The election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. earlier this month offered the very thing our movie franchises and television series have denied us for two decades: catharsis.
For a writer, it turns out I may suffer from a staggering lack of imagination.
I will confess to anxiously entertaining all the apocalyptic post–Election Day scenarios contemplated by even our most sober pundits and analysts: the disillusion-fueled outrage on the left should Trump eke out a narrow Electoral College win despite losing the popular vote to Biden; or, the armed militias activated by the president in the event of his loss. Like the set of a Snake Plissken movie, store windows on Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive were boarded up; correspondingly, I barricaded my own front and balcony doors as I watched, sick to my stomach, an endless caravan of MAGA-bannered pickup trucks roar past my home in the liberal bastion of Los Angeles the weekend before Election Day. I girded for the possibility (if not inevitability) of social breakdown, fully aware I would not be cast in the part of uber-competent dystopian hero—the Rick Grimes or Mad Max—in that story.
What I never imagined—not once, even fleetingly—was that upon receiving official word of a Biden/Harris victory, cities across the country, and the world over, would spontaneously erupt into large-scale celebration worthy of an MGM musical. Ding-dong! The witch is dead! It was a perfectly conventional—and conventionally predictable—Hollywood ending, yet I never saw it coming.
Despite all the warnings I’ve issued about the unconscious maleficent messaging in our commercial fiction—stories in which messianic saviors redeem our inept/corrupt public institutions (Star Wars and superhero sagas), armed men with badges act without even the smallest measure of accountability (action movies and police procedurals), and environmental destruction/societal collapse are not merely inevitable but preferable (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Walking Dead), because apocalypse absolves us from our burdensome civic responsibilities—this election season has exposed my own susceptibility to pop-cultural conditioning.
It wasn’t merely a spirit of doomism I nursed throughout October; it was an unchallenged assumption that the interminable Trump narrative would simply do what all our stories now do: hold us in a state of real-time presentism (“We’ll have to wait and see” and “I will keep you in suspense” are common refrains from the outgoing president) rather than arrive at definitive conclusion.
The erosion of cathartic narrativity is a subject I’ve admittedly addressed a lot here on the blog since I first published “Journey’s End” over five years ago, but it’s essential to understanding how the Trump presidency came to be, and why we all felt such an atavistic sense of relief when it reached an end on November 7.
Around the turn of the millennium, storytellers mostly abandoned the Aristotelian narrative arc—with its rising tension, climax, and catharsis—in favor of “storyless” fiction with either a satirical-deconstructionist agenda (Family Guy, Community) or to emulate the kind of open-ended worldbuilding previously the exclusive province of tabletop RPGs and videogames (Game of Thrones, Westworld).
If Forrest Gump could be considered a defender of the narrative worldview, its mid-1990s contemporary, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, may be thought of as its opposite. Where Gump offers us a linear, if rewritten, historical journey through the decades since World War II, Pulp Fiction compresses imagery from those same years into a stylistic pastiche. . . . forcing the audience to give up its attachment to linear history and accept a vision of American culture as a compression of a multitude of eras. . . . The narrative technique of the film also demands that its audience abandon the easy plot tracking offered by sequential storytelling. . . . Pulp Fiction delights in its ability to play with time, and in doing so shows us the benefits of succumbing to the chaos of a postnarrative world. . . .
Slowly but surely, dramatic television and cinema seemed to give up the fight, and instead embrace the timelessness, even the purposelessness, of living in the present. The classic situation comedy had been narrative in its construction. The “situation” usually consisted of a history so important to the show that it was retold during the opening theme song. . . . Compared to these setups, modern sitcoms appear as timelessly ahistorical as Waiting for Godot. Friends chronicles the exploits of some people who happen to frequent the same coffee bar. Seinfeld is a show about nothing. The backstory of Two and a Half Men has more to do with Charlie Sheen’s dismissal and Twitter exploits than the divorces of the show’s in-world characters. These shows are characterized by their frozenness in time, as well as by the utter lack of traditional narrative goals. . . .
CSI, one of the most popular franchises on television, brings this presentist sensibility to the standard crime drama. Where Law & Order investigates, identifies, and prosecutes a murderer over a predictable sequence of discoveries, CSI uses freeze-frame and computer graphics to render and solve the murder as if it were a puzzle in space. It’s not a crime, but a crime scene. . . .
. . . In Lost, characters find themselves on an island where the rules of linear time no longer apply. . . . Solving the mystery of the island and their relationship to it is not the result of a journey through evidence but a “making sense” of the world in the moment. . . .
. . . The Wire, which follows drug dealers, corrupt union bosses, and politicians through Baltimore, never doles out justice. A world in which no good deed goes unpunished, The Wire is as existential as TV gets—a static world that can’t be altered by any hero or any plot point. It just is. . . .
This is no longer considered bad writing. In fact, presentist literature might even be considered a new genre in which. . . . Narrativity is replaced by something more like putting together a puzzle by making connections and recognizing patterns. . . .
This same impulse lies at the heart of so-called reality TV—the unscripted, low-budget programs that have slowly replaced much of narrative television.
Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New York: Penguin Group, 2013), 30–34
Without a catalyst to herald a heroic journey or the closure of catharsis, the characters of our contemporary commercial fiction, divorced from the organizational patterns of traditional narrative structure, are left only to busy themselves with an aimless, and tragicomically futile, search for meaning—either by neurotically codifying the unwritten rules of the social contract (Seinfeld), supplanting the philosophical subjectivity of justice with the scientific objectivity of forensics (unlike the fictional detectives of the previous century, the criminalists of CSI were seldom made to wrestle with moral quandaries or exercise personal judgment), or, most commonly (and addictively), tirelessly navigating expansive, rabbit-hole mythologies that lead everywhere and nowhere (Lost, The X-Files, Heroes, Westworld, Once Upon a Time, Orphan Black, Castle Rock, Manifest).
These shows have plot to spare—often too much fucking plot—but no story arcs: no goals, no catharsis. Indeed—like the absurdist existentialism of Samuel Beckett, the characters of our postnarrative dramas are but cogs in a cosmic wheel that turns just the same, with or without their intervention.
On no TV series is this worldview more readily and dispiritingly accepted than The Walking Dead, whereby civilized society collapsed overnight with the sudden onset of a zombie virus, and at no point do any of the survivors demonstrate even passing interest in rebuilding the world—i.e., resuming the project, and by extension the narrative, of civilization; they merely violently exert their primal drive to continue to exist within its ahistorical continuum at any cost. The show’s title applies just as aptly to its amoral protagonists as its undead revenants.
Such is where we found ourselves in 2015: After having been conditioned for a quarter century to not merely accept but enjoy “the timelessness, even the purposelessness, of living in the present”—how else, after all, could one possibly explain the fanatical popularity of Game of Thrones (which, for the record, I’ve always considered bad writing)?—down the gilded escalator swooped a nefarious media messiah who very much understood, if only intuitively, how to capitalize on “the chaos of a postnarrative world”:
Before 2015, Donald Trump was a fringe media curiosity, a rich loudmouth with the world’s most elaborate comb-over who whored himself for ratings and Internet page views in the same waters as David Hasselhoff and Dramatic Chipmunk. Originally famous as a real estate magnate who obsessively pretended to be richer than he was and fumed over the media-created perception that he had short fingers, he was reduced in the late 2000s to trying his hand at reality TV, where weirdly enough America made him more famous than ever.
The Apprentice spoke to Middle America’s most ghoulish masochistic fantasies about life in a world with no job security. In it, Trump played a vicious corporate tyrant firing unworthy losers over and over again in a revolting sadomasochistic ritual that millions for some reason found entertaining. Huge audiences got themselves worked up for the orgiastic “You’re fired” climaxes, clearly enjoying the spectacle of being humiliated by the despotic rich.
But Trump wasn’t satisfied. He wanted more. So he parlayed his Apprentice role into a new part in America’s longest-running TV show, the presidential election, reinventing himself as a ludicrous caricature of a racist strongman.
Matt Taibbi, I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2017), 286–87
From there? You reduce narrativity to its most ephemeral temporal increment—the news cycle—then inundate the audience—the American public—with a barrage of nonstop new twists to the point where even Game of Thrones seems underplotted by comparison, and suddenly we all become like the castaways on Lost: no longer on a purposeful journey of common interest, merely trying to make sense of the world in a given moment. Voilà—the presentism presidency.
And so, for four interminable years, we’ve been suspended in the postnarrative stasis that is Trump’s America—a goal-deprived state of relentless prevarication, cruelty, authoritarianism, white supremacy, and environmental and democratic degradation. And if you ever needed proof that we are a culture that aches for cathartic resolution—that’s sick and tired of sustained presentism, at least under a President Trump—the literal dancing in the streets of our major cities that occurred on November 7 tells you everything you need to know.
We deserved the celebration, too, because despite the pandemic, the GOP’s multipronged voter-suppression strategies, and online misinformation campaigns by foreign actors, we turned out in record numbers to vote Trump out. We proved our country doesn’t have to exist in the bleak reality of The Wire, “a static world that can’t be altered by any hero or any plot point,” or that of The Walking Dead, in which personal interest and/or survival from moment to moment compulsorily supersedes any notion of long-term civic obligation or good-faith effort at sympathetic coexistence.
Nor does this have to be a “timelessly ahistorical” sitcom à la The Simpsons or Arrested Development (the title of which is no fluke). We can—we seem to even now want to—confront the original sins of our past, make reparations for them, and move the country forward to a more equitable and sustainable mode of existence. Let this moment be a reminder that there can be heroic agents of change, there can be social progress, and, by Christ, there can be meaningful catharsis.
Look, it is gonna be a long road to dig us out of the place that the last four years have put us in, but that is why it might be so important to remember the moments of triumph that this week has managed to provide. Ritchie Torres and Mondaire Jones became the first gay Black men elected to Congress. Cori Bush, a Black Lives Matter activist, is Missouri’s first Black congresswoman. In Delaware, Sarah McBride became the country’s first openly transgender state senator. Multiple counties elected reform-minded prosecutors and sheriffs. Florida voted to increase the minimum wage, and every state that had a marijuana initiative on the ballot approved it. And most importantly, despite his lies, his obstructions, and his depressingly popular racism, [Donald Trump] fucking lost.
John Oliver, “Election Results 2020,” Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, November 8, 2020
Hear, hear. And in spite of the trust we misplaced in our favorite political fantasy, Game of Thrones, to establish order and make meaning out of its postnarrative chaos, to give us the vicarious pleasure of seeing wise and decent leaders installed in its halls of power, we instead discovered we were just going to have to do that for ourselves—by actively exercising the levers of democracy. We wrote our own ending—one that was worth the wait.
Authors and screenwriters, take note: Two decades into our new millennium, audiences are starved for stories that illumine a path forward, not relegate them to a nostalgic past or lead them in vertiginous circles. What an opportunity artists now have to be the architects of a bold new era—to inspire “everyday people” to rise, courageously and creatively, to meet the challenges of climate disruption and systemic racism. Show them we can turn the page on the incessant simultaneous plotlines of the Trump narrative, and—at long merciful last—start a new story.
And that in no way means spoon-feeding viewers formulaic narratives with easy answers and tidily unambiguous conclusions. Not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. I love Return of the Jedi, too, but instead of acknowledging the thorny consequences of political revolution, Lucas closed on dancing teddy bears. (And though Darth Vader was made to pay for his sins, some of the saga’s more virtuous figures, like Yoda and Obi-Wan, were summarily let off the hook for their arrogant lapses in judgment and inexcusable failures of leadership.)
We need storytellers who can confront the uncomfortable truths that led to this unprecedented era in both American and human history, and convey the nuanced complexities of the existential challenges ahead: climate change, police reform, health care, wealth inequality. This juncture calls for artists with the creative courage and moral imagination to eschew nihilistic and exploitive narratives, and instead supply genuine cultural orientation and inspire call-to-action through meaningful catharsis. Because catharsis—something we all have renewed appreciation for at this moment—can empower people to move mountains.
Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry enough to change the world. A story can make us angry enough to change the world. . . . There is observable evidence to suggest that what we believe to be true directly affects how we live. As the first few years of the twenty-first century wore on, I wondered just how badly people, especially young people, were being affected by the overwhelmingly alarmist, frightening, and nihilistic mass media narratives that seemed to boil with images of death, horror, war, humiliation, and pain to the exclusion of almost everything else, on the presumed grounds that these are the kinds of stories that excite the jaded sensibilities of the mindless drones who consume mass entertainment.
Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011), 409
Exercising their own considerable moral imagination, voters rejected those narratives when they elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They yearn for new visions, for noble goals, for forward motion again—for an ethos of decency and a quickened regard for scientific expertise. It isn’t merely the federal government that’s been handed a mandate to espouse those values; so have the storytellers.
For two decades now, we’ve had our fun indulging “little-boy wish fantasies”—our misanthropic dystopian prophecies and our Saturday-morning cartoons–turned–shared cinematic universes—and now it’s time once again to practice emotionally honest and morally imaginative storytelling. This is, to be sure, a creative godsend—because the most thrilling thing about the cathartic boon from the last story is that it’s often the animating spirit of the next one.
The extent to which Joe Biden will be empowered to fulfill his pledge to Build Back Better hinges on the Georgia runoff election scheduled for January 5, 2021. Rally+Rise offers several suggestions on how you might help the Senate campaigns of Jon Ossoff and Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock here, and if you happen to live in Georgia, please vote—and encourage your neighbors to do likewise!
Except that instead of accepting his defeat w/ dignity and grace Trump continues to throw a temper tantrum
AND NEARLY HALF THE COUNTRY SAYS HE’S RIGHT TO DO SO!!
Remember, Trump got a record number of votes, beaten only by Biden. And the Blue Wave was far smaller than we anticipated
In an old-fashioned typical murder mystery the killer, once caught, would confess and either go along quietly w/ the police or commit suicide, giving the story closure. In the real world Trump is still a danger, perhaps now more than ever
Even if he can’t sue his way back into power, sow enough doubt about the election that the majority-conservative Supreme Court gets the final decision, nearly half the country will be convinced that the election was stolen from him (or at least claim to be)
And who knows what he’ll do before his term ends? Any time you ask “Is Trump stupid enough or selfish enough to do whatever?” the answer is virtually always “Yes!”
I won’t feel comfortable until after January 20. And maybe not then
Well, we knew Trump would never accept the conclusion of the story of his presidency, whether it came in 2020 or even 2024. After controlling the narrative for the past five years, it must be deeply frustrating to him that the American people wrote The End. Wah!
The subject you raise here is one we could discuss all day, Dell, but I’ll try to keep it to a few key points from which I take reassurance, and perhaps you can, too. The first is that it isn’t half the country that’s subscribing to his delusional fantasies right now; it’s two-thirds of Republicans. Granted, that is still an absolutely appalling statistic — something rightfully concerning — but it doesn’t account for half the populace, let alone a majority.
Trump is leaving in January, whether he likes it or not. It’s inevitable now. Even if his base, hopelessly drunk on his Kool-Aid, hasn’t accepted the new narrative — that he lost and Biden will be president — the country and even the world at large have (happily) moved on. Trump is desperately trying to hold us in a state of motion-arrested presentism, hence the reason he’s got Giuliani out there spinning conspiracy theories (or performing what Gloria Borger aptly calls “conspiracy theater”), but no one’s buying it. Trump’s favorite tactic — sowing postnarrative chaos — is no longer working. As my old teacher David Freeman used to say about the fine art of storytelling: Audiences want to be manipulated, they just don’t want to consciously sense the manipulation — they don’t want to “see the strings.” The American public sees what a desperate and nonsensical power grab the Trump/Giuliani conspiracy stories are, and we aren’t buying them — same as we didn’t buy the abject attempts to brand Biden a socialist.
I also don’t think Trump, post-presidency, will be the impactful political rabble-rouser we’ve feared. Don’t get me wrong: He’s gonna be a pain in the ass, for sure, attempting to undermine Biden at every turn through his platform (Twitter, etc.). But I also think the media and the rest of us are going to move on once he’s out of office, and reflexively cease to give him oxygen. As Colin Jost observed on a recent ep of SNL, prior to 2015, no one ever said, “Hey, what does the world’s least-successful real-estate developer think about this?” I believe now, moving forward, Trump will speak exclusively to his (increasingly diminished) base.
The base will continue to shrink, I suspect, because Republicans are going to move on, too. In the months to come, they’re going to find new candidates that champion the causes they support — overturning Roe, environmental deregulation, all the standard-issue conservative horseshit — who actually have a political future, unlike Trump. Granted, within the party, Trump will wield power for some time still, with respect to coronating GOP candidates, but I think his enthusiasm for that is going to wane in short order. He doesn’t give a fuck about any cause or any party — only his own self-interest. I don’t think he’s going to be the force in national politics we fret — simply because it doesn’t serve his ends or his ego.
What would serve his ego is his own cable-news channel, but just last week Howard Stern astutely noted that a “Trump News Network” would fail inside a year, just like all his other endeavors (including Trump University and his own presidency). It would be a big, spectacular bomb — which would be right on-brand. Trump will continue to make noise for many years to come — once a loudmouth, always a loudmouth — but I imagine his influence is going to abate considerably over the next eighteen months. He’ll go back to being that “fringe media curiosity” he was before all this, except now with an irreversibly tarnished reputation, a mountain of debt, and the pressure of criminal investigations weighing down on him. I think he’s going to be less of an ongoing problem, politically speaking, than some are anticipating.
What will remain, however, is Trumpism — the mindset that gave rise to his presidency. That’s the story the lion’s share of us rejected earlier this month when we elected Joe Biden… and Cori Bush… and Jamaal Bowman (in my home district of the Bronx). But politicians don’t change the narrative; the citizenry does. And that citizenry can be inspired by the storytellers, so we all have a role to play in what comes next. I’ve never been so excited to get to work!
You’re more optimistic than I am
But you might be right after all
In fact, Emily Murphy just, grudgingly, sent a letter of “ascertainment” affirming Biden’s victory, and they’re losing court case after court case so bad that they can’t even (yet) present anything valid for the Supreme Court to consider
>Trump will continue to make noise for many years to come
He’s 74, overweight, and under a lot of stress. Maybe not “many”
And as of just this morning, even the White House has capitulated to Biden receiving PDBs. Every day since November 4, Trump’s grip on the narrative has loosened — even he knows the show is over (hence the reason we’ve barely heard from him in weeks). Granted: He’ll never concede, because he’s congenitally incapable of admitting defeat, and because he’ll continue to shout the IT WAS RIGGED! canard to true believers for years to come. But I genuinely suspect fewer and fewer people — even the Trump diehards — are going to care as the months and years progress. Trump’s political and cultural irrelevance will only fortify with each passing week.
When I consider the TV shows I used to be fanatical about in my youth — 21 Jump Street, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alien Nation, Party of Five — I’m forced to concede I barely spare a thought for them anymore. I mean, I devoted so much time and interest in them at one time in my life, but at some point they all went off the air for good… and when a show isn’t producing new episodes, it’s hard to maintain the same level of enthusiasm for it. Eventually, you just move on to new things. Same will happen to superfans of The Trump Show. Right now, we’re in the midst of the Twitter campaign to save the series, but it isn’t gaining much traction. The network is simply burning off the remaining episodes.
To your other point: Virtually all the assholes standing in the way of progress right now are old white men in their 70s. Trump is out, and even though we’ve still got McConnell to deal with (or, as Samantha Bee calls him, Foghorn Dickhorn), the clock is on our side, not his. And that’s just as true of some of the aging Democrats: Pelosi has intimated this will be her final term as speaker, and Biden has been very open about his being a “transitional presidency” to the next generation (embodied by Gen Xer Kamala Harris, who may very well run in his stead in ’24). The difference, of course, between Biden and Trump/McConnell is that the former views himself as a temporary custodian of the Republic, whereas the latter are looking to possessively hoard their power. But the white patriarchy is being outnumbered with each passing year (hence the reason they’re so desperately trying to forestall the inevitable).
And I also believe, as I said to Michael directly below, that Biden recognizes this is his last hurrah, that he wants to seize what could be his “FDR moment” (provided Georgia hands him the Senate), and that he’s listening to the progressive flank of the party — particularly the Gen Z activists. Yes, he’s an “imperfect friend,” but I don’t think this is a case of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” One often has to read between the lines with politicians: Sometimes they say all the right things on the campaign trail, but then do all the same old shit once in office. But the reverse is also true: For instance, Biden has hedged on climate a bit, distancing himself from the Green New Deal or calls to ban fracking, and yet if you listen to his stump speeches on climate policy, he often cites passages from the Green New Deal verbatim (like how his plan to build a green infrastructure would create millions of good-paying jobs, thereby growing the economy)!
I think — provided we keep the pressure on him — Biden might very well be the “green president” we’ve been hoping for. And given that he’s a moderate, he might even be the best messenger we could’ve asked for, because centrist voters will trust him when he puts forth policies and programs that might otherwise be interpreted with suspicion — socialism! — if they were coming from a progressive like Sanders or Warren.
Trump is history. Let’s invest all our energy now into helping Biden help us.
Don’t count Drumpf out yet. The boy still refuses to concede, his challenge is slowly winding its way through the courts, and he has the Supreme Court stacked with judges favorable to him—no thanks to Democrats gleefully approving virtually all of his extreme right-wing appointments. But even if Biden does manage somehow to be sworn in as dictator on 20 January 2021, don’t expect anything to change. That senile child molester won’t change anything from Drumpf’s policies except to more successfully (he thinks) hide them behind closed doors, not to be unlocked again until the next Republican comes along to smash them down.
Michael, I certainly understand your disillusionment; I sympathized with it on the record in “What Comes Next: Lessons on Democracy and Narrative from Hamilton.” But I also know, from my experiences as an environmental activist, that politicians don’t create political will — they respond to it.
As a card-carrying democratic socialist, I recall quite vividly how hopeful it felt last winter when Bernie Sanders emerged, against all odds, as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. And then came Super Tuesday, and all our ambitious hopes — of a Green New Deal, of Medicare for All — seemed to slip out of reach when Biden took the lead, and it appeared as though we’d have to settle for simply “getting Trump out” rather than fast-tracking a progressive agenda.
But the activists refused to sit around licking their wounds. Organizations like Justice Democrats and Sunrise Movement went to work supporting progressives all the way down the ballot, and put considerable pressure on Biden, despite their reservations about his candidacy, to Think Big on matters like environmental justice — issues to which the Democratic establishment customarily pays lip service at best, and ignores outright at worst.
And you know what? That pressure manifested in Biden’s platform and his language. When he talks about how his climate plan will create millions of good-paying jobs? That’s taken verbatim from the text of the Green New Deal. That’s a big deal, my friend! That’s change. And it only came about because millions of American citizens (a disproportionate share of them under 25) refused to submit to doomism or defeatist thinking. And now the pressure is on Biden to choose his cabinet mindfully — because the work doesn’t stop on Election Day.
Unlike the MAGA crowd, these young activists weren’t looking for a messiah, merely a candidate they could work with, reason with, and even persuade. Comedian Bill Maher — and I trust you’ll forgive me for invoking the wisdom of someone else I know you disdain — has a maxim: Don’t mistake an imperfect friend for a deadly enemy. The progressive movement identified Joe Biden as an imperfect friend — not someone who’s going to give them everything they want, but someone willing to work with them to move the country forward. Recognizing that took a degree of optimism on the part of progressives, and an understanding that optimism requires action. The MAGA crowd was willing to hand their democracy over to an authoritarian; the progressives are engaging in democracy by working in good faith with someone who shares their values if not always their precise agenda.
I wish I could impart some of my own sanguineness to you, sir. It’s not blind optimism; I fully appreciate the depth of the hole we’re in right now, and the challenges we’re going to have even with our “imperfect friend” in the White House. All I can suggest is that you attend a few virtual Sunrise Movement meetings, and let yourself be inspired by the can-do spirit of those kids. Whereas the boomers and Xers — speaking as a member of the latter demographic — have complained relentlessly about the state of the world and done nothing to change it, you don’t hear any complaining from Gen Z; they’re too busy doing the hard work of reform. Biden can get on board with their vision or not — and I believe he intends to in good faith — but change is coming regardless. A new generation is rising — I see it every time I attend a (virtual) rally.
Happy Thanksgiving to you, my friend — one full of health and hope.
Woo hoo, Sean. Just reading this made me want to do a little happy dance. Ding-dong, the witch is dead. We were celebrating too and still are. But the work is far from done. The heroic Americans who came out in throngs to usher out four years of devastating corruption must continue to work for justice, equity, truth, and compassion, we may lose it down the road.
(I’m so glad we didn’t end up in a real post-narrative world).
That’s right, Diana: We won the fight to have a shot at change, so we celebrate that victory, and then the hard work of building back better begins in earnest. And we all need to be invested in that effort. As I said to Michael above, the pressure we put on Biden during the campaign to adopt progressive policies worked, and now it needs to be applied twice as forcefully to turn those policies into programs and legislation, rather than seeing them spoil into empty campaign promises. Provided we can win the Georgia runoff — the next battleground — Biden will very much have a once-in-a-century “FDR mandate” to push a slew of progressive bills through Congress, on everything ranging from health care to climate change to the Electoral College. If he can make those institutional reforms legislatively, without resorting to easily undone executive orders, they could define the path of the country through midcentury and beyond. I absolutely believe we are at an historical juncture here — I think ’20 and ’21 will define the course of the twenty-first century — but the work in no way stops with Biden’s swearing-in ceremony. Now more than ever, we need to activate our activists!
I won’t be celebrating the holidays with family this year, so I’m going to take this season of thankfulness to celebrate what we’ve accomplished, and to rest for the fight to come. I wish you only peace and health, Diana — and of course a Happy Thanksgiving!
Normally, I have much to say. At this moment, I am thinking much and feeling much, even hoping much; yet I will say little quite yet.
What I will say for now is that I found D. Wallace Peach’s newly released Unraveling the Veil trilogy to epitomize what you’ve talked about here, Sean: thoroughly entertaining storytelling within a unique world and magic system, and yet a story that underscores modern challenges with an eye toward the power—and the responsibility—of personal choice within “the system.” Far from being preachy or political, you just can’t help confronting the all-too-real questions of “I” vs. “they.”
Four years ago, half the people I know and love fell apart, locking themselves away, fearing the literal end of the world. This time around … once again, half the people I know and love are falling apart, locking themselves away, fearing the literal end of the world. It’s exhausting for all involved. My focus right now is on how I might be part of bridging divides with empathy. It’s hard, even (and perhaps especially) with family. But I find myself awakened to possibilities. If the celebrations of half of us mean the devastation of the rest, we can’t help but continue to be perpetually broken.
Erik! It’s so nice to have you back, bud! I’ve missed your equanimity and compassion these past months. In the waning days of this hellish year, I’m in desperate need of some of your Best Advice So Far! I was going to reach out to you privately this week to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving; in the spirit of the holiday, I am thankful to see you here once again!
Since you’ve been away, there’s no question the events of 2020 have affected the creative identity of my blog; it’s become very topical, and, accordingly, often overtly political. I started the quarantine by talking about the profound self-reflection the pandemic compelled; from there, I developed the idea of writing with moral imagination, then applied that to how commercial storytellers have a role to play in championing police reform and the virtues of Enlightenment democracy. I think — I hope — I’ve become a more patient and compassionate person this year, which has been reflected in my interests, my priorities, and my writing. I consider the blog posts I’ve published these past months the best I’ve ever produced, IMHO. Blogging has been a godsend during this deeply distressing and often disorienting year.
I have not yet read Unraveling the Veil, but I casually consulted with Diana on her back-cover blurbs, so the books are very much on my radar, and I know that they were written with the creative and moral imagination we’ve come to expect from our dear friend. As Diana and I discussed in an exchange on “The Road Back,” novels have not been subjected to quite the same degree of narrative degradation as movies and TV series because A) they don’t anchor multimedia franchises (in which every new product is merely an advertisement for the next one), and B) their audiences expect — even relish — a more meditative storytelling experience, versus the way movies and TV shows are binge-consumed these days. I’ve read some absolutely wonderful novels lately — standalone stories written with moral imagination — including Rivers Solomon’s The Deep and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, and I hear great things about Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible. Alas, the audience for those works is probably a splinter-thin fraction of those who’ve binged Emily in Paris, so until screenwriters and filmmakers aspire to the kind of moral imagination many novelists still practice, commercial storytelling will leave much to be desired.
With respect to your last comment — on how we start building bridges over our yawning political and ideological divides — I thought Bill Maher did an excellent video essay on that very subject just last week called “New Rule: The Great Disappointment.” In short, his philosophy is: Hate the cult; love the cultist. As you begin to explore the healing possibilities to which you’ve recently awoken, I hope you’ll share those experiences and insights on the Best Advice So Far blog. We need all our storytellers showing us a path forward — even if they’re only a step or two ahead of us themselves.
Great to have you back, sir. Happy Thanksgiving!
Just waiting for the child to concede so that the celebrations can really start. All this time, I keep thinking, “What’s he planning in that tiny little mind of his? and who does he have enough dirt on to support him?” Wishing your country all the best and hoping that the tantrum ends soon!
That’s exactly what it is, Suzanne — a tantrum. It’s the final resistant bellyaching of a petulant child, and all the adults in the house are just waiting for him to cry himself to sleep. Fuck him! As I said to dellstories above, I’m absolutely certain now Trump is going to slink off to Mar-a-Lago in January — he’ll never concede and he’ll skip the inauguration, of course — and preach to his ever-diminishing choir of MAGAts. Right now, we’re in the final stretch of a once culturally defining TV show that’s gone on one season too long — The Office without Michael, Roseanne without Dan, The Golden Girls without Dorothy — wishing the producers would put it out of its misery. Regardless, it has assuredly been canceled.
Take my word for it: The tone in this country has already appreciably changed for the better. We’re moving on — that’s what we voted for. Cable news is milking the last bit of Trump drama out of his moribund presidency before it moves on to the Next Thing in ’21. I imagine you’re seeing the same thing on CNN that we are here in the U.S., but I can assure all my Canadian friends that we’ve turned the page on the last four years, even if Trump and Giuliani haven’t. As I saw on a lawn sign just this morning: Bye Don — End of an Error. I no longer think there’s going to be a red-state insurgency; there’s just no energy for it. Trump and his most ardent supporters — the “tough guys” — are now unambiguously exposed for what they’ve always been: whiny little bitches.
I felt the jubilation and exhaled, and I live on the other side of the border. I followed this nightmare very carefully, and sadly, this danger to the world has a lot more damage to do before he either gets cuffed Jan 20 or thereafter, or runs to Russia beforehand. Joe has his plate full, and frankly, I think it will take a generation to pass before the division is repaired.
Great post and analogies and comparisons with The Wire and GOT. Yes. So much to write about. 🙂
Hey, Debby!
I suspect future damage will be more minimal than initially feared — I’m betting Trump will speak to an increasingly diminished base in the months and years ahead, for reasons I elaborated on in my reply to dellstories above — but, as it is, he’s already left plenty of democratic wreckage to deal with, alas. Whether the Biden administration pursues legal action against him — which they probably should — or lets it go for the sake of trying to heal the country and/or move on from the Trump era — which they probably will — is an open question, but I don’t really see Trump getting much oxygen from the mainstream media moving forward, and even Fox News and its ilk will eventually move on to new outrages, as well.
It probably will take a generation to repair some of the damage done, but that’s the kind of work we can all start right now, whether you’re a politician, an activist, a storyteller, or merely (to quote sci-fi author David Brin) a mighty being called a citizen. We all have a role to play in building a better, kinder, more equitable, and more sustainable post-Trump world. It’s the project — and the opportunity — of a lifetime.
Thanks for reading and commenting, Debby — much obliged.
Sean
Thanks Sean. I do agree with all you said. He will eventually fade to black. It’s quite evident his BS plot about running again in 2024 is all about a new grift to siphon as much as he can from his sheeples for donations – to pay for his legal bills. Last I heard, you can’t run for Prez from jail! 🙂 🙂
He’s fading already, Debby:
I second your observation: Hopefully he’ll be too entangled with legal and financial quandaries to make another run in ’24. In the meantime, the GOP is going to have to do some serious soul-searching — as though it even has a soul — and figure out what the party that sold itself to Donald Trump might look like without him. I suspect Republicans will become deficit hawks once again, and that COVID-19 will be the top story on Fox News every night — with every single death attributed directly to Joe Biden. They’ll move on from supporting Trump blindly to opposing Biden rabidly; it’s the only play their morally bankrupt and ideologically bereft party has available. But we will never let them forget they supported Trump.
Sadly, I agree with what you said. But I read some good news today. Leticia James AG of SDNY already has 62 criminal offenses to slap him with Jan 20th! Tender mercies. 🙂
The trouble the SDNY alone could cause for Trump is reason to be hopeful that karma may finally — after 74 years of failing upward — catch up with him!
For anyone interested in learning a bit more about the SDNY’s (many) cases against Trump, Samantha Bee recently interviewed NY Attorney General Letitia James in this five-minute video.
Well, I’ve already agreed with you on the shallowness of post-narrative storytelling.
Instead, we’re finding well-constructed narratives in politics–on both sides.
I liked it better when we told good stories and dug a little deeper for facts. : )
Hey, Cathleen!
Sometimes I don’t make it clear enough how much I prize true postnarrative fiction for both its artistry and its audacity to challenge conventional beliefs and assumptions. The films of David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino and Robert Eggers, as well as series like Seinfeld and The Sopranos and The Wire, don’t just deny their protagonists the comforting predictability of the Hero’s Journey, but their audiences, too — and, in doing so, they force us to consider anew the values that conventional stories unconsciously affirm. The Wire, for instance, was a much-needed check on the police-worshipping Law & Order franchise. Honest postnarrativity gives us new perspectives on the world, and challenges traditional storytellers to write with a greater degree of moral imagination. I have nothing against that.
What I object to is commercial postnarrativity — open-ended series that do away with the patterns of traditional narrativity not as an existential statement but rather as a way of making sure you’re ever and always on the hook to buy the next product in the franchise. When a multimedia initiative like the MCU not only never ends, but retroactively incorporates past iterations as part of a “multiverse” (whatever that is), there’s always a new Super HD edition of a very old movie (to say nothing of yet more custom action figures) you are now required to add to your collection. It’s that sort of shit I oppose. Far from challenging accepted behaviors, “mega-franchises” train us to be faithful consumers, buying and rebuying the same old shit ad infinitum.
When these are the only kinds of stories we are exposed to, a secondary problem arises: Disciplined storytelling itself becomes a lost art. We begin to assume sprawling, open-ended narratives with no shape, point, or conclusion are simply the way stories are told (look no further than all the Emmys we heaped upon Game of Thrones). Part of the reason why traditional stories — what I’ve called cathartic narrativity here — no longer work is because no one really knows how to write them anymore. And postnarrativity, which was once used so brilliantly (Pulp Fiction, The Wire) to question the traditional values of conventional narrativity, has now been coopted and corrupted by corporations like Disney to indefinitely power their most profitable franchises (Star Wars, MCU). Such is why we need honest, principled, disciplined storytellers now more than ever — to show us the story of what is possible in post-capitalist society (in which there is no place for mega-franchises).
I’ll close on a lyric from the late Neil Peart (writing about the state of the music industry in “The Spirit of Radio”):
Amen.
Happy Holidays, Cathleen! And congrats again on the publication of Snow White and the Civil War, parts 1 and 2!
Sean
It’s hard to go wrong with Rush lyrics, Sean. Thanks for the good wishes, and may you and yours have a terrific Christmas and joyous New Year. : )
Year after year, I always find wisdom in the music of Rush! Merry Christmas to you, as well, Cathleen, and — now more than ever before — best wishes for a Happy New Year!