I am reposting two of my 2022 posts. Not to say I told you so. To say that I told you that David-Wallace Wells told you so.

And—

Relatively nuanced discussions elsewhere.

Just because Republicans are using this news to say bad things does not make this news a bad thing.

The good news is a good thing.

Despite everything.

My brilliant colleague Greg is a cartoonist for the New Yorker:

Keep keeping it real, party persons.

I knew British-American relations were close enough to merit cute shorthand: in the biz, they call it The Special Relationship.

I would’ve told you that Britain, for sure, was our closest European ally.

Guess what!! It was Denmark!!! PAST TENSE.

Since 9/11, Denmark has adhered to so-called Super-Atlanticism3, which makes alignment with the U.S. its foreign-policy priority.4 The country sent thousands of troops to serve in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Fifty-two Danish soldiers died in those operations—significant losses in a country with a population of only six million.5

Super-Atlanticism! On purpose!! FOR YEARS.

Among NATO allies, Denmark maintained the highest level of popular support for the mission in Afghanistan, even though it sustained the highest number of fatalities per capita.6

Denmark loved us. They loved us and we threw it away.

Danes have been particularly stunned by Mr. Trump’s taunts that Denmark relies on “two dog sleds” to defend Greenland.

“It’s like fifth graders bullying the small guy in the corner,” said Company Sgt. Maj. Bager, the Danish soldier who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Danes in his unit died during his 2009 deployment to Helmand Province in Afghanistan, he said, and the rhetoric from the White House hurts.

“First time you get disappointed, then you get angry, and then you start feeling sad, you know?” he said. “I can’t remember when we haven’t been with you. You asked us to go. We went.” You asked us “to send airplanes, we sent airplanes.” Denmark, he said, “never said no.”7

By the time I got to the part of the article where the Danish veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan says, “I can’t remember when we haven’t been with you. We never said no,” I almost started crying.

And I’m not known, particularly, for my support of the troops.

As I now find myself detained, AGAIN, by a person from Porlock, I must leave you simply with the text of my colleague’s mug:

DICK CHENEY DIED ON THE DAY THAT ZOHRAN MAMDANI WAS ELECTED MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY, NOVEMBER 4, 2025

🇺🇸

It started with a dispute about turning off the lights.

Everyone sleeps in large rooms. It has this advantage over hostels in Newark: no bunk beds.

Sometimes the night staff are vigilant and make sure every room turns off their lights at midnight. Otherwise, the situation is up to the social consensus of the room’s occupants; anyone who wants to can hit the light switch by the door. Occasionally, conflict ensues.

I wanted it to be dark so that I could try to sleep, but I was too scared to participate in the darkness debate: after all, I was literally surrounded by poor people. By homeless men! (Better to worry about them than to admit to my innermost self that I am a Poor Person Who Is Homeless.)

There was a drunk-seeming black guy whose bed was close to the door. This gave him disproportionate power over light. He was generally unruly; earlier in the evening, I’d seen him try to explain to a Hispanic man that 1. The United States is better than other countries, and 2. Other people shouldn’t come here. I remember him as the Drunk Black Patriot (DBP).

In most American contexts, being black puts you at a disadvantage. (News at 11.) The situation in the shelter is more complicated. No one is white. Except for Alex. One of the only times I ever saw another white guy, he tried to give me a sympathetic look. A look that said, “Can you believe WE’re in here?” I tried to meet his glance with a counter-glance that said, “I reject your premise as well as your conclusions.” Probably I mostly looked Afraid.

Over the dozen or so nights of my Residency at the shelter, scattered widely across the last couple years, some things remained the same. The largest number of occupants were Latin American delivery riders, with many West African migrants as well. I’d guess the native-born population of the shelter at no more than half.

This is the context in which DBP turned the lights back on after midnight.

Thankfully, someone turned them off again.

…but DBP, defiantly, turned them back on.

This continued back and forth. Finally, darkness prevailed. The lights remained off.

The arc of history is long. And it… gets lost, sometimes.

DBP wasn’t going down without a fight.

Into the darkness, his voice emerged:

“America.”

No response.

“…America.”

Can’t we sleep, yet?

“…AmERICA.”

Good god, man. Don’t you even realize that the traditional jingoistic interjection is “U-S-A?”

I was much too scared to say anything, but my mental state was fragile. I feared for my sanity if I was unable to sleep. Maybe DBP will just get tired, finally? And pass out?

…

“AMERICA!”

…

Fuck.

Still no response.

And then, from the darkness, a hero emerged. A voice in the wilderness. A fearless delivery rider who had heard enough.

…

“…Ecuador.”

…

No fucking way.

…

“—America!”

…

Louder now.

“EcaDOR.”

…

“—America!!”

…

“ECUA-DOR!”

At this point, Ecuador and his buddies are just cracking the fuck up laughing. This, finally, proves too much for DBP. He retires for the night, thank the gods. I fell asleep in the shelter in the most unlikely way: with a smile on my face.

Wherever you are, brave rider, I thank you. You, and the very nation of Ecuador.

By which I mean: Ecua-DOR!!

If you secretly have a HOUSE, stay OUT.

The second funniest thing about the homeless shelter is Nothing. (Lol.)

Actually that’s not true. The second funniest thing about the homeless shelter is that I once Instagrammed a broken fidget spinner on the sidewalk near Atlantic Avenue. “This city will eat you up, kid.” That was my caption. I was on my way to work at a marketing agency.

~Seven years and one novel coronavirus later, in 2024, I walked down that same sidewalk, crossed Atlantic Avenue, and walked into the Armory shelter. The good news was, I wasn’t trespassing. The bad news was, I wasn’t trespassing.

For two years I’ve tried to make a life in New York City with the money I make at a job I enjoy (bookstore). I’m paid $20 an hour. My plan was, do the job and write on the side until writing on the side started making me real money.

I could list the problems with that plan, but to save time, I’ll list the things that make sense. (There’s nothing on the list.)

The king of problems is rent. Three or four thousand dollars a month for something comfortable. But I’m a WRITER. I don’t NEED something comfortable. I have ART. I’ll get someplace AFFORDABLE.

And I did. Affordable is a hostel in Newark. (Not the good part of Newark.) The typical guest is an Uber driver from a troubled country. I am assigned the bottom bunk of a bunk bed. The top bunk contains the other typical guest: a person watching TikTok, eating snacks chosen for audibility, and not sleeping.

This costs $1,000 a month, unless you’d like to be close to the train, or in the good part of Newark. If it’s close to the train, I can’t afford it. And the good part of Newark is called Hoboken, and I definitely can’t afford it. Meanwhile, I’ve written nothing.

No more hostel, then. My friend Ben, divinely, lets me crash on his couch. We have tremendous fun, Ben and I, we really do, talking, mostly, and watching Deadwood. This works as a stopgap for several days years, on and off but mostly on, but Ben, menschiest of mensches, nonetheless has a life of his own. And, you know, a girlfriend and stuff. I’m back on the hunt for a non-apartment. Meanwhile, I’ve written nothing.

There is no tidy upshot, at least not yet. I feel better when I write, so I’m writing. Greetings from Tremont Avenue, Boogie Down Bronx: private room, shared bathroom. ($1,300.1)

I’m allergic to numerology2 but round numbers are compelling and this morning I turned forty, through no fault of my own. I have a high tolerance for discomfort but my breaking point was about a year ago so I’m going to figure out how to make more money. Adversity is not, in my case, conducive to art-making.

Augustine of Hippo reshaped the future of the world at 40. Muhammad reshaped it again at the same age. Me? I’m reasonably confident I can secure a place to live on purpose by the time I turn 41.

My life has not turned out as I expected. My life has not turned out as I expected!

Which means I’m aging. Which means I’m lucky. And I learned something about myself.

I’m impossible to discourage.

I’m tempted to call that priceless.

I need to get in touch with Fox News personality Jesse Watters.

I would like to invite him to consensually fight me at a time and place of his choosing.

In this time of national derangement, I want to believe that sports retain the power to bring people together. And unlicensed pseudo-boxing is technically definitely a sport.

Why Watters?

The other day, Watters went on national television and referred to leftists as "rats."

I would like now to address this—to address him—directly.

Jesse Watters, you are not the first authoritarian nationalist I've wanted to box, but you are the only one who works a block away from my job. You also look approachable, despite everything.

People make fun of you for constantly smirking, but I have to stand up for perma-smirkers, being one of them.

Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, Steve Bannon: those faces. Those people look like God put them here to disprove His existence.

You, on the other hand, look like you might not be a demon in every part of the multiverse. Here your life is dedicated, with chthonic good cheer, to destroying Lincoln’s last best hope, the one he died for, the better angels you’re hellbent on deporting illegally—but you look like you could’ve grown up to be a bat mitzvah DJ instead, or a door-to-door solar-panel salesman, or someone’s son-in-law who was hated at first but eventually tolerated and finally welcomed when the other offspring married people who were significantly worse.

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Also, I think it could be a fair fight.

Like you, I am not old, and like you, I am no longer so very young. I weigh about 170, maybe 175, and I have no idea how to fight.1 In preparation for writing this I did nine push-ups (in a row) in the bathroom at the bookstore where I work, which is on 48th street in Rockefeller Center, half a block from Fox headquarters.

I'd suggest we fight in the spot where they put the Christmas tree, but Tishman Speyer security is impressively... proactive.

How about your place? We could fight in the Fox storage closet where you keep Herman Cain’s death mask. Or in the subbasement with the Westworld-style labs where blonde anchoresses are grown, trained, and destroyed. Or on the top-secret 13th floor where Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz are trying to think of words that rhyme with “hegemony” but all they can think of is “jihadi.” They’re ignoring the letter on the conference table, the one they’re afraid to open. It’s from their old boss, Dubya. He finally wants to know, so he asked his straight shooters: is it true? Afghanistan—is it really the graveyard of empire?

The point, Jesse Watters, is that we can fight wherever you want. (Consensually!)

Fox News personality Brian Kilmeade also works one block away from my job, and he recently advocated the extermination of homeless people, but he at least apologized, and anyway he looks vaguely old and sickly.

Like it's possible that Brian Kilmeade will eventually look like Cincinnati Bengals owner Mike Brown, which is to say he will look like Snoke.

Snoke, the villain of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, lives to destroy what remains of hope in the universe, making him so behaviorally similar to his dometwin as to nearly redeem phrenology.2

In the annals of understatement, my new champion is the quote from the family of Charlie Kirk’s presumptive assassin. They said he had recently “become more political.”

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Like literally everyone alive, I am frenemies with electoral democracy. A demagogue like Trump winning an election and then dismantling democratic institutions is the worst case scenario for our form of government: the nightmare that lowercase-r republicans have been warned about since Plato. The Republican Party is more than ready to dispense with democracy altogether, and Trump looks to be aiming for a high score on Robert Paxton’s stages of fascism.

We must resist peacefully for as long as peaceful protest is possible. Enough people have lost their lives to zealots and madmen; to add to the list erodes our position, rallies our enemies, and darkens our future. Cheering on assassins from our couches is not a resistance movement: it’s the Hunger Games.

A year ago a coworker asked me, “What has nonviolence ever accomplished?” Excluding MLK and Gandhi as low-hanging peaceful fruit, it would be a good time for Americans of conscience to learn about South Korea in 1987, or Portugal in 1974: nonviolent mass movements that toppled dictatorships and established democracies. Portugal’s, true story, was triggered by a signal on the radio, pre-arranged with a sympathetic DJ: the country’s latest entry in the Eurovision song contest.

Murder, meanwhile, is the practical enemy of even the most radical goals, and—guys!—completely morally wrong, even and especially as it is libidinally satisfying. When I get the courage I will write a post about how lionizing Luigi is a catastrophically bad idea, born of the immense and apparently self-annihilating privilege to have been born into a society that was not yet at war with itself; but at the moment I am too afraid of what my friends will think to publish it. In my circles, the range of Luigi sentiment runs from “adoration” to “aspirationally pregnant.”

When my grandfather was growing up, becoming a man and serving in the military were practically synonymous.

When my dad was growing up, that was no longer the case. But even then, no boy escaped adolescence without getting into fights with other boys.

Going to war, hell though it is, cures the delusion that war cures anything. Actual violence is a panacea only for violence’s notional allure.

As for my generation, I know plenty of men who, like me, have never been in a fight. Fighting gets you in serious trouble!

My whole life, I never understood why there used to be duels.

It seems insane—an insult was suffered so now maybe let’s die?

But as nonverbal channels of conflict are closed off, I almost wonder if the inborn hostile energy of masculinity is curdling, for lack of outlet, into something worse.

And at the risk of accidentally rewriting Fight Club from scratch, infinite-monkeys style, I’d like to experiment with this hypothesis as soon as possible.

Just not with guns! Jesus christ. Shooting an unarmed person is cowardly; calling for others to do it for you is doubly so.

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No. I’d like to test my hypothesis with sportsmanlike fisticuffs.

One Fox News host at a time.

Consensually.

Ideally, tomorrow.

When Gilgamesh heard this.
he looked at Enkidu and laughed:
”Look, my friend, how scared I am,
I am so scared I will not go! Bah!”

— Gilgamesh, trans. Sophus Helle

Fall 2020.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

The CEO of my email job suggests I quit.

He’ll even pay me to quit.

I’ve been working here for nearly five years without ever figuring out how to get much done. Call it ADHD, call it anxiety—my psychiatrist calls it both—but it is actually a relief to be told that the jig is up. In Office Space, getting paid without having to work feels at first like heaven; for me it feels like purgatory.

I wonder: Am I being too hard on myself?

As it turns out, I am not.

The CEO explains that, with budgets tightening, “We can no longer afford creative fellowships.”1

I agree to quit. Like LeBron taking his talents to Miami, I take my Creative Fellow-ship… away from… working. From having any job.

Understand, I’ve never gotten a severance before. I think I am rich forever. As a newly yet permanently rich person, I use my severance to pay for:

• Two deluxe Bibles.

  • I was raised by atheists and am myself agnostic but I’d seen so many remarkable Bible quotes used as epigraphs by poets. What’s up with that old book? To find out, I impulsively Amazon the three-volume box set of Robert Alter’s new translation of the Old Testament, plus a gilded King James with full-color illustrations.2

• Application fees for 26 MFA programs in creative writing.

  • I am rejected from 25 and get in off the waitlist at the program in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a place I know only as the involuntary sex-worker graveyard in the first season of True Detective.

• A Dyson fan.

  • Handsome!

• …

There’s no fourth item because at this point the severance is gone.

That and ten dollars will buy you a cup of coffee in the place you choose to live.

— My friend’s dad re: our podcast idea

Spring 2021. Williamsburg.

Two stimulus checks and a mental crisis later I am broke again.

My friend Austin says he can get me a job as a merchandiser at Scotts Miracle-Gro.

My sworn goal is never again to darken the door of an office. But the Scotts job is literally manual labor. Have I lost my mind? Wasn’t the purpose of my education to avoid this kind of thing? Didn’t my great-grandfather emigrate from Italy expressly to prevent this specific scenario?

It turns out to be the best job I’ve ever had. Austin and I get sweaty building displays of fertilizer and pesticides at Home Depots deep in Queens. We eat cheesesteaks. We talk shit and contemplate the universe in the Corollavirus, strangely happy to be stuck in traffic on the Kosciuszko Bridge.

Most importantly: no emails.

Fall 2021.

Lake Charles, Louisiana.

…

I’ll tell you when you’re older.

Summer 2022.

I am once again living in my parents’ basement in Cincinnati, Ohio.

I am, shall we say, uncomfortably comfortable.

My mom says I can stay as long as I want.

My dad says, “Are you thinking about working? [ever?] [again?]”

I am not.

I am starting a Substack.

I am emailing everyone I know.

Where this tends toward, no one can say.

— Daniel Boorstin

Fall 2022. Cincinnati.

I receive a Facebook message that is remarkable for not being spam.

A high school acquaintance has grown up to be a freelance reality-TV casting producer. She wants me and five of my college pals to audition via Zoom for a new team-based competition series. She keeps saying “CBS primetime” the same way my dad says “R1 research university.”

The show, Buddy Games, is something like Breakfast Club meets pickleball. Semi-athletic summer camp-style contests between dissimilar friend groups. The only requirement is an eagerness to be stereotyped.

Retired Wisconsin police officers who love bowling, for example. That’s one of the teams.

What team are we?

“Revenge of the Nerds.”

She reached out to me because Dartmouth is technically a member of the Ivy League, if only because they have yet to discover a legal way to remove us.

We would be, she cheerfully explains, underdogs. Easily underestimated due to 1. the perception of our poor athleticism and 2. the reality of our poor athleticism.

She is at pains to emphasize: some of the competitions will be mental, rather than physical, challenges.

Several of my best college friends agree to participate. I am going to be famous and my Substack is going to make me wealthy.

The majority of the team drops out the day before the Zoom audition when the contract is discovered to include insane language to the effect that CBS reserves the right to replace our faces, bodies, and voices with AI, without limitation.

The nerds, it seems, are big into reading.

I convince several college acquaintances to join the decimated team. We are scrappy. Two of them even played sports in college. We audition on Zoom, doing our best to resemble best friends.

Spring 2023. Still Ohio.

The Zoom audition fails.

If I don’t move out of my parents’ basement, I’ll never move out of my parents’ basement.

Austin says he can hire me for another summer of Scotts.

THAT MEANS WE’RE GOING BACK TO THE BIG APPLE, BABY.

And by we I mean me, AND BY ME I MEAN YOU, DEAR READER, IN OUR NEXT INSTALLMENT(S), Ishtar help me.

And please, Ishtar. Help me.3

The protest succeeded. We are in jail.

I cannot overemphasize how often we, the protestors, were, in our training, reminded—and subsequently reminded each other—of the supreme importance of maintaining silence in interactions with law enforcement. Silence or banalities, and even banalities were suspect. (Anything you say can be used against you.)

A chat in the back of the police van on the way to jail went something like this:

“Have you enjoyed the weather lately?”

“Wait. [lowers voice] Climate change…”

“…Does anyone know anything about sports?”

We did not.1

After several hours, we are released from jail.2

A few weeks after that, we are summoned to a meeting at the office of the district attorney.

We sit at a conference table. At the end of the table stands a representative of the state.

She says, “Do you know why you were arrested?”

Before I have time to remind myself to be silent or banal, an instant and shocking reply from the other side of the room:

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Early on the morning of the protest, we assemble in secret at Starbucks.

I’ve called in sick at work in order to volunteer with Never Again Action: Jewish activists against genocide.

(Though it feels like a cosmic error, I am not Jewish. Allies are, apparently, welcome.)

Our target is GEO Group, an operator of private prisons. They’ve drawn our ire by running ICE detention facilities: they are (profitably) executing Trump’s anti-immigration policies.

The GEO Group office is near LAX. I live in Los Feliz. In normal circumstances, one doesn’t drive to the airport from the east side of Los Angeles for anything short of the second coming, and then only if there’s free parking.

(If I were a comedian, I would have fun with Jesus: famously Jewish, and not the last to have mixed feelings about it. I think of Christ’s fellow Jews, only twelve of whom were moved to convert—what about the rest?

— Did you hear about the Nazarene? Turned water into wine!

— Sure. But did you taste it?)

Leaving Starbucks, my spirits are high. I am nervous, but adrenaline is doing its thrilling work.

I am rather more high-strung than your average bear. But today my companions—my fellow protestors—look distinctly more nervous than I feel. This is unusual.

As planned, we assemble slowly in the office building’s lobby, entering one by one or in pairs. We do our best to seem law-abiding—almost in love with the law.

The lobby is sleek; the windows are enormous. If shit goes down, it will be well-lit.

It’s time. We link arms at the elbow in front of the only elevator bank, forming a human wall.

The security guard, who was slow to notice us, asks what we’re doing. He is a man Of Color. I feel a flicker of moral ambivalence.

The guard asks again what we’re doing. He looks tired already.

A protestor explains that we are here against the GEO Group and ICE. The guard says that he understands. He even supports us. But again he must ask us to stop.

We decline. He calls the police.

So far, so good.

Officeworkers arrive. They are confused. The security guard explains that police are on their way. Most of the officeworkers cut their losses and walk away. Some linger outside, making calls. Some photograph us.

Eventually an officeworker decides he’s had enough. He tells us that he supports our cause. He tells us that he does not work for GEO Group. I realize that I have no idea how many companies have offices here—that he could easily be telling the truth.

But we remember our training. We are firm in our resolve. I say, “This is what we’ve decided to do.”

He seems to think that we are, in some way, kidding.

The officeworker tries to force his way through our wall of elbows and shoulders. Honorably, he chooses a pair of men to seek to breach. I am one of them. He fails.

When we rebuff him, he appears shocked. Finally, he walks away.

It is one of the most thrilling moments of my life.

Playing Red Rover as a kid did not prepare me for doing my job. But it did prepare me to stop this man from doing his.

This sequence—flatter, cajole, attempt to breach—is repeated by several more officeworkers over the course of the next hour. All fail. This includes at least one woman, who implements Sheryl Sandberg’s advice as literally as possible.

If nothing else, we have succeed in being a pain in the ass. A current of excitement runs through our line.

We are impregnable.

At which point the police arrive. Several of them.

The cop in charge is older than the others; his vibe is Baseball Dad.

He approaches me first. This I was not expecting.

You know you’re dealing with a ragtag/motley crew when I appear most likely to be reasonable. (Less flatteringly, I could’ve appeared most likely to fold under pressure.)

At our training a week ago, a volunteer lawyer explained that Los Angeles County is a decent place to get arrested. No guarantees, but we could reasonably—as peaceful protestors—expect mild treatment from police and prosecutors.

I am trying to keep this in mind as the cop, standing quite close, explains the severity of resisting arrest. Panicked thought: What if the lawyer was wrong? What if the lawyer wasn’t a lawyer, just someone’s unmedicated roommate?

The cop says that we’ve made our point. That it’ll be better for everyone if we start letting folks through.

Adrenaline, by this point, has replaced most of my blood. It steadies me and deepens my conviction: I can’t let the others down. I can’t be the one to break the line.

I watch myself say to the cop, “This is what we’ve decided to do.”

The next part happens quickly. He places a hand on my shoulder, gently but firmly turning me around. Handcuffs.

His speech about resisting arrest, I realize, was only more cajoling. Presumably, a protest ended by persuasion (or by feigned threats) means less paperwork than a protest ended by making arrests.

But we did not falter.

We are arrested.

We did it.

After the leader-cop reads me my rights—exactly like on Law & Order—he says something like, “Well done.” I’m beaming. I’m—a pleasure to have in class? Stockholm Syndrome doesn’t take long.

We are put into vans and driven to jail, where we are handcuffed to a metal bench.

At our training we were told that, while detained, we should speak as little as possible—banalities or silence. After all, anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.

But some of our number are naturally chatty. Others are urging them not to be. Tensions are rising.

One hour turns into two. The people handcuffed to this bench are beginning to strike me as crazy. Which is a bad sign, because I’m one of them.

My adrenaline is gone. Actually, more than that is gone.

I feel like the dog I grew up with, TJ—or, Turbo Joe. He’d sprint insanely around the house, around the yard, in circles, finally collapsing in happy exhaustion.

My anger is exhausted. I’m coming back to myself.

And I cannot avoid the feeling—awkward under the circumstances—that I dislike being handcuffed to a bench. Quite a lot, in fact. But it does give one time to think.

I’d never entirely made up my mind about whether ICE was committing genocide.

How, I wonder, do other countries approach these matters?

It was there, on that bench, in that moment, that the truth fell on my head.

The truth is that I know nothing about immigration policy.

At the end of the 2010s, I’m living in Los Angeles and losing my mind.

Living by myself for the first time since college, I am not getting over a breakup, but being blown through it backwards like Walter Benjamin’s angel.

At work I write a weekly company newsletter about Current Events. The newsletter is called Alex Explains the News. I keep it professional, against my nature, and politically neutral (if voice-y).

Privately I harangue anyone who will listen about the possibility that Trump will lose re-election and refuse to leave office; like Trump winning in the first place, this scenario goes unheeded in proportion to its plausibility.

I know few people here. I’m not in therapy. When I leave the apartment I’m alone in my car. Sometimes I’m alone in my car in the parking lot at Ralph’s, engine running, motionless, scrolling on my phone. Not for a minute: for much longer. For this I pity myself until I look up and see that I’m not the only one, which makes me pity everyone.

I know I should make new friends.

I stay home and read tweets.

Scratching an itch makes the itch worse. Worse than that, the relief from the first scratch is not matched by the second scratch unless you increase its intensity.

In this way, the more upsetting the tweet is, the better. Soon politically centrist opinions disgust me, then center-left opinions, and so on.

Ratchets only tighten. An anarchist on twitter explains, in a long 2019 thread I still think about, that everyone being radicalized by Current Events needs to understand that joining a movement against state power automatically invites state retaliation, like an immune response. Don’t be surprised if police harass you. You are being watched. For me that idea is flattering.

I’m starting to get literal heartburn, which I attribute to my coffee consumption. I replace the coffee with energy drinks from Ralph’s. Things worsen.

I discover that an acquaintance from high school, a gifted actor, has become a moderately popular YouTuber. His videos build a near-scholarly case that Trump is a full-stop fascist. Robert Paxton is quoted at length. Somehow, also, there are jokes. In a clever visual gag, his appearance in his videos is increasingly disheveled. In a non-clever non-gag, so is mine.

Faintly aware that the bottom is falling out, I wean off of energy drinks by ordering caffeine pills from Amazon.

The world increasingly fails to match my preferences. This increases my preference for failure.

An article by Malcom Harris explains that the United States is conducting genocide at the southern border. Life during genocide, he points out, “is not supposed to be worth living.”

Always on the lookout for reasons to avoid working, I begin to find my colleagues’ industriousness disgusting.

Even the most alarming tweets are losing their potency. Judgment at Nuremberg, the classic docudrama about the Nazi war crimes tribunal, is not available for streaming.

Immune response?

I discover that Judgment at Nuremberg is available, in dozens of tiny pieces, on DailyMotion, a fourth-tier platform presumably kept afloat by videos of ISIS decapitations. Over the course of many hours, I watch the fragments of Judgment at Nuremberg.

I learn that an anarchist in the Pacific Northwest has set fire to ICE buses and been killed by the police. I am listening to John Brown’s Body on YouTube and crying.

Zoom in far enough on one aspect of reality and that aspect becomes your reality. You’ve discovered the secret shape of the world. Like a fractal it reappears at every scale; like a fractal is it limitless. Functionally speaking, you are insane.

What happens next is cushioned, I believe, by inexplicable luck. My mom still calls me, for one. And two dear friends, fellow New York transplants, live nearby. They keep me tethered to the only reality worthy of the name: the social one, the world we share. These friends are immensely patient, even as my tethers fray.

In full lather, I write a gruesome edition of Alex Explains the News which seeks to raise the alarm of fascism amongst my coworkers. It is political, it is not professional, and it is… alarming. In my heart, this email will either get me fired or see me raised triumphant on executives’ shoulders as the new SVP of Being Upset.

In reality, I receive a cryptic “Nice email” from Kaitlynn and a “What was that?” from my boss. Alex Explains the News is over, and I still have a job.

I need to do something dramatic or I am going to burst. I’ve been nurturing the fantasy of punching Proud Boys long enough to realize that I don’t have the courage for it.

So I sign up as a volunteer with Never Again Action and begin training for a protest targeting the office of an ICE contractor near LAX.

When the organizer asks who among us is willing to be arrested, I am flattered by the question. I will be a “pleasure to have in class.”

I raise my hand.

So who really won?

(Ben. Still Ben.)

By now you’ve heard that inflation tipped the scales against Kamala. That case is plausible to me, especially because it is hostile to nearly all partisan narratives.

Inflation would be a convenient villain for small-government conservatives—if you can find any. (Honey I Shrunk the… Small-Government Conservatives?)

As the New Yorker recently put it:1

Inside the daily chaos of politics, there seems to be a new invisible foundation: the era of the era of big government being over is over.2

In short, inflation is inconvenient. Inconvenient for Biden’s infrastructure and stimulus legislation,3 and therefore for liberals and centrists; inconvenient for leftists who regard austerity as a failure of imagination; inconvenient for conservatives who read their victory as a rejection of wokeness; inconvenient for right-wingers who lionize Trump. Convenient, that is, only for me—Genius On Substack. Haha.

There are three things about Trump’s re-election that I find difficult to keep in mind simultaneously. Thing one is that the Democrats had one job, and they shat the bed with the lights on.4 Thing two is that Trump’s Trump-ness made the Democrats’ one job ungodly difficult. Thing three is that the Democrats, while out of power, must now help ensure that 2024 is not our last free and fair election. Taking whatever help they can get.

Perversely, Trump’s clear victory might ultimately serve Thing Three—which is the only one that matters now. Had Trump lost, violence from his supporters seemed all but inevitable. Now—careful what you wish for?—they have to watch him govern.

Four years from now, voters might again be eager for change. And if they aren’t, or if there’s any monkey business, I for one will be in Washington D.C. on January 6th, 2029, protesting peacefully. Aggressively peacefully.

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Losing this election sucked every kind of ass. That’s the cold fact of the thing.5

It is paradoxically difficult to win an election against someone who says, in effect, “Vote for me if you agree that elections are fake.” Persuading people of the virtue of your cause is hard enough without having to simultaneously persuade people of the virtues of persuasion.

Democrats could have excluded “Protect Democracy” from their platform, but if we’d excluded it and lost, we never could’ve convinced the future that such cynicism was justified. As it is, we can marinate in a signature pyrrhic victory defeat.

Trump becoming a politician is like when the British public voted to name a new government vessel “Boaty McBoatface”: once the idea of a joke becomes seriously viable, all serious options look like killjoys in comparison. (Volodymyr Zelensky, who first became famous in Ukraine as an actor in a television comedy about zany politicians, is a more palatable example of the same pattern.)

As a Cincinnati Bengals fan, I spend a grotesque amount of time thinking about the last play of the 2022 Super Bowl. We lost. Not by much. But I think about that “not much” so much that I can almost forget… that we literally and unambiguously Did Not Win.

For the record, this is an analogy between football and politics.

In each case, “what if” scenarios have a sickly allure. As does assigning blame.

Every new season that fails to deliver us to glory makes our loss more painful, not less.

But shit happens. Facing loss is part of adulthood, in all its rumpled glory. To accept loss is admirable—to embrace it, even more so. Amor fati, the ancients called it.

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We are delivered each day an untouched field of hours in which to use yesterday’s defeats for all they’re worth. The task is to ignore the past, except for its tactical value. And, as we test new ambitions, to ignore the future entirely.

It is—impossible! But take it from Donald Barthelme:

How joyous the notion that, try as we may, we cannot do other than fail and fail absolutely—and that the task will remain always before us, like a meaning for our lives.

Here’s another football analogy.

American Senators are usually re-elected, and “reelection rates in the House have never dropped below 85%,” with “highs of 98% in 2004 and 97% in 2016.”6

In sports, this is called home-field advantage. Season after season, NFL teams playing at home win more often than not.

Historically, the same applies to our Presidents. Once they’re elected, they’re likely to be re-elected. From 1936 til 2012, 78% of Presidents running for re-election won a second term.7

But we live in interesting times. Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020; in 2024, the incumbent party was defeated for a second election in a row.

The really wild thing, though, is that this has been happening all over the world:

Since the pandemic hit in 2020, incumbents have been removed from office in 40 of 54 elections in Western democracies, said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University, revealing “a huge incumbent disadvantage.”8

If the NFL had a season in which 51% of the home teams lost, it would be a curious aberration.

40 of 54 is 74%. That’s an extremely curious aberration:

[NPR] looked at advanced economies that have undergone elections since 2022, when inflation peaked in many countries. Incumbent leaders, parties or coalitions in more than 70% of the countries we analyzed lost the presidency or prime ministership in the time period we studied.9

This includes “both left-leaning and right-leaning” leaders.

So—the geopolitical weather was against the Democrats.

But even more than that, the last decade has been spectacular for authoritarians and dangerous for democracies.10 A given candidate losing an election is one thing; many countries today are losing the ability to hold elections in the first place.

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Rather than thinking, “How could this happen,” a better question might be, “How could the United States weather this crisis as well as or better than the sundry other societies caught in the same storm?”

Personally, I’m starting with more coffee.

Last week, when I wrote:

What if we instead handed the reigns of power to the next person who walks into Dunkin’ on Route 1?

What I meant was:

America runs on Dunkin.

I have thoughts and feelings about Thing One from the beginning of this post: the Democrats’ mistakes. I also have thoughts and feelings about the historical arc of democracy. And thoughts (and feelings) about how individual Americans can best weather this political, weather.

All is forthcoming in the near future, and every new subscription helps enormously. My INTESE-EST gratitude to everyone who has purchased one so far.

When 9/11 happened George W. Bush said Americans should go shopping.

Let me be the first to say that, when Trump is re-elected, Americans should go shopping. For Substacks to financially support. Mine, mostly.

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🫡💝🥹

Let my work begin here.

It is a fact that the people is sovereign: but this sovereignty never comes of age and therefore has to remain under the permanent care of a guardian: it can never exercise its rights itself without giving rise to limitless dangers, especially as, like all minors, it is easily fooled by cunning impostors, who are therefore called demagogues. — Schopenhauer

“But how are you doing?”

My girlfriend and I are asking each other with unusual frequency.

In part because Kamala lost. And in part because it is easier asking someone else how they feel than it is to describe one’s own feelings.

Today our feelings are bad.

But I have a hard time saying that I feel bad. Insanely, it feels to me like failure—even though admitting difficulty is the path to surmounting it. Luckily, it’s the only neurosis I have.1

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“Galvanized.” That’s what I keep saying. When the celestial Theodóra asks me how I’m feeling, I say feel galvanized.

And I do.

Feel galvanized.

Among other things.

(Bad’s one. That my hair looks spectacular even though I’m off work today and there’s no one to see it, is another.)

But if you’ll permit me the lowest form of rhetoric2—etymology—the origin of the word “galvanize” is an Italian scientist, Luigi Galvani, whose investigation of the effects of electrocution on animal carcasses inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

That’s actually true.

Am I Italian?

Yes.

Am I jolted?

Yes.

Less clear is whether I’m Dr. Frankenstein or his monster (or the pitchfork-wielding mob).

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When Hillary lost in 2016, both sides had cause for vindication; she won the popular vote, Trump won the election. That’s why 2024, not 2016, is the American Brexit. We went to bed Tuesday as the common-sense majority and woke up Wednesday surrounded and outnumbered, with aliens for neighbors.

William F. Buckley said we should replace the Senate with the first hundred names in the Boston phone book. He felt they would govern more wisely than our actual Senators. Actual Senators are, after all, out-of-touch elitists by definition.

What if we instead handed the reigns of power to the next person who walks into Dunkin’ on Route 1?

With the re-election of Donald Trump, this time by emphatic popular majority, Operation Dunkin’ groans to life.

We can look forward to four years of vicious infighting on the left. The funny thing is that that would have happened anyway.

We meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. — JFK, 1962

The presidential election may be considered as a time of national crisis.1 — ‘Democracy in America,’ Tocqueville, 1835

Robert Lowell said history is what we cannot touch.

But history has felt uncomfortably… present, these last eight years.

Experiencing history can be exciting. It can also feel like being digested.

Wild now to remember the premise of Fight Club.

       FADE IN

       EXT. MAIN STREET - NIGHT

       Late 1990s—the American middle class. 

       War stalks the land. No… 

       Hunger stalks the land?

       Pestilence? Stalks the land?

       …Political stability and
       steady employment… 
       STALK THE LAND. ✅

First rule of political stability club: as long as you have it, take it for granted.

They say the Chinese have a curse: “May you live in interesting times.”

Our times lack not for interest, fellas.

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Famous to goblins is a 2016 essay which called that year’s presidential contest the “Flight 93 Election.”

The gist was: Hey fellow conservatives—we’re losing. Culturally and politically, we’re losing. After eight years of Obama, things were bleak for the bow-tie set. So bleak that, for the hard-core, 2016 wasn’t just an election. It was win or die.2

Trump won, neutralizing the Flight 93 scenario. But when he lost in 2020, January 6th followed hard upon.

These clowns, it seems, were serious.

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Today, to me, is the Flight (2012) Election. Flight is a movie starring Denzel Washington as a talented airline pilot who is also a dire alcoholic. At the beginning of the movie, the engines on Denzel’s plane fail mid-flight, but he pulls off a miraculous landing and brings his passengers safely to the ground. Where he immediately faces prosecution and professional ruin, because you aren’t supposed to be drunk if you’re the captain.

Flight is about taking stock of reality, however uncomfortable. It’s about catastrophic failure—and how failure offers a portal to transformation. Ad astra per aspera, et cetera.

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In the city, Trump supporters are few, but they’ve grown louder and prouder. Maga hats are no longer rare. He will lose in New York by less than expected.

On the other hand, polls significantly underestimated national support for Obama in 2012. A similar dynamic may boost Kamala. (Fly, 2012.)

When Biden dropped out, I bet my friend Ben $20 that Trump would lose. I… now wish that number were smaller. But I wouldn’t change my pick.

I am resolved that it is impossible for Americans to appreciate how lucky Americans are. Here’s Tocqueville in 1835:

Until now, a great democratic republic has never existed. It would be insulting to republics to call the oligarchy which ruled in France in 1793 by that name. The United States is the first example of such a phenomenon. Now, in the half century since the formation of the Union, its existence has been challenged only once, during the War of Independence.

Has been challenged only once? In its first fifty years? Surely an American would have written: “Our republic had hardly taken its first wobbling steps when a leviathan of the Old World sought to crush it in the cradle.”

But Tocqueville was French. His world, his Europe, was one fucking war after another—and would remain so, the four decades after World War II excluded.

Three years after Tocqueville published Democracy in America, a young Abraham Lincoln addressed “the perpetuation of our political institutions”:

Why suppose danger to our political institutions? Have we not preserved them for more than fifty years? …We hope all dangers may be overcome: but to conclude that no danger may ever arise, would itself be extremely dangerous.

Lincoln continues:

That our government should have been maintained in its original form from its establishment until now, is not much to be wondered at.

See? American.

It had many props to support it through that period, which are now decayed, and crumbled away.

…Props? Crumbled, props?

Through that period [American democracy] was felt by all to be an undecided experiment; now, it is understood to be a successful one. Then, all that sought celebrity and fame and distinction, expected to find them in the success of that experiment… Their ambition aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no better than problematical; namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves.

Celebrity culture!!

They succeeded. The experiment is successful; and thousands have won their deathless names in making it so. But the game is caught; and I believe it is true, that with the catching, end the pleasures of the chase.

Tony Soprano: “It's good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”

Abe continues:

The question then, is can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that had been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot.

Abe! Meaning what?

Meaning that future Americans of ambition, perceiving “nothing left to be done in the way of building up,” will “set boldly to the task of pulling down.”

Lincoln foresaw this day.

It is for us, then, to meet it.

Aaron Boone — New York Yankees

Has cigarettes. Also, wants more cigarettes.

Kevin Cash — Tampa Bay Rays

Half Lego, half Ruffalo.

John Schneider — Toronto Blue Jays

Gigachad of the leprechauns / no one told him about football / protein Santa.

Brandon Hyde — Baltimore Orioles

“What do we do when we fall off the horse? We get back on. And we apologize to the horse.”

Alex Cora — Boston Red Sox

Kendall Roy if his parents had been nice.

Pedro Grifol — Chicago White Sox 

Not his fault he looks good in a suit, but he looks more like an owner than a manager.

Dress for the job—your boss, has?

Stephen Vogt — Cleveland Guardians 

Growing up, he was always told becoming a comedian was too unrealistic. So he became a terrifying and enormous bird.

Matt Quatraro — Kansas City Royals 

The postman in Grover’s Corners / the bartender in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Joe Espada  — Houston Astros 

“What did I say? I said, ‘If you don’t stop stealing second base, I’m calling the police.’”

Ron Washington — Los Angeles Angels 

Spent quarantine getting really into Ted Talks. Spent spring training making the team do likewise.

A.J. Hinch — Detroit Tigers 

Glenn Beck meets Donald Sutherland (RIP).

Scott Servais — Seattle Mariners

The governor, apologizing, unsure of his sincerity.

Bruce Bochy — Texas Rangers

King Lear (Disney Channel adaptation).

Text-only bonus round because I ran out of space slash jokes:

• Rocco Baldelli — Minnesota Twins

  • Aaron Roders meets Charlie Day.

• Mark Kotsay — Oakland Athletics 

  • Daniel Stern in Rookie of the Year.

Next up: the National League.

“T.G.I.F. folks, T.G.I.F. For those of you who might not know what that means: Thank God it’s Friday. Yah-huh.”

Accustomed to admonishment in our train announcements—“Stand clear of the closing doors”—such levity augurs only goodness.

But first, I’ve an itch to kvetch.

Seeing me approach, lips parted, a beleaguered acquaintance once said: “What the fuck is ailing you now?”

The popular singer-songwriter has a new album out today. As the name of the album is Tortured Poets Department, the paper of record dutifully called poets for comment.

My hackles were raised not by the album title—which I support—nor by the bemused reactions from the article’s quoted poets. My problem is this guy:

“Poets today take mental health very seriously,” Mr. Pardlo said, “and I find it a little troublesome that this poem seems to be romanticizing what are often diagnosed as anxiety disorders.”

Poets today take mental health seriously.

Is this the case?

I dislike the quote in part because it is hugely soft, but I am open to the possibility that I’m being unreasonable. Maybe I need to T.M.H.S. (Take Mental Health Seriously.)1

Let’s test the claim against other vocations.

Investment bankers today take mental health seriously.

Hm.

Baristas today take mental health seriously?

Okay.

CIA agents take mental health seriously.

Yahtzee.

A real-life CIA press release from November 2022:

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William J. Burns welcomed Dr. Jennifer Posa during a swearing-in ceremony last month to serve as CIA’s first-ever Chief Wellbeing Officer.

Dr. Jennifer Posa’s LinkedIn is a gas. When she was hired by the CIA, she posted the following (hashtags original):

I look forward to continued collaboration with longtime colleagues and new partners to ensure the advancement of the field of workplace health & wellbeing through evidence-based practice to drive innovation. #healthandwellness #employeewellbeing #organizationalwellbeing

Collaboration ensures advancement through practice that drives innovation. Good. Good!

A more recent post promotes the benefits of the CIA’s workplace “pedometer challenge.” The headline is remarkable:

As the good doctor says:

At CIA, our mission drives purposeful work each day and supporting a culture where high performers can be energized, inspired, and supported is a top priority.

Their mission drives purposeful work each day. Supportively supporting a culture of supporting regime change of socialist governments.

The New Yorker spoke to Dr. Posa last year:

“There’s an undercurrent of caring in the halls here,” she said.

An undercurrent of caring; a dash of mutual suspicion; top notes of moral injury.

“We’re here to protect and serve the country—but also each other. Wellness is safeguarding.”

The real 9/11 is the friends we made along the way.

“What enables performance in wellness and in life? It’s a competency, like a muscle.”

She’s the Jason Bourne of mixing metaphors. But we agree on one thing:

Cell phones and electronic devices are not allowed inside the Langley compound. “I was nervous about that,” Posa said. “But from a performance perspective there are a lot of benefits—nobody’s distracted, nobody’s looking at their phone under the table.” The ban, she continued, “can help us connect in ways that allow us to be truly present.”

Truly present with my coworkers at the bookstore today, Taylor Swift was on everyone’s lips.

“Did you hear? It’s a secret double album.”

Just as this is a secret two-part post. I missed you guys. Literally, hi.

1. She looks like the Statue of Liberty, face-wise, and she’s wearing a matador shirt. She’s a dancer. This is what people keep telling me. Not that she dances but that she is a dancer. (Later at the party, people danced in the living room. The dancer was in the kitchen, talking, permitting her wrists to be held.) The word dancer is spoken the same way my friend described her maid of honor’s mother as Chilean—“her mom’s Chilean”—friendly envy, glint of anger.

2. The dancer’s carriage reminds me of a Vincent D’Onofrio clip I’ve never been able to resurface. He’s teaching actors. He’s saying, “You’ve been told, haven’t you? Didn’t someone tell you? Acting”—his hands are in front of his hips—“acting begins here. Your groin. Your power is in your groin.” He stalks forward. His power is in his groin. At the beginning of this paragraph I misremembered the quote as “Hips, your power is in your hips,” which would’ve been bad enough.

3. In general, people at the party went to Bard. Tom, for example. When I told my friend Eva, who went to Bard, about my new friend Tom, she asked what he was like. I said he was feline and languid with big sad eyes. She said, “They’re all like that.” I assumed she was exaggerating until I met Jack and Finn and Cyrus.

4. Before the party began in earnest, Jack and Cyrus and I spoke haltingly in the kitchen about the future of the internet as it relates to artificial intelligence, a future of which we know nothing. We did the best we could.

5. Jack is charismatic in the manner of a young Christian Slater. He has permitted me to crash on his couch for three days, culminating in this party. My friend Ben said, “Three days? Doesn’t he like you?” before letting me crash on his couch for two days. This wasn’t Ben’s fault, a fact the paragraph acknowledges reluctantly.

6. In general, people at the party work at Metrograph, the chic downtown repertory cinema movie theater. Historically I’ve enjoyed telling people that Metrograph is staffed by the cast of Daria, but it turns out people are more cheerful when they aren’t working.

7. Not everyone at the party works at Metrograph. Jack is in the arts (nonprofit). Pansy writes about architecture. Her sister is a tutor. Esme has an unusual accent and a shambolic charisma. If that sounds like a lot of charisma for one party, it is.

8. When they are old, they will be everyone’s favorite old people. When I responded skeptically to an offer of mushroom chocolate, I was reassured that the chocolate itself was good, too.

9. As to whether ———— is still dating ————, reports were initially mixed.

10. Sabrina told me that if I loved Ashbery I should read the Berrigans—both Ted and his son. Glimmers of larger structures. At the bookstore where I work now, the architecture section has one book on bridges and dozens on communism.

11. Walking to Jack’s from the train, I realized I was only a couple blocks from the apartment where I first watched Game of Thrones. My then-girlfriend convinced me I should watch it and she was right. I was new to sobriety, to spending time on purpose. I was afraid I’d already met all the poets I’d ever meet. At her apartment it snowed for days. It was narcotic, the snow on the brownstones in the windows behind the screen. The binge itself. She wanted to tell me the most popular fan theory about the characters’ backstories; it would explain where the show was going. I asked her to wait. I didn’t know how much I wanted to know about the future.

Texting acquaintances in hopes of crashing with them proved both awkward and fruitless; I did not yet realize I was in my mid-30s, much less that my peers were too. Neither begging nor not-planning was working. I was ready to panic.

In desperation I found a hostel on San Vicente with good reviews and a charming name: Space Pods Hollywood. I’m thinking, hey, people love this sci-fi themed hostel—and it’s in the same neighborhood as the office.

When I arrived at the hostel I learned that “space pods” was a euphemism for bunk beds with privacy curtains, also that it was nowhere near Hollywood.

The next morning I’m thinking, hey, I’m practically a New Yorker—I love a good stroll. It was a brisk two miles from the hostel to the WeWork on LaBrea—and the scenery was, surprisingly, pleasantly residential. I couldn’t wait to tell my colleagues.

When I arrived at the office, my colleagues were disturbed that I had walked to work. Some were openly skeptical that I was telling the truth.

The skeptics, I later learned, suspected I was sleeping at the WeWork. This was untrue. I was, however, staying late at the office to binge Black Mirror on my work laptop in a small glass-walled conference room, usually with microwaved popcorn.

Why?

Because while Space Pods Hollywood was an acceptable place to sleep, it was not a nice place to spend time. Additionally, the office had popcorn (and a microwave).

In retrospect, it’s probably for the best that they thought I was homeless.

Do you really need a car in L.A.?

One of my coworkers was a fellow Brooklyn transplant. He not only offered moral support for my stubborn belief in legs, but even rode his bike to work from his apartment by the ocean. In short order, he was hit by a car.

I got a car in L.A.

Newly mobile, I left the hostel and Airbnb’d a spare room in Glendale from a nice Asian man whose kitchen featured a water-alkalization machine that cost several thousand dollars.

For me, the first upside of Glendale was that it provided pseudo-plausible water-cooler material for the cute Armenian coworker with whom I had nothing in common—Glendale being the global headquarters of Armenianism, Armenia excluded.

The other upsides of Glendale were its dueling be-fountained malls, the Galleria and the Americana. When, taking myself to a midday movie at a deserted Americana, I ordered a “large popcorn, large Coke Zero and—,” I was interrupted by the concessions worker:

“Slow down.”

In this way I discovered I lived in Southern California. The year was 2019.

CIA Director: What do you think of her?

CIA underling: I think she’s smart.

CIA Director: —We’re all smart, Jeremy.

from Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

That “Never Forget” became the de facto national slogan of 9/11 now strikes me as insane. Anyone in this country who was old enough to watch television in 2001 is incapable of forgetting. If we’d forgotten 9/11, maybe we would’ve forgotten to invade Afghanistan.

Alas, hindsight is 2020.

(This week there was a pickup truck parked on 48th street with a commemorative 9/11 license-plate frame. The actual license plate read NVRFRGV. Never forgive! So much for the Judeo-Christian tradition!)

I first heard 9/11 jokes in college. Knock knock. Who’s there? 9/11. 9/11 who?

—You said you’d never forget!

The problem with telling that joke at parties is not the one you would expect. The problem is that, by approaching the topic sideways, the joke attracts people’s unorthodox beliefs about 9/11.

And christ jesus, do people harbor unorthodox beliefs about 9/11.

Perhaps you are one of those people!

Here’s the thing. Governments lie. Power corrupts. Gulf of Tonkin, yellowcake uranium, FIFA. Skepticism of received knowledge is indispensable. And! The lure of ostensible secrecy, the promise of hidden information, is irresistible. Seductive, even. Pointing out that a particular narrative is convenient for (invariably vaguely defined) Powerful People has the shape of persuasiveness—but sometimes lacks its content.

All conspiracy theories share the same insane premise: that groups of people achieve shared goals on purpose. Think about that for a second. Have you ever had a job? Conspiracy theories are implausible not only for their implication of supernatural discretion on the part of the conspirators—they’re implausible because they pretend people know what’s good for them. The greatest lie the CIA ever told was not one of their (many) bullshit denials of (many, many) evil deeds: it was the idea that they’re good at their jobs.

The truly convenient narrative is not a story of magic secret supervillains. It’s the hope that someone, somewhere, knows what they’re doing.

I suspect 9/11 has attracted so many conspiracy theories because the plain truth is hard to swallow: we got our asses handed to us. The claim that our own government orchestrated 9/11 is untrue in its popular form—that George Bush, or whoever, knocked down the Towers. For some reason. Ennui, perhaps.

Definitely Bush, and not the guys who had been loudly wanting to Do Terrorism at us for decades, and who by 2001 had long since graduated to actually Doing Terrorism at us, including attacking the literal Twin Towers in 1993.

Meanwhile, the claim that our own government orchestrated 9/11 rather by accident and negligence is close to indisputable. Whose idea was it to give Islamic militias as much destructive power as possible? Ours, in the 1980s, in order that the USSR might lose its war in Afghanistan. Remarkably, it worked. Until it didn’t. (That part is 9/11, btw.)

Despite general institutional sclerosis at the end of the 90s, some people in the CIA and FBI knew that al Qaeda was planning a large-scale attack. But having a good idea and getting your boss to listen to you are two different things; getting your boss to act on it is yet another; and your boss getting their boss to stick out their neck is yet another. This is also effectively the plot of Zero Dark Thirty, transposed to the post-attack search for bin Laden.

Don’t get me wrong—powerful people do fucked-up shit every day. But no one is immune to office politics. Least of all actual politicians.

Let me stress. None of this is new. The claim that Jesus had no dad feels dubious, but it’s historically clear that there really was a dude named Jesus—which to me is never clearer than in accounts of infighting among his apostles.

Bonus literary example: though the Iliad is about the Trojan War, the Trojan Horse does not appear in the poem. The Iliad is—and this is true—largely about Achilles refusing to do his job because he feels disrespected by his manager.

The stated intention of the 1993 World Trade Center bomber—nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM—was to remove U.S. military bases from Saudi Arabia and stop U.S. support for Israel. In this, and in attempting to destroy the Towers, he failed.

Why did bin Laden and KSM do what they did? Their stated intention… was to remove U.S. military bases from Saudi Arabia… and stop U.S. support for Israel. The Towers fell. And they still failed.

Achieving shared goals on purpose is extremely difficult in practice—even for two of the most bizarrely successful conspirators in the history of the world.

No matter who you think your enemies are, I promise: they aren’t as powerful as they appear.

“Hope you had a great 9/11 this year” is definitely the wrong way to end this post, right?

Is “It’s 9/11 somewhere” better?

Excellent.

In the New York of the 2010s, pedicabs were uncommon and uninspiring.

Now: neon lights, fake lush flowers, tourists smiling.1 And music. The loud kind. You can tell it’s a strong hustle because their speakers sound pristine. George Michael never misses, but I was strangely moved to hear him booming from a rickshaw on Avenue of the Americas.

In this way the city sings. (Sing the city.)

They’re semiotically rich, these post-pandemic pedicabs. A bumper sticker depicts Walter White. A selfie backdrop says “U LOOK GREAT.” Side-by-side American flags.

The overall vibe is a lot of a lot.

Music taste varies, naturally. The Alicia Keys/Jay-Z [Song About New York] is ineradicable. One of the staple midtown pedicab guys plays Billy Joel exclusively. But my favorite so far is “Danza Kuduro,” a song that for me is a time machine. (It appeared on a 2010 album called, hilariously, “Meet the Orphans.”)

For many years the soundtrack to tourist Manhattan was the Godfather theme. For busking musicians, it was surefire. Now I find myself missing its ubiquity. But as Ian Malcom put it, life finds a way. That pedicab with two 🇺🇸s? On its bumper, a fake New York license plate reads “MAFIA.”

JOE MAZZULLA — Boston Celtics

Can’t believe his boss asked him to do something.

JACQUE VAUGHN — Brooklyn Nets

Your wife’s secret hall pass.

Tom Thibodeau — New York Knicks

Auto mechanic, the bad kind. Hates you, hates cars, loves crawfish.

NICK NURSE — Philadelphia 76ers

The rough draft of Bill Cowher. (Nick Nurse is an insane name for a person.)

DARKO RAJAKOVIC — Toronto Raptors

Agent told him this was a Marvel audition. Making the best of it.

BILLY DONOVAN — Chicago Bulls

WWII-era drill sergeant. Trying to be mean, he says your mother sometimes gets tired of making dinner but she’s doing her best, we all are, we’re going to get through this, together.

J.B. BICKERSTAFF — Cleveland Cavaliers

Hard to talk about his face when his name is so mismatched. J.B. is so folksy and Bickerstaff is so Hogwarts! Might as well call him Joey Crackleflame. Ricky Dragonmail. Ol Bobby Castlecliff. Big Tony “T” Mythrilhearth.

MONTY WILLIAMS — Detroit Pistons

Math professor; never wanted to be anything else. Funnier than he thinks he is.

RICK CARLISLE — Indiana Pacers

You cheated on every quiz when he taught precalc. Got away with it at the time, but your DUI case is going to trial and he’s the jury foreman.

ADRIAN GRIFFIN — Milwaukee Bucks

Saw the face of God and God was fugly.

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QUIN SNYDER — Atlanta Hawks

The AI-generated composite of every guitarist who appeared on VH1.

STEVE CLIFFORD — Charlotte Hornets

Is it racist to say he looks racist? Invented fishing.

ERIK SPOELSTRA — Miami Heat

Tinder bio: “Hurt me.”

JAMAHL MOSLEY — Orlando Magic

A Sim (from the Sims).

WES UNSELD JR. — Washington Wizards

Tired of wizard jokes and hats that don’t fit.

MICHAEL MALONE — Denver Nuggets

One of Jack Nicholson’s hitmen in The Departed. A reminder that the lyrically romantic tragedy of Irishness isn’t always lyrical or romantic.

CHRIS FINCH — Minnesota Timberwolves

Your boss’s boss’s boss. You only met him once and he was extremely nice, which is unnerving because every story about him is one of Lovecraftian horror.

MARK DAIGNEAULT — Oklahoma City Thunder

Not all white people look the same. That said, this guy, Will Hardy, Frank Vogel.

CHAUNCEY BILLUPS — Portland Trail Blazers

Taught Lil Nas X to ride a horse.

WILL HARDY — Utah Jazz

Still an Account Manager, which means it’s weird that his LinkedIn says Senior Account Manager, right?

Right?

Guys—

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STEVE KERR — Golden State Warriors

Just realized he could buy you and doesn’t need to haggle over price. Will haggle like his life depends on it; amusingly, it’s your life that does.

TYRONN LUE — Los Angeles Clippers

Hopes you’re kidding.

DARVIN HAM — Los Angeles Lakers

Currently behind you.

FRANK VOGEL — Phoenix Suns

Found out yesterday his dad wasn’t actually Special Forces or in the military.

MIKE BROWN — Sacramento Kings

In every other part of the multiverse he is a high school principal. Still feels like a glitch that he isn’t a principal in this one.

JASON KIDD — Dallas Mavericks

Head looks like a basketball, which is a little much.

IME UDOKA — Houston Rockets

Transferred to your school halfway through sophomore year; somehow already friends with everyone by March. God’s own best left striker; still not good enough to get your team above .500.

TAYLOR JENKINS — Memphis Grizzlies

Really good at asking how you’re doing, really good at remembering details from your life. You avoid him like your life depends on it.

WILLIE GREEN — New Orleans Pelicans

Just found out she said no re: prom. She wasn’t the one for you anyway, Willie!

GREGG POPOVICH — San Antonio Spurs

Kendall Roy’s uncle and my conscience.

(See also: NFL edition.)

SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.