by Edward Champion

America is Dead, But We Are Not

The United States of America, as we have known it, is now dead. Here is what we must do to survive.

America, as we once knew it and as we once lived it, is now dead. The idiocratic will of a vastly illiterate and uneducated populace expressed itself yesterday at the ballot box. They opted to throw the great American experiment into the dustbin of history.

We had a good run.

Like many of you, I never thought I would see the day in which fascism would rear its ugly head in our once great democratic republic. And I am not going to sugar coat this. What we are about to experience will be more awful than even the most devoted cynic or the most prescient scholar can possibly imagine. There will be cruel and repugnant wars on people who are not white, male, hetero, cis, and wealthy. Women will become second-class citizens. We will see arrests and iniquities beyond our wildest imagination. We will see injustice and barbarism meted out on an unprecedented scale. And it will be ugly and callous and shocking.

We will see many people we love die and disappear. Some of us, including me, may not be here in five years. Because they are going to go after the most outspoken voices. Be prepared for many of the prominent figures you now trust to sell out to the new order. Because they will do everything they can to stub out the most vital lights. And they will succeed to a large degree.

All this is going to happen, whether we like it or not.

The vile chowderheads and uninformed fuckwits who decided to destroy the considerable promise that our nation once possessed will also feel the evil implications of their flippant choice. Even after it is too late, they will fail to understand how we got here. But make no mistake. They were the ones who got us here. They are the ones who are the true enemies within. They are the ones who cannot be trusted. It is now abundantly clear that there are two Americas. Those who are on the good side – and there are still many here — are now the minority.

Most people will keep their heads down. They will not be up to the new challenge. And they will come to accept the new state of affairs. Many of these self-serving cowards will casually report anyone who sticks out to the new authoritarian regime and it will be as natural as the manner in which they voted for this unhinged madman, who will likely die before his term is completed and who will be replaced by a younger and more dangerous bastard legitimized by the likes of Ron Howard and the mercantile opportunists at HarperCollins.

But we must not remain silent. Yes, the new American existence will be fraught with peril and danger and disaster. Prices will go up. MAGA brownshirts will roam the streets looking for enemies, even in blue territories. People will be detained. But we cannot remain silent. We must continue to fight and speak out, even if it means losing our lives.

Yeah, that’s the new American existence. I’m not happy about it either. But if the alternative is pledging fealty to a despotic felon and rapist who possesses no guardrails, then I can think of no other way to live. I would rather die than capitulate to the Evil Orange Menace. They can torture me and cut out my tongue. But they won’t take away my spirit. This is because I am a patriot. A patriot of the old America, which died on November 5, 2024. Don’t let them take away all that is good about you.

We must live to fight. I cannot possibly predict what the nature of this new fighting spirit will be. It could involve crossing into territory that was once unfathomable and distasteful. It could involve forging the unlikeliest alliances. But it is our duty to keep the memory of what we once had alive so that we can rebuild something beautiful after the chaos that is about to come. And that means being fiercer and more provocative in the name of good. It means sticking up for the weirdos and the outliers and the marginalized. It means supporting all the people who are telling us things that we do not want to hear. It may involve secretly hiding people in our homes.

But we must do all this.

History reminds us that fascism never lasts. Fascism is a repugnant ideology that is incompatible with all that is good about humankind. But while it exists – and it will thrive here in deeply unsettling ways for at least five years – we must do everything we can to support each other and to uphold the remaining virtues of the commonweal.

We must also be extremely careful and cautious about who we invite into our inner circles. There will be traitors eager to rat us out. There will be ravenous lowlifes quite happy to destroy our lives to save their own skin. And the people who betray us will include our families and our closest friends. Not all of us will make it. But most of us can stay alive, with our spirits intact, if we keep fighting.

Silence is not an option. This is precisely what the new order wants. They want you to feel helpless. They want you to feel fear. But you must not give it to them.

This will be the most difficult time that you and I have ever lived through. I am not being hyperbolic here. It’s all outlined in the Project 2025 manifesto. What I can say is that all the in-fighting on our side needs to stop. Because the only recourse we have is strength in numbers.

Do not let them destroy who you are. Do not let them stop you from living or being kind or cracking jokes. We are in for some deeply unpleasant times, but it will not last. It cannot last. It is very possible that the United States of America will fracture into territories. We will be tested in ways that we never imagined, but I can tell you this much. We are up to the challenge. We are stronger than we know. All who believe in basic decency and kindness and humanity must come together and be fearless in fighting these jackals. The bastards won the election and ended this nation, but I promise you that they will not win the long game if we fight indefatigably for the greater good.

by Edward Champion

Garth Greenwell’s Small Brain

Garth Greenwell’s third novel is easily among the worst books of 2024. It is badly written, indulgent, and has nothing meaningful to say about the human condition. This longass essay is an attempt to reckon with the woefully mediocre novelist who continues to be falsely praised.

In these years after my illness, when I can no longer speak and am set aside from the daily flow, I live more in my memory and discover that a great many things are safely stored away. It all seems to be in there somewhere. At our fiftieth high school reunion, Pegeen Linn remembered how self-conscious she was when she acted in a high school play and had to kiss a boy on the stage in front of the whole school. She smiled at me. “And that boy was you. You had this monologue and then I had to walk on and kiss you, with everybody watching.” I discovered that this monologue was still there in my memory, untouched. Do you ever have that happen? You find a moment from your past, undisturbed ever since, still vivid, surprising you. In high school I fell under the spell of Thomas Wolfe: “A stone, a leaf, a door. And all of the forgotten faces.” Now I feel all the faces returning to memory.

– Roger Ebert, Life Itself

Roger Ebert was 67 years old when he wrote these words. He was three years away from succumbing to the awful cancer that contorted his body and robbed him of his smart sonorous voice. But what’s so deeply touching about Ebert’s memoir is how you marvel over how the man was still committed to the life of the mind. Garth Greenwell is 46. He is incapable of such reflection or humility. And if his insufferably indulgent third novel, Small Rain, is any indication of his present intelligence and late life wisdom potential, I highly doubt that Greenwell will get anywhere close to Ebert’s poignant well-lived insight in twenty years. If anything, Greenwell seems to be on the Philip Hensher career track to becoming an insufferable Tory, a pretentious cynic whom nobody really likes. Like Hensher, Greenwell is tolerated simply because the son of a bitch has prattled banality for too many years and, instead of recognizing that he has nothing original or interesting or genuinely moving to say, he just doesn’t have the decency to shut the fuck up.

Reading Small Rain is like being trapped in an escape room in which all of the fun puzzles and quirky themes have been removed and you’re left staring at soulless cinderblock walls. You slam your fists against the concrete to the point of bleeding, only to hear Garth Greenwell’s faux patrician voice over the PA system. A copy of Small Rain spits out from a secret slit onto the floor. “We’ll let you out when you finish reading.” “I don’t want to read this shit. Let me out now!” “No, you fucking mook. I am Garth Greenwell, certified literary genius. You cannot leave until you get to the last page. You will genuflect to me and provide me with four pints of your blood and your social security number.” “What’s the alternative?” “You will die in this room.”

And because you value your own life, you slog your way through an interminable and truly awful novel set In Iowa City during the summer of 2020 in which an unnamed poet tears an aorta and ends up in the hospital. And stays in that hospital. With occasional visits from his partner L. And he stays in the hospital. And he stays in the hospital. And does nothing but stay in that hospital without really revealing all that much about himself other than that he is a precious prick who talks about his days teaching in Bulgaria (hey, just like Greenwell himself!) when he’s not mixing up foreign accents (the poet speaks fluent Spanish but he can’t recognize a Colombian accent?) or throwing fits before the nurses.

In fact, Greenwell is so superficial that we learn far more about the house that the poet and L. live in than we do about their relationship. There is a meet-cute flashback in an Iowa City joint, but the only thing we learn about this pair is that the two talked about poetry for two hours and that L. in the initial courtship days didn’t speak English very well (despite being a professor?). And they are big on “alternative nights,” which extends to cooking and speaking in different languages. In other words, we have nothing but vapid shorthand and very little reason to care about this couple because Greenwell serves up nothing but boilerplate. In fact, L. is so underwritten that he is almost as stereotypical as Manuel from Fawlty Towers. But Fawlty Towers, at least, had the benison of being hilarious on multiple viewings. It is believed that Garth Greenwell is so humorless that he has not laughed once since the Clinton Administration.

And the more you learn about the poet — and let’s be clear that there really isn’t all that much to know because Greenwell excels in graphene-flat characterizations, including the Lifetime movie formulaic desperation that kicks in halfway through the novel when we learn that his father abandoned him after learning that he was gay – you really want the fucker to shut up already and die. Greenwell is such a manipulative narcissist that he even throws in some body dysmorphia and sibling bullying near the end of his novel to try guilting us into sympathizing with his bland and unremarkable protagonist. Here is one such banal flashback:

I remembered my mother saying as we drove each weekend to my grandparents’ farm, at each sharp turn she would say it, this is a real death trap. It was part of her constant narration as she drove, as constant as the cassette tapes she pulled out to flip from one side to the other, Juice Newton and Kenny Rogers; still those songs can place me in the car, int eh backseat beside my brother, strapped in:I can conjure up the smell of my mother’s cigarettes, the cheap upholstery, the foam of the headrest my sister, in the front, leaned back against…

Blah blah blah. What on earth is the fucking point of this, Greenwell? Jesus Motherfucking Christ, you’re trolling us, ain’t you, ain’t you, you talentless repetitive mind-numbingly boring fuck?

(menacing crackle from the escape room’s PA system)

“MISTER CHAMPION, I TOLD YOU THAT IF YOU DON’T FINISH THE BOOK, YOU WILL DIE IN THIS ROOM!”

“Alright! Alright! I’m reading it, you sadistic asshole!”

And he stays in the hospital. And he whines. And he stays in the hospital. You read variations on the same tedious descriptions over and over again. You howl at the sick bastard behind the PA system, who responds with frequent laughter. Two gin-scented tears trick down the sides of your nose. But it’s alright, everything is all right, the struggle is finished. You will win the victory over yourself. You love Big Greenwell.

* * *

This is a roundabout way of reporting that Garth Greenwell has used his dubious talents to deliver one of the worst reading experiences I’ve had in the last three years. Garth Greenwell is not about life. He does not care about human beings and is thus, as far as I’m concerned, an enemy to true literature. He writes with the groan-inducing cadences of a long-winded septuagenarian about to show you his vacation slideshow in the basement. You will not find three-dimensional characters in his work. You will find plenty of gay sex (though not so much here) that isn’t nearly as bold or as vivacious or as honest as the carnality flowing throughout Alan Hollinghursts’s rich work. You will also find extremely generalized descriptive shorthand that reveals nothing, along the lines of:

the man, who was young and thin, in his twenties, a short beard visible around his surgical mask, took my arm to examine my IVs.

The man’s physical details, of course, tell us nothing about him and don’t really contribute to the atmosphere. If so, why even bring this up? And Greenwell does it again here:

He was in his midfifties, maybe around L’s age, a white guy, wiry, with a buzz cut under the red ballcap he always wore (a flag on that, too), his sunglasses perched atop the bill.

Not only is Greenwell so without imagination that he gives us a MAGA stereotype, but he even uses the same occluded hair trick for two separate walk-on characters. Or to put it another way, Garth Greenwell can be likened to a bumbling hit man showing up to a far-range job with a .22 Short instead of a sniper rifle.

And when he’s not giving us this woefully inept physicality, he resorts to the same repetitive vomiting:

He was my age, twenty-something, an actor performing in the Festival, not in any glamorous way; he was a local, an extra or maybe something more than an extra.

Garth Greenwell is around my age, actually a little younger but about my age, a writer performing in the Hot Fall Books Olympics with Small Rain, not in any glamorous way, although he does believe he is glamorous, or maybe he is both glamorous and not glamorous like Schrodinger’s cat; I sound so literary when I am pointlessly speculative; he was a yokel from Kentucky, a local from Kentucky, a huckster from Kentucky and now he hates Kentucky, a literary grifter or maybe something more than a literary grifter.

By way of contrast, here is a beautifully compact single-sentence description from Paul G. Tremblay’s excellent The Cabin at the End of the World:

Freckles dust across the bridge of a long nose that dives deeply beneath her large, egg-shaped brown eyes.

Boom! We’re in. We know so much about this woman in only a sentence and we want to know more! Greenwell is completely incapable of such economical descriptive depth.

Oh, and before i am accused of hating literature (I obviously don’t!), let me serve up a counterpoint to further demonstrate Garth Greenwell’s dereliction of descriptive duty. Here’s an excerpt from John Langan’s criminally underrated The Fisherman (Word Horde, you’re doing the Lord’s work!) describing a man who has lost his family in a car accident:

Aside from the scar and the slightly longer hair, the only change I saw in Dan lay in his eyes, which locked into a permanent stare. Not a blank stare, mind. It was a more intense look, the kind that suggests great concentration: the brow lowered ever-so-slightly, the eyes crinkled, as if the starer is trying to see right through what’s in front of them. In that stare, something of the fierceness I’d seen dormant in his face came to the surface, and it could be a tad unsettling to have him focus it on you. Although his manner remained civil — he was always at least polite, frequently pleasant — under that gaze I felt a bit like a prisoner in one of those escape from Alcatraz movies the moment the spotlight catches him.

Unlike Greenwell, one isn’t vexed by the “at least polite, frequently pleasant” aside because there is a natural descriptive escalation in the language. And every physical detail spells out exactly who this guy is. Greenwell can only repeat himself like a lonely parrot braying for a cracker.

* * *

In Small Rain, you will find plentiful prolix descriptions of stuff. Lots of stuff. Not such stuff as dreams are made on, but stuff you can find on any given Target receipt. A little life rounded with a sleep indeed.

But in the public areas there was art on the walls, bright geometric abstractions or gauzy photos of Iowa scenes: an old barn, the sun setting behind it, fields of corn. One showed a stretch of prairie in bloom, though there wasn’t a prairie anymore, not really.

John Cage once suggested that if something was boring for two minutes, then you should sit with it for four. If it was still boring after minutes, try it after eight. Keep multiplying until you get to thirty-two and you eventually discover that something is not boring at all. This hideously generic passage would suggest that Cage’s credo may be one secret ingredient in the Garth Greenwell Writing School. But I’m here to tell you that Greenwell has nothing to say. Zilch! Nada! Nichego! He pads out his endless paragraphs with this nonsense. And then he throws in a half-assed reference to Walter Benjamin after all this. (No, I’m not kidding.)

a shallow wide glass on a long stem that I lifted often in my boredom

Well, you certainly bored the fuck out of me because you couldn’t just write “coupe glass.” But good on you for padding out that word count!

She returned a few minutes later, her hands full of the plastic packaging all of the medical supplies came in, endless boxes and envelopes and bags; so much plastic, I thought, as she sorted them on the counter and began tearing them open, so much waste.

“So much waste.” A rare case of Greenwell having a moment of self-awareness? Somebody hide the lexical firehose from this puffed up practitioner!

The floor in my bedroom had been badly damaged, the beautiful old wooden floors we had salvaged everywhere in the house; here they were strained beyond saving, sanded too often to sand again.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the duds of his sentences. Why does this unintentionally hilarious stab at “poetry” through mindless repetition remind me of the “life unworthy of life” mantra used to justify the evil Aktion T-4 program? And why does every picture of Garth Greenwell instantly remind me of Reinhard Heydrich? It’s certainly true that I’ve read twenty-five books on the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany ever since Joe Biden choked in the presidential debate. Still, I can’t shake the obvious metaphor. Reading a Garth Greenwell novel is not unlike a German being forced to vote for Hitler while being observed by an SS officer.

And there’s also the redundant manner in which Greenwell describes the condition of all this stuff. Is he writing fiction or product entries for an L.L. Bean catalog? One reads a prolonged Greenwell sentence beginning with the phrase “But maybe a Snickers bar is a wonderful thing…” and one wonders if whipping up zippy slogans for Madison Avenue is more his speed. He is so condescending to his readership that he seems to believe, at times, that we cannot infer for ourselves whether a pen is uncapped or whether a remote control can turn on a television:

A television hung just to the left of the cabinets, more or less where my bed pointed; I could operate it with a control that hung from a cord attached to the bed.

There was a marker clipped at the top, which she pried loose and uncapped.

It would honestly be more interesting if the doctor aggressively loosened the cap from the clip while pulling it out. But Greenwell appears to have an allergy to active verbs.

* * *

Some of Greenwell’s descriptive redundancies are outright insulting, almost as if Greenwell believes his reader demographic is somewhere between five to eight years old. We are informed — as if we couldn’t figure out the facile arithmetic on our own — that a building that is a “1970s monstrosity” was erected “after the chaos of the sixties.” A building constructed from chaos! Poetry!

There are classist overtones, such as the poet being condescending when he is told that COVID would be “catastrophic” to his medical condition and when he admits that he is attracted to L because his Spanish is “not the language of the streets but a private language.” But it’s an unearned classism. Because Greenwell simply has no concept of how people live and spend money. We are asked to believe, with astonishing incredulity, that L. — a Portuguese professor who is probably making $135k/year tops (that’s what a Glassdoor search gives me) — and the poet narrator — who subsists in the far from lucrative field of freelance writing — can not only pay rent and a mortgage, but can also spend money on credit cards and significant home repairs. (Greenwell does try and cover his ass later by pointing out that the poet is slated to be teaching classes in the fall of 2020, but it’s still unconvincing.) Does the cost of the poet’s healthcare come into play in this novel? Of course not. Clearly, L. is the one pulling the financial weight in this relationship, but it never occurs to Greenwell to investigate how money (particularly when one partner earns much more than the other) can impact a relationship. Instead, L. and the poet simply scream at each other. He may as well be writing an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. Because this loathsome bastard really does have this annoying tendency to fixate on a word and riff on it in a way that reads like some illiterate yokel trying to mimic Samuel Beckett after skimming the Molloy Trilogy CliffsNotes:

there was a tremendous smile, full voltage, an American smile, a smile of triumph, I thought, a smile of that Midwestern confidence and cheer I found so odious, a pernicious smile, privileged and coddled, a smile that had never known hardship or fear, a smile of utter complacent harmony with its world, a smile I had always hated.

I haven’t quoted the full passage because simply typing it reduces me to a small animal whimpering with hunger for a substantive meal. Greenwell actually believes that if he bombards you with banal repetitive bullshit like this, you will somehow come around and declare him a sui generis prodigy. And judging from the unquestioning reception that his hopelessly desiccated work has received, his marketing strategy seems to have worked.

* * *

I last took a principled swing at this grandiose gasbag back in 2020 — ironically, only weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic — the subject of Small Rain. I received a surprising uptick in emails from some hot literary names who thanked me for writing the piece, but who couldn’t go on the public record because, as one correspondent conveyed to me, “I’ll get into trouble if I cross Garth.” Well, I have no such qualms about getting into “trouble” — in large part because the higher calling of demanding literature that isn’t predicated upon overwrought and superficial bullshit is too vital. I also despise the backscratchers and hobnobbers of the so-called literary world with every fiber of my being. They invented a smorgasbord of untrue rumors about me many years ago after what I had to say about the joys of literature was listened to with more regularity than any of the ponderous logs they dropped into the minuscule ponds of literary rags that nobody reads. One of these opportunistic shit-talkers was, in fact, Garth Greenwell.

To this very day, I simply cannot believe that anybody takes Greenwell’s pompous and atrocious sentences so seriously. Even the grumpy Dwight Garner, who gave Small Rain a pan, professes to be a Greenwell stan. But Garth Greenwell’s “success” — and it is the type of succès fou that only fools in a small circle salivate over — has more to do with Greenwell being a nimble networker rather than a writer of any real talent. He has sycophantic and untrustworthy lapdogs like Matt Bell, Taffy Brodesser-Alzer, and Sam Adler-Bell in his corner to butter his day-old bread, revealing in their undiscerning monomania that propping up mainstream dullards in high places matters more than stumping for the truly original weirdos or having bona-fide principles. But now Garth, dear Garth, Garth is his name, Oh Fucking Humorless Gasbag Garth Please Stop Writing Your Dreadful Fiction, let me forge interminable Garth-like sentences with all the dubious grace of a wino downing five shots in one sitting at a bar because it’s oh so literary, has written a Novel for Our Times! A pandemic novel! The same form that “inspired” Gary Shteyngart to capitulate to egregious navel gazing of the affluent and write his worst novel, Our Country Friends. It is a template that recalls the embarrassing rash of extremely mediocre novels that followed 9/11 more than two decades ago — with only Ken Kalfus and Jess Walter emerging out of this topical Faustian bargain with anything truly original and groundbreaking. I think it says something about our declining literary standards that, outside of Katherine Anne Porter’s moving “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” you won’t find a lot of fiction about the 1918 Spanish flu that people remember. Previous literary practitioners understood that you could never escape the platitudes and generalizations that froth to the surface when you write about a cataclysmic catastrophe. Risk-averse critics have turned this pigshit into a silk purse because job security matters more than upholding literary standards. Presumably, they also do not want to “cross Garth.”

I have insisted that Garth Greenwell has a small brain and I would like to qualify this.

I am convinced that all the most intelligent artists of Western Europe in recent centuries have been tormented by this search for a justification of their work and a criterion of its value; and that almost all such artists have attempted to solve the problem by some consciously-held idea of art; or in other words that in place of art justified by service to a religion they have sought to evolve an art justified by service to an idea of art itself.
– R. H. Wilenski, The Modern Movement in Art

In Walter Lippmann’s A Preface to Morals (of which I shall later deliver more fulsome thoughts as part of my ongoing Modern Library project), he rightly argues out that art’s purpose is to offer alternative ways of existing and negotiating the universe. Art is a corrective to the moral self-righteousness of religious fundamentalism, which regulates our bodies (and permanently aligns sex with procreation, as decreed by a dubious almighty authority) when it isn’t declaring that all subjects submit with abject fealty to a fictitious deity’s sovereignty. But as religious authority has rightly eroded in the last century, artists have become forced to survive by dint of crass mercantile methods, in which the quest for differing ways of existence is interrupted by the need to paint the wife of a millionaire. It is, of course, the duty of any genuine artist to carry on this vital mission. But Greenwell’s feeble output makes it perfectly clear that he would rather surrender to market forces rather than imbue his characters with anything close to a meaningful consideration of existence. He has successfully manipulated many well-meaning individuals into believing that his mission is that of the holy artist, in large part because he writes about LGBTQIA characters. But if his gay characters are not altogether different from the heinous stereotypes populating a potboiler, then what makes him any different from some garden-variety Brooklyn writer writing another pedestrian debut novel about some twentysomething cipher trying to land a media job or find love?

Greenwell’s small-minded “effort” then is not to burden or challenge us with vital meat-and-potatoes questions, but to force us to submit to badly written and falsely tender longueurs that represent a conformist betrayal of the artistic purpose — in short, a capitulation to capitalism. If Greenwell wanted to write a “topical” novel, why then does he lack the guts to confront the moral fundamentalism of Trumpism? (Since I’ve taken Greenwell to the woodshed, I think it’s only fair to praise him on one minor point. The only page of Small Rain that I appreciated was a moment in which the poet sees how his sister has been brainwashed by right-wing news and is taking the poet’s mother out to a populated restaurant. Had Greenwell written an entire novel with such relatable human stakes like this, I would have written an entirely different essay.) Why does he traffic in such obvious observations such as the way in which physical touch became a rare commodity during lockdown? Well, it’s because he’s little more than a literary hack sitting by the sidelines, a member of the uninvolved who will never take a real risk, an obnoxious milquetoast incapable of putting himself on the front lines.

In fact, the only true sentence in Small Rain — and this one is just as grotesquely belabored as all the others — comes about a third of the way through the book:

It was a mystery, everything around me was a mystery — which is always true, I don’t know how anything works: my computer or a light switch or an airplane or a car, how toilets flush, how electricity is generated or moves from one place to another, it might as well be magic; and now my life depended on it.

Or, to read this more accurately, Garth Greenwell knows fuck all about what it is to be alive. Or if he does know, he’s certainly quite hopeless in conveying this through language! He probably knows deep down — despite his tendency to quote the “germs” line from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure at nearly every opportunity (he does it again in Small Rain) — that he is a literary charlatan. But he must carry on bombarding us with his hideous prose as if his life depended on it.

In response to being reviewed (naturally, Greenwell the bitchy capitalist pig put his “essay” behind a Substack paywall), Greenwell recently had the wildly arrogant temerity to suggest that “there’s something a little degrading in evaluation.” Mr. Greenwell, the only person who has degraded himself is you. You are the chump who wrote the shitty book: a novel gravid with empty calories that is far from “nourishing” and this is not of any “help in living” whatsoever. Are you truly that delusional? Are you sure you don’t have a cult of acolytes wearing red baseball caps? (Make American Greenwell Again?) And take your lumps like a man. You’re an immensely privileged middle-aged white guy, not a teenager. The degrading thing here would be to accept you as a god who is above reproach. I have already established in two essays (and numerous examples) that you cannot write a smooth sentence even if a terrorist held a gun to your head. You literally have nothing to say about human existence that I haven’t seen more eloquently and originally expressed in the perhaps fifteen thousand books I’ve read over the course of my lifetime.

Of course, if Greenwell does learn how to write a sentence without shoving his Brobdingnagian head up his own asshole, then I will be the first to commend him. But it’s clear that such a day will never arrive. No argument that I promulgate will deter Farrar, Straus & Giroux from continuing to publish further drivel from this wildly arrogant impostor. And all of literature suffers when mediocrity is propped atop the dais.

by Edward Champion

Thou Art Mortal

Some considerations of aging, mortality, and grief.

They drop. One by one. Not like flies. No, these vital spirits soared so high above the earth that it is tragically inconceivable when you learn that they are gone. Permanently. And as they disappear, their flesh rotting ignobly inside the cinnabar chambers of the dead and the veracity of their former vivacity powering mighty metropolises you didn’t know they constructed inside your mind, you are reminded of how increasingly invisible and vulnerable you are. You are not dead like them. Not yet at least. But you will be dead sooner than you think. You are not quite forgotten although the texts and the calls and the emails and the social invites attenuate as you become a more exclusive and less desirable prospect with age. It is harder to plant new hitches with the other mischief-makers. You know the ebullient minds are out there, but they have become lost in the insufferable noise of who’s the best. It’s not who is the best. It’s who feels and thinks the most. It’s who has the stones to be completely truthful, though gently and lovingly so. It’s who does the most solids without consideration of reciprocity. And as your truth burgeons into one of complexity and nuance as you rack up more life experience than even the most exactingly tabulating mind can track, the quest for who remains among your ilk grows harder.

You feel more disposable somehow, but more giving. More loving. More present. And you wish that this feeling had been actualized much earlier in your life, even though it was always there and it only required the secret sad ingredient of loss to bake the ironclad bonds that endure.

You wished that you could have tamed whatever solipsistic beasts had roared before they buckled out of the gate. You’ve seen how others succumbed to late age narcissism you didn’t quite possess. And now you know, as the minutes become evermore precious, that they did so because they had no other way of coping or behaving. We all delude ourselves in one way or another. Most of the time, it’s that constant navelgazing, that incessant self-interrogation and self-immolation that backfires upon you years later like some aging car incapable of passing the yearly smog check.

But the self is overrated. Nobody cares about the preening anxieties and the careening fears that keep you stirring in a cold sweat beyond midnight. Even when you express these to others in the clearest and most vulnerable and most mindful terms, they simply won’t perceive it or practice it the way you do. But that also goes for loving and giving and being present. Nobody sees the world the way you do. Maybe centuries from now, some genius will crack the social code so that there isn’t so much of a divide. That is, if the robots, who are now honing martial arts skills, don’t destroy us first.

But sometimes you get lucky and you meet a soul of limitless depth who is on a similar journey. If you’re really lucky, they stick with you for life.

But what if they don’t make it while your engine still has a good deal of mileage? What if you’re minding your own business, dipping your morning spoon into a granola bed shrouded with yogurt, and you get the text that they passed? Then what? Well, unspeakable grief for a start. And the sense that your world is becoming much smaller soon after.

Before fifty, these alerts happened every once in a while and it made you sad. But what if two people you know drop dead on the same day? That had never happened to me until yesterday. And I was ill-equipped to contend with all the sorrow and the feelings of unbearable loss that mopped up every last ounce of my usually robust and exuberant energy and that caused me to sleep for an obscene number of hours. I put up a good front, as I always do, when I entered into the world. But, oh, I was crying behind closed doors. Remembering a wonderful evening with my now dead ex, one of the first women to call me sexy and truly mean it, as the two of us fooled around to She Wants Revenge’s first album playing on repeat and watched the sun rise and talked about how awesome Emma Goldman was. And I recalled how smart and witty and beautiful she was. I remembered her full punkish splendor. Perhaps that memory will die with me. That’s the other great tragedy. So much human experience lost to time.

What’s happened with me is that I have grown angrier and less tolerant of those who eschew compassion and empathy. Of those who are conveniently selective towards those outside their myopic sphere, almost always out of spite and bitterness and almost always functioning with that supercilious streak that often walks hand in hand with stupidity.

Technology has given us the power to connect with each other, to find our fellow weirdos, and yet I feel that most people understand each other with less acumen than they did before the invention of Netscape Navigator.

It’s strange to me that the most expensive human rituals are weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs. What of everything in between? Life should be defined by more than coming of age, death, and who we decided to marry. This is stuff for the census takers, not for the celebration of life.

Human beings are more than mere insects. And the loss of someone you know is hardly on the level of a fly being swatted.

We only start to understand mortality when we’re in our last decades. Herman Melville once called mortal greatness a disease. And when even the great 19th century Bard of New York is uneasy about this state of affairs, you have to wonder on some level if you’re as crazy as Ahab to care and feel so much about the friends, family, and lovers you lose. Well, I’d rather be sick with sorrow than to feel nothing at all.

by Edward Champion

The Fleeting Horrors of Getting Robbed

I was robbed in New Orleans on the occasion of my fiftieth birthday. And while the experience has unleashed horrors, it has also reaffirmed just how strong I am.

I went on vacation to New Orleans — an attempt to celebrate my fiftieth birthday that ended in the worst way imaginable. I was robbed of my phone and my wallet. As I joked later with a congenial neighbor who asked me how my vacation went, New Orleans is somehow more of a den of criminal mayhem than even the roughest parts of Brooklyn, where I once lived when I was homeless. I have never been robbed in my seventeen years of living in New York. By contrast, when I went to the New Orleans Police Department to file a report, the officer there pointed to a thick pile of pamphlets that were on the front desk. Indeed, the only literature that the police had on the high counter in the vestibule was information on what to do after getting fleeced. Such is the admittedly impressive ubiquity of thieves in New Orleans. Shortly after it happened, when I emerged from the Airbnb desperately trying to flag someone with a phone at four in the morning, the only person who would help me was — you guessed it — another poor bastard who had just been rumbled. Given what happened to me and the inherent cruelty that lurks beneath many of those sweet-sounding Southern voices, I do not plan on setting foot in the Big Easy again. It is a hopelessly seductive city, but it is also a dangerous one populated by a sizable contingency of deep-dish long game grifters. Sloppy thugs whose efforts are designed to make you think that they’ve taken everything, but who make a lot of mistakes along the way. (I’m still baffled as to why these unremarkable “high rollers” who blow so much stolen money choose to eat at such a shitty place as McDonald’s rather than a nice restaurant. But I suppose that if you become a criminal, you often do so because you have neither taste nor imagination.) And despite the fact that I stayed largely equanimous throughout all this, the first three days after the robbery have been among the most hellish of my life. Reporting and reclaiming everything without money, credit card, or a phone required a herculean focus and drive, which are qualities that I apparently have. But, hey, on the bright side, I rode a mechanical bull for the first time in my life — the video, of course, captured by one of the two criminals — and I was surprised by how long I was able to hang on. I’m sure there’s a metaphor there for how I handled what transpired soon after.

It is frankly a miracle that I made it back to Brooklyn alive. After I got rolled, I felt humility and gratitude far more than indignation, although I did feel deeply furious once I was safely ensconced in my Brooklyn apartment. And I did end up puking my guts out the morning after I returned. Such was my nausea and anxiety. Part of what helped me stay calm — indeed, so calm that a friend who knows me very well commended me on how well I was handling this nightmare — was writing a fictitious version of what happened to me on my laptop. Writing has always helped me grapple with the unsettling truths and the unshakable pains of existence. And this experience was no exception. It was a miracle that I somehow made it onto the flight back home without an ID and that I was resourceful enough to prove my identity in an indisputable manner. But then I did have the good fortune of being a highly memorable and eccentric fellow who is not easy to forget or impersonate. All that lexical wattage in my noggin that powers the way I speak and write turned out to keep me bright and cheerful at the darkest moments. And for what it’s worth, the TSA officials at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport were incredibly kind and professional and made the process smoother than I ever anticipated. (I cracked jokes to keep the process as stress-free as possible and, deploying wit as a method to stay calm and respectful, I somehow managed to crack up a stern tight-lipped TSA officer who looked as if he had not laughed in years.) In fact, the TSA part was the least of my worries. I had hoped to get back to Brooklyn as fast as possible and make more phone calls and lock as many accounts as I could. I had spent Sunday afternoon holed up in a cafe with a borrowed phone trying to cancel all the cards and report them as stolen. I had walked five miles in scorching Louisiana heat to the nearest official retailer for my cell phone provider to issue a replacement phone. There was very little I could do without my phone or my wallet. But by some miracle of foresight, I did have my laptop on me, on its last legs but an invaluable tool that allowed me to report the criminals to the authorities, contact the banks that didn’t have two-factor authentication (the criminals, of course, had changed all my passwords; I have changed each and every password with a new complex system that rivals a DNA structural chart), and abate a great deal of their avaricious rampage. They were still using one of my credit cards when I was on the phone with the bank, somehow racking up $500 charges at Target and lifting cash from any ATM that would still accept the card.

But I ended up spending twelve hours traveling home due to constant flight delays. And since I only had three dollars in my pocket (leftover from two extremely kind ladies who gave me bus fare to get to the airport), that meant that I wasn’t able to eat much during that time. An incredibly kind woman who worked at the airport gave me a big glass of water. When I asked the people at Delta if I could have a meal voucher given the delay and the fact that I had been fleeced and had nothing, this was denied. They rolled out some snack boxes to “apologize” for the delay to all passengers with a hideously and grimly hilarious corporate slogan on a placard: “Here’s a little something from us.” One of those slogans designed to reframe a colossal fuckup as a “little problem” for which they could provide “a little something” that was completely disproportionate to the wrong. You have to admire savvy marketing people for the way they manipulate our world. It truly takes a stone-cold disposition and an unwavering fealty to capitalism to lie through your teeth like that.

Given the way my stomach was rumbling and how hangry I was (but couldn’t dare express any anger, lest TSA eject me from my hard-won place in line at the airport), I asked if I could have a second box. A woman boomed, “One box for one customer! If we gave you a box, then we’d have to give everybody a box.” Under any other circumstance, I would have agreed with this. But this was hardly a level playing field. Everybody else had access to their phones and money. I didn’t. I watched all the people around me eating and drinking with an increasingly ravenous envy. I had made the mistake of believing that these people who toiled for Delta, often thanklessly, might show a sliver of compassion for a guy who had been robbed. But no. I whispered thank you, returned to my seat at the gate sullen and hungry and very much alone, with only a ragtag laptop with a twitchy display as my means of communicating with people in New York who were looking out for me and trying to work matters on their end. Shortly after observing this colloquy, an extremely kind Canadian bought me a chicken sandwich. And I’m telling you. It was the best fucking chicken sandwich I’ve ever had in my life. I remain a fervent champion of Canadian kindness. That dude did what no other American could do. (I made an effusive effort to get this guy’s name, email, and Instagram. But Canadians are often self-effacing and this very good fellow with the goofy baseball cap and that mellifluous Canadian “Eh?” abjured any effort on my end to recompense. In my case, the kind act provided a much needed salve that allowed me to stay calm for the remainder of my long journey home. I ended up reading 100 pages of a thick book about the Holocaust on the plane home. It seemed appropriate. Even in despair, I enrich myself, often with dollops of irony.)

And because I am still alive, I greatly count my blessings. Because it could have been so much worse. There was a point in which the two assailants, whom I stupidly and optimistically invited into the AirBNB that I was staying at and whom I should have sized up but somehow didn’t (even the smartest men can be easily fooled by the ribald flaunting of the feminine form), looked into a spare capacious closet. And I now understand with a certain chill in my spine that this was likely their backup plan: to bludgeon me if I discovered that they had pilfered my phone and wallet. The assailants were two women and, yes, they kept me distracted in ways I don’t feel comfortable sharing publicly, but that any man who is attracted to women is fully aware of. And that’s the truly shameful thing. Despite my theatrical presence and my boisterous writing style, I’m actually a quiet, peaceful, deeply mindful, and sensitive man, particularly when it comes to the ladies. Anyone who has dated me knows this. But of course they kept plying me with liquor, sizing up how much I was spending on everybody so that they would know if I was a dependable roll. And because I have significantly cut down on my drinking in recent years, it went straight to my head. By the time they had stolen everything off my back, except for my NYPL and BPL library cards, which they ignominiously tossed onto the floor under a towel in the living room — the final fuck you from two illiterate and ultimately undistinguished thugs — I was too incapacitated to do anything about it.

I decided to sleep it off, figuring that what I had experienced — which was something between Wild Things and Spring Breakers — had been some ridiculous nightmare that I had fantasized. But, no, I woke up sometime in the afternoon and realized that this was very fucking real. And that’s when I headed to a cafe with my laptop, where two incredibly kind young ladies gave me busfare and a cup of water, allowed me to borrow their phone, and let me set there for many hours to undo as much damage as I could.

I have managed to secure my online presence. I am who I say I am on Mastodon, YouTube, and Instagram. And even though the criminals changed the passwords on my two TikTok accounts (as well as the Gmail accounts that I had set up), I got those back too. That’s how thorough they were, although they weren’t nearly as thorough as they thought. My hope is to get back to my daily creative routine of writing five fresh new pages every day for my audio drama and performing TikTok ablutions in between all the feverish logging of all the funny characters chattering in my head. I’m nearly back to normal. But it wasn’t easy to get here. Because without a phone, you are essentially fucked in 2024. While I was awaiting the delivery of my replacement phone, the criminals still managed to rack up charges on one of my cards long after I had reported it stolen. It turns out that two-factor authentication, which is intended to “secure” us, is the very thing that allows all this criminal theft to flourish. The criminals didn’t find everything, although it angers me that they had access to so much of my personal information.

And while my spirits remain intact, I can’t gainsay that there wasn’t a little emotional damage. I am now reticent to go on vacation or to date and will probably not be doing any of those things for a good long goddamned while. While I have been humbled by the kindness of many strangers, I’m not so sure how much I can trust people right now. Although one of my dear friends picked me up at La Guardia with a gyro, a pack of cigarettes (yes, I’ve quit for long periods this year, but cut me some slack given the circumstances; I will get off these evil addictive sticks again) and beverages and she gave me a big smile and a hug. And I cried with great joy as I hugged her. I was so happy to be back in New York. I was so happy to see my dear friend. The other thing I have had to combat is certain obsessive enemies of mine who delighted in my misfortune and who sent me very cruel messages in which they rubbed it in. Which I would never send to my worst enemy. Additionally, the silence of certain “friends” in relation to this incident speaks volumes about how little they actually care for me. And I’m now going to significantly raise my standards on who I let into my life. I am such a loyal friend that, had the roles been reversed, I would have done what my dear friend did at La Guardia: offered the shirt off my back and served up a nonstop soiree of jokes as a reminder for why life is so beautiful.

The biggest horror I feel is having to reconcile my natural optimism and exuberance with a deeply unsettling takeaway that the world is far crueler than I’ve understood it to be. I really don’t want to transform into a cynic. A bleak-humored grump at times, sure, but not a cynic. But as someone who has historically had trust issues, well, this terrible incident has only exacerbated a feeling I don’t want to hold that you can’t really trust anyone. The one thing that prevents me from sliding into antisocial nihilism is knowing that these criminals have nothing but terror, rampant consumerism, bloodthirsty lucre, and the thrill of betrayal to offer the world. These criminals are vacuous shells: little more than empty-headed, unfeeling, and dishonorable fuckheads. And I know karma and the law will get them in the end. Because I am far more than they are or ever could be. I make. I create. I give. I live. I love. I write. I have my art and my wit and my lexical ninja moves and my audio chops. At fifty, my eyes still dance with endless felicity and limitless curiosity. And I’m strong enough now that nobody can break that. Not fascists. Not thieves. Not talentless assholes in the literary and tech worlds who have openly lied about me, spread false rumors, and created an image of me that fewer people believe these days. These assholes will never have any of that. Talent and commitment and creative drive cannot be stolen or bought. Being a kind and decent person has no cash value. If anything, being so thoroughly robbed like this has only redoubled my commitment to being kind and giving. So I’m out a few hundred dollars for the phone. Big deal. The life I live is eminently more richer and a lot more fun than that of a predictable thug. You can’t place a cash value on being sui generis, which, if you’ll allow me a modest flex of my ego, I certainly am. And they’ll never have that. That was evident in the melancholy look that one of the two women gave me when I asked her what her passions were. She had nothing. Zilch. Just a beady rapacious look that reminded me of the way that Dr. Sam Loomis described Michael Myers. She had nothing other than hurting other people even as she pretended that she was looking after them. Not unlike Annie Wilkes, Stephen King’s frighteningly memorable creation. And if you practice that level of deceit and dishonesty, well then your world is very small indeed. The two women thought I hadn’t seen what they did before. But I’ve been around the block. And I’ve seen their “performance” executed before with love and ardent passion and inclusion. You can’t be a truly free spirit if you don’t have those vital human qualities.

I am a cathedral built from robust alabaster and designed by an extremely quirky architect. These criminals are nothing more than ramshackle hovels easily blown over by a modest gust. Sure, I may have lost my phone and wallet. But these were easily replaceable: mere mechanisms to negotiate our world. But, for the criminal, there’s nothing else beyond thieving and ennui between jobs. That’s all the criminal understands. And when the two women who rolled me turn fifty, if they’re not in prison by then, then the void of their vapid lives will catch up to them and they’ll have nothing when they get to be my age. Sure, I made a huge mistake. But at the end of the day, they could not break me. The beauty of existence is learning how to grow with humility and wonder and grace, even when the worst thing happens to you. It’s a process that never stops. And if you’re doing life right, then you may just summon a few unexpected catches from the rough and tumble curveballs that the universe throws at you. And that’s when you give back. So others can thrive with the same fearless and indefatigable gusto. So that all of us can be here for each other in the best way possible.

by Edward Champion

Ritchie Torres, AIPAC’s Most Dutiful Rentboy

Flush with AIPAC money, the corrupt Representative of the poorest congressional district in the United States cares more about Israel than his own constituents, which he now regularly belittles and insults by twisting objective reality and blocking them on X.

Of all the venal and easily purchased members of Congress who take AIPAC money in the manner of an eager head-bobbing whore pretzeling his position to show the money men just how limber and rentable he truly is (even at the expense of listening to constituents, a basic duty of any sitting Representative), Ritchie Torres is my personal favorite. He is such a preposterous cartoon of a man — a smug and treacherous scumbag who blocks anyone on X rightly calling him out on his bullshit — that you almost get the sense that he’s cozying up with the genocide-friendly financiers so that he can pluck some Zionist diplomatic position from the horrific jaws of a potential second Trump administration.

Ritchie Torres is a truly impressive specimen. Because just when you think Torres couldn’t become any more of a self-serving tosspot, he descends into self-parody, complete with anti-Semitic “Jewish mother” tropes that bristle with the telltale timbre of casual misogyny:

Yes, that’s right. This was how Torres was spending Juneteeneth on social media. And while Torres was happy to serve up predictable and phoned in platitudes about Juneteenth, Torres, living up to his present status among progressives as a corrupt and unprincipled coward without political credibility, remained silent about Mayor Eric Adams denying Black Lives Matters’s Hawk Newsome a permit (one that two city employees had promised Hawthorne would go through) to celebrate Juneteenth in the South Bronx on the corner of 163rd Street and Sheridan Avenue — not far from Torres’s own district (the 15th). Which is truly something. Ritchie Torres cares more about Israel than his own borough, much less his own congressional district, which is the poorest one in the United States.

But Torres’s remarkable hubris has only grown ever since cashing AIPAC checks and selling out at dimebag levels became part of his regular routine. As Marisa Kabas has cogently unpacked, Torres, who is not Jewish, is policing exactly what being a “good Jew” is:

Imagine having the gall to be a non-Jew and tell a Jewish organization that they are not worthy of representing Jewish interests. Imagine thinking that steadfastly supporting the state of Israel gives you authority over people who are part of the religion for which the state was founded. Imagine being a member of Congress and using your position to demean Jews in service of ousting your own Democratic colleague.

The Democratic colleague that Kabas is referring to is Representative Jamaal Bowman, who has continued to remain unequivocally against AIPAC and Israel’s policies, despite AIPAC putting up a colossal $2 million to attack Bowman and prop up a pro-Israel candidate that even the right-leaning Politico had to confess was “the Cher of Westchester County.”

Torres attacked The New Republic‘s Talia Jane for an October 7, 2023 tweet in which Jane, trying, like many of us, to wrap their head around the immediate aftermath of the October attacks, had posted, “State oppression vs rebellion against state repression,” and falsely insinuated that The New Republic had promulgated these views and put Jane’s reporter status in mock air quotes. But he didn’t stop there in his tone policing. Torres blasted the far left for “falsely accusing George Latimer [Bowman’s AIPAC-financed challenger] of racism.” Never mind that Politco — which is about as far from a fringe-left outlet as you can get — reported on how Bowman accused Latimer of sending mailers that had darkened Bowman’s skin. (Back in 2022, The New York Post — clearly a bastion for Marxism under News Corp — reported on similar racist efforts made by then Bowman challenger Vedat Gashi.)

When Netanyahu released a video attacking the Biden Administration, Torres suggested that anyone who criticized this tyrant was somehow emboldening Hamas. (Never mind that a Gallup poll last month pointed out that only 36% of Americans approved of Israel’s actions against Gaza. If we look through the ridiculous and disingenuous Overton window opened by Torres, we would have to risibly infer that a good 55% of Americans who oppose Israel’s actions are somehow stumping for Hamas.)

The convenient manner in which Torres twists the facts like this has caused many of his constituents to rightly call him out. Since they have been ignobly blocked by Torres on Twitter, many of Torres’s critics have attempted to call him out in person. Sometime in March, some enterprising people with a camera confronted Torres, asking, “As a citizen who pays my tax dollars, okay, I’m wondering why you are in favor of sending our tax dollars to starve children to death.”

“Well, that’s a lie,” responded Torres. (The liar here is Torres. Here’s a Human Rights Watch report documenting the starving children in Gaza.)

After the people behind the camera pointed out that this was not a lie, Torres responded, “If you have an issue with me, you should run against me.”

“How is it a lie?” asked the man behind the camera. “Are you saying there are no children starving in Gaza?”

Instead of answering this question, Torres said, “I think Hamas started the war, which led to starvation.”

When the man behind the camera calmly and reasonably tried to ask another question, Torres interrupted him and snarled, “That’s a terrorist organization that you support.”

The man said that he did not support Hamas. Then Torres accused the man of lobbying for them, which the man also denied. Then Torres said, “You’re a disgrace.”

And in these collective moments, we see the feeble and pathetic toolkit of a fact-denying attack dog who has seen his coffers fatten by way of AIPAC. If you are against Israel’s actions, you are somehow for Hamas. If you criticize Torres on facts, you are somehow lobbying for Hamas. And if you question Torres using objective examples obtained from reality, Torres resorts to insults and false accusations.

In short, this kind of contemptible behavior (which resembles any number of efforts by activists with cameras to confront Republicans) clearly evinces that Ritchie Torres is not a man who is fit to serve his constituents, much less the American people. He is more of a thin-skinned and not very bright AIPAC rentboy than a “Congressional Representative.”

[6/20/24 4:00 PM UPDATE: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Ms. Jane’s pronouns. This has been corrected. I regret the error and offer my most fulsome apologies to Ms. Jane for my oversight.]