the mechanism
designed to record it evolves into something diabolical.
Speaking of dollars and mechanisms, consider, in conclusion, the
case of Heinrich Anton Mller, who was born in 1869 in Versailles but
emigrated to Switzerland to marry a Swiss woman and make wine. In
1903, Mller patented a clever grapevine-pruning machine, but forgot
to pay the annual dues to keep the patent enforced. His invention was
stolen. He fell into a depression and was committed to a psychiatric
hospital in Mnsingen, where he remained until he died in 1930. He
began creating art in 1914. His output included a veritable bestiary of
creatures in pencil and white chalk on cardboard and wrapping paper.
One of his images on display in New York, an odd figure allegorically
harassed by insects and a snake, served as the cover of the book of the
show, Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet.
But more to my point, Mller also called on his skills as a handy-
man, the same skills that had resulted in his patent, to create many
fanciful mechanical devices during his institutionalization, machines
of perpetual motion that he built from rags, branches, and wire. He
fashioned tangled gears and ingenious cogs, lubricating them with his
own excrement. But heres the thing: The mechanisms cant be viewed
today. They were never sold. They are not in any museum. Mller
destroyed them all.t

Long division at the dinner table
6 fr ancine j. harris
Under the windowsill flowers, my father, stark like

math without calculator, sitting so still and nothing
but a blackened gum eraser and little yellow pencil
at table, among the kitchen pastel, a noon window
as I divide big number into big number, add another
line, another mark he bemoans with the rule and deep
voice at the back of his throat, and the face he makes
when I miscalculate, and then sit more with him, carry
one and drop three and lay it at the back of more odd
number and if I get stuck, he might nod, tell me work it
out, hand me scrap paper, which we never throw away; we
distrust easy and waste, because longhand might be hard but
is the best way, with multiplication in the margin, and another
line carried, one below impossible math, what on this gods
earth does twenty-seven go into, as he heats coffee on the
tiny stove and my mother stitches balls of his socks under
lamp with a magnifying glass, and an odd number makes de-
cimal which means now we are into fraction, his gum eraser
marred up and black with sketches, maybe, or math he used to
decide to whom he owes, what he might make on the street, how
many hours he has, how late he has to stay out to make enough
for it, and in mornings he leaves, as if for work, and in summers I
sit sometimes after breakfast at the kitchen table doing that divis-
ion until I figure it out; it could take a very long time if he doesnt
let me round up; I used to wait for him at the window, like its really
a miracle if you think about it, an odd thing someone should figure out
long division like that, the whole thing about carrying and stacking lines
under lines so perfect they became the only way you can work out the math.

A n i m a l M a gn e t i s m
Who Speaks
for the Trees?
3 Astr a Taylor
O n the corner of South Finley and Dearing Streets in Athens, Geor-

gia, the small college town where I grew up, there is a tall white oak,
and a small weathered stone plaque that reads:
For and in consideration of the great love I bear this tree and the great
desire I have for its protection, for all time, I convey entire possession
of itself and all land within eight feet of the tree on all sides.
William H. Jackson
The Tree That Owns Itself is a beloved local landmark, one I vis-
ited many times as a child. Standing under its branches provoked a
subtle awe, a respect not usually granted to mere plants. The Tree was
imbued with rights, not an object but a subject, animate, existing with
a kind of inviolability and autonomy. It had also achieved that elusive
quality that so many self-possessing humans desire: fame.
The Tree got its first taste of notoriety in a front-page Athens
Weekly Banner article published on August 12, 1890, under the headline
Deeded to Itself, although in truth, the Tree had been in self-posses-
sion for more than half a century by that time. Another half-century
after the Banner article was published, the original oak, so beloved by
Mr. Jackson, fell after an unusually strong storm. The community ral-
lied to plant a seedling cultivated from one of the Trees acorns; the new
oak has thrived in the same plot since 1946. Thus, as noted on another
small plaque, the Tree That Owns Itself is technically the scion of the
Tree That Owns Itself. Nevertheless, the Scion of the Tree inherited
its parents unusual claim to independence. This claim is not necessar-
ily binding, because Georgia common law, like that of all other states,
does not recognize the capacity of trees to hold property, since plants,
like nonhuman animals, have the legal status of things and thus lack
the right to have rights. Yet the Trees self-possession is an accepted
part of local identity and lore and has never been challenged in court.
In the minds of Athenians, the Tree owns itself and its plot.
Perhaps in the near or distant future, the Tree That Owns Itself
will not be regarded as a charming curiosity but as a political pioneer,
the embodiment of an imaginary and ethical leap that foreshadowed

K ATH Y B OA K E

In the near or distant future, what will seem, from the futures transformed
vantage point, the inevitable and necessary
the Tree That Owns Itself
expansion of rights to the natural world. In
will not be regarded as 1972, law professor Christopher Stone pro-
vided a sketch of what such a future might
a charming curiosity but
look like in a groundbreaking scholarly essay,
as a political pioneer. written on a whim after he found himself argu-
ing the unthinkable in a class lecture. Still
9 widely read more than forty years later, Should
Trees Have Standing? doesnt go so far as to contend that all flora should
be given a deed to the soil in which they are plantedlike our arboreal
outlier in Athensbut it does systematically and dispassionately make
the case for granting baseline legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers, and
other so-called natural objects in the environmentindeed, to the
natural environment as a whole.
Its not as strange as it may sound, for the uncanny entity that is
the nonhuman person is already omnipresent. The world of the
lawyer is peopled with inanimate rights-holders: trusts, corporations,
joint ventures, municipalities, Subchapter R partnerships, and nation-
states, to mention just a few, Stone reminds us. Corporations were
granted legal personhood in 1886and oddly, it happened in an almost
backhanded way. The Supreme Court did not directly rule on the
matter. In a headnote that wasnt part of the formal opinion in Santa
Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., the court reporter (who
had sympathies with the railroads) noted that chief justice Morrison
Waite affirmed the personhood of corporations under the Fourteenth
Amendment in a passing comment as proceedings began. Of course,
railroad attorneys and business interests had been opportunistically
demanding for years that the equal protection clause of the amend-
ment designed to secure equal rights for former slaves be twisted to
apply to corporations. The Santa Clara trial affirmed their Gilded Age
aspirations as fact, even though the suit was decided on other grounds:
defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the . . . Four-
teenth Amendment. Later cases built on that thin precedent. Today,
corporations are entitled to an ever-expanding array of constitutional
protections, from the Fourth Amendment ban on warrantless search
and seizure to the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.
Convincing a court that an endangered river is a person, Stone
acknowledges, will call for lawyers as bold and imaginative as South-
ern Pacific Railroads counseland, one might add, considerably
less mercenary. Thats because extending rights to other forms of
nonhuman life entails fighting to counteract the rights of corporations

and the remarkable power personhood allows profit-seeking ventures.
The intrepid lawyers and citizens who have taken up this gauntlet
challenge our legal and economic systems, while chipping away at
the moral framework of human separateness and superiority that has
evolved and solidified over millennia.
The Right to Flourish

Grant Township is a tiny community of seven hundred citizens that sits
in Indiana County in western Pennsylvania. Should you drive through,
you might not realize you were there: it boasts no downtown, no stores,
no traffic lights, no public sewage, and few jobs. But there is land and
water, and there are trees and animals, king among them the eastern
hellbender, North Americas largest aquatic salamanderand all of
this natural richness is vested with rights. According to a Community
Bill of Rights Ordinance issued June 3, 2014, and adopted by the resi-
dents, Natural communities and ecosystems within Grant Township,
including but not limited to, rivers, streams, and aquifers, possess the
right to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve. With a single vote they
became rights-holding entities, potential legal persons.
Grant Township adopted this ordinance as a direct challenge to
the Pennsylvania General Energy Company (PGE), which wants to
create a seven-thousand-foot Class II injection well within the town-
ships border, pumping fracking waste into empty boreholes. That
toxic fluid threatens to seep through rock formations into local aqui-
fers, poisoning drinking water and ecosystems with hazardous chemi-
cals and radioactive materials. More than one hundred communities in
Pennsylvania have taken the unusual step of embracing some version
of the same Community Bill of Rights, including rights for the envi-
ronment, to oppose various kinds of polluters, but Grant Township
has taken the struggle further than most. They have done so, town-
ship supervisor Stacy Long told me, not because they are a bunch of
Gaia-worshipping hippies but because they have run out of optionsat
least within the boundaries of the law as it is written.
Like many battles, Grant Townships began with a bureaucratic
formality. In August 2013 a small notice appeared in the local paper
saying the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was hosting a
public hearing about the planned well. On the scheduled evening, EPA
officials stood shoulder to shoulder with gas company representatives
and assured residents all would be fine; the residents, knowing better,
had come to the hearing prepared, naively assuming their research and
reasoned arguments about the dangers inherent to the project would
prevail. It quickly became evident that the EPA, failing to live up to

its name, intended to rubber stamp the plans. At a later meeting with
township supervisors, PGE employees were blunt: the state has com-
plete authority in these matters; the township has no say; we are going
forward with the well whether you like it or not. We had no leverage,
Long told me. We were sitting ducks. For the people of Grant Town-
ship, disillusionment morphed into open rebellion.
Re-Gaming the System

Like it or not, PGE was fundamentally correct. The law was indeed
on the utilitys side, representatives of the Community Environmental
Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), a nonprofit law firm, confirmed when
Long and others connected with them. Once permits were secured,
disposing of hazardous materials on property abutting peoples homes
was the corporations right. It didnt matter that in 2014 a Government
Accountability Office report found that, as consequence of underfund-
ing, the EPA is not consistently conducting two key oversight and
enforcement activities for class II programs; it didnt matter that an
earlier investigation by the journalism nonprofit ProPublica found that
the EPA didnt know how many wells existed or the volume of waste
pumped into them and that it failed to keep the records required by the
Safe Drinking Water Act; it didnt matter that many scientists have
warned about the potential dangers of injection wells due to waste
migration and water contamination; it didnt matter that PGE, one
of the states top polluters, had a history of environmental violations;
it didnt matter that injection wells have also been linked with earth-
quakes in Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas. The only recourse, CELDF
explained, was for Grant Township to change the rules of the game, to
tilt the playing field in the residents and ecosystems favor. Thats what
the township did by implementing the Community Bill of Rights.
According to CELDF organizer Chad Nicholson, the fundamen-
tal issue is less environmental than political: Its about who has more
rights, who has the authority to legislate and make decisions. Com-
munity control may not be desirable in many casesif a suburb wanted
to segregate its schools, saybut state and federal laws also do things
like blocking towns from protecting the health and safety of residents,
and thats what CELDFs ordinances are designed to challenge. The
groups radical, rights-based approach is relatively new. For over a
decade, beginning in 1994, CELDF was a conventional environmental
law firm, working with communities to painstakingly appeal industrial
permits. CELDF attorneys would often win the first round, perhaps
having identified some clerical error or deficiency in the application,
and would celebrate over a beer, but the company would eventually

successfully resubmit. Though it won accolades, including from the
White House, the organization had an existential crisis. The bitter
irony, Nicholson explained, is that we were helping corporations
build better permits and helping the corporate lawyers, who got to bill
another round while the company got to write off the expense.
Predictably, PGE wasted no time in suing Grant Township, assert-
ing that the Community Bill of Rights ordinance was unconstitutional
and in violation of the corporations rights under the First and Four-
teenth amendments, in addition to the Commerce and Supremacy
Clauses of the U.S. Constitution. A judge found that the municipality
had indeed exceeded its authority. The ruling stripped out most of the
ordinance, including the rights of naturewhich only caused the town
to escalate the rebellion. Within weeks, a majority of the residents
voted in a home rule charter, essentially changing their local form
of government to override the judge and reinstate their Bill of Rights.
In the interim, CELDF had the local watershedthe Little Mahoning
Watershed, which includes a 4.3 mile stretch of stream that is home to
fish, freshwater mussel, aquatic insects, and the aforementioned hell-
bender salamanderjoin a motion to intervene in PGEs lawsuit, seek-
ing to defend its legally enforceable rights to exist and flourish. The
lawsuit is ongoing.
Grant Township and its litigious watershed will likely lose the
case, which means the township, facing millions of dollars in damages
and legal fees, may go bankrupt. Long, who as a supervisor has access
to the books, assured me that the township has no wealth or real tax
base. What are they going to do? Long asked. Take our garbage?
Our public sewage? We dont have either.We dont have anything to
give. And that, she continued, is why PGE came to them in the first
placebecause the townships citizens are poor. Rural areas like ours
are the sacrifice zones for the gas industry.
Trump v. Octopus
What are rights anyway? We invoke them all the time, but they are not
easy to define and rarely if ever absolute, as anyone who has spent time
pent up in a free speech pen at a protest knows too well. A right is not
some strange substance that one either has or has not, Stone points out
in Trees. Ones life, ones right to vote, ones property, can all be taken
away. But those who would infringe on them must go through certain
procedures to do so; these procedures are a measure of what we value
in society. The right to remain silent or to bear arms is as irrelevant to
a chimpanzee as it is to a human infant, but the latter still has certain
inalienable rights, and the former could use some. One former Supreme

Court justice described rights as trump cards. Of course, that doesnt
mean government, corporations, and private citizens cant or wont
violate them routinelywe know they will. But few of us who feel our
rights are imperfectly conceived or protected would give them up.
That we think of rights as something we individually possess is
arguably part of their fundamental weakness. That was the position of
Karl Marx, who in 1843 wrote:
None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man,

beyond man as a member of civil societythat is, an individual with-
drawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private
caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is
far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life
itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a
restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them
together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation
of their property and their egoistic selves.
The last thing we need is to further privatize our world by granting

plants and animals egoistic fiefdoms. But that is not what the expan-
sion of rights to nonhuman life has to mean, proponents say. Ecosys-
tems are too complex for natural rights to mean that no tree could ever
be felled. Instead, CELDFs Nicholson insists, giving rights to nature
provides a way to push back on self-interested, acquisitive personhood,
opening legal space for humans to recognize themselves as part of
the environment, not separate from it, while providing a way to argue
that the environment, as a rights-holder, has a value that is not purely
economic. Under this framework, a creek or a forest in a poor, rural
area has grounds to refuse being sacrificed to private profit, even if its
health and thriving provide no immediate measurable financial benefit
to humans living nearby.
There is also, always, the question of where rights come from. The
2016 Republican Party platform stipulates that man-made law must
be consistent with God-given, natural rights. The God the drafters
refer to is one widely believed to have given mankind dominion over
the natural world, not one who would deign to give the natural world
rights. To give rights to oceans or octopi, then, would be to privilege
quite reasonably!actually existing life over the alleged dictates of a
imaginary and typically wrathful man in the sky, and it would also be
an affront to the natural right to property best personified today by
the Republican Partys new leader, real estate mogul Donald Trump.
The citizens of Grant Township, meanwhile, are seizing new priv-
ileges for themselves, whether God intended them or not. This spring

they took the dramatic step of legalizing civil The environment will never be
disobedience undertaken to prevent the injec-
able to seize rights or ask politely
tion well. Any natural person may . . . enforce
the rights and prohibitions of the charter for them, which means human
through direct action, a new ordinance states.
allies will have to do that work.
Challenging the legitimacy of the system that
has completely dismissed them by legalizing 9
resistance to what they believe are unjust laws
was a warning shot, a shot over the bow, Long said. If the judge says
something we dont like, we are not going away. The environment, how-
ever, will never be able to seize rights or ask politely for them, which
means human allies will have to do that work, however fraught it may be.
Personhood Without People

The Little Mahoning Watershed is not the first natural habitat to seek
legal redress. With guidance from CELDF, the rights of nature were
included in Ecuadors 2008 constitution, and cited to halt two indus-
trial projects. This July a former national park in New Zealand became
a person in the eyes of the law, and a river may soon be granted the same
exceptional status. Over the years, a variety of cases naming environ-
ments and animals as plaintiffs have come before U.S. courts, mainly in
response to the Endangered Species Act. Byram River v. Village of Port
Chester, Loggerhead Turtle v. County Council of Volusia, and Coho Salmon
v. Pacific Lumber Company have all raised the issue of nonhuman person-
hood and legal standing, though none have had unequivocal success on
that particular front. All these cases used additional human co-plain-
tiffs, which lawyers typically include as a kind of insurance that a claim
will be heard. In these proceedings, asserting the rights of trees blurs
into asserting the rights of ecosystems blurs into asserting the rights of
species blurs into asserting the rights of individual nonhuman animals.
While animal rights may be a common enough refrain in our
culture, those who invoke the phrase rarely mean it; what they are
actually referring to is animal welfare, because they are against unnec-
essary cruelty. Even the philosopher Peter Singer, who is known as the
godfather of animal rights and author of the 1975 classic Animal Liber-
ation, does not put rights for nonhuman creatures front and centeras
a utilitarian, his emphasis is on reducing suffering. Likewise, the stat-
utes protecting animals today, including the Animal Welfare Act and
the Endangered Species Act, regulate the use and abuse of animals but
do not challenge their fundamental legal status.
In contrast to the welfarists, Steven Wise, founder of the Non-
human Rights Project, has spent thirty years building the legal argu-

ment that some nonhuman animalsgreat apes such as chimpanzees,

bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas, as well as dolphins, orcas, belugas,
and elephantsshould be granted legal personhood on account of
their advanced cognitive abilities. Legal personhood, he writes in
his book Rattling the Cage, is the frame upon which we stretch funda-
mental immunities that block abuses of power, whether that power is
rooted in precedent, policy, principle, or prejudice. While Wise relies
on detailed affidavits provided by scientists and researchers to make
his case that these species possess self-awareness and autonomy, the
idea of exceptional animal intelligence is hardly a stretch for laypeople
these days thanks to social media. Our digital portals teem with videos
of crows solving complex puzzles and dogs breaking out of cages. But as
much as we might enjoy procrastinating by gawking at animal ingenu-
ity, granting nonhuman agents the status of legal persons with a base-
line array of rights remains a major stretch. And though few among us
would describe crows or dogs, gorillas or elephants as things, thats what
they remain according to the law.
Wises approach tries to provide an answer to a paradox: How can a
legal thing sue to challenge its thinghood? Wise eventually found inspi-
ration by looking back at the history of slavery, specifically the famous
Somerset v. Stewart case. James Somerset, a black slave purchased in
Virginia, accompanied his owner, Charles Stewart, on a journey to
England, where slavery was less entrenched than in America. Somerset
tried to escape but was captured and returned to his owner; as property,
he could not sue for his release. In 1772 the English abolitionist Gran-
ville Sharp, serving as a legal proxy, filed a writ of habeas corpus in his
stead, which the justice, Lord Mansfield, upheld against the commer-
cial interests of slaveholders.A precedent was set, as a man who was for-
merly property became a free person. (Britain abolished the slave trade
in 1807 and gave all slaves in the empire their freedom in 1833.)
A recent documentary directed by Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pen-
nebaker follows the Nonhuman Rights Project team on its quest to inch
forward the march toward nonhuman personhood by suing on behalf
of three chimpanzeesTommy, Leo, and Herculesto gain their free-
dom. (Tommy was kept in a small cage on a property in upstate New
York, Leo and Hercules in a laboratory at the State University of New
York, Stony Brook.) With cameras rolling, Wise passionately makes
his case in numerous courtrooms; one judge refuses to entertain the
controversial analogy between slavery and animal oppression, advis-
ing him to move on to other lines of reasoning, while others appear
more open-minded. Wise understands that the law does not prog-
ress in a straightforward or linear fashionit advances and regresses;

judges disagree, then agree, then disagree again; legal precedents are
vague or conflicting. His goal is to create the first small chinks in the
legal wall that deems animals worthy of welfare but not rights; it will
be up to others to keep chipping away until the barrier disappears.
The habeas corpus cases for Tommy, Leo, and Hercules are currently
being appealed, and Wise will soon file writs on behalf of multiple ele-
phantswith other species to come.
The Court of the Absurd

Propounding the rights of nature raises countless philosophical and
practical riddles. Should invasive species have equal protections? What
about the rights of prey against predators? Where does a watershed
end if all ecosystems are interconnected? To the common question of
whether rights for nature require some kind of corresponding duties,
the standard answer is no; after all, human children and some mentally
disabled people have rights without responsibilities. While corporate
persons can be prosecuted for crimes, a tree that falls on someones
home should not be liable. No need to revive the tradition, routine in
the Middle Ages, of bringing animals accused of crimes to trial and
punishing them by torture and death. (Some were granted clemency on
the basis of their good characteran eighteenth-century French female
donkey, embroiled in a bestiality case, was acquitted when prominent
members of the community signed a certificate testifying that she was
known to be virtuous and in all her habits of life a most honest crea-
ture.) But more unsettling questions remain: How do human advo-
cates know what is best for the rights-holders they aim to help? In Trees,
for example, Stone recounts a case in which the rights of two dolphins
were asserted after a pot-smoking lab assistant liberated them from
their tanks into the Pacific Ocean. On being charged for theft (the dol-
phins were lab property), the assistant countered that he was saving two
jural persons from slavery. Unfortunately, marine biologists testified
that the captivity-bred dolphins would not last long in the wild. The
assistant got six months in jail, and the dolphins were never seen again.
What Stone, Wise, and CELDFs Nicolson all maintain is that,
however many absurd scenarios one can imagine arising from giv-
ing nature rights, the current system is already preposterous in ways
non-lawyers dont realize. To improve their chances of winning,
environmental lawyers are often forced to frame their arguments
around far-fetched injuries or financial inconveniences to humans
the diminishment of property values or reduced business revenue.
(Likewise, only humans are eligible to be compensated for damages,
not ecosystems in need of restoration.) The environment is an after-

thought, of indirect importance as lost profits, an externality subject
to a cost-benefit analysis. Cases of habitat destruction or animal abuse
have been filed in terms of tragically limiting a human plaintiffs aes-
thetic enjoyment or annoyingly impinging on future vacation plans.
A 2008 suit to stop the Navy from killing whales included testimony
from tourists about the fulfilling opportunity to observe and inter-
act with marine species and the bottomless disappointment they
felt knowing they wouldnt be able to see whales spout as often. The
direct harm to whales, beings invisible in the eye of the law, had to be
tiptoed aroundand the real grievances advocates sought to remedy
left unstated because the actual victims lack rights.
For now, those who resist such legal contortions are frequently
ridiculed. Long told me that the gas company mocked the people of
Grant Township for imparting rights to the environment (What are
you going to do? company officials said. Take a jar of creek water and
put it on the stand and have it testify?), while also taking the threat
seriously enough to sue. Wise and his team, too, have encountered their
fair share of scorn, and Stones treatise inspired other scholars to reply
in jeering verse (Our brooks will babble in the courts, Seeking damages for
torts). It is true that their efforts seem quixotic at first blush, whimsical
or absurd or offensive, but over the last three decades, their arguments
have made measurable headway. We have been through revolutions of
rights before, they remind us: slaves, free black citizens, indigenous peo-
ple, women, children, the disabled, and refugees have all had to fight for
basic recognition as members of the rights-holding community. Why
should we assume that we live at the end of history and all entities wor-
thy of rights or legal personhood have already been identified?t
R A N DA L L E N OS

Nothing Wrong with a Maple
6 Matt Hart
Go fast, white light, go faster out of sight

The Devil does know
how to row my boat ashoreHallelujah
Orange juice, a swing set, the creaminess of milk fat
But first lets pull
the papers weight
Let the wind blow
O how I love thee
thy shadowy grace
And the moon off its hinges,
Henry David Thoreau
OwletsThunderThis
nervous blinking page
All the mulch
I spread around
in the ultra-black bramble Let it not
wash away in the very next rain
And let me,
just the same,
stand forever in my backyard
beneath a maple
looking up
there is nothing wrong with a maple looking up
and gape in the gap of the thoughts strewn around it
Pleasantly,
with witchcraft, I return to what befallsThe gone white light,
the Devil as he rows
Hairy Beard-Tongue
Butter-and-Eggs
Only for a moment,
then it leaves me

Womb Up,
America
3 Lucy Ellmann
C onsider pistons and pumps. Sockets and plugs. Consider shafts.

Cogs. Funnels. We cover the earth with stuff in the image of our gen-
italia. Almost every machine we produce is unashamedly coital, just
one thing after another sticking out of something, or into something.
And buttons, how we love pressing buttons! It must be some dim col-
lective memory of the G-spot. Every president has to have his or her
finger on the goddamn Button.
Despite the somewhat noble efforts of queer theorists to fudge the
issue, the influence of differing genitalia still spreads into every aspect of
our lives. Its natural enough. Our thinking sprouts from the sensation
of inhabiting a body: you start with yourself and move outward. It only
gets dicey when the establishment declares one type of genitalia superior
to another. Having the wrong genitalia (female) currently means exclu-
sion from clubs and other privileges, leadership roles, cultural, economic,
and political power, and some very silly sports. This is counterbalanced
by forced inclusion in menial tasks, physical mistreatment, low paid or
unpaid labor, cake-baking, bill-paying, and eyebrow threading.
Yet, unless youre a seahorse, or perhaps an octopus, or were born dis-
appointingly by Cesarean (as I was), we all emerge from that vital female
juncture where two hind legs meet. This is our entrance to the universe;
out we come to seek and find (or not). In his magnificent, hyper-autobi-
ographical movie, My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin repeatedly likens the fork
in a river to the maternal groin, or lapin his case, the Forks, where
Winnipegs Red River merges with the Assiniboine, a significant ancient
meeting-point for indigenous peoples. Many cities are at the confluence
of rivers, for reasons both sacred and banal. And other womanly groins,
laps, and forks are everywhere, be they manmade, literal, or abstract: in
architecture, in carpentry, in geology, and between the branches of trees.
Robert Frost, too, thought forks make all the difference.
Forget all the penile towers suspended over every city. How flimsy
and impotent they seem, compared to the Eiffel Tower, an overt
monument to the vagina. Never mind the structures airy lack of sub-
stance. Read between the lines! Look up its skirts. With its four legs
spread wide in a birthing squat, the Eiffel Tower is just one big iron

We need to
put feminine
curves back
into the body
politic.
Its so flat
without them!
E L L E N W EI N S T EI N
pelvis displaying its carnal opening to the gawping tourists below.

Its a subversive breakthrough in publicor pubic?architecture: its
nineteenth-century engineerings equivalent to a can-can girl, Pariss
flamboyant answer to Romes more austere cloaca maxima. You feel
the Eiffel Tower could contain, or expel, the whole world.
The Sprawling Corpus

We just cant leave the body alone. We really think of little else. Ver-
bally, we cant bear to be parted from bodily processes for a second:
everything is fucking this or fucking that, its shitty, its crappy, its

People are never acclaimed nail-biting, hysterical, vomitous, nauseating,
stomach-churning, piss-taking, back-break-
for having the breasts to do
ing, nerve-racking, and it gives you goose-
something braveits always bumps. And thats just the DNC!
Curiously, our obsession with gender
got to be the balls.
tends to relent when we turn body parts into
9 workaday metaphors or sources of lamenta-
tion, like a pain in the neck, down in the
mouth, or one foot in the grave. (Suffering is a leveler.) That these
knee-jerk (or restless-leg) coinages are largely ungendered suggests an
unconscious drive for equality, a recognition that being human may
come before being male or female. Female anatomy admittedly has
some pretty show-stopping faculties (ovulation, menstruation, concep-
tion, gestation, parturition, lactation, mastitis, and mammoth moping,
to name but a few), but when you get right down to it, male and female
bodies still have plenty of stuff in common.
We all try to stand on our own two feet, dont we? We grab a foot-
hold, and put our best foot forward. We try to be footloose and fan-
cy-free. Okay, we usually end up putting our foot in it, but its not our
fault if we trip up, given that our masters, and their feet-of-clay foot
soldiers (the mainstream media), are always stepping on our toes and
telling us to toe the line. They want to bring the down-at-heel to heel.
They think the body politic, bodies of evidence, bodies of water, gov-
ernment bodies, regulatory bodies, and even celestial bodies are all for
them! And they dont tiptoe around.
Tired of being a footnote in history, never offered a leg up? Hip-
hop hipsters are starting to shoot from the hip. They dont want to be
elbowed out of the way anymore and forced to lead hand-to-mouth
existences under the thumb of the 0.01 percent. (Aristos have gotten a
bit out of hand of late, havent they?) So, when youre next confronted
by underhanded members of the patrician class, just holler, Unhand
me! Hands up, and hand me all your hand-me-downs!
But look out. If theyre smart, theyll give you such a handsome
hand-out that theyll temporarily nullify that compassionate chip on
your shoulder. And if youre not careful, you too will end up a chin-
less wonder, living cheek by jowl with a cheeky hedge-fund tycoon and
dancing cheek to cheek with billionaires who pay lip service to moral-
ity. Cin cin!
None of your lip now; you dont want to look a gift horse in the
mouth! Word of mouth has it that social climbers must sink their
teeth into high society and hang on by the skin of those teeth until
theyre long in the tooth. So, if you ever get down in the mouth and

start mouthing loudmouth, biting, loose-tongued notions, just explain
that they were tongue in cheek, a slip of the tongue, or that English is
not your native tongue. Dont cut your nose off to spite your face! And
dont turn your nose up at a little brown-nosing.
Riches are nothing to be sneezed at, after all (though youre bound
to pay through the nose for them in the end). No, just put your nose to
the grindstone, play it by ear, get some shut-eye, and keep your eyes
on the prize. Dont be too short-sighted: you could be heading head-
long into the heady headnip of oligarchy headquarters. And if they let
you have your head, you might even end up head of the nation! Why
not? They take anybody these days. Just think of all the blockheads,
lunkheads, dunderheads, and numbskulls who vie for the head job. Not
to mention the daft old crowned heads of Europe. So go ahead! The
muted masses will be all ears for your soundbites, if you just look them
in the eye and convince them you see eye to eye on a few things.
But after you win the election by a hairs breadth, get ready to
endure the bald malevolence of your fellow bigwigs. They may try to
split hairs with you about their shameless injustices and craven mur-
der-lustbut we all know theyve got the people by the pubes! Thanks
to all their hair-raising, hair-brained schemes and their bad hair days,
hairline cracks have begun to show from top to bottom in the body
politic. How long will you be able to swallow their bloody lies? Youll
find yourself having many a heartfelt heart to heart with blood-tied
bluebloods tainted with a disheartening vein of heartlessness and
blood on their hands.
Stuck long enough in those clogged arteries of power, youre bound
to suffer a change of heart. Then you can make a clean breast of it. If
you have a bone to pick now with the fractured head honchos, make
no bones about iteven if it jeopardizes your membership in Skull and
Bones. The lazybones will give you only the bare bones of an answer,
though, since bonehead bigheads and billionaires have no backbone,
and no funny bone. Yet they expect us to work for them pro bono, with
skeleton staffs. Now that is a joke.
These fatuous fatsos live off the fat of the land, while were all skin
and bone! We cant even afford Moleskine diaries anymore, or skinny
lattes, thanks to those skinflints, all of a lather now to save their own
skins. Well, heres the skinny: weve had a bellyful of their bellicose
belligerence and can stomach no more. We too need some belly laughs!
We are not polyps in the entrails of the tea-party class, to be viscerally
pounded, squeezed, and expunged by those lily-livered gasbags. Its
high time they went belly up. The shit has hit the fan, and were ready
to kick some ass in the seat of piddling power.

Sure, the corporate swells are cocky now, after all their cockeyed,
cockamamie, cock-and-bull stories. The dickheads think they alone
have the balls to run the world. And here we come to the crux or smelly
chafed crotch of the matter, where all kindly gender-neutrality ends and
were back slap dang in the middle of the battle of the sexes. The thing
is, people are never acclaimed for having the breasts to do something
braveits always got to be the balls (though the grandeur of the scrotal
sac, in comparison to breasts, is negligible). In a misogynistic society it
takes real guts (and muscle!) to have breasts, yet ejaculations of respect
only for testicles spill willy-nilly across the globe. This is nuts.
Where are the ululations for the undulations of the uterus, a
rip-roaring cornucopia of plenty if ever there was one? Where are
the catch-phrases of the snatch, the all-encompassing, inventive, and
expansive female groin, lap, funnel, and fork? Nowhere to be seen or
heard. Instead, all we get are seminal insights. Men have a lot of these,
it seems. They set great store by anything seminal: its all seminal this,
seminal that. They avidly disseminate their seminal ideas. They even
ascribe seminal achievements to women. Sometimes. While all the
fabulous, life-enhancing, life-generating wonderment of ova, placen-
tas, clitorises, and labia, both minora and majora, is lost to us! This is
below the belt. But soon female germinations will be adequately recog-
nized, if we just egg matriarchy on a bit.
The Genital Good

Lets return to the wombI know you want to. Its time we got to grips
with womb-based womanhood. Not womanhood of the card-carry-
ing variety, led by that shape-shifting, email-secreting, vote-rigging,
child-deporting, assassination-greedy embarrassment of a million-
airess now campaigning to be the new American purse-pincher and
drone dangler. No, the female leader we seek would stand for those old
forgotten principles like justice, truth, and the common good. What
we need is an animated version of the Statue of Liberty, now such an
odd woman out with her softy offer of mercy, warm welcome, and mag-
nanimous multitudinous motherliness. Built, coincidentally or not, by
Gustave Eiffel, Liberty was eulogized by Emma Lazarus, who awarded
her an attitude very foreign to our bully-boy times:
Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The gal has a lamp, because motherhoodMother Nature,
Mother Hubbard, Mother Goose, mother love, mother vinegar, moth-
er-of-pearl, the mother tongue of the motherlandis an enlightening
force. When your mother fades, darkness falls. Darkness is falling now
on us all, in the form of fascism, militarism, terrorism, and hitherto
unimagined extravaganzas of phoniness.
Most of human history was matriarchal, a system founded on the
valued exertions of the mammalian womb. Womanhood was seen
as an honorable (if risky) undertaking, and women were valued, not
just as potential mothers but for their own sakewhat a revolutionary
idea! Now, despite feminism, the male hierarchy is in the ascendant
again, with women getting paid less and mauled more. Patriarchy
sees women as mere proto-males who can obediently contribute to
corruption, inequality, and hypocrisy in return for minimal financial
recompense.
Some queer theorists have fallen right into the trap, rejecting the
urgent need for female supremacy in favor of some kind of unisex uto-
pia, improbably brimming with rights and equality. But to blur la dif-
frence is to assist patriarchy by blurring blame. And this gets on my tits.
Do women have to take the rap for patriarchy too?
Incubation Nation
If the anatomization above reveals anything, its that we need to put
feminine curves back into the body politic. Its so flat without them!
Trump and Pence arent the only ones who need our menstrual updates.
Lets discharge a heavy flow of labial lingo across the land, sparked up
with hot flashes of vulval ideology. Lets put the cervix back into lin-
guistic service. Lets ease the labor pains of the workers, and, while
were at it, put a picnic hamper in place of that depressing presidential
football. We only want to nuke the nuclear family now.
City by city, we will reclaim a matriarchal world order: Clitropolis,
Oviductia, Wombberg, Tittsburg, Fallopidelphia, Fort Forks, Odalisque
Falls, the twin cities of Multiple and Orgasm, and why not (in a nod to the
Eiffel Tower) a Petticoat Junction, irresistibly adjacent to Hooterville?
In terms of states, we already have the Carolinas, Louisa-iana, Georgia,
Virginia, and Marilyn. We can easily rename the resttheyre long over-
due for a revamp. (Connect-A-Cunt sounds matriarchal already.)
We can call our newfound land New Lapland, or maybe just the
Motherland, and celebrate it all with a lip-smacking, thigh-slapping
knees up. Next stop: the Milky Way.
I dont expect a standing ova-tion for this or anything. Just let the
plan gestate a little. Its pregnant with possibilities. Vive la rvolution!t

The Higher
Happiness
3 George Scialabba
I n the Feminist Hall of Fame, there are a few places for men. Near
the entrance, in the Mary Wollstonecraft Room, theres a bust of Wil-
liam Godwin, her husband. The author of A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman was a cast-off woman with an illegitimate child and a history of
suicide attempts when they met. He was a renowned political philoso-
pher. But he saw her courage and genius. They had an ecstatic though
tragically brief relationship: she died in childbirth only months after
they married in 1797. As a tribute, Godwin wrote an unusually candid
biography of her. Pre-Victorian England wasnt ready for freethinking
or free love, at least when practiced by women, so the book caused a
huge scandal. But at least the infamy helped keep her memory alive
until her masterpiece was rediscovered.
Further on, in the Bloomsbury-Fabian Wing, are plaques for
George Bernard Shaw, who ridiculed conventional patriarchal moral-
ism in Mrs. Warrens Profession and Man and Superman, and for Leonard
Woolf, whose self-effacing devotion to Virginia she often acknowl-
edged gratefully. There was even some talk recently of honoring Denis
Thatcher, the Iron Ladys faithful and supportive husband, until left-
wing feminists pointed out that Mrs. Thatchers policiesfinancial-
ization, deindustrialization, privatization, deregulationwere not
actually good for most women.
The only man to have an entire room named after him is John
Stuart Mill, to whom half of the John Stuart MillHarriet Taylor
Pavilion is dedicated. When Mill was twenty-four and already a ris-
ing intellectual star, he met Mrs. Taylor, twenty-three, the wife of a
Unitarian businessman and mother of two children. John had recently
come through the depression he famously described in his Autobiogra-
phy, caused, he was convinced, by having starved his feelings. Harriet
was brilliant, beautiful, and fearless. Both were smitten, instantly and
forever. Except when one or the other was convalescing (they were
both tubercular), they rarely went a day without seeing or writing
each other until she died twenty-eight years later, in 1858. (For the
first nineteen of those years, they met openly at her house, thanks to
her remarkably enlightened husband, John Taylor, of whom there is a

K AT H E R I N E S T R E E T E R

John Stuart Mill and Harriet small commemorative medallion on display in
the Harriet Taylor Room.)
Taylor were not sex-positive.
Mill insisted that everything he wrote
They had an unfortunate habit after meeting Taylor was a joint production
she had the flashes of inspiration that he
of referring to sex as an
laboriously worked out. Some subsequent
animal function. critics have doubted that this was true of his
Logic and other philosophical writings. But
9 it was surely true of The Subjection of Women,
his powerful and influential critique of sex-
ual inequality. Mill was already an advanced feminist when they met
(which was, he later wrote, the only reason she gave him the time of
day). But she enlarged his vision and kindled his indignation. The
latter is perhaps the most striking feature of Mills treatise. Woll-
stonecrafts Vindication had a conciliatory, occasionally even pleading,
tone. But The Subjection of Women gave no quarter, rhetorically. The
relentlessness of the prose in the cause of emancipation fits right into
todays sex-war rhetoric.
Of Marital Bondage
Mill wrote The Subjection of Women in the early 1860s, when English rad-
icals like him strongly sympathized with American abolitionists. Mill
himself was an early supporter, referring bitingly in 1848 to the United
States as a country where institutions profess to be founded on equal-
ity, and which yet maintains the slavery of black men and of all women.
Time and again in Subjection, Mill presses home the resemblance of
nineteenth-century marriage to slavery. How did marriage come about?
From the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman ... was
found in a state of bondage to some man. Laws and systems of polity
always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing
between individuals. They convert what was a mere physical fact into
a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and principally aim at the
substitution of public and organized means of asserting and protecting
these rights, instead of the irregular and lawless conflict of physical
strength. Those who had already been compelled to obedience became
in this manner legally bound to it. Slavery, from being a mere affair of
force between the master and the slave, became regularized and a matter
of compact among the masters, who, binding themselves to one another
for common protection, guaranteed by their collective strength the
private possessions of each, including his slaves.
And their wives, too.

Defenders of marriage invariably appeal to the immemorial order
of things. To be a wife and mother, they argue, is a womans natural
vocationeven though, Mill points out in the book, they seem in
reality to believe the opposite: that given a choice, few women would
choose their natural vocation.
If this is the real opinion of men in general, it would be well that it

should be spoken out. I should like to hear somebody openly enunciat-
ing the doctrine (it is already implied in much that is written on the sub-
ject)It is necessary to society that women should marry and produce
children. They will not do so unless they are compelled. Therefore it is
necessary to compel them. The merits of the case would then be clearly
defined. It would be exactly that of the slaveholders of South Carolina
and Louisiana. It is necessary that cotton and sugar should be grown.
White men cannot produce them. Negroes will not, for any wages which
we choose to give. Ergo they must be compelled.
Mill was especially scornful of his contemporaries pronounce-

ments about womens essential nature, which always seemed to jus-
tify their subordination. He was not an anti-essentialist, simply an
agnostic. One of the earliest philosophers of social science, he kept
pointing out that circumstances shape character, and since womens
faculties had never been allowed their full development, nothing plau-
sible could be said yet about their scope and limits. Again, he drew his
favorite analogy with slavery.
I deny that any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as
long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one anoth-
er. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women
without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which
the women were not under the control of the men, something might be
positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be
inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women
is an eminently artificial thingthe result of forced repression in some
directions, unnatural stimulation in others... . No class of dependents
have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural propor-
tions by their relation with their masters; for, if conquered and slave
races have been, in some respects, more forcibly repressed, whatever in
them has not been crushed down by an iron heel has generally been let
alone, and if left with any liberty of development, it has developed itself
according to its own laws; but in the case of women, a hot-house and
stove cultivation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities
of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters.

With respect to sexual inequality, that is, John Stuart Mill and
Harriet Taylor were abolitionists. And like the anti-slavery abolition-
ists, they are sometimes classified by their latter-day admirers, with
perhaps a hint of condescension, as liberals, presumably meaning
that they emphasized individual rights and abstract principles rather
than collective liberation and improvement in material conditions.
But this isnt altogether true, especially of Taylor. She persuaded Mill
to include a chapter on the future of the working class in his Principles
of Political Economy, which predicted and advocated (around the same
time as The Communist Manifesto) the association of the laborers them-
selves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which
they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected
and removable by themselves.
And while Mill thought that, for practical reasons (i.e., to avoid an
oversupply of labor, which would lower wages), most women would not
enter the labor force even when legally emancipated, Taylor, in her own
pamphlet, The Enfranchisement of Women (1851), disagreed. She refused
to accept that the division of mankind into capitalists and hired labor-
ers, and the regulation of the reward of the laborers mainly by demand
and supply, will be for ever, or even much longer, the rule of the world.
Mill and Taylor were socialist feminists.
Empire of the Sensualist

At the same, there is something suspiciously ambiguous in Mill and
Taylors legacy. They were not, it appears, sex-positive. It was impos-
sible, of course, in mid-nineteenth-century England to write without
euphemisms about sex. But even granting that restriction, they could
hardly have sounded less enthusiastic about it. They had an unfortu-
nate habit of referring to sex as an animal function and of deploring
the sway of sensuality (a distinctly disapproving word at that time)
over the average run of humankind.
While Mill was writing his Autobiography, Taylor hoped that his
account of their relationship would provide an edifying picture for
those poor wretches who cannot conceive friendship but in sex. In an
early essay, On Marriage and Divorce, Mill asked: Will the morality
which suits the highest naturesa morality of companionshipbe
also best for all inferior natures? It would, he thought, if the latter
would allow themselves to be guided by the higher natures. But
alas, the greater number of men ... are attracted to women solely by
sensuality. For that reason,
the law of marriage as it now exists, has been made by sensualists, and

for sensualists, and to bind sensualists. The aim and purpose of that law
is either to tie up the sense, in the hope by so doing, of tying up the soul
also, or else to tie up the sense because the soul is not cared about at all.
Such purposes never could have entered into the minds of any to whom
nature had given souls capable of the higher degrees of happiness.
Mary Wollstonecraft, too, had misgivings about the depravity of

the appetite which brings the sexes together and exhorted men and
women to seek something higher in marriage:
Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, be-

cause it is founded on principle, and cemented by time. The very reverse
may be said of love. In a great degree, love and friendship cannot subsist
in the same bosom; even when inspired by different objects they weaken
or destroy each other, and for the same object can only be felt in succes-
sion. The vain fears and fond jealousies, the winds which fan the flame
of love ... are both incompatible with the tender confidence and sincere
respect of friendship.
Theres a large question lurking in Mill and Taylors (and Wollstone-

crafts) portraits of the higher friendship between men and women: Can
the higher and lower flourish equally in an intimate relationship? Is
there a strain, a tradeoff, a slight disconnect perhaps, between lust and
respect, between spontaneity, intensity, even frenzy, on the one hand,
and delicacy, tact, responsiveness on the other? Is the male libido (and
increasingly female, according to reports from the hookup culture, of
which I cannot be said to be) incorrigibly objectifying?
Sexist reprobates like Henry Miller and Norman Mailer arent the
only ones to have implied as much. Some feminist theorists harbor the
same suspicion. Even while disagreeing with it, the strongly sex-posi-
tive Ellen Willis acknowledged the plausibility of the Freudian/conser-
vative view that the sexual drive itself ... is inherently anti-social, sep-
arate from love, and connected with aggressive, destructive impulses.
In her influential essay Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State:
Toward Feminist Jurisprudence, Williss sometime antagonist Cath-
arine MacKinnon came very close to defining heterosexuality as vio-
lence. Sexuality is a social sphere of male power of which forced sex
is paradigmatic. Sex and violence may be conceptually distinct, but
the problem remains what it has always been: telling the difference.
... For women it is difficult to distinguish them under conditions of
male dominance.
In another essay MacKinnon argued that the male sexual role
... centers on aggressive intrusion on those with less power. Such acts of

dominance are experienced [by men] as ... sex itself. It is hard to decide
whether Harriet Taylor was more fully reincarnated as Ellen Willis or
as Catherine MacKinnonclearly her impassioned spirit shines out in
both. But it does seem that she and Mill believedor fearedthat to
express their affection physically might endanger their higher degree
of happiness.
Men Overboard
In a tragedy, according to my dictionary, a noble protagonist is brought
to ruin as a consequence of an extreme quality that is both his [sic]
greatness and his downfall. If we take the withering away or perma-
nent sublimating of sexual passion as a loss (as sex-positive feminists
certainly would), and the heroic rationality and restraint demanded
(according to Mill, Taylor, and Wollstonecraft) by the higher friend-
ship as one possible cause of it, would that qualify as a tragedy?
You can ignore that question, actually. Its very likely moot. Tech-
nology doesnt tolerate tragedy very well, and it certainly has no use
for heroism. Involuntary pregnancy and differences in upper body
strength once seemed like essential features of human life and insu-
perable obstacles to sexual equality. The Pill nearly vanquished the
former; automated production, the information revolution, and Title
IX the latter. Adjusting to the results is apparently so difficult that
what journalist Hanna Rosin calls, in a bestselling book, the end of
men now seems to be on the horizon. Fortunately, capitalism is inex-
haustibly innovative. Without popular, democratic control of tech-
nology, advances in genetics and cybernetics will probably abolish sex.
Both technologies, as scientists like Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky,
and Lee Silver have assured us, are well on their way toward radical
innovations in the design of a new apex species for Earth. Does any-
one imagine it will incorporate an archaic, hopelessly flawed design
feature like sex?t

Song
6 Charif Shanahan
I wait each night for a self.

I saythe mist, I saythe strange
tumble of leaves,I saya motor
in the distance, but I mean
a selfanda self anda self.
A small cold wind
coils and uncoils in the corner
of every room. A vagrant.
In the dream
I gather my life in bundles
and stand at the edge of a field
of snow. It is a field I know
but have never seen. It is
nowhere and always new:
What about the lives
I might have lived?
As who?And who
will be accountable
for this regret I see
no way to avoid? A core,
or a husk, I needto learn
not how to speak, but from where.
Do you understand? I say
name,but I meana conduit
from me to me, I meana net,
I meanan awning of stars.

Story
Dazzle Speaks
with the Dead
6 Scott Br adfield
D azzle was neither a mystical nor a metaphysical sort of dog. He

didnt believe in karma, redemption, the transcendental ego, or the
immanence of Platonic forms. For Dazzle, the world was a mean-
ingless and immutable messand the byproduct of entirely material
insufficiencies. Not enough bones to go around, say. Or people with
too many weapons living next door to people without any. So it came
as something of a surprise when Dazzle developed, late in life, a gift
for speaking with the dead. He had never sought out such a gift, but
once it came his way, he lived with it the best that he could.
I want to tell her that Im sorry I didnt clean the bowl more
often, or show her enough attention, especially when I was working,
Mr. Lapidus confessed to Dazzle in the sandalwood-scented Com-
fort-Room of Madame Velmas Spiritual Contact Center, the lon-
gest-functioning spiritual arts shop on the central coast. I meant to
clean it more often, but I never did. And I wish Id been more affec-
tionate. I dont know how affectionate I couldve been with a goldfish,
but I shouldve at least made more of an effort. Im just not the sort
of person who develops healthy emotional connections with other
creatures, probably because I didnt know my father when I was little.
Other little boys had fathers to play with but I never did.
Dazzle was accustomed to the weeping, the frantic hand-wring-
ing, and the physical convulsions that manifested human remorse.
But if he lived to be a thousand, he would never grow accustomed to
the preposterous get-up that Madame Velma insisted he wear each
morning while serving customers: the multicolored scarves layering
his forehead like the turban of some furry Sikh, or the silver-painted
bracelets chiming loosely from his neck and ankles, making him feel
like a cheap whore at a carnival.
Sitting on a rickety wooden stool behind an even ricketier card ta-
ble, Dazzle took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and placed his callused
paws against the sides of his gloaming, Taiwanese-manufactured
crystal ball.
Shhhh, Dazzle breathed softly. Somebodys trying to speak.
Mr. Lapidus, wringing his large pale sweaty hands, hunched closer.

M I C H A E L O LI VO
Yes, Im listening, Dazzle whispered. Speak louder, please.

Your names Fishface and youre lonely. Your names Fishface and
youre trying to find a path into the next world.
Mr. Lapidus blew his nose into a moppy clump of Kleenex, his
eyes round and wide.
Have you found my beloved Fishface? he asked. How did you
know her name? Whats she trying to say?
Dazzle cautioned Mr. Lapidus with his half-lidded eyes.
Life was hard, Dazzle confirmed. The spectral presence ap-
peared in Dazzles ambient perception like a blip on a sonar screen, a
spiny blur of incoherency and loss. It was cold and round and came
up hard from every direction. It yielded nothing but the minimal
reflections of yourself.
Mr. Lapidus stopped crying and sat up straight. He could feel the

Your names presence too. Or maybe he could just feel Dazzle feeling it.
And now all youre looking for is peace, Dazzle continued, try-
Fishface and
ing not to look directly at Mr. Lapidus. You arent interested in what
youre lonely. this lonely man wants from you. You just want to get as far away from
his big, emotionally obsessed moon-face as you can get.
Your names
Fishface and Since appointing Dazzle her Apprentice-Medium-in-Training,

Madame Velma had departed to Club Med with a Dominican leaf-
youre trying to
blower named Hymie Sanchez. But not before signing over the DBAs
find a path into to her financial manager, and opening an online account at the down-
town Albertsons, where Dazzle could purchase home-delivered dog
the next world.
food, fresh fruit and vegetables, and an occasional mixed-case of Ctes
9 du Rhne or Beaujolais nouveauwhich proved especially useful in
helping Dazzle unwind after a long day communing with the cosmos.
They dont care one whit about their recently departed, Ma-
dame Velma assured him during their weekly phone conference,
her voice suffused with the immanent echoey rush of waves on what
Dazzle envisioned as a white, shell-less beach framed by blue sky and
bluer water. They just cant stand being disobeyed. People devel-
op an unnatural attachment to pets, mainly on account of pets got
no say in the matter. Go there, sit here, eat this, sleep on the floor,
get in the cage, stop growlingpeople get what they want from the
human-beast dynamic, and thats extremely satisfying to the sorts of
fragile egos that need pets. But when a pet dies, it issues the only inde-
pendent statement it ever makes, as in: Good riddance, pal! Take your
catnip toys and doggy treats and shove em straight up your you-know-
what! Its like primal disobedience at the cellular level. For pet-lovers,
it sends their self-images into a state of shock. Suddenly, their pets
have become as indifferent to their happiness as everybody else.
Since developing an evening regimen of lapping moderately
priced wine from a plastic dog bowl, Dazzle had grown about as mel-
low as he was likely to get.
Im cool on the whole over-the-top emotional crisis deal, he
said, kicking back on Madame Velmas corrugated blue sofa amongst
the burbling lava lamps and steadily glimmering Hummels. Im even
cool with the neediness, the endless litany of personal regret, and the
desperate post-midnight pleading for emotional guidance when, jeez,
you know me, Velma. I dont care what happens to human beingsI
really dont. But the part that drives me most crazy is that here I sit,
day after day, listening to one homo-sap after another begging me to
contact their departed loved ones, and then, when I do make contact?
Theyre not interested in what their loved ones are trying to say. They

just carry on whining about what theyre feeling, and their pain, as if
the entire spiritual universe is all about them.
Unlike Dazzle, who tended to worry too hard about things,
Madame Velma was more the carpe-diem type personality. Which
was probably why her voice faded away into the distant rush of waves
whenever Dazzles voice grew most distraught.
Te amo, mamacita, a swarthy-sounding Latin voice whispered in
the staticky background, as rhythmic and self-sustaining as the tides
of St. Tropez. Te amo all the time.
But if Dazzle waited long enough, Velma either hung up the
phone, or reemerged from what sounded like a long kiss.
Youve got a gift, Daz, Madame Velma would conclude, wheth-
er you like it or not. Me, I was a total charlatan, with all those spooky
hidden tape machines and wobbly floorboards hooked to remote con-
trols and so forth. But I know a good soul when I meet one, and one of
those good souls happens to be yours. So do what your gift tells you,
honey, and always remember the most important part of spiritual-arts
services: we take cash, money orders, and American Express, but
never Visa. Those Visa pricks keep hitting us with surcharges, and
if theres one thing that pisses off Madame Velma, its lining pockets
that arent hers.
Sometimes the waiting room at Madame Velmas grew so crowded

with tearful comfort-seekers clutching hand-worn animal toys and
framed photographs that Dazzle resorted to a crude fire-hydrant-red
Take-a-Number dispenser at the front door.
Okay, Number Seven-Six-Six, lets cut to the chase. Your cat got
crushed by a semi, and hes been searching purgatory for months but
cant find his catnip bell anywhere. My advice, as per usual, is burn it.
Help Sheba understand theres nothing worth coming back for, and
shell stop waking you in the night with her infernal mewling, and
knocking over the rubbish bins. Oh, and by the way, she does some-
times miss you a tiny bit. She recalls you as the Bringer of Meat, and
the Warmth That Lingers in Cushions, which is pretty good individ-
uation for a cat. Those characters usually never think about anybody
but themselves. Next!
Rightie-oh, so were up to Seven-Six-Seven, and I cant help you
if you dont listen, so listen good. Polly didnt want a crackershe
just wanted you to stop clipping her wings long enough so she could
fly out that window as far as she could get. She didnt like your smell,
she didnt like your taste in music, and she definitely didnt like your
girlfriend, who, by the way, bludgeoned poor Polly to death with a

Story
meat tenderizer and carefully positioned the corpse in front of that

carefully blood-smeared window so youd think what she wanted you
to think. My advice is to dump the broad, let Polly carry on her quest
for non-being, and get on with your life while you still got one. Next!
Which brings us to Number Seven-Six-Eightjeez, what time
is it, anyway? Youve got exactly two minutes and here goes. You had
a hamster and it died, big fucking wow. Thats what hamsters do,
pal; get used to it. Believe me, Kiddo appreciated the little world you
built for her with mazes and skytowers and tubal corridors and so
forth. But now shes roaming the stratosphere with all the other dead
hamsters, and its time to let go. So please, fill that plastic bottle up
for me with this budget-priced Cuernavaca, and hook the pipette to
my collartheres a little clasp right there next to my license. Oh, and
slip the Nachos into my shoulder flap, thats the ticket. Im off to the
beach where Im planning to get really, really drunk. And please turn
off all the lights when you leave. If Madame Velma ever catches sight
of our latest utility bill, shell kick my sorry ass into the Great Beyond
her damn self.
What Dazzle most appreciated about the beach was the way it
scrubbed the air clean of implicationsconcepts like identity,
meaning, specificity, and permanence didnt mean much out here,
where everything that ever was was continually being eroded into
everything it wasnt and back again: driftwood and condoms, broken
sea shells and pop-bottles, seagull poop and cigarette butts, jetsam
and flotsam, forth and so forth. The sensory freedom was exhilarat-
ing, Dazzle thought, gazing up at the heavy moon and fractal stars.
Every smell and sound and texture seemed to be wrapped up in
everything else, like some Dionysian schiz-bath of pure undifferen-
tiated sensation.
Its the only place where I can hear myself think anymore,
Dazzle confessed to his friend Harry Canfield, a publicly disgraced
family-investment adviser who had recently begun sleeping under
the pier in a moldy goose-down mummy-bag, and escape all that
endless wittering of dead pets yearning for the crappy plastic doo-
dads they left behind. Like rubber chew toys. Or hamster wheels. Or,
jeez, their filthy litter boxesif that isnt a metaphor for enslavement
by material crap, I dont know what is. It makes me wonder, Harry.
Whats it gonna be for me when Im dead and almost gonedimin-
ishing in the stellar radiance like some dissipating radio signal from
Whats My Line? What will I be endlessly desiring back on this in-
creasingly perilous and desperate ball of dirt and stupidity and grief?

My comfy sofa cushions? My sweet spot in the Big Sur cave next to
Edwina? Or will it be my emerging fondness for alcohol, which is the
only thing that makes me relax anymore? Is that all Ive got to look
forward to when I cash in my chips? Because if thats what living is
all about, Harry, then maybe we should just call an end to the whole
shabby shebang right now.
Harry was crouched over a thinly blazing can of Sterno with
a pair of hotdogs skewered on a twisted coat hanger. It was one of
Harrys endearing qualities, Dazzle had come to realize: his ability to
appreciate lifes simplest pleasures.
As I get older, you know what I think about, more and more?
That old Toyota Corolla my parents gave me when I graduated
college, Harry reflected softly. Palomino white with white sidewall
tires; it never broke down once in five years. And an eight-track tape
deck back before eight-track tape decks were funny. Sometimes, I
miss that damn car more than my kids, my house, my wife, or even
and I hope you pardon the expressionor even my stupid dog. It was
certainly more dependable than the rest of them put together.
Dazzle usually woke to the pre-dawn clamor of beeping garbage

trucks along the boardwalk, and the exhortations of Mad Alice walk-
ing her shaggy, muttish dogs along the thinning bright shoreline in
her baggy gray Mexican wool sweater and leather sandals.
Six ayem, boys! Mad Alice shouted, striking each of them three
metronomic beats on the butt with her varnished redwood walking
stick. The shore patrol hits these sands at six thirty, and you need to
kick sand over this campfire, and move your legs long enough so you
dont qualify as loiterers!
With dawn came more than recollection, Dazzle thought. As
the pinkish morning glow diminished into the flat blue horizon, the
voices of departed entities regained focus and resolution in little bursts
of static, like Russian or Chinese broadcasts hitting the dashboard
radio in the post-midnight resonance. I want my squeaky ball under
the sofa in the den, whispered an expired Pomeranian named Dodo,
somewhere off Grover Beach. Or: Those breadcrumbs look deli-
ciousemanating from a forlorn spectral pigeon fluttering eternally
over the 101 overpass in Goleta. Departed spirits popped and sparked
in the air around Dazzles brain like tiny fireworks or little blizzards of
sentience. Give me bring me get me need need need. I want want want
must must must must. Help me help me find me help me.
After I lost Frankie Avalon the Third, Alice confessed later,
sharing charity donuts and coffee on the greatest beachfront bench

in the history of civilization (or so Dazzle figured), I thought my
life was over. I went to bed thinking about that stupid dog and
woke up thinking about him. For months, Id jump out of bed and
head straight to the kitchen and start fixing his breakfast before
I stopped and thought, Hey. What the hell am I doing? Frankies
dead as a doornail. He got a tumor on his liver and the chemother-
apy never took. He was dead for months and wouldnt go away, and
something in me wouldnt let him go away, it was like we were bound
together in some diminishing spiral of being and nothingness all at
once. The carpets were still brown with his damn dog hairs. There
were still these round ovular stains where hed throw up on the
corduroy sofa after eating crap off the beach. And then the voice of
that dog would start buzzing around in my head. Go for walkies!
he kept saying. Give me treat and go for walkies! It was like I could
hear his voice bouncing around the house in the places he used be.
Near the front door, in the kitchen near his doggy bowl, out back
near the gate. Go for walkies! Beach beach beach! Run on sand. Eat
crap off beach! It was like that crazy dog had a one-track mind and
that one-track mind was circulating endlessly through my house like
those automatic floor sweepers, you know the kind I mean? They
look like little silver robo-dogs but they do the vacuuming. The kind
that were invented by the Japanese.
After breakfast, Alice drove Dazzle back to SLO in her 86 Ford

Ranger S. Otherwise he might miss his first appointments at Madame
Velmas, which started heating up around nine or nine-thirty.
You cant spend your life living for the dead, hon, she told Daz-
zle one morning. Her face was as wrinkled as the underlay of a card-
board box. You may not have noticed, but you arent looking so good
since you started drinking and working weekends. Maybe its time to
hang up your crystal ball and get your butt back to planet Earth.
At Madame Velmas, they were already in the waiting room, hold-
ing up their yellow number-tags like overeager suitors at a flash-date.
There was Mr. Lapidus, of course, with his mineral-streaked gold-
fish bowl, and Mrs. Judson, with her rhinestone-studded dog collar.
Or the Burley Brothers, carrying the rusty cage of their departed
ferret, Sparky, between them like pallbearers at a childrens zoo; or
Miss Muoz, weeping into the faded flannel scarf of her dead burro,
Maximilian Buonaparte IV. Some days, entering Madame Velmas
anteroom felt like entering a flea-market in hell. Everybody had some-
thing to sell but nobody in their right mind wanted to buy it.
Mr. Dazzle? Are you in contact with Fishface? Youve got that

faraway look in your eyeslike youre looking at me and youre not Polly didnt want
looking at me. Its the sort of look Ive been getting all my life. Its me,
a crackershe
Mr. Lapidus. Look, Im first in line, and I been waiting since four a.m.
I just remembered something important to tell Fishface. Its about just wanted you
the noise from my television, all those gunshots and torture sounds
to stop clipping
from CSI and so forth. I cant stop thinking about how terrified she
must have been with all that high-volume violence echoing around her wings.
her fishbowl. It kept me up all last night. So much to be scared about
and so little time to understandisnt that what lifes really about, 9
Mr. Dazzle? And then, just when we start to understand a tiny bit of
it? Were suddenly dragged off to some other meaningless form of
nonexistence altogether.
Then, one night when he least expected it, Dazzle was visited by a
spirit from his own half-forgotten lifeand not, as usual, a spirit from
the half-forgotten life of others.
Dazzle, honey? Can you hear me? Its Mom. Its very dark out
here, and Im having trouble finding you and your sisters. I can smell
you, but I cant see you. Is that our garbage bin over there? Its even
darker and scarier-looking than usual. Can you help me find my way?
This is a lot more complicated than it should be. After all, Im just
looking for our silly old garbage bin. Im just looking for my babies.
Now Dazzle was not a sentimental sort of creature; in fact, he
considered sentiment to be one of those bourgeois illusions that
bound animals up in fantasies of individual plenitude and fulfill-
ment. But when he heard that unmistakable voiceand smelled that
unmistakable smella surge of emotion rose from his chest as swift
and disorienting as one of the legendary riptides off the Pacific Coast.
When first it takes your ankle, it feels almost flirtatious. But then,
before you know it, it wraps you up in stronger arms than yours, and
drags you into dimensions you cant control.
Mom? Dazzle said. It was one of those words he never expected
to use again and somehow, in the simple act of using of it, he felt some-
thing round and pliable burst inside him, and wetness spilling out
of his face and heart like an overflowing of the world he had always
secretly and profoundly loved. Mom? The tears were like a physical
convulsion; they shook Dazzle to his coreand then shook him again.
Like many precocious children, Dazzle suffered from conflict-
ed memories of his mother, who had raised him the best she could
behind a Ralphs Market in Encino, and then went off on a wander,
got hit by a bus, and unknowingly relegated him to the dubious
patronage of the Los Angeles SPCA. In his earliest, most intensely

Story
remembered days and nights of existence, she had been pure surfeit
and totality, dispensing milk and love and indulgence and marveling
at every aspect and expression of him. Youre so handsome, she
told him. Youre so smart. Youre so much better than your father.
Youre my baby, youre my lover, youre my honey, youre my all all all.
Ill hold you close forever, baby. Your mommy loves you more than
anything.
And then you went away, Dazzle thought, the tears pouring out of
him like water from a faucet. You loved me and promised me and then
you went away.
It was so selfish to hate her for her mortality, he thought. But it
was the only thing he could hate her for. And it was the only way he
could get her back.
It took him several minutes to catch his breath. He sat up on the
living room couch. He gazed into the empty air.
I dont know how to tell you this, Mom. But youre dead. You
dont exist. Youre like this reflection that keeps reflecting after the
mirror is broken, or this echo of a voice that has gone away but keeps
echoing. You dont have any more substance than that, Mom. And
youll never have any more substance than that ever again.
There were other voices out there, Dazzle realized. Ducks, wal-
ruses, ostriches, ocelots, kangaroos, pandaseven human beings. A
discordant continually accumulating cacophony of intentions and de-
sires and memories and misfortunes. It was like stumbling into a huge
subterranean vault filled with the newspapers of a dead civilization,
bristling with an infinity of DOW forecasts, midnight TV schedules,
astrological horoscopes, crossword puzzles and op-ed features about
elections, weather-paradigms, international treaties, and scientific
discoveries that no longer mattered because everybody who once
pretended to care about them was dead. And in the midst of all that
black-and-white hieroglyphic unreadability, a small spark of color
flashed. It called out to Dazzles peculiar and unwanted extra-sensi-
tivity. It had a name.
You have seven sisters, Mom said, but I love you best. Youre
my big boy. We keep each other warm behind the garbage bin, Dazzle.
Please dont send me away.
It didnt seem fair, Dazzle thought. All this unwanted emotion
spilling out of him, tracking his gray chest hair with tiny sand-speck-
led rivulets. How could he send her away?
Because he couldnt send her away until he knew how much he
wanted her back.
He wanted her back.

And then he could send her away.
Its never easy to tell whos holding onto whom, or why we cant let
go, Dazzle explained a few nights later to his assembled soon-to-be-
former clients at a pre-announced Going Out of Business Spiritualist
Confab on the post-midnight Avila shore. Even when we know
better, we try to hold onto what we cant keep. Thats because the
most horrible realization any self-reflective creature can suffer is that
this whole crazy universe doesnt make sense, even on a good day. It
doesnt make sense that what we love cant last; and that, in the long
run, we cant ourselves last for those we love. What sort of fucking
asshole universe is that? Its a fucking asshole universe, thats what it is.
And Im sick of it.
Gathered together on the darkling beach, Dazzles clients repre-
sented every conceivable shape, size, and ethnicity, brightly adorned
in dashikis and fezzes and Native American headdresses and man-
dala-earrings and peacock-emblazoned Indian saris. And, like most
New Agers of the late baby-boom generation, they seemed mutually
ill-fitted to their exterior manifestations. Its like theyre dressing
to be somebody theyve never met, Dazzle often thought. Someone
infinitely wise with all the answers. Someone who will live forever.
What does that even mean? Mr. Lapidus whined miserably,
clutching his mildewy ceramic castle as if it were the only safety bar
on a vertiginously careening roller coaster. What do you mean the
universe doesnt make sensewhat sort of comfort is that? And of
course we can hold onto the ones we loveyou help us do it every day.
Why are you trying to confuse us just when were starting to find a
little peace in this terrible world where everybodys always dying, even
me?
Mr. Lapiduss big, red, tear-streaked face was like a worm on a
picnic table. Everybody had to look at it, and as soon as they looked at
it, they looked away. Mrs. Beasley with her squeaky rubber dinosaur.
Mrs. Cha with a blue corrugated Kong. Freddy Watson with a mouse-
shaped catnip toy. Louisa Merchant with a heavily scored cuttlebone.
Too often, Dazzle thought, our lives record the passage from one
piece of meaningless crap to another. And theres no end to the things
we cant throw away.
What Im trying to tell you, Mr. Lapidusand all you fine,
bereaved peopleis that Ive been going about this whole sixth-sense
nonsense the wrong way. I tried to give everybody what they asked
forcontact with the lost friends who left them. I tried to help you
adjust to their departures with this one-step-at-a-time approach. But,

as Im finally learning, the one-step-at-a-time approach never works.
If you want to actually change your life, its gotta be cold turkey.
As a pup, Dazzle had been briefly enamored of sixties rock music,

especially the Woodstock-types such as Carlos Santana and Stephen
Stills. It had all seemed so simple back then: just take off your clothes,
roll around in the dewy grass, smoke a little doobage, and love who-
ever you were with. For decades, public media had dismissed those
brief muddy years as a sort of bizarre, Manson-like orgy of crime,
freaky sunglasses, and a pathological disregard for the achievements
of supply-side economics. But Dazzle remembered them fondly as a
fragrant period of benign inattention. Love the one youre with, Daz-
zle thought now. Ignore all the bullshit and politicians and stupidity
and guns and bombs. If you cant be with the one you love, babythen
just love the one youre with.
Weve all got our crosses to bear, Dazzle told his spiritually dis-
traught customers. Weve all got things we want back, and voices we
dont want to lose, and a faith in ourselves that well never have again.
Which is why I want us to do this together. Its time for everybody
to let go, especially me. Its time to take what was never ours and set
it free. So I want you all to grab hold of whatever it is you want back,
and feel what it feels like one more time. That paltry little object, or
that memory, or that still-resonant voice in your head. Then I want
you to turn to whoevers standing next to you and do the only thing
left to do for any sane, rational individual in a totally insane, irrational
universe.
Dazzle paused for healthy dramatic effect.
Swap, he said.
It was so obvious, he thought. I dont know why I didnt think of
it before.
So what happened then? Mad Alice asked, turning over three

pasty-colored tofu-patties on a tinily blazing Walgreens brand Hiba-
chi with a long metal fork. She had recently done something dread-
locky to her whitish-gray hair that made her look like an inverted
mop.
Lying on his favorite green khaki blanket, Dazzle gazed at the
glowing coals with a pleasant sense of inanition. When things get hot
enough, all things turn into something else, he thought. Even some-
thing as unpalatable-looking as a tofu-patty.
What else could they do? Dazzle shrugged. Its hard to ignore
somebody who speaks with this voice of authority Ive developed.

Its a voice I plan to jettison the first chance I get.
Harry poured three paper cups full of fruit smoothies from a
large glass pitchera concoction of icily whipped bananas, mangoes,
granola, kiwi, and lemon zest that Mad Alice had dubbed the Banana
Wow. Ever since releasing his clients three days ago, Dazzle had
submitted to Alices most stringent self-purging programnothing
but fresh fruit, vegetables, and, every night before bed, a large glass of
pure unfiltered lemon juice.
So, Dazzle continued, Mrs. Chen dutifully swapped her cos-
tume-jewelry encrusted kitty collar for Mr. Jorgensens hamster-car.
And Phil Hatland swapped his budgie bell for Harriets well-chewed
sweat-sock. And rubber balls got swapped with squeaky toys and
doggy treats got swapped with fish-flakes and one sense of loss got
swapped with another sense of loss and one memory got swapped with
another memory and, before you knew it, everybody was talking and
chattering about these terribly insignificant items and dead beasts
and crying and hugging and feeling some reasonable measure of
catharsis in the arms of one another. It was like this really embarrass-
ing group hug and, to be totally frank, I indulged in some of the good
vibes myself. I mean, there we were, sharing in this really awkward
sense of togetherness and well-being, and suddenly I look up from
this great scratch Im receiving between the ears from a hand I cant
recognize to find the one lonely soldier on the shore, looking like a
wallflower at the orgy. Poor, rubbery-red-faced Mr. Lapidus, clutch-
ing that stupid ceramic castle and looking like hes about to burst.
And nobody wants to go near him, right, since hes a walking exempli-
fication of everything weve left behindthat sense of solitary loss we
feel cringing alone in the dark. And I dont know what happened, but
I just stared Mr. Solitary Loss straight in the eye, walked up to him,
and took that silly ceramic castle from his white-clenched fingers
with my teeth. He wanted to let go; he wanted to give it to me; but his
fingers took some convincing. And when I finally flung that stupid ce-
ramic castle into the campfire where it belonged, neither of us turned
to watch it burn. Instead, I stood as tall as I could on these old gray
hind legs and gave Mr. Lapidus the last thing Mom gave me before
we parted material company forever. And Mr. Lapidus thanked me in
just the way I expected.
Ewwwww, he said, wiping his mouth as if he had just tasted
mandrill-poop. I got licked on the mouth by a dog!
Frankly, it was a lot less thanks than I deserved. And at the same
time, considering the fundamental ungenerosity of human beings? It
was all the thanks I could ever expect.t

T h e R e a l A m e r ic a
Black Elk, Woke

On the remaking
of a Native American prophet
3 Ann Neumann
P erhaps the prophets and systematic theologians of some future reli-

gion will adopt the phrase American visionary as a curse, in the same
general semantic family as, say, the worlds policeman or presump-
tive GOP nominee. Its certainly true that our history affords precious
few honorable examples of visionaries in the American grain, while
plenty of ambitious prophetic visions in the New Worldfrom Joseph
Smiths Mormon revelation to Mary Baker Eddys Christian Science
healingshave run aground on some combination of exhausted cha-
risma, institutionalized compromise, and a vast, undermining array of
unintended consequences.
Its bracing, though, to encounter the idea rendered anew in Joe
Jacksons new book, Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary (Far-
rar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). Jackson, a former investigative reporter
and the author of six historical nonfiction books, chronicles the life
of the Lakota medicine man made famous by the controversial Black
Elk Speaks. Published in 1932, that book grew out of a long series of
interviews between the titular Native American prophet and John
Gneisenau Neihardt, an Anglo Great Plains poet of some Depres-
sion-era renown. Though initially a publishing bust, it was rereleased
in the 1960s and is now a standard text in the canon of American dissi-
dent spirituality.
The sixties appeal of Black Elk Speaks isnt hard to grasp: it offered to
a restless postwar generation of American spiritual seekers a version of
Native American spirituality that resonated with the romantic image
of the vanquished native peoples of the North American continent. At
the same time, it connected with an awakening urge among the parti-
sans of the ascendant counterculture to discover and get in touch with a
more authentic, deeply grounded version of belief and New World spiri-
tual autonomy than anything on offer in the regnant culture.
For this generation of seekers, Black Elk Speaks was the voice of tradi-
tional Lakota life before the forces of frontier imperialism and modern-
ization ravaged the Native American world. Black Elk lived from the last

J OS E P H C I A R D I E L LO

The fuzz of New Ageism has days of what the Sioux called the old life in the
1880s, when his tribe still roamed the unfenced
long attached itself to Black Elk
West, to 1950, long after the last of the Indians
and American Indians. were containeddiseased, alcoholic, and desti-
tuteon scraps of reservation land.
9 The history of Americas Indians makes
for tricky storytelling, and the task is vastly
complicated in this case by relaying the story through the life of a
religious figureone who had himself done a fair bit of self-mytholo-
gizing and religious self-editing when he sat down to speak with Nei-
hardt. Even apart from the readerly challenges presented by its sub-
ject-cum-narrator, Black Elk Speaks now makes for anything but simple
or solace-filled spiritual reading. Black Elks legacy has been stubbornly
contested, and the contest remains unresolved. To those who saw his
countercultural image as a permanent rebuke to American settlers
domination, extermination, and marginalization of Native American
peoples, Black Elk was a tragic prophet who channeled ecstatic visions
of Indian pride and independence. Meanwhile, his fervent conversion
to Catholicismwhich took place in 1904, forty-six years before his
deathseemed to Catholic missionaries and their adherents an inspir-
ing proof that ancient and orthodox Christian principles could finally
win over the hearts of the savages.
Jackson offers a third-way interpretation: the holy man recon-
structed in this nuanced, revisionist story was an avatar of neither faith
system but instead one of American historys great voices for social
justice. Unfortunately, the claims for peace, the environment, and the
rights of natives that many (including Jackson) ascribe to Black Elk
Speaks are too often projections of the readers own historical frame
of reference or preferred cosmology. You may want to believe with
Jackson that Black Elk was a tragic prophet, but the substance of the
prophets message keeps slipping away.
Black Elk never outlined the Lakotas rights and needs. He was no
leader of uprisings, no maker of demands or negotiations. An undeniable
creativity informs his persistent performance of Indian behavior and
ritualacross continents, venues, cultures, and eras. But theres no spe-
cific, actionable call for change contained within the Kahlil Gibranlike
pages of Black Elk Speaks. What, then, accounts for Black Elks renown?
Jackson is most successful at explaining why Black Elk matters to us
today when he recounts Black Elks early years, before his life on the res-
ervation and conversion to Catholicism. But sadly, as was the case with
Neihardts initial foray into the medicine mans world, were forced to
conclude that much of the rest of Black Elks life is not what we came for.

Settle or Starve
Time has shamefully romanticized and dulled the viscera of the Amer-
ican Indian Wars. Jacksons account of this history is an integral part
of the Black Elk saga. What is an Indian? commissioner of Indian
Affairs Thomas Morgan asked in the late nineteenth century. His
answer, according to Jackson: Blood and land. Notwithstanding all
the lofty talk about the White Christian continental imperative, bod-
ies and territory were at stake and in jeopardy. In our civic religious
theology, the dark, savage ones were pitted against Americas destiny.
A violent, righteous quest for total dominion began the moment that
ambitious, liberty-obsessed whites stepped on the shore of the New
World.
The Sioux originally lived as far east as the Mississippi River and
the Ohio Valley but were pushed westward in the mid- to late 1600s
until some Lakota Sioux reached what became the Dakota Terri-
tory. The Lakota are one of three Sioux tribes; Black Elk is from the
Oglala Sioux, a sub-tribe of the Lakota. They were largely independent
until the mid-1800s, occupying rich territory that American settlers
regarded as their own divinely ordained birthright.
In the summer of 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong
Custer left Fort Lincoln, near Bismarck, North Dakota, and headed
south into the Black HillsIndian territory. His cavalcade was one of
the largest ever amassed in the West: 1,200 men, most of them soldiers,
with dozens of scouts, engineers, photographers, and reporters. Custer,
a West Point graduate (famously, he graduated last in his 1861 class),
had made a name for himself in the Union Army during the Civil War.
He was a notorious dandy, known to the Lakota as Pahuska, or
Long Hair. According to the press, he kept his blond hair swing[ing]
below his shoulders [and] perfumed with cinnamon oil. He was also
media-savvy. He had recently completed his autobiography, My Life
on the Plains, styling himself a great frontiersman. Custers expedition
had been sent to scout a location for a new fort that would protect the
planned Northern Pacific railroad line. The railroad would be a conti-
nent-straddling triumph for the white American republic that General
William Tecumseh Sherman, Custers superior, hoped would bring
the Indian problem to a final solution.
The expedition violated a six-year-old treaty with the Sioux that
gave the Black Hillsa holy area they called Paha Sapato the tribe
in perpetuity. Although the treaty allowed government agents and
employees to pass through, Custers group looked very much like an
army in search of a fight. Prospectors in the bed of French Creek had
found gold. When Custer scaled Harney Peak, a sacred Lakota site, his

geologists found the yellow metal that made white men crazy, as
Black Elk said. Within weeks, word spread far and wide. White men
with pans and dreams of instant riches came running to the Black Hills.
The Sioux, led by Sitting Bull, now knew that living alongside
white men, even on the outer reaches of the vast western plains, was
no longer possible. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which
we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever,
Sitting Bull told his tribesmen. Now they threaten to take that from
us also. My brothers, shall we submit? Or shall we say to them: First
kill me before you can take possession of my fatherland!?
Acrimonious negotiations ensued. The government offered to
buy the Black Hills for $6 million. Every chief on the Plains protested.
The federal position was essentially: settle or starve. The chiefs left
the negotiations, vowing defiance. They were deemed hostiles, to be
detained or punished. A lawsuit contesting the treaty violation contin-
ues to this day.
The tribes spent the last months of 1875 on the grassy plains
where present-day Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska intersect.
It was a cold winter. In the spring, Sitting Bull called together all the
Sioux tribes for the annual summer Sun Dance, a central ceremony of
Lakota spiritual life, and afterward warriors and clans from all across
the northwest headed toward Little Big Horn, an area the Sioux called
Greasy Grass.
Three regiments of troops, one led by Custer, caught up with them
on June 25, 1876, just nine days ahead of the United States centennial.
Around fifteen hundred Sioux warriors, led by Crazy Horse, were
waiting. It was a gruesome slaughter, with the soldiers frightened and
outmaneuvered. Historians estimate that between twenty-six to one
hundred Indians were killed, while the most liberal accounting put
the ratio at one dead Indian for every fifteen whites, Jackson notes.
Among the dead was Custer, shot in the chest and the head; also killed
were his two brothers, his nephew, and a brother-in-law. Many of the
soldiers bodies were scalped or mutilated. According to one theory,
Custer wasnt scalped because, under his jaunty hat and above his lush
cinnamon-scented sidelocks, he was prematurely bald.
When news of the battle arrived, the rest of the country was out-
raged. White Americans praised Custer as a gallant hero; he was cele-
brated in songs and even a poem by Walt Whitman. The federal gov-
ernment soon discarded any remaining shred of diplomatic restraint
in negotiations with the countrys Native American population. For
more than a decade, Indians tried to hold onto their victory and prior
nomadic life, but disease, encroaching settlers, prospectors, and sol-

diers cut them downalong with the specter of starvation from the
declining buffalo population.
It wasnt until 1890, at the Wounded Knee Massacre, on a creek
in Pine Ridge reservation, South Dakota, that the nation and Custers
7th Cavalry got their real revenge. At least 250 Lakota men, women,
and children were slaughtered by soldiers on December 29, their bod-
ies strewn over an area of nearly two miles. Babies cried in the arms
of their dead mothers; little girls and boys lay twisted in the coarse,
frozen grass. Photographers roamed the area, capturing the carnage
for posterity.
Assimilation had long been the policy of the U.S. government and
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, founded in 1824. The idea was to instruct
the Native American population of the country in the canons of prop-
erty ownership, farming, and Christianitythe pillars of the Ameri-
can dream. This patient course of civic pedagogy, the administrators
of the nineteenth-century Indian removal believed, would turn the
lazy savages into productive citizens. As the end of the Indian wars
approached in the wake of Wounded Knee, the Indians had only two
choices, little different from the ones they faced at the opening of
negotiations over the Badlands territory: assimilate or die.
The Mother Church, Spurned

Black Elk was twelve when he helped his cousin, Crazy Horse, cut
down Custers troops at Little Bighorn, taking his first scalp. He was
twenty-seven when he escaped the massacre at Wounded Knee. Both
events, and the Siouxs eventual fate, were foretold in his visions, Jack-
son writes. After decades of practicing as a Lakota medicine man and
holy man, Black Elk converted to Catholicism in 1904, becoming one of
the Churchs most successful catechistssome have credited him with
winning four hundred souls for Catholicism. Pine Ridge Jesuits praised
him as an Indian heir to the Apostle Paul, rescuing his people from sin
and damnation. He died in 1950 in a simple cabin on the Pine Ridge
Reservation, in what is now the poorest area in the United States.
Black Elk would probably not be known outside his tribe today
if it werent for Black Elk Speaks, which became a lodestar for a pre-
dominantly white American readership hoping to learn more about
traditional Lakota life. It has been translated into at least a dozen
languages and is a regular entry on college history and religion syllabi.
Young Indians, who for generations had been shamed and taught to
despise their history, also embraced the book as an invaluable record of
how pre-reservation Lakota proudly lived and believed.
In Black Elk Speaks, the Lakota prophet recounts the early years

of his life and the visions that came to him before the age of ten when
he was told by the Great Mystery, Wakan Tanka, what he must do to
save his people. These and subsequent visions are filled with natural
imagery: rainbows, animals, and plants are all imbued with spiritual
significance. Black Elk Speaks is a compelling work of literature. But to
identify its specific religious teachings is difficult. Beyond basic ico-
nography and images, there are mainly bromides: It is in the darkness
of their eyes that men get lost, the prophet announces at one point.
A boilerplate warning about the snares of consumerism, attributed
to Black Elk, now peppers the internet: Any man who is attached to
things of this world is one who lives in ignorance and is being consumed
by the snakes of his own passions.
There are some conspicuous blank spaces in Black Elk Speaks where
the title characters own spiritual odyssey should be. Black Elk revis-
its the battles with the U.S. military that took place in the late 1800s,
including the Wounded Knee Massacre, but he barely mentions the
last forty-six years of his life, after his conversion. This is one reason
why the book has proven so controversial: Black Elk portrays himself
as a mystic warrior defending Indian tradition, foreseeing and fore-
telling the future of his people, while also fighting alongside them in
defense of their rights and, when the Sun Dance and medicine men
were outlawed on the reservation, carrying on with both. Because
Black Elk Speaks ends where it does, these acts of indigenous protest
seem to be the end of the story.
It wasnt, however, and the Jesuit fathers on Pine Ridge Reserva-
tion who had converted Black Elk were enraged. To suggest that one
of their most valued catechiststhe man theyd paraded to the world as
an Indian Saint Paulstill practiced the old religion horrified them,
Jackson writes. In a broadside denouncing the book immediately after
publication, Father Placidus Sialm wrote: The story of Black Elk
clearly proves that the old times had more ways of starvationi.e.,
starvation of the spiritthan the latter days.
The other chief criticism of Black Elk Speaks concerns the way it
was written. This is where Jackson begins his study, with Neihardt,
poet and ethnographer, bumping across the South Dakota prairie in
his 1929 Gardner in search of an Indian holy man to interview for an
epic poetry cycle Neihardt was then working on. A man at the Pine
Ridge Agency sent Neihardt out a dirt road to Black Elk, who was
standing outside the cabins doorway. When the medicine man met
Neihardt, he explained that the white poets appearance had been
foreordained. The collaboration would prove life-changing for both
men. All Neihardts other accomplishments, including his thirties

renown as the Shakespeare of the Plains and John Neihardt bumped across the
his appointment as Nebraskas poet laureate
South Dakota prairie in his 1929
in 1921, paled next to his role in propagating
the Black Elk myth. Gardner in search of an Indian
The old Indian welcomed the interviews.
holy man to interview.
Black Elks son, Ben, translated his fathers
words from Lakota to English, Neihardt 9
repeated them for accuracy, and once father
and son consented, they were transcribed in shorthand by Neihardts
daughter, Enid, who later typed up her notes. Throughout May 1931,
the quartet labored, while Lakota elders often listened in to ensure
accuracy. Yet could such a process really capture the meaning and
rhythms of the Lakota language? More important, could any one man
profess to know and embody traditional Indian beliefs? Some Lakota
Indians condemned Black Elk for sharing his peoples holy rituals with
a white man. Neihardt, others claimed, took advantage of Black Elk,
inducing him to trade his holy wisdom for personal financial gain.
The controversy over who owns Black Elks spiritual legacy is
still raging, says Mark Clatterbuck, an associate professor of religion
at Montclair State University. (Clatterbucks Demons, Saints, & Patriots:
Catholic Visions of Native America through The Indian Sentinel (19021962)
is cited in Jacksons book. Clatterbuck is also, as it happens, my broth-
er-in-law.) As far back as the early 1930s, Catholic missionaries among
the Lakota were already asserting that Black Elk had abandoned the old
Indian ways of his youth in exchange for his Catholic faith, Clatter-
buck continues. Of course, that generated lots of pushback, with others
insisting that Black Elks Catholic faith was more of a pragmatic choice
than a profound expression of religious devotionor, at the very least,
that Black Elk practiced both traditions side by side until the end.
Jacksons prodigiously researched narrative excels at parsing these
controversies, concluding that Black Elks faith was a syncretic one,
blending Lakota beliefs and rituals with Catholicism. It skillfully recon-
stitutes Black Elk as a testament to the ways in which ancient cosmolo-
gies can be merged and revitalized to form a new, more resilient brand
of modernized religious tradition. Whats harder to accept is Jacksons
more expansive claim that Black Elk is not merely an authentic voice
from the Native American past but also an enduring truth-teller, his
visions accurate, his prescriptions for a better society prescient and wise.
Balance for Whom?

Trying to give substance to Black Elks visions, Jacksons writing
often wanders into an exoticized, spiritual softness. He acknowl-

edges that the fuzz of New Ageism has long attached itself to Black
Elk and American Indians. By the late 1960s, Black Elk Speaks and
the spiritualism it made famous released a New Age flood upon the
reservations, the likes of which the tribes had rarely seen. But he
fails to muster sufficient critical detachment, finding that his sub-
ject might be the only tragic prophet in American letters. Theres
a tincture of the noble savage in Black Elk, a fetishizing of authen-
ticity. The Lakotaand all Native Americans, for that matterwere
in syncretic cultural contact with outside influences for centuries,
from settlers to trappers to missionaries. The idea that Black Elk was
a lone conduit to traditional ways rests on the dubious assumption
that those ways never changed or shifted before the tribe was pushed
onto the reservation.
Jackson vividly describes Black Elks time with William F. Codys
Buffalo Bills Wild West Show. Cody often picked Lakota perform-
ers for his show straight from the Pine Ridge reservation, hauling them
around the eastern United States and then across Europe. The show
was a primary source of Europes fascination with the American West
and of its particular interest in the plight of the American Indian.
(Cody, of course, sidestepped Europes own complicity in the Indian
genocides of the New World, focusing on the U.S. frontier.) Millions of
Old World devotees of the Wild West shows gulped down this bowd-
lerized version of Indian lore, commodified for Anglo and European
consumption. When it was published, Black Elk Speaks was very much
of a piece with the tradition of the Wild West Show.
Black Elk did not live as a paralyzed victim of Western subjuga-
tion or a despairing old man, but as a vital presence, wrote Clyde Holler
in his 1995 study, Black Elks Religion: The Sun Dance and Lakota Cathol-
icism. Likewise, the Black Elk that Jackson shows us is no defeated old
Indian. Thanks in part to Neihardts narrative skill, the holy man is
both a voice in the wilderness and an avatar of the wilderness itself.
Jackson writes:
With Black Elks story, Neihardt felt he had discovered an alternative

to the American myth that the West could only have been civilized by
means of savage war. The typical account blamed Native Americans
as instigators of a war of extermination; Neihardt rejected the national
narrative, and hoped to show otherwise by exposing the real savages
at Wounded Knee. The beauty and grace one found in life came from
balance, not conflict, and he saw Black Elks quest as a search for greater
understanding in every sphere. Too many secrets had been lost in the
national slaughter. Truth did not reside in a gun.

Neihardt died in 1973the year of the American Indian Move-
ments seventy-one-day siege at Wounded Kneesatisfied that Black
Elk Speaks was being embraced by a new generation. How does one
survive in [the modern] world? Jackson asks. The Machine is over-
whelming and unstoppable, larger than any one woman or man. Black
Elk saw it early, though he never used such dystopian terms. Perhaps
the only true defense is the most intimatepreservation of ones soul.
Seen like that, his life is more than just another tale of Indian versus
white. It becomes instead a parable of modern man.
That is one way to tell the story of Black Elk: the hopeful way.
But theres another: modernism won, capitalism won; the genocide
of American Indians has gone unpunished; and today they live with
the highest poverty, unemployment, suicide, and mortality rates in the
country. The banner success of Black Elk Speaks and the impassioned
testimony of Jacksons Black Elk cant change that.
Black Elks legacy is a witnessa first-hand account of the horrors
that accompanied national expansion and the cruel containment of
the native population. Its also a warning; in celebrating our righteous
prophets, we are often too enchanted by their personalities to address
the pressing needs of their people.t
BRAD HOLLAND

B a f f l o m at h y ( no. 3 2 )
Scott Bradfield (Dazzle Speaks with the Talia Lavin (The Schmaltz in Our Stars, p. 68)
Dead, p. 160) has been channeling the adventures is a fact-checker at The New Yorker. She loves dogs,
of Dazzle the misanthropic dog for almost thirty cats, and men but owns none of the above.
years, which has not endeared him to the human Jackson Lears (Material Issue, p. 48), who
race.His forthcoming book is Dazzle Resplendent. teaches at Rutgers, is the editor of Raritan.He is
Aaron Miguel Cant (Thin Blue Spin, writing a book called The Wild Card:Animal Spirits
p. 26) is a journalist based in New York City and in Anglo-American Economic and Cultural Life.
a contributor to the forthcoming bookWho Do Chris Lehmann (Small Worlds, p. 104) is
You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and editor in chief of The Baffler. His new book is The
Resistance in the United States. Money Cult.
Alexander Clapp (Skopje, City On the Make, PeterManseau(Father Worship, p. 15) is the
p. 8) is a writer based in Sarajevo. author of several books, includingOne Nation
Jessa Crispin (Madam Prescient, p. 96) is the Under Gods: A New American History.
author of The Dead Ladies Project. She currently Ann Neumann (Black Elk, Woke, p. 172) is
lives nowhere in particular. a visiting scholar at the Center for Religion and
Barbara Ehrenreich (Displaced Deities, Media at New York University and author of The
p. 62) is a contributing editor of The Baffler. Her Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America.
latest book, a memoir, is Living with a Wild God. Rick Perlstein (Time Bandits, p. 38) is a
Lucy Ellmanns (Womb Up, America, p. 146) contributing editor ofThe Baffler. He is the author
most recent novel isMimi, for which there is an of Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and other books.
exciting new online index by Suzy Romer. George Scialabba (The Higher Happiness,
Shira Erlichman (Ode to Lithium #419: p. 152) is a contributing editor of The Baffler. He
Perfect, p. 95) is a songwriter, producer, writer, and it are sex-positive.
and visual artist. Her latest album, Subtle Creature, Charif Shanahan (Song, p. 159) is a Wallace
was released in August 2016. Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University
J. C. Hallman (The Shock of the Crazed, p. and the author of the forthcoming Into Each Room
122) is the author ofThe Chess Artist,The Hospital We Enter Without Knowing.
for Bad Poets,Wm & Hry, andB & Me: A True Story Patricia Smiths (Incendiary Art: The Body,
of Literary Arousal. p. 67) is the author of seven books of poetry,
francine j. harris (Long division at the dinner including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, Blood
table, p. 133) is the author of play dead and a writer Dazzler, and the forthcoming Incendiary Art.
in residence at Washington University in St. Louis. Jonathon Sturgeon (Divine Indigestion, p. 82)
Matt Hart(Nothing Wrong with a Maple, is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. He was
p. 145) is the author of several books of previously an editor at n+1 and The American Reader.
poems,includingthe forthcoming Radiant Action. Astra Taylor (Who Speaks for the Trees?
He is editor in chief of the journal Forklift, Ohio p. 134) is a contributing editor of The Baffler,
and plays in the band TRAVEL. a cofounder of the Debt Collective,
David V. Johnson (Improv-da, p. 20) is a and the author of The Peoples Platform.
writer and editor in Berkeley, California. Hanif Willis-Abdurraqibs (Kirk Franklin
Sam Kriss (Village Atheists, Village Idiots, Has to Be, p. 14) The Crown Aint Worth Muchwas
p. 72) is a writer who lives in the United recently published. He is also a columnist at MTV
Kingdom. His blog is Idiot Joy Showland. News, where he writes about music.

L E W I S KO C H
Graphic Artists
Melinda Beck, Gerry Bergstein, Kathy Boake, Claude Bornand,
Danielle Chenette, Joseph Ciardiello, Mark Dancey, Sofia Drescher,
Michael Duffy, Vanco Dzambaski, Randall Enos, Patrick JB Flynn,
Stuart Goldenberg, Brad Holland, David Johnson, Lewis Koch,
Sara Krulwich, Olivier Laffely, Cristina de Middel, P. S. Mueller,
Keith Negley, Michael Olivo, Jonathon Rosen, Katherine Streeter,
David Suter, Michelle Thompson, Raphal Thierry and Christian Volckman,
Ellen Weinstein, and C.K. Wilde
The front cover of this issue of The Baffler was illustrated by Keith Negley.
The back cover was illustrated by Mark Dancey.
The Hoefler Text typeface is employed throughout the pages of The Baffler.

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M A R K DA N C E Y

The Baffler Magazine Issue No. 32

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No.

And thank you.

The journal that blunts the cutting edge

EDIT OR IN CHIEF PU BLISHER

Chris Lehmann Noah McCormack

Lindsey Gilbert Hamilton Fish

Dave Denison Valerie Corts

Patrick JB Flynn Acknowledgments

No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.

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Househol d G ods Poe m s

Small Worlds 104 Incendiary Art:

Who Speaks for the Trees? 134 Nothing Wrong

the Baffler [no. 32] 1 5

Remembering the National Academy of Science,

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C itizens of Skopje have nicknamed Macedonias capital the dj vu

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Free Fall in Marble During this springs

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night, the fountain doubles as a light show: Alexander charges atop a

Public Art, Without the Public

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6 Hanif Willis-Abdurr aqib

I, too, have craned my neck / under a shower head that is not

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the Baffler [no. 32] 1 15

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too burdened by ambivalence to fully embrace the American faith.

the Baffler [no. 32] 1 17

In its marketing materials, as well as in the title of the bestselling

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But ownership of history can be tricky. Inevitably, Luthers ver-

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key insights gleaned from psychological and anthropological research.

Although this short essay is no more than an introduction, by now it

In improvisation, Johnstone goes on to argue, the key to facilitat-

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alter the personality and induces feelings of disintegration.

Your education and upbringing have ruined your genius.

In other words, to become a great Palantiriana title-less, autono-

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Thin Blue Spin

3 Aaron Miguel Cant

N ot long after Micah Johnson mortally gunned down five Dallas-area

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As it happens, digital-media professionals have long hailed the

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media for everything from community engagement to criminal inves-

Stevens recalled one example of especially positive cop branding:

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