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Tag: satire
Why Bernie lost (and how you can too)
First hypothesis. (Humour: melancholia / Star: Saturn / Stone: topaz.)
Bernie lost because he lost the working class. He started his campaign marshalling what Amber Frost has described as the Busytown coalition: the postal workers, the firemen, the nurses; the people who, even now, are still in shops and warehouses, ensuring the continuation of human life. It's a good coalition. It cuts across all lines of age, race, gender, and sexuality. There are a lot of these people, and what's more, they have justice on their side. So what the hell happened? Why is it that, by Super Tuesday, places with lower average incomes, higher unemployment, more ethnic diversity, more people without health insurance, and fewer university degrees were tilting towards Biden? The answer is you. You did this.
If you're reading this, I know what you're like. You're young, or young-ish; you're well-educated and ever so smart, but your life didn't turn out exactly how you hoped. Your parents are from the middle classes, but what are you? Column A: you're currently tending to a sourdough starter, you lug around several suitcases of books whenever you move house, and you can talk about Debussy or drill with equal enthusiasm. Column B: you're flat fucking broke. When you were a kid, you imagined what your life would be like at twenty-five, or thirty, or forty, and it didn't look like this. You imagined yourself into An Adult, a mythological creature that never unfurled from your cocoon. You are a nymph. You're the same kid, terrified of the passing time, but still waiting. It's not too late for you, not yet, but so much would need to change in such a short time. We'd need to totally decarbonise the economy and end all interventions in the Middle East. We'd need to massively raise corporate taxes and someone would have to marry you. You believe passionately in that kind of change, and that's why you supported Bernie. We are the same, you and I. We're poison, absolute poison, for any democratic leftist movement. We corrode it from the inside out.
I watched the same thing happen in the UK: Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party tried to reactivate the working class vote – and instead, working-class voters fled the party in droves, abandoning it to a rump of young people with advanced degrees and low prospects. Children are not the future. Young people are not a solid political constituency. Give us our due, though: we're passionate, and committed, and we're strivers. In a few short weeks, we had the Bernie campaign speaking our language and broadcasting our concerns. We turned ourselves into its faces and figureheads. Just in time to thoroughly alienate everyone who wasn't already onside.
I don't think socialism is always, by necessity, a bourgeois idea. On both sides of the Atlantic, left-populism did briefly enjoy a broad base of support. But we need to be smarter: we need to understand that ordinary people simply do not like us, and they're not wrong to feel that way. We're basically obnoxious, and to overcome that we need to meet the people where they are. This is how.
Step one is to place a permanent taboo on the following words, which we use too much, and which do nothing to help our cause:
Kindness. A disgusting word. The watery eyes of some paedophile vicar, smacking his lips together as he dreams his gentle brutalities. Be kind to me, oh be kind to me, let's all be kind to each other. You make me sick.
Empathy. Even worse. The person who needs to put a name to fellow-feeling, who needs to adopt it as a regulative principle, has none of the stuff. The person who endlessly natters on about empathy is always, without exception, a bitter and spiteful toad, asking for the manager, making complaints, deplatforming: bottomlessly, abysmally cruel.
Hope. The most vicious of the bunch. Hope is an ancient Greek curse. Hope is only a substitute for the thing you hope for; it's what you're left with after everything else has fled. Hope is always, always disappointed. No movement that bandies around words like hope ever delivers on its promises. No movement that talks about hope is ever trusted.
That's step one. In step two, we embrace the values that actually matter to American voters. Namely, patriotism, the family, and badass overpowered military hardware. If you want to embark on a programme of economic nationalisation, why would you willingly give up a potent rhetorical tool like nationalism? If you want to build bonds of solidarity, why would you ignore the already-existing communism within a well-functioning family unit? And if you want the working classes to own the world their labour creates, should that not include the nightly livestreamed bombing runs over the Middle East? I made that, we could say, watching the fires consume an Afghan village. My hands tended this death.
Finally, with step three we build on the progress we made at the start, and gradually eliminate all words from our vocabulary. The working classes hate words. They're all illiterate, probably; I assume they communicate in grunts and squeals. We must learn to squeal like they do. Roll around in the muck. Hide your delicate bourgeois face in a plastic snout. Lap up corn syrup from the trough. Drape yourself in a soiled flag and grunt the name of Jesus Christ. Squeal, piggy, squeal.
Second theory. (Humour: choler / Star: Jupiter / Beast: the Hog)
Bernie lost because, in the end, he wasn't willing to fight. He set himself up rhetorically in opposition to a deeply corrupt and moribund Democratic establishment – but then he adopted all their dumbest talking points. He promised to support the nominee, whoever it was, because the greatest danger was another four years of Trump and his Russian cronies. No: the greatest danger to ordinary people is capitalism, whoever its figurehead. Trump won in 2016 by utterly eviscerating and then colonising a hated party structure. Bernie couldn't bring himself to do the same. He talked about a revolution, but shrunk back from revolutionary agonisms. What he offered was, as he himself kept insisting, a political revolution – which is to say, not a social revolution, not a revolution in the forms of human life, but only in their superstructural expressions – and he couldn't even do that. Imagine how differently things would have gone if, during one of the televised debates, Bernie had denounced Joe Biden as a kulak fattening himself on the misery of the American peasants. I don't know why he didn't do this; he should have been listening to me instead of his lib advisors. He should have pointed out this dazed, leathery man as a class enemy, and then two of his Blue Guards should have run out from the wings to beat Biden in the head with the butts of their rifles, until he was forced to kneel right in front of the MSNBC studio hosts and confess, with tears in his eyes, to being a capitalist roader and a traitor to the working masses. Execution should have followed instantly: a single nod from Bernie, and a single bullet in the back of Joe's head. At this point the audience should have stood up and cheered as Biden's blood congealed tackily over the pristine half-CGI debate stage – but the theatre of justice shouldn't have ended there. More Blue Guards in Bernie caps with rifles slung over their shoulders should have poured out onto the stage and erected a guillotine, singing cheerful songs as they winched the enormous razor into place. Then Bernie should have puffed out his cheeks and wagged his finger and shouted 'The people's revenge is not yet whetted! Which of our enemies will hone this blade?' and then he should have condemned his rivals to death and beheaded them one by one. One cannot serve as the Attorney General for California innocently! The Blue Guards should have blocked off all the exits to this philanthropically-funded theatre and arts space in a third-tier Midwestern city, to encourage patriotic feeling among the audience as the heads of one politician after another tumbled from the jaws of the guillotine, their faces frozen in expressions of unutterable horror – but if Bernie heard a murmur of discontent as the lifeless bodies were flung into the orchestra pit, limbs folded at unnatural angles, torsos crowned in red-rimmed stumps, he should have given the signal for one-tenth of the audience to be dispatched too, so a productive atmosphere of Blue Terror might set in among the workers and peasants live-streaming at home. Then, once the bloodshed was over, a gorgeous person of my preferred gender should have turned to me and said 'We did it, comrade – we finally overthrew traditional beauty standards, and now I don't mind that you're obsessed with seedy violent revenge-fantasies and have a deeply unfortunate neck that just kinda melts clammily into your shoulders; at long last, you have become sexually viable,' and then I should have never been alone again.
Third assertion. (Humour: blood / Planet: Mars / Curse: eternal)
Bernie lost because the 2020 Democratic primary was ssstolen.
You think you know what happened: Klobuchar and Buttigieg dropped out as if according to a script, dealsss were forged, rooms filled with sssmoke, polling sssstations were closed down in low-income and ethnic-minority areas, exit polls showed a marked dissscrepancy from the final result, there was some vast fuckery in Iowa, because They – the unnameable They – would never let Bernie Sssanders win.
This is not what I mean.
I know it was ssssstolen because I ssstole it myself.
For years now I have been sssneaking into Bernie's house at night, quietly, sssilently, in through the windowsss to lick his furniture, up through the floorboards to wander through the objects of his life.
And one dark February night I sssaw it – I sssaw where he kept the election, hidden in his house.
It was an egg, an unformed thing.
He kept it in his fridge, in a carton with the other eggs, and nothing on its sssurface told how different this egg was from any of the otherssss – maybe he didn't know himssself, but I knew; I felt what was waiting within its yolk, the thing that could hatch.
I conssssumed that egg there, in Bernie Sanders' kitchen – I ate it whole, shell and all, unsocketing my jaw, engorging my gullet; hunger, straining againssst the wholenessss of this large cold egg.
And out of my throat black tendrils grew.
Fourth conjecture. (Humour: phlegm / Planet: Mercury / Leprosy: gleaming)
Bernie lost because nobody – and I mean NOBODY – understands why people make the decisions they do.
I mean, look at it. Look at the Biden voters who said they wanted Medicare for All. Or the Biden voters who said they thought radical – even revolutionary – change was necessary. But they still pulled the lever for ol' Creepy Joe. They liked Bernie and they liked his policies, but they weren't voting for them. You thought it would be easy? You thought you just had to present the right ideas in the right language? Nah. Something much stranger is at work.
And please, I'm begging you, please don't give me any guff about low-information voters. You seen what it's like out there? You can't move for information. The sky and the trees are information. It's being poured into our eyes at one gigabyte per second, EVERY SECOND OF OUR LIVES. We eat pure information three meals a day. Chomp through it, metabolise, shit it out. We fuckin' radiate data, and at night the tech companies come and gobble up whatever we've left behind. Like dust mites feasting on our sloughed-off skin. Maybe you wanna start talking about low-oxygen voters too while you're at it?
But you wanna hear a secret? Advertising is bunk. Market research is bunk. None of it works. All those urban legends about how gifted psychopaths are rearranging supermarkets to make you buy shit you don't need – all fake. It's the admen's last con. Even marketing types don't really understand why people make the decisions they do. Not in the market, not in relationships, not anywhere. Cuz what we have now is the data, man, THE DATA. We can see the chaos of everyone's life in ten trillion consumer decisions, and none of it adds up. Like there's some tiny chaotic imp burrowing around in the innermost folds of your brain, doing stuff for no reason. And everyone's praying the truth of it never gets out, cuz if it does? Google, Facebook – worthless. Spent a decade collecting the whole global population's shit, promising they could sift out some specks of gold. It ain't there. Useless. Planetary midden. And yeah, it just so happens that we've premised the entire economy on online data-collection and advertising. Imagine if tomorrow morning, oil was as flammable as water. That's the level of trouble we're in.
Unless there was a new science. Deleuze saw it, in the Postscript on the Societies of Control: 'Can we already grasp the rough outlines of these coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing?' A science that could explain why people make the decisions they make, and accurately model long-term social changes. One that could inherit and abolish all the failed theories of the past. Shit like Marxism. Gramscianism. Freudianism. I'm talking politics, rhetoric, marketing. Marginal utility and rational-choice economics and von Neumann games. Hell, let's chuck art in there too. It ain't heavy. This theory would be huge. I'm not talking about a revolution in the human sciences. I'm talking about a revolution, full stop.
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Fifth derangement. (Humour: gelatine / Planet: Niburu / Destination: across the nameless sea to Knossos, where we are devoured)
Bernie lost because politics is not about power. It's not about collective decision-making; it's not even about representation. Try to imagine things differently. Try to imagine the 2020 election as a highly advanced form of vivisection.
Think of all the endless awful candidates invading your consciousness, one after another. Didn't it feel like some kind of experiment was being performed? The system throws people and archetypes at you – A Woman, A Person Of Colour, A Rich Guy – and tries to find out what sticks. We might think the contenders are just a bunch of hollow-eyed narcissists vying for control of an enormous nuclear arsenal, and they might think it too, but they're not. These are test subjects. In a sense, they're victims.
A politician is shoved under the spotlight, and they tremble. Slowly, scientists peel back the skin so we can see their innards. We find out more about the personal histories and inner worlds of Beto O'Rourke or John Delaney than any sane person could possibly want to know. But someone, or something, somewhere, is learning. Slice through the flesh; get to the organs, the queasy, greasy, soft wobbling darkness in the creature's furthest pit. See what's there. Cory Booker's kidneys. Julián Castro's spleen. Scandals and corruption; dark money, racial epithets, sex scandals, and lies. The attrition rate is high; most test subjects don't survive the procedure. Pour enough shampoo into Kamala Harris's eyeballs, pump enough anti-depressants up Tom Steyer's arsehole, and eventually the creature will just go limp.
For Baudrillard, new schemata of social control are always applied first to animals, and then to human beings. 'Animals have preceded us on the path of liberal extermination.' Couldn't we say the same thing about politicians? What are electoral politics, if not a breeding-ground for affects and psychoses, a petri dish swarming with new and disordered ways of relating to the world? Forget policy. Forget the presidency. This is what it's for.
Decades ago, politicians started being followed by people with cameras, monitoring their movements, looking for any hint of wrongness – a banana, for instance, held at an unusual angle. They had to perform, every minute of their waking lives. Forbidden from breaking character, they melted into their own personae. Politicians were the first to enter the world of inescapable digital surveillance, then celebrities, and then you and me. The innovation now, of course, is that the person following you around with the camera is yourself. We're all public servants now.
Examples pile up. Politicians were the first humans to turn themselves into brands, to sell themselves not as a lump of labour-power but as a finished commodity, with the full fetishistic halo. Before there could be a Kim Kardashian, first there had to be a Tony Blair.
Of course, there's another type, the Bernie-type. Politicians who sold themselves on the promise of what they could do rather than what they might mean. Politicians who offered something to the voting masses, a pact, a contract, not the possibility of representation or identification. Politicians who didn't want to be your bff or your abuela, but who did want to build a big new canal. The heroic, promethean, reforming bourgeois politicians of the eighteenth century onwards, who set out to transform reality by their labour, not for themselves, not to rule the world, but only to remake it – these were the advance guards of proletarianisation. Their time has ended now. Like the organised proletariat, they survive – but lost in a whirlwind of new forms.
In fact, you could go further. The thing we call politics – in the sense of an ideological agonism, not just manoeuvring between personal factions – begins with the English and French revolutions. The birth of politics is also the birth of politicide, the idea that you can fix things by simply killing everyone with bad opinions. Both revolutions also featured, quite prominently, the removal of a royal head. The king becomes a politician – which is to say, a carcass, an animal test-subject – the moment the blade touches the hairs on the back of his neck. (This seems to hold across time. The ancient Greeks had their factional intrigues, and they thought a lot about systems of government, but they never managed to develop the political movement. The Romans, who executed their king, did.) He clears the way. Then the masses can follow him into the guillotine, or march off in vast conscript armies to the meat-grinder of the front.
This is why the nomination went to Joe Biden, a man who is clearly senile and dying, and not Bernie Sanders. He is our future, the herald of an exhausted and forgetful age. Digital archives are already eating away at our ability to remember. Automation enfeebles our bodies. The frenzy of communications puts a stammer in our speech. Senseless and dependent, passive in a meshwork of machines. In the crypt of the Capuchin friars in Rome, stacks of grinning skulls bear a motto. Quello che voi siete, noi eravamo; quello che noi siamo, voi sarete. What we are, you will be; what you are, we once were. Look on Joe Biden's empty face, and be afraid.
How I got these scars
BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1895
I learned to laugh where the whale bones were. On the iron shores, where gulls tittered and tore the last scraps of greying whaleflesh from ribs half-buried in the muck. Where curving bones threatened the foam, like the earth itself had fangs. Where the boulders were carved with bug-eyed faces, fat-lipped, grimacing; the sisiutl, sea-monsters. In low unadorned longhouses, huddled in the chill, where I sang: 'Wa haiya, wa haiya, the weapon flew into my hands, the tool with which I am murdering, with which I am cutting off heads.' And around me they sang: 'The great madness entered our friend, he is killing old and young.' Here I blackened my face with ashes and reddened my nose in the snow. Here I tore my clothes and tossed eagle-down in my hair. Here I became the nūlmal, the fool dancer, the killer clown. Here I learned that laughter is mine and nobody else's, and when the boy – my cousin's son – laughed as I japed and spun, I put my lance through his neck.
But who is this stranger in the cabin? Squatting by the fire is a man of no tribe, or who gave up his tribe – the Deutsche Juden – many years ago. A lonely creature. Not timid, with his virile moustache and his shock of dark hair, but passive. Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, does nothing: he just sits and observes, even when the boy is speared. Only scribbling in his notebook: 'They do not dance, but, when excited, run about like madmen, throwing stones, knocking people down, and crying… They dislike to see clean and beautiful clothing. They tear and soil it. They break canoes, houses, kettles, and boxes…' In the summer months the Kwakiutl live in small bands, whose chiefs are ceremonial or mediatory. Only in the winter, when the world turns harsh, do they congregate together in one place. This is the ritual season, the potlatch season. But it's also the season of the clowns. And these clowns officiate: they set the times of the ceremonies, they punish anyone who eats too slowly or performs the wrong dance… What are they if not a form of police? In the summer these people are peaceful anarchists, and in the winter they fall under a crazed dictatorship… Mein Gott, we've got it all backwards; the fool dancers aren't a chaotic response to repressive society, they're the basis for the whole structure… And even though he's a lifelong opponent of cultural evolutionism, he can't quite suppress a guilty thought. Is this how it all started? When political power first showed its face to the world, was it really in marble and bronze? Or was it a face like this, blackened with soot, decked in rags and shit, its centre bursting out into a huge red nose?
He looks into the fire, as if it could have an answer, and it does. A figure circles four times around the fire – tonight, she is the Kinqalalala, the female slave of Baxbakwalanuxsiwae (a figure he's already described in his notes: the great cannibal god, He-Who-First-Ate-Man-At-The-North-End-Of-The-World, every inch of his body covered in terrible chomping mouths). At each turn, Kinqalalala throws a handful of something into the fire, and there's a flash. Shapes indistinct in the flames. Here a molten ditch cut through the earth, and slimepits where the bodies rot. Here a bolus of flame bigger than cities, a sun-mote brought down to cauterise the earth of life. Here a barbed-wire cage webbed tight against the earth, thrumming with frenzy and exhaustion. He doesn't know it, but he's witnessing the vast long mistake of the twentieth century that is to come. And somewhere, rising through all this wreckage, a single wordless laugh salutes the highest joke.
Ah, so this is what a philosopher looks like. He looks sad. The great thinker approaches the table timidly, nose-first, sad wet eyes following far behind. 'You must be Georges,' he says. Georges stands, removes his hat, shakes the philosopher's hand. 'Monsieur Bergson,' he says. Henri also removes his hat, removes his coat, sits down. 'I hope this restaurant is to your satisfaction,' he says. 'I know the chef to be French, but there have been no good waiters in this city since all the Germans left.' They talk about this for a while – the small travails of being a Frenchman in London, the scattered places where one can still get a good hat, a good shave, a good steak. Something vicious wants to bubble up through Georges' throat. 'What about a good fuck?' he says. 'These English girls, they don't have any word for partouze.' Henri looks like a startled rabbit. 'Just a joke,' says Georges, and he laughs. Henri laughs too, but he's nervous. Those eyes dart from the menu, to the grinning face of the young man in front of him, to the exit, the empty chill outside, the everywhere-else where he'd suddenly much rather be. He's a kind and generous man, which is why he's agreed to meet this young student from the British Museum – but ever since the War these young students have been crueller, stranger, their heads all muddled by Marx and Freud… 'I read your book,' says Georges suddenly, 'your essay on laughter. I must admit – please, forgive me – I'd not had the pleasure of reading your work before.' This surprises Henri. 'And you wish to be a philosopher?' he says. 'I don't regret my essay, but perhaps you should begin with something more substantial – my Matière et mémoire, perhaps; I would gladly lend you a copy…' Georges shakes his head. 'This is precisely the matter,' he says. 'I think your essay might have cured me of philosophy altogether. If I could ask you something… how can you write so many pages on laughter, and all of them with a straight face?' Henri appears to consider this. 'But surely, Monsieur Bataille, you must agree that the comic forms part of the human tissue? That it is as worthy of serious study as any other facet of experience?' Georges shakes his head. 'You misunderstand,' he says, sadly, disappointed to his core. 'I don't doubt that laughter is worthy of serious study. But is serious study worthy of laughter? That is to say, Monsieur Bergson, why must you be so eternally serious? What is the laugh if not the annihilation of all seriousness, all propriety… yes, even philosophy? How can you write a study of laughter without first staring into the sun?' Henri doesn't say anything. 'Have you not read the anthropological reports on the primitives of British Columbia?' says Georges. 'Their societies are ruled by clowns, but it's forbidden to laugh at them, on pain of death.' 'I'm not sure I follow,' says Henri. 'Allow me to demonstrate,' says Georges. 'Here's another joke; you'll like it. Toc toc toc.' Henri sighs. 'Qui est là?' he says, and then Georges pulls out a pistol and shoots him in the head.
HUẾ, 1968
A line crawls across this city. On the other side of the line lies chaos and Communism, and the people shiver under the terror of the Viet Cong. They have lists of enemies – 'tyrants and reactionaries,' in their jargon. Names are read out on loudspeakers. The tyrants and reactionaries assemble dutifully in the designated places, and then they're trucked out of the city, never to be seen again…
On this side of the line, freedom reigns. On this side of the line, by sheer coincidence, all the buildings are in ruins. And the line is moving: whatever all those cowards back home might want you to believe, the line is moving, and the bright realm of freedom and ruin grows larger every day. A column is trudging forwards, through the mire, to push against that border. Helmets and rucksacks, assault rifles or flamethrowers slung over their shoulders, and at the front, the banner of the LCAB, the Ladies' Crusade Against Beastliness. Two Marines lean against some piled-up rubble, smoking. Before Tet, this was a bar popular with GIs, and they've returned out of sheer instinct – in the same way that migratory birds sometimes flap over the chaos of the war, looking for trees long since defoliated, eaves shelled into fragments while they were away. These Marines know better than to whistle at the LCABs as they pass, or make any crude remarks. That would fall squarely under Beastliness, and Kissinger has given the Ladies all the necessary authority to punish any beastliness, in any way they see fit. So they just watch them as they pass, from a thousand yards' distance. Afterwards, one passes the joint to another. 'Someone's gonna die,' he says. Maybe the Ladies; maybe their enemies. This is the law.
Somewhere in Huế, the Commies have set up a secret special-weapons unit: pinko intellectuals from Europe, alongside loonies scraped from asylums over three continents. Every day, shells from across the frontlines burst overhead into a flurry of pamphlets. Some of this artillery-borne propaganda is dense, in tiny print. 'WHAT IS LAUGHTER? The laugh is a painful spasm affecting the chest, neck, and face. When laughing, a subject experiences a significant decline in reflex response and awareness of his surroundings. Vision in laughing subjects may be blurred. They may experience salivation, watering in the eyes, nasal congestion, shortness of breath, or involuntary animal-like vocalisations. Laughter substantially reduces combat effectiveness, often fatally. HOW IS LAUGHTER INDUCED? The laugh may be induced by certain chemical weapons. However, we are also developing the capacity to induce laughter through the combination of words, noises, and actions. We can turn any part of your language into the laughter-weapon. Even the most basic movements of your body – eg, coitus or defecation – are not safe. HOW CAN I PREVENT MYSELF FROM LAUGHING? You can not prevent yourself from laughing. If your people do not leave Việt Nam, we promise to spread joy and laughter among your ranks.' Other leaflets are far cruder. One shows a grotesque cartoon of an old man with an erect penis, and the slogan: 'AMERICAN SOLDIER, GO HOME… To Be Gay With Your Dad!!'
A radio broadcast, a book, even a movie, that can seize the people exposed to it, make them break out in violent spasms… the top brass are worried, and it's understandable why. Huế is exporting body-bags at a prodigious rate, and at home, the appetite for war is diminishing. ARPA's trying to engineer its own version of the laughter-weapon, but trial versions (tested illegally on black civilians) are stubbornly ineffective. 'So look,' says a Pentagon scientist in a windowless cell. 'I'm white. I know, right? Like, Whitey-McWhite-white. But I'm trying to get better.' Behind the one-way mirror, they monitor the test subject's heart rate, his breath, sweat, hormone levels, brain activity… nothing. Why isn't he laughing? 'Please,' he says, 'I'm begging you, please can you just let me out of here?' The scientists know that some kind of cruelty – sadism, even – is essential to the procedure, but even after dumping the bodies of a thousand failed test subjects in landfills across the country, it just won't work. Still, there's one interesting finding. Certain individuals from certain socioeconomic strata are entirely immune to the laughter-weapon. The Viet Cong can broadcast whatever they want; the upstanding patriots of the LCAB suffer no spasms, eject no crude and ugly noises, have no spit running unwholesomely out of their faces. So now, combat teams of conscientious young ladies fan out across the city, finding VC laughter-weapon cells buried in the rubble, and cancelling out their cruelties with bright clean jets of flame. Leave the world purer. Kinder. More empathic. More polite.
At the head of the column, the head of the LCAB battalion is being interviewed by a spectacled young man for Stars and Stripes. (And is that – is that a peace button on his helmet? Above the words 'BORN TO KILL'?) All the usual questions. So are you gonna get that weapon before it's too late? Aren't these tactics proof of the cruel and underhanded nature of the enemy? But then he gets a strange glint in his eyes. 'Don't you think,' he says, 'that destroying this weapon robs us of an essential part of the human experience?' The commander's head whips suddenly towards him. 'The human experience?' she says. 'What's your name, young man?' The reporter swallows. 'I'm Sergeant J.T. Davis,' he says. 'But they call me the Joker.'
NEW YORK CITY, 1985
'See, what they don't understand about Bernie Goetz is that he's a vigilante, a crime-fighter, an honest-to-God American hero… Those folks watch cartoons about the heroes who dare to stand up to crime, but when it actually happens they want to prosecute the man like he's a criminal? No, no, no. Haven't they seen what's going on out there? You got people scared to go out at night. You got people scared to walk the streets of their own city, cuz of what the young folks might do… And down there it's even worse! Down there the sun never comes up! You walk these streets and think you're safe, while not twenty feet beneath your shoes there's folks getting beaten, folks getting mugged, folks getting killed, twenty-four hours a day… Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there? What kind of world is this, where the kids are beating up on their elders? How did we, as the guardians of this community, let it come to this?' Give the man his due: Walt is a powerful speaker, but this is entirely the wrong audience. It's not his fault that his charging, stomping oratorical style comes with a slightly slipshod attitude towards the Word in its written form. The names are so similar, after all, and as for the photo on the posters – ah, white people all look alike. So while Walt thinks he's addressing a fundraiser for Bernie Goetz – the subway avenger, the white man who shot four unarmed black kids on the 2 train when they asked him for a cigarette, who shot two of them in the back – the attendees at an academic symposium on Clifford Geertz's Anti-Anti-Relativism watch politely, and wait for this unexpectedly impassioned presentation to meander a little further towards the point. Geertz himself, the plenary speaker, shuffles through his papers: this man isn't citing my work at all… Still he continues. 'You know what I say? I say Bernie Goetz is the sanest man in this city. And do you know, do you understand what it means to be a sane man in a crazy world? It means wherever you plant your two feet, that's where you stand, and if someone tries to threaten your life where you stand – then you put! him! down!' At this point a graduate student starts to ask a question: has Walt considered the relevance of his namesake Walter Benjamin's Kritik der Gewalt to this issue? The law prohibits individual violence, not because it contingently contradicts the content of the legal system, but because it challenges the juridical form itself… The fear of some lone individual (and aren't individuals getting lonelier and lonelier, as Reagan goes to war against the unions, as capitalism starts to eat away at the foundations of society itself?) picking up a gun and exercising sovereign authority all by himself – it's not just a practical fear, it's an ontological horror. The madman returning from the mountaintop with the tablets of the Law. A cruel new social order, festering like a parasite inside the corpse of the old. Only – if Goetz is found innocent at trial, what would that say about the present constitution of the State? Walt looks slowly around the room. 'Now what kind of foolish question is that?' he says, and then it starts to dawn on him exactly where he is. Oh, how they laughed.
LOS ANGELES, 2019
A killer clown is on the loose.
The weather here is perfect every day of the year, and you spend your life inside, consuming entertainment media. When you do venture out, it's to the canyons and valleys, where you trim and tone your body so it looks more like the images of bodies you've seen, so it can be turned into a more pleasing picture. You live alone with a very small dog. You're afraid of the other people, the lonely sexless weirdos who stay indoors, whose lives are directed by entertainment.
The world churns out pretty things for you to enjoy. Like a child, holding up some squidged clay in two timid hands: look what I made. I made a movie. I made a TV show. I made an opinion column. I made it so that you'd be happy. Far away, there are coups and genocides and workers jumping off the roofs of their factories, to keep it all moving, so that you'll be happy. So why aren't you?
After the revolution withered and the religions drifted away, the only one left was the clown. He is here to entertain. The planet's getting warmer: a fiery red desert on the equator, and permafrost melting into fringes of unkempt green. One huge mask, spinning giddily through space.
It was already too late when we realised that this clown, like all clowns, is carrying a gun.
The Army surrounds the red-carpet premiere with tanks and armoured personnel carriers. (This basically derivative pastiche movie about a sad clown who hates society – it's simply too radical and dangerous.) Busy soldiers dig trenches through Hollywood Boulevard. (So why are they all wearing white masks?) Attack helicopters chuckle in the sky overhead, and outside the city, generals in bunkers stare at computer screens, their fingers trembling over the red button, ready to commence a full-scale nuclear bombardment of the greater Los Angeles area if the Thing inside the cinema starts to stir.
And in the dark, it does stir. Baxbakwalanuxsiwae, the cannibal with a thousand mouths, who lives in his lodge at the frosty edge of the world. Mouths that chomp human bones and tear human flesh; mouths that once burst, in the old cold times before the world, into the first and endless laugh.
I, who learned how to laugh where the whale bones were, watched the gunfire start. I squatted by the burning city – not timid, but passive. I saw moviegoers streaming in terror out of the cinema, only to be cut down by the soldiers outside. I saw tanks grunt in formation to pound the building, one after another in turn. And from far over the hills, a screaming across the sky.
Here I sung my song.
Ham ham a'mai, ham ham a'mai, hamaima ma'mai, hamai hamamai.
Utter the hamatsa cry, utter the hamatsa cry, the cry of the great spirit who dwells at the north end of the world.
Utter Baxbakwalanuxsiwae's war cry, utter Baxbakwalanuxsiwae's war cry, the cry of the one who eats living men.
Utter the raven's cry, utter the raven's cry, the cry of the cannibal pole which is the Milky Way of our world.
Utter the hoxhoku cry, the hoxhoku cry, the cry of the one who is going to eat, whose face is ghastly pale.
Utter the clown dancer's cry, the clown dancer's cry, the cry that is heard all over the world.
Wa ha hai, waiya wai.
Scenes from the Žižek-Peterson debate
[Applause. SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK and JORDAN PETERSON are standing in a big cauldron, tied together back-to-back, before an audience of CANNIBALS from a racist 19th century cartoon. The CHIEF CANNIBAL, or at least the one with the largest bone through his nose, prances around the cauldron, humming an obscure tune and freezing at regular intervals to hiss and violently shake a long staff at the two debaters. He is the moderator. Once this ritual is complete, he gives the cauldron a good sharp kick, and it rings satisfyingly. The AUDIENCE squats. They spit betel juice into the damp earth. We are ready to begin.]
MODERATOR: Thank you, thank you all. I'd like to start by acknowledging that we are on the ancestral lands of the earthworms, who funnelled the soil through their bodies before we walked upon it, and who will eat us when we die.
[Applause.]
MODERATOR: So: we have something of a treat for you tonight – two of the most prolific and controversial scholars in the humanities, Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson, finally coming head to head, here to debate the motion 'For God's sake, not me, don't eat me, eat him.' Arguing for the motion is Professor Žižek. Slavoj Žižek is the author of over eight thousand books, some of which are slightly different. Stunning in its breadth and fluency, his work has touched on Lacan, Hegel, Marx, what would happen if they were cold pockets instead of hot pockets, what the deal is with airline food, and whether or not we deserve doggos. Among his roster of impressive academic titles, he is Global Distinguished Professor at NYU's College of Dentistry, Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at the European Graduate Dental School, International Director at Birkbeck Dental Institute, and a Senior Researcher at the Department of Dental Diseases and Endodontics at the University of Ljubljana.
[ŽIŽEK hacks up what appears to be a small quantity of frogspawn onto his shirt.]
MODERATOR: Arguing against the motion, we're very lucky to have Dr Peterson, who shot to fame after he filmed himself eating dog turds to prevent Islam. He's received further notoriety for his self-help book Crying Yourself to Dignity, sleeps surrounded by Soviet propaganda for apparently non-sexual reasons, and is currently serving on the editorial review board for a twelve-year-old's Disney blog. The debate will work like this. Each participant will have ten minutes to make an opening statement, which will be followed by three minutes for rebuttals, before we open it up to the audience, who will be able to ask questions and then eat one of the debaters. Professor Žižek, you're arguing for the motion, so if you'd like to start?
[Applause. PETERSON rolls his eyes.]
ŽIŽEK: Thank you, thank you, no, no, thank you.
[He does his bit about Stalin clapping for himself.]
ŽIŽEK: I'm very glad to be here, my God, in this pot, to be cooked and eaten and so on and so on. In this situation, I am reminded of one of my beloved Radio Yerevan jokes from Soviet Union. You will see, I have a very vulgar sense of humour.
[Indescribable throat noises.]
ŽIŽEK: So the listener asks, is it true that Marx, Engels, and Lenin were stealing the wheelbarrows? And Radio Yerevan replies, in principle yes, but with three corrections. First, it wasn't Marx, Engels, and Lenin, but you, second, you weren't stealing them but being gifted them, and third, they weren't wheelbarrows, but a pair of testicles hanging underneath your chin. I claim, is this not our situation today? I like this joke in that it repeats itself. You will see what I mean. First you have the heroes of the grand socialism of twentieth century, my God, in reality it is only yourself, the politics of the self. The act of stealing the wheelbarrows, in which we see labour activism, fighting your bosses, insurrection, all that bullshit: they are not what is taken, but precisely that which is given to us by power. You know, I was at Occupy, but now I have no time for these things, it is precisely the form prescribed by capitalism. It is as Jacques Lacan said to the revolutionary students in Paris '68 – as hysterics, what you want is a new master.
[He does his bit about perverse fantasy vs. hysterical questioning.]
ŽIŽEK: But see what is happening in this joke! Here I agree with my good friend Alain Badiou – the testicles are the least shameful area of the body, precisely because they belong to the part of the Real; there is no testicular enjoyment, testicular desire, and so on, and so on. They constitute the remainder, the third term that destabilises the system, it is here that the truth of the system will be found. In the whole of Freud, he refers to the testicles only twelve times, and the penis, you know, on every page he has the penis, if you look. But do you know this, Freud's first research as a physician was to try to find the testicles of an eel by, how do you say in English, disekcija, cutting up hundreds of eels to find their balls. You do not need me to finish the joke, you are good Lacanians: he did not find them. The eels, they are very postmodern, very LGBT-plus, they do not grow the balls until mating season comes, eel gets horny, and they appear.
[He does his bit about the Hegelian implications of 'being a plus' in LGBT+.]
ŽIŽEK: Now Freud says in his letters, he writes: I cannot find these testicles, all the specimens must therefore be female, das schönere Geschlecht. In this, I claim, we find the model of the entire theory of castration complex. It is not, as the postmodern feminists will tell you, that Freud can only see woman as a mutilated man. No! The true history of Freudian psychoanalysis is the history of a fruitless search precisely for the mutilation, for testicles within the, sorry to be vulgar, the impenetrable feminine-phallic body of the eel. But what is it when the testicles appear underneath the chin? Just as what was taken is in fact a gift, now the Real we try to encounter in revolution becomes this grotesque ornament. Here I am a pessimist. It is not that mystical bullshit, the answers will always elude us, we have limited intellect, truth is outside our grasp, and so on and so on. No! The answers are literally under our noses, but they are only a pair of testicles, they will not satisfy you. But I see from our moderator that I am running out of time talking about the testicles on his chin, ok, so enough stupid jokes, I will address the question. You know, my critics will tell me that as a Communist I should not be arguing for this motion, that I should take the militant posture, sacrifice my life, heroically demand that I be eaten instead of Dr Peterson, and so on and so on. But here I claim that in this stance we do not see the testicles on the groin, the proper functioning of things, but precisely the testicles on the face. The renunciation of desire is in itself a perversion, because there is no ordinary operation of things in which the testicles that have no proper place are in their proper place.
MODERATOR: Slavoj Žižek, thank you very much.
[He throws a bay leaf and some peppercorns into the cauldron.]
PETERSON: Well.
[He chuckles. A pause.]
PETERSON: I suppose I'm meant to respond to this, but I think my opponent's made my case for me already. He claims I have a pair of testicles on my chin. I don't. It simply isn't true at all. I challenge you to find even one, let alone two. Clearly Professor Žižek doesn't have the faintest bloody idea about basic human anatomy. It's an absolutely dreadful lie, it's a horrible thing for a distinguished professor to be teaching people, and it's the kind of degeneration of civilised debate that happens when you allow this neo-Marxism to take over our universities. Professor Žižek is upholding an ideology that brutally murdered tens of millions of people, starved them in gulags, shot them in ditches, all because they held to the nonsense idea that people could have testicles on their chins. Totally contrary to biology, and when you come up against the laws of nature you need to be ready, man, because they will always win. I think the only sane solution is to just damn well eat him. Among certain species of amoeba, they performed a study, the amoebae will hold a debate on abstract concepts, and the losers are digested by the winners. And you see the same principle in the Bible, when Elijah holds an Parliamentary-style debate with the prophets of Baal and slaughters five hundred of them on a point of information. So you can complain, or call this injustice, but you have to accept that the most competent individual will always win, and elites are there for a reason.
[There's a whine like escaping gas. Has the fire been lit? But the wood's still dry; it's just Jordan Peterson, thinking.]
PETERSON: Except academic elites, they don't count.
[The CANNIBALS nod sagely and make hungry humming noises.]
PETERSON: There's an important archetype you should know about here, and that's the Devouring Mother. There's the Devouring Mother in Babylonian myth, the monster Tiamat, and in some of the early Care Bears cartoons. And the Devouring Mother teaches you that if you're not careful, the same things that created you are going to consume you, and that's life, man. It goes to show that these behaviours have been with us for a long time. You can't just throw out these traditions, you can't go into a fantasy world where you pretend they don't exist, unless they tell you to eat a varied diet of grains, pulses, fruits, and vegetables. So maybe if more discussions were run like this, and people understood that the consequences of falling into this kind of pernicious nonsense is that the nonsense is going to come and eat you, bucko, then we'd have a lot more caution and a much fairer debate on our college campuses.
MODERATOR: I should remind Dr Peterson that the motion today is 'For God's sake, not me, don't eat me, eat him,' and he's agreed to argue against it.
[PETERSON bursts instantly into tears.]
PETERSON: No, I'm sorry. No, no, no, I don't accept that premise in the least. There's a basic principle of fair discussion, and that's the equal and opposite nature of each side. That is foundational. I won't debate on these terms.
[ŽIŽEK tries to interrupt with something about the dialectic, but the MODERATOR bonks him over the head with a ladle.]
PETERSON: You can't have us both arguing that I should be the one that gets eaten. That's entirely unjust. Look at what you've thrown away! Western civilisation is in ruins! We had trains that arrived on time, they had a computer to tell you when they'd be arriving to the minute – an honest-to-God miracle, something that would have astounded every one of our ancestors. A society that works – and they want to get rid of it! Look what happens when the SJWs get the upper hand! Cannibalism, gulags, Frozen, the total bloody collapse of meaning in people's lives! This is how Marxism always ends! It's got to the point now that they're openly saying – and this is their argument, not mine – that they should kill and eat people if they don't like their ideas!
[He's bawling now. PETERSON strains against his bonds, and ŽIŽEK is also struggling, trying to scratch his nose with his elbow. Clearly, it's all a joke to him; he's worked out where he is. He wears a truly monstrous grin. Some of the CANNIBALS rush over to fan PETERSON ineffectually with large banana leaves, but the MODERATOR bares his teeth, filed into a row of serrated points, and they disperse. PETERSON appears to be finished – or, if he has more to say, it's drowned by his sobs. Striking the cauldron again with his stick, the MODERATOR allows ŽIŽEK to make his rebuttal.]
ŽIŽEK: You know, I agree with everything my friend Dr Peterson says here. My God, it is a monstrosity that we must eat him, I oppose this utterly. But let me pick up on what he says here. Yes, I agree, we must defend the Western tradition, but is it not true that Marxism and postmodernism come precisely out of that tradition? I claim, look at where we are, in this pot, about to be eaten by naked cannibals: instead of the opposing term of Western humanism, is this not its own internal fantasy of the colonial other? So when Dr Peterson says that one tries to escape the contradictions of reality in a fantasy world, is not fantasy that which is precisely more real than the reality?
[His opponent doesn't seem to hear him. He twitches, and tries to rock back and forth, but he's immobilised by ŽIŽEK's bulk.]
PETERSON: My testicles are normal. They're not on my chin. They're normal. I have normal balls.
[Finally, the Q&A begins – but nobody has a question. The SAVAGES all seem bored, listless; they're not happy with the debate. Why these speakers, and this topic? It might make sense to have ŽIŽEK and PETERSON tussle, with Lacan and Jung, over the ashes of Freud. But who eats and who gets eaten is a political question, and these two are both uniquely inappropriate representatives of their putative politics. ŽIŽEK, who is simply too clever by half to repeat all the stale and earnest socialist talking points, who'd rather talk about the antinomies of the left than the evident evils of capitalism. PETERSON, who seems to think capitalism is as socially conservative as he is, who thinks he's defending competence hierarchies rather than entropy itself, who doesn't understand that he's been riding his own chaos-dragon for his entire career. Still, there's a group of GIRLS in grass skirts. They giggle and avert their eyes, and stutter over the words, until they each take a deep breath and chant their question in chorus.]
GIRLS: Daddy, does capitalism make us happy, or does it create a need in happiness? Daddy, does it fulfil the essential lack in being, or does it open up a void to be filled? Daddy, does happiness only ever belong to other people?
[Both ŽIŽEK and PETERSON attempt to answer at the same time.]
GIRLS: Daddy, please.
[ŽIŽEK releases a flurry of woodland animal noises, slurring over mutations of the word 'precisely,' emitting the phrase 'petit a' in a sharp volley of spit. PETERSON complains, between sobs, that he's not their daddy, and what would the girls' real father think about how they're using that word? At this, an ENORMOUS NAKED SAVAGE suddenly stands. A terrified silence. His vast, muscled body is covered in patterned scars, whorls of gleaming spider's-web flesh all over his chest and back. He wears a long necklace beaded with human teeth. His balls are enormous, and not under his chin; one of his eyes is milky-white, the other only ferocious. A long spear in his hand, viciously barbed. When he opens his mouth the teeth are black and rotting, and the foulness of his breath wilts the long grasses. Is this the father? What could this monster possibly want?]
ENORMOUS NAKED SAVAGE: This isn't really a question, more of a statement.
[He sits back down.]
ŽIŽEK: Yes. My God. I couldn't agree more.
[A fire is lit under the cauldron. Rot and jungle surrounds the whooping in the camp, and the hills slope down to a warm and sparkling sea.]
And her name is Lisa too
I didn't understand Captain Marvel.
The film is about an interplanetary war between the Kree (a rationalistic, technologically advanced race of blue-skinned aliens, who readily admit outsiders and rule their benign and multi-ethnic empire with a firm but welcoming hand) and the Skrulls (an orcish race of shapeshifting terrorists with Australian accents). Obviously, the Kree are the villains. They are also, quite clearly, a sci-fi version of America.
The hero of Captain Marvel is a kidnapped US Air Force pilot who ends up rebelling against her Kree masters, and the military was highly involved in its production. Fifty soldiers worked as extras in the film, military officers were used as consultants, and multiple scenes were shot on an Air Force base. Female RAF pilots, in uniform, surrounded Larson at the film's European gala screening in London; for the Los Angeles premiere, the Air Force supplied six F-16 jets for a celebratory flyover. In return – and this is the usual deal – the military was given substantial editorial control over the film's script. The Marcel Cinematic Universe is, as everyone knows, the cultural wing of the military-industrial complex. This isn't really an anomaly. These films form the vernacular folklore of post-industrial society, and mythic cycles tend to be martial and heroic narratives. It's all a lot dumber than the Homeric epics or the Nibelungenlied, but then so are we.
Is it possible that Americans simply can't see themselves in the screen? Do empires fail the mirror self-recognition test? This seems like too easy an answer. The question we should be asking isn't how an anti-imperialist message managed to 'sneak past' the military censors. Instead, how is it that what appears to be an anti-imperialist message has actually been recuperated by empire?
Anyway, this is what was exercising me after I saw Captain Marvel. I couldn't sleep that night, but I find it hard to sleep most nights. I took a sleeping pill before bed, and then another after an hour of anxious sweat and irritation, and then another. So I was neither asleep nor awake, but woozily skimming just above the surface of reality, when a group of orcish aliens with Australian accents kidnapped me, took me up to their spaceship, and fed me into their memory-harvesting machine. 'Go back,' they said, 'go back.' They made me watch Captain Marvel again. But this time, the story was very different to the one I thought I'd seen.
I can't tell you which one is real. All I know is that I don't understand.
It's 1995, and former US Air Force pilot Carol Danvers falls from a very great height into a Blockbuster Video store outside of Los Angeles. She levitates between the racks of VHS tapes: the mocking green grin of The Mask, the stern half-face of Van Damme in Timecop. Her fingers trail across stacked plastic edges, and they're scabbed and filthy. The other customers stare: clearly, this woman doesn't belong here. She's come from somewhere distant and unknown, and she's wearing strange armour; she doesn't look entirely human. She doesn't seem to disagree. As she drifts, she's whispering to herself. 'It isn't real,' she says, 'it isn't real, you're not here, you're in outer space.'
It's 1988, and Carol Danvers is at the first of her obligatory therapy sessions. Dr Nicholas Fury's manner doesn't match his name. He's still a military psychotherapist, he sits with his back perfectly straight, but his face is open, and there's a box of tissues on the low table between them. This is where you can say the things you couldn't say outside. This is where you don't have to be strong.
'There must have been a lot of pressure,' he says, 'being the first female combat pilot. That's a whole lot of expectation riding on you.' Carol smirks mirthlessly. 'The first,' she says, 'and the last. They won't make that mistake again.' Dr Fury purses his lips. 'It's interesting that you respond with humour,' he says. 'Why do you think that is?' It's because every time some braying Air Force frat-boy told her women had no place flying a plane, that was always somehow just a joke. 'Because it's true,' she says. 'I read the internal report,' says Dr Fury. 'There were a lot of reasons for what happened, and maybe some of them have to do with you, and maybe some of them don't. But what I need you to understand is that none of this is simply because you're a woman.' And Carol nods, but she's not convinced. Because there had simply never been a woman combat pilot before, and the system just wasn't built for someone like her. The flight suits didn't fit properly; the controls were just slightly too far away; there weren't separate showers or separate bathrooms. And while the flyboys all necked their go pills before each mission, little methamphetamine tablets to keep them alert, the standard doses had been calculated for a man's body. The other pilots had been alert. She'd been tweaking.
Up there in the sky, the edges of her vision had blurred, and the centre pulsed. Everywhere she looked was a bloating, living heart. The gumminess and grinding inside her mouth, the crawling on the edge of her skin, the uncontrollable strobe-flash flutter in her eyes, and the strange objects that darted out of the darkness to linger in the sky. Shameful to admit now, but she'd loved it, the cranked-up intensity of it all. The only thing better than drugs is flying, and the only thing better than flying is flying on drugs. Maybe this is just what perfect alertness feels like, she'd thought – but she knew she was making mistakes, the kind of rookie errors a pilot as good as she was shouldn't be making, and it wasn't just nerves. Her fingers shook over the controls. She saw shapes in the clouds. AWACS that turned out to be cirrus drifts; zeppelins roiling out of the nimbus. And a hostile F-14, flying aggressively out towards US Navy vessels in the Persian Gulf, which was actually Iran Air Flight 655, with two hundred and ninety civilians on board.
Back when she was at high school in Boston, a friend of hers had gotten wasted at a party and then tried to drive home. He'd gone too fast, accelerated sloppily around corners, spun out of control in that fucked–up maze of crooked streets, and knocked down an old lady taking her dog out for a walk. The dog had to be put down. The old lady died instantly. Ralph: his name was Ralph; she couldn't remember the old lady's name. And it was hard, when she visited Ralph in jail, to see him crying in handcuffs. 'I can't go to prison,' he'd whimpered, 'it wasn't my fault, I wasn't in control.' It had been awful. This kid had killed; he'd taken away someone's life for no good reason. He wasn't the friend she'd known, but something else, someone else's death, a living tragedy plunged into someone else's world, and he disgusted her. And what is Carol Danvers now? Everyone on that plane had died. Nearly three hundred people. Sixty-six children. And she'd killed them.
Carol Danvers goes home, grabs a bottle of go pills out the bathroom cabinet, and necks three of them at once.
It's 1989, and Carol Danvers is being stalked by the skulls. They could be anyone. They change their form. Iranians, Carol has learned, have a doctrine called taqqiyah: they're allowed to hide their religion and deny their God; they disguise themselves to blend in. Maybe that's why this Wal-Mart is full of monsters. Carol twitches between the aisles, piling up her basket with cakes and candies, high-energy things for when she remembers to eat – and the faces of the other shoppers keep changing. She knows she shouldn't have flushed the pills, but the two were interacting unpleasantly, and between meds and meth, she was always going to go for the meth. Things are under control, she tells herself. She's not on the streets. She has her Air Force pension and her disability checks. She has Dr Fury. It's under control, just not her control. Because when she shuffles over to the cashier and dumps her basket full of oily sugary snacks, the kid bagging her groceries turns his dumb head, and his flesh chars and drifts away in motes of burning dust, leaving only the perfect fire-stripped scream of a passenger as the plane is atomised around him, one of the two hundred and ninety, one of the Iranians, one of the skulls.
It's 1991, and Dr Fury is being briefed. 'I know her background,' he says, waving a dismissive arm. 'I treated her for two years after the incident.' The ward superintendent tries to cough as mildly as possible. 'Ah,' he says. 'Well, you might, ah, find that her psychosis has deteriorated considerably since that time. We still have her on the antipsychotics, but the, ah, pattern of her delusions is unfortunately conforming to a fairly classical schizoid type.' Dr Fury glances over his notes. 'The influencing machine,' he says. 'That's correct,' says the superintendent. 'As it happens, I'm composing a paper on the subject. Are you aware of the, ah, James Tilly Matthews case?' Dr Fury looks impatient. 'Remind me,' he says. 'Quite a landmark in clinical history,' says the superintendent. 'A merchant in the eighteenth century, who came to believe a gang of criminals was remotely torturing him with a machine he called the Air Loom, a system of pipes and, ah, valves, that could interfere with his mind and body through magnetic rays. Dawn of the industrial revolution. I suppose he wasn't entirely wrong. Machines always seems to carry certain, ah, potencies. There's a fellow named Francis in Long Island who seems to have something similar, keeps mailing letters about it to random addresses. You know that when I was starting out in the fifties, I had multiple patients who believed Sputnik was beaming messages directly into their brains?'
Carol's sitting peacefully on a plastic chair in the rec room. Fury sits next to her. 'Do you remember me?' he says. Her eyes light up. 'Dr Fury,' she says, 'thank God, you have to help me. We have to go to Cree River.' Out comes the notepad. 'Cree River,' he says. 'Of course,' she says. 'Cree River Air Force Base, in Montana. You're still in the Air Force, you know what they've built there.' Dr Fury shakes his head. 'Remind me,' he says. 'It's the AI,' says Carol. 'There's a supercomputer in a bunker under the airfield, the Air Force is using it to model the movements of Iraqi tank columns. But listen: it's got too smart for them. Reality is just a highly accurate simulation, and it's simulating the whole universe now. Don't you get it? We're in that simulation. It thinks it's a god. It's sending messages through time. We have to destroy it, we have to get in a plane right now and destroy the Supreme Intelligence.' 'You said it sends messages,' says Dr Fury. Carol gives him a canny glance. 'You want to know if the Supreme Intelligence shot down that plane,' she says. 'You don't believe me, do you? You think this is all in my head. Well it is. It's in my head, and yours, and it's in the trees outside, and it's everywhere, it's everything, and it wasn't my fault, do you hear me, it wasn't my fault.' She's smiling now. 'How can you look so concerned,' she says, 'when you don't even have a face?'
Afterwards, outside, Dr Fury notices as if for the first time how all the cars stop at a red light, and how there's always someone to sweep the leaves off the sidewalk; how perfectly everything in the world fits together, as if this were all just part of the plan.
It's 1993, and someone has detonated a truck bomb beneath the World Trade Center in New York. TV footage shows rescue teams pulling the wounded out of the collapsed garage. Carol Danvers watches the devastation from a quiet air-conditioned bar out in the California desert, and Maria Rambeau watches her. It had all sounded so much simpler when Carol's doctor had phoned her out of the blue. 'I'm not asking you to be her nurse or her carer,' the man had said. 'I'm just asking you to be her friend.' Being friends with Carol had been easy, once, when they'd both been bright-eyed and ambitious kids at Basic Training in Texas. And it's not as if the Carol she knew is gone, not exactly. Days and weeks can go past without incident. Long periods in which she's a little off, a little scarred, but basically fine. She always was resilient. The drugs are working – and, as Dr Fury keeps telling her, what's more important is that Carol has her. Friends, a job, a bar she can go to, where they can sing karaoke duets again and drink whiskey straight, something like an ordinary life. But being friends with someone like Carol really is like being a nurse or a carer, it is a chore, and as much as she loves her, sometimes Maria wishes it could all just be someone else's problem. Like now. Maria's country is under attack. People have died, and she would rather be anywhere other than here. This bar in the desert, with pictures of fighter jets on the walls and ballads twanging tinny on the speakers, with her, her best friend, watching them pull the wounded out of the World Trade Center, and mumbling a constant stream of insane drivel into her glass. Rogue computers, weaponised syntax, Islamic doctrine as a metaphor for quantum energy weapons, faster-than-light drives schematically represented in the traditional patterns of Persian carpets, a hole opening in the sky above New York, and flying lizards streaming through. Maria wants to grab her friend by the shoulders and scream: girl, you fucked up bad, and that's on you; don't make me your two hundred and ninety-first victim. But instead she just nods, and bears it, and orders another drink.
It's 1995, and Carol Danvers is in outer space. She turns back a barrage of ballistic missiles; she swoops through an enemy spaceship in a trail of gorgeous explosions. She's saved the skulls, the innocents and their children. She's put back flesh to repair their wounds. She builds universes. She makes and unmakes empires at will. Every flicker in her fingers is significant, every motion changes the world. Lasers sparkle like confetti around her, as she chases the Imperial warships deep into the interstellar void.
And inside the simulation, the false world, the flat world, the dead zone of magnetic tape and digital signals, Carol Danvers is levitating between the racks of VHS tapes in her aluminium-foil armour, as laurels of light wind and unwind around her stained and scabbing hands.
The opinions of others
Your first clue that something's up comes when you're accosted by two people, an extremist on the right and an extremist on the left. They stand there blocking your path, two abreast – like creepy twins, or the world's smallest military formation, although they look nothing like each other. The right-wing extremist wears a read hat with the word Maga in black across the front, and a blue t-shirt that also says Maga. 'I want to exterminate racial minorities,' he explains. The left-wing extremist is clearly from a racial minority herself, in a vaguely indeterminate way, or possibly she's just very suntanned – but she has green hair, and wears high-waisted jeans, glasses, and a look of weary patience. 'Um?' she says. 'How about we don't do that? And just be nice to people instead?' You try to push past them. 'Please,' you say, 'you have to let me through, there's somewhere I need to be, something terrible will happen if you don't let me through.' But the knowledge of what that terrible thing might be is fading as you speak. All you have is the sense of a terrible rupture, something you've been fleeing from or running heroically towards. 'No,' says the extremist on the right. 'Not yet,' says the extremist on the left. 'First,' says the extremist on the right, 'you have to distinguish us.'
He laughs, and as he does his laugh floats off his face and shatters into endless duplicates. The flesh peels from the extremist on the left's body, twisting in neat ribbons, and nests around the extremist on the right. Her hands scrabble furiously up and out through his cheeks, splitting his face open, black-painted nails slick with spit and gore, while his laugh dances in hornet-swarms from every direction. A blue eye rolls upwards into its skull, and a brown iris rears out of the clearing fog of sclera, blood vessels writhing to make way. The extremist on the left has been stripped to the bones now, and when you pick up a single greasy vertebra that clatters at your feet, you see that it's moulded with raised ridges in the shape of a swastika, in the way that other manufacturers might mark their products with the words made in China.
Kaleidoscope arms split from the remaining body. Human detritus licked up by frog-tongues that dart from sudden mouths; orifices swim over skin. A rib pulses and ripples just under the skin through the new creature's bloatedness, up the leg, up the torso, bulging the neck, until it emerges in a small spray of blood out of its head, a raw and magnificent antler. Swarming laughters dart back towards their source, and become teeth. The thing wobbles for a moment, and then it splits. Two mouths open in unison. 'Distinguish us,' they command. There are two people standing there again, but they're utterly formless. All you know is that they're a threat. 'Distinguish us,' they say again. 'I can't,' you say. 'I can't see the difference. You're exactly the same to me.' And then they vanish.
Now you understand where you are. This high, dark, echoing marble corridor, this endless hall blasted with alcoves, from which classical busts of broadsheet columnists and TV pundits frown and glare. The laurels slip over Tucker Carlson's face. David Aaronovitch stares his stony empty-pupilled stare. Some cheerful rebuke seems like it's about to burst out of Owen Jones's frozen puffed-up cheeks. And the Chapos are on their plinth, a screaming five-headed monster. The candle-light is dim, and the darkness behind you billows and swells, forcing you on. You are in the worst place that can be imagined. You are among other people's opinions.
Further on, the outer wall has nearly collapsed. The space beyond this long, dark, linear universe is excruciating: a swirling blackness, gnawing at the back of your eyeballs. Looking at it feels like having a stinging-nettle grow in the centre of your brain. But an army of Trumps is blotting it out. None of them are more than a few inches high, but the cleaner, straighter Trumps are lifting up boulders three times their size. Those stones are marked with words like Integrity and American Renewal. The Trumps squeak and chirrup without words; their noses wrinkle as they do their diligent work, and the long fine whiskers on their snouts twitch in the gloom. But there are other Trumps, bloated and pustular, chunks of fur missing from their haunches, white circles gleaming like cadaver-flesh beneath black and pitiless eyes, and the stones that they move with miniature cranes and earth-diggers read Lies and Sleaze and Russiagate.
You try not to look as the Trumps build their wall, because the whole scene is washed by the terrible rays that come from Outside, but as you hurry past you tread on one of the Trumps's tail. The President bares its long incisors, and sinks them into your ankle. And then, chaos. The rat-Trumps stream out of their control cabins and start scratching at faces; the squirrel-Trumps form a protective semicircle around their portion of the wall. Letting out terrible battle-squeaks, a phalanx of huge and hulking Trumps, sleek with grease, pink in the cracks of their scars, roll for the frontlines. The squirrel-Trumps are annihilated. Their skulls are cemented into the wall.
A hand lands reassuringly on your shoulder. 'See,' says its owner, 'the squirrels won, everything's going to be ok.' A rabid dismemberment. Scraps of squirrel-fluff fall out of the tumult and drift like falling snow. 'But the rats won,' you say. 'No,' he says, 'look.' But you can't; you're looking at him. An almost skeletal young man, pale and pockmarked, his head shaved, in a hospital gown, with what you think is a drip plugged into his arm, until you see the little pump mechanism at the top of the line. His eyes are the same black as that razor void beyond the wall. He's going to die. 'Those are rats,' you say, again, as if to reassure yourself, because it's unfathomable that someone could be so wrong about rodents. 'Rats have naked tails,' he says, in the slow voice you might use with children or the insistently stupid, 'and these have furry tails. They're squirrels.' He kneels down to pick one up, and the rat starts pulling at his fingernails. They fall out so easily. The tissue beneath is already rotted. He talks to the rat that's mutilating him with a dreamy, happy, slurring voice. 'Do you want a peanut, little pal? They won't let me eat, but maybe I got a peanut for you.' He fumbles around in his mouth with the other hand, and pulls out a tooth. The rat seizes it and starts to eat, and the tooth comes apart in glossy, oily, yellowing crumbs.
You follow the dying man along the endless doorless corridor, and you have to keep moving, or else the terrible thing will take you. Alone, on an island of washed-up garbage, plastic sun-bleached in the Pacific, slabs of computer hardware matted together with seaweed, a raft of flotsam and strangled fish, stands a six-year-old girl. She's wearing a kind of Halloween costume, and cradles an object in her hands. 'I like this,' she says, overflowing with sincere emotion. 'The world is so miserable,' she says, 'and the trash-tide covered everything, and all the insects died, but this wreckage is full of treasure. I'm allowed to feel joy. I'm allowed to find the things that I love in all these ruins, and I'm allowed to cherish them. I like this. I like this thing.' She shows you the thing she likes. It's been whitened in the sun, and hollowed into a thin plastic shell by the tides, but it's an enormous dildo. From out the base, the pale legs of a hermit crab flail helplessly. 'It's so important to me,' she says. 'Do you like it? I like it more than anything. Do you like it too?' The crab's antennae lick the air. Maxillipeds churn like pistons around its long vaginal slit of a mouth. You can't bear to tell the child what it is. 'You have to like it,' she says, 'you have to like the same things as me, or it means you think I don't matter.' You can barely manage a whisper. 'I don't like it,' you say. The girl opens her mouth wide to scream, but there's no sound. Six long crab-legs unfold themselves out of her throat, and the thing that's living in her shell scuttles away in sadness and fury.
Here and there the floor is slippery with the three essential oils, which are Brent crude, sebum, and partially hydrogenated vegetable fat.
There's Roman graffiti defacing the walls. It's doggerel. Quaero Quaestum Qualitercumque. I seek profit by any means necessary. Quidnam Quiritor Quotidianus? Why not whinge every day? Quosque Quaestores Quisquilias Quatiebant? For how long have our elected officials brandished garbage? It has to mean something. There must be some pattern, some secret code.
And all this time the Jews have been following you. They roost in the ceilings of this place, in the coves and coffers of its rotundas, in the vegetable decay of Corinthian capitals; straddling gargoyles, keening and kvetching, letting long trails of Jew-guano splatter the marble and pile up in calcified heaps. This place was built for them. The Jews flap around on leathery wings in the upper darkness, finding their way by olfactolocation, propelled by their huge turreted nostrils. Up ahead you see a small hunched crowd. Human-like creatures, naked and as pale as moonlight, skittering on fingertips and toes. They've gathered around a squat stalagmite of Jewshit. 'Filthy birds,' they croon, 'Rothschild birds, Zionist birds, kill them all.' They're licking at the pile with long dry tongues. This is their only subsistence in this place, and a diet of guano has riddled them with disease. You can see the lesions over their fish-white skin, the redness and swelling in their joints, and as you approach they can see you too. 'Only a minority of them, of course,' one says, straightening its back in an anxious hurry. 'Just the ones that make a mess on the floor,' another chimes in. They're cringing; something in this endless passage hunts these coprophages, a taloned predator that lives one step removed from the muck. 'Some of my dearest comrades,' they mumble in unison, fear glittering over their sunken features. The dying man tugs on your sleeve. You must continue. But as you edge past the troglodytes and their feast, you see one of them pinned to the wall, held in place with a short bronze sword driven right through its throat.
Wheels whine on the dying man's drip. He drags you over to a stark bare hospital gurney, and you help him clamber onto it. He beckons you in with two fingers, and rasps in your ear. 'Everyone's gone,' he tells you. 'Alcohol and opiates. There's nobody left.' He's right, there is nobody left. The stranger has vanished. There's only you, the dying man, immobile on your hospital bed, the drip slowly squeezing the last drops of blood out of your withered arm.
They swoop out of the darkness, twelve figures in brightly coloured animal masks, forming a tight vigil around your deathbed. 'This is terrible,' says one, 'it's inhuman that people are dying like this. We have to do something.' There's an agonised pause. 'Did you just speak over me?' says another. 'Nobody else was talking,' says the first. 'Oh,' says the second, and now her voice whirs to a mocking yelp, 'nobody else was talking, so I thought I'd just butt in here with my white boy opinions that nobody asked for.' A thoughtful silence. 'This is terrible,' she continues, 'it's inhuman that people are dying like this. We have to do something.' Another animal face looks up eagerly. 'We could spit in his mouth,' he says. 'Replenish lost fluids.' This sets off a brief squabble, everyone complaining at once. 'Enough!' one of them shouts. 'We'll do this democratically. Go round the circle, clockwise, starting with me, so everyone's voice is heard.' 'Why do we start with you?' says another. 'Because I'm the one that's speaking now,' says the first. 'No you're not,' says the other, 'I am, I'm talking right now, and I refuse to be silenced.' Then there's a silence. 'Why can't two people speak at once,' two masks say simultaneously. The remaining ten all screech their objections in unison, and as they do you remember the terrible thing that will happen if you don't keep moving on. You remember why it's so dangerous to be among other people's opinions, why everyone is so terrified of this place, why they all come in here to tear it down, and why nobody ever leaves. 'Please,' you croak, but they don't hear you. 'Please,' you say again, 'you have to wheel me on, you have to move me on down the corridor, or I'll start believing this.' Suddenly, all twelve round on you. 'Who said you get to speak?' spits one. 'You don't believe in this?' hisses another, squeezing the fat of his upper arm. 'This isn't real enough for you?' They point out that you're with the rats, that you're still holding one in your hand, even as it's tearing your palm to shreds. One leans in close, until you can see the sweat drenching the animal mask. 'Did we hurt your fee-fees?' he growls. 'Are you going to cry those toxic fragile tears, just because we've made you confront the fact that you're a bad person?' A consensus is reached. 'Yikes,' they say, 'this ain't it chief, you're trash, I hope a bird craps on you.'
One by one they depart, muttering darkly about how each of the others has let them down once again, and the billowing dark roils from one end to the other of the hall of other people's opinions to swallow you whole and become the world.
Ram-packed: a horror story about rail privatisation
Despite what you might have heard, we did not collapse into savagery on the 19:26 privatised Virgin Trains service from London Euston. There was not a breakdown of society. We did not revert to barbarism or become like beasts, we did not experience a collapse of social norms, we did not suffer from a brutal upsurge of some timeless human nature in all its frenzy, its envy, and its sanguinary gore. What we achieved on that train was the highest possible expression of modern liberal civilisation. What I saw there, among unseeing eyeballs trailing tails of slime, between its black holes and white walls, was the the truth. The realisation of a perfect idea; at long last, something that works. When the train finally slid into that dry and hungry mouth at Crewe, having experienced minor delays, and we got off to make our connections or to buy a sandwich and a bottle of Diet Coke from the WH Smiths or to wash the blood off our faces in the greasy train-station sinks, we arrived in a world made finally itself.
Start at the beginning. London dribbles in loose splats against the outside of the windows as we speed north. There are parts of the urban chimera that you can only really see out the window of a panting intercity train: the fast-coursing rivers of unused rail and mossy gravel, the heaped industrial shacks groping over each other behind barbed wire, the shockingly naked backsides of terraced houses in grimy brick and spiderweb-cracked plaster with their haphazardly placed windows and their squat forms that bloat like the buried secret of the nice stucco streetside. All these things fade, bursting against the window and trailing off along the sides of the train. London itself fades, staggering into its own twilight. Soon it will be night, and the only thing visible through the train windows will be your own guilty reflection. I am guilty. I am sitting in someone else's seat. Of course the train is overcrowded; it's a bank holiday weekend, and thousands are streaming out of London to get the boat from Holyhead – but more than that, this is just the way things are. See how practical questions become moral ones: if you wanted to sit down for your journey, you should have booked a seat instead of getting an open return like the feckless dilettante you are; if you really wanted that seat, you should have been on the platform early instead of wasting five minutes dithering over three types of layered salad at the M&S Simply Food in a drooling microcosm of the delayed-adulthood indecision that is already setting the coordinates for your wasted life and will make sure that your grave is unvisited and unmarked after you die. There are rules; if you can't play by them then you have nobody else to blame. But trudging through the Gothic infinity of packed carriages, I find an empty seat. Reserved from Milton Keynes Central. And I sit down, knowing that it doesn't belong to me and I'll have to give it up, knowing that I am the most worthless creature on this train.
First division. The people left standing, their long line like manacled captives searing through the middle of the carriage, are giving me strange looks. A healthy-looking couple, her hair tied back in a sheer ponytail, his cut short, both of them dangling big hiking rucksacks knotted with strange straps and harnesses, glare. Aleady they want me dead. They know I have no real right to be sitting down and I only got where I am from sheer blind luck. Second division. Out in the vestibule, little eyes peer and scowl behind doors that intermittently hiss open and shut. Third division. In the seat besides me, a balding navy-suited creature reading the Financial Times will sometimes almost-accidentally jab me with his elbow as he lobs peanut M&Ms into his mouth. I hear the flickering neck-snap crackle of candy shells breaking, the damper meatier crunch of masticated peanuts, the slurp and slobber of liquefying chocolate as it gums up the unholy inside of his mouth. He wants me dead too; he knows I don't belong in that chair, and he hates the fact that to an imaginary observer he might appear to be somehow on the same social plane as an indolent impostor like myself. And me? I hate every one of them, the athletic young couple, the accusing eyes from the vestibule, my peanut-eating neighbour; they've seen my shame, and I want it to sprout tendrils and strangle them all.
At Milton Keynes the first skirmishes break out. The platform is packed, and grunts of open hostility greet the people trying to move into the train as others move out. Toes are mangled underfoot, epithets hissed. I give up my seat when the shadow of a tall skinnyfat beardo hovers over me, brandishing his ticket. (It's hard to tell in the flurry of fake-apologetic winces and grimaces that pass between us as mandated by law – so sorry, no I'm sorry – but for a moment he appears to be wearing my face.) As the train insinuates through rotting late-summer fields I slide into the aisle's frozen conga. I don't feel any more solidarity for the seatless as I join their ranks. They certainly don't seem to feel any for me. At the end of the carriage I see an old man leaning on a stick, stoically mashing his gums. The passengers around him stare into their laps. Not my problem. He should have bought a proper ticket.
Behind me, things are not going so well. A newcomer, short and brutal in a floral print dress, seems to have been allocated a table seat that's currently being occupied by a family of four – fat gregarious husband, patient hijabi wife, children sucked face-first into their iPads – who also have a valid reservation. The Miltonian still expects them to move, children be damned. She'll call a conductor. She'll tell the authorities. When threats don't seem to work, she leans down, arse bumping against elbows on the opposite row, to grab one of the small children from his seat. The kid screams and flails for his iPad. The husband roars and stands, swings a big broad wobbling punch, catches the aggressor just under her collarbone, and she staggers. The whole line of patient standing-room travellers tilts; I'm knocked forwards into someone's sweaty shoulderblade. What happens next seems to coruscate in time. In the chaos of that sudden motion a sleek black camping knife tears through the fabric of the big healthy hiker's rucksack, waiting, mechanically erect. His girlfriend, standing behind him, is knocked forwards, and it jabs deep just under her chin and comes out again, followed by a halting piss-stream of blood. There's no sound. 'Whoa,' he says, noncommittally, as he rights himself; he still doesn't know what's just happened. She crumples dead. This carriage is not safe for me. As the first screams rise, and the panic of people crammed immovably in place spreads, I duck and sidle out back to the vestibule. My voyage begins.
This was not, as I discover, the first death. They might have all started like that – accidental – but the killing made too much sense to end that way. In the rubbery intestine between carriages a sprawling clot of people has formed, a pearl around a corpse. The body flails helplessly as the train lurches from side to side, still being kicked and pummelled furiously by an inner ring of maddened passengers; it's already too disfigured to tell what its age was, or its sex. I don't ask what crime the victim committed. I already know: they didn't have the proper reservation. I move on, squeezing past the murderers. Sorry, I say. Sorry, they mutter in reply. The train is a linear Gormenghast, a sucession of reclusive bubble-worlds, each of them with the same decor and the same grisly violence, each brutally different. In the little restaurant car, children run and scream through the burst contents of bags of crisps and other people's luggage. There's blood crusting under their nails. They turn dagger-sharp eyes to me, and I move on. In the quiet coach bodies dangle silently from the overhead rail, mouths yawning in wordless screams. I bump my head against one with a barely audible thwock, and a lone impatient tut sounds out from somewhere behind me. I move on. I journey for a very long time, for what feels like years, pushing politely past the killing and the dying, fighting when I have to, fleeing when I can. I'm looking for something. A space where I can catch my breath, just a breath of air that's not been made humid by sweat and frenzy. No luck. There are, I hear someone whisper, plenty of seats up in first class; you just need to buy a £12 upgrade. Impossible. By this time I've seen it myself: the drinks trolleys barricaded against the entrance, the sloping pile of corpses abutting it, every poor mangled idiot still gripping his credit card. And behind them, painted in grime and ichor on the frosted-glass sliding door, the face of the god: bearded, smiling warmly, the faint outlined suggestion of a nude woman clinging behind him on his kiteboard. Not a god who might save us. Richard Branson is a god who has already come to deliver us all.
I soon realise that this isn't mere anarchy. This is the train responding creatively to its crisis, in the only way a privatised British rail service knows how. All the normal rules of decorum are still in place, the rules that let thousands of people travel amicably across the country while speaking as few words to each other as possible, the rules that give the reservation ticket its magical power and are inscribed in tiny polite jargon on its back – it's just that the rules that ensure peace are being enforced by increasingly violent means. We are all good and valued customers, and we all have a right to be on this train. It's just that there's not enough room for us all. How else can we process our abstract equality? The marketplace of violence will sort everything out. Here, cloistered on a speeding train, we have spontaneously generated the most perfected version of the neoliberal utopia: thousands of subjects, all imprinted with its rational doctrines, working things out. The system is fair, I know it is – because in every carriage I cross, each bristled knotted carpet strewn with blood and viscera, the seated passengers are tapping placidly at their phones, leafing through the g2, idly munching Jelly Babies or nibbling at supermarket sushi, as if nothing were happening at all. Not my problem, their eyes say. They should have bought a proper ticket.
There's so much I don't remember.
Not the murder and the bloodshed – I will remember that forever – but more basic facts. Why was I going to Crewe? Why did I leave London and its nurturing stink? I paid, I think, twelve hundred pounds for my ticket. Sometimes I can't help the vague disquieting feeling that there was someone else with me, that I was idly chatting in my stolen seat to someone important, someone that I knew but can't now remember, until we reached Milton Keynes and everything started to become the same as it had always been. On this train everyone is only alone. Sometimes, as I edged my way through cacophonous carriages, I'd put a hand against the windowpane and try to look outside, at scenes that felt wrong. Were we moving? Sometimes there seemed to be deserts outside, sloshing dunes in the blue twilight, running like water from vast buried scales, beneath this train gritted still by a million chattering grains of sand. Sometimes I saw the sullen fields of England crisscrossed by tracer fire, paratroopers tumbling strangled from invisible planes, and over the horizon Coventry burning. Sometimes the darkness outside was lit by a tiny pinprick of the noonday sun, burning cold to the faint peripheries of this faraway solar system, where the 19:26 privatised Virgin Trains service from London Euston ploughed through sterile Hadean rock that had glittered lifeless for four and a half billion years, and under contellations unseen by humankind. At one point, I briefly locked myself in the bathroom, shortly before a furious minor tribe ripped out the door. I sat shivering on a toilet seat that pathetically begged with a coprophage's masochism: 'Don't feed me wet wipes or sanitary products – they make me feel very poorly.' I tried to connect to the onboard WiFi, and instead of a username and password, it asked me for the true name of God.
Despite what you might have heard, I said, we did not collapse into savagery on the 19:26 privatised Virgin Trains service from London Euston. But if I'm honest, I don't know what you might have heard. As the train finally slid into that dry and hungry mouth at Crewe, having experienced minor delays, I found myself cowering in another vestibule. Most of the others were dead; the screams and gurgles, at least, had faded. And above the bins, behind blood-smeared glass, was a screen showing live CCTV from throughout a clean and orderly privatised train, resplendent with soft comfortable inviting empty seats. The god's eye view. Onscreen, the only people left standing, or cluttering up the vestibules, were the ones who obstinately refused to sit. There, on one seat, with his hand on his companion's knee, hunched over an open copy of René Girard's Violence and the Sacred, scrolling through his phone between its pages, was myself. I remembered the man who had taken my seat at Milton Keynes, the one that looked for a moment exactly like me. He was arriving at his destination. I had no idea where I had ended up. I still don't know where I am. As the doors pinged and hissed and opened, I stepped out of the 19:26 privatised Virgin Trains service from London Euston, and into the truth.
Voyage to the prison planet
Paul Joseph Watson stares through the tiny weeping mole-eyes half-buried in his face, and is afraid. You would be too. He lives on the prison planet, encased in a thick concrete shield twenty miles above sea level: you think it's night and it's always been night, but those stars are just a fluorescent buzz through the gaps in the barbed wire, each constellation has its tangled wiring and a strange cloudy liquid that slowly drips from one corner, and you've confused the moon with a searchlight your entire life. You think the clouds are gathering, but tear gas is leaking through the mildewed firmament to disperse the population. You think it's God you're praying to, but the guards have their snitches everywhere.
Holed up in Battersea, Paul Joseph Watson sees the prison planet slowly crumbling under its concrete shell. The rioters outside, for instance; they're everywhere now, crowds of pinch-faced foreigners sweeping over Europe like starlings in its dusk. They burn everything in sight. The prisoners crisp in their cells, body fat dripping liquid through the fissures in their scoriated skin, because the media told them that none of it was real. Those are the living dead, trundling inauthentically from the prison canteen to the commissary to the rec room, they are the rubble that is torn up and rearranged into new cells for the rubble that follows them, more prisons of stretched-out flesh and fingernails linked in rippling fish-scale walls, still hair, still bleeding. They do strange experiments here; human beings are turned into something else, their hair brutishly thick, their balls mournfully gone. And above it all, suspended between the fires and the concrete shell that some unknown species placed around the Earth some time in the last century: the cultural Marxists, the feminazis, the SJWs, the thugs, the false flags, the weather-control stations, the mind rays, all arranged in some great chain of power that leads up from the fanatical mob outside and its flaming bottles that smash against the shutters of the Battersea swank pad all the way through the concrete shell and out the other side. Paul Joseph Watson is afraid, but he knows that this prison was only really built to contain one person. He stands between the camera and his map of the world and stares out terrified through his half-closed eyes and says: Gary Linker is the absolute epitome of the virtue-signalling social justice warrior cunt, and he needs to put up, or shut dah fuck up.
I hate Paul Joseph Watson.
I used to enjoy the Alex Jones show, back before Donald Trump's victory – before it turned into just another piece of glib boosterism for political power, as neutered as any other eunuch in the bureaucracy. Jones would puff out his head into a greasy sphere and yell, or detail the Satanic imagery in cereal boxes and the patterns in the clouds, or bare his nipples at the New World Order, and it was fun. A sadistic sort of fun, watching an adult human maddening himself with conspiracies that don't really exist, but fun. The only problem is that you could never tell when they would cut to Paul Joseph Watson – oh god, not this tiresome prick again, the gimpy Yorkshireman with his suit slightly too large, standing in front of his big important map, with his tiny eyes, and his awful moist red lips, and his unbearable rants of a thirteen-year-old sagely informing the YouTube community that while most people his age listen to crap he prefers good music, and his oppressive pedantic pompous droning hectoring honking plodding nasal clammy mucous flattened choked-up gurgle dipshit arsehole nightmare of a voice.
English speech tends to resolve into iambs, but when Paul Joseph Watson speaks the banal rhythm of it all becomes unbearable; he talks like a teacher demonstrating the concept to a class of bored GCSE students, the deathly tick-tock of her tapping pencil, ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM. He talks with the rushing dismal clarity of those mid-morning TV adverts: if you've SUFfered an INjury that WASn't your FAULT, come to LAWyers 4 YOU. He talks like an automated call informing you that you've been missold PPI and could stand to receive a substantial cash settlement. He talks in stops and starts, water dripping from a rusted old tap, a fractured desert in quartz and sand, a late capitalism so exhausted by its own failure to imagine that it's reduced to openly announcing each new shabby con as it arrives by the tortured mendacity of its speech. He doesn't talk at all. He yaps.
All the usual tedium of the right-wing fringe is present in Watson's work. There's the racism and sexism and transmisogyny and anticommunism and other assorted foundational isms, of course, the conspiracy theories about white genocide and the globalist master-plan, the scattershot insults, 'virtue-signalling' and 'politically correct' blanketed about until they lose all meaning beyond that of a sourceless, careless sneer. But there's also what really distinguishes the whole project: the idiot's joy in being smugly wrong about stuff, complete with triumphantly feeble Twitter putdowns and the absolute assurance that everyone who makes fun of him is actually a snowflake who's just been triggered.
In between it all, though, there are flashes of an almost mournful, almost sympathetic idiocy. Take his New Year's video, about how you've achieved nothing in the past year and don't deserve to celebrate at its end, about how it's only 'the most twattish insufferable losers' who get wasted in preparation to snog some other nobody come midnight; you can hear, buried in his hectoring, the echoes of the precocious but shy teenager who didn't get invited to any parties and decided that it made him a better person. Take his interview with the dyslogical student rag The Tab, marketed to all those same twattish insufferable losers, in which he says that the thing he misses most about living in Sheffield – a thriving and multicultural university city home to over sixty-five thousand fun loving students – is 'the ability to isolate yourself and truly be alone.' You can see how it started, how a lonely boy ended up flying far off across the galaxies to isolate himself on a prison planet built especially for him, where a strange cloudy liquid drips from the stars, where the Islamic mob spreads from his door to the furthest reaches of the world, where the human being in its cage slowly shrinks into something sleeker and stupider and more absurd.
Paul Joseph Watson believes that conservatism is the new counterculture and the new punk rock. Years of puritan liberal censoriousness have exhausted a population that just wants to be able to say 'gay' pejoratively, and all the gleeful busting of self-serious taboos is coming from the right – but it's hard to square this pose with the fact that Watson thinks having fun is insufferable and sex is best avoided. It's impossible to see the fearless discursive titan Paul Joseph Watson wants to be, because Paul Joseph Watson sentenced himself to life on the prison planet, where he stares through the tiny weeping mole-eyes half-buried in his face, and is afraid.
The punk rock countercultural hero lives in fear of absolutely everything under the heavy concrete shell where the sky used to be. In particular, he's afraid of the Swedish city of Malmö, a quiet and faintly boring town whose struggling economy has been revitalised by an influx in migrants from Africa and the Middle East. After Donald Trump – pointlessly filtering the previous night's TV through the loose sieve of his brain before barfing it all back onto TV again – declared in shock that something terrible had happened in Sweden the previous night, Paul Joseph Watson undertook a personal mission to prove that Sweden really was that bad. The place is a warzone: constant riots, killings on the streets, brutality in the homes, a bubbling hive of miniature Islamic emirates, cultural genocide erupting in thousands of maggots from the heart of old Scandinavia. His challenge to the journalists – who had gone through the usual smug liberal chuckling, tragedy in Ikea, the great fika massacre, as if terrible things aren't happening in Sweden and everywhere else every second of the day – was this: if you think Sweden is so safe, I'll pay for you to go there and see. And some journalists, who sometimes happen to go to actual warzones, took him up on it. (Myself included.) His wording was clear: any journalist who disagrees with him gets a free ride on the PJW Öresund Express. Needless to say, he wimped out.
Whether Sweden is a good place to be or not (it's not, but where is?) isn't really the issue; what was strange was exactly why Watson thought we should all reconsider our nice Northern jolly. Frantically trying to stem the tide of bankruptcy-inducing holidays he'd had to pay for, Watson showed us why everyone should be scared of Malmö, posting pictures of an apartment building, some punks, and a group of well-dressed teenagers wearing Christian crosses around their necks, and then a video of some other teenagers letting off fireworks on New Year's Eve. (That last one, incidentally, was not an immigrant riot but a celebration that takes place in cities across the region; that year saw no injuries and no arrests. In his terror of foreign violence, Watson ended up condemning exactly the kind of cherished local European traditions the right claims to want to protect.) Paul Joseph Watson isn't just constantly afraid, hidden away from everything in a Battersea apartment whose walls grow thicker and denser and arc out from his little hollow of a home until they sweep over the sky and encase the entire planet in a concrete shell dotted with fake stars that thrum with a weak failing electric glow. His fears aren't even human fears; he lives in terror of big scary buildings, people he doesn't know, crowds of drunk people, and fireworks – in other words, the things that are frightening to a dog.
They do strange experiments here on the prison planet; human beings are turned into something else, their hair brutishly thick, their balls mournfully gone. The chimera Paul Joseph Watson yaps and whines in front of a camera and behind his map of the world, all of it perfectly positioned to hide his disgrace, the shuddering dog's body with its fur and its claws and its endlessly shitting arsehole that trails off behind the suit just slightly too big for it. He howls at the searchlight that was his moon; he barks at the strangers outside his door; he has lost all interest in any part of a human woman except her leg; he is ashamed of what he's become. He kennelled himself in Battersea, because where else do lost dogs go? The reactionary right scream for a rugged and manly authenticity because they are the most domesticated people in existence. They wilt in horror at a few kids in hoodies or a few students who don't approve of what they have to say because a lifetime of bourgeois morality and the comforts of a life built on imperial superprofits have made them biddable, tail-wagging, snarling but tamed. The lonely boy from South Yorkshire has travelled a long way in search of something, and he's not found it yet: a scratch behind his ears, and a few comforting words. Good boy. Good boy. Goodnight.
A creepy clown manifesto
We only wanted to entertain. We only wanted to make you laugh. We only wanted to see happiness, smiling children in the dizzy whirl of the circus tent; we only wanted to pull on our masks, as thin as a the image on your TV screens, and make you glad. Watch us tumble, watch us fall down ladders, watch us blow kisses and balloons: we only ever wanted to entertain.
Autumn is here, and you will have seen us at the edge of the woods. We live at the edge of the woods; like all the rest of your litter the damp winds have blown us to the edge of the woods. We haunt the fringes. Small-town America, brand-new and broken-down. The forests have been strip-logged and grown back again worse, and the trees are just weeds now, white and narrow, branching out like pale spindly fingers: the rustling of trees outside your window at night is how you know that there's someone in your house. These woods are all hollow inside, forests too young and splintered to hold anything like folklore, where nature looks like a cheap film set, where the nymphs and sprites would get trapped in Coke cans and starve, where every animal is mud-splattered, pre-butchered, and desperate. Since you stopped leaving pornography out here you have no use for these woods, and they have become a home for the clowns. They suit us fine. Our evil is not ancient; we are depthless and outside of history. Hallowe'en is coming: leaves are starting to clog the dirt now, piling up in the gas station forecourt, deformed and organic against the square rows of toilet cleaner and laxatives. Leaves drift against the church, where God lives between plywood walls. Sooner or later someone will need to come along with a big noisy machine to blow all the leaves back to the edge of the woods. And then he'll go back home, and not have to worry about what the clowns in the woods could possibly eat. He's the lucky one. There aren't any jobs or much hope either; some people are on heroin and most are on Netflix, staring through hours of entertainment standardised especially for you, plugging into Americanywhere. You don't go to see the travelling circus any more. The travelling circus has pitched its tent right there in your house, and it's come to whisk you away.
The first person to spot us this year was a young boy in Greenville, South Carolina. Standing in the scrub-patches between Greenville and whatever surrounds it, he saw two figures at the edge of the woods, one in a bright red wig, the other with a black star painted over his face, silent, motionless. He ran to tell his mother. He wasn't the last. In the same town another clown appeared in the woods behind an apartment block, and another was seen staring impassively outside a laundrette. This was late August, when the nights are too hot for too many clowns to squelch out from the soil; our face-paint runs in sweaty drips, we wilt. In September, we started to spread. Across the state, then to South Carolina, then to Georgia and Virginia, until we could stalk from coast to coast, leering over the border at Canada, tumbling slapstick to Europe. An epidemic of creepy clowns, panic across the nation, and nobody knows why. Clowns were seen holding knives in Kistler, Pennsylvania; machetes in Tchula, Mississippi; a pistol in Monroe, New Jersey. Clowns started to appear outside schools. Clowns started to leer at the side of the freeway, watching you buzz about from one place to another, rooted among the wet exhaust-stained trees. People have been fired from their jobs for wearing ordinary non-creepy clown costumes in social media pictures; it's become the sign of an obscure and undefinable criminality. Every genuine sighting brings a dozen phantasmic ones; schools close, mobs form, ordinary citizens buy themselves a gun. These clowns hunt a very particular demographic: white, prim, conservative young families, away from the big cities, once comfortable but declining, the moribund lower bourgeoisie. People who despite themselves feel that subtle tug coming from the edge of the woods, the call of rot and decay, the bliss that comes when everything sprouts mushrooms and melts into the trash-strewn ground. People who are afraid of clowns, and people whose fears are listened to. We are by nature indifferent to the state, but it's been amusing to watch its antics and pratfalls: the armed police establishing their perimeter around a school in Flomaton, Alabama, sweeping the classrooms for signs of clown-related mischief; the men charged with terrorism for wearing clown costumes; the helicopters on standby and the military bases on constant alert; the tension as a vast engine readies itself for war against its own clowns, and finds that when the missile silos are opened there's only the wet smack of a custard pie against the ground.
It's so boring of you to make this about politics, when you could just as well blame rising global temperatures giving us a glut of worms to feed on, or astral alignments poking pores in the fabric of your universe. Why clowns? Why now? Isn't a big sad-faced clown about to reach out for the Presidency? Aren't you all afraid, safer than you've ever been in your homes surrounded by three lines of cops with military-grade weapons, but terrified of the refugees, of the terrorists, of the criminals, of whatever it is that's lurking in the dark by the edge of the woods? It's even worse when you psychologise. The horror of the clown is the sad man behind the painted smile, that desperate need, going back to old Grimaldi, for the unhappiest ones to make other people laugh. Learn the truth: we are not unhappy. There is nothing behind our masks. Note how in so many media reports, the clowns are not a he or a she but an it. Why are you afraid of clowns? Don't you love to be entertained? Weren't wars fought, cities basted to rubble, children burned alive, all to defend a free society in which you could live without fear and be entertained? But there's something restless: a vague sense, as credits roll for episode eight and you know without thinking that however much you might want to do something else episode nine is as inevitable as the setting sun, that you're wasting your life; that it may as well be over already. And at that very moment, a clown lurches out of the edge of the woods behind your house, a big plastic grin on his face, and a knife in his hand.
We don't mean to frighten you. We don't mean to cause you any harm. We carry weapons, but you love to look at weapons; you put them in our hands. This is what we will do. We will stand at the edge of the woods and not say a word. We will wait patiently until you put down your guns, call off the police, and end all this senseless panic. We will wait until, of your own free will, you follow us into the woods, those grey shallow woods where everything new falls to rot. We will take you into the woods, and then we will put on a little show for you. And you will laugh.
David Miliband isn't real
It is the bleak, chilly summer of 1978, and Primrose Hill is under siege. A fortified citadel of flowerbox houses aches with quiet fret, while down in Chalk Farm and Camden Town a crude Amoco Cadiz-tide of punk is lapping bitumen-black against their toes. The kids these days – they're spitting on each other to say hello, they eat live rats, they swap VD like Panini cards, and there's no love any more, only leather and swastikas, they're all getting off on the mutual infliction of pain. And then the worriers look at their own children, jelly-eyed and milk-happy, and think: what will happen to them? We're at the end of something. The winter about to arrive is already seeping into its past; icicles claw into the heart of July, and everyone somehow knows that when the sun starts to sink this year it might not rise again for two long decades.
Ralph Miliband is reading in the garden, tapping cigarette-ash into patio puddles that glitter with a dying age's sickly-grey sky. He's hardly had time to register the strange young men in mohawks gobbing phlegm on passers-by, he's already accepted that however informed his analysis of the political situation London will always baffle him, that his adopted home still grunts danger whenever he shuttles back from lecture tours in the cloistered sycamore-shade of New England. But even in this politico-prepubescent tumult it's impossible to ignore the facts: something is clearly wrong with eight-year-old Ed, his firstborn and only son.
Marion, for her part, is worried to bits. It's normal for children to have imaginary friends, even at Edward's age, but he's doing it all wrong. For a start, David is older, and all Marion's research at the LSE library informs her that this shouldn't be the case. Edward doesn't blame his made-up brother for pranks and mishaps, because there aren't any; Ed is such a docile boy, quiet and conscientious, eating his vegetables and eagerly sitting down to do all his homework (which also worries her, a little; she remembers what happened to good and obedient people not so long ago) – and when he gets his praise, because regular affirmation is so important for a growing boy, he always says the same thing. Oh, it wasn't me, I'm no good at school, David did it for me. It was David who helped with the dishes, it was David who drew that nice picture, it was David who tidied my room, David David David. She's had to tease out little details about this son she never knew she had, piece by piece – Edward realises that nobody else can see his brother, but that's why David does so much helpful work around the house; he wants to be recognised, he wants them all to be a family. But David bullies him too, David tugs on his ears and calls him stupid, weak, useless, and Edward can only agree. All through the spring she relayed this to Ralph in those long late night transatlantic phone calls, and he'd always said not to worry, it's normal for children to have imaginary friends. And then one night, curled up safe and warm on the trembling balance between storytime and sleep, Edward had muttered: goodnight David. David does everything. One day I'll kill him.
Ralph always tried to be a kind father, even an indulgent father; he loved his son, he'd dedicated Marxism and Politics to him, and he could hardly wait until the little fidgeting creature in front of him was old enough to disagree with it. But he was also a good Leninist, of a sort, and he knew that sometimes one had to be harsh; some brief, scientifically applied harshness now might just be able to remove any need for all the kindness and patience of psychiatrists and clinicians for decades to come. So he calls Edward out into the garden and sits there, one leg folded over the other, a book splayed open over his knee, the pose of a man who has better things to do, and says: Edward, it's time we had a chat about this David character. The change is immediate. Edward stops twitching, he sits bolt upright as a flash of utter terror floods his big brown eyes with black. And it's strange; the air outside is dead and perfectly still, but shadows seem to be moving across the walls of the house. Yes? says David, and for a moment Ralph forgets what he was supposed to say. Young Edward still seems out of sorts, but thirteen-year-old David is perched nonchalant on the edge of his chair, picking at his toenails. It's the fifteenth of July, his birthday, and tonight the whole family is going to Marine Ices to celebrate. They'd planned it for weeks. Could Ralph really have forgotten that he has two sons, that he's always had two sons?
One thousand years ago the people that lived on this hill would scatter salt on their doorsteps as a barrier against the ælfe, but Ralph Miliband knows that all history is only class struggle. Thunder bellows over Primrose Hill, and in the park the cuckoos in their trees scream their victory in hideous unison.
The early twenty-first century was a time of incredible ethnological fecundity; perched on the far edge of the great era of demicentennial revolutions and counter-revolutions that started in the late eighteenth century and would come to end in the grand catastrophe that it had always predicted for itself, the years between 2010 and 2020 saw an immense flowering of chiliastic prophecy, cults of personality, interpretative schemata, fantastical creatures, and hero-figures. In this study I wish to focus on one particular such myth, which was briefly present among a small and largely unremembered tribe calling itself the Parliamentary Labour Party (rough translation: 'the council of chieftains of those who till the soil'). The hero-cult of David Miliband is remarkably developed for its time, a period in which most myths were provisional, intended to be of use to a singular instant, and speaking to neither future nor past, perhaps indicating exogenous origin or a refracted version of narratives from earlier, more sophisticated eras.
The story of David Miliband describes a struggle between two cosmic brothers, one good and one evil; the evil, younger brother seduces the people of the tribe, and convinces them to band with him to defeat his older sibling, who is forced into exile, journeying across the seas to the West. As he departs, the good brother curses those who have betrayed him; thereafter they enter a fallen state, the earth does not yield up its fruits freely, the land is beset by natural and human catastrophe, and the tribe will be persecuted wherever they go. Redemption can come only when they have purged their tribe and their souls of this original wickedness; at this point the vanquished brother will return from across the sea to lead them once again to victory. Crucially, this return was not placed in some far-flung future, but was expected (despite the presumable antiquity of the mythic events) to be perpetually imminent and eternally immanent; any moment could bring salvation from evil.
This narrative has a number of important antecedent: the theme of an antagonistic duality out of balance with itself could be considered as a continuation of the Zoroastrian and Yezidi traditions of the Near West; a Levantine heritage is also manifest in its figuration of a returning saviour, although this is of a type more similar to myths of the Far Western Americas. (Some scholars have attempted to draw a parallel to the Biblical narratives of Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, hunter and agriculturalist – note the identification of David with a banana and his brother with a bacon sandwich – however. it should be noted that here the scriptural principle of ultimogeniture is reversed, with the younger trickster-brother a figure to be despised.) My general contention is that the David Miliband myth is, at root, a solar myth, in which the westerly setting of the Sun and its eventual reappearance is cast as a metaphorical vehicle for redemptive, apocalyptic hope.
As always with this kind of study, we must be on guard against any kind of reductive literalism. It may be comforting to ascribe a kind of primitive credulity to group such as the Parliamentary Labour Party, but such tribes often have a sophisticated oral culture and a remarkable level of self-awareness about the social function of their mythic apparatuses. It's very likely that none of the people who told the David Miliband story, or who publicly wished for the hero's return, would have actually believed in his physical existence.
David Miliband ruined his chances of taking the Labour leadership when he was photographed holding a banana outside the party's 2008 conference. Suddenly he looked ridiculous, a clown cartoon, the banana-man, a figure as waxy and as primary-coloured as the fruit in his hand. We would be in error to not consider the deliberate responsibility of the banana in all this, the possibility of a vegetable intervention in human political affairs, the expression of a long musaceous plot.
It's well known that the banana plant is incapable of reproducing by itself: centuries of selective breeding have made its fruit entirely seedless, a long sugary appendage the blind, crazed, wordless organism endlessly extrudes without ever being able to know why. Only human labour, cutting and splicing, can reproduce the banana, and even then its vast genetic uniformity leaves it vulnerable to every kind of parasitic disease. The banana, mushily phallic, the great agricultural desideratum, the object of salivating desire who totemic presence crushed Latin American social democracy again and again over the twentieth century, is entirely sterile. A synthetic monster, a fruit tending towards the apocalypse. When the human species finally goes extinct, we're taking the bananas with us. Most other forms of life are horrifying insofar as they present a potency alien to all human understanding; the banana is horrifying in that its weakness is all our own.
Bananas rot fast; they love decomposition, they love to fall apart. The banana-phallus, the thing that everyone wants but which you don't have, your dick shrinking and liquefying and blackening into a putrid stump throwing up clouds of tiny burrowing flies. That moment with the banana was a visual gaffe, but how would a banana proceed except by failing at every turn? Examine the connections. The CIA overthrows democratic governments to protect banana plantations; David Miliband quits British politics to become president of the International Rescue Committee, a charity founded by Trotskyites but occasionally accused of operating as a CIA front organisation. The stink of rotting bananas hangs in the air long after you've thrown the things out, and Westminster still can't seem to scrub a Miliband-y whiff out of its crumbling halls. David Miliband is long, and curved, and ever so slightly yellow. David Miliband has two adopted sons, which is commendable, but the fact remains that he was unable to produce children through ordinary sexual processes.
Is David Miliband a banana? What's under that waxy-smooth skin, once you peel slowly and see? Did we domesticate the bananas, or have they been waiting for a very long time, ready to start ruling over us?
The Harambe variations
INTRODUCTION, or GORILLA ZERO, the META-APE OF UNDERSTANDING: Harambe in the chaos of the world
Harambe is the dead ape that will not die. It's been months now since the Cincinnati Zoo ruthlessly dispatched its prize 440 lb Western lowland gorilla with a single deadly gunshot after a three-year-old boy fell into his enclosure, but his name lives. During the recent parliamentary elections in Australia, many voters wrote 'Harambe' over their ballot papers, with one telling an Independent journalist, who appeared to take it in full sincerity, that this was because 'we Aussies feel our government should have done more to save Harambe and now we're voting for his corpse.' In Ohio, a street was renamed 'Harambe Drive' on Google Maps after multiple reports to the company from three local teenagers. 'Bush did Harambe' signs appeared at the Republican National Convention. 'Dicks out for Harambe' has become a global cri de cœur. Clearly something has happened, and is continuing to happen. Isn't it natural to want to explain?
At the start of this month, an undergraduate student at the New School for Social Research called Alexander Fine wrote a short blog post about the enduring legacy of Harambe, noting that the people most fascinated by the gorilla tended to be on the political left, and attempting to draw some kind of relation between Harambe and its wider social and political context. 'Harambe memes,' he wrote, 'reflected, and continue to reflect, the left's disillusionment with our political reality and the media at large. The left keeps Harambe alive because we see ourselves in the dead ape. Harambe's death was inevitable, and so too was the defeat of an ageing presidential candidate who identified as a socialist.' It's hard to remember what else he wrote, because the post was quickly deleted – it became the subject of a mass outburst of derision; there was something in this form of interpretation that was recognised as being fundamentally inappropriate. Fine's essay was judged to carry an unacceptable excess of thinkpieceiness, to be uncomfortably commingling the weighty and the ludic, to deal with something inherently silly in far too serious a manner, even despite its evident playfulness. It was agreed to be a bad take. But why?
It's not as if other attempts haven't been made to ask the same question, of why people remain so attached to Harambe, or why he's still funny, without generating the same backlash. See, for instance, a recent essay by Brian Feldman in New York Magazine, which does much the same thing as Fine did, without attracting any of the same scorn. Feldman attempts to classify the Harambe memes (they 'aren't the topical equivalent of dead-baby jokes; they're fairly standard internet non-sequitur nonsense humour'); he relates them to current events and to asymmetries in the discourse (noting, for instance, their echo of Cecil the Lion memes); he even situates his discussion within a broadly Marxist framework. If there is a central difference between the two interpretations it's this: Fine situates the death of Harambe within the political order and sensuous reality; he relates the loss of an ape to the other senses of loss that dominate the experience of the twenty-first century; he approaches Harambe as an overdetermination, a sign that points to a phenomenal referent. Feldman, on the other hand, situates the death of Harambe within a network of other memes. In other words, to draw meaning from a sign is tacitly forbidden, to present the world as being explicable through signs is classed as a risible proposition. Signifiers relate only and always to other signifiers, and Harambe has become a metasignifier, taking on a Barthesian dimension of myth. To say that Harambe must be a symbol for something, that the fascination with Harambe points to something else, is a sacrilege.
This is not an essay about Harambe, the ape who died, but one about interpretation, the ways in which people take the raw material chaos of the world and fashion it into something meaningful. I'm not interested in denying the dominant position that Harambe can only be meaningfully related to other signs, only in testing it or situating it; all I want to say is that a silverback gorilla is a very large animal, and it can carry many things.
The NAÏVE, MAGICAL, or PRESIGNIFYING Harambe; the APE OF SIMILITUDE.
(Humour: Blood. Element: Air. Planet: Jupiter. Gemstone: Sand.)
The magical ape begins in curiosity and terror. The curiosity of the child, looking into the enclosure and unable to differentiate between the friendly monkeys of cards and cartoons and the brute sweating thing before him. The terror of the child, taking its first lesson in depth analysis as a creature beyond language drags him through the water by the legs. The curiosity of the ape, padding down to sniff at this tiny, fragile thing of a type he'd seen before, but only ever seen, as if through a television screen, now tumbling from image to object. The terror of the ape, rattled by the screams from outside his cage, puffing himself up, ready to deliver death or be dealt it. The terror of the parents, the terror of the zoo authorities, the terror of the marksman. And then the questions: was Harambe threatening the child, or protecting him? Is a gorilla's life worth more than an infant's? The body of a gorilla is strong, and any number of interpretative schemata can tense or flex under his skin.
The first ape is the visual ape. Under its regime symbols do not simply emerge through mimesis or signifiers through onomatopoeia; the ape beheld by the eye codes a world in which words and things endlessly refer back to one another. Prior to the initial phallic signification the snake is shaped after its own name, while the penis leaks poison in imitation of its zoological archetype; there's no genitality in the Garden of Eden. Oedipalisation occurs only when the child crawls into that enclosure in the Cincinnati Zoo: now we're faced by a dyad, the child and the gorilla, the child and the father. On the terrain of magic or similtude an ape is a visual intensification of the father, physically terrifying, hirsute, a potent castrator. Here the principles of Darwinian evolution are only a minor feature of Oedipus: the ape is the father of humanity. Remember the originary father in Freud, half-man, half-ape, pure threat and pride, who must be killed by his weaker, more glabrous sons. Only then is the father mourned, and his arbitrary law incorporated into the psyche.
But animals are also gods or totems, and God the Father is also the paternal superego. Pure identity, without representation, without one prior to the other. Christ on his cross cries out: eli, eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Was he not told the entire plan? The death of Harambe is a blasphemous inversion of the passion of the Christ; here it's the father, and not the son, who dies for our sins. The name for this heresy is patripassianism, or Sabellian modalism, an immanent possibility in Christianity denounced since Tertullian, and endlessly produced in its denunciation. The Trinity, Sabellius declared, is only a mask, describing aspects of one person. He could not bring himself to say it, but the implication is unavoidable. The Godhead in its entirety suffered and perished on Golgotha. It's easy to see why this doctrine prospered, and why it was so ruthlessly stamped out: this is the Oedipal fantasy, the cannibalistic feast of the first father. They killed the ape in Cincinnati, and as they did so they unleashed the vastness of a heretical third-century theology; we are fascinated by a dead gorilla, because something that started two thousand years ago on a hill outside Jerusalem is now finally complete.
The CRITICAL, PRODUCTIVE, or REVOLUTIONARY Harambe, the APE OF TUMULT.
(Humour: Melancholia. Affect: Embarrassment. Constellation: Pisces. Gemstone: Ruby.)
Six days before the death of Harambe, two lions were shot dead by a zoo in Santiago after a man climbed into their enclosure, intending to commit suicide. There was, briefly, an explosion of anger at the zoo. Why the ape? Why not the lions? Why Harambe?
For much of his life, Georges Bataille was obsessed with the anal scrags of great apes. In The Pineal Eye, he describes a tropical sacrifice ceremony: a gibbon is buried alive, head down, with only the 'bald false skull' of its anus protruding; a nude woman crouches over it and 'the beautiful boil of red flesh is set ablaze with stinking brown flames.' Later he declares that 'the little girls who surround the animal cages in zoos cannot help but be stunned by the ever-so lubricious rear ends of apes.' In The Jesuve, he notes that with a hint of sadness that 'anal obscenity, pushed to such a point that the most representative apes even got rid of their tails (which hide the anuses of other mammals), completely disappeared from the fact of human evolution,' but takes comfort from the fantasy of a new sexual organ located in the human forehead. (It could be added, after Deleuze and Guattari, that 'the first organ to suffer privatisation, removal from the social field, was the anus… it is the anus that removes and sublimates the penis.') The obsession with apes is an obsession with a brutal and a terrifying freedom we've lost long ago.
We have done terrible things to the animals: most of them are wiped out and gone for good; some are slaughtered by the billions, mulched up and turned into hundred-gram increments of edible slurry; a few still sulk in the furthest wildernesses and the deepest oceans, hunger-crazed and desperate. The unluckiest become objects of contemplation. Watch a pig in a pen and try to see that brutal and terrifying freedom; walk along the rows of cloistered cattle, each tagged and microchipped, each staring in dull incomprehension, a living thing in a hard shell of cruelty, its feed dispensed by computers, its milk sucked out by machines, its death decided by algorithms, and try to find an erotic thrill.
But at the same time, an ape hovers on the edge of meaning. There is another gorilla, Koko, which has been taught basic sign language; not only can it signify, it's capable of the rudiments of abstract thought. This is the ape as metaphor; the political ape. Killing a lion represents the cruel mastery of animals by humans, a kind of heroic mastery, with all that implies – in many societies only the king could hunt a lion. The decision to shoot a gorilla with a sniper rifle, on the other hand, represents the subjection of rational beings to the principle of reason. There is no heroism, not even a transcendental subject; only system. Aren't we all, in some way, trapped in an enclosure, with the marksman's single shot – delivered, of course, for very good reasons – always a possible threat? As Baudrillard writes, 'animals have preceded us on the path of liberal extermination. All the aspects of the modern treatment of animals retrace the vicissitudes of the manipulation of humans, from experimentation to industrial pressure in breeding.' But when it happens to an ape – an ape with a name, no less – it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that we are not free. We say Harambe's name because he is the hero we lack, because he is the sign of our own unfreedom. We say Harambe's name because the new orifice Bataille imagined really has opened across our foreheads, plugged in to the internet, and that's the name it screams.
The DESPOTIC or PARANOID Harambe, the APE OF FIXATION.
(Humour: Choler. Voltage: 240 V. Disposition: Agitated. Gemstone: Topaz.)
It's possible to discern several stages in the general reaction to Harambe's death. First, the non-ironised, the determinate, the unfunny. Was what the zoo did justified? Donald Trump said yes. Others said no. Many were furious, petitions were signed, there were calls for the child's parents to face criminal charges. This first movement was also the last phase in which it was at all possible to talk about image and object. Next, hyperbolic descriptions of animal slaughter at the zoo. Instances overwhelm. 'Zoo employs troop of insane hollering teen infantry to ride multiple M1 Abrams tanks through lemur enclosure, shooting them with the tanks.' 'Child Plays Calypso On Ancient Galapagos Tortoise's Shell Before Zoo Crew Obliterates Beast With M-4s.' 'The gorilla was killed by a tungsten rod dropped from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit over the zoo.' Then, rewording song lyrics to be about Harambe – but this intentionality is anaemic and ironised; the songs are not about Harambe so much as the word Harambe, and a set of other words that have come to coalesce around it. This advanced form marks Harambe in the purity of its irony: a signifier without any signified whatsoever.
The ape is simply not there; this is Feldman's ape, the mythic meme-ape, the ape as empty signifier. Its differential nature is expressed not as a relation between signifiers but as one between 'Harambe' and the systematicity of the signifying system itself. As Laclau points out, however, the outside which is from within the system constituted as 'pure negativity, pure threat to the system' is in fact 'the simple principle of positivity – pure being.' Harambe therefore eventually comes to signify the immanent positivity of ironic superimposition; performatively, in its discursive rather than semiological meaning, it is invoked to signify the presence of an irony – itself an empty signifier. Something called irony occurs, but rather than being in the form of any kind of antiphrasis or anything that could be understood as a substitution of meanings, meaning itself is challenged by its other.
But then something unusual occurs. The current moment – dicks out, signs at protests, streets renamed – is marked by a return to veneration of the dead ape, a kind of dialectical recuperation of the first phase. The living and dying animal itself returns, but here no longer as an event to be coded by interpretation, but an interpretation by which to code other events. The moral question of whether his shooting was justified is no longer in effect; in fact, the zoo and the child and shooting have disappeared entirely. We are angry that Hillary Clinton refused to mention Harambe in her acceptance speech. We are worried that North Korea is testing new ballistic missiles, and Harambe is not here to protect us. We wonder, in times of crisis, what Harambe would do. Word and thing are reuinited. This is the point at which the Harambe thinkpieces proliferate, attempting to interpret the phenomenon. But all such attempts at a transcendental critique necessarily fail, because the dead body of Harambe has become isomorphic with the heuristic as such; we are in Harambe, we cannot hope to think outside our present Harambe.
The NIHILIST Harambe; the APE OF DISAPPEARANCE.
(Humour: Phlegm. Articulation: Multifoliate. Sex: I've. Gemstone: Space Junk.)
I love Harambe, the ape who died. I love the dead ape Harambe.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl