Our Weekly Discontents 10/12/20: Ghost of the Discourse

Is there any escape?

Why would anyone want to escape reality right now? Sure there are things happening or whatever, but we also get posts like this. We are all witnesses.

More seriously, we all owe an apology to the concept of “escapism.” Maybe now that we’re all so immersed in the digital muck, slogging forward and hoping not to get dragged down too far, we don’t draw so stark a distinction between “escaping” and whatever else we’re supposed to be doing. But when I was a kid and even into college, there was a pervasive sense that if you were going to read a book or watch a movie or play a video game, the media you were consuming would be nobler if it eschewed escape and instead… confronted reality? Bull-rushed reality? Nestled up against reality and gave it a tender hug? It was never clear what the alternative to escaping was, but reality was supposed to be better.

We’re all probably feeling a little dubious about [gestures toward reality] at the moment. Interestingly and maddeningly, many of us are also spending a lot of our time in a ghostly space between escape and confrontation. We can’t escape the pandemic and its subsidiary crises, but to confront it means to withdraw from doing things we would otherwise want to do. I know for many people work schedules haven’t changed, and time at home is spent caring for others and otherwise being responsible adults. For quite a few of us, though, the soberest way to face up to reality is to stay at home almost all of the time. In my humble opinion, one of the healthier ways to spend that time at home is to play video games.

Lately I’ve been playing Ghost of Tsushima, which I wrote about in last week’s newsletter. Read that piece if you want some in-depth gaming talk. I’ll try to keep that to a minimum here, since I know not all of you are gamers, but I do want to make one key point: Ghost a game that revels in the mundanity within the drama. Your guerilla samurai (a wonderful paradox) player-character wanders the island realm of Tsushima engaging in modular “stories” within an open map. At the end of many of these tales, all of which involve bloodshed and many of which proceed like miniature Greek tragedies, you sit on a boulder drinking sake and watching the horizon. There’s an understanding that the melodramatic faux-reality of the game is itself full of moments of quietly sitting and not doing much.

So while it’s certainly escape to pretend to be a heroic samurai fighting an asymmetric war against invading Mongols, I also find myself appreciating the game’s nods to my own sedentary life. Even in the midst of a mythic struggle, sometimes the right thing to do is sit to sit still and look at clouds. My escape helps me appreciate the best ways to handle my reality. This is ultimately why I believe “escape” is an admirable goal for narrative art, and for those of us who consume it: We don’t really want our own lives perfectly mirrored, but we do love seeing our reflection at unexpected angles.

Of course, I can’t solve my actual problems with a katana. I wouldn’t recommend you try doing so either. But maybe there’s something to be said for spending some time waving around a digital sword, and then sitting on a pixelated rock.

A Lonely Impulse of Delight

Connor Wroe Southard

I’ve already belabored Ghost of Tsushima, so I’ll just say that my next installment will be a short note on something (maybe Ulysses), and then a mailbag of questions I’ve gotten dropped in my comments. If you want to get in on the fun, here’s last week’s post yet again. Drop anything you’d like to ask me in the ol’ comments. Taking questions will likely be a staple for the letter going forward. The most important thing you can do, of course, is sign up.

Wars of Future Past

Kelsey Atherton

Loitering munitions are the deadliest kind of robot weapon in regular use today. A weird hybrid of both cruise missile and drones, they’re the purest technological descendant of the Kettering Bug, the 1918 Aerial Torpedo that is the primogenitor for all sorts of autonomously guided flying explosives. Loitering munitions take the basic concept, “what if this plane could find an enemy, and then turn into a bomb and crash into it?” and add a lot of sophisticated sensors, so that they can, say, autonomously target anti-air missile-and-radar installations. Any humans that happen to get caught in the following dive and explosion become afterthoughts when the robot decides to destroy a radar.

I talk about loitering munitions at length in this week’s Wars of Future Past for a couple reasons. The first is that, as tech, they’re fascinating, a sort of backdoor around any attempt to regulate lethal autonomy. The second reason is that, if we are very lucky, the present war between Armenia and Azerbaijan will go down in history as the first war where both sides used loitering munitions. Symmetry is rare in war, by design and intent. Nations and militaries work to avoid a fair fight as much as possible.

If we are especially unlucky, the loitering munitions will be a mere footnote in a far more familiar story, of the proxies for nuclear states, and the proxies for their proxies, turning a regional conflict into a bigger war, and then the biggest war. That specific outcome is unlikely, but with Russia a formal ally of Armenia and NATO-member Turkey backing Azerbaijan, the possibility that bad things become world-historic bad things always exists.

Foreign Exchanges

Derek Davison

With war in the southern Caucasus and Kyrgyzstan’s political situation collapsing into near chaos, I spent most of this week at Foreign Exchanges talking about those two places. But I was also very pleased to be joined on FX’s weekly podcast by researcher Jessica Moody, whose work focuses on post-conflict Ivory Coast. She helped explain the context surrounding Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara’s decision to run for a third term and the tensions that are surfacing (or resurfacing, as in some ways they go back to the 1990s and earlier) as the October 31 presidential election approaches. Check it out here at Substack or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Hell World

Luke O’Neill

It was a busy week at the old newsletter factory. First off I expressed some unbridled rage at the report, that has all but fallen out of the discussion already, about the Trump administration specifically drawing up a policy of child separation — remember that? — and posed the question: So can I piss in their food yet or no?

Second I shared a bunch of Louise Glück poems and reacted to a Brooklyn-based design company that has raised over $230,000 for their Pelosi and Fauci action figure project with this truly cursed description:

“These are imperfect times but still they could be worse,” they explain on their Kickstarter page. “Imagine a parallel universe where everything else is exactly the same, except there is no Nancy Pelosi to act as a check on power. Kind of terrifying, right? Pelosi has basically been leading the Resistance these last few years. She's the one person standing between us and unfettered lunacy; a tiny Atlas, bearing the weight of the world on her shoulders.”

Then this past weekend I kicked off a series called The Last Normal Day featuring essays from some of my pals and favorite writers about their memories of the days before the pandemic actually became real. Samantha Irby started things off:

I had a mild panic attack while filling up the car: touching a gas pump feels like a dare even under normal circumstances. Having to wrap my clammy hand around the visible dirt and invisible disease at the onset of a mysterious, rapidly spreading global pandemic??? I could hardly fucking breathe! I could feel the germs slithering onto my skin, oozing into my open pores. I watched the numbers and did the deep breathing my nurse practitioner taught me and imagined someone at my funeral rolling their eyes like “of course that dumb bitch stopped to get a fucking hot dog,” but listen, I was down to a quarter of a tank and I’m a forty year old woman who has never done a single kegel exercise, I didn’t want to wet myself, ok?????

The second and third installments, from Zaron Burnett III on being a Black man wearing a mask in the early days before masks were a thing, and from myself about moving house just as the pandemic started, can be found for paying subscribers here and here.

Cruel and Usual

Shane Ferro

This week I wrote about forced prison labor in the time of Covid, which was the recently the subject of an excellent in-depth feature in the L.A. Times. While prisons around the country are still pretty much on lockdown in order to halt Covid within institutions that could not be better designed to spread it, prison factories in California are still up and running. Slave labor is an essential part of government functioning in the state of California, may we never forget it.

BORDER/LINES

Gaby Del Valle

When Trump became president, there was this notion that ICE would suddenly start rounding up immigrants on the streets and deporting them to their countries of origin en masse. That isn’t exactly how deportation works. It’s usually a bit of a longer process, one where respondents—the immigration court equivalent of a “defendant”—get an opportunity to argue their case before an immigration judge, though they aren’t given a free government-appointed attorney. There is a notable exception, though: expedited removal.

Expedited removal lets immigration officers quickly deport people without due process. The practice was created by a 1996 immigration law signed by Bill Clinton, which basically created the immigrant detention and deportation system as we know it. Until now, expedited removal has been used against people who were found within 100 miles of any U.S. border who couldn’t immediately prove they had been in the U.S. for 14 days. Asylum seekers get placed into ER until they affirmatively ask for asylum. 

The Trump administration is now trying to expand ER to its full statutory authority, which would allow any immigration officers to arrest anyone in any part of the country who can’t prove they’ve been in the U.S. for two years (or that they can legally be here).

We looked at the history and potential future of expedited removal in our latest edition of the newsletter. It’s a nice (as in, fucked) reminder that restrictive immigration policies have a long bipartisan history in this country.

The Insurgents

This week we brought in frenemy of the show Ken Klippenstein to break down the absolutely surreal Donald Trump COVID saga (after a brief Sorkinesque walk and talk through Insurgents Global HQ). Ken also tells us about some of his latest scoops, involving the DHS becoming an official propaganda arm of the Trump Administration, and how there is a faction of the intelligence community raising alarms about the growing threat of right wing extremism.

We also produced our first premium episode featuring Aída Chávez of The Intercept. We talked about Kamala Harris’s epic slay queen performance at the Vice Presidential debate, how liberals value optics and aesthetics over actual substance, the foiled Michigan Governor kidnapping plot and more.

Discourse Blog

We had yet another week dominated by a debate: this time a far more civilized and utterly irrelevant contest between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. I wrote about what that pageantry tends to overshadow, and Paul wrote about how Mike Pence is a political nothingburger, with no base or any kind of power outside of his association with Trump.

Outside of the debates, though, we had some real bangers. Caitlin wrote about the New Yorker union and organizing and solidarity across the industry, and Sam went deep on an essay about her personal experiences with social media radicalization and the shitty “both sides” politics of The Social Dilemma.

As always, here’s our round up of everything behind the paywall. Our new website goes live very soon, so there’s never been a better time to sign up.

Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future

Patrick Wyman

Why did the early farmers of Europe, some 6,000 years ago, spend mind-boggling amounts of time and energy building enormous structures out of stone, earth, and timber? Stonehenge and Newgrange are just the most famous of the megalithic monuments dotting western Europe, but there were thousands of barrows, dolmens, and standing stones, all of which must have mattered a great deal to the people who put them up. In this week’s post, I talk about the megaliths and one recent argument - based on the analysis of ancient DNA - about their origins: At least in Ireland, megalithic tombs contained the remains of people who belonged to some kind of Neolithic dynasty. Pretty wild.