Review of Nellie Bowles' book Morning after the Revolution, Penguin Random House, 2024
Nellie Bowles is a young San Francisco resident as trendy as one can be in Frisco, a journalist at the New York Times , a regular at gay bars, a devilishly progressive who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, she "ticks all the boxes"... And then?
And then one day, she starts asking herself questions: does this whole movement we call woke in France, in which she feels completely at home, really help move things forward? Help people? It's awful: asking these kinds of questions is going against the grain of history, her colleagues told her…
No matter! She's a journalist? So she's going to investigate! Without preconceived ideas, without a mask, she's going to infiltrate "progressive" circles, training workshops, and heated demonstrations. She's going to find, against her will, strange things, stranger than what she expected to find, and things that would be funny, funnier than she anticipated if they didn't manifest the call of the void and the madness that has taken hold of the world she lives in...
Nellie Bowles simply describes what she saw and heard, recounting the pronouncements of the gurus, copying leaflets, banners, and even emails, without adding her own commentary, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions and form their own opinion. There's no need to say, "These wokies are crazy !" The reader will realize that for themselves, without even having to use the offending term. Tragic, terrifying, but perhaps above all hilarious, these statements and writings are enough to demonstrate the state of decay in Californian life in the years surrounding 2020, when the pandemic exploded.
Certainly, it's acknowledged that the murderous rampage of a police officer slowly killing George Floyd almost in public was one of the triggers for this wave of backlash, but the problem runs deeper… “Delightfully funny and painfully insightful,” one reviewer tells us, “ Morning After the Revolution is a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber.” Is it just a moment? That's debatable. Europe was hit late by this wave of reality being submerged, which has affected so many areas that one wonders if the infiltration of rational thought will ever disappear without taking reason itself with it.
In the meantime, I'll highlight a few key points, gleaned from the fifteen short and engaging chapters. I'll quickly gloss over the first three, which recount the story of the collective madness that gripped Seattle in June 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement . Residents of the Capitol Hill neighborhood had established themselves as an anarchist "free commune" where the police could no longer intervene, and where theft and destruction proliferated. The situation culminated in a shootout that forced the authorities to reassert control over the "zone." Generally speaking, " Defund the police" and " abolish the police " are the rallying cries of a certain progressive ideology, from which ordinary people suffer when they are victims of various attacks and forced to hire private militias to protect themselves and their property. It is the victims' fault if they are harassed or robbed, the author tells us clearly: "to be a victim of a crime is to victimize the one who commits the crime" (p. 127).
Even more disconcerting is this "racial" madness, so characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon world, far more so than our own, which never experienced slavery on its soil—a madness that some activists would gladly import without nuance. It's all the rage in the United States to claim a few drops of Native American blood , to the point that the number of people declaring themselves as such doubled between 2010 and 2020… For example, a good American woman, Kay LeClaire, claims a "Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenodaunee, Cuban, and Jewish" ancestry. Who can top that (or more)? Not to mention that her pronouns are " they / them ." Naturally, with such a diverse range of ancestors… The problem is that some clever fellow, presumably having some of her DNA at his disposal, has found her German, Swedish, and French Canadian ancestry . Surely that's more commonplace…
“Some of these people have completely erased their families to live out their deception. They create a new life, make new friends, and fall in love under their false identity” (p. 51). Why, the author asks, usurp an identity that isn’t their own? Prestige, first and foremost. The opportunity to publish books: if you want to study the culture of an indigenous people, you must belong to that culture—otherwise, you’re problematic . And then there’s money, of course: activists receive lucrative funding to expose the microtraumas they’ve experienced because they belong to a minority group. Unable to appear brown or black, white is the only option, but white of a rare and attractive ethnicity… As for Asians, they don't stand a chance: they try to imitate whites, and if they want to benefit from social mobility, if they want economic security, they must belong to the “white adjacency” and do not deserve the attention given to those who are truly discriminated against…
Twenty years ago, a white woman , Tema Okun, discovered a remarkable talent: defining "whiteness," that is, "white values," through which white people maintain their supremacy. These definitions were revealed to her in an almost mystical way, "the words came through [her ] and not from [her] " (p. 61). This includes perfectionism, a sense of urgency, the blessing of the written word, the right to comfort individualism , the right way of doing things, and if a Black person is a perfectionist, it's because they have been contaminated and have internalized white supremacy… Oh, the traitor! A token Black person, a Mélenchon henchman would say. Based on these definitions, which don't make much sense but have been widely disseminated, this woman and many others organize conferences and (paid) training sessions for other white women —thousands, according to Nellie Bowles, who attended one. We must atone for being white… Individualism, punctuality, objective, rational, linear thinking—these are all part of white culture and are the instruments of white supremacy . Onward to the path of atonement… On page 69, we encounter a woman who is ashamed of being white; another, on page 73, also white, who has a biracial child and is afraid that her whiteness will hurt the child. We experience… 80 a real happening, placed under the guidance of Robin DiAngelo, during which participants are made to repeat with conviction " I am racist " and then asked if they feel sadness or grief... And to deny our white bodies, somatic abolitionism must be put in place (p. 82).
Several chapters on gender and transgender people recount anecdotes that can be found hilarious or tragic. In a spa area reserved for women who are nude, a penis is spotted; the front desk can do nothing: this penis belongs to a person who presented a driver's license declaring them female… The penis in question is white, and it was “Black Hispanic” women who complained, “which could have helped to elicit instinctive public sympathy” when the video of the scene at the front desk was posted online (p. 134). But it didn't: “Trans activists protested to defend the spa and all trans people […]. The transition from Black Lives Matter to Trans Lives Matter was seamless.” A large demonstration was organized in front of the spa to denounce the police, invite an officer to commit suicide, and shout “ You short fucks [2] "And call them Nazis, as usual … The man with the penis didn't show up, and the question remains unresolved, Nellie Bowles tells us, as to whether said penis was flaccid or erect during his stroll in the open air. Our journalist was there and was able to gather firsthand accounts, which didn't stop The Guardian from proclaiming that the whole affair stemmed from a transphobic rumor, the person who displayed his supposedly virile attributes being a man (imagine that!) who had come there to, so to speak, turn everyone against trans people , the woman who complained at reception being an accomplice…"
We also have, in one chapter, the complaints of the "A"s in the LGBTQIA+ acronym. There are all sorts of "A"s: they are countless, as this bourgeois philosopher who counts the sexes would tell us [3] but doesn't quite get to the bottom of it. There are Asexuals , quite simply, but also Demisexuals , Fraysexuals . A young woman interviewed by the author explored homosexuality, bisexuality, and pansexuality in succession, before arriving at demisexuality, which is now her comfort zone. To better define themselves, asexuals created the word allosexual to name those who are not asexual. A man who loves women is thus a cis-het-allo (cisgender, heterosexual, allosexual, one possibility among many…). I will quickly pass over the chapter devoted to those teenage girls who try to find a solution to their pubertal anxieties by proclaiming themselves to be of the other sex, and whom compliant doctors take under their wing from the age of fourteen, prescribing hormones and various mutilations (in principle prohibited, in the United States as in France, before the age of majority): the issue is becoming well known in France, and you will learn nothing new there [4] . Nellie Bowles alternates between derision and horror in her book; while some fads are indeed ludicrous, other movements are profoundly and alarmingly permeating American society. The upheaval in San Francisco thus appears as a precursor but is not isolated. “If you want to die in the street,” says Nellie Bowles, “San Francisco isn’t the worst place: the fog ensures a mild climate, and there’s nowhere else in the world that offers such beautiful views. City employees and volunteers bring you blankets and food, needles and tents.” No question of hospitalizing you: “Doctors come by from time to time to monitor your fentanyl levels and make sure everything is alright for your final departure.” The homeless die on the sidewalk, but you mustn’t say “ a homeless person ,” but “ someone experiencing homelessness ” (p. 193). Atrocity, yes, but benevolent atrocity…
