Books I Read This Month: December 2023

Jeff Sharlet • Werner Herzog • Bruce Jay Friedman • Nita Farahany

The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (Jeff Sharlet)

On September 9, 2009, South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson screamed “You lie!” at President Obama, interrupting the State of the Union Address, stopping it cold momentarily. It was a shocking show of disrespect, and the holler was quickly labeled the “shout heard ’round the world.” If it wasn’t exactly actor John Wilkes Booth angrily directing threatening lines during a stage performance at audience member President Abraham Lincoln in 1863—Wilson wasn’t planning an assassination at a later date and quickly apologized—the energy had a similarly ominous tone. Something fundamentally shifted in the space of that brief, uncontrollable accusation, or more accurately, it was a highly visible manifestation of a shift that was taking place in the country. That the President was the first African-American head of state did not seem incidental. Three days later, tens of thousands of citizens gathered in Freedom Plaza in D.C. for something called the “Taxpayer March,” the most conspicuous example of what would become known as the Tea Party protests, which were bankrolled in large part by the billionaire Koch brothers, extreme right-wingers whose father was a founding member of the John Birch Society, a New Deal-loathing group of wealthy Americans who promoted racist theories and anti-tax policies, their leader Robert Welch infamous for conspiracy-driven bomb-throwing decades before that behavior came into fashion. At least in his heyday, a both-sides-of-the-aisle consensus was possible and a centralized media existed, making it fairly easy to swat away titillating lies.

Wilson’s jeering and the white panic on the Plaza weren’t the usual protests of a party out of power, and they were just the beginning of the breaking of convention. (Within months, at subsequent Tea Party protests in D.C., some in the mobs were spitting on Black Congresspeople, hurling racist slurs at them.) You could argue that these three days were the beginning of America’s Civil War 2.0, a soft opening but not too soft, one demarcated not by neat geographical lines or official proclamations, but the start of an ongoing, angry rift that’s only deepened much further over the last 15 years, driven by a new dynamic in which facts and alternative facts share equal prominence, a product of one of the country’s two major political parties going insane during the rise of new unfiltered media and the fall of older, curated ones. Not even six years after the sparks of that September, the ultimate taboo-buster and relentless Birther Donald Trump descended on an escalator to announce his ridiculous run for President, surprising most people, even himself, when he took his Simon-Cowell-as-a-strongman routine to the White House, willfully destroying any norms along the way which did not enable him, which were essentially all of them. When he lost his reelection bid, Trump led a violent coup attempt, one we were told time and again by journalists and politicos would not happen, even as Trump made clear what he would do and then did it.

Jeff Sharlet’s brilliantly written, heartbreaking 2023 essay collection about the potential unmaking of a union, The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War, is as good as any writing I’ve come across about the terrifying political decline of America over the last nine years, a collapse that was in the making for decades. The author doesn’t reflect too much on the Tea Party or anything else that led us to this low moment, but instead simply examines where we are now, that dark place, conducting his intrepid reportage during what’s regrettably got to be called the Trump Era. Having suffered a pair of myocardial infarctions at age 44, Sharlet is a man of fragile health trying to make sense of a volatile time. Much of his fieldwork is dangerous because so many of his subjects are deeply paranoid and heavily armed. He and a journalist friend commiserate about how they are in this era “received too often as enemies.” Sharlet doesn’t attend MAGA rallies to try to understand the psychology of people convinced that Trump is a savior or that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. What, exactly, is there to understand? He's more a witness, a designated mourner, of a teetering society.

The centerpiece and long title story at the heart of the book is a distillation of toxic waters as Sharlet engages right-wing extremists at revival tents, American Legion posts, and Lauren Boebert’s locked-and-loaded restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, while meditating on the death of January 6 protester Ashli Babbitt, who was shot lethally by a police officer when attempting to violently breach the Capitol as she and other Trump supporters tried to overturn the U.S. government. The military veteran and QAnon enthusiast believed she was risking her life to save her country from a stolen election, and that Trump was “one of God’s greatest warriors,” which, yes, is insane, but if enough people believe crazy lies, the truth can be elbowed aside. The author attends the “Justice for Ashli Babbitt Rally” in Sacramento six months after her death, standing among the members of white nationalist militia members and conspiracy theory peddlers in attendance. There people confidently tell him all manner of arrant nonsense, asserting that the “coup was a psyop” or that “no cops were hurt” during the insurrection, with Sharlet providing a running stream of fact-checking (150 cops were hurt during the insurrection). Despite being a very witty writer, he isn’t here to mock cranks at a right-wing rally à la a Daily Show correspondent, because there’s nothing funny about any of this political devolution. It has led directly to a lot of death, as it did during the worst of the Covid pandemic, and it may very well lead to a lot more. Babbitt’s mother speaks and you can have sympathy for her pain, having lost a daughter in such a public and shocking way, but white grievance soon manifests itself, as it does with almost everything related to MAGA. “Everybody knows Breonna Taylor,” she exclaims. “Everybody knows George Floyd. Why don’t people know who Ashli Babbitt is?” Of course, people do know who her daughter is, and those two Black murder victims weren’t doing anything illegal or violent when they were killed by police. Breonna Taylor was reclining on her couch at home after a hard day’s work when police wrongfully broke into her apartment and shot her to death for no reason.

“I feel like the revolution won’t start until something that happens that affects white men.”

Another tremendous essay, one that doesn’t address politics directly but is of a piece with the same malignant modern situation is “Ministry of Fun," a profile of second-generation Southern prosperity preacher Rich Wilkerson Jr., a millennial lunkhead who starred in his own Reality TV show, and one who’s so stunningly vacuous that he’s almost too perfect for this Instagrammable moment, a time when we’re experiencing, as Sharlet puts it, a “simultaneous explosion and collapse of meaning.” He’s a combination of Fear Factor (“Miami Gardens Pastor Will Eat a Cockroach if Enough People Attend Church Tonight”) and Keeping Up with the Kardashians—he officiated the Kimye wedding in 2014—and is more interested in the $100,00 sound system he installed in his Miami church then in any bible teachings. “The moral conversation is one I don’t get into,” he tells the author when asked a simple question about social justice.

Sharlet was a student of Michael Lesy, the author of the sui generis 1973 Gothic American history Wisconsin Death Trip, and he decides to tour the titular state, which is the basis for the section, “The Great Acceleration,” perhaps the most unnerving of the book’s chapters, one which suggests that we’re at the tipping point of mass violence. There’s more of the nation’s toxic mix of assault weapons, retributive Christianity, substance abuse, and conspiracy theories, but there’s also a twist the journalist wasn’t expecting. Roe v. Wade is overturned while he’s in Black River Falls, and he comes across a group of teen girls outraged by the Supreme Court decision, who believe that violence may be necessary if they’re to permanently secure their rights. “I think people should be prepared to arm themselves because it’s been shown to women that we can’t trust our government to protect us,” one college student tells him. A high school girl who's furious about the end of Roe notes that African-Americans and women have gotten a raw deal in the nation, but that an uprising that leads to a shattering of a corrupt system won’t occur until the pain is spread more democratically. “I feel like the revolution won’t start until something happens that affects White men,” she says.

Of course, something has happened to many white men in America. Something has affected them deeply—and white women also. That the majority have given themselves over to a fascist wanna-be like Trump in the wake of the Obama Presidency is steeped in racial resentment. It’s not as simple as that—there’s also opioids, a poisonous media arrangement, and Trump encouraging the worst impulses in us. He’s made it acceptable to flip off our better angels, made it fashionable to be a vile ignoramus. It’s “the end of shame,” the author notes of this hellish climate. A brick has been thrown through the Overton window, and now everything is acceptable and nothing sacred. I picked up Sharlet’s book of essays with an essay by another writer in mind. The late author Denis Johnson, in his forbidding 1995 Esquire piece, “The Militia in Me,” wrote about a schism in the country that was just beginning to emit scary warnings, with violent fractures possible. Johnson was worried about both the government and the anti-government militia movement in 1990s America when he wrote the chilling article. The violence of Ruby Ridge and Waco and the horrific Oklahoma City bombing had shocked the nation into realizing the terror within, so Johnson traveled the U.S. and Canada to find out how and why militias had come to be. Sadly, the unsettling subject is as timely as ever, nor is it limited to discrete militias—the emergence of the Internet helped the movement link up and galvanize.

Sharlet bookends the many portentous chapters with a pair of more hopeful ones about an earlier combustible time in America, the pre-Civil Rights Act era, providing portraits of Harry Belafonte and Lee Hays of the Weavers, two performers who found a measure of success using politicized music to fight injustice, to improve the lot of marginalized Americans expected to cower before guns and dogs. There is a season for such things. But there are also moments when you think you’re singing for progress, but you’re screaming into a void.•

Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir (Werner Herzog)

A fascinating dichotomy resides inside the mind of filmmaker Werner Herzog, who lives in fear of the whole of human knowledge disappearing and yet feels a strong antipathy to bare facts. If you use the d-word (documentary) in conversation with him in reference to any of his works, he will promptly, perhaps exasperatedly, correct you, asserting that some of his so-called documentaries are among his best fiction films and some of his nominal fictional films are his greatest documentaries. “Truth does not necessarily agree with facts,” he protests, preferring his “ecstatic truth,” an attempt to use literary and cinematic devices, even the stuff of dreams, to rearrange reality and somehow make it more real. “It takes poetry, it takes poetic imagination to make visible a deeper layer of truth.”

In his enthralling, entertaining 2023 memoirs, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, the German-American director recounts the undeveloped science-fiction film he planned to write with his friend Ryszard Kapuściński, the late, peripatetic Polish journalist who likewise had an often-ambivalent relationship with facts. It’s a shame most Americans know Hunter S. Thompson as the gonzo journalist, because he was a mere piker when compared to Kapuściński, who covered revolutions and coups, and was imprisoned dozens of times and sentenced to death on four occasions. The forces he reported on would have eaten G. Gordon Liddy and the Hell’s Angels alive, perhaps literally. The journalist was the uninvited guest who bore witness to the Machiavellian maneuverings of Haile Selassie, the Shah of Iran, Idi Amin, and other men who need no introduction, in times of usurpation and assassination.

This was the Herzog-Kapuściński elevator pitch: They would create a futuristic dystopia that wasn’t governed oppressively by jaw-dropping advances in machine learning but one in which human beings had been through some sort of existential shock, maybe more than one, and the greater mass of technological knowledge had been lost in the tumult, institutional memory of all kinds having blown away on the wind, in much the same way the genius Roman hacks which enabled aqueducts had been forgotten in the aftermath of that civilization’s collapse, and the great storehouse of knowledge in Alexandria had burned to embers, setting back human progress by millennia. The setting would be a hellscape reliant upon seriously reduced tools and infrastructure, with traffic jams lasting a week, water sold to the highest bidder and a wheelbarrow’s worth of currency required to purchase a single chicken. Reading would be a lost art, language a disconcerting drivel, and only the crudest conspiracy theories would command attention. It may not be quite as resoundingly Herzogian as some of his other unrealized projects—a staging of Hamlet to be performed in under 14 minutes by champion livestock auctioneers or the making of a film about the early Frankish kings with Mike Tyson, an autodidact on the subject—but it speaks directly to his anxieties over humans returning to a more feral state by virtue of the erasure of intelligence.

The act of forgetting—“act” is an admittedly imperfect word—is a leitmotif in this book. “How true are our memories?” the author asks, not quite sure on numerous occasions if what he’s remembering is completely accurate or if it even happened at all. “I don’t think it was a dream, although it’s always a possibility,” he writes of a childhood experience in which a bonkers number of weasels suddenly appeared behind the family house. Did his mother really fight off a witch who had him in his clutches when he was a small boy, a shocking event that cured him of his penchant for peeing himself? I’m going to guess “no,” but far stranger things really have happened to the filmmaker during his life. After all, he filmed at the foaming maw of an active volcano on Guadalupe, had to talk an Indigenous Peruvian tribe out of murdering his lead actor, Klaus Kinski (a truly evil person), and was shot in the abdomen with an air rifle while being interviewed in Los Angeles by the BBC. Of course, the consolation of forgetting, especially for someone with Herzog’s enmity for cinéma vérité, is that it allows the room for creativity, for moments of inspiration. It is a loss attended by surprising utility.

Herzog depicts himself as a shy-if-maniacally-determined man, one who happens to possess a killer Bavarian accent that, against all odds, became a familiar voice in American pop culture. He was given to sudden outbursts of rage as a child, episodes he didn’t put behind him until he furiously stabbed his older brother, Till, in the arm and leg with a knife, harming his sibling and nearly destroying his family. (When adults, Till evened the score by setting on fire the shirt Werner was wearing, a “joke” they both enjoyed.) Both his parents were early members of the Nazi Party. Herzog says his mother, a biologist, came to believe before the beginning of World War II that she had made a grave misjudgment, while his father wasn’t quite so remorseful. It’s hard to forgive either of them since the anti-Semitism fueling Nazism had been crystal clear from the beginning. In general, Dad doesn’t sound like a prize. A self-styled intellectual, he was something of a layabout who lived off the earnings of his wives and talked constantly about the cerebral magnum opus he was supposedly writing but never really was, making him a sort of Germanic Joe Gould.

In 1942, the year the future filmmaker was born, when the family’s home city of Munich was being bombarded by the Allies, Mutter packed up her boys and fled for the remotest Bavaria. There Herzog grew up in a town called Sachrang in the Chiemgau Alps, raised in a ramshackle abode that often lacked food, as well as a toilet and a telephone. (He wouldn’t make his first phone call until he was 17, just ten years before the moon landing, and cinema was beyond his comprehension.) He could have easily killed himself any number of times with reckless ski jumping or other lunkheaded stunts he cooked up with his brothers and friends, setting a pattern whereby Herzog (unwittingly or not) would seek out the exhilaration that results from surviving suffering and woe, a mainstay in his often perilous methods of filmmaking. After the disastrous Axis defeat, the family returned to Munich, and one of his neighbors was Kinski, a ranting madman a decade his senior. Despite bringing out homicidal urges in one another, they ultimately collaborated on five turbulent films, including Aguirre, Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, which remain among the best movies ever made. All that success came after Herzog, rejected by German film schools, taught himself the finer points of the art by reading camera manuals. He discovered that not knowing was sometimes an asset, making it impossible for his films to resemble anyone else’s.

When not tracing his career, which progressed initially in fits and starts as he labored mightily to push it forward like a ship over a mountain, Herzog writes on topics numerous and diverse: his move in 1964 from Germany to Pittsburgh to attend Duquesne University (“an intellectually impoverished place”), his escape from U.S. immigration officials to Mexico where he was employed as a rodeo clown treated roughly by bulls, his three marriages, an intense friendship with the nomadic writer Bruce Chatwin, his unlikely leading man Bruno S., experiences with hypnotism, and his affection for Trash TV (“the poet must not avert his eyes”).

What seems to engage Herzog most, however, is the technological revolution he’s lived to see. He explains this transformation in one section in agricultural terms. In his boyhood, he watched as fields were mown by hand with scythes, work not unlike that done by serfs in medieval times. As decades passed he came to witness machine farming, industrial farming with genetically modified seeds, and, finally, human-less robot farming. One day he was milking cows in rural Germany and then he somehow was directing a film in Antarctica about NASA astronauts starring actual NASA astronauts, as his life and work careered back and forth from high-tech hot spots to streets with no name. It’s been a transformative period of stunning speed, one he declares is unlikely to be repeated. But I think what’s coming will be bumpier yet; to paraphrase terminology from his longtime film-making friend Errol Morris, the world will become even faster, cheaper, and more out of control. Freeman Dyson wrote of a future not too far off in which he asked us to “imagine a world where whole epochs will pass, cultures rise and fall, between a telephone call and the reply,” which is certainly hyperbolic, but we should expect to endure a more disorienting churn than the current one. On some level, despite his assertions, Herzog agrees.

In one passage near book’s end, he foretells of a collapsed future, anticipating a culture with the light of humanities eventually extinguished, of a globalized Tower of Babel. The last language of capitalism, he believes, will be raving.

“I try to imagine the world without books like this one. For decades now, people have stopped reading, even university students no longer read. The development is the result of tweets and texts and short videos. What will a world be like with hardly any spoken languages, which are becoming extinct in their profusion and variety? What will the world be like without a profound language of pictures, where my profession no longer exists? The end is coming. I picture a radical turning away from thought, argument, and image, not just an approaching darkness in which certain objects can still be felt, but a condition where they no longer exist at all, a darkness filled with fear, with imaginary monsters.”

On matters more personal, this memoir is probably the most forthcoming Herzog has ever been, though even here he isn’t given much to introspection. The director loathes psychotherapy, believing it an enemy of creativity and a source of lasting discomfort, and would prefer not to closely examine his motives in art or life. For instance: His grandfather was an archaeologist who discovered old Venetian marble ruins, but an increasingly devastating case of dementia in his last decade buried all those treasures once again, at least for him. Does the filmmaker’s profound sense of disquiet over the loss of personal and collective memory stem from this cruel episode he witnessed early in life? No dots are connected. Another example: Herzog desperately wants to make a film about the now-deceased British identical twins Freda and Greta Chaplin, whose words, even their verbal stumbles and spoonerisms, were completely synchronized, a spectacular anomaly never recorded in any other case. Is it possible that part of the reason the director’s drawn so strongly to siblings so simpatico is not just because of their extreme psychological portrait but because of the often-tempestuous, sometimes-violent relationship he had not only with his own brother but also other surrogate brothers like Kinski? There was even a long glacial period with Errol Morris. These are questions Herzog avoids asking, if they occur to him at all.

Rather than engaging in self-contemplation, Herzog holds fast to his self-appointed role as an interpreter of collective dreams. He prefers to speak of the sources of his stories, about ancient cave paintings and opera houses being assembled in the jungle and those humans who convince themselves that they can befriend grizzly bears. He will take liberties in his narratives, believing that the greater reality lies beyond what we commonly think of as real. In this memoir as well as in his films, he makes a good case that in one way or another, his mad visions, and things much stranger, are all pretty much true.•

About Harry Towns (Bruce Jay Friedman)

From 1965 to 1975, a period in which American society was being shaken to its core in numerous ways by a large-scale progressive movement, with traditional gender roles among the customs being challenged, the unsparing satirist Bruce Jay Friedman was something of a poet laureate of male disappointment, the kind men experience and especially the kind they cause, the two situations unsurprisingly often interlinked. His were stories about guys who feared they wouldn’t measure up, and honestly they couldn’t even if you lowered the bar by several feet. In his breakthrough 1965 novel, Stern, the author follows the disquieting life of the title character, who moves his family to the suburbs, encounters various forms of threatening anti-Semitism, and tries awkwardly to preserve his dignity, to stand up to the specter of violence, something that makes him squeamish. It’s a work that speaks directly to the Jewish experience but also uses ethnic tropes to examine a broader reality about masculine insecurity, the same way that Francis Ford Coppola uses the microcosmic world of an Italian clan of “legitimate businessmen” in The Godfather melodramas to study the Iago-ish nature of American capitalism. Friedman’s 1966 Esquire short story, “A Change of Plan,” about a skittish man bailing on his new bride when he impetuously “falls in love” with another woman during the honeymoon, became the basis of the 1972 counterculture hit The Heartbreak Kid, a piercing comedy which sends up male immaturity while quietly doing double duty as an escapist fantasy for the many men who found wedded life stifling. His 1974 seriocomic novel, About Harry Towns, focuses on a seriously self-absorbed New York-based screenwriter in his forties going through a trial separation from his wife and young son, flailing around wildly for anything that will alleviate his profound unhappiness.

When we first meet Harry in the summer of 1969, he’s reclining by a Los Angeles hotel pool, too distracted by gallons of wine and a rash of recent hook-ups to pay much mind to the monumental blastoff of Apollo 11. He’s in L.A. on a studio’s dime as he does some sort of work that’s never described. Whatever it is, it’s clearly not consequential, but at least it (barely) pays the bills. At home on the East Coast is his estranged wife, who doesn’t want their marriage to fall apart, and a forgiving 12-year-old son whose very goodness makes Harry feel guilty. Dad tries to soothe his kid’s anxiety about the nuclear family melting down during a subsequent vacation together to Las Vegas, just the boys, but Harry’s narcissism—as well as his voracious taste for gambling and escorts—nearly leads to disaster. When he takes a break from the blackjack table, he brings the child to a gym to work out and fails to monitor the boy, who soon drops a weight on his face and is knocked unconscious. That he leaves the crying child alone that night, ice applied to his cheek, so he can return to the gaming tables, hoping to make up for all that he lacks, cannot be unexpected. (To try to make it up to the kid before they head home, he lets him play slots, which is illegal, of course, for a pubescent child.) So much of the trip is inappropriate because so much of Harry is inappropriate. “Why was he taking his boy to gyms and casinos?” he wonders. “Didn’t other fathers take their sons camping and duck-hunting? Next thing you know they’d be passing hookers back and forth.” When a recent one-night stand leaves Harry with an itchy STI, self-pity is all he can muster on a father-son bus trip to see a dam at the Nevada-Arizona border. “He felt sorry for himself, an about-to-be-divorced guy, riding out to a dam with crabs and a young boy.” It’s not that Harry doesn’t care for his son; he just cares more for himself.

Harry is aware that he’s on a “downhill slide,” and when he makes an honest accounting, he realizes that he not only knows a lot of dangerous riffraff but that he is dangerous riffraff.

What Harry loves most is an extravagance he can barely afford, a modernist bachelor pad in a “tower of steel and glass high above Manhattan,” replete with a king-size bed “recommended by Playboy magazine.” How he adores this set-up, free of the domestic responsibilities, which leaves him time to develop a ripsnorting cocaine habit and roll around on his majestic mattress with airline stewardesses, “tattooed hookers” and others. He’s mid-dive into a mid-life crisis, on a hedonistic tear, spending hundreds a week on blow, hanging out in seedy bars with shady characters and creepy drug dealers. In his lifestyle of endless scoring and using, he misses most of a pre-funeral ceremony for his recently deceased mother because he’s busy securing some extra-pure cocaine in a deal that drags on longer than anticipated. Harry’s aware that he’s on a “downhill slide,” and when he makes an honest accounting, he realizes that he not only knows a lot of dangerous riffraff but that he is dangerous riffraff. One time he spends all night feeding coke to a high school girl as she sits on his lap. And that’s not nearly the worst thing he does, not even close.

After his father unexpectedly dies soon after his mom, Harry, feeling bereft, returns for a spell to his incredibly understanding wife and son, kicks the drug habit, and begins jogging. It’s a healthy turn that proves fleeting, as domesticity doesn’t take hold the second time around, either, and, soon enough, he’s packing up and moving out again. (“He was unhappy, and that was enough for him.”) The erratic behavior commences once more, financial worries mount, until…Harry finally runs headlong into a wall. We were told earlier in the story that “there was just nothing Towns could do to control himself,” but sometimes life intervenes. The screenwriter begins feeling sickly and is diagnosed with a vaguely defined “illness of the blood” which will keep him sidelined for months with exhaustion. He should get better if he rests, but the festivities need to come to a halt. Now he has to sit with himself, no wife or son or parents or barflies around, no one to blame for his misery, and try to forge a better path. Harry may convince himself that the odds of a turnaround favor him, but you may feel convinced at this point that any corrections he attempts will be done, at best, in half measures.

His particular focus is on the intermingling of the cruel and unusual things men do and their guilt over how much worse they secretly wish they could have done.

There’s nothing wrong with men rejecting what society expects of them, choosing to live an independent life with few responsibilities, but there’s often a nasty, sexist edge that accompanies the rejection of such traditional roles, and Friedman focused on this scapegoating, which has manifested in our moment in the misogynistic manosphere. And to be accurate, the writer also benefited from portraying that hostility, providing a taboo thrill by saying aloud the reductive remarks that target women. After all, the subtitle of the aforementioned Esquire short story was this: “Dedicated to any man who has ever, for one fleeting moment or more, harbored the thought that his wife was not absolutely the most wonderful woman he ever met.” Not that he allowed men off the hook at all; Friedman clearly did not like many of his male protagonists, and it’s through their character flaws—selfishness, awkwardness, cravenness, etc.—that he was able to help birth black comedy, a style which mines humor from embarrassing and painful distress. His particular focus is on the intermingling of the cruel and unusual things men do and their guilt over how much worse they secretly wish they could do, playing on forbidden desires and visceral fears. You don’t want to confuse the art and the artist, but some of these very instances in About Harry Towns bear resemblance to episodes from the author’s own life.

In the novel, there’s an episode of shocking violence between Harry and motel owner, a brutish exchange of vicious acts that would have been easy for both to walk away from. Surprising violence wasn’t absent from Friedman’s life, either. In one infamous example, several years before this novel was published, the author quite literally butted heads with Norman Mailer at a party at the latter writer’s house, when the two literary heavyweights got into wild, skull-banging, haymaker-throwing brawl, with Friedman emerging needing a tetanus shot (neck bite). And Harry’s Vegas trip with his boy was inspired by a real-life jaunt Friedman made to Sin City with his eldest son, Josh, when the child was in the fifth grade. Josh confirms that he was allowed to play slots and did knock himself out with a weight in a gym, but that the trip was amazing and his dad wasn’t at all a reckless and cold figure. “It was a marvelous trip, I was in heaven,” he said. Josh and his brothers remember Friedman as a wonderful father, so either they suffer from collective Stockholm Syndrome or, more likely, dad just painted portraits several shades darker than they were in reality. So, why did the writer take life’s casual cruelties and make them worse? Is it simply because that’s where discomfiting comedy resides? Was depression driving his work? Is it because you don’t have to be guilty to have a guilt complex? Whatever the answer, this impulse to amplify the negative is the basis of Friedman’s influential art.•

The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology (Nita Farahany)

Even if America didn’t have a conspiracy-addled President who wasn’t exactly well-versed in science during the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, one who suggested crackpot ideas in the early days of the global scourge like injecting disinfectant into those afflicted to give them a “cleansing,” our fact-challenged Circus Maximus media culture and the many crackpots in its orbit would have made certain that bizarre conspiracy theories would soon circulate about the lifesaving vaccines that were miraculously developed in great haste, the more outlandish and empty theories were, the more likely they were to go viral. One of the most popular and pernicious of the blatant lies asserted that Bill Gates, who spent billions developing vaccines that would neutralize the virus, was doing so that he could actually introduce tracking microchips into people’s blood systems, allowing their movements to be monitored and brains controlled by him or the government. Gates, a truly bizarre mix of cutthroat business practices, thoughtful philanthropy and disgusting taste in friends, had done nothing of the sort, of course, but what’s truth, really, at this late date?

Of course, even fakakta conspiracies often contain a kernel of historical truth, if in a warped form. The asinine vaccine hokum can be understood as a mishmash of at least two very real events. One is the CIA’s shockingly unethical Cold War drugging program, MKUltra, in which spymaster Sidney Gottlieb oversaw the dosing of unwitting Americans with LSD and other narcotics, as a means to see if the human mind could be controlled, even programmed. (I reviewed Poisoner in Chief, Stanley Kinzer’s 2019 book on the topic.) The other is a dream of contemporary technologists, who have long anticipated the day when wearables would become implantables, when microchips could be installed in the human brain, supposedly supersizing intelligence and memory, but also feeding back information to the corporation providing the hardware, the way each Tesla automobile constantly conducts reconnaissance for Elon Musk’s parent company. It is the next-level progression beyond placing a smartphone in every pocket. “Eventually, you’ll have the implant,” Google co-founder Larry Page said out loud nearly 15 years ago, speaking of a minor brain surgery that would be nice, neat and affordable.

She’s not suggesting that consumers will soon be queuing up outside Apple stores to have a quick brain operation the way they do for the latest needless iteration of the iPhone.

So, yes, paranoia does often wear the fashions of the age, but as adults we need to be able to distinguish between a really dastardly plot by the CIA, a genuine desire by corporations to colonize our brains for profit and “progress,” and ridiculous rumors about vaccines that can get people killed—that have gotten people killed. That ability to employ a basic level of critical thinking during the age of neurotechnology is at the heart of Nita Farahany’s 2023 nonfiction book, The Battle for Your Brain, which covers the waterfront on the topic of cognitive liberty and the many threats it now faces. The volume sometimes veers off into directions that seem unnecessary—cryonics, transhumanism, “targeted individuals”—but oftentimes asks intelligent questions while synthesizing historical and contemporary ethical quandaries.

The author’s not proposing that consumers will soon be queuing up outside Apple stores for a quick brain operation the way they do for the latest needless iteration of the iPhone. She does, however, argue quite convincingly that soon enough a “large section of the population will routinely wear neural devices,” which doesn’t suggest that goofy Google Glass-style inventions will come into vogue, but that truckers and gamers and some others will be routinely donning headgear or wristbands embedded with EEG sensors, becoming pioneers in the process of fully opening the human brain to algorithms. “Commoditizing consumer data is the business model,” Farahany writes of Meta, but she might as well be talking about any number of super-powerful Silicon Valley corporations. As we’ve seen clearly this century, information extracted from consumers is the coin of the realm, and consumers don’t seem to mind if they receive convenience or a “discount” in return.

Farahany isn’t opposed to all neurotechnology. She’s come to believe it would be a positive if long-haul truckers were compelled by their companies to don headbands which can remotely alert the home office via brainwave data when fatigue is setting in and danger becomes real. As she points out, some train drivers on China’s high-speed rail lines are already required to wear such headgear. She understands the privacy issues but believes safety concerns to be greater. Certainly it would be great for epileptics to have the option to utilize a wearable or implantable able to alert them when a seizure is approaching, which can help them manage the condition with medication, preventing pain and distress or even death. There are now brain implants being used to successfully treat intractable depression. But clearly Meta didn’t blow through billions on its ill-fated AI experiment just because the company wanted to do well by doing good. This is a company willing to kill democracy if it swells the bottom line, and Mark Zuckerberg wants to harvest private information from your brain to gain greater wealth and power, and he’s far from alone.

The author writes early on about an experiment conducted on gamers which makes clear how neurotechnology could soon be used (and misused) in workplaces, marketing, etc.

Hackers could even install brain spyware into the apps and devices that you are using. A research team led by UC Berkeley computer science professor Dawn Song tried this on gamers who were using a neural interface to control the video game. As they played, the researchers inserted subliminal images into the game and probed the players’ unconscious brains for reaction to stimuli—like postal addresses, bank details, or human faces. Unbeknownst to the gamers, the researchers were able to steal information from their brains by measuring their unconscious brain responses that signaled reaction to stimuli, including a PIN code for one gamer’s credit card and their home address.

Yes, all that’s possible right now. Similar tech, even utilized remotely, can measure not only fatigue but also productivity, engagement, even happiness. You want your boss to know when you’re not feeling it, don’t you? Won’t you be pleased if companies are able to peddle the state of your emotions as if it was a credit score? Just the knowledge of surveillance alters behavior significantly, encouraging obedience. Farahany references the work of Dr. Elizabeth Stoycheff, whose experiments on mass surveillance have shown that those who believed they’re being watched to be much more reluctant to share nonconforming views. Thousands of workers, including some at Amazon and Tesco, are already wearing wristbands that monitor them.

Politics will naturally become very interwoven with neurotech, a process that’s already begun. Electrical engineering professor Howard Chizeck tells the author that he could show photos of politicians to people wearing brain-computer interface devices, read their opinions without asking a question or saying a word, and then sell that information to pollsters. It’s the digital focus group, but this time there’s no room for fudging the truth. More menacingly, suspected criminals or dissidents could find themselves on the business end of such tech. Michael Flynn, the lunatic former high-ranking American military man who’s a few pillows shy of even Mike Lindell’s sanity, was on the board of directors of a company that manufactures brain-wave tech for governments, one that was happy to sell its goods to the KGB. Prisoners, forced to don headsets, can be shown a weapon or crime scene, and have their brainwave reactions read to see if “recognition”registers. Brain fingerprinting, as it’s called. Say goodbye to messy waterboarding. Such progress! (Whether the company Flynn was involved with has hardware that’s worthwhile is up for debate.)

We already have machines in our heads hoovering up all sorts of data, even if they’re not literally there yet. If we ever get to the point where a brain chip could actually significantly increase intelligence or memory, it will enter into mass use rapidly, regardless of any concerns that currently exist. If, say, China can add IQ points to its citizens, every other country that can afford to will follow suit. Even without that “great leap forward,” neurotech will become an increasingly larger part of our reality. As the author writes, “with widespread adoption of wearable neurotechnology, adding our brain activity to nationwide identification systems is a near-term reality.” One of her suggested prescriptions, adding “nutrition labels” for devices to let us know how they’re using us as we’re using them, seems a weak balm, but she’s right to worry about the inability of law to keep up with technological change. It may be even a greater worry that so many U.S. citizens don’t seem to care about trading their info for trinkets, as we’ve seen clearly in this time of surveillance capitalism, when people are eager to live in public, not just accepting being watched but longing for it. Maybe in scary times like these, everyone wants a big brother even if it’s Big Brother.•