Did Derrida and Lacan create post-truth politics?

Carlos Lozada's recent editorial in the Washington Post, in which he both outlined the contours of contemporary post-truth politics and reviewed a number of books on the subject, was the latest in what I take to be a refreshing trend: liberals in a moment of introspection about the role we have played in pushing us to the current political moment. He quotes Lee McIntyre:

McIntyre, whose book is perhaps the most thoughtful of the post-truth set, also urges us to root out untruth before it festers. But he calls for introspection, even humility, in this battle. “One of the most important ways to fight back against post-truth is to fight it within ourselves,” he writes, whatever our particular politics may be. “It is easy to identify a truth that someone else does not want to see. But how many of us are prepared to do this with our own beliefs? To doubt something that we want to believe, even though a little piece of us whispers that we do not have all the facts?”

It’s annoying advice, for sure. It takes the focus off Trump and his acolytes. It casts the gaze inward, toward discomforting self-reflection, at a moment when engagement and argument seem like all that matter.

But that doesn’t make it untrue.

That's good advice, and I wish more people I generally agree with politically followed it. In fact, I'd be more likely to join a political party based on HOW it determines its agenda rather than the agenda itself.

All the theorists I hated in college coming back to haunt me again? 

There's another point Lozada develops in his essay. It has to do with the extent to which post-structuralist, deconstructionist, and post-modern theories that ruled universities from the 70s to the early aughts led to the current difficulty society is having with determining that truth matters. Lozada cites Mike Cernovich, a "pro-Trump troll and conspiracy theorist," the one who put forth the Pizzagate rumors.

“Look, I read postmodernist theory in college,” Cernovich told the New Yorker in 2016. “If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative. I don’t seem like a guy who reads [Jacques] Lacan, do I?”

Many of the books Lozada reviews include a discussion of the influence of theorists like Derrida and Foucault, and whether their out-sized clout among intellectuals for decades helped create the current political scene. I don't think that's completely groundless; in fact, that's a big reason why I disliked these thinkers in college/grad school when they were being pushed on me. In a sense, the whole mess of semiotic deconstructionist thinking left a lot of students wondering why, if Hamlet and Bazooka Joe comics were both culturally dependent narratives, we ought to study one rather than the other. Was our gut feeling that Hamlet was somehow a better, worthier narrative false? I'm sure a lot of students ended up walking away from those thinkers wondering what, if anything, really mattered.

Still, I think the influence of continental, post-modern theorists might be overblown. For one thing, nobody outside of the humanities knew much about them. Their writing was so intentionally abstruse, very few people who weren't in the profession of talking about culture would have picked them up. They resisted the merely curious reader. There was, I think, an intentional use of cognitive dissonance resolution on the part of the post-modernists here. They wanted reading their work to be like college hazing: something so arduous that once you had done it, you'd be much more likely to declare reading the work worth the effort, because you wouldn't want to admit to yourself you'd put all that work into reading something that was stupid.

Secondly, I don't think even most people in the humanities actually "read Lacan."  We read key passages from Lacan and we read explanations of key concepts in Lacan's thought, but hardly anyone actually read full works of Lacan. Foucault was a little more likely to be read, but still, I knew very few people who had actually read an entire book of his. If they had, it was likely Discipline and Punish. Derrida nobody read in full. I don't believe Cernovich really "read Lacan." I think he knows some ideas from Lacan, much like I do, and he is cashing in on those ideas to justify doing what he damn well wants to do.

Those French thinkers were notably slippery when anyone tried to pin them down for criticism that their philosophies led to a nihilism that would be unable to withstand tyranny. They often insisted that they were being humorous and intentionally using hyperbole and that readers who were troubled by their writing misunderstood them. In this, they were not unlike Trump in his Twitter tactics, but the followers of Derrida, although strident in the academy, were less so socially and politically. Partly because understanding what the hell Derrida was even saying was so difficult, deconstructionist students never really became much of a political force.

Finally, I don't think most propagandists need to resort to any French philosophers that are hard to understand. Modern propaganda has changed as technologies do, but the basic techniques of spinning everything to suit your preferences hasn't changed in a very long time. I fell under the sway in the 80s of creation scientists who presented what looked to me then like real science, but was actually just propaganda that aped real science enough to trick the gullible. What they did was really not that different from what a biased news site does now. I doubt any of those creation scientists had read any French philosophy other than Descartes.

The answer to nihilist relativism is not absolute dogmatism 

I'm glad some liberals are taking the time to consider our own role in creating a culture that is cynical about what is true. But because culture seems to list back and forth from side to side wildly like a ship foundering in a storm rather than iron out its wobbles and steady itself, I am afraid that as liberals try to undo the damage we imagine was done by relativist and deconstructionist narratives, we will end up becoming dogmatic about the existence of certain truths. I wrote about something in this vein a couple of months ago, when I worried that the #metoo movement might, while rightly trying to change years of bad male behavior, end up propagating a new sexual puritanism. It would be a puritanism that had room in it for LGBT and non-polar sexual behavior, and it would allow for sex outside of marriage, so it would be better than past versions of sexual puritanism, but it would be puritanism nonetheless.

A Christian friend of mine posted this on Facebook a while back. It's from the Babylon Bee, which is an evangelical satire site in the spirit of the Onion (yes, such a thing exists in the world).

(The actual article is here.)

The point behind the satire is this: once you reject timeless and eternal truths as given and fixed, like God's truths, the slide into a world where nothing is true is inevitable. For the Babylon Bee, the only antidote to post-truth is absolute truth.

It's enticing, but it's entirely wrong. First of all, it is confusing facts with truth. I can assert that the speed of light is known with certainty but the meaning of light is not. I can hold that the Earth is objectively getting warmer but be open to various solutions to what could be done about it.

Secondly, and more to the point, "all truth is relative" is just a dumbed-down version of what many non-absolutists think about truth. For people like me, there is no Platonic beauty, no perfect version of what beauty looks like, and so no version of what beauty is will ever fully express what beauty might encompass. For all that, I still think beauty exists. It exists in a problematic way, but it exists. I don't believe truth is relative. It's just a lot more work to get to than an absolutist would think. It's not a point you arrive it; it's a roughly sketched-out  region on a map with borders that are in dispute. But every argument over where the borders truly lie makes the map clearer and more meaningful, not less so. A willingness to accept a game with difficult and vague rules does not mean I want to stop playing the game altogether.

As rational people--a set which surely includes roughly an equal number of conservatives and liberals-- ponder our role in fixing post-truth politics, we need to keep in mind that our goal is not to re-make a world in which we pretend to be sure of more than we really are. It's to draw a nuanced difference between a world in which meaning is constantly being developed and a world that is meaningless.

An allegory of our republic

In fiction, it’s very hard to make a metaphor or (God forbid) an allegory that doesn’t come off as heavy-handed. Writers go to great lengths to make anything that could stand as a symbol for even the most remotely abstract notion appear to spring organically from the story. There are a few stories from my actual life, though, that serve as almost perfect allegories (or microcosms, metaphors, what you will) for something much larger than the stories themselves. If I wrote them as fiction, the story would seem concocted. 

One of those stories took place in January 1992, at Marine Combat Training at Camp Geiger, one of the small offshoots of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Marine Combat Training (MCT) was the brainchild of Al Gray, the then-commandant of the Marine Corps. Gray thought the Marine Corps had become too soft, and he wanted every Marine to have at least some basic understanding of how to operate in an infantry environment. "Every Marine a rifleman" is a credo he left the Corps, and for the six years of my enlistment, well-meaning officers and NCOs would interrupt my attempts to become a proficient Korean translator by trying to make me resemble a bad rifleman. 

General Gray, Weber can translate for you like a motherfucker, but if you've got Weber holding one of these things, you're already fucked, Sir. 

MCT came at a weird time for the new Marines enrolled in it. We were all just out of boot camp. We graduated from boot camp on December 6th, took ten days of leave, then showed up for MCT. We knew nothing, but almost the only thing we took away from boot camp was an unearned sense of confidence. Confidence, and--for many--aggression. 

It was also a weird time for MCT institutionally. General Gray got MCT going by 1989, but when I went there in late 1991, it was clear they still didn't have everything ironed out. The instructors were a far cry from the drill instructors we were used to. They didn't care, they were unimpressive in terms of knowledge and ability, and there didn't seem to be enough of them. This was probably made worse by the fact that we were all doing our four weeks of training right through the holidays; I imagine there was a fair amount of attrition due to leave plans. 

What all this meant was that several hundred young men who were used to constant, close supervision and probably needed it didn't have nearly enough of it. We all came in from the airport on a shuttle bus, checked in, got an MRE to eat and were sent to an old squad bay. There were no instructions about which bed belonged to whom, or which wall locker to stow our things in. Everyone grabbed spots, and then fights instantly broke out over who the rightful owners of those spots were. There was no NCO in the room the whole night. 

Right before dropping us off at the squad bay, some staff had apparently told two of the new Marines that they were supposed to have "fire watch," or night-guard duty. They didn't say anything about changing off during the night, and nobody came back to check on us, so those two never felt like they could go to sleep. 

Sometime around the middle of the night, they got sick of being awake while others went to sleep. They started shouting throughout the squad bay. They were the things most raw Marines say, mostly just parrot-like imitations of things our drill instructors had said in boot camp. 

These things were funny in a newly sentimental kind of way for about ten minutes. Then it got real old, real fast. When eighty or so guys are prevented over and over from falling back to sleep, the mood gets tense in a hurry. It led to a an escalating war of words that would heat up, die back down, then heat up all over when the night watch would start shouting again. At one point, one of the guards yelled out that "if I'm not sleeping, none of y'all are sleeping." He had a point. We really should have been able to sort out among ourselves some sort of rotating schedule of fire watches for a few hours. But we didn't. So the shouting continued until the morning, when one of our instructors finally came to take us to draw our gear. 

This cycle played out over and over throughout the four weeks of MCT. Whenever we were unsupervised, someone would start shouting. This led to even louder remonstrations against the shouting, which in turn invited replies that were louder still. The worst was when someone would, in all earnestness, try to passionately reason with people. There was something pathetic in the hopefulness of these speeches; a new Marine who believed his trial by fire in boot camp had now made a leader of him, hoping to inspire those around him to show common human decency and respect the need for peace and quiet. Before this would-be William Wallace could get done leading us to the freedom of a moment of silence, some of the cleverer trolls in the platoon would start to agree with him--at a very loud volume, which inevitably led to the whole thing starting over again. 

If you've ever been on a very large email distribution when someone started a reply-all storm, you might be familiar with this phenomenon. There is an email to a large audience, and then someone--usually inadvertently--replies all to the email, when clearly a reply to the author was called for. This leads to a third person sending another reply-all email saying that others should not use reply-all. This third email might or might not have been meant genuinely. Soon, though, there is an obvious troll who gets in the mix, and then, it's off to the races. This guy writes something like, "Please do not reply all to say 'do not reply all.'" Which leads to more people writing more emails telling others to stop writing emails. 

Most of the people responding after a while are trolls, trying to see how long they can keep this game going. Some of the people responding are sincere. They just want everyone to stop writing. They think a simple, one-time appeal to reason will do the job, and their email will be the last. But it never is. Nothing can stop an email storm like this except the end of the day or an admin nuking the whole chain. 

That's what nearly all of MCT was like for me: one long reply-all email storm, played out in real life like performance theater. If we were in the squad bay, I could escape to the bathroom and read. (Yes, the Marine Corps wanted me to call it a "head," but I hated using their patois then, and I refuse to use it now.) If we were anywhere else, though, there was really nowhere to go.

It was only four weeks, I told myself. I couldn't believe how long those four weeks seemed, given that boot camp had been thirteen weeks and MCT was supposed to be a lot easier. It did help that we got long breaks from training for Christmas and New Year's; otherwise, I honestly don't know if I would have made it.

The somewhat dangerous climax

I might have forgotten about this little quirk of MCT as quickly as I forgot how to fire a .50-cal if it weren't for something that happened on the final day of training. All the trainees were stuffed into the back of a big transport truck--a "cattle car," as it was called. These trucks were not comfortable, although they were a good deal more comfortable than a ruck march, or "hump" as we called them. (The first hump of MCT, I had to walk in boots that had no supports in them. At the end, my feet were bruised so badly, they hurt for the rest of MCT. That is my second lingering memory of those four weeks.)

We were stuffed in there together cheek to jowl.  It was the end of a long day of training, most of which was humping about with a lot of weight to carry. We were tired enough to more or less lie still against one another for a while, until the first person cracked the first "Hey, yoohoo." It was met half-heartedly at first, and it might have died out, but someone was tired enough to launch into the most sincere invective yet against this kind of aural assault. That got the trolls going.

Most of us were too tired to protest, but enough people were tired enough to be angry that it quickly got dangerous. The mood went from joking to serious so fast, it took us by surprise, and we didn't know how to react. Nobody had time to deflect the mood. We had been shivering for four weeks in the cold, and suddenly we realized that we were hot, we were packed in together, we smelled bad, and we were all locked in together.

It was at this moment I suddenly felt the need to rise up and be heard. Although I'd been watching the futility of impromptu speeches for four weeks, for some reason, in that moment, I thought that surely, what this situation needed was for me to come to the fore and reason with the denizens of the cattle car close enough to hear me. In fact, it seemed that what must have been missing all along the last four weeks was the clarity of reason only I could provide.

Just as I was about to launch into my invective, the guy next to me, who'd been my friend throughout boot camp and MCT, did something unexpected. He got the attention of one of the more active trolls who was seated near us. He told the guy he thought all his trolling was pretty funny, and then he asked where the guy was headed after MCT. They started talking, and suddenly, at least our immediate vicinity quieted down. The rippling tide of anger that was circling around the inside of the truck continued on apace, but with one little dead zone it kept hitting, it never quite got to critical mass.

My heavy-handed interpretation

If I'd have jumped into the fray, that might have been the last straw. Once the heavier atoms, the hardest ones to agitate, start oscillating in the heart of a star, it's about time for the whole thing to blow. But my friend managed to cool the engine down enough in the area right around us that it had an effect on the whole truck. (He'd gone into the Marines at 26, for some reason, so he had wisdom that the rest of us lacked. He probably deserved a medal for keeping us all from killing each other.)

This is also the only way to deal with a replay-all email avalanche. The sane people need to exert a moral influence, offline, on the people in their immediate vicinity that keeps those people from jumping into the fray. You won't stop it, but you can slow it down somewhat.

Is this not exactly our precise political moment? What is the news cycle every day but a new reply-all email chain? Every day, it seems, we get something from the troll-in-chief or one of his designated sub-trolls that starts the whole cycle rolling. Liberals prove incredibly easy to bait, and we spend the day locked in a shouting match that distracts everyone from the real work that needs to be done.

Of course it's important to speak out against evil. There is a time for courage, a moment for the prophet to shout the truth in the marketplace and for it to be echoed from the rooftops. But that moment does not arrive every damn day over every damn issue. A sun whose core can be agitated that easily is near is last moments.

It's a scary moment, I get it. For rational people, when we hear incoherent statements, it makes us nervous. (I was going to link to something there, but there are just too many choices.) We feel the needs to flap our arms and scream "fire!" But it might be good to consider using discretion. Some of those moments might be the exact time to act completely nonplussed, like everything is perfectly normal.

Consider social media interactions. The other day, when Kavanaugh was announced as the nominee, I saw a couple of Facebook friends put out something like, "Here come the unbalanced rants from the libtards!" There can be a number of reactions to that: a 12-paragraph retort, complete with citations; a quick, "you got owned" flame retort; an attempt at a gentle answer; unfriending the person; or ignoring. I chose to ignore it.

When I do engage, I try to keep it at a conversational volume, so to speak. I hear a lot of liberals insisting that Trump's more ardent followers are evil, and that evil people are not owed civility. I don't accept that premise, but even if I did, one has to accept the simple fact that those supposedly evil people are stuffed into the same truck as the rest of us. If a fight breaks out in the truck, we're all going to get punched. So it's in our interest to get along as best as we can.

Yes, I've posted that clip before. I know the series is a joke now, but that scene remains one of the best statements of political reality I've ever seen.

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, sometimes, when there is a ton of dynamite sitting just below us and a whole bunch of oil and matches all around us, the best thing to do is not to scream and yell about how we're all going to die. It might be best to act like everything is fine, then quietly try to start moving a few things out of the house.

What to do with a novel I can't publish?

Obviously, I'm not doing much with writing these days. I'm not blogging much, and it's not because I'm furiously writing my next batch of short stories. I've moved on.

But I still have this novel I wrote. I really like it. I pitched it to thirty-some agents and got only a few responses. They were all no responses, even if some claimed they really liked it.

A few weeks ago, I got a delayed response from someone else I sent it to. This would be another "no, but I like it" kind of response. Here it is:

I'm afraid this one isn't for me. But, I have to say, your writing is tight and very accomplished. And - most important of all for a writer who is trying to be funny -- the voice IS funny! When the narrator breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience, I think most writers make a mess of it. But you accomplished this task 100%. Congrats on that. So, so difficult to do.

I would suggest that you focus a bit more on leading the reader into the story. Right now, it feels like we're all over the place. There's a lot going on in the first few pages and, while the narrator does an excellent job at telling the story, it still feels like we're jumping around - one moment you're talking about the job, then your son, then (the country) and its history. Overwhelming the reader early on doesn't give the reader a chance to really sink into the story. I want to know the point early on, and then get hooked and dragged along to the end. 

It's difficult to know what to do with a response like this. The main reason he wrote it, probably, was just to be nice and let me down easy. He thought what I wrote was decent, but not what he was looking for, so he very kindly decided to add a little encouragement with the rejection. He also tried to give some reason for why he didn't pick it. But he probably spent very little time considering either the positives or the negatives of what he wrote. His main goal was to get the message out that he was saying no but to make me feel not too terrible about it.

Which is why the critique doesn't really make much sense. How can the writing be both "tight" and also "all over the place"? I think what he means is simply that each of the first three chapters have completely different settings, and I keep on rotating the setting of the chapters throughout, although not always with each new chapter. That is an intentional, conscious decision, one that hundreds of novels use each year. Rather than confusing the reader, I feel like it keeps the novel from seeming dull from right out of the starting line. If there is anything that leaves you confused, I'm hoping the humor and observations are enough for you to trust I'm taking you somewhere. It's possible I used that technique poorly, but this feedback seems to be criticizing the novel just for the technique itself. That's a strange response to a standard literary technique for a publisher that leans toward the literary-fiction side of things.

I'm in no way complaining. It was nice of him to write anything. The fact he tried at all means he might have thought it was better than most of what comes across his slush pile. But I've seen these kinds of explanations for a no answer all the time when working on the Baltimore Review--the editor feels the need to justify the no, but doesn't have a lot of time for it, so he relies on vague statements like "it didn't take me anywhere" or "the characters didn't come to life for me." It's meant to make the point that you tried to explain your response without really having to put too much work into really explaining it. It's what he had time for. I appreciate it, but it doesn't tell me anything about what to do with the novel.

What to do now

I'm out of patience with trying to get it published. At the same time, I like the novel, it's about an important subject, and I have more personal insight into that subject than most almost anyone who's  written about it. That doesn't mean it's a good novel. Even if this particular criticism isn't that on-the-money, the story might just not be that good. Still, I just can't escape the notion that I'm supposed to put this novel out there, even if it's a complete failure commercially and critically. I could do that by self-publishing it. It wouldn't be what I'd want, but I'd feel that I'd fulfilled whatever obligation it is in my head to put this out in the world.

That's a ridiculous way of thinking, flawed by magical thinking. People do not have destinies they were meant to fulfill. They have things they are good at, and they should try to use those abilities to fill voids in the world and be useful. I ought to keep moving on with other things. Trying to publish a novel now would just be a distraction.

I was thinking I'd take the summer to edit the novel, which is now two years old since I wrote it in a blur in late spring and early summer 2016. I thought I'd see how I felt after editing it. But even an edit now seems like a lot of time to invest in something that's a bit of a fool's errand.

Several years ago, I had no reason to think anything I wrote would ever be published, no reason to think I was writing for any purpose beyond having done it. But I had limitless energy to write back then. Now, I've had a little taste of success and nearly saw the novel get to an agent who wanted it, but I feel like writing is pointless. The reasons why aren't unique--I wonder if writing is useful and if mine says anything worth saying. But they're reasons I feel pretty strongly. Writing seems like an incredible act of faith, such that I can't even find the will to bring to completion work that I've mostly finished already.

I really am that uncertain

In Hegelian philosophy, after a thesis is met with an antithesis, you're supposed to end up with a synthesis, merging the two clashing thoughts into a new thesis, which then leads to a repeated process of refinement. When I have a thought in my head, though, and I then start to question that thought, the two poles tend not to synthesize so much as collide and cause mutual destruction. 

In my last two posts, I posted two opposing ideas that popped into my head while re-watching The Office over several months. On any given day, I might honestly believe either one of those two opposing ideas. I think I'm a little more likely to lean in the direction of the first post, which was why I put it in the lead, but there are days I really, really think the second one was more correct. 

Being able to embrace opposing schools of thought like this might mean I'm a reasonable person. But I don't think reasonable people tend to be that interesting. To be interesting requires being a little bit off-balance. It requires a little bit of shutting one kind of thinking out of your head and favoring another. That's why saints are so unfailingly odd, as are great artists, social do-gooders, and even great athletes. 

I wonder if maybe one reason my writing is stuck where it is has to do with this kind of reasonable-to-the-point-of-dullness agnosticism. Most people who captivate aren't agnostic. They might be horribly wrong about many things, but they aren't agnostic. 

I don't think I can make myself the kind of person who is a true believer. I can't make myself so off-balance the see-saw is always full of potential energy. It's all I can do to keep the bare minimum incline necessary to keep things from stopping altogether. I think a better goal is to try to be more concerned with practical matters and stop thinking so much about metaphysical and philosophical issues I can't solve. 

No book I could write will probably ever do the tangible good for humanity this man did with his 61-second YouTube video. I know I certainly appreciated it yesterday. I think I should aspire to be useful like this man, rather than brilliant like the unbalanced:

I don't even care that he thinks it's called a garbage "disposer." 

I am my own guest blogger: My last post was full of crap

In my last post, I argued that racism as a character defect does not, by itself, preclude someone from being a good person. I used Michael Scott, the insufferable boss from The Office, as an illustration to make my point. Here today to offer a counter-point is...me. Let's all welcome me here.

Guest Post

Art is not life

In Jake Weber's June 24th post, "Is Michael Scott both a racist and a good person," we get a good glimpse into how addled a brain can become after a lifetime of interpreting the world through fiction, rather than reality. Weber tries to debunk the notion that racism alone is enough to make someone a bad person. He derides the idea that racism is somehow a more elevated form of evil, worse than greed or parsimony or concupiscence.

It might be a convincing argument, if there were any examples in the real world of people with enough racism to be plainly evident but enough other charms to balance it out. But there are no such people, unless you find Paula Deen charming.

This is what comes of using fiction to draw ideas about real life. Fiction isn't real life. It follows a specific path meant to bring about a satisfying response in the reader or viewer by the end, leaving the consumer of the story to feel that all of what happened along the way was there for a reason. The real world isn't like that, and people in the real world tend to be quite different from people in art. In art, we need to show people as balanced, and give them some redeeming trait so they don't seem too simple. But the real world is full of people with no redeeming qualities at all, and racists are often at the top of that list. People who say the kinds of things Michael says don't usually also have hidden hearts of gold. They just don't. It's nice to think that people have some kindness just beneath the surface waiting to come out, but usually, when people seem like assholes, it's because they're assholes.

The Office is fantasy

The Office is escapist fantasy pretending to be a realistic comedy about working class people in middle America. When Michael says things no longer tolerated in any office in America, the audience cringes, but it also feels a slight tinge of vicarious thrill: someone is getting to say something that none of us is allowed to say anymore, and because it's presented as bad, we can enjoy it without feeling guilty about enjoying it. In this manner, the show gets to have it both ways: it can give us a stock heel character, but it also gets to show that same character humanized enough that we feel warm and fuzzy when he once in a while gets something right. Because Michael so frequently offends, the emotional payoff is that much higher when he acts appropriately.

Can't you tell when you're being played, Jake? 

There is no greater example of this than the very scene Weber cites: the one in which his employees sing a tribute to him before he leaves. The writers need the audience to have warm feelings for sweeps week, so everyone remembers the Michael of the previous three episodes instead of the one who picked Stanley for his basketball team because he was black.

Some flaws really are more important than others

Racism might not be a greater sin than avarice in a personal or spiritual sense, but that's between you and your confessor, if you're into that kind of thing. Because in its effect on society, racism is far more dangerous, as the entirety of human history teaches us. Society's judgment lies on the behaviors that most threaten its harmony. So yes, it is appropriate to hold the racist's racism against him more than than egoist's egotism.

Michael may grow throughout the series, but we don't see him ever explicitly repent of any of the terrible things he said or did over the years. By the end of the show, we did, it's true, witness fewer lines like "Mo' money, mo' problems, Stanley; you of all people should know that." But it seems more likely (other than the business reasons that the show couldn't keep going to this well) this was because Michael learned from his many scoldings from corporate, not because he had a change of heart. In other words, the punishment worked. Society is right today to treat racism as a special brand of evil, because treating it like this works.

Is Michael Scott both a racist and a good person? Thoughts on re-watching all of "The Office" on Netflix

While suffering through a lecture on gender roles in Renaissance literature--the most painful class I took in graduate school--my professor made an off-handed remark that has always stuck with me. She said the writer we were studying--I forget who it was now--exhibited such ingrained prejudices surrounding class in her writing that she suspected that we, in reading her, would find her to be "a classist, much like we would now think of someone as a racist."

What she meant was not just that we would find her assumptions about class to be anachronistic; we would actually find them evil, the way we find racism to be evil. We would find her prejudices to be inexcusable. She feared that we might be so put off by how ugly her thoughts on lower class people were, we'd be unable to see value in anything else the writer had to say.

I don't recall what I thought of the writer. I hated both class and professor, so I assume I hated the assignment, too. But what stuck with me about that comment was how easily I knew what she was saying. Our age finds racism to be so heinous a crime that anyone guilty of it is written off as altogether unredeemable. It's what makes trying to label a politician a racist such a powerful and divisive claim. Who would vote for a racist, even one who had a plan to fix schools and the economy? Being a racist in 2018 (or 2002, when I was in that class) is a tenuous step above being a pedophile in the hierarchy of public enemies.

Can a racist be in any way redeemable? You'd probably get a mixed answer to that question, depending on whether the person answering has had enough personal experience with a variety of racists to be able to distinguish between them. You'd get a much clearer majority, though, on this question: Can a racist be a good person? I'd wager the overwhelming majority would say no.

Michael Scott of the 1970s

This was a question pop culture made people ask when I was very young. The show All in the Family featured Archie Bunker, who was clearly a bigot, but also could show flashes of a rascally charm from time to time. The New Yorker ran an interesting article a few years ago about how All in the Family did not accomplish its goal of getting viewers to examine their own prejudices through humor. The article quotes Saul Austerlitz: “A funny thing happened on the way to TV immortality: audiences liked Archie. Not in an ironic way, not in a so-racist-he’s-funny way; Archie was TV royalty because fans saw him as one of their own."

I remember reading a Reader's Digest--that paragon of conservative mores--that was strategically placed by the toilet in my home when I was a teenager. An opinion piece within it noted that even though Archie was a bigot, you couldn't deny that Meathead and Gloria were living in his house and mooching off him.

Nussbaum saw All in the Family as the show that launched the "bad fan," the person who unambiguously likes the character meant to be ambiguous and partly hateful.

Michael Scott of Dunder Mifflin 

Watching the entire nine seasons of The Office forces the viewer to consider it as one large work of art, with the entirety of the series operating as one extended narrative cycle. (Okay, I see it as seven seasons with a two-season spin-off by the same name once Steve Carell leaves.) While individual episodes and seasons certainly have a self-contained meaning to them, the series continues narrative threads from one to the next, and so it asks us to consider it as a unitary whole.

A quick non-sequitur 

The first thing that struck me watching the series in 2018 was something I'm sure others have noted, but I'm not even going to bother to Google. Michael Scott is a white man who has succeeded in business in spite of having almost no sense, no intelligence, little education, and being a generally irritating person. He is racist. He is sometimes a terrible friend. He ogles the secretary and makes comments on how attractive women in the office are. Yet, he is somehow a gifted salesman with the common touch who can make people like him if he shuts up long enough to let them. I will just say that in 2018 that...reminds me of someone.

The narrative arc of Michael Scott

Michael grows as the seasons go by, influenced by the people around him. But at the beginning of the show, Michael is pretty clearly a racist. Season one is the status quo for Michael as the curtain rises, letting us see what he is like before the events of the show begin to change him. He is clueless, stupid, racist, and sexist. We laugh at him because he is what is wrong with the American workplace. He is not a good person with flaws so much as an incarnation of all that is bad. This montage captures most of him at his worst:

After the short season one, the creators realized that unlike the British version of the show, this one was going to try to stick around for the long haul. That meant they couldn't leave Michael relentlessly awful. So Season Two starts to give us a more complex view of him. We see that he is a good salesman who was pushed into a position that isn't right for him. This alternating Michael--the terrible, tone-deaf racist and the sympathetic, goofy guy who just needs to be surrounded by better people--is carried into season three.

Season four is where the real change in Michael's character takes place. Is it possible that his relationship with overbearing Jan is the impetus? That her terrible treatment spurs a change in him? Michael's fundamental weakness is his need to be liked. But in Season Four, Michael, possibly learning from his mistakes in failing to stand up to Jan, manages to stand up to Stanley even though he risks not being liked because of it. If all of the first seven seasons are one narrative arc for Michael, then Season Four is something of a crisis point. Having gone through the climax of learning from Jan makes him ready when Holly comes along.

The show then goes on a three-season-long denouement, in which we wait for Michael and Holly to get together. Michael backslides for our amusement often, which makes it difficult, sometimes, to follow his narrative path. For example, Michael is sometimes extremely loyal, insisting on sticking with Ryan in spite of Ryan's obvious character flaws, or refusing to say his employer is a bad place to work even when it costs him millions of dollars. But he will also be suddenly and disturbingly disloyal to his faithful henchman Dwight when the writers need a joke. There is then a second climax of development for Michael when he goes off with Holly. Right before he goes, he manages to get rid of Packer, a far viler man than Michael ever was who has had a terrible influence on Michael. It shows that Michael's judgment has improved at least a tiny bit.

So how do we answer the questions? 

Is Michael a racist? At least as we define these things in 2018, I think he's absolutely a racist. Although he's not, by the end of the show, what he was in Season One, he still shows some signs of racism. He is still afraid on occasion that Darryl will physically assault him based partly on Darryl being a large black man, even though Darryl has shown his good sense and trustworthiness over and over.

One might claim that Michael isn't racist, he's just ignorant. It's okay to laugh at his racism, because it's based on him being a rube. We can forgive him, for he knows not what he does. He actually believes that he is enlightened, as a matter of fact.

There is a difference between Michael assuming things based on assumptions he isn't bright enough to question and a KKK Grand Wizard who quotes from dozens of books of racist theory he's consumed. One has been educated into hating others, while the other inadvertently hurts others through a lack of education. But we tend, in 2018, not to forgive this kind of racism via ignorance. Archie Bunker's racism was also ignorance-fueled, but we are less likely to overlook it now. Furthermore, Michael's racism through ignorance is, at times, pretty profound, and he never seems to learn from it or apologize for it. When confronted with the fact that his actions are racist, he stubbornly refuses to change his mind: "When Chris Rock does a routine, people call it edgy and groundbreaking, but when I do the same routine, I get called racist?" he says, speaking of a bit Rock did criticizing black people and using the N word liberally. So I think you have to say Michael is a racist.

Is Michael a good person? Well, it certainly seems that viewers like him. (The surest sign that fans have taken to him is the number of people I know who still do the  "That's what she said" bit at every opportunity. I'm one of them.) Does this mean we're being bad fans? I don't think so, as long as we "like" him in the ambiguous way the show presents him to us. I definitely found myself cringing and
even shouting at Michael during some scenes I'd forgotten about. But when I'm shouting at him, it's because I've seen enough to know he can do better, and I'm disappointed when he doesn't. I can still laugh at his failures through the disappointment.

I don't think I'm a bad fan for liking him, unless all of Michael's subordinates on the show are bad people for liking him, too. They've certainly been given more reason than anyone to dislike him. But they send him off with a loving Broadway-style tribute song they wrote for him, Why? Well, at the end of the day, most of us don't get to pick our co-workers anymore than we get to pick our family. You can end up with anyone. The employees of Dunder Mifflin/Sabre are wise enough to know that given all of the people out there you could end up with, Michael Scott, weighed in the balance, isn't the worst you can do.

Racism isn't a special genus of defect that should be privileged above avarice, hubris, sloth, indifference, ignorance, fastidiousness, or any of the other flaws we ridiculous humans show. While it can be especially insidious when it manifests itself at a macroscopic social level, in individual humans, it shouldn't be a hammer to smash the scales of character pluses and minuses we would otherwise weigh character with. Racism is not a unique class of human wickedness. It is not different from the other vices. It is at times shocking and terrifying and at other times so absurd one can only laugh at it. In that, it is like humanity itself. 

Thoughts on a late-arriving review of my book

When my book came out last year, I tried to focus my marketing efforts on getting it reviewed. My graduate school adviser helped me navigate the process of finding someone to review it at American Book Review. ABR focuses on small-market books. In exchange, my adviser asked me to review a book for someone else. It took me a lot of effort to stop everything last year, read that book, and come up with something intelligent to say about it. I actually don't know if they're going to publish my review.

Apparently, there is a fairly lengthy lag between when ABR gets the reviews and when they publish them. Diane Goodman's review of my book just appeared in the January-April edition of ABR. (They usually put these out more often than quarterly. I have to imagine they're having issues at the journal.)

It's a really nice review, just like the other ones I've gotten. I think that ABR is mostly in libraries, so the majority of its readers are probably people who read the print version. If that's true, the people who might have read this review already saw it a while ago. ABR puts its digital versions out months behind the print versions, which is why I just now saw it.

Here's what I've learned about reviews from smaller venues: they're really nice, and they make you feel good, but they don't sell books. This review from ABR has been out for a while, and in that time, my book has sold two copies on Amazon. Marketing books is a social media game. I was talking to someone this week who was describing how Twitch, the video-streaming site that focuses on video game play, works for people trying to gain sponsorship. It sounded a lot like how we are encouraged at writers' conferences to market our books: Twitter stalk anyone who matters, make friends, hope they cross-reference you. My reviews would only really have helped me if I had posted a link to it on Twitter and had an army of people to re-tweet it. That sounds awful. I like to write words in silence, not chat up my friends while drunk-playing Overwatch. Do I really have to market myself the same way?

I don't think I'm cut out for the modern world of self-promotion. I tried looking around for a new job the other day, just to see if anything might be out there. Job hunting sites all push LinkedIn now, and there is some algorithm-driven science to not only how you write a resume, but how you create your LinkedIn profile. I gave up. In any event, an awful lot of the jobs for people like me, whose main skill is writing, seem to be in creating social media content for companies. I don't like tweeting to pimp my own work, so I doubt I'd enjoy tweeting or doing whatever a post on Pinterest is called for someone else.

For now, that was a nice surprise to find that review had finally come out. In all likelihood, it's the last one I'll get for this book, and the last time anyone will ever talk about the stories in it. It's nice, at a time when I have a ton of other work I've done--work I think it better than Don't Wait to Be Called but that I can't seem to get published--to look back on the book and realize that I managed to have a little bit of success there when I didn't even know what I was doing. Maybe I'll get lucky again.