It's sort of ridiculous to try to draw themes for short story anthologies like Best American Short Stories. None of the stories in it were written with the intention of going together. They're culled from hundreds of thousands of stories published in English each year, whittled down to a list of top candidates of around a hundred or so, then whittled down again to the final twenty. They are intentionally chosen to demonstrate diversity of voices, not unity. While the O. Henry Anthology ("The Best Short Stories" collection, rather than "Best American Short Stories") does seem to give some consideration in its mix of stories to creating unity by selecting stories that share subject matter or theme and then try to place them in conversation with each other, BASS really doesn't. Even their choice of story order, always done by author last name, reflects this. If one story seems to be placed where it is because of its relationship to the story before it, that's just a coincidence.
Nonetheless, the BASS anthology is a cultural artifact, and as an artifact, it represents the culture that made it and the culture which it hopes to shape. In a thousand years, if someone happened to leaf through the digital pages of BASS, things might leap out to them that don't to us. (Man, the third decade of the 21st century was sure obsessed with their lame technology!) In spite of the piecemeal way in which is is assembled, it still presents itself, to an outside observer, as a singular object, so I'm going to look at it, just briefly, based on a reading that seeks for some kind of unity.
The things that pops out at me most are the number of stories in which the reaction to trauma or stress is to hide or run away. Let's see:
-In "The Magic Bangle," the narrator attempts to hide in plain sight in order to be able to turn his gay-hating town into a gay paradise.
-In "Viola in Mid-Winter," Viola uses a glamour spell to remain hidden from a romantic partner who hurt her.
-"Blessed Deliverance" features a narrator who keeps his own name hidden, and the climax features rabbits being set free to run away.
-"The Bed & Breakfast" features a young narrator trying to avoid her own coming of age as long as she can.
-In "Dorcester," the narrator runs away from reading his poem when he realizes what a phony he is.
-"Seeing Through Maps" has a son who runs away to escape his family's crazy.
-"Engelond" is about an attempt to escape one set of circumstances followed by the desperate attempt to flee the first attempt to escape.
-"P's Parties" features a narrator who enjoys remaining hidden in the anonymity that parties provide.
-Where do I even begin with the theme of hiding in "Baboons"? The utility of hiding as a survival mechanism is possibly the central theme of the story.
-In "Valley of the Moon," Tongsu retreats from a modernizing society after the Korean War, preferring the presence of ghosts and moonlight on his family's secluded old farm.
Is this a reflection of society?
Again, this is all a very tenuous thing to do because of the semi-randomness of a BASS anthology, but let's look at BASS as a product of a certain time. That time is really 2023, of course, because that's when the stories were published. And many were written, at least in part, long before that. Since the anthology says "2024" on it, though, and since it came out weeks before the 2024 election, it's hard not to read that as the historical moment of the anthology, even if the individual stories belong to a somewhat different moment. The 2024 election, for now, stands out to me partly for the way in which so many people I know have disengaged from news since the election, because they just can't deal with it. Or the way in which some rich people who don't like Trump have moved to another country. Going underground, either literally or emotionally, seems to be a big part of the reaction of the 48 percent of us who didn't want this outcome.
We used to do all kinds of drills in school that had us hide under our desks. They must have had a lot of faith in the structural integrity of desks in those days.
I've come to be kind of skeptical about the ability of fiction to directly change the course of political history. The BASS 2024 story that most directly addresses American politics, "Democracy in America," is easily the weakest story in the anthology. I realize there are a few examples from history of fiction that has changed politics through a frontal attack, but those example are rare and limited. Fiction is great at a limited number of things, and at those things, it's not just great, but really great. It's great for imagining different ways things could be. It's great at helping develop empathy. It's great at raising questions. It's great at helping people to become clearer thinkers about issues with no obvious right answer. It can, when a story becomes so widely a part of culture that it is on the level of myth, affect the self-image of entire groups of people.
And it's great at helping people to escape or survive hard times.
That's BASS of 2024. Nothing in the anthology is going to change the political course we're on. It probably won't even elevate our dumb national political discourse by the slightest nanometer. But fiction has been a part of human society for as long as we've been around because it has a useful role in our survival in a wide variety of social contexts. In the current context, that role might be to help folks batten down the hatches emotionally and prepare for the storm.
Best American Short Stories drops at midnight. I'll be back to analyzing it this year, as it's pretty much the highlight of whatever it is I do on this blog. Each BASS comes with a foreword by the editor and guest editor, which I usually ignore. It's always about how things are dire in the world and how it's a miracle that art like BASS continues to survive and how critical art is in these dark times.
Since the first election of Trump in 2016, I've not been a fan of two trends among liberals. One is the tendency to over-catastrophize. The election of such a mercurial and at times vengeful person to the highest office is calamity enough without looking for extra reasons to find it terrifying. The second is the refusal of liberals to acknowledge their own part in creating the monster of Trump. The result is that I've spent the last 8 years loathing the fact that Trump ever got past eleventh place in the primaries on one hand, and chiding fellow liberals on the other for finding a Trump conspiracy under every bottle of ketchup on the other. Those BASS forewords sometimes trip both of those triggers of mine.
Nonetheless, it does look like somehow, my fellow countrymates are going to elect him again in two weeks, and this time, not feeling any need to surround himself with grownups in order to make himself look like a real politician, Trump is going to feel free to do whatever dumb thing pops into his head. Meanwhile, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are all feeling bolder to do whatever they want to do, because they doubt the strength, resolve, and ability of what has been the world order to do anything about it. It really feels like Trump will be elected, he will force Ukraine to take a terrible deal or be conquered outright, and what has been called the liberal world order will officially come to an end. In its place will be a much more frightening world.
In the 90s, it seemed to me at one point like in a mere twenty years or so, the world would have all its major problems solved. It now feels the opposite of that, like some kind of definitive doom is imminent, and only unlikely chance can prevent it.
That's the environment in which I approach an attempt to seriously read twenty short stories that represent the best of what American letters produced in 2023. In the middle of the greatest angst I've felt since I was a kid thinking about nuclear fallout, I'm going to put all of my effort into reading, thinking about, and communicating my thoughts about twenty short made-up stories. It's a hugely frivolous thing to do, and it's also the only thing I can think of to do.
There's never a time when there aren't more useful things to do than write or read or think about literature. We could always be feeding the poor or righting a wrong or curing a disease, but we read anyway. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing in the human race, but I know it's in our nature. So if we're going to do it anyway, we may as well try to do it well. So for the next several weeks, I'll be neck-deep in trying to do the least fuzzy-headed readings I can do, readings that are hopefully what the authors who wrote these stories deserved.
On the first day of the new year, I think all aspiring writers are supposed to feel the way this Tweet encourages us to feel:
Am I an aspiring writer? I mean, I write already. I even get published sometimes. I guess I aspire to more with writing, but isn't that every writer? Isn't every writer "aspiring"?
My own current mental state is somewhat less ardent. I never make resolutions, but I do sometimes use the New Year to re-focus on something I've been letting slide. In the past, that has sometimes meant writing. Last year, I submitted stories to a slew of venues on the first day of the year. And 2019 turned out to be a very encouraging year, writing-wise. I got three stories accepted, one of which just got published in what was probably the journal with the biggest cache I've gotten into yet. More importantly, a whole slew of top-tier journals that have never done anything but ignore me before at least gave personal responses. (It's really hard for me to convince friends of mine who aren't writers that getting a personal rejection from some journals is actually a big deal and hard to get.) After six years of focused effort, I felt like I had at least gotten some signs that I was moving the rock up the hill.
But here at the outset of 2020, I find myself unable or unwilling to make a push to capitalize on that momentum. In the past, my ambivalence about continuing to push forward with writing has usually been values-based. I've questioned whether putting so much effort into a project I'm not likely to succeed at, one where even if I do "succeed," I'm not likely to have much tangible positive impact on the world, wasn't terribly self-indulgent. I don't worry about that now. It is self-indulgent, but I'm at a point in my life where I realize how much we all need indulgences if we're going to be able to convince ourselves to keep stumbling through life.
The issue is that I'm just at the crux of both my professional and parenting life. At work, I've never felt more pressure to get everything right. That requires a lot of my time, not just at work, but at home. When I finished my annual commentary on the Best American Short Stories collection several weeks ago, I wanted to continue right on with the O.Henry Anthology, because I feel like all these close readings of the best American short fiction has been the most important factor in improving my own writing outcomes over the last two years. But I just couldn't justify the time when what I really need to do with my limited spare time is comb Korean news, improving both my language skills and my awareness of what's going on.
Meanwhile, although I don't want to invade my son's privacy by putting all his business out here, I will say that his performance in school over the last few years has gotten to a point where it now requires my almost constant intervention. Making sure he's ready for adulthood in a few years is now practically a second full-time job for me. So between my actual full-time job, my de facto second full-time job, my desire to focus on improving my professional skill as a translator, and the need to at least be present enough as a husband that my marriage doesn't disappear, I'm about tapped out.
I know, I know, we're not as busy as we think we are. There's always time. I've usually been the chief cheerleader saying those very things. All I can say is that right now, I feel tapped out. Something's got to give, and for right now, that thing is writing. That's unfortunate for me, because I've finally felt like I was getting somewhere. But I think it's the right thing to do.
It is an inconvenient but unmistakable truth. 2020 is going to be a year of going backwards, at least with writing. Hopefully, that going backwards with writing will allow me to move forward in my life enough that when I come back to writing, I have fewer distractions overall and will make up the lost ground quickly. But if I don't pay attention to some other things right now, then all the success in the world won't matter, because I won't respect myself for the choices I made to make it happen.
I'm not saying I won't write at all in 2020. There is a tiny bit of room to squeeze things in, although it will likely involve cutting back my already cut-back time with a group of friends I enjoy spending time with even further. But even with those sacrifices, writing this year is just not going to be what the last few years were. I'm still going to try to do the occasional short story analysis; I just won't do the entirety of O.Henry or Pushcart.
I neither believe fully in "follow your dreams wherever they lead" nor in keeping my feet on the ground to the exclusion of all dreams. It's better to stay in flux between the two poles, adapting as needed to the situation before you.
Wherever you are in your dream chasing, I hope 2020 brings some progress to you. Thanks for reading and making my catalog of dream-chasing part of your life.
A friend of mine was telling me the other day that over a weekend, he and his daughter were sitting on the couch when the movie Dead Poets Society came on. His main reaction to re-watching it was that it hasn't aged well, but his daughter was moved by it. When I think back to when I first watched it, I think I was moved by it, too. Nowadays, my thoughts of the movie tend to be closer to those of Kevin Dettmar or Stephen Marche. It's a lot of schmaltz with a few superficial ideas about the humanities or how literature can affect our lives.
When I first started to study literature in a semi-serious way, I checked out a poetry anthology from the library on base where I was stationed. I have forgotten what anthology it was, but I remember reading a justification of why poetry mattered in the introduction. That essay argued that learning to read poetry well could help us to separate the truly moving from the "mawkish," a word I learned for the first time reading that essay. Its meaning is close to James Joyce's definition of sentiment, which was "unearned emotion." And this really is one of the better uses of not just reading poetry, but of close reading of any kind. People who are easily swayed by emotion can be manipulated, whether it's by the people in their lives or the companies that advertise to them or the governments that ask for their compliance. Learning to read in a way that withholds your emotional responses to characters until they have earned it can also teach you to make real people in your life earn your love and loyalty.
But doesn't this sort of clash with another oft-cited benefit of reading literature, especially literary fiction, which is that it increases our empathy? People who defend the value of reading literature will often cite studies that suggest those who read fiction, especially literary fiction, have a higher level of empathy than those who do not. So how does that square with the idea that literature also teaches us to be more discerning about the things we give our emotion away to? Wouldn't being more discerning mean the claims others make to you emotionally have less sway?
After I started reading seriously, I remember one of the things I lost interest in was country music, which I had only just been introduced to by friends in the Marine Corps. Whether because I really started to know what fake sentiment was or because I wanted to appear to, the emotional register of country music didn't interest me anymore. Some people think reading literary fiction--which, let's face it, is just an industry term for "serious" fiction or maybe even "worthy" fiction or "quality" fiction or something like that--makes people discerning. Some think it makes people into snobs, too good to sing along to "Friends in Low Places" or to enjoy the kinds of movies that don't qualify as "films."
You think you're too good to cry at this, Jake? Do you?
Not too long ago, I dumped all over a story about a young child with a brain tumor, because I thought the story relied on a false appeal to emotion. Was I being too harsh? Have I become so skeptical about the possible existence of bathos I'm now unable to recognize genuine pathos?
There are two dangers for those who read a lot of fiction seriously when it comes to empathy. One is the same one that concerned Saint Augustine: that we will become so enthralled with our vicarious empathy, we fail to care about the real suffering person in the real world. The other is that we can get desensitized to pathos, the way too many action movies can make someone desensitized to violence. Nothing moves us anymore.
For me, I think the latter is a real danger, but it's probably a danger even without being a discerning reader or film viewer or music enthusiast. For everybody, life makes it harder when we're older to become emotional about the same things that make us emotional when we're young. "Win one for the Gipper" might work on college athletes, but it's not likely to work on 35-year-old cornerback just trying to survive one more season. Discerning reader or not, life has a way of taking the sentimentality right out of us.
The ennui we get from excess of empathy from literature is a disease that brings its own cure. By inoculating ourselves early to the false promises of cheap emotion, we help preserve our limited supply of empathy throughout our lifetimes. We also learn to focus our care on proper objects. Literature teaches us to be more disciplined about giving our love away, so it doesn't become too diffuse to have an effect.
We ought to remember that everyone is going to have their own empathy level. Bridge to Terebithia is the saddest thing in the world if you're eleven. It was sad to me when I read it with my son a few years ago, but not as sad as it was to him. We all change as time goes by. It really is okay to be moved by Mr. Keating standing on the desks if you're sixteen. The sort of person who finds that satisfying at sixteen is the same sort of person likely to find it no longer satisfying at forty, because she needs something more enriching and less sweet to keep drawing nourishment from narratives about made-up people.
In other words, yes, literature should make you more discerning the more you read. That might mean you like fewer things. But narrowing your own empathy to a finer point shouldn't mean you lose so much empathy you forget what it's like to experience emotion more broadly. When it starts to do that, I think that's when literature actually becomes destructive, and maybe it's time to take a step back and do something else for a while. There's likely never been a time in history when there is a greater danger of this kind of emotional eating beyond our ability to digest, because we now live in a world where we can stream hours and hours of high-quality fictional stories in our homes. We're building our own empathy-resistant super bugs the way we're creating antibiotic-resistant diseases. Superfluity of emotional response-causing narratives might be making us less empathetic overall.
If it's true that fiction can get around the prejudices people carry with them and subtly change hearts and minds, then our culture now ought to be full of the best, most empathetic people in history. We have more literature available to us than any culture in history, with many of the great works available for free online or on Kindle. There are resources to help understand that literature. And then there's the Golden Age of American Television, with streaming services giving us quality programming to challenge and stretch us. (Yes, there is plenty of good stuff to go along with the straight-to-Netflix Adam Sandler movies.)
When I read a story like "Anyone Can Do It" by Manuel Muñoz, my first thought is whether a short story is actually good for anything in the face of a massive social issue. This is the second year in a row Best American Short Stories included a story from the point-of-view of illegal immigrants. Last year, it was "Everything is Far From Here" by Cristina Henriquez, which I didn't care for, largely because it didn't seem to say anything about the border and incarceration that hasn't already been said a million times. (Incidentally, most of the traffic I get on my site seems to be from students who are assigned Best American Short Stories in school. I can tell which stories are the ones they want to write about by following which of my posts they click on. Henriquez's story is by far the least-clicked link from 2018 BASS.)
This year, "Anyone Can Do It" is a solid piece. It's not clear whether the protagonist is actually illegal. She claims throughout to be from Texas, although, because the characters in the story talk about Texas as though it were still part of Mexico ("the Matamoros side of Texas" as well as the "Texas side of Mexico"), it's not clear that her claim would be recognized by the INS. (And I do mean the INS rather than ICE, because this seems to be set a few decades ago.) What the story does right is take a big social issue like illegal immigration and the socially useful work done by immigrant labor (picking fruit, in this case) and look at it from an intensely personal lens.
Delfina's husband doesn't come back from the orchard one night. Nobody's husbands in the neighborhood do, and everyone is worried they've been rounded up. A woman named Lis from down the street cons Delfina into using the family car to take the two of them to go work in the orchards while Lis's daughter watches Delfina's son. Delfina is suspicious, but eventually gives in. Lis steals Delfina's car, takes their joint daily wages, and runs off.
It's full of suspense for the reader as we watch the bad thing happen to Delfina in slow motion. We listen to her slowly talking herself into it, even though she is right to be suspicious, because what are her options? If she doesn't take a chance with Lis, she won't be able to pay the rent in a few days.
We see the "law" contrasted with "justice," as Delfina's son steals a toy car from a store while she is on the phone with her family. We know he shouldn't have done it, but given his life, who would want him to take it back? Even a reader who has particular political views about illegal immigration shouldn't fail to empathize with her as she struggles to take care of her kid. And the possibility that she might actually be from Texas, meaning she might be legal, means that at least that one objection can be held at bay.
For that matter, because Delfina is cheated by another member of her own community, while the only person who is kind to her is an old white man, a white reader can read the story without feeling personally attacked. So if any story is going to change how a hardcore send-em-all-back immigration hardliner feels, it would be this one.
But I don't think it will. The actual human cost of our current social policy isn't hidden. There are signs all around of what it means. Even if "change" from this story isn't measured in people changing their political views--because I can believe someone might feel genuine empathy and still think it's important to secure our borders--at the very least, the story ought to challenge the comfortable belief that immigrants are lazy and soaking up our social services. The title "Anyone Can Do It" has a double meaning. On the one hand, it's what Lis tells Delfina about work in the orchards, that it's both "easy and hard." Which it is. It's a simple thing to learn, but repeated thousands of times in the heat. The other meaning of "anyone can do it" is what skeptics of immigrant laborers might say, that their lives aren't really that hard, that they've actually got it easy.
Will this story make anyone stop saying that? Because I feel like with the advent of this surplus of great stories our culture is currently experiencing, we're also experiencing a sudden stubborn refusal to be emotionally moved by stories. Maybe we're so used to stories that stimulate empathy in us, we're actually building up an immunity to empathy.
If you're a student looking to this blog for help with meaning or theme or whatever from this story, I doubt you even need my help much. This isn't a difficult story to understand. The meaning is all right there. It's about the tough lessons experience teaches us, about how you can't survive without trusting someone but it's also a great risk, and about the real human cost of abstract political policies. Nobody could read this story and miss those things.
But even if we set the bar incredibly low for what "changing hearts and minds" might look like for a story like this one--if we say, for example, that it's a success if just one person reads it and does not, in his next conversation about immigration, immediately assume the lives of immigrants are easy--will this story succeed? Or is it just written for those who already believe?
It's not the fault of an individual fiction writer that we now live in an age where people can so insulate themselves against beliefs they disagree with that they become impossible to convince. But that's our age. Given how difficult it is to change anyone's mind, what am I actually hoping to accomplish when I write a story? What is anyone?
I don't believe in giving up. We have to keep trying, because to stop trying, to give in to some nihilistic impulse, is to be okay living in a world where nothing we do matters. So people should keep writing, if only to not live in that world. But I don't want to support the false hope that if someone can only write the right story, things might get better. While we have to maybe give ourselves that hope in order to get on with our daily lives, I don't think we can avoid the conclusion that it's probably a fool's hope. It just that it's a fool's hope that's about the only hope we've got.
Of course I realize that fiction writing is making things up, but when I've really been at it a long time at one stretch, it strikes me how absurd a practice it is to keep creating realities for imaginary people. I often treat fiction writing like it's a very serious business. Many writers do. But it's probably healthy to take a step back sometimes and just think about what it is we're doing in a more macro sense. I just spent the last hour imagining the love life of two people who don't exist until I had given one of the two fake people a little tendency to do something that slightly bemused or irritated the other. I'm daydreaming, which is often thought of as one of the biggest wastes of time one can do--so much that we yell at students who are caught doing it when they're supposed to do something else--and then putting the results of that daydreaming on paper.
No activity could be a more confident assertion that life is ephemeral and not something, ultimately, to be taken that seriously. Or, as Vonnegut put it, "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anyone tell you different."
I took a little break after finishing my critique of all the short stories in this year's Puschart Anthology. In my own fiction writing life, it's been more of the same: a bunch of near success, a lot more not-so-near success, also known as failure, and then the questioning of whether I want to keep doing this.
This last question has been a never-ending loop of self-inquisition for me, not just for the last six years I've been seriously writing, but for the twenty years since I first picked English as a major in undergrad. There are so many problems in the world that need addressing, and my life is passing by. I've had a small impact on a few things that maybe made the world better, but all in all, I don't know if I can really justify the resources the world put into making me who am I now when measured against what I've given it back. I believe stories have value and that they can make the world better. But how much better? And is it likely I personally will make the world better through stories?
As I was pondering whether a long-odds attempt for literary relevance is a good use of my remaining time on Earth, Literary Hub just posted an article about the role of fiction in addressing climate change. I think it was meant to be inspirational or enlightening, but it had the opposite effect on me. Climate change is obviously a massive threat to our species, and there aren't really many more critical issues in the world. So if fiction had a role to play for the better, you'd think it ought to have something to do with climate change.
The article is basically a couple of paragraphs of introduction followed by one or two paragraph statements from a number of writers who've recently created literary fiction with climate change as a major element. Here are the five main moments of this article for me:
1) "...smart policy is needed as much as great art" -from the introduction:
In reality, one drop of good policy is worth an ocean of great art, and an ocean of great art is worthless without good policy. They're not equals.
2) Two writers noted that the main thing fiction does well is create empathy, and this might be a way to engage people to do something about climate change. First, empathy might move those who aren't immediately affected to care about those who are. Secondly, empathy might motivate everyone to care more about the world that stands to be lost.
That's true; creating empathy might be what fiction does best, its most redeeming characteristic. But if I'm being honest, I feel a lot more empathy for the species being wiped out when I watch a nature documentary than I do reading a story. Only the best of the genre, like Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence," can create that level of feeling for another species in me.
3) But even if I do feel empathy, so what? One writer wrote rather anemically that "The fact that we can’t put out the fires and lower the seas with words or pictures or music doesn’t mean we’re off the hook for trying." But how is trying to create empathy really trying to save the world? As fate had it, I also just read an article from the Atlantic about Just, a company trying to master lab-grown meat (or, as they would have it, "cultured meat"). If successful, it would eliminate the suffering of millions of mass-grown animals. But the CEO of Just understands that the company's future isn't in satisfying people like me, the guilty carnivores who fail through on-again, off-again vegetarian periods. As CEO Josh Tetrick aptly put it:
“I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, so imagine one of my friends who doesn’t care about any of the shit that I’m doing now,” he said, while perched on a bar stool in front of Just’s test kitchen. This hypothetical friend goes to a Piggly Wiggly to buy burgers. Except—oh wait!—next to the animal-based patties wrapped in clear plastic, he sees a Just burger patty for less money. “That, to me, is what it’s gonna take in order to break the dam of a habit,” Tetrick said.
In other words, without giving a damn about the welfare of animals at all but by just applying good science and business principles to a problem, Just and companies like it might do more for animal welfare than all the activism in the world has ever done.
The article said this company also makes plant-based eggs, which are available at the Silver Diner, a restaurant in my area. I intend to try them soon.
4) "One hard lesson I’ve learned from my fifteen years as a community organizer is that changing the minds of our enemies is less important than giving hope and power to our friends. I’m not writing for the people who are against us. I don’t mean to say that it’s impossible to convince people with great art—other writers might legitimately feel like the role of fiction in the climate change fight is to convince the skeptical—but that’s not my priority." -Sam Miller
What did I draw from that? It merely reinforced for the millionth time how similar the literary community is to the evangelical Christian churches I once attended. "Do I focus on evangelism or on discipleship?" is the Christian version of this issue Miller is addressing. And right now, "if they don't get it, then let God deal with them" is a pretty ubiquitous stance among literary folks. This has made literary gatherings feel fairly insular to me, and even the attempts at whatever the liberal political and literary version of evangelism is seem rather lame.
5) "I doubt that many people in power are poring over speculative literary fiction for inspiration to enact climate change policy. But they should be." -Helen Phillips
Yeah, but the thing is, they don't. Maybe they should be, but they don't. And I have to think that if people have to be shamed to read literary fiction, the fault can't entirely be with the people who don't want to read it.
Yes, fiction can be powerful. In the mosaic of intellectual tiles that have made up who I am, a couple of stories are among the most important pieces. But if fewer and fewer people are going to read what I would call serious fiction, fiction that has the power to be transformative, then the possible space to find a wide enough audience to make fiction matter is shrinking. The odds that fiction will be a useful endeavor--by which I mean an endeavor that makes life better for others--is small. It might be small enough that it just doesn't make sense to keep doing.
Or maybe I'll keep going. But this article wasn't the help it meant to be.
The Best American series of anthologies--which include poetry, short stories, essays, comics, and probably others I don't know about--are openly acknowledged, even by their creators, to be less-than-precisely named. Nobody is claiming that the 20 stories or 75 poems in each anthology each year really comprise the "best" that America has to offer. Even if it were possible to rate a poem or story with a score like you'd get in a video game and then pick the ones with the best scores, the anthologies wouldn't work like that. Rather, the series gives, in the words of Robert Pinsky, speaking about the poetry series, a "vivid snapshot of a what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable."
That phrase "a distinguished poet," or, for Best American Short Stories, "a distinguished fiction writer," is critical. The choice of what to put in the volume is left up to the guest editor of the year. Although the guest editor gets help whittling it down, the final product is a product of what the guest editor values. So it's as much about what the guest editor liked at the time as it is about what was good in American literature at the time.
Nobody wants twenty stories about college kids in New England, or twenty stories about poor kids trying to make it in a third-world slum, so every editor tries to balance it out a bit as far as subject matter. The idea is to have the twenty stories that together make the best collection, not the twenty that are individually the best.
Alexie didn't duck what he did. He called it "a form of nepotism," and justified it by saying he'd seen plenty of similar nepotism from white editors. He also kept the controversial poem in the anthology even after learning what had happened (and, he says, being furious about it). If that's true, I respect Alexie more than I can say for keeping a record of what really happened. However you interpret it, it's a fascinating anecdote of American literature in 2015.
The Gay BASS anthology of 2018
Roxane Gay followed the "I pick what I like" theory of filling out an anthology. Therefore, the collection doesn't have ethnic or gender "balance" like a lot of volumes do. Of the twenty stories, only four are by male writers. Two of those men are white. (If my numbers are off, I apologize. This was all my own Internet research, and I'm going off pictures, names, and assumptions in some cases. It's not like writers list race on their Twitter pages. Also, Rivers Solomon is, I believe, non-binary, so it's four cis-males, fifteen cis-females, and one Rivers Solomon.)
(As a total aside, I have to note Gay's omission of "Cat Person," on of the most talked-about short stories in years. It was published at the right time to make this year's BASS, but Gay has said before she disliked the story, partly because of its too-frequent fat shaming. She was really following what moved her personally.)
Harold Bloom's unforgettable introduction to the Best American Poetry 1988-1997 edition
Gay's gender and ethnic anthology choices immediately took me back to the introduction Harold Bloom wrote to the Best American Poetry series' "best of the best" book from 1997, after it had been putting out yearly best-of anthologies for ten years. (BASS is a lot older than BAP.) It's Bloom in a nutshell: exasperating, lucid, erudite, anachronistic, codgerly, and wrong in all the right ways. When I read it, I couldn't believe the incredible "fuck you" he was giving to the people who gave him the job; he essentially said, "I picked the best I could find out of what they gave me to pick from, but American poetry will probably die before long, and only a few of these are even close to the best poetry I've ever read."
He started his introduction with a quote from Thucydides: "They have the numbers, we, the heights." By "we," he meant the scholars who still thought art was about aesthetics, meaning what was good, beautiful, and perceptive. By "they," he meant those whose thought art was about politics and the dull sub-categories of politics like gender, sexual orientation, etc. His immediate venom in that introduction was aimed at the 1996 Best American Poetry volume, from which he did not pick one poem for his ten-year wrap-up. He thought nearly all the poems in it were terrible. He claimed guest editor Adrienne Rich had followed "the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet."
Bloom had a more enduring irritant than the 1996 BAP in mind, though, and he swept up his vitriol against it along with ranting at Rich's choices. He was taking shots at cultural shifts in American universities, their obsession with the various programs of cultural "studies": gender, race, orientation, etc. He saw the origin of this shift at the university as "cultural guilt," a phrase that isn't too far away in terminology or sentiment from the more popularly used "white guilt."
The focus on "cultural criticism" had weakened the ability to carry out literary criticism. Good readers were dying, and, Bloom suspected, good poetry would soon follow.
I don't know if good poetry has died, but Bloom was certainly prophetic about some things. Mainly, he was correct that the political focus on college campuses had (and still has) done little to change the political culture outside those campuses. Republicans and Democrats continue on with their political charade, capitalism continues apace, the counsels of the powerful are not troubled--then in 1997 and now.
Bloom and those who followed him have been criticized along the usual lines: there is no such thing as apolitical art, even to be apolitical is itself a political position, etc. But I think there is a more direct critique of Bloom one could make, one that is more applicable to a discussion of the 2018 BASS put together by Roxane Gay.
Would BASS 2018 have made Bloom happy, or would it have made him look like this?
Good art and genius art
Bloom's contention was that Rich, in her choice to put identity issues first, had picked bad poems. I have no opinion on the 1996 BAP Rich put together, but I have an opinion on the 2018 BASS. Clearly, Gay was motivated even more than most editors by concerns centering on the gender, sexual orientation, race, and gender identity (a thing that had barely entered Bloom's consciousness in 1997) of the writers. One could allow that Gay was mostly just picking what interested her, and as a black, feminist, bisexual woman, what she liked reflected those interests, not a conscious decision to have any particular array of writers. But even accounting for that, there was probably some "balancing" that went on. There was still a story from a Korean-American perspective and one from a Chinese-American perspective. There were a couple of stories about Latinos. There was a story about a gay man. It had some of what is typically referred to as "balance," an attempt to have appropriate numerical diversity based on categories of identity. But it was balance on Gay's terms.
Here's the thing about that balance, though. Bloom thought Rich's choices were identity-based and bad. Gay's were identity-based and excellent. What does this do to Bloom's idea that "the school of resentment" would destroy perceptive works of art when the most identity-based collection I've ever seen was also the best BASS I've read in six years?
It wasn't uniformly excellent, but its heights were higher and there were far fewer lows than in past collections. The lowest points, interestingly, were the two white men included in the collection. There's something perfidious going on with the way men are writing these days. Men seem to be encouraged to produce works about men behaving badly, what's called "toxic masculinity" nowadays. These works tend to be gritty and violent and have characters who are not really like most men I know.
I've written my share of stories with men and violence in them. "Brokedick" was about young men who join the Marine Corps to prove their manhood, and how a man's sense of his own fitness as a man can depend on physical factors, some of which he can't even control. I wrote "What Every Parent Should Know About Head Injuries in High School Sports" (maybe the bleakest story I ever wrote) full of violent, racist football fans. But I tried to tell the whole story about toxic masculinity. I was aiming for what Bloom said about Shakespeare: "his men and women never invite us to believe that when we know the worst about them, then we know exactly who they are."
The fact is that when you're threatened by a violent man, you want another man capable of being violent more effectively to stop him. Being ready to deal that violence--which, like it or not, men are still rewarded for being able to do and disrespected for not being able to do--requires a difficult balancing act, if you intend to also live as a functioning member of an enlightened society. You have to keep a wild animal alive inside you, but keep it caged until needed. It's not easy to do, and men fail at it. But the picture we're getting isn't really the balanced and nuanced picture of maleness I'd expect from perceptive writers. In fact, it's women who are writing more memorable male characters than men, because men are expected to write their men as so appallingly bad.
Aside from that, though, the 2018 BASS is excellent. I've already cited the best works from it in my last twenty-two posts. Clearly, there is a problem in Bloom's contention that merely focusing on cultural criticism instead of literary criticism will weaken the aesthetic excellence, or "perceptiveness," of a work.
But there may be a critique of Bloom's that is worth considering here in 2018. His real concern was that genius--inexplicable, mind-bending genius--would disappear when poets had to bend to a particular political ideology. Poets were meant to be "liberating gods," those who "are free throughout the world." The 2018 BASS is full of very good stories, but all but one of them--Emma Cline's "Los Angeles"--are somewhat safe in their political convictions. They are the sorts of stories, with the sorts of sensitivities and underlying political convictions, for which literary fiction writers are rewarded nowadays. With literary fiction being closely tied to universities and their writing programs, the politics of those universities have spilled over into serious writing in America. It's hard to imagine someone with openly conservative political ideology in his work being printed in a BASS anthology. I often think Cormac McCarthy only gets away with the conservative nature of some of his work because it's mistaken for being a commentary on toxic masculinity rather than being a commentary on an effete culture that scolds masculinity on the one hand and refuses to stand up to its worst forms on the other.
The two most truly mind-blowing short stories in BASS since 2013--as long as I have been reading it--were Joshua Ferris's "The Breeze" and Elizabeth McCracken's "Thunderstruck." Neither was political. Writers should, of course, never run from writing about politics. But it can't be the only thing we have to talk about, either.
Racism, sexism, bigotry--these are all terrible evils. But none is the main evil. These are all just tools of the main evil, which is something unspeakable and more terrible than political works could ever hint at. The job of art is to uncover this unspeakable thing, to speak to it in the heart of people and somehow, implausibly, to charm it out of them. Until it's been driven from all of us, politics is just a delaying action, a game of inches gained and inches lost.
Anis Shivani wrote that competence has killed the American short story. It has led, as he put it, to stories "so very good, they're intolerably bad." The short stories of BASS 2018 are very good. But in some ways, they might be like what Bloom saw in cultural studies: a seemingly rational response to the political realities of the moment that somehow doesn't correct those political realities at all.
If Jamel Brinkley and Danielle Evans and Jacob Guajardo and Tea Obreht never move beyond writing the kinds of stories that are in BASS 2018, I'll still read them. They're that good. I hope these writers turn their energies, eventually, to more enduring themes, themes that will be recognized in fifty years or five hundred. There were already hopes in BASS 2018 of breaking out: Emma Cline wrote a political story, but a daring one that flirted with heresy within the liberal enclave of literary fiction; Kristen Iskandrian and Amy Silverberg wrote classic coming-of-age stories. Dina Nayeri managed to write a story about bigger themes than America of the moment, in spite of writing a novel very much about America at the moment.
Bloom's worries for the future were foolish and unfounded in some ways, but also troublingly prescient. America's best literary minds are sometimes too focused on fighting rear-guard actions against the political issues of the day, but because literature is a slow process in a world where we all talk about the Tweet of the day, it is not a very effective tool right now in leading the struggle. It is producing good, but not always genius, work. If I have hope, though, it's that the work is so good, I believe the best minds in American literature today will find a way to transcend the issues of the moment and produce enduring works the world will read centuries from now with profit.
There are two things about my life I've beat to death on this blog: that I used to be a rather devout evangelical Christian, and that when I stopped believing, literature partly filled the gap in my life where Christianity used to be. I ask a lot of literature. So I was intrigued by an essay that appeared on Lithub last week by Rachel Vorona Cote, who confessed to a similar habit. As she put it in her essay ""The Complicated Comforts of Marilynne Robinson,": "I have a nasty habit of asking too much from books."
Her essay is a personal look at her own pain and an attempt to use literature to overcome it. In late 2017, she was discouraged by the first year of Trump's presidency and personally undone by her mother's death. She was in a place where people often turn to religion, but knowing ahead of time from personal experience that heading to church would end up fruitless, she was looking around for something religion-like to fill the void.
Gilead
She tried Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. It is a very well-regarded novel about an aging Congregationalist minister, John Ames. I read it last year. Almost nothing happens in it in the present. There is some action that takes place in flashback, but much of the action in the novel gets sidetracked by Ames' own theological musings. Still, it's not like being preached to for the length of the novel. Ames, in fact, is a bit too introspective to be a fire-and-brimstone preacher. In one of the few passages I highlighted from the book, he says of himself that "...there is tendency in my thinking, for the opposed sides of a question to cancel each other more or less....If I put my thinking down on paper perhaps I can think more rigorously. Where a resolution is necessary it must also be possible."
But Ames never really quite succeeds in achieving his resolution. The conflict of the book, if it can even be called that, is that Ames is concerned that the ne'er-do-well son of his lifelong best friend is going to try to move in and marry his much younger wife when Ames dies. But the conflict more or less takes care of itself.
Cote found comfort in reading the book. She had hoped that Robinson could be her Virgil, "a woman of faith to guide me through her theological web--and who could believe in my stead what I feared couldn't possibly be true. That I would find my mother again. That she had not been obliterated by death. That our shattered country might stumble onto a path of progress, however slow and aching."
Although Ames asserts that the "purpose of a prophet" is to "find meaning in trouble," you won't find that meaning explicitly stated in Gilead. I found reading it to be akin to looking at a painting for an extended period of time. I was left more with a continuous mood or feeling than with what you might call a discursive kind of impression.
This was enough for Cote, at least mostly:
"Gilead could not entirely soothe my despondence: it couldn’t assure me that Mom was peeping into my apartment’s darkened windows, or directing her love-filled gaze at Dad while he slept. It couldn’t even convince me that her soul awaited mine in some obscure afterlife. But John Ames would have believed this to be the case, and somehow, that was enough for me."
She found that simply vicariously huffing off the faith fumes of someone else was close enough to the experience itself to bring comfort. She read another Robinson novel, Housekeeping, which I have not read. But then, she did something I find telling: she read a book of essays by Robinson. As Cote put it, she was hungering "for a more explicit manifesto." She had been comforted by living in Ames' head for a bit, but she was looking for something that offered a less poetic sense of meaning here in the modern world.
But Robinson's refusal to be more certain of herself in her non-fiction is a double-edged sword for Cote. Robinson is not an agitator; she is too circumspect about her own conclusions for that. On the one hand, this is the hallmark of a rational thinker, but on the other hand, too much self-circumspection can lead to inaction.
It's a familiar conundrum for liberals. Cote nicely sums up this conundrum in the concluding paragraphs:
If Robinson’s nonfiction feels insufficient in the face of a political crisis, it’s because certitude seems foolhardy, and a bit smug. The agnosticism that plagues me in mourning strikes me as productive, even necessary in the political sphere. We do not have the luxury of always being sure, especially when we are a solitary voice within a purportedly democratic cacophony. To achieve anything worthwhile we must writhe and grapple like blind animals in a net, stumbling upon deliverance without the satisfaction of knowing it’s within our reach.
Still, too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy...
Truth and Comfort
"Too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy?" Tell me about it. Agnosticism seems to me to be the most intellectually honest position to take, but the thing about agnosticism is that its adherents are, well, agnostic. Which doesn't mean, of course, that they are "indifferent," as many people are now starting to use the word. It means they just don't know what's right. An agnostic can look at the faith of a true believer and be genuinely jealous. Look how that person seems filled with certainty. Look how much she accomplishes. I wish I could believe like she does.
I don't think it was wrong of Cote to expect a lot from a book. I keep reading because I am constantly hoping I will find something that can help me resolve my honest uncertainty with my desire to be more certain. But I'm not sure Gilead is the right place to look. Musicians and prophets may both have been inspired by the gods, but they bring different things. Musicians--and Gilead is more like music than a sermon--bring comfort. Prophets bring truth that demands action.
There's nothing wrong with comfort, but even an agnostic like me can see the wisdom in C.S. Lewis's warning: "If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth--only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair." That's the reason Cote found herself wanting to read non-fiction: she wanted truth.
In fact, I'd say that it's only because Cote was steadfast in wanting truth that she found any comfort in Robinson at all. It wasn't a deep and satisfying comfort, but it was a small comfort. It was enough to keep going on. And maybe that's the most an intellectually honest person will ever get. The most you can hope for is to string together enough moments of hard-won comfort until you reach a point, like John Ames did, where you live long enough "to outlast any sense of grievance you may acquire."
There's an old Monty Python bit about an agnostic who is protesting the racket coming from church bells. The punch line, after the agnostic finally achieves his end, is this: "I've always said there's nothing an agnostic can't do if he really doesn't know whether he believes in anything or not."
I may have objected to a joke like this at one point. I'm an agnostic, in the sense that I don't believe any religion on Earth has a convincing enough story I'm willing to overrule my skepticism and accept it. But I wouldn't say that equates to not believing in anything. That's the theist's absolutism that without God nothing means anything, not mine.
But the longer I'm alive, the more I wonder if I'll ever really be able to believe in something again, at least enough to be moved to meaningful action by it. I suppose I am moved enough by the feeling of responsibility to my family that I am willing to work a lot every week. I even put a fair amount of effort into it. So I guess I'm moved to do what nearly every other human on Earth does and work for a living. But beyond that?
If I try to come up with ideas I believe in without reservation, I can only come up with one: I believe strongly that the world is complicated and most simple answers are probably wrong. There may be elegant answers that take something complex and express it simply, but if the underlying idea is actually simple, it's probably wrong. That's it. That's all I've got.
Everything else is just things I'm sure I don't believe, followed by a lot more stuff I'm uncertain about. I know I don't believe that any of the main sects/denominations of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism offer deeply true explanations of the world. But that's just an affirmed non-belief, not an affirmative belief in something.
Lately, I've been reading Fashionable Nonsense by the physicists Alan Sokol and Jean Bricmont. It's about the way French thinkers of the 60s to the 90s who are roughly called "post-structuralist" or "post-modern," and later their followers, abused science and math concepts in order to add authority to otherwise nonsensical theories.
The "nonsense" they were attacking is no longer fashionable--the book is twenty years old--but it was still quite influential nonsense when I was an undergrad and grad student in literature in the late nineties and early aughts. I could never quite understand what the philosophers were saying. I used to credit that to my being stupid, but I'm now relatively certain that there really wasn't much there to understand, and that's what was so difficult about it. I don't think anyone else--the professors included--really knew what the hell Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and so on were saying. They just learned key phrases and would repeat them at what seemed like the right moments--much like Sokol and Bricmont claim that these same philosophers did with math and science.
The writers of Fashionable Nonsense seem to believe these thinkers were the cause of a great deal of epistemological relativism, the notion that one way of explaining things or understanding things is as good as another. I don't know if this weird blend of linguistic theory, sham psychology, abused science, and erudite white noise was every really influential enough outside of the literary theory crowds I hung with back then to effect any real change in the culture at large, but it was certainly influential to me. Having ditched Christianity in my early twenties, finally gotten out of the Marine Corps--another cult of sorts--a few years after that, I was anxious to see what college had to show me. The best it had was these charlatans, whose message, as best I could make it out, was that everything was meaningless. The best you could say about the attempt to create meaning was that it was entertaining to watch people try to make meaning stick and then fail at it.
This intellectual nihilism flew in the face of everything that the centuries before had been about. Ever since the Enlightenment, Western intellectuals had believed in their ability to improve their understanding and the world around them through the application of human reason. I understand that--to use the general explanation of how these theories came about-- Europe grew weary of intellectual optimism after a few world wars built upon a positivism about the meanings of things nearly killed everyone. But to date, there really has been nothing that has come after de-constructionism, no reconstructive philosophy. All we've done is keep applying a new post- suffix: Post-post-post modernity.
As a writer, if I don't have some animus driving what I write, it's all just tricks and workshop hocus-pocus putting together things that seem to have what a story should have. It's achieving all the formal, external characteristics of story without any of the heart of it. Stories can certainly be satirical; they can serve to tear down what needs to go. They have also, though, been the mythos that energized civilizations, that caused them to work and explore and create and fight and do all the good and bad things that civilizations do. I don't see much of that in the stories I read today. The world is too much with us, and our ambition is much too small.
I say this as an inveterate deconstructionist. It's not unusual for me to play the role of iconoclast in the social settings I inhabit. And I don't always have to have the answer. I don't need to know how to cook a steak well to know my steak tastes like shit, to use a metaphor a friend of mine often cites. But once in a while, I ought to be ready to offer a vision of what I want more of rather than just what I want less of.
My brother, a lawyer in the Air Force, recently wrote a piece for the War College entitled "Hope Isn't A Strategy, It's the Only Strategy." My brother has apparently been in one too many meetings where someone wrote off an idea that didn't have every base covered ahead of time by saying "hope is not a strategy." My brother points out that while it is of course important to plan, waiting for a perfect plan before acting just prevents action indefinitely. I read a copy of it before he published it, and it influenced my thinking when I wrote about liberal pessimism last week.
As a writer, I don't have to know everything about the universe to have something worth writing about. There can be a certain ad hoc nature to truth. It can be something you find out as you go. That's a lot different than the intellectual certainty that pre-dated the deconstructionists. It's more difficult to obtain. But accepting that truth on my terms in more difficult than I thought it would be once upon a time doesn't mean it's not there. Some things, you figure out beforehand. Others, you jump, and you figure out on the way down how you're going to land.
Parachute or pancake, at least you've done something. And it's a lot more fun believing you might be able to solve the riddle and failing than just giving up trying.
There is a South Park episode where Randy Marsh gets obsessed with cooking shows and decides to dedicate his life to becoming a great chef. He quits his job and dedicates himself to the task. This drives his wife crazy, but she is unable to change his attitude until finally, to make a long story short, she gives him an "old fashioned" (hand job), and he concludes that "cooking is dumb" and goes back to life as before.
That's how I feel right now about writing literary fiction. I've given most of the last four years to it, not to mention all that time in grad school, and now, I just don't see what I saw in it. I've read every short story in the Pushcart and Best American Short Stories Anthologies for the last five years. I've read the Pulitzer-winning novels from that time, too. None of them has really changed my life the way I thought great literature should. Meanwhile, I continue to write stories that I think are getting better, but I'm having more trouble getting them published than I did a few years ago. Clearly, my ideas about what makes something worth reading do not match what the industry thinks makes something worth reading.
I was going to try to keep going for a full five years, but that just seems like a decision based entirely on the number of fingers on the human hand. I already know this isn't for me. I've done well enough I don't have to feel like I'm quitting because I just suck. But I also know I don't want to keep going forward. It's a good time to quit.
So what's next for me? I'm going to focus more on my day job as a translator. I'm going to try some different kinds of literature, probably science fiction to start with. I'm also going to read more non-fiction. I may take some courses in topics I feel stupid in, mostly information technology stuff. I don't know how to code in a single computer language. I've never taken calculus. These seem like things I ought to remedy.
I'll never stop writing. It's too much a part of how I figure things out for myself. But I think I'd like to write more about politics, religion, and other big-idea type stuff than just about writing. That's why I was interested in fiction in the first place. I don't know if I ought to start another blog, since the new one wouldn't be about writing, or just keep going on here and change the focus. Or maybe not write a blog at all, since blogs are so ten years ago that hardly anyone reads them.
I have found that blogging has been useful to me, personally, even if it's been of no use to anyone else. I see now why people used to keep journals. Writing this journal in public has been good enough for me that I will probably keep doing it in one form or another.
The show Black Mirror is a little bit hit-or-miss to me, but when it hits, sometimes it just crushes it. The premises of some shows are so compelling, I had my first long conversation about one of the episodes before I'd even seen it. Just the description of it was enough to draw me in.
Jump off here if you've never seen the show
Anyone who's seen the pilot episode will probably remember it forever. In it, the British Prime Minister is awakened to hear some shocking news: someone has kidnapped a popular young princess, and is threatening to kill her unless the Prime Minister has sex with a pig that same day and broadcasts the act live on television for the world to see. There are technical provisions in place that prevent faking the act.
There is a provision that makes it less preposterous: The Prime Minister can wear a condom.
A friend of mine told me this premise in a bar one night to entice me to watch the show (it worked), and we spent the next two hours dissecting this thought experiment. We added wrinkles to it: what if, instead of a princess, she's a poor woman with kids? What if it's ten people whose lives are at stake instead of one? Fifty? A hundred? A million? What if it's a school full of kids?
My friend tended toward the "no negotiations with people who make me fuck pigs" end of the spectrum. I had to add a lot of people with lives hanging in the balance before he would consider carnal knowledge of a pig. (I might claim some hypocrisy here. He loves bacon.)
The show itself isn't really about the morality of what the right decision is. It's more about the media and how media-driven public perceptions can change in an instant and determine what politicians do. At the beginning of the day, the public supports the Prime Minister's decision not to pork the pork, but after an effort to trick the kidnapper fails and the princess pays the price, the same public begins to demand he do it. The Prime Minister ultimately bows to public pressure and does the deed, but he does it so save his political career, not to save the woman. But I didn't know all this when talking about it in the bar with my friend, so we treated it like it was more or less an ethics problem: given the situation--hostage, demand, pig--what is the right course of action for the Prime Minister? I've been thinking this over for almost a year, now, and I'm still not sure what the right answer is.
Turns out, The University of Alabama has been running an advanced program in theoretical ethics for decades.
The no argument
My friend had some good reasons to say "no" other than just not wanting to do it. First, how do you know that anyone sick enough to come up with this plan would actually release the princess? But more to the point, let's say you do what the pig perverts ask and they do release the girl. You've saved her life, but what if there are other people who then try the same thing? Now, ransoming humiliation out of politicians can become an easy way to get any politician with an agenda you dislike out of politics. You've opened the floodgates to all kinds of evil.
The yes argument
I wanted to agree and vote no on this, but there was something that didn't sit right with me. Try changing a few parts of the situation, and you might come up with a different conclusion:
-What if, instead of schtooping a swine, the kidnappers say you must give up your life in her place? You must drink poison on national television or the woman will die with suffering. Wouldn't most people say that yes, one ought to sacrifice oneself for another? Or at least that doing so would be noble? So why is it noble to give your life to save another, but not to just be humiliated to save someone? Does pride mean more than life?
-What if it's not the Prime Minister being asked? What if it's just some random schmo, and the kidnappers have picked him as the patsy at random from a phone book? They just want to humiliate a random person. What should he do?
-What if there were no public shame element to it? Let's pretend a woman has a rare form of cancer, and scientists have discovered that pigs produce a chemical that defeats the cancer. However, they only produce it when a human male has sex with them, and so far, the hospital hasn't found any volunteers. So there are no cameras and no agendas--just the need to have intercourse with a pig to save a life.
-Even my friend had to admit that the argument for sexing Sooey became stronger when you started adding victims, especially if the victims were children. This, of course, brings about the difficult question of how many people become enough to fuck a pig and how many is few enough to not do it.
I couldn't help feeling there was a good moral argument that at least the first time this happens, the morally correct action is to take whatever drugs you need to take so you aren't in your mind and your equipment works, and to fuck the pig.
Okay, I might have been encouraged to take this position because every time I said, "I think you've got to fuck the pig" in that bar, I enjoyed watching the bartender who was eavesdropping on us shake his head. But I don't think I was only ready to say there was a good argument for banging the bacon because it got a rise out of the bartender; I think that it might actually be the right thing to do. Snort coke, take an entire bottle of Viagra, hire porn stars to whisper in your ear, and do the deed. After that, resign your post in politics and retire to a monastery somewhere to live our the rest of your life.
Two caveats: 1) Only the first person this happens to should comply. Once is noble sacrifice. Twice is inviting an outbreak of copycat crimes. (And actually, now that Black Mirror has done this idea, I don't think anyone in the real world ought to go along with it. It could very easily become a popular form of criminal mischief, like an extreme form of SWATing.) 2) Nobody can blame you if you say no. If the kidnapper's requirement was to stab yourself in the eyeball, I don't think I could make myself do that, either. How do you overcome the body's instinct not to do some things? I don't know if all the drugs in the world could get me to do it. Even if I could bring myself to try, I'd probably fail.
More important than the yes or no
The bigger deal to me as a writer is that I can't remember having had that animated and engaged a conversation about a "literary" story in a long time. Literary fiction seems to feel that setting up a moral choice that a character must make where there are competing moral claims is beneath it somehow. That's for science fiction. It's too plot-based. Yet people love reading for these reasons. Moreover, it's clear to me what the social value is of a story meant to engender a debate over the right or wrong path in a certain situation. I'm not always sure what the social value of literary fiction is. Lit fic seems to produce a million versions of the same story, where we open a window into the psyche of a character faced with a private form of crisis, and we try to convincingly render the psychological process in the character that leads to some kind of internal change. It sometimes feels like literary fiction is the same story over and over, just with a never-ending quest to find an overlooked type of character to tell it about and a new form to fit the story into.
I've never really read sci-fi, unless you count Vonnegut. I took a course in high school on sci-fi and fantasy, where I read a lot of the best-known sci-fi short stories from a hundred years ago when I was a teenager. Since then, I've never really examined the genre. I'm rethinking this. I've written before that I'm not totally sure literary fiction is the right genre for me. All the stories I've written in the last five years have been lit fic, but maybe it's time to change that. Maybe this is the year where I take a break from the road I've been on, read some new stuff and re-think what I want to do with writing. It makes sense that I would try to write the kinds of stories I myself find compelling.
...such a degree
of unmingled good was expected as it was impossible to realize. If the
Revolution had been in every respect prosperous, then misrule and
superstition would lose half their claims to our abhorrence, as fetters
which the captive can unlock with the slightest motion of his fingers, and
which do not eat with poisonous rust into the soul. The revulsion
occasioned by the atrocities of the demagogues and the
reestablishment of successive tyrannies in France was terrible, and
felt in the remotest corner of the civilized world. Could they listen to
the plea of reason who had groaned under the calamities of a social state,
according to the provisions of which one man riots in luxury whilst
another famishes for want of bread? Can he who the day
before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded,
forbearing, and independent? This is the consequence of the habits of a
state of society to be produced by resolute perseverance and indefatigable
hope, and long-suffering and long-believing courage, and the systematic
efforts of generations of men of intellect and virtue.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, from the preface to "The Revolt of Islam"
...our condition is not a mistake.... (W)e don’t need to run around
pretending, as though there’s some great mystery going on—it’s not. If
an alien came to planet Earth and looked at the socioeconomic statistics
for African Americans and then measured that against the history and
the policies of this country, there would really be no surprises about
who we are and where we are.
-Ta-Nehisi Coates
I've been doing a fair amount of writing about race on this blog in the last year. From a business perspective, this is probably a disastrous decision. I'm a struggling part-time writer trying to get myself noticed. Writing about race is more likely to alienate people than it is to grow an audience. It's especially perilous for me as a white male writer to talk about race, because the statements of white writers are--not without good reason--looked upon with a certain a priori suspicion.
The best strategies I could follow from a business model perspective if I wanted to discuss race would be one of two courses: First, I could ape the idioms of the dominant liberal discourse on race, nod my head at ideas like white privilege and whitesplaining, and then generally avoid going too deep into it after that. Race is a dangerous subject, so it's best to just prove you know the right things to say and then move on. Secondly, I could throw my lot in with the self-described mavericks, the Breitbart crowd who think they're telling you the truth about race that the liberal establishment doesn't want you to hear.
I don't think either course is honest.
What I believe about where we are
I agree with Coates that the conditions of black Americans today are not an accident. They are the result of systemic choices over hundreds of years. Those choices include slavery and Jim Crow, but they also include more recent choices like redlining, the War on Drugs and how criminal justice is handled.
To say these things happened long enough ago that their effect should no longer be as great as it is today is to ignore how profoundly pernicious those choices were, up until how recently they have played a role, and how long-term the generational effects of these things can be. Conservatives argue, rightly, for the primal importance in society of family. Slaves were intentionally kept from having normal patterns of family life. At the end of slavery, former slaves weren't able to simply go back to their wives and children and start to rebuild a life as free folk. Many slaves had no idea who their parents were. The fact that former slaves didn't bounce right back after slavery doesn't prove that there is something wrong with African-Americans. It proves how terrible slavery was.
Normal family life would have taken generations to regain after slavery even in a best-case scenario. As I hope everyone knows, post-bellum black families did not face a best-case scenario. In the South, there was Jim Crow and predatory economic conditions for black families. Even in the North, there was separate-but-unequal segregation.
Black families recovered, albeit unevenly, over time. Even in two-parent families, though, there were problems most white families didn't face. Most black women worked long hours, making them unable to supervise the children. (Feminism's history of the last 50 years was altered by the realization that the demand for the right of women to work was a strange request if feminism was going to include women of color, who might have liked the ability not to work so much.)
In the last fifty years, although the legal standing of black Americans has largely been set right, there have been other policies that have disproportionately hurt black families. The War on Drugs has been the main one. Mrs. Heretic, as I've mentioned before, taught in Baltimore City Schools for about five years. Almost none of her kids were from families with two parents or guardians. The main reason was incarceration, followed closely by death from drugs, then death from gun violence, then AIDS, then diabetes, then the rest of the other black killers.
The main criticism of capitalism is that it's a race in which once you fall behind, it becomes exponentially more difficult to catch up. Black Americans have been shoved back by policy over and over. Each time they try to catch up, but America is a hard place in which to catch up. The tendency is actually not catching up: poor people tend to raise poor kids, and rich people raise rich kids.
There is a strange argument made by the alt-right crowd that when liberals assert there is a reason why black Americans struggle to catch up, this amounts to a kind of racism. The claim is that we liberals think blacks are fundamentally flawed and need help to catch up. This is a bizarre argument. Slavery is bad. Legal discrimination is bad. They harm their victims irreparably, and those effects are felt generationally. Just because I don't think black people are magic and super-human and immune to the effects of bad policy doesn't mean I think they're inferior. I think they're like everyone else. I think they're like me, or I'm like them. If I'd been born under different circumstances, I'd be a different person.
What I believe about what to do about it
I didn't blog for almost all of 2016. What started me going again was the election of Donald Trump. Like so many liberals, I was suddenly thrust into a place where I went from the rhetoric of being alarmed to being actually terrified. There was something obviously different about Trump's election from anything I'd ever seen in American politics. Vox writer German Lopez summarized a year's worth of study of the election by telling us what we kind of knew: the main factor behind Trump's win was racial resentment. Not kitchen table table issues. Not middle-class, middle-America-being-ignored issues. Racial resentment. Lopez defined racial resentment as “a moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self-reliance.”
It might seem like the thing to do in the face of this moral resentment is to confront it, to decry it and those who espouse it, from the rooftops. Here, I'd like to introduce a principle of political discourse I term "The Jack Sparrow Principle of Political Pragmatism":
It's hard to believe now, four movies later, that this series was once so much fun and Jack Sparrow seemed full of so much wisdom.
The fact that so many white people voted for Trump out of a sense that things they believed in were under attack is a raw fact we have to deal with. We can draw our sword on it and demand justice out of our own sense of righteousness, but that won't do any good. Lopez notes that it is possible to reach out to Trump voters. While one doesn't have to condone racism to do it, it has to be done in an empathetic way. As Lopez developed more fully elsewhere, calling people racist is not an effective way to reduce racial bias.
This is one reason why I consider writing stories to be my main project. Stories done well increase empathy. I could have browbeaten those people I knew who were criticizing the kids in the streets with their low-hanging pants tearing up their own neighborhoods during the Baltimore riots. Or, I could write a story, based very loosely on one of Mrs. Heretic's students, about what one young man's life was like during the riots. (That's "A Cinnabon at Mondawmin, the second story in my collection of stories from this year.)
Spike Lee's Chiraq or Aziz Anzari's Master of None deal with the very painful experiences of marginalized people. I never felt while watching either that I was being attacked. Chiraq is dealing with the very worst consequences of systemic racism in America, but I never felt that its point was anything except to tell the story of the people living in it. Ansari occasionally takes swipes at white folks. Once, while on an Internet-appointed first date, he mentions that black women and Asian men get the least views on dating websites. After adding that white people tend to get the most views, Anzari jokes that, "Well, thank God white people are finally getting a break in something." I didn't feel in any way offended by that. It was an earned joke at that point, because we'd seen enough of Anzari's life to know that:1) It was a joke, and 2) Even though he partly meant it, he had some reason for the frustration in it. One of the best characters on that show is a big, dopey white guy named Arnold that Ansari's character is obviously very close to. The show celebrates more than it scolds, and it works for that reason.
We can scream ourselves hoarse at the other side and pat ourselves on the back for our moral righteousness. But if it's not effective, what have you accomplished? In any event, the country is something like a big boat, and we're stuck in it with all those people who voted for Trump. So we can't start a riot with them without sinking ourselves.
Our role in this
Lopez's article points out that Trump channeled white angst in a way that neither Romney nor McCain did. One obvious reason why is that neither Romney nor McCain really tried. But there were other candidates available to the Republican Party in those years who would have been happy to try what Trump did. They didn't get the nomination. I have to believe that Trump rose not just because of his outsider persona, not just because Clinton was a flawed candidate, but because white feelings about race in America changed between 2008 and 2016. That is, not only did Trump do more to capitalize on racial resentment more than earlier Republican candidates, but there was more racial resentment in America on which to capitalize.
There are a lot of reasons why this resentment might have grown. Certainly, the organization of the alt-right has allowed it to get its message out more effectively. So race-baiters have grown through their own grass-roots movements, to some extent. I would like to submit, though, that we liberals who use a particular manner of speaking about race are also one of those reasons. Over the past decade, we have evolved a discourse that comes off as shrill. I do not mean to suggest that this was decisive or the main reason for the growth of racial resentment, but I believe it is a factor. I believe by changing it, we can help to shrink racial resentment.
Plea for an open mind
Before I start my list of changes I'd like to see in liberal rhetoric that I think might help to reverse the growth of white racial resentment, I'd like to say that I already know two objections. One is that I'm "blaming the victim," saying that the oppressed bear the blame for demanding their rights too directly from the oppressor. It's a fair objection, but I think it's important to keep in mind that many of the racial issues discussed in the public sphere now are more akin to the oppressor unknowingly stepping on the foot of the oppressed than knowingly stepping on the neck. There is oppression, but it takes a few steps of explanation to show how. Yes, the oppressor shouldn't be such a clod and should realize what he's doing. But he doesn't. So here's how to talk to him.
It's like if your neighbor's landscaping is causing flooding on your property. You don't storm over there demanding changes. You explain why you think your problem is caused by your neighbor. You provide expert testimony from the flood mitigation guy you brought to your house to fix the problem, because you're neighbor's immediate reaction is going to be to think you're wrong. If you're right, that means he has to do work and spend money, and that means you've got to get past the instinctive urge to deny the facts. So you ask, not demand, that your neighbor make changes. You offer to help if you can. The fact is, the law might not necessarily demand that your neighbor make the changes you want. It's the decent thing to do, but it might not be required. So it's better to appeal to his better side rather than go in guns blazing. So if I suggest that liberals can change their language and get better results, that's not to excuse bad behavior. It's simply to suggest a more effective means of asking your neighbor to do right by you.
Secondly, one might object that I'm advocating respectability politics, or going out of the way to avoid confronting American racism and upsetting whites. Again, this is a fair concern. The line between moral cowardice and pragmatism can be a thin one, and the latter can be used to justify the former. And it does seem like every time I want to defend white middle America, some guy I know on Facebook who fits that demographic posts something that is unambiguously racist. Something like this:
About 500 dogs showed up at my window the moment I selected this photo for my blog.
It's not just my liberal imagination making this racist; it's racist. (Part of me wonders if it's one of those things posted by liberals posing as Conservatives meant to make Conservatives look stupid by exaggerating the racism. The misspelling makes it suspicious to me. But I'm sure the guy who posted it meant it without irony.)
But what should my response be? I could unfriend the guy in a righteous huff, but that will make no difference to his life, and then there'd be one less social media contact likely to question his ideology. I've tried different approaches to these things with varying degrees of success, but one thing I don't do is tell him that either the post or he himself are racist without at least explaining what I mean by that and why. And I try to do it in a way that appeals to the better angels of his nature.
So how do we appeal to those angels?
I think there are five tropes of liberal discourse on racism that do more harm than good. There is truth to each of them, but they are presented in such a way that they instantly raise the defenses of people confronted with them. I'd like to hear less of each of these in 2018.
1. Advocating "color blindness" is racism by other means
I understand the argument. As Adia Wingfield put it in The Atlantic, "as the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality have become more
covert and obscure than they were during the era of open, legal
segregation, the language of explicit racism has given way to a
discourse of colorblindness. But (sociologists) fear that the refusal to take
public note of race actually allows people to ignore manifestations of
persistent discrimination."
Too many liberals will use this observation to produce unbalanced rants in which they accuse anyone who uses the language of color blindness of overt racism (instead, as the proper argument goes, of indirect and possibly unintended racism). This is not playing fair, because it ignores history.
As Wingfield noted, the language of color blindness was developed to confront the racism of an earlier time. When I was growing up, progressives actually argued that people needed to be color blind. That never meant that people didn't see color, of course. That's impossible. It was a hyperbolic way of saying you should strive to treat people as though you didn't see color.
In 1992, this was how progressives talked about race: "Free your mind/and the rest will follow/Be color blind/Don't be so shallow."
In an age of overt racism and the decades immediately after it, this was the right way to teach people. You have no idea how hard it was to get people in Ohio where I grew up to accept "treat people all the same" as a reasonable rule for human interaction. But it worked. It really worked. It's a goddamned miraculous social accomplishment that we got this country to mostly agree on at least the basic principle that people deserve to be treated equally regardless of race. It happened in a generation, and the language of color blindness played a big part in that. "Color blind" was an inaccurate but easy-to-digest bit of memetics that worked.
If you don't see any value at all in color-blind rhetoric, you likely never heard a scrum of football players referred to as a "nigger pile" when you were fourteen. You likely never heard someone tell your best friend in seventh grade, who was the only black kid you knew back then, that he ought to "go back to the plantation." I'm telling you, getting those overt racists from back home to "I'm color blind" a decade later was amazing. I doubt that 90% of those kids use the "N" word now. It didn't solve racism, but it was step 3 in our nation's 157-step program to recover from racism.
It's true that there is a difference between equality and equity. Step #4 in the 157-step program involves understanding that fact, and "color blind" language gets in the way. But the nation is still sort of consolidating the victory of step #3. We need to allow people a transitional sort of language and not immediately chasten the stragglers who just caught up to 1993 yesterday.
Rather than "it's racist to say you're color blind" it would be better to simply focus on equality vs. equity logic. That is, don't focus on ripping out the language you used to accomplish step #3, just introduce the language from step #4. If someone is still using the old language, just keep using the new with them. That's how anyone learns--from modeling.
It's hard to believe, but there are a lot of people in the U.S. for whom "I'm color blind" really represents their best efforts, and a lot of personal growth had to take place to get them there. That doesn't mean that you have to give them a cookie, but it does mean it isn't helping to immediately tell them all the growth they went through to get there just means they're now completely wrong about everything.
2. Ignoring (or accusing of racism) social conservatives who use the language of personal responsibility
If I believe the argument--and I do--that black Americans aren't struggling by accident, then I also accept that it will take something other than an accident to right the wrong. Intentional harm can only be undone by intentional attempts to fix the harm. I accept this.
That doesn't mean I have to think that every social program meant to be part of the intentional solution is a great idea.
Mrs. Heretic, in her years of teaching in Baltimore, knew hundreds of female students under 18 who had babies. When they got pregnant, it was treated like a very normal thing, something to celebrate. The students had baby showers--sometimes, very elaborate affairs. It wasn't uncommon for more than half of the females in her classes to be either pregnant or already mothers.
Social and economic conservatives have been arguing for decades that social programs make the cost of bad life choices too cheap. I have often thought their arguments were racist: who were they to criticize teen mothers for their choices under hard circumstances, and what was the cost of WIC and Medicare compared to the price of a human life?
But seeing how normalized it has become to have babies in the teen years--and contrasting this with how much anxiety I faced when I became a parent in my thirties with my upper-middle-class income--makes me accept that these conservatives at least have a good prima facie case. Maybe band-aid programs only serve to institutionalize poverty.
I don't know what the answer is. Ripping a band-aid off means terrible pain for a community already suffering. I just know that the current answers haven't seemed to help like they should have in the last 50 years. So a critique of social services-based solutions doesn't deserve to be attacked on the grounds it's racist.
It's certainly an inconvenient critique, because coming up with another solution isn't easy, and nobody wants to try to figure one out. I myself have tried to figure out what I would do to help Mrs. Heretic's students in Baltimore if I were president, and I don't know that I have an answer. Or I do, but I know that the country does not have the will to carry it out, because it would call for a massive mobilization of resources.
We can disagree over what the right answer is, but we shouldn't accuse someone of being racist because they say what ought to be plain, which is that whatever we're doing now isn't working like it should. 3. Calling critiques of culture racist without considering the critique
My Facebook friend who posted that meme up above with the sagging-pants guy was making a racist argument. If you asked him, though, he'd probably say he was criticizing an aspect of (black) culture, not black people, or not all black people. He'd probably be full of shit, and maybe this line about criticizing culture is, like patriotism, a last refuge of many scoundrels.
But that doesn't meant that it's never right to critique black, urban, American culture. One has to consider how well-informed and well-reasoned the argument is. I myself don't try much to talk about the culture. I've had a chance to learn a little about various segments of American black culture, but it's really been just enough to get past a little-learning-is-a-dangerous-thing territory. That is, I know just enough to know I don't know much.
But some people do, and they've actually done the work to deserve an audience. If someone argues that hip-hop isn't really a positive force, that argument isn't itself a racist one. Certainly, there are feminist critiques of hip-hop and rap that seem very reasonable to me. These deserve a hearing.
4. Ignoring prejudice against whites
I get that there is no such thing as "reverse racism," if I accept the standard definitions of these things. But there is prejudice, and sometimes it's excused as a truth-bomb.
It's not the most serious issue out there, so I don't need to belabor the point, or cite examples of it. We all know it happens. I just want to point out that my son, when he sees examples of it, has a much harder time excusing it than I do. He is growing up in a much different world from me. His school is 40% black, with the rest evenly split between white, Asian, and Latino. He is living in a world where students are expelled for hate speech if they use the N word. To him, when he sees those videos about dumb things white people say or do, and he knows his mother and I have threatened death to him if he ever speaks that way about another racial group, it's difficult for him not to develop cognitive dissonance. He either has to accept that he should put up with something we've taught him others shouldn't have to put up with, or he develops...well...racial resentment. You can argue with him if you want, but this is the kid of two fairly liberal parents who has a black sister. This is our ghost of Christmas future, liberals, if we don't mend our ways.
We don't need a massive campaign to eradicate it. We just need to stop doing it and not accept it when we see it.
5. Not having an agenda
It often seems like the only goal liberals have is to make everyone talk like they're woke. People are never going to see culture in the same way, so it's pointless to try to conquer society by working to get everyone to use the same vocabulary. Having a concrete agenda, on the other hand, is easier to get people to unite behind. Agendas can appeal to different people for different reasons, and we don't even have to agree on what those reasons are to work together.
What, in practical terms, do we liberals want? I bet we'd have a hard time giving an answer other than "to get rid of Trump."
Trump came to power with about a million promises, but a yuuuge infrastructure program was one of them. One of the benefits (?) of de facto segregation is that it's possible to advocate for a racial population by proxy. For example, liberals could stump for a massive infrastructure program "in America's inner cities." Why shouldn't we use our own dog whistles? We could try to shape it so that people in the cities themselves should get first pick for jobs. This makes it both a jobs program and an infrastructure program. One of the largest obstacles to work people in a city like Baltimore face is that it sometimes takes hours to get to work if you don't have a car. So a better system of public transportation would be a good thing to put at the top of the infrastructure wish list.
I don't know why we couldn't work with Trump to get it. If there's one thing that guy loves, it's to be loved. He doesn't particularly care who loves him, either. He'd take it from us as quickly as he'd take it from the other guys. Could we consider offering it to him? Or at least a truce until we inch forward the next step in the long battle?
우리답게 싸우자!
I had to write that sub-heading in Korean. Koreans are great at social campaign slogans. The one I just created there would be translated as "Let's fight like us!" Liberals have been growing coarse and shrill over the last twenty years, and 2017 was the peak of it. It's not a winning strategy for us. We're supposed to be charmers. Conservatives tell others how to live; we're supposed to make people want to live like us.
Sun Tzu counseled that the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. I hope that 2018 is full of less fighting and more winning.
