(Note: I wrote this in the Fall of 2017)

“A society is only as free as its most inconvenient dissident.” – Caitlin Johnstone

M

M was in his late twenties; he was dumpy and bearded. He wore hiking boots, tan survival pants (the kind with many pockets up and down the leg and fabric that is made to dry quickly) and a blue parka. His backpack was enormous. He found me online, through a site set up to connect tutors and college students. It would be the only time I used the website. When I arrived to work with him—sight unseen—he sat in the side café—a Starbucks inside the larger chain bookstore, Barnes and Noble. M had a Norton Anthology of Medieval Literature and it was opened at “Lanval,” a long poem by Marie de France, a writer about whom I knew nothing. 

He looked perplexed—bewildered actually—and he would not make eye contact with me. In fact, his ball cap covered his eyes. He spoke as if he were from an imagined genteel class of conservatives from the New England area of another century. His speech was tonally flat: “I will need your help with my writing…it would be quite helpful if you could possibly meet this Saturday, if that is at all not too much to ask…I am sorry if you were angry at me today; I sometimes hold unconventional views in areas such as politics.” 

He certainly needed help. A victim of the Special Education program at a local high school, I would come to find he had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (a label no longer used by professionals) and held strange resentments. He hated the Boy Scouts, “for what they did to me.” He loathed the academic salary class (i.e. his professors) who he considered lightweight goons carrying the pitchforks for multiculturalism, anti-hate and anti-racism. These ‘agendas’ he found stifling, shallow and vane. To him his teachers and fellow students were “Social Justice Warrior assholes.” His mom and dad he loathed because “they never asked me to do anything. They coddled me. To this day, I do not know how to do anything.” He was more than a little angry.  

M called them "Social Justice Warrior assholes."

Initially he needed help studying for a course titled "The Literature of Passion," something I was on short supply of lately, seeing as I had lost my little sister (a social justice teacher herself) months previous, was drinking too much, and I worried about my now motherless six-year old niece. I lacked clarity about what I needed and wanted for my own life. In short—and I know this is getting lengthy—I was adrift in a kind of hopelessness and despair unimaginable to me before I myself returned to school to attain my M.A.

I always used Barnes and Noble, when I was an undergraduate, to read my assigned books for free, in a setting that allowed me to sit in a comfortable chair without too much distraction (perhaps some muzak) and drink coffee, one of the few things I spent money on back then. 

M had no real investment in reading. He sat slouched over the table. He was so nervous he could barely look up from the table. At the outset of that first meeting I thought certainly there would be no way we could meet again. We had barely made eye contact. We were in completely separate realities, and I had no idea what his had anything to do with. The only connection I felt was the visceral shame, the embarrassment at mere being; the inability to look at the world eye to eye because he felt he did not belong. I could relate to those things.  

I looked over the writing prompts he had for “Lanval,” a verse translation of a morality laity (whatever that was) written in the twelfth-century by a noblewoman writing under a pseudonym, translating Latin to English, but actually French because this was during the centuries France controlled England, so the dialect she wrote in is called Anglo-Norman (as opposed to Anglo-Saxon, in which Shakespeare and Milton wrote). 

These were basic moral stories, or fables, and in the specific case of Marie, they made love the focus for analysis of the individual’s relation to the whole. This, at least, was what the forward told me.  Here is a quote from “Lanval”: 

He to whom God has given knowledge 

And the gift of speaking eloquently,

Must not keep silent nor conceal the gift 

But he must willingly display it.

Within that kernel could bloom and blossom, if I were to put it on display, the entirety of my relationship with M, or lack thereof, which lasted two years. Therein exist ideas of charisma, courage, knowledge, ‘gifts,’ and obligation and responsibility, none of which would ever actually become the true fulcrum of our tutoring sessions, and this was because, as I noted above, M refused to read. 

In comparison, when I was an undergraduate English major in my year-long introduction to literature course, when it came time for my test on Chaucer, a random line by line translation, I joked with a friend that instead of studying the great poet I had been carousing the night before drinking Old English (a malt liquor). Fortunately for me, I think my Teaching Assistant liked me. In the middle of the test she slipped out of the room, seemingly to allow degenerates like myself to pull out translation guides and to not so subtly cheat. 

Up to that point it seemed I might fail the course. After that passing grade things got better. My T.A. liked the work I produced on “Henry the Fourth, Part 1,” Shakespeare’s play. I had fallen in love with the character of Falstaff and would write about his down-to-earth and worldly character traits in juxtaposition to the coddled and Machiavellian Prince Hal, who looked to the former as a father figure. I ended the year with a steady stream of B minuses. I learned to take notes. I learned to focus and my confidence grew. 

Falstaff

Things got easier in upper division courses and I grew to understand that what I was doing in college was learning to learn, for me an intuitive and performative task. I became enamored of Faulkner, not because I understood what his writing meant, but because it was so difficult to read, so carefully written; I thought reading him would somehow cast me into the echelon of people who understood big and important things. I read the other American modernists. I studied more Shakespeare. 

Faulkner

With M, these aspirations mattered not a whit. He wanted to be a writer but would not write on his computer because he was convinced that the Word program that he would be writing on had a ‘backdoor’ and therefore would be impossible to secure. He actually said that someone could crack into the computer, steal his writing, and publish it as his or her own. “Wouldn’t there be any satisfaction in the fact that your writing got published, even if by somebody else?” I asked. “I won’t be anybody’s cuck,” was what he would respond.

I was dumbfounded. What on earth did this guy see in the world as true? Why was I working with him?? 

After our first meeting—a meeting I was sure would be our last—I got up to dismiss myself, appalled at the guy’s inability to comprehend and contextualize literature, and as I was turning to head out of the bookstore, M said, his eyes turned to the ground, “so hopefully we can meet again at the beginning of next week?” This was a relief, as I was beginning to hate the kids I worked with in my ‘other job.’ 

M (actually, M’s parents) would pay my rent, I decided.

I did not think about M much after our first meeting. I figured working with him would be easy money. I thought that because he never did any preparation, I would never do any either. This approach worked. He wanted someone to hang out with. I met with him two, three, even four times some weeks for two-hour meetings at the Barnes and Noble café. Eventually we moved to a donut shop because he felt more comfortable there. The Barnes and Noble café was often crowded with shared seating. 

It was at about the end of our first semester working together that M told me about his Asperger’s diagnosis. It was also at this time that I started to become aware of the online world he inhabited. I learned about Pepe the Frog, the ‘Trump alt-right’ meme; I learned about PewDiePie, the online celebrity gamer best known for his provocative pushback against European speech laws; I realized that M was infatuated by Sargon of Akad, a Youtuber who hosted a regular podcast who considered himself, like many of these ‘new’ conservatives, a Classical Liberal. He told me about Tommy Robinson, a British Brexiter who had been taken to jail for teaching his bulldog the Nazi salute and posting a video of it doing so online.

Pepe the Frog

All of these people and names were new to me. Before meeting M I had happened upon a regular blog by an autistic writer who was also a self-labeled ‘Burkean Conservative’ (a follower of the English philosopher Edmund Burke, who wrote a famous treatise critical of the French Revolution) and a Druid. This guy sometimes wrote about politics and, when he did, he had an uncanny way of clearly explaining the populism sweeping the western world. Unlike almost everyone I interacted with in my world—family, friends, colleagues—I had been exposed to, or at least I was beginning to feel drawn to a different understanding of the political landscape for the Trump era. I was fed up with holding out hope in the specific political paradigm of Corporate corruption and the all-out militarization of everything that had lead us up to the moment. I could no longer see the relevancy of liberalism. I always craved tradition, even though I was vehement in my ambivalence towards authority. I had become entrenched in my refusal to entertain political solutions that existed within the paradigm of Clinton-Bush-Obama (birthed, I suppose, by Reagan). I assumed the Occupy Movement would be coopted and destroyed from the inside, and it was. I now see the Occupy Movement as an odd normalization of the sad fact of homelessness in society. We are living in a post-political reality. 

M was turned on to politics with Occupy. He was outraged and noticed a shift in what took place amongst ordinary people because of the financial turmoil in 2008. I was astounded by that moment too. Unlike M I had already gone through the school system and because I went to school in a progressive, liberal town, the politics I learned to recite without thinking related to race and gender and class and sexuality and the importance of questioning the hierarchy. In other words, at the same time the economic reality created atomization: the internet, Neo Liberalism and then the war or terror, students were being told to think only of identity. It was bizarrely dystopian, and I saw it in the mid 1990’s. 

So just as the fellow elected to lead a progressive, social justice minded coalition took his first opportunity in office to do something about the ‘hierarchy’ and absolved the Corporate fat cats at the very tip top of the hierarchy of any wrongdoing and not only absolved them but rewarded them for their egregious behavior, he helped set things up so that they could mess everything up again. You see what I am saying about a shift. Obama was unprecedented in that what he represented as an individual—good or bad—and what he did to keep the paradigm of war and corruption and inequality afloat simply does not lead one to trust or even want to participate in the system at large.

In other words, M is not an idiot. He saw all this. What he turned to resulted in Trump. It was not Russian bots or Wiki Leaks that elected Donald Trump. It was people like M: disaffected, open to new ideas, disappointed and more than a little dissatisfied. What got Trump into the White House was the before mentioned hypocrisy in combination with a corrupt political establishment in combination with the Internet. Let me explain what I learned working with M. I learned that the more isolated we become and the more we are expected to be individuated with no concern about community in the local sense, the more we turn to these things elsewhere. The most convenient place to turn for community—a sense of belonging—happens to be the Internet. It is convenient. It is anonymous. It does not require a lot of responsibility nor does it require accountability. Thank god for Al Gore, right?

M was a gamer, another aspect of the online community that I knew nothing about. Yes, I played video games when I was a kid. Not online though. Today people play online and they also communicate via chat while they play. Furthermore, a whole breed of celebrity Youtubers has grown out of the gamer culture. These folk record themselves playing video games and their cultural commentary makes them their lifestyles. They are paid, as far as I can see, to play video games and say provocative things. The ethos that was the very fabric of America one hundred-fifty years ago when the French writer de Tocqueville traveled the country and recorded what he saw has completely disappeared. What de Tocqueville saw was that Americans operated in community. He saw that politics was diverse and that people formed coalitions in order to get things done. Americans were communitarians back then. 

Alexis de Tocqueville

M's lifestyle and opinions slipped out over time. Some things startled me about M. He had reported one of his professors to the Dean of Student Affairs on more than one occasion for what he called her oppressive politics. He secretly recorded in-class discussions he claimed were biased and anti-Trump. He claimed one of his professors said she would “kill him” on the day of the 2016 election if he argued against her pro-Social Justice Warrior stances. While I took her behavior to be familial playacting, M, because he is on the autism spectrum, could do nothing other than take her statements as a threat. 

To me it was all very ironic. Here was a kid who had been taught from day one in his educational experience to advocate for justice, equity and fairness; but he was being told his opinions did not count, that he did not matter if he did not hew to the particular line of argumentation going on in class. Critical Theory, to take just one example, is theory after all but is taught as scripture by some professors. More pointedly, if the right wing represents the vertical and the left represents the horizontal then the two are meant to balance each other. It sounded to me as though there was not much balance in the ideological perspective M attributed to his teachers. If a pro-Trump student can be derided as a fascist, why is it not ok to question a pro-Sanders student who claims to be a Communist? Which ideology has done more historic harm? That depends on who you ask. In all fairness, both have been egregious.  

This is not to say I support one or the other (Trump or Sanders). The latter seems far more in touch with the political realities of the past century, while the former might be more in tune with political dystopia  here today. It’s hard to say. Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, compares the online video gaming community to the ‘Old Bowling League,’ or a Hollywood version of a Western Utopia that never was, whose “angry voices, properly directed, have lengthened political-power.” He claims that he knew early-on that the comment sections of the Gaming World, “could be weaponized at some point.” At least some of these are the people who voted in the populist surge that brought Donald Trump. 

I do not like the police state. I do not support politicians who take money from weapons makers. I do not support the expansion of the US military. In this respect, I do not see that there would be much difference between Trump and Sanders. Socially, they are different. As people, they are different. I would have a far easier time in relation to Sanders, I suspect. As leaders I cannot know who will get the ‘better’ results. It seems this kind of information is always controlled. History writes and rewrites itself. It is a mass of entanglement, of mis- and dis-information. What is and what has been cannot truly be untangled without the collective intent to include dissident voices.

In this sense, I knew M needed to be heard; and, over time, he became a dissident voice I listened to.