Doppelganger, page 25
Even in those schools that have been forced to step up—which are overwhelmingly in whiter, wealthier districts where parents can afford to sue—the dominant teaching method is still ABA, often executed as a system of candies and consequences not unlike dog training. In New Jersey, after I got over my initial euphoria that we were no longer dealing with straight-up neglect in the school system, I often had the distinct feeling that the atypical kids were being hived away in special classes and bombarded with ABA training less to support their needs and more to show impressive results on the tests that never stopped coming. Those tests formed the basis for school rankings, which formed the basis for property values, which formed the basis for property taxes, which funded the schools. And from the moment the diagnosis process begins, children are put into a matrix of normalcy and deviance.
“Does he play with toys appropriately?” the first doctor asked.
Appropriately? Well, who’s to say it’s more appropriate to stage a race between toy cars than to pile them up against the wall and turn them into an abstract sculpture? Not I.
“Does he mirror?” one therapist, who came to our home, asked.
“What is mirroring?” I asked back.
“Does he mimic what you do, like Simon Says?”
Oh. I had never thought to notice. But that raised another question: Did I want him to mirror? If so, mirror whom? Me? Other kids? Cartoon characters? Isn’t the reflexive impulse to copy what everyone else is doing part of what has landed us in such a mess? Sure, it would make life easier. But is it so bad to have a few kids in the mix who are tuned in to their own inner music?
Do we really need more mirrors? How about some portals to somewhere new?
So much of my family’s experience with disability has been a conflict with the mindsets that seek to name, cure, and control. But there are—as always—other mindsets available, which is what we discovered, to our surprise, when we moved to the rock. In truth, it’s the reason we have stayed. At first, I was sure that sending T. to regular school in the country, without the fancy supports we had in New Jersey, would be a disaster. It turned out to be the best experience of his young life, and for a simple reason: there is very little pushing, measuring, or testing.
There are no specialized autism therapists, but when he is stressed, he walks in the woods with a loving educational assistant, taking turns choosing topics to get used to the give-and-take of living in a world with other people. His endlessly creative teacher somehow makes time to build curricula about his latest predator interests. T. assures me that he has been blessed by a total absence of bullying. That could change, and probably will. I have met people who haven’t been so lucky here. But for now, in this community, with more than its share of dropouts and misfits (and, sure, some odd political views floating around), he is experiencing something close to what all kids deserve: acceptance.
The Off-Ramp
Not long after Avi’s campaign summer, I was standing in line at the drugstore waiting for a prescription when a young woman, who looked around eighteen, struck up a conversation about the merits of cloth masks versus disposable ones.
“I hate the blue masks,” she offered. “They make too much garbage.”
“Leave her alone,” said the woman (mother? grandmother?) who was with her. She grabbed the teen’s arm and pulled her away from me. “She”—meaning me—“doesn’t want to talk to you.”
I don’t know what label a doctor had placed on this young person, but I suspect it wasn’t that different from the one placed on my son.
“No, no I am happy to talk,” I said. “What else am I doing? Just waiting.”
And so we talked. About the benefits of cloth masks (softer, prettier, better for the environment). About how many brothers and sisters I have (one of each). About how old I am. And all the while, I watched her caregiver visibly relax and let her guard down.
I have had several such experiences, usually while waiting in line, and they always go the same way: first comes the friendliness of the neuroatypical person, piercing through my little bubble of public isolation (usually involving headphones), then the shame and panic of the parent or grandparent, and finally the relief at having permission not to feel those painful emotions about someone they love, finding a little safe harbor in a never-ending storm.
I know something of how they feel. When I was a teenager, my mother had a severe stroke and permanently lost many of her physical abilities, and some of her cognitive ones. As her caregiver, I learned quickly about our world of carelessness and grew to recognize the looks of disgust and impatience from people who clearly believed that disability should be hidden away. Even so, I carried my own shame and was not always able to see the beauty in the different ways that human brains and bodies meet and interact with the world.
I had a turning point when T. was in kindergarten and I was watching him struggle around a simple play structure outside our local school. A girl from his class showed up and started leaping and swinging like a professional gymnast, her long hair brushing the dusty ground as she hung upside down. What might it be like, I wondered, to have a child so able? And sweet, too! She paused and tried to help T. figure out how to cross the monkey bars. I have a very soft spot for confident girls with time for my son.
Around then her father showed up, and I complimented him on the awesomeness of his offspring and her kindness with a differently wired child. This precipitated an outburst of manic bragging, leading me to learn, in very short order, that in addition to her obvious proficiencies as a gymnast, his five-year-old could recite entire soliloquies from Romeo and Juliet, competed in chess tournaments, was a violin aficionado, and had never, ever ingested anything containing refined sugar.
I was so tired for him. The perfection Olympics in which this father-daughter duo were clearly excelling seemed like a terribly sad thing to do to childhood. This little one was already luminous—she did not need to be polished into a trophy. But if I was honest, I also could see how, if I had a child who navigated the world with such ease, it would be nearly impossible to resist the temptation to live through them and try to win all the prizes our brutal economic order has to offer the few deemed merit-worthy. It was in that moment that I realized the special gift of having a child whose innate differences meant that he was never going to be able to compete in that race. By then, he was already on his own field, making his own rules—cool rules, ones that might lead to some very interesting places when he is older—but rules that he alone could decode.
I looked at T. as he joyfully if clumsily slid down the plastic slide and blessed him for giving us both this off-ramp.
Secrets and Shadows
I have stressed over sharing even this much about T., this beautiful being who was born without the protective armor that so many of us take for granted. I hope, when he is older, that he agrees it was worth letting some light into the shadowy corners of autism parent world. I also deliberated over sharing that story about that very proud father, which may be painfully recognizable to him. Does he deserve that, as someone probably just a little too eager to impress a new acquaintance? Maybe not. Still, his attitude is worth considering, I think, because, unlike so much else I have been writing, it is not about the ludicrous goings on in the Mirror World. It’s about what goes on in circles that pride themselves on reason and humanism and listening to the science, and caring for the less fortunate—circles that define themselves as not being like them.
It’s well-off liberal parents who have turned childhood into an achievement arms race, one in which admittance to an elite university is the first of many finish lines, but one so important their children are pushed to turn their most intimate traumas into triumph-over-tragedy stories (while the wealthiest families simply bribe and cheat their way to access, as we all learned through recent scandals). I also worry that members of this same class of liberal parents will convince themselves, in a few years’ time, that doing just a little bit of embryonic gene editing to enhance their future child’s IQ or athletic prowess or height is not just their prerogative, but their duty.
The world is spiraling out of control, they will tell themselves. Surely my kids deserve a competitive edge. Or as Bill McKibben said to me recently, “Instead of figuring out how to have a world where everyone can thrive, they want their kids to thrive in a world that is falling apart.”
This is what unsettles me most about the race for perfection at work in the interlocking worlds of wellness and parenting: the pervasive structural unwellness from which the hyperwell and insistently perfect are so clearly fleeing. The unwellness that is all around. At bottom, I suspect that much of the mirroring and doubling we are seeing comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see, to really look at—in our midst, in our past, and in the tumultuous future racing toward us. There are many different ways to try to outrun our shadows. Succumbing to conspiracy worlds is only one of them. And it was toward a confrontation with those shadows that this mapping was taking me, inexorably, next.
PART THREE
Shadow Lands
(Partition)
We have put up many flags,
they have put up many flags.
To make us think that they’re happy.
To make them think that we’re happy.
—Yehuda Amichai, “Jerusalem”
“It’s gonna hurt, now,” said Amy. “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”
—Toni Morrison, Beloved
11
CALM, CONSPIRACY … CAPITALISM
It was 2007, I was on a speaking tour for The Shock Doctrine, and the stop that day was Portland, Oregon. The kindly, gray-haired organizer who picked me up at the airport was vibrating with stress. She explained that there was a very active “truther” group in town and she had gotten wind of a plan to disrupt my event that evening.
Sure enough, they pulled it off. In the middle of my book talk at a local church, a couple of guys in hoodies in the balcony dropped a banner declaring 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB.
The truther scene was thriving in those days, and some on the left tolerated or even cultivated it. Powered by the low-budget viral documentary Loose Change—the Plandemic of its time—the movement’s strategy mainly involved trying to get high-profile critics of the Bush administration to “admit” that we all secretly knew that Dick Cheney and George W. Bush had conspired to blow up the Twin Towers and make it look like a terrorist attack. They hijacked the Q&As at many of my talks and did the same to my friend Jeremy Scahill when he was on tour with his book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
Enough incidents like this over the years have led me to conclude that the line between unsupported conspiracy claims and reliable investigative research is neither as firm nor as stable as many of us would like to believe. It’s clear that some people consume investigative journalism, fact-based analysis, and fact-free conspiracy interchangeably, drawing their own connections and mixing and matching between the three.
From the researcher’s perspective, the differences between the genres should be glaring. Responsible investigators follow a set of shared standards: double- and triple-source, verify leaked documents, cite peer-reviewed studies, come clean about uncertainties, share sections of text with recognized experts to make sure technical terms and research methods are correctly understood, have fact-checkers comb through it all prepublication, then hand it all over to a libel lawyer (or in the case of my books, multiple lawyers in different territories). It’s a slow, expensive, careful process, but it gets us as close as we know how to something we all used to agree was proof that something was true.
Conspiracy influencers perform what I have come to think of as a doppelganger of investigative journalism, imitating many of its stylistic conventions while hopping over its accuracy guardrails. Wolf is an impresario of the technique: repeatedly, she claims to have found a “smoking gun” or to have a “blockbuster scoop”; she makes references to tens of thousands of pages of scientific documents, as well as metadata, that no one is going to check to see if they say what she says they say (usually that “a genocide” has taken place through Covid vaccines—and no, the documents she cites that I’ve looked at most certainly do not show that).
Like the clutch of professional climate-change deniers who claim to “debunk” the avalanche of scientific evidence that the planet is warming by deploying entirely decontextualized temperature charts, along with outdated data and a steady flow of complex scientific terms, Wolf also engages in what we might think of as a pipiking of the science. She peppers her comments with medical terms that she abuses with abandon, rattling on about “lipid nanoparticles” and “spike proteins” and the “blood-brain barrier” so quickly and incomprehensibly that even Steve Bannon has to beg her, “Slow down! Slow down!”
The end result of being surrounded by this kind of discourse is a reflexive state of continuous disbelief that the Brazilian professor of philosophy Rodrigo Nunes calls “denialism.” This in an upside-down state that, like everything else in the Mirror World, neatly serves the right and undercuts the left because, Nunes writes, it “displaces the real threats looming on the horizon into distorted, fun-house versions of themselves. Thus, the problem with democracy is not political elites everywhere who are beholden to the interests of corporations and financial markets, but a secret cabal of pedophiles planning to institute a world government.” Just as “the problem with the environment is not climate change, but the weaponization of science by a political agenda bent on changing our lifestyles and preventing growth.” To which we can now add that the problem of Covid was not a highly infectious disease being fought half-heartedly by for-profit drug companies and hollowed-out states, but an app that wanted to turn you into a slave.
This is surely why the Bannons of the world, bankrolled by a rotating cast of billionaires, love conspiracy theories, whether they personally believe them or not: they reliably shift attention away from the scandals we know about and that many have already painstakingly proved, and focus us, perennially, on something more explosive, something that is just on the verge of being proved (The election really was stolen! The vaccines really are killing babies! And doctors!), but never quite yet.
Since the Covid-19 global health crisis, we have been inundated with real examples of corporations profiteering off the virus, alongside cynical moves by political leaders to auction off our vital services under cover of the emergency. Trillions were spent to backstop markets and bail out multinationals, only to have workers laid off in droves; billionaires have increased their wealth at a blood-boiling rate, even as they have gouged customers and fueled a cost-of-living crisis. All of this is more than enough to justify a popular democratic revolt, without any embellishment (just as the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, should have been enough without talk of “inside jobs”). There was no need for histrionics about how unvaccinated people were experiencing “apartheid” when there was real vaccine apartheid between rich and poor countries; no need to cook up fantasies about Covid “internment camps” when the virus was being left to rip through prisons, meat-packing plants, and Amazon warehouses as if the people’s lives inside had no value at all. In a just world, we would have been talking about these real and proven scandals around the clock; most of us didn’t, in part because the clock was being run out with the fallout from made-up plots.
Calm as Shock Resistance
“Pattern recognition” is often how I describe the work of my life. I remember the moment, a true click, when I realized there was a connection between the increasing precarity of work, the consolidation of ownership in key industries, and the exponential increases in marketing budgets that characterized the hollow corporate structures of the first lifestyle brands. It wasn’t a master plan that a cabal had cooked up, but there was a flow, a pattern, that wove seemingly disparate trends into a logical story about a new iteration of capitalism. That was the moment I decided to write No Logo, and the feeling was so powerful that more than a quarter century later, I remember where I was sitting and what I was doing when the pattern clicked into place (on the floor, on the landline speaking to a student journalist).
I wrote The Shock Doctrine in the hopes of providing a similar feeling of orientation. These were the years after the September 11 attacks had scrambled political signals and shaken the confidence of many friends and colleagues. I pursued a story, once again, of connections: this time between our moment of post-terror shock and the way other shocks have been used, over the last half century, to push policies that stripped other nations and peoples of rights, privacies, and wealth held in common.
In the torrent of disconnected facts that make up our “feeds,” the role of the researcher-analyst is plain: to try to create some sense, some ordering of events, maps of power. The most meaningful response in my writing life came from the loveliest of literary mapmakers, John Berger, when I sent him The Shock Doctrine in galleys. Many people have said they found the book enraging, but his response was very different. He wrote that, for him, the book “provokes and instills a calm.” When people and societies enter into a state of shock, they lose their identities and their footing, he observed. “Hence, calm is a form of resistance.”
I think about those words often. Calm is not a replacement for righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for necessary change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize. If shock induced a loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves. Berger helped me to see that the search for calm is why I write: to tame the chaos in my surroundings, in my own mind, and—I hope—in the minds of my readers as well. The information is almost always distressing and, to many, shocking—but in my view, the goal should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it.
