We need to call out politicians who use mental illness as a scapegoat

Addressing the nation in the wake of Wednesday’s Florida school shooting, President Trump told the victims they “are never alone.” He offered to do “whatever we can do to ease your pain,” while committing “to working with local leaders to tackle the difficult issue of mental health.” In a tweet, he had this to say:

So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!

Other “true friends and champion[s]” were quick to add their two cents: Rick Scott called the shooting “pure evil.” Marco Rubio tweeted that the attack “was designed & executed to maximize loss of life,” but said it was too early to discuss gun control. The BBC reports that Rubio told Fox News "You should know the facts of that incident before you run out and prescribe some law that you claim could have prevented it.”

I’m not entirely sure what facts Rubio is waiting on here. We know that the FBI was notified twice that this individual might be planning such an attack, and we know the school was aware of the individual. We also know the shooter attained his AR15 (every gun nut’s favourite toy) legally.

When Mr. Trump asks people to report the “mentally disturbed,” I really don’t understand the logic. All the arguments for gun control are already out there, so it’s not hard to understand why this tweet is complete bullshit. Mr. Trump’s clear misunderstanding of mental health is the most obvious place to begin. Though the “mentally disturbed” argument is the common fallback of Trump, the GOP, and the NRA, few have ever really given an adequate definition for what they mean when referring to a “mentally disturbed” individual.

This is dangerous. Mr. Trump never defines exactly what he means by the terms “mentally disturbed” and “big problem,” and he never defines what he means what he means when he asks (who, exactly?) to “report such instances to authorities.” I guess President Trump is unaware that the FBI was already notified about this particular individual. Twice.

The president’s lack of clarity in this tweet leaves far too much room for individual interpretation. Given the continued prevalence of toxic stereotypes which are can be easily debunked with five minutes on the internet, it is not unreasonable to ask the President of the United States to qualify his statements.

Because right now it seems to me as though the President of the United States is aligning mental illness with white supremacy and mass murder for the express political purpose of backing the private interest group that paid over $17 million to GOP candidates in the 2015-2016 election cycle.

As someone who’s dealt with a lifelong struggle with depression and severe anxiety, I take personal offense to this. As someone who’s struggled with a health care system that can’t seem to provide answers for myself and others close to me, I’m angry that this kind of rhetoric is not being more widely questioned.

For a relative summation of my position here, I’d recommend watching John Oliver’s excellent segment on the subject. Mental illness – a health issue that effects an increasingly vast segment of the western society in a variety of ways – is the favoured scapegoat scape goat of gun lobbyists and the politicians who gladly accept their money. It happened after Las Vegas, and it happened after Orlando: these politicians and lobbyists are contributing a dangerous rhetoric to mental health discussions in order to avoid dealing with the political reality that the right has lost the gun control debate on all rational and intellectual grounds.

In practice, this means that politicians like Trump and Rubio consistently focus on the fact that the attacker can be broadly labelled “mentally ill.” Meanwhile, the systematic factors that contributed to the shooting –the killer’s background in foster care, his ties to white supremacists, the AR15 he was legally allowed to own despite multiple tip-offs to the authorities that he was potentially homicidal – are ignored.

The standard Republican response also allows sweeps politically inconvenient talking points under the rug – like the deleted Instagram account in which the shooter showed off his Make America Great Again swag.

After all, he was disturbed. Why dig deeper?

When mental illness is only just beginning to lose its stigma in the west, it is the responsibility of moral individuals to question the narrative Trump is setting. By consistently aligning the experience of legitimately “sick individual[s]” with the fraction of mentally ill people who turn violent (almost always due to other factors such as, I stress again, white supremacy), Trump and others like him are hijacking a growing awareness over an important issue for political purposes.

To my knowledge, Mr. Trump has not once publically mentioned mental illness outside the context of gun control.

Since this rhetoric has an impact that echoes far beyond the borders of the United States, the responsibility to criticize the precedent set at that country’s highest level also falls outside those borders. That’s why I’m writing this piece. That’s why I’d like to see Prime Minister Trudeau do more than give his “deepest condolences” in between his Team Canada tweets.

In the future, I’d like to see the Prime Minister and other Parliamentarians directly question the toxic narrative that is consistently being spread in our southern neighbours. At the very least, this would be a good time to bring up the issue of Canada’s chronically underfunded mental health system.

One final note. About a year ago, I wrote a post in which I pointed out the value of history in interpreting the new Trump presidency. I asked readers to be vigilant, using an example from the historical moment most clearly comparable to today’s America, 1930s Germany. I attempted emphasize how Hitler utilized public apathy as a key weapon in Germany’s slow move from democracy to dictatorship.

The mentally ill were one of this dictatorship’s first distinct targets, along with Jewish and Romany communities.  

In addition to Nazi Germany, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Imperial Japan, and Communist Cuba all explicitly utilized the mentally ill for political purposes, often to delegitimize political opponents. The list goes on. In the west, a time when mental illness was a primary fallback for those who opposed female suffrage remains in living memory. Though as a culture we seem to have forgotten this.

I’m angry. Gun lobbyists and their political allies are using the lived experience of millions – my lived experience – to justify their blatant corruption and inaction. We should all be angry.

Star Wars in the Twenty-First Century

Last week, I finally got around to seeing The Last Jedi.

I’ll admit, I had some trepidation. I’d seen the Rotten Tomatoes debacle, heard about fan reactions. Low expectations were a part of why I took so long to see the film. The spoiler-free reviews I read seemed pretty promising, but that was almost even more discouraging. Was The Last Jedi just going to be another example of why critical opinions need to be taken with a grain of salt?

As it turned out, The Last Jedi reminded me why I tend to take fan reactions with a grain of salt.

To avoid spoilers, it’s only the last week I’m letting myself read commentary and the fan reactions. But after watching the movie and reading the articles that have slowly accumulated in a folder on my desktop, it seems the main justification for the vitriol is that the movie “absolutely ruins 30 years of cinema lore.”

While there is a kernel of truth in this statement, I have to admit, I find this thinking somewhat reductive.

In responding to that particular Tweet and the countless fans who agree with its sentiment, I’ll start by acknowledging that, yes, The Last Jedi disappointed me. It was a disappointment for the little boy who’s still somewhere in there, that continues to drive my fandom. In many ways, The Last Jedi spit in the face of the little boy who watched the originals as long ago as he can remember before getting his own generation of Star Wars.

This newest movie disappointed the part of me that drives my belief that Return of the Jedi is the best of the series. In many ways, The Last Jedi is the sequel to Episode VI we never saw with The Force Awakens.  Like all good sequels, The Last Jedi addresses the legacy of its predecessor. Luke’s bleak monologues cut to the romantic heart of Return of the Jedi’s neat fantasy ending: the comradery, the optimism, the mythologizing. The kid inside who continues to idolize Luke’s hero’s journey felt pretty hurt and even offended by the writers’ cynical manipulation of the mythology.

I get why people dislike this movie.

But I’m no longer just that kid. I’m also an adult who attempts to engage at least somewhat critically with the cultural artifacts I am exposed to.

My adult reaction to any offense taken after seeing The Last Jedi is basically this… the existence of a third Star Wars trilogy in a universe where George Lucas sold his baby to Disney is fucking offensive.

Most of the problems with both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi can be directly tied to the fact that the series should not even exist. Any manipulation of fan-favoured franchise lore isn’t the fault of a single writer or his film. His directing is not the reason Luke seems like an entirely different character in this movie. It would have been inevitable. Luke’s story ended with Return of the Jedi.

Any problems arising with his character can be traced back to the increasing commodification of franchises like Star Wars by entertainment giants (remember, Disney also owns Marvel Entertainment). Rian Johnson seems to understand this, and I wonder if this knowledge played a part in his choice to characterize Luke this way. Is it, perhaps, a statement? At the very least, he’s given an alternative to the predictably Yoda imitator we might have ended up with under a different director.

Whatever people say about the prequel trilogy fit, it directly into the creative vision Lucas created. The first follow up trilogy enhanced the franchises core themes and deepened the universe (providing space to revive a dying expanded universe) while mostly acknowledging the original trilogy as its foundation piece. This new trilogy was unplanned, clearly a product of corporate machinations. Our Twitter friend succinctly summarizes what many of us have been thinking since 2012: “cash cow only and goodbye to all that made #StarWars great.”

I’m almost tempted to say the world did end in 2012, because the world where Star Wars fandom is untainted by the postmodern malaise is no more. Hence, I return to my reaction The Last Jedi: I loved it. It’s up there with the best of the canon, precisely because it understands the place Star Wars is at in the 21^st century.

One of Star Wars’ many values is its reflection of the culture that produces it. The original trilogy reflected Reagan-era anti-communist rhetoric, centered on a hero’s journey to join the collective fight against the evil Empire. Concerned with diversifying the series mythology, the prequel trilogy is perennially well suited for the post-9/11 world, dissecting empires, republics, and religions. In the prequel trilogy, we witness an outdated order being torn down in a manner that seems both reflective and eerily prophetic. The prequel trilogy remains relevant when we look back from sixteen plus years into the War in Afghanistan.

Rian Johnson asks hard questions that have always existed in the Star Wars franchise but have never been tackled in the film’s main line. He exposes some of the problematic thinking promoted by the original Star Wars series, and the way that dogged faith in organizations and religions can exacerbate these problems. Despite Return of the Jedi’s optimistic ending, I’ve always wondered if the Jedi need to return. It was, after all, (as Luke notes at one point in the new film) the overconfident and bureaucratic Jedi order that allowed Darth Sidious to organize the Empire and order the Jedi’s destruction.

Perhaps, The Last Jedi asks, it is time to stop looking for the past for answers. This, of course, brings the film into conversation with contemporary political debates.

The Republic and the Empire both function as analogies for the American state. Though fans debate over how those analogies map onto the real world, look around the world today. Does any other political entity represent the First Order better than the United Sates and the late capitalist west more generally? Specifically, who better represents the First Order’s incompetent and extremist leadership than those politicians currently sitting in the White House?  

It’s no longer enough to joke about “the only other woman in the galaxy” as some form of empty lip service. It’s time to actively dismantle and deconstruct the institutions that reproduce social ills. On the fandom level, that means criticizing franchises like Star Wars and others when they fail to promote socially diverse narratives. It means questioning elements of fandom that are unwilling to compromise their views about the social ramifications that fiction has.

In terms of the franchise’s creative direction, it means little humanization for the villains and even less romanticism in dealing with them. The Last Jedi excellently deconstructs the naiveté of believing in the good inside. In real life, the good guy doesn’t turn, the eleventh hour plan fails, and a petulant man child is in charge of the most dangerous and powerful military in the galaxy. In real life, a villain’s backstory is second to the threat he poses threat. In the real world, actions define a person.

The Last Jedi is the first truly adult Star Wars film not just because it strays heavily into PG territory but because it is aware of itself and the franchise as a set of cultural artifacts with social ramifications. While the child in me will always love the original trilogy the best, The Last Jedi seems to point towards a future where nine films form a unified progressive update to the six-episode saga my heart still considers the core of Star Wars.

Mishandled, though, J.J. Abrams and Episode IX’s creative team risk dismissing some of the thematic depths reached in The Last Jedi. Though The Last Jedi is certainly one of Star Wars’ best moments, this seems largely due to Rian Johnson’s update to George Lucas’s creative vision. Two years on from The Force Awakens, I’m still unsure how I feel about this new trilogy.

Black Mirror’s “USS Callister:” Understand but Do Not Defend Toxic Nerd Culture

SPOILER ALERT. Don’t read on if you haven’t yet watched “USS Callister” from season four of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror.

Since the series released at the end of December, there has been a lot of talk about “USS Callister,” an exceptionally well promoted episode that was far from the Star Trek parody we all expected. Highly in tune with the show’s best moments, Black Mirror’s most cinematic episode to date is a chilling critique of systemic issues in science fiction fandom and nerd culture at large.

To quickly recap, the plot goes like this: after her first day working for the developers of the online virtual reality videogame Infinity Nannette Cole wakes up in outer space aboard the USS Callister, a ship reminiscent the original USS Enterprise. The crew of the Callister, her coworkers at the Callister Inc. tech company, inform her that she is a digital copy of Nannette created by her boss Robert Daly, and that both the Callister and its crew are trapped in an offline development version of Infinity where Captain Daly rules as a god in a make-believe world.

The episode’s themes are hinted at from the beginning as Nannette explains how she left her previous workplace after being the victim of bullying. Her new workplace is apparently little different, filled with disrespectful interns and gossiping coworkers. Though Daly’s psychopathy is quickly revealed, he is introduced as a shy loner who is clearly mistreated by these people. It is implied that Daly, like Nannette, has long been the victim of bullying. For ten minutes, he is one of Black Mirror’s most relatable characters. The audience understands that, at one point, Daly was perhaps little different from the countless young men who find a much needed (and harmless) escape offered by fandom.

It’s here that some concerns about the episode have arisen. A lot of viewers take issue with the episode arguing that science fiction fans shook the Daly stereotype years ago. This is true. In the age of Elon Musk, The Big Bang Theory, and a third Star Wars trilogy, it’s acceptable and sometimes even cool to be a nerd. But I after watching this episode, I can’t help thinking of the acquaintances who regularly attend Calgary’s Comic Expo every year yet view themselves as somehow different from the cosplayers. Passionate nerds continue to be othered.

Straight out of a little boy's imagination

This increase in mainstream superficial interest in nerd culture has, I think, played a huge role in why the fandoms I love are becoming increasingly taken over by an internet-filtered toxic ethos. For decades, nerd culture has centered on a degree of enforced but proud difference from a superficial mainstream society. The fact that this difference is currently being commodified on every level (Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe is a great example of this) is a strong force in the maintenance of toxic nerd culture.

Viewers who insist that Trekkies long ago shook the Daly stereotype misunderstand Brooker’s characterization of Daly as a literally different person inside the game. The sadistic and cruel Captain Daly has escaped so far removed from our reality that he has forgotten the philosophical motivations of the Space Fleet he loves. Meanwhile, programmer Robert Daly is a soft spoken individual who displays a clear sensitivity to the world around him. He seems to maintain the earnest passion we nerds identify with, and he is clearly a person who has long suffered as a social pariah. It is implied that, in the real world, Nannette’s desperate pleas for kindness might have been heard by Robert Daly, if her voice had not been filtered through the ears of Captain Daly.

At the episode’s beginning, Robert Daly was the character with whom I have identified most in four seasons of Black Mirror; he then he became the singular most disgusting villain in the show’s history. This is no accident. In a show where each episode’s core theme can be summed up in a sentence, the juxtaposition of the two aspects of Daly’s character is where this episode’s central concern lies.

Robert Daly

One wonders what sort of a person Robert Daley might have become if he had a strong social group to ground him in reality. Watching this episode, I found myself wondering who Robert Daly might be if he spent his time around a Dungeons and Dragons table rather than an online community populated by the likes of Gamer691. I assume that the reason Aaron Paul’s character picked this tag is that Gamer69 was taken. How might this world have changed a more innocent version of Daly?

The point Brooker is trying to make is that while many are born with the potential for evil actions, few are destined for them. Without a secure anchor to reality, these behaviours can and will escalate. This is especially true in an online space where the loudest voices are generally bullies living out their own fantasies of power.

In the end, Captain Daly has become so isolated from his redeemable characteristics that it is simply unrealistic to suggest he represents any kind of fandom stereotype. The sympathetic and understandable character we were introduced to at the episode’s outset has been replaced entirely by a sociopathic sex predator. Here, Brooker’s message is pretty clear: a monster is a monster is a monster, regardless of circumstance.

At the end of the day, “USS Callister” is an attempt to understand toxic behaviour without in any way condoning it. The episode sends nerd culture a prescient message: while escapism is important, it cannot to happen in isolation from its real world consequences.

But a criticism of toxic nerd culture is too simple a takeaway for Black Mirror. As always, Brooker wants us to look at ourselves and understand that, while horrific actions cannot be excused, a little kindness and human connection goes a long way to preventing them from happening.