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 “checks all the boxes”… And then?
And then one day, she asks herself questions: is all this movement that we call Woke in France and in which she is like a fish in water really serves to move things forward? To help people? It's horrible: 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 describes what she saw and heard, quite simply, relates the words of the gurus, copies tracts, banners and even e-mails, without accompanying them with personal comments, leaving the reader to conclude and form an opinion. No need to say: "They are crazy, these wokies ! », the reader will realize this on their own, without even having to use the annoying term… Tragic, terrifying, but perhaps above all hilarious, these words, these writings are enough to show the state of disrepair of Californian life in these years surrounding the year 2020 when the pandemic exploded.
It is admitted that the murderous madness of a police officer slowly murdering George Floyd almost in public was one of the triggers for this wave of madness in return, but the evil comes from further afield... "Delightfully funny and painfully insightful," one comment tells us, Morning After the Revolution is a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber." Is it just a moment? It is permissible to doubt it. Europe has been hit late by this wave of submersion of reality, which has affected so many areas that one may wonder whether the infiltration of rational thought will ever be able to disappear without taking away reason itself.
In the meantime, I will give a few highlights, taken here and there in the fifteen chapters, brief and well-paced. I will quickly go over the first three, which tell the story of this collective madness that struck the city of Seattle in June 2020, shortly after the assassination of George Floyd and the reactivation of the movement Black Lives Matter. Residents of the Capitol Hill neighborhood had set themselves up as an anarchist "free commune" where the police could no longer intervene and where thefts and destruction multiplied. The affair ended in a shootout that forced the authorities to take back control of the "zone"... Generally speaking, Defund the police, abolish the police, are the watchwords of a certain progressivism, from which honest people suffer when they are victims of various attacks and must call on private militias to protect themselves and their property. It is the victims' fault if they are molested or burgled, the author tells us clearly: "being the victim of a crime is victimizing the one who commits the crime" (p. 127).
More disconcerting is this "racial" madness that is characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon world, much more than ours which has not known slavery on its soil, madness that certain activists would like to import without nuance. It is the latest chic in the United States to find a few drops of blood Native American, to the point that the number of people declaring themselves as such doubled between 2010 and 2020… This is how a good American, Kay LeClaire, declares her ancestry to be “Métis, Oneida, Anishinaabe, Haudenodaunee, Cuban and Jewish”. Who can say better (or more)? Not to mention that her pronouns are “ they/Them " Of course, with such a variety of ancestors... The problem is that a smart guy, probably having a bit of his DNA at his disposal, found German, Swedish and French Canadian. Sure it's more banal...
"Some of these people have completely erased their families to live out their deception. They create new lives, make new friends, and fall in love under their false identities" (p. 51). Why, the author asks, would they usurp an identity that is not their own? Prestige, first. The possibility of publishing books: if you want to study the culture of a native people, you must belong to that culture – otherwise, you are problematic. And then the money, of course: activists get juicy funding to expose the microtraumas they have experienced because they come from a minority. Unable to appear brown or black, go for white, but white of a rare and attractive ethnicity… As for Asians, they are no match: 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 contiguity” (white adjacency) and do not deserve the attention that is given to real discriminated against…
There’s nothing quite like a white counters, Tema Okun, had discovered twenty years ago a marvelous talent: that of establishing the definition of "whiteness", that is to say, the "white values", thanks to which whites maintain their supremacy. These definitions were revealed to her in an almost mystical way, "the words coming through her and not from her" (words came through [her] and not from [her] ", p. 61). This includes perfectionism, a sense of urgency, blessing (blessings) of writing, the right to comfort [1], individualism, the right way to do things and objectivity. In this way, if a black person is a perfectionist, it is because he has been contaminated and has internalized white supremacy… Ah, the traitor! A Negro on duty, a henchman of Mélenchon would say. Based on these definitions that do not make much sense, but which have been widely disseminated, this lady and many others organize conferences and training courses (for a fee) for other white ladies – thousands, Nellie Bowles, who attended one of them, tells us. We have to atone for being white… Individualism, punctuality, objective, rational, linear thinking, are part of the white culture and are the instruments of the white supremacy. On the road to atonement… We will meet on p. 69 a lady who is ashamed of being white; another, p. 73, also white, with a “biracial” child, and who is afraid that her whiteness will hurt the child. We will experience on p. 80 a real happening, under the leadership of Robin DiAngelo, during which the participants are made to repeat with conviction “ I am racist " and then ask them if they feel sadness or grief about it... And to deny our white bodies, we must put in place somatic abolitionism (p. 82).
A few chapters on gender and transgender people tell anecdotes that can be found hilarious or tragic. In a spa area reserved for women who are naked, a penis is spotted walking around; frontdesk can't do anything: this penis belongs to a person who presented a driver's license where he is declared to be female... Said penis is white, and it was "black Hispanic" women who complained, "which could have contributed to attracting the instinctive sympathy of the public" when the video of the scene at frontdesk was broadcast on the net (p. 134). This was not the case: "transactivists protested to defend the spa and all people tranny […]. The transition of black lives matter toward Trans lives matter was made without any apparent connection"... A large demonstration was organized in front of the spa to jeer at the police, invite an officer to commit suicide, shout " You short fucks [2] " and call them Nazis, As usual… The man with the penis did not show up and the question remains unresolved, Nellie Bowles tells us, as to whether the penis was flaccid or erect when he went for a walk in the open air. Our reporter was there and was able to collect first-hand accounts, which did not prevent The Guardian to proclaim that the whole affair came from a transphobic rumor, the person who exhibited his supposedly virile attributes being a man (well, well, wow!) who came there to set everyone against the tranny, the lady who complained at reception being an accomplice…
We also have in a chapter the complaints of the "A" of the LGBTQIA+ acronym. It's that there are all kinds of "A": they are innumerable, this bourgeois philosopher who counts the sexes would tell us [3] but does not get to the end of it. There are the Asexuals, quite simply, but also the Demisexuals Fraysexual. A young woman interviewed by the author thus explored homosexuality, bisexuality, pansexuality, to arrive at demisexuality, which is now her comfort zone. To better define themselves, asexuals have created the word allosexual to name those who are not asexual. A man who likes women is thus a cis-het-allo (cisgender, heterosexual, allosexual, one possibility among many others…). I will quickly pass over the chapter devoted to these teenage girls who try to find a solution to their puberty anxieties by proclaiming themselves to be of the other sex, and who are taken care of by complacent doctors from the age of fourteen by prescribing hormones and various mutilations (in principle prohibited, in the United States as in France, before the age of majority): the question is starting to be well known in France and you will not learn anything new there [4]. Nellie Bowles alternately juggles in her book with derision and horror; if some fashion phenomena are indeed derisory, other movements cross American society in depth in an alarming way. 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 is not the worst place: the fog ensures a temperate climate, and there is no place in the world that offers such beautiful views. City employees and volunteers bring you blankets and food, needles and tents." There is no question of hospitalizing you: "the doctors come from time to time to monitor your fentanyl consumption and make sure that everything is going well for the big departure." The homeless die on the sidewalk, but we must not say " a homeless person "But" someone experiencing homelessness » (p. 193). Atrocity, yes, but benevolent atrocity…
