Culture, Digested: Resolutely Unserious

After the first election of Donald Trump, the discourse got stuck on “he won because of racism/misogyny,” mostly because the Democrats had spent the campaign saying no one would vote for Donald Trump unless they were racists and misogynists. I guess we’re doing this again — I barely get a sideways glance of The Posts and see “they voted for evil” and stuff like that.

The same commentators and professionals who came out to explain Trump to us in 2016 despite having no insight into his supporters (other than “Evil”) and despite having no ability to even question let alone criticize the institutions that have been failing us will likely get book deals, spots on TV shows, and branded merch to do it all over again.

david wojnarowicz

In the lead up to the election, I had a lot of trouble processing the cognitive dissonance of being told over and over again “this could be the end of democracy” while seeing no one acting with anything that resembled urgency. Do you ever have those nightmares where a threat is looming — a house is on fire, there’s someone bad lurking just out of sight — and you can’t seem to convince anyone to run or to help? Yeah, like nine months of that.

I was asked by the Telegraph to review That Librarian, Amanda Jones’s book about fighting book banning efforts in libraries and schools. The review I handed in was too exasperated and furious to print or revise, I guess. Because we are talking about a serious issue here, how information about sexuality is disseminated, the threat from the political right to declare all information about homosexuality “pornography,” the threats our libraries face not only from armed adults invading the spaces to look for evidence of “grooming” but also from defunding efforts. But there’s also a larger issue, where the political left is fine with restricting free speech all of a sudden but also resolutely denies doing so, making every conversation on the subject immediately disingenuous.

Influencers on the left are quick to use words like “genocide” to infer what the battle over libraries and information might mean for LGBTQ in the Trump/Vance administration, but can’t be bothered to take five minutes to think about what book bannings mean in the age of the internet, about how a culture of overproduction reinforces bubbles and destroys curiosity, or how public figures can be better stewards of information. People on each “side” will happily use the word Nazi and reference book burnings when someone challenges the right of someone to say or read something, but won’t think through the long term effect of using such hysterical political language anytime anything weird happens.

So when I got into That Librarian, I thought maybe Jones will make an effort to get into some of this. Jones is a small town librarian in Louisiana who went viral after a statement she made at a public hearing about the possibility of removing certain materials from libraries made her a target of hate. The statement itself had been fine. Direct, well intentioned, even if not particularly insightful. Hardly showing enough potential to build a whole book around. But if you become a target of hate in today’s “polarized” political atmosphere, then people in media might find it convenient to turn you into a champion.

Standing in the middle of this builds up an intolerable level of frustration. Can someone just say what they mean? I let loose on the book:

That Librarian does not educate, it tells the reader they are so smart and good for already believing the correct things. But even so, this review feels a little mean spirited, like telling a child their fuzzy bunny with the velvety ears is an idiot. But kid, I’m sorry, your rabbit’s stupid, okay?

Jones should be a better guide through this political battle – not only because she’s an activist in a conservative region, but also because she voted for Donald Trump in 2016. But her tale of coming to the light (and liberal politics) provides little insight on Jones or the political atmosphere at large. She isn’t clear on why she voted Republican in the first place – chalking it up mostly to peer pressure and letting her “’red’ community and my family influence” her. She doesn’t come clean about any objectionable politics she used to hold, writing, “I threw up a little in my mouth when I placed that vote.”

Her conversion comes mostly through changing her pop culture habits. She watches an episode of the TV talk show The View that points out the whiteness of the literary canon. She goes to a professional dinner hosted by the activist group We Need Diverse Books, which strives to change prejudiced beliefs by bringing more stories written about marginalized identities in publishing. She confronts her own privilege and her habit of acting like a “Whitey McWhite.” “The song ‘Man in the Mirror’ is one I listen to often,” she writes. “The lyrics resonate.”

But this story mostly just sounds like she, for a while, agreed with one political group and then she decided she agrees with the other. She attributes this change of heart to an “education,” and that leads Jones to believe that anyone who disagrees with her politically is only doing so out of ignorance. Calling your political opponent ignorant is an easy way to feel smugly superior and to suggest an easy solution – just force them to read these books instead of those other books and they’ll convert, too. The end result is the equivalent of one of those “In this house we believe in science” yard signs stretched out to almost 300 pages.

Back in 2018, I wrote about all these “feminist” books that came out by professionals who were trying to make anti-tyranny part of their brand for The Baffler. A lot of those books were about how good it was that women were angry about Trump, but failed to figure out what women should do about any of that anger.

Neither book considers the possibility, even for the length of a sentence fragment, that one thing making some women angry might have been the insistence by a certain segment of elite women leaders that Hillary Clinton was the feminist choice despite her having made the lives of an entirely other segment of women unlivable through her support of military intervention, the gutting of social welfare programs, and the financial ruin of our nation by the wealthy. We should only care that some commentators were mean about her pantsuits, and her laugh, and her hair.

And of course neither book manages to explain how women’s anger is different than men’s. When a woman is angry in these books, it is because of injustice, not because of immigrants. An angry woman is working toward progress—she is not a white supremacist, or a mother trying to suppress trans rights for the sake of “the children,” or an online troll sending death threats. Readers of Traister and Chemaly would never guess that a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016. When a woman is angry in these tracts, she is Elizabeth Warren, not Marine Le Pen.

One thing I appreciated around the election was Jon Stewart’s comment about the usefulness of “moral superiority” to the media during the Trump administration. Certain decisions, like firing specific figures, were cloaked in righteousness when really there were purely financial motivations. This protected media organizations, but infuriated parts of their audience about “cancel culture,” “free speech,” and the persecution of Christian or conservative voices. But pointing out “all these guys are frauds and liars” does little to help anyone figure out what to do other than drive people even deeper into bubbles and conspiratorial hideouts.

It's irritating to read an entire book about how gravely important this all is but only be offered slogans (Diversity! Inclusion! Tolerance!) to deal with them. If we are sliding hopelessly into fascism, it’s even more depressing to know how some people will take every bad thing that happens as an opportunity for heroic self-branding.

Recommended:

• I’m reading Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born, and she has a wonderfully tart description of the grifters and fools America turned to during World War II to explain to them what was happening. “Ladies’ clubs saw the label on her coat and the quality of her bracelet and at once begged her to instruct them in politics.” Powell describes a silly romance novelist turned political columnist as a woman “who rode the world’s debacle as if it was her own yacht.” At least there is comfort in how some things never change.

• All the astrologers who had just a few months ago predicted the assassination attempt on President Trump are confused how they got the election results so wrong. (If you are actually interested in this, an astrologer I trust gets into the confusion here.)

• An award-winning documentary got one of its subjects killed.