How We Got to Trump

There are a lot of potential lessons from the rise of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for president and, given how the Republican establishment is falling in line to support someone they very recently told us was unfit for the job, it looks like many of those lessons will go unlearned. Perhaps the most important of the lessons, at least in terms of potentially improving our political discourse in the future, is how a Trump candidacy can even fucking happen. As much as Republicans, Trump voters, and some currents of the media would like us to believe that Trump is sui generis or a fluke or the result of an historically weak Republican field, he is the result of a long political process, one that has consequences far beyond the human parody now leading the Republican party. Understanding that process is the first step, both in preventing a Trump presidency and in recreating a political system in which future Trumps are impossible.

McCarthyism & the Red Scare

I don't think the idea of “real Americans” was born during McCarthyism and the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, (I'm sure there is a brilliant doctoral thesis out there about the idea of “real Americans” and how that idea has moved and changed and manipulated political discourse in our country.) but it was during the Red Scare that the traits of the “real American” began to include being a Christian living in a small town (rather than one of those out-of-touch big cities), who believed in capitalism (rather than in socialism or any of its possible forms). Furthermore, this is when actors, writers, and university professors were all summarily barred from the “Real American Club.” Given how it has defined populism, America has always had a fraught relationship with its public intellectuals, but it was here with McCarthy that the very act of intellectual exploration, or the development of intellectual talents, awareness, or resources, became inherently suspect. Essentially, this was the beginning of the end of nuanced, intellectual, and truth-seeking discourse in the public mainstream media.

The Southern Strategy

In the city of codes, the dude who just fucking says it, rules. I feel like there should be some bodily punishment for every Republican who refers to their party as “the party of Lincoln.” With the Southern strategy, Nixon and his allies sought to capture the racist southern Democrats who were alienated by the Civil Rights movement, by, well, by turning the Republican party into the party of racists. But, of course, no one said that. Instead, over time they developed a whole system of codes and policies (e.g. The War on Drugs) that disproportionately affected African Americans and other minorities; a system of codes that is easily transferable to whatever non-white group Republicans in power can blame for America's problems. All Donald Trump did with his racist nonsense was stop talking in the Republican code.

Morning in America

The American century from 1870-1970 saw the greatest increase in overall standards of living in human history. A combination of technological advancement and federal economic management essentially created the middle class, the single-income family, and retirement from the wreckage of the Great Depression and World War II. Really, the only white people who weren't substantially better off in 1970, than they had been in previous decades, were the rich oligarch assholes at the head of so much of society's previous misery. (Of course, they also benefited from the technological advances so it's really, really hard to argue they lost anything anyway.) Obviously, they weren't going to take their slight diminishment of power sitting down. And so, though the stagflation and general malaise of the 1970s were really just a blip at the end of unprecedented century and nothing that couldn't be fixed by some energy independence, rich assholes used it as an opportunity to dismantle the wealthiest and most equitable (for white people) economic system the world had ever seen.

Politics has always been an emotional game, but I believe it was here, with Regan's “Morning in America,” where a candidate ran on the idea that everything would be fixed if we just had the right person as president. Trump's success right now is almost entirely based on the idea that he'll just fix things because he's a good leader and we have Regan to thank for that. (Oh, and pretty much all of our current economic problems, but this piece isn't about those.)

Bill Clinton's Triangulation

It's one of those ideas that makes perfect sense: if you listen to both sides of an argument and take a position roughly in the middle, you'll get a lot of people to agree with you. Shit, you might even stumble into a good idea or compromise while you're at it. And by “makes perfect sense” I mean, “reveals politics as a shell game of shifting power structures that has nothing to do with fighting for the best policies.” In some ways, after losing so much political ground to Regan Republicans, Bill Clinton's triangulation wasn't a bad idea for winning back the White House and stemming the tide of conservative legislation. Unfortunately, rather than triangulating with him after his re-election, Republicans simply moved the center rightward. In the short term that meant Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the Defense of Marriage Act, Welfare Reform, the continuation of the drug war, the further dismantling of financial and consumer regulations that were such an important part of past growth, and, lest we forget, the George W. Bush presidency.

In the long term, this lead to an overall shift in policy towards the right (despite a population that is actually fairly liberal when their opinions are broken down issue by issue), while hamstringing the more liberal members of the Democratic party who suddenly found themselves radicalized simply for saying the same things Democrats have been saying since FDR.

The Myth of the Liberal Media

There was never a time of unbiased media. Though most did their best, journalists are human beings and their own biases and opinions are naturally going to color their reporting in some way. That said, there was a time when, despite the problem of bias, journalists at least tried to present objective truth to the public. Now, thanks to conservatives who kept ending up on the wrong side of the truth and Fox News, journalism consists of stating a few unassailable facts and presenting two opposing opinions about it, as if those opinions carry the same weight, whether rigorous critical analysis and research would reveal those opinions to have equal weight or not.

So many people, through little fault of their own, end up believing that utter bullshit is true, or, at least has enough truth in it to confirm their bias. Furthermore, we've now reached a point where the mainstream televised media doesn't seem to know how to critically explore an idea, topic, or policy, in a way that moves towards the truth. (It should terrify us, that comedians like John Oliver and Samantha Bee, seem to be the only one's who have figured out how to do in-depth reporting about a topic.) To put this another way, because we are no longer allowed to present a liberal truth without a side of conservative bullshit, mainstream media (which includes Fox, of course) is no longer capable of revealing Trump's bullshit.

McCain Picks Palin

As destructive to our democracy and our political process as all that other shit was, we still might not have Trump if it weren't for Sarah Palin. By selecting her as his running mate, John McCain legitimized a fringe-faction of the Republican party, while also legitimizing the anti-intellectual, totally myopic image of the “real American just speaking her mind.” In a way, Sarah Palin completely changed how we discuss the idea of being “qualified to be President.” Palin was so far beyond the idea of being qualified to be President that she very nearly undercut the debate about qualifications entirely. And, of course, without Palin there is likely no Tea Party.

The Tea Party Lies It's Face Off and Wins

Not a single thing the Tea Party “revolution” was based on had any shred of truth to it. We need to remember that. Not one fucking thing. We have the Tea Party because for one mid-term election, American voters bought a ton of bullshit about death panels, birth certificates, and the tyranny of getting health insurance. It wasn't just that a section of the population got particularly angry about a policy they didn't understand and then voted for a bunch of like-minded individuals; it's that Tea Party leaders and the Republicans who enabled them lied to the American people and the media let them. Since then, the Tea Party has become entrenched in Republican politics and shifted the Republican party far more to the right than maybe it has ever been, to the point where it is actively and unapologetically undermining the functioning of government.

Of course, government is still functioning and Barack Obama is still doing things, which, to those who believe in the Tea Party, means the Republican establishment is failing them. Hence, the destruction of John Boener's career. It's only natural then, that of the field of choices, Republican primary voters would choose the one posturing as the most extreme anti-establishment candidate.

How We Got to Trump

So how did we get to Trump? In short, white supremacism as a political force never went away it just hid itself in codes and we have removed critical discourse from our political process that reveals the racism and nationalism in those codes. I know there is a temptation to blame both sides for a political problem and though Democrats and especially Bill Clinton were involved in laying the ground work for Trump, the responsibility for his candidacy is not equally split. In short, Republican and conservative ideology is wrong, has been wrong for decades, and looks like it's going to be wrong until it finally dies. Sure, there are Republicans who offered substantive input into our political process and, sure, the Republican aversion to taxation and regulation can create important debates about the role of government and the efficacy of federal involvement in the economy and society, but, as a political ideology, social-conservatism and supply-side neoliberal economics are factually bad for the citizens of the United States of American and, well, human beings in general.

In order to keep getting elected despite being wrong, Republicans had to cater to racists, create wedge issues and litmus tests, wave the bloody American flag of shouted patriotism in a time of endless war, leverage the worst traits of organized religion, and become the lapdogs of the wealthy while preventing the rest of the country from learning just how much of their bullshit is bullshit. Given that Trump has four bankruptcies, a litany of failed businesses, is currently under investigation for fraud, would have as much or more money if just didn't mess around with what he inherited and still gets away with telling us he is a successful business, his nomination really isn't a surprise. Trump and the modern Republican party are a perfect fit.

Books for the Weird Kids

I was reading Jesse Ball's forthcoming novel, How to Set a Fire and Why and a phrase flickered through my brain, “This is the perfect book for weird kids.” Once the phrase hit me, the list followed. Not all of these books feature “weird kids” as protagonists and only one or two of them were written specifically for young adults, but I think all of them touch on the bravery and creativity that I think define the idea of “weird kids.” So, thanks to the book that I hope will finally make Jesse Ball the international literary superstar that I think he deserves to be, here are some books that are perfect for the “weird kids.”

How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball

Lucia's father is dead, her mother is essentially catatonic in a mental institution, her elderly caretaker aunt is just barely scraping by, and she is far, far too smart for her own damn good. A sharp wit, an aversion to the bullshit society asks of us, and exactly zero fucks to give, Lucia is your new favorite character. Though Lucia is very much a teenager—Jesse Ball does an excellent job not forcing adultness on her—it's a few moments scattered throughout the book where her insight breaks through the adolescent doldrums to reach profoundly human, and yet realistic insights or phrases that makes this book so special.

Every brilliant book Jesse Ball writes I think will finally bring him the fame that he deserves. Given that How to Set a Fire and Why is Ball's most realistic and straightforward work, with YA crossover potential that still maintains the sense of wisdom, radical politics, and wonder that defined his early works, and an intoxicating narrator I think this might finally be the book.

Lord of the Barnyard by Tristan Egoff

John Kaltenbrunner is a genius of self-sufficiency. From a young age, he has the knowledge and the aptitude to run his family's farm without any help from the outside world. His is a genius that makes the rest of society (maybe even civilization) irrelevant to him. There are few things society hates more than being ignored and so all the forces of school, government, and religion converge on a young John Kaltenbrunner to take away everything that was important to him and crush every resource he once used to sustain his independence. His farm is taken and he gets sent to jail.

When he returns to his hometown, he ends up on the lowest rung of society that can be occupied by a white man; garbage collector. (Among other things Egoff does brilliantly, Lord of the Barnyard confronts directly the classism and bigotry of our still severely stratified society.) But he eventually gets his revenge by organizing a garbage collector strike that results in massive city-wide riot that is one of my favorite scenes in all of literature.

The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace

Grace Krilanovich's novel of drugs, drifting, and language is the thinking goths vampire novel. This dark and moody novel is drenched in language and imagery and manages to portray it's drug-addicted drifting hobo vampires beautifully without glorifying them. (Romanticizing, maybe, but it's not like Krilanovich is the first to romanticism marginalized lifestyles. Actually, now that I think about it, that's pretty much the entire point of the Romantic movement.) In a truly just world the phrase “The Orange Eats Creeps,” would be scrawled on the inside of locker doors as a code to fellow travelers all across the country.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

A lot can happen when you start a band in high school. It could be your foot in the door to the music industry, or lead to fame the long way around, or create nothing more than some good memories of thrashing on instruments in a garage and dreaming of far more than your talent and/or work ethic could ever accomplish. But none of it can happen without that first spark, that first whatever it is you feel in your bedroom or in the back of your friend's car, or during gym class or whatever, that lets you imagine you could be doing something else. You could be in control. You could express yourself. You could be exploring fashion and identities. You could discover yourself. You could be an artist.

Egan's masterpiece is about a lot more that just the music industry and its style looks forward to the next great movements/developments in English language literature, but, with all of its wide ranging brilliance and stylistic innovation, A Visit from the Goon Squad is about that spark that keeps the goons of time at bay.

Flight by Sherman Alexie

No other book I've read so perfectly captures the contradictions and complexities of adolescent male anger and how that force, often most mysterious to the young men who feel it, can lead both to tragedy and to growth. The protagonist, Zits, is about to shoot up a bank, but in the instant before he makes the biggest mistake of his life, he goes on a vision quest in which he inhabits the bodies and minds of people across history.

Ultimately, what Zits discovers is that there really is no such thing as an “individual,” just moments temporarily sliced out of the continuum of human life and human decision by the limitations of perspective. Zits discovers he is a part of something that stretches back in time and, if he stops himself now, forward into the future. And Alexie does an amazing job of communicating those ideas through the diction of a teenager, making this one of the books I often recommend to teenagers. And it even has a happy ending.

How I Became a Nun by Cesar Aira

As a rule, Aira writes weird books. Some of the weirdest in fact. How I Became a Nun starts when a sour tasting cone of ice cream leads to a murder by arsenic poisoning. (As happens.) Naturally, that leads to the impossibility of identity and gender in centralized power structures.

There are many things that Aira does well as a storyteller, but, perhaps what he does better than everyone else is maintain a tense but perfect balance between rational techniques for storytelling and utter batshit insanity, so that it is often impossible to tell when a scene has transitioned from realistic to flat out bonkers. Whether they feature weird characters or not, all of Aira's books celebrate the freedom and fun of being weird.

I Await the Devil's Coming by Mary Maclane

Maclane was the first queen of that magical, wondrous, rainbow dedazzled kingdom of not giving a fuck. A literary sensation and scandal when she was alive, Maclane was an amazing cross between Fredrich Nietzsche and Annie Oakley, with a dash of Whitman and Dickinson's impossible love child. I Await the Devil's Coming is something of a memoir, something of a journal, and something of a manifesto. Maclane herself became one of the first sexually open, feminist superstars, with this debut book selling 100,000 copies in its first month. (So naturally, the patriarchy did their best to erase her from our cultural memory.)

Her prose can be raw, even desperate as she dreams of a freer life than the one she leads in Montana, but despite its volatility, her prose is also intelligent and perceptive. If Lucia from How to Set a Fire and Why came to Porter Square Books, I'd give her I Await the Devil's Coming. McClane is the patron saint of everyone looking to leave this shit town to become a fucking legend.

Geek Love by Katharine Dunn

And, of course, a list of books for weird kids wouldn't be complete without Katharine Dunn's classic. To me, the important idea in Geek Love, at least for this list, is that “normalcy” and “freakishness” are constructions. Whether it's through breeding experiments or the accumulation of social mores or the calculated and intentional marginalization of identities that threaten homogeneous power structures, the ideas of “normal” and “weird” are movie sets, creations that can be built, torn down, replaced, and modified both at the societal and the individual level. Once you see that, and weird kids do see that, the world of potential identity and experience opens up before you.

I was weird kid adjacent growing up. Though I hung out with some of the artists, started a lit mag (that had a shockingly long life), took AP classes, and dabbled in one-act theater, I also played football and hockey and felt comfortable being and looking like an affable cisgendered straight white man. My parents even supported my dream of being a writer. Which is a long way of saying that, though I had my adolescent struggles as everyone did, I never learned the bravery that weird kids learned.

Given that bravery, is it any surprise that weird kids make our art, design our fashion, drive our culture, and invent our great technological breakthroughs? We clearly learn something when socially and sometimes even official outcast from society, something that can help us grow into the world's most successful and important adults. Perhaps the title of this list is something of a misnomer then. I hope that there will be comfort in these books for the weird kids now and maybe even some pride. But I also hope those of us who weren't weird, either by choice or by social pressure can get a lot of out of the books as well. I hope we can see how valuable those risk-taking kids really are to our world, how much joy and beauty their weirdness adds to the world, and perhaps even, try out a little of that bravery for ourselves.

Packing for Paris

I leave for Paris tomorrow, so I have been doing a fair amount of planning of what I want to bring. As a reader and a writer, that means I've spent most of my time trying to figure out what books and projects to bring along with me. (I'll handle the clothes and other incidentals later. I mean, the flight doesn't leave until, like, 8 or something.) Packing, as a reader, is all about balance. You never want to be stuck without something to read and you don't want to pay the extra fee for having too heavy of a bag. Furthermore, you need to leave at least a little room for the books you are going to buy on vacation, because, let's face it, you're going to buy books on vacation. Paris poses an extra problem, because along with being one of the great walking cities, eating cities, and drinking cities, it is also one of the great sitting cities which naturally leads to being a great reading and writing city. So, with all that in mind, here are the books and projects I'll be bringing with me to Paris.

BOOKS

The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley

Eventually, I'll find myself back in my hotel room winding down from a long day of coffee, cheese, wine, and walking, and I've always found big old critically acclaimed fantasy epics relaxing to read before I go to bed. Hurley's series has come highly recommended by a number of people I know who read more fantasy than I do, so the first volume was a natural fit. I've also, already read about half of it and have really enjoyed it so far, so I know it's a safe bet for the nightstand in the hotel.

Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson

Anne Carson is a genius. That's just science. Eros the Bittersweet is her exploration of the idea of of “Eros” in classical literature and all the ideas of language, metaphor, and storytelling that grow out of that exploration. Though the content is challenging, the book is organized in relatively short chapters, so it's easy to incorporate into a coffee-sit. You can read a chapter, look up, watch the people around you, talk, stash it back in the satchel to take with you to a park, read another chapter, rinse and repeat.

How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball

I love Jesse Ball and the galley of his new novel is the perfect packing size. Furthermore, as I as was chatting with another bookseller at Porter Square about my upcoming trip she said something to the effect of, “It's nice to start something on a trip." I don't entirely know why this was a compelling argument, but it was. Also, read more Jesse Ball. 

Paris Vagabond by Jean-Paul Clebert

My original packing list was just the three books above. For reasons lodged in the mysteries of consciousness, I wasn't particularly motivated to read a Paris-themed book in Paris. But then I was shelving at Porter Square and came across this fucking thing. I mean, just look at it. I mean, according to the jacket it was “embraced by the young Situationists as a kind of manual for living off the grid.” What the fuck else was I supposed to do? I'm not made of stone.

PROJECTS

I'm not setting any goals and I'm not sure if I'll do any writing, but as with reading, I don't want to find myself inspired to work and not have anything with me. Furthermore, Paris has been so important to so many English-language writers, including some of my heroes (Joyce and Stein), that it would feel almost sacrilegious to go to Paris without a notebook and a few drafts. Also, if you're curious what I'm working on, well, here's your answer.

Side Project A: The Biography of Alisoun

This is a novel that (at the moment) will be composed of two distinct parts. The first part, which is the one I'm working on, is composed of vignettes of varying length and set at varying times in the titular character's life. The second part will be (at least at the moment) a linear narrative of a particularly dramatic series of events in Alisoun's life. (Chaucer fans will take note of the spelling.) Because it's told in vignettes this is a really handy side project because I can basically write about whatever is in my head at the moment I feel like writing for as long as I feel like writing about it. Though I do have some vague hopes and goals, the current state of this project is very much anything goes. Which makes it perfect for hanging in the satchel while I wander around Paris. Also, in case you can't see from the picture, this was the notebook I got for attending the sixth Winter Institute.

Draft of a Chapter from the New Novel

Specifically, the “Coyote Casablanca” chapter if that makes any sense or is in any way intriguing. I decided I didn't want to bring my laptop so made sure I had drafts that I could read and edit if I felt so moved. This way, progress doesn't have to stop completely on my novel. Furthermore, drafts can be easier to pick away at if motivation comes in little bits and bites and fit a lot better in my satchel.

Draft of Short Story: "The Morning Skate"

Because the first thing you think of when you hear the word "Paris" is “Quebec Major Junior Hockey League.” This actually began life as a chapter in an essentially abandoned novel. I've been chipping away at it for a few years now and I think I'm almost done. It's about a youngish, sports journalist, working on a feature-length story about his home town's junior hockey team. One of the reasons I like to juggle a lot of different writing projects is that I always want to have something to work on, regardless of my mood, energy level, or ideas. And packing a bunch of drafts is a lot easier than packing a bunch of notebooks and a laptop.

Draft of a Short Story, "The Summer Slip"

This is actually a story my father started that I'm going to finish. It's about a family opening their summer camp for the first time after the patriarch and grandfather of the narrator died. They struggle a bit early on to remember all the steps to getting the camp ready for the summer, which they eventually connect to the idea of “summer slip,” the stuff students forget over the summer. It also features of a short collection of classic Lewiston Quebecois swearing. I purposely set this draft aside a few months ago with the intention of letting it rest for awhile.

The Satchel Notebook

Everything else, should there be anything else, will go in the catchall satchel notebook.

Why Moderate Republicans Are 2016's Most Important Voters

Though it certainly can happen here (especially if Hilary Clinton is the Democratic nominee and she runs her general election campaign as if she is entitled to the presidency, which I don't think she is going to do) I don't think Donald Trump can win a general election. Right now, even as the front-runner, he is not winning over the majority of Republican primary voters and given his national unfavorability rating, his lack of support from the Republican establishment, and the fact that he's a fascist, I think there is a good chance he is already close to his ceiling for support. Furthermore, the relationship between the electoral college and America's shifting demographics stacks the deck for whoever the Democrat is anyway. This doesn't mean a Trump presidency is impossible (hold on, let me swallow that vomit back down), but I think it is still relatively unlikely.

But it is not enough for Trump to lose. Trump losing to Clinton (or Sanders) 47% to 53%, as Mitt Romney did to Barack Obama, means that Trump is a legitimate candidate. A 53/47 tells us that Donald Trump was the legitimate representative of the Republican party. A 53/47 loss tells the world that the United States is capable of making Donald Trump the most powerful person in the world. A 53/47 loss means we'll go through this all again in four years, whether in the form of second tries by Trump himself, Cruz, or Rubio, or Chuck Norris, or some radical demagogue who hasn't become a celebrity yet, and all of them will emulate the radical, hateful, fascistic techniques that got Trump so close to the presidency.

It is not enough for Trump to be defeated in November. The unprecedented candidate must suffer an unprecedented defeat. It must be 60/40 at least, but 65/35 would be acceptable and 70/30 better. Only then can we prevent this year's catastrophic carnival from happening again in four years, and only then can we prove to the world that we actually can be trusted with the power we have.

And that kind of landslide requires moderate Republicans voting for the Democrat. There is a lot that Democrats can do to inch those numbers up. An effective ground game, a compelling campaign, the fear of a Trump presidency, along with unusually high turnout from largely Democratic demographics could get us to 55/45 or maybe even 58/42 if all of those new voting restrictions don't mess things up too much. But even that's not enough.

To prevent another Trump, there needs to be a significant Republican defection. We need to show ourselves and the world that we can get beyond the little letters next to a candidate when we need to prevent the election of a fascist. And that responsibility falls to moderate Republicans.

Of course, Trump is not sui generis. His candidacy is the natural, even logical, endpoint to a decades long process that could be traced at least back to McCarthy's Red Scare, through the Republican Southern Strategy, Bill Clinton's triangulation, and the Tea Party of 2010.

It is important to remember how the Tea Party came to power. They were elected in 2010 on a platform built almost entirely on misunderstandings, misrepresentations, lies, and fear. They told us Obamacare would destroy the economy, cost American jobs, rob us of our medical freedom and, I don't know, make it illegal to enjoy a big old ice cream cone on a hot July day, and absolutely none of that is true. Furthermore, they ran on the promise of repealing Obamacare and not only did they utterly fail to do that, they made absolutely no progress developing a legislative structure for the repeal, building a viable alternative, or proposing reforms with a chance in hell of being passed. In the process, they shut down the government, played chicken with America's credit rating, ended the political career of John Boehner, and, in general, ground legislative progress to a halt. Donald Trump is just the Tea Party with a few extra filters off.

So, not only is it important for moderate Republicans to vote for the Democrat in the presidential election, if they want to have a legitimate political party for the foreseeable future, they will need to kick out the Freedom Caucus legislators, who both, set the stage for Donald Trump and have been abject legislative failures, both in terms of policy and procedure (I think at least) and in terms of their own campaign promises. And with the radically gerrymandered districts (more on that later) the only way that will happen is if moderate Republicans who are currently represented by Freedom Caucus legislators vote Democrat.

And then there's that whole thing about radical gerrymandering. The same collective freak out over Obamacare that drove the Tea Party into federal government, drove the Tea Party into state governments. The result has been radical gerrymandering (49.15% of Americans voted for a Democrat in the house, compared to 48.03% who voted for Republicans in 2014, so that 33 seat Republican majority is....democracy?), a coordinated attack on voting rights targeting largely Democratic demographics, the spiteful rejection of Medicare expansion, and an obsessive war on reproductive rights, all while generally wrecking their states' budgets (school systems, water supplies...) through reckless tax cuts. Dwight D. Eisenhower would not improve. (Hell, Richard Nixon might not even approve.)

If moderate Republicans are truly serious about taking their party back from the radical fringe, all they have to do is lose big in 2016. They can then rebuild the party from there.

I know there is still a good chance Trump will not be the nominee, but honestly, this principle holds for any of the other current options. Ted Cruz believes he is on a mission from God, Marco Rubio has proven himself to be utterly incapable of functioning in high pressure situations, Paul Ryan's policies live in a Randian fantasy world, and somehow John Kasich might be even worse, especially on women's issues. Given what the Republican party has become, how they have let racism, cheap power grabs, and radical strains of Christianity infect their party, the only responsible thing for moderate Republicans to do in November is hold their nose and vote for the Democrat.

There is a lot that Democrats and liberals can do to beat Trump, but, ultimately (unless there is truly miraculous voter turnout), that just treats the symptom, not the cause. The power to truly stop Trump, not just the person, but the political concept, rests in the hands of moderate Republicans.

Homage as Criticism: On The Ballad of Black Tom

Victor Lavalle is one of my favorite living writers. Like Edgar Allen Poe, he is able to layer weirdness on top of weirdness so that, as you dig through the monsters and the radical suicide death cults and the mysterious librarians, you find it's our real obsession with higher powers and our real attitudes toward mental health that are truly strange.

His new book, The Ballad of Black Tom is an homage to the work of H.P. Lovecraft (based primarily on "The Horror at Red Hook") that draws elements from Lovecraft's entire ouvre into a story about a young black man from Harlem trying to make his way in the world. In some ways, Lovecraft is as influential to horror writing as Tolkien is to fantasy writing, providing a lexicon, a fundamental structure, and a mythology that horror writers still use today. Lovecraft was also racist. And not older-relative-after-a-few-glasses-of-wine-at-Thanksgiving racist; he was hatefully, maliciously racist.

Lavalle has talked about what it means to be an African American author writing an homage to a racist so I don't need to here, but I think he does something interesting that reveals one of the powerful, critical aspects of homage. Homage can be more than just a celebration, more than just a retelling, more than just a depositing of a story or style in a new place or time (though all of those are fun, important aspects of homage). Homage also allows authors to critique those past works, turning up the volume on certain traits, emphasizing certain ideas, elucidating aspects that are not otherwise obvious, and even re-appropriating the works for different, even opposed purposes.

What made Lovecraft's work powerful, and what still resonates in the horror genre today, is the idea of another world of unseen forces pushing us this way and that through life. Whether it was magic, Cthulhu, or some other mysterious force, the characters in Lovecraft's stories were subject to forces vastly more powerful than they were that determined the course of their lives or even their deaths. We might feel as though we are in control, we might even believe we can harness some of those powerful forces, but that is only because we haven't dug far enough into the basement, sailed far enough into the ocean, looked deep enough into the eyes of the stranger. Lovecraft made daily life's simple anxieties visceral, bodily, and horrifying. Lavalle's homage taps into that existential anxiety, but by twisting it ever so slightly, by setting it partially in Harlem and by making one of the protagonists a young African American man, Lavalle has revealed an aspect of Lovecraft's unseen forces that Lovecraft himself never saw.

At one point, Tom comes home to find that his father has been murdered by the police. Tom's apartment was searched in connection to an investigation and one of the investigators saw Tom's father with a guitar, assumed it was a gun, shot him six times, and—because the officer “feared for his life”—reloaded his revolver and shot five more times. For most people, for pretty much everyone in this country who is not a straight white cisgendered man born in America, those mysterious powerful forces casually dealing death and destruction, those otherworldly beings, those dark underground cabals deciding the fate of those they do not regard as worthy of dignity are real. They are not forces of magic or hauntings or Cthulhu, they are institutional racism, systems of power, and the residual structures of colonialism. They are Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and 75 cents on the dollar. In some ways this really isn't even a metaphor. If a magic spell is a string of words able to bring about some kind of corporeal action, “Hello, police, there's a man in my neighborhood, um, he's tall and black” might be America's deadliest spell. Is there any ritual that signals the loss of one's personal agency more than the chanting of “Stop resisting?” I mean, the Klu Klux Klan leaders call themselves wizards and dragons for fuck's sake.

What is most interesting to me about this is how otherwise faithful to Lovecraft The Ballad of Black Tom is. The creeping unease. The protagonist in way, way over his head. The magic. The monsters. The skin of the universe peeled back for just a second to reveal the contorted organs of being beyond our conception. And yet twist it all just ever so slightly, and an entirely new conversation is created. Lavalle has been utterly faithful to Lovecraft and told a story that would've horrified him.

To me, this is where the real power in literature resides. All books are only semi-stable. Though the words on fixed on the page, the efforts of readers give them vitality, make them move, transform them into something (and some things) beyond the imagination of the individual creator. The act of writing is powerful and flexible enough that a potent reader can transform the work of a malignant racist into a statement on the experience of institutional racism. No story is ever really dead. No work of literature ever irredeemable. The Ballad of Black Tom begins with Tom delivering a magic book, which in its complete form would give the reader the complete magic alphabet and access to unspeakable power. Of course, we already have the complete alphabet and when it's used by a writer and reader like Victor Lavalle every book is magic.