In the cyberpunk dystopia of contemporary Philadelphia, showing solidary for one dead cop is more important than responding to a suicidal teenage girl in crisis who is actively self-harming and drawing pictures of herself hanging from a bridge with a noose.
I am sickened by what happened yesterday and I don't want to go deep into it except for that statement. I am disgusted. But I am also disgusted that if I go into enough detail some moderate will deconstruct my statement just to be a contrarian and think he is smarter than bleeding-heart Barry.
I am not McCoy and I am not Spock. The world does not exist in binaries.
I don't really like blogging all that much because it feels like being a talking head. Why should I, a white man in America, presume to have anything to say that hasn't already been said by my more oppressed comrades? What I try to do with this space is respond to the constant stream of propaganda that exist in the form of narrative tropes.
I am a writer. I understand narrative tropes. To employ one is an act of social construction. When we write, whether consciously or unconsciously, we are modeling an ideal of society. If a story goes far enough in its critique, if it deconstructs those tropes critically, it is often labeled big-P Political.
I was recorded on Monday for a radio show, "Live at the Writer's House," which will be broadcast on XPN, probably sometime in December. I will update my readers. It was my first paid gig as a professional writer. I was asked how to write "radical" science fiction. There was so much I wanted to say, and so little time. I said that a writer has to understand that literary establishments, including the speculative fiction and science fiction establishments, are bourgeois institutions, with gatekeepers, and our job as radical writers is to subvert and undermine those gatekeepers, who play a dominant role in a selection process with implications for the scope of "acceptable" social criticism, which in media is called the "Overton Window." We have to write outside the Overton Window. And then I said to the host, Alli Katz, that if I had known she would ask me that question, I would have selected a more radical piece to read than "This Car Hates My Guts," which is without a doubt, my most commercial short story.
In "This Car Hates My Guys," which you will be able to hear on XPN soon, a car thief in a future where AI cars have forced car thieves to become "car hackers" steals a vehicle which proceeds to make the ride unbearably uncomfortable by blasting heat, keeping the windows up and the seat warmer on, and generally trying to "throw" the rider like a horse. It's a humorous cyberpunk story, short and concise, intended to make you, dear reader, laugh. It's almost slapstick. It's a good story. But it doesn't fundamentally question the social order. A car thief is an extreme example of property crime. Cars are personal property, for most workers who have one. It's how they get to work, how they earn a paycheck. Stealing a car is not the same thing as stealing bread. A teenager shoplifting, or a justifiably angry Philadelphian taking out their frustration against private property, does more to question the social order than that story.
I hope this critique is not taken for granted. A person can only take so much alienation and humiliation before they snap and lash out against themselves or others. I see this all the time. Not just with the teens I work with, I see it with my coworkers. I see it with families. People are so alienated from each other by this individualistic, hyper-atomized, competitive, ruthless system that they lapse into solipsism and selfish behavior. I think people are better than that and deserve better. We deserve a better system.
In school, I lead a weekly social skills group with the kids. It's on Fridays. I spend the other days sitting in on their social studies classes so I can like the things they are studying, like the concept of settler-colonialism, and structural inequality, to what I'm doing in the social skills group. I use activism to talk about impulse control and strategic, rational thinking. The kids are very interested in protests and activism. Some of them protested last year and had bad experiences with the police. They're very passionately engaged in social studies and I use that time to engage with them. They often make very valid institutional criticisms. On Monday, they were dancing around Marxism. I spoke about it with their teacher afterward.
One of the kids told me he thought peaceful protest had limits. I'm going to do a unit with them on Apartheid and Nelson Mandela. About how Amnesty International refused to list him as a Prisoner of Conscience because he would not renounce violation as a tactic of political change. About how the USA support the Apartheid Regime. I plan to ask them why they think we did this. I am curious what they will say.
It is 6:56 AM. Signing off.