Dear Readers,
In the climax of Ghostbusters (1984), Gozer the Gozerian—played by Slavitza Jova as an androgynous club girl with red eyes and a flat top—roars at the four titular heroes, “The Traveller has come! Choose and perish!”
“What do you mean, choose?” asks Dan Aykroyd’s character, the feckless Ray. “We don’t understand!”
“Choose!” says Gozer. “Choose the form of the Destructor!”
Bill Murray’s character, Peter Venkman, immediately understands what Gozer means: “Whatever we think of—if we think of J. Edgar Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover will appear and destroy us, okay? So empty your heads, don’t think of anything. We’ve only got one shot at this.”
Ray can’t help himself. He thinks of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Moments later, a fifteen-story-tall humanoid marshmallow comes lumbering down Eighth Avenue, ready to spell their doom.
I (the writer Jasper Nighthawk) have been thinking lately about this phrase, Choose the form of the destructor. For reasons that are maybe obvious?
Today is election day here in the U.S. It’s a little late for an endorsement. Many tens of millions of us have already voted, myself included. Also, most of us don’t live in the six or seven states with actually competitive contests, so under the electoral college system our votes are basically guaranteed not to make a difference. (Thinking about this can bring my blood right up to a rolling boil.) And who knows how much a newsletter can change a mind or heart.
And yet—better late than never. I feel particularly obliged to speak out because back in 2016, the final slide of my visual endorsement had the unfortunate power of prophecy.
Pew! Pew! Pew!
Four years later, I made another slide show endorsement, right here in this newsletter—an election-year travelogue at the end of which I implored America to vote the fascists out. My preferred candidate fared a little better in that one.
This year I’m late to speak up, and I have to admit that I feel uninspired. The candidate I support, Kamala Harris, has been campaigning with, of all people, the hawkish neocon nepo baby Liz Cheney. Harris has refused to criticize Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. And she is running a campaign so centrist that even if she wins and Dems hold the House and the Senate, she will hardly be able to claim a mandate to enact many of the reforms our country so desperately needs.
And yet! The alternative is unspeakably worse: a woman-hating fascist leading a bloodthirsty party set on vengeance, a group of people willing to do basically anything to entrench their clique of stupid billionaires, hateful Catholics, and annoying crypto bros into power and build a durable edifice of oligarchic white supremacist power.
Choose the form of the destructor, indeed.
This archived Lightplay was sent on 5 November 2024.
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To me, and to most people I spend time with, the cruelty of Trump and this current Republican Party is obvious. Yet most days I find myself doing my best not to think too much about this movement and its aims. I look away. It’s too painful.
A few weeks ago I read this interview that my friend Talia Lavin did with Moira Donegan. The whole thing is worth reading, but I rang like a bell when Talia said:
This is the third time in a fucking row that we’re having to deal with an election where our basic humanity—like, are you fully human or not—is the top line question on the ballot. And the degree to which it is demoralizing, dispiriting, exhausting is wild. I think many of us are still contending with this ongoing trauma that has started in 2015 and never stopped.
This feels so true. I myself am not a woman, but still, I feel it in my bones.
Make no mistake, this Republican ticket, if elected, will collaborate with the packed Supreme Court to roll back women’s bodily autonomy in every realm, reducing half of our country’s population to something less than citizens. These guys are creeps, and they already have so much power, and they’re ready to keep going. If they win the electoral college or succeed in otherwise stealing the election, it will be some dark years for our country.
I always try to remember that, to rephrase William Gibson, The apocalypse is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. The worst thing you can imagine happening is already happening or has already happened, just not to you.
So as Trump promises to detain and deport over ten million people who currently are living in this country, I’ve been remembering a previous era of American concentration camps—the ones Californians built and then locked our Japanese American neighbors into, back in the 1940s. This history still lives here in California. A friend’s dad was a little kid in the camps. Another person from my writing world was in the camps as a child himself. I also have met people who helped build the camps. This injustice happened right here. The scars remain.
I recently learned that Dorothea Lange—famous for her Dust Bowl-era photos including the iconic “Migrant Mother”—made a whole project photographing Japanese internment, but these images were suppressed by the U.S. Army and only rediscovered in 2006. Here are a few of these images, with Lange’s captions, from this invaluable webpage that collects them.
We must do what we can to ensure these shameful scenes of prejudice and oppression are not repeated in our own age.
There is so much heaviness in this year’s election that I have to remind myself that the existence of good times won’t immediately end, even if the fascist wins. There will still be bread to bake, the kid to get ready for school, the figs on the neighbor’s tree to glean, the Sunday sun to sit in. Until someone actually takes something away from you, you’ve still got it.
Part of how fascism accomplishes its ends is by what the historian Timothy Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience.” (See: billionaires with newspaper hobbies who have cancelled their editorial boards’ presidential endorsements out of fear and cowardice.) I think there can be a kind of anticipatory obedience in our everyday lives, too. We sense what’s coming, and we cower.
I’m instead trying to follow the lead of Stubb, the Pequod’s second mate in Moby Dick, who said,
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.
Easier said than done, of course! But I want to be a happy warrior. I vow to enjoy my life, despite the haters—and I think enjoying life often has the effect of actively spiting the haters, too.
In Ghostbusters, just as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man lurches into view, Ray explains why, when asked to choose the form of the destructor, he thought of this spun-sugar mascot:
I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood. Something that could never ever possibly destroy us. Mr. Stay Puft!
And as it turns out, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man doesn’t destroy them. Quite the opposite—they cross the streams, they reverse the particle flow through the gate, and they send Gozer back to whatever realm they came from.
So maybe Ray’s approach of imagining the least harmful opponent really was the right one. Venkman’s idea of just clearing their minds and making no choice wasn’t a strategy at all, because it had no chance of actually working.
Neither does voting for a third-party candidate in this election. One of the things I like least about American democracy is how its winner-take-all elections enforce our two-party system. I want us to change that. But we vote in the system we have, not the system we wish we had.
Today, we have the opportunity to choose the form of the destructor. Kamala Harris isn’t the candidate I would choose, all else being equal. But she’ll be a far better enemy than Trump would be. She won’t assault women’s rights. She won’t terrorize and deport millions of our neighbors. And with the right pressure, I believe we can push her to help end Israel’s war in Gaza—and push her to take bold action on climate change. We have the rare opportunity to pick our opponent. We’d be fools to make the wrong decision.
So when you’re in the voting booth today, don’t keep your mind blank. Let it settle on the harmless thing from your childhood: the establishment Democrat. She’ll still be fifteen stories tall and leaving wide a path of destruction—the American Presidency basically guarantees it—but I think we’ll have a chance.
That’s my take on the election. Thanks for reading. And stay safe out there. Take care of each other.
– Jasper
PS — Alright, if you insist, here’s the Stay Puft Marshmallow President:
