ANDOR (2022): EPISODES 4-6

Episode 3 of Andor ended with Cassian Andor and Luthen Rael, played by Stellan Skarsgård, blasting their way out of Ferrix, and leaving Syril Karn and his corporate police detachment either dead or in a state of shock wondering what happened. Andor, who has no money or ship of his own, is essentially Luthen’s prisoner, dependent on the older man, not only for his ride out of Ferrix, but for food and shelter until they both figure out his next step. When Luthen suggests to Andor that he join a group of revolutionaries on the planet Aldhani to take part in the robbery of an imperial garrison, it’s more of an order than an opportunity. Andor, who doesn’t have much choice in the matter, agrees.

If you’re a student of the Russian Revolution and all of this sounds familiar, it’s no accident. In a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, Andor’s creator Tony Gilroy explains that he based episodes 4-6 of the show on the opening of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book Young Stalin, and the infamous 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, where a heist organized by Lenin and led by Joseph Stalin, carried off 241,000 rubles from a caravan of armored cars making their way through  Erivansky Square in what is now the city of Tbilisi, Georgia. The robbery was not a success. Over 40 people, including a number of innocent bystanders, were killed. 241,000 rubles in 1907 was only the equivalent of about 3.4 million dollars today, and very little of it wound up being of much use. The Czar’s secret police had a record of the serial numbers of all the largest bills. What’s more the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party passed a resolution condemning the “participation in or assistance to all militant activity, including expropriations as disorganizing and demoralizing.”

Nevertheless, The Tiflis bank robbery was a defining event for the ruthless, violent group of revolutionaries who would later become known as the Bolsheviks. Luthen, like Lenin, is determined to bring down the empire by any means necessary, and to do that he needs a lot of resourceful young petty criminals like Cassian Andor. On the way to Aldhani we not only learn that Luthen knows pretty much everything about Cassian Andor, but that Andor is no stranger to revolution and guerilla warfare, having served as a cook for an insurgent army during his teenage years, and having quit in disgust over factional squabbles that saw his fellow revolutionaries fighting one another more than they fought the empire. That Luthen is willing to pay Cassian 125,000 imperial credits to join his team on Aldhani is a testament to Cassian’s potential as a future militant. When Luthen asks Cassian to choose an alias, a codename, and Cassian calls himself “Clem” after his stepfather, we see how Bolsheviks are made. Clem, a skilled thief and scavenger, a black man who was hanged in the town square on Ferrix by the empire, has become Clem, a member of the revolutionary vanguard.

Cassian’s salary is an immediate source of tension between Luthen and Vel, the leader of the revolutionary cell on Aldhani, a severe young woman played by Faye Marsay, “the waif” from Game of Thrones. The last thing she wants is a mercenary, whose high salary is guaranteed to cause resentment among the other members of the cell, but Luthen insists that she take him and she follows his orders. As she introduces Andor to his “comrades,” Cinta, a young dark-skinned woman whose entire family was murdered by stormtroopers, Karis Nemik, a young man in his 20s, and the group’s intellectual and revolutionary theorist, Taramyn, a tall, formidable looking black man and an ex-imperial storm trooper, Lieutenant Gorn, an imperial officer and Vel’s man on the inside, and Avrel, a white man in his 40s, an ex-con who immediately begins to antagonize Cassian Andor and foment discontent, we begin to see why Vel is in command. She’s authoritative but open-minded and curious. She breaks up fights by asking each man his opinion on the issues. She skillfully integrates Andor into the team while making sure her people keep an eye on him to make sure he’s trustworthy.

The mission on Aldhani is a classic heist movie played out in the most poetic of all setting, Glen Tilt Park in Perthshire, Scotland. If you can imagine Jean Pierre Melville crossed with Ossian, Oceans 11 in the Scottish Highlands, the Italian job in the middle of the Highland Clearances, you can begin to understand the narrative complexity and originality of Andor. The imperial garrison on Andor is a bit like any frontier garrison in a district being ethnically cleansed for the good of “progress.” If the Kenari people in the early episodes of Andor were indigenous Mexicans, the Dhanis are basically Highland Scots, fair-skinned, red or blonde-haired pre-industrial people the empire has been pushing south out of their native land for decades. Just like the Irish peasantry in 1847, or the Scots Highlanders after the Jacobite Rebellion, the Dhanis are squatting on land too valuable for their “primitive” way of life. For the imperial officers, administrators and bureaucrats at the garrison, Aldhani is considered a bad posting, a backwater they send you when your career isn’t going anywhere.

As we follow Luthen back to the imperial capital on the planet Coruscant, where the formidable revolutionary leader lives as the owner of an art gallery popular with the imperial elite, we immediately understand why nobody at the imperial garrison on Aldhani can appreciate the planet’s staggering natural beauty. Even the ruling class on Coruscant live in dull high rises decked out in sterile IKEA furniture. We also meet two new characters, Mon Mothma, a liberal Senator who’s working behind the scenes with Luthen to raise money for the oppressed, and Deedra Meero, an ambitious imperial intelligence officer who sees the imperial crackdown in the wake of the disaster on Ferrix as a chance to jump-start her career. Imperial society is the picture of corporate evil. The ruling class make banal small talk. Senior management plays mid-level managers off against one another. Mid-level managers bully their underlings. Everybody moves in a tight, clipped way that says “I’ve built a forcefield around myself against beauty and imagination.” Above all, everybody is spying on everybody. Luthen has organized the heist on Aldhani partly because his contact in the Senate, Mon Mothma, is no longer able to move money around in the official banking system. Even her chauffeur is an imperial spy.

Probably the biggest plot hole in Andor is the fact that the empire still uses hard currency, that there’s a Fort Knox full of imperial gold bars to steal on the planet Aldhani. Nobody in the United States in 2024 uses cash. Even back in 1907 in Russia, the Secret Police could render stolen bank notes useless by circulating their serial numbers. There’s no reason to believe that the empire wouldn’t simply deactivate stolen imperial credits and render the physical media as valueless as expired Walmart gift cards. What empire worth its weight in evil lets people use cash. The empire in Andor is still in transition. It’s the 1970s, not the 2010s. The system of repression has not yet been perfected. In the end, the imperial payroll in Andor is a McGuffin, the excuse to show how the revolutionary cell organized by Luther and Vel pull off the perfect heist, not because any of them has any kind of superpower or extraordinary skill, but simply because they train for it, and train for it, and train for it. They put themselves through the paces so many times that even at the end when they’re all ready to kill one another, they still manage to pull it off.

What makes the heist in Andor so original is that in order to make their getaway, Vel, Andor and their comrades exploit The Eye of Aldhani, a rare natural phenomenon, a once every three years meteor shower, which is the center of a traditional religious ceremony for the Dhani. They need to pilot their slow, bulk freighter past the luminous natural phenomenon before the imperial garrison’s tie fighters can blow them out of the sky. Karis Nemik, the team’s intellectual has modified an ancient navigational system that will pilot them through the awesome spectacle of light even as the electrical charges fry the sophisticated computers on the tie fighters. Everything about the heist requires perfect timing, nerves of steel, inside information, and precise mathematical calculation, but in the end, it’s the beauty of the Scottish Highlands that lets the rebels defeat the evil empire. Andor and his space Bolsheviks succeed where Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite Rebels failed. The Jacobite Rising of 1745 isn’t particularly well known in the United States, but if you’re a fan of the TV series Outlander you will see the connection immediately. It’s an astonishing moment of TV. Somehow Tony Gilroy has managed to insert Celtic romanticism in the middle of a dirty Bolshevik Revolution organized by squabbling sectarian murderers and thieves. Cassian Andor, the last descendent of an extinct Mesoamerican tribe and Karis Nemik, a young intellectual with salvaged technology from the distant past, outwit an entire imperial garrison and make off with a spaceship full of gold.

Andor has rescued Bolshevism from young Joseph Stalin and given it back to the ancient highland bards.

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Andor (2022): Episodes 1-3

The 2016 film Rogue One is perhaps the most divisive Star Wars movie of all. The Excellent film critic Deep Focus Lens absolutely hated it. I thought it was the best Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes back. Set immediately before the first scene of the original Star Wars, which I will never call A New Hope, Rogue One is the story of Jyn Erso, played by the British actress Felicity Jones, and Cassion Andor, played by the Mexican actor Diego Luna. While neither Jyn nor Cassian has ever been particularly popular with hardcore Star Wars fans, they are the real heroes of the whole saga, since they are the ones who steal the plans to the original Death Star. Without Jyn and Cassian, Luke Skywalker, force or no force, would not have been able to send a pair of torpedoes down the garbage shoot, and blow the giant planet killer to kingdom come.

Running for twelve episodes, and consisting of three feature length movies, the first of which I will review here, the Disney + miniseries Andor is the prequel to Rogue One, the origin story of Cassian Andor before he reluctantly teamed up with Jyn Erso. Andor is no super hero story. It’s not even really Star Wars. Rather, it is Star Wars without the force, light sabers, Jedi knights, emperors or princesses, 8 foot tall space wizards in black S&M gear, or swelling orchestral scores by John Williams. If the original Star Wars was classic 1930s Hollywood, Andor is a mixture of genres, a heist film, a prison escape film, a police procedural, all wrapped up in a gritty style that might best be called kitchen sink noir, a style best exemplified by the forgotten 1981 Sean Connery film Outland or the 1984 cult classic Streets of Fire. If someone told me there was a lost Bruce Springsteen album called Darkness on the Edge of Andor, I would believe you. In fact, compare Diego Luna to young Bruce Springsteen or young Michael Pare.

Andor opens on the “industrial planet” of Morlana One with Cassian walking down along causeway in the rain towards the red light district of a corporate office park. If you’ve been to Hoboken or Jersey City, you’ve seen this place. He walks into a bar you might be tempted to compare to the bar at the Mos Eisley spaceport in A New Hope, if the bar in the Mos Eisley spaceport got rid of the raucous music and only admitted humans. Naturally everybody in the bar, including a pair of corrupt, corporate security guards, think Cassian is there to get laid, but even though Cassian is very much the type of guy who would pay for sex, that’s not what he wants. Just the opposite, Cassian is looking for his younger sister, from whom he got separated on their home planet when their tribe — who are obvious stand ins for indigenous Mexicans — was wiped out by an imperial ship in an incident that looks a bit like the first time white men made contact with Native Americans back in 1492. Cassian, who was rescued by a white woman named Marva, and her black husband Clem, who we later learn was hanged by the Empire, is looking for his authentic self in a place that no longer exists, a planet that was made uninhabitable by an imperial mining disaster, for an indigenous culture nobody has ever heard of, for a little girl who has been dead for 25 or 30 years.

Finding no trace of his sister in the bar, Cassian walks back up the causeway to his ship, where he’s mugged by the two security men who had mistaken him for an easy victim. Diego Luna, who’s about 5’10” and 150 pounds, is no more imposing than Mark Hamill, who got bullied at the bar at the Mos Eisley Space Port until he was rescued by Obi Wan Kenobi and his light saber. It’s a fatal mistake. Cassian was brought up on the working-class planet of Ferrix by a pair of scavengers, and knows how to handle himself in a fight. He knocks one of the men to the ground, cracks his skull on the concrete and shoots the other as he begs for his life. What makes the scene so good is how believable the fight is. There are no fancy martial arts. Cassian isn’t even that strong. It’s just one sober man against two jackasses who have had too much to drink at the bar, and who have convinced themselves that they’re tougher than they really are. When Cassian gets back into his ship and goes back to Ferrix, it feels like he had just killed a pair of drunken New York City Police officers outside a bar in the East Village, and fled the scene of the crime to go back home to Newark or Elizabeth in New Jersey.

Back home in Ferrix, Cassian begins constructing an alibi he hopes will cover his tracks. Along the way he meet his ex-girlfriend Bix, that one perfect 10 you sometimes run into in a dreary blue collar city, her current boyfriend Timm, Cassian’s friend Brasso, a hulking giant who’s willing to cover for him, everybody who’s ever done Cassian a favor or lent him money, and above all Marva, Cassian’s formidable old step mother who will later appear in perhaps the most memorable scene in the series. While Cassian is planning his escape, arranging to sell a valuable piece of gear he had stolen from the empire to a shady buyer he contacts through Bix, we go back to Morlana One and meet the imperial authorities in charge of the crime, only they’re not the imperial authorities. They’re just a mid-level corporate security department, the local cops in the 1993 movie The Fugitive who bungle the case until Tommy Lee Jones takes over. The head supervisor accurately sizes up the case from the very beginning. Two corrupt security guards picked a fight with the wrong man. We also see that the Empire is basically New York in the 1970s or 1980s, the imperial core before sincere Nazis and authoritarians like Rudy Giuliani take over. People tolerate the Empire because they can carve out their little grift inside of it. The two security guards got to drink, and fuck, at an expensive whorehouse because they could use their authority to shake down an occasional customer for his wallet. If they got killed in the process, that was just too bad. Nobody was going to waste any time tracking down their murderer, but the times are changing.

When we meet Syril Karn, we don’t even need an introduction for he’s such a familiar character. Played by the American actor Kyle Soller, Syril is the ambitious young police officer, think Lieutenant Exley from LA Confidential or Elliot Ness from The Untouchables, who’s determined to root out the corruption of the city police department, and put it back on track as an official crime fighting organization. “They were two Morlana employees,” he tells his supervisor, who advises him just to let it go. “If I don’t solve their murder than I am not worthy of the uniform.” While Syril may be the villain of the first part of Andor, there’s nothing particularly evil about him. He’s just a dedicated police detective doing his job. He’s not likable like Kevin Costner or charismatic and macho like Clint Eastwood or even an intellectual like Sam Waterson in Law and Order, but he does do exactly what every good police detective does. He kicks his lazy subordinates in the ass and makes them earn their pay. He locks on the one clue Cassian was careless enough, or sincere enough, to let drop, that a man from the planet Kenari (think Oaxaca or Chiapas) was looking for his long lost sister in a whore house in Morlana One, and just methodically sifts through the details. It’s a long shot, but like in every police procedural, that long shot eventually leads right to a viable suspect.

It is a long shot. Marva has wisely covered up the fact that her step son is an indigenous Kenari. Diego Luna is a well-known Mexican actor who fully embraces Mexico’s indigenous heritage but he doesn’t look particularly indigenous. He looks like any mixed race, mostly white, upper-class Mexican. If you told me he was Greek, or Turkish, or Sicilian, or even French, I’d believe you. Ferrix, like Elizabeth New Jersey, Scranton PA, Buffalo, New York, or Chicago is a dirty old industrial city full of every ethnic group, race, nationality, religion, skin tone, facial feature, height, weight, build, physical appearance, and cultural eccentricity known to man, or whatever humans in the Star Wars universe are called. It’s exactly the kind of place where a man like Cassian would cling to whatever makes him different. I know, for example, that my name “Rogouski” is derived from a small city in Silesia on the border of Poland and Germany, that my mother’s ancestry is French Swiss and German, that my paternal grandmother was born in Lithuania. Yet I couldn’t tell you very much about any of those places. I’m as American as Cassian is a native of Ferrix. In this day and age of the “Landback” movement you better believe that if I were even 5% Cherokee I’d tell everybody about it. Cassian, of course, who adores his mother Marva, has wisely kept his ethnic heritage to himself, but of course he has told most of his girlfriends, including Bix. Who hasn’t told their boyfriend or girlfriend about that obscure little country they can claim as their homeland?

As Cassian is getting his alibi straight with Marva, we learn that he has not brought Bix home to meet her. That tells us that she was never really important to him, that she was the passive partner in their relationship, the one who admires more than is admired. Timm, on the other hand, who’s played by the Scottish actor James McArdle, knows that he is punching far above his weight category. He’s a dull working class bloke in a dull industrial city who has scored the hottest babe in town. This fact is such an important part of his identity, he’s terrified of losing it. He also knows that he’s living in Cassian’s shadow, the mysterious Hispanic bad boy who for some reason Bix is reluctantly willing to do a favor for every time he comes around and asks. Timm fears that as soon as Cassian wants her back, she’s his for the asking. Timm is also not particularly bright. He doesn’t realize that his best possible option is to let Cassian sell his stolen imperial electronics to Bix’s contact and let him get out of town for good. Timm is a young man who knows he’s the rebound guy, the warm body who will serve as a place holder until she finds something better. So he acts in an irrational manner. He calls up Syril Karn. You were looking for a man descended from the mysterious and now genocided people of Kenari? I have some information that might be of interest to you.

In the third episode of Andor, the first story arc of the series comes together in an explosive way. Syril taps another security officer, commandeers twelve soldiers, and heads to Ferrix to arrest his only suspect. We also meet Luthen Rael. Played by the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, he’s Ben Kenobi to Cassian’s Luke Skywalker, Alec Guinness to Mark Hamill, the wise old mentor the lost young man was seeking all along. Unlike Alec Guinness’s Ben Kenobi, however, Luthen is no kindly old space Jesus. He’s more like Lenin or Robespierre, a ruthless, cold revolutionary determined to bring down the empire by any means necessary. If that necessary means is using and exploiting an angry young man like Cassian, so be it. He wants the electronics, of course, but he’s more interested in Cassian himself, a thief clever enough talk walk in and out of imperial bases and just take what he wants. Cassian mistrusts Luther but he also has no trouble telling him how he can steal so many imperial components. He’s a nobody. The Empire doesn’t care about him. All he has to do is walk in and take what he wants. It’s New York City in the 1970s and anybody with the requisite lack of morals can probably steal enough to live a pretty good life.

But times are definitely changing. Syril Karn and his detachment reach Ferrix faster than anybody, even an experienced Bolshevik like Luthen, expected. They quickly take Marva hostage, arrest Bix, and trace Cassian to the spot where he and Luthen are arranging their transaction. It’s now too late. Cassian has to trust Luthen, who’s his only way out. As they shoot their way out of the city, as Timm foolishly dies trying to rescue Bix from Syril Karn’s officers, as Marva taunts her arresting officer with a promise of the revolution that awaits him, Luthen tells Cassian about a mission. The rebellion is now ready to infiltrate a frontier garrison and steal the payroll for an entire imperial sector. Is Cassian interested. The rebellion is ready to pay well, and what choice does Cassian have after all? In the next episode, soon to be reviewed here, we enter a new arc of the Andor series. Fans of Jean Pierre Melville or the Oceans 11 series will enjoy it.

The Narcissism of the Oppressor Class

Try to imagine for a second that we’re all Canadians. I’m a middle-class Anglophone Canadian in the old capital of Kingston, Ontario, a two hour drive from Syracuse, New York. One day I pick up the local newspaper, the Kingston Whig Standard, and learn that the provincial government of Quebec had mobilized the 2^nd Canadian Division, which then stormed into the Mohawk reservation of Akwesasne, killed all 14,000 residents, and buried them in mass graves. The next day protests erupted on college campuses all across Canada, the University of Toronto, McGill, the University of Ottawa and Queens University in Kingston. The students at Queens University had even set up a tent city with signs like “No More Genocide in Canada” or “Arrest François Legault for War Crimes.” A few of the signs were a bit nuttier. One or two of them expressed outright dislike for the French. “You can never trust a frog,” one sign said. “Die cheese-eating surrender monkey,” another read.

As the week went on, more and more mass graves at the Akwesasne Reservation began to appear on Tik Tok, snuck out of the province by brave local activists with cell phones. It was clear that the provincial government of Quebec had committed a genocide. As a typical Anglophone Canadian, a bit conservative and a bit racist, I was first inclined to doubt the news of the atrocities, but after awhile it became undeniable. The people of Quebec had gone mad, and in an orgy of white supremacist violence, were trying to cleanse the province of the First Nations. I began to feel my outrage grow. I also began to take a certain pride in the 18-22 year old college students who had been the first to call national attention to what had happened in Quebec. But that’s not how the media saw it. All across the English language media of Canada, all my fellow Anglophones, who had always had a problematic relationship with the French, could talk about nothing but the former lowly status of the Francophone working class in Quebec. Every day there was a new apology from the media for what the United Kingdom had done to these oppressed people. Soon it started to be considered racist to refer to French Canadians as “white.” Every day there was a new horror story about how someone got a dirty look for saying “bonjour” instead of “good morning.” One day at the local Tim Hortons I found myself behind a pair of French-speaking patrons. “Oh hurry up you fucking frogs,” I whispered under my breath. The next day woke up to see myself on tape that the security camera had taken. “Who is this racist?” the local reporter said. “Anybody with information contact the station immediately.”

Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it?

It may sound ludicrous, but that’s exactly what’s happening in the American media. The Palestinians in Gaza are among the poorest people in the world. For the past 6 months, the Israeli Defense Forces have pounded a densely populated area with American made weapons, killing tens of thousands of people and creating a famine that will doubtedly kill many thousands more. The Israeli government is committing a genocide with the full support of President Biden and all of the wealthy, powerful countries of the European Union. The entire American political and media class has remained silent, even as they uncover mass grave after mass grave. Finally, the student body at Columbia University, the very best and brightest 18-22 year olds America has to offer, erect a tent city on their campus. They are met with brutal repression. The NYPD storms the campus, and evicts their first encampment. They return even stronger than before, determined to resist the attempts of the university administration to silence them. The media begins a smear campaign, accusing the protesters, many of whom are Jewish themselves, of being anti-Semitic terrorists. Rich conservative Jews make it all about themselves, and the story becomes all about how one of the wealthiest, most secure populations in the United States, a country which has never had a tradition of anti-Semitism, feels “unsafe.”

It is the narcissism of the oppressor class on full display. Oddly enough, as a white American Christian, I finally understand how black people perceived people like me in 2020, when a nationwide wave of protests erupted against police brutality, and many white conservatives made it all about themselves. It shouldn’t be “Black Lives Matter,” they insisted, but “All Lives Matter.” There is nobody in Western society more afraid and more insecure than the oppressor class. As Malcolm X used to argue, it’s all about projection. White people in America are terrified of black people because they are terrified of the idea that they will someday be treated like black people. Jews in Israel and the United States remember that in the 1930s they were the Palestinians, a stateless people targeted by all the most powerful racial supremacists in Europe and North America for destruction. It always comes full circle, doesn’t it?

It’s OK to kill jews ’cause they don’t have any feelings

Back in the 1990s, I used to spend my Summers in Alaska, where I would work on industrial fishing trawlers in the Gulf of Alaska, or in Salmon canneries in Ketchikan or Petersburg. It was cold, dirty, nasty work. I spent weeks covered in blood and fish guts without showering. The pay was terrible, a few dollars above minimum wage, plus time and a half for overtime. One year I worked on a boat I will call the Alaskan Collaborator. The captain, a Scottish-American immigrant from Glasgow who I will refer to as Bonnie Prince Malcolm, was an actual Nazi. I’m not joking. He not only had a tattoo from the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne — his grandfather was a Highland Scot who crossed the Channel to volunteer for the French Nazi Party — he even asked me if my name ended in a “ski” or a “sky” before he would hire me. “The only thing you have to worry about with skis,” he would say, “is that dumb Polacks like you need a lot of patient supervision. Sit a ski in the back of the boat with a pile of fish and a knife, and the only thing you have to worry about is him cutting his finger off. But a sky is devious,” he would go on. “You never know what a sky is up to. Hire a sky and he’ll probably go home in the Fall and ask his daddy to give him the money to buy my boat. Welcome aboard Mr. Rogouski,” he added, shaking my hand, and pointing me to a couple of tax forms I had to fill out. “I’m glad you found your place at the bottom of society. Just remember, down here in the blood, gore, and fish guts. I’m the king. If you don’t like it, you better learn how to swim. Because one complaint and you go right over the side.”

As the Summer went on, as I sorted fish after fish, making sure to separate valuable king and sockeye salmon from the cheap pink salmon we could be sending to the cannery back home, I often thought about Bonnie Prince Malcolm and his Nazi tattoo. I rarely saw him after the initial interview since the owner-operators of industrial fish trawlers rarely if ever fraternize with their minimum-wage employees. I began to play a game with myself. I was a guard at a Nazi concentration camp, not a high-class German but a Ukrainian conscript who saw the Nazis as liberators because they both hated communists, and the fish were inmates in the Alaskan Collaborator death camp. King salmon were Aryans who had either fun afoul of the law or joined the communist party. Sockeye Salmon were Poles, retards, sexual deviants, or gypsies. Pink salmon were Jews, destined to be run through the “iron chink” (a politically incorrect name for the head-chopping machine in an Alaskan salmon cannery), put into aluminum cans, and baked in a retort oven until they were ready for consumption. “Found another dirty Bolshevik,” I would say, tossing a valuable King Salmon in the fresh frozen bucket. Sing me a song gypsy,” I would say to the Sockeye Salmon who followed him shortly after. “Jew, Jew, Jew,” I would spit out at each cheap pink salmon I passed on to be sent back home, decapitated, canned, and baked. “Jew. Jew. Jew.”

One day Bonnie Prince Malcolm dropped by for a visit.

“How’s everything going Mr. Polack,” he said, nodding his head as I continued to work. “You and the fish getting along?”

“I’m sending them back to the gas chambers,” I said.

“And that’s where they belong,” he said.

“Do you ever feel sorry for them?” I said.

“No,” he said. It’s like that Kurt Cobain song. “It’s OK to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings.”

As I watched Jonathan Glazer’s film Zone of Interest, I thought about my Summers in Alaska. Glazer’s earlier film, Under the Skin, starred Scarlett Johansson as an alien disguised as a beautiful woman sent to Earth to harvest voddissin, human meat, a very expensive delicacy on the aliens’ home planet. She would lure unsuspecting men to their deaths, where they would be taken back home and processed. Zone of Interest reads a bit like the Sequel to Under the Skin. Based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, and set in the home of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, it details the mundane everyday life of Höss as they manage the giant industrial death machine on the other side of the wall separating their beautiful suburban house from the gas chambers and crematoria. There’s nothing particularly evil about Höss and his family. He’s just another white-collar middle manager with a socially ambitious wife and kids who want to get into the right colleges. To be honest, if he ever met a character like Bonnie Prince Malcolm he would probably piss his pants in sheer terror.

We never see the minimum wage workers on the other side of the fence in Zone of Interest, the Kapos, Ukrainian collaborators, Polish slave laborers, or Aryan draftees who got unlucky enough to be transferred from the Western front to do the shit work in an Eastern European death camp, any more than we see the Jews, gypsies, retards, Polacks or communists. But I imagined them, not as humans, but as aliens, the working class of Scarlett Johannson’s home planet, the minimum wage schmucks like me who processed the voddissin for consumption. Occasionally a Sockeye or King Salmon would slip through, and a Jewish woman with an expensive fur coat that would be examined by Höss’ wife to determine whether or not she or any of her fellow Aryans wanted it. Höss, his wife, and his children, I decided, were also aliens, allowed to take on human form and manage a voddissin factory in Poland. At the end of Zone of Interest, we suddenly find ourselves in the Auschwitz Museum in 2023, the cleaning staff sweeping up after a hard day’s work, me hosing down the deck of the Alaskan Collaborator after sunset.

Jonathan Glazer, a British Jew born in London, had the best day of his life, along with the worst, last week at the Oscars. As he accepted the award for Best Foreign Film, he did something stupid, declared that the Palestinians in Gaza were not voddissin, pink salmon, Polacks, Gypsies, or retards, but human beings. There was nothing particularly radical about his speech. All he did was the equivalent of the Dixie Chicks when they declared that they were embarrassed that George W. Bush was President of the United States, or like a liberal Protestant Minister who declares that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson don’t speak for all Christians.

“Right now,” he said, “we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist? Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, the girl who glows in the film, as she did in life, chose to. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance. Thank you.”

Pretty tame stuff, but there are no innocent “can’t we all just get along” statements about the genocide in Gaza, at least where Israel and its propagandists are concerned. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, Jews have no more right, or obligation, to speak out against atrocities committed by the Israeli government than anybody else. Glazer chose to demonstrate his solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza, and for his trouble, he got “canceled” by the Israel Lobby.

“Hamas’s October 7 slaughter, mass sexual assault, and hostage-taking onslaught in southern Israel, and the consequent ongoing war, was the result of the terror group’s avowed antisemitic ideology and its implacable desire to kill Jews anywhere and everywhere and destroy the State of Israel,” David Horovitz writes in the Israel Times. “Not the consequence of an ostensible Israeli hijacking of Glazer’s and others’ Jewishness and the Holocaust in the cause of ‘occupation,” then, but the barbaric manifestation of a neighboring terrorist government’s absolute negation of Israel’s right to exist.”

Jonathan Glazer is not going to lose his career. At worst, he’ll probably get disinvited to a few parties in Beverly Hills. Next year, after the Palestinians have all been processed into cans and baked in retort ovens, everybody will realize how silly the whole controversy was. Glazer at least, said something, even if it was “as a Jew.” Good for him, but where were Ryan Gosling, Margot Robbie, Greta Gerwig, and Christopher Nolan? Why didn’t they speak up about the genocide in Gaza? None of them should be let off the hook because they’re all blond, blue-eyed Aryans. As rich Westerners, it’s their genocide too. They should either own it or disavow it.

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious

In the Fall of 1964, a protest erupted at the University of California at Berkeley, the most elite public university in the world, and at the time tuition free, that is generally regarded as the beginning of the 1960s new left. Under its liberal Chancellor Clark Kerr, the university had become so successful that it probably surpassed the Ivy League for academic quality, but it all came at a price. It was also a training center for the military, defense industry and intelligence agencies, where California’s best and brightest public school graduates would prepare themselves for careers at Lockheed Martin or the State Department.

That Fall, Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense who would become Berkley’s most famous, and infamous, graduate in the late 1960s, had already mapped out a high-tech genocidal war in Vietnam where American planes would defoliate the country from above, and working-class draftees would keep track of their “body count” in the jungles below. But another, very different man, a 22-year-old graduate student name Mario Savio, a working-class Italian American Catholic from New York City, had enrolled at the university the previous fall. He had spent that Summer registering voters in the Jim Crow South, which at the time was probably as dangerous as serving in Vietnam, and had returned to liberal Northern California eager to share what he had learned with his fellow students.

The problem for Mario Savio and his fellow liberal idealists was that the University of California had a “no politics” rule on campus. In order to set up a table and give out leaflets, or just talk to other students, you had to be a member of an officially recognized Democrat or Republican club. The University also had a requirement for faculty members, a “loyalty oath” where you had to swear that you were never a member of the Communist Party. Four years before, in front of San Francisco City Hall, the San Francisco Police had brutally suppressed a protest against the House Unamerican Activities Committee, washing people down the steps with fire hoses, tear gassing and beating them. A confrontation had become inevitable. When a former graduate student named Jack Weinberg attempted to set up a table for CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, he refused to show his ID to campus police, and was arrested, handcuffed and put into a squad car. Student activists, eager to try out their training in non-violent civil disobedience, quickly surrounded the car, and prevented it from moving. Eventually the crowd swelled to several thousand people. Weinberg would spend the next 32 hours in the back seat of the police car as student after student jumped up on the roof, now a makeshift speakers corner, to give a speech, the best known being Mario Savio’s.

And that’s what we have here. We have an autocracy which — which runs this university. It’s managed. We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn’t he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, “Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his Board of Directors?” That’s the answer.

 Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be —  have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean — Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!

And that — that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mariosaviosproulhallsitin.htm

To be perfectly honest when I studied Mario Savio’s speech in an English 101 class in the 1980s at Rutgers, New Jersey’s shitty state university with an even shittier football team, I had always found it melodramatic. Berkeley wasn’t Northern Ireland or the Jim Crow South. Weinberg would be taken down to the campus police station. They would write him out a summons. He would pay a fine and that would be that. I didn’t realize at the time that the reason New Jersey’s somewhat less than elite flagship state university had a Classics department where you could study Latin and Greek, a well regarded philosophy department that would eventually be considered the best in the world, and top 25 programs in English and history, was precisely because an earlier generation of students had fought so hard to make sure higher education in America had not become a training center for the CIA and the Pentagon, a factory that processed teenagers to take their place in the American war machine. In 2024, things have gone backwards. The University of West Virginia, for example, has almost entirely abolished its liberal arts curriculum, a flagship state university without a French Department or a Comparative Literature Department.

Barnard College in New York City, the women’s division of Columbia University, is of course never going to abolish its Classics or French Departments for it serves an entirely different purpose from Rutgers or the University of West Virginia. The entire reason Barnard College exists is to train upper-class women to speak well, read deeply, write novels and poetry, and run the publishing industry in New York and NGO complex in Washington. Restrictions in the Ivy League have always been relatively few because it’s always been assumed that upper class Americans will always act in their own upper-class interests. That all changed last October 7, when Hamas broke out of the Gaza Strip and attacked Israeli settlements. Israel’s genocidal counter-offensive awakened a new generation of American student activists even at, or should I say, especially at ruling class institutions like Barnard. The Israel Lobby quickly counterattacked, forcing the Presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania to resign. The President of Columbia and the Dean of Barnard College, therefore, nervous about losing their jobs, have decided to ban all pro-Palestinian decorations on the doors of student dorm rooms at Barnard.

It’s the Fall of 1964 all over again.

(New York Times article is unlocked so there shouldn’t be a paywall.)

Students had also posted stickers and slogans supporting the Palestinian cause and naming the war in Gaza as a genocide. “Zionism is terrorism,” one student’s door sticker said.

Concerned that some students might feel intimidated by such messages, the Barnard administration has decided to enforce a ban on dorm door decorations altogether. Their removal was set to begin on Thursday, and all but “official items placed by the college” will be taken down, Leslie Grinage, the dean of the college, wrote in an email to students.

“While many decorations and fixtures on doors serve as a means of helpful communication amongst peers, we are also aware that some may have the unintended effect of isolating those who have different views and beliefs,” she wrote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/nyregion/campus-free-speech-barnard-columbia.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Zk0.w1-2.2PqpRWOP1eUd&smid=nytcore-android-share

Tis Pity She’s a Whore

There is something oddly satisfying about the moment when you read a news story and suddenly realize it’s not a news story at all, but an advertising campaign. The news itself is usually pretty trivial. In this case, a washed-up actress, down on her luck, goes online, sells some mildly racy photos, and makes enough money to pay off her house. What’s not to like?

When you look more closely you realize there’s quite a bit not to like. Drea de Matteo is a fellow Gen Xer, 52 years old. As much as I like my generation — we’re far less “woke” and a lot more fun than millennials — we’re not exactly young and sexy anymore. How exactly did a middle-aged woman make several hundred thousand dollars in 5 minutes selling sexy photos on the Internet?

That Drea de Matteo is selling nostalgia, not sex, wringing every dollar she can out of the valuable corporate property she was part of in the early 2000s, is no cause for concern. In fact, it’s cause for celebration. You go girl. But nostalgia isn’t all that Ms. de Matteo is selling, or why the corporate media is suddenly boosting her OnlyFans site. Drea de Matteo is also acting as a brand ambassador for a sleazy soft-core pornography channel, one that rewards already well-off, established media personalities, and exploits desperate young women. Her being 52-years-old is part of the ad campaign. How many 18-25 year-old girls are going to read about her success and think “gee. If a woman my mom’s age can make money selling nudes, why can’t I?”

When it comes to sex work, OnlyFans seems like a pretty good job. Strip down to your underwear in the comfort of your own home, snap a few selfies, post them on line, and wait for the money to start rolling in. The problem is that, except for a small elite with an already established brand in the corporate media, it doesn’t. In 2021, the top 1% earned 33% of the total gross merchandise value while the top 10% earned 73%. In other words, the bottom 89% split 4% of the revenue, accomplishing little but providing free content to a social media company, and putting photos online that will most likely not remain private forever, and will almost undoubtedly come back to haunt their creators in the future.

What’s more, OnlyFans, while relatively safe in and of itself, can often be a gateway to other, more dangerous kinds of sex work. How many naïve young women in these economically desperate times dreaming of being the next Mia Khalifa yet only making a few dollars a month will get a private message from a “professional photographer” offering to redo their portfolios for free and from there to meeting some friend at a bar somewhere who can introduce them to the “right connections?” Ending up as the “NUDES IN BIO” for some Russian troll on Twitter/X might be the least of your worries.

During her time on The Sopranos, Drea de Matteo played Adriana La Cerva, a young mafia wife who wasn’t particularly good at being a mafia wife. Eventually she ratted her drug addict of a husband Christopher Moltisanti and his sociopathic mentor Tony Soprano out to the FBI. We all know how she ended up. It’s one of the most disturbing scenes in a very disturbing series. Driven out to the woods by Silvio Dante, one of Tony Soprano’s lieutenants, a sleazy night club owner and sex trafficker by played Steven Van Zandt, the ugly guy in the E-Street Band, she’s shot in the back of the head while crawling on all fours begging for her life. It’s not that Adriana La Cerva was a particularly likeable character. She wasn’t. It’s that her end was far out of proportion to any evil she might have done. She sold some drugs and get entrapped by the feds into spying on her husband. Compared to most of the demons who inhabit the world of The Sopranos that qualifies her as a saint.

As far as I can tell, her murderer Silvio Dante is one of the most popular characters on the series, mainly because he seems mostly sane and level headed, at least compared to Jersey Italian berserkers like Richie Aprile, who cripples an innocent pizza shop owner by running him over with his car, or Ralph Cifaretto, who beats a pregnant 20-year-old stripper to death in a coked up rage. In reality, however, Silvio Dante is probably the most evil character in the series. Aprile and Cifaretto act like murderous thugs because they need to maintain an intimidating image among their fellow mobsters. Silvio Dante, on the other hand, mainly exploits women — nice work if you can get it — including the young stripper murdered by Ralph Cifaretto. After her death at his nightclub, Silvio carries on as if nothing ever happened, one more disposable body to be chopped up and fed to the sharks. It seemed fitting, therefore, that he would be the one chosen to murder Adriana La Cerva. As a sex trafficker and pimp, he knew exactly how to put her at ease before she finally realized what was going to happen, that she was going to die at the hands of one of her husband’s goons while desperately begging for her life.

It seems almost as fitting that 20 years later, out of her economic desperation, Drea de Matteo would become a Silvio Dante for the social media age, an unwitting if privileged spokesperson for the online sex industry, unknowingly putting young women at ease selling nudes on the Internet before some of them are dragged down into hellish world of a lot of real life Tony Sopranos, and Silvio Dantes.

About suffering they were never wrong the old masters

According to a tweet from an organization that appears to be connected with the Israeli Defense Force, about 1000 Palestinians in Gaza rushed an aid convey bringing food. Some appear to have been trampled by the mob. Others appeared to have been shot by Israeli soldiers. As always in these incidents it’s best to wait for a few days until all the facts come out before drawing any conclusions.

תיעוד אווירי של המבצע להכנסת סיוע הומניטארי לצפון רצועת עזה, המראה כיצד ההמון פלסטיני התנפל על המשאיות וכתוצאה מכך נהרגו עשרות מצפיפות, דוחק ודריסה>> pic.twitter.com/a7DqU9kKFB

— צבא ההגנה לישראל (@idfonline) February 29, 2024

A translation of the Hebrew.

Aerial footage of the operation to bring humanitarian aid into the northern Gaza Strip, showing how the Palestinian crowd attacked the trucks and as a result dozens were killed from overcrowding, crowding and trampling

Looking at the video posted by the IDF Twitter account, I immediately thought of the movie The Third Man by Carol Reed.

It’s always worth revisiting. Harry Lime, Orson Welles, sells stolen and diluted penicillin on the black market. When confronted by his old friend, Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotton, he points to a crowd of people below. From the vantage point of the giant Ferris Wheel they’re both riding, the people look like dots. “Would it really bother you if one of those dots stopped moving?” he says.

Never forget that this is how the ruling class sees us all, not just Palestinians.

Aaron Bushnell 1998-2024

On November 6, 1965, six months after President Johnson had authorized the use of napalm in Vietnam, a 31-year-old Quaker named Norman Morrison brought his baby daughter Emily to the Pentagon directly below the office of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, doused himself with gasoline, and set himself on fire. Eyewitness accounts differ about whether he set Emily down before striking the match, or if someone snatched her away at the last moment, saving her life, and quite possibly Morrison’s soul from eternal damnation. The coverage the next day in the New York Times reported that his motivation had been to protest Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam, but expressed bewilderment as to why he had chosen to do it in such an extreme manner. Largely forgotten in the United States, Morrison is a hero in Vietnam, the subject of Emily My Child, a famous poem by Tố Hữu, and memorialized by Vietnamese President Nguyễn Minh Triết on a visit to Washington in 2007.

There is no question that Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old Air Force IT specialist from Orleans Massachusetts who burned himself alive last Saturday in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, will become a hero to Palestinians. In spite of the coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Guardian, which speculate on his religious background and about whether or not he was mentally ill, there is also no question about his motivation. Bushnell died screaming “Free Palestine” through the flames. He had an extensive social media presence. A reporter named Talia Jane covered Bushnell’s self-immolation live. Unlike with Norman Morrison, we don’t even have reason to be confused about why he chose such an extreme method of protest. A self-published video captured the following declaration. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he said. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

These are very eloquent words for a man many people in the media have decided is mentally ill. I would only disagree with Aaron Bushnell on one point. He declares that extreme forms of protest are what our ruling class has decided “will” be normal. In reality they’ve been normal for decades. Isolated, alienated, in despair over a future they feel they have no control over, Americans have developed the most extreme form of political expression ever known to man, the mass shooting. Where the French pull up cobblestones from the streets of Paris, or dump piles of shit in front of the ministry of agriculture, where Koreans take to the streets in the hundreds of thousands, where Indians stage mass strikes, Americans bring their trusty AR-15s to the public square and take as many people as they can down with them before saving the last bullet for themselves. The reason why is obvious to anybody outside of the United States. The United States of America is a fascist country with a violent, fascist culture that promotes death and destruction all over the world, including, at the moment, in Gaza. In spite of a thin façade of democracy, Americans get no vote in whether or not we go to war. Not even Congress gets a say in that anymore.

In his book The Rebel, the French Algerian philosopher Albert Camus, who died before the age of mass shootings, but witnessed more than his share of senseless violence, talked about the logic of mass murder. The mass shooter isn’t merely suicidal, he argued. On the contrary, his suicide can only be the final act of what over the past 25 years we have seen so many times. Dylan and Klebold didn’t simply go out to the woods one night and kill themselves. Adam Lanza had no reason to murder over 30 innocent grade school children. If he was so angry about not getting laid, Elliot Rodger would have been better off paying for an escort than shooting and stabbing 24 people, including his mother. I don’t even remember the name of the man who killed 19 kids in that school in Uvalde, Texas. The only thing I do remember is how dozens of heavily armed police officers waited outside talking on their cell phones when the slaughter was going on inside the classroom. What all of these men have in common, and yes they’re always men, is the will to power, the urge to play god.

The Israeli government, in turn, shocked at the speed and violence of the Hamas attack on October 7th, has decided to commit genocide in Gaza, rampaging through the tiny, densely populated refugee camp like an American with an AR-15 at the local elementary school. Whether or not it makes any sense, or even eventually means the end of Israel as a nation state, means nothing. The only thing that matters is that they get to play God, killing women, children, the sick and elderly along with the Hamas leadership. At this point, they show no signs of stopping, and unless President Biden, or President Trump, orders them to, they wont. If it means World War III, so much the better.

“This logic has carried the values of suicide, on which our age has been nurtured, to their extreme logical consequence, which is legalized murder. It culminates, at the same time, in mass suicide. The most striking demonstration of this was provided by the Hitlerian apocalypse of 1945. Self-destruction meant nothing to those madmen, in their bomb shelters, who were preparing for their own death and apotheosis. All that mattered was not to destroy oneself alone and to drag a whole world with one. In a way, the man who kills himself in solitude still preserves certain values since he, apparently, claims no rights over the lives of others. The proof of this is that he never makes use, in order to dominate others, of the enormous power and freedom of action which his decision to die gives him. Every solitary suicide, when it is not an act of resentment, is, in some way, either generous or contemptuous. But one feels contemptuous in the name of something. If the world is a matter of indifference to the man who commits suicide, it is because he has an idea of something that is not or could not be indifferent to him. He believes that he is destroying everything or taking everything with him; but from this act of self-destruction itself a value arises which, perhaps, might have made it worth while to live. Absolute negation is therefore not consummated by suicide. It can only be consummated by absolute destruction, of oneself and of others. Or, at least, it can only be lived by striving toward that delectable end. Here suicide and murder are two aspects of a single system, the system of a misguided intelligence that prefers, to the suffering imposed by a limited situation, the dark victory in which heaven and earth are annihilated.“

Albert Camus, The Rebel

Aaron Bushnell, who was born the year before the Columbine mass shooting, three years before 9/11, and five years before George W. Bush’s homicidal (and suicidal) invasion of Iraq, had never known a time where the United States engaged in diplomacy, not war and sanctions, or where the American government genuinely represented the American people. He had grown up in the age of suicide and mass murder, not on the scale Camus describes in The Rebel, but at the level of the individual political act, the idea that if you commit an act so committed, so extreme, and so violent, you could reach out from beyond the walls of your alienation and bring other people with you. But Aaron Bushnell was not a murderer. On the contrary, he believed that by killing himself, a white American male, a colonizer complicit in the destruction of the Palestinian people, he could motivate other people, especially his fellow white American settler colonialists, to stop funding Benjamin Netanyahu and his genocidal government. Will we disappoint him?

Sisyphus FAFO

Most of us know how Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll a stone to the top of a hill, only to see it roll back down again. Albert Camus in his book The Myth of Sisyphus even tells us why. He was a rebel who needed to be punished. Camus is basically right, but while he refers to him as “Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious,” he also tells us that he somehow managed to put death in chains and escape from hell. I assure you, Sisyphus never did either. Before landing in hell, Sisyphus failed at just about everything he tried. He even failed at being a failure, or to be more specific, he never asked himself what being a failure really meant. This is the story about how Sisyphus fucked around and found out.

Sisyphus did have a promising start. The eldest son of upper-lower-middle-class parents, he was such a bright, good looking, obedient boy, that after he entered puberty, that most beautiful time in a young man’s life when his beard is just beginning to grow, but doesn’t need to be shaved every day, his mother got him a job as cup bearer for Zeus, not Zeus the Greek god, of course, but an important local dignitary nevertheless. At first everything went well. Sisyphus made his way around the feast carefully bearing skins of fine Samian wine filling the cups of admiring women and men alike. Zeus was in fact so pleased with his job he did that he didn’t even mind when the young man sampled some of the best vintage for himself. But after the feast was over and Sisyphus accompanied Zeus back to his chambers to attend to his bath and robes, he was shocked to discover the old fellow completely naked, his disturbingly large penis rock hard, beckoning him to bend over and spread his legs. “You did a fine job son,” Zeus said. “Now comes time for the fun part.” Sisyphus was not only shocked and outraged by the proposal, he beat the old man within an inch of his life, and walked back home to his mother.

“What do you think a cup bearer does?” she said, “I thought you understood it went with the job. You really have to read between the lines of that Ganymede story.”

The next thing Sisyphus failed at was being a shepherd. To be fair, he was probably overeducated for the job. Too much Shakespeare, Virgil and Christopher Marlow had convinced him that the life of a shepherd was all about strolling through green pastures, and piping the occasional tune to whatever lusty shepherd lass came his way. He never quite understood that being a shepherd was hard work, tedious dirty labor where you spent the day in damp, rainy weather, shearing wool, digging ditches, putting up fences and shoveling poop. The first month on the job Sisyphus failed to bring the herd inside the protective fence and lost three prize lambs, not to wolves, but a bobcat and a pair of especially vicious, and hungry, racoons. He was so bad at shearing, he almost always ruined all the wool he was supposed to gather for the day. The last thing he was assigned to do before they finally lost patience and fired him was put up 50 feet of barbed wire, an easy job that was almost impossible to screw up, but screw it up he did, getting caught wrapping him up in a half finished length of fence, and calling for help so pathetically that Duke, the owner’s Australian Shepherd, who loved everybody, came over and bit him.

Sisyphus also failed at being a hoplite, a potter, a sculptor, and a blacksmith. After his mother kicked him out of the house, he enjoyed a briefly successful career as a traveling Sophist, but he severely underestimated a renowned philosopher who challenged him to a debate — how could you take a man seriously who lived in an old wine barrel and masturbated in public — and lost so badly nobody would ever pay him for lessons again. He went back home and begged his mother to take him back. She agreed he could sleep in the basement while he got back on his feet. Of course he never did. He fell into the world of casual labor and short term temps jobs that few people ever climb out of successfully. As long as his mother was doing well, never having had a “real job” didn’t bother him. He began to embrace failure, the idea that being a loser meant being a rebel. The only reason he was still living in his mother’s basement, he flattered himself, was because he hadn’t “sold out.” Sisyphus decided that the worse his life got, the more it freed him, that the lower you sunk in mainstream society the more you could speak you mind without fear of consequences, the more you could act like yourself without following convention. He was happy. He could troll the Internet all day, grab something his mother had left over in the refrigerator, watch a little TV, then go to bed.

When his mother’s health began to decline, however, he began to worry. He began to wonder if he had been lying to himself, if perhaps the opposite was true, that he had accepted his mother’s domination as the cost of not having to work, and that all the future really held for him was a lifetime of slavery. It turned out to be something even worse, much worse.

After his mother died, and he and his three brothers split what was left of the estate, Sisyphus found himself with a job or a place to live. A sense of panic set in. For years he had worked to avoid getting stuck in a job or a career, assiduously seeking out cracks in a society he very badly wanted to escape. Now in a fit of white knuckled terror, he realized that fitting into the society he had worked so hard to avoid was the only way he could survive. As he searched for some, any way, to earn his keep, Sisyphus found himself alone in the desert begging for water. Even if by some miracle he managed to find an oasis, and even if he had something to trade, there probably wasn’t enough water for the people already there. Every job he saw advertised was something he had already tried and failed. Cup bearer, shepherd, hoplite, potter, sculptor, blacksmith, is that all anybody in the world did? The senior positions appropriate to a man of his age were even more ridiculous. King of Sparta, Athenian naval commander, Stand Up Philosopher, High Altitude Juniper Bush Attendant, Cretan Labyrinth Runner, Theban Fleece Gatherer, he barely knew what half the positions even required, let alone had the work history or recommendations to secure an interview.

Then, just as he was contemplating suicide, Sisyphus noticed the ad in the local paper. He cried out with relief. I can do that, he said to himself as he read the job requirements. I can absolutely do that.

“Rock pushers” the notice began. “The gods need you. Do you have a passion for getting things done? When someone asks you to do a job, do you ask why, or do you ask how fast they need it completed? If you think you’ve got what it takes to push rocks for the gods, if you think you’re the right man for the job, contact us at the ACE Institute today. Immortality nice to have but not strictly required.”

Sisyphus was so happy about his new job he didn’t even apply right away. Instead he took a few days off to sit back and enjoy the new life ahead of him. All he had to do was push a rock up a hill, then watch it roll back down. There were no supervisors, no local grandees who expected you to service them after the feast, no sheepdogs or half crazy cynics to get in your way. There was just you and the rock, a simple job, an honest, straightforward task, and a clear goal to work for. On top of the hill, you would undoubtedly get a short break before running back down, and starting it all over again. There would probably be beer, wine Rakija, loaves, and fishes, a nutritious snack for the hard working, boulder pushing proletarian. Eventually, he thought, he would build muscles and increase his cardiovascular capability. After all, he was getting paid to exercise all day. He looked at his pot, belly, man breasts, and love handles. In a few months they would all be gone. He could go out to the ceremonial grape crushing and Pythagorean Angles and Wine Dances and maybe even meet a nice girl. Why hadn’t he thought of being a rock pusher before? Why hadn’t his mother suggested it?

The next week Sisyphus showed up at the ACE (Associated Compassionate End) Institute to apply for the job as “Rock Pusher.” For a few moments the receptionist looked confused before she realized exactly what he was talking about. “Oh you mean the job as Junior Boulder Intern,” she said, looking at his thinning hairline while handing him a pen and clipboard full of forms, and indicating he should wait in the room to her right. “We usually don’t take men your age. But I suppose they might work something out inside. Step inside please sir,” she added opening the door and gesturing to the ACE waiting room.

Sisyphus stepped inside the ACE waiting room. For a moment he was shocked, so shocked he even thought of that old line from Dante’s Inferno that had made such an impression on T.S. Eliot. “I had not thought death had undone so many.” There were thousands of men, perhaps tens of thousands, all with the same clipboard and pen, all waiting for the “initial evaluation.” Did they really need so many Junior Boulder Interns? The initial evaluation was exactly what he thought. It was just a multiple-choice psych examination to determine whether or not he was crazy or retarded, and of course it was simple. I’m a loser and an incel, Sisyphus said to himself. But thank the gods I’m not crazy or retarded. He had filled out so many of them over the past few weeks, he could do it in his sleep. After he handed his clipboard to the ACE Attendant, he was given a glass of wine and a complimentary ACE Cookie and told to relax. There would be a slight wait before anybody could see him. But not to worry. Eventually everybody got processed. Rest in Power Sisyphus.

Sisyphus woke up on a long, rolling hill. He had gotten the job. It was not what he had expected. It didn’t look like ancient Greece at all, but the New Jersey Meadowlands. The ground wasn’t smooth or covered with grass, but gutted, full of rocks, soaked with acid rain, littered with debris, metal, concrete, glass. There was a rancid stench in the air. The sun was nowhere to be seen. On the top of the hill he could see the sign. “Welcome to the land of shadows.” Even worse, he wasn’t alone. Everybody from the ACE antechamber had gotten the same job as he had. He also noticed people from the past, the same people he had previously tried, and failed to establish a career with. There was Zeus the local grandee and homosexual rapist, Duke the angry sheepdog, the crazy philosopher who had ruined his career as a sophist, and worst of all his mother. A pained, embarrassed expression came over his face when she saw him. “I always knew you would end up here,” it seemed to say. “My son. My beautiful baby son. Just like his father.”

Sisyphus tried to ignore his mother when his Probationary Boulder Handling Supervisor took him aside and explained to him that he would have a trial run up the hill.

“I’m Hades,” he said. “Call me HD for short, and let’s not use that tired, patriarchal old label supervisor. Ever since we instituted our new DEI program I’ve simply been a Lead Rock Pushing Intern.”

HD beckoned Sisyphus to grab his rock and follow him up the hill. The rock was far heavier than Sisyphus had anticipated, so heavy he could barely move it a few feet ahead without having to stop for a brief rest. Is this hell, Sisyphus whispered to himself. Surely this must be hell.

“Take your time,” HD said. “We have all the time in the world. But this is why we usually send men your age right to the pit. It never makes much sense to torment them with the idea they might get a few loops up and down Mount Futility before being sent on to their final destination.”

“My God,” Sisyphus said. “This is heavy.”

“Take your time,” HD said. “We have all the time in the world.”

It was days before Sisyphus finally made it to the top of Mount Futility. His clothes were torn. His legs were cut to ribbons by the debris along the way. He could barely breath. The only thing that had kept him going was the complimentary beer, grapes, loaves and fishes he believed would be waiting for him at the top of the hill, an idea that only seemed to confuse HD, who seemed to know everything else. Of course when Sisyphus finally got to the top of Mt. Futility, there was no beer, or complimentary loaves and fishes. Instead there was an iron gate with the words “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here,” which looked out over a lake of fire, tens of thousands of feet above ground. Sisyphus noticed a group of Lead Rock Pushing Interns standing around looking bored, waiting for their next assignment. A more senior level executive, a tall, red faced, awful giant of a man who looked a bit like Nikola Jokić, if Nikola Jokić had the face of a man and the body of a horse, instructed the Lead Rock Pushing Interns what to do with the the new hires. Most were simply pushed over the side into the lake of flames. Every once in awhile, a young, strong soul was shown a boulder, which was then rolled back down the hill. He was assigned a new Lead Rock Pushing Intern and told he would be given a second “opportunity.”

“Horse master,” HD said, bowing. “This is Sisyphus.”

“Do we give him another round?” the tall, awful, half man, half horse said.

“No,” HD said, barely able to restrain his laughter. “Not even close.”

“Assume the position,” the horse master said, opening the iron gate and instructing Sisyphus to bend over and face the lake of flames. “Remove your trousers.”

“Zeus,” he added to an elderly man, totally naked and brandishing a gigantic erection. Sisyphus will stand on the edge of the gate bent over to reveal the crack between his legs. You may do with him as you please. As long as he maintains his position, he will be allowed to remain at the gates of his final destination. He may of course jump into the lake of fire at any time. But if he is strong and determined, he might even last the rest of the afternoon. Are you ready Zeus?”

“Now comes the fun part,” Zeus said, stroking his penis, then letting out a cry of disappointment as Sisyphus jumped into the flames. “Fucking wimp.”