Friday Links: Stop The Expansion of the Police State Edition
"'I killed my mom and pop,' Teacup said. The crowd booed, screamed at him. They loved their mothers and fathers." - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, 'Chain Gang All-Stars'
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
Been thinking lately about metaphor. You know, that thing the Garden of Eden is? Stories we tell as cautionary tales or reminders, even when they’re not explicitly cautionary tales or reminders. Things we say that aren’t true—this place is a prison after we’ve been grounded by mean step-parents, for instance—but we say them as a warning. This is how this feels. Wait. You still don’t understand? Let me explain it this way. Metaphor has a deeper place in our lives than we think. It’s worth digging into what’s behind people’s need to use metaphor. If a riot is the language of the unheard, what’s a dystopian novel?
What I’ve Been Reading Lately:
When I called Indra Das’s The Devourers “one of the most gorgeous books ever written,” I meant that a deep, inescapable sensuousness ran like an ocean current through each sentence. With that lens in mind, this week’s novel might be the same, but substitute brutality for beauty. The harsh, unsentimental, start-with-failure-of-the-imagination-end-with-perversion-of-the-imagination nature of the carceral state covers this book the way you might try to keep steam in a sizzling pan. Mainstream comparisons would be The Hunger Games (without the Lifetime-style fetishization of country-vs.-city struggle) or The Handmaid’s Tale (but, like, Season 1, when it felt like there was a direction). Add a bit of that Vonnegut-Pynchon-Saunders-style of exaggerated satire, and you get, of course, Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
This is a remarkable novel. Quick scene-setting: we are following prisoners who are participating in “action sports,” a euphemism for “people locked away in the prison system can earn their freedom by spending three years doing gladiator-style fights to the death,” and these fights (and the prisoners’ lives) are broadcast in a kind of ESPN-meets-24-hour-livestreams to an adoring public.
Nana is incredible on the sentence level—it was hard to settle on one epigraph (maybe I didn’t, read til the end). The characters are interesting and hard-nosed and full of pathos and complex because they’re all murderers and rapists and domestic abusers but under inhumane conditions of severe torture and excess fame they’ve maybe discovered love and tenderness and community? But not 100%. Not unlike Beloved, some people are (metaphorically) forever dipping their hands in butter and putting it on their faces. Only unlike Beloved, these people have lethal weapons. We also see how action sports affects the public. One storyline follows a white couple—the husband a huge action sports fan, the wife initially queasy but quickly addicted to watching. Their hilariously cringe scenes of the husband explaining things to the wife made me want to never tell Mallory so much as a Bulls player’s name ever again. We also see activists protesting the very existence of action sports. It’s fiction, but I won’t pretend I didn’t find their courageousness exhilarating. These disparate parts build to a climax the same way sweeping, maximalist books like White Teeth or The Tin Drum do, which is always exciting to watch come together. It’s an expertly crafted book.
All that said, this novel also made me realize I’m kind of over dystopias for a while. Blame Hollywood over-saturation, blame the way so many books are marketed now as “a world eerily similar to our own, Hunger Games meets Handmaid’s Tale meets the prison industrial complex,” or whatever, blame revolution-curious and Coen-Bros-style-skewering-loving me for seeking so much of this stuff out for so long. CivilWarLand In Bad Decline and Pastoralia changed my life in college, and Nana’s reaching heights every bit as high (and higher? Ranking too finely is silly) than his mentor. Still, there was something more grounded about Friday Black (or even I Keep My Exoskeletons To Myself, which is a parenting novel more than a dystopian novel) that I think appeals to my current taste right now—emphasis because I want to be careful to say I don’t necessarily think one of these two books is better than the other. I just know which style I’m more into right now. Hey, I don’t really read sci-fi, either, and this exact thing is usually my barrier for entry.
If that’s not a hangup for you? Well, here’s one ranking I’ll say with confidence: Chain-Gang All-Stars runs absolute circles around The Handmaid’s Tale (the show, anyway, I haven’t read the book yet) and The Hunger Games six times a week and twice on Sundays.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Why not check out the music video for the homie
, who is here on Substack as BUT ALSO makes music as Infinite Runner. His EP, Piece of Cake, just came out on Tuesday. It’s real good. Real clear notes despite heavy distortion, real tasteful bass lines, real-ass drums.As the NBA Trade Deadline has passed and the podcast landscape slowly clears out the rubble of People Who Don’t Play Professional Basketball referring to People Who Do Play Professional Basketball as “assets” until free agency, here’s a necessary piece from at about how players pack when they’re traded (and more, obviously. It’s not like “Robin Lopez made sure to grab Spider-Man #347 or whatever). NBA players are people, which is a thing that gets real easy for some talking heads to forget. And people can all agree: moving sucks.
Speaking of groups that are people: fascists! Over The New Republic, Brynn Tannehill has the necessary reminder that ordinary, pleasant-to-be-around people can totally be fascists. A lot of people still think it’s “oh, we disagree about a few things, but deep down, everything’s okay.” No! Playing around with this MAGA shit is a real threat.
Fascinating read about “True Crime’s ACAB playbook” from Kathryn VanArendonk in Vulture. It’s become abundantly clear that police are, as the article very generously puts it, “not the best narrators of crime.” With an eye towards shows like American Nightmare and Murder In Boston, VanArendonk shows how cops like to pretend they’re in movies or easily block out certain facts. Or, “Individually, each of these series suggests that police are not effective at investigating crimes among certain marginalized communities or crimes with white male perpetrators. Collectively, they suggest that police narratives should always be met with skepticism.”
Brandon Johnson is not renewing the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, the gunshot tracking system that doesn’t keep Chicago safe but does increase the amount of times Black and Brown people have to interact with police. At Truthout, Kelly Hayes interviews organizers Navi Heer and Nathan, as well as South Side Weekly investigations editor Jim Daley about the news. Getting rid of ShotSpotter is an undeniable good and anyone who tells you otherwise pees in their own bed every single night and wakes up a puddle of their own pee every morning and likes it.
Did you know paramedics weren’t around until the late 60s? Did you know the first paramedics were Black? Can you put together the systemically racist reasons why Black people in Pittsburgh would need to invent something like the paramedics? I bet you can—you read this blog and therefore are smart. Even so, check out this Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff on the Black men in Pittsburgh who started the paramedics. We, as people, have the ability to help each other. We have the responsibility to help each other, no matter the political circumstances. Some people are evil. Some people are, well, the title of the podcast. Part 1 | Part 2
What’re you still doing here? You want a bonus second epigraph? Here it is: “To be inside don’t mean you did wrong, but many of us did…Does disappearing one person from the earth clean it some? I seen men I knew were a danger to the world and they too deserve better than this.”
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. If you don’t work in the service industry, you have to spend the weekend reading We Do This Til We Free Us if you haven’t. Or at the very least, re-evaluating your NFL fandom. Don’t call the cops.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris