#i obviously can't write about this for my newsletter or anywhere publicly really so i'm putting this here i guess.

[holdoncallfailed]

long post sorry lol

i’ve posted about this before in kind of oblique joking terms but one of my professors in college whom i truly adored and admired, with whom i exchanged many emails even after i wasn’t in her classes (though i took as many of them as i could), and who was probably the closest thing i had to a ‘mentor’ in the admittedly flimsy academic structure of my undergraduate program is now a huge antivaxxer and general conspiracy theorist. she was always rather caustic and prone to luddism (she railed often against stuff like tinder killing romance and serendipity) and we certainly didn’t agree on a lot of media-related stuff, but that was something i really liked about her: i liked that we had such different tastes but that we still respected one another. she was intelligent and incredibly well-read, and it was in her classes that i first encountered many of the texts that would become foundational for my writing and general worldview—marxist psychoanalysis and sarah schulman and hilton als and derek jarman’s blue, to name a few. i always felt like i learned from her even when i disagreed with her (on media, not politics—i.e. she thought almost famous was drivel and that say anything was cameron crowe’s masterpiece; i think the opposite). but her criticism of contemporary society and media always seemed like it was rooted in a deep love of culture despite that—as in, she only hated so much recent crap because she knew that we deserved better as audiences and could do better as creators.

she also liked to talk about astrology (“ad-rock is the perfect example of a scorpio man!”) and homeopathic shit (my friend once emailed her saying she couldn’t come to class because she had a bad cold and she told her to take a shot of liquid oregano and come in anyway), but i ignored it because astrology especially was a common lighthearted talking point at my school. midway through 2020 she started posting on her blog about how frustrated she was with all the lockdown measures and the general state of the world, as we all were, and then it devolved so quickly from there into full-on antivax stuff. i’m talking pull quotes from RFK jr. and celia farber and glenn greenwald and even fucking joe rogan, and other shit like that. and now her whole blog is just pages and pages of antivax nonsense when she used to post screencaps from bresson films and excerpts from james baldwin’s writing. i feel like her blog could be used as a case study for the slippery slope of antivax conspiracy theory culture, how it started with one or two comments and then devolved into...whatever it is now. especially because she doesn’t fit the stereotypical antivax profile, because she was a marxist professor at a left-leaning liberal arts university who was known particularly for her critical thinking skills! 

it makes me so sad, for mostly selfish reasons, because this was someone who is ultimately the source of so much of the influential work i now hold dear, and it’s difficult for that to not feel tainted now—even though the work obviously exists on its own with or without her. but it also makes me sad because reading her blog reveals the extent to which this kind of paranoia is truly so isolating (ironic lol) and how it feeds a genuine, livid hatred of the world that can never be satiated or soothed. you can’t enjoy anything with a worldview like that, as much as people who think this way claim that their fealty to capital-T Truth is based on wanting what’s best for humanity. i can’t imagine how exhausting and thankless and lonely it must be to go through life with that mindset. there’s no love in it, no grace. i think it’s pathetic, really. (in between the antivax stuff she talks about how miserable and exhausted she always is, how she isn’t moved by anything anymore, and the connection seems so obvious. how can she not realize it?) but i do still think it’s possible to critique contemporary society and media in the way that i thought my professor was doing while i was still her student—that is to say, with love: we do deserve better and can do better. but whatever she’s doing now isn’t that.

i suppose i’d like to think that she could change someday. we were still exchanging emails when she started posting that BS (i didn’t know; i wasn’t checking her blog) and not much seemed amiss to me, but obviously i haven’t contacted her in a while since. it’s a funny way to lose someone, i guess.