sunday energy #56

on fire

“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

So, there’s this meme, and the meme is the world:

A cartoon dog wearing a hat, dead-eyed, smiling blithely as he declares, “THIS IS FINE” to a burning room. You’ve probably seen the image many times over the last decade. The brilliance of it is its easy applicability and appropriation to fit almost any scenario.

You might have seen it on Reddit or Twitter or Tumblr with a caption like “me during finals week 😩,” or “introverts at a party be like.” Maybe you saw the official GOP Twitter account use it in 2016 to mock the Democratic National Convention. Or heard it strangely referenced by Sen. Richard Burr during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian interference during the election 2018.

When the artist KC Green first published the images above as part of a webcomic in 2013, he didn’t anticipate that they would eventually be weaponized in political squabbles, applied to all kinds of self-delusion and detached despair. He himself was climbing out of a deep hole of depression, trying to launch a viable career in the world of comics and feeling overwhelmed. Out of the womb of that overwhelm “On Fire” was born, its first two panels quickly going viral.

But there’s more to the comic, as Green explained in this 2017 interview:

He's sitting there completely happy, very wide eyes, and just says, This is fine, when everything is burning around him. Like, literally everything is just on fire. He continues to say, Uh, I'm okay with the events that are currently unfolding. Then his arm catches fire and he [says], That's okay. Things are going to be okay. And then he melts away. Most people have probably seen the first two panels, which is him sitting quietly in the fire and then saying, This is fine.

The other day a friend sent me a long voice note. They caught me up on how life has been since we last saw each other, describing a series of increasingly unfortunate events — family drama, work drama, relationship drama, and of course the general miasmic atmosphere of impending doom that has come to define life in the 2010s and 2020s thus far. In a bid to finish their missive with some levity they quipped, “It’s giving ‘this is fine.’ The world is on fire.”

I hadn’t thought of the meme in a while, but my friend’s reference prompted me to look it up, the whole comic, and when I saw those rather graphic final two panels they struck me almost instantly as a kind of portrait of the world. A prophecy, a warning, a reflection of something ugly that we’re all living through. If the dog is all the people willing to tolerate the horrors of white supremacy and capitalism if it means they get to maintain some deluded semblance of comfort; the fire is genocide, climate apocalypse, the rise of fascism, the carnage of capitalist war-mongering.

The world is, quite literally, burning. The phrase “hottest summer on record” gets more ubiquitous and more sinister by the minute. There are suffocating heat domes taking lives in India, wildfires tearing through millions of acres of land in North America. In Sudan, fire has been used as a cruel tactic of war, with hundreds of settlements and villages burned down. Everything is on fire. Hotels filled with terrified refugees in the UK, a Nigerian carer’s car flipped over and torched by fascist thugs. In Gaza: tent camps, schools & universities, hospitals, mosques, apartment buildings—all burning, with innocent people burning inside them.

And while the conflagaration continues, intensifies, there is a so-called ruling class that looks on, collectively chanting “this is fine,” a mantra of delusion to obscure the truth: that they are willing to watch the world burn as long as they can still turn a profit. I’ve been so confused by this. Like, if you burn it all down, there will be nothing left to steal?? Nothing left to kill?? Nothing left to exploit?? Everything will be burned to ash. Including them. But it has occurred to me that these people really don’t see themselves as a part of the world they are burning. These people really think they’ll be able to just find ways to profit off the ashes.

There is a suicidal urge, a death drive in capitalism and white supremacy, that “this is fine” perfectly encapsulates. The dog knows it is burning alive. In fact, it wants to. (Sometimes I imagine, just out of frame of the comic, a water hose waiting for someone to do something with it.) For those comfortably ensconced in the delusional promises of neoliberalism, death is far easier than doing something to change our collective circumstances.

This is fine, they say, as bombs funded by the Biden-Harris administration tear apart a school full of children. This is fine, they say, insisting that once Harris is in office they will hold her accountable. When they can’t even hold themselves accountable.

And so, in lieu of accountability, they laugh at the dog in the burning house. Because what else is there to do? They generate and consume an endless stream of memes about Brat summer and being “very demure” and coconuts falling out of trees and don’t think too hard about how the meme-fication of our world has led us to a place where everything is, or has the potential to be, a reference of a reference, decontextualized, stripped of meaning, easily digestible yet devoid of nourishment. By design.

Listen, it’s no shade. I love a meme. I love an escape. I myself am grappling with the distraction and the dissociation of these times. Posting my little moodboards, trying to find medicine in a poisoned well. We need coping mechanisms to get through all the tiny and big apocalypses we’re living through. We need ways to get through the fire. But how do you get through a thing that you won’t even acknowledge is happening? That’s my question to the gworls who still seem so strangely invested in a world that doesn’t exist, that indeed never actually existed:

A world in which a Black woman president is tantamount to progress. A world in which hierarchy and success and social/professional clout is more interesting and urgent than the preservation of human life. A world in which attention is currency. A world in which only about a thousand people actually exist, and everyone else — billions of people — are hypothetical humans, at best. A world in which detachment and disaffected contrarianism is considered some signal of intellectual or moral superiority and fortitude. In other words, a world where nothing real matters.

I think what I’m trying to say is that even as the world burns, I yearn for meaning. I yearn for something more beautiful, more honest, to rise from the ashes. I yearn for things to have meaning beyond little snippets of virality, little panels of resonance that go only so deep. I yearn for a world where we can hope for more than a kind of passive horror. I want to believe that we can do more than just sit in the fire and smile.

read

• Next Sunday, August 25, my new workshop Through A Lens Darkly: Film Criticism for BIPOC Writers, begins. There are still a few spots left - you can register here and read more about the class in my previous post here.

  

• These words from Saul Williams sum it up:

• Shout out to Fariha Róisín who recently sent me this piece by Marina Magloire, “Moving Towards Life.” Pulling from research and correspondence across three archives, Magloire recounts the falling out June Jordan and Audre Lorde had over the issue of Zionism in the wake of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. This is a wild and illuminating and deeply important read.

• Lisa Lowe on comprehending fascism in our time, in conversation with Alberto Toscano’s book Late Fascism:

  

• This quote from Alok V. Menon’s interview on the We Are Man Enough podcast:

  “People have been taught to fear the very things that have the potential to set them free. This has nothing to do with trans and non-binary people - it’s never been about us. It’s not about what we look like, it’s about what they feel like. And they don’t know how to feel love like we can give. And that’s why marginalized communities are persecuted. It’s not because of what we look like, what we’re saying our identities, our pronouns, our nomenclatures, our language, our scholarship. It’s because of the presence of love that people feel like they can’t actually inherit on this earth. And so the reason there is so much violence that men are siphoning onto us is because they don’t love themselves.”

watch

• The other week I had the pleasure of moderating a Rooftop Films screening of Seeking Mavis Beacon, a kaleidoscopic documentary film written/directed by Jazmin Jones in collaboration with Olivia McKayla Ross. Chronicling Jazmin and Olivia’s search for the woman who became the face of the popular Mavis Beacon typing game, it’s part detective story, part exploration of the impact of Black women/femme people on tech and AI, and part meditation on the digital and spiritual technologies we use to navigate the world. If you’re in NY the film opens at IFC Center on 8/30, in LA, SF & Chicago on 8/6 and in select Cities on 9/13. Here’s the trailer below:

• Came across this rare tape of Julie Dash interviewing Octavia E. Butler in 1995 — it’s unedited so there are a lot of stops and starts and moments of candid mundanity, which I love.

• Dr. Joy James speaking about abolition and revolutionary love in February 2024 — she has a lot of clarifying things to say here about hope, and about the traps of representational politics.

• Doechii gets it.

listen

• Recently discovered this artist Nemahsis and I really like this song, so very nostalgic:

• This episode of Guerrilla History has a really great conversation with Rajesh Thind about his three-part Channel 4 docuseries Defiance: Fighting the Far Right and the rise of fascist terrorism in Britain over the past several months.

some Sunday energy:

A still from Chantal Akerman's ‘Portrait of a Lazy Woman’ (1986)