J.R. Gerow

On Politics By Other Means

What we’re seeing in the last week is a pretty old story.

The crowd is almost a mirror. The majority of protesters showed up wanting to hold signs and chant slogans, because people are mostly good people. A handful of organizers might have had a list of concrete demands that never really penetrated the consciousness of the crowd or the media, as crowds are wont to confusion and media are wont to spectacle. A substantial minority showed up wanting to throw rocks and light fires because it reflects their sincere attitude towards the brokenness of the social compact. Another set showed up wanting to break windows and steal things because it reflected selfish anarchic glee. A small opposition group wanted to accelerate the chaos of the protests to undermine its message. All of these groups largely ignored that there was a pandemic going on, which may leave a long shadow on the communities involved. There is no telling these groups apart in the dynamics of the crowd. The audience to these acts is wide, and some will be disgusted, some sympathetic, depending on what kind of people they are prepared to see. That is the self-reflective quality of a roiling crowd.

It’s at this point in the script that leaders start directing people towards non-street-based action. The town hall on reimagining policing starts next week. The local leaders start inviting organizers to sit down with police unions for some kind of discussion. People dust off their police reform checklists and start trying to check another box or two. It’s mostly the same checklist from a decade ago, sadly. The sense that what’s happened over the last week has an unsustainable cost is sinking in, and will mostly redirect people’s energies.

This is, of course, part of the process. If the news hadn’t spent 72 hours showing burning buildings, the community meeting and legislative campaign wouldn’t have gotten any notice. When the majority is comfortable, inertia is quite inviting. Letter writing campaigns by the downtrodden are seen as a nice act of civic engagement, almost their own reward.

If the left does its job from here, a convulsion of social unrest sets the stage for a meaningful second act. That second act can accelerate some good reforms that increase trust and accountability between police and their communities — and which, frankly, I think most people would find nonpartisan if they weren’t swayed by the politics of opposition.

There is, of course, something pitiable in the fact that a substantial amount of energy has to go into conflict and destruction in order to direct a smaller amount of energy into dialogue and construction. But that’s a quality of our society. This is what political engagement looks like among people who fear the law, distrust the institutions that make and enforce it, and don’t believe that their fellow citizens sincerely hear them. Sometimes that’s a lazy posture, but sometimes, it’s with cause. Black people, specifically, have some good cause to feel that they exist on oppositional terms to American society. They are marked by 400 years of social engineering to make them into a racial underclass, with all of the social judgments that attend it. Their social alienation will likely persist until the day that you can look at a page of demographic data and not see a clear American racial underclass, and there’s not even a conversation around the reparations that would require. For now, many American blacks don’t feel heard when they cry for their own lives, much less when they do a letter writing campaign.

The people who pick up the pen and not the torch in times of crisis are themselves a privileged class because they feel they have a receptive audience. All too often, those pens don’t get busy until the torches are already on parade. If war is politics by other means, rioting is politics by another class. A deeply unequal society does not politically engage on common terms.

We’ll see what comes of this round of unrest. There have been bouts of unrest that saw rights backslide. In America, the politics of this past week certainly have value for the right. The accelerationists, the law and order crowd, those who traffic in racial antagonism all find something useful to bolster their campaigns in the last week. A highly politicized pandemic in the middle of this complicates matters, to say the least. In a tight 2020 race, the messaging to the white suburbs that carried the 2018 election takes a new tack.

But it can also, always, be a pivot towards progress. What was got in the last week was the attention of the whole country, which is rare. In this moment, the country is looking for leadership that can speak to peace between all these actors, and their audiences. If they can find it, transformative things are possible. So pray that out of all the noise of the last week and the attention that it got, people gravitate towards a signal.

The Surreal Is My Real

One of curious effects of this pandemic has been a profound feeling of coming home, for me. This crisis is just one of a series of nesting crises that define my lifespan. There’s a pandemic, which takes place during the Trump administration, which is a symptom of the larger crisis of the age of misinformation that threatens democracy, which comes along just at the right time to complicate our response to the climate crisis, which will have a million sub-crises that compound each other and threaten state failure. And there are other, lower key crises that don’t occupy much of my attention but that I wouldn’t actually bet money against either, like AI going nuts or accidentally toxifying our bodies or whatnot.

So this moment, for me, feels like a small release. Ah, the world in turmoil, as it should be. Normal, when it comes in 2022 or whatever, is a kind of segue — a brief interlude tempting the suspension of our disbelief.

Solidarity is a Circle and It’ll Roll Around

At a high profile time like this, with everyone watching, if your society doesn’t express social solidarity with the tens of thousands or millions who may die of a pandemic, it doesn’t just send a message to the elderly and infirm. It sends a message to everyone on the spectrum of endangerment in your society. Everyone who feels threatened by police, economic forces, environmental threats, and more. It tells them that when they are under siege, they should expect no better, and give the same.

On Reopening

I don’t know how bad the “reopening” wave of this virus is going to be, for many reasons connected to many variables. I don’t know the best way to account for all the direct and indirect deaths and social harm that result from a lockdown, now and years into the future. I don’t know how to balance these two things even if I could quantify them. I don’t know how precise or reliable the information is that our public servants are relying on as they nuance their reopening plans by industry and region.

What I do know is that I’m thankful to be living in a country with high social solidarity, and trust in our media, government, and healthcare institutions. Because whatever comes at us, whatever the cost of our inevitable errors, it is far superior to have a coordinated, broadly supported response than be driven by at least 50 different policies in an environment dominated by distrust and propaganda.

A Real Climate Accord

So, in my work life, I’m a climate lawyer. I’m not a big name, I don’t run any important national campaigns, but I studied at the UN during the Rio Negotiations, I concentrated in environmental and international law in law school, I’ve worked for two different climate change think tanks at Pace Law School and Columbia University, and I consider myself an activist. The big thing I’m on now is research for a web-based platform showcasing legal pathways to deep decarbonization, which should launch at some point in the next couple months. So I live in this space pretty deeply.

I’m convinced that the biggest idea that nobody talks about in climate politics is getting to a Real Climate Accord. I’ve written a bit about what that would mean. I made a logo, some model legislation, wrote some outreach, and designed a website to promote the core concept. It’s up there at www.RealClimateAccord.com, my baby. So this post kind of takes that thinking and explains it a little less formally, with a few more asides, to flesh out certain things that don’t make for good political language (this is a 2300 word version of what I tried to reduce to 400 for the site) and cross-pollinate my audiences. Here goes:

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Climate change is a global collective action problem. That is, every country faces strong incentives to pollute even though they know that they and everybody else would be better off if we didn’t. Because everybody knows that nobody else has a private incentive to stop polluting, we might as well keep polluting ourselves. It’s irrational to handicap your own country if nobody else will – if, indeed, the world is going to just get hotter anyways. Make money while the sun shines, burn oil before the seas rise.

Since the first UN conference of the parties, every step of the way we’re trying to solve climate change by doing exactly the sorts of things that should fail in a collective action model. And, okay, the most basic collective action model is admittedly too simple to predict the real world response – but it’s telling that for thirty years, the world has moved roughly on the business-as-usual emissions trajectory forecast back in 1990. The simplest model would say it absolutely should. It absolutely should continue to going forward. This is economics 101 stuff, and for the last generation we’re desperately hoping economics 101 is wrong or underaccounting for something – and yes, there’s a lot of smart debate about the kinds of things you can accomplish in spite of the collective action nature of this problem – Elinor Ostrom rightly says that you shouldn’t expect zero cooperation, lots of sectors of society exhibit small capacities for sacrifice in order to win forms of social capital, and that’s all true – but even she’ll admit that this is a core problem. And I’ll go further to say, the evidence seems pretty overwhelming that social capital isn’t getting the job done at scale. Collective action problems require collective action solutions.

If anything should open our eyes to this truth, surviving the coronavirus pandemic should. A global problem without global coordination creates a mess.

The first prerequisite to a credible global decarbonization plan is that there’s some kind of real, enforceable accord. Within that, you can get into a million political questions around who has a burden to decarbonize and do technology transfer and development funding and apply tariffs and on what schedule and impose what kinds of internal pollution regulations (and whether they should be in the form of taxes or caps or industrial nationalization) – and it’s well beyond the scope of this argument to try and spitball where the sum of a thousand small intra- and international negotiations lead us in that regard. It would be hubris and counterproductive, in fact. Countries need to come together and negotiate and feel heard and fight for whatever degree of concession or independence is important to them. They need to do that if they’re going to accept the outcomes.

But a few things about the core framework are clear as day, and any outcome that lacks an element of that framework is probably going to fail. Countries need to acknowledge that at the start of the negotiation and be guided by that framework until the end.

So my yawp into the void is just to say, and repeat, and repeat that a global climate accord can’t get us to a temperature target unless it is:

Actually based on that target. That is, sets a scientific global carbon budget linked to a temperature target, with whatever probabilistic certainty we want to accept. This isn’t what we do now. That 1.5C or 2C target they talk about at the UN is just aspirational.
Actually assigns responsibility for that target. That is, every country comes home with a carbon budget that collectively adds up to the whole – not just “individual nationally determined contributions.”
Actually monitors whether people abide by their targets. That is, establishes an independent monitoring body to survey global emissions, rather than relying on self-reporting from self-interested parties. Countries lie about their emissions for no good reason already, they certainly would do so more if you gave them hard incentives to.
Actually creates an enforcement mechanism for people who break their obligations. Obviously, there’s nothing even gesturing in this direction right now. This should create effective incentives to comply – that is, puts every country in the position where they’re better off economically if they make their emissions target than if they don’t. There’s at least two ways you can do this:
1. Set a global tariff system that creates free trade pathways for countries abiding by their obligations, and harshly punishes those who don’t. The EU particularly seems close to broaching this to a small degree with talk of border carbon adjustments – the problem being it’s necessarily kind of a small, limited tool right now (I can’t tax you for burning down your forests for shits and giggles if it’s not somehow reflected in exports, I can only tax the implicit carbon footprint of manufacturing a given widget to precisely the extent that my country makes that exact same widget and imposes that same carbon tax internally). Because of the restrictive nature of the kinds of reciprocal tariff penalties that can be applied at the World Trade Organization currently, an exemption may need to be added to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to get enough muscle here that it’s a truly effective incentive. That is, we may need to rewrite international trade rules so that I can say something about you burning down those internal forests. But as daunting as that is, the GATT didn’t come down on two tablets from Mount Sinai, and we can amend it for the biggest challenge to ever face humanity.
2. Create a global system of development finance. Developing countries aren’t very incentivized by tariffs scheduled against exports that they don’t produce. So create a global system of development finance that expands what they have at stake – if they meet their targets, they get their full funding. If they don’t, they lose out. This exists already at a pretty modest, voluntary level, and it’s not contingent on emissions goals. For the developed countries providing the funding, of course, you need to then make their funding obligations every bit as binding as their emissions obligations for this to work. (Just an aside, but you could link these mechanisms together and even provide for wealth transfers between rich countries to reward exceptional decarbonization efforts. The more cooperation you get on that, the more the system starts to function like global cap and trade.)

If you do all this, if you have the core elements in place to actually give someone a private incentive to decarbonize, you finally have a workable framework that every other small political battle can be guided under. China can have a big messy internal process to figure out their preferred internal decarbonization path and the US can do the same and third parties can stand in the middle and still feel confident that whether the rest of the world chooses industrial nationalization or R&D-oriented tax credits, in the long-run, countries will meet their emissions targets. They should, because they will finally face a self-interested incentive to do so.

If you don’t do this, then I say it’s really not a surprise if you get another 30 years down the line saying, this is the moment when it finally seems imperative enough to act, and it never is, because the private incentives are never fucking there for anyone to do so. Your country could be literally disappearing and it’s still smarter for you to make a little oil money on the way out than build windfarms underwater.

For 30 years, people have known, at some level, that this is what needs to happen, and they’ve largely kept saying to themselves, nah, countries will never agree to that kind of accord, it’s impossible. But I say this is inevitable. This is absolutely going to happen someday. It may take a crisis, but what countries stand to lose in unchecked climate change is astronomical next to what they stand to lose from ceding a little autonomy to an international accord. Starting from about 2050, the projections for climate change get hairy. Once you’re past that 2C threshold, you start worrying about mass starvation and water security and migration at a scale that collapses governments. You start worrying about world war and pandemics waking up out of the permafrost where they’ve been buried for 10,000 years. You start worrying about the collapse of societies. I bet that before national power fucking disappears, national power will learn to work a little with a limited global accord.

So this is going to happen, but the more we get this idea into people’s heads, the sooner it will. There’ll be a thousand small crises between now and doomsday, and when you’re in a crisis, policy gets built out of whatever ideas are lying around, as they say. We need this idea lying around, everywhere on earth. We need it to spread. We need it to be infectious.

So that’s what this little organization is about, what this piece of political action that I’m engaged in aims for. And if I’m the lonely guy with the sign and the binder full of model legislation on the steps of Parliament yawping into the void, so be it. This is too big and too important of an idea to lack its wild prophets.

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A couple caveats:

Okay, this is actually a fairly flexible prophecy in some ways. If you live in this space, you know there are always potential silver bullets lying around that could solve climate change without, really, any society even having to meaningfully sacrifice. A technological breakthrough is possible at any moment. Right now, the one I’m interested in is negative emissions technologies. If direct air capture got a heap of R&D funding and proceeded to have a decade like solar just had where costs came down 90%, you could solve the climate crisis with a few heroes footing the bill, and it wouldn’t even be that big of a bill. That’s the rosiest scenario.

The darker, still not abysmal scenario is just that we do lots of geoengineering to forestall the apocalypse – by agreement or rogue actors, either way. The idea of spraying aluminum aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reflect out the sun is comparatively cheap. The idea of doing ocean iron acidification to accelerate carbon capture in the deep oceans is a very plausible idea at a certain scale. These are the sorts of things that rogue billionaires could and probably will do if society starts hitting some hard shocks from climate. This might buy us time (and, yes, pose totally unforeseeable risks of a Snowpiercer scenario or whatnot – but I’ll take the global geoengineering that we consciously choose to do because our best models think it will have beneficial effects over the global geoengineering that we’re doing already, totally by hazard, in spite of our best models saying it’ll have disastrous consequences).

Either way, I come out thinking that global governance of the global atmosphere is probably inevitable, even if it isn’t the first order response to climate or it comes later. Because technological miracles don’t only happen for the good guys. The biggest energy story in North America in the last thirty years wasn’t renewables, it was fracking, which dramatically shifted the energy landscape. From our previous baseline, this was actually for the better since it crowded out coal, but if it were to reoccur in the future, it would probably hurt renewables. This kind of thing can absolutely happen again. Today, they’re excited about the prospects of natural gas drilling in the ocean. Maybe that’s another boom that shocks renewables right back out of the bidding stack. Or maybe there’s a technological breakthrough that makes it incredibly profitable to emit one of the secondary GHGs that we hardly talk about – methane, nitrous oxide, HFCs. Either way, in the long run we have this collective good, our atmosphere, without collective governance of it. That we might find a way out of climate change in the near-term without having to establish that governance system leans a bit hard into optimism, I think, but it’s not impossible. That we will thereafter never backslide, never face a natural shock, never invent another way of polluting that collective good seems truly magical. So even if it’s just to maintain the stability that a technological miracle bestows on us, we’re going to need enforceable ways of caring for our atmosphere in the long-run. The bottom line is that we have a planet that we are now big and dangerous enough to threaten, and there will be other ways and other challenges to it in the future that require our cooperation.

Six Albums I’ve Really Enjoyed

The cats are on the balcony, the ice rink is a giant glistening puddle, I know we have a couple cold snaps left here, but it’s starting to turn to spring, so it’s time to wrap up my winter playlists. Here’s a few albums and artists I recently discovered and really enjoyed:

Marika Hackman: Any Human Friend (2019). Hackman’s latest album is infectiously catchy and viscerally sexual. The songs are little urges and the lyrics are invested in finding the depth in those urges — the emotional resonance, sometimes even holiness. It has me bopping along dirtily and “dig[ging] for light in the eye of my thighs.”

The Weather Station: The Weather Station (2017). This Torontoise chanteuse has been making some excellent folk music for a few years, but the rock-adjacent full band arrangements she plays with on her latest lend her Joni Mitchell sensibilities a little more dynamicism. She’s a lyricist first, second, and third, though. These are all stories about measuring what we owe to each other in our relationships, and they hit with insight and intimacy. “Thirty” is a highlight if you’re anywhere around that age.

Benjamin Booker: Witness (2017) and Benjamin Booker (2014). I couldn’t easily choose between Booker’s albums, they’re both so solid and mature. Booker’s got the ability, in each bluesy vocal hook, to find those minimal 6-10 words that sink in like mantra and define the world against you. His voice is silky and husky at once. His work is politically and culturally aware, visiting hate crimes by the police (Witness), the poverty pipeline into the army (Believe), the stubborn persistence of old oppressions (Slow Coming), while also being surprisingly vulnerable when it comes to reflecting on his personal relationships. The video for “Believe” is particularly worth seeing.

Weaves: Wide Open (2017). These Torontois rockers just have a good time. The early two-punch of “Law and Panda” to “Walk Away” is great dance stuff.

The Accidentals: Odyssey (2017). This orchestral indie trio have what I’d call a young sound — by which I mean, the songs are very inward-focused, very concerned with locating the self. But the sentiment is earnest and confident, the music is tight, and the lyrics are inventive and playful, and sometimes it’s nice to close your eyes and indulge that sense that everything in the universe is bright and tragic and your new heart is a privileged thing in it.

J.E. Sunde: Now I Feel Adored (2017). J.E. Sunde has a certain quality I can’t put my finger on. He’s earnest and mature. He’s melodic and rich. He’s wholesome, in an era when to sound wholesome means old-fashioned, and he leans into that hard on songs like “Color Your Nails.” His bio reads something about how he cleans houses between record tours and he’s happy with that life. He’s the Mr. Rogers of indie rock, which is to say, a little revolutionary.

I Saw “Cats” High and We Need New Vocabulary to Describe Its Majesty

As is in vogue these days, I saw “Cats” high and I must impart to you all, the cognitively-bounded masses, that the film is a misunderstood masterpiece.

Let me be clear: I acknowledge that “Cats” is very, very bad at being a certain type of movie — which may be precisely the type of movie that you expected and/or wanted to see. This is true.

In fact, I cannot say that “Cats” is particularly “good” at being any type of movie, per se — because declaring something “good” really requires us to have a body of films in its genre to compare it against, and I’m not sure there’s anything that plays quite on the revolutionary terrain of “Cats.”

But I do believe that one can experience “Cats” with a mind opened (perhaps chemically) on a certain reading of the film that makes it, in a word, transcendent. That renders all of its foibles into expressions of a deeper theme and begs us to invent new vocabulary to describe what exactly it is doing.

Let me tell you how the expanded mind must receive “Cats,” and the concepts we need to add to our lexicon in its wake.

First: “Cats” takes its surreal premise deadly seriously at a thematic and aesthetic level.

Andrew Lloyd Weber wrote a Broadway musical about the societies of cats explaining themselves to people, starring people as cats. Consider that. Here’s how you could’ve written that synopsis just as honestly:

An alien intelligence lives among us. We have conducted our lives in parallel to it for millennia — superficially orbiting each other, but never really seeing each other, or possessing the concepts to do so.

One day, in a burst of ambition, the alien decides to try and transcribe the experience of its bizzare-o religious death cult society into a form that the humans would understand: that of a Broadway musical. To breach the bounds of empathy, they represent themselves to us in the forms of men and women — at least, men and women as they conceive them. These unreal creatures try and relate to us how the aliens conceive of themselves, individually and collectively, in our vocabulary, and tell us what gives meaning to their rituals and traditions. To make the experience familiar for its audience, the alien renders its self-expression into how it thinks a three-act structure probably works, with “characters” and “plot” and “pacing” and “mood.” It is a rough attempt, but a noble one.

The creatures we see on the screen before us, of course, are never real. Cats do not look like Rebel Wilson covered in fur. They are irreal, and yet it is precisely their irreality that hints at something more profound than a normal human character behind its eye — they are the cipher to another quality of mind altogether. We require, here, our first term of art to describe what we are seeing:

The uncanny mountain. The uncanny valley, we all know, refers to when a CGI creation looks so close to human as to almost trick us into believing it — but, perversely, that postured near-humanity registers as danger and evokes revulsion when the viewer notices all the subtle ways in which it is not quite right. The uncanny mountain, on the other hand, is a parallel and opposite experience. It is the experience of seeing something that is almost human in many ways. Yet it insists to us, openly, that it is not human, that it represents something more, something superhuman, and that makes its eerie facsimile of human features covering the unnatural thing behind them actually alluring, fascinating, the opposite effect of the uncanny valley. It is the feeling of looking on a god in its almost-human form, or a demon that slips us a peek of the horns under its hat.

That is the feeling one is overcome by watching the uncanny human-cat hybrids dance — they move like people, and yet one can detect in the artificial shiver of their graphically rendered fur as they spin and contort that they are but the shadows cast by another reality outside the cave. In that way, the question “why are the cats sexy” is the wrong one altogether — of course they are sexy, they are urgently sexual creatures locked in a fertility-death cult — the reason they might appear sexy to us is that we are only prepared to receive their essence disguised through Taylor Swift’s hips. The wrongness of their bodies itself is a metaphor for an unsurpassable separation between us and the expressive force outside our cave.

Read through this lens, all of the surrealism of the movie “Cats” resonates as an artifact of the incredible distance traversed in trying to translate cat consciousness for humans. Of course the chorus line of roaches should have small human faces, think the cats in their cute little writer’s room, for we are trying to represent them to people, after all. Of course the magical cat should be represented in a top hat, making disembodied trombones float through the air in celebration while bouquets of flowers burst out of the aether. That will be how people understand that he is magical. Of course the story should shift, within 30 seconds, from the most tragic song’s final chord, to a laughing villain threatening his victim in a dark alley, to the broad and joyful chords of “Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat,” as that is what the humans would call an “emotional transition.”

In this way, the film is able to overcome the viewer with laughter at its absurdities without ceding to the emptiness of camp. It employs what I believe is the second piece of new aesthetic vocabulary that “Cats” requires from us, deep camp.

“Camp,” of course, occurs when an artistic creation is so poor (often deliberately) at mimicking the reality that it purports to represent that the viewer laughs at its shortcomings. “Deep camp,” par contre, exhibits its shortcomings as thematically relevant to the meta-oeuvre. When we are watching “Cats,” we know, as we have already established, that we are not looking at real cats. Moreover, we are not intended to be deceived that we are looking at real cats. We are fully aware at all times that these are not actual cats, and we are invited to experience their irreality as a gesture towards an impossible translation — that of the cats presenting for us a version of their reality in a format in which it cannot naturally exist.

It is therefore with joy and acceptance that we greet the absurdity of Ian McKellan dumbly stooped with his face hovering half an inch over a bowl of milk, badly lapping at it with his all-too-human tongue, a poor representation of catness indeed — and yet noble in its affect, as we are made to grapple, in that image, with how deep the chasm lies between our two realities (Sir Ian’s and the cat’s). It is with a kind of respect that we hear Idris Elba’s laughably feeble hissss at his co-stars and how unspeakably stupid the whole line of performers appears simulating “cat applause” by alternating their left and right paws up and down. It is unbearably bad, and that is fitting, and its badness is itself a source of meaning in the art.

[It is, in fact, sometimes so unbearably campy that I cannot accept that the creators of this masterpiece did not know what the movie was doing. Here is their self-aware signature, if nowhere else so clearly. Sir Ian McKellan yowling in cat does not happen by accident. Sir Ian always knows what the movie is doing. He is a knight.]

The third term of art we require to appreciate “Cats” is what I would call decriticalization. It describes the sensation of being taken out of one’s critical mind, leaving one more receptive and vulnerable to the appeals of an art. As one watches a film committed to its well-established genre, one is able to separate oneself from the experience of the film in order to critique its execution of certain expected genre elements. In “Saving Private Ryan,” for example, we can stop and appreciate how realistic the war cinematography is, in part because we are already anticipating the beats of the story while we are supposed to be experiencing it. In a romantic comedy, we may groan at how predictable the plot is, or appreciate small subversions of the formula. In a Marvel movie, we may spend the entire running time critiquing style.

In “Cats,” the film loudly declares early on that the viewer is not permitted to anticipate anything intelligible. As the second cat we are introduced to jovially sets enslaved human-mice hybrids to play in a cupboard band while swallowing human-cockroach hybrids, the viewer is violently decriticalized. We are neutered of our expectations, and with them, our critical faculties. We are confronted with the possibility that this movie could do anything — anything at all — and so experience it in a state of wonder and/or suspense at its vision and/or terror.

It is this suspension of the critical mind that grants the film latitude to play emotionally on the viewer. Because we have not steeled ourselves against the tropes of any genre, I am in full and genuine suspense when “The Magical Mister Mistoffelees” becomes a public trial over whether the titular cat can reapparate the kidnapped leader of the cats before she is murdered by a criminal cat on a remote gangplank. Will he do it? Are the first four times he has failed just baiting the audience’s expectations for a final success, and emotional release? Or will he fail at his ultimate attempt, too, and be disemboweled by Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat in retribution? I have no beliefs left. These are all possible worlds.

In this state of critical vulnerability, even the tired conventional appeals of “Cats” have greater resonance. When Jennifer Hudson wails her sad little cat song, I can’t gird myself against that pain. This may partially have to do with the weed. When the cat society breathlessly receives its hallowed leader, Old Deuteronomy, I too feel touched by a transcendent presence as she passes, grazing their blessed cheeks.

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Two notes on “Cats” that do not fit precisely into the themes of this review otherwise:

First, I have not seen the original 1998 PBS recording in its entirety, though I have seen 15 minutes or so of it in passing. I have never, of course, attended a live performance. Nevertheless, I could immediately detect which song was the new one, “Beautiful Ghosts,” and whispered as much in my best demure, not-at-all-high aside to my wife in the theater, who confirmed. There is something in that new song’s lyric and melody that sounds too easily human. In Andrew Lloyd Weber’s original score, every song subverts your musical expectation in some way — a slightly wonky tune, a lyric that drags on a few syllables after it should have returned to tonic. It all sounds like a jerky translation of a story that might have been written, originally, in cat.

Second, the moment when Sir Ian McKellan topples his cat enemy from the end of a long pier by forcefully exclaiming “I am Firefrorefiddle!” reminded me of another career moment of his involving an enemy on a long pier. Although “You shall not pass” doesn’t quite have the same oomph as “Firefrorefiddle!” I expect the internet will remedy the original LOTR footage for us soon enough.

Propaganda

When I was born, America was one of the great democracies of the world.

In the 1990’s, partisan media started polarizing the country.

In the 2000’s, the internet starting creating a national discourse that could fully detach from reality.

In the 2010’s, right wing media created a president who spent most of his time creating and amplifying propaganda. One can interpret almost everything he does through that lens. He was an addict of the product before he entered politics, and he serves the product now.

At the dawn of the 2020’s, he will stand trial for bribery with the intent of creating more political propaganda. There is no serious defense. He will be acquitted because his party believes that is an essential part of the job.

Few will go out in the streets, because it is clear that they have no power against this machine. His half of the country is untouchable.

The difference between true democracies and merely nominal democracies can be explained by the power of propaganda. Why lock the journalists up when you can drown them out?

What America is now is hard to say. It may take another ten years to gauge, and I think it depends in large part on what norms the propaganda-state decides to embrace, what types of power it wants. It may be happy to solidify its grip on traditional powers. It may choose to quash resistance when third parties attempt to hack the voting system. It may go after “illegal” votes. It may load the courts with types sympathetic to this project.

One of the most important political projects for the rest of the world will be how to contain America, and to understand and combat the forces that broke it.

Come From Away and emotional sleight of hand

Come From Away, about a small town in Newfoundland that takes in stranded passengers when US airspace is shut down after 9/11, is a deceptively affecting piece that weights its unassuming premise with a kind of sleight of emotional transference. So I found myself, unexpectedly, crying within the first twenty minutes of the performance. Based on what I’d heard about the show, I’d thought that the emotional valence would be about welcoming the stranger (which may not be surprising, I suppose – our culture does tend to interpret every story through contemporary politics). And on the surface, that is what it’s about. But the gravity of the show is all about people processing mass tragedy.

Art that deals with mass tragedy has a tradeoff to make. It can hover directly over the tragedy, and that can give the audience a real perspective of what happened and what it was like to be there, which is vital. But it also shuts us down emotionally. Watching a mass tragedy occur, the scale of loss is inhuman, numbing, emotionally inaccessible to us. Our animal brains know very well that when you see a cloud of ash sweep across a city like the fist of God swallowing people whole (or a gas chamber in Germany, or a machete genocide in Rwanda) that this is not a time or place to access our feelings. This is a time to run. Our other systems shut down. The fully engaged audience comes out battered, but not necessarily enlightened or cathartic.

To offer catharsis about a mass tragedy, focus just to the left of the tragedy itself. A rural town in Newfoundland, just turning on the news (the abandoned building where the pianist discovers a piano that he can’t yet play, the hotel in Hotel Rwanda, etc.). You take the audience someplace safe. And then you give them a smaller, more human-scale drama onto which they might project all of the feelings that inform that day, about which they can’t directly speak, because that surrogate of the experience is what we need to process it.

A less emotionally intelligent show, for example, might give you a glimpse into what was happening in New York on that day, just to set the context. But Manhattan doesn’t appear in Come From Away. With a conspicuous discipline, what happened there is not even spoken of. We see people turning the radio on. And then, with ashen faces, telling other people to turn the radio on. When the passengers disembark the plane at nightfall and ask the woman running the shelter finally what happened, she struggles to find the words, and then tells them that the televisions are on in the cafeteria. They can see for themselves.

In any other context – say, an airline goes bankrupt in midflight – the spectacle of a few dozen planes full of international strangers without a common language and a crate full of animals plus a rare pregnant baboon touching down in a rural backwater where everyone has to run in circles to find food and toiletries is a setup for a comedy. What happens to these stranded people for five days doesn’t particularly matter in any material sense. Whether the Newfoundlanders, in a vacuum, are hospitable or a bit prickish isn’t that important, because we know that on most days the world is full of casual indecencies and we probably wouldn’t believe a fairy tale about general Canadian saintliness anyways. But on 9/11, as everyone getting off that plane and everyone on the ground is struggling to come to terms with an act of mass inhumanity just a few hours away, the tiny trials of this nowheresville becomes weighted with processing that trauma. And suddenly, whether everyone gets hot showers deeply matters. Whether people give up their barbecues to the community center is important. Whether somebody goes into the cargo hold and makes sure the cats are fed is paramount – because however morally insignificant these particular passengers are over a given five-day layover, it is the sharp insistence on decency and order and kindness that we need to see, regardless of who receives it or how effective it is or whether the world is really any better for it. We need to believe that these forces respond when they’re affronted, whether they can heal Manhattan or only make tea for group of inconvenienced strangers. We need that insistence for its own sake.

In that sense, I think Come From Away could have been about anywhere and maintained resonance. And whether the folk who touched down in Iceland were greeted with cocoa or forgotten at the airport, the emotional heft of that story, about people trying to come to terms with how to respond in all the little ways that affirm or deny their humanity in the days after a traumatic event, would be intact. That’s the sucker punch that I didn’t quite expect walking into the theatre, focused on the foreground of the story. Just watching people probe their humanity in the shadow of that trauma makes you realize what that trauma really meant.

“Fable” Selection out in The Tusculum Review

Many thanks to Kelsey Trom, I have a quasi-poem out in the 2019 Tusculum Review (for paid subscribers only). They published a selection out of a piece I’ve had kicking around for a long time, a 17-poem suite titled “Fable.”

Announcement here: ttr.tusculum.edu/2019/11/13/201

“Fable” is a longer series that develops this archetypal myth of a girl named Marina who falls mute and how she recovers her voice again. I’ve had it for some time, but don’t get an option to submit it very often (not a ton of publications looking to put out epic poetry). The selection that The Tusculum Review chose to publish comes from the second section of the piece — where the angel steals into her room and takes something from her.

I’d still love to see the entire suite printed together one day. I’m not primarily a poet, so it may wait a little while before there’s a manuscript-length collection to send it out with.