White Read online

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  A cultural low point of 2015 was the effort by at least two hundred members of PEN America, a leading literary organization to which most writers belong, to not present the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris with a newly established Freedom of Expression Courage Award. Not everyone admires this satirical weekly magazine’s lewd cartoons and takedowns of Catholicism, Judaism and Islam (these including obscene drawings of Muhammad), but some people really like it, others are offended by it, and before the massacre it hadn’t even been selling all that well. When two offended Islamist gunmen burst into Charlie Hebdo’s offices that January and murdered twelve staff members while shouting “God is great!” and “The prophet is avenged!” people everywhere were shocked but perhaps not surprised—this was where we had been for a while. And it seemed appropriate for PEN to acknowledge this loss by giving Charlie Hebdo a Freedom of Expression award in May at their annual gala in New York. And yet, there were a few American writers who nuanced this tragedy into a sentimental narrative about the case and encouraged boycotting this recognition of it. Their argument was that Charlie Hebdo made fun of people who were already marginalized, and by granting this award PEN would be “valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.” My reaction was the same one I’d had to similar sentiments that were being voiced over the past few years, except now swifter and harder: So. Fucking. What. Should any murder be rationalized away because somebody got offended by how an opinion was expressed?

  The writers who were boycotting the PEN award had decided to draw a line where freedom of speech should start and where it should end—and once again I began imagining the frightening muzzle that increasingly proposed itself to me, in which one faction of our society demands the censorship of another faction in the name of their own ideas of noble intentions and notions of peace and goodwill. I never assumed that PEN was honoring any specific content, but rather that it was honoring a principle. The award was ultimately given to Charlie Hebdo, because many more PEN members believed the magazine deserved the award. But there were still the two hundred who were offended and felt Charlie Hebdo went “too far” in its satire, which suggested there was a limited number of targets that humorists and satirists were allowed to pursue. These protesters were mostly Americans. So, where were we coming from?

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  If you’re a smart white person who happens to be so traumatized by something that you refer to yourself in conversation as a “survivor-victim,” you probably should contact the National Center for Victims and ask them for help. If you’re a Caucasian adult who can’t read Shakespeare or Melville or Toni Morrison because it might trigger something harmful and such texts could damage your hope to define yourself through your victimization, then you need to see a doctor, get into immersion therapy or take some meds. If you feel you’re experiencing “micro-aggressions” when someone asks you where you are from or “Can you help me with my math?” or offers a “God bless you” after you sneeze, or a drunken guy tries to grope you at a Christmas party, or some douche purposefully brushes against you at a valet stand in order to cop a feel, or someone merely insulted you, or the candidate you voted for wasn’t elected, or someone correctly identifies you by your gender, and you consider this a massive societal dis, and it’s triggering you and you need a safe space, then you need to seek professional help. If you’re afflicted by these traumas that occurred years ago, and that is still a part of you years later, then you probably are still sick and in need of treatment. But victimizing oneself is like a drug—it feels so delicious, you get so much attention from people, it does in fact define you, making you feel alive and even important while showing off your supposed wounds, no matter how minor, so people can lick them. Don’t they taste so good?

  This widespread epidemic of self-victimization—defining yourself in essence by way of a bad thing, a trauma that happened in the past that you’ve let define you—is actually an illness. It’s something one needs to resolve in order to participate in society, because otherwise one’s not only harming oneself but also seriously annoying family and friends, neighbors and strangers who haven’t victimized themselves. The fact that one can’t listen to a joke or view specific imagery (a painting or even a tweet) and that one might characterize everything as either sexist or racist (whether or not it legitimately is) and therefore harmful and intolerable—ergo nobody else should be able to hear it or view it or tolerate it, either—is a new kind of mania, a psychosis that the culture has been coddling. This delusion encourages people to think that life should be a smooth utopia designed and built for their fragile and exacting sensibilities and in essence encourages them to remain a child forever, living within a fairy tale of good intentions. It’s impossible for a child or an adolescent to move past certain traumas and pain, though not necessarily for an adult. Pain can be useful because it can motivate you and it often provides the building blocks for great writing and music and art. But it seems people no longer want to learn from past traumas by navigating through them and examining them in their context, by striving to understand them, break them down, put them to rest and move on. To do this can be complicated and takes a lot of effort, but you would think someone in that much pain would try to figure out how to lessen it, however great the cost, instead of flinging it at others expecting them to automatically sympathize with you and not recoil with irritation and disgust.

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  In the summer of 2016 the University of Chicago sent a letter to its incoming class of 2020 stating in essence that no “trigger warnings” or “safe spaces” would be allowed on campus, that there would be no crackdown on micro-aggressions and that visiting speakers would be allowed to speak without being boycotted because a fraction of the student body felt they’d be victimized—all of which had been almost ubiquitous at campuses around the country that year. The announcement was greeted by almost everyone with a huge sigh of exhausted relief; this seemed to mark a forward movement, a progression. Instead of coddling, babying, and letting students victimize themselves, here was the notion of helping these students become adults by forcing them to confront a world that’s often hostile to individual dreams and ideals and restoring the university as a place where young adults might, instead of shutting discussions down, build themselves up by encountering ideas that differed from their own, ideas that could lead them beyond the narcissism of childhood and adolescence and enable them to absorb multiple views on any given issue—both sides of an opinion, a thought, an idea—that is, to expand their horizons, not narrow them. As a vital part of becoming an adult, questioning the status quo about anything should be encouraged. But clamping your hands over your ears and stomping your feet and demanding safe spaces and abhorring contrary ideas for fear of being victimized finally seemed to be held in check for once, at least at this one institution. Disgust with this victim culture, which exploded during the Obama era, also proved to be an ominous factor later that year with the election of Donald Trump. And one couldn’t help but wonder if this surprising result might not also have been a rejection of the party-line mentality, another form of resistance.

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  Post-election, and well into 2017, a few of my friends and acquaintances, as well as my millennial partner of eight years, were undergoing a hangover psychosis, with no end in sight. The building that had been inhabited by liberal identity-obsessed elitists was now, after eight years of an Obama hep-cat style and sensibility, being deconstructed—in fact, decimated—by disruptors who’d taken over and were playing by an entirely new set of rules. Not only that, but these disruptors were telling those confused by their new rules to go fuck themselves—and rightly so; they won the election, it was their turn. But people were still fighting the fact that this man had been elected, fairly and legally, and was now act
ually residing in the White House, and yet they were constantly gasping, at every turn, “That’s so not presidential.” It was as if they still didn’t recognize what we’d all seen throughout the campaign when the disruptor played with that rule book and blew up perceived truths about what was presidential, how campaigns should be run, how social media could be used to create supporters. This game plan is what ultimately made the media look like an old-school anachronism unable to comprehend either the playbook or the electoral mood, instead flailing around and wasting everybody’s time by hectoring about what Trump did and said literally, while these anarchists in the shadows just smiled to themselves in triumph. Liberalism used to concern itself with freedoms I’d aligned myself with, but during the 2016 campaigns, it finally hardened into a warped authoritarian moral superiority movement that I didn’t want to have anything to do with.

  Meanwhile, people had branded themselves, somewhat touchingly, as the Resistance. But what were they resisting and what were we supposed to do about it? Posters all around my neighborhood in West Hollywood urged me to resist, resist, resist—most prominently on the gates in front of LA’s most famous gay bar, the Abbey, on the corner of Robertson and Santa Monica Boulevard. Some of us who hadn’t voted for Trump, and who decades ago had precisely identified what he might be capable of (see American Psycho) were wondering what exactly the targets might be. And who was telling us to resist, um, whatever? Certainly not people who’d voted for the losing candidate? We were supposed to be listening to them? Was this just an elaborate joke, an art project, a hoax? What were we supposed to be resisting? During the winter of 2016 and into 2017 I myself began to resist the meltdowns I’d been witnessing at dinners and on social media and late-night TV, and too many times in my own home, in the aftermath of Trump’s victory. I found myself resisting, too, the hysterical wails about this unfair disruption of the status quo, aka the Establishment, which itself decried the dismantling of the political narrative we’d all grown accustomed to and that had eagerly expected the Obama era to effortlessly resume with another Clinton in the White House. (This had alarmed me during the campaign, suggesting as it did a movement backward instead of forward, regardless of this Clinton’s gender.) When this didn’t happen, well, it was just too much for some people to accept. This wasn’t the usual disappointment about election results—this was fear and horror and outrage that it seemed would never subside and not just for members of Generation Wuss, like my partner, but also for real grown-ups in their forties and fifties and sixties, so unhinged that their team hadn’t won they began using words like “apocalypse” and “Hitlerian.” Sometimes, when listening to friends of mine, I’d stare at them while a tiny voice in the back of my head started sighing, You are the biggest fucking baby I’ve ever fucking heard in my entire fucking life and please you’ve got to fucking calm the fuck down—I get it, I get it, you don’t like fucking Trump but for fuck’s sake enough already for fuck’s sake.

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  Just as I soon began tuning out anyone who shrilly insisted Trump had called all Mexicans “rapists” (only once, in the speech announcing his campaign, an example of how unpolished he was and what ultimately drew voters to him) I also began to tune out those who relentlessly stated that Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote (yes, basically in New York and California) and these various statements and mantras started reminding me—as the resistance continued—of the complaints of spoiled children at a birthday party when they didn’t win the relay race, and who wanted the race rerun with different rules, while stomping their feet, arms crossed, pinched faces crimson and wet with tears. The legions of the disappointed had failed to get over the outcome of the election, failed to move on, and at times it became appalling, almost unbearable, that there were no signs of accepting one of life’s simple if brutal truths: you win some, you lose some. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was the background music of the Trump campaign, a boomer elegy about ’60s optimism sliding into disillusionment and finally a resigned pragmatism, and it was played at all of Trump’s rallies as well as after his victory speech, sealing the deal. In these contexts it always sounded mysterious: mournful and rousing, ironic and playful, fraught with multiple meanings, and it had an eerie, teasing quality.

  The childlike disbelief had manifested itself immediately after the election in embarrassing ways, from morning-after posts titled “What Am I Going to Tell My Daughter?” (one friend suggested telling her Trump won, that shit happens, grow up, this is how the world works—and next time find a better candidate) to teachers at a private school where a few of my friends sent their children denouncing the bad new president in their classrooms, which caused one parent who’d supported Trump to ask the principal how such attitudinizing could be justified in front of her five-year-old child—from a teacher who was an adult, no less. There seemed to be no point in even addressing the pink pussy hats and women walking around dressed as giant vaginas in protest, or Ashley Judd performing some slam poetry about her menstrual cycle and Madonna announcing that she wanted to blow up the White House.

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  In the week after the election, I had a few random dinners with male friends who’d voted for Hillary. I hadn’t voted for anyone, not only because I lived in rest-assured California but also because during the campaign I’d realized I wasn’t a conservative or a liberal, a Democrat or a Republican, and that I didn’t buy into what either party was selling. (I’d also thought Bernie Sanders’s platform was impractical to the point of absurdity.) Sometime during that year and a half I had come to understand that I was many different things and none of them fit neatly under the ideology of one party; I disagreed with much of what both candidates said, and sometimes agreed with one or the other, but I was never convinced or swayed by either of them. And since I hadn’t voted, I had no right to complain about the outcome, and I didn’t. However, the friends I had dinner with that November, with whom I’d never talked politics during either the Bush or the Obama administrations, admitted how unmoored they were by this outcome. They seemed surprisingly calm, or maybe just dazed, as they confessed their shock and disappointment on election night, and then described the hangovers, literal and metaphorical, they’d endured on the morning after.

  During those dinners I had that week after the election, two men had expressed their surprise and dismay that they apparently had been living in a bubble. Living…in…a…bubble. I, for some reason, hadn’t been living in a bubble and knew almost as many people who’d announced their intention to vote for Trump as those who said they were voting for Hillary. It was pretty evenly split in the world I moved through—maybe 55 percent for her, 45 for him—and this might have been why the outcome hadn’t seemed as shocking to me as it was to those residing in that bubble. And yet one of these men, a writer I’d known for twenty years, became even more hysterical as the Trump administration revealed itself, and his initial resignation turned into something desperate and childish—complete with a certainty he carried with him at another dinner, late in the summer of 2017, that Donald Trump would be impeached by September. He was sputtering, furious; everything was just a total shitshow. I stared at him in the restaurant not saying anything as that voice began sighing in my head again.

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  My moral ambivalence about politics in general has always left me the neutral guest at many tables. As a writer I found myself more interested in understanding my friends’ thoughts and feelings than in debating the accuracy of their political forecasts or who should have won the Electoral College, or if it should even exist. I preferred, as always, to talk with them about movies and books and music and TV shows. A romantic by comparison, I’d never been a true believer that politics can solve the dark heart of humanity’s problems and the lawlessness of our sexuality, or that a bureaucratic band aid is going to heal the deep contradictory rifts and the cruelty, the passion and the fraudulence that factor in
to what it means to be human. When my traumatized boyfriend criticized me for not being angrier about the election (five months after it happened) I shot back that I didn’t want to talk about Trump anymore. I didn’t care. He was elected president. Get over it. The Russians didn’t destroy the Democratic Party or cause it to lose more than a thousand legislative seats in the four years leading up to the 2016 election—the Democrats did that to themselves. My boyfriend shot right back that I was being a Trump apologist, and that by simply accepting the election’s results I was “colluding” with the new administration and, by extension, with Moscow.

  But conspiracies were everywhere. Trump was going down. In the fall of 2017 I sat in the Polo Lounge with a well-known writer from New York who was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and over dinner he informed me that he had heard “very reliably” from a “CIA operative” that a videotape of Trump urinating on two fourteen-year-old Russian prostitutes actually did exist, then sat back in the booth, satisfied, as if he’d laid out a fact that was guaranteed to shock me. I could tell from his expression that he thought this proved some desperate truth, but I told him that this had always sounded like a bogus rumor to me. Why hadn’t the tape been released to derail Trump before the election? My friend answered with a continuation of the conspiracy theory: the Russians were using the “pee tape” as blackmail so Trump would do whatever “they” had elected him to do. I sat there silently, staring at him, and immediately ordered a third martini, one more than I usually drink.