Extremis
But don't blame only the fascist, racist, Christian Taliban MAGA imbeciles.
This week I finally read American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins, a novel about a Mexican mother and her child who must escape a violent Acapulco cartel after it guns down 16 of 18 family members at a quinceañera. Two of them are spared simply because they happen to be in the bathroom during the massacre.
Lydia and Luca survive because they are lucky. And they survive because they are gritty beyond my imagination, but not Cummins’.
As long as mother and son remain in Mexico, they are within the murderous cartel’s reach and so set out north — 2,000 miles by bus, on foot, perched atop freight trains, through the mountains, through the desert and through towns and villages teeming with informants. Police. Federales. Migration enforcement. Narcos. And random opportunists looking for a reward of silver and hoping to avoid one of lead. Over two months there is not a moment, not an unguarded word, not a breath they take but in a moveable prison of fear.
Halfway through I spotted a typo — “Olso” for Oslo — and thought of an Amish quilt, with an intentional mis-stitch so as not to presume or mock God’s perfection. American Dirt is a masterpiece: horryifying but never melodramatic, intricately plotted but never contrived, a portrait of unfathomable heroism but hagiographic not for an instant. It is a breathtaking tale of humans in extremis.
Assholes like Trump whisperer Stephen Miller claim America is being invaded by criminals, drug mules, rapists and terrorists bent on destroying our society. Maybe they have never been in a place, as I have — in Venezuela, Brazil and South Africa — where criminal gangs, protected by corrupt governments, rule by AK-47 and plunder the barrios, favelas and townships they control. Honduras is worse. Guatemala is worse. Salvador is worse. Mexico is an ongoing bloodbath. That’s why thousands of desperate refugees surrender their meager nest eggs and risk their lives to flee to el Norte.
When they arrive, they don’t rape white women. They get grueling jobs for low pay and wire money back home. Do you think Western Union is in the telegram business? For fuck’s sake, use your head. They are in the lifeline business.
Which is why all those MAGA morons are exactly as stupid and hateful as you imagine. We have the hardest working labor force on earth, queuing at the border by the thousands to do the dirtiest jobs at the worst wages, and the Nazis who won the election want to deport them, without due process, to whatever Auschwitz awaits their destiny.
That is why MAGA and Trump and their Gestapo government are the worst thing to happen to America since at least the Civil War.
That’s a brief summation of why the Trump right is both beneath shame and the apotheosis of it.
Sadly, there is more to this story. More shame, more stupidity, more tunnel vision, more hysteria, more misplaced outrage, more mind boggling assholery.
When American Dirt was published in 2020, Cummins became the target of such venom that she had to cut her book tour short. Why? Threats of violence. How dare this Anglo, non-immigrant presume to appropriate the experiences of actual Mexicanos, actual refugees, actual victims, when she had been through zero of the emotion and terror real migrantes face every day?
It’s cultural appropriation — of course — but even worse, because she profited from the torments of vulnerable brown-skinned women whose lives she couldn’t possibly understand.
There are hundreds of contemptuous quotes I could trot out here, but this one, from critic Myriam Gurba, should do:
There is a scene where the main character encounters an ice rink. And she’s utterly shocked at the existence of this ice rink, as if she’s unaware that winter sports are played in Mexico. And I was laughing. I laughed out loud when I got to that section because I learned to ice skate in Mexico. I learned to ice skate at age 9 in Guadalajara.
Hey, Gurba, if you are so skating-enlightened, why the fuck didn’t you write American Dirt?
Do you even know what fiction is? Slim Pickens, of Dr. Strangelove, never dropped a bomb that began nuclear Armageddon. Shakespeare never lived in Denmark, much less as royalty. Picasso never saw Guernica, nor Michaelango David, nor Tolstoy Napoleon. (His Anna Karenina, by the way, was pretend!) Monumental author Kazuo Ishiguro was not a pre-war English butler, and neither was monumental actor Anthony Hopkins who played the role in the movie. Dora the Explorer, the intrepid grade-school geographer was not actually a Latina. She was a cartoon. Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, one of the 20th century’s two great anti-war novels (with All Quiet on the Western Front) was not Armenian-American. His protagonist, Yossarian, was. Who the hell did he think he was, appropriating the Armenian-ness of a culture he could not have possibly understood?
No painter witnessed the Crucifixion. Not one. Ever. So, here’s a thought. Think about what art is — that precious combination of skill, imagination, drama, universality and insight — then, if you’d be so kind, shut the fuck up. Art comes with license, for shortcuts, compression, even error. People complain that Cummins got some details wrong about Mexico, maybe condescendingly so. Oh, well. Macbeth or not, there are no black-magical witches. And tell me again how Han Solo exceeded the speed of light. The cult of “authenticity” has become so preposterous that people actually wigged out that Rachel Brosnahan — the lead actress in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel — is not Jewish, like her stand-up comic character, but Irish. Yeah, the Jews. They just can’t catch a break in show business. John Hurt, playing The Elephant Man, wasn’t really disfigured with neurofibromatosis. It was prosthetic makeup. Dustin Hoffman, in Rainman, wasn’t autistic. Daniel Day Lewis, in My Left Foot, didn’t have cerebral palsy. There are actors who have cerebral palsy, but none of them is Daniel Day Lewis, an acting genius.
Pretty sure I’ve written about this before, but it’s only a matter of time before the Zombie Actors Guild files suit in federal court.
Okay, so now add the cultural appropriation of fashion, music, ethnic food, dance and all the exotica that we treasure as insights — or at least tastes — into another culture. They are the atmosphere of other peoples, like the air around them, but they are not the intellectual properties of other peoples. They are vibes. They are cultural treasures. But they are not assets plundered by the outside world. On the contrary, to see them cross over is the most respectful homage.
Now I don’t know if “cultural appropriation” was the last straw for a political correctness run berserk (my guess is trans athletes). But I do know what MAGA hates most. They hate being told what they can’t admire, what they can’t savor, what they can’t joke about and what they can’t say. We don’t have ourselves to blame, exactly, but we do have some of our reductive, condescending, virtue-signaling mentality to blame. And that is the stuff of backlash.
Thank you, Jeanine Cummins. You have given us a priceless gift. Same goes for Marni Nixon, who in My Fair Lady appropriated performed every one of Audrey Hepburn’s notes.