Grabbing the Third Rail

There are a lot of good reasons not to talk about politics in my column here.

It's not really what SleuthSayers is about, first of all. We're here to talk primarily about writing and reading, mostly in the area of short mystery fiction.

It risks alienating some of my readers. In these highly divisive times, declaring any particular political stance is putting a target on your back. Sometimes literally.

And, of course, there's the fact that it rarely, if ever, does any good. There was a time when I believed a well-crafted Facebook post, drawing on sound logic and reliable evidence, could actually persuade people to change their point of view on political issues. That time is well past.

So, yep, there are a lot of compelling reasons I shouldn't talk politics here.

As you've probably guessed, I'm going to do it anyway. 

Specifically, I've been thinking a lot about this question: what's the role of the writer in these times? Is it possible for writing to exist outside politics?

What's prompting this? Well, in addition to my columns here, my stories, and my actual day jobs (teaching, in case you've forgotten), I've somehow found myself serving, for the last year and a half, as the President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society (you're a member, right? It's free! It's fun!). Mostly I'm doing this because nobody else wanted the gig, but I've tried to make a go of it with the time I have available.

The heart of SMFS is our discussion board, and one of the things the members have made very clear is that they don't want overtly political content there. This is, of course, entirely understandable. There are plenty of other places online for people to scream at each other about it, and once such discussions start, they're almost impossible to stop. Inevitably they turn hostile, sometimes to the point of rendering the entire group useless for days on end and some members walking away for good.

So one of my roles, as President, has been to police the discussion board, trying to enforce civility and head off potentially explosive topics before they build up a head of steam.

Woody Guthrie

Lately, some folks seem to think I'm not doing a very good job of it.

In the last few weeks, members have posted news about a pair of upcoming publication opportunities focused on what's happening in the US. One is an anthology called American Gestapo; the other is a periodical called the Antifa Lit Journal. As the titles indicate, these are both publications taking a decidedly left-wing stance on current issues. I don't think posting about such opportunities on SMFS is itself problematic. Notifying each other about new markets is one of the things the group is for, after all, and simply informing the group about them isn't necessarily endorsing their political stances. People who know they have no interest in such a market are perfectly free to simply scroll past the post.

That's not what happened, of course. I won't get into all the details of the ensuing mini-firestorm, and as these things go, it was relatively brief and contained. There were some posts that I could only take as attempts to bait the members into a political crossfire, perhaps out of ideology, perhaps out of sheer mischief. There were a series of posts with people instructing each other, in increasingly hostile tones, not to talk about politics. These posts, of course, only prolonged the discussion and made the intrusion of political content more likely.

Recommended Reading

Then came the inevitable complaints that the board is tilted to the left, and that those on the right end of the spectrum were being subjected to unfair mockery, vitriol, and silencing. Now, I'll freely confess that I am a liberal, but I maintain, and continue to maintain, that I've done my best to be impartial in what I allow and what I silence on the board. No doubt I haven't been perfect, but I've tried. Anybody who thinks the job is easy is welcome to run to replace me. Elections are coming up in a few months.

Finally, there were the people who loudly declared that they're sick of politics altogether, and that they have no interest in any political debates, and that both sides are equally stupid, and it has nothing to do with their life or with writing.

And that's what I found I couldn't get past, and what I find myself compelled to write about here, somewhat against my better judgment. The idea--admittedly one propagated by most media coverage--that politics is really nothing more than a kind of sport, one that you can tune out of your life in the same way you'd decide that you really don't care about the Superbowl. One side wins, one side loses, life goes on. The belief that writing, specifically, can exist in an apolitical realm that's somehow above (or at least removed from) the petty political debates of the day.

I don't buy it. And since I can't talk about it at SMFS--where my mandated role is to minimize political discourse as much as possible--I'm going to talk about it here.

Even though I shouldn't.

First: in purely practical terms, politics do have real, concrete implications for people trying to write today. Sell a book on Amazon? You've put a couple of bucks in the pocket of a billionaire who's spent decades systematically dismantling organized labor and driving small businesses under, and who's currently in the process of gutting what was once a pillar of independent American journalism.

RIP Journalism

Politics are why library budgets are being slashed in many communities, pushing small publishers--the kind who, say, publish mystery anthologies--closer to the brink. Politics are why schools are banning books and universities are cutting humanities programs. Politics are why I know more than a few American writers hesitant to attend this year's Bouchercon, being held in Canada, because they're not certain they'd be allowed back in the US. Politics are why there's been no real effort to contain or regulate the AI explosion that threatens all artists, including writers (to say nothing of its devastating environmental impacts and terrifying stunting of critical thinking skills).

Those are just some of the concrete reasons writers should be concerned about politics, but more generally, and more importantly, writing is an inherently political act. In part that's because the freedom of expression is itself a political idea, but it goes beyond that. There's a reason despotic regimes make a practice of throwing writers and other artists into cells. Roger Ebert said that "cinema is like a machine that generates empathy." I think the same is true of all art. Creating and consuming art--and perhaps especially fiction--requires and promotes the imaginative effort to see the world through another perspective, from another set of eyes. It encourages us to step outside our narrow individual experience and recognize the fundamental humanity of others. To a certain set of people, that creation of empathy is dangerous. Maybe the most famous example in American history is Lincoln calling Harriet Beecher Stowe "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Uncle Tom's Cabin awoke Americans to the horrors of slavery in a way that nothing else had.

And America today is sorely in need of empathy.

Bad Bunny with a message that
shouldn't be controversial:
"together, we are America"

The descent of the Republican party into what can only be described as a cult of personality, one fundamentally opposed to many basic tenets of American democracy, has been a long process. It probably began with the backlash to the Civil Rights movement; recall LBJ's observation that "if you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

For the last sixty years, the GOP has been giving its voters people to look down on, and picking all of our pockets. Reagan set the pattern with his lies about "welfare queens" and the glories of "trickle-down economics." Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh sold the ideology to millions with rants about libtards and feminazis. The catastrophic Citizens United decision solidified it as inescapable policy. It's a simple bargain: give us money and power, and we'll protect you. We'll protect you from immigrants, from gays, from the trans community, from scary brown people of all varieties. We'll protect you from intellectuals and scientists who think they're better than you. We'll protect you from teachers who want to tell your kids that America isn't perfect. We'll protect you from union thugs. We'll protect you from man-hating feminists. We'll protect you from lazy poor people, stealing your money through social programs. We'll protect you from traitorous liberals who want to take your guns and make you eat quiche.

They made people afraid, and they turned that fear into hatred. They convinced millions of Americans that empathy for the other is weakness. And then came Trump, who wields and directs hatred as a weapon in the service of his all-consuming ego.

This is no longer "just politics." This isn't normal. If Trump and his many enablers are not stopped, America will slip into full-blown fascism. Many would say we're already there. And you can pin your hopes on the next election, but right now the GOP is working very hard to suppress and undermine the vote, and that's just the start. Given everything else he's done, does anyone really believe Trump won't mobilize ICE and the other forces at his disposal to "secure" voting locations? Does anyone really believe he'd accept losing Congress? Or will he do everything in his considerable power to declare the results invalid and make himself the dictator he clearly longs to be?

These are not law enforcement officers

This might all seem unthinkable, but a lot of things that have happened in the last ten years used to seem unthinkable. American children are dying of entirely preventable diseases because the American government has tossed science out the window and turned over our national healthcare to a man who brags about snorting coke off toilet seats. Children around the world are dying because American aid to foreign countries has been gutted, in adherence to the President's racism and xenophobia. Our Attorney General screeches at members of Congress that, because the stock market is up, she's under no obligation to investigate child sex trafficking. Our President . . . well, there's no need to make a list, is there? Every day he does something that would have shamed any previous holder of the office into immediate resignation. And he gets away with it, in part because virtually nobody in his party has the spine to stand up to him and in part because everyone immediately gets distracted by the next outrage.

It's not normal for the Department of Justice to try to prosecute sitting members of Congress because they told the military not to obey illegal orders. It's not normal for a Congressman to insist a Superbowl halftime performance be investigated for the crimes of being in Spanish and asserting that there are countries other than the US in America. It's not normal for a President to demand that media outlets that report bad news about him lose their licenses, or to withhold resources from states because they didn't vote for him.

Or brag about his ability to walk into dressing rooms and ogle naked teenagers. Or grab women by their genitals and expect them to accept it because he's famous. Or post disgustingly racist memes to social media. Or demand his name be slapped on any building he happens to like the look of. Or defend himself against rape charges not by saying he would never do that, but by saying the woman isn't his type. Or shred decades-long relationships with American allies while embracing and praising dictators who flatter him. Or remove references to slavery from historical sites. 

The Attorney General of the US literally
refusing to look at or acknowledge
Epstein victims

Just to make a connection back to crime--since this is a site for crime writing--we might as well acknowledge that crime is at the heart of all of it. We've turned over most of the wealth and power in the country to a small group of billionaires who are now utterly beyond accountability and consequences, even when they have committed the most vile offenses imaginable. Laws that don't apply to everyone aren't laws. They're tools of oppression. If we're going to write honestly about what crime is today, if we want our writing to be anything other than pure escapism, we can't ignore that.

So, no, I don't believe it's noble to claim to be above politics, to regard it as something irrelevant to your daily concerns. Calling yourself apolitical at this moment is a willful refusal to face the reality of what's happening. It's not being high-minded. It's complicity.

During his first Presidential run, Trump claimed he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. What seemed at the time like just another in his endless string of absurdities has become a grotesque reality. Americans are being murdered in the streets, simply for protesting against his masked thugs who claim they are not bound by the Constitution.

This is not normal, and we can't pretend it's not happening.

I don't know if it's too late to save American democracy. What I do know is that, if we're going to save it, one of the things we need is empathy, which is what brings us back, again, to writing. I hope that my little stories do some small amount of good in promoting empathy, in addition to anything else I can do to protest and resist. And I hope we all have the courage to speak honestly about what is happening.

I'll write about something a little lighter next month. Promise.