Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better
On political patience, "Dublin Murders", weed cuisine, and more.
There is a common thread among people who are new to politics: they are all driven to extremes by failure.
Especially on the left, this can be the surest way to separate the wheat from the chaff and the men from the boys; if you have been at it for years, failure has been your constant companion, your usual outcome, and the thing that teaches you the most lessons. We do not embrace or enjoy failure, but we know that it is the most likely outcome, and the greater our target, the more likely we are to miss. It may seem to be motivational-poster equivocation, but we learn as much or more from failure as we do from success; and, by the same token, we buy our victories with the coins earned by bitter defeats. We should never plan to fail, but we must never take success as a given, no matter how popular our ideas may seem to be.
If you have only recently arrived at a place of being politically active, defeat can seem like the end of everything. It can convince you that your cause is not just; it can convince you that your cause is just, but unpopular; it can convince you to ally with the worst people, align with the worst tactics, and invite the worst elements into your plans. The greatest failure is the failure to not trust yourself and your knowledge and analysis, to abandon or compromise your ideology because of a setback, however minor or major, because it is this failure that invites new failures and replicates old ones. We saw this play out rather starkly in the so-called Force the Vote controversy: a tactic was proposed that was not in line with the overall strategy, it was pushed by people new enough to organizing to not understand what battles were and were not worth fighting; and its ultimate failure, because its proponents were mostly unfamiliar with the process and read every roadblock as impassable, led to recriminations, enemies lists, and other solidarity-killing forms of bridge-burning instead of a simple, honest re-assessment of the process.
To those of us who have been in the trenches for decades, though, it was just one more loss among many. We’ve seen opportunities come and be wasted; we’ve seen our cause betrayed, oppressed, ignored, and simply deflated by inertia. We remember, personally, how bad things were in some ways, and how good they were in others, and are not as prone to looking back in anger or donning rose-tinted glasses to peer into the future. We know there are ten thousand ways to lose and only one way to win. The weak elements of the left will see this process play out and retreat into cynicism, despair, liberalism, ultra-leftism, isolation, and irrelevance; the strong will realize that war against capital is a heavy burden and we will be carrying it for an incredibly long time—maybe even the duration of our loves – so we’d better learn to get comfortable with it.
This is why I always say that a good revolutionary will always be opportunistic. There are no shortcuts, no magic spells, no one neat tricks that will overturn the most resourceful and powerful oppressors who ever lived. The struggle is called that for a reason: it is habitual, perpetual, and constant, and we have to keep fighting it all the time. The moments in which revolution is possible are infinitesimal against the span of a single human life; they can be a week, a day, even a single moment. Our job during those times is to be ready to spot them and seize them; the rest of the time, our job is to build, to learn, and to be alert to ever-changing possibilities. There will never be a single tactic, a single idea, a single activist or politician, a single tipping point of information that will save us and free us from doing the hard work. What worked at one particular time and place will not work in another. We are bound to be forever trying, forever failing, and forever trying again.
To those who would say this seems like defeat, it is anything but. It is an exhortation to have faith and keep trying despite defeat. For when victory comes – and it will come, albeit less often and in a smaller form than you are born wanting – it will be stunningly, blindingly, unbelievably good. Using real power to exert real influence on the real world and seeing it really happen in a way that gains real benefits for the working class gives you a frisson of joy and strength that is a thousand times greater than the mild serotonin rush of dunking on a possible ally over Twitter.
Sports analogies plague political discourse, and usually for the worst, but it’s not for nothing that baseball players learn patience, craft, and observation through the punishing grind of a 162-game season. They all go into the game knowing that at the end of the year, only 25 people a year will get to experience that ultimate rush of victory. The rest will go home and wait for the next opportunity. And it will come. The insightful knuckler, Jim Bouton, talked about the myth that good chemistry created winners. It was winning, he said, that created the chemistry; a room full of teammates who loathed each other when they were in the cellar suddenly became comrades for life once the victories started to pile up. There is a lesson here for the left. Be prepared, always, to lose; but always act like you’re winning. Eventually, you will, and you can go from strength to strength.
When Tana French debuted In the Woods, the first novel in her “Dublin Murder Squad” novels, in 2008, it became an immediate sensation. It sold very well, won her a number of literary awards, and kicked off a series of books of generally excellent quality. French is sometimes thrown into the same semi-genre of twisty psychological thrillers written by women that has commanded the best-seller list for the last decade or so, alongside such literary luminaries as Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins, and Sophie Hannah. There are some similarities, but French’s prose is sharper, her psychological insights are more profound, and her plots are less reliant on twists and shocks. The series has slowly emerged as the best in its class.
Given the current hunger for this sort of thing, the appeal of the Irish setting, and the lasting appeal of well-done police procedurals on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s surprising it took so long for a screen adaptation of the books to arrive, but in late 2019, one did, in the form of Dublin Murders, a co-production of the BBC and Starz!. Over eight episodes, we see the fraught investigation of a young girl’s murder in a small Irish town by detectives Rob Reilly and Cassie Maddox – the very town where, 20 years before, Reilly had himself been the focus of an investigation into the disappearance of two other kids, an event of which he still has no memory. The cast is impeccable, led by the terrific chemistry between Killian Scott as Reilly and Sarah Greene as Maddox; it’s also enhanced by some stunning performances by the actors playing the dead girl’s family and by an extremely credible cast of young actors in the flashback scenes.
Dublin Murders is generally well-written (by BBC pro Sarah Phelps, transferring from her usual Agatha Christie adaptations to darker, murkier modern fare with surprising deftness), and there’s some good camerawork and pacing to accompany its typically 21st-century thriller backgrounds of rainy streets, glum offices and bedrooms, and menacing street corners. French’s books are filled with ambiguities and uncertainties which translate to the television format with the tragedy intact, and the series – in talks for a second season – to keep viewers coming back while trying not to frustrate them with a lack of clear resolutions. Overall, it’s a pretty solid viewing experience, much like French’s novels, elevated above the usual experience by the superior qualities of the execution more than anything inherent to the material.
Where it founders a bit is in the decision to compress two novels – In the Woods and The Likeness – into a single season. The “Dublin Murder Squad” books have six installments, and the miniseries makes the risky decision to try to tell the first two concurrently. This doesn’t work more often than it does, and while watching Dublin Murders doesn’t have the calculus-homework feel of, say, Dark, it is a lot more confusing than it needs to be, and to no really good end. It becomes difficult for the viewer to keep track of the threads of Reilly and Maddox’s past experiences (both told in flashback, but without warning and in three different timeframes), a task made more challenging by the fact that their stories are similar and intertwined. If this all had a big payoff, it might be worth it, but it doesn’t, and all it ends up doing is making the otherwise skillful writing come off as less economical and more complicated than it needs to be. Hopefully, a second series – which, if it follows the pattern of the novels, will feature a new set of leads – won’t make the same mistake.
Now that legal weed is enough of a thing to penetrate layers of society that are too insufferable to even be stoners, we are seeing the growth of something called “elevated cannabis cooking”, or “high cuisine”, a joke even I’ve never been baked enough to find funny. I get that chefs like to get zooted, and God bless them for it, and I get that THC in edible form is a gift from Heaven, but I find this whole thing incredibly misguided.
For one thing, there’s never enough psychoactive ingredients in cannabis cooking to make it worth my while. If I’m going to eat a three-course meal, a combined total of 8mg of THC just isn’t enough! I don’t even get out of bed for less than 10mg; if I gotta eat a salad, a soup, a whole ass baked chicken, and a panna cotta or whatever the fuck else passes for dessert with these fancy lads and lasses, I want at least 20, 30mgs for my troubles.
Second, as either a delivery vector for weed or a companion to a meal, haute cuisine isn’t really my go-to pick. If I just want to get high, I’ll do bong rips or burn a j or pop an ed; I don’t have time to wait for some dropout to sous vide a pork loin for me. And if I’m high and I want to eat, I’m gonna go for a pizza or a bag of M&Ms or a box of Cheez-Its 100 times out of 100 instead of grazing on something that looks like it should be on the cover of a book stacked atop a perfect geometric spiral of other, identical books at Barnes & Noble.
Finally, it makes you prone to the classic rookie error of chasing your high. You eat some highfalutin Chez Panisse-lookin’ meal with a token amount of canna-butter; so far so good. It kicks in a little and you get slightly breezy; everything’s A-OK. But you worry: is this shit taking too long, or is it just not working? And then, because of course it is working and you’re too stoned to realize it, you start to get hungry. And what do you have to eat? More weed-infused food, which will make you more stoned and therefore more hungry, and you just repeat the process from the beginning. Uh oh!
Take it from a pro. Weed is great. Haute cuisine is great. But don’t mix those two pleasures. Brownies are just fine as a THC delivery vector, and if you’re still hungry after that, well, GoPuff was invented for a reason.
This week’s links: a British ‘agroforester’ grows hundreds of edible plant species in a low-maintenace wooded garden; the Dust to Digital label releases its massive ‘alternate history’ of world music; The Baffler investigates the bizarre flattening of corporate logos; Phil Bronstein in Atla investigates the dying profession of the private investigator; and the former leader of the Proud Boys right-wing street gang is outed as a busy police snitch.