Resist the pleasures of doom

It is Monday morning in New Orleans and I think some of the plants in my courtyard are dead, or at least ill, from the snowstorm that happened while I was away.

It is the morning after the Super Bowl and I made the mistake of coming back to the city right before rather than after this nightmare event. It’s tourist season anyway at this time of year, the first Carnival events on January 6th and parades have started and so it’s not surprising for the traffic to be intense and to open my gate to strangers grouped outside my door but the Super Bowl brought a different feel to the city. There was carpet of all silly things on Bourbon Street and stories I’ve yet to confirm about Bourbon Street bars being bought out by big companies who brought in their own staff and booted the locals for the weekend (you can read my latest for a taste of how much local service workers rely on big weeks like this) and the parade that rolled on Saturday was full of corporate-sponsored floats from a rogues’ gallery including Chevron, Verizon, Entergy (our nightmare of a local utility) and Draft Kings.

But New Orleans made itself heard during the halftime show, when a local activist, part of Kendrick Lamar’s performance, unfurled a pair of flags from Sudan and Palestine, waved them while dancing on the roof of a car, and then evaded capture for a bit.

I love this city.

New Orleans also protested the arrival of Donald Trump to watch the game, despite the presence of what felt like an invading army of police. Helicopters circled overhead for days—somehow not colliding with the planes towing banners advertising various betting sites and who knows what else—and state troopers on motorcycles circled residential areas. I had to walk five blocks to get home at midnight Thursday night because cops had my neighborhood walled off.

We like a party, here, but this didn’t feel like a party that we were invited to. Still, I am looking forward to the rest of carnival season even if it feels odd to be celebrating these days.

Still.

Sometime during the first Trump administration I came out with the phrase “Resist the pleasures of doom” during a panel. I don’t know if I coined it. But it has been on my mind again as we face a flurry of activity, of shock and awe and bullshit from the administration. As we watch cities burn and storms hit. As I look out my window at brown trees that were green when I left just over three weeks ago.

Because doom can feel good. Despair is seductive. Panic can become a habit. And not to repeat what has become beyond cliche but social media is designed to feed us bad affect and keep us churning on the app rather than in the world with people we love.

Still. This morning my feed was full of pictures of the man dancing with the flags to Kendrick Lamar. (I also saw a shot of people flipping off Donald Trump through the glass of the box from which he watched the game.)

I have been threatening for a while to write a piece titled “against hope.” I probably will, at some point. I think sometimes hope is as deluded as doom. Both are structures of feeling that can preclude action, change, motion. We need to absorb the reality of the conjuncture we inhabit, to study the apocalypse, as Jonathan Matthew Smucker wrote, to understand the balance of forces against us and for us, and to notice the way they move, sometimes like tectonic plates shifting and other times like the little brown lizards that manage to get into my apartment no matter how much I think everything is closed.

I wrote a book about grief that argues for the necessity of feeling the uncomfortable, the painful, the raw. Of letting it transform you. Doom isn’t transformative, though. It is a way of refusing to be transformed.

I do not have the answers to this moment we are in. History can offer us some of them—not just the rise of fascism but the stories of the red scares and Jim Crow here at home, the rounds of backlash any time some excluded group makes a dent in the hierarchies of power or, more often, someone slips like those little lizards through the cracks. But we are facing different technologies and different men (and it is still mostly men and mostly white men) who have wielded those technologies for capital accumulation, and the scamming is so naked that even the financial papers write about the way the US government is backstopping speculation. We will have to figure out new solutions together, and we will inevitably try things that will fail. We will lose, and we will grieve, and we will continue to fight.

We will figure out what works, and that means we have to accept what doesn’t work, rather than doing the same thing over and over and hoping that it has an effect this time.

If you are flailing right now, I understand. But try to take a breath, and realize that simply flailing isn’t doing things. Find the people in your community who have been organizing around the things that matter to you. Get to know your neighbors. Find—and support, financially—the news sources that are doing more than turning a fire hose of bad news on you. Talk to your coworkers, particularly if you’re in a workplace that is a potential target of funding cuts and halts and invasion by Musk’s little stooges. Organize a union.

Feel your feelings. Let them change you. Let them, as Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes write, radicalize you rather than lead you to despair. Resist the pleasures of doom.

I have a tendency, when sitting with the people I love, to laughingly say, “We’re fucked” before returning to the business of figuring out how to un-fuck one little piece at a time. We solve the problems of the world over drinks and pizza in an East London pub or following a Carnival parade through our New Orleans neighborhood or one voice note at a time. We take one another’s hands and tell each other “You give me hope.” We text in the middle of the night when we can’t sleep. We share stories, and we send memes to make each other laugh.

Organizing, real transformative organizing, as Jane McAlevey reminded us over and over and over again, means expanding every day the group of people who are part of “us,” who are comrades, who will fight, but crisis moments also depend on friends, the ones with whom we share bone-deep trust. The people you call when you have a crisis. Hold the people you love close, right now, particularly if they are in the line of fire and particularly if you aren’t, directly, but hold each other close anyway. Be careful with one another so that we can be dangerous together.

This is a good moment, I suppose, to say hello to new followers here. I’ve been mostly off the text-based socials so I’m not sure why there’s an influx but hello, welcome to my infrequent newsletter. I’m a journalist, the author of three books, a thoroughly middle-aged person who’s been through some movements and some hellscapes and has covered a lot of troublemaking. Last time that Trump was elected I did a series called Interviews for Resistance that ran at several different outlets and I haven’t revived it but many of those interviews are useful still and most of those organizers are still doing the work if you are looking for places to start. I’m full-time freelance, so I send these newsletters periodically to share my latest pieces and what I’m thinking about. I don’t charge here—if you feel compelled to financially support me, you can buy my books or donate to the Patreon for my advice podcast, below. Whether you do or no, welcome. I hope this is helpful, in some way.

Troublemaking

I’m still doing the occasional media for From the Ashes, if you’re interested, hit me up. Most recently on This Is Hell Radio. And a little plug for it and for Work Won’t Love You Back in the Christian Century, in a piece titled “emotional communism.” (I’ll take the credit, I guess, though again, not sure I coined that.)

I’ll be at the New Orleans Book Festival March 27-29th. If you want to talk to me before then, you know how to reach me…

You can still get the beautiful art prints made by Nicole Manganelli—order them now directly from Radical Emprints, sign up for her newsletter, and if you have a bookstore or other distro, she has a new wholesale page!

Also, if you really can’t get enough of my past events, you can watch or listen here:

Housmans Youtube

Lighthouse Books

Magers & Quinn Youtube

Spotify playlist of all the podcast appearances thus far

Haymarket House Youtube

Socialism Conference panel Youtube

Writing

I had two pieces go up last week that really belong together, though they’re at different publications.

For In These Times, I wrote about the Bourbon Street attack on New Year’s Day, the workers who went through it, cared for the survivors, and are still forgotten by the city and their bosses—though some of those workers, the nurses at University Medical Center, went on strike last week to remind their bosses that their work matters.

And at the Baffler, I wrote about New Orleans, Los Angeles, disasters, organized abandonment, and a few questions about the nature of the state.

Podcasting

Heart Reacts continues! This is, for new readers, my advice podcast for surviving late capitalism, co-hosted with Craig Gent. In our most recent episode, we discuss whether therapy can be Marxist, and what to do when all your friends are starting families and you’re not.

You can get the show wherever you get podcasts (and if it isn’t showing up, let me know and I’ll see if I can fix that).

Please do send us questions—the form is totally anonymous. And please do share with your friends and comrades and that person you’re thinking of writing in about.

And someone else’s dog

This is Bruce. He’s still just a puppy, but a puppy the size of Texas.