The weather has a long-standing monopoly on the small talk market, and it’s not hard to see why. What we’re searching for in this kind of conversation is linguistic grease to oil the gears of social interaction. With acquaintances we can assume a certain shared pool from which to draw conversational topics, but with strangers about whom we know nothing, the weather is our old faithful, always ready to be enlisted in action. Of course, the perfect obviousness of the weather is why it’s also the ultimate sign of banality. Samuel Johnson famously observed in 1758 that “when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.” And for the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, the art of interpretation was defeated in the face of Wettergespräche, weather-talk, with its endless repetitions of what has already been said or what needs no saying at all.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first appearance of the term “small talk” to eighteenth-century British Parliamentarian Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son, a collection of pedagogical nuggets dispensing wisdom on a comprehensive range of topics, as befits a book with the subtitle “On the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman.” In a letter from 1751, Lord Chesterfield informs his son that “there is a sort of chit-chat, or smalltalk, which is the general run of conversation at courts, and in most mixed companies. It is a sort of middling conversation, neither silly nor edifying; but, however, very necessary for you to become master of.” At its best, he goes on, such talk turns on the public events of Europe, but more frequently it concerns subjects like the clothing of the troops of different princes, the marriages and relations of “considerable people” and the magnificence of balls and masquerades. It may have fallen from “sort of middling” to definitively small, but in the transition to its contemporary form—“Did you see Lady Gaga’s meat dress?”; “No way, they broke up?”; “Crazy party on Friday, huh?”—very little about small talk seems to have changed.

A little small talk before getting down to business is like washing your hands in preparation for a meal. But it can also be a filler that ends up consuming the entire conversation, an endless ritual of hand-washing in which no one actually gets to eat. We’ve all had them—exchanges of meaningful words strung together in well-formed sentences lasting multiple minutes in which, to borrow a line from “Singin’ in the Rain,” nothing has passed between us, just air. This aspect of small talk is undoubtedly the reason it earns our suspicion and contempt. Solicitous inquiries with no desire for an answer, self-evident observations running on a permanent cycle of rinse and repeat—it’s little wonder such discourse is associated with vapidity or falseness.

Exchanging small talk with people we’ve just met may be an unfortunate necessity, but with people we already know, it seems to suggest that they’re people to whom we have nothing to say. And yet if small talk is just talk that’s idle, insignificant and without stated purpose, then surely a substantial portion of the chatter that goes on between couples, friends and (or especially) families must count as small. Banality, however, need not always be insignificant. There’s nothing earth-shattering, usually, about missing the bus, what you ate for lunch or the new dress you just bought, but these are just the mundane tidbits that make up so much of the talk between intimates. In fact, such conversations about trivialities can arguably happen only with those close to us—only the members of our inner circle do we presume to burden with the minutiae of our lives.

Idle talk about inconsequential matters between friends may be divided into several varieties. There’s a notable species, for instance, that goes by the name “chewing the fat” or “shooting the breeze” (there is a variation of the latter for the more scatalogically inclined). This type of non-purposeful conversation, made up mostly of freewheeling banter, relies less on its subject matter than what you can do with it, and, usually, how amusing you can be while doing it. A kind of conversational scatting, the best breeze-shooters and fat-chewers can riff on any topic, the smaller the better—their virtuosity is displayed in the irrelevance of the subject matter to the rapier of their wit. “I love talking about nothing,” said the great talker Oscar Wilde. “It is the only thing I know anything about.”

Of course, as in all forms of speech, more is being communicated than just what is said. However inconsequential the things spoken, we’re also sizing each other up in the act of speaking. Gestures, facial expressions, postural shifts and places of pause are just a few of the examples Erving Goffman cites as communicative non-linguistic aspects of conversation. There is no doubt that we distinguish ourselves at least as much by the manner of our talking as by its content.

It’s unsurprising, then, that the phenomenon of small talk seems to receive interest today primarily from linguists interested in discourse analysis or pragmatics, and self-help gurus interested in improving your networking skills. The readership of the first camp, if you can believe it, is not large. The latter group is doing a little better: the go-to tome in this genre seems to be The Fine Art of Small Talk, by the conveniently named Debra Fine. She provides a helpful list of icebreakers you can memorize (but at your own peril, I have to note, since they include prompts like, “If you could replay any moment in your life, what would it be?”—a question that must surely count as at least “middling” talk). Another source of wisdom on this matter, a networking expert named Susan RoAne who, according to her website, is a Mingling Maven® and can teach you to be one too, advises adhering to the maxim: “Be bright. Be brief. Be gone.” The talent of ready utterance has long been a virtue, and in a way it wouldn’t be too hard to trace a line—sloping downward, for a number of reasons—from Lord Chesterfield’s epistolary advice to latter-day “conversation consultants” like the author of Goodbye to Shy, Leil Lowndes, who promises breezily to turn you from a “shy” to a “sure.”

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Although a sometime topic of instruction, small talk, as is clear by its very name, possesses no great stature among the arts of conversation. No one, after all, aspires to banality. So we wield our scorn for vacuous chatter like a strand of garlic, warding off the contaminating musk of inauthenticity. The allegiance to high-mindedness and substance that most of us have carefully displayed at one time or another was summed up in a recent New Yorker cartoon depicting a dinner table in ancient Greece, where a father admonishes his son: “If you don’t have anything profound to say, don’t say anything at all.” It’s no coincidence that this cartoon is set in antiquity, at the birth of Western philosophy. As a group, philosophers have been the most vocal critics of empty chatter. It wouldn’t be hard, in particular, to imagine that dinner table scene taking place chez Martin Heidegger. His 1927 Being and Time offers an analysis of Gerede, translated as “idle talk,” which forms probably the best-known philosophical critique of this phenomenon.

Heidegger’s remarks arise in the context of an investigation into our everyday way of being. Let me report the results upfront: our everyday being is resoundingly inauthentic. Instead of a genuine self-relation, we allow ourselves in daily life to be determined by “das Man,” the neutral, impersonal “they”—not any particular person or group of people, but the murky, anonymous subject of formulas like “so they say” or “people often think.” “We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge … we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking.” At this point, no one will be surprised to discover that Heidegger wrote much of Being and Time while sequestered in a hut on the edge of the Black Forest.

“Idle talk,” correspondingly, is the inauthentic everyday mode of language, the indistinct chatter of anonymous “people” (the founders of Twitter knew what they were about when they named it). It shouldn’t be understood pejoratively, Heidegger is quick to claim, because idle talk is the first way that things are made intelligible to us, especially things we aren’t acquainted with or haven’t experienced ourselves. In addition to small talk, Gerede for Heidegger also includes forms of discourse we wouldn’t consider diminutive at all, such as those in academic philosophy departments. But what all statements of idle talk share, from platitudes about the weather to the free-will problem, is that they offer up their basic terms as already known, already understood, and in so doing make us forget to attend to the things themselves.

We become wrapped up instead in the idées reçues that circulate around the object, taking for granted what’s said about it, then repeating and disseminating these as self-evident truths that become ever more authoritative the more they’re repeated: “things are so because they say so.” Rede is speech, and Gerede is literally that which has been spoken, formulas and clichés with no author or origin, which we toss to one another like so many balls in a circle—Heidegger calls idle talk “gossiping, or passing the word along.” It’s not intentionally deceptive like, say, swiftboating, but in this vast social game of broken telephone, the results of all the passing along can be equally misleading. In contrast, the authentic mode of being of discourse is defined in terms of the “essential possibilities” of “keeping silent” and “reticence.”

“Passing the word along” certainly seems to constitute the major activity of 24-hour cable news networks, not to mention what passes as political analysis. With ever less centralized seats of authority and canons of legitimation, discourse may be believed against all evidence if it’s just repeated enough. Technology now circulates words and images at previously unimagined velocities, and if the internet has enabled everyone to have their say, it has also made it easier than ever to say less while speaking more. Think of all the linking, reposting and retweeting that make up so much of the chatter online, not to mention the status updates and IMs that have made us privy to previously unimagined banalities in each other’s lives (it turns out that we do presume to burden more than just intimates with our daily minutiae). More troubling is the fact that in a framework where everything is predigested and already-understood, comprehension is presumed to be a matter of course rather than something to be achieved after careful thought (if at all). Is it any surprise, then, that there seems to be less and less space for ideas that are demanding or difficult? And that such ideas increasingly seem, by virtue of their very difficulty, simply wrong?

Small talk in our daily lives may be far less insidious than the circulation of hearsay on Fox News, but for Heidegger both amount to idle talk or linguistic inauthenticity. Certainly the amount of recycling that goes on in small talk would make Greenpeace proud. Its stock in trade is the endless circulation of platitudes we don’t really mean and that themselves mean nothing—talk that’s suitable to everyone and distinctive of no one. Grammar may generate a near infinite set of sentences, but this doesn’t mean talk is novel in the same way. “We draw on a limited compendium of pat utterances,” Goffman reminds us. Make no mistake: small talk is idle talk, just a little smaller.

But the critique of the inauthenticity of our everyday speech may also provoke a distinct prick of discomfort. Idle talk encourages the public proliferation of the formulas that it passes around, Heidegger writes, because it encourages the idea that everyone can have access to the comprehension of everything. But the repertoire of pre-formulated sayings is also a common linguistic bank that affords us immediate access to public meanings. Talk that “anyone can snatch up” allows us to speak with facility in our everyday lives. If we had to rewrite Shakespeare every time we opened our mouths, it’s doubtful any words would come out.

Heidegger is not unaware of this. Everything that gets circulated in idle talk, all the pat formulas and conventional wisdoms, are just part of the “thrownness” (one of his most vivid neologisms) that defines the human condition: the fact that we always find ourselves thrown into an already-interpreted world. “All genuine understanding, interpreting and communication and new discovery come about in [idle talk] and out of it and against it.” In no case are we untouched by the way things have been previously and publicly understood. In no case are we set before “an open country of a ‘world-in-itself’” to be encountered with virgin eyes. And yet for all this, the true form of talk for Heidegger can never be idle.

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The valorization of silence and condemnation of chatter has a long philosophical tradition. “Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something,” Plato reportedly claimed. But taciturnity, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argues, is in many cultures a sign not just of unfriendliness but of bad character. The opposite of small talk isn’t big talk, but no talk; not meaningful conversations about the infinitude of the private man, but the potential hostility of dead air. We find the silence of others alarming rather than reassuring, Malinowski observes, and breaking silence with companionable words is the first act in establishing links of fellowship; empty pleasantries are required “to get over the strange and unpleasant tension which men feel when facing each other in silence.” In this analysis, “beautiful day out” is just the evolved form of “look, I’m putting down my machete.”

Drawing on his ethnographic field studies in Papua New Guinea, Malinowski identifies the type of language used in “free, aimless social intercourse” by the term “phatic communion.” Prevalent in “European drawing-rooms” no less than “savage tribes,” such talk takes place when a number of people sit together over a village fire at the end of a day, “or when they chat, resting from work, or when they accompany some mere manual work by gossip quite unconnected with what they are doing.” We tend to think of linguistic communication as a meaningful transmission of thoughts from a speaker to a hearer, but “inquiries about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things—all such are exchanged, not in order to inform, not in this case to connect people in action, certainly not in order to express any thought.” Instead, Malinowski suggests, the function of phatic communion touches on “one of the bedrock aspects of man’s nature in society”: our fundamental need for the presence of others, “the well-known tendency to congregate, to be together, to enjoy each other’s company.”

With all due respect to Schleiermacher, Wettergespräche might be the best example of small talk’s potential to express sociality. As Virginia Woolf makes clear in a passage from her late novel The Years, there is no greater democratizer than the weather. “The fine rain, the gentle rain, poured equally over the mitred and the bareheaded with an impartiality which suggested that the god of rain, if there were a god, was thinking, Let it not be restricted to the very wise, the very great, but let all breathing kind, the munchers and chewers, the ignorant, the unhappy … and also Mrs. Jones in the alley, share my bounty.” Our lovely-day-outs and yes-isn’t-its assure one another of at least one thing we all share. However diverse the forms of our experience, we are, all of us munchers and chewers, indiscriminately subject to the vagaries of the skies.

Lest this point seem too humanistically utopian, let me bring things down to ground. “A fine thing to get up on stilts: for even on stilts we must ever walk on our legs! And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.” That’s Montaigne at the end of his long, rambling essay, “On Experience.” He’s not talking about the weather, of course, but the sentiment isn’t dissimilar to Woolf’s, if we throw a sprinkling of precipitation and a splash of pathetic fallacy into the mix. The rain that falls indifferently on the very wise and the very great, the ignorant and the unhappy, and also Mrs. Jones in the alley, we could say, serves to reminds us of both the inescapability and the universality of our seats.

My best friends and I often catch ourselves talking about the weather, especially if we live far apart. I say “catch” because as soon as we realize it, we stop self-consciously, almost guiltily, as if each of us wants to reassure the other that our friendship hasn’t come to that. But inquiries about the climate where the other person lives are an expression of care, a signal of wanting to know what it feels like where the other person is. These questions and comparisons—“It’s been raining here for days. No, really? The sun’s been out here all week”—manifest curiosity not about the actual tempers of distant skies, but about the interior weather of the people who live beneath them. In a recent 3 Quarks Daily piece entitled “What We Talk About When We Talk About the Weather,” Alyssa Pelish speculates similarly about the empathy that can be coded in redundant observations about the temperatures outside, poignantly relating her father’s habitual practice of checking the forecast in the faraway cities where his children lived.

For Heidegger, a crucial aspect of the human mode of being is that we find ourselves not just thrown into a world, but thrown into a world that we share with others. By his own logic, then, we could understand small talk as an affirmation of our collective thrownness, even if for him it always remains inauthentic. In this sense, it’s a way of continually responding to the perfectly justified complaint of children, I didn’t ask to be born. The content of idle chatter may be empty, but through it we affirm to each other that out of the existential catapult and across the range of possible worlds, we’ve landed on our arses, all of us, in this one.

If this truth has any profundity, it has at least as much banality, and double the amount of self-evidence. Is it any wonder, then, that we’re constantly communicating it to each other not by weighty argument or the authentic mode of keeping silent, but by the inconsequential chatter of the everyday? In making observations about “what is perfectly obvious” with strangers, or idly shooting the breeze with friends, we simply employ the appropriate tool for the job. It may be hard, living in such close proximity to one another, to find reprieve from unsought or unwanted talk of all kinds—cell phones, for one, have made imposed eavesdropping a fact of modern life—but if we restrict speech to the profound, the serious or even the meaningful, we impoverish it.

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Any defense of small talk is difficult to mount today because we are obviously undergoing an erosion of big talk—serious discussion of complicated ideas and events—in our public discourse. But if much of what masquerades as big talk turns out to be small, it doesn’t follow that small talk is the enemy. If talking is a fundamental human propensity, we should attend to its different forms, taking care to distinguish between them, serving as they do such different functions. There should be more real, big talk. But perhaps there should also be more small talk. It is, after all, the first means by which we herd animals paw the ground around each other and tentatively join our solitudes.

“Throughout the Western world it is agreed that people must meet frequently, and that it is not only agreeable to talk, but that it is a matter of common courtesy to say something even when there is hardly anything to say”—this is C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning, cited by Malinowski in his essay. A similar sentiment is expressed in a defense of gossip from 1821: “Why do men associate? Some say it is owing to our weakness, and our wants, but it would be more correct to attribute it to the delights afforded us by the sound of the human voice.” And over a century and a half later, talking about her observations of chat-rooms dedicated to the Furby, the electronic pet that swept the late Nineties, MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle speculates that “the extraordinary popularity of the seemingly extraordinarily banal chats has to do with people experiencing the pleasures of the feel of talk.” The delights of the human voice, the pleasures of the feel of talk—it seems there’s something to be said for talking for the sake of talking. Small talk may be speech when there’s nothing to say, but what we’re expressing is our need to talk regardless. Which reminds me: lovely day out, isn’t it?

While the story itself is fixating in the way an airport adventure novel is fixating (bombs? A police chase? Calling in the FBI? A shootout? A manhunt? Shutting down a city?), I would probably, under normal circumstances, have moved on by now. The news cycle is, bit by bit and rightly so, starting to. But it wasn’t really the action element that hooked me, that made me obsessed.

Much has been made of little brother Dzhokhar’s Twitter account (ominous tweets!), and I looked into it on Saturday out of curiosity.

Friends’ accounts in the media are adamant about how nice the kid was, how normal and social and funny he was, how shocked they were. People say things like this after people snap pretty often (“quiet, a good student”) because most sociopaths do OK blending in socially. But Jahar’s world of tweets completely captured me–because it so perfectly and utterly reflected the exact opposite of what I would expect a terrorist’s Twitter feed, were I asked to imagine one, to look like.

It is the bro-iest thing I’ve ever seen. Mainly he tweets about cars, pot, TV shows, girls, food. Sometimes he shares jokes or mundane observations. He retweets uncontroversial, random facts or pictures from users like “Science Porn” and “Not Common Facts” and “Earth Pics.” This is a mind that was apparently simultaneously planning/preparing for a bombing—presumably reading manuals on packing pressure cookers with nails and BBs—and thinking and then deciding to share the following:

* “Got me a haircut, I don’t usually do those” (April 13)

* “Dreams really do come true, last night I dreamt I was eating a cheeseburger and in the afternoon today, guess what I was eating..” (April 11)

* “Living life too fast y’all need to slow down” (April 10)

* “I really don’t like it when I have one ear pressed up against the pillow and I start to hear my heart beat, who can sleep with all that noise” (April 6)

* “I need a new show to watch” (April 4)

* “Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred miiinutes” (March 27)

* “That homework that I was supposed to do, yeaaa I’m still doing it” (March 25)

Occasionally Jahar shares something creepy and foreboding (“If you have the knowledge and the inspiration all that’s left is to take action”) but only in retrospect. He tweets about Islam once in a blue moon (“I meet the most amazing people, spent the day with this Jamaican Muslim convert who shared his whole story with me, my religion is the truth” [December 31]), and it doesn’t seem terribly out of hand or different from the Christian Facebook macro images or status updates that go around (“Great day at worship, so glad I worship an awesome God, Jesus is the #truth”). He also occasionally self-reflects or urges people to chill out (“My last tweets felt too wrong, I don’t like to objectify women or judge anyone for their actions” [December 24]; “There are enough worms for all the birds stop killing each other for ‘em” [March 6]).

When you spend a lot of time looking into a topic on Twitter, you begin seeing the different tributaries of thought people glide down, away from the original river, depending on their politics or interests. #Dzhokhar/#Jahar, for example, has a fervent crowd of supporters who espouse conspiracy theories about his being framed in the bombings. This tributary itself breaks into little rivulets–accounts with names like @OpenYrEyez or @TRUTHwarriors who regularly attach to whatever conspiracy theory is floating around that implicates the government—and who, interestingly, always appear from both the far-right and the far-left (and then blame the far-left or far-right); not-quite-crazy but still skeptical people who, feeling an unease with the drama and schizophrenic misinformation of the past week, dip a toe into the conspiracy theories; and a legion of young fans, a disturbing, creepy, alarming percentage of whom are young females with dopey profile photos who tweet things like “OMG I feel so sad for #Jahar” “some1 said #Jahar would get bail, is it tru??!” “is it just me or is #Dzhokhar kind of cute, Idk, lol.”

As horrifying as it sounds, I kind of get why people are susceptible to the conspiracies—because both Dzhokhar’s jokey online persona (“Beemer, benz, bentley? Honda, bro” [December 23]) and his moody good looks (moppety hair, clean/symmetrical features) make him seem an unlikely terrorist (see: the halo effect).

But I’m not a conspiracy theorist—he was spotted in surveillance images, he was involved in a carjacking and a shootout, he ran from police and emerged bloodied from a boat, and he allegedly admitted involvement from his hospital bed. It seems highly unlikely that he did not bomb people in Boston on April 15.

It’s just that when my mind tries to leap from Jahar (“Peanut butter, fluff, and nutella #iwentthere”)—to Suspect #2, coolly planting a bomb next to an 8-year-old, shooting at the police—it falls into the void every single time. Even when taking into account the heavy influence his brother most likely had. When you’re young you sometimes get mixed up in things, but they’re not usually bombings.

Because if he drank, and smoked weed, and immersed himself in American pop culture (The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones), and loved cars, and loved money, and loved women, and blew up three people and wounded hundreds more on a Monday afternoon in the name of Allah, that makes him either a brilliantly deceitful sociopath—which I have trouble believing—or, somehow, a casual terrorist, showing up to a bombing the way I might show up to a protest.

I admitted my obsession with the Tsarnaev case the other day to a friend, who responded pragmatically, “There’s probably a lot we don’t know.” While it’s absolutely true, why do I feel like I know this kid, like having never known him even I have a right to be shocked?

I keep having fantasies about interrogation—Carrie Mathison, or sometimes, as a poor substitute, myself—alone in a room with him as he inevitably breaks down, as terror suspects are wont to do in a room with Carrie Mathison (or myself), but how and why and when?

I think of him hiding for hours on the bottom of a boat, curled up in the fetal position, without weapons, maybe watching a small spot of light at his feet change in shape and shadow throughout the day—or waking up restrained in a hospital bed, with multiple wounds being tended to gently and methodically by a doctor—and I know it’s reading into something I know nothing about, but I can’t help but think his brother’s notion of jihad was cold comfort to him then.*

* This article is adapted from a post that originally appeared on Emilie Shumway’s blog, The QuarterLifery.

Sure, a part of me will always be that pajama pants-ed person snacking away on olives and soft cheeses while snarkily jeering and judging. But another part of me may have become genuinely attached to this disturbing production. This past season, I’d find myself brimming with an unreasonable amount of excitement for the new episode each Monday. I wouldn’t make plans when it was on. I’d read up online to learn cast members’ backstories. I’d spend actual time writing about it on my blog. It’s as if hate-watching somehow gradually morphed into real watching, something I suppose I might feel more ashamed by if not for the fact that so many of my friends are in the same rose-festooned boat.

There have been 17 seasons of The Bachelor and one of the things that many of us followers seem to have latched on to—counterintuitively enough—is the show’s unrelenting sameness. Year after year, the format remains remarkably unchanged, as do the date activities and the very sentences uttered by the host (“This is the most shocking rose ceremony in Bachelor history!”), the Bachelor (“I really think my wife could be in this room“) and the contestants (“I’m ready for my fairytale”). There’s a certain comfort to this tidiness, a certain relief knowing you could just superimpose the various seasons on top of one another like a sleek, delicious Bachelor layer-cake of insanity. It reminds me of long-running soaps where the characters stay the same but are played by different actors over the years, like on Santa Barbara with all those Kelly Capwells. It also reminds me of sports, less in the contest way and more in the ritual way. Sometimes sports is about watching a riveting, on-the-edge-of-your-seat game, but often it’s just about turning on the TV and having the familiar, comfortable sounds waft through the air while you putter around the house. That latter thing, that’s what The Bachelor gives me.

And just like with sports, there are simple sensory pleasures. The sight of all those sterile, humanless beachscapes, mountain knolls and grassy fields is soothing to my brain in the nicest way; same goes for the sound of crashing waves, tinkling fountains and slow, nasal voices. The girliest me—the one who thrills at the chance to flip through Lucky or Vogue in doctors’ waiting rooms—loves the chance to check out so many makeup and hair choices in one concentrated spot. Plus there’s the camaraderie. The Bachelor has its own water cooler style community, one comprised of hate-viewers and real viewers, but mostly those somewhere in between, all of whom, like me, cherish the chance to travel to Bachelor-ville for two hours each week and then discuss the trip afterwards. Of course, these conversations are complicated. Even as we give in to the pure joy of dissecting the most recent episode, we’re careful to sprinkle in caveats (It’s the worst; It’s not smart), as if to distinguish the show’s pleasures from those of the more “conversation-worthy” series, like Breaking Bad or Mad Men. We can’t help but insist that we’re all in on the joke, even if we’re in with two feet.

The sameness of the Bachelor world begins with the group of lady contestants, which always includes the requisite stock characters. There’s the villain who alienates the other gals because she’s “not here to make friends” and is irate that her fellow contestants even exist (this year’s Tierra), the one who claims to be a Ford model but is really just tall (this year’s Kristy), and the righteous whistleblower who wants to out the villain for “being there for the wrong reasons”—and who gradually unravels on a spool of her own self-righteousness (this year’s Robyn). There’s also the veteran from a previous season’s cast who comes back to try again (this year’s poor Kacie B). And of course, there are always Ashleys, the fun twist being that it’s not always spelled A-s-h-l-e-y (this year’s AshLee F., Ashley H. and Ashley P.).

Date activities inevitably involve helicopters (and the ladies exclaiming “wooo!” as if they have never before seen The Bachelor, or helicopters) and harnesses for climbing, rappelling, bungeeing and wall-scaling. There are horses, obviously, since this is a required ingredient in all fairytales, as well as boats off which contestants can leap—holding hands or not—into tranquil turquoise waters in a very subtle metaphor for JUMPING INTO LOVE. Also, group dates: sporty outdoor team competitions for which the girls don cute-sexy uniforms while frantically competing against one another for time with their potential future husband. Evenings are when the show pulls out its fanciest signature moves, namely candles. The largest collection of candles you have ever seen in your life flickers away to illuminate earth-toned patio furniture, gurgling fountains, platters of lowfat dinners that go untouched (rice pilaf is always involved), goblets of wine (white, rarely red) and, of course, red roses, the show’s primary form of currency.

Indeed the conditions on planet Bachelor have remained so consistent over time that, just as we viewers know what to expect, so too do the contestants. As is the case with American Idol, another long-running reality series, many of the women who appear on The Bachelor have grown up watching it. They all know the ropes, which is why it’s particularly fascinating when the ladies react as if every picturesque date, every gesture, every rose has been arranged and presented just for them by their beloved, rather than by a team of well-paid producers and location scouts. But that’s the magic of this show. It’s unabashedly as plastic as can be, yet once the contestants plop down their rolling suitcases and breathe the air and drink the Pinot Grigio for awhile, they’re powerless against their suspicion that the Bachelor universe and its nonsensical contents might be real.

The guy our ladies were clawing each other’s eyes out for this season was Sean Lowe, a truly decent, mild-mannered, muscled up Texan, already familiar to fans of the franchise as the second runner up from the last season of The Bachelorette. Sean’s priorities are his family, God and maintaining lean muscle mass. He speaks slowly and liltingly and sounds eerily like Al Gore, which is just one of the reasons it’s so hard to imagine him actually existing in the world outside the show. In all twenty-something hours of airtime last season, I’m not sure we ever learned what Sean does for a living (my own research tells me it may be furniture restoration and/or “fitness model”). But did it really matter? The show decided that Sean’s smooth, hairless gym body was his most salient personality trait. This meant that each episode began with Sean/Al Gore sharing his feelings in voiceover atop footage of himself in some state of wax doll nakedness: working out, showering, or getting dressed extremely slowly.

If our seventeenth bachelor will be remembered most for his torso, he’ll be remembered second most for his crippling indecisiveness. The warning signs came early on, when Sean took to murmuring “I’m crazy about you” in a seemingly-sincere way to not one, not two, but handfuls of moony-eyed women. By season’s end, when only three women remained, Sean had developed a maddening style of riddle-speak that allowed him to fill up lots of airtime while saying nothing. My relationship is strongest with Catherine. But best with Lindsay. But most promising with AshLee. Lindsay is my best friend and we have a fire-like passion. But with Catherine we have a fiery spark that can’t be denied. Yet AshLee “gets” me better than anyone else. So it wasn’t a surprise when, just one day before the big proposal was to take place, Sean was shedding tears of frustration over the fact that neither the Lord nor his mom was offering any clarity on who he should choose as his wife.

Speaking of the Lord, there’s one—and perhaps only one—other thing that Very Vanilla Sean will be remembered for, and that is his chasteness. The show didn’t need to make a point of Sean being a man of faith because Sean himself made it clear, although any specifics that may have been mentioned to that end never made it to air. But the show also never mentioned that Sean is a “born-again virgin,” presumably because when you remove sex from this series, very few plot possibilities remain. The tabloids broke the story and Sean confirmed that he’s indeed been celibate since college and plans to remain so until after marriage.

It’s unclear whether the show made an effort to select contestants who were actually like-minded or if the ladies were just following Sean’s lead, but there was definitely a faith-centered flavor to the whole enterprise. Cast members took every opportunity to mention how much they valued family, God and “praying on” any and all decisions at hand. Many of the women brought along their Bibles. And it’s no coincidence that the gals who fared best were those who struck the delicate balance of looking bewitching and acting flirtatious while simultaneously making sure Sean knew in no uncertain terms that they were “traditional” in matters of sex and romance. Early in the season, Selma, a particularly glamorous and cleavaged Iraqi beauty, delighted Sean to no end when she refused to kiss him on account of her family’s religious values; instead, the two spent their date on a chaise lounge, nuzzling each others’ necks and having eyes-intercourse. Weeks later, when it was time for the Fantasy Suite dates—the point at seasons’ end at which the Bachelor gets to invite each of the final three wife-options to spend the night for a last-minute test run—two of the candidates demurred, insisting they’d accept only if Sean promised they could just talk the whole time.

The off-the-charts prudishness of this season added an interesting twist to the standard Bachelor formula. Personally, I adored all the awkward, highly entertaining moments it provided. But if you’re a viewer who’s actually hoping that Sean will pick the “right” woman, and you’re rooting for the coupling to stick (not that it ever has in 16 seasons, although two marriages born on The Bachelorette are still intact), then Sean’s no-sex rule was disconcerting. If you’re going to marry a complete stranger, shouldn’t you at least make sure the sex is good? Not that fans of the show seemed to mind, if ratings were any indication. Viewership was up from previous years for most of the season, and ratings for the finale crushed last year’s by 14 percent.

Since sex was off the table, the contestants’ devotion to Sean was instead tested via challenging date activities that sometimes seemed more in the spirit of Fear Factor dares than jaunty Bachelor outings. There were standard gross-out challenges, like chugging warm goat’s milk fresh from the teat as part of an obstacle course, and snacking on crunchy bugs with and without dipping sauce at a Thailand market. There were also truly dangerous physical challenges like the Polar Bear Plunge at Lake Louise, where the ladies were tasked with submerging their bikini-ed bodies into icy waters while EMTs stood at the ready on shore (and not just for show as it turned out; the medical personnel were forced to spring into action to tend to a shivering Tierra, who may or may not have been faking hypothermia). But even this paled in comparison to the emotional challenges. The one that made me the most uncomfortable was when AshLee, known for her deep-seated abandonment and control issues, almost passed out from anxiety after being coaxed to swim with Sean into a pitch black, grotto-like cave in the ocean. Taken with everything else, the moment felt exploitative and out of character for the show. Sure, these women surrender much of their agency when they decide to appear on The Bachelor, but it’s stressful to see their lack of control dramatized so explicitly. Here’s hoping that next season, with sex back in play, we can return to more benign dating activities. What I do not need from this show is second-hand adrenaline surges and feelings of panic; just let me eat salty snacks and be swathed in warm sunshine and lip-gloss, please.

Some changes were also afoot in casting for season 17. The contestant pool was more racially diverse this season than it has been in the past, with five women of color (including winner Catherine Guidici, an Asian-American) in the 26-person contestant pool. This is particularly noteworthy because ABC and the producers of The Bachelor have been widely criticized—and sued by two black men last year—for never having featured a person of color in the role of Bachelor or Bachelorette over the two series’ combined 25 seasons. While the show still has yet to cast a person of color in the title roles, time will tell whether or not this season’s more inclusive casting was a small step toward the larger leap of putting a minority in a central role.

In other casting progress, this was the first time the show included someone with a significant physical disability. A big fuss was made over Sarah Herron, a pretty yet deeply boring blond with one arm. The show seemed conflicted about how to deal with her: at first there was the insistence that her inclusion was no big deal. We always cast people with one arm! Wait, does Sarah have one arm?! Sean, to his credit, promised he wouldn’t coddle Sarah, and mostly he didn’t. He brought her on the group roller derby outing. He sent her home when he realized she wasn’t a wife-match for him. But, in the end, Team Bachelor couldn’t resist the chance to make a big, self-congratulatory to-do of The Sarah Story, pushing a narrative about Sarah as “fan-favorite” (no) who was dealt a “shocking elimination” (no). The truth was that Sarah and Sean didn’t particularly click, which probably had nothing to do with her having one arm and everything to do with her having the slowest, most grating voice imaginable.

Other than these small changes, though, conditions on Planet Bachelor remained blissfully unchanged, which is exactly how I like this spectacle served up. I wouldn’t want the show to evolve too much. The thing is, I appreciate that The Bachelor was created in a test tube and is produced within an inch of its life. I appreciate that I can count on it to be surprise-free in every way, even when it comes to its “big surprises” (Kacie’s baaaack! Sean is walking away from the rose ceremony to gather his thoughts! Chris Harrison is knocking on the door!). I appreciate, too, that this show is edited with a hand so heavy it’s basically scripted. I don’t care. Because only once every so often does something come along that just flat out is what it is. The Bachelor world is completely and utterly straightforward. Its social universe—within which there is nothing to misread or misinterpret, no grey matter, no nuance or subtext or ambiguity or big questions (other than, of course, the Big Question that our Bachelor poses on bended knee at season’s end)—offers me an oasis of order and satisfied expectations. The absoluteness of it is energizing; it thrills my love of structure and gives me a feeling—of mastery, maybe, or command—that I don’t find so often while navigating the terrain of my own much murkier social world.

This little gift is what I get in return for carving out two hours (less, thanks to the DVR) every Monday for the length of the season, and I think it’s a pretty good deal. Here’s a production where no one gets hurt; cast members get some airtime on national TV, a springboard to the next project, some self-knowledge and possibly a spouse. Would I let my daughter watch The Bachelor? Of course not. But me, I’m a grown woman with a fully-formed brain and, as far as I’m concerned, this show is the perfect accompaniment for my cheese.

Today, a month-plus after the end of the The Bachelor‘s season, our shirtless wonder is still a part of my life, having shoulder-shimmied over to another ABC property, Dancing With the Stars, which is a really, really good reality competition show. It’s odd to see Sean on the loose in the real world interacting with human beings. His over-the-top earnestness, which seems out of place on planet earth to begin with, seems particularly out of place in Hollywood and especially so on DWTS whose live, off-the-cuff production style is a complete free-for-all compared with the hermetically sealed world of The Bachelor. It turns out that for all his muscles, Sean’s a terrible dancer whose movement can best be compared to that of a friendly robot or scarecrow, but Catherine is in the audience every single week, beaming. Sometimes Sean’s sweet mom and pastor dad are there, too, and it’s like seeing old friends.

As for Sean and Catherine’s road to the alter: word on the streets is they still haven’t slept together (not married!) and are actually living in separate apartments in L.A. (not married!) while they figure out next steps and get to know one another. Interviews have them swooning over how fun it is to finally be in public together and discussing how many kids they’ll have (at least three). The couple’s wedding is planned for this summer and will be aired (and planned by and paid for) by ABC, just like their courtship was. It’s all so exciting!

Some press accounts are already reporting trouble in paradise, though. The couple allegedly fought in a restaurant. Catherine allegedly cried in a club and turned her face away from her betrothed. Sean allegedly acts a diva on the DWTS set.

Who knows? If the formula sticks and things shake out as they have in previous seasons, Sean and Catherine will break up within the year. She’ll have to return the ring to Neil Lane Jewelers, and it will be a total travesty for her to move back to Seattle and those told-you-so sisters of hers. She may well have the chance to appear on other shows, but will forever more be chyron-ed as “Catherine Guidici, Sean’s season”—a reminder of the prince who didn’t quite pan out when it came to the final chapter of the fairytale. For his part, Sean will be just fine. He’ll have the opportunity to advise future Bachelors and/or appear on other reality shows and/or model for Men’s Health Magazine. I can’t say I have any real predictions about Sean and Catherine, but I do hope they’ll find what they want in each other. They seem like nice people, and I’d love to watch their TV wedding.

Whatever happens, though, we viewers will bounce back. Even if things with Sean and Catherine disintegrate like the dried out petals of a red rose that’s been soaked in white wine and then left to languish on the side of a roiling Jacuzzi, we, Bachelor Nation, will not crumble. The Bachelor carousel keeps moving, after all, and there’s barely a moment to dwell on the past. In just a matter of weeks, The Bachelorette (starring Desiree—who grew up in a tent!) will be along to cleanse our palette and wash Sean’s season out to the sparkling sea. New players will step in to our Monday night snacking/sporting slot, and the cycle will begin once again. In fact, they’re probably gassing up the helicopters right now—for what I am fully anticipating will be the most exciting season ever.

Inevitable perhaps … but how “soon” really? Last fall, I posed the question “Where is all the climate change fiction?” in an article in the Guardian. And yet, since then only Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior has offered itself up as a mainstream, non-genre response. Perhaps, this lack of climate change fiction reflects what’s going on in the world: we know how serious a problem we face, but do we engage with it directly? Perhaps tomorrow, we say to ourselves. Aren’t other people looking into it? We are not too concerned about our relationship with climate change, and neither, it seems, are the characters in most published novels.

But now Beacons has been released, a collection of 21 Stories for Our Not So Distant Future. It’s a rich and diverse book—brave in its intention, and original in its writing—and it places its emphasis firmly on what we can sometimes neglect in our theoretical, often abstract discussion of temperature rises and carbon reduction targets: the very human aspect of climate change. Beacons is “not polemical; nor is it a policy document or a lifestyle guide,” the collection’s editor, Gregory Norminton, points out in his introduction. “It is, rather, a meeting place for new stories that recognize where we are and where we might be heading.”

Which future will it be? The one where people living in regions threatened by climate change get “Zero-rated”? In Liz Jensen’s chilling contribution to the book, dubious TV shows trick these unfortunate “Zeros” and “Sub-Zeros” into believing that suicide is the honorable thing to do. After her mother has complied (“Five floors is a long way, if you’re someone falling”), a young daughter confronts the TV host—Mother Moon—in her office, but Mother Moon only snaps at her: “Honest truth, the big picture can’t afford people like Mummy.”

It’s hardly surprising that speculative fiction continues to be a natural choice when it comes to writing about climate change: a distressing sense of uncertainty runs through most aspects of the issue. Not about the Whether—there’s precious little doubt about the Whether in the year 2013, unless you receive a paycheck from the fossil fuel industry. But about all the Hows and Whens and What Exactlys. About: how on earth are we going to deal with it?

When, in the middle of the night, Clare Dudman’s protagonist encounters a refugee in front of her fridge with a knife, his logic is simple: “I hungry. I have baby, wife, child. They all cry. You not need. I do.” It’s an unsettling illustration of a potential consequence of a warming world—the mass movement of displaced people across borders—that is all too often neglected, or simply ignored, because we can’t quite stomach the implications.

The same goes for armed conflict. In Jem Poster’s devastating story, soldiers are patrolling the Welsh countryside, looking for “protestors, draft-dodgers, saboteurs. The so-called resistance.” It’s a future where only a huge military presence, within our own borders, seems able to protect the “freedom to live as we want,” as the soldiers put it. It’s a future where anyone who dares to criticize society’s agreed mantra—that we need to stay in the game, and that we need all the oil supplies we can get our hands on for it—has become an enemy. It’s a future where the empty barn of a widowed farm-owner (located next to a refinery) is suddenly a security threat.

The widow can only stand back—powerless, and strangely resigned—as the soldier burns down her property in front of her eyes. It’s deeply saddening to watch, and yet: it seems to be one of the more harmless acts we are prepared to tolerate in our effort to keep this show running, slaves to the monster we have created. When, in Alasdair Gray’s story, a bunch of gods (of a kind) reckon that “it was maybe a mistake to give big brains to mammals” a nod doesn’t feel too inappropriate a reaction.

•

Last year, during the six hours of the US presidential debates, there wasn’t a single mention of climate change, not even during an extended discussion of offshore drilling. President Obama had merely sprinkled his campaign speeches with a reference here and there. Back in office, he—like most politicians of his generation—seems happy for it to remain a second-tier issue: too many other, allegedly more urgent, things to think about; too much uncalculated risk in acting; too little play with the electorate.

Tell that to the “pre-Revolt” Prime Minister of Adam Thorpe’s contribution. Living as a recluse in a world of ration cards and attacks on petrol-driven cars, he has started to write his autobiography, but “his years in politics, his period of apparent power and influence, some twenty years ago” has long fizzled out. All that’s left are “issues and small dramas no one save the academics now remembered.” In the end, “he wished to say sorry.” How many of today’s politicians, I wondered, will feel this way in twenty years’ time?

Arriving at Maria McCann’s story after all those accounts, its present-day quarrel—about changing our lifestyles—has almost a touch of silliness: Is this really what we’re still arguing about? This kind of interplay between stories is one of Beacons’s strengths. There is nothing silly about it at all, of course: what it means to do “the right thing” is by no means obvious, and we are all filled with contradictions when it comes to our personal response to climate change. After much soul-searching, the couple in the story decides to shun a holiday in Italy for a house swap closer to home. In bed, at night, the wife asks her husband the tormenting question that hangs over all our personal efforts to change: “What if nobody else stops?”

Meanwhile, companies and governments of all persuasions are using the adjective “green” to describe even their smallest (and often bogus) efforts to become more sustainable, loading the word with so many different meanings, it has lost almost all of them. Holly Howitt provides a dazzling twist to this: in her story, “Green people” are those living in a zone where mankind has learned to control the weather (“You press this button, it rains. You press this one, the sun shines”). The controlled environment allows them to keep growing food—to the detriment of those living in the “sandtowns” next to them, where people are perishing. “Don’t tell me you believe in being Green now?” a furious wife shouts at her pragmatic husband, who, for their newborn baby’s sake, has just accepted employment as a “weatherman.” “You can’t be that stupid. Or that shallow.”

The story poses another uneasy question: What does it really mean to care for the next generation? To give your daughter a good life (by playing the system), or to fight the injustice the system is based on (to her detriment, probably)? Tensions like this are what make climate change such a challenge for the environmental movement. The unique nature of the situation—that we have to drastically change our ways now to prevent something becoming truly terrible in the future—is one of the hardest messages to get across. Might we need to see the post-glacial flooding of our cities to realize the full extent of our predicament, or perhaps, like the guy in Lawrence Norfolk’s story who builds self-sustaining “earthships” near the Rio Grande (and who everyone thinks is half-crazy), might we understand a little earlier than that?

•

Closing Beacons, I felt—perhaps more strongly than ever before—that fiction writing is one of the greatest aides we will have in our collective coming-to-terms with climate change. These “fictional landscapes” did not just resemble our future “physical landscapes” in enlightening, often challenging ways; they also resembled  my inner journey as I read through the stories, from sunlit peak—from the conviction that we can meaningfully come together, and put the struggle against climate change at the very heart of who we are—to desolate sandtown, where quiet resignation lives. Will we ever be able to turn this around? What stops us from simply going on the way we are right now? And then where would we be?

2. But probably the familiarity is generic. You’ve experienced a scene resembling this one. In photographs, necessarily.

3. The immediate details are not in question, although you know all these items intimately. Here you know the setting from life and the cars from the movies, as if the memory of your actual youth was beginning to drift backwards into history.

4. It’s a landscape that makes sense to you, a place you could just enter and inhabit. You know that sort of garage, even that kind of tenement, although nowadays they are probably hidden under asphalt or vinyl siding.

This is an excerpt. To read more of this article, please subscribe to issue 6 of The Point, or ask for the magazine at your local independent bookstore.

What you’re asking for here is what’s known as “the hook.” The hook is the part of the essay where I try to spray some intoxicant into your mouth so that it stays open long enough for me to feed you a turkey without you noticing. In this case, everything you ever wanted to know about Lydia Millet is the whole turkey, and if you need an intoxicant to fit this turkey down, I’ll just go ahead and say that Lydia Millet sits somewhere between Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus, and that this position of hers is significant because those two guys, when compared to each other, can be easily mistaken for irreconcilable poles, with Franzen as the earnest, realist, political writer, and Marcus as the voice from the underworld in which love is turned upside down and the ocean’s black and the trees are gray. Millet is equal parts both of these guys, but really she’s her own thing, and if I hadn’t thought that maybe you needed your mouth sprayed with intoxicant, I would’ve just skipped to your next question.   

Lydia Millet recently released Magnificence. What’s it about?

A very good question. To understand Magnificence, you must understand that it’s the third installment of a trilogy, and that How the Dead Dream first, and Ghost Lights second, preceded it.

In How the Dead Dream we meet T., a boy who’s especially equipped to succeed in business. T. swindles his friends and talks circles around his friends’ mothers—and, when he gets to college, he doesn’t let the opposite sex interfere with his dreams for riches, a lifestyle choice that causes his fraternity brothers at Duke to refer to him as a eunuch.

After college, T.’s early success in real estate leads him to Los Angeles, where he finally falls in love, only to see his girlfriend die tragically. After she dies, T. begins to question his way of being and goes to Belize, where he had been building a resort. When he gets there, encouraged by some fortuitous circumstances, T. finds himself alone under the firmament rather than pondering sand quality and thatch construction. Finding himself alone under the firmament, T. loses his resolve to spend his life developing real estate, and he doesn’t come back to LA.

In Ghost Lights, T.’s assistant, Susan, has a husband, Hal, an IRS agent who believes that taxes are worth waxing philosophical about. Hal goes to track down T. in Belize and bring him back. Hal decides to do this partly in order to prove his virility to Susan, and partly in order to prove his virility to himself—Hal had become upset with himself for being blind to Susan’s philandering, which he’d just discovered, but also for being blind to the fact that his paraplegic daughter operates a phone sex line, which he’d just discovered as well.

So while T. goes to Belize because he’s disillusioned with his successful realization of his life’s misguided goals, Hal goes to Belize because he’s disillusioned with his own mediocrity. Hal, while there, gets drunk, has an affair with a German beauty, finds T., calls his wife, starts to restore himself in her eyes, calls his daughter, then gets stabbed in the gut by a thief and left to die alone on a sidewalk.

In Magnificence, T. is back from Belize, the tan line around his recently shaved beard still evident, while Hal is dead and Susan is calling herself his murderer, on account of the fact that Hal went to Central America only after discovering her with a young man who didn’t know that his fantasy baseball hobby was funny, and who also had a robotic style of lovemaking. Also, while still grieving, a distant relative dies and gives Susan his house, which is a mansion filled with taxidermy.

Has Lydia Millet written any other books aside from the three in this trilogy? If so, what are they like?

Lydia Millet has written a number of other books aside from the three in this trilogy, and in terms of what “they’re like,” they vary, but her early ones do have a peculiar brutality to them.

For example, take My Happy Life, which is about a woman who’s led the worst conceivable life. The narrator was an orphan in a box on the street, and now when she tells her story, she’s locked starving in a room in an abandoned hospital. This, however, isn’t the first time she’s been locked up. After Mr. D. finds her living in a park, he takes her home and installs her in a pink room with tropical flowers.

And soon he brought a tool into the room. It was of an old and strange design, sharp in places and black and very heavy. He said it was authentic and historical, and could be in a very fine museum indeed.

However it did cause discomfort nonetheless, leaving blue bruises, red welts and lacerations on the skin. I thought: Excuse me. Perhaps it is an honor to be lacerated most historically.

Still I was worried, and wished to shelter my arms and legs. Otherwise they would go the way of the foot, and I would be one giant deformity.

Or take Omnivores, about another imprisoned young woman named Estée, this one held at the behest not of a guy who finds her in a park, but of her father, who collects and dissects specimens like bugs, but also larger animals including eventually an old lady named Margaret.

“Who is she—?”

“Old bag. I found her selling Bibles in Tulsa, and crappy pictures of angels. Religious comic strips.”

“You’re letting her go,” Estée said, but again she’d misremembered Bill’s strength. It had been a mistake to try straightforward defiance: a devious path would have been wiser. Her father was a fat man, some might say obese, but that didn’t stop him from charging. He had the strength and mass of a bull, the speed of a human cannonball. He was on top of her again in seconds, pressing thick thumbs against her windpipe.

She woke up with a headache and swollen tongue, her back sore, across the room from the old woman. They were both caged.

When Bill comes to the cages to bring his prisoners sandwiches, Estée’s first question is where she’s supposed to go the bathroom.

This is all pretty brutal.

Yes.

And the brutality here makes for a natural comparison to Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet, where the voices of children make their parents sick, a situation that draws the world to moral extremes.

Millet and Ben Marcus both roam mechanical, deprived, dark, absurd underworlds. But Millet is funnier than Marcus. And whereas Marcus mourns the fact that his characters in The Flame Alphabet cannot love, Millet seems to revel in her characters’ detachment, in their numb matter-of-factness. We see this again in George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, when Rosemary, who’s obese and obsessed with George Herbert Walker Bush, finds a guy named Apache smoking a joint in front of her George H.W. Bush media crucifix and tries to get him to stop.

I soon realized I had made a grave error of judgment in engaging him in combat physically. Ten minutes after hostilities had been initiated, the sour-smelling carpet of his facial hair was flowing over my face, blinding me, suffocating me, and tickling my nostrils unpleasantly, and my wrists were pinned to the floor while Apache had his way with me.

I was not new to the game, fortunately—on the contrary, I was by that time a seasoned veteran—and was able to relax eventually, to minimize abrasion.

Is that the political writing you were talking about that connects Millet to Jonathan Franzen? An obese women who’s built a media crucifix for George H.W. Bush but also suffers from the darkness that links Millet to Ben Marcus?

No. Though there’s plenty of political writing in Dark Prince of Love in the form of satire, and there is an implicitly political aspect to deranged men inflicting violence on numb, detached women, Millet also writes in a more directly Franzen-esque, less absurd, less brutal, explicitly political way.

Which is relevant to detail being that Magnificence is going to make use of both of these modes, and so form a sort of culmination of her work, the culmination being the meeting point between: 1.) political-feeling social commentary like having a boy swindle his friends and avoid sex in order to improve his chances of becoming successful enough to construct subdivisions in the Mojave—only to reverse course and decide to save near-extinct species in Borneo instead; and 2.) the peculiar brutality that involves caged women who don’t acknowledge the horror that is their lives, and rather carry on with hair-raising matter-of-factness.  

Exactly. Millet’s first explicitly political writing appears in Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, in which Robert Oppenheimer comes back from the dead with a few of his colleagues to learn about his own legacy and begin a global campaign for nuclear disarmament, a campaign that packs very little wince factor for the reader, thanks to the sheer disorientation of reading about Oppenheimer alive in the new millennium—it’s like the disorientation disarms the reader from wincing at what might otherwise come off as didactic.

Wait a second. What’s this “wince factor?” What do you mean by that?

What I mean by wince factor is that it’s easy to imagine that in Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, a contrite Oppenheimer roaming the globe in the new millennium talking about nuclear disarmament could’ve induced winces. Like sometimes you’re reading about the human condition, and then you begin to sense the onset of pontification, which you know from experience feels like a violation of the high standards of writing that are required to represent the human condition, a violation that sometimes authors commit in order to expedite certain political points, points that, by their very nature, rely on a certain one-dimensionality that, in other circumstances (circumstances without a political point to make), would add up to bad writing.

Meaning that, for example, a character like, say, a heartbroken slave driver, when being written about for the purpose of illustrating the human condition, can still be a sympathetic character because he, like the reader, is a human being, a fact that even his job as a slave driver can’t completely obscure. But when the writer’s purpose when describing this slave driver is political-social commentary, it becomes more difficult for that slave driver to be sympathized with, because the writer leans upon his slave-driving aspect more heavily than normal, and the balance employed to represent the human condition—a balance that is normally the hallmark of good writing—is violated, and the slave driver is made less human in order to prove the opportunistic point that certain things are bad, rather than the more everlasting point that all parts of being human are human, and that all the bad parts are inextricably linked to the good.

In Magnificence, Lydia Millet wonders, “Why was the term [do-gooder] so bitter, so resentful?”

Which can be translated to: Why does do-gooder writing make readers like me wince?

Maybe it’s just that readers don’t like when writers ensnare them in a plot and then take advantage of their attention to deliver a lecture. Or maybe it’s that political-social commentary, when delivered in the sobriety of tone characteristic of third person omniscience, feels fraudulent, because social commentary ought to be delivered in a form with flaws built in and confessed to up front, like Henry Miller’s first person invective. Or maybe it’s that do-gooder characters and moments tend to feel absolved from moral judgment, or God’s purview, a tendency that, at the bare minimum, robs a story of some tension or makes it fall flat.

I’m not sure. But when I feel the possibility of poorly done political-social commentary on the horizon, I get nervous. Like when Dave Eggers has a very good book going in the form of The Hologram for the King, and a guy’s in Saudi Arabia and spending a lot of time waiting around and unable to have sex with women, and then he’s got this growth on his neck that he keeps on poking, and the book really seems be gathering steam, but then all of a sudden the guy’s reflecting on his decision to compel the bicycle company Schwinn to start manufacturing their bicycles more cheaply than they were before. And then the guy’s reflecting on how he personally ruined Schwinn, and also ruined himself, and it all just feels a little bit bogus, like maybe market forces had something to do with Schwinn’s doom, forces bigger than this one guy, and maybe Schwinn’s move to manufacture bikes at a lower cost is something the guy could get mad at the government or Wall Street or the whole world for, instead of himself. Like maybe there is no conceivable ex-Schwinn employee on the planet who thinks like this, because the economic climate isn’t the kind of thing that any one man blames himself for. And then you’re kind of wishing your dad were around to tell Dave Eggers about low taxes and how great they are, even though normally when your dad’s going off on this, you get up and leave the room.

How does Millet deal with the pratfalls surrounding political-social commentary?

In How the Dead Dream, Millet buys leverage with her use of absurdity. T., at this point in time a college student, counsels a young man who sometimes wishes he were a farmer in Guatemala. The kid muses out loud, “You just get up and eat beans and then you work all day, like, hoeing shit.”

And in a line like that, you see not just how difficult it is to be a decent human being, but how to try to be decent is to risk absurdity. And that there is really what this trilogy is about—how absurdly difficult it is to be decent. To not be a monster like the murderers and abusers in Omnivores and Dark Prince of Love and My Happy Life.

What about in Magnificence?

In Magnificence, Millet has quite a task on her hands—to end a story about a onetime swindler and master businessman returned from his epiphany under the firmament to make good, to apply his epiphany and lead a decent life.

And she does this. But, T’s reformation happens in the background, and really Magnificence is about Susan, Hal’s widow who insists on calling herself a “murderer,” a set-up that returns the trilogy to Millet’s early focus on women, and, by relegating T. to the background, goes a long way towards warding off winces.

We’ve talked about winces enough.

Ok.

Let’s focus on Magnificence.

Millet opens Magnificence with a lengthy, poised, both un-absurd and un-didactic meditation on the ways in which the evolving world has doomed men to insanity, and women to complicity with their insanity.

“To be a tragic hero, all that was needed was manhood.”

In this opening, I got the sense that Millet had come to understand how the brutality of her earlier writing relates to the political-social imperatives of her later work—this insanity of men that was so evident in Omnivores and My Happy Life had found a home in the real world. Or rather, Millet found a home for this insanity in her quite real surroundings, rather than in the forced environments of locked rooms and cages, abandoned hospitals and basements.

“The men, being permanent sociopaths, got credit for consistency.”

In the book, Susan, while trying to figure out what to do with herself after her husband Hal dies in Belize, inherits a mansion from a distant relative, and the mansion is filled with taxidermy, a detail that rightfully leaves the reader with a sense of foreboding. But moving into this mansion, Susan moves into the sort of environment Millet’s earlier work had taken place in—the house/prison filled with specimens in Omnivores, most readily—except this time, the man’s dead. The sociopath is gone. But Susan is left to investigate his legacy, the darkness that any reader of Millet knows lies behind the seemingly innocuous stuffed animals, and all the while she does this against the backdrop of T.’s reformation.

So Susan’s in this mansion filled with dead animals, and she likes being there. She likes being rich, and she likes the investigation. She wants to know why these dead animals are here. What motive brought them all together, if only as corpses. And she’s transfixed by the quest to figure it out, by the motive behind this celebration of murderousness, so much so that, when she finds a manhole that we know full well has to lead to some kind of nightmare, Susan has to go down there.

Couldn’t she just lift it up? But there was no handhold, no opening.

“Backhoe,” she said to herself.

Certainly it was a fool’s errand. Still, she would make some calls to the city.

There was a moment in Magnificence when I thought I knew exactly what was going to happen—Susan had just inherited the mansion, and her contrition-filled grief phase had abruptly terminated. After saying that the problems of the world invariably came back to rich people, she found herself quite attached to the mansion, to being rich. And then, some cousins threatened to file a lawsuit so that they might get a share of her new home.

And then, there’s T., back from Belize having decided to dissolve his company and start a charitable foundation instead. And he appears to be the only person who can help Susan. So. What’s going to happen? Susan’s going to need help fending off her cousins so that she can keep the mansion that’s made her happy, and the only person she knows with the competence and the resources to help her has just decided that money is inconsistent with what he felt when he had his epiphany under the firmament.

Is that what happened?

No. The puzzle I saw was a red herring, a distraction that enabled Millet to set up her true finale, which juxtaposes “doing good” not just with the dark forces of badness and death, but with our—with Millet’s—fascination with said dark forces—e.g. with the fact that Susan cannot help but go into the basement, and also with the fact that Millet so clearly enjoys detailing brutal rape scenes, the more horrific the better. One suspects that if Millet were writing in a sealed-off basement like the ones in her stories, she would keep on with the brutal satire that characterizes her early work, the sadistic men and shackled, desensitized women, her imagination free to indulge its darkest corners without the interference of the outside world, the interference of the fact that brutality must compete with the instinct to do good. But Millet doesn’t write in a basement. In her later work, she opens herself up. At the same time, she always keeps the brutality close and ready, right below ground, right underneath the mansion. And what we wind up with in Magnificence is a juxtaposition not between doing good and the mere existence of darkness, but between doing good and our fascination with darkness, with our eager and willing complicity with it, a complicity that makes doing good feel so meek.

So you liked it.

Magnificence, along with Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, is my favorite of Millet’s works. Part of the reason I like it so much is for the case study Millet provides on how to write about political and social issues—she writes about women and men, wealth, taxes, disability, the environment, soulless subdivisions, capitalist imperatives expressed in boyhood, interracial couples, caring for the elderly, and whole a lot more. She makes the points that need to be made, but that can send readers running on account of the fact that hearing about this stuff can feel like sitting in a third grade classroom.

But with Millet, it almost never feels like I’m sitting in a third grade classroom. I think this is because she hasn’t sworn off her early fascinations: with terror; with the fact that she can find humor in terror; with the odd joy she finds in writing her way into the darkest worlds conceivable—the joy that, even as she writes to us about a capitalist who goes to Borneo to save animals, she can’t forget about, and can’t give up. And this joy in darkness gives her street cred. And it also gives us faith in her, faith that she’s not telling us how to be good, but writing to us about how difficult it is to be good. With the difference being that she’s not saying we need to give up that basement below the mansion. She’s not telling us to pretend it doesn’t exist, or to fail to pop open the manhole. She knows that’s impossible—and what’s more, she knows that, even if it were possible to go through life denying our intoxication with darkness, to do so would be bad. Bad because a story in which Susan doesn’t go into that basement would be boring, but also, fraudulent. Because that’s not how things are. That’s not how we are.

Thankfully, that’s not the ending we get. Because the Millet of Magnificence is not a recovering alcoholic rambling on about the joys of sobriety. Millet is not even a writer torn between the bottle and the wagon. Rather, Millet is a writer who wants both. She keeps darkness (her own, and ours) always in view, but she’s also chosen to write about goodness. And it’s this choice, I think, that’s delivered the humor and brutality of her early work from the confines of the basement to the light of the wider world.

The parents on My So-Called Life—remarkable among TV parents in being allowed to have inner lives—were banner members of the larger intergenerational love-fest of 1994. They made a second Woodstock in August of 1994, and seemed to be making a second Woodstock in general throughout the year. Shannon Hoon wandered the scene as if to prove it. Bellbottoms, John Lennon sunglasses and British rock were back, and consumer fashion tried to cut mod London looks of the late sixties into slippery rayon. Baby boomers by now had more than just a “Touch of Gray”; they had the Big Chill in its own anniversary editions. Boomers passed a baton to the youth with Woodstock ’94, sponsored by Pepsi, and they passed the great kidney stone of their midlife crises in Forrest Gump, also released that year. 1994 would be among the first system-wide swells of nostalgia we engaged in culturally, and by now we have reiterated this pattern for every discernable unit of thetwentieth century. The need to frantically recycle past decades became more and more piquant as the late 90s ushered out any semblance of temporal identity on a cloud of HTML code, but by ’94 the urge was already there. The alternative music peak of 1994 that brought Beck’s Mellow Gold and Weezer’s blue album also initiated the genre’s decline. Afterwards, white people would lose any market share they once held in the realm of articulating authenticity, parceling it out into smaller and smaller shares until the indie cred contingent of the early 00s studied its taxidermied remains like beleaguered academics.

As a sixth grader entering into the cultural landscape of 1994, the terrain ahead looked promising. The bratty chords that tumble into “When I Come Around” and the melancholic swell of “Found Out About You” defined the terms of the contract I thought I was making with music. I saw before me a landscape of teenagers in motley subcultures that could be decoded in a language of sneakers. Their Vedder-via-Beavis and Butthead ethos seemed awfully swell from within the first buds of my alienation, and I reasoned that “alternative” would offer a helpful canopy to park under, given the guaranteed shunting I would receive from the Mariah Carey set. Having no sturdy archive of the past, I wouldn’t have known to think of 1994 as a unique moment of cultural jibe: I welcomed the future, and felt confident that culture would sustain that year’s variegated and faintly delicious offerings for the long run.

You wouldn’t have noticed 1995-1996 as distinctly different from 1994, but as the years age, you can see evidence of the first stitchings-in of the following era. By the time Clueless came out in 1995, Paul Rudd’s socially conscious slacker already seemed anachronistic, and when Brittany Murphy shed her flannel in favor of the newly ubiquitous baby tee, girls all over America were inclined to take her cue. The apocalyptic horses that foretold the end of days for the mid-Nineties weren’t Trojan; Scary Spice plainly zigazigged alternative and its ilk right out of existence. But it wasn’t bubble gum that initiated the glum autumn of my relationship with culture; rather something in the eighth or ninth month of the “Mo Money, Mo Problems” juggernaut. By now I see the song’s message ironically embedded in the dot-com/credit nonsense banquet that laid the groundwork for the Reagan-Eighties Aughts, but something about that song’s chrome-smooth sheen and hybrid appeal seemed impenetrable and portentously pregnant even then. It was a watertight feat of industry cross-pollination to cast off all previous cultural amalgams as sheer juvenilia, to lend them an air of the naïve or ridiculous. It made it clear that nothing would be not-it ever again.

In conversations with people three or four years older or younger than me, it strikes me that those of us who were, say, ages 9–13 in 1994 remain on a little boat together, having glimpsed a period that pre-consciously knew itself to be the twentieth century’s wake. Maybe what sets us apart from those who came before and after is that we were partially but not fully formed before being passed through the analog-digital converter of 1997. Anyone who ever made a mix tape off the radio in the early Nineties, pirating in the vogue of the day, knows the sensation of clipping culture like coupons in the moment of pressing “stop” too late and catching an errant commercial or a DJ’s vociferous outro. If you listened to the tape enough, the ad or phrase could become so interlinked with the song that it would prompt it in any associated hearing. There is something of that temporality and physicality left in our non-generation, and it strikes me that that’s probably the place where we will be stored in the archives: not quite an entry on the mix tape of that century, but as a sticky remnant clipped into the end-static, our presence always a cue to rewind.

Please join editors, writers and readers of The Point to celebrate the release of issue 6 on Saturday, January 26th at High Concept Laboratories in Bucktown (1401 Wabansia, across the street from the Hideout). If you’ve been to our parties at HCL before, you know how fun they are. If you haven’t, maybe you’ll be intrigued by just a few of the things people wrote to us after last year’s party:

“Hey guys! That was so much fun, as USUAL!!! The belt to my coat got lost amidst all the ‘COAT CRAZINESS.’ It’s dark blue, wool/cashmere, no hardware. Please let me know if it turns up!! Thanks!”

“Thanks for a good party. And I lost a brown and white sweater with a zipper on the side. Did anyone find it or take it by accident?” 

“While enjoying myself at the launch party a few weeks ago, I unfortunately left a green Boeing knit hat behind. The hat is of great personal importance; it is made of green yarn with BOEING in white capital letters on the sides and a white yarn snowball on the top.”

Okay, so there were some issues with keeping track of winter clothing last time, but just look what a good time everyone says they were having while they were losing their clothes! And rest assured that this year, HCL promises, there will be coat-racks! There will also be jazz, a DJ and a band, and also plenty of discounted copies of Issue 6. So, please, if you live in or near Chicago, or are visiting town that weekend, join us. We promise it will be fun and think it’s more than likely you’ll leave with the same coat you came with. RSVP here if you’re on Facebook or via email at thepointmagazine@gmail.com. See you there!

Details:
When: Saturday, January 26th, 8:00pm-1am
Where: High Concept Laboratories, 1401 Wabansia Ave, Chicago, IL

How Much: Free for subscribers and anyone who purchases a $10 magazine. (We will be asking for a $5 suggested donation for those who do not like to read).

Take James Marsh’s 2011 film Project Nim, which concerns the extraordinary life of a particular chimpanzee. Born in 1973 at the Oklahoma Institute for Primate Studies, the newborn Nim was taken from his mother and loaned out to a Columbia University psychology professor, Herbert Terrace, who hoped to demonstrate that chimps’ capacity for learning human sign language was greater than generally believed. For nearly five years Nim lived in different human households, and during this period he was treated like a human child and taught to use many signs. But when Nim bit and badly injured one of his student handlers, Terrace unceremoniously deposited him back at the Oklahoma Institute for Primate Studies. Thanks to the care and attention of a research student named Bob Ingersoll, Nim, who had never before seen a member of his own species, eventually adjusted to life with other chimps. This was not, however, the end of his troubles. A few years after Nim’s return all of the Insti- tute’s chimps were sold to the NYU Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) where, among other things, they were used to test vaccines for humans. Ingersoll worked hard to publicize Nim’s plight, and eventually Nim was moved to an animal sanctuary in Texas called the Black Beauty Ranch. There Nim was given a relatively large concrete compound with a porch, but he lived alone. Ingersoll intervened again and arranged for two other chimps to move in with Nim. These chimps were Nim’s companions for five years until his death in 2000.

The film that Marsh made about Nim deals with these and other events in Nim’s life. Marsh made Project Nim because he wanted to understand the life of a particular chimp. But he didn’t limit himself to the plain recital and visual presentation of facts. He does rely heavily on archival material such as movies and photographs taken by people who knew Nim. At the same time, he employs various methods that invite us to enter into and explore different perspectives on what happened to Nim. He employs images from the archival material in an expressive manner; he stages and films a number of reenactments, using them in a similarly evocative style; he adds his own formal interviews with some of the individuals who interacted most closely with Nim; and he uses music to capture the most psychologically and emotionally salient aspects of Nim’s story. These different techniques shape our attitudes, inviting us to place importance on particular aspects of Nim’s life, and a good case can be made for saying that they are essential to Marsh’s goal of conveying an understanding of what that life was like.

Consider how the film brings out the mag- nitude of the wrong that was done to Nim and the other chimps when they were sold to LEMSIP and used for testing vaccines. Relevant here are not only the parts of the film that are specifically concerned with LEMSIP but also the parts that show Nim in happy times. Some of Nim’s happy times were at the Institute for Primate Studies. During the day he and his friends had access to an indoor compound with toys and climbing surfaces, and Nim himself also had Ingersoll, who took him for walks, roughhousing and simply hanging out with him. In one sequence, we see Ingersoll and Nim heading out of the compound, signing to each other in a relaxed manner. Ingersoll signs “where?” to Nim, and Nim responds by making the sign for “walk.” Nim turns to Ingersoll, makes the sign for “play” and sprints energetically off across a field. As we see these images, Ingersoll tells us: “Chimps aren’t humans. You have to kind of understand chimps to be able to … work with them and be with them.” We also hear a folksy musical phrase played repeatedly on an acoustic guitar, a melodic fragment that differs notably from the menacing riff that shows up when Nim is living with humans and threatening physical violence. The different techniques Marsh uses to show us Nim’s life with Ingersoll thus position us to look at Nim’s gestures and antics in an ethically non-neutral manner, so that we see in them the pulse of flourishing chimpanzee life and perceive in them a kind of vital glory.

These happy days form the background to Nim’s time at LEMSIP, where individual chimpanzees are separated from each other and confined to small barren cages. Traumatized by what was done to them, they appear alternately groggy and frenzied. A veterinarian from LEMSIP explains that since he and his colleagues knew that some of the chimps could sign they posted pieces of paper with pictures of signs so that everyone in the lab could learn them. As this vet is speaking, the camera turns and—in what is evidently a re-enactment—scans a series of pieces of paper with drawings of signs on them, coming to rest briefly on a drawing of the sign for “hug” and then, after a brief interval, lingering on a drawing of the sign for “play.” It is in this way—by means of a series of expressive techniques—that Project Nim conveys an understanding of the awfulness of what happened to Nim at LEMSIP. And what is impressed on us is a contrast with Nim’s former life that could not be more poignant: however much the lab workers may want to sign meaningfully about hugging and playing with their chimp subjects, the magnificent chimp form of life to which hugging and playing belong has already been cruelly extinguished.

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Do Marsh’s expressive techniques contribute directly to ethical understanding of Nim’s life? Might they, or something like them, even be necessary for such understanding?

This is an excerpt from an article in The Point‘s issue 6 symposium, What are Animals For? To read more, please ask for The Point at your local independent bookstore or subscribe here!

I’m spending this MLK day at home outside Philadelphia, where I teach at Villanova University. The idea that anyone, let alone a successful politician, could oppose the existence of MLK Day seems even more ante-bellum than the “Arizona” video seems pre-9/11: banners of King’s face flutter on campus; the university dedicates the entire week to events celebrating King’s life; the president of the nation (although not of the university) is black.

But for all the bunting and feting it can be to understand what King’s message was meant to be, beyond having something to do with peace and racial equality of opportunity. ESPN, for instance, broadcasts short pieces in which black sports stars express their gratitude to King under the title “Content of Character.” The pieces are heartfelt; it must be awesome for Kevin Durant to compare his life now to what his life might have been like before civil rights. The “I have a dream” speech is broadcast by everyone everywhere, often as the soundtrack to heartwarming scenes of black and white children who have, all indications suggest, no clue that racism ever existed. On MLK Day almost all of us can come together to celebrate a great man.

It’s easier to stress the peace theme of King’s life because we celebrate King on or around his birthday, January 15th, 1929, and not the date of his death, April 4th, 1968. King was assassinated. James Earl Ray pled guilty to the murder before recanting his confession three days later (documents relating to King’s death remain classified until 2027. Many believe the U.S. government was involved). Stokely Carmichael suggested that King’s death had taught black Americans the important lesson that they needed guns to defend themselves from white Americans. Rioting ensued (not, it should be stressed, Carmichael’s fault). In Washington D.C. marines armed themselves with machine guns on the steps of the Capitol. Over 6000 people were arrested.

Similarly, we can celebrate our current version of civil rights and legal equality because we focus on the content of King’s character, not his actions. At the time of his death King was working on the Poor People’s Campaign. In the wake of President Johnson’s failed “War on Poverty,” the PPC demanded recognition of the basic human right to the means of subsistence and, among other things, pushed the government to guarantee full employment and a minimum basic income. When you read about how Nineties politicians opposed MLK day on the grounds that King was a socialist, it’s easy to be incredulous—anyone we celebrate so festively can’t possibly…. But the Poor People’s Campaign was nothing short of a socialist call to arms. This will go unmentioned on ESPN. It will be ignored in the omnipresent “Dream” sequences.

But King’s violent, politicized death and his final project both seem particularly relevant this year, thanks to Sandy Hook and the Trillion Dollar Coin. Most readers of essays like this one think gun control is a complete no-brainer. America has high levels of gun violence, higher than any other developed nation. America has lax gun control laws. The connection is made dramatically obvious when young children are killed with automatic weapons. Without automatic weapons, they would still be alive. The story and the theory are gripping and moving because the victims, perpetrator and bystanders at Sandy Hook are all just like the media commentariat. And that kind of thing just doesn’t happen to people like us.

But as we all know, intellectually at least, the children of Sandy Hook are atypical^[1] of Americans killed by gun-toting men (almost always men). When white people use guns on people, they mostly murder themselves: suicide accounts for 80 percent of white gun violence. The situation is precisely the opposite for African Americans, amongst whom suicide accounted for only 16 percent of gun-caused fatalities. And we all know, intellectually, that this other-directed gun violence is not taking place in Atlanta’s middle-class black neighborhoods. If you’ve been shot to death, you were most likely a young, non-white male living in an impoverished, urban neighborhood.

Thanks to Sandy Hook, the White House has chosen to focus on the reform of gun laws. For much (but not all: Democrats away from the coasts and cities are often opposed to gun reform)  of the Democratic base, the gun issue is simply too obvious to ignore. It seems doable. If Health care was a Pyrrhic victory (so… now everyone has to buy insurance from profiteering insurance firms?), gun control is something we can win, convincingly, before the end of Obama’s second term, second amendment or no.^[2] On MLK Day 2013, this (or poor/culpable Manti Te’o) is the issue all over the news.

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But that’s a shame. The big constitutional law story that gun-control shunted out of the way is much less emotionally compelling, but—absurd as it sounds—much more important: the trillion dollar coin. The idea behind the coin is very simple. In order to raise the debt ceiling, and thus to allow the U.S. to pay off the debts it has already accumulated, Congress must agree to allow the government to take on more debt (taking on debt to pay off debt is how all large economic entities work). Congress didn’t want raise the debt ceiling and, although it would probably be calamitous to default on the nation’s debt payments, it is unconstitutional for the White House to raise the ceiling without Congressional approval. It is not unconstitutional, however, for the White House to mint special commemorative coins. Usually those coins are worthless, hence, “commemorative.” But the White House may also, whenever it chooses, announce that a certain coin has a certain value: say, this blank coin in my pocket—and say, a trillion dollars. Deposit that coin in the treasury and the government could, theoretically, pay off debt for a year or so without having to ask Congress for anything. This idea caused quite a ruckus, because it really does make a mockery of effective government, and because the economic consequence is, according to text-books, disastrous inflation. The mere existence of the trillion dollar coin would reduce the worth of your salary or stipend to roughly nothing.

But the American government’s policy for recovering from the great financial crash is no different from the trillion dollar coin idea in principle. Interest rates are effectively zero, which encourages borrowing; the money borrowed has been created no less fantastically than the trillion dollar coin. And the Federal Reserve’s funkily named adventures into monetary policy (Operation Twist, QE) involve inventing money to buy bad or illiquid debt or stock or bonds from businesses, particularly financial enterprises, and then kind of ignoring that that debt ever existed (with the result that the businesses now have scads more money without having to deal with the consequences of all their bad decisions over the last twenty years, while the government can postpone redeeming treasury bonds). And it seems to be working: the stock market has never been stronger, corporate profits have never been higher, private debt is slowly decreasing.

This is good news for the Democrats, whose odd policies have kept the market and large corporations afloat. I call the policies “odd” because standard Keynesianism^[3] holds that government debt should be on the side of fiscal policy: using government money to, e.g., build infrastructure, employ people and so on. But the Democrats have overwhelmingly used monetary policy to encourage economic growth, flooding the country with liquidity through low interest rates and fancy accounting at the Fed. With all that money sloshing around, someone’s bound to find a way to spend it. And so they have.

But many economic indicators suggest that this approach isn’t working at all.^[4] GDP itself seems to have grown massively in the post-war era, but once you subtract debt from output over that period, that growth appears minimal at best. In fact it is possible that all economic growth since the end of the World War II was just debt-driven. And if that is so, then the solution to the financial crisis is just an intensification of all the bad ideas that led to the financial crisis in the first place. And as everyone knows, the vast majority of the gains have gone to a very small number of people. As for the rest of us, employment is stronger than expected in terms of the number of people employed. But, after decades of stagnation, wages are still stuck where they were in the Seventies—and the new jobs are, overwhelmingly, cheaper than the pre-crash jobs, so wages make up a smaller percentage of GDP than ever before. Corporate profits at an all-time high, and wages at an all-time proportional low? There’s no reason to think that the Obama administration’s response to the debt crisis will do anything at all to address inequality or poverty. It’s entirely possible that in order to tackle those problems we may need a genuinely fiscal stimulus.

But it is precisely by addressing economic inequality that we could really cut down on gun violence. Consider these two options: first, borrowing from Obama, imagine a world in which all gun purchases must, in order to be legal, involve a background check, cooling-off period, gun-license and so on and so forth. Now, borrowing from King, imagine a world in which young men are guaranteed employment with a minimum income and a range of government-provided low-income housing to choose from. The Obama option just might reduce the number of children shot in elementary schools, although there’s no guarantee of that. Only in King’s imagined world would incidences of gun violence against other people really decline. The solution to gun violence in America is a radical reduction in poverty—which, as everyone knows, is correlated with race. That’s a dream worth having.

Sandy Hook was, from (and only from) a statistical or historical perspective, an outlier of little meaning. The government’s response to the debt crisis, and the Republican opposition to that response, will affect Americans for generations. If it really is working, and the willy-nilly creation of liquidity is the way our economy now functions best, the trillion dollar coin isn’t only economically feasible, it’s morally compulsory. And there could be few more worthy of having their head on the coin that saves the American population from poverty than Martin Luther King—a black man who tried to teach white America the meaning of civilization, was murdered for his efforts and then, in a final indignity, revived for posterity as the new Booker T. Washington. But if Obama’s response isn’t working, it might be best to spend the next three years on something more significant than the reform of gun laws: a genuine attempt to fulfill the promise of King’s Poor People’s Campaign. I’ll be spending MLK Day 2013 remembering that, not so long ago, the “Greatest American of the Age” was an assassinated socialist.