The World That's Coming

When girls tell me that a book I wrote made them a feminist and they want to hug me, I let them, but I also hate myself a little bit because the feeling I am feeling most is that if they really knew me they would never say that. But I say, Thanks, thank you, that means a lot to hear, thank you. It starts to feel like nothing, which is fucking horrible, because when someone calls you a cunt it sticks. It’s everything else that feels like the fluke. I am not supposed to say that. Of the horrible things that men say to women online, I am supposed say, You get used to it. Or They must have sad lives, I feel bad for them. And it’s true—I imagine these men who spend so much time hating women and sending me pictures of fetuses or making videos screaming about my sucking their dicks must have sad lives. Of course they do. There is no version of a fulfilled life that allows someone to write fuck you cunt on Twitter or tell you over email that your four-year-old daughter will grow up to be a bitch like her mom. But despite my best intentions and pseudo-Buddhist upbringing, I don’t feel bad for them. I don’t feel compassion. I just hate them. That’s all I have.

Mathematics contrasted strongly with the ambiguities and contradictions in people. The world of people had no certainty or logic. People confused me. My mother sometimes said cruel things to me and my brothers, even though I felt that she loved us. My aunt Jean continued to drive recklessly and at great speeds, even though everyone told her that she would kill herself in an automobile. My uncle Edwin asked me to do a mathematical calculation that would help him run the family business with more efficiency, but when I showed him the result he brushed it aside with disdain. Blanche, the dear woman who worked forever for our family, deserted her husband after he abused her and then talked about him with affection for years. How does one make sense out of such actions and words? A long time later, after I became a novelist, I realized that the ambiguities and complexities of the human mind are what give fiction and perhaps all art its power. A good novel gets under our skin, provokes us and haunts us long after the first reading, because we never fully understand the characters. We sweep through the narrative over and over again, searching for meaning. Good characters must retain a certain mystery and unfathomable depth, even for the author. Once we see to the bottom of their hearts, the novel is dead for us. Eventually, I learned to appreciate both certainty and uncertainty. Both are necessary in the world. Both are part of being human.

First, the news cycle is dead in the eyes of the consumers; they want news immediately on demand. They don’t want to wait for the 6 P.M. news or the next morning’s paper to be delivered to get the latest news; they want to look at the news on their phone at any hour of the day, while killing time in line at the grocery store or sitting on a city bus. This means that reporters are basically working 24/7, updating stories posted earlier, and writing new stories as soon as events dictate. Second, digital advertising—the revenue source for most media in the modern era—is a volume game. The more content you create, the more ads you can sell, and with declining print ad sales, you need to make up the difference somewhere.

This means we live in a never-ending, always accelerating news cycle, which makes the brutal White House lifestyle more brutal than it has ever been.

If love had changed to something else, something I did not recognise, the terrace at the front of the pensión with its tables and chairs placed under the olive trees looked exactly the same as it did when I last stayed here. Everything was the same. The ornate tiled floor. The heavy wooden doors that opened out onto the ancient palm tree in the courtyard. The polished grand piano that stood majestically in the hallway. The thick cold stone of the whitewashed walls. My room was exactly the same too, except this time when I opened the doors of the worm eaten wardrobe and saw the same four bent wire clothes hangers on the rail, they seemed to mimic the shape of forlorn human shoulders.

The best and worst advice I ever got about being powerful and having a successful career was fake it till you make it. So many of us, women especially, don’t feel confident or worthy or smart enough to be in the rooms that we worked hard to get to. So instead of letting that insecurity take over and showing the world just how vulnerable we feel, we’re supposed to act like we belong. Feign the entitlement that seems to come so easily to our male peers. I live this advice every day and hate myself for it most of the time. Fake it till you make it, but at what point are you just a fucking faker?

Starlings fill the sky. They circle a large whitewashed mansion with green shutters raised above the bay. Scarlet blooms grow in turquoise pots and trees bend in the breeze inside the walls of the garden. There is shade in that garden. And a hammock strung between lemon trees. There is health in that garden. Cool walls and birdsong. I’d get to look young in that place. I’d come home to rest in that place. I’d stop running, running through airports and railway stations, running through European cities looking for rooms and coffee and company and comfort. I would stop running away from this beast inside me. We would rest here and stop being frightened of each other.

Released in 2005 in the midst of the George W. era, Revenge of the Sith was perhaps the most overtly political of the entire saga. Nixon was no longer the emperor. As Lucas explained, “George Bush is Darth Vader. Cheney is the emperor.” Supreme Chancellor Palpatine manipulates fear to turn the Republic into the Empire. With eerie prescience, Lucas told the Chicago Tribune, “Democracies aren’t overthrown; they’re given away.”

As a strongman , T’Challa bears some resemblance to Kwame Nkrumah, the leftist president of Ghana who was overthrown by a coup allegedly aided by the CIA in 1966. There’s little about T’Challa that would suggest he’s a leftist, save for the fact that he rules over a country untouched by colonialism. If anything, he leans right. His beneficence does not extend beyond Wakanda’s borders, sealed against as they are against the povertystricken tribes on all sides by a ring of mountains. T’Challa believes that only by refusing to share its wealth and technology can his country protect its unique way of life. His Wakanda First isolationism flies in the face of Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism, and even has a whiff of you-know-who about it. In fact, in this important way, he is more like Donald Trump than he is like Nkrumah.

An index of the pessimism that pervades these shows is that the dystopias they picture are not sited in the indeterminate future, but only a few years off. In 2017’ s Blade Runner 2049, a crisis occurred in 2022, the year after my driver’s license expires.