I just finished reading The Grapes of Wrath. That was intensely traumatizing, but I must say, it was also oddly refreshing. I felt a great relief in being spoken to that way. What way, you ask? So directly. Straight from the heart, straight to the heart.

I tried to understand its effect on me for a long time. I realized, this kind of story is not told enough anymore, and almost never in that way. There’s a reason for this.

If you haven’t read it, or it’s been a while, it’s the story of a family losing their farm and moving west during the Dust Bowl. Notably, between each chapter, essays explain why this is happening to them. The narrator zooms out and talks about how banks, junk yards, wages, and property rights, each function. The reader is forced to understand: as long as these systems are in place, and they are, this family’s story will keep happening. It is not just a story, it’s an allegory. And it basically tells you as much.

I was curious about how this book was received at the time it was published. It turns out it is complicated. It was an instant classic, yes. Eleanor Roosevelt was a big fan. It was a shoe-in for the Pulitzer and its movie adaptation, the Oscar. A review in the NYT the year it was published perfectly describes my experience reading it today:

“It is a long and thoughtful novel as one thinks about it. It is a short and vivid scene as one feels it… As plainly as it can be put, Mr. Steinbeck puts it.”

And predicted:

“The moralist [in Steinbeck] is as important as the story-teller, may possibly outlast him.”

The New Yorker the same year started with the claim that “If only a few million overcomfortable people would read it, a revolution will take place in their minds and hearts.”

Well more than a few million have read it at this point, so what gives?

Where’s our revolution?

I learned that by the time Steinbeck received his Nobel prize in 1962, opinion of his literary merit had shifted considerably. Even the Nobel committee admitted it had been “a bad year.” Despite the 1939 rave, The New York Times now published a rebuttal to his win citing Steinbeck’s “limited talent…watered by tenth rate philosophizing.”

What happened? Well, the generation had been conditioned to a very particular standard of taste. Steinbeck himself had a great working theory as to why:

In my time, Ernest Hemingway wrote a certain kind of story better and more effectively than it had ever been done before… When his method was accepted, no other method was admired. The method or style not only conditioned the stories but the thinking of his generation. Superb as his method is, there are many things which cannot be said using it. The result of his acceptance was that writers did not write about those things which could not be said in the Hemingway manner, and gradually they did not think them either.

How does a generation of aspiring writers spontaneously and collectively grasp the same highly idiosyncratic author and devote themselves to his style? It’s not that great a style, in my opinion. But whatever I think of Hemingway, my point is: his acceptance wasn’t spontaneous nor was it scientific proof as to the objective superiority of this style. Systems have a role to play in shaping why this style—namely: spare writing about interior, as opposed to, social struggle—was taken as right and good, and still is.

One reason is that this style dovetails nicely with the political establishment moving away from the New Deal era of social welfare to a red scare, and the belief in individualism as the greatest and only good. These ideals in turn perfectly complemented the mandates of New Criticism, the mid-century dogma in the literary establishment.

New Criticism holds that a text is “autonomous” and can and should be read without its authorial or historical context. It was one of the main theories I was taught in the private schools I attended, which was convenient for the purposes of education in more ways than one.

It all sounds very scientific, for one. I remember reading the theory for the first time, and not being able to find a hole in it. It also benefitted from my confirmation bias. I have ADHD, so it was great news for me as a college student to know I could produce “close readings” of texts ad infinitum without having to do any research.

The particular idea of good taste that New Criticism helped to shape allows us to discount any text that explicitly indicts its social context. Because they shouldn’t even be bringing that up. That’s basically a faux pas.

How convenient, how convenient.

This is good news for the teachers, bound to produce (and be) the right kind of thinkers and social beings: people who could build cultural capital around their taste. If the meaning of a book is made clear, how can anyone show off or gain anything by proving they understand it?

They need to prove their understanding of art is intellectual, not emotional, to be accepted in intellectual circles. This was also good news for the artist themselves, who benefit from multiple channels, one where their work is received, another from a cottage industry where any unspoken meanings are explained.

The result is that artists may continue to talk about systems, but only through allusion, and subtly, and please, using the tone of ironic detachment that has become the disposition of the cultured class. To speak with any urgency is to be sentimental or melodramatic, the deadliest sins of all in art (and two criticisms frequently lobbed at Steinbeck). By swearing by subtlety, you can engage freely with critiques of the ruling class, without ever putting your own membership at risk.

The result is that it’s now considered unfashionable and in poor taste for artists to directly state the social problems their works address. It’s rude to outright demand an emotional reaction from an audience (in the way Steinbeck does in the Grapes of Wrath, for instance).

Take the Great Gatsby, to use another classic. We know, vaguely, that this story, is critical of the system. Certainly it’s not endorsing the society that made Tom so racist and Gatsby and Daisy so shallow. It gestures broadly to a critique of some kind. But still, most people’s lasting impression of that story is a desire to dress up and attend a party.

Likewise, today’s media landscape is awash with ‘critiques’ of the systems we live in. But I notice that they all suffer from the same problem. An unwillingness to go there. To state explicitly what they are critiquing and why. Do the creators even know?

The White Lotus was basically appointment TV in the last five years. It benefitted from its gestures, broad but ample, to a critique of wealth inequality. I didn’t feel any bite. I never felt any pain.

The concept of a five-star resort in a colonial outpost is supposed to suffice. Enough said, right? You’d be forgiven for thinking the major downside to this kind of inequality is the feeling of awkwardness it spawns. In truth, it’s a system with real victims and perpetrators. But that truth is never spoken or revealed. And I think that is intentional.

I suppose these creators think what I used to. That it would be too obvious to say it outright. That their artistry would suffer. That it’s deadly to have an agenda in fiction. Well, it wasn’t deadly to the Grapes of Wrath. It wasn’t deadly to Dickens.

Why are we so sure it would be deadly now?

What should we do when our kids refuse to eat the dinner we’ve prepared and ask for a bowl of cereal instead? The Internet is awash with answers from nutritionists, psychologists, and parenting experts on this scenario who have all reached the same conclusion. Most recommend using some version of this simple script:

“Cereal is not the menu tonight. But fruit and yogurt (or other previously agreed upon ever-greenlit foods) are always available.”

They recommend still offering your child a choice, but holding your boundary in a gentle manner while doing so. This way, the child feels a degree of autonomy—he has two alternatives—and, the more philosophical of them add, he feels psychologically safe because his parent isn’t wishy-washy.

A therapist once warned me that if I kept negotiating with my child over bedtime, he’d end up “scared” by my weak will and learn dangerous lessons about respecting boundaries as a result. Which felt like a bit of a stretch.

But this is the widely held order of operations that seems to work well for most families. The child protests. The mother presents choices and holds her boundary gently but firmly. The child feels safe. Free but not too free.

I think that’s good advice if it works for you and your personality. For mine, I always say yes to the cereal. I might try to persuade him a little at first. But if his mind is made up, I choose to honor that.

My reasoning is, I don’t believe in my own authority. N knows it, and I know he feels safe all the same. It’s not to say I won't carry him away from activities kicking and screaming at times. He’s not entitled to behave in ways that impact the wellbeing of others. I obviously take him away from danger if need be. But if someone is brought to tears by the food in front of them, I personally don’t feel right pushing the issue.

Furthermore, I know kids can sense lies and hypocrisy. I don’t follow a perfect diet myself, I eat according to my mood. If someone offers me food I don’t want, I don’t like to just try it anyway. I am lucky that my child eats a variety from every food group and that I have the means to provide that. Any fear of malnutrition is so far fetched as to feel almost offensive to people for whom it’s an actual concern.

Most of all, I lack the desire to use food as a way to make a point about my authority or my right to make certain calls as a parent. In fact, I don’t think I have that right.

Today’s parenting experts use the term “authoritative” to describe the ideal parenting style, as opposed to “authoritarian,” which they’re against.

When a child demands cereal for dinner, a good parent may adopt the expression, words, and tone of their favorite pop-psychology influencer and repeat:

“Cereal is not on the menu. If you don’t like peas, yogurt and fruit are always available.”

Child: *Cry, cry, cry*

Parent: “I know it’s hard.”

The authoritative parent sympathizes, says so, but insists nonetheless on her right to determine what the child eats. The peas aren’t the point, the point is that dinner runs smoothly without a hitch, and children internalize the presence of assured authoritativeness in their lives.

The social psychologist-philosopher Erich Fromm wrote about the shift in the 20th century, from overt authority to anonymous authority. Critiquing the failed promise of progressive education, he might as well have been describing current parenting gurus like Dr Becky and Big Little Feelings when he wrote, in 1960:

While the teacher of the past said to Johnny, "You must do this. If you don't, I'll punish you"; today's teacher says, "I'm sure you'll like to do this.”

Here, the sanction for disobedience is not corporal punishment, but the suffering face of the parent, or what is worse, conveying the feeling of not being "adjusted," of not acting as the crowd acts. Overt authority used physical force; anonymous authority employs psychic manipulation.

The anonymous authority at play in the gentle-parenting dinner script ensures the same result for ‘authoritative parents’ as overt authority once did for authoritarian ones, the parents of the past who matter of factly informed their children that a spanking would follow if they didn’t eat their peas.

Both serve the function of a smooth-running dinner. As runs dunner, so runs the home. And an unsaid, maybe unintended exponent: as runs the home, so runs society.

According to Fromm, it is no accident. The shift toward anonymous authority as a teaching and parenting technique was essential in the post-industrial world to produce the right kind of workers and consumers. Anonymous authority allows compliance to feel natural, indeed, psychologically safe, in order to imitate the conditions of freedom, for maximum market value.

The change from the overt authority of the nineteenth century to the anonymous authority of the twentieth was determined by the organizational needs of our modern industrial society. The concentration of capital led to the formation of giant enterprises managed by hierarchically organized bureaucracies. Large conglomerations of workers and clerks work together, each individual a part of a vast organized production machine, which in order to run at all, must run smoothly and without interruption.

The individual worker becomes merely a cog in this machine. In such a production organization, the individual is managed and manipulated. …

Our system must create men whose tastes are standardized, men who can be easily influenced, men whose needs can be anticipated. Our system needs men who feel free and independent but who are nevertheless willing to do what is expected of them, men who will fit into the social machine without friction, who can be guided without force, who can be led without leaders, and who can be directed without any aim except the one to "make good."

It is not that authority has disappeared, nor even that it has lost in strength, but that it has been transformed from the overt authority of force to the anonymous authority of persuasion and suggestion. In other words, in order to be adaptable, modern man is obliged to nourish the illusion that everything is done with his consent, even though such consent be extracted from him by subtle manipulation. His consent is obtained, as it were, behind his back, or behind his consciousness.”

In the 19th century, authority meant religion dictating morality, masters enslaving people, employers controlling workers with force and impunity, and every good parent and teacher using ‘the rod’ to show young people the way.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, authority is softer and subtler. The effect is that, as workers and consumers and as citizens, we are made to feel free within a system with every bit as much power over our lives and destinies as the kings and masters of the past. It’s as true in the workplace1, as it is in the White House, as it is at home. We are not outright forced to obey, we are guided ‘behind our backs’ along a nicer-feeling form of compliance.

Children, like the workers and consumers they will become, are made to feel they have autonomy, but in reality, they do not. The child learns to trust and internalize this form of control. They believe they are choosing, while learning to accept “firm boundaries,” and with them, the idea of immovable authority.

I’ll tell you another story. N takes Tae Kwon Do at a dojo where, hilariously, he has to address his master as Sir, and me as Ma’am while there. He has to bow to the Korean and American flags at the start and end of every class. He has to promise, in the form of a group chant with the other “little tigers” to “always listen to his parents.” If he misbehaves, he will not receive a star or a smiley face on his “passport” at the end of class. If he does exactly as he’s told and right away, he advances from stripes to stars to trophies in a hierarchical system with clearly defined rewards and punishments. I have to sign off on his home behavior each week.

He absolutely loves it.

You might be thinking here is proof that my child loves and thrives with authority and boundaries. But this authority is overt, not anonymous. And it is something he has chosen. I’ve thought about it. But ultimately some ‘in depth research’ on the topic of “is tae kwon do authoritarianism” led me to a response on reddit/anarchists that put my fears to rest.

“you’re overthinking this.” Oh, phew. “it is ok,” one wise Redditor wrote “if someone has more experience and/or knowledge in a particular field, to follow instructions, or do what they tell you as it pertains to that field. the problem comes when a) someone expects to carry that power/authority into other fields, and/or b) when you are coerced to do what that person says.

there are not any contradictions in anarchists doing martial arts, unless the understanding of where the problem is, is extremely simplistic.”

I will say to point A,—“unless someone expects to carry that power/authority into other fields”—the temptation is great.

The other day, as I begged N to leave the playground, and he refused, I reminded him: “Hey, I thought I heard you telling Master you ‘always listen to your parents’…”

“I tricked him!” he said.

I went over to full authoritarianism and grabbed him from behind like a stasi goon.

Freedom is a work in progress.

There’s a wildly popular franchise that started in our neighborhood that converts warehouses into dazzling bright white indoor playgrounds. Think: a McDonald’s PlayPen, but—are you ready to be dazzled?—in bright white. Like an Apple Store.

Many of our parent friends enjoy this place (and some of them I might add are very good people). It’s based on one of those highly Instagrammable immersive ‘art’ experiences like the Museum of Ice Cream. There’s a jungle gym made of ladders and precarious nets held together by PVC pipe and zip-ties, a ball pit the size of an olympic swimming pool, and textured walls. There are tubs full of choking hazards I mean beads, and a room I like to call the strangulation chamber, with plastic ropes of different lengths hanging from the ceiling. All bathed in the kind of lighting that makes one feel high on drugs or inside of a David Lynch film. While interesting in those situations, believe it or not this type of lighting can be quite panic-inducing in others, like, for example, when searching for a small child.

I try not to be a hater, you know I try, but it’s all a bit Willy Wonka for my taste.

A membership costs $300/month and grants access to exciting extras like tubs of a patented playdoh-like substance made of god knows what. Single entry for $50 doesn’t include that, but you try explaining to a toddler he can’t touch slime with the other toddlers because he isn’t a member.

The company also provides signature color block socks ‘free’ at every expensive entry, making kids’ bodies into walking advertisements wherever they go, which is simply brilliant marketing, and not sinister or exploitative at all.

I suppose if my child hadn’t broken his leg on an oversized bouncy castle there, I might still be tagging along with my mom friends when the weather was bad—complaining the whole time, but they’re used to that with me. But as it is, every time I come across one of those infernal socks at the bottom of my drawer, I march it straight to the trash.

For some reason, as we sped to the hospital that day, N screaming in pain in the back seat, I became carsick and started throwing up uncontrollably out of the window onto the BQE. Since that day, I’ve thought a lot about this space.

Now I’m not saying a child’s life has to be all washing the table and polishing the cup like Maria Montessori intended. Surely there’s a time and a place for chocolate rivers and candy wall paper—the odd Willy Wonka experience.

But I do seem to remember a certain complex morality at the heart of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I’d go so far as to say any time a ticket promises families the wildest fantasies of children come to life, you can bet on a PT Barnum or Oz-like hum-bug pulling strings behind the curtain.

McDonald's introduced its play pens during the height of the ‘stranger danger’ panic. As constant news coverage of child abductions made parents fearful of public space, McDonald’s sold families on its enclosed, private playgrounds. The sense of safety was, of course, 100% illusory, and, due to horrifying sanitary and safety concerns, McDonald’s has since almost completely phased them out. (-Mental Floss).

Replacing the conditions of the real world with high-design alternatives simply introduces alternative risks.

In all my reading and experiences with childcare, I find myself very drawn to this idea of the real, and the ever-present option as adults to present children with constructed alternatives.

For me, it’s always been the most indelible insight of Montessori philosophy: her views on the child’s relationship to reality and ‘practical life.’ Montessori believed that tangible interactions with the real world were essential for a child’s development, which is why she insisted they use real glass, real knives, and take part in self-care and cleaning tasks as soon as they could walk.

And one of the hardest aspects of Montessori’s philosophy for me is her belief that young children should not be exposed to fantasy until age six(!) when their grasp of reality is more developed.

“Reality is the true basis of imagination,” she wrote. And even though my child is obsessed with fantasy, I think about this often.

I wonder why this idea has so much pull for me. What would it mean for a society to honor and protect a child’s relationship to reality. There would be no need to create fantastical concepts for them out of plastic or warehouse families for whom the stresses of childcare necessitate total breaks with the real. She is saying there is no alternate space that is somehow better suited, more fun, more heightened, or more engaging for children than reality itself.

And if we accepted that children belonged in the real world, we would also accept that the real world should be an accommodating place. It would mean endorsing true inclusivity, even for the least capable and least independent among us.

It’s the same reason I love when Mr. Rogers takes kids into factories and bakeries and the homes and schools of real kids. I’m especially amused when he emphasizes his ignorance about the way things work. He’s not exaggerating, exactly, he’s demonstrating. He’s inserting his child-like modality (that we all inhabit at times), and in the real spaces he enters, it’s fully welcomed. These moments in the show quite frankly stun me with their kindness. He’s modeling what a mutually respectful relationship between kids and the real world could look like.

In Japan, I was thrilled to find out that kids study cooking and cleaning in school in full academic units where they have to bring in vacuums from home and learn to use them. And of course, small children famously run complicated errands for their families, making train transfers and lugging heavy bags of groceries. Obviously this is adorable. But it’s more than that. It speaks to the standards Japan has for its society, the agreement that everyone will contribute as they can, and that public life will be safe and navigable for all.

One of my favorite parenting books I’ve read is Hunt Gather Parent by Micheline Ducleff. In it she talks about the “W.E.I.R.D.” child-rearing ways of “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic” nations. One of the weirdest things we do is create special activities for kids, sequestered from the rest of the social world. In the author’s view, it leads to high-conflict relationships between parents and their children that would seem foreign and bizarre in many societies.

She makes an important distinction between independence and autonomy in the book. WEIRD societies value independence, but not autonomy. Independence is the ability to run wild, do a backflip into an olympic swimming pool sized pit full of plastic beads if you want, while your parent scrolls Instagram on a memory foam lily-pad out of sight. Real autonomy—the ability to navigate a city, contribute to a family, or make self-directed choices—requires access to the real world.

In much of the US, public space is chaotic, fragmented, and built for those who can pay their way into curated experiences. We know these places are no safer than public ones (not by a long shot). But the sense of control and exclusion provides useful cover. Instead of building safe and inclusive public spaces in the real world, we get to feel like we’ve opted into something magical and special instead

Disney World is the apotheosis of this curated wonderland concept—an unreal, uncanny space where parents and kids’ relationship with reality, and one another, are transformed. The happiest place on earth.

We are often told (or I was, by my industry-loving parents) that Walt Disney’s great innovation was inventing the idea of family entertainment. He imagined a universe kids and adults could enjoy together and built it whole-cloth from swampland. It’s true. As an adult, I’m thinking about taking my child to Disney World someday. He loves Mickey Mouse. I love Baudrillard, weird applications of social theory, and writing essays. It might be fun for the whole family indeed!

But visiting a fantastical wonderland for kids and adults to enjoy together is not quite the same as enjoying the real world together, and not quite as gratifying. We can give them their wildest fantasies—a river of chocolate, a bouncy castle the size of a real castle. But unless you’re Charlie Bucket, (who at the end of the story, inherits the chocolate factory, having passed Willy Wonka’s twisted test to find a humble and deserving heir) the experience will remain just that: a temporary fantasy.

My real, wildest fantasy come to life would be for the real world to accept that kids are people, too, and should be included in the built environment in public spaces. Imagine a world where parents wouldn’t have to divorce ourselves from reality in order to enjoy our time with kids. I wish the city would invest in indoor public spaces (like it has done with public parks) that were truly inclusive of kids and parents, especially the ones who can’t afford $300/month. Now THAT would be my version of winning a golden ticket.

I used to have a bit I would do. Whenever someone would do that thing, known to all denizens of our local melting pot, where they perform a quick scan of your features and ask, "What are you?" I would say, by way of explaining my face and my last name, "I’m like…Jewish." If they happened to be Jewish too, which, in the circles I’ve hung out in most of my life, they often are, I would get a big smile, "Jewish!" to which I would quickly clarify...

"I mean, like, bagels and musicals...and that's it. I wasn't raised with religion or anything."

"Bagels and musicals," they'd reply. "You ARE Jewish."

"I am, I am."

Which, in fact, I am. So Jewish in fact, that both times I set foot in Idaho, I felt distinctly nervous. So Jewish that when I toured Auschwitz I was stunned at the resemblance of the gaunt faces in the black and white photos to my own reflection. So Jewish that if I wanted to move to Israel, claim citizenship, enjoy all the rights promised to all citizens of the free world, along with some I don’t even get at home, like attending higher education and receiving healthcare for free, legally speaking, I could.

I’m a little ashamed at my own naiveté. It came as a shock to me over the last year and half to learn how many of my fellow Jewish Americans believe in a continuous thread, connecting us all, that leads us directly from bagels and musicals to comedy and intellectualism to anxiety and psychotherapy to trauma, all of which I gladly follow right along with, right up to the point where I break off…at a state where Jews enjoy political supremacy over another indigenous ethnic group.

Over the past year and a half, I’ve read and I’ve listened to podcasts, I’ve attended lectures and a few protests, I’ve posted in all caps on Instagram, and I’ve had tough conversations with family members, and beautiful conversations with people who want to know, too. And in all my reflecting I've learned something else: it isn’t just Jews who do this.

We all take huge, head-spinning leaps from shared culture to shared values without thinking about the contradictions, or questioning the shared rules, all the time.

I think this is why I’ve come to see Israel and Palestine as a metaphor and microcosm for so much wrong in the world. At least it explains, (for those who have perhaps been wondering), why I’ve become almost singularly obsessed with “this particular conflict” as it is euphemistically referred to by some who’ve questioned my interest.

I think of the Jews and their relationship to Israel as eerily analogous to the only other social group I’ve ever been able to claim membership of: the liberals, and their relationship to the military industrial complex. It is a road paved by cultural affinities that leads directly to everything we claim to stand against.

There’s a joke I’ve heard told a million ways in every liberal circle I’ve ever sat in, usually in election years when attempting to make sense of how liberals, in spite of our moral high ground, in spite of our better policies, in spite of our generally more attractive and objectively appealing candidates, are never as successful as conservatives. It’s our infighting. It’s our innate fear of confrontation. It’s our inability to organize effectively.

Let me posit, it’s none of these things. It’s actually that our position doesn’t make sense.

Our stated ideal world order conflicts directly with our stated ideal national order.

The stated ideal world order is neoliberalism. Any liberal who denied this fact would immediately disqualify themselves from serious consideration in politics. Neoliberalism is the system which says trade and markets take priority over states and people. On the one hand, it ensures that the market remains free even amid political upheaval overseas. On the other hand, it means we trade with abusers of human rights, and our lifestyles depend on these abuses. We couldn’t lead our liberal lives without them. As long as they’re profitable, we insist that the abuses continue.

Our liberal lifestyles demand so much daily moral compromise it is hard to draw a line anywhere. I know my clothes were made in sweat shops. I know my phone was mined by children. I already know every fiber of my culture—my wide leg pants, my avocados, my meditation app—is inextricably tied to a system that relies on pain and suffering overseas.

The only way my world view makes sense is if I think the world begins and ends at the boundary of my walkable neighborhood. (And we liberals are the first to remind ourselves that it doesn’t).

Of course it’s better to do some good, knowing we can never do enough, than loudly proclaim we don’t care about doing good, like Republicans do. For liberals, though, it’s not so much a compromise as it is a self-cancelling contradiction.

We want good liberal policies, but any good liberal politician we’d elect to advance them must first vow to defend our position of global dominance. The first part we vote on and debate; the other part is taken for granted. One is always negotiable, the other always given. The fun, thriving liberal culture is ‘what’ we want, but global domination —and a robust military apparatus, vast beyond comprehension— is both the ‘why’ and the ‘how.’

Cruel Republican policies, and the weird and unsettling Republican culture that goes along with them, have one and only one advantage. But unfortunately for us, it’s a big one: their position actually adds up. Ours doesn’t.

Below, is a picture of Obama having dinner with one of the great intellects of all time, in my opinion, Edward Said. I loved him before I ever gave a shit about Palestine, because of his literary criticism, and honestly, because of his look. Like Obama himself, he’s… hot, he’s sophisticated, and he’s a fantastic writer.

Now today, of course, I love him in a different, deeper way. I see him as not just sophisticated and literary but courageous and heroic. I know he was an exile, and I’ve seen the pictures of the library in his name that was decimated because it stood for the best of what Palestinians could be if they were given the chance.

This photo devastates me, honestly. Barack Obama looks, as ever, thoughtful and engaged. And that’s the worst part about it. He knew what Israel meant for Palestinians. He knew, and he knows. But he chooses to leave his knowledge at dinner parties, not on the world stage. There, his job is insisting we need an even stronger military, and many more billions for Israel. And we liberals will fool ourselves to think that was the theater. “He has to say that,” I used to think. The real Obama has dined with Edward Said. Well, one he is willing to kill for. The other, is just dinner. Which one, then, should we believe?

Culturally, this photo attracts me strongly. Morally, it repels me.

I can’t reconcile those two, opposite feelings anymore. I hate an exercise in futility. And I don’t think it can be done.

There is a similar thread to the one I once held that (loosely) connected me to the Jewish identity group. This one belongs to the liberal group (they overlap in places). This one, too, tries to string me along, to lead me down the path directly from liberal culture to liberal geo-political ideology. Public radio and the arts (check, I’m with you), mass transit and social services (check, check)…higher education and healthcare, for a price, of course, these things aren’t cheap (check?)…free trade and around 750 military bases globally required to sustain it…(Um, no!)…

I used to think liberalism’s contradictions could be resolved. That it was a simple gap between what we valued and what we had accomplished so far. Now I see that these contradictions aren’t accidental—they are the mechanism it requires to sustain itself. Now that I’ve seen—with devastating, unforgettable clarity—where this thread leads, I think I’ll cut myself loose.

Though never from bagels or musicals, mind you.

I once read a book that claimed it would answer the question it called “the grand mystery of culture”: Why do certain cultural practices—fashion styles, food trends, artistic movements, etc.— become widely adopted, then abandoned in favor of new ones every few years? As someone who's done a lot of screaming into the wind over the past decades about skinny jeans, I obviously picked this book up and read it.

Its answer was basically that since people are always seeking status and social capital, the masses copy the practices of elites, who then move on from those practices when mass participation renders these practices uncool by definition.

It’s…a theory. We’ll call it Theory A.

It makes a kind of sense. In this theory coolness has to do with exclusivity. And it’s true once something is so widely popular as to be considered basic, it can scarcely claim to be very cool anymore. But this book’s logical holes kept me up at night. (You can read my Goodreads review for more about that.) I never did get my answers about skinny jeans. I think I’m getting closer now, though.

Let’s pretend for a moment that the book’s theory is the wrong one. Let’s just say the answer to ‘why certain things become cool as others become uncool’ is the exact inverse theory. It is actually elites who copy the cultural practices of the masses, and the masses who move on when elite participation by definition renders those practices uncool. ←Theory B.

Since these theories contradict one another, you can only pick one. Which one do you think I pick? Those of you who guessed B win a special prize.

First of all, let’s get this out of the way. Cool is obviously subjective, highly personal, psychological as well as systemic, even spiritual, and largely subconscious. Cool is very hard to define. We know it when we see it though.

Maybe it’s easier to define by its opposite. Someone who is trying to be cool is a perversion of concept almost painful to behold. But people who try and fail to be cool are useful because they provide multiple planes from which to view coolness. We can see what they’re trying to convey, and what they’re failing to convey, what they think is cool, what they think others think is cool, and what we think is cool. We can get greater clarity, though we’ll never see something subjective and personal with total clarity of course.

Let’s examine the figures of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. They think they’re cool, that much is clear. To me, this makes them deeply uncool to a painful to watch degree. Absurdly, they each want to claim some kind of countercultural status. It’s a claim as baseless as it is infuriating, given each of their roles in powerfully, insanely, shaping and controlling the direction of culture on a more literal level than should even be possible. How can you swim against the currents when you are literally powering a jet turbine that pushes the water a particular way? *rubs temples* Perhaps in part because of this essential contradiction in who they are and who they claim to be, (or perhaps because of mommy issues who knows?) they both seem angry and fearful, and beneath that deeply insecure, that is, another basic antithesis of cool. This insecurity and anxiety emanates from both men palpably. It’s an anxiety I recognize, perhaps in myself on some level.

Despite their bottomless power, they’ve failed at the simple task of embodiment. They experience little of the human reality that is the basis of all culture, and it shows.

The claim to “cool”, to counterculture in particular, from people who are literally controlling the culture, while having nothing to do with the facts of living in culture themselves, who we know would never in a million years endorse anything truly countercultural because doing so would threaten their status and power, two things it’s ABUNDANTLY clear they value above all else, …is uncool to the point of repulsive. I’m getting angry now, hold on I need to calm down.

They just want it so bad. Coolness. Culture. But they will never have it. They will try. God will they try. Best we can do is pray they don’t take us all down with them in the process.

So if I’m right that we can best define coolness through its antithesis, it would reason that to be cool you must be in some way countercultural. And you have to embody your countercultural values… with some real stakes on the line.

I don’t think smoking is cool for the record, but I think this is why smoking, culturally, came to be a bit of a shorthand or stand-in for the idea of coolness for a time. It’s the element of embodiment. The living and breathing of it.

If we had to pick just one answer to explain ‘the grand mystery of culture,’ the obvious one has been there all along. It’s the story from mythology, when Zeus, despite living among goddesses, goes down to sleep with mortal women. It’s when Rose discovers the trad music party going on in steerage on the Titanic and thinks ‘hey this is a lot cooler than the party upstairs.’ It’s the plot of the song ‘Common People’.

Elites have always envied the masses for their ability to embody culture, and counterculture in particular. And the masses will always have superior culture. The reason I can say this is simple math. There are more of them, and more culture there.

Elites are desperate to participate in mass culture. And their desperation betrays them. It renders their practices perverse and grotesque in extreme examples like Elon and Zuck, but more often just boring and dull. Uncool. Two classic examples come to mind: abstract expressionism and disco. As soon as they came to be seen as backdrops for bourgeois lifestyles, they faded from relevance, stripped of their original energy and purpose—at least until countercultural members of the masses wish to reclaim them.

The song ‘Common People,’ considered one of the great Brit pop songs of all time, tells the age old story well. She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge/ she studied sculpture at St Martin’s college,… and so, naturally, it follows she wanted to know common people. This is framed as a natural extension of her obvious interest, as an elite, in culture. She infiltrates common culture via the singer. She adopts all the right practices. But she will of course “never get it right.” She ends up the butt of a joke. The singer ends by chanting to the audience he wants to be like common people like YOU (when he performs this line, he points at us, the masses listening in the audience).

Here’s another more topical example for you. Funny enough this one also comes from that place we like to think of as this more rigidly stratified, mirror image of our own society that is England—America if CLASS was still a thing, can you imagine? (haha, as if any other society could be more stratified than ours).

‘Brat’ is the 2024 album by Charli XCX. The first time I listened to the album, three different songs made me cry. (Don’t worry about me, please, I’m just an emotional person). In her strong accent the American brain immediately classifies as working class, she projects such vulnerability about losing a friend in a tragic accident (‘So I Cry’), alienation between would-be friends (‘Girl So Confusing’), and wanting a baby (‘I Think About It All the Time’) in between ‘hyper-pop’ beats and a lot about cocaine and clubbing. I thought it was daring, at times beautiful, at times grating, and, for a massive pop star, impressively transgressive and counter-cultural.

One day last summer, Charli XCX tweeted “Kamala is Brat” and the Democrats went from blue to lime green. When Barack Obama pushed out his annual playlist last summer, I laughed so hard that he had selected the one song most explicitly about drugs to share with his followers (365 Party Girl). That fall, the Democrats lost the “most significant election of our lifetime” and I can safely say I will never listen to that album again. There’s your Sherlock Holmes answer to the grand mystery of why *I* for one adopted a particular cultural practice then suddenly abandoned that practice.

Some are saying the reason Democrats failed so hard is because, having successfully captured a class of people known as “cultural elites,” they came to cater excessively to their wishes and needs, in the process abandoning the working class, who allegedly don’t share elite cultural values. I don’t know if that’s true. But I will say if their major accomplishment has been in capturing a group known as ‘the cultural elite’ they have failed even harder than we thought. There is no such class called the cultural elite. Cultural elite is an oxymoron.