I'm 90% sure the title isn't ironic: "The Pleasure of a Working Life" by Michael Deagler" (O.Henry Awards 2025)

It's a good idea in general to be on the lookout for irony when you're dealing with a title as triumphant-sounding as Michael Deagler's "The Pleasure of a Working Life." One good reason to be wary is that's exactly often how good literature works. You think you're going to get a paean to working-class life, and maybe the story does dangle some distractions at you to get you to think that's really what it's about, but really, it's about how capital takes advantage of this very idealization of working life in order to extract maximum value from labor without paying a fair wage in return. I was especially on guard for this because "capital takes advantage of labor" seems like the more likely political stance a story in a literary fiction anthology would take. 

But I think that actually, the opposite is happening. I think the story is using the instinctive wariness of irony among its readers, coupled with a number of characters who are skeptical about the value of a working life, to throw the reader off. We are expecting another takedown of capital, but really, the story is, without offering any real opinion on the battle between capital and labor, simply reaffirming an old belief in the value of work.

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker

An occupation is given for almost every character in "Pleasure." Rather than being dehumanizing, reducing people to the work they do, this has a humanizing effect. Nearly everyone in the story gets to demonstrate at least some level of individuality, and the means by which they do it is primarily through work. Here are some of the people, and the work they do:

-Gary Monihan, the main character, who delivers mail until bad health forces him to run the small post office in Kilntown, PA. Gary could be seen as alienated labor. He never really liked carrying mail, and he always wanted to do something else, like write.

-Chuck Feeney, Gary's friend who is higher up in the post office, and who tries to advise Gary on how to be politically savvy. 

-Gary's pair of malcontent employees at the Kilntown post office, Marla and Alondra. Alondra complains more, but Marla outdoes Alondra in terms of malfeasance, as she eventually gets caught trying to pull off a worker's comp scheme.

-Adman Jeremy Krukowski, who fashions himself a wheeler-dealer but who seems mostly to be bad at his job. He wears loud suits. He imagines he's an old-time business man, making secret deals in smoke-filled rooms, but he is mostly just failing, and his wife has noticed. John Candy would have played him in a movie, if John Candy had ever wanted to make the jump from comedy to tragi-comedy. 

-Gary's wife, Claire, who keeps books for a screw and bolt manufacturer, along with their daughter Caitlain, who has a degree in communications and their son, Colin, who works in medical software along with his significant other. 

-Unnamed construction workers Gary sees through his window as they work on a ditch. 

-The nuns Mary Elizabeth and Agnes Marie, with whom Gary makes jokes. 

-Two unnamed postal employees, one of whom seems to really love his job.

"Pleasure" acknowledges that work is work

One of the red herrings the story throws at readers that might make them think this is actually critical of the idealization of work comes when Gary looks out the window of the Kilntown post office. (Even the name of the tiny town where Gary works gets its name from the kind of work that was once done there.) He sees construction workers. He imagines some ill-informed people thinking that it might be nice to work outside on a day like today, and he extrapolates to something he also heard when he was carrying the mail:

For thirty years, people had said to Gary, "At least you’re getting exercise," even as he stood before them in all his heaviness, growing wider by the season. It was a hot day for early May, with the sort of heat that a person walking in and out of buildings might mistake for beautiful weather. Anyone who had to dig a ditch would never mistake a hot day for anything other than what it was.

I've heard similar complaints from people I knew who worked outdoors. Everyone sees them outside on a sunny, sixty-eight-degree day and thinks, oh, I wish I had your job, but they don't notice when it's a hundred and muggy or when it's four below. People do have a tendency to imagine jobs are better than they are, especially when they're jobs they don't themselves do. Everyone envies teachers being off in the summer, but anyone who thinks this is unfair is welcome to go become a teacher if they want, and yet few do. Jeremy the adman think Gary's life as postmaster seems pretty good, because Gary has enough time to sit and read books, but Jeremy wasn't there all those years when Gary was slogging from one house to the next, slowly getting bad hips. Jeremy comments on how it would be great to slow down like Gary does, but does he? No, he prefers to keep on keeping on with his get-rich-quick schemes that don't pan out.

 

"Pleasure" doesn't ignore the cold and hot days. It doesn't overly glamorize work. Its characters go to their jobs with debilitating medical conditions, like lupus, a herniated disc, and diabetes. They struggle with seeing the meaning in all of it. They feel alienated, because they can easily imagine things they'd rather be doing. Gary acknowledges that there are seasons in life, and some of them, like when you've got young kids and you're struggling with work and family, are the hard part of life, and there's just no getting around it being hard.

"Pleasure" manages to avoid both extremes of work as either paradise or purgatory. 

But work still has value, and it might even be allowable to enjoy it

In spite of the very real challenges of work, "Pleasure" still holds out hope that a working life can be a pleasure without irony. It shows us a number of ways people deal with the hardships of a working life, all of which I'm sure we have all seen examples of in real life, and all of which, on a given day, I'm sure I've done to some extent. There is the complainer in Alondra, who never meets with a work condition she can't kvetch about. There's the scammer Marla, who gets tired of seeing her cousin make what looks like easy money, and decides to try to make some of her own. There's the dreamer Jeremy Krukowski, who thinks the key to making working life succeed is to have the right connections, leading to the right golden opportunity. There's even the "I love my job" guy, shredding the postcards at the end, and the woman with him, who seems to enjoy the social aspects of work, along with her frequent smoke breaks. 

Then there's the main character, Gary. Gary was a guy who slogged ahead, in spite of not wanting to, and near the end of his career, while his old, broken-down body is struggling to shovel snow out of the parking lot, he chastises himself for not having picked one of the other strategies: 

He had been a fool to think there would be an early departure, a special dispensation that would excuse him from his work, his real work, before they had gotten everything they needed from his body. He ws only--had only ever been--a set of arms and feet, a back to lift and haul. A shoveler. A carrier like his father. A smarter man would have played his hand better. Cut corners, made a fuss, found a scam. He'd lacked the imagination for that. 

This is a nearly Marxist way of viewing his labor. He's been a schmuck, used by callous, cynical capital, who saw him only as an expendable bag of bones to be exploited until there was no more value to be squeezed from him. Against such a view of labor, it's natural to think it's okay to pull off a worker's comp scam, or just to have been as underproductive as he could get away with, complaining and taking smoke breaks as often as possible. 

Community and solidarity

But Gary's father, who had also been a mail carrier and who originally got Gary his job, had an entirely different way of looking at work. His father, on the last day he carried mail, put a letter in the mailbox of every customer he had served. The letter was all about how his job had at times been difficult, but "the people on his mail route were a source of fulfillment." Gary's father had considered being among these people to be "the pleasure of (his) working life." 

There are two senses the story gives us in which work may not be utterly futile. By far, the biggest is the way works makes us part of the community we serve. When we ring a register, dig a ditch, or build software, we become part of the lives of the people our labor serves. Gary learned about the letter his father wrote when one of his father's former customers gave it to Gary at his father's funeral. Gary is later astonished at how meaningful it is to the family of a woman he once delivered mail to that he went to her wake. "He delivered mail to Mom for ten years!" the son announces. When the adman dies, Gary cannot understand why his wife thinks he should go to the funeral. He wonders why anyone would care that he sold stamps to the dead guy, but his wife thinks it might matter to the family. Most of us never get to achieve immortality through fame or far-reaching deeds, so the closest we get is in the links we make in the work we do every day. If we repaired a driveway so well it'll still be in good shape three owners of the house from now, that's all most of us get. In Gary's case, he's been fortunate in that by delivering mail, he's impacted a wide number of people in a small way every day. His work has an effect in ways he can't quite see, down to even the (presumably unemployed) homeless people who sleep in the warmth of the post office he now heads. 

Work binds employee to customer, but it also binds one employee to another. When Gary is out struggling to clear the sidewalk, he hears the "sympathetic scrape" of a shovel from the McDonald's parking lot as another, much younger worker with his whole working life ahead of him struggles through the same task. Through work communities are brought together, but also there is a universal solidarity of working people that is made stronger. Work sucks, but it sucks for the guy next to you in the same way it sucks for you, and so by working, you join a family of people worldwide who are trying to get from one day to the next. 

I don't think we HAVE to come to an especially rosy picture of work by the end. We don't have to be the "just happy to be here" guy at the end of the story, the one who drives us all crazy to be around in our jobs. It's understandable if we spend most of our working lives wishing we could be doing something else, if we regret the time not spent with family, the time not invested in doing activities that better our spirits. A college professor of mine once said that we are taught that there is dignity in work, but in reality, there is only dignity in labor. We don't have to abandon our critiques of capitalism as wage slavery, but neither should we shut out all possibility of finding some meaning in work. Gary, who spent much of his life wanting to be a writer, finally dedicates himself to reading during his easy postmaster job, and he finds that it, too, is work. He eventually gets better at it, as all people do at just about anything they stick with, but he seems to miss the point. The final lines of the story are of Gary having meant to sent his customers a letter like the one his father sent, but he forgot, and when he thought of it, the moment had passed. Gary's moment of finding something redeeming in his working life, some pleasure, has almost passed him by, too. 

Possible objections

I can see a reader with deep Marxist commitments, or possibly just one who really hates their job, finding fault with the story.  Gary's father was a boomer, and work paid back boomers much better than it did future generations. Gary's job is also a throwback, one of the few jobs that still provides a pension, that has little chance of a layoff, and which accommodated Gary when his health became poor. Most people don't have jobs that good anymore, and if they do, it's only because labor fought for those conditions and capital hasn't yet been able to wrest those benefits back yet. Work still often consists of the many being taken advantage of by the few. 

I don't think "Pleasure" totally avoids those issues, and to the extent it does, it's because it's dealing with work less as a philosophical and political issue than as a close-to-home issue nearly all of us have to face day to day, starting often from the moment we wake up. It's not looking at work primarily from a social perspective, from from an individual one, asking not how to make work better for most workers, but how to survive your job as you find it today. I don't think every story needs to examine every aspect of the themes it's working with in order to succeed. "Pleasure" is a good reminder that the thing most of us spend more time doing than anything else still has some possibilities for enjoyment.

Fear, power, and the fear of power: "That Girl" by Addie Citchens

When we first meet her, Theo is beneath an awning on a porch that almost acts like a cave in which she is hibernating. "Underneath the huge, old, rusty awning, it was three shades darker and ten degrees cooler than in the street." It's a place of retreat and safety from "the street," where dangers lurk. Theo is in her early teens, about to arrive at a point in life where she cannot hide from danger anymore. Some dangers, in the form of her mother, Jane, who occasionally hits her, have already come to her, although Jane's recent marriage to Roger has temporarily tamed Jane's violent streak. Still, Theo prefers places of quiet retreat, just as she feels more comfortable reading inside her own head, where words make sense, to reading out loud, where she has a stutter. 

Shirlee first appears on the street in front of her house, where Theo is spending the summer reading on the porch, and this is the moment when Theo realizes she is lonely and longs for some kind of connection to the world outside the cave of isolation. Whether Shirlee is--as Jane believes--herself one of those dangers of the street outside the cave, or if she merely brings knowledge of those dangers, she eventually comes into Theo's sanctuary on the porch, rather than tempting Theo to come outside. This is a pattern that will repeat itself. There are two ways to end the isolation of being in a room alone. One is to open the door and leave, the other is to open the door selectively to others so they can come in. Theo much prefers the second method, perhaps because it feels safer to her, but as any cyber security expert will tell you, leaving ports open in a firewall, while necessary in order to be able to do fun stuff like watch videos and chat with people, also leaves you vulnerable to threats. 

Theo experiments with various possible apertures to take her outside her cave of safety. There are books. Theo first reads an unnamed story "about England in the First World War" with Shirlee, finding, to her surprise, that she is no longer stuttering when reading in Shirlee's presence. Her first attempt at letting someone into her zone of safety seems to have helped her out of isolation. There are Roger's songs that he plays when he comes home, forming a diegetic soundtrack to the story. But the main doors she leaves open are literal ones for Shirlee to sneak into the house, first during the day when Jane is gone, and then later during the evening so they can do "secret, sweet stuff" with each other that one can only do at night. 

The second and third books are a book about murderers she selects to entertain Shirlee with and a romance novel she hopes to read when she is forced to go to Bible study. The book about murders is a good example of a door she leaves open into her life that brings both pleasure and fear, as she and Shirlee do, as expected, enjoy reading it together, but once she's read it, it leaves Theo worrying about murderers. One night, when she leaves the door open for Shirlee to sneak in, Theo worries that a murderer might sneak in first, showing she has realized the vulnerabilities that leaving portals open into your life entail.

She briefly imagines, along with Shirlee, taking the fight to the threat by hatching a plot to kill men who would otherwise do violence to women. Beyond the book, Shirlee has already learned about the threat from men when her principal molested her. Their plot involves luring men to let them into their cars, where they would then kill them, but Theo finds herself not up to breaking down the doors into the lives of others. When she thinks of carrying out the plan, she trembles with "fear, and power, and the fear of power." 

Shirlee comments more than once that Theo is a "scary ass" (meaning scaredy-cat) or a "scary Mary," because Shirlee is much less afraid of breaking doors down to go get what she wants. When they go to the house of an older boy to get pot in exchange for sexual favors, Shirlee walks in without fear, while Theo can't even wait for Shirlee to reappear from the back and has to leave the house, locking herself out in the process, and then stumbling back home where she barely manages to let herself back into safety. Theo is curious enough to let others in selectively, but she also knows her mind enough to know when a new adventure is too much for her. 

Icarus doesn't fall but he does get the door to his room taken off

The threat of Jane is kept at bay for most of the first two-thirds of the story, because she is too busy being happy with Roger to take much note of Theo. We will later realize that Jane, helped out by tattling from older cousin Keita, has half-suspected that Theo was running around with Shirlee, including the suspicion that Theo was a "bulldagger" or "dyke," which seems to upset Jane more because of how it would appear to the church-going crowd than anything. Jane breaks into Theo's room when Shirlee is there, and after Shirlee runs away, she attacks Theo with an extension cord. Theo curses herself and Shirlee for getting greedy and bringing Shirlee over too soon, but the worst effect of them flying too close to the sun isn't the bruises Theo gets. It's that Jane has Roger take off the door to her room. Now Theo has no ability to control who enters her quiet inner space. She has no quiet inner space left, no interior life. It's all laid bare to everyone. It's the personal space equivalent of being completely hacked, where the hackers now have access to all your information.

Worse for Theo, the hackers, in this case Jane, have shared that information with everyone. Everywhere Theo goes now, from her aunt's day school for people with developmental issues to Bible studies, people already know why Jane has concocted a strict summer schedule for Theo to keep her out of trouble. 

Lacking any ability to keep others out of places in her life she doesn't want them, Theo is reduced to a space somewhere between fatalism--wondering if she's condemned to hell or if some people just have to live out hell on Earth--and impotent fantasy, promising herself that she will run away when she is sixteen or have her mother put into a nursing home when Jane is sixty. She has one opportunity to run out of a literal door at Bible study, but she declines, and instead return to class, holding her hands over her lower abdomen in a way that leaves Brother Dobbs guessing what the gesture means. Making Brother Dobbs unsure if she has bowel troubles or menstrual cramps is the closest she has to masking her interior life at this point.

Is Theo closer to making a step forward by the end?

One could read the ending as another form of Theo's fatalism. The two girls, who have been a rare portal into happiness for one another, are not going to be able to be together, and that's that and life sucks. Theo shouts her pet name for Shirlee into the darkness, but Leelee is gone. 

But maybe Theo has gone through a transformation, one that might help her prepare for life with some kind of self-fulfillment. She has realized that the spirit resides "between the skin and the muscle," and while an "invisible razor" has been cutting her spirit loose, Theo feels this as a bit of a liberation, because "her skin had been so tight that it had been smothering her spirit." In other words, something about the ordeal has freed her spirit. When Shirlee comes to the house at night one last time, Theo herself goes out the door to meet her, not even taking a minute to put shoes on. This is a significant step for her, as it signals a movement from passivity to actively claiming what she wants. Moreover, the final sentence of the story has Theo calling after her friend, but this time, in her head. She has reestablished her ability to have an interior life separate from that which everyone can see. She's going to need the ability to keep her private thoughts private if she's going to survive long enough to get out of the house. 

This ability to keep thoughts within herself has allowed her to reclaim the phrase "that girl," which is the title of the story, from Jane. Jane has used it as a curse, "that girl" who is threatening to corrupt her baby. But Theo uses the phrase to recall the good that Leelee brought to her: "No one would ever cup Theo as tenderly as that girl had." This isn't the power to bring retribution on all would-be evil-doers, perhaps, but it is power of a sort that might help Theo survive adolescence. 

Gonna be, gonna be golden (arrow): "Arrow" by Gina Chung (2025 O.Henry Awards)

One of the good things about blogging on American contemporary short stories for a while now is that hopefully, I've gotten better at it. One of the downsides is that there are some topics that come up again and again, and after a while, it feels hard to say something you haven't already said before. So it is with "Arrow" by Gina Chung, the most noteworthy characteristic of which might be the second-person narrator. This is hardly a novelty in American literature anymore, but it's still less used than first person or third-person limited, so when it shows up, it does still stand out. 

I used to not like it, because it felt, not gimmicky, but overly writerly. It wasn't until I wrote a story using second person myself that I realized that far from being a stodgy and difficult form to maintain, it is actually very natural, almost as natural as "I" is. When I learned Tigrinya--which now seems so long ago I can't believe it was actually part of this lifetime--I was surprised to learn that as different as the language is from English in so many ways, it shared the use of the indefinite "you" in speech. Much as we might say, "To get to Cleveland from Canton, you have to go up 77," even if we don't mean that the actual person we are addressing has to do this, Tigrinya often does the same thing. This means to me that using it is probably part of humanity's inherited grammatical deep structure. It's a very natural way to speak, so much that English teachers for generations have been struggling to get kids to write "One does not simply walk into Mordor" rather than "You don't just walk into Mordor." "You" just feels right to us when we're talking about a generic person other than us. It's colloquially very common, so when it gets transferred over to a story, it gives it a lot of the natural feel that a spoken word story has over a highly literary one. 

Second person "you" narratives feel to me like they more easily maintain momentum. "Arrow" by Gina Chung was certainly no exception. 

Symbolism!!

Other than the narrative choice, the next thing that stands out the most reading "Arrow" is the symbol of the arrow itself. We're already well into the story of the main character "you" getting pregnant at 35, not knowing who the father is, and not being sure what you should do as you're such a mess you can barely take care of yourself, when the arrow shows up. It gets referenced when we read about your hookup with a tattoo artist, the third of your three trysts that give you one-in-three odds of knowing who the father is. You met the tattoo guy at a cheesy bar, where the two of you played darts. (More arrows! See, I pay attention when I read! 

"You" tell the tattoo artist about the only tat you ever wanted, which is a "slim arrow pointing down the length of (her) forearm." You don't explain what it really means to him, but it has to do with how you wanted to escape your mother and Southern California. It means two things to "you." You recall learning about how sharks die if they don't keep moving, so you also kept moving, working hard to get good grades and earn money for scholarships so you could leave. So in that sense, the arrow just represents something moving. But then "you" also associate the arrow with fear: "You thought of your fear as a golden arrow that pointed outward from the dark surrounding your mother's house, a beam that led you away...toward a future where you were no one's daughter, where the only dreams and desires you had to follow were your own." 

Fear of what? Presumably, of not escaping your mother and Southern California. Your golden arrow is both a symbol of the need to keep moving and also of fear. Turns out you have pretty good reasons to fear your mother. She's pretty tough. She hits. She belittles. She manipulates. She's like a lot of Korean mothers I've seen on Korean television shows or read about in books, and also like a few that I've known in person. There's some cultural reasons why Umma (pronounced Uh-mah, not Oo-mma like Uma Thurman) acted the way she did to you, but it was still a traumatic childhood for you. Even when you talk to your mother today, you end up on drinking binges. 

Even more symbolism!!

Once it arrives in the story, the arrow takes over as the gravitational force of the narrative. The narrator has two ideas of what the arrow means to "you," but more emerge, unasked for. When "your are alarmed by and resentful of the passage of time," this calls to mind Eddington's "arrow of time," which tells us that time only flows in one direction. This is the closing image of the story, when the gold arrow has been replaced by the golden shafts of lights coming into your apartment: "And as the sun climbs over the lip of the sky, and the two of you watch its ascent, gold filling the corners of your apartment, you begin to understand that there is only this moment, and then the next, and then the next, and then the next, and that the only thing to do is to keep on living." 

It's typical for a character's narrative arc to be completed in a way that the character wasn't expecting. The Wizard of Oz is one of the clearest examples of this, as all of the main characters find that the thing they set out to have was there all along. There's no place like home. In "Arrow," the unexpected arc is expressed through the shifting appearance of the central image. "You" thought the arrow was telling you to keep moving, to run like hell from home. But the golden arrow turns to golden shafts of light, reminiscent of the "warm, healing ball of divine light and energy" you try to imagine God as, that instead tell you to keep on living. 

If you wanted to go a little bit further, you could also extend the arrow's meaning to how, once we are all shot into the world, we are at the mercy of fortune, which is why "you" feel your connection to your mother is as much of an accident as anything else. The arrow is just uncertainty in general, then, which is natural for "you," given your upbringing. 

Foreshadowing!!

I'm just going to point out that "you" foreshadowed your own golden arrow tattoo on your forearm by cutting yourself with paper clips so you could feel something. That's it. I have no greater point than that. 

Look, this is a good story...

I have nothing really negative to say about this story. The symbol of the arrow comes in at just the right time and exerts just the right amount of influence over events. "You" are a believable and sympathetic character in your weakness. It's not too much weakness, and the explanations for your foibles don't sound like weak attempts to excuse bad behavior. When "you" lose the baby, I felt loss, even though I kind of thought that's where it was going. 

I'm often tough on Korean stories, because I think I know enough to be critical, but this one put in all the Korean touches in just the right places. I love juk, by the way. South Korea has a chain of restaurants that just serve juk (translated as porridge, although that never felt quite right to me). I think I went five times a week one autumn. 

...But I can't help reading it in the context of this cultural moment

Because absolutely nothing in America anymore can just be a thing in itself without it being a thing either claimed by right or left, conservatives are really into fitness. In a recent New York Times discussion of this phenomenon, Jessica Grose quipped that compared to conservatives, who are all about going to the gym and eating well and cutting alcohol out of their lives, liberals come off as "TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a Ring light." Conservatives have latched onto wellness because, among other reasons (some of which are very good ones), they feel that a message of taking control of your own life and taking responsibility for your own health will play well politically to people who are tired of being shamed for ableism or being forced to watch the Oppression Olympics. 

Conservatives of this stripe would read this story and shake their heads, saying look, here's what fetishizing your traumas instead of working to overcome them, along with decades of feminism and free sex have gotten you: a woman totally unable to live her life responsibly or make good choices. I'm just glad that "you" didn't take anti-depressants in this story, or it would have been a perfect conservative strawman all queued up for them. 

I think the "you" of the story is sympathetic and not overly indulgent of herself and her traumas. I think your drinking and dropping out of law school and questionable sexual choices are all understandable, but in this particular moment, when conservatives are being especially hard on women in their thirties and forties who aren't married and don't have kids and are still struggling to get their lives in order, it's a little bit tougher to appreciate the story as "your" own private life story and not as part of a social drama that's going on. Which might be the whole point of conservative rhetoric: to deny the existence of personal stories by turning them all into public and political ones. It's a perverse application of Kant's categorical imperative by making every individual's life journey a question of what the world would be like if we all lived in that way. "Arrow" could be seen, then, as an answer to that kind of thinking, one that defiantly defends a woman's right to pick her own errant way through life. 

I'll just say that society sometimes fixes flaws by overcorrecting. If we've gone too far in one direction, being too indulgent of ourselves as a reaction to traumas such that we have infantilized ourselves, the movement among conservatives is likely soon to go too far in another. It will eventually spark its own backlash. If so, we may one day in the near future be looking back with nostalgia to when it was okay to write stories about deeply flawed female characters using their freedom to make bad choices. 

By that time, I assume I'll have forgotten all about what happened in the summer of 2025 that made me choose the title for this post that I did. 

The role in socialization of the last thing you should do in polite society: "The Stackpole Legend" by Wendell Berry (2025 O.Henry Anthology)

I've blogged Best American Short Stories nearly every year for the past seven years, but I've only done the Best Short Stories anthology, a.k.a. The O.Henry Awards, twice. Both times I did O.Henry, I did it after BASS. This year, I'm aiming to switch the order and do O.Henry first. I don't know if I can get all the way through O.Henry by the time BASS comes out in a little over a month. I'm hopefully starting a new job soon, and it's going to take up a lot of my better brain cells for a while. But I don't want to not start something just because I might fail to finish it. So here we go.

For a long time, I didn't read much contemporary fiction. I think I felt like there were the classics and there was contemporary fiction, and contemporary fiction had to be all frivolous, or else its products would be classics. Since I wanted to write what would become classical fiction myself, I decided to stay away from anything that wasn't already on college syllabi. I'm not sure how, in my highly circular system of evaluation, anything new could become considered classic, since its failure to already be considered a classic meant it must not be one, but it was my system. It's really only been in the last dozen or so years that I've read books written by people who were alive when I read them. 

I wonder what my brain would have done if, by chance, the first contemporary writer I had chosen to read had been Wendell Berry, because reading Berry is a lot like reading all those authors that a high school student encounters in the first semester of American Lit. The language is a bit more up to date, although still full of some anachronisms, but if one of his stories was slipped into a high school class next to Twain or Washington Irving, a student might very well not notice the difference. 

"The Stackpole Legend," which leads off the 2025 O.Henry anthology, is a good example of a story with a 19th-century feel in a 21st century book. Its entire presentation as one of many local legends collected by an author who is more aw-shucks-I-just-came-across-this than the thundering man of tortured genius the 20th century created reminds me more of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" than it does any work of the last hundred years.

This throwback feel is Berry's signature style. I try not to write too much commentary on writers themselves on this blog and focus only on the work, but with Berry, it's kind of important to know that you're reading someone whose entire oeuvre as well as personal life is an effort to turn the clock back. Much of his work takes place in the past of his fictional Port William, as does this story. 

Berry thinks modern society is unhealthy for humans, both individually and as a society, but rather than write entirely about what's wrong about us, he writes a lot about humans in a bygone age to show what a different relationship with the world would look like. That isn't to say that every story he writes is a rosy picture of the past, a sort of MAGA literary movement that goes back to 1850 instead of 1950 the way the current political MAGA does. But his stories from the past do present us here today with a different way of viewing human nature, both individually and in a social context.

Socialization

"The Stackpole Legend" is a fable about how socialization happens. We follow the life of Delinthus Stackpole, one of Port William's residents long ago. Delinthus is made fun of for his name, but he neutralizes his would-be tormentors by simply not realizing they were teasing him. Soon after, the boys his age, thinking him slow, try to bully him by pushing him, but they realize that, just as Delinthus will not be teased, he will also not be pushed. This is how he earns the nickname "Stump," presumably because he is as hard to move as the stump of a tree is hard to pull out. 

Since he was raised in a very small society of three on his family's farm, one in which he did very little talking because it simply wasn't needed, he is bewildered by the avalanche of questions to be answered that he faces when he enters school. He is happy to let others do the talking. One could look at this and say that it was the relative isolation Stump grew up with, having only his parents nearby and not speaking much with them, that made socialization difficult when he began school, but it's actually the opposite. It is the solidity and certainty of his value and place in his family that prepares him for life outside the farm. His unique upbringing is what allows him to remain unbothered when introduced to social life at school. He might take longer to become part of the community, but he at least survives childhood unharmed by society--more than most people can say--and when he decides he is ready, he turns out to have all the tools he needs. Stump is able to navigate his way into society precisely because his personality is first made secure and unmovable through isolation. Stump's progression is to first be secure in himself, and then to try to find how to make that self fit into a larger world. 

Stump is impervious to the mean side of social life, which does him a lot of good, but he is also unable to enjoy the positive aspects of living in a community, and therein lies his arc. When both his parents die, he realizes the same thing Adam realized when alone in the Garden of Eden: it is not good for man to be alone. But Stump, who has been content to not speak for most of his life, suddenly finds himself in need of speaking if he is to find a wife to end his loneliness. 

Stump feels lost, but he does, in fact, know everything he needs to know in order to develop his capacity for speech. "To say something, he had to begin by saying nothing" is now the narrator put his reluctance to speak, but it also sums up Stump's progression. He becomes part of society by first not being part of it, and he learns to speak by first being silent. If the path to socialization of young people today is thrown off by too much togetherness through social media and other forms of technological togetherness at too young an age, Stump, by contrast, is able to follow a much more natural path of silence then speaking, of learning to be comfortable being alone before learning to be comfortable being with others.  

When he finally gets up the nerve to talk to Kizzie, he feels "himself pushed backward" by his question, but "he held his ground." His practice at being "not pushed" that came in his pre-social days has prepared him for his dive into society. 

The fart

I'd bet a lot of us have heard many stories from friends and family that involve passing gas in embarrassing ways. It's a pretty normal topic of conversation for real tales, but not for literary ones. High literature might include frank depictions of sex or the gory details of injury or illness, but I can't think of a single story from one of the "best of" anthologies of the past many years that had a fart in it. Literary fiction is seemingly like the female-dominated planet Gazorpazorp in Rick and Morty, where it is referred to as "the sound we do not name because it does not exist." 

"The Stackpole Legend" not only includes passing gas, but it's the climax of the story. Stump gets up the nerve to take Kizzie out for a buggy ride, but this is no "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" kind of trip. Kizzie is curiously quiet, and for once, Stump can't stop talking, because he is no longer comfortable with silence. He keeps talking and talking, which makes him more and more nervous, until pressure starts to build up inside. He tries to cover over the sound of his fart by firing his revolver into the air, but it misfires, meaning she hears the whole thing. She laughs, and soon he does to, and that's what opens the door to them having a long life together.

Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry away from this fart I just ripped.

In modern couples' therapy wisdom, there is something of a split verdict on the value of couples breaking wind in the presence of one another. Some say it promotes intimacy, because you're being real with one another and doing in each others' presence what you wouldn't do in polite society, which makes you both co-conspirators of a sort. The other school says that it takes the mystery and the romance out of a relationship. Couples should strive to impress one another as much after marriage as they did before, so the thinking goes, and that means still going on dates and thinking of thoughtful gifts and romantic gestures and not farting, burping, or going to the bathroom in the presence of the other. 

Stump's flatulence is involuntary. He didn't mean to do it. It's possible he will go the rest of his life and never fart in front of Kizzie again, because now he won't be as nervous. For them, at least, it's a faux pas that Kizzie generously interprets (as she also interpreted his accidental touch of one of her softer areas). She laughs at it, and this laughter is what allows "Nature" and the preacher to guide them to the altar. Stump has missed out on society at its worst, the mob mentality, but it isn't until he shares a laugh with Kizzie that he gets to enjoy society at its best.

Nature

Nature looms large in "Stackpole." Stump eyes up potential mates with the eye of a "stockman," comparing them to livestock. The "Nature" that lays the way before Stump and Kizzie is capitalized. Nature is best when it's in harmony with society, as in the case of Bill the horse, who is always ready to go when he needs to go, and always ready to stop. And the best way for a person to integrate into society is naturally, as Stump has done. 

Portrait of an artist

You could probably turn about half of all art into self-referential works about art, and this story is no different. When Stump realizes he needs to start talking to people, he begins by talking to himself. When someone catches his talking to himself, he quickly makes up a lie about what he is doing. He finds, to his own surprise, that he is pretty good at making up lies. What is making up lies but writing fiction? He also opens up his imagination to start asking himself what someone else might be thinking, frequently questioning "how do you reckon" someone would react if they saw his home. Trying to imagine what someone else might be feelings is foundational both to writing fiction and to the empathy upon which all life in a society is grounded. 

Style

As I said up above, the narrative style is a throwback. The narrator slips himself into the story, but as a cataloguer of the legends of Port William, not as a character within the story itself. He uses folksy devices, such as turning God's declaration in Genesis of "It is not good for the man to be alone" into "the world's first piece of good advice." The are numerous euphemisms and some hilarious use of litotes, both of which are characteristic of how an old person might tell a real, spoken story, but neither of which is used in the same rhetorical fashion in much literary fiction nowadays. Literary fiction and a good yarn have little to do with one another. Except in Wendell Berry. 

I've mused before on why the best literary writers don't seem to tell stories the way our best story-telling friends do. It's nice once in a while to enjoy a pace and tone that's a little more like the everyday tales our co-workers might tell, the ones we stop our work for a minute to hear. 

Future

Kizzie and Stump have four boys and a girl. They children all go off to school, and eventually they move off to the city, into the "world of the future." Their background of hard work and love on a farm ensures they succeed when they go off into the world, but it also means they never come back home, and eventually, the Stackpole name disappears from Port William. Here, the story lays out an irony of the idyllic life in which Stump was raised. Its success leads to its own demise. Stump was raised with the right mix of solitude and society, and so were his kids, but they eventually move off to cities, where they--and most of America--will now have too little solitude, too much community. The America that balances the individual and society, leading to healthier versions of both, will disappear. To a nation that now cannot even conceive of things being different, the narrator presents a version of life from the past, one in which a different balance of individual and society existed, to suggest what ails us.

Does God still love you if your football team sucks?

"If there's a god, he's laughing at us 

and our football team." 

-from "Effington" by Ben Folds

When I was young, I used to get angry when a team in any sport I was rooting for lost. Like, really angry. I'd throw things and storm out of the house. I remember once I was so angry that as I was running out of the house, I needed something to throw, and the only thing I could think of was the watch I was wearing. I really loved that watch, which I'm sure was just a cheap digital one you could get anywhere, but back then, it was one of the things I had that I cared most about. I couldn't even wait to unstrap that watch to throw it, so I ripped it off my wrist, essentially destroying the band so I couldn't wear it anymore. 

Thinking back, even I have a hard time understanding what upset me so much, but I think part of it was the way I felt like my team losing was rejection of me, personally. By God, or the universe, or whatever was in charge. Fans irrationally take part in feelings of celebration when their team wins, so I guess it's natural that I irrationally felt a vicarious participation in the losses of the teams I was rooting for. 

It's easy to believe sometimes that some people get more of a share of success than one person needs.

Because I grew up in Northeast Ohio, it was easy to think that I grew up among a cursed people. Even as I got older and less superstitious about such things, it was hard to shake at least some gut feeling that really good things only happened to other people. People who lived in some place you'd never heard of and would never be fortunate enough to go, places where people who had it all figured out lived. 

To some extent, America encourages linking the success of your sports team with the favor of God. We are admonished that true fans always believe, even when things seem bad. This is exactly the kind of faith we are told to have in God. The gospel of true fandom in America tells us that we should always be true to our team, that rooting for another team is like cheating on your spouse, or worshipping a false idol. When I lived in the DC region for two decades, which was full of at least as many people from other places as from around the area, you were as likely to see football jerseys from all over the country as you were to see a Ravens or a Commanders one. It was like wearing a wedding ring, showing the world that your football love was not subject to change, no matter where the universe had placed you for work.

When I first moved near Baltimore, I was determined I would never, ever root for the Ravens. They weren't just a different team from the Cleveland Browns, they literally used to be the Browns. When owner Art Model took the team (remembered in my part of Ohio the way some people remember Benedict Arnold selling out his country), he moved it to Baltimore. Then, the team had the audacity to be good, winning two Super Bowls, while Cleveland has still never been to one. 

After a while, though, I couldn't help but at least admire the Ravens. In the NFL, which actively tries to create parity and avoid dynasties, the Ravens seem to be good almost every year. Clearly, they do something with their franchise that teams like the Browns only wish they could do. Over time, that admiration turned to liking them and actively wanting them to win games. If the Browns aren't doing especially well, then in a Browns-Ravens game, I am definitely hoping the Ravens win. 

Officially, I've evolved as a fan to where I try very hard not to root for teams. I realize every team has plenty of players and coaches and fans with stories that, if you just knew about them, would make you want all their dreams to come true. I try to appreciate the game now and notice the best players doing their thing without pulling internally for one outcome or other. One way I try to help myself to watch in a detached way is to bet for the team I suspect I might find myself rooting against. If the Chiefs are playing the Eagles, and I want the Chiefs to lose, I'll bet for them to win. That way, there is at least something telling me it's okay if they win, some impulse to counteract the one in me that irrationally thinks it unfair if they keep winning. Even with this system in place, though, it's hard for me often to maintain my pledged neutrality. There's something in us that makes us pick sides. 

Years ago, when Tim Tebow had his short run in the NFL, he had a streak where his team won a bunch of games in a row. Although Tebow didn't play that well, his team had a good defense that would keep them in games, and then Tebow would pull off some scramble for a long gain near the end of the game that would win it for them. An evangelical friend of mine was sure God's hand was in those wins. I challenged him on it. Surely, Tebow wasn't the only evangelical on the field. At the ends of NFL games, players from both teams often come together for prayer. It's a violent game where any play can bring about the end of a career. It's understandable if players lean on divine help to cope with the stress. My friend thought, though, that because of Tebow's public persona as a Christian, that God was using him to spread the gospel, and Tebow's miraculous victories were part of that. I wonder how the lopsided loss of Tebow and his Broncos to Tom Brady's Patriots that eventually ended their season fit into God's plan.

I actually like Tebow as a person, by the way.

Ultimately, I doubt any divine force is guiding the outcome of football games. If there is any kind of supernatural power with the ability to intervene in history, I'm not sure we can even get its attention enough to avert genocides or famines, let alone get the Browns back to the playoffs. In the epigraph, Ben Folds imagines a God laughing at our football team, which is reminiscent of the old adage that if you want to make God laugh, you should tell him your plans. If there's some kind of power that created us and watches us, it has its own ideas about the way things should work out. 

But that doesn't keep us from agonizing as our teams are in close games, from praying if we're the praying sort or simply trying to project our will if we're not, so that our teams might prevail. We don't think about the fans of the other team doing the same thing. Or if we do, we imagine that they're bad people who deserve the agony of defeat. There are definitely people out there who have strong opinions on how Eagles fans or Cowboys fans are all terrible, and who take special joy in the losses of those teams because of the imagined gnashing of teeth in those cities. Sports may have some good effects on us as a society. They might have encouraged our sense of the importance of law and fair play. But they also almost certainly encourage a provincial mindset, one in which solidarity is difficult to achieve. People in a bar in Akron can't even watch a game without demonizing the fans 100 miles to the east in Pittsburgh. 

I don't believe God, or whatever hypothetical being who runs things, cares about the outcome of football games. The universe runs on its own laws, and when people with extraordinary talent vie with one another to achieve something under those laws, amazing results happen on their own. That doesn't mean that luck doesn't play a role, and often, luck can feel like divine intervention. 

Football is a microcosm every weekend of the whole human drama. Massive populations--the fans--have their hopes tied up in the decisions of small organizations, and ultimately in the performance of a very select group of athletes whom history has favored to be on the field at that moment. When our teams win, it is tempting to think God favored us, much as when our country wins a war, it is tempting to think the same. That is, to think that God wanted to enemy to lie shattered and broken and weeping for its dead. When our teams lose, especially in heart-breaking fashion, it is tempting to ask why, or to seek for the head of someone responsible. Generally, though, when we have lost, it's because the other team had better coaching and/or players. There's nothing more to it than that. Or, if we were evenly matched and the game was very close, there was some luck involved. If the teams had played a hundred times, our team might have won 55 of them, but they just didn't win that one game. 

God doesn't love you if your team sucks. But then, he doesn't love you if your team wins, either. Football is like life in that most of the time, it's going to end in sadness and defeat, either this week or next. You might get a few moments of real triumph in your life, if you're lucky. To me, football is an invitation not to the tribalism of banding together with others rooting for the same team, but a call to sympathize with everyone, everywhere who shares with me in miserable, mostly futile hopes.

Unless the Browns win a Super Bowl, in which case, y'all's teams suck. 

While Democrats regroup, they need to focus on more than just what it takes to win the next election

There are a couple of intellectual arguments out there that make me uncomfortable, because they seem to make at least a halfway convincing case for a belief I find disturbing, or one that complicates all my other beliefs. A friend of mine sent me an article several years ago that has proved, repeatedly, to be one of those trouble makers. It was Adrian Vermeule's "Liberalism and the Invisible Hand," from the Spring 2019 edition of American Affairs. Vermeule first summarizes--largely uncontroversially, I would believe--that the neo-liberal world order, including the U.S. for at least a century, has relied to a great degree on an extension of economist Adam Smith's belief in the invisible hand into other realms. That is, given a free market, the best ends will tend to naturally assert themselves, as competition between suppliers and the signals from consumers eventually find a happy point that is close to the ideal one. We all pretty much understand how this works economically, but Vermeule focuses more attention on how this faith in the invisible hand has been turned to other ideas, such as the "free marketplace of ideas." 

The world has definitely done a 180 on me in my lifetime, because it used to be conservatives arguing for free markets, and now a conservative like Vermeule isn't unusual at all when he's undermining them. He spends some time in his article highlighting weaknesses in Smith's belief in free markets, including how ideal free markets never exist and how they require constant intervention from a not-invisible-at-all authority to continue working. He spends a lot more time, though, critiquing other, non-economic forms of invisible-hand faith, or "fideism," in his terms, meaning not just faith, but unwarranted faith. 

He points out how just like with economic markets, the free marketplace of ideas never really has the ideal conditions that its adherents admit are necessary for the mechanism to work. To my mind, his most effective example is in the Western jurisprudential practice of having a prosecution and a defense slug it out, and presumably, the correct outcome will ensue. I think even people like me who try to avoid news about high-profile court cases have seen enough examples of justice not working that we would probably accept the prima facie case against our court system leading reliably to just outcomes. If resources put into the defense and prosecution are not equal, why should we expect the outcomes to be? 

Our entire political system has gradually moved in the direction of being more like our legal system, characterized by a primarily adversarial system between parties. Whereas in times past, there was some shared sense of, for lack of a better expression, being on the same team, this seems to have largely disappeared. We no longer think it important to be honest and admit when the other side has a point about something. Instead, we oppose everything the opposition does and think it's up to them to do a good job to convince people that we're wrong. What we call partisan politics is nearly as bitter--and may yet become as violent--as sectarian politics once were. Trump's one-time advisor and likely still-influential voice Steve Bannon often described politics as being war, flipping Carl von Clausewitz's old aphorism of war being politics by other means. If politics is primarily conflict, why should we think the outcome will lead to anything more just or right than what court outcomes lead to? Instead, the side with the most resources and the one that wages war best will have its interests met, whether those interests are just or not. 

There's a real danger of falling into circular logic with a system that involves fideism in competition. If one side is currently holding power, they will never think they might be wrong, because after all, they won, and doesn't our system ensure that the right side wins? This is the logic that allows Trump to deride all of his critics as losers. They did, in fact, lose elections. You can see where too much faith in the power of competition to produce the right answers can lead. If we think that someone isn't on top because they don't deserve to be, then we will never change our minds, either, because if that person was right, they'd have won already. 

Plato understood this to be an inherent danger in democracy. He feared the ability of Sophists to win arguments for bad causes by making a weak argument sound strong. He felt the only defense was solid philosophy. Vermeule apparently believes the answer is in a Catholic theocracy, or at the very least in some ideology that predates humanism. I disagree, but it is hard to argue that invisible hand systems don't require some ideals outside of invisible hand systems to make them work. 

A number of philosophers had a crack at rebutting Vermeule, with what I felt was varying success. To me, the best possible line of refutation is that if the free market of ideas has produced the idea that at least at times, collaboration and cooperation should moderate competition and conflict, then maybe the system works, although in a self-contradictory and ironic way. Even if Vermeule is right and the only hope to escape from eternal conflict--which will necessarily always go not to the side that is right, but the side that wins--lies in ideas outside of secular free market thinking, I don't really care. The idea came from somewhere, and if it at least in part comes from religious-based thinking, that doesn't bother me. It's a good idea, wherever it came from. But that doesn't change the fact that I find Vermeule's basic argument difficult to refute entirely, and this challenge to one of the most fundamental underlying assumptions our society is based on is unsettling. It's clear that if society is going to work toward beneficial ends, there has to be something more at work than just no-holds-barred competition. You can't just cynically use media to convince people you're right; you should actually be right. 

One reason I think politics should be at least mostly the art of trying to make sure all the stakeholders get something even if nobody gets everything is tied to my basic agnosticism. I don't know the answers to anything for sure, and I have a hard time believing anyone else does, either. If there are people who disagree with me about what ends society should be pursuing, it's possible they are right and I'm wrong. It's possible I'm right. It's possible neither of us is. It's very likely all of us are at least a little bit mistaken. 

To take one example, if conservatives generally dislike social welfare programs and liberals generally like them, I don't think that means that most conservatives think we should have no social welfare programs, or that liberals think we should have so many that ninety percent of all income goes to paying taxes to cover them. There's some kind of balance to strike, and conservatives need liberals to avoid letting their own impulses go too far as much as liberals need conservatives to prevent their own worst tendencies from going unchecked. I don't believe this will ever lead to a Utopian perfect harmony, but rather to an always moving tension that hopefully has just enough stability that society can function. One of the most basic facts of society that kind of sounds like hopeful hippie hogwash but is actually cold, hard fact is that nobody knows everything, so we kind of need each other. That includes conservatives and liberals. The more we can cooperate and work together, the more we can accomplish, but also the more we cooperate and work together, the harder it is to avoid conflict. That's the eternal struggle of politics. 

In addition to the fact that nobody's philosophy is so perfect it doesn't need correction, there is also the fact that the very disagreements we have point to some shared ideals we seem, however unlikely, to still have. Maybe we do still have something outside of invisible hand fideism as a founding belief that holds us together. 

Why I think we ought to model the behavior we want

Everyone nowadays seems to be settling into the politics as conflict model. Democrats, for all their talk of how Trump's aggressiveness is unprecedented, seem to be more and more willing to match it with their own brash talk. This has certainly spread to the general public as well. A number of personalities I follow, whose reasonableness I admire, nonetheless will never say a single word about Trump or Republicans that is anything except full of scorn. 

Liberals will say that it was the conservatives who started the scorn, or who at least have continually pushed it up a notch. They'll say it was Trump who took it to new and unprecedented levels in a chief executive. They are probably right, at least based on my half-awake observations of political discourse since the late 80s. But there is more than one way to express contempt. If conservatives have done it with epithets like "libtard," liberals have often done it with sneering disregard. In any case, since squawk-box news programming involving putting two or more personalities on screen and then having them joust at each other in short segments first appeared soon after the advent of cable news (my first sign that something was really wrong in American politics), news shows haven't been short of liberals willing to spar on them. Liberals may have felt like their position needed to be defended, even if the forum was not ideal for fully developing ideas, but if liberals really valued truth over simply winning the war, they would have refused to ever go on a screaming match-type debate. The screaming debate, where neither side is listening to the other, is bad for society, even if the right side "wins" an individual round (by convincing more viewers they're right, I guess) here and there. 

Most liberals would probably argue that it's naïve to model virtue with an unvirtuous opponent, just like it's foolish to try to treat a bully with kindness and think he's going to become nice himself. A bully only responds to strength, so you have to meet him blow for blow. Hence the calls for Democrats to get "meaner." (Here, here, and here are examples.) People love to compare Trump to Hitler, even when they're trying not to, and I think a lot of Democrats suffer from the belief that any kind of cooperation with Republicans is the same as Chamberlain giving away the Sudetenland to Germany. It's appeasement. The more progressive end of the Democratic spectrum particularly wants a guerilla campaign. They only people they hate more than Republicans are moderate Democrats who are willing to work with them. The circular firing squad is far more pronounced among liberals than conservatives right now. Maybe that's part of the stress of losing, but it's also because of the way that liberalism has come to mirror religion, which better minds than me have pointed out (like here, here, and here). The way that the greatest hate progressives have is not for conservatives, but for liberals who aren't pure enough recalls to mind Elaine Pagels' The Origin of Satan, in which she argues that Christians began seeing the devil in non-believers, but then started seeing him more in other Christians they disagreed with. 

Half the time, liberals conveniently do the work of conservatives for them, likes the orcs in LoTR.

I understand the pragmatic argument that it's an imperfect world and we sometimes have to use imperfect means to achieve the right ends. Maybe it would be better if presidential debates were Lincoln-Douglas style, allowing ideas more time to develop, rather than distilling everything down to easily digestible two-minute segments because we assume the public can't handle anything more. Maybe it would be better if discussions on news segments between people who disagree were respectful and slowed-down, rather than Springer-style arguments that only barely stop short of fistfights. Maybe it would be better if political speeches tried to take an objective view of events, including admitting one's own shortcomings, rather than only giving one-sided cant and assuming it's the other side's job to find your weaknesses in their own media minutes. But the world is the world and there's nothing we can do in the short term to change it, so for now, to win the battles at hand, we have to use the tools society is using in order to win. We have to get our hands dirty. But if we only think that we'll be able to practice Socrates' "true rhetoric" after we've first used cut-throat rhetoric to defeat our enemies and bring about a perfect world, then we'll end up being like communists who only treat humans well after they've destroyed all their enemies. That is, we'll never end up trying to say anything that's really true, we'll just keep trying to win by any means necessary. 

Isn't now the best time to think of changing philosophies?

It's possible that this moment of liberal defeat is an opportunity, as many have pointed out. There's a growing desire to push out the old guard in the Democratic Party. New ways forward are being offered, whether it's to be meaner or to go with more progressive leadership like Mamdani and AOC or to become less progressive and more moderate. Whatever the plan is, I'd like to suggest that now is the time to get off the ever-accelerating treadmill of politics-as-conflict rhetorical approaches. It's not just about being more conciliatory. It's about communicating in more than sound bytes, in demonstrating a rhetoric of thoughtfulness rather than always being in attack mode. I'd love to see an interview in which I don't already know what the political representative is going to say before they say it. I want to see politicians whose speech seems to be that of a person who is genuinely reflecting on the world in an earnest and humble way, not someone who is talking down to me about a world they think they already fully understand. 

I'd like to see honesty as a core principle of politics. It can't be that every news item of every day confirms your worldview. If Epstein conspiracies were hogwash a few years ago--and they were--then they're hogwash now, even if it seems like a hopeful source of problems for your opponent. Focus on what's real, rather than what you think might score you points and get you clicks on your Instagram today. Sacrifice winning a point here and there in the political struggle of the moment in order to have a winning strategy for the next hundred years. The answer isn't just to make better use of podcasts and social media to win elections. It's not to do what the folks in strategic communications want. It's to ignore the people in communications and focus on authenticity. You will never win by trying to follow trends, anymore than you will write a great movie by imitating a movie everyone liked last year. People can smell out cynical use of trends. The answer in a world run by conflict isn't to fight dirtier; it's to offer a way out of conflict. 

No Free Road Snacks: "Mobilization" by Allegra Hyde (O.Henry Anthology)

Why does the first-person plural narrative voice so often give summaries of habitual actions rather than declarative sentences in the simple present tense? I'm not complaining; I'm really asking. I'm not the most widely read of commentators, but I can think of five stories I've written about on here that used the first person plural: "Serranos" by Francisco Gonzalez, which appeared earlier in this same O.Henry anthology as "Mobilization"; "The Little Widow from the Capital" by Yohanca Delgado, which appeared in the 2022 Best American Short Stories; "The Whitest Girl" by Brenda Peynado, one of the few Pushcart stories I've looked at on here; "Mbiu Dash" by Okwiri Oduor, which appeared in the 2022 BASS; and Joshua Ferris's And Then We Came to the End, one of the few novels I've looked at in depth on this blog.

All of these stories, when using the "we" of the first-person plural voice, tend very often to avoid a simple depiction of past events, such as: "We went to Heini's Cheese Chalet as a group that day, and although we all meant to spread out as we went through tasting samples, we ended up clumping around one another at the same popular cheeses." If these stories were written in Spanish, they'd favor lots of past imperfect verbs and very few preterits. There's a heavy dose of depictions of things the "we" used to do regularly, rather than things we did once. Because nobody in the "we" is more important than anyone else, the narrative tends towards general descriptions of behavior, rather than specific anecdotes.

Here's an example from "The Whitest Girl":

We wanted to know Terry's secrets, we wanted to know who she loved, who she hated, what she dreamed of in the bed she shared with her sisters. This is not what we admitted to each other, of course. We said that we hated her, we wanted to ruin her life, or at least get her kicked out of school, and haz me el favor, how dare she?...Some of us protested at our cruelty, but the rest of us framed it as a game. Then it all seemed harmless.

And here's another example from "Serranos":

Although we had been ten years in the valley, and no longer thought of ourselves as foreigners, our precautions had long ago become a part of us. We avoided banks, police stations, doctors' offices. We had stopped attending Mass, since we'd heard the stories of worshippers seized at the steps of churches. And we visited Albertsons or Safeway only in groups of three at most. We couldn't risk losing too many adults; someone had to remain to watch over our daughters and sons.

If there was too much of this kind of generalizing, this-is-what-life-was-like kind of summary in a first-person or third-person singular POV, I think it might get boring quickly. But for some reason, with a first-person plural, it actually leads to a strong forward propulsion of the narrative.

---

"Mobilization" Does This Even More Than Most

Most of the other we-narrator stories I've alluded to break from the general to the specific at some point, but Allegra Hyde's "Mobilization" sticks to imperfect-tense actions almost exclusively. It reminded me not so much of the stories I mentioned above, but Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," in that it's a poetic series of paintings of landscapes, both internal to the "we" and also external, that tell a loose story. Only the very end of the story seems to tell of a specific event that happens to the caravan of RVers, and even then, there is still a good deal of general listing of the kinds of actions taken to cope with the end of the party mixed in with the occasional specific, one-time historical action taken.

Many of the we-narratives I've mentioned make a shift in style at some critical junction. In And Then We Came to the End, there is a chapter told in the voice of the boss, Lynn, that stands out from the "we." In "Mbiu Dash," the "we" switches to "I" after the protagonist is rejected by the town. In "Mobilization," the shift isn't from "we/us" to some other pronoun, but from the past "imperfect" to the present indicative. This shift happens in the closing paragraphs.

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A Real Present Transposed on an Imagined Future

As anyone who's seen the movie Nomadland knows, the community described in "Mobilization" isn't made up. There really are communities of people in the United States living fully nomadic lifestyles in RVs, vans, and various cobbled-together vehicles. "Mobilization" has them traveling in packs together a bit more than Nomadland does, and that's to fit the idea behind this being a true mobilization. The title is, of course, a play on words, as the nomadic families described are both mobile, meaning on the move, but also something of a movement, giving it the military flavor of one of the word's meanings.

The attitude of the nomads is a unique blend of independent and communal. They look down on land dwellers who are tied to their normal lives and relish their freedom above all else, but they also share in a quasi-communist fashion. The mobilization, then, depicts two sides to America, two sides that have always been there. The first white settlers left to be able to practice religion as they saw fit without being told by someone else how to do it, but the initial colonies they founded were intensely, often oppressively, communal.

As anti-establishment as the nomads are, they are generally very pro-American, sporting "USA" signs among their bumper stickers and shooting off fireworks to "show our shared patriotism." This isn't the only contradiction in them. Their feeling of superiority is founded on their belief that they have solved a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too contradiction, being able to be "always at home, but always away," to "have an adventure yet keep your home close." They hope their ancestors' ashes rest in peace on their dashboard, even while they stay forever in motion.

The nomads, then, are a riven embodiment of the nation they are traveling about. Not unlike their country, they generally mean well, but they still cause harm as an unintended but unavoidable consequence of all that activity: "We tried not to litter, but we often couldn't help it. Leaflets, leftovers, stray bits of plastic wrap--they fluttered from our windows."

The nomads are presented as highly sexual, and their sexual appetite is linked to the nation's "fecundity," i.e., its fertility. They are representative of America in so many ways: their pioneering spirit; their don't-tread-on-me sense of individual freedom that nonetheless has room for community; their high levels of consumption, sucking up gas as well as a long list of foods they eat on the road in their "invincible ease." They hope this restless energy will keep them from harm, "death as distant as a possum in a mirror," much like our national zeitgeist has always felt the restless need to move forward. Even their very contradictions are American ones: they try not to read much, but they also cover their vehicles with text that "piles on top of itself."

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The Piper Has to Be Paid

The narrative pays a lot of homage to "us," and much of its poetry is a paean to the grandeur of the caravanners. They are the opposite of xenophobic, welcoming all without discrimination, happy to introduce their children to "every accent, every perspective."

Nonetheless, at some point, there ain't no free lunch, and this very American lifestyle, with all its goods and bads, can't go on. Gas suddenly disappears. The proximate cause isn't given. We read about a trade embargo and general chaos, but that seems to be a result of the gas shortage and not the cause. We can maybe assume that of the many reasons why we in the real world might one day face a serious gas shortage, the nomads in "Mobilization" were victims of several or all of them. It doesn't really matter. That level of consumption can't be maintained forever, and at some point, it's going to end, whatever governments may do in the meantime.

The caravanners conduct a desperate search for gas, sure it must be out there somewhere, but the search is in vain. The camaraderie of the road at last breaks down as the few people with custom-made electric vehicles run off, allegedly to get help, but they never return. The marooned campers try to carry on gamely, but eventually, they are hot and hungry and cut off, and things look bad.

As I've already noted, the end of the story switches to present tense. "Darkness comes quick..." "Algae blooms..." "It swallows us, grinds us." The finale is, I believe, an epoch-making event, perhaps marking the end of the Anthropocene era. "The bones" of the motorhomes are buried along with their owners. Mud and muck presses on top of them. They are pressed and squeezed. They're turning into fossil fuels, in effect. The restless nomads are still restless for more motion at the end of the story, and they will get it, but this time, they'll be powering the movement of others rather than using the remains of a past era to move themselves.

I do not plan to present a song that matches the theme of every story I blog about, but I have done it for two stories in a row now.

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It's obviously a commentary on American consumerism and American lifestyles in general, but is it anything else? 

Well, maybe not much more, but it's offering its commentary in a layered way that's kind of interesting. In fact, I found this story a lot more appealing than Hyde's "Democracy in America," which was also a pointed commentary on the American way of life. "Mobilization" at least takes the time to eulogize the dead way of life, doing what all good eulogies do by finding that even in the worst of the deceased, there is often much to admire and praise.

America's weird leave-me-alone-but-also-don't-touch-my-social-security and its I-hate-taxes-but-the-police-better-come-when-we-call split personalities are contradictory, but it's so breathtaking to behold the chutzpah of Americans being themselves, we don't always mind the contradiction. The observation of the hypnotic power of American kinetic energy calls to mind Whitman. And of course Kerouac, but that's too obvious to even bring up. "Mobilization" is a eulogy for a dying America, but it's also a hymn to what has been best in us: our adventure, our creativity, our fierce sense of individualism but also our compassion and community spirit that can thrive as long as nobody is making us do it.