Looking for a concise counter-argument to the annoying, fabricated assertion that our Founding Fathers were pious, God-fearing men? Read below…

I just wrote a piece on America’s original constitution, The Articles of Confederation, our confederal founding and decentralized original intent for Unherd. The reviews for my piece came in hard and fast: “florid pretentious piece of trash,” “prolix,” more difficult than Finnegans Wake. But defenders of America’s original intent have had to bear up under much worse, and in honor of our confederal founding I suggest you give it a try.

Now, our confederal origins are such a poorly taught history that “confederal” bears the red squiggly line of the typo here on Substack. In fact, the whole episode is America’s first hornswoggle: a class of creditors coercively swapping out a decentralized polity for a consolidated central government. Lucrative! In so doing they turned the American Revolution into a Reformation of English polity. They also removed religion from the law.

Citizens of Massachusetts were never supposed to be able to cast a federal vote that effected how Texans live. As a confederation, we were supposed to be a simultaneity of disparate polities and beliefs. In this paradoxical spirit, I want to show you how decentralized is my own mind. I am an anti-Federalist and consider the Federal “Founders” to be traitors. But I am also a patriot, and can’t stand to see our atheist “Founders” labeled as Christians. I am, yes, deeply proud of their secularism.

The anti-Federalists were the Christians; the Federalists were the anti-Christians. Enjoy.

In celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the founding of America, the Trump Administration and its supporters in the MAGA coalition have begun pushing a false history of America’s origins. Back in May, J.D. Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio and others gave speeches at Rededicate 250, a government-organized Christian prayer rally where, amongst “rededications” of the United States to God, they propagated the spurious narrative that America and all of Western civilization were founded by pious Christians and based on Christian principles. Of course, the exact opposite is true: Western principles and America in particular were founded by religious skeptics in contradiction of Christianity.

For folks supposedly passionate about American history, they give the impression of not having read our founding documents. After all, the greatest counterargument that the Constitution is not a Christian document is the Constitution. The pious may search in vain for a single mention of God, Jesus Christ, Christianity or the foundations of a Christian politic within the document: there are none.

There are of course purposeful references to the concept of religion, namely the explicit forbiddance of religious faith or tests as requirements to hold public office. The only other mention is the First Amendment’s wall of separation between church and state, a principle that, far from being Christian in origin, is anti-Christian in origin, being as it is an explicit refutation of the then Christian practice of barbaric punitive violence between sects for practices of free speech. At the time of the Revolution, Christians in Europe were still burning each other alive and menacing scientists for looking through telescopes. (Christian violence is not quite in our distant past either: the last four decades furnish us with Christian atrocities in Lebanon in the early 80s, the terrorism of the IRA, the Christian genocide in Bosnia, and American bombings of abortion clinics.) This scourge of organized religion was not lost on the amendment’s non-Christian author, James Madison, who said, “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize and every expanded prospect.” Later in life, Madison’s religious skepticism fully evolved into, at the very least, agnosticism, writing of the Christian concept of God that the universe was “visibly destitute of those attributes.”

The Declaration of Independence, a poetic expression but not a governing document, does make scant reference to an intentionally vague universal “Creator,” but this is the non-theological “Supreme Being” of deism, not the Judeo-Christian God. This makes sense as it was written by a deist and fearless public scorner of Christianity, Thomas Jefferson. In the 18^th century, before the discoveries of evolution and the big bang, deism was a halfway house for agnostics and anti-theists who had moved beyond religious skepticism but were yet without the scientific knowledge and modern confidence to posit a universe without some prime mover at work, or simply did not want to risk public affiliation with atheism for understandable self-protective reasons. The deistic “supreme being” was the prime mover or demiurge of the pre-Christian, secular Greek philosophers whose works the founders turned to when inventing our nation. Deists did not believe that this supreme being intervened in human life, nor did any theology describe cosmology with any truth or accuracy. They also did not believe in the divinity of Christ, and so cannot be referred to by the meaningless compound “Christian deists,” and certainly not by the term “Christian.”

Jefferson, who hoped “that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago,” that is, the intellectual freedom before Christian governance caved in the principles of secular civilization in Rome, was famously scurrilous toward Christianity and religion in public. In private he was even more unequivocal, writing to friend Alexander Smyth about the Bible, “I do not consider them as revelations of the supreme being.” The Jefferson Bible was Jefferson’s defilement of the New Testament, removing every mention of God, miracle, and Christ’s divinity, winnowing it down simply to the ethical preachments of Christ. This personalized text was held in his Monticello library where it was outnumbered by works of pre-Christian philosophers such as Livy, Tacitus, Aristotle and Plato by orders of magnitude. Jefferson was accused, quite accurately by the Charlie Kirks of his day like the rabid Yale President Timothy Dwight, of being an “arch-infidel” (in the parlance of the time, an atheist) for statements such as “history, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government” and “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

In private, Jefferson speculated fairly conclusively that our first President George Washington was not a Christian. “I know that Gouverneur Morris [an atheist founder], who pretended to be in his [Washington’s] secrets and believed himself to be so, has often told me that General Washington believed no more in that system than he himself did.” Washington’s private life bears this out as well. As President, he refused to take communion at church, leaving before the services. Reprimanded for this by his Reverend James Abercrombie, Washington ceased attending church altogether, not wanting to set a “zealous example” to the nation. Abercrombie, as well as two other of Washington’s priests, concluded in terse, private correspondence that the man was not a Christian, but a “deist.” Washington’s last public address was written for him. Before delivering it, he removed and swapped all mention of Jesus Christ, Christianity and God with non-sectarian deistic terminology. When he died, Washington called for no father of the cloth to give him last rites.

To round off the founders on our money – whose pecuniary mottos of “In God we trust” were interlarded into our currency in the mid-20^th century when our nation last played with Loyalty Oaths – we come to Benjamin Franklin. A genius of comical imposture and America’s first troll, Franklin is perhaps the easiest to identify as a non-Christian. Like Jefferson and Washington, the pious of the time like First Great Awakening found George Whitfield privately urged upon Franklin a conversion to Christianity. Even deists as irreligious as Dr. Joseph Priestly despaired of Franklin’s infidel soul, and John Adams explicitly identified Franklin as a man of no religion in his Paris diaries. Franklin’s Autobiography is in part a testimony of his intellectual journey away from Christianity and that doctrine of “revelation” of which he said it “had no weight with me.” He wrote that the pamphlets he read against deism as a young man convinced him of deism. He considered Christian doctrines “unintelligible, and others doubtful.”

After all, it was the establishment of Christianity as a polity in Rome that marked the collapse of a Western civilization on the cusp of the steam engine and Industrial Revolution. This ushered in the 500 year-period of the Dark Ages, when even the knowledge of how to build an arch was lost and child soldiers were sent into religious Crusades in Palestine. It was Christianity that burned and permanently destroyed thousands of secular works of the ancient world, leaving Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers and our own founders with mostly the post-Socratic Greeks to reach toward when founding America, the pre-Socratics being laid to sectarian waste. Far from being the foundation of Western society, Christianity devoured its foundations. And now with oligarchs who own the data of every American like Peter Thiel spreading bizarre new visions of anti-Christs, Thiel-funded J.D. Vance claiming aliens are “demons” amid official UAP disclosure, and a Trump Administration full of false history, Christianity seems poised to collapse civilization all over again.

I have been teetotalling, but last night I had two gin and tonics and my body was glowing. I drove to Provincetown and the monument that Norman Mailer once climbed looked lunar. Like a rocket on the eve of orbit.

The water in the wharf was violet and there was white in the violet where the harborlights shone and the water was flowing through the lights. It was raw outside but there were people out in town and I drank whiskey and beer in the Old Colony until midnight. I saw a star: a local anchorman from the Boston news channel. But there was no moon, alas. I have been obsessed with her. She is in hiding for a few more days and yet I have been approaching her shores in my mind all the time. I am mapping her harbors and her bays.

I think it’s that the moon puts one in the state of Adam, everything there is open to being named.

I slept through the whole morning with bright dreams of women I’d never met before and woke up at noon alive and a poem was in me. I always feel a little mad when I write a poem. They come to me in moments of libration.

Libration is the wobble in the moon that lets us peak around her edges into the dark side, and see more than 50% of her land.

The dark side. On their recent voyage, Artemis II captured the first images of a lunar eclipse of the sun from the dark side of the moon.They floated in total darkness for an hour, except for the faint halo the sun gave the moon, and then the first bursts of light when the eclipse ended.

There are many things for Adam and Eve to do on the moon. Someone alive today will tell a lie on the moon. Someone born today will die upon the moon. The first people to have sex on the moon are alive on earth and have not yet met. What will they mean to each other? How will it feel? Will the change in gravity alter the very structure of the orgasm, of conception? How will the womb grow a child on the moon and what shape will they take? Do not let us grow beyond the womb: do not let us make of the womb an abandoned architecture where no child grows. A Roman ruin. No.

Let us have children.

So who will get drunk on the moon and kiss on the moon and put

A

fire on

the moon,

&

Sleep

upon

the moon

&

Seas

upon

the moon.

I have had

a dream upon the moon.

Darkness

on the moon, &

Sex in the darkness

of her noon.

A murder on the moon.

I have had a dream

that murdered the moon.

An

ocean on

the moon,

&

Mountains on

the moon,

&

Birth upon the moon.

I have had a dream

that curtained the moon.

A shadow on the moon

I saw too soon,

I have seen the sun

Die behind the moon.

When the sun dies

The mind dies too,

And from the darkest side

It dreams around the moon.

But when the rims of night

Take an inch of light,

One remembers light

And dreams awake so soon.

One sees the light

Of the silver inch of soul,

& one remembers light

Is our silver inch of soul.

One has their oldest dream

That put footsteps on their soul,

And has their day of sleep

That sails them through her poles,

And lays them down to sleep

With silver in their hold.

And lays them down deep

In the silver of the soul.

I know a town that sails the sun

I know a town where light is dry and boats come home with silver in their hold

where boats come home with silver in their hold

(Do not grieve the death of little fish

They are lights that search the deep)

I know a town with sighs of sea

white with the tides of me

white as the spine of the sea

The Harbors of the Moon, Norman Mailer

Actually, Aquarius was bored. Sitting in the Manned Spacecraft Center movie theater, he noticed that the Press was also bored… Aquarius could detect surly traces in himself, as if he were annoyed with the moon—it should not be so simple to trespass her zones. […] In fact he could not forgive the astronauts their resolute avoidance of a heroic posture. It was somehow improper for a hero to be without flamboyance as if such modesty deprived his supporters of any large pleasure in his victories. What joy might be found in a world which would have no hope of a Hemingway? Or nearest matters first, of a Joe Namath, or Cassius Clay, Jimmy Dean, Dominguin?—it was as if the astronauts were there to demonstrate that heroism’s previous relation to romance had been highly improper—it was technology and the absence of emotion which were the only fit mates of the brave.

Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer, 1969.

I have been smoking Mailerjuana. As I mentioned in my last piece about porn I have been reading Norman Mailer’s Lipton’s Journal, where he recorded his auto-psychoanalytical experiment with stoned cerebration in an attempt to touch his genius and feel for secret psychic depths he was otherwise unable to locate and map. Similarly — and without marijuana, and without, for now, the implication of genius — these small Substack columns are my attempt to capture moments in the development of a thought, and see if any useful insights glint in the light of the next day.

So then, the following about the moon is a record of the effects Mailerjuana has had on my brain. The spirit of the writing is that I have not quite edited it. I should say, too, that reading Mailer intensively for the first time brings me to a place of being fourteen, fifteen again, when I had just discovered Nietzsche and Heraclitus and Blood Meridian and Pound and Rimbaud and I stayed up till 3 AM in my bedroom every school night writing poetry until floaters exploded in the corners of my eyes and patches of colors on my blanket flickered in their shapes and my mind moved naturally into open space with a dialectical rhythm. This was an age, in the countryside of Lunenburg and the summer coasts of Cape Cod with my window open and the sea breeze blowing across my shoulders, where every line of poetry seemed a possibility of modern civilization.

I still think dialectically and optimistically, but the dialectical is a mode I now choose to enter — it is not my resting state of mind. Or rather, yes, I take longer pauses in my loyalties to a mood or a thought or a dictum before I swing out into orbit and question it and attack it and see if it holds. I take longer before I see where the dark side of the moons of my loyalties lie and if they can take light, or if the bright white halves can handle an unexpected shadow or two. And yet when I swing out, I swing out on the axes of a few unalterable principles. One is total artistic freedom.

So you see, I am already in lunar orbit…

1.

Before Artemis II broke from the webbing of Earth its black pilot Victor Glover gave a message the American ear has not heard in over an epoch. When asked about being the first black astronaut to orbit the moon, Glover politely accepted the premise of the question before saying, “I also hope we are pushing the other direction, that one day we don’t have to talk about these firsts, that one day, this is just — listen to this — that this is the human history. It’s about human history. It’s the story of humanity — not Black history, not women’s history — but that it becomes human history.”

The pivot from the question implicit in this question (“Hey wait a minute, you’re black! How does it feel being black?”) to the vantage of deep posterity speaks to the high seriousness of the moonshot and its vantage beyond our gravitational fields. Astronauts, after all, are required to venture beyond the fleeting fads and fashions of the Earth. They are taking steps beyond the human and beyond the prejudice.

But how far beyond the Earth are they really allowed to venture? How far beyond the Earth are astronauts—color, creed and credulity aside—capable of contemplating?

When I was a child watching documentaries about space (this in the heyday of PBS String Theory specials, the era before Ancient Aliens), my father would muse optimistically over my shoulder that NASA ought to send philosophers and artists out into space too. What would Dostoyevsky make of the moon, he wished to know. The authors of the Bible. Sartre, Camus. There was implicit in this utterance the psychical wish which pricks wistfully at the holes of our hearts branching in the wee hours of the night into the warring ventricles of religion, atheism, astrology, agnosticism for the long-awaited reunion across the deep crater of physics and metaphysics. The resynthesis between the specialist’s observation and the genius’s interpretation. Yes, here are black holes and stardust and optical warps from event horizons, but what do they mean? It all started with the Big Bang, yes, but was there a before and why can’t you explain its first planck second? And could a non-physicist perhaps see beyond the edge of the edge of this question? This was what, on a weekend afternoon, my father would have liked to learn and contemplate: the full panoply of archetypes blasted into the unknown.

For from the very first launch of Apollo 11 (interesting orthographic echo between Apollo 11 and Artemis II), NASA failed to properly dock the moon and the exploration of space to the consciousness of man. In the mid 20th century following the moonshot, all our frontiers of new, optimistic knowledge suddenly went cold and dark and silent on us. Our frontiers became zones of dissuasion. “Argh, feel your pain: we thought the moon would be epic too, but it’s ultimately just a big ole rock, y’know?”

It began with the deadening language they communicated the unknown to us in.

Artemis II was the first manned voyage to the moon in nearly half a century and they orbited the moon on Easter, when Jesus too returned from the dead. On that Sunday, Captain Glover recited verses from the New Testament about the Resurrection. Which brings us to our Biblical dead-end. Man orbits the moon with two millennium year old cliches. We no longer name things. The confident felicity of Adam is gone.

We’ve come to the end of our tongues in a strange land and our language is perished on our lips.

2.

There is a place on the moon called the “terminator.” Already echoes of pop culture work their way in with an Austrian accent to destroy the beauty of this phenomenon. But how Germanically fitting, as it was the war effort and rocketry-obsessions of a mustachioed Austrian qua Charlie Chaplin impersonator that eventually put us victorious Americans on the moon. Wherefore art thou herr Werner Von Braun? If you listen, he speaks from the waves of the lunar sea. “Nature does not know extinction,” says Braun, the Nazi/NASA mystical physicist who defected and put us on the lunar face, “all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.”

Thomas Pynchon epigraphed Gravity’s Rainbow’s “Beyond the Zero” section with this mystical dictum, a novel about the fate of the parabola — the Earth’s gravitational field and the terrestrial geometries of all that does not achieve escape velocity. It is well we remember the parabola is the shape of a thrust that fails to escape gravity, and the two fates of the rocket are failure (parabolic assault on the enemy or self) or success (the straight line of escape). So let us come right up against the permanent darkness of the zero then by defining the lunar “terminator.”

Let us peek over its rimmed invisibility into a nighttime on the moon.

The terminator is the line between sunlight and the “permanent” dark side of the moon. The line of darkness that draws leftward across the face of the moon each night in its phases until the moon is eclipsed and is a secret once again in the outer dark. The terminator is a bad, unpoetic name for a beautiful concept. Phenomena take on artistic complication when considered from the perspective of human misperception. From Earth-errancy. (Let us add “error” to “Earth” and call it Eden.) From Eden we beautifully misconstrue. But the terminator is just the line of darkness that moves across the face of the moon. What of the permanent boundaries between the light and the dark side of the moon?

Selenographers — the geographers of the moon — fail when naming the boundaries of light. They call the edges of the moon that stand between day and night limbs. How lame. And yet for the bulk of mankind’s cerebrational history we thought there was a permanent dark side of the moon, a permanent boundary line the terminator draws toward one day at a time. If you lived on the moon, each day you’d have to travel deeper into the eventual crescent to stay in the light, until at last you were gathered into the silver of curvature, then nothingness.

But where have we named the darker lights? Where is the melodic word for this misperception? For the idea of a line that eternally divides the dark side of the moon from the light is a gorgeous mystery. One we’ve dreamed of since anciency. A permanent line between day and night falling through the rim rings of a crater, falling halfway across one of the seas of the moon and a lunar floodplain.

Of course, the concept of a permanent dark side is not real — it is just how the moon presents to the human eye. It is how it misleads us beautifully into the contemplation of the unreal. It is a metaphor for our positioning to the irrational and the unknown: how man casts a terminator line out across the furthest reaches of what he seeks to know.

3.

So man’s earliest misperceptions answered the beauty of the moon with the petnames of his infatuation. We named its landmarks from the skewed state of first love. We saw seas in her light, harbors in her craters and basins in her shades and mountain streams between. We are lucky we named her when our geniuses spied shorelines so that the moon still has maria’s (seas) and mon’s (mountains) and floodplains and rilles and we can look up at her full face within our old fascinated attraction and contemplate with poetic precision her waterways. We are lucky we can still see what does not exist. Indeed, some nights on the coast of Cape Cod the sand takes the moonlight so bright and so cool you feel you are walking the white beaches of the moon, and the lit waves before you the darkened whitecaps of her seas.

Just think what horrid names we’d give to her features now if we had discovered her in the year 2026. Think how we “honor” the discoveries of the unknown today. I shudder when I prophesize the outposts on Mars. We do not name a new planet Athene, for instance, but XR-2678-P1, or GLP-1 Base Inhibitor… The learned Greeks did not believe in gods either, and yet they named their planets after them.

But NASA’s list of recently discovered planets are not names: KMT-2021-BLG-0852L b, TOI-1232 b & c, and “other notable additions,” HD 36384 b, TOI-2095 b, and MWC 758 c.

Hey, NASA, FUCK OFF.

These are not names, and they are not even pronounceabilities. They are anti-melodic groupings of one-syllable initials. They answer to no inner echo of melody, no need for sonic pleasure which is a requirement of intelligibility.

We do not name anything for we do not move symbologically. Look: we no longer come up with narratives for would-be Presidential assassins, no very grand lies about military intervention. We don't even have the thirst for half-scale war, as recent right-wing defections from Trump’s traipse in Iran have shown, for intervention necessitates a “theater” of war and we do not like theater.

Anti-federalists vs Federalists, Democratic-Republicans vs Federalists, Democrats vs Whigs, Democrats vs Republicans. By 170 years this is the longest stretch that our two American parties have kept the same names. (Where does it say we only get two for the rest of time?) Somewhere along the way the morphology of names, of nomenclature ceased and instead there arose a morphology of definitions and principles below the surface of the existing names. The same stands for categories like socialist and capitalist. Up until six years ago no socialist would have entertained the idea of undercutting and threatening the social benefits and wages of workers via mass migration (Bernie Sanders, a representative of 20th century intelligibility, still does not). Yet today when we think of socialism we think of open borders and climate change and Hasan Piker, who profits off the monetization of boredom and the exploitation of metadata, ie surveillance capitalism. This “ideology” should be called something else, but not socialism. “Left” and “right” become incoherent if one means to trace them back in an exact genealogy to their origins: one would shape a defective double-helix that has stagnated into arid parallels.

I once, in a literary review, wanted to refer to a sentence that alliterated several words beginning with the letter A. I thought, surely there must nice poetic terms for words that begin with a specific letter. Say, “alphal” or “omegal” for A and O words. I found the closest humans have got for the letter A is “A-initial lexemes.” Or, if that doesn’t suit your meter, there’s this which fits the iambic pentameter, “Alphabetically indexed signs (A-class).”

We have so much we refuse to name.

This extinction of morphology is the great lunar tide of human energy ebbing away underfoot, and if I draw you too far afield in this observation it is only to point out certain tidal shifts across all of civilization. People stand gazing at the ebb and the tide rushing out feels nice on the feet, because human energy still exists on the way out and it is fascinating to watch it draw away. Onlookers do the same when a tsunami draws the water to her monstrous breast. Where does it disappear to? What is drawing it, what tugs? A moon of some near apocalypse? How far is its tideline?

But where our lingual morphology ends, our journey into existence ends. And so, too, with the advent of Neuralinks and cybernetic minds, our physically organic, evolutionary morphology also ends.

4.

We have approached the shores of the moon in the wrong spirit, and so I cannot summon the requisite elan, or eclat — or is it esprit? — to write properly about her. I went too Earthly just now. (Did you feel an elanlessness, eclatlessness, or espritlessness in the preceding section?)

In the epigraph where Norman Mailer outperforms me we see that he grew bored with the moon also. But why?

But let me first haul ass downtown from 86th street on the 1 train. After Artemis II went into lunar orbit I teleported to bookstores all over New York City looking for Atlases of the moon. I wanted to take in all the lunar features. I wanted to idolize her craters and hillheads. But they repelled me. Each and every book about the moon repelled me. Or rather, they did not repel me but their paltry offerings were so far in arears of what I desired from them that I resented them for their Vincenzo-themed failure. I loathed them. How could they do this to the moon? How do this to signore Vincenzo? I extinguished all the picture books and dopey ChatGPT-esque selenographies and picked up a “real book” about the moon — you know, one made almost entirely of words — and it didn’t put Apollo 11 into orbit until 372 pages in, with less than 100 to spare.

The boredom with the moon comes because we have sent no Essexes into the darks of her terminator. We have hunted no Moby Dicks in her tropics. No Titanics have gone down in her craters. We have not eaten her lotus leaf in a strange isle and spent a decade in the drugged arms of her Circes. We have not gazed across the floodplain at her sirens and tied ourselves to the rocket to resist her volupty.

The Greeks would have launched Thales and Sophocles upon her shores, or Pythagoras who was a mathematical genius as well as a religious mystic. (These were not always separate things, and need not be.) We would then have lunar geometries and moon-dramas staged on amphitheaters built into the crescents of craters and we would be suckling on the teat of their milky ways two-thousand years hence, wondering why the ancients were so brilliant and so vibrant and named everything so beautifully and aptly, and why are we so cynical and lacking in spirit and imagination? Why have we declined so far from them?

Yet it was left to us to make the trip. We have made a transit reserved only, perhaps, for the dead, or for the artist who can visit the dead on the edge of their underworld.

If I could send anyone to the moon and read what they’d write, I can think only of the dead: Mailer, Nabokov, McCarthy, Milton, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Paul Virilio. I wish I could send these minds to space and have them dawn the space suit and pocket the moonrock and gambol the craters and recline in the shadows of the hills and write about it. Any of the sentences they’d write about hurtling beyond the skies of the earth or floating weightless toward our moon or walking its surface would be the greatest sentence ever written.

In their pens’ absence, through our modern history no myth moves through the moon. Armstrong and Aldrin gave us no sentence of the moon, no couplet of the crater. One cannot even remember the names of the others who walked her beachheads. Consciousness has had no taste of her orbit. The only myth left to us is conspiracy—conspiracy which is the absence of myth. The cynical belief that we never even went. That is our “myth” of the moon.

So why shouldn’t we be dead bored with the dead rock?

5.

“The rise of Marxism,” Hugh intones, “is but a corollary to the fundamental historical malady of this century: false perception.... Our real duty is to become the mind of America.... The aim is to develop teleological mind. Mind that dwells above facts ...” [Emphasis mine]

Hugh “Harlot” Montague, based on James Jesus Angleton, Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer

As I am about to deploy the term “Deep State,” let’s get one thing absolutely out of the way. When I say “Deep State” I refer to the entity that Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky christened the “National Security State,” and which the pro-Assange-Snowden left pretended no longer existed only when right wingers caught wind of its presence and renamed it the “Deep State.” Because the left has abandoned much of her nomenclatorial battlements we are left to speak mostly in the right wing’s language. And thus, the intellectual left today is like the original Apollo 11 landing vessel the astronauts left behind on the moon: visible in obscure zones when you feel like traveling 238,900 miles from normality.

If the Deep State is a secret satellite orbiting the world and pulling on the tides of our civilization, Gore Vidal was her light side — her rational historian — and Mailer her dark side — her psychohistorian. In other words, Vidal is Thucydides who traced the betrayal of the Constitution and Mailer Herodotus who probed the imagination of the pocket cults.

The revelations of the last decade of UAP disclosures, whistleblowers, and the Epstein Files have met Mailer at the face of his psychoanalytical portraits. The various secret organizations that couped our republic and run our government are modern day mystery cults.

America’s transition from Republic to Empire after the Second World War was our first conspiracy theory. But America could not tell her citizens that she had become an Empire with clandestine apparati. Whereas Rome had only the senators to lie to, America had her huddled masses. So she pretended to remain a Republic with some existential fires to put out while sunbathing in post-war Europe and the Pacific. I will write about this conspiracy theory, this lie, in more detail in the future, but suffice it for now that you swallow whole my maxim that this denied, repressed, sublimated transition between republic and empire created a psychosis in the American. Citizens cannot help but be psychical portraits of their country and so we live in a country where people construct their worldviews either entirely by uncorroborated conspiracy theory, and the other half who refuse to absorb the real, declassified conspiracy theories: that which is no longer denied. Lo: people will still roll their eyes when you try to tell them about MK Ultra or Project Stargate. Or the Pentagon’s declassified UFO videos. They simply don’t believe it’s true. Even when the government tells them it is.

The creation of these mystery cults created a mystic vacuum. Since the Manhattan Project, the Deep State has run countless secret physics programs, or USAPs (Unacknowledged Special Access Program)s, alienated from the public, from the truth, the discovery of knowledge, the nature of reality, and human achievement in the fields of physics. The existence of these secret programs are long declassified. Look, for instance, at the technology the CIA and President Donald Trump announced it deployed in Iran to recover a downed pilot: Ghost Murmur, in which quantum magnetometry located the pilot’s heartbeat in a mountain range from forty miles away. What are the metaphysical implications of such technology? Of quantum manetometry? We don’t know, for the Deep State — which is to say The State — controls the disclosure of human knowledge.

This, of course, resembles the structure of a totalitarianism.

Every year the widening of these secret programs casts a growing penumbra upon civilization, and steals from us our mysticism. It tilts us from the contemplation of God, because it tilts us from all that is coming-into-knowledge, all that is new.

This alienation between man and discovery widens until we are effectively locked into a simulation of civilization: politics replaces the soul, science becomes the dead end of “string theory,” and art is generated by computers. We are confronted with the reversal of Neil Armstrong’s maxim: “One giant leap for man, one small step for mankind.” For the knowledge is there, but it has yet to be disclosed. The effort required to reach it far exceeds the energy of bridging its actual distance.

The secret of the substance of the soul is stolen from us and we are vessels with leaky spirits spilling out upon the wind.

6.

The artist must leap this gap into the unknown and construct a new cosmogony. If NASA will not send us, we must summon the escape velocity to name our world. We must tie the unknown and the true nature of reality to the consciousness of our times. Philosophers must leap the gulf too, but they must leap with the strength of the artist in them. Einstein created General Relativity — it came to him the same way Lolita appeared to Nabokov — and it turned out later, in his verifying calculations, that it also happened to be true.

The artist always throws, if they are a genius, a terminator line somewhere, across something. A mystical boundary across some span of nature and the irrational mystery of it lures us toward it: does the horizon simply end? Shall we fall off the Earth? Maybe we should journey out to the edge to see. Thus does the artist pay the right respects to our lunar mistress. Thus does man requite the love of the moon. It is in the way the landscape throws the lights and shadows of the artist’s terminator from her moutainheads and basins out into the lighted known and the shadowed unknown which wins the artist their immortality.

And perhaps in death the artist’s soul makes a transit to the place they cast their shadows. And they live there by the light of a fire on the moon.

Dear reader, what writer or philosopher or artist or personage would you send to the moon and have them report back and why? I’m curious to discover the spoils of your imagination.

Dear subscribers,

The following is an experiment. For almost all my life I have had a mental block that has told me any piece of writing under a thousand words does not deserve to be made public. It is not a “piece.” It is for the notebook, or incorporation into some future, larger work. I have a complex that tells me I have to make all things “major.” But perhaps minor pieces can be “major.” Perhaps I am too tied to a single form of essay, which hinders me and prevents me from being productive. I save up so much that when I add it into a large amalgamation the finished product sometimes becomes overlong and obtuse and too tangential.

So this is a very small piece. The kind I write in a notebook during the day, or envision as a Tweet and save as a draft. I want to see if you respond to this kind of writing, shorter and more frequent than my long pieces which I spend far too long trying to perfect. It’s an experiment, so feel free to share your thoughts. They will not all be about pornography. They will be spontaneous. This just happened to develop within me at a cafe, listening to an old woman talk about her grand-niece making lots of money on OnlyFans.

Here’s the first one.

Norman Mailer recorded the following “highdea” in his Liptons Journal from the mid-50s, the journal wherein he documented his experimentation with marijuana-psychoanalysis, only recently published by . (If you crack it open past midnight with total concentration you will feel high reading his stoned cerebration. Many of his insights, whether true or not, have a little of the glow that comes with the stoned shock of a new connection.)

Doesn’t the great dancer wish to dance in the nude, and don’t we wish to see him or her that way? Doesn’t the great actor or actress wish finally to act before an audience the fuck itself, and indeed the great actor or actress always gives a sense of the fuck? (Marlon Brando, Tallulah Bankhead, Laurette Taylor.) Doesn’t the great painter wish to convey the outside and then the inside of the act? Renaissance fabrics and textures and landscapes and nudes, and our modern non-objective art which is concerned with the variations of the soul in the act. Doesn’t the great novelist always seek for ways to communicate his amazing knowledge of the sexual act?

But, now look, society prevents all these expressions in everything but the most degraded form. We are only allowed strip-teasers for the dance, whores for the circus act, cheap drawings for the art, cheap pornography for the literature. Only in perversion is the sexual and creative soul of man allowed to express itself.

This split between purity and degradation has happened too in “metaphysics.” In the early 20th Century -physics became so complex and complicatedly unresolvable (the failed marriage of General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics, the abject failure of String Theory) that it conclusively outstripped the metaphysician and perverted philosophy. It then went so deep underground in America's Unacknowledged Special Access Programs (USAP) that it outstripped and perverted the physicist. The frontiers of new knowledge about the nature of reality raced away and the metaphysician could not measure the distance of the gulf. This left philosophy — at the precipice of generating new ideas on the instant man pierced the webbing of the moon with rockets— with only the meta-, ie the degraded state of late 20th century postmodernsim and critical theory, and an impossible leap to make back to -physics. Thus, we have no public ontology for the 21st Century, and the perversion of philosophy has left us to think, among other terrestrial concerns, with sex.

Britney Spears has started an OnlyFans. Developments in culture often announce themselves first as psychosis, and from the direction of “low culture,” and then are normalized in the proceeding generation. This is how Christianity spread in Rome, amongst the barbarians and then the low plebeians and only then the elite. Now, you’ve read this sentence about Britney Spears and believed it. I did too when I first wrote it. The news first went viral on Twitter until several days later a Community Note verified the OnlyFans account was an inactive parody. But we believe it because of the public psychosis of Britney Spears, the degradation of American celebrity, and the plummeting curve of our culture. Of course the logical extension of 21st Century celebrity is pornography. Whether this story about Britney Spears is true or not this trajectory is true.

We are fast approaching a moment where we will call all pornstars “great artists.” There may be some genuine artists among them. I don’t see it in the current generation, but all it will take is a rising generation of actresses and “musicians” to make and sell pornography on OnlyFans parallel to their acting careers (not before fame like Kim Kardashian), and the merging will be irreversible. There is probably no way around it: AI porn will force the celebrity’s hand, bringing this into existence whether celebrities actually partake or not. The law will not be able to stop the distribution of, say, a realistic Sydney Sweeney in a twenty-eight minute porn, just as it could not stop children of my generation from illegally accessing infinite amounts of internet porn for free. This will then open the doors for the pornstar to enter Hollywood. They have already entered reality television; newspaper articles when they’re spotted at courtside basketball games with comedians (Sky Bri); cameras cut to them at college football games (Abella Danger). They are right there on the other side of a thinning wall.

Sex already exists beyond the event horizon of the actor’s mask — it is part of the subconscious attraction to celebrities, it is what the libido is there to think of during the movie, or during their striptease-simulated-sex concerts. It is not imaginable that 21st Century Man is going to consume less porn going forward, and so if the celebrities themselves won’t do it, 21st Century Man will find a way to fabricate it through AI himself. Add to this the fact that we already call performers who have their songs written for them by ten or twelve people “artists,” an archetype the pornstar is not so far from as we may think, and it is almost certain pornstars are hurtling toward this new category. Many of them are just as globally known and recognizable as, say, Taylor Swift, or Sydney Sweeney. So what shall we call that fame?

Hark at how Bad Bunny walked around in “symbolic solidarity” with supposedly all of Central and South America against American imperialism (even though the majority of, say, Venezuelans welcomed the Imperial arrest of their dictator Nicolas Maduro), a hero at that moment of the left, singing these words over and over at the Super Bowl:

Pussy with dick, dick with ass (Push it in)

Pu-pussy with dick, dick with ass, yeah (Push it in)

Pussy with dick, dick with ass (Push it in)

Yo-Your tits rubbing my nipples (Push it in)

The fact this was sung in Spanish and many Americans enjoy the song without understanding the words shows what a hairsbreadth lies between us and the future of total pornography. Then again, this is the ubiquitous style of modern pop. It is already hard to tell a new “musician” from a new OnlyFans star. The names, aesthetic and fashion, end product (and talent) is roughly identical: that of pornographic plausibility.

Porn has already become a genre of pop music. Children on school buses with Beats headphones Neuralinked to their skulls will soon be putting their headphones on their friends heads to show them the new hot song they can’t stop listening to. The song will merely be the isolated audio of hardcore porn, “Fuck! Fuck me! Fuck my tight little pussy! Oh daddy, fuck!” Yeah, that one’s good, the friend will say, but have you heard this? “Oh my God, you’re so much bigger than my boyfriend. He can’t know. Oh shit, go slow. Oh, oh! I’ve never been fucked like this before!” And the two seventh graders will get off the bus and sit down in class and open their glowing tablets for Algebra class, and their teacher will be a Jeffrey Epstein-escort qua Melania Trump-approved robot named Plato (who pimps like Epstein think never physically wrote — but that’s a different piece about illiteracy).

But will this future of celebrity pornography bring humans real sex, or the widening Imperium of solipsism and fantasy that is external and cybernetic in origin? For indeed the “addiction” to porn is an addiction to cyberneticism. Will the last people left having sex in America be the pornstars themselves, before a recording camera or cellphone? What will happen when the projection and fantasy of sex amongst our celebrities is no longer a mystery, when the vanity lingerie brand is but a supplement to the OnlyFans account and career in Hollywood?

So much of art is built on the metaphor for sex. Many of Shakespeare’s love sonnets, amongst the most beautiful lines ever written in English, are about convincing his love to have a child with him: that is, to have a lot of pro-genitive sex until she becomes pregnant. And then do it all over again. This is being a bit crude but there is some truth in my crudeness, and the sex of fertility is the most beautiful and erotic form of sex. Because the entire act is in a sense a metaphor for the Creation of a new human. But the pornstar does not whisper, “I want you to make me pregnant.” If she did it might be art. Still, the erasure of metaphor leads to the erasure of Creation.

Mailer jotted his observation about art and sex in 1955, before the dawn of the nude sex scene in Hollywood. He said of Marilyn Monroe two decades later, in a 1973 post-Last Tango in Paris world, that Monroe’s sexual mystique lay in the “look of a good woman who has just been well laid.” Thus, “one felt a sense of accomplishment in looking at her, not the nervousness of anticipation.” (Why do I have this feeling, this American feeling, that it is somehow more dangerous to quote this and to cogitate around pornography than it would be to blast Bad Bunny or, say, “Wet Ass Pussy”?) At any rate, fifty years later the libidinal tension of our century is not in sex, but in masturbation. 21st Century Man does not imagine what it will be like to have actual sex with an actress, but in imagining what they will be like in porn. And I do mean will, for this future is coming.

Imagine updating Mailer’s description of Monroe for next-gen onanism (the red typo-squiggle appears under “onanism” as if it did not exist!): “She has the look of a good woman who just been well masturbated to. One feels a sense of masturbatory accomplishment in looking at her, not the nervousness of anticipating masturbating to her.” And where shall we be fifty years hence? Is there a fractalization of the individual beyond masturbation?

Perhaps after absorbing the shock of this development, the pornstar as great artist, the pornstar as Oscar nominee, it will have a leveling effect on society. There is the parabolic arc of tragedy, but even decline and fall has its boundary and eventually civilization pulls upwards against gravity. Maybe after an extreme paucity of art, metaphor will come back in to replace the former sex mystery, and sex becoming so saturated as to lose its modern edge of taboo, actors and actresses will act “the fuck,” as Mailer puts it, within great artworks. Not as the main event or as ornamentation, but simply as a facet of an artwork. True sex, real sex. Merry Clayton was pregnant when she sang on Gimme Shelter — perhaps future generations will watch talented actresses become pregnant in a film. Perhaps we will have less Puritanism and less pathology because sex will not be so hidden, so private, and it shall return to a healthier magnitude in the deep future. The pre-Christian sex of the Ancient West — of the Ancient Rome that was on the cusp of the steam engine before morality nearly did it in. (Remember that handful of centuries called the Dark Ages?) After two-thousand years we are still exorcising the pathology this morality introduced.

Regardless, we will achieve a reconciliation between sex and art before a reconciliation between meta- and -physics. A pornstar will be in a Hollywood film before we discover the reality of another inch of the experience of consciousness after death. America will boast major celebrities on OnlyFans before legal prostitution and a new ontology. I would wager my savings on this prediction in Polymarket.

Imagine Vladimir Nabokov submitting Lolita to a Master of Fine Arts degree program. First, under the tenured wisdom of his failed-novelist-professor, Nabokov’s style would be radically de-escalated and purloined of some 30,000 imperishable words, including every adverb. This, of course, is a mere paper cut compared to what would be coming down the pike for the unfortunate masterpiece and its schlepping emigre author. Next, the 10 or so randomly assembled mediocrities would zero in on Lolita’s title: it would be strongly if not threateningly suggested to steer away from the Latinx toward something more in Nabokov’s ethnic wheelhouse, perhaps Larissa, or Lilya.

Just barely skirting expulsion and social ostracization for the pedophilia of the first draft, the author, by the end of term, would revise Lilya to be about a widowed man who takes his 12-year-old biological daughter on an innocent and sexually eventless road trip, learning a thing or two about fourth-wave feminism and gender theory along the way. There’d be incredulous lines over the steering wheel like, “How do you know that?” and “How old are you?” (Not to mention the “You go girl”s from the reader.) Having been recognized as a “Master of Fine Arts” for this ability to be editorially coerced by 20-year-olds, Nabokov would spend a sleepless fortnight after graduation researching 140 literary agents so as to pretend in his query emails to be a fan of their client lists of nonentities and “comparable” titles. (Nabokov would have failed to secure an agent through one of those end-of-term backroom deals every student-novelist dreams of, having permanently rubbed the professor the wrong way.) He’d find obscure interviews online with agents who say with hauteur and scarcely credible pride, “Don’t even bother cold querying me, I never look at the slush.” Of the 140 agents, 10 would respond and request sample pages. Eight would ghost Nabokov. One would write him a moderately personalized rejection with the cadence of the admiring pass, “confident that many agents will want to toss their hats in the ring.” The last agent would, because he knew Nabokov’s professor back in grad school, sign him. Champagne would be opened. Véra would smile to Volodya over the foaming brim.

Three months of torturous silence later — Nabokov’s new agent having disappeared into a vague and nebulous paternity leave without warning — the author would receive an email with a draft of Lilya riddled with inspired deletions and insightful suggestions for rewrites. If Nabokov plucked up the courage to so much as balk, the agent would, after another mum trimester in which he’d leisurely switched American coasts — never intimating exactly which one he’d settled on — buck him up threateningly. “I worry that sending Lilya off in its current state would threaten all of the hard work you’ve put into this, and publishing this version would be a mistake for you and your career. My job is to give you honest advice — I can’t sell this, Nabokov. I know this is a lot to absorb, but we’re almost there. Talk soon?”

Terrified of the state of agentlessness — that Hades of non-representation — and his stomach dropping at the thought of his ambitious six-figure student debt rendered all for naught, Nabokov would have submitted to the next round of unnecessary edits, finding some substitute stepmother approved of by young Lilya for the novel’s hapless pops, or perhaps an age-appropriate stepfather, having discovered in a brisk, bland, and anti-Nabokovian 55,000 words that Humbert was queer-curious the whole time. Nabokov would then use the bulk of his small advance from a Big Five imprint to hire a freelance editor to further gut Lilya for upmarket “readability,” the book no longer bearing any trace of his voice anyways, and his new editor turning out to be more of a point-person of obscure purpose than someone who edits books.

With the publisher putting zero publicity effort behind it, Lilya would get a handful of listless, monotonously congratulatory reviews from critics Nabokov had vague connections to from his MFA days. There would be some TikTok video reviews, Substack essays with three likes — then, mysteriously, only two, the user having died perhaps — and it would never be read again, if it had been at all. Netflix would cut Nabokov a check for $5,000 for film rights and never develop it. He would land his Cornell job and work off his debt from college by toiling forever at college. Jeffrey Epstein would be lost to the wilderness on what to christen his jet. And posterity would not remember Lilya’s name except, I suspect, to chide the past for its tepid conformity. Which is what we shall begin doing now: chiding the past from an enlightened vantage.

I hate to pass along such news, but it’s the 30th anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the preeminent MFA novel, which in the heady days of the Clinton surplus passed through the aforementioned burning hoops of the publishing-industrial complex with flying colors. In fact, it introduced many of the colors as it leapt and gamboled. Three decades of nimbus have grown round its obsolescence, and yet its publishers insist on goading us every 10 years with a freshly introduced reissue of the dead horse. This time, the publishers have tapped singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, an introductress who has gone into the belly of the beast cognizant of her “own innate and internalized misogyny,” an obligatory non-sequitur that lets the reader know they’re in the good, coercible hands of someone in way over their head.

But a country that amended its constitution to prohibit alcohol and then changed its mind a decade later has the mettle to make sure this doesn’t happen again: we can’t allow a 40th anniversary reissue written by, say, Clavicular in a booksmaxing phase. It is high time to marshal a final confrontation with the insidious philistinism of David Foster Wallace. That sweaty bandana of his and what publishers let him do to us with it. Wallace, the middle-aged student who never left the classroom; the teacher from whom no college was safe: Amherst, University of Arizona, Harvard, Illinois State, Emerson, Amherst redux, Bennington Writing Seminars, Pomona. Just try and keep Wallace from going to college — go ahead, try. He’s still there, on desks and bookshelves in dorm rooms. His presence there has become inappropriate, and we can’t let this go on a moment longer. We must think of the children.

But it’s not we who are going to confront Infinite Jest. Not head on. Cormac McCarthy, our dashing and fearless hero, is going to confront it for us. The terse, macho cowboy who thought Proust was a waste of time because no one was killed is going to read more than 1,000 pages about tennis and beta-male marijuana addiction. The writer who never had a running TV in any of his novels, let alone electricity or plumbing and so offed one of his most famous scalp-hunters in an outhouse because that was his idea of modern comfort at the time — well, this tough customer is going to get his fill of couch potatoes. There are limits to man’s imagination, as Wallace will shortly show us, and so this time around I’m not asking you to tax the gray cells by picturing America’s greatest novelist wasting his time with America’s most overrated: I’m going to tell you exactly what happened when Cormac McCarthy read Infinite Jest.

Full article here.

To what side of our fatuous and entirely worn-out American political spectrum do the following reactionary positions fall: anti-European Union, anti-Deep State (neé National Security State), anti-globalization, anti-Nato? The fortunes of this piece bank themselves on the bet that American reflexes work and the medical hammer produces the involuntary jerk of the knee: “Right wing.” Very good, all is in working order.

But it would be tiresomely derelict not to acknowledge that these stances were actually first conceived and nurtured by the far-Left of the mid- and late-20th century against Right-wing opposition, and I shan’t let another piece pass through my hands without doing just that. Progressives such as Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky literally wrote the books on the illegalities of the National Security State, domestic and abroad. Chomsky was so opposed to globalization that he nearly brought himself to defend the genocidal Serbian Milosevic regime as the socialist victims of global neoliberalism. The EU and Nato were not always gazed upon with bended Left-wing knee as they are today but once critiqued as creations of Cold-War imperial hegemony designed to keep the West in constant conflict with Russia, our secret military budgets astronomical, and Europe a vassal state to the American empire. It is only the lobotomizing force of what Gore Vidal termed “American amnesia” that has brought us to a contemptible present where the Right-wing lays claim to these positions as their intellectual property and most of the Left assails them as Trumpian, autocratic and, most farcically, Right-wing.

This autumn has been pregnant with just such political incoherence, only with a new European spin: On 29 October Naomi Seibt, an anti-immigration journalist and supporter of German political party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), announced her application for political asylum in the United States due to death threats from German Antifa and surveillance by the German government, both confirmed to me. (Labelled an “extremist” organization by the German government, surveillance of AfD and its affiliates is legal and oft-practiced in Germany. The US also spies on its own political parties, but imagine a willful public disclosure of this – President Richard Nixon resigned for less). In the midst of a national Right-wing tantrum about the “Communist” policies of New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, US Representative Anna Paulina Luna personally saw to Seibt’s asylum application, declaring that so too was Seibt under attack in her homeland by “Communists.” Here commences nomenclatorial inanity: the AfD and its welfare sister parties of the European “far-Right” are as far left or further to the left economically than the supposed “Communist” boogeymen of America.

It would be cloying to say that the AfD, zealously supported by American Right-wing figures like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, is a controversial party in Europe. They’ve been likened to “Nazis” by the international media for their extreme positions on the remigration of non-German born residents of their state (and even some German-born), as well as their openness to removing Germany from the EU if it can’t be restructured to weaken its centralization. But it would also be a solecism of the highest insult to language to describe, say, AfD’s economic platform as anything approaching “far-Right,” as far as it is defined in American terms of re-privatizing healthcare and dissolving an already weak welfare system. To borrow the hyperbolics of American patois, one might even describe AfD economics as “communist,” or dare I coin it, “Mamdanian.”

I admit, this will only work if we employ the archaic practice of defining socialism as socialism. That is, defining it solely on material outcomes afforded citizens via economic redistribution. This requires leaving aside modern cultural-economic attitudes toward climate change (which Bill Gates is now pumping the breaks on) and open borders (recently decried by Bernie Sanders in the correct measure), two phenomena that have been conflated into socialism by groups like the DSA despite being anachronistic and arbitrary to its definition. But how else besides socialist do we define a political party such as the AfD which supports free education through college; universal non-profit healthcare with strict regulations on prices and out of pocket expenses rendering it more effective at half the cost of the American system; heavily subsidized childcare, child-rearing wages, cash allowances and generous tax breaks for families, stay at home parents and caretakers of relatives; unemployment insurance up to two years and basic income support which grants a monthly allowance in perpetuity to adults whose income falls below a certain threshold? Does any of this sound remotely American, let alone kin to a Trump Administration that tried to repeal the unaffordable Affordable Care Act from the right, and is kneecapping America’s comparatively woeful welfare programs of Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP and EBT as we speak?

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In comparison to AfD’s socialist economics, newly elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposals to freeze rent hikes on already rent-stabilized apartments and create a handful of city-owned co-op supermarkets look downright paltry. His version of “Communism” is pat ball and pastiche. Things get even more socialistic if one were to incorporate the economic platform of AfD’s Dutch sister party FvD (Forum for Democracy), with its housing subsidies, wealth taxes and even stronger, wider social safety nets. The Dutch “far-right” are so inherently redistributive that their platform offers to pay immigrants 50,000 EURO to leave the Netherlands and renounce their citizenship. For in Europe, true democratic-socialism is so longstanding and successful that it has become a conservative position held even by opposition parties. If instituted in America, AfD or FVD’s economics would usher in a revolution the likes of which we’ve never seen. And you can guarantee it would be fought tooth and nail by the same conservatives who support AfD by day and have Mamdani meltdowns on Twitter by night.

The American mind is imperial and solipsistic. It is wont to see the rest of the world through the lens of its own culture war and political definitions. For instance, Left-wing colleges brandish sophomoric seniors who can see foreign human rights struggles only through the prism of politics that do not exist in the countries they stand in solidarity with; hence “Queers for Palestine” march alongside Hamas flags and the whole worthy cause flounders in not undeserved ridicule. Whereas the Right boasts blinkered figures like Alex Jones who, a day after bringing Seibt on to his show to champion the AfD and advocate for her as asylee, hosted high priest of ignoramuses Gavin McInnes to warn against Mamdani’s incoming “Communist Caliphate” without detecting the slightest economic consonance. The economic similarities between an AfD and an AOC are, to the bipartisan American tunnel vision, undetectable. Yet both AOC and AfD believe in universal healthcare, free higher education and vocational training, minimum income guarantees, free childcare, and state regulations of the economy.

It is true that the Trump Administration and the AfD and her sister parties in Europe are in lockstep on closed borders and disdain of multiculturalism – which has emerged with the subtlety of an Overton Window as the new dividing line between the left and the right. However, even here they are out of step with one another. Unlike America, European countries were not founded on mass immigration and its de facto multiculturalism. Germans, for instance, are indigenous to their land, unlike all non-Native American Americans. The recent massive influx of immigrant refugees have come from, in no small part, the destabilizing wars of America’s National Security State, and immigrants’ presence and entitlement to democratic-socialist benefits has put a profound strain on many of vassal Europe’s welfare systems, fostering a class war between young native-born citizens being passed over by non-citizens for priority subsidy, housing and other types of anti-American Euro perks. (This is why Bernie Sanders has been unequivocal in his criticism of Joe Biden’s open border policy, and the capitalistic exploitation of mass illegal immigration to drive down wages, weaken worker benefits and promote class war.) “Because asylum seekers receive benefits, free healthcare and free housing, the costs of immigration are enormous, estimated to be 27 billion a year,” Massimo Etalle tells me, FVD International Affairs Coordinator and City Council Member of The Hague. As a vassal state of America, Europe is obliged to take these immigrants in. But as conservative socialists, the removal of non-citizens from entitlements is, in the strict economic sense, socialistically protective of the welfare and pension benefits of Europe’s labourers. “Protecting workers, one-hundred percent that’s the idea behind it,” Seibt told me of AfD’s stance on immigration.

In ignoring this, the modern Leftist relinquishes the coherent socialistic economic critique to “the Right.” Things get worse when one considers attitudes toward free speech. Bernie Sanders referred to AfD last year as “authoritarians,” but neglected to critique Germany’s own authoritarian defamation laws targeting political dissent. Specifically Section 188 of the German legal code which renders anything the government classifies as “abuse, slander or defamation against persons in political life” subject to fine and imprisonment. (I want the American left to imagine here what someone like Trump would do with such a power in the United States.) This anti-democratic law was recently visited upon editor-in-chief of AfD-affiliated Deutschland Kurier David Bendels, sentenced by the German government to seven-months probation for posting a meme of a German politician holding a sign that read, “I hate freedom of opinion.”

I asked Heidi Reichinnek, Leader of the Die Linke (the Left) party in the lower house of the German parliament, about this speech law, and whether the German left would pursue free speech protections equivalent to America’s First Amendment after a talk she co-hosted on November 14^th in Manhattan. “Of course if you propagate hate speech or you insight violence or you call to arms or call for violence against people, then of course the law will persecute you,” she told me. I recalled to her attention that Bendels’ meme had not incited violence, and mentioned the case of Aron Pielka, who was sentenced to a year in prison for making a video of himself burning a piece of bacon on top of a Koran. A tall mustachioed German man in a crushed velvet suit, whom I presumed to be Reichinnek’s handler, informed me that the protection Germans don’t provide for speech is denying the Holocaust. (As an American, I am by nature perturbed by mustachioed Germans in chic suits, but relied on my journalistic mettle to carry me through.) I reiterated that neither of these cases made any mention or adjacent association with the Holocaust, nor incitements to violence. The two assured me that free speech and censorship were not problems in Germany, and the unidentified German man intervened to cut the interview short.

“The first thing that needs to be done is to completely eliminate Section 188 where politicians get special protection, and Verfassungsschutz,” Seibt tells me. Verfassungsschutz, which Reichinnek insisted she was not aware of, is the policy that allows German intelligence to surveil and intercept private communications of citizens it classifies as “extremist” or affiliated with extremist groups, which Seibt has been a confirmed victim of and is why she’s applying for asylym. With AfD polling at 30% approval in Germany and growing, that’s potentially a lot of citizens. This has left the only vocal parties in Europe calling for First Amendment equivalent legal protections and the abolition of surveillance those labeled as “Nazis” by American leftists who already enjoy the amendment’s protection. And defamed by their own compatriots: in Reichinnek’s talk at the Verso offices, she quipped that the Germans voting for the AfD are all “literally Nazis.”

Is this where the left wants to be? Not just on the wrong side of free speech, but gifting the sole and justified advocacy for it in the hands of “Nazis?” The criminalization of free speech is not just bad in principle but is bad as political stratagem: not only does one add weight to the rod being fashioned for one’s own back, but one also grants the allure of apostasy to the censored and penalized, and the apostate begins to be identified by a democratic public with the purity of the democratic principle, no matter how anti-democratic their political intentions may be.

But this is the physics of reactionary politics, when a politic does not define itself from stationary principle but from reactionary inversions of an opponent’s platform. Soon all political definition is lost, amnesia sets in to cover the attenuation of political identity, and people begin to think it’s left wing to criminalize free speech and right wing to protect welfare benefits, all the while Trump fawns over “Communist” Mamdani in the White House. “Left” and “right” do not make sense anymore. Our “political spectrum” is not but a geological boundary line marking the dramaturgy of a now extinct political age, and the continued use of these binary categories only impedes reasonable discussion and clear thought. At any rate it’s a bad state of affairs, or perhaps simply the end state of affairs, when Bernie Sanders and Alex Jones can’t recognize socialism anymore – not that Jones was ever particularly good at it to begin with.

I started a podcast with and Clementine Ford called Quality Lit Game, a reference to a Terry Southern coinage from a Plimptonian profile of that unsung comic novelist. We discuss One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Wes Anderson in the first episode, a terrible film whose adulation I fail to understand — or better yet, fail to enforce. I may also fail to articulately explain my qualms in this episode, but that’s for you to tell me in the comments below. My major quibble, which shares a fate with nearly all adaptations (however loose, however intimate), is the stark inferiority of the film to the novel it was lobotomized from, Vineland by the — as it turns out — inimitable Thomas Pynchon. The episode can be listened to above, on Spotify or on Patreon.

The tireless , of whom it has been said (by me) that even his indefatigability is indefatigable, published a revisitation of Gore Vidal this morning. My ego knows bounds, so I’ll not claim the noble title of Barkan’s frisson, but we did have a pleasantly libational conversation last week in Brooklyn about the mainstream right wing’s adoption of what were once far-left Vidalian positions – anti-NATO, anti-Deep State (neé National Security State), anti-proxy antagonism of Russia, the open embrace (in some uncloseted quarters) of homosexuality, etc. – and the further oddity of how all these positions, save the latter, had seemed to disappear from the mainstream left. (As we spoke, my five or six gin and tonics seemed to disappear just as mysteriously.)

It could be said of Barkan, a one-man USAID for victims of the publishing-industrial complex, that he runs the risk of spreading himself thin with so many of his humanitarian literary endeavors, except that his range has never shown itself to be anything but quite deep wherever he turns his attention. With Vidal it runs six feet under, as it were, revisiting aspects of the Vidalian political ethos that seemed to die in concert with the great aristocrat, a plural termination that I can only explain by way of Vidal’s theory of American amnesia. (At the height of his powers, Vidal warned us he’d be forgotten.)

Barkan wagers, quite insightfully, that Vidal would not have been melodramatically flummoxed by the Donald Trump presidency nor seen it as the end of democracy. That end Vidal dated, with as much insight, to the 1950 birth of the fledgling American Empire’s National Security State apparatus, the great enemy the leftist forgave and suddenly pretended didn’t exist once the right finally acknowledged it, rechristened it the Deep State, and it went to war against Trump in his first term.

It’s safe to say Barkan would like to see Vidal back in the discourse, and as he shows it is not fruitless to speculate what Vidal might have made of the Trump era, I’ll waste no more time in doing just that myself.

Actually, I shall waste a little more, but only a paragraph. The Vidal I shall now ventriloquize is not the senescent figure Christopher Hitchens (another man we dearly miss, another man whose summa of a political opponent would have been Trump) called “Vidal Loco,” who believed 9/11 and Pearl Harbor were inside jobs, but rather the barrel-chested Senatorial candidate of the 80s. The megalithic historian of the American empire. The man whom we could cure our American amnesia by remembering. Without further adieu, I shall now part the fog.

After the betrayal of the American Revolution’s first constitution, The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, by the Constitution – a polity of centralization that we’d just fought a war to be independent from, and which turned the Revolution into a mere Reformation of English monarchy – America, with her aversion to political parties and factions, became a one-party state with two conservative wings. Though they have swapped names and platforms over the centuries, today the two wings of the same party are known vestigially as Republicans and Democrats.

Each party protects the interests of the elite propertied class who administer the country, while appeasing the reactionary fringes of their constituents with just enough “wins” to make them think they are participating in a democracy, and to keep them from establishing any legitimate political parties outside the two parties’ reach. (Both parties also agree in concert to make it virtually impossible for candidates to run from a third party, making democracy virtually impossible too.)

Actual critical issues of the individual vs. the state – such as Citizens United’s assigning personhood and unlimited donational power to corporations, BlackRock’s growing rentier society, surveillance capitalism, neo/techno-feudalism, imperial presidential reform (remember when we used to talk about taking away the president’s unconstitutional power of executive order?), the National Security State’s secret twelve-figure budgets – are replaced with the simulation, nay, the aesthetic of “discourse.” This replacement is what we call the “culture war,” which is waged primarily through internet addiction (our modern opium war) and the lucrative monetization and monitorization of the addicted populace’s disorganized boredom by the very powers that the two parties equally represent.

In such “culture wars” between two equal opponents in an impotent society, legitimate ideologies that could affect the apparatus of the state are forgotten in lieu of those that could affect other citizens, something both parties love to do. (Our Constitutional structure of a centralized system rather than the original vision of America as loosely collected sovereign self-governing republics has given us this false center to fight over, and the inanity of trying to entropically legislate the actions of hundreds of millions of people we’ll never meet.) This is because at best the warring populace has only the two options of cultural reaction and counterreaction to choose from, which go on influencing each other in a death spiral of puerile reflex. Thus, as the Democrats recognized the cultural demands of its reactionary fringe constituency (gender ideologies, identity politic hierarchies – aesthetical and symbolic presentations), the legitimate left policies that had primed and saturated the culture since at least 9/11 fell into desuetude, and were repurposed by the fringe right. These would be anti-globalization (the brainchild, first, of democratic-socialists), anti-Deep State/Unconstitutional fourth branch of government, etc..

In 2016, for the first time in the modern era two populist candidates speaking to the people (and most importantly, to disaffected citizens who do not often vote) rather than the establishment emerged: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Trump, although far-less legitimately anti-establishment but more aesthetically seeming anti-establishment than Sanders, was able to defeat the RNC’s attempts to silence him in lieu of one of their clone candidates, and he won his nomination through an organic democratical primary. (Republicans, having a better business sense than Democrats as America’s former majoritarian administers of the state, soon recognized the popularity of Trump and abdicated their platform in 2020, giving the keys of the entire party to just one man.) Sanders on the other hand, being actually anti-establishment – that is, seeking to actually change the establishment structure of the American economy into democratic-socialism – had a tougher road to victory. After all, 2016 was Hillary Clinton’s coronation year, and so in this primary, as well as 2020’s coordinated Super Tuesday dropout, and in 2024’s cancellation altogether of a primary, Sanders and his movement were successfully thwarted and torpedoed by the handpicked candidates of the Democrat donor class. No surprise, they lost to the organic enthusiasm of Trump, a candidate picked by his people. (Cue the steambath of self-pity that is Kamala Harris’s memoir 107 Days – a candidate for President who was not elected by the electorate of her party – and its requisite entitlement not only to our support to govern us, but to our sympathy. The Democrats should never be allowed to forget that while campaigning about democracy being “on the line,” they cancelled their Democratic primary and picked a nominee for its constituents, and then had the moronical delusion to wonder how, in contrast to Trump’s organic base, Harris could have lost.)

To go back to 2016, Trump’s victory gave America its first legitimate political contest of the modern era between the bipartisan old order of the “two party system” and Trump’s new order, behind the scenes and spilling out into the inflammations of the mass media. Thus we saw not just the age-old, wornout conflict between Republicans and Democrats, but a novel conflict between Trump and older guard Republicans, elected and unelected within Washington’s monolithic bureaucracy. It also gave the mass media and their arbitrary 24/7 news cycles an opponent against which they (and their failing viewership) could be legitimated by fighting against. Here, finally, was the enemy they’d always warned of — and helped to elect by covering him non-stop since he descended a golden escalator. Trump was, in a way, a boon to the old order. Like the artificial military conflicts the government has been prolific at conjuring to excise profit for decades, the fight against Trump is good for business.

Witnessing this drama (and the fact that Trump’s political personality is the closest America’s legitimately had to a dictator), the disaffected fringe and intellectuals of the left who had always known the DNC (and mainstream media) to be as corrupt and inauthentic as the RNC, were tricked into thinking the Democrats were a legitimate party again, and quickly re-elided into the elite donor class’s approved conformities. The battle between Trump and the bipartisan old guard of the post-World War II National Security State temporarily reified the left, who rallied to save the status quo it had always wanted to change, so much so that all footing in former definitions of “liberalism” were seemingly lost, and replaced from the top down by neoliberal corporations’ technocratic frameworks. Hence the frictionless merger between the algorithmic economic models of “targeted audience”/“customer segmentation” and identity politics.

It was forgotten, for instance, that after World War II’s metamorphosis of America into global empire, the office of the President had become that of rotating one to two term Kings, with the unconstitutional powers to declare war and do whatever else at whim with executive orders. It was forgotten that the FBI and CIA, headed by such temporary “heroes” as James Comey and Robert Mueller, were sham organizations of a metastasizing police state, a turn-key totalitarianism of “Big Brother.” It was forgotten that NATO was an imperial, hegemonic bully. It was forgotten that… that… it was forgotten…

O but my powers are fading. I am very tired, I am grown weak. I would like a very cold wet rag for my forehead, please. Thank you. For I have just given birth to a six-foot tall American aristocrat. His name is Gore Vidal. Look, he’s smiling. As am I, as am I. His fixation on legitimate reform, rather than the illusional dramaturgy of the reactionary politic death spiral, is, I think, vital. Hah, Gore Vital, that is cute, you make me laugh. I should check my own vitals now, shouldn’t I? Thank you for the flowers but I must nap. Maybe some water. I can do no more, but maybe one of you can look after Vidal now while I sleep. I am very tired, but perhaps one of you can keep Vidal going, in the “discourse.”

Ewan Morrison’s “For Emma” is now available for purchase in the US and UK.

Civilization has now crossed to the elegiac side of intelligence, not because the dunce’s dream of replacing intelligence with computers has finally come to pass, but because after decades of its degrading misuse we’ve come to consider intelligence replaceable. Despite the lack of any conclusive evidence and the superior counter-arguments of leading experts in consciousness like Sir Roger Penrose and Dr. Stuart Hameroff, it’s become the most banal, unanimous position amongst the forgettable personalities of podcasts, social media “intelligentsia,” and the computer science experts they interview that science, governance and imagination are but moments away from being amelioratively eclipsed by “artificial intelligence.” (If ever a cult of stupidity deserved replacement it’s this one, and if ever a phrase required a quotational escort it’s the tumor growing upon the four much abused syllables of “intelligence,” which manages to negate the very definition of sapience while passing fraudulently for its ultimate goal.) This, mind you, has become a position held even by artists and thinkers who consider such an incursion unjust, to say nothing of the imbeciles who lay enthusiastically supine to generative AI’s glorified plagiarism-skirting software, using it to help them “come up with ideas.”

But whether or not human intelligence is actually swappable with artificial mimicry is irrelevant to the fact that this replacement will be attempted by the very autistical technofeudal dingbats who couped the global economy in the early 2000s and funneled human behavior into finite algorithmic patterns that a computer can imitate, only because a computer dictates them. Thus reviled at human fate’s bad breadth, aggrieved father Josh Cartwright decides to assassinate Zach Neumann, the CEO of multi-billion dollar AI microchip corporation Biosys. No, it’s not a copycat of Luigi Mangione, but the prescient plot of Ewan Morrison’s Silicon Valley techno-thriller, For Emma, written much in advance of that mentally ill heartthrob’s mewing murder of CEO Brian Thompson. (For the record, Mangione’s generic handsomeness has always struck me as rather AI-generated itself, and his motivations just as artlessly unintelligible.)

For Emma was begun in advance of the tremors, too, of 10/7, though the anti-AI domestic terrorist act to which its plot builds takes place on 10/01, one of just the mercifully few days a year when the calendar reads in binary. Much of the novel is built on these sorts of acute perfections, such as the slogan of Neuralink-modelled microchip implant pioneers Biosys, “The future is within you” (or will be soon whether you like it or not, Cartwright surmises) as well as the epigraph which opens the novel on an emotional syllogism:

“The death of a child is the greatest reason of all to doubt the existence of God.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81)

“With artificial intelligence… we are creating God.” Mo Gadwat, Former Google Executive (1967-)

The dates appended to the quotes show not just the temporal and intellectual distance culture has travelled from the days of Dostoyevsky’s fragile pathos to the gullible brio of AI “thought leaders,” “evangelists,” and “gurus”—this being the patois a nation populated by born-again Christians but ruled by cynical atheists deserves—but the unanswered death date left open on the leeward side of 1967 gives an ominous echo of the novel’s assassinational plot, asking of it almost to be an epitaph.

For Emma does not quite pass a judgement on whether such an assassination would actually be morally justified, but asks of the non-fictional foray into AI and human experimentation with microchips to become memorial at any rate. It is a conspiracy novel, and a very plausible one at that, comprised of video diary entries from Josh Cartwright to his deceased daughter Emma, a scientist at Biosys who dies after volunteering for its illegal human trials with AI-powered chips. The diary entries detail Cartwright’s grief, potential auditory hallucinations of Emma, covert reception of a tranche of Biosys files video documenting Emma’s experimental torture, culminating decision to assassinate the CEO to buy humanity time to fight back, and the detailed procedure of bomb making.

Biosys and its CEO Zack Neumann are up to, essentially, what the real global economy is being groomed for by the Neuralinks and Palantirs of the world: the implantation of AI-infused microchips in human brains and the angling of the final technofeudal nail in the coffin of human capitalism and human personality. But whereas the CEOs of those real companies have taken as of late to voting for the right, this doltish dystopia was first championed by neoliberalism, and continues surreptitiously under its blazon of “progressivism,” which Morrison nails. (In truth, dystopia will continue under any political blazon that suits it, like the idiotic Republican pun DOGE which used the commendable promise of cutting waste to hand over formerly inaccessible data on every single US citizen registered with the IRS to Peter Thiel’s Palantir.) The World Economic Forum enthuses annually about the obsolescence of human intelligence and this gaiety is handed down in consensual form to the left that the greenest, most moral, and most progressive future is one in which AI diagnostics and implants take over medicine, meat is grown in labs, and home appliances eavesdrop on one’s privacy. How perfectly Morrison captures the left-appeasing corporatist speak of these companies, and the oligarchical relationship between these tech companies and state governments. Here’s Biosys’s CEO:

‘Imagine if you can,’ Neumann said as he paced the stage, ‘a future in which humankind has discovered how to cure all illnesses, how to achieve lasting and true equality for all the peoples of the world, imagine a unified planetary economy based on 100% sustainability.’

The screen images showed smiling people from many races, holding cornucopias of fruit, other smiling among medical contraptions beneath the graphic of a rainbow, then the Biosys logo wrapped itself around an image of the globe.

Biosys’s hologram AI, their Alexa or Siri if you will, is a “mixed-race twenty-year old female, a kind of hybrid between a supermodel and an activist, with a lip piercing and blue hair,” which is almost exactly the only phenotype ChatGPT could produce for, say, Thomas Jefferson, in its first satirical weeks of image generation.

Behind this veneer, however, Biosys is conducting illegal human trials in the South Pacific, leading to the tormented deaths of their human guinea pigs, including Cartwright’s daughter. They are colluding, as we know corporations do, with search engines and governments. “I learned,” says Cartwright,

that Biosys made two trillion in dollars from experimental vaccines during the last pandemic and used that leverage to buy shares in the two biggest Big Tech corporations, so it could control its public image on social media; that Biosys had huge economic ties with the CCP, who were involved with ‘organ harvesting,’ and experimental gain-of-function research to create super-viruses and human-animal-hybrid organs… I’d found proof that they’d done many more clinical trials in Indonesia – funded by government sources and the [redacted by the fictional editor] foundation…

Their use of surgically implanted microchips to map the human brain achieve some short-term success in the amelioration of physical and mental health issues of their host, but end up eating away at the brain in attempts to control and then dictate human behavior and action. All while being “lauded as a miracle breakthrough in health and security by the WHO, NIH, and CDC,” naturally.

The novel is built on an almost Balzacian level of procedural detail, which lends the plausibility its horror. This includes accounts of just how integrated smart appliances and internet-connected surveillance technologies are into every inch of the home and the public square, as well as how to detach oneself from all of it. So too the intricacies of existing frameworks of hate speech laws are explained as they start to ensnare Cartwright in his Biosys research and activity in conspiratorial chatrooms:

…since I’d used the college computers, I’d placed the college in violation of International Hate Speech Law and this had left The Community College of San Francisco open to prosecution – under the UN Hate Speech Charter, section 178 (b) (c) (d) & (f).

They said my contract was terminated immediately and I had to attend a meeting that would be recorded for legal reasons.

[…]

Human Resources NOTE attached a screenshot of the so called ‘Hate Speech’ that I’d posted on the shared site – it said:

Where have the Indonesia news stories on the new Biosys nanochip-trial deaths gone? Erased by Big Tech search engines overnight. Check out the Top 3 Big Tech search engines $98B investment in Biosys.

I’d overlooked the fact that, fake ID or not, my college had signed the State Security Information Sharing Act, 2019, and so every word and search I typed, encrypted or not, had been flagged by a US Govt. Department of Homeland Security bot.

This is what the world would look like if it were dictated by Bill Gates’ vision of using AI to police “misinformation.”

As the day to assassinate Neumann approaches, Biosys begins shutting down Cartwright’s life, like a Big Tech cancellation. I will leave the plot in the hands of Morrison from here, before saying that For Emma also includes a masterpiece of an episode of modern humanist crematory funerals, reaching the poignant, atomised horror of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. Morrison’s novel, his eighth, is a triumph in that it reaches deep into the territory of Michel Houellebecq’s best works, wherein the critique of both neoliberal capital and received cultural liberalism is so penetrating as to make very poor leftists of those to whom it does not give profound pause, or alter the course of their private politics.

But more importantly, it is a triumph as a piece of art. For Emma is ultimately of two voices (not counting Emma’s benevolent hauntings), as the diary entries are transcribed by an anonymous editor of a publishing company who interrupts only to remind the reader of their impressive CV (“Mental health is an issue that I have some expertise with as an assistant editor on The Burnout Survival Guide and Single and Happy Forever”), congratulate themselves on the cashcow they’ve got on their hands (“I shuddered to think how important this could be”), and introduce naïvely self-assured doubts of the possibility of Biosys’s experiments (“As far as I can find, from my searches on the top biomedical sites, such recordings of permanent surgical brain chip experiments on actual humans do not and cannot possibly exist. As editor, this gave me some peace of mind…”). These doubts come to an end when Biosys starts targeting them as well. But this voice provides a comic counterpoint and a serious ironical dimension to the emotional Cartwright, reading as if if Dr. John Ray kept interrupting Lolita to give pleasingly inane comment. In fact, the editor’s voice is perhaps the novel’s most complex, and its subtle dystopian portraiture of modern publishing (and personnel) relinquishing what little was left of its talents to AI is one of its scariest elements because it’s actually happening right now.

Instead of fighting against this coup, publishing companies have already begun using AI for marketing analysis and topic curation—the bland dowsing rods that long ago replaced talent as a publisher’s main criteria for signing a book. Worse still, some publishing companies allow generative AI technologies to train on their books, which is the same as saying they allow them to plagiarize their works, as generative AI’s procedure is to copy, agglomerate and modify existing human content just enough to skirt copyright laws. Hark, too, at the codicil in Trump’s doltishly named Big Beautiful Bill that would disallow the regulation of AI for ten years.

Morrison himself has become an integral voice in the fight against this moronic inferno (to do my own borrowing from Saul Bellow), though he’s up against three decades of a headstart. With or without direct replacement, the power allotted to algorithms has been grooming the publishing-industrial complex for replacement by generative AI technologies like ChatGPT for decades. In the early 2000s Google co-opted magazine traffic and began to sell ads against it, without investing a single cent of their own into producing human content. Gone were print advertising and magazine budgets. To stay alive, much of print journalism that hadn’t vanished overnight retreated to die slowly online instead. Magazines could no longer prioritize writing for humans to gain visibility and subscribers and sell ads, but for the algorithm Google uses to rank its search results instead and funnel readers into digital subscriptions. This is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. It’s not as exciting as microchips, but harbor a prejudice against it, dear reader. For born of it was the insidious one-line opening “paragraph,” and destined for obsolescence were voice, nuance, word count, and style—things computers cannot assign value to. This is the only reason generative AI technologies like ChatGPT have a snowball’s chance of replacing mainstream writing: because mainstream writing has been devolving toward the vapid, voiceless, informative “style” of algorithmic writing for decades.

But let us end on a high note: computers will never achieve consciousness because consciousness is based on non-computable processes. Mathematician Kurt Godel proved with his Incompleteness Theorem in the 20^th century that human mathematical understanding cannot be contained in computational procedure. In summa, any system of formal logic based on mathematical proofs and rules (an algorithm) can produce a statement that is true, but that cannot be verified as being true by the system itself. It is human understanding alone, outside the system of regulating algorithms and based on something fundamentally transcendent to computational processes, which can understand the statement as being true. Penrose and Hameroff, the only theorists who have actually pinpointed a precise physical location of consciousness called “Orch (OR),” have shown that consciousness precedes and transcends computational processes and is seated in the quantum processes of microtubules and taus in the brain. Consciousness operates by laws of quantum physics we do not yet have a perfect understanding of and which AI scientists do not even consider in their simpleton technologies, but which Penrose sketches the outlines of with his theory of twistors. But I have a feeling I’m losing you. It is enough that you buy For Emma, and resist the looming coup. You are not a computer.

To Calvin Klein and whomever else it may concern,

Most male underwear comes with a built-in flap or button-up hole for the penis, for easy access urination, or whatever else the male genital needs to get up to in a pinch. After half a decade of rigorous use, my old Calvin Klein boxer briefs now sport themselves a second hole in th…

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“It cannot become old-fashioned because it is not part of a fashion.” Preface to the Decoration Designs of Francis Crease, Evelyn Waugh.

“…

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I wanted to update you guys on recent goings-on. Today, a profile I wrote about the greatest muse in American literary history, Augusta Britt, has been published by Vanity Fair. A little background. Augusta Britt was the secret muse of Cormac McCarthy for half a century and entrusted me a year and a half ago to tell her story. As you’ll see in the piece, her influence spans ten of McCarthy’s books and even more characters. Considering both the breadth and depth of influence on McCarthy’s novels, as a muse she is second only to the platonic form. Indeed, there is something deific about her. Her name, even, is an honorific, and it has been the greatest honor of my life to know it. We first made contact on this Cormac McCarthy essay I published to Substack on April 1^st, 2023. It’s been the greatest April Fools gift I could have ever hoped for.

I want to thank Benjamin Anastas, a dear friend and great novelist without whom I would not have made contact with Vanity Fair. (Ben has a fantastic Substack as well, focusing at the moment on Robert Musil’s magnum opus The Man Without Qualities.) I must also thank Lawrence Hecker, my most generous and steadfast entertainment lawyer. Thank you as well to Daniel Kile, my incredible editor on this piece, and Radhika Jones. Vanity Fair was the perfect home for this story, and it was an absolute dream to work with them, the best editors imaginable. Again, I can only compare them to the idealized figures journalists daydream about. Would that all writers were so lucky!

Finally, and above all, I must thank Augusta Britt, one of the best humans I’ve ever met, and to whom I owe the most gratitude. I don’t know why, but I was lucky enough to be found by her on April Fools Day. Everything since then has felt foolishly kismet. Without Augusta, I would be fiddling away at this Substack, going nowhere fast. All that I do from now on, I owe to her and dedicate eternally. Thank you, Lady A. You are a beautiful human.

Stay tuned for more pieces here on Barney’s Rubble. I will be bringing you much more content in the coming months. Thank you all for reading and for your support.

All my very best,

Vincenzo Barney

Special Offer You Won’t Find Anywhere Else on Rubble!

Well, it’s been quite the past few months. Even just this week’s been a doozy. Trump’s federally indicted, it appears aliens are in fact real, and you guys, my subscribers, have been instrumental in getting Barney’s Rubble firmly off the ground!

Barney’s Rubble has been on a steady, bi-monthly publication streak since April Fool’s Day—no laughing matter. I’ve covered the phenomenon of quantum spinors in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies; the unknown masterpiece that is Wild Thorns; published a short story about a writer who just can’t seem to die, no matter how many tomes he pens about his terminal ailment; and covered the corpuses of two of my favorite writers, the late and great Martin Amis and the octogenarian Cormac McCarthy—the latter of which has generated 5,000 reads! Along the way I’ve received such amazing encouragement from you guys and have had some very stimulating discussions in the comments section.

Now, most of my content is free, and that’s how I’d like to keep it going forward. However, it takes a lot of time and creative energy to write many of my pieces, which I do on the weekends and after the work of my two (count ‘em, two) paying jobs is done. My most successful piece, the one on Cormac McCarthy, is 10,000 words! Now, that’s the stuff I’d like to be writing more of, and it’s clearly what you guys want based on page views. But the only way to make more pieces like that happen is if I can start earning some dough from this venture. (I’m even going to launch a podcast interview series with writers and other movers and shakers in the literary world). By upgrading your subscription to a very cheap paid plan, you are in effect becoming something like my employer—and I’ll even give you the contractual power to make me quit my other jobs!

So, as a thank you to everyone, I wanted to offer this super cheap subscription plan:

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(I also wanted to drop this UFO/UAP video here, because I think everyone should be paying attention to what’s going on. Even if it’s just a further complication and legitimizing of a well-worn conspiracy theory, why are so many legitimate intelligence personnel coming forward? Is there a conspiracy behind the conspiracy? It’s all worth asking.)

Summer Update & Why You Should Upgrade

Now, I’m sorry I’ve had to break the bi-monthly streak this weekend, but I’ve been working on a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, which will supplement my AirMail article that got me blocked on Twitter by Joyce Carol Oates. Not sure who will block me this time…

Also, I’m not exactly breaking my streak, am I, as I’m taking this slot usually reserved for literary criticism to lay out what you can expect over the summer:

1. Podcast. I’ll be launching an interview series with writers and other movers and shakers some time this summer, stay tuned!

2. Whales and Men. A review of Cormac McCarthy’s unpublished screenplay Whales and Men, which I briefly covered in my previous McCarthy essay.

3. Something Amiss. Another piece on Martin Amis — I might revisit his infamously bad Yellow Dog and its savage reviews, questioning along the way, “Is it really that bad?” and “Why are the reviews particularly nasty?” OR: I might explore Amis’s misevaluation of Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, which, judging by Amis’s appraisal, is Nabokov’s Yellow Dog. Arf arf, I think not.

4. Infinite Joyce, or, why David Foster Wallace is crap. Period end of story.

5. The Importance of Being Ernest. The genderfluidity question—unasked by virtually everyone—of, yes, Ernest Hemingway. (The Garden of Eden, anyone?)

6. Anti-Federalism and The Articles of Confederation. The original, founding American constitution was not The Constitution, but the Articles of Confederation, in which there were congressional term limits, one-year presidencies, no standing army, no police, and stringent laws against gerrymandering. I’m going to explore the little-known history of this document and its seven year span as America’s founding polity, as well as the specific positions of the anti-federalists who fought against its extrajudicial replacement with the plutocratic Constitution, engineered by the monied classes. Anti-federalism is the founding, dissenting American position, and, oddly enough, the direct ancestor of both progressivism and libertarianism. They say if you go far enough to one end of the political spectrum, you wind up on the other side. The American political spectrum is not a line so much as a secret loop, which I’ll attempt to square… wish me luck!

Also in the offing will be a deeper dive into the quantum physics behind Blood Meridian, which I really only teased at in my piece, and which needs far greater exploration than what McCarthy scholars have ever been able to drum up.

Anyways, that’s just a taste of what can be expected this summer. In the meantime, I’m going to take this brief interregnum to get cracking on those pieces. I’ll also link to my LARB piece when it’s out this July!

Thank you once again for your support. Starting this Substack, I didn’t want to just howl into the void—though there is that. No, I’m so beyond grateful that the abyss is populated with such cool people.

See you soon,

Nick Vincenzo Barney

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Gore Vidal described his approach to criticism as standing between two gongs with a mallet in hand, striking each in a raging crescendo. I must say, I haven’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about, but I do find the image a perfect depiction of how I approached Martin Amis’s body of work. In 2018, I planted my hindlegs equidistant between the gongs with Time’s Arrow—that prosebed of diabolically dewy flowers—and began swinging between the book ends of his corpus with my own mallet: a red ballpoint pen. Though that novel urged me backward, I read The Information next, having to first raise my hand, you see, to gain the necessary momentum to swing at his debut, The Rachel Papers. The unexpected punch of that book—so much more youthful and unconscionably promising than anything I’d read by a contemporary—was followed by a ricochet of near chronological neatness: Dead Babies (nascently abandoned, I admit), Other People and Success, at which point I found the gong on my right had suddenly shimmied a few feet outside my wingspan with Inside Story, deckled out of the blue in 2020. I lunged eagerly and elicited its tremulous, unrecognizable melody—that alien resonance of what we could not yet know were closing chords—and my arm fell hypnotically backwards, my hand opening in the shape of a snout, toward the distant barking of his Yellow Dog. 

I don’t know what kind of racket I made, but the music of Inside Story always stuck with me—written as it was for me. “We all have more or less shameful fantasies about our best-loved writers,” said Amis. “We meet them in our heads—and everything works out fine.” Inside Story shows Amis making good on this maxim—the reader gets to meet Martin in his head and the two get along Amisly. But the novel, a semi-fictional memoir, really, is the conclusive evidence1 of another Amisism: a great writer is a great host. Joyce moons you out in the boonies as you sip his sulfurously mulled wine, Amis explains, while Nabokov gives you the best seat by the fire and a vintage red after dinner. Though, this particular squaring off of Joyce against Nabokov is second only to Amis’s matching them up on the tennis court: 

“Although of course Joyce and Nabokov never met in competition, it seems to me that Nabokov was the more ‘complete’ player… Losing early in the French (say), Joyce would be off playing exhibitions in Casablanca with various arthritic legends, and working on his inside-out between-the-legs forehand dink; whereas Nabokov and his entourage would quit the rusty dust of Roland Garros for somewhere like Hull or Nalisea, to prepare for Wimbledon on our spurned and sodden grass.”

In Inside Story, Amis never gets around to laying out the tennis whites on the guest bed, but enters his own host analogy instead. Indomitably charitable—as opposed to, say, “eloquently aloof,” as his spurned biographer Richard Bradford once yearningly described him from a rigorous distance—he invites the young reader, a burgeoning writer in need of some counsel, into his Brooklyn brownstone to smack their lips at his dinner table, a daydream I’d been enjoying long before Amis seemingly read my mind and the minds of his next generation of fans. His swan song was not for the critics who, in their contemporaneity, predictably missed this most unexpected of chess moves in the corner of the board—it was written directly to the readers and writers of the future instead who would be analyzing the grand master’s game long afterwards. Martin had some writing advice, and like his father Kingsley before him, he wanted to pass down the craft before departing. A wise castling indeed.

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Review of Volume 2 of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Vile Bodies published by Oxford University Press. Originally published in The Evelyn Waugh Society, issue 53.1. In the pantheon of physics novels, there is only Anna Karenina (special relativity), Blood Meridian (quantum mechanics), and Vile Bodies (quantum mechanics).

I was taking a few weeks’ indulgence in answering the question we Wavians love to be posed (unless your name isn’t Vincenzo), “Vincenzo, which Waugh should I start with?” when by chance the very man who introduced me to Evelyn Waugh asked if I would review the towering Oxford University Press edition of Vile Bodies—the very Waugh with which I started. Serendipity of this sort has a tendency, in Waugh’s novels if not in his life, to morph into the cruelest of mistresses before too long. After all, it was halfway through writing Vile Bodies that Evelyn Waugh divorced Evelyn Waugh. (Waugh’s first wife, Evelyn née Gardner, left Waugh for John Heygate—and she was not the first Evelyn in the relationship to have affections for another man.) Not only that, but the deep psychical gout of the 1929 divorce nearly led Evelyn to take his own life—or, to put it another way, Evelyn Waugh nearly divorced Evelyn Waugh—which might have left Vile Bodies gapingly unfinished at Chapter Six with columnist Simon Balcairn’s own suicide, one of the dark peaks of the novel’s famous cruelty.1

I wavered at the assignment and was dealt, naturally enough, an increasingly Wavian hand: the review was initially assigned elsewhere and would I take over the job pronto, and to boot (or Boot), I would not be given a copy of the text I was reviewing by my editor. Well. With the cards of coincidence stacked against me, yet with my last quantum review of Cormac McCarthy making for, I hope, awe-inspiring reading, I set out boldly to see if Vile Bodies still glints in the dark age of our 21st Century, and if the editors of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh had dipped any of it in amber. After all, if these were the Wavian fates at play (another way of saying original sin), then I didn’t really have a choice now, did I? And I may as well prepare for the worst.

Oxford’s Coat of Arms and anti-Lit. Theory Undergarments

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A review of Wild Thorns by Sahar Khalifeh, published by Interlink World Books.

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In memory of Cormac Roth who told me the first night we met at Bennington that he was named after Cormac McCarthy.

It’s an odd phenomenon having read everything a writer’s ever published. It smacks of puberty and the sudden, embarrassed intimacy with your parents’ tics and foibles. Martin Amis’s male characters, for instance, enjoy a boisterous, splashy hummer (you know, a while you’re down there, a nose dive, a honk on the ol’ bagpipe). His inherent (if not iterative) “philo-semitism,” the strength of Time’s Arrow and the unsung Zone of Interest, could not be extinguished even by his House of Meetings, which in Amis’s long phylum of philo’s features his most cramped attempt to remind the reader of his glimmering morality: its nameless narrator gaily, guiltlessly rapes and murders his way through half of Europe pausing only to express, at random intervals, a naive incredulity at the very possibility of anti-semitism. That is, Amis overplays a calling card and fashions a contentedly evil man who cannot fathom, well, evil, and winds up like the author and many of his leading men: obsessively, predictably in love with a Jewish beauty.[1] Vladimir Nabokov, on the other hand, was more orderly with his twin flame and flaw, and created an entire genus to contain them: nymph-, as in the nymphets of half a dozen novels and novellas and the Nymphalidae, Satyrinae, or wood nymph butterflies of his lepidoptery.

            Blowjobs, philo-semitism, nymphets, butterflies—these literary themes are of course not in themselves flaws, but upon their sixth or seventh iteration our reflexive eye-rolls begin describing the outline, in the distance, of a boundary coming into disappointing focus: the writer, our hero, our parent, has limits. There is a horizon beyond which they will not be going and beyond which they will not be taking us with them, page in hand. But we must master this disappointment, because parents do not live forever and we ourselves are not patternless. There is a lot to learn from last novels and the fading shimmers of their well-wrought patterns.

            So what stands out about 89-year old Cormac McCarthy’s latest (last?) work of fiction, The Passenger and its diminutive, incestuous (though not quite scandalously enough) little sister Stella Maris? It’s not a well-worn bushwack or a refurbished saddle, but its new terrains—that is, a break in McCarty’s familiar landscapes. As well we McCarthyites might’ve hoped, for with The Road’s publication in 2006 the outline of McCarthy’s corpus had come into the completed, satisfying shape of a mountain with two distinct climes: Blood Meridian capped the ascending peak, and The Road waited at its foot. What more could be said, putting our packs down, unlacing our hiking boots?

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