Ronson Vs Johnson

Disclaimer

This is really about Things Fell Apart and the title is a bit of a red herring. I always have a bit of a Spooner moment with Jon Ronson and I’m sure he’s more than tired of others doing the same. However, that there is a Wisconsin Senator by the name of Ron Johnson who is a staunch Trumpist, with all that entails. He is a man who makes public committments to tell the truth and then spreads disinformation about Covid vaccines and the January 2021 Capitol attack. He has apparantly been described as ‘what you get when QAnon and the Tea Party have a baby’. So the the prospect of Johnson facing off with Ronson was too good to miss – and isn’t that far off what Things Fell Apart is about.

I can’t stop myself: if Things Fell Apart framed its look at ‘culture wars’ in the context of the borderline civil war brewing in the U.S. – or should that be ‘threatening to reignite in the U.S.’, because the old tension between democracy and civil rights on the one hand and a violent will to power on the other is what is being contested – it would be better for it.

Without having any deep animosity towards it, Jon Ronson’s Things Fell Apart, isn’t really the sort of thing I would tune into. If I’m honest (moi?), I find his presentation hard to get past, plus the contrived sense of mystery is all a bit much. Anyway, it was on the wireless and at various times I have caught bits and pieces of, it turns out, of three episodes. I wasn’t paying full attention and didn’t listen all the way through, so in the best manner of critics who haven’t read the thing they’re reviewing, here we go.

Each episode purports to unearth the origin story of a contentious contemporary issue, these being the sites of ‘culture wars’, at least in the U.S. If you’d like to skip the following dubious episode summaries, please do. As a complete aside, the idea of writing faked reviews of fake productions holds a certain appeal. A project for a quiet news day perhaps?

Episode 1

Episode 1, 1000 Dolls, starts with an evangelical Christian the United States in, I think, the ‘sixties or ‘seventies, teaching or preaching about how Christians might engage with modern / popular culture. His son makes a documentary series, the last two (of ten) episodes of which focus on abortion, heretofore not generally a topic of evangelism, it being perceived as more of a Catholic preoccupation. Although the documentary series is a success, the audience do not warm to the abortion episodes and really, that should have been the end of it. However, not being one to be deterred from his convictions and the imperative to share them, the son now makes a second series, this time entirely given over to the supposed evils of abortion. The series is an unqualified flop, playing to more-or-less empty venues, and really, that definitely should have been the end of it.

However (quirky-twist-of-fate alert )…

…the spectacle of repeated tumbleweed screenings itself attracts a level of (secular) media attention. News of an evangelical film opposed to abortion gets out, and venues now start to be picketed by feminists. Previously absent evangelicals then start showing up to support the evangelist side against the feminist side, and then it’s too late: battle lines are now drawn on an issue that one side didn’t even have a strong view about five minutes ago.

The episode is therefore an exposé of how one of the more divisive issues in the States, and now a key part of evangelical conservatism, derives from a hobby-horse documentary that no-one cared about until they did.

Episode 2

Episode 2, Dirty Books seemed to be about the religiously influenced vetting of school texts in the United States (or parts thereof). The episode traces the issue back to the ‘seventies, when a more progressive curriculum was being introduced in West Virginia as (I think, though it’s not really clear) a precursor to a nation-wide overhaul. Initially out of concern at the inclusion of sex education, and then out of concern at the more questioning stance of proposed texts across a range of subjects, someone or other gets herself onto the local school board. Through its role of approving the purchase of texts for the school, the board was able to effectively veto texts that members felt to be inappropriate and so the new curriculum was blocked.

Things apparently escalate when the someone or other appears on local radio and, by way of egregious example, reads from a poem that turns out to be Roger McGough’s At Lunchtime: A Story of Love.  A concerted campaign develops, schools are boycotted and the state backs down.

However (quirky-twist-of-fate alert 2)

The poem concerns a busload of passengers who, in the belief that nuclear annihilation is imminent, have lots of sex with each other. Realising that this is, in fact, a false alarm, the passengers nevertheless continue to have lots of sex with each other. The moral import of the poem rests on its final lines where it is suggested that, while the world has not literally ended, somehow, as a result of all this promiscuity, the social / cultural world has irrevocably changed. The lines are:

people pretended that the world was coming
to an end at lunchtime. It still hasn’t.
Although in a way it has.

The assumption of the someone or other was that these final lines were a celebration of the ending of the old order; however, Ronson suggests– and this is confirmed by the author – that they were rather intended to be regretful.  So, far from being revolutionary, the poem is in fact a reactionary questioning of free love and a defence of someone-or-other’s own conservative morality.

Someone-or-other now looks more like the ignorant hick they were upset at being taken for. Our (or at least Ronson’s) liberal sensibilities are affirmed through this example of book-burning carried out by people who can’t even read. That the example poem was, ironically, on the side of the censor all along is a nice touch. Ronson: 1 Someone or other: 0 (I just can’t resist a football metaphor. Can you, Jeremy?)

Confronted with this, someone or other couldn’t give a fig, and not because they don’t get the joke either: by their own admission, it helped spread the message, and for that they are grateful. The fundamental case that the proposed changes were markedly liberal and progressive in direction is not challenged and someone or other’s argument remains essentially unexamined. Ronson: 1 Couldn’t give a fig: 1.

For purposes of musing about Things Fell Apart though, there is a more substantive point here that goes unnoticed: if, on the basis that couldn’t give a fig might have (mis)quoted from any number of texts to make their case, then their particular misreading of a particular text is of virtually no relevance to the subsequent development of a supposed ‘culture war’. A more plausible explanation – and essentially the one that someone or other gives – is that their radio interview struck a chord because it found an audience already receptive to the concern that the list of approved school texts was apparently being quite radically revised in a certain (liberal) political direction without their assent. But the narrative that the introduction of such changes in a socially conservative (though Democrat-voting at the time) state like West Virginia, where a high proportion of the electorate were (and still are) evangelical Christians opposed to abortion and don’t even think about gay marriage in the 1970s, was always going to run into concerted opposition at some point, doesn’t really make for compelling investigative journalism.

In the episode, Ronson does actually go on to make an allegation far more damning than the possible misreading of a poem which is that, of the authors rejected by the school board, a disproportionate number were black. However, since the allegation of racism is flatly denied by couldn’t give a fig, that’s as far as things go. Even if it were the case that racism was at work though, what would the Things Fell Apart narrative be? That racism played a motivating part in conservative religious rejection of socially liberal school reading lists in West Virginia? Well, in other news, it turns out the pontiff is Catholic: it’s hardly surprising and it’s hardly compelling radio, lacking the little ironic twists and unlikely parochialism of Roger McGough that make the anecdote about the misreading interesting and amusing. Which it is, mildly, as an anecdote, but that’s as far as it goes really.

Now I haven’t gone on at this length just to pop Ronson’s slightly annoying bubble on the grounds that his origin story doesn’t really stack up. My real objection (spoiler alert) is the disingenuous presentation of that story; however, rather than launch into that now, I’ll try and bring this together at the end.

PS on Roger McGough

I don’t have a problem with Roger McGough (though I think I started this whole shebang with I don’t have a problem with Jon Ronson, although it would seem now that I do). Anyway. Roger McGough. While I prefer my poetry with a bit of bite (no surprise there I suppose), there is something inherently decent about McGough’s avuncular tones: he has the integrity not to pretend to like everything on Poetry Please but is nevertheless always respectful and considered in what he says. I thought it was a curious moment though, when in Things Fell Apart, he acknowledged the social conservatism of At Lunchtime A Story of Love. In truth, I suppose it was simply that I’m used to every poet as well as every comedian, singer-songwriter, artist and philosopher who declares an affinity, to do so for the political left and for progressive social mores. Geoff Norcott is the exception that proves the point because being Tory is his USP and the likes of Roger Scruton don’t count.

From what I recall of McGough’s poetry, it’s not, at least on the whole, overtly political. But in acknowledging his brand of gentle social conservatism, something dropped into place for me so that I think I now ‘get’ his poetry in a way I didn’t quite before. I feel both more impatient with it now (because its conservatism is now more apparent) and also more sympathetic (because the poetry seems more at ease with itself now that I’m not trying to read across it). And this set off a chain of association that went something like this:

1. At Lunchtime A Story of Love was published in the 1967 anthology The Mersey Sound that, in its title and cover art was clearly trying to hitch a ride with the Beatles and the Merseyside beat music scene.
2. Something about the Beatles has always irritated me. I don’t know much about music and I don’t know much about them, but I’ve always been suspicious of their being presented as revolutionary. I don’t want to over generalise; although I don’t know a lot about them I do understand that McCartney and Lennon were different people and that the band worked through different stylistic periods influenced by different things to which they produced different responses. I also wasn’t there to experience their impact first hand. However; in registering that thread of social conservatism in McGough, I feel like something has also fallen into place for me with the Beatles that redeems them slightly in my eyes. Just don’t pretend they’re too radical.

PPS on Roger McGough

The clickbait promo spiel of the Dirty Books episode of Things Fell Apart is that this particular ‘culture war’ started because a poem was misconstrued as endorsing sexual permissiveness, when, in fact, its intention was to bring such permissiveness into question. While the episode does confirm that the apparent misreading took place, there is one link in the chain that is not examined: what was the reasoning behind the poem’s inclusion on the list of proposed school texts in the first place?

This (admittedly trivial) query is obscured by the narrative structure of the episode. The path that we are led along depends for its logic on the assumption that the poem At Lunchtime: A Story of Love was proposed as one of a number of progressive and/or otherwise socially liberal texts that were challenged by socially conservative members of school boards and of the wider state community. But wait! It turn’s out that the use of the poem as an example of egregiously liberal literature rested on a misreading.

But this chain of events only makes sense on the assumption that those pesky liberal reformers also misconstrued At Lunchtime A Story of Love as pro-free love. In which case, it would seem that either McGough did not convey his intentions sufficiently clearly, or that the poem is more ambiguous than he lets on in the episode, in which case the subsequent ‘misreading’ by someone or other who couldn’t give a fig is really quite excusable and therefore not ironic or noteworthy in any way that could serve as the basis for a compelling story.

Or…

Two other possibilities remain. One is that At Lunchtime: A Story of Love was read by those proposing it as suitable school reading as (correctly, apparently) casting doubt on the societal desirability of casual sex. Perhaps they had felt the need to add balance to their choices? This would serve Ronson’s purpose better, adding a layer to the irony of someone or other’s lambasting of its permissiveness.

But here’s a thought: perhaps those proposing the changes to school texts had read a few books in their time; after all, they at least knew enough to include a reasonably diverse range of contemporary authors, including someone as relatively little known in the U.S. as McGough. Suppose At Lunchtime: A Story of Love was selected because it was nicely and ambiguously poised between two possible reading, and therefore an ideal text around which to promote sensible and nuanced discussion in schools about values and morality (to which I’d add ‘consent’)?

It doesn’t matter, of course. It was only that there was perhaps scope in Dirty Books not only to identify one misreading but potentially to identify that as a misreading of a misreading. And where does it all stop? With the author of course, but authorial veracity is something I’ll come back to.

PPPS on Roger McGough and authorial intention

I’ll try and keep this short. And I’m rusty on literary theory. Couldn’t Give a Fig read At Lunchtime: A Story of Love one way, Jon Ronson read it another, so the author, Roger McGough, was called into settle the matter. But does it settle the matter? I’m not going to go so far as to say ‘what the author really meant’ is irrelevant, but once you write something down it really has a life of its own. At one end of the scale of banality, every social media user knows this. At the other end of the scale, we have Poe’s The Purloined Letter in which a compromising letter circulates dangerously until it is properly restored. Writing is like giving birth – you can name it and call it your own but in the end, it leaves you. At Lunchtime: A Story of Love as a text, is ambiguous: the [old] world is no longer what it was after this outbreak of promiscuity. Whether that is good, bad, both or neither is not explicitly stated, and I would suggest that is where its strength as a poem lies.

Episode 7, A Secret Room Behind a Fake Wall

Good gracious, have I still got an episode to go? Right then: Episode 7, A Secret Room Behind a Fake Wall, concerns a young man who, around 2016, believed in a number of conspiracy theories, including that there was a pizza restaurant in Washington that concealed the secret dungeon headquarters of a child sex-trafficking ring led by Hilary Clinton and Co. One day this chap explains to his friends how he believes that a number of Hollywood stars are members of a world-wide paedophile ring. However, rather than challenge him, or inquire about his wellbeing, or even just change the subject, his friends decide to humour him, first by confirming, and then by expanding on his theory, so that, in the end, the chap comes to fervently believe not only in the Hollywood paedophile ring, but that the Hollywood paedophile ring is specifically holding a child in a dungeon for purposes of sexual abuse.

He then makes it on to some talk radio show alleging further that he had actually had been shown the door to the ‘secret room behind a fake wall’ of the title in which the child is being held. Despite the complete absence of any corroborating evidence for any of this, the belief takes hold and said chappie becomes a leading figure in QAnon. Until he kills himself, or at least dies, since we are told his death occurs under confused or unclear circumstances.

The tenet of this episode of Things Fell Apart is therefore that the outlandish claims made by QAnon, one of the most bewildering phenomena in the States, have their origin in the clearly paranoid fantasies of a troubled young man and his friends who wound him up. Who would have thought it? So endeth this lesson.

And the point is…

Goodness, it’s taken this long for me to get to the point, which is basically, (drum roll…): isn’t Things Fell Apart essentially peddling its own micro-conspiracy theories?

Indulge me…

In several, if not all episodes, Ronson is keen to claim that he doesn’t want Things Fell Apart to become a part of the culture wars. This disclaimer has the ring of something he was strongly advised to include in order to head off precisely the sort of things I’m going to suggest, but even taken in good faith, this is a very hard thing to live up to.
The question of how to engage with a contested narrative without becoming a participant is, in practical terms, straightforwardly impossible. The nearest I suspect you could get would be a patient, sober, evidenced-based account that does justice to the claims of all parties, while abstaining, as far as possible, from evaluating the relative merits of those claims. Something like an academic paper. I’m not sure any of these qualities are Ronson’s strong suit. To try and stop this turning into War and Peace, I’ll try and limit myself to two points: one about structure, and one about presentation.

Structure

Things Fell Apart is, we are told, a series of investigations seeking to uncover the ‘origin stories’ of contemporary ‘culture wars’. Origin stories are, in my view, to be approached with circumspection and go something like this: In the beginning there was a land of milk and honey; however, that blissful state became corrupted by forces sometimes internal, sometimes external, resulting in a decline to where we are now. Implicit to origin stories is the suggestion that the golden age is still there, visible beneath the surface, to be reclaimed if only we could reach it. Examples of origin stories are:

• Adam and Eve (in the beginning were two perfectly formed beings who would have lived happily ever after if one of them hadn’t sinned)

• All the founding myths of nations (in the beginning was the land of the free, or, once upon a time there was Albion). I really mustn’t go off on one about founding myths of nations but will limit myself to noting that the idyllic moment is often located in adversity. An example of this is the sacrifice made by the Russian people to win the Great Patriotic War, a period of great hardship that is nevertheless celebrated an idealised and defining moment of national unity and purpose.

• Race theories: enough said.

However, when Ronson says ‘origin story’ this isn’t quite what he means: what he’s seeking to identify is not the original state of affairs (the Garden of Eden moment), but the nature of the corrupting influence (the snake). And so we have:

Episode 1, 1000 Dolls, in which a society content for abortion to be a matter of personal choice becomes polarised on the matter along religious and political lines because it happened to be some Christian film maker’s hobby horse.

Episode 2, Dirty Books, in which education as the vehicle for the values of the enlightenment is derailed by the reactionary evangelising of someone or other who didn’t even care if they had misquoted so long as they won (and they were probably racist too).

Episode 7, Episode 7, A Secret Room Behind a Fake Wall, where we used to live in a reasonably sane evidenced-based world until someone started spouting about paedophile rings and then other people started listening to him.

Ronson’s ‘origin stories’, at least these ones, are about different ways in which the liberal enlightenment values of the U.S. have been compromised by committed individual detractors under curious circumstances. Although Ronson’s perspective invites our sympathy through its appeal to our own liberal, Radio 4, sensibilities, the structure of his appeal is what you would find at the bottom of the demented ‘common sense’ of anyone claiming, ‘it’s all because of …’ (fill in your own blank from the following)

• asylum seekers
• big pharma
• taxes
• Brexit / the EU
• satanic cabals in league with neo-cons
• cyclists
• ‘them’ as opposed to ‘us’.

‘Origin stories’ of this sort are variously lazy, self-justifying, simplistic, over-emotive, and generally fall apart under the most modest scrutiny. Essentially, they are little more than empty assertions. So how do Ronson’s claims stack up?

Skip this bit if you feel like it

Lazy and simplistic?

Tick. The common theme with ‘origin’ stories of this sort (which are really stories of the corruption of a prior status quo), is that they seek to explain a great deal by reference to only one thing where cause and effect are both poorly defined, as in ‘it’s all because of…blah’. The claimed explanatory power is wildly over exaggerated.

Episode 1, 1000 Dolls. The reason why abortion is such a contentious issue in the U.S. and for Christian evangelism in particular is not because of the furore over a film. It just isn’t.

In Episode 2, Dirty Books. The strength of opposition to changes to school curricula and related texts did not hinge on the validity of a particular reading of a particular poem. That’s silly.

Episode 7, A Secret Room Behind a Fake Wall. If a group of people were ever open to believing there was a dungeon in a pizza restaurant, they were never going to be deterred by anything as ephemeral as evidence, or lack thereof. If they weren’t going to seize on the rantings of one person as saviour of their cause, then it would have been the rantings of another. Who that person was is neither here nor there and does not explain why such beliefs have proved so intractable in the U.S.

Episode 1, 1000 Dolls

This episode about evangelism and abortion centres on a film made in 1979 by Frank Schaeffer. However, without being an expert and on the basis of a quick Wiki for confirmation, the defining moment of the abortion debate in the U.S. was the Roe vs Wade case of 1973, which we’ve all heard of. One aspect of the cultural impact of the case, which we in the home counties might not have heard of, was that the erstwhile pro-choice (as it later became known) Republican party shifted its alliance to side with the pro-life camp (as it later became known). This was the key moment in which social conservatism aligned with opposition to abortion in a definitive way and predates Schaffer’s film by some years.

Now, although the Things Fell Apart episode is more specific in its focus on the emergence of abortion as a particular matter of concern for Christian evangelists, it’s hardly a surprise to find Christian evangelism sharing the concerns of wider social conservatism which, since 1973 and Roe vs Wade, now includes opposition to abortion. At the bottom of that, I’m going to suggest on the basis of very little (at least I admit it) – is a tension between the premium placed on individual freedoms in the U.S. (it’s my right to do what I want to my body) in conflict with the inherently judgemental morality of religion (maybe you can do what you want but some things are good and some things are evil and my own freedom says I can assert this), played out around the rights and freedoms of the unborn.

So why the empty stadiums? Who knows? But there are simpler explanations for its failure, for example ‘who really wants to go and see a film about the evils of abortion?’ Really, was it ever going to be a sell out?

None of this is to suggest that Schaeffer didn’t produce a film that became influential partly because of the coverage it received for being a flop, and which then served as a flashpoint for the polarisation of opinion, but it is to question the claim that his film is somehow at the heart of an issue that has a much more obvious precursor in Wade vs Roe and, considered in some ways, is just another working-through of the . This is also true of the other episodes.

In Episode 2, Dirty Books,the story about the misreading of At Lunchtime: A Story of Love is a nice aside but little more than that. The substantive point of the episode is that a particularly committed Christian conservative got themselves onto a school board so that they could veto any progressive texts, and did a very good job of it. Again, without questioning that these events took place and that the aforementioned couldn’t give a fig was an influential figure in the opposition movement, without the nice anecdote it’s hardly a riveting story, More importantly, it’s hardly surprising (as above) that in the state of West Virginia, with its high proportion of evangelical Christians, progressively liberal changes to education would run into determined opposition at some point. Again, there is no readily identifiable singular origin, and if there were, it’s not likely to be this one.

Considered as an origin story, Episode 7, A Secret Room Behind a Fake Wall is more of the same. By way of establishing some context, the episode explains how the bubble of the conspiracy theory ‘community’ had previously been burst by the debunking of the pizza restaurant theory. To recap, this held that a specific Washington pizza restaurant concealed a basement dungeon. To expose its heinous goings-on, some chap had gone into the restaurant with a gun, demanding to see said dungeon, only to find – gasp – that it didn’t have one.  Despite this blow, that the conspiracy ‘community’ doesn’t then disband, and everyone return to their day-jobs chastened by their brush with reality, again, isn’t really a surprise. That it re-forms around some other paranoid delusion is only testimony to people’s preference for that which affirms their beliefs over that that which challenges them.

Where are we? All this was to substantiate that Ronson’s ‘origin story’ claims are not really that convincing. I think I said ‘variously lazy, self-justifying, simplistic, over-emotive, and generally fall apart under the most modest scrutiny’. I think I’ll leave over-emotive to the next bit and considered the others covered. This is only supposed to be a blog after all.

But so what? Things Fell Apart may be guilty of the same faults that plague most other ‘origin’ stories but, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll recall that I actually suggested that Ronson was effectively peddling his own mini counter-conspiracy-theories and we can’t say that yet.

What is a conspiracy theory?

To round off this freewheeling look at the structure of Things Fell Apart, let’s briefly consider what a conspiracy theory is. Conspiracy theories are ‘origin’ stories in the ‘how the world became corrupted’ sense above, and which includes Things Fell Apart.

However, what specifically differentiates conspiracy theories from other ‘origin’ stories is… you guessed it, (drum roll)… that there is a conspiracy. An actual malevolent intentionality is posited that exercises great power over the ostensible power structures everyday life whilst remaining occluded. Things Fell Apart does not do this, but bear with me.

In its peculiarly American guise, conspiracy theories tend to have two further distinct but related characteristics. The explanatory power of conspiracy theories by which a specified minority group (Hollywood paedophiles) is held to be the real power behind just about everything (it’s all because of…), can only be maintained because the link between one (Hollywood paedophiles) and the other (everything) is completely nebulous. If it were otherwise, then the conspiracy would be exposed as demonstrably laughable. It therefore, and bizarrely, actually adds to the credibility of conspiracy theories that they be as outlandish as possible. Being otherwise inexplicable, the leap from improbable protagonist to malignant hand of power behind all things can only be attributable to some sinister but unspecified hold over others, in essence to magical abilities, possession of which further enhances the perception that the protagonist is powerful, and to be feared.

I imagine a conversation going something like this.

That child who disappeared was taken by a Hollywood paedophile ring

Oh, I didn’t know about them

Yes, they abduct children and abuse them

Oh. I didn’t know.

You wouldn’t; they’re very powerful so won’t get caught. They are above the law.

Oh, well, I guess they must be very powerful then

Yes, they’re very powerful, that’s how they get away with it without anyone finding out.

But you know about them?

Yes, because children are going missing.

I don’t know if that works or not, but conspiracy theories rest on circular reasoning and so are essentially articles of faith: belief is an all or nothing affair and the more extreme the example, the more apparent it is that there is a choice to be made between living in ignorance and immersion in truth. That is the essence of the red pill/blue pill of The Matrix: it’s a leap of faith that is past any appeal to evidence or reason.

Where did we get to? Oh yes, Ronson. Good grief.

In a nutshell: the origin stories of Things Fell Apart centre on individual actors seeking to persuade a wider audience of their views and are thus, strictly speaking, conspiracies only in the most minor sense. Moreover, though those individuals are undoubtedly committed and vocal, they are not malevolent and possess no particular hold, secret or otherwise, over more powerful individuals or institutions. However… the claim of Things Fell Apart is that these individuals (a Christian, a Christian film maker, a mentally disturbed man) nevertheless did have a disproportionate impact on the world.  The claim is that without these individuals, particular issues (education, abortion, QAnon) would not be the points of contestation that they are today, or at least not in the way they are. In Things Fell Apart, the obscure, magical force that allows for such implausible influence is provided by circumstance: by chance. The (apparently) misread poem that galvanised state-wide opposition to curriculum changes; a film about abortion that became a focus of protest only because no-one cared enough to go and see it; one man’s tortured delusions that took hold only because his mates thought they’d humour him: these strange twists are what Things Fell Apart revolves around and are, essentially, about the role of chance in how we got to where we are now.

So: something big and pernicious (the ‘culture wars’) is explained by some hidden agency exerting a disproportionate influence via magical means in order to further its own agenda. Though there are much more obvious (though much more boring) factors that would plausibly explain the big pernicious thing, if we suspend disbelief and follow the narrator, the hidden agency will be revealed. Sounds pretty close to a conspiracy to be.

By the way, all that above was about the structural parallels between Things Fell Apart  and conspiracy theories. I haven’t got onto the presentation of the narrative. But first (what else?) a digression.

The role of chance, or circumstance, in the stories of Things Fell Apart plays an interesting double role. On the one hand – and this is tied up with Ronson’s faux-naif narrative style – it imparts an air of significance, almost of determinism, to events such that the whole sequence seems less to be about chance, and more about fate. This is something that’s a recurring feature of other narratives where something or someone goes from obscurity to prominence. Celebrities often recount how they were noticed or otherwise plucked from nowhere and propelled to where they are now, which is, of course, their destiny. It is a feature of such retrospective narratives that chance events occur both as moments of ‘good fortune’, changing the direction the narrative was apparently going in, while also confirming the new path that we knew all along the narrative was always going to follow. Dickens does a lot of this.

So, the element of chance can actually add a layer of significance to a narrative, particularly when narrated as progression from the past to the present. That is the amplifying ‘magic’ element I was getting at above. However, when narrated in the opposite direction as an origin story, from present to the past, as a revealing or peeling back, then the intervention of circumstance serves instead to diminish the significance of events. If debate about serious issues – abortion, education, the integrity of power – are shown to rest on chance misunderstandings or accident, then the whole issue, poof! Can be dismissed as nonsense.

One can imagine a dinner party conversation…

An afternoon dinner party chez home counties, a drop of wine, convivial conversation flowing on points of agreement, and someone burbles something about how shocking it was that an armed mob briefly occupied the Capitol (I choose this example as abortion would probably result in a swift change of topic and the rescinding of any future invitations), and you say, leaning back, glass in hand, having listened to Everything Fell Apart, ‘Oh, you know it all started because some poor mad soul who believed in a Hollywood paedophile ring got himself on to one of those aaawful radio stations they have and they all believed him!’.

The point here is that spinning a narrative by which a ‘culture war’ is shown to rest on something arbitrary and/or some quirk of the American psyche allows for the whole thing to treated dismissively.  That’s fine if we only engage with this at an entertainment level, as with the dinner party conversation, but is problematic if you’re also claiming to expose the origin of fiercely contested issues. In order of magnitude, this approach:

1. Trivialises the actual focal topic of the episode (education, abortion, conspiracy). I know it’s a bit po-faced of me, but people have lost their lives over these things.
2. Trivialises the fact that many people apparently sincerely hold the views that are being held up for a degree of ridicule. There are a lot of evangelical Christians in the U.S., and in some states in particular. The number of people who believe in various conspiracies appears to be not insignificant. To us in the home counties, mockery and bemusement seem the only responses, but what is going on there such that people can come to fervently believe such nonsense?
3. Further undermines any notion of truth and rationality. Christians questioning the teaching of sex education or anything that might encourage independent, critical thought seems, to me, to be an attack on rationality in the name of faith. Politically focussed conspiracy theories of the sort held by QAnon, or the fifty murders of Hilary Clinton, or Donald Trump’s claim that the last election was stolen, work to undermine democratically legitimate power structures by making such preposterous claims, that some of them stick and seeds of doubt begin to grow.

Such pernicious nonsense should be challenged, but to do so, as Things Fell Apart does, on the basis of claims that are themselves spurious, and presented as tawdry revelations only adds nonsense to nonsense. Perpetuating a tit for tat of outlandish claim and counter claim, dismissal and counter dismissal only takes us further and further from any genuine process of listening to the other and reflecting on one’s own views. Again, its all a bit straight-laced of me, I know, but it is Ronson who repeatedly says ‘I didn’t want Things Fell Apart to become a part of the culture wars’, which is precisely what it is.

Do you know, I have got more on this, but I do think that I have fairly exhausted myself, and that being the case, I will stop.