Angry Planet - On Spectacles of Cruelty

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

On the last Angry Planet of 2025, novelist and Marine Corps veteran Phil Klay returns to reflect on a year of spectacle and cruelty.Between the Pentagon’s boat strikes and the administration’s constant barrage of grotesque memes, it feels like America is a crueler and cruder place. For better and worse, the Presidency sets a moral standard for the country and Trump has lowered that standard. Klay wrote about all this in a piece at The New York Times and he’s here with us today to talk through it.“It’s too easy to condemn.”The project is spectacles of cruelty“You’re not supposed to be joining a gang of thugs.”What is this doing to us as a nation?The lust for cruelty and dominationKlay’s review of Hegseth’s first yearWar vs. Defense“Read long things.”Living in the Hell of opinionsEnding on a high noteWhat Trump Is Really Doing With His Boat StrikesTrump Admin’s Racist Halo Memes Are ‘A New Level of Dehumanization of Immigrants’Trump has accused boat crews of being narco-terrorists. The truth, AP found, is more nuancedSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello, and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galtz, and I am here with a returning guest. Sir, will you introduce yourself to the audience one more time? So I'm Phil Klein.

I'm a novelist and a professor at Fairfield University and also a veteran of the Marine Corps. And I write a lot about military policy. So you just wrote a piece in the New York Times that really caught my eye and is kind of part and parcel with something that's been haunting me a lot lately. It's kind of a big topic. But I would say that the piece of Trump meme world that really caught my eye and really kind of dragged me under earlier this year, the official White House account released a reference to, which is a pretty popular game, where they compared immigrants to some of the monsters from that game that needed to be destroyed. And I thought, like, as grotesque as a lot of the propaganda has been already, that one

really struck me. And it struck me because that's part of the world that I'm in. You understand that culture, and they're kind of using those cultural signifiers to really just signal to their base. but also do this other thing, which is change the moral character of the country, which is kind of what you wrote about. And can you kind of walk me through your piece? And like, tell me about Augustine.

The piece came about in relation to the strikes on Venezuelan boats. And the kind of strange thing is somebody writes about national security, military policy, if you're interested in international law, law farm conflict, any of these issues or the drug war, the strange thing about this subject is it's almost too easy to write about or too easy to condemn, right? Because you have both legally and morally dubious strikes, right? In particular, the second strike in what is already a morally and legally dubious war, called war by the administration, as part of a legally, morally dubious policy against, you know, in the drug war. And sort of at every level, this isn't something

that you can kind of look at and say, oh, there's a serious argument for why we should be doing this, right? So we're left with kind of, kind of, nonsense piled on nonsense. So, you know, when you're looking at people who are justifying the second strike, they're like, you know, he's he's looking at the video, then I'm also looking at the video to see if they're still in the fight. And it's like, well, well, what fight? There was never any fight. These are just killing people. Yeah.

Right. And so the question in terms of, you know, law firm conflict is like, do they count as enemy combatants? Are they still in the fight? Shipwrecked sailors. it's a kind of classic case if you're if you're shipwreck sailor you can't be targeted right and uh but you can't be targeted if you're still somehow in the fight and so it's like well are they still in the fight well it's kind of a ridiculous question to begin with because it's what fight they were never in any fight right i think this boat wasn't even heading to america it was like

gone off to europe but even if it was it's not a fight and then you know it said well the weapons are in this case that they have are supposedly the drugs right So you've got this already tortured rationale for something that, look, we can argue this within the U.S. conflict, but anybody outside of any military lawyer who's not invested in defending the United States at all costs is just going to look at this and say it's a war crime. Okay. That's what everybody else around the world is. So this is one of those issues where at the end of the day you have. an American admiral who made a decision that lowers the prestige and honor around the world of the United States military, right? He's tarnished the uniform, right?

In pursuit of a policy set by an administration led by Secretary of Defense, who has been quite clear about the fact that he's uninterested in war crimes, right? and who kind of came to prominence defending, you know, murderers and getting pardons for people accused of or convicted of war crimes, right? One of the most egregious cases being Clint Lawrence, who seems to straight up be a, you know, sort of sadist who went to Iraq, wanted to kill people, and was turned in by his platoon of combat veterans immediately. So it's this bizarre circumstance because, you know, you sort of, where's the argument, right?

And people say, well, you know, drugs do terrible things to America. It's like, yeah, okay, is this part of a serious counter drug policy? No, it's not. And there's plenty of reason to think that this will damage our ability to, you know, to have a counter drug policy. So, you know, people who are in favor of a more aggressive and militarized drug war, I don't think they're looking at this and thinking that this is the greatest thing, right? I mean, a lot of what we do overseas in terms of the drug war is we need to work with local partners, right? You have a administration in Columbia, which is already extremely skeptical of the drug war, but which is, you know, at least so far been cooperative with U.S. law enforcement. in a military, this sort of thing alienates them and provides them more reason to pull away from us.

So, you know, there's, and that's just one country. You know, there are all sorts of reasons why you would think that in the long term, this is probably going to be very detrimental, even to a kind of more hawkish-aggressive version of the drug war. So, you know, for me, is somebody looking at this, it's like, well, what do you write about, right? The moral issues, the legal issues, they're all pretty simple, right? you know, if you're if you're a hardcore partisan, you can do, you know, backflips and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, it doesn't fit morally with what we've expected of, of, you know, how we conduct strikes in the past and, and, and it doesn't fit, uh, legally. And it doesn't even seem to have, much to do with a serious counter-drug policy. So I'm left thinking like,

so what is this, right? And I kept thinking about this story that St. Augustine tells in the confessions. And it's not the first time that I've thought of it because, you know, you mentioned memes before. And whenever I see like the White House will post a meme of, say, a weeping migrant, handcuffed by immigration officers.

Or they had that video that they put out. It was like an ASMR and it was of migrants being shackled before being sent to a prison. Or Christy Noem in front of just a bunch of prisoners in an infinitely brutal El Salvador in prison. And I thought of this story, which is, you know, fourth century AD, this young man named Dilipius. as a friend of St. Augustine's who comes to Rome to study law, and he's a decent guy. He's aware of the Gladiator games. He thinks they're terrible and tells himself that he's never going to go, right? But his fellow students drag him to a match.

And he's appalled initially, Augustine says, the entire place seethed with the most monstrous delighting cruelty. And Olympias keeps his eyes shut. But eventually, the gladiator is struck and the crowd roars. And curiosity forces his eyes open. And Augustine says that he is struck in the soul by a wound graver in the gladiator in his body. He sees the blood. He's just riveted by the violence and the excitement of it. and in that sort of crowd in place where everyone's excited and lusting for cruelty,

Augustine writes, he imbibed madness and eventually became a fit companion for those who brought him, meaning somebody who took pleasure in the spectacle of cruelty and violence and death. And that's, I think, really what's happening. I think, you know, if you can't really look at this, these with any kind of legal moral or policy justification. And it should be noted, the White House is not really trying to do this, right? You know, it's been well past 60 days since they initiated this campaign. They never, they haven't gone to Congress for approval.

Congress has not given them approval. So this is not a war. It's a violation of war powers act. But they haven't even tried to make the case. And details about the individual boats are always really scant, right? The actual explanation between, you know, we'll get Christy Noem saying that, you know, because he's blown up these boats, he's saved hundreds of millions of lives, I think, which is an interesting suggestion. But she doesn't believe that. Nobody believes that.

it's nonsense. And so it seems to me that it has to be just the sort of excitement of being able to blow up boats and show it on TV, right? We get these videos after videos of the boats blowing up, as well as accompanying memes, you know, Secretary of Defense's posts a, you know, image of him with laser eyes or stuff like that. So it's all this kind of swaggering, braggadocious. spectacles of violence with very little behind it.

And, you know, there's an element of this which I find just deeply disturbing, even sort of beyond my problems with the individual strikes, which is, you know, the human beings haven't changed in terms of their basic human. nature in 2000 years. We still are the kind of people who could enjoy gladiator games, the cruelties of the ancient world. We're also the kind of people who

can listen to the better angels of our nature, right? And do tremendous and inspiring things. And I think that the president occupies a really unique place of moral leadership for the country. Right. So, you know, when he's selling his policies, it's not just a kind of technocratic vision of how we're going to achieve something

that will ratchet up, you know, American living standards by a degree. But he's selling a kind of vision of what it means to be an American, what it should mean to be an American, right? And what should delight us, what should give us pride, what should discuss us, disgust us, what should enrage us. And it seems to be that we're, they are. are appealing to and attempting to shape an electorate satisfied by spectacles of cruelty. And it seems like that is, because there was a part of me at the beginning that would think

that that is just a byproduct of other policies. But the longer this goes on, the more I believe that that is the whole project or a large part of the project. It seems to be the only consistent thing is the footage of cruelty. Do you feel that it's hard to avoid, especially if people that pay attention to the news, like I see this stuff every day. Do you feel it changing you or affecting you? And if so, how? You know, I think about this, not just in terms of what I'm seeing, but also like I'm a

father, right? And I'm a patriot. You know, I'm somebody who signed up to serve my country, join the Marine Corps, right? Join the Marine Corps with it and understanding that it was an institution bound by values, right? That's one of the kind of big selling points of the military. You know, you're not, you're not supposed to just be joining a gang of thugs. And, and so the more direction of the country, obviously is something that concerns me, not just for the present day, for where we're going in the future. And I think also, I do have a sense that, look, I don't want to be naive about the American past, right? And, you know, when you bring up these criticisms of the current campaign, the first thing that people will bring up is, well,

What about Biden's airstrikes and Obama's airstrikes? And, you know, I criticize those at the time. And I think that it is important to acknowledge that, you know, the kind of place where we are now where the president is really sort of pushing the bounds of his ability to reach out and kill people, right? And I think sort of passed the law. But Obama had already stretched that very, very much during his time, right? And had used authorizations of military force in novel ways at the time. And so it's, it's, there is a kind of progression in terms of more and more authority to kill with limited congressional oversight being vested in the executive, which is a recipe. for disaster, I think, in the long term.

A big part of how we got where we are now, right? Yeah, it's a huge part of how we got where we are now. And, you know, the first person, not the first person, one of people who was a key player in pushing us to this was, you know, was not somebody who is putting out memes of cruelty, but somebody who, you know, in the New York Times announces his drone campaign, And he's talking about how he's reading philosophers of just war and that sort of thing, right? So much more, you know, friendly version of this to, you know, your median American liberal.

And yet here we are. So it's not that, you know, I sort of want to be naive about the past or think that this is the first time that America has morally disgraced itself. But nonetheless, here we are. And that is what we're doing. and I think that it is, it's incumbent upon us to push back, to push back in terms of policy, but there's almost a way in which when you get trapped in these debates, you know, you're kind of hiding the ball, right? So there's this debate like the second strike.

What's the, you know, can you find a sort of rationale by which you justify the second strike? And maybe that, and then it's like, you know, the whole thing's nonsense. right the whole thing is nonsense and it's grotesque and uh and and that's and and what is it doing to us as a nation that i mean what is it doing to us as a nation is one of my big questions is i know that the thing that i'm feeling and i do have complicated feelings about it because as you said am i am i just upset now that our faces being rubbed in it and that it's being turned into spectacle, that we live in every 1980s sci-fi dystopia. But no, I don't, I think there are there is, there are, there are,

there are variances, there are levels, things are different. This is worse. And it's making me, I'm really angry. This is making me very, very angry. And one of the reasons I'm mad is that it does feel like it is every criticism, you know, when you get into an argument with a friend and they do the thing like, well, what about all of the bad things about America? This is who we are. This is who we've always been. It is as if someone is stepping up and saying like, yes, this is who we are. This is who we've always been.

And on top of it, that's good and let's celebrate it. And just like that's not the entirety of the country. It is part of the country, but it cannot be the entirety of it. And we're moving into this celebration of the anniversary of the whole thing next year at a time when we've turned Twitter into a feed for our version of gladiatorial combat. Yeah. You know, there's a Sam Huntington, this is an off-quoted line of Sam Huntington's where he says, you know, America's not a lie. It is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope, right?

And so I think that the issue here is that, you know, I guess this administration doesn't seem disappointing. Right. They are what they say they are. and they're not calling us to anything greater. And it was interesting to me. You know, I was in Washington recently. I took a run and I went to the Lincoln Memorial, and you read the second inaugural.

And that is wartime rhetoric, but it is wartime rhetoric of such a different register, right? It is not full of braggadocio and like this kind of like fake macho, tough guy swagger. I'm sorry, so ridiculous. You're talking about like blowing up boats of people that aren't even in a war with you. Probably more than likely like guys that got 500 bucks to run something up the coast.

The Associated Press did a investigation of who was getting killed. And, you know, a lot of these people are like poor laborers, you know, out-work bus driver or whatever who get 500 bucks to do one of these runs. And it's like, you know, this is, these are the people that were, you know, blowing up with American bombs. And, you know, Megan Kelly had this sort of grotesque response to the pushback where she said, you know, I want to see them suffer, right? Like, I want to see them strike them in such a way that they bleed out slowly. And yeah, it's, it's, that's the kind of. sadism that these videos and memes seem set to

to slake, whereas, you know, which again, it's like we're back in the pagan world that Augustine was criticizing and very much far from the kind of nation that Lincoln was trying to call us to be when he argued, you know, that we need to fight with malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness and the right as God gives us to see the right. right that a tough firmness of moral purpose right in which we are not blind to our own faults but resolved to succeed in a cause that is determined by the values that we have right that's what lincoln

was calling us to do is very different from you know whatever it is that's going on right now The other part aspect of this that's disturbing me is learning the character of the Megan Kelly's and the other, my fellow citizens, the people around me. There's other people in this arena that are cheering, that are pleased with this. How do you reckon with sharing a country with the bloodthirsty, the people that are happy here with this? Look, we all are capable of this, right? And I would say that a certain kind of, look, lust for cruelty for domination, that is part of the human condition, right? To go back to Augustine, right? He talks about a people as being bound by loves, right?

common object of love. And that's what Lincoln is trying to give people in his public rhetoric, right? Common objects of love that we can bind us together, things, values, things that we can and share. But Augustine also says in practice, most states are ruled by lust for domination. Right. And that can take different forms. but I would, I'm very leery of, you know, the kind of question sort of very neatly settles like, how do you share a republic with people who enjoy this sort of thing?

It's like, okay, yes, there's right now, and this is the most grotesque variant of it, there's that lust for cruelty and domination, which is being stoked by a right-wing administration, right? And so their audience is the political right, right? I'll say a couple things. One, I don't think that that's every Trump supporter. I think that this story makes a lot of people uncomfortable, right? Even people who's, look, your average person, and I think this is what the Trump administration is counting on, you say something bad happened to a drug dealer.

They don't care. And yet, this story has legs, right, and not just among liberal America. The piece that I put out in the Times that criticized this, and specifically criticized the way that they talked about it, the way in which they're sort of choosing to talk about the moral questions, right? That was shared by a lot of conservative Christians on social media. And such. The National Review put out a link to it and said that it was worth praying about.

Right. So I think that the question is not like, how do you share a country with people on the other side of the aisle who are bloodthirsty? But rather, how do you recover the better angels of our nature within the American electorate, right, on both sides of the aisle? and that is something that I think we need to think about individually, right, as fellow citizens, right, in terms of how we act with our fellows, but also the kind of leaders that we support. You know, one of the things about the Trump administration is he's sort of activated by hate, loathing and disgust and likes to sort of divide the electorate, right?

And, you know, name enemies and all the other stuff. sorts of things. It's not like that style is impossible to have in the Democratic Party as well, right? And so the question is, how do you have somebody who speaks with moral firmness and doesn't shy away from the moral questions at hand? And yet doesn't seem to be dividing us in that way. And it's actually trying to represent not a political tendency, but America itself. and in so doing try and sort of push America forward in that kind of hopeful way. I worry about that in the next five years. And I do also worry about what Democrats and left-leaning people may be learning from this moment in terms of what's possible. and what the

what the like what you can do with publicized cruelty hopefully the better angels of our nature went out yeah so can we pivot a little bit here and the last time you were on

we were HEC Seth was just coming in it's been about a year now what's your review I mean, it's about what I thought it would be. So not a ton of competence. Okay. I think this is not somebody who is able to articulate a serious vision for the challenges of the future.

There was something kind of almost comical about that event where he brought all generals together, this unprecedented meeting, everybody in one room, so he could pretend to be Patton in front of a giant flag and give a speech about how they shouldn't be fat and they should be fit and the American military shouldn't be woke and we should kill people, do a good job of killing people. I mean, it was truly mind-boggling. You can only imagine and what it must have felt like in that room. And, you know, these are people who are dealing with serious things. And there's a lot that's changing in the world.

And it's like, all right, you have the rise of China. You have AI. You have the war in Ukraine is changing people's understanding what may or may not be necessary useful in the battlefield and different types of technologies we might need to invest in and different types of ways in which we might need to train. and our troops and all these other things. And they get called in for like a kind of battalion level,

hey guys, you know, hit the track. And we're tough guys kind of talk. I mean, it must have been, frankly, enraging. You can only imagine that in that room you have a bunch of professionals who, you know, it's doubtful that they had a ton of respect for the guy at the beginning. But, you know, the one justification I heard from it from a friend of mine who's sort of conservative guy, right? Conservative vet. And he said, well, it's nice to know that even a general can get called in for a bullshit meeting and have to sit through nonsense.

He's like, as a Lance Corporal, it happens to you all the time. So there's that. But, you know, I mean, like, there's Signal Gate, obviously, is, it's just ridiculous. I mean, it's, it's one. absurd thing after the other, as well as nefarious things, right? The thing that I'm most concerned about is him pushing the military to do war crimes, basically, right? You know, he went in, he fired the, fired the Jags. Uh, C. Jags has made a career of defending people accused of war crimes. Uh, and in his tenure, you know, there's still

all sorts of questions about how involved he was in terms of pushing the second strike that has become the sort of object of discussion, which, funnily enough, he sort of backed away from very early on in the, in the controversy. Yeah, I thought that was interesting that he, the, the admiral seemed to have been asked to fall on the sword. Yeah, well, I mean, he's like a swaggering, a tough guy. but also a total coward. It's, you know. And then there's just like, you know, he's a buddy of mine who's a Marine vet,

he puts out more workout videos than Richard Simmons. Like, what? What is, you know, I mean, it's fine, okay? Who's obsessed with like so much of the rest of the administration? It is about the image. It's about the projection. It's about the propaganda that's created. Right.

And yet he has. as a real job. Mm-hmm. You know, so it's, it is an, it's an embarrassing tenure. And I don't think that, I don't, I don't think this is going over that well with the American public. That's the other thing, right? I think this sort of thing, they thought there was more of an appetite for it than there was. My instinct is that a lot more people are discomfited by this than they thought.

And at the end of the day, yeah, it is kind of important to Americans that their military behave with a certain code of honor, right? and the thinness of it comes through as well. There's something ridiculous about Hegsseth. There's something embarrassing about having him as secretary of defense. So my suspicion is that he's just kind of, he's a drag, And even though he's fulfilling, I guess, the fantasies of a certain type of highly online, conservative, who likes it when liberals complain about brutality and unnecessarily killing, that's not much to have as the Secretary of Defense. And I don't think people like it. Do you think he makes it the whole four years?

I don't know. I'm not, I'm not like political analyst of the Trump White House guy. I don't know. I have no. Fair enough. Yeah, I, you know, I think like, too, my approach to like really detailed knowledge of the inner workings of, you know, politicians' thought processes is like, it's like knowledge and lovecraft. If you know too much of it, it's just going to destroy you. that's a good analogy yeah if you if you know what all who all the whips are then your mind shatters there are things man was not meant to know um a okay you i've noticed that you you do not call him the secretary of war oh yeah i mean so you you have to it's not a it's just another dumb thing, you know? Like, Congress renamed it, the Secretary is the Department of Defense.

So him calling himself the Secretary of War is just him calling himself the Secretary of War. And we've given him a lot of power, so everybody's going along with it. But it's another silly thing. And, you know, I don't know. It's not like a big point of pride. It's like, I won't call him the Secretary of War. It's just actually not. It caught my ear because I always call him the Secretary of War when I write about him. And I do it very intentionally. And kind of my logic is that I want to hang that on him.

That is their choice. That's what they've decided to label themselves as. And I do think it's ridiculous. And I want us to never forget that that. That's what they chose. And every time I do it, it's usually like a blue sky thing, but I always have angry people in the comments or in the... Oh, yeah. They're like, he's the Secretary of Defense.

Actually, you should stop calling him that. Angry people in the comments of Blue Sky. I know. I know. It's very, very shocking. But I always, it's always just like, always just an interesting fight that I think people pick. And, you know, I know that I'm picking it by calling him the Secretary of War, too. But, so it just caught my ear.

Yeah, it's a very different set of angry comments than the blue sky. Twitter is mostly people calling me gay. Or they'll be like, well, Obama, you know, do this. Actually, the most common one seems to be, well, you seem to have forgotten about when Biden said he was drone striking a terrorist and instead he killed up and killed an Afghan family. And it's like, how, I don't understand how in their minds. That's an argument for more strikes. Like, it's like, yes, we've previously struck someone who we thought was the terrorist and killed a bunch of innocent people. And that's, and you think that's a defense of the current ball.

Yeah, the idea that a mistake was made once in the past justifies, it's just like, well, I guess it's just free reign now. Yeah, I mean, so there's an element of social media, which is interesting to me, which is sort of like a sub-discussion of this. but probably relevant because it seems like a lot of the administration thinks in those terms. Yeah, we're ruled by social media addicts right now. So a kind of like brain dead, both sides is, or other, you know, not both sides is, like a brain dead sort of like, what aboutism ism is a dominant mode in social media. So if you wanted to justify this policy, right, you could make an argument, but you'd have to actually like make a long argument.

To respond and what people would is a sort of generative mode of social media is something quick, punchy, usually contemptuous, dismissive, something hot, right? And so I found increasingly that, you know, like years ago, the way people would respond to you was the thread where you'd get like, you know, a 19 point thread about why your argument is wrong. And now the most common thing, whenever. I make a political argument is somebody will point out, oh yeah, but did you say X about other politician, right? And the funny thing is, I've been writing critical things about every president that I've ever written under. So I've had this happen to me about everybody, you know.

Well, did you say this about Trump when I'm writing during the Biden years? Now it's, did you say this about Biden and Obama? And the answer is always yes. But I think it's like this sort of instinct where it's like if you can pin the same fault on another administration of the opposite side, it somehow feels like it neutralizes the complaint, which is really intensely stupid. But it does seem to be a dominant mode of response to political arguments that you don't like on. social media. I've seen it in person, too, not just on social media. So it's filtering, it's filtering up into the real world.

I think that it's become a real, like, brainworm. Yeah, because then if you can, if you can use, it's almost like a shield. If you use that, then you don't have to think about the other thing, right? Yes, right. And, and, yeah, it's, you know, it's like, it's especially strange with me. because in every, like I've always, I always have criticized the other person, right? But that's not about actually responding to the argument at all. It's about saying something to be able to say something in a aggrieved, self-righteous tone,

whether or not it even kind of makes sense. And that seems, we'll sort of feel like it answers the thing in as quick a sound bite as possible. Yeah, which is, you know, I said, like, we're no, we're in the, in the realm of like, the image and the sound bite rather than like serious moral and policy discussion. Do you have any guidance for how to live in the realm of the image without losing yourself to it or becoming complicit in what we see? read long things read confession I mean it really is read yeah I mean read confessions

read read long form journalism like actual journalism where somebody went out and reported on a place you know one of the one of the better pieces of political journalism

that I read in the run of the election was after the kind of like Haitian the lie about Haitian people eating cats and dogs. George Packer went to a town with a lot of Haitian immigrants and just talked to a lot of people. And then he wrote a piece about the individuals in that town and how the political debate was shaping the dynamic in the town and the things that mattered to the normal people there. And it was a really interesting and surprising in many ways piece with a lot of complications because that's what you find when you actually go out and talk to real people. And, you know, so just there there is still really good journalism going on.

And I always think about Tom Slay, is a friend of mine as a poet and an essay of has done some journalism in war zone. So he talked about it's a great essay of his called To Be Incarnational, which is mostly about the World War I poet David Jones. But he talks at the beginning of that piece about reporting on a famine. and then coming back to America and how you're overseas, you're in the realm of just like physical immediacy and sensations and facts, like things that you're seeing.

And then you come back to the hell of opinions that is America. And I always think about that. You know, we're living in the hell of opinions. And that we then, you know, like we eat some of those opinions and just regurgitate more opinions back into the hell of opinions. And yet there are people who are doing something genuinely interesting. And we've built machines that make it easier for us to eat and regurgitate opinions. Yeah.

So it's very simple. Read long things is my response. And it is not just that it exposes you to more information because it's not a matter of the amount of information that we're getting. but like rewiring your brain to think about things at length and in their complexity is deeply, deeply valuable. I mean, look, I'm a novelist, so read novels. But, well, what are the best long things that you've read this year? What are the novels you recommend? I just read Septology by John Fawsey, which is one of the most extraordinary reading experiences of my life.

I think a lot of people will be a little bit learly. of it because sort of famously it's like 700 pages, one sentence, and not a ton happens, which makes it sound like it's going to be really boring. It's very hard to describe. It's written in this kind of stream of consciousness, and there are moments of actually really incredible intensity, beauty, dread. but it's like an artist going through his life, dealing with a friend who is dying of alcoholism, and thinking about God and art, which, again, doesn't sound like it's the most thrilling or exciting thing you'll ever read.

And yet, you know, especially by the letter half of it, my mind was being blown. I felt like it was, again, the opposite, actually, of the social media landscape and the current information landscape because it was a character sort of who is slowly thinking about things in a cyclical way. He's kind of doubling back to things. It's almost a kind of, if you're familiar with the music of Philip Glass, where these, like, low, you know, create these kind of like musical pieces that repeat. and then build and slowly over time, kind of like a crete and a crete, and he's doing that with language and with ideas and images in septology.

And so as you get into, especially in the second half of it and towards the end, there's this unbelievable intensity that builds and builds, and he'll have these passages that are so charged and loaded and it's happening because he's slowly, and carefully working them over time, right, and allowing them to build and grow.

You're sort of thinking with a character, right? And you almost have the feeling of, like, working through a kind of deep sort of moral, emotional, spiritual problem over time as you're kind of getting sort of closer and closer to the end of the book. It's extraordinary. It's really extraordinary. Where do you catch your breath in a book where there's no, what? it's all one sentence.

Or do you just kind of have to slide down the hill with them? You do. I mean, like, look, you don't read it all in one sentence. You just kind of, you know, there are places where it's easier to stop than others. But there are also places in the book where you're like, I'm not stopping. I don't care what's going to happen around me. I will. there could be a building across the street from me could blow up and I'll be like

I will help with the recovery in like five pages you know nonfiction do you have a nonfiction recommend from this year yeah the master of contradictions by morton hoy jensen okay this is an incredible book it is about the writing of the magic mountain by thomas mawn but I think people will find it very relevant today. And it's actually relevant to our discussion right now. So, when World War I broke out, Mon embraced militarism in a really big way,

like in a dark way. He wrote a whole book about it, which is one of the most unlikable books by a great author I've ever read. But after War I, he essentially through the writing of the Magic Mountain, wrote himself out of that mind frame and became one of the stalwart defenders of democracy, right? Liberal democracy. And so it's not just about the writing of the Magic Mountain and it has all these fascinating

details about that. And if you're a Thomas Monfan, you absolutely should read it. But it's also about the interplay between actually really that long, slow thinking and this profound change in his relationship to the state and political ideology. It's a wonderful book. This brings out another good question, I think, might be somewhere to see us out at the end. We live in this time where it feels like we don't forgive each other and we want to live in one moment and we won't allow anyone to change.

And I can imagine like Thomas Mann writing his later years and posting about it on Twitter and they're like, well, what about this other thing that you wrote like 10 years ago? Oh, it's wild.

The stuff that wrote in his militarist phase is it's pretty wild and it's pretty morally wrong. repulsive. Yeah. So how do we, how do we move forward in this dark time and,

and like for, I guess, forgive each other and not live in that moment other than read long things? Yeah. I mean, look, I think that having a sense of forgiveness and a willingness to embrace notions of redemption is really important.

It's really important, right? I mean, so we had a kind of moment, right? This was like the ascendant puritanical left in liberalism, right, which everybody hated. And then the response to that from the right, it's like proudly being evil. You know, proud of your vices.

Let's make forci in real life. You know, liberals are complaining that this was. of war crime, well, Meg and Kelly's going to go on and say, I want to see these people bleed slowly to death. Right. And that's really bad. So hopefully we find a more open, open kind of understanding.

I mean, look, I'm somebody who's changed. my opinions many times of the course of my life. I'm a multiple Catholic, and for me, one of the things that keeps me in the Catholic Church is deeply important to me is a sacrament of reconciliation, the notion that we can be forgiven,

even though we know that we're going to fail again and again and again. And I think that if we want that personally for ourselves, which we all do need, we need to actually instantiate that publicly as well. Right? So. Hey, look at that. I managed to end an Angry Planet episode on a high note,

something a little bit more hopeful than we normally do. But I think we need that now, especially going into the holidays. Yeah. Sir, thank you so much for coming on to the show and talking with us about your piece. And I hope you come on again. Thank you very much. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. That's all for this year, Angry Planet listeners.

listeners. We will be back next year. We've got one that we recorded maybe a year ago that we're going to bust out and see how the predictions went. You can look forward to that beginning of January, but you know, thank you all for listening. Thank you all for being with us for about 10 years. It's absolutely incredible. The show is Matthew Galtz, Jason Fields, Kevin O'Dell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. I won't give you the hard pitch. Everyone deserves a break. into the year. You don't need one selling you anything.

Stay safe out there, and we will be back next year with more conversations about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe and enjoy the holidays.