By Don Jolly

Subway Conversations About Politics – Part 2

I was sitting at a coffee shop in Hell’s Kitchen, talking about Donald Trump, when the man with the plucked ostrich feather came by. I was making the point I usually make about Trump, since Paris and since he presided over the beating of a black protester by a majority white crowd in Birmingham, Alabama. He’s not funny anymore, The man with the plucked ostrich feather overheard me.

He’d wended into the shop to pester the clerks, and was wearing a ratty costume of discard clothes, cloaked by a too-big suit jacket, colored black. “You gotta vote for Donald Trump,” he announced, breaking into my conversation. “He’s the only hope we’ve got!” The bell on the door dinged twice. He left the shop.

I saw him marching down the street in the white-blue sunlight, twirling his tall and picked-clean feather with both hands. He walked towards the water, and was gone.

Think Big

On Sunday, the sixth of November, the President of the United States addressed the nation from the oval office. The last time he did so was in 2010 – and his announcement concerned “the end of our combat mission in Iraq.”

His remarks on the sixth were less ambitious. Days before, two “radicalized” American Muslims shot up a workplace holiday party in San Bernardino, California, killing fourteen and wounding more than twenty. As massacres go, it was small potatoes – neither as gruesome or as organized as the assault Paris suffered in November. But San Bernardino is American soil, and the “holiday party” is a ritual of forced socialization required by many American workplaces. Fear, spreading like fire in dry woods, flared crimson across the internet.

Which is why the President spoke from the oval office on December Sixth. He used this platform to argue against overreaction – and any major alteration in policy concerning international and domestic terrorism. “The strategy that we are using now — airstrikes, Special Forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country — that is how we’ll achieve a more sustainable victory,” he said.

“We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam,” he continued.  “ISIL does not speak for Islam.  They are thugs and killers, part of a cult of death, and they account for a tiny fraction of more than a billion Muslims around the world.” Islam, Obama implied, was a religion – ISIS, a cult. And more than that – a cult of “death.” A reality and a system of beliefs dedicated to the antithesis of life.

This election season, the President acknowledged, has produced a lot of odd and hyperbolic ideas. But “freedom,” he explained, “is more powerful than fear.” Americans, united by their “common ideals” can meet any challenge. “So long as we stay true to that tradition,” he said, “I have no doubt America will prevail.”

Others do.

The Wrong Composition – It Doesn’t Work on Human Flesh

I am excited about the prospect of atomic war.  Two days before Thanksgiving, a Russian warplane was shot down by Turkey, supposedly for a brief airspace violation. Vladimir Putin, I have heard, has dreams of dissolving NATO — of pushing some minor member-country to the point of invoking Article Five, and committing all the allied nations to war on its behalf. This war, Putin is supposed to suppose, will not actually occur — the leaders of the major NATO states are too cautious to risk a showdown with a nuclear superpower over anything but the most flagrant of attacks on the wealthiest of states.Not going to war, an effective breach of the great North Atlantic Treaty, would instantly transmute the iron of that postwar alliance into steam — and by such alchemy, Russia could remake the world. Writer Max Fischer rendered it in relatively complete form on Vox last summer. It’s been catching on.

I don’t like the word “belief.” It’s too small, too optional — it reads as something that can, and should, be altered by the acquisition of information and the accumulation of years. Beliefs are open to question. Realities are trickier.

Reality forms the context and the precondition of belief — it is the raw material from which beliefs are assembled, and the workshop where they can be modified, reinforced and discarded. Realities are also comparatively invisible. While belief is the subject of conscious examination, realities simply “are.” They can be held up or thrown out as beliefs can — but the cost of doing so is high. It requires thinking beyond the boundaries of one’s thinking – a process of dissociative (and sometimes physical) violence from which it is impossible to return.

NATO is a belief. The bomb is a reality.

The cold equations of troop distribution and weapon capabilities define the reality of war for the the military thinkers I have known.. All ideology fails in the face of these amounts: only so many bullets for only so many skulls, and a discrete number of missiles for a discrete number of cities. Everything beyond that annihilating fact can be negotiated, ignored, disproved, trespassed and sanctioned — but in the end, the harshest truths exert their power. Russia and the United States have the power to render our planet uninhabitable. Military expression is built from gestures, subtle and overt, towards this concealed power.

Writing for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in March of last year, Nikolai N. Sokov, a senior fellow from Vienna’s Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, summarized a disturbing modification of belief among Russia’s military thinkers. In 2000, spurred by a possible war in Chechnya, Russia’s Security Council developed a new doctrine regarding the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “The doctrine introduced the notion of de-escalation—a strategy envisioning the threat of a limited nuclear strike,” Sokov explained. Essentially, this threat was built around the potential deployment of a relatively small nuclear weapon against a military target. Such tactics were meant to communicate to the United States, or any other nuclear power, Russia’s willingness to face annihilation for the sake of its interests. This show of force, it is supposed, will trigger “de-esclation” by necessity. Its inverse – escalation – remains unthinkable.

As Secretary of the Russian Security Council in 1999, Vladimir Putin helped draw up the founding documents of de-escalation. As President, a year later, he “signed it in,” accorsding to Sokov. De-escalation remains an important entry in Russia’s military vocabulary.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists still maintains their famous “doomsday clock,” a timepiece that ticks closer to midnight as the tangle of beliefs governing the planet’s nuclear arsenal approach the point of fatal accident – a nuclear war. Since January of this year, it’s stood at three minutes till – its latest hour since 1984.

We have built a pistol from scratch, polishing every piece and cog. Then, with great ceremony, we pointed it at our own heads and threaded a finger through the trigger guard. Everything since has been Russian roulette.

Common sense, and the rules of effective narrative, demand a discharge. Hence, Fallout.

War Never Changes – But Media Does

On November 10th, three days before the terrorist attacks in Paris, the fourth installment of the Fallout franchise was released for personal computers and home videogame consoles worldwide. The series, like many gaming juggernauts, has an excess of history. The original Fallout, subtitled “a post-nuclear role playing game” was released in September of 1997. In this game, and its sequels, players are invited to construct a personalized character who lives in a world annihilated by nuclear war. What remains of our civilization, in this reality, is ruin and rust — ironically styled after the pop-culture and industrial design of the Eisenhower administration. In Fallout games, your character picks through the rubble, encounters mutated ghouls and wasteland settlements, and cuts an individuated swath through a world where history has ended.

Fallout 4, released this year, is set in the environment of a post-nuclear Boston. It made more money in its first twenty-four hours of release than the new “Jurassic Park” movie has since June: seven hundred and fifty million dollars, derived from over twelve million copies sold. That’s roughly six copies for every subscriber currently boasted by the New York Times,, and all in one day. Who knows what the game will achieve as Christmas approaches.

Videogames are big business. Investment analyst John Markman, writing in Forbes last month, reflected on how little videogames are discussed by more traditional media, in spite of their financial success. “If the videogame industry were covered as heavily as Hollywood […], every director, character designer and scenarist in hit franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield would be a celebrity stalked by TMZ,” he wrote.  “Instead they labor mostly in anonymity and just vacuum up cash.” What makes this popular disinterest curious is just how much cash is involved. The videogame industry, Markman continued, is fast eclipsing film in terms of raw profitability: “Tech research firm Gartner sees the worldwide videogame market of console, online, mobile and PC products at $111 billion by 2016 and $128 billion in 2017,” he reported. Film, by contrast, generated only “$88 billion in worldwide revenue” this year.

In print and on television, videogames are treated as a mysterious haven for social misfits and amoral malcontents. In the United States, since the 1990s, they’ve carried almost as much blame for mass shootings as permissive gun laws. But this doesn’t bother gamers overmuch. After all, as John Markman pointed out, this relative impenetrability just means that the gaming industry gets to “vacuum up cash” without attracting the kind of gnawing, endless media commentary that churns in the wake of Hollywood… and Washington, for that matter.

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the last seventeen years, writer Jerry Holkins and artist Mike Krahulik have uploaded a three-panel comic strip to www.penny-arcade.com, offering profane observations on the latest news in gaming. Each strip is accompanied by a brief “post,” or text piece, by Holkins. On the 23rd of November, this year, its subject was the relationship of gaming to its attendant journalists – the kind of people who blog about the subject professionally, or write for one of the industry’s few surviving magazines. “There was a period of time, not even that long a period of time in the grand scheme, where a kind of collaborative back-scratching arrangement was in operation between publishers, the developers in their charge, and the enthusiast press,” Holkins reported. As of 2015, “it has not been dissolved utterly, but you can tell […] that something key has changed.”

Kotaku [www.kotaku.com], the videogame blog operating under the auspices of the struggling Gawker Media, had just posted a story complaining of being “blacklisted” by several prominent game publishers as a result of unfavorable coverage — among the offending parties, according to Kotaku , was Bethesda, the company responsible for Fallout 4.  “I can understand why a publisher might determine that an increasingly hostile outlet whose business model is “Start Shit” might not be the best time or money investment,” Holkins wrote on the 23^rd.  “Why did it ever work this way?  Why would you be obligated to spend millions of dollars on something and then place it gently on the black altar of a hivemind cult, bowing as you retreat?” Why, in other words, should “journalism” be involved in games at all?

Consumers and publishers have access to the same Internet — and through that medium, the press releases and advertisements and pre-release content traditionally filtered first to an “enthusiast press” can be given directly to consumers. . Gaming blogs and websites, Holkins concluded, are becoming superfluous. “Having been the cowering creature beneath enthusiast media’s Eye of Sauron on more than one occasion […] I have no sympathy for these creatures,” he said. “Which is to say, I have the same sympathy they express for those outside their cloister.”

The maturation of digital games occurred at the same time, and often on the same platforms, as the maturation of digital communication writ large. Where the subculture specific to gaming is now, the larger culture is likely to be in three years, or five. Print magazines covering games lost their primacy around the turn of the century, for instance. Now, if Holkins is to be believed, the digital imitators of magazines are dying too. “These creatures,” as Holkins calls them, are journalists covering a very large and lucrative industry. And they are passing from the world.

On Monday, the 23rd, while Jerry Holkins was dancing on the grave of the “enthusiast press,” republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump repeated a controversial story on stage at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “During a speech recently, I said that I saw, in parts of New Jersey [Muslims] getting together, and in fairly large numbers, celebrating as the World Trade Center was coming down, killing thousands and thousands of people!” he said. To accentuate his point, Trump kneaded the air with his right hand — miming the motion a building falling inward.

“And I saw people,” the candidate continued. “And I saw em’ on television and I read about it on the Internet.” The press, however, was unconvinced. They called, Trump said “all day and all night,” pestering him about the veracity of his claim. “All of sudden I’m getting all of these tweets! ‘I saw it!’ ‘I was there!’ ‘I was this!’ But I saw it!” Dutifully, Trump rebroadcast his supporters’ accounts, and continued to do so over much of the next week. As far as he was concerned, this settled the matter. The press remained doubtful.

On Sunday the 29th, Trump called in to NBC’s storied political talk show, “Meet the Press.” Its host, Chuck Todd, exercised his journalistic prerogative: challenging the frontrunner on the veracity of his remarks. “Let’s go to this Jersey City comment,” Todd began. “You said you saw this [celebration but] nobody can find evidence […] Where did you see this?”

“Chuck,” said Trump, sadly. “I saw this on television. So did many other people […] I’ve had hundreds of phone calls to the Trump organization saying ‘we saw it! It was dancing in the streets!'”

“This didn’t happen in New Jersey,” Todd pressed, citing a litany of sources. “There were plenty of reports.”

“It did happen in New Jersey,” Trump maintained. “I have hundreds of people who agree with me.”

Todd continued to protest. “But they want to agree with you!” he said. “That doesn’t make it true!”

“Meet the Press” dominated the other Sunday shows in November, in terms of viewership. According to Rick Kissel, writing in Variety, ” It averaged 953,000 adults 25-54, besting ABC’s “This Week” (907,000), CBS’ “Face the Nation” (808,000 for its first half-hour) and Fox’s “Fox News Sunday” (502,000). And in total viewers, its 3.424 million held off “Face the Nation” (3.390 million) and “This Week” (3.232 million) and nearly doubled up “Fox News Sunday” (1.716 million).”

Donald Trump’s twitter account, where the “truth” of his New Jersey claim has been affirmed again and again, has over five million subscribers.

In media, as in war, beliefs must yield to certain mathematical reality. “Meet the Press” has more “prestige” than Twitter – just as The New Yorker has more prestige than a magazine like PC Accelerator, which once tried to boost sales by putting a sexy orc on the cover. But if more people watch Trump’s twitter than “Meet the Press,” the “truth” offered there is given a larger footprint than Todd’s debunking. The traditional press and its digital descendants, the papers, are still with us – still influential. But for how long? “You may feel very confident that there are conversations at every publisher now, wondering to what extent they are required to eat shit from these people,” wrote Holkins on the 23^rd. I am equally confident that our political campaigns are entertaining the same idea.

Give the People What They Want

Fallout 4 begins with a short movie, designed to ease players into the recreational world they have purchased – a meticulously crafted model of an American city in ruins. It begins like this:

“In the year 1945, my great-great grandfather, serving in the army, wondered when he’d get to go home to his wife and the son he’d never seen. He got his wish when the U.S. ended World War II by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

What followed, the film explains, was a golden age, where “people enjoyed luxuries once thought the realm of science fiction.” But “years of consumption lead to shortages of every major resource.”  In the end, “the entire world unraveled.”

“In the twenty-first century,” the game gravely concludes, “People woke up from the American dream.”

Everyone is talking about “dangerous rhetoric” these days. This variety of it – a poetry of national disillusionment – is a good way to sell twelve million copies of a sixty dollar game. It’s also a good way to run for president.

On Monday, December 7^th, Donald Trump dropped a bomb of his own. He suggested, in an official statement issued by the Trump campaign, “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

He was denounced by everyone – except the voters.

All our “common ideals” seem to be on the table this year. Beliefs are dying, being replaced – but our reality, as it has existed since the Second World War, is being progressively revealed.

Our freedom is the consequence of fear. Our nation’s geopolitical position has been predicated, for the last seventy years, on our willingness to employ the machinery of global suicide. Whether we remain willing or not doesn’t matter. The fact of what we are is waiting in the pit of our stomachs.

There are many of “cults of death.” Some bigger than others.

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You can read all of the “Salem 66” dispatches here.

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Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.