Inflammatory rhetoric is the currency everyone is learning to trade in
Words are volatile things. As we try to confront the violence of modern politics, both physical and rhetorical, our grip on the facts can easily slip into, even give rise to fantasy. But while social media creates a distorted, unreal version of actual events, sometimes only fiction can bring the truth back into focus.
A few summers back, I read a novel that continues to influence my thinking: Mumbo Jumbo, by the African-American author Ishmael Reed. Apart from a flutter of interest eight years ago when Penguin Modern Classic republished the 1972 volume, few outside the American literati have read it. But in this time of curses and conspiracy, I think it should be on everyone’s reading list.
Ishmael Reed is, in some ways, the archetypal culture warrior. In a predominantly white liberal industry, he established himself as a fierce defender of marginalised writers and artists, rejecting comparison with William S Burroughs and other literary troublemakers whose privilege shielded them from the consequences of their mischief. Still writing in his ninth decade, he wields his pen as acerbically today as he did in the Black Arts Movement of the sixties and seventies – if not as a sword, then as a wand.
Culture and witchcraft have always been revolutionary comrades. Where Lennon and Ono stayed in bed and Lee Harvey Oswald loaded his rifle, others in the counterculture marched on the Pentagon, hoping to ‘levitate’ the building and those inside with ‘psychic energy’. The heyday of the counterculture coincided with ‘Satanic Panic’, a Wiccan revival, as a new generation felt their words bubble with toil and trouble. From this deeply strange cultural moment, a mixture of art, violence and witchcraft, Reed constructed a space where language makes things happen.
Mumbo Jumbo is a sprawling, hilarious, often infuriating novel that gets closer than any work of literature I know to the chaos of contemporary discourse. Between its covers, misinformation mingles with historical detail, as Reed sets the political culture of the 1920s alight with his irreverent, yet diligent, satire. It’s the story of a mind virus spreading through the United States, infecting its carriers, overwhelmingly African American, with liberal abandon and dance. Meanwhile, a secret White Supremacist society descended from the Knights Templar sets out to eradicate the contagion, working through the media to discredit and suppress this wave of Black creativity.
If comparisons with contemporary conspiracies are coming to mind, you’re not alone. Reed’s cultural analysis of the 1920s was designed to shine a light on the present of the 1970s – but readers in the 2020s, surrounded by ‘woke mind viruses’ and Satanic cabals embedded in the media, are arguably living in its shadow.
Nearly two decades before Ronald Reagan espoused his ‘Voodoo Economics’ to wish away the inconvenient relationship between growth and inequality, Ishmael Reed was casting spells at his typewriter. At the core of Mumbo Jumbo is Reed’s ‘NeoHoodoo’ aesthetic, an unholy communion between literary theory with African esotericism. Mumbo Jumbo’s protagonist is Papa Labas, a Voodoo priest and incarnation of a core West African deity, who fights the united front of politics and print with spells and hexes. In the Voodoo mythos, Labas is a mediator called upon to negotiate between the worlds of the living and the dead. But, like the old man at the crossroads, he’s not always to be trusted. That’s precisely why Reed selects him as our compass, not guiding, but obscuring our way through his delicate weave of fact and fabrication. Towards the novel’s end, Labas unfurls an alternative history of the world, rejecting Abrahamic culture for the arcane power of the Ancient Egyptians. In Reed’s NeoHoodoo fiction, bristling with rhetorical fervour, what the trickster says goes.
But it’s our present for which Ishmael Reed’s vision of trickster historians and cultural sorcerers seems to have been most prophetic.
Today, culture is produced in previously unimaginable ways. ‘The podcasters have won’, declared neoconservative intellectual Douglas Murray in April this year, after his debate with comedian-turned-commentator Dave Smith on the Joe Rogan podcast. His words recognise the newly pivotal role of amateur experts like Smith and Rogan in moulding the political climate. Under the veil of humour and entertainment, these dishevelled thought-leaders are concocting potent narratives from a mix of truths, mistruths and exaggerations. It’s a formula that has yielded undeniable results at the ballot box. Without the arch-provocateurs of that digital ecosystem, like Kirk and his colleagues Ben Shapiro and ex-comedian Steven Crowder – whose incendiary campus appearances are a goldmine of clippable ‘gotchas’ and ‘owns’, ripe for monetisation – it’s unlikely Trump would have been returned to the White House.
‘Shitposting’ has become a living: every expression of outrage generates income, launching careers through algorithmic alchemy
Desperate to catch up with these philosopher-kings of the right, left-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic are also diving head first into new media, from Britain’s newly-elected Green Party leader Zack Polanski to a host of Democrat-funded influencers in the USA. But try as they might to hitch conventional political discourse to this runaway carriage, online debate is ruled more by the trickster than the formal orator.
Tellingly, those who engage with this content don’t just consume, they also comment, spinning thoughts, reactions and predictions of catastrophe like modern Fates. In today’s ‘attention economy’ – which delivered Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump to our consciousness, along with a whole new era of wishful thinking – inflammatory rhetoric is the currency everyone is learning to trade in.
From satirists like the creators of South Park, who were quick to retract their lampoon of Kirk after his death, to chronically online politicians across the spectrum, this language takes on a life of its own. Indeed, ‘shitposting’ is, itself, a living. Every expression of outrage generates income, launching careers through algorithmic alchemy, and inspires further outrage, further clicks, further content. But the vocabulary of this outrage, as we’ve seen, also has the potential to boil over into action.
Kirk’s horrific assassination will no doubt be written up as another episode in the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, between wokeism and common sense, between deep state and new media. As Ishmael Reed remarks in Mumbo Jumbo, many assume that ‘[b]eneath all political and cultural warfare exists a struggle between secret societies’. But like Reagan’s Voodoo Economics, politics don’t always ‘trickle down’ through the culture: this conspiratorial relationship can be flipped.
Reed also suggests that ‘the Nursery Rhyme and the book of Science Fiction might be more revolutionary than any number of tracts, pamphlets, manifestos of the political realm’. Far from simply describing our world, cultural texts, from novels to tweets, are the spellbooks that conjure new, unpredictable realities.
Who needs manifestos when you can ‘manifest’? As we voice our opinions, share predictions, wish people well or ill, the potential for our words to take shape as something more than just rhetoric seems to haunt us like never before. Like Macbeth’s Weird Sisters, a speaker can be easily ‘vanish’d’ – but what they’ve said will linger. With nothing but words on the mind, we’re left to question, as Banquo does, ‘[w]ere such things here as we do speak about?’
Maybe not. But they might be soon.
