Jocko Homo

We’re pinheads now. We are not whole.

Beto O'Rourke, pictured here hemorrhaging Texas votes

They tell us that

We lost our tails

Evolving up

From little snails

I say it's all

Just wind in sails.

- Devo (1978)

A story for you:

During my 2021 fall semester in grad school, about three or four weeks in, I was in my art theory class, which was digging into post-Marxist, post-structuralist crip theory or fat theory or Judith Butler or whatever, and my amygdala hit a wall and took over and I spoke up. I told my fellow students, these young women (in Art History they are all young women), and my grown-man professor, that a massive red wave of elections was headed our way, because when these ideas leave the classroom they are terribly unpopular.

I mentioned my own extended family members living in the suburbs and exurbs and rural parts of Texas, who work really hard and always have. They are well-read, friendly, and law-abiding, and yet—surprise!—not at all into Foucault. I said that I realized how treating so many of our fellow citizens like they’re dumb and regressive (ahem: “deplorable”) is going to result in a colossal backlash, and this time it will count.

(I know you think that’s what Trump’s election was. But he was just a symptom of a long-brewing crisis.)

I’m paraphrasing here—I was adrenalized in that classroom—but told the class I felt like they were missing something huge, that Republicans and conservatives in Texas and beyond were lined up on the horizon like orcs (with guns) and they could not wait to vote. I know this because I get out of blue silos and talk to people. I read things I’m not supposed to read. I told them that by the 2022 midterms, and certainly by 2024, that the GOP will have won so much control that we may never have free and fair elections again. I said all of this, and I said it with urgency. I may have been kind of loud. We all had to wear masks in class, of course.

Let me be clear: I do not want Trump back in the Oval Office anymore than an “intersectional non-binary ADHD ASD allosexual queer person of color” wants Trump in the Oval Office. I think people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn or whatever that punk’s name is are gross grifters. They are deplorable, because they are liars and opportunists. I feel that way about a lot of people in the top spots in Texas government, too.

But it was a pretty sucky moment in that classroom. I sensed my impulsive monologue went over like a lead zeppelin. The class probably thought I was crazy. But I was actually just really scared and pissed off. Maybe demoralized.

I think I am demoralized, being a Gen-X person who trusted our two-term president, the constitutional lawyer Barack Obama, when he told us that while the United States may not be perfect, it at least has progress and evolution built into the very fabric of its constitution, its amendments, and our Bill of Rights (very unlike the vast majority of the world’s governments)—and then he got to take a well-deserved retirement from office (I’ve always loved Obama), and then Trump got in, and people went nutty. And we all watched as grievance-and-identity-based massive overcorrections reversed decades of sanity, goodwill, and actual progress. Tribalism exploded. A broad left became as deranged as the far right.

Those of us born before 1980, classic liberals of the analog world, had kicked open door after door of new ideas, protections and liberties, and now the new kids, and a lot of “affirming” adults who should know better, are acting like they invented the very concept of doors, and the rest of us are fascists. Millions of us have lost our political home in this national struggle session.

I think one or two students in that classroom got it. Who knows? I couldn’t read their covered faces. I worry about all of them; they are whip-smart, and kind, and yet their futures look bleak from where I stand. But what I did not say that day was that if illiberal progressives of the far left win in the long run (and I think in the very long run they will win it all: see China) we will never have free speech again. Civil rights will be over. I couldn’t say many things I wanted to say in that class, or anywhere at school, or in public, because at the time I was still the editor of an absurdly progressive non-profit arts magazine.

I’m not at that job anymore, but I can tell people on “my side” of the political fence, the “blue “side, all day long, that I voted for Sanders in one primary, and Warren in the next, and they will still think I’m a pretty bad person, because I believe deep in my bones that the First Amendment is the one thing on which all of our other rights are predicated. Real freedom is terribly fragile and rare. And we’re tossing it in the garbage like it’s a three-day-old cat turd.

(The pandemic certainly sped up the process.)

I don’t think I’m projecting when I tell you that the private conversations I’ve had with many liberals and progressives of my generation—artists, musicians, writers—are steeped in despair. We were natural allies of the coming generations. We were androgynous and curious and culture-obsessed, and yes, inclusive and diverse, and in a way that world history had never seen before: we wore whatever we wanted to, loved whoever we wanted to, fucked whoever we wanted to. We didn’t love transgression for the sake of transgression. We embraced transgression as a by-product of free minds thinking freely, roaming a sublime and terrifying open range of creative and intellectual thought, without all the PC barbed wire that went up in the ensuing years and has made so much of today’s art so lockstep and propagandistic. The revisionist history on display these days is breathtaking. An implanted oppressed or “marginalized” identity is the key to power and status.

Plenty of young people, young Americans, are impressive. Talented, endlessly creative, and with lightning-fast minds. They work hard; they follow through.

But also: What do many of these most “oppressed” youngsters and young adults believe in? These individuals with so much potential? Tech and our institutions have broken so many of them. They vape, and take Adderall, watch porn (though their lives are often sexless), play video games, and stalk and shame people on social media while demanding we affirm their every blink. They are depressed and anxious. These are smart and lovable human beings, and yet they are lost. Like the mainstream media, and now our government, they don’t believe in the primary function of free speech, or free thought. They feel that their “freedoms” are more moral than those of others; they believe that two wrongs make a right.

Nina Jankowicz, a musical-theater nerd who adores strict authority, is the head of our new Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board. Is this constitutional? We now have a Ministry of Truth.

When I write that students in that theory class didn’t absorb what I said, I also wonder if they even understood what I said about pendulum swings. I know I keep beating this drum, but: today’s young minds are not free. The ivory tower is a massive indoctrination machine, and I would not have believed the extent of it had I not witnessed it in person. Social media is the machine’s fuel. The result of the combination has created a multi-generation, multibillion-dollar DEI infrastructure that will not only not dissolve under a coming GOP government, but will double down on making more and more people feel oppressed and fragile and confused and outraged. It will keep the super-connected freight train made up of anti-Semitism, the trans and gender cult (a deeply homophobic and misogynist industrial complex), and engineered racial animosity oiled up and unstoppable. Speech will be more compelled by the day; free thought and inquiry will be more scarce by the year. No army of red-wave orcs is going to stop it, even if Trump or DeSantis or whoever wins in a few years. I asked my theory professor about theory: What is the endgame here? My question may have offended him.

Demoralization is the endgame. We who took civil rights very seriously and took the First Amendment for granted are supposed to shut up now, stand down, and go away—along with due process and any media or government that tells us the truth.

You know what this is.

This new order is not brought to you, to all of us, by an actual underclass finally getting a seat at the table. Working-class people who work all day are not in this conversation. Poor people are not, either. This obsession with identity-based social justice and “equity” is a giant smokescreen masking real disparity and hopelessness. This is a knock-on effect, brought to us by navel-gazers who know how fun it is to discuss theory in the classroom (it is fun!) taking longterm if not permanent revenge on the nation’s exhausted majority for some imagined oppression that never messed with them in the first place, and hasn’t been any individual-defining issue in their lifetimes. Like the worst impulses of the far right, the relativist politics of the far left run against human nature and human potential. And many of us unwittingly carried water for this sinister development. I did. We just sort of… let it happen.

This is not progressive, or progress. At this point, this is drummed-up division and grievance. It’s profound distortion. We’re living through an era of unending and escalating left-right, pendulum-swing power grabs, an unraveling of democracy, the bad dreams of Orwell and Vonnegut and Bradbury and Huxley. This is de-evolution.