Indigenous Religion in Popular Fiction: The Case of Yellowjackets

Note: This essay is, I hope, to be run eventually in some more “august” format such as a journal focusing on theology, on popular culture, or on both; however, the slow pace of publication in many such outlets, in combination with the fact that a third season of the show is currently in production, made me believe that time was of the essence when it came to getting this out in some form or another. Thus I am running it here first.—Saint John’s Eve 2024

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The wildly popular (in some circles) television show Yellowjackets, which so far has two seasons out of a planned five and airs on the American cable channel Showtime, tells the story of a turf war between a Francophone demon and an albino moose for the souls of a team of ambiguously lesbian soccer players.

           I hope that the rhetorical strategies I am employing in saying so—attention-grabbing overstatement, deliberately strange wording of concepts that are in fact more ordinary, leading with an extremely confident assertion of a view my actual grounds for holding which are more tenuous—are clear to most readers. I also hope, however, to make it clear that this is a genuinely held interpretation of the program. Not only is it a genuinely held interpretation, it is an eminently defensible one based on Yellowjackets’s style and tone, narrative conceits, and genre antecedents.

           To avoid overloading this essay with ponderous “expository” material, and in deference to the precedents set in “acafandom” writing on more established genre canons like Star Trek and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, this essay will at various points presuppose the reader’s familiarity with the characters, situations, and visual and auditory aggregates depicted in Yellowjackets. Readers who have not seen the show can consult breakdowns of the first two seasons on entertainment websites including Vulture, The Cut, and Cosmopolitan, although these also contain elements of subjective review and not everything that has been said online about the show’s aesthetic or narrative quality aligns with my own opinions.

           Much of Yellowjackets’s unique thematic richness when it comes to the issues that this essay will address—issues involving religion, indigeneity, ruralism and the “Wilderness” topos, and their relationships with one another and with more obvious issues in the show such as gender—occurs by accident. For example, the indigeneity-related subtext informing the character of Lottie Matthews (and the closest relationships that she has with white characters, Laura Lee and later on Natalie Scatorccio), subtext that is substantial and is by turns endlessly fascinating and somewhat troubling, cannot have been intentional from the beginning because the mixed-Maori actress Courtney Eaton was matched with the character through a race-blind casting process. Yet by the show’s second season efforts are clearly being made to establish this as an intentional element of the character, such as the casting of another mixed-Maori actress, Simone Kessell, as Lottie’s older self.

           Nor is this to be wondered at. Television production is a collaborative process and an element of serendipity, chance, fate, or providence is inevitably one of the collaborators.[1] Authorial intent in this context is an important consideration when thinking through why the show is the way it is—attempts to artificially bracket out authorial intent as a consideration are just as limiting to one’s understanding of a text as are attempts to artificially inflate it—but it clearly cannot be the whole story. For example, the extremely common belief among the show’s viewers that the character of Jackie Taylor comes across as a closeted lesbian can be amply backed up with comments to that effect from writers, directors, actresses, and so on, yet there is also an element of sheer reader response in the audience’s decision that Jackie is simply more legible as a lesbian character.

           The intentional aspects of the show’s religious commentary mostly involve either what get called the dueling “supernatural and rational” explanations for some of the events that take place (incorrectly; supernatural and rational are not, properly, antonyms or a dichotomy) or the motif of cannibalism itself. The “supernatural or rational” issue is, in my view, a red herring tout court, and a pernicious one for multiple reasons: it creates a false sense that a “rational” version of the series would somehow automatically be narratively and perhaps ideologically superior, it betrays a habit of baselessly expecting that the series will eventually provide “explanations” rather than accepting that it is set in a stupefying universe, and it distracts the viewer from the analysis of religious belief in which, according to the series’ own creators, Yellowjackets is engaged:

I think if you are a spiritual person on any level, or had ever considered or wrestled with spiritual questions, something else to throw into the stew here is that there is an experience or phenomenology of like belief in spiritual experience. There is an expansive quality to it that perhaps you’ve felt in religious ceremony or looking at the Grand Canyon or an art or piece of music (sic), or being with family. However you’ve gotten it, I think we all have a kernel of that experience. So on the one hand, yes, something that expands this feeling seems great. But then there is all the tragedy and the times that it is elusive or completely unhelpful to you. So if you’re going to have a show that in some sense is trying to explore these elements of faith and spiritual experience, if you’re not also going to have the moments where those things are failures or useless, then you’re really not having a fair conversation.[2]

So much for the “supernatural or rational?” non-issue; the program is (in part) about religion, and the program is not a proselytization tool. What of cannibalism?

           Discussing the evil eye, in which some of my own relatives grew up believing in the Italian-American community of the 1950s and 1960s, Sam Migliore writes that belief is part of a “language of distress.” “First,” that is, “[believing in the evil eye] provides people with a means by which they can identify, explain, and communicate specific experiences to significant others. Second, it provides people with a means by which they can take action when confronted by misfortune.”[3] The Yellowjackets take action when confronted by misfortune in many ways, but, as is well-known and as is one of the main draws of the series, eventually they take action by eating people. This action, as with Migliore’s evil eye curatives, they connect to and situate within the magical or religious thinking that the show depicts (and that the show refuses to condemn).

           A great deal of research about the cultural and mediatic history of cannibalism went into the show’s development and writing. Some of this research, when performed in a Christian country by people interested in telling a story that touches on spiritual concerns,[4] is inevitably going to involve the Eucharist. Direct, clearly communicated Eucharistic imagery in the show is surprisingly sparse (especially given that there are major characters to whom religion in general and Christianity in particular are very important), but it is present at two key moments in the first episode of the second season, which are also the chronologically first cannibalistic acts to take place. At the beginning of the episode Lottie Matthews performs a series of protective rituals over Natalie Scatorccio and Travis Martinez—Nat calls them “Wicca bullshit”—before they go on a winter hunting expedition; one ritual has her make them drink her diluted blood, a finger pricked and allowed to drip into hot water or tisane. At the end of the episode Shauna Shipman, grieving her best friend Jackie Taylor (whose death in the last episode of the first season Shauna feels she caused), furtively eats a small, roundish piece of her ear in a moment whose visuals are immediately familiar to people who regularly attend Mass.[5] The symbolic connection is compounded by further connections that have already been established between Shauna and Roman Catholicism. According to Jackie, she “tried to become Catholic” at some point in the past (“I liked the saints; they were all so tragic,” Shauna says),[6] and Shauna reveres Jackie herself in ways explicitly analogized with devotion to a saint, even decades after adoring/consuming her bodily.[7]

            Catholicism has a long history of attempting and failing to “beat the cannibalism allegations” regarding the Eucharist, and an almost-as-long history of deep ambivalence about the Wilderness topos. As Fumagalli, among others, has pointed out,[8] for the bulk of the religion’s history, remote areas were generally seen not as spiritually nourishing or closer to God, but as pernicious because deprived of the “civilizing” aspect of the Church’s mission in the world. This is difficult to understand today; the Romantic movement changed the typical Western conception of the relationship between “wilderness” and the divine so utterly that the previous way of looking at it now seems alien, almost incomprehensible. Even consciously medieval-influenced twentieth-century writers, first and foremost Tolkien, struggle to replicate the medieval worldview on this point.[9] Yet in the medieval and even early modern Christian mind, it was important, obvious, and only dubiously countervailed by the experiences of hermits and desert saints. As Belden C. Lane puts it in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, “[t]hroughout much of the history of Western culture, mountains have been viewed as physically threatening, aesthetically distasteful, even morally reprehensible”; thus “fascination with mountain terrain is a relatively recently development in Western thought,” earlier writers having “scorned [them] as proud, insolent, sky-threatening, and aloof.”[10]

           The historian Allan Greer, in his biography of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha—on whom more later in this essay—Mohawk Saint, discusses this at length in the Yellowjackets-esque setting of seventeenth-century Quebec, where French Catholic missionaries of the Jesuit order and indigenous Iroquoian and Algonquian cultural systems did ideological and spiritual battle. Of an episode in Kateri Tekakwitha’s life in which she maintained her religious practice as a Catholic convert during a long hunting expedition, Greer writes that:

The vignette featuring [Kateri] praying at her rustic chapel in the forest came to be the favorite image in modern versions of her life story; it seemed to epitomize all the most appealing qualities associated with the “Indian maiden” as an innocent woodland creature at one with nature. All the more reason to note that the seventeenth-century Jesuits attached a very different meaning to this scene. Chauchetière and Cholenec worried about the moral and religious dangers of long hunting trips, even though they recognized their economic necessity for the convert Iroquois. Not only did the hunt pose practical problems in their ministry in that it kept people physically removed from the mass and from the supervision of the missionaries, but it took Indian neophytes into a wild environment with perilous associations. For the original biographers of [Kateri] Tekakwitha, space had moral meaning: the Christian village at Sault St. Louis, together with the fields that surrounded it, was good, whereas the forest was almost entirely evil, the dark haunt of demons and pagan savages. Thus, far from “communing with nature” in her woodland oratory, they saw [Kateri] doing her best to commune with civilization.[11]

On this point Yellowjackets is closer to the medieval Christian worldview than are most expressly Christian modern works of art. The two characters to die first in the Wilderness experience, not counting the initial plane crash, are both associated with the norms of the parent society on the urban or suburban, secular or conventionally Christian or Jewish, affluent East Coast of the United States. Laura Lee has a strong and mostly-conventional Evangelical Christian religiosity, and Jackie Taylor maintains her priorities about things like interpersonal hierarchy and who is having sex with whom long after the others have ceased to care. The Wilderness evidently does not need this. Yet it is Laura Lee who is Lottie’s first and most devoted confidante and Laura Lee whose baptism of Lottie backfires and sets Lottie down the path to starting the group’s later cultic practices;[12] it is Jackie whose earthly remains are the stuff of Shauna’s first act of cannibalism and, an episode later, the first full-fledged cannibalistic feast.[13] There is a series of motifs being put together here—a snowbound cabin; w/Wilderness; Canada; cannibalism; religion; the atavistic or uncivilized or “primal”—that recalls an episode in the earliest biographies of Kateri Tekakwitha. In this incident, Kateri’s closest friend, Wari Teres Tegaiaguenta, is a member of a group that resorts to cannibalism during a disastrous winter hunting expedition, guilt over which inspires her to adopt extreme ascetic practices to which she then introduces Kateri. The cannibalism motif informs their religious practice in a way that is technically separate from but unavoidably juxtaposed with the Eucharist, and untamed forest is again a place of extreme physical and spiritual danger.[14]

           In other aspects of Yellowjackets, as well as in Laura Lee’s and Jackie’s deaths, the Christian elements of the religious aesthetic and of the characters’ religious imaginary seem incongruous in the Wilderness topos. A piece of set design is, tellingly, a reversal, so to speak, of the attributes of St. Hubert, the patron of hunters. Hubert’s attributes include a stag with a crucifix between its antlers (and thus above its head), in reference to a vision that he is said to have had.[15] On an interior wall of the Yellowjackets cabin, however, there is a crucifix positioned below a stag’s head that has been mounted as a hunting trophy. Other reversals or parodies of well-known biblical and liturgical narratives and images abound, from Lottie’s chrismation with blood in the episode “Blood Hive”[16] to the Exodus 16-inspired “suicide on our roof” of a clutter of starlings in the episode “Digestif.”[17] These kinds of reversals and parodies are, in orthodox Christian belief, associated with the demonic, which at several points in Yellowjackets lends substance to an otherwise somewhat tendentious-seeming interpretation that the supernatural force in the Wilderness is a demon (despite various characters’ insistence that “It” is neutral or amoral rather than wicked).

           The demonic overtones interact somewhat uncomfortably—we might even say problematically—with the elements of the show’s look and feel that are most obviously influenced by Native American religion and culture. The “Antler Queen,” for instance, a polysemous symbol of the girls’ cult that is sometimes the person leading the group and sometimes a separate being sort of like an avatar or paraclete of the Wilderness/It, wears a crown of deer antlers like those worn historically by Iroquois political leaders.[18] Lottie, the first person to don the antler crown in the episode “Doomcoming,”[19] has, as mentioned above, at least two relationships with blonde white characters whom the narrative generally favors over her, morally speaking. (It must be acknowledged, however, that, subtext aside, the question of Laura Lee’s or Nat’s moral superiority over Lottie is one in which the show as scripted says it is not interested; these are, among other things, characters who love and are loved by Lottie on what is supposed to be a more or less even footing. The failure of writerly intent on this point seems to me to be an honest one.) The Antler Queen also conjures up specters of the pop-cultural wendigo, an appropriative and (according to many people) spiritually dangerous reperiodization of the folkloric Alqonquian cannibalistic monster of the same name; in mass media this being is typically depicted as a sort of stag-man, a portrayal especially popularized by the mid-2010s cannibalism-themed television series Hannibal. All of this is to say that juxtaposing Yellowjackets’s religious imagination with its preferred depiction and framing of cannibalism rapidly raises questions of cultural sensitivity vis-à-vis indigenous worldviews.

           In a key storyline early in the show’s second season, Nat runs across a large white moose on a hunting expedition, fails to shoot it, then, an episode later, finds its body half-immersed in a frozen-over lake. Efforts to haul the moose out of the lake prove unavailing as the group’s ropes break and it instead sinks to the bottom. The white moose too is an Algonquin religious and folkloric being, one much more benevolent than the wendigo; this is reflected by its positioning in Yellowjackets as a ray of hope, even though that hope is ultimately dashed. Particularly significant is that in the Algonquin culture in which the white moose plays the most important role, the Mi’kmaq of Maine and Atlantic Canada, it is a guardian spirit and a “messenger or link to the Creator.”[20] Several Native American people whom I know have told me personally that the white moose, among other things, leads hunters to food in the winter—exactly the situation in which Nat encounters it in the show. It is in this lake that the Yellowjackets eventually allow Javi Martinez, the second cannibalism victim, to drown, in a cruel parody of Mi’kmaq beliefs much like the cruel parodies of Christian beliefs elsewhere in the series. As Masuzawa points out,[21] to treat a religion similarly to Christianity is, in a primarily-Christian intellectual landscape, to ratify and validate it as worth taking seriously; looked at this way, the sequence of events surrounding the white moose validates indigenous North American religion more than anything else in the show.

           The white moose would, had the Yellowjackets successfully hauled it out of the lake and consumed it, have obviated the real or perceived need to engage in the ritual cannibalization of Javi five episodes later. It is possible that it falls through the ice as a way of taunting them and driving them further into despair, but I, and much of the show’s fandom, prefer to see the moose as a more positive figure. This turns its loss in the lake into an instance of power struggle between multiple forces within the Wilderness, and thus turns the Wilderness itself into a morally and spiritually contested space. In this context we might note that, early in the development of the Lottie-focused Wilderness cult, Lottie refers to “the ancient gods,” only shifting to the singular “It”—“we hear the Wilderness and It hears us”—later on. A reading that sees the moose positively—the way a Mi’kmaq audience would see it—would have it that Lottie got it right the first time, and that the Wilderness is a stage on which sacred dramas play out, dramas whose main characters might be very different from the main characters of Yellowjackets-the-television-series.

           Yet, sacred dramas aside, the this-worldly, human concerns of the characters we follow in the show generally see reverence for or deference to the Wilderness topos functioning in a socially corrosive way. It does not always corrode the microsociety that the Yellowjackets themselves build in the woods—quite the contrary; important moments like Taissa and Van coming out as lesbians in “Doomcoming” or Shauna barely surviving childbirth in “Qui” are made emotionally and relationally easier, if anything, by taking place in the new society and according to the new cultural practices. It does, however, corrode the connections that most characters seek to maintain with the parent society. (There are a few exceptions, characters who do not seem to miss anything about their pre-crash lives and might even actively prefer the Wilderness, and these are the characters who tend to become the diehard cultists in the show’s second season.) The stage of Yellowjackets is not one whose players can maintain at will investment in their backstage lives.

            It should go without saying that in most situations the concerns of a suburban high school are going to be both more legible and more sympathetic than the concerns of a backwoods cannibal cult to most television audiences. Admittedly, with the sort of viewership that Yellowjackets has attracted, this hasn’t always been the case, but it does mean that we can’t ignore the associations between Wilderness, religion, violence, etc., nor even the (atypical and quite boldly articulated) connection that the show proposes between all of these things and femininity. Yellowjackets is a feminist series; it is also a series in which womanhood and women are somewhat horrifying. The same can be said of its relationship with rurality and atavism, and there is much less of a history of conceding this sort of point or seeing it as acceptable and empowering among indigenous and ruralist thinkers than among feminists.

           What is one to make, then, of the questionable symbolic and aesthetic association between indigenous religion and violent, atavistic brutality? Two avenues come to mind for reparative reading of this admittedly troubling facet of Yellowjackets’s aesthetic schema. The first is for the viewer to determine that what appears to be presented as terrifying and despicable is in fact not, and that, like Melville in Chapter 57 of Moby-Dick,[22] the Yellowjackets writers are willing to entertain an astounding degree of relativism about what the characters are doing and then commend that relativism to the audience. This avenue has an intuitive appeal and at points is spelled out within the text. “When you were with those women you were free,” the Antler Queen tells Lottie in “Burial”;[23] “God is alive; magic is afoot,” the soundtrack (Buffy Ste-Marie interpreting Leonard Cohen) tells us two episodes later.[24] The viewer doesn’t have any immediate reason to doubt that this is partly the case—that, whatever else Yellowjackets’s Wilderness is, it is also an enchanted forest where the terrifying and transgressive contains or points to the sublime.

           A second avenue might be to look at the show through a more conventional cultural or moral lens but conclude that this lens isn’t actually being inherently violated by the Wilderness topos. Put simply, in this reading, what produces the barbarity is not the look, feel, or Sitz im Leben of indigenous culture and indigenous religion themselves; it is how that is experienced and engaged with by interlopers from the cultivated world of end-of-history liberal suburbia. None of the human characters in Yellowjackets are actually from the Wilderness or from cultural groups that traditionally live there, and the most obviously malevolent supernatural agency in the series communicates in French, a colonial language par excellence in much of North America’s vast internal frontier.

           As Margaret J. Leahey remarks in “‘Comment peut un muet prescher l’évangile?’ Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France,” French missionaries and traders in what is now Canada and parts of the Northern United States had little interest in forcing, encouraging, or even teaching Native peoples to speak French; indeed, many of them preferred to learn Native American languages instead despite the extreme difficulty of doing so as adults from a Romance starting position.[25] Kateri Tekakwitha likely understood more Latin than French, because all the Frenchmen she ever met would have spoken primarily Mohawk outside Mass and Latin in Mass. Thus early in the settlement and colonization process French was a white man’s language in ways that English and Spanish ceased to be much sooner. To this day French is somewhat racialized (as “white”) within Canada; when primarily Anglophone First Nations voters helped sink the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum, Premier Jacques Parizeau infamously blamed “l’argent pis des votes ethniques” (“money and the ethnic vote”) for the loss. It’s difficult to say whether the writers of Yellowjackets are expressly aware of this history; as Americans it is likelier that many of them tend to associate the French language with Canadianness writ large.[26] Nevertheless, it provides a potential resource for interpreting the horrors of the Wilderness as those of imperialism rather than those of indigeneity.

           But let’s set indigeneity and imperialism aside and think, on a human level, on the things the characters in this show do to one another. The show connects brutality and survival in ways that are less Golding than London or even Nietzsche; the “freedom” in “when you were with those women you were free” bears more than a whiff of Also Sprach Zarathustra’s madman or Hawthorne’s Ethan Brand, that nineteenth-century Will that baptizes harpoons “non…in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli.”[27] I don’t think this is by any means a moral problem with the show, since the demonic can’t be honestly depicted without depicting why some people find it appealing, but it does mean that Yellowjackets is a story that contains Tolkienian “pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.”[28] The view of the Wilderness’s ominous quality as solely an issue of colonial domination would seem to run into a wall here.

           I would further submit a third, synthesized avenue of understanding, which has become my own preferred reading of the show. As seen above in the discussion of Mi’kmaq beliefs, we can support an elevated moral and aesthetic reading of the Wilderness even if there is something genuinely foul and evil out there too—even if, so to speak, the Francophone demon as well as the white moose is a going concern with real power over the enchanted woods. Lane, moving on to the subject of deserts from the discussion of mountains quoted above, introduces an interesting and illustrative nuance, a nuance that itself produces much of the Christian spiritual tradition and grounds that tradition ecologically.

In a similar way, deserts have been viewed with fear and contempt as the snare of the devil, the abode of dragons, or the lair of the lawless. As wilderness, wüste, waste, the desert becomes the haunt of demons—at best a “negative landscape” or “realm of abstraction,” located outside of the ordinary sphere of existence, susceptible only to things transcendent. In early Christian tradition, the desert was perceived ambiguously, usually as an unfriendly, intimidating domain; but for those able to endure its purifying adversity, an image also of paradise.[29]

Looked at with this stereoscopic spiritual and moral vision, Yellowjackets seems to share concerns not so much with Lord of the Flies or even with The Call of the Wild as with Dune. Perhaps, much like Arrakis, God created the Wilderness to train the faithful.[30]

           Yellowjackets on a human level is almost certainly meant to communicate a studied and methodologically “correct” agnosticism about not only the existence of God (or the Wilderness) but the existence of any religious “knowledge” as such. Yet resources within the text for a theological reading of the show exist, and are not present within the text necessarily merely by accident.

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[1] Might that “serendipity” or “fate” itself be viewed as an “author,” depending on the religious beliefs of the interpreter?

[2] Bart Nickerson, quoted in Jackie Strause, “‘Yellowjackets’ Bosses Explain Shocking Episode and “Perversely Celebratory” Final Scene,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 30, 2023.

[3] Sam Migliore, Mal’uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 49-50.

[4] See the above block quote for a denomination of the show as “spiritual” rather than “supernatural.” The narrative is interested in epistemology to an unusual extent; much of the second season, in both timelines, involves the characters factionalizing based on degree of receptiveness to mystical experience, as opposed to more obvious cleavages such as race, class, sexual orientation, amount of practical survival prowess, or on-paper religious background.

[5] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 1, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, written by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, and Liv Hewson, aired March 26, 2023, Showtime.

[6] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 1, “Pilot,” directed by Karyn Kusama, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired November 21, 2021, Showtime.

[7] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 6, “Saints,” directed by Billie Woodruff, written by Chantelle M. Wells, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired December 19, 2021, Showtime.

[8] Vito Fumagalli, Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, England: Polity, 1994).

[9] The degree and suddenness of the change in attitudes can be and has been, however, exaggerated. Martin Korenjak, “Why Mountains Matter: Early Modern Roots of a Modern Notion.” Renaissance Quarterly vol. 70, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 179-219.

[10] Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998), 42.

[11] Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005), 131. Greer favors the French form “Catherine” over the Mohawk form “Kateri,” for various reasons to which I am sympathetic but which I have made a decision against; thus in quoting him I render “Catherine” as “[Kateri]” to maintain consistency with the rest of my text.

[12] Op. cit., “Saints.” The character is always referred to and addressed as “Laura Lee,” either a double-barreled given name, like the Mary Graces and Mary Katherines that many families have, or a full name the use of which is ubiquitous among the other characters, like Charlie Brown or Mary Poppins.

[13] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 2, “Edible Complex,” directed by Ben Semanoff, written by Jonathan Lisco, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, and Liv Hewson, aired April 2, 2023, Showtime.

[14] Op. cit., Greer, 182-184. Cf. footnote 8 for Greer’s “Marie-Thérèse” vs. my “Wari Teres.”

[15] The legend appears in most older reference works on Catholic saints and is amply attested in art, heraldry, and even alcohol labels; that of the liqueur Jägermeister will be the most familiar depiction of St. Hubert’s stag to many readers of this essay.

[16] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 5, “Blood Hive,” directed by Eva Sørhaug, written by Ameni Rozsa, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired December 12, 2021, Showtime.

[17] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 3, “Digestif,” directed by Jeffrey W. Byrd, written by Sarah L. Thompson and Ameni Rozsa, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, and Liv Hewson, aired April 9, 2023, Showtime.

[18] William N. Fenton, “Structure, Continuity, and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treaty Making,” in The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League, ed. Francis Jennings (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 17.

[19] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 9, “Doomcoming,” directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, written by Ameni Rozsa and Sarah L. Thompson, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired January 9, 2022, Showtime.

[20] Chief Bob Gloade, quoted in Diana Hall, “Hunters spark outrage after killing ‘spirit moose’ on Cape Breton Highlands trip,” National Post, October 8, 2013.

[21] Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Masuzawa does not condone or approve of this; nevertheless, she makes a strong case that this is, descriptively, how this works in Western intellectual and artistic cultures, and thus, for our purposes, that this is a case of Yellowjackets taking its implications seriously.

[22] 278-280 in my Collins Classics edition. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (London: Collins Classics, 2011).

[23] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 7, “Burial,” directed by Anya Adams, written by Rich Monahan and Liz Phang, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, Lauren Ambrose, and Liv Hewson, aired May 14, 2023, Showtime.

[24] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 9, “Storytelling,” directed by Karyn Kusama, written by Ameni Rozsa, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, Lauren Ambrose, and Liv Hewson, aired May 28, 2023, Showtime. We might note that the choice of song also reinforces the series’ connection to Kateri Tekakwitha in that Cohen’s lyrics are taken from Beautiful Losers, a novel that he wrote as a young man in which she is one of the main characters.

[25] Maragret J. Leahey, “‘Comment peut un muet prescher l’évangile?’ Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France.” French Historical Studies Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 1995): 111-112.

[26] With all that Canadianness tends to imply to Americans—remoteness, coldness, “nordicity” in general, perhaps a more collectivist political culture, a history assumed to be without the series of enormously violent inflection points (Revolutionary War, Civil War, etc.) that characterizes the United States’ history.

[27] Op. cit., Melville, 501.

[28] J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf. In The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), 33.

[29] Op. cit., Lane, 43. This passage in Lane goes on to cite, in its own notes, Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves, which, while beyond the scope of this essay, has immediate areas of relevance to Yellowjackets as well.

[30] This Herbertian bon mot appears most prominently on 501 in my 2010 Ace Books edition.

Bibliography

Fenton, William N. “Structure, Continuity, and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treaty Making.” In The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League, edited by Francis Jennings, 16-36. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1985

Fumagalli, Vito. Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, England: Polity, 1994.

Greer, Allan. Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Hall, Diana. “Hunters spark outrage after killing ‘spirit moose’ on Cape Breton Highlands trip.” National Post, October 8, 2013.

Herbert, Frank. Dune. New York: Ace Books, 2010.

Korenjak, Martin. “Why Mountains Matter: Early Modern Roots of a Modern Notion.” Renaissance Quarterly vol. 70, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 179-219.

Lane, Belden C. The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Leahey, Margaret J.  “‘Comment peut un muet prescher l’évangile?’ Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France.” French Historical Studies Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 1995): 111-112.

Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. London: Collins Classics, 2011.

Migliore, Sam. Mal’uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

Nickerson, Bart, Ashley Lyle, and Jonathan Lisco, lead writers. Yellowjackets. New York: Showtime, 2021-2023.

Strause, Jackie. “‘Yellowjackets’ Bosses Explain Shocking Episode and “Perversely Celebratory” Final Scene.” The Hollywood Reporter, March 30, 2023.

 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966.

Another Autoflorilegium

The foregoing is a collection of my further thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, and mostly from recent months. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or multiblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.

On the Relationship between Religion and Politics

In grad school I watched the Scorsese adaptation of Silence. It was in a seminar on East Asian Christianity so we got some very good discussion out of it. My parents watched the movie on their own as well. Between the three of us, my parents and I came up with what my professor thought were two very good, very important observations: First, the persecutors seem just as strangely obsessed, from a modern liberal standpoint, with the martyrs’ religion as do the martyrs themselves; secondly, why does this sort of killing and dying for religious beliefs come across as more irrational than killing or dying for political or philosophical beliefs? It is not immediately obvious why it should, yet it does.

            It is, in fact, possible, I think, that the order here has been entirely reversed. The habit now is of viewing a political worldview—leftism, rightism, the “MAGA movement,” “common-good constitutionalism,” Posado-Catholicism, neo-Ikkō-ikki Pure Land communism—as a static mass, a single object. A set of beliefs is bundled together and given over as handsel to an adherent. Religion and morals, now downstream from politics, become individuated epiphenomena, to be filled and animated, or deadened, by the waters of the person’s oceanic political conviction. Yet from the beginning it was not so.

On Identifying the Least Unbearable Social Media Platform

Tumblr is the only usable one, mostly because the bulk of its unbelievably toxic early-to-mid-2010s user base bolted for Twitter about five years ago, but also because its algorithm doesn’t work and all its updates are done by frivolous twits; yes, these are selling points, or at least they ought to be. More generally, though, social media is bad for society and everyone should be able to acknowledge this in the same way that, for example, the Victorians knew that constant exposure to lead and arsenic was unhealthy, only they didn’t know exactly why or have viable alternatives yet. Don’t be fooled by the idea that banning TikTok will fix it, either, although it won’t hurt; teenagers getting zonked out on Osama bin Laden apologia and slickly repackaged Holocaust revisionism is socially and politically and culturally disastrous, and boomers getting their personalities so thoroughly replaced with hateful parafascist conspiracy slop that they believe it over their own loved ones is socially and politically and culturally disastrous as well. God have mercy upon us. Butlerian Jihad now!

On Soda, Tonic, or What You Will

I was very surprised by how ingrained the culture of free refills of non-water beverages is when I visited a friend in Indiana last year. I was especially confused that one wouldn’t just order the smallest size of something if the actual amount of it one gets is arbitrary no matter what. It’s indeed very stereotypically Middle American, despite certain affluent coastal liberals’ characteristically nasty and bigoted way of saying so.

On the Incumbent Governor of the Great State of New York

Kathy Hochul doesn’t really make sense if you're looking at her through the usual ideological-spectrum and blue-tribe-red-tribe lenses, but she makes perfect sense through the lens of being a creature of the New York Democratic machine, where it’s still the Clinton-Gingrich era and everybody with real ideological or moral commitments, of any kind, is a dumb Columbia sophomore who doesn’t know what’s good for them. In the House in the early 2010s this expressed itself as a mostly productive, collaborative, “bipartisan”-for-the-time voting record; in Albany in the mid-2020s it expresses itself as out-of-touch heavy-handedness and open alignment with property developers and people who think rural Upstate school districts somehow have too much money.

            I think a successful 2026 primary challenge is a possibility. James has about the same approvals as Hochul but much lower disapprovals, and could probably raise a lot of money through various #Resistance channels, especially if it’s another Trump midterm…

On LED Headlights

Let’s discuss. I’m sure we can all come up with a naïve argument that these things shouldn’t be street-legal; I know multiple people who no longer feel safe driving at night because of how blinding they are if you’re not in the car or truck or whatever that has them. So what gives? Is there some specific legal or regulatory reason why they have to be allowed, or is it just that nobody’s bothered to put through a rule against them because they tend to be popular with car buyers in our antisocial and fuck-you-I’ve-got-mine-oriented age?

On Evangelicalism in Latin America

Latin American Evangelicalism has very much been ratfucked into existence there by various Republican-led State Departments but, also, I have heard that it appeals because of its dissimilarity to Catholicism. I have heard, that is, that it’s able to present itself as less corrupt and hypocritical and less politically overconcerned. All of which is demonstrably untrue, but Evangelicalism has a certain Teflon quality to it when it comes to those particular charges, because it’s so decentralized—nowhere for the buck to stop—and because we as a civilization cannot have nice things. It should go without saying that I see the growth of this kind of Christianity as a serious, direct, and quite personal cultural and sectional threat as well, which affects my ability to think about it with any sympathy.

On the Collapse of the So-Called Liberal World Order

I do not like the way the current state of the world has caused me to think and feel. I will not say “made me” or “forced me,” but “caused me to” I think is true. I unironically say things like “heiwaboke,” I treat it as a red flag rather than a green one when someone says that they are into “peace activism,” and when I rewatched “The City on the Edge of Forever” recently I was not initially sure I would be able to see Edith Keeler with any charity. I hate all of these things about my current self, and I hate feeling like this. We live in a cruel and coarse time.

            I do need to wonder if people who were perhaps similar to me in the 1930s and 1940s felt the same—the bulk of the Catholic Worker movement, for example, who temporarily broke from it, or at least from its leadership, over Dorothy Day’s no-nuance opposition to getting involved in World War II even after Pearl Harbor. There are circumstantial reasons to look at her later writing and conclude that she perhaps realized afterwards that this had been a serious mistake, but it is a serious blot on her copybook. I wonder how disillusioned people like me felt.

            I do not like to feel disillusioned. One’s illusions are a precious thing, but one only realizes that after one realizes that they are illusions, and one only realizes that they are illusions after one no longer has them. There needs to be some route to gratitude for what one still has; I know that for some people there is one, but I suppose I spend so much time dreaming the kinds of dreams that I wish to dream.

On Gender

If you, like me and like Courtney Love, want to be the girl with the most cake, what is stopping you? Where is the rub? What is your trouble? What part of that target are you unable to hit? We often hear of girls who do not have the most case, or of people who acquire the most cake without being or becoming girls.

On Wedding Culture

My mother has long felt, and raised me to feel as well, that weddings as commonly done in this country are monuments to the couple's excessive self-regard and impositions on everyone else involved—but other Americans tend not to agree with us on this.

On Various Fictional Women

Nobody knows Cordelia Flyte’s story like I do (in the sense that it’s important to understanding her and Brideshead Revisited as a whole that she is 1. a wonderful, wise, compassionate person but also 2. a fascist).

            There should be more Tar-Míriel fanwork out there that’s emotionally and morally complex without using the Z draft or going we-all-know-what-early-2010s-fandom-figure-I’m-vaguing-about-here full King’s Men apologia.

            There’s a pervasive mischaracterization of Lottie Matthews as an outgoing popular party girl that seems to be based exclusively on the fact that Courtney Eaton is really, really, really hot. The hints of pre-crash Lottie that we have in the actual show suggest that she was a weird, introverted, studious girl who disliked popularity drama and probably listened to Hole.

            You know that headline that’s like “he’s gay, she’s a lesbian, and their thirty-three-year marriage will redefine how you think of love”? I never actually read the article that that was the headline for, and I suspect I would not necessarily like everything it had to say if I were to read it, but that is Makioka Yukiko, she of the Telephone Incident and the dancing-sushi bloodlust, and her eventual husband.

            Lila dissolving-margins-brains herself into realizing, or assuming, that sending the dolls did not have the intended psychological effect, so she escalates to sending blunter and blunter Mysterious Parcels until finally for an eightieth birthday present Lenù just gets a flash drive with an MP3 of “Good Luck, Babe!” on it. It still doesn’t work.

            As for Galadriel—it’s hard to know what’s left to say about Galadriel. What is there? She’s a great character. She’s a creep. Lothlórien is one of the most terrifying places in Middle-earth. Much of what I say about Tar-Míriel also applies to her, less because there’s any deficit of thinking and writing and art about Galadriel and more because she’s oddly inexhaustible for a character so well-understood (well-understood, that is, except by people who like the pig disgusting Amazon show).

On the Locked Tomb Books and the Carole Lombard Movie Nothing Sacred

Hazel Flagg walked so Cytherea the First could run.

On Anomie

On a day, I went to pick up an online order at Walmart. Simple, right? One would assume that it was simple because online orders and the picking-up thereof are how we’re supposed to do everything now, how we’re supposed to prefer it at any rate—it’s more “convenient,” a term, or rather a way of using a term, to which I will get back later.

Anyway, I had thought so, but there is A Process now, and it starts on An App and involves another person putting things into your car.

            I did not know that, so what I did was I went to the store, I walked in, I got directed further and further away from my car by multiple greeters who could tell that I was in the store and on foot and thus should, perhaps, have explained the Process to me and explained that one is meant not to do it outside of a fucking internal combustion engine, then, when I finally got out to the loading bays, I saw signage indicating that I’d done the whole Process wrong.

            So I shlepped back to my car—through, I should add, an unpleasantly warm, humid, drippy day—and, since I had budgeted “walk into a store and go to a customer service desk” time into my errands, not “wrestle with a fucking app and then wait for some sort of confirmation” time, I realized I had to go back again tonight and do the entire process over again on a separate trip. It really made me appreciate the previous week’s civilized, human-scaled, reasonable-expectations process of “run around to two libraries asking if either of them had kept a bookmark that I accidentally returned with my copy of an Elena Ferrante book, because I got the bookmark at a church in Italy that does not have an online presence and would not have been able to get another one until some time in 2025 or 2026.”

            If I had known about this in advance, I would have just walked in and bought the speaker the old-fashioned way. But the speaker was bought and paid for and, presumably, would be brought out to the loading zone when I finally figured out The Process, so oh well.

            In any case, I went  to the library to do something else and then, while there, realized that I had a badly frayed section in my pants, in an area where with that kind of thing it matters whether or not you are wearing underwear—which I wasn’t. Fortunately I did not have to do anything after that before I could go home and change. If I had had to I think I would have committed vehicular manslaughter.

            Attempt #2 to pick up the speaker worked, but was also aggravating as all hell. This is the world of everyone being confined to their cars all of the time because relentless anomie has been plugged to us all as “convenience”—and perhaps it is “convenient,” in a way, since people will simply believe anything that advertises itself as “convenient.” If something claims to be cheap and it isn’t, you can tell; if it claims to be fast and it isn’t, you can tell; if it claims, however, to be convenient and it isn’t, there is a temptation to assume that, since “convenience” is so vague, maybe it is more “convenient” on some difficult-to-measure level that you’re just too much of a luddite to see. More often than not this level is the level on which anomie sets in and people become obsessively unhappy with and afraid of one another. At the store, one shops. One goes out to the shops and meets people in the shops. Growing up I did in fact dislike that process very much, but that was just one case among many of people who were unhappy kids in the 1990s and 2000s not realizing how good we, in fact, had it.

On the Egotism of the Summer People

Warm-weather people are the morning people of weather.

Other Topics Not Covered in This Autoflorilegium: The unconscionable treatment and constant betrayal of people who live in the Gaza Strip; New Caledonia; Great Britain; the apparently extraordinarily bad movie Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage; the very good movie Marathon Man and the virtues and vices of the schools of acting that it features; my health; other people’s health; Pope Francis’s use of the quasi-reclaimed offensive Italian slang term frociaggine; what makes a good and a bad socialist realist propaganda poster.

Greetings from the Peacock Room

I.

Recently I undertook a solo road trip to Washington, DC, one that I think aided my understanding of the country, of many things of deep importance to me, and, least importantly, of myself.

The trip to DC itself was interesting, as was the return drive, which took a different, more coastal route. Traveling often puts me in mind of the Japanese writers who perfected travel literature, as Occitan writers perfected lyric love poetry and English writers perfected the novel. Bashō Matsuo is the obvious (in certain circles) example, but we could also name Arii Shokyū, Jippensha Ikku, and Suzuki Bokushi, list just a few from the Edo period alone. I’ll describe part of the journey in a narrative mode that vaguely pastiches some of these writers:

I set off through New York down Interstate 88, through fields and hills speckled with hard snow, on a frigid evening after leaving work. Stopping at a Mirabito in the middle of nowhere for a chicken spiedie—not something I normally eat—and to fill up my gas tank, I played with the cruise control to get the mileage as economical as I could as I finished the first leg and entered Pennsylvania. I stopped for the night at a Fairfield Inn and Suites in Wilkes-Barre, in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The second day of travel, the bulk of which was in Pennsylvania, was perhaps the most interesting from a human-geographical perspective, in some ways more so than the time I spent at my final destination in the capital.

My main objectives for that day were to meet up with my friend Laurel, whom I do not see often, and to visit Centralia. Centralia, a town almost entirely abandoned because of an anthracite coal fire that has been burning underground since the 1960s, is well-known among connoisseurs of decaying, left-behind, and generally vanishing places. To the extent that the town still has life to it, that life is, touchingly, almost entirely religious; there is an active Catholic church (built on solid rock, not on burning coal) that now serves surrounding towns, and people are still being buried in Centralia’s Eastern Orthodox burying ground. (Also touching is the view from a still-active coal fire vent to a ridge on which a series of windmills stands; volvitur orbis!) The town smells about how one would expect, only the smell is so faint that it manifests as a mild headache and unpleasant aftertaste in the throat, rather than as anything that one recognizes as an odor. Before Centralia I tried and failed to get to confession at a church in Hazleton; after Centralia I proceeded to Ashland, a small town hard by where I made a spontaneous stop at a little restaurant for a fried haddock special, it having been a Lenten Friday. I had it with a strawberry milkshake; my diet that day was, in general, very bad.

Northeastern Pennsylvania is generally quite bleak, a region whose heart has been broken not only by deindustrialization but by policy choices that accompanied deinsdustrialization; there’s no iron law that technological unemployment has to end up like this, quite the contrary. It takes deliberate choices to let somewhere like this rot on the vine rather than building up new industries and new lines of work in the same general region. Reagan and Clinton both have much to answer for on this point. Also, like many other parts of my route, it’s full of overtly religious and patriotic appeals in advertising for businesses so disconnected from religion and patriotism that it gave the heebie jeebies to a New Englander like me. One small city has a “Christian Clothing” consignment store; another has a gutter cleaner whose logo has multiple separate American flags in it. It was a trip that many people from my part of the country, especially LGBT people, would have thought twice before taking. This is not to be wondered at; trans people in particular, which I’m going to define in an unfashionably objective and concrete way as “people who have a persistent discomfort or unease of some kind with the visceral aspects of what sex they are and would like at least in theory to do something about that,” are currently a political football in Middle America to a point that tends to raise real questions about one’s safety. I’ll return to this point later on in this essay.

After Centralia and Ashland, I met up with Laurel in the little town near Lancaster where she lives, no thanks to the exit I decided to take from Interstate 81. After spending about an hour with her, chatting and looking at a South-Central Pennsylvania chocolatier that she insists—correctly—is much better than Hershey’s, I got back on I-81 as quickly as possible and played a game with myself: I would drive so as to conserve gas and not need to refuel before crossing the Mason-Dixon Line into Maryland. I almost made it, but I did not want to risk getting stranded for a pride about which nobody else knew or cared; I pulled off in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, just before the Line, and refueled at a Sheetz whose pump, for some reason, did not stop automatically once the tank was full. I noticed that gas prices in the Mid-Atlantic are much higher than in New England and Upstate New York. The land was getting greener, spring rather than winter, and the sky was just turning from blue to evening-gold.

As much for the sake of it as to avoid the worst of Beltway rush hour Friday, in the gloaming I took a detour through Harpers Ferry, the first time I had ever been in the State of West Virginia. I was delighted to see that it had one of the best-preserved downtowns I have ever seen, from the standpoint of intact buildings from the period for which the town is famous. The landscape, where the Shenandoah River meets the Potomac, is craggy and dramatic even in near-dark; not for nothing is West Virginia the only state entirely covered in mountainous terrain, no matter how much Vermonters like me try to relativize the Lake Champlain basin. The John Brown Wax Museum, at least when driven past in the blue hour, looks as macabre as it should, and as inviting.

The last leg of the trip into DC—or technically into Northern Virginia, where Mary, the friend with whom I stayed for the second and third nights of the trip, lives—was not very interesting, although I did survive driving the Washington Beltway (so well-known from the phrase “Washington Beltway”), as indeed I would again the next day and the day after that.

II.

That Saturday was rainy in the morning and cloudy-to-sunny in the afternoon. This did not bother me overmuch; “rain in Northern Virginia” is an inside joke with some friends of mine, and it also meant that I was able to park in East Potomac Park without too much trouble and see the somewhat bedraggled, but still very pretty, Tidal Basin cherry blossoms without jostling enormous crowds. The last time I had been to the capital, in either 1999 or 2000—certainly before Bush took office—when I was a small child, had not been in the cherry blossom season, but I had a clear memory of the Tidal Basin and, of course, found it almost unchanged. So too with the National Mall. Some of the specific buildings and monuments that I passed were, of course, new, but nothing about the overall layout was; indeed, it had not been in 1999 or 2000 either.

This did not surprise me. DC is set up in a way that, were it an archaeological site in England, would get it called a ritual landscape without qualification or controversy. This is well-known to the point that there are conspiracy theories about it. The city is an interlocking series of gridlike, starlike, and triangular patterns, most of which are themselves relatively normal urban or suburban streets but which end up converging on the famous central features: the Washington Monument, the White House, the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, and numerous other national and constitutional structures in and around the National Mall, Tidal Basin, and Ellipse. The general approach to changing anything about the setup is additive rather than substitutive; recent structures like the World War II and Martin Luther King Memorials have simply been incorporated into previously open areas of the existing layout. (The King Memorial has a distinctly Mosaic vibe, with a rock wall split in two over which artificial waterfalls course.)

One would think that this reflects an additive principle in American civic nationalism in general, and in some ways it does, but in other ways our general approach to history as a country has actually been getting thinner and poorer over time. With someone like Christopher Columbus (who distinctly lacks a memorial or monument in the capital’s ritual landscape, although Union Station has one), the current status of fodder for flame wars about wokeness is clearly a step down from the twentieth-century status of ecumenical national hero. That, too, however, was already a step down from the nineteenth century’s more complicated and realistic view of the man. When last winter I visited a preserved 1870s schoolroom at the Bennington Museum in Vermont, I found a poem called “The Discovery of America” by an author named John Townsend Trowbridge, which tells a pat, conventional, complacent version of the story until the last stanza, then cold-cocks the Gilded Age schoolchild with:

With wondering awe, the red men saw

The silken cross unfurled.

His task was done; for good or ill,

The fatal banners of Castile

Waved o’er the Western world.

This in an otherwise approving story told about American colonial history! In the twentieth century this sort of observation became a political third rail, and now in the twenty-first it has become a culture war flashpoint. In the late nineteenth it was uncontroversial enough for publishers of primary-school readers to allow it to be made to ten-year-olds. Clearly some of the texture of American history has been sanded down here, whereas the National Mall and Tidal Basin ritual landscape just keeps adding texture, as, frankly, it should.

Americans in the 1870s had quite a lot to say about other cultures as well as about our own, which brings me to the central reason why I wanted to visit Washington: a visit to the Peacock Room, an installation artwork by James Abbott McNeill Whistler that currently occupies part of the Freer Gallery at the National Museum of Asian Art. I became aware of the Peacock Room in the early 2010s during discussions about Orientalism in the Japanese language and literature major to which I have alluded twice already, and in divinity school a few years later I did a lengthy independent-study paper about Western receptions of Buddhism that touched on some aspects of its look and feel. Thus it came up in both my undergraduate and my graduate education, and, I think, reasonably so; the style and content are indeed Orientalist, and specifically japoniste, as all hell. The room is executed mostly in gold and a vivid peacock-y teal; there are gilt fighting peacocks on the wall at one end and a painting (famous in its own right) called “The Princess from the Land of Porcelain” over a fireplace at the other; multiple owners of the room have filled it with Asian ceramics to suit their tastes. Frederick Richards Leyland, the British shipping magnate who hired first the architect Thomas Jeckyll and then Whistler to design and execute the room, was unhappy with it both aesthetically and because of the enormous fee Whistler charged; the fighting peacocks represent Leyland and Whistler and are titled “Art and Money; or, The Story of the Room.”

This is one of a very few instances of this type of conflict in which I tend to side with the industrialist over the artist. Whistler did a dramatic installation in another person’s house without adequate involvement or consent either from the house’s owner or from the original artist from whom Whistler had taken on the job. This is not, to me, so much an issue of art versus money as one of hubris versus humility. But at least the Peacock Room looks astonishing. People who behave like Whistler do about artistic commissions nowadays more often than not come out with some kind of AI drivel or, at best, art that’s no better or worse, no more or less impressive, than what the commissioning party asked for in the first place.

After the Freer Gallery I parted ways with Mary for a few hours and went on a very long walk, much of it in the company of still another friend (I meet a lot of people online). I did briefly take a bus, to get from the area around the Mall to the area around Georgetown University, which is more leafy and dense-suburban and closer to a “normal” East Coast city of Washington’s rough size. The bus routes ostensibly take cash for the most part but after the COVID year 2020 there was a push to make some app the default, like for seemingly everything else these days; the driver’s machine had some problems with the cash and I couldn’t figure out how to work the app even once I had it downloaded, but the driver, kind man!, let me on anyway.

I enjoyed meeting up with this friend; we talked about things like fascism (agin’) and the architecture of the Washington National Cathedral (fer), to which we walked through Dumbarton Oaks Park and past the Naval Observatory and up Embassy Row. (I particularly liked seeing the Italian embassy, the Wiphala flying outside the Bolivian embassy, and the aggressive pro-Ukraine propaganda throughout the residential street immediately facing the Russian embassy.) After about two hours we parted ways, because I still had to get to confession—I had been trying and failing throughout the previous week, for a variety of reasons that I personally find hilarious with the long /aɪ/ in retrospect—and then to the MLK Memorial to meet up with Mary at five o’ clock. Since my phone was by this point dying, and then dead, and since I did not really have time to sit somewhere fiddling with its infernally finicky charger port, this turned into a long and almost completely uninterrupted shlep across Washington, orienting myself by a combination of street signage, the Washington Monument, and vibes.

I walked, in total, about eleven and a half miles that day, not counting however much walking I did inside the Freer Gallery. It was worth it. My right hip, both knees, and both calves hurt for days.

III.

Let me come back again to my observation about people from my part of the country, especially people who are “queer” in whatever sense I am. I refer here to what gets called gender dysphoria, which gives me a relationship with LGBT self-concept that is indeterminate in a way that pains me; I am on the side of the concrete and the legible whenever possible. A lot of people in my position would have avoided making parts of this trip. This probably includes the eleven-and-a-half-mile hauling-of-ass through the nation’s capital; this is an almost completely unfamiliar city to me, after all. Yet I went, I did all of this, and I’m glad I did. There’s a Sylvia Plath quote that I often think about:

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

My situation is unlike Plath’s in many, many ways, most of which give me more freedom when it comes to things like this than she had. I too wanted and still want to be able to do these kinds of things, and I, unlike Plath, am in a position where I actually get to make a choice about it. Or it’s better to say that I have to make a choice, maybe; as with all choices, to have this one looses in some ways and binds in others. This sort of thing is, simply put, in large part why I’ve set aside any realistic prospect of outwardly expressing my subjective sense of myself to the world. I suppose I have spent too much of my life too zonked-out on Japanese literature to find this as troubling as would many; who am I, that I would be mindful of myself?

Troubling or not, self-abnegating or not, this served me well when I was poking around Centralia, or ordering the “haddie” special at the restaurant in Ashland, or undertaking the hours-long trek across the District of Chaos. “You exist in the context,” as Kamala Harris (a resident of the Naval Observatory herself) says, “of all in which you live and what came before you.” This distinctively Californian spin on the Democratic Party’s more general “you didn’t build that ethos” seems, to me, relevant here. We are discussing queerness, closetedness, travel, and, on the other hand, the sense of having been passed by or passed over that animates a lot of the cultural and political tenseness in the fruited plain. These aren’t really matters of individual identity. They’re matters of what one can bear in order to relate to other people, and what one cannot.

The Freer Gallery currently has, in addition to the Peacock Room, another Whistler exhibit, and I think this exhibit might valuably be put into conversation, as they say, with this issue about “existing in the context.” The exhibit focuses on Whistler’s streetside scenes of storefronts and working-poor houses, many in neighborhoods of Paris or London that were about to be redeveloped. The interpretation of this material is some of the most critical I’ve ever seen in any museum, in the sense of calling attention to moral problems with the artist. If Sargent painted the élite in a way that deliberately bracketed out social and political tensions around their status (he did not, but this is the common stereotype about his work), Whistler painted the poor that way, reducing them to a closely cropped individual and thus subjective ego. The cropping, in many cases, is literal; the pictures are physically very small, unlike “The Princess from the Land of Porcelain,” which is much larger than I had realized. Divorcing the subject’s ego from his or her surroundings, from the political and economic situation appurtenant to a butcher or an ironmonger or a mud lark or a lady of the evening or whatever, leaves the élite client’s, patron’s, and audience’s egos out of it. Sargent is able to criticize his subjects on a personal and psychological level; “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” is the famous example, but I find his mother-daughter portrait of Gretchen and Rachel Warren, which is in the same room at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, at least as troubling, in a Sarah Waters sort of way. Whistler’s patrons are off the hook here because not only does he not depict them, at least not in this particular subset of his work, he doesn’t even depict the socioeconomic order that they built and that they maintain.

Whistler didn’t want to exist in the context, yet he did; I would not be able to be so critical of him otherwise. I hope if people end up as viciously critical of me and my decisions, about the world and about myself, a hundred and fifty years from now, it’ll be in connection with an achievement as impressive as the Peacock Room. I doubt it, though, and that’s okay too, because there’s no inherent virtue to either the chase after achievement or the chase after earthly memory.

IV.

After my “main” DC day I still had almost twenty-four hours before I absolutely had to start heading home. I ended up using, more or less, twenty-one of them.

A lot of what I did with that Saturday evening has to do with family history that I have around Annapolis and on the Eastern Shore. I don’t want to go into too much detail about this; I think of my family history, especially the positive parts, as having put certain deep structures at the roots of my personality that I do not now want to air out in detail. What I will say is that I had a very good and not-even-too-late dinner on Kent Island, a snapper (or bream, as some call it, such as in Sasameyuki) braised in some unidentifiable but very delicious sauce, on a bed of rice pilaf with steamed vegetables. I had all this with a glass of prosecco. It was windy and got dark faster than I would have expected, perhaps because it was so close to the spring equinox. The restaurant gave directly on the Chesapeake Bay and the lights of the Bay Bridge were insistent in the gloaming.

I also went to a Wawa in Annapolis; I did not know that there were Wawas in Annapolis. More on Wawa generally some other time.

The next morning was Palm Sunday. I took my leave of Mary—whom I did greatly enjoy spending time with; I have not talked much about my visits with the friends mentioned, or about my friends as people, but that is a matter of their privacy and not my level of interest—and went to Mass at Saint Matthew’s Cathedral, near Dupont Circle. It is a remarkable building, even though it is not a purpose-built cathedral; the Romanesque Revival art suggests somewhere like Ravenna, and there is a chapel to Saint Anthony of Padua that has beautiful frescoes of early Franciscan history. I prayed in that chapel with the text of (most of) the Canticle of the Creatures carved below the frescoes to three sides of me, then sat down for Mass under a distinctly worried-looking Saint Mark the Evangelist.

The Archbishop of Washington, Wilton Cardinal Gregory, preached, mainly, about trees. The locus classicus here is The Dream of the Rood, although one finds everything from motets to terrible Christian children’s videos on the same theme. You can probably find the homily online; it’s a pretty good one. “Pretty good” is, as will probably not surprise anybody with a quantum more familiarity with Washington than I have, unfortunately not something that can at all be said of the traffic leaving this Mass. (Incidentally, on the way out I overheard two older women arguing about whether or not “vote early, vote often” is an LBJ quote. I think I recognized one of their voices from cable news.) In part because the weather was now fair—and how beautiful the cherry trees were when I drove along the Tidal Basin!—it took me an hour longer than I expected to get out of the District for a supposedly planned-ahead lunch with my editor at a Catholic website for which I write. The lunch was in a very suburban place, which I have to say I do not mind as much as I once did. The conversation and company were good, but of course had to be cut much shorter than would have been the case had I had a more reasonable way of coping with and arranging things around that traffic.

From there on home, an adventure itself and one not necessarily as pleasant or as edifying as the drive down through Pennsylvania. Several points stick out. Before entirely leaving the Washington area, I stocked up on Old Bay as requested and required by a Marylander colleague back home. In the Eastern Shore, I listened to gospel radio out of Baltimore until the station gave out; this was a mere couple of days before the bridge collapse in that city. (One standout was a partially spoken-word rendition of the story of the empty tomb; I’d love to find it again some day but I did not look for the title and the name of the choir in time.) From the Eastern Shore on Route 301 I crossed into the State of Delaware, where the constant smoke of some kind of horrible DuPont chemical plant rises up between the branches of flowering fruit trees and the struts of white bridges. The state has been a point of amusement for my housemate Veronica and me for years now; I stopped and bought her a two-and-a-half-dollar refrigerator magnet that reads “Delightful Delaware,” nothing more, against a simplistic gradient background.

From Delaware one crosses, of course, into New Jersey, a state which is full of places of my memory. I lived there between the ages of eight and fifteen and then on and off, because my parents were still there, till the age of twenty. I owe to my time there many of my tastes and habits, a few lasting friendships, and a certain feeling of push-pull with ugly or disreputable places; this last is a feeling of which I am very protective. Once when my friend Antonio told me that I could not invoke home-state immunity-from-criticism privileges for every state I had ever lived in, I chose to invoke it only for New Jersey from then on; “bold choice,” he said, “but I understand it strategically.”

I’ll elide this, for the same reason I elided some of the stuff about my family history around the Chesapeake Bay. I will say only that I returned home very late at night, after a sparkling snowstorm with an underlayer of power-line-downing ice.

An Autoflorilegium

The foregoing is a collection of my thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, over the past five or so years. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or multiblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.

On Taylor Swift

As a Taylor Swift fan who cordially dislikes gridiron football (I think this combination of tastes is what in right-wing grievance lingo is called “cultural Marxism”), I hope the “synergy” in which she is for some reason to do with the NFL now loses its luster as soon as possible.

I haven’t been to any of the Eras Tour shows (I don't exactly make “Taylor Swift tickets” money as a museum archivist, and even if I did, I overstimulate easily), but I’ve seen a fair number of fan bootleg clips from them and it’s really an astounding spectacle. We’re talking a setlist that rivals your typical Springsteen concert, pyrotechnics that could seriously injure Swift if she gets sloppy with her choreography, lighting effects and stage design that seem precision-engineered to remind one at every moment that she is an overgrown theater kid with an unlimited budget and at least one unmedicated mood disorder—why be to do with football as well?

This is not apropos of the above (except in the ways that it is), but I have, as I’ve said, been spoiling to tell people off about this:

Substantively, strong-to-dispositive arguments can and should be made that Taylor Swift’s actual ouevre is a lot less monomaniacally obsessed with buttressing heteronormativity than her public image tends to suggest. This shows up in her choices of hypotexts, in her aesthetic and intellectual relationships with other artists, and in specific songs like (off the top of my head) “Wonderland,” “Seven,” and “Ivy.” This doesn’t mean that Taylor Swift the human person is gay or bisexual, but it’s at least a little bit likelier to mean that than it is to mean that Taylor Swift the cultural product (an ungainly generation-absorbing chimera better understood by drinking heavily while watching Millennium Actress than by experiencing or researching anything in the mind-independent physical world) is “queer.” She isn’t, and people aren’t really saying that she is. These are three separate Taylor Swifts. No one worth listening to is arguing that the one who’s to do with gridiron football now for some reason is gay.

What’s demoralizing about every time Gaylor (both in the narrow sense of speculation about Taylor Swift not being straight and in the broad sense of the LGBT side of Taylor Swift’s fandom) makes mainstream news is the hostility to which LGBT Swifties, especially lesbian Swifties, are subjected. It can get shockingly overt, to the point of making one wonder how much other homophobia is just barely repressed in our society rather than having actually been overcome, but it also shows up in coded forms. Foremost among these is the idea that Gaylor speculah (to use an old anime fandom word) is somehow more egregious and insulting than other kinds of invasive speculah about Taylor Swift’s affective life, an idea that only makes any sense at all if you do on some level think that saying that someone is gay or bisexual is derogatory. The bemusement with which LGBT people who like more-firmly-queer art and do not like Taylor Swift tend to react is a bit more understandable, but still depressing to see because of the no-true-Scotsman element and the apparent lack of awareness that millions of people like Taylor Swift and also like Jen Cloher and Rina Sawayama and Boygenius and Killing Eve and so on.

In conclusion, Gaylor is a land of contrasts.

On Sports

Speaking of football, but not of Taylor Swift, the legalization of sports gambling has made mainstream sports TV, ESPN and the like, damn near unwatchable for anyone who isn’t a gambler, and I know people with otherwise vigorously libertarian views on gambling and other (of what used to be called) “vice” issues who think it was a mistake from a sheer quality-of-life standpoint.

It seems like such a shame to see sports in terms of bets about outcomes anyway, and this fuels my aesthetic dislike for sabermetrics as well; obviously it “matters” who “wins,” but in other countries, Tunisia for instance, I have seen large celebrations of local soccer teams that did not even win, just because they played a good game—and I myself liked both the Red Sox and the Orioles better when they won less.

On the 2023 Writer’s Guild of America Strike

Not only does a television writers' strike not cause much harm, out-and-out automating cultural production does. Too, if human writers really can't produce anything better than whatever ChatGPT’s great-grandscion program spews out for Avengers Wars 69, then we’re already halfway down the road from Rossetti’s “Amor Mundi.”

The only current scripted American TV show that I’m actively following is Yellowjackets, which genuinely could not be written, at all, without human consideration. If subsequent seasons suck because of this then I’ll be upset, but not nearly as upset as I’ll be if the strike fails and in ten years nobody has anything to watch that’s better-written than a fin de millénaire car commercial.

Moreover there have by definition to be some things that aren’t automated in order for human society to not just be that one wojak comic of someone hooked into a Harry Potter-themed VR headset while on a morphine drip.

On the Remake of the Film Mean Girls and Its Discontents

For Regina George being on TikTok now, she doesn't default to saying “fucking kys” nearly as much as is realistic for a high school bully born in ~2006. I'm not sure I'd say this ruins the tone—Mean Girls isn't exactly Heathers or Jawbreaker to begin with—but the tone is noticeably different, especially given instances of outright bowdlerization when in the original they call people sluts or dykes. There’s also a failure to accurately reflect the huge differences between bullying twenty years ago and bullying today, even though everyone is on social media (i.e., again, Regina should always be telling people to kill themselves, probably from behind seven burner accounts). We're left with unnecessarily softened forms of bullying behaviors that were mostly extirpated from American schools over a decade ago, all being filmed for TikTok for some reason. Some of the songs are really fun, and there are interesting and considered acting choices being made, particularly by the women playing Regina and Janis. The woman playing Cady is a bit more questionable, but that's interesting in itself since it means that she comes off as genuinely offputting and difficult to understand from the perspective of the characters who have been socialized normally.

On Various Movies That I Watched in June 2019, Written at That Time and Largely Unedited

Tolkien (2019)

This is a paint-by-numbers biopic that at more than a few points actively bored me and that felt way longer than it actually was; I would not see it again, at least not in its entirety. It fudges the facts in ways that sometimes make its subject look worse rather than better than he actually was and its treatment of his religious background is perfunctory at best. However, it’s not completely fatuous, not compared to actively audience-insulting biopics like The Babe Ruth Story or that Lifetime movie about J.K. Rowling; it does dramatize some of the key moments of Tolkien’s early life pretty well, its lead actors (Nicholas Hoult as Tolkien and Lily Collins as his eventual wife Edith) more or less know what they’re doing, and the production designs are pretty. A few early scenes with Tolkien’s mother Mabel, who is often overlooked when people discuss his early influences, were especially welcome to me; I particularly liked one where she puts on a magic lantern show for him and his brother.

From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)

With this Studio Ghibli movie we have a “save the historic building” plotline wedded with surprising grace to what in other hands would probably have been a shockingly melodramatic emotional arc involving the female protagonist’s male love interest finding out his true parentage. It’s set in Japan in the early 1960s and when I watched it with my mother a lot of the material culture and even some of the songs felt familiar from her 1960s American childhood. These moments of recognition and nostalgia are common with Ghibli movies and I felt them too even though I was born in 1993. People say that Japan is a socially conservative country, and they’re right to say it, not because of “hot-button issues” but because much of the country looks basically as it does in this movie even now. The cute, fun-but-contemplative, jazzy soundtrack is a particular standout.

Suspiria (1977)

Midnight-movie stalwart Jessica Harper and her friend Stefania Casini go up against an evil coven at her posh European ballet school in this gore-soaked Italian horror classic directed by Anthony Bourdain’s father-in-law. A female friend of mine says that this movie looks the way a heavy period feels; its chief strength is its lurid cinematography, and Harper’s mega-ingenue balsa-wood acting style would go on to serve her well in the lesser-known Rocky Horror Picture Show sequel Shock Treatment. Harper is in her late twenties in this but looks maybe nineteen after wardrobe and makeup; her character is an interesting missing link between classic Gothic heroines like Mina Harker from Dracula and The Turn of the Screw’s nameless governess and more proactive but also more morally and (sometimes) sexually innocent “final girls” like the girl from Scream and Buffy the Vampire Slayer from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Field of Dreams (1989)

It surprises me that there’s never been any kind of fad for this movie in Millennial social media circles. In so many ways it’s tailor-made for “Tumblr”-ish aesthetic tastes—it’s pervaded with American Gothic imagery with its unexplained disembodied voices and time-traveling baseball ghosts manifesting out of cornfields, Kevin Costner’s character is defined by proto-Chris Evans nonthreatening flannel-and-dad-jeans masculinity, it has an unsympathetic character being called a Nazi in public, it’s an unintentional eighties period piece in a way that people were all over two or three years ago, and on top of all this it’s a well-written and visually beautiful movie. It’s possible that the sports-driven premise and the fact that the movie is a Father’s Day staple and lots of people have awful relationships with their fathers put the social media scene off of it, but if so, I think that’s a shame.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is both a prequel and a sequel to the original Mamma Mia!, and that fact, which sounds at first like a gimmick, is in fact exactly what makes this otherwise insubstantial movie work and resonate at a surprisingly deep level. It would be ridiculous to say that this is a religious movie in the sense that The Song of Bernadette and Kundun are religious movies. What it is, however, is a movie that is at least occasionally able to look beyond its own boundaries to imagine an eternal world of total significance and utter joy. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is a rigidly-enforced no-irony zone in which past, present, and future; sea, sand, sun, and sky; art and nature; “and we ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted” are fused into a bright blue eternity whose beginning is in its end, through a riot of unselfconscious musical joy, in saecula saeculorum.

On the Battle of the Sexes

People who get set off by every little thing have always been with us. Thinking of it as a recent phenomenon specially linked to women or to feminism strikes me as confirmation bias.

On Bob Katter, Australian Politician

Every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a moose in Northern New England.

On Jim Jordan, US Congressman

A few ideas for unconventional Speaker candidates, given the GOP's demonstrated preference for abusive sports coaches:

Jerry Sandusky
Joe Paterno’s ghost
That Jim Foster guy from Northwestern’s baseball team
John Kreese from The Karate Kid
Ben Scott from Yellowjackets
Rex from Napoleon Dynamite
Eteri Tutberidze
Tonya Harding’s ex-husband
My high school gym teacher, from what I can remember

On Elena Ferrante

There’s apparently serious controversy among meridionalists about whether Ferrante is sufficiently critical of her namesake protagonist’s attitude at the end of L’amica geniale (the first book in the series that, in Italian, has the same title). As of this writing I have not finished the series and so I am keeping an open mind; I think how angry I am at Lenù right now is intentional on Ferrante’s part, but we’ll see how things evolve from here.

Galling, either way, that someone would make an active choice to ignore a real class conflict happening in real time in the same room as her in favor of listening to some guy bloviate about his trick of writing magazine articles about class conflict by regurgitating other articles and ISTAT papers. Plebs this, plebs that; Lila deserves better, especially since Lenù’s thoughts and feelings about Lila herself—we all have some idea what I mean by this; “dissolving margins”; “I had made a place for her in me”—are also so vague and self-evading, things she just won’t look straight at no matter how much mental drudgery she has to put into looking at other things instead.

Not that that is entirely her fault. Every time I think the teachers in L'amica geniale can’t get more classist, they come out with some horrifying shit like “Lila’s mental beauty all went to her tits and ass,” said directly to another teenage girl. It’s not even classism in the economic sense, since Lila is one of the wealthiest characters at this point, but that makes it all the more pernicious since, especially if you are the Smarted Gifted Kid Who’s Good at School, it’s more difficult to recognize it as classism rather than as a sound appraisal of the value of an education. It is to be mourned that Lenù eventually loses the ability to see through it.

I know that Ferrante is doing this for a reason and I know what that reason is, but every time Lenù’s narration refers derisively to the Neapolitan language as “dialect” my skin crawls. And that starts early on.

Other Topics Not Covered in This Autoflorilegium: the 1990s Children’s Book Series Animorphs; the 2006 Anime Simoun; the Locked Tomb Books; the Band Boygenius and Its Discontents; Most Matters Directly Involving Religion; Preservation; Touch-Aversion; the Egotism of the Summer People

The Last True Conservatives

The very-online extreme right, in addition to its many other faults and failings, tends to have a crass, self-conscious masculinity to it. Either in the “pure” form of jacked douchebags who like yelling slurs or in the “inverted” form of resentful Shiraha-from-Konbini-ningen-type evolutionary-psychology-obsessed incels, an enormous proportion of the online rightosphere consists of people with heavily masculinity-inflected beliefs and concerns. I have not experienced this for myself because I only date women, but I’m told that in some quarters the synthesis of “masculinity in crisis” and far-right channer politics is so advanced that women who are interested in men date seemingly normal people whom they realize only later get their views on the great issues of the day from people with handles like “Bronze Age Pervert” posting screeds in the already-unfortunate “Twitter thread” format all day long. It goes without saying, at least among those in the know, that there is usually something homoerotic about this as well; witness the fixation on the deceased Japanese novelist, bodybuilder, and right-wing political commentator Mishima Yukio (whose output of novels and short stories, if nothing else, deserves better than being associated with these people), or the tendency to idolize early periods of Western cultural development in which many or most literate men were either so misogynistic they wrapped round to being gay or so gay they wrapped round to being misogynists. A recent article in The Atlantic about Bronze Age Pervert—a real person or, to make a distinction that Mishima himself would readily understand, at least a real persona, not just a name I made up as a stick to beat an ideal-type with—addresses this directly and at some length. According to Richard Spencer, the infamous former neo-Nazi leader who these days is happy to go on the record for essays in liberal newsmagazines, Bronze Age Pervert is obviously gay; the article’s author describes Spencer himself as a “homoerotic fascist” as well. But what if there were a distaff counterpart of sorts to all of this, a fringey rightist current heavily laden with lesbian cultural signifiers and preoccupied with the idea that femininity, rather than masculinity, is in crisis in weak, enervated, effete, androgynized modernity? I am not happy, but not not happy, to report that such a current does or did exist, and that it has or had surprising links to several other people, places, and things about which I have written before.

I want to make it clear from the outset that I do not write about this current, which in its classic form was named Aristasianism and called Web 1.0 chat groups and certain clubs in 1990s London home, from a place of ideological sympathy. I will be presenting it as a tacitly racist, avowedly elitist and class-snobbish movement that escapes being a form of fascism only through its commitment to pre-fascist ideas about subjects like culture, sexuality, authority, punishment, and the state. Much of what I have to say about Aristasianism may sound sympathetic and perhaps even approving, but the truth is much simpler: I think Aristasianism is funny, in a way that is not true of Bronze Age Pervert, the so-called manosphere, masculinity-obsessed fascist pseudointellectuals like Julius Evola, or frankly even Mishima outside a few specific stock jokes about him and deliberate instances of humor in his novels. Part of this is simply because a bunch of lesbian poshos, no matter how conservative they are, just do not have the pull within “real politics” that right-wing men tend to; part of it, however, is because of the uniquely complicated and surreal underpinnings of Aristasian political philosophy. Aristasian thought involves multiple layers of reality, a cosmic shift to degeneration and decay that happens to coincide with the culture shocks of the 1960s, and, most characteristically, a posited parallel world in some way “realer” than the immediately apparent world in which men do not exist and there are two feminine sexes, blondes and brunettes.

All of this comes from a quintessentially English-eccentric mishmash of 1. ideas taken from Dharmic religions (either 1a. directly or 1b. through motivated and often politicized interpretations in the writings of Western scholars like Mircea Eliade and René Guénon) and 2. classic prejudices of the British upper and upper-middle classes. Like many such trends and currents, it seems to have begun at Oxford. “A History of Aristasia-in-Telluria” by someone going by Miss Anthea Rosetti, a document on a website called aristasia.net which as of this writing must be accessed via Wayback Machine but is probably the closest thing extant to an official internal history of the movement, is my source for much of this, although I’ll discuss some other, more hostile witnesses later on. By Rosetti’s account, “at Lady Margaret Hall [one of Oxford University’s constituent colleges] in the early 1970s[, a] group of Sapphically inclined female students who sensibly disliked the modern world and admired the philsophical (sic) works of René Guenon (sic) found each other.” To the extent that I do have any unironic ideological sympathy for Aristasia, it is probably situated here; a political and philosophical framework for right-wing or traditionalist-conservative lesbians that is not just copying and pasting mainstream rightist politics into an incidentally-lesbian mind like Cynthia from Dykes to Watch Out for is something that probably needs to exist. History is full of examples of gay people whose orientation did not lead them to the broadly left-liberal value set that we associate with the LGBT community today, and in this respect these “Sapphically inclined” early-70s Oxonians were engaging with and advancing a worthy intellectual tradition. It isn’t even completely novel or outré that they were unhappy with the cultural changes of the preceding decade; gay writers like Mary Renault and Noël Coward were at best ambivalent about them as well, and memoirs of Hollywood actresses of the period often remark that their roles got worse in the first few years after the Hays Code fell. Indeed, I would argue that this first cohort of proto-Aristasians have a sincerity and courage of their convictions to them that one sees precisely in their not having had as much to gain from turning back the clock as many people who were not lesbians would have.

The early-stage Aristasians did not use that term yet; they went by a number of names that, according to Rosetti and other sources, included Lux Madriana (“Light of the Mother,” in an early phase that emphasized the religious dimensions of the movement, a form of monotheistic goddess-worship), Romantians, and the Silver Sisterhood. By the time of the Silver Sisterhood name, in the 1980s, they had moved to a compound in County Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland, which they ran in a way supposedly styled after a Victorian girls’ boarding school. This is the point at which some of the more hostile witnesses come in and at which another characteristic Aristasian preoccupation—physical discipline of a type that they (implausibly, in my opinion) insisted was not sexual in motivation—becomes prominent. Of the at least seven or eight meanings of the euphemism “the English vice,” sadomasochistic sexual practices in general and flogging in particular are among the most common, and the latter was a facet of Britain’s traditional educational culture that “St. Bride’s School” seems to have adopted with verve. There continued to be a strong religious and mystical element derived in large measure from Guénon’s “Perennial Philosophy” interpretations of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, as was the case at every stage of the Aristasian subculture, but the surface-level aesthetics of the 1980s iteration were those of a posh girls’ school in the Home Counties, or perhaps in the Bombay Presidency, around a hundred years before. They kept casting about for pre-“Eclipse” (their term for the shocks of the 1960s) societies and ways of life to emulate, the consistent animating conviction seeming to have been that, wherever the society or culture that they wanted lay, it has to have been somewhere in the past—or in another world, since this was also probably around when the concept of “Aristasia Pura, the Feminine Empire,” with its blonde-brunette sexual binary, was introduced.

The disciplinarian penchant, the promiscuous borrowing from past ways of life, and an involvement in early video game culture unfortunately aroused the attention of overtly fascist movements like the British National Party and its leader, John Tyndall, who corresponded with St. Bride’s/Silver Sisterhood leaders in the 1980s. Accounts of the nature of this correspondence and of the proto-Aristasians’ reasons for engaging in it vary. Rosetti, an Aristasian or former Aristasian who is interested in a positive assessment of the movement and its legacy, insist that the subjects discussed were “boring stuff about Guenonian (sic) metaphysics” and that Aristasia was never a racist movement, but I recently found a thread on the British internet forum Mumsnet that was not so sure. According to the Mumsnet thread there was a certain amount of local news coverage in the northwest of Ireland at the time that suggested, among other things, the presence of a large amount of antisemitic literature in the community. I unfortunately don’t find this difficult to believe of people who came primarily from the traditionally very antisemitic upper echelons of British and Irish society and who corresponded with the leader of the BNP. It should be noted, however, that Mumsnet is not a solid investigate source and that, in keeping with the forum’s reputation for strident transphobia, many of the people making these claims seemed primarily interested in establishing whether or not the Aristasian leaders of this time were gender essentialists because they were trans. I am not interested in “transvestigating” these people and I consider the idea that this is relevant insulting, so all I will say for now is that, while Rosetti’s view that Aristasia was consistently non-racist is probably straightforwardly wrong, it doesn’t seem to have been motivated by racism or antisemitism in the same way that Evola, Bronze Age Pervert, et al are.

I know someone who, in my opinion aptly, described the pre-fascist racism of the British Empire as “the 1910s equivalent of ‘white people drive like this and black people drive like this,’ only backed up by the armed machinery of the State.” Any movement that tries to replicate British imperial aesthetics and lifeways, even in a radically different context (like, for example, one in which lesbianism is normative and men are at best peripheral), is going to take up at least some of this through osmosis, in addition to, as I’ve stressed, whatever prejudices these women had before they were Aristasians. I have no difficulty believing that this school-cum-compound-cum-vacation-destination (yes, really, for a while it was, further calling the insistence that the flogging wasn’t meant to be erotic into doubt) was happy to communicate with racist politicians and had at least some members who read a lot of antisemitic screeds in their spare time, and one does not actually have to conceive of the movement as predicated specifically on racism—I believe Rosetti that it was and is not—in order for this to make sense. This should inspire some soul-searching on the part of people who are not motivated by racism themselves but who have ideas that are amenable to racist impulses. Mary Renault, whom I mentioned earlier, left England in part because of the widespread homophobia of the time and settled in, of all places, apartheid South Africa; what does that tell us?

In any case, the association with Tyndall was short-lived mostly because the sojourn in Ireland was itself short-lived and, whatever the relationship between Aristasia and the BNP may have been, the former do not appear to have left the latter any forwarding address. In spite of this the next stage, comprising the 1990s and early 2000s and focused in the London area, was probably Aristasia’s period of greatest public presence and political involvement, not that this is saying much for a group of radical traditionalist kinky lesbian separatist Perennialist mystics that probably never numbered more than a few dozen committed members.

I have not named any individual Aristasian leaders so far because of the community’s Potemkin village quality; prominent Aristasians cycled through personae and pseudonyms over the years and occasionally used more than one at a time, depending on the situation. Rosetti says that Hester St. Clare, the name used by the earliest of the Lux Madriana leaders at Oxford around 1970, was “probably not her real name.” Donegal-era community leaders included someone going by Sister Angelina (the figure “transvestigated” by the people on Mumsnet) and someone going by Miss Martindale. Martindale is a particularly bizarre and multivalent figure who may have retained far-right political associations, ended up with an assault conviction in 1993 in connection with the flogging and disciplinary practices (which she strongly advocated and, again, insisted were not sexually motivated), and made numbers of media appearances as a sort of sideshow in the 1990s British press. The period of her prominence, and perhaps dominance, within the movement is what Rosetti and others depict as what we might call “classic” Aristasia. The axis mundi here is London, the historical references of choice tend towards interwar rather than Victorian, the “Feminine Empire” aspect of the movement with its posited or theorized or longed-for all-female blonde-brunette world is especially emphasized, and the disciplinary practices are, despite or perhaps because of Miss Martindale’s run-in with the law, kept in the foreground as well. Documentary crews film the insides of Aristasian homes—not many of which exist, of course, but there are a few—as human-interest curiosities, women associated with the movement participate in various low-stakes culturally conservative causes such as opposing metrication, and the group expands onto the early internet. As far back as the Donegal phase the Aristasians had a somewhat hypocritical attitude towards computers; because they thought that they improved focus and concentration (which admittedly may have been true of 1980s computing technology but is certainly not true now), they treated them as exceptions to the general eschewal of post-1914 (in Donegal) or post-1965 (in London) technological forms. Thence came the involvement in the early PC game industry and thence also the very-online quality of the current remnants of the Aristasian movement, which mostly go by different names and lack or have deemphasized things like discipline, fringey rightist politics, and the stark blonde-brunette gender binary. (“What about redheads?” is one of the first questions most people ask about “Aristasia Pura.” The answer, admittedly a cogent and even thoughtful one, is that redheads in Aristasia have a hormonal or chromosomal ambiguity a bit like intersex people in our world. Relatedly, most Aristasians are “straight” in the sense that blondes go for brunettes and brunettes for blondes. Readers familiar with lesbian cultural history might find this reminiscent of butch-femme roles, but in fact the blonde-brunette binary is much more consciously tied conceptually to heterosexuality than the butch-femme binary ever was, even though it is more distinct aesthetically.)

The increasing preoccupation with online, virtual, constructed, and imagined worlds is, in my interpretation, what ultimately led to the movement’s current moribund state. In 2005 or 2006 a few newer and mostly internet-based community leaders announced something called “Operation Bridgehead,” in which they claimed to have received orders from Aristasia Pura that the this-worldly sector of the movement was to absent itself from participation in affairs of the world. For a group that thrived online and as a media curiosity in the infamously sensationalist and gawking-oriented British press, this would have been a serious blow no matter what. In Operation Bridgehead’s case the problem was compounded by a somewhat prudish new-look policy of stripping Aristasia of its overtly lesbian and quasi-sadomasochistic aspects. What was left therefore lost much of its unique appeal; Operation Bridgehead left a group of internet-dwelling fantasists who were most comfortable around other women and liked Perennialism, vague knee-jerk conservatism, and, increasingly, anime and Japanese pop culture more generally. I should stress that I do not mean most of this pejoratively. I know and like many people of whom some or most of these things are true. The problem is that there are tons of women like this in the world and one really does not need to subscribe to an idiosyncratic lesbian separatist interpretation of the Perennial Philosophy in order to be one.

In its own way, Aristasia ended up with the same problem that the “disappearing center” has in the developed West’s mainstream religious culture. If there aren’t many people retaining a set of cultural forms anyway, there is not much reason for one to retain them oneself absent a strong motivating drive to find something in them of substance that one cannot find anywhere else. You don’t go to an Episcopalian church on the Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time unless you strongly believe in God and in moderate-to-progressive Anglican theology, because there is no longer much social infrastructure around doing so, especially for younger people; you no longer style yourself an Aristasian and treat it as a moral and political imperative to dress like Greer Garson unless you have a strong belief in a system of behavior that not even the remnants of the organized Aristasian community advance any more. Even if you do, you are left basically to do it on your own. I first found out about Aristasianism years after its collapse via the YouTube comments on a video of a scene from a mid-2000s anime, probably not in any objective sense the best way to find out about it. I’m writing about it now mostly because not many other people are, although it does show up in an academic book or two about Perennialism and, of course, in the Mumsnet thread.

❦

What is one to make of a culture, or subculture, or movement, with this kind of limited and constrained and, it’s difficult to avoid concluding, ultimately failed history? “Learning from failed experiments” is a pat and somewhat insulting concept here; former Aristasians have not necessarily abandoned all the value and importance they placed on their ideals. These days some of the old Aristasian leadership is based in Southern California and is involved in goddess spirituality and (more conventional) LGBT activism there. Are the radically conservative political or quasipolitical or historiographical tendencies still there? I am not sure; I don’t know these people. But even if they are not, it is instructive to think on the fact that they were. In other words, the goddess spirituality and the strident lesbian activism did and thus could coexist with some deeply strange and even dangerous rightist or rightist-tending ideas. It is again tempting at this point to talk about “internal contradictions” or the Aristasian ideology falling apart under its own weight because it contained elements that could not practically exist alongside each other, but this too strikes me as too easy, somewhat along the lines of Adorno’s dubious “right-wing authoritarian personality” concept in which authoritarianism was constructed as 1. self-evidently a personality trait rather than something else and 2. concentrated exclusively among people who disagreed with Adorno politically. It is easy to write off Aristasia as incoherent and doomed to fail if one starts from the premise that Aristasia was incoherent and doomed to fail and then simply begs the question.

It might have been a matter of attracting or pursuing the wrong allies. Orwell points out in his excellent essay on Rudyard Kipling that “Kipling’s outlook is pre-fascist (sic; Orwell usually, but not always capitalizes these kinds of terms),” a term I have used for Aristasia before. People claiming to be conservatives at the time that Orwell was writing this were always in fact, he said, “either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists.” If we take Orwell at his word—it is not self-evident of course that we ought to, but I think that he has a solid point here—we see that even a generation before Aristasia was a twinkle in Hester St. Clare’s eye the pristine pre-Eclipse world, and ideologies predicated on it, were no longer anywhere to be found. No doubt someone writing a generation before Orwell could have said the same, and so on, and so on, like the ancient writers on Sparta who always situated the golden age of Spartiate equality at some point in the past, relative to themselves. Confucianism and Taoism, similarly, project their ideal pasts arbitrarily far back; the Tao Te Ching seems to long for something pre-agricultural, whereas Confucius—more “progressive” than Laozi in that his cutoff point is right after neolithic river delta state consolidation rather than right before—pinpoints the days of Yu the Great, who invented flood control. This seems like a pat progressive argument (in the historiographical sense) but I think something equally damning can be said of people who are always looking to a more and more more distant, yet somehow always-any-minute-now, future for a world without devastation and woe. Once upon a time petroleum was the one neat trick that would fix the world’s conservation problems, because it spared the whales. This sounds utterly deranged to us today—we have by and large saved the whales and yet the whole biosphere is in peril in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1860 when the first commercial petroleum exploration was getting underway—but the documents, the editorials and political cartoons and policy papers and correspondence, are right there to consult. “Atoms for Peace” were meant to save us all too, once.

It should go without saying that the present sucks as well, particularly since it doesn’t exist; only the past has any demonstrable existence, and the present is a mere moving front between that demonstrable past and the undemonstrable future. So an attitude towards time is never going to be a cogent basis for political action. An attitude towards history might be, but at that point we are in the realm that cannot support something fantastical along the lines of Aristasia. So the invested Aristasian looking for kindred spirits outside her clique is left casting around for the next best thing, and the next best thing, unfortunately, is in most cases fascists—which makes the Aristasians the accomplices of fascists whereof Orwell spoke, perhaps.

Yet lack of care with the company they kept was not, actually, what did Aristasia in. It was, in my opinion, lack of care about venue and context and situation-in-life. Rosetti quotes one woman’s admission that Aristasians tended to be “‘somewhat overbalanced’ on the side of imagination, intellect and the fantastical”—hence the nonsexual component of the reasons for the violent discipline. These were people who need to, to us the parlance of our times, touch grass, and in Donegal and earlier at Oxford they did. The urban setting of London and the penchant for the early internet probably were not good for keeping them grounded—and one does need to be kept grounded even if one truly believes that one’s true home, heaven or Aristasia Pura or the Western Paradise or whatever else, is a great Somewhere Else, because until then we still must live in this world, unremitting Benjaminian shitshow though it is. I cannot blame people for not wanting to accept this, but the wages of not accepting that one must function in the world is, put simply, not being able to function in the world. I wish I could decide I was no longer interested in functioning in the world and let the chips fall where they may. I do not think that I actually can, and if I could I think that I would be obliged to choose otherwise.

Could a version of Aristasia that chose otherwise have had some staying power? Ought it to have had any?

Some Aphorisms

Massachusetts politics from the beginning has drunk deep of the belief that an objective moral law exists and that Massachusetts voters, perhaps only Massachusetts voters, can be trusted consistently to know what it is. It is only the contents of that moral law that, to the minds of the state’s body politic, have changed.

The problem with the open society is that you can’t get dirt on anybody.

If there’s one thing that I know boomers love, it’s free ziti.

Traditionalism is to tradition what a decapitated body is to a star athlete.

One should love God’s moral law in the way that one loves one’s most boring relative.

Just as the sun sets in the west, so the moral sets into the political.

In languages that have no gnomic aspect one cannot understand religion.

While I’m not sure whether or not I’m willing to fully subscribe to it, there is a robust public health and consumer safety argument for suplexing TikTok and similar algorithmed-to-hell-and-back short-form-video-oriented platforms into the fires of Orodruin whence they came, an argument that has nothing to do with what foreign dictatorships they do or don’t have servers in.

The Victorians were the last civilization to understand that human life is not actually very secure as a matter of course, which covers a multitude of their many other sins.

The modern tendency is to stress marriage’s exclusivity more than, and sometimes over against, its permanence. It is socially destabilizing and still morally imperfect, but not necessarily morally worse. What were once abuse victims’ (mostly women’s) problems become the community’s problems. Strong arguments can be made for that.

Moreover any situation that one is “allowed” to leave is going to look similar to this.

At least on the level of cultivating personal virtue, casual sex might actually be less immoral than plenty of what passes for normal heterosexual relationship behavior in the secular world. Casual sex is, whatever else can be said about it, at least a straightforward way of addressing a very common type of physical desire and frustration to which most (not all, but most) people can relate. With practices like hanging on in vague situationships with people one neither likes nor respects because of the perceived social censure that comes with singleness, or rebuilding one’s entire social circle from scratch every time one starts or ends a romantic relationship, other areas of life are implicated and it becomes very difficult to avoid the conclusion that an idol is being made of sexual practice itself, as long as that practice is dully heterosexual in character—and yet irreligious heterosexual people are at least as likely to behave this way as religious ones, to the point that I have known people who have left their childhood religions for the sectors of secular society that behave in this way! Received-wisdom heterosexual relationship behavior takes an axe to almost all the virtues, not despite but because of how socially normative it is.

The thing about Jesus the “moral philosopher” (Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?) is that he’s really not unique and he’s certainly not uniquely admirable. The “historical Jesus” is a self-aggrandizing and occasionally even violent apocalypticist who swings back and forth between preaching what was actually within the mainstream of Pharisee moral theology at the time and demanding that people abandon their families and economic obligations to follow him around listening to more of this. The “Christ of faith” is the only Jesus Who’s still a convincing moral exemplar once you dispense with the presupposition that you have to like the guy.

Even the southwestern tip of Connecticut really is New England at heart—its deep history, landscape, and lieux de memoire are all pure New England. It has not so much sold its birthright as had that birthright bought out by rich people who have thrown up tacky mansions all along the shoreline and raise their children to root for New York sports teams. One need only visit an old burying ground in Greenwich or Darien to understand this.

The American right from Reagan onwards, arguably from Goldwater onwards, has had one important point of similarity with fascism wisely expounded: it is not so much any form of “conservatism” as a Revolutionary Right ideology, which seeks not to preserve an existing or even restore a former social structure but to create a new type of society entirely. This society keeps nothing of substance from the past and owes nothing to the past other than as a wellspring and storehouse for its aesthetic imaginary. In the recent vicissitudes of the American right under its Tea Party, alt-right, and MAGA guises, we see this in the promiscuous cribbing of aesthetic signposts that in the past pointed to very different and often mutually hostile sectors of American society, not all of them reactionary at the time: Southern Redeemers and Neo-Confederates, “Main Street” small businessmen in the Northeast and Midwest, anti-authoritarian frontiersmen, many-relationed immigrant Catholics and religious Jews, blue-collar tough guys whose fathers or even whose younger selves were the “Resistance libs” of the Reagan years. The resulting historiography, or fantasia on themes from American historiography, is starkly nationalistic, but eclectic enough to have a certain crossover appeal to people disillusioned by or unwelcome in previous American nationalist spasms.

In the end, all non-absolute moral theories are the friend-enemy distinction in drag.

Added November 19, 2023: When one is parched beyond belief in a bone-dry airplane cabin and the drinks cart is ever-so-slowly inching closer, closer, closer—this too is a manifestation of the unsatisfactoriness of things. I have heard that in previous days it was not like this—but, then, almost nobody could afford it back then.

Polemic on the Rectification of Names

It is said that when Confucius was asked what he would do if he were appointed a governor, he said that he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. This (to English-speaking ears) unusual expression, written 正名 and pronounced zhèngmíng in Chinese and seimei in Japanese, is important in Confucianism and other East Asian philosophy and provides for some interesting harmonies and counterpoints with concepts in Western thought as well, such as direction of fit and disputes concerning linguistic prescriptivism. Unfortunately, the main setting in which one sees the term employed in non-specialist English is the so-called “intellectual dark web” and related far-right online environments—a milieu in which “rectification of names” is used both insufficiently and inaccurately.

            The late sociologist Peter L. Berger appears to have been one of the first to (mis)use the term in online political commentary, in the January 2015 article “New Atheism and the Rectification of Names.” The article mounts a series of (in my opinion mostly well-founded) criticisms of atheist polemicists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, with most of which people familiar with current Anglophone public life will already be at least vaguely familiar: they make false dichotomies between faith and reason, aren’t in fact saying anything “new” but rather relitigating Enlightenment- or Victorian-era disputes, and so on. Berger attempts to ground these criticisms in the rectification of names, which he describes thus:

Confucius and other Chinese philosophers who followed him thought that much social disorder comes from the wrong names being used to describe groups of people. This mistake was supposed to be most dangerous if it was applied to the proper hierarchy on which social order must rest. For example, if people in the lower classes give themselves, or are given by others, names that properly belong to the higher classes, this will result in rebellion and social disorder. Confucian sages had the task of educating the populace in knowing and accepting the proper names of things, and government had the task of enforcing this vocabulary.[1]

Berger concedes that “our views on hierarchy differ somewhat from imperial China, or seem to differ,” but it is still easy to see the appeal of the idea, framed this way, to people on the authoritarian right. It provides a cogent philosophical basis both for cheerfully inegalitarian views on the order of society and for opposition to “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” and efforts to control or limit speech, especially online. In recent years I’ve seen everyone from Twitter-based Catholic pseudotheologians to crankish followers of the computer programmer-turned-rightist cultural critic Curtis Yarvin use “rectification of names” to argue for everything from insistently referring to gay people as sodomites to claiming that capitalism is a meaningless concept (and therefore cannot be intelligibly criticized). Berger, for his part, makes a valiant attempt at evenhandedness by identifying both “enhanced interrogation techniques” for “torture” and “gender” for (in some contexts) “sex” as unacceptably euphemistic in ways that run afoul of his Confucian terminological buzzsaw. However, Berger has the misfortune to be writing just at the beginning of the current especially nasty campaign in the cultural forever war, and I am not aware of anybody else using the term who has been so gracious, certainly not Yarvin and his ilk.

            One problem with this use of the concept is that if one only wants to claim that much, or most, contemporary political language is euphemistic for malign reasons, one only needs to cite George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”[2] There is no need to bring Confucius into it, given that Orwell is more accessible to English-speakers and thus invocations of him are easier for readers to check for themselves. Indeed, Berger’s example of “enhanced interrogation techniques” reminds me very much of Orwell’s observation that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” The Bush administration’s use of the term to obscure the fact that it had a probably-illegal torture program fits perfectly into Orwell’s own list of cases in point. “Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended,” Orwell writes, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.”

            Leaving aside anything to do with Orwell, the second, and much more serious, problem with the current political use of the “rectification of names” concept is that it both reduces and misunderstands Confucian thought. Confucianism is, first of all, concerned about dysphemism as well as euphemism; harsh, cruel, and intemperate language runs clearly afoul of the core virtue of benevolence. Moreover, zhèngmíng as a concept has a great deal more active, positive political and moral content than merely “calling ‘em like one sees ‘em,” “telling it like it is,” or refusing to be “PC” or “woke” in the way one speaks. “It’s time to call you what you are: ORANGE MAN DONALD TRUMP #OrangeManDonaldTrump,” reads an infamous Twitter reply by the anti-Trump social media personality Ed Krassenstein. Certainly this rectifies the names in the sense that Donald Trump is indeed orange-hued and Ed Krassenstein presumably had not directly said so before. However, an equally important question is whether “Orange Man Donald Trump” is the sort of name that needs to be rectified. This is a question that Berger does not answer and that Yarvin and Krassenstein are probably constitutionally unable to answer, but Confucius sees its importance and it is a key consideration in his, and later Mencius’s, treatment of political and social legitimacy. Let’s look at what Confucius himself says in the Analects about the rectification of names:

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.[3]

One is not only morally responsible for the content of one’s speech; one is also morally responsible for correctly carrying out the types of actions that the content of one’s speech implies. An example of this principle might be a person who says “I love my wife” and yet disregards the wife’s opinions and values, cheats on her, is unkind to her, undermines her in the presence of others, and so forth. As extended to affairs of state, it would include a king who does not behave according to qualities that are, according to Confucian theories of social relationships, implied by the title “king,” such as magnanimousness. Thus we have Mencius’s remark, discussing the overthrow of the tyrannical and incompetent King Zhou of Shang, that “I have indeed heard of the punishment of the ‘outcast Zhou,’ but I have not heard of any regicide.”[4] The implied principle here is that Zhou effectively abdicated by failing to use his royal authority in ways consistent with kingly virtues. Since being a tyrant is morally wrong and being orange is morally neutral, making the distinction between “outcast Zhou” and “King Zhou” is thus a morally and politically significant case of rectifying the names in a way that is not true for, say, “President Donald Trump” and “Orange Man Donald Trump.”[5]

            The lack of any account of this important point even in the writing of the normally much subtler Peter Berger is, in my opinion, probably due to the aversion to prescriptivist accounts of language in modern Western academic thought, which when applied to political questions involves rejecting the idea that different political and social concepts and terms have implied moral content regardless of how they are used. The Yarvinite use of “rectification of names” is unsystematic about this, because it is unsystematic about just about everything; “rectify your names” coming from an extremely-online far-rightist is a call to accept certain moral implications that such people think proper language use involves, but very rarely implies any perceived need to change behavior, especially not that of the person insisting on it.[6]

            Mental thoughts or words or intentions both influencing and being influenced by actions and behaviors in the external world, such that either can be “correct” or “incorrect” relative to the other, might be understood, in Western philosophical terms, through the concept of “direction of fit.” This is the idea, or principle, that just as it is possible for one’s psychology to conform or fail to conform to the mind-independent world, it is also possible for the world to conform or fail to conform to some psychological states. The classic treatment of this is in Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention. In Intention Anscombe gives the example of a shopping list.[7] If I, for example, shlep to the Hannaford across the road from my apartment in search of pita, but there is no pita to be had because it is sold out or because of supply chain problems, the problem is not with my intention to buy pita; my shopping list that had pita on it was not attempting to faithfully represent the real world, in which the store turned out not to have any pita (in other words, it was not an inventory). Rather it expressed my desire and my will to buy certain items, and the unavailability of one of those items was a failure on reality’s part to conform to my desire and my will. This is not a moral failure on reality’s part, because reality does not “owe” me pita any more than it “owes” anything else to anybody else. Even so, the nature of the divorce between mind and world in situations involving intention or desire is, according to Anscombe’s analysis of action and the direction of fit concept, entirely reversed from the nature of that divorce in situations involving description or assessment. In the latter case, the incorrectness is mine; in the former case, the incorrectness, if it can be called incorrectness, is the supermarket’s. The way to rectify the situation would be for a shipment of pita to come in, not for me to strike pita off my shopping list or stop expecting the store to have it.

            The fact that nobody could seriously believe that a supermarket is morally in the wrong for not having pita in time for a particular shopping trip is the main thing that distinguishes the rectification of names from the rectification, or vindication, of my shopping list. In large part the difference is that the mind-independent aspect in the rectification of names concept is the person’s own social behavior. There are implications of kingly behavior to the title “king,” implications of conjugal behavior to the title “husband” or “wife” or “spouse,” and so forth. Although it requires some creativity, it is possible to conceive of situations in which events outside of someone’s own control could lead to a rupture between words and reality when it comes to their social behavior; however, such situations, such as natural disasters leading to a rupture between “king” and kingliness, were in historical East Asian thought often interpreted as externalized portents of some kind of inward dysfunction.[8]

            Similarly, for Anscombe, there is the possibility of an error in judgment in my supply chain example. Her own example presupposes that the only thing the shopper does wrong is simply forgetting to or choosing not to buy something that is on the shopping list.[9] This, then, is what rectification of names might actually look like when looked at through a Western philosophical lens, although we are still missing the fact that with the rectification of names the implications of the names are seen as objective or at least matters of a social and political consensus rather than freely chosen in the sense that Anscombe’s shopper (or, in a corollary example, the shopper’s wife) freely chooses to put butter rather than margarine on the shopping list. This idea that the names that one must rectify are not, ultimately, up to one is one of the things that makes Confucianism come across as an inherently conservative and authoritarian philosophy to many commentators. Even so, I think most people can think of examples of everyday situations in which a milder version of the concept motivates normal behavior—if you don’t rectify the name of “spouse” or “partner” by being unfaithful or abusive, you will (or should) suffer social odium, and if you don’t rectify the name of “employee” by going to work, you will (regardless of whether or not you should) get fired. Confucianism simply extends this to a more general theory of obligation as preceding choice when it comes to structuring relationships and society.

            The link between correct language use and correct behavior is unfashionable in the contemporary West except in niche political arguments, and its association with those arguments if anything makes it even more unfashionable in other contexts. As I write this, off the top of my head I can think of people who insist on “person-first language” to refer to disabled people instead of actually advocating for disabled people, right-wing theologians who insist on dysphemisms like “same-sex attracted” to refer to homosexuality instead of actually defending the rationales for traditional religious teachings on the subject, and, of course, participants in the unending argument regarding third-person singular pronouns and how they relate to gender identity. Such people’s ideas do show some vague family resemblance to the morally substantive parts of zhèngmíng, but in an inverted and weakened form that probably owes more to the mostly-discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis than to any notion that choice of political language actually imposes moral obligations on the societies that use it to describe themselves.

            So what is the basis for the rectification of names, if it is not a mere call for clarity in language and if a Sapir-Whorfian account of language choice affecting available thought processes misses, or does not entirely encapsulate, the point? In fact, I would argue that in order to really understand the concept, one must be willing to look at cosmological and metaphysical issues, not just disputes in the area of political theory or linguistics. For Confucius and his intellectual descendants, who include not only “Confucians” in the narrow sense but also many East Asian Buddhists, Taoists, irreligious people, and even Christians,[10] “the truth of things” and “affairs” relate conceptually to both human practices and broader natural realities. This is not meant to imply that there is a sacred language in the sense that Muslims hold Quranic Arabic to be sacred, or a language of truth in the sense that one occasionally encounters in science fiction or fantasy novels. Nevertheless, words can be used in ways and with implications that have either greater or lesser connections to understandings that will keep human affairs rooted in reality.

            In some areas of East Asian thought this set of ideas and principles can get downright mystical. Japanese has the concept of 言霊kotodama, “word spirits,” an extension of the animist sensibility widespread in Japanese culture to include a spiritual dimension to words and names. This idea, while in my opinion aesthetically beautiful, is morally ambivalent. Much like Confucianism, it can easily be extended in authoritarian directions; one pair of Japanese authors even argues that freedom of speech will never gain wide acceptance as a Japanese value unless kotodama goes.[11]

            However, the belief nevertheless imposes certain limits on the reasonable use of language by the rulers as well as by the ruled. A completely relative view of language in which all words are equally made-up no matter how long they have been in use for or how much consensus exists (or used to exist) about how to use them, is at least as liable to be put to authoritarian ends. Powerful people can just redefine criticisms out of existence. Berger, to his credit, understands this; just as in wartime Japan anybody who seriously discussed the possibility of defeat fell under suspicion due to the kotodama-derived idea that discussing defeat made it likelier,[12] in the 2000s US criticisms of the Bush administration’s war aims and war tactics could be defused by resort to euphemism and evasion.[13] As is so often the case, excessive realism and excessive relativism are thus both best avoided when it comes to political language. Instead of either, we should find a way of discussing public affairs and social life that implies some basic set of agreed-upon values without assenting to cosmological or metaphysical claims about different terms’ supposed innate and precultural significance.

            So, then, we might say that the rectification of names in fact has important parallels to the tradition in Western philosophy concerning direction of fit, and that it is in conversation with concepts of desire, volition, and imperative that we can best understand it. It is not simply a matter of calling ‘em like one sees ‘em and telling it like it is, although rectifying names in that sense is probably a necessary precondition to rectifying them in the sense of behaving the way one’s purported social position or values dictate that one should. The concept also has to do with unchosen obligation, not necessarily in an authoritarian sense (although Confucius’s own development and use of it was certainly in the service of policies that were authoritarian) but in the sense that none of us always and in all places get to decide how we want to relate to the people, places, and things around us. If the concept is going to be invoked in political and social controversies in the modern West, it should be with a greater degree of respect for or at least awareness of its full meaning and rich texture of connections to other philosophical and spiritual ideas.

❦

[1] Peter L. Berger, “New Atheism and the Rectification of Names,” The American Interest, January 7, 2015, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/01/07/new-atheism-and-the-rectification-of-names/.

[2] George Orwell, "Politics and the Enlgish Language," Horizon 13, no. 76 (April 1946): 252-265.

[3] Confucius, transl. James Legge, Confucian Analects (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 263-264. My emphasis.

[4] Quoted in Wm. Theodore de Bary, “Introduction,” in Confucianism and Human Rights, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 8.

[5] Then again, since part of the problem with King Zhou was traditionally held to be that he indulged in crude, off-rhythm music, perhaps Trump’s reasons for tanning himself into orangeness are unaesthetic enough that Mencius would have seen it as relevant after all.

[6] I hesitate to cite specific social media accounts for this due to both the ephemerality of the medium and the fact that doing so blurs the line between criticizing socially relevant public thought and criticizing the opinions of private citizens, but searching the Tumblr tag for “rectification of names” gives a wealth of examples of the far-right usage, and very few examples of any other usage.

[7] G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention, Second Edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), 56.

[8] This was a belief common in the West for many hundreds of years as well, hence practices like augury and the various “-mancy” disciplines by which Western religious and protoscientific leaders attempted to glean information from the natural world about how to correct or not to correct human affairs. I would argue that the search for meaning in seemingly random natural forces is still with us and probably always will be in one form or another. It is to some extent answered in teachings such as those of Averroes or John Henry Newman concerning “spiritual intelligences,” but the search for greater understandability of that meaning or greater ability to plan and take action based on it is left unanswered by those teachings and must be pursued through other means, such as, in our own time when many other options are widely seen as discredited, alternative medicine or astrology.

[9] Op. cit., Anscombe.

[10] For over three hundred years there was an on-and-off dispute within the Catholic Church over whether or not Chinese Catholics could licitly continue Confucian ceremonial practices. Eventually in 1939 Pope Pius XII ruled that they could, within certain limits.

[11] Yamamoto Shichihei and Komuro Naoki, 日本教の社会学Nihon-kyō no shakaigaku (Tokyo: Gakken, 1981), 58. (In Japanese.)

[12] Ibid.

[13] Op. cit., Berger; the previous citation of Berger’s essay includes the passage mentioning the “enhanced interrogation techniques” euphemism. At one point in the Bush administration the comedian Jon Stewart responded to an admission that the US was not winning the Iraq War “in the present tense” by speculating that the US was instead winning in the pluperfect subjunctive, a tense and aspect used to discuss things that might, could, or should have happened in the past.

Patriots in Control

A specter is haunting the American left, the specter of “America Bad” thinking—not “America Bad” in the sense that America is flawed and most Americans are not willing enough to recognize those flaws, but “America Bad” in the sense that we are both the villain and the main character of current world history, a sort of Walter White or Patrick Bateman of the international arena. This is the tendency that Jeane Kirkpatrick attributed to the “blame America first crowd”—unhelpfully, because Jeane Kirkpatrick did not actually know who was and wasn’t in the “blame America first crowd,” or, if she did, she pretended not to for the sake of the cheap seats.

The “blame America first crowd” that actually exists makes two basic mistakes. The first is in thinking in the first place that the United States is a uniquely malign influence in the world. It isn’t; indeed, America is an unusually benign global hegemon in most ways, although given the direly low bar set by previous hegemons, this is not much of an accomplishment. Ideally the recent practices of some of America’s so-called near peers like China’s treatment of its religious minorities or Russia’s high-on-its-own-supply ideology-poisoned unprovoked invasion of Ukraine would have disabused people of the idea that America is a uniquely abusive world power, and in many cases it has, but unfortunately, there are still plenty of people on the left who have had exactly the opposite reaction. One’s modus potens is another’s modus tollens, and some people are in fact so committed to “America Bad” thinking that they conclude that anything bad-seeming that America’s rivals are doing must be either misreported or not actually bad at all. One can sometimes see Pope Francis obviously and publicly struggling to suppress this line of thinking when he comments on the plight of Ukraine; “NATO is barking at Russia’s door” is an assumption about the situation that it is understandable for a Latin American Catholic prelate to make, given that region’s own history, and in the grand scheme of things the Pope is probably to be commended for resisting the temptation to go all the way down that rabbit hole. I can’t say the same for figures who are American, like Noam Chomsky and the ever-embarrassing Glenn Greenwald, suddenly adopting a naïve pacifism about Russia or even, as Chomsky did at one point, claiming that Donald Trump is “the one Western statesman” who actually wants peace. These people have completely reversed axiom and application, going from “my country is violating its own declared principles” to “violating one’s own declared principles is that which my country does, and if a country opposed to mine appears to be doing that, it must actually not be.”

The second mistake of the anti-American American left is to assume that a country—one’s own country—is reducible to the worst instincts of its political classes and the most broken aspects of its political institutions. American imperialism doesn’t make America bad for the same reason that your cousin from the poor side of town getting busted for drug dealing doesn’t make her bad; people aren’t reducible to the worst decision they’ve ever made and countries aren’t reducible to the worst features of their political cultures or military histories. Some might respond to this by pointing out that the United States’ domestic culture has obvious and universally known pathologies as well—the consumerism, the horrible diets, the hyperdivisive sociocultural politics, the obsession with large and terrifying cars and the built environment that caters to them, the increasing relegation of serious interest in religion and the divine to certain right-wing subcultures that most other Americans reasonably despise. Again, however, if most of us saw a family member or friend mishandling their household affairs in analogous ways, our natural reaction would be to pity them, not to hate them. (I say “our natural reaction,” not necessarily the reaction that we think is in keeping with our political commitments; plenty of American leftists today do also have a problem with jumping awfully quickly to interpersonal shunning of those with messy lives or bad ideas.)

A country is just its people, as a group of individuals and as a collective; this includes the abstractions that emerge out of any mass of people, such as social emotions and cultural practices. America is me, my family, and most (but not all) of my close friends; it is Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and the lion’s share of the people who love and hate them most; it is art forms like jazz and comic strips, holiday traditions like unedifying political arguments on Thanksgiving and presents (or Chinese food) on Christmas, and time-honored aspects of workingmen’s and workingwomen’s culture like filling out March Madness brackets at random, stealing small items from one’s workplace, and dying of black lung around the age of sixty. For a leftist to hate America yet claim to fight for the liberation of humanity is for a priest to love God and hate his parishioners, or for a “male feminist ally” to exploit and berate his own mother.

It is imperative, then, that a left-wing patriotism reemerge in the United States, both as a civic value—those who control American public life will always either be or make others perceive them to be those who love America best—and as a moral value—exaggerated contempt for something that is flawed, but is ours, is a flaw of character and virtue on our own part. Left-wing American patriotism should honor—but not revere; reverence for mere mortal men is something that American patriotism in general absolutely does have in excess—left-wing partisan or sectional figures such as Jones, Debs, and Guthrie. Perhaps in our more trollish, bullet-biting, or yes-chad moments we might even add in more ambivalent characters like Jimmy Hoffa. At the same time we should not abandon ecumenical American patriotic figures like Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts. Rather than rocketing back and forth between denigrating our national heroes as the lowest of the low and unduly praising them to the stars, we should seek to interpret their lives and actions in ways as compatible as possible both with our political and moral values and with historical facts. Whether or not the country deserves our love is not the issue. We deserve to let, or make, ourselves love it.

Who Said It: God-Emperor Leto II or Greta Thunberg?

One is a visionary who thinks in the long term about the future of the humanity but often stakes out incendiary or extreme-seeming positions on here-and-now issues that some argue damage the credibility of the overall cause. The other is a climate activist. Can you tell who said what?

1.       Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

2.       We have to tell it like it is. Because if there are no positive things to tell, then what should we do, should we spread false hope? We can’t do that, we have to tell the truth.

3.       I am the most ardent people-watcher who ever lived.

4.       Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most.

5.       It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?

6.       That is what we have to realize, that that is what we have to do right now. I’m not the one who’s saying these things. I’m not the one who we should be listening to. And I say that all the time.

7.       We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences.

8.       Only fools prefer the past!

9.       Almost everything is black and white.

10.     If everyone is guilty then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame.

Answers: Leto, Thunberg, Leto, Leto, Leto, Thunberg, Thunberg, Leto, Thunberg, Thunberg

2. and 6. come from a Financial Times interview and a Democracy Now interview, both from 2019. 7., 9., and 10. come from a book called No One is Too Small to Make a Difference. 1., 3., 4., 5., and 8. come from God-Emperor of Dune.