The big difference - and I think Adam points this out - is how nakedly power now announces itself. There’s no shame or embarrassment, no gesture towards justice or legality, nothing but “I want. I do.” I’m in my 70s and I’ve never been so despondent about world politics. As a citizen of the UK, I’m well used to being sidelined but Trump’s random dissolution of any and every pretence of alliance with other nations (Putin’s excepted…) has me seriously disturbed.
But thank you, Adam, for articulating sharply and with righteous anger what many of us have felt in our bones.
I think I must feel the same humiliation and rage that you do, because this post had me nodding along, releasing a "Yes, yes" with every paragraph like pent-up gas, releasing them as emphatically as that bass-voiced landmass that sits at the back of every white American evangelical church releases their powerfully bovine _amens_ throughout any good sermon. Mark Callan writes in a comment here: "I'm in my 70s and I've never been so despondent about world politics." I am in my 40s as, I think, Adam you are too. Between Mark's comment and the fact that I found myself nodding along, yes-yes, a-a-amen, even to your almost wistful remembrance of George W. Bush . . . (say what you will about the tenets of blah-blah, at least its an ethos) . . . a thought passed through me with a shudder: what if we, Adam and Jared, in our 70s, look back as wistfully at this time when Leviathan was at least the stupidest motherfucker alive and not a coherent, organized, rational sociopath? I want to believe that it can't get worse, but a theory of history whose refrain is "And then it got worse" seems to have more predictive power by the day.
Well said. Although I myself find it less humiliating than terrifying and depressing. But of course it's all of the above. A few fairly scattered reactions:
You dance around the idea in this piece, but there's a line from La Rochefoucauld that is apt here: "Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue". So are lies and deception. The Bush administration paid the tribute of all three when they pretended they had evidence, when they pretended they were reasonable, when they make a show of convincing people. It turns out that even that little bit of tribute helps.
"hope it doesn’t occur to him to (for instance) start picking and choosing which schools get access to student loans": I read this and I was screaming at the screen "What happened to "I am afraid to even joke about what it might be, lest I somehow call it into existence"?? That was a good idea!!"
"Makes me sick motherfucker how far we done fell." — Bunk Moreland, The Wire, season 2
On the heels of the releases of “Shadow Ticket” and “One Battle After Another” and upon rereading some of his older stuff, I’ve been thinking lately about Thomas Pynchon. For the most part his writing, past and present, still reads as fresh and irreverent, but there’s one area that I think has not aged well: all the paranoia. The paranoia just doesn’t resonate with me, as an unwilling subject of 21st century brain-rotten statecraft. Jittery, chain-smoking Tyrone Slothrop, daydreaming of a V2 rocket-bomb with his name painted on it — "Ah, how quaint," is my kneejerk reaction. It's what my kid might call a "grandpa meme," a screengrab from a moment in time whose sense-making context no longer exists.
Two state capacities have been lost since Pynchon’s heyday, both of which are necessary for a conspiracy theory to have any punch: secrecy and planning. The Trump administration has neither. All the evil happens out in the open, and impulsively. Think of Jared Yates Sexton writing about Don JR and the Russians in 2017: "I chased this story for a year and he just . . . tweeted it out." The phenomenon has only gotten more extreme in the intervening almost-decade. "Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran" went from a kooky inside-baseball news-junkie joke to a tangible historical fact, overnight, on the whim of a guy with a phone and a toilet, like you said.
At this point, a return to a geopolitics where actual conspiracy is a possibility would feel like a return to, dare I say it, normalcy. As others have written, with different phrasing, I would peg the moment that Consipiracy died to the 2007 to 2009 era, when two big lies (the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" and the word "HOPE" in all capitals on the election material of a candidate who rescued perpetrators, abandoned victims, and bombed weddings all in the holy name of "reaching across the aisle") were revealed. Those revelations made all subsequent conspiracy-making impossible. In retrospect it's not surprising that someone like Trump would take the mantle of power. He's the one who's most internalized the lesson: nothing matters, never apologize, fuck everyone and everything else.
As for 21st century literary fiction, I keep searching for writing that captures our moment the way Pynchon captured the 20th century's boogey men, the CIA's invisible Cold War tradecraft and the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower mike-dropped about. Pynchon reads in 2026 like somebody else's history. Literary fiction written of and for our enshittified, banally horrific Present has to begin with different priors: our leaders are idiots who don't have a clue what they're doing today, nor why they're doing it, except maybe that old saw: lib-ownership.
(I really hate how Substack hides a bunch of comments by default. I guess they would get in the way of clicking through to the recommended links below them.) In week 2 of my social media detox and feeling extremely out of the loop. I appreciated the opportunity for catharsis you provided in this post.
The big difference - and I think Adam points this out - is how nakedly power now announces itself. There’s no shame or embarrassment, no gesture towards justice or legality, nothing but “I want. I do.” I’m in my 70s and I’ve never been so despondent about world politics. As a citizen of the UK, I’m well used to being sidelined but Trump’s random dissolution of any and every pretence of alliance with other nations (Putin’s excepted…) has me seriously disturbed.
But thank you, Adam, for articulating sharply and with righteous anger what many of us have felt in our bones.
The sphere beyond utility and calculation. Thanks.
I think I must feel the same humiliation and rage that you do, because this post had me nodding along, releasing a "Yes, yes" with every paragraph like pent-up gas, releasing them as emphatically as that bass-voiced landmass that sits at the back of every white American evangelical church releases their powerfully bovine _amens_ throughout any good sermon. Mark Callan writes in a comment here: "I'm in my 70s and I've never been so despondent about world politics." I am in my 40s as, I think, Adam you are too. Between Mark's comment and the fact that I found myself nodding along, yes-yes, a-a-amen, even to your almost wistful remembrance of George W. Bush . . . (say what you will about the tenets of blah-blah, at least its an ethos) . . . a thought passed through me with a shudder: what if we, Adam and Jared, in our 70s, look back as wistfully at this time when Leviathan was at least the stupidest motherfucker alive and not a coherent, organized, rational sociopath? I want to believe that it can't get worse, but a theory of history whose refrain is "And then it got worse" seems to have more predictive power by the day.
Well said. Although I myself find it less humiliating than terrifying and depressing. But of course it's all of the above. A few fairly scattered reactions:
You dance around the idea in this piece, but there's a line from La Rochefoucauld that is apt here: "Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue". So are lies and deception. The Bush administration paid the tribute of all three when they pretended they had evidence, when they pretended they were reasonable, when they make a show of convincing people. It turns out that even that little bit of tribute helps.
"hope it doesn’t occur to him to (for instance) start picking and choosing which schools get access to student loans": I read this and I was screaming at the screen "What happened to "I am afraid to even joke about what it might be, lest I somehow call it into existence"?? That was a good idea!!"
"Makes me sick motherfucker how far we done fell." — Bunk Moreland, The Wire, season 2
On the heels of the releases of “Shadow Ticket” and “One Battle After Another” and upon rereading some of his older stuff, I’ve been thinking lately about Thomas Pynchon. For the most part his writing, past and present, still reads as fresh and irreverent, but there’s one area that I think has not aged well: all the paranoia. The paranoia just doesn’t resonate with me, as an unwilling subject of 21st century brain-rotten statecraft. Jittery, chain-smoking Tyrone Slothrop, daydreaming of a V2 rocket-bomb with his name painted on it — "Ah, how quaint," is my kneejerk reaction. It's what my kid might call a "grandpa meme," a screengrab from a moment in time whose sense-making context no longer exists.
Two state capacities have been lost since Pynchon’s heyday, both of which are necessary for a conspiracy theory to have any punch: secrecy and planning. The Trump administration has neither. All the evil happens out in the open, and impulsively. Think of Jared Yates Sexton writing about Don JR and the Russians in 2017: "I chased this story for a year and he just . . . tweeted it out." The phenomenon has only gotten more extreme in the intervening almost-decade. "Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran" went from a kooky inside-baseball news-junkie joke to a tangible historical fact, overnight, on the whim of a guy with a phone and a toilet, like you said.
At this point, a return to a geopolitics where actual conspiracy is a possibility would feel like a return to, dare I say it, normalcy. As others have written, with different phrasing, I would peg the moment that Consipiracy died to the 2007 to 2009 era, when two big lies (the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" and the word "HOPE" in all capitals on the election material of a candidate who rescued perpetrators, abandoned victims, and bombed weddings all in the holy name of "reaching across the aisle") were revealed. Those revelations made all subsequent conspiracy-making impossible. In retrospect it's not surprising that someone like Trump would take the mantle of power. He's the one who's most internalized the lesson: nothing matters, never apologize, fuck everyone and everything else.
As for 21st century literary fiction, I keep searching for writing that captures our moment the way Pynchon captured the 20th century's boogey men, the CIA's invisible Cold War tradecraft and the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower mike-dropped about. Pynchon reads in 2026 like somebody else's history. Literary fiction written of and for our enshittified, banally horrific Present has to begin with different priors: our leaders are idiots who don't have a clue what they're doing today, nor why they're doing it, except maybe that old saw: lib-ownership.
(I really hate how Substack hides a bunch of comments by default. I guess they would get in the way of clicking through to the recommended links below them.) In week 2 of my social media detox and feeling extremely out of the loop. I appreciated the opportunity for catharsis you provided in this post.
I neglected to mention: Ted Jennings sounds like he was a lovely mentor and human being.
He was indeed.