Meeting In Neo Noir is a photograph by Pablo Abreu.
A friend who lived in France for many years taught me how to boil an egg so that the yolk comes out pure yellow. With a needle you pierce the bottom of the shell before boiling the egg, and this allows that little green layer of bitter sulfur that would otherwise surround the yoke to release into the water.
Putting the egg aside for a moment, I’m here to talk to you about TGBs—Toxic Grinning Billionaires. You see them on social media and in the news, these villains in the noir film we are currently enacting, lurking on the sidelines of the civic fires they’ve started—Charles Koch, Robert Mercer and Patrick Byrne, Musk and Thiel. There’s always that little grin—so mischievous, these demonic over-achievers, fiddling as the world burns and the fascist night flows in behind them. It has become a dismal spectacle, a death’s head grimace conspicuous for the aggressive fear it conceals.
I have also come to recognize the TGB I carry around in my own shadow—a greedy and aggressive aspect of myself I long ago split off from my conscious persona and pushed into the dark room where I keep all I judge to be deficient in myself. This kind of splitting is, of course, a familiar trope in literature—what Dr. Jekyll does to Mr. Hyde—but familiarity does not alter the reality of what I am doing, nor the fact that all self-repression ever yields is a life refusing to be lived. I have been fortunate to have found my way to a creative vocation and a long list now of artistic work in which my own darker aspects can claim, for a while anyway, center stage. But my often nearly obsessive preoccupation with these malevolent billionaires still points toward the long gestation of my adult life, and the gradients of tension and terror present in the egg-seed of it.
What happens between the day we are born and the day we turn two years old, modern psychology tells us, is where all the action is. Actually, I need to go back fifteen years before I was born to the moment when my father was decommissioned from the 158th Infantry. They had been fighting in the Pacific War, including serious combat in battles in and around New Guinea—”the island of death,” as it was called by the Japanese—with names like Sarmi and Noemfoor. In 1996 I took my father to see Terrence Mallik’s Pacific War film The Thin Red Line and within fifteen minutes he was shaking so hard we had to leave the theatre. I hadn’t known until that moment that my father suffered from PTSD—trauma held deep in the body, unprocessed, unfelt, but still shaping behavior on every level. Traces of this buzzing, lethal energy are what I encountered in him when I came into the world—the strong resonance of the terrible violence he witnessed, suffered and enacted as a member of the 158th Infantry. Minor everyday frustrations triggered in my father an energy from fifteen years earlier that my young animal body would have recognized as threatening and terrifying beyond measure. As an infant, I would not have been able to process or release the fear I felt as that energy rose up in him. Today, I am shocked by the proximity—fifteen years ago it was only 2007, which seems like yesterday.
Thomas Houseago (b. 1972), Untitled, 2008.
It is in me still, is my point—that background layer of terror, and it left me feeling unsafe and disconnected from everyone and everything around me. This is at once a significant fact about me and also no big deal. It is simply what I encountered—no doubt you, in your equally long infancy, will have had your own version, moments when you felt your survival to be threatened and you were powerless to stop it. The result? Freeze mode. Dorsal vagal triggering of trauma circuits. And could such an experience, if repeated often enough when you were very young, come to be a basis for your life? Of the habits of splitting and dissociation that give rise to the vast fuckery we are now mired in? To ask the question is to know the answer.
I like polyvagal theory because of how it points toward our own origins as a species—the egg we emerged from—what in Greek would be called our “arche.” The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben points out how arche is a prefix that implies both beginning or origin—the root of archeology and architecture—but also commander or leader—as in the Greek word for ruler: archon. These two meanings are brought into alignment by contemporary systems theory through what the engineers call “sensitivity to initial conditions”—where and precisely how a system begins will strongly shape what it later becomes. The odd kluge arrangement of our parasympathetic nervous system—how the dorsal vagal nerve winding down into our guts to coordinate the operation of our organs was later recruited to animate our faces and “down-regulate” the “fight or flight” threat response we inherited from the reptiles—strongly orients us toward dissociation as an adaptive way to deal with trauma, stress and fear. And astride the apex of the culture of dissociation that is modern capitalism stands the Toxic Grinning Billionaire.
Living in the middle of the 6th great extinction on planet earth, an extinction driven mostly by our use of fossil fuels, I sometimes try to imagine what it’s like to wake up in the morning as Charles Koch. There’s a moment right at the edge of consciousness when the dark knowledge of what I have done presses in. In that moment all the money in the world does not protect me from the nagging fear that my convictions have been horribly wrong, that all the ways I have justified my deployment of violence against the planet are too idiotic to even be mentioned, and that the damage I have wrought can never be reversed. As the first attendants arrive to pamper me with endless flattery I push that disquieting knowledge down into my guts where it curdles into defiant hatred for all who oppose me. I rig up that juvenile grin, and, dreaming that my dissociative soul-essence will be redeemed in the ultimate dissociative realm of heaven, I gather my minions and double down on the violence I do daily to the planet and to all future generations. This means that tomorrow I will wake up with a taste even more bitter in my mouth, rising to double down with new fury. So be it.
When I was thirteen years old, at the end of 8th grade, I got in trouble several times and was brought home one night by the police. On one level it was no big deal. I had gone out the window that night and hitched out Route 55—we were living in Poughkeepsie, New York at the time—to attend a party near the small farm town of Poquag where I knew I’d find this seventh-grade girl named Allison. Later that night, elated by our encounter, I missed my ride home and, hitchhiking again, got flagged down by a squad car. Smelling alcohol on my breath the cops called ahead and took me home. My mother was there on the front porch as we pulled up, arms akimbo, the faces of my three sisters peering out around her house coat. The two cops cracked up as I got out of the car, but a single mother raising four kids on a teacher’s salary was no joke. Before the month was out the catalogues to pricey boarding schools began arriving on that same front porch in the daily mail. A couple of these places offered me a scholarship and so the next fall I shipped out, trading in my working- and middle-class friends in Poughkeepsie for the sons and daughters of the American elite.
I had been raised with strong counter-cultural values, and my mother, who grew up in Britain during the war, considered herself a socialist. I quickly found, however, that my anti-elitist feelings found no traction in what I encountered in my sudden immersion with these other beings. What struck me most about that school at that time was that the kids there seemed not worse on the whole, and yet certainly in no way better, than the kids I had made friends with after arriving in Poughkeepsie four years earlier. Some of these rich kids were kind, some funny. A few were arrogant; others wise. Most were, like me, a little scared—a bunch of thirteen-year-olds, basically. I acclimatized fast as I could, bonding especially, but not exclusively, with other kids from humbler backgrounds. Together we did the things American teenagers were doing with a vengeance at that time–basically sex, drugs and rock-n-roll.
No doubt a need to be accepted and liked by these new peers played an important part in the confusion I felt. And, of course, in ninth grade, these kids hadn’t yet made sense of what it meant to be who they were in the social hierarchy. It was the 1970s besides—a period of time when the American elite were in an unusually reflective mode, in love with the counter-culture and full of self-doubt. It was easy to miss the incubation taking place, the subtle introduction we were being provided to a game rigged in our favor on the QT.
This aspect of the school leapt into high relief in my second or third year in the school’s beautifully appointed hockey rink where our team, loaded with accomplished players who, after graduating from a public high schools had been lured to repeat their senior year for the promise of a “post-graduate” diploma from the school, happened to lose a goal to some hapless local team. “That’s all right, that’s okay,” the chant rose up, “you’ll be working for us someday.” The aim of this chant was to terrorize and demoralize the players on the other team in order to then dominate them more completely on the ice.
I remained uneasy and watchful in my time at that school, and then later at the upper tier university I dutifully attended, a university distinguished by its famous business school, which at that time was very efficiently churning out the leaders of the neoliberal “stealth” revolution that shifted into high gear with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. The business elite had rallied by that point to strike back at the countercultural left, launching the four decades of class-warfare-from-above that we are all reeling from (whether we realize it or not) today. Instead of the repressed and boring square at the party, standing alone at the drinks table while everybody else tripped out or got naked, the new captain of industry—grinning roguish on the front covers of newsweeklies, and swaggering like Michael Douglas through villainous film roles—was a charismatic pirate ready to “move fast and break things” as he brought us a glorious feast of – record-scratch-effect.
I want to consider these Toxic Grinning Billionaires against the backdrop of a basic human capacity for a kind of terror that sets us apart from all other species. The poet Rilke understood this terror. So did Melville. Dostoyevsky, certainly, but also, with a wry gentleness shot through with compassion, did Anton Chekhov. It’s difficult now somehow, to even write these names – how shut down we’ve all become, how flattened, how stuffed down into the stooped, nil space gifted to us by the Mark Zuckerberg and the Google dweebs and the Paypal mafia and all the other Silicon Valley “visionaries” who have gifted us such enormous conveniences that we are now drowning in a vast lukewarm sea of convenience, fighting so hard to keep our heads above that high tide of choice and convenience that we must—sorry, Mom, sorry Dad—warehouse our aging parents in clinical wards staffed by nurses so over-taxed they cannot provide care, dropping our children off—sorry Biff, apologies Bonnie—at schools in which teachers live in perpetual fear of losing their jobs (if not their lives). Gasping for air, our cities choked with encampments of the homeless, we begin to lose any capacity to help one another in any actual human way, and stagger zombie-like through a flattened social landscape, our neurology held tight by dark little handheld devices delivering all that marvelous convenience…
On the other hand we have figures like Gabor Mate, Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kock and the author of the first work in polyvagal theory Stephen Porges—these are some of the pioneers of contemporary research into early childhood trauma and the somatic dimension of healing. My own experience with this work involves a meditation practice that includes both Zen and Vajrayana, Jungian therapy and most recently somatic work in the Peter Levine mode. I have been shocked by what has emerged at this late date about my own arche, my origins, and the release of infantile terror like an obsidian creature leaping electric around the room.
In some societies, or so I’ve heard, childrearing demands that children never touch the ground for the first year of their lives. Many other cultures seem also to take the vulnerability of the human infant into account—how can we protect this creature as long as possible from the shocks and impacts that will scar all that sensitive and burgeoning gray matter? In the west we have forgotten all this and allow an underlying capacity for sheer terror to be actualized in the minds and bodies of our infants without any knowledge of what we are doing. As a result we, as a society strongly oriented toward dissociative modes of interaction (i.e. capitalism), don’t understand how our commonsense orientation toward pleasure and convenience could be causing such immense harm.
Driven by their own version of this terror, our Toxic Grinning Billionaires can’t stop reaching for the political power they need to amass more of the wealth that feels so good and hurts so bad. As in the Greek era, democracy, of course, is their natural enemy so their actions inevitably undermine democracy. Hence over the past few decades we have seen that bad boy smile curdle into the sneer of the autocrat. Today they have dropped all pretense and a nihilistic love of raw power fills their hearts with toxic blood. Darth Vader, Voldemort and Sauron—the syndrome is known to us in our myths and collective dreams, and today it rises up in the flesh, active and potent across the globe. I feel it too, active in myself, emerging from a subtle residue of darkness just detectable at the far edge of experience, like the background radiation the astronomers locate beyond the furthest galaxies.
The casual, knowing sadism animating the chants around the hockey rink of my private high school—“You’ll be working for us someday!”—enrolled me in the rigged game of a true noir still unfolding around us. The hidden dimension of this class relation, a relation rooted in raw, primate domination and supported by a vast economic apparatus of dissociative rules and norms, demeans and threatens us all. What is the way for the egg of our species to release that sulfurous layer that otherwise surrounds the yolk, with all its rich capacities? For a practitioner it’s always the question what am I doing relationally to co-create the conditions of suffering? The most difficult aspects always involve ignorance—what you don’t see will undermine your intentions. And undoing ignorance involves undoing trauma. The small black electric star-like demon that is my early childhood terror cries out as it jumps around. But I am listening now.
