Issue 16 - Reboot
It’s been a while, for which I apologize. The last issue of this newsletter went out on April 20th, relatively early in the unfolding of what has become a peculiarly American pandemic.
(and, quick aside, "American" insofaras every dark facet of the American psyche—childish individualism, blind corporatism and endemic racism—have conspired to ensure that our national response has been the least effective in the world. Hurrah!)
I’ve written multiple abortive issues of this newsletter in the 8 weeks since, but none of them have felt worth actually sending. In that time, George Floyd was murdered by cops in Minneapolis, and a protest movement re-bloomed, and it feels like maybe, at long last, a slim majority of privileged folks are beginning to understand that “white privilege” isn’t a personal insult but (just like “toxic masculinity”) a simple description of a centuries-old systemic imbalance which holds all of us back, one way or another.
One of my major reluctances in continuing with The Vague Mountain Chronicle has been my strong aversion to engaging—consciously or otherwise—in performative allyship. I’m a white man. There’s not much that anyone needs to hear from me in this moment. My time is better spent ensuring I can fully understand, and that is achieved by listening, and reading, and watching, and following others' leads—not speaking or writing.
But most of you have, at some point in the last couple of months, asked when I’d write again. So I will share what I’m currently thinking. You are more than welcome to skip it, though.
I occupy an odd liminal state—growing up in England, I wasn’t privy to the American whitewashing of history in school. I didn’t learn all that much about American history at all. In a sense, this perhaps makes it easier for me to learn the deeper truth of events like the Tulsa massacre, because I have less misinformation to purge.
But if my adopted home benefited from slavery, it’s my native land which pioneered turning it into an industry; which spearheaded most of the hunting, kidnapping and shipping of humans into a life of miserable brutality. And—no surprise—we didn’t talk about that at all in my history lessons.
So I’m glad that Britain is now removing its own sprinkled monuments to slavers and racists; that the post-WWII hagiography which surrounded Winston Churchill for decades is finally receding into a more honest, nuanced picture of a talented wartime leader who was also a deeply problematic racist.
This is all good.
But we have a very, very long way to go. If we are to succeed in building a more just society, it’s going to take more than a few weeks of protests; much more than a few ephemeral instagram shares; more than working hard to safeguard this November’s election. It took centuries to build the dumpster-fire we have now; it will take—at least—decades of hard, dedicated work to extinguish it.
We will need to lose things which are so indelibly part of the fabric of life (for privileged sections of society, at least) that their absence will be shocking and confusing.
We will likely need to rethink our entire economic system, for one thing, because systemic bigotry primarily exists in service to something. Sure, there will always be a minority of folks who simply enjoy being cruel to those who are different from them. We call those people psychopaths. But the structural stuff—the selective histories, the “law and order” policies (and housing policies, and hiring practices, and food safety directives, hospital diagnostic criteria and eminent-domain highway infrastructure projects, and so on ad infinitum) carefully tailored to disproportionately disadvantage everyone who wasn't born with light skin?
All that is largely in the service of our current economy. After all, in order for some folks to have billions of times more resources than others, somewhere along the line, a theft needs to occur. All of us below the “billionaire” rung of society suffer some degree of this theft—you can bet for damn sure that if you work for a company with shareholders, or a profit-making concern where the CEO is far better paid than you—that you’re not being paid the true value of your work. That, for every $10 you bring your employer, you receive at best $5.
The “success” of this system, in fact, if you strip away all the stuffed-shirt jargon surrounding markets and dividends and ratios and EBITDA, is entirely predicated on continually stealing more from us.
And what better way to make the theft easier than to render whole classes of people as “lesser”? Less deserving of healthcare, of a healthy home, of a decent wage, of a life free of harrassment, assault, incarceration, death.
Defunding the police is an essential step here—the system’s most devastatingly reliable tool for decades has been its paramilitary wing, corrupted by fine-, bail- and incarceration-driven revenue-generation.
But we also need to question the rest of our economy. Are 401(k)s really the best way to secure everyone’s retirement (no, pensions are far more equitable). Is untrammeled profit a good thing? (No, obviously). Should anyone, really, ever need more than, say, $20-25 million in personal wealth? (No, they shouldn’t, and even that number is probably too high).
This line of thinking may well feel radical to you. It might be unsettling, or frightening. And if so, this is exactly what I mean. We—the beneficiary white folks, much more than the people we’ve helped oppress—have been sold a pack of lies. It papers the walls of our houses; it’s the sauce on our hamburgers; it’s the hops in our post-game beers.
It’s far past time to complete the gut-wrenchingly difficult task of rooting it out and discarding it all.
Project Updates
You may recall that the original goal of this newsletter was to talk about my various creative endeavors. Those have fallen into various states of disrepair, given the way 2020 has gone so far.
I do have some fun things brewing right now, but they'll take a little longer to fully-form.
In the meantime, I did perform a Drum'n'Bass set for a live event last week, and honestly it might be the best DJ set I've ever put together. You may think you don't like D'n'B, but give this one a try. It's surprisingly, beautifully melodic, I promise.
A Thing of Beauty
I don't, as a rule, get much pleasure from Schadenfreude.
That said, given that this particular failure is hopefully a positive development for all of us, it was disconcertingly uplifting to see the Narcissist-in-Chief's utterly defeated return from his failure of a Tulsa rally last night. It's worth 71 seconds of your time if you haven't seen it already.
Ephemera
On Racism and Race
Tyler Merritt's "Before You Call The Cops", whether you saw it in 2018, or more recently as part of current protests, is an incredibly well-done, powerful piece of art.
But, Thomas Chatterton Williams argues, its resonance is also, to a large degree, dependent on its alignment with "white" values and stereotypes.
Williams's own evolving relationship with race is further illustrated in this profile from last November.
Together, for me, these three works have helped illustrate many of the nuances and traps at the heart of race, as it is currently constructed in America.
Mac & Cheese
Pro tip: it's rare that a product claiming to be the "World's Best" is anything other than a pathetic mess of corn syrup and industrial chemicals, but the exception (besides cooking it from scratch) is right here:
It's unjustifiably expensive (at least, ordered online--places like Kroger and Whole Foods sometimes carry it, maybe cheaper?), but as an occasional lazy splurge it really is a comfort-food revelation. It even microwaves well.
I'm not a massive fan of the "Kraft"-style boxed mac'n'cheese because I didn't grow up with it, so I don't have any nostalgia for it. Nevertheless, this canned history of the dish was a short, fun read, jarring in only one aspect--it was told entirely from the point of view of white culture.
Thankfully, I also found this piece from the Charleston Observer, which delves into the significance of this dish in black culture, and is as satisfying to read as really good mac & cheese is to eat.
K-Pop Revolution
Meanwhile, elsewhere, let's all be bemusedly thankful that avid K-Pop fans have stepped up as a force for good.
Firstly, they've been neutralizing racist hashtags by bombarding them with K-Pop videos.
And they were also responsible, in part at least, for ordering thousands of no-show Trump Rally tickets, completely bamboozling his campaign. Led, no less, by a grandmother from Iowa!
Everything Else
Yes, this was a particularly political edition of this newsletter. If you weren't expecting that in this moment... I don't know what to tell you.
That said, I know most of the people who read this have appreciated the broader mix of subjects and ideas which I usually try to stuff in here.
So, by way of transition, let me show you the Dumpster Fire vinyl figure I whim-ordered online several months ago. It turned up this week, and if it isn't a perfectly cute representation of the Trump era, I don't know what is.
Next up, something that's always slightly bothered me--after claiming he'd make an album for every state and then only getting around to Illinois and Michigan, a bunch of musicians spent some of May's quarantine time finishing off Sufjan Stevens' never-quite-serious project. I haven't had time to listen to all of it (duh), but the sheer volume of inventiveness here is lovely.
In case you ever need to build a website which looks like Windows 98, there's a design system for that.
And finally... look, everything is political in one way or another. On the one hand, it's a great triumph for The Commons that the British Museum has released nearly 2 million hi-res creative commons-licensed images of items in its collection. On the other hand, as Britain grapples a little more seriously with its colonial past, we really also need to acknowledge how much of that collection was just straight-up stolen from its rightful homes. And, y'know, should maybe be returned?
Endnote
Thanks for hanging in there. I hope the wait was worth it. I'm honored that you spend time reading even a fraction of what I write, and I hope you'll stick with me as I continue to figure out the longer-term form of this newsletter over the coming weeks and months.
And as always, if you're enjoying reading this, please feel free to let me know by replying to this email. Even better, tell your friends to sign up!