#278: WELCOME TO OUR WORLD(S).  In 2011, the essayist Naomi Klein had her first experience—a conversation overheard in a public rest room in New York—of having her identity scrambled with that of another writer, Naomi Wolf.  It wasn’t just the coincidence of their shared first name: both had written extensively on social, political, and climate issues.  What was particularly disconcerting to Klein was that Wolf had abandoned her original feminist and leftish stances for a headlong dive into what Klein comes to call the Other World: the conspiracy-ridden, MAGA-supporting, anti-vax activist, Steve Bannon-guesting place “where the far right meets the far out.”  In her attempts to track what “Other Naomi” was saying—Wolf had a large online presence—Klein got a disconcerting education in the political and social  stances of what seemed a parallel existence to our everyday world of fact and shared assumptions.  What had seemed at first a merely personal twinning turned out to be the discovery—and mapping--of a variety of worlds existing simultaneously with our own, reversing all custom and common sense.

        The resulting book on her experience, Doppelganger, is a precise and frazzling cartography of the Other World, with its disorienting mix of tragedy and horror with laughable absurdity.  She quotes the Mexican philosopher Emilio Uranga’s term, zozobra: “A Spanish word for existential anxiety and deep gloom, zozobra also evokes generalized wobbliness: ‘a mode of being that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which of those to depend on’—absurdity and gravity, danger and safety, death and life.  Uranga writes ‘In this to and fro the soul suffers, it feels torn and wounded.’”  Sound familiar?  You’ve

heard friends speak of limiting their intake of the daily news, to preserve their sanity: you wake up, turn the news on, and are asked to believe six impossible things before breakfast.  I’m reminded constantly of Dorothy Parker’s exasperated question: “What fresh hell is this?” 

      Klein’s book is a full and informative dose of the crazy gong on out there, but it is, thankfully, viewed from the side of sanity—a kind of Ariadne’s thread leading back to reality.  The Doppelganger theme—she pulls in works ranging from Dostoevsky and Philip Roth to Chaplin’s Great Dictator and Jordan Peele’s Us--turns out to be more widely applicable than you could’ve guessed, and she tracks it to topics as varied as the anti-vax movement and the Othering of anti-Semitism.  All of it seems to me legitimate, sanative and exact.  Klein is an experienced and accomplished hand at expository prose: she knows precisely how to marshal and present her material for clarity and impact; she’s a stable guide to wildly unstable elements.  This is particularly helpful when she gets to what she calls the diagonalists: those strange and unexpected alliances over single issues among people who otherwise barely speak a common language.  And by the end, amid the distortive welter of conspiracy theories, she cunningly turns the mirror back on our own world, where the exploitations of late-stage capitalism perpetrate their own lies and distractions, fiddling the facts about climate change while the world burns.  She reminds us that there may not much longer be any worlds left for any of us.

       Given the time period—in effect, today—the background of the book is the Covid pandemic, the traumas and effects of which still linger, like something moldering in the cabinet stinking up the kitchen.  Covid foregrounded much of what had long been possible to ignore, and highlighted the possibilities and failures of where we were and are.  But Klein, like Arundhati Roy in the moving last essay in her book Azadi, insists on the pandemic as a portal, a possible incitement to discovering community with our despised twins and to community action.  Roy writes of this portal: “We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us.  Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.  And ready to fight for it.”   Klein, after showing us close-up why we are so disconcerted and frightened these days, writes: “The known world is crumbling.  That’s okay.  It was an edifice stitched together with denial and disavowal, with unseeing and unknowing, with mirrors and shadows.  It needed to crash. Now, in the rubble, we can make something more reliable, more worthy of our trust, more able to survive the coming shocks.”   She emphasizes the need for communal action in the face of our isolation: “A bigger part of being human, though, and certainly of living a good life, is not about how we make ourselves in those shifting sands of self.  It’s about what we make together.”

Will this happen?  Will we learn, discard the old bad lessons, and act together?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Did you have something more important you were doing?

Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein.  Picador, 2023.

Azadi, by Arundhati Roy. Penguin, 2020.