Gwoss Dispways of Power

Four years ago I jotted down some thoughts concerning moral puritanism’s hold on our relationship to art, posted the finished article to Patreon, and fell asleep. I woke up to a firestorm of debate, hundreds of strangers accusing me of being a pedophile, and thousands more groaning, “Finally, somebody fuckin’ said it.” That essay, I Don’t Wanna Grow Up (And Neither Can You), specifically interrogated the desire to punish others for their artistic preferences. For watching the wrong shows, for writing the wrong kind of fanfiction, for enjoying the wrong kind of pornography you might find yourself surrounded by vicious moral scolds who openly boast about stalking, suicide-baiting, and otherwise harassing their targets. In these circles the depiction of an act or dynamic in fiction is given real-world moral weight, a species of context collapse not only inherently absurd but which acts as a convenient gateway to verbal and material brutality and self-righteous moral absolutism.

But what happens when those same people find themselves up against real, tangible moral wrongdoing? You only need to look as far as the case of Ana Mardoll to find out. Mardoll, 40, a self-published YA author and former core Shakesville member, spent the better part of two decades debating the minutiae of queer micro-identities and raising loud moral concerns over everything from cutesy dating sim Boyfriend Dungeon to Isabel Fall’s landmark short story ‘I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter’. This past week it came to light that he was in fact a longtime software engineer at arms manufacturer Lockheed-Martin, a position secured for him fifteen years ago by family members already installed at the notorious corporation, which manufactures everything from white phosphorus bombs to F-35 jet fighters. Mardoll offered a half-apology, stating that his disabilities and need to work from home made finding any other employment with equivalent health insurance impossible, a claim somewhat undercut by his ownership and recent sale of a four-bedroom house valued at just over four hundred thousand dollars.

Suddenly the “harm” Mardoll and his cohort had so obsessively policed seemed to many a dubious proposition when measured against a decade and a half of material support for war profiteers. Discourse ensued. Others, among them body liberation activist Lindley Ashline and semi-popular Twitter account @sheologian, soon stepped forward to declare their own past and present association with arms manufacturers and assert that it “said nothing about them as people” and “was just part of life under capitalism.” A large number of these personalities had their own histories of online aggression under the guise of moralistic scolding, from Ashline’s involvement in contentious circumstances surrounding Health at Every Size originator Lindo Bacon’s racist treatment of a prospective collaborator to @sheologian’s frequent bad faith diatribes aimed seemingly at anyone and everything. These and other users forwarded arguments that they “needed to survive” and to “feed their families”, which sounds reasonable until you realize there has never in recorded history been a situation where a person’s only two choices were “work for a war profiteer” or “be destitute.”

What Mardoll and his defenders and colleagues in the arms industry are really defending is the right to suburban comfort, to home ownership and lawns and two-car garages and PhD programs. One user, the now-deleted account @loudpenitent, even outright stated, “An anonymized “people of the global south” is not worth more than one domestic queer citizen.” in response to individuals sharing examples of Lockheed-Martin’s contributions to war crimes and mass murder, while Bob “MovieBob” Chipman chimed in with his legendary tact and charm to defend arms manufacturers as “the good guys” in the wake of a long thread slavering over the munitions used to kill alleged Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. For a loosely affiliated group of people united only by their fixation on prosecuting others over perceived or minute moral infractions against their own personal codes to come together so strongly in defense of perhaps the most obviously and directly immoral industry in the modern world suggests a shared psychological root, one powerful enough to draw disparate viewpoints together in a kind of group denial exercise.

When a population lacks control over its own circumstances, one way it releases internal tension is through the phenomena of the witch hunt. The waves of the Great Mortality, colloquially known as the Black Death, which swept over Europe saw recurring witch persecution in which accusations stoked by grudges, delusions, and other forms of public hysteria led to torture, which led inevitably to more accusations, the cycle repeating itself until in some cases it even consumed its own architects before burning out. A witch hunt’s participants may believe they’re in pursuit of an occult enemy, but their true goal is to release pent-up frustration at a world fundamentally beyond their control. Fast-forward to the present day — two pandemics in the streets, elections collapsed into meaningless back-and-forth between the fascist party and the fascist-but-polite party, forever wars metastasizing across Eurasia as student debt swells and medical infrastructure collapses — and you have the ideal circumstances for charismatic agitators like Mardoll to generate and parasitize meaningless proxy conflicts. No single moral crusade is meant to accomplish something concrete within a community so much as it is to show that its instigators can exercise power, no matter how soft and sickly sweet their public personae.

These purgative displays of force look only inward, atomizing communities and pitting their members against one another while inspiring universal anxiety. It’s just Stalin’s inner circle playing out in a much broader and more diffuse setting. The names and faces don’t matter, the conflict itself is immaterial, but all of it serves to distract from the very real violence to which people like Mardoll contribute materially with their labor. Not only do such bad actors get to vent whatever vestigial guilty feelings they harbor through these brutal social games, but they train their followers and even their ideological opponents to look inward, to waste time litigating minutiae rather than confronting with force the institutions which immiserate and torture the entirety of the human race. These institutions, after all, pay their bills, though that didn’t stop Mardoll from fundraising from an audience composed largely of actually impoverished young queers. That hypersensitive concern for moral propriety dissolved as soon as it touched money, or the sacrifice of the least convenience or comfort.

Art may be an ideological battlefield, but beware anyone treating it as the whole of any given cultural war. Beware people who cling to their helplessness and their victimhood as symbols of power, as cudgels to fend off real accusations of abuse and wrongdoing. The most debased and degraded of us still has agency, and a person’s feeling that a work of art is attacking them carries no inherent moral weight. Cycles of outrage and infighting over manufactured slights serve not only to distract us from the wolves in sheeps’ clothing among us but from the wolves who move undisguised through the world, smug and secure in their untouchability. If we as queers, as artists, as trans people, as disabled people or sex workers or any of the many, many overlapping groups which comprise the wider circle of this readership are exhausting ourselves taking sides in the petty tantrums of crybully con artists like Mardoll, where will our strength be when we have a chance to stand up to the blood-soaked institutions on which parasites like him feed? Art is not morality. Art cannot inflict material harm. Art as a field is not a substitute for the conditions of gross imperialist violence in which our lives are entangled.

Fuck Lockheed-Martin, every company like it, and every selfish tick clinging to their flanks, and fuck anyone who says we should give up and accept bloodshed as the cost of life in the United States, who says we should play our little games of social roulette instead of turning en masse to face the people who’ve forced us all into this gutter. We will sacrifice the personal comfort to which people cling even at the cost of their souls, we will set aside our differing tastes in movies, our divergent opinions on books, and we will move forward united and with a clear vision both of our own mistakes and shortcomings and of the real and tangible power we can still wield against the world’s war profiteers and institutional murderers.