Take That, Hamlet
Hi!
Lots of you wrote back in response to the special newsletter I sent out right after the election. I read all of the emails and I tried to get back to everyone but there were a lot of emails in a short time, so I apologize if I missed you. Thank you for being such a thoughtful and engaged group of people.
I want to be clear about where I am because I know for a fact that a lot of you are really freaked out right now: I don’t feel as though the future is lost, or that American politics is a hopeless endeavor. But I do think that this year’s presidential election pushed back years—maybe decades—of progress, and it’s going to be a lot of work just to tread water for the near future.
What does treading water look like? For one thing, it means we’re going to have to work extra hard to ensure the safety of anyone who’s not an upper-middle-class straight white Christian. There are about to be a lot of laws and policies enacted that will punish anyone who’s part of a vulnerable subgroup. Some of those laws will make life a little more annoying and difficult for those folks. Other laws will aim to strip away some of their rights and their dignity. All of those laws will be morally wrong. You can’t ethically legislate someone’s personhood, or put their essential humanity up to a vote. That means all of those laws and policies will need to be loudly and publicly fought.
And for another thing, it’s going to take work just to figure out where you should spend your time and energy. That’s part of the plan—the people who are coming into power want you to get tired. They want you to be confused about what’s actually happening and which actions require a response.
One more thing that I think will be different this time: The culture isn’t going to be as eager to fight as it was in 2016. CEOs have already bowed down to the incoming administration and the mainstream media seems to be doing its best to normalize evangelical Republican extremism. A lot of organizations are going to go out of their way to stay “apolitical,” which of course is a political choice to allow the status quo to unfold.
There are a couple of things that I need you to remember. First and foremost: Donald Trump is not some all-powerful, omnipotent chess-master who plays five moves ahead of everyone else. He is a grifter who is good at gumming up the system and then taking advantage of the chaos that ensues. If you fall into the bad habit of thinking of him as some sort of a cartoon supervillain who can anticipate and block his opponents’ every action, you’re giving him way too much credit and making your life more difficult for no good reason.
And if you’re trying to think about where to put your energy in the weeks and years ahead, you should always choose the action that protects people who have less power than you. That means not spending your time posting on social media about some Russian collusion conspiracy when you could be attending a protest to defend the rights of trans people instead. It means not buying the next Maggie Haberman tell-all documenting the palace intrigue of the next administration, and instead supporting Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQIA+ authors and businesses with that money and attention.
I can’t lie: This sucks. It’s not the future that I signed up for. This is certainly not how I thought I’d spend my late 40s and early 50s. The better world that I imagined myself moving toward feels further away today than it did twenty, ten, or even two years ago.
But nobody can predict the future. Who knows? This might be the moment when the conservative alt-right’s reach exceeds its grasp. Nobody is ever prepared for the future, and the past always feels obvious in retrospect. As bad as it feels right now, action is always better than inaction, and communal action is almost always better than action taken alone. Finally, no matter what a prevaricating Prince of Denmark might try to make you believe, it is always better to be than it is to not be. So let’s get down to being.
I’ve Been Writing
For my day job I wrote this week’s edition of The Pitch, which is all about why air travel has become so terrible over the last forty years, and why it’s not likely to get any better over the next four years.
For the Seattle Times, I profiled Arcane Comics, a local comic book store that’s been ahead of its time since it launched two decades ago.
I also wrote about ten of the most exciting November paperback releases.
And I asked local authors, literary nonprofit leaders, and other luminaries what books they’re most excited about giving this holiday season.
I’ve Been Reading
In the days before the election I read War, Bob Woodward’s book about the last days of the Biden Adminstration and the 2024 Trump campaign. The book felt like an outright warning, a siren alerting us to the fact that a second Trump Administration would be meaner, uglier, and much more unhinged than the first. And here we are.
After the election, I fell into reading biographies. I really enjoyed Dorothy Parker in Hollywood, which was a well-researched biography of Parker’s late-life entanglement in the movie business. I’ve read a few Parker biographies and I’d say that if you were to only read one, it should be this one. All the others are too obsessed with the New York portion of Parker’s life, when in fact her turbulent relationship with Hollywood is far more interesting.
And while I’ve always found Johnny Carson to be a fascinating figure—his chilly Nebraskan anger was always coiling under the surface even as he served as the most cordial host on American television for decades—I can’t recommend his new biography, Carson The Magnificent, because it is overwritten and overwrought and generally exhausting to read.
Speaking of smug narrators: All the Worst Humans is a confessional memoir by a man who served as a PR agent for some of the worst people in the world, including Muammar Gaddafi. The author keeps commenting about what a terrible human he is, but the book feels way too braggadocious to be truly desiring of forgiveness. It’s kind of similar to Catch Me If You Can in terms of smarminess.
One of my favorite newsletters is local author Steven Arntson’s Steven Richard Newsletter, so I was happy to see that he published a compilation volume. If you’re a fan of heightened absurdist comedy like The Onion or McSweeney’s, you’ll find a lot to like here. It’s a collection of humorous pieces including a song about a junk drawer, a few jokes about nihilists and realists, and robot toddlers.
Seattle cartoonist Brett Hamil is putting out a serial comic now, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s called Bald Knob, it’s the story of the residents of a small town who keep getting in the way of their own ambitions, and issues #1 and #2 are available now. At a time when comics feel a little too invested in maximalism and absurdity, I’ve been enjoying Hamil’s turn toward comic realism. He writes about stupid people who are almost heartbreakingly un-self-aware. There used to a lot of cartoonists working in this space in the 1990s, but now Hamil is out there charting these waters on his own.
Cities Made Differently by David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky is an illustrated encyclopedia of different concepts of cities, both real and fictional. They write about cities being constructed in deserts and underwater cities and cities that are panopticons. It’s a very beautifully designed book that will get you thinking playfully about the purpose and forms of cities.
Lynne Tillman’s novella Weird Fucks was the first fiction I was able to read after the election. It’s a collection of encounters with men—some weird, some depressing, some sinister—and it’s the kind of book you can really just absorb on an aesthetic level, swinging from beautiful sentence to beautiful sentence like Tarzan in a jungle.
Screenwriter and cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan’s memoir They Went Another Way is a book that every aspiring screenwriter should read, because it perfectly captures the absurdity and frustration of working in the entertainment industry. Kaplan presents the rise and fall and rise and fall and maybe rise but then complete and total fall of a single project—a sitcom about a May/December romance starring Glenn Close and maybe Pete Davidson—in a series of diary entries. It’s a mundane book, relaying all the meetings and canceled meetings and boring texts and small talk that go into making a TV show in the streaming era, but Kaplan’s bracing honesty about all the bullshit that a Hollywood writer has to endure makes the book feel raw and honest. It’s like Waiting for Godot, only Godot is a Hollywood studio rep holding a paycheck for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
On Being Wicked
I was very entertained by the Wicked movie. It’s got singing, dancing, excellent performances, talking animals—what more could you ask for?
However, the entire phenomenon of Wicked—by which I mean the bestselling book that came out in 1995, the Broadway musical that has sold out shows for 21 years, and last week’s number one movie in the country—feels to me like a symptom of a larger problem in American entertainment.
In short, I think too many writers over the last 30 years or so have taken the basic writing lesson that “every villain is the hero of their own story” to instead mean that “every villain is a hero until they make a single, tragic, bad decision.” And that’s just not the case.
The drumbeat of films and books starring the great villains of popular culture has been increasing in recent years. Malificent, the Joker, Darth Vader, and even Cruella DeVille—the aspiring puppy-skinner!—have starred in vehicles meant to transform them into sympathetic figures, tormented by complicated pasts and destined for tragic futures.
You might argue that this storytelling trend—along with shows like the Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Ozark that put villains in protagonist roles—is a good thing because it reveals the inherent humanity behind even the worst individuals.
And while I am desperate for true reform in our criminal justice system that humanely addresses the systemic burdens that create criminal behavior, I don’t think that rehabilitating the image of cinematic monsters is a real first step toward that better world. This doesn’t feel like an attempt to be restorative, or to find the humanity in those who have wronged us; it feels much more sinister and inward-looking to me.
The truth is that sometimes, there are monsters. Nothing could justify the heinous acts that Hitler urged people to commit in his name. Charles Manson deserved to be locked away from society. Donald Trump undoubtedly had a wretched childhood, but that doesn’t explain away his lusty desire to execute the Central Park Five or to separate children from their families and place them into internment camps.
So why do our entertainment conglomerates feel the need to retroactively psychoanalyze some of our most hissable villains? Part of it is just the unquenchable thirst for content: Every idea has to have the last ounce of interest squeezed out of it, and villains have always occupied an outsized chunk of audience mindshare.
But I wonder if some of it has to do with self-reflection. The more we learn of the world, the more it becomes clear that the wealthiest people in the world are basically looting the poorest people in the world. With our inability to address climate change, we are looting the future in order to avoid changing the way we live in the present. We seem more aware of our own monstrousness than in any other time in history, but we also seem unable to do anything about it. So why not distract ourselves with films that serve as a meditation on the sympathetic, vulnerable, innocent child inside Darth Vader? If he’s a good guy deep down, aren’t we all?
I think a lot about this graphic, which shows that in one Star Wars video game, a majority of players in the developed northern hemisphere chose to play as the Empire while players in the southern hemisphere chose to play as the Rebel Alliance:
What does it mean that our collective unconsciousness seems to be desperate to sympathize with the villains and idolize the evil empires? It almost feels too on-the-nose, but maybe the simplest answer is true: Maybe, after all is said and done, we are the baddies.
Yeah, that about sums up my mental state. Maybe you’re doing something fun and uplifting and cool right now? If so, tell me about it by responding to this email. I could use some happy news.
Anyway, take care of yourself.
Paul