Barrett Swanson

“Particularly in the wake of the 2016 election, I have found myself subjecting other people to vulgar taxonomies, watching them shed any nuance of history and become corpses whenever glimpsed through the begrimed looking glass of political identity [...]
No longer manifestations of sublime mystery, gifted with the fluke of consciousness, born of a thousand minute experiences, they had become, through the defects of my perception, dead mouthpieces for dead opinions, always victims of false consciousness, already agents of bad faith. All around me were dead Republicans and dead Democrats, dead snowflakes and dead working-class voters, dead virtue signalers and dead trolls, dead boomers and dead millennials, dead beta-males and dead deplorables. Very quickly the world became a zone of corpses, feeding off the carrion of pundits and demagogues, and I began to see everyone univocally, as though they were only what they betrayed.
It was in such moments that I had forgotten my obligations as a writer, which is to eschew generalization for particularity—I had forgotten that in the jurisdiction of my perceptions I always have a choice."

Swanson, Barrett. Lost In Summerland (pp. 280-281)”
― Barrett Swanson, Lost in Summerland: Essays