Episode 98: Transcript
Episode 98: Will the United States Survive Another 50 Years? We Ask Jamelle Bouie
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct a podcast about the meaning of science fiction and everything else. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of a new short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes. Plus a young adult novel Victories Greater Than Death, and a book about how to use writing to survive the worst stuff life can throw it you, Never Say You Can't Survive.
Annalee: [00:00:22] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who also writes science fiction. I'm the author of a new book about archaeology called for Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:36] So today, we're going to be talking about whether the United States of America will continue to exist as a country 50 years from now and what that might look like and what kind of scenarios we could envision for a medium-near future United States. And to help us do this, we're going to be joined by New York Times columnist, Jemelle Bouie who has done a lot of thinking about these issues. And also on our audio extra next week, we'll be talking about which decade of post-apocalyptic movies was the most apocalyptic: the 1970s or the 1980s?
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Charlie Jane: [00:02:14] So now we're joined by Jamelle Bouie, New York Times columnist and co host of the new podcast, Unclear and Present Danger. Welcome, Jamelle.
Jamelle: [00:02:23] Thank you for having me.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:25] Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us. So can you give us like a ballpark percentage of how likely is it that the United States will still exist as a country in 50 years.
Jamelle: [00:02:34] So I think it's worth starting by saying that more or less, since the United States has existed, people have been predicting it's going to break up. So in the immediate 20 years after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, you have real fears, right, that incipient partisanship, the development of political parties, intensely fierce political rivalry at the turn of the century, real fear that the whole thing is going to fall apart. There is fear act during the 1800 election, which was famously acrimonious, that the country would collapse into civil war.
[00:03:16] So you have these recurring fears throughout the first half of the 19th century, usually over the sectional divide over slavery. And obviously, of course, we do come to civil war in 1861. But the important point there is that the sort of political and social and economic pressures that produced that took the better part, right, of a century to fully take shape and produce the Civil War. And are the kinds of things that aren't necessarily replicable again, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:03:51] Right.
Jamelle: [00:03:51] I think analogies to the Civil War that you see—I've seen some, over the last few years, really do, I think, understate the sheer magnitude of the division that was created by slavery.
[00:04:07] So that's to say, I'm not surprised, in the present, that there is again, conversation or fear about, however you want to frame it, of the US coming apart. And what I would say is that I, myself, am doubtful, right? That like nothing so far that we've experienced for as traumatic as it may or may not be, nothing lacks an antecedent in the American past. And all of it is the kind of thing that the country's gotten through more or less in shape. So that doesn't mean there isn't a chance of the country fracturing but I, for me, at least, I'm skeptical that it's going to happen. Smarter people, in the past have predicted that the US is going to fall apart and that hasn't come to pass, so.
Annalee: [00:05:00] So it's interesting that you say that people keep bringing up the parallel with the Civil War, which is also something that I've kind of fallen into myself. And I wonder if you think there's a better antecedent for us to be thinking about instead of kind of always going back to like, “Okay, we're on the brink of civil war.” What are some other periods of, of turmoil or fragmentation in US history that provide us with a better analogy for thinking about what's happening now?
Jamelle: [00:05:28] So, for my part, I think kind of the most useful analogy or the most, the two most useful periods are probably Reconstruction in 1865 to 1877 or so. And I'm about to revise that, sort of not even really reconstruction, but sort of like the decline of and then transition into Jim Crow. That's about 1874 to 1900, which is it’s own kind of period. And then also the 1920s, which were like an intensely fractitious period that bears a lot of similarities to our own.
[00:06:05] And I say those periods because they are characterized by extreme partisanship, extreme polarization of the political system. It's worth, just for fun, looking at the margins in presidential elections from that 19th century period, 1876, that election to 1900, which you're looking at margins of usually no more than a percentage point in the popular vote. Just intensely contested presidential elections and really high levels of partisanship. Much more turmoil in the country, labor unrest. This is the age of lynching, for example. So you have also that kind of endemic violence in the south, you have tons of political violence in the south in particular. You have efforts at restricting democracy north and south. North, targeted towards immigrants, south targeted towards Blacks, west targeted towards Chinese immigrants.
[00:07:01] And you have, sort of like… the thing that's different is there still sort of a regional distinction or regional variation. A lot of these things are still ongoing in the ‘20s, they're just a bit more modern sounding to our ears. But the interplay of division, of partisanship, of violence, of kind of a wide spectrum of ideological views. All these things are sort of part of the firmament in American life, in these decades. And I think some familiarity with that might help us better understand what we're going through. But to kind of put a pin on that last point, the fact that we do have kind of a national political culture in a way that we never really have before, does make things a little different. Because it means that, it sort of means that people can't, people can't retreat necessarily. After the the Scopes Monkey Trial in the 1920s, the big evolution trial, fundamentalist Christians sort of made a strategic retreat from American politics and could more or less do that. They could retreat to their communities without really having to engage the outside world. But nationalized politics, nationalized media, nationalized culture, that makes that thing kind of more difficult, which I think kind of adds to, for some groups, a sense of being besieged, right? You can't really escape anything you don't like. So what are you gonna do about it?
Charlie Jane: [00:08:38] Yeah, well, that actually leads to the next question I was going to ask, which is, I think it's interesting to talk about historical antecedents like the ones you mentioned, do you think that there's any truth to the notion that we are living through an unprecedented time and that the thing you mentioned about how politics has become nationalized. When I was a kid, I certainly heard often, this maxim that all politics is local. And I know that in your home state, Danica Roem, somebody that I've been supporting a lot keeps winning re election to the House of Delegates, just by being like Route 89, or whatever it is, doesn't have enough traffic lights, and this is like the issue that I'm going to focus on.
[00:09:13] But you know, it does feel like politics have changed in the era of social media and cable news and all these other things, to the point where people are much more concerned about national issues and much less concerned about local disputes. And I'm wondering if that makes it difficult to reach into history to look to our future?
Jamelle: [00:09:34] No, I think that's a really fair point. And you can kind of go down the list of things that make the present distinctive, it's not just sort of like our nationalized, kind of political and media and cultural environment, but also sort of like, local media doesn't really exist in the same way anymore. People’s sort of an affective connections seem to be less towards things in their community and more towards more broader and national kind of imagined communities. There’s a loss of locality in American life, just in general, that I think, is a very powerful force. And I don't think we've really ever seen before. And so that that is distinctive, I think. Yeah, it's funny, the extremely strong feelings people have about many things, some of those strong feelings are very justified, are not novel. That’s not a new thing. It's just sort of like the context in which those strong feelings are happening is a new thing. And I suppose the question is whether we have any institutions or anything that can somehow channel that stuff into something more constructive than just an inchoate anger and rage ready to be harnessed by someone.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:50] Yeah, so actually getting back to the Constitution. I feel like, I mean, I talk to my mom a lot. She's a historian and I just, I'm always saying to her, I feel like the Constitution is just like broken, that it's unworkable, because of the compromises that were baked into it. And what my mom always says is kind of what you said, which is that back then people were worried that the different colonies could become client states of European powers if they weren't harnessed into something unified. And so whatever was needed to do that was what people were willing to do.
[00:11:20] But you know, I mean, part of why I'm a little pessimistic about the future of the United States is because I feel like our Constitution has so many weird kludges like the Electoral College, like the Senate, and just a bunch of other things that make it kind of like a millstone around our necks. And do you think that there's any way to cope with that? Or do you think that we're just stuck with it?
Jamelle: [00:11:41] I've sort of, of two minds of this. On the first, I myself, am very pessimistic about the ability of making any kind of root and branch constitutional change, like the Constitution is, for all intents and purposes unamendable. The most significant amendment over the last, you know, 50 years is probably the 22nd, which lowered the voting age to 18. You can maybe make a case that presidential term limits is a very consequential one. But that’s very debatable. I think that lowering the voting age is more clearly the very consequential one. But the thing about that, right, is that lowering the voting age isn't necessarily an issue of intense partisan contestation, right? It’s kind of like, people at the time are like, well, these kids are going to fight and die and they can't vote. That's not cool. So we should let them vote.
[00:12:32] If you're thinking of any kind of like serious structural reform of American government say, you know, a popular election of the President outright, reconfiguring how the Senate operates, right? All these tweaks, it's hard to imagine them ever happening given how they're attached to kind of different partisan beliefs about who's gonna advantage and who's not going to advantage.
[00:13:04] On the flip side, though, the Constitution is a funny document in that in some sense, it sets up a pretty kind of rigid structure. But in another sense, it's actually remarkably flexible. And so if a political consensus were to develop around certain things, you wouldn't necessarily have to amend the Constitution to make those changes. The Constitution itself was a kludge, but you can kind of kludge your way out of things as well. And so, I often wonder, for my partmy kind of analysis here is that the ideological polarization, geographical polarization, these things have sorted the two political parties into one being pretty liberal, almost uniformly, the other pretty conservative uniformly, and that you can more or less predict where someone's gonna fall in the two party system based off of where they live and what race they are. Those two variables, and you've kind of figured it out. And to me, what that does is it introduces a level of predictability that is actually really harmful to democratic politics, because it always, there's always the possibility in any given election, in a mostly evenly divided country that you can win and you can win it all. So why would you compromise? Why would you moderate anything?
[00:14:32] And this is more for Republicans than Democrats. I think Democrats having a very diverse coalition kind of cuts against this somewhat, but for a Republican that sort of a, well, we might be able to win everything without even really winning most of the vote so why would even compromise? And so what needs to be introduced back into the system is a level of unpredictability. If I'm going to channel James Madison here who thought that in a large Republic, you would need factions meeting factions, ambition meeting ambition, to be able to channel things into something constructive. I think that what the country needs is something like a multi party system to introduce a level of unpredictability into election outcomes. And that's something you could achieve without really having to change the constitution is you can mainly just operate by law. And it's like, I don't… do I think that's terribly likely in the next 50 years? Probably not. Do I think it is a good, I think it's something that you can build support for? Do I think it's something that there's a politics you can create around it to maybe get to that outcome? I do.
Enough of those kind of adjustments, adjusting our political institutions to sort of the kind of society we have now, enough of those accumulate, and you have something a bit more workable. And I want to be clear here, workable, for me doesn't mean that, right, like, my preferred policy outcomes happen. As much as I would like that to be the case. Workable for me, means that the country can govern itself, that it can govern itself in a way that doesn't sort of like exacerbate the worst forces within the country. In that it can govern itself in a way that makes most people feel our institutions. Not great, Americans have never really felt great about our institutions. Makes most people feel like, fine. Rather than, you know, helpless.
Annalee: [00:16:41] Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the future of the United States.
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Annalee: [00:16:55] So we were just talking about how the United States is kind of suffering from two weirdly contradictory problems. One is that we're in a state where local political culture is kind of evaporating, and we have this new kind of sense of national politics, that kind of takes everyone up into the same issues. At the same time, we're seeing a kind of fragmentation, and we're seeing local issues and local interests, kind of taking over in some cases. We're seeing this kind of minority rule in many regions of the country. And so I'm wondering, if we look to the future, in a kind of science fictional vein, we're casting our eyes forward into the next 50 years. If you could think a little bit or talk a little bit about how you imagine some of the stuff that you were just talking about coming to pass? If we were to head toward a system with multiple parties, whether that's toward a parliamentary system or something else, what does that look like? How do you, again, in a kind of science fictional mode, how do you imagine that developing?
Jamelle: [00:18:04] So in terms of there's like particular policy things you would do, right? You'd have multiple member districts for the House, you would have some form of runoff voting, or rank choice voting or something, etc. etc. All that stuff is easy to imagine. For the Senate, things wouldn’t be too different. Maybe you could by law, create, like, at large senators, for the country. I mean, there's all sorts of little things you could do. But in terms of the sort of what are the events? Or what are the processes that would get us from point A to point B? I mean, historically, in the US, like one of two things has to happen. Either, you have some sort of like big social revolution of some sort, that kind of puts so much pressure on the political system that it's forced to change.
[00:18:54] So that's like your Civil Rights movement. That's kind of like the era of mass immigration, the beginning of the 20th century. That's, you know, the rapid territorial expansion of the United States in the 19th century, all that stuff. Or you have a war, a big conflict, that provides some of the energy itself. I hope I will be alive for the next 50 years, I would rather not experience any wars, any significant ones, during that period. So my hope is that basically, we have one of our recurring social revolutions, we have on our one of our recurring movements towards more and greater political equality and it's probably going to be in reaction to some kind of domestic unrest, domestic disturbance, some sort of long term, or at least like medium term phenomena that kind of leads the country to reorient itself.
[00:19:58] There's a great book by a political scientist named Lee Drutman called The Two Party Doom Loop, which is about 10 of the inherent problems of the two party system. And he imagines, basically, sort of like the United States coming dangerously close to military dictatorship as a result of internal unrest, and then kind of reorienting itself. I feel like…
Charlie Jane: [00:20:26] That does sound fun.
Annalee: [00:20:28] Yeah, I was just starting to feel really optimistic there and then you brought it back to the doom loop.
Jamelle: [00:20:33] So I should say, I don't know if I'm optimistic or not. I have no sense of whether of whether that could accurately describe me. But I will say that I do not underestimate the kind of the kind of connection, faith, belief, whatever people have, and just the idea of the American union, that is a deceptively powerful idea. And that, to me, makes me think that the country will figure something out. I don't know what that thing is. But I actually think that for as much as you do have people who are like, “Oh, we should let them all go. We should split up.” I think there's a deep emotional connection to the idea of the United States.
Annalee: [00:21:23] Yeah, I think that's true. And I wanted to follow up and ask you another, I think this is a bit of a science fictional question, too, which is if we were to have more political parties in this future, like say, we have a kind of crackdown of some kind, and then we get a social movement that emerges out of it, and we get more political parties. What are some political parties that you could imagine emerging? Like what comes after Democrat versus Republican? As long as we don't bring back the Whigs or the Tories? I'm totally cool with that.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:59] I think the Whigs had a cool name.
Annalee: [00:22:01] I know. Yeah, that’s true. It was a good name. Not as good as Know Nothing, I guess.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:05] Bull Moose. Bring back the Bull Moose party.
Annalee: [00:22:07] Yeah, I'm actually I'm in favor of the Citron party from Canada.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:12] But anyway, yes, tell us: future political parties, please.
Annalee: [00:22:15] Sorry.
Jamelle: [00:22:15] One way you could think of it is you could kind of just get the existing two parties and kind of break them up in their constituent parts. And so if you broke up the Republican Party, you would have like a center right business party, sort of your Mitt Romneys, your George Bushes kind of stay down the line. You would have a MAGA party, like a xenophobic, really reactionary nationalist party. You would have a social conservative party that's sort of more traditionally, yeah, you’d have a straight up social conservative party.
[00:22:53] And then on the left, you would have kind of a counterpart to the center right business party, kind of a more center left. You know, Bill Clinton, Clintonite. Even Obama-esque center left party. You would have, I think something like a Green Party. And you would have as well, like a Labor Party… yeah, a Labor Party that might be a little more socially conservative. I think that's like your basic breakdown. But of course, depending on how you structure a multi-party system it could be one where you really do just have four, five, or six parties that emerge. Or you can have one where there's a bajillion different little parties, and they all kind of do their own thing.
[00:23:39] My hunch, my sense is that if we ever move to a multi party system, we'd be more the former. Things would still be, four, five, or six kind of major parties that contend and contest with each other, and not so much a huge proliferation of parties. But that's how I imagine it. Basically some smaller version of the existing Republican and Democratic parties, and then kind of Green Party, Nationalist Party, Labor Party, you know, Social Conservative party.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:12] Yeah. So continuing on the sort of science fictional vein, I write some books and stories sometimes that take place in kind of the future of the United States. And one of the things I always kind of bump up against or one of things I always kind of struggle with is trying to predict how current trends like climate change and corporate consolidation mixed in with ubiquitous surveillance, how those things kind of put stresses on the American political system and potentially cause it to break. How do those things factor into kind of your vision of the future of the United States?
Jamelle: [00:24:48] I always like to stress the unpredictability. So the climate change, for example, I'm not really sure how climate change is going to going to influence American politics. I don't think it's going to influence American politics in ways that we can sort of reliably predict. There is going to be an influence. It is going to be a shock. It is going to change things. But what those things are, and how they change are, I think, a little bit up in the air. Some things I can imagine, right? I can imagine a world of climate disaster and climate refugees really bringing a more more reactionary turn in American politics as people want to keep people out of the country. I could imagine climate crisis within the United States. This is a big, big country. I can imagine climate crisis within the borders of the United States, really transforming American politics in pretty profound ways.
[00:25:41] I had recently had a conversation with some students of religion about the future of American religion. And I wouldn't be surprised if endemic climate crisis causes some sort of revitalization of religious belief in the country. It wouldn't be the first time that the United States went through a Great Awakening. And I feel like we're probably due for one in the next half century. So that would be one catalyst for it. And then who knows how that would influence things. I'm 34. If we start from when I graduated college, my adult life has included lots of things that seem highly unlikely if you were to try to explain to them, explain them to you beforehand. If you tried to explain to me in 2009 that the President in seven years, eight years, would be Donald Trump, that would sound ridiculous. And I’d have a hard—
Charlie Jane: [00:26:32] It still does.
Jamelle: [00:26:35] And I’d have a hard time imagining the path from here to there. And that's all to say that there are going to be events, there are going to be occurrences that we simply cannot anticipate and that are going to shape things in profound ways. And I feel like the best I can do, the most I can say, is that we should not, we should neither discount the the odds of some sort of fundamental break happening with the past because of events. But we can't also just, I mean, it's also fair to wonder if we are going to… things are going to happen along a pretty linear path. I doubt that they will. But that's always a possibility, too.
[00:27:22] The same goes for technology. Maybe we're on, if you imagine a linear path, it's like 30 years from now we just live in sort of like an all pervasive surveillance state, like private surveillance state, but who knows? Who knows what might happen in 20 years? Maybe there's a huge backlash. Maybe there's a mini Butlerian jihad against surveillance technology.
Annalee: [00:27:51] All those anti-algorithm bills, you know.
Jamelle: [00:27:53] Right, right.
Annalee: [00:27:53] They could get together themselves and achieve sentience, and then they would fight… anyway, nevermind.
Jamelle: [00:28:00] So yeah, it's hard for me to predict. I often feel like, everyday life for most people will probably be roughly kind of the same. And it's only when you try to take a big systemic picture that things will look very different.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:21] Yeah, so final question. You obviously spend a lot of time thinking about pop culture, and you have a new podcast about sort of 90s action movie political thrillers. Are there any movies or TV shows or books that you feel like, depict the future of the United States either accurately or in a way that is useful?
Jamelle: [00:28:40] In a way that's useful? Because I'm not sure you know, accurately is like, tough, right? Like, I don't know what…?
Charlie Jane: [00:28:47] Yeah, I mean, obviously…
Annalee: [00:28:48] Yeah, we're not wizards. We can't actually predict the future.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:48] I mean, I am but I'm trying to not bring [crosstalk].
Annalee: [00:28:52] Yeah, don’t lean into that.
Jamelle: [00:28:55] I'll say what movie I recently rewatched and recently, meaning like, in the last year or so, was Minority Report, and being very, very impressed on how much that movie gets right about sort of the next 10 and 15 years of technology, at least. Sort of its sense of where things were headed. So I would toss that in there.
[00:29:16] Movies I love for their depiction of the future are just the Star Trek movies because there's such an optimistic and humanist vision of the future of sort of humanity at its best. I feel like so many cinematic depictions of the future are essentially dystopian and Star Trek is sort of a rare example of a cinematic depiction of the future in which there are still problems and challenges. There's still drama, but we've been able to at least resolve some of the biggest material issues that we face as human beings.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:54] Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you online?
Jamelle: [00:29:58] So you can find me if The New York Times I'm just one of the columnists and write there. I'm on Twitter as @JBouie. I'm on Instagram as well as @JBouie. And then yeah, I have my new podcast with my friend John Ganz. We’re watching 90s kind of post-Cold War thrillers and talking about their politics, trying to historicize that decade a little bit, as it recedes farther into the rearview mirror.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:24] I'm gonna put on some flannel shirts and give it a listen. Thank you so much.
Annalee: [00:30:29] Yeah, thanks for being here.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:31] Have a great rest of your evening.
Jamelle: [00:30:30] Thank you so much for having me.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:34] We're going to take another short break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about my brand new short story collection.
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Annalee: [00:30:48] All right, Charlie Jane, I know that we've all been waiting for this moment, your first big short story collection. It’s called Even Greater Mistakes, and to start off, why don't you tell us a little bit about how you picked the stories for the collection?
Charlie Jane: [00:31:04] Yeah, that's a wonderful question. So you know…
Annalee: [00:31:08] Yes, it is.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:08] I've written a lot of short stories in my so-called career like, I think a couple 100. Probably more at this point, I've written a ton of short stories, many of which nobody has ever read, thank goodness. But there were a bunch that people have read. And I really tried to pick stories that, fulfilled two criteria. One, they still made me feel something when I looked back at them, like I still kind of felt like the characters were compelling there was something emotionally potent in the story that at least spoke to me and that I felt like it still held up in some way. And it wasn't just like a fun thought experiment that was just like, “Oh, that was fun. Now, let's move on to the next thing.”
[00:31:47] The other criterion was that I wanted to the stories collection to be as varied as possible, because I'm like, it's 19 stories by me. And if it's 19 stories that are all kind of the same thing that's gonna get really old. And I really wanted to kind of showcase like, okay, I've got some stories that are really silly and funny and kind of gonzo, and just like, you know, clown pants, and then I've got other stories that are actually kind of more serious and introspective, and kind of weighty and in some cases, actually a little bit upsetting and dystopian. There's one story in particular that that refers to, but I just wanted it to feel like kind of a chocolate box where you get like a bunch of different flavors.
Annalee: [00:32:29] And like one of them is mouse turd like that's the dystopian flavor.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:34] I mean, I hope that the dystopian—
Annalee: [00:32:36] What is the flavor of dystopia?
Charlie Jane: [00:32:36] I think the flavor of dystopia is maple syrup, maybe, because—
Annalee: [00:32:41] What? No.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:41] Because when you're living in a dystopia, you can't necessarily get sugar but you can still go and like make your own maple syrup by like tapping the trees. I don't think the dystopian story is like a mouse turd, I actually still think it's a really beautiful story. It's just very upsetting and very kind of dark and scary.
Annalee: [00:32:59] I didn't mean mouse turd like the story is shitty. I just meant that like, you know, the box of chocolates, it’s like and then you get to the dystopian chocolate and like what is in there?
Charlie Jane: [00:33:08] I feel like the dystopian… well, for you dystopian chocolate would be white chocolate.
Annalee: [00:33:09] It would. Actually white chocolate is a sign of dystopia.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:16] Like you'd be like, okay, white chocolate. That is the dystopian story.
Annalee: [00:33:19] It's yeah. So that's my box of chocolates. I'll just give you—
Charlie Jane: [00:33:22] Or like marzipan.
Annalee: [00:33:24] Ugh. White chocolate with marzipan inside and then really dried out coconut flakes somehow integrated into it as well.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:33] See, I love all of this, I would eat that chocolate in a second.
Annalee: [00:33:35] I'm not anti coconut, I just like the really dried out, awful coconut flakes.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:38] You know, I love marzipan, I love white chocolate, I like dried out coconut flakes.
Annalee: [00:33:43] Well, I like maple syrup and I don't think it's dystopian.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:45] I just am saying in dystopia.
Annalee: [00:33:46] I consider maple syrup to be like, the kind of centrist of sweet flavors. I don't know if there's like a centrism here like between goofy fun and dystopia.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:58] So it’s the kind of middle of the road.
Annalee: [00:34:00] Yeah, it's middle of the road, because it's you know, I just… Yeah.
[00:34:05] Alright, so I think we've established what the chocolate box is. I'm wondering, why don't you just give us an example, though, of like, when I open this chocolate box, what's one of the really funny stories that you included and what's one of the white chocolate stories that you included?
Charlie Jane: [00:34:19] Okay. I mean, so, one of the really funny stories that I feel like nobody has read. It was published online, but I felt like it just slid way under the radar. But there's this story called “Vampire Zombie versus Fairy Werewolf.”
Annalee: [00:34:31] Amazing title.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:31] I mean, I feel like that title, you know, I would want to read that story. It's about it's about a vampire who's also a zombie. And you know, it ends with the him getting into a fight with a fairy who's also a werewolf. And so the title is very descriptive of what the story is. It's one of my most kind of accurately descriptive titles. And it's just pure, ridiculous silliness. At one point, one of the characters has a +1 Vorpal shotgun and there's like a karaoke battle. There's like a lot of dishes against the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It's just, it's a very kind of like goofy, wacky story that's kind of like based on my love of Vampire Diaries, but taken to a very ridiculous place.
[00:35:16] And then a kind of more, I don't know, intense, sad story, like, I'm just gonna pick “Rat Catcher’s Yellows,” which I think did get a fair bit of attention. But it's a story about a woman whose partner has early dementia due to this kind of disease that is kind of a cousin of syphilis and Lyme disease. And the only thing that helps this person with dementia is playing this weird video game where she wears a cat head mask and like governs a kingdom full of cats. And it's kind of a cute story, but it's very sad and very upsetting. And it definitely was like me thinking about my father's dementia and the other people in my life who’ve had dementia, but I kind of changed it into a different sort of relationship story. And it's a very sad story, but I think it, you know, because it's got cute cats and like other stuff. It's not like, I think that it'll be fun to read, even though it's also like, oof, you know?
Annalee: [00:36:15] Yeah. I wouldn't actually call that a white chocolate story, I think.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:19] I mean, the most white chocolate story is obviously like, “Don't Press Charges And I Won’t Sue,” which is like the kind of super dystopian, upsetting, like, what if you know, the transphobic jerk wads who are like currently jerking up the place, what if they get their way? And it's sort of an exaggerated version of that. And it's a very scary upsetting story that, you know.
Annalee: [00:36:42] Yeah, it's like a kind of TERF dystopia, basically, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:45] It is literally a TERF dystopia.
Annalee: [00:36:47] Very intense story.
[00:36:47] It's such a great range of stories in here. And I know that when you were putting this book together, you actually revised a lot of these stories so they're slightly different, in some cases, from what people read initially, if they read them online or in the publications. So how did you, what was that like, going back and doing that? Some of these stories are several years old now.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:10] Yeah, I mean, it was really a thing where like, the older the story, and the more I had to kind of work on it, and the more I had to kind of like beat it up and kind of smack it around a little bit. And there are stories from like, 15 years ago, where I really had to go back and just kind of punch of the characters, make the characters a little bit more, like, have just a little bit more complexity to the characters and a little bit more emotional center of the characters. And then for stories that were more recent, it was mostly just a matter of going through, streamlining a little bit, taking out… You know, even stuff that I wrote a few years ago, there's, there's language that I don't use in my fiction as much anymore. Like, I'm really trying to get rid of ableist language in my fiction and that's a struggle, because there's so many—
Annalee: [00:37:51] It’s so important.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:51] Common phrases and words that we all use all the time, that are actually really ableist. So I've been trying really hard to kind of root those out of my fiction. And you know, even at the copy editing and kind of proofreading stage, I would still be like, “Oh, okay, I cut another one. Gosh.” It was like a process that was kind of never ending and I'm sure I still missed some stuff. But there was that, and mostly, it was just like, yeah, making sure that the stories felt like they were of a uniform standard, and that they flowed well and stuff. And I felt like there was a very clear progression where, like, I got technically a little bit better at certain aspects of story writing, after about 10 years ago. And so the stories prior to that, I really had to just kind of go in and tweak them a little bit more.
Annalee: [00:38:38] Yeah, it's so interesting. We're definitely going to do an episode coming up about writing short stories. So we're not going to delve too much into process right now. But to finish up, I just wanted to ask, I know you said that you worked really hard to have this diverse box of chocolates. I'm just going to keep going to this horrible box of chocolates metaphor.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:54] Yeah, no. Do it. Let’s Gump it up.
Annalee: [00:38:58] God…
Charlie Jane: [00:38:57] Let’s Gump it up!
Annalee: [00:38:58] Gump is the worst chocolate. Okay, that is, whatever the flavor of Gump, it's like a fried shrimp inside of white chocolate shell.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:07] Oh man.
Annalee: [00:39:07] Anyway, so I wanted to ask if you actually did find some themes that surprised you, where you were like, oh, I guess I've been obsessing about this for 20 years?
Charlie Jane: [00:39:18] Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, themes that obsess me. Like things that jumped out at me in the stories, and some of its selection bias, some of it’s just the stories that I chose, but I think these are themes that I obsess about a lot. A big one that powers a lot of my stories is just the thing of knowing that bad things are going to happen. But not knowing what or when or how, and that’s what… I have that one story “Six Months, Three Days” about these two people who can see the future in different ways. And that really ends up being about how both of them kind of know that some really bad stuff is going to happen to them. And in one case, the one character is like I know exactly what the bad things that are gonna are, I know exactly when and how they're going to happen. And the other person is like, I really don't. Like there's many different ways that things could play out for me, because they have different views on the future. But I feel like a bunch of my stories, one way or the other, are about kind of like reckoning with the fact that the one thing we can know, as human beings, is that we're going to suffer, we're going to lose things that are really important to us. And there's nothing that we can do to prevent it. We can't even predict it, really, we just know that it's going to happen. Like you could get hit by a bus tomorrow, or you could never get hit by a bus. But things will happen, and you can't know. And so that is the thing that a bunch of these stories are wrestling with in different ways. And it is the thing that I kind of low key obsess about all the time, because it's genuinely upsetting. To not know, like to not be able to see. And probably it was better because…
Annalee: [00:40:55] Well, to know and not know, because what you're saying is like, you definitely know that something bad is gonna happen. But what it's gonna be, you know, it's kind of like what we were talking to Jamelle about?
Charlie Jane: [00:41:06] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:41:06] It's like, well, we know that something dark is going to happen to the United States. What will it be? How will we respond? We don't know.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:14] Yeah, I mean, you know, we did an episode recently about 9/11. And it was like, there were, we certainly could have said, “Oh, there's going to be some kind of… there'll be some kind of incident that's going to be really destructive and terrible, but we don't know when and how and,” But nobody really saw that coming. Nobody really expected it. And it just, everything was changed afterwards, everything was different and we had a different frame of reference.
[00:41:43] So that's the thing that I obsess about. A lot of the stories are about people kind of finding human connection and finding each other and finding love between two people, but also finding love with a community in the midst of terrible things. And I think that that's what really powers the hopeful side of these stories. I feel like it is a very hopeful collection, I think even the darkest stories in it are full of hope and full of the notion that we can connect with other people, we can hold on to ourselves, and we can hold on to our communities even when things get really bad. And I think that that's like where I draw a lot of my hope from is just that sense of us coming together in relationships, but also in big community groups. And that is where we get our ability to survive. And there’s one story in the book where you really kind of influenced it a lot, where it’s a story that takes place in a future San Francisco that's underwater, like San Francisco has been flooded. It's now a chain of islands. It's an archipelago. And I remember I was working on it. I even say this in the introduction to that story. I was like, I was working on this story. And I was like, well, I really want to write this story about a an underwater San Francisco or a drowned San Francisco but I'm really sick of kind of dark post-apocalyptic stories. And you were like, “Why does it have to be dark or post-apocalyptic? Why can't it be hopeful about people rebuilding?” And I was like, oh, yeah, no, you're right. And like it ended up being about this lovely kind of queer kind of intentional community on Bernal Island, which is now Bernal Heights. And you know, it's actually a very kind of... Some bad things happen, for sure. But it's a very hopeful, joyful sweet story.
Annalee: [00:43:24] Yeah, I love Bernal Island.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:26] Yeah, me too.
Annalee: [00:43:26] Yeah, that's very on brand for us. I feel like there's always that moment where I'm like, but what about when we rebuild?
Charlie Jane: [00:43:34] I mean, you know…
Annalee: [00:43:37] I like to think about that because I think I also, yeah, see the darkness too clearly. And so I'm like, let's get to the yummy chocolate. What's the, okay, final question. Final, final question. What is the flavor of the best candy in the box?
Charlie Jane: [00:43:52] The—
Annalee: [00:43:52] The happiest. The happiest candy. The most zany happy candy in the box.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:57] I mean, gosh, like, I mean…
Annalee: [00:44:00] Is it dark chocolate or milk chocolate? Come clean.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:02] I think it's milk chocolate. I think it’s milk chocolate.
Annalee: [00:44:04] Thank you. Thank you.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:05] I think it’s milk chocolate with like maybe…
Annalee: [00:44:07] [Whispering] Salt. Salt.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:07] With salt? Okay, salt. It’s salted milk chocolate.
Annalee: [00:44:10] I don't know. I don't know if you're allowed to do that. Are you looking to salt milk chocolate?
Charlie Jane: [00:44:12] I don't know.
Annalee: [00:44:12] Or you have to only dark chocolate. Okay, listeners. Let us know. Is the best chocolate, salted milk chocolate or salted dark chocolate or no salt?
Charlie Jane: [00:44:24] I mean, I really like milk chocolate like around some kind of nut.
Annalee: [00:44:27] Me, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:27] Like, I just got a—
Annalee: [00:44:30] Or a honeycomb. What about around a honeycomb?
Charlie Jane: [00:44:31] Milk chocolate honeycomb? Yum. That’s amazing.
Annalee: [00:44:33] Okay. All right. Well, we figured it all out.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:37] We have.
Annalee: [00:44:36] I’m so excited for everybody to read your collection of short stories.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:40] Even Greater Mistakes. It’s out now!
Annalee: [00:44:42] It's so good.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:43]It's out wherever books are, you know, booking.
Annalee: [00:44:46] Awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:48] This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. Thank you so much for listening. You can find us wherever podcasts are found. If you listen to us on Apple Podcast, please, please leave a review. It helps us a lot. And don't forget, you can find us on Patreon where we would really appreciate your support and that's patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. We're also on Twitter at @OOACpod.
[00:45:11] Thank you so much to our incredible, brilliant, audio producer Veronica Simonetti. Thanks so much to our studio space, Women's Audio Mission and thanks to Chris Palmer for the music. And if you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord. Everybody else, we'll see you in two weeks.
Annalee: [00:45:25] Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:45:26] Bye!
[00:45:26] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.