Welcome to Weed Church, the place where I write stuff. Sometimes the stuff is good, but it’s always free so nobody is allowed to complain.
Wrote a published piece for Defector this week. That’s what today’s newsletter thing is about. Read it first if you want but the blog will make sense without it.
How Commercial Art Works
I write for Defector Media most often. I could spin up an intellectual justification for why I like writing for Defector, but instead I’ll engage with a bit of self-honesty: I’m quite lazy about networking. I don’t want to / care to find new editors who understand my evidently strange way of working or my (at times) discursive means of thinking through complex problems. For those who have never freelanced, it is very hard and undignified work. Talent is not the first or even the fifth consideration for who gets to write for Big Pubs. Even if I didn’t like writing for Defector, I probably wouldn’t try to find a new editor because the whole process sucks.
I’d sooner stop writing for periodicals than find new people to chop up my words. The scam of journalism culture is how it sells itself as some moral pursuit, despite the ongoing evidence that even good journalism accomplishes very little of its intended outcome. I’ve read a lot of great journalism about the objective reasons that Donald Trump should be in prison and it’s raised a lot of awareness, I presume, but it also looks like he’s going to be the president again if voters get their way. Turns out, objective truth is received subjectively by its intended audience. What a bummer.
Barry Petchesky at Defector seems to understand my heart and my spirit. We often disagree about the world, how the world works, and the right way to compose a piece of journalism. Those two factors make it a great editing relationship. I trust that Barry will not greenlight a piece if I have a half-baked grievance or concept, and from what I can tell, he trusts that when he does greenlight a piece, he won’t receive a half-assed “take.” I can be mean via email and Barry — perhaps because he got to Deadspin from the comment section — has always taken those emails in stride (often reminding me that taking this stuff personally is a bad idea). The guy won’t let me burn the bridge! It’s often quite annoying for someone whose compulsions tend towards self-destruction.
I always feel a certain sense of urgency when I have a story I want to write. It’s not healthy and comes from a sense of impatience with injustice (genuine or petty) I’ve had since I was a kid. That’s another thing that is useful about a trusted editor relationship: Barry is great at reminding me when maybe my pitch is technically correct, but really not the kind of 1,500 word grenade to throw into the proverbial room just because I’m in a bad mood.
I wrote a piece of media criticism this week for Defector about Ethiopia and my experiences there. The piece is intentionally vague and leans into the irony of that vagueness as a means of (hopefully) giving readers a crash course in media literacy about geopolitical conflict. As my editor (and some good writers willing to lend me advice) noted, the end result is something that reminds readers that it’s impossible to summarize an entire country, its culture, and its struggles in anything shorter than a book. However, by doing so, I also knew that I was sacrificing my own perspective for the sake of “informing” readers. The goal was to illustrate what I’ve come to think of as a parallel reality I encounter — some people “know” what Rastafari is, but then I bring up Haile Selassie I and it becomes extremely clear they have no fucking idea what Rastafari is.
That’s the shit that I hate about this passion of mine. I want to write so that I’m capable of reaching people through a universal symbolic tradition, but reaching people requires at least a modicum of effort from the reader. There’s a proverb about horses and water and whether one can make them drink that is instructive for how that whole arrangement works. I wanted to come home from Ethiopia and tell readers exactly what I felt, but doing so would implicitly signal to readers (many of whom would’ve had no previous awareness of the conflict) which militia they should “root for.” That’s how Ukraine coverage works, for example.
What kinda stupid arrangement is that? That’s not my job! Read a paper on JSTOR and abide by your moral code, presuming you’re not the kind of goober that thinks one can rationalize their way to a moral existence. That’s where the Scientific Socialism dinks get their kicks: figuring out right and wrong through the man-made invention of rational science, which has also given man the atomic bomb. Might be a fatal flaw in there somewhere. That’s also not my job to figure out and most of the writing that attempts to do so is a waste of fucking time. Nobody cares about anyone’s opinion about how things “should” work. Get a life.
Aside from the complications of the conflict itself, there’s also the knowledge gap that audiences don’t like acknowledging: secular liberals donn’t know shit about religion and it makes them stupid about geopolitics. It is not possible to understand Ethiopia through a secular lens. Even if I did so, it would be a betrayal of its people and their perspective; a Western interpretation of the secular challenges facing a culture that still puts God first. It’s why Haile Selassie I (and Menelik II and many others) are nationalist avatars even for those Ethiopians who don’t care for monarchism: they weren’t just kings but the heads of the church. Erasing them is akin to sacrilege.
“This is our church. This is not about a country,” one woman told me. Another orthodox man spoke to me at a church for a half hour about how, in his view, Ethiopia wasn’t a country at all, but a nation for all who believe in God. I would’ve never been able to get that perspective through edits — not just at Defector, but any editor I’ve ever worked with. Like unwritten rules in baseball, there are plenty of unwritten rules about what kinds of writing gets published where. There are only a handful of publications that allow “God” work, and those publications are not the kind that can keep my sources in Ethiopia safe.
I could’ve written a well-argued and rational piece about which Ethiopian cause I personally feel attached to. Each of these causes has a militia attached to it. Each of these militias do things that I would never personally endorse because it’s a war and war is ugly. I’m sorry to say, but I’m not writing that on the record for some drooling politics junky, especially not for the kind of money one gets for a feature story. People die over this stuff in Ethiopia. I’d rather not risk that just so some lawyer with a Defector subscription thinks I’m smart for a few moments, especially given that they’ll forget about Ethiopia as soon as they read their next blog.
There is no rooting interest in a war except for war’s end. When I got home from Ethiopia, I spoke to friends in the diaspora to process just how angry I was; to parse if I was being a paternalistic Westerner or whether I had genuine reason to feel such rage. I was comforted by their words reassuring me that it was indeed as bad as I’d observed, but that did little to comfort my spirit. Being told that I’m not being another ignorant American with this stuff may feed my ego, but it does little to settle one’s conscience. Unfortunately, it seems like audiences just want to know which jersey to wear when the bombs go off.
Every time I send a pitch to anyone, I’m told that the piece needs to reach audiences where they are. In America, that means I have to write for people who can read but are otherwise illiterate. It can be challenging, but I have seen the hills of Amhara. The Lion of the Tribe of Judah is awake. If Americans don’t know what that means, they’ll figure it out soon enough.