Twenty sixteen
I can’t write about my year in writing without acknowledging the year in crisis. They are inseparable. The urgency of the times compelled me to spill most of my words recklessly, usually in the confines of some corporately-mediated platform: A tweet, an email a text, a hastily opened document that wasn’t saved, the comments section under somebody’s sad post-election Facebook post. There was too much to think about, to account for, and to understand. But I did manage to get a few things published.
In January, I found out that a museum in Austin was hosting an exhibit about state violence perpetrated against Mexicans in South Texas a century ago. The display was personal for me because, I came to find out, some of my ancestors were affected by the Texas Rangers’ campaign of extermination. The state has done a thorough job of repressing this collective trauma. But the most poignant thing I learned was that the killing happened in response to an attempt by Mexican leftists to overthrow the American state in the Southwest. I channeled the emotions I was feeling at the time into an essay for The New Inquiry that criticized the museum’s exhibit for downplaying the insurrection, whose memory now influences my work. In hindsight, my use of the word “colonization” in the piece was inaccurate and underdeveloped.
In part, that piece was about white supremacy, which I’ve thought a lot about as a conceptual system since Trump announced his candidacy. When summer came, I felt like I had to attend the Republican National Convention to see American white nationalism in full bloom, so I asked the Washington Spectator to send me there. The media had anticipated a major clash, but that didn’t happen; it was instead a gathering of the worst this country has to offer. I held my tongue for three days in order to talk to all stripes of Trump backers, from an alt-right Internet whizz to an old Nixonite racist (who, actually, I found charming). There was a lot that concerned me throughout the trip, but the desperate behavior of the press corps stands out —it was disturbing to see how easily some were manipulated. Many swarmed all over “dapper” alt-right mascot Richard Spencer, just as he’d hoped they would. I questioned whether I really believed in what I’d been sent there to do, and my last night there — after I had filed my story — I relished the chance to argue and talk back instead of passively report people’s garbage. I even got to salute the soon-to-be 45th president, just outside the building where he accepted his party’s nomination. Heil Trump!
There were a few lessons I carried back with me from Cleveland. The first was that it was nearly impossible to cut through certain differences of perception — a symptom of what we now call post-truth, Oxford Dictionaries’ word of 2016. The second was to trust my darker instincts about this country and its people, and resist the temptation to be lulled by feel-goodisms and denialism. With this orientation I wrote a piece for The Baffler about cops on social media, focusing on a police department in Delaware that gloated over its ability to win the information war against the obstinate local press. My approach for the story was to attribute the most cynical of motivations to the police. This, I believe, is the best way to report on institutions that seek greater control over people. I used a similar approach for my second piece for The Baffler, about Starbucks’ foray into branded content (for which the company has drafted former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to help with messaging).
Shortly after the RNC, I traveled to the Golan Heights, the contested land between Israel and Syria, to report on an American company’s oil drilling plans. That story hasn’t panned out; my pitch was rejected from the two places I sent it, and I haven’t had the energy or time to try elsewhere. But I learned a lot while reporting, and wound up writing some reflections in a piece for Mondoweiss. I wrote this quickly on the plane ride back, but it’s looking more likely that it may be the only thing I’ll publish from the trip, and the thing I actually went there to do will remain a digital pile of notes on my laptop. But the experience irreversibly altered my understanding of the world, so it wasn’t a total failure, I hope.
I haven’t figured out how to best deploy my writing going forward, in the post-truth, far right-ascendant world. I’d like for my words to be the sparks that light a torch, the metal that sharpens the tips of a pitchfork, to go viral in the all-consuming sense of a virus that eats fascist flesh. Bearing witness isn’t enough. It makes no sense that the way we consume information has changed more in the last two decades than the previous century yet journalistic conventions remain relatively unchanged. All the high powered reporting during the election was not enough to overcome the affective appeal of the right, and it won’t be enough to stop it going forward.
We should continue to ask ourselves why it wasn’t enough, and push ourselves to find solutions. We should be thinking about narratives and framing, and be conscious of the fact that, yes, we have enemies, and they would take away the things we value most if they had the chance. We should be ready to fight them, on this medium and all others.
