The first word of the Illiad

Rage by Stephen King is a really weird book. I must have been about thirteen when I read it the first time. It's a short book and a real page turner, I probably read it a few times in my early teens. It probably kept me from doing something stupid at my school, at a time when I often fantasized about shooting death rays out of my eyes and exploding the heads of all the hordes of cruel, stupid people I felt I had to deal with every day.

I'm not saying King was wrong to drop the book from publishing. An intelligent maladjusted person can probably learn any lesson they desire from it. To kill or, in my case, not to kill. I probably would have done the same in his shoes.

But it's a really weird book. It's not about a school shooting. That's a mistake you might make if you hear what it's about second hand and find it in the libraries of a few teenage mass murderers. But it's about a school shooting as much as Grave of the Fireflies is about World War 2. That's just the background.

What happens in the book is this: Charlie Decker, American high schooler, murders two teachers and barricades himself in a classroom with some classmates for a few hours until a police sniper tries to murder him. It's in those hours between the gunshots where it gets weird.

See, Charlie doesn't hold these other kids hostage. He doesn't plausibly threaten any of them except for one, Ted, who tries to act like an adult. What he does with them has been described by reviewers in terms like "spellbinding" and "catalyzing" and "creating an otherworldly bubble where the rules of civil society and maybe our very reality get suspended". It occurs to me today (which is why I'm writing this), what Charlie does is create a safe space. A place where these kids can express themselves without fear. A place where they can drop their shields and be completely honest and vulnerable with each other for a moment. A place without adults.

They all, except for Ted, elect to stay there when given the explicit choice to leave. They say they have to finish "getting it on" and "working it out". This ineffable "it" Stephen King comes back to again and again - see "strapping it on" in Lisey's Story and It in, well, It. Something too primal to define in words, too personal, too frightening.

What they do with all this time is they tell stories about themselves, and this is spellbinding. Fascinating, tiny, utterly real stories about being ashamed of your mom for being poor, about sex in the backseat of a car where neither party knows what they're doing, about being little and thinking your daddy is a monster, about being fifteen and knowing your life is never going to go anywhere.

In the middle of all this senseless murder, and Charlie's and Ted's lives being destroyed, the kids find something raw and real and short-lived and more precious than gold. And you feel that when you read it. It feels like one of those conversations you have at most every ten years, usually sitting or lying still in the dark late at night, the ones that stay with you forever, even if you don't remember what either of you actually said. You just remember the feeling of closeness. Intimacy. Baring your soul. Getting it on, I guess.

Arguing away fascism

I am beside myself with anger, but the words come from within.

Still. There are people claiming Donald Trump and the fascists he represents should be defeated by making a "better" argument, rather than reducing the ability for their argument to be heard. I can't help but rail against this idea, with words.

Because how do you argue with Trump? How do you argue with someone who lies, has his lies spelled out and picked apart in their component atoms and continues to tell those lies without shame, without the body language that should show he is aware that he is lying, without any concept of consequence, without any respect for the world that the rest of us have to live in or indeed the structure of reality itself? How do you argue with someone who argues that he has always been against the war on Iraq and argues that he's for the war on Iraq at the same time?

How do you argue with contradiction?

The fact is, hate speech works. It has real and measurable effects against people. It poses a clear and immediate danger. There's been science done about this. It's no more defensible as free speech than shouting fire in a crowded public hall is. People will believe any lies that are repeated enough. Some people. Enough people to do harm.

The fact is, democracy works only if most people believe that it should work. This graph, assuming it's not the product of Russian hackers or people who don't actually know what democracy is, tells us that the "better argument" does not in fact exist. If you think more people should be able to do what they want, be who they want and go where they want, then the argument that those are good things for our society to pursue is a good argument; if you don't, it isn't.

If you don't read books, there's no argument that will teach you empathy. If you don't believe that reading books teaches you empathy, there's no argument that will convince you of this demonstrated fact. If you don't believe demonstrated facts are more useful than your gut feeling in making this world where we're stuck together, there's no argument good enough to convince you. If you think you can have a world where you get rid of people you don't like, then all of human history is not good enough to convince you you're wrong.

Maybe it's only snobbery to think we can, to use Grant Morrison's device from back in the turn of the century, "steal back the illusion" with anything better, any elegance rather than boorish yelling and intimidating and brutalizing the opposition into shutting up. They sure seem to think so. They sure seem to work hard to leave us no other choice.

So I'm making a comic where the main character can't lie. It may be more constructive than making the argument "Trump's lies are going to get a lot of people killed and that's bad" and repeating it enough times that it becomes a good argument.