The Watch

This week’s big story

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In March of 2017 I wrote to the now-dead author Ursula K. Le Guin to request an interview for a story about the Trump administration’s proposal, since rejected, to destroy the National Endowment for the Arts.

The email was one of a few—I cast a wide net, heard back from a couple of them, took an interview from a famous playwright instead, and moved on.

Working at speed for a daily newspaper as I was then, I found that time dilated for me, especially in the early days of the Trump administration. Journalists, always prone to self-aggrandizement, behaved during that period like people told that the building they’re in is on fire: frantically choosing what to save, where to go when home is gone, making sure everyone who can be rescued is accounted for. At that time yesterday was years ago as far as I was concerned, but, two days after publication, I was surprised — and delighted, her books have been with me since childhood — to receive a response from Le Guin.

Knowing that she had written angrily on her blog about the way Trump had turned national politics into an offensive circus, I had asked her if she would comment on what the NEA meant to American life, in keeping with her own exhortation to her blog readers to keep focus on the people Trump hurts, rather than on the vain, self-regarding president himself.

It’s a measure of her skill that even with the horrified brevity of my attention during those early months, when annihilation felt like a near-certainty and journalism felt like a sword with which to fight it, the email below stuck in my head, as her writing so reliably does.

On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 8:29 PM Ursula Le Guin <redacted> wrote:

Dear Sam Thielman,

Thank you for your generous invitation.   

I wonder if “what NEA means to American life” is quite the question that needs asking.  People conscious of the importance of art in daily life don’t need to read the answer; people uninterested in the arts or who hold them in contempt won’t read it.   

Perhaps the real problem is that people to whom the arts are extremely important — who listen to  popular music, watch movies on screen or tv, or take their kids to the public library — often don’t think of them as arts.   American culture encourages “art” to present itself as necessarily irreverent, revolutionary, distressing, formidable, esoteric, etc.  People whose art is country music or Zits* see NEA as elitist money going to elitist projects — nothing to do with them.  They’re the ones who need to hear that the songs and pictures and stories they value are indeed art, and will indeed be damaged by the malevolence of the Republican leadership toward public support of education and toward independent creativity.  

But I’m a product of the elite side of culture myself, and I don’t know how to reach them.

And frankly, at  87 I’m kind of tired of hitting my head against the wall.

With all good wishes,

Ursula Le Guin

That was the only time I ever had the opportunity to communicate with her; there are other writers I wanted very badly to meet and never had the chance—Gene Wolfe, author of The Book of the New Sun, who died last week, Lloyd Alexander, author of The Prydain Chronicles, who passed not long ago—and an email is, I’ll freely admit to you, an odd thing to treasure. But I do treasure it, and not just in the way I treasure a signed book, but because Le Guin was correct, and in a way that I have not thought enough about.

Her most famous novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, is about humility. It is, at first, an absolutely normal if beautifully phrased and perfectly economical wizard-school story, predating the first Harry Potter novel by nearly 30 years. But unlike Harry, its hero, Ged, discovers his power too early; he misuses it, causes tremendous harm, and is sent away from the campus to learn how better to master himself. It’s something Le Guin’s writing often examines—the way hubris can be harmful, even fatal.

Le Guin had an astonishing knack for keeping the main thing the main thing; she was, in that regard, the anti-Trump. “He is a true, great master of the great game of this age, the Celebrity Game,” Le Guin wrote of the president a few months before her death. “Attention is what he lives on. Celebrity without substance. His “reality” is “virtual” — i.e. non-existent — but he used this almost-reality to disguise a successful bid for real power. Every witty parody, hateful gibe, clever takeoff, etc., merely plays his game, and therefore plays into his hands.”

That strikes me as true. There are good reasons to avoid the kind of stigmatization that Trump’s self-appointment as The Subject We Must Always Be Arguing About creates. It’s very easy to hate Trump’s supporters for his actions, but that’s not the same as seeking to determine who carries out the president’s hideously inhumane policies like child separation at the border, who writes his policies and briefs, and who is hurt by those policies, and how to help them.

There is a swath of America that just doesn’t care very much about politics and is waiting for everything to get back to normal. Art is a way to demonstrate the limits of normalcy, to show that actually, even politically disengaged people have skin in the game—they just don’t know it or have forgotten. Country music, newspaper cartoons, and Clint Eastwood movies are at risk here, too. For better or for worse, Trump’s celebritized presidency has proven that those are the things people care about. They can be used as leverage.

*Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman’s newspaper comic strip about an adolescent boy, a kind of unofficial sequel to Calvin and Hobbes, less Hobbes. It’s pretty good.—Sam

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Marking Time

Odds, ends, and observations

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• Things I am reading/playing/watching/listening to:
  1. Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend. It is my first experience reading something by her and it’s good so far.
  2. Just finished Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals, a masterly history of white evangelical America. I recommend it highly, though the last few chapters are almost exclusively about the political organ the evangelical community became and less prominently about the theology. Still, can’t recommend highly enough; it made me less angry with conservative Christians, oddly, and I recommend being less angry.
  3. Hidetaka Miyazaki’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, a video game by FromSoftware, notorious for their difficult titles. If you’re playing it like an Uncharted game it is absolutely incredibly difficult and the story is elliptical and hard to uncover, but if you want the video game equivalent of Nabokov, which is to say leisurely, difficult, and witty, I can’t recommend it enough. I don’t know that I’ll buy a better game this year. I may not buy another game this year.
  4. Barry on HBO. Bill Hader, surprise, is a terrific director, and the idea for the show is very funny—a hitman decides to become an actor—and played so straight-facedly it’s all the more ridiculous. Stephen Root is improbably magnetic as Barry’s handler.
• This Week in Parenting
  1. We took my kid to an auto parts swap meet because his granddad is restoring an old roadster and wanted to hunt for exactly the right distributor cap. He—the two-year-old—had an amazing time. We’ve learned that the best way to deal with the wiggles is to just let him roam a little. Often he wants to walk from table to table in whatever restaurant where the food has lost his attention and greet people like a chef with his name on the marquee making sure the meals are good. Generally speaking people dig it, or at least are nice about it.
  2. I am not a spanker. I was spanked, I know and admire many spankers, but it ain’t my thing. The question, if you were disciplined that way, becomes how to make sure you’re not just duplicating the experience of being spanked by terrorizing your child when he does something wrong. Getting down on his eye level, speaking softly and low to him, and asking him to repeat back what he shouldn’t do next time (“no throw car;” “no run street”) has yielded good results for us so far.

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I consume far too much conservative media. Any is too much, but I have a mild obsession with learning what the right thinks and why, especially the Christian right, and so I trawl the home pages of The National Review, The Federalist, Christianity Today and The Daily Caller for information—not the information imparted in the articles, but the information omitted from them, and from any sort of coverage, and I carefully keep track of the stories that remain important to the regular readers of these—and darker, more obscure—outlets.

Something has departed from American civil discourse in the last few months; a kind of pretense that, however contemptible and offensive, saved a number of us from annihilation. I’m working to name the thing. It’s a confounding task.

Here’s an example: In 2012 there were 15 bias-related murders according to the FBI’s hate crimes division, which is not exactly known for its liberal standards on the topic. This is pretty good, all things considered—not a lot of race-related murders. 

Also in 2012, The National Review, the magazine begun by William F. Buckley to protest Brown v. Board, fired writer John Derbyshire for racism in a column denouncing his post for reactionary website Taki’s Magazine, though editor Rich Lowry did take pains to name him “a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer” in the same post. Another Review bulletin dubbed the piece unworthy of its author, who “always gave me the impression of an Oxford don” but ultimately “had more courage than sense.”

Indeed, Derbyshire’s cultivated courageous donnishness was always delivered with a skillfully naughty, slightly hectoring friendliness that never quite masked his profound distaste for people other than white whose religions were other than Christian. “It is good to be reminded, too, with forceful supporting data, that the 1924 restrictions on immigration to the U.S. were not driven by any belief on the part of the restrictionists in their own racial superiority but by a desire to stabilize the nation’s ethnic balance, which is by no means the same thing,” he asserted in Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative in 2003, in a wry and respectful semi-dismissal of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique, the ur-text of contemporary American anti-Semitism. 

MacDonald, Derbyshire explains, was removed from polite society because “he got the Jew thing,” as someone said to him at a party. Though he personally does not have the Jew thing and resolved to do his best not to get it “so far as personal integrity allowed,” “if, however, you have got the Jew thing, or if, for reasons unfathomable to me, you would like to get it, Kevin MacDonald is your man.” MacDonald had not yet been declared persona non grata by his university, but he would be five years later.

It’s worth examining what Derbyshire represented within the complicated framework of conservative intellectualism during this period of detente between its factions of crabby paleoconservatives, pre-Vatican II Catholics, born-agains, libertarians, Bushie neocons, and all combinations of the above. Like Buchanan, he would have described himself in the moment as a paleoconservative; someone concerned primarily with preserving social mores, public respect for religion, and not afflicted with the same concerns about deficit spending or socialized medicine that bedeviled his frenemies elsewhere in the Review, beyond his concern about the propensity of the latter to encourage laziness in the lower orders.

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Factions and Fictions

There is a lot to be said here about the interpretations of German-American philosopher Leo Strauss, whose affinity for deception plays a central role in both strains of contemporary conservatism. I’d rather not say it; it’s tedious and Strauss’s work, whether it intends to or not, functions as a theory of elitism and leaves its two factions at war over only the worthless question of which one ought to be considered elite. Suffice it to say that Buchanan, Derbyshire, MacDonald, Steve Sailer, Joe Sobran and the rest of the comfortably stodgy old Catholics and their allies and protégés defined themselves during the Bush administration in opposition to what they rightly understood to be the fad of neoconservatism.

The neocon movement, especially Andrew Sullivan at The New Republic and David Brooks and ultrahawk Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard, preached Strauss’s gospel of lies. Lies were necessary to the concept of nation-building, they wrote, and told each other, and themselves. The Great Deceptions must not merely be believed by the masses in order to have an idea of nationhood, they must be aggressively practiced by the elite (which is to say, writers at The New Republic, The National Review, and The Weekly Standard and any politicians who knew what was good for them) on those masses if the nations in question are going to be built. Imagine The Secret, except armed to the teeth.

This is how we ended up with absurd pronouncements that of like “an aide” (almost certainly Karl Rove) to the Bush administration memorably waving off New York Times reporter Ron Suskind with the novel insult that Suskind was a part of “the reality-based community.”

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (full article here)

Rove, or whoever he was, was right about that last bit, at least. Having failed to create a democratic Iraq using the power of positive thinking, Iraq’s ostensibly well-meaning architects gave up the ear of the last president and moved on to the next one, having received the requisite career boost for their participation in the activities of the Oval Office, never mind that those activities killed half a million people. They didn’t mind the occasional R-rated movie, after all, and some of their best friends were gay, or black, or women.

In hindsight, it was easy to see happening if you were interested in conservative media as an observer rather than a consumer. A Bush-unaligned part of the intricately linked world of conservative publications was engaged in a very different project from the self-appointed great actors of history: It had appointed itself the filtering mechanism for the rest of the press and the parts of culture that its viewers found suspicious or alien. “Politics is downstream of culture,” Andrew Breitbart, progenitor of Trumpworld’s most effective mouthpiece, famously said. 

This part of conservatism was engaged not with problems of democracy in faraway lands, but with degeneracy in our own. “Lots of Christians have the false idea that The Benedict Option foresees the greatest challenges to the faith coming from state persecution,” wrote Rod Dreher in The American Conservative, referring to his own project of supposedly Benedictine withdrawal from American public life. “Though I do believe that is coming, by far the greater threats to the churches come from the culture in general, and from internal collapse.” The targets here are familiar: In the piece quoted, Dreher was writing about the scandal of widespread child abuse in the Catholic church, which he blamed on homosexuality.

The Taki post that got Derbyshire fired began as a sort of Modest Proposal making light of the African-American fear of cops who murder them, or at least it pretended to be that for a few lines before it, too, descended into a purer and more earnest expression of Derbyshire’s concerns about degeneracy. Like most bullies, Derbyshire was less kidding than maintaining a veneer of kidding so he could say, “I’m just kidding,” which he did when he was criticized for the article’s ugliness. But the veneer had cracked open wide enough for the squirming putrefaction animating it to be visible, and it got him tossed into the outer darkness: the same stagnant toilets of the internet to which MacDonald, Sobran, and others like them had been banished. And, in that still, lightless excrescence, something was growing.

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“Which race of smiley face do you use when your employer texts you on the weekend?”

Jump forward a few years. A symptom of that growing thing, but probably not the thing itself, seems to be neoreactionism, nauseatingly abbreviated NRx by its adherents, among whom Trump advisor Steve Bannon and many other ascendant political movers are numbered. It is a political philosophy embraced by conservatives across the social and religious spectra but especially by conservative Catholics, such as Harvard Law’s Adrian Vermeule and Sohrab Amhari, who both write for right-wing religious journal First Things, which briefly hosted political disinformation blog The Gateway Pundit. The various strands of right-wing media often come together like that.

James Duesterberg wrote a sympathetic and informative 2017 pocket history of the movement for University of Chicago literary magazine The Point, “Final Fantasy.” The author points out that, though the antics of neoreactionary thought leaders like Curtis Yarvin, who blogs as Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land are often risible and their policy ideas absurd, it has “a more savage bite” than its ludicrous social prescriptions suggest. 

“[W]hy are we required to believe in political correctness, rather than simply being forced to accept progressive policy as the rules of the game for our time?” Duesterberg asks. “And why, after all, are liberals so threatened by dissent?”

Throughout his Point article, Duesterberg maintains the same just-asking-questions posture as Derbyshire in his review of The Culture of Critique, but his agreement with, at least, the premise of neoreaction—that social-justice warriors run society and have made it into a wasteland—seems clear. “Want to earn enough money to support your family? You’ll need a college degree, so you’d better learn how to write a paper on epistemic violence for your required Grievance Studies 101 class,” Duesterberg writes. “Want to keep your job? You’d better brush up on climate-change talking points, so you can shift into regulatory compliance, the only growth industry left. Want to relax with your friends after work? It’s probably easiest if you like movies about gay people, pop music that celebrates infidelity and drug use, and books about non-Christian boy wizards. Want to communicate with other people? Better figure out how to use emoticons. Which race of smiley face do you use when your employer texts you on the weekend?”

This was, essentially, Donald Trump’s campaign platform. Not his vacuous ramblings or his personal dishonesty, criminality, and cruelty, but his proposal to voters: The world you live in is worthless and has been overrun by self-righteous scolds who want to pick your pocket and invade everything that gives you the slightest pleasure in the name of an obviously irreligious “morality” that you quite rightly resist; they’re the same people who depress your wages, change your health insurance plan twice a year, and send your job to Mexico when you turn fifty. You’ve been terrorized by the invasion of the diversity officers, Obama chief among them.

It’s the basis of Trumpworld’s rallying cry every time someone shares a story about kids teaching each other to change the smallest children’s diapers in our new immigrant baby jails, a video of a toddler who doesn’t recognize his horrified mother at the airport after months of captivity, an interview with schoolchildren weeping in uncomprehending despair having returned from the first day of elementary school to find that their parents have been rounded up by the secret police. Now, in your misery, they tell us, you know how WE feel, we who spent the Obama administration in fear for our precious, notional liberties. The stakes, for conservatives, are entirely imaginary, but they are a matter of bone-deep belief.

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Equal and Opposite Reaction

While Yarvin and Land are its founders, reaction’s champion du jour writes under the nom de guerre Bronze Age Pervert; his work has leapt into the White House via Michael Anton, “the brilliant, bespoke Straussian who went to work for Trump’s National Security Council for a while,” according to Andrew Sullivan, now of New York Magazine in a piece called “The Limits of My Conservatism.” 

Anton cuts an interesting figure and has been profiled several times, the best one probably Rosie Gray’s, from March, 2017. A financial services goon, Anton published punishingly lengthy blog posts in support of Trump at the Unz Review, a project of former American Conservative publisher and Republican politician Ron Unz. Anton’s most influential post was certainly “The Flight 93 Election,” in the Claremont Review of Books, in which he argued that Americans had to “rush the cockpit” despite—in fact, because of—the possibility of destruction if they did not.

The nesting dolls go like this: the Review of Books is an enterprise of the Claremont Institute, founded by Henry Jaffa, patron saint of the West Coast school of Straussian thought, bankrolled by billionaire Carnegie heiress Sarah Scaife, whose extreme hatred of immigrants and virulent racism aligns perfectly with the Institute’s mission and its subsequent embrace through the Review of Books of Trump, who also hates black people and immigrants.

It’s easy to get lost in warring philosophical schools and old grudges between conservatives, but the cheat code, always, is bigotry—racism, antisemitism, and, always, misogyny.

Here’s some of Bronze Age Pervert’s philosophizing, glowingly reviewed by Anton and pushed enthusiastically to the White House: 

[A]ncient “public-spiritedness” [is] free men accepting the rigors of training together so they can preserve their freedom by force against equally haughty and hostile outsiders and against racial subordinates at home. Any “racial” unity of the Greeks was therefore only the organic unity of culture or language, but never became political: such people would never tolerate losing the sovereignty in the states they and their recent ancestors had established to protect their freedom and space to move. But to draw any parallels to our time is absurd: these men would have never submitted to abstractions like “human rights,” or “equality,” or “the people” as some kind of amorphous entity encompassing the inhabitants of the territory or city in general. They would have rightly seen this as pure slavery, which is our condition today: no real man would ever accept the legitimacy of such an entity, which for all practical purposes means you must, for entirely imaginary reasons, defer to the opinion of slaves, aliens, fat childless women, and others who have no share in the actual physical power.

A perhaps overremarked facet of the Trump administration is that its ideologues don’t come through the usual channels—no columnists left tony positions at the Times or the Washington Post or even the National Review to work as speechwriters for Trump, to their frustration, I’m sure. Instead, Trump staffed his advisory ranks from the anti-news sycophants at Fox News, where the intellectual life, such as it is, has little to do with policy or reportage and more to do with broad theories completely divorced from measured data like those of Mr. Age Pervert. 

The tone of Trump-era conservative intellectual life trends toward self-help and whites-only feel-goodism, with a tonal spectrum that ranges from the spittle-flecked stemwinders about dirty immigrants from Tucker Carlson to professorial disquisitions on women’s place in the home from the most popular of these intellectuals, Jordan Peterson.

Much of this is to do with Trump’s own bottomless intellectual laziness, but it is also a product of his preferences, namely the aforementioned racism, and the ressentiment, as M. Duesterberg would have it, of a paleoconservative class expelled from movement conservatism in favor of witless neocons for what it believes was simply its realism about race, gender, and the inferiority of Islam. With their unexpectedly successful rushing of the cockpit, as Anton would have it, they were suddenly given the opportunity to exercise real political power. 

Yarvin, Derbyshire, Carlson, Bronze Age Pervert: These are the thinkers of the contemporary right. Some may have access to the halls of power and most may not, but the fact is they are read by the few in the Trump administration who at least pretend to literacy, and even the old neocon guard, rather than seek approval among authority-weidling women, black people, and gay people, have chosen like Sullivan to re-investigate racism to see if there isn’t something interesting they can salvage. And they have found conservatism’s old wounds rich with a festering, suppurating intellectual life.

So it would be fair to call reaction’s politics ascendant in the years between Derbyshire’s dismissal and Duesterberg’s essay.

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Conservatism Unlimited

As the Trump administration shifted into gear in 2017, it made no bones about its distaste for immigrants, and neither did the reactionary outlets that shared its ideology. That year Breitbart was aswarm with articles about Ebba Åkerlund, an 11-year-old killed by an Islamic State militant in Sweden. The administration itself opened a hotline for Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) through the Bush-era Department of Homeland Security’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. This is not an emergency helpline; rather, it is a hotline through which people can inquire about whether or not people convicted of crimes have been deported. Trump also ordered the Department of Justice to establish an “Alien Incarceration Report” showcasing crimes by immigrants, who offend at a much lower rate than citizens and whose neighborhoods are generally safer than neighborhoods without them, according to the government’s own National Criminal Justice Reference Service.

On the third of this month, a right-wing gunman in El Paso killed 22 people, most of them over 55, and shot 24 others who survived, including a four-month-old baby. In April, a right-wing gunman killed an elderly woman at worship in a synagogue and wounded three others, including the rabbi. In July, a right-wing gunman opened fire on the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California, killing three and wounding 13 before he was shot to death. The Proud Boys, a far-right gang whose leader, Enrique Tarrio, is chair of Florida Latinos for Trump, started two riots in Portland this summer, one on June 29 and one on August 18. 

Since the El Paso murders, the police have arrested “dozens” of young men, teenagers, and one woman threatening or credibly believed to be planning mass attacks—not just shootings but also bombings. Conor Climo, a 23-year-old Nevada man, was arrested for communicating with neonazi group Atomwaffen division about bombing a synagogue and killing patrons at a gay bar. James Reardon, a 19-year-old man who attended the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville where neo-Nazi James Fields ran over Heather Heyer with her car, was arrested for threatening to attack a synagogue. Police found a long gun, body armor, a gas mask, and antisemitic literature in Reardon’s home. After his arrest, researcher Emily Gorcenski found a photo of Reardon with Fields at the Charlottesville rally.

These are unusual crimes: They are committed against strangers, based on those strangers’ status or perceived status as a member of an outgroup, and all are coming from the right, often with the explicit stated purpose of starting a race war.

In their manifestos, some of these killers have parroted what we in our capacity as a nation of boiled frogs have come to regard as anodyne, if distasteful, conservative talking points: that immigrants are an invasion, that demographic diminution is “genocide,” that morality derives from strength and that strength derives from eugenic theories of heritable positive traits and that these traits include intelligence. None of this is true; Stephen Jay Gould spent much of his late career debunking scientific racism.

But in this iteration of conservatism as in the previous one, thank Strauss, its truth or falsity is not of much consequence; those qualities are a product of the enlightenment, which, the intellectuals of the right inform us, is a lacuna in the true history of humanity, which is darkness extending eternally on both sides of it. The days of the reality-based community are once again numbered.

To people like Brenton Tarrant, the act of slaking his bloodlust on dozens of worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, including, among the dead, a three-year-old, is politics. He says as much in his manifesto, claiming that the birth rates of non-natives are so high that the people themselves must be culled. Christchurch may be in New Zealand, but the memes and and imageboard culture he jokingly cites in his manifesto are pure Americana; Patrick Crusius recognizes them as such in his own manifesto before his murder of 22 people in El Paso, which cites Tarrant. John Earnest, in his own document describing his reasons for carrying out the murder and assaults at the synagogue in Poway, also approvingly cites Tarrant.

Tarrant’s seventy-odd-page screed, which he called “The Great Replacement,” has surpassed even The Culture of Critique (which codifies many of the same claims about the coming subordination of the white race as Tarrant’s document) as literature of political influence. It is contemporary conservatism’s purest distillation.

The killings are consistent with paleoconservatism, reactionism, or fascism, as it is most properly called. Pat Buchanan, himself a paleoconservative, agrees with me on this point: “Now, there are no excuses, or defenses, for what happened in Christchurch. But there is an explanation,” he wrote on the blog The Unz Review after Christchurch. “All peoples to some degree resent and resist the movement of outsiders into their space. Some migrants are more difficult than others to assimilate into Western societies. European nations that had not known mass migrations for centuries were especially susceptible to a virulent reaction, a backlash.”

Paul Nehlen, an avowed fan of The Culture of Critique, is a former Republican candidate for Congress, whose primary candidacy against Paul Ryan received fawning coverage from Breitbart News and an endorsement from Fox News’s Laura Ingraham and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. If Tarrant’s writing is the literary framework for present-day conservative thought, Nehlen is its avatar. He was less equivocal than Buchanan in his analysis of the spate of white nationalist shootings in an interview on White Nationalist podcast The Gas Station. 

“We’re gonna find ourselves in a situation where we’re the ones who tear it down,” Nehlen said. “We aren’t necessarily going to be the ones who are going to build it back up, be great if we are. Be great if we could do it in that timeframe, but it’s gotta be torn down. This whole neoliberal façade that we’re all walking around in has got to be torn down, has got to be destroyed. So that’s where I stand on things. I’m not backing away from this kid [John Earnest, the Poway shooter]. I’m heralding his arrival. And I will look forward to his eventual release. Maybe some folks will show up there and he’ll be sprung [from prison]. So peace be upon him.”

It may be true that our current prosperity is simply an all-too-brief respite between dark ages. But it is not true that white people are superior to other races, or that there is no truth. Nor is it true that there is some kind of especially worthy cultural product, or indeed, any cultural product at all, that is generated by contemporary conservatives and their sympathizers; there is nothing to conserve. Rather, their project is a soulless, aching void, an irrational perception of slights and wrongs so great that they act as plenary indulgences for any monstrosity, no matter how great, any murder, any incarceration, any rending apart of mother and child, of body and soul, and all of the movement’s intellectual force is now directed at arguing its case in favor of this infinite license.

It is not a complicated evil, but it is a forceful one, and the force of civilization and dignity ought to prepare to meet it with refusal, silence, and, so far as it is still possible, the merciless application of the law, because if we do not, we will have to meet it with violence, and that is one of the only two things it wants. 

The other is a platform to argue for the inhumanity of the great mass of us who deplore its wickedness, and, in the presidency, it already has that.

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Officially New Year’s Eve! Here are the ten best things I wrote in 2018. I hope you enjoy at least one of them.

• My examination of the way the CIA gamed the media to get Gina Haspel confirmed https://www.cjr.org/analysis/the-cias-unprecedented-pr-push-to-make-gina-haspel-its-director.php

• My explainer of what exactly Vladimir Putin wants out of Donald Trump, and what he seems to be getting: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/when-putin-asked-for-help-on-sanctions-trump-listened
• My examination of the group of Russian right-wing maniacs trying to use the NRA as a recruiting vehicle for credulous and/or horny Republican operatives and officials https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/exclusive-russian-gun-group-with-ties-to-nra-backed-by-right-wing-extremists
• My profile of comics deity Frank Miller https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/frank-miller-xerxes-cursed-sin-city-the-dark-knight-returns
• My investigation into the group of contrarian waiters who didn’t want raises and turned out to be an astroturf group working on behalf of restaurant owners https://www.cjr.org/analysis/77-referendum-astroturf-tipping.php
• My explanation of why the Republican line of idiotic, illiterate questioning of tech execs on Capitol Hill is more sinister than it looks https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/google-should-have-been-grilled-more-intelligent-lawmakers-house-republicans-ncna947221
• My interview with Marcy Wheeler: https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/emptywheels-marcy-wheeler-knows-more-than-she-tells-but-she-tells-a-lot.php
• My laundry list of reasons for the press to step back and take stock of itself after the Maria Butina indictment: https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/tldr-from-russia-with-love.php
• My essay on comics as therapy https://woollymag.com/culture/comic-books-are-self-care.html
• My feature on the Kalashnikov factory in Florida that *probably* does not exist. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/rick-scott-sanctions-and-a-shady-gun-maker-with-russian-ties

That’s it! It wasn’t a particularly glamorous year but I’m surprised by how proud I am of my work, which I think mostly holds up pretty well. I’m also *incredibly* proud of the work of my colleagues at the Tow Center and the wonderful people at CJR who let me hang out in their office and yell story ideas in the morning meeting.

In general I spent a lot more time parenting and husbanding and drawing and reading and walking than I did last year. I’m glad I did, and I think it made my writing better, too.

1. I would rather eat glass than directly engage with people who think it’s necessary or at all useful to police the content of artistic work for political respectability as determined by the least generous contextual interpretation of that work and a similarly magnanimous assessment of the intentions of the people who created it.
2. I shit from a very great height indeed on the notion that craft-based criticism is worth much when it comes from people who call themselves artists but whose main contribution to comics as a medium takes the form of horny Twitter selfies.
3. Sex comics are a really odd form of art that has mostly fallen out of vogue but a lot of astonishing artists, notably Robert Crumb, did them on their way to creating some of the most beautiful visual art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Straight American and European men illustrating their most depraved sexual fantasies make for queasy reading for a lot of people; that’s fine. Nobody has to like anything, just as nobody has to make art anyone else likes. These comics really help other people, believe it or not! Whatever you may think about them, the act of making a drawing from memory is not an act of violence, as I keep seeing it described. You can call it violence, but you will be completely wrong and incapable of having a discussion about art with anyone because you don’t know what words mean.
4. It’s really telling how many people who have a problem with Crumb, with Manara, and with their American and European contemporaries, luuurve manga and preach it generally as gospel to everyone who will listen without for an instant considering manga’s regressive and sexist qualities. Crumb drew a lot of gross stuff but he never drew tentacle rape. Either it’s okay or immoral to depict the extremely weird sex stuff that bugs you or turns you on or whatever in your work. I’m going with the former, thanks.
5. People can be tarred as sexual predators when there is an accuser and not before. If all you have as evidence are interviews featuring a bunch of old guys hee-hawing about their almost certainly embroidered sexual exploits, please jam a sock in it.
6. I keep seeing comics twitter types say some variation on “I know five people who are just as talented as R Crumb and they’re not personally shitty!” Actually, you do not know five people who are as talented as Robert Crumb. There are probably not five people alive who are as talented as Robert Crumb. An entire industry of confessional alt-comix came into being ex nihilo because of Crumb and multiple successive generations of artists have learned from him, in good ways and bad. You may like your friend Saffron’s stippling or whateverthefuck better than Crumb’s but Crumb’s influence on comics is not simply that the guy is good at crosshatching. This is one of those weird cases where an artist’s obvious technical supercompetence obscures his actual contribution to art and I sort of sympathize but seriously, when you say this shit you sound like one of those boors in the 20th century wing of an art museum who looks at a Joan Miro painting and says “I coulda done that!” No, you could not have, because then you would have done so.
7. As the nauseating spectacle of #comicsgate winds down due to a number of its partisans realizing that they’ve been hilariously grifted out of roughly a million dollars–no kidding–collectively, I was very annoyed to see a bunch of people tweeting incredulously that they were surprised Frank Cho wasn’t a part of the comicsgate bandwagon and had in fact gone out of his way to dump on the whole clownshow. This is what happens when you are so incredibly invested in seeing people who disagree with you as irreducibly evil and corrupt that you pay no attention at all to what they’re saying. If you deliberately misunderstand people, you will find them hard to predict! Frank Cho is a person of color rose to prominence by writing a humor strip about a pretty woman constantly disappointed by lunkheaded men. He likes drawing cheesecakey pinups and doesn’t like being picked on by silly prudes on social media, which is different from being a frothing misogynist.
8. Guys, a lot of comics are extremely grim and unpleasant, in terms of the material they explore and originate. That is their nature, largely because of the way they evolved over the 20th century and as a response to that period’s excesses. I find that response to those excesses to be energizing and encouraging and even somewhat optimistic because of the way it resists sanitization and exportation into the larger monoculture, a gelatinous mass of contract law and 1950’s cultural mores mostly owned by the Disney and Warner Bros corporations that I personally consider hugely offensive and disturbing in a way that I absolutely do not find Crumb’s sex fantasies or Alan Moore’s horror comics. If you prefer to carefully dictate the terms on which you consider works of art acceptable for publication and distribution to the artists and publishers by means of boycotts and public pressure campaigns, congratulations on being an evangelical Christian, I guess.
9. So there you go. I can’t stop people from saying really ignorant and foolish things and of course I wouldn’t if I could but my god, it makes me tired and discouraged about the future to see it in such an unending flood.

I’m back from Iraq. It was a wonderful experience and full of some of the most interesting people I’ve ever had the privilege of meeting and I hope to go back there soon. I’m accidentally backing into a niche of consulting on fake news for various people and places and I hope it’s something I’m doing well. It’s a strange world. I’m so tired I can barely see at the moment.

I think I’ll start out with some comics:

• Holy shit, Mark Russell and Steve Pugh’s The Flintstones is fucking magnificent. I haven’t read a work-for-hire comic that good in years. Many years. I have to to read his new Snagglepuss comic immediately. I can’t believe I’m typing any of this. But yeah The Flintstones is an Anatomy Lesson-level reinvention of a classic character, and it’s REALLY funny and quite sad. Five stars out of four.
• A Walk Through Hell by Garth Ennis and Goran Szuduka is probably the single most frightening comic book I’ve ever read in my life. It’s so upsetting and disturbing, I just can’t even tell you about it. Holy shit. It’s about a pair of cops on the trail of a child murderer who end up in a warehouse that appears to contain… Hell? It’s hard to tell exactly what’s happening at the moment in it, four issues in, but the parallel narratives of the police case that went down before the cops walked into the warehouse and the story of what they find when they go inside are just riveting. The art is pretty good; there aren’t a lot of visual fireworks in the writing yet though there are some really amazing/horrifying ideas. I’m hoping we’ll get a little more room for the artist to work in coming issues.
• Anders Nilsen, whose art is just astoundingly gorgeous, has a new series with a lot of different threads going at once, called Tongues. It remains to be seen whether Nilsen can keep all the balls in the air, though based on past performance I’d say we’re in capable hands, but purely on a visual level the book is just eye-popping. There’s a recent trend toward (I feel) excessive simplicity in contemporary art comics and I have very little use for it; I like Bryan Lee O’Malley’s stuff a lot but in general I find the Hello Kitty-style quasi-anime school of not really doing much rendering in handmade ink on fair-trade artisanal paper to be incredibly lazy-looking and tiresome and weirdly insulting of actual anime which is often rendered to the hilt. It’s nice to see someone moving in the opposite direction as fast as his pen will carry him.
• Yes of course I’m reading the final League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, yes I absolutely love it, no I don’t think Alan Moore is a misogynist, yes Kevin O’Neill is one of the all-time great underrated artists and I hope they rename Ruskin after him. If you haven’t read the previous installments you probably won’t get all the in-jokes but the only person who gets all the in-jokes is Jess Nevins, Cruden to the LoEG’s King James Bible, and you can get Jess to explain them to you pretty easily on Twitter and on his website. The League is all women now, interestingly, and, being as it is a series about hardcore status quo changes happening pretty much nonstop, it has to go a long way to surprise me but it has done exactly that in both issues I’ve read so far. I just adore this series. I can’t say enough good about it—it’s one of the great works of literature of the last twenty years and I’ve treasured every page. It has a lot of Moore’s favorite tics in it but honestly, who cares, in many ways it’s the summation of his entire career and he can repeat himself a little if he wants to. (Providence was pretty much wholly original on that score, interestingly. I feel like he still has more good work in him, but on the other hand I’m glad I feel like that at the end of his career rather than silently wishing he would go away).
• Warren Ellis and Jason Howard have a new book called Cemetery Beach, which I’m excited about because I was one of the six people on earth who read and loved Ellis’s Trees, a sci-fi series about an earth invaded by completely nonhuman aliens. I wish I understood why people are hot and cold on Ellis; his supposedly “bad” books like Jack Cross have some absolutely thrilling visual stuff in them and his good ones are transcendent. Anyway Aftershock Press, which also publishes A Walk Through Hell, recently put out a trade paperback of his megaweird book Shipwreck, which apparently will have more installments though it feels pretty compact and complete to me. I recommend that, too; it’s in a similar vein with his great Karnak miniseries over at Marvel and his absolutely bizarre meta-retcon of Supreme with Tula Lotay, called Supreme: Blue Rose. For more conventional action stuff by him, I’ve recommended The Wild Storm on here every time a new issue comes out and I regret nothing.
• I’m liking Coates-Yu on Captain America though I really did love Mark Waid’s ten-issue run the year previous. Coates has been finding his sea legs on Black Panther and I’m encouraged by the direction he’s taking Cap if not the development of the characters, which is a little lacking, especially by comparison to Waid’s two books, which were so slick. I’ll read absolutely anything Yu draws so it’s fine with me if the story is a bit expositionally clumsy and overreliant on ruminative captions. I want this series to really take off but I’d rather it happened sooner than later; the decompression of comics stories seems to have meant that nothing is really required to happen in the course of a single issue anymore and I find that frustrating as someone who schleps down to the shop every week, rain or shine.
• Waid’s Doctor Strange in Space is pretty fun so far although I worry it will suffer the same fate as his Hulk book, which got crossovered into oblivion fairly quickly. At the moment it’s very light and fun and I hope the higher-ups don’t drag the character into too many corporate events so the series has a chance to grow. I am and will continue to be a serious Waid partisan.
• I wait with bated breath for the final installment in the ongoing Kurt Busiek Astro City ongoing, and I look forward to the graphic novel next year, too. I love AC and I’ve loved the recent stories a lot; he keeps finding ways to bring in superhero-universe archetypes that surprise and delight me, 19 books into this series. The most recent is a kind of Sandman analogue called the Outsider whose recent adventures have been really fun in a way that is both metanarratively interesting and then meta-metanarratively interesting in the ways it recalls Grant Morrison’s shenanigans on Animal Man and some of the odder Sandman issues. Busiek reminds me of something Alan Moore wrote about Rick Veitch, that he’s such a reliable craftsman that people take for granted work that would be astounding if it came from anyone else; I agree strongly on Veitch and think the same compliment applies to Busiek. Also I want that final Batman: Creature of the Night issue to come out, goddammit.
• Frank Miller’s Xerxes is over; it was a lot of fun to read if significantly lighter than 300. The real pleasure in it was watching Miller get his mojo back over the five issues. By the end he’s at the height of his kinetic powers and it’s a relief to see his colorist, Alex Sinclair, learning to work with him. Miller is a genius for emphasis and sometimes he just gives up on a page after putting the few things it needs on it in black ink; by the end of the series, Sinclair has figured this out and stopped trying to draw in backgrounds with gradations of green and orange.
• Daniel Mallory Ortberg wrote a Rick & Morty comic; a one-shot about Krombopoulos Michael, the cheerfully amoral hitman played by Andy Daly in a very funny episode of the show. I love Daniel; he published an essay of mine I’m really proud of a few years ago but I also just admire his writing—his jokes at the Toast were some of the funniest humor prose I’d ever read and he communicated a brilliant, tactile understanding of online culture while also being more deeply literate, something digital culture has a lot of trouble with. Anyway his Krombopoulos Michael comic is funny and good and I hope he writes more.
• Batman #50, the wedding issue, was fun; it reminded me a lot of the old special issues that got filled out with pin-ups after an extra-long story, except in this case the little mini-posters I used to cut out and tape up on the inside of my locker are actually part of the story. There’s a fantastic Frank Miller page, a Neal Adams page, pretty much everybody you could want who’s still alive and capable of drawing.

If you like, you can see the emergence of a united trolldom in the comics fanbase, now apparently called Comicsgate [retching noise] as laterally related to Gamergate (which it apes), and to the Sad Puppies dickheads who tried to get eighth-tier hack sci-fi writer Ted Beale a Hugo Award because he was a white guy (Beale has founded a publishing imprint actually called Comicsgate).

And it’s understandable to want to dismiss these dudes as fake geek boys, who don’t get the most basic tenets of superhero comicdom, namely diversity, inclusion, selfless heroism, and sacrifice. What else are Superman and the X-Men supposed to stand for? They’re the original social justice warriors.

But doing the former ignores the actual comics, and doing the latter commits one of the more annoying fallacies of contemporary mainstream comics criticism, which is certainly not above reproach though it is at least non-Nazi, which is apparently the subterranean state of the bar these days: It resists marrying the work performed on comics to the actual people who perform it and instead weds it to the characters themselves, who are not much more than corporate glyphs at this point. Roughly the same amount of moral goodness suffuses Batman as does the Pepsi logo. Perhaps this wasn’t always this way but it certainly is now.

With each new act in this regrettable bullshit circus I hope more and more fervently that some kind of intelligent analysis of the actual people who help create comics will get written by someone capable of writing it: Chuck Dixon, for example, is one of the most prolific comics writers ever to pick up a pen, having made his mark particularly on wildly popular characters like The Punisher and Batman. Dixon has never been shy about his right-wing politics and now, predictably, he’s thrown in with Beale, writing a comic called “Alt-Hero.” Mike Baron, writer of beloved superhero series Nexus was for a while slated to write a comic about the heroic exploits of Kyle Chapman, the fascist activist who attended rallies calling himself Based Stickman, wearing a mask and wielding a club that the criminal complaint sworn out against him refers to as a “leaded stick.” (Baron dropped out, which is nice to hear. I like a lot of his work.) Obviously, it’s not hard to see the connection between Chapman and the mask-wearing, batarang-wielding four-color heroes who thump thugs every week in the comics.

There are more besides these examples, less egregious but just as noteworthy: Bill Willingham, who devoted most of an issue of his wildly popular book Fables to explicitly comparing the Palestinian people to the subhuman goblin villains of his series, which kind of ruined it for me; and who can forget Dave Sim, the prodigiously gifted writer-artist whose 300-issue long self-published epic Cerebus devolves into a misogynist screed written mostly in tiny serial-killer-font captions and lengthy back-and-forth letter-column discussions with more progressive writers like Alan Moore.

I’m going to take the odd position of declining to insult the workmanship of these guys’ comics; a lot of them are very good. Failing to take into account the world as it is, whether by misrepresenting women or refusing to understand gay people or deploring entire races, is a serious error of imagination and impedes the basic aesthetic goal of communing more deeply with people who aren’t you. But that error, particularly in fantasy fiction where quality depends so much on constructing an entire world as thoroughly as you can (and where a lot of the legacy audience is white and conservative), is not always fatal to the larger project. And these mistakes are very easy for artists who aren’t hooked in to political culture to make, because if they’re any good, they’re thinking about what kind of brush to use or whether the gesso is drying correctly, rather than the Dakota Access Pipeline. There’s an essential conservatism to quite a bit of art, probably because you simply have to accept the status quo, however shitty, for long enough to competently produce it: A lot happens to art between conception and publication. That’s probably why artists get so frustrated with criticism that neglects the actual process of creation in favor of some moralistic superstructure that best serves the critic’s list of political grievances. Criticism is political, sure, but if it’s exclusively political and not at least partly an examination of how art works, it gets hard to call it “criticism” with a straight face.

The trouble is in some ways the medium of comics itself, just as Gamergate was, at least partly, about the culture of games. Media don’t exist independently of their histories: Comics and indeed most figural art are built in significant part on a foundation of straight men’s lurid fantasies. Some of those fantasies are beautiful and moving and even aspire to revelation, but they are still the products of cultures that denigrate women, that enslave black people, that persecute gay people and shun nonchristians. Comics are most interesting when they transgress those norms and because of their disreputability, transgression is comics’ stock in trade, more often than not. Transgression isn’t *necessarily* good but it is *often* good or can be made good: Tijuana bibles are gross little porn comics but perhaps they’re also liberating for people constrained by the public hypocrisies about sex during the thirties and forties when they were published. Robert Crumb’s vision of the world is horrifyingly bleak and corrupted but maybe it’s some part of an antidote to smothering capitalism. I don’t know. Defending the morality of art is a trap; that’s something the Comicsgate chuds instinctually understand and that’s why they’re so eager to talk in completely invented terms about the comics economy and the numbers of books sold, or which series were canceled early and how those metrics prove that this or that book was a grievous business error by people who rose to positions of authority by being diversity hires or something.

The truth is, I hope obviously, none of these things. Art is valuable neither for its didactic lessons nor for its impressive quarterly margins. The best art has no simple moral message by definition and very often leaves its creator no better off financially than she was when she started drawing or painting or writing.

There are big problems of professionalism and cliquishness in comics long before we get to Comicsgate. When big tranches of verified Twitter tell an untried writer that their new book looks amaaaaaaazing despite astonishingly ugly promo art, it smacks of a kind of clubby boosterism that feels designed to pick readers’ pockets from the outside. On the inside, there is a feeling among progressive artists that they must have each other’s backs in uncertain times and if so-and-so’s debut is a little rough and overpraised, it’s just three dollars they’re asking readers to spend, so what’s the harm? Much of the comics-critic world either has one foot in professional comics-making or wants to, and so they tend to be obsequious and ingratiating about this tendency when it suits them and to gin up immaculate political objections to the work of people they dislike when it doesn’t; the notion that criticism might possibly be a form intended to serve a general public readership seems to have vanished almost entirely.

It’s also true that the unwashed hordes who bought every issue of every X-Men book from puberty onwards are a powerful, consistent, and not especially progressive market force. Richard Meyer, an occasional comics writer who runs a hilariously underinformed and horrifyingly popular Youtube vlog called Diversity & Comix*, launched a crowdfunding campaign for a new comic called Jawbreakers; he made half a million dollars. Ethan Van Sciver, a very gifted right-wing artist who contributed work to hit stories starring the X-Men, Green Lantern, and any number of others, made hundreds of thousands from his own Kickstarter for his comic Cyberfrog. I saw someone on Twitter proclaim that these campaigns were successful because they attracted a few wealthy donors; that is absolutely untrue. The donor pages for both projects are almost entirely small-dollar donations from happy fans.

The problem is not that Jawbreakers is a monetary failure or even an expression of moral turpitude. It’s that it’s shit. It’s fucking awful. The dialogue in Jawbreakers is such painful tough-guy bullshit that it’s funny, except when it’s trying to be. The art looks like it went to the colorist before the inker had finished. Cyberfrog is at least nicely drawn.

There are terrible comics from progressive writers, too; Marguerite Bennett, a very popular writer, once gave one of the X-Men a bromide-filled monologue about why racist jokes are bad that’s so long it takes up an entire page so that there’s only room for a little drawing of the characters in the lower right-hand corner. I can feel myself needing to qualify this by saying Bennett is actually an okay writer because I like her politics but I don’t really think she is. She’s fine for superhero books, and there has always been a subcategory of superhero comics that feel like reading a benefit book from which the proceeds go to orphanages for especially nice children.

This is a thing Comicsgate has always gotten wrong, and in a particularly annoying way: The Denny O’Neill Green Lantern-Green Arrow comics, classics though they may be on the strength of Neal Adams’s art, are terribly written in exactly this way. Lame, socially aware superhero comics are as old as the genre; they’re just misremembered as good by people who haven’t read them because, to quote John Huston’s villain in Chinatown, politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respect if they last long enough. There are also *good* socially aware comics: Sex Criminals, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, the Lee-Kirby FF, any number of others.

Radiating like a bad smell off the other kind of work, which is to say, comics writing that engages directly with the culture wars, is a kind of panic, a sense that we have to sacrifice aesthetics in order to give necessary voice to the ideals that have driven us to create art because time is running out. And I think on the right, too, there is a similar animating force, a desire to define oneself in opposition to the misperceived status quo of insincere, clannish progressives who are eroding the very fabric of our society. It’s absolutely not true that these positions are morally equivalent—the people on the left are correct and the people on the right are incorrect—but it is true that both are using art to demonstrate the application contemporary political ethics. And that project is doomed to failure, because that is not what art does.

“It is disgraceful for a philosopher to say: the good and the beautiful are one; if he adds ‘also the true’, one ought to beat him,” Nietzsche reminds us. “Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.”

*Disclosure: Meyer did an episode about my Guardian profile of Frank Miller earlier this year, in which he said he hated the article because I had obviously never read Holy Terror (Richard: My Holy Terror, which I’ve read several times, is signed by Frank) and that it had moved him to tears.

1. Prison Pit, Johnny Ryan’s absolutely revolting sci-fi monsters-fighting comic, which makes me laugh until I wheeze like a banshee, is finished; I think most of the people who pass it in the store do not realize that the cover is an image of our hero with a monster’s head impaled on his penis. This is the sixth book in the series and I loved them all; Ryan’s Instagram is a personal favorite of mine although as always I feel terrible recommending it to anyone. It’s a really amazing feed of extremely offensive gag comics and, to my delight, he tags the New Yorker in all of the worst ones. The joke is that much funnier for the fact that he draws exactly like Syd Hoff when he wants to.
2. Some things I’ve kept reading:
   Doomsday Clock, by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, largely against my better judgment; Frank, at least, is a terrific artist. I’ve finally realized what the damn thing is actually supposed to be: It’s Watchmen 2, the book DC could never get Alan Moore to write. It’s really astonishing to witness the precision with which Johns has managed to trap in amber the exact tics of a 33-year-old Alan Moore gloomily working through his depression over Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Of course, things trapped in amber are dead, it ought to be remembered.
   Sex Criminals, Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s truly excellent I guess I should call it a sci-fi series? It’s a really wonderful book, totally enamored of the inherent plasticity of the comics form and seemingly at ease with using and misusing every one of its possibilities. It’s a wonderful, willful book and I hope it makes its creators a godzillion dollars.
   Mister Miracle, by Tom King and Mitch Gerads, one of the better superhero books I can remember reading. King has learned a lot of ironic tricks and flourishes from Neil Gaiman and his work is consistently surprising for it; in a corporate universe where pretty much everybody is trying to be a version of Alan Moore that even Alan Moore thinks is boring, it’s a very fresh and interesting take. I was not as enamored of King’s The Vision book as were many others, so that’s probably on me; it left me with a gnawing worry that he has trouble sticking the landing, and for a book as portentous as Mister Miracle, I hope he works that problem out. He’s had some good plot twists, especially recently; I suspect he’ll pull it off.
   Jimmy’s Bastards, an extremely silly Garth Ennis comedy book that manages to be “un-PC” (ugh) without going full reactionary. It’s mean about the right people, mostly.
   The Wild Storm, for which I just don’t have enough superlatives. It is so much fun. Jon-Davis Hunt is a treasure, and Ellis is firing on all cylinders here. It’s not merely enjoyable to speculate about where it’s going, it’s a blast to read as it progresses. There’s never a missed opportunity to impress or entertain the reader, which, as someone frustrated with the growing emphasis on byzantine imaginary-world politics in ostensibly kid-friendly superhero comics, I am very grateful to read.
3. Frank Miller’s Xerxes, I think I can say with some certainty, is quite good and will be better still by the time it finishes. I wrote a long feature for the Guardian on Frank earlier this year; he’s a towering figure in comics and it was obviously a thrill to get to speak to him though I think the reporting turned over more rocks than he wished it had. He’s been in rough physical shape for a long time, a thing that, I suspect, explains why people seemed to feel that he’d lost his mojo or something. Whatever it was, it seems to be going away; Xerxes #3 is as cool-looking as anything he’s drawn since 300 and it’s a hell of a lot of fun to read. Alex Sinclair, his colorist, has also kind of figured out what to do with him—that’s a kick to witness, too. I’m really happy about this; I love Miller and always have. I hope he keeps going, as he promised he would, into a third volume, though I sorely miss Lynn Varley, who never quite got her due as a masterly painter.
4. Speaking of writers I love whose politics are probably quite a ways from mine, Ennis has another book out from Aftershock and I can be relied upon to pick up his work pretty much every time. This one, with serviceable art by Goran Sudžuka, is called A Walk Through Hell and two issues in, it really does appear that our protagonists are in Hell. I’m curious to see where it goes. It’s very strange and Ennis seems to have set himself the task of truly and intensely horrifying the reader, which I’m always up for.

A specter is haunting America–the specter of incivility. All the powers of legacy media have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise it, never mind the broader state of the world.

Noting that President Donald Trump’s habitual slurs on black and brown people have been received, quite correctly, as government permission to express racism in bald terms in public with far fewer consequences of public censure than they might have two years ago, two prominent New York Times political reporters, Peter Baker and Katie Rogers, diagnose the president’s detractors with the same malaise of rudeness, explaining that Kathy Griffin joked about his death, for which she was fired. The two go on to compare a Trump supporter’s complaining about imagined murders by Hillary Clinton to a Trump protester’s suggestion that when governments move to concentrate classes of people in camps of some sort, historical resonances with 1940’s Germany present themselves.

In their laudable quest for elevated discourse Baker and Rogers have managed to avoid not merely good manners, which is not at all the same thing as civility and requires genuine grace to deploy, but the basic meaning of the words coming out of people’s mouths. Good manners demonstrates welcome and anyone can do it, while civility proclaims class status and is thus circumscribed more closely. The two are sometimes consonant, but they are hardly the same thing.

Donald Trump, since his arrival on the public scene in the 1980’s, has not been consistently uncivil, exactly, but he has always used his public position to solicit violence done to black and brown people. He asked for the five innocent black children falsely accused of rape to be executed in an ad adorning the pages of Baker and Rogers’s own paper in 1989, he launched his presidential campaign with a series of rallies where, by implication and by direct instruction, he encouraged supporters to beat Hispanic and black people, which they did, and now that his pronouncements have the force of law, the language he uses must be carried down the chain of command in the form of policy, forcing small children into lice-infested internment camps where they are held for months without being bathed.

You can see, easily, the way that Trump’s language becomes violence as his public influence grows, because words have meanings, and comedian Samantha Bee’s description of White House advisor Ivanka Trump as a “feckless cunt,” though it is perhaps not a very nice thing to call her, is perfectly accurate, even if the word “cunt” can be investigated for nuance—as, of course, can Bee’s subsequent apology.

But there is less need to investigate Trump’s instructions to “knock the crap out of them” for nuance, or his lapdog Jeff Sessions’ declaration that “If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you,” except perhaps for the use of the word “smuggling,” which the administration has delighted in so that it may blur the line between slavers and parents seeking asylum for their infants.

In fact, the word “cunt” has a rich and interesting history of usage and reclamation and in its most literal sense describes something for which many people, myself included, have great admiration, while the history of the euphemisms and strongman bullying employed by Trump and Sessions is almost exclusively one of atrocity. The rhetoric comprising both men’s statements, I would humbly suggest, is used exclusively by cunts, in the cuntiest cunting way possible, and the use of obscenity to describe them seems not merely permissible but compelled by the lodestar of good manners.

And when New York Times reporters, some of the most powerful people on earth, draw equivalence between the public act of declaring the internment of babies suckling at the breast by legal decree on the one hand and the admittedly graphic suggestion by a private citizen that anyone who would do such a thing ought to be beheaded on the other, there is, I would suggest further, an obligation of the highest possible propriety to remind those reporters that they are asslicking pantsloads whose time spent not fucking themselves is sadly wasted.

To do less would perhaps be classier but it would be unwelcoming.