A few weeks ago when I was having drinks with coworkers after school, I was asked how I defined myself politically.
I had to think of an answer, the same way I often have to do some quick math when I’m asked how old I am. I’m a modestly public figure, not in the sense that I’m of any legitimate importance, but my opinions on most major political and social issues are Googleable. Of course, I don’t expect anyone to be familiar with everything (or even anything) I’ve written—the question arose from my coworker finding out I was a writer at all—but the question took me off-guard because it made me realize something: after nearly a decade of sounding off publicly, it’s become more difficult to think of myself in terms of political definitions and party associations, even when they generally fit.
Part of this is practical. I make an effort to avoid overtly politicized words and phrases in my writing (“woke,” “late-stage capitalism,” “white privilege,” etc). I don’t say that in judgment of those terms. They often express important, complex ideas in elegantly simple phrasing, real phenomena that existed unnamed for a long time. It’s not their fault they’ve been conscripted into the culture wars, but they have, and once you use them, readers come to believe they already know where you stand and what you have to say. When you’re writing for actual people and you want them to engage with your ideas—and maybe even change their minds—giving them reasons to stop reading isn’t a great tactic.
More than that, I don’t believe it’s accurate to split political belief into Right vs. Left. It’s much more precise to say there’s a distinct Center, not just some blurry purple smudge separating Right from Left. From there, we can add our other political descriptors alongside them: Left/Progressive—Center/Liberal—Right/Conservative. This is obvious to me, and I’ve never heard a compelling argument against it, yet The Discourse is still stubbornly fixed on an antiquated Left/Right binary.
But even a more refined spectrum and better language to accompany it fail to capture how most people really are. Which is to say: complex, contradictory, multitudinous.
Part of what draws me to the housing crisis—aside from it being one of the significant problems of our current moment—is that it polarizes people in fascinating ways. Progressives who care about social justice and equality have made friendly with anti-government libertarians who tend to be in the Center/Center-Right of the political spectrum. Under the shared belief that housing is critical for basic human survival and flourishing, both market solutions (like removing needless regulation that drives inequality) and tax-funded solutions (like well-funded public housing) can harmoniously coexist.
Meanwhile, anti-immigrant Fox News conservatives have made common cause with liberal NPR NIMBYs who, for differing reasons, don’t want people moving into their neighborhoods. The former care about dog-whistle abstractions like “community character,” while the latter are primarily concerned with their property values, but both ultimately land on indifference to the suffering of others if it requires them to be around more people more often.
This is just one example of how our shorthands for political identity break down in the real world. There’s real convenience in using these shorthands, but I fear this convenience has something to do with why we suck so bad at communicating with each other. There are almost always asterisks in our identities, and within them lies vital connective tissue.
It’s more productive, if also more tedious, to think in terms of specific issues and work from there, instead of starting with political identity and drawing conclusions from it. I don’t believe bipartisanship is inherently virtuous (see: the aforementioned union between xenophobes and NIMBYs), but if we are to take seriously the enormous challenges we face like climate change and poverty and all the other existential nightmare things, it does us no good to limit ourselves only to ideas that fit neatly into our petty political borders.
Reads from April
Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish? by Rebecca Fishbein, Bustle
I Love the Country I Was Told to Hate, and I’m Not Alone by Se-woong Koo, New York Times
What’s a God to a Machine? by Jeff Weiss, The Ringer (and if you want a double-dose of Weiss, one of the best music writers around for my money, check out his profile of Suga Free in the LA Times)
The Surprising Geography of Gun Violence by Colin Woodard, Politico Magazine
The Importance of Bears by Ilaria Maria Sala, Cha
Who Could Mistake Tucker Carlson for Anything Else? by David Roth, Defector
Books from April
Record Of A Night Too Brief by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Lucy North
A collection of three novellas, each one strange and charming all at once. A woman goes through a carnivalesque night that blurs into eternity alongside a porcelain girlfriend who she barely knows but loves deeply; a brother becomes (mostly) invisible as his family tries to welcome his wife-to-be into the mix; a woman accidentally steps on a snake, revealing a world of snake-people living among human society. This was the fourth book by Kawakami I’ve read, and while I enjoyed it, I didn’t like it as much as I did the other three (Strange Weather in Tokyo, The Nakano Thrift Shop and People In My Neighborhood). Maybe I’d feel differently if I read this before the other ones, but it was still good and thoroughly entertaining, and anything she writes is worth checking out.
Ask the Brindled by Noʻu Revilla
This is a fierce collection of poetry. It plays off the layered definition of the word moʻo, the word for lizards—shapeshifters, protectors and deities in Hawaiian culture—but also the word for lineage, story and brindled skin. True to the moʻo she invokes, Revilla traces the shape-shifting regeneration of her identities as a Hawaiian and a queer woman. She’s daring with her form without ever coming across as trying to be clever. One of my favorite techniques she employs is what she fittingly calls erasure. She starts by copying down a comprehensive list of definitions of the word ʻai—a key linguistic component of Hawaiian language is the multi-layered meanings of words, called kaona, or “hidden meaning”—then proceeds to black out certain words so that what remains takes new shape. She describes the process in another poem, called Notes on ʻai erasure:
1. Draw boxes around words that resonate. Reveal obscenity. Reveal secrets.
2. How mesmerizing the back-and-forth of ink and fingers across the superfluous
3 …Pour black ink over the words you did not choose…
Remember: you are not making a home here…
5. …What did you just let go?
What gave you permission?
Ask the Brindled is a blistering, ferocious work, maybe the best poetry collection I’ve read.
Writing from April
I wrote about teacher turnover and the teacher shortage and how they’re different, and talked about the myth of burnout with Alexandra Robbins, author of “The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession.”
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