Some films were reviewed:

• Zero Dark 30
• At Jacobin, Lincoln Against the Radicals (preceded by The Young Mr. Lincoln)
• Do Not Go Gentle Into that Dark Knight: Occupy Batman
• The Albatross Around Johnny Depp’s Brain

Some books were written about:

• Autumn of the Patriarch, Forgetting to Live: Gabriel García Márquez’s Memory
• Damning With Faint Prize: Stanley Kenani’s “Love on Trial”
• What It Takes to Build Your Credit: Billy Kahora’s “Urban Zoning”
• Everything Fantastic is Credible: Babatunde Rotimi’s “Bombay’s Republic”
• David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words

Some television was watched:

• The Privileged White Men of Treme, and Their Hard Working Others
• The Earnestness of Being Grantham: Anglophonia and Marital Inaction
• The Jimmy McNulty Gambit: Mike Daisey and the Thickening Crust of Our Awareness

And of course, a lot of writing on higher education was done:

• With Mike Konczal, From Master Plan to No Plan was written on the slow decline of California public higher ed, and with Gina Patnaik, a piece On Privatization and Brutalizing Campuses
• On the late, great UC logo debacle: first, Let Us Eat Cake and then A Different Baton.
• Some stuff on other campuses; Quebec: Il faut défendre la société contre les étudiants: Québec’s Law 78; UVa: What Terry Sullivan’s Reinstatement at UVa tells us; and UC Davis: Reading Katehi: The Pepper Spray Chancellor
• Most recently, an Inside Higher Education piece Questioning Clay Shirky (on MOOC’s and the techno-utopianism thereof).
• And some thoughts on academic social media: My Norm is More Normal Than Yours: Academic Tweeting and Loose Fish

In an election year, some America stuff happened:

• American Democracy’s Bad Infinity and America Dads: Louis CK and Barack Obama

As Occupy was ended, the violence of the state was considered:

• Eikonoklastes: Violence and Speech
• Dumb Computers, Smart Cops
• Political Language on Police States and Political Language
• Hearing Like an LRAD: When Violence is Speech and Speech is Violence
• We Cannot Afford to Protect the Anuses of the Condemned

And the intersections of speech and forbidden speech:

• Creepshots and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of “Free Speech”
• Obscenity: I Know It When I See It
• The Deep Resentment of Having to Think About It: Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke
• “What William Faulkner implies, Erskine Caldwell records”

Finally, A Breather was taken.

• Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1906)
• Don DeLillo, The Names (1982)
• Hanif Kureishi, The Black Album (1996)
• Suheir Hammad, “First Writing Since” (2001)
• Orhan Pamuk, “The Anger of the Damned” (2001)
• Salman Rushdie, “Yes, This is About Islam” (2001)
• Arundhati Roy, “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” (2001)
• Ward Churchill “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” (2001)
• Wells Tower, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” (2002)
• Granta 77 “What We Think of America” (2002)
• Amiri Baraka, “Somebody Blew Up America” (2002)
• Spike Lee, 25th Hour (2002)
• Slavoj Zizek, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” (2002)
• William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2003)
• Donald Rumsfeld, occasional poetry. (2003)
• Michael Muhammad Knight, The Taqwacores (2003)
• Tom Junod, “The Falling Man” (2003)
• David Foster Wallace, “The Suffering Channel” (2004)
• The 9/11 Commission Report (2004)
• Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (2004)
• Tony Kushner, Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy (2004)
• Battlestar Galactica (2004-8)
• Brian K. Vaughan, Ex Machina (2004-2010)
• Christopher Nolan, Batman Begins (2005)
• Wes Craven, Red Eye (2005)
• Interrogation Log of Detainee 063 at Guantanamo Bay (2005)
• Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
• Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Sightseeing (2005)
• Frédéric Beigbeder, Windows on the World (2005)
• Juliana Spahr, This Connection of Everyone With Lungs (2005)
• Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (2005)
• Erik Saar and Viveca Novak, Inside The Wire: Inside the Wire, A Military Intelligence Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantanamo (2005)
• Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006)
• Alfonso Cuaron, Children of Men (2006)
• Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (2006)
• Jess Walter, The Zero (2006)
• Jonathan Raban, Surveillance (2006)
• Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006)
• Laird Hunt, The Exquisite (2006)
• Nell Freudenberger, The Dissident (2006)
• Ashis Nandy, “The Other 9/11″ (2006)
• John Updike, Terrorist (2006)
• Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children (2006)
• David Hare, Stuff Happens (2006)
• Don DeLillo, Falling Man (2007)
• Juliana Spahr, The Transformation (2007)
• Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (2007)
• Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)
• Paul Haggis, In the Valley of Elah (2007)
• Sinan Antoon, I’jaam (2007)
• William Gibson, Spook Country (2007)
• Phillip Roth, Exit Ghost (2007)
• Verso, War With No End (2007)
• Pankaj Mishra, “The End of Innocence” (2007)
• Yasmina Khadra, The Swallows of Kabul (2008)
• Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight (2008)
• Martin Amis, The Second Plane (2008)
• Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker (2008)
• James Marsh, Man on Wire (2008)
• Coen Brothers, The, Burn After Reading (2008)
•  Chris Adrian, A Better Angel (2008)
• Nadeem Aslam, Wasted Vigil (2008)
• Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008)
• Joseph O’Neill Netherland (2008)
• Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (2008)
• Neill Blomkamp, District 9 (2009)
• Armando Iannucci, In the Loop (2009)
• Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City (2009)
• Chuck Palahniuk, Pygmy (2009)
• David Finkel, The Good Soldiers (2009)
• Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (2009)
• Amitava Kumar, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb (2010)
• Rachel Zolf, Neighbour Procedure (2010)
• George W. Bush, Decision Points (2010)
• William Gibson, Zero History (2010)
• Lorraine Adams, Harbor (2010)
• Lorraine Adams, The Room and the Chair (2011)
• Amy Waldman, The Submission (2011)
• Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs (2009)
• Hari Kunzru, Gods Without Men (2011)
• Lavie Tidhar, Osama (2011)
• Edmund Caldwell, Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant (2011)
• Daisy Rockwell, Little Book of Terror (2011)
• Lavie Tidhar, Osama (2011)
• Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2011)
• Jarett Kobek, ATTA (2011)
• Kathryn Cramer, ”Am I Free To Go?” (2012)
• Sam Thompson, Communion Town (2012)
• Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
• Poetry of the Taliban (2012)
• Tabish Khair, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (2012)
• Rowan Ricardo Phillips, The Ground: Poems (2012)
• Teju Cole, Open City (2012)
• Azadeh Moaveni, Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran (2012)

“Disruption” is usually a code word for privatization, after all, or its stalking horse: when we anticipate “disrupting the classroom,” what we look forward to will be a mode of pedagogy that is cheaper and more profitable, and almost certainly worse for the students involved. I’ve made this case elsewhere, so I won’t rehearse it here. But it’s a fate I want to avoid because it will be worse for those involved.  In the sense by which education is a good thing, I believe it will become a worse thing.

“Disrupting” the MLA, by contrast, will take a thing which is terrible, by many standards, and make it… well, how much worse? I’m really not sure. MLA and its convention have value. I enjoy it. I enjoy seeing my friends, I’ve been at some great panels (amid the many stinkers), and if I get a job at a school where I’ve interviewed, I will certainly be glad that I did. Going there gets me excited about the profession, and I do value that. But I have also paid through the nose for that value. When you make $15k a year, and your future employment prospects are murky, it’s pretty hard to drop a thousand dollars on plane tickets, hotels, overpriced food, and all the other hidden costs that are involved. One must buy a nice suit so you look like you deserve the job that will allow you to pay for that suit, and nine out of ten people who buy that suit and interview for that job, will not get it. They will simply pay to look like they deserve a job that does not exist for them.

I’ve been lucky; generous friends and family have shielded me from having to pay a full price I’m not sure how I would afford. But most people do pay that full price. And at the most basic level, MLA exists because of the money that job candidates spend as a category, this money that many or most simply cannot afford. Those job candidates fill the hotel rooms that feed the convention’s profit margin, directly subsidizing the ability of the convention center and participating hotels to give MLA a rate that it can afford to pay. Your dues are not nothing—and even paying the reduced graduate student rate is a kick in the teeth—but the cost of the hotel rooms is where the Sheraton gets the money it needs to profitably host the conference. Every lazy tenured professor that gets up and delivers a paper they’ve barely written and hardly prepared—and I’ve seen quite a few in my time—is able to do that because of all the hotel bills that subsidize the convention.

What would happen to the MLA if every single search committee switched to Skype interviews? I am opposed to online education—in at least many of its potential forms—because I think it will be cheaper *and* worse. But would universal Skype interviews be worse enough to justify not absolving all future job candidates of the debt they will accrue applying for jobs they won’t get? It’s a little cheaper for the search committee, and that cheapness would come at the cost of the ability to ascertain whether candidates had achieved appropriate levels of personal hygiene, dress, and conversational grace. It would also impede their ability to judge the things you can judge about a person when you have a spirited and high-stakes conversation about literature, pedagogy, and themselves. These are not nothings. These are somethings. But they are very expensive somethings. And if every job search doesn’t require ten candidates to fly to MLA and stay in an expensive hotel room—if every job search instead conducts the first set of interviews over Skype—they will, collectively, save nine out of ten job candidates the many hundreds of dollars that those job candidates would have spent on a job they wouldn’t have gotten. That’s a lot of un-bought plane tickets and un-bought hotel rooms, a lot of suits un-purchased and un-laundered, and a great many graduate students, adjuncts, and postdocs who can instead spend money on things like rent, food, and not being in debt.

This would have to be a decision that was made collectively, of course; if half the universities conduct Skype interviews and half of them do it the old-fashioned way, a two-tiered hiring process takes shape, a new hierarchy of academic respectability (though is it new? Maybe we’re already there). It might become a point of pride for schools that can afford it to conduct interviews at MLA, and people who can’t afford those interviews won’t apply for those jobs, won’t also wander into cutting edge panels, network with new friends, etc. Moreover, if it isn’t system-wide, it’s more of a savings for the interviewer than the interviewee. A friend was told by a hiring committee that they had switched to Skype interviews to save money for job candidates; he did the Skype interview with them, and then he flew to MLA to do his other interviews—his fourth year on the market—and saved exactly zero dollars on the ticket he had bought and the room he had reserved months ago.

I’m not going to go around calling for a collective switch to Skype interviews, because “calling for” a huge change in a profession I haven’t managed to join—yet? or am I wrong to pretend that I haven’t joined?—is sot of an absurd rhetorical position to assume. And others have made such calls before, and will in the future. But I am in the part of my career where I still pay an arm and a leg and receive a few trinkets in exchange, so I enjoy the trinkets while my attention is drawn to the arm and the leg, and then grumble about it. If I advance to a position where my school flies me to a new city each year and pays my hotel bill, I imagine I’ll probably enjoy the good parts and endure the unpleasant parts (like interviewing a dozen job candidates in a cramped hotel room). But I wonder if I’ll also forget who pays that cost in my place, were I to acquire the position from which I could theoretically call for change? Or would I just enjoy being on the top half of the pile? If I had some kind of voice in the MLA, would I call for its abolition? I won’t waste my breath on having an opinion here; I’m just enjoying having a good grumble. As someone once put it—who was that guy again?—institutions are usually not very interested in solving problems that will make themselves unnecessary. And maybe next year will be the year I’ll register early enough to get the early registration rate.

And today, Inside Higher Education ran my article critiquing Clay Shirky’s advocacy of MOOC’s in higher education.

“Tarzan’s White Flights: Terrorism and Fantasy before and after the Airplane”

The argument is built on the coincidence that Edgar Rice Burroughs started writing his first Tarzan novel a month after the first use of aerial bombardment against “primitive tribes” in North Africa, and the ways the original Tarzan’s “death from above” style blends an American enthusiasm for racialized lynch mob violence with a British desire to take gunboat diplomacy into the skies:

R. P. Hearne’s 1910 Airships in Peace and War, for example, suggested that “in savage lands the moral effect of such an instrument is impossible to conceive,” because “[t]he appearance of the airship would strike terror into the tribes.”…The airplane, as Hearne imagined it, would “enable an expedition to be made with astounding rapidity [and] create the most terrifying effect on savage races, and the awful wastage of life occasioned to white troops by such expeditionary work would be avoided.” And in 1910, Major Baden F. S. Baden-Powell had predicted that airships would be a great asset in “savage warfare” because “the moral effect on an ignorant enemy would be great, and a few bombs would cause serious panics.”…The dream was, almost without exception, that creating nightmarish terror among natives would make it unnecessary to actually exert costly military force. As a British official claimed in 1914, “[I]n a few years aeroplanes or airships will be used in West Africa . . . . They would be invaluable against the hill pagans, and the terror caused by them would probably do away with bloodshed.”

It is a fantasy that has endured; that U.S. imperial strategists in 2003 named the first bombing campaign in Iraq “Shock and Awe” only demonstrates the extent to which the utility of airpower is still, explicitly, its ability to create terror from above. However, while hopeful military thinkers in the teens created the imaginative terms through which fictions of racialized airpower would be articulated for a century to come, technologies get defined both through hopeful fantasies and also through practical use. When the RAF first deployed airpower on a large scale—in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq—they hoped it would provide the perfect solution to two different problems: on the one hand, a surge in Arab “intransigence” after World War I, and on the other, the need to quell it cheaply, since postwar demobilization of the exhausted military made resources for colonial policing extremely scarce. The fantasy, then as now, was that airpower could deter Arabs into passivity by terror, a bloodless imperial pacification that would proceed by playing on the savage inability to control their own fear, the same “wonderful moral effect” the Italians had hopefully imagined themselves to have produced in North Africa in 1912.

But the interesting part of the essay, to me, is the ways the film Tarzan’s run away from this legacy, as racial violence goes out of style in the 1930′s.

For further context, you may also find these interesting:

• Edward Said’s “Jungle Calling”
• Eli Eshed and Alon Raab’s “With a Star of David He Swings: Tarzan in the Holy Land”

Remember. Remain indoors. Take shelter in your home. Keep duct tape on hand. In case a refinery explodes. Have a home. The homeless have only themselves to blame. Take shelter in a Community. Without refineries. Do not go out in public. Stay off the Phone. Close your windows and await instructions. The people of Richmond. Have only themselves to Blame. Trust. It is Important that you do not politicize a tragedy. Do not politicize a tragedy. Do not politicize a tragedy. Do not politicize a tragedy. Do not politicize a tragedy. The fire is contained.

First! A video that I recorded with Catherine Cole and Kwame Braun as part of their “Take Five” project — which they describe here – and which basically consisted of giving me Ansel Adams’ Fiat Lux book of photographs (which the University of California commissioned him to produce, of the University of California, in the 1960′s) and telling me to warble on camera about five images which struck me as interesting. Then, they edited it to make me sound a lot more coherent than I was:

Second! I sat down with J. A. Myerson at the Free Speech Cafe the other day, and we chatted about student protest, the releasing of pepper spray to maintain safety, and the general beating of students until morale improves. He used some of what I said as part of an amazingly syncretic report for Citizen Radio on the student debt bubble and related sins. You can listen to it here; Myerson’s segment begins right around the 30 minute mark, and it’s worth listening to in its entirety.

Third! On Monday, the New Inquiry’s “Police” issue will be dropped onto the world, and nothing will ever be the same again. I have a contribution to it called “Dumb Computers, Smart Cops” which will attempt to connect constitutional history, police beating student protesters, and mad robots that want to destroy the universe into a single narrative. You can subscribe here for a miniscule $2 and receive the whole magazine in .pdf form sometime tomorrow, though my essay will also be up tomorrow on main The New Inquiry site as well.

On Sunday, I went with a friend to Laney flea market, and watched as lots of people’s stolen laptops were resold. Mine (serial number C02GM6RYDV13) was not among the fifteen or so 2011/2012 Macbooks that I saw being passed from hand to hand in exchange for big wads of cash; presumably if you arrive at 7, when the flea market opens, you’ll see the thieves arrive to sell the laptops to the dealers, who were doing a busy business at 8:00, and were mostly done by 10. I don’t know that those computers were stolen, of course, but I also don’t know that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. Chances are good, either way.

I bought that laptop in a moment of unusual financial solvency, a moment which has passed. Last Thanksgiving — on “black Friday” believe it or not — I bought it with money I had made writing this article for Technology Review, a bit of freelance writing that paid me nearly half a normal year’s total income (Thank you Jason Pontin and Technology Review!). I spent the rest of it paying down some debts, and that money is gone now. I have no savings with which to replace that laptop, and I probably won’t. The New Inquiry pays its writers as generously as they can, and I can’t emphasize enough how happy I am to write for a publication that prioritizes paying its writers over its editors (name another publication where management mostly works for free and revenues go to pay for labor? I’ll wait.) But TNI’s pool of subscribers isn’t (yet?) at the point where they can pay me anything like enough to defray the cost of being a human being in the world, even in the Oakland part of it.

Thanks to the kindness of a friend, I now have a year old, new-to-me chromebook that I can use for internet and portability, and I also have the six-year-old Dell laptop that the Macbook replaced, a tank of a computer whose battery and wireless card no longer work, but which I can still use for word processing. With any luck, that machine will keep me afloat for a while. But much worse than simply the loss of the laptop is the fact that I lost parts of my dissertation which I hadn’t fully backed up. Here, I can save you the trouble of stating the obvious: “Aaron, back your computer up, so this doesn’t happen.” Done! But the fact remains; lots of it wasn’t. It’s an eerie feeling to realize that documents I’ve labored over may be being erased, right now, never to be seen by anyone again. I wrote 1500 words on Foreign Policy magazine’s failed states index, and that’s gone; I had a written much of an essay on California’s Master Plan for Higher Education. But the dissertation is the important thing. The most important parts were backed up, but lots of it wasn’t.

The breakdown isn’t important, though. The point is this:  I’ve been set back, significantly, on the work I need to do on my dissertation, and my deadlines haven’t changed. So to catch up, I will need to make up that time and that work some other way. If I’’m going to replace the stolen computer, I will need to do more outside work to make the money to do it, which will cost me time and energy. And since I will need all my time and energy if I’m going to get back on track, I’m probably not going to replace it, at least not any time soon.

The calculus is quite simple: I have more to do, and less to do it with (though if anyone wants to kick in a few bucks to defray the cost, a WePay tip jar is here, or PayPal here).

One of the great and terrible fallacies of our time is the idea that you can “do more with less,” or even that you can do the same with less. The managerial notion, for example, that it is possible to cut away the resources a person or institution has without thereby degrading that person’s or that institution’s ability to do their job is a fiction, but a useful one. It’s a way of making it someone else’s problem to make up the shortfall. If funding to a government agency or university is cut, and the workers there are told to “do more with less,” they will try to do the things they already do, but they will do them more cheaply and worse. If an employee is told to get the same job done, but she is given less to work with in doing so, she will either do a shittier job of it, or she will have a shittier life as a result of having no other choice but to work harder and longer and be paid less. In other words, great ideological energy goes toward making us overlook what is simple and obvious: the cost of doing something will always get paid somehow. Either it will be done less well, or the cost will be shifted from the managers of the system, who give the orders and have the power to enforce them, to the people who have to do the work and make up the difference with extracurricular, unpaid time.

I say all this to explain why the theft of my laptop — and the loss of a significant amount of work on my dissertation and on other things — means I’m going to stop blogging and tweeting for a while. I don’t have the resources I need to do my job the right way, and the fact that it was a snatch-and-run theft rather than a funding cut doesn’t change the basic logic of the situation. Rather than “do more with less,” and keep waking up at 2 a.m. in a panic over undone things,  therefore, I am going to do less with the less I have. Rather than fool myself into thinking I can just make it up magically, I am going to be realistic, and revise my plans and expectations according to my diminished pool of resources. I’ve lost time, work, and money and I need to make up the work without the money, so something’s got to give. In administrationese, I have to Be Realistic, and “being realistic” means deciding which of my priorities I am going to eliminate.

I spend a lot of time on twitter, which I value. Gone. I spend a lot of time writing blogposts, and trawling the internet. Also, gone. At least for the duration, I can’t spend time and energy doing this. There just isn’t any left over. I’m paid enough to be a graduate student, but not enough to be much of anything else, and if I’m to have any hope of getting a job better than the month-to-month, hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck existence I currently enjoy, I need to get eight months worth of work done in the next four. I’ve got to do that, and only that.

If you are reading these words, I want you to understand how much I appreciate that you are, how much it means to me that a decision of mine, like this one, would be of interest to anyone other than me. It means a great deal to me. If you’ve read this far, thank you. The academic world frustrates me by the extent to which we labor on writing that such a very few people will read, and that’s why I have a blog. It’s a way of doing a more capacious, more open version of intellectual labor.

But: having this kind of precarious existence means the privilege of spending so much time and energy writing for free about whatever I think is important is only one disaster away from becoming unaffordable, and I am one disaster past that moment.

There are greater tragedies in the world than this, obviously; losing one’s laptop and parts of one’s dissertation are the worst thing that can happen to a graduate student, but I’ve been joking to people that being a graduate student is already one of the worst things that can happen to a person, so the glass is half-empty either way. There’s a certain amount of truth to that: this experience has forced me to think about ways I can interface with the world not through a computer screen, and that’s important; I’m going to make this experience into something healthy, a way to re-focus my intellectual energies. But it’s also kind of a bitter joke. Being a graduate student is much more stressful and anxious than people often realize. The psychic and physical toll you pay is significant (there are those costs again!), and the end (when you face the seemingly non-existent employment prospects) can be rough. I tell people starting out that they should expect to fuck up their backs, to maybe need or go on some kind of anti-anxiety medication, and to spend their twenties intimately aware of the price of peanut butter. Your ability to be a graduate student for the next 7-10 years will be totally contingent on finding new strategies to keep yourself healthy.

But, of course, all of this only makes graduate students a lot like most latter day American workers: a paycheck away from missing rent, physically damaged by the work they do, and often waking up at 2 in the morning consumed with anxiety about the future. Like most people of my generation, it can be hard to imagine doing the things that my parents saw as the good life. That doesn’t mean I won’t have a future endowed with health insurance; that doesn’t mean I won’t be able to financially support a family, that doesn’t mean I won’t be able to “have it all,” as they say. Statistically, a person with an advanced degree like mine is still way ahead of the median American worker, and I’m well aware of that fact. But at the moment, I look at my bank account, I look at my job prospects, and I look at what I’ve got on my plate, and it makes me tired just to try to figure out where all the time and energy is going to come from even to get to the place where something good can happen.

So, for the time being, the next few months, maybe the rest of the year — depending on how the dissertation comes — I’m not going to cannibalize body and mind to do more with less. There’s a certain kind of politics to this choice, maybe, but the main thing is just an honest account of my situation, and an effort to make an actual choice, rather than coast along on momentum. Writing this blog and having you read it has been a real privilege, but it’s one that I don’t think I can afford any longer. I will lack the time and energy to put together the Sunday Reading posts each week, so the great Jane Hu has kindly agreed to do it in my stead. I’m going to hand my twitter password over to a friend and ask them to change it, so I can’t log on (and believe me, that’s what it will take to keep my addiction in check; I haven’t yet gotten up the courage to do it, but I will, soon). I’m not going to blog for a while and I’m going to try to chill out on the internet in general, try to read a few books and maybe go outside every once in a while. Feel free to drop me a line, aaron AT thenewinquiry.com.

UPDATE: Thanks to the generosity of a really humbling number of people, I now have enough to replace the computer, and then some  (over $2k in total). I don’t have the words to express my gratitude, so thank you will have to do.

Let us mourn for the essay never to be! Let its sacrifice never be forgotten! So say we all!

Battlestar Galactica is nakedly referential to the post-9/11 psycho-situation of the United States, the war on terror, and the scurity state. It wears the directness of this address on its shirt sleeve, and everyone understands that it does. From the occupation in season three – complete with Bush-era cliché’s like “shock and awe” and “Welcome us with open arms” – to the montage of 9/11 visual cues that opens each episode, this is something we are never confrimed in understanding, and never need to be.

But 9/11 was not a genocidal first strike; it was terrorism. And the substance of that distiction is relevent to assessing the substance of the allegory that Battlestar Galactica performs: it makes us think about the US after 9/11 as if it were the human race after a genocidal first strike by a robotic alien other, instead of this simply being (more or less) the lie that our leaders tell us.

After all, the interesting thing the show does is blur the distinctions between cylons and humans. If you had made the cylons into [insert Muslim Terrorist stereotype here] and the humans into [insert Virtuous American War Hero stereotype], it would be seen as blatant propaganda. It would be understood to be making a claim about the rightness or wrongness of the war on terror, and – as its politics became clear – we would bracket it off, inoculate ourselves from its message. So the entire point of the show – everything that makes it interesting – is the way those distinctions fall apart in practice, the ambiguity of a human race that isn’t nearly as good as we expect them to be or a cylon race that isn’t as bad as we expect. This problem is given maximum tangibility by the steady suggestion – occasionally give real substance – that while the cylon attack might not have been justified in the form that it took, it was mounted in response to a real grievance.

And yet, everyone knows that the cylons are the Terrorists. Everyone knows that the humans are the United States. The structure of the allegory – the extent to which it refers to post-9/11 USA – depends on this being the case. And by the same token, while the remnants of the human race inBattlestar Galactica really are facing the constant prospect of continual annihilation – which makes arguments for things like martial law, torture, recourse to extralegality massively more sympathetic – the most important fact about the post-9/11 USA has been the absence of the kind of existential conflict upon which so many of the state’s actions and transformations have depended. The show lets us forget that absence.

My grandfather was always perfectly kind, and he had a coarse joviality, but he was also never very demonstrative or expressive. That was his wife, my grandmother, who would fill our every minute of every day with activity, useful or just fun. He could also be stern, but mainly he was just busy, busy and self-contained. As a child, growing up, I liked him, but also had never really connected with him. He liked children, perfectly well, just didn’t have much to say to them, and there were always a lot of them; they were a good catholics, you might say, and had eight kids and thus quite a few grandkids (whose visits we always tried to overlap with). Before he came down with Alzheimer’s — when I was in my teens and later — he had opened up a bit, slowed down a little, but when I was a child, my main interaction with him was through the gadgets he would make, everything from little wooden rubber band shooting pistols to the giant swingset he had constructed in the back yard.

As I drove them to the truckstop diner that grandma had picked out to eat, later that day, he asked perhaps fifteen times where we were going, and who I was. This was normal, and we answered patiently. Then, suddenly, he looked at me and said, “You know, you’re a really good driver.” And he patted my hand affectionately. I had tears in my eyes.

Since he died, now a few years ago, I think back to that moment as maybe the only time when he ever did anything like that, at least with me. He wasn’t an affectionate man, by nature, and across the generations, I always squinted dimly to see him. But in that one moment, when he had forgotten how old he was or who I was, when it didn’t matter, he looked at me and patted my hand in a memory I still cherish, for reasons I can’t fully articulate. But it’s what I remember when I think of him.

* * *

When I heard the news that Gabriel García Márquez was in the beginning stages of dementia, I wrote a piece over at The New Inquiry on García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, a longish essay I called “Autumn of the Patriarch, Forgetting to Live.” But I was also thinking of my grandfather.