Friday, December 27, 2024

The Lost Boys Never Grow Up

 

Review of What is the What by Dave Eggers.

It's important to read books like this. Let's talk about why. 

What is the What by Dave Eggers tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, an immigrant from Sudan to the US. According to the novel's introduction, Achak sought out an author through a friend to help tell his story as a novel and Eggers answered the call.

That summary will carry with it a whole host of assumptions, many of which flooded my head while reading the intro; is this going to be an incredibly contrived bootstrap story following a tale of some otherized sense of individually experienced hardships delivered by a white guy's pen?

Spoiler; it wasn't. Assuming so ended up being a massive disservice to Eggers who, whatever one may feel about him, knows how to curate and tell stories.What is the What isn't a story about hardship it is a story of unbelievable horrors. Eggers doesn't revel in the details as though he were there, he crafts Achak's cruel and violent experiences with a simplicity that is haunting and critical to the way they impact the reader. 

Take the horrifying scene in which an airplane bombs the group of "Lost Boys", a group of children displaced and forced to march across Sudan by the civil war;

"But the plane returned a few minutes later, and soon after, there was a whistle. Dut screamed to us that we needed to run but did not tell us where. We ran in a hundred directions and two boys chose the wrong direction. They ran for the shelter of a large tree and this is where the bomb struck."

Achak's childhood story of displacement from his home is a non-stop barrage of atrocities that should sicken the privileged American reader. Watching his family and loved ones butchered or sold into slavery, his village burn, walking for miles and miles with thousands of other Lost Boys, seeing his peers eaten by lions and collapse dead from exhaustion. The violence visited upon little kids, rendered in the simplistic but profound way Eggers chooses to expound in it is heartwrenching and stomach-churning.  

We're also given Achak's life chronicled in two different refugee camps, all told from his current perspective as an immigrant to the US. His life in America is equally as important as his violence-steeped childhood. While it isn't the bulk of the novel, we're told the story of Achak's life as he undergoes some of our favorite and almost uniquely American burdens, made all the more... burdensome by the fact that he is an immigrant. 

The atrocities of war and violence make an interesting juxtaposition to Achak's life in America. Here he is obviously free from many of the ravages of a civil war, a government actively trying to kill him, and can more or less experience the great abundance of things like food and running water in our nation.

However we do see Achak suffer from gun violence (his apartment is broken into by armed burglars and he's severely pistol-whipped by one), systematic indifference (the police do little to nothing when they finally respond hours later), health injustice (the emergency room makes him wait over 24 hours to see a doctor, he has no health insurance with which to pay), discrimination (he's treated poorly because of his race and his status as an immigrant from Africa), domestic violence (the woman he loves is killed by a man she was supposed to be married to), exploitation (he's underpaid and overworked at every job he's had), and more, less categorical shit is heaped on too (he can't seem to get into a university out of his dead end community college because of his age). We also hear of his many cohorts who were also moved from the refugee camp to the states succumbing to gambling addictions, dying in fist fights, falling to drink, etc. 

This is not the typical tale of a striving immigrant bootstrapping his way to greatness in the greatest of all nations after fleeing his "shithole country" (Trump's words not mine). This is the very real story, both in part and on the whole, of what millions of refugees and immigrants experience every day on this planet. War or famine or state violence, usually spurred in some large or small way by the United States, followed by incredible suffering or death. Those that make it to the US are then confronted with the many contradictions of life here; vast wealth and innovation and fame and healthcare and bureaucratic efficiencies and order all on wonderful global display but entirely inaccessible to them. 

So why is this important to read? Because Donald Trump is president again. Because we're about to see migrants being whipped by border patrol on horseback again. Because this country never stopped putting "kids in cages". Because we're going to see more boats sinking in the Red Sea. Because we're bankrolling Israel's genocide. Because it is important to consider the mountain of corpses we wake up on top of every morning to live our precious, normal lives. 

Monday, December 2, 2024

The Hope is Just a Logo

 “Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children” - Sitting Bull

In full authorial disclosure, after I read The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells I was so wracked with fear and anxiety that I had to put the whole Kids Today project on hold. Wells wrote such a believable and horrific future for my children and their children that I could only describe having what I assume is a panic attack (never had one!). I dove into fiction for a bit but remembered I had saved Naomi Klein’s On Fire to hopefully spark some hope for the future.


The point of reading Klein is that she doesn’t just have one of the sharpest visions and world views for a future without suffering in a capitalist-fueled climate nightmare, but also a vision for how we get there. This is something that I have rarely found climate texts reconciling with. I thought Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future depicted one of the best possible outcomes, but his visualization for how to get there was completely unimaginative and mostly nonsensical. I think the key difference is Klein is an activist and therefore can more easily conceptualize the movements she is a part of making meaningful change at scale.


Hence I cracked open On Fire hoping to be given, if not some degree of hope for the future of the planet, at least a blueprint, something I could potentially build on in my local community. I couldn’t have predicted that I would be finishing this book at a confusing time; just one week before the 2024 presidential election, in which Donald “Drill-Baby-Drill” Trump was elected.

I’m not here to hash out the autopsy on the Kamala Harris campaign and how it failed to mount a meaningful rivalry with the Trump campaign. However, one component I was paying attention to in the aftermath was the plethora of young people, described mostly as despondent, who either didn’t vote, didn’t vote for Kamala Harris, or actually voted for Trump. I’m not alone in noticing there are armies of young people who seem to have nothing to believe in.


One of the reasons I’m On-The-Left is I firmly believe in the possibility for a better world; one not dependent on the capital class of owners and their whims, but of true redistributive power and justice. It’s worth considering if Klein and other ambassadors On The Left are winning the battle not just of ideas, but of movements. It’s possible, as I often feel, to be completely convinced and yet utterly lost.


Klein’s On Fire is a series of essays and speeches that “tracks [her] own attempt to probe a different set of barriers - some economic, some ideological, but others related to the deep stories about the right of certain people to dominate land and the people living closest to it”. She collapses her many arguments and movements into “the Green New Deal”, projecting on it a “kind of response that might succeed in toppling those narratives and economic interests, responses that weave seemingly disparate crises into a common story of civilizational transformation.”


Maybe it’s because I was so frantically searching the text for something to pin my hope on, but I seemed to miss the concreteness of what exactly we need to be working towards. And I really hate to make this critique of Klein, she’s one of the best, but exactly because she is one of the best she so exemplifies the problem the left has of acting and inspiring action in turn.


I think because it’s a movement largely buoyed by academics, there is a real problem dealing out an outline of things we can be doing right now. This can best be demonstrated by walking the litany of dos and don’ts that Klein explores in this book.

To Klein, the climate crisis is a larger culmination of the ravages of capitalism, which also means it is tied to other problems with the same roots; things like private healthcare, privatization, imperialism, racism, sexism, exploitation…the list is endless. This means the most obvious solution is the Green New Deal; a set of policy proposals aimed at transforming the very fabric of society to be BOTH greener and more equitable (the caps are important). There is the jobs guarantee program that will be launched to build green infrastructure, single-payer healthcare, and other welfare and government programs that are designed to grow the economy and green the economy for everyone. She is ecstatic to point out the new “bloc of politicians in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere ready to translate the urgency of the climate crisis into policy and connect the dots of the multiple crises of our time”.


So voting and coalescing for political power and advancing policies, that’s something to get behind, right? Not exactly. The heart of many of these essays isn’t an argument for any given policy within the Green New Deal, her blueprint is for a movement focused “not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy.” Her issues with simply advancing big government policies is “an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies but by reducing the amount of material stuff we produce and consume”. It can’t just be what she calls climate Keynesianism, because then we run the risk that “the salaries from all the good green jobs it creates [are] immediately poured into high-consumer lifestyles that inadvertently end up increasing emissions—a scenario where everyone has a good job and lots of disposable income and it all gets spent on throwaway crap imported from China destined for the landfill.”

Klein understands that “shifting cultural values is a tall order”, and it certainly can’t be done simply by voting and advancing policies. So then maybe we should first start working to change our culture; producing art and having difficult conversations to move people to consume less. Perhaps that would have a cascading, trickle-up effect where we can then fight for those major policies in the GND.


However, Klein critiques this as well. Saying making changes as consumers and individual activists, even changing those habits and organizing in our “neighborhood or town” is simply “acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small” and abandoning the “structural changes, the policy and legal work, to others.”


This is why being leftist is maddening. I never know what to DO when I read shit like this. The ideas make so much sense but the articulation of getting there; whether it’s labor unions, or electoralism, or dual power, or whatever it all feels already defeated, utterly impossible. When I read Klein’s stand-out line in this book; “It is true that we have to do it all. That we have to change everything. But you personally do not have to do everything.” it’s almost impossible for me not to translate this into “you personally do not have to do anything”.

When Klein speaks of her strong emotions when she thinks about “the tremendous intergenerational theft underway” or the “sheer panic about the extreme weather we have already locked in for these kids” or the “sadness about what they won’t ever know growing up in a mass extinction” I am right there with her.

And this election brings with it another level of despair. Trump is going to visit untold cruelties onto populations this nation has deemed sacrificial. My privilege will protect me and my children for a long time I’m sure, many people with that same privilege made the calculation that their immediate ability to consume; buy cheap gas for their big cars and have cheap things and access to cheaper take-out and the ability to watch their 401k go up infinitely was more important to them than whatever longterm effects will be wrought upon the planet. Because the only thing to believe in is the terrifying and crushing reality of preserving your own comfort and the comfort of your family right now.


So no, there is not a lot of hope in this book. There isn’t really a lot of hope anywhere. The only liferaft of hope is that people will see “the light” and that a great many more people are seeing it than I thought. There is a great refrain in a Malcolm X speech where he implores his audience to “never let them tell you how many of YOU there are”. Even after a disastrous election, I took a lot of hope from my friend Matt’s recent piece where he wrote that “a vote, like a poll, is a snapshot in time and does not represent any sort of commitment, nor is it a particularly meaningful political act.” I cannot simply believe this mass of people who voted for Trump or didn’t vote because they could only believe in the material reality in front of their face are wholly lost to the cause.


As far as what we can all be doing once we have seen the light, this seems to be, as cynical as it sounds, something we need to figure out on our own. But if Klein’s thesis that all the issues of our time are threaded by the climate crises - and I am compelled to believe she is correct - then working toward any issue is as effective as any other. Basically, if you don’t know what to do, just do something.