Salt and Burn the Bones

Chris,

You like horror stories, right? I’ve got a scary one for you, but you’ll have to figure out how it ends on your own.

It goes like this: There’s a monster who harms people for his own gain. This isn’t the kind of monster you could identify with, like Frankenstein’s creature, Dracula, or the Wolf Man. Those European traditions fail to capture this monster’s malevolence.

Indigenous folklore offers a better analogy with the wendigo, a creature of insatiable greed, whose personification of selfishness never satisfies his hunger. Worse, this monster causes his victims to feel a similar hunger, driving them to eat one another, spread disharmony, and destroy the very community that supports them.

You know a Run the Jewels line that evokes this monster and its victims: “Cannibals on this island, inmates run the asylum.”

This monster seems inevitable and impossible to defeat; his influence grows, spreading far and wide. But, in the story’s third act the survivors realize something… the monster is simply sowing chaos so no one will notice how weak he actually is. 

This small piece of knowledge gives the survivors some confidence, but they’re still left with the question most horror story characters face, “How do we continue to survive, much less defeat this monster?”

Okay Chris, how does the story end?

If it’s not obvious by now, it’s me, your future self. I’m writing to you in February of 2029. We’re 51 years old now.

Don’t concern yourself with how I’m able to send an email to you four years in the past. I won’t spoil it for you. But I know you – like many Americans in your time – feel frustrated and helpless in the face of the words and actions of the newly elected presidential administration. I’m writing to remind you not to be paralyzed by that feeling. 

You refuse to use his name anymore. He’s not Voldemort; you’re not worried the invocation will summon his wrath. It’s simply because the very usage of those five letters in that particular order feels like someone slid a tiny, cold, dog turd under your tongue.

You reason that attention is the currency he values the most. You want to take that away from him, even if it’s in a petty way. Instead of his given name, you refer to him as The Bad Penny.

You recently looked up the percentage of people who voted for him in relation to the total population of the country. Right now, when you read polls or approval ratings, it may seem like you’re caught in the crossfire of a civil war with equal troops on either side. But only 25% of your fellow citizens actively support his sociological cannibalism. Even though he wormed his way back into office, the Bad Penny is weak.

No matter what happens, those 77 million people aren’t just going to blip out of existence like in a Marvel movie. Long after he’s gone, most of them will still be around. One thing I can tell you is that when this monster dies, his victims do not return to their innocence.

If the wendigo is the monstrous analogy we’re going with here, you might wonder why I’m breaking the sections of this letter up with stills of villains from David Lynch films. Do you remember back in April of 2020 when the Bad Penny’s first administration announced its “Council to Re-Open America” to strategize how to lift pandemic lockdown restrictions? At the time you thought that group was staffed by people so vile, the only worse candidates would have been the ghouls Lynch pits his protagonists against. This is how the Bad Penny’s familiars appear to you since: abusive, amoral, cruel, corrupt, menacing, and selfish. With Lynch’s recent death, you can’t think of better visual signifiers for these minions.

Think about how angry and hopeless you’ve felt the last few weeks, Chris. Now remember that you are white, cisgender, male, straight, middle-class, and middle-aged. You may not be wealthy, but you still hold most of the privileged identities in this stupid society. You can cross borders, play sports, and access health care anytime you want. When a cop pulled you over the other day, you didn’t worry that he might shoot you.

Imagine how much worse the people who don’t hold your privilege must feel. Now remember that dejection is exactly what the Bad Penny and his cronies want from all of you.

Some of the people you’ll share this letter with are under much worse circumstances than you are. They may be outraged because there’s so much happening all at once. This letter may not include an issue close to their heart.

It’s okay that this won’t be perfect. You are a single, subjective, human being who is doing the best you can. Even though we’re writing this under the ridiculous conceit that I’m four years in your future, the point of this letter is still primarily for you, because you need someone compassionate to validate the ideas in your head. Sharing it may be helpful for some, but they are going to need to fill in the gaps on their own.

This brings to mind the lyrics to another song you know well, Propaghandi’s “Resisting Tyrannical Government.”

And yes, I recognize the irony
The system I oppose affords me the luxury of biting the hand that feeds.
That’s exactly why privileged fucks like me should feel obliged to whine and kick and scream
Until everyone has everything they need.

The gist is, despite your concern that you won’t be perfect, you still want to do something. You want to go beyond survival and somehow defeat the monster.

Last week the Boston Globe noticed that it’s time to look beyond street protests to fight back. That’s the difference between Boston and your former home of Portland, Oregon. In Boston, “the focus is centering on direct action, such as filing lawsuits, helping migrant families resettle or fight deportation, or staffing phone banks to pressure lawmakers to push back.” Boston’s resistance knows their enemy and exploits that insight to hit the Bad Penny where it hurts. 

In Portland, it’s smashing nonprofit windows, destroying libraries and chiseling away at whatever minimal community alliances have formed on the left. That kind of activism didn’t solve anything for the last eight years and it certainly won’t now. It drives the Left into petty feuds, gives the Bad Penny’s disciples ammunition for their disinformation campaigns, and places a bullseye over organizations that could be allies. This self-indulgent illusion erects walls instead of building bridges, demoralizing those who could provide the resistance relief, instead of inspiring them.

So Chris, what are you going to do? You’re not a politician; you can’t change laws. You’re not a lawyer; you can’t file lawsuits. At your core you’re a writer and communicator; what you do is observe what’s happening and write about it reflectively, usually as scary stories. Hopefully that motivates you, or maybe others, to participate in your own form of direct action, by identifying other possibilities for resistance.

That’s an important distinction right now in a flurry of chaos and disinformation. Because that is the Bad Penny’s strategy: to overwhelm you with enough bad news to keep you from participating in any meaningful mobilization.

The wendigos want to keep you glued to your phone, doom scrolling, instead of getting outside and taking action.

In these first few tumultuous weeks you’ve found it helpful to focus on what the administration does, rather than what they say they will do. They are two very different things.

Their actions are designed to destabilize whatever accountability remains in your government, so they can avoid responsibility for their actions while stuffing fistfuls of cash into their own pockets.

“Cannibals on this island. Inmates run the asylum.” Remember?

All the shit they talk? It is an attempt to “flood the zone” so you’re distracted and can’t recover while they’re skulking away with your wallet. They are and always will be grifters, relying on your outrage to distract you from looking too closely at what they’re palming away in their other hand. Their greatest trick is to make their grift seem inevitable, largely aided by America’s pitiful understanding of basic civics. 

To avoid their distractions, you’ve been reading a round-up of the news each evening on What the Fuck Just Happened Today. Then, in a bright orange, weatherproof notebook you record entries, categorized by topic: education, economy, immigration, human rights, health care, etc. You also created sections in the notebook for your city, country, state and federal representation, including the Bad Penny’s cabinet.

This does three things for you:

1. It allows you to separate the doomsaying and disinformation from the rest of your daily life.
2. It focuses your observation on the impact their actions have, rather than the spectacle and pageantry they’re putting on.
3. It makes it clear which representatives to contact and vote out of office if they don’t try to stop this.

Just over a month into the madness, here’s what you’ve observed:

When you review your journal the monster metaphor sticks. For the last twelve years the Bad Penny was a blustery ghost haunting society. But just like the villain in a Scooby Doo, Where Are You! episode, his creepy moaning and rattling chains are just diversions to scare away you blasted, meddling kids. It’s time to unmask the fraud and explain his dastardly plan.

The Bad Penny’s main focus is hacking and slashing through the federal government with firings and shutdowns designed to disable any methods of accountability that hindered him last time. It’s like a child cutting out his parents’ tongues so they can’t ground him to his room.

These cuts have already led to preventable accidents, like multiple plane crashes. You’ll face even more crises when he destroys your social safety net.

If the Bad Penny’s fatal flaw remains unexposed, your next crisis may be another pandemic, since the dismantling of your health system leaves your most vulnerable open to disease all over again. Or how about more natural disasters like wildfires, consuming your homes and sense of security? Do you think a hobbled government can stand up against the inevitability of earthquakes and hurricanes?

Are those not dramatic enough emergencies for you? What about an end to the human rights of your colleagues and neighbors? In addition to their suffering, these acts will lead to rampant street violence worse than what you saw in Portland in 2020. He’s already pardoned all the thugs who are loyal to him. They’ll be more than happy to show up with their Gadsden flags, tacky tattoos, cosplay body armor, and semi-automatics.  

Maybe if it gets bad enough America’s former allies will declare international war in an effort to liberate you or simply restabilize foreign affairs and their own economic prosperity. America has done worse to others for less. Will you welcome that alliance of Canadian, Mexican, Columbian and Danish soldiers as your liberators?

Their dismantling of the government goes well beyond any conservative argument for fiscal responsibility. It haphazardly demolishes the hierarchy of needs for all but the wealthiest people. This starts spiritually, stunting the progress of society. Next it inflicts stress, chaos, and uncertainty. Finally comes the physical harm: removing people's means of survival by cutting jobs, housing, finances, and accessibility to healthy, affordable food. 

Humans are forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned, stoking fear in your communities. Some are no longer allowed to do basic everyday things like travel, use a public bathroom, or play a friendly game of soccer. Suicide rates sky rocket along with the stress. Safety precautions on food, medical products, and tobacco are weakened so you’re more vulnerable to disease. Planes continue to fall from the sky. Militias battle in the streets.

I know what I sound like: “Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!” The point is, the world is less safe thanks to the Bad Penny.

It’s no coincidence that the owner of Twitter is hip-deep in this. They may pretend to be more subtle about it, but the owners of Facebook, Instagram, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Tik Tok are also wading into the cesspool. The people who own the devices and the platforms you use to express your outrage about this situation helped to fund it. At a minimum they each gave $1 million dollars to the Bad Penny to pay for his inauguration party. Rings have never been kissed as passionately as this.

It’s the end of The Magic Christian all over again. Businessmen are jumping into a pool filled with blood, piss, and shit to grab the “free money” floating inside. As Badfinger’s theme song to that film says, “Would you walk away from a fool and his money? If you want it, here it is. Come and get it.”

The tech moguls support the Bad Penny so they can reap more cash off us. Dollar dollar bill y’all. And as Douglas Rushkoff has pointed out, our institutions were already failing us because they couldn’t keep up with the pace of contemporary digital life. Any checks and balances that did exist have had their knees cut out from underneath them.

So, Chris, it’s not abnormal that you feel conflicted about using the products these companies sell, personally, much less professionally. You can’t forget that as a marketing professional you pay them thousands of dollars a year to recruit students for public higher education. It would be next to impossible to enroll this generation without them and you’re already aware of how difficult it is to exist in modern society if you try to quit.

So how can you survive the monster and his familiars? I’ll give you a hint. Look at the horror stories you already know. After a lifetime of spooky tales you know there are five proven methods to survive the well-known monsters who drink blood, eat brains, and possess bodies. In this respect, the Bad Penny is no different.

1. Give him what he wants so he’ll go away.
2. Run and hide.
3. Fight him, with knowledge of his weakness.
4. Join him.
5. Become him. 

On a recent episode of Chapo Trap House the hosts joked that the most common archetype for American men is the Miserable Coward. You don’t want to play that role, so methods one and two are out. Nor do you wish to be the Bad Penny’s familiar with method four or give up your identity to be turned into just another voracious cannibal with method five.

That leaves only method three: Do your homework and hit him with critical damage. It’s Supernatural monster hunting 101. Stake the vampire. Headshot the zombie. Exorcise the demon.

The folklore says to slay a wendigo requires piercing its heart with silver, shattering the remnants of the frozen organ, dismembering the corpse, salting and burning the bones, then locking the remains and shattered heart pieces in silver boxes and burying them in remote locations.

But those rules of engagement don’t apply here. Defeating the Bad Penny will be even trickier than killing a wendigo. There’s no grimoire full of lore on his weaknesses. But it’s clear it will require consciousness raising, non-violent protest, divestment from the businesses he and his supporters own and operate, and fundraising for continued lawsuits against absurd executive orders. Personal leadership is more important than ever before, not just from your representatives, but from the everyday people who are confronted by the chaos he’s inflicting.

I’ll leave you with one last piece of advice for the next four years. You’ll recognize it, because it’s what you would tell someone you hold compassion for, who is striving to make sense of this mess and do something about it. In fact, it’s the same advice you would give your own past self, the one who struggled to get through 2021 under quarantine and without a job:

Bad things are going to happen to you, possibly some of the hardest of your life. But you will survive. You’ll continue to make friends and have wonderful memories to hold on to.

Bad things are going to happen to other people, worse than what you’ll go through. But society will eventually come to its senses and correct itself.

Some people are going to frustrate the shit out of you. But in the near future you will barely think about their annoying behavior.

Don’t doubt yourself. You’ve worked hard to get where you are and should trust your instincts, no matter how many people disagree with you or ignore you. 

You’ll get through this.

C. Steinmetz

3/2/2029