Take two! Sorry to all of you Citizens seeing this twice. I swore I set this one to “everyone.” I actually think Substack has it set up that when something gets tripped up when you publish a post, it defaults to “subscribers only,” and substack kind of trips up a lot… platforms, what are you gonna do? Anyway…
Hello, one and all! This one is a true feast of prose. It’s been a while since I’ve had a four-book week, but things lined up that way this time. We’ve got literature, history, political theory, journalism, good books, bad books, something for everyone! We’ve also got the return of Ed’s Corner as he takes on the question on everyone’s mind: does Batman go downtown? All in all, this is a great Review to share with friends who like hearing opinions! Enjoy!
CONTENTS
REVIEWS
James McBride, The Good Lord Bird
Seth Jacobs, Rogue Diplomats
Friedrich von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: The Sexually Inconsiderate Adventures of Batman & The Modern Sex Panic
REVIEWS
James McBride, “The Good Lord Bird” (2013) (narrated by Michael Boatman) - People don’t really know what to make of John Brown. I can’t claim to be a John Brown scholar but I have read a fair amount about him and people really don’t know how to paint a full, communicable picture, and sometimes it seems that the closer a given writer gets, the more the real man and his real story eludes them. It also sometimes seems that writers contemporary with Brown, both enemies and friends, maybe get somewhat closer. That’s not linear- writers in the late nineteenth century seem just as lost as writers in the late twentieth. It seems to me that whatever sets of filters come down to make Brown opaque came down not that long after his death, and stayed there (or got thicker). I’m tempted to place the date at 1877, the year the US abandoned Reconstruction and well into the decades-long global freakout about revolution that came about as a result of the Paris Commune, but that’s not really something I can prove at present.
In any event, the combination of factors that go into John Brown’s story — race, slavery, militancy, strategy, psychology, religion, to say nothing of the chasm of the years and the many succeeding historiographical paradigms between now and 1859 — make it hard, really hard, to tell his story in a way that feels adequate. And each angle of his story, every aspect that makes it relevant today, also provides opportunities for people, honestly or not, to drive the story into one or another pitfall, slot it nearly somewhere it doesn’t belong but which pleases the teller. The guy who first got me into John Brown in a serious way is a crank, an anti-masker libertarian (opinion varies on the question of whether he was always that absurd or if he got worse over the years). He’s a somewhat more needlessly ideologically elaborate version of the Republicans who try to claim Brown as theirs. That’s a straightforward misprision- they only get weirder and more tedious from there.
I don’t say this often, but arguably, the contemporary American leftist attitude towards John Brown — admiration, of a type rarely extended to white men of his time, and not looking at him too hard — might actually be a decent default setting for contemporary people with things to do. Especially because this lack of digging usually means that said leftists won’t slavishly follow Brown’s failures; he’s a symbol, not the man with the plan ala Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, etc. The reasonings behind the attitude of the contemporary left towards John Brown might range from the respectable (they admire Brown’s courage) to the eye-roll worthy (he’s someone a variety of black figures, including Malcolm X, have given white people “permission” to admire- he has yet to be “canceled” in any meaningful sense), but there it is.
Still and all- people will look closer, and I’d say it’s a good thing to do so. This review is part of that. And novelists have taken a crack at it, too, not just historians. I tried reading Russell Banks’s “Cloudsplitter” and didn’t like it. Too much modern psychologizing, too slow. Even then, near the beginning of my historical education, I could see there was something just “off” about trying to wedge John Brown into contemporary standards. I don’t think we should abandon our standards while looking into the past, excuse slavers and tyrants and fuck-ups with “well, they were men of their times.” But the opposite doesn’t work either. As per usual, we are forced to think more, think better (or, you know, find another hobby).
“The Good Lord Bird,” by novelist and memoirist James McBride, takes a novel approach to John Brown, at least novel as far as I know in “serious letters”: violent slapstick comedy. This is the story of a boy known variously as Henry, Henrietta, and perhaps most often in the story, Onion. Enslaved in Kansas Territory and working in a tavern with his drunken slave father (his mother isn’t in the picture, and it’s implied that she’s white- McBride first came on the literary scene writing about his own mixed background, son of a black father and a white Jewish mother), Onion gets swept up in the fighting in “Bleeding Kansas” and freed/kidnapped by none other than John Brown. Somehow, Brown gets the impression that Onion is a girl, and for a variety of silly reasons, Onion keeps up the charade for most of the book.
The story is narrated by Onion many decades after John Brown’s death, with a “found footage” backstory to the manuscript I rather like. You’re never sure how truthful he is, and I’m uncertain whether McBride has everyone — Onion, Brown, Brown’s men, Frederick Douglass, JEB Stuart — speak in the same informal English because that’s how Onion would have recounted it, or under the idea everyone would have spoken like that (maybe they would have- I don’t know nineteenth century speech patterns).
In any event, Onion gets brought into John Brown’s band of antislavery militants and has to survive the maelstrom of Bleeding Kansas. Bleeding Kansas compounds our John Brown confusions, because Americans, historically, haven’t been great at looking at the realities of “unconventional”/“informal”/“irregular”/guerrilla/insurgency (the profusion of terms isn’t a good sign for clarity) war in the face. Bleeding Kansas looked more like Syria during its civil war than what we think of when we think of the American Civil War, with its uniformed armies fighting each other in open battle. Bleeding Kansas was ambush, massacre, pillaging, avoiding battle and striking at enemy civilians. It’s one possibility of what the whole north-south border could have looked like if the South had come closer to winning the Civil War… McBride’s tone, both comic and horrified, actually works pretty well for the situation. Onion keeps trying to get back (what he has to get back to — he was enslaved, and his father died in the raid that freed him — is questionable, but he’s twelve and far from home) and keeps getting into situations with angry, armed, often drunk (except John Brown- no booze for him) white people, scared and confused and trigger happy.
The relationship between Onion and John Brown makes up the emotional core of the book, and was the thing that gave me the most ups and downs in terms of what I thought of the whole project as I read it. There’s a section where Onion is separated from Brown and his band, lives as a slave for a hotelier, witnesses an abortive slave rising, etc., but that part felt almost wedged in to make the timeline work- it was the time between the Pottawatomie massacre and Brown’s decision to make his final raid. Onion’s time with Brown both gives him the chance to be eyewitness to history and to develop the relationship. As you can imagine, writing the relationship between a white historical figure and a young black boy (dressing up as a girl), set in the mid-nineteenth century, in the second decade of the twenty-first with all the weirdness about representation and literal-mindedness in literature that time entails, makes this a charged endeavor.
This is my own peculiar perspective, but as I came to listen to the book, I came to see Onion as, essentially, a contemporary subject, looking at and trying to grasp a profoundly non-contemporary subject, John Brown. That is to say, Onion is a lot like us, and like McBride, in terms of where we stand next to the figure of Brown. Onion is interested in the sort of things that we today often assume most people are interested in, as a baseline that people might somewhat deviate from but usually not abandon entirely: Onion wants fun, generally understood as relaxed and luxurious living with plenty of booze, he wants sex and love (confused, as it often is, especially in the minds of adolescents), he wants freedom for himself, and, relevant but generally less important than the other things, he wants to belong. That last does the most to propel him into action and keeps him around Brown, but his fecklessness and cowardice continually screw the pooch (and arguably alter history). The narrator is quite open about his fecklessness with the advantage of years, and Onion is only somewhat less open about it on the ground.
I’ll go out on a limb: this is the contemporary subject, as understood as the reader of contemporary literary novels. Feckless, cowardly, self-aware, looking for something bigger and better but unsure where to find it and skeptical of all comers. John Brown… is not. He was none of those things and is not the contemporary subject. In many ways, the admiration the left has for him is admiration for the qualities that render him alien, that, when we look a little deeper than “a white guy who actually meant it” — and he did, far more than Lincoln or Grant or any of the others — cause us to reach for terms like “religious fanatic” or “clinically insane.” And McBride dwells on both- John Brown’s praying spells, his evidently being off his rocker in numerous ways. Onion sees “the old man” as crazy and often wants to get away from him. He doesn’t, but often wants to. I would further put it to the reader that our construction of the “human” and the “normal” are as restrictive, if not more so, than many previous regimes, and surely more opaque, this despite the inclusiveness we all pat ourselves on the back for.
The worst moments of the book, for me, are the moments when I think McBride will take an easy way out. I’m actually continually surprised that John Brown hasn’t been “cancelled” as a “white savior.” It really wouldn’t fit — among other things, unlike Lincoln, Brown really did believe in social equality, lived with black people, gave them real positions of authority in his militia based on merit — but when has that ever stopped anyone? McBride, or anyway his narrator, depicts Brown, for much of the book, as blind- blind to Onion’s real identity as a boy, blind to the problems with his plan, blind to the realities of race. That’s in keeping with the slapstick/satire thing McBride is doing. I came to think, at certain points in the book, that maybe he wasn’t trying to “cancel” Brown — Onion never once doubts Brown’s sincerity — but that he was trying to deflate Brown. Just another guy with ideas, the classic foil of the feckless individual subject. Among other things, McBride does seem bound and determined to deflate Frederick Douglass, who he depicts as a lech and a hypocrite. My understanding is that Douglass didn’t actually treat women that well. But it seemed a bit much, and worse, a signal of intent towards Brown. “Weren’t those people in the past stupid? Isn’t greatness a joke?”
But it wasn’t that way, and I’m glad I stuck with “The Good Lord Bird” until the end, with its depiction of the Harper’s Ferry raid. It doesn’t get sloppy or sentimental. John Brown doesn’t suddenly become what a contemporary subject could see as a hero- flawless, a deus ex machina. In a lot of ways, that would have been worse than just deflating him. I am uninterested in uncomplicated, unearned heroism. Let’s put it this way- both Brown and Onion become tragic in intertwined ways, and in Brown’s case, it leads to something like apotheosis. Maybe Brown didn’t want to die, maybe he thought his plan could work (McBride presents it as obviously foolish- I’m not sure it was, but it’s also worth noting that calculuses of success and failure, and the tools used to pursue them, were radically different at the time). But he accepts his death- interestingly, accepts it at the moment when Douglass backs out of the plan. When he does, the truth — including the truth that Brown isn’t blind, that he sees a lot more than young Onion gave him credit for — emerges. Brown and his men are there to die and by dying, kill slavery, not all at once, but to set the events in motion. Even Onion’s failures — and one of the reasons Brown fails and dies, in this telling, is Onion’s fecklessness — ultimately contribute to this apotheosis.
Death is unavoidable, and the use of death as a solvent for truth is a deep and old enough trope that it finds its way even into our trite pop culture. In some ways, the idea that Brown died for what he believed in is what unites him with the contemporary subject- the latter can still admire the former, even if he can’t follow (Onion, after all, lives to tell the tale as an old man). Arguably, McBride didn’t understand Brown better than anyone else for most of the book. Among other things, comedy is a great excuse-maker- “I’m just trying to be funny, not trying to interrogate the way our present construction of sanity and, indeed, the human subject itself, impedes our understanding of John Brown and of the nineteenth century more generally!” And it is funny, and in the end, McBride does touch something outside of the cyclical self with with we all appear stuck. That’s something. ****’
Seth Jacobs, “Rogue Diplomats: The Proud Tradition of Disobedience in American Foriegn Policy” (2020) - My advisor wrote this! Seth is a good guy and was a good advisor to me during my time at Boston College. He’s also a good diplomatic historian and writer. I remember when he started this project- after years of teaching US Foreign Policy courses, he noticed how often American foreign policy seemed to pivot on American diplomats saying “yolo” and defying instructions from Washington… and most of the time, making better (in an American nationalist realpolitik sense) deals than if they hadn’t.
The story starts early, when communications took a long time, enabling diplomats to get away with more than they might. At the negotiations that ended the American Revolutionary War, John Jay (the least “sexy” of the writers of the Federalist Papers) decided to blow off provisions that American negotiators stick closely to the positions of their French patrons. He saw he could play the British and the French off each other. He got a lot more out of Britain than a nascent ex-colony that only barely beat its mother country in a protracted war could have expected, most importantly a western border that went out to the Mississippi River. The French only wanted their American buddy to go to the Alleghenies, but were faced with a fait accompli.
Similarly, wordy political appointee Nicholas Trist accompanied the American army conquering Mexico when the US jumped that country in the 1840s. He got a lot of confused messages from back home- President Polk, another creature of hacky politics, was trying and failing to balance various factions and their demands to variously seize part of Mexico, seize all of Mexico, or seize none of Mexico. Trist, on site and seeing just how unstable the wartime Mexican government was, and how intransigent the Mexican people would become if more of them were occupied, wrote and signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, taking Texas, California etc but not dismembering Mexico to such an extent that the US would be forced, with its relatively small and unprofessional army, to occupy the whole country. Everyone congratulated him but Polk, an asshole in more ways than one, still ruined Trist’s career for his disobedience.
But it’s not all comms troubles making for ambassadorial disobedience, though, Jacobs persuasively insists. Even when something like modern communications technologies come on line, American diplomats still disobeyed. I will say, though, I noticed the disobedience became more “elided orders and went off-message” than straight-up “signed a treaty against orders” disobedience. Walter Hines Page, US ambassador to Britain under the Wilson administration, went whole-hog on US support for Britain during WWI in ways that could be understood as compromising US neutrality. On the other side of the coin, Joseph Kennedy emphasized American neutrality in the lead up to its entry into WWII above and beyond what FDR had in mind while he held “Embassy London,” descending into out and out apology for Nazi Germany. It looks like Henry Cabot Lodge probably didn’t have direct orders to greenlight South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem (and his family) when he did in 1963, to clear the way for a more competent (and compliant) ruler- he just interpreted vague documents about encouraging Ngo to go away, made contact with the generals, and the rest was history.
All of these stories are told in engaging style, and I read enough diplomatic history under Seth’s direction to know you can’t take that for granted. More than anecdotes, Jacobs points out the ways in which this record of disobedience at key points illuminates a uniquely American style of politics. The US didn’t have a formal civil service for decades after most important European countries adopted one. It was routine for American presidents to give away ambassador posts as patronage appointments (and still is). Important posts might get somebody more competent… or might just get a higher bidder. Among other effects, this guaranteed that many American diplomats in important spots were independently wealthy, not reliant on a civil service salary (among other things, that didn’t — still doesn’t — cover the budget for all the socializing you’re meant to do as a diplomat, which is wild to me). They were self-assured men, often “aristocrats” (Joe Kennedy was an arriviste, even if he probably had more cash than all the others combined), confident of their ability to make independent judgments in matters of state independent of “superiors,” no matter said superiors ability to win elections. Sometimes, it paid off.
Jacobs also depicts all of these rogue diplomats as winners, for American policy aims if not in their personal lives, with the exception of Joe Kennedy. I’m ambivalent about this. Seth understood my politics were more radical than his and never dinged me for it- he’s a fair, broad-minded guy. I get that from a realpolitik perspective, stealing a third of Mexico probably “made sense.” I get from both that perspective and from a more liberal, “let’s try to ameliorate things” perspective, stopping Mexico from collapsing completely after we dismembered it was probably a “good” thing for Nicholas Trist to do. But it still leaves a weird taste in my mouth, praising anyone involved with the American side of the Mexican war.
As far as American involvement in WWI goes… that’s a weird one, even from a realpolitik perspective, and it’s made foggier by the fact that the American historical profession as we know it in many respects emerged out an act of parricide- routing old-school “progressive” historians, many of whom were as suspicious of the American founding fathers as they were of America going “over there” in 1917 (or abolitionism, or, as in the case of at least one prominent historian from that cohort, the Holocaust- skepticism can become a disease), from the profession and trashing their legacy in grad seminars across the land. Jacobs follows that rebuke and agrees that America should have intervened in WWI. You all know me, revolutionary defeatism and all that, but just taking the “American perspective,” I guess I’m on the fence, but come down to sort-of agreeing in an attenuated way. I think German brutality in WWI was inexcusable, but also circumstantial, not an essential part of the Kaiserine regime (above and beyond the “normal” cruelty of imperialist powers). British were no strangers to brutality, as their effort to starve Germany shoes, and I think the big surprise was that the Germans were willing to directly kill (as opposed to genteelly starve) “civilian” white people, Belgians and ocean liner passengers. I’m not sure Germany was a direct threat to America, beyond its shipping, at the time. What it was, especially after years of terrible war making everyone involved more extreme, was a threat to an Anglo-centric world order America was set to inherit from the British. Who the hell knows what would have happened if the Germans had won? Whereas we know what happens if the British won- by and by, we’d inherit more and more of their mantle. Duck soup- in that way, Page knew what he was doing.
Lastly, Vietnam… well, from both an American realpolitik and a revolutionary perspective, we never should have been there. Jacobs argues, against some historians (and many counterinsurgency boosters- a lot of latter day counterinsurgents like Ngo, an opinion not shared by contemporary counterinsurgents like Roger Hillman), that getting rid of Ngo extended America’s play in Vietnam. Maybe, but is that a good thing, for anyone? I guess according to Lodge and his bosses in the Kennedy White House, it would be, unless we buy the Oliver Stone theory that JFK was looking to get out (he wasn’t).
Anyway! This was a fun and interesting book with good insights into American diplomatic history. I’d recommend it even to people to whom the phrase “diplomatic history” doesn’t seem to promise good times, because of the quality of the writing and the intrigue of the stories. I like to think I’d say that even if I didn’t like and respect Seth Jacobs as a teacher, scholar, and all around good guy. ****’
Friedrich von Hayek, “The Constitution of Liberty” (1960) - It’s honestly getting to be like Charlie Brown and the football, me and these right-wing intellectuals. I mean it when I say I expect more from these people (as it happens, I did encounter a genuinely interesting — and genuinely batshit — reactionary work of genre fiction recently but did not review it because it was for Birthday Lecture research- you shall see). I didn’t expect the world from Hayek. I know how much a “Nobel” in economics is worth. “The Road to Serfdom” might be the single most ludicrously inaccurate prediction of the future taken seriously by “serious” people in recorded history. But I at least expected something more than the sententious performance of intellect, slathered over a fundamental lack of insight or even curiosity, that I got in “The Constitution of Liberty.”
The list of terms in “The Constitution of Liberty” that either aren’t defined or are defined in ways that beg further definition by anyone with a half-awake critical faculty encompass every important concept Hayek uses to make his argument, from “freedom” to “coercion” to my favorite, “civilization.” “Civilization” requires this, this, and that, mostly the unfettered right of people to dispose of their property, at least in the various ways that people near the “height of civilization” as far as Hayek was concerned— basically, his boyhood in pre-WWI bourgeois Europe— were used to doing.. A lot of syllogisms between underdefined concepts, like so many venture capital promises or poorly-laid invasion plans.
I don’t read these books because I think I’ll like them (though I never foreclose the possibility in advance). I read them for various types of insight, both those into “the enemy” and those that are more broadly applicable. There wasn’t a lot of the latter, here. I actually do think there’s some merit — at least enough to consider, if not to adopt whole hog — to the notion that rational planning isn’t an end-all-be-all and that there needs to be room for experimentation in economic processes, and other processes as well… though it is worth noting the idea we simply can’t process the information well or quickly enough has taken some knocks in the “Information Age.” Maybe Hayek’s work on economics would make the point with less baggage (though as a rational economic actor, I wouldn’t bet on it).
I probably should not have made that “rational actor” crack, because the main thing of value to be taken from this book is that it is a mistake to associate libertarianism or “classical liberalism” with rationalism, in any sense of the word. Hayek neither believes people to be rational actors nor that rational economic behavior is necessary to an economic system, and often eschews “rationalism” as the philosophy of top-down planners who think they can make everything anew. I had some inkling of this from reading scholars of the right like Corey Robin and Quinn Slobodian, but it is good to see it on the page. Among other things, this implies much more of an embrace of established rules and hierarchies than we often associate with “free-wheeling” libertarianism (and causes one to raise an eyebrow at how often, including in this book, Hayek averred he was no conservative). Once you open that door — that what we’ve got, from constitutions to borders to religious beliefs, is likely a good inheritance for freedom unless it can be “proven false” (to whose satisfaction, exactly?) or else was imposed by “central planners” — the walkway to anarcho-capitalists waving the yellow and black to support ICE is clear. So too, more seriously, is neoliberal embrace of the state (and in some but not all cases the nation or even the empire), precisely to enforce the creation and nurturing of markets. States and markets aren’t opposites, as a strain of libertarian thought contends- they necessitate and in some ways constitute each other.
All in all, this was worth reading to “catch the scent” of this particular ingredient in the stew of the modern right. Capitalist ideologues have been trying for a long time to find a figure isomorphic to Marx, but for their side. Sometimes they enlist Adam Smith, who died before Marx was born, has numerous negative things to say about capitalism and rich people, and whose most inspired reader probably was Karl Marx. Hayek is a close second in the sweepstakes as a potential capitalist system-builder (a fervent cult insists on Ayn Rand as the capitalist Marx but that’s just stupid), but try as they might, you can’t really map his powers, his influence, or even his meme-ability anywhere near that to the grumpy old Rhenish grouch. But they tried hard enough that aspects of Hayek’s thought have permeated modern right-wing thinking, even if relatively few of his influencees can say exactly how, beyond mumbling something about price signals. That Hayek’s main influence is actually non-rational, in contrast to how libertarians like to posture, is ironic. That Hayek helped ensconce a shallow performance of intellectual virtuosity shellacked over a curious lack of real critical curiosity… well, that’s hardly unique to the right. That’s ubiquitous, alas. *’
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, “A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)” (2020) (narrated by Kevin Stilwell) - Why did I let you fucking jabronis talk me into beach reading? This fucking sucked. Jia Tolentino better be better or there’s gonna be hell to pay!
In all seriousness: if there’s a group of people who deserve to be spoken of (and to) smugly, it’s libertarian ideologues. I don’t mean guys who just like being left alone to enjoy drugs, guns, and fireworks, and haven’t developed a class analysis. I’m sympathetic to that position (but consider developing a class analysis, guys). I mean the people who really think they’ve figured something out when they decide “government” is the problem and “free” markets are the solution. Especially at this late date, as most of the smarter libertarians become liberals and the meaner ones becomes Nazis, there’s such an unconsidered, Panglossian quality to the whole thing, such a satisfaction with received ideas whilst spinning their wheels frantically to convince themselves they’re free-thinkers, that it’s hard to avoid smugness. Hell, they’re hardly strangers to smugness themselves.
But smugness doesn’t make for a readable work of extended prose. There might be a few prose masters who can pull it off, but it’s a hard sell, and Hongoltz-Hetling is no master. To be fair, he doesn’t seem like he’d claim to be one. He seems like an affable, agreeable sort, a New Hampshire-based journalist. His writing style would be totally appropriate to crafting articles on quirky local stories with some poignant, lightly humorous sentiment at the end. The problem is, he wrote a book that is basically that article-ending sentiment, and a more pressing problem is, I listened to the whole thing.
“A Libertarian Walked Into A Bear” is the story of the little town of Grafton, New Hampshire, primarily in the first two decades of the twenty-first century but ranging to the town’s founding near the time of the American Revolution and the decades in between as well. Grafton is way the hell out there in the woods, at least as far as the east coast of the US is concerned. There are bears. At first, the white settlers hunted the bears and sold their pelts, clearing land so as to farm the rocky bullshit soil of New England. When it turned out that northern New England was in fact a blind alley in continental settler expansion, Grafton began a long slow decline in population and wealth. Bears came back. There weren’t and aren’t resources to do anything about it, or about the town’s other problems. It sucks pretty hardcore for Grafton.
Exacerbating the issues and forming the center of this book was the Free Town Project, an effort by Internet-borne libertarians to settle in Grafton and make it a model libertarian burg. I don’t recall if Hongoltz-Hetling made the numbers clear, but somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred libertarians answered the call in those halcyon Bush years, when libertarianism could pose as a viable path forward, before the financial meltdown and Black Lives Matter. Predictably, a great many pedants all moving to an isolated rural town didn’t make friends right away, despite newcomers and old hands agreeing that taxes suck (Grafton always hated taxes, as the author takes pains to point out, while smugly dissing the eighteenth century pioneer tax resistors’ bad spelling). As it turns out, New Hampshirites aren’t the native libertarians, just waiting for a spark from outside to ignore a bonfire of liberty. They’re mostly flinty Yankees who chose to live out of the way because they like living with people they always lived with and don’t like outsiders or change. Even when change means fewer taxes, a lot of people were resistant, especially when it was suggested by outsiders with a lot of other funny ideas.
Among other problems with this book, Hongoltz-Hetling does that annoying liberal thing where he accepts the libertarian “government versus liberty” framework, and expects to win the day by pointing out that “government” does good things and absence of it often causes problems. This is, in certain respects, “why don’t you move to Somalia if you hate government so much?” the book. It’s not like I like libertarians. I just hate shitty arguments, that don’t even have any juice to them anymore — I’ve never seen that line hurt a libertarian’s feelings — and especially hate them when they’re presented in a smug, “get a load of these freaks who hate the government!” tone.
There’s two related issues that compound these basic problems above and beyond the basic mediocrity of liberal political journalism. The first is that these freaks really aren’t that freaky. Hongoltz-Hetling puts a lot of weight on one founder of the project who turned out to be a pedophile… who was thrown out of the project before it really got underway (though more for optics reasons than anything else). The rest of the libertarians involved seem like fairly normal, if often pedantic and sometimes pretty gormless, white New Englanders of their generation. Some of them, like a guy who tries to create a church/free space but gets tripped up by taxes (and his refusal to apply for an IRS religious exemption), are even pretty sympathetic. Hongoltz-Hetling seems to be a canny enough writer to get that that guy and a few others are sympathetic, especially after church guy literally dies in a fire in said church. But that doesn’t change the fact that Hongoltz-Hetling looks down his nose at them, and expects us to do the same, from the extraordinarily short horse of contemporary liberalism.
The other problem is this- he does not make the case that libertarianism did that much to accelerate Grafton’s decline or exacerbate its bear problems. Grafton was declining when the libertarians got there. As the author took pains to point out, the locals always resisted the sort of taxation that might have made possible more public amenities that might induce people to move and/or remain there. The root problem really doesn’t seem to be ideology. The root problem seems to be economic marginality. The global economy doesn’t need anything Grafton produces, other than, perhaps, rural isolation for weirdos. Maybe if they had their shit together, the Graftonites could have plugged themselves better into an information/service economy, but that’s not entirely their fault. In their situation, considering what state and federal government generally does — tax their already poor farms, send their sons to war, and send money to develop towns on the opposite end of the country, like the booming Southwest (or research dollars to Dartmouth in nearby Hanover, NH) — you probably wouldn’t like government either. You don’t need to be a libertarian ideologue or servile to the rich to feel that way. The joke about libertarians moving to Somalia isn’t funny (to the extent it ever was) when you realize how badly imperialism and the Cold War screwed over that country, making the sort of “good government” American liberals take for granted impossible.
Of course, that’s not to say people can’t make bad situations worse. The closest thing to a real smoking gun Hongoltz-Hetling puts in the hands of the Free Town Project people (beside from insinuating that the church guy didn’t follow fire codes, without proving it) is that the libertarians encouraged a laissez-faire attitude towards trash disposal and the feeding of wild animals, thereby encouraging bears to become bolder. He lingers on the case of “Donut Lady,” a lady who fed bears donuts every day. The problem is, Donut Lady is a local, not a libertarian settler. Bears were already escalating, attacking pets, before the libertarians came. Moreover, the state, as Hongoltz-Hetling points out, does a shitty job of managing bears anyway, bound by muddled romantic notions of what wildlife “should be,” bureaucratic inertia, and funding issues. When locals take matters into their own hands and cull the bear population, Hongoltz-Hetling treats it like a war crime, when in other parts of the books he acts as though human-acclimated bears are in fact are war with us, and the Graftonite’s inability to do something about it shows their lack of civic virtue!
On top of that, Hongoltz-Hetling speculates that brain parasites from living around animals, especially cats (some prominent Graftonites in the book have cats), might be driving the madness he sees around him (but never conveys as being really mad- more just sad). I’ve literally heard altright guys make the same arguments about liberals and feminists (the trope of the crazy feminist cat lady). I’ve always said, frustrate a liberal long enough and he’ll break out the calipers and start doing biological determinism, but I’ve never seen them do it in response to a tiny group of hapless libertarians before. See something new every day, I guess.
Basically, this is some Daily Show-style profoundly inconsistent and incoherent slop, except not funny. “But the bears!” I can hear you say. “What about the bears, can’t they save the book?!” Well, reader, I give the book an extra half star, less for bear content — the author sees no or few bears and only intermittently passes on bear stories from his informants in a compelling fashion — than for llama content. He does tell one bravura anecdote about a woman’s pet llama rinsing a bear who wanders into her yard. That was cool. But otherwise, this was a shot at one of the fattest targets conceivable that lands flat on its face. **
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: The Sexually Inconsiderate Adventures of Batman & The Modern Sex Panic
We have fun here on the internet, right? Just last week there was a lot of hay being made about an interview in Variety where the co-creators, Justin Halpern and Paul Shumacker, of the HBOMax animated Harley Quinn series, related that the network higher ups overruled a writer’s room joke about Batman performing oral sex on Catwoman. Now the decision to not proceed with the joke likely had more to do with business sense than prudishness. Batman is set to star in two upcoming tentpole blockbusters just as cinemas are reopening post-pandemic, and it was expressly stated that the license owners at Warner Bros. didn’t want the assured internet buzz about Batman having cool sex cutting into Christmas-time toy sales from the family values crowd. I mean everyone was talking about it in the days after it was merely mentioned in an interview somewhere. But if the joke had aired, you’d hear even more about it than you already had. While I think the world is poorer for the networks forbearance, no one is actively decrying the removal of the joke as the overreach of reactionary forces in our culture, which I find interesting due to the current cultural conception of Batman in media, but I’ll go into more detail on that after we work through the main ideas brought about by the discussion of the question in the broader culture.
Ultimately the discourse seems to have settled on the idea that studio mandate be damned, Batman would go down on Catwoman, for a variety of compelling reasons. First of all, Catwoman is canonical connoted across several different iterations of Batman as basically being the embodiment of kink-positive, (not that oral sex is kink), non-traditional sex, both in regards to gender roles and just general social mores regarding sex. This side of Catwoman’s characterization is perhaps best embodied by Michelle Pfeiffer’s portrayal of the character in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, although elements of Catwoman as a sexually aggressive libertine are evident as far back as Eartha Kitt’s cavalcade of purred multiple entendres in the Adam West series. She was a bit of a flirt in the early comics, but leaned more on the cat part of her gimmick than the woman part even before the Comics Code Authority kicked in. While billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne may have had many love interests over the course of his publication history, his Batman persona has really only consistently held a torch for Catwoman, who given her assertive nature probably wouldn’t continue the whole game of cat and mouse night after night if it were clear Batman wasn’t willing to do whatever was necessary to get the job done.
Further, Batman and Catwoman are characters in serialized media that extend far beyond any one work. There’s no definitive version of Batman, as there have been hundreds of versions of him in different works and genres. The character of Batman exists not in the comics or movies that feature him, but rather the character of Batman exists primarily within the mind of the consumers of the media, the media merely is a medium which helps to facilitate a conception of the character. Long before this most recent discourse on Batman’s sexual boundaries arose, this exact topic was likely already covered in exhaustive detail by any number of fanfiction writers, who I hope are now reaping some manner of windfall due to the increased interest in their area of specialty, and that conception of Batman is no less definitive than Bob Kane’s original comics.
So, mostly, the opinions landed on the idea that Batman would give oral sex to a committed partner. I can’t really fault these conclusions, but I’m left to wonder why folks were so vehement on this fact. I think some of it has to do with Batman and his place within the current social landscape, and how the demand for a Batman that would go down on a woman perhaps heralds a change in prevailing attitudes within our culture. Now, I’ve promised myself and my readership that my takes will never be hot, this is why we’re getting around to the “does Batman eat pussy” debate a full week after it’s relevant, but the closest I ever came was a temptation to say that the “modern” version of Batman assuredly would not. Batman of the current popular imagination is largely based off of the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy, probably best encapsulated in the second movie in the trilogy, The Dark Knight. This Batman is a rather grim figure, a self sacrificing protector of Gotham City, fighting against the destructive anarchy of the villains he’s soon to toss into Arkham Asylum. This Batman is tormented and traumatized by the death of his parents, as are most versions of the character to be honest, but this Batman works through it by taking it upon himself to protect, and police the morals of, Gotham in a solemn ascetic vigil.
As the poster boy for arrested development, this Batman has a child’s concept of justice, which comes in the form of broken bones, literal torture, and extended prison sentences. The film tries to have it both ways by positing that Gotham is such a den of iniquity that Batman is forced to enact low justice upon the common thugs he dangles off of roof tops, while simultaneously pointing to his moral code, which largely consists of his not killing anyone. Honestly though, if this Gotham is such a bad place to live, all he’s essentially doing is condemning the criminals he “spares” to live for longer in the hellhole that his family helped make into the social failure that it is today. We see this dynamic play out in the contrast drawn between him and his arch nemesis, The Joker. Batman suppresses his emotions, just as he suppresses the criminal urges of the criminals he finds himself in conflict with, but leaves his victims alive. The Joker, on the other hand, will cackle like the maniac that he is while afflicting his target with a deadly laughing gas, or in the movies carving them up in a Glasgow smile. The Joker is expressive with his emotions, and elicits the expression of emotion from his victims, but in doing so brings about his victims’ deaths. This sets up a rather unenviable choice for those in Gotham: would you rather get to live an extended but joyless life under Batman’s graven protection, or suffer a quick, mirthful death at the hands of The Joker? Could you even call the oppressive gray day to day life that Batman is supposedly a protector of “living?” The whole thing smacks of the grim hagiography of the post 9/11 years, a real hero of his time.
This version of Batman takes a lot of cues from Batman as written by Frank Miller. The first movie in the series Batman Begins essentially being a modified retelling of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, which featured an equally stoic Batman taking up the bleak mantle of saving the city from a rot that he thinks a few well executed beatings can sort out. I could absolutely imagine Frank Miller writing up a character Bible for Batman that states explicitly that Batman does not give oral; that seems like a very Frank Miller thing to say. As evidence, Batman: Year One features a version of Catwoman, establishing for the first time that prior to her turn as a costumed thief she was some manner of sex worker, sex workers being a slightly offputting fascination of Miller’s work (likely a dominatrix although it’s never stated explicitly). In the panels that establish this, she is speaking with a john whom she refers to as Skunk, who asks why she is so contemptuous of men. Selina shoots back that she’s “Never met a real man,” before, and later on it’s implied when she meets Batman during her early criminal career that she finally has met her conception of a real man. The implication being that Selina holds men like Skunk in contempt for engaging in “deviant” unmasculine sex roles. It's implied that Skunk was paying to be sexually dominated by Selina during their conversation, but that the authoritative and domineering Batman is worthy of her respect and sexaul attentions.
Of course, this version of Catwoman is doomed to be disappointed. Frank Miller’s version of Batman is weirdly sexless. Miller takes great pains to show him refusing sex, both as a billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, and as he infiltrates the seedy underworld of Gotham in disguise. This version of Batman finds the criminals he is tasked with subduing as sexual degenerates. This is most explicit in the spiritual sibling to Batman: Year One, Batman the Dark Knight Returns, where the version of The Joker that Batman must do battle with is very uncomfortably queer coded, and subtextually through The Joker’s various ploys to bait Batman into killing him, implies that he’s also trying to seduce him into illicit gay sex. Instead, we see Frank Miller’s Batman sublimate his various sexual urges into violence, and monologues about how degenerate the city has become. This version of Batman essentially makes use of Arkham Asylum to kink shame on an institutional scale. The weird sexual politics aren’t as explicit in the Nolan films, although one indication that Batman is off of his game and thus potential prey for Bane in the Dark Knight Rises is that he has sex with Marrion Cotillard’s Miranda, who turns out to be the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul setting up his devastating betrayal in the third act. But the joyless reserved guardian of virtue remains intact enough to be recognizable. This is the Batman I think people wish to dispel when they invite a Batman who will have oral sex with Catwoman.
It’s high time we show that version of Batman the road anyhow, not necessarily because it’s not in line with open progressive views on sex. If you like Frank Miller’s Batman, I think you’ve got weird taste but whatever man. Rather, I think the era of stoically remembering 9/11, and reverently continuing to uphold the values that the “terrorists are trying to take away from you” is over, and that this grim Batman has outlived his usefulness in the current era. This sense of always being on guard, of defending our cultural ideals against “degeneration,” has burst its own banks and is actively oppressing other elements within the cultural milieu. The current panic of the post pandemic “baby bust,’ wherein the expected increase in birth rates following the pandemic lockdown failed to materialize, (as though it’s a silly idea to be hesitant in conceiving a child in the midst of a society that consistently failed to manage what should have been a fairly manageable pandemic), has resulted in a moral sex panic. Where do you think the fears over open kink at Pride stem from? What cultural force prompts the hundreds of column inches given over to scolding pronatalist op-ed writers in journals of record throughout the country? As though the problem with birth rates is that millennials are having too good of sex through rejecting the traditional sexual roles of previous generations. Millennials might indeed be more sexually open than their parents' generational cohort, but the reason they’re not having kids is because they’re goddamn broke off their ass.
Obviously Batman isn’t to blame for these cultural forces, but the mentality he represents is. At heart, this is the idea that a society in crisis doesn’t require actors applying themselves to change the fundamental problems within that society, but that it merely needs constant coercive force to continue to force those within the broken society to continue to live, miserably, within it. The anhedonic, oathbound Batman of the Nolan films is a symbol of the coercive forces within society to submit to the societal forces as they exist now. This Batman is a cop, whose only joy comes from the fact that he’s empowered to make sure you’re not having any fun either, by any means necessary. Nobody is happy to see this version of Batman show up, least of all his romantic partner. We need to move beyond this version of Batman, to a version where at least someone is getting some pleasure from his presence.
Thanks Ed! One hell of an Ed’s Corner. What does Mithra thinks? She thinks if that caped crusader blows in, interrupting her nap, he better bring treats!
This tickles a particular interest of mine, so I hope you will forgive my digression into something beyond Hyeck’s ideas.
>I actually do think there’s some merit — at least enough to consider, if not to adopt whole hog — to the notion that rational planning isn’t an end-all-be-all and that there needs to be room for experimentation in economic processes, and other processes as well… though it is worth noting the idea we simply can’t process the information well or quickly enough has taken some knocks in the “Information Age.”
It was assumed in the 1900-60 that if you took a computer and improved it so that it was twice as fast/capable you double it's problem solving ability. Much like if you make an engine twice as powerful, it can haul twice as much coal. As far as I know, no one at the time thought to even challenge this assumption. What happened is that they made computers twice as fast and saw almost no increase in problem solving ability for certain problems, then they made computers one hundred times faster with more memory and still for certain types of problems the computer could solve it for say five objects but not six.
The Soviet Union ran headlong into this. For instance they wanted to know how many sprockets vs ball bearings vs gears should they produce given that we have this much steel and they want to maximize the number of lathes, tractors and aircraft under some function. You can represent this problem as a fairly simple equation and the equation has one right answer which represents the best possible economic plan. The optimal plan to achieve the results you want. In looking at these problems the Soviets discovered whole fields of computer science. Yet for some of these equations finding the solution is highly intractable and likely always will be regardless of how much computing power you have. This was discovered in parallel in the West and the Soviet Union some time in the late 1960s.
That there are inherent limitations on the effectiveness of certain types of economic decision making has plagued both planned and market economies. Economics often talk about game theory, but in many cases the optimal game theory equilibria is computationally intractable to find so how do markets find it? Well it appears that they don’t either.
Where does that leave humanity? There are economic problems that are simple to describe, have easily verified right answers and that are in practice impossible to find. It’s a weird sort of pessimism about the limits information and computing. Like telling someone that there is a book in the Library of Babel that will solve all their problems, but good luck finding it.