Monsters, Trust, Nihilism, Hope

Newt: My mommy always said there were no monsters--no real ones--but there are, aren't there?
Ripley: Yes, there are.
Newt: Why do they tell little kids that?
Ripley: Most of the time it's true.
Aliens  (1986, James Cameron, dir.)

Most of the time, it's true.

I concluded yesterday that trust may be a precondition for hope. When we tell young kids that everything's going to be all right, we're not offering a literal prediction of the future. We know, being humans who have lived for a significant amount of time, that things are often not all right. There are monsters. But "everything's going to be all right" isn't a factual description. It's a performative gesture. It brings into being the reality of love and trust. I love you and will do my best to be with you and protect you.

That trust, in turn, enables hope. I knew you would come, Newt says as Ripley rescues her. There are real monsters. But I hope. I hope.

As I waver between hope and nihilism, I wonder whether the passively or actively nihilist forces animating so much activism on the right and the left stems from a loss or lack of trust. I can well see how strains of Afro-Pessimism have at their root the charred remains of trust in whiteness. Trusting whiteness, from this point of view, has repeatedly proven lethal to black people. Whiteness is the zombie-bit person who swears they won't turn, only to savage you at the earliest opportunity. We have (collectively, generally) squandered any right to request or expect the trust of black and brown people.

Lack of trust subtends an absence of hope. There's no hope of a racial utopia, the realized dream of the beloved community. Whiteness is, from the Afro-Pessimist view, definitionally about maintaining and deepening the oppression of black people. It will never get better so long as whiteness exists. And whiteness--like captialism, misogyny, greed, bias--seems immortal.

That certainty itself resembles a kind of trust, however. The nihilist trap lies in its own smug-depressed-more-cynical-than-thou surety. I trust that there is no hope. I thus hope for nothing. Such a view founds the thanatopian urge reflected in the nihilist political bumper sticker: Giant Meteor 2020. As in The Neverending Story, the Nothing acquires substance, agency. It becomes a kind of dark deus ex machina for intractable situations, an anti-miracle, salvific entropy. When in doubt, trust nothing. Put your trust into the Nothing. Hope in the Nothing.

That's a bit more Cthulhu-esque than the average Afro-Pessimist, I'll wager.

What creates trust? Philosopher Keven Vallier distinguishes political trust--our trust in the institutions of government, our faith in peaceful transfer of power after elections, etc.--from social trust--our trust in strangers to abide by the codes that keep society more or less orderly. I wonder if that insight leads to distinctions in hope and nihilism. Is there a meaningful difference between political hope and social hope? Between political nihilism and social nihilism?

Maybe, in other words, I can find a way to talk about hope and nihilism, have my cake and eat it too.

There are monsters, after all. But, at the end of the film, Newt asks if she can dream. Ripley, knowing that monsters exist, affirms that "we both can."

The Preconditions for Hope

Roundtable-planning for my proposal about the affective drives for performance continues apace. I've sent out invitations; I'm waiting on yeses or noes. Love and outrage are onboard. We'll see about joy, patriotism (or nostalgia), devotion, and whatever LF wants to do (if she says yes)/

And I'm delaying committing to hope or nihilism.

I should do hope. What gets me out of my doom spirals, I told my therapist yesterday, is teaching. When I'm teaching students, I cannot project pessimism and nihilism to them. I may loathe myself for my white male Americanness, but I cannot stand self-loathing in my students. It's Fred Rogers all the way: There's no one else in the whole world like you, and you are capable of loving and being loved just as you are.

There are few things I hold for certain. When I say that Rogers message to students, though, I deliver it with as much certainty and conviction as I can muster. There's no room for hedging. There's no room for doubt or exceptions.

I once asked my sister (wisest person I know, mental health counselor) about the ethics of assuring small children that everything's going to be all right. It's literally not true. She allowed that, of course, bad things happen to everyone, children included. Of course, telling children that nothing unpleasant will ever touch them their whole life long would be a recipe for dysfunction. But when a parent tells a frightened child that they'll be OK--most of the time--it's not a literal prediction of the future. It's a promise: I love you. I am with you. I will do my best to stay with you and protect you.

She reminded me of a snippet from Won't You Be My Neighbor (the excellent documentary on Mr. Rogers). Mr. Rogers (very young in this clip) tells of one of his first encounters with a group of small children. One of the kids shows him a stuffed animal, telling him that its arm came off in the wash. This was a test, Mr. Rogers reflected. They waited to see how Mr. Rogers would respond. Would he swoop in and save them from their fear? (But your mommy fixed it, didn't she? It's all better now!) Instead, he asked a question: Our arms don't fall off when we wash them, do they? The kids, delighted that someone pinpointed their real fears here, responded enthusiastically.

The point, my sister said, isn't the factual status of Mr. Rogers's statement. Sometimes, indeed, children do lose limbs. But what the kids are asking isn't Do bad things ever happen? but Can I trust you to love me? Children need a foundation of trust and consistent care in order to thrive.

So do my students need something other than the yawning nihilism of my own pathologies. They have troubles aplenty. They're stressed, busy, going into debt, and terrified of the future. They're struggling to discover who they are apart from the family patterns they've learned throughout their childhood.

They aren't children. They know bad things happen. But they can all use a bit of Mr. Rogers certainty, the thing that is true by virtue of its affirmation: You are precious. You are loved. You can love just as you are.

There's a hope in that, or at least the preconditions for hope.

Leaning towards Hope

So, at a visit to my therapist today, I shared my wavering between hope and nihilism as areas of study.

"That's cute," he said. And then he asked about whether I had any morbid or suicidal thoughts. Morbid thoughts would include stuff like thinking things might be better if I weren't around or if I just went to sleep and never woke up. Suicidal thoughts are explicit plans. (Either one is cause for alarm.)

I've never in my adult life been without both kind of thoughts.

I remember once in youth group, way back in the early nineties, where I said something to the effect of how everyone thinks about offing themselves sometimes. My youth director caught that and said, as gently as she could, that no--in fact, most people don't have those kind of thoughts.

On a deep level, I still today, in my forties, just can't believe that's so. I can't believe that most people don't have a voice--not a literal voice, just a strong feeling or intrusive thought--that things would be better--for themselves, for the world--if they were dead. Kelsey Piper, writing at The Unit of Caring, puts it well:

People who are chronically suicidal ask themselves if maybe they should kill themself all the time, over all kinds of things. I missed the last train home, maybe I should just kill myself. I need to decide what to have for dinner…or I could just kill myself. It can be ignored; it doesn’t always accompany a strong compulsion to act; often people think that they’re not really suicidal, or that it’s just kind of the way the world is that you’ll spend a lot of your time wondering it if would be better if you died.

People who are chronically suicidal often think that everyone is like this, and are genuinely surprised to learn that there are lots of people who basically never want to kill themselves or wonder if it’d be for the best if they did or find their planning short-circuited by ‘maybe the best next step is to kill myself’. 

That's what I mean. My brain outputs "end it" to a pretty wide variety of stimuli--mostly any kind of shame or frustration (or anger, which for me generally involves both those things). It's a psychic reflex to stress. And as a reflex it's terrible. Piper continues:

 You should treat that thought as untrustworthy. It is untrustworthy. You have a brain that occasionally spits out ‘suicide’ as an answer to questions when the answer should be ‘spaghetti’ or ‘call an Uber’ or 'don’t get into stupid arguments on the internet’. It may be an excellent brain in other respects but in this respect it is silly and the correct response is to roll your eyes and go ‘no, brain, sorry, keep problem-solving, that was a terrible answer and you know it’.

 Most of the time, this is what I do. I recognize the thought I'm having--morbid or suicidal--as untrustworthy, even as lying. I have the suicidal thought, sigh inwardly, and turn toward something else. It's a boring thought-voice, after all. Most uncreative. It offers the same solution to every situation. It's not advice; it's a tic.

I have come to trust, because I don't know, that most people don't have this tic.

On another occasion, Piper notes that depression feeds us untruths:

Depression causes distorted thoughts. One really common distorted thought is that what you are experiencing is normal. Another really common distorted thought is that you’re hurting other people by having your own experiences, or by seeking help for them. Both of those are lies fed to your brain by the depression, because depression is an amazingly good liar.

That normalcy lie is one I still tend to believe. (It doesn't help to be told, as I have been told in the past by well-meaning but misguided people, that my depression isn't that bad if I can get out of bed. No question: can't-get-out-of-bed depression is awful. But saying that passively suicidal depression is no big thing is like saying skin cancer's no big thing compared to pancreatic cancer. It's not a contest.)

All this is to say that my therapist suggested that I find something life-affirming to do in the next few days and that I steer clear of writing about nihilism right now.

So: maybe hope.

Emotional Fuels and Anti-Fuels

Anger, fear, aggression. The dark side of the force are they.

So spake Yoda in Empire Strikes Back.

There's been some pushback against this movie wisdom lately. The burgeoning work about women's anger in particular has sought to dismantle the notion of anger as something to apologize for or be embarrassed by. The Gift of Fear is another, earlier example of reclaiming an emotional state often seen as purely negative. And aggressiveness needs no defenders, having been installed as a permanent feature of masculinity and capitalist heroics. It may not be championed as the best of all affects, but it's certainly better than passivity in the eyes of popular culture.

I'm thinking about these in relation to the roundtable thing I'm pulling together on the deep drives of activist performance. My tendency is to zero in on the "negative" emotions. I'm hopeful to attract participants who can help me trouble my prejudice against these, reclaiming their power.

I am also pleased already to have some folk on board willing to talk about non-dark-side drives like love, hope, or joy. The notion of joy driving a social change movement is . . . refreshing, almost fantastic in its distance from the daily headlines.

I'm trying to think of other affects beyond the cliched ones. Greed, sorrow, and pride, to be sure, have proven motive power. Disgust, I'm sure, has spurred a violent mass act of three. Lust could arguably claim some movements.

But what about awe? Nostalgia? Ennui? Could these fuel social movements, too?

What about shame? Guilt? Embarrassment? Envy?

Which emotional fuels burn longest? What formula of affect proves most efficient?

Are there emotions that simply could never spur long-term group endeavors? Emotional anti-fuels, as it were? I can think of additives to primary fuels like anger or outrage, supplements which on their own do little to promote activity but that can temper the combustion of sharper feelings. Patience. Gentleness. Empathy.

But total combustion-killers? Depression, perhaps (that old companion). Self-loathing. Sloth. I mean the deadly sin, acedia, which we often think of as laziness but may actually better be translated as a kind of helpless-hopeless surrender in the face of everything. It is pathological apathy.

Pity, too, seems like an anti-fuel. It can provoke one to action, to be sure. But usually the action pity inspires feeds into other dysfunctional systems. It's a maintenance emotion, not a change emotion. C.S. Lewis references this in his book The Great Divorce. Set in a kind of halfway point between heaven and hell, the book features souls caught between these two realms making a choice about which path to take. Occasionally a purgatorial soul encounters a heavenly being, one who has already ascended.

In one such passage, the soul of a woman who was much put-upon and misused by her needy, self-centered husband is presented as heavenly royalty for her life of generosity to those in need. The husband is now a ghost who lets a melodramatic Tragedian speak for him. He is in the afterlife as wretched as he was inwardly before. The Tragedian, speaking for him, beats his breast, begging his former wife to join him in hell (which, for the record, is not a place of fire and torment but, basically, a slightly more unpleasant version of Earth). Doesn't she care about him? Can't she see how she's hurting him by remaining aloof? Isn't she aware of how hard it would be for him to change enough to join her in paradise?

Essentially, the wife extends the invitation to change. When he churlishly refuses, appealing to her pity, she turns and leaves him. Her retinue of angelic beings sings a song: The Happy Trinity is her home; nothing can trouble her joy. The narrator, confused, protests that she is without pity. The narrator's Teacher affirms this. Pity had long been a weapon the man in life had used to pull down the woman into his own hell. Here in the After, pity holds no such power over her. Her joy cannot be held captive by another's selfish choices.

I'll have to see who else joins the roundtable to discover what other driving emotions may be worth looking at.

Caught between Hope and Nihilism

Every year around this time I wake up and realize that the deadline for proposals to the Big Summer Conference is November 1. And every year around this time I brainstorm madly for some kind of session that matches the Conference's yearly theme ("Drive" this time, since it's in Detroit).

After today's wake-up and brainstorm, it looks like I'm going to be pulling together a roundtable about the deep, enduring emotions (affects) that drive social movements in performance. My idea is to have each roundtable participant write/present something about a particular emotion. I have a friend who's researching fear. Another writes about outrage (a favored topic of mine in the past). Someone else is doing love.

Eventually I need to decide what to do myself. I'm caught between hope and nihilism.

Just put that on my tombstone: "I'm caught between hope and nihilism."

Actually, I don't want a tombstone. Or a funeral, really. I'd prefer to leave no trace and disappear from human memory as quickly as possible. Nihilism FTW! Except--I feel guilty thinking that. Can nihilism ever be anything other than a mental pathology? (There's my paper, probably.)

There's already a go-to performance scholar for hope: Jill Dolan. Hm. I should ask her. She's a super-star, of course, and likely already engaged. But it's worth a shot. I hope she says yes! LOL.

Nihilism and pessimism aren't safe topics for me, really. They're fascinating in the way that unhealthy-for-me things often are, like chocolate fudge ice cream sundaes from Baskin-Robbins. Or chocolate pudding. Or chocolate anything. I can get into really, really bad spots thinking too much about pessimism.

I have a pessimistic bent and a tendency to depression. This is both a neutral fact of my brain/personality and a complication for me as a Christian. The second fruit of the Spirit, we're told, is joy. It's right after love. Christians should be joyful, hopeful, cheerful. I'm not by nature a cheerful person.

I strive for pragmatism tempered by humble gratitude. The more I can recognize my kneejerk pessimistic thoughts as reactivity, the better. But even after that, it is often hard for me to discern reason for hope (as my recent posts have illustrated). When obliged to be a leader or a teacher, I can shift into an optimistic gear. It's a fake-it-til-you-make-it kind of gesture. Sometimes it works to get me out of a spiral.

But we'll see.

Father K

I've gotta stop writing about depressing things.

Or, better: depressing things have to stop happening.

Today's depressing thing: a snippet of a Radiolab episode I heard today while driving. The episode, "Father K," concerns Khader El-Yateem, a Lutheran minister of Palestinian descent and Brooklyn resident for over 23 years. He was running for New York City city council. The episode looks at his campaign through the lens of the shifting demographics of the southern Brooklyn area. Historically white (Irish), it's been diversifying--gentrifying, really--lately, particularly with immigrants from parts of Asia and the Middle East. Unlike other kinds of gentrification, in this situation older white people are feeling the squeeze, seeing local housing they had long considered "theirs" gradually being priced out of their reach.

El-Yateem seems like precisely the kind of unusually patient, passionate, outgoing person who's born to be a politician--or a pastor. I mean both those in the best way. Politicians get a bad rap. Calling someone a politician can sound like a smear. But, just as our complicated society requires bureaucrats, technicians, and other specialists, so too do we require politicians. Our representative-democratic system requires that there be people like El-Yateem willing to sacrifice their privacy and mental well-being for a shot at being a servant of/by/for the people. To be sure, some are attracted to politics for less than altruistic reasons. But El-Yateem struck me as the real deal.

That hardly seems to matter, though, to a lot of the white people in south Brooklyn who'd have to vote for him if he were to find a way onto the council.

To be fair, the episode does a good job taking us on a deep dive into the complex politics of this area and of Arab-Americans in this era particularly. Arab-Americans have of course had a rough time of it in the last few decades in the US. If you come from the wrong country, you're pushed to register. The government has given this community plenty of reasons not to trust their names and information to government entities. That makes it hard to get people registered to vote. There's also a good bit of mutual distrust within the Arab-American community, between Christian and Muslim Arabs, for example, who know and hear about inter-religious violence in places like Egypt. El-Yateem, a Christian minister, is sometimes distrusted by other Arab Christians for his close ties to Muslims.

All of that tension, however, pales in comparison to the good old-fashioned racism readily apparent in some of the anonymous Brooklynites interviewed.

"That one that is running," said one, "He's Egyptian."

"He's Palestinian," journalist Simon Adler corrected gently."

"Okay. Palestinian, still Egyptian," the voice asserted flatly. "That's how I feel. It just completely turns me off." Others echoed this sentiment. These were Democrats. The "how I feel" person continued:

Anybody asks me to vote for Donald Trump. When he was running, I would turn around. I said, hell no, but I feel this is our country. This is America. And I feel American person should be in for office.

Pastor El-Yateem is of course American. 

Democrats, El-Yateem notes, are often a little more "under the table" about their anti-Arab, xenophobic, racist sentiments. But Republicans, echoing Trump, are just fine saying the quiet parts loud: immigrants are bad for white people, aka the "real" Americans.

The election in September came and went. El-Yateem lost. There were many reasons. None of the polling stations in the area (where about 10% of the population is Arab-American) had translation in Arabic available. The campaign's volunteer translators were turned away--illegally, it appears--from polling stations. The bigger reason for El-Yateem's loss? White folk. "Just in this moment," says Adler, "there were not enough white folks who would be willing to vote for an Arab candidate. Uh, no matter what."

The episode did its best to explain the white Brooklynites' sentiments in terms other than racism. And those contexts matter. Racism isn't magic; it doesn't just appear out of nowhere. But neither is it merely a side-effect of economic duress and fear. It becomes its own thing, acquires its own malignant agency. 

I'm so disappointed in white people. Just when I think I'm really, thoroughly disappointed, I hear a story like this and discover a new sub-level, an underground bunker, for new levels of dismay.

A conservative columnist today has a standard, "isn't critical race theory dumb?" column up today. "Is there any criminal thing whiteness cannot do?" his headline (which he may not have written) asks. He means the question ironically.

I'll ask it unironically and slightly altered: Is there any criminal thing whiteness will not do?

I dunno. I just don't.

JF

Ramble-Grumbles about Trumpian Intractability

Despite a pretty good day, my general funk deepens.

Impeachment seems destined to become a tribal identity contest. Those of us convinced the president is guilty gesture repeatedly, exasperatedly at the evidence and wonder how anyone could think Trump innocent of corruption and incompetence. Trump's defenders may have retreated from "no quid pro quo" to "yeah, quid pro quo, but everyone does it!", but they remain constant in their insistence that the impeachment inquiries are a coup. The Senate GOP's latest anti-impeachment resolution, symbolic though it may be, signals what everyone already knows: impeachment will die a quick death in the Senate, no matter what. The DOJ's opening of a criminal investigation into the origins of the Muller probe promise to throw enough chaff into the air to confuse anyone not already engaged and committed.

It'll be red versus blue, not Trump versus evidence. Even Trump's red-leaning critics are, by and large, still "Yeah, but he's better than a Democrat."

I can't deny a lot of my animosity toward Trump is rooted in red/blue, them/us dynamics.

But the reality of motivated reasoning isn't the only thing going on here. Trump is really, truly, objectively operating out of the normal range of any president in living memory. There's just no legitimate comparison with Obama or Bush or Clinton. Even Nixon managed to govern without daily public, narcissistic rants. Nor did Nixon comport himself internationally as an ill-educated boob. I mean, the White House had to confirm that the Erdogan letter wasn't a parody. They had to de-satire-ize the president's own letter!

The rational defense of Trump--behind the distraction, he's giving us what we want--doesn't quite work with me. Sure--you get your judges and justices appointed, and that's not nothing. But in other arenas of governance he's a disaster! International relations? The long-term economy? And just plain character, a model for our children to look up to. There's no sense of the right calling Trump out for the kind of mean, petty, and deeply irresponsible discourse that makes up his whole rhetorical style. Trump himself won't stand for it. His rants aim at his critics. He talks like a cartoon supervillain--but not the scary kind, the sadly inept kind. I mean, that's the best defense The Wall Street Journal can summon: he's too inept to impeach.

But none of that matters. The base supports Trump for reasons that aren't rational. His combativeness is for them a signal of strength. He's saying what they've wanted to say to all those people who call them stupid or bigoted for denying climate change, wondering why white men are so put upon, or hating taxes.

Actually, I get at least two strands from the comment threads I read. On one hand, Trump is seen just as he sells himself: a kind of outsider/house cleaner, clearing out the festering wound that is "government" and replacing it with American Greatness. Trump isn't just pragmatically right; he's a good man unfairly smeared by people who hate goodness. Others, though, readily admit that Trump is an agent of chaos, that he's rude and unrefined and even a bit willfully ignorant. He's less a cleansing treatment and more like chemotherapy. He'll burn out the badness of Washington. And if he burns the place down while re-arranging the furniture? Well, all the better. It needs to go.

"Savior" and "agent of destruction" aren't obvious bedfellows--except in certain forms of American evangelicalism. I'm not sure that a wedge strategy to split the salvationists from the nihilists would actually work.

Hm. Gotta think more on that.

Funk out!

Warning Lights on the Control Board

Ugh. The funk that is this less-than-stellar week continues.

I do not drink, nor do I do any drugs. I dislike inebriation, find it a turn-off.

But at times like these, I see the appeal of creating for yourself a blackout period. You dive into non-consciousness. You wake up, days later, and resume your life. It's nothing like that, really, I know. Actual blackouts are terrifying for loved ones and no picnic to pick up after for anyone.

But the fantasy of just turning off for a while, sleeping through it, like a surgical procedure: that has appeal. If perfect cryonics existed, I'm sure people would dip into the freezer for weeks, months, years at a time, just to escape . . . everything.

All these thoughts, I know, are little warning lights blinking on my mental control board. "Check engine." "Maintenance needed." But that's costly work. It feels better to power off and restart in the hopes that jump-starts things.

Except I have stuff to do yet tonight, stuff I wasn't able to do earlier because Reasons.

I've checked all my usual news sources for some inspiration about what to write about. I do not recommend such an activity when the warning lights are blinking. Evidence increases of Trump's having done--or at least having tried to do--exactly what the whistle-blower's complaint alleges: using military aid already allocated to Ukraine to get Ukraine to investigate/embarrass his political rival. Republican response? Condemn the inquiry, disrupt it, delegitimize it, call any GOP member who dares question Trump "human scum."

The Wall Street Journal editorial, apparently (it's behind a paywall) suggests that Trump ought not be impeached because he is too inept to have accomplished the crime. As with the Russia thing in the Muller report, Trump tried his darnedest to break the law, but his own people foiled him. He tried to bend Ukraine to his will via pressure, but someone cracked and filed a complaint. I'm worried that argument--he would have done it, but he didn't--will actually work.

I'm more depressed, though, that it just seems impossible to foresee a working democratic government emerging from this crisis.

Such is the working of despair. Hope is forward-looking, future-imagining. Despair is stuck on the present, extending the worst aspects of the now into the forever.

Perhaps my worrisome fantasy of "just sleep through it" is hopeful after all. At least I imagine waking up. At least right now I do.

Translating Bullshit

Guh. What a bad day yesterday! What a bad night!

I'm still getting over the shame of it, trying to turn a negative experience into take-away  lessons for the future.

One of the signs I was bombing was when I was talking blithely about Donald Trump as a bullshitter. I'm using Harry Frankfurt's specific usage of the verb to bullshit, a term that's become well-known in the field of political communication. To bullshit, Frankfurt argues, is not to lie. Lying requires that you know the difference between truth and falsehood. The liar knows and intentionally chooses falsehood. The bullshitter, however, neither knows nor cares about the distinction between true and false. The bullshitter just talks, makes stuff up.

I'm hardly the first person to call Trump a bullshitter. Even his advocates will admit that he has a casual relationship with facts, that in his public rhetoric he's quick to insult, suggest innuendo, and make grandiose claims. His fans, we've been told, know to take him seriously but not literally.

And Frankfurt's notion of bullshit underlies the Calling Bullshit media literacy project I was talking about.

I expected to be talking to adults who were passingly familiar with that term and willing to go along with characterizing Trump as a bullshitter. A page or two into my talk, though, I saw this was not the case. My audience was primarily undergrads taking some gen ed course and attending this event for credit. They were disoriented that I was cursing and unsure what to think of my making casual, isn't-it-obvious references to Trump's bullshitting. I'm sure that for many of them I was the stereotypical liberal professor who just hates Trump because I'm liberal.

It went downhill from there.

This mismatch was my fault. I should have inquired more carefully about who was going to attend. I'd have created a lesson rather than given a paper otherwise.

On another level, though, the mismatch, the translation gap, speaks to a larger difficulty with fake news. We teachers and scholars want to be able to say that fake news--misinformation and disinformation alike--are problems on right and left, that everyone struggles with confirmation bias. But the fact is that, as Benkler, Faris, and Roberts argue (assuming they're right), the right-wing mediasphere has over decades (predating the internet) created a closed system of authority and trust based not on journalistic standards of truth and evidence but on identity-based standards of loyalty to the party line.

Just saying that is, as BFR note, awkward. The right-wing media absolutely thinks that about the MSM, the mainstream media. And to be sure there's bias on the center and the left. But, BFR argue, the center and left tend to cluster around established news sources like The New York Times or The Washington Post (or even the news part of The Wall Street Journal)--sources that adhere to journalistic norms of fact-checking, mutual accountability, and corrections. There's simply nothing on the left or center to compare to the persistent conspiracy narratives that drive the right, such as the deep state or the notion that global warming is a hoax. Multiply, repeatedly, thoroughly debunked narratives (the Clinton Foundation's corruption, Seth Rich's murder--heck, even birtherism) remain in strong circulation, fed oxygen by sources like Fox News and Breitbart.

There is a disinformation asymmetry between the extreme right and everyone else.

How would you possibly convince someone on the right that this is so? It's akin to persuading someone they're brainwashed or in a cult. How would I react--how have I reacted in the past--if someone were to tell me that, despite my feeling that I'm rational and ethical, I'm actually caught in the grips of an all-consuming, evil ideology: gayness, perhaps, or Methodism. Or progressivism. I'd resist. More--I'd take offense. And rightfully so!

As Dan Kahan has argued, we have good reasons, usually, for holding the deep beliefs we do. These reasons may not be based on an accurate picture of the relevant facts of the issue. But they're likely based on our sense of what the social groups we belong to value. It makes every sense for us to prefer those kind of beliefs that align us with our primary social groups. I'm not sure this is something you can convince people out of.

I can tell you--trying to do so? Well, it feels akin to the kind of hopeless despair  I felt as I was telling these students about Trump's bullshitting. I could tell that, to them, I sounded like the bullshitter.

What's to be done?

Bomb

Well, that went terribly. Mismatch between audience and presentation, ran out of time halfway through, embarrassed myself thoroughly.

Standup comedians earn their stripes through repeated bombing before bored audiences,

This will one day be a stripe.

For now it's just a lousy experience.

I'm ending my day now, hoping tomorrow will be better.

Good night.

Asymmetric polarization, universal deepfakery

The Network Propaganda book by Benkler, Faris, and Roberts (BFR) continues to impress me. They provide a compelling counter-narrative to the "social media exacerbates polarization" narrative that I've been invested in throughout much of my recent work. This latter narrative gains a lot of traction from scholars like Cass Sunstein's #Republic: Divided Democracy in an Age of Social Media. Essentially, the neurocircuitry of us-versus-them that makes humans the biased, motivated reasoners we are plus the outrage/fear-driven attention economy of the current internet makes for an especially divided, polarized demos.

BFR's pushback (I'm just now getting to their chapter on polarization) seeks to undermine the "both sides do it" subtext of Sunstein et al.'s argument. Polarization, they insist, is asymmetric. Over the past generation, the USAmerican right has become much more rightwing than the left has become left. The left has its extreme actors, but on the whole there's nothing approaching the kind of debunked-but-persistent conspiracy theory narratives that regularly consume a vast amount of oxygen on the right. Whereas Sunstein (I'm generalizing here to mean the broad swath of folk arguing in his vein) would say that both left and right engage in identity-motivated, antagonistic communication, BFR's research points to a news media ecology with two fairly distinct sides: a basically truth-seeking, self-correcting center/left--and the extreme right. The right, they contend, has its own, long-in-the-making media sphere operating not according to verification protocols but to identity-affirming protocols.

BFR admit that this asymmetry is awkward for scholars who wish to preserve a sense of partisan neutrality. Rush Limbaugh has already branded academia one of the "Four Corners of Deceit" (along with government, science, and media). The idea that university scholars are left-leaning and hostile to the right (especially the Christian right) is a background assumption across the right. It is not without some truth; humanities and arts scholars do skew left. Most scientist accept anthropogenic global warming, evolution, and other right-wing bugaboos.

To say, as BFR do, that the right-wing media produces, signal-boosts, and circulates many more untrue things than the mainstream media--well, I can just imagine what conservative-leaning folk would say about that. How convenient. You find that your side is for truth while our side spouts propaganda. 

What's depressing is that, as BFR realize, the very model of network propaganda--the self-reinforcing ecology of right-wing disinformation and misinformation--inoculates itself against truth-checking by dismissing reality checkers as biased. PolitiFact? Snopes? That's just more corrupt, left-wing media obsessed with making Trump look bad. I mean, look how they find Trump uttering more lies than Democrats! Clear bias. And what if, in fact, Trump is spouting more lies--more by orders of magnitude--than any president prior to him? Please. 

BFR's case actually takes me a bit too far afield from the brief talk I'm giving tomorrow on deepfakes. Indeed, I don't think they talk about deepfakes at all. But their insights help me frame the field of dis/mis/information exchange in which deepfakes play.

Or do they? The fear of deepfakes, the thing that keeps security experts up at night, concern scenarios where deepfaked videos trick reactionary leaders like Trump into drastic actions. The reality of deepfakes, however, is that 96% of them are porn flicks with non-consenting women's faces superimposed onto actors' bodies. Beyond this considerable harm--one that doesn't fit BFR's definitions of mis- or dis-information--is the "worst thing about deepfakes" according to Thom Dunn: "we know about them." The accepted possibility that any video may be deepfaked grants those in power a handy excuse for those who would hold them accountable via video evidence.

I await the wave of deepfake defenses from authority figures like police ("that clip of me planting the drugs? Deepfake!"), politicians (deepfaked pee tape, anyone?), and celebrities  ("My ex deepfaked the footage of me hitting her!"). And they may be right! Deepfaked false allegations will soon be as easy as uploading a YouTube--easier still for those with power or platforms who already have access to scads of images/clips to train a deepfake app on.

Add facial recognition tech, and a whole vista of micro-targeted deepfake advertisements pop into being. See yourself--literally!--having fun at Disney World's newest attraction. Hear yourself, in your own voice, using your own style of speaking, pleading with yourself to buy X product, watch Y show, or vote for Z candidate. See your parents and closest friends pleading with you.

Or watch yourself committing a crime or deeply embarrassing act--caught on tape!--and learn that the video will be forwarded to everyone you know or work for unless you pay X amount in bitcoin or Libra.

I've switched gears mid-post. Awkward. But that's what happens when I'm writing a post and paper simultaneously.

More tomorrow, with a report on how the paper went, maybe.

JF

Network Propaganda and the Asymmetry of Disinformation

Today's deepfake research consisted of reading roughly half of a fascinating book, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. There's not so much there about deepfakes per se; the book is only from October 2018, so news about deepfakes was still rolling out.

Benkler, Faris, and Roberts (BFR) instead give an overview of the media landscape (news, social, and other online) for the past five years or so--before, during, and after President Trump's election, in other words. The book is thus far wonderful in terms of establishing a solid foundation for the kind of inquiries about deepfakes, irony, and information literacy I'm interested in. The authors provide an up-to-date survey of media studies of propaganda and internet communication. And they stabilize a few key terms in ways that will prove useful to me. The distinctions between misinformation (mistaken or unintentionally misleading info), disinformation (intentionally misleading information), and propaganda (manipulative communication to obtain behavior compliant with the propagandist's goals), for example, has been pretty well established elsewhere. But they elaborate and expand on the interaction of these terms in original ways.

One innovation, for instance, lies in their specification of what manipulation means in a propagandistic context: "Directly influencing someone’s beliefs, attitudes, or preferences in ways that fall short of what an empathetic observer would deem normatively appropriate in context" (BFR 30). I find this more intriguing than convincing. The media studies tradition they're grounding themselves in seeks to retain the negative implication of propaganda while distinguishing it from less objectionable forms of communication. In practice, such distinctions often boil down to propaganda being "what the baddies do" and communication or advocacy being "what we good guys do." The notion of an empathetic observer normatively judging between appropriate or inappropriate communications, though, seems a bit like this same old thing but with more steps. Who defines the appropriately empathetic observer?

Of greater use, I think, is BFR's putting mis/disinformation and propaganda into relationship with some newer terms. Bullshit comes from Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, where he describing rhetoric that simply doesn't care about the truth content of its claims. Network propaganda is BFR's name for the architecture of media and media exchange that creates feedback loops where disinformation and propaganda thrive. Disorientation refers to an intentionally fostered, widespread ethos of apathy/helplessness in which information consumers feel unwilling or unable to distinguish truth from falsehood in political communication.

Having laid out these terms, BFR's methods of argument are both quantitative and qualitative. Quantitatively, they survey trends of online media views and shares, mapping out how a bit of how the mediasphere operated and shifted over that time. Qualitatively, they tackle a few case studies of how certain news stories (Uranium One, Seth Rich, etc.) flared into life, spread, and were either ignored or installed as doctrine by partisan media ecologies.

What's fascinating here to me is how BFR push back against many of the easy or widely accepted ways of thinking about political communication in the Trump era. I'm certainly re-assessing many of my preconceptions in light of some of their arguments.

Their research, for instance, throws a bit of cold water on the notion that the 2016 election was entirely won due to the actions of Russian infiltration, white supremacist groups, or the attention/outrage cycles of online information exchange. All of these, to be sure, played a part. But in terms of magnitude of effect none of them outweigh the long-developing dynamics of media ecology in the US. It's difficult to say, for example, exactly how much effect Russian (or Macedonian) interference played in generating pro-Trump support. At several points BFR note that their snapshots of the mediascape in case studies don't change much when they control for known Russia-produced sites. White supremacist media (that is, media by explicitly white supremacist groups, agents, and sites) similarly got a load of attention from the left but seems actually to have had a distinct and attenuated impact on right-wing news exchange.

Most surprising to me, though, is their somewhat reluctant but nevertheless certain finding of an asymmetry of partisan media. It simply isn't the case that disinformation and propaganda spread equally across the political media spectrum. There's just more right-leaning disinformation proliferation than there is left-leaning disinformation. This is not, the authors rush to say, because right-leaning folk are less honest than left-leaning folk. The issue is not one of individual actors but of media architectures. The extreme right has built for itself a media ecology distinct and isolated from center and left exchange networks.

Those center/left exchanges have their share of fringe and extreme communicators, to be sure. But most left-leaning and center exchanges privilege sites and sources that value traditional journalistic norms of fact-checking and self-correction. When The New York Times gets a story wrong, The Washington Post or The Guardian will challenge it, and vice-versa. There's a sense of trust in these sources, an agreement that they are, if imperfect, at least trying to play by the rules of epistemic integrity.

The extreme right mediasphere, by contrast, sets itself up as opposing those sources (the "corrupt main stream media"). Led by Fox and Breitbart, conservative media exchanges tend to be more insular. They site other right-leaning sites. Their verification procedures are less concerned about the truth of a story and more concerned about whether the story puts their partisan identity in a good or bad light. "Is it loyal?" becomes more important than "Is it true?"

How do BFR know this? They point to quantitative and qualitative studies in which the center/left mediasphere privileges stories that disconfirm progressives' preferred narratives. When Huffington Post, for example, published a claim that Trump had raped a 13-year-old girl (a story that, while horrible, would fit progressives' negative views about Trump), this claim was examined and found to be unsubstantiated--by other left/center sources using traditional journalistic methods.

Media sources and sites within the right-wing sphere, however, have fewer incentives to reality-check stories that seem to embarrass Democrats or credit Trump. Thus, conspiracies about Seth Rich's "assassination" or the amorphous-but-ever-powerful "deep state" (or, now, about Democatic servers hidden somewhere in Ukraine)--these stories, once spread, become part of a never-challenged narrative on the right. To challenge their veracity is to endorse the anti-Trump main stream media, which (as right-wing pundits declare constantly) is irreparably liberal and corrupt.

This asymmetry of disinformation poses considerable challenges to the kind of depolarizing activities of groups like Better Angels who strive to reach across party lines without getting bogged down in debates about matters of fact.

But that's probably a matter for the rest of the book.

JF

The Right's View of the Left

OK, now I'm blatantly procrastinating on the deepfakes research in favor of more "Christianity is dying" news. Rod Dreher on The American Conservative website has thus far provided me the most intriguing take on this trend. An early critic of Trump, he still regularly criticizes the President. He was a Catholic until he abandoned that faith for the Orthodox church. He's unabashedly conservative, but he is not shy about refusing to see Trumpism as a reliable standard-bearer for conservatism. Amid the impeachment scandal, Dreher's support for Trump appears to be hanging by a thread.

But for Dreher, that thread of support is spun from the deep and abiding apprehension and loathing he has for the left. I've picked up a similar current of anything but Democrats sentiment across the right-wing sites I survey daily.

This "left" that appears in such red-leaning discourse fascinates me. I recognize some of it. Imagine every excess of racial/sexual/gender/class wokeness you can, magnify it, join it with a deep hatred of Christianity, and you have something that resembles red America's vision of "the SJW [Social Justice Warrior] left," a label that often gets the gendered adjective hysterical attached to it. From this point of view, the left consists of an ongoing cultural inquisition dedicated to rooting out those normal-thinking regular folk who just think good old-fashioned common sense things like marriage should be between one man and one woman, that the point of sex is to have lots of babies within the confines of stable marriage, that worship of the Christian God was-is-should be the basis for much of American culture and law, that human personhood begins at conception and that "science" proves this, that variation in gender presentation should be treated as abnormal, that the climate is basically stable and earth's resources there for humans to use, that Western European culture (and possibly ethnicity) has fairly won out as the best and most noble of human expressions, that...

Well, there's a never-ending list of things lefty SJWs don't like but that regular people do. Mind you, after the first few items (lately, "drag queen story hour is an abomination") the regular people would start bickering sharply about exactly what the right and true is (Is there One True Church? Should women be allowed positions of leadership in church and society? Are mixed-race marriages a good idea?). Such fractures, however, get a pass compared to the clear and present danger of SJWs.

Just what threat do SJWs pose? Well, first of all, they're judgey. Cross them, believe anything different than they do, and suddenly you're a "bigot" or a "racist" or a "sexist"--and that hurts! (That's ungenerous of me; let me try again.)

From the red-leaning point of view, progressives preach a peculiar kind of tolerance: tolerate the things we say you must tolerate--and don't ask too many questions about it. The "snowflake" stereotype often plastered on progressives comes from a sense on the right that their tolerance and social justice exist primarily as an ethical style, a taste for what's acceptable or not, and not as a set of clear or defensible principles. Inquiring about the boundaries of that style, or disagreeing with its arbiters, is in this snowflake religion a dire sin, a performative act that marks you as a heretic. Everything's acceptable and tolerable except questioning acceptance and tolerance.

Conservative Christians--the ur-regular people in right-leaning thought--cannot help but seem distasteful and disgusting to SJWs. They believe things--God, sin, commandments, redemption, moral codes--that SJWs deem as unacceptable. Therefore Christians are hateful bigots just for being Christians. Christians, in other words, are intolerable to pro-tolerance SJWs.

My snide bit about judgeyness aside, red-leaning folk point to actual consequences of holding views disliked by the predominant culture of SJWs (and, to reds, SJW culture predominates). There's social judgment, being seen as bigoted. Then there's the economic and political consequences of being seen as such. Reds often point to high-profile instances of people being shown the door of private companies or disinvited from special events for expressing, say, skepticism about gay marriage. Many conservative folk live and move in predominantly blue circles; they'd lose friends, clients, and referrals if word got out that they were Trump voters.

On larger levels, conservative Christians see threats to their beliefs in anti-discrimination policies. The cake-baker cases, where conservative Christians seem (in their view) to be coerced into celebrating a ceremony they see as contrary to their faith, worry them greatly. Consider Beto O'Rourke's remarks at a recent Democratic debate, where he argued that churches that deny services like marriage to LGBTQ+ people should lose their tax-exempt status. Such a statement, argues Ben Shapiro, is "saying the quiet part of the progressive agenda out loud."

The "left" that O'Rourke seems to be speaking for, from the conservative Christian perspective, isn't merely different than but inimical to Christians. It wants Christianity gone.

More tomorrow,

JF

Wars of religions

For those that watch for them, ripples of reaction have been spreading across US religious thinkers over the last twenty-four hours. It's not the tumult of impeachment or Syria (or not only that). It's the new Pew study that confirms the continued decline of religious affiliation--especially Christianity--among USAmericans. Only 65% of adults now identify as Christian, down 12 points over the past ten years. And for the first time, a majority of millennials do not identify as religious.  

The post-Christian epoch, long prophesied, is upon us.

For a while now, the religious right in this country has written about the decline of faith in public life with the same fervent apprehension that scientists use when discussing shrinking ice caps in a warming globe. The why and the what to do about it questions seem similar. Are we causing it? Can we stop it? How might we adapt if we can't stop it?

For Erick Erickson at The Resurgent, some blame lies with those who call themselves born-again Christians. The faith of many of these, he argues, is shallow:

It is important to note that it is very likely that the number of self-described evangelicals already does exceed and certainly will exceed the number of actual church going Christians in the country too. Evangelical is rapidly becoming an ethnic identifier of someone who loves Jesus, but doesn’t really have a relationship with him.

A profession of faith, in other words, is increasingly less about describing a theological commitment and more about signalling membership in a political tribe. Erickson singles out strongly conservative (Baptist and/or Reformed) institutions like Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as bulwarks against such a-religious drift.

Rod Dreher cites a similar tribal identity argument in a fascinating post with the dire title, "Our Coming War of Religion." Note that, contra lots of other right-leaning pieces, Dreher is not framing a war on religion. He gestures toward the constellation of beliefs that make up the left's "wokeness"--feminism, critical race theory, sexuality and gender studies, postcolonialism (he doesn't use these terms exactly). Dreher suggests that these beliefs cohere into a kind of de facto mythology, by which he means a comprehensive, deeply held set of assumptions about how the world is and ought to be. This view, he suggests, contributes to the deep antipathy left-leaners have toward Trump and toward traditional Christianity. Christianity, in turn, holds an opposing mythology.

In other words, what's at stake in polarizing conflicts of today isn't a rational disagreement beetween opposing arguments but a war of mythologies, a war of religions (whether they be called so or not). Beneath questions about what Trump has or hasn't done and whether Trump is or isn't right to do those things, Americans are divided over what kind of world we ought to be trying to make, what that world should look like.

This conflict isn't made of reasons coolly discussed. It's made of visceral reactions, stomach churning feelings stirred up by the very thought of the other side triumphing. Such felt orientations, warns Dreher, aren't likely to submit to the ordered game of democracy. If Warren (say) wins, how will die-hard Trump supporters react? If Trump wins a second term, are progressives likely to roll over?

Worrisome stuff.

JF

Diving back into deepfakes

It's been a busy day of catching up with a dear friend. I've not caught up, alas, on as much grading as I need to, nor have I yet really sunk my attention into updating disinformation and deepfake research. This report (linked here) by an Amsterdam-based company called DeepTrace suggests that there have been over 13,000 deepfake videos produced (and that's counting only US sources).

About 96% of these, apparently, are pornographic in nature, almost totally involuntary deepfakes of females in hetero-oriented vids. That in itself is a worrisome issue, a sad route into new, are-we-really-talking-about-this questions about consent, misogyny, and representation.

For all the worry about political processes being disrupted by deepfakes, though, so far there's not been much to suggest that we've been radically fooled in political realms.

I take that back: we've been fooled, but not by deepfakes. As Lindsey Graham getting hoaxed by Russian pranksters pretending to be Turkish officials to edited videos ("shallowfakes" or "cheapfakes") of Nancy Pelosi or Jim Acosta demonstrate, humans hardly require machine learning AI systems to get duped. Indeed, the most directly deepfake-related political hoax stories from Gabon and Malaysia involve not actual deepfakes but allegations that X or Y videos of politicians have been altered or deepfaked.

As Thom Dunn argues, "The worst thing about deepfakes is that we know about deepfakes." The possibility of perfectly faked or invisibly altered video undermines the reliability of video evidence we've long (but not too long) assumed as infallible. If the Gabon and Malaysian examples are any guide, default skepticism will likely, primarily aid politicians and other relatively privileged folk who wish to dodge accountability. Caught on tape? Think again. That's just deepfaked video to make me look bad. Deepfake news.

On the positive side, deep/shallowfake video imagery holds some promise for resisting certain vectors of surveillance capitalism. Jing-Cai Liu, an industrial design student in the Netherlands, recently publicized a projected-video face mask, essentially a helmet that projects a fake face onto your own in order to foil facial recognition technologies. News and video of the mask went viral, erroneously being spread as having been developed and used by Hong Kong protesters to circumvent Chinese government facial recognition. It was not.

But it could be.

Brave new worlds in front of us.

More tomorrow,

JF

Failure and Resilience

And now for something completely different: here's Zach Galifianakis talking about his two weeks as a writer on Saturday Night Live:

Long story short: Galifianakis was a struggling stand-up comedian. After trying out--again--for SNL, he won a contract, moved to New York, got to work . . . and discovered he'd been hired as a writer, not as a cast member. It was cliquish, he said, though he holds no animosity toward the folk there. In the clip he recalls having a sketch of his read out in the writers' room to utter, deathly silence. He says he remembers hearing the AC click off halfway through. Tina Fey, sitting next to him, patted him sympathetically on the shoulder.

It's an awful feeling, he reflects, experiencing that failure from other folk. But by then, he says, he had developed a thick skin thanks to all the times he'd bombed on stage as a comedian. He'd gone through those dark nights of the soul, wondering if he were even funny. It still was awful, but it didn't break him.

I've been thinking a lot about resilience, the ability to endure unpleasant times. So much of growing up, becoming a mature adult, a friend of mine said, is the repeated experience of going through something awful and coming out the other side alive. You realize that discomfort, most of the time, isn't fatal. Your apprehension of discomfort, your efforts to avoid it at all costs--most of the time these burn up more life energy than the experience itself ever does.

There's a sense--I have it too--that a lot of our students nowadays are coming to us less resilient than in the past. Sometimes this manifests as escape tactics--avoidance, distraction, outbursts, panic. Sometimes this turns into mental health emergencies. Other times a lack of resilience radiates out as entitlement: How dare you expect me to do this assignment by X date? Don't you know how stressed that makes me??

What's tricky is that another part of growing up is learning not to tolerate or endure unnecessary pain. You learn to say no to abuse. It's tough when you aren't always sure whether a negative feeling is an unpleasant-but-not-fatal learning experience or an injustice. Sometimes, frankly, our experiences can feature a messy mix of both.

(A whole other post would be about our tendency to romanticize abuse as necessary learning experiences that we then inflict on those we're teaching or mentoring. That's a whole bushel of BS there.)

It's helpful to have people like Galifianakis speaking so frankly about their histories of failure, how failure can be good.

As Jake the dog says:

More tomorrow,

JF

Presentation Planning and Conference Skipping; or, Guilt but No Regret

Two currents of activity-anxiety vex me this evening.

The first: I've started the crushing information download of articles and books necessary for me to feel ready to talk a week from tonight at a special event on deepfakes (scarily realistic-looking fake videos of real people produced by AI). I'm giving a paper at our university library about it as part of their digital security month. This is way out of my normal scholarly sandbox. I'm a bit freaked out about sharing the stage with some people who, you know, actually know something about designing and developing machine learning programs.

I'm invited thanks to an article I wrote last year sorta sounding an early alarm about deepfakes. It was not, as reviewers noted, a great example of original scholarship. That is, I did not make the usual gesture of identifying and intervening into an extant critical conversation. I was basically, Y'all, this is scary! I synthesized information and news from a variety of sources, translating a lot of background material about AI, machine learning, and other such stuff into layperson's terms.

My poor editor at the journal had to keep pressing me to go forward with it. I had no confidence in the piece.

It's now one of the more downloaded articles from the journal. Go figure. Plus, from what I can tell, it's still one of the first academic articles about the phenomenon. I don't really know how to follow up.

So I'm nervous, doing my usual last-minute thing of absorbing an obscene amount of information, filling up my mental thinktank with data that I can hopefully use to craft a halfway decent presentation (which no one I know will see thanks to the presentation being cross-scheduled with a science and performance event across campus).

The other anxiety is that I'm likely-probably not applying to a big conference that I've been intimately involved in for over a decade. I'm just not going this year. I think I probably could devise a good abstract for it. I'm pretty well-known in that conference, so I'd probably get in. But--well, I'm tired, for one thing. And for another thing, my funding just isn't stretching as far as it used to. To be clear, I have nothing to complain about. That I have funding at all puts me into an elite group.

That said, if I want to do more Better Angels conferences over the next year, I'll need to make some sacrifices elsewhere, namely this conference.

But, boy, is the Guilt strong here.

I recently stepped back from directing a show I had agreed to direct this fall. I had reasons. My chair understood them. But still: guilt. I was upset about it, depressed about it. And then my therapist asked if I regretted the decision. That is, if I could, would I go back and make a different decision, keep my original commitment to direct? The answer flew from me: Not. At. All. I had plenty of guilt--no regret.

I'm hoping such is the case here. Guilt but no regret.

We shall see.

JF

Triumph of the Pro-Trump Meme

The outrage du jour from Team Trump: a video edit of a scene from the 2014 movie Kingsmen: The Secret Service. In the original movie, Colin Firth's heroic character is basically mind-controlled into attacking a church full of innocents who have in turn been mind-controlled to kill him. He slaughters them in gory, stylized choreography. In the video edit, Trump's face is cut-and-pasted over Firth's, and the folk Firth is shooting, stabbing, and otherwise massacring wear the faces of Trump's enemies: the Clintons, Obama, John McCain (?), and various network logos (NPR, ABC, CNN, etc.).

I'll not link to the video here. For one thing, it's distasteful and depressing. A joke about mass-shooting? No thanks. For the record, I had a similarly queasy feeling watching Kingsmen in the theatre--graphic violence wrapped in stylized irony and served with vapidly elitist anti-elitism. I doubt the edit improves on the original.

But the bigger reason not to post here is because the video is a trollish basilisk. To re-post it or contribute to its spread and view count only spreads its curse.

The New York Times broke the story late this weekend, reporting that the video was shown at a Florida Pro-Trump conference (by the group American Priority) as part of a larger panel (display?) about memes. News of it rolled across the mediasphere this morning, sparking mostly alarm and anger from the left (and the media) and mostly whataboutism from the right.

As The Washington Post follow up reported, the video, attributed to a pro-Trump meme group called TheGeekzTeam, had been posted on YouTube for a year. Accounts and pictures of the conference suggest that the video was on a small TV in a mostly empty room on loop. Not many people would have seen the edit but for the Times story going viral. 

Now practically everyone scrolling through news sites has seen it.

This is a coup for TheGeekzTeam and other pro-Trump meme artists like CarpeDonktum, whose videos attacking Democrats Trump has re-tweeted without context in the past. Their view counts have skyrocketed. That most views come from folk opposed to their message matters little. Trolls don't feed on adulation, only attention. Outraged attention is just as tasty as cheer-leading attention. I'm sure there are countless other videos by Donktum et al. just waiting for intrepid reporters to signal-boost their message to the masses.

Meme warfare has been a huge part of Team Trump's media machine. They've taken "memetics" seriously, devising workshops, contests, and showcases to produce and disseminate anti-left and pro-Trump memes. Donktum garnered popularity initially by winning a meme contest, a feat that earned him an invitation to the White House's recent "social media summit." Trump himself, whether through canny strategy or dim narcissism, regularly proves himself master of this attention economy. His tweets become memes spreading across the net, the cyber equivalent of "no such thing as bad publicity." He remains the center of the narrative, the object of everyone's attention.

I'm weary just writing about it. That weariness is part of the point. Trump and Trump meme outrage panics burn off our reservoirs of attention. A lot of Trump's impeachment inquiry strategy just involves counting on the public's energy to flag, for the show to become boring. 

I don't know how we go back to any kind of normal.

Skip forward five years. Regardless of whether this whole impeachment moment ends with Trump leaving or Trump triumphant, in five years there's someone else. What do they do? How does anyone govern after the anomaly of Trump?

Even 50% less wild tweeting from a POTUS would still mean an unending stream of outrage fuel for the side not in power. Already, it seems to me, Trump's penchant for attention over stability is damaging us. Our only reaction to it, from the left, seems to have the unfortunate side effect of feeding the troll.

Guh. Just guh.

JF

Hearts and Treasures, Resumes and Eulogies

So today I went back to church on a not-rushing-to-a-performance basis. I even went to a new Sunday school class. My discovery: I love church. Sure, on a Sunday morning there's always a bit of reticence to get up and get going. But it was such a relief to be there. I loved talking about creeds and prayer in a group of people where I wasn't in charge and didn't have to do anything but attend to my soul.

Well, I did have to do a thing. I was in charge of the children's moment. The sermon title was "Where Your Heart Is," the scripture from Luke 12: 22-34. It's Jesus's admonishment not to worry. Consider the lilies of the field. Do not store up treasure on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves steal. Store up treasure in heaven. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

For the children's moment, I brought lots of cheap purses, handbags, fanny packs, and piggy banks--things I store my treasure in. Then I pulled out the cheap, hand-painted TARDIS my mother made for me out of an old Nestle's can in the 1980s. "It doesn't work as a bank to keep treasure any more," I said. "But I keep it because it shows my mother's love for me." The children's moment followed a performance of the little kids' choir. "While you were singing," I told them, "I saw all your parents and grandparents and friends video taping, leaning forward, focused on you. You're where their heart is. You're their treasure." I turned to my TARDIS. "My mom died a few years ago. But I know when I look at this that I was her treasure, that I was where her heart was. And I believe, somewhere beyond time and space, that she still treasures me as I do her."

The Pastor's sermon was great. He referenced a TED talk by David Brooks (no lefty's favorite person--no conservative's favorite either). There Brooks asks whether you're living your life according to your resume or your eulogy. What's the definition of success you're going for? What kind of accomplishment are you aiming at?

Dagnabbit, that's a good one. My father would like it. I'll be inflicting it on students.

It made me think that I don't want a eulogy. I fantasize about a "leave no trace" life, where my ultimate goal after I die is to disappear as completely and quickly as possible. I don't want a funeral. I don't want a memorial. It's a bit of nihilophilia that I'm pretty sure indexes my depression.

It's also, as my close friends remind me, a bit selfish.

I was advising a student the other day who was wondering whether to go to their graduation ceremony. They'd skipped their high school ceremony even though they were the valedictorian. That act was for them a point of pride, a way of distancing themselves from social pressures and therefore proving that they were the sort of person who resists social pressures. Fair enough. And certainly no one's going to stop you from not going to your own college graduation.

But have you ever been to one of our graduations? I asked. They had not. I think you'd find, I said, that they're less about cloying nostalgia for what was and more a communal celebration of the accomplishment. It's a way of cheering the jumping-off-point that is graduation itself. It's also, I said, a ceremony that isn't all about you. I mean, sure, you're the focus. But it's not all for your benefit. Like other life transition ceremonies--like weddings and funerals--they're almost more for everyone else rather than for the people who are the ostensible center of the event.

I should heed my own advice. There's likely a bit of childish I'll show everyone! to my funeral resistance. I won't be there one way or the other. (I don't imagine the afterlife as one in which I'm overly focused on the minutiae of earthly life.) It's about other people, not me. It is, perhaps, a thing I allow for as  way of demonstrating how I treasure those left after I go.

I dunno. I'll think about it, though, to see where my heart is on the matter.

JF

Porn and script analysis lessons

So--having thumbnail-sketched the approach I use in my script analysis classes yesterday, I can get to the thing I teased yesterday: one of my favorite lessons.

A quirk of the artificially strict exercise I teach in script analysis is that I insist (along with Hornby) that student-critics approach the script bracketing off everything but the script itself. No playwright biographies. No social-historical research. And no production-oriented considerations. In particular, when students analyze a particular dramaturgical choice, I ask them to consider the choice in relation to other choices in the script--not in relation to the choice's immediate effect on an audience.

Thus, when Hamlet starts with the guards and the ghost (rather than with the Prince of Denmark himself), I steer students away from explaining the "why" of that choice by Shakespeare by saying something like "it catches the audience's interest" or "it gives the audience a good scare." Both those effects may be true. Who knows, they may even explain why Shakespeare originally wrote it that way. But in terms of dramaturgical analysis, explaining a playwright's choice via an audience's immediate emotional reaction doesn't get you very far.

I give students several reasons why immediate emotional reactions aren't good endpoints for discussions of dramaturgical choices. 

On the simplest level, explanation via audience reaction is unreliable. As anyone who's performed knows, audiences are funny, mercurial entities whose dispositions shift radically from night to night. A serious scene one evening may garner tense silence, only to provoke nervous titters the next evening. Actors (and directors and designers) must of course take audiences and their reactions into account as part of a production process and performance. But at the level of script analysis--in the artificial, build-this-kind-of-mental-muscle exercise that I teach--a hypothetical audience's hypothetical reactions must be blocked out.

On another level, analyzing choices via their immediate emotional effects leads to a frustrating circularity. It's like explaining why a joke is funny by saying, "Well, because it makes you laugh!" Or it's like explaining how the horror in John Carpenter's Halloween (the original) works by saying, "It makes the audience jump." Such an explanation traps you at a surface level. How does this race-car achieve such high speeds? Well, it does it by passing up all the other race cars. Trivially true, but not very revelatory or useful.

I do want students to notice the effect a script choice has on them (the closest stand-in to an audience they have while reading a play). Does tension rise or fall? Is the shift sudden or gradual? Is information dumped or dribbled? Does the emotional atmosphere change? All those are important to note. But those effects must be accounted for and analyzed themselves, put into relationship with other effects in a script.

For example, if scene B features a graphic, shocking act of violence, then the analyst must note the shock, yes, but then go on to ask how that shock relates to what happened in scene A and how it affects scenes C, D, and so on. Is this a play about a single shock and its aftermath? Is this a play of increasingly tense shocks? What happens to that shock over the course of the script? What does the shock do, what function does it serve, in relationship to other choices and effects in the script?

All that said, I finally allow that there are in fact some performance forms whose entire being--all their dramaturgical and production choices--aim toward a singular, immediate emotional reaction.

We call those kinds of performance porn.

Announcing this gets titters from my classes.

By "porn," I elaborate, I don't just mean depictions of sex. I mean any performance whose sole aim is to provoke a single kind of reaction. Take, for instance, subReddits like r/aww or TV shows like Too Cute. R/aww features nothing but video snippets of puppies and kittens. You watch one, you go "aww!", you upvote, and you scroll on. Too Cute's dramaturgy likewise has one goal: to get you to go, "Oh, cute!"

This is cuteness porn.

There's other kinds.  Reddit has another subreddit called r/shockwaveporn. It's videos and pictures of shockwaves radiating out from explosions. I told my class about that yesterday. One woman in the back went, "Cool!" That's the emotional reaction shockwave porn aims to provoke.

Reddit is arguably 99% this kind of porn: posts intended to provoke a quick, strong reaction of a particular sort. Nothing more.

There's nothing wrong with porn per se, I tell students. There are times where all I want to do is go aww! or Cool! or OMG WTF?? Reddit--indeed much of the internet--is perfect for that. Sometimes I need me some tearjerker porn, and so I watch movies guaranteed to make me sniffle. Or I need some superheroic porn, so I watch a good superhero movie.

Sometimes (though I don't go into this with students) I watch regular old sexy porn, precisely to produce the kind of singular reaction that kind of porn is intended to produce.

One big problem with porn of any kind (but particularly with sexy-type porn) is that it can easily be exploitative, turning real people's lives into means rather than ends. Disaster porn (such as r/catastrophicfailure) can be fascinating to watch, and it can also sometimes turn real people's tragedies into something to gawk at and upvote.

Another problem is that porn presents a very limited view of what performance (live and screened) can do. The kind of plays we read and study in class, I tell students, operate at levels a bit more complex than producing a single emotional response. We're after bigger fish.

And that's one of my favorite lessons in script analysis classes.

JF

My script analysis approach

Wuff. Tiring week. I'm all "Dear White Progressives"-ed out. Tut-tutting my demographic for meanness all week long has temporarily drained my writing batteries.

Well. That and a day of meetings, teaching, grading, and some emotional labor.

Today I gave one of my favorite script analysis lessons.

Some background info is necessary before I specify. My script analysis approach is based largely on the system I learned as an undergrad. It comes from Richard Hornby's Script into Performance, but I make lots of changes along the way. I'm not sure Hornby (whom I never met) would have approved.

Anyway: Hornby offers, in essence, a set of questions that can be asked of just about any play-script:
What choices does the playwright make in turning a story (all relevant people, places, and events related to a narrative) into a plot (the distilled, truncated, and specially arranged product that is the script itself?

• How does the playwright's sequencing of scenes, events, and moments affect the meaning?
• How and why does tempo vary over the course of the script?
• How and why do tension levels vary over the course of the script?
• What lines, actions, and/or images repeat in the script?
• What takes up a lot of space or weight in the script?
• What role do irony, ambiguity, and complexity play in the script?

After you go through a script (several times), addressing these analytic questions in full, Hornby says, you must synthesize by creating a "unifying principle." I define this latter concept in terms of an active verb phrase that provides an interpretive lens to illuminate how the playwright's choices (the answers to the questions above) work together. It's a phrase that captures what the script does, summarizing the action pattern manifested in the script.

This kind of analysis is mechanical. Whereas a literature class or informal book club might focus on character arcs, social issues, or life lessons the script teaches (what the script is about), this method focuses on action patterns (what the script does). Hamlet is, in terms of themes, about things like indecision, the meaning of loyalty, the duties of an heir, and so forth. But knowing these things doesn't help me as a director to divine why Shakespeare starts the script not with Hamlet himself but with some guards wondering who goes there and getting spooked by a ghost. If I see Hamlet through the lens of a unifying principle such as "to pause before striking," then having that first scene be something of a pause itself before the play "strikes" makes a kind of sense. The macro structure replicates some of the main action patterns throughout the play (where Hamlet pauses before striking).  (Fair warning: that's an off-the-top-of-my-head analysis; I won't defend it as especially strong.)

This kind of analysis is a useful exercise for artists to learn, a discipline that forces producing artists to grapple with the script as it appears to them, bracketing out historical or social-contextual information. That kind of analysis also brackets out the kind of dynamic awareness of a live audience that actors, directors, and designers rely on to make a production work. Before you get to that stage, I teach students, you must first engage the script, collaborate with the playwright whose presence is only apparent in the choices she makes in writing the play. Listening to those choices helps you to make your production move with the grain of the text.

None of that is the favorite part I referred to. It's just background. What's the favorite lesson?

I'll let that wait until tomorrow.

JF

The wrapup

I criticized Tim Wise yesterday (a writer whose work, let me underline, I mainly admire) for falling into a barrage of stereotypes in characterizing rural, red-leaning people. The stereotypes he used are pretty standard "white trash" material: unhealthy, dirty, ill-educated, bigoted. I suppose I should be glad he didn't go on to make incest jokes.

I'm harping on Wise, though, because that one piece he wrote represents a whole bandwidth of commentary I often hear from the left, especially from other white progressives like me, and especially in online spaces. The pattern usually goes like this: some bit of cringe-worthy news emerges from or about the South. The news goes mini-viral among left-leaning sites and Twitter accounts. The commentary floods in about "flyover country," usually mobilizing the hoary old tropes and epithets reserved for "white trash."

I hear such comments occasionally even in person, especially at national academic conferences (where white progressives tend to be the majority or plurality of attendees). I've been in many a career advice session for graduate students, for example, where someone living on the East or West Coast confesses their mortal fear of getting a job in a "Podunk" town at Flyover State. One such student broke down into tears, insisting that because of their queerness they could never survive in "Trumpville." Heads around the room nodded in sympathy.

Not every head joined in, though. There were some of us there who live in the kind of places that get painted as Hell. I was fuming. I was thinking of my students, my LGBTQ+ students, who call that place home, who love and value their lives there. To be sure, many of them (as with all college students) yearn to move elsewhere. More power to them. But many stay, digging in, carving out a place for themselves in an environment other progressives regularly deem unlivable for any good or conscientious person.

There is, dare I say it, a kind of privilege involved in urban-West/East Coast progressives dismissing those beyond their borders as hopelessly backward. But of course I don't mean YOU! I can hear them say, I mean the bad ones! Isn't that always the shoddy defense of the stereotyper? In fact, isn't saying some variation of the "yeah, but I'm only talking about the real [slur], not good ones like you" the signal par excellence that you're committing a bigotry of some sort? (I say this as someone who has, to my shame, been caught in the middle of uttering that kind of defense.)

Such attitudes only confirm the stereotypes the right has about progressives: that we're elitist snobs who cloak our own prejudices in a mantle of "woker-than-thou" righteousness.

And yeah, I know: the right stereotypes the left just as much if not more. I'll go further: I think their stereotyping fuels much more lethal patterns of dehumanization and dismissal. For the record, I don't think both sides are equal. The right regularly pokes fun at progressives' "political correctness" or obsession with intersectionality, It's hard for me not to see all those criticisms as fragile anger at being called out for using harmful stereotypes. Why aren't red-leaning folk as concerned as progressives are about avoiding language and rhetoric that hurts people for who they are? Instead, almost all the criticisms of "PC" culture I read and hear concern how (mainly white, mainly hetero, mainly Christian) conservatives feel uniquely oppressed or hurt. Where's the outcry when Trump mobilizes racism or xenophobia or sexism?

So, sure--the right does this stuff too, even does it more and worse than the left ever did. But I'm talking to white progressives here, not to the right. And pointing to others' bad behavior to excuse your own is wrong.

Look, I'm not saying "be nice to people who hate you" (though most red-leaning people don't hate progressives). I'm not even saying that folk have to practice curiosity and understanding toward their political enemies (though I think these are admirable attitudes to adopt). That's not always healthy or safe for for people.

I'm just saying that, in your resistance to practices and mindsets you find harmful, try not to adopt a harmful mindset yourself. We can do better than classist cliches of conservatives.

Just had to get that off my chest.

Part 4: Un-Wise Stereotyping

Tim Wise scores some trenchant points about civility in his "Not Ready to Make Nice." I nod along with him when he complains how rural white Trump supporters are rarely tasked with the same kind of "be more civil/understanding" narratives that urban (and often nonwhite) Trump resisters are. Somehow, he observes, small-town red-leaning folk get to be the "real Americans" who claim the moral high ground against intolerant blue-leaning folk, even as Trump's policies target the most vulnerable people in society. It's selfish, hypocritical, and willfully ignorant, yet conservative pundits often seem to prize those attitudes as proof of moral authority.

Hear, hear.

But--and here's the thrust of my "dear white progressives" rant--I'm dismayed at how Wise feels it necessary or effective to mobilize some rancid stereotypes. A sampling:

As the administration launches ICE raids on hard-working parents in Mississippi, ripping them from their kids on the first day of school, all talk of compromise with these people is perverse. To speak of understanding those who sanction such evil is a sickness.

I need not sit around and discuss politics with people such as this as they wolf down their biscuits and gravy or sop up their toast in a cholesterol pond of runny eggs, while adjusting their dirty trucker caps and holding forth about the Mooz-lims or the Mex’cuns who have come to take their jobs. Especially when those they’d be griping about would already have been working for three hours while Billy Joe Jim Bob sat there telling me about how he can’t work anyway because of his disability. For which he receives a check, along with his Medicare. But he wants me to remember that he’s tired of people living off the government.

What. The. Fuck. Ever.

I understand these folks all too well. There is nothing more to learn.

It's weird to read someone whose career as a writer and speaker involves dismantling stereotypes apparently forget all the lessons he teaches about why stereotypes qualify as odious in the first place. Shall we review? 

Stereotypes are wrong intellectually because they emerge from and deepen unexamined preconceptions. We fall back on stereotypes when we're too lazy--or perhaps too scared--to be curious. Wise insists he understands these folks. I'm not sure what underlies his insistence, but it isn't (at least in the piece I'm referring to) hard evidence, quantitative or qualitative. I mean the kind of evidence found in works like Arlie Russel Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land, Katherine J. J. Cramer's The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, or Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. I (as a gay white progressive) read these works and come away no less frustrated at rural red-leaning folk. But neither can I condone the kind of simplified flyover-state-country-bumpkin smear that Wise uses here.

Stereotypes are wrong strategically because they give us false images of the world, illusions that hinder us as we seek to repair and reform that world. Even if I view these people as my enemies, surely it behooves me to desire as accurate and nuanced a picture of them as I can get. Stereotyping works as an accelerant for my own outrage or contempt, not as a good guide for navigating the world. One of Isenberg's main points is that the very classist stereotypes of poor rural whites that Wise regurgitates in his piece have long been a tool that the economic elite uses in concert with racism to prevent organized mass resistance against itself. To traffic in stereotypes about poor rural whites is to abet the systems of oppression I seek to fight.

Finally, stereotypes of this sort are wrong morally because they reduce other human beings to objects of contempt. That is, they turn people who are capable of suffering, loving, changing, thinking, and growing into something that it is OK for me to disregard. Such dehumanization, as Wise well knows, lies at the heart of prejudice. 

It does not undermine this point to argue, as Wise does, that "these people" have dehumanized others first and worse. Suppose that's true. Suppose we can say confidently that all rural conservatives espouse racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQ+ views. That, we can say, is wrong. And that wrong does not make it OK for us to fight fire with fire and dehumanize them, too. It is wrong to dehumanize persons, full stop.

The kind of liberal humanism that fuels Wise's progressivism (and my own) insists that human regard shouldn't be a privilege earned only by a moral elite. It is an unalienable feature of being a person. To be sure, the liberal humanist tradition is defined by its failure to live up to its own standard. Throughout history, the concept of "human" has shown a worrisome tendency to cast a shadow of inhumanity, a shadow that falls too often on vulnerable populations. I know I'm human because I'm not one of those animals there. I do not need for rural white people to be equally or more vulnerable than, say, trans Native Americans, in order to object to their being dehumanized.

As Amy Olberding says, holding the humanity of people in our minds does not preclude strong negative feelings toward them. I'm disappointed, mystified, exasperated, furious, and disheartened by the attitudes of some of my rural neighbors--sometimes all these at once. And I can say so. But once I season those expressions with the kind of stereotypes about appearance, hygiene, diet, income and education level that Wise does, I've left the realm of the good, true, and useful.

More tomorrow,

JF