Foreigners

Books and Literature, Culture

Jennifer duBois’s second novel, Cartwheel, is an example of psychological realism done right, that is to say, not locked into a desperate schemata designed to make each act of each character a Newtonian inevitability set into elegant motion within the heatless, frictionless word problem of The Way We Live Now; rather, it’s a fraught, cock-eyed rending of minds made ever more inscrutable the deeper we delve into them, a sort of dissection that ends with a pile of catalogued parts that can never again be whole. This is how the mind really works, or I should say instead, how it is, but too much realist writing has never gotten over Freud and sees consciousness as a knot to be untangled into a genealogy. Cartwheel is full of minds that make less sense as the book goes on, less sense to us and less sense to their own fictional selves. Superficially a novel about a notorious murder, it becomes a book about the obscurity and impossibility of motive, about the odd fact that self is as much a conceit as narrative; that as there aren’t actually stories in the world, neither are there selves.

The novel is both loosely and precisely based on the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, or put another way, on the Amanda Knox affair, reset to Argentina, but following the general contours of that case closely. I’d heard about but hadn’t read duBois’s first novel; I should be honest and admit that the descriptions of the thing didn’t especially appeal to me; the setup sounded like the sort of prize-bait I try to avoid. I should maybe give it a chance. But I like lurid literature—I mean, I’m not above rereading Call Me by Your Name for the sex, for instance—and I was slightly fascinated by the Kercher/Knox story, as, I think, any former exchange student must be. So I grabbed Cartwheel from the library as a wild card and figured I’d read it in a night.

In fact, the murder story is a sort of MacGuffin; though the details are changed, it’s almost immediately evident that we’re not going to stray too far from the Knox case. What we get, instead, is a series of chapters that wind in and out of the consciousness of Knox-manquée Lily Hayes, her sort-of boyfriend Sebastien, her father, and Eduardo Campos, the official prosecuting her case. All of them are thoroughly introspective, fully convinced of their own insights into their own motives, and thoroughly, tragically deluded. But—and this is the book’s neat trick, its welcome departure from the norm of American “literary fiction”: their delusions are never that they misapprehend something essential about their own character, that they believe themselves to be altruists, say, when they’re really egoists; that they’ve convinced themselves they’re doing good when in fact they’re just reenacting some evil done to them long ago.

Instead, they keep circling a core of self that isn’t there; they’re not orbiting a star, but a black hole, a well so deep and dense that it approximates solidity through a kind of nonexistence. They’re all reference and no referent; a set of contingencies reflecting only each other. Now, there are some predictable bits; the effect isn’t absolute. Lily and her family are burdened by the loss of an earlier child and sibling; Eduardo, the prosecutor is confounded by a fickle, disastrous marriage. And still, the pervading sadness in Andrew and Maureen Hayes, Lily’s divorced parents, feeds mostly on itself, even as they both—both of them intellectuals—cast back in hopeless hopefulness to the ur-tragedy of losing a child, while Eduardo’s dogged, moralistic pursuit of Lily in the murder case wills itself into a parallel with the flights of Eduardo’s wife rather than being naturally generated by them. Lily is the most obscure of all of them, and we can believe that she both did and did not murder that girl; that if she didn’t, she might have; that if she verifiably did, she might not.

This is a kind of fiction I wish we got more of: subversively resistant to the idea that human beings are a quantity to be known. In it, we are utterly alien to ourselves, and our lives aren’t hemmed in by the conventions of narrative and psychology, but keep messily, insistently transgressing them.

As in, Jerk

Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, The Life of the Mind

Dave Eggers’s The Circle has won a lot of critical praise from traditional book-review types and a lot of derisive snorts from those of us—I count myself, somewhat embarrassingly, among them—who have both computers and business degrees for its comic ignorance of how computers function, what the internet is, or how these corporations are created, funded, and managed. But, although it’s easy enough, and fun, to giggle at a book whose near-future information architects say “in the cloud” with the same skittish incomprehension as your mother or your sixtysomething boss; although it’s easy enough, and fun, to plunk Eggers into the dour, self-reverential gentlemen’s club of Twitter-hating Franzens, forever clearing their throats and folding back their broadsheets in the Anglosaxon gloom of a midday liver lunch with the brocade curtains pulled; the less funny, unfortunate truth about The Circle is that it isn’t just an obtuse book, but a bad one: badly written, poorly conceived, and deeply uncharitable.

The main character is a young woman named Mae, freshly rescued from a dull job at a public utility somewhere in the Central Valley and plopped in an entry-level position in the novel’s eponymous Google-manqué. She rises through the company, and although the narrative frequently stops to mete out in actual, numerical detail the various impressive scores she receives on the company’s 100-point internal grading system, our principle experience of Mae via a limited third-person voice that never exits her rather limited head is a skein of never-ending idiocy and incompetence. Eggers clearly set out to write her as a naïf whose unfolding experience and awareness of The Circle both prompts and mirrors our own, but he accidentally wrote her as one of the shallowest dummies you’re likely to encounter this side of a Tom Friedman column; you wonder how she made it out of high school, let alone how she managed to get hired by the choicest tech firm in the world, connections or no.

She wanders around bedazzled by everything, and the prose reads like an unapproved merger of bad Young-Adult writing and SkyMall catalog copy. More skillfully done, this sort of thing might come off as satire, but here it just reads as clumsy writing, and when errors pop up, you can’t quite tell if they’re meant to be mocking Mae’s misunderstandings or if they’re just errors. There’s a particularly odd passage in which, while taking us on one more interminable tour of the company’s campus and all its myriad wonders, we encounter, “Another Circle team [that] was close to dissembling tornadoes as soon as they formed.” Does Eggers mean disassembling? Would that actually make any more sense? Would it be better writing?

Nitpicking copyediting issues is trivial and a little unfair, but there’s a broader problem here, a problem that the giggly eviscerations of Eggers’s internet non-comprehension hint at: the texture is all wrong; The Circle’s ersatzness is . . . ersatz. There are piles of detail—the naming conventions of buildings, the layout of the campus, the many projects that many teams in many departments are working on, etc.—but there’s not the slightest sense that any of these things exist except as convenient ideograms for Big Google Company Doing Big Google Company Things. A really good workplace novel, a really good workplace satire—Then We Came to the End; On the Floor—hauls the essential unreality of working life out of the weird blandness of working life as much as out of the particulars. Eggers famously (notoriously?) bragged that he hadn’t done any research on tech firms when writing this book, which is clearly not true. If anything, the book suggests an unhealthy infatuation with the self-presentation of those very internet companies, all happy-happy people playing ping-pong in the artisanal cafeteria while dreaming up the next disruptive inflection point in human history. Eggers exaggerates all this to a point light-years beyond absurdity, but he never manages to land a convincing blow because his target is itself an illusion.

So a dumb character stumbles through a poorly conceived fictional company until—spoilers—she arrives at her Winston Smith moment and loves Big Brother. Except she always loved Big Brother; her moments of doubt are petty and procedural; she always gets over them, and quickly. She must betray her friend and mentor, Annie, but the betrayal is such a foregone conclusion, so telegraphed, so obvious the moment Annie’s own first doubts emerge that you mostly wonder why it took so long to get there. Mae has already abandoned her family. Oh, and she drives her ex off a cliff, literally. That scene has a quality of slapstick. Intentional? In a book so hasty and thoughtless, it’s hard to tell. Anyway, she loves Big Brother. The Circle has turned—in about a year—into a force of global domination, and Mae is, like, cool with that. Eggers’s ideology appears to lie with her dead ex, but he’s dead, and in any event, his speeches mostly sounded like bad college-paper op-eds. I suppose Eggers made him insufferable in order to make him more complicated, to make the point that unpleasant people and cranks and kooks can be right, too, but the guy mostly comes off as a bozo. And despite living for years now with revelations about government spying and subversion of the online world, about a complex interplay of antagonism and collusion between spy agencies and tech businesses, this is a straight-up evil corporation; the hapless government is just hapless. Mae isn’t manipulated; she isn’t tortured; she isn’t a skeptic converted or corrupted by The Circle’s promise of wealth and power; she’s nothing that would make her interesting, and she doesn’t change. Eggers sets his come-to-Jesus moment in the middle of a megachurch.

But what bugs me the most, and what makes this book worth reviewing as an artifact of an attitude, is the unfair and uncharitable way Eggers writes the rest of us idiots, who appear here only as a vast, unthinking mass eating whatever shit the internet shovels at us out of some desperate, pathetic, mewling, self-worshipping desire to be loved, or something. One of The Circle’s supposed-to-be terrifying slogans is “Privacy is theft.” Well, no. Privacy is respect. But sharing (“Sharing is caring” is another scare-phrase here) is human; the desire to know and to be known is one of the bases of cognition, conscience, and sentience. There’s nothing wrong with lampooning narcissism, and the internet enables plenty of it, but this evident belief that there is something fundamentally disordered about rating your favorite restaurants or poking your friends is a load of snobbish, patrician garbage. If modernity and modernism are the history of human atomization, of the centrifugal forces of technology and economy flinging our communities and families ever farther away from each other, of the dislocation of the human mind and the human soul, then how do we find ourselves in an era when some small part of our old communities—gossipy, yes, and sometimes without secrets, and very judgmental, and yet, because we know them, very often good—can be regained, only to find that many of our writers, who are supposed to be concerned with things like the mind and the soul, hate it, and think that we’re children and fools for wanting it, even if our desire should indeed be tempered with reserve.

I am not a technological utopian. I don’t think that “information wants to be free” is an adequate ideology for the perfection of the human condition. I also don’t think that governments should be in the intellectual property racket, and I think Google and the like ought to be broken up, although I’d probably give them a pass until I got done with the banks. I worry about my privacy, both the privacy that I sign away when I log onto gmail or Amazon and the privacy that’s wrenched from me by the panty-sniffing fear salesmen in the US government. I would gladly eat my own eyeballs before reading another restaurant review on Trip Advisor. I find Instragram slightly upsetting, but I’m willing to admit that’s probably just me getting a little bit old.

But it’s unkind and unperceptive to assume that people’s sometimes ill-considered flight to convenience is a mark of some vast inadequacy. Insofar as we encounter any citizens of the internet in Eggers’s book, they’re a horrifying stampede of gimme-gimme-gimme status-obsessed zomboids who will kill a man through an overabundance of likes. Yeah, well, maybe some of them are just busy moms with long commutes to lousy jobs in a shit economy. Maybe some of them are wannabe reviewers who got one too many rejection notes from McSweeny’s and decided to start their own blogs. Maybe some of them are gay dudes in Russia or activists in Myanmar who find pseudonymity convenient and safe. Maybe some of them just like taking pictures of their fucking food. Maybe some of them were forced to move across the country for work and this is just how they stay in touch. Maybe some of them are uncomfortable with the compromises they make to bank online or e-file their taxes. And maybe some of them are trolls and misogynists and scammers and crooks. But they are, in fact, people, for whom The Circle, in whose sympathies they supposedly lie, hasn’t got any time at all.

Update: I was not the first to this post’s title, or at least, the punchline. Credit and attribution where due.

The Won Percent

Education, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

Oh, Jesus, you’re already thinking. Another one of those “when I was at Oberlin back in the good ol’ days” stemwinding openers. Fuck you. Get your own blog. When I was a whippety little undergrad at Oberlin College lo this last dragging decade ago, one Larry Summers—you may have heard of him—was invited to speak at Finney Chapel as part of a yearly “Convocation Series”, the sort of series that well-heeled college and university presidents pride themselves on, the kind of convocation in which one is likely to encounter, say, the phrase “thought leader” incarnated in the form of various state functionaries and intellectual popularizers, an ongoing and geographically distributed set of temporary Chautauquas, pace Mencken, a sweaty, Gilbertian landscape of eating, praying, and love, at least, of money.

Summers was Clinton’s Treasury Secretary at the time—this was just before Harvard signed him on waivers. If you want a good example of exquisite mediocrity as the sole unkillable constant in American public life, just look at this guy’s career as he’s careened from one gorgeous scam to another, forever making millions. Anyway, I don’t think we yet knew about his role in the manufactured California Energy Crisis, but those were the waning glory years of gaudy Clintonian neoliberal economic imperialism, and plenty of us were outraged that this towering economic shock doctor was going to be ushered into our sylvan utopia and given a polite public reception. Of course, I was mostly interested in the business end of my bong in those days, and thus unable to rouse myself to any sort of action, but a bunch of campus socialists got themselves into the chapel for the speech, unfurled banners, shook noisemakers, and shouted the greedly little schlub off the stage.

The internet was as-yet inadequate to viralizing this sort of thing into a national scandal, but on campus, recriminations broke along predictable lines. The college administration and that portion of the student body and faculty who believed the purpose of education to be preparation for Congressional internships, get-out-the-vote campaigns, and Teach for America, with subsequent stints at the Kennedy School or Wharton and nice lives in the leafy Maryland suburbs were outraged at this abridgement of Summers’s right to be heard, besides which, it was impolite. The more radical sorts, mostly students and some of the hipper profs, replied, well, shit, our positions are totally unequal; he gets a stage, while we get lines at the microphone for a Q&A; he has a national, an international, forum; we have the letters to the editor in the Oberlin Review. The whole thing eventually blew over. Despite the earnest worries of the Leave Larry Alone faction, he was not irreparably tarnished; he went on bilking millions out of American institutions, and I’m sure he still gets invited to convocations today.

Thirteen years later, Ray Kelly gets shouted down at Brown. In a fully reciprocal, eye-for-eye, digit-for-digit justicial universe, students would have thrown him against a wall, forced his legs apart with their knees, grabbed at his crotch and fingered his anus, all the while laughing and cracking vulgarly wise about the size of his dick and the failures of his race, then publicly claimed it was for his own good. Instead, he suffered the mere indignity of not being able to read the same prepared remarks he’s read a thousand times before. But the internet has matured into a great engine powered by a steady injection of mere indignity, and although the truth is that this was a forgettable incident, a typical confrontation between young people with a burgeoning awareness of the systems of power in America and the sort of asshole that middle-manages those systems, a meeting of unequals in which strength in numbers briefly triumphs before the jerk they’re booing trundles off to a paid sinecure in one of the oligarchical pensioners villages set up by the finance industry for former servants of maintaining the status quo, it all became a great opportunity for national tut-tutting. The President of the University made a pitiful public apology; your cheeks and mine would burn with shame at such personal and professional abasement, but these people are the worst sort of masochists, and they get off on their own humiliation, so long as it’s in the service of someone with a slightly higher rank in the hierarchy. She promised that these students would “face consequences”, and the university has formed the hilariously Soviet “Committee on the Events of October 29^th”. No, really.

Divisive, intemperate, ineffective. There’s plenty of scolding to go around, much of it from liberals who ostensibly see themselves as opponents of Ray Kelly. Most of these are reliable party Democrats who forever plead for work within the system. And it’s no coincidence that they call it work. Politics, including its PR arm, the press, is a profession. We can’t have all this shouting in the workplace. Some of us are trying to get something done here. Typical of this attitude and its attendant misunderstandings is Democratic commenter par excellence Katha Pollitt, of The Nation, who writes:

More important, shouting Kelly down shows lack of respect for the audience and for the larger—much larger—number of people who had never given stop-and-frisk much thought. By shutting down the event, activists successfully threw their weight around—all 100 or so of them—but did they persuade anyone that stop-and-frisk was a bad, racist policy? Did they build support for their larger politics and their movement? I don’t think so. I think the only minds that changed that night were of people who felt bewildered and irritated by being prevented from hearing Kelly speak by a bunch of screamers and now think leftists are cynical bullies who use and abandon free-speech arguments as it suits them.

It’s fashionable on the left to mock liberalism as weak tea—and sometimes it is. But you know what is getting rid of stop-and-frisk? Liberalism. A major force in the campaign against stop-and-frisk was the NYCLU, which carries the banner of free speech for all. And Bill de Blasio, who just won the mayoral election by a landslide, has pledged to get rid of the policy and Ray Kelly too. Those victories were not won by a handful of student radicals who stepped in with last-minute theatrics. They were won by people who spent years building a legal case and mobilizing popular support for change.

This is a type of rhetoric much-employed in the polite liberal press, a strategy for being superficially correct through artful misunderstanding. Nothing Pollitt says here is wrong, per se, and yet, if you ask me the proper temperature to roast a chicken and I tell you that the square root of two hundred and twenty-five is fifteen, well, what’s that got to do with the price of milk? You see, the point of shouting Ray Kelly off the dais isn’t to get rid of “stop-and-frisk,” which these students are sophisticated enough to understand as merely symptomatic of greater injustices and inequalities in American life. No, the point is to get rid of Ray Kelly, to make the point that he has nothing to say that’s deserving of public consumption, that he is a wicked fellow who ought to be drummed from public life, his opinions, like those of most of us, to be shared grumpily over beers with no one to listen but the other cranks and kooks drinking in the middle of the day. The point is to shame Brown University—admittedly, a difficult task, since the university in the form of its administration is, as noted, shameless—for inviting the weasely little fascist onto the stage in the first place.

After all, Bill de Blaisio’s presumptive firing of Kelly will not get rid of him, any more than the election of George Bush or the Enron fiasco could get rid of Larry Summers. I think de Blaisio’s comments on NYPD practices have been mostly laudable, and firing Kelly would be correct. But Kelly is going to get a bazillion dollars and a no-responsibility job at JP Morgan (or the like) for his troubles, and for the rest of his life, Brown University (and the like) is going to pay him tens of thousands of dollars a pop to opine sagely on the tradeoffs between the comforts of white people and the brutal oppression of everyone else in the service of an empirically dubious but psychically reassuring notion that this “reduces crime.” Paid public appearances are performances, and booing a bad band or a lousy soprano is not a First Amendment issue. If Kelly doesn’t want to be booed, he should recant and become less odious; otherwise, any effort to make him and his kind publicly unacceptable is a good, clean game.

The Enterprise of Late, State Capitalism Constructs a Sort of Cathedral

Poetry

Construct it out of prayers that you can’t quite
recall with full fidelity; you heard
some rabbi once, and distantly; the words
may not have been in English. Then you’ll write
instructions made of Morse-encoded light
machine-translated into songs by birds
and pleasure-whines of dogs discovering turds.
Then patent, IPO, and copyright.
Like god, it is a conjugation
of the verb, to be, irregular and yet
entirely essential, absolute,
humanity in whole its congregation,
a thing unbounded as an Aleph set.
Oh, frozen? Turn the power off. Reboot.

Va, pensiero

War and Politics

policy in disarray greenlight atmosphere of crisis deeply divided claimed lives proved prophetic touching off a crisis banking on the success intervention diplomatic breakthrough deeply ambivalent president contentious debate authoritarian governments enmeshed in a messy war debate dragged on emboldened strained relations messy threat of force paralysis . . .

These are the clichés of American mainstream foreign reporting, which is rarely more than the DC Local beat, from just the first quarter of a long New York Times article on the heart-rending, life-changing story of an administration at war with itself. It’s a sort of metafictive take on the Syrian civil war that manages to be almost entirely devoid of Syrians. Where they do appear, they serve in a solely adverbial capacity.

I’ve already seen some criticism of the story for making the neat arrangement of stock phrases a substitute for analysis, and it is true that it’s just terribly written, a parody of the house style of major American papers. (I idiosyncratically believe that terrible writing is among the greater contributors to their continued decline in American intellectual life; the chocked, neutered, non-committal, wishy-washy, passive prose of our Timeses and Posts is the literary equivalent of eating a box of stale crackers without water.) I agree with that criticism, obviously, but could the story have been written any other way? Is there anything to analyze? It describes, after all, a non-event; a series of non-events. I know we’re supposed to believe that this sort of reporting exposes the inner workings of the American government, that our civic understanding is somehow enriched by knowing that Samantha Power and some other guy disagree with each other, that the mechanics of these little office dramas, because they happen to revolve around questions of war, are of critical importance to the life of the Republic. Well, I say: bogus.

Actually, these people could be arguing over who does the dishes in the kitchenette and why no one ever washes out the microwave. These are conflicts of temperament and personality in an office, and what makes it so appalling is that an actual event, a war in which many thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—of people have died and are dying, serves as the last cupcake from the staff meeting that I was saving for after lunch and someone ate it. Yes, someone will say that the attitude of the administration toward Syria is important; we should know when and how the president reached his decision over what to do or not to do there. Well, I’d say, no, not really.

The relentless refocusing of world events onto the minor squabbles of American actors over how to respond to them not only serves to trivialize all the other lives and societies in the world beyond Washington, but also, ironically, it fails utterly in reporting on what the US is, in fact, doing in other countries around the world. We see, for instance, some passing references to the CIA smuggling arms to rebel factions, but that’s lost in the swirl of detail about how crisply Mr. McDonough responded, or how the President’s enthusiasm cooled.

Behind these arias, there’s a war on, but the tunes are so familiar to us; honey, let’s just stay in our seats.

An Incoherent List of Books Demonstrating Why I Am Not on Any Sort of Curriculum Committee

Uncategorized

My tweetfriend @PEG asked after books his kids ought to read during their adolescent unschooling, and since 1.) lists are fun and 2.) I’m unable to resist the calling of my inner pedant, oh boy, I’m gonna give him a list. Idiosyncratic and in no particular order, and apologies for using the word “great” so frequently:

The Story of Philosophy, by Will (and Ariel) Durant. It’s everything you could ask for in an introduction to Western philosophy, thorough but not didactic, elegant but never breezy, at once conversational and erudite. It covers the big guys from Plato through Bergson and Russell and James. I have my dad’s old paperback copy from the seventies, and it’s one of my favorite books.

Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne. This slightly violates Pascal-Emmanuel’s dictum that the list steer clear of books already on the “Great” lists, but it’s one of those titles that everyone seems to know and no one seems to have actually read, which is a shame, because it’s one of the three great inventive novels in the Western canon (the others are Don Quixote and Moby Dick, btw), and because it’s just so funny and such a joy to read. There is no innovation of modern or postmodern fiction that Sterne didn’t anticipate back in 1759. The sentences can be immensely complex and convoluted, so this is also a great book for anyone who wants to truly master the English language.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, by Philip K. Dick. I love Dick’s earlier works; Martian Time-Slip and The Man in the High Castle were two of the great loves of my own adolescence, but Dick’s last novel, published posthumously, is at once his most philosophical and his most affecting, a step away from the madness and disorientation of his earlier work (though they aren’t forgotten or discarded here) and toward a contemplation of humanity, divinity, and belief. I love the whole VALIS Trilogy, but The Transmigration is the great Christian novel of the 20th Century, if you ask me.

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder. Just terrifying: a re-centering of the whole narrative of WW2 to the Eastern Front. Unrelentingly horrific, but so necessary to Anglo-American and French perspectives that the war was fought in Normandy.

The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Half poet and half documentarian, she’s more remembered now for her poem “To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century,” which was adopted by the Reform movement, but the poems in The Book of the Dead especially are a masterpiece of both poetics and journalism. In a way, she was a mid-century heir to Melville.

Love, Death, and the Changing of Seasons by Marilyn Hacker. A sonnet sequence written in the mid-eighties about getting older and about the end of a love affair.

Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. Ferris’s first novel. It’s sad and yet hysterical, written in a plural first person that somehow never bugs you. One of the really great workplace novels of the last few decades.

On the Floor, by Aifric Campbell. Another workplace novel, this one set in the trading floors of an investment bank and elsewhere in the boom-boom Wild West of The City of London in the early nineties that manages to be simultaneously polemical, wistfully sad, and utterly alien.

And speaking of aliens, Consider Phlebas and the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. Banks, recently deceased, wrote about a dozen novels set in a fantastically advanced, post-scarcity, space-faring society that found itself often intervening in the affairs of lesser civilizations. Banks was one of science fiction’s great moral and economic thinkers.

The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner. Already wrote about this one.

The Comforters, by Muriel Spark. Most high-school reading lists include The Prime of Miss Jean Brody, but Spark’s first novel is a personal favorite of mine, and I still think it may be the best of her works. In the great tradition of British novelists converting to Catholicism and going slightly crazy in a good way.

Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene. Again, an early work by a Catholic Brit that I consider in many ways superior to the (nevertheless very, very good) works that came after. Gangsters, girlfriends, and the priestly admonition: “You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the . . . appalling . . . strangeness of the mercy of God.”

Wonderboys, by Michael Chabon. A lot of people seem to think this is Chabon’s weakest work, a shaggy-dog second novel that lacked the energy of his first book or the inventiveness and AMBITION of the coming novels, but I think it’s his best, a great, Lebowskian stoner comedy, an academic satire as sharp as McCarthy or Jarrell, and one of the only books about writing books that doesn’t make me want to hurl it against a wall.

Forewards and Afterwards, by W.H. Auden. Essays on everything from education in the classics to Protestantism.

Foe, by J.M. Coetzee. Maybe not his best, but one that I studied in college, which contemplates, among other things, the nature of slavery and servitude.

Mumbo Jumbo, by Ishmael Reed. The great conspiracy novel of American literature. I’ll take this over Pynchon any day. Egyptian gods, secret societies, an Afrocentric history of the world, and jazz.

The Gates of Repentance. The Reform machzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. A bit of a “greatest hits” compared to some of the Conservative and Orthodox machzorim, but lots of English (although, fair warning, about half is still in untranslated Hebrew). Still, a very good read for a Christian seeking something other than academic or narrative introduction to Jewish belief and prayer.

Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard. The rare instance where an author’s most critically acclaimed work is also his best. Stoppard is one of those playwrights whose work is better read than seen, if only because actors rarely seem to figure out what he’s talking about. Math, the nature of time, Byron.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way, by Timothy Ferris. This is the physical-science counterpart to Durant’s history of philosophy, an amazing survey of the state of physics and astronomy from Ptolemy to the twentieth century. When I was a skinny science nerd in high school, I carried it everywhere.

Breaking Open the Head: A Psychadelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, by Daniel Pinchbeck. Before Pinchbeck became a bore, yammering on about 2012 and the Mayan calendar, he actually studied and participated in chemical and shamanistic rituals all over the world. Part travelogue and part ethnography and part plain, good-old-fashioned gonzo journalism.

Miami, by Joan Didion. Her best collection of essays and one of the truest, strangest portraits of the Cold War in North America.

Erasure: A Novel, by Percival Everett. Everett’s satire on a black author becoming A Black Author.

Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant, by Edmond Caldwell. Destroy narrative, eradicate character, spoof Beckett, mock James Wood. One of my favorite novels of the last few years, and an amazing, funny, and even heartbreaking book that shows how much more is possible in a novel than the sort of thing you read about in the Sunday Times.

Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity, by David Kirby. Curse the editor who came up with this awful title. Although partly a sort of procedural investigation into several deadly incidents with captive killer whales, this book is really about the relationship of humans to non-human intelligence, a moral investigation of what it means for us to discover that we live among other thinking and feeling creatures.

We Like Ike, Man

Culture, Education, Uncategorized, War and Politics

I graduated from Oberlin College ten years ago, and if the college was in many ways an exemplar of the sort of economic inequality and unfairness that define the waking American dream, a charming oasis of unostentatious but everywhere evident family wealth amid a lot of Cass Gilbert architecture plunked obscenely in the middle of one of the poorest counties in Ohio, then it was also a fine example of what a college or university ought to be. Yes, it had its share of bureaucrats, and yes, there was an occasional adjunct, though usually just visiting for a year right out of graduate school, but there were precious few deans; I never once met a “director” of anything other than, maybe, campus dining; the departments were run by faculty; the office of career services was a distant backwater, an uncomfortable fishbowl near an underutilized computer lab; we got stoned and complained mightily about the fascist administration of then-college president, Nancy Dye, about the progressive, radical spirit of the school disappearing in the assault of Ivy-League-ism, but in retrospect I most remember that everyone seemed genuinely to believe that the purpose of the whole shebang was for everyone to read a lot, think a lot, and learn a few things. There were a bunch of professors, most of them seemingly well-paid, and not very many students as far as the ratios went. It was very expensive, but you could multiply the number of kids times the number of dollars per kid and come up with a reasonable cost for operating such an institution for a year. Select any random college employee, and you could figure out without too much trouble what it was that he or she did all day.

So you can imagine the revelation of entering a business school at a large public university almost a decade later. Great gouts and floods of ink have already broken the dam and overrun the banks of the conversation about “the rising costs of higher education,” and I won’t bother repeating all the data that others have collected, collated, and explained better than I ever could. But I can’t help but share my anecdotal astonishment at the number of inessential administrators running around. Even the dean (especially the dean?) of the business school drifted from here to there on campus in a slightly overlarge suit that seemed expressly tailored to contain both a man and his aura of uselessness. Of the dozens I encountered, only one manager, a sensible, lovely woman named Linda, far down the hierarchy of pay and title, ever managed to get anything done; I mean, she got everything done, from our schedules to the hiccups in our travel arrangements when we went to conferences abroad.

I don’t mean to cast aspersions on their characters. One of the bad habits in the radical’s critique of any institution is to presume evil intentions on the parts of people who simply, unthinkingly serve. Most of the people involved in the spiraling scam of university administration are just doing their jobs, however hopelessly unnecessary they may be to the actual operation of an actual organization dedicated to the real teaching of students. Making some assistant director for recruitment the object of moral ire is like hating on some corporate spend analyst in the bowels of Enron. How many of us would give up our livelihood at the vague prospect that our employer might be causing an indefinable and distant harm? The assistant director of recruitment just wants to make his quota for the year, save enough money for a vacation, pay his rent, go to a nice restaurant from time to time. Does he realize, in some general way, that he’s implicated in the personal debt crisis, or the Taylorization of learning? Hey, he went to grad school, too. He’s no dummy. But you gotta feed the monkey.

This isn’t to say that there’s no moral blame; it is to say that you’ve gotta amortize that blame over an awful lot of associate deans and provosts and boards of trustees. We are uncomfortable with the idea of distributed guilt, but there it is. What makes the problem intractable is precisely its lack of some monstrous secret master, some center, not to mention the essential ordinariness of all the participation by all the beneficiaries of a rent-seeking education apparatus that largely apes finance and government by siphoning money from the general wealth and moving it to certain select cadres of the population. That last bit, of course, makes the whole thing even more confounding, since the scam is so non-particular; you can’t even blame the institutions of education, which are only comporting themselves to an even broader social and economic pattern. The modern university is to contemporary American society what that vice-provost for media relations is to the university: a functionary, just doing its job.

So I’ve been thinking about David Petraeus, a former military commander in Iraq and Afghanistan and the director of the CIA for a year before an inconsequential sex affair involving a sycophant biographer and bankrupt Tampa con artist caused him to resign. He was hired by CUNY to teach the sort of bogus celebrity seminar that appeals to college administrators because it predominantly involves reading Economist articles and consulting group reports and considering how to reproduce them in the form of PowerPoint presentations, in other words, exactly what an assistant director of does for much of the day. This is a slightly more advanced version of the kind of education foisted on primary and secondary students, with the slide show template filling in for the bubble sheet. It’s mostly notable in that it requires no thought; it’s an exercise in formatting. For this, the university offered to pay the general $200,000, later reduced to $150,000, and then, when a load of malcontents refused to shut up about it and administrators got worried about bad press, finally, they knocked it down to a one-buck honorarium.

This original scandal was mostly about money. Adjuncts were starving in the outer boroughs, while some four-star jerk was going to get paid $10,000 an hour to show up and gallop through material prepared for him by his own underpaid assistants. What was fascinating about this episode was less the imbroglio itself than the reaction of the participants; most notable to me was the initial incomprehension and painfully slow dawning of the problem on the administrators who brought the general to the table to begin with. Their first reaction was visceral disbelief. But, but, he’s David Petreaus. Former 4-star general and CIA director David Petraeus! These are people for whom status and career recognition hold intrinsic value—name and title function as a kind of irreducible gold standard of human worth. The idea that one might not richly compensate such a guy just for showing up was so alien to them that they could not, at first, understand what the fuss was about. The relationship between this and the underpayment of temporary faculty was thoroughly beyond them.

But eventually they did come around to the idea that there was, at least, some sort of fuss, and they grudgingly reduced his pay. With the economic argument now largely undercut, opposition to Petreaus’s appointment found a new target in the idea that he is an abominable war criminal who presided over unspeakable violence and torture in the illegal occupation of other countries, and who now sullies the university with his very presence. Since I am, and have always been, deeply opposed to US military action abroad, the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, I’m innately sympathetic to this view, but I also believe that we err in assigning this sort of direct and unique moral culpability to Petreaus, that we commit, in effect, the mirrored error of his boosters, who generally proclaim him the hero and genius who rescued one, possibly two American wars from utter catastrophe.

Petreaus strikes me as a skilled bureaucrat who rose steadily through the ranks of America’s largest and most byzantine bureaucracy, but I find it hard to believe that a man who assigns Brookings Institution readings and Washington Post op-eds as anything other than object lessons in bad prose can be any kind of genius. His legendary success in Iraq was no success at all, not even by America’s own self-interested, self-designed, and self-applied metrics, and his supposedly ingenious reinvention of America’s Iraq occupation was never more than a tactical redeployment cribbed from a centuries-old colonial playbook. Remember the glowing reports of military brass gathered in dark conference rooms watching The Battle of Algiers? We’ve been to this theater before. His proponents would cast him as some kind of Eisenhower; his opponents as some kind of latter-day Heydrich. In reality, he was a functionary, and for all the horror perpetrated under his command, he was only the latest in a long line of commanders going back many decades. The war in Iraq, let’s not forget, began not under George Bush, but under his father; the US never ceased its low-level conflict under Clinton; Bush Jr. just re-upped; Obama continued it, although it seems as if he may have been out-foxed by the Iranians into withdrawing at last. The US project in the Middle East dates to the passing of influence from Britain to America after the Second World War; we’ve been fighting conflicts and proxy conflicts in the region for half a century. Petraeus may indeed be a criminal, as the internal auditors at Lehman were criminals, but in our zeal to condemn, let’s remember that all of these guys just showed up for work and did what they were told. Better men would have resigned; good men would never have found themselves in such a position to begin with; but there aren’t that many good men in the world, and most Americans do what they’re told.

None of this absolves Petreaus of responsibility or culpability. He was, after all, a general, but the main characteristic of his life and career is not the vicious contemplation of how to bring violence, misery, and death to peoples around the world, but rather the stubborn inability to think about that violence, misery, and death, to consider it in any way other than the unfortunate but necessary ancillary outcome of some other thing that had to have been done. The very same unthinking allows the President of the United States of America stand before the United Nations and say that the US harbors no imperial agenda because it frequently invades other countries. This is taken as evidence of extraordinary hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance, but both interpretations require an element of cognition that’s wholly lacking. The principal characteristic of these sorts of pronouncements is their lack of deliberateness and their lack of thought. These are just rote recitations of obligatory memorization; is it any wonder that a society led by such cliché machines chooses to measure intellectual achievement through standardized tests?

I think this is the really salient point. A brutal and unfair society requires a population that conceives of the intellect in terms of taking instruction. Even in my own student days, when testing was far less important, I can recall teachers and exam proctors stalking up and down the aisles between desks warning us of the dire consequences of not carefully reading the instructions. A culture thus educated develops mental habits that revolve around taking and interpreting commands. Its sense of duty and ethics isn’t is this right, but rather, am I doing this right? In this regard, the appointment of a David Petreaus, or a John Yoo, or a Condoleeza Rice to prominent positions in the academy are less significant because these people are monstrous than because they are expressly not so. When Yoo is asked about the torture memos he authored and replies that he was just providing the executive with what it requested and required, people tend to see obfuscation, but I see an instructive kind of honesty: he just can’t imagine that one wouldn’t provide what his boss required of him. He didn’t torture anyone.

This by the way, was Arendt’s misunderstood point—she had the bad luck to coin a very quotable phrase that distracted from it. What enables evil is not so much the capacity of ordinary people to be converted to dark purposes, but instead the incapacity of people to think about purpose and consequence. Our dilemma is that this form of thoughtlessness is exactly what the reformers of education at all levels seek. Unfortunately, for the most part, they too are unable to think about what they’re doing. The people who hire a Patreaus only perceive that his instruction might in some way help some students do what he did, and what they themselves have done to a lesser degree: enter an institution, serve it, and move upward through its ranks to their natural place in the overall order. Does it occur to them that this is Huxley’s dystopia, a life of servitude in a predetermined class interspersed with the occasional recreational bunga bunga and some Coors Light Lime? No. They haven’t read it. But you can divide into groups of four and prepare an in-class presentation for the next time we meet. Here is a Harvard Business Review article summarizing the case. Use it as the basis for your work.

Small Fowls Screaming over the Yet Yawning Gulf

Economy, Education

It was the last week of our Executive MBA program and we were drinking car bombs on the patio outside the fake Irish pub in Pittsburgh’s dull, chain-infected South Side Works development, a few blocks from the better bars on Carson Street. One of the few concrete lessons I learned as an MBA student was how to get staggeringly drunk in the middle of the day. As an aesthete, a Francophile, and a frantic, obsessive exerciser, I tended to limit my day drinking to a single glass of austere white wine with lunch, and even that only when vacationing in Europe, perhaps in New York if I was feeling particularly louche. But The Businessmen, as I had come to affectionately call my classmates, were titans of lunch-hour beer drinking, driven in part by a general spirit of fratty, macho competition, but in larger part by the growing realization, as our program crawled toward its conclusion, that our classroom experience was bogus, and the only solution was to drink.

This was actually my biggest surprise in MBA-land. I was ideologically and temperamentally opposed to the degree; as a matter of principle, I rejected the very idea of the thing. But it was a couple of years ago, and I hadn’t yet sold a book, and I’m a non-profit manager, and everyone said that I needed the fucker on my resume. I expected to learn a bit of the phony math of finance, formalize my accounting experience, brush up on my stats, ignore the catechismal belief in the divine efficacy of labor cost arbitrage, and despise my classmates, a cohort of thirty-to-fifty-year-old managers and executives from much larger and more horrible companies than my own. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that, while the academic portion was even dumber, more banal, and more ethically objectionable and politically suspect than I’d initially imagined, the guys—The Businessmen—were really pretty fucking great.

I suppose that traditional MBA students in fancier schools with dreams of Goldman Sachs salaries are emptier vessels for the promised miracles of this most American of religions, this socially acceptable Scientology, but a bunch of guys who’ve worked the trenches of the American Corporation for a decade or so are pretty immune to the evangel. Yeah, we all buckled down, or tried to, and learned to calculate the Net Present Value of a growing annuity, or whatever, but when it came to Porter’s Five Forces or the balanced scorecard or disruptive technologies and transformative innovations, well, our eyeballs went right back to our laptop screens. Which brings us back to the patio of Claddagh on a cloudless, 80-degree day in July. “Hey Nicky,” one of the other businessmen yelled. “How much money did you spend shopping online during the program? Order of magnitude!”

Nick had somehow acquired both a bottle of Malbec and a pint of Guinness, and he looked about ready to slide off his chair and curl up under the table. “Oh man,” he said. “At least fifteen grand!” We all had laptops, and we all used them uniquely to while away the hours and hours of nonsense to which we were subjected in the pursuit of a thing that our various bosses and mentors felt was important for our CVs. Nicky shopped. Stewball read ESPN and Deadspin. Papa Stokes seemed to do actual work for his actual job. Solutions hunted animated .gifs, which he broadcast to the rest of us via gchat. I tended to watch pirate feeds of bike races on cyclingfans. A chacun son goût.

Inescapably, I recalled those hundreds of hours staring at my twitter feed or listening to Sean Kelly mumble about Tour climbs in my earbud while some earnest academic tried to cajole us into thinking strategically for the strategic disposition of future strategies when I read the Times’ latest survey of crackpot education-industry profit-taking—in this case, a scheme to sell the undercarriage protection package a bunch of shitty tablets to a lot of schools based on the vaguely MBAish idea that education needs “disruption.” The article’s author, Carlo Rotella, is the director of something called American Studies at Boston College and presumably a living human creature, but the writing could have been produced by a New York Times Article Generator Algorithm; brief Statement of Authorial Skepticism followed by Interviews with Interested Parties, Reluctantly in Favor, followed by Entrepreneurial Boosterism, followed by Designated Third-Party Doubter, followed by Assurances of Good Intentions on All Sides of Debate, Despite Their Differences. This formula is deeply ideological, although it presents itself as a kind of position of intellectual neutral buoyancy, merely immersed in the vast, rolling waters all around it.

The story is this: Joel Klein, a vaguely ghoulish but fairly typical on-the-make ex-public administrator, gets himself hired by Rupert Murdoch, whose money people see the potential for profit in selling shiny trinkets to America’s beleaguered schools. Rotella calls this “the tendency to turn to the market to address social problems,” deliberate phrasing that’s meant to indicate the author questions, modestly, the application of for-profit business models to public goods, although it mostly just reveals the author’s own unrecognized ideological assumptions. Selling crap to the taxpayers is capitalism; government purchasing is the market. Whether an incinerator in Harrisburg or a billion-dollar jet that doesn’t fly in the rain, the business of American business is public rent-seeking, and education is just one more tank of money to siphon off. No one is “turning to the market”; a lot of administrators, like Klein used to be, are performing their pre-designated market function by purchasing marked-up commodities. Most of them assume that they, too, will one day move up the salary scale when GE hires them to sell brain implants in the next round of disruptive change. This isn’t a misapplication of the system. This is the system.

Disruption is a very of-the-moment pseudo-coinage of the business world; it’s meant to imply a historical process rather than the more mundane reality that “disruptive” and “transformative” change is as old as business itself. You figure out how to make some shit, and then you go out and convince a bunch of people that they really need to buy it. Do they? They will when they hear about its amazing, time-saving features. The old anecdote about the housewife saving not one second of housework by purchasing a power vacuum applies here. I say this as a lover of technology; but a true aficionado knows the limits of his hobbies. I happen to think and write better in the evening when I’ve had a glass of wine, but I don’t prescribe a universal program of Côtes-du-Rhône in our elementary schools.

And in any case, when you look at the sales pitch, you see the same old clichés about the workplace of tomorrow peddled as the great social inflection point whose crisis-borne arrival necessitates the adoption of these critical tools that just happen to cost $199 a pop. The simple fact of that traditional dollar-short-of-an-even-hundred commercial pricing model ought to tip you that something may be slightly crooked here, the transformative promise more marketing than prophecy. “Robin Britt, the Personalized Learning Environment Facilitator (PLEF)”—no, really—leaps Ballmer-like to the front of the room and engages in a little future-is-nowism for the crowd:

His “before” picture was the typical 19th-century classroom, the original template for our schools. He likened it to industrial shop floors designed for mass production: “People sitting in rows, all doing the same thing at the same time, not really connected to each other.” He contrasted that with a postindustrial workplace where temporary groupings of co-workers collaborate on tasks requiring intellectual, not physical capabilities. “We need a schoolhouse that prepares students to do that kind of work,” he said.

Oh, please. We all have jobs, and we all know about the “team-based environment.” This notion of the collaborative workplace is totally in vogue and totally crap. Maybe that shit sells to the new crop of 23-year-old business students, but the rest of us work for a living, and we’ve heard it before. Everyone still has a boss, and the annual review is the same as it ever was. Meanwhile, the idea that the 19^th-century schoolhouse was an emergent social property of the age of mass production misdates the assembly line by at least half a century; the notion that industrial production is a non-cooperative endeavor is spoken like a man who, though he “holds an M.B.A. and a J.D. from the University of North Carolina,” has never seen a shop floor; the idea that most jobs consist of intellectually engaged programmers tossing tablets across the table at each other as if they’re in the Enterprise Ready Room is as divorced from the working reality of America today as the Just Hang In There poster on the Guidance Counselor’s wall from the anxious quotidian existence of the average high-schooler.

The even more basic fallacy is this: that education is a process of injection molding whereby our plastic youth are forced into a utile shape for the machinery of future business profit, AKA employment. Even were this the meaning of education (it’s not, but assume for a minute), the model fails. You’re telling me that giving a third-grader a piece of prior-gen computer technology today is really going to prepare him for the world of tomorrow? Can’t we just teach these poor kids to read and let them play Oregon Trail every once in a while as a treat? Yes, yes, a lot of successful sorts want schools to look more like business, although business mostly looks like a lot of disengaged peons watching their eBay bids and thumbing through Facebook until 5 o’clock. They want disruption and transformation, a classroom full of the dynamism of market capitalism. Except they still believe in all the pieties of universal education, and yet they propose that the solution to its ills is an economic system in which the majority of new ideas and enterprises fail utterly.

Why So Syria?

Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

My friend D. recently sent me an email asking the really critical question: why does Captain Janeway suck? Fortunately, I had recently re-watched most of Voyager, and had given the question a fair bit of cogitation prior to his asking. Viewed in relatively quick succession over the course of a month or so, what you really notice is that the Janeway character combines an immoveable moral rigidity, which manifests as a strident self-righteousness, with an extraordinary capriciousness, a mercurial ethic completely at odds with her self-presentation as a pole of right conduct.

It strikes me now that this is the perfect analog for the Obama administration’s approach to armed violence and the use of the military, stentorian correctness overlaying a feckless utilitarianism, utter conviction the costume of callous ineptitude. The last few months’ red line drawing and redrawing have been as arbitrary as any underwritten weekly serial, and the promises of punitive action suggest an adolescent aesthetic enthusiasm for some explosions right around the third commercial break. That may even be over-crediting this government; at least B-rate TV throws in the space battle because the audience demands it.

Yes, there is the irony of the government that murders 16-year-olds because it doesn’t like their dads arrogating to itself the right to punish other governments for choosing the wrong method with which to kill their own citizens, but I think the grimmer joke is the US so publicly preparing to once more wade into a civil conflict as an act of Public Relations, because if you listen to the appeals and to the rationales, what you hear, again and again, is that the US must make a tepid—albeit deadly—gesture of disapproval at the conduct of a war in order to maintain its brand as the industry leader in hasty moral arbitration. “They must not doubt our resolve.” Yes, and there’s a reason that phrase sounds like an ad for detergent.

Truly, all the agonizing—do we, or do we not light the rockets and launch the mortars—has the real moral seriousness of a generically pretty 30-something commercial actor wondering “where do all these stains come from.” Casuistry is deeply repellent as theater, and the fact that our government is willing to kill even against the better judgment of its own professional military is a sign of just how little it really values life. For all the showy agonizing, the administration has treated its decision to kill as casually as any decision to issue a press release. The thing is already written; they’re just waiting for the right moment to blast it out.

Schnell! Eeeeaaasssy. Um?

Culture, Economy, Media, Movies

I walked into Elysium a few minutes late, and Matt Damon was getting the beat-down from a robot, to whom he’d had the temerity to back talk. This robot was the only character in the film whose motivations were clear and whose actions were a function of its character. Nothing else made any sense.

In the future, an orbital post-scarcity society with the capacity to manipulate complex organic systems at the sub-molecular level maintains Fordist manufactories on Earth. Is it just to give the proles something to do? A single line of dialogue to the effect of, “We gotta keep them busy or they will revolt,” might have covered this flaw, although how an earthbound population could revolt against a well-armed space station, manifest numerical superiority or no, is quite a question, and in any case, most of the people on Earth don’t appear to have work, so there goes that theory. William Fitchner plays the vicious capitalist who runs this robot mill. He does most of his via computer terminal in a hermetically sealed office; naturally, we wonder: why is he on earth at all? Couldn’t he just Skype? Rather more to the point, in an orbital society capable of manipulating individual atoms, why is there still enterprise capitalism? Is it like contact sports, a vicious and anachronistic entertainment, practiced by only a few professionals, kept around for entertainment and kicks? Well, our industrialist suggests that it’s essential he get his company back to profitability, and he is willing to assist Jodie Foster in a coup to do so. Wait, wait, wait a minute. She offers him a 200-year contract to build Elysium’s missiles and robots. Does this not imply a competing firm, or firms? But there’s only one space station. How are these other firms in business? Who’s buying their robots and missiles? Am I going insane? What day is this?

The movie desires to be an allegory of illegal immigration, the hispanophone have-nots of a SoCal favela relentlessly throwing themselves over the Rio Grande of Near Earth Orbit in order to get to the better lives Elysium has to offer. Wait, what? Oh, no, I’m sorry. They’re going for miracle cures. Elysium doesn’t offer a better life. It just offers to fix your boo-boos. Three out of every four shiploads of immigrants gets blown to smithereens, so, like, it appears that you do not increase your chances of beating that cancer, if you consider the actual odds. Here again, the motivations are completely nonsensical, and needlessly so. We could understand people risking their lives to escape this wretched Earth in order to make a new life in space, but all evidence suggests that even those who get there and get their thyroid problems and sugar diabeetuss cleared up get deported right back to our little ball of pollution. Your cancer’s fixed, but you’re still going to starve to death. Hm.

Meanwhile, on Elysium, Jodie Foster plays a French fascist. Fascism, like capitalism, seems an odd ideology for a post-economic paradise, but I suppose assholes will always be with us. She plays some kind of secretary of defense, and she growls that the feckless leadership of Elysium is going to get them all killed, or something, despite the fact that everything on Elysium seems to be going absolutely swimmingly, and the few Earthers who do manage to crash land in this vast La Jolla in the sky appear to be swiftly rounded up and returned. Again and again and again, nothing about this world justifies her snarling aggression (nor her French, but I suppose it’s just meant to convey aristocratic awfulness, so we’ll laissez-faire).Why not make immigration a really confounding problem? The smugglers have figured out how to get hundreds, thousands of people onto Elysium. It’s upsetting the political order. They’re voting for OBAMA! The white peoples is gettin’ restless. Jodie Foster seule pouvait eux sauver !

So Jodie Foster wants to take over Elysium for no reason, and she has William Fitchner rewrite the code for the Elysium operating system. Which he can do, because he or his company built it? Why is he in such desperate straits, then? Why is he bugging Jodie Foster for contracts? Why doesn’t he take over? I don’t know, I guess he read the script, and it says that he didn’t. He’s motivated by money in a world where money is irrelevant. Elysium has no stores, no ATMs. It’s just houses and swimming pools. Robots bring you champagne. At no point do we see any sort of transactional exchange, except of course when William begs Jodie for a contract. No one has a reason to do anything. William Fitchner goes to Earth, writes the magical spell to take over Elysium, and gets shot down by Matt Damon. Damon is dying because he got irradiated building robots in the factory that exists for no reason. Apparently this happens all the time, because they have a robot whose design features make it useful solely for the purpose of pulling irradiated humans out of a robot chamber. Yo, why didn’t you just send a robot into the radiation chamber in the first place, guys? No, Jim! You’ll flood the whole compartment! He’s dead already.

Anyway, Matt Damon and a gang of dudes who have kept Mazda 626s operational for two centuries shoot down his airplane. Matt Damon has been technologically augmented, and they download the shit into his brain. They unscramble it on the Dell desktop that I had in my office when I was an administrative assistant 10 years ago. Aw, shee-it, it’s the codes to do something. Argue argue. Run run run run run. Jodie Foster sends an augmented assassin whose motivation is that he fucking loves killing shit after Matt Damon. Eventually, everyone ends up on Elysium, because although this is the future and they are able to manipulate matter at the atomic level, if Jodie Foster is distracted for a sec, any asshole can just roll right through the gate, because Elysium’s automated systems read the script and realized that’s what they were supposed to do because of the plot. For no particular reason, the assassin stabs Jodie Foster in the neck with a piece of glass and decides that now he wants to rule Elysium. Has he ever even been to Elysium? Who cares? Jodie Foster bleeds to death on the floor in a closet with a woman who is only in this movie to prove that Matt Damon is not gay, even though Matt Damon is clearly gay; the only person with whom he has a convincing emotional connection is the sexy DL Latin thug car thief who is his best friend, who gets killed, and whose death is Damon’s one moment of actual pathos. These two obviously were boning, but don’t worry, look, there’s this woman!

So the movie kills its main villain in the middle of the last act for no reason, and then reminds you of the narrative senselessness of this act by occasionally cutting back to the room where Jodie Foster is literally lying dead under a tarp, which is the one allegory this movie gets right, except that it is an allegory for this movie. Then some shit happens, and then it turns out that there is no reason at all for the material privation and medical hopelessness on earth, and then the movie is over. I suppose there was some decent production design, in the sense that it all looked better than Star Wars Episode I. Foster does a fine villain, but her character makes so little sense that her performance was lost, and although Damon does the everyman with some skill, he gets lost as soon as the action starts. Bourne proved him a capable action hero in the hands of a capable action director. Here, alas, no.

Look, the future as an allegory for the present moment is effectively the whole point of science fiction, so the movie’s intentions were in the right place, but Blomkamp didn’t think about his concept. You don’t need a Tolkienian backstory to build a realistic fictional world, but consistency matters. If no one has any reason to do anything, or if they act constantly in contravention of their own apparent interests, then all an audience can do is be confused. The movie struggles to present its characters in the tradition of psychological realism. This may be the future, but these people are just like us, etc. etc. And yet, because everything these characters do is in the service of a story that ought not be taking place at all according to its own rules and logic, all these emotions and psychologies are rendered not more, but less real.