Mooks

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“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”

— Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1846

In “Best Man Fall”, issue 12 of the seminal comic book series The Invisibles written by Grant Morrison and published between 1994 and 2000, we meet Bobby and learn about his life. How he had a disabled daughter, was injured in the military, cried at night as a child promising to protect his teddy bear when his parents were abusive to each other, how he abused his own wife and loathed himself for it, how on his brother’s death bed he told him he loved him, only for his brother’s last words to be how he always hated Bobby, how he got a job as a security contractor only to be one of four who’d been summarily shot dead in the first issue of the series.

Bobby is, in other words, a mook, one of the normally nameless disposable bad guys who only exist to be eliminated by the hero on the way to the big bad. And by giving Bobby a sympathetic backstory, Morrison has violated one of the unspoken rules about such characters. Mooks don’t get backstories, they don’t get loved ones, they don’t have children at home they’re just trying to support, usually they don’t even have names. Typically they can’t even by women, because somehow mowing down legions of women feels less morally acceptable than legions of men in our still sexist society. And by violating these sorts of rules, Morrison forces us question assumptions we take for granted in these sorts of stories about the morality of our heroes and the way stories in which they mow down hoards of enemies function.

I once got in an argument with some friends of mine over the first episode of the Star Wars TV show The Mandalorian(2019-2023). There’s a scene in that show where the bounty hunter lead charater, often referred to as Mando, comes back to his spaceship to find it overrun with Jawas, the diminutive, hooded scavengers from the first Star Wars film, stripping his spaceship for parts. He responds by pulling out his blaster and starting to gun them down as they scramble to get away with their illicit goods. And I was like, this is horrific, he’s massacring these guys, how can you care about this piece-of-shit character. And my friends were like, man, you sure care about Jawas a lot, huh?

In July, 2023, US Space Force intelligence analyst Orest Schur came upon two people trying to steal his wife’s car. He pulled out his gun and chased them, getting in the car to drive after them and firing at them 11 times as they were running away, killing one and hospitalizing the other. They were 13 and 14 years old.

Schur was arrested was sentenced to 54 years in prison. Social media reacted in predictable ways. Open Neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes portrayed this as a travesty of justice against the continued lawlessness of the black race.

The movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier opens with the titular Captain America, the Marvel universe’s symbol of righteousness and goodness, boarding a pirate ship and along with a crew of SHEILD agents, attack with deadly force and kill the crew and free the hostages. Much later it’s revealed that these pirates were actually in the employ of Captain America’s boss, Nick Fury, who’d used them in an elaborate scheme to get evidence that SHIELD had been infiltrated from the inside. The morality of killing those pirates is never remotely explored. They’re pirates. They took hostages. Therefore they may be summarily executed. In reality, this isn’t how hostages situations are supposed to go; not only is the use of deadly force only typically permitted in case of an imminent threat, but because just attacking hostage takers usually leads to them immediately start to executing hostages, these sorts of tactics are simply not used. And while you might think Captain America would go by-the-book in such cases, the truth is the screenwriters probably didn’t know and didn’t care. This is just how good guys and bad guys work now.

Beginning in September, 2025, the Trump administration began blowing up ships off the coast of Venezuela whom it accused of being narco-terrorist drug smugglers. This was pretty brazenly illegal. In fact, we already have a protocol for this kind of thing, the Coast Guard will go out and board ships suspected of drug smuggling and if drugs are found those aboard are arrested and tried for their crimes. Capital punishment, however, is not a legal sentence for drug smuggling, and that’s when people are proven guilty in a court of law. Here, Trump and his people are just blowing up boats with people in them, with at least one lawsuit claiming that they’d murdered two Trinidadian fishermen. If only we were able to, say, board these boats and find out who they are. Oh, wait—

The one time I remember the subject of criminal liability for these crimes coming up was when it was revealed that they’d double-tapped one of these boats, in other words they’d hit a boat with a missile and then when two survivors were clinging desperately to the side, they hit them with another missile. Firing on injured people who are no longer possibly a threat is, of course, a serious war crime, and there was a lot of outrage and some shifting of blame from Secretary of Defense—sorry, I mean Secretary of War—Pete Hegseth claiming he knew nothing about the double strike despite all evidence that he’d given the “kill everybody” order and he threw one of his admirals under the bus. But you can see why an enraged man-child TV host thrust into terrifying power like Hegseth might be confused about something like this. The man literally has a Crusader cross tattooed on his chest and a crusader slogan tattooed on his arm that for years has been associated with White Nationalist groups. In his mind, these are enemies, and like the Crusaders before us who massacred whole cities, we kill enemies.So what’s the difference if we blow them up before or after we’ve already illegally hit their boat? It was honestly a little maddening watching the media cycle lose its shit for five minutes and then completely forget about the boat double tap when the whole thing is an exercise in unmitigated and unambiguous murder. Murders we’re still committing, by the way.

Some time later, Trump declared war on Iran and blew up a school full of children, and there were no consequences because the government said, “whoopsy” Something tells me that if I accidentally blew up a school full of children, there would be some legal repercussions for me, and there’d probably be Republicans on the floor of the Senate demanding legislation against the threat of radical left-wing YouTubers to our children. But then, some people’s children seem to matter a lot more to us than other people’s, don’t they? What’s that you say? But this is war? Yeah, that’s why they’re called war crimes. That’s the whole point of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

Sometimes I think about Geneva in 1949. Following the unfathomable mass deaths of the Second World War, the countries of the world gathered in Switzerland and vowed Never Again. From then on civilians would no longer be legitimate targets of war. There would be no more Hiroshima, no more Leningrad, no more Dresden. There would be no more military prisoners starved in disease-ridden camps. No more slave “comfort women”, no more mass rape, no more holocausts, no more genocide. From this point forward, all of those things and more would be “war crimes”. For a moment there must’ve been some hope among people who’d witnessed it that we could really prevent the horrors of the World Wars and bring about a new international order based on a greater respect for human life.

Of course, even at the time the signatory countries knew on some level these rules were bullshit. Major powers like the US, the UK, or the Soviet Union would never allow their sovereignty and power to be challenged by the international community. These were rules those powers could impose on smaller weaker nations, even used as tools to manipulate them for their own interests. And they might be useful as propaganda for one country to point fingers at the misdeeds of another. But that was all. The United States actually made this explicit in 2002, amid concerns that the Bush administration was committing war crimes in conducting its “war on terror”, when the US passed a law that said that if the International Criminal Court—the body charged with trying international war crimes in the Hague—ever tried to arrest or detain US personelle for war crimes, the US would invade the Hague in order to secure their release. This bill was voted for by such radical right-wing figures as Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden. Meanwhile, after the IEC found Benjamin Netanyahu guilty of war crimes in 2024, President Trump placed sanctions on the judges of the IEC, making it impossible for them to do things like use banks and have cell phones. Why would Trump and his people care if they commit war crimes? We’ve stated publicly that war crimes don’t apply to us or our friends.

There are some filmmakers, like Mathew Vaughn, who revel in the cartoonish piling up of bodies by the heroes. Though even that pales to the holocausts incurred in many video games.

There’s a reflexive reaction to criticism of violence in video games both from the left and from gamers more generally. This is because there’s a long-standing phenomenon of politicians (both center-left and right) and right wing figures blaming all sorts of societal ills on violence in video games. The Right in particular has deflected to criticizing violence in media in lieu of any more practical solutions to things like gun violence. Donald Trump blaming video game violence for school shootings in 2023 is only the most recent instance. In reality, there is ample evidence that gun control does reduce gun violence, and while violent video games are everywhere, as per the Onion headline this is the only nation where these shootings regularly happen. But then, the Right also likes to blame mental illness while proposing no mental illness programs. Which is because what this really amounts to is another instance of the right wanting to simply crack down on media and culture it doesn’t like.

So to be clear, I’m not saying that violent video games directly cause real violence. But, as I talked about way back in my episode about the war for the soul of video games fought in the 90s between Doom and Myst, we’ve arrived at a point where the predominant mode of gaming, particularly for mainstream, triple-A titles, is enacting mass violence on enemies, who are almost always unending hoards of some sort of mooks. And this is part and parcel of a larger culture that frames the world in terms of people who deserve to live and people (or beings) who don’t. There’s nothing necessary or inevitable about the dominance of shooters in our society. They’re something that we created and choose to consume.

As I talked about in my last episode and as pointed out by David Graeber in his book The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement (2013), after the protests and backlash to the war in Vietnam, the US developed a military strategy based on heavy bombing which minimized loss of American life while maximizing war crimes. The result were hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi and Afghan civilians, fostering an intense hatred of the US that fatally undermined the war effort and aided the efforts of groups like ISIS and the Taliban.

But it’s not just that war crimes don’t seem to matter if we do them. As I pointed out in Gravity’s Rainbow Over Palestine, when Russia bombed hospitals in Ukraine, Joe Biden declared Russia guilty of grave war crimes. However, Russia had been bombing hospitals in Syria for years already at that point, with not a peep from Biden or anyone else about it. Somehow it seems like war crimes don’t matter if they happen to be done by white people on non-white people. And while W Bush is still one of the greatest war criminals of the century, and Trump’s been busy racking up his own ledger, this is hardly an issue exclusive to Republicans. Bill Clinton’s bombings in Bosnia, President Obama’s bombings and drone strikes in Yemen and Afghanistan, and Biden’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza are all more than enough to warrant accusations of war crimes if they had been done by a world leader we didn’t like very much. Honestly, it’d be nice to have a president who wasn’t a war criminal for once. Still, no president since the 1949 conventions has uttered such naked war crime talk as Donald Trump threatening to “wipe out a civilization”, and Hegseth’s explicit talk of “no quarter, no mercy”.

One of the comments on the Oscar Schur case is illustrative. “Why are democrats always defending criminals?” The fact that capital punishment isn’t an acceptable sentence for car thievery, particularly by a child, isn’t the issue for this person. The issue is that there are law-abiding people and criminals, and criminals essentially have no right to any sort of defense. If you’re reaction is that Oscar Schur is also a criminal and a much larger one than the alleged car thieves, and maybe you also ask why these same people defend a convict fraudster and child rapist like Donald Trump, well, you’ve hit on the real point. As political scientist Frank Wilhoit once put it in what’s known as “Wilhoit’s Law”, “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Trump and Schur are in the in-group, the child car-thieves are not. And the color of each parties’ skin is not a coincidence.

But how can this be conservatism when I’ve described how this indifference to the lives of othered people is found in figures like the Clintons, Obama, and Biden? Well, I can reiterate what I said in “How Conservatives Become Fascists”about how America actually now has a conservative party and a fascist party. But more than that, there’s a way this is a conservative impulse that’s baked into the status quo of our society, part of the larger way in which conservatism is a political philosophy designed to reinforce social hierarchies and portray them as “natural”. You could write an ostensibly leftist narrative about brave Communist revolutionaries mowing through fascists like grass, but if you do you’re giving in to a conservative impulse, and it’s exactly that kind of conservative impulse that says some people are “more equal than others” that allows leftist movements to fall to authoritarianism. That doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as a just conflict or that taking another human life is never warranted, it means that taking another human life is always tragic and its a fundamentally dehumanizing and hierarchical impulse to frame it as celebratory or triumphant.

And perhaps the thrilling climax of this line of thinking is the latest conservative bugaboo of “toxic empathy”. Here the line of thought is straightforward—we on the left have too much empathy for people like minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and so on, and that emotional reaction distorts our straightforward understanding of the facts. Immigrants need to be deported, even if you feel bad for them, they’ll tell you, because you have to look clearly at all the crime and drugs that immigrants bring into the country, and they’ll name off a list of people harmed by immigrants to bolster their claim. The irony of this kind of thinking, of course, is as I talked about at length in “Superman and the Case for Open Borders” that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit far fewer crimes than people born in the United States. The numbers aren’t even close; for every person you name who was harmed by an immigrant I can name many more who were harmed by someone who was not one, it’s just that right wing media has overwhelmed a certain news ecosystem with a certain message. In reality, it’s all fear mongering over facts. But really when you strip this kind of thinking down you arrive at uncomfortable places. Because if looking at immigrants clearly means we should deport immigrants, if looking at black civil rights movements clearly means we should dismiss their claims of discrimination, what does looking at these things clearly mean exactly? That immigrants and black people are simply more criminal than white people? This all pretty quickly descends into “race realism”, into Charlie Kirk spouting fake crime statistics about black people, into naked fascist Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk both openly calling for white nationalism to the muted non-response of major media, and Elon Musk mass murdering hundreds of thousands by shutting down US Aid while telling us we shouldn’t be fooled by the evil of empathy.

There’s no way to square the idea that it’s okay to blow up sailors off the coast of Venezuela or the hospitals the US and Israel have been blowing up in Iran unless you think that some people’s lives fundamentally have less value than your own, and that preserving your own interests is worth ending theirs.

The thing is, there’s always been a sense that some people’s lives mattered more than others, at least since the rise of hierarchical societies in which some people and their followers ruled over others. In terms of culture and stories, the key difference was actually found less in the nameless mooks but in the people they served. In contemporary narratives, even complex, adult stories, there’s typically a sense that the people at the top in some way deserve to be there because of their merit and ability, except in the cases of farce or satire where this notion can be turned on its head. The TV series House of Cards (original 1990, remake 2013-2018), for example, is about how some people are really manipulative geniuses who can use their powers to rise to the top of the political or financial pyramid. But with this notion of merit came the notion of the scheming villain, the immoral figure who uses their great abilities to achieve unjust heights from where they typically bring suffering to the people beneath them. And typically they must be met by a moral hero who uses their own abilities to thwart them (though in dramas like House of Cards they might be brought down by their own flaws).

It’s worth highlighting that this is a relatively modern development in narratives—and by modern, I mean the modern era beginning around the year 1500 or so. Indeed, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is often thought of as one of the first “modern” writers exactly because he created figures like MacBeth and Iago who follow the tropes I’ve just described. But before this period, stories were generally quite different.

There’s a tendency in narratives created in the ancient and medieval worlds—and forgive my Western-centricity here, but I’m a product of my culture as much as anyone—for the antagonistic forces to be less some brilliant and evil person conspiring against the hero, as much as fate, the forces of nature, or the gods who essentially represent forces of nature. Oedipus is not brought down by some personal flaw, he’s brought down by the fate he desperately tried to escape and could not. It’s sometimes said that his tragic flaw was his pride in thinking he could defy his fate, but if he didn’t try to defy his fate one assumes he would have been brought down by his fate anyway, that’s how fate works. Tristan and Isolde are cursed by the happenstance of accidentally drinking a love potion, not because of their own personal passions. Rarely do these stories have the simple heroes and villains as we think of them today—the Trojan War happens, for example, not because Paris is some arch evildoer but because he was “rewarded” by the goddess Aphrodite to have the most beautiful woman in the world fall in love with him, starting a war with her husband. In Biblical stories, figures that we think of as villainous like the Egyptian Pharoah in the story of Moses is said to have had his “heart hardened by God”, in other words motivated less by his personal will than by the will of the divine to make Moses and his people suffer longer. This has often seemed strange and cruel to modern readers, but there’s a sense in these ancient stories that man’s decisions should never take precedence over the divine as that would in some way usurp the divine’s authority.

In The Divine Comedy (1321) of Dante Aligheri, which is thought to exemplify the Medieval theological worldview of the Western Church, Satan is not the ruler of Hell and its legions of demons but rather just another sinner bound and tormented within its bowels. It’s only by the 18th century when Milton wrote Paradise Lost, that Satan has been recast as someone who’d rather “rule in Hell than serve in Heaven”. This may seem strange to Christians raised on the idea of God and Satan locked in a battle for our immortal souls, but this is an essentially modern conception of Christian theology that didn’t exist a few hundred years ago. Early Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), who formulated many early Christian beliefs including the idea of “original sin”, wrote that it was pride to think that “we are the ones who choose God or that God chooses us (in his foreknowledge) because of something worthy in us”, rather God brings us to faith through his divine Grace, not the other way around.

Narratives we have from the pre-modern West almost exclusively concern Great Men anyway, kings, nobles, gods, holy men, generals, and great warriors, and for the most part these were people born into their positions or destined for them from birth. In the Bible, there’s a sequence in the Book of Kings where the prophet Samual draws lots to see who will be the first king of Israel, but he rigs the game so that Saul, the choice of God, will be selected. People, in other words, don’t generally attain their positions by merit, ability, skill, or even genius in the sense we think of it today—except in cases where that merit is sheer moral fortitude or devotion to the divine, as in The Book of Job. And this makes sense for a world in which class mobility essentially didn’t exist and the right of nobles and lords to rule absolutely over their subjects went unquestioned, much as God or the gods were said to rule over them. As per Medieval tradition, kings ruled by divine right, and if they ruled their followers unjustly, if their people slaughtered others and were slaughtered in battle or wiped out others or were wiped out in sieges or conquests, that was rightful and unquestionable. It’s not an accident that the whole concept of war crimes didn’t emerge until the modern era; Charlemagne might have mass executed prisoners of war and William the Conquerer slaughtered the people of Northern England and burned their crops so they would starve, but such things literally could not be illegal in a framework where the law itself was thought to extend directly from the will of the king. Of course, how much people at the time actually always believed they should quietly accept the injustice of their rulers is illustrated by things like peasant revolts, but in terms of cultural norms and narratives these sorts of things were not only unacceptable but fundamentally immoral. Narratives at this time represented the understanding that things were how they were because God or the gods wanted it that way, that, in other words, this was the natural order of things. And that’s because the people making these narratives, the ones that survived, were people who were born into positions where they would be able to make such narratives, born into the noble classes who were educated and learned to read and write, or perhaps in the Medieval period joining the church and working their way up through it at the judgement and tutelage of church leaders and overtly dedicating their lives to serving the will of God.

So what changed? In a word, the emergence of capitalism and the class mobility it represented. In a world in which a peasant merchant could amass as much wealth as a king, the natural right of some to be born to rule and others born to serve shifted. Now someone could achieve wealth and power not by birth or the simple will of the gods but by ability, skill, and merit, at least in theory.

In “Star Trek into Socialism”, I talked about how this gave rise to the idea of the “self-made man”, the Ben Franklin type figure who through skill, talent, and persistence could rise up to wealth and power. (Of course, in reality even Ben Franklyn came from a background where he was literate and learned a trade, which weren’t privileges most people had at the time, but the way privilege fits into the “self-made” myth is typically downplayed.) And thus narratives gained self-made heroes like Gil Blas in the eponymous novel (1715-1735) by Alain-René Lesage. And particularly with the rise of universal education in the 19th century, commoners gained far greater voice and interiority in narrative media, and with that came the idea that maybe, just maybe, people like prisoners of war and civilians should not be killed with impunity. Maybe, in fact, doing such things should be a crime.

And yet, there’s a fundamental tension here, and it’s the same fundamental tension or contradiction that plagues capitalist democracy as a system. We live in a system where ostensibly “all are created equal”, have an equal vote in our democracy, and equal opportunity to make something of themselves. And yet economically speaking we’re obviously not equal at all, some live in dire poverty while others have fortunes greater than the GDP of whole nations. The narrative of the self-made man, though, provides a justification for this inequality—those with wealth and power must have it by merit, they deserve it, in fact, them having wealth and power proves that they deserve it, that they are geniuses among us. But the fact that many people are born into wealth, and are aided by wealthy family members, the fact that we don’t have anything representing equality of opportunity in our society, contradicts this idea, and as with narratives like House of Cards there’s often even an implication that the rapacious ambition necessary to amass so much wealth is a function of immorality and even sociopathy, the villainous flip-side of the self-made man, the self-made monster. And these contradictions swirl around our narratives around wealth and power in a heady stew even while its underlying assumptions—that some people are simply that much smarter and better and more special than other people—goes largely unquestioned.

But if some people are more special than others, then logically some people are less special. Inferior. So unimportant their deaths only exist to demonstrate someone or something else’s power. And so we have Mooks.

And with the creation of the concept of race as we currently understand in the 18th century, mooks were often portrayed in racial terms, brutish sub-humans who could be mowed down like animals, notions which continued well into the 20th century. Tarzan in the books of Edgar Rice Burrows (1875-1950), for example, would readily slaughter and torment African natives much as the Western heroes of Louis L’amour (1908-1988) would liberally wipe out American natives. In the US, this didn’t really start to change until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and associated anti-racist efforts, like the re-examination of America’s relationship with Native Americans in the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) by Dee Brown.

And while those anti-racist movements were largely successful in making entirely racialized mooks in American media less common—even as the racism that undergirded it still quietly informed policy, and with the current “anti-woke” backlash and domination of media ownership by open and brazen racists, cultural norms have been shifting again—mooks still tend to be characterized by class, as in they’re typically the kind of roughnecks who come from the “bad” part of town, or nameless grunt soldiers, poor people from poor backgrounds, the Lumpenproletariat goons that work for the head mobsters or drug lords or terrorists or Nazis or whathaveyou. That is, if they’re human at all—one way to shave the serial numbers off the moral issues around mass killing is to make the mooks monsters, zombies, robots, or aliens, creatures safely coded as either mindless, animalistic, or pure evil and therefore worthy of indiscriminate death. Though, of course, these non-humans often just become stand-ins for the racialized others that have become less acceptable—like the Jawas in The Mandalorian. As long as the “savages” aren’t human, it’s okay, right? Though, of course, this can be cannily turned on its head by humanizing those figures, and for example the film Starship Troopers(1997) was intended as a satire of the fascistic, kill ‘em all thematics at work in the 1959 book on which it’s based.

But this sort of thing is a brief cresting above the waves of ideas that are normally invisible to us, the presumption of the specialness of some and concurrent lack of specialness of others. It’s invisible to us the same way the right of gods to use humans as their playthings is unquestioned in the work of Homer, or the right of God to wipe out the children of Job to prove a point in the Bible. Or for that matter, the right of God to wipe out everyone on Earth except for Noah and his family.

Our media exposes not how things necessarily are in reality, but how we imagine they should be or more accurately, how we imagine the moral logic of our world works. The hero beats the villain, the tortured, tragic figure suffers a downfall, and the mook dies with barely an acknowledgement that they’d ever lived. There’s exceptions, stories where the villain wins without a catch or, like the Morrison comic, where the mook gets a life, but these sorts of stories get their power from how they intentionally buck against our assumptions of how these stories usually work. Of course, the real world doesn’t work this way, the police are often corrupt, many or even most people are in prison just because they’re poor, and good people are murdered and jailed while the most evil people imaginable have absurd wealth and power. But the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, and we want to believe that we have a society and a status quo where wrongs are righted and good is rewarded and some people are just special and deserve things that other people don’t have.

And this idea, that some people are born special and more worthy of life than other people runs through our culture from tip to stern, informing our stories just as it undergirds every war crime committed in our name. It’s what allows people to look the other way while ICE destroys people lives and shoots people in the face or allows people to quietly die in custody. It’s okay. Captain America beats down pirates and a figure like Superman who doesn’t want to kill his enemies is seen as corny and quaint and even he is forced to kill his enemy at the end.

And if we actually faced the idea that some people don’t deserve to be very rich while other people are very poor, that some people aren’t fundamentally more special and deserving than other people just because they have such and such skill or ability or charm or whatever, that its unjust and undemocratic to have a system where a few people own all the businesses and everyone else works for them, that killing civilians is always wrong whether done by a terrorist or a president, then we might have to face the fact that our whole system is fundamentally unjust and deserves to be overturned. And so it’s not that the people creating our media are intentionally trying to propagate these beliefs because they’re soldiers in the class war, it’s that the people creating our media, who are predominantly people at least comfortably well off themselves—in fact, typically seeing themselves as self-made successes—and so have trouble imagining a world in which these things aren’t true. There isn’t a commandment that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, but the ruling class by definition have the power and will inevitably propagate ideas that portray that power as justified and necessary, with only momentary instances of contrary self-awareness that can easily be recuperated by the dominant culture in a way that exploits it for profit. The most radical YouTube video still makes money for Google.

But the thing about unquestioned assumptions is that they can start getting questioned, and cultural norms people took for granted can be overturned in a generation. In the 19th century, a narrative in which a woman had sex out of wedlock was scandalous and would almost always result in the character’s ruin, as in Anna Karenina (1879) by Leo Tolstoy. Successive waves of feminist movements later and that’s changed, to the continued fury of those on the religious right. War crimes have become more brazen in recent years—where once a president would make elaborate cases and justifications for military actions, the current American regime does it on a whim. But with that and things like what’s still happening in Gaza, it feels like among the youth there’s a greater awareness of the fundamental value of human life, which could set-up another sea change along with the more egalitarian movements I’ve talked about in the past as inequality continues to skyrocket and capitalism continues to break down amid ongoing ecological collapse. Things can change very quickly. We can help them along by making new stories, stories where maybe the mook cried into his pillow at night as a child.

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