We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
—OSCAR WILDE, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
Why Donald Trump and Jeb Bush Should See Hamilton
—REBECCA MEAD, THE NEW YORKER
For a long time people had a crude but basically correct understanding of culture’s relationship to politics: Marx’s idea that the “superstructure” of society—law, morality, and culture—arises out of the economic meat grinder hidden underneath, the “base.” This rough version of the theory gets criticized as simplistic, and to be fair, it is: there are all kinds of inputs and outputs that determine culture, and there’s plenty of good criticism of this bastardized version of Marx. Still, as far as we’re concerned, it’s always better to err on the side of this crude theory than to go in the opposite direction, the For Dummies version of Antonio Gramsci: the idea that a nation’s culture is self-reinforcing and affects all other walks of life, so if you change the culture, you can change the political reality. To quote the Italian Communist himself, “Ingredienti migliori, cultura migliore, Papa John’s.”
The taste of Gramsci-lite won a lot of people over during last the few decades, trading away material and economic analyses for an overwhelming focus on culture. But this approach comes from the generally bad side of 1960s radicalism (incidentally, the only part that survived). It was embraced by middle-class hippies whose demands were not material and collective but aesthetic and individualist—which, once you smooth off the edges, is just libertarianism. We know this because almost all those baby boomers grew up to become square, greedy marketing consultants for UBS who also happen to smoke weed while they binge-watch Westworld.
That’s because capital has no problem assimilating pop-cultural rebellion and antiauthoritarian imagery. In fact, that stuff creates all kinds of new markets, new consumers, new suckers. All the cultural modes of resistance slowly turned into marketing categories, and the brave hippie dipshits of the sixties left us with an even more powerful money machine, totally compatible with social liberalism and openly unafraid of the militant but always shrinking left-wing movement. In the absence of real political power, liberals and lefties stumbled into a pathology where we only hold power over—and wage struggles for—the realm of fantasy.
That would be bad enough, but ever since The Incident in 2016, some of us have tumbled through the looking-glass. People have fallen victim to the same forces that so addled James Woods’s character in Cronenberg’s Videodrome: having become obsessed with the hypnotic imagery inside the TV, they began to hallucinate in their waking hours, confusing fiction for reality and vice versa. They went beyond fighting over TV and film and fantasized that they were, in some form, fighting inside the world created by TV and film.
Hillary became Khaleesi. Trump became Voldemort. And as the Videodrome synthesizers hummed along, some dark conspirators took a giant videotape and shoved it into Lawrence O’Donnell’s pulsating chest and said, “death to Trump, long live the new flesh.” Along with him, wide swaths of the liberal and left spectrum have become the video word made flesh, the evil wavelengths of the TV eating away at their brains until they believe not only that culture is the way to achieve social justice but that Game of Thrones or Harry Potter itself is social justice.
This is not to say people shouldn’t seek comfort in art, in TV, in movies. It’s the only way to not go mad! But, in our view, do it knowing what you’re doing is fun and aesthetic, not militant and subversive—it’s never going to substitute for real political action. It may make you feel better to watch a show that’s calling out Trump, or oppression, or our podcast—but if you stop there, you’re demobilized as a political actor. Again, between half-assed Marx and half-assed Gramsci, it’s better to go with the former: of course being in control of what is “cool” in our culture is a kind of power, but it’s one that liberals increasingly rely on in lieu of actual politics, to the detriment of politics—and culture, and cool people.
On the other side, for the culture warriors of the Right, a death grip on power maintained through gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc., will never be enough to give them what they truly crave: popularity, celebrity, and the admiration of the same cultural elite they despise. Despite witnessing a rich pedigree of reactionary artists in the early twentieth century (Céline, Ezra Pound, Leni Riefenstahl, Hanna-Barbera), the contemporary American right-winger is congenitally incapable of being funny, entertaining, or interesting in any of the ways art demands, relying instead on ham-fisted sentimentality and self-abasing ressentiment. The paradox is that the further their liberal enemies get from holding real power—the more they rely on the symbolic and pop-cultural—the worse they get at the very things that built liberal cultural hegemony in the first place. Libs find themselves aping the shittiest habits of their right-wing culture-war opponents. As this war on culture progresses, both the general public and cultural elites ask less of art and reduce their interests to a checklist of “good points” or “progressive portrayals” while ignoring anything that doesn’t superficially conform to the immediate political conversations of the day.
Don’t get us wrong—we’re not against state censorship, as long as we’re in charge of it. After Chapo Year Zero, we’d probably leave most film, literature, music, and television alone and focus instead on censoring things that are truly evil, like TED Talks; Malcolm Gladwell books; the study of economics, philosophy, and journalism; and the just plain boring things like poetry, dancing, and plays. After all, Soviet Russia and Communist China kept a close watch on artists, while our own CIA funded plenty of literary magazines and writers’ workshops to nudge the culture in the right direction—so if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
It’s time that we turned the tables on the ruling class and prescribed our own correct Chapo cultural revolution. Hopefully you, too, can become a Chapo-certified Free Thinker™ or at least understand the references that form the broad outlines of our cryptic inside jokes and long-winded “ironic” remarks that allow us to get away with making so many Polack jokes.
The legendary Soviet film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein once said that “American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema.” This remains as true today as when Sergei made his classic film about the most powerful and biggest battleship ever. Film remains a potent vehicle for ideology. However, if film can be harnessed to transmit capitalist ideology, then it stands to reason that it can also be used to send more subversive messages. Indeed, the revolutionary potential for film is limitless, and movies have played an integral role in firing our imaginations and forming our worldview. Here are a few of the most important.
THE MATRIX
All we can say is, “Wow!” 1999’s The Matrix is probably the most important movie ever made. Even if it was just the film’s badass gun murders and high-flying kung fu, it would have its place in the Western canon. But at its heart is a moral more valuable than possibly any work of art ever: that being on the computer is cool, sexy, and important. Instead of reverting to the trope of computer users as sedentary slobs who avoid the real world, the Wachowskis showed us that the only way to see the truth is to be so online that you could die from it. Simply put, take the red pill and get back on the keyboard and mouse!
THE MATRIX RELOADED
They say you have only one chance to make a first impression. Well, that may be true, but you also have two chances to make a second impression, and it’s twice as important, because it’s like a first impression times two. That’s doubly true for The Matrix Reloaded. The sequel may actually be more important, as we’re introduced to three major characters who show us the sexy dark side of the computer. First is the Merovingian, a French pervert who represents all French people who are online. He makes some sort of chocolate cake that makes a woman nut, which is a metaphor for mutual masturbation on Skype. The next two, of course, are the Twins. Let’s put it this way: You’ve seen albinos. You’ve seen white guys with dreadlocks. You’ve seen identical twins. You’ve even seen white three-piece suits. But have you seen them all together? The Twins shifted the realm of what was possible in the minds of viewers. It’s no mistake that only six years after Reloaded and the Twins, George W. Bush stepped down as president of the United States. Good art makes you think. Great art makes you act. Enough said.
THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS
All good things come to an end. But they live in our minds forever. Coming out the same year as Reloaded, the third installment completed this biblical fable. Honestly, we don’t remember this one too well. There were some new robots. The Merovingian is there, but doesn’t cause any nutting. The important thing is that Neo dies doing computer stuff, becoming a hero forever. This is a metaphor for doing a dangerous stunt on a livestream that kills you.
THE ANIMATRIX
If The Matrix series constitutes one whole Koran, The Animatrix is the definitive hadith. While the films focus on knocking viewers’ socks off with sick action set pieces that act as amuse-bouches for the main course of philosophy and even cooler action scenes, The Animatrix does not ease the viewer in, for this simple reason: for all the Matrix series’s revolutionary ideas and concepts, it was still trapped within the confines of Hollywood films, which are produced by degenerates and idiots who think filmgoers are as stupid as they are. Series-defining features like the Twins and the Colonel Sanders guy were put off till much later, as the repulsive freaks who constitute Tinseltown’s leadership could barely handle them.
Their powerful ignorance, however, did not extend to the art of anime. Producers like Joel Silver found the medium too complex and powerful to dig their hideous claws into, allowing The Animatrix to flourish. In The Animatrix, viewers are treated like adults and shown vignettes about a guy who runs really fast, a robot who’s a slave, and other ideas that would simply be too much for Hollywood to allow in a conventional film. If you think you can handle it, dive in, and Dōitashimashite (Japanese for “you’re welcome”).
We all love our stories. They give us something to look forward to at the end of the day and something to talk about with family, friends, and coworkers. Television is the younger cousin of film, but one that has perhaps even greater power to shape minds, as we invite it into our very homes. Long gone are the days when an entire family had to gather ’round the tube to watch Amos ’n’ Andy or the Kennedy assassination. Now there are so many channels, so many content providers, and so many damned good programs that it’s hard to know where to start. Since we like to think of America as one big family, and the TV as the thing that unites us all, here are stories about a couple of criminal families that represent America while remaining fiercely united.
THE SOPRANOS
To truly understand America in the twenty-first century, one must imbibe the entire run of The Sopranos as it was originally intended to be seen: in one seventy-hour sitting. In The Sopranos, creator David Chase gave us a host of characters who represent the grand archetypes of our culture and where it was headed at the dawn of this new millennium. In patriarch Tony, we have the cheap and nasty criminal sociopaths who would inherit the world, namely Trump and those who voted for him. If you want a vision of the future, just imagine America wearing a soiled bathrobe, sullenly staring at a bowl of Honeycomb cereal in a gaudy exurban McMansion. As a counterpart to Tony’s criminal depressive, we have wife and mother Carmela, who represents the complicit suburban petit bourgeois, happy to live a life of comfort funded by blood money in between charity bake sales held to assuage the phantom pangs of a nonexistent conscience.
Hovering above everything like a black, odious cloud of shit is the sour and berating matriarch Livia, who represents the crushing weight of olds on the American psyche, sapping us of joy, independence, and any chance to escape our history. As a corollary to all our collective efforts to overcome the psychological damage done to us by Livia (i.e., all previous generations), there is Dr. Melfi, Tony’s therapist, who represents the ultimate and final failure of educated, cosmopolitan liberals to meaningfully confront—let alone reform—evil. Throughout the run of the series, Melfi’s attempts to treat Tony serve only to help him manage his criminal empire more efficiently, making her at best an enabler and at worst an accomplice.
Finally, in the Soprano children, we see the two paths laid out for the millennial generation. In Meadow we have the “success daughter,” a high-functioning and ambitious striver with a superficial interest in social justice who is well adapted to the world of neoliberal hegemony. In AJ, we have the great American failson, a figure uniquely ill suited to the times. AJ is lazy, petulant, insouciant, and one Howard Zinn book away from realizing how fucked-up shit really is. He is the ur-figure for what would eventually become the podcast listener and host.
SONS OF ANARCHY
Some hour-long dramas follow great men who walk the line between good and evil, while others show people who are forced to commit immoral acts due to brutalizing circumstances. But only one show is about a hugely stupid man whose good acts always result in evil because the soft spot on his skull never hardened. That show is Sons of Anarchy, and that towheaded imbecile hero is Jax Teller.
The heir to a family of motorcycle dunces, Jax leads a gang of sex perverts, delinquent dads, and murderers known as SAMCRO (Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original). His late father, John, bequeathed him a semi-flattened carton of Kool XLs, a twin bed, and a series of journals that turn out to be unreadable libertarian drivel about how he tried and failed to make a vroom-vroom club for grown men but his vision was ruined.
While this may seem like utter nonsense, it actually has deep cultural meaning: after 9/11, the small and silver screens were dominated by tales of good and evil like The Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, and 24. We clutched these simple narratives about highly competent protagonists who exhibited extraordinary abilities, selflessness, and flawless moral compasses like security blankets while being fed easily digestible footage of air strikes and easy military victories. Their stories buttressed our self-narrative as a benevolent empire giving back what we’d gotten from rank evildoers. However, as the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars grinded into bloody, unwinnable occupations, the economy sputtered, and everything turned out to be much more complicated than we wanted to believe in our deepest moments of agony. Simple hero’s journeys would no longer do.
We needed a new type of good guy, one who fucked up so badly that everyone around him died, who fought hard despite not knowing what he was even fighting for. Someone who talked the talk and walked the walk, right into a field of rakes. That man was Jax Teller, a stand-in for both our then president, with his own father issues, and ourselves. SAMCRO’s dusty Northern California hamlet was a microcosm for the world at large, with the good townspeople and the snarling black and brown gangs who sought to upset the Sons’ murder-based economy. American exceptionalism became the bike buffoons’ indecipherable moral code.
You cannot understand America without understanding Sons of Anarchy, and you can’t understand Sons of Anarchy without understanding America.
Literature—it’s our name for books that are full of emotion and make-believe as opposed to facts and reason. Inexplicably, these works filled with lies, nonsense, incorrect political ideology, and not a single graph or chart are still venerated as vital parts of our culture. Once a book is deemed important by the literary elite, it enters what’s known as “the canon.” You’re probably familiar with the Simpsons parody versions. In many cases, elevator schematics hold up better than these “classics,”I but if you learn the plots of a few of them, you can likely hold your own at Chapo speed dating sessions.
MOBY-DICK BY HERMAN MELVILLE
Roundly regarded as the single greatest American novel ever written—if not the best of any nation’s output—Moby-Dick is about a young man who decides to go whaling for a few years because he’s depressed, and going to sea is an act of self-care. He travels from New York to New Bedford and meets a guy named Queequeg from the South Pacific Islands who practices cannibalism and is really good at harpooning whales. They spend a night together in a hotel room, fall in love, and join up with a ship called the Pequod, which is captained by a madman named Ahab who is hell-bent on pursuing his vendetta against a legendary white whale who bit his leg off.
With a winning plot, featuring a battle between an unstoppable monster and the lunatic who wants it dead, you’d think the book would be a page-turner. But after setting up the central conceit, it goes on for about four hundred pages describing the different kinds of knots and ropes that are used on a whaling vessel. It’s pretty boring, but if you want to sound smart, you can bring up the fact that it’s chock-full of homosexual themes. For instance, the narrator begins the novel by stating that he “set out to sail a little,” which was a nineteenth-century euphemism for cruising. Pretty much the entire thing is just metaphors for being gay. Back then you had to be on a boat to have sex with a man, so that’s the subtext for the whole book, which is summed up in its deceptively simple opening line: “Call me gay.”
MIDDLEMARCH BY GEORGE ELIOT
Set in the fictional English Midlands town of Middlemarch, this book is a sprawling and epic portrait of provincial life and social change in nineteenth-century Britain. Though written in the Victorian era, it has many of the hallmarks of modern novels, such as its refusal to conform to a given style, dense literary and even scientific digressions, and multiple and diverging points of view. So, yeah, our main takeaway is that George Eliot was a really great writer and probably didn’t get the recognition he deserved while he was alive.
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN BY MARK TWAIN
Race relations in the nineteenth century were strained, to say the least—that is, until great strides were made in the field of white guys ironically using the n-word. In his classic satire of life on the mighty Mississip, Samuel Clemens—who posted under the screen name “Mark Twain”—created a comic masterpiece: a tale of a rapscallion named Huck and his friend who will be referred to in these pages as “Jim” and certainly nothing else. By realizing that a white author could get away with using racial slurs provided he didn’t use his real name and used the slurs only to point out that racism is bad, Twain created a distinctly American art form that endures to this day.
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
In his book The Great American Novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald set out to write something that would be taught in American high school English classes forever, and in so doing created an indelible portrait of life during the “Roaring Twenties.” The book is about a reclusive millionaire bootlegger named Gatsby, who, despite his money, spends most of his time as beta orbiter to a woman named Daisy whom he met in Army training.
Gatsby spends his money on lavish parties he doesn’t attend at a house he bought across from Daisy’s so he could impress her, specifically in a way that didn’t involve making eye contact or conversation. Fitzgerald’s book is about the dark side of the American dream, suggesting that we can all be alpha players if we use advanced PUA tactics. But in reality, only a few of us are going to be born “great” enough to consistently score with straight-up tens. The rest of us are left to beat off, ropes against the current, jacking off ceaselessly into the past.
ANYTHING BY WILLIAM FAULKNER
It doesn’t matter which one you read, because they all take place in a terrible part of Mississippi where every once-proud family is riven with secrets about incest, interracial children, grotesques, suicide, financial ruin, abortion, or some combination of all of the above. Faulkner’s books often feature “stream-of-consciousness” and “nonlinear” narration, which are the techniques serious authors use when they’re trying to make fun of the mentally handicapped.
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD BY HARPER LEE
Much like the work of Faulkner, To Kill a Mockingbird is another great book about how the Depression-era American South was a rich, magical place full of colorful characters. With Maycomb, Harper Lee created an unforgettable portrait of a “tired old town” in an America gone by. Maycomb is the kind of place where you wish you could have spent the halcyon days of childhood summers with Jem and Scout, whiling away the days indulging in high jinks down by the ol’ fishing hole with loveable town drunk Bob Ewell, playing pranks on Tom Robinson or rounds of mini golf with man-child shut-in Boo Radley. To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t just a book for kids, though—it also has lots of lawyer jokes that adults can enjoy, too.
NAKED LUNCH BY WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
“Agents of unconsecrated insect semen corporations repent! The control you seek is in your own prolapsed asshole!” Who can forget the first time they read those immortal lines in William S. Burroughs’s classic book about shooting heroin into your dick? Naked Lunch was the first American novel to not be a novel or “readable” in the traditional sense. Extremely controversial upon its initial publication, it faced a long battle against censorship for violating nearly every social convention of the day in its depiction of drug addiction, homosexuality, and actually, for-real killing your wife. Naked Lunch follows William Lee, the literary alter ego of Burroughs, through a series of loosely connected vignettes or “routines” as he travels to the fictional country of “Interzone,” a place where it’s okay to have sex with teenage boys. In addition to expanding the American literary consciousness around issues of drug use, murder, and ephebophilia, it also has a long and rich legacy of inspiring people to start rock bands and do heroin.
DUNE BY FRANK HERBERT
Probably the most important book ever written outside of the Holy Koran, Frank Herbert’s Dune is a sprawling sci-fi epic about a war between two powerful galactic dynasties who battle for control of a planet that’s too spicy. The planet in question, Arrakis, is a giant political allegory that contains the universe’s most precious resource—except instead of oil, it’s the cum of giant space worms. The worm-cum is called “spice,” and it’s both an energy source that bends space and an extreeeemely dope fucking hallucinogen. Dune created a huge universe with dozens of characters and long story arcs carried out over a whole series of books and helped inspire the sci-fi/fantasy megafranchises of today, like Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones, which all borrowed heavily from Dune in that they’re also thinly veiled calls for their young readers to martyr themselves in a holy jihad against a corrupt and decadent American empire.
BLOOD MERIDIAN BY CORMAC McCARTHY
See the book—It is thick—Sentences short—Landscapes bleak—Glanton gang—Doing genocides to Indians—War is good—Yonder bald man is large—Universe is indifferent eternal violence—It is also good—The men tell the women to read the book—Sometimes they don’t—Then men cry
WHITE NOISE BY DON DELILLO
This book is good to know about because it’s a satire of academia, and if you want to pursue a postgraduate degree, it’s important to keep this one in your back pocket so you can impress your peers by being “in” on the joke about how they’re full of shit and their career choice is pointless. The book follows professor Jack Gladney and his family in the small midwestern college town where they live. Gladney is a professor of “Hitler Studies,” and though the book was written in the 1980s, DeLillo had an uncannily prescient vision of the “irony occupations” that would become prevalent in the twenty-first century. The book channels a lot of the broadly felt anxieties surrounding consumerism, mass media, divorce, and train derailments that cause huge leaks of airborne chemicals that undergird so much of modern American life.
GARFIELD: HIS 9 LIVES BY JIM DAVIS
There are many classic Garfield collections that belong in the American canon, such as Garfield: Bigger Than Life, Garfield: The Big Cheese, and Garfield: Origins, but Garfield: His 9 Lives warrants special consideration for the astonishing and groundbreaking questions it poses about the very nature of literature and authorial intent. Organized into ten short stories, each differing wildly in content, style, setting, and tone, the book completely recontextualizes the Garfield character and, by extension, the reader’s shared experience of Garfield the Cat. His 9 Lives contains meditations on the creation of cats and the role of large, surly cats throughout history, as well as stylistic digressions into detective fiction, slapstick, and William S. Burroughs–style cut-up experimentation. The effect can be jarring, and indeed, His 9 Lives was savaged by critics upon its first release, but with time it has come to be recognized for the work of genius it truly is.
Paintings get a bad rap for being boring, but it is nevertheless important for you, the callow and stupid reader, to embrace the visual arts, as communion with paintings opens you up to unique experiences and sensations. It also trains the mind to notice small details and contemplate what lies beyond the surface.
BAL DU MOULIN DE LA GALETTE (PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR, 1876, OIL ON CANVAS, MUSéE D’ORSAY)
Impressionists sought to capture moments in time through swift brushstrokes, wet-on-wet intermingling of colors, and careful attention to natural light. Renoir’s masterpiece depicts a moment in the Montmartre, a district where working-class Parisians would dress up, drink, and dance. The patrons are dappled with blotches of light shining through the canopy, imparting a vivid sensation of motion to the tableau as the eye imagines trees swaying over the dancing couples in the middle distance and the young raconteurs in the foreground.
Like all impressionist artworks, Bal du moulin de la Galette invites the viewer to imagine these patrons naked if he or she gets bored. The figures depicted all appear fairly attractive—the fluid brushstrokes obscure any imperfections, much like an Instagram filter—and it is not beyond the bounds of belief to think they could all strip off and have an impromptu orgy, considering the sexual mores of urban Paris at the time. Careful observers will note that Renoir inserted fellow painters Pierre Franc-Lamy and Norbert Goeneutte in the lower right as voyeurs nursing glasses of grenadine, dreamy expressions on their faces, almost certainly picturing Monet being beaten with a riding crop.
GUERNICA (PABLO PICASSO, 1937, OIL ON CANVAS, MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFíA)
The destruction of the small village of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War heralded a modern horror that the entire continent of Europe would soon be acquainted with: terror bombing. Pilots sent by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to aid Franco’s Nationalists reduced the town to rubble, killing hundreds of civilians and paving the way for ground forces to march in amid the chaos. Having received a commission from the Republican government to create a work of art for the Spanish display at the World’s Fair in Paris, Picasso responded to this atrocity with a twenty-five-foot mural in the cubist style depicting the experience on the ground during the raid. Employing simple lines and a black-and-white palette, Guernica is a raw depiction of humans and animals panicking, suffering, suffocating, and dying through the horrors of war. The skewed perspective—a hallmark of cubism that seems in this case to perhaps dehumanize the figures, or to emphasize their captivity—and the incorporation of newspaper print indicted contemporary viewers for being passive observers to human suffering, an early critique of the mass media that remains strikingly relevant in the digital era.
Guernica has resonated through the ages as the most profound visual encapsulation of man’s inhumanity to man in the era of mass communication and mechanized warfare. It has also resonated as a hugely erotic work of art. The emphasized hands and feet on the wailing human figures are an obvious nod to fetishists, but what makes Picasso’s masterpiece truly revolutionary is his incorporation of highly sexualized cartoon animals whose bodies intersect with other figures. Modern-day vore, furry, and even hentai subcultures can all trace their lineage back to Guernica, which, along with Betty Boop, Li’l Abner, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm, was for millions of people the World War II–era precursor to DeviantArt.
FOUR DARKS IN RED (MARK ROTHKO, 1958, OIL ON CANVAS, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART)
Rothko’s later work consisted of abstract “multiforms,” canvases featuring little more than overlapping layers of color. He once said of his paintings, “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions.”
Four Darks in Red, with its horizontal swaths of black and red hues, presents no conventional narrative to interpret but instead exists as a form in and of itself, containing its own meaning through imparting an experience to the observer. The central, primal emotion aroused by this experience is horniness, as the observer cannot help but be sexually excited by the bold colors arranged in rectangular shapes whose juicy borders and low-key thiccness call to mind throbbing red cocks and big-ass pussies. The real subversion of Four Darks in Red is that, despite its lack of recognizable human figures, no one can observe this composition without getting so profoundly horned-up that they lose their job.
GREY LINES WITH BLACK, BLUE, AND YELLOW (GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, 1923, OIL ON CANVAS, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON)
These are some pretty flowers. The colors are interesting and nice. Not much else to say about them.
We’ve discussed film, television, literature, and painting, but are you ready to get higher than you’ve ever been before—and then seamlessly and safely travel right back down again? Then prepare yourself to appreciate an often overlooked form of human creative achievement: elevators.
THYSSENKRUPP
You’re on the fifty-third floor of a skyscraper overlooking downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Your partner and infant twins (one girl, one boy) are on the forty-seventh floor. You hear a loud bang. The building shudders. Ceiling tiles fall. Smoke fills the room. Sirens wail. You come to on the floor and realize that another 9/11 has happened. How do you get to the ground floor safely and efficiently? You could take the stairs, but that’s a lot of stairs. That’s when you remember that this is a Thyssenkrupp building. You pick yourself up and march to the elevator bank and hit the down button, secure in the knowledge that a century of German engineering has ensured that even in the event of catastrophic architectural failure, goddamn it, these elevators will make it to their destination.
The doors open. The building lurches and groans as you step into the car. The doors shut so quickly that you wonder whether you’ve died and entered a conveyance to hell, because surely only the devil himself would be capable of achieving such a short door-closing time.
People in the car are crying, diarrheaing themselves, that sort of thing. But your eyes are glued to the state-of-the-art LED display showing each floor you pass by, an amenity you’ve come to expect from a modern elevator. The only thing more shocking than the accuracy of the digital indicator is the celerity with which this car is approaching the ground floor.
You exit the car into the lobby and run outside the building. Your partner and kids are there. They also took a Thyssenkrupp-manufactured elevator to escape. You embrace them. You look up and discover that the building isn’t actually collapsing. It was all a false alarm, a fake 9/11 meant to test the integrity of the building’s elevators in the event of a national emergency. The Thyssenkrupps passed with flying colors. You and your partner look deep into each other’s eyes. No words are needed. Your look says it all: “I will always love you. Thyssenkrupp, whose elevators are unsurpassed in terms of efficiency and reliability, will keep us together, no matter what.”
OTIS
The year is 2152 AD. The world’s resources have been nearly exhausted. A corrupt ruling class maintains control over the last scraps of the earth’s bounty through elaborate systems of violent repression. Your “name,” were such a thing conceivable to you, is Quantum-291. You have no parents, no heritage that you know of. You have not been permitted to have a personality. You have known no life but servitude to the Directorate as a menial laborer in the cobalt mines. There is very little cobalt left in this vein. Each week you and your dozen fellow laborers must show quota. The one who mines the least is sent to University. No one has ever returned from University.
Last week Quantum-285 was sent to University. You knew him for nearly two cycles. He was the closest thing you ever had to a “friend.” He once risked his life by sharing his 500 milliliters of soy slurry with you when you were being punished with starvation for glancing at the Overseer’s console.
You were bred to know nothing, but now you have learned something. Now you have a rudimentary understanding of kindness, which has led you to conclude that something like “justice” exists. Using subtle gestures and miners’ argot, you are able to communicate this concept to your fellow Quantums.
At the appointed time, you collectively turn your laseraxes and cyberdrills on the Overseer. The man you once watched personally zap a miner to death for singing off-key at grueltime now begs for his life. It brings you nothing but pleasure to watch his life force be torn into tiny shreds of flesh.
Klaxons blare. Reinforcements are coming. The only hope for you and your nascent freedom force is to exit the mine as fast as possible. The odds may be long, but if you can get aboveground in time, you and your comrades have a chance to scatter across the surface and spread your revolution to drone warrens throughout the Cryptosphere.
You and your fellow rebels make a break for the mine elevator. You press the button. You wait. You hear the elevator creak and groan as it descends toward your floor. The Klaxons grow louder. Overseers from surrounding tunnels are closing in on you. You press the button again and again and again. Your comrades start to panic. What’s taking so long?
Psychoblaster shots fizz around the corner. The elevator finally settles on your floor. The doors slowly open. You shove your way in and slam the S button. The elevator shakes. Panicking, you hit the button over and over again. The doors start to close but stop a quarter of the way. Beyond the elevator doors, a team of black-suited Troublers has appeared, their psychoblasters aimed squarely at you. You wave good-bye to them, expecting the doors to close at that second, saving your life and the lives of your friends.
The doors don’t close. You are blasted into darkness. When you awake, you and all your colleagues will be sentenced to 1,500,000 millennia of mentotorture for your little insurrection, an unspeakably excruciating penalty that will last one hour in real time and can—and will—be renewed at the whim of the magistrate who sentences you.
In the last moments before you succumb to the blaster’s effects, you yell, “I am not a Quantum! I am a Tesla Model 663, and I am alive!” Then you fall to the floor, your circuitry shorted. The last thing you see before losing consciousness is the infernal word etched at the bottom of the elevator shaft: OTIS.
SCHINDLER
This is an okay elevator. Not great, but not bad, either.
So ends the brief survey of what you will be allowed to read, watch, and ride after the coming revolution.
But every manifesto must contain both a positive platform and a negative critique, and it’s to the latter we now turn. Though we pride ourselves on our general tolerance of deviant, revisionist, and counterrevolutionary cultural output, there are certain kinds of decadent formalism that can and will be eradicated from the landscape when Chapo commissars take their stations in government. Atop the pile is one figure in particular, a renegade hyena who preaches a disgusting creed of logic, braininess, and love for truth.
Liberals, having sold out decades ago and laid the welcome mat for a new era of right-wing domination, have long retreated into realms of fantasy. In the aftermath of the 2016 elections, they’ve disappeared into cultural cosplay more than ever before—and no one has done more to sculpt their virtual reality than the master of the monologue, the king of quips, the ayatollah of argument: Aaron Sorkin.
Everything shitty about libs, from their smugness to their worship of decorum to their embarrassing rhetoric of “resistance,” is arguably Sorkin’s fault. From humble beginnings as a cheesy but not terrible playwright, Sorkin has come to dominate the popular imagination, and has done more to poison American political culture than anyone since D. W. Griffith. Sorkin’s preeminence in the world of political drama testifies to the destitution of American culture. Let’s survey the damage.
To Sorkheads, of course, his dialogue is electric, his characters are memorable, and his narrative voice is bold and unmistakable. Another Hollywood weirdo with far more talent, Quentin Tarantino, once gave this stunning quote to New York magazine:
Now, the HBO show I loved was Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. That was the only show that I literally watched three times. I would watch it at seven o’clock on Sunday, when the new one would come on. Then, after it was over, I’d watch it all over again. Then I would usually end up watching it once during the week, just so I could listen to the dialogue one more time.
The fact that Tarantino—a man heralded, rightly or wrongly, for his command of snappy banter—felt comfortable praising Sorkin’s dog-shit show for the same strengths shows how far America has strayed from the light. Through some alien brain virus, people have learned to regard Sorkin’s Adderall-fueled schlock as the gold standard.
In fact, The West Wing is the Rosetta Stone of every stupid thing that contemporary liberals have come to believe. Many of us in Chapo were impressionable kids when West Wing first came on, and as we grew older and slightly less stupid we went through the natural progression of disgust with this show: first, we realized that the way things worked on The West Wing wasn’t the way they worked in the real world; then we realized things had never worked that way; then finally we realized things should not work that way. That would be horrible. It would be a gaudy, unending pageant, full of self-obsessed blowhards saving the day not through radical change or real moral courage but with shitty zingers and face-to-face bloviation.
The show was, however, an instant hit among those enjoying the twilight of the Clinton years, when it first lit up the screens of content, sated middle-class families who felt that basically all the problems had been solved. Once George W. Bush slithered into office in 2000, the show took on a new purpose as a liberal fantasia, presenting an alternate universe where everything was fine and the Yosemite Sam Republicans were put in their place with catty banter and speechifying. But then, after eight years of evil with the Bush administration, the Sorkinites got their wish with Obama, a real-life Jed Bartlet: a Nobel Prize–winning commander in chief who was eloquent, academic, and presidential, and who ate dog.
And sure enough, the show telegraphed every single failure, error, and misapplication of power in the Obama years. Why? Because the people in charge finally got their chance to play out their fantasies of being characters on The West Wing! In so doing, they ran straight into the maw of real politics, power, and ideology. Anyone who may once have believed in the Sorkinverse discovered, if they were paying attention, that the person who had the most data at their fingertips and owned the other person in the debate did not automatically win.
To give an example of the show’s diseased politics: In season five, episode twelve, Toby Ziegler voices the dreamy prose of Sorkin’s pen to make a bold, brave, and moral case to cut Social Security. The whole episode chronicles his effort to form a commission that will reduce benefits and save the program from an (invented) financial doomsday. And were it not for the CHUDs of the Freedom Caucus who spoiled it for John Boehner in 2011, President Jed Obama would’ve gotten his Grand Bargain, which had been designed to obliterate the American welfare state to appease the honorable Republicans on the other side of the aisle.
And that, in closing, is the scariest thing. This shit went from pages on a cokehead’s laptop to a network TV show straight to the Obama administration: Obungler came onto the scene in 2004 with his Sorkinesque DNC speech about how there’s no “red or blue America,” then campaigned on “bipartisan,” nonideological solutions to the unambiguously partisan and ideological onslaught of right-wing America. And we don’t even need to go into all the ways the administration pursued the stupid neoliberal fantasia that West Wing characters such as Toby preached, like getting everyone from both sides into the same room to hash out the most reasonable solution to a divisive problem. Hell, there’s even an episode in which Josh Lyman has a beer summit, à la Henry Louis Gates Jr., at the White House with a Republican with whom he trades facts and bromides about gay marriage.
This reality-bending curse latched on to Obama’s would-be successor in 2016 when Hillary Clinton’s rolling calamity of a campaign took every page from the Bartlet manifesto. Take note: In season three, episode fourteen, as Bartlet runs for reelection, Toby Ziegler counsels the president before a crucial televised debate: “Make this election about smart and not; make it about engaged and not; qualified and not. Make it about a heavyweight—you’re a heavyweight, and you’ve been holding me up for too many rounds.” Bartlet goes on to own the shit out of the folksy, dumbass, Jeb Bush–style yokel, and the president is reelected in a landslide. Why? Because he was smarter than the other guy in the debate.
You could see how ill-equipped to operate in the real world this liberal adulation of the office of the president was once the long reign of Democrats in the twentieth century came to an end. As soon as they slipped out of power, their ideology—their mythology, really—left nothing in the toolbox that would get them back in. They were equipped only to keep inheriting power; as soon as they lost it, they had no tools or vision for getting it back. Watching The West Wing twenty years on, you realize that as the Democrats lost each and every municipal, state, and now national office, their self-perception as heroic Jed Bartlets and C. J. Creggs and Josh Lymans only grew deeper and more convinced. The further liberals got from power, the further they delved into fantasy and the more they appropriated Sorkin’s pithy banter, letting events pass by, letting history shove their heads down the toilet for a swirly scored by the tinkling notes of Thomas Newman.