I need you to understand that, at bottom, fascism is a story. It’s a disruption of order that calls itself order. It is a descent into barbarity while cloaking itself in superiority. The story of fascism doesn’t spread because it’s a good story— you don’t have to be a good story-teller to control a population: you just gotta get ‘em mad. Robert Penn Warren taught us that in his book All the King’s Men. Donald Trump is, in this way, an ideal catalyst for the story of fascism— not because he’s smart, worthy, attractive, or charming but because he knows how to get a person mad. That skill-set matters: if you know how to manipulate a crowd by tapping into their despair and turning it into righteous anger, you can get that crowd to believe any old story you tell ‘em. The price of eggs is going down. Affordability is a hoax. Your immigrant neighbors are eating your pets. Liberals are letting children get sex changes. Women who miscarry are murderers. Tylenol causes autism, and autism is “bad.” Only white men can lead things, by virtue of them being white men. The last seven sentences I just typed are absolute utter nonsense. But just look at the vile conduct these stories have inspired! Get the entire nation at each other’s throats, convince them politics is a blood sport, and then sow so much confusion and chaos that no one can see the dismantling of a democracy happening behind the smokescreen of domestic terror to really make a holistic plan to do something about it. So how the hell do we stop this? The first step, I’d like to offer, is for us to change the goddamn story. Bad things have been happening in the United States for a very long time, and people don’t intervene— either because they believe the violence won’t personally touch them (indifference) or because they don’t believe things can change (helplessness). Based on a person’s beliefs, they are moved to intervene, remain frozen, or justify the cruelty. As a rhetorician, I need you to keep something in mind: beliefs it comes from somewhere. Beliefs are a result of storytelling— a nebulous web of stories that often condition you to accept abuse and believe that you are powerless, when you could be standing in your integrity and rising up in collective power. So, if you want to know why the fascists are trying to control social media, news stations, legacy media, algorithms, film industry, and even writing itself: it’s because they’re terrified of people getting together and changing the story. So I sit here, a humble community college English professor, at the precipice of societal collapse, with an offering so simple it may seem laughable: this all stops the moment we start telling a different story about this moment, who are are, and what regular people can achieve when they work together.
Postscript: I wrote this late at night, without paragraphs or proofreading. I publish it, with all its glorious human errors, as an act of rebellion. This world tells us to manicure ourselves— in body, dress, and forms of expression. White supremacy wants us fixated on “perfection” to the point of body horror. I believe using ChatGPT to write is, among other things, its own kind of body horror. Writing isn’t always supposed to be perfect. Sometime perfection kills the message. That’s becausewe write not just to communicate but to solve problems, figure out who we are, and arrive at a sense of human values. The moment we valorize uniformity and praise it “perfection,” we weed out all the wild and wonderful things about our writing. We rip out the beating heart of storytelling. People who change the course of history are rarely, if ever, perfect people— they’re people who learn how to change the story. Don’t give up your glorious mind to large language models (AI).
grow wild — by flightlessblrbs
