Previously, Goddamn American Hero Jake “I’m a Peaceable Man” Rivers went on a date with Dr Natalie Burke, a professor, consisting entirely of complaining about SJWs and identity politics, which I can’t say anything funnier to say about than simply pointing out how miserable their dating lives sound. Like most things in Jake’s life, it ends with someone showing up out of nowhere who can’t help but try to beat him up.
Trigger Warning: Chapter 14
Jake pushes Natalie out of the way and a fight scene that isn’t fun to summarize breaks out.
Jake’s foes keep him pinned to the ground long enough for him to bring out his knife, which he tries to keep a level head about since it’s a pretty serious escalation even for self-defense, but those gosh darn liberals just make him so angry.
he tried to calm the rage that had burst into white-hot fire inside him. All the resentment and disgust that had been building up since he had come here to Kelton College had broken free.
I feel like Jake’s feelings about being socially ostracized aren’t really as related to his feelings about people literally trying to kill him as he thinks they are.
If he killed any of them, he would be arrested and probably charged with murder. […] Jake knew his grandfather would provide him with the best lawyers money can buy, but it might not be enough. […] The news media would try him in the court of public opinion and find him guilty, guilty, guilty . . . of being a conservative, and oh, yeah, of murder, as well.
And Jake’s privilege gets shrugged off again as the book pulls a well actually you know who’s really persecuted nowadays is conservatives. I mean, you know, if privilege were real.
Y’all, I’ve been thinking a lot about my quip from last week about how Jake felt weird about how his grandfather’s money is able to save him from the lawsuits, but because this book’s point is that privilege isn’t real, Jake just… stops feeling weird about it. The more of this book I read, the more that issue seems to be a fault line throughout the whole damn thing, because Jake’s conservative persecution is completely divorced from any structural explanation for said persecution. Or at least not one that rings true.
he couldn’t defend himself without risking life imprisonment. The system was broken and had been for a long time. The axis had tilted toward the monsters for so long that most people now regarded the situation as normal.
Like that. Whatever your feelings are on Antifa, I feel like it’s a little bit of a stretch to argue that Antifa hit squads roaming the streets doling out vigilante justice with unwavering support from the public and the justice system is “normal”.
I’m gonna move onto writing jokes about this book again in just a minute, but I want to credit that this part of my critique of Trigger Warning builds on – incongruously though this may sound at first – the podcast Let’s Watch 2 Movies‘s critique of The Green Book and Crash. One of the two hosts, Mary Ellen Murr, helpfully (for me) elaborated on Twitter how this sort of high-emotion, low-context narrative depends on ignorance of systemic issues at the heart of political issues, because “conceiving of [political conflict] as something structural is much more threatening“.
it’s similar to a presentation of political conflict as a simple disagreement between two equal sides. which makes it easy to decry things like impoliteness or incivility because in that vision there’s no stakes, no power, no right or wrong
— Mary Ellen (@alissacaliente) March 17, 2019
Of course, Trigger Warning more often than not misreads who has power, and definitely has an opinion about who’s right or wrong. See above: somehow it doesn’t conclude that the kid running around with legal impunity because he happens to have a rich grandpa who shits out lawyers is the one with the scales tipped in his favor. But I wanted to bring Mary Ellen Murr’s argument up because as Trigger Warning is going to start creating escalating life-or-death stakes while Jake starts crying about how all he really wants is to just let bygones be bygones so long as they’re reasonable about it, presumably while he’s in a kitschy, guns-a-blazing burst of all-American performative sentimentality, it’s important to remember how grounded the stakes are in a paranoid sense of persecution rather than any actual systemic issues behind present day American discourse.
Anyway, sorry, back 2 jokes.
Campus police show up and the Antifa thugs run away. Jake slips his knife away. One of the officers who Jake argued with the last time he was in the police office is eager to search Jake, but the chief talks him down because Jake isn’t resisting or anything.
“I didn’t attack anybody,” Jake said calmly. “I was walking back to Olmsted Hall when some of those Antifa goons jumped me again.”
“Antifa,” Granderson said with a sneer obvious in his voice. “You blame everything on Antifa, Rivers.”
The chief tells Jake that Professor Burke called in the attack, although he does finds it curious that the two of them were in the same place at this time of night. Jake, who is a peaceable man who doesn’t want any conflict and just happens to keep getting erroneously labeled as an alt-right fascist or whatever, eggs on the cops.
McRainey gave Jake a shrewd look. “Is there something going on I ought to know about?”
“I don’t know what it would be. You’re not the morality police now, are you, Chief?” […]
Jake could tell that Granderson was just busting at the seams to get a comment in. He couldn’t resist poking the campus cop.
“Something you want to say, Cal?”
It’s a little early for sweeping proclamations, but an early contender for the most inexplicable thing about this neocon fever dream of a book is how much love it seems to think the left has for the police.
After the cops let Jake leave, Jake wishes he could text Natalie Burke to see if she’s alright, but he hadn’t asked for her number yet, which is exactly when Natalie texts him asking if he’s alright. I have no idea if we’re supposed to find this suspicious or not. I can’t follow what kind of paranoid I’m supposed to be.
If you enjoyed today’s post, please consider buying the BBGT writers a cup of coffee? That’d be swell of you!
I’m so confused. Surely this book isn’t serious? Surely it’s a parody?
It’s so ridiculous
“If I murder someone I might not be able to money my way out of being guilty of murder! Why am I so disadvantaged in todays society?”
According to the usual BBGT fare, somebody having your cell number unexpectedly is romantic, right?
Well, she seemed to stalk him which lead to their first meeting, so … yes? Now we just need her to sit outside of his window and watch him sleep (because of his irresistible manly, white, conservative smell).