5 false narratives

Downstream

 

“Politics is downstream from culture.” This is what Andrew Brietbart said. And he was right. He was right in the way that every maneuver appears right once the war is won, in the way that every tactic is brilliant until it lands its tactician in The Hague.¹

 

Andrew Brietbart was right, so the generals moved their armies upriver. And their enemies followed. And their enemies’ enemies followed. And their enemies’ enemies’ enemies followed. And the forests were full of game. And the towns were ripe for plunder. And they choked the river’s mouth with corpses. And the wellspring erupts below the putrefying dead. And the corruption flows downstream.² And the puss and blood and piss and shit flows downstream. And sometimes you see an intact body, just bobbing there, floating by and you know that they had a life and a family and maybe a career once. And you wonder what the fuck they did. And now all the water is fetid. No matter where you make your camp along the bank, you choke and gag. The water is red. Then the water is yellow. Then the water is green. 

 

And we drink the water because we have no choice. And we drink the water because everyone lives along the river and the wilderness terrifies us. And because anything in the wilderness could prey on us, could kill us. Because in the wilderness we still die, but we die alone. 

 

So we drink this fetid water and we grab our stomachs and writhe and scream and vomit. We drink the water and we hallucinate. We see the undine rise from their stagnant pools and sing to us in tongues about our insecurities. They sing to us about our inadequacies and about our loneliness. They sing to us about the problems of their undersea world, the tyranny of Triton, the internecine acrimony between the fae, the war of nymph against nymph. They sing, and because we are lonely, and because we drank from the river and the water has made us sick, we imagine their problems are ours. We submerge our heads in the water and mistake the water flowing into our ear canals for flirtatious giggles. We go deeper and mistake the sound of our eardrums popping for spiteful laughter.

 

We drink the water and we fill with hate and resentment towards our enemies, whoever they are, who refuse to move or desert or die and leave the river to us, so we can drink without fear and disgust, without feeling the scum form a film on our lips, and drink without the agony of knowing everything we drink must be expelled, soon, and with intense pain. We lift the befouled cup to our lips and wish our enemies dead. We lift the cup to our lips and wish our enemies lived. But our enemies are algorithmic code. Our enemies are words that have no meaning beyond their caustic pronunciation. Our enemies are onomatopoeia. Our enemies are the babbling of the brook. The sound of water. The sound of water where men have drowned.

 

Meanwhile, I’m on YouTube, listening to soft-spoken, flat-affected men explain the mechanics of retro video games that I’ve never played, soaking up speedrun strats for games I’ll be content to abandon, unfinished, after 40 or 50 hours, letting my eyes unfocus at the sight of simulated scanlines, getting drowsy as lines of code are read to me in a language I’ll never learn. Then when I can no longer hold my eyes open and my brain is too sedate to scream in grief or despair, I switch over to a 12 hour black screen video of thunderstorms or ocean waves. I fall asleep to the sound of running water.

Cadaver Synod

 

In 897, Pope Stephen VI had the body of his predecessor’s predecessor, Pope Formosus, exhumed and put on trial.³ Formosus’ desiccated remains were accused of crimes against the church, including perjury and having claimed St. Peter’s throne (even then already tarnished by centuries of papal and ecclesiastical misconduct) illegitimately. Unable to mount a convincing defense, the corpse was convicted, mutilated, and thrown into the Tiber River.⁴

 

We stand before the dead pope’s throne and read off an inventory of his crimes.

 

We condemn him for indoctrinating our children with Critical Race Theory,™ or curse him for failing to produce an iconic queer Superman of color, after all these years. We ask him why he never issued a papal bull denouncing the War on Christmas, why after two decades of ceaseless secular aggression there is still no holiday detente, no silent night devoid of cable news cannon fire (and can[n]on fodder), no men crawling from the service industry trenches to embrace in no man’s land and wish each other a—well, you know.

 

And the dead pope sits with his jaw hanging open. Or the dead pope sits with his mouth glued shut.

 

And please, we demand of the pope’s corpse, tell us, without resorting to equivocation or excuses or whataboutism or bothsidesism, exactly what your position is on Trump’s twitter ban, and, while we’re on the topic, misinformation writ large, that topic so central to the continued functioning of our great democracy?

 

And the dead pope’s eyes do not move to acknowledge us, because they are painted on. Or the dead pope’s eyes do not move because they are coins.

Is it so unreasonable, we cry, to expect just one authentically black playable character in Super Smash Bros., and, no, alts and costumes do not count and neither does Ganondorf because he is some kind of Arab and also evil and don’t you fucking dare joke about Donkey Kong unless you’re prepared to eat a lifetime ban from ResetEra and an underpaid staff writer from Kotaku with a quota to fill will take a screenshot of your post and use it as a basis for an entire article about endemic racism in gaming culture.  And why, we implore, did you efface Lara Croft’s⁵ voluptuous, angular tits, leaving her chest as flat as our affect? Our hands that were so soft then, in our bedrooms, unlubricated, are now so coarse and dry, our dicks so chafed and sore.

 

And the dead pope does not hear our accusations, because his ears are made of papier-mâché. Or the dead pope’s ears are ash and dust.

 

We upbraid him for his incessant queerbaiting of fandom communities, who only want to see Sherlock and Watson, kiss a little, not even necessarily sexually, but definitely on the lips, in exchange for all their ceaseless devotion. 

 

We insist that he explain why Star Wars is woke now, with anti-capitalist subtext and feminist generals with purple hair and chubby Asian comic relief characters who we swear we will never masturbate to again, when all we really want is for the technicians from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to creep into our bedrooms at night and erase from our minds all memory of The Empire Strikes Back so we can watch it fresh every evening after work and before bed and also to be thirteen forever.

 

And the dead pope will not turn his head to address us, because then his head, which is held on by nothing, would fall off and we would be forced to consider the void where his head once was, the void where his head never was.

 

We rend our garments and scream and order our imagined legions to bring us the pope’s lifeless hands or heart or head. We scream and scream and scream, our demands unheeded, unheard.

 

The show trial didn’t have the desired outcome: the populace turned on Stephen and he was overthrown, imprisoned, and murdered in his jail cell. After Stephen’s death, his successor nullified the results of the synod and Formosus’ body was recovered and reburied in Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Joseph & Jacob

 

Joseph’s brothers stripped off his many-colored coat. They beat him, threw him into a pit, and sold him into slavery. They tore the coat and killed a goat and smeared its blood on the polychromatic fabric. They smeared the coat with complicity. And then they showed their father.

 

They did this because they didn’t dare to lay hands on their father; their father who did not treat his children as equals; their father who robbed his brother of his birthright; their father who put on goat skins and defrauded his own dying father; their father who took two wives but loved only one; their father who wrestled God to a draw in the dark; their father who wrestled with God until God, exhausted, cheated.

 

So they brutalized their brother; their brother who did nothing; their brother who was idle and beautiful.

 

But as a child, hearing this story, again and again, I didn’t think about injustice or providence or family dysfunction. “What happened to the coat?,” I wondered. It disappears from the narrative as soon as it’s no longer useful as a plot device. It seems so important (symbolically, psychologically) and then it’s simply gone. It’s defaced and vanishes, taking its irrational, meaningless, gaudy beauty with it. Let me wash the blood from that coat. Or, better still, let me admire it bloody and feel even greater satisfaction.

NEET

 

I’ve opted out. I wouldn’t say so in conversation.⁶  I would tell you that I’m between jobs, that I’m looking. If we were relatively close, I might say that I’m lost, that I’m figuring things out. I might even mention how hard things have been for me lately: the boss who hanged himself, the people I lost, the multiple moves, my lifelong struggle with social anxiety, the drama, the fear, the grief. Then I would change the subject as soon as I felt allowed. But, no, I’ve opted out. I’ve fled. I’m on the lam and will not be taken alive. I’m fucking done.

 

I wish I could rationalize this to myself as an act of principle or courage, as a rejection of capitalist exploitation or corporate hegemony. I’d settle for the understanding that I’m acting out of calculated laziness or cowardice. I’d love to romanticize it or aestheticize it, to embrace the stereotype of the starving artist, to tell myself that at least, as clichés go, it’s a noble one, with a rich, pretentious history.⁷

 

But I cannot rationalize my behavior, because I cannot begin to understand it, and I cannot understand it, because I refuse to consider it. It’s unfathomable. There is no story I can tell myself. No explanation I can imagine, let alone believe. Whatever the truth is, it cannot be internalized. I try to swallow and I spit and choke.

 

I cannot imagine going back to work in the same way that I cannot imagine being dead, cannot visualize the vacuum and the void, the nonexistent sensation of nonexistence. I only know the terror of the anticipation of both, the horror of knowing that a thing is simultaneously impossible and inevitable. Memories of being a teenage insomniac, writhing in bed, losing my faith, so afraid, thinking, “I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”

 

The local Dunkin’ always seems to be closed when my dad attempts the drive thru. (Do I want something? … No, I guess not.) There’s a paper sign in the widow saying they can’t find enough employees. “Help Wanted” becomes “Help Needed.” The minimum wage in upstate New York is $12.50 an hour, among the highest in the country. I wouldn’t work at Dunkin’ for $12.50 an hour, or any wage. I would rather die. I would rather die than do most things. (Do I simply want to die? Why should I aspire to be productive? Tuberculosis is productive.) Is this feeling universal? Is it growing?

 

Maybe I’m not alone. Maybe something systemic is happening. Sometimes the headlines penetrate my willful fugue. Speculation about supply chain failures. Escalating worker shortages. Maybe we’re in the midst of some mass disillusionment. The Great Opting Out. I don’t know. I don’t have the desire or energy to investigate for myself, to sort fact from propaganda, to separate partisan death drive fantasies from sober, dispassionate, impartial doomsday scenarios. 

 

Recently, I’ve begun supplementing my tranquilizing gaming videos with a missing persons channel documenting true accounts of lost hikers and others who vanished in the woods.  Sometimes they’re found alive, disoriented and naked, with a warped perception of how much time has passed and no explanation to offer for why they shed the protection of their clothes and gear. (The distance between us and our feral state can be measured in days, not millenia.) More often they’re found dead, their corpses dismembered by carrion animals or buried in shallow graves amid the exposed roots of crooked trees. I squirm and scoff when the narrator’s speculation turns to the insidious or the supernatural, to traceless killers and forest monsters. That’s not the fantasy I’ve tuned in for.  Isn’t there wonder and romance enough in the notion of vanishing into the wilderness and being unmade?

 

And now I’m in flight again, to a purely imaginary place: The Last Estate. A post-haunted post-house in the American Post-South. A home in no practical sense of the term. A home in every sense I need.

The Empty Tomb

 

Culture is not art. Culture is not the arts. Culture is not the melting pot or the stew. Culture is not a unifying, clarifying metaphor. Culture provides no lasting insight, reflects no honest light, and has no reality outside of our fevered minds. Culture is the collective interpretation of noise as signal.

 

The vile phrase “cancel culture” actually becomes salient once culture is viewed through this lens; you could likewise have said that Salem had an authentic “witch culture” before it had a culture of tourism subsidized by the memory of murdered witches that never were (witches, that is; they were certainly murdered), not because the witches were real once, but because the shared delusion of their reality created a culture.  I know that there’s a crass obviousness to comparing cancel culture to a witch hunt, but understand that I’m not using this metaphor (only?) in the popular “innocent people are being scapegoated in pursuit of an evil that does not exist” sense, but rather that all of it—the belief in witches, the hunt, the show trials, the executions, the enthusiastic bystanders, the doubtful bystanders who said nothing, the sense of meaning and escape from boredom and existential dread it gave both participants and rubberneckers, and, most importantly, the tacit agreement of everyone to all look in the same direction at the same time, even though there was nothing there (except perhaps a pyre they lit themselves)—is culture. 

 

Culture is mass hysteria. Culture is folie à deux. 

 

Culture is dead, but it wasn’t murdered by social media or socialism, multiculturalism or fascism, by woke scolds or vicious trolls, by foriegn interference or civil war. Ask your favorite boogeyman to show you their hands. They’re bloodless, clean. (At least until your imagination paints them red.)

 

Culture is dead because we’ve imagined it so. Culture is dead because when we look in the direction where it is not but where we’ve been told that it is, we all see its great, rotting corpse. We see its corpse regardless of our ideology or partisan affiliation, regardless of whether we revered or disdained it while it lived. We see its corpse, together, in a rare moment of unity: the one surviving universal delusion. The corpse of consensus. The corpse as consensus. And so all cultural commentators, all critics and pundits, are resurrection men, but only in the crassest, most opportunistic sense. They’re profit-minded graverobbers. There’ll be no resurrection, man.⁸

 

Culture is dead and its tomb is empty.

 

Culture is dead and there’s joy in the mourning. Culture is dead and there’s joy in the morning.

 

Culture is dead, so let’s move the fuck on.

 

Culture is dead. It is survived by art.

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1. In The Fog of War, Robert MacNamara confides to documentarian Errol Morris (and through him us, the audience, the tribunal) that, had the second world war gone the other way, the Allies would have been charged with war crimes for the firebombing of Japan. Over a decade later in American Dharma, Morris interviews Steve Bannon, Brietbart’s successor, the ambitious heir who turned his predecessor’s duchy into an empire, and reveals a life lived exclusively in narrative, completely removed from material reality. Morris and Banon talk about Bannon’s favorite movies (war films, Western, Shakespeare) and you can see that this is the lens through which the master provocateur views all politics, all conflict: unflappable leaders, mavericks, gunslingers, noble sacrifices. Bannon’s worldview has no room for the complexities of policy or the strategic compromises of realpolitik. It’s stories all the way down.
2. As I write this, I’m reminded of Tyler Peterson’s sublimely gross story “Red Mass.” We published it over on Misery Tourism. You should go read that instead of finishing this. You’ll find more truth there, less sleight of hand.
3. Jean-Paul Laurens’ painting depicting the synod, made centuries after its conclusion, has a permanent, haunting place in my macabre imagination. Look at the colors on the throne! Look at the pallor of the dead pope’s face!
4. I was trying to write a novel about this topic, but instead I’ve written a thinkpiece. Can you see how sick we are, how desirous of easy attention, how desperate to be seen?
5. I have no nostalgia for Tomb Raider. My brain hadn’t yet experienced the cruelty of puberty when it was released. And I was all in on Nintendo over Playstation. So on Christmas of ’96 I was playing Super Mario 64, and experiencing some of the most pure, uncontaminated bliss that I would ever know. I pity the early bloomers. I pity those for whom art is a parade of fetishes. I just wish I could know the joy of blackflipping across the castle courtyard again, of scaling that tree by the moat and discovering that you could do a handstand at the top, and then learning, as if the handstand was not reward enough, that there was a one-up mushroom hidden there.
6. I understand now why Bartleby was so passive-aggressive in his rejection of work and society. You don’t fight the system. That’s a hilarious impossibility. You withdraw and evade. You politely excuse yourself. When you’re asked why you haven’t been sending out resumes or going to interviews, whether you’re serious about wanting to get a job to support yourself, you equivocate and demur. To me, even to pull a Bartleby, even to  say “I would prefer not to,” perhaps to add a “please” or “sorry” to dampen the impact, seems an incalculable act of courage, is more than I dare. So I sidestep, and I bow.
7. I don’t share the titular affliction of the protagonist of Hamsun’s Hunger. I’m well fed, even if I’m cooking dinner for my parents, like a maid, like a latchkey child. I want for nothing but purpose, and even that seems like it would be more of a burden than a relief.
8.  And yet, even so, someday, I hope, I’ll make a pilgrimage to the Rothko Chapel to pray facing eastward, not in the direction of Jerusalem or Mecca, but towards the city where the artist bled himself to death into his studio’s sink, red over white on porcelain.