Trying to Survive in a Shared Sea

31 Dec, 2023

Last week, I blew through Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland: one of those rare, riveting volumes that makes you stay up too late to finish it, resulting in bleary-eyed, if totally worthwhile, grumpiness the next morning.¹ So yeah, a great book. But among so many harrowing situations, decisions, misfortunes, etc., etc., described therein, one phrase Radden Keefe included stood out as particularly chilling, so much so that I had to stop and collect myself when I first came across its deceptive dispassion—and it’s continued to pop without warning into my brain ever since. Radden Keefe tells us that counterterrorism mastermind Frank Kitson, who developed a disturbing relish for his field while quashing any number of colonial uprisings against the British Empire, built upon “a quote attributed to Mao... about how the guerrilla warrior must swim among the people as a fish swims through the sea.”² Kitson added to that assertion his own: that “A fish can be ‘attacked directly by rod or net.... But if rod and net cannot succeed by themselves it may be necessary to do something to the water.’”³

“It may be necessary to do something to the water.” You couldn’t have come up with a better movie villain motto. No specifics given, everything on the table, plenty of room for movement and experiment and evasion, necessity for whom always understood. And in classic villain fashion, no self-limitation is accepted; I can’t think of an instance of Ming the Merciless or Magneto realizing, much less admitting, You know what? I think we’ve gone as far as we can, and we’re obviously not meant to win this one. Let’s call it a day and focus our energy elsewhere.⁴ There is, of course, no need to state the obvious: that a villain won’t recognize the perspectives, much less the rights or dignity, of anyone else, including a natural entity as prevalent and taken for granted as water. And that lack of recognition comes with its own dangers; in the fisherman’s case, both hunter and hunted rely on the same water. Toss a toxin into a great conducting medium, and fail to remember that said medium itself isn’t exactly known for staying in one place or putting up with attempts to contain it, and in all your destructive fury, you’ve found that you’ve poisoned yourself.

Ovid knew something about this. In Metamorphoses, he relates the tale of Leto, outcast and wandering from place to place after being impregnated by Zeus.⁵ The Titan managed to find a bit of shelter long enough to give birth to Apollo and Artemis, but Zeus’s cheated wife kept dogging her, forcing Leto to keep moving. When the new mother and twins, by now dehydrated, came to a lake, it seemed like a no-brainer to take a drink. But the peasants at the shore refused to hear her story about the infants being close to death, or her argument that “Water is there for the use of all. Nature has made rippling streams, as she made air and sunlight, not for individuals, but for the benefit of all alike. I come in search of something to which all men have a right.”⁶ No dice; the locals just started insulting the supplicant, and piling it on, jumped right in and “stirred up the waters of the lake itself with their hands and feet, and leaped about... in pure malice, churning up the soft mud at the bottom of the pool” to make the water undrinkable.⁷

They got theirs, though; pariah though she was, Leto was still a goddess. After informing the peasants that if that was the way they were going to be, they could just “Live then forever in that lake of yours!” Leto turned them all into frogs—who, by the way, “still tried to be abusive” in the situation they’d brought upon themselves.⁸

The Water We’re Swimming In

We’ve seen literal somethings being done to actual bodies of water in the last few years in the US; think Flint or Jackson. But Kitson’s statement works all too well as a metaphor for our own sociopolitical atmosphere.

There is, of course, the general degradation of discourse pervading much of social and even more traditional (TV, radio, print) media, and the openings it creates for propaganda and conspiracy to take hold. Twitter/X may be the most obvious example of how ugly absurdities, aggressions, accusations, and pointed disinformation get tossed around in the absence of content moderation, itself driven by the platform owner’s less-than-noble (if bumbling) intentions.⁹ And painfully ridiculous as it all is, the way in which we speak to and with each other, and the inability to make sense of what’s reliable or real, has real-world effects, from COVID deaths related to vaccine skepticism to injuries and even fatalities resulting from the January 6th insurrection.¹⁰

That’s all a generalized, if disturbing, dumpster fire, though; as all the distraction and sick croaking plays out on the surface, we may fail to notice or attend to careful scheming aimed at a real, comprehensive power grab.

I’m talking in particular about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led plan for fundamental political change meant to be issued in by an amenable future president. (That plan includes “the politicizing of independent institutions [including DOJ and FBI], spreading disinformation, aggrandizing executive power, weakening checks and balances, quashing criticism or dissent, marginalizing and restricting the rights of specific communities, corrupting elections, and stoking violence.”)¹¹ Much like the implicit unwillingness in Kitson’s statement to accept you’ve been beaten, the people behind Project 2025 realize on some level that a solid portion, maybe even a majority, of the US population, is no longer (if they ever were) with them; the days of fishing with rod or net are over. If they’re going to create the culture they want, they’re going to have to do something to the water—the democratic society we could at least try to achieve—because they’ll never succeed via fair elections or other means of accountability to democratic and/or US constitutional norms.

It’s a bleak vision—but as in any other authoritarian or totalitarian set-up, the Achilles heel may lie in the program’s own refusal to recognize anything beyond its own desires. Powerful people, members of cabals, or, say, Republican politicians who thought they could manage Trump or his fans, always seem to assume that they’ll be unharmed or unaffected by the rules that they make for everyone else, that they’ll be able to maintain control of the situation they’ve created. But anyone who remembers Frankenstein, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” or the fate of a ton of party loyalists who somehow got on the wrong side of Stalin, knows that even our own carefully crafted creations have a way of taking on a will and momentum of their own—and if you happen to stand in their way, you’ll be swept away. Project 2025 has all the makings of an authoritarian regime quickly eating its own, which wouldn’t be so bad it if didn't also entail the damage heaped upon those unwillingly caught in its grip.¹²

What to do, then? Stop spitting mud at each other, for one thing. But the most useful advice I’ve seen of late comes from lawyer and legal analyst Teri Kanefield:13 don’t let the bastards make you panic, and don’t give in to the spectacle. Understand the facts, understand the possibilities, talk to each other. It seems like trying to fight a house fire with a toy water pistol. But all the history I read of activists, writers, and average people getting through and working against their own horrible situations¹⁴ does help me feel a little less helpless, and Kanefield has provided her own reading recommendations to boost our confidence that something better than what seems to be looming is possible. For now, I’ll start there, and hope to find something powerful enough to counter any suggestion that we should do something sinister to the water; whether we label it as others’ or our own, it'll all merge into the same sea in the end.

^{2. Radden Keefe, 72.↩}

^{3. Radden Keefe, 87.↩}

^{4. This does, though, sound a lot like certain powers’ presence in and departure from Vietnam or Afghanistan.↩}

^{5. Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Mary M. Innes (New York: Penguin, 1971).↩}

^{6. Ovid, 143–44.↩}

^{7. Ovid, 144.↩}

^{8. All citations in this paragraph are from Ovid, 144.↩}

^{9. Among the ton of reporting and commentary on the situation of X and Musk, see Nora Benavidez, “Musk, Twitter and Misinformation in a Time of War,” Free Press, 19 October 2023, and Tom Singleton, “EU takes action against Elon Musk’s X over disinformation,” BBC News, 18 December 2023.↩}

^{10. Mirjam Guesgin’s recent article for Vice looks at the way in which “data voids” and lack of understanding about what counts as a credible sources leads to getting swept up in conspiracy theories and disinformation. See her “Scientists Explain Why ‘Doing Your Own Research’ Leads to Believing Conspiracies,” 21 December 2023. For an example of how Russia’s use of propaganda is especially influential in Latin America, see Gretel Kahn, “Despite Western bans, Putin’s propaganda flourishes in Spanish on TV and social media,” Reuters Institute, 30 March 2023.↩}

^{11. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s article linked in the text above, “Project 2025: The Far-Right Playbook for American Authoritarianism,” provides an extensive discussion of the plan.↩}

^{12. I’ll assume victims here are both human and non-, given how the right wing tends to treat the environment.↩}

^{13. Teri Kanefield, “No Time to Panic,” terikanefield.com, 30 December 2023.↩}

^{14. An off-the-top-of-my-head and by no means complete list of writers I go to for strength and encouragement includes Václav Havel, Steve Biko, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Hofstadter, Chân Không, Jan Patočka, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Gloria Steinem,...↩}