This work contemplates, albeit in a slightly deranged way, the events of protest in the United States in the years 2016-2019. It makes no pretensions to be a piece advocating non-action, but rather shows the folly of ineffective screaming amidst times of great pressure and strain. As a writer who has typically shied away from politics, I have hidden clues as to the events I'm referencing. Just know I belong to no political party though I take my position as a citizen seriously and crave a time of peace where we can really talk to each other, rather than scream.
Who knows how these things happen? Crack-up of identity. What was the individual is now the collective. Everyone loses themselves when linked up with groups. Or perhaps is it that we began as groups and found the individual? No. All life begins with screaming. Caught up in your pain. Others around you be damned, mother excluded. The fractioning begins. You are not what you are and are nothing in return. To avoid the nothingness inside, you look to correct the world. Since the world is in constant need of improvement no matter where you are in human history, this seems just and justifiable. You can preach uniformity and a hundred other philosophies in tandem. In fact, you can be replaced by anyone who feels the same way, thinks the same way. We talk the same, after all. Buzzwords, neologisms, hashtags, memes in verbal form. Recreate the language. Deconstruct the language. The fact that language is all we have, and we warp it at your peril? Oh, well, whatever, never mind. We have souls to save. Theatre in reverse—think of it as a gigantic backwards step—Thespis hiding back into the Chorus, cowed down by a becloaked choral leader eager to keep everyone in line.
It was a December at a time of fulcrum. Unease crept in—not the malaise of the previous decade—but a deep fear, a reckoning ‘round the corner. It always does. In a world of things like generalized anxiety disorder, it hits the collective and the individual with a defining, deafening wallop. There are always individuals who dare not find themselves caught in the fray, but no one escapes the fires and the more likely you are to resist the more likely you are to be accused and the more likely to be judged and the more likely to be offered for sacrifice, penance, to the gods even. At any rate, this wintry freeze set in and, all through the winter, mouths gaped wide as previous atrocities came to light. History haunting the present. A pall set in. History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. Or perhaps we don’t really know history at all. What is it even? It is like all our present enemies—it is not like us so it must be destroyed. Age-old game. Adversary, evil, what-have-you. It did not help, I suppose, that there was a changing of the guard. A controversial figure—a figurine in the limelight. When we all have these maladies, we seem to forget that perhaps we put too much into who will be the figurehead and not enough attention on the worker bees who are in charge, so unlike the hive. The republic would not burn for a further three years, but the uncontrollable fires were already gaining ground and it starts where all the fires start—in the west.
Now, what is an actor, exactly? Oh, I don’t know. They stand in for us, stand in for you. Once a regulated class of cockroach, they now are the new beacons (royals) whereby we gage ourselves. We have given them far too much power (Power? Let’s not go there!) for their own good. Now, I don’t know about peanut galleries and what peanuts they’re picking, but as for myself (I don’t know about you), I’ve never wondered what an actor thought about anything. One wants them to act. But we no longer have actors, but actor-activists. Wait, what is wrong with everyone being an activist? Well, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that when every grievance has a voice, and each voice its grievance, there is none left quiet to answer the grief of his brother or sister. Tut-tut, these are not grievances you say, but a conversation we’ve needed to have for quite some time. But you’ve forgotten the word conversation implies two people trying to wrestle an alligator to the ground and come to some understanding. It is not diatribe. Diatribe? Is this not a diatribe? Perhaps a mono-tribe. Who knows?
Tribes! We have tribes and civilizations, humbug words now but descriptive of the difference between a land with grass huts and a land with steel towers. One is not necessarily better—who wouldn’t love a grass hut? I suppose this is where the concept of third world came from. Which is the second world? The second world is the truth of most countries in the West. It is neither hut nor tower, but towers filled with people thinking in terms of huts. But what about the first world? Are they not oppressors, pillagers, enslavers, AAAAAGHHHH capitalists? Yes, but in that truer, second world, it is civilization that brings oppression and relinquishes it when it has played out. It is civilization that pillages and then acts to restore. It enslaves and lets slaves free, even if it is done with the utmost difficulty. It is all difficult, messy, bloody, but don’t count civilization out. The two tribes we deal with here are abusers and abused, oppressor and oppressed, predators and prey. It would seem easy to categorize them. Bad and good. Good and evil. Cotton and Irish wintry wool. Sometimes even fractured into male and female, the original enemies who occasionally must transact business.
But let’s back up a little further to a simpler time. Decade prior to that wintry December. A lone voice in the wilderness cried out an important cry. A cry that should be heard by all. And. I. Also. It was a fracture in the psyche of the mind, at least the eros mind, but some agape minds as well. I’m one of the good ones, I’m one of the good ones, I’m one of the good ones. But when you are speaking, you are not listening. And. I. Also. How could this have happened? This country littered with the bodies of half-eaten prey. Who are we? How did we let it get to this? I am a victim. No, I am a survivor. No, victim is better. And. I. Also. But who would listen to this lone voice crying out in the wilderness—a Joan the Baptist of the Stockyards signaling the alarm by encouraging commonalities midst the wounded? Decade goes by. These things bubble under the surface. Panic followed by rest followed by panic. That’s how we roll (USA, USA, USA!). Well, it was a rest period, but bubbling, bubbling under the surface…
Now, I am not a victim, and, by that, I mean I’m also not a survivor except of what we are all survivors of—the Earth being the especially guilty party. We really are just the tiddlywink toys that floods, famines, volcanoes, hurricanes, pandemics play with. So, in a sense, we are all survivors of life if we are here. Count us one-two-three. And since you will ask why my voice(?), where are the voices of the victims, it is equally appalling that I cannot share a story with you. Stories now are claimed. For six billion people there are six billion truths—my truth my truth my truth. With the jettisoning of absolute truth, there is no truth. Only constructed truths. Horse****. But I censor myself now. You see it in the text. It is what has been asked of me, of all of us. So, how do we share the voices of the victims when they are not our truth? Of course, in all scenarios, you find there is an absolute truth that is not spoken. It concerns the absolute truth of the predator and his inability to rehabilitate himself. Then again, not a lot, but now we have some time passed. We have heard the victims—not all the victims, we have not heard all the truths too many to number...Even still, in that sense, perhaps we can go back now and analyze. If you cannot stand in a fire and not be consumed perhaps there is something still warm in the embers after the fire is gone. Something we can learn from and not what you think.
Oh, hell. Let’s tell a story anyway. Maybe they won’t yank my Thespis off his stage. This chant, this chant came from what they call a woman of blush. Created by a woman of blushing for women of blushing. Now, what do I know of hue? I am a person of no hue. Yet, when the chant spread, only the echoes from women of no hue were heard. What do they call it now? Appropriation? But it was the monster in the murk, the ogre overreaching from coast to coast that caused this echo, that drew this line in the sand, that gutted people in the streets. It all began with him, of course. The biggest open secret out West. Everybody knew. Everybody knew and everybody was surprised somehow. How does that one grab you? The rainbow, if you follow it, can very well have a cache of gold in the pot once you get there, but the casting couch begins the journey. Perfect environment. Did I not say toxic? Oh, my. Perfect toxic environment. The word toxic must be used every half sentence or half of every sentence—my apologies. So, an industry with few real rules, few precautionary measures, and the promise of the American dream…well, the old version of the American dream. The new one is the promise you can be advertised to every hour of the day (and you’ve already been bought and sold).
Because we knew, does that make it right? No. Silence equals violence. What a concept! The blood-soaked ogre gnawing at pearls of human flesh? The surgeon cutting and cutting, deeper down, exposing muscle, sinew, blood? The super****ers imposing their will on any flesh they please? But the person shunning speech—that’s the real enemy. The mugwump in the corner not saying anything, eager to meet grief with no words (for what words can be said?). What has he done wrong? What has she done wrong? HeShe has the gall to find shelter, bake bread, feed sher family—the slimeball! Why is Heshe not out in the streets with half-thought-of posterboard signs? Let’s get ‘em—let’s get those wolves. Let’s get ‘em—let’s get those wolves. Ah, but they are just the status quo. Maybe they are cur non possum vitam vivere? Well, who cares about them? We have souls to save.
Now, before we get into this, can we have some definitions? No. Definitions are the enemy and yet they are everything. Look at ourselves now. We went from shunning labels to MY GOD! MY GOD! LABEL ME OR I AM NOTHING! So, can we get demarcations for crime one, crime two, crime three, crime four? If we can’t have definitions, what about levels of penance? My God, no! All sins worthy of capital punishment—except in the eyes of the courts. Oh, well, if we can’t get them legally, we’ll get them the only way we can now. Here come the media with their cameras! That’s right—we don’t hang our enemies in the streets anymore, we destroy them in other ways, ways that ensure they will be pariah-tized for the rest of their lives. Success! Or is it?!
Of course, this all has to do with voices, doesn’t it? Voices silenced finding voice again. Perhaps we all take for granted that everyone gets a say forgetting some people don’t. We live in a democracy, yes? No, it’s a republic so often we forget. But what is a republic without representation? Then again, perhaps the victims did not know the power they had. Then again, does any of this matter when the crimes were pure evil? With the Ogre from the West, it’s always the same story. Meeting in the hotel room. The bathrobe. The massage. And what of that man’s power? Oh, they said he could make or break you. You can say society let him thrive, but would no one have really listened if someone spoke? But anyway—we have our agèd, readied on the arctic ice, to be cut off. Maybe, even, unconsciously, there was something nefarious underneath our celebration. Not pure hatred, per se, but the oldest fracases fracking up our minds. More so, how does one physically non-disclose(?) and how does one sacrifice who they are for a milltown that’s, well…not worth it? But it doesn’t matter. That never should have happened. If anyone disagrees, who are they? Have you met them? I have not met them. Mustn’t cast aspersions on the victims, who once were survivors, but now are victims again. Has a ring to it.
But why didn’t people buy it before? Major thought from the Blumpkins: Western civilization equals victims not important to be listened to. A possible alternative: perhaps the very thought of what had happened was too much to bear. It couldn’t be believed because it was unbelievable. One must have faith to believe. You have faith to believe maybe people are basically good, but you rarely see that in action, do you? But alright—let’s stay with the narrative. We emerged from the caves with the express purpose of oppressing. Built huts to keep them down, built bridges to keep them down, invented the wheel to keep them down, raised castles to keep them down, fought wars to keep them down—towns, cities, nations, states with the single-minded purpose of oppression. Or let’s just play the Devil’s advy—perhaps the caves and huts and castles were to shelter those they felt (perhaps stupidly) couldn’t defend themselves. We don’t need defending! Fair point. Mistake! Let’s dig up the fossils to kill them again! History—not a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, but a marker to measure drift by as we drift into Enlightenment or as we drift near it so long as we’re not drifting further away.
It’s all a bit more messy than we’d like to believe. No sorghum fields or sugarcane in this story. Our compassion for the oppressed moves us. There is safety in numbers. All around are rapists in their roundelays. All around are victims afraid to speak. All around the soul is slaughtered. And all around everyone screaming, no one listening all around. And all around the viper hisses and all around the angels have left us oh Lord and all around we start to wander about the other and all around another face on the front page and all around the time is up and all around time stopped still and all around we are playing an ancient game; for the Earharts and all around trailblazers and all around and Chancellors all around and oh no truth is we are very different all around and all around isn’t there something Victorian about this all around you know the pedestals all around and look to your left and look to your right all around and that is your enemy all around and my do we have our enemy all around and all around the trials began and all around the evidence what evidence all around and strike due process all around and disagree with me all around and you will go down all around and somehow this is not a panic all around I wasn’t panicking were you panicking all around and oh what a lovely inquisition all around and am I making sense all around?
Even before the appropriators, heads began to fall. Even before talk of statues and limitations and eliminations, resignations began due to the printed word. We must be interviewed! Think for a second of interview. Why have you agreed to talk to us? At some point in human history, we created celebrity and a celebrity interview gives us insight into the world of said celebrity. Alright, and this regardless of whether you’ve actually done something? I’ve done a movie. Oh, I see; isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Yes, and me talking about it will drive folks to see it. Is it any good? It doesn’t matter if it is or isn’t (I mean, let’s be honest: it isn’t, but no one knows that till they’ve paid to see it). I see; so, you haven’t seen it? No, I’ve nothing to tell you of its quality; it is quality because I am quality—that is the presupposition. I understand and, since you haven’t seen it, what do people really need to know about you? I don’t suppose there’s anything they need to know about me, but my causes, hobbies, flirtations all seem of interest. Yes, indeed and did you want to talk about your causes? Yes, this is a platform. A platform? A soap box. A bugle call. A clarion call. What do you do with a platform? Plat, I suppose. Celebrities are just people? No, they are our elite, people given a pass to deign to educate the masses. Are the masses just sick of it? No, we lap it up like yesterday’s drain-water. If they have an opinion we dislike, take them down. If they falter off-step of the party line, take them down. But otherwise hale and hearty the gang’s all here look at them in their finery. And, somehow, despite evidence to the contrary, we believe they are just people.
What do you say to this? I have no hand in Witchcraft. What did you do—did not you give your consent? No, never in my life. What ails these people? I do not know. But what do you think? I do not desire to spend my judgment upon it. Do not you think they are bewitched? No. I do not think they are, Tell me your thoughts about them. Why, my thoughts are my own when they are in but, when they are out, they are another’s. Well, what have you done towards them? Nothing. Perhaps it is your presence? I cannot help it. I desire to lead myself according to the word of God. Is it God’s word to lie? If I were such a person, I would tell you the truth. Why does your appearance harm these girls? How do I know? Are not you willing to tell the Truth? Do you believe these girls do not tell the truth? They may lie for all I know. May you not lie? I dare not tell a lie if it would save my life. Then you will speak the truth. I have spoken nothing else.
There will be one thing we know of these interviews. That every interviewer, years later, looks back deeply embarrassed as will we anon. Wait, what is the through-line? Witches’ switches. I thought that was clear—you throw a rapier in the rill and if it sinks…? Wait, there are no such thing as witches. There is such a thing as this. Other such things still with us: purging, vigilantism, accusation without evidence, faulty voir dire. Wait, I thought you said the word Ogre. Did I say did he or didn’t he? Listen to the logos emitting light from axis to axis and you see that, in the heat of the crucible, there is nothing left untouched by the conflagration. What do you do with anger, justifiable rage? Start taking the pickaxes off the barn walls and barnstorm the capitol? Think back and catalog in the brain every injustice and stand in the street opening fire indiscriminately. Stand with your sisters and brothers (for there were brothers). When I can do nothing else, I will stand. What does solidarity mean? How hyped up do you let yourself go? We must purge injustice now for our children and our children’s children but those children’s children will see for themselves the world you create. Oh, yes, all you have to do is look around and see the Ozymandiases of history. Look at population figures in Europe and you can see, even without photographs, evidence of mass extinction. Look on the plains of Kansas and see the dearth of our native brethren and you can know of the trail of tears. Look at the smooth nub on the end of your arm and you will see you’ve lost a hand.
Those children’s children’s children will know as young as four to stifle all natural instincts. Bereft of options of changing the world, their parents’ parents’ parents decided to adopt in their minds the dress of the cultural revolution. Give the women toys and the men dolls and only deal with each other in vitro. You say you obfuscate, exaggerate, use your privilege to piss on the yearnings of the underprivileged? My exaggeration will pale in comparison to the mutated alternate timeline we’re heading down now. So, look out at the scene today. You can see the aftereffects of genocide, mass hysteria, cracking ice in the Arctic. I can tell you one thing you cannot see. One thing you can never tell occurred anywhere in this nation-state was a sexual revolution of any kind. We’ve always been Puritans; we can’t escape it—came from it, have been creeping back to it ever since. When other Europeans arrived, our Puritanism subsumed them—same with everyone approaching these shores. There were some who tried to break away. Those who looked around and saw lies and ties and suffocation and attempted revolt. At the time of that so-called revolution, muddled up with psychedelics and narcotics, they tested limits. Limits, perhaps, that should never be tested. How can you forge a new path or build a new dam when the faculties are frigged beyond reproach? Ah, well.
Who is left from that generation today? Who left that did not choke on their own vomit? Who left that did not abandon all hope as soon as forty emerged? The academics? The ones who introduced to us multi-colored lenses through which to see how wrong we are for having been urged to speak? Who read bad translations of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and began to write like them and think like them, never saying anything of value, but saying it well and saying it with citations? Okay, those are the limits. But those are the outer limits. But inside I see inner limits. We must limit. We must put a wrap on this immediately. Remember we (I suppose not we all but...) came to this country on the Mayflower, landed on Plymouth Rock, and today we are proud to say our legacy is clear. We have what we wanted: people in fear! And that is the world the children’s children’s children will look out and see. Young girls looking askance at those stoop-shouldered mongoloid boys who only are looking for the right moment to pounce. And, inside the boys at that point: tens of thousands of years of evolution brow-beating the sonsofbitches into procreation. What do we do with this? Six times a day they think of it they say. I must be the new less-than. Halt, that’s not so different now, is it? Okay, you think about it six times a day, but you have to learn to keep it in. Fair point to middling. Everyone works—must work—to control what their inner animal is telling them to do. For most people, it’s not that hard. Most people make the two-backed beast with no qualm. Most people are self-controlled. Most people have better things to do than to sacrifice their inner joy to be dragged into the neurosis de jour. Your rage, no matter how well-meaningly directed toward whatever injustice, will not consume everyone. Your banning of a violent video game will not erase violence neither will that game propagate it. We could—at any time—take the Wonkavator out and up from our dramas and, from the sky, the raging flames of our house will be ever dissimilar to the next house over.
There, all is well. Next to that house, a woman weeps for a lost spouse which has nothing to do with the pool party next door. Eagle-eyed and that high, the drama is at a remove, and you see the happy little forest not on fire at all, but perhaps one or two branches buckling. That is not a reason to light a match and start over with another growth. But wait! How can you soar there, aloof, above—not caring for the lowdown, the looked over, the least of these? One can acknowledge pain—sympathize and empathize—without being folded into it. What are you going to do? Say nothing? If my saying something brings only self-aggrandizement—a kind of trying to top the hand that tops the hand of the baseball bat of indignation—I would choke on those words, I don’t know about you.
Statements! We must release a statement. An apology no one will accept. Behavior like this is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. We have a zero-tolerance policy. We aim to be the most aware, the most awake. We really couldn’t give two jolly ranchers and a rat’s patoot about your cause, but you few loud and proud, standing in the stead of your allies, shouting down anyone who disagrees with you—well, we simply must have your money, so this is where we are. Success! This artist will not allow his music to air on a station where the DJ stands accused of whatever current outrage. That’ll show ‘em! Use the computer to wipe an actor clean from a final cut. That’s going to solve a lot. We will know you are simpatico with us. You get it. You and I are alike. Let’s get rid of those who don’t see it like we do. Get rid, get rid.
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A Necessary Post-script
Not I but Also is (for all intents and purposes) a postmodern text that is sending up and is critical of postmodernism. Such a text is bound to be misread and/or read in multiple ways and I’m prepared for that. It is advancing arguments though the subjects it is about are hidden and/or obfuscated.
This piece is about the fractioning of the United States after Donald Trump was elected. Specifically, the tensions in late 2016 before he took office and, after, the protests he exacerbated by simply being elected, having nothing to do necessarily with his actual presidency. Since that time, I have been keenly aware of some of the reasons we’re so divided and believe Trump’s mere presence brought to the forefront issues that had been bubbling for some time (“Me Too” and others). I make no suggestion that the reasons people were protesting were illegitimate. I do not believe them to be so. But I do believe it is time to look with a critical eye at what was actually accomplished, not to mention my belief that most of the ire in the nation today is leading to decisions that will ultimately help no one and will make us all worse off. I could be wrong, but that is my prerogative. I am hardly the only one who thinks this way, including other progressive people.
The text criticizes (I think rightfully) those actor-activists who have no right to lecture the public at all, to take a phrase from Ricky Gervais. The text also tackles the Harvey Weinstein effect and how “Me Too” (buried in the text as “And. I. Also”) was originally conceived by a woman of color for women of color and this was appropriated by white women, no matter how noble their cause might have been.
It argues that some of the aftereffects of “Me Too” have led to further division among the sexes, have seriously tampered with due process, and have perhaps even failed in their ultimate goal. For example, the Time’s Up board had to be dissolved because they were stuffing their own pockets rather than working toward their ultimate cause.
It also attempts to skewer slacktivists who post rage on social media rather than actually working with organizations that are trying to affect and change the law. It ridicules a world where we all (perhaps through the social contagion of the internet) use the same words all the time—"toxic," "privilege," etc. It is not that these words are wrong necessarily, it is that they are overused by a public who have been educated in very different schools than the ones I attended. Colleges have become so ideologically possessed that even art schools now are not teaching art, but art as activism.
There are also things that some readers will definitely be provoked by—most especially white people trying to show off their “woke”-ness in insufferable ways that draw attention away from the issues being raised and making it, again, about them.
It also deals with our obsession with labels (rather different from my generation who didn’t want to be labelled, but wanted to be people, not divided in so many categories as we are now). There is also a very serious argument to be made that we are in one of our temper tantrums we have every twenty years or so where there’s a lot of yelling and not a lot of actual progress.
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