Absorption and theatricality in Michel Houellebecq
I did not begin Annihilation expecting Fried to keep popping into my head. What I thought would happen is what Houellebecq clearly wanted me to think would happen: that this would be another of his now-familiar stories of European civilization collapsing, whether through external conquest by violent jihadism, inner exhaustion from individualism and fertility collapse, or self-immolation of a historically Christian society to a seductive form of neo-traditionalist conversion.
“Not unlike the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park,” the Princeton historian Fara Dabhoiwala writes in his What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea, “the First Amendment was brought to life long after its bloodline had died out. But now we’re stuck with it.” As the second Trump administration attacks free speech and press freedoms on multiple fronts, we can only hope so!
Two summers ago, two colleagues and I tried to spend our lunch break in what we’d noticed was a miniature wading pool about ten minutes southwest of our office downtown.
I hadn’t seen anything like it since high school, when a bored, drunk childhood friend pulled up LiveLeak.com in his kitchen and scrolled until he found a music-video compilation of Islamic State executions. Doom metal played while masked men calmly lopped off the heads of nameless victims. My friend’s expression was blithe and blank. Years later, watching this gory video of Charlie Kirk dying by the Wasatch Mountains under a banner reading “PROVE ME WRONG,” I felt the cold familiarity of being a teenager again.
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