Author: Antonia Malchik

My first semester of college, I had a neighbor who had a nice stereo system. I don’t know anything about stereo systems to I have to take her word that it was nice, or at least expensive.

My neighbor set up her CD player and speakers inside her closet, against the interior wall that separated her closet from my closet, and when she played music loudly, which she liked to do, especially at night, it thumped right into my room. Sometimes I asked her to turn it down, and at one point asked if just in general she could not turn the volume so high because it was just as loud in my room as it was in hers. Or even just keep it off at night. Her response was one of my first encounters with the feeling of entitlement that comes with having money: “What’s the point of having a nice stereo system if you can’t play it?”

I remember having a vague feeling of injustice, of thinking about shared space and why her right to play her pricey stereo system shouldn’t come at the expense of my right to quiet. (So began my long road to having no patience with libertarian ideology.) I was a math major and only took one political science class, so didn’t have a framework for that feeling until many years later, not until I’d lived overseas for a while, gotten married, and moved back to the States to bumble around inarticulately and angrily liberal during the entirety of the George W. Bush administration. I’m still liberal and often angrily so, but I hope more articulate.

Entitlement is a vague thing to try to pin down, an unvocalized feeling that the entitled person somehow has more of a right to exist, to take up space and air and attention, than other people; and a feeling that the fact of their ownership, whether of property or money, gives them an automatic right to it, no matter how that property was gained or at whose expense it’s employed. 

Being wealthy is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for entitlement, but they do often correlate. Entitlement infects our civic and social life and the function of our political system at every level. Why buy an expensive car if you’re not allowed to drive as fast as possible wherever you like? Why own property if you can’t use it for whatever purpose you have in mind? Why finance a politician’s political campaign if you can’t use their influence to forward your own interests?

An example of entitlement that comes to mind a lot, especially when thinking about upper middle class Trump voters, is the character Maurice Minnifield from the TV show Northern Exposure. Not that all entitled people are Trump voters. It’s just that a lot of them remind me of him, especially in rural-ish areas like mine where the local gentry easily maintains a thick cushion from challenge to their worldviews.

For those who don’t know, Northern Exposure was an early 1990s sitcom in which a young Jewish doctor from New York City takes a position as a general practitioner in a small, remote Alaska town in exchange for having his student loans paid off. It’s a plot ripe for rural-urban cultural clashes and stunning scenery shots (the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska, was filmed in Roslyn, Washington).

Maurice Minnifield, one of the show’s main characters, is a Korean vet, a retired astronaut, and the town’s wealthiest landowner with 15,000 acres. He is also self-important, pompous, and bigoted. I can’t remember if the show ever delved into how he made his money or if he was born into wealth, but his entitlement is a theme throughout the show. It’s not just that he’s rich and a large landowner, but that he considers these facts as giving him a certain standing in the community, as having a kind of ownership over Cicely and its residents similar to that of an English nobleman over his land and tenant farmers. One manifestation is when Ruth-Anne, who runs the town’s general store, saves up enough money to pay off Maurice’s loan to her for purchasing the store. Maurice’s response to her thrift and the loss of the owner-debtor relationship is to feel a personal sense of betrayal. Ruth-Anne’s freedom from his financial control is an affront.

It’s a sitcom, so the storyline requires that Maurice come to terms with Ruth-Anne’s independence by the end of the episode, but these kinds of relationships exist all over our real lives—particularly in small towns with petty bourgeoisie—and they do not usually end either with freedom from debt (financial or otherwise) or with personal growth on the behalf of the wealthy and entitled.

Like many upper middle class Trump voters today, Maurice is shocked at being called racist when he’s so clearly racist both in obvious ways and also in subtle ways that most mainstream media can’t seem to characterize; and he’s deeply homophobic, inhabiting a revulsion so ingrained that, if the show had lasted long enough to witness the legalization of same-sex marriage, might have seen his character written out of the show.

But it’s his also wealth-given entitlement that explains similar real-life people today. With that kind of entitlement, there’s a sense that no matter what you have or how you acquired it, you have the right to keep it and use it and nobody has the right to question how you got it or how you employ it. No right to ask if your company is built from other people’s underpaid labor, or if your profits come from mining activities that poison other people’s water, or if your use of said wealth, the weight of it, is crushing other people’s ability to survive. Your wealth might have come from slavery or near-slavery, or from pollution that leaves toxins for subsequent generations to grapple with, but legally it’s yours and therefore questioning its virtue and by extension your own virtue is an insult. Maurice would have been deeply offended if anyone questioned the source or use of his wealth, and the world is riddled with people of a similar socioeconomic status who feel the same, who feel that the most they owe society is some kind of noblesse oblige and that we should feel grateful for any generosity they feel like bestowing.

Patrick Wyman, host of the Tides of History podcast and related newsletter, was on a recent episode of the podcast TrashFuture (this is not a podcast I listen to regularly and won’t start because there’s too much banter and not enough information for the amount of time it takes*) talking about some of these issues, and he said a bunch of things that perfectly captured the entitlement aspect of the Maurices of the world:

“It’s very hard for them to accept the fact that the system that produced them and made them people who matter, people whose needs and whims are catered to and who feel like they have some positive role to play in society—the idea that the systems that put them where they are might somehow be bad or might have negative consequences . . . it’s very hard to wrap their heads around.”

Wyman and the podcast hosts were discussing a kind of capitalism divide prevalent in the January 6 attempted insurrection and the movements leading up to it (I think; the banter sometimes made it difficult to grasp the conversation thread), which they said was partly a result of two different kinds of capital opposed to each other, “the Davos guys versus the boat dealership guys,” a “revolt of the regional elites, the regional gentry.”

Who comprises regional gentry rather than the international über-wealthy is something Wyman got into in a newsletter he wrote about the kinds of wealth you see in the power players of small towns and mid-sized cities—not the ilk of the Koch and Mercer families, but people who run McDonald’s franchises or large local construction companies. People who are much better off than you’d think but who also work hard. People like car dealership owners, which made perfect sense to me—the owner of the local Subaru and Chevy dealership where I live seems to be incredibly well off, and there’s no other place within hours to buy a Subaru. A pity because he’s also the head of the Montana Republican Party, which I wouldn’t mind so much if he hadn’t become more vocally right-wing and anti-democracy over the past few years. 

These are people, Wyman points out, who derive their wealth from ownership of actual, physical assets rather than from salaries like a doctor or lawyer or hedge fund manager would.

“Wherever they live, their wealth and connections make them influential forces within local society. . . . We’re not talking about international oligarchs; these folks’ wealth extends into the millions and tens of millions rather than the billions. There are, however, a lot more of them than the global elite that tends to get all of the attention. . . . It’s not hard to spot vast apple orchards or sprawling vineyards and figure out that the person who owns them is probably wealthy; it’s harder to intuitively grasp that a single family might own seventeen McDonald’s franchises in eastern Tennessee, or the kind of riches the ownership of the third-biggest construction company in Bakersfield might generate.”

It’s ownership, Wyman said in the TrashFuture podcast, that creates the basic divide between the two kinds of ruling capital. “To what extent is ownership central to your identity? The more central ownership is, the more likely you are to fall on the right side of that spectrum.” Maurice Minniefield of Cicely, Alaska, most definitely saw himself as an owner. He owned many of the town’s assets and envisioned building—and benefiting from—more, and would have come down hard on any resistance he met against his right to use his assets as he saw fit, including his 15,000 acres. Maurice, in a way, straddled the identities of both kinds of capital that Wyman speaks of, and embodied their entitlement at the same time.

A real-life example closer to the Davos end of the capital class, or maybe somewhere in between, was recently covered in a feature in High Country News: When Gunnison County, Colorado, tried to exile non-resident homeowners (who tend to extreme wealth; David Koch owns a vacation home there) in the early months of the pandemic, those property owners fought back, but in ways that demonstrated entitlement rather than relying on either the law or by showing their commitment to the health of the community.

Whether banning non-resident homeowners from staying in their homes was a wise or legal choice for the county isn’t something I know enough about to comment on (legally it seems pretty sketchy), but the homeowners’ responses reflected not arguments for what would be best for the community or what their own legal rights were but what they personally felt entitled to no matter the consequences to anyone else. In addition to setting up a PAC to raise money to unseat county commissioners and replace them with more congenial candidates, a group of non-resident owners set up a private Facebook group as they worked against the ban, and some of the comments that have become public were . . . telling. 

“‘People who rely on others for their livelihoods should not bite the hand that feeds them,’ wrote one second-home owner.”

“‘Where is the appreciation and gratitude for the decades of generosity?’ wrote another.” 

“‘Maybe don’t run your mouth so much on social media when you depend on those people to help pay your bills,’ one Facebook commenter wrote.”

“According to the second-home owners,” wrote the author of the article, Nick Bowlin, “Gunnison County’s economic survival and most of its residents’ livelihoods depend on their economic contributions and continued goodwill.”

It’s easy to see the logic of this thinking, but it also shouldn’t take that much work to pause, for a moment, and comprehend more fully the expectations of those who see themselves not as integrated members of a community, but as generous and gracious people of means to whom local residents should be grateful but for whom the health of that community itself is a matter of choice and leisure rather than necessity. People who have no bonds to the community itself but still feels it owes them something. When I buy books from the local bookstore, I don’t expect the clerks or owner to be grateful to me. I am part of my community, interdependent with it; the continued existence of the bookstore and the coffee shops and the library and all the small downtown businesses also make my life whole. I am grateful to them. It is their existence that makes our community thrive, along with the hard work and mostly non-monetary contributions of people who live here. When the non-resident homeowners of Gunnison County lambasted a local restaurant server who’d publicly disagreed with them—“One of those big mouths is slinging drinks for tips—I’ll be sure to leave her a little tip,” wrote one of the Facebook group’s members—it was clear that what those residents expect is not service but subservience.

(Somewhat beside the point here, but it’s worth pointing out that escaping this kind of landed gentry vs. villein or tenant relationship is exactly what drove so many people like my ancestors out of Europe and into the American West.)

Bowlin tried to talk about the wealth divide in Gunnison County with Jim Moran, who launched the PAC to attempt a takeover of the county commission and whose vacation home in Crested Butte is worth, according to Zillow (referenced in the article), $4.3 million:

“I pointed out Gunnison County’s housing shortage to Moran, who, from 2008-2011, was an advisor of the private equity firm Lone Star Funds—the biggest buyer of distressed mortgage securities in the world after the 2008 financial crisis. After the crash, the firm acquired billions in bad mortgages and aggressively foreclosed on thousands of homes, according to TheNew York Times. I asked Moran if, compared to locals who struggle to pay rent, people who own two or more properties should be considered wealthy. ‘I think that’s wrong,’ he replied.”

Once you’re in a position of wealth and power and mostly surrounded by people who are the same, it can be very, very difficult to see yourself as wealthy, or powerful, much less to understand how your position affects the lives of everyone around you. Of the more small-fry but locally large-fish gentry dependent on their assets, Wyman said that, “These people exist in a world that caters to them.” That characterization applies to both types of capital classes and most of the spectrum in between. I don’t think my former neighbor in college was from serious wealth, but she was pretty well off, and I could easily see her going from insisting she had a right to turn up her music to becoming of those non-resident homeowners making entitled comments on Facebook.

“So what do we know about them, these vocal second-home owners?,” wrote Bowlin in High Country News. “They worked hard for everything they own. They are clear on this. Their critics, they believe, are often motivated by jealousy. ‘I’m certainly not “rich.” I’ve worked for my entire life to have the properties I own,’ wrote one group member.”

Properties. First of all, owning more than one property of the type described in the article, in a country where millions of children go hungry every day is, yes, rich, no matter how hard you’ve worked. Secondly, we have a problem when the very fact of ownership becomes its own justification. How is that wealth gained? At whose expense? And what impact is one’s ownership having on the local community? As someone who also lives in a resort town with a high percentage of non-resident homeowners, this is not a minor question. Wealth that translates into property ownership frequently has a terrible and nearly immediate downstream effect on the affordability of homes for people who live and work in that community full-time that cannot be counterbalanced by a few dinners out. Ownership in and of itself is not a value-neutral position.

I can see Maurice Minniefield now, nearly 25 years after Northern Exposure went off the air. He’d have spent the last couple decades increasingly annoyed at being called racist and homophobic but also increasingly entrenched in those positions because it wouldn’t occur to him to question his own perspective. He’d maybe be initially appalled by Donald Trump’s absolute lack of morals, but their common membership in the owner class would override much of that disgust, and the opportunity to be released from the obligation of changing how he viewed other people would be tempting. 

A property owner and developer like Maurice might think that Trump would understand the necessity—for the good of the economy! of the country!—of reducing his taxes and releasing him from burdensome regulations. He could then use his assets to benefit the community because he had a strong sense of noblesse oblige; he just wanted his contributions acknowledged and, in a way, bowed down to. What that community itself saw as a benefit wouldn’t matter; they should be grateful that he was willing to use his wealth to bring jobs and amenities to their isolated town. The character of Maurice was written as a war veteran and a retired astronaut—creative choices that complicated his sense of worth in ways that benefit Northern Exposure’s story arcs. He had a strong sense of service that was evident in his personal history. But it was his wealth that saturated him with a sense of entitlement, that made him believe he knew better than others what was good for them and what was good for the world.

“Equating wealth,” wrote Wyman,

“especially generational wealth, with virtue and ability is a deeply American pathology. This country loves to believe that people get what they deserve, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. Nowhere is this more obviously untrue than with our gentry class. They stand at the apex of the social order throughout huge swathes of the country, and shape our economic and political world thanks to their resources and comparatively large numbers, yet they’re practically invisible in our popular understanding of these things.”

Entitlement whitewashes wealth within the owner’s own mind. It makes all that they do and think automatically valuable. It grants them, they believe, the absolute right to do whatever they like with their property regardless of the consequences to other people. And just like the problems of white supremacy and white nationalism, entitlement isn’t the sole province of high-profile stories located in a few specific enclaves. It’s everywhere.

And if the rest of us do benefit from the choices the entitled make in how to employ their wealth and property? Well, we should be grateful that they’re willing to share—or, at the very least, grateful that they’re begrudgingly willing to turn down their music once in a while and throw a few tips our direction.

*TrashFuture is described in my Apple podcast feed as a “comedy show about late stage capitalism f*****g our lives up,” and I like the concept and have absolutely nothing against banter but as someone who’s spent over a decade as a primary caregiver to children I have little patience or time for thought-interrupters. When I listen to a podcast it’s because I want to spend time deep in thought with whatever they’re presenting. I’ve got kids to provide banter.

Walking composition

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” —Fyodr Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Last week I read Simon Winchester’s new book Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World. I . . . did not love it. I’m going to refrain from critiquing it heavily here until I’ve thought more about it, but I found it massively flawed in more than one respect, and for Winchester a surprisingly uneven read. For anyone who’s interested in the subject of land ownership, Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth remains a far better book—more comprehensive, more informative, and it manages to grapple frankly with ownership as a destructive force as well as a creative one. The Post-Its sticking out of my copy of Linklater’s books contain notes about interesting facts, observations, or history; the most common things I wrote on my Winchester notes were “WHAT???” and “Seriously?”

In fact, it irritated me so much that instead of picking up Nick Hayes’s Book of Trespass or Riane Eisler’s Nurturing Our Humanity next as I’d intended, I started on law professor Blake A. Watson’s book Buying America from the Indians, a critical and comprehensive investigation of the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh that codified the Doctrine of Discovery into U.S. property law. So far I’m liking how Watson picks apart Chief Justice Marshall’s convoluted thinking as the justice tries to argue that Native Americans have only the right of tenancy on this continent and that only Europeans can exercise the right of possession.

—-

I know that every subscriber to this newsletter has been waiting on tenterhooks to hear if I managed to get my mother a vaccine appointment, and the answer is yes! Because I was loading up her county’s website to make sure it was ready for the following day, which is when they told me there would next be appointments available, and when I refreshed the site after an hour it told me appointments would be released at 4. This day, not the next day. So I kept refreshing and got through and then got an error message after I put her information in, and then panicked and went to Chrome because sometimes I have this problem with Safari and should know better than to use it, and then half the appointments were gone so I was race-typing to get her in (thank you Mrs. Stebbins the high school keyboarding teacher!), and then success. The rest of the appointments were gone in under 15 minutes.

If you have poor eyesight, shaky or slow typing, a sluggish internet connection, or just aren’t tech-savvy enough to quickly discern which text is a hyperlink that will send you to the right places, I don’t see how you could make this happen.

She has an appointment. How many others who qualify were trying at the same time?

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On Saturday, after we got home from a midwinter gathering by the beach to eat potatoes and toast my dad’s birthday with vodka, we chopped some wood and started a fire and then for some reason I had an itch to watch Vikings, which I’d watched through Season 4 a few years back but then stopped. (I tend to avoid anything with violence, horror, or themes of betrayal and manipulation, so how I go into the show in the first place is a mystery to me.) Being in the cold and snow must have revived a never-satisfied longing for stories placed in lands that make the discomfort of cold weather inescapable. Vikings is a bit too uncomfortable on other levels, though, so I probably won’t continue. Rereading Waubgeshig Rice’s post-apocalyptic novel Moon of the Crusted Snow is probably a better idea.

It’s hard to find words about winter and snow that aren’t completely overused, but the cliches are true. I’ve lived in places without winter and find myself waiting all year for the time of darkness and fires, of cold and slowing down. The sense of hush and pause that winter gives is something I crave. Permission to rest the mind and senses. To be still. To have the time to chase vaccine appointments online, evidently.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• N. Scott Momaday’s Earth Keepers, which I read as a palate cleanser after Land, is almost like a book of poetry, something to keep by the bedside and dip into for contemplation. After the massive buffalo slaughters, he writes, “The worst of all was that the killers knew no shame. They moved on, careless, having left a deep wound on the earth. We were ashamed, but the earth does not want shame. It wants love.”

• Pico Iyer’s memoir Autumn Light is something I didn’t know I needed and slides nicely into the stillness of midwinter. It’s a contemplation on Japan and Iyer’s place in it woven through with the death of his father-in-law and the tensions and affections that grow within families. Also a lot of ping-pong!

• I don’t know what it is about this pandemic that has people talking about microbes so much—is it all the sourdough bread?—but this interview on the Smarty Pants podcast with professor and biologist Rob Dunn was super interesting: “When we looked at the bakers’ hands . . . they in fact looked more like sourdough starters than they looked like the hands of other people we studied.”

• An essay from anthropologist Manvir Singh in Aeon on what we might have gotten wrong about hunter-gatherer societies and deep human history: “The idea that human nature was forged in a chaos of sundry social environments might be more distressing than a narrative about small, egalitarian bands. But it explains the breadth of human behaviour and the ease with which we live in modern societies.”

• Along those lines, this video from writer and professor of Native American Studies and Vietnam veteran Stan Rushworth is a vital reminder of perspective and is one I’ll be listening to more than once. “Individualism is a much more simplistic approach to life. It’s based on fear. . . . Sustainability is not about individuals at all.”

• EVENTS: Two of the scientists I interviewed for my book have upcoming events with different organizations: Evolutionary biologist Herman Pontzer, who has studied hunter-gatherer societies to better understand the role that exercise plays in human health, is doing an online event on metabolism for New Scientist magazine. And paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva will be a featured speaker for the Leakey Foundation’s 150th celebration (also online) of the publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man. DeSilva’s book First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human is being published in April and I’m really looking forward to it.

Walking composition

“There is too much tendency to making separate and independent bundles of both the physical and the moral facts of the universe. Whereas, all and everything is naturally related and interconnected.” —Ada Lovelace, mathematician and designer of the first known computer program

I’m still catching up on my magazine backlog and recently enjoyed in particular “The Bear God Revisited,” an essay by Emily Sekine in the Spring 2020 issue of Orion. Sekine wrote of her journey learning about disaster preparation (for tsunamis in particular) in Japanese communities. For a backdrop, she used author Kawakami Hiromi’s 2011 rewrite of a short story in which a woman goes for a walk with a bear. In the new version, the story reflects the recent reality of nuclear contamination—rice fields are turned over in an effort at decontamination; the bear god still catches a fish but has to wash it with bottled water. (While Sekine’s essay isn’t online, both versions of Kawakami’s story are, translated into English and published with Granta.) Kawakami’s fictional bear god, wrote Sekine, “is a sort of everyday god.”

“Note that Kawakami does not claim that people used to believe in these gods; rather, she asserts that the gods used to exist.”

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Text from my mother regarding the difficulties making vaccine appointments in her county: “Yesterday all appointment slots were gone in five minutes and the suggestion was, ‘Don’t you have children or someone who is good at this?’”

I don’t know how to further express the frustration and anger that comes from knowing I’m surrounded by people who call themselves patriotic and will rage-wave massive American flags at any questioning of the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget, and then perform the same pseudo-patriotic rage-waving to reject any suggestion that at least some portion of our tax dollars would be better spent on a caring and robust public health system. Why wave the flag around if you don’t actually believe in having a functional country?

“I don’t remember having quite this much trouble getting an appointment in the USSR,” my mother said, laughingly referring to our conversation last week about how few people in this country understand how deeply broken and dysfunctional it is (or who believe it’s broken and dysfunctional but for fantastical reasons rather than real ones). She’d already lived in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and dealt with its bored and inefficient bureaucracy. Getting a vaccine for a virus causing a global pandemic in a supposedly first-world country in 2021 shouldn’t rely on rumors, money, or having tech-savvy, English-speaking young relatives who can try to game the system for you; comparisons to the Soviet-era necessities of finagling connections and pooling together time and resources to get anything from sausages to ballet tickets to a doctor’s appointment come quickly to mind.

I called her county’s dedicated vaccine line and talked to a very friendly and helpful person who said the website might have information the middle of next week. Maybe. But keep checking. And check the news. “It’s kind of like getting concert tickets,” the person said. I laughed. “It’s a little more serious than that but I get where you’re coming from.” In my head I wasn’t laughing. Hundreds of thousands of people have died. It’s nothing like getting concert tickets. FFS.

An hour later I saw this Anne Applebaum article in The Atlantic: “You all might be living in 21st-century America, but those of us who reside in this new version of Moscow, circa 1975, have to scoff at quasi-optimism. Beat COVID-19? With a bunch of dysfunctional Safeway websites? With dozens of different institutions, each one requiring different forms and a different registration? Signs that we live in a dying superpower are all around us.”

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Philosopher Stephen Jenkinson has referred to the coronavirus as a god, a “small god,” like those left by the wayside two thousand years ago in the wreckage of Rome’s conquests. Not thinking consciously of it, I found myself over the last few months texting phrases like “Covid willing, we’ll be able to have dinner/go hiking together/hug each other sometime in the fall/next year/whenever people stop flaunting their ignorance and distrust of science.”

In a retrospective on the bear god story rewrite and a related discussion of uranium 235, Kawakami wrote, “If the god of uranium really exists, then what must he be thinking? Were this a fairy tale of old, what would happen when humans broke the laws of nature to turn gods into minions?”

Covid willing. Maybe it is a small god. How many others are out there waiting to trip us up?

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• If I lean toward any economic theory, it’s probably that of Georgism, which follows the notion of late-1800s economist Henry George that land should never be privately owned. Failing the overthrow of land ownership, George advocated for what’s called a “land value tax,” which separates the values of land from the value of improvements on it and plows tax from the land itself back to the community rather than the property owner. It’s a system that’s been successfully implemented in the past (most notably in Pittsburgh, where’s it was credited with having kept housing prices affordable for decades), and is complemented by the acknowledgment that when a community invests in improvement, nearby property owners shouldn’t be the sole beneficiaries of an increase in value. Along those lines, Sydney, Australia, is trying to implement a land value tax that would kick in when infrastructure improvements lead to increased property values, but it’s finding it more difficult than it should be (capitalism!).

• Just a bunch of random but weirdly riveting observations from Sapiens about the slowdown of growth in tooth enamel found in 300 teeth spanning a 2,000-year history.

• I wish this essay on Psyche had more advice for how to deal with a seemingly global epistemological crisis, but it was interesting to think about author Kenneth Boyd’s prescription for nourishing one’s own epistemic well-being: “There are three components of epistemic wellbeing: access to truths; access to trustworthy sources of information; and opportunities to participate in productive dialogue.”

• An “alternate history” from MIT Press Reader on what would have happened if the Luddites had won and managed to develop a productive and healthy rather than extractive and profit-driven relationship with technology. This piece is a fun excerpt from a book of “economic science fiction” and purports to be an encyclopedia entry from the year 2500. “Principles over Property” became their motto and Lord Byron was their poet laureate. (Weird echoes of the actual organizational structure of Soviet communism in this imagined world shaped by Sustainomics, though.)

• This episode of Origin Stories (the podcast from the Leakey Foundation—I can’t link to the specific episode, but the most recent is near the top of the page) has a great conversation with Rebecca Wragg Sykes about her new book on Neanderthals titled Kindred. The details about hearth fires in particular had thought-provoking insight into how much of a story a hearth fire leaves behind. Neanderthals evidently had very advanced control of fire and even burned coal.

Shortly after January’s attempted coup in Washington, D.C., Leah Sottile, a long-time reporter on anti-government extremism (including this great piece on the history and co-opting of the “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden flag) and host of the Bundyville podcast* about the Bundy family, the 2016 takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, and related stories, published a newsletter on what she sees as the dangers inherent in the likelihood that Congress—or the D.C./Atlantic seaboard bubble in general—will brush off the insurgency as a fluke of freaks acting out a fantasy.†

The very fact that this possibility is right now more likely than true accountability and reform is indicative of the problems we face, but even more daunting is the continued failure of major media outlets to take this threat seriously. Even when covering armed and clearly serious and organized extremists, there’s a tone of “this can’t be real, can it?” that I assume has characterized insulated media types throughout history until the moment it became all too real for them. There is a lot of good journalism out there, but for the most part the biggest platforms, and voices with the widest reach, aren’t the ones practicing it, and I’m not just talking about the big newspapers that wasted four years publishing sympathetic stories about Trump voters in midwestern diners and barely mentioned murders carried out by militia-trained white supremacists.

In her essay, Sottile recounted something she’d heard from a bomber she’d interviewed for the Bundyville podcast. When she asked him what would happen if Trump were impeached and/or removed from office, his response was, “All bets are off.” Most of her essay is about the seriousness of those four words, and the failure of much of the “serious” world to take them, and the threat they pose, seriously.

“Those four words alone have kept me on the domestic terrorism beat. . . . They pushed me to understand the bombing in Nevada more, how it tied to the greater Patriot movement, to understand the movement’s capacity for violence.”

Watching the attempted coup last month, Sottile was reminded of the way that major news outlets dismissed the significance of the 2016 Malheur standoff (or whatever we want to call it):

“What I was thinking about was the way national media outlets scoffed at the presence of armed men in a remote wildlife refuge out here in Oregon. It was a novelty story. A fringe story. Did it really matter? I thought of all the conversations I had with editors in New York and DC, who couldn’t understand why this was a story everyone needed to care about. . . . As the Malheur takeover played out, people found a way to scoff, to tell journalists like me to not give them so much attention.”

Living in a place like northwest Montana, and having grown up alongside children of probable Aryan Nation members and Montana Militia sympathizers, it took me a long time to come to terms with the mountainous, crushing dismissiveness that many major media outlets treat “Western” stories and trends that, they clearly feel, have nothing to do with real people’s lives. The only national media outlet I’ve seen (and published with) that treats “the West” as a real place with real problems rather than a movie backdrop is the Los Angeles Times, which is why I subscribe to it and not the New York Times.†† (It wasn’t the truly idiotic piece about the Sip ‘n Dip bar in Great Falls, Montana, that finally stopped me reading NYT, but it didn’t help.)

Reading Sottile’s essay reminded me of a response I’d gotten from a high-end literary journal in New York a couple of years ago to an essay I’d submitted about my hometown. “Richard Spencer lives in Whitefish and there’s a growing white supremacist movement there,” wrote the editor. “Anything about Whitefish has to include that.” This essay, mind you, was about walkability and the decades of community work involved in slowly evolving a tightly connected walkable community with a healthy downtown retail core. It had zoning code overlays and an explanation of school trust lands in it. It was about urban planning. Most of the social and financial capital invested in the town’s current walking and biking trail system was built in the decades before Spencer’s parents bought a vacation home here and he decided to launch a white nationalist podcast out of one of their bedrooms.

I realize that I’m on the one hand saying that a magazine shouldn’t have insisted my small western town only be defined by the fact of white supremacy while at the same time complaining that major news outlets don’t take the threat of white supremacy and anti-government extremism seriously, but the points are two sides of the same coin: the simplification of places, people, and issues. The lack of multi-dimensionality with which so-called hinterlands are viewed. We’re either hicks, rednecks, and a joke, or we’re completely defined by the presence of racists. (Also fly-fishing because Norman McClean.) I don’t know what those editors are imbibing (or maybe I do and it’s part of the problem) but just because a place has a population of under a zillion doesn’t mean it lacks complexity. We have real problems and we also have real ways of trying to address them.

That editor’s assumptions made me angry but worse was the lack of humility. This was at a time shortly after the Charlottesville tiki-torch event, which predictably turned violent (predictable to anyone paying attention), and certain parts of the country were only just coming to terms with the realities of white nationalism in their midst. To ignore the fact that this problem is everywhere, to pretend that little Whitefish, Montana, is more tainted by the presence of this high-profile white supremacist than New York City is by its several known hate groups (37 statewide according to the Southern Poverty Law Center) is only going to perpetuate the problem. The white supremacy, the anti-government extremism, the sovereign citizen movement and constitutional sheriffs aren’t “over there” or “out there” or “anywhere but here.” They are everywhere. If the most elite of editorial teams can’t perceive the reality of our predicament after militia members in Michigan allegedly planned to kidnap the state’s governor and a local sheriff said they were just doing their duty in trying to make a citizen’s arrest, much less after an attempted coup, then those teams and editors are at a minimum not doing their jobs. Having a little humility about what we don’t know is one of the biggest steps anyone can take to start healing many of society’s ills, and it’s particularly vital to performing the service of crafting civic discourse, which is part of what media does whether it intends to or not.

After all, I don’t go around telling Queens residents who they are and what defines them just because Donald Trump is from Queens. I’ve known plenty of people from Queens but don’t know anything about the character of the place and wouldn’t presume to pretend.

Sottile’s frustration stems partly from the difficulty she faced getting editors interested in stories on the 2016 Bundy-led takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. If anyone needs a reminder that Trump was a symptom of this country’s racism, not the cause, that takeover was achieved (albeit temporarily) during the Obama administration by a group of heavily armed white people with a history of anti-government extremism and violent threats. They spent a month at the refuge toting guns around and destroying artifacts with no intrusion from law enforcement. That same year, under the same president, mostly non-white and totally unarmed water protectors encamped at Standing Rock were systematically harassed, hazed, attacked, and abused by law enforcement and a militarized private security corporation simply for trying to protect their only source of clean water—all taking place on land and water that was legally theirs by treaty right.

For Sottile’s uninterested editors, Malheur and the whole mess of the Bundy movement were an “over there” problem. But, as I also wrote in a post a few weeks ago, the recent attempted coup was the blindingly obvious evolution of an increasingly armed, trained, and angered group of people whose threat to society and potential for mass violence the U.S. government has insistently ignored since the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992.**

It’s not that papers like the New York Times or Washington Post are required to tell these stories, but the fact is that they, and other major media outlets, do tell them, and for the most part tell them poorly, perpetuating both stereotypes and a dangerous belief that extremism is some sort of uneducated and poor rural people problem (if you go by major media characterizations, it’s amazing how many people in this country grow up poor, including me, and manage not to become extremists). Up to and including the moment when a bunch of armed self-proclaimed “patriots” come within minutes of possibly murdering members of Congress. Because some people were dressed like they were headed to a Renaissance Faire, it was assumed to be a LARP, and because almost all of the people were white it was assumed that they didn’t pose a threat.

And it’s not just major media outlets. One of the last episodes of Sam Harris’s podcast Making Sense (formerly called, like his meditation app, Waking Up) that I ever listened to was one where he interviewed an historian of white nationalism. “Finally,” I thought, “Harris is going to dismount his Islam-is-worse-than-all-other-ideologies hobbyhorse and grapple with this very real homegrown threat.” Instead, his only substantive response was to add on a bit after the interview where he critiqued the scholar’s frequent correction of the differences between white nationalism and white supremacy (because she’s a scholar and making those kinds of distinctions is part of what scholars do) as a “symptom of wokeness.”

I know I go on about the power of story a lot, but they matter. Refusing to see the importance of work like Sottile’s and instead spinning a different story about all extremists being rural rednecks on the one hand and anything that tries to take white supremacy seriously as “wokeness” on the other is part of what got us into this mess. There are plenty of people in this country, millions, maybe tens of millions, who do understand the dangers we’re facing, but the urgency of that knowledge is either being tamped down, turned into a joke, or completely erased by media that is meant to be a counterweight to both extremism and to government power, not its handmaiden.

Instead of telling me that my town of almost 8,000 people that has long been a minor liberal bubble in a deeply conservative area must be defined by one high-profile white nationalist because his wealthy parents happened to have bought a vacation home here, editors and producers could create more space for writers like Sottile who know that every place has nuance and layers, journalists who seek out the story that is, not the story they expect to see.

There’s a quote from mythologist Martin Shaw I’ve been coming back to a lot, especially now as I watch some editorial departments scrambling to understand what’s going on and how to talk about it. “The business of stories is not enchantment,” he wrote in his book Snowy Tower. “The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.”

I doubt there is much that Sottile could say, much less anything I could say, that would change the minds of thought leaders or editorial departments. But the perspectives they dismiss as irrelevant will continue to affect this society in increasingly violent ways, and their insistence on telling only one narrative, the one that feels comfortable, is a structural part of the problem. One thing that Malheur and the attempted insurrection had in common was that they only failed, it seems, not because they weren’t serious but because, while the perpetrators were armed, trained, and present in significant numbers, they weren’t quite certain what to do once they succeeded in their first set of goals. It’s only a matter of time before someone connects those two live wires, access to power and those willing to use violence to gain it. The people who could, and would, do so are right in front of us. If we plan on stopping them, we have to start telling the right stories.

—-

* The entire Bundyville podcast is a story worth listening to (you can also read it on Longreads) but if you just want an overview, this live interview from 2019 is a good primer.

†LARP—live-action role play—is an acronym I had to look up, seeing it referenced all over Twitter and various think pieces after the attempted coup. The question posted was often how many people thought they were engaging in a LARP. It’s not an irrelevant question, but I’m more interested in how many people knew they weren’t, including members of Congress.

††High Country News is an obvious exception and also a model for the kinds of solutions that media could look for: an exceptional regional news magazine whose stories invariably have national implications. I also subscribe to Native News Online and Indian Country Today.

**This problem is obviously far older than that, but in my lifetime Ruby Ridge and Waco formed a distinct fault line after which federal law enforcement wasn’t even going to attempt dealing with extremist white people. Those events radicalized whole new generations of extremists, and subsequent lack of follow-up either by government or media allowed the movement to grow unquestioned and unchecked.

Once and future technology

“If the ultimate authority in the world is human feeling, but somebody has discovered how to hack and manipulate human feelings, then the whole system collapses.”
—Yuval Noah Harari speaking recently on the podcast Your Undivided Attention

My spouse and I skinned up the local ski mountain on a recent early morning (those tiny tinges of pink on the clouds are all we got of the sunrise). If I happen to still be on my way up when the chairlift opens and my father happens to be skiing that day, he’ll stop on his way down and ask me how I’m enjoying suffering. Skinning up a mountain does feel idiotic sometimes but it also feels awfully good.

On the way up I listened to a recent episode of the Futures podcast with computational biologist Andrew Steele on aging and longevity. (I don’t usually listen to anything while out in the woods, but the chairlift started turning early and I’d generally rather listen to something that makes me think than the squeaking of the empty lift a couple hours before it’s even open to ride.)

I’m not really a futurist and probably don’t think about this stuff more than the average person, but there’s two reasons I listen to more episodes of Futures and Your Undivided Attention than I do of other podcasts. The main one for Futures is that every time I do, the interview turns out to be far more thought-provoking than its description implies. The conversations are far-ranging, and the interviewer Luke Robert Mason almost always asks the questions that rattle around in my head as I’m listening. For example—when discussing how humans might soon live to 200 years, I thought of recent discussions about the problems with gerontocracy in the U.S. Senate. (Not that there is anything wrong with people of any competent age wielding power, but most of us see the power imbalances inherent in the Senate and U.S. politics in general. This is a good article on the current drawbacks.) Next thing I knew, Mason was asking about power imbalances in scientific research or university departments that might develop with a healthier elderly population that lives longer.

The other reason is one that I brought up toward the end of my book, which is that when we don’t pay attention to the future implications of current technologies, they can end up having a disastrous effects on our lives. Since my book is about walking and a good chunk of it deals with the loss of walking, my main focus was the national highway infrastructure. There was tremendous resistance in the 1920s and ’30s against car dominance on streets that used to belong to everyone, but over the decades we’ve allowed that history to be rewritten by car manufacturers while approving highway plans that destroy communities and human health at the same time.

How technology shapes our lives matters. I think we all know this. But we don’t always envision what the shape of its effects will be in 100 years or so. There’s a phrase, “legacy infrastructure,” in computing, architecture, urban planning, and street design that describes baked-in infrastructure that can be extremely difficult to reverse-engineer to be more human-centered. Redesigning a four-lane, 45 mph road to include bike lanes and sidewalks, for example, can be both difficult and expensive. But there’s no choice. If you want a walkable world you have to work with legacies of the decades when pedestrians weren’t considered in road design.

We deal with visible and invisible legacies all the time, from lack of crosswalks or sidewalks to laws that encourage destructive profit-seeking over, say, a right to clean water (approving oil pipelines from a legal perspective is a legacy of values, just as lead pipes are a physical legacy); from private and shared traumas to tooth decay guaranteed by a childhood of too much sugar.

When it comes to technologies, the more potential they have to affect life on this planet, the closer attention we should pay to the consequences, good or bad. Corporations are just fictions we’ve collectively (kind of) agreed on, but what they build or destroy is very real.

To keep this attentiveness in balance with paying attention to the world around me, the physical world, this breathtaking planet, is always a challenge. But it’s mornings like that one recently, as my spouse pushed his skins up ahead of me until he was out of sight, and the overcast sky offered a muted sunrise, that remind me why it matters.

I guess I’ll keep suffering up that mountain as long as my knees let me. The sunrises are worth it, even when they’re barely visible.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• A thoughtful, well-written article on the evolution of the idea of “redpilling” from The Matrix’s original creation to radicalizing people—usually young men—into extremist ideologies: “How did the red pill go from being a critical component of a film created by two trans women to being a popular term used by men’s rights activists (MRAs) and white supremacists?”

• The Yield, by Tara June Winch, is a novel of love and dispossession placed in a rural part of Australia. I had some trouble engaging with it, which I’m sure had to do with my mood but wasn’t helped by the fact that one of the three interwoven plot lines was a long letter written by a white colonizer about 100 years before the story takes place and I’ve never enjoyed historical fiction very much (with the exceptions of Kate Atkinson and Louise Erdrich). Not the fault of the author, and the chapters containing the main character’s grandfather’s dictionary listings for his native Wiradjuri language (Winch is Wiradjuri, though in the book the language and clan have a fictional name) made the book worth it on its own. A reminder that every word is ripe with story.

• If you have any interest in fire ecology, this episode of the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers podcast with research ecologist Paul Hessburg is sobering but fascinating. Sobering: the mildest years of Western wildfires are already behind us, even counting California’s recent megafires. Fascinating: everything about fire, forest ecology, and what modern foresters and fire ecologists are learning by (finally) looking back at how people managed these forests before European invasion and colonization.

• An interview with astronaut Kathy Sullivan on the Futures podcast about her new book. It was something different to listen to, which was nice for me, but it’s also worth scrolling through to about 7-8 minutes before the end (around one hour in), where she talks about not being a fan of the Lifeboat theory for space—colonizing space as a response to climate change and environmental devastation. It’s a form, she says, “of the ultimate gated community”: “It becomes close to being an amoral proposition to me. . . . No one who talks about that means all of humanity. They mean some small segment of people—chosen by whom? on what grounds? . . . And the rest of you lot we’re just going to leave behind on the trash pile we’ve created. So no.” I like her.

• I somehow can’t stop watching this 15-minute video on Psyche that explores and evokes the attachment to movement and landscape experienced by the staff of the Trans-Siberian railway. I could totally see getting addicted to that job.

Space and time

“Movement is humankind’s oldest survival strategy.” — Paul Salopek, Out of Eden Walk

My media consumption this week had a collision of observations about space. In National Geographic, Paul Salopek published an essay on the slowness of his multi-year walking journey compared to the increasing change of the world. Salopek is following humans’ ancient migration from Ethiopia’s Rift Valley to Tierra del Fuego in Chile. He started in 2013 and is currently in Myanmar. The quote above is taken from his recent essay, and reading it made me sit back because it’s such a lovely distillation of what I spent a lot of words saying in the introduction to my book.

The question he poses afterwards has become even more important since he began his journey: what happens to us sedentary moderns who don’t have the capacity, money or legal room to move elsewhere when climate change brings big shifts?

This is something we’re all going to have to reckon with at some point or another and it’s one I think about a lot as I wander around our neighborhood trying not to slip and crack my head on the ice. We built our house and moved in about four years ago. I really love it here in my hometown. I love my community, my family being nearby, my friends. Even deeper, I love the mountains and the lodgepole pines and larch trees, the rivers and tucked-away lakes. I don’t know that I love the fact that those high mountain lakes get stocked with fish every year (why???) but to roam around a mountainside in August and jump into an ice-cold lake accessible only by foot (or fish-stocking plane) is something I don’t ever want to have to give up. Might we have to, someday?

There’s a quote in the beginning of my book from BBC journalist (and a personal friend) Bethany Bell, whom I interviewed about what she saw covering the Syrian refugee crisis as thousands of people walked from Hungary to Austria several years ago. With the lives we build for ourselves, the things we love, she said, “sometimes we just have to walk away.”

Are we prepared for what might come, and what it might ask of us?

—-

I finally finished Nick Estes’s book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. (Thank you, Chris La Tray, for prompting me to move it to the top of the TBR pile!) This is a must-read of American history and an incredible narrative of injustices inflicted paired with matching resistance. It’s an answer to so many issues that plague America today, stemming from colonialism and racism and perpetuated because we’ve been too scared or too weak to admit and deal with the realities of our history. “By following its own legal traditions,” wrote Estes, “the arc of the Western moral universe never bends towards Indigenous justice. At best, it ignores it. At worst, it annihilates it.” Private property law, repeatedly, forms a lynchpin for what has been stolen and how it is justified.

—-

And then on the Team Human podcast Douglas Rushkoff had a long conversation with Mark Pesce about his book Augmented Reality and how realities that play out online, like Pokemon Go, are increasingly affecting our real-life physical spaces. “Property law may be the very problem that AR could break,” Rushkoff said when talking about people in Los Angeles jumping over fences and onto private lawns to find their Pokemons. But, countered Pesce, “do you want it broken by Mark Zuckerberg?”

Well, no, though I don’t think Zuckerberg is among those who want to break property law so much as he is among those who knowingly use its power to hoard property and wealth for themselves. But the question did make me pause.

Property law, or at least its application, is far more likely to be broken by the physical realities of climate change—the hurricanes and floods that sweep away cities, the wildfires that repeatedly burn down towns, the droughts that make staying untenable. How many times will people be willing to survey and document wrecked land in order to establish their property ownership?

Sometimes we’ll just have to walk away. And I don’t think enough of us are even close to being able to face that reality.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Paul Salopek also published an incredible op-ed this week reflecting on the decline of the once-thriving multicultural and highly advanced Silk Road and its links to America’s modern decline as the U.S. chooses fear, ignorance, and isolationism.

• I enjoyed philosophy and religion professor Alan Jay Levinovitz’s essay in Aeon on natural medicine and the way he broke down the two questions that “natural” medicine claims to answer—Why me? and What can be done?—that “modern” medicine fails to address. As someone with chronic pain issues that will likely never be resolved (I wrote this post on one of the many days that I woke up feeling like all my joints were on fire), I’ve had more than one friend claim certain supplements or that one chiropractor across town or some kind of ionized water sold under a pyramid scheme would cure me. (Spoiler alert: No. Neither has anything else, ever, except walking. And Vicodin did once but its addiction potential scared me.) I appreciated Levinovitz’s points that there are answers we crave from medical professionals that if they can’t answer—which usually they can’t—they can at least address instead of ignore.

• Istanbul might have barely a month’s worth of potable water left, as Turkey faces a severe water shortage. The religious affairs directorate has instructed imams to pray for rain, which never hurts, but that won’t do a whole lot if the government refuses to acknowledge that reaching for more capacity isn’t going to solve a problem wrought by sprawl, population growth, and climate change. Science denial and lack of political will strike again. Turkey is one of the countries I most loved visiting, and this makes me very sad.

• If you need a little escapism this week, this episode of Scotland Outdoors was lovely. The wonders of ice (including in recorded sound), the importance of play, and the worldwide lore of ravens. Did you know that ravens imitate wolf calls? You can hear it at about 1:19 (one hour nineteen minutes). So eerie.

The space between

Ski Jesus says be nice to people.

Listening to an episode of the Futures podcast on quantum mechanics with physicist Sean Caroll reminded me of a science fiction book I read recently—Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds, whose plot relies on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the theory that every possible reality exists simultaneously in an infinite number of universes.

There was a perhaps predictable but nevertheless well-executed metaphor that spun out in this novel about how the spaces between people, and how we understand one another (or mostly, don’t), are even wider than the spaces that the main character traverses between worlds.

The main character is allowed to do this on over 300 worlds because her “self” on those worlds has died. Only people whose alternate self has died in a universe can visit it, and only worlds relatively similar to the one the main character lives on are accessible. These specifications make sense given the science, but they also allow Johnson to explore many issues of class and justice: Since your other self has to have died for you to visit a world, the people employed to traverse are almost always those whose lives are precarious to begin with—they’re more likely to have died in many different realities, so employing them is efficient because they can visit all the worlds where they no longer exist. And it allows the author to play with plenty of ways that the main character can fail to understand her own self.

It’s a very human book, coping with questions of trust and division while at the same time with the unfolding reality of a wannabe dictator raised by an abusive and narcissistic father. “He doesn’t want us to feel closer to him; he wants us to worship him.” Oof.

The spaces between us, the ways in which we try to relate to one another and save our own lives, while struggling against the forces that seek to take all they can and crush everything else, they’re a hard thing to traverse. But they’re worth it, even if we’re not walking among the stars.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• A whole lot going on in this two-hour podcast episode of Your Undivided Attention—a conversation between the founders of the Center for Humane Technology and historian Yuval Noah Harari. AIs that understand people better than people do, the fast-arriving reality of tech that can read your emotions from the inside, and the degradation of a shared reality as everyone silos into their own virtual reality. Kind of fun freethinking when Harari presses the group to think about utopian uses of tech rather than dystopian. Even in these best cases, he asks, do we still lose our free will?

• The wonky side of my brain that still follows a lot of urban planning would very much like you to get interested in parking policy. An enormous amount of land is devoted to parking, and unlike, say, affordable housing or decent health care, minimum parking requirements are dictated by local zoning and is something that normal everyday people can to work change in their own communities. Planetizen has some good thoughts: “We consider housing for automobiles a necessity that, by law, everybody must subsidize, while housing for people is optional.” A lot of wonkiness here — like “For example, a recent study of multifamily developments in the Denver region found that 40% of spaces in market-based buildings and 50% of spaced in below-market buildings are virtually never used” — but the boring day-to-day stuff is actually where the world changes if we truly want it to.

• More wonk: There are actually 3 housing crises in California. Also part of the same article, a really compelling overview of how the power of California’s construction workers’ union seems to hold back affordable housing initiatives.

• Watching Barcelona use the pandemic to forward people-first urbanism was inspiring but I wasn’t sure if it would last. It seems to be going full-steam ahead, though, squeezing out cars to make more room for public spaces and urban greening.

• I haven’t read this book yet, but if you’re interested, Verso Books is making its U.S. Anti-Fascist Reader available for free as an ebook (electronic version only; paperback is around $20).

Grief

“If we love anyone, we will grieve them when they die—and it will be harder, and last longer, than we ever expected.” —Mark Liebenow

One of the newsletters I subscribe to (Zeynep Tufekci’s “Insight”) had a subscribers-only piece about the vaccine rollouts the other day, and I kept trying to prod my brain into at least fully, attentively reading the piece even if I couldn’t think of anything to say about it. But I couldn’t muster the attention because I was giving most of it to what almost everyone else was giving attention to that day.

Even when I can’t engage with Covid-19 news, though, there is one thing that brings its reality home to me every single day, and that’s the obituary section of my local paper.

Not everyone in there has passed away from Covid, and even if they have it often won’t specify (I assume that’s up to the family), but there is no denying the reality that for well over two months now that section has been longer than it was six months ago. Sometimes it stretches over two pages, which might not seem like a lot, but I do live in northwest Montana, not in a city of millions (the entire state barely has over a million people).

By chance on one of the days when the obituary section seemed even longer than usual and included two people in their thirties, I received Mark Liebenow’s newsletter—Mark writes beautifully about grief and being a widower and was one of the people whose feeds made Twitter a more human place to be when I had an account there. It included a link to his short essay “The Landscape of Grief,” and provides some direction that many might need right now but don’t know how to find.

Many of my friends have lost someone over this past year, some to Covid and some to other causes, and the inability to gather and share the grief has felt an added source of pain. It’s hard to know what to do with the enormity of grief and the need to help when physical contact is impossible. All I can think of is advice a friend gave years ago when talking about her bout with cancer: Don’t disappear.

But I wish I could be there to grieve with everyone. I wish we all could. I should have said this in my post on the attempted coup and embodied trauma, but I hope that throughout this—throughout life—you are able to pause and take stock of how fear, anger, worry, tension, and all the grief, all of it, affects your body, and how you can care for yourself.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• In the midst of miring myself in Twitter during the attempted coup this week, I came across this bizarre story of someone in Oregon who light-heartedly tried to train some crows while they were furloughed and ended up with a semi-violent crow army. If you need something else to think about, diving into the Reddit thread of advice in response to the problem was probably the best use of five frivolous minutes I made all week (that’s not saying much). I think my favorite part is that it’s posted in a forum for legal advice because the poster wasn’t sure about liability if the crows attack someone.

• This piece by anthropologist Gideon Lasco on rediscovering the rewarding rituals of making and consuming coffee during a pandemic, published in Sapiens, is a pleasant reminder of the small joys we look forward to whether the world is storm-tossed or calm. (Also, if you read it and are interested in the Cup of Excellence competition mentioned at the end, it’s actually a great organization that has helped many small family coffee farmers by rewarding them for quality coffee [several of my family members work in specialty coffee, and my father has served as a judge for Cup of Excellence in the past]).

• Also in Sapiens, anthropologist Julianne Yip on new technical approaches to saving Arctic sea ice, and her advice that anyone attempting to do so should first start thinking of the ice—and nature in general—as a partner, rather than as an inert object that humans can manipulate at will: “Focusing on levers can lead people into a technical trap, whereby a complex problem is falsely reframed as a simpler, technical one just to make it tractable.”

• Also on the subject of partnership, Rianne Eisler, a Holocaust survivor and author of the now-classic The Chalice and the Blade, on Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast talking about her new book Nurturing Our Humanity.

A short time ago (a million years ago? Covid time is weird and stretchy and shapeless but combine it with attempted coup time and I don’t even know) I wrote a bit about the Boston Tea Party—a founding myth of America, but also a riot that destroyed private property. What many people also don’t know is that the perpetrators dressed up in costume—garb imitating the nearby Mohawk tribe, to be exact—before overtaking three ships and dumping their cargoes of tea overboard.

I’ve read some news reports from that time period (and if anyone’s really interested, the information I used in my book for the Boston Tea Party section came from The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants, an enormous but invaluable volume of first-hand accounts from that era of America-to-be), and after reading mainstream media’s hot takes from yesterday’s attempted coup, I’m thinking about looking back to see how derisively the British Parliament and British press spoke and wrote about the men in costume revolting against their country, or at least their country’s taxes.

Just because people are attempting insurrection in costume and look and sound ridiculous doesn’t mean they aren’t deadly serious.

Like the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party, those who “stormed” (their word) the U.S. Capitol fervently believed, and continue to believe, in their cause. This is one of the reasons I wrote recently in my post about the CSKT water compact that its opponents are people I have completely given up on reasoning with, if I haven’t given up on them as human beings and neighbors. (And just for the record, this is one of the reasons I value living in a complicated, mixed community that is anything but a bubble and why this “getting along with people whose opinions I detest” can’t just be rhetoric: one of those elected state lawmakers, whom I’m sure supports yesterday’s attempted coup, is married to a teacher who has been one of the few people to make my kid’s middle school years slightly less hellish. They live a ten minutes’ walk from our house.)

I keep going back to this video posted by Molly McKew, an expert on information warfare whose Twitter feed I used to follow, of a young-ish man (need I say white?) who had witnessed the shooting of a radicalized QAnon-believing Air Force veteran as she and others rushed through the doors of the building.

In videos like this what gets my attention is the body language—shakiness, tension in the voice, and the rise in pitch toward the end as the man’s passion comes through. About a minute into the two-minute video is when his real self comes out, his purpose (or what he thinks is his purpose) for being there: “This—this cannot stand,” he says, pointing toward the building. “They don’t represent anyone. . . . They think we’re a joke. . . . We have to do something.” As McKew points out, he can’t really explain who the enemy is or what his goal is. But he is angry and shaken and firm in the beliefs that led him there.

I’d ask where his passion was during Standing Rock or pretty much any week last summer during Black Lives Matter protests, but I imagine we all know the answer to that.

As I tried to drag myself away from Twitter yesterday while doing math with my kids, I thought a lot about bodies and emotion. My publisher, Hachette, did a little interview with me before A Walking Life came out, and in it I said some things I’d maybe revise or update, but some things that seem even more relevant today, like how social media—in fact, all media—seeks to manipulate our emotions, and what that does to us:

“I’m also really interested in the messages our bodies are sending us and how that can be manipulated. When you feel angry because of a news headline or depressed because you’ve been reading your Twitter feed, what do you really know about that emotion and what’s causing it? Are you, in other words, responding according to what you actually know is true in the real world and about real people, or according to outrage constantly triggered by the media you consume? I’ve come to think that getting to know your body—unfiltered through social media—is essential for understanding emotions like anger. Maybe it’s time more of us started asking how our perceptions of people on ‘the other side’ are being manipulated and whom that manipulation serves. Because it’s definitely not serving us.”

The entire scene yesterday is a part-answer to that problem, and as so many have pointed out, from Sarah Kendzior to Joy Ann Reid and many others, it was entirely predictable. I’m a writer at core but essentially I’m a housewife and mom of two living in a small town in Montana—I’m nobody, basically—and last summer even I was saying to friends that I didn’t see any of this going anywhere except armed clashes between police, citizens, and factions of enlisted military and the National Guard if nothing was done. That wasn’t just informed by Trump, but by having grown up in a place with a strong Aryan Nation contingent, and having watched it and its offshoots blossom after the FBI and other enforcement mechanisms lost the stomach for going after violent white extremists post-Ruby Ridge and Waco.

So here we are. The people breaking windows in the Capitol were responding to what they thought was true about the world, and their bodies were pumped with outrage and anger kept fed by a media machine that has zero interest in facts, only in attention.

The title of this post is taken from the book The Body Keeps the Score by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, in which he lays out his ideas involving how trauma lodges in the body, and details his work with Vietnam veterans and victims of child abuse. His work has been extended through studies on epigenetics by people like Rachel Yehuda (who studied descendants of Holocaust and 9/11 survivors) and Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart, who has studied trauma passed on through generations of Native American populations—Lakota descendants of those who’d survived the horrors of Wounded Knee in particular, but also those who suffered conditioning and abuse when forced into residential boarding schools.

The man in the video posted by Molly McKew is deeply misinformed at best, and looking for further radicalization at worst. I hope not. But no matter where he goes from here, the reality is that he and so many others who participated in a revolt yesterday are carrying bodies full of toxins that have been pumped into them for years by right-wing radio show hosts, by the Fox network, by online conspiracy theorists, and of course by the president and his supporters and enablers.

All of those words and feelings don’t just pass through the brain or stay on the internet. They stir emotions, start rushing energy and stress hormones around, and clamor for action. This is part of our evolution. Our flight-or-fight reaction is a stress response evolved to save our lives in the fact of immediate danger. Media uses it all the time, in some cases unknowingly but they certainly know what they’re hoping to achieve: to keep people engaged by keeping them outraged and angry, by keeping those bodies pumped full of stress hormones.

At some point all that radicalization and anger was going to have to go somewhere. People have been acting on those emotions for years by yelling online, by going further into conspiracies and disinformation, and by stocking up on weaponry. In some cases they’ve attended training camps for armed revolutionaries.

Nothing ever stays “just online.” It doesn’t matter whether I agree with any of those people or not, or whether you do or not. All of society suffers the consequences because at some point their emotions will need their bodies to take action.

And it’s not like I’m immune. One of the reasons I quit Twitter was because it was clear to me how easily hooked I get in toggling from one political feed to the next, and going further into the “how bad is it?” rabbit hole. Once I left, I was more aware every time I let myself look at Twitter of its physical effects on me. It’s like a craving for sugar or trashy cliffhanger TV shows (24 comes to mind) but worse. I can go from feed to feed to feed and at the same time be completely conscious that my body’s tension is growing—not just from anger, but from a physical need to fix it all. It’s no different, likely, than what a conspiracy theorist goes through engaging in a near-manic desire to connect all the threads together and finally grasp the entire picture. If I just check Molly McKew’s feed one more time, or Sarah Kendzior’s, or Malcolm Vance’s, or JJ MacNab’s*, or someone who seems to have an ear in the White House, then surely I’ll “get” it all.

And then what? I think we know what. Those aren’t the feeds yesterday’s insurrectionists were following, but the mind-body process might have been similar. The end is a strong desire to do something. And when you have a president who’s prompting you to go invade the houses of Congress to save his presidency and the democracy you believe you’re losing, what does anybody expect? Throw in a feeling of connection and fellow-feeling with a whole lot of other radicalized, disinformed insurrectionists, and you’re going to take that body full of excitement and stress hormones and march up the steps. And put your feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk I guess?

The longer a toxic media ecosystem is allowed to pump poisons into society, the more their bodies—or all our bodies—will keep the score. But it’s the body politic that pays the price.

*These are really good people to follow if you’re interested in these things, though!

John Vaillant and the likeways of art

“Public property rights stand equally important [to private ownership], for they secure the life sources for all citizens: the air, water, oceans, wildlife, fish, forests, vegetation, and soils. Without an abundance of such natural wealth, there can be no social stability, and thus no individual liberty, for citizens struggling to survive can fall prey to tyrants.” —Mary Christina Wood, Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

I recently finished reading John Vaillant’s book The Golden Spruce, about a famous golden spruce tree and the logger-turned-environmental activist who cut it down. Somewhere around a third of the way through I almost stopped reading, because I wasn’t sure if I could handle yet another story of the utter destruction wrought by commodification and unchecked capitalism.*

It’s an incredible history, reaching back to the first meetings of the Haida people with European ships looking for commodities and trade in the late 1700s, delving into the growth and mechanization of the logging industry, and tracking one man’s personal journey of heroism or hell.

I kept reading because Vaillant is an excellent writer and several friends whose judgment I trust have recommended him, and I wasn’t sorry I kept going. I didn’t feel any better about commodification or humanity, but Vaillant was deft and matter-of-fact in his treatment of the subjects—not leaving me with hope exactly, but more a bolstering, of refusing to look away from the reality whether you think you can change it or not. His skill in narrative turned the subject from one I wanted to avoid for once, to a book I’ll actually keep on my shelves rather than passing on.

—-

Some days after finishing the book, I walked to City Beach on a gray, cold day with my husband while our kids were at their grandparents’. We ran into one of the swimming teachers from the gym, a woman I’ve known marginally for several years, and was glad to find was coping with quarantines and pandemic as well as possible. We chatted a bit about this and that, and somehow stumbled onto Elon Musk and Mars.

“What are we doing messing about with this planet?” she said. “We need to be out there, we need to be building space stations and moon bases.”

Well, maybe. Do we? I don’t think so. Personally, I think it’s the frontier mentality, looking around and realizing what a mess things are and how much work it’s going to be to clean it all up, and fantasizing about being able to start over with a clean slate elsewhere. It never actually works that way, and space will be no different.

But she talked about the technology and how fascinating it is and how much we benefit from the kind of research that goes into space tech, and that, of course, isn’t wrong. But I still think we’re fooling ourselves if we imagine we can go and do incredible things in space and somehow be a better species when we still can’t bring ourselves to feed all the children on the planet. We’ll do it anyway, though. Or some people will, while others will keep trying to feed all the children.

—-

Recently I’ve been questioning the purposes of art, which is kind of a hopeless quest that every creative person goes through (and just for the record, I think everyone’s a creative person)—a three a.m. “What am I doing here?” wail followed by searches on the internet for wildland firefighter training. Which is doubly silly because I already have a non-writing job and, at 44, am probably too old to go off firefighting.

In any case, Vaillant reminded me that the purpose of art is to serve a perhaps undefinable role in tracing the vast networks of connections, knowledge, pain, hope, and lifeways that bind us together, and will always bind us together, no matter how much we forget about them nor how far we travel from one another. To remind us to keep watching the stars while we feed the children.

*I was going to write “unchecked greed” here, but I don’t think greed is the right word. Greed seems to imply an intent to take from others, knowing that it’s unfair, but the kind of capitalism we function in tells us that there’s nothing wrong with commodification that causes complete destruction, that whatever we pursue in the interests of profit is the right thing to do. Plenty of people participate in this system with willful greed, but plenty of others do because there are no other choices.