 Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982)
Today: Josephine Riesman, New York Times bestselling author of Ringmaster and True Believer.
Issue No. 265Mother, Should I Build a Wall?
Josephine Riesman
Mother, Should I Build a Wall?by Josephine RiesmanBy my sophomore year at Harvard, I was studying the social sciences, editing for the school newspaper, participating in a Jewish fellowship, keeping up a busy social schedule, and feeling so dedicated to my education that I petitioned the school to let me take more than the recommended number of classes (I just had to fit Intensive Russian in somehow). The pressure coming from within and without mounted until I was buckling under the weight of responsibility and expectation. I became my own punching bag, a target of constant self-criticism. I felt like everyone was judging me and finding me inadequate. I started seeing a therapist, but I kept deteriorating. Things took a turn for the worse when I started having so-called “suicidal ideations”—visions of self-harm that would burst into my mind uncontrollably. I desperately wanted to force them out, but I had no idea how to perform that kind of exorcism. Every day was a battle to restrain my thoughts and keep from screaming curses at myself in public. One April afternoon, I snapped. I stayed in a classroom after everyone else had left and, with numb determination, filled three chalkboards with nonsense poetry about some of my more gruesome ideations. Then I went home and engaged in self-harm for the first time, cutting up my shoulder with a scissor blade. When I told my therapist about it a few hours later, we agreed I had hit some kind of rock bottom. She drove me to a hospital and, in a daze, I checked myself into its mental ward. The most healing part of the six-day institutionalization was the isolation it offered. Far away from my peers, it was easy to ignore them and their accomplishments. At school I was surrounded by fellow overachievers, and I couldn’t escape the sense that they were somehow better than me at everything; that I was a twelfth-rate intellect and not worth anyone’s time. So, predictably, when I got back, my re-entry to the college community went terribly. I craved isolation again, and that craving led me to a strange place: the juvenile ramblings of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. For most of my life I had loathed the self-indulgent whining of Floyd frontman Roger Waters and his prog-rock coterie. Their music was somewhat forbidden in my household when I was growing up. I was a fan of Floyd descendants Radiohead, and I once asked my dad to buy me Dark Side of the Moon for a middle-school birthday. “Oh God,” Pop had sighed. “I already had to live through that band once. Please don’t make me do it again.” Throughout high school, I had carried on the familial tradition of snobbish disdain for Pink Floyd, a band for stoners who showed up late for class in stained ponchos. I was all about indie rock and laser-like focus on my studies. But in my post-hospital state, The Wall took on a new kind of meaning. Lines like “I can’t explain / You would not understand / This is not how I am,” bland and self-absorbed as they were, made sense to me in a way that other music didn’t. Within a few weeks, I became obsessed. I would lock myself in my room and play the bloated, 80-minute opus about the decline of fictional rock star Pink over and over again. The melodramatic excess of songs like “Hey You” and “Mother” made my anger and jealousy seem valid—artistic, even. But as I learned one May afternoon, my Floyd-fueled misanthropy was only a balm for my malaise, not a cure. While shuffling to an economics lecture in clothes I had been wearing for days, I saw my ex-girlfriend and her new beau in a stairwell. “Hey, Abe!” she said, cheerfully. I suddenly lost my command of basic human greetings. “Sorry!” I blurted. My vision started to blur with rage and panic. I ran down the stairs and into the basement. Just seeing her had reminded me of everything I could never do or have. She made great grades, she was rarely plagued by self-doubt, and she had a stable relationship. She had her sanity. All I had was the bombastic lyrics of Roger Waters. And now I needed him. I dashed through the basement hallways, looking for a place where I could listen to Floyd in peace and stop being a part of the world. I threw open the door of an empty, darkened room. I fumbled for my iPod like an addict with a bottle of pills, popped my earbuds in with shaking fingers, and hit play on Disc 2 of The Wall. In the dark, I started mouthing the words. As my pulse slowed, I flipped on the light and quickly recoiled in surprise. I could see myself. I was in a dance studio with mirrored walls. As my lips moved, I couldn’t look away from my reflection. Motionless, I started singing in full voice. I felt the same numb motivation that I’d felt in that other classroom, weeks before. I had to do something to physicalize what I felt. I started shouting the words. I started gesticulating. After about 20 minutes, I was doing a full-on reenactment of The Wall—my reflection was the performer and I was the audience. Then the Nazis took over. Midway through Disc 2, Waters declares, “Pink isn’t well / he’s staying back at the hotel / and he sent us along as a surrogate band/ We’re gonna find out where you fans really stand…” For three songs, these surrogates are in charge, and they attempt a fascist coup. As they took over, I stopped moving for a moment. Am I really going to do this part? But as the music swelled, I found the idea thrilled me, even though I wasn’t sure what was so thrilling about it. Grinning demonically, I shouted for all the Reds, the gays, and the Jews to be rounded up. My reflection pointed at me and screamed, “They’re gonna send you back to mother / in a cardboard box!” I goose-stepped and pumped my fists in the air. My heart raced. As the music pulsed in my headphones, I wiped my sweat-drenched brow, brought my heels together, and drew a deep breath. “Sieg heil!” I screamed, throwing up a Hitler salute. I was in ecstasy. That’s when it hit me. The album had something crucial to offer that I’d never understood before. Ugly as it is, the fascist portion of the album presents a profound way to deal with self-loathing. For a few exhilarating moments, I had done what Waters did—instead of just pitying or loathing myself, I became everything I hated. Once I’d undergone that transformation, I could release all my worst thoughts of self-destruction. I could order my hardened troops to destroy all the wimpy, emotionally troubled Jews like Abe Riesman. And when the fascists left the album, I had arrived at a firm stopping point. I’d accomplished what I couldn’t at the chalkboards: I got my urges out but remained in control. And I couldn’t have done it without the structure and focus of this music and the story it told. Against all odds and against my better musical judgment, I’d listened to what Pink Floyd had to say and heard something I could use. By the end I found myself collapsed on the floor, gasping for air. I felt my muscles unclench and my chest open up. Luckily, there hadn’t been any passersby—or at least if there had been, they’d been nice enough to leave a raving Nazi re-enactor alone. My depression wasn’t cured, but the visions and the rage died down. I felt like a functional person for the rest of the semester. And according to my iTunes, I haven’t listened to The Wall in full since that day. Thank God. Most of it’s pretty lame. This memory is still an uncomfortable one. Especially in a world where trans women such as myself are often accused of having a “Nazi phase,” I am reluctant to accept that the terrifyingly liberating 45 minutes or so even happened. But I admit to it because I gained insight into a much larger phenomenon that day.
Vivek Ramaswamy and Elise Stefanik were a year and two years ahead of me, respectively, as undergraduates at Harvard. Both majored in political science. I didn’t know either of them. But in the years since we all graduated, Elise has become one of the MAGA movement’s most jagged edges in the House of Representatives, gleefully lying and ripping up anything and anyone Donald Trump wants out of the way. Vivek, you may recall, helped found the DOGE enterprise that is currently ransacking the federal government and stealing private information about hundreds of millions of Americans. They are fascists, serving a fascist movement. Harvard isn’t solely to blame for Elise and Vivek going full fash, but it certainly didn’t help. The Ivy League is a fertile environment for casually cruel “maverick” ideas. Professors suggest top-down social engineering or justify the worst human tendencies, all with the sotto voce belief that the people who would be hurt aren’t worth considering. They couldn’t get into Harvard, after all. In the very first lecture of Introductory Economics—one of the too-many classes I was taking during the Pink Floyd incident—professor Gregory Mankiw, the architect of the George W. Bush tax cuts, told us that there should be no minimum wage and that human organs should be sold on the open market. The previous year, I’d taken a course on Evolutionary Psychology that kept emphasizing that rape was a natural part of primate behavior. I absorbed it all dutifully. “Elite” academic institutions like Harvard are built on a particular kind of toxicity and individualism that emerges when you pit competitive 18-to-22-year-olds against each other. It breeds bullshit and self-hatred. The burden of expectation and the lack of care for undergrad mental health has led to an epidemic of Harvard suicides. I could’ve been one, if not for the swift intervention of a (non-Harvard-affiliated) therapist. The pressure to be The Best combines with the propaganda you’re forced to swallow in order to get good grades, and out come damaged humans. I have no idea what Elise and Vivek’s moments of surrender to fascism were like for them. Perhaps these moments felt like mine, an opportunity to look in the mirror and destroy yourself. Elise is a woman. Vivek is brown-skinned. They long ago made a choice to politically assault their own essential selves. I’m sure it was comforting, on some level, to give in to that all-consuming, childlike hatred, whenever it happened. Perhaps it even felt like love. Roger Waters loves the Palestinian people, he says. He has been a relentless advocate for their struggle and a vicious critic of the Israeli government. In return, the Israeli government regularly calls him an antisemite. This is perhaps the only instance in which I agree with Israeli propaganda. Anti-Zionism is not definitionally antisemitic—overall, it is a noble cause—but it also attracts antisemitic conspiracists like Waters, who once said “the Jewish lobby is extraordinarily powerful here, and particularly in the industry that I work in, the music industry”; more recently, he suggested the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks were a “false flag” operation executed by Israel. And also, he regularly performs a version of what I did back in 2006: live renditions of the fascist portions of The Wall in provocative quasi-Nazi regalia, surrounded by fascist iconography. The genius of The Wall is the message that fascism had never really died, and would someday be brought back to power by bored, drugged-out celebrities chasing a new thrill. And so it has come to pass. But where is Roger? Is he out in the forefront denouncing the Americo-fascists who threw a Nazi-style rally at Madison Square Garden last year? Of course not; his aesthetics resemble theirs far too much. He’s also been pro-Putin and pro-Assad. He’s lost his way, if he ever had it. And yet. And yet. And yet. I am sitting here in exile this morning while my spouse sleeps in, listening to “Mother,” and understanding how people like Elise, Vivek, Donald, Roger, and Elon end up becoming conduits for evil. Fascism begins with loneliness. Loneliness begins in youth. The fascist impulse is to return to a youth you never had; one where you felt loved and in communion with other people, especially those with power over you. One where mom held you in her arms and you never had to grow up. “Mother, should I run for President?” Pink asks. “Mother, should I trust the government? Mother, will they put me in the firing line? Oh, is it just a waste of time?” “Mama’s gonna keep baby healthy and clean,” he replies in his mother’s voice. “Ooh, baby, you’ll always be baby to me.” Harvard is a terrible place. Don’t send your kids there. The place hates young people and minority groups, and it breeds loneliness—as do many other venerable American institutions that have briskly capitulated to ascendant fascism. This is the danger of the deeply destructive mindset of “meritocracy”: the people who don’t make it to the top are made to feel that it’s entirely their fault, that they are simply human garbage who didn’t have what it took to be The Best. All failure is your fault. And if you do make it to the top, you think you deserve to be there like God deserves to sit on Heaven’s throne—and though you may still be left feeling isolated and miserable, you will tolerate no threats to your dominance—a dominance you may well have just stolen or inherited. It’s lonely at both top and bottom.  Theatrical poster for 'The Wall', fair use image via Wikimedia Commons If loneliness has already found you: let art save you. We are bound and dragged by our urges, but the challenge of life is to satisfy them in ways that don’t annihilate the world around you. Listen to The Wall, feel that rage, and then put it away as best you can. I danced like a Nazi on a single day in 2006, and to some degree it exorcised me of the demons of isolation and self-loathing. What remained of it was done away with when I transitioned to being a woman. I no longer feel any temptation to destroy myself or be reborn as a creature of ecstatic violation. When I listen to The Wall today, in place of that self-hatred, I let myself feel the sorrow that hatred is built to mask. You shouldn’t trust the government. They will put you in the firing line. There are people who will send you back to mother in a cardboard box. These are facts worth grieving over. But the sorrow is not the end of our story. The struggle to live, to thrive, to be in community will never end. In this time of apocalyptic crisis, resist with all your might the urge to become comfortably numb.
FLAMING! AT THE DISCOSpend a hypnotic hour with Hydra Brian Hioe’s 2020 composition, Life is Just to Die, at Mixcloud.
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