Etiquette for End Times

Of politics, politesse, and power

Hello, friends!

*Pops top on a can of worms*

Let’s talk about language!

No seriously sit down. This will be fun! In a slightly grim sort of way. But you aren't here because I'm all sunshine and spit-polished spin. You know I swear too much for that.*

*PSA for the new folks - and by the way, we've got a bunch of new readers with us this week. Welcome to the road! Buckle up, hang onto your hat, we're so glad you're here! - I do. I swear a great deal and with relish. Frankly I feel it's a skill. If you are of an intellectual bent or background or gender or generation that is perhaps less inured to the absolutely unhinged sailor-speak of American Gen Xers in general within which a particularly spicy patois is in heavy rotation among peri- and post-menopausal people and/or those who identify as reporters who've done gone run clean out of patience and are wholly unburdened by propriety and absent the willingness to sand down their rough edges or lower their voices or soft-pedal when speaking their mind - though in truth I didn't have any of those things before menopause either - but please, if you are easily jangled by strong language, I beg you, just cover your ears as you need to and consider this your bracing weekly cold-plunge of reports, one written - I mean it - with enormous care and love for both my readers and this dumpster fire of a world, but here we are, so I'm afraid you will, from time to time, have to pick your way through the smoldering rubble that remains of the few fucks I had left to give.

Which brings us to the subject of today's piece - language - and the serious question at its core: how can we use the sole specialized skill we wordy primates have for responding to and shaping reality more accurately, more usefully, and maybe more honestly for once?

I see a lot of people struggling to describe reality as it takes on monstrous new forms for which we claim we lack language - but that isn't true. We have the language. We just don't want to use it. We're instinctively afraid - the language instinct itself instills this innate understanding of language's power - that if we name the thing, speak it aloud, we'll make it real.

It's already real. The effort to downplay and diminish the seriousness of the situation we have allowed to take shape before our eyes - the normalcy bias - is working night and day, from within and without, to persuade us that there's another way to spin it.

A more comfortable way. A way that's more pleasant, more polite.

But if we keep trying to navigate and comprehend a world that has already transformed - and not overnight - using language that has not, we will never use the most powerful tool we have for change to any real effect, let alone with the force and precision it looks like we’re going to need.

We’ve got to start where we are. And we've got to cut the crap.

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NO MORE HOW ARE YOU'S

I know. It's reflexive. It's so reflexive I once posed the question to a three-year-old. I had nothing of substance to say - I didn't know him well - so I was stuck making small talk. How are you, petit human? Got any hobbies? Seen any good films? But given the global/cosmic context, isn’t this question so far past absurd that halfway through asking you feel the last of the sentence fall out of your mouth (...re youuu...) like your tongue is numbed up with Novocain and now you’re just drooling words?

Well, I do.

So instead of How are you? why not try...

· what fresh hell? *inclusive gesture indicating everything*

· any new bullshit headed your way?

· how did pants work out for you today?

· blocked anyone interesting lately?

Meanwhile, my reporter friends have settled on

· how are you handling the horrors?

And my dear bud Jeremy Norton - evidence of whose razor-sharp intellect and sweeping understanding of the gnarled roots that give rise to our contemporary American malaise are on full display in his book Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response (excerpts of which you can read along with some of Jer’s outstanding essays right here on his Substack) and whose bone-dry sense of humor and compassion appear in all their smirking glory in this post of mine from last year, suggested the following:

· 'So,' sidelong glance, 'you seem to have your major appendages intact. Well done.'

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SPEAKING OF SMALL TALK

Inevitably, of course, we’ll find ourselves in a social setting where some if not all of the parties feel that there needs to be talking. Noise needs to be made. Humans need to be doing their little out-loud routine. Can't just sit there in sullen reptilian silence. We’ll be on an elevator or in the checkout line or trapped, lord help us, in a car with someone we don't know. On a bus or a plane with a chatty overdressed glorified chimpanzee in the next seat. And we will be called upon to participate in small talk. So.

Instead of How about this weather? shake things up with...

· how about this view of the vast dystopian landscape?

· hoo-ee, these nonstop randomized cortisol spikes sure are somethin’, aren't they?

· getting yourself all prepped for Armageddon, then?

· *unwraps package, offers* care for a small weapon?

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UPON RUNNING INTO A SEMI-GOOD FRIEND

See, this is where things get kind of sticky, right? There are those friends who ask you how you are because they actually want to know. They don't have an agenda. When they ask, 'How are you?' they want you to tell them the truth. This is a very select group of people. Colleagues, neighbors, your family, most everyone else expects you to say something that lands you safely toward the + end of the +/- Standard Banal Interaction Scale. It's the parlor game of politesse: they're supposed to pretend to genuinely care how you are, and you're supposed to pretend to answer, honestly and effusively but not too effusively because that would be weird, that you are very well. They are in hell; you are in hell. Everybody smile & wave! If you fail to perform this, your one social function - and how hard can it be? - and do your little part in sustaining and perpetuating the unspoken collective agreement that if we pretend it isn't that bad then it is not in fact that bad (*whistles "Mother's Little Helper"*) - what's the matter with you?

Because if you forget your place or just flat out refuse to play, and someone asks you how you are and you reply, Not that fucking great, my dude, and also the overall level of global fuckery? has begun to exceed my capacity for miscellaneous bullshit, so while I'd really love to trade meaningless mouth sounds while we stand here on an elevator, I am running super low on overall bandwidth and plumb out of energy to spend in a vapid exchange about absofreakinglutely nothing with a stranger who can't tolerate twenty-three seconds of silence? so please just don't talk please? they get their feathers all ruffled and now you're the asshole.

But what about people who fall in the middle? The rest of 'em. The semi-good friends, the exes who don't really count as exes because you can't even remember when or why you stopped hooking up besides the sheer bother of having to unlace and then relace your freaking shoes, the colleagues with whom you'd theoretically hang outside of work, the people that you meet, as the great philosopher and social scientist Mr. Rogers once sang, when you're walking down the street each day. What do you say to them?

A few options you might consider:

Instead of Whatcha been up to? or Any travel plans this summer? how 'bout

· hi great to see you is your passport current

· oh my gosh what are the odds we'd bump into each other buying solar generators powerful enough to run a small city for at least a week in the unlikely event that ours for whatever reason goes offline pursuant but probably unrelated to the random shenanigans of teenage hackers with their twitchy little fingers on the nuclear codes

· parents still kicking? work going well? kids still enjoying their new authoritarian regime?

· heyyyyyyyyy you look amaaaaaaazing! it's been too long! also wow total non sequitur but don't I seem to remember you have dual citizenship? I happen to be taking applications for my fourth spouse haha jk

· getting your news from the 1938 Farmer's Almanac these days, I trust?

· no but like actually don't you have dual citizenship because my Thursday is wide open

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It's not just the odd awkward social encounter for which we need a whole new vocab; we could also stand to be a titch more careful with how we throw around what used to be understood as social niceties. Remember when it was absolutely copacetic to lob some bullshit line about how you should really meet for coffee or lunch or golf or squash or a show next time you swung through town and everybody understood you were all just pleasantly lying?

The art of social dissembling is quickly dying, I fear. Everybody’s so dang literal these days. And broke! If you ever need anything, you know I’ve got you! What if someone thought you were serious? People need things! People need all kinds of things you do not have right now and would not give them if you did! Come on by anytime! Do not come by! What? Some fool shows up on your doorstep, three a.m., bedraggled, thinking you meant it? You can totally crash with me! You may not crash with me! You do not want me crashing with you! I have a chihuahua. I haul a 5000-pound camper with a pickup larger than Vermont. Your neighbors will have your house towed. I’m feral. I smoke,

FACED WITH A QUASI-RHETORICAL QUESTION INTENDED TO GIVE THE IMPRESSION THAT THE SPEAKER IS AWARE OF AND/OR CONCERNED ABOUT THE STATE OF THE WORLD WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY ABSOLVING THEMSELVES OF ANY RESPONSIBILITY TO ACT? GOT A BIT OF A SMART MOUTH? DON'T HAVE ANYTHING NICE TO SAY BUT DAMNED IF YOU'RE NOT GONNA SAY ANYTHING AT ALL?

Here's some boilerplate that can be easily adapted for virtually any question of this type.

Sample Quasi-Rhetorical Existential Question: Well, what are we even supposed to do?

Sample Salty But Not That Salty Response: Nothing. That's the point. We are supposed to do nothing. We are supposed to drift around looking wan and sniffing our sniffing salts and making grandiose grandstanding statements about how bad it all is and not. doing. anything.

So you're right on track! Go, you!

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But what if the tables are turned?

What if you’re the guy who needs the thing or is going to be immediately and profoundly and irrevocably harmed by the situation and you’re listening to someone who has all the things talk about how exhausting and sad and anxiety producing it has become for them to watch the situation from the comfort of their living room on high-definition TV?

Tough call. Because, to be fair, it is all of those things, for them and for you and me and the lot of us louts - these are in fact hard times, no matter whether we’re down in the mud with the rowdy groundlings or up in the nosebleeds watching it all fall apart from afar. The real-time collapse of an empire is perhaps the only show for which you don’t want good seats, but no matter where you’re sitting when the show starts - and no matter how much you paid to be well out out of range of the spit and sweat that’ll fly from the stage - when the ceiling starts to cave, the only direction it’s going is down.

With this in mind, I submit to you the following:

IF YOU ARE TEMPTED TO ASK A QUESTION TO WHICH YOU DO NOT IN FACT WANT AN ANSWER, LIKE ‘HOW CAN I HELP?’

Resist! Tho’ the urge be strong, hold fast!

Ain’t nobody got time for that shit.

The question has been revised. Here is the new question.

Other than actually helping, how can I help?

That’s the question from here on out. Write it on a napkin. Put it in your wallet. Refer to it when in doubt. I don’t want to hear any more floofing around trying to gussy it up. Stop putting lipstick on a pig. Just give me the pig.

AND IF YOU'RE THE GUY LISTENING TO THE TINY SYMPHONY OF SOMEONE'S EFFUSIVE YET ABSTRACT CONCERN?

Leave.

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BUT WHAT ABOUT THOSE AWKWARD SITUATIONS?

Ever been more or less naked when somebody reveals some horrible poisonous feature of their deeply-held sociological and/or political n o n s e n s e with about as much fanfare as if they put their hands behind their head and said all casual, "So turns out I'm a werewolf" and then looked at you like "what?" while you have a quick internal debate about how fast you can get out of there and where are your shoes and do you really need pants that badly? or could you maybe just take off as-is - Or how about those awkward situations where somebody you thought was pretty cool leans in conspiratorially and says something abjectly, overtly heinous and bigoted and you're tasked with not throat-punching them because it's the office or a Zoom meeting or a restaurant where people call it 'manners' to pretend they didn't just hear yet more WHITE PEOPLE SAY MORE STUPID SHIT so you have to think up a way to tell them they're a heinous bigot and you are not at all the co-conspirator in b u l l s h i t that they have gravely mistaken you to be?

You feel me. I can tell.

So rather than preach to the choir about the ongoing challenge of dealing with entitled people and wealth myopia and the unrelenting caucasity and the epic audacity - because what, I look like the guy to be giving advice about how to handle these dingbats? No I do not, let's just keep me out of jail this week and we'll call it a win - I have suggestions for the dingbats themselves. Feel free to offer these helpful tips to the dingbats in your lives.

SPECIAL TO THE DINGBATS

If you find yourself saying "I'm sure it will be fine. I mean, how bad can it really get?" just cut to the chase. Instead, try:

Hi! I'm new to history, what happens when everyone who can afford to insulate themselves from and ignore the suffering around them does exactly that?

If you find yourself compelled to get chummy with someone who shares one or more of your primary demographic traits by saying something like, "But you don't really think this will affect us, do you?" first follow these simple steps.

1. Don't.

· shut up. like, right now.

· preemptively shut up.

· shut tf up.

2. While you are taking a little quiet time to think before you speak, ask yourself the following questions:

· am I white?

· am I basing my belief that the person to whom I am speaking shares my unexamined, unfounded, unethical, unbelievably ignorant belief that whiteness is a de facto form of protection that I have the right to employ at will for my own benefit?

· has it occurred to me that using my whiteness as political and social currency is an active form of white supremacy?

· if it has not occurred to me, have I considered the possibility that the person to whom I am speaking may not see this chummy little throwaway comment I've made about the likelihood that they won't come for the liberal white ladies—right?

· right?

· right?

· —as harmless chummy chitchat at all but rather as a display of the covert bigotry that is just as rampant on the left as it is on the right, but it recycles?

· who, exactly, do I mean by 'us'?

3. If you've taken all these steps but still feel compelled to say this out loud, why beat around the bush? Spit it out. Call it what it is.

Instead of "You don't really think this will affect us, do you?" just say, Look, as much as I've enjoyed 'doing' 'my' 'anti-racist' 'work' by scrolling incessantly on my thousand-dollar phone and clicking 'donate a dollar!' to god knows how many rando rah-rah pro-whatnot anti-whatever organizations these past few years from my comfy chair because I really thought that would do the trick to - you know - solve the systemic inequities and sort of fix? the racist gendered violent foundations on which this country was built? i guess? and honestly I am really surprised - like SO surprised, and so sad! - that it didn't totally work? and while I wasn't exactly expecting the Fourth Reich to rise to power QUITE this quickly, now that it has? I really feel like I just need to take care of myself. because that's important too. and I just want to validate myself in that. so imma bounce.

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Until we are able to name and discuss what is going on in the world with each other - a stage that is a non-negotiable precursor to and prerequisite for meaningful large-scale social change - we will continue to accept and normalize it for each other and ourselves. Instead of naming, calling out, resisting, rejecting the delusions and distractions that have been disseminated and designed with the express purpose of selling us on this brave new world, we will remain complicit. We will capitulate. We will comply. We will participate in and perpetuate the lie.

The most pervasive, pernicious path to power is not seizing control of large numbers of people but infiltrating individual perception and warping it to power’s benefit from within. The mechanism of that most malign form of social control is language.

Power creeps into a culture’s language, its story, at first by small degrees. It co-opts colloquialisms, changes patterns of speech; it seeps into and enforces social contracts and codes. Soon, it's embedded itself in private conversation and public discourse, crept into mass communication, education, public health. Eventually it’s bought up all the media; the levers of power that were once believed to be in the people’s hands seem to have been handed over - when? to a power that seemed to rise up almost out of nowhere. From behind, maybe, or within.

It all happened so quietly, so quickly. It’s hard to know who to trust, who’s telling the truth, who to ask, what to believe. We cast about for answers, for stories, for reasons, for ways to make it make sense. Everything looks pretty much the same; everybody’s acting like things are more or less ok. Everybody seems to be singing the same song.

And that’s the danger; and that’s the point.

Because for a while, we’ll just mouth the words. But sooner or later, we’ll find ourselves singing along.

Going Solo at the End of the World is and will remain entirely free to read …

but it’s not free to create. If you look forward to and find something of value in these weekly reports from the road, and you’re in a position to throw a little change in the hat, you’ll not only be keeping Luna well-dressed and in dog treats and me at least marginally clean, you’ll be contributing on behalf of subscribers who’d like to contribute but are in financial turmoil, distress, and real crisis as a direct result of the growing economic upheaval in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and beyond.

If you’ve got a little extra to spare, think about becoming a paid subscriber or giving someone who would enjoy being a part of this journey a paid subscription as a gift.

As always, your readership is more important to me than anything else - and it’s more important now than ever before. -xo M