Comfort, Truth, and Soft Soap
Zombie politicians, vampire comedians, fascist architecture, and more.
Now that all the speculation about who will be on the Democratic ticket for the 2020 presidential election is over, we can settle down to a good solid three months of embarrassing ourselves before the actual decision is made, either by us or for us. The one-two punch of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is delivering such powerful kinetic energy that it has dropped something like ten points in national polling in the space of a week, no doubt buoyed by the ridiculous spectacle of a virtual Democratic National Convention that presented us with the best the Republican Party had to offer circa 2006 and the ascendance of the K-Hive, a group of online liberals with the appeal of an immensely disliked human resources manager and the ideology of a speedboat dealer with an “America: Love It or Leave It” sticker on his Lexus GX.
The convention and the discourse surrounding it were curiously toned. For all the talk of building coalitions, reaching across the aisle, and expanding the party’s core support, very little effort was made to reach out to progressives and none to leftists; although they would both seem crucial to the goal of ousting Trump—which they are constantly assured is the prize on which we all should be focused to the exclusion of everything else—they received almost no concessions or consideration. Instead, the campaign seemed to take the lead of its presidential choice, telling anyone with the temerity to ask about specific policy platforms or the ideological direction of the party that maybe they’d be better off voting for someone else. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, one of the most beloved elected officials in America, was given exactly one minute to speak and was the sole admission that a left element to the party even existed; afterwards, she was widely excoriated in the media for using the limited time she’d been given to nominate Bernie Sanders, even though it was a simple procedural matter that she’d been asked to take care of by the Democratic National Committee.
While the party’s crippled and uncared for left wing was handed one perfunctory flap, and Sanders (who we were reminded about two hundred million times over the last five years ‘isn’t even a Democrat) was excoriated for not bending the knee sooner and deeper, actual Republicans, who apparently also aren’t even Democrats but in an acceptable way, had an absolute field day. They appeared in prime speaking gigs at the virtual convention far more than leftists or progressives, and while there was no time for the left-leaning ‘Squad’ allies of AOC or the DSA-backed insurgents that have electrified the party’s younger voters, there was plenty for the likes of Christine Todd Whitman, Cindy McCain, Susan Molinari, John Kasich, and Colin Powell.
It’s not so much the presence of lifelong Republicans at the convention that’s galling. The Democrats have been moving markedly to the right since Ronald Reagan’s first term, and since the Clinton Administration’s embrace of third-way triangulation, every presidential election has been more or less focused on winning the support of the same few thousand well-off suburban conservatives whose fickle culture-war nonsense and pathological individualism are the qualities that have come to dominate electoral politics in America. Chasing the votes of the terror-management-theory center-right is nothing new for the party. What’s changed, and what makes the whole thing such a pointed farce, is the pretense that while clearly following the same playbook of tracking down every single white conservative suburban vote as if it were the Koh-I-Noor diamond, the Democrats are actually presenting us with—say it all together, now---“the most progressive platform in presidential history”.
This would be amusing if there was anyone alive who remembered the platform Bernie Sanders ran on just four months ago, let alone FDR’s New Deal or even the work of lesser postwar presidents like LBJ or Jimmy Carter. But America misplaced its institutional memory some time around the War of 1812, and it is no longer possible to communicate that the current party platform is considerably less progressive than even that of the Obama Administration after they stopped pretending the hopeful promises that won them the White House in 2008 were just attractive rhetorical flourishes. Indeed, this is part of the problem: the Biden/Harris platform, even if you choose to ignore the fact that it isn’t really that ‘left’ or ‘progressive’ by the conditional standards of the moment in which it appears, is only those things if you believe that its proponents have any intention on actually delivering on it, which they are taking great pains to signal they will not.
As the kind of black woman liberal centrists like to pretend Kamala Harris is once said, a bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. What do we choose to believe: the part of the DNC platform that purports to want to expand the Affordable Care Act with a public option, or the Democratic speakers who mentioned it only one time over the four days of the convention? The speakers who talk a good game about stopping police brutality and white supremacy, or Biden’s repeated claim that he will increase police budgets? The tough talk about reversing the course of the Supreme Court as a reason to vote (D), or the failure of the speakers to even mention the courts for most of the convention? Biden’s half-assed claims to have learned the lessons of the past, or his stubbornness on crime and cannabis legislation? Harris’ alleged sympathy for the working class, or her immediate embrace by big-money financial services executives? The progressive bona fides the party puts on paper about big dreams and bold moon-shot policies, or the desperate attempts to walk them back and talk about budget reduction and austerity measures that came not even after, but during the convention? The people Biden and Harris tell us they will be when they govern, or the people they have actually been when they’ve governed before?
That same black woman famously asked: “When people show you who they are, why don’t you believe them? Why must you be shown 29 times before you can see who they really are?” The Democrats are showing you who they really are. They are telling you one thing, and telling their investors and funding sources another; who do you think has more claim to their loyalty? If they think John Kasich is a worthy voice to reach the voters they desire, how do you think they will govern when it comes to unionizing workers and abortion access? If they seek the imprimatur of one of the primary architects of the murderous lie that was the invasion of Iraq, and dance with the ghost of the man who thought that war’s only problem was its paucity of scale, how do you think they will approach foreign policy? If the voters they chase are Republicans who are simply disaffected by Donald Trump’s crassness and lack of respect for the play-act of ‘political norms’, what will the ‘coalition’ they are assembling look like, and how will it react to any attempt to realize any actual progressive legislation?
They are showing you who they are, the Democrats; they are not doing it later, but right now. It’s time to start believing them.
What We Do in the Shadows is one of those highly agreeable and compulsively watchable shows that I never get around to for the usual no good reason. I can distinctly remember the movie coming out—I must have walked past the poster at the Logan Theatre and reminded myself to go see it a dozen times before it eventually stopped playing, back in the days when movie theaters were a place you went to see movies instead of someplace you paid $20 to pick up a medium bag of popcorn curbside out of pity. When the TV series appeared last year, I took the same vague notice and promised myself to check it out, largely on the strength of positive reviews from just about everyone who had watched it. And this week, only a few months after the end of its second season, I finally got around to it, taking in a late-night screening of the movie and then diving straight into the series.
Of course, it was worth it. Of course, it’s a terrifically funny show, full of equal parts perfectly realized little moments of awkward character work and over-the-top physical gags and held firmly in place by a dynamite cast. There have been plenty of great surprises: the sometimes gimmicky cameos that still pay off hard in laughs; the terrific writing (much of which comes from Paul Simms, a veteran behind the scenes of some of television’s best comedy of the last three decades from NewsRadio to Atlanta). And the cast really is terrific: Kayvan Novak took time to grow on me as Nandor, but the Matt Berry/Natasia Demetriou combo was fire from the start, Harvey Guillén as hapless servant Guillermo is delightful, and ubiquitous comic character man Mark Proksch gets some of the show’s best scenes as the emotional vampire Colin Robinson.
But what’s interesting to me about the show from a sort of metafictional approach is the way that it deals with the comic potential of something as vastly horrific as undead monsters who thrive on murder to survive. I’ve written extensively about the cultural shift in crime fiction from the robbers, hoodlums, crooks, and mob men who were its villains for the first part of the 20th century to the psychopaths, serial killers, and maniacs who took their place in its latter half, and the transformation of our perception of evil as something more or less rational, preventable, and comprehensible to something unfathomable, primal, and unstoppable; a similar shift took place in moving the focus of horror fiction from the obviously alien monstrosities of the Famous Monsters of Filmland era to the dead-eyed sociopaths and cosmic horrors of the modern day. And as such shifts occur in this sort of material presented straight, so too does it leak into parody and satire.
The dread we have of vampires is in their lack of familiarity, their monstrousness, their otherness: they are infused with notions of mysticism, primal horror, seduction of the innocent, destruction of the will, sexuality as a bloody dagger. When we started joking about them, the jokes were built around the tropes and forms of their myths. Now, in a more cynical age, we have come to understand that just as there is terror in what we cannot understand, there is humor in what we understand too well, and the great appeal of What We Do in the Shadows is that the vampires are not intrinsically dark and mysterious creatures whose un-life we can never comprehend, but are actually no better or wiser than us, mere hopeless humans with hopeless human egos and neuroses, sidled with addictions and lifestyle requirements that emphasize their banality, not their otherness. Horror fiction, whether straight or comic, has realized what aspirational drama has not. The rich really are different, and celebrities really aren’t just like you and me; but monsters are more relatable than we ever considered.
Speaking of delayed gratification, my wife and I recently got around to watching Adam Curtis’ 2002 documentary The Century of the Self. In my darker moments, I worry that America is too far gone, and that we long ago lost even the possibility of mass working-class resistance—that we are doomed to a slow spiral down the imperial drain while politics becomes nothing but endless culture-war bullshit. Century gave those darker moments free reign, and I’ve spent the last few days worrying that, having traded our self-conception as members of specific economic classes pitted in a war against each other for a self-conception as consumers granted the privilege of engaging with the ruling class over what products they will be given the boon of selling us, we’re stuck in an eternal cycle of individualistic signification and differentiation with material analysis dismissed as a joke or a pipe dream.
I’m not very invested in cancel-culture bullshit; I’m fine with people, especially when they have nothing of value to contribute to society, being hounded out of their do-nothing phony-baloney jobs for saying or doing something really shitty and stupid. But I do worry sometimes about there being a growing segment of the self-identified left (I want to avoid controversy by not giving them a name, but others might call them the excessively woke, the social justice crowd, or the Tumblr generation) deciding that politics requires too much effort or in some way has no purchase over ‘human nature’ and should be set aside in favor of a sort of morally satisfying cultural signaling. This sort of thing manifests itself in essentialism, to be sure—in the idea that by populating positions of power with more women, more people of color, more queers, we will sort of increase our society’s virtue by osmosis because those people are inherently more moral than others by dint of persecution—but it also makes itself known in the worst sort of virtue-signaling there is: the kind that is just preferential consumerism, elevated to a means of spiritual fulfillment.
It is this tendency that believes there is something to be gained over feeling guilty that we eat food from cultures that are not our own. It is this tendency that believes we can accrue personal worth by means of buying things, especially if those things are manufactured by a capitalist of another color. It is this tendency that thinks of a pop song as totalitarian, a building as fascist, a pet dog as an expression of white supremacy, a love of the outdoors as a bourgeoisie value. It is the removal of material analysis in a universal or societal sense and its replacement with an endless series of essentially unknowable navigations around products, each of which requires the presence of a self-appointed guru well versed in the mysteries. It is, at heart, mysticism, and can lead us only deeper into capitalism’s caverns, never out of them.
Once, it was possible to discuss the idea of, say, fascist architecture in a sense that involved historical analysis, material factors, and cultural drift, and to conclude that Indianapolis looks the way it does because of those reasons; we might say this was a fate cities would wish to avoid, or not, but the discussion would range over a fairly wide field of societal influences. Now it is possible to judge that all of architecture is fascist because your father, a notorious homophobe, chose it as his occupation. We have tried to kill the cop in our heads, but we have given free rein to the prude who keeps calling him.
This week in links: Victoria de Grazia urges an understanding of fascism rooted in historical analysis; The Nation warns about vigilantism and union-busting, eighty-three years ago; the invaluable We Are The Mutants looks at a series of enigmatic journals from 1977; StoryCorps tells the tale of early Yiddish radio and its unexpected connection to socialism; and in the New Scientist, Finland concludes a successful test of universal basic income.