(Hey, before I get started, please please pre-order my novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster. It’s about queer families and surviving in spite of right-wing hatred, among other things. Get a signed/personalized copy here.)
As I've mentioned before, most of my teachers in elementary school couldn't stand me. I had a very severe learning disability, and I acted loopy and chaotic at the best of times. I’m eternally grateful to Ms. Pennington, the special-ed teacher who saved me from falling through the cracks, and inspired me to become a writer.
One particular interaction with my second grade teacher, Ms. Stratton, is burned into my memory. She felt like I was goofing off in class, or taking too long to do something, and she got furious. I remember all the kids were kind of scared of her, not just me. She was always in a horrendous mood — and I get it: teaching is a super hard job. Anyway, she wanted me to do some kind of penance, like writing on the blackboard a bunch of times — bear in mind that penmanship was a skill that I was still struggling to master, due to my learning disability — and I felt her sentence was unjust.
The part I remember super vividly is standing there looking up at my teacher towering over me, with my hands on my hips, and saying in the loudest voice I could muster at the time, "I refuse." She sent me to the principal's office.
I think the main reason this is such a vivid memory for me is because I was so damn scared. She was terrifying, honestly. But also I was really proud of myself for rejecting what I saw as unjust authority. (Especially since I was, and am, mostly a giant people pleaser.) And you know what? I'm still really proud of my seven-year-old self for doing that. I think that resisting and rejecting unfair authority is one of the most important things we can do in this world.
For years now, I've had a phrase in my head, and it's the five words that I think are the most important for the years to come: "I don't recognize your authority."
There are always going to be bullies and would-be strongmen who want us to knuckle under and obey them. Pay them respect — give them our devotion, even. There will always be people in the world, not all of them cis men, who mistake being feared for being respected.
This has been obvious to me my whole life, but especially the last 5 years, it's become more and more salient. (See my previous newsletter about bad bosses.) Even ignoring what happened last Tuesday (as if we could), swaggering dipshits are on the rise and feeling newly empowered, and they're clearly going to be feeling their oats for a long time to come. As our interlocking set of crises continue to grow and worsen, including climate change, public health crises, wars and all our unsustainable systems slowly breaking down, we'll see swaggering dipshits stepping up, with their hands on their belt buckles, offering themselves as the solution.
I’m worried about what our national political leaders and tech billionaires are going to inflict on us, with so few constraints left to hold them back. But there will also be a million smaller petty bullies, including bosses, parents, spouses and corporate bureaucrats, who will feel empowered to fuck with people. A lot of people are going to feel they’ve been given permission to become their worst selves. There will be actual stochastic violence, but also just a lot of random control-freak cruelty.
I fully understand that you cannot always look a shitty boss or abusive leader in the eye and say out loud, "I don't recognize your authority." You might really need that job, or you might legitimately fear for your physical safety. But you can always say those words in your head, and they make an excellent mantra for when you are face-to-face with someone in a uniform, or a three-piece suit, who is trying to roll over you. You can smile and say nothing, and repeat those words in the privacy of your own mind. And bide your time.
And sometimes, you can say them out loud. If you have the wherewithal and the safety to say out loud, “I do not recognize your authority,” I highly recommend it. Sometimes other people will hear it and realize that they, too, don't recognize this asshole's authority.
The reason why I think about those five words so much isn’t just because they're a way of resisting and holding on to my own autonomy. They're also a good way of thinking about where authority comes from, and how much it relies on our explicit and implicit consent. (I see lots of people passing around that quote from On Tyranny author, Timothy D. Snyder, “Do not obey in advance.” In other words, don’t anticipate what authoritarians will ask of you, and do it freely without even being coerced.)
In my own work, I’ve touched a lot on the notion that authority always comes from violence, whether we know it consciously or not. In The City in the Middle of the Night, Mouth says:
“Part of how they make you obey is by making obedience seem peaceful, while resistance is violence. But really, either choice is about violence, one way or another.”
In the United States, you only have to look at the guns, body armor and riot shields that cops are sporting to know, as Monty Python would put it, “the violence inherent in the system.” Failure to obey comes with a severe risk of physical harm, imprisonment, and various types of ruin.
As a white, solidly middle-class, person, I have been shielded from a lot of these realities due to my immense privilege. And no, my transness and the fact that I still struggle with weird brainmeat stuff, do not in any way change that equation. In fact, my privilege gives me a bit more leeway for open defiance, but only up to a certain point.
But that's why I think it's especially important to recognize that most authority is fake, and that we wouldn't obey if we weren't threatened with harm of some sort.
I have a recurring daymare lately. I often find myself daydreaming about a possible future, not too far from now, where I find myself under the thumb of some blustering white cis man who has the unquestioned loyalty of everyone around him.
Sometimes, it's because I'm a refugee from some massive disaster, and I've landed up in a small community that is trying to survive in the midst of chaos. And this white guy, whom I'll call Dirk, is in charge of this embattled group. Sometimes, it's just that things have deteriorated to the point where local authorities are able to crack down a lot on people like me, and Dirk is our de facto ruler.
In my daymare, everybody tells me to be nice to Dirk. Cut him some slack. He's not that bad. He's doing his best. He just wants to keep us all safe. Sure, he comes on kind of strong and yells and throws things if his authority is challenged. Yeah, he's a little sensitive. But if you just show him some respect and do what he says, things are pretty okay. Just let Dirk do what he has to do to keep us all in one piece. Often, they kind of plead with me to not rock the boat, as if they're low-key terrified of what will happen either if Dirk gets angry, or if we no longer have Dirk to protect us.
“I don't recognize your authority,” I say to Dirk over and over again in these imaginary scenarios. “I didn't choose you as a leader, I don't think you know what you're talking about.”
Dirk is loud and very sure of himself. He knows that we have to be strong in order to survive, and he has a very limited definition of what it means to be strong. He usually has a generous mustache and beady little eyes, and his face turns red if you dare to question him — let alone challenge him.
Dirk is partly based on those abusive bosses I wrote about before. And he's partly a familiar figure from science fiction — a lot of sci-fi stories from the 1960s and 1970s have a Dirk in them. He’s usually the person pushing rash action that ends up making a bad situation worse. See: Quatermass and the Pit, many episodes of Doctor Who, many episodes of Star Trek, countless books from the New Wave. (In the 1967 movie version of Quatermass, this blustering-martinet figure is played by the always-wonderful Julian Glover.) Science fiction spent decades warning us not to listen to a swaggering fool.
I try to imagine what happens after I say to Dirk, “I don't recognize your authority.” I'm pretty sure that whatever transpires after that is pretty unpleasant, but I like to hope that others will have my back, and maybe other folks are quietly sick of Dirk’s bullshit. But often, the happy ending to this scary fantasy is that I simply slip away from the group and leave everybody else behind, to be Dirk's willing subjects.
And that is a happy ending — because if you can escape from Dirk, you should.
Music I Love Right Now
Black MacHine is a Brazilian soul/funk band that I recently stumbled across while looking for something else. Their early stuff is pretty solidly old-school funk: Here they are covering James Brown and Maceo Parker. Mostly, though, I’ve been listening to their 2022 live album, Black Na Live (Ao Vivo), which isn’t on their Bandcamp page (but it’s on Spotify and other services). Black Na Live is a scorching concert with more of a hip hop edge than their older stuff, and it slaps so hard, thanks to a series of guest vocalists. (My Portuguese is not good enough to understand all the raps, alas.) I’ve had this live album on heavy rotation for a few weeks and I’m still not tired of it. The wall of percussion and drums is amazing, and so is the slithering bassline. But what makes this album for me is the way the soft/punchy horn lines compliment the urgency of the vocals. The horns don’t sound like Tower of Power or Earth Wind & Fire to me, they’re more smooth and melodic, but they make everything else punch that much harder. Here’s the whole thing as a YouTube playlist:
