Homeward Bound: A Memoir

It was soft, the feeling of my chin resting on my flak jacket. Mesopotamia danced in red-orange flame and moonlight. The crackling of a thousand fires in a city was strangely silent while a drumbeat of soft explosions in the distance lulled my mind to sleep. Shattering the peace, a cacophony of anger barked from the mouth of a tattooed corporal with brown-skin and a square jaw. “Eh! Steen! You awake?”. Startled, the harsh voice altered me to my trespass, and the punishment my trespass would earn. I responded quickly. “No corporal”. My nose grew long; I was falling asleep on watch.

At 19 years old, I found myself afraid and exhausted on my first tour of duty in the city of Fallujah. The “city of mosques” presented a world that I could have hardly imagined in my life before. On early patrol in the city, my eyes squinted in the Iraqi sun as the day’s light glanced off the city’s spires and domes. Foreign prayers drummed throughout the city and echoed through the streets, alien to my ears. I began my career in the military longing for an experience to define my life. Inevitably when you ask for something, you get more than you bargained for.

Three sleep-deprived days caught up with me, their visions fighting a war for dominance in my mind. There, behind my eyes, I saw a man standing in an empty street, screaming holy hell, spraying gunfire at faceless threats on the rooftops. The forms of his targets were blurred in my memory. Were they covered? Or was it that I didn’t remember? No, they were covered. The details returned to me and I remembered the cracks of the rooftops and the red patch that formed on the screaming man’s leg where he had been struck.

After the man fell, two faceless comrades grabbed him and hauled him to the ground where I had been standing. He wasn’t screaming anymore and laid moaning softly, tranquil in a drug-induced stupor. I preferred the screams. When the soldier was yelling incoherently, it seemed like he was saying “Not Yet, there is so much that is unfinished”. With the drugs, there was nothing but resignation. In the quiet, the man continued to die in front of me.

Finally, after what seemed like ages, a squadmate set a tourniquet on his leg and placed his knee on the man’s chest as the injured soldier faintly struggled against his friends’ attempts to help. A covered vehicle with a tattered drab green color pulled up and a group of desert-fatigued men placed the injured soldier in the back. The man was still audibly groaning as the Humvee pulled away.

I closed the hatch to my own vehicle and prepared to move out. As we accelerated, the remaining pool of blood spread across the vermillion floor and down its narrow channels forming a sort of morbid mosaic on the floor. A man named Charlie sitting next to me opened a pack of cigarettes drawing one into his square white jaw. The smoke passed the filter of his lips and gave a slow white puff. The smell was glorious, masking the smell of rotting flesh. Extending a narrow digit into the pack, Charlie extended his arm, offering a choice from roughly twenty, a gray stick that promised something more peaceful than what I had just witnessed. I took the cigarette and lit up. And for the first time in my life, I breathed the fire out my lungs. The inhale was tormenting.  My head spun violently. Then there was relief, and the veins in my head disappeared. My body relaxed. It was peaceful. Like a dreamless sleep, I thought of nothing in the present or the future. The distant noise of the city was replaced with calm.

The vision ended and my head turned back to the corporal screaming. The memory vanished but the reality of Falluja persisted, I was still deployed, still riding patrol. This was yet another day in a long stretch of days one very much like the other.  As I came back to my senses, a whirring sound crashed outside of my vehicle. We ground to a halt and I opened the hatch. A dead man lay next to our vehicles treads. How long had he been there? hours? maybe days? Death was plentiful in the city. Answers were scarce. All I knew was that the man was dead and that I hadn’t seen him die.

The corporal got out to take pictures of the man. His burnt brown body was growing putrid in the hot sun. At the time, I thought it was strange to take pictures. The man was of no relation to the corporal or any of us. He was, as far as we knew, a random fixture of the city’s decay, betrayed by one explosion or another within a city at war. The Corporal climbed back in the vehicle in a hurry. “Steen! Are you deaf? Back up! We are getting mortared from our own people”. I pulled the gear selector in reverse and slammed the accelerator. The green beast lurched backward and then screamed down the street away from the threat. My nerves were reeling. I wasn’t sure if I was more terrified of the exploding projectiles or the verbal punishments from the corporal, either was motivation enough to move quickly.

The corridor with the corpse grew small and disappeared into the distance. But the body of the unknown man remained; in the corporal’s camera, and in my memory. The image was there indelibly: an unknown Iraqi man, burnt and decaying in the Fallujah sun.

Pictures are odd things. I have often found it strange how people want a physical image to remind themselves that, sure enough, they were somewhere, that they participated in life events that should be well-recollected. Are memories not enough? It seems that the frame and the caption associated with each picture provide a type of comfort; “A Fishing Trip with Dad 2002”, the moment captured with smiles, poses, and a convenient explanation.

Lots of Marines try to label their own experiences in combat with these kinds of convenient explanations. But explanations fall short, they are cheap. People say that a picture is worth a thousand words. But sometimes a picture is worth no words. Labeling an image removes a part of its power. Pictures of smiling men with guns standing next to one another, corpses in the backgrounds, dead bodies hanging from a bridge, I look at pictures of myself from that time and understand nothing aside from how I felt in the moment. Apathy, anger, camaraderie, and cowardice alternate across the memories. But emotions are words, and words are insufficient to explain anything. I can’t bring myself to understand these moments, but I re-live them from time to time over a cigarette.

For as long as I can remember, I have asked myself if there was a plan for existence, some meaning that could make sense of things. As a child I was raised to believe in God, that life had a plan and that one’s duty was to realize his gifts to the glory of God. But war has a way of laying bare the uncertainty and grim realities of existence. After returning, I found myself questioning whether there could be any plan or purpose. Men who had much more to lose than me were dying every day in overseas cities. Men with wives and children were shipped home in flag-draped coffins. Sometimes I felt that the injustice was unbearable. Why did I live through so many close calls when others did not? Other times I could not even mourn those who had fallen. I was just glad they were not me.

And through all of this, the notion of a divine plan for the universe began to seem like a farce. The idea sickened me. Mankind was horrible enough to not need the Devil to explain his evil and meaning was too absent to require a God to explain it. Besides, if the cruel contradictions of war were part of some larger divine plan, I wanted no part in it.  

After returning from deployment, my thoughts began drifting in a new direction.  I began to read and listen to the skeptic voices popular in the late 2000s: the secular witticisms of Christopher Hitchens, the insights of Richard Dawkins, and the rational refutations of Sam Harris and Matt Dillahunty. These were my guides on a new intellectual journey. From them, I was able to build a new logical foundation to form the atheism that I still maintain.

I became enamored with the idea of building a world without fate or destiny, a world in which people were free to act without God, and where empirical reality revealed the correct path for humanity and myself. Science and secularism provided a story and a sense of stability that didn’t rely on a divine plan which seemed absent both in America and Iraqi. There was a certain confidence that the atheist approach provided to both the present and the past. However, even this confidence would be shaken by events to come.

Today, I find myself looking back on these life changes, in a crisis I had never anticipated in the streets of Fallujah or in my subsequent philosophical ruminations. My father is diagnosed with stage-4 colon cancer.

People act like science has all of the answers. Maybe it does. Science has an answer for my dad. The answer is that he will likely die from his affliction. But this is not the answer that anyone wants, and it is not the answer that anyone is looking for after the prognosis.

Now, even as an atheist, I think I understand why people pray. People pray because they don’t have control. Most of us are not doctors, and none of us can heal the sick with certainty. Rather than pursue self-destruction, stew in anger, blame the government for not curing my dad and burn down the world, I have to accept that there is no remedy that is within my power. All I can do is hope that my father survives his treatments.

In the same way, while I was at war, I could not stop the bullets and explosives directed at my comrades and myself. Rather than shoot everything that was a threat I had to accept that there were things beyond my control, things for which scientific warfare and tactics had no answer. In these places, I have found that it is necessary to believe in something beyond the plain facts of the situation. And, even as an atheist, I can’t think of a better word for this than “faith”.

I have to have faith that things in life will work out. I have to have faith that even though my dad will die, and he may yet die horribly from the cancer consuming him, his passing will be serene and sacred. In order to continue to live and justify my own existence, I have to believe that life can be better and that my father’s memory in this world will be honorable.  

Science has possibilities, but I remain with the hard reality of my life. I think back to my family’s last conference call. I listened to the thoughts and hopes of my family members believing all the while that I could not share in their prayers to a God who I rejected. But after everything was said, I realized that I could not help but pray. There was nothing else to do.

The foxholes of Iraq were not enough to force me to understand belief. Instead, it was that deeper foxhole of seeing the man who raised me from birth face his final hours, a man I love, and deserving of a good life, dying. I am the continuation of my father. I am his flesh and blood and there something from me is a part of him, just as a part of him will be with me always. The blessing of life he gave me is something that is sacred and must be continued forward into the future.

As I close these reflections, my mind again returns to another dusty tale from the Middle East, not a wartime memory but a parable, the story of the Prodigal Son. I remember Jesus’s parable more vividly in these times recalling its many details: the younger son’s life of wanton decadence, the hard times of hunger, and then the feast and the fatted calf that greeted him upon his return to his father. Undoubtedly the original moral of the tale was directed to those in the role of jealous older brother, a caution against pride. But in the parable’s words, there is a promise of hope, a story of a son returning to the love that he had thought he had lost. Every day, I try to remember to take one step closer to the parable’s example. I am grateful for each lamp post that I have found on my way, but I must remind myself that the future is unknown. There remains no certainty of an ultimate answer at the end of things, but I have a direction to travel and I know that I  must hurry home before the light grows dimmer.

Tales from a Middle Place

Growing up on the West Coast of the United States at the tail end of the 1990’s technology boom, a strange notion was ever-present; the notion of “the edge”. I found that in the minds of locals living in the Golden State, both young and old, possessing this “edge” was something of a secular cult. Brilliant scientists and rich Silicon Valley entrepreneurs were “cutting edge”. Big budget film-makers from Hollywood were always bringing their audience “to the edge”. And what successful comedian, or teenager for that matter, didn’t consider their humor to be “edgy”? The “edge” was the place everyone wanted to be, a place at the forefront of human endeavor, the limit of what had been achieved and the beginning of what was possible. The edge wasn’t easy to define, and it certainly wasn’t safe. In fact, as the writer Hunter S. Thompson warned, “the edge” could only be described vaguely since everyone who really knew what it was had already toppled over it. Still, the edge was the place of life, the place where things happened, and the place where people made names for themselves.

Even the landscape of the state seemed tuned to the notion of “the edge”. In California, the featureless plains and deserts of middle America became transformed into a land of fresh agriculture, novel lifestyles, and technological innovation, before finally meeting the abyss of the Pacific Ocean. Here within a narrow strip of tasteful villas, high-tech corporate parks, and cliff-side urban metropolises lay the home of true innovation. The only place where genius could emerge and, as I thought, the only place where interesting stories happened to people.

Yet halfway through my 20s, during an attempt to find my calling with a degree from a university tucked away in a Midwestern town, I encountered a place entirely separated from the hum of those living on the edge of things. This place was neither the dull world of Walmart consumerism nor the fevered swamps of evangelical fanaticism which so plagued the nightmares of blue-state denizens of that era. This place wasn’t even the land of plain and honest folk described in Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon”. It was something apart, mired in its own haunted history, and possessing a quality absent from locations more in tune with the spirit of the age.

Such places are not easy to notice. Indeed, I might have missed it. All universities, regardless of their location, exist on the edge of things. They bask in the glow of the novel and erect monuments of chrome with academic programs designed, as one pamphlet put it, “to push the boundaries of human possibility”. But in this new home, locked in the orbit of one of Michigan’s largest rust belts, a curious individual could observe the seams of the modern world built into the landscape of the Detroit metropolitan area.

Half a century into its decline as a manufacturing capital, Detroit in 2008 was twisting in the winds of a financial crisis that had swept the rest of America. As such, the city was gripped by a stagnation that a denizen of Seattle or San Francisco could hardly imagine. Engulfed in a notorious crime epidemic since the early 70s, the Detroit of the late 2000s had somehow burnt out, transforming into a deserted landscape with a barely active downtown surrounded by miles of desolate ex-urban neighborhoods and industrial ruins. Those still attached to the city who had any money had fled to the suburbs and visited its downtown only for the occasional sporting event, interacting as little as possible with the urban reality that most considered as unfathomable as it was unsolvable.

Then, local news seemed filled with bizarre stories from the city: fully functioning homes selling for dimes and nickels in semi-deserted neighborhoods; abandoned multi-story commercial buildings excavated to find the bodies of long-dead junkies in their elevator shafts; and the humorous story of a local comic journalist completing an 18-hole pick-up golf game across downtown, unperturbed by authorities. The city had become a type of wilderness, embodied, most notably in Ford’s Michigan Theater, once an art deco jewel, now a rain swept ruin with plants growing in between the seats where glitzy theatergoers would have sat fifty years before.

But outside the urban devastation, there remained a manner particular to the region. Burning in the hearts of those who remembered better times was an animation that would be exceptional even in the most sentimental small-town community on the west coast. At first, the attitude came off as a mix of nostalgia and self-righteousness, but it nevertheless contained a warmth and cheer that I have since associated with the term “Middle American”.

Often, Californians traveling out of state expect to find places totally assimilated into West Coast mannerisms spread far and wide by Hollywood. But in some places, one can find folk distinct from the America that left the 20th century behind. This quality was less present in the younger generation, who fled from midwestern cultural attitudes faster than they fled midwestern geography. However, among the older folks, living on the outskirts of the post-industrial strip, or holding down a homestead in an otherwise abandoned urban neighborhood, one could get a sense of what was, or perhaps still is,
“Michiganess”.

I encountered the quality no more fully than in my friendship with Charles Novak, a short balding and bespectacled man in his late 50s living alone in a private dormitory room in the student housing cooperative where I took residence during my career in Grad school. WIth an off-balance gate, a lazy eye, balding gray hair, and an overly polite mannerism that would have, in today’s college environment,  certainly been called out as “White”, Charlie was an odd character to find in a student dormitory mostly occupied by hip 20-somethings. Still, eccentricities and all, Charlie Novak was Michigander in the old sense. And it was from Charlie that I received a brief glimpse into a world that I would have never known otherwise.

Like many of the rust belt’s residents, Charlie’s father and grandfather had worked in the auto industry and had managed to build thriving lives for themselves with only high school educations. As the first of his family to attend college, Charlie carried his parents’ hopes for upward mobility, until an early-life stroke nearly killed him half-way through his degree. Upon recovering, Charlie managed to muddle through his college years with his radical political convictions intact and absolutely no professional ambitions otherwise. And so, after graduation, Charlie stayed put in the socialist living experiment he had joined in the 70s, long after his peers had moved on.

Charlie seemed a man whose development was frozen at the cusp of adulthood, just at the point in life when his father and grandfather would have found meaning in marriage and a stable unionized job. Not that Charlie was morose or distant. He remained ever outgoing and gregarious with a childlike enthusiasm for new things. But, in spite of this, Charlie was stationary. He could not confront the changes required by his own life and times. And so, Charlie stayed put, year after year in the student housing CoOp, as generations of students passed by around him.

But in spite of his eccentricities, Charlie was well-adjusted in one way. Despite his continuing health problems, he had obtained a career driving a taxi across the Detroit Metropolitan area. The occupation was close to ideal. In addition to covering his expenses, the work as a cabbie provided him with a collection of second-hand stories taken from passengers and a nocturnal sleeping schedule which on most days found him eating his dinner with the dormitory’s night owls still socializing long after the regular work-a-day people had gone to bed.

Most of my contact with Charlie came during late nights when a desire to procrastinate brought me to the dormitory kitchen to socialize. There, nursing cups of tea and feasting on dinner leftovers, a company of insomniacs, late-night gamers, night-shift workers and, of course, Charlie collected around the central table to shoot the breeze in the light of a single overhead fixture and the glow of the kitchen pilot lights. Charlie showed up late to these gatherings after finishing his taxi rounds, joining those gathered with a wide smile and a “howdy” before jumping into whatever discussion was underway.

Residents often excused themselves when seeing Charlie, realizing that if they had stayed up long enough for his arrival at the table, it was far too late indeed. Moreover, Charlie’s presence in a conversation marked a distinct decline in focus. Seldom being interested in the more controversial subjects that occupied other CoOp residents, Charlie often shifted the discussion to more human fare, which usually included questions concerning people’s personal lives, local and CoOp history, and Charlie’s own accounts of transporting passengers from one end of Detroit to the other.

Even for one loathe to leave a good discussion, Charlie’s digressions were usually more interesting than the controversies they replaced. Looking back, I remember hearing, in no particular order, a tale of late night witchcraft, taken from one of Charlie’s passengers claiming to be a Voodoo priest; business advice Charlie had received from a local pimp using his taxi to ferry prostitutes to suburban clientele; and an advanced conspiracy theory concerning Detroit’s then-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick that Charlie claimed to have pieced together by eavesdropping on political insiders. Other stories included the time that Charlie worked as a temp roadie for the band “The White Stripes” (before they were big, Charlie assured us), and one extended tale of his encounter with a local crystal worshipping cult.

One expected an element of tale-telling in Charlie’s accounts, and this provided his stories with a theatrical dimension. As the last of the gatherers broke away each night, Charlie punctuated the talk with a coda, cheerfully announcing “to be continued!” as the last CoOp denizen retired.  This expression was so popular among those who knew Charlie that “to be continued” became a general conversation stopper in the CoOp, a wink of recognition among the late-night crew and those who knew Charlie in other contexts.

For all the myriad stories told at late-night gatherings, I spoke to Charlie in private only once. Then, wandering into the CoOp’s common area at some ungodly hour following a collapse after a two-day studying binge, I found Charlie sitting alone, long after the other late-nighters had returned to their rooms. Charlie wore a more serious disposition than I ever remember having seen. After receiving an only slightly less enthusiastic “Howdy” and fixing a cup of tea for myself, I sat down at the common table wondering if for once Charlie was too tired to launch into yet another story.

I waited but Charlie said nothing, maintaining a neutral expression. Then after seeing me shift uncomfortably, Charlie broke into a smile and began to talk.

“You know, when I was your age, I thought I would be a writer like Stephen King or something. But it never worked out. I think when you get to be my age and you realize that some people have it and some people don’t.”

“I don’t know,” I added. “You certainly have stories. Did you ever think of writing them down? You could probably make a book out of that.”

“Nah, I don’t have stories, not real ones. Weird things happen to me, I hear about weird things happening to other people, but they aren’t stories like the kind that you put into a book and get someone else to read. Strange things just happen all the time. But you can’t make a novel out of it, it wouldn’t work.“

Charlie continued.

“Stories have beginnings and endings, people learn things, there is a point. Most weird things just happen to people. There isn’t a point. There isn’t even a way to make it sound cool. Probably the weirdest thing that ever happened to me was…“ and here Charlie stopped as if something had occurred to him. After pausing, he started again, this time in a more relaxed voice.

“There was this time, you know, I got lost. People think they know a place, but no one really does. I have been driving around this city for most of my life. I’ve been a cabbie since the 90s. I’ve traveled on every street, every backway, and alley. It’s like the back of my hand, you don’t forget it,  you couldn’t even if you tried. But then…”

Charlie paused again.

“But then a strange thing happens. I think it was two years ago in August, maybe earlier, but definitely summer. I get a call from dispatch for a pick up on Cloverdale. No problem, I’d driven there and back plenty of times. I even know a shortcut. This time, however, as I get off the interstate strange things start happening.

“I remember it starts with the radio getting quiet. The music that I am playing fades away and I remember cranking the volume knob up until it doesn’t turn anymore. Then, right where the radio voices were, there is this piercing sound, softly first then growing louder, like something sharp being drilled through a piece of metal. But somehow the noise is coming from inside the cab pushing out from the back seat towards the dashboard.

“So, I slow down, try to get my bearings, and I realize that I’m lost, totally lost. No idea where I am. I check the street signs and I don’t recognize them. They seem to have names that don’t make sense, and the ones that do I can barely read because as I am there, rolling down the street, the light from the sun starts fading, everything become dim, and I get this horrible panic welling up from my gut. I start sweating, sweating so much that I have to wipe my brow every second just to see ten feet in front of me. And all the while that slow piercing sound is getting louder until it feels like it’s perched right there in the air, right behind my ear, and I feel it pressing against my skull.

“Finally, I can’t go on. I slam on the breaks-don’t even pull over. The car is running, keys in the ignition, and I just open the door and jump out of the cab onto the pavement, like a frog out of a boiling pot. And then the sound stops. It’s like someone hit the mute button and I stand there for probably ten minutes staring at the running car and listening to my heart pound in my chest.

“As I listen, I realize that everything is silent- there’s not a decibel coming from the radio or anywhere on the street. I’ve stopped right in the middle of a city block, but there are no cars, no car sounds even. There are no voices and no birds. There’s just the hum of the cab engine and the wind between the buildings and trees.

“And when I look more closely, I notice not only is there absolutely no one living on the block now, it seems like no one has been living there for a very long time. The street beneath my feet is cracked right through to the earth and in between the line of my cab’s wheels, there are patches of foxtails sprouting up. The buildings are empty, boarded up, with tree branches jutting through windows and roots overflowing the devil’s strip. A few lots are so overgrown that I can’t tell if there is a house or apartment there at all, just huge piles of branches and brambles. And as I am looking down the street, it just keeps going; torn pickets, dying trees, and ruined houses on and on down the line.

“Even the sun in the sky is twisted as if it is behind some mist. It isn’t bright and piercing, but faded and uneven like a penny melted into the sky until everything in the background is like a dull dark copper sheet. And as I sit there I get an uneasy feeling, like I’m being watched.

“I look back at the street again. And then I see, right from the corner of my eye, an enormous beast, sitting crouched right behind the bumper of my car. The thing is huge. Its frame is half the size of my cab, and its covered in thick brown fur with mud like it had climbed up out of some hollow in the earth. And I take two steps back, you know, half expecting King Kong, until I see that it’s a deer.

“A deer?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s a stag. But not one of those whitetails. This thing is a huge animal with a hulking arch in its back and antlers. You could see the mange and patches on its coat where it had gotten scraped fighting a predator or something. The thing is so close I can see the flies buzzing around its shoulder and smell the odor coming off its hide. It’s powerful.  

“And all the while, as I am standing there a few yards away, I see that this creature crouched with its antlers down under the cab, and it’s grinding them against the rear of my fender: back and forth, back and forth until the cab is shaking on its suspension. It’s like the thing is trying to fight the car, and doesn’t even see me standing right there in front of it.

“Now, I have no idea what to make of all this at first. But after a few moments of just watching the creature, mangle the back end of my Taxi, I get this strange notion that the deer, this huge stag thing, is the reason why I’m lost and that if it goes away things will go back to normal again.”

Charlie glanced up before continuing. “I know it sounds crazy right? But that’s the state of mind I am in. And in that frame, I decide, right then and there, that I am going to scare the deer off, shoo this stag back, back to…well, back to wherever it came from.  So, I step forward, start waving my arms about, and shout ‘HEY, YOU!’

“I hear my voice echo across the neighborhood but other that nothing happens. The stag doesn’t even look up, so I take another step closer and yell again. ‘HEY YOU, GET AWAY!’

“I don’t know it if heard me, but this time the stag starts up on its back legs and rams against the cab so hard the entire frame is lifted three feet off the ground. It looks like the vehicle is about to get flipped. And, at seeing that, something snaps in my brain. I run right up to the thing, right up to its flank and yell ‘GET AWAY FROM MY CAB!’ and slam my shoulder right into its ribs.”

“You tackled it?” I asked.

“I know, it doesn’t make any sense! And, to tell you the truth, I don’t remember touching the thing because, next thing I know I am lying on my side on the street, and the stag is walking towards me. I remember lying there, the hooves sound like metal slabs dropping on the pavement. And at once terror wells up from my gut. It feels like the pavement is on fire, and sweat starts pouring into my eyes to the point where I’m not sure which end is up.

“Then as I clear my vision, the stag is there, standing over me. Its hoofs are an inch away from my feet. The thing must be at least seven feet high to the top of its antlers. And as it approaches, I look up at it from its scarred hooves, to the wall of its mangled fur, and then to its face.

“The face is the strangest thing. It’s not normal. Right where its eyes should be there is this brightness, piercing like the sun on an ordinary day. It’s like someone set off a flare just inside the creature’s skull. It is growing brighter every second, overpowering the other parts of the animal until I can’t directly look at the thing, and it seems that the deer’s head is a mask of light set under a crown of antlers.

“I sit there waiting for something to happen. And, at once, the beast raises its head to the sky, opens what I could make of its mouth, and makes like it’s going to call. Everything is quiet for a moment. And then at once, a sound starts rushes out of the creature, like the sound of an ocean, but louder. It’s so that I think the cry might bring the sky crashing down, and I feel the force of it push against my chest with such strength that I think my heart is going to give way.”

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“What do you think? I find my guts, get off my butt and get the hell out of there! I run, right off the pavement, off the street, back through the line of houses, and through the space in the lots where gardens had been. I run through the trees and brush, between the brick buildings, and yards filled with car parts and lawn equipment. And all the while, I know that the thing is behind me, following me. It’s not like I hear it coming, I can’t hear anything. But, still, I know it’s there behind me like in a nightmare, following. So, I just kept going and going.”

And Charlie trailed off here before returning.

“I keep going until I just can’t go anymore. I feel my body caving in on itself from running and climbing. I remember thinking that this is it, I’m done for. Either my heart is going to give out or I am going to be trampled under the monster’s hooves.

“So, I stop, turn around, and look back. There, a yard’s length away, is the creature charging forward, leaping over roots and around the pieces of car strewn around the yard. The light from the thing’s head is now so bright that its whole body looks blurred and indistinct. It’s consumed in a brilliance like the creature is a ball of white fire with solid legs and antlers.

“Then staring at the monster, I feel myself evaporate. I don’t tap out, but my will stops. My thoughts stop. Everything stops. And in a second it feels like the creature is approaching in slow motion. The light coming from its body is so powerful it consumes the sky and the buildings, then the yard and the houses. Then even the ground beneath my feet vanishes. It’s like I am floating there with the creature and nothing else. As the creature is there, a foot away from my heart, I put out my hands. I reach out and grab onto its antlers and hang on for dear life. Then everything is blurred.  I am lifted, up and up and into the sky: floating first, then flying, and then falling; off the earth, out of space, and everything becomes dark.

“The next thing, I am laying on the ground in a different world, staring upwards. Everything is still and there is a calmness in the air. I don’t know how long I was out, it seems like hours or days. And for the longest time, all I can do is look up. The sky is cleared of the orange hue and it’s blue like I never remember seeing it, a solid indigo. There is a breeze blowing and I hear bees buzzing around my ears. There’s soft vegetation beneath my back and the smell of vegetables everywhere.

“After a moment, I sit up and I see that I have landed right in the middle of an enormous garden. My backside is on top of a zucchini patch and I have my right hand in the middle of an eggplant that must have broken my fall. I still remember it, like it was yesterday. At that moment, it is like each of my senses is heightened. Every object around me is vivid. The oak trees are greener than I remember them ever being, and each blade of grass seems sculpted. The fences and houses around me, even the city skyscrapers far off in the distance are like a painting. And when I hear the birds chirp, it’s not faded into the background, but distinct, as if I could pick out and point to each song coming down from the trees.

“Then I remember myself, and I stand up in hurry to look for that stag-thing. But the creature is nowhere to be seen. It’s like the whole thing never happened. I can’t tell where the monster went, and more than that, I can’t even tell where I have come from. It’s like I have been dropped right there in the middle of the yard, and everything that happened before was a dream.

“I am there trying to get things straight in my mind when I turn to find this girl standing right there behind me.” Charlie stopped and corrected himself.  “Err… I should say ‘woman’. But she is young, not more than twenty-five with a big sun-hat, khaki overalls, and muddy sneakers. She is there, with a hoe in one hand and a bucket of fertilizer in the other, just looking on quietly and saying nothing.

“For a while, we stare at each other. Then she puts down her hoe and takes off her hat. And I know then that this woman is the most beautiful woman I will ever see. She doesn’t look like a model, she is too slight and her hands are too stretched and calloused for a girl you might see in a movie or advertisement. But there is something in her face that is strange, delicate and old. Her hair is braided and matted with sweat, and those parts that aren’t look like strands of spiderweb.  Her eyes are tired, as if they have seen things that a woman her age couldn’t have experienced, and she is wearing a smile that seems like it must have a story behind it, but probably didn’t.

“I remember she is standing in place with the wind blowing across the yard, and it feels as if the air around her body might crush her but at the same time like an invisible strength is holding her in place against the sky like a suspension bridge.

“And after another moment, the silence breaks.

“She asks me ‘Are you from the police?’, and I say ‘No ma’am. I drive a taxi’.

“She asks where my taxi is, and I say that I don’t know. She asks me if I am hurt, and after thinking about it, I say that I’m alright. Then she invites me in for lunch, and we walk back to an old brick house just behind the yard under an enormous tilted oak tree with flaky bark. Inside, there is a kitchen with stripped walls and buckets of paint and plaster on the floor above torn up tiles.

“Lunch is borscht made with vegetables from the garden. It is delicious, but not too delicious. The food is not some symphony of flavor but feels like a piece of the background, as much a part of the environment as the sounds of summer birds outdoors and the feel of the patchy wood table where I am sitting.

“My host fetches her own meal and we talk. I learn her name is Sarah, spelled with an “h” and that she was born in a Detroit suburb in the 80s. She is from a military family, and during her childhood, she moved around every few years. She even got to live in Germany and Japan. After high school Sarah had things figured out, going to an Ivy League for pre-law, before a fascination with Urban homesteading brought her back to Detroit to manage a farm collective in the city.

“I talk to her more about the town, how it has changed, how it hasn’t, the weather that year-typical stuff. But all the while, I feel like there is something important lurking right behind the conversation we are having. My mind is tuned into something like I am hearing a message break in from outside the universe. And I know with certainty, that I am at a turning point. There is something I need to hear from this woman: some piece of wisdom that she must impart at this time and at no other.

“I wait for this girl, this girl who I don’t even know, to say something. Something profound. I am hanging on her words. But our conversation just sticks to the mundane, the city, the weather, the details of gardening. It goes on, and I feel an urgency building. Then I ask her the only question I can think of.

“I ask her, ‘When you came back, back here to Detroit did you come back for a reason. Did you feel like you were coming home? Was there something here?’

“And at this, she shrugs and says ‘No’. She tells me – and I remember this, she tells me ‘Places aren’t that different. Life is the same. There are people, houses, streets, driving to work, doing chores. Things aren’t that different anywhere.’

“That’s what she says and I can’t think of anything more to ask. The moment passes.

“And after that not much more happens. I finish my meal, get my bearings, say goodbye. Then I find my way back to the street where I had stopped the car. It wasn’t even that far away and my cab was still open, engine idling with the keys right there in the ignition. I guess the only thing miraculous that came out it, after all, was that I had managed to leave an open car in Detroit for several hours without it being stolen. And so, I drive home, drink some tea, make an appointment to see my doctor and, well, that’s that.

“Quite a tale,” I said, seeing Charlie had finished.

“It’s a strange one.”

“Did you ever go back. Try to find the street and the house again?”

“I found my way there a few times over the years. I didn’t see Sarah. She probably moved on to something else.”

“And the neighborhood where it happened?”

“Just somewhere. Somewhere in the middle of Nowhere.”

“The story has everything: mysterious omens, a battle with a beast, and a beautiful woman at the end”

“But, it’s still not a real story,” Charlie replied.

“Sounds like one to me.”

“But nothing happened, I didn’t fall in love, I never saw that girl Sarah after that. I didn’t get a new job or move to a different state. I didn’t meet God or the devil. I didn’t change my religion or even change my morning routine. I just went home and things went on as usual. You know? Weird things happen.”

The dining room was quiet for a moment as I chewed on the words, listening to the sounds of the dormitory building settling into itself. Then I noticed that Charlie had dozed off and I stood up from my chair. Charlie snapped back.

“Oh-I guess I’m not as young as I used to be.” He chuckled as he got up from the table. “You know, there is probably more to all this, but, like I said, you get to my age and just living through it is enough. You can’t spend time trying to figure it out.”

“Perhaps it’s ‘ to be continued’?” I offered

Charlie smiled. “Yeah, Dave, it’s ‘to be continued’ “. Then he shuffled out of the hall to retire for the night.

Things did continue. A year later I finished my degree, moved back to the West Coast, and got a job at a Silicon Valley company. I changed my politics. I changed my attitude. I even found religion. All the while, Charlie stayed put, just where he had been for the previous three decades. Yet, years after moving away, as my memory of Michigan grew more distant, I was still reminded of Charlie and his stories from time to time.

As a religious person, people sometimes ask if I have had some encounter with the divine. No doubt they are looking for a story like that of Saint Paul being thrown from his horse by a voice from Heaven. Unfortunately, as someone who obtained their theological positions from dusty tomes and ruminations about metaphysics, I don’t have much to offer in the way of a good tale.

Still, I listen to other people’s religious experiences with rapt interest. From flashes of light, to voices, to more advanced visions of angels and saints, the stories fascinate me, even as I have no reference in my own life. The stories are human, and, at times, inspirational. But still, there often seems to be something missing, a dimension of the divine which remains undescribed. And when hearing of encounters with the divine, my mind returns to Charlie’s tale of a celestial stag chasing him across the ruins of America’s last forgotten metropolis.

I had hoped to see Charlie’s story captured in a hipster-style podcast like NPR’s StoryCorps or “The Moth”. Although I saw little chance of Charlie ever achieving his dream of becoming a writer, it seemed that someone with more literary flair might bring his story to the public and give it new life.

Seven years later, when meeting with an old school friend, I heard that Charlie had passed away. Carried off by another stroke when sleeping in the dorm room he had taken residence in 40 years earlier, he was laid to rest alongside his father and mother on a plot in Romulus, Michigan. His late night tales would no longer continue.

News of Charlie’s death struck me more deeply than the death of someone I had not spoken with for the better part of a decade should have. But more than his stories, I found my mind returning to the mannerisms and character Charlie had shown me when we lived in the same dormitory building.

It is true that Charlie was a lost soul in his time, never meeting his potential and shirking from the challenges of the world. Nevertheless, he possessed a singular humanity. In my travels since, I have encountered many men and women of intellect and spiritual development who achieved humility and spiritual awareness through years of discipline. But the way of Charlie Novak, was that of effortless warmth, as if he had, through sickness and circumstance, lapsed into a grace that he could neither explain nor comprehend.

Perhaps what was missing in Charlie’s life was a conclusion, a direction to frame the sundry events that had occurred to him between his birth and death. While no man can know what befalls a soul ultimately, I feel inclined to write a coda, not for the life of Charlie Novak, but for his stories. And while it may be presumptuous to impose a theme upon tales that manifestly had none, I can offer here what little Charlie was able to teach me through his stories told in the early hours of the morning.

As humans, we are driven to reach ever upward, for ambition, for worldly meaning, and for progress. There, we are told, lies greatness and fulfillment. But while these promises tantalize us, they are ultimately unattainable. And those living through our modern age are not slow to uncover the bitter truth.

Yet we persist in our endeavors out of fear. That which is static perishes. What is slow is ended by the merciless logic of Death and Darwin. Therefore, we flee to the edge of things, to the boundaries of life, and to that which is new and novel. And when we cannot flee anymore, we build temples to honor gods who tell us salvation lies behind the next cutting-edge gadget, the next political campaign, or the next revolutionary social reform. We work diligently, yet while we never speak the name of Death, he is there behind us as we walk upon life’s precipice.

But the God of the meek stands apart from our struggle. Fearing no death, He descends to the center, to those living in the valley of the shadow of death. And within humble souls, like Charlie Novak, He brings virtue and wisdom that is practiced even where it is not preached. Those on the edge of things seldom suspect the unconscious holiness of the middle places.

And in all of this, I see some small mercy for humanity when our age recedes, and mankind is forced again to look back towards the home it abandoned. Time passes, and like all things striving for prominence, our modern world will depart from history. Then arising from the center, crowned with horns of light, and animated with the force of a new resurrection, the living God will charge ever outward.

The Normalcy of Donald J. Trump

This is #NotNormal.

In the weeks and months after the 2016 Presidential Election, this hashtag became an instant hit on left-wing Twitter. Conceptually, the hashtag went hand in hand with the anti-Bush “Selected, Not Elected” slogan. But this time instead of trying to delegitimize the way a President entered into office, the left wanted to delegitimize the everything for which the President stood. Donald Trump was #NotNormal. According to left-wing Twitter, Trump was so onerous, so boorish, and so divisive that the mere fact of his presidency was simply unacceptable to American Democracy.

Two years later and the Left has not slowed down in its hysteria over Donald Trump. Anyone that expected things to calm down after the election must at this point be quite disappointed after the last three and a half years of breathless anti-Trump coverage by the media. And despite Democrats doing well in the Midterms (maybe not #BlueWave but still respectably) things have not calmed down since. As it remains undoubtedly true that the left will continue to vehemently hate Donald Trump, it’s worth interrogating the rather fascinating claim that a duly elected President is somehow #NotNormal.

It’s not that there aren’t legitimate criticisms of Trump. He uses inflammatory rhetoric, he has had a hard time retaining cabinet members and staffers, he’s fond of “finessing” the truth to make himself look better, and some of his business relationships remain troubling. Even from a right-wing perspective, he has failed to deliver on many of his signature policy issues at the forefront of the 2016 campaign. Still, the #NotNormal hashtag popular among left-wingers on Twitter (garnering over 2 million impressions in the last week according to socialalert.net) betrays a myopic understanding of the American cultural reality of the last thirty years.

A constant source of consternation on the left is Trump’s use Twitter to bypass the traditional media to get his message out to his followers directly. Although the content of these tweets can be difficult to defend, he is by no means the progenitor of social media in presidential politics. Not that you could discern that from watching CNN. Ironically, the Left hates Trump for using a form of communication designed to circumvent the mainstream, a technique pioneered by their golden boy, Barack Obama. In the 2008 election, Obama was able to garner an unprecedented following across social media. Far from being seen as contemptible, this was cheered by the left as a sign of the approaching Democrat hegemony. The left, we were told, was more effective at using social media, which skewers younger. Under these circumstances, the Democrats could guarantee a structural advantage in any campaign for generations to come.

Fast forward to the Era of Trump, and the left is no longer as sanguine about a President’s use of populist forms of communication. The use of social media to appeal to one’s base is now proclaimed as a threat to the republic and its guardians in the corporate media.  Much of the ongoing censorship of right-wing voices on social media seems to be aimed at limiting the spread of the message put forward by Trump and those who followed in his wake. But according to the left, we’re expected to believe that in 2018 harnessing social media for purposes of political organization is a bad thing.

Another way we are to believe that Trump is #NotNormal is his general boorishness. Between constantly insulting CNN, calling Stormy Daniels “horseface”, denouncing NFL players as ‘sons of bitches,’, Trump has a habit of making personal beefs into public affairs. And while this trait is somewhat unique to Trump as a President, it’s hardly unique to our zeitgeist. The cultural left has done everything it can to coarsen the discourse of society. It has taken every opportunity to make the “personal” and “political” indistinguishable.  That celebrities like Alec Baldwin or Robert De Niro are publicly condemning Trump is particularly rich when they embody the same New York cultural sensibilities as the president himself. It’s probably not a good thing for the republic that we have a President who is so comfortable using his office to spread insults. But the existence of an ever coarser and political popular culture was going to make a phenomenon like Trump inevitable. And as much as one might lament this fact, it is hard to take seriously such a complaint coming from the very media that is responsible for the degradation of decorum.

Hand in hand with his boorishness are Trump’s sexual peccadilloes. Trump, now on his third marriage, has had numerous affairs, most infamously with porn star Stormy Daniels. Certainly, marital infidelity is a character flaw to anyone of a more traditional mindset. However, Democrats fake outrage (or worse, genuine outrage) over this adultery is insulting to anyone not totally on board with stale partisan talking points. Democrats loved Bill Clinton in the 90s. When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, we were told “It’s just sex”,  “they’re two consenting adults”, and “who cares what the President does in his spare time?.” The cultural left has spent the entirety of the 20th century gleefully chipping away at norms and standards of behavior surrounding matrimony. Marriage was “just a piece of paper” until homosexuals claimed they wanted to get married of course. Sex was “just sex” until the hedonism of Trump entered public life. Mind you, this is the modern lifestyle that the left has claimed they wanted to normalize, yet this time they’re horrified. Trump breaks nearly every standard of what used to be acceptable behavior and the left sputters, “How dare you!” in the tone of a 1950s chaperone. Don’t they know it’s “Current Year”?

Now the obvious answer from the left, when any of these objections are brought up, is to re-focus on policy. It is Trump’s policies that are #NotNormal, extreme, and dangerous. Yet this is, on its face, absurd. Trump has not done anything that any of the other 2016 Republican candidates wouldn’t have done, and many of his more controversial platforms (the “Muslim ban”, child separation at the border, etc.) are continuations of Obama era policies. His performance as President has been, in most respects, unimpeachably normal, to the point that disillusioned Trump supporter Ann Coulter has said that if we’re going to have a generic Republican President, she’d rather have Pence. The left might not want to acknowledge just how normal Trump is, but the disappointed reactions amongst those on the far right tell a very different story. This is simply what politics looks like the divided America of the 21st century.

As stated, there are legitimate criticisms of Trump. But if the left is going to carry on as if Trump is historically #NotNormal, it makes one wonder what world, or time, progressives think they’re living in. One presumably lacking the progress of the last 30 years. How many people swear or express “offensive” ideas in their day to day language? How many men over the age of 45 are on their second or third marriage? How many people are faithful to their spouse nowadays? And more importantly, why are these behaviors so widespread? The left has been pushing these behaviors as positives for a generation. Journalists, activists, Hollywood producers, and our media facilitate as much as they observe the decline of traditional morality.  For decades they laughed at the decline. Yet oddly, when the ne plus ultra of the new cultural order becomes the most powerful person in the world, they’re not laughing anymore. If nothing else, our decadent age provides the entertainment of watching the left self-immolate in the flaming path of the devil they helped summon.

But if Trump’s excesses are indeed normal, for both the American political class and the people as a whole, is there hope for our republic? Trump came to power with the slogan “Make America Great Again”, reflecting a deep desire among the electorate for a revival. Trump does not seem to be the person that can provide this revival but maybe the sentiment that he has encouraged can continue independent of his political career. But if the crude evils of men like Trump are to be judged as unacceptable, it will require a genuine spiritual awakening amongst the American people at large. Something we might hope for one day, but is entirely #NotNormal.

“Getting Out” of Post-Racial America

Around the midpoint of Jordan Peele’s film Get Out, the film’s black hero, Chris, finds himself trapped at his host family’s party punctuated by awkward exchanges with various white strangers. Seeing the only other black partygoer, Chris approaches with a greeting “Good to see an old brother ’round here,” before patting him affectionately on the arm. The scene stands out as one of the few moments that Chris’ near perpetual state of unease vanishes briefly until he finds that the man’s mannerisms are far too WASP-y for him to be anything but more unsettled. In a movie that is ostensibly about the hidden horror of racially tinged faux-pas, Peele presents a moment of racial solidarity without a hint of reproach. This brief moment neatly encapsulates the film, which opens on the same black partygoer (this time exhibiting sufficiently explicit blackness) being abducted in a white suburb and ends with Chris being rescued from a body-snatching suburban nightmare with the arrival of a black friend to drive him home.

Indeed, Get Out’s vision of an America where a well-to-do black man can’t safely stroll down an upscale neighborhood at night is less remarkable than its vision of a world lacking any possibility of racial reconciliation. “If you haven’t seen the movie, maybe there’s a good white person in it,” remarked Jordan Peele at a promotional panel discussion. Or maybe not. Peele certainly hopes his white audience will cringe at the many awkward racial exchanges that Chris endures in the film. In Jordan’s words: “I’ve heard white viewers react somewhat more vocally to certain seemingly innocent interactions, like the scene where an older white guy goes up to Chris and says, ‘I know Tiger [Woods].’ You can hear a sense of recognition from white audiences, like Oh my God, I’ve done that.” Certainly within a film that portrays kidnapping, murder, and forced lobotomy, focusing on such trivialities seems strange. Though this response from white movie-goers seems less than unexpected on the part of Jordan Peele.

Within the world of Get Out, the only escape for the black protagonist is immediate and unapologetic separation. But within the world of the audience, the white audience at least, Get Out encourages one to observe and learn from any number of social slip-ups that might impede total integration. The black audience is, mercifully, spared from any real-world takeaway besides validation that there is something insidious about their weekend cocktail parties with WASP friends. At a basic level, this dynamic presents a contradiction at the heart of Get Out.

Of course, the prima-facie way to resolve this contradiction is to read Get Out as a cautionary tale against racial complacency. Jordan Peele seems to have something like this in mind when he explains what he was trying to convey in the film:

“The idea of, ‘We’re past it – we’re past it all!’ For me, and for many people out there – as all black people know – there’s racism. I experience it on an everyday basis. This movie was meant to reveal that there’s this monster of racism lurking underneath some of these seemingly innocent conversations and situations.”

Far from me to say that any explanation of Get Out should be dismissed merely because it adheres glovelike to a convenient narrative, but Peele’s explanation of his own film could not be more self-serving. Every character who stumbles over their words into the racist uncanny valley is either white or revealed later to be possessed by someone who is white. Get Out was sold as a scary satire of race relations, but it reveals a general perspective on the world in which Peele eschews even a cursory gesture towards introspection. Every problem arising in the fall-out of the American post-racial myth is entirely external to himself and the groups to which he belongs. He needs to do nothing differently, and if he does, it is to be more vigilant in calling out the trespasses of other groups from which he is immutably excluded.

Now, a movie reflecting its director’s own myopic resentment is nothing new, and the themes expressed in Get Out would certainly be quite at home in niche genres of American film-making. But Get Out does not stand isolated from the culture that received it, and mainstream American culture greeted Jordan Peele’s film with a megaphone of praise, pronouncing Get Out not just worthy, but great. At the moment I am writing this, Get Out sits in third place on RottenTomatoes.com list of the top 100 movies ever made, behind The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane. Critics are not simply acknowledging good technical craft and a well-told story, they are endorsing Peele’s vision and message at all levels. Quoting just the top critic blurbs that accompany the near-unanimous positive reviews, one can read the following:

“Cultural appropriation shifts from ‘problematic’ to ‘horrific’ in writer-director Jordan Peele’s sharp take on the scary world of stuff white people like.”

“Writer-director Jordan Peele has fashioned a smart, scathing commentary… as a base for his allegory on the horror of race in America.”

“Peele doesn’t just subvert a genre often dinged for making people of color expendable cleaver-fodder. He also flips pearl-clutching, white-flight anxiety about predatory black men on its ear, turning a gated community into the real danger zone.”

I could post more, but there wouldn’t be much point since, by in large, none of the quotes stand distinct from the rest. Among the positive reviews from the mostly white critics, there seems to be near unanimous approval of Peele’s social critique. But perhaps it is too much to ask that critics detect a lack of self-examination in a film that asks others to examine their role in American race relations.

I don’t think it would be contentious to say that film critics are predominantly progressive in their worldview.  But it is notable that as much as Get Out exists as an open cinematic attack on America’s white progressives, the film has been openly embraced by the community it criticizes. Strangely enough, white progressives read Peele’s critique not only as valid but heroic. Mind you, this is a critique that aims to rip apart the mannerisms of an ethnic group to which white progressives belong, a critique in which one race ’s yearning for homogeneity is passed over without a second glance while another’s inability to sufficiently achieve heterogeneity is portrayed as a veil that obscures demonic racism.

It is a common observation that white progressives do not live as if their idea of American race relations were true. Find a well-to-do social activist and you will invariably find him living in the type of predominantly white community they vehemently preach against. This particular type of cognitive dissonance is often explained away as “white guilt.” But if it is guilt that motivates progressive sympathy, it’s a strange sort of guilt that manifests in loud pronouncements that ultimately cost nothing. Perhaps one explanation of this phenomenon is that rich progressives are indeed the “good White people” who are totally unconcerned with preserving their status and privilege. But perhaps not.

In America today, upwardly mobile white progressives remain the most privileged members of their own ethnic group with an unrivaled ability to make their voices heard both on a national and international level. White progressives also stand out worldwide, as uniquely willing to denounce their own group’s “white privilege”. Framing privilege in racial terms could be understood as a certain type of social responsibility, perhaps even altruistic. But a closer examination of the realities in 21st century America may lead one to doubt how extensive the presence of “privilege” is across “white” American once one departs from areas dominated by rich white progressives.

Despite its persistent claim to be “intersectional”, the presence of a white lower class seems absent from Peele’s vision of America. The concept that the rich white Armitage family from Get Out might share their “whiteness” with a poorer white America unable to sequester themselves in gated communities or dedicate effort to “checking their privilege” seems only grudgingly acknowledged in the modern progressive vision. To Peele himself, meaningful class divisions in American are spoken about as if they were a quaint myth from a previous era of American history:

“As far as the class question, I think black – you know, from my experience, blackness totally trumps any kind of class question. You know, I don’t – you know, this is – maybe Ben Carson aside, it’s, you know, no matter who, you know, I run into, there’s going to be a connection that’s more powerful than any economic difference.”

Perhaps this is the case, but one can be forgiven for thinking that Jordan Peele is telling his white progressive audience just what they want to hear. Ethnic loyalty is cheap for those who are upwardly mobile, and it is interesting to note that rich progressives are the only party looking to scrap the concept.

For great progressive believers living in newly gentrified urban neighborhoods or pastoral suburbia, like the Armitage family in Get Out, cultural heritage and even nations can be picked up or abandoned at a moment’s notice. Should their dreams not manifest under the circumstances, well, perhaps the grass is greener on the other side. Demographics can change, national and racial boundaries can shift, but wealth will always buy privilege. However, for poor white people whose dreams are inevitably anchored to their geography, their nation, and their own bodies, there may, in fact, be no way to get out.

The Men Who Killed Bin Laden

Part 1: A Death Observed

On the evening of May 2^nd, 2011 in the city of Abbottabad Pakistan, a special operations team lead jointly by the CIA and JSOC, and consisting of eighty personnel, four helicopters, and one Belgian Malinois military dog, began a raid that would mark the culmination of America’s longest war. In objective terms, the operation had difficulties. The product of years of intelligence work, the raid ran afoul of one of America’s regional allies, Pakistan, and resulted in a helicopter crash that would be the source of an embarrassing leak of American technology. But, in the end, Operation “Neptune Spear” had accomplished what few people previously thought possible: the death of Osama bin Laden.

I remember reading the news late on a Monday night, half expecting to learn it was a hoax the following day. In fact, its reality didn’t dawn on me until the next day’s shift pass-down at the factory where I worked. As the supervisors asked for recognition for work well done the night before, a machinist called out loudly, “Seal-Team Six! The men who killed Bin Laden!”. The rest of the shift broke into applause. Indeed, it had occurred, the rogue sheikh and author of the attacks of 9-11 was dead by American hands.

But for some reason, the event did not sit easy in my mind, and as the days past after Bin Laden’s assassination, I could tell that I was not alone. There seemed, in the minds of Americans, a difficulty in finding a narrative that could contain the event. In some sense, Bin Laden’s death had come too soon and too late; too late for the triumphalism that would have certainly greeted the news had it happened in the early Bush administration, and too early for the event to be the capstone of futility in the wake of the renewed Islamic radicalism of ISIS. In 2011, as much as Americans could hope, we could see that the shadow cast by the rogue sheik was not undone by his earthly demise, and we knew too much to believe that the event marked some turning point.=

Part of this dissonance stemmed from the fact that ordinary Americans understood Bin Laden on an emotional level much better than their media and intellectual elites did.  Regardless of the mainstream narrative, Bin Laden’s magnum opus was not the deaths of 3000 Americans, it wasn’t even the notion that large-scale terrorist attack could happen in America. Instead, the sheikh’s legacy was, a challenge for which the theatrics of the collapsing world trade center was a framing device. Osama’s legacy was an accusation that Western power -as far-reaching and as unquestioned as it remained in the early years of the 21^st century – was at its core, hollow and built on a foundation of decadence.

For all the cultural self-criticism the West had undergone since the 1960s, Osama Bin Laden was the first to announce the weakness of modern man, not with critical theory or deconstruction, but with a declaration of war and a call to battle.  Bin Laden was the first to wager that, underneath the mountainous wealth and military might of America and its European allies, was a “Weak Horse” that when the chips were down, no one would choose support. And for all the congratulations being exchanged in the spring of 2011, Bin Laden’s death had not answered his accusation.

America had been at war for 10 years.  Had it shown itself to be the “Strong Horse” in the conflict with the Islamic world? Was the Western man the victor over the pre-modern jihadi? Bin Laden’s question, wild conjecture in the 1990s, was asserting itself with overdue irony. While Osama’s body now slept at the bottom of the Indian ocean, his shade still loomed over the America’s universalist project and the West was left to ask itself if it had finally dispelled his prophecy.

Part 2: The Fall of the Western Archetype

When discussing historical trends, there is much to be said for the use of the “archetype”. Indeed, the University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson has made a career around employing this tool, almost to the point of self-parody. But while many modern people might balk at a discussion of “forms” and “types”, the fact remains that on a society-wide level, Western man has always defined himself using symbols and abstractions.

America, in particular, has always been fond of elevating an archetypal vision of what it means to be “American” in any given era. From the gilded age to the progressive era, each period of American history has been characterized first by a challenge and then by a vision of a man who could might that challenge. In the era of manifest destiny, there was the pioneering man who boldly took his family across a wild continent, for the era of the New Deal there was the honest working man who did an honest day’s work for an honest day’s wage, and for the suburban age of the 1950s there was the nuclear family led by the prosperous patriarch and the happy homemaker.

As someone, reaching adolescence in the late 1990s, I recall a distinct awareness of the archetypes that inhabited the contemporary cultural milieu. The 1990s was the era of the “global village”, the “end of history”, and the birth of an optimism, both technological and geopolitical, that seemed to stretch endlessly from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the end of time. The era contained nothing less than a promise that liberty and prosperity would touch all peoples and all places and would continue to expand forevermore.

The world was becoming smaller. Nationalism meant less. Individualism meant more. We as Americans would grow broad and less particular and the world, in turn, would grow more American. Everything was at our fingertips and there was nothing to fear. Even in my boyhood I remember this promise hanging tacitly in the air of almost every cultural product. We would all be rich, we would all be free, and this all could be guaranteed. This was the end of historical struggle, and all that was needed was an archetypal of “last man”. The 1990s, in its characteristic over abundance, furnished us with two, which I have dubbed the “Prosperous” man and “Liberated” man.

The “Prosperous Man” formed the ideal of the new 1990s information economy. He thrived in the flattened corporate culture of Silicon Valley, was an early adopter of the novel electronics, drank expensive gourmet coffee, and was linked-in with all the latest developments. He didn’t talk about his mortgage like the patriarchs of the 1950s, he talked about his portfolio, and always had an eye out for growth -both economic and self-actualizing. The “Prosperous Man” found spirituality in the pop-consumeristic tripe of Deepak Chopra, and hope in the utopian corporatism of Tom Friedman and Benjamin Barber’s “McWorld” concept. Like the working family man of the previous eras, the “Prosperous Man” was an American who worked hard and produced wealth. Unlike the previous American archetypes however, the “Prosperous Man” was rootless. There was nothing holding him back. And although history had given him everything, there wasn’t a tradition in existence to which he owed anything back. McWorld had a place for individualistic consumers, but superfluous traditional obligations were hazardous to the bottom line.

However, the “Prosperous” man was not the lone archetype of the 1990s, he was contrasted, loudly, at every step by, “The liberated man”.  “The liberated man” was the rebel, the poetic nihilist, and the visionary of post-national world. He bought his clothes on consignment, practiced daring and ironic acts of self-destruction and was ever committed to walking away from that great job or deal that was always and forever achievable and available. “The liberated man” was inspired by the anthems Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vetter, and cheered by the jokes of George Carlin and Bill Hicks. He was the radical anarchists on the left, and the radical libertarians on the right. The “Liberated Man” bought Naomi Klein’s NO LOGO, van shoes, and worried constantly about whether his favorite band had “sold out”. Like the frontiersmen of the past, the liberated man of the 1990s shunned the mainstream in search of freedom. But in all his rejection of conformity, the “Liberated Man” was at his base isolated.  He was in rebellion against soulless materialism, but it was not a rebellion that bound him in brotherhood with the common man. His rebellion was aloofness fought almost entirely by consumer choice and expressed only through a differentiated alternative lifestyle.

Looking back, I find it amazing just how important this struggle, between alternative and corporatist voices, was in my own mind and in the culture. I cared deeply about whether Linus Torvalds would triumph over Bill Gates, whether Eddie Vetter would win over Brittany spears, and whether Napster would prevail over the record industry. The conflict was everywhere from the movies we watched to the music we listen to. And while it seemed, at any moment, that humanity might follow the corporate path of wealth, or the poetic path of counterculture, it nevertheless had one such secular global world future in store. And, regardless of what anyone says, this perception persisted well after the events of September 11^th, 2001.

Media retrospectives on the World Trade Center attacks often describe the event as a jolt that rattled America awake, but from my own experience this narrative was ridiculous. Almost immediately after the initial shock of the attacks faded, America slid back into the narrative of optimism it had grown accustomed to in the 1990s. Regardless of the physical devastation of the falling towers, the recovery efforts left no space to question our commitment to a globalized world order, or our culture of individualism. Instead, I remember distinctly every media and government institution falling over themselves to reframe the catastrophe and assure the American public that this was an anomalous bump on the inevitable road to global peace and prosperity.

On the left, we heard assurances that the jihadist ideology did not represent mainstream attitudes in the Muslim world and that further attacks could be managed easily by the reformation of American foreign and domestic policy. On the right we heard pronouncements that the attacks were the product of a small group of extremists and that the threat could be addressed through military action and a renewed commitment to national security. The message, over and over, was to stay calm, stay tolerant, go shopping, and to let the professionals manage the professional problem of global security. Besides, it worked in the cold war didn’t it?

The figure of George W. Bush seemed the living embodiment of the attitude prevailing in the wake of the attacks. Even his name contained the implicit promise that the strategies used to bring America victory in the Cold War could simply be re-purposed for the task of combating anti-Western Islamism writ-large. The Muslim world was -in Bush’s mind- a culture like any other. It yearned for freedom and worshiped a God who only wanted peace and prosperity for his followers. Though 9-11 was a bold challenge, in the end all that was required was a bold managerial correction to remove the enemies of democracy and return the Muslim world to the proper path of democratic liberalism. It was the politics of “McWorld” and the mythology of the “Prosperous Man” through and through.

In the end, the failure of Bush’s answer to Bin Laden’s challenge was exposed, with extreme historical irony, in the President’s continued failure in prosecuting the wars of his own creation. Operation Iraqi Freedom remained a show case of this failure: a corporate war, fought to advance the interests of liberty and globalism. The conflict ultimately resulted in an exhibition of America’s fundamental misunderstanding of the Muslim world and the organization of power within Islam.

It was in Bush’s foreign policy fiascoes, followed promptly by the global financial crisis, that the world of the “Prosperous Man” finally crested. The corporate masters and futurists who dreamed of an indefinitely expanding sphere of democracy paired with sustainable economic growth could not account for the post-2007 world. It was apparent that the non-Western world would not, as a matter of course, grow in liberalism just as the Western world would not, as a matter of course, grow in prosperity. McWorld had its limits. As such its vision must recede.

But in the fashion of historical dialectic, if the path of prosperity was closed, did the path of liberation fare better? No Doubt, the inheritors of the 1990s counterculture saw this as the natural conclusion.  The “Liberated Man” had triumphed by his opponent’s deficiencies. He had demonstrated, culturally, that his message was irresistible. And while the machinations of universal democracy might fail worldwide, it was of no concern. Personal liberty was unstoppable and ultimately the violence of the third world could not prevail against man’s natural desire for revelry of self-expression. It was just a matter of time. But even in this triumphalism, one could see the inevitable fall of this vision planted in the pages of a Danish newsprint magazine in autumn of 2005.

Following the events of September 11^th and an enormous wave of immigration, many among Europe’s self-assured elites were developing a desire to witness secular humanism’s victory over their countries’ newly initiated Muslim citizens. After all, if America’s wars had so obviously failed in winning the hearts and minds of the Islamic world, what better way to demonstrate the dominance of Europe’s peaceful humanitarianism, than to transform the newly immigrated Muslim into a modern secular European within the confines of the modern European welfare state?

The prospect, was too juicy to be undesired. And in response to this desire, the Danish satirical magazine, Jyllands-Posten published a set of 10 cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammad in irreverent and satirical contexts. The publication knew t it was courting controversy, but no doubt the editors anticipated something akin to controversies generated by anti-Christian satire in the 20^th century: a quick and lucrative outrage, followed by the full-throated support of the global “free-speech” community, concluding with total victory of irreverent secularism over traditionalist busybodies. Few in 2005 suspected how wrong this anticipation might be.

Far from earning disapprobation of a few mumbling ninnies, the reaction to the Mohammad cartoons exploded into an unending series of violent international protests. Carried forth by Salafist and jihadist clerics, who themselves saw the cartoons as an opportunity to flex their political muscles, the outrage reverberated for months. Resulting in millions of dollars in property damage and several deaths at the hands of mob violence.

This was not an outrage that could be solved through the assertion of “free speech”. In fact, as the protests mounted and showed no sign of abating, the institutions that would have ordinarily gone to the wall for free expression one by one conceded to Islamist demands to censor the publication of the cartoons. And so, with a whimper, the media mainstream looked on as the editors and satirists of the Jyllands-Posten were forced into an apology and then into hiding; cowed by perpetual death threats which, the world would soon see, the jihadis had every intention of carrying out.

At the time of the Danish “Cartoon Riots”, few grasped the critical turning point that had been accomplished. After half a generation of fearless and irreverent rebellion, after every right-wing society, church, and conservative group had failed to turn back the deluge of iconoclastic rebellion marching in the free expression, a small group of Salafists had broken history like a twig. Whatever we might have wanted to believe in the 1990s, free expression was not unlimited, it could not forever grow unchecked, and whatever inspiration was drawn from unconstrained human imagination, it was no match for the terror and zeal that could be unleashed by the proteges of bin Laden. The liberated man of the 1990s had met his match.

After this what more could be hoped for from a rootless Westerner dreaming of some liberation in global cosmopolitanism? To be a citizen of the world among a growing number of people who had no interest in granting your cherished principles? A rebellion against anything traditional, so long as that rebellion never crossed the piety of the most puritanical imams? It was one thing to be the “Weak Horse” on the battleground of Tikrit, quite another to be the “Weak Horse” in the culture of one’s homeland. No one could want this role for themselves. And no one did. And sure enough, a reaction was in the works.

The reaction manifested in a new type of progressive anti-particularism, seen first in the “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, then returning again in the platitudinous multiculturalism of progressive leaders like Barack Obama. It was a type of crusade against Western tradition and a doubling down on the cosmopolitanism of the past decades. This time the victory of emancipatory movements would be complete in the West, and no traditional sentimentality would stand in the way.

While the rootlessness of 1990s was unconscious and habitual, the multiculturalists and secularists of the late 2000s sought a more active approach at cutting away the stifling grip of the past. The traditions and mores were now considered an active threat to humanity’s progress. And from Bin Laden down to the Danish Cartoon riots, the opponents of a post-national future could no longer be ignored. What was needed was a harder counter-punch, a more fanatical and directed cultural revolution, and a more focused intolerant tolerance, in the West at least.

What defined the opponents of the cosmopolitan future? Religion? It must be eliminated! Traditional cultures? They must be interchangeable! Ethnic custom? It must be a toy reducible to exotic restaurants and yoga lessons. It was time to join the struggle, tradition was for the past! Any notion that Western or European culture needed to be valued, in particular, was the source of racism and hate. Bring on the cosmopolitan future of undifferentiated globalism! Bring forth the post-national and anti-cultural world order!

Of course, there was no path to bring this revolution to the Islamic or developing world. In fact, there wasn’t even a path to bring this anti-cultural revolution to immigrant populations living inside of the west. Still none of this mattered. What did matter was that the upper middle class of the West was dedicated to showing that THEY were living in a post-cultural age. The west, at least, could demonstrate that history was moving in the right direction by cleansings itself of its own particularism with the assurance, that, whatever might be delaying the rest of the world, the continuation of progress would eventually become unstoppable.

But what were the specifics of this vision? What was the new society or the new man who would emerge from this process of cultural sterilization? No one knew, and no one cared. The progressive revolution was not directed at some ideal, it was a desperate grasp for consolation, designed to save elites from the realization that their own vision of the future was adrift. The snake of societal progress had begun to consume itself in a quest to satiate its own hunger.

The naked unsustainability of this new mode was apparent. Even its cultural products seemed like less vigorous echoes of their 1990s counterparts. Gone were the fearless anarchists who wanted to tear down the superstructure that stood in their way. In was the hipster, the diversity consultant, and the progressive fanboy. This was not a time for righteous rebels, this was the age of nihilists with no chests, urbanites who defined themselves through consumption, and technocrats congratulating themselves on far-off plans to solve humanity’s problems with “science!”. This was the age of the eternally offended social justice warrior and the pathetically sycophantic pop culture consumer. A society whose visionaries, from Steve Jobs to Barack Obama, seemed to have little interested in planning for anything other than a post-national, post-hardship, and post-scarcity future. A civilization where one might define themselves as consumers of organic food, video games, or queer paraphernalia, but never believers in tradition, posterity, nationhood, or faith.

It was this new cultural archetype that, on the morning of May 3^rd 2011 greeted the news of Bin Laden’s death. It was the juxtaposition of this archetype to Bin Laden himself that gave the news of the sheik’s death its strange melancholic aftertaste. The contemporary world could produce ineffectual consumers and self-obsessed preening moral puritans. But it could not produce devout and courageous men and women who wanted to defend their civilization and fight for their posterity. And although its author was dead, Bin Laden’s prophecy had been granted its final demonstration.

Part 3: The Men Who Killed Bin Laden

The period between September 11^th and the death of Osama Bin Laden marked a transitional period, both for my own thought process and the ideological development of the West at large. At this time, reeling from the disrupted optimism of the 1990s, America paused briefly before finally doubling down on the globalist vision during the age of Obama. My own journey marked a similar transition, albeit, in the opposite direction. Still, strangely enough, both transitions have become indelibly linked in my mind with a speech delivered by Pope Benedict XVI to an audience at Regensburg Germany in 2006.

Pope Benedict’s 2006 Regensburg lecture, originally intended by the Pontiff to address spirituality, became infamous when it sparked controversy by its inclusion of an 15^th century quote from Byzantine Emperor Manuel Palaiologos on the persistence of violence in Islam. Like the Danish cartoon riots previously, the Regensburg address inspired massive Muslim protests, who in vindication of the Byzantine Emperor’s words, carried their murderous rage to the streets. Its irony lost on opinion makers of the time, the incident was characterized by the mainstream media as an outburst prompted by the cultural insensitivity of an out of touch pope and promptly forgotten about within a month.

I remember reading the address at the high point of my youthful anti-religiosity, hoping to find some lurid anti-Islamic screed and being disappointed to discover only esoteric religious ruminations which I did not have the spiritual or philosophical background to understand.  Years later, following my return to the Church, and on the advice of a friend, I revisited the lecture with different eyes and found something entirely unexpected.

Although often talked as a departure in tone from other addresses, Benedict’s lecture at Regensburg summarized much of his previous thinking on the state modern man in the 21^st century following on a deeper examination started by his predecessor John Paul II. The address documented the path that both modern Western man and his pre-modern Islamic counterpart had taken over the course of the last two centuries.  Setting aside the assumed opposition between the rootless modern and the intolerant Islamic fanatic, might both implicitly share a common critical flaw? Could both archetypes be the product of an acute intellectual mistake so near to our own age that we failed to notice? Here Pope Benedict laid his thesis.  Instead of opposites, perhaps the fanatic of the old world and the secular of the new were complementary pieces of humanity torn apart by the old misbegotten notion that evidence driven rationality was fundamentally incompatible with transcendent human spirituality.

For over a millennium, the Islamic world held firmly to a spirituality that would admit no rationalism and stood prostrate before a God who ruled by fiat; a tyranny of divine meaning that could not even admit exploration and under whose reign there could be no art, music, or reason not determined by divine decree. It remained a stifling straight jacket that limited the Muslim’s imagination and stunted Islamic civilization.

By contrast, the post enlightenment western man remained enthralled to a rationality that permitted not even a shadow of the living God. After a century of becoming liberated from all external constraints, had the secular age produced great saints or great spiritual achievements? While the West’s liberation and rationality resulted in exploration, music, and literature, nowhere in its modern life could be found meaning or edification. The man who made rationality his religion could produce his own culture, but not a culture he would make sacrifices or, as it turned out, expend any real effort to defend.

Yet the separation of reason and divinity was not an eternal human condition but a product of our own age. To the medieval man, God unified reason and transcendent love and embodying each in their fullness, an image of the divine that did not operate through dominance but through sacrifice. A vision of creation that extended not from necessary dependence nor meaningless tyrannical whim, but from conscious and intentional will to create based on an act of self-giving love.  Beneath this vision of God, man and woman could stand with confidence, curiosity, and compassion reconciled.

It was this vision of God that the ancient Saints and Scholastics felt when laying the stones of the cathedrals and the foundation of the renaissance. It was this understanding of God set the likes of Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante to build the outline of Western prose and poetry. And it was this vision of God that was fatally pierced by the late enlightenment bleeding out over the course of centuries to where the modern man stands confused and directionless.

Here was the chink in the armor of modernity. Just as Bin Laden’s challenge itself had exposed the hollowness in the distinction between the “Prosperous Man” and “Liberated Man” of the 1990s, the insight of Benedict and John Paul exposed the seam that bound the Social Justice Warrior to the Salafist. They were both incomplete parts of the human being, emptied of mystery and forced into one dimension, hollow in their intention, and devoid of life or passion.

Much has been said about the malaise that inhabits the Millennial generation. And while this pessimism might certainly be laid at the feet of the 2007 financial crisis, as an observer who has witnessed my own generation from within, I feel that this despair begins with a deeper metaphysical problem. There remains a foreboding sense among Millennials that no future is possible that will require authentic human participation. Destiny might choose the bleary-eyed fanatic as king, or it might choose the detached monomaniacal rationalist. But nowhere in the set of possible futures is there space for humans who believe in the unity of truth, goodness, and beauty. Nowhere is there space for a person who possesses both spirituality an intellect.

I might speculate that my generation is in search of a missing archetype that could unify these desires and promise them a more hopeful future. This archetype that was hinted at in Pope Benedict’s speech at Regensburg and the prior writings of John Paul II. And for a moment after reading these men’s work, I believed that here might be a solution to my generation’s woes. The course of history has so far, not obliged.

It has now been four years since I read Benedict’s address at Regensburg and as I look back on the intervening years, I am struck by a sense of loss. If Benedict and John Paul’s vision was the answer, it was an answer unheeded.  The vision of a renewed Christianity that could revitalize the West and heal the world has gone unfulfilled.

I have, in my journeys since then, met many courageous people that seem to walk with the spirit described by Benedict and John Paul. But although these men and women have shaped my life and given me hope, they are still a remnant. They comprise a small part of modern church, and an even smaller part of modern humanity. They are an echo of the past; perhaps, we may hope, a prevision of the future. But at any rate, they are removed from spirit of their own age and live waiting in the wings of modernity. But the future is another country.=

I could have hardly comprehended the ideological battles that now consume the West in the era of Bill Clinton, any more than a knight of the First Crusade could have comprehended Martin Luther. In our own age, framed by the archetypes of Bin Laden and Barack Obama, it might not be possible to imagine what history has in store. And, now, as in every age, there are those who work unseen to build the boundaries of the next epoch. We can recognize this heroic feature of humanity in hindsight, looking back at figures like Catherine of Sienna and Saint Francis of Assisi, but in their own times saints and revolutionaries most often go unnoticed.

Spiritual masters of the past have long cautioned against measuring worth in terms of historical “greatness”. Nevertheless, from time to time I have fancied that posterity may look back at our confused age and recognize not decline, but a turning point. The future is unwritten, and the challenge issued by Osama bin Laden’s may yet be answered if western man claims his heritage and begins an arduous journey back to sanity. Such a phenomenon would require struggle, and would be historically uncommon, but humanity has overcome similar challenges. And after this age and struggle has past, perhaps scholars will look back upon the men and women who pulled their civilization away from the brink and recognize among them two pontiffs who first provided an answer to the dead-sheikh’s riddle, and, with a perspective granted by hindsight, drink a toast to the men who killed bin Laden.