The great man theory, p.1
The Great Man Theory, page 1
To Phoebe, my brightness
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Apartment
Loner
The Love Song of Jonny Valentine
Kapitoil
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
Chapter Eighty-Three
Chapter Eighty-Four
Chapter Eighty-Five
Chapter Eighty-Six
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Chapter Eighty-Eight
Chapter Eighty-Nine
Chapter Ninety
Chapter Ninety-One
Chapter Ninety-Two
Chapter Ninety-Three
Chapter Ninety-Four
Chapter Ninety-Five
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol
—Bob Dylan, “Idiot Wind”
1
“I am a Luddite,” Paul typed.
My ailing laptop, a prerequisite for this manifesto and my profession, is by now capable of word processing, email, and little else. Eleven years ago I acquired a cell phone whose functions are limited to calling and texting, and have not upgraded it since. My home is without a television or a tablet. I do not post, comment, or “like,” as I have no social media accounts and thus no online “brand” (nor, it would appear, that conspicuous an offline one). I have never—and this may come as a shock—taken a selfie.
And yet, as much of a curmudgeonly crank as this abstemious lifestyle might make me sound, I’m also an idealist at heart.
After this opening inventory of renunciations (and its redemptive punctuation), he delivered the précis of his argument: our subsuming addiction to screens has, more than any other economic or cultural factor, fostered today’s perilous political climate. Technological immersion has fomented the rise of right-wing extremism, giving platforms to abhorrent values once disqualified from decent society; neutered the left with a hashtagged resistance that substitutes apoplexy for action; and, perhaps most perniciously, anesthetized us all with spectacle and distraction, blinding citizens to our imminent jeopardy while smothering our desire for progress with an endemic cynicism.
“The stakes, bluntly put,” he concluded, “are a matter of life and—”
Paul stopped before the last word. Beyond being a cliché, that final sentence employed the very hyperbole he was diagnosing as a malady of the digital age. Subtlety in language was paramount, and asserting the existential risk of our screened lives through a stand-alone sentence at the end of the prologue was the handiwork of a turgid hack, a blaring news chyron. The caps-locked president.
The Luddite Manifesto: How the Age of Screens Is a Fatal Distraction would have more integrity than that. After twenty-odd years of publishing little-read essays on niche subjects in obscure literary magazines, he had a chance, with his first book, to reach a wider audience. The topic generally interested people, nearly all of whom recognized their addiction to their digital devices, occasionally with concern, more often in shrugging acquiescence. If he didn’t pander, if he wrote the book he knew he had in him, he might actually get them to pay attention.
The eyestrain-deterrent-cum-motivational-phrase he’d set up for his computer flashed on its twenty-minute cycle: THE SCREEN IS A FATAL DISTRACTION—LOOK UP! He’d been writing for two hours straight, heedless of its instruction. He blinked away the dryness, unclamped his chunky noise-canceling headphones, and took in the room. The heads of the other patrons genuflected before their own silvery computers and black phones. A few screens he could spy on displayed work applications, but most were social media feeds, the reflections waterfalling down the lenses of their users’ trendy eyewear. He was the oldest person present, an increasingly frequent phenomenon of late. Already aging out of the quinoa-and-chickpea-salad coffee shop demographic at forty-six.
His seniority was usurped by a man with springy coils of white hair who wandered in with a rolled-up copy of the Times, his shirt reading SUPER CALLOUS FRAGILE RACIST SEXIST LYING POTUS. He ordered a coffee with milk, couldn’t hear over the music when the barista asked him what kind of milk, seemed bewildered by the plant-based varietals she then rattled off, and clarified that he’d just like a little whole milk.
Paul had a soft spot for this species on the verge of extinction, the throwback Brooklyn liberal, and it always made him happy to spot one puttering about in its native habitat of Park Slope, the last neighborhood in which they throve. As he left to collect his daughter from her day camp, he passed the man’s table. On the front page of his newspaper was a headline about fracking and earthquakes, the literal coming apart of the planet from greed and overconsumption.
The despairing thought that typically resulted from an encounter with these old-timers: all that utopianism and organizing and protesting—for this blighted world, now led by the very worst member of their generation. You could blame venal politicians, avaricious bankers and CEOs, the yuppie defectors from their ranks, the vast swath of America that had remained indifferent or mulishly resistant. But maybe these people, the only ones who’d cared in their heyday, still hadn’t sacrificed enough for the cause. And now all that remained in their arsenal were acerbic made-in-China T-shirts.
His phone shivered with a call he’d been expecting for weeks. He doubled back to a corner of the room.
“How are you, Paul?” his department chair asked after they said hello, and from the measured timbre and salesmanlike deployment of his name, he could tell he was about to receive bad news.
2
Near the end of the spring semester, he’d lodged a request for a 6 percent raise with his next senior lecturer’s contract, and his chair, Nathaniel Zielinski, had promised to do his best once he squared away the upcoming budget. The English department at their third-rate private college in Manhattan appreciated Paul’s professionalism—he hadn’t called in sick in eight years, his student evaluations typically marked him as tough but fair, he kept his mouth shut at faculty meetings—if not his publishing profile, and he anticipated they would meet him in the middle, a satisfactory outcome. Next year, with the publication of The Luddite Manifesto forthcoming, he’d have a stronger negotiating hand as a viable candidate for a tenure track professorship, either as an internal promotion at the college or somewhere else within a Metro-North ride to maintain weekend visits from Mabel.
But now he was listening to Nathaniel’s my-hands-are-tied litany about general austerity, line items withdrawn, once-slack belts refashioned into Victorian corsets. A completely predictable apologia; the administration would seize any excuse not to fairly compensate untenured faculty. Winning a 2 percent raise last time had required an undignified month of lobbying.
“I take that as a no on six percent,” Paul said. “Can you do three?”
A firing would have been almost more humane than a demotion. Senior lecturers had benefits and modest job security, with biennial as opposed to semester-long contracts. Then there was the matter of salary.
Nathaniel stammered when Paul asked what adjuncting paid.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated after sharing the puny figure. “That’s all we’re allotted. But we can give you four classes a semester.”
“More work for less money?” Paul asked. “Sign me up!”
“And I hate to tell you this now, too, but we’re overhauling the writing curriculum,” Nathaniel continued. “Student interest in traditional creative nonfiction has waned quite a bit in recent years, as you’ve probably noticed from the enrollment numbers. We’re asking you to teach a newly designed intro to nonfiction writing class for first-years.”
“Glorified freshman comp, you mean.” He hadn’t taught such a low-level class since the beginning of his teaching career. “It would’ve helped if you’d told me this a few months ago so I could have looked around for other work this semester. It’s almost August.”
“I understand. I’ve been fighting this budget the whole summer, hoping it wouldn’t happen, and I just got the final word. I know it’s not ideal, but does this sound amenable?”
Paul would have preferred the less fancy but more honest tolerable, or the humbler doable. Being amenable to Nathaniel meant being “agreeable,” not “willingness to be submissive.” But that’s what it was: the powerful demanding that the powerless submit to their rules in their game, skirting the unseemly, Anglo-Saxon truth with a Latinate euphemism.
“Paul?” Nathaniel asked. “Did you hear me? Is that amenable?”
3
His future direct deposits more than halved, Paul stepped out of the air-conditioned coffee shop and into the afternoon’s wool blanket. This June had been the hottest in history, and July was on pace to set records, too. Even in climatically conscientious Brooklyn, people acted as though extreme temperatures were a new norm to marvel at, like fitter and more skilled Olympians pushing the right wall of human performance.
He’d pick up a class or two at another college in the city to cover the shortfall. There would be less bandwidth, as the cyborgian phrase went, for The Luddite Manifesto, but he’d truncate the margins of his days, brew more coffee. He’d chosen this profession, if not its instability. Most of the world had it much harder. He’d survive.
Still: fucking Nathaniel. He could’ve reminded the administration that Paul was the department’s longest-serving lecturer, a title that with each passing year had become more of an embarrassment, the oldest minor leaguer never to crack the majors. But every favor Nathaniel asked on Paul’s behalf of his higher-ups now was one less he could demand for himself in the future. He was a few years younger than Paul and had never visibly demonstrated any meaningful interest in teaching or scholarly work. He simply wanted to be in charge of others, and his Machiavellian means to that end was inciting neither fear nor love, but presenting himself as a preternaturally nonthreatening bureaucrat, a marina manager whose solitary concern was that no boats ever rock in his vicinity.
Paul spotted Mabel’s cohort on a grassy hillock in Prospect Park, a cluster of preteens supervised by two counselors. Half the campers were soldered to their phones, and both adults, too. Jane hadn’t seen the harm in giving Mabel one. She’d used Paul’s overheated bias against him, as she had done more and more near the end of their marriage, semi-playfully calling him Professor Webb, after a “curmudgeonly crank” (he’d lifted the Homeric epithet for the prologue of The Luddite Manifesto) of an English professor she’d had in college who disparaged seemingly all new technology and culture: answering machines, “rap music,” even VHS tapes. As a result of the students’ antipathy for him, they automatically despised the old novels and poetry he taught to which, with a more inspiring guide, they might have been receptive. If he kept this up, she warned him, Paul would only instigate Mabel’s rebellion.
But this was one co-parenting fight he’d won, after wearing her down with reams of data and arguments against mixing children and smartphones: decimated attention spans, self-esteem issues, the creep of materialism, time spent not reading, cyberbullying, potential exposure to monstrous men, scarier developments to come in the dystopian future. They still needed a line of communication with their daughter, given the logistics of shared custody, and had compromised, for now, on a bulky phone that, like his, had restricted functionality. Mabel pulled it out in public with great, status-anxious reluctance.
She was on the edge of the group, in her camp-branded teal shirt, ponytailed and summer-bronzed, toeing a patch of dirt. His irritation with Nathaniel lifted for the moment. When Mabel was a baby, and he and Jane weren’t yet defeated by the fatigue of parenthood and the iterative quarrels and détentes of a faltering marriage and the is-this-all-there-is nihilism of early middle age, he sometimes wondered when the paroxysm of joy that gripped him upon seeing her would peter out, as it inevitably had to. But the raw magic of her existence hadn’t yet faded; he was a fool for her, still instantly smiled upon seeing her face. He believed that it was in fact his curmudgeonly, cranky stance toward most everything else that induced this response. It opened up a Mabel-sized space in his heart, an unexpected warm spot in an ice-cold lake.
To think, as he often did, of what nearly happened almost a dozen years ago.
4
Paul hadn’t felt much when Jane had become pregnant. Nor when her bump swelled and he could see the extraterrestrial fetus on the sonogram and hear the squishy underwater thumping of its heart, or even feel it kicking. He’d chalked it up to his lukewarm interest in procreating; whereas Jane had wanted a baby, especially a daughter, more than anything else, his reaction to the project had been tepid cooperation. When he’d readily consented to giving their child Jane’s surname of Bailey, he had claimed to others it was in feminist solidarity, but the real reason was that he didn’t care much about his name’s living on in this unborn human. Close male friends he’d confided in about his numbness had assured him that men seldom developed an attachment during the pregnancy, but that he’d be flooded with profound paternal emotions once he met his daughter in the flesh.
Jane’s labor likewise failed to excite anything in him other than helpless anxiety as it dragged on overnight. When Mabel was delivered and eventually thrust into his unpracticed arms, he supposed he felt something, though it was more an acknowledgment of the moment’s historical import rather than overwhelming love for this wizened homunculus of a stranger who was about to upend his heretofore streamlined life. She looked like every other newborn he’d ever seen; nothing marked her as distinctively his. His concerns mounted with each passionless minute he held her. He was different from his friends, defective. Not cut out to be a father. Assessing himself as the head of their household, he conjured up horrific hypothetical scenarios. If he, Jane, and Mabel were all in a sinking boat and he could save only one of them, it would be Jane. And if rescuing Mabel meant surrendering his own life, a trade-off Jane would instinctually make, he wasn’t sure he’d have that same measure of courageous devotion.
A couple of hours later, a salt-and-pepper-haired doctor who looked like a soap opera physician came into the recovery room. He wanted to run an echocardiogram on their baby. The doctor’s responses to their questions were vague.
“Purely precautionary,” he said. “We just want to rule some things out. Don’t worry about it.”
A nurse rolled Mabel away in her bassinet to the neonatal intensive care unit on another floor. Paul and Jane were told the test would take forty minutes, and since Mabel was sleeping so soundly, she needn’t be sedated. Paul stayed with Jane in the recovery room, feeding her unconvincing reassurances.
After ninety minutes with no updates and intensifying fears, they were told they could see Mabel and the doctor. Paul pushed Jane in her post-delivery wheelchair down to the NICU, a dark hallway resembling an air traffic control unit, with computer stations that displayed health statistics he didn’t understand. Soft beeps issued, at once calming in their regularity and ominous in what a sonic deviation might portend. He steered Jane through the cramped space until they reached Mabel, sleeping in her bassinet near another baby. A nursery of newborns slumbered in an adjacent glass-walled chamber. It was sundown now, the only window showing a dusky gray sky rimmed with orange.
