Political posts on social media often seem little more than rehearsals for what we’d like to see engraved on the tombstones of our friends and allies, if not on our own. Fair enough. No matter what form we choose to embody our resistance, la lutte continue:
If there ever was any doubt, there’s none now. There’ll be no justice, no mercy, and no place to hide so long as Trump, Vance, Musk, and their coterie of bootlickers, wannabes, and volunteer thugs are running things. Act accordingly.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
I could hear blast door bolts slotting home behind me, but there wasn’t any use trying to pretend I’d come through before it closed. The woman standing next to the captain’s chair in the center of the hide—short hair, sand camo, half-drawn sidearm—was looking straight at me, her you gotta be fucking kidding me reaction turning lethal before either of us could blink. Except for the obvious crew at stations to my left—I counted six of them—the hide seemed to be jammed all the way to the back wall with raggedies of every age and condition, probably survivors brought down from the ruins of the Strip.
“How the hell?”
“Grepped by your portal north of the Wynn—what’s left of it anyway. You were after someone else?”
“Wasn’t us.”
“Unfunny either way. Any idea who hates us both?”
“At this point? Damned near everyone. Where’s the rest of you?”
“Name, rank, and serial number, all you get.”
The sidearm was all the way out now, the business end glowing. “Think again.”
The air around me rippled briefly like a stone tossed into a pond, and suddenly my whole crew was formed up between us, the better part of a heavy weapons squad already in full on search and destroy mode. “Hold!” I shouted, and well-trained fingers came off half a dozen triggers. “Make a hole.” Pushing a couple of nasty-looking muzzles aside, I stepped to the front. “This is the rest of us. I don’t know why we’re here. Do you?”
She shook her head slowly, the sidearm already back in its holster. “So now what?”
“I’m thinking what our betters call ‘a frank exchange of views.’”
“Works for me. Let me get these people someplace first.”
I nodded. She unshipped a handheld and tapped at it briefly. Somewhere beyond the huddled masses at the far end of the hide an airlock began to cycle. “Okay everybody, 20 at a time into the lock. Gunnery Sergeant Walker there will monitor. There’s secure shelter at the farside end of the tunnel—beds, food, water, and sanitary facilities including showers. Changes of clothing will be handed out as and when. Anyone needing medical attention or prescription meds see the corpsman on duty. We’ll get you back topside as soon as we can.”
Took a while, but eventually there were just us grunts in the captain’s hide—half hers, half mine. We signaled them to stand down while we were off sorting out our uneasy truce.
Her ready room, built for speed, not for comfort. A table with four chairs, a sitrep holo over the center that blanked as we entered. She gestured. We sat. We talked.
“You are?”
“California. 1st Armored Cav. You?”
“Texas. 415th Force Recon out of Corpus Christi. Also a handful of stray Hoosiers and Jayhawkers from that KC sigint battalion got mauled last month up around Pahrump. Some awful shit went down there. Here too. I used to fly over from home with the sigo for a show, now I hate the fucking place.”
“Not really a place anymore, though, is it? Not much left but latrines, body bags, and rubble. I figure we’re just about done here. Some papers’ll get signed, some razor wire’ll get unrolled, a few mines and flagpoles planted. Then the fuckers in charge’ll declare it a demilitarized zone, and anybody left alive’ll finally get to go back home and start over.”
“Yeah, probably got in mind going all ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ for the coastal stringers. Not this time, though, not with all the broken parts getting shipped back home to the folks.”
“So…wasn’t you grepped us?”
“Wasn’t. I been asking myself who pulled it and why, but I keep coming up with nada. If it wasn’t my people, and it wasn’t yours, who the hell else has the mooch to grep half a fucking infantry squad halfway across a city this size with most of what’s left of it still under fire? You want a beer?”
“You got beer?”
“Liberated a dozen cases of longnecks a week ago from a half-wrecked convenience store behind our perimeter. Been doling them out for good behavior, but I’ve still got a dozen or so left. So yeah, I got beer.”
“Bring it, then, and let’s see can we figure this shit out.”
We never did figure it out. I said maybe some do-gooder NGO put us together on purpose, see if a couple of ground pounders’d make love not war. She said no fucking way, just blind luck we didn’t waste each other on sight. We were still scratching our heads at 1650, when both our handhelds started to flash. Armistice signed, all hostilities to cease at 1700. And that was that.
Around sundown, I raised one of the last two longnecks, knocked it against hers. “I hope you’re right about this time being different. Sad we have to live in hope—probably what guarantees we stay at the bottom of the foodchain where we are. Hope or no hope, I’m thinking I oughta get my people up top before reporting in. Just in case.”
She upended her bottle, drained it, slammed it down on the table next to mine. “Until the next one, then, Califa. ¡Que te vaya bien!”
What do I think about TikTok? What do I think about X? What do I think about all our 21st century digital anxieties—China’s nefarious designs on democracy, Musk’s knee-jerk racism, Zuckerberg’s peculiar concept of masculinity, Thiel’s equally peculiar attitude toward his own mortality, and by extension our own?
What I think is that once the box is opened, Pandora can no longer help us—or, in more contemporary terms, scale matters. What does that mean? It means, to resort to the original Latin, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. Genuine freedom of speech reveals things to us about ourselves that we’d rather not know. Content moderation can’t help us with that. Neither can the clever pretense of algorithm patrolling, nor bans that, for obvious economic reasons, won’t ever actually be enforced except selectively. Not even some real version of the Butlerian Jihad can help us.
The singularity may never come to pass, but governmental interventions in the creations of the digital age, legislative, executive, or judicial, are, like the military career of Josef Švejk, tainted with all the accidental qualities an indifferent universe can conjure. The truth is, we can no longer afford our own immaturity. My advice is simple: don’t go with the tech bros if you want to live. They really have no idea what they’ve wrought.
When the Fearful Symmetry’s shuttle silently terminated its descent, and extended its boarding ramp for him, he’d already been standing quietly at the entrance to the village for nearly an hour, a lumpy canvas duffel at his feet and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses clinging precariously to the end of his nose. As the wave of dust displaced by the shuttle’s shield envelope began rippling around his ankles, he reluctantly gave up on the pocket-sized vademecum of the prophet’s sayings a local elder had pressed on him earlier that morning, and slipping it into an empty side pocket, reached down for the straps on his now thoroughly dust-coated duffel.
Squinting a little as his eyes adjusted, he pushed his glasses higher up on his nose and turned toward the ramp. He’d dressed that morning as he always did, in the vest and shalwar kameeze of the locals. Only a brief metallic glint at the end of his sleeve as he hefted the deceptively heavy duffel hinted at the temporamores he was now wearing underneath them.
The villagers, who, despite their uncertainty, had remained at a more or less respectful distance from him throughout the morning, now shuffled even farther back, the men arranging themselves according to age and dignity as custom dictated, and the women, now partly under the shade of the village bus stop’s extended roof, tending to what women always tended to. The mothers and older sisters herded the younger children away from the edge of the road. The grandmothers, abandoning their furiously whispered disapprovals of a morning wasted, raised their kerchiefs against the dust that suddenly threatened to envelop them. Two teenaged boys in the middle of the road, hands resting firmly on their motorbike handlebars, glanced nervously at each other, already poised to thumb their engine starters and speed away.
He pivoted back toward the gathering as he reached the near end of the ramp, giving them a brief wave of acknowledgment, of farewell. Then he turned and walked briskly up the ramp into the waiting transport, which had begun rising even before the ramp had fully closed behind him. It paused briefly a dozen or so meters above the ground, and then, without any warning at all, disappeared with a sound not unlike a pair of very large hands suddenly clapped together.
“They weren’t exactly waiting for a bus, were they?”
“No. They were waiting for the future.”
“And you promised them a sneak peak at it? That won’t go over well.”
“It won’t disrupt the timeline.”
“And you know this how?”
“Research.”
So I find myself netflicking again the other night, looking for something to rest my weary eyes on after another long day spent reading and writing on that radiant little iPad of mine. Ah, here we go then, a new one of those geriatric menaces with Liam Neeson in it. This time he’s to be a hit man (what else) retired in a village full of innocents the producer seems to have borrowed from the Banshees of Inisherin. It does also have Ciarán Hinds and Colm Meaney in it, though, so maybe….
Turns out it’s quite satisfying—serious enough to portray a character who has as hard a time as any of us figuring out if it’s his death or his life catching up with him, and wise enough to cast a superb Kerry Condon as the young harridan with a revolver who helps him with the final bit of calculation. It’s not quite Inisherin, but it doesn’t embarrass itself.
It’s called In the Land of Saints and Sinners, and it’s on Prime. It wouldn‘t kill you to have a look at it.
58 years ago a twenty year-old Mike Davis taught me to love LA. Even then he was a sharply critical lover of that magical place, so I’m not sure how it was that, despite his tutelage, my love for LA came to be so much less critical than his. Like Randy Newman, I loved LA without reservation, and kept loving it even when, roughly 25 years after I last saw Mike, I found myself reading my library’s copy of City of Quartz and nodding along in agreement as I followed his historical analysis of what I’d long since thought of as his city far more legitimately than it had been mine.
These days, I live in Arizona, feeling much more exile than expatriate, even on my good days, for reasons anyone who’s spent any time in Dogtown will understand. I’ve long wanted to thank Mike publicly for his exuberant gift to my younger self, but not having the patience to write memoirs, and being temperamentally unsuited to the writing of eulogies, I never got around to it while he was alive, and couldn’t bring myself to commit to it in the days after he passed, as surfing on his hard-earned fame as a public intellectual seemed a rotten way to honor his memory.
So let me do this instead: For anyone who lives in LA for any length of time, and responds to it as I did, memory becomes a sort of protean creature, one which with or without their consent claims a small but significant share of their consciousness. One can never tell for sure whether what one remembers is something lived in the flesh, experienced vicariously in a darkened movie theater, or simply appears unbidden as an inexplicably alchemical fusing of the two.
This, then, is the introduction to a series of small, but haunted Los Angeles memories that have affected me more deeply over time than I had any reason to expect when they first came to me. They’re personal, of course, not necessarily having any significance for anyone but me, but I offer them here for any others who may find them resonant—you’ll know who you are. Above all, though, they’re my thanks to the Mike I still remember from those long ago days when we were both impossibly young, who long before he had any thought of leaving the life he lived so furiously, gifted me with this oddly Southern California capacity for double vision that I’ve treasured ever since.
Trans people are people. …endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights… and so forth and so on —248 years into our grand collective experiment even you should have learned the fucking drill….