Blood Atonement

Reflections on the American Counterpastoral

First things first: I want to thank so many of you for reaching out in response to my essay on my father, the body in pain, and what it means to be human. I am truly touched by the messages you shared with me, and the support you’ve offered—it means so much, thank you. It was none other than my dad himself, commenting on the essay, who noted that what separates humans from AI is our ability to feel emotions:

I don't mean simplistic descriptions (e.g., oxytocin "causes" feelings of attachment) but it is an essential part of defining how we experience the world, from love (eros and agape) to feel an enriched response to a poem or piece of music and so on. This is why computational models are inherently inadequate; they do not arise except as add on subroutines to mimic the emotional depth of our experiences. And it is, to use the words of Victor Frankl, the last freedom, our freedom to choose our attitude. I have nothing but gratitude for how my life has gone. To love and be loved, to fight the good fights, to live with the contradictions of sorrow and joy and never fail to appreciate a good joke is for the living alone.

That’s MY father, everyone! And just so y’all know, he’s starting a new treatment for his leukemia that his doctor believes will significantly alleviate his pain. Let us hope.

So. There I was last week, feeling grateful toward my family, my friends, and my readers, and starting to compose in my mind a cheeky essay regarding the parade of Big Tech CEOs to the White House for some dumb summit to promote “American AI dominance.” My plan was tie this embarrassing, sycophantic display of cozying up to American authoritarianism as akin to Charles Lindberg happily accepting the Order of the German Eagle from Herman Göring in October 1938, and then willfully refusing to give the medal back when, only a few weeks later, the Nazi government conducted the mass pogram known as Kristallnacht. I was then going to share with you that Lindbergh was publicly shamed for his fascist sympathies by none other than Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, whose career took off when he started lampooning Lindbergh via his cartoons:

(Source — and there’s plenty more!)

Finally, I planned to conclude by once again beseeching you to read (or watch) The Plot Against America, Philip Roth’s counterfactual history of a fascist America under a President Lindbergh during WWII, to help understand the current moment we are in.

And then Charles James Kirk was killed.

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By the time I publish this essay, it will be a less than a week since this murder took place, yet I suspect already many if not most of you have had your fill of “takes” on this grisly event. Here are a few that resonated with me, if you’re curious. With apologies, I’m afraid I must share my thoughts too, although they originate from a perhaps unusual angle that’s both personal and historical.

You see, nearly one year ago to the day, I drove through St. George, Utah, the home of Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s alleged killer. I was road tripping with my girlfriend—it’s a stunningly beautiful part of the country—when we found ourselves in the middle of the Mountain Meadows Massacre national historic site, about 30 minutes north of Robinson’s hometown.

Do you know about the Mountain Meadows Massacre? In 1857, a wagon train of settlers from Arkansas, bound for California, passed through the southwest corner of the Utah territory, or “Deseret” as it was referred to by the Mormon settlers who controlled that corner of America. At the time, tensions between the de facto theocratic Mormon state and the federal government were at a fever pitch—historians call it the Utah War. Wanting to send a message that Deseret was theirs and theirs alone to govern, the Mormons engaged in a sustained campaign of terrorism to deter outsiders from entering their land.

Accordingly, when the Baker–Fancher wagon train crossed into territory they controlled, the Mormon militia decided to attack. They did so while impersonating (and partially mixing with) the local native Pauite tribe, to avoid taking direct blame. But when a scouting party for the migrants ran into Mormon attackers retreating from the field of battle, Mormon leaders grew worried that their cover was blown, and news would eventually travel back to DC about their guerilla activities, which in turn would prompt federal military action. So they decided the best course of action was to slaughter the entire wagon train, save for the children under the age of six. Around 120 people were killed en masse, with their bodies left to rot in the mountain meadow.¹

I can’t help but think about how the relative insularity of the Mormon community at the time fueled their paranoia and fear, to the point that they commited this incomprehensible barbarity. Echoes of that same paranoia and fear grow louder every day in America. Dehumanization is the order of the day.

Politics being done the “right way,” according to Ezra Klein (Source)

It is a coincidence that Tyler Robinson grew up with a half hour’s drive of Mountain Meadow, but I do not find it coincidental at all that he appears to have spent much of his time after dropping out of college playing video games online, ensconced in a modern-day digital Deseret. Such an insular life, if it can be called that. I am not making a causal claim so much as recognizing, as so others many have, that there is something deeply warping about these poisonous online worlds. They seem anti-human. (If reports are to be believed, one day after assassinating Kirk, Robinson was back on Discord, cracking jokes.)

Can we escape the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the indigenous American berserk?² Who knows. Increasingly, though, I find myself fantasizing about starting a new sort of school, one that is largely if not entirely devoid of technology. I get the irony of typing these words on my laptop with the intention of uploading them to share with you via Substack, so perhaps this is a hypocritical pipe dream. But something is profoundly broken in America, and I suspect our path to redemption and restoration will take at least a generation. And so in my emergent fantasy, digital technology starts to shrivel and shrink in the schoolhouse. Touch grass? Yes indeed, and think, write, talk, debate, paint, sing, ponder, feel—in a place that is for humans alone.

Either that, or flee the country. Speaking of which, I’m heading out myself for a few weeks, so posting may be light-to-nonexistent. Or maybe I’ll share some kangaroo pictures, we shall see.

Mountain Meadows Massacre memorial

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1. The Mormon community took these children in and abused them for two years before they were returned to their families in Arkansas. According to one soldier who helped with the repatriation, the kids were “in a most wretched condition, half starved, half naked, filthy, infested with vermin, and their eyes diseased from the cruel neglect to which they had been exposed.” If you’re interested in going deeper, Vengeance is Mine; The Mountain Meadows Massacre and its Aftermath by Richard Turley Jr. and Barbara Jones Brown is comprehensive, and Netflix recently aired a six-part dramatization of the Mountain Meadows massacre, appropriately titled American Primeval. It’s brutal but relatively accurate, as these things go.

2. Philip Roth, again—I’m paraphrasing from American Pastoral. Interestingly, a central character in that book resembles the twisted fantasy of a left-wing terrorist that is currently fueling the fever dreams of the fascist right in America.