Dirtbag: Essays

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With the promise of a revived left politics gaining improbable traction on the American scene, it’s high time we took a long unsentimental look in history’s distant mirror, analyze our victories, and conduct some honest post-mortems of previous failures. How can we develop a workable strategy for movement-building and coalition-nurturing in a broader political culture that thrives on the psychology of possessive individualism? How can we bring together a diverse array of agendas and constituencies without obsessing over the disabling complex of small-bore purity tests and deviation-spotting that Sigmund Freud memorably dubbed the “narcissism of small differences”? How can we affirm the messy human quest for pleasure and sardonic wit along the oft-competing mandate for vigilance and ideological rigor? Most of all, how can we transcend the subcultural left, stop acting like power is a dirty word, and go about seizing it in the service of a socialist future for all? Join fearless Baffler dispenser of all-purpose wisdom Amber Frost on this brave new intellectual sojourn—the answers may surprise you! I asked how the seeming frigidity of the #MeToo moment, let alone the alleged epidemic of uterus removals, sits alongside modern feminism’s ‘sex positive’ celebration of polyamory, pansexuality and sex workers. ‘It’s because these people would rather negotiate sex than actually have it… They don’t want to take responsibility’, says Khachiyan. ‘That’s why nerds love this stuff’, says Frost. ‘It’s huge in Silicon Valley. They like games and rules. These are people who consider themselves leftists but probably don’t like anything about socialism except the gulags.’ He could be very charming and funny. He could also be very irresponsible, negligent, abusive, and downright mean. He was not fit for the task of fatherhood, not for me or for any of my biological siblings or step-siblings. Gospel Half-Truths As a “big S” Socialist, my reading habits often surprise liberals. I’m a writer, though my biggest audience comes from the listenership of Chapo Trap House, a popular leftist comedy podcast. This makes me something of a curiosity among my colleagues at traditional media institutions—staffed largely by liberals—so I often find myself explaining my preference for the pink paper of liberal capitalism over the Gray Lady of cultural liberalism. The answer is simple: by literally any measure, the Financial Times is just a better paper. It covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests. And even when the economy makes way for the culture, you still always run the risk of ending up with a nogoodnik—however rare they may be in a just (and subsequently more enlightened) economy. (Sorry honey, some men are just duds. There’s nothing to be done for it, but a problem without a solution is not, per se, an insoluble problem—it’s just a fact of life.)

She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight years old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all, for I worked or looked for work and for Emily’s father, who “could no longer endure” (he wrote in his goodbye note) sharing want with us. It’s a perfect scene: the ruthless capitalist bellowing the reality of the world to a hysterical showbiz crusader who heretofore imagined himself a virtuous evangelist, never once considering his own insignificance in the face of market forces. And when it comes to journalism, committed capitalists are always better materialists than the liberals. And that’s why I read FT. Sure, they’re rooting for the other team, but at least they know the game.I believe my father has failed a total count of five biological children, along with the five different mothers of those children. I could not count the number of children whose mothers he married or moved in with. I know two of my half-siblings, but most were well before my time. One, an older brother, I met for the first time about five years ago. He is a very good person, friendly and kind, but I avoid him because he has my father’s face. A previously unknown half-sister reached out to me recently on social media. I have not responded. By the time our little family’s finances got out of the absolute pits—a state of precarity created in no small part by the enormous amount of student debt my mother would not pay off for many years and the many work hours she spent away from her latchkey daughter—I wasn’t little anymore. And that was the end of that. Walkouts and Walkabouts Once I asked my dad why he had been married so many times. He paused, waited a beat, and said with a grin and a shrug, “Well, I guess I’m just the marrying type.” Even I have to admit that’s a pretty good joke. Frost and Khachiyan have a Marxist understanding of race. ‘We invented race to justify exploitation’, says Frost. ‘Splitting people on the basis of race was used to morally justify slavery… Racial discourse was created after hyper-exploitation.’ But ever since, argues Frost, ‘When we tried to not be racist, we ended up using the same framework’, which today also lives on in identitarian form. ‘All “race” is, is that some people don’t sunburn. That’s the entirety of racial difference.’

The narrative isn’t itself so interesting’, she argues, but it shows ‘the willful failure of the Democratic Party. Again and again, they fall on their face. There’s some kind of Freudian, masochistic thing they have where they get off on publicly humiliating themselves.’ My father was a frustrating, sometimes dangerous person, but I have no anger for him. I’m told he’d often be assailed with the regrets that any self-aware absentee father is bound to experience, and I feel nothing but pity for a sad old man who missed so much. Were the American media machine accountable to the public, a more self-reflective, penitent assembly of institutions, or at least capable of shame, the Times might have spent a little effort reconsidering its “house style” ideology. And yet it stays the course. But why?My grandmother is an incredibly dutiful and loving woman; I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been for her to watch her son fail over and over again to fulfill his patriarchal responsibilities. The community she left to work in a paper factory in Indiana—to make a better life for their children, no less—prized god and family above all else, and everyone had a job to do to keep it running. She also loved kids and babies—her home was covered in pictures of children, some of whom she wasn’t biologically related to, some of whom were only the grandchildren of church brethren whom she’d babysit free of charge. In what was probably his most responsible act of fatherhood, my father signed over all his parental rights and responsibilities governing one son to the child’s mother so that her new husband could legally adopt him. The boy was a toddler at the time, and my grandparents had already grown strongly attached to him. When his mother said they couldn’t see him anymore, they were absolutely crushed. His baby pictures remain all over the house to this day. Civility is destructive because it perpetuates falsehoods, while vulgarity can keep us honest.” Amber A’Lee Frost, The Necessity of Political Vulgarity Compared to the Times, the reporting is usually more in-depth; the reporters generally have more expertise; the coverage is more comprehensive both geographically and substantively; even the op-eds are better (likely because they are far fewer, and they’re not used to pad the paper with “content”—confessionals, puff pieces, listicles—rather than reporting). Most refreshing, the FT does not lose itself in the mire of myopic American culture wars, which very rarely breach the surface of material politics and/or economics. When it does run soft news, it’s higher quality (Rana Foroohar’s “Lunch with the FT” with Rebecca Solnit, for example, transcends the genre of fawning celebrity profile into an understated but scathing critique).