Silence Encourages the Tormentor

Our abusive political system; "The Stand"; boats aren't real; and more.

Jan 15, 2021

It can be said of the American voter what is said of the victim of any other kind of abuse: the next blow may be a shock, but it’s never a surprise.

Thanks to our reliably shaky two-party system, we never really get out from under the thumb of that abuse; particularly in recent years, with the neoliberal turn of the Democratic Party and the overall shift of political possibilities from the capitalist center to the authoritarian right, it’s fair to say that we merely switch one abuser for another. With the Biden administration already hedging its bets and counting its pennies, we’ve likely just made a lateral move from a leader who will crush and brutalize the working class to one who will merely ignore and impoverish it. With Democrats now in control of the Presidency and the Congress, the promises they made to get there are already evaporating: fifty thousand dollars in student loan relief is downgraded to ten thousand, $2,000 COVID-19 relief checks are knocked down to $1,400, and universal health care becomes “improved access to health care”.

Of course, this is nothing new to people who have paid attention to the overall arc of the Democratic Party since it lost its nerve, its guts, and its mind after losing so badly to Ronald Reagan. There’s still plenty of time for other promised returns to evaporate into thin air: raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, a reform that is both long overdue and already insufficient, may still end up on the cutting room floor. This is the third presidential election in twenty years to feature a highly disputed result, but anyone holding their breath for the appearance of a serious election reform bill will pass out before Biden’s 100th day. A promise to support unions will probably translate to some feisty speeches in front of conservative labor leaders and not into the introduction of card check. Hopeful gestures from the Department of the Interior are nice, but both Biden and Harris backed off of a fracking ban even before they were elected. And it’s pure fantasy to believe that we will see any repudiation of our disastrous foreign policy or ever-growing security state; indeed, the attacks on the Capitol earlier this month practically guarantee we will see an expansion of local and federal police powers, not a reduction.

In other words, what we are seeing already, before Biden even takes office, is a repeat of the Obama administration. Biden is a boob, but he’s no fool: he learned his lesson well at the side of his political savior. All the Democrats have to do is what they do best – manage our expectations – and wait until their predictable fuckups result in big losses in the 2022 elections. Then, with their control of the House and Senate vanished, they can run out the clock by shrugging and saying “What can we do? We aren’t in charge anymore.” Any questioning directed at the matter of why they didn’t do anything while they still held all the cards will be brushed off or obfuscated, and the helpful fingers of the media (who are already, with infuriating condescension, ‘explaining’ that it’s us who misunderstood when the party repeatedly claimed to be fighting for $2,000 checks) will point to some largely decorative accomplishment to get us to stop talking about everything else that was left undone.

Biden will follow this path even around the sole ‘issue’ on which he won the election in the first place: the country’s deep dislike of and embarrassment around the presidency of Donald Trump. Just as Barack Obama rode a wave of populist fury against bankers, financier, real estate speculators, and other mega-capitalists to the White House, only to do absolutely nothing to punish them for their role on one of the most destructive economic disasters in American history, Biden will step into the Oval Office bearing the fresh scent of being Not Donald Trump, but will let that shameful shit off the hook entirely for nearly staging a coup, and he will likewise do nothing against the Republican enablers and plotters who rubber-stamped every cruel, crooked, and clumsy maneuver Trump ever made except urge the country to forgive and forget, to work with them for the sake of a unity no one seriously believes in. And, as before, the risk is not that this will turn liberal voters (who are perpetually caught up in West Wing win-one-for-our-side fan fiction) into conservative ones (who are drunk on petty grievances and culture-war buffoonery). The risk is that, as has happened for decades, people will just stop voting altogether. And who, frankly, can blame them?

Normally, I eschew the use of political analogies drawn from psychology. Politics is not therapy, and people who use one as a substitute for the other are usually doing themselves and others more harm than good. But the comparison between Democratic voters and victims of abuse is so unbearably pointed that it’s hard not to prick your finger on it. Like many abusers, the Democratic leadership does not feel guilt for the things it does to us; it feels guilt for the way we make it feel for doing them, and its confused and infrequent attempts at making it right are driven not by any political calculation or even moral attitude, but largely by trying to get us to shut up. Presented with two untenable options, our only choice is to do the hardest thing there is: leave. There is a way out; there are people who will help us, shelter us, and show us how to get our shit together; there is an alternative. It’s hard to see, because one set of abusers keeps punching us in the eyes, and the other set won’t tell us where the door is. But it’s our job to look carefully, and to walk through it with resolve and determination never to return. We’re trapped in a house that’s on fire, and it’s just as bad to listen to someone who tells us that they can contain the fire to only one room at a time as it is to listen to someone who tells us that being burned to death is good, actually. We need to listen to the public service announcement and walk calmly but quickly to the nearest fucking exit.

It’s not hard to fuck up a Stephen King adaptation. (Hell, King has done it himself, more than a few times.). Whatever you think of Big Steve’s work, it is very apparent that what makes it so compulsively readable on the page does not often translate well to the screen, and the result is a handful of strong efforts (usually characterized by taking great liberties with the source material) and a whole big boatload of failures, embarrassments, and nice-trys.

What’s a lot harder is to make a Stephen King adaptation with worse politics than the original. King is mostly a standard-issue liberal with a bit of an authoritarian streak (there’s nothing worse in his books than the breakdown of authority, no matter how illegitimate), and whatever brings people to his books, it’s not his trenchant political analysis. That’s the reason the latest episode of the CBS mini-series of The Stand, the most recent attempt to bring what may be his best book to life on screen, is such a bizarre misstep.

The series already has plentiful problems. Aside from its generally solid and engaging cast, there’s not much going for it: its script is dishwater-dull, none of the leads have any real charisma with one another, and, as should have been obvious, there is so much happening in the novel that is its source that almost everything enjoyable about the book is left out of the TV show. (This is especially apparent in the inexplicable decision to pick up the story after Captain Trips, the plague that devastates mankind, has already happened.) It robs the whole story of its compounded tragedies and leaves a bunch of characters on screen that we have no real emotional investment in, leaving us to wonder why we should care about their apparently epic struggle.

Struggle against who, though? The answer the show gives us is no less than the forces of evil. The Stand is meant to be the ultimate showdown between the ‘good’ people – who are drawn to the city of Boulder – and the ‘bad’ people, who reside in Las Vegas (pardon me, New Vegas). The problem is that none of this manifests itself in interesting or even understandable ways. We’ve mostly seen Boulder so far, and, aside from the fact that these people mostly seem like co-workers than any kind of intentional community, they don’t seem to be doing any actual good; mostly, they just seem happy to have found some affordable real estate.

And now that we’ve finally seen the ‘evil’ community of New Vegas, it’s…well, it’s not that it’s not evil. There are crucifixions, slaves, chainsaw fights (!), and other obvious scary-signaling, all overseen by a bored-looking Alexander Skarsgård. But beyond that, there’s coke parties, drinking, public fornication, gambling, pansexual orgies, and other signifiers of what most people probably think that a wild weekend in Vegas is like right now. It doesn’t make it seem scary, except in the sense that rampant public hedonism is always kind of scary if you want to keep other peoples’ bodily fluids off your shoes. But in the novel, Las Vegas was, above all, a place of order. Drugs were not just forbidden; their use was severely punished. People were too busy working to fuck in the streets. King at least understood that part of the evil of fascism is that it’s too repressive, not too permissive. What message is being sent here? How is portraying the seat of Satanic post-apocalyptic madness as somewhere you can cut loose, do drugs, get some strange, and have a big outdoor party anything but a reactionary one? King’s vision of Flagg’s Las Vegas was that of an armed camp; the mini-series’ vision is that of Mardi Gras. That may not be to everyone’s taste but making it out to be a modern-day Sodom is a piece of throwback conservativism that predates even the original edition of the book.

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