Madness, Civilization, and the Insurrection Act of 1807

Are you feeling a little hysterical? I sure am!

Hello my dear newsletter friends!

First some housekeeping:

for creative and/or legal reasons or just because I’m feeling personally chaotic, I now declare this newsletter to be a work of fiction. It is written by a fictional Amy Newell who lives in a part of the multiverse so nearly indistinguishable from our own that to jump to it you do not have to do anything so complex as leaping onto a massive butt-plug shaped auditor trophy inside of a local IRS office (won’t exist in this timeline for much longer apparently anyways, amirite?) or even give yourself five paper cuts.¹ All you have to do is sneeze. Just find some dust bunnies and inhale them and sneeze and there you are, in this, the fictional near-reality version of the world.

I am a fictional Amy Newell who resembles the real Amy Newell almost exactly except that this version inexplicably has MUCH cleaner fingernails. In this world, when I write to you about protest opsec or how much I love cigarettes or how hysterical I’ve been lately, or when I try to explain how I once was in a blood cult so I can guarantee you that whatever was said in that book Careless People the reality is like ten times more weird, you know that it is fictional. It is fictional in exactly the same way that the narrator of all my poems over on my companion website is a fiction, in exactly the same way that identity itself is a fiction, the author is a fiction, words are fictions, money is a fiction. I went to Harvard when it was overrun by Maoists², you see, and there I learned that the Author died just before anyone who was not a white man got to write a book. Aww, shucks, too bad, I said, I guess I didn’t have anything interesting to say, I’ll just be over here in the Schlesinger Library examining their vintage lesbian porn archives.

Flash forward to now, where I, fictional Amy, am supposedly writing a book about my thru-hike. This, Ye Olde New Amsterdam Paper of Record informed me the other day, “borders on ambitious.”³ You see, a woman once wrote a book about a solo woman thru-hiker. That was back in 2012, and it was a very successful book, they even made a movie about it, it was touching, Reese Witherspoon starred in it.

There is obviously not room in the world for a single additional book about a solo woman thru-hike, it would be ridiculously ambitious for me to think I could write one, and even if there were room for one more, well Ye Olde blah blah has just reviewed such a book. So check back in 2038, I guess, when a woman might get another chance to write a book about a thru-hike, if she can manage to resurrect the Author by then.

Now, for the serious part, also fictional:

Don’t let anyone tell you last Saturday’s protests weren’t a success, or didn’t change anything, or weren’t enough, or did it wrong somehow. Last Saturday’s protests were a massive success on the part of many, many people, and many many organizations. They were large, they were everywhere, they were decentralized, they were creative, they were fun, and — while many newspapers tried to avoid saying too much about them because, presumably, they don’t want to piss off Trump, who is predictably angered by large crowd sizes that aren’t his — they were all over the social media.

Maybe 3, maybe 5 million people were out on Saturday. There’s a number people float around, that if 3.5% of the population is mobilized, they have a very high chance of overthrowing a dictator. This is oversimplified of course. That number comes from Erica Chenoweth, who studies nonviolent resistance movements at Harvard (for now, anyways, while they still allow woke Maoists to roam the campus and haven’t deported them all to a gulag in El Salvador). You can read more about their thoughts on this number here. On Saturday, at the lowest estimate, we got almost halfway there, and that is just the people in the streets.

There’s another protest planned by the same coalition of groups for Saturday, April 19th. Many of the TeslaTakedown protests happen weekly. There’s something planned for May Day as well, and there’s probably stuff happening down the street from you too. Check last week’s newsletter for my handy (fictional) step-list on how to go to a protest, and some ideas of what to do if you can’t go to a protest.

Protests aren’t everything, but they do matter. They help us build solidarity with one another, they help us feel less alone, they help us feel that we have agency and that we are fighting. Plus they can be fun. More on that below.

The most serious part:

If, like me, you spend too much time on PurpleSky, the fictional social network in this, the fictional near-real universe where I have clean fingernails, you might have heard people freaking about about the Insurrection Act of 1807. I know, I know, in addition to having to care about some law from over a hundred years ago that sounds frankly a little alarming, I also did not think I would ever have to hear the words Smoot-Hawley again after acing my AP US History exam, but here we are, having to re-learn history through a new form of art that goes somehow even beyond farce.

So here’s the deal: People are worried that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act on April 20th and then it’s a whole Reichstag Fire situation and all the skies are falling and we find ourselves suddenly under military occupation by our own military. This is unfortunately a real thing that could happen. April 20th is the date people are freaking out about because that is 3 months from Inauguration Day, when Trump directed Kristi Noem to “research” whether we have some kind of military emergency going on at the southern border that would qualify as an invasion and justify the use of the Insurrection Act.

I have no idea what will happen, but some very smart people who love democracy have put a lot of effort into gaming this out and I am going to link you to two posts that explain the situation clearly and tell us what to do if the thing in fact happens. No, I don’t expect you to click through and read those posts now, I hardly expect you to make it through this newsletter. In this economy? A whole newsletter? How much immediate-release d- amphetamine salts do I think you have access to anyways, right? You gotta hoard that shit, since RFK jr is coming for it and bringing you measles instead.

In fact, by this time next year you’ll be trading your spare lexapro for my spare ritalin (joke: I have no ritalin), and no one will be able to even read a single 147-character twat (which is what we call posts on PurpleSky, here in the Amy-with-clean-fingernails universe) without losing focus, switching to a semi-private ad-sponsored browser window and gargling “vintage lesbian bigballs” so that a Ghibli-themed chatbot version of a DOGE bro can auto-generate deportation porn so depraved you will set your own eyeballs on fire and never finish reading the twat. Aren’t you glad this is all very fictional and you don’t have to set your eyeballs on fire because of something unspeakable a deepfake (but is it??) Kristi Noem did to someone in a prison?⁴ I sure am.

Did I say this was the serious part? Yes, it’s the serious part. If April 20th or some other day rolls around and you read a minor reference to something called the Insurrection Act five screens below the fold on Ye Olde New Amsterdam Paper of Record, and you think “boy, that sounds scary, what should I do” that is the time to remember that I gave you these links. Go to your email and gargle Fictional Amy Newsletter with Clean Fingernails Insurrection Act and here you are, click through to Waging Nonviolence’s “What to do if the Insurrection Act is Invoked” and Indivisible.org’s “Could Trump Invoke the Insurrection Act? What to know and how to prepare”.

Yes, I too wish this world was a giant leap onto a butt-plug-shaped award distance away instead of just some dirty fingernails distance away from the real world, but, you get what you get and you don’t get upset, or so I was told by my younger child’s preschool teacher once, years ago, when what you got wasn’t… all this.

Here we are at the not-serious part of the newsletter!

Whew, we made it! This part is not serious because it’s about feeling hysterical and as we all know only unserious people with lady-parts get hysterical, people who are so hysterically ambitious as to think that there might be room in even just one universe for more than one book about a solo lady thru-hiker, that is how unserious and hysterical this section is…

So, I admit: lately I’ve been feeling a little hysterical. It’s been getting hard to know what is real and what isn’t, and what is important and what is not. I wake up and think Sun Salutation, 10 pushups, Meditate, Work on Ambitious Book Project, Activate and Organize, GO. Then at the end of the day I realize that what I actually did was bulk buy 3 kilos of cocoa powder, make sauerkraut, and spend seven hours crying and staring at the mini-fridge in the corner of my art studio wondering when the people in the wallpaper are going to come and take me away. This is particularly disturbing since my studio does not have wallpaper.

I find myself weeping hysterically over a skirt that I ordered that wasn’t the color orange that I had hoped it was. I decide that all my problems would be solved if I got my hands on enough GLP-1 to lose 10 pounds, even though I literally spent every Season Three White Lotus episode complaining about that one girl who was way too skinny it was painful to look at. The other day like a dying man I took a whole drag off someone else’s cigarette, half-convinced it would immediately turn me back into summer 2018 Amy screaming WHY IS MY JUUL NOT CHARGED??! at 6 am. (It did not). I scroll PurpleSky, like six twats and re-twat one of them, and then 10 minutes later go through and unlike and un-retwat, just in case the government is watching. If the government is watching, this entire newsletter was dictated to me by minecraft ransomware, I had no choice but to paste this photo of a protestor holding a sign that says Oligargle my balls on it, the ransomware was holding my Klonopin prescription hostage.

source...

I find myself hysterically questioning every relationship in my life and every choice I have ever made. Who even am I? This miasma of unreality, this hysteria and confusion is just migrating around like a wandering womb, making me question everything. Do I like wearing leather pants or do I just like the way my ass looks in them? Or do I like how other people like the way my ass looks in leather pants? Does it depend on the definition of the words ‘ass’, ‘leather’, and ‘like’? Do I even want an orange skirt? Is cracking a non-alcoholic beer at 11 am alcoholic behavior, or not? Should I buy an entire wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano and store it in my closet next to the sauerkraut? Should I liquidate my boot collection and buy several gallons of vanilla extract and a whole Jamón ibérico, which I could hang in the closet next to the cheese wheel in the space I free up from liquidating the boot collection? Should I bother working on an ambitious book about a solo woman thru-hiker or should I just take photos of my Maoist boobs and post them on OnlyFans so as to be completely transparent that I am the Bad Kind of Female who is not only Hysterical and Woke but also Slutty? Why not both!? (In this, the fictional world, my fictional boobs are both hardcore Maoists, even though in the real world my left boob is more of an anarchist and the right one leans a little bit more socialist. Yes, there is lore explaining why this is, but that’s for another day.)

Why am I telling you that I am feeling so hysterical? It is certainly not so I can more easily be shipped off to a labor camp in Texas to (Parker Posey voice) have a GRAND MAL SEIZURE⁵ from abrupt discontinuation of Klonopin.

I’m telling you this because under the circumstances feeling hysterical is actually a completely fucking normal thing to feel.

Fixating on small things we have some hope of controlling, like being sure not to run out of the cat’s insulin needles; feeling unreasonably angry at people around us; questioning whether our entire lives aren’t just delusions; obsessing over our overuse of semi-colons; — which, if you think I’m using them weirdly here, I also think I totally am, but that is how we do it in PurpleSky dirty-fingernails world, okay!?! — worrying that people on the street are following us; fantasizing about doing bad things to cybertrucks; spending too much time in the vintage porn stacks; deciding it’s time to learn to make our own kombucha; getting into arguments with strangers on Tinder; binge-eating; micro-cleaning — none of this is optimal, okay, none of it is good coping skills great job resilience your Oura ring gave you a butt-plug shaped award for how awesome your metrics are, you and Cory Booker have got it dialed in, you don’t even have a blood boy but you are WINNING at Thriving Under Fascism —

…

okay, you are not winning at that, there is no Oura award, even though it does feel like every day is somehow 25 hours of standing at a lectern shouting WHAT THE EVERLIVING FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?

but that’s okay…

I mean, because really, does anyone want an award for Thriving Under Fascism? We are feeling this pain because all of this is too, too real. The reality is that it is I, the Amy with dirty fingernails, who is writing to you right now, as much as I wish it were the Amy with clean fingernails who gets to say “did you see what Dril just twatted on PurpleSky?” out loud in public.

This is real, and it fucking sucks. We cannot thrive under these conditions. Even the most privileged among us cannot thrive under these conditions. But blessedly, we do not have to. We can be hysterical and scared and sometimes a little too reactive and be mad at our friends over dumb shit and drink a little too much wine and spend too much time in the vintage porn collection and vaguely consider getting into iPhone arbitrage or making mead or moving to an abandoned nunnery in Malta, and we can hate our bodies and our laundry piles and our handwriting and our dirty fingernails and that is all okay because all that means is that we are human, marvelous complicated endlessly creative hopeless pathetic needy little freaks and incredibly brave weirdos who are paying enough attention to know how utterly fucked up this situation is and that it is not fucking OKAY.

I’m hysterical because hysteria is entirely called for here, it is a migrating hysteria that attaches to all kinds of random shit because it’s creative, my hysteria is so creative precisely because I am so creative, and in my creative hysteria, and in yours, there lies a secret superpower: the irrefutable proof that unpredictability is an inherent attribute of the universe, of this timeline and every other, that each of us fucked up hysterical humans has within ourselves a vast, inexhaustible well of creativity that cannot be predicted by any olibro’s generative fantasy chatbot servant, and it cannot be controlled. It is our birthright as humans, this unpredictable creativity, it is entirely ours to wield, and it is unbelievably powerful.

We are in a completely fucked up timeline, yes, a dystopian prison of a timeline, but I really believe that we are creative enough to find our way out of it. Every one of us just needs to redirect a tiny portion of all that wild chaotic hysteria into creatively participating in making some other future that is less unbelievably shitty than the one that we are being force-fed and told is the only one that can possibly exist. This is a lie. The future is not already determined. The guys who want to tell you it is determined, that they have determined it — they haven’t accounted for our creativity because from their perspectives we are not real people, we are NPCs. We don’t count. So they haven’t accounted for us.

They have not accounted for me deciding to clean my fingernails (or get them even dirtier), or for you deciding to bake an olive oil cake, or for both of us independently showing up to different protests with signs that read Oligargle My Balls. They have not accounted for everything we are capable of fermenting in our hearts and in our kitchen cabinets and in our closets next to the parm wheels and the thigh high boots. They have not even accounted for our next dance craze, and they have absolutely no idea how to account for giant puppets, poets, or people who stand by their principles.

They have not accounted for our humanity. The other futures we can make are not far off at all.

***

I’ll leave you with a piece of this poem by Wendell Berry, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front, which I quote at every opportunity because I love it so much (but go read the whole thing!):

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

here’s to losing our minds and leaving false trails,

xo,

Amy (the one with the dirty fingernails), and the other Amy (with the clean fingernails)

PS if you haven’t already, please stop getting your US news primarily from Ye Olde New Amsterdam Paper of Record or The It Sure Is Getting Dark Here in DC Post, and get it from The Guardian instead. At the least.

1. If you have not seen Everything Everywhere All At Once a. why the fuck not? but b. in this movie you switched between universes by doing improbable things like impaling yourself on a butt-plug trophy. Also, A24, the production company, sold the butt-plug for 60,000 dollars, apparently. Also, why not get into butt stuff as a coping mechanism these days, if you haven’t tried it before? Sex is a healthy, fun, creative hobby! I recommend silicone lube.

2. If you click through that gift article you can see Bret Stephens trying to tell Masha Gessen and Tressie McMillan Cottom that universities like Columbia are “essentially factories of Maoist cadres” —which the fact that these two brilliant humans even have to sit down with this idiot to have a ‘debate’ when he has almost certainly never met an actual Maoist in his life — is just one glaring example of how much more woke the world needs to get before we stop having to tolerate men spouting complete NONSENSE in Ye Olde New Amsterdam Paper of Record.

3. The exact lede to this review of a book about a woman thru-hiker: “In the long shadow of Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild,” it borders on ambitious to write a book about a solo female hiker setting off on a long, prickly journey.”

4. If this reference makes no sense, you can go ahead and gargle Kristi Noem Rolex El Salvador Photo Op. That, unfortunately, is a totally real thing that happened in both this, the fictional universe, and the real one where the Amy Newell with dirty fingernails lives.

5. This is another season 3 White Lotus reference and if you haven’t seen it yet don’t worry it’s not important.