Call Them by Their True Names Read online

  Call

  Them

  by Their

  True

  Names

  American Crises (and Essays)

  Rebecca Solnit

  Haymarket Books

  Chicago, Illinois

  © 2018 Rebecca Solnit

  Published in 2018 by

  Haymarket Books

  P.O. Box 180165

  Chicago, IL 60618

  773-583-7884

  www.haymarketbooks.org

  [email protected]

  ISBN: 978-1-60846-947-5

  Trade distribution:

  In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

  In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

  In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

  All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International,

  [email protected]

  This book was published with the generous support

  of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

  Cover design by Abby Weintraub.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

  Contents

  Foreword: Politics and the American Language

  Armpit Wax

  I. Electoral Catastrophes

  The Loneliness of Donald Trump

  Coda (July 16, 2018)

  Milestones in Misogyny

  Twenty Million Missing Storytellers

  II. American Emotions

  Ideology of Isolation

  Naïve Cynicism

  Facing the Furies

  Preaching to the Choir

  III. American Edges

  Climate Change Is Violence

  Blood on the Foundation

  Death by Gentrification: The Killing of Alex Nieto and the Savaging of San Francisco

  No Way In, No Way Out

  Bird in a Cage: Visiting Jarvis Masters on Death Row

  Coda: Case Dismissed

  The Monument Wars

  Eight Million Ways to Belong

  The Light from Standing Rock

  IV. Possibilities

  Break the Story

  Hope in Grief

  In Praise of Indirect Consequences

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Politics and the American Language

  One of the folktale archetypes, according to the Aarne-Thompson classification of these stories, tells of how “a mysterious or threatening helper is defeated when the hero or heroine discovers his name.” In the deep past, people knew names had power. Some still do. Calling things by their true names cuts through the lies that excuse, buffer, muddle, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness. It’s not all there is to changing the world, but it’s a key step.

  When the subject is grim, I think of the act of naming as diagnosis. Though not all diagnosed diseases are curable, once you know what you’re facing, you’re far better equipped to know what you can do about it. Research, support, and effective treatment, as well as possibly redefining the disease and what it means, can proceed from this first step. Once you name a disorder, you may be able to connect to the community afflicted with it, or build one. And sometimes what’s diagnosed can be cured.

  Naming is the first step in the process of liberation. Calling Rumpelstiltskin by his true name makes him fly into a self-

  destructive rage that frees the heroine of his extortions; and though fairytales are thought to be about enchantment, it’s disenchantment that is often the goal: breaking the spell, the illusion, the transformation that made someone other than herself or himself, speechless or unrecognizable or without human form. Naming what politicians and other powerful leaders have done in secret often leads to resignations and shifts in power.

  To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or corrupt—or important or possible—and key to the work of changing the world is changing the story, the names, and inventing or popularizing new names and terms and phrases. The project of liberation has also involved coining new terms or bringing terms that were obscure into more popular use: we now talk about normalization, extractivism, unburnable carbon; about walking while Black, gaslighting, the prison-industrial complex and the new Jim Crow, affirmative consent, cisgender, concern trolling, whataboutism, the manosphere, and so much more.

  The process works both ways. Think of the Trump administration’s turning family reunification, which sounds like a good thing, into the ominous, contagious-sounding “chain migration.” Think of the second Bush administration’s redefining torture as “enhanced interrogation,” and how many press outlets went along with it. Of the Clinton administration’s hollow phrase “building a bridge to the twenty-first century,” which was supposed to celebrate the brave new world tech would bring and disguised how much it would return us to nineteenth-century economic divides and robber barons. Of Ronald Reagan’s introduction of the figure of the “welfare queen,” a mythic being whose undeserving greed justified cutting off aid to the poor and ignored the reality of widespread poverty.

  There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that the white kids are “hanging out” but the Black kids are “loitering” or “lurking.” Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.

  You can pretend there are two sides to the data on the climate crisis and treat corporate spin doctors as deserving of equal standing with the overwhelming majority of scientists in the field. You can just avoid connecting the dots, as this country long has done with gender violence, so that the obscene levels of domestic violence and sexual assault against women become a host of minor and unreported stories that have nothing to do with one another. You can blame the victim or reframe the story so that women are chronically dishonest or delusional rather than that they are chronically assaulted, because the former reaffirms the status quo as the latter disassembles it—which is a reminder that sometimes tearing down is constructive. There are a host of words used to damn women—bossy, shrill, slutty, hysterical are a few—that are rarely used for men, and other words, such as uppity and exotic, carry racial freight.

  You can invent conflicts where there are none—“class versus identity politics” ignores that all of us have both, and that a majority of people who might be termed the working class are women and people of color. Occupy Wall Street’s slogan “We are the 99 percent” insisted on a vision of a society that didn’t need to be stratified into several classes, but in which the 1 percent—a phrase that has stuck around and become part of the mainstream vocabulary—had pitted themselves against the rest of us.

  Precision, accuracy, and clarity matter, as gestures of respect toward those to whom you speak; toward the subject, whether it’s an individual or the earth itself; and toward the historical record. It’s also a kind of self-respect; there are many old cultures in which you are, as the saying goes, as good as your word. Our Word Is Our Weapon was the title of a compilation of the Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos’s writings. If your word is unreliable, junk, lies, disposable pitches, you’re nothing—a boy who cried wolf, a windbag, a cheat.

  Or so it used to be, which is why one of the crises of this moment is linguistic. Words deteriorate into a slush of vague intention. Silicon Valley seizes on phrases to whitewash itself and push its agendas: sharing economy, disruption, connectivity, openness; terms like surveillance capitalism push ba
ck. The current president’s verbal abuse of language itself, with his slurred, sloshing, semi-coherent word salad and his insistence that truth and fact are whatever he wants them to be, even if he wants them to be different from what they were yesterday: no matter what else he’s serving, he’s always serving meaninglessness.

  The search for meaning is in how you live your life but also in how you describe it and what else is around you. As I say in one of the essays in this book, “Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.”

  Encouragement means, literally, to instill courage; disintegration means to lose integrity or integration. Being careful and precise about language is one way to oppose the disintegration of meaning, to encourage the beloved community and the conversations that inculcate hope and vision. Calling things by their true names is the work I have tried to do in the essays here.

  Armpit Wax

  (2014)

  You can take the woman out of the church but not the church out of the woman. Or so I used to think, as my lapsed Catholic mother carried out dramas of temptation, sin, and redemption by means of ice cream and broccoli, or froze with fear at the idea of having made a mistake. She had left behind the rites and the celebrations but not the anxiety that all mistakes were unforgivable. So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good, it’s also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun.

  My mother’s punitive God was the enemy of Coyote. Prankish, lecherous, accident-prone Coyote and his cousins, the unpredictable creators of the world in Native American stories, brought me a vision of this realm as never perfect, made through collaboration and squabbling. I came across one of these stories a quarter century ago, when the conceptual artist Lewis DeSoto, whose father was Cahuilla, asked me to write about his work. He handed me a photocopy of one version of the Cahuilla creation story, which someone had transcribed from the oral tradition. The Cahuilla were one of the myriad smallish tribes that inhabited the vast area now known as California.

  They lived in the western Mojave Desert, and, in the story Lewis sent me, the world begins with darkness and “beautiful, far-away sounds—sounds such as might come from distant singers.” It continues, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep”—not so unlike the Book of Genesis, until the maternal darkness endeavors to give birth and miscarries twice, then bears twin brothers, who grow up to quarrel constantly about who was born first.

  As they fashion the world and all the things in it, the twins argue about whether there should be sickness and death. The brother who wins is worried about overpopulation. The loser abandons the earth in a huff, in his hurry leaving behind some of his creations, including coyotes, palm trees, and flies. The remaining brother becomes such a problem—lusting after his daughter, the moon; giving rattlesnakes poisonous fangs; arming people with weapons they would use against each other—that his creatures have to figure out how to kill him. No one is unequivocally good, starting with the gods.

  Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Ohlone people say that Coyote was the first being, and the world was created by him, and by Eagle and by Hummingbird, who laughs at Coyote’s attempts to figure out just where to impregnate his wife. (He’s not always this naïve. In the Winnebago stories from the Great Lakes, Coyote sends his detachable penis on long, sneaky missions in pursuit of penetration, like some drone from the dreamtime.) As the Californian poet Gary Snyder once put it, “Old Doctor Coyote…is not inclined to make a distinction between good and evil.” Instead, he’s full of contagious exuberance and great creative force. In another Californian creation myth, the gods argue about procreation: one thinks a man and woman should put a stick between them at night, and it will be a baby when they wake up. The other says that there should be a lot of nocturnal embracing and laughing in the baby-making process.

  These supple stories, unalarmed by improvisation, failure, and sex, remind me of jazz. In contrast, the creator in the Old Testament is a tyrannical composer whose score can only be performed one right way. The angel with the flaming sword drove us out of Eden because we talked to snakes and made a bad choice about fruit snacks. Everything that followed was an affliction and a curse. Redemption was required, because perfection was the standard by which everything would be measured. And by which everything falls short.

  Nearly everyone under the influence of Genesis, over half of the world’s population, believes in some version of the fall from grace. Even secular stories tend to be structured that way. Conservatives have their Eden before the fall—it usually involves strong fathers and demure women and nonexistent queer people—and liberals also have stories about when everything was uncorrupted, about matriarchal communities and Paleo diets and artisanal just about anything, from cheese to chairs. But if you give up on grace, you can give up on the fall. You can start enjoying stuff that’s only pretty good.

  According to the Pomo, another Northern California tribe, the world was formed when the creator rolled his armpit wax into a ball. Or, according to the Maidu, who live largely in the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains, it’s made from mud picked out from under the nails of a turtle who’d scraped it up at the bottom of the primordial soup.

  They’re not my property, these old stories, but they’re an invitation to reconsider the stories that are. If the perfect is the enemy of the good, maybe imperfection is its friend.

  I.

  Electoral Catastrophes

  The Loneliness of Donald Trump

  (2017)

  Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws upon the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching, reaching for more, a carrion crab, a lobster and a boiling lobster pot in one, a termite, a tyrant over his own little empires. He got a boost at the beginning from the wealth handed him and then moved among grifters and mobsters who cut him slack as long as he was useful; or maybe there’s slack in arenas where people live by personal loyalty until they betray or are betrayed, and don’t live by the law or the book. So, for seven decades, he fed his appetites and exercised his license to lie, cheat, steal, and stiff working people of their wages, made messes, left them behind, grabbed more baubles, and left things in ruin.

  He was supposed to be a great maker of things, but he was mostly a breaker. He acquired buildings and women and enterprises and treated them all alike, promoting and deserting them, running into bankruptcies and divorces, treading on lawsuits the way lumberjacks of old walked across the logs floating down the river to the mill, but as long as he moved in his underworld of dealmakers, the rules were wobbly and the enforcement wobblier, and he could stay afloat. But his appetite was endless, and he wanted more, so he gambled to become the most powerful man in the world, and won, careless of what he wished for.

  Thinking of him, I think of Pushkin’s retelling of the fairytale “The Fisherman and the Golden Fish.” After being caught in the old fisherman’s net, the golden fish speaks up and offers wishes in return for being thrown back in the sea. The fisherman asks him for nothing, though later he tells his wife of his chance encounter with the magical creature. The fisherman’s wife sends him back to ask for a new washtub for her, and then a second time to ask for a cottage to replace their hovel, and the wishes are granted. As she grows prouder and greedier, she sends him to ask that she become a wealthy person in a mansion with servants, whom she abuses, and then she sends her husband back. The old man grovels before the fish, caught between the shame of the requests and the appetite of his wife, and she becomes tsarina and has her boyards and nobles drive the husband from her palace. You could call the husband consciousness—the awareness of others and of
oneself in relation to others—and the wife craving.

  Finally, she wishes to be supreme over the seas and over the fish itself, endlessly uttering wishes, and the old man goes back to the sea to tell the fish—to complain to the fish—of this latest round of wishes. The fish this time doesn’t even speak, just flashes its tail, and the old man turns around to see, on the shore, his wife with her broken washtub at their old hovel. Overreach is perilous, says this Russian tale; enough is enough. And too much is nothing.

  The child who became the most powerful man in the world, or at least occupied the real estate occupied by a series of those men, had run a family business and then starred in an unreality show based on the fiction that he was a stately emperor of enterprise, rather than a buffoon, and each was a hall of mirrors made to flatter his sense of self, the one edifice he kept raising higher and higher and never abandoned.

  I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful that there is no one around to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures.

  “They were careless people,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the rich couple at the heart of The Great Gatsby. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Some of us are surrounded by destructive people who tell us we’re worthless when we’re endlessly valuable, that we’re stupid when we’re smart, that we’re failing even when we succeed. But the opposite of people who drag you down isn’t people who build you up and butter you up. It’s equals who are generous but keep you accountable, true mirrors who reflect back who you are and what you are doing.