Bumping Geese 11 (Double Feature): The Haunted Mask

 And now, the finale of our first ever official

And this week we're finishing with what I understand to be the last of the most iconic Goosebumps books, one so emblematic of the series that it was chosen as the two-part pilot for the TV series, and one of the handful of books to receive sequels. I'm far from the first to opine on this book, and I'll surely not be the last. But I'll do it anyway and you can't stop me.

'The Haunted Mask' is the story of Carly Beth, just your usual young girl Goosebumps book protagonist. She lives in the suburbs or a small town, has a best friend, a younger brother, a stay-at-home mother, a working father, and a completely ordinary life until the events of the book transpire. No pet, though, which is unusual. What is also unusual is that a chunk of this book takes place while Carly Beth is at school. Most, if not all the books so far, have either skipped over school hours to take place on weekends and week nights, or have taken place during a holiday period (usually summer break), so we don't see the protagonists at school.

What it completely unexceptional, however, is that Carly Beth is surrounded by just the worst people. Total trash. All her friends? Garbage people. 

Not, like, people who collect garbage as a job, but people who are made of garbage.

I mean, they're not, like, actually literally made of garbage. They're just terrible people.

What makes them terrible is that they have all come to learn that Carly Beth is something of a meek child, very easily frightened, very nervous, and they have decided this is the funniest thing in the world. Her friends - which is a generous term - Chuck and Steve in particular like to do things like trick her into thinking a spider is biting her leg, and they do this while Carly Beth is giving her presentation at the school science fair. Other greatest hits include offering her a sandwich that they have put a worm in, and not telling her until after she has eaten half of it. Then telling her the worm is fake to calm her down, until she investigates it and confirms it is real.

You know, what garbage humans like to call "pranks" and the rest of us call "being awful".

Carly Beth's best friend Sabrina is less involved, but always encouraging of their friends scaring Carly Beth, and dismissive of Carly Beth's fears and frustrations and really just all of her emotions. Sabrina is the sort of person who would burn down your house and then wouldn't talk to you until you apologised for getting mad at her over "a joke."

I'm not saying Sabrina or Chuck or Steve are worse people than Lindy Powell, but characters likes these really make you appreciate the sophistication and cunning of a sociopath like Lindy.

Anyway. After being pushed too far just once too often, Carly Beth gets it into her head to get her own revenge by scaring her friends on Halloween. She takes a last minute trip to a party shop to buy the scariest mask she can, and while browsing, comes across a back room in the store full of the most realistic and most disturbing masks - the perfect frightening masks for her plan. The store owner is hesitant to sell them, but she convinces him and hands over her life savings ($30) for the mask, then sets out to begin her reign of terror.

She starts with her brother, Noah, and scares him when she gets home. It works a treat, and Carly Beth discovers that inside the mask, her voice takes on a sinister growly pitch. It's not a comfortable mask to wear, though. It smells awful, makes her sweat, and is kind of sticky.

Carly Beth rounds out her costume by taking a plaster sculpture of her face (made by her mother in an art class) and sticking it on the end of a broom handle, and carries it as though it were a head on a pike. Now set, she dashes off into the eerie Halloween night to spread fear and terror.

And she does.

We have a montage of Carly Beth scaring some random tick-or-treaters, and her friend Sabrina, and then literally anybody else she runs into. And although none of the adults she meets are afraid, she gives them the same angry and growling treatment she gives everybody else, and claims she is just "in character". Carly Beth has the time of her life jumping out of bushes and roaring at children. When she gets tired of Sabrina's reservations about their mischief, Carly Beth runs off to bring vengeance on the town by herself. She steals somebody's trick-or-treat bag. She throws apples at a house. And finally she meets Chuck and Steve and terrorises them, demanding their bags and threatening to take their heads just like she did to Carly Beth. Chuck and Steve are put off but do their best to remain strong, until, as Carly Beth thrusts her head-on-a-stick at them, all three see the plaster sculpture come to life and plead for help. Chuck and Steve go running and Carly Beth, the real... the maybe real Carly Beth gets such a fright of her own she tosses it aside.

But that only lasts a minute. Once it dawns on her that she has frightened her friends and accomplished her goals, she goes for a mad run around the streets and howls at the night sky. It seems her transformation from meek and frightened girl to something scary, something powerful, is complete. And for Carly Beth, despite a lingering doubt that maybe this is all a bit much, revels in her Halloween shenanigans.

About this time, Sabrina finds her and the two decide to call it a night and go home to sort through their Halloween loot. But when Carly Beth tries to take off her mask, she discovers it has become fused to her body. She and the mask are now one. There is no seam, no space between her flesh and the skin-like mask snug on her face. Carly Beth rushes out into the streets again, this time in a panic, and tries in vain to hide her hideous new face. This desperate flight brings her back to the party store, where the store owner once again welcomes her inside. He explains that he thought she might come back, that he expected this would happen. For the mask is not a mask at all, but a strange life form he invented in a lab. All the masks in the back room are alive, and were once beautiful, but over time became hideous monstrosities. All they want is a body, and from time to time, somebody comes into the store, finds them, and demands to buy one.

And the book just kind of glosses over how fucked up all this is, but, hey, not everything needs to be explained. In a world in which sentient mask monsters can attach to people's bodies, suspending disbelief on the how and why we got here is a small ask. This shit is crazy enough as it is.

Anyway, for other reasons which aren't explained, the mask can only be removed by a symbol of true love. But it will only work once. Should Carly Beth or anybody else put the mask on again, there will be no separating from it.

I'm sure you can see where this is going. Carly Beth runs back into the streets, now chased by the other masks (because of... more reasons), and finds the sculpture her mother made of her face. Carly Beth is able to free herself of the mask with this and drive away all the other masks chasing her. The nightmare apparently over, she returns home to a worried mother. Carly Beth begins to explain where she has been, why she is home late, why she left without the costume her mother bought her, and why she has the plaster sculpture, but she's only a few words in when her brother Noah bursts into the room snarling and screaming, wearing Carly Beth's monster mask!

So I guess the first thing we have to address here is the ending. It is not one of the better ones. There is good planting and pay off, but a lot of the exposition doesn't really add up, and really just leaves you with more questions instead of fewer. The climactic chase scene comes and goes with barely any escalating of the tension and it's not clear why the masks decide to join in the way they do. I've read that RL Stine comes up with the title and the twist ending for the books first, and then writes around them. And I think sometimes you can see the weakness in that approach. Sometimes I get the impression he has stuck too hard to an original idea and the end result is a little forced.

But it's also far far far from the worst case we've seen. 'The Haunted Mask' isn't, in any sense, bad. It's probably one of the best so far, in fact. Unlike 'Monster Blood', it is worthy of its privileged status as an iconic entry in the series. I look forward to the sequels.

Because ultimately, those are small issues. Noteworthy, but not enough to subtract from the overall quality. This might be the best written book in the series so far. RL Stine goes all in to create a visceral Halloween atmosphere. All the motifs you could want are here: trick-or-treating, jack-o-lanterns, dry autumn leaves, cool winds, and frequent acknowledgements of the bright moon hanging over the town, occasionally vanishing behind clouds in the darker moments of the story. More than any other Goosebumps book before it, this one paints its environment for the reader in beautiful detail.

And it might just be that I have a great fondness for Halloween in all its camp tradition. The German word "fernweh" has been described as not merely wanderlust, but as a "homesickness for somewhere you've never been." We don't have a Halloween tradition in Australia, but I definitely feel a kind of fernweh for it, a second-hand nostalgia. Which also sort of describes this whole Goosebumps reading enterprise we're on. And so 'The Haunted Mask', in addition to being an excellent entry in the series, resonated with me and ticked a lot of my personal boxes in the same way 'Stay Out of The Basement Did'.

And I wonder if that isn't the appeal of the series as a whole? Sure, they're all pretty formulaic, they're all spoopy children's books with generous helpings of comedy and occasionally they are awful. But they're so broad in topic and tone, and increasingly broad in setting, that eventually, if you read enough, you're almost guaranteed to find one or two that fits you perfectly. And those are likely the books that will stick out in your mind.

Every time I sit down to write one of these blogs, I am tempted to rag on 'Monster Blood' some more, because it is a bad book and it does deserve the hate I give it. But when I walk away, when I'm starting the next book, when I'm going through my day, it's the good ones I think about most. 'Stay Out of The Basement', 'Say Cheese and Die', and 'Let's Get Invisible' have all stuck with me because they are genuinely good books. They're scary, they're well written, and they have something to say. And 'The Haunted Mask' is going to join that list.

I know this has been something of a Ramble Review and we've talked about a lot, but there's one more thing I want to say about 'The Haunted Mask' and I feel like I'd be doing you and the novel a disservice if I didn't touch on it briefly.

In my reading about the book and its TV adaptation, I saw a few comments about the book's themes regarding peer pressure and how the story is about Carly Beth learning to love herself as she is. And while those are good messages, with all due respect, I don't think those interpretations carry a lot of weight. At the very least, I don't think it is the strongest or even most interesting reading of the book.

As I read 'The Haunted Mask' I was constantly reminded of two famous quotes*: "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." and "Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."

Carly Beth's story is a story of revenge. The transformation she undertakes is the result of her desire to get back at her friends for how they have treated her. That desire is so consuming that it ultimately changes her, inside and out. Her vengeance needed a monster, and so she became that monster, even though a lot more people than Sabrina, Chuck, and Steve suffered for it. Even though Carly Beth herself suffered for it.

One way to look at the conflict in a story is examining what the protagonist wants, compared to what the protagonist needs. Often they are different, and how those tensions are revealed and resolved is a big part of what any story ultimately has to say about the world and the human condition. Carly Beth wanted revenge. What she needed was better people in her life. By the end, she had both. But one - revenge - turned her into a hideous monster that carried her own head on a pike like a trophy, and the other - her family - gave her warm cider at the end of a rough night. And it is that latter resolution, Carly Beth getting what she really needed all along, that delivers on her happy ending (obligatory twist not withstanding) and that's how we know it is her need even though it is never stated in the way her want is.

Some of you may well think this all sounds like a lot of High School English Class bullshit and you wonder why a book can't just be a book. A spooky story about a mask might just be a spooky story about a mask. And that is a whole conversation in itself, but let me just say, as somebody with a level of expertise in writing fiction, these themes and ideas your English teachers and book bloggers like to pry out of stories are put there on purpose.**

Obviously I can't speak for RL Stine specifically, but authors are a clever bunch.

Trust me.

*The former is attributed to Confucius and the second to Buddha. There's no evidence of the former, and the latter is from a later Buddhist writer.
**There is also an argument to be made as to whether or not it even matters if it is deliberate but, again, that's is a whole big conversation in itself.

Bumping Geese 10 (Double Feature): The Ghost Next Door

Welcome to the first official

This isn't the first time I've reviewed two books in a week, but it's the first time I'm making a big deal of it. 

Why? 

Is it because it's the third week of January and I've only talked about one book? Is it because there are a lot more Goosebumps books than I thought there was and if I don't do more than one-a-week, I'm going to be doing this until the day I die? Is it because I don't have much to say about this first book?

Yes. All of that is true.

And also I feel like it.

But before I get to that, I want to share some good news with you all.

Eventually, it seems, RL Stine does learn to make a funny joke. I don't know when, I don't know how, and I don't know how many books until it shows up in his writing, but eventually, we can be certain, it happens.

Okay. Onto the first book.

In Goosebumps #10 'The Ghost Next Door' we follow the life and times of Hannah, a girl all alone during summer vacation. Her friends are at summer camp and not writing to her. So it's just her, her parents, and her two younger brothers. She's feeling pretty lonely. And then she meets a new neighbour, Danny. Danny claims to live next door, but Hannah thought the house was empty. Danny claims to be in the same grade as her at the same school, but Hannah has never seen him before. Danny doesn't know any of Hannah's friends, and Hannah has never heard of the boys Danny hangs around with. It's all very mysterious and sudden, and Hannah begins to suspect that maybe--

Hannah is the ghost.

Yeah, this twist was pretty obvious from about page 3.

Despite that, we spend the rest of the book seeing Hannah live out her day to day life mostly alone, sometimes with Danny, eventually stalking Danny from afar to find proof that he is the ghost she thinks he is. But those paying attention at home will notice that outside Hannah's family and Danny, nobody ever interacts with Hannah or seems to notice her.

Hannah also keeps seeing a strange, think, faceless, shadowy figure watching her, following her the way she is following Danny, eventually warning her to stay away from Danny.

All this is very strange, and Hannah can't help but think there is a problem with her theory. If Danny is a ghost, does that mean his family are ghosts? Are his friends that she has never met before also ghosts? And surely the mailman Danny and his friends harass, or the poor ice cream store owner they rob, would notice if they were ghosts. Hannah decides she can't keep puzzling it out and confronts Danny, only to discover in doing so that she is the ghost, that she has been the whole time.

And then something unusual happens.

The book keeps going after the twist. Hannah learns that she died five years ago in a fire, and after her discovery, her ghost family vanishes. Danny avoids her, since now he knows she's a ghost too, and is afraid, but Hannah keeps stalking him and his friends, following them to the home of poor postman Mr Chesney, whom they have been harassing for weeks. Danny and his friends break into the house and accidentally start a fire, but while his friends escape, Danny is stuck. Hannah rushes to his rescue and helps him escape. When Danny is fine, she realises that she came back as a ghost just for this moment, just so she could save Danny from dying the same way she did and now, now she can move on.

Oh and the shadowy figure is revealed to be Danny's unborn ghost trying to keep Hannah from saving Danny so that when Danny dies, his ghost can exist... In some way that is different to how it already exists. But since Danny doesn't die, the ghost-not-ghost does... die... I guess. It's weird and probably best not to dwell on.

So look, I know I am a grown adult and these are spoopy books written for children who probably haven't seen 'The Twilight Zone' or 'The Sixth Sense' or any other version of this story with this twist, so it's not like I earn some bragging rights for guessing the twist. But even though I did see the twist coming about 100 pages before it happened, and even though the twist ending is a big part of the 'Goosebumps' identity, it didn't subtract from my enjoyment of the book.

The characters were likeable and sympathetic. You feel for Hannah's isolation, and you worry about Danny and the bad crowd he has fallen in with. Even when you know Hannah is the ghost, you want to see how she learns and what that means for her. And even though the reveal of the shadowy figure's identity is... bad... It was an extra layer of mystery to keep me going.

'The Ghost Next Door' shows us how even when a mystery is at the heart of a book, the enjoyment doesn't come purely from the reveal but from the journey. And that's just as true of spoopy children's horror novels as it is of actual mystery novels. If it wasn't, nobody would read a Raymond Chandler book twice.

'The Ghost Next Door' was a journey worth taking, even when I'd seen the destination. It's a solid entry into the series, at least in terms of pure entertainment value and page-turning engagement.

But I will say there's not a lot under the surface. Stories from the point of view of a ghost tend to work best when they are thematically about loneliness, isolation, regret, and grief. The ghost's perspective is one of loss. See, again, 'The Sixth Sense' and why it holds up under repeat viewings. The emotionality carries the film more than the actual plot. But 'The Ghost Next Door' doesn't do much with its own themes. They're there, they're just under explored.

That's all for this book, friends. But we're only halfway through our spooky double feature! Click on ahead for more!

Bumping Geese 9: Welcome To Camp Nightmare

We're a little overdue again, with this one. But I thought it only fitting I start off Bumping Geese in 2021 in the most 2021 way possible.

By being a general disappointment to all involved.

That's not to say 'Welcome To Camp Nightmare' is a disappointment, though. It is... Well, let's talk about what it is.

I think this is my favourite cover so far

'Welcome To Camp Nightmare' is about going to summer camp. I don't know if we have summer camp in Australia. There's probably a niche industry. We have organisations like the Boy Scouts, who go camping, but I don't think I know anybody who has ever been to a summer camp. Our summer school holiday period overlaps with Christmas and New Years, so most families would rather be together around this time, not apart. This means everything I know about summer camp as a concept comes from US media and it's all kind of a weird concept to me.

That made this kind of a tricky one to break into. It wasn't a situation I felt engaged with or that I could relate to. For all I knew, none of the weird stuff in the book would be any weirder to me than summer camp already is in my eyes. As the story begins, the main character Billy is on the bus to summer camp, the bus is full of boys his age and a couple of girls who are attending a near-by and associated but different camp. Billy starts to make some friends and looks out at the empty scenery going past. Then all of a sudden the bus stops and all the kids and their luggage are thrown off the bus.

But not before the bus driver scares them all with a monster mask.

And for a few minutes, all the campers are left alone by an empty stretch of road in the middle of nowhere, no idea amongst them what happens next.

Is this the weird part? I don't know. Maybe this is how camp normally works. Billy's narration suggests it's weird, but he isn't sure and so neither am I.

But then some monster cat things show up and start to attack the campers, but before anyone can get hurt, there's a gunshot, the monsters leg it, and the campers meet Uncle Al. Uncle Al runs the camp and he has arrived to pick everybody up in another bus and take them to the camp.

Is this part weird? I mean, I live in Australia. I know for a fact that sometimes wild animals are strange and look monstrous, and sometimes they're definitely inclined to murder you. And a man with a gun? Seems normal if this book, like the rest, is set in the USA.

It's not NOT scary, but I also don't know how normal any of this is or isn't. So it was kind of difficult to get into the book.

But then we get to the camp and shit starts getting undeniably weird.

And with it, shit gets proper scary.

We quickly learn that Uncle Al and the camp counsellors take a stand-offish approach to caring for the children in the camp. Billy's friend Mike finds some snakes in his bunk and they bite him. Mike rushes off to find the nurse, but the camp has no nurse. One of the counsellors tells Mike to rinse the wound and bandage it (the counsellor offers bandages but does not otherwise help). Over the next few days, Mike's wound gets worse and then he vanishes from camp completely.

The camp has a "Forbidden Bunk" (bunk here means cabin, I think, as opposed to bunks as in beds, like where Mike found the snakes) and the children are warned not to go near it, not to ask about it, and also not to go out at night, lest they be attacked by bears or some kind of mysterious monster called Sabre. Well, two of Billy's friends do exactly that, but only one returns, in a state of terror, claiming some monster tore the other boy, Roger, into shreds near the Forbidden Bunk. Billy and his pals report the attack, but the counsellors don't treat it seriously and accuse them of lying. The boys insist it be investigated, and the counsellor agrees, only to return a day later and explain that nobody named Roger had ever been at the camp.

The tension continues to rise with, eventually, all of Billy's bunk-mates vanishing, and then being replaced by new kids to share his bunk. But those new kids also disappear, washing away down the river in a canoeing accident. One of the counsellors is there when this happens, but treats the loss with the usual indifference. Billy wants to leave, and hopes to contact his parents, but while sneaking around the camp, trying to avoid camp activities and counsellors, he learns the one phone in the camp is false and that the letters he and the other campers have been writing to their parents every day have been collecting dust in the camp office. Never sent. Never to be sent. Two of the girls Billy met on the bus sneak into the boy's camp and report similar disappearances, monsters, and strange goings-on at their camp across the river. Together, Billy and the girls discuss a plan to escape.

But before they can put any plan into action, the whole boys' camp is rounded up for a special hike, walked deep into the woods along the river, handed a rifle each and told that two girls have escaped their camp, and the boys are to hunt them down and shoot them. But the rifles only shoot tranquilizer darts, as if that somehow makes it okay.

Now, you and I both know that a twist is coming up. Before we get there, I want to praise this book. This is some scary shit. Monsters. Isolation. Missing friends. A sense of powerless in the face of the world, and the authorities, who seem not only cold, but complicit. One of the counsellors tells Billy and his friends that Uncle Al doesn't like to "coddle" the campers, but it's clear this really means "does not care if you all live or die."

And by the time they're all being marched into the woods, it seems like anything could happen. This could be a mass execution for all I know. This is by far the darkest Goosebumps book so far, and the most lethal by a long shot. I knew the twist must be coming, but I had no idea what to expect. How could this story get worse for anyone? How much darker can it get?

I was, to say the least, impressed. Despite the rough start, the book really sucked me in. The horror and tension was palpable. And I haven't really made it clear in the recap, but it's worth noting that outside Billy and his friends, none of the other campers seemed to care. Nobody else was worried. These horrors didn't seem to be affecting the other bunks. It adds an unsettling element and made me wonder how many of the campers were in on it too. Whatever "it" was. Sometimes they seemed shocked at what was happening and equally as in danger, but other times they seemed like they were deliberately isolating Billy and his buddies.

When Billy hears what Uncle Al wants and realises that it's his friends from the girls' camp he must hunt down, he refuses. He refuses to do anything Uncle Al tells him, and threatens Uncle Al with the gun. Uncle Al, in a rage, attacks Billy, and Billy fires on him.

But nothing happens.

And Uncle Al takes Billy by the hand, shakes it, and tells him he has passed the test.

Everybody at camp applauds. All his missing friends, he escaped girls, even his parents step out from their hiding places in the woods and they explain to Billy that the whole camp has been a test. You see, Billy's parents are field researchers for the government, and they want Billy to start coming on their science expeditions with them. But they go to some far away dangerous places, so Billy had to be tested. And it had to be a secret because, if he failed, he wasn't allowed to know about the secret workings of the government department his parents work for.

So I guess if he failed, he'd just get to be traumatised and gas lit for the rest of his life? Convinced monsters stalk the woods, that several friends of his died, and there's a camp run by psychopaths that nobody is doing anything about... Cool. Good plan, folks.

Anyway. Billy did pass, and he'll be going with his parents to an especially dangerous place. A place called...

Earth.

Yes, in a twist truly worthy of the Twilight Zone (and which does indeed appear in an episode of the Twilight Zone) this whole story has actually taken place on another planet. Another planet that just happens to resemble Earth culturally, biologically, and even linguistically. I don't think any of the aliens in the Twilight Zone were named, and that works better than trying to justify why your aliens are named Billy, Roger, Mike, Dawn, and so on.

I can't say I like this twist. It does leave a bad taste in my mouth. It's another one of these twists that nobody can predict because it isn't hinted at or signalled at all. They could all have just as easily been snowmen for all the difference it actually makes to the narrative.

But in a way, it's all still worth it. Everything up to that point was good, was gripping, was scary. It reads like RL Stine went as hard on horror as he could get away with, even ditching a lot of the goofy and comic elements that show up in his books. It reminded me of some of other memorable works of horror I've encountered in my life: 'Endurance' by JA Konrath, 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' directed by Tobe Hooper, and 'Wolfe Creek' directed by Greg McLean, but, you know, in a way that's not going to scar a person for the rest of their life.*

So, yeah, all in all, this was a good one.

It's also a good example of another classic Marxist complain about labour under Capitalism.

If you just, like, ignore the twist ending and take the narrative as it is presented up until the last two pages. Just like with the mummy book, we're treating this situation as a metaphor for labour.

And speaking of that last time: I explained how the Marxist analysis of Capitalism presents labour as inherently exploitative and as a political struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. So the question is, what's the alternative? How should it work under a Marxist model?

Well one such answer to that is to bring democracy to the workplace. 

If you think about it, while many of us say we "live in a democracy" because we have some sort of government made of elected representatives, the amount of democracy in our lives is actually tiny. Yes, we might elect a head of state (though not in Australia) and we might elect politicians, but do we elect the civil servants who do most of the work executing the will of those politicians? Generally no.

And for most of us, we might spend a third of our time in any given week working under what is, effectively, a dictatorship. For most of us, our workplace is not a democracy of any kind. And if you consider how much the decisions of your manager, of your company's board of directors, or corporate officers affect you, you might wonder why you don't deserve to have more say in that.

Take the camp Billy is attending - Camp Nightmoon - as an example. It's not a workplace, but Goosebumps is about children in, thankfully, a society where children do not regularly hold jobs. But we're using metaphors, and Camp Nightmoon is clearly a top heavy power structure. It's a dictatorship. Uncle Al makes all the decisions. Decisions like not hiring a nurse to oversee the health of the campers.

“Well, Camp Nightmoon is pretty wild,” Larry said. “And you guys had better be careful. I’m warning you.” His expression turned serious. “There’s no nurse at Camp Nightmoon. Uncle Al doesn’t believe in coddling you guys.”

But that has a profound impact on the campers. Uncle Bill might think it's best not to coddle the children, not to have a nurse, but I bet a lot of the children would rather have a nurse at camp and if they get hurt, the lack of a nurse affects them a lot more than it affects Uncle Bill. Why don't those people who are most at risk get a say in how that risk is managed?

In my younger years, I worked as a kitchen hand in a lot of different places. One place I worked, I had the misfortune of cutting myself with a paring knife. I was lucky it was just a small knife cut and not a cut with, say, the industrial can opener or a meat slicer, because this kitchen had no first aid supplies. Not one. I was told to put pressure on the cut with a paper towel until it stopped bleeding, at which  time I presumably would have gone back to work, had I not instead chosen to leave.

The person who ran that business wasn't a chef. He didn't work in the kitchen. The owner of that business wasn't even in the building that day. He's not going to cut himself with anything, but he's the one who decides whether or not the kitchen has a first aid kit.

You can extend this analysis to more than safety. Maybe you work for a company that builds websites. Maybe you're hired to build a website for a corporation that has been exposed as selling firearms to terrorist groups. You and your co-workers might find that reprehensible, and you don't want to assist that business in growing or advertising. But the workers who make that website don't get a say on whether or not the company takes that contract. The only person who does never has to write the copy that praises the business, or choose the pretty pretty photos of guns that are being used to execute civilians. The only person who makes that decision just cares whether or not the contract will be profitable. Why shouldn't you have the right to say no when the majority of the workers object to the work? Again, it impacts them the most.

And it is, of course, hardly a radical notion to suggest some employers care more about profit than the well-being or safety of their staff. Uncle Al is a great example of these petty business dictators.

“The two boys floated on downriver?” Uncle Al asked, staring hard at Larry, scratching the back of his fringe of yellow hair. Larry nodded. “We have to find them!” I insisted, trembling harder. Uncle Al continued to glare at Larry. “What about my canoe?” he demanded angrily. “That’s our best canoe! How am I supposed to replace it?”

And in theory, if a politician decides they will support a terrorist organisation, democracy affords us a mechanism to remove them, should the majority object. Many of us claim to like that. Most people in the Anglo-Sphere claim to be pro-democracy. But few of us seem willing to engage with the suggestions that we could, even should, have democracy in a lot more parts of our lives than we currently do.

There are two common counter-arguments to this suggestion.

The first is that if you don't like it, you can quit. Get another job. You do have a means to object. Like me, you can walk out the door. You can go build websites for puppies somewhere else instead of being complicit in terrorism.

But can you?

How many times have you walked out of a job one day and into a new job the next? I'm willing to bet that if you did, you'd organised that new job while still working the one you want to quit. When your capacity to buy food, pay rent, pay for medicine, pay for water is all dependent on having a job, you actually aren't free to just leave. The choice is actually between working and starving. That's not a choice. That's an ultimatum. That's coercion. Capitalism, in this way, is coercive, is violent.

The other argument is that if our workplace was organised democratically, the majority might still decide to do something bad. And, yeah, that can happen. To paraphrase, Henry David Thoreau: nothing has ever been right because it was supported by the majority. So yes, that's an imperfection, but you end up no worse off than the system we have now. In a democratically controlled workplace, you have an equal say in that decision. You not only have a say, your equality gives you a position from which to negotiate with your peers. Don't want to build the terrorist website? Okay. Well, you are as much the boss as your co-workers, so you can, perhaps, arrange to work on other contracts while those comfortable with terrorism work on that one. So even if the result is the same, your position is better. You are still better off.

A less common argument, but one I know you may be inclined to make, because I have made it myself, might be the social democrat argument that these problems can be mitigated through regulation. If our government, which we elect, keeps control over labour laws, then a workplace must have a first aid kit. A strong welfare system means labour is not coercive and you are free to walk away. I know these arguments well because I used to be the one making them.

But labour laws in Australia do require a first aid kit in a workplace, and there still wasn't one when I cut myself. And unless an inspector of some kind, acting for the regulating government bodies, visits that site and finds out, there is nothing the employees - again, the people who need it - can compel their employer to do to install one. But if the workers are in control, they don't need that external authority to enforce regulation because they have the authority to do it themselves.

I want to finish by saying that Marxist workers coops do exist. There are businesses owned and run by the workers in equal share. They do work. But the proof we have is limited to small businesses so far. The question "Would this be sustainable in larger corporations over an extended period?" is a question we don't have the answer to and is, at its heart, a bad question.

No anarchist, no communist, no socialist wants to democratise workplaces and stop there. This is not only just one particular approach to organising labour, it is also only one of many changes that would need to be made. We could have democratic workplaces, and solid welfare systems. This thing we call society, this curse called economics, this monster called money, we humans made all of it. The wheels spin because we turn them. We can change them. All of them. In as many ways as we like. As many times as we like.

So to ask how one left wing idea would work if you changed only that and nothing else is to fail to engage with the conversation in good faith. As such, I won't be answering it.

Oh, and if you're wondering where to start. Well, surprisingly, the Goosebumps has an answer for that, too.

“We have to get together. The boys and the girls,” Dawn whispered, peering once again over the tops of the leaves. “We have to make a plan.”

*That really only applies for 'Wolf Creek'. Personally, while it was an excellently made film, it was too intense, too real, and too visceral for me to get any actual enjoyment from. I had to break up my watching of it into two sessions. I've not had to watch a film that way before or since.

Now Is The Time of Monsters

We'll return to Goosebumps in a moment but, folks, we need to talk about what's happening in the USA right now.

Here's the ABC's running report on the incident.

But the short version is that Trump supporters have stormed the Capitol Building in Washington DC. Trump supporters are violently rejecting the result of the federal election that saw Joe Biden elected as the next President of The United States.

And how's it going for them?

A lot better than it is going for the Black Lives Matters protests that have been going on for months now.

Here is the national guard mobilised to protect
the Lincoln memorial during a BLM protest

'nuff said

And this is awful. But it's not surprising.

This morning, as I have many days in the last few years, I've been thinking about the book 'Total Proaganda' by Helen Razer. Specifically, this part:

Nobody can predict the future. I can't tell you exactly how this is going to play out and I couldn't have told you that in January of 2021, Trump Supporters would storm the Capitol Building. But it is possible to look at the material conditions, and to look at historical precedent, and make educated speculation.

A butterfly flaps its wings. A tornado forms.

A state fails its people. A fascist rises.

And the USA has failed its people. Those failures are numerous: incredible wealth inequality, crumbling and dangerous infrastructure, malicious denial of health care. The USA has created a desperate population and history has shown us desperate people radicalise.

The US has also spent the better part of a century poisoning the socialist well. There is no main stream left wing movement in the USA. The media and the government will not even entertain the most basic left wing notions. Bernie Sanders' social democratic platform was even too much, too socialist, for the establishment and even for many of the USA's citizens to believe in.

So of course, when those desperate people radicalised, there was only one direction for them to go.

In 2016, when a lot of people were looking at the shit lives they were living in their failing state and asked "What the fuck is going on?" it was a fascist that answered their question. Not only did he answer, but he was the only one answering their questions with a political platform broadcast by the main stream media. 

And it doesn't matter that he has failed in almost every way to deliver on his promise, because he is still, for a lot of people, the only person making the promises they want to hear. Trump may have lost the majority, but those radicalised by his fascist rhetoric are demanding answers for the same problems they were in 2016.

But it wasn't just solutions Trump promised. He also gave them enemies.

Enemies both at the gates and inside the gates is fascism 101. Who can you blame for your shit lot in life? Who can you blame for your problems? Who must answer for these crimes? Blame the corrupt democrats. Blame black, indigenous, and people of colour. Blame LGBTQI+ people. Blame migrants. Blame lib elites. Blame antifa terrorists.

Side note: here's the same shit happening in Wyoming at the same time

As I said, we can't predict the future. At time of writing, a curfew is in effect in Washington DC and Vice President Pence has approved an order to mobilise the national guard. I'm not sure what goal Trump's supporters thought they would accomplish, so I certainly can't say whether it was a success.

But what they intended is not as important as what they did. And in this article from November, India Samarajiva that even if Trump leaves office, even if he is forced from office, extraordinary damage has already been done. The USA's already thin and fragile democracy is cracking like glass and can't be repaired.

One thing we can be certain of is that the current order cannot last. It will either kill us all, or it will crumble and something new will rise from the ashes.

Antonio Gramsci said: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” 

And Rosa Luxemburg said: "Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism."

These latest events are just another paving stone in the road we're all walking. Marxists and Anti-Fascists have been sounding alarm bells for years. We're not surprised.

But this isn't about "I told you so".

This is about ringing those alarm bells until our knuckles bleed.

There is a line to be drawn between the desperation caused by neo-liberalism, austerity, and modern free market capitalist economics and the current rise in fascism. The USA isn't unique, it's just farther along the path.

Australia is walking the same path.

The Liberal/National coalition wants us on this path. And Labor's vision isn't much better. It might be, at best, a slower step.

England too.

The whole Anglosphere and much of Western Europe is walking this path.

Right into the jaws of monsters.