There I was, just looking for another reason to cancel our subscription to Paramount+ (as if the cancellation of one of the conglomerate’s biggest stars & one of the longest-running, most iconic programs in the history of television in a naked concession to political pressure dovetailed w/ epic corporate greed wasn’t substantive enough) and almost daring The Daily Show to piss me off again with their holier-than-thy-neighbor rhetoric juxtaposed with wanton shameless indulgence in the lewdest, most disgraceful attempt at humor outside of the MAGA-sphere they so cleverly deride, when Jordan Klepper, that self-styled avatar for whiteness constantly name-dropping rap artists we all used to listen to as children, as if to segregate himself from the hand-picked morons he highlights at Trump rallies (not that he has to look that hard, to be sure) as diagnostic, rather than merely symptomatic, of America’s present and ongoing malady---pardon my tangent; when Mr. Klepper announced his guest, Thomas Chatterton Williams.
Now,
don’t get me wrong; the frequently insightful and intelligent guests TDS brings
on is one of the primary reasons we DON’T cancel Prime Video/Paramount+;
although most of the truly insightful ones are interviewed by legacy host Jon
Stewart, who tends to talk over his guest, as well as the audience’s applause,
but nevertheless brings a depth and breadth of political, social, historical,
and just plain human understanding to the program that is far beyond the
broadcasting norm, let alone whatever garbage keeps popping up on your feed…
Mr.
Williams, to my pleasant surprise (and what a breath of fresh air if a surprise
should turn out to be pleasant in these days, eh?) exceeded even these
distinguished experts and do-gooders with his acute, sustained, yet casually
flexible insight into WTF is going on in America (and, indeed, the world) at
this moment, tracing our present despair from the collapse of the Obama-era
hope (which, I would argue, was not perhaps as complete and universal as he
would have it; even outside the nascent reactionary movement that became
ascendant and now appears perched for dominance) through the first Trump
presidency, to climax in the violent orgy of performative, secular Holy War
that filled the streets, and our screens, during the Pandemic, between the
brutal videotaped police murder of George Floyd and the bizarre reality-TV
spectacle of the first sustained assault on the Capitol since the War of 1812
(which is what our National Anthem is about, that once-loftily-inspiring hymn
to liberty cacophonously butchered by the J6 Crew who, temporarily, were
submitted to Law and Order for their role in the insurrection.)
I have
forgotten all the details of the interview itself, but immediately I wanted to
read the book. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good non-fiction read, in any
case; and when I’m not frequenting my neighborhood dispensary, my mind craves
stimulation. I had no real thought of being emotionally moved; I just wanted
something to keep my interest on my days off from work, holed up in an
air-conditioned room. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortuitously, the book was not
out yet for a couple weeks, and did not appear to be on pre-order from my local
library, or I could have requested it ahead of time; it was available to pre-order from the publisher, but I couldn’t get
anyone to take the hint and get me a copy as a slightly late birthday gift,
either. What the library did have available was an earlier, autobiographically
framed, yet sociologically examinational work by the author, Losing My Cool. I slurped this one up
like a well-mixed Arnold Palmer over the course of several hot summer days, and
I’m glad I did as it gave me some profound insights, into myself, surprisingly;
into epistemological phenomena I have pondered for decades; and of course, into
the author himself, preparing me to some extent for the new book and the
thinker from whose mind it sprang.
And a
thinker he is! I will attempt not to fawn excessively, for a variety of reasons
which should be self-evident, not the least of which is that I fear I have
already distracted the reader too much from the focus of this book report: but
that is why I don’t call it a book review; though we are far from grammar
school. I do want to say, before I move on to the work at hand, my ultimate
assessment after reading the earlier publication, or rather my statement to
whomever is listening, is this: Williams has arrived, a legitimate American 21st
Century philosopher.
Summer of Our Discontent
The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Summer of
our Discontent is a deep dive into the shifting waters of debate in America and
abroad around race, progress, morality, and competing visions of the ideal
society. Inseparable from this struggle between conflicting ends, is the argument over means: the tactics of activists,
politicians, journalists and intellectuals; as well as a more spiritual war
(for want of better term) over the narrative that frames past and present,
human agency and social culpability. Not such a long time ago, in a presidency
that seems farther, farther away with each day’s news cycle, Barack Obama’s
administration, whatever we make of it substantively, symbolically seemed to
enshrine the enlightened consensus we used to fancy was shared among most
educated, intelligent, or simply decent people: the idea, to paraphrase Dr.
King, that a person’s character was of more worth than accidental or arbitrary,
superficial signs of identity, be they the color of our skin, the gender we
were born with, or even, in that halcyon era, sexuality, which had only just
recently gained a slight majority slant towards tolerance (and yet was
immediately seized upon as a marker of enlightened versus reactionary
attitudes, to demonize Americans not on board with the values currently
trending, as well as foreign nations with whom we had a bone to pick---this
last detail to be revisited briefly later in relation to Russia.) Less than a
decade after the first Black First Family left the White House, this
liberal-centrist orthodoxy has seemingly been replaced by two irreconcilable
yet almost symmetrically mirrored dogmas of value-signaling, blame casting,
performative shaming, cancellation, and a growing tolerance for not just
character assassination but actual cold-blooded murder, kidnapping, and wanton
destruction, coupled with a reflexive, martyr-like denunciation
in-no-uncertain-terms of even the most dubious perceived slight, when it comes
from the ‘other side’, all of Biblical proportions. This is less like the Civil
War and more like the Thirty Years’ War which decimated Central Europe over
theological dispute in the name of the
Gospel of Love!
The central
theme of the book revolves around the erosion of intelligent discourse directed
at the pursuit of “a more perfect union” which has engaged liberal pols,
pundits and thinkers throughout the post-War era, and indeed has always been at
the heart of our American form of the liberalism which has gained currency
since at least the Enlightenment. This is, granted, only one mental construct
of progress, which has faced intense scrutiny and critique all along, from
convincing arguments on the left and the right, as well as more nuanced and
lofty analysis by Nietzsche and other heterodox philosophers as well as
powerfully moving religious leaders of all stripes and sects. Were Williams’
views to approach anything like mainstream acceptance, they would be well-deserving
of similar qualifications and counter-argument. What saddens, angers, and
frightens me, threatening to lull back into complacent despair those of us who
still stubbornly insist on thinking in this fraught arena of outrage and
conviction (as Nietzsche also wrote, “Convictions are greater enemies of truth
than lies”) and what again touches on the core argument of the book, is not
that nobody will agree with the author (dig Henry Louis Gates’ cheekily couched
praise on the back cover) but that few will be very likely to read the book, at
all the pessimist in me worries, let alone cover-to-cover,
footnote-to-YouTube-link; and fewer still will understand or even engage in the
meticulous exposition, let alone grapple with the dire consequences of not
taking these questions seriously; indeed, at a time when we are being
encouraged to take everything personally, how can anyone afford the
intellectual luxury to take anything
seriously anymore?
And yet,
this is far from an impersonal work, for the writer nor, at least, this reader.
How many indignant, well-intentioned young soldiers in the alt-Left social
justice thought-bubble have experienced firsthand excessive police brutality
inflicted on their flesh and blood kin in what should be the privacy of their
own home, in a bald act of almost objectively-defined racial violence? And how
many of the frustrated, alienated and left-behind voices of young men who have
been seduced by pseudo-conservative ideology have actually come to terms with
and reaped the rewards of this once-and-still (and, optimistically, still to
be) Great America that emblazons their baseball caps, replacing the team spirit
and rivalry of Red Sox and Yankees fans with a fictitious tribalism that makes
a savage mockery of the now quaint-seeming notion of “no Red States or Blues
States”? Thomas Chatterton Williams has
experienced firsthand both of these
Americas, and likely others besides. Growing up as a modestly privileged white
boy myself, I have no firsthand experience of many of the harsh challenges that
Williams faced growing up; nor have I achieved any of the academic and career
growth of which the author is duly proud, having worked to support my children
in menial retail and grocery work since becoming a young father after goofing
around as so many of us do when young and not impressed upon as to the inherent
value of American meritocracy, scions of white hippies who could afford to
indulge in a youthful cultural diversion from the rat race due to the
confluence of post-War prosperity and white privilege, while Williams
ultimately came to see his own black community as caught up in their own
juvenile culture but without the luxury of pursuing it and still leading a
comfortable life, as white millennials have finally had to come to terms with,
to a lesser extent, since the Recession.
Nevertheless,
in Williams’ story I can’t help but see myself, and perhaps this is the crucial
thing that, to me, informs him with true experience; that, while living in two
worlds, he does not fully belong to
either, not conforming to the cultural prejudice of his peers after Losing His
Cool nor being fully welcomed by the (still almost exclusively white)
gatekeepers of the intellectual zeitgeist as a black intellectual who draws
from his life experience and perspective but does not fall into the neat
category of the burn-the-house-down angry Black deconstructionist telling the
aforementioned disaffected white liberals how to redirect their rage against
the very system that has propped them up for generations and for just a moment
in time really did seem ready willing and able to lift us all. How many of
these white young (and sometimes not-so-young, the same generation of spoiled
LBJ-haters that clearly have no wish to grow up intellectually) liberals with
their vicarious outrage at newly-magnified, though in reality diminishing,
injustice actually live in public housing with poor Black and immigrant
families, as I do, or work alongside them for low-paying wages? Victimization
is just as much a form of dehumanization as bigotry; more perniciously, while
being downpressed can lead to a struggle to better oneself and one’s community,
being made the token martyr for some privileged white academic’s pet project of
catharsis degrades both the brown individual and the Black community; but why
not fancy that was really the whole point all along? Since I’m clearly upset
and venting these last two paragraphs, losing my own cool as it were, in the
common sense of the phrase, and veering from what I meant to be a concise
intellectual examination, why don’t I just get paranoid to boot and say that
“They” want us weak, disunited, and confused, at odds with each other,
scapegoating our neighbors, fighting our brothers and sisters in a disturbing,
dystopian civil war. Whoever “they” are…oligarchs, technocrats, the crooked
politicians and the corrupt media that props them up with one hand, ready to
tear them down with the other, whatever it takes to get ratings or mollify
whoever just bought out their parent company or approved the merger that made
it happen? Sure; I always bought into a lot of these same identity politics of
despair myself, long before it was so fashionable; I just prided myself that I
married these outrageous assumptions to a more-than-healthy skepticism and
never actually became moved to reject society in toto. In fact, looking back, it was Obama who directly called on me, not in the early era of Hope
but during a State of the Union speech during his second term, which all those
same early enthusiasts probably didn’t bother watching, to abandon cynicism,
that it would get us, as a people, as a nation, nowhere. I tried to become more
objective, to regain my cool in this context, to try to achieve a broader
understanding of American politics (inspired by my wife’s college studies, pursued
intermittently but successfully while raising three children under trying
circumstances) and our history, and to convey some of that to our growing
children as well, particularly during the precious time after my wife got her
degree and stopped working full-time in order to be at the bus-stop, cook meals
and read to them.
But then
when Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 everything seemed to change, almost
like a climatological phenomenon. I remember as if it were yesterday how it
hard it was to attempt to remain levelheaded and neutral during those days when
the air seemed electrified with human anger and Puritanical judgement from all
sides meeting in an explosive and unexpected, in not by any means unpredictable
thunderclap on Election Day. We were accused of both-siderism or worse; misunderstood
and practically disowned by friends and family, and fed algorithms that either
forced us off of social media altogether or simply motivated our loved ones to “block”
us, a cozy little new feature leaving us none the wiser and them all the more
ignorant for insulating their bubble further and pretending other points of
view did not exist. The funny thing is, I’ve always been to the radical lunatic
left of most of these liberal lemmings that happen to be my social milieu, and
yet all of a sudden the only people who were still my friends on Facebook were
more conservative: not because they mistook my intellectual curiosity for MAGA
enthusiasm (because, obviously, how could a rational person conflate such
mutually exclusive positions?) but because they actually did love their country
and care about their family and neighbors and wish for more discourse rather
than value-shaming; because they were complex, normal people, maybe a little
older and having lived through many changes themselves; maybe Williams and I
are too young to remember all the seismic shifts and witch-hunts that predated
this moment. I don’t really know. Read the book. Make your own conclusions.
Talk to your friends and family and neighbors once again. I’ve got to hurry up
and rush this onto my blog before my son steals the laptop, as I’ve been
meaning to write this concluding paragraph for several days now. There is so
much more I could say, if I haven’t said too much already. All I know for sure
is this:
That
summer, too, was just another thing for the man who has turned out well to
digest---
