How Cherries Freed Me From My Feed

Aug 27, 2024

Earlier this summer I saw the post above pop up in my Facebook feed. It made me angry, but it also served as a mirror for myself.

Maybe it’s the LOL, the juxtaposition of dire warnings with flippancy, that rubs me wrong. I’m a Virgo, loyal and earnest by nature. I don’t do sarcasm well. But I think it’s also the way that grains of truth are overstated far beyond what can be reasonably supported that spikes my blood pressure. Butler’s narrator, Lauren Olamina, also describes severed human limbs being tossed over the walls of her compound. Are we really so near such a total collapse?

I have a diverse group of friends, which makes every presidential election year pretty entertaining, but there’s been a harder edge to everything this year. I’m not going to show all the doctored photos of Kamala Harris that I’ve seen, but that kind of propaganda appears right alongside the smug posts about how terrible a book Hillbilly Elegy is and how everyone in it needs a heavy dose of therapy.

Meme of a chicken dressed in scrubs with a stethoscope and a syringe and the caption "Scamdemic 2 Coming Soon" — From Facebook

Too much ink has been spilled about tribalism in America, how we all increasingly preach to our choirs or to our echo chambers. But I don’t think those metaphors adequately capture this mode of communication. My term for it is grievance porn,1 and I believe it has spread from social media into our reflexive modes of discourse. It’s ubiquitous: I see just as much of it from people with PhDs as I do from people with no more than a high school diploma. And lately I’ve been seeing it in my own private texts and emails.

So this essay is an attempt to name that kind of rhetoric for what it is and, for my part, steer clear of it.2

The point of grievance porn is to achieve a predetermined catharsis. It’s certainly not an invitation to real critical thinking. And in that way I think fails utterly at doing what principled arguments ought to do: engage, explore, and sometimes persuade. Discourse like this maps perfectly onto Karpman’s drama triangle, which illustrates how three fixed roles (persecutor, victim, and rescuer) create a self-fulfilling cycle of dysfunction. Once you situate yourself as victim or rescuer, you need others to play their foreordained roles. You don’t want to think about exceptions, because the goal is to arrive at a rehearsed consensus that feels righteous.

The pattern aligns more with rituals and fetishes than it does with free speech. Meaningful dialogue leads in surprising directions, toward a synthesis or epiphany neither party could have foreseen. But grievance porn ends with precisely the combination of anger, fear, and violent agreement that it was designed to produce.

For years I struggled with this conundrum while teaching nature writing, which often turns activists into saints. Reading John Muir, for many environmentalists, means worshiping at his altar rather than probing his nuances and contradictions. So as much as I enjoyed teaching Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, which imagines a world similar to the one Butler paints in Parable of the Sower, I wrestled with the rigid moral premises on which its warnings were based. Income inequality is real, even dire, but are we really in danger of being sorted into corporate compounds and the anarchic “pleeblands”? Are our daughters really one or two elections away from being conscripted as handmaids? Might those figurative warnings not conceal or distort more than they reveal?

My students often had binary reactions to writers like Atwood. Even T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, which parodies the narcissistic side of eco-activism, draws the same conclusion that the planet is doomed. It was difficult for a student to conscientiously disagree with those texts, and I felt hamstrung as a teacher who wanted to encourage close reading without implying that there was a correct interpretation. A similar rigidity has inspired critiques of Jane Brown’s famous Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes experiment and its present-day equivalents, which often map onto mandatory trainings with multiple choice tests.

One feature of this election cycle has been the sense on both sides that everything is at stake. But Michael Moore has been making crisis films since 2002. I was raised on apocalyptic warnings about the end times long before Rush Limbaugh took to the air and Rupert Murdoch built his propaganda empire. In fact, it has been startling to hear echoes, in voices like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, of the jeremiads that defined my Pentecostal youth. But the jeremiad, a sermon designed to drive sinners to repentance, conventionally turns on grace.

Jonathan Edwards terrorized his congregation in 1741 by comparing them to spiders dangling over the flames of hell. But he offered relief — an “extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open, and stands in calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners.” As a child, I understood that the ritualized threat of hell was designed to produce a change in me, that I could theoretically experience absolution for a time, even if damnation was an ever-present danger.

We all need relief from a crisis mentality. I left the faith decades ago, in part because of coercive altar calls, but as a writer I can appreciate the rhetorical closure that a jeremiad provides. Why state the problem if we’re not prepared to offer a remedy, and one that’s open to all? I don’t think we’re wired as human beings to sustain vigilance and focus at such a fever pitch all the time. Yet grievance porn finds catharsis in the crisis. The megaphone of excoriation and warning is all there is. Rehearsing futility with a safe audience offers vindication, but never solace.

Didactic literature like Parable of the Sower has been both a blessing and a curse for the humanities. The most strident voices capture the attention of administrators, who find it easier to justify allocating resources to programs driven by a mission, rather than the relativism that more conventionally defines the liberal arts. If your program has a clear moral brand, it has a target audience, which seems like it might translate to more predictable enrollments. But branding also boxes us in, and so English departments might lose more prospective majors than they gain by clarifying their marketing messaging. In the worst case scenario, humanities education becomes grievance porn for the already converted: an affinity group of victims and rescuers rather than a crucible of innovative thought.

Stridency breeds unyielding counterparts, and you surely hear me drifting toward that mode right now. I’ll admit that I have sometimes sought catharsis by texting friends screenshots of literary firms where every agent has a client list that seems the exact mirror of their own identity or where the staff consists of a dozen bourgie white women between the ages of 30 and 50. Who am I kidding thinking that they would want my novel? But I’m under no illusions that these communiqués change anything, and I’ve come to see hollow commiseration as a form of inaction.

A friend recently reminded me to water the things in my life that I most want to grow. He is a conservative. I’ll take those reminders about where to productively invest my time and attention from anyone.

Earlier this month,

Dana Leigh Lyons

wrote: “Whether on Notes or anywhere else, we can refuse to participate in polemical, non-listening, fear-driven stories. We can refuse to participate in sowing more hate and division.” Solidarity with that, sister.

My friend

Tara Penry

has devoted her own series to an even more restorative practice: “A weekly boost of confidence in humanity inspired by authors, books, and literary history, with sometimes a golden interlude about anything at all.”

Dana and Tara echo Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “The Honorable Harvest,” which I revisit every year while freezing pesto and turning gallons of tomatoes into salsa and marinara.

People all across America who think they are enemies observe the same harvest rituals, putting up garlic pickles, shaving cabbage into sauerkraut, filling their homes with the smell of basil and oregano and thyme. Food was also the way out of grievance rhetoric in my nature writing class. Farm kids who had felt vilified by environmentalists their whole lives were heartened to learn that they had been practicing sustainability all along in the family garden.

This week while I was feeling down, missing my kids, angry about my feeds, I saw that a tree in my yard had turned red, laden with what looked like it might be fruit. I’d photographed the leaves earlier in the year (I’m still learning what’s planted where), and my phone had mistakenly identified it as Witch Hazel. But now the fruit offered clear proof that it is a Cornelian Cherry, a species of dogwood that I’ve since learned has a cult following among locavores.

I carried my stepladder out into the yard and spent a happy hour picking two gallons of cherries. Maybe Octavia Butler is right, and Armageddon is not far off. Maybe my harvest is not that much different from disappearing into a tumbler of bourbon, just one more way to take the edge off. But I can’t live my life in anger and fear. Those cherries felt good rolling through my fingers and drumming into my stainless steel bowl. I’ll use them for back-to-school kolačes this week, for jam and kombucha.

Maybe I’ll even share them with a neighbor who votes differently from me.

Part of the Honorable Harvest is saying thank you. It might seem strange to be saying that to an ornamental tree. But I did. Many times over I did.