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Lumbersexuality, a Sport and a Pastime

Illustration by Homestead

Jonny Diamond | LongreadsJune 2019 | 22 minutes (5,308 words)

The sound is the first thing you notice, deep and hollow, burnished steel hitting chewed-up white pine. It’s not quite the warm, resonant thok of an axe in the woods, but the nearest forest of any significance is 50 miles up the Hudson River. This is Brooklyn, one very long bow shot from the Gowanus Canal.

It’s a chilly Monday night before Thanksgiving and Kick Axe Brooklyn is surprisingly full. Around two dozen people cluster in groups of six or eight across several “ranges,” tidily built versions of the old roadhouse bar-band cages, target at one end, party at the other. There doesn’t appear to be any flannel in the crowd (for now) but there are at least three reasonably grown-out beards in plain sight. One of the beards puts his beer down next to a basket of plastic Viking helmets and walks forward to pick up an axe from a squat round block of maple (each range has one of these blocks, to which the axe is returned after it is declawed from the wood).

Nobody pays much attention as he squares himself to the softwood target 16 feet away, holding the axe — specifically, an Estwing hatchet weighing about a pound and a half — with both hands and raises it above his head. Then, in a surprisingly fluid motion, he steps toward a faded red line on the floor and releases the hatchet in the direction of several concentric red and black circles painted on the wood, axe head over handle, where it strikes fast about six inches to the left of the bull’s-eye. He shakes his head, pulls the axe from the wood, and goes to collect his beer.

Scenes like this occur with increasing frequency in cities across North America, from Toronto to Austin to L.A., as axe-throwing clubs attempt to create their own niche and fill it, something like a laidback millennial bowling alley except with deadly weapons. For some, particularly since the election of Donald Trump, the physicality and latent violence of axe throwing has served a therapeutic purpose. As Megan Stielstra wrote in an essay last year for The Believer, “I threw axes throughout the fall, waking up every morning to new impossible cruelties. … I kept trying to pass the axe to my husband, but he wouldn’t take it. ‘You need it more than I do,’ he said from behind the yellow spectator line.”

Aside from its salubrious value the basic appeal of axe throwing is not complicated: Like bowling or billiards or darts, it is a way to give loose structure to any given social gathering. When I ask Kick Axe’s Nathan Oerstler if he’s ever had to deal with any drama among the beer-drinking axe throwers, the recently promoted “axe master” (up from “axe-pert” — there is no pun left unmade at Kick Axe, as the name might suggest) demurs, explaining that most of the axe-perts are comedians or actors — theater types — and serve as much as entertainers as they do instructors or referees: in short, they keep the people happy. Kick Axe opened in December 2017 and is more flannel-inflected theme park than bar, its employees communicating via headset about what targets need replacing, which axes need sharpening. This level of organization makes sense when you consider the hundreds of pounds of deadly steel flying through the air at any given moment, but axe throwing wasn’t always this professionalized: In fact, the origin of the axe-throwing social club is basically a bunch of bored Canadians in the mid aughts, standing around drinking beer and chucking hatchets at backyard waste wood.

As Backyard Axe Throwing League (BATL) founder — and one of those bored Canadians — Matt Wilson recounted, people kept showing up to throw axes in his backyard, so he had no choice but to grow. And so they did: The BATL, which has 10 locations in Canada, has since expanded into the U.S. with spots in Chicago, Nashville, Scottsdale, Houston, and Detroit. This unlikely success story has spawned competitors: Ontario’s Bad Axe now has 15 locations across the U.S.; the aforementioned Kick Axe also has locations in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and is opening more in Florida and Texas; and there are at least a half dozen independent axe-throwing venues across the country (including Massachusetts’s Half Axe, whose name heralds the end of the useful axe pun, or at least demarcates its nadir).

Whatever side of the border these clubs are on, most of them affect a shaggy, woodsy aesthetic, a little plaid here, some taxidermied animal there. One could say the same thing of many of their patrons, from Calgary to Orlando: red-and-black Buffalo check accenting high-cut oxblood Red Wings; gray chambray tucked into vintage denim; Carhartt jackets over Carhartt vests over old Woolworth’s shirts.

Most of the axe-perts are comedians or actors — theater types — and serve as much as entertainers as they do instructors or referees: in short, they keep the people happy.

This aesthetic — lumbersexual, which entered the mainstream vernacular in 2014, at a site called GearJunkie, and was just as quickly derided on Gawker and in The Atlantic — is certainly not limited to axe-throwing clubs (one could make the case that axe throwing as a pastime has arisen, inevitably, from the aesthetic). But as a loose set of fashion signifiers, lumbersexuality has been around in some form or another for a generation, competing with any number of the self-consciously vintage looks manifested in hipster culture.

As with so many of the aesthetic strands that make up any given tangle of contemporary style-consciousness, lumbersexuality’s origins can be found on the margins, one more example of straight culture borrowing heavily from gay culture, with half the commitment and none of the risk. Beards and bears and woodsy scruff have now fully entered the mainstream as the contemporary lumbersexual reappropriates the same tropes of classic American masculinity so long adopted and amplified in LGBTQ spaces. But even the original tropes themselves — of paternal strength and rugged stoicism — are products of male fragility.

As Willa Brown points out in the perfectly titled article “Lumbersexuality and Its Discontents,” the endless talk in the past decade of a crisis of masculinity is part of a long tradition in the patriarchal American imagination. In Brown’s oft-cited 2014 account for The Atlantic, the nostalgia-ridden aesthetic of the lumberjack has always been an outsize performance instigated by the insecurities of straight, white men, be it 1905 or 2005. But where Brown saw an imminent expiration date for the lumbersexual, it doesn’t appear to be happening any time soon.

As traditional hierarchies very slowly flatten into a more equitable distribution of power across society, the current crisis of masculinity is finding extended life in the backwaters of the internet. And while the real crisis of masculinity is male violence against women, the proliferation of pseudo-intellectual charlatans simultaneously seeding and harvesting the anxieties of young men for their own uses isn’t helping.

Male fragility isn’t going away. Nor is the flannel. Because there’s another performance happening here: different stage, same costume.

***

Back-to-the-land nostalgia has existed in the United States for almost as long as there’s been a United States, at various points manifesting as religious isolationism (think saucer-eyed Protestant sects one valley over), transcendentalist escapism (rich white guys reading poetry in the gloaming), and communitarian anti-capitalism. Its latest incarnation — rooted chiefly in an environmentalism that gestures at change through practice rather than policy — has been about bringing the virtues of the land back to the city, reimagining the frontier as urban rather than rural: a bespoke localism that animates everything from figurative fireside hobbies like pickling and needlepoint to larger-scale industry like rooftop farming, craft-brewing, and restorative, salvage-based building.

But in the same way the “frontier” of the 18th and 19th centuries was a romantic way of describing a slow genocidal war of settler colonialism, so too did gentrification’s border zones, through the mid 1980s to the late 2000s, serve as locations of displacement much more so than the idealized renewal imagined by urban planners. From its early days, gentrification was similarly romanticized with the language of westward expansion, those in its vanguard heralded as “settlers” and “urban pioneers.”

For good or for ill, these “pioneers” — comprised largely of artists in search of an affordable life in the city, abetted by canny real estate speculators — wore the mantle proudly as they built out semi-legal living spaces in (often but not always) sparsely populated post-industrial neighborhoods, sometimes squatting entire buildings. They were essentially homesteading — stealing power from the grid rather than rendering tallow, jury-rigging plumbing instead of digging wells — leading precarious DIY lives based on many of the virtues of the old frontier: resilience, independence, ingenuity, competence.

There was among this early, punk-inflected group of gentrifiers — buried under layers of rebellion and irony — a quiet reverence for working-class utility, often expressed in an aesthetic straight from their stepfathers’ closets: old beat-up boots, blue short-sleeve work shirts (bonus points for actual name tags), paint-spattered coveralls, and … flannel.

This commodification of rural life and labor feels, at best, like a post-industrial Instagram fantasy, personal branding available a la carte or by kit.

Much ink has been spilled on the mass-cultural half-life of flannel, but it wasn’t until the Seattle grunge scene exploded into the mainstream in the early 1990s — with a look that had begun with bands like Minutemen and Minor Threat a decade earlier — that flannel would achieve its high fashion ascendancy, showing up in collections by designers like Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood and never really going away. The aesthetic and political interplay of these subcultures — gay, punk, DIY — would continue through the early 2000s as a youth culture raised on environmental angst looked further into the past for alternatives to the increasingly apparent cruelties of late capitalism, withdrawing to a kind of privileged moral quiet room in the handmade, the local, the slow.

Here then was a hardworking, readymade look, an identifying aesthetic with a notional connection to virtues of self-sufficiency, sustainability, the wild, and, if not out-and-out Luddism, at least an appreciation of analog competence.

But what happens when the performance overtakes the performer, when the flannel habit intensifies from urban axe throwing to rural woodcraft? What happens, in other words, when you finally buy an axe?

Well, it depends on the axe — and the performer, for that matter. If you’re Justin Timberlake, in his Man of the Woods era, the axe in question comes with a private Montana “ranch.” Timberlake, who grew up in suburban Memphis, has lately been performing a return to nature, (nature in this case being the exclusive 15,200-acre Yellowstone Club, a 21st-century millionaire land rush catering to those who want the gated community without having to see the gates). The streamable georgics resulting from this relocation — manifested as the 16 tracks on his February 2018 album, Man of the Woods — reveal little of Timberlake’s relationship to the actual woods (or mountains or fields or wilderness) and present more like a checklist of urban-versus-rural cliché, the kind you might find in the playbook of any halfway decent political operative aiming to divide and conquer. Here are some lyrics from the album’s seventh track, “Supplies”:

’Cause I’ll be the light when you can’t see

I’ll be the wood when you need heat

I’ll be the generator, turn me on when you need electricity

Some shit start to go down, I’ll be the one with the level head

The world could end now, baby, we’ll be living in The Walking Dead

Translation: My hard-won know-how (money) will save us when the poors run out of stuff. (Also, a cavil, but one doesn’t “turn on” a generator like a lamp, one starts it like a lawnmower … and “start me up” would have worked here!) In track 11, titled, naturally, “Flannel,” he sings:

Right behind my left pocket

That is where you’ll feel my soul

It’s been with me many winters

It will keep you warm

Ooh, here’s my flannel

The character’s in the way you wear it

Translation: I wear grandpa shirts and grandpas are good guys. Then, on track 14, “Living Off the Land,” we hear that:

You have to be comfortable with yourself

because that’s all there is

There’s you and nature

Soon as you think you got it all figured out, you know,

the wilderness will figure some way to teach you a lesson

As I’m alone in the forest, I’m one with my surroundings

and there’s a lot of peace in that solitude

I’ll be a mountain man ’til the day I die

 

(Living off the land)

And I break my back

And I work all night

[. . .] I’ll be damned, sometimes it’s hard,

the backed-up bills on the credit cards

Translation: One time I got a little lost on the way to Bill Gates’s cookout. It was tough. And these are the more thematically substantial tracks!

One might find more insight into how the Big West has rubbed off on the Big Pop Star with a quick look at the wilderness-adjacent merchandise from the Man of the Woods Collection, one item for each of the album’s tracks. These include nods to practical Americana like a wool Pendleton blanket, a tin of beard butter, and a trucker vest; objects from the collection that correspond to the tracks above are:

Track 7: A strongbox

Track 11: A flannel shirt, obviously

Track 14: A Best Made Co. felling axe, with custom-painted handle

These items, along with a cooler, a jean jacket, a bandanna, and more, were all available for sale at a Lower East Side pop-up shop the week the album was released, a kind of company store for Timberlake Inc.

As brother to a trucker and an actual lumberjack, it is hard for me to fully understand totems of daily labor so dramatically upsold to “influencers” under the banner of authenticity. But as obvious a target Timberlake is for derision, he’s more of a symptom than he is a cause, one more in a long line of mythologized white men, from Paul Bunyan to John Wayne, out there taming the wild as they tame themselves (but not too much), spokesmodels in the endless ad campaign for America that began with Horace Greeley telling us to go west and live off the land.

And that’s the dream we’re still being peddled, embodied by the upsold axe. That the axe in question is hanging on the wall of a pop-up store in downtown New York creates a particular kind of dissonance: Timberlake Inc. is almost too perfect a microcosm for the stylized repackaging of the outdoors, for the yearning after a frontier that never really existed and the rural “working-class” sensibilities that accompany it. This commodification of rural life and labor — its ruggedness, its whiteness — feels, at best, like a post-industrial Instagram fantasy, personal branding available a la carte or by kit; at worst, it perpetuates pernicious stereotypes, both racist and classist, about natural purity and rural misery, a paradox in service of the powerful.

As brother to a trucker and an actual lumberjack, it is hard for me to fully understand totems of daily labor so dramatically upsold to ‘influencers’ under the banner of authenticity.

But life adjacent to wild spaces — and the work that sustains it — can be good, regardless of your politics. The braiding of masculinity and wilderness is as old as the American frontier, but it’s worth considering how we might untangle the two, worth considering how we might live with the forest world — and all it has to offer us — without destroying it.

***

But maybe you’re not a rich, world famous pop star with a flannel fetish (if you’ve read this far, it’s likely you are not). Sure, axe throwing seems like a fun thing to try, but lately you’ve been spending more time upstate (whatever state that might be) car camping, or staying with friends who’ve left the city; there are campfires, fireplaces, wood to be chopped, logs to split. You are thinking of buying an axe of your own.

Where to start?

There are three basic types of axes you might acquire: a hatchet, for light camp use limbing branches and making kindling (12 to 18 inches long, around 1.5 pounds); an all-purpose camp axe for clearing saplings and light splitting (20 to 28 inches, around 2.5 pounds); a felling axe for chopping down trees (30+ inches, between 3 and 4.5 pounds). Within each of these basic categories there are dozens of varieties, based largely on the regions from which they originate: the Allagash Cruiser, the Hudson Bay Camp Axe, the Dayton Railsplitter, etc.

Whatever you’ve chosen, the first thing you’ll notice is the weight: a multipurpose Swedish forester’s axe — weighing three pounds — is a manageable tool, useful on smaller trees and for light splitting. You’ll probably pick it up by the end of its American-hickory handle using your dominant hand. If you’re lucky, it comes to you as an already well-used and well-loved tool, the wood worn to a tacky smoothness by years of sweat and sap and the occasional reapplication of linseed oil. It will feel heavier than three pounds should.

Next, you’ll probably hoist the heavy end up into the other hand, striking a slightly awkward pose halfway between lumberjack and serial killer.

Perhaps the light will catch the burnished cheek of the blade, and you’ll reach a tentative finger to the hardened edge, which, if properly sharpened, can dry-shave the hairs from your arm. You’ll continue to feel that weight, three pounds starting to feel like 30, and you’ll begin to wonder: What can I chop with this? The axe is one of the oldest tools we have, designed, essentially, by gravity (which does most of the work anyway) — when you pick it up, you’ll want to let it fall.

Let’s say you’re in the woods — on a weekend camping trip or at a friend’s woodsy cabin — so there’s a lot it could fall on. For a first swing, a nice, newly down log is good for practice — in a wild forest, there should be plenty of recently downed deadfall not yet rotten.

You stand square to the log — imagine it as Eastern red cedar, for its intense scent and lurid scarlet heartwood — and raise high the axe. The weight will do the rest. If the swing is true, there will resonate from the tree — through still-growing sapwood to the compressed cells of the dying core — a deeply satisfying, percussive boom, scattering birds and startling deer. The first swing invites another, and then another, until a deep ringing rhythm echoes through the forest. It’s hard work, but in its repetition it is meditative.

That sound, of axe on wood, calls back to a hundred generations of humankind, invites considerations of how our ancestors might have understood their place in a world covered by forest. Sitting there, axe across knees, taking a breather, it’s not so hard to imagine them.

Shaggy Briton woodsmen in the vast pre-Roman forests of Cumbria, gripping their sacred Langdale axes, with glimmering heads knapped from the rare volcanic greenstone mined from the Pike of Stickle.

A barefoot Japanese carpenter moving gingerly across a hinoki cypress swinging his heavy, long-handled masakari, leaving palm-size chips of wood as a massive six-by-six beam reveals itself from the 16-foot log.

A pair of Basque foresters, generations ahead of the chainsaw, laboring astride two great beech trees pulled from deep within the Irati Forest, locked in a traditional aizkolaritza, a village-wide test of strength, precision, and endurance to see who might hew the finest, fastest timber.

Tireless Henderson Islanders squaring off Pacific rosewood, adzes made from giant clamshells, chewing out chocolate shavings from the dark heartwood. 

A thousand miles and a thousand years separate these moments of labor, and at the heart of each, the same basic motion: Pick up the heavy thing and let it fall; let the weight do the work, or at least half of it.

This is the allure of the axe: It is a simple, efficient tool charged with power and violence; it lets us measure our labor swing by swing, as we gather fuel for heat or timber for shelter. To look at a stand of trees, axe in hand rather than chainsaw, is to understand it not as a resource for the coming weeks or months, but for subsequent years and generations. And though the axe confers an intoxicating dominion, over woodlot and wood target both, it is a tool that invites a way of seeing that is very old indeed. The various eras of human prehistory seem named for dynastic families from alien worlds — the Mousterian, the Denisova, the Aurignacian. It is the Acheulean in which early stone hand tools begin to flourish, particularly what is now referred to by paleoanthropologists as the “hand-axe.”

The Acheulean “hand-axe” is not an axe in the modern sense; really, it’s just a big rock with two chipped-off edges, bits of flint “knapped” away to create a biface the better to dig or cut with, to remove bark from a tree or, even, to fell that tree by hand. Perhaps, also, the better to kill with, human history providing no shortage of reminders that any distinction between tool and weapon derives from delusions of civilization. 

The finer specimens of these hand-axes, unearthed across Europe and Africa, from the Fells of Cumbria to the river gorges of the Olduvai Valley, have the shape of great and heavy tears. For centuries, British farmers, turning one up with plough or spade, thought of them as thunderstones, specially formed rocks either dropped from the heart of terrible storms, or seeded deep beneath the earth by lightning strikes, gifts of creation, that man might make better dominion of a world made just for him. 

Hand-axes represent the evolution of a very basic technology, and one can imagine that moment when the blunt rock was discarded for the edged rock, followed quickly by the thought, in not so many words: “What if I made this even sharper?”

And so these rough-hewn stones-as-tools, ranging in size from an iPhone to a toaster, underwent refinement over scores of generations — and with that refinement toward balance and symmetry, they began to take on value, both material and spiritual. Hand-axes, their abundance and quality, became a symbol of wealth, a currency; and those created from rarer elements (the deeper in the earth the better) were revered as religious symbols, not to be used as tools, but rather thought of as we now think of art. As French paleoanthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan puts it, in contemplating the unlikely craftsmanship of such early humans:

It seems difficult to admit that these beings did not experience a certain aesthetic satisfaction, they were excellent craftsmen who knew how to choose their material, repair defects, orient cracks with total precision, drawing out a form from a crude flint core that corresponded exactly to their desire. Their work was not automatic or guided by a series of actions in strict order, they were able to mobilize in each moment reflection and, of course, the pleasure of creating a beautiful object.

Though Gourhan is writing about human beings 10,000 years ago, he could be describing a certain strain of contemporary axe maker, for whom an axe is just as at home on a pristine West Village gallery wall as it is in the back of a woodshed.

About a decade ago, Peter Buchanan-Smith, a Canadian designer living in New York City, found himself in need of a hatchet to make some kindling. Looking to grill a choice cut of meat over a hot, wood-fueled fire, Buchanan-Smith found himself unimpressed by the cheap, poorly made imports at nearby hardware stores (dull edges, synthetic handles), so he expanded his search for a better, American-made tool.

The story might have ended there, but shortly after Buchanan-Smith finally did get his hands on a decent axe, he decided to customize the handle in colorful stripes: and just like that, the Best Made Co. was born. (Buchanan-Smith declined to talk to me for this story and is, I’m told, transitioning away from the company.)

Things happened quickly from there. Buchanan-Smith, who’d won a Grammy for his art for a Wilco album cover and who’d done design work for Isaac Mizrahi and David Byrne, was well known among New York’s art and design community, and very soon after the first axe was painted, it was hanging on the wall of Partners + Spade in Manhattan. That was in May 2009; a month later, in anticipation of Father’s Day, the fledgling brand sold out its stock (100 axes) in an hour.

The past decade has been a good one for Best Made Co. with the opening of a flagship store in lower Manhattan, followed by a 2,700-square-foot showroom in L.A.; and on top of their apparent domination of the bespoke axe market, the company has gone all in with a full line of forest-forward gear and apparel. So, if anyone has a full view of the aesthetic arc of lumbersexuality, it’s Buchanan-Smith, who’s described his ideal customer as “Alaskan Charles Eames (rather than Brooklyn Grizzly Adams).” And while someone who relies on tools but also likes good design is certainly cooler than dresses up like someone who relies on tools, it helps that the former usually has a little more money to spend than the latter.

One might wonder how great the difference could be possibly be from one axe to the next, but it only takes an afternoon at the wood pile to appreciate good steel as opposed to bad: the former holds its shape longer, has a stronger edge, stays sharper, and is less prone to chipping or breaking, all of which makes for a safer, more efficient axe. It is taken for gospel — at least on the internet of old guys and their tools — that the older the axe, the better the steel.

You are thinking of buying an axe of your own. Where to start?

If you’re looking, it’s not hard to find someone in just about every rural county in the country with a grinding wheel, a set of files, and a strop, who will take your grandfather’s axe and return it to its former glory. And for every one of those guys there are a hundred others hanging out in online forums asking one another the best way to rebevel the edge on a timber-hewing broadaxe or how to de-pit the cheek of a 100-year-old New Jersey pattern felling axe. (To its credit, Best Made’s L.A. store has a counter devoted to restoring and refurbishing old tools, from cast-iron pans to axes.)

Navigating sites like BladeForums.com and TalkBlade.info, a theme begins to emerge: New, mass-produced things are bad; old, handcrafted things are good. And while there’s an awful lot of grumpy conservatism burbling through these forums, spiked with a mild dose of over-the-counter libertarianism, if you squint past the bumper-sticker usernames and shallow isolationism, the underlying politics run parallel to much of the contemporary green movement, from the embrace of all things local to a rejection of late-capitalist disposability. Granted, from the conservative direction these politics are rooted in a nostalgia that veers into apocalyptic nativism, but it is bewildering to see how similar in outlook — when it comes to craftsmanship, consumerism, conservation — so many people are who otherwise identify with different ends of the political spectrum.

***

Politics doesn’t come up much at my return visit to Kick Axe for the opening of spring league night — it’s likely that the ideological spectrum here is similar to any Brooklyn bar on a Monday evening, which is to say not as liberal as Twitter would have you believe. I sit back and watch 76 amateur axe throwers crowd around league master Anthony Oglesby, who stands upon a stump introducing new rules and reminding competitors of the old, part carnival barker, part vice principal.

There is more flannel in this crowd than the last time I was here, more self-conscious woodsiness expressed through beards and boots, so I’m not exactly sure where Melanie Serrapica fits in. In her late 20s, Serrapica is wearing a semiformal low-cut red dress, and if it weren’t for the custom-painted hatchet she holds lightly in her right hand, its handle a gradient from lustrous black into midnight blue, I’d assume she’d entered the wrong bar.  

“[Axe throwing] is a great way to blow off steam after coming from work, where you want to throw things at people but aren’t allowed,” Serrapica deadpans, despite having to yell over the anticipatory din of her fellow axe throwers. Her friend Sara Morabito nods in agreement. “We’re two nerds who don’t do things other than conventions,” she says, gesturing to her fiancé Chris Knowles. “This was the first athletic thing where we were both like, ‘We’re really good at this.’ It’s a great thing to do together.”

Like Serrapica, Morabito and Knowles fell hard for the pleasures of axe throwing, and also have their own custom axes (hand-painted by fellow league member, Tommy Agniello) — unlike Serrapica, they have yet to name their axes. “Yeah, I named it Axe-Po,” Serrapica says. “You know, like B-MO from Adventure Time?” (I don’t.) As the subject turns to axe care and sharpening technique, I ask the trio why they think axe throwing has become so popular. Chris (who favors a double-grit sharpening puck for maintaining his blade) gets to the heart of it: “It’s something that feels masculine and outdoorsy, and I think people are looking for that.”

This is the allure of the axe: It is a simple, efficient tool charged with power and violence.

 

You don’t need a gender studies degree to understand that ideas of masculine and feminine exist on a spectrum that doesn’t map across a male-female binary; in fact, the league crowd is as diverse in gender as you’d expect of a bar in Brooklyn on a Monday night. As I circulate among teams with names like Inside the Axer’s Studio, Axes of Evil, and Well, Axetually, interrupting people as they get in a few more practice throws before the competition starts, one name keeps coming up: Rebecca. The best. Unbeatable. Rebecca is the best axe thrower. “Number one last season, and the season before.” Nobody knows if she’s coming tonight, nobody seems able to spot her or her girlfriend in the crowd. Someone thinks she might have moved upstate, “to be closer the woods,” and I can’t tell if they’re fucking with me. She’s already a legend, the more so in her absence.

People are drinking — each league night has its own beer sponsor — and it gets noticeably louder as the new season begins, the title wide open and up for grabs in this new and Rebecca-less reality. Soon into it I notice a woman pressing a call button next to her range, an intense look on her face: It’s too early for a wood replacement on the target, so she’s looking for a judgment. An axe-pert calls the league-master over, and all parties approach the target, like lawyers approaching the bench, to peer and point at an axe stuck just off the bull’s-eye. League-master Anthony waves over at Kick Axe’s manager, Nic Espier, who, with his suit and his earpiece looks like he’d take a bullet if ordered to, goes over to settle the issue.

“Seven points decided last year’s title,” he tells me, after judging in favor of the button-pusher. “These guys look like they’re having fun, but they take it pretty seriously.”

The pleasures of axe throwing or wood splitting or tree felling aren’t for everyone — nor, indeed, are they available to most. But it would be a shame to dismiss these things we yearn for — open spaces, wilderness, a particular kind of labor — simply because we’ve had them so relentlessly repackaged and sold back to us.

So let the axe be many things — tool, work of art, diversion — but let it also be a way back into the forest. Let this very old machine remind us of our limits and show us not what is ours to use, but ours to preserve.

***

Jonny Diamond is a writer and editor who splits his time between New York City and the Hudson Valley. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Geist, Hobart Pulp, Rolling Stone, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book-length object history of the axe, part investigation of its symbolism in America’s westward expansion, part interrogation of contemporary tropes of masculinity and wilderness. He is the editor-in-chief of LitHub.com

Editor: Kelly Stout
Fact checker: Ethan Chiel
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Psychiatrist in My Writing Class and His ‘Gift’ of Hate

Illustration by Olivia Waller

Rani Neutill | Longreads | May 2019 | 11 minutes (2,723 words)

It is day three of the writing workshop. I sit in a small room with a table fit for ten. The chairs, blue and plastic, are uncomfortable. The table, smooth. The walls, buttercream. I cram writing, reading, and workshopping into four hours a day. Each morning a slight wind breaks through the New England summer heat and wafts salt through the air. It reminds me that the ocean is not far away. I am grateful to have five days away from waiting tables and teaching so I can learn and write.

Covered in greens, reds, and orange, I wear tank tops that expose my tattoos, that make eyes follow the lines of my decorated arms. My skin has grown into a deep brown from the sun’s finesse, from the batches of melanin that lay under my flesh, from my mother’s Indian blood.

All my classmates are white.

I have meticulously selected this date, smack in the middle of the week to present my work. I wanted time to get acclimated, to know my fellow classmates, to feel comfortable around them. When I walked into the room on the first day, I felt my difference, my race, my arms marked with color. I knew my story would be different. How questions of racism and immigration might not pertain to the other members of my class. The eight pages I workshop are from the memoir I’ve been writing for three years about my mentally ill Bengali immigrant mother and the way she tragically died. A memoir about the silence around mental illness within South Asian communities. A memoir about the costs of beauty defined by racism, a quintessential Bengali story about the impact of the forces of migration and colonialism.

The teacher is intelligent and kind and has encouraged helpful criticism, beginning with an author’s strengths. She does not like the Iowa Workshop type of annihilating appraisal. Students talk about what they like. Then a fellow workshopper says,

“I guess I’m the only one who hated this piece.”

I recoil.

My skin combusts into tendrils from the force of his statement. My back sharpens. Eyes wide, I turn towards this man. I am thankful there is a student between us so I don’t have to be near his translucent skin, his bald head shimmering under the fluorescent lights. Sweat beading on his brow. His long grey and red beard, his attempt to look distinct. His small silver earrings, his attempt to look edgy.

The class takes a quick breath, exhaling after two Mississippi seconds. It is a pause and silence that registers what was said. That impenetrable word, hate.

He continues.

“I found myself furiously crossing things out and correcting grammar, fixing sentences and wondering when this writer learned to speak English.”

I wonder if he has British blood. I was a professor of postcolonial literature for sixteen years. I am familiar with the white man’s interrogation of colonized peoples’ ability to speak English. I read and taught Freud and Lacan to analyze the white man’s words; Kipling, Macaulay, EM Forster all come to mind.

I am livid. I was born in the United States. English is my first language and I speak it fluently, but am embarrassed because my relationship with the language is fraught. My mother’s English was fractured. Her accent muddled white people’s perception of her. She tried hard to rid herself of that accent, to sound like a “real” American. As she grew older, her Indian accent crept back in and her English became broken.
Read more…

Our Words Will Save Us and Set Us Free

Getty / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Jackson Bliss | Longreads | March 2019 | 13 minutes (3,149 words)

1.

In 2002, when I was living in Portland, Oregon, I got a call from a friend of a friend who worked for an immigration lawyer. One of her colleagues needed a French interpreter in a pinch. Could I help out? I met with the asylum lawyer and a refugee who I’ll call Yacoub to go over a few things in his family history and adapt to each other’s accents. Yacoub and I were listening to words we already knew, but couldn’t always recognize coming out of each other’s mouths. He had a Mauritanian accent and like most West Africans, he rolled his R’s. According to most French speakers, I had a Belgian or Swiss accent. As we spoke, we became victims of dialect, urgency, and defamiliarization, but we pushed on with our flawed cultural exchange because his life depended on it.

On the day of Yacoub’s asylum interview, we met in the lobby of the I.N.S. building. The air was stagnant like in every government building, filled with the weight of human words, confessed and unspoken, official and unwritten, stamped and erased. After all, this federal agency was a de facto dictionary of American citizenship, defining Americanness in the sense that what was called American and what wasn’t (i.e., who became American and who didn’t), was continuously defined, interpreted, and redefined here, not by linguists, philology scholars, or grammarians, but by civil servants carrying suspiciously thin folders that reduced human struggle to bullet points. Above the x-ray machine, the dual portraits of Bush and Cheney practically snickered at me. There could have been dialogue bubbles coming from their mouths that said, Good luck kid. This country isn’t a free ride and we don’t give a shit about Mauritanians unless they bring over a corporation. I grabbed my satchel from the X-Ray machine and took the elevator to the 9th floor, my feet tapping the ground to break up the silence. As Yacoub’s translator, silence meant loss and loss meant deportation. For both of our sakes, I vowed to fight that silence and defeat my own self-consciousness to the very end, so that I could be the advocate he needed. This moment forced me to reconsider the power of my own words.

2.

Eight years earlier, after spending an entire summer in college working on a coming-of-age novel and some shorter nonfiction pieces, my mom mentioned my prodigious output to my brother, who got annoyed and blurted out that my writing was “just a bunch of words.” That slogan became forgotten artillery ordnance in a proxy war of identity, language, and vocation until the first explosion. The delayed violence of those words was disguised to me until the exact moment I tripped over them unwittingly. For seven years, whenever I started seeing myself as a writer, even for a brief moment, I’d hear his barb again and watch the world around me detonate into rubble. The fact that my brother and I have been extremely close since I was in junior high didn’t diffuse the explosiveness of his words. I was too vulnerable to criticism and afraid of failure. I was sensitive to his dismissal because my writing career had always been suspect at best and aspirational at worst. It was only after a stint in the Peace Corps and a series of volunteer gigs working with refugees that I learned the power, the necessity, and the redemption of language, the way it could literally help some people achieve cultural reincarnation in America.
Read more…

A Moral Center In a Decayed Ethical Universe

Former Abu Ghraib interrogator turned playwright Joshua Casteel, left, interviews an unidentified prisoner, played by David Blum, during a dress rehearsal of his production, "Returns," in 2007. (AP Photo/The Daily Iowan, Ben Roberts)

Joshua Casteel had to decide between attending seminary and deploying to Iraq as an army interrogator. He chose Iraq, where he hoped to bring morality and humanity to interrogations. But army interrogators already had their own version of “moral order”:

For the first week Casteel sat in on interrogations. There were six booths on each side of a long hallway; down the center was a two-way mirror that didn’t always work well, and when it didn’t, the prisoners watched you watch them. The rooms held little beyond plastic chairs, cheap tables, maybe zip ties on the chair legs. Sometimes a steel hook was attached to the floor. Every now and then prisoners were led to a more comfortable room, to confuse them, make them relax. The goal was to make them slip up. Sometimes Casteel saw men kept naked. Sometimes they were handcuffed to chairs.

During lessons, Casteel’s supervisors explained how to use fabricated stories and charges of homosexuality to shame the prisoners and manipulate them. The commanders were clear about who they were dealing with, Casteel remembered.

“These men,” they said, “are the agents of Satan, gentlemen.”

Casteel kept his own moral compass in the interrogation room, where it turned out that treating people like people was more effective than treating people like animals to be broken.

It turned out he couldn’t help but feel bad for the prisoners. It didn’t matter if the prisoner was a wrongly accused farmer or a jihadist bent on Casteel’s destruction. His orders commanded that he approach prisoners as assets to manipulate, but when Casteel walked into the interrogation room and saw the prisoner, he thought, This is a man in need of redemption. “From my very first interrogation,” he wrote later, “I have simply lacked the ability to look at the person I interrogate in a way that does not demand I also think about what is best for him.” Soon Casteel was attending confession with an Army chaplain after each interrogation, because “of an overwhelming burden to atone for what I considered the sin of reducing individuals to strategic ‘objects of exploitation.’” Once, he told a prisoner “You are not a criminal, you are not a terrorist,” and the prisoner wept, because no American had ever called him anything but evil.

At the same time, Casteel was extracting more information from the prisoners than other interrogators. During interrogations, Casteel smiled a lot and tapped his foot or smoked a cigarette to give the prisoner time to think, or sometimes because he didn’t quite know what to do next. He tried to show respect. He listened more than he spoke. He paid attention to a prisoner’s words, tone of voice, body language. “Some good news came in today,” he wrote to his parents after a month in Iraq. “I was just notified that the results of my past three interrogations received special recognition from ‘higher up.’ I guess my cigarettes and smiles with the ruthless man I spoke briefly of earlier did something profitable for the commanders in the field. That was a big boost of confidence, being as the best thing I did was simply respect him.”

Casteel eventually left the military as a conscientious objector after one particularly transformative encounter with a detainee. On his return to the U.S., he struggled both with the aftermath of his experience and with his health — his time monitoring burning waste pits in Iraq left him with Iraq/Afghanistan War-Lung Injury, and the ensuing cancer killed him. For Smithsonian and Epic magazines, Jennifer Percy tells the story of his life, work, and death.

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The Caviar Con

Wiki Commons / Thor via Flickr CC / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

David Gauvey Herbert | Longreads | February 2019 | 15 minutes (3,739 words)

Not long ago, Mike Reynolds was working at Cody’s Bait and Tackle when two men entered the shop with a jingle. He identified them right away by their accents as Russians. The two men began rifling through fishing poles that didn’t yet have price tags. Reynolds asked them to stop. They ignored him and continued to lay rods on the floor.

Reynolds, then 57, had seen plenty of Russians come through the shop, which sits on a quiet dam access road in Warsaw, Missouri, deep in the Ozarks. He was tired of them poaching the town’s beloved paddlefish. Sick of their entitled attitude, too.

So when he asked them to leave and they did not comply, there seemed only one option left. He removed a .40-caliber pistol from under the counter, chambered a round, and placed it on the counter.

“I fear for my life,” he said in a slow, deliberate drawl. He wanted to cover his bases, legally, for whatever came next.

The two men looked up, backed out of the store, and never returned.

It was just another dustup in the long-running war between caviar-mad Russians, local fishermen, and the feds that centers on this unlikely town in the Ozarks and a very curious fish. Read more…

The Battle Over Teaching Chicago’s Schools About Police Torture and Reparations

Illustration by Cha Pornea

Peter C. Baker | Longreads and The Point | February 2019 | 35 minutes (8,900 words)

This story is produced in partnership with The Point and appears in issue no. 18.

“What do you know about Jon Burge?”

Barely seven minutes into her black-history elective on the morning of April 16th, Juanita Douglas was asking her students a question she’d never asked in a classroom before, not in 24 years of teaching in Chicago’s public schools. She’d been preparing to ask the question for over a year, and she knew that for many of her students the conversation that followed would be painful. Disorienting. She didn’t like the idea of causing them pain. She didn’t want to make them feel overwhelmed or lost. But she thought, or at least hoped, that in the end the difficulty would be worth the trouble.

It was only second period. Several of Douglas’s students — a mix of juniors and seniors — were visibly tired. A few slumped forward, heads on their desks. I was sitting in the back row, so I couldn’t tell for sure, but I thought one or two might be fully asleep. Some were stealthily texting or scrolling through Snapchat. Others were openly texting or scrolling through Snapchat.

After a few seconds, Douglas repeated the question: “Do you know Jon Burge?”

A ragged chorus of noes and nopes and nahs.

“Tell me again what year you were born in,” said Douglas, who is 54 and likes to playfully remind her students that they don’t know everything about the world.

2000. 2001. 1999.

“Okay,” she said. “Well… Welcome to Chicago.”

Like so many new curriculum units in so many high schools across America, this one began with the teacher switching off the lights and playing a video. Who was Jon Burge? The video supplied the answer. Burge was a former Chicago Police Department detective and area commander. Between 1972 and 1991 he either directly participated in or implicitly approved the torture of at least — and this is an extremely conservative estimate — 118 Chicagoans. Burge and his subordinates — known variously as the Midnight Crew, Burge’s Ass Kickers, and the A-Team — beat their suspects, suffocated them, subjected them to mock executions at gunpoint, raped them with sex toys, and hooked electroshock machines up to their genitals, their gums, their fingers, their earlobes, overwhelming their bodies with live voltage until they agreed: yes, they’d done it, whatever they’d been accused of, they’d sign the confession. The members of the Midnight Crew were predominately white men. Almost all of their victims were black men from Chicago’s South and West Sides. Some had committed the crimes to which they were forced to confess; many had not. The cops in question called the electroshock machines “nigger boxes.”

The video cut to Darrell Cannon, one of the Midnight Crew’s victims. He spoke about getting hauled by cops into a basement:

I wasn’t a human being to them. I was just simply another subject of theirs. They had did this to many others. But to them it was fun and games. You know, I was just, quote, a nigger to them, that’s it. They kept using that word like that was my name… They had no respect for me being a human being. I never expected, quote, police officers to do anything that barbaric, you know… You don’t continue to call me “nigger” throughout the day unless you are a racist. And the way that they said it, they said it so downright nasty. So there’s no doubt in my mind that, in my case, racism played a huge role in what happened to me. Because they enjoyed this. This wasn’t something that was sickening to them. None of them had looks on their faces like, ugh, you know, maybe we shouldn’t do this much. Nuh-huh. They enjoyed it, they laughed, they smiled. And that is why my anger has been so high. Because I continuously see how they smile.

Text on the screen explained that Burge was fired in 1993, following a lawsuit that forced the Chicago Police Department to produce a report on his involvement in “systematic torture,” written by its own Office of Professional Standards. After his firing Burge moved to Apollo Beach, Florida, where he ran a fishing business. In 2006 another internally commissioned report concluded that he’d been a torture ringleader, but still no charges were brought; the Illinois five-year statute of limitations for police brutality charges had by then expired. In 2008 FBI agents arrested Burge at his home, and creative federal prosecutors charged him — not with torture, but with perjury. In a 2003 civil case, Burge had submitted a sworn statement in which he denied ever taking part in torture. In 2010 a jury found him guilty. After the trial, jurors pointed out that the name of Burge’s boat — Vigilante — hadn’t helped his case.

As soon as the video ended and Douglas flipped the lights back on, her students — most of whom were, like her, black — started talking. Their confusion ricocheted around the room.

“How long did he get?”

“Four-and-a-half years.”

“He only got four-and-a-half years?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“I really feel some type of way about this.”

“Is he still alive?”

“I’ve got it on my phone.”

“He didn’t torture them alone. Why didn’t anyone else get charged?”

“I’ve got it on my phone. He’s still alive.”

“I’m just… angry.”

“He lives in Florida!”

“Didn’t no one hear the screams?” Read more…

Stalin’s Scheherazade

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Brian J. Boeck | an excerpt adapted from Stalin’s Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival: The Life of Mikhail Sholokhov | Pegasus Books | February 2019 | 29 minutes (8,255 words)

Between April of 1926 and September of 1927 Mikhail Sholokhov performed a literary miracle. Never before — and never again — would a similar feat be accomplished. During those incredible months he managed to generate hundreds of typed pages of some of the most engaging prose ever to appear in Russia, a country blessed with Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and numerous other gifted writers. On an epic scale he narrated events that occurred in far-flung trenches of World War I, distant centers of power, and revolutionary meetings. He described multiple historical figures he had never met, and he painted vivid verbal pictures of battles that took place when he was still a boy. Brief periods of mad, feverish writing were sandwiched between moves, multiple trips to Moscow to meet with editors, and the birth of his first child.

His literary output during those months exponentially exceeded the accomplishments of his whole career up to that point and most decades of his career afterward. The improvement in quality was incredible. None of his colleagues wept with rapture when they read his early, formulaic, communist short stories. Early editors sometimes had to apply a heavy, corrective hand just to get some of them into print. Suddenly seasoned editors were in awe of his prose. Even more mind-boggling is the fact that this rapid, unexpected literary metamorphosis occurred at the age of twenty-two.

How did he manage to pull off such an improbable literary feat? Some locals insisted that he acquired manuscripts that were left behind when the Cossack side was routed by the Red Army during the civil war. At a minimum the archive he acquired appears to have included an unfinished novel that ended around 1919 and a trove of scrapbooks consisting of stories, sketches, newspaper clippings, and articles spanning over a decade of Cossack history. Read more…

Vladimir Nabokov’s Other Favorite Crime

Flickr CC / Getty / Photo courtesy the author / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Sarah Weinman | Longreads | October 2018 | 12 minutes (3,096 words) 

In the summer of 1952, George Edward Grammer was living a compartmentalized life, like so many middle-class executives of his kind. His wife, Dorothy, a Sunday school teacher, was spending the summer in Parkville, on the outskirts of Baltimore, with the couple’s three daughters — Patricia, Dorothy, and Georgia Lee — caring for her bereaved mother, settling the estate of her recently deceased father. During the day, Grammer, who was known as Ed, commuted from his apartment in Parkchester, a planned community in the north end of the Bronx, into Manhattan for his job as an office manager for the Climax Molybdenum Company. Grammer had worked there for about a year, returning to a full-time position after a few years on his own as a sales representative, itself a change of pace from wartime military work he couldn’t discuss with others. Perhaps it prepared him for the split life he led, visiting his family on weekends, and his mistress on weeknights. Read more…

Did We Learn From Anita Hill?

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

In the early 1980s, probably the summer of 1982, a teenage girl was at a party in a Maryland suburb near D.C. It was a memorable night, one which she could recall in detail almost forty years later. Two boys pushed her into a bedroom. One pinned her to the bed and groped her, his body writhing on top of hers, clumsily attempting to pull off her clothes and the one-piece bathing suit underneath them. When she tried to scream, he put his hand over her mouth. The boys were laughing. The girl was afraid the boy on top of her might accidentally kill her. His friend watched, then tried to join in, jumping on top of them. All three went tumbling to the ground and the girl fled, locking herself in a bathroom until she heard the boys stumbling away.

The girl — around 15 at the time — did what many girls who find themselves in this situation do: She told no one. In the next few years, she struggled academically and socially, unable to form romantic relationships.

It’s possible she watched on television almost ten years later when Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about being sexually harassed by her former boss, Clarence Thomas, then a Supreme Court nominee. It’s possible she saw Hill accused of being delusional, or a vengeful woman scorned. “She wanted it” is likely something she heard said of this poised and polished scholarly woman. It’s possible that two years after that, in 1993, she watched as David Brock gained plaudits and wealth for a character-assassinating book claiming to show “the Real Anita Hill,” watched when GOP operatives referred to his mansion as the house that Anita built.” It’s possible she again noticed a decade later, in 2001, when Brock quietly disavowed his entire book and said his writing on Hill was gleaned not from reporting, but from rumors intended to destroy her reputation. He faced exactly zero repercussions. It’s possible she watched Hill, an accomplished legal scholar and lawyer, get reduced forever in history to a woman in the shadow of a man for whom consequences proved to be purely theoretical.

A year later, in 2002, the formerly teenaged girl, now a successful professor herself, married. Early in their relationship, she told her husband she’d been physically abused, but it took ten years of struggling in their marriage before the details came out in couples counseling.

It’s unclear whether she noticed that the boy who watched in that room on the night in question published a book, chronicling his history of alcoholism, and including anecdotes about a friend named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” who partied at the beach with him as a teen. According to her husband, she did remember the last name of the boy who held her down: Kavanaugh. In the 2012 therapy session when she revealed the details of the night that traumatized her as a teen, she told her husband that the boy who attacked her was now a federal judge, and she feared he might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.

That day came earlier this year. Hesitantly, the woman contacted the Washington Post’s tipline and her congresswoman. Through her congresswoman, she sent a letter describing the incident, and requesting confidentiality, to the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Frightened of the repercussions of going public with her story, she ignored efforts from the Post and others to speak with her. She hired a lawyer who specializes in sexual harassment cases, and took a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent. The test concluded she was telling the truth.

It’s unlikely that gave her much comfort, if she remembered Anita Hill’s experience. After all, Hill took and passed a polygraph test. The man she accused, Clarence Thomas, refused to, was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, and remains on the court to this day.

Those are the details of the story provided by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser thus far, and some of the historical context surrounding them. There are other cultural realities to consider, of course: the current #MeToo movement, which has some women feeling slightly less afraid to speak up about experiences of abuse, and many powerful figures on the defensive, accusing supporters of the movement of going too far. We are in “the year of the woman,” some say. Will that help Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor accusing Kavanaugh? Consider this: 1992 was also “the year of the woman.” It was a year after Anita Hill testified, the same year as the Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, allowing states to regulate abortion as early as the first trimester, a ruling that reaffirmed central tenets of Roe v. Wade while beginning the gradual process of eroding the rights granted to women in the 1973 landmark decision.

Ford initially agreed to testify before Congress, just as Anita Hill did after statements she gave to FBI agents doing background checks on Thomas were leaked to the press. Women from her high school have circulated a letter of support. Of the 65 high school acquaintances of Kavanaugh’s who signed a letter of support for him last week, only four have stood by their signatures since Ford came forward. (Many of those 65, though, did not respond when POLITICO contacted them.) Mark Judge, the friend who Ford says was with Kavanaugh when he attacked her, has since written that he never saw Kavanaugh behave as Ford described and he would prefer not to testify. The Senate Judiciary Committee has subpoena power to compel him to do so, but it’s unclear whether the committee will pursue that route. Meanwhile, a woman who says she went to school with Ford tweeted that she knew about the incident when it happened, though she has since deleted the tweet and declined to discuss it further.

Hill had support back in 1991 too. She had four women waiting to support her credibility, but they were not allowed to speak — because Joe Biden, a Democrat, made a deal with his Republican colleagues. Biden has of late taken up the cause of affirmative consent and campus sexual assault, and has twice come close to apologizing to Hill — though not for suppressing her supporters, or for his own role in the attacks she received (he claims he wishes he’d done more to tone down his colleagues’ attacks on her). As Hill herself said: “He said, ‘I am sorry if she felt she didn’t get a fair hearing.’ That’s sort of an ‘I’m sorry if you were offended.’”

Biden has pointed out he voted against Thomas’ confirmation, but if he suppressed her witnesses, how much does that single vote really matter?

Biden has long been praised for his ability to “reach across the aisle” and work amicably with his Republican colleagues. Many of today’s top Democrats have the same reputation. Does that mean Ford can expect to be undermined in back-door dealings the way Hill was? The vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation was scheduled for this Thursday, but after three Republican senators said they thought it should be postponed, Sen. Chuck Grassley canceled the vote. A new date has not yet been set.

At first, Ford’s lawyer said on television that Ford would testify before the committee. But after receiving death threats, having her email hacked and identity impersonated online, Ford said an FBI investigation should occur before she is forced to go “on national television to relive this traumatic and harrowing incident.” While Ford and her family had to relocate from their home for safety reasons, Kavanaugh’s wife was handing out cupcakes to the reporters outside their house. (Hill’s experience predated the internet age, but she too received harassing phone calls from strangers.)

Sen. Orrin Hatch has claimed the FBI doesn’t conduct such investigations, even though they did investigate Hill’s statements about Thomas. Hatch should know this: During Thomas’ hearing, he praised Biden and Strom Thurmond for ordering an FBI investigation “which was the very right thing to do, and they did what every other chairman and ranking member have done.” (The Justice Department has said the allegation against Kavanaugh “does not involve any potential federal crime” for the FBI to investigate, and that the FBI’s role during background investigations is specifically to look for natural security risks.) The Utah senator even doubled down in recent days: When Sen. Schumer criticized the White House for not ordering an FBI investigation, Hatch said his complaint “does not hold water” because Senate Democrats had withheld Ford’s letter from Republicans and the FBI for two months. Hatch’s accusation comes off a little hypocritical, however, considering the White House and Republicans have withheld the majority of Kavanaugh’s record, only releasing about 7 percent of it and blocking subpoenas seeking answers to a variety of questions. (For comparison, when Justice Elena Kagan was nominated, the Obama White House released about 99 percent of her record.)

Why do these details about Hatch matter? He sits on the committee that will question Ford — and was on it back in 1991 when they questioned Hill. He was one of her most aggressive interrogators, and accused her of plagiarizing her statements about Thomas from “The Exorcist” and an obscure decision by a federal appeals court in Tulsa, Okla. He doesn’t seem to have changed much since then: Ford hasn’t even testified yet and he and Grassley (also on the committee when it questioned Hill) have already said she is “mistaken” and “mixed up.” As Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has sat on the committee for at least a decade, told The Washington Post, “I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close,” which hardly suggests any plan to actually consider any testimony from Ford.

It’s odd that Hatch’s blatant, seemingly blind support for Kavanaugh doesn’t disqualify him from being on the committee considering his appointment. It’s especially worrisome in light of a David Brock tweet claiming that it was Hatch’s staff who selectively leaked part of the FBI investigation into Hill’s claims about Thomas to him. It would not be surprising to hear that Brock is experiencing deja vu these days, harkening back to the days when he was determined to help make Hill appear “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” by printing “virtually every derogatory and often contradictory allegation” he heard about her. Contradictory claims are making a comeback, it seems: Kavanaugh’s defenders have mounted a wild array of excuses for the man. Sometimes it’s that he wasn’t at the party; other times that there never was a party. Or he was at the party but the incident didn’t happen; or it happened but it doesn’t matter because it was a long time ago and apparently teenage boys categorically sexually assault their female peers and that’s acceptable. Or something happened but it was “rough horse play.”

Hill herself penned an op-ed in the New York Times this week, writing that “the public expects better from our government than we got in 1991.” But will we get it? She doesn’t sound so sure: “That the Senate Judiciary Committee still lacks a protocol for vetting sexual harassment and assault claims that surface during a confirmation hearing suggests that the committee has learned little from the Thomas hearing, much less the more recent #MeToo movement.”

It’s fair to wonder why Republicans wouldn’t want to just pick a new nominee. Ford’s accusation is, after all, not the only problem that has come up during the judge’s hearings. He is accused of lying under oath not only this year, but also in 2004 and 2006. The thing he was allegedly lied about: allegedly stolen documents. (A former staffer for Sen. Hatch now claims that Kavanaugh “knew nothing of the source” of the documents he was provided.) It’s also unclear whether he was truthful about his involvement in the vetting of a judicial nominee whom he recommended for the seat. He may have also lied about his involvement with the appeals court nomination of a lawyer who helped develop the Bush-era interrogation torture policies, and another judge who suggested a reduction of the sentence of a man who helped to burn a cross in front of a mixed-race couple’s home. He may have even lied about his knowledge of the interrogation torture policies themselves (according to Sen. Richard Durbin, to whom Kavanaugh professed his ignorance of the Bush administration’s detention and torture policies during his nomination to the D.C. Circuit court, “…[Kavanaugh] had to know he was misleading me and the committee and the people who were following this controversial nomination”).

While legal scholars say Kavanaugh’s actions likely don’t meet the very high bar for perjury, it’s hardly commendable to give someone who apparently struggles to tell the truth under oath — or fully understand the documents he is given or the actions of people he promotes — a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court. There are more than 3,000 federal judges in this country. Is it really not possible for Republicans to find one who has not, willfully or otherwise, said untrue things under oath? The Supreme Court is, after all, the highest court in the land. Wouldn’t it be reasonable, then, to hold the people we put on it to the highest standards?

Moreover, is being the party who insisted on putting not just one, but two men accused of sexual misconduct on the Supreme Court really how the GOP wants to define itself?

Apparently, it is. POLITICO quoted a lawyer “close to the White House” insisting Kavanaugh’s nomination would never be withdrawn. “No way,” the lawyer reportedly said. “If anything, it’s the opposite.” Apparently, the White House is concerned that “if somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.”

This is perhaps not a surprising view from a White House that stands behind a president caught bragging on tape that he doesn’t wait before forcing himself on women because “when you’re a star, they let you do it… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” A president accused of sexual assault by at least 22 women. A president who defended his White House staff secretary after claims of the man’s history of intimate partner violence — which the White House knew about for months — was exposed. Or who said, of child predation allegations against Republican senate candidate Roy Moore, “forty years is a long time.” Or who defended Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Corey Lewandowski and so on. In effect, an endorsement from the Trump White House doesn’t do much to dispel the idea that his chosen nominee may have committed sexual predation.

If anything, it’s the opposite.

 

Michelle Tea and the Betrayal of Queer Memoir

Feminist Press

Alana Mohamed | Longreads | August 2018 | 12 minutes (3,094 words)

Michelle Tea has made a career of memoir, and in doing so she has chronicled a generation of queer and punk subcultures. Growing up a lonely and shy teenager, for me Tea’s autobiographical novel Valencia represented freedom. She wrote about sex and friends and death in a way that made me feel alive, kind of like the way watching Party Monster makes some want to do a face full of cocaine. I wanted to be her, or the women she portrayed, who were all so brash and powerful and sexy. With her latest release, Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms, Tea continues to write explosively about her life. But she’s also slowed down and become reflective — while still delightfully contradictory — dissecting the history of the ruptures within the communities which she has documented so well.

Recently, I’ve gotten in the habit of saying people have been “so generous” when sharing their stories. Post-#MeToo, radical disclosure has become typical, if not necessary, to speak frankly about sexual boundaries and trauma. “Thank you for being so generous with your story,” I say to the woman who just described her first fisting experience to contextualize her rape. It feels right, like it acknowledges the spiritually taxing effort that goes into disclosure when someone offers a highly personal narrative. But who talks about their first fisting for the good of the general public? Often, they’re talking about it because no one else will, and someone needs to. It’s not so much a matter of generosity as one of necessity. Read more…