In this time of darkness, with America a captured state of the Fourth Reich and the cartoon tyrants of the Trump regime sending their ICE white supremacist terror force to subjugate us and repress dissent as well as commit a campaign of ethnic cleansing and theft of our universal human rights, with the White House literally demolished by a wrecking ball to be replaced by an imperial palace of gold with a ballroom for the amusement of elites to recall the imagined lost glories of the Confederacy, I reflect during our Free Speech Week on the subversion of our social media as instruments of oppression and the theft of citizenship including our rights of free speech and a free press, but also on the social and historical forces which made it possible.

   As I wrote in my post of May 18 2021, Zero Fail: Behind America’s Mask of Lies and Illusions; Behind America’s mask of lies and illusions, a state of predation, of tyranny, force, and control, of corruption and perversions, of racism and treasonous authoritarian fascism, an amoral nihilism whose purpose is the centralization of wealth, power, and privilege to elites, festers with rottenness and cruelties.

A new book exposes and interrogates our system and structures of government through the example of the Secret Service, the tip of an iceberg of dishonorable and incompetent buffoonery which represents the whole of our failed public institutions.

Written by the champion of transparency and truth telling Carol Leonnig, whose previous book A Very Stable Genius stole the belled hat of mirth from Our Clown of Terror Donald Trump and revealed his true form before the world as a monstrous beast of rapine and Gideonite patriarchy, white supremacist terror, and kleptocracy greedily snatching from the air the cash thrown his way by his treasonous champing and hooting fans, tyrant of degradations and perversions.

Zero Fail is a primal scream of terror echoing through chasms of bottomless depravity which is our hollow government, a shell empty of values, ideals, or meaning. But this alone does not make it unique nor merit our attention; what does is when you read it as the case study of symptoms of a general condition of neoliberalism which birthed the travesties of Trump’s Fourth Reich.

As I have often written, our normality has betrayed us and is obsolete; normal doesn’t live here anymore. The abandonment of our values and ideals in support of the state of Israel is another such example, canaries in the coal mine of a failed moral vision.

Our society has only begun to heal itself in the Restoration of America, but we must not simply restore our nation to what it was before the fascist subversion of democracy, for like the collapse of civilization in the First World War, the exposure of the lies of the British Empire in the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the Indian Revolution, and the triumph of the Russian Revolution over the Czar, the Fall of America and the Stolen Election of 2016 were mechanical failures from the internal contradictions of a decrepit and mad system.

Let us reimagine and transform America and humankind, not merely to restore ourselves but to begin again. We must dream better dreams.

As I wrote in my post of July 21 2022, Our Stories, Ourselves: On the Right of Free Speech in a Social Media Forum; Of late our Forum of Athens here on Face Book has tried to seize control of our dialog and the narratives of identity which we construct here as memoir and as shared history, an alarming and tyrannical turn of events which manifests in the banning of any posts which are not unique, any which contain links to media we do not ourselves own as citations to references in the text we have written, and some which seem politically motivated censorship and repression of dissent.

This has occurred broadly throughout our communities and threatens to take down our cherished groups; the equivalent of purges, witch hunts, show trials, horribly reminiscent of the assassination of Khashoggi and the police raids on Hong Kong publishers to silence journalism as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.

Who owns our ideas and our conversations? If I stand on the master’s truck to address his laborers, does he have the right to censor unauthorized speech?

Face Book offers a free publishing platform which is superb at making connections between people and helping us find an audience with like interests; but this is not how it makes its money. We are the products of this system; this is a great power which can be leveraged to seize control of what we may say and to whom.

Here in this virtual Forum we struggle for control of our authorial voices, independence, and authenticity against commodification, theft of intellectual property, falsification, and dehumanization. 

Why is this important?

Censorship, book burnings, and the enforcement of authorized identities, versions of truth, and control of the mimetic function of history is always important, for identity is a primary ground of struggle. In the silencing and erasure of our voices and witness of history, Face Book attempts to shape our becoming human as theft of the soul.

And this we must resist.

As I wrote in my post of June 26 2022, Caught in the Gears of the Machine We Serve: FaceBook Censors My Posts on the Pretext of Being Spam; The mystery of the missing posts is solved; FB blocked 42 of them as spam.

Two of these censored posts were intended as allyship for Pride Month and interrogated identities of sex and gender, one was about the Supreme Court’s Abortion Ban, and the one that took several days to write, difficult days and nights of working through trauma and grief by writing, and made me late in subsequent posts, was about the anniversary of a friends death who happened to be Palestinian, and of great value to me because we must bring meaning to each other’s lives and deaths by sharing our stories. Our stories and witness of history are a ground of struggle against silence and erasure, falsification and dehumanization

No fascist agenda in censorship of dissent, Face Book?

I call out the truths authority would keep out of the public domain, the issues they would shape the discourse of, and the hidden purposes of elite hegemonic power which are served by social media in the commodification of our forum of discourse and connectedness.

We serve a vast machine of wealth and power, like Charlie Chaplin in The Factory, through which we ourselves become the primary product of the system, our votes and our purchases, but also our ideas of self and others.

In the words of Lenin; “What is to be done?”

As I wrote in my post of October 5 2021, Seizure of Power, Self-Creation and Self-Ownership, Authenticity and Autonomy, Self Representation as Construction of Identity, and Ourselves as Living Memoirs: the Case of Facebook; Something crucial we ignore about social media; though its pitched as connectedness, its primary function is to construct identity through ordering and prioritizing our experience in time. Our social media publications are a form of memoir, and this is a ground of struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and those which others tell about us.

As with the public negotiations of national identity and conflicted histories in the competing narratives of the 1619 Project and the Mayflower origin story, the first question we must ask of our stories is simple and direct; whose story is this?

This is the great test of disambiguation between falsification and authenticity, and between autonomy and subjugation; not whether a statement is a lie or a truth, though this is also important, but whose truth is it?

As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Kurdistan; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.

Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.

Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming its most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.  

As I wrote in preface to my reading lists, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?

I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.

We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.

The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.

As I wrote in my post of June 19 2022, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?

Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.

Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?

We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. Our stories live within us, and we also live within them. Who owns these stories also owns ourselves.

Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?

America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.

Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.

We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.

Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves and for ownership of ourselves.

Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?

As I wrote in my post of February 2 2022, James Joyce, on his birthday; We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.

Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?

Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?

Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.

As written by Eloghosa Osunde in The Paris Review, in her column Melting Clocks; “If you really think about it, we were all raised inside a giant dictionary. Society as we know it is simply a collection of shared definitions. Who is normal? What is beauty? Who is a criminal? What is a woman? What is a man? What is good love? What is sex? What is fair? Who is holy? What is evil? The more you agree with the definitions you’ve been given, the more you belong. The more you belong, the farther away you are from punishment. And you want to be safe in this scary place, don’t you? So you do what you’re supposed to do, and you avoid what leads to suffering.

You don’t want to be lonely either, do you, so you believe the rule: there’s nothing but nothing for you outside the defined lines. You’re told this from when you’re little, that your questions will put you in trouble, that you are and will always be too small to challenge a meaning. You’re just one person and this is how it works: society decides, you obey. But is that true? Seeing as many of us are alive on the outskirts of definitions, seeing as that’s the address that saved some of our lives, the place where we watch our safeties spring out of the ground, it’s clear that whatever was defined can be redefined. Whatever was written by a person for a people, can be edited by a person or a people. We’re proof. What is society, anyway? It’s an anthology of someones. We make it up. We have always made it up.

Art making is my strongest argument for redefinition, because nothing shows you the lie of impossibility and the multiplicity of worlds better than a body of work standing where once there was nothing. You don’t know how to turn Something into Something Else? Listen to what a remix does to a song: how in African Lady, an ADM remix, TMXO lays Masego’s music over a Lagbaja sample, rubbing two worlds against each other until they spark a three-minute-fifty-seconds long fire. Listen to the Red Hot + Riot album made in honor of Fela’s music and enter the rooms that appear when Meshell Ndegeocello, Manu Dibango, Sade Adu, Kelis, Common, Tony Allen, and D’Angelo are invited to the same house party. Or watch Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer and notice the world you hold too tight become subsumed in an alternate reality, another now. Watch the Greek film Dogtooth and remember how you were taught to see; see how every manipulation has its genesis in language, how language reshapes the cornea and whatever stands before it. Read The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa and register what feels familiar about the premise; where have you seen that before? It’s strange, isn’t it, to know that what we remember is also a collaboration. Find all five remixes to Rema’s “Dumebi” [Vandalized, Major Lazer, Henry Fong, Becky G, Matoma]. All these unalike branches, growing out of the same tree. You think language is set in stone? Listen to a Nigerian talk a person to the fringes of their own English using pidgin—a genius composition. Strict binaries and genre are real until you watch DJ Moma play a New York club or DJ Aye play a Lagos night. Technically a thing like that should be impossible—continents ejecting you onto the same dance floor, that voice meeting this synth, the low wail of a bass guitar free-falling through the deep grunt of an ancient drum: jazz meets Afrobeats meets house meets alternative meets grime meets highlife meets soukous—but there you are, all of a sudden, thinking, Wait, who said these things can’t belong together?

Two months ago, when a fraction of my chosen family and I gathered to talk about the things we’re often discouraged from saying in public, one of us named that space—my living room couch—The Womb. I didn’t ask why because I didn’t need to; I know Whose it was. It fit. We all belonged inside it in a way that everything outside my door claims is impossible. It makes sense to me to miss being carried in safewater, it makes sense to me to feel yourself being (re)made, (re)gaining realness—later and now and before, all at once. Womb is a word that made me wince for a long time. That time includes now, and the reasons are still just mine. But a word means one thing until it gets a chance to mean another. The promise of being born again appealed to me for a reason, after all. That February in twenty-fourteen, the church didn’t even have to try hard. Said once as a promise, and I was already on my knees saying Yes Please, Yes. So, in the dark of The Womb, there were stories shared over palm wine and smoke that are still behind my ribs. Everyone was truth telling and the room shimmered with an earned sweetness. In response to one of those stories, we shuffled truth about our shadows, about the darker parts of ourselves we’d folded away for at least two and a half decades because it was that urgent to be A Good Person. We admitted the reasons we all fight so hard for the word Good, the reason we answer when it is called and try to claim it like a name, how frightened we are of Bad. I’m trying something new: asking myself if the choice I want to make is matched with a consequence I can live with, instead of if it’s good or bad. We talked more about how much we tuck in, how even in grief, there is a correct way to feel the weight, there are feelings we’re still not allowed to admit having. But not-allowed means hiding, even from yourself; and hiding is exactly why Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom insisted on disassembling me recently. A humbling feeling, being turned inside out like that. Also a kind of kindness. “You know when a story sees the things you’ve been hiding from yourself?” Yeah, that. This time, nothing was off the table, not even when it started shaking; not even when one leg fell off. So in response to “Wait, are we allowed to say these things out loud?” I said, “Well, here we are.” I can’t vouch for anywhere else in the world, but where I live, the only commandment is that there are no commandments. Be true, is the only rule. Put the lie on that rack, take off the uniform they insist you wear when you’re outside—and just be true. This is not always a beautiful or weightless thing. When you ask for truth, sometimes heavy things get said. Heavy things got said. So two weeks after The Womb had closed and we’d all been born again, in response to: “Do you ever get lonely?” (living differently, living outside, fashioning a life), I played Obongjayar’s “Carry Come Carry Go” to the person who asked this in my car. Even now, recalling it, I can see the road get stretched insanely by the hook. The answer is that feverish bridge; the answer is the way he moves on the track; it isn’t just what is said, it’s in how it’s shivered onto the beat, almost wept. The answer to what helps and holds me, what restores me to myself is also inside sound: “Good” by Sutra, “Get Free” by Mereba, “Bordeaux” by SuperJazzClub, “Ngeke Balunge” by Mafikizolo, “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane, “Unspoken Word” by the Soil. More, more.                                

There are multiple exits out of what is often referred to as Real Life on a daily basis, if you’re really paying attention. You probably fall in and out of your life regularly: between deep belly laughs at the dining table, or in clubs, bass beating against the small of your back. You do it when you’re watching a film that sucks you in or reading a book that pulls you deep into the corridor on the inside of your body, because imagination is a place. Distraction is a place. But you come back to, crawl right into the present so quickly, so casually that it’s hard to know what you’ve just done. Some of us have been there longer than others. I would know, having dissociated for years at a stretch, consistently moving at at least zero point zero two seconds ahead of myself, always catching up. I come to when I catch it, because I need me. Plus, you’re meant to snap out of stories and realms that are too fleshed out, too fantasy seeming, because people who believe stories and alternate realities too much and for too long see things that are not there, see things others can’t see, are called insane. Well, I used to fear that word until I was that. Until people I love were that and my love still met them there. Now I can’t care. There are a thousand reals vibrating in formation at any given moment and I’m open to many. We choose what we plug in to. The rest is the rest.

Words have synonyms and antonyms, for depth of meaning, yes—the meaning of a word thickens next to its partner or companion, its opposite or opponent, because just like you, language needs company. But my favorite thing about language is that it responds to how it’s used. It can be anything, really: from a cave or an obstacle to the bridge between lives, the road between worlds. Redefinition is relocation. It’s why the easiest way to get Somewhere Else is to name it like something real. I was raised to worry about right or wrong. I cared until I was labeled wrong and did not die. So I tell myself: don’t worry about being good; just be as intentional about destruction as you are about creation. Do not create anyone, do not destroy anyone. Understand this and no need to run: nothing on the inside of you can swallow you from there if you keep an eye on it. Keep an eye on it. Anyone can change. Forgive your fumbling. People who don’t change don’t change because they trust the dark label like they would a name. Only your name is your name. When people tell you a word can only mean one thing, they are telling you—subtly, too—that change is impossible. It’s not true. Destroy that idea. Create another truth. A word can mean something new because language is still and always being made. It’s why you can take a word like Vagabond—weaponized by the law of your land in real time— name your work after it and still be here. It’s a kind of rhythm making, this; the synthesis of your internal soundtrack. Another word that might fit here is: chaos. And another: freeing. You are free.

Forgive yourself for acting like you’ve never met yourself. Forgive yourself for sweating in the pursuit of importance, of acceptance. Forgive yourself for growing spikes when ashamed. Forgive your stubbornness. Forgive yourself for being more willing to die than fight, then forgive the defeats you stacked up inside. Forgive you for how tired you are. Forgive you for not knowing better. Then for knowing better and not yet being able to do better. For your hiding and running, for the suffocating disguises. For the secrets you still keep from you. For the times you unbecame yourself for someone else—a partner, a parent—because you were trying to become real, desirable, a shame to lose. Forgive you for the size of your love (you needn’t repent). Forgive you for the hands (they weren’t even yours). Forgive you for believing in anything that called you forbidden, for kneeling before whatever tagged you a sin. Forgive you for deceiving your head, for thinking the lie made you matter, more solid, more indestructible. Forgive you for breaking your heart, for lashing out, for falling apart, for losing your mind. You are here now. Let this matter more. A different now is close enough to exhale on you.

What does fiction do for me? It allows me to see what has been made, just as it is. It reminds me that if there are seven billion of us, there are seven billion ways to experience the world, seven billion valid iterations. The systems do what the systems do, and the kindest thing I can think to do for anyone I love is to follow them to the end of their desire, is to go with them to the beginning of their imagination—that place where I wish turns into I want. I listen to my loved ones when they say: I wish this was a world in which I could decide not to have kids. I wish I could decide not to get married. I wish this world was kinder to queer people. I wish we’d all take friendships more seriously. I wish this world was fair to neurodivergent people. I wish. I wish. There’s so much I still wish for, too, but also so much I have now only because someone stayed with me past a question mark. What would you be like if you had room? I try to ask that often. When they start describing it—I’d live with my friends; I’d treat my partner more kindly because I’ll at least be allowed to love them; I’d just not get married; I’d just be an aunty or uncle instead of trying to be a parent; I’d share resources with people around me; I’d put way less emphasis on money and more on community building—I watch what dawns on all of us. Maybe it’s not possible for us to have everything right here right now, the world being what it is, but it’s not true that we can’t get closer to what we want. It’s not true that none of it is accessible. Your hope is the perfect size, so no point waiting, sometimes. Because what is society anyway? It’s an anthology of someones. We make it up. We make it up.

It’s hard to remember this, because some feelings are so particular, so precise that you think no one will ever know what it feels like under your skin; but there’s a song for every feeling and a story for every situation for a reason. It’s how we get through. Maybe your life tells you that you’re right about being unseeable at the moment. Maybe that’s what you found to be true with people. Good thing stories can go everywhere then. Wasn’t it a book that reminded me recently that I have the spine it takes to stand up to my life? This life is massive, and of course. Massive and on course. It was a song that reminded me, too, some nights ago what a privilege it is that what I call family without flinching is a fiction I made; that there is a group of people who bear the truest witness of my life; that I get to live out the impossible. It’s only because of stories and music and art and love that I’m able to remind me how free I am to act in favor of myself and how free I am to not. I’m free to reach for more and I’m free to not. When I put it that way, I know what I choose.

One of the first definitions I remember learning is from primary school. “Culture,” the teacher said, “is a way of life.” We repeated it after her; a simple sentence. As long as we’re alive, there’ll be other ways of life being made as we breathe. Some of them can be ours. It’ll just require us to take what we see and want and wish for seriously. If I say that I am free to dream and I’ve dreamed a world with decentralized power, a much slower pace, more kindness, a timeline in which people can fall apart and hibernate, where rest isn’t a luxury, where gender is an abundant harvest instead of two darkly rigid lanes, where sanity is not the measure of worth, where no one is an outcast and we’re all responsible for each other, where friendships can survive mistakes and tension, where thick love is commonplace, where I can hold my love close no matter the skin they’re in, then I’m free to test run that way of life on myself and my relationships. I’m free to do it now, because now’s when I’m alive. That won’t always be true, but I’m here now and that hereness is sometimes a vehicle, sometimes a tool.

We were all raised in a giant dictionary, yes, and we’re more able to move out if we can find somewhere else to go: a where, a how, and a who to be with there. We find somewhere elses by making up and living out freeing fictions—even in small clusters. When we ground our faiths in the right not-yet-reals, when we look at the nonlinearity of time, we see how right here the future has been since yesterday, how we’re always practicing it in fractions now. Aliveness has always been a staring contest between us and time. We know that. No one blinks with you when you do. We know that. It’s costly, this, always—a life has to be—but what I know for sure is this: there are always other words and other definitions, always other worlds and other locations. To know this is to see this, too: we can grow the spines we need to stand up for our lives.”

As written by Helena de Bresis, author of author of Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir, in Aeon; “I wrote a memoir recently, and sometimes I ask myself why on earth I did. It was difficult and time-consuming, it involved some rather unpleasant self-examination, and it raised suspicions of self-involvement, exhibitionism and insufferable earnestness that I’d so far mainly avoided in life. If I publish it, I risk being accused by friends of betrayal, by readers of lying, and by critics of any number of literary flaws. Since selling a memoir is hard, all of that would represent things going well. When I complain to my sister about this, she suggests that ‘maybe’ I should have – ‘I don’t know’ – considered these points two years ago, before embarking on this thing that she would ‘never, like, ever do’.

When asked why they bother, memoirists offer a range of reasons. Saint Teresa did it for the glory of God; Jean-Jacques Rousseau to express his inner self; Vladimir Nabokov to recreate his vanished childhood; Frederick Douglass to advance the cause of abolition. But maybe the deepest reason for writing a memoir, intertwined with all the rest, is the desire to find meaning in one’s past experience. Whatever else they’re up to, memoirists are in the business of locating some form or order in their personal history: setting it down as an intelligible shape, not a hot mess. Finding this form is both a necessary part of memoir and one of its key rewards. That was what I was after, anyway. Life moves so fast. Stuff had gone down. I wanted to slow the passage of events, grasp what the past had meant, before picking up the pace once again.

You can search for form in life through philosophy, science, religion and any kind of art. The memoirist’s distinctive move is to do it via autobiographical narrative: the construction of an organised sequence of personally experienced events, along with an implied evaluative response to them. Life stories have three things going for them when it comes to making experience intelligible. They’re selective, highlighting particular agents, settings and episodes out of the mass of material that life provides. They’re also unifying, drawing connections between their disparate parts and situating them in context. And they’re isomorphic: they share deep structural and thematic features with other stories, which we use as a shortcut when interpreting them. Psychologists report that most autobiographical narratives follow the classical story arc: steady state, complication, rising action, crisis, resolution, then coda. And they involve quests, comings-of-age, fatal errors, comeuppances and returns recognisable from myths, parables and fairy tales. Most, though maybe not all, humans tell such life stories. Memoirists recount them at length, in writing, with literary ambitions. We’re trying to do it, but make it art.

What are memoirists doing exactly, when we claim to ‘find’ this form and meaning in our past experience? Are we genuinely discovering it back there or just making it up? For the past century or so, the wind has been behind the latter interpretation. Many take the existentialist line that seeing your life in narrative terms is a form of mauvaise foi, or bad faith. We urgently want there to be order and meaning in the world, independently of us. But there isn’t, and our attempts to impose coherence and significance where none exist are self-deceiving and absurd. Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938), describes the ‘disgust’ and ‘nausea’ produced by our meaningless universe, alongside its ineffective narrative remedy:

This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

What exactly is wrong with construing your past as a story? In his memoir The Words (1963), Sartre suggests that storytelling distorts our understanding of life, by confusing it with literature. We can tell autobiographical narratives if we like but, if so, we should be clear about what we’re doing: producing fiction. This take suggests that memoir, which calls itself nonfiction, is a fundamentally suspect enterprise.

A similar critique of narrative emerged in the philosophy of history in the 1970s. In his book Metahistory (1973), Hayden White argued that historical writing is a constructive process, in which the historian selects a subset of past events, imaginatively fills in the gaps, and orders the lot into a unified story. These historical stories, like the life stories of individuals, take conventional literary forms – tragedy, romance, comedy and satire – and employ poetic devices, including metaphor, synecdoche and irony. All of this is a creative act on the part of the historian, an imposition on the historical record. As a result, different historians can and do provide different narrative interpretations of the same events, none of which can be said to uniquely fit the facts. White concludes that historical writing, despite its scientific pretensions, reduces to fiction.

The philosopher Noël Carroll offered two main lines of response to White that transfer nicely to memoir. The first points to a set of faulty inferences in the argument. White assumes that each of the following features of an interpretation transforms it into fiction: inventiveness, selectivity, multiplicity, conventionality and literary quality. But a quick run-through shows that each can be present without an immediate diagnosis of fictionalising. Photos are invented rather than found, but that doesn’t make them inaccurate representations of the past. My telling you only some things about my spring break doesn’t mean that what I do tell you is made up. The availability of multiple good stories about the Loretta Lynn fan convention doesn’t demonstrate that one or all of them are fiction: each can just highlight a distinct aspect of the same complex course of events. And your description of what you’ve been up to recently might be Homeric, but some weekends genuinely are epic, and nonfigurative, nonliterary language might not be enough to capture the truth about them.

Carroll’s second reply to White questions the assertion that the world isn’t story-shaped. Humans act for reasons, and those actions have consequences, including the imprint of certain patterns on the world. We can describe all this in terms of atoms moving in the void, sure. But there’s an equally legitimate form of explanation that appeals to the values and goals driving the action, and therefore to the purpose and significance that human life genuinely contains. A story that offers such an explanation is picking up on real aspects of the world, not confabulating. Similarly, since humans think and act symbolically, narratives that incorporate metaphor and myth can serve to reflect, rather than distort, reality.

That said, there’s some truth in the claim that narrative is created, not found. Successful nonfictional storytellers both discover and construct. They do the difficult work of pruning and unifying experience into a shape they and others can understand. As the writer Lorrie Moore puts it: ‘Life is a cornfield, but literature is that shot of whiskey that’s been distilled down.’ And when nonfictional storytellers succeed, the shape they create tracks genuine features in the life described.

To defend nonfictional narrative isn’t, of course, to defend all particular life stories. At one early point in writing my memoir, I announced: ‘OMG, I think my life tracks the history of Western philosophy!’ ‘That’s wonderful!’ my long-suffering sister replied, but the angle of her eyebrow effectively consigned that one to the trash. There are also some general narrative conventions we’re better off without. No literary memoirist would be caught dead these days writing a traditional autobiography: a strictly chronological tracing of events, from infancy on, in a tone of untroubled authority. The contemporary memoir zooms in on a specific period or theme, and moves back and forth in time. Modern memoirists tend to be less certain than autobiographers, more alert to the seductions of narrative closure. As a result, their books are more complex, searching, and truer to life.

But we can welcome these salutary effects of 20th-century narrative scepticism while keeping the baby in the bath. Old-fashioned storytelling has real virtues when making sense of the world. (I once lunched with a literary magazine editor after he’d gone through the latest set of submissions. ‘Oh god,’ he exclaimed, like a frustrated police chief, ‘just tell me what happened in order!’) Those virtues are so great that even narrative sceptics make use of them. Joan Didion ends her essay ‘The White Album’ (1968-78) with an admission of defeat: ‘Writing has not yet helped me to see what [experience] means.’ But sometimes the pattern just is chaos, and Didion’s use of personal narrative in this essay deftly captures that truth about 1960s California.

Cynics about narrative often give off an air of expecting more from stories than memoirists themselves do. No memoir can reveal an underlying grand narrative in the universe as a whole, or give its writer anything more than a partial and provisional grip on their personal past. But it can sometimes provide that grip, which is no small thing. When I look at my own memoir, I can clearly see its fictive qualities. The stage is set, the action rises, the protagonist falls apart, then lurches out of the abyss. There’s a coda, written in a tone of battered hope. Sartre would give it one star on Goodreads. That would be mean (I gave his five!), but I’m not too troubled by it. The book reads to me like my life, a life that makes better sense to me now that I’ve written it down.”

In the chiaroscuro of darkness and light, free speech is delimited with hate speech, and the region of ambiguous meanings and values between them is both a boundary of the Forbidden and an interface of transformation.

When our defining moments are controlled by tyrants, plutocrats of amoral capitalism, and other apex predators of systems of oppression and the enforcement of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, rather than seized and owned by ourselves along with our own voices, witness, and remembrance, it becomes an existential threat of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and a primary ground of revolutionary struggle. 

During the abomination of the Trump regime we have witnessed this struggle played out on a national and global scale, with democracy, the idea of human rights, and the choice between being citizens or subjects hanging in the balance. 

As I wrote in my post of December 16 2022, Hate Speech is Not Free Speech: the Case of Elon Musk’s Twitter; Mesmerized as by the blinkless predator stare of a cobra or its echo in the Kubrick gaze of Jenna Ortega’s character of Wednesday, we have witnessed the spectacle of violation and degradation of a beloved social media platform by an amoral plutocrat who purchased it to leverage Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, into the White House once more, for the purpose of the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America to a regime of tyranny, and has relentlessly and with feral viciousness promoted white supremacist and antisemitic terrorists and fascist propagandists and marginalized and silenced dissent, impartial investigative journalism, and voices from the center of traditional democracy and its values of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.

Hate speech is not free speech, and merits no quarter. To fascism we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again!

In all of the absurd madness of conspiracy theories, alternate realities, rewritten histories, lies and illusions, propaganda and thought control, and the commodification of humankind by big data and pervasive surveillance, and with the examples of monsters of depravity and paranoid fantasy such as Traitor Trump, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, and Elon Musk, of apologists of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, of fascist propaganda mills like Fox News and now sadly Twitter weaponized in service to power and the repression of dissent, let us study closely a great truth which now stands revealed on the stage of history; the Fifth Estate has now replaced the institutions of politics as the shaping force whereby we choose how to be human together.

Its been a long process, the fall of democracy; I’m tempted to say it began with Hearst and his 1898 false story of the bombing of an American ship in Cuba as the pretext for the Spanish-American War and our conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as we built our empire on the carcass of Imperial Spain’s; but the historical forces involved are ambiguous and complex. And the mighty have always sought to keep the slaves at their work creating the wealth they enjoy through lies as well as force; lies are cheaper than armies.

As the marvelous and prophetic film Wag the Dog tells us, he who tells the story shapes the response. And we must be very careful who we allow to write our history, and who makes the rules by which it is written, for journalism is a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and electoral democracy requires truths free from the influence of power.

As Lenin asked in the essay that began the Russian Revolution; “What is to be done?”

If we do not seize and nationalize Twitter and any media platform of hate crime or fascist propaganda as a public good owned by us all, we must enact fair rules of play which ensure no one’s speech harms another, either as individuals or as a class of persons.

To create an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.

As I wrote in my post of August 8 2019, Free Speech Versus Safety From Fascist Terror: Hate, Violence, and the Dark Side of Social Media;” As written in the Essential California newsletter of Tuesday morning: “In his much-cited 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow — an internet pioneer and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — wrote that “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

But the utopian ideals of the early internet are increasingly at odds with the view of it as a place for free speech at all costs, as the darker corners of the web have proved a fertile breeding ground for violent extremism.”

Barlow’s Declaration is a gloriously anarchic and libertarian manifesto; pretty words, indeed, which I endorse without reservation but for this; the right of free speech ends where others are harmed, dehumanized, identified as targets for violence, or restricted in their own freedoms.

The very first and most important example of what is meant by our founding principle of America as “only that government which is necessary to obtain those rights which we cannot obtain for ourselves” is our right to freedom from hate speech which authorizes murder, as no one’s rights may infringe upon another’s. Further, the right to life takes precedence over the right to freedom of information and communication, as we may have one without the other, but not the reverse. Before all else, we must be alive to possess other rights.

Whenever I consider our freedoms of speech and of the press, I imagine myself in the great film V for Vendetta, and secondarily in the classic film Brazil, whose dictum “We’re all in this together” has been the guiding principle of so many of my adventures. Harry Tuttle, played by Robert de Niro, V, played by Hugo Weaving, and the hero of Inglourious Basterds, the magnificent Lt. Aldo Raine played by Brad Pitt, are together my heroes and role models of political action. I have asked myself in many contexts over a lifetime of complex choices, what would our heroes do in this situation?

What would Aldo Raine do if confronted by a global Fourth Reich which has seized control of the American Presidency and has built concentration camps on our border?

What would Harry Tuttle do when a totalitarian regime has enacted pervasive state terror and surveillance, secret prisons, and attacks on truth and justice, equality and freedom?

What would V do when tyranny and plutocracy have stolen our humanity from us, and lost our values in a sea of illusions and lies?

As I wrote in my post of July 19 2021, Signs of Tyranny: Surveillance, Propaganda, and Repression; To free ourselves of the ideas of other people; such is the essence of democracy. Conversely, the use of social force in marginalizing and silencing dissent is the definition of tyranny.

Of the silencing of dissent in service to the authority of the state and of the tyranny of force and control I have written often, for it touches upon the origins of evil and the centrality of fear, power, and force as an engine of violence, inhumanity, dehumanization, and the theft of the soul.

Herein I find another purpose in defining the nature of truth, and of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth. And this provides us with a yardstick against which to measure the legitimacy of the state; the test of a government is its transparency, its tolerance of dissent as a feature of democratic process, the degree to which it upholds freedom of speech and of access to information, and its reverence for objective and testable truth as a keystone of freedom.

As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own. Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.

As I wrote in my post of August 15 2020, Windows Into Our Souls: Why Surveillance is a Subversion of Democracy; Those who would enslave us have at their command an arsenal of surveillance and control which threaten to make tyranny and authoritarianism pervasive and endemic, and these rapidly evolving technologies must be overcome both as individual tools and methods and as structures of the police state. Cameras, phones, drones, and face recognition as means of identification and tracking in the repression of dissent must be resisted, for these define the front in the great struggle for freedom versus the carceral state.

As I wrote in my post of May 27 2020, On Speaking Truth to Power as a Sacred Calling; Authorized identities and boundaries of the Forbidden are about power, and we must call out the instruments of unequal power as we see them. Foucault called this truthtelling, and it is a crucial part of seizure of power and ownership of identity; always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves.

Against state terror and control let us deploy parrhesia and the performance of our best selves. Go ahead; frighten the horses.”

Often have I referred to this key performative role in democracy as the Jester of King Lear, whose enactments of mockery and satire, the exposure and deflation of the mighty as revolutionary seizures of power which reclaim that which we the people have lent them when it is used unjustly, are necessary to maintain the balance of interests in a society in which government is co-owned equally by its citizens and has as its overriding purpose the securement of the freedom and autonomy of individuals and of their universal human rights.

Without citizens who refuse to be silenced and controlled by authority, democracy becomes meaningless.

So with my arts of rhetoric and poetry as truthtelling, with my praxis of democracy as a debate coach and English teacher of these essential skills of citizenship, and with my political journal here at Torch of Liberty :  https://torchofliberty.home.blog ; to incite, provoke, and disturb.

For democracy requires a participatory electorate willing to speak truth to power.

To all those who defy and challenge unjust authority; I will stand with you, and I ask that all of us do the same.

As I wrote in my post of December 16 2020, Principles of Democracy: Freedom From Surveillance, or Repeal the Patriot Act; Hope dawns for liberty in America as the first bipartisan legislation of the Biden Presidency is an effort to reclaim our freedom from surveillance, a key principle of democracy. Freedom means freedom from coercion by force and control; and while force refers to repression of dissent by the police and the carceral state, my subject here is its shadow, now pervasive and endemic, thought control.

We now live in a nation of universal surveillance and the sacrifice of privacy to security, and in the words of Benjamin Franklin; “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

We have arrived at this sad pass by a long and circuitous route, but the trigger event was the tragedy of 911 which signaled the Imperial phase of American history and the state tyranny and terror authorized under the Patriot Act.  As is far too often the case, we as victims have learned the wrong lessons from our abusers; force and fear are not the sole basis of human relationships in a nihilistic and amoral universe, nor the highest ideals to which humankind can aspire.

This is part of the ideology of state terror called the counterinsurgency model of policing, which replaces the legal presumption of innocence with the presumption that all citizens are potential terrorist threats and enemies of the state.

The most visible part of this is force, which begins with the selection of police on the basis of willingness to kill, and then trains and equips them with military weapons as a force of occupation and repression, takes monstrous form in Homeland Security and its campaign of ethnic cleansing and system of concentration camps for migrants and the illegal secret army which coordinated with white supremacist terrorist organizations in attempts to provoke violence and use the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-fascists like myself as a pretext for the federal occupation of Democratic cities in aid of Trump’s first three coup attempts this year, and extends throughout the justice system from the rapacious and unchecked power of the Prosecuting Attorney’s office to the fascist political appointees among our judges and Attorneys General, and to the prisons of our carceral state which are designed to re-enslave the Black population and provide free labor to plutocratic elites and to enforce social hierarchies of belonging and otherness for the purpose of maintaining a hegemony of power, wealth, and privilege for the elite. It is an inherently antidemocratic system, subversive at every level from the policeman whose thin blue line enforces injustice to the power brokers of fascist tyranny.

But without the social control of surveillance and propaganda force has no target and no concealment. Information is gathered at all times and about everyone, through cameras, drones, phone tracking, face recognition, a myriad and evolving web of surveillance, and analyzed through big data to shape our beliefs and actions as typified by Cambridge Analytica’s subversion of elections.

There is no form of power more subversive than that of secret power.

Just ask any survivor of abuse by predatory authority, because that is exactly the relationship of citizens to the state under our present system.

We have been like captive children howling in terror and rage in the darkness of a basement prison, we Americans, throughout this terrible time of our subjugation to the Fourth Reich which began with the Patriot Act, alone and awaiting horrors. I hear America howling in the streets of over fifty cities where from the spring of this year we have fought the forces of state tyranny and terror until the federal government announced the defeat of its occupation campaign, withdrew the secret army of Homeland Security, and the fascist triumvirs Trump, Barr, and Wolf officially ceded control to the people and proclaimed New York, Portland, and Seattle Autonomous Zones.

We have seized our cities in the streets and our nation in the elections, and with the repeal of the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act we can begin to reclaim our democracy and our liberty. We have won free of our prison; let us now transform the systems, structures, and institutions which made our enslavement and subjugation to fascist tyranny possible.

   There can be but one reply to fascism; Never Again.

Here is Lionel Trilling’s brilliant review of Orwell’s 1984, the classic exposition of anarchist philosophy as a critique of unequal power and the authoritarian nature of government, from the June 18, 1949 Issue of the New Yorker; “George Orwell’s “1984” predicts a state of things far worse than any we have ever known.

George Orwell’s new novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (Harcourt, Brace), confirms its author in the special, honorable place he holds in our intellectual life. Orwell’s native gifts are perhaps not of a transcendent kind; they have their roots in a quality of mind that ought to be as frequent as it is modest. This quality may be described as a sort of moral centrality, a directness of relation to moral—and political—fact, and it is so far from being frequent in our time that Orwell’s possession of it seems nearly unique. Orwell is an intellectual to his fingertips, but he is far removed from both the Continental and the American type of intellectual. The turn of his mind is what used to be thought of as peculiarly “English.” He is indifferent to the allurements of elaborate theory and of extreme sensibility. The medium of his thought is common sense, and his commitment to intellect is fortified by an old-fashioned faith that the truth can be got at, that we can, if we actually want to, see the object as it really is. This faith in the power of mind rests in part on Orwell’s willingness, rare among contemporary intellectuals, to admit his connection with his own cultural past. He no longer identifies himself with the British upper middle class in which he was reared, yet it is interesting to see how often his sense of fact derives from some ideal of that class, how he finds his way through a problem by means of an unabashed certainty of the worth of some old, simple, belittled virtue. Fairness, decency, and responsibility do not make up a shining or comprehensive morality, but in a disordered world they serve Orwell as an invaluable base of intellectual operations.

Radical in his politics and in his artistic tastes, Orwell is wholly free of the cant of radicalism. His criticism of the old order is cogent, but he is chiefly notable for his flexible and modulated examination of the political and aesthetic ideas that oppose those of the old order. Two years of service in the Spanish Loyalist Army convinced him that he must reject the line of the Communist Party and, presumably, gave him a large portion of his knowledge of the nature of human freedom. He did not become—as Leftist opponents of Communism are so often and so comfortably said to become—“embittered” or “cynical;” his passion for freedom simply took account of yet another of freedom’s enemies, and his intellectual verve was the more stimulated by what he had learned of the ambiguous nature of the newly identified foe, which so perplexingly uses the language and theory of light for ends that are not enlightened. His distinctive work as a radical intellectual became the criticism of liberal and radical thought wherever it deteriorated to shibboleth and dogma. No one knows better than he how willing is the intellectual Left to enter the prison of its own mass mind, nor does anyone believe more directly than he in the practical consequences of thought, or understand more clearly the enormous power, for good or bad, that ideology exerts in an unstable world.

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book. It is a fantasy of the political future, and, like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present. Despite the impression it may give at first, it is not an attack on the Labour Government. The shabby London of the Super-State of the future, the bad food, the dull clothing, the fusty housing, the infinite ennui—all these certainly reflect the English life of today, but they are not meant to represent the outcome of the utopian pretensions of Labourism or of any socialism. Indeed, it is exactly one of the cruel essential points of the book that utopianism is no longer a living issue. For Orwell, the day has gone by when we could afford the luxury of making our flesh creep with the spiritual horrors of a successful hedonistic society; grim years have intervened since Aldous Huxley, in “Brave New World,” rigged out the welfare state of Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor in the knickknacks of modern science and amusement, and said what Dostoevski and all the other critics of the utopian ideal had said before—that men might actually gain a life of security, adjustment, and fun, but only at the cost of their spiritual freedom, which is to say, of their humanity. Orwell agrees that the State of the future will establish its power by destroying souls. But he believes that men will be coerced, not cosseted, into soullessness. They will be dehumanized not by sex, massage, and private helicopters but by a marginal life of deprivation, dullness, and fear of pain.

This, in fact, is the very center of Orwell’s vision of the future. In 1984, nationalism as we know it has at last been overcome, and the world is organized into three great political entities. All profess the same philosophy, yet despite their agreement, or because of it, the three Super-States are always at war with each other, two always allied against one, but all seeing to it that the balance of power is kept, by means of sudden, treacherous shifts of alliance. This arrangement is established as if by the understanding of all, for although it is the ultimate aim of each to dominate the world, the immediate aim is the perpetuation of war without victory and without defeat. It has at last been truly understood that war is the health of the State; as an official slogan has it, “War Is Peace.” Perpetual war is the best assurance of perpetual absolute rule. It is also the most efficient method of consuming the production of the factories on which the economy of the State is based. The only alternative method is to distribute the goods among the population. But this has its clear danger. The life of pleasure is inimical to the health of the State. It stimulates the senses and thus encourages the illusion of individuality; it creates personal desires, thus potential personal thought and action.

But the life of pleasure has another, and even more significant, disadvantage in the political future that Orwell projects from his observation of certain developments of political practice in the last two decades. The rulers he envisages are men who, in seizing rule, have grasped the innermost principles of power. All other oligarchs have included some general good in their impulse to rule and have played at being philosopher-kings or priest-kings or scientist-kings, with an announced program of beneficence. The rulers of Orwell’s State know that power in its pure form has for its true end nothing but itself, and they know that the nature of power is defined by the pain it can inflict on others. They know, too, that just as wealth exists only in relation to the poverty of others, so power in its pure aspect exists only in relation to the weakness of others, and that any power of the ruled, even the power to experience happiness, is by that much a diminution of the power of the rulers.

The exposition of the mystique of power is the heart and essence of Orwell’s book. It is implicit throughout the narrative, explicit in excerpts from the remarkable “Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” a subversive work by one Emmanuel Goldstein, formerly the most gifted leader of the Party, now the legendary foe of the State. It is brought to a climax in the last section of the novel, in the terrible scenes in which Winston Smith, the sad hero of the story, having lost his hold on the reality decreed by the State, having come to believe that sexuality is a pleasure, that personal loyalty is a good, and that two plus two always and not merely under certain circumstances equals four, is brought back to health by torture and discourse in a hideous parody on psychotherapy and the Platonic dialogues.

Orwell’s theory of power is developed brilliantly, at considerable length. And the social system that it postulates is described with magnificent circumstantiality: the three orders of the population—Inner Party, Outer Party, and proletarians; the complete surveillance of the citizenry by the Thought Police, the only really efficient arm of the government; the total negation of the personal life; the directed emotions of hatred and patriotism; the deified Leader, omnipresent but invisible, wonderfully named Big Brother; the children who spy on their parents; and the total destruction of culture. Orwell is particularly successful in his exposition of the official mode of thought, Doublethink, which gives one “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” This intellectual safeguard of the State is reinforced by a language, Newspeak, the goal of which is to purge itself of all words in which a free thought might be formulated. The systematic obliteration of the past further protects the citizen from Crimethink, and nothing could be more touching, or more suggestive of what history means to the mind, than the efforts of poor Winston Smith to think about the condition of man without knowledge of what others have thought before him.

By now, it must be clear that “Nineteen Eighty-four” is, in large part, an attack on Soviet Communism. Yet to read it as this and as nothing else would be to misunderstand the book’s aim. The settled and reasoned opposition to Communism that Orwell expresses is not to be minimized, but he is not undertaking to give us the delusive comfort of moral superiority to an antagonist. He does not separate Russia from the general tendency of the world today. He is saying, indeed, something no less comprehensive than this: that Russia, with its idealistic social revolution now developed into a police state, is but the image of the impending future and that the ultimate threat to human freedom may well come from a similar and even more massive development of the social idealism of our democratic culture. To many liberals, this idea will be incomprehensible, or, if it is understood at all, it will be condemned by them as both foolish and dangerous. We have dutifully learned to think that tyranny manifests itself chiefly, even solely, in the defense of private property and that the profit motive is the source of all evil. And certainly Orwell does not deny that property is powerful or that it may be ruthless in self-defense. But he sees that, as the tendency of recent history goes, property is no longer in anything like the strong position it once was, and that will and intellect are playing a greater and greater part in human history. To many, this can look only like a clear gain. We naturally identify ourselves with will and intellect; they are the very stuff of humanity, and we prefer not to think of their exercise in any except an ideal way. But Orwell tells us that the final oligarchical revolution of the future, which, once established, could never be escaped or countered, will be made not by men who have property to defend but by men of will and intellect, by “the new aristocracy . . . of bureaucrats, scientists, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.”

These people [says the authoritative Goldstein, in his account of the revolution], whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal.

The whole effort of the culture of the last hundred years has been directed toward teaching us to understand the economic motive as the irrational road to death, and to seek salvation in the rational and the planned. Orwell marks a turn in thought; he asks us to consider whether the triumph of certain forces of the mind, in their naked pride and excess, may not produce a state of things far worse than any we have ever known. He is not the first to raise the question, but he is the first to raise it on truly liberal or radical grounds, with no intention of abating the demand for a just society, and with an overwhelming intensity and passion. This priority makes his book a momentous one.”

As written by  Mary Papenfuss in Huffpost, in an article entitled United Nations Rips ‘Dangerous Precedent’ Of Elon Musk’s Chilling Crackdown On Journalists: Musk “sets a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats, and even worse,” said a spokesperson; “United Nations officials are “very disturbed” by Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s “dangerous” assault on free speech in his crackdown on a group of U.S. journalists covering him and his businesses, a spokesperson for the international organization said Friday.

Musk’s “arbitrary” action sets a “dangerous precedent” by suspending targeted prominent tech journalists reporting on him at news organizations including CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Mashable, among others, Stéphane Dujarric told reporters.

Dujarric said the media must not be censored on a platform that professes to be a haven for free speech — run by a billionaire who has claimed to be a “free speech absolutist.”

“The move sets a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats, and even worse,” said Dujarric.

Musk is incensed that his private jet flights have been tracked regularly on Twitter by user Jack Sweeney, a sophomore at the University of Central Florida. Musk earlier this week booted both the @ElonJet tracking account and Sweeney’s personal account — and then threatened to sue Sweeney.

The Telsa CEO warned Thursday that anyone who “doxxes” on Twitter — reveals another’s real-time location information — will be suspended.

Musk considers his flight details — which are already publicly available to anyone — verboten “real-time” doxxing, he has tweeted. Yet countless people’s “real-time” location is constantly revealed on Twitter, from videos of protesters at demonstrations to celebrity appearances to politicians’ press conferences.

Apparently, not all the suspended journalists reported about or linked to the flight tracking information that Musk objects to. But they may have irritated Musk in other ways, such as reporting on the crash records of Teslas on Auto-Pilot.

CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan said Musk’s flight tracking gripe was an “entirely false” justification for the crackdown and that he was irritated by negative press. “I poked the billionaire,” O’Sullivan said Friday on “CNN This Morning.”

European Union leaders are warning that Musk’s crackdown on journalists has already run afoul of the continent’s digital regulations ensuring free speech.

Věra Jourová, the European Commission vice president for values and transparency, called Musk’s actions “worrying,” The Guardian reported.

He emphasized that the EU’s Digital Services Act required platforms to respect media freedom. When any user or content is penalized, it must be done in a “proportionate manner, with due regard to fundamental rights,” state the regulations.

“This is reinforced under our Media Freedom Act. Elon Musk should be aware of that. There are red lines. And sanctions, soon,” she said.

Dujarric said the U.N. is continuing to monitor Twitter as it weighs whether or not to continue to use the platform. He said its popularity makes it a handy “tool” for sharing factual information. But officials are concerned about the recent disturbing rise of hate speech and disinformation on Twitter, he said.”

As written by Tom Nichols in The Atlantic’s newsletter; “A lot of serious things are happening in the world: economic uncertainty, war, a pandemic. What’s happening on Twitter isn’t even close to those issues in importance or impact. But the continued reign of Elon Musk as Twitter’s chief jerk could, in fact, affect your life, in ways you might not realize. But first, let’s review the events of the past 24 hours or so. If you haven’t been on Twitter, you’ve been missing something like the tech version of Desperate Housewives, but it’s important to understand the claims Musk is making and why major news outlets are pushing back on them.

This entire drama is probably rooted somewhere in Musk’s privileged youth or his bloated psyche, but the immediate spur to this most recent mini-drama was that Musk does not like people knowing the location of his private jet. Jack Sweeney is a college student who used public data to track the location of Musk’s jet and many others, including some owned by Russian oligarchs. He then posted this information on Twitter through a variety of different accounts—all now suspended—including one dedicated to Musk, @ElonJet. Musk disliked this so much that almost a year ago, he offered Sweeney $5,000 to stop doing it.

Sweeney declined. Musk took ownership of Twitter in late October and, in a flurry of Calvinball rule changes, declared this week that revealing the whereabouts of his jet was the same as doxxing (that is, publishing personal data about private citizens), decreed this a violation of Twitter’s terms of service, and banned the account.

Musk claims that a stalker used the location of his jet to attack a car that his son was in. He has not presented any evidence that this event happened or, it seems, filed any police reports. And in a karmic plot twist, the founder of the investigative journalism site Bellingcat tweeted that his team ascertained that the event did not take place near an airport. But Musk used this story to go after yet more accounts. None were sharing the real-time location of his jet, but some were reporting on the ban of @ElonJet and the Musk Twitter tantrum that went with it.

Within hours, the account bans had piled up. Musk took out the independent journalist Aaron Rupar, a regular thorn in his paw. He banned Donie O’Sullivan of CNN. He scragged the accounts of Drew Harwell at The Washington Post, Micah Lee of The Intercept, and Ryan Mac of The New York Times. As the night wore on, he vanished Keith Olbermann—sure, he’s annoying, but still—and Mike Binder of Mashable. And just for good measure, when Steve Herman of that notoriously left-wing organization known as Voice of America merely affirmed the news that Musk was banning his critics, the Chief Twit zotzed that account too.

The usual Twitter tempête de merde ensued. Twitter’s liberals swore that this was the last straw and that they were all decamping to alternatives, usually the Mastodon social network. This really got Musk’s oddly shaped dander up, because, as it turns out, Sweeney was over on Mastodon doing his usual flight tracking—and so Musk seemingly went through another round of sweaty, angry panic, in which Twitter declared references to Mastodon to be “unsafe,” eventually blocking links to Mastodon itself in the name of safety and virtue and all that is holy and good—which is also convenient, because Mastodon is one of Twitter’s few competitors.

Musk’s petty outbursts make you wonder how dangerous it would be if a narcissistic, self-interested, vindictive adolescent ever gained a major political office such as, say, the White House. But I digress.

Now, unless you’re Very Online—and I am, for both personal and professional reasons—none of this matters very much at the moment. But Musk’s weird rampage does have an impact on the way the world around you exchanges information. Twitter has many levels; for some people, it’s a place to talk about oddball hobbies and exchange pet pictures. (Have you met my cat?) But it’s also an extremely valuable conduit for news, information, culture, and argument. Twitter doesn’t control the news, but it helps to shape public debate about many issues. Indeed, Musk’s entire public rationale for taking over Twitter was to preserve an important venue for free speech.

Musk’s defense of free speech is nonsense. One of the world’s richest men—who is not shy about his politics or his contempt for the free press—has reinstated Donald Trump, white supremacists, and any number of dangerous malefactors to Twitter, but he has made it clear that Donie O’Sullivan is beyond the pale. He has purchased an important and influential piece of the public square not to enhance public debate, but to punish people who annoy him. As if to underscore this point, Musk joined a Twitter Spaces live audio chat with journalists who asked him to explain what he was doing. He abruptly left the meeting—and then Twitter Spaces itself was shut down. (This was, he tweeted, to fix a “Legacy bug.” He announced on Friday evening that Spaces had been restored.)

I actually don’t subscribe to some of the more nefarious theories about Musk’s motivations (nor will I share them). I think he lost his cool because for more than a  month, he’s been in way over his head with an impulsive purchase, his fortunes are plunging, and he got booed by a crowd of thousands of people at a Dave Chappelle performance—which, for a guy like Musk, is probably an unforgivable injury from what should be an adoring public.

But we can at least shelve all of Musk’s blather about free speech. Twitter is an important part of how we disseminate and process news, and it’s now in the hands of an irritable and unpredictable child. This is one more step in the infantilization of American life, in which we must accommodate and work around the behavior of grown men and women who not so long ago would have been pushed out of public life either by our collective political disgust or by responsible shareholders who would insist that their corporate leaders get back to work instead of making a spectacle of themselves.n The Atlantic’s newsletter; “A lot of serious things are happening in the world: economic uncertainty, war, a pandemic. What’s happening on Twitter isn’t even close to those issues in importance or impact. But the continued reign of Elon Musk as Twitter’s chief jerk could, in fact, affect your life, in ways you might not realize. But first, let’s review the events of the past 24 hours or so. If you haven’t been on Twitter, you’ve been missing something like the tech version of Desperate Housewives, but it’s important to understand the claims Musk is making and why major news outlets are pushing back on them.

This entire drama is probably rooted somewhere in Musk’s privileged youth or his bloated psyche, but the immediate spur to this most recent mini-drama was that Musk does not like people knowing the location of his private jet. Jack Sweeney is a college student who used public data to track the location of Musk’s jet and many others, including some owned by Russian oligarchs. He then posted this information on Twitter through a variety of different accounts—all now suspended—including one dedicated to Musk, @ElonJet. Musk disliked this so much that almost a year ago, he offered Sweeney $5,000 to stop doing it.

Sweeney declined. Musk took ownership of Twitter in late October and, in a flurry of Calvinball rule changes, declared this week that revealing the whereabouts of his jet was the same as doxxing (that is, publishing personal data about private citizens), decreed this a violation of Twitter’s terms of service, and banned the account.

Musk claims that a stalker used the location of his jet to attack a car that his son was in. He has not presented any evidence that this event happened or, it seems, filed any police reports. And in a karmic plot twist, the founder of the investigative journalism site Bellingcat tweeted that his team ascertained that the event did not take place near an airport. But Musk used this story to go after yet more accounts. None were sharing the real-time location of his jet, but some were reporting on the ban of @ElonJet and the Musk Twitter tantrum that went with it.

Within hours, the account bans had piled up. Musk took out the independent journalist Aaron Rupar, a regular thorn in his paw. He banned Donie O’Sullivan of CNN. He scragged the accounts of Drew Harwell at The Washington Post, Micah Lee of The Intercept, and Ryan Mac of The New York Times. As the night wore on, he vanished Keith Olbermann—sure, he’s annoying, but still—and Mike Binder of Mashable. And just for good measure, when Steve Herman of that notoriously left-wing organization known as Voice of America merely affirmed the news that Musk was banning his critics, the Chief Twit zotzed that account too.

The usual Twitter tempête de merde ensued. Twitter’s liberals swore that this was the last straw and that they were all decamping to alternatives, usually the Mastodon social network. This really got Musk’s oddly shaped dander up, because, as it turns out, Sweeney was over on Mastodon doing his usual flight tracking—and so Musk seemingly went through another round of sweaty, angry panic, in which Twitter declared references to Mastodon to be “unsafe,” eventually blocking links to Mastodon itself in the name of safety and virtue and all that is holy and good—which is also convenient, because Mastodon is one of Twitter’s few competitors.

Musk’s petty outbursts make you wonder how dangerous it would be if a narcissistic, self-interested, vindictive adolescent ever gained a major political office such as, say, the White House. But I digress.

Now, unless you’re Very Online—and I am, for both personal and professional reasons—none of this matters very much at the moment. But Musk’s weird rampage does have an impact on the way the world around you exchanges information. Twitter has many levels; for some people, it’s a place to talk about oddball hobbies and exchange pet pictures. (Have you met my cat?) But it’s also an extremely valuable conduit for news, information, culture, and argument. Twitter doesn’t control the news, but it helps to shape public debate about many issues. Indeed, Musk’s entire public rationale for taking over Twitter was to preserve an important venue for free speech.

Musk’s defense of free speech is nonsense. One of the world’s richest men—who is not shy about his politics or his contempt for the free press—has reinstated Donald Trump, white supremacists, and any number of dangerous malefactors to Twitter, but he has made it clear that Donie O’Sullivan is beyond the pale. He has purchased an important and influential piece of the public square not to enhance public debate, but to punish people who annoy him. As if to underscore this point, Musk joined a Twitter Spaces live audio chat with journalists who asked him to explain what he was doing. He abruptly left the meeting—and then Twitter Spaces itself was shut down. (This was, he tweeted, to fix a “Legacy bug.” He announced on Friday evening that Spaces had been restored.)

I actually don’t subscribe to some of the more nefarious theories about Musk’s motivations (nor will I share them). I think he lost his cool because for more than a  month, he’s been in way over his head with an impulsive purchase, his fortunes are plunging, and he got booed by a crowd of thousands of people at a Dave Chappelle performance—which, for a guy like Musk, is probably an unforgivable injury from what should be an adoring public.

But we can at least shelve all of Musk’s blather about free speech. Twitter is an important part of how we disseminate and process news, and it’s now in the hands of an irritable and unpredictable child. This is one more step in the infantilization of American life, in which we must accommodate and work around the behavior of grown men and women who not so long ago would have been pushed out of public life either by our collective political disgust or by responsible shareholders who would insist that their corporate leaders get back to work instead of making a spectacle of themselves.”

As I wrote in my post of March 15 2021, Free Speech, Hate Speech, and the Use of Social Force: the Case of Dr. Seuss;  Much like his wonderful anarchist hero The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss has been judged as rather naughty of late, taken to running amok and being ungovernable, transgressing the boundaries of the Forbidden, an agent of Chaos and mocker of authority. Reversals of order and authority, the violation of norms, and the destabilization of ossified forms and structures as a liberation from the shadows of our past and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, whose books modeled the limitless possibilities of becoming human as free-roaming Autonomous Zones like the delightful child criminals Thing One and Thing Two; Dr Seuss offers us much by way of the reimagination of ourselves, and for this I cherish him.

His works can be read as celebrations of childhood as an ideal state of being; uncontrolled, wild, beings of nature, and free of conscience, inhibition, submission to authority or what Freud deliciously called polymorphosly perverse, but free of the Freudian injunction to control and sublimate our desires, works as with nature in which anything goes.

The works of Dr Seuss are a sustained advocacy of the idea of the natural human as conceptualized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his brilliant manifesto of 1762 The Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Right. Here are some of my favorite quotes; “Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent.” “MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.” “To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.”

Dr Seuss also used his platform to legitimize regressive ideologies in which he was deeply embedded; but he did not end where he began, and through his writing he transformed himself and our culture. In this respect his works are a parade of taboos and his art one of Swiftian satire which mocked and deflated authorized identities by extending them to the Absurd.

As I once said to Jean Genet of a sniper who had joined us in resistance after having tried to kill me for several days, no one is beyond redemption.

I’d like to keep the anarchy and transgression and struggle free from the legacies of our historical injustices and inequalities, among them racism and patriarchy which Janus-like act as dual faces of a coin of power, as did Dr Suess.

Mistake nothing in this; there can be no excuse for racism nor for any advocacy or representations of racism or fascism. We must have zero tolerance for hate, and give no quarter to its perpetrators.

Cancel culture is a fascist term and its use is a warning sign. It is used both as in-group recognition signaling among fascists and white supremacists, and as a tactic of deflection. None who are innocent of intent to harm use this expression, and it is one of many identifiers we can use to tell friend from foe. The apologetics of hate and white supremacist terror recast resistance and deplatforming as cancel culture to shift blame. When someone invokes cancel culture to avoid responsibility for their actions or to delegitimize you, know that you are speaking with an enemy who is committed to your destruction.

As to the themes of Dr. Seuss, it is useful to compare him to Robert Coover, the author who appropriated his character of the Cat in the Hat in a 1968 satire of Nixon entitled A Political Fable, a story whose lessons apply equally to the presidency of Donald Trump.

As reviewed in The Guardian by Hari Kunzru; “Coover’s greatest battle with complexity is The Public Burning, a massive novel about the McCarthy era and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which appeared, after much struggle, in 1977. Coover, whose work belies the idea that postmodernism is necessarily disengaged and apolitical, had been active in campaigning against the Vietnam war, and made a short film about a 1967 campus protest against Dow Chemical, On a Confrontation in Iowa City. The authoritarian drift of US politics led him first to write a satirical novella imagining a presidential campaign by Dr Seuss’s Cat in the Hat (A Political Fable, 1968) and then to take a panoptical look at the anti-communist panic of the 50s. Conceived before Watergate and then completely rewritten in the wake of the scandal, The Public Burning is narrated by Richard Nixon, who struts and frets his way across a political stage dominated by a foul-mouthed, xenophobic Uncle Sam, who is locked in mortal combat with the Phantom, a shadowy and seemingly omnipresent enemy”

And from Kirkus Review; “The Cat in the Hat for President”: that was the title of this satire when first published in 1968 (in the literary magazine New American Review)–and that’s the single, inspired, ferocious joke (dated not one whit) that keeps most of these 88 miniature pages roaring along. Coover’s narrator is old party pro “Soothsayer” Brown, who goes to the Convention hoping to hand-pick the V-P candidate for this no-win election year (the Opponent will be virtually undefeatable). . . and then watches as the Convention turns into a circus: first a catchy slogan starts appearing everywhere (“Let’s make the White House a Cat House”); next, an irresistible campaign song fills the air (“So go to bat for the Cat in the Hat!/He’s the Cat who knows where it’s at!/With Tricks and Voom and Things like that!”); then funny hats, gorgeous cheerleaders, cute gags–and finally the arrival of the Cat himself, who pulls Seuss-like stunts, wreaks cartoon havoc, wows the crowd, and wins the nomination on the first ballot. Brown is the party’s last hold-out, but even he grudgingly goes along. After all, he can’t deny “the Cat’s essential ambiguity. . . thus his electoral power.” And he’s only half-revolted by the philosophy of the man behind the Cat–a creep named Clark who believes that “extremity is a great catalyst,” that the Cat’s outrageous campaign will free America of its illusions. But the Cat’s antics–gross practical jokes, driving the Opponent bonkers with those hat-tricks, fomenting racial riots in Mississippi (“the Cat’s ambivalent blackness, heretofore a political asset, now turned on him”)–eventually get out of hand; there’s talk of a military coup; “all the Good Folk of the Valley” now hate the Cat; and he’s skinned alive by an angry mob” “the sheer awful exuberance of the central absurdity here–which somehow, paradoxically, tempers Coover’s naked loathing with Seuss’ more good-natured mania–works to perfection: a devastating, across-the-board swipe at presidential imagery and campaign hype, perhaps even righter for Election ’80 than it was for the more issue-centered nightmares of ’68.”

As I wrote in my post of August 16 2020, Democracy, the Right of Free Speech Versus the Crime of Hate Speech, and the Principle of Open Debate;    To free ourselves of the ideas of other people; such is the essence of democracy. Conversely, the use of social force in marginalizing and silencing dissent is the definition of tyranny.

Much talk of late has employed the term cancel culture to deflect and obscure the true issues involved with the disambiguation of free speech from hate speech and the role of open debate in a democracy; cancel culture is a figment used without sincerity to obfuscate loathsome acts of incitement to violence and dehumanization, for platform denial and forms of peer ostracism are part of the free market of ideas and have no relation to silencing and erasure used by authoritarian tyrannies of force and control to subjugate a population and repress dissent, as exemplified by the Chinese Communist Party’s recent arrest of newspaperman Jimmy Lai in their campaign against democracy and truth in Hong Kong. But the values issues which the phenomenon raises are interesting, as they signpost the heart of what democracy means and our responsibility to others as well as our freedom from the ideas of others. 

Democracy is reducible to a simple idea; the abandonment of social force in  shaping others to our own image, in the authorization of identity, in our freedom of conscience and from the establishment and policing of boundaries of the Forbidden.

In a democracy, the principle of the autonomy of individuals takes precedence over the state, which exists only to secure those rights which we cannot secure for ourselves.

Any society or culture requires shared values and principles, agreements about things such as freedoms of and freedoms from, whether in systems of law and justice or as standards of courtesy. Democracy is unique in that it requires  rights of free access to information and the sharing of it, and freedoms from surveillance, censorship, and lies disguised as truths, but also requires for its functioning the tradition of open debate founded with our civilization in the Forum of Athens.

Hate speech, which seeks to harm a class of persons, is the only exception to the right of free speech as parrhesia, the sacred calling to expose injustice, and the independence of journalism as a sacred calling to seek the truth, for hate speech dehumanizes others as a criminal theft of humanity, citizenship, and identity which violates our ideals of equality and liberty; hate speech is an act of tyranny and terror which is subversive to democracy as a free society of equals.

As truth becomes uncertain and malleable through the instruments of media and reduces everything to identitarian partisanship, as reality becomes a social consensus model authorized for us by others, as we wander in a wilderness of mirrors, distorted images as if in a funhouse which falsify and abstract us from ourselves in infinite reflections, of misdirects, lies, and illusions, we become colonized by these falsehoods and shaped to the uses of their puppetmasters and those who would enslave us. Thus do we become puppets of the thieves of souls.

And somewhere in the funhouse, a Clown of Terror laughs.

To make an idea about a kind of people is a hate crime and an act of violence.

To Question, Expose, and Mock Authority are among the Primary Duties of a Citizen.

Let us be citizens, and never subjects.

Who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights?

Wag the Dog film trailer

Chaplin’s The Factory

October 4 2025 61st Anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement

March 11 2025 Free Speech Versus State Sponsorship of Genocide and Repression of Dissent: Case of Mahmoud Khalil

The Trial of Socrates, I.F. Stone

Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, Michel Foucault

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18631427-discourse-and-truth?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_9

           On Hate Speech, a retrospective of my writing

February 18 2021 Death of a Monster: In Memory of Rush Limbaugh, Master Propagandist of Fascist Terror

April 28 2023 Tucker Carlson, Voice of the Fourth Reich and Nazi Ideology in the Era of Traitor Trump, Is Disavowed by Fox and Now Free to Run For the Presidency

September 10 2025 A Reckoning Is Brought to Fascist Propagandist Charlie Kirk

On the Fascist Assault On Truth, a retrospective of my writing

March 5 2025 Trump Is An Illusion Made Of Lies, But How Is He Constructed and How Can He Be Unmade? Case of Trump’s Address to Congress

January 31 2025 Trump Unfurls His Tongue of Lies

October 10 2024 Lies, Misdirections, and the Fog of War: the Information Front of the Climate Crisis and the Party of Treason’s War on Truth and Democracy

February 8 2024 Falsification and the Wilderness of Mirrors: the Case of the Surveillance State Blueprint Hidden In the Immigration Bill

April 5 2023 With all the Lies Exposed and Let Out Of Him, Trump Becomes Nothing

February 8 2023 The Limits of Fear and Lies: the Republican Party Has No Story to Tell Beyond These Instruments of Subjugation, Division, Tyranny and Terror, and the Wealth, Power, and Privilege of Hegemonic Elites It Represents and Enacts

July 8 2021 Truth, Lies, and History as a Ground of Struggle; the Case of Critical Race Theory Repression