Authoritarian Rule Will Look Like Office Space

I feel like democracy and open society are having a bad moment at the time, in part because their proponents aren't doing a good job communicating their benefits. People like me (and I'm not saying liberals or progressives or lefties, but all people who care about free elections and less state control) can say that the Republicans are driving us toward authoritarianism or fascism - and it's true - but to many/most Republicans, or to so-called independents, it just comes off as left-wing sour grapes.

What's worse is that the average Republican seems to think that authoritarian rule is a good thing, as long as it means smashing the libs. There's a certain tendency toward this on the left, too, by the way, but the difference is that no progressive or Democratic figure is trying to dismantle the administrative state, while large parts of the GOP are. But the upshot is that, whatever side of the aisle you're on, the allure of suspending democratic norms is appealing if it means stopping the other side from "ruining America".

So how does the average, right-thinking person who doesn't want to see authoritarian rule in America communicate this in terms that even the most blinkered, hang-em-all independent can appreciate?

My suggestion for the Democratic Party, and whatever Republicans out there still believe in rule of law: authoritarianism will be like being stuck in a job you hate, and that you can't quit.

What does that mean?

Think about the worst job you've ever had. Maybe it's a retail job where they change shifts on you at short notice, or where they dock your pay if you have to go to the doctor or get your car fixed. Maybe it's an office job where the management keeps an up-to-the-minute accounting of how many minutes late you arrive each morning, or how many minutes early you leave. Or the corporate job where they just expect you to work long hours, even if you get your work done on time every day.

I don't have direct experience of living under authoritarian rule, thankfully, but this is how I imagine it. Not so much jackbooted government thugs breaking down my door in the night to disappear me (although it'll come to that), but a continuous drip-drip-drip of petty and annoying legalism, arbitrary rule changes and exhortations to show team spirit (but you're the one who has to show team spirit, while those in charge are exempt).

Your employer monitors what you look at on the internet. Hell, the government already does it in your non-work life too: that is, after all, what Edward Snowden revealed back in 2013, to not much interest from the American public. But under an authoritarian government, all those things you think are private now - messages, purchases, searches - will be of great interest to someone.

In his book about the Real Madrid-Barcelona rivalry, Fear and Loathing in La Liga, Sid Lowe notes that one of the initiatives of the Franco regime was to specify how eggs should be cooked at breakfast. This seems innocuous, but it speaks to the sort of obsession with sameness that pervades both authoritarian regimes and corporate workplaces; a personal favorite of mine was one of the higher-ups at an old office saying she didn't want employees to have personal items or family photos at their workplaces, which was portrayed as a way to smarten up the office but was really just a way prepare everyone for hot desking.

One reason why shows like the Office and movies like Office Space have maintained their cult followings is because viewers recognize the petty and pointless indignities to which employers subject workers. Now, just imagine that instead of an obnoxious "fun" restaurant demanding that you have more than just 15 pieces of flair on your uniform, it's the government.

Of course, some right-wing folks think that the government is already doing that. They point to mandates like vaccines in schools, or wearing your seatbelt, as government overreach. And in fact, those initiatives are designed to limit your freedoms: your freedom to infect other potentially vulnerable populations to avoidable diseases, or your freedom to guarantee your own death and your family's if you get into a car accident. 

These right-wing folks, either genuinely or in bad faith, imagine that eternal GOP (or Tory, or Bolsonaro) rule will end all these infringements of their liberties, by getting rid of the people they've been told are making fun of them. But then when those people are gone, Trump or DeSantis or Bolsonaro or Giorgia Meloni will find someone new who's mocking them, and the cycle will continue.

It might seem farfetched but there's an example of this process. The Tories in the UK aren't quite as far-right as the Republicans, but they are led by a clique with a worrying obsession for "woke culture", which they've used to demonize Labour (and sometimes with Labour's own help, as in the tin-eared response to the antisemitism crisis that swirled around the party before the 2019 election). Since taking power in 2010, the Tories have harnessed this anger against elites and "wokeness" to secede from the European Union, destroy trade with the EU and to an extent the rest of the world, drive down living standards, and oversee a culture of corruption and sleaze and impunity that goes down all the way to police officers who can rape and murder citizens without much in the way of consequences.

And the best/worst part is, the Tories have convinced the voters that all that stuff is somehow Labour's fault!

This is what we can expect when we lose democracy. Life will probably go on as normal for a lot of people, but conditions will worsen, the fires and floods and hurricanes will grow stronger, the infrastructure will crumble... but they'll tell us none of that is important, because we're free.

And we'll be grateful for the crumbs we do have, because if we aren't, well...

In Praise of the All-Star Superfan Podcast

My podcast backlog is never-ending, especially when taking into account ongoing shows like Guardian Football Weekly or WTF with Marc Maron or any of the innumerable history podcasts that I've picked up over the last couple of years. That said, I always like to keep an eye out for interesting new shows, especially if they're in an area that I haven't been following much recently. I seem to get a lot of recommendations from Twitter, and the All-Star Superfan Podcast is one of these.

Hosted by two Irish guys, Alan Burke and Rob O'Connor, the show talks about everything to do with Superman. And I do mean everything: not just comics and movies and TV shows, but also games and even the Superman radio serial from the 1940s. They also manage to talk about other stuff going on in the DC universe, from other DC-related shows to movies and so forth.

So far, so good - but the reason I first downloaded an episode, over a year ago, was that they got legendary comics writer JM DeMatteis to talk to them. I had no idea what connection he had to Superman (it turns out he wrote episodes of the Superboy show from the late 80s/early 90s, which I remember vaguely), but since I loved his work on Justice League in the 80s alongside Keith Giffen, I had to check it out. Since then, I've heard them talk to a number of other luminaries, from Mark Waid to Marv Wolfman, so they're clearly more than just a couple of dudes recording in their basement.

I'll admit I don't listen to every show, since the stuff about the Lois and Clark show isn't a huge draw (though their enthusiasm for it is making me consider revisiting, even despite Dean Cain's turn toward alt-right idiocy). It's the same with the Superman and Lois show on the CW, which I didn't really take much interest in after the pilot, but they talk in such glowing terms about it that I'm thinking of giving it another shot.

That said, it's nice to hear them talk about general developments in Superman and DC stuff from time to time, or to dig into really obscure bits of Superman mythos, like the aforementioned radio serial. Indeed, the talk with Marv Wolfman happened because he said he'd only do it if they could ask about something that he hasn't talked about already a bunch on podcasts; they brought up the 1980s Ruby-Spears cartoon, and he admitted that this was indeed a topic no one else had ever asked about.

Also, God help me, I saw an episode or two of that show when it was on, so that should give you an idea how plugged into Superman I am.

Listening to the show always makes me think about my own fandom for the character. It's way more fashionable to say you like Batman, and traditionally my favorite individual characters were always the Flash and Green Lantern. Yet I've always had an appreciation for Superman, because his stories tend to be a lot more varied than those of those other characters: a Flash story is all about Barry Allen (or Wally West) learning how to use his superspeed in a new way, while a Green Lantern story is always about using the power ring to solve a problem. Batman, similarly, is always using his vast array of skills and knowledge to solve crimes.

Superman, though, is the only character I can think of (except maybe Todd McFarlane's Spawn) who routinely has to solve his problems without his powers. Lex Luthor, particularly since the 1985 reboot, is not a character that Superman can punch out, so Lex Luthor stories always require Superman to outthink his opponent, who happens to be the smartest man on Earth. It's the same with Brainiac and various other characters, though of course every once in a while you do get villains against whom Superman can cut loose - but the most notable of those, Doomsday, actually killed Superman. So you could say the punching part of Superman is the least fascinating thing about him.

I also love the different ways to tell the same stories about him: his origin has a different resonance depending on what time period it's set (there's a great novel by Tom DeHaven, It's Superman!, that goes back to the character's 1930s roots) or where on Earth he's supposed to have landed (Mark Millar's not my favorite writer but he knocked it out of the park with Red Son, which imagined Superman landing in the USSR instead of Kansas). In some stories he's always the last Kryptonian, while in others he encounters other survivors, which lets the creators examine how his US upbringing puts him in conflict with his native planet's culture.

My absolute favorite Superman story, though, is Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, in which Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, loads of other stuff) tied up all the threads from the Silver Age Superman continuity, from the 1950s to the 1980s, to finish up the Superman mythos before they got rebooted in the Crisis on Infinite Earths. It's scary, heartbreaking, but ultimately a loving goodbye to that continuity, helped by the fact that it was drawn by longtime Superman artist Curt Swan, who'd done a lot of the original stories this was based on.

The All-Star Superfan Podcast hasn't tackled that story yet, and I'd be surprised if they can ever get Alan Moore to talk about it, but I'd love to see them do a segment on it. Either way, if they can keep getting great guests, I'll be happy to keep listening.

Spoiler Filled Thoughts on The Rings of Power

For the last couple of months I've been watching The Rings of Power on Amazon, and witnessing social media losing its mind over the show, mostly to dunk on it. Some of the dunking seems to be the usual bad faith, alt-right complaining that a fantasy show featuring magic and Elves shouldn't also feature people of color, but some of it comes from SFF authors I generally admire, or at least appreciate, poking justifiable holes in the teetering edifice of plot that the show runners have erected here.

So is it a good show or not? Should you watch it? I've just finished the last episode of Season One, having essentially had the big reveal spoiled for me (thanks a lot, juxtaposition of pictures with oblique headlines on episode recaps), so I'm going to wade in. Spoilers abound, as noted in the title.

Spotlight and The Thrill of Doing Journalism

So last week I talked about All the President's Men, and highlighted that plus Spotlight and The Post as some of my favorite movies about journalism. This week, lo and behold, Spotlight shows up on HBO Max, so with my endorsement from last week still fresh in mind, I decided to watch it again.

Now, whereas last week I talked about All the President's Men's distinctively 70s filmmaking, with Spotlight I'm struck by the legwork, as I put it then. The reporters on the Spotlight team are shown chasing down leads, frequently by showing up at people's homes and offices, working the phones, working the legal records. All of these are things they tried to drill into us at journalism school, though I'm not sure how well it all penetrated, at least for me, in all cases.

Certainly the stories I wrote, for the most part, weren't as important as the one in Spotlight, dealing with sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the institutional coverup surrounding that abuse. I worked on one crime story, involving a robbery that turned into a deadly shooting, and made it all the way to the intensive care unit where the victim was being treated, before my and my partner's nerve failed us and we couldn't bring ourselves to hassle the victim's relative who was sitting by his bedside... certainly not for some stupid story for school that only our professor would ever see.

My other bite at the journalistic cherry was an investigative piece were another partner and I tried to establish whether the trash incinerator on the other side of the river from Manhattan was burning electronic waste. I had one good success, when I doorstepped the lawyer for the environmental group who'd turned us onto the story; he was quite impressed that after a few days of not being able to fit me in for a call, he found me at his office so he made some time. The rest of the investigation didn't go so well, which is probably one of many things that... I was going to say put me off journalism, but it's probably more accurate to say that it showed certain types of journalism don't necessarily play to my strengths.

The first instance doesn't bother me so much, for the reason I mentioned. The second one does, because when I watch movies like All the President's Men or Spotlight, it feels too bad that I didn't manage a good investigative piece. There were some factors against me, notably the impossibility of confirming something that the environmental lawyer was probably right about but also acting on his own agenda; also, my professor was pretty bad, since her way of teaching journalism was just to tell us to "write it beautifully" but not actually... teach anything. Yet at the end of the day, the failure is my own, and it certainly pushed me away from taking a class in the second semester on how to do investigative stories (I also didn't care for that class's professor, so I'm not super sorry I missed it).

Still, I fancy that I know enough about the legwork the reporters in Spotlight are doing that I can imagine what it would have been like for me to work on something like that. At the same time, I know from later experience that the pressure of getting things in quickly doesn't always work for me: I believe, or my work experience has led me to believe, that I'm better at putting together an analysis of what's going on, explaining why it's important rather than giving a running commentary on the latest developments.

What I just wrote may be true, or it may be the reason I give for why I didn't do so well in rapid-fire journalism. The job I had after J-school was probably not unreasonable in asking for 2-3 short pieces per day, but I couldn't seem to get them right, even though there were some interviews or discussions that I remember being proud of. On the other hand, a big problem was also trying to avoid rewriting all the press releases that came across my desk.

Something else that Spotlight emphasizes is the changing nature of journalism, into which I found myself ejected from J-school upon graduation. It takes place in 2001, and starts with a new editor taking over at The Boston Globe amid the declining circulation and revenues that came with the rise of the internet. The movie itself came out in 2015, so there was more than a decade's worth of further destruction of the newspaper industry, but the issues raised in the film are still valid now: advertising on the internet killed classifieds in papers, which was the real lifeblood of the industry. This led to the need to attract more eyeballs, which meant dumbing down headlines and subject matter.

To the film's credit, the new editor isn't portrayed as a marketer who's only interested in the bottom line, and he's shown pushing the Spotlight team to give the abuse story more prominence. But it's striking to see the seeds of all the things that have hurt journalism up to now, including a shot of an AOL billboard right outside the Globe's offices. The movie doesn't mention social media or fake news or polarization, but it came out late enough that you can fill in those blanks yourself.

Unlike All the President's Men, they do make movies like Spotlight now, which is a good thing, because it's important to show journalists as more than the amoral sleaze bags that some (predominantly rightwing) filmmakers like to portray. It's also good that the movie shows the legwork, the long hours and the long calls, that should characterize good reporting.

And who knows - maybe one day I'll manage to do something along those lines myself.