I spoke with the excellent Hannah Proctor once again; this time she interviewed me about my book for the Baffler:
Walter Benjamin’s messianic historical materialism is getting at something about the ways we can’t escape history entirely. At Standing Rock the bulldozers that were coming through to dig the Dakota Access pipeline literally turned up graves. Rather than thinking that we can bring back the dead, it’s important to think that things can get worse. In terms of Holocaust piety, the dead are being used in many cases in ways they would not want to be, in that they’re being used as justifications for war.
I contrast at some point, Mother Jones saying, “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living” with the famous Joe Hill phrase “Don’t mourn, organize.” I think we have to mourn and organize.
Grief is inevitable. We’re still mortal—Peter Thiel is not going to solve that. We’re all going to die. People we love will die. But often it will not be dramatic or horrific. It will just be a thing that is a natural outcome of being human. We can’t solve grief. We’re going to have to do it. But there are so many horrific ways to die that we can stop, that we can change. During Covid, people I talked to who lost parents couldn’t be there with them. I was upended by the death of my father, but I could see him. I could visit him in the hospital. I could say goodbye.
What does justice look like in an expansive way that reaches into the past as well as into the future?