This Post Will Infuriate You

A Literal Literary Loser Pokes and Prods Provocatively

So, I read a book. (This is the part where my family bursts into jeering laughter because a good 70% of my sentences begin that way.)

So, I read a book. It was called “Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults” by Mara Einstein.

Confession time: I didn’t read it so I could find out how evil marketers use the same techniques as evil cults to get poor, innocent, helpless people to buy their products. I read it so I could learn how to use the same techniques evil cults use to get poor, innocent, helpless people to buy my products. (I may be evil, but I am also self-aware. And honest.)

I didn’t like the book much. Not merely because the author divided the world into two categories: Marketing of products/organizations/causes she didn’t like, which was evil and cult-like, and marketing of products/organizations/causes she did like, which was effective and professional. I didn’t like the book because there weren’t enough step by step instructions re: how to use the same techniques evil cults use to get poor, innocent, helpless people to buy my products. Which was what, as I may have mentioned, I was looking for.

The one thing I did get out of the book I was reading (insert familial laughter, here), was the reminder that social media runs on rage. Businesses, politicians, trolls, all post provocations designed to make the user furious, which then translates into that gold standard of all things, “engagement.”

If I want engagement — which, at the very least, is what the social media companies want, and what they want me to want, because it keeps suckers on their pages for longer — then I have to infuriate people.

And that’s not really my jam.

I mean, I certainly infuriate people.

When it comes to my education writing, I infuriate people all the time — I even had to say to my younger son, “I can’t be expected to remember the names of all the people who have threatened to stab me.” — by making such controversial statements as: Schools should teach students stuff, minority kids are capable of learning stuff without having the curriculum dumbed down for them in the name of “equity,” and, worst of all, Your Child is Not Gifted. (I don’t know your child but, nevertheless, I do know that.)

When it comes to this Substack, though, I have written about such infuriating topics as: How few books are actually sold. How everyone is selling more books than you. And how those “professional marketing experts” who contact you out of the blue are scam artists who aren’t even good at scamming.

But I didn’t write any of that to be infuriating. It’s just the truth.

My most controversial opinions, I suppose, are ones that I don’t consider to be controversial: Communism is bad. Not all women are good (and it’s not wrong to say so). And when it comes to censorship in America, to quote Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I no think it means what you think it means.”

I suppose I could lean more into that moving forward. But it just doesn’t feel right. I don’t write to deliberately infuriate. I write. And then I inadvertently infuriate. It’s a gift, really.

Is that how an evil cult leader would approach matters, though?

I think not. An evil cult leader would be much more deliberate in their approach. As would the head of any major social media company. (But I repeat myself.)

Do you have any thoughts… advice… provocation… for me on the matter? While I ponder my quickly dwindling potential evil cult leader future, I leave you with an excerpt from my latest historical fiction novel, “Go On Pretending,” specifically on that topic (yes, "Go On Pretending” covers soap operas, the Soviet Union, Libertarian communes, Upper West Side liberals, the Women’s Revolution of Rojava, and cults; as Gypsy Rose Lee sings in her eponymous musical, “I’m very versatile!”):

“My name. Coop. It’s short for Cooperation. Cooperation Gump, if you can believe it.”

There were non-sequiturs. And there were silly names. This was Emma’s first silly name non-sequitur. She had no idea what it had to do with anything.

“The rich San Francisco family,” he prompted. “They own the department store. Gumps.”

“So?”

“My mother was living in a commune when I was born.”

“OK.” Two could play the indifference game. Emma just wished she felt indifferent. No matter how much she hated to admit it, he had her attention.

“She ran away from her parents, denounced their consumerist lifestyle. Free love, good vibes, peace, no possessions.”

“How John Lennon of her.”

“Her scene believed nobody owns anybody else. Everyone belongs to themselves. And to the collective.”

“Did they sing patriotic songs about it while gleefully stomping through fields, chopping wheat? Do you know how many times I acted out that scenario in my school plays?”

“They tried to grow food. They mostly failed. Upper middle class kids from the suburbs. Their liberal arts degrees rarely covered applicable skills. So they stole.”

“From the capitalist pigs’ store?”

“From the store, from their parents, from visitors passing through, from each other. Then there were the arguments over cars, over clothes, over drugs, over fuck buddies. My mother came looking for peace and love, and what she got was more of the same old, same old.”

We tried to do what was better, Mikhail Gorbachev said after the dust had settled, but we ended up with the usual.

“She kept picking up and moving somewhere else. Sometimes before the cops got there with arrest warrants, sometimes after. Meandered all over California, Oregon, Washington, only to end up back in San Francisco. And the People’s Temple.”

Emma’s horrified expression told Coop she knew where and what that was. He wouldn’t need to explain.

“It’s funny. Religion was another thing she was running away from. She thought how her family practiced was performative, no spirituality. She wanted a deeper connection, true equality. Men, women, Black, white…. What she wanted from Jim Jones, it’s the same thing your parents wanted from the USSR.”

“How did you know about my parents?”

“Your mom’s a talker.”

So was Coop, apparently. When you got him on the right subject.

“Were you there, too? In Jonestown?”

A nod. The man of few words had no words for this.

“How did you… survive?”

“Do I look like the type to drink the Kool-aid?”

She’d accused him of that. She’d used those exact words when… oh, God. Emma sucked in her breath, as if that could call back what she’d said the other day.

Coop clearly remembered. Coop, just as clearly, took no offense. Perhaps because he’d already lived through something a great deal more offensive. “Morning in November, I watched a handful of folks sneaking off into the jungle. One of the women, Leslie, she’d strapped her kid to her back. He was no baby. He was two, maybe three. Leslie was married to the compound’s security chief. I figured if she was willing to take off into the wild, with the snakes and the jaguars and the tapirs, carrying a kid that heavy, she knew something major was about to go down.”

“What about your mother?”

“She’d never wanted to leave any other place when I begged her. Why would she now? I was finally old enough to risk it on my own.”

Later that November day, the man who’d brought them all to Gyana ordered 900 of his followers to ingest cyanide. Men, women, elderly, children, teen-agers, babies. Jim Jones knew his South American reign was doomed. Kill a US congressman who’d come to investigate your operation, as well as the three reporters accompanying him, and even a megalomaniac grasped he could no longer hide and claim immunity from international law. Authorities would be coming for him. But, just like with the Jewish zealots scraping to hold out on the mountaintop of Masada from the Romans, Jones made it so his pursuers came upon a massacre, no one left alive to arrest, save an old woman who’d hidden under the bed, and a deaf man who’d slept through the suicide order. The press reported that less than a dozen people had escaped before sunrise.

“I got flown back to the US, dumped on my mom’s family. They thought the illiterate little hippie they’d been saddled with could use some discipline. So they sent me to military school.”

“Quite the change.”

“Surprisingly similar. Do what you’re told, don’t ask questions, dress like everyone else, and if you don’t like it, keep it to yourself or get the shit beaten out of you. I adjusted quick.”

As I mentioned, I don’t seek to be infuriating. It just comes naturally to me. Below is an interview I did with the “Amusing Jews” podcast. I cover quite a few currently non-controversial topics like totalitarian governments, interracial relationships, immigration, and independent Jewish states. I guarantee, you will be infuriated by at least one of them. Whether I meant it or not: