To Join Forces with the Pestilence
COVID, "King of the Hill", video games, and more
Conversations about the effectiveness of American government tend to have a speculative quality. Can you imagine, they tend to go, that if it reacts this or that way in the present moment, what might it do in a moment of real crisis? Well, the moment of real crisis is here, and it is almost impossible to imagine a worse response to the government. A global pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people, a concomitant economic collapse unprecedented since the Great Depression that will leave millions of Americans homeless and without insurance or income, a wave of police violence as brutal and uncontrolled as any in history, a transfer of wealth from the laboring classes to the idle rich like no nation has ever seen, and the abandonment of even the pretense of democratic elections and the idea that power is answerable to the public: All this is happening right now.
The response of the ruling party—ostensibly conservative but functionally authoritarian—is to either do nothing or to take actions that make all these conditions worse. The response of the opposition party—ostensibly liberal but functionally conservative—is to either actively abet the ruling party or to propose doomed technocratic tinkering that will do little more than cushion the blow for a handful of members of the professional class. Absent some vast famine (which will come soon enough thanks to both parties’ inaction on climate change) or shooting war (which will be the inevitable consequence of same), this is the sort of concatenation of crises that signals an empire in its end times, and it is being met at the highest levels of power with indifference at best and malevolence at worst, presided over by a chief executive so vain and frivolous that he would invite comparisons to Nero if he were not so cartoonishly incompetent.
How did we get here? As with most such situations, we are living in the result of multiple failures, caused over time by cowardice, denial, inaction, short-sightedness, and greed, all of which come to a head at the worst possible time. But what is most striking is the way that so many people, from the disenfranchised lumpen proletariat to the masters of men in their penthouse towers, don’t seem to be taking it very seriously. At the very least, we might expect people to behave according to some sense of self-preservation, to some ingrained sense of how a society operates and needs to fulfill its basic functions in order to survive: the urge to live, at the lowest levels; the knowledge that people must make money to spend money, among the bourgeoise who live and die by classical market forces; the need to maintain the barest semblance of social order, for those at the top, to prevent the rabble from locating a handy supply of pitchforks. So why isn’t this happening?
To look at it through the lens of just one ingredient in the stew of social decay we are cooking up—that of the impact of COVID-19—we see a number of factors at play. The emergence of coronavirus is unquestionably the worst threat to the safety of its citizens that America has faced in over a century; the closest comparison was almost a hundred years ago, when the Spanish flu had such a devastating effect on global populations that it literally gave birth to our current concept of and approach to public health. Now, however, the coronavirus has had much the opposite effect: it has led to a widespread abandonment of public health. Far from spearheading a unified response, the federal government has engaged in everything from fuzzy messaging to outright denialism, going as far as to attempt to suppress the findings of its own public health officials for foggy ideological reasons. Far from coordinating with government to provide relief and hope for the citizens who keep it functioning, the private sector has engaged in widespread profiteering, looking to government not as a mechanism of support and structure but a trough to be emptied. Far from taking responsibility for the health and safety of their residents, state and other local governments have thrown up their hands at having been locked out by the feds and engaged in selfish ideological battles, taking half-assed measures designed to please the merchant class at the expense of everyone else. And far from embracing a sense of shared responsibility and sacrifice, the general public has inexplicably turned the crisis into a free speech issue, treating the attempt to halt a deadly disease as an intolerable imposition on their right to drink beer outdoors.
The reasons for all these reactions are many and varied. At the lowest level, among the poor and abandoned, is a sense of hopelessness; receiving no help in any other area of need, they have given up on asking for any against the plague. Among the middle class, the petit-bourgeois and the cockroach capitalists, there is the usual eye towards self over all, combined with a curious sort of public nihilism that recalls that of the Freikorps so memorably documented in Theweleit’s masterful Male Fantasies: a notion that, perhaps, it is good to die for the health of the state—a notion that is reinforced by many of those who govern them. In the higher echelons of power, among the managers of local governments and academia and the professions, there is the usual reluctance to do what needs to be done lest they set the dangerous precedent that they have some fiscal, let alone moral, responsibility to respond to the needs of the working class. And among the elites, among the very rich, at the very highest levels where wealth is so vast and plentiful as to be essentially imaginary, there is the dual recognition that money can indeed buy health and that the pitchforks will never be located and the masses have lost their taste for revolution. It is a combination of attitudes and material realities that all adds up not just to nothing being done, but to a pervasive sense, even as the body counts rise higher and the economic consequences become (for most) more dire, that nothing really needs to be done.
It all recalls the prophecy, as we slowly circle the drain down which all empires disappear, of maybe the last of our transcendent visionaries, William S. Burroughs: “We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decisions. They are representatives of abstract forces…the iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are…inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine that they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which button to push.” We have evolved out of being terrified by a disease that we cannot understand, and we have decided not to oppose a disease that we cannot eradicate; we are now allied with the disease, praying to its mindless hunger to be forgiven and rewarded for aiding its spread.
As I have written about extensively here and elsewhere, I do not believe that so-called ‘cancel culture’ (this decade’s ridiculous term for what was called ‘political correctness’ not too long ago) really exists, nor do I believe that we have to do anything about it, because one is under no responsibility to respond to crises of the imagination. Americans, drunk on exceptionalism and individualism, turn everything into a free speech issue (see above), and tend to ignore material crises in favor of largely invented ones that all tend to focus on how the rest of us need to shut up and listen to whatever stupid, shitty ideas one loudmouth happens to come up with. What I am interested in is how these patterns work, and why some people and institutions are exempted from them and others are not.
Last week, when discussing the now-infamous letter in Harper’s where a bunch of alleged intellectuals and academics embarrassed themselves over alleged violations of their freedom of expression, I noted that many of the signatories had themselves engaged in or endorsed the censorship or ‘cancellation’ of others who happened to advocate positions they did not share. (Primary among them was former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, who has since cancelled herself out of a job since, despite her numerous and constant provocations, no one would do it for her.) The questions of who gets canceled, for what, and why are never answered, which is one reason why the whole thing strikes me as a cooked-up, phony issue that is almost always special pleading in disguise.
A perfect example of this is the actor Bill Murray, whose occasional bad behavior involving alcohol and mistreatment of women are a matter of public record, but who seems to have generated enough goodwill over the years that he is exempted from the usual suspects when problematic faves are discussed. (To be clear, I am not interested in ‘cancelling’ any of these people, or even drawing attention to the nature of their alleged infractions of our current moral standards. I am just intrigued by who gets criticized for which wrongdoings and who doesn’t.) Another is also noteworthy in light of the moment’s mania for network withdrawals of controversial episodes of TV programs that aired years ago due to the presence of blackface, yellowface, and other instances of nonwhite roles being performed, either in live action or in voiceover, by white actors: Mike Judge’s long-running animated sitcom, King of the Hill.
Now, again, we should understand this tendency on the part of the network bosses not as ‘cancellation’ or ‘censorship’, but as good old-fashioned public relations and ass-covering. It’s as ineffective as it is cheap, which is why they like it. But it’s odd how some shows get a pass and others don’t. The Simpsons, to make an obvious analog, caught a tremendous amount of heat for the fact that Indian convenience store clerk Apu was voiced by a white actor, while almost no one has called out King of the Hill for having white actors provide the voices for black, Asian, and Latinx characters throughout the entire run of the series. (It can’t just be because King of the Hill is no longer on the air, as similar excisions were made to shows like The Golden Girls, which has been off the air for almost thirty years, and Mr. Show, which hardly anyone watched in the first place.) It’s particularly fascinating because King of the Hill is, at heart, a pretty conservative show; partly this is attributable to creator Mike Judge’s personal politics, but part of it is baked into the very premise.
To be clear, I love the show.While individual episodes are hard to watch, and a few have moral lessons that are pretty repugnant, it’s an enormously funny, infinitely re-watchable, and tremendously good-natured sitcom, and a devastatingly accurate portrait of any number of deathless American archetypes, saving its most pointed satire for specific avatars of white male suburban life.Perhaps its general exemption from contemporary criticism along identitarian lines is because of the fact it makes such entertaining and accurate sport of white men, or perhaps it’s despite it.But as a great man once said, “Are you sure that white people did all that stuff? Because I come from white people, and this is the first I’m hearing about it.”
Bobby Hill, of course, is a big fan of what his dad calls “the vidya games”. I always wanted to be, but it never quite stuck. As a relatively ancient Gen Xer, I am of the last human generation who remembers a time before the internet and the widespread proliferation of home computers; when I was growing up, video games were a relatively new invention that you had to go to the mall or the 7-Eleven to play, unless you were lucky enough to have parents who would blow hundreds of dollars on an Atari 2600 or an Intellivision console for you to screw around with. (I myself once owned a Texas Instruments ‘computer’ which you hooked up to the back of your TV set, which is probably as relatable to Zoomers as the idea of hunting and foraging is to me.)
When I get into something, I get really, profoundly, stupidly into it, as evidenced by the fact that I own roughly seventy billion sourcebooks for tabletop RPGs that I will never actually play. During the brief period that I owned an Xbox, I spent inordinate amounts of disposable income that I could otherwise have converted into rent, a retirement fund, or drugs on games that I would play for about three minutes, completely suck shit at, and never play again. The games I really enjoyed were sandbox-style adventures like the Grand Theft Auto series where you could get the actual story missions out of the way quickly enough to spend hours just wandering around a pointlessly elaborate game world without some asshole AI bugging you to actually accomplish something. As a result, I never got into video games the way I did other recreational activities, and even now, I view people who can spend upwards of a hundred hours beating this or that popular game as some kind of alien creatures who have been miraculously relieved of the need to have a job or go to the bathroom.
I no longer own a console, and my Steam library consists, as did my Xbox one, of hundreds of games I bought at full price and played for the exact amount of time it took for me to get hungry. I am one of the few suckers in America who bothered to purchase the Google Stadia, which has the advantage of giving away a lot of games for free, which makes me feel less guilty about how bad I am at them, and since no one else cared to sign up for it, it allows me to play online games with mere dozens of teenagers yelling slurs at me rather than hundreds. Being Gen X means never having to say you care, and so I’ll get to live and die thinking that it’s video games that failed me, and not the other way around.
This week in links: A survey by the Harvard Medical School examines how and why the coronavirus epidemic and our social response to it is affecting our dreams; the ticket resto program in France helps keep venerable cafés and restaurants alive in a time of economic upheaval; capitalists continue to buy up public goods—in this case, the spaces beneath our feet—under the guise of ‘preservation’; a Black Lives Matter protest in a small Ohio border town exposes old and ugly racial divisions; and in The Comics Journal, I review Paying the Land, comics journalist Joe Sacco’s stunning look at political, social, and environmental issues among the First Nations people of Canada’s Northwest Territories.