Mr. Melancholy & Memento Mori
election reflections, pirate lessons, and a brief confession
I wasn’t a great student in high school (or ever?). Sophomore year, I turned up sleepy and often stoned for my United States history class. I found the origin story of our country maddeningly boring — rich fancy boys who were pissy about taxes on tea. Yawn. I mostly kept my head down on the desk, catching a few Zzzs I missed from closing up shop at Chick-fil-A the night before. For homework, we had to create outlines for each chapter of our textbook. It was a tedious task for which I had neither the time nor the interest. Once, I decided to copy my outlines from some source on the internet. The outlines were returned with a red ink zero. While I didn’t become a better student, I didn’t plagiarize again. Stranger still, I liked this teacher who had called me on my bullshit, and so I signed up for her European history course.
European history was fascinating. While the political violence of American history is directed towards the nameless, faceless underclasses, the violence I read about in European history occasionally found its climax in the rolling heads of monarchs and religious elite. As a queer kid growing up in suburbia, this was dreamy. The culture of Enlightenment salons was captivating — imagine! — a space where no idea is anathema; philosophers, aristocrats, and artists meet as equals to debate how we might achieve the lofty goal of liberty. My adolescence was defined by nights smoking with friends, lapsing from delirious giggles to ‘deep’ consideration of the few philosophical works we had read. Stretched out across a friend’s bed, face cut open into an uninhibited grin, hands on my head in wild wonder, positing aloud — what if Alcibiades’ drunken rant in The Symposium really is what love is all about? only to be rebuffed by a fellow teen philosopher queuing up a video of Hedwig and the Angry Inch’s Origin of Love on YouTube. In our minds, there wasn’t much daylight between our little friend group, Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.
Being a kid is always strange, but in particular, I struggle to make sense of the landscape I grew up in. I graduated high school in 2010. In fourth grade, I saw the Twin Towers fall on TV. Our nation hurried off to war. I’m doomed to permanently mispronounce Iraq and Iran because I grew up sitting criss-cross applesauce at the podium of a cowboy president. And while I avoided some of the nastier bits of nationalism, I was invested in the American project and believed in the essential goodness of our institutions. I knocked doors for Obama at 15, bought and sold ‘Change We Can Believe In’ to anyone who would listen, carried a pocket constitution (lol), and even appeared in a ‘rock-the-vote’ style public broadcast.
There was something magical about the 2008 election. Arundhati Roy gives a crystal clear distillation of what made this moment electric in The Architecture of Modern Empire, “I watched the night [Obama] won. And I wasn’t so concerned about who he was as much as to see the happiness on people’s faces and to know that, whatever will be given to them, they wanted change. That they wanted something else means a lot, because the last time they wanted the same guy back, which was devastating for the rest of the world.”
The people wanted change. That mattered.
I was taught that our nation’s founding brought together the best of Enlightenment thinking, tapping an almost supernatural wisdom to assemble our founding documents. In reality, such charters were the work of cider-drunk twenty-somethings, with a rough understanding of the philosophies of a few French layabouts, and largely preoccupied with the needs of a handful of international corporations and human traffickers. In my mind, there’s little daylight between the founding fathers and the 8-top party of coke’d out Wall Street guys at an over-priced sushi bar. All false gods have their origin myths.
Today, turn on the news (or rather, open up Instagram) and you’ll see an onslaught of terror. The Supreme Court is on a rampage of turning over horrific rulings — from criminalizing poverty, to handing blank immunity checks out to presidents. Project 2025. The accelerating genocide of the Palestinian people. Cop Cities popping up in your backyard. Climate disaster is not our future: it is here. A sitting president in obvious mental decline. Surveillance, censorship, state violence of every kind. All of these presented alongside the Democratic Party’s refrain: We must save America! We must save democracy!
I recently watched the movie I Saw The TV Glow.1 In the film, Mr. Melancholy — a tyrant moon — oversees a land of lies and shadows known as The Midnight Realm. The Midnight Realm seems real: a predictable, sterile logic, suburban little boxes made of ticky-tacky, so banal that all physical violence occurs off-screen. The Midnight Realm makes our subjugation average and makes our power an apparition. But reality is beyond The Midnight Realm. Reality is far more surreal.
America functions in this way.
The weakness of the people is normalized. We fetishize our powerlessness and wring our hands to say, but what can we do? I suppose we must vote!
Anyone who believes in their own power, in our collective power, in the possibility of a world that could be otherwise, is taken with the same seriousness as a ghosthunter. The illusions of checks and balances, a justice system, a republic are reinforced at every turn. They are repeated over and over as a numbing hex, as if stating them again will make them true.
But you know better.
You feel in your bones that none of this is real, that the presumed order and decorum of our present world is but a cobweb to be brushed aside.
Already this election cycle, someone has sent me a message explaining why I must vote for the Democratic ticket. The message came with the usual hallmarks: an accusation that I am ‘sitting out’ from the democratic process, a reminder that my rights are up for debate, and the pronouncement that Trump is a really, really, really bad guy. Liberals cling to the mythology that folks who aren’t voting for their candidate are ‘low information’ voters or somehow disengaged from politics. This is a foundational principle of their own Midnight Realm: I am very smart and I am very good.
It is this respectability curse from the Midnight Realm that makes them say, I pray for the speedy recovery of the same guy I believe is ushering in an era of Christofascism, for political violence has no place in our society! Yet this same curse allows them to entertain the political justifications for murdering nearly 200,000 Palestinians, surely you believe Israel has the right to defend herself?
Trump is indeed a really, really, really bad guy. But where the Midnight Realm would have you understand Trump as an aberration from the American Project, even a cursory understanding of our history would tell you he is the pinnacle of the American Dream. And that dream is a nightmare. And while the majority of our political violence happens “off-screen” — at the hands of prosecutors and petty bureaucrats — in courts, prisons, eviction notices, medical bills, school lunch debt, etc — it is no less evil. Fascism has been here the whole time. Perhaps the barrel of its gun was not under your nose until now, but I assure you, others have taken those bullets.
This summer I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about pirates. (And not just because I’ve moved to Pittsburgh — but I should say: Let’s Go Bucs!)
I picked up Graeber’s posthumous work Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia. This book asks an intriguing question: how did pirate politics (particularly as they interwove themselves with the people of Madagascar) “inform the […] revolutionary conclusions reached by some of those attending those salons about the nature of liberty, authority, sovereignty, and ‘the people?’” I have loved imagining all those Enlightenment figures of the salons discussing the rumored pirates of the high seas. Additionally, I read Kung Li Sun’s Begin the World Over which imagines an alternative history where enslaved Africans, Indigenous folks, and a few pirates — inspired and emboldened by the struggles in the West Indies — come together to overthrow the newly formed United States of America.
Briefly, pirates ruled the seas, terrorized imperial forces, gave refuge to those hated by the State. Many pirates sabotaged the trafficking of enslaved Africans. Legendary pirate governance — both at sea and on shore — was roughly democratic and egalitarian. They merrily mutinied against and plundered colonial captains and enterprises. Their deep understanding of their fugitive nature and mortality gave pirate crews both courage and levity. Their black flags served as a memento mori, an understanding that they were doomed — and a calling to laugh and loot until the end.
Pirates shattered the illusion of The Midnight Realm. “The toothless, or peg-legged buccaneer hoisting a flag of defiance against the world, drinking and feasting to a stupor on stolen loot, fleeing at the first sign of serious opposition, leaving only tall tales and confusion in his wake, is perhaps just as much a figure of the Enlightenment as Voltaire, or Adam Smith, but he also represents a profoundly proletarian vision of liberation, necessarily violent and ephemeral.” As the United States breathes her death rattle, pirates could teach us a few things about sticking it to the empire amid rampant political violence. Here’s what I’m taking with me —
Join a crew. Existential and physical death for a pirate is to be marooned, left alone with no crew. To be alone against the empire and the elements is to be as good as dead.
Stay menacing. While pirates were prepared for a fight, they weren’t as bloodthirsty as their reputations claimed. Unsurprisingly, this mythology protected them. The American left should take notes. It is strategic to bare our teeth. In a political order predicated on violence, respectability won’t get you far.
Organizational adaptability. While the general structure of pirate life was quite democratic — there was a pragmatic allowance for pirate captains to quarterback in times of dire conflict. “Pirate captains often tried to develop a reputation among outsiders as terrifying, authoritarian desperadoes, but on board their own ships not only were they elected by majority vote and could be removed by the same means at any time, they were also empowered to give commands only during chase or combat, and otherwise had to take part in the assembly like anybody else. There were no ranks on pirate ships, other than the captain and the quartermaster (the latter presided over the assembly).” This country is a big place with a lot of people and many urgent needs. The current order is in collapse. What decision-making structures will best serve the people? How can we balance our ideals with pragmatism? If these questions feel stressful to you, just remember we don’t have to start from scratch. The world has seen revolutions of varying degrees of success. It’s worth your time to read and study past strategies.
Loot. Pirates broke laws, disrupted international commerce, and plundered the riches of an empire. Elsewhere Graeber writes, “Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” If our people need something: a home, healthcare, food — we should take it. We’ve seen our people occupy city blocks and forests and universities. What would it look like to occupy an apartment complex? a grocery store? a hospital?
Embrace both life and death. “Discipline on board sixteenth-century European ships was arbitrary and brutal, so crews often had good reason to rise up; but the law on land was unforgiving. A mutinous crew knew they had signed their own death warrants. To go pirate was to embrace this fate. A mutinous crew would declare war ‘against the entire world,’ and hoist the ‘Jolly Roger.’ The pirate flag, which existed in many variations, is revealing in itself. It was normally taken to be an image of the devil, but often it contained not only a skull or skeleton, but also an hourglass, signifying not a threat (‘you are going to die’) so much as a sheer statement of defiance (‘we are going to die, it’s only a matter of time’)—which crews making out such a flag on the horizon would likely have found, if anything, even more terrifying. Flying the Jolly Roger was a crew’s way of announcing they accepted they were on their way to hell.” In my faith, we believe in the deep power of remembering that we will one day die. From Ash Wednesday, the Cross, and our collection of skeletal relics, Catholics understand that reflecting on our mortality provides moral courage, clarity of conviction, and prompt action — all necessary components of a good and meaningful life. Our comrades should consider what keeping death before them might gift their political life.
Final thoughts: on July 24th I was in DC to protest Netanyahu’s appearance before Congress. The police were so very quick to violence, it felt unlike any action I’ve ever attended before. I was scared.
I tell you this because I don’t want to be scared anymore.
We live in the belly of the beast. So much evil has taken the world, birthed from our depraved nation. I am just beginning to understand what this birthright means for me, for my duty to the world. The future is terrifying, but I don’t want to be scared. I want to be resolute, disciplined, and ready for what is next. I am reminded of how Tipu’s Tiger ended their article “Dangerous Allies” in Taking Sides,
“The choice is not between danger and safety but rather between the uncertain dangers of revolt and the certainty of a world with no future.”
I want to write about this movie soon! If you saw it, let’s chat!
I'm really into this!