Embedded within us now are opposing ideas of who is wise or what is truthful and we hold to these ideas steadfast, as though they are as constant and as rational as God. The political individual is left with no choice but to identify as a member of an ideology, or, a part of the body—a practice that is entirely contradictory to freedom, as we stretch ourselves in order to defend its other implications, reduce ourselves to a label, betray our instincts, and lie to ourselves and others in order to prove ourselves consistent. That our ideologies materialize as politics means they cannot be malleable or subject to change or else not only will we be deemed hypocritical, but categorized under a different political label that lays claim to whatever ideology emerges from the subtext of our statements. Therefore, one should remain subservient to the ideologies they’ve chosen or have been assigned to minimize confusion and the risk of having the perceived caliber of one’s morality so quickly diminished.

 

1993

LIAM POWERS

        Across the fields of shallow grass a person with long hair could be seen running. There was nothing more than this, and the wind. Her bare feet kicked up the dust. 

She left the field’s perimeter and entered the woods, where the shade covered everything. Her breath pulled in and out as she ran. The beer cans were on the ground up ahead. She snatched them up and stuffed them into their soggy cardboard box, colors bleeding into one another, and all of it went into a black trash bag she’d withdrawn from her cargo-pants pocket. Then she turned around and ran back to the house. 

Harris derided the “chaos and calamity” of the Trump presidency, with its rise in crime and insurrectionist mob and assault of law enforcement officers. A repetition of that era would invite dictatorial consequences, she warned, to a crowd whose votes are galvanized by the prospect of disintegration. Indeed, perhaps she is less an emblem of preservation and cultural hegemony, but what she promises is not an alterable topography of political relations; she promises reconstitution, redemption, restoration––the values which promise change and deliver instead the grandeur of history. Harris concluded her speech with an ode: “Let us write this great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.” Listening to the raucous cheers at the nomination of a president intent on the restoration of authorship and authority, I thought of Derrida: “The petrified character of writing assures the law’s permanence and identity with the vigilance of a guardian.”

       Even when I’m lost, buzzing with a low hum of panic, there’s a pull that feels unsettlingly like home, like a signal I chase through static, always just out of reach. That’s how I became America—woven in but standing apart, part of the rituals yet always sensing the rot no one talks about. The ones barely clinging to the edges, the off-frequency hum we all hear but pretend isn’t there. You don’t understand a system until you know what it’s built to hide. To confront it isn’t just about exposing the system—it’s about gutting yourself. The system survives because it’s fused to us, and ripping it out would make us bleed. Only naive, reckless kids fail to grasp the cost of speaking the unspeakable.

         When you go back far enough, the story of Crum’s and the story of Panacea suddenly but not unexpectedly falls into a familiar arc of small-town American deindustrialization. When there was dancing along the coast, there were also jobs for young people, most of them in the crab and oyster industries—two abundant natural resources in the Gulf of Mexico. Back then, seafood was enough to buoy the economies of plenty of small towns along the Gulf Coast. But, as Ms. Ann tells it, environmental regulations in the seventies and eighties changed the whole industry, made the process of crab and oyster harvesting at the same scale impossible. Most of the big facilities shut down and took many of the town’s jobs with them. The clubs closed and the coast got quiet. 

Flyover Country

FIONA PEARL MILLER

        He believed, like a good APGov student and a natural party democrat, that one's political opinion is a product of their culture, their family, their educational attainment, their race, religion, and class—so under the fluorescent lights of the University of Chicago’s “Media Village,” speaking to someone (me) he considered a credentialed journalist (lol), employing a tone usually reserved only for those lab-coated or enrobed in habit he revealed his own absolution from autonomy. His holy church; his Hippocratic oath? The information regime, a new totalitarianism which takes the “rule of no one” literally by domesticating all actors into allo-exploitative consumer cattle, unable or unwilling to form worldviews for themselves. When I scrawled down into my notebook the inciting sentence: NOBODY HAS THEIR OWN POLITICAL BELIEFS—he asked that it be struck from the record.