Who can explain why Elon Musk is?
A.R. Moxon can. Because A.R. Moxon could explain your nose to your face. His words levitate us over our sleeping bodies so we can see reality with a clarity life generally lacks.
His new book of essays VERY FINE PEOPLE follows his critically acclaimed debut novel THE REVISIONARIES. And everything he writes dances off the page and into your deepest ruminations.
We wanted to talk to him about how Donald Trump became the law, square dancing, and what it was like to grow up among the very fine people.
Catch up on all the episodes of “How are you feeling about democracy?” here.
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ROUGH TRANSCRIPT
Jason Sattler: Let's start off with that press conference from 2017 that gave your book its title. Have you watched it recently?
A.R. Moxon: No, it's been a while since I've listened to that guy very much. I really I have to guard my sanity and the I tend to consume things through through the printed word since the 2016 election. I don't listen to a ton of radio. I don't listen to a ton of watch a ton of cable news. I definitely went back and referenced the transcript of it all. But now I don't think it's been a while since I've actually watched that guy saying those things.
The Very Fine People Press Conference: Are you putting what you're calling the alt left and white supremacists on the same moral plane? I'm not putting anybody on a moral plane. What I'm saying is this. You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other and they came at each other with clubs and it was vicious and it was horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch.
But there is another side. There was a group on this side. You can call them the lefty. You've just called them the lefty. That came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that's the way it is. Mr. President, you said there was hatred, there was violence on both sides. Well, I do think there's blame, yes.
I think there's blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there's blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it. And you don't have any doubt about it either. And, and, and, and, and, and. And if you reported it accurately, you would say, this killed Heather Charlottesville. They, they showed up at Charlottesville, excuse me, to protest, excuse me, down.
And you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.
Jason Sattler: Reading your book, the "very fine people" press conference, seems like the break in recent American history.
A.R. Moxon: From my perspective, it felt like a break for sure. It's a point in time that crystallized for me. I think one of the things I'm learning as I keep continue along this journey of, very low awareness, I think, to more awareness is that. Yeah. It was absolutely a in many ways, it was an unprecedented sort of thing. Got a cat coming up. This is a, this is a house of cats.
Jason Sattler: Welcome.
A.R. Moxon: So yeah, in a lot of ways, an unprecedented sort of thing, but in a lot of ways of continuance of what already was as. Well, you know, and um, so... but it was so overt and it was so grotesque, right? That it was something that became just undeniable.
Jason Sattler: There was that joke that used to go around, "This is the day he became president." I think it was Oh, this is the day. That's who he's going to be as president. Like there was still, I still, think there was some aspect of us that believed in the NBC censors, that there was a real human being in there that they were going to continually show us the right parts of...
A.R. Moxon: There was and is a desire for him to be something other than he is. There's always, there always is. "Oh, this is going to be the point where he pivots. Oh, this is going to be the point where he becomes statesman." This is the, all of these things. And it's Because I think it's, I think it's born out of a realization that they are going to have to try to normalize him no matter what, and if he would just help them out, that would make them look a lot less ridiculous. I I think the "This is the day he became president." if I recall correctly, this was Van Jones.
Ryan died as he lived, a warrior and a hero, battling against terrorism and securing our nation.
He became President of the United States in that moment, period.
A.R. Moxon: Van Jones. I don't know. It was something or other that Trump did. And I think it was even something terrible, but it was at least terrible in the way that presidents are terrible. And so he was like, this is it. And I feel like I got the chills. This is when he became president. And the next day, he's out there, talking shit about Joe Scarborough's wife. And it's it's more of the same just absolute rodeo clown show, that it's always going to be because he is what he is, but Yeah, and then the tv writer Megan Amram just took that up and started posting it like every single day. This is the day down Donald Trump became president, which I think was an effective way to clown that whole thing. It was the day that he became the president that he promised to become though, he ran promising to to defend Nazis. I think that was the explicit promise in 2015 and 2016.
I think it was explicitly there for anyone who wanted to hear it.
Jason Sattler: What do you mean when you say Donald Trump is the law ?
A.R. Moxon: I think that the idea there, what we're dealing with is in my opinion, is supremacy. And supremacy is the belief that some people matter and other people do not matter. And most people don't matter, and the people who don't matter should be used in whatever way the the people who do matter see fit, by the people who do matter and and so we see this play out in a number of different manifestations.
One of them is yeah, in the most recent essay that I was writing about moral authorities and I was writing about people people who are supremacists at at the core believe that the law is something that. Does not bind them. It binds other people. There's the famous Frank Wilhoit quote. Um, the composer Frank Wilhite, I've learned to that effect. But what Trump is saying and what I think supremacists in this country are saying is that the law is not a matter of statutes and and rules, regulations, um, and certainly not principles or values or virtues. The law is whatever it is that they do. If they do it, then it is lawful because they do it. And this manifests itself, you could talk about any number of of examples, but the fact that the concept of self defense applies only to them and any violence that they might enact, no matter how premeditated, no matter how no matter how clearly the act is murder, it must be self defense based on whatever justification they want to give and any violence done in no matter how clearly it was in self defense against them is clearly even even if it's, even if it's uh, hypothetical future violence is justification for any other violence that might already be considered.
So this is the crux of it, right? Is the demand to be seen as virtuous without, even making a gesture towards virtue, to be moral while showing morality the greatest contempt, and to be considered moral authority is not because of any moral act that's being taken, but only because what, whatever it is that you are doing and intending as a supremacist is what morality then will be. And yeah that's it. That's the concept that I'm playing with in that essay. And I think that we can clearly see that manifests itself in many different ways.
Jason Sattler: Your essay made me think about the Alito flag. He said that the husband called his wife the C-word . And it was the wife. And it happened a month after the flag went up.
A.R. Moxon: And his rationale still needs to be taken at face value because it's what he said and what he said is true because he's saying it right. He is not just truthful. He is truthfulness itself. And whether or not. He is actually telling the truth is completely immaterial to it.
What he says becomes the truth because he's saying it.
Jason Sattler: I think this is what makes you so useful and important to me is the ability to see the world in clear terms when it's so hard to see it in clear terms, just telling it like it's a story. The story of supremacy. It's so hard not to sound like a college professor when you start talking about supremacy quickly becomes quite talking about white privilege or, the to avoid that kind jingoism or, you just even arcane language.
I think this ties to your background and I want to get to the title of the book and the spoiler of your book is, that you and your family are among the very fine people. I just wondered when did you figure that out? And what did that mean to you when you heard Donald Trump say that?
A.R. Moxon: Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for all of that. First of all I think the reason primarily that I put things rather plainly is because I'm figuring them out myself. And so I find it useful to approach it the way an alien might coming to this and saying, okay, so what is this? Let's just say it in, in plain terms. I've So if it's useful to you, I think it's probably because it was first useful to me.
So to the question, when we, when I talk about in my book about how I have the realization that I too am among the very fine people and that I was raised in that. It's true. I don't think I'm particularly unusual in that. I think there are. It's not the only story, but it's a pretty common story of somebody who was raised in, um, in evangelical Christianity. I was a missionary kid. I grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, what was then Zaire. My parents worked as a nutritionist. My mother ran a nutrition program. And my father was the head of the hospital out there, and they did a lot of really good work. I think that, uh, we were probably closer to the colonialist part of white supremacy than we realized. I dare say we were I still feel a good amount of pride for the work that my parents were able to accomplish out there while recognizing and holding the reality of that. And I think it's that it's recognizing and holding that reality that I think is hard for me, and I think it's hard for a lot of people. It's not comfortable to do. This is what I mean when I say that I am among the very fine people is the very fine people is, Trump saying there are the Nazis and they're not good, but there are also really fine people marching with the Nazis in common cause we're supposed to make a meaningful distinction here. But at the same time. We all live in a reality where we are, if we're in the United States, we're part of an empire and that empire serves us to a certain degree myself, more than many but all of us to a degree and a particular sickness called supremacy really is the traditional foundational organizing principle, I would say, of our dominant culture, the way that power is organized and the way that dominant culture makes its assumptions and creates its reality.
And that is something that is imbalanced. I think that we see that it's unsustainable. I think we've seen that it's resulted over the course of our history in many failures. And we are experiencing many failures right now and we're on the cusp of many more. But at the same time, we're this is true because it benefits many of us and to the degree that it does, we bear that responsibility and coming to grips with that is is a piece of work to be done. And working through that and defining what that work is should be is the journey I've been on and it's what makes up the core of what I am trying to piece out and layout. or in an organized fashion that's understandable throughout the course of the book is this could become about guilt, but it's really more about responsibility. It could become about feeling bad about yourself, but it's really about what kind of person do you want to be, realizing the world that we're in, realizing our own culpabilities and our own responsibilities, things that we've inherited, whether we want to or not, do we want to be the kind of people that defend our own blamelessness or do we want to be the kind of people that fix What is broken and what will it and pay the cost of what it costs to fix what is broke?
Jason Sattler: There's this very specific kind of brokenness that came from that day...
[Nazis chanting "You will not replace us!"]
That has now become Republican mainstream ideology. I think tied directly into what you've been saying all day...
A.R. Moxon: Mainstream. Yeah.
Jason Sattler: I wonder how you look at that event, that kind of changed your life in a certain way. I just wonder how you feel about seeing this just become something that we just hear every day, all the time.
A.R. Moxon: It's well, it's distressing to be sure. I don't know what else I make of it. It's become, it's all become so normalized and there's so much of it now. It's difficult to come up with something useful to say. I think, it, it is it is so pervasive at this point. The replacement theory, which is, just a core tenet of antisemitism, of Nazism is, as you said, one of the core planks in the Republican platform. It's the centerpiece of their of their politics. It keeps coming up again and again, elected officials, highly placed and it's very disturbing.
But I would say the more disturbing thing is the the extent to which other institutions and other other parts of American life have just rolled with it and normalized it to a point where it really just is in the in the atmosphere.
As you said I first came into having a platform being somebody who spoke in a public way, albeit, Mostly on Twitter, to a certain degree of prominence on Twitter and a couple of other places. But to the degree that I have that platform, I've been using it and I've been using it to talk about this. I've seen it get more pervasive, not less. I've seen it get more normalized and mainstreamed, not less. And it, it is distressing to see the same people that we were told they're not as bad as you say, prove themselves to be worse than we could imagine. Um, and I I think it's, I think it's incumbent on all of us to do what we can to push back against that to speak with awareness very clearly with moral clarity to what we see and what we know and how we know it. And why but, I make of it? That's, I guess that's what I make of it. It's very disturbing to me. It's very distressing.
Jason Sattler: Another spoiler is you talk about this in "Where do we go now?" which is about where do we go now? You focus on the spirit. This is where we diverge is that you focus more on spirit than specific action. My whole thing this year is about specific but I do think I just I love that idea of building spirit so much and then you also add "What should you do?"
"Maybe you should run for office. But maybe you'd be bad at that." I love that line. But then you propose a bunch of great actions and I'll just, if you know them off the top of your head and you want to say them, or I could try to read them.
A.R. Moxon: No, go ahead. I, I, I certainly don't have it memorized.
Jason Sattler: It was awaken, convict, confess, repent, repair and redeem.
And me, that's like a political manifesto. And you actually have steps that how this could look in policy and it would, it almost would be my, it would be my party's platform if I could choose that. It's much easier for me personally to focus on the repair and redeem those other steps or the, like you are the really hard part of that.
I think we're trying to fix, I think we're trying to get to that every four years, we want to just skip the rest of the part and then repair and redeem for five months and then elect the right person at the right time, hopefully, and then they pick the right Supreme Court. Doesn't seem to be working that way.
What are the things that you think average people can do to help each other repair the spirit that we're lacking in the society right now?
A.R. Moxon: I do use the term spirit. I think of the, I think of the problem before us as being a sort of a sickness, and I think of it as a spiritual sickness. But I should be careful what I mean when I talk about spirit. Because I do talk to A great degree about spirit, and I talked to a rather large degree using words that you just used of awakening and conviction, confession, repentance, reparation, and redemption.
These are religious terms. I don't mean them in a negative way overtly religious sense. When I talk about spirit, I taught, something that we can all that we can all comprehend and we can all actually observe. And that is when when a collective belief takes hold within a culture or within a group of people, and that collective belief creates something generative that is more than an individual can can create by themselves. And it, it creates new possibilities that actually change the way things are and the scope of what can be. So when we think of spirit, we can talk about team spirit. We can talk about the spirit of the law. The ways that team can rally together and maybe their crowd as well to lift them to a greater a greater accomplishment than they thought was possible, or the way that a law might be might be applied and might be enforced in ways counter to what the letter of it say. That spirit, void of any religious tradition or belief in, ghosts or angels or I don't mean any of that. That's what I mean when I talk of spirit, and that's why, as you point out, a lot of what you're focused on is rubber meets the road actions. Actions are very important, and we have to take actions and those actions are, because they are specific and they are measurable and they are the way that we would take a journey step-by-step. So we actually have to do the work. We actually have to take actions, but because actions are specific, I've found that when, um, that When you write things and you put them out there and people find them helpful, they tend to think that you have answers.
And I'm, I I really, when it comes to tactics or when it comes to the specifics I'm really, I'm not very, I'm challenged, I'm as challenged as at that as anybody else, and I find it difficult to just come out and say, "Yes, the thing you should do, like you said, you could run for office, but maybe you'd be bad at that. Or maybe you need to donate." But maybe you're just hanging on, maybe you're just trying to, or maybe you need to confront some people. But maybe you're just trying to stay alive and to sit for me to go and say these are the actions It's difficult. It's difficult. But at the same time I thought people find it unsatisfying and I find it unsatisfying To just leave it at the level of spirit. I work on spirit and I work on, you could call it atmosphere, right? Like the thing that we all breathe could, what can we do to change the atmosphere? Which I believe you do by telling different and better stories. I do that. Maybe just because it's what I do best and maybe when it comes to actions the answer is find you know find the place where you are do the action that makes sense for you, in the place where you are. If you have the correct if correct principles isn't exactly what I want to say, but if you begin to enter into a journey where you are repairing brokenness, where you see it within yourself or in the world I think the actions start to suggest themselves to you. And I think that thing that you talked about earlier, where every four years, we hope to put the right person in office. I think again actions are important. I think we should vote. I think that there are people who don't think we should vote and I understand their reasons many of them, but I I do know...
Jason Sattler: Michigan, if they live in Michigan, they have to vote.
A.R. Moxon: I well, I understand why people would be jaded and I understand why people might come to that conclusion, but I can't help but notice that the fascists definitely think that voting matters because they're expending a lot of energy trying to prevent it and trying to make it something that doesn't happen anymore. And the past civil rights activists have also believed that it was pretty important. So I, I believe it's important. I think it's something that we it's one of the things we do, but I think one of the reasons that people have gotten jaded is because there is, especially among comfortable people. And I've been one of these myself a general current to just do it as you said, every four years we just try and put the right person in office and then we wash our hands of it all. And that isn't really democracy. I think democracy happens much more between the votes. The votes are important. But if all you're doing is just saying, Oh, we got the right person in office. Now we don't have to think anymore. We can just switch off our brains and our consciences. Then you actually, what you're trying to do is rediscover a self exoneration or a blamelessness and you're trying to participate in something that isn't really all that important removed from the from the mission of supremacy. I think it doesn't necessarily mean that you are a fascist. If all you want to do is get a leader in office and let them and let them solve all the problems for you, but it doesn't differentiate you from fascists very much either.
So I think that's. That sort of alignment toward the democratic process is the sort of thing that leads people to become more jaded because a lot of the people who are jaded about that process and a lot of the people who are jaded about elections, even though I don't agree with their perspective on this, they are often the people who are doing a lot of the day to day work, often because it's a matter of survival to make sure that they're engaged with mutual aid and with networks of support and with advocacy. And and I think they see that happen, are really in the trenches like that see people approach democracy in that sort of capricious way and it makes it creates adverse relationships with the overall process of elections in the United States in my opinion.
Jason Sattler: So speaking of broken and fascist, why is Elon Musk??
A.R. Moxon: If Elon Musk wasn't, then we would have to invent him. Elon Musk is the is the smartest person man in the world. And if you don't believe that then just go online and you'll find people who will tell you. And He made a truck that looks that looks like I don't know, a shiny dumpster because he's the smartest man in the world.
And I think Musk is another person who, who really exposes the brokenness of our system for what it is, because he's somebody who is in the business of selling futures that are unlikely. In order to, uh, sabotage very possible and imminent solutions that don't really favor him. He sees that we're thinking about him. Lightspeed rail in California. So he comes up with the Boring Company and the Hyperloop and all of these things that are right around the corner. And so we don't have to build, but lightspeed rail, because Elon Musk's going to come save us. And we're going to be going to Mars in 15 years and 15 years ago, we were going to be going to Mars in 15 years. And every time he mentions that we're going to Mars in 15 years, and we're going to terraform Mars and we're going to make it livable. And it all seems to me to be because so that we so that we don't have to try and make this happen. This currently livable planet stay livable because again, doing that would get us into money.
And Elon Musk, like most successful people, um, got that way by not paying his bills. And I think that. Is the core of supremacy, is making other people pay higher costs for brokenness rather than paying the natural and lower costs that attend repair and maintenance of what we've already inherited.
Elon Musk. He's a sucker in a very specific way. He's believed his own bullshit, I think. So he's sort of, the head of the Elon Musk fan boy army. Um, I don't know. He ruined the platform that that. My main output, my main platform for getting for building an audience and for just connecting with people and a lot of people who were friends of mine that I met on that platform aren't there anymore, so he can go to hell and he probably will. Before too long, right? So
Elon Musk is because a system that is built to create Supremacy is always going to generate supremacists like Elon Musk.
Jason Sattler: I think with Elon Musk, it's made me rethink Henry Ford. We're here in michigan something. It seems a lot less cute now, I still like to go to greenfield village. I imagine, being a Jewish person who's living in Dearborn or there somewhere in, Lansing or even in Detroit or Grand Rapids, somewhere in Michigan and seeing this guy buy a newspaper and start to publish, just the most virulent anti-Semitism and racism. was so much like Elon and the weirdness and the aggressiveness he put into it. And it's remarkable how that has all been sanitized. Is this something that has ever hit you living in Michigan?
A.R. Moxon: You live on, I think, the east side of the state, and that's where the Ford Museum is. And that's where the Ford plants for the most part are, it's Motor City. I didn't, I don't know if I had the same sense of Henry Ford growing up outside of the country as I did. But certainly, look, it's not just you. Henry Ford is, has, pretty, was pretty famously a Nazi sympathizer virulent racist and also a extraordinarily rich industrialist who as by virtue, by, by virtue is not the right word, but by virtue of of his vast wealth and his business success was able to was able to launder his reputation into something else. And really craft, craft the narrative and convince other people to to repeat the narrative that of him simply as a successful businessman, flat philanthropist, et cetera. And very, very common story with massively wealthy individuals. I think at the end of the day being a billionaire is not so much about money as no longer being accountable to society in any way. I think of billionaireism as a cruel luxury that, that society don't know the society afford itself to, do we have a choice? They bear such outsized influence, but it's not something that we can really afford and. And, Henry Ford is probably one of the prime examples in our area, right? We're both from Michigan, we're both in Michigan still, still a very still a very famous and. In many ways, very respected person, you still have school field trips to the Ford Museum and it's, a nice museum and very lovely.
All of that, I square danced in grade school because Henry Ford wanted to make sure that jazz didn't infect the minds, the woke mind virus of jazz didn't infect young white minds, and yeah, he had influence on the state that lasted all the way until then and still beyond feel. In my area, we've got the DeVos family, and we've got, when we want to see when we want to go and see the latest musical act, we're going to go to a we're going to go to a stadium that's named after, either the DeVos's or the Van Andels, both of them, Amway billionaires who have scattered their largess all over West Michigan.
And. We thank them for it because otherwise, where would where would we have gotten the money? The money that managed to suck up and we got a bit of it back. It's a cruel, it's a cruel luxury. I don't think that we can afford that sort of thing. And I don't think we should.
Jason Sattler: I love reading you so much online and print and on your newsletter, The Reframe It's fun. It's just, it dances, it lives...
A.R. Moxon: Thank you.
Jason Sattler: And it's always surprising even just the way it looks on the page. Somehow you manage to make that look not so digital which is an impressive feat. I know these are all very serious essays. You managed to make talking about Elon Musk whimsical. Which of these essays was the most fun to write?
A.R. Moxon: Oh, wow. They're all fun to write. It's I love to write. So I always, I pretty much always have fun. Every once in a while, there's one that's a slog. But if it's a slog, it's often one that doesn't get published. Published because if it's a slog for me to write, it's probably gonna be a slog to read.
So if you've ever read one and you were like, that one wasn't very good. That was a slog. That probably wasn't very fun to write. One that comes to mind that was a lot of fun to write, was one from, oh, over a year ago now, it was about Scott Adams, and it was called The Case for Shunning, and it was essentially a couple thousand words of just clowning Scott Adams and his whole world. And I think I never mentioned his name. I think I just called him the creator of Dilbert, or maybe I always called him Scott. I don't know. But in any case that one really came very easily. That was, that one was a lot of fun. There's one called the owners of the world. Um, that. It started with a parable about Jimi Hendrix and a guitar that really came very quickly and easily. Usually if they start with a story if there's a story that I can attach to them those usually are a lot more fun when I just, when I have that to deal with. I'm a fiction writer at the core even though most of what has gone out is that people have seen is political writing. I think that is. really where my heart is. So there was one that used a story idea that I had had in mind for a long time and I wasn't sure where to put it. And I suddenly realized, Oh, this would actually work really good with what I want to talk about. It was a, it was about persuasion and what persuasion really is and what it isn't and how it's often weaponized by abusive people in order to facilitate the abuse. And that one is called The Finger-Taker's Son. Um, and I really liked how that one came out. Anybody who's listening, if you want to go and check out one from the not so distant past that I thought came out pretty well, go check out The Finger-Taker's Son. It's got a story in it.
Jason Sattler: And the feeling you get always is reading something that happened 20 years ago with the understanding that you might have in 20 years from now because of the estrangement that you provide. I really want to thank you for doing that. You're the clown prince of twitter and I mean that totally as a compliment. You are always someone who adds a perspective that makes me want to care. That is a real gift when things can get as shitty as they are right now, so I just want to thank you.
A.R. Moxon: Thanks Jason. Thanks very much.
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