i hope you stay married

The year was 2016. Everyone had cut crease eyeshadow and Tara Reid was on a press tour for Sharknado: The 4th Awakens. While being interviewed on Jenny McCarthy’s podcast, she took offense at a reference to her plastic surgery and decided to cut the interview short, leading to an exchange that would be referenced in my household at least monthly until the end of time:

J: Good luck to you too! And I’m so excited about Sharknado, and I hope you stay married.

T: I hope you stay married, too. I’m sure he’s a nice guy.

J: I will! And I hope your knees get a little wobblier than they already are.

T: My knees? Oh yeah, I hope your tits get even nicer. Amazing. Same guy that did mine, right?

J: They are! Thank you. Yes, same guy.

T: Fantastic. Always use your advice. You’re the best! Bye.

J: Love you, Tara. Good luck on Sharknado 18.

Shakespearean in its drama, breathtaking in its subtext, this interaction would come to symbolize peak White Woman Conflict to me. The attacks in descending order of devastation, starting with your man, then your body, and finally, as a bonus, your stupid little public persona — all delivered in a tone in which the "niceness” is in direct inverse proportion to the vitriol.

And yet WHY should I need to reference a 2016 Tara Reid Sharknado interview ever, let alone regularly? Was such White Woman Conflict was so present in my life that I needed a shorthand? The answer is yes!

I saw it everywhere (but in myself, of course). When describing two co-workers battling it out in a staff meeting, I’d tell Christian, “It was a real hope-you-stay-married moment.” Celebrity feuds, Barbara Walters interviews, family snipes, email threads, dog park exchanges. Everywhere!

It’s interesting to me because fighting like this is so OBVIOUSLY fighting, and yet on a fundamental level it CANNOT admit that obvious reality. Two wolves fighting in real time: the wolf that believes open conflict is so base that one can never enter into it honestly or clearly, and the wolf full of violence and rage that lunges towards conflict with glee. It’s conflict while lying about conflict, convincing no one.

Spoiler alert, I was OF COURSE guilty of Sharknado-18-sniping myself. When I was in denial (wolf 1), I told myself I was evolved. When I was rageful (wolf 2), I told myself I had no problem with conflict. Look who couldn’t admit an obvious reality!

Hear me out. Lately I’ve been listening to the Revolutions podcast episodes on the Russian Revolution (long story that involves a terrible idea I have to write a novel set in the early 1900s but also the future). Everyone involved was obsessed with the idea of figuring out what moves the motor of history. And one thing that keeps coming up again and again? CONFLICT, external or otherwise. This is (part of) the idea of a dialectic — two opposing ideas or material realities, pushing against each other to arrive at the truth.

(Side note, there is an amazing line in DARKNESS AT NOON about this, a novel about Stalinism that Rebecca and I read because Ray Bradbury said it was his favorite book and we are now in a Fahrenheit 451 super-fan club… anyway in it this imprisoned revolutionary writes in his diary: “We dug in the primeval mud of history and there we found her laws. We knew more than ever men have known about mankind; that is why our revolution succeeded.” !!!)

And yet Sharknado-18/White-Conflict-Style sublimates conflict to the point of absurdity — so you have to ask, to what political end? The usual one, I assume, which is to maintain power and control. To maintain, at all costs, the social illusions that hold up hierarchy.

There is something here about historical materialism and Sharknado that I am reaching for, which is probably my sign to put down the iced coffee and get back to revising my novel. Hope you stay married!!