The Grim Reader: Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger

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Is Doppleganger the right book to add to The Grim Reader series? It has a breadth and scope that is deeply necessary. It is personal. It is political. It gives voice to all kinds of issues from our ecological crisis to rising fascism. So, yes.

On the surface, the book is about the unfortunate mix-ups Naomi Klein has had to endure between herself and Naomi Wolf. Wolf used to be a well regarded feminist academic, but at some point, she took a turn in another direction. The book that brought her widespread attention, The Beauty Myth, was good. Although it didn’t add anything new to the understanding of how beauty is used to hold women back (this was already well trodden ground), Wolf was a new, young, and welcome voice on the scene and gave the argument a new (and beautiful) face. I used her work when I taught Women’s Studies at the college level.

Meanwhile, Klein, became a well known feminist progressive, environmental activist, and political activist. She is the writer behind No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. She tried for years to shrug off the mix ups between the two Naomis. Although harmless at first, as the years wore on, Wolf veered into territory that was anathema to Klein and mix ups became more embarrassing. Over time, Klein became interested in (and possibly obsessed over) how someone like Wolf could change her world views so radically.

Klein’s exploration into Wolf’s transformation brings her to a profound book about mirror images, doubling, or doppleganging. In a way, Doppleganger is a book about how we all contain multitudes. If you’ve ever asked yourself how your Uncle Jim or your mom or someone who you used to know as a great helper-parent in your neighbourhood school or volunteer at the food bank became a FOX News watching, conspiracy-minded, MAGA hat wearing, flag waving, vaccination fearing, Pierre Pollievre supporting, maybe even gun-toting, freedom screaming, convoy supporter, this book is for you. It actually helped me understand how it happens.

I have to admit that even I mixed the two Naomis up, a fact that I am embarrassed about now. I had thought that the incredible foundational error that Wolf made in writing one of her books, Outrages, was an error Klein had made in one of her new books. Oops. But because, in my mistaken mind, it was Klein, I shrugged it off as an “everyone makes mistakes” moment. It did not, to me, change anything about the brilliance of her earlier books, No Logo or The Shock Doctrine. But now that I know it was the other Naomi, can I extend the same grace to Wolf and say that this big mistake she made doesn’t change anything about The Beauty Myth? 

Sure. I guess.

It’s definitely harder because of Wolf’s turn to the right and the new company she keeps, like Steve Bannon. But it is important to give people like Wolf a little grace. How else can they come back?

One of the things Klein finds is that the difference between herself and Wolf and their increasingly divergent ideas is the difference between having a world view that is community oriented versus one that is more individually focussed. As Wolf’s shine wore off, she was all about finding another platform on which she could remain a darling. And find it she did. As a sociologist, I appreciate Klein’s observation that individual goals lead to different outcomes than more community-minded goals. I might even rephrase it to say that the difference between being Naomi Wolf or Naomi Klein is that Klein has a sociological imagination (with thanks to C. Wright Mills) and Wolf does not, or at least, does not anymore.

Klein writes, “These doubles share one thing in common: all are ways of not seeing. Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing an idealized version of ourselves), not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others), and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision). I think this, more than anything else, explains the uncanny feeling of our moment in history–with all of its mirrorings, synthetic selves, and manufactured realities. At bottom, it comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see–in our past, in our present, and inthe future racing toward us.” And in ourselves. We all have an authoritarian toddler within us screaming for control. Most of us learn to get past that and live with others in a society working towards mutual benefit.

It is that simple. And that complex. And the road Klein takes herself on to get herself and her readers here is fascinating. Quoting prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba, Klein reminds us “Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” And we are going to have to understand all kinds of people to do anything worthwhile.

On a personal note:

I read Doppleganger while in the midst of a critical health crisis. I started reading it at home, had it with me for a week in the hospital and finished it when I got home again. In that period, I had been told my illness was terminal. Then the doctors found a way to save me. I post this two months later, after three more hospital stays, one of which included open-heart surgery. The fact that I can be (hopefully) cogent again is promising. I have yet one more very difficult surgery ahead and my current hospital stay will not be my last.

All of this is happening in a time when SARS-CoV-2 has been allowed to run rampant, as though it isn’t a killer disease, a disease that can affect every organ of every body, a disease that is chronic for many, a disease that is the source of a mass disabling event. I navigate this while trying to deal with my own non-covid related situation. Mitigations have been dropped in favour of keeping a society looking “normal,” that is, like it is 2019. As though we can choose the changes that happen around us constantly and reject some of them. As though we can keep our heads in the sand.

As of April 8, there is no longer a mask mandate enforced in BC hospitals. Some of my own doctors don’t wear masks and it makes me wonder if I can trust their medical knowledge. But the demands of capital have won out over the needs of sick people. It all became political and public health is now a joke, existing in name only. This is also considered within the pages of Doppleganger.

What’s happening to me personally is life and death. What’s happening to all of us collectively is life and death. The trend towards authoritarianism, the casual eugenics, (well, it’s ONLY those with co-morbidities that are dying, it’s ONLY the frail and elderly, it’s ONLY the disabled) and the genocide(s) taking place across the world are all related. Klein knows this. She looks at Hitler’s Germany, and specifically the life’s work of Hans Asperger who went from being someone trying to help children who were a little different live full lives to someone who was selecting which “disabled” children would die within the Nazi’s genocidal machine. Klein  writes, “Asperger’s jarring career trajectory demonstrates that, in just a handful of years, the same institutions and some of the very same people can shift from an ethos of care and curiosity toward a vulnerable group to one of callousness and genocidal cleansing. As if a switch has been flipped.”

I’ve noticed this with a lot of people throughout the pandemic. So has Klein. The admittedly weak and nascent efforts at community protection we saw in the beginning of 2020 completely turned around. Now wearing a mask or getting a vaccine is thought of as a bad thing by an apparently vast swath of people. Or maybe they are a particularly loud minority. Whoever they are, they have won. Protecting each other is a long-gone ethos. She cites examples of people on the vaccine-feaing, invermectin-promoting side saying the weak should die. And as a person who is now one of the weak, effectively barred from participation in much of society because no one is willing to wear a mask anymore or put any effort or resources into creating cleaner indoor air, I can tell you, it sure feels eugenic to me. As I mentioned above, even my own doctors don’t always wear masks. I’m sure they care about me (at least abstractly) and they have put a lot of their skill and effort into keeping me alive, but they just don’t see how careless they are.

Caring and careless. At the same time. For example, I have no doubt that some of those same people who were banging pots and pans in support of health care workers in early 2020 wouldn’t deign to put a mask on to save the health and life of a health care worker today if they had to go into their doctor’s office or to the hospital. Nor will they wear a mask to save their own life. Or mine. In short, we are “both this and that.”

And this is the key realization of Klein’s opus. Both individual people and even states can be “victim and victimizer at the same time.” One of her most extraordinary and helpful conclusions is that what makes the difference between going “there” and not going “there” is one’s attachment to a sense of community or society and an understanding of class. My sociologist soul rejoices at this conclusion.

Klein writes, “The disability justice advocate and author Beatrice Adler-Bolton refers to the mindset that has animated so much Covid denialism as ‘deaths pulled from the future’–which she defines as the judgement laden posture that frames ‘deaths from Covid-19 as somehow preordained’ because the people doing most of the dying were probably going to die prematurely anyway. Covid just moved up the timelines a few years, so what’s the bid deal?” Klein states clearly, “this is fascist thought. More specifically, it is genocidal thought. It recalls the ways in which colonial massacres were rationalized because within the ranking of human life created by pseudoscientific racists, Indigenous peoples, such as the original residents of Tasmania, were cast as ‘living fossils.’ … Indigenous peoples were, in this telling, the pre-dead, with extermination merely serving to accelerate the inevitable timeline.”

I am not keen on being shunted aside as the pre-dead. I’d appreciate being able to keep every day I might have to experience this troubling body and all of the joy and love it is capable of manifesting.

The planet itself and our eco-systems are disabled now. Our work must be care-based in this “time of planetary shocks and layered disasters.” Our most prevalent state is “chronic impairment,” says disability rights theorist Sunaura Taylor. Klein quotes her saying, “As a disabled person I recognize this as disability… What we live with in the present and will for decades to come, even under the best-case scenario, is mass ecological disablement of the more than human world, a disablement that is utterly entangled with the disablement of human beings. Given this, it seems vital to consider what forms of care, treatment and assistance this age of disability will require.”

On the final page of Doppleganger, Klein writes, “Negotiating that doubling [that is, the doppleganger]–between our younger selves and our older selves, between our public selves and our private selves, between our living selves and our dying selves–is part of what it means to be human.” My living, disabled self has a huge stake in all of it.

This is where Doppleganger lands for me. The mini-thesis inside the bigger thesis is about disability. I am in my age of disability in a world that is already disabled watching another mass disability event play out among humans during the sixth great extinction. I watch these events through wildfire smoke and sometimes through a hospital window. While there are still hospitals. There is something powerful and necessary about facing what’s real. I think constantly about words like accessibility and inclusion. I think about what they mean for me, for the forests. I think about what it means to truly respect every living thing, as it is, to know that it has an inherent purpose all of its own, even when damaged. Naomi Klein is still thinking about this. Her Doppleganger is not.

Read Dopplegnager. Tell me what you think.

 

An open letter to my health care providers: you are irreplaceable.

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As you know, I’m in a health crisis. You are one of many professionals who are applying their skills, expertise, experience, and knowledge to helping me get through this. I appreciate you more than words can convey. Your care is the difference between life and death for me.
And I’m worried about you.
Many of you are not taking the pandemic seriously. You act like it is over and talk about it in the past tense. Covid, that is SARS-CoV-2, is a Level 3 biohazard, like tuberculosis. It is spread through the air like smoke. Once you get it, it often presents as a cold or flu, but it is so much more. It is a vascular disease. It potentially affects every part of your body, every organ (including your brain), your blood, and your immune system. It has long-lasting effects that we are only beginning to understand. There are a plethora of peer reviewed studies examining the harm that Covid can cause. For years now, some have suggested Long Covid could be a mass disabling event. It already is. Over three million Canadians have already experienced symptoms of Long Covid. Many people with Long Covid cannot work. The first major study of doctors with Long Covid in Britain reveals it has impacted the respondents’ ability to work and to carry out regular day-to-day activities. Almost one in five said they were no longer able to work because of their post-covid ill-health.
You are around sick people all the time. I urge you to wear a good mask, that is, a respirator. Yes, it would help me, but again, I am also worried about you. You are so important. So few people can do what you do. It takes years of training and practice and hard work. You studied for years to be able to do this. Your knowledge is so needed right now. And you are irreplaceable. Irreplaceable.
I have conversations with those of you who are obviously dedicated to protecting yourselves from Covid. You wear respirators and some of you wear face shields too. I appreciate the care you are taking. Some of you only work nights now or take only occasional shifts. Some of you have left full time employment. This is a huge loss for those of us who need you, but I understand. And I support you. It is safer. As one of you said, you have to protect yourself and your family.
Some of you wear the masks that your employer provides. They are better than nothing, and I appreciate the effort. But often they are not N95. They are not respirators. Maybe your employer, the health region, the hospital, the doctor’s practice, could provide better respirators.
Even though in my region, there is currently a mask mandate in all patient areas in hospitals, everyone behaves differently. Some of you introduce yourself and take a breath, peel off your mask for a second so I can see your face, and put your mask back on. I understand why you are doing that, but you don’t have to. I can see what’s going on in your eyes.
Some of you, particularly those at intake desks, still think being behind a clear plastic barrier is enough. It is not. Air travels over, under, and around these barriers and Covid travels in the air.
Some of you pull down your mask when we get into an important conversation, a life and death conversation, or when you are trying to make sure I understand you. Don’t worry: I can understand you through your mask.
Some of you wear masks in the hospital but not in your offices.
Some of you don’t wear them at all.
Masking is a vital part of infection control. It is a vital part of protecting yourself.
You are irreplaceable to me, as your patient, and to your other patients. There is no one else who knows what you know the way that you know it. No one else has your exact experience.
You are even more irreplaceable to your families and your loved ones. Irreplaceable.
I’m going to say something wild here: I love you. All of you. Even the bossy nurse whose poor mask wearing set the tone for the rest of the medical staff in that unit and left everyone less safe. Even you. You obviously have skills. You were the one who got everyone’s questions. You were the one who knew how everything worked. You are so important. We can’t lose you. Please, wear a mask. You are needed. You are irreplaceable. You are loved.
With gratitude and respect,
Your patient,
Jane

Fire Weather by John Vaillant: The Grim Reader

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What can I say about Fire Weather than hasn’t already been said? Grim reading, for sure. Vaillant is a brilliant writer. He could not be more clear and he surely deserves every accolade he has received for this book (and more). This is one of those texts that makes science accessible to the non-scientist, like myself. If you want to understand how our exploitation of oil and gas have forever changed our atmosphere, this is the book to read.

Cover of John Vaillant’s Fire Weather

Vaillant offers an account of the terrible fires in Fort McMurray in 2016 that saw the evacuation of an entire city. Fire Weather is almost excessively detailed, at times offering a house-by-house, heartbreaking and terrifying account of the destructive power of the fires that engulfed this northern outpost. The portraits drawn of the people in charge of the fire fighting efforts and of ordinary citizens are compelling. The fear is palpable, the losses almost inconceivable.

Irony is front and centre. Fort Mac is a city built for the express purpose of enabling the exploitation of the vast tar sands that ultimately falls victim to the destructive forces of all the carbon dioxide unleashed by the use of oil and gas. And it’s not just Fort Mac. Our whole society is dependent on oil and gas and will be undone by it.

Having lived in Alberta for a couple of decades and having a daughter who worked in the oil sands briefly as an engineer, I have an inkling of what life is like there, of what they do, of the indelible scars left on the landscape. I also know that I use products made from oil and gas every day. Our modern life is predicated on oil and gas, on plastic, on the burning of fossil fuels.

On a recent visit back to that province, I was shocked by how many people had never heard of Vaillant’s book when I asked if they had read it. Here is a “home town story” in a way, about Albertans, even heroic Albertans, a book that has been on everyone’s must read lists, a New York Times bestseller, and in my admittedly limited experience, few of the Albertans I talked to had read it or even heard of it.

But it also doesn’t matter. What happened in Fort Mac is a global phenomenon now. Maybe it is unfair to ask those most enmeshed in a deadly system to lead themselves out of it.

I’m probably wrong, but I always think change comes mostly from the outside of systems needing change. Sometimes, people with “outsider knowledge” get inside a system and try to work from there. Certainly the understanding that something is amiss is often pointed out by outsiders first. Unfortunately in this case, oil and gas companies have so much power that they can stifle almost any effort that might limit their profit. Vaillant describes how this happens in his book too, and the depth of the deception by oil and gas interests that he details is astonishing. They knew. They always knew.

I also have some limited experience with wildfire smoke. I lived in the southern interior of BC for a time and the smoke would roll into the valley every summer as the temperatures got higher and the ground drier. I know the inescapability of it. Last year, smoke seemed to be everywhere; Toronto, New York City, Vancouver. A section of Vaillant’s book had me remembering what it was like to sit in the back of my parents’ station wagon while they smoked cigarettes up front, windows rolled up. Our world is as closed an environment as my parents’ car was.

Vaillant writes, “Fort McMurray, founded at the dawn of the Petrocene Age, has grown into an unlikely flashpoint in this collision between the rapid expansion of our fossil fuel-burning capacity and the rigid limitations of our atmosphere. Here, in this city’s fire and the events leading up to it, can be seen the sympathetic feedback between both the headlong rush to exploit hydrocarbons at all costs, in all their varied forms, and the heating of our atmosphere that the global quest for hydrocarbons has initiated, and that is changing fire as we know it.” (P. 231)

In his epilogue, he writes, “The consequences of burning millions of years of accumulated fossil energy in a period of decades will be ongoing and dramatic.” He is stark in his assessments. “The willful and ongoing failure to act on climate science is unforgivable; recrimination is justified, but none will be sufficient. In this case, at the planetary level, there is no justice; the punishment will be shared by all, but most severely by the young, the innocent and the as-yet unborn.”

Yup.

Vaillant is echoing Thom Hartmann in his ground-breaking work, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, a book that was formative for me in understanding what we are doing to ourselves and the planet. Maybe that’s why I see echoes of Hartmann in so many of the books I read now. We are draining the bank account of the resources the planet has stored for millennia in only a few generations. We are like drunks on a lottery-win fuelled spending spree, and we won’t stop. Won’t stop until what? Until the bottle is empty? Until the inevitable crash? Until….

In fact, it won’t stop with us. In Vaillant’s work, I begin to realize that even after our society is gone, the fires won’t stop. We have changed the chemistry of the planet and the nature of fire itself. We have fire tornadoes now. Will we leave behind a new Venus? None of us will be here to know.

Nevertheless, Vaillant tries to end on a hopeful note, invoking another favourite of mine, Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth century nun who was able to express the regenerative capacity of our world through her combination of acute observations and her poetic soul. Maybe all is not lost. Whatever regenerates though, I surely will not be here to see it. I will have to have faith, like Hildegard.

Where I’m Finding Inspiration for the Year Ahead

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December 30 always feels like a hyphen to me. A little gap. It is the space between the past year and the next. Traditionally, it is a day of reflection for me. I look for inspiration for the year ahead. Not resolutions. That’s not my thing. I’m looking for a bit of a North Star, if you will. Something to guide me in 2024.

Inspiration can come to me during meditation. But meditation doesn’t always help when I’m looking for what to DO. That’s because meditation is about being, not doing.

Often, I need more. When that happens, I’ll pull a word out of the little bag of words I keep. Or I’ll pull a tarot card and think about what it means in the context of whatever problem I face. Sometimes, I’ll play “Bingo” with any number of books I keep handy that offer brief inspirations and insights, which means I’ll open to one random page and see what it offers me.

St Roger of Cannae

St Roger of Cannae. Source: Wikipedia

Today, I looked up which saint has their feast day on December 30 and discovered Saint Roger of Cannae. This is a surprising thing for me, an ex-Catholic, to do. But inspiration can come from anywhere. According to Wikipedia, (which admits their page on Saint Roger is lacking detail) he was the Bishop of Cannae in a region of what is now southern Italy. The region was destroyed by Normans in 1083. Little is known about him. Even saintoftheday.com has little to go on. And my own little reference guide to saints, Saints: A Visual Guide does not even list him.

Saint Roger is sort of a forgotten saint, I guess. Little known. Known just enough. That appeals to me. Fame would be a burden, I think.

“Roger contributed to the moral and material reconstruction of the ancient city of Apulia, supporting his fellow citizens with the consolations of faith and the material aid” after it was destroyed, says Wikipedia. Saintoftheday.com writes that after Cannae was sacked, “Where some saw only destruction, Roger saw an opportunity to create an even more welcoming and compassionate community.”

Bingo. That’s exactly the kind of inspiration I’m looking for today.

When I think back to the beginning of 2020, I thought building a better community was the possibility that the pandemic offered us. It was horrible, yes, but it also showed us important things we could be better at. I remember that first week after planes stopped and cars stopped and everyone stayed home, I went for a very solitary and quiet walk down to Lake Ontario. The sky was SO BLUE. I hadn’t seen a sky like that since I was a kid. The pollution was clearing. I thought, “Oh! Look. Look how fast we could fix what ails us.” Sometime later, I stood in awe as a ten point buck walked in the forest along the Humber River. Where had he been all this time? I saw foxes. And turtles. And so many birds. In Toronto, a huge and sprawling city.

Sigh. I was so naive. I admit I have felt very bitter about the lost opportunity. I haven’t always taken it well. Like many of us, I’ve been adrift in conflicting emotion. The pandemic challenges our relationships as we negotiate our different responses. I feel let down by my fellow humans. As a person with serious health challenges, I often feel abandoned as the world goes “back to normal” and opportunities to participate more safely evaporate. Ableism is what makes my life harder, not mask wearing.

Anyway, although those hopes I had for a better world are mostly dashed, reading about Saint Roger, I felt a little jump with the words “create an even more welcoming and compassionate community.” I realize that is still the goal.

Fortunately, more opportunities are right in front of us. Climate change will test us even more than Covid. If Covid was the quiz, climate catastrophe is the final exam. It’s not one any of us can pass without each other’s help. We need a study group.* And, of course, the pandemic and climate are connected. Failure is almost certain, but how we fail matters.

I am not a patient person. And I am notoriously blunt. It puts people off. I’m going to try to do better. Oh dear. That sounds ominously like a resolution.

A more compassionate community is possible. Even if we are being sacked by the Normans. Whoever they were. I’ll keep Saint Roger with me in 2024.

*Subscribe and follow along with The Grim Reader posts, which is a kind of book club of one about all the climate change books I’m reading, and, I realize, a kind of study group too. Comments on posts are always welcome.