The Week I Finally Got Scared

The dark times are here.

This was the week I finally got scared.

I have of course been worried by the rise of Trumpworld. But I also lived through the post-9/11 frenzy of patriotic war-lust, and the years of Bush/Cheney/Blackwater/Halliburton corruption. Those were the truly bad years, I told myself, because there was no mass resistance, and it all largely took place behind closed doors and in the shadows. It was well-masked, well-managed. By comparison to the Bushes, the Trumps are short-con pikers, I told myself, bound to self-immolate – and take the entire GOP with them as a bonus, playing out the logic of Reaganism to the inevitable conclusion of all ideological movements based on self-interest.

But this week, I felt scared. Partly it was the Republican National Convention, full of blondes and chants and faith and a party platform that is nothing but a statement of support for one man. Most ominously, the convention featured nearly no representatives of a traditional party structure – former Republican officials, VPs, even former GOP Presidents were nowhere to be found. The party has been entirely hijacked by Trump, irrefutably transformed into a cult of personality around a man who could not be less deserving of it. Based on that alone, the GOP is now the party of American fascism, full stop.

And we got the tragedy of Kenosha, where yet another red-pilled right winger opened fire on the protestors he was told by the President and his cronies are bringing a new wave of ‘chaos’ and ‘disorder’ to America. The slight variation on the theme was that Kyle Rittenhouse is 17, and instead of existing on the edgelord fringe of the Right, he was a direct supporter of god-emperor Trump.

Maybe I should be ashamed that it wasn’t the shooting that spooked me. Even if it was a political killing, it’s still just another shooting in gun-crazy, miserable America. Instead, it was the response that shocked me into dark recognition. In particular, it was the response from Tucker Carlson, who has eagerly occupied the O’Reilly/Limbaugh vertex in the current Lament Configuration. Carlson, once hailed as an intellect, is far worse than O’Reilly or Limbaugh ever was – the opposite of the HW>W>Trump trajectory from Machiavellian to bumbling.

People who believe in justice rightly excoriated the right-wing talkers of the 90s through 2010s. But despite allusions and barely-sly jokes that revealed their own true feelings, none of the mainstream right-wingers made racial grievance the centerpiece and defining essence of his product. But Carlson is smarter than his forebears, and he has leaned into white nationalism with subtlety and fervor, most recently in his heinous smears of Black Lives Matter as “poison” and part of a vast, menacing conspiracy that will “come for you.”

That stance left him no room to condemn a murderer.

"Are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder?" Carlson said during his show last Wednesday night. "How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?"

This is of course hilarious, since Carlson and his fellow cowards are constantly hammering on about how the police are the thin line between order and chaos, in defiance of hundreds of hours of video evidence exposing them as a the zombie horde of fat, lazy, untrained, anti-poor, anti-black stabbing robots that they are.

But no, forget all that, the last bastion of order is a brainwashed teenager with an AR-15.

And so yes, at long last, I’m scared. America has faced fascism at home before, of course, in the 1930s, when Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford angled to turn Washington into Berlin West. It was a near thing back then, and that was with the advantage of an enemy abroad we could turn our sights on. Today’s fascists have their figurehead at home, and they have captured a major piece of political infrastructure. I think I’m scared because I’ve finally accepted that, regardless of the outcome of the November election, this isn’t going away soon. And the violence is going to get worse.

Welcome to Flesh/Markets 1.0

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Symptom/Synthome

The question of how to unwind this madness has no simple answer. Like a great dark beast, it has always been here, will always be here, can only be sent back to its lair to brood until its next appearance. But certainly the first step of banishment is understanding the beast’s twin components: racial resentment and cult brainwashing.

Lovecraft Country – A+

My expectations for this HBO adaptation of Matt Ruff’s novel weren’t high. The book itself, about a team of black investigators who pursue Lovecraftian monsters and cults across Jim Crow America, was a noble concept delivered in a fairly smooth genre package. The show is not that – it is extreme, in the best sense. It might just be a matter of medium – on TV, the parallels between the Klu Klux Klan and the Order of the Golden Dawn can be pointed to without being spelled out. The action and visual effects are relentless, fast, brutal. Not since Moby Dick has whiteness been made so effectively terrifying. I’ll have a lot more to say about this one, but if you want to dive deeper into the subtleties of Lovecraftian horror and race, I’ve already written about them at length for Lovecraft E-Zine and more recently for Fangoria. (Sadly the Fangoria essay is offline at the moment because of a reshuffle under new ownership, itself a sad tale you can Google if you want to know more.)

The Night Land - B

One of the references in the early episodes of Lovecraft Country is William Hope Hodgson’s House on the Borderland, a quite bizarre novel published in 1908 which helped set the table for cosmic horror. The game studio Emperors of Eternal Evil also recently published a game based on that book through Lurker Magazine. House is a pretty great read, but if you really want to get weird I’d also point you to The Night Land, a much, much stranger work by Hodgson. I’ll say up front that it’s so repetitive and near-plotless that it’s practically unreadable, but it’s an attempt to do something very appealing – place a human protagonist, nearly alone, in a completely alien world, and turn it into a story. It fails, but in a really hypnotic way. If you’re into Borges or Beckett or others that fall more on the ‘literary’ side of weird fiction, this will have something to offer. And just like House on the Borderland, it’s in the public domain so you can get it free on your e-reader.

The Vow - B+

This dive into the NXIVM “executive leadership seminar”/sex cult (also on HBO) is vital viewing for the Trump era. There’s good reason for the preoccupation with both scams and cults over the last five years or so. Confidence games and illusory easy answers have become increasingly central to our culture, and even to our economy.

Already The Vow provides the two keys to understanding why a strong leader imbued with almost supernatural insight or power is so appealing to many. Some of the NXIVM figures interviewed in the first episode do seem to buy into the group’s Scientology-like rhetoric of self-actualization and achievement, but many also admit that the group itself became the site of their greatest achievement, often after failure or frustration in their own lives. From having no role, from feeling irrelevant, they were suddenly told they had found a secret, that they knew things others didn’t. They climbed ranks, had responsibilities, were told they were changing the world – all while paying thousands of dollars to the organization for the privilege. This sense of achievement, privilege, and uniqueness – all with minimal actual work – are precisely the deliverables that have made Qanon yet another terrifying force in contemporary life.

In the second episode, something else becomes agonizingly, cringingly clear: Keith Raniere, the founder and mastermind of NXIVM, is a remarkably stupid man. There are recordings of the regular sessions in which Raniere – known within the group as Vanguard – detailed his supposedly world-changing ideas. In some cases, the man with the utterly fraudulent claim of super-IQ simply spins some banal, half-baked truism. In other cases, he seems outright drug-addled, babbling non-sequitors furiously. But you get to see his victims eat it up - because while Raniere is not particularly wise, he is a master manipulator.

The other remarkable thing is that these recordings exist. Some of them exist because members of the group became skeptical and started keeping tabs. But most of them exist because faithful members and leaders though that it was a good idea to document the rise of a group that was going to enlighten the world and change everything. This is the second, scarier key to understanding not just this sort of movement, but scams of all sorts:

The best scammers actually believe what they’re selling.

Miscellany

GameBookClub podcast – This is a tiny lil’ podcast with amateur production values but a great premise and a lot to offer. The basic idea is that they discuss tabletop games in conjunction with books, at significant length and with a critical approach. I sampled their episode on the Dune wargame first, and it had some good insights into both the book and the game, which I’m now curious to play.

Buy My Books

This newsletter is free and probably will be for a long time. But just like that ‘free vacation’ you got, you have to listen to a pitch. I have two books you can pick up if you’d like to support this project:

in night we coax things out of hidden shapes is a surrealist horror/weird novella, full of bizarre, otherworldly images and grotesque violence, and ultimately about the vengeance that comes to the powerful.

Bitcoin is Magic: Internet Money, Memetic Warfare, and the End of Mere Reality is a more recent book of essays and reporting. It’s focused on cryptocurrency, but more broadly it’s about how information moves, and how we join communities of belief. The book is largely about more positive examples of shared belief - being part of a community doesn’t require being a sex slave, a violent racist, or a mouthpiece for authoritarianism.

Coda

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