Notes on week one

So ends day one of SWAMP and week one of my experiment in serializing it for you all. Thanks for reading, as always–this is an easy thing to say, but if you’ve never been on the other side of the keyboard, working your shit out in real time, you probably don’t know how deeply felt it really is. I hope you continue to hang in there, and I continue to publish on the schedule I laid out, rounding out each week’s posts with an extra chapter while we get closer to current events. SWAMP’s remarkably unlikely to match the real-world calendar and unfold in anything like real time, but within a couple of weeks we’ll be getting towards more recent backdrops.

Which sort of raises one of the nagging ongoing questions of my whole basic effort here–why Trump? Why now? In real terms there’s some risk to choosing to mire my characters in very current events, both in terms of vague concepts like “legally actionable”¹ , but also a question of the shelf life that offers. Writing something that riffs on now-current events extremely closely might not look that interesting in six or nine months, nevermind to readers in some undefined perpetuity.

It’s not something I have a good answer for, which is to say, it’s not the sort of intentional strategic plotting choice writers sometimes make, it’s just what I felt like the story needed to be. Stories draw inspiration from many different places, and even the term “political” attached to a narrative can mean different things to different people. But most stories are, ultimately, about the author working out their own shit–whether that’s trauma, understanding history, or exploring ethical questions, that’s typically what’s underneath and behind our fictions.

If you’re as terminally online as I am, you may’ve seen the author Ta-Nehisi Coates trending again, despite having left Twitter somewhat famously and last seen writing mainstream Marvel Comics. His new book, The Message, dropped on Tuesday and far before that there were already quite a few critics eager to dig in and challenge his arguments. This seems to be exclusively driven by his vocal opposition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the longer-term occupation and settlement issues in the Occupied Territories² .

Being honest, I had to think long and hard about how I wanted to phrase the above sentence and whether it's worth risking alienating readers by touching on one of the most polarized debates going in the world right at the start of this project. The answer is I can only describe what I perceive to be truthful, that is that the government and military of Israel are engaged in genocidal action against Palestinians. That some people–friends, potential readers, even family–might disagree with me doesn’t let me off the hook of speaking out on what I believe. Fundamentally, this is the same reason I choose to make my characters specific to this time and this place, to fix them here, now, in precisely what is wrong with our current politics and the nascent fascist movement coming from the political Right.

Coates, right here and now, is offering an object lesson on the undeniable morality of standing up for what you believe is right, regardless of the risk to his career or standing. It’s a bit hard to imagine this position helping him get lucrative writing work or the kind of acclaim his previous writing, like The Case for Reparations, earned him. This week he went on CBS Mornings to talk about these issues and, from the very first question, was accused of extremism and antisemitism for not including all of the historical “complexities” of the conflict³ . 

As Coates keeps repeating, the issue is not complex at all, but stunningly simple–Israel, as currently constituted, is an apartheid state engaged in genocide. The causes and background, nuances and complexities do exist, but they don’t change those simple facts, which move us to ask if we, individually and collectively, are opposed to apartheid and opposed to genocide. If the answer is yes, then there’s a clear moral call to action that’s implicit in recognizing that.

What I find most fascinating about the exchange on CBS is that it’s a really good demonstration of the way passionate ideologies can blind people to reason. Coates gets asked over and over again why he didn’t include other information that’s freely available, or why he doesn’t believe Israel has a right to exist. He deals with that latter argument with a kind of stunning clarity that’s lacking in most political dialogue I see; first he reframes the question–no country has a “right” to exist, so why ask people to recognize Israel’s–then he clarifies his position–that no country that is explicitly an ethnocracy should exist. Watch it if you haven’t yet (link in footnotes).

Nowhere does CBS’ Dokoupil acknowledge or address these points, instead asking Coates why he wants to “topple the whole” of Israel by delegitimizing its “pillars” (I don’t really know what that means, either) and why a Jewish state “offends” him. Dokupil, it should be noted, is sort of definitionally mainstream media, a journalist and host on a morning news show on one of the big three networks, and while he does have personal ties to Israel (where his children live), his views are very well represented in mainstream media.

Interestingly, out on the fringes, Bari Weiss’ outfit ran a piece by Coleman Hughes dismissing Coates as:

Which is, I dunno, a pretty good description of writing when it works. I can’t really refute Hughes’ argument because it's paywalled and, well, life is too short to keep reading authors who have never impressed me with their craft or arguments hoping they will this time.  I’ve read Hughes' work before, as well as Weiss’, and have never really found their arguments compelling enough to require any rebuttal. Hughes seems to benefit from the bizarre affirmative action of the rightwing, which love to elevate conservatives who aren’t just white men, regardless of their bonafides, while accusing the mainstream/left of doing exactly that.

You don’t have to scroll long into the replies of Weiss’ tweet linking to Hughs’ piece to find quite a few people dismissing Coates as a half-baked intellectual and mediocre writer who has only found success by promoting a liberal agenda while being Black⁵ . For my part, right here and now, I'm less concerned with unpacking the pretty obvious racism of these kinds of claims than I am thinking about how limited the power of rhetoric is. 

I don’t know how to convince you that Coates is an incredibly skilled essayist and journalist if you’re convinced of the opposite. You can visit his wiki and see for yourself the critical acclaim he’s amassed over the years. For my part I find some of his work occasionally overrated, and it might grate that he gets acclaim regardless of my take on quality, but much of his work is staggeringly good; deeply-researched, passionate, well-argued, just incredible rhetoric.

That Hughes, or Weiss, or random internet conservative #890,128,409 might not think so shouldn’t matter, but it does. Because it speaks to the power of groupthink over rationalism, and how even the people who speak the loudest of wanting to let free speech and the marketplace of ideas sort out the good from the bad don’t seem capable of unbiased evaluation. (Weiss’ publication that I neglected to name earlier is The Free Press.) 

I’m not sure real objectivity is possible, but I do try my level best to be open to arguments I nominally disagree with and look for contrary evidence that might help me better understand my own beliefs. Growing up on the late aughts/early teens social media space, including message boards and comments sections like Coates’ at The Atlantic, helped me learn how to argue for what I believe in. How to spot the holes in my own arguments, and how to hunt up information that left me with greater understanding and a more confident commitment to my beliefs. Working out my shit on message board pissing contests all around the internet is where I learned how to write, argue, and think critically more than anywhere else.

The titular “message” of Coates’ new book, from the first forty or so pages I read and the interviews he’s given promoting it, is that narrative not only can change the world, it already does, shaping the world and our perceptions of it and beliefs, within it constantly. This is why, incidentally, Coates dedicates the book to young writers, who he charges with saving the world. I haven’t read far enough into it yet to know if he distinguishes fiction from fact, journalism from novelists or comic writers. But I know the last decade, but, especially this election season, have near-completely wiped out my faith in good arguments to change minds.

I don’t know if I’ll ever write anything–fiction or fact, journalism or comic script–that will convince anyone of anything; at the best of times I can maybe manage to convince my cats to eat their own goddamn food. But I believe in the power of narrative to shape our worlds and guide our understandings of it, rationally, emotionally, and morally. So as long as that belief remains true, I’ll probably keep trying this, or something very much like it. Thanks, again, for joining me in the work along the way.

1   I’ll get around to posting something along these lines later, but for now just suffice to say SWAMP is entirely and exclusively a work of fiction, wherever relevant I’ll try to link readers to the real world events which inspired the fictional events of the work.

2   I’m also struggling to understand how to offer convincing evidence of these facts to those not already convinced. Just this week Propublica published another investigative piece finding evidence that as early as this January, there were concerns in State about war crimes being committed with US arms by Israel, which were overruled to speed another arms sale along.

3   CBS Mornings: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the power of stories, new book, “The Message” aired 30 September 2024

4   Bari Weiss on Twitter/X linking to and quoting Hughes’ The Fantasy World of Ta-Neishi Coates, The Free Press, both published 2 October 2024

5   Racist columnist wrote racist column about Coates years ago, wants everyone to know, I guess.

6   Hell World: The Longstanding Battle of Pen Versus Sword, published 16 May 2022