The Wokeness of Nomadland

Autofiction has now moved from literature to the movies. Nomadland, featuring the indubitable Frances McDormand (who redeemed herself in my eyes after the horrendous “Three Billboards Outside Ebbings, Missouri”), mixes up real life people with actors who drive around the west in their RVs and vans and school buses as nomadic refugees from capitalism. The movie doesn’t play up the class issue but it’s why they’re on the road “houseless” as Fern (Frances) calls it, looking for community.

Fern’s husband worked at the sheetrock plant in Empire, Nevada, where they lived for decades. After he dies and the plant closes in 2011, she’s kicked out of the company house and on the road in her outfitted van she names “Vanguard.” She works temp jobs at Amazon in Nevada, a campground in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, a sugar beet farm in Nebraska, and a restaurant cook, also in South Dakota. But the best parts of the movie are when she migrates to the Arizona encampment run by Bob, a real life nomad, where others come together to share information, food, and friendship with the likes of Linda May and Swankie, also real life nomads.

I was completely engaged throughout the movie where not much happens. It won awards at the Toronto and Venice film festivals and got glowing reviews from the LA Times and the New York Times. But then came the complaints. Now we’re all entitled to our opinions, of course, and Richard Brody in The New Yorker let it be known that he didn’t think the juxtaposition of real life/fiction worked and complained that the documentary part was hackneyed and in the fictional part characters weren’t fully developed, nobody got to talk enough, all the usual complaints about movies that don’t follow the accepted narrative of plot and character development. Talking to my friend Terri about his review she exclaimed: “Swankie is the classic old lesbian hippie. I’d know her anywhere. And Fern doesn’t need to talk. She listens.”

But then came the other complaints that painfully reveal how cancel culture and identity politics have diminished critical thinking about content and aesthetics (you’re so right, Jakob). First came the class issues: how could this movie portray oppressed people having a good time doing their own thing, finding spiritual support at the Arizona encampment, and actually wanting to be a nomad? What a betrayal of class politics.

Then came the complaint that while the movie shows Fern and Linda May working at dead end Amazon warehouses it doesn’t talk about the movement to organize a union that’s now playing out at Amazon in Alabama. Fern and Linda May are in the warehouse in Nevada. They’re trying to make enough money so they can buy gas and groceries to get to Arizona. They don’t know anything about union organizing, but failing to mention it is somehow class betrayal.

Next came the race card. Here we finally have a story centered on working class women, who yes, are white, but the movie is based on a book by journalist Jessica Bruder who wrote about the actual plant that closed in Empire, Nevada, that mostly employed white people because that’s the demographic of Empire, Nevada. So when Fern goes to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota to work as a campground host a Native American academic posts on Facebook that she immediately quit watching the movie that she “initially liked” because there weren’t any Indians in it. This is Indian Country and how can the director not make sure that Indians are part of the conversation? It reminded me of the same kind of criticism leveled at Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester By the Sea” that there weren’t any black people in it. The movie takes place in a working class town in upstate Massachusetts where the demographic is white. I thought the critique was a joke, but it wasn’t.

Scrolling through Rotten Tomatoes “Top Critics” reviews it looks like The New Yorker is the single negative mainstream review. The rest come in from the woke world out there, immersed in their bubbles of correctness.

Upstairs Maude

My cat Maude lives upstairs. That is, she never ventures downstairs where most of the action is: cooking and eating, working on my laptop, reading, listening to music, hanging with the dogs. The dogs may be why Maude remains upstairs, but there are other factors at play, I think.

I “rescued” Maude from my neighbor Matthew’s house, where she was contending with a puppy and a kitten by hiding under any furniture inaccessible to the puppy and kitten. Matthew had taken Maude in due to her previous owner’s allergies—no information beyond that as to age, previous tenure, etc. Seeing as how she has to claw the spread to climb up the beds where she spends most of her days, I suspect she’s an old gal. But once there, she’s an affectionate bedtime partner, snuggling up to convey warmth both ways.

Cats in El Valle are an endangered species due to coyotes and owls (and unfriendly dogs) so it’s good Maude lives upstairs. As a guilty enabler, I’ve had plenty of them over the years—both here and in Placitas, another dangerous rural environment—who had to navigate these dangers. It all began with Alley Cat, a little gray girl who facilitated my relationship with Mark, my partner of 34 years, way back in 1976. At the time I was working as the fire lookout on Mount Taylor and I took Alley with me to the tower (I also took my dogs Chani and Judge). She played on the catwalk surrounding my tiny little room and I tucked her in my jacket on evening walks. But one week when I left her home with my roommates, I came home to find she’d been poisoned, probably with antifreeze, and the vet couldn’t save her. Mark was with me at the vet’s and stayed with me while I grieved.

Mark had two cats himself, Belle and Pie, so when we moved in together in Placitas, we had a full household of cats and dogs. But it soon expanded. A young yellow tabby showed up one day and decided to stay. During one of her climbing forays she knocked over a bottle of salad dressing that drenched her, thus becoming her name. Next, a beautiful gray guy decided he preferred living with us rather than our neighbor, who graciously relinquished him. We named him Merle. While living in the village we started building a house out near Tunnel Springs. That’s where Cisco turned up one day, a short-haired gray tabby who we of course brought home.

No, we didn’t have five cats at one time. Belle and Pie were fairly old cats and we lost them to age as we accumulated Salad Dressing, Merle, and Cisco. And we didn’t get to have Cisco very long. He had a very weird habit of sleeping over the back of a chair, standing on his hind lets with his head and front paws hanging down. It turned out he had a tear in one of his heart valves and this position allowed him to breathe better. But the tear got worse and he struggled more and more to breathe, which resulted in one of those horrible situations most of us with animals have had to confront: whether to have the vet put him down. When the vet told us he couldn’t fix the tear, we had to say goodbye.

Fern showed up next. A long-haired gray tabby, she was one of my all-time favorites—sweet, affectionate, yet fearless and independent. When we moved out of the Placitas village to the new house, she’d go for walks with us into the forest, warily darting from tree to tree in case those coyotes or owls were watching. Neither Fern nor Merle did well with the move from the village to new house and decided numerous times to return to their home of origin. This is a fairly common occurrence with cats, but Merle took it to the nth degree: I think we drove back to retrieve him at least 10 or 15 times. He finally decided to stay.

While we loved living next to the forest, it’s probably why we eventually lost Merle, Fern, and Salad Dressing, who all disappeared without a trace. So by the time we gave it all up and moved from Placitas to El Valle—my book Culture Clash: Environmental Politics in New Mexico Forest Communities, documents in excruciating detail why we left—we had no cats. Alas, that was not to last. My friend Susan Larson, a veterinarian, gave us a going away present of two tortoise shell sisters whom we named Thelma and Louise. Thelma disappeared within months of our relocation, but Louise lived to a ripe old age of 15 because she, like Maude, liked living inside (though Louise did venture downstairs).

The tale of many cats continued during our almost 30 year residency in El Valle. Honus, named by younger son Max who was besotted with baseball cards (named for Honus Wagner, slugger for the Pittsburgh Pirates) showed up one day and became one of our favorites. He was also well liked by our neighbor Tomás, whom he would visit to hunt gophers, or “rattas,” as Tomás called them. We had Honus for a good number of years and were heartbroken when he, too, disappeared.

We also took in Blanche, a black feral cat that Mark’s sister-in-law dumped on us while visiting. She found her lurking around our friend’s house where she was staying for the visit and figured Blanche could be domesticated. She couldn’t. While she came in the house to eat and sleep, she basically lived outdoors and disdained human contact. She soon disappeared.

Then we took in Ernie, a black and white kitten who was sweet and playful, which extended to putting his head in our dog Django’s mouth as they rolled around the living room floor. But one day Ernie took sick and we took him to the emergency vet in Taos, who announced that he had cancer and was dying. The vet put him down and in shock we brought him home to bury. Max was completely caught off guard and distraught that we came home with a dead cat. It was probably one of the first times he’d been around a dead creature; he cried and cried.

After the kids left home we acquired an orange tabby named Mavis from a young friend who went off to work for the Forest Service. Mavis exemplified what is lovely about orange tabbies: affectionate, smart, independent, and quirky.

After Mavis disappeared, I swore off cats. I was by myself by then (Mark died in 2010) and didn’t need any more heartbreak. Suffice it to say, I ended up taking in several more cats for short term stays that I won’t go into detail about as it’s all too depressing. Maude is here, though, safe and sound upstairs. Even though she doesn’t come downstairs, the mice in the house seem to have sensed a cat is in the hood and have disappeared. And bird lovers can’t chastise me for having an indoor/outdoor cat. But reading back through this post I’m appalled: in my almost 50 years of rural residency I’ve had eighteen cats (OK, I’m admitting to the three I took in after swearing them off)! My friend Jan, who lives in town, has had two over the course of almost 40 years (long lived cats). My only defense is that I never actively solicited any of them. They came to me (and to Mark). While it means I have a soft heart, it also means that in the larger scheme of things the human population is not dealing very well with the cat population and should probably heed the bird lovers’ advice and stop domesticating them. In the meantime, I hope the universe does not send me any more cats.

On Getting the Vaccine and Being White

I was given the Moderna vaccine at Las Clinicas del Norte in El Rito yesterday because I’m old, immune compromised, and white. I’m not casting aspersions on the El Rito Clinic, as it has probably inoculated more Hispano and Native American people than just about any provider in New Mexico. We’re blessed with a relatively good rural health care system in el norte that reaches into many areas that suffer other kinds of inaccessibility. It’s just that I found out the clinic was vaccinating from my network of white friends.

I’m talking about being white in the world. This discussion has been in the crossfire lately between the pro- and anti- cancel culture crowds over the legacy of white privilege and the absolutism of first amendment and civil liberties. On the one hand, there’s a movement to chastise, censor, and fire white people who do stuff that’s reactionary, bigoted, racist, misogynist, or any number of things that are deemed denigrating to the liberal code. On the other hand, there are those who see the actions that big tech companies have taken to kick these people off their platforms, or newspapers that have fired columnists or editors for these “indiscretions,” is an abrogation of their first amendment and civil rights.

This is all quite complicated and I’ve written before about it, in my #MeToo Part 2, December 14, 2017, of the difference between Roy Moore of Alabama, a pedophile who ran for the U.S. Senate, and Al Franken, a sitting senator who committed stupid “sexual misconduct.” Then there’s the incident where Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton wrote an editorial in the NYT saying President Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act to put down protests across the country after the murder of George Floyd, that resulted in the editorial page director being forced to resign (I just saw where he was rehired by The Economist).

When you make a distinction between depravity/immorality, and misconduct, then you need to also figure out where to draw the line between what constitutes free speech and what constitutes incitement. I doubt that Cotton’s editorial rises to the level of “incitement,” but what about the Proud Boys in Charlottesville who chanted, along with other neo-Nazis and anti-Semites “Seig heil,” “blood and soil,” and “You will not replace us.” That’s the first time I remember thinking, as a card carrying ACLU member, that maybe there were limits to free speech. Here’s what the First Amendment guarantees: “The First Amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition. It forbids Congress from both promoting one religion over others and also restricting an individual’s religious practices. It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. It also guarantees the right of citizens to assemble peaceably and to petition their government.”

The Charlottesville protestors didn’t assemble peaceably. They beat up the counter demonstrators, they almost beat up Cornell West, and one of them killed a woman with a car. Was this protected free speech and if not, should the authorities have arrested all of them (the city tried to deny a march permit but they marched anyway)? Some ACLU folks raised this issue, but not Glenn Greenwald, former constitutional lawyer turned journalist. Writing in the Intercept, which he co-founded but has now left for Substack: “ . . . those who favor free speech suppression, or who oppose the ACLU’s universal defense of speech rights, will create results that are the exact opposite of those they claim to want. It’s an indescribably misguided strategy that will inevitably victimize themselves and their own views.” By exact opposites, he of course means the dangers of suppressing the free speech of the left.

Journalist Matt Taibbi is Greenwald’s partner in protest over the abrogation of free speech and the promotion of cancel culture. When YouTube announced in December of 2021 that it was removing any content that misleads people into thinking there was widespread fraud in the 2020 Presidential election, Taibbi claimed there wasn’t a “better way to further radicalize Trump voters.” Same argument for Twitter blocking Trump’s tweets. While they both acknowledge that Silicon Valley tech companies are monopolies that should have never accumulated the power they have to disseminate misinformation, it’s even more insidious if they are endowed with the power to suppress speech, no matter how misinformed or incendiary.

So where do you stand on this? Did kicking Trump off Twitter for insisting the election was a fraud help staunch the dissemination of propaganda? Was it too late? Should it have been done sooner? Did it recruit more crazies? We’ll have to leave it to the pundits to keep trying to find the answer.