Palisades Spark

It’s strange that eldritch-pagan-sounding right-winger Steve Bannon—one of many on the far right who’ve condemned Elon Musk’s pro-immigration tendencies in recent days—talks as if he’s a gatekeeper for Trump White House 2.0. “He will not have a pass to the White House,” warns the flabby pundit about Musk.

Wasn’t Bannon ousted from his role as advisor to President Trump after only seven months back in 2017? How does he imagine he’s now in a position to oust or ban other people—especially a billionaire who’s routinely seen hanging out with the President and being invited to create an informal waste-cutting agency called D.O.G.E.?

Bannon’s less like the beloved D.O.G.E. than like lowly CatTurd2, his fellow far-right pundit, in that they’ve each been divorced three times. They seem more like exiles than like exilers. But now that Bannon’s on an anti-Musk crusade, I’ll bet it wouldn’t take much effort to get the thrice-divorced podcaster ranting about Musk—with his own multiple baby-mamas—being an ineffectual guardian of Western Civilization’s virtues.

True, these days people a bit too readily pick and choose which virtues they respect, but the abuse heaped on Musk over the specific issue of immigration is a reminder of one great virtue of our civilization that lately seems in danger of being forgotten: exploration. The right used to defend frontiersmen and at times even imperialists (see: Latin America, Greenland)—which at least showed they had some spirit of adventure and willingness to meet new people—but are reduced to nowadays hunkering down and defending borders and boundaries above all else.

What inward-looking cowards they’ve become, curled up in their cultural fetal ball while Musk, crazy or not, at least dreams of getting us to Mars in a non-socialist fashion, quite likely employing deserving Indian engineers while he’s at it. Amy Chua, before she was mainly known for being a stern mom and alleged slutty professor, wrote a good book about how empires in decline tend to become fearful of immigrants, eschewing their founding impulses of trade and travel. Does the current crop of right-wingers not want the “Golden Age” that their leader Trump has declared to be one in which people hustle and bustle, boldly going to and fro?

So much creativity in this world happens because of fractal-like open-endedness in systems—but I guess we may instead be due for right-wingers as grim border guards and Bannon as volunteer bouncer outside the Oval Office. If this Golden Age produces neoclassical sculptors, they may spend a lot of their time carving the words “None Shall Pass.”

That sulky tone of resistance to change makes one yearn for exuberant bursts of informal, largely apolitical American creativity—like the creation of Hollywood out of what was just a stretch of dry desert a century ago. We can and should be saddened by the recent fiery reminder of how dry the area still is without for a moment letting irresponsible government officials and their green-liberal enablers among the local residents off the hook for causing the conflagrations. Love the movies, hate the regulators—there’s no real contradiction in that, as more Hollywood folk should realize.

California’s rulers and their cheerleaders haven’t just been failing to clear brush or fill reservoirs out of absent-mindedness. For decades, they’ve been treating preservation of whatever happens to be the status quo in nature—and nearby real estate—as a great virtue, even as the kindling for future, larger fires built up (a form of neglect-as-pseudo-kindness that has proven as dangerous as the indifference to crime in NYC I described in my column two weeks ago).

They keep calling right-wingers and libertarians the ones who want to “burn it all down,” but maybe everyone wants to “see the world burn,” just in different ways. Don’t take it out on the creatives in L.A., though. Instead of kicking them while they’re down, be grateful when they do what they do best, which is entertain. Don’t think of them as fiddling while Rome burns—they’re not really in charge—but as creating while others (and sometimes nature) destroy. Don’t get played like a fiddle yourself by people harnessing factional sentiments to get you to laugh at others’ misfortunes, whether they want you to think like a right-winger despising left-wingers, highbrow reader despising TV-makers, or East Coast resident grateful not to be a West Coast resident (North Carolina is still a mess too, after all).

There’s nothing wrong with subdividing if it’s done peacefully, but remember that some of the most fun and productive experiences involve creatively blending things as well, whether through video remixes, film remakes, everyday trade, intellectual collaboration, or migration. Without Mormons, Canadians, and Hollywood joining forces to give us the 2000s version of Battlestar Galactica, to take one tiny example, we probably wouldn’t have this video, which to my amazement is now 20 years old, for the Clutch song “Burning Beard”—sung by a literature major from Maryland with an obvious roundabout appreciation for revivalist preachers. Let him do his eclectic thing.

I don’t know exactly what the Golden Age starting next week is going to look like, but I hope it contains a lot more random rock ‘n’ roll Hollywood nonsense than dark control-freak nightmares from Bannon’s id. 

—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey