I’ve been battling the flu and its consequences for the past few days and I’ve been trying to force myself to rest, which is difficult not only because of my own drive to be productive but because it’s hard to tell people who want you to work that you actually can’t work, or even jump on a quick meeting because your voice is gone. Not for five or ten minutes.  

The last day or so has been better for me, with the last real flu problem being a sore/dry throat that I didn’t realize I was making worse with certain medicines that kept drying it out. Because of this improvement, I’ve been doing little bits of work—I can’t help it—and cleaning my apartment. The laundry had also piled up, and with everyone being out and about on Friday evenings, I figured today would be the best time to take care of that problem. I don’t mind doing laundry. It’s not really a hassle for me. Part of that is that I still see doing laundry through a nostalgic lens. I wrote an essay years ago about the early days when my family moved to the United States, when we would go to the laundromat as a family and the kid would play arcade games or sit around reading, while my parents did the work. As we got older, we also helped loading and taking out the clothes. I enjoyed the stillness that doing laundry forced onto our lives. It felt like going outside of the regular world every weekend. It’s why I don’t mind not having laundry in my apartment. I enjoy taking my clothes down to the laundry room, leaving my space for the world outside, and waiting for the clothes to wash and dry. 

While doing laundry today, I was listening to a 2000s pop playlist on Spotify on shuffle when Bubbly by Colbie Caillat came on. Suddenly and transported me back almost 20 years to 2008, to the second semester of my Freshman year in college—which is insane to think about, years really pass in the blink of an eye. 

Bubbly was Caillat’s debut single from her Coco album. It was released in May of 2007 and reached six-time platinum status in the United States. It was everywhere but the first time I heard it was in my friend Chris’ car while we were driving to pick up a futon from a furniture store in the middle of the winter night. I don’t remember why he had to pick the futon up so late, but he had asked me if I wanted to go on an adventure with him. Chris and I lived on the 5th floor of the dorms, which were all guys, and from the start of the year, my friends and I created an identity around living on the 5th floor. We were a group, and everyone who lived there belonged to the collective. There were the main actors, which was six of us, but anyone else up there was included or invited to anything we did. We partied together, took as many of the same classes as we could, made music and performed together, and generally hung out. We didn’t need to leave the floor to do any of the fun things we wanted either. My birthday that year was thrown in my dorm room and we managed to pay off the resident advisor to turn a blind eye to it. We even managed to organize a schoolwide snowball fight that same year, that got me written up when I dropkicked the head off the snowman of our resident director’s child. I would have gotten away with it had my leg not gotten stuck on the snowman’s body, leaving me dangling until the director came out. 

Chris lived on the 5th so he was part of our group, but he and I had also had a separate friendship. We had gone to camp together in the week before school started and grown close even though we couldn’t be more different. I just thought he was a cool dude, and for some reason, him being colorblind was so fascinating to me. On the 5th floor, his room was a few doors from mine and I used to go to his room and chill while he did work, just to get out of my own space. When he asked me to get the futon with him, he won me over by saying that while other guests could use it, the futon would really be for me. 

Winters in Detroit used to be much harsher back in the 2000s and that winter was no different. It snowed so much and was below freezing for weeks. The snow is bad but the treacherous part of a bad winter is the black ice. I remember asking about how we would navigate the ice when we got into Chris’ SUV and he was so proud to flex his car’s capabilities to handle the winter and his own driving skills. And he was right, the car barely slipped and Chris drove steadily, without rush or a need to prove that he could drive well in the snow. About 30 minutes into the drive, I was dozing off. The steadiness of Chris’ driving was part of the reason, but it was that in combination with the heated seats and the soft pop songs that were playing on the radio. The last song that I heard before I dozed off completely was Bubbly and it became the background music to the coziness and comfort that I felt during that drive. 

When Chris woke me up, I still felt that I was dreaming. The world was so quiet. And the darkness of the night was contrasted by the headlights of the car which he left on, and the blanket of white snow that covered the ground. I was still half-asleep and still feeling the warmth of the car as we stored the futon. I was so hypnotized by the sound of the snow crunching beneath our feet that I almost let the futon slip. I slept again on our way back, and when we got the futon back to his room, I slept on it. The next morning when I woke up in an unfamiliar room, I realized that I hadn’t dreamt the whole thing. In the years since, that night has been one of my favorite memories from college. And I always think of it when I see a futon or whenever I’d see Chris’ life updates on Facebook—lowballing people on Facebook Marketplace is a hobby and an art. 

One of the last posts that I saw from him was about his newborn son. Chris had married not too long after college and had a daughter. He had a son earlier this year, but the baby was born premature with a rare heart condition. I saw that post this last spring. Then during the summer, I was on Marketplace looking for last minute World Cup tickets when I looked at my timeline and saw people posting on Chris’ page about how much they missed him. I was curious about where he was, or who some of the people were, and I went on his page to be nosy. On his page I saw multiple messages from his friends and family, along with a GoFundMe link. Chris had died unexpectedly in April and his widowed wife was left with the two children. People had been posting on his page in the months between his death and when I saw it, reminiscing on the memories they shared with him and letting him know how much they missed him. 

Social media is strange. You can keep up with the lives of people you knew from a long time ago without really interacting with them or being friends like you were before. You can watch them grow, marry, have kids, and settle in the life and routines, and while that watching from a digital and physical distance can feel weird —since at some point you and them change so much from the people you were back then that you’re practically strangers again—it’s still nice to see the people who you were friends with, who you shared shared wonderful memories with, find their happiness or put in a real effort to find their happiness in the world. Their existence, however distant, becomes part of your vision of the world. Even if you don’t see anything about them for months or years, you know that they’re out there, present and striving to make their lives, and that presence, the knowledge of their existence, makes your world feel fuller. 

Then suddenly, for one reason or another, they disappear. And sometimes you don’t even find out until months later, not that you have a right to know the news of their life anymore, but their disappearance still rips a hole of their size in your image of the world. That hole might not be as gaping as the one in the lives of their closest family and friends, but it’s still there. They go from a distant presence to a memory, and where before there was a thrill whenever you were reminded of them because of the chance to see how their life has developed since your last encounter, when they become memories, they slowly start to fade away because there are no longer opportunities for life updates or chance encounters. As memories they become confined in the few objects or moments that you relate to them. 

The endless rat race of trying to make your own life and the nonsensical video meetings of introductions and updates on projects makes it hard to remember everyone that we lose in life, especially if they’re not part of our immediate life. Yet, memory is also strange because all it takes is for one unexpected moment, a song playing from one of Spotify’s generic playlists, for me to return back to the winter of 2008 with Chris, young and alive, with his differently colored eyes that could only see a limited range of colors.. The second Colbie Caillat asked “will you count me in?” while I was loading laundry, I was back in the passenger seat of Chris’ car, curled up during the Detroit winter, warm and fuzzy, dreaming and comfortable in the knowledge that those young days where everything seemed so possible would last forever. 

Just a thought about the show at SoMad for their opening:

The artist was strapped on the cross and had their phone in front of their chest like an exposed heart. The phone was unlocked and there were two screens on the sides that projected and doubled the phone screen. They stood strapped on the cross, and on a pillar of salt, for hours.

The audience was allowed to do whatever they wanted on the phone, from taking selfies, looking through the artist’s photos, to texting their contacts and shopping on the retail apps. The performance was a reference to Marina Abramović Rhythm 0 and it seemed apt for our contemporary world that while the body of the artist in this show was on display, and it was still a performance of endurance, that the man site of interaction wasn’t that physical body but the phone, which tends to contain more of our life and self these days than our actual physical bodies and the material world. So much of who we are can be found in our phones.

Just as with Abramović’s show, it’s fascinating what people immediately think to do when given the freedom to do as they please with another person. Many go towards violation.  Abramović was sexually assaulted and dehumanized in numerous ways by some members of her audience, and the artist in this case had people go beyond taking selfies to opening their dating apps like Grindr and Sniffies, to not only send messages to potential dates and hookups but to open private photos and showcase the nudes of others on the screens to the public. Audience members also scrolled through the artist’s photo gallery to find their own nudes and other private photos. Some looked through the artist’s messages and notes, which wasn’t as severe as exposing nudes but was still invasive. The selfies, as playful as they were, also spoke to a narcissism that is foundational to our current digital culture. There’s this compulsion to inscribe oneself onto everything, every moment, and every person, as the protagonist of the moment, the event, and the world. It’s one thing to take a selfie in your own phone, it’s another to take and save it to the phone of someone you don’t know.

There is the matter of consent. The artist is clearly consenting and inviting people to interact and participate in the performance. It doesn’t work without an audience engaging and at no point did the artist ask anyone to stop. The only restriction that I saw as I walked in was a sign that asked people not to take photos or videos of the performance. And it’s not surprising that people, endlessly curious about the private lives of others, immediately went snooping into every crevice of the digital life to find anything that can be seen as scandalous or at least risqué. But just as the performance asks for participation, there’s a hidden dimension. The power to not participate, to not take the invitation. Watching people go through the artist’s phone, I wondered whether they also recognized that alongside the question of what someone would do when given another’s phone and body, there’s also the question of what you wouldn’t do. There was no requirement to interact with the phone at all. The body and the phone were present and presented, but it was up to the participant to decide how to engage. To be fair to the people there, some made that choice not to participate and I stood with them watching the others. The people who I talked to found the notion of looking through someone else’s phone to be weird, even if the person gives you access. The reason was hard to articulate, though we kept coming back to the engagement feeling violative.

I think it’s a matter of respect. Respect for other people as private creatures, and for yourself as someone separate from another. One of the main things that I think has been lost in the world where our private lives are entirely too public and everyone has access to everyone is the concept of human dignity. The violations of other people is so normal in our everyday lives that we don’t even consider it as anything worth investigating or interrogating. Every app and tech company is constantly stealing our information, listening, collecting, and selling every conversation, touch, movement, and thought. In mimicking our tech overlords, we’ve adopted this attitude of treating other human beings as our playthings and property, endlessly entertaining ourselves with the drama of their public and private lives. We reason that if the information is out there, we have right to consume it. Especially if the other person shares it themselves. And anyone who has spent a substantial time on the internet and social media knows that the information and entertainment that is often sought after and rewarded with high engagement is not those of good news and successes, but the scandals and destruction of lives. The Internet was built on celebrity and non-celebrity nudes being exposed as much as it was on cat videos.

In a culture that encourages that kind of spiritual greed, the idea of human dignity and the responsibilities that we have towards it feels like it’s gone. Everything and everyone is for consumption, and the primary way we think about other human beings is through this lens of product and entertainment. The argument becomes about the right to consume and what is forgotten is the possibility of restraint. You can say no. Saying no is one of the great powers each human being has. The ability to reject what you’re presented is one of the markers of children entering a more mature stage of seeing themselves as individuals in the world with their own humanity, likes and dislikes. Going forward in the world is about saying yes as much as it is about saying no. And I think people often hide behind their right to consume as a way to dodge a greater responsibility to restraining themselves from destructive behaviors even if those behaviors are thrilling. You can look away. You can always respect the border between your life and the lives of others. Even if the drama of someone’s life  is available for you, you can say that’s none of my business. You can stand back out of caution and respect for the dignity of others and yourself.

One thing that was made clear to me in watching people go through someone’s messages, photos, and dating apps, was that the violation of one phone, one life, one body, reverberates to a multitude of others. No life is isolated, and the artist’s social and personal connections were put up as entertainment for others, as much as they were. The artist’s body was exposed through photos, and so were the bodies of those who sent them photos privately. The artist’s thoughts were exposed in their private digital journey, and so were the thoughts and conversations of people who sent them messages in private. What was done to the artist through their phone, was done to everyone connected to them.

I went to see American Doctor at the Angelika theater in Manhattan recently, a screening presented by Acacia Magazine. The documentary follows three American doctors who operated primarily out of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, a city in the Gaza strip, before and after the ceasefire in 2025. They are Dr. Mark Perlmutter, Dr. Thaer Ahmad, and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa. The movie was directed by Poh Si Teng, a former journalist turned filmmaker, who funded the initial production with $150,000 of her own money. 

The film is nonlinear and the time shifts, along with the somber music in especially sad moments, made me feel immediately uncomfortable. By nature I’m very suspicious of art that is openly trying to manipulate my emotions, and these tactics felt even more superfluous in a film whose subject matter already evokes a maximum of emotional heaviness, depth, and sadness.

But my complaint is a useless artistic one, and like Christopher Nolan said recently, being able to recognize a mechanism doesn’t invalidate the mechanism. American Doctor is a documentary but it is still a film, playing within familiar rules and structures. It had to be shaped, reshaped, and edited to turn unimaginable chaos, brutality, and death into an endurable and effective narrative. 

The film’s focus on three Americandoctors allows the story of Gaza and its destruction to be viewed primarily as a humanitarian disaster, a politically “safe” framing in comparison with the idea of a complicated ethnic and geopolitical conflict. This alternate framing is often used to depoliticize the culpability of Americans and others whose countries bear responsibility for enabling the genocide and occupation; deliberately or not, it discourages them from learning more, or from taking any kind of stand or action in accordance with their morals. 

Screenshot from the trailer for American Doctor, via YouTube

Doctors have historically held a protected status in the context of armed conflicts. Their mission is saving and preserving lives, and they are supposed to be allowed to do their work without being targeted or killed. To show the story of Gaza through the attempts of American doctors to save and help the maimed and brutalized, and the successes and failures of that mission, along with how Israel obstructed them, is to make the story apolitical in the sense of presenting the people of Gaza as patients first, before any other identity. This view flattens the history of the genocide by replacing the moral spectrum of good and bad with the putatively still more urgent one of life and death. These doctors are trying to save people; the aggressor is preventing them from doing so. But these aren’t the Palestinian doctors who struggled and died protecting their families, neighbors, and fellow citizens, all of whom Israel identified as terrorists, since in their calculus every Palestinian is guilty by nature. No; these are outsiders, moved by a selfless and innocent duty of care toward their fellow human beings. 

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa asserts and references this doctor-patient framing throughout the film. Sidhwa is a trauma surgeon from California, of Pakistani Parsi background; he emphasizes multiple times that he has no connection to the conflict except for the moral responsibility he feels as a doctor. Sidhwa stands out from the other two because he doesn’t seem to have a family or social life. The scenes shot at his home or apartment have the characterless air of a hospital or museum more than a home. The walls are undecorated, his bed is on the floor covered by a gray sheet, and everything is as bare as possible. He talks about having problems dating, which he first positions as a problem of priorities between his duties and the work needed for romance, but later he backtracks and admits that he’s just difficult to be with. 

Sidhwa is almost a romantic figure, the living embodiment of the familiar trope of a dedicated doctor whose entire life is his work. He’s sandwiched between Perlmutter and Ahmad, whose warm sociability makes for a drastic contrast. 

Perlmutter is a Jewish Americanwhose story revolves around his late enlightenment regarding what Israel is doing to Palestinians in his name, and his desire to act against it. Of the three, he is the most outspoken politically, and he openly acknowledges the privilege of identity that allows him to be bolder than his fellow doctors. Ahmad is a Palestinian American, who desires to go back and help his people, but can only look on from Jordan after Israel blacklists him. 

Perlmutter is always surrounded by people. He plays around with the kids in the hospital. He jokes around with his staff. They tease him about glazed donuts. Ahmad is constantly thinking about his children, and sees the children of Palestine as no different from his own. In one touching scene while he’s stuck in Jordan, Ahmad asks his children over FaceTime if they want to visit Palestine one day. He turns the camera to show them how close Palestine is to Jordan. Both children say yes, and their answer and the sight of the country being so close, yet so far, momentarily overwhelms him. 

Sidwha is his job: colder, more direct, logical almost to a fault. At a conference, he opines that everything he has done is meaningless because it didn’t change much, though of course that didn’t mean that he would stop trying. A member of the audience then chides him for the comment, pushing back to say that what Sidhwa and the others are doing gives hope to others, and that change sometimes takes a long time. The audience member tells Sidwha to remember how long it took to put an end to the Vietnam war. 

Watching Sidwha move around almost emotionlessly, even in the midst of death and brutality, makes it easier to see why he would have difficulties with romantic relationships. But Sidhwa’s role also works in service of showcasing the unique inhumanity of the violence against Gaza. He has seen the worst things imaginable as a trauma surgeon, and has shielded himself from emotional reaction, and yet the seeming futility of his efforts sometimes catches him off guard. 

There’s a scene where he checks out the charts of some of his young patients, and mistakes the records of one teenage boy for another who had been there before. When he’s corrected, he remembers that the other boy had died. He then says without any real emotion that at least they tried the best that they could. For a second it seems that he’s going to move on to the next case and continue his work, but the moment hits him harder than he expects. As if unaware that the camera is looking at him, he stands still, unable to speak, before whispering that it sucks. He then goes away to recompose himself. 

There are a lot of devastating images of brutalized and disfigured bodies, mainly children; in fact the film opens with Perlmutter chiding the director for wanting to pixelate an image of dead children, the victims of a bombing, with their bodies whitened by death and dust, laid out in a row. He tells the director that she wouldn’t be preserving their dignity by not showing them. Israel has already taken their dignity by killing them. She has a journalistic responsibility to show the brutality in full, he says, to not comfort the audience by looking away from the truth.

She wouldn’t want to retraumatize the family, she says, but he assures her that he has their consent. And if hehad to see those dead children, if their families had to lose and see them that way, then the least the world could do was look and bear witness. And so she follows his directive and shows the bodies. The bodies of those children, and more. Dead bodies. Bodies with limbs blown off. Bodies mangled. Scenes of mothers and fathers carrying their bleeding children. Scenes of siblings and parents screaming in despair at the sight of the brutalized bodies of the children, brothers, parents they love. Scenes where the three doctors work tirelessly and meticulously to save the lives belonging to those bodies. 

Screenshot from the trailer for American Doctor, via YouTube

I found myself sometimes looking away during these scenes. Like millions of others, I’ve spent the last few years seeing those images of dead and mangled bodies almost daily, supplied by news outlets, by Israeli combatants celebrating their deeds, and by Palestinians themselves showing what is being done to them, day by day. The images are supposed to provoke us into moral and political action. 

The literature considering how effective images of suffering can be in provoking a reckoning is a long and storied one, and in almost every article or essay that contemplates the question there are the same references to Susan Sontag, John Berger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Walter Benjamin, and Jean Baudrillard. The same arguments appeared in 2015 in response to the images of Alan Kurdi, the two-year-old Syrian boy who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Photographs of suffering and starving people were central to Biafra’s fight for independence during the Nigerian Civil War in the 1960s, images I’ve been familiar with since my childhood in an Igbo household. And images of the devastation of the Vietnam war were central to the protests that took place against it. It makes sense that those images of horror could have been so effective in the past, even images as recent as the ones of prisoners of Abu Ghraib in 2004—prisoners piled on top of each other and put into humiliating positions as American soldiers smile and point and laugh and thumbs-up at them. 

For people who hadn’t seen those kinds of images before, who were ignorant of what was happening around the world and what was being done by their own governments, seeing those photos and videos must have come as a shock, an antidote to the propaganda and lies being fed to them by their own governments. Such a shock leads naturally to a moral and political reckoning, since no good person would be comfortable knowing that other humans were being slaughtered and humiliated in their name and with their money. But while the outrage is important, it often dissipates quickly in the absence of meaningful and concerted threats of accountability for the political actors, entities and structures that engineer those horrors. The Syrian civil war continued, and produced many more dead children. About three million Biafrans died, many of them civilians, due to starvation, and the architects of Abu Ghraib remained unpunished; the media outrage seems to have had no real long-lasting effect at all, as ICE roams the streets, two decades later, piling up migrants in concentration camps on U.S. soil now as well as abroad, depriving them of their rights and their dignity. 

We’ve seen a similar cycle play out with Gaza. The initial images and videos were so horrific that people all over the world took to the streets to denounce their own governments’ funding of and collusion with the Israeli government’s genocide. But rather than cede to the will of their own people, the governments of countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany opted instead to criminalize and suppress any action or speech against Israel. They demonstrated quite clearly that they would sooner destroy the civil liberties of their own people, in their own lands, than move to stop the massacres. The images worked to awaken people, but it was not enough. This is what made Sidhwa say the truth, that his work and advocacy were in many ways useless. 

It seems necessary to show the world what is happening, even if that doesn’t lead to immediate political change. And I can’t and don’t wish to stand against people who want to tell and show what is being done to them. But watching this film, what I was struggling with in context of the power of its images was my own inability to look. W.E.B Dubois said that “there is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know,” and while I had gone to see the film knowing what would be in it, and while I accepted the responsibility of witnessing, I still recoiled against the sight of human beings destroyed in that way. 

I didn’t want to look directly at the evils done to people. I didn’t want to see parents and siblings wailing, I didn’t want to see the dead children. The cameras were on the survivors, and they had consented to the world viewing their despair, but I didn’t want to consume it as spectacle, as entertainment, in the form of a movie. The non-linear structure and the sad music made me feel something like anger because they were making me look at the interrupted lives of human beings as part of a cinematic experience. 

And beyond that, I didn’t want to look directly at evil. Each image hurt, as evidence of great violence on human beings, and also as a possible destruction of the psyche of those who witness it, not least by asserting these kinds of images as the dominant and lasting idea of Palestinians. I don’t want to see those images of mangled and destroyed bodies as defining the nature of Palestinian people—forever suffering. 

Film is a medium that underscores the passivity of its audience, and that too felt wrong to me. I didn’t want that despair, filtered through familiar visual and narrative structures, to prompt the improper emotion of pity in me. Pity is often the escape route when confronted with witnessing an unbearable situation. We look for a way outside the discomfort of seeing human beings in desolation. All that is seemingly left for the audience to do is to feel bad and to congratulate themselves on feeling bad. As Simone Weil said in Waiting for God: “The capacity to pay attention to an afflicted person is something very rare, very difficult; it is nearly a miracle. It is a miracle. Nearly all those who believe they have this capacity do not. Warmth, movements of the heart, and pity are not sufficient.”

At the end of American Doctor a young patient from Gaza, whose family was killed in an attack by Israel, is brought in a wheelchair to see Dr. Ahmad. The boy’s right arm is in some kind of cast to stabilize it. We learn that the doctors in Gaza had initially wanted to amputate the arm, but one of them realized that it could be saved. Dr. Ahmad looks at the arm, praising the unseen doctor for keeping it intact. It’s a tender scene, but the way that Ahmad admires the work of his predecessor is funny. Doctors have a characteristic habit of seeing human beings in narrowly focused parts, or as abstract cases, and they can be so deep inside their work that they sometimes offer comments, admire or joke about their job in a way that seems misaligned with the emotional tone of the moment. Earlier in the film, Perlmutter jokes and laughs about the size of a hole in a patient that he’s operating on, for example. And while this weird habit of doctors seems like an inability to read the mood, or evidence of their distance and removal from the suffering in front of them, it’s actually one of the advantages of the movie’s framing, and could be a way for the rest of us to think about how to approach our moral and political work. 

For doctors, each patient is a collection of discrete problems, and their role is to find the solution to each one that can make the person whole again, or to make them as whole as possible. A bullet in a child’s chest is evidence of Israel’s brutality and it is the reason why parents and siblings are outside crying, but it is also a logical problem to solve. There are tools and processes to address it. And even when things go wrong there are other things to try, until there’s nothing left. The hyperfocus on the problems and solutions often makes doctors behave and sound like aliens, but it is also a way for them to keep working and moving forward without losing their minds. Pity has no place in their deliberations, and neither does despair. 

Doctors are often deeply affected and even traumatized by what they see and experience. They’re still human after all. But what supersedes those feelings is their duty. 

Most of us aren’t doctors, and will never have the courage that these three have, but what makes their actions invigorating, what they seem to be an example of, beyond the unique powers and knowledge of doctors, is what a responsibility to life and humanity looks like. Patient after patient comes in, with a litany of issues, and they do whatever is in their power to ease the pain, to mend, to heal.

The hospital is bombed, and they go in right after to continue their work. They make TV appearance after TV appearance, pushing back against every narrative working to shield Israel from criticism. And they meet with senators and their assistants who dismiss them with bullshit statements, and while this annoys and dismays them, it never stops them. They get mad, they make morbid jokes, and then they try again. 

The success of the New York Knicks and the cultural celebrations and exchange initiated by the World Cup taking over the city of New York among other American cities, have been a good showcase of what sports as a realm of experience can be at its best. It can, as the cliche goes, bring people together in a way that nothing else can. It doesn’t necessarily transcend borders or identity, but can offer millions of people from different worlds a shared identity and language through which they can experience the lowest and highest emotions together. A fandom is a home, a tribe, a faction, that gives people a place to belong without the complications and real-world consequences of political, cultural, and even neighborhood tribes and factions.

Like all cliches, this idea of sports as something that brings people together and out of the limitations of their other identities can unravel very quickly if you engage with it seriously. Jordan Eagles’ “Bases Loaded” is that sort of interrogation, which takes up the selling point of sports as a space for belonging and confronts the cliche with history and reality.

Showing at Pioneer Works until August 9, 2026, the exhibition is rooted in Eagles’ fandom of the New York Mets, the little and less successful brother of baseball teams in the city. Eagles inherited the love for his favorite team from his family, and the exhibition includes a series of resin sculptures featuring family ephemera and childhood photos of the artist wearing Mets gear. In some photos he’s hugging his father. For many of us, sports are a family affair. We inherit teams from our parents and family members, and through that fandom, we are initiated into a bigger family that can number in the millions. If you are a fan of the same team as me, then we are connected, even if we don’t know each other. It is this notion of family and belonging that is the inspiration behind the exhibition, particularly the shirts that the Mets offered to blood donors at Citi Field, with the slogan reading: “The Mets are in our blood.”

The slogan can be dismissed as simple marketing copy to help inspire people to give blood, a way to marry the service with the bond created by fandom, but in it, Eagles, a gay man, sees the contradictions and limitations of sports, fandom, and the cliches that it sells itself through, especially when it comes to gay men. Blood isn’t just where fandom of the Mets live, but it becomes the limitation of belonging. It was only in 2023 that the FDA dropped all restrictions on gay and bisexual men donating blood. Before, gay and bisexual men and women who have sex with men who have sex with men, were given lifetime bans on donating blood as a consequence of the AIDS epidemic. A ban that had less to do with personal risk than it did with belonging to particular groups of people.

Eagles takes the blood that had been demonized in society and in baseball and puts it everywhere. He splatters it over the giveaway shirts. The resin sculptures contain vials of blood from the artist, his father, and a friend, and the blood lives next to those childhood photographs and Mets gear.  In the reinterpreted and sensationalized copies of the New York Post covers dealing with rumors of former Mets star Mike Piazza’s sexuality, the “not” in the large font statement “I’M NOT GAY” is traced and covered in blood.

There is blood everywhere in Eagles exhibition, HIV-positive blood, the tainted blood that was and still is feared in society, the blood that condemned people to early death and an ostracization from society, from belonging to the human community as people deserving of care and inclusion, blood that put over the images of sports and fandom, reveals the statement that the “Mets are in our blood” as not a statement of inclusion, but one of rejection. Sports and fandom are in our blood, but not in everyone’s blood. Not in the blood of those who are deemed outside of the family, by the nature of their sexual preferences.

By revealing the contradiction and limitations of that statement and sports fandom in general, Eagles doesn’t just condemn the cliches and the power of sport. The work is more generative than that. After all, he is a lifelong Mets fan. The work feels like a demand for sports to actually live up to what it sells. By reminding us that sports have often had the same limits and bigotries as society, Eagles also reminds us that he and other gay people have always been there. Since childhood. As part of that greater family bonded by the love of the Mets. He is not making a demand for special treatment, but quite the opposite. The exhibition demands that the Mets and sports recognize its own family members. That it should be greater than the society that excluded those people. It demands that the statement that the “Mets are in our blood” to be more than cliche and marketing copy, but a real declaration of belonging that transcends sexual preferences and the discrimination tied to it.

Before Egypt’s round of 16 match against Argentina in the 2026 World Cup, Egypt’s coach, Hossam Hassan, took time out of his pregame press conference to speak not about the upcoming game or his country’s hopes in possibly defeating the reigning champions, but instead, to point out the hypocrisy and silence of the football world and in the world in general when it comes to the lives of Palestinian people. 

“If there is anyone in the world who does not feel for the Palestinian people, then they are not human — whether they are Arab, European, or American.”

After Egypt lost the match, he was asked in the postgame press conference if his stance on Palestine had an effect on how the referees might have judged his team. He refused to take the angle, using that moment instead to again bring up the simple fact that Palestinians are as human as everyone else, they enjoy football as much as everyone else, and that what was being asked when it comes to the Palestinian struggle is a recognition of that humanity and the rights that come with it. 

"Children who are wearing Argentina, Barcelona, City, and Real Madrid shirts are being killed, yet you remain silent.” 

This wasn’t the first time that Hassan had brought Palestine into the realm of the biggest sporting competition. He had continuously spoken about Palestine in his press conferences and when Egypt beat Australia in their round of 32 match, he raised the Palestinian flag on the field afterwards and then draped himself in it. He dedicated Egypt’s win to Palestinians in the postgame conference after.

“My heart and soul are with them. I dedicate this victory to the Palestinians. May Allah grant them victory and have mercy on their martyrs."

Hassan’s insistence on bringing up Palestine is in contrast to how FIFA has treated the issue. Though FIFA has allowed Palestine flags to be flown by fans in the game, the governing body has refused to take meaningful action to ban Israel from its competitions by continuously delaying the decision. Instead, FIFA decided to align itself as a partner for Trump’s craven and intellectually and morally contemptible Board of Peace project. 

In one of the most symbolic examples of how little FIFA cares about Palestinian life under occupation and genocide, FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, tried to orchestrate a handshake between Palestinian Football Association’s president, Jibril Rajoub, and Israel FA’s vice-president, Basim Sheikh Suliman, at the end of the 76th Fifa congress in Vancouver. Rajoub refused the handshake, leaving Infantino to stand on stage awkwardly championing the idea of working together to resolve “complex matters.” Though Rajoub was accredited to attend the World Cup, his visa to enter the United States was denied. FIFA said nothing about the denial or about the recent news that a Palestinian aid worker, Mohamed al-Wahidi, the director of the Egyptian Committee in Gaza, who organized World Cup watch parties was killed by an Israeli airstrike right before Egypt played Argentina. Or as Hassan stated, that kids in Gaza who are watching and love the game as much as anything else, are being killed as well. 

Palestine didn’t qualify for the World Cup but as has been shown with Hassan’s courage in speaking out, it has still been visible. At least with the Arab teams and countries. One of the great powers of the World Cup is not only that it is the biggest sporting competition in the world but also the biggest spectacle. There is no larger platform to speak out about any issue. It is also an event that gives substance to cliches.

The World Cup is often said to be able to bring people together in a way that nothing else does. The idea can be seen as reductive and in a way insulting to the divisions that exist between people from different societies and even people in the same society. International football is a kind of soft power and a summer of nationalism can’t really undo the harms that people suffer before, during, and after the tournament. You can’t just shake hands with a representative of the country bombing and killing your people and have everything be alright. But what it does do is allow for sport, as a platform for shared joy and suffering, to elevate the things that people do have in common, and allows that to be the basis of forming a wider community that would be more difficult otherwise. 

One version of this is how the World Cup acts as a space for pan-Africanism, when the African teams and their fans see themselves as a community working together to prove the validity of African soccer and the depth of African culture. When Cabo Verde does well, they’re cheered on by Africans in Africa and the African diaspora. This is also mirrored in the pan-Arabism that comes from watching Arab teams do well in the tournament—some teams, like Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt, tend to exist in both spaces. When one does well, everyone seems to cheer for them, in a way that would not ordinarily happen when we’re talking about the countries and their relationship to each other outside of sport. In the World Cup, the bond between people becomes more clear and becomes a reason for celebration and support. 

The cause of Palestine acts as one of these bonds, not particularly of the governments, but of the people. The coaches, the players, and the fans. Hassan and the Egyptian fans flying the Palestinian flag becomes then not a political statement in the sense of one being made by the Egyptian government, but a political and human declaration that Palestinians are Arabs like us, but more importantly human like everyone else, and just as they are watching the same tournament, even in the worst possible conditions, they deserve to be remembered, acknowledged, and championed. When we win, they win, and they will come with us as far as we can go. 

One of the best places to see this kind of unity in person has been in Astoria, Queens, in New York City. There’s a particular street, named Steinway, which acts as a hub for Arab life in one of the most diverse boroughs and areas in the city and the world in general. It’s nicknamed Little Egypt, but if one walks down the street, especially during the World Cup, you’d see all kinds of stores decorated with flags from all the Arab and some African teams. When Algeria wins, thousands of people pack the streets and celebrate into the night. When Morocco wins, the same thing happens. And of course, if Egypt wins, people won’t be able to leave or get home until at least the early hours of the next morning. It is not only people from those countries who celebrate, it is the entire neighborhood. Everyone is happy for each other. Everyone feels as if they have a shared destiny. 

Every time I have gone there for a game, no matter who was playing, Palestine was part of the conversation. Bootleg Palestine jerseys would be mixed with the real and bootleg versions of other teams. You could buy them from old Moroccan and Egyptian men for $35. Kids and adults drape themselves in Palestine flags and yell out “Free Palestine!” during conversation. And of course, the Palestinians who live in New York City are part of the audience, cheering and suffering with everyone else. 

When Egypt beat Australia, the celebration spilled out in the streets as expected. People shot off fireworks, sang, and danced for hours. The younger kids, the ones who still have good knees, climbed on top of cars and trucks. In one of my favorite photos from that day, a young man is standing on top of a truck in front of a crowd of other young men, Both of his arms are outstretched to either side. In his left hand he’s holding the Egyptian. And in his right hand, he’s holding the Palestinian flag. Afterwards, I sent it to a Palestinian friend of mine, along with an article about Hassan dedicating the victory to the Palestinian people. She said, “I saw this last night and it made me so emotional.” 

Egypt played against Argentina at noon eastern time on Tuesday, July 7th. The story and controversy of that game has been well discussed now. My Palestinian friend didn’t text me until 11pm that night. And when she finally did, she said that she didn't want to talk about what happened. That it was bullshit. And that she was so stressed out about it that she took a nap at 9pm. Anyone reading our messages would have thought that she was Egyptian, but just as the Egyptians and other Arab countries had brought the topic of Palestine and Palestinian people along with them, the ones that I know and saw on the streets, as well as the videos of Palestinians in Gaza watching the games, had joined in with those teams, countries, and people in their World Cup journey. Sharing in their joys, hopes, and suffering together. 

After a World Cup of dramatic late comebacks and wins, it wasn’t to be in the final for Argentina. Unlike their previous opponents in England, Switzerland, and Egypt, Spain didn’t withdraw into their shell at the end out of fear and allow Argentina to come roaring into the match. Rather than giving in to the frustration of thoroughly dominating the game while remaining unable to score, Spain stuck to their plan and their identity, making like-for-like changes in order to maintain the pressure on their opponents. As they had in their previous matches, Spain believed that their ability to control and squeeze the life out of their opponents would pay off.

If Argentina had had the chance they could probably have equalized, but Spain didn’t give them one. In the few moments when Argentina found space to possibly get a shot at goal, there was always a Spanish player in front of the attacker to block the shot or shepherd them away. Mikel Merino, who had played the hero in previous matches for Spain, coming in to score winners, notably blocked a Lionel Messi shot with his face. In the end, Argentina didn’t have a shot at all in the first 90 minutes, and overall, they never got a shot on target.

Argentina also tried to destabilize their opponents through hard fouls and trying to goad them into a fight, aiming both to buy enough time to get to penalties and possibly to win a red card, but in the end it was the Argentinian player Enzo Fernández who would be sent off and make things harder for his team. The referee had been lenient, but it was impossible to overlook Fernández sending Pau Cubarsí flying and twirling in the air. And then Spain refused to give in to their opponents’ attempts at provocation, and waited for the game to be decided on the merit of the better team.

The decisive moment, when it came, was cataclysmic. A Ferran Torres half-volley, assisted by a cushioned header by Nico Williams at the beginning of the second half of extra time, broke the Argentine resistance and Argentinian hearts everywhere. Throughout the World Cup, they had been the ones celebrating in those dramatic moments, but now they found themselves a goal down, a man down, and with no real plan of attack or even the possibility of attack, since Spain was so much the better team that they could keep the ball away from Argentina effortlessly. Barring one good chance by Argentina, the rest of the match played out as it had before the goal, with Spain playing football and Argentina looking for a fight.

After the match ended, the fight finally came. Spain’s celebrations were interrupted by the Argentina players, and a commotion broke out that featured Leandro Paredes—who had spent his short time on the field fouling and antagonizing the Spanish players—wrestling Gavi to the ground. Eventually Argentina manager Lionel Scaloni, had to come in to try to calm his players down.

A bit away from the brawl was Lionel Messi, who at first watched the chaos but then sauntered away to be on his own. The image of Messi walking around, isolated from everyone else, was one of the dominant images of the World Cup and of Argentina’s run. Messi is 39 and has played professional football for 22 years. During this World Cup, he would mostly spend most of the games walking and conserving energy while his teammates did the hard work of defending and winning the ball back. There aren’t too many players who could get that luxury or whose team could make the final—and win the previous World Cup—by basically playing a man down most of the time, but Messi is not an ordinary player. Not even now, at the end of his career.

Messi was allowed to saunter around that way because his team was constructed around his genius. The other ten players would run and work as hard as possible in order to provide him the foundation to lead them to victory. He is a creative visionary like few others in football history, combining his ability as a near-unparalleled playmaker with a goalscoring ability that transcends the skills of even the greatest strikers. It would be silly for any other team to work in favor of one player but with Argentina, it really was the most sensible tactical decision. Fight for Messi and then hope that Messi will deliver them to victory. He achieved this in 2022, and in this World Cup he was still one of the best players, leading a team that really wasn’t that good to the final through his ability to conjure up magical moments in the last minutes of matches.

Argentina played in a manner not too dissimilar from the way Spain played, though their styles might be seen as opposites. Both teams were trying to create the possibility for a heroic moment: Spain through control and tiring their opponent, and Argentina through hard work and violence. The other philosophical difference is that Argentina had determined who that hero would be from the start. It would be Messi. He was the chosen one. He was the king. He was the leader, as captain, and as best player, and everything was designed to set the stage for the star to come out and do what he was asked to do.

Spain, on the other hand, are a team that is built on the collective. Everyone works for each other, and anyone can be called on to take the role of the hero. It could be Merino, Mikel Oyarzabal, Álex Baena, Lamine Yamal, Torres, and so on. They play with the understanding that all will create that deciding moment, anyone can, and just as anyone can make the through ball, the cushioned header, or the cutback, so can anyone arrive into the box to finish it.

Both approaches to heroism are hard for opponents to defend. The obvious problem with defending Spain is that every player must be defended with the same discipline and intensity, because the danger is everywhere. The problem with defending Argentina is that you have to stop arguably the greatest player of all time, often at the cost of putting multiple players on him constantly. Even then, it only takes one moment for him to make a team pay. Once your defender turns his head away from Messi, once they get pulled toward the ball because that’s where the action is, or they start to tire, then he can seize the advantage.

Spain, by their nature, defend a strong opposing team by keeping the ball away from them, as they also did against France and Kylian Mbappé. It’s hard for even Messi to shine, if he hardly touches the ball. In the few moments where he did touch the ball, there were several players ready to force him to give it up quickly or to tactically foul him so that he couldn’t build up a rhythm. Spain created their heroic moment by engineering the possibility over and over, and they stopped Argentina from doing the same by making sure that they didn’t even have the ball. This tactic reduced Messi to a spectator.

Messi spent the moments after the game walking around in the same manner, on his own, now with tears in his eyes. His moment of heroism never came. It’s normal for players to cry after they lose a final, but out of all the Argentina players, Messi looked the most devastated. Which could be seen as strange, because just four years ago, he had led his team to the World Cup and was seen by fans as completing the history of football, in a way, because he had won the last trophy that had eluded him. Argentina’s World Cup victory in 2022 was the country’s first in 36 years. The one championship that catapults players into the realm of immortals, and for him, the title that was the proof and exclamation mark on his claim as one of the best, if not the best player of all time. He had won it all—and hadn’t even been sure that he would compete in this year’s World Cup—yet here he was, four years after his great triumph, crying as if he were still looking for his first title with his country.

There are some people who think that a great player should go out on top, that the best version of their story is to win a title at a retirement age and then to go out with the final image being of them lifting a trophy. It’s a fair idea, since fans tend to view sports through that same heroic lens; there is a more cinematic appeal to ending the story after a final victory than to follow the hero around in their old age as they struggle with their waning abilities. Which is why fans often make the silly claim that losses that come later in a player’s career can diminish that player’s legacy.

I can understand why fans who want to protect their idea of Messi would want to preserve their final image of him in an Argentina shirt and lifting the World Cup, but watching him cry openly on the field in New Jersey after the defeat to Spain made me think that the image we will have, the image of Messi with tears in his eyes, suffering alongside his teammates and the fans, probably represents his life with Argentina better than anything else could.

Though he was born in Argentina, into a close-knit family of Italian extraction, when Messi was young he was often accused by Argentinians of not caring too much for the national team. They said he played better for Barcelona—where he made his debut at the age of 17, becoming captain 14 years later—than for Argentina. They said he was practically Spanish, since he spent most of his life in Spain, rather than in his homeland. The proof of that cold relationship was evident in how he hardly ever displayed emotion when playing for Argentina. He was too introverted. Too in his own world. Unlike other Argentinian heroes, like Maradona or Juan Román Riquelme, who wore their emotions on their sleeves, for good or bad, Messi was hard to relate to, and hard to read.

It would be easy to assume that everything flipped in 2022, after he won the World Cup for them, but the change in Messi’s relationship to Argentina and the fans happened slowly: it really began much earlier, and during some of their worst moments. From 2014 to 2016, Argentina lost three finals in a row. They lost the 2014 World Cup to Germany, thanks to a Mario Götze goal in extra time, not unlike the kind of heartbreak they just suffered against Spain. They then lost to Chile twice, in the Copa América final of 2015, and then the Copa América Centenario final in 2016. They had also lost the Copa América final in 2007 with Messi on the team.

Those three consecutive losses felt like rock bottom for the team, as if they were always destined to come up just short. Messi could get them to the final, but for one reason or another, he couldn’t bring them the joy of winning a title. After each one of those losses, Messi was shown crying in a way that he had never done before—openly, without reservation. He was no longer the cold, distant genius. It became clear that he had wanted the victory so desperately, for himself and his teammates, but also for the people.

After the 2016 loss at MetLife Stadium, in which he had missed the decisive penalty, Messi abruptly announced his retirement from the national team. He said: “I tried my hardest. It’s been four finals, and I was not able to win. I tried everything possible. It hurts me more than anyone, but it is evident that this is not for me. I want more than anyone to win a title with the national team, but unfortunately, it did not happen.”

The country responded with dismay; the president urged him to reconsider; Diego Maradona, a sometime critic, made the same plea; teammates made public statements of support; he was greeted at the airport by hordes of fans bearing signs reading, “No Te Vayas, Lío” (“Don’t go, Leo”). By the time he changed his mind and returned to the national team, weeks later, his relationship with the people had changed. Not only because the fans saw how poor the team was without him, but because there was a closeness from the suffering they had endured together. The fans had thought for a long time that he didn’t care, but Messi had clearly shown them that he was doing his best to make them happy and that each loss had hurt him as much as it hurt anyone in the crowd. It would have been great for them to win, but a strong bond had been formed between Messi and Argentinians from crying together.

This shared pain invigorated and sweetened their eventual World Cup victory in 2022. Argentinians were defensive and protective of Messi because they had suffered with him, and a lot of his teammates in that 2022 team were players who had themselves grown up watching and idolizing him. And they openly declared that they were willing to sacrifice themselves to make sure that he could win. Emiliano Martinez, the Argentinian goalkeeper who played the hero in the final as well as the previous Copa América final, said after the victory: “We had said it in the Copa América, that he had to win it. I was doing it for my country first and then for him.”

The Argentinian players, then, as now, were willing to put their bodies on the line, were willing to be the villains, play anti-football as they’re accused of doing, and to make an enemy of their opponents and the world, in no small part for the sake of Messi. The players, as well as the fans, knew how burdened he was by his own pursuit of greatness and in his effort to make them happy. To get closer to them. It was through those tears that all of them became united, and their bond became unbreakable.

The two eventual Copa América victories, and the World Cup victory, were incredible moments for the team and Messi, bringing the team back to the top of the rankings as a global footballing superpower, and cementing Messi’s place at the top of the football hierarchy—but even if they hadn’t won any of those, that relationship would have remained just as strong. As long as he gave it his all, the fans and his teammates would love and defend him to the proverbial death.

Argentina and their fans didn’t make any friends through this World Cup run. Because of their dirty play, the sense that they were being favored by the referees, and the general behavior of the players and fans as sore winners, they became the enemies of the footballing world. Even fans of other Latin American countries, who would ordinarily cheer for each other, chose to cheer for Spain over Argentina. Some Argentinians tried to push back on the negative image of them, while others embraced it. The way they played during the final and fighting the Spanish players afterwards further divided them from everyone else. They seemed to hate everyone. But their love for Messi never wavered. Even in the loss, their love for him grew.

As the Morocco vs. Netherlands game went into penalties, a few of the men in the hookah bar that I was at in Astoria, Queens, stood up on the couches and led the audience in prayer. At the same time, the broadcast of the game showed the players from both teams in huddles, praying as well. As the crowd prayed together in our venue, I said to a friend next to me that while praying to God, maybe we should also see what the devil is capable of doing since the devil is known for sometimes working faster, even if it comes at a price.

My friends and I were on Steinway street in Queens, New York City. Astoria is home to people from more than 100 countries, and Queens is the city’s most diverse borough and one of the most diverse places in the country, if not the world. The borough lives up to the idea of the city as a melting pot more than anywhere else. Steinway Street is where you can experience all of those cultures—Arab, Greek, Latin American, Asian, North and West African, etc—all in one two mile road. Anyone who has been keeping up with the World Cup taking place in the United States has likely seen photos and videos of Steinway street bursting with people, songs, and fireworks.

Before the game, we ate at a Moroccan restaurant and reserved a table at the hookah bar on Steinway. We then loitered around the area talking to Moroccan fans. In the timespan from arriving at the restaurant to the game starting, Steinway had turned into a bustling commercial street to what felt like a street festival. The game hadn’t started yet and it was already difficult to walk down the sidewalks. Outside of the hookah bar, I asked a couple of people how they felt going into the game against such a strong opponent, since Morocco are the 7th ranked best team in the world, and the Netherlands are the 8th, and what their predictions were. Most people were confident, with some declaring that Morocco would win by 2-7 goals. One guy was pragmatic and said that the game would be 1-1 and go to penalties but Morocco would still win, Inshallah.

Football is a game of tension. People who didn’t grow up fans of the sport sometimes find it hard to get into, with the standard complaint being that nothing happens for vast stretches of the game, and if you’re an American who loves American football or basketball, there’s the additional complaint that the games are too low-scoring. The second complaint is true and the first is not. Both are equally misguided, because they come from a misunderstanding of the drama of football.

A lot is happening on the field even when there isn’t a goal. That seems very basic to say and I don’t want to spend time explaining tactics and strategy, only to say that you have to see football games from the perspective of them being an exercise, sometimes torturous, of building tension in anticipation for an eventual release. As the score stays 0-0 and the clock runs down to its final minutes, the more unbearable the tension becomes. A one goal lead isn’t comfortable for anyone, the leading team or the one chasing the game. And as the cliche goes, a two goal lead is the worst lead in football. Because the margins are so tight for victory or defeat, it makes the eventual release, whether in celebration or despair, even greater. Every pass, run, tackle, save, cross, shot, blocked shot, and goal missed by only a few inches takes on an elevated nature, precisely because one moment can change everything. Watching a game often reminds me of seeing the movie Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Every moment, gesture, look, slight touch, and missed chance counts.

Each moment adds to the other, raising the stakes and the tension, drawing you in until you’re so emotionally invested that you’re exhausted by the act of watching. And when that moment of release comes, if it does come, it’s a feeling unlike anything else. Joy and relief mixed together, or relief and despair, since even in defeat, you at least get to be free of the emotional prison of suffering through each tiny moment. There is nothing quite like your team scoring after a long period of probing and almost taking their chances. After Morocco went down a goal to the Netherlands, it was as if the air was sucked out of the hookah bar and the street outside. A crowd that had been so rambunctious was so quiet that you could hear a cough from the restaurant next door. It was as if we were at a funeral. But when Morocco scored to equalize in added time, the explosion of joy shook the entire building.

Nowhere in the game is the tension worse than in the penalty shootout. When teams in tournaments fail to win in normal time, plus extra time, then they have to send out players to take penalties against the opposing goalkeeper until one team has an insurmountable lead. If the score is tied out of the initial five, then they go into sudden death. The penalty shootout is the worst, most agonizing, and yet wonderful and thrilling concept in the game. It compresses all the tension and drama of the game into one segment. When a player misses a shot during the 90 or 120 minutes of play, it’s terrible. But when a player misses their penalty kick in the shootout, it feels like the end of the world. Every feeling is at its maximum.

The shootout is also fantastic because, for all of the skill of the players, and the hours they spend practicing penalties, it feels like it’s out of their hands. The moment of putting the ball down, stepping back, running and kicking the ball is so singular, so removed from everything else, so isolating and lonely, that it is overwhelming for even the best players in the world. Football is a team sport, and though penalty shootouts have an order of players to take them, it actually reduces the game to its most basic principle. An attacker against a goalkeeper. You have to get the ball beyond the keeper with one kick. There is no second chance. Your teammates are depending on you and everyone’s eyes are on you.

Slip, and it’s over. Try to do something different from your usual routine and it’s probably over. Try a cheeky penalty against the wrong goalkeeper and you’re looking at a lifetime of embarrassment. Simply choose the wrong direction, even if you hit it as best as you can, and it can still end in heartbreak if the keeper guesses it right. So many things can go wrong and often it doesn’t matter how good or prepared you are. For the players, it is unbearable, and for the audience, who can only sit there and watch, even more powerless to affect the events, it feels like being stuck in hell. At that point, in such a vulnerable and helpless position, all you can really do is pray.

I share with my father and Pep Guardiola a refusal to watch penalty shootouts. My nerves can’t handle it. Even if I’m not cheering for any of the teams, the tension of the moment is too much for me. My dad will leave the room and go to bed if we’re watching at home. Guardiola famously sat on a seat and turned it away from the action. And when it was time for the penalty shootout between France and Argentina in the last World Cup final, I ran up to the roof of the building and closed my eyes and ears until it was over.

For Morocco and the Netherlands, I had no choice but to suffer through it since I was in a public space with friends. I tried to escape but they forced me to stay. My stomach dropped with every kick. I hugged my friends after every make, and felt like running and jumping off the building after every miss. The crowd cursed every Moroccan player who missed and sang about each one who scored. After Ismael Saibari scored, everyone jumped up, hugged whoever was closest to him, with grown men and women close to tears, started singing and poured out into the streets. An entire one mile radius was packed with people singing, dancing, shooting fireworks, and celebrating together. The joy of winning multiplied by how close the team had been to losing. The tension gave birth to an uninhibited expression of happiness because it had worn everyone down to their raw emotions. What could words do at that point? The hugs, cheers, kisses, sighs of relief, and fireworks, were enough.

After an hour or so of celebrating with the people, I decided to find my way to the train station to get back to my apartment. Before I could escape the crowd, I ran into the guy who said that Morocco would win on penalties. He hugged me and kept repeating that he said it would happen. It would happen. He knew it. Deep in his heart, he knew it. Because God had willed it.

The day before the United States played Australia in the World Cup, I hosted a watch party for the Mexico and South Korea game. The match was tense and though most people who attended were neutrals, everyone quickly picked a side for arbitrary reasons—the pink of the South Korean shirts were appealing to some, and others still had a fondness for the great Mexican players of the past (me and my love for Carlos Vela). The atmosphere was fun and light until the conversation touched on the upcoming USMNT game and what our predictions and rooting interests were. 

One of the attendees, a guy around my age whose family is from Lebanon, said that he wanted the USMNT to lose because he doesn’t like the team and what and who they have historically represented. He played soccer growing up and beyond the barrier of the pay-to-play system, the identity of soccer and the men’s national team was mostly white and mostly rejected people who weren’t white and wealthy. Even though the makeup of the national team has changed, with more players being people of color and coming from diverse backgrounds, he said that the structure of the system is still the same. The powers behind the team still look the same and one can go to any American Outlaws bar and still see that the fandom looks a particular way and doesn’t feel welcoming to anyone who isn’t that. 

Immediately he received pushback from a younger friend in her mid-20s. She had also played soccer growing up and worked in the game in some capacity in the past. She pointed out that the makeup of the team had changed, and included players like Folarin Balogun, a naturalized American whose Nigerian mother famously gave birth to him in New York City after she was denied a chance to fly for being too heavily pregnant. The starting lineup was a collage of races and backgrounds that represented the idea of the United States as a melting pot. 

She argued that though there was still a lot to do to make the game more inclusive in the national team fandom and as a whole in the country, it was worth fighting for since nothing in the country or the world unites people as much as football does. She didn’t think it was worth abandoning and ceding such a unique sport and platform for change and building connection to people and ideologies that reject the universality and openness that feels inherent to the sport itself. He resisted, concluding that it seemed nonsensical, and even a bit embarrassing and humiliating, to continue trying to be included in spaces that have openly rejected you over and over before. Beyond the playing squad and the national team, the culture around the team still rejects the people that it’s trying to advertise to through the diversity of the squad. It was all a ruse, of representation without any fundamental change to the culture. 

The US beat Australia 2-0, through an own-goal and a second from Alex Freeman, the son of Antonio Freeman, a former NFL star. Immediately after the victory, the Department of Homeland Security posted a graphic of the national team with Balogun, Sergiño Dest, and Chris Richards, with the words: DEFEND THE HOMELAND. One nation. One homeland. One team.” And the caption: Our Soil, with an American flag emoji. 

It was an odd post for many reasons, and as fans online have pointed out, the policies that the Trump administration has pursued and the ideas that it has expressed in numerous ways, would mean that in their ideal world, these three Black players in the graphic wouldn’t be playing for the national team in the first place, let alone being integral parts of it. There are a few naturalized citizens, and the administration has come out against that right. Balogun is a citizen because his pregnant mother was denied the opportunity to fly back to England and had to give birth to him in New York City, and the Trump administration has made it their mission to get rid of birthright citizenship. Dest was born in Almere in Flevoland, Netherlands, and  is the son of a Surinamese-American father. He’s hardly the kind of player that can be spoken of when talking about one “homeland”. And Chris Richards is an African-American born in Alabama, who was recently on video for the USMNT talking about the importance of remembering and celebrating Juneteenth, a day that still remains a federal holiday since only Congress can change that, which hasn’t stopped the president from trying to reduce its recognition and visibility. Not to mention the overall negative attitude that those in his administration have had for Black people in general, from policies to his personal views. 

It’s not the fault of the national team or its players that an administration that seems hostile to its constitution is using them to advertise itself and its aggressive policies, but it does go back to the key problem at the center of the argument at the watch party, and at the center of USMNT fandom, and of the dominant concerns in the country right now. The question of who is allowed to be included in the idea of being an American. It’s not a question that’s unique to the USMNT, every national team faces the same tension, since the nature of international sports is soft nationalism and soft power, no matter how much we may pretend or want to keep the worlds of sports and politics separate. 

Under those conditions of soft power and nationalism, it’s not a contradiction that the administration is using the image of Black players on the national team to champion itself and its ideas. The World Cup isn’t just the biggest sporting event in the world, it’s also the biggest advertising platform for brands and participating countries. And no one has a bigger space to sell itself than the host country. By the nature of the relationship between the national team and the country, the better the national team does, the more the administration gets to use their successes and positive feelings around them to sell its ideas. Whether the team wants that to happen or not. They’re a means to an end, and while the makeup of the team may not be what the people in the administration wants, what is most important is the opportunity that the team presents as a messaging platform. 

This gets back to the tension in the relationship between the national team and a lot of Americans. Who gets to own that messaging platform and what is it used for. For a long time, even before this current administration, that platform and the greater soccer structure in the United States has been used to express a more condensed idea of the country and belonging, that an American looks one particular way and everyone else can participate in the margins. Now the team looks different, but the hostility towards non-white Americans continues and has reached a boiling point. There’s no confusion that the Trump administration sees everyone else as lesser and as not real Americans, at least as real as they are. 

It’s hard to argue then against anyone who abandons the national team and the fight for their platform because of the overt rejection of other identities now and then. After all, as the guy said, it’s humiliating to keep begging to be included when you keep being told that this space is not for you. Representation helps, but it takes much more than that to include others. 

And yet, I also understand the desire to fight. The question of who is and isn’t included as an American is not settled, it has never been, and as we see from the current national team, it can always be changed and widened. To cede the ground is to allow this administration, and people aligned with them, complete ownership over the space to advertise its own conception of the country and its people. It’s to give power to only one idea. It’s to accept defeat before the whistle has blown, which feels antithetical to the spirit of football and to its principles, and the example that the athletes set on the field where they push the imagination of what is possible and who belongs. It feels like our duty to do the same off the field. 

The day started with me missing my 6 a.m. flight because my iPhone alarm didn’t go off for some reason. According to reddit, this is a fairly common problem.

Changed to a new flight at 1 p.m., at triple the price of the original flight.

Forgot to pack my Marni trousers. That may not sound important, but it mattered to me. I was headed to Detroit to be part of my nephews’ baptism, and I wanted such a special occasion to be marked by the boys knowing that their uncle is a wonderfully dressed man. I wanted one of the first images that they saw after they entered into their new life to be of me in a white shirt, Marni pants, and black loafers, so that they could have a good sense of how an angel would look.

Because I was assigned to the last boarding group for the new flight and the overhead compartments were full, my carry-on suitcase was tagged instead, forcing me to pick it up at the baggage claim when we landed.

As is natural, I had to wait at baggage claim for an extended amount of time for my bag to appear.

The reason I like to carry my bag, rather than checking it in, is so that I can leave the airport as quickly as possible; since I had to wait for the bag, the Uber from the airport to my parents’ house, which usually is about $40, was double that because of, I don’t know, traffic on a Saturday afternoon?

There’s a bus that runs from Detroit airport to downtown Detroit, which stops quite close to our house and costs only $5. Not wanting to pay $80 for a 25-minute ride, I took the bus instead.

I have a friend who says that sometimes I’m unnecessarily cheap, especially since I spend my money on expensive things elsewhere, and this behavior almost always costs me in the long run.

The bus took forever to go half the distance. The more people it picked up through the journey, the more chaotic the scene inside became. The midwest has dark energy, but dark energy that’s different from a place like New York City. In my opinion, the dark energy in NYC is external, whereas in a lot of Midwest places, it is internal. When people in NYC are going through something, it’s expressed externally and everyone else has to become a witness or bystander to their particular event. You get on a train and a guy is sitting bloodied in one of the seats telling a story about the time he worked in fashion, loudly, to no one in particular, and all you can do is be part of the story for however many stops you have. It’s why the most valuable personal characteristic I think a person can have in a city like New York is a great inner solitude. You have to be able to go into your own world and shut out what’s happening around you, because it’s none of your business, and it’s the only way to really protect your sanity. You can’t let the chaos overtake you. But in the Midwest, outside of people having direct problems with each other, that kind of dark energy tends to be internalized. Maybe it’s because of how spread out everything is, or being close to Ohio—it’s worse there—but people there seem to be going through some blinding spiritual disturbance, or they behave like they’re not part of the world around them. When someone’s going through something, it’s as if the whole battle is taking place in the world in their soul, and while their physical body might be next to you on the bus, their consciousness is so far away from Romulus or Dearborn Heights. Most of the time, you can just leave those people alone and go about your day and they won’t bother you. The problem is that when you pack a bunch of those people in one bus headed to downtown Detroit, then it’s like being on Charon’s boat on the River Styx.

WELCOME ABOARD bus, on Charon's boat with the Damned, who are writhing in anguish.

Photo illustration by Joe MacLeod. Bus: Google street view. Charon & co.: Gustave Doré

Along with the spiritual battles that were happening, there was also the pretty banal event of a group of men harassing a woman whom they had sandwiched in her seat when they came on the bus; after she got up and walked away from them, they continued to harass her. She pretended not to hear them. And naturally, they started harassing everyone else who looked at them with annoyance.

I got annoyed with the state of things on the bus and got off early. Even though I had been on there for an hour, I was still far from where I needed to be.

In my book, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza, I wrote a bit about the way that poverty constricts the soul by lessening the possibilities of your life and what you can see yourself becoming. A small world shows up in a small imagination. As John Berger wrote in Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance: “Poverty forces the hardest choices which lead to almost nothing. Poverty is living with that almost.” But maybe even more than mentally and spiritually, poverty is evident physically.

One of the things that stands out about poor people is their bad dental health: missing, decayed, and crooked teeth, for example. When you have money and good insurance, problems with your teeth can be easily fixed even when they’re frustrating. Fillings, crowns, root canals, and having wisdom teeth out are irritating to deal with, but a good dentist will make the process as easy as possible and will do everything to make you comfortable before extracting a tooth, as well as providing the preventive care that keeps you from having to endure the more gruesome procedures. But poor people don’t get that care, so that normal dental issues like cavities, which could be easily addressed early, grow and become severe problems that cause terrible pain and eventually lead to rotting or missing teeth. And then, even when you have the chance to get care, you get the worst version of it. What you get are dentists who can barely do their job, let alone do it well. Fillings that fall out easily. Cheap crowns that come out and don’t preserve your teeth. Painful root canals that lead to the teeth being pulled regardless. And all of that is accompanied by unbearable pain. Toothaches, exposed nerves, tooth sensitivity, dry sockets, and so on. Tooth pain isn’t the most physically painful thing you can experience, but it dominates your mind. It paralyzes you and makes routine functions like eating or drinking water traumatic.

About half a year ago, while I was home, I noticed that my dad was eating slowly and taking care to chew slowly on one particular side of his mouth. When I asked him what was wrong, he said that he had been having tooth problems for damn near half a year and wouldn’t return to the dentist because the pain was a result of the dentist having botched a previous issue. He was willing to live in constant pain rather than risk having the dentist possibly make things worse.

I knew from experience that he was right to be angry and wary of the dentist, a man we had all gone to, whose office was close to us on the west side of the city. In the past, he had made one of my own issues worse and at one point attempted to pull a tooth that only really required a crown. When I got fed up with him I called a college friend who had a dentistry practice in one of the suburbs, and he was able to fix my issue with little pain, as well as correct the shoddy work the other dentist had done. I suggested him to my dad and set up an appointment. After a few appointments, my dad’s issue was taken care of and he’s been able to eat and drink water pain-free.

Going to the dentist isn’t fun, but going to a good one helps prolong your life and the quality of it, and going to a bad one can make your life considerably harder. And the difference between a good or a bad one tends to depend on who you are, how much money you have, and as a consequence, where you live.

In that short trip on the bus, that’s what I paid attention to the most. All the people there with missing, crooked, or decaying teeth, and how it symbolized the lower quality of life and care that poor people are forced to endure.

After I got off the bus, I called an Uber from the bus station and got home almost two hours after I had landed.

I had to get ready to go watch a Detroit City FC soccer game with a friend. I suggested that we eat before going to the game and picked a restaurant. She suggested another one which she considered better and I agreed to try that one out.

When I got to the house, I was told that my older brother had taken my car to the mall and wouldn’t be back for several hours, too late for me to make the game in my car.

After showering and changing, I called another Uber. This driver, a maverick, refused to follow the suggested path on his maps app, deciding instead to conduct a full conversation with a friend while having to make several U-turns to correct missing routes.

When I got to the restaurant, I was told that there were no tables available and only one chair at the bar. But, one of the waiters said, I could sit at one of the tables awaiting a reservation if I wanted, and if I would be able to eat within 50 minutes. Expecting that my friend would be arriving shortly, I took their offer.

I ordered ginger beer and chicken katsu. Thirty minutes later, they brought me pork ramen. I don’t eat pork.

My friend texted me several times to say that she was running late, and then never showed up. Later, at the game, I found out that her car had died and she was embarrassed about letting me know, but at the restaurant, before obtaining this additional information, I was furious.

I scheduled an Uber to pick me up at the exact time the reservation for my table was supposed to arrive. Then something told me to check the scheduled car about ten minutes before the pickup. When I did, I saw that I had somehow canceled the trip while the phone was in my pocket. Because it was a scheduled trip, I was still charged full price.

I ate some of the vegetables in the ramen, but the taste of the pork broth was too much for me. I asked for the check. The waiter who brought out the check / machine for me to pay was happy to give me the news that the reservation for the table had been cancelled and so I could sit there for as long as I wanted.

I called another, more expensive Uber.

I don’t know if I would consider myself religious. Like many other Catholics, I’ve had to distance myself from the church and as someone who distrusts groups and institutions in general, I have a strong aversion to ideologies that people diffuse their identities into and the ways in which those ideologies and organizations have helped spread misery and suffering around the world. As a Black African, I also know what the Christian religion has been used to do to people in Nigeria as well as the United States, even when I am aware that there’s an equal history of Black Africans and Black Americans resisting evil through the same scriptures and teachings. I know how that religion is still being used to oppress in the present world. It’s complicated, as they say. I can stand with my nephews as they’re baptized and renounce the devil and his works, and feel part of the grand order of existence and a greater force that animates the world. At the same time, I see the human blood that the walls and floors of the churches are covered in and the doubt that always has me asking, let me see and feel the holes in the hands and the feet. Regardless, I don’t feel the need to resolve this tension.

In Waiting for God by Simone Weil, translated by Emma Craufurd, she writes about her aversion to belonging to the Church: “I have the essential need, and I think I can say the vocation, to move among men of every class and complexion, mixing with them and sharing their life and outlook, so far that is to say as conscience allows, merging into the crowd and disappearing among them, so that they show themselves as they are, putting off all disguises with me. It is because I long to know them so as to love them just as they are. For if I do not love them as they are, it will not be they whom I love, and my love will be unreal. I do not speak of helping them, because as far as that goes I am unfortunately quite incapable of doing anything as yet. I do not think that in any case I should ever enter a religious order, because that would separate me from ordinary people by a habit.”

What I feel responsible for is the wonder of existence and the rejection of evil, in myself and others. Evil to me comes down to doing harm to others and reducing their ability to share in that great wonder of being. To dominate someone is to infringe on their freedom to express themselves fully in the world, to reduce their ability to discover and become the fullest version of themselves. I have a great disdain for any systems or reasons given to why domination or hierarchy must exist. Racism, sexism, misogyny, queerphobia, power, wealth, eugenics, tradition, religion affiliation, corrupted law, and so on. Anything that assigns a lower class to another, whether temporarily or permanently, is repulsive to me, because it says, this other person should not be able to experience the fullness of existence in the same way that I do. They should have less of the world. They should have less of life. I think evil is silly, and the reasons given for it are pathetic.

All that to give context to a very ridiculous part of me. From youth, I’ve thought that God was trying to kill me. This is both an ironic performance and the way that I deal with problems, little to big. Each of us tells a heroic story about ourselves to ourselves, and mine is a story of defying the heavens. God is trying to kill me but I keep escaping and surviving. Some might say that I am a modern-day Gilgamesh, but greater, since he was not as handsome; nor was he living in the age of technology, which is also trying to sabotage me. Because of this tension with God, my way of dealing with things going bad is to lean in further. To embrace the setback as part of my story. That’s not to dismiss or belittle what happens to me, especially when the lives of other people are involved, but to go further, to give myself over to the event. For example, on a day when every small thing seems to be going wrong, I don’t resist it, even as I bitterly complain. Instead, I want to see how far that day can go. Where does it end? How will I play my part to reach that end?

When I was a teenager, my dad and I got into a car accident while he was driving me to soccer practice in Dearborn. We were going through an intersection when a lady in a jeep who was distracted on her phone sped through a stop sign and hit the passenger side of our car. Both cars spun around. Miraculously, beyond whiplash, I wasn’t hurt. My dad asked if I was all right and I was laughing because I had escaped again.

I think I was very affected by the circular nature of myths when I was young, where the destiny of the characters is determined at the beginning of the story and the gods are mischievous. To them the lives of humans are part of their game. What I do, for the good and bad days, is to try to play along with them.

I try to be worthy of the events that happen to me, as Gilles Deleuze said in his lecture series on Leibniz and the Baroque: “Every event precedes itself, every event follows itself. In a certain manner, one might say: every event waits for me! And it’s already that. What interests me is a morality (une morale) of the event, because I believe that there is no other morality than that of the nature of people in relation to what occurs to them. Morality is never: what must one do? [Rather] it’s: how can you stand what happens to you, whether this be good or bad?”

Naturally, there will come a day when the game ends. Or when the event will overwhelm me. But then again, the expression of pain or sorrow could also be worthy of the end of the game.

Deleuze, ibid.: “There are some who take wailing to a level of poetry, elegy, and elegy means the complaint … There are some that complain with such nobility; think of Job. Job’s complaint is worthy of the event.”

Leaving the restaurant, I was prepared for whatever else God wanted to throw my way. I was wondering what it would be. Was I going to get a driver who would take me to the wrong part of the city? Was I going to get to the game only to be told that my ticket was invalid and that I was going to be arrested for using a fraudulent ticket? Was the hamburger at the stadium going to give me a stomachache, so that I would throw up in the VIP section, and be banned forever from seeing the team? Regardless of what it was going to be, I felt ready.

As I was walking out, a lady sitting in the previously open seat at the bar called out to me. I turned around wondering if I’d dropped something but that’s not why she wanted my attention. Instead she said something that no one has ever said to me. She told me that I had such beautiful eyes. I was so flustered that I could barely get the words together to thank her.

Outside, waiting for the Uber, I was suddenly so angry. Damn it, I said to myself, God was playing dirty with me.

When I saw a group of fans urging a young boy who was afraid to climb the facade of a building to go ahead and climb up, and helping lift him up so that he could join the other fans, young and old, who had scaled the building, and everyone exploding into cheers when the boy made it up there and pulled out a flare, my heart was so full of joy that there was no doubt in my mind that it had been the correct decision to book the last-minute trip to fly from New York City to London to be a part of Arsenal’s trophy parade. 

I’d had other plans for the weekend. I was supposed to attend a music festival, one I had spent serious money on, for the tickets and the lodging. Yet as the day of the festival got closer and Arsenal managed to win its first title in over two decades during that time, my heart kept pulling me toward London. 

I’ve been an Arsenal fan for as long as I can remember, and I’ve seen them play in London plenty of times as well as elsewhere in the world. The last time they won the title I was a young boy, so this was a rare and historic moment. When my friends urged me to go, the refrain was: We don’t know when this could happen again. But I’m not usually someone who can be convinced to do things by the fear of missing out. In fact, I would say I’m the opposite. I’m pretty happy to miss out, and ordinarily I can resist the desire to be part of the crowd quite easily, since that can overwhelm one’s responsibility to one’s life, and even keep you from doing the things that you need to do in favor of chasing whatever seems cool at the moment.

The wisdom of my decision became gloriously clear in the disparity between what I saw for myself in London and the online conversation about Arsenal that was happening in the days beforehand. The team had lost the Champions League final to Paris Saint-Germain the day before the parade, and rival fans online were saying that Arsenal fans should be embarrassed and miserable because the team had won only one of the two trophies it had been fighting for. And yes, losing a Champions League final was painful, especially since the team has yet to win that competition. The players and fans were devastated. Part of sports fandom is the conflict with other fandoms. You make fun of your rivals, they make fun of you. That’s the game. What was annoying wasn’t that rival fans were doing what rival fans are supposed to do, but that Arsenal fans were arguing too, and trying to justify celebrating their team. 

I once said that the true nature of sports fandom isn’t to be happy for your team but to take joy in the misery of your enemies, and I still think that’s true to a degree. Seeing your rivals fail, hate-watching, can be very fun. However, though it’s pretty cliché to say it, sometimes people need to touch grass. I flew to be with the hundreds of thousands of Arsenal fans celebrating in London exactly for the joy of touching grass. 

The language of social media at this point consists largely of misery and provocation, and is geared to reward extremism and agitating as many people as possible. Being immersed in those warped virtual worlds for too long can distort not only the experience of your team winning a trophy—because you’re spending so much time reading about and seeing others belittling that achievement—but it can even diminish the experience of fandom itself, and the true lifeblood of supporting a team. 

I walked through North London for a few hours before and after the parade, through an endless sea of Arsenal jerseys, worn by people young and old, from every background imaginable, and from every corner of the world, and the overwhelming feeling, multiplied to a staggering degree by being shared with tens of thousands of others, was joy. It may seem basic to say that fans whose team won a title were happy, but it feels like something that has to be emphasized now more than ever, before sports itself is reduced and confined to the misery that sells online. 

Being a sports fan is about shared joy. The nature of sports is that only one team can win and sometimes your team will go through long stretches of being bad, but those periods or eras of disappointment and despair don’t alter why we watch and give ourselves over emotionally to our teams. On the contrary, I believe that those times of sadness prove exactly how powerful the joy of sports and fandom really is. What sustains us through those bad times is either a remembrance of how good the good times felt or the hope that they will come again. Otherwise, we would abandon those teams and chase glory elsewhere. But most of us don’t, not because we need to romanticize the disappointment, but because we’ve made a choice to be with a team and to be part of the collective fandom of that team, and we want to be happy with the players and people we have chosen. And that hope of joy, the dream of one day celebrating with others who have been on the same emotional journey as us, who believe in what the team represents—whether true or otherwise—that hope alone outweighs the struggles and the disappointment. That’s how little misery matters in relation to joy, the hope of joy alone is much bigger and more sustainable than the unhappiness that can last for decades. 

When that joy finally comes, when your team wins a trophy—which doesn’t have to be the biggest one—or gets promoted, or succeeds in any other way, the shared joy that comes pouring out makes every disappointment so small that it feels silly even to engage with the arbitrary, small-minded standards of your rivals. When you are in a stadium or a crowd of tens or hundreds of thousands of people shouting, singing, and dancing, blanketed on all sides by people smiling, feeling connected to a world much bigger than yourself, this much bigger than yourself, you are at the heart of what sports and sports fandom is all about: a very simple thing that says as much about sports as it does about the world at large, it’s all about the chance to be happy with others. 

This desire, to be happy and to share in that happiness with others, is such an integral human desire that it feels both vulnerable and embarrassing to admit. I want to be happy, that’s all we’re all fighting and living for. Sports gives us a chance to have that desire fulfilled through the silliest construct, but one that allows us to pretend that such a desire is both more and less serious than it really is. We assign identities to our teams that flatter us, we do the reverse for our rivals, we talk about how winning or losing games is a matter of life and death; the games are like a stage that dramatizes loyalty, responsibility, cowardice, success, failure, and so on. All these artifices that we have to put on top of watching a bunch of people try to score goals, to give it meaning beyond the most immediate one—when they win, we are happy. 

Our friendships, hobbies, and everything else we do in life work through that same principle of joy, there’s no reason that sports would be any different. Sports just makes that struggle to attain joy a clear one, presenting us with the possibility of a salvation that real life often doesn’t offer. We are at the mercy of the conditions of our lives, and at the mercy of the whims of those who rule over us. But in sports, every year comes with the hope that it can be our year. No matter what, we still feel like it can happen, that things will change, that happiness is just around the corner, and this keeps us going to the games, watching the matches, and leaning on the joys of community to diminish the pain of losing. Because what’s important isn’t the suffering, but the faith that one day we can celebrate together. 

I still remember how happy I felt as a young man in high school when Arsenal won its last league title before this one, 22 years ago, and I will never forget the joy that I felt with hundreds of thousands of people in North London in the last few days. People showed up hours early and stayed around the Emirates Stadium until the early hours of the morning, because they didn’t want the party to end. They didn’t want to move on from the feeling. It’s the kind of joy that makes everything worth it, and which can sustain a fan for another two decades, though it would be nice if we won more frequently. 

I stayed at the parade and around the stadium from the morning until the evening, and went home to charge my phone. I showered and took a nap. When I woke up I was exhausted, but my phone was full of messages from friends telling me to come back out, because everyone was still celebrating. I ended up going back down to the Finsbury Park area and partying with other Arsenal fans at a bowling alley that had become a dance club until about three in the morning. 

On the way, we ran across a group of drunk fans shouting, “Champions of England, we know what we are!” and one of them, a woman holding an Arsenal flag, was nearing falling over; her friends kept her upright, and she kept yelling at them that you have to be fucking happy.

That is the point. You have to celebrate your life and be fucking happy. 

As I was walking to the train yesterday morning, I saw a woman speeding into the station and down the stairs to catch the G train. She was dressed professionally, wearing black flats and a black skirt, and behind her bounced a gray backpack. I knew I wasn’t going to make that train, so I walked, but for some reason, she needed to be on that specific train to get where she wanted to be on time, and so while I was strolling to the station, she was running at almost a full sprint. If she hadn’t been wearing work clothes, I imagine she would have been even faster.

She didn’t make it. I could see her disappointment and frustration, as well as how out of breath she was when I walked past her to sit and wait for the next train that was scheduled to come in five minutes.

Beyond the impediment of her outfit, the fact that she needed to be on the G train probably made it more difficult for her. For some reason, the G train is shorter than the other trains and so when you arrive at the station late, you can’t just jump into the last car like you would with the F. You could make it there while the G is still at the station and still miss it unless you’re an Olympic level sprinter. The G train demands more from you than the other trains.

Running after public transportation is a common experience that can be both humbling and embarrassing. You can sense how much people try to avoid it at train and bus stations. They speedwalk, call out to the conductor, and ask people to move out the way, all to avoid the mounting inevitability. You have to run to catch that train or bus before it leaves.

It’s embarrassing because it makes you stand out. Suddenly you’re the desperate person running while everyone else is walking, which can lead to so many accidents like bumping into other people, tripping over your own feet, or falling down the stairs. If you’re carrying something, then you’re the person sprinting with their bags swinging all over the place. And then of course the running leaves you sweaty and tired by the end. It’s anything but refined.

In everyday life, we’re not really asked to be athletic. Running to catch the train is also humbling because it will reveal how unathletic you are or have become. Some of us still participate in sports, and others go to the gym, but I would bet that the vast majority of adults haven’t had to do a full sprint since they were children. Unless they are late to the train station, bus stop, or airplane gate. And when you have to catch a train or a bus, once you set off on that sprint, you truly feel the weight and limitations of your body. You’re nowhere as fast as you imagined, your body is much heavier than you remember, and after a few seconds, you find it hard to breathe. You have no stamina.

Yet I find people running after trains and buses to be such a beautiful sight. The combination of desperation and hope in their eyes and movements adds so much drama to the short sprint. The person is so vulnerable, so exposed, as if, in that short burst, they have cast off all the numerous masks that we wear in everyday life, all the ways that we conceal ourselves and what we want, the ways we hide who we are and how we feel, and it all comes pouring out in those few seconds. I want to catch that train. I need to be on that bus. I will make it. Maybe I won’t, but I have to try. Please be there when I get there. Please don’t leave me behind. I can’t fucking believe I missed it.

The great advancements of the modern world have left many of us divorced from our bodies, in a state of being where we spend most days feeling trapped or at least repressed in our physical form. We have to counter this by carving out time to exercise, holding the line against a condition that would make our bodies decay faster than nature intended. This separation from the body has obvious consequences, but I’m not as concerned by health and the craze of thinness as I am elated by the spark that a person has when they are obeying physical imperatives outside their bodies, inhabiting their bodies fully, and being dynamic. When human beings are in motion, they are alive in a way that you don’t normally see.

The way that their hair flows in the air, following behind them. The muscles in their bodies twitching, activating, and pushing forward. The way that their brain comes alive, in anxiety and excitement, scanning their surroundings, taking in information at an accelerated rate, solving the problems of time, space, and anticipation. Blood running and the heart beating faster, the lungs expanding bigger and bigger to take in more air, the nose doing the same, sometimes the mouth. The skin glowing from sweat and activity. It’s all so mesmerizing and entertaining to watch.

A normal person running after the train or bus is a different kind of excitement and I think a more human excitement to me than watching athletes play sports. I love sports and deeply appreciate the ways that superhuman athletes expand the imagination of what the human body is capable of. But there is a great distance between their physical superiority and the body of a normal person. Their feats say more about the realm of sports than about the lived reality of ordinary human beings, and the beauty in what they do exists in a different space for me than the beauty in watching someone set off on a sprint to get to work on time.

Watching a game is like watching great theater. Athletes are not exposed in a way that an ordinary person running is. They may be emotionally vulnerable after a win or a loss, but the sphere of sports is a stage for performance. You’re watching masters of physicality at work, on that stage, far from you, far from the world. What makes the ordinary person sprinting so fun and makes the person so alive, is that they’re in the world with you. They’re your friends, your neighbors, strangers, and sometimes you. They’re people who are going through life the same as you, following the same social rules and cues as you, trying their best to get through the days without trouble, and often minimizing themselves, not out of shame or fear, but simply because they are in public and part of the public world. Even though we are all unique individuals who may feel like the most special people in private, out there we are one of hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions. We adopt an anonymous role out of respectful politeness and sociability.

But then you’re running late for the train or the bus, and speedwalking won’t cut it. You have to run. You have to take the stage and bring attention to yourself. You have to use and feel your body in a way that you have forgotten. You have to show us and the conductor or bus driver what you’re made of. You have to get to point B from point A as fast as possible with your body and everything that it’s carrying. And within that short sprint, a sudden burst of aliveness, is the whole human drama. I want to get there, and I’m going to try as hard as I can.

Some of us catch that train or bus, and the satisfaction is not only in getting to where you want to in time, but in delighting in the success and possibility of your body. Others come up short. We miss by a second or by one step. The train or bus leaves us behind. We have to wait and humbly reckon with what our bodies can’t do. But that is fine. At least to me. What is beautiful is the openness of the body and soul in that sprint.

There’s a bus that goes to the park that has a stop a few blocks away from my apartment. It’s also where the route ends for one driver and another comes in. So that when it arrives, there’s a few minutes’ lag before it departs again. I can usually make it even when I’m running late because of the changeover. But this knowledge about the lag can lead to a kind of arrogance.

One time, I was walking to the bus which had arrived a few minutes before, and I saw the new driver getting in along with the passengers. The changeover had happened faster than I’d anticipated. I made the calculation in a split second—can I get there before he leaves? The bus was three blocks away. How fast could I sprint it? Thinking any longer than that would have made making the bus impossible. I shut the thoughts out and set off sprinting.

I was wearing jeans, sneakers that hurt my feet since I hadn’t changed out the insoles, and sunglasses that threatened to fall off my face. But still, the air rushing through my hair and lungs, the sun beaming down on me, the feeling of floating on top of the concrete and maneuvering the numerous dips and tricks that a New York City sidewalk presents, made me feel so deliriously happy with myself. By the time I got to the bus it had started leaving, but even though it was already in motion, I knew that I could chase it down. I kept going, and soon after the bus driver stopped. When I got on, I jokingly asked if he didn’t see me running after the bus and he laughed. He saw me. He just wanted to see if I would keep going. And I said to myself, blessed are the bus drivers who stop for you when they see you running after them.

Let’s start on October 16, 2021, when Liverpool beat Watford 5-0. Liverpool had beaten Watford by that same exact scoreline before, and will again after that match; alongside the insignificance of the scoreline, Mohamed Salah wasn’t even the best player that, as he had been a few seasons earlier when he scored four goals against the same opponent with Roberto Firmino scoring the fifth. But on that day, he did score a goal that I think represents the kind of player that he is.

In the 2001 match, Firmino scored a hat trick with Sadio Mané scoring one goal and Salah scoring the other. Salah’s goal came in the 54th minute with Liverpool already up three goals. In that context, this Salah goal wasn’t as important as his other match-winning goals or the goals against the best teams in the league. Watford were bad and were already badly beaten.

The sequence of play starts with Salah getting the ball on top of the right side of Watford’s box. He drives diagonally into the box towards Firmino who tries to pin his defender so Salah can play the ball to him, and the two can hopefully play a one-two—Firmino was a great striker, not because he was selfish with scoring goals like other great strikers, but because he was the opposite, and the perfect complement to Salah and Mané. Salah tries to pass the ball to Firmino but one of the two defenders between them intercepts and clears the ball. It lands to Cucho Hernández, who fails to properly control it, allowing Firmino to win the ball back.

Firmino then drives inside the box and passes it to the left to Salah who is also just inside the box. As soon as Salah settles the ball and looks up at the goal, there are four defenders surrounding him—two in front and two on his sides. The one on his left closes in, so Salah cuts the ball to the right. The one on the right and one of the ones in front join in, and now he’s completely trapped in a small circle. Firmino’s run has pulled the fourth defender away and more towards the center.

To get out of the trap of three, Salah does what so many young players are advised not to do. He steps on the ball. This unusual pause in the middle of the chaos allows the defender on the right’s momentum to push past Salah. Now there are only two, both on his left now. Salah pushes forward, leaving one of the defenders behind and, as he reaches the endline, he fakes either a cross or a shot with his right foot that makes the final defender go to ground to block it. Instead Salah cuts the ball back inside and to his left foot. Suddenly he has space, time, and the perfect shooting opportunity. At this point, James Milner, who is watching all of this unfold in the penalty arc, spreads out his hands, already celebrating the goal to come.

With the fallen defender on his hands and knees, and the rest of the Watford team and their fans looking on helplessly, Salah then curls the ball into the far side of the net. The keeper barely moves.

In sports, we often think about talent in a binary way in order to preserve the idea that the realm of sports is a meritocracy. Talented players make it, regardless of their situation, and those without talent don’t. Superstars become superstars because of their innate potential, and those who don’t reach that level fail because of the lack of that superstar potential, or because they didn’t work hard enough to make up for the lack of raw talent. This way of thinking is attractive as a shield from the way that things work in the rest of the world, where we often see people with great ability and talent go to waste because of their socioeconomic condition or simply never having the chance, or the luck, to be in the right place at the right time.

No matter how much we would prefer for success to be simple in sports, it’s closer to the way things work in the regular world than it is to our fantasy idea of meritocracy. Mo Salah is a great example of this. He is one of the great kings of the game of football, but he is a king who was made and who made himself, rather than someone who was always destined to be great.

When he reached his peak and started winning trophies at Liverpool, his heroic narrative became that teams like Chelsea, Fiorentina, and Roma didn’t recognize the talent they’d had on their hands. And maybe that’s true—especially at Roma, where he had been their Player of the Season while on loan—but who can blame them for taking what was then a club record from Liverpool. You never know what the future holds, as they say, and Roma wanted to cash in on the talent they had, not knowing what was to come.

Yet, before Roma, it would have taken an oracle to see that the Liverpool version of Salah was possible. Perhaps you could see him scoring goals for Atletico Madrid or for Sevilla, which is not an insult at all but a recognition of what kind of player he was then. A talented player, trending towards maybe being a star outside of the big four teams in the Premier League, or someone who could do really well in Italy or for one of the teams in Spain right outside the big two.

Salah became a legendary player at Liverpool and in the Premier League through an alchemical variety of factors, with his talent and discipline being critical ingredients.

By the time he arrived at Liverpool, the Jürgen Klopp project was already in full flow. The club had reached the Champions League final again and were stabilized as Champions League participants. Firmino was already there, and Mané had come the season before. Then, as Salah arrived, Philippe Coutinho was sold, and Virgil van Dijk, Alisson, and other critical players came in. Klopp had the backing of the ownership and the personal philosophy to play a high octane, counter-pressing, relentless sort of football that he labeled “heavy metal.” It was the perfect situation for a winger who likes to run and dribble.

Salah could do a lot without having to do it all. He had playmakers on the team, a great defense, a fantastic goalkeeper, a partner on the other wing who was his equal for a long time, and a striker who could create chances out of nothing while blinding opponents with his unnaturally white teeth.

It’s a simple observation: great talent blossoms in the right environment. Salah scored more in his first season at Liverpool than he did both seasons at Roma. And the same goes for the other greats. Thierry Henry without Arsène Wenger might have been great, but it’s hard to imagine him having a statue outside the Emirates Stadium. When he arrived at Arsenal, even he might have been unaware of the levels he was about to reach. If you strike a flint rock against another over a bed of mud, you can’t make fire. But put the right kindling under it, and you might see a conflagration pretty quickly. When the stage is set, when the situation is as perfect as it can get, that’s when we get to see how much talent someone can squeeze out of their body and soul.

In those early years at Liverpool, Salah transformed himself from a good winger into a force of nature. He remade his body to be able to withstand the pressing and doing full field sprints for damn near 90 minutes. That Liverpool team is not the same without Salah’s ability to run full speed over and over and over, getting to the ball before the defenders and pushing defenses backwards out of fear.

Then there was his ability to score all types of goals. Tap-ins. Long-range goals. Volleys, half-volleys, deflected volleys. Goals that came from finishing a team move after sprinting from the halfway line. Goals that came from cutting inside and curling the ball to the left corner. Goals that came from cutting outside and blasting the ball to the top of the net with his weaker right foot. Backheels, headers, goals scored awkwardly with other parts of the body beyond the feet and the head. Goals that came from beating one defender. Then two. Then three. Sometimes four. Goals that took your breath away because they seemed to come out of nothing. And goals that were satisfying because you could see them coming as soon as he got the ball in a good position. Slowly he would also develop as a playmaker and assist even more goals, which helped him maintain his status as one of the best players in the league, even as his physical superiority waned.

Salah elevated that team with his technical and physical ability, and his relentlessness that became a defining personality trait for the great iterations of Liverpool in his tenure. Liverpool were once called mentality monsters because of their refusal to give up on a possible win, even when they were behind towards the end of the match. And few players exemplified that quality like the Egyptian forward.

The goal against Watford for me, captures everything that he is as a player and as a story. He’s caught in an impossible situation. Trapped on all sides and pushed towards an idea of what he should do, what he should be, what the suggestion of his limits is. Then, through a combination of technique, speed, power, and patience, not just waiting for the right situation but creating the possibility of that situation through ability and persistence, and then when the opening comes, striking and achieving something unique and fantastic where so many others would have done the lesser, standard thing.

There are some players who seem like they came out the womb anointed to be legends in the game. Salah is not one of them for me. Part of the excitement and joy that I’ve had from watching him is that you could see him force his way into the realm of greatness when he wasn’t initially marked for it. He made himself impossible to deny. He wasn’t given the crown at birth and shepherded to greatness. His journey was more humble, more twisting and uncertain, sometimes even treacherous. Now, at the end of his tenure at Liverpool, he won’t just leave as the greatest African player to ever play in the Premier League, but as one of the best players ever. He took that crown for himself.

On Thursday, March 19th, I went to Puma’s release event for their World Cup jerseys at Domino Square. The event was from 4pm-8pm and I arrived more than halfway through. When I got there the small-sided street tournament, named King of the Court, was already reaching its conclusion. Surrounding the make-shift concrete field for the tournament were stands serving food from the different countries and national teams that Puma sponsors — Ghana, Portugal, Czechia, New Zealand, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Austria, Egypt, and Paraguay. I was told by a friend that the food was free. Another friend, who took advantage of the free food, tried to open and eat a can of sardines that he got from Portugal’s stand in the middle of a crowd. A truly insane decision.

Every brand with some tie to soccer is doing an event, whether they’re releasing jerseys or simply want to be seen as part of the greater culture. A similar event to the Puma one happened with on the same day in Los Angeles. Nike has held several events as well. Jordan Brand held a private dinner and mixer at the Pele Soccer Store in Times Square. Almost every week there’s another invite to another event or announcement about some event to come or a giveaway that’s cheaper to do than to produce a soccer event.

Going to one of these events means you’ve been to them all. The small details might change—one brand might do a dinner, another might throw a party with a famous DJ, and another puts together a small-sided tournament and invites an from one of the countries to perform—but the essential purpose is the same. They want to garner attention for their product while signalling that they’re a part of the authentic soccer culture and community. Many of the attendees go to be part of the scene, to network, and to maybe see and meet some former players—Asamoah Gyan and Ricardo Quaresma were guests at the Puma event. 

If you’ve worked in advertising, you’ve probably worked on and attended a countless number of these kinds of activations. You may be one of those who loves creating and being invited to them, someone who gets a thrill from being seen as a friend of the brand and the perks that comes with that. Sometimes that’s the opportunity to interview athletes, former athletes, and influencers, and other times it’s to receive free and exclusive gifts. Some attend as a matter of staying part of the community—part of doing business is being visible and shaking hands—even if you’re tired and unmoved by the performance of being out there and pretending that every event is something new and refreshing.

It’s easy to feel jaded by the cliched nature of brand events. They’re brand events after all. No matter how much brands posture about creating these moments for the people, it’s always about product first. And they tend to play the same notes, appealing to the same ideas and principles, often as things to gesture towards without attempting to create a long-lasting impact with the communities that they take from. After about an hour of greeting friends and making small talk, I was ready to leave. I also wasn’t inspired to spend more time there by how cold it got once the sun went down, and the reality of being near the East River in what was still the winter set in. The creatives at Puma probably assumed that it would be warm in New York City in the middle of March but I hope they’ve learned their lesson about the city’s false spring season. 

The producers of the event also sensed that the cold was driving people away and decided to have their secret artist perform before the final of the tournament rather than after as they had apparently planned. That secret artist was Black Sherif, a Ghanaian rapper, singer, and sometimes model, whose musical style is a mix of rap, drill, and reggae. Though his lyrics contains the expected themes of wealth, flashy success, fashion, cars, clothes, and all other forms of hedonism, his songs also have an aspirational and inspirational bent to them. An added religiosity and how he sings the choruses, his music in certain songs also sounds like gospel.

The chorus for my favorite song of his, Oil in my Head, goes: “Oil in my head, everything I touch is blessed / All I see is blessings / And no man can't stop this / Send them away, evil eyes don't watch me / 'Cause all I see is blessings / And no man can't stop this.” It feels like listening to a sermon.

I was lucky to have watched Black Sherif’s performance next to a group of Ghanaian-Americans, who were wearing the long black coats that had been provided to people who were players in the tournament. While most of the audience were enjoying the performance at the beginning, you could tell that many were playing it cool in the way that people tend to do in public now. They were bobbing their heads along to the songs but maintained the kind of restraint you see with people who are aware that everything is being recorded and don’t want to be embarrassed by being too expressive. Of course, some simply didn’t know the songs or the words. The Ghanaian-Americans were the opposite. They stood out in the crowd. They knew every single lyric and sang as if they had written the songs themselves. They were so excited that they almost broke down the barrier that separated the audience from the makeshift stage and field. Their energy was vibrant and magnetizing that Black Sherif kept coming over to them, rapping and singing directly at them. At one point he took a selfie with them while still performing. 

The happiness of the Ghanaian-Americans infected everyone else. The more they expressed themselves, the more freedom it seemed to give to the rest of the crowd to follow along. It couldn’t be helped. The combination of Black Sherif’s energy mixed with the group’s elevation of that energy swept everyone else up in tornado of joy. By the time Black Sherif got to the song Wotowoto Seasoning, a song that he has with the Nigerian artist Odumodublvck, the place had turned into a real party. Even for a cynic like myself, it’s difficult to remain disaffected in the face of unrestrained human joy.

One of the big things that tends to give people permission to be publicly happy in an unbridled way is music. I’ve seen people scream, cry, and protest to the power of art at concerts than anywhere else. The only other place that seems to be a stage for grand human emotions in the way that music does is soccer. Soccer and music hold similar powers in acting as a stage for expression, for artists and players, but also for the audience in allowing them to connect, feel, and express a range of emotions in a way that would otherwise be denigrated anywhere else. These arts also engender a sense of wonder for fans through the experience of seeing human beings do spectacular things with such talent and technique that it’s both humbling and delightful to the imagination. A delight that is multiplied when shared with a community of others. Regardless of whether that community is two others or 20,000 at a stadium. Music and soccer don’t and can’t erase the differences between people, but they can create pathways from one person and community to another. By having a wonderous shared experience, we can take the first steps towards understanding others, with their unique histories and cultures, better and with more of an open mind. Sharing in joy makes the human world more accessible.

This joy, this opportunity to move outside from one’s world to explore the other worlds through celebration and sport, is essentially what the World Cup is about. The thing that saves the spectacle of the tournament from being simply a greedy business mired by corruption, a real hive of scum and villainy, is the fact that at the foundational level, on the ground, among the people, the World Cup is a stage to showcase the vibrancy and depth of cultures from around the world. It is a celebration of the world’s best soccer athletes, but outside the stadiums, it is an exploration of the depth and heart of human life.

This function of the World Cup as a celebration of the diversity in its greatest sense, makes it more frustrating and infuriating that the current iteration of the United States and this administration, have positioned themselves as enemies to that idea. Sharing in each other’s cultures is in opposition to a political project meant to dominate and subjugate the world.

There’s no joy to be found in state agents kidnapping and killing people on the streets. There’s no celebration of the diversity of humanity in threatening to prevent a qualified nation from participating in the tournament while bombing their country. It’s true that the United States is not the first World Cup host where human rights and life have been under threat but the United States in not even pretending to care about what the game means to people around the world or at home. This government accepts the tournament as a platform to extend its politics of reforming in a reductive and bigoted way, but doesn’t even pretend to gesture at caring about anything else beyond that. It wants the body of the sport without its soul. It wants to say that it’s hosting the World Cup but doesn’t actually want the fullness of the World Cup in its streets.

By the time I left Domino Square, Senegal had won the tournament—though we have to wait to see if Morocco claims that title later on. It was so cold by then that my teeth were chattering and my hands were shaking enough that it made it difficult for me to call a car. Yet, watching the games on concrete and seeing all kinds of people trying different foods from different cultures, and being a part of the the collective happiness of those who were singing and dancing along to Black Sherif made me feel me feel childishly happy.

In those few hours that evening, and during a cliched event that was produced to sell jerseys, there was still a glimpse of what the sport can mean and can do. There was a glimpse of the better world that we could have, if our world was designed towards collaboration rather than a hierachy of race and gender. A world so much more vibrant and alive than the one we have been burdened with. There’s a saying that before you can make a new world, you have to imagine it first, but the reality of this country’s oppressive politics and cruelty toward differences, makes the image of the better world feel less possible with each passing day. It’s hard to understand what sense it makes to rule the world through power and fear, where everyone but a small group is miserable, when the game and community of soccer, with the way that it allows people to connect to each other, constantly offers up a much more substantial idea of what the world could be—if only the histories and cultures of others were seen as oppportunities to share and embrace different worlds, rather than to destroy them.

Like any nation or people that wants to dominate others, the United States practices the same old tradition of dehumanizing those that they want to kill. This dehumanization effort doesn’t start or end with the state institutions but is spread through the media, textbooks, and now all over social media from those talking heads whose jobs it is to add an intellectual sheen and justification for any kind of state violence. 

Often, this process of dehumanization is as simple as presenting opponents in a conflict as barbarians with strange customs and practices. An inherently violent horde who are always planning and working towards the destruction of the United States. In Pete Hegseth’s defense of the bombing of Iran by the United States and Israel, he described Iran as “...crazy regimes like Iran, hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions…”

These barbarians at the metaphorical gates, as they are presented to us, don’t value life and will commit acts of brutality which are shocking to our more refined and humanistic hearts. 

This making of other human beings into subhuman entities deserving of whatever violence done to them also extends into the language used to describe those people. Sometimes it means using extensive military jargon to create distance with the reality of violence — American soldiers are soldiers, daughters, wives, sons, husbands, where the enemies are insurgents. And the killing of innocent human beings gets reframed as collateral damage. When the state wants to enlarge the umbrella of who it is allowed to kill without offending the sensibilities of its citizens, it uses terms like “all military-age males” as Barack Obama once did, to mean that any boy or man within that age range is seen as a combatant, regardless of whether they are or not. Their existence itself is a violent threat. 

None of this is new, but this exercise of dehumanization and justification for the death of others also has the effect of making Americans feel like they’re the only real human beings. While others are presented as barbaric, strange, cruel, violent, and less than human, Americans are flattered as refined, moral, and as part of the greatest civilization. The violence done by others is beyond explanation and comprehension. Those people are inherently aggressive and evil, but Americans, and the American government as the extension of the collective will, only kills when their hand is forced. It kills because it is liberating people. Because it is trying to make the world better. America is good. All of its enemies are evil. And the enemies include the people of whichever government the US disapproves of, even when the people are actively protesting and trying to overcome that government. The only possible way to survive is total submission, and even that is usually not enough

It is childish to reduce the histories and present lives of people around the world in such a binary way, and you would think such a blatantly propagandist effort would be dismissed by the populace, but it is ridiculously effective. From birth until death, Americans are told that their country is the greatest country in the world, not only in military might, but as a moral force. Even when the country does evil, the evil is framed as a failure in service of good, as an aberration outside of its normal mission of extending liberty through the world. 

It’s taken a long time for the country to admit that the Iraq War (and the war in Afghanistan) was a horrible effort, but that is still talked about as a mistake. As one president’s failure. Even though if we were to step back a bit and take a longer look at the country’s military history, the Iraq War looks more like another plot point in a longer narrative of atrocities than a divergence from it. How many military campaigns can be considered not just a crime against humanity but against life itself?

The fact that those who championed and orchestrated the Iraq War, for example, have suffered no consequence and in fact remain in prominent public positions, and are often called upon as experts and voices of reason, shows how that war really isn’t seen and treated as the horrible and disastrous event that it was. George W. Bush is out there painting and writing on substack.

Regardless, what I’ve learned in so many years is that there is a belief that American lives are worth more than others. Everyone from the President to the soldiers, to the ordinary citizens tend to think and verbalize this in so many ways. It is not a shock to read that the mother of an American soldier who died in the Iraq War was comforted by the bombing in Iran.

“We had to do what we had to do to protect the American people,” she said. “And people like my son, and many others that passed in the beginning of the Iraqi war... It makes us parents, family members feel like they didn't die for nothing.”

Her words echoed the words of Hegseth, who also said in his speech: “If you threaten Americans anywhere on this earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.” It doesn’t matter if that threat is simply that you exist in a way that the United States finds uncomfortable, or that you defended yourself against American aggression. There is no equality of life. American life stands at the top. 

There’s a lot to be said about which American lives are valued, and why everyone gets brought under that nationalistic idea when it’s time to kill abroad, but then separated when the violence happens to minority groups within the country, but what is particularly interesting in this exercise where non-Americans are portrayed as barbaric hordes and American lives are elevated, is that then the people are so distanced from what their country is doing around the world that they can’t engage with the reality.

The truth is that the United States is killing other human beings around the world on your behalf. When it bombs a school of girls, and kills over a hundred of them, it is not killing an abstract idea of a people, or subhumans who don’t have an understanding of life. It is killing human beings with the same right to life and dignity as you have. When it bombs a residential building and kills tens of people in order to eliminate a target, those are human beings, children, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, flesh and bone, with their own dreams and ambitions, their own struggles and desires, who are torn apart by those bombs. No matter how much those people are framed as lesser than you in order to justify whatever violence this country does to them, they are every bit as human as you are. 

All the effort at dehumanizing others, through mass death that turns them into mere numbers and the twisting of language, is to make you comfortable with the country killing them indiscriminately. This endless death of others is sold as the price for comfort and freedom, the cost of doing business as the greatest country in the world which has to protect itself from the evil villains hell-bent on its downfall. In order to achieve lasting peace, the country must be in a constant state of war. All for you. All in service of your liberty. So that you can go about your days peacefully, without having to think about what’s happening outside of the gates. 

You are, as I am, constantly being told that your life is worth more than others. To accept this idea is to accept that the individual and collective death of everyone else is not only justified but means nothing. They are not even something to think about and consider. Those lives are so distant, so lacking in humanity, that they are not even worthy of being news. To accept this proposition presented by the state, as what you must think and be in order to have all the freedoms of being an American, is to not accept the supposed inhumanity of others, it is also to sell your own soul and your own humanity completely. 

- Oedipus’s Fury. 1808. Alexandre Evariste Fragonard.

Last November, I went to the Studio 54 theater to see a performance of Oedipus starring Mark Strong as Oedpius, Lesley Manville as Jacosta, Michael Gould as Creon, and June Watson as Merope. Jordan Scowen and James Wilbraham plyed his two sons, and Phia Saban was Antigone. The performance is a modern retelling directed by Robert Icke, who is fond of reimagining the classics, including Romeo and Juliet, 1984, The Alchemist, Uncle Vanya, Hamlet, and the entirety of the Oresteia. He won the Classical Association Prize last summer.

I had wanted to see the play for so long and checked on the tickets so often that the TodayTix app was practically sending notifications to buy the seats every other day. For one, I’ve been a big fan of Mark Strong ever since I saw him in Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla in 2008. I think he’s been severely underused in the American film world, even though I know he has done tremendous work in theater. He’s a wonderful actor and has such gravity and sincerity in his performances that it is often wasted in movies like Kingsman or Shazam. Those movies are supposed to be dumb fun and while they have made him a lot of money, seeing him in them is like watching a great soccer player playing in Saudi Arabia. I selfishly want him to play in a more challenging league, not to prove himself, but because he can’t be his best if he’s not being challenged to be at his best.

When it comes to art, it’s not necessarily that I want to always see the best plays and performances, on Broadway or the National Theatre. I’ve watched students put on plays in Detroit universities and I will be equally delighted watching friends act in their apartments, but what I want to see and know is that the people involved are giving it their all. And I don’t think those kinds of movies do that for good actors, through no fault of their own. They’re just not asked to do much. Doing too well would be a negative in those movies that don’t even take themselves seriously.

Movies like Kingsman and Shazam are always winking at the audience, reminding you that it’s silly and dumb, constantly undercutting the stakes that they want you to believe in, because they’re afraid of failure. The people responsible are afraid of making a bad movie, they don’t believe that their writing and ideas are good enough, so they have to tell and constantly remind you that it’s bad on purpose. I have no real patience for art that doesn’t believe in itself. That attempt to undercut expectations is boring to me.

I’m getting distracted!

I wanted to see Oedipus because I like Mark Strong and because Oedipus is one of my favorite classical plays, along with Antigone. I’ve read the Sophocles version as part of the Theban plays, the Seven Against Thebes trilogy by Aeschylus, the ones by Euripides, Seneca’s version, Andre Gide’s version in Two Legends, and so many different versions written by random writers on the internet.

I like Oedipus because to me, it’s the only tragedy where the protagonist realizes that they’re in a performance. It builds up like a heroic myth and right when the hero is marveling at his accomplishments, everything comes crashing down, not only from the outside even though his fate had been determined from birth, but like all the great tragedies, the fate is determined also by the character of the protagonist. It’s Oedipus who drives himself to destruction. You want to argue that he has no choice because his fate had been planned from the beginning but he takes ownership of his disaster. He refuses the idea that he was just a passive character and puts the events on himself in a way that I don’t think any other character truly does.

Oedipus is warned several times that discovering who his mother and father are will ruin him, and yet he persists, he demands to know, saying: “Nothing can make me other than I am.” And when he discovers his history and curses himself, he takes responsibility, saying that it was his hands that committed the crimes and the actions, but he also blames Apollo in the original and the gods in general in other versions. He blames them for setting him up to fail, knowing that there was no way, with his personality, with who he is, that he wouldn’t demand to know the full truth once it’s dangled in front of him. The truth doesn’t just make him an accursed man, with the murder and incest, but it unravels his belief of himself as a person. It destroys the idea that he made himself.

The Andre Gide version does a great job of giving voice to that realization and him seeing at the end that he was just a character in a story that Apollo, the gods, or God had constructed:

“God, you say. I felt strong enough to resist even God Himself. I wanted to turn away from Him, when I made off toward the Sphinx. Why? That’s what I’ve come to understand today. I was content to remain subject to God while He led me to glory, but not if He was driving me to commit a crime-and a crime whose horror He hid from me. . . . Oh, most cowardly betrayal of God, no longer to be tolerated. And now am I still God’s puppet? Has the oracle foretold what I must do next? Must I still consult it? And find out, 0 Tiresias, what the birds have to say? . . . If only I could escape from the God who envelops me, escape from myself! Something heroic, something superhuman torments me. I should like to invent some new form of unhappiness-some mad gesture to astonish you all, and astonish myself, and astonish the gods.”

After he leaves, Jacosta says:

“O unhappy Oedipus! Why did you have to know? I did what I could to stop you from tearing aside the veil that protected our happiness.”

For me, Oedipus is a monster story, as is Antigone. Monstrous in how unusual he is and how destructive that outsider quality becomes. The attribute that Oedipus has which Antigone inherits isn’t just stubbornness, but a refusal to choose safety over the truth. Or living according to their truth.

When Creon scolds Antigone for being just like her father in her destructive nature, it is because both of them are willing to tear everything down in order to live as they feel is most honest. You can see it as naive or as ridiculous, which the other characters do, but it’s because that kind of honesty is unusual. Especially when faced with death or losing a kingdom. Oedipus refuses to accept a false life, even if it costs him everything, and Antigone refuses to act any other way than as she feels is the responsible way for the ones that she loves. They don’t behave like anyone around them and no one can understand why reason doesn’t work to dissuade them.

Icke’s retelling of Oedipus Rex takes place on an election night with Oedipus set to become the new prime minister. A big stop clock on the stage counts down the hour and minutes until the election results but is also counting down to the climax of the story.

The retelling does so well at focusing on Oedipus’ value of living truthfully and honestly. Strong plays it as delicately and ferociously as needed. When one of his sons reveals that he’s gay (a twist to the story), the anger that Oedipus has isn’t about the son being queer but that he would try to hide it in fear that he wouldn’t be accepted. As long as he lived his true self, his father wouldn’t reject him. And when the truth of his life starts being revealed, first by Tiresias, then his mother, his wife, and also Creon, and everyone starts connecting the dots and begs him not to ask any further questions, assuring him that they can hide the truth of his involvement in the death of Laius, Jacosta’s first husband and the former king of Thebes, the suggestion enrages him.

They all beg him to stop. To not go further. To not know more than is necessary. None of them can understand why, on the verge of achieving his dream and becoming the prime minister, with his happy life and family. why he would risk it all by unraveling a truth that shouldn’t be. And he keeps repeating, and screaming, that he has to know. Because his idea of himself is a clear and honest one, he made and raised himself from a poor background to the top of society, and he never hid anything about who he was. To suggest that there are things that he doesn’t know about himself, is to invalidate not just his life story but his idea of himself. To reach that truth and clarity, he has to tear down everything because to go forward into a false life, a life of lies, is impossible for him. It’s not just that he refuses to do it, but he can’t.

As he says in Gide’s play:

“That crime was imposed by God. His was the ambush on my road. Before even I was born, the trap was laid, and I could not but fall into it. For either your oracle was lying or I had no possible escape. I was caught.”

The more Oedipus finds out, the more he has to know. And the more he demands to know, the more his whole world unravels. The clock in the play enhances this tension and implosion to an almost unbearable degree. Nothing about the play is new and I imagine everyone who was in the theater had read and seen the play before, but as the clock ran down and all the information started to connect and show more of the truth, the anxiety of what was to come was so high for me that I was fidgeting in my seat. It was like watching the rope holding the sword above his head slowly tear until you want him to either jump out the way or for the sword to hurry up because the slow release was too much to bear.

That tension is why going to see the play or any play or movie in person, in the theater, is so unique. You are as trapped in the story and the time of the story as the characters are. You are as vulnerable to the events as they are. You discover information along with them, even when you already know more than they do. You can’t pause or walk away. You can’t change the channel or close the book. By sitting down, you give yourself over to the experience, and when you do that, you can’t save yourself.

This giving-over to the experience is so powerful that it can make an ancient play feel new every time, regardless if the play tries to be faithful to the original or transforms it. In the play’s climax, Jacosta kills herself by shooting herself rather than hanging and when the gunshot went off, so many people in the audience gasped and put their hands to their chest. Afterwards I asked someone if that reaction was because as Americans, a gunshot sound in a public space can mean the absolute worst, or because the moment took people by surprise. The other audience member said that it wasn’t exactly a surprise because you knew what was coming, yet because we were all so invested in it, that the event suddenly felt new and shocking. By the end of the performance, I was exhausted and relieved for it to be over. In the best way possible.

When I think about Oedipus the character and the way that Strong played him, I think of what Gilles Deleuze termed as someone who is worthy of the event in his lecture series on Leibniz and the Baroque:

“One of the greatest moralists of the event is the poet Joë Bousquet. Bousquet suffered a ghastly wound that paralyzed him, and among other things, everything that he tried to say and explain was in some manner: this event, I was created to incarnate it. That is, starting from this, his problem was, in a certain manner, being worthy of the event…You indeed sense that there is a certain way to live the event as being worthy (en étant digne) of what happens to us in the good and the bad. I would say that it’s this aspect through which every event is addressed to my soul…There are whiners/wailers who are worthy of what happens, it’s even these ones that are called prophets, the prophet in his fundamental wailing. There are some who take wailing to a level of poetry, elegy, and elegy means the complaint … There are some that complain with such nobility; think of Job. Job’s complaint is worthy of the event.”

Oedipus is worthy of the event because he goes all the way. He realizes that he is a character in a story outside of his control, he sees the trap that is laid in front of him, and as everyone begs him to stop, he knows that the story can only be truly completed, if he goes all the way into the destruction of himself, his family, Thebes, and the world around him. What separates the play for me from so many others is the agency and responsibility that he takes for his actions. His refusal to live a false life but also to find a way out of the fact that he is the driving force.

Oedipus’ story doesn’t end at Thebes. At the end of Oedipus Rex, he becomes a blind wanderer, helped by Antigone, and in Oedipus at Colonus, he goes to a wilderness near Athens and Thesesus is instructed by the gods to take care of him. After his death, his grave is made sacred. I think it’s because of that worthiness, that willingness to go all the way, is why even though he is repulsive in the eyes of the other characters in the play and supposedly in Thebes, that he isn’t condemned or rejected by the gods. He plays his role perfectly, as Strong does. Both are worthy of the event.

“This refusal to participate in the classificatory “order of things” is true of monsters generally: they are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions.”

- Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein isn’t a direct adaptation of the book and it would have been disappointing if it was. Del Toro is the kind of director with such a particular style and perspective that I always want to see what his version of stories look like rather than having him try to directly translate the story to the screen. The same way that I wanted to see how he interpreted Pinocchio is the same way that I wanted to see what he could do with the story of Victor Frankenstein and his creation. There are already a ridiculous amount of Frankenstein movies, some more fateful than others, and the fun now, at least for me, is in how this story can look according to the storyteller. If I wanted to read the original, I can always go back to Mary Shelley.

Del Toro made so many changes to the story that it’s probably easier to talk about what remained the same than what is different. The characters may have the same names, and be in similar settings, but everything from their relationship to each other to their internal motivations are transformed for Del Toro’s purposes. Victor doesn’t pursue the creation of the creature from ambition and curiosity but because of his mother’s death and a desire to supersede his father (and death) through science. Rather than being his aunt’s child, adopted sister (whether from his aunt or after being an orphan), and fiancée, Elizabeth is the fiancée of Victor’s youngest brother, William. And this change of relationship allows a kind of love triangle, not between Elizabeth, William, and Victor, but with Victor, Elizabeth, and the Creature, since Elizabeth grants the creature the affection that Victor desires from her. He is in love with her, or he thinks he is, but she doesn’t think that he understands what love is because he is so self-centered. But she believes that the creature understands love so well, without intending to, just by nature, because the creature, at the beginning, is so much like a child that it wears its heart on its sleeve.

Where Victor hears the creature repeating his name and sees that lack of vocabulary as evidence of a lack of intelligence, Elizabeth tells him that maybe it’s because for the creature, the name, the word, contains the world. The movie argues that she is right, in the sense that the more the creature learned, the more experiences that it had with the human world and its cruelty, the more it moved from its “pure” and childlike nature to becoming more and more like Victor himself, and Victor became more like his own father in the movie, who was abusive, the more human the creature became, the more cruel and evil it became.

That last point is probably the main thing I was curious about when it came to Del Toro’s Frankenstein. How he would treat the transformation of the monster into a cruel and evil creature. The book and the movie are clear that Victor himself becomes a monster and it is a consistent joke about the story that everyone thinks the monster is the creature but it’s actually Victor. At one point in the movie, when Will is thrown to the side by the creature, hits his head and is on the verge of death, Victor tries to save him only for Will to tell Victor that he had always been scared of his older brother, and states explicitly that it is Victor who is the monster.

But the book does much more than show that Victor is the monster. It shows that Victor is one of them. The movie mirrors Victor and the creature, but it stops short at the end of truly accepting that category of monster for the both of them. And I believe this is because Del Toro himself, identifies so much with the monsters of his stories, and is so sympathetic to the outcast, the one outside of categories, that he can’t condemn them.

In Parul Sehgal’s essay/profile of Del Toro about the movie, she writes several times about how Del Toro sees himself as one of the monsters, which was exemplified by his reaction to seeing the classic 1931 film directed by James Whale:

“Del Toro saw the 1931 film as a monster-mad child, and when Karloff’s face filled the screen, he was transfixed. ‘That is my Jesus,’ he thought. ‘That is my patron saint.’ He saw himself in the creature’s innocence and awkwardness and ill-fitting suit; he saw the Catholic martyrs in the heavy-lidded eyes rolling back, as if in ecstasy.”

Showing that Victor is the true monster in his Frankenstein is not that different from his other movies like Shape of Water, Pinocchio, or Pan’s Labyrinth — and the Hellboy series as well — where it is the human, and often a man of duty and relentless ambition, that truly embodies the cruelty and evil the monster or monsters are accused of simply because they are different or have been made differently than us humans. In Del Toro’s world, monsters are simply other beings, some malevolent and some not, but it is not their overall nature as the humans would like to believe.

This is often one of Del Toro’s biggest strengths and one of the qualities that he shares with Hayao Miyazaki, where different creatures are not presented as evil simply because they are different, and both directors treat these creatures with the same and sometimes more care than they do their human characters. But in Del Toro’s Frankenstein, that sympathy is a bit unbalanced. In trying to really show that Victor is the mad scientist, a reflection of his father, and to reflect that relationship with his relationship with the creature, Del Toro shies away from the creature’s role as the monster and Victor’s humanity.

Victor is a monster, or becomes one through the story, but so is the creature who is also made one. If the two of them act as reflections of each other, it’s about how they’re both transformed through the conflict with each other, the human world, and their internal selves, into becoming the idea of the monster — cruel, evil, and irredeemable, where death is the only possible escape for each at the end. They pull each other to the absolute bottom, and whenever one tries to get off the cycle, the other drags them into it. When Victor tries to get on with his life after the creature disappears, it comes back to haunt him. And when the creature asks for a companion in order to live quietly, Victor denies him that and forces him into more rage and destruction.

An example of Del Toro’s reluctance to condemn his monster came at the wedding day for Elizabeth and William. In the book, it is the creature that invades and strangles Elizabether. But in Del Toro’s film, to really show the divide between Victor and the monster, he has Elizabeth shot and killed by Victor, though it is an accident. Then the creature gently takes her body away, carrying her beautiful corpse through a sea of people as a visual illustration of the creature’s humanity, even though by look and build, it looks everything but human among the people.

This reluctance is completed at the end when the creature and Victor are reconciled after telling their stories. The two see and accept each other finally. They touch and pronounce themselves father and son. Then it is Victor who dies and the creature goes off into the cold and distance. The ending is very heartwarming and is understandable alongside the other Catholic elements of the movie. Of course it ends in forgiveness.

In the book, the creature goes off into the darkness and distance, but in an effort to kill itself. There is no great reconciliation at the end, but there is a monologue, a thesis, and an accusation. Before it goes off the die, the creature makes a grand confession which both indicts him, Victor, and the world, as equally monstrous.

When I was young and a more disaffected person, I knew the creature’s last monologue by heart. As I wrote in my first book, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza, I had grown up feeling distant from the world, so much so that I had gone so far into myself as to not be touched by external things, whether events or people. It was an attitude and way of being that was so different from my parents and siblings.

I was especially like my mother in so many ways, and for a long time I couldn’t understand why I was so different from this woman who was so sensitive to the world, who felt everything and didn’t deny herself those feelings. If she was mad, she didn’t shy away from her anger or see it as a weakness. And when she was sad, she expressed it without shame or desiring to end it before she confronted it. But for me, it was as if all of these emotions and the world itself was locked in a glass cage, on display where I could see them, but I couldn’t touch or genuinely feel them. After a while, I started to think that something was wrong. Not that I was defective, but that I was alone. The world was not real for me because I couldn’t be present in it.

Back then, I had a friend in London who would sometimes call me in the early hours of the morning because she knew that I would be up with insomnia, and it would be around 9am for her. And sometimes she would ask me to recite the creature’s monologue during our conversation to see if I remembered it.

What is incredible about that monologue or its last testament is that the creature accepts that it has crossed the line and become the monster that the people always thought that it was. It doesn’t shy away from the blood on its hands. It even expresses disbelief about the distance between the creature it was at the beginning, who wanted a community to belong to, people to be loved by, and to be judged by its soul rather than its appearance, and the cruel and evil monster that it eventually becomes. It doesn’t excuse itself. The monologue is excellent and worth reading in full. After it is accused of playing the victim, the creature responds:

“Oh, it is not thus—not thus…yet such must be the impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the purport of my actions. Yet I seek not a fellow-feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now, that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone, while my sufferings shall endure: when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of bringing forth. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now vice has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No crime, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I call over the frightful catalogue of my deeds, I cannot believe that I am he whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am quite alone.

“You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But, in the detail which he gave you of them, he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured, wasting in impotent passions. For whilst I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were forever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.

“But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for the moment when they will meet my eyes, when it will haunt my thoughts, no more.”

The creature’s acceptance of its actions and condemnation of itself also becomes the greatest condemnation of its maker and the society that shunned it. It is the evidence of their evil, because of how deformed it is, because of all the crimes it had committed. By accepting the blood on its hands, it also the blood on theirs. Everything it did was its own decision, but a decision formed in response to the cruelty of the world. It had been born as an innocent child, desiring the same love of its parent and community as any other, and when denied that, it grew into a monster capable of such terrible things that surprised even itself. The testament at the end acts as an incredible balance of personal and social responsibility, but in order to make that account, the creature had to become the monster. In Del Toro’s film, it never crosses that line because Del Toro can’t let his monsters, the ones that he identifies with, his Jesus, be that monstrous. It can only be a misguided saint at the end.

This same tension came up for me in my book. Towards the end, the memoir transforms into something more surrealist where the protagonist, myself, transforms into a Minotaur. There are many reasons for this — Venice as a double labyrinth. the desire to interrogate the human from outside the category, pushing hypervisibility and the need for invisibility to their extremes, the strange time in Venice, and my own personal relationship to the creature, and so on. I could write another book about the Minotaur.

Regardless, after the transformation, the minotaur is injured by a group of teenagers. Then after accepting its new nature and haunting the streets of Venice, it stalks the teenagers and confronts the boy who took its horn. They fight, the minotaur wins. And then I leave it a bit vague about whether or not the Minotaur kills the boy. The incident came up at one of the first readings I did for the book, where someone asked if the Minotaur did kill the boy. And I said that it did. It had to. Not because the Minotaur is inherently evil or capable of such things, but because to accept the human and inhumane, you have to accept what humans are truly capable of. And that is often crossing that line between monster as a category and monster as a mark of one’s nature.

I also believe that you need to condemn your characters, and that one of the reasons a lot of people fail in not only monster stories, but stories in general, is because they identify with their protagonists so much that they feel the need to justify and redeem their actions. Even when it comes to the unreliable or unlikeable narrators, you can often see the author saving the character from doing something wholly unforgivable. And I guess my opposition to that is the other side of Del Toro’s Catholic pull towards the idea of forgiveness. For me, forgiveness is not as significant or as a better story than atonement.

In forgiveness, one seeks absolution. In atonement, one seeks reparation. Not only for the party that has been hurt, but reparation in the form of betterment. To atone for something becomes a lifelong effort to repair yourself, to be better than what you were. Atonement doesn’t even require forgiveness, forgiveness is almost not the point. It requires a reflection, an acceptance of one’s condemned nature, not only in the sense of the religious but in that you have let yourself down, that you have crossed a line that should have been a limit for you. And now you must work to be better without any expectation that it will be enough. I’d say that in Del Toro’s stories, his monsters fall but are saved before they hit the ground. And for me, I want them to hit the ground and rebuild themselves from there.

When it comes to monster stories, it is often divided into the ones where the monster is a horrifying creature, human or supernatural, that can commit the worst horrors, and then there’s the other side where the monster is actually us, and the creature that we call a monster is a symptom, a consequence of a human sickness. Del Toro’s Frankenstein leans towards the second, where the book accepts the two as the more complicated issue. But when I wrote the part of the transformation in my book, I didn’t want to do either because both were still a desire to identify the monster through the human, and I wanted something outside of that.

I transform, the Minotaur goes through his story, and when there’s a secondary transformation, I really fought to not have to explain the Minotaur and speak for its actions. Because the monster may be in me, it may be a creation of Victor’s and it may be seen as the mirror image, but it is so outside the human story by nature and construction, that I feel like it needs to retain a kind of mystery, a distance from us. Otherwise, it’s not really a monster.

Anyone who has ever spent time in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City has likely seen the old people there practicing Tai Chi. Classes and meetups are happening all over, from the community centers to whatever outside space is available. When I play soccer on Saturdays or Sunday mornings in that area, I always see them near the field or park performing their flowing and meditative movements. Even on cold winter mornings, they’ll be out there bundled up, inhaling and exhaling the cold air with the kind of control that stands out in contrast to the heavy panting coming from the soccer players.

A lot has been written about Zohran Mamdani’s recent breakthrough mayoral campaign, citing his team’s skill in producing social media and videos allowing him to express his political ideas and positions in a relatable, or at least more human way, in particular by showing the love and understanding he has for the people and culture of New York City. The campaign focused on making lives better for all of the people, and his engagement with so many diverse cultures and histories demonstrated in a vivid way what makes the city unique and exceptional.

One of the videos that touched me most came late in the campaign, when Mamdani visited a community center in the Lower East Side to talk with seniors, and emphasized that the affordability crisis affects seniors as much as it does young people. Part of this engagement included a Tai Chi session with the older Asian American women there. He didn’t do it especially well, but it was still lovely to see.

***

T’ai Chi: The “Supreme Ultimate” Exercise for Health, Sport, and Self-Defense by Cheng Man-ch’ing and translated by Robert W. Smith gives several accounts of the origins of Tai Chi. The first is that a Taoist priest of the Yuan dynasty learned it in a dream; the second, that it developed in the T’ang dynasty, through four schools: the Hsu, Yu, Ch’eng, and Yin; the third credits the Ch’en of Ch’en Chia Kou in the Honan province during the Ming dynasty, and Cheng Man-ch’ing relates the fourth as follows:

...while passing through Ch’en Chia Kou in Wen-hsien (Honan province), Wang Tsung-yueh saw the villagers practicing a form of hand boxing called pao ch’uan. Later at his inn he made an offhand remark on the method, which the villagers—almost all surnamed Ch’en—had practiced for generations. His remark brought several challenges and he met them all successfully. The villagers were impressed and asked Wang to stay for a short while to teach them his method. Moved by their sincerity, he agreed and helped them modify their hard boxing method into the softer T’ai-chi. The practice was eventually divided into two styles, the old and the new.

Tai Chi is a practice for transforming and increasing the “chi,” loosely translated as life force or energy, through slow and rhythmic movement. This goal has taken many forms in addition to exercise, from dietary practices to sexual experiments, all intended “to extract ch’i from matter in its solid, liquid, and gaseous forms,” according to The World’s Religions by Huston Smith. Tai Chi “gathers calisthenics, dance, meditation, yin/yang philosophy, and martial art into a synthesis that in this case was designed to draw ch’i from the cosmos and dislodge blocks to its internal flow.”

When I first practiced Tai Chi I was in middle school, soon after my family had moved to the United States in 1998, and I had no idea what it was. I had already developed the reputation in school of being a troublemaker and would be sent to detention so regularly that additional punishments were added to the already dull requirement of having to sit quietly in a classroom for an hour after school. The detention teacher sometimes made me stand in front of the class holding a heavy dictionary in each hand for a certain amount of time, a punishment that would definitely not be permitted nowadays. If I dropped them before the time was up, I would have to hold them up for longer than the previous time, or until the teacher was satisfied that I was too exhausted to continue misbehaving.

These punishments were sometimes draconian but it was an effort from the school and its teachers to deal with an angry, disruptive, and rebellious child. The reasons for my bad behavior were sometimes obvious and others mysterious in the sense that I felt things that I couldn’t properly explain, or that I would try to explain but sounded silly coming from such a young child. The obvious problem was that I was a young immigrant and some of the kids in the school were testing to see if they could get away with bullying me; rather than accept it, my natural attitude was to say no, both verbally and physically. My mindset was that we can just fight it out, all the time. Which teachers and the principal didn’t particularly like, since they would have much preferred to live in the peace of me accepting the bullying quietly than in the prevailing chaos of my resistance and the work of having to address the tension. But I didn’t mind the punishments. They were fine with me, even though my parents quickly got tired of getting calls from the school.

Harder to explain was that at that young age, I felt the hands of everything and everyone pushing me, trying to shape my life and my future, and the lack of freedom or agency that I had in that process. Everything was being done to me. I was being made into someone without my input. Since no one cared what a young kid had to say about their own life, I exercised the only power that I had, that is, the power of my own life, body, and self, and said no to all of it. If I felt that I wasn’t being listened to or respected, I said no to the situation completely. Whether that was in leaving class, talking back to teachers, putting a kid in a chokehold during gym for tripping me, or not coming home when I felt that I was getting punished without my parents’ clear understanding that I had been justified in what I did.

They put me in detention almost every day but it had little effect because sitting in that classroom was no different from being out in the world; it all felt like one continuous experience of being disrespected and ignored, each event as hostile as the last. It changed nothing, and sometimes it was a kind of reprieve to have time to sit and draw in silence rather than having to answer for and defend myself.

Eventually, one of my teachers, who saw that the punishments weren’t working, suggested that instead of detention I should be put in afterschool volleyball. It was an activity that some of the kids did as they waited for their parents to get off work to pick them up. I still remember walking into the large, dark, quiet, room that seemed to exist outside of the school, as if it were a different realm completely, and having our teacher, an older Black woman, introduce me to the strange cast of afterschool kids. She told me that before and after each practice, we were required to do Tai Chi. I hadn’t played volleyball before, and I definitely had no idea what Tai Chi was.

We all had so much pent up energy and wanted to get to the volleyball as quickly as possible, but she never let us touch the ball without a few minutes of imitating the flow of water and concentrating on our breathing. We did Tai Chi to meditate, relax, to feel at home and engaged with our bodies. She didn’t emphasize emptying the mind as much as she did learning to float in it, as well as feeling every part of our bodies. She wanted us to get to know and be in ourselves, mind and body. Then we would get to expressing that knowledge of self through volleyball. And after that high intensity action, we would meditate once again, returning to ourselves.

The combination of Tai Chi and volleyball were delightful to me, and I looked forward to going every day. I had a friend who also played volleyball with me, who was on the basketball team and was so good and so athletic that he became a rival for me. Tai Chi became a time for me to lock in before I tried to beat him at the volleyball court. Not only did I try learning to calm down and be comfortable in my body and mind, but I would cheat by also visualizing myself beating my friend in volleyball. I could imagine the person that I wanted to be, and each practice was an opportunity to work towards that person. I would lose, come back and refine myself, and try again. In this one space, outside of the reality of life beyond its borders, I could participate in the designing of myself and my life, with the help of a teacher and a practice that helped in that project.

Unfortunately for my teachers then and the teachers afterwards, Tai Chi and volleyball seemed to have the opposite effect of their hopes for docility. By allowing me to see myself more clearly, my new practice only made me double down on the demand for freedom and active participation in my own life. The anger was still there, but it didn’t feel chaotic or without reason. I knew now that my anger was the proper and natural reaction to an intense set of circumstances. The same way that a body of water could grow intense during a storm.

What I could articulate much later in life, with the vision of myself then and in the future clear in my mind, was that while I could negotiate with the demands and hopes of parents, teachers, and the world around me, I still wanted to have a life that allowed me a sense of freedom, one that I would be proud to live. If that desire were respected, then I had no problem doing the things others wanted, and making the necessary adjustments for existing in society. But I wanted to feel part of my own life.

After that time, playing soccer and my intellectual pursuits took up most of my time, even as the fights and trouble continued. I only managed to beat my friend one time, but never got to thank our teacher for making us do Tai Chi before and after practice. Things in life sometimes end without a soft closing. But whenever I see the old people in the Lower East Side doing Tai Chi, it takes me immediately back to that room and those times. I see the young me watching and imitating my teacher’s moves as he tried to imagine himself floating in the river of his mind, clearing through everything that makes life complicated to allow him to see his own face, the image of himself more clearly, and to imagine the best possible future. Inhaling and exhaling, feeling the movements of his arms, legs, hips, chest, neck, and head, and then locking in to put all of that body on the line for an inconsequential, all-important volleyball game.

There’s several tensions at work in the new Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man — religious belief vs nonbelief / atheism, innocence vs guilt, love vs hate, what a community looks like, what is the true Christian reaction to a sinful world, should a leader be a king or a servant, can a leader be both, since yearning for the position to lead signals an egotism regardless if one models oneself as a servant, what responsibility do we have to our parents and our grandfathers, to our children, to legacy, and what is legacy to begin with, and of course, the foundation question and tension that holds up every other one, what is truth, object fact or a story that a collective decides to believe in? 

Rian Johnson is such a wonderful filmmaker that he manages to hold up all of these tensions in the film and address them with the appropriate level of comedy and seriousness that they all deserve. It is funny that an old woman drops to her knees in the dirt to declare that a farce is a miracle because she desperately needs to believe or needs others to believe that a miracle has happened, and a scene like that has to be played up as extreme and ridiculous, but on the other hand, a lonely woman needing someone to talk to about her dying mother deserves a seriousness and attention that seems to and should cut through the movie, reminding Father Jud, Benoit Blanc, and the audience, what is truly at stake beyond finding out who the killer is and how the murder was committed. 

All the while, the movie feels like a movie. In the sense that it doesn’t yearn for realism and doesn’t try to sell itself as such, in the way that so many films and shows do, even genre ones, in order to feel like serious works of art. Johnson knows that a whodunnit should feel like one, like you’re entering into a different world with different rules, a world where Monsignor Jefferson Wicks feels larger than life, where his speeches are powerful not because he is speaking to some great truths, but because the people in his flock believe that he is, where Blanc is not a silly detective but someone after something of equal worth as Father Jud and anyone else attending the church. When at the end, Blanc has his “road to Damascus” moment, it doesn’t feel cheesy even though the light from the window shines on him to drive in the moment of revelation. 

You can laugh, but you don’t dismiss him, because you’re in his world, their world, and in their world, that moment and the next moment matters. By leaning so much into the genre of these movies, Johnson creates films that are both fun and campy, but grounded in serious topics and tensions that it doesn’t shy away from. The film can laugh at the world because it also laughs at the world, and the intimate moments don’t feel undeserved because it has been earnest from the beginning. 

This tension, this duality of comedy and drama, works so well because it’s especially embodied in the character of Blanc, who Craig plays so delightfully. The accent, the clothes, his manner of speaking, the way that he pokes fun at everyone and everything around him, while knowing that they’re all capable of doing the worst possible things to each other, and the way that he treats a murder like a game to solve, but also as something much more. 

In one of the critical turns of the film, after being swept up in Blanc’s game to solve the murder, Father Jud realizes that he’s behaving the same as Wicks, looking for the “guilty” to judge and punish them, when he should be opening his arms and being with them, and he decides that he’s had enough. He pushes Blanc away and says to Blanc that Blanc doesn’t understand his work, and that to him, the murder and his work aren’t games in the same way that they are to Blanc. 

That moment pointed to a very particular reason why the movie and series works so well. Blanc wasn’t just working to solve a murder, to finish a game that entertained him, he hounded Father Jud, rejecting his rejection, asking, practically beginning him to reconsider and continue his participation in the mystery, because it seems to me that his desires are as deep as anyone else’s in the movie, and that he himself represents a great tension that the films carry, the question of Justice. 

Blanc comes into the case as an outsider, but he’s not objective. His introduction to Father Jud is the two of them arguing about religion, where Blanc states his position which embodies everything from his political to his moral positon. It’s not just that he doesn’t believe in a higher power, but he doesn’t like the harm that the church does to people, and often exploits their vulnerabilities. His actions also embody that morality. He doesn’t work with the police, he can’t because he and the police have different goals. The police want a perpetrator, they want to solve the case, lock someone up, and move on. That’s not necessarily justice, even if it wears the mask of it. For them it’s work, most of the time a game, but not for him. 

In all of the movies, Blanc is on the side of the most vulnerable individual, even if at first it seems like they’re the guilty ones. He immediately recognizes that the structure of the case and the world is built to condemn the one that seems most obvious. He uses his skills, and the notion of truth, to counterbalance power and money. The fun of these movies isn’t in figuring out who the real killer is, that one is made pretty obvious and always comes to no surprise, it is about how Blanc is going to undo the construct that protects the one who did it while shielding the one that is being condemned. 

He doesn’t just solve the cases, he is always solving it alongside someone, the person who has no one else on their side. It’s why when Father Jud goes to turn himself in, and Blanc notices him, Blanc pushes him out of the police station and when Father Jud almost confesses to what he thinks is the truth, Blanc plays the organ to shut him up. 

Just as much as he unravels the mystery, he also keeps the police and the legal system away. He distracts, lies, and sabotages the police. He is their enemy, even if he first arrives like he’s there to help them. He plays dumb, and even at the end, he sacrifices himself, makes himself look like a fool to push them away, even for a moment, for justice to arrive, alongside mercy. Because his intention isn’t about putting a killer away and locking the door, because what he wants is truth, because his goals are more profound than who is guilty and who isn’t, just as father Jud’s mission is, he can create the space for an ending that grounds the film and expresses a better vision of humanity — even within all the carnage, lies, death, and deceit that can before — than simply throwing the perpetrator in the back of the police car. 

Blanc acts as a detective in a whodunnit, but he’s also a shield against the possibility of a police procedural, and the cold way that the force of the state and the legal system divides and diminishes people. In that way, he’s doing the same kind of work that Father Jud is doing. He doesn’t need the Mass, the revelation, or the belief in a higher power. The film and the series work only because not because it’s an entertaining game for him, but because through his actions, as theatrical and ridiculous as they can be, you can see how much he cares for the people that he’s entangled with. 

It wasn’t surprising that after it was reported that the Trump administration would suspend SNAP benefits during the government shutdown, that the moral argument in defense of SNAP, which benefits and grants food assistance to 40 million low-income people in the US, would be that many of those people who receive benefits are people who work.

This defense came as a counter to the glee that some were taking in the possibility of watching others suffer, justifying this desire for pain by arguing that people on SNAP were lazy and unemployed, leeches to the system. Which wasn’t based on fact, since the lie is just a way to rationalize a dark desire and make the evil feeling seem so rational that not desiring the same would become the abnormal position. So the defense was to assert the truth — people who work are on SNAP and actually the fact that so many working people are on SNAP is evidence that poverty is a corporate and governmental policy / subsidy. It’s better or cheaper for corporations to have SNAP around than to stop exploiting people.

Fact and truth doesn’t really matter in these kinds of arguments because the side that desires pain for others aren’t working to better understand the conditions of people not like them, they’re simply using any available reason to justify their position. They don’t want to make things better. They want to pretend that wanting things to be bad is an intellectual and moral position.

Beyond the uselessness of going back and forth with such people, what makes me weary about those kinds of conversations is the fact that at the foundation of it, and so much of the discourse of American politics, is about who we should let suffer. Whether it’s about SNAP or culture wars, there’s this push and pull between the sides about who should be condemned to suffering and marginalization, and how to justify that judgement of them. It’s easy to do with the poor because in the United States, your worth is tied to what you can do for the economy, how much of your life you can give to work, regardless of the nature of work and whether or not it is fulfilling. What you can do is what you are, and the instant that you can no longer sell yourself to the workforce, or in these times, the instant that you are cut to squeeze one more dollar for shareholders, you become nobody and nothing. Then you become one of those who can suffer without defense. Not just a nobody but a parasite.

I wish I could talk about the politics of work in the United States — the fact that it’s harder and harder to live a decent life with a full time job, that every industry is made increasingly precarious by the tech evangelists who will invent any and every way to put people out of work, and that even beyond that, it feels spiritually deadening that so much of work has no meaning or benefit outside of completing repetitive tasks and that work dominates so much of people’s day to day lives that one can rightly say that we’ve turned human life into one endless workday where the possibility of rest only exists to get you ready again for work. There’s so much literature on all of these topics and I find the topics fascinating and critical to building a better world and shape of human life, but I just can’t get past the initial step where we judge that even though the money, resources, and food is available, that some people should suffer because they don’t work. And not only suffer but that they deserve to do so. It is what they have earned. I feel like accepting that sets you on a morally and spiritually dangerous path. Even if, like many others, I feel the need to differentiate and elevate myself as someone who is doing things the right way, by working, following the rules, and making a life through talent and determination, someone who puts into the world and the greater economic system, and thus deserves access to its benefits, I still can’t justify the feeling and idea that because I do all of those things, that those who do not should be condemned to suffering and living out hell on earth. I would much rather some of my tax dollars go to provide for those people than build another predator drone.

Regardless, the conversations reminded me of one evening that I spent with my mom looking for a suit for my dad. We were at a strip mall and while walking to the suit store, we were joking about the lottery which had been in the billions. I said that if I had that amount of money, I would be dead within weeks because I would do so much reckless shit with it. When I asked her what she would do, my mom said that she would help out as many of the poor people on the street as she could. She said it as if it was the simplest and most obvious thing in the world. Then she talked about how awful it was that we let other human beings lay outside on the streets when we had the resources to help them. Then she asked me, doesn’t it break your heart?

I’m someone who is very against sentimentality — I don’t think one’s feelings matter much in moral and ethical issues — but the question from her comes from such a deep place in who she is. My mom has continued to teach special education because she feels a responsibility to the disabled children that the school systems often overlook, and since we were young, even when we were poor, she would buy enough food on Sundays for our family and for the kids at school, because she knew that food insecurity was an issue for them. For many of the kids, lunch at school was their main meal for the day.

It was a question that also put in perspective for me how much we accept the suffering of others as a normal part of living in this world. It feels like all the time we’re told and asked to accept that our price for being in this society, which is bragged about as prosperous and more glorious than all others, is the needless pain of others. A country that could solve this poverty and affliction and chooses not to, for whatever reasons it decides are just, is not really a good one. To celebrate the hoarding of wealth while condemning those who are unable to prosper in an increasingly difficult and unforgiving situation, feel extraordinarily wicked. I believe that any argument for how the world should be, whether that’s a political argument or not, should start with, how can we lessen the suffering in the world, rather than who can and should be condemned to suffer.

I’m also reminded now of a passage by Emil Cioran from On The Heights of Despair:

“Whenever I think of man’s abject poverty, his rot, his spreading gangrene, I am gripped by mortal despair. Instead of constructing theories and ideologies to deal with poverty, man, this rational animal, should simply give the coat off his back in a gesture of fraternal understanding. Poverty in the world compromises man more than anything else and will no doubt bring about the downfall of such a megalomaniac animal. In front of poverty, I’m even ashamed of music. How, then, should one support any social or political doctrine?”