Fight the Enemy You Can See
On learning the lessons of the past, "Hannibal", austerity socialism, and more
I know some people think I'm a cynic, or that I'm poisoned by leftism, or that I complain too much about the Democrats and not enough about the Republicans, and so on. I'm sorry if I give that impression and all I can offer up by way of explanation is 30+ years of actually paying attention to politics.
So I know this isn't going to find a very receptive audience, but here's the thing: It sucks that Mr. Bad President is talking about suspending the election. Of course it sucks! That's terrible and awful and unbelievably bad!
But the reason he's talking like that has a precedent. It has lots of them, in fact, but the most immediate one is the 2000 election. Remember that one, gang? The one where the Republicans disrupted voting, suppressed ballot counts by dispatching goons, and stole the election with the help of their partisan allies in local governments and on the Supreme Court?
Some of you remember! Some of you are old enough! A lot of you ain't kids. And I know you remember. So try and remember even more: how many of you, and how many of the liberal Democratic politicians you support, did a goddamn thing about it? Who agitated for electoral reform? Who demanded an end to the electoral college system? Who advocated for Supreme Court reform? Who demanded that the perpetrators of the the theft of a presidential election in the 'world's greatest democracy' be held responsible and brought to justice?
We both know the answer: fucking no one. No one in the Democratic Party, anyway; just us lonely losers out on the fringes of the left, who have always demanded these things and gotten ignored and laughed at and vilified by both parties. And so, of course, it happened AGAIN in 2016, and AGAIN nobody said shit and nobody did shit and it's going to keep happening only the stakes will be higher and the consequences will be worse. Meanwhile, the people who act the most scandalized and horrified about it are the same people who are rehabilitating and praising George W. Bush, the *primary recipient of the 2000 election theft*, because he's not as bad as Donald Trump. This is like letting a guy burn down your bathroom, doing nothing about it, and then forgiving him because he's not as bad as the guy you let burn down your bedroom and your kitchen.
Folks, this is politics. This is how power works. This is the meaning of letting policy and ideology, not party, drive your worldview. This is the law of consequences. This is the result of material analysis, of fighting the enemy that’s right in front of you instead of the one that you’ve made up in your head.
If you're mad about Trump threatening to suspend elections, you should have insisted that someone be held responsible for the theft of previous elections. If you're mad that cops are brutalizing people on the streets of every city in America, you should have been against police brutality when it was largely confined to black people and the poor. If you're mad that Trump is keeping thousands of undocumented children in cages, you should have been angrier at Obama for building those cages in the first place. If you're mad that Russia might have interfered with our elections, you should have insisted that America stop interfering with other countries' elections (including Russia's). If you're mad that the Republican president is an embarrassment, you should make sure you don't let your party let shitty evil Republicans have access to the levers of power just because they don't like Trump. If you're mad that Trump sits on his hands while hundreds of thousands of people die from a plague, you should have fought harder for universal health care. If you're mad about gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the general decay of the workings of democracy, you should have hollered just as loud when it was the Democrats who were doing it and benefitting from it. If you're mad that Trump and his cronies are willing to let the economy crater and the poor suffer, you should have yelled even louder when the Democrats dismantled the welfare state and embraced austerity. If you're mad that Trump's government is filled with people on the payroll of big corporations, you should have been just as mad when Democrats took money from those same big corporations. If you're mad about how bad things have gotten, you shouldn't have stopped paying attention when one of your team was in charge.
None of this, of course, is to say that if you’re just now learning about the sins of the past, we shouldn’t be patient with you and let you catch up. When we talk about a mass organized movement of the working class, it means just that – a mass movement. We need everybody on our side, even the normies, even the go-along-to-get-along gang. I’m not here to chew out anyone who’s just now coming to the left, or who have just now figured things out, or who are too young to remember the repeated betrayals and sell-outs of the past. As a good comrade put it, it’s never too late to stop doing the wrong thing. I’m not here to shame anyone for arriving late to the party. But I think it’s necessary to speak to the people who know, but who keep pretending they don’t know; the people who can’t seem to get with the program. At some point, you have to either wise up or opt out. Once you know – once you see the kind of bullshit I-got-mine compromises the people in power are prone to – how can you forgive? How can you keep forgiving? How many times do you have to be taught the same lesson before you get sick of it? The pieces have been laid out on the board long enough; eventually, you have to make a move.
It's really that simple: if you care about this shit at all, you care about it all the time, not just when someone wearing a different-colored tie is doing it. If all it is to you is a game of respectability and accepted norms, I got no use for you. If you think politics is important, then it's always important. Otherwise it's just sports.
Just as the forced retreat into our homes necessitated by the coronavirus has led to a mini-Sopranos revival as people look to catch up on cultural triumphs of the past that their schedule never before allowed time for, so too have a number of people revisited Bryan Fuller’s canceled-too-soon Hannibal. Based on Thomas Harris’ best-selling Hannibal Lecter novels, it ran for three compelling seasons on NBC, ending on a cliffhanger and getting cancelled before its proposed seven-season run, denying fans one of their most anticipated developments: the show’s interpretation of the Silence of the Lambs story arc.
Hannibal was always a curious creature. For one thing, it aired on a free-TV network, and its dedication to baroquely tasteful gore (one episode featured a killer playing the vocal cords of his victim like a cello; another saw someone being sewn inside the uterus of a dead mare) pushed the boundaries of acceptable levels of violence on mainstream television. For another, it was presented with exquisite sensibilities rarely seen in the oft-grimy world of serial killer fiction: everything from its costumes and lighting to its tremendously talented cast to the presentation of its human-based haute cuisine (legendary Spanish chef José Andrés was the show’s culinary consultant) was beautifully presented, in keeping with its main character’s approach to ritual murder as a sort of highbrow expression of aesthetics.
What’s particularly odd about it, though, is the way it functioned—and here I will admit to loving Hannibal—in such a unified, consistent, and riveting way despite being completely absurd. Nothing about Hannibal was realistic, even by the overblown Grand Guignol standards of serial killer fiction. Not that it needed to be, but the surface beauty of the show often functioned as effective cover for the absolute absurdity of everything that was happening: the presentation of the Baltimore metropolitan area as having roughly as many mass murderers as it has laundromats; the ludicrous idea that anyone would put a neurotic mess like Will Graham in charge of a homicide investigation; the portrayal of psychiatry as a blend of alchemy and sorcery; the murder-as-art metaphor that consistently elevated grubby little monstrosities to the level of Picasso during his Blue Period; the fan-service homoeroticism that would have been laughable if the cast was not so totally committed to it. None of it stood up to even a moment’s worth of analysis, but it was that rare case where the presentation was gorgeous enough that it didn’t matter.
It’s probably for the best that Hannibal didn’t get Fuller’s full seven-season run. It’s the rare TV series that can produce quality episodes over that long of a stretch; even generally accepted masterpieces like The Sopranos and The Wire were starting to drain the tanks by the end of their runs, and Mad Men definitely went on too long. Raiding the source material would have given us the certain pleasure of that Silence of the Lambs arc, especially tempting given Fuller’s substitution of the always-excellent Anna Chlumsky as Miriam Lass for Clarice Starling thanks to legal rights issues; but if he’d stuck to the source material, no matter how much he tried to elevate it, Harris’ novels get a bit flatulent towards the end. As it stands, the show is a beautiful, if unfinished, remnant of those days when the networks, trying desperately to compete with cable in the prestige television wars, would take a chance on anything.
This past week saw a brief but enjoyable eructation on Twitter of the kind of misguided pseudo-leftism that characterizes the medium and proves the futility of building socialist credibility around cultural issues rather than material analysis. Responding to a harmless photograph of a simple, home-built charcuterie board, a young anarchist posted that “this is what rich people eat”, and, faced with the inevitable clapback, accused those mocking her of being sellouts, bootlickers, and capitalist roaders. Eventually, she locked her account, she stopped being Twitter’s main character for the day, and everyone found a new meaningless thing to get mad about.
I don’t want to compound this person’s embarrassment by pointing out that simple meals of meats, bread, and cheeses have been a staple of the European working class for a century, nor do I want to dwell on the perplexing question of what they must eat if a fancified Lunchable strikes them as the meal of plutocrats. What I do want to emphasize is that this sort of thing, much loved by the callow and self-righteous online left, is always, always a dead end. It is based on a belief that cultural signifiers are not just superior as a tool of class analysis to material conditions, but that they are eternal and unchanging; that personal preference is a more reliable guide to social realities than actually interacting with other people; and that the proletariat (and, for that matter, the bourgeoisie) are absolutely defined by immutable matters of taste and aesthetics and one can no more cross those boundaries than a rich man can enter the kingdom of Heaven.
It’s the same kind of categorical error that leads this same cohort to believe against all available evidence that the working class still consists of hard-hat-wearing middle-aged white men in the trades, or that the entire socialist movement is doomed if we ask people not to clap during meetings or refrain from using ethnic slurs. There is no meaningful difference between this nonsense and the visions peddled by right-wingers of latte-sipping metrosexual liberals; in existence and in essence, it is always reactionary and never socialism. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my ploughman’s lunch is waiting.
This week’s links:
Italian storefronts, Japanese candy, Indian cinemas, and Soviet toys, all from the redoubtable Present & Correct blog.
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