Les fous sont rois et moi je bois Mao Mao
I
“Their Little Red Book,” K said (we were talking about the cynical and androgynous Harvard literary bourgeoisie of the Weimar days of the early Obama administration: a kind of goofy, sex-obsessed, and semi-sociopathic fraternity predatorily masturbating on the social reproduction playground of the ruling class), “was Heidegger’s Basic Writings.”
“And now, I said, “they’re all in the DSA. The right-wing of the DSA, all contradictions sublimated in the new bourgeois teleology of hope.”
“Proving there must be some truth to the 1930s Comintern line that all social democrats are really ‘social fascists,’ at the end of the day.”
“And that a romantic antimodernism steeped in somatophobia and overlubricated desire is compatible not just with the futurist death-machinery of imperialism but with a practical belief in progress. The obverse side of the fascist coin, just as their seeming sexual normality hides all sorts of orgies and crimes (though they outsource them to the violence proletariat, or the proletariat of violence).”
“From paint the ovum white to paint the military-industrial complex pink…”
“And now of course they sit down to interview Fred Moten for The New Yorker, talking about how the aioli at brunch reminds them of the concept of emulsion.”
“They like Moten because they see in him a Radical Black Tradition alibi for their own lazy dadaist eclecticism. But white boys from rich families have always been unscrupulous and absurd.”
“There is a Tijuana poet cum depressive shaman who says colonialism is a remix. And time, too…”
“George Jackson said the essence of fascism is reform, which amounts to the same thing.”
“Did you hear Louisa,” I mentioned the ethereal hippie Southerner and fellow writer they were all in love with, “published a novel? Hundreds of pages of descriptions of nature and bodily effluvia, naturally. It’s about a girl who runs away from an Ivy League education to join an ecoterrorist cadre, naturally. You can’t publish a novel these days that doesn’t in some sense double as counterinsurgency. Now that she’s done the Bildungsroman the next will be about a nonbinary femme Black Lives Matter activist who falls in love with a nefarious white anarchist with a ten-inch dick.”
“…”
“Was she really a tragic naïf from backwoods South or was that just an act of self-indigenization, the kind you see all the time?”
“Her parents were professors, I think. It always struck me that her appeal to all these men was half that she was queering Faulkner, as one does, with deep reservoirs of erotic doom, but she combined that with a kind of quirky Jewish girl persona that made them feel at ease.”
“Do you remember when Jeremy punched a wall over her and broke his hand the night Leon cucked him for the millionth time?”
“Leon’s male friendships were prolonged forms of sadomasochistic torture, a prolonged cuckold fantasy, with him as the Dostoevskian bull. He got all the girls they wanted and they resented him for it. For the slipperiness of his androgyny and for his amoral refusal of a constraining homosocial code. Of course, the way he treated women was worse. Psychological warfare. He destroyed Louisa.”
“…”
“Anyway, she reached out to me recently.”
“What about?”
“She wanted me to come work with her. Do you remember Michael Goldberg?”
“The deranged trust fund cokehead?”
“Yeah well I guess he was doing coke with some VC guy and he got him to fund a think tank on modern monetary theory and other “socialist” ideas for millennials. Anyway now Goldberg is using it as a slush fund for all his friends.”
“…”
“…”
“Did you hear about J?” I mentioned the scion of the hideous Nannygate family, a family with more blood on its hands than almost any other in this country. He’d been a kind of gay patrician poet in college and had reinvented himself as a Beijing whisperer, a deep state Sinologist. His last published poem was dedicated to the widow of the insane and racist charlatanic warmonger, Liu Xiaobo. Then he’d published a book on the Chinese reformers, their neoliberal heroics. He was a Dengist before it was popular, before the online zoomer communists took over its mantle.
He’d changed his tune, of course, for the new Cold War with China (these androids all come with an on-off switch for the warfare state). The bridges the ruling class constructs are imaginary, unfathomable. Bridges over the abyss, over innumerable corpses, over the future. Bridges to hell, to nowhere, to death.
K laughed. The way one laughs at evil people, under the guise of eternity. The kind of laughter in which evil evaporates into the epiphenomena it always was.
“No, what’s he up to?”
“He’s got a job on Biden’s National Security Council.”
“…”
“…”
Conversation like the smoke from K’s pipe that cleanses the bad energies of the world and, in an incantatory way, calls another world into being, or invites this world to show its true face…
II
His friends and family (the ones who knew him in the guise of East Coast bourgeois innocence) had been looking on in crescendo-ing horror and incomprehension at the path his life was taking (mania, California, left-wing politics, a stint of polyamory followed by divorce), but the last straw was when he started plastering his social media with full-throated defenses of the Chinese Communist Party and their policies in Xinjiang. This was both morally unsavory and illegible. He started to take on a kind of demonic aura in the minds of some people who had once been close to him. It was as if five years ago he had defended Assad. But they had already forgotten about the existence of Syria. His father worked for the National Endowment for Democracy, plotting soft coups in Latin America, and his older brother had even worked for ICE. He himself had once been a CIA contractor, though that wasn’t so unusual for where we grew up (the spooky hometown of Jim Morrison and Jared Leto). The family had been caught up in the PizzaGate conspiracy by mistake. Various YouTube personalities would spend weeks looking for clues of their complicity with pedophilic cabals and child self-trafficking. His brother bought a gun and had a nervous breakdown. The two of them had never had much in common, besides certain broey mannerisms and a kind of glassy look of alcoholism. His older sister was married to an Opus Dei lawyer and had seven kids. His father was a fast-talking Chilean with a criollo beard. He rejected everything his father stood for but he had the same beard, in order to cover up his doughy physiognomic and moral mediocrity. Left-wing conquistadorism: an infantile disorder. They both had plans for Latin America, though his father’s were more realistic. He didn’t know what to make of Che’s virulent homophobia or of how he lost his virginity by raping a Black maid. Complexity wasn’t his strong suit, and ideas were more like primitive archetypes than material forces. Now that he was a “Uighur genocide denier,” they’d ask, What happened to him? He used to be such a nice guy, they’d say. He had once belonged to a dry UVA fraternity and a debating club called the Jefferson Society where they discussed the merits of monogenism versus polygenism. After 9/11 he saw an opportunity to unseat the Iranian-American class president and claim the office for himself. He had supported his wife when she wrote a memoir that depicted him as a hypochondriacal cuckold. It’s not clear if he really was a nice guy or if he lacked the courage of his predatory instincts. He was thoroughly Oedipalized, always, only now for Daddy Proletariat. A perceptive teenager once compared him to a little mouse, a nervous creature who didn’t know where he stood, a mouse you could blow over in a single breath. He had a parasitical soul, a trait he shared with his ex-wife, though that wasn’t incompatible with a certain generosity: the generosity of a bootlicker or a being in perpetual inner famine. He licked his lips a lot, for uncertain reasons. He adapted his politics from tankie kids on Twitter and from cynical ultra academics who, as the country hurtled towards naked fascism and genocide, encouraged a kind of insular purist pessimism and dangerous Weathermen adventurism: a future in which they had no stake. A pure libidinal violence and a purer despair. Catastrophism appealed to him. His impatience had always been vast, his sensation-seeking indiscriminate, and his ego coherence dubious: a flickering computer monitor, a Salvador Dali mouth, gaudy and melting, foaming blood in the dark. He couldn’t tell if he was a Maoist, a Dengist, or something else. He knew the Black Panthers had gone to North Korea. He tried to read Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He tried to read Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, but really only internalized a few titillating phrases from Sartre’s introduction. In seventh grade he refuted Marxism by claiming that Marx had cheated on his wife. He believed that a poor person could be happy, if the love of God was in his heart. That was the same year he foreswore masturbation and devoted himself to God. That was the same year his germaphobia began to plague him. He lost his germaphobia and his belief in God in various stages. By the time we reconnected in Oakland (we devoted the early years of the Trump administration to a near-constant state of drunken delirium) he looked like a hobo. He suffered several concussions. For some reason he couldn’t stop falling off his bike. He’d been concussed in high school when he was the starting quarterback on a team that literally never won a game. He showed signs of early onset dementia or chronic encephalopathy starting in his thirties. I’d planned to punch him in the face before he broke his jaw in a bike accident that permanently made his face lopsided: I was afraid it would be an act of reparation. Actually we reconnected in Mexico City. I tell him about the sex workers of Mexico City and his eyes lit up. He and his wife cooed over the preposterous dogs in Condesa. They adopted a part-German Shepherd they named Zapata but abandoned him when he attacked her. She was writing an article about Beauvoir for The Guardian. She became a leftist obligatorily but she was still molded more by the evolutionary psychology and Third Wave feminism of the previous decade. She told me Asian men were inherently more feminine: it was just biological truth. Once she wrote an article about psychopathy, which read, on an ideological level, like a document from late-nineteenth century phrenological criminology. She interviewed a so-called “psychopath” in prison, gaining his trust, a kind of eroticism passing between them, only to conclude in an article for Slate that he was neurologically and congenitally evil. Neither of them was very smart, but their friends considered them smart. We reconnected again in a beachtown in Oaxaca, a narco-tourist fishing village, where the ocean’s calm hid sudden deadly swells. Once he almost drowned. She was writing her book. He was drinking but he also wanted to write a book. He carried around a journal with him everywhere he went. He was a graphomaniac, or really a logomaniac (he never stopped talking, either). His writings were always bad: worse than bad, somehow unintelligible and derivative at the same time. In his twenties he had an intense epistolary and homoerotic romance with a strange white man he went to college with whose affects, or lack of affects, reminded me of a serial killer. Later the friend was eaten away by paranoia and phantom psychosomatic pains. When I heard he’d lost his sanity, I was happy. All their friends in the beach town were gringos. They had an idea that they would be “ethical coyotes,” like ethical ayahuasca providers. She wanted to buy a boat and captain poor Central American migrants to Canada. She didn’t know that dozens or more seasoned Mexican fishermen do the same thing each day. In some sense, she knew nothing. It might have been impossible for there to be a person with a more limited view of the world. Columbus syndrome. Every idea she had was nauseatingly naive, yet arrogant. Once when I was drunk on the fourth of July I told her about the mysterious and reclusive neo-Nazi Louis Beam and she spent years under his spell, chasing his trail, but when she finally told the story in The New York Times the FBI became the good guys, of course. Once I had a dream that all of us were being swept out to sea, to drown, and Louis Beam was among us. Amid beams of esoteric light from the Black Sun. He saw a bit more than she did because he had a maniac side. Still, the two of them were always seeking out corrupt menages for their marriage: they had a vampiric quality together. At their insipid wedding many people kept saying they were going to “save the world.” This D.C./Northern Virginia gentry was easily impressed, and they saw noblesse oblige around every corner. After the wedding they went on a Wanderjahr in southeast Asia, where she realized she would never be a novelist but that her orientalist instincts would serve her well in journalism. He began to lose his mind. He decided he didn’t want to go to law school. Climate change concerned him in 2013. Even then, terrorism had a certain appeal. It wasn’t possible for him to live without agency or futurity. Her, either. I suppose in that sense they were quintessentially white Americans. Later he earnestly called the U.S. government “the regime,” which cracked me up. He finally found his “style” in a dead Stalinism. Well, he said “settler colonialism” and “racial capitalism,” too. She needed something to write about for a book deal after getting an MFA so she decided to open up their marriage. Polyamory was in fact very common at that time, it was already a cliche, but in the world they came from it was still considered shocking. It shocked their friends. Later, when he was a “Uighur genocide denialist,” his friends may have subconsciously looked back at their unconventional marriage as a sordid omen. They had been such a glamorous couple. I mean glamorous in a very provincial sense. He was cuckolded by a fat, pompous Canadian poet who still believed in liberalism and in so-called “Canadian literature.” This was for the book. He had to find someone, too, so he started seeing her best friend from the MFA program, a dull, stout South African girl with nothing to say. Is it possible to go through life with nothing to say? The book was frivolous and politely reviewed, in some cases poorly reviewed. When they moved to Oakland their marriage began to fall apart. He drank and fucked around (the tables were turned, a fact she hadn’t anticipated and that made her physically ill). He started going to Mexico to ride la bestia. His speech patterns became more disordered. He seemed to believe a revolution was imminent. He wanted to smuggle arms to Central Americans at the U.S. border. He was a prison abolitionist but he believed in CCP prisons. He combined the fatuous utopianism of the abolitionist movement with a kind of dour meme anti-imperialism. It didn’t seem possible for him to combine opposition to U.S. imperialism with the understanding that capitalism and state-led development inevitably produces racial difference, racial mythology, racial pathologization, in which certain peoples became obstacles to economic progress, backwards, disposable, criminalized, etc. If you believed him, a kind of cultural renaissance was going on in Xinjiang. He took Eric Prince’s word for it that everything was fine. Suddenly the global textile and cotton industries were ok. The fact that Xinjiang is obviously an intensely carceral, militarized, surveilled, and stratified society, with elements of settler colonial dispossession (labor camps, residential boarding schools, widespread resource extraction),seemed to elude him. Ten years ago it was common knowledge among the left that such practices took place in the Pearl River delta and all over China. Consciousness changes without anyone taking notice: that’s the nature of consciousness. It’s possible anti-imperialism was being psyop-ed by the CIA, in that the militaristic moralism of the hegemonic discourse was designed to produce a counter-discourse that was mendacious, macho, and paranoid. It’s possible that the U.S. will go to war with China, but it’s also possible that the ruling class is aware that such a war would be doomed and the current warfare footing is a desperate attempt to buy time. It’s possible that we are running out of time. It’s possible that in the next decade no one will read or write or publish memoirs about polyamory. It’s possible that we are living at the end of a terrible time, or the beginning of an even worse time. It’s possible to think of this on the scale ofdecades, centuries, ages, or yuga cycles. It’s possible that this collective temporal sickness that unites enemies is a destructive neurosis and an expression of profound impotence. It’s possible that we are experiencing a fundamental revolution in values, but it’s also possible that the left is on the verge of a cataclysmic generational failure. It’s possible that none of us has the slightest clue what’s going on.
III
If one day a messenger arrived from the future and told me, undeniably, that humanity will not win, I would kill myself on the spot. For what would it have all been for? God is good, humanity is good, and communism will win. This is what I tell myself every morning when I get out of bed. Cops are inhuman pigs, therefore they are not human. All that is human is good. They are trying to drive me insane like they drove Jean Seberg insane. We must unite now before it’s too late. Do not criticize the vanguard party in public. Which vanguard party? Any vanguard party. My husband and I are asking Xi Jinping, if he can hear us, for political asylum. We practice our Mandarin in the evenings. We are all doomed.