Annual Round-Up 2024

Hello friends. It looks like we've had another year. We just keep having those things whether anyone thinks it's a good idea or not; and it looks almost certain now that in a few days we're going to have another one, though based on the quality of the last ten or so of those things we've had, we might want to look into our process, or see if something is fouling the yearly crop; they're arriving looking a little droopy and spoiled.

One good thing about this year, though, is that for the first time in the history of the newsletter, I'm not announcing a move to some other site, and that is a considerable relief. Another good thing about this year is that I spent the entirety of it on the sunny side of 50 years old, though I imagine the upcoming post-50 side is sunny enough in its own way. And I published my second book, the essay collection Very Fine People, with the help of all of you nice people, especially the patrons who support me at the level I still for some reason (laziness) call Founding, some 3 years after the founding. And everyone in my life stayed healthy, and there was no water damage to my house, which isn't always the case in every year. Not bad!

However, in many ways, this year was not a great one here for decent people in my country of the United States of America, and even less great in many other places. For example, we had a slow seemingly inevitable crawl toward electoral defeat to some of the most transparently horrible people the universe has ever produced, abetted at least in part by the losing party's unwillingness to stop providing unbreakable military and political support to the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, no matter how brutal it got, no matter how it spread. And now we're witnessing a near total capitulation by our national institutions to the incompetent oligarchical American fascist party that will be taking the reins in a few weeks. This is a gang of empty-souled corrupt thugs and sex-obsessed bigoted religious creeps who seem pretty intent on setting up murder programs for some of our world's most marginalized and neglected people, while controlling the bodies and lives of everyone else so they can strip-mine the world's future to temporarily line the pockets of the world's wealthiest people. And on the platforms of influence they've purchased, they'll sing the songs they commissioned about how they are not only justified for doing all this, but are in fact heroic saviors of humanity, and they'll do their best to punish any human who fails to gratefully dance to their tune.

I've got an essay teed up about that capitulation; it's a follow-up to last week's post about the capitalist Billionaire System, the murderous scam which is my nation's founding myth. And, because I can only stare at the eye of Sauron so long at a time, I'll probably do another LOST recap soon before that or soon thereafter.

But that's what's ahead. Right now I'm looking back at the year that was.

I did a lot of writing on here, it turns out, and some of it I still like OK. Here are six essays from 2024 that I think are best, which I share with you now, partly because hey why not?, and partly because I enjoyed reminding myself of them and so maybe you will also enjoy being reminded of them, or maybe you missed them and would like to enjoy them for the first time.

In January, I wrote Hello I Must Be Going. This was about my decision to move The Reframe off Substack, which is a platform I quite liked and upon which I had enjoyed quite a bit of success. I decided to do this because their leadership, who had already been pretty enthusiastic about promoting anti-trans voices on their platform, also starting monetizing Nazis, and for reasons I lay out, this was too much for me, so I said goodbye to all that, and thankfully all of you came along.

In April I wrote The Bloody Math. This was about the genocide in Gaza that my country and I are complicit in, and the election, and the electoral math that the Democratic Party appeared to be applying, and the dangers of running traditional electoral equations that fail to create sharp points of differentiation from eliminationist fascists, particularly the fact that it might cause people who would otherwise see in you some hope of deliverance from their oppression to stop seeing you as aligned against that oppression, and start seeing you as aligned with it, and, despairing of ever receiving support from you, withdrawing their support as well.

In August I wrote The Whole Purpose. This was about turbo-creep and recently named Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance and his statements about the purpose of post-menopausal women, and what it indicates that the people like Vance, who seem to provide our society with the least value, seem most confident in declaring the worthlessness of everyone else.

And then, in November, I wrote a few essays around the election that were a bit more tactical than I usually get.

First, before the election, I wrote Apology Not Accepted. This was about Republicans and the way they employ the classic bully's tactics of engaging in bottomless cruelty toward others while nurturing hair-trigger grievance on behalf of themselves, as seen through their use of "garbage" to simultaneously dehumanize Puerto Ricans while demanding an apology for being called the same thing. It's also about the utility of the word "unacceptable" and of refusing to apologize to bullies.

Next, after the election, I wrote Fighting In the Dark. This returns to the idea of differentiators, and lays out certain things we must practice in the coming age of empowered American Nazis: doing what fascists cannot do, not doing what fascists want us to do, and never accepting the fascist offer.

A week after that I wrote Rules of Engagement. This is about boundaries and permission, people who refuse to hear about the hurt they are causing, and what to do with people who have proved that they are not safe, not to be trusted, and not worthy of our engagement or our time.

Friends, here we are: at the end of the year and the start of another; here at the end of neoliberalism—which is the iteration of what U.S. supremacy has been for the first 50 years of my life—and at the start of whatever thing U.S. supremacy is going to try to become now that open Nazi ideology isn't off the table. I don't pretend to know what this will ultimately look like; I know what the American Fascist party known as Republican intends to make it into, because they are very clear in their intention to convert the country into a corporate work prison and bigoted free-range murder factory, but I still dare hope that they will be hobbled by their own incompetence and inability to engage with observable reality and provable evidence, and most of all that they will be thwarted by the work and sacrifice of people of good intention who love the living art of human beings more than they love their own all-consuming greed and self-exonerating controlling hatred.

I do know that we people of good intent will need one another, so I am hugely grateful that we have found each other, and I truly appreciate all of you.

Let's keep it going.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. Falling slowly, sing your melody, he'll sing it loud.