With Wings as Eagles

I have to give a shout-out to Will Menaker, a host on the podcast Chapo Trap House, for casually mentioning that Charles Portis' The Dog of the South is the funniest book he has ever read. Normally, I don't go for recommendations of books that are funny; I can get on board with Gore Vidal "witty" (or "petty") or a Foster-Wallace "ironic", but I don't really have interest in reading humorists, and even the great satirists I find a little too on the nose. But I have always trusted Menaker's taste in movies and books, plus when someone you find very funny mentions a book as being formative, it drives a sense of curiosity in it.

Portis did not disappoint. Dog of the South is not a work of satire or even a work of humor; it - like many literary works - is chiefly interested in sad people, except its depiction and treatment of them is both unique and hysterical. The novel follows a young Ray Midge, whose wife just ran out on him with a man named Guy Dupree. Midge is himself a character in crisis; he is determined to find his wife, though as narrator he insists he really just wants to find his car, and he's going through some typical mid-twenties dilemmas like post-college aimlessness and relying on his father for income.

Midge is a great character. He's obsessed with guns, cars, various war histories, and approaches any conversation with the other array of frankly bonkers characters with an intense and genuinely portrayed curiosity that only makes those characters more endearing. This cast includes Dr. Reo Symes and his mother, the transient Christine and her young son Victor, Guy Dupree, Ray's wife Norma, and the young hotel attendant Webster, to say nothing of the carousel of more minor characters that appear in the novel that are written with such a degree of simultaneous brevity and depth it is itself kind of comical.

For the most part, everyone is attempting to scam. Scam each other, scam other people, scam the government. It almost makes a great analog for today's age of relentless phone and email scamming ruining the promise of mass communication. As Ray travels down to British Honduras (colonialism here is subtly portrayed as a giant scam, though hardly a dominant theme), he meets con man Doctor Symes and, from that point, mostly circles around him to bear witness to his various schemes. That all of the scams discussed or perpetrated in the novel hysterically collapse, including Midge's own attempt to intimidate Dupree, is key in the recipe to what makes this book so funny.

The main driver is Portis' seemingly underrated ability to write. It isn't just his exceptionally fun character building but the action he writes and his ability to do it so simply and with so few words that really makes the work shine. Simply describing, almost second-handedly, what is happening but in a way true to the characters he's writing. The passive way he ends any anecdote about Dupree with his getting his ass kicked, Doctor Symes terrible tendency to talk over an answer to a question he just asked, or Ray's casual admittance that he is a bad person with bad thoughts (the first time I laughed out loud is when Ray remarked that if a bar rose up and beat a live performer to death with bottles he'd probably join in). All of it is so real and vivid, but none of it really takes up a lot of space on the page; this is underappreciated craft in action.

I would hazard the same recommendation as Menaker: while I can't say it's the funniest book I've ever read (although it may be; I need to think about it more), it elicited a lot of actual laughter. Books can move you in a lot of ways, and moving you to laughter is a rare one; Dog of the South will likely succeed.

All Love Stories are Actually Gross Stories

Being an English major in college permanently ruins your ability to simply passively enjoy literature. Anyone who got a humanities major has surely been accused of "reading too far into it", where the "it" is like an episode of Friends or something. Every read is an argument, a parable, allegory, satire etc etc.

Which is not to complain, this muscle memory, every time I crack open a book, is probably one of the only things that makes non-contemporary literature accessible. When I saw the new Wuthering Heights movie come out and all the subsequent complaints around the atrocities it visited to the text, I knew I had to give it a go. Anytime literary fiction is in the discourse, I feel the need to read it.

The only thing I knew about Wuthering Heights was that I remembered a number of girls I really liked in high school who read it and talked about it a lot. Brontë's work was stacked next to Jane Austen or Elizabeth Gaskell. So I was sort of expecting similar, some excising commentary of their time with a heavy ladle full of romance.

That is...not what I got. For one, nothing in this book can feasibly be called "romantic". There is plenty of familial love and emotional bond, but there is also bitter hatred and intractable abuse crossing in those same streams. Romance implies two unrelated individuals who love each other through circumstances that generally aren't amenable to the blossoming thereof. I'll come back to it, but trust me, you won't be finding that here. Wuthering Heights also evokes some commentary about the time it was written, but not as you'd expect; the setting is extremely remote, and the cast of characters is very thin and quite (literally?) incestuous. The entire work struck me as a comment on the field of male-dominated literature (Brontë wrote it with a male pen name).

While one might be tempted to synopsize the various activities of the characters first, the book is named after the estate, Wuthering Heights. The Heights is old, haunted, inhabited at various times primarily (and sometimes exclusively) by men. It's foiled by the Thrushcross Grange, home of the Linton family, which was often the site of various women characters learning to read and being treated like humans.

Brontë also has a lot of fun with the narrators and point of view. The novel starts from the perspective of Mr. Lockwood, a sort of insufferable baby who fancies himself worldly. From there, he falls away almost completely, and the housekeeper Nelly, becomes the focal narrator. This is the equivalent of Brontë looking directly at the camera as if to say, "gee, women sure are good storytellers too". 

Then there is Heathcliff, the very allegory for male authorship himself. He is inexplicably beloved by women, particularly Cathy, which was probably the most shocking aspect of this book. There are zero scenes of intimacy between Cathy and Heathcliff, but she does wax extremely eloquently about him (although many of the lines seem to be a wink/nod to the possibility of their being related). Later in the novel, Heathcliff essentially captures the offspring of every character in his machinations and forces them to live out a little play version of their lives constructed solely by his will. This is Bronte's depiction of the male-dominated field of fiction, mean-spirited and fraudulent. It is clear she holds no love for women who throw themselves at its feet, nor the fanatic men who cling to it like barnacles (portrayed here by Joseph, the servant at the Heights, whose dialogue I had to read out loud to understand).

Brontë effectively demonstrates the need to take women authors seriously. They can be as dark and ravaging as the male authors of their time. They are perfectly capable of redefining or even perverting the romantic novel society expected them to be writing. The fun of Wuthering Heights was mostly because I fell into the same trap Brontë expected readers to fall into when they saw a woman was writing it; they expected a love story. What you're given instead is shocking cruelty. So bring your preconceived notions when you read this one, it makes it all the better.

But the union makes us strong

"Name a single country where socialism has worked."

Since I realized I wanted to explore and eventually hold a belief in socialism, I have gotten bolder in calling myself one. Usually in casual political conversations, maybe after someone calls like...Nancy Pelosi a Marxist or communist, or maybe just in a statement of support for the UAW presence in my workplace. Most people who don't agree or have sympathy for the position hit me with this question. 

"Name a single country where socialism EVER worked."

The question, unfortunately, often puts you on the back heel. There are, of course, countries that were nominally socialist that failed; the USSR is a massive example. You either hear horror stories of collapsing economies or murderous dictatorships, or you hear stories of collapsing economies WITH murderous dictatorships. The basic narrative around socialism that grows in the mind of most Americans is that it fails and/or devolves into totalitarianism.

As a rhetorically argumentative question, "name a single countery where socialism ever worked" is effective exactly because it relies on this basic narrative and forces the person fielding the question to have to frantically begin trying to define what terms like "socialism", "a socialist country" or "worked" even mean, or sputter out something about China so they can be peppered with questions about human rights abuses.

It is not a question I struggle with because it has not inspired any doubt in me; I can define the terms, however it is a question I struggle to answer in these spur-of-the-moment conversations.

That is, until I finished John Nichols' book The S Word. From now on, the answer to "Name a single country where socialism actually worked" is simply "the United States of America".

Nichols' history of socialism in the United States is one of a deeply successful movement despite never holding power in a way one traditionally might think about. There has never been a socialist president, for example, but Nichols reveals influential, self-identified socialists in the administrations of Lincoln, Johnson, and even Woodrow Wilson.

By exploring the United States' socialist journey, we discover a practice not devolving into dictatorship but rather standing in opposition to the most evil and undemocratic institutions in the nation's history. A movement pushing policies that need to be expanded, but have provided a shared wealth and public expenditure system that has become foundational to our country.

The S Word makes the argument that Socialism should not be a bad word in America. Each chapter flows through the history of our country, centering on socialists' standing for and building our greatest institutions and pillars of human rights. Thomas Paine and other socialists influenced the end of monarchy, the most fervent anti-slavery activists and writers who brought about abolition were socialists, the sewer socialists who wrote the blueprint for effective municipal government, socialists who wrote our welfare state (to the extent it exists) into existence, A. Philip Randolph (avowed socialist) and the civil rights movement...the book is rather expansive.

Obviously, I had heard of and was a big fan of folks like Eugene V Debs, who I was expecting the book to be about primarily. Debs was certainly present throughout Nichols' work, but he never got a standalone chapter. Instead, I found myself more acquainted with socialists I'd never heard of, folks like Christian socialist Francis Bellamy, who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, or the socialist mayor of Milwaukee, Frank Zeidler. 

It was the chapter about Zeidler and the Milwaukee "Sewer Socialists" that intrigued me the most. Especially reading it in the wake of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani's victory to become New York City's mayor. "I was elected as a socialist, and I will govern as a socialist," Mamdani said in his victory speech. The history of Frank Zeidler not only illuminates what that means, but is itself a rich history of Socialism working in the United States. Sewer socialism laid the groundwork for effective municipal governance, building highly effective and beloved public services and institutions. Across US cities, it's anything from running fire departments to opening public pools to making the buses run on time. Wonders of public transportation or education or even just water works - thank a socialist.

To be honest, I found myself wishing that Nichols spent more time on chapters like this, the actual socialist policies that made a difference in people's lives. A good portion of the book focuses on either socialists driven to defend human rights because of their beliefs, OR liberals who were so impacted by socialists that they took more radical approaches to the human rights crises of their time. This is obviously very important and impacted people's lives in meaningful ways, but Nichols wasn't specific enough when it came to calling out the actual structure of ownership (capitalistic or social) that was driving these crises in the first place. 

When people ask you to name a country where socialism has ever worked, you can say the United States, because state/public-owned institutions have and continue to work. We have universal k-12 education, we maintain complicated systems of mail delivery and vehicle registration and licensing, and we have near universal access to potable water, electricity, and internet. We have Universities and weather facilities that do life-changing research. The United States government is the country's largest employer. This is socialism "working" every day. While we have our share of human rights abuses, it's generally in the service of private property.

The argument will, of course, shift. Rather than "name a country where socialism has ever worked", you'll hear "name a socialist country that worked." The goal posts will move; one can't define the US as entirely socialist (or any country for that matter, nor can you call any country entirely capitalist). But Nichols' book still helps; socialism is not a bad word. By identifying as one and believing in the propensity for socialist institutions to work, you are connecting to a rich history of abolitionists, free speech warriors, labor union activists, the people who ended child labor and won social security. We're not the ones who should be afraid of "the S-Word"; they are.

We Are All in 2005's Crash

Photo by Andrew James on Unsplash

                                    

Whenever I finish a book or experience a piece of media or literature that particularly engages or touches me, I always go on a full press tour for that thing, recommending it to everyone around me, even those who are marginally interested. For the most part, most people ignore the recommendation. This is fine. Obviously, in an ideal world, they would take the recommendation, and I have someone I can gush with because they loved it too. But I would rather the recommendation go wholly ignored than have it be picked up only for the person to hate it.

I recommended the Overstory by Richard Powers to some friends in the group chat, one of whom wasn't impressed. "It's just 'crash' for old tree-hugging white hippies" was what I got back. I loved the Overstory, but this response got me thinking about the trope of interconnectedness as a storytelling trope. It DOES seem to be particularly relied on and cheap. Have we really been dunking on this since 2005?

Woven stories are a good way to blend form and content. In the case of the Overstory, which was largely about trees, the connected narratives mimic tree branches growing together in the forest like- you guessed it -an overstory. I happened to think this was neat at the time, but I can see where my friend was coming from. When Crash came out it was kind of a stupid and unbelievable concept that wore itself out quickly because the dumbest people you know thought they were geniuses for Figuring It Out. 

Which is all to say that I'm getting weary of interconnectedness as storytelling, so when I approach a novel like Tommy Orange's There There, it's on uneven footing. I enjoyed Orange's writing; there were parts of his novel that felt Faulkneresque: complicated and even sinister family dynamics, chapters from points of view of a cast of characters that shift the narration style between them, and some truly beautiful prose writing - particularly in the intro and in Thomas Frank's first chapter. 

And then there is Tommy Orange's point of view, which is very present, something I rarely welcome from an author. The originality of urban native stories can't be overstated; it was thought-provoking but not in a stifling way. The book does a great job of featuring the concept as a backdrop, not as a takeaway. This also takes a degree of skill to do as a writer.

So with excellent writing and perspective in There There, what's not to love? Basically, everything else. Orange can craft beautiful sentences, but his characters felt hollow, and the story felt forced. All of his character plotlines interconnect and crash (heh) together at the end. But that's just it, the narratives seem frantically mashed together, to the point that the cross sections are unconvincing, even eye-rollingly unbelievable at times. 

Some of the characters and plot points in the novel build, but a lot of them fail to go anywhere or elicit any sympathy. One of the novel's female characters, Blue, has a singular chapter devoted to her escaping a domestic violence situation. There was some real weight to the chapter but it was also incomplete. It was hard to bring myself to care about Blue again and again when her connections to the other characters in the novel were unbelievably tenuous and her origin story, which WAS harrowing, was hardly a blip on the timeline. I wanted to care about this character, but I could not get the sympathy meter to sustain. I shouldn't have to work so hard to care for your characters!

No spoilers per se, but sympathy is something you need an abundance of at the end of this novel for the "punch" to pack anything. Which is another thing, the ending was wildly unconvincing, violence for the sake of it. And again, I'm not spoiling anything, the ending was increasingly predictable and equally observable as about to be really bad. Like watching a car crash in slow motion, I kept thinking there was no way Orange was about to do what I thought he was going to do. When the book finally ended, I couldn't imagine Orange expected the reader to feel as stoic as I did. 

I don't want to hate There There. I think Tommy Orange is a great writer and has incredible things to say. I'm mostly disappointed in the way the characters and plotting of the novel just didn't do justice to the author's style. Maybe I just need a break from the loosely connected characters colliding in the universe. Although I'm sure it'll find me again soon. 

Socialism's Editor in Chief

When Bernie Sanders launched his presidential primary bid in 2016, my worldview was totally transformed. Prior to his campaign, I was a liberal and a Democrat who spent an admittedly unhealthy amount of time arguing with friends, family, and strangers on Facebook about this or that issue. So much so that I deleted my Facebook at one point. I remember one of the last things I watched on Facebook was Hilary Clinton’s campaign announcement.

As interested in politics as I was, I had never really seen a politician like Bernie. He lacked a lot of traditional, charismatic style, but his insistent messaging about class politics combined with his willingness to go to the mat on policies that were bigger, more ambitious, and more impactful than the usual parade of polices you saw out of democrats instantly hooked me.

I was all in on Bernie, but what frustrated me was that the usual outlets I was subscribed to did not take his ideas or his campaign seriously. At the time, I remember being subscribed to the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the NYT. None of the barrage of articles disparaging Sanders as a crank or painting his policies as unrealistic were all that convincing; they seemed about as compelling as some of the unconstructive Facebook arguments I used to engage in. I needed something else.

My friend Mike and I had always been sort of nominally interested in socialism since high school. I won’t speak for him (he is much smarter than I am), but I didn’t really know all that much about it beyond its capacity to piss off my fellow suburban classmates. At around the tail end of the Bernie campaign, he handed me a copy of a publication called Jacobin Magazine that he found at Barnes and Noble. I read it cover to cover the second he handed it to me. He ended up letting me keep it.

I’ll never forget the first piece I read: Thinking Small Won’t End Poverty. It was an effective argument about the limits of private, community-led philanthropy. The next week, I became a lifetime subscriber.

Jacobin has taught me a lot about the world and introduced me to new writers and thinkers. I often stocked up on books advertised throughout the issues, entry-level books on socialism by Danny Katch. With her book The New Prophets of Capital, Nicole Aschoff (also a Jacobin editor) was singlehandedly responsible for throwing off my classic liberal slobbering appreciation of ethical capitalists like Oprah and Bill Gates and establishments like Whole Foods. I became a single-payer activist largely because of pieces I read from healthcare writing power couple Adam Gaffney and Natalie Schur.

It would only make sense then that this year, when I want to reflect on my ten-year journey as a socialist, I start with Jacobin Editor Bhaskar Sunkara’s book The Socialist Manifesto. Ten years later, he is still teaching me things about what it means to be a socialist and what socialism means for society as I know it.

Written in 2018 after Bernie’s first loss but before the Corbyn flop, the Socialist Manifesto is separated into three parts: a conceptualization of socialism in the future, a history of what socialism has looked like in the past, and a few notes on what socialists should be doing in the present.

Most socialist writers I’ve encountered generally do a poor job conceptualizing a future under socialism, and I genuinely have to hand it to Bhaskar, he probably does one of the best jobs. The reason his hypothetical depiction seems so much better is centered on what I think the whole premise of the whole book is: that socialism is a process.

Sunkara is an editor, so his framing of socialism this way is very fitting. His depiction of a socialist future in the US asks the reader to imagine themselves working in a hot sauce bottling facility, making gains under social democracy, then transitioning towards socialism with a greater union presence, turning the factory into a worker-owned co-op, working towards a way to exist free of the need for profit.

This is far from the utopian dreams of technology-fueled, post-scarcity futures depicted elsewhere. The future Sunkara imagines, you (the reader) never see fully actualized Communism, but you do lead a dignified life free of economic burden as part of the journey towards socialism.

Similarly, in the larger section that runs the history of socialism in Europe, the global south, and the United States, Sunkara extolls the gains made by the world’s poorest people and the victories against imperialism that happen as the left begins fighting and advocating for social democracy; a better and more inclusive welfare state, decomodified basic needs, union workers and sectoral bargaining, and much more.

The really valuable lesson in the Socialist Manifesto is for every socialist at any given time to be thinking about how they can work to advance toward socialism, rather than fussing and infighting over the ideals of their imagined endgame. His last section about what socialism means today is all about how to get involved, how to talk to our neighbors about and generally socialize socialism.

The more I think about it, the more this tracks with my experience as an organizer. I led the Medicare for All group. At our most effective, we had everyone from anarchists to slightly left of center Democrats coming together to protest and host town halls and birddog politicians. It didn’t matter if single-payer was “socialism” from an anarchist or Marxist lens (it arguably isn’t either); what mattered was that we were advancing the plot.

This is socialism; a constant state of class struggle, a work in progress. All the more reason to wear it proudly.

By Any Other Name

Over the years, I've hosted a handful of Town Hall events spotlighting Medicare for All to various communities across the state, from unions to universities. One of my favorite speakers to get when I could was Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. He was knowledgeable and was absolutely electric talking about the issue. He always fired up the crowd.

I was similarly fired up when I saw he was entering a primary race to be Michigan's next senator. For years, I have birddogged his opponent, Haley Stevens, to sign onto the House M4A bill (she never has), and while Mallory McMorrow is a political talent, El-Sayed was clearly stepping into the progressive lane; declaring support for Medicare for All, calling out genocide in Gaza, and demanding we abolish ICE.

This is all to say I'm an El-Sayed supporter and likely voter, but after the last few days, he needs to clarify his position on Medicare for All.

McMorrow recently posted a snippet of an interview El-Sayed gave in which he made the claim that "if you like your employer insurance or your union insurance, those will still be there for you". She pointed out that this was more akin to a public option, which is what she has consistently supported over Medicare for All and been criticized by El-Sayed for.

I was willing to give El-Sayed the benefit of the doubt. It was very possible that he was saying coverage was going to be there regardless of losing your job, but not necessarily the specific private plan.

But then he further muddied the waters when he replied to McMorrow's tweet. He posted a snippet from his book with the last line highlighting to suggest that under Medicare for All, private insurance could exist and duplicate coverage with Medicare.

This is not a good response. The House and Senate M4A bills explicitly do not allow for duplicate coverage. They are single-payer policies, meaning the only possible private insurance would be supplemental, covering things expanded Medicare would not cover (IVF, for example). By definition, if private insurance exists and is providing duplicative coverage to the public insurer, it is not a single-payer system.

This isn't a post about the virtues of M4A, but rather to say Abdul seemed dangerously close to bailing on the policy, the way we watched almost every Democratic primary contender in the 2020 race abandon the idea, exactly because it would eliminate people's private insurance.

He was then asked to clarify his remarks, and unfortunately, not only was he more unclear, he seemed to be implying that McMorrow was just inexperienced or unintelligent on the matter. The tone itself invited a lot of dunking, but I'm concerned about his quote on the policy in which he says, "I don’t have a problem with private insurance offering some of the same services to folks, or covering some of the same services." And then adds the incoherent "It’s public guaranteed, private option." (???)

Some pundits are saying this is basically Pete Buttigieg's Medicare for All Who Want It. This is wrong. Mayor Pete's plan would have put up a new plan on the ACA exchanges for people to buy into that was like a publicly owned insurance option (this was a stupid policy). But El-Sayed defenders like Ryan Grim are also wrong in that this ALSO isn't Medicare for All. What El-Sayed seems to be alluding to and, honestly, McMorrow is supporting, is what the Center for American Progress calls Medicare for America. This is a true public option that exists to be the insurance of default for people who fall off of or simply don't/can't have employer-provided insurance. It's frankly not that bad of a policy; it's just not as good as Medicare for All.

Not to get in the weeds, but here is just a quick note on why Medicare for All is a superior policy. Even the liberal policy critics can really only serve up the political difficulty of passing it as the major problem with it (because it eliminates private, employer insurance). It solves problems in healthcare that a public option doesn't: it stops insurance churn, it ends the administrative burden of switching coverage, and reduces the cost of care with single risk pools and monopsony power over drugs. 

To be fair, Abdul also says he supports the current iteration of Sanders' M4A bill, but then he tries to imply he's middling because "we don't have the votes for that right now".

This is getting dumb. No one, even supporters like me, expects or thinks El-Sayed is going to go to Washington and make Medicare for All happen any more than McMorrow supporters think she will be able to make a public option happen. When you say you support Medicare for All, you are signaling your values. You are open to radically changing the status quo, disrupting a model that isn't working at a fundamental level. When you support the public option over M4A, you are signaling that you are compromising with the status quo. El-Sayed could simply say he would vote for the Bernie bill and his opponent won't; that is the key distinction. I would rather he lose the primary than prove even our chosen progressive champions are too chicken-shit to support it.

If this seems unfair, it's because I expect better of El-Sayed. I want to see him make the case like I have so many times at town halls, in stirring debates, and on national television. Tell people, Yes: your private insurance plan will go away and be replaced with an objectively superior plan that cannot go away by virtue of losing your job or the divine writ of your employer. This is unequivocally good and better than a public option. That is the bold El-Sayed I want as our next senator.