"Parable of the Sower" comparisons, the stupid era of American politics, "Nosferatu" + "Real Life" double feature, Last Days of Tiktok
Fires in LA aren't the start of anything. They're the latest consequence of a century of decisions.
(originally published Jan 11, 2025 on Patreon)
You know, I'm going to start considering people who bring up Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower in response to current events as Hunger Games fans that saw other adults get bullied for comparing everything to it, and who also saw The Handmaid's Tale fans get bullied for glazing a book that stole from Parable of the Sower. Please don't misunderstand me, I love Octavia Butler, probably more than you do. She's my guiding light and North Star. She is also quite observant and attentive to history. Proclaiming that the "Make America Great Again" slogan the president in the second book uses is an example of prescience is not giving mother the credit she deserves! There's many cases like this to be chalking it up to some special foresight that she has that we all must learn from. We are all capable of seeing what she saw when we have a clear-eyed view of current events and where they can go.
The story starts in 2024 with fires in California, and as I type this in 2025, fires have burned through the Palisades and Malibu, still advancing thanks to powerful Santa Ana winds. Octavia Butler predicted America's brand of climate catastrophe because the trajectory was legible by 1993, when Parable of the Sower was first published. In the year leading up to its October release, Clinton was inaugurated after H.W. Bush wrapped up the Gulf War, the World Trade Center had been bombed, the Branch Davidians stood off with the police for almost 2 months before their burning compound killed all 76 of them, an east coast blizzard killed over 300 people, the Unabomber terrorized the country, an Amtrak train derailed in Alabama and killed 47 people, the Church of Scientology gained tax-exempt status, Bill Clinton sent warships to Haiti, and wildfires begin in California, destroying over 700 homes.
Fires in LA aren't the start of anything. They're the latest consequence of a century of decisions.
In terms of politics, well, Elon Musk is now at the kiddy table with Minecraft streamers while the party that used his money to buy total federal power is setting up to return to the 3/5ths rule. Open slavery soon to follow. Speaking of the LA fires, it is my right as a 21st century American to indulge in a conspiracy theory, and mine is that the upcoming land grab will ensure the American film industry won't recover to what it once was, marking another massive slip towards modern American isolationism (but now extra fascist this time). Maybe Newsom will add a Film New Deal to his 2028 platform if the GOP doesn't go full Turner Diaries and place blue states under military occupation? Lots of interesting possibilities for the decade! Nothing more to add on that front. Everything is quite stupid.
I had a good time seeing Nosferatu and reading Real Life by Brandon Taylor this past week. Nosferatu was the Gothic bliss I hoped it would be, so I'm not surprised that people online absolutely don't know how to handle it. Did Ellen accidentally call a monster to haunt her? Yes. Did that monster traumatize her and terrorize everyone she loved? Yeah we all watched it happen. Was the final scene a genuine embrace? Absolutely! The urge to make Ellen a perfect victim when she repeatedly looked into the camera and told the viewer the horrors she dreamt and experienced made her happy... is truly giving cope. She found comfort in her trauma because no one listened to her when she described it. She named her shame and kept returning to it because it brought her the ecstasy confiding in her loved ones was supposed to bring! If anything Eggers should've made it sexier. We only got one Orlok dick shot and a couple scenes of penetration, like it's really not the vampire goonerfest some reviews led me to believe. But my goodness, what a gorgeously shot, deeply immersive, and wonderfully acted film. Shit so good it makes you consider reevaluating Lily Rose Depp's performance in The Idol and ignoring your R*bert P*ttinson boycott to finally watch The Lighthouse.
Real Life gagged me in a different way, specifically as a Black person who grew up in predominantly white spaces. It's a unique form of insanity. I just did not understand how people I knew since we were kids could parrot the racism my parents used as teachable moments. Middle school during the origins of the BLM movement must have been a chrysalis that devolved them. So I ended up relating in a very sensitive way to Wallace, the main character, through the reality distortions that tokenism creates. The fact I enjoyed it so much is crazy because. despite following Brandon Taylor on Twitter for years, its campus novel nature repelled me at first. Despite being a bit of a scholar in my free time, I do not find fictional academia that interesting. My nostalgia around college revolves around how I was away from home for the first time and got to be a person separate from my parents — I wasn't really into the actual work or stress of it. Real Life soothed my worries by including classroom scenes for emotional context, not Peaked-In-School indulgence. We read about Wallace slicing nematodes apart because we're learning about how European-American delusions grate against his detailed myopia. He accepts dull, repetitive work he's good at to lighten the workload of lab's superstar senior, then gets berated for it, to show that his best intentions can't overcome the locked box of another's life. He tries to correct the technique of his Gifted™️ first year lab partner and receives hostility from her in kind because Gifted Kids™️ are the result of other inflated egos seeking to make a cult of snobbishness. He meets his friends at orientation and optimistically toasts the rest of their lives together because we just read a novel about all the ways they needle and cling to each other. That's what I'm talking about!! Make every single detail serve the theme! Turn the lake and the color yellow into characters, then combine the two during Wallace and Miller's greatest moment of trust in one another, bitch! I love that shit! If any mention of credit requirements got in between that I swear I would've bit somebody's head off.
On top of that, the more I sit with it the more I appreciate how Taylor shows the way Wallace, despite being genuinely persecuted by his surroundings, contains plenty of hurtful blind spots himself. A lifetime of homophobia and racism is traumatic. Trauma makes you selfish. There was a moment at the end where he questions the struggles of the only Asian woman in his biology postgrad, which is insane from everybody else aware of the stereotype, but why would Wallace clock that in the moment? He's drowning in a mille-feuille of desirability politics and social structures. He's not immune to similar genres of ignorance. The messiness of existing with and loving the place and people who easily hurt you, where everybody steps on toes and leaves fractures, where a sense of obligation drives you to hold onto a dream that makes you worse and where you get mad when someone points out the bubble you've made — if every campus novel was like that, I'd be happy.
I'm a bit sad that the Tiktok ban is likely to go through. I hope the potential backlash reverses it, but I don't like the implications of that either. Many things are worse and stupider than we can imagine. I'm sad for the small businesses and unlikely stars that the app brought to prominence and I hope our paths cross again down the line. Since it's not the Internet's first rodeo with losing a generation-defining platform, I have confidence people will bounce back elsewhere. I just wonder about what will happen between then and now. I've been thinking of Alternatives For Myself, but truthfully, I'm at the point where I think leaving social media is something everybody needs to do quickly because they're just disinformation machines at this point. The factors have changed and we need to be very intentional with where we put our information. Personal websites seem to be a steadily gathering wave, so if we must be online, I think it'll be great to get our own operations up, running, and established before ZuckerMuskThiel McFascism mandates all of us to post twice per day on the AI Panopticon under the threat of the Boston Dynamics machine gun dog posted at our front doors. But as someone gathering marketing knowledge for my own purposes, I understand that the more cross-platform you are, the better your reach and promotion is. I'll have to reconcile my highfalutin positions with good business, I fear. I'm considering something like: for timely updates, you can add me to your subscription ecosystem or visit my website; for everyone else, wait it out for a couple of weeks. We'll see.
a better world
To look at someone with a few aesthetic and cultural differences, then decide those differences inherently make you the arbiter of their fate, is a mentality I find inaccessible. It’s a choice to dehumanize. It’s a choice to lie. It’s a choice to erase. It’s hard to look into another human’s eyes and declare they do not have a right to exist. It’s not as hard to toss unruly animals into a cage.
(originally published Oct 27, 2023 on Substack)
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is at its darkest moment. All of it has weighed heavy on my heart.
My first inkling of something being Wrong with the world came with my understanding of my identity as a Black person in the United States. The reason I couldn’t trace my family tree the way other kids could growing up is because it was stolen from me. My ancestors were kidnapped, raped out of their lineage, and turned into animals. I have no connection to Africa that isn’t vestigial — my nose, my lips, and my eye color gesture at a homeland I do not recognize. My family just popped into existence from soil our ancestors’ blood watered.
Molding history in such a way requires power that is inhuman to me. To look at someone with a few aesthetic and cultural differences, then decide those differences inherently make you the arbiter of their fate, is a mentality I find inaccessible. It’s a choice to dehumanize. It’s a choice to lie. It’s a choice to erase. It’s hard to look into another human’s eyes and declare they do not have a right to exist. It’s not as hard to toss unruly animals into a cage.
The news coming out of occupied Palestine is the culmination of so many axes of arrogance. I see and read so-called “truth-tellers” and “allies” become the mouthpieces of lying regimes with documented histories of every single lie. Stories of Arab terrorists beheading babies get worldwide front page coverage while Gaza runs out of body bags in silence. Occupying Zionist forces bombed a hospital after a week of sadistic warnings, then their social media accounts engaged in cartoonish bait to distract people while they dropped another thousand pounds of munitions elsewhere. In full view of the world, the sadists in Israel toy with millions of people’s lives, and the only thing people with revolutionaries on their walls and bookshelves do is excuse it as “the nature of war”. What war? Gaza is not a sovereign state. Gaza is no-man’s-land, a legal technicality existing outside of legality, both a state and not a state according to the excuse needed in the moment to slaughter its people. If Gaza is its own state, why can Israel, a foreign power under this definition, declare it illegal for it to build its own infrastructure? If it’s not a state, then why can Israel decide to bomb the people under its administration with impunity? What war features a captive population with no army being attacked with high tech weaponry with no aid allowed? Why is Israel even able to bar humanitarian efforts to begin with? These simple questions are unanswerable to liberals outside of the usual “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
I thought that genocide would be everyone’s line in the sand. My mistake was in expecting people to recognize it at all. Liberals pride themselves on the moral superiority their “impartiality” affords them, and that means when someone says (in English) that they’re not committing genocide, that’s the end of it. They’re not like emotional leftists with their refusals to compromise, because the world was built upon compromise! Everyone must turn away from violence except for when the violence is against targets, then everything must be done to eradicate them. Poison the earth with righteous fury, not grief or pain, and when the smoke clears, always remember that “they” started it.
My disdain for the machinery of the Western world has turned into utter disgust. I have no grace for cowards who dress up in progressive causes only when the blood has been washed out. Every famous evil in the past was conducted under their gleeful watch. I drafted this when 4,000 Palestinians in Gaza were being buried in mass graves while Anderson Cooper corrected his use of “civilians” when referring to them, now I revise it while Gaza endures indescriminate bombing without telecommunications. The US government’s official stance is that the Gaza Health Ministry collaborates with terrorists and is lying about the number of dead. It’s barbarism trying to convince others of its civility.
I’m not sure what to do with this rage I feel. I think something fractured in me and revealed depths to it that I don’t know how to deal with. Writing, creating art, and speaking about it feel like grabbing for kid tools when I’ve been tasked with digging a mine. But I know a better world is possible. I’ve been sitting with myself and praying to all who listen to decide what parts of my political education can stay or go, and I keep being guided back to Black American history and the horrors my people survived. So here’s my new mental rubric when faced with two parties in conflict:
If one imposes similar conditions to what kept my ancestors in bondage upon the other, my support will start with the subjugated.
If one party is described as animals like my ancestors were as justification for their brutalization, I know the descriptors do not need me to waste sympathies on them.
If people are sent into diaspora clinging to fragments of old lives they will never return to, I will do everything in my power to advocate for their right to return to the same homes they left.
Above all else, I cannot ever trust or respect people who make excuses for this current world. It is traitorous to humanity itself to collaborate with today’s status quo. Good intentions will not free Palestine, it will not end discrimination, it will not solve climate change, and it will not put an end to the structures squeezing our only Earth for more pennies in immaterial profit. Continuing to support the same evil with different faces is described as insanity in fiction. Only in the real world will people try hard to convince you it’s “rational”.
The United States looked at itself after experiencing plague, continued poverty wages, unsustainable price gouging for corporate profit, housing held hostage by petit digital bourgeoise, and crumbling infrastructure, and decided to write a blank check for an occupying force that celebrates the chance to create an ethnostate. It’s a betrayal of the highest order, yet laughably par for the course for the longest-lasting banana republic the world has seen. The anger I feel will color the rest of my life, and it will motivate me toward a better world.
Because it will exist. It must.