Progressive Hobbyists

Tom Sawyer kicks back at the White Lotus Hotel

By Micah E. Weiss

Ernest Hemingway will forever be connected to Mark Twain by his oft-quoted sentiment that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”  Although attributed to Hemingway, he never said it, and it is not even complete in this, its most ubiquitous form.  Rather, this line is spoken by the narrator of Green Hills of Africa, so connecting it 1:1 to Hemingway himself is a little tricky, though not impossible.  Not that it matters much in public discourse, or what passes for it.  It’s a good quote, one way or another, and speaks to some truth we accept.  Besides that, quick and dirty quotations of convenience are the great shortcut in social debate, and now, in the meme-verse; accuracy is irrelevant, and proper context eludes us and would elide the purpose of using the quote: to assert the agreement of a great personage with one’s cause, rather than playing fair. 

It is illuminating to look at the rest of the quote.  The narrator continues: “If you read it you must stop where. . . Jim is stolen from the boys.  That is the real end.  The rest is cheating.”  The “cheating” comment calls attention to maybe the central problem in Huckleberry Finn, which any reader might find when considering the general tone of the novel to the point described.  For the uninitiated or forgetful, Jim and Huck have traveled together for some time, and as the resolution of their travels and adventures come to a natural narrative stopping point, Tom Sawyer appears seemingly from nowhere.  With his appearance, Huck fades into a role of a side character, and the next several chapters are a series of cockamamie schemes suggested by Tom that act as a plot excursion often known as the “evasion sequence.”  

All of the schemes in the “evasion sequence” are, ostensibly, attempts to get Jim to freedom.  All of the schemes are convoluted, overly complex, and downright goofy.  Huck expresses doubts, suggesting simpler schemes to free Jim, but Tom overrules him.  The schemes fail, Tom gets shot in the process, and Jim is caught by a white mob and nearly lynched because he stayed behind to tend Tom’s wound, Jim showing his goodness and humanity once again.  Ultimately, through the Deus Ex Machina revelation that Jim has already been freed in his now dead owner's will, all’s well that ends well. This revelation is made by Tom himself, claiming he knew all along that Jim was a free man who merely wanted to have an adventure.  What an adorable little scamp!  Never mind that this last (mis)adventure almost gets Tom himself killed, and Jim sold down the river or possibly killed.  On the surface, the point of the schemes was to entertain Tom.  He is a contrast to Huck, who is not only capable of seeing Jim’s common humanity, but willing to go to hell to save Jim. 

The evasion sequence is an odd departure in the novel, one that disconcerted me from the first time I read it.  And this is where I think Hemingway (if we want to think of that quote as Hemingway himself speaking, of course) was wrong, that perhaps the evasion sequence was one more disconcerting trick up Twain’s sleeve to discomfort his readership before the denouement of the novel.  A common interpretation of these Tom Sawyer chapters is that this is where the novel hits its full-on allegorical stride concerning the racial politics of the 1880s.  Reconstruction had ended in ignominious failure almost a decade earlier, and the few reformers left were fighting a losing battle against the formation of Jim Crow, while the once victorious Republican North retreated further and further away from anything but token assistance to the Black Americans still largely living in the Jim Crow South.  In this reading, Tom is representative of well-meaning white reformers who come to aid Black Americans, yet again, but for their own reasons.  I see Tom’s late addition to the story as compounding the absurdities Twain had thus far satirized by highlighting the parasitic relationship reformers slipped into through their own ham-fisted advocacy.  Essentially, Tom is bored, and “helping” Jim is diverting.  For the reformer/progressive, the cause is meaningful, it brings meaning to the lives of the advocates.  There is a serious danger that the advocacy might succeed, however, stripping the advocate of their raison d’etre. 

A baker’s dozen or so decades later, in the first season of the HBO show White Lotus, a similar plot-line is explored by the writer/creator Mike White.  In this case, a liberal-arts college undergraduate named Paula is the special guest of her wealthy friend’s family.  Paula starts having nightly rendezvous with Kai, an employee of the show's titular hotel.  Kai is a local native Hawaiian whose people used to own the land upon which the resort is built.  In Kai’s post-coital musings to his soon to be erstwhile lover, he mentions that his brothers can’t afford a good lawyer to fight the company that, in all likelihood we assume, bought the land in a less than savory way (a brilliant touch of pathos in the dialogue is that there are no parents mentioned in Kai’s family).  Paula presents as excruciatingly bourgeois, educated, and is Black or mixed race (played by the mixed-race actress Brittany O’Grady).  The books she is seen reading in several scenes look like the summer reading list for Brown, or Middlebury, or some such place– Freud, Butler, and two books on colonialism.  It isn’t difficult to understand why Paula sees the deep injustices of racism and colonialism in Kai’s plight.  He performs at the hotel every night for the guests in a native Hawaiian ritual dance for a mostly white crowd.  The exploitative nature of the scene is discomforting and should cause introspection for anyone burdened by historical knowledge and a functional conscience.  But for our idealistic young pseudo-intellectual, she only feels discomfort.  Though she is more than happy to join her equally progressive friend on this exploitative vacation, she seems unwilling to see herself and her life as a part of whatever “ist” or “ism” problems she has diagnosed in her youthful arrogance.  Paula is equally willing to use Kai as both a sex object and a political abstraction, there to screw her guilt away by assuming the suffering from his abject condition as a victim of white supremacy.  She has, after all, the “BIPOC” shield of victimhood that she presumptuously supposes Kai shares with her, and that also blinds her from her own culpability. 

It is worth considering what a Hemingway character might do in her shoes.  The emotional value of the young couple’s sexual connection is felt by both Paula and Kai.  The passion that they share would move a hero in the Hemingway mold to action, to grab ahold of what is good and true and fight to not let it go.  Alas, Hemingway writes for us no longer.  When Kai asks Paula to stay in Hawaii on several occasions, she rebuffs him with pity but little effort.  She was never going to catch feelings from this victim of oppression, she is merely slumming it, and were he to become an individual human being in her eyes, he would lose his utility as both a disposable object of her sexual desire and the political abstraction of her moral outrage.  She wants to help, but she doesn’t want to be involved; she wants to act out her self-righteous anger, and fuck the cute native boy, all without any long term consequences haunting her—be they emotional or legal.  She has the tiny dollop of grace to feel guilty for using him and so she becomes the Tom Sawyer of the narrative by setting Kai up to steal expensive jewelry from her wealthy friend’s wealthier parents to “hire a lawyer.”  Or whatever.  What could possibly go wrong?

What goes wrong is irrelevant, and the consequences are obvious and inevitable for poor Kai.  That his capture and the return of the jewelry is handled off screen and mentioned in a single sentence of expository dialogue underscores the importance Kai really plays in the lives of the White Lotus guests, including Paula.  The rest of the drama of that plot-line is handled by shots of a horrified and silent Paula who quietly leaves the hotel, the island, and the consequences of her actions far behind her.  Similarly, Tom Sawyer walks away from Jim, still a rich little boy with a new adventure story to tell.   Jim remains the object of Tom’s entertainment, Kai the object of Paula’s lusts for transient hedonistic sex and ideological self-satisfaction. 

Plus ça change, I expect.  I couldn’t help putting these two together when I saw the midterms come and go and wondered when the left’s comeuppance was going to come with regard to the marginalized masses it proposes to serve.  While I was relieved that the reality denying “Stop the Steal” partisans were roundly admonished by the American public, it was hard not to notice the continuing trends in the Democratic and progressive left.  As the Hispanic and Black votes continue their decline as a share of the Democratic party’s base, and as the party persists in its ideological shift towords serving the political ideologies of an elite affluent class of Paulas and Toms, rather than the working class, I couldn’t help but be a little overwhelmed by the increasing number of well-intentioned bad ideas that have inadvertently hurt so many. 

There are the usual suspects.  The welfare state and no-fault divorce caused a spike in single parenthood that has yet to plateau—not only affecting Black communities, although they were disproportionately affected.  It is interesting how the welfare system relieved the bourgeois of having to connect with the poor, while the change to no-fault divorce empowered mainly bourgeois couples to escape inconvenient marriages at the expense of poor women who increasingly have become single parents. 

Rockefeller drug laws were put in place to help save inner-city communities in particular from sky-rocketing crime rates, but caused mass incarceration.  Clinton’s ‘90s crime bill, championed by the Congressional Black Caucus, accelerated the problem.  The crime rate spike from the late 60s to the early 90s needed to be addressed, and the Boomers had all but made legalizing drugs a non-starter issue because of their behavioral excesses. 

Affirmative Action is tricky and controversial; however, the downsides are palpable in the debt burden carried by too many unprepared students from underserved high schools shunted into universities far above their preparation.  And that’s not including the emphasis on college itself as a social norm.  The affluent-elites who have controlled progressive discourse for half a century have pushed the “college for everyone” narrative hard.  The decline in vocational education and the taboo around tracking in public schools is well documented, and is only now abating slightly. 

Was there anything more absurd in this regard than Black Lives Matter?  BLM has been touted as the next Civil Rights movement—NPR commentators often refer to it as “powerful.”  A movement with a centralizing organization started by middle class Black Marxists that once had policy proposals on its website before they were taken down while a big “donate” button remains.  The fact that BLM organizers did little to curb the violence and riots that burned down Black communities, while mostly white progressives made books like In Defense of Looting a bestseller, begs for a giggling Tom Sawyer emoji in a Twitter flame war. 

Meanwhile many forms of crime are spiking again while police face major attrition and retirement rates that are making them unable to be sufficiently present, despite the high support for more law enforcement in communities of color. In fact, when Minneapolis attempted a - failed - referendum on defunding, it had the lowest support in Black neighborhoods and the most support in upper class white neighborhoods.    

But then, these are the obvious things, aren’t they? 

There are the more subtle cultural reasons for Black America’s continued struggles that only Black conservatives seem to be allowed to write about.  Thomas Sowell, Glen Lowery, Shelby Steele, Jason C. Riley, and now Coleman Hughes all have sound statistical economic and socio-political analyses of the internal problems that only Black Americans can do anything about.  I am hesitant to write about it here.  

I will bring up one, however, the preponderance of grotesque cartoonish masculinity filled with sexism, materialism, and homophobia that is not just tolerated, but often lionized by our popular culture in much of hip-hop.  This in and of itself is its own essay, but briefly I can say that cowed progressives have so lost their way that they can’t even criticize some of the most violent and pornographic lyrics if they were written by a Black person.  Only recently has homophobia in hip-hop been lightly admonished, although no one’s career seems to have ended and no serious cancellation campaigns have been formed.  This subtle form of progressive racism hurts Black women and girls and boys every day, but it is ignored, and often embraced by our Toms and Paulas.  And that’s not even to delve into the depravities of white rappers’ lyrics who have, to coin a progressive phrase, “appropriated” these regressive tropes under the cultural radar despite their face tattoos. 

But the causes of much of the challenges that afflict many in the Black community according to the Kendi, DiAngelo, Hannah-Jones universe of pseudo-analysis is a “systemic racism” that defies nearly all attempts at concrete definition and the “implicit bias” of millions that is of questionable scientific validity.  The cause of the former is the latter, and the latter has so far been incurable by the DEI training industrial complex. 

But then, a cure would defeat the purpose. 

To actually help Black people in America today—or any marginalized group—is not the object of these “thinkers,” or the donor class that buys their books, endows their foundations, and advocates for their curricula.  Concrete solutions are coming from the conservative intellectuals listed above–and yet they are persistently maligned as Uncle Toms, and dismissed as having “internalized racism.”  I am not convinced that the conservative solutions are best, I am not advocating for them here, but without those minds in the conversation, entire avenues of progress will continue to go unexplored.  Which works for the bored elite.  What the activist class wants is to fight, not to win.  Were the racial disparity statistics ever to close, were the gaps ever to be leveled, the new elite-led progressive class of activists would suddenly have very little to do; they would be bored, and stripped of their meaning and purpose.  Unlike the imaginative Tom Sawyer they don’t have a framework to make trouble in some other way, and unlike Paula, they never have to feel the consequences of their profligacy.

But this crisis seems forever averted; they feel they are doing good, and I guess that’s what matters.