The Bluestocking, vol XXXV: Getting high, getting hoaxed and getting erased

Happy Friday! A bumper newsletter today, after two weeks off. I went to a writing retreat, because the world needs more terrible screenplays, and to Bavaria, to see another Civilisation 5 wonder. (Three so far this year!)

Helen

The Drug Of Choice for the Age of Kale

It was the flailing that got to me. I thought of the girl whose parents had called Charles Grob and the Canadian kid who stabbed his associate in Iquitos. Any second now, I would be descending into the pit of my being, seeing serpents, experiencing my own death or birth—or something—and I did not necessarily want that to happen in a windowless vomitorium while a millennial in crazy pants had her first psychotic episode. Her yelling was getting weirder: “I want to eat sex!” I got up and went into the front room with the wrestling mats, where I tried to think peaceful thoughts and take deep, cleansing breaths.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to observe that the worst thing about taking drugs is having to spend time with the kind of people who take those drugs. Alcohol is a case in point.


We're The Only Plane In The Sky

There were two TV tuners, worldwide television tuners [at my workspace on Air Force One]. They were like old-school rabbit ears—UHF and VHF frequencies. We didn’t have the ability to tune into CNN, Fox, or anything else. It was the Today Show, the strongest signal that day, and they’re showing pictures [of the Towers], smoke billowing out. I saw the second airplane strike. I said, “Oh shit.” I just dropped everything and ran downstairs to get Colonel Tillman: “You’ve got to come see this.”

A great oral history of 9/11 from the point of view of those on Air Force One. Contains the mad detail that President Bush relied in local TV stations whose signal kept fading in and out as they flew over their patches. (As a chaser, this NYer story from 2002, about one of the people who died in the Twin Towers, is very slow but also beautiful. Have a tissue nearby.)


The Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theorists

The internet also made it easier to reach victims, and the Pozners became an early target for hoaxers. Veronique, who is a nurse, joined several parents in channeling her grief into vocal gun-control advocacy. One early conspiracy theory held that she was actually a Swiss diplomat named Veronique Haller, who once attended a United Nations arms-control summit. (Veronique is Swiss, and her maiden name is Haller.) Hoaxers quickly scoured family photos on Veronique’s online accounts and began dissecting them for odd shadows or strange poses, suggesting that she had been inserted into the family via Photoshop.

Those of you unlucky to know me IRL will have been treated to my terror that decentralised information, thanks to social media and the record low trust in journalism, has turned politics into a conspiracy theory jungle. This article on the Sandy Hook "truthers" - who want grieving parents to exhume their dead children to prove the whole thing wasn't a CIA set-up - won't make you, or me, feel any better.

Ken Levine reflects on Bioshock

Here's what I'd say. BioShock 1 is about Jews. I'm a Jew. If you think about it, Andrew Ryan, Sander Cohen, Tenenbaum, they're all Jews. Suchong is Korean. During World War II, Korea was brutally occupied by Japan. He's a guy who survived.

They're all survivors of oppression. And they don't come out of it heroes. Oppression turns them into oppressors. And that's the cruelest aspect of oppression. If you look at Andrew Ryan and Daisy Fitzroy, they're not that far apart.

Maybe people wanted me to write about a hero who rose above that. Elizabeth is the character I invented who does sacrifice herself to break the cycle. But I think most people are destroyed by oppression. I could tell a fairy tale about people who are ennobled by it. But in my experience, as a student of history, that's rare.

As the world burns, I've just decided to spend tomorrow playing Bioshock - it's the game that most makes me feel sorry for people who have never played a videogame. You don't know what you're missing! (For literary types, here's John Lanchester on Bioshock to reassure you that I am still a Serious Person.)

The amazing disappearing women

As one feminist remarked on Twitter, there’s a parallel here with the self-serving faux-inclusiveness of ‘All Lives Matter’, a slogan adopted by some white people in response to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign. The substitution of ‘all’ for ‘Black’ is an attempt to delegitimize the campaign’s focus on institutional racism by presenting it as narrow and exclusionary. ‘Why do you only care about Black lives? Shouldn’t we affirm the value of every human life?’ It’s neutralising the political challenge by reframing a specific problem as a universal one. ‘All lives matter’. ‘We’re all in this together’. ‘We don’t need feminism, we need humanism’. The effect is to make a problem of structural inequality–racism or class privilege or male dominance–disappear.

Deborah Cameron articulates why it will be a cold day in hell that I start referring to "pregnant people".

Quick links: How did a crap Telegraph tech blogger become a major force in the US election? (Side note: do not believe a word of any "fact" in this unless you personally know it to be true...) The lost generation of journalists. A documentary on the last days of hot metal typesetting at the NYT. Samantha Bee takes aim at the US media's coverage of Donald Trump. Lionel Shriver is typically contentious on cultural appropriation. I enjoyed this reflection on the Facebook v Napalm Girl brouhaha.

See you next time...