works of wanderlust

Tag: politics

  • book reviews: on down the river

    September may be the end of summer reads, but no doubt that I am still trudging through a reading list longer than I care to admit. My lack of completed tomes this last few weeks has less to do with the quantity of reading I am going and more to do with my ability to focus on just one book.  It would seem that my digital distractibility in this department is no less a problem than the analog version.

    That said, I have been reading. And reading. And reading some more. 

    And lately I’ve read…

    James by Percival Everett

    James is a horror story. Flipping the perspective on a book I literally just read, it instead retells the events of the famous Mark Twain novel Huckleberry Finn from the view of the runaway slave Jim.  But where Twain’s original text is merely a weighty adventure romp with a moral imperative baked into its layers, all of it nudging and imploring readers to examine their notions of the racial divide in the Americas of that time, James wraps Jim in a kind of fictionally-driven agency to offer a story that is both compelling in its context and chilling in its implications. It is made no better, of course, that the all-too-real monster chasing James as a runaway slave through the pre-civil war south is the great grand-pappy ancestor of the same monster now creeping out of the shadows and into seats of vengeful political power in the US in 2025. Being a white, middle-aged Canadian man leaves me in no good position to offer any opinion on what this book does right or what it is supposed to mean or how it should be read. All I know is that it shook me, shook me to the point that like a horror story I often had to put it down for days at a time to process the descriptions of inhuman cruelty written inside. It is a fictionalized account, of course, and rightly so told as it is as a counterpoint to a “great American novel.” My reread of Huckleberry Finn recently was still quite fresh in my head, of course, and having just revisited the raft ride down the Mississippi I was all too aware of the weight of that story in the modern context of American neo-racism and an orange menace normalizing two hundred year old ideas that should have long been sent to their grave. But naivety of reality is the greatest ally of the dark impulses of humanity and one’s greatest weapon is education of the horrors as painted in even just a fictional tale, and empathy for the fact that while James is fictional his is a story built upon more truth than many of us can stomach.

    Shit, Actually by Lindy West

    There are days when I fashion myself a humorist of a sort, attempting to write clever reflections of life, the universe and everything—but mostly books and video games if I’m being honest. But that said, even if I can’t always measure up in my own witty writing, I do have a vibe and am drawn to reading the kind of observational kinds of reviews that I wish I could churn out with my little keyboard here at a Starbucks. This book of clever film reviews of a bunch of movies, all of which I have almost certainly seen every last one (except Twilight, I’ve never seen that one!) multiple times, showed up as a recommendation in my audiobook feed—and there I was looking for a low risk, light-hearted listen with a credit burning a hole in my digital pocket. I am also, notably, a fan of the oft-chided podcast rewatch genre, which has led me into similar additional reading expeditions. In other words, this wee book checked a lot of boxes for me. I consumed the whole damn thing inside of two days, all seven hours of short essays read by the author, providing clever, witty and jabbing summaries spectacularly mediocre movies while sticking her finger into the gaping plot holes of the same. And what else is there to say. I was funny, sometimes laugh out loud funny, which startled me almost as much as it did the other people in the room where I was listening with headphones.

    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

    The day I finished re-reading this classic all tangled up in the history of American racism and slavery as it definitively is, the government of my (Canadian) province released a book ban list to the public, which given the company it would have been among—classics of political reaction like 1984, cautionary tales of amoral governments tangled up in religion like The Handmaid’s Tale—it was almost surprising that there was no Twain on the list. We live in dark times here in the mid-20s and while I’m not exactly sure the motivation for Twain to have written a book and a character like Huckleberry Finn, and can’t help but believe it was, too, a reaction to dark times. The book, obviously, is an indictment of American slavery told from the perspective of young adventurous Huck Finn whose adventures in a previous novel landed him a rich kid with an abusive, alcoholic father (all too normalized by the society in which Finn lives.). He escapes by faking his own murder and lands up in a classic travelling-the-river tale in the company of Jim, a slave who has also escaped. The duo’s adventures are a fictionalized glimpse at middle America of an era, one assumes, peppered with the moral maturing of Huck as he faces down the complex questions of right and wrong in a society that taught him that certain people are property and that what he is doing is abetting a crime the likes of which he figures will condemn him to hell, all the while we as the reader look at it from the modern perspective of Finn’s innate judgement being the right one. And still it is a hard book to read, not because of anything particularly narratively confusing, but if only because does at time feel as though the demon Twain was shining sunlight upon has risen up once again, never truly departed from this world.  It wouldn’t surprise me to see this wind up on the banned list of any American politician who had both read and understood its story.

  • social games, two

    We all start to sound a bit like junkies when we ponder aloud the idea of fleeing the social platforms once and for good, weaning ourselves off our feeds, setting limits and goals and self moderation parameters, or screaming digital curses to the gods of going cold turkey.

    It has been a week. A fucking week of social media garbage.

    Let me define my parameters. I used to vaguely claim that blogs and personal websites and sharing platforms all fell into some common harmonious categorization under the term “social media” and that posting on facebook or twitter or bluesky were just another form of socially participating online. No longer.

    When I write from here on in about The Socials I am strictly referring to the toxic sludge pool of low friction group-text platforms that slurp up our engagement vibes for likes and shares and algorithmically grind it into a type of endless digital slop hose. It may be photo sharing sites like instagram or discussion forums like reddit or hate-text engines like shitter, but those are the targets of my current ire.

    These machines had such potential for good, but humanity it seems had different plans. First came the artists and philosophers, sharing ideas and vibes. Then came the marketers spinning webs of greed and consumption. Next came the bots in their AI legions attempting to con us into clicking and buying and selling our secrets for a hint of fake human contact. Finally have arrived the ideologies, hate filled rhetoric machines set on dividing and destroying the fragile peaces of times through misinformation and threats and raw, unfiltered hate.

    Each time a new platform arrives I dip my toe in the digital river and see if the current is any different than the one I just left.  But people never really change, it seems. Even the most honourable approaches to creating a space of the kind we all seem to yearn is thwarted by sinister agents of chaos hell bent on shaping the world to their dark visions of division and rage. 

    Bluesky was my latest attempt at participation, and yet nine months on my efforts are once again beset by the unavoidable impression that it has become a whirlwind of political rage and a blur of misinformation. Post sweet nothings and you are ignored. Post creative joy and it attracts hoards of malicious bots bent on deception and digital theft. Post opinion and someone will set their heart on vengeance and attempt to destroy your life. Post truth and someone will dispute it with every fibre of their being.

    If there was a kind of metaphorical temperature dial to control all this, the ouija spirits of the internet cranked it up another notch last week upon hearing the echo of a sniper rifle. Orwell warned us of the dangers of crowdsourcing our hate to the masses and of handing off our power to an unchecked state. We did not listen. And in fact if the vibe resonating within the socials is to be analyzed with any confidence democracy is rasping it’s last breaths. The end of meaningful freedoms may not be completely over, but the front line of expunging them from the modern world will be on the feeds of social media.

    I may not be done writing and posting, but I am considering if I am now finally done writing and posting there, or if I am just another junkie who will never truly break free.

  • flick: idiocracy

    I jumped on the bandwagon and last night I watched a flick I haven’t seen in almost twenty years: Idocracy.

    And, boy, does that hit differently these days.

    You’ve seen the meme shitposting, no doubt. “Idocracy wasn’t an instruction manual, guys!” At least people are screaming it into the void on my social feeds as kind of the defacto answer to every other news article gurgling out of the fetid swamp of american politics these past couple months.

    I risk devolving into political rants here myself if I’m not careful.

    The crux of the film hinges on the opening sequence where—even before Luke Wilson and an almost unrecognizably vanilla Maya Rudolph (she’s really honed her vibe and her craft so well lately, don’t you agree) are hibernated into the grim and stupid future—two characters named in IMDB as simply “Yuppie Wife” and “Yuppie Husband” stand in for rational america opting to hold off having kids meanwhile the literal trailer-dwelling mouth-breather characters standing in for stupid america are breeding like its a race to the bottom.  There is no subtly or hinting that director Mike Judge sees some kind of devolution of humanity occuring by raw natural selection at work. Selection of the stupid by sheer overwhelming numbers.

    Jerry Springer eat your heart out (while may you rest in peace.)

    Fresh out of a biology undergrad and back when I first watched the flick back in 2006 or so I probably could have explained the genetics a little better, and maybe even argued against the premise using big science words. I wouldn’t be so lame these days. Satire as this was intended is meant to show us extremes… and extremes we are shown. 

    Spoiler: the dough-brained inhabitants of the remnants of twenty-sixth century america are watering their crops with off-brand gatoraid and wondering why there aint nuthin grownin. Plot ensues.

    Back in the twenty-first century real world we’re not quite living in idocracy, but the government seems to be filled with reality television personalities, irrational “i researched it mu-self” antivaxxers are arguing themselves into letting their own kids die of preventable diseases, and the stock market has become little more than a roulette wheel where the chips are crypto coins (that by the way are generally understood by the average person in a way best summed up by my father-in-law who legit asked me if he needed to download Minecraft to get started in bitcoin.)

    Idocracy is not an instruction manual indeed, guys.

    When it came out I laughed this goofball comedy off as ridiculous absurdist science fiction. Gawd, tho, if it didn’t hit like a sledgehammer smacking a warning gong when I watched it last night. Not an instruction manual, but satire-come-documentary of the moronic twenties perhaps.

  • undeleted

    To be fair, I didn’t actually read the article.

    In these days of click-bait headlines it is equally likely that any given bit of tripe posted in traditional media is some too-clever journalist writing a bit of sarcastic parody humor prefixed by an all-too-clever title to draw in the crowds who are almost certainly looking for some bit of legitimate-seeming news to validate their screwball wacky viewpoints. The author then typically tries to write some clever well-actuallies… but then who actuallies need the article when most of us never read past the headline anyhow?

    So I didn’t read it. Couldn’t read it. At least not without forking out money for a subscription. So, won’t read it. Can’t read it. Don’t need to read it.

    The headline was “Go Delete Yourself from the Internet. Seriously, Here’s How” from the Wall Street Journal.

    And in this day and age of terrible tech advice abounding I’m pretty sure this was not parody. It might have been well-meaning. It might have even been sensible. But it was probably not good advice.

    Today is a day I have marked in my calendar as my “blogiversay” which is twenty-four years to the date of when I made my first blog post on my first blog. I didn’t put it into my calendar until years later when I noticed that the first post in the archives of the blog was, and would for a long time be, April 20, 2001.

    And then one day I deleted myself from the Internet. Seriously.

    There were a lot of good reasons to have done it. I was, what? Twenty-four when I first posted. I had just moved out of a backwards little life in a backwards little city (which you can ready-aim-fire at me for being judgemental but you could easily google the name of said city and you’d be greeted with a lot of right-wing, nationalistic, hyper-religious news-adjacent references that would vouch for my then and current opinion of the place.) I had a lot of growing to do, and I did a lot of said growing right there live on that blog, sixteen years worth. A lot of that blogging, those growing and changing opinions, may not have aged well, and good or bad, I don’t care to read and edit two million words of my blathering personal blog writing for any reason.

    So I deleted myself. I deleted myself when I got a semi-public job. I deleted myself when I started managing people, particularly a few stubborn ones who didn’t like me, and I deleted myself when it started scraping up against the gentle opposition of my peers.

    But here we are in 2025 and there are suddenly and realistically a lot of reasons to undelete oneself from the internet. There are a lot of reasons to hold one’s ground and push back against the very idea of ceding this digital space.

    Mostly? There is a vacuum that will exist in the space where each person deletes themselves from the internet and that vacuum would almost instantly be filled by something else. Something bad.

    Maybe some terrible AI content will slurp into the vacuum.

    Perhaps what people will see will instead just be more terrible influencer content and the tidal wave of stealthy and deceptive advertising.

    Or worst, and what I fear the most, is that the vacuum will be filled by the relentless creeping onslaught of political propaganda and the opinions (agree with me or not) which are increasingly anti-fact, anti-science, anti-intellectual, and anti-reality. I fear the space will just get filled with more lies, more manipulation, and more noise designed to overwhelm and crush what little remains of these fragments of freedom and democracy to which we cling.

    April 20, 2001 was a few months before 9/11, a day which for reasons beyond the obvious changed the trajectory of western civilization. On that day we went from an optimistic society progressing towards something special and we collectively did a u-turn into fear and suspicion and surrendering our rights for the illusion of slightly more safety. Now, arguably, many of those rights have been gone for a generation, nearly twenty-four years gone, and yet we all feel less safe than ever. What are terrible trade. What a terrible decision we all made together.

    Right now, a big part of me feel like that happened so easily because we deleted ourselves from the conversation. Deleted ourselves from reality, from truth, from the fight, from purpose, from everything. We deleted ourself from the internet, a great big town square where we should all be shouting and having a voice, arguing and making better choices for us all. We deleted ourselves and turned over our voices to corporate social media, to algorithms, to AI, to billionaires who claim that they are guardians of that voice but who only put it in chains.

    We deleted ourselves and surrendered.

    I am undeleting myself. This stupid little resurrected blog is the beginning of that effort. I am trying to reclaim my voice, small and unpracticed as it is.

    Undeleted.

    You next. Stay tuned.

  • blog-iversary

    This coming Sunday, April 20th 2025, marks the twenty-fourth anniversary of my first blog post.

    You can’t even read it.

    I can.

    I mean, I have an archive of it somewhere in a document, stored away safely on multiple hard drives and backed up to the cloud and generally tucked away for some future time when I want to read about how I spent some random, idle day in April 2001. 

    But you can’t read it.

    That said, I have been thinking about that blog lately because of a long list of reasons, not the least of which is the state of technology, freedom, democracy and more in this world, and how so many of us enthralled by the idea of cheap fame are dumping billions of hours into populating the apps and websites of private companies. And how some of those companies are revealing just how much of a bait-and-switch this aways was, how sinister and self-serving they have always been, how much of this gets fed into the AI behemoth, and how we have collectively tethered a decade of creative energy into feeding a corporate beast that does not care a whit about the soul of humanity.

    I should never have shuttered that blog of mine, the one that would now be twenty-four years old and a few millions of words strong.

    Every so often I sit down and try to resurrect something of that vibe, though.

    Every so often I kick off a new site with a grand idea and think, now if I could just get some momentum on this topic or that theme and maybe I could start writing more again.

    But it never sticks.

    And maybe it never will again.

    But it doesn’t mean I won’t keep trying to write, because as I realize with each passing day, not writing as much as I can, logging what I want to write about and not caring my own whit about cheap fame or filling up the follows or feeding some corporate social vortex, I can maintain my own little bit of that human soul. 

    And you can definitely read this.

    For now.