5 Handy Parenting Hacks for the Descent Into Fascism!
On Charlie Kirk, the fallacy of parenting advice, and connecting with teenage boys.
If you want to talk about raising boys in these frightening times, Come to a dinner and book discussion about Boymom in LA on October 23rd with me and model-author-advocate Paulina Porizkova. Email jill@happywomendinners.com for info and tickets.
There are also a few spots still open on my upcoming Memoir Plus course. The course starts on October 21st for 6 weeks every Tuesday night over Zoom. We will cover this extremely popular genre- memoir with an additional element of reporting or research, and learn how to tell our own stories, how to make them “bigger” and how to weave the two elements together. The price will include optional individual feedback from me on your writing , as well as a live Q and A with Shannon Welch, Editorial Director of Simon and Schuster’s Avid Reader Press. Cost for the course $500. Reply to this message for more info or to sign up. (I also have one scholarship place available for $150. DM if you are interested.)
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And onto the slow slide into authoritarianism.
My son had a section on his math homework recently about quadrant graphs, and now it’s as though I have been cursed by the evil quadrant-graph fairy and am seeing them in everything. Perhaps the most notable example has been in the reactions from the left to the Charlie Kirk shooting. (Though the same basic graph could be applied to many leftist causes that trigger the right.)
On the y axis we have political principles- on a continuum from “free speech is the thing most worth defending” to “violence is justified for political ends.” On the 𝓍 axis is a newer, murkier, and possibly more dangerous conceit- the question of what we are expected to feel about Kirk’s death, and what kind of public performance we are expected to make of our emotional state. On the one end of this scale is some version of “Kirk was a human being and a young father, and some public expression of grief and respect for this tragedy is a basic requirement of human decency.” On the other end we have variations on “I am not wasting the tiniest speck of sadness on the loss of that racist, misogynistic, gun-endorsing shitbag.”
For the record, I place myself at the tippy top right corner of the “free-speech-shitbag” quadrant of this graph, (which ironically is likely the same conceptual position that Kirk himself occupied about his own hobby horses.) I absolutely believe that Charlie Kirk’s inalienable right to say god-awful things without censorship or threat of violence is one of the fundamental conditions of a healthy democracy. But I also believe that this principle demands nothing from me emotionally in the way of sorrow for his death.
appears to be somewhere in the same quadrant and expresses her thoughts on the whole horrorshow beautifully in this essay.)Many many people have articulated the value system of every quadrant of this graph with deep moral certainty already, with the possible exception of the bottom left position of “family man- human decency/ kill the fucker anyway.” (Although in our psychotic cultural moment, I wouldn’t be surprised.) Everyone lives in a different social media universe, of course- a friend who is nearly two decades younger than me and moves mainly in queer Bay Area circles, is seeing pretty exclusively content from the bottom right position, (the “shitbag/ he deserved to die” quadrant.) But my own older, more moderate bubble is weirdly dominated with content from the top left, with a heavy emphasis on a ‘grief as basic humanity’ vibe. In this worldview even quoting Kirk’s own racist, misogynistic, homophobic words in this moment is somehow framed as a violation of basic human values.
From my vantage point up here in the free-speech/shitbag quadrant, this kind of decency policing can easily become its own threat to free speech, starting to mirror- and even subtly enable-the more terrifying free speech crackdowns on the right and from the administration itself. When announcing that it would pull Jimmy Kimmel’s programme, the TV station operator Nexstar Media Group also drew on the language of offence and decency norms, claiming that Kimmel’s extremely mild, barely there pushback was “offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse”. All around us, people are losing their jobs for simply quoting Kirk’s own misogynistic, racist or homophobic words, and the attorney general has apparently cancelled the First Amendment. I’m all for human decency but this is dangerous. Kirk was not a private individual. He was, by any definition, someone who opened himself up for political critique. Decency does not require shedding tears for a fascist.
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One way or another I’ve been thinking a lot about Charlie Kirk over the last few days (who hasn’t?) and why his particular brand of politicking held so much appeal to teen boys and young men in particular. Fascism and authoritarian movements have always drawn in disaffected young men, and fascists have always exploited this, and right now, America is full of disaffected young men.