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Max Read wrote a great book review not too long ago where, among other things, he suggested that scrolling through social media (and even posting!) were manifestations of the death drive, peculiarly modern forms of self-annihilation that, for insidiousness and profitability, probably beat booze and heroin. After reading that, I checked my own responses. Reading twitter really did make me feel dead, like Max said. There was a sacrifice, even a potlach of time: whole hours disappeared. And during those hours my consciousness sort of dissipated. I was relieved of the obligation to think; the web thought for me.

Hard to square with those observations is the day-long sense of anxiety and outrage that I feel after being “online” for a while. Something’s happening to something there: the feeling of being dead corresponds with a continued life, the unwelcome and persistent ability to feel. So annihilation can lead to a kind of undeath online, one where you’re made to feel like your ego is under threat by mysterious agencies even as, in fact, you surrender it to the feed.

That experience helped me understand something from Arya-Surya’s garland of past lives, a great catalog of self-annihilation (since they’re all past lives, the Buddha dies at the end of each episode; I hope to write on here sometime about the one where he’s born as a rabbit, then cooks himself to feed a guest). After a particularly good run, the Buddha gets an exit interview with Indra, who offers him a couple free wishes. The Buddha says, “May I never know Indra! May I forget him, may I never see him again!” And Indra is understandably a bit insulted.

Well, the reason – which Buddha is too polite to say – is I think this: that knowing Indra makes it impossible for Buddha to find the zero-point of self-annihilation that he must reach from one life to the next. And Indra stands in for the whole metaphysical system, the thing that, in effect, makes Buddha what he is. Awareness of Indra, awareness of the structure, is paralyzing. It puts a stop to the cycle of rebirth, not by ending it through the annihilation of all reality, but by freezing prematurely. No knowledge can exceed this.

Social media works that way too. It’s a machine for producing the feeling of annihilation, among other feelings. We know the machine’s there and the machine is working on us. So nothing changes; we annihilate ourselves, then revive just like we were, only angrier and also worse in probably other ways. Unfortunately, no knowledge can exceed this.

The zombie ego, still subject to programming even after the annihilation of consciousness, has been a genre trope ever since Romero’s Dawn of the Dead with its hordes of decaying mall-shoppers. A new ego has to follow the end of the old one; otherwise, as the ad-funded rise of social media has demonstrated, nothing is more profitable for capitalism than ego-death.

What is the point of politics? From a certain perspective, the answer to that question has always been obvious: self-preservation. That orientation is obvious in slogans of the paranoid style of right-wing politics, from “Purity of Essences” and anti-fluoridation to the 14 words of modern white nationalists. The point of those pitches is to create insecurity about self-preservation where none had existed before, a disease to which the snake-oil salesmen of fascism can offer their cure.

As those examples suggest, politics as self-preservation isn’t always (or even usually) about fending off an existential threat. The aim is rather to fend off the threat of a threat, to remove a source of anxiety in the political subject. What masquerades as defense of biological life turns out to be nothing more than a kind of therapy, a public soothing for those incapable of soothing themselves. The subject is preserved, not from dying, but from having to live in different circumstances: in short, from change.

On that interpretation, it’s possible to learn to see this politics of self-preservation as characteristic not just of the paranoid right, but of much of America’s political center, too. When Joe Biden’s presidential campaign promises a return to normalcy, what that means is that you, the political subject whose inner life has been destroyed by Trump’s presidency, don’t have to change. If you like your ego ideal, you can keep it.

Biden has staked an awful lot – in some sense, the country’s whole future – on the widespread appeal of that promise. As Trump overturns aspects of “normalcy” upon which more and more Americans had been depending to feel sane, that decision may prove prescient. If so, and even if Biden wins, this will put many of us into an uncomfortable bind. Because the alternative to Biden is the complete destruction of our psychic reality, we will have identified with and voted for Biden essentially at gunpoint. The Democratic machine will have learned a bad lesson about the utility of creating monsters, because monsters hold our dreams and ambitions and sense of what’s right hostage to mere survival.

There’s a parallel problem in psychoanalysis, when the ego is suffering because of what it is – because of neuroses or addictions or nostalgia or other structural flaws – but refuses to change because change means passing through non-being, or death. This is one compelling explanation of the failure of the psychoanalytic logos to suffice for transforming the psyche: you can tell someone what’s wrong with them, you can give them a detailed and correct explanation of the structure of their illness, but that (as Freud discovered, to his puzzlement) won’t make them well. A self wants to go on being what it is.

The junction of these two fields in a teleology of self-preservation leads me back to a process that I more and more feel is at the center of our current political nightmare: the direct insertion of the ego at the center of our political deliberations. White people are increasingly encouraged to identify themselves with a set of easily-sloganized values, or even with a particular authoritarian individual, which they can for the most part only “successfully” defend (and therefore occupy) by constructing fantasy scenarios in which they tell off a racist or shoot a protester (I’m not drawing equivalences here – shooting protesters is evil, telling off a racist is harmless at worst). We’re now seeing these scenarios acted out with increasing frequency, the actors drawing vicarious (and, in the case of Kyle Rittenhaus et all, deeply vicious) participation on the part of an audience enraptured by what it imagines to be a mirror.

As a slur, “identity politics” is best used not of political movements emerging in communities of color (who, as the primary object of republicans’ political sadism and Democrats’ less-than-useful pity, really do have gains to make by organizing around a racial identity for which they will anyhow be targeted) but of white peoples’ appropriation of politics as a way of ego-construction and preservation. That kind of identity politics makes white people feel important and gives them the feeling that they’ve been recognized while, simultaneously, freeing national politicians (with the exception of a number of left-democrat senators and representatives) from any obligation to respond to the actual needs of their constituents. The arrangement (in the building since 1980 and finally perfected in 2016) is a convenient one, but we pay the price every four years in ever-intenser paroxysms of psychic antagonism. That’s the predictable result when you wager your soul on something as transient as a presidential election.

How much better would it be if we could learn the lesson, insisted upon by every serious revolutionary movement from Christianity onward, that the only way to work towards a better (or even tolerable) world is to give up on self-preservation? You can accept that change means annihilating yourself, or you can hold onto your ego and keep having more of the same – or, as it happens, the illusion of more of the same, projected in front of your eyes at an ever-greater off-stage cost.

The preface to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History stands out among introductions to ancient books for being particularly self-deprecating. That’s partly because, as a work addressed to an emperor, it has to approach its dedicatee in a cringing way. The other half of the problem is that Pliny seems disaffected with his own subject matter. That’s “nature,” as the title of the work suggests: a “sterilis materia,” Pliny calls it, nobody’s idea of a good time to read or write about.

There’s a pun in the Latin that suggests Pliny is playing a trick on the reader. “Natura” is that which “gives birth” to everything, so how could it be sterile? Why isn’t it generative at the level of description, too? How come nature can “give birth” to everything except a lively prose style through which to represent itself?

Another way of putting the same question is to ask “what’s nature, really?” Implicit in the prologue is a sense of nature as a given object that Pliny, like other encyclopedists before him, aims to represent in a culturally legible form. The task of representing nature then imposes its own imperatives, notably and problematically the imperative to completeness. The necessary capaciousness and universality of Pliny’s imitation is what makes nature into a sterilis materia, paradoxically forcing a kind of deadness on “life” (id est, vita) by pursuing its imitation ever outward into a bad infinity. An endless scope, no room for making selections or anothologizing: Pliny’s putative approach is rather like that of Borges’ librarian of Babel, cataloguing an archive that, just because of its infinite extent, can’t mean anything to anyone.

Fortunately for those of us who work on him, the method actually on display in Pliny’s NH could hardly be further from the description of it that he offers in the prologue. In the preface, Pliny insists that the true representation of nature has no room for rhetorical figures or the kind of mirabilia that make the thaumasiographical tradition so engaging; from book 2 onward, however (book 1 is an index and list of auctores), Pliny violates both these rules more or less routinely. His talents as a rhetorician and stylist are debatable (in Antike kunstprosa Eduard Norden stigmatizes Pliny as, basically, the worst, which I think is unfair), but Pliny’s bent for reporting miracles and freaks of nature means we should probably locate him within, rather than in opposition to, the genre of thaumasiography.

The task of depicting nature turns out to be much more complicated than the preface’s rhetoric of accurate and full imitation would lead us to believe. In a sense, that’s obvious: infinite nature fits within the bounds of Pliny’s finite book, so selections must have been made. Pliny foregrounds the problem near the begining of book 2, when he insists that “nature” as far as it matters to us only includes (to put it anachronistically) our own solar system. Pliny knows and does not refute the claim, advanced by Epicureans and others, that worlds similar to ours dot an infinite universe. But he excludes these at the outset, marking off a bounded part of nature as the object of his own representation. Lato sensu, that’s what NH book 2 does in general: it defines nature, and, by defining, it selects.

The preface promises to hold a mirror up to nature. This is a metaphor that we can understand. Book 2 invites us to look for another metaphor. If the map isn’t the territory, then what is it? And also, what’s the territory?

I’m definitely not saying anything revolutionary when I answer those questions by saying that nature, in Pliny, is thoroughly acculturated. If Philippe Descola is right to tag Rome as a society that, like our own, splits nature from culture, then Pliny and his readers have no more ever been Roman than we have ever been modern. Nature exists for Pliny insofar as it interfaces with (a certain) human culture: far from standing on opposite sides of a divide, nature and culture mutually and intimately define.

The upshot of that, less frequently appreciated, is that neither nature nor culture can serve as an absolute measure for the other. In Pliny, they pass the task of measuring back and forth: sometimes culture evaluates nature, sometimes nature condemns society. Even stranger (and I’ll discuss some examples in a later post or two), nature sometimes seems to take over the task of representing from culture and actually to represent culture. In those cases, the map is a map of itself. There is no territory.

In early 1993, contaminated hamburger patties served at Jack in the Box – a personal favorite of mine, though for locational reasons not one I get to visit often – sickened more than seven hundred diners. Four children died. It was a disaster, a mass poisoning carried out inadvertently and in plain site. A fast food franchise had deployed biological weapons against its own citizens. Jack in the Box made amends by running a series of ads through 1993 and early 1994 that showed a mascot-headed terrorist annihilating a boardroom full of corporate types who, it was implied, bore all blame for the contamination. I remember the ad where the mascot dynamites the boardroom with particular clarity, because it seemed to me at the time to predict the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City later that year. I was eleven and prone to draw imaginary connections. But I wasn’t wrong: as fast food goes, so goes the country.

America imagines itself as a land of freedom, but food is metaphysically the opposite of that. What more frequent reminder is there of our fundamental unfreedom, our inescapable submission to the laws of nature, than that we have to take the time to feed ourselves or else we’ll die? That’s not freedom, that’s constraint, the background human condition and also why capitalism, using “free labor,” manages to work people about as hard as slavery did. You have to buy food from the Man: he pays you with one hand and takes your money with the other, and, in the middle, you work.

Fast food is America’s way of obscuring that grim truth. The Americanness of the solution is as follows. First, minimize the time it takes to eat, minimize the role that eating plays in people’s lives; make food always be ready to hand. That way, you can almost forget the iron necessity of eating. Then, take advantage of the speed of fast food to shorten lunch breaks and its cheapness to cut real wages. Finally, monetize fast food as another object of consumer choice, a marketing ploy that people have been trained to misrecognize as the very substance of freedom. Necessity reappears as branding. That’s the American Way.

Repressed necessity has a way of reasserting itself and reappearing at inconvenient moments. Necessity is an choice between life and death; fast food branding obviously wants to hide the second option, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. When you eat at a fast food restaurant, you’re putting your life into play.

The fast food restaurant is a characteristically American way of death. You can do an eating fail, for instance, as did the victims of the great Jack in the Box burger contamination and those of countless other similar disasters over the last half-century. They thought they were eating, but they were doing something different – the stakes perhaps obscured from them by the fact that they were doing it in the presence of one or more giant cartoon clowns. Or, like Rayshard Brooks, you can get executed by cops for gumming up the wheels of commerce. Or, like people throughout the supply chain during the coronavirus pandemic, you may be forced to risk your life as an “essential worker” in close contact with customers and other employees, any one of whom may give (or take) a COVID infection.

Yes, you’re an essential worker, even though nobody respects you and you make minimum wage or less. That’s America, baby! You’re stuck in a work environment that, by way of branding, all at once infantilizes the customers and trivializes the workers. Nobody’s going to take you seriously as long as you’re working next to a cardboard standee of a clown or a Kentucky Colonel or an illiterate cow. But your job is serious: you’re mediating survival for maybe hundreds of people every day.

This frantic haste to eat and forget eating leads, inevitably, to accidents. Yet carelessness gets encouraged at every turn, a carelessness that is at once casual and metaphysical. In McDonald’s, nobody cares about the food you’re eating and you don’t care about your own mortality, something of which hunger and the need to eat and the everyday difficulty of finding food might in other circumstances remind you.

An architecture student from the moon might have a hard time telling McDonald’s apart from a children’s hospital: same harsh fluorescent lighting, same vinyl or plastic furniture, same garishly cheerful decor. Could we blame them for not realizing that color schemes make all the difference? McDonald’s makes money by getting you in and out the door as fast as possible, something allegedly encouraged by painting every surface yellow and red; Children’s hospitals decorate in blues and greens that invite you to stay a while, because they make more money that way. Both enterprises only turn a profit by economizing death.

What gave places like the City of Brass and Iram of the Pillars the appeal that they obviously held for medieval Islamicate audiences – to say nothing of modern European readers who might have encountered them in translation? Partly, a background ideology of ruins that made these a safe-ish place for encountering the voluptuous pre-Islamic past without maybe having to admit that its superiority to the present might be anything more than architectural. From the Qur’an forward, ruin-gazing in Islam basically always comes with a reminder that the spiritual truths of the religion both trump and outlast mere buildings, no matter how grand the latter might be.

That’s an element of the story that non-Muslim readers (or even modern Muslims, for that matter) won’t understand without a footnote. However, there’s also an element to the utopian vision of the City of Brass that transcends the medieval Islamicate cultural moment enough to have reappered as a story pattern in modern movies from Indiana Jones to The Guardians of the Galaxy. That’s the act of stealing from dead people – a source of deep pleasure but also enough guilt that it needs to be punished, within the plot, by sword-wielding automata or a giant boulder or Ronan the Accuser or what have you.

How’s this different than winning the lottery, which is narratively boring? Why does stealing from a ruin amount to more than a windfall? Because it’s an act that embodies the hope, basically shared by everyone, that property relations are one day going to disappear. And then, because this is the most verboten of wishes under capitalism, a boulder gets dropped on us. If the punishment fits the thought crime, then we have to admit that the fantasized punishment ends up being a lot more drastic under capitalism (in Indiana Jones, e.g.) than it does under the monarchical despotism of the Arabian Nights. Capitalism judges us much more harshly for imagining alternatives to it than pretty much any earlier political/economic dispensation. If a city of brass is an urban apparatus that punishes us for stealing, then we live in cities that are brassier than ever.

The City of Brass is a weird one, for sure, lessfrom the perspective of modern Western readers than by comparison with the usual plot structure of the stories in alf layla wa layla. If you’re not familiar, the plot goes like this: the Caliph sends an expedition to a magic abandoned city he’s heard about. The expedition finds the city (made of brass, natch), then manages to get inside after overcoming a bunch of obstacles (including, notably, a shaytanic illusion that makes people think they’re jumping into an ocean when actually they’re plunging onto solid ground). There’s lots of treasure to be had, but one man – the Caliph’s vizeer, often a sinister figure in these stories – goes too far: he tries to take clothing from the preserved corpse of the city’s former queen, and gets his head chopped off by her zombie/automaton servants. The surviving expedition members grab their haul and head home.

There’s plenty of surreal stuff going on in the City of Brass, but we still experience a frisson of recognition at what’s basically an Indiana Jones movie waiting to be filmed. On the other hand, what’s it doing in a collection of stories that’s mostly about improbable solutions to serious problems? The plot of a normal story in alf layla is mostly about setting up a seemingly inescapable situation which the hero will nonetheless manage to escape. That’s a way of creating the suspense that’s keeping Shaharazad alive.

The story of the City of Brass, by contrast, is descriptive and meditative, slow and basically plotless: by far the bulk of the text gets taken up by pious poetry, ou sont les nieges d’antan-type reflections, and ecphrasis of the various treasures that the explorers find there. One can imagine these details as elements in a virtuouso oral performance, but that performance would be of a very different type than the ones that make up the rest of the alf layla.

You get some interesting suggestions about this from scholars. For instance, is the City of Brass a neo-Platonic allegory? Maybe, but that kind of claim is by its nature hard to prove. More verifiable are the generic links between the City of Brass and certain episodes in the qass tradition of popular folkloric expansion on narratives from the Qur’an. Qass recitals about the ruined cities of ‘Ad, Thamud, and especially Iram al-‘Imad feature similar ecphrases and similar pious meditations; the motif of the trap that catches a greedy explorer is also a commonplace. By abstracting those motifs from their Qur’anic frame and resituating them in the narrative world of the Caliphate, the story of the City of Brass creates a new kind of narrative – historical fiction that verges on sci-fi. But the germ of that narrative is still, unavoidably, Islamic civilization’s relationship with a pre-Islamic past.

The qass narratives on the pattern of which the City of Brass gets built are themselves expansions of Qur’anic pericopes about tribes destroyed by Allah whose houses remain as a sign to later generations. The sira and hadith show Muhammad attributing a kind of accursed quality to such ruins, which Muslims are encouraged to avoid. Yet the buildings themselves (vide the tombs at Mada’in Salih, a site associated with Thamud in the Islamic tradition) have a monumental appeal that, as the qass tradition attests, is hard to deny. Can good Muslims take anything from those monuments without falling victim to their curse?

Narratives like the City of Brass offer a reassuring answer to that question. Piety (as embodied in this story by the Sheikh ‘Abd as-Samad) can protect you against the seductive menace of ancient cities, and you can steal a lot of treasure as long as you don’t (like the vizeer) go beyond the bounds of decency. Alongside those material rewards comes an intellectual harvest, a vast cache of poetry (revealingly said to have been written in Greek) that instructs you about the transience of worldly things.

A more threatening version of the same basic story pattern would be the preface to the pseudo-Aristotelian Sir al-Asrar, a book of political and medical advice interspersed with a few magic recipes. There the “translator” of the book (again said to have been written in Greek) tells us how he swindled it out of a Christian monk living in a ruined building. We need to look for esoteric meanings, he says: the true meaning of the book would destroy the world if it were widely understood, so it needs to be hidden in code. We’re now far from conventional Islamic piety.

In both narratives, ruins share an enchanted quality which (outside of Indiana Jones movies) they’ve basically lost for us. Is modern archaeology to blame, with its relentlessly informational focus? Or are we actually losing in general the idea that the past can be interesting (not to mention dangerous?)

What I mean is that you can see a picture, and you can also see yourself in a picture. When it comes to regular old perception, you never see yourself in the picture unless, 1.) there’s a mirror, 2.) you have a doppleganger, or 3.) you’re losing your mind. In this sense, seeing yourself in the picture is a stock trope of horror movies and/or a diagnostic criterion for certain serious delusions. On the other hand, we screen films in our head that feature us all the time; this is a normal part of imagination, the medium that allows us to think through a future that features us. That distinction is a way of signposting where the ego should be: absent in the real, present in the imaginary.

Are the law and politics real, or are they imaginary? Both, in a democracy: that’s what makes democratic politics so psychologically difficult. The law is something real that’s also subject to the rule of the imagination. We’re both there and not there. An attractive alternative to maintaining that suspended judgment is just to come down on one side or another. For most of America’s history, the contest has been between progressives, who can hold both ideas in their minds at once, and conservatives, who take the shortcut of equating the law with the real, legal with just.

There’s always been a strong counter-fantasy on the right that frames individual believers as knights in shining armor, defending the law from people who want to revise it. That’s the law-and-order type, basically, inside every one of whom is a tiny James Earl Ray struggling to get out. Only in the 90’s and 2000’s did this counter-fantasy turn into the central tenet of right-wing politics, and since 2016 it’s spread everywhere.

What does this mean, in practice, for how we think about politics? Here’s what it’s meant for me. Instead of thinking about how to make political change happen in a realistic way, with a frequency justified by the lackadaisical pace of electoral politics in the USA, I imagine politics as a debate between me and one or more individuals from the opposite party. Sometimes, violence breaks out. Politics is a film that I star in. Like all mind-movies, this one is hard to stop watching, but it also generates anxiety because of the unresolved tension between what it predicts and what may or may not actually happen.

That’s politics as pure imaginary. You put yourself in a picture where you don’t belong: the accompanying delusion is that you, as an individual, can or should make a difference to the politics of the nation as a whole. For some people, that’s actually true, but you and I know we’re not one of them. So we imagine politics as the kind of contest in which we can make a difference, and, if we’re deeply psychotic, we try to make that dream come true by putting aggressive bumper stickers on our cars, etc.

What’s the solution? Don’t buy bumper stickers, unless you’re supporting Ego Death for President 2020. On a personal level, remember that thinking you matter for politics is a compensatory fantasy for not mattering. The alternative to that fantasy is actually doing things, not by yourself but as part of a collective that actually does matter. The most practical things, like voting and supporting political campaigns, may seem unappealing because you get the opportunity to do them so rarely. But is whatever you’re “doing” in the abstract when you vote and campaign actually something you want to be doing all the time? Every four years, the nation gets a hole ripped in its mind. Why would you want to repeat that multiple times a day?

The big ego trauma – the experience that creates the ego, actually – is supposed to be our discovery that the world doesn’t respond to our desires in the same way our body does. Major mediators of this trauma are language and, through language, the law. The law just exists to tell you you can’t do that: it takes the lessons you learn as a child from trying to fly or eat a live dog and turns them into examples of, or better yet metaphors for, what happens when you jaywalk or steal. Studies show that children can’t tell one kind of “can’t” apart from the other.

If politics is thinking about the law, then, you’d expect most people to experience it as a kind of ego death, and that’s (probably) been true for most of history. Scipio’s dream at the end of Cicero’s De re publica sets the model: encountering the law means annihilating your own subjectivity, watching yourself dissolve in the bigness of a universe that is mostly not you. The law is something you learn about or discover, not something you make, even if it is (obviously) made and enforced by humans. That’s the parado that Kafka leans on for thrills and chills.

Kafka comes from a different world. His was the last generation anywhere to come of age in an honest-to-god, non-constitutional monarchy. For us, the strangeness of Kafka is in large part the strangeness of that experience. We live in a democracy and, as such, have a much more secular view of the law, which we see that anyone, even roadkill-eating goons like Mitch McConnell, can have a part in making. The democratic ideal is that we’re all supposed to take part in making it. How is our ego supposed to relate to that? You spend your whole childhood learning, via the law, that the universe is separate from you, and then you discover, around age 18, that actually the law is one thing over which you do have control. You’d go crazy. That’s a good plot for a Kafka story.

Americans constantly finding themselves in that position probably does explain a lot of our national weirdness, our grownups not-quite-grown-up by comparison with their European contemporaries and yet, in other ways, super-competent. It also seems to me like this part of the project has gotten, for lack of a better word, “thematized” in recent years as a tool of mass political motivation. I’d like to meet the psychologist who figured that one out.

What I mean is that we’re increasingly encouraged to think of ourselves not only as participating in making the law, but as somehow responsible for the whole thing. A law I don’t like isn’t just something I should work to overturn, it’s a direct attack on my ego. My honor (read: the coherence between my ego-ideal and reality) is at stake, and I need to respond as though it were a personal affront.

If I had to guess, I’d say that this framing got its start as an advertising strategy for firearms, since the world of gun nuts is one in which it’s particularly thrived. In the American ideolect, there aren’t many clearer ways to say “I don’t accept this” than to reach for your gun, a gesture that means you’re done talking (and, it follows, done with “politics” as usually understood). That’s mostly a performative gesture, except when it’s not, as for instance in El Paso and Pittsburgh and Las Vegas.

It’s always the right-wing nuts who pull that shit because they’ve been subject to this kind of marketing for longer. The RNC saw an opening in the outrage that a certain segment of the population felt at the sight of a black president; the “resistance” politics of Obama’s second term was essentially about organizing people around that personal affront to their honor as (white) Americans. Trump, the world’s most easily-offended man, did this act better than any of the party avatars he was running against. Voters who’d been taught to think about politics as an attack on their egos saw a man whose ego was always on the defensive and said, “he understands me.”

That’s a speculative way of framing the last election, but there’s concrete evidence to support it. Michael Anton’s editorial, “The Flight 93 Election,” probably the single most widely-circulated (non-hacked, stolen or faked) written document in right-wing circles leading up to November, 2016, is basically a fantasy rewrite of Trump’s campaign in which his supporters get to imagine themselves as passengers rushing the cabin on the hijacked flight which crashed near Pittsburgh on 9/11. The editorial worked because it transformed political subjects into egos, because it crystalized the “not on my watch” resentment of white nationalists under Obama into a simple, heroic narrative. It worked so well that nobody cared about how flight 93 ended up crashing, killing everyone on board.

Well, the election happened, and now we’re all crazy. I chalk that up in part to trump’s campaign playbook, which involved actually affronting progessives at every opportunity, and in part to Clinton’s desperate last-minute attempt to mobilize voter turnout via “it can’t happen here” rhetoric that tried to convince us we were personally on the hook for stopping a trumpian dictatorship. No one inside the Clinton campaign had the courage to say, “actually, Madame Secretary, that’s your job,” so Clinton lost and we shouldered the blame.

Did I sometimes “do politics” by having arguments with imaginary people in my head before 2016? Yes, I’ll admit it. Does that happen more than once a day now? It does, and it’s profoundly draining. It also blocks me from doing the medium-scale things, like organizing with other people, that might actually be effective between now and when trump gets shuffled off to a nursing home in January, 2021. Like a lot of psychoanalytic lessons, “politics isn’t about you” is something you can know, cognitively, without it making much difference. The ego’s still there, responding to every perceived slight. That’s why I’m now supporting another candidate with a down-scaled version of Giant Meteor’s program: Ego Death for president, 2020.

Because current events are still making me lose my mind, I googled and then read an article reassuring me that the carbonization of the Amazon Rainforest won’t lead to the collapse of the global oxygen supply. Mind you, this isn’t because the Amazon won’t be carbonized; it will, it’s just that no particular forest has much of a net impact on global oxygen levels one way or the other. That’s because forest ecosystems decompose as much as they grow, and so absorb about as much oxygen as they produce: in terms of the composition of our atmosphere, the Amazon is a wash. What matters is the rate of burial of organic carbon from plants in places where it’s cut off from oxygen and can’t decompose. The Amazon makes a big contribution to that by sending wood down its namesake river and out to sea, but annual rates of addition are so small compared to the overall amount of oxygen in our atmosphere that we won’t notice the change for millennia.

The atmosphere is, however, changing. Increasing carbon dioxide concentrations make the air harder to breathe and will, given time, make us stupider; even at the 400 ppm level, which we’ve now shot past, carbon dioxide demonstrably slows down human problem solving. It also makes things hotter, of course, changing the physical properties of the atmosphere so that, for instance, aircraft have a hard time taking off and (on a smaller scale) people have a hard time dissipating excess heat. Ever-lengthening fire seasons blot out the sun over major cities for days or weeks at a time.

So much modern technology – from air conditioning to the Haber-Bosch Process to chemical warfare – takes the atmosphere for granted, as a resource or as a dumping ground or just as a breathable default that will always be big enough to dissipate whatever we put in it. The atmosphere has been so kind to us that we’ve even evolved to ignore it, our strongest senses – sight, hearing, touch – basically treating the atmosphere as if it weren’t there. The atmosphere is so necessary for us that lack of it sends the body into immediate, death-avoiding panic. Yet, now that the atmosphere is being methodically destroyed, there’s no sense of general worry to mirror that reflex response.

What if the global supply of oxygen really were about to collapse? Could we do anything about it? Would we want to? Or would we “adapt,” carrying oxygen tanks with us everywhere like emphysema patients – oxygen tanks we’d be paying for, probably further enriching the same tycoons who made bank off of burning down the Amazon in the first place? Would rich people live in hermetically-sealed dwellings with central O2? Would we mind the death of the outdoors, or would we secretly be thrilled that nobody could tell us to go play outside anymore? Would the market for drones take off?

It’s easier for me to imagine our putting up with this complete involution of nature than it is for me to conceive of action being taken, on any timescale, to protect the atmosphere. That’s a consequence of where politics are right now: thirty years ago, the whole world got together to ban CFCs, but now – despite their well-established ozone-destroying effects – CFCs are somehow having a comeback. Politics used to be at bottom about survival; now it’s another profit stream for the rich, with all the dangerous knock-on effects that implies.

When did “representation” start to belong to the vocabulary of media rather than politics? I couldn’t tell you where the usage comes from, but I started noticing it about a decade ago. How early it penetrated your thought-world probably depends on where you stand in the map of American culture. By now, though, it’s part of the public discourse. You have to be a real nerd to care about whether people in Puerto Rico or Washington, D.C. are getting adequate representation in Congress, but anyone can have an argument about whether giving representation to more genders and races made Star Wars worse (a deceptively good question if you take the prequels into account, and one that I’ll try to answer by the end of this post).

Some people are pushing for representation in media that reflects the actual diversity of the world; other people want every show to be as cis/white/straight as Friends. Both sides are working from the super-dubious assumption that “representation,” per se, is good. The pro-diversity crowd wants that good to be distributed more fairly, while the white-supremacist crowd wants to keep it all for themselves and people who look like them. It doesn’t seem to have occured to anyone that, actually, being associated with Friends should be deeply embarrassing, and that’s just the start of the trouble with a discourse where the possibility of misrepresentation gets suppressed.

There are reasons why things work this way, or at least beneficiaries. Both major political parties benefit from keeping their constituents’ concerns about representation focused elsewhere and from keeping even the notion of misrepresentation out of our heads. The Democrats probably have it slightly worse right now (we’re not supposed to be asking practical questions about Obama’s legacy, especially whether his “representation” of Black America actually worked to its benefit), but the Republicans are going to get it just as bad whenever Trump’s supporters stop assuming that he represents them and ask themselves in what conceivable world Trump might represent the interests of anyone but himself.

Everyone in the political mainstream has an interest in reminding us that what matters is our seeing ourselves onscreen, not what our mirror images do there or whether they really resemble us. White people have actually worked on those assumptions for years, molding themselves in the hollow image of (say) the cast of Friends rather than being shocked that anyone could imagine white people acting that way. You get the sense that these happy mimes would be lost without fictional characters to imitate, which might be why some of them seem to get so triggered by the notion that a Jedi might be a woman.

Well, what about the pretext that most of these crackers hide behind, the claim that diversity detracts from plot, that Finn and Rey have somehow “ruined Star Wars?” That’s a claim you could only make by deliberately forgetting Return of the Jedi, a much worse movie than either of the sequels, both of which (I’d bet, someday) are going to end up near the top of the Star Wars canon. With respect to the sequels, the trolls don’t have a leg to stand on.

They could have made a better case re: the prequels, which, even at the time of their release, were criticized for basically trafficking in blackface. Would the prequels have been better without the Trade Federation, Jar Jar Binks, or the living anti-Semitic tropes from Tantooine? Unquestionably. I think that the groups supposedly “represented” by those figures wouldn’t miss them either. What we have here is a clear-cut case of misrepresentation, one made easier to recognize by the fact that the “representatives” were CGI, not members of the races or ethnic groups they were supposed to represent.

We yearn for simpler times. The problem of misrepresentation has only gotten more insidious as we lose our language for talking about it. Eli Valley surely speaks for more American Jews, but Ariel Sobel and (ugh) Meghan McCain are better at the rhetoric of representing a Jewish identity that somehow turns out to be identical with Zionism, so Valley gets ignored when he’s lucky and slandered as an anti-Semite when he’s not. We have a language for attacking McCain – she’s “appropriating” an identity that doesn’t belong to her – but what about Sobel? She really is Jewish, so does that make her representative?

With that example, I may seem to be reverting to a political meaning for representation. All the figures involved, though, belong to a media landscape that (I wouldn’t be the first to observe) people now approach via something more like fandom than political partisanship in the classical sense. From that point of view, Sobel’s claim to “represent” is unquestionable – but that just goes to show that representation isn’t reality, and that it’s not always a good thing.