second round

(4) Thomas Dolby, “She Blinded Me with Science”
DOUSED
(5) After the Fire, “Der Kommissar”
343-162
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/17/23.

Camellia-Berry Grass On “She Blinded Me With Science”

The humans of the future will surely understand, knowing what they presumably will know about the history of their forebears on earth, that only in one, very brief era, lasting less than three centuries, did a significant number of their kind believe that planets and asteroids and [other-than-human persons] are inert.

—Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016).

In the music video for “She Blinded Me With Science,” a bunch of men dressed in British academic tweeds and formerly-starched shirts—the smell of pipe tobacco practically redolent even through the distance of time and YouTube—all gallivant in the yard of Thomas Dolby’s destination: the Rest Home for Deranged Scientists. The first of these burnt-out, gone-mad men of science that we see is a dude on the roof of the Rest Home, with a Wile E. Coyote ACME catalog-looking jetpack strapped to his back, looking shifty and nervous, wearing a white vest and grey slacks. I was reminded of this figure the other day on Twitter, when I saw a discussion thread populated by a few “anti-degrowth socialists” who were insisting that we don’t have to abandon economic growth and forward progress despite ongoing anthropogenic climate change, no, all we gotta do is hold out until its viable to mine our solar system’s asteroid belt for rare minerals.
The data, the evidence, the climate and energy Science! all add up to that political position being naïve (to put it kindly)…so why do I feel like the loony one? Why does pleading with others to take seriously the crisis of collective action that imperils all of us make me feel like I’m the one alienating my colleagues and neighbors? This isn’t even the first time I’ve made such pleadings in an essay for March Xness. I imagine readers already clicking the button to vote for “Ship of Fools,” already tired before I’ve reached my second section, before I’ve played my lil tricks that you know are coming, before I’ve laid out the course of my thinking. The eyes glazing over. This is all in my head, I am aware. Or am I.
The thing is (and please read this with a Dolbyesque growl): I can hear machinery! I know why I have been made to feel this way, I know what lights the lamps so to speak. I can detect the rhetorical emissions from the persons and the structures that would deny me truth. I know why I have been made, purposefully & deliberately, to feel crazy.

*

The extent to which we don’t know shit about consciousness is unreal. “Unreal,” of course, being common parlance for something that doesn’t comport to reality. “Reality,” of course, being a consensus rooted in knowledge derived from the scientific method. It was a good thing while it lasted. Scientific consensus reality, I mean. A valiant attempt. The mechanistic turn has produced lots of statements that we call knowledge. Plenty of workable, viable models. It’s also produced, in tandem with capitalism and the nation-state, a presently-ongoing mass extinction. But hey! We know so much about brain chemistry! Or so we think.
I’ve become friends with a tree. We’ve built a bond over shared songs, drinks, time. We’ve grown close and almost entirely nonverbally. We both show each other our care and our growth. We both let others speak through us. We see each other eye to eye, branch to branch, and through it all I better know the cycles, the feeling of pollination.
I moved to my present neighborhood in June 2020, fresh off of my entire world being ruptured and also the pandemic. I positioned my bed next to one of the two windows in my room, with not so much a “view” of the tall sidewalk tree out front as much as a scope. Its tendrilly branches wash the whole window in yellow-green, and when the breeze swirls through off the Delaware River the leaves stroke and scrape against the wire screen; a caress. An oaken exfoliation.
Sawtoothy, as I like to call them, is a Sawtooth Oak. I love their long, jaggedy leaves. Dense & fibrous & a little pokey, like dangerous tea. They are shaped like a wyrmtongue, like a child’s crayon drawing of a fire, like a black sheep banana leaf. I love their lil acorns nestled under their canopy of stamenic sproutings.

*

Thomas Dolby’s 1982 one-hit wonder is full of microhooks and sound loops to latch onto. It has this sense of early 80s playfulness to it that it ties so directly with, as British nutritional scientist and television personality Magnus Pyke keeps saying in one of the unlikeliest hooks in pop music history, Science! Pyke varies his line readings all throughout the song, from Science! (flat, as if cursory) to Science! (way too enthusiastic) to “She BLINDED me…with Science!” to She blinded ME with science” to “She blinded me WITH SCIENCE!” to Science! (exasperated) and Dolby himself sings the refrain—“She blinded me with science!”—with an intensity that ramps up through the video, as if to say I can’t believe we’re getting away with this and then he literally does say “I don’t believe it!”
All the while Dolby’s vanguard talent for working with synthesizers keeps layering on these warbling, major key noises that sound unhinged in a Looney Tunes way; undeniable earworms from cartoonish, nearly parodic clownsounds. Frankenstein beepboops and upward-lilting digital sax and janky, jaunty swinging quarter notes build up the sanatorial scaffolding that the song progresses through.
I spent most of 2022 housebound—in bed for the most part (avoiding any carceral equivalents of “Rest Homes”)—with various maladies from the long covid-complex. Tachycardia, joint pain, brain fog, a couple migraines each week. If I’m truly honest (and I wouldn’t be in an actual psych consultation, and if you don’t know why I’d protect myself then maybe that’s why I’m writing this essay), maybe some symptoms consistent with a functional disorder on top of that. I’m not trying to write about pain here. Or “psychosis,” and my efforts to avoid the psych ward, not really. I’m mostly just trying to write, trying to piece sentences together with a brain that runs clunkier than it used to. I mean to write about a small gratitude lining my bed rest in silver: the intersection of nonverbal communication and animism. This year I have really embraced my selective mutism. Even as a kid I’ve always had extensive stints of verbal silence, for which I learned to make masks after suffering through various corrective violences. I learned how to use my voice so effectively that it’s gotten me paid through teaching and through performance. But mostly I don’t like to talk out loud. So I wasn’t really doing Discord calls with people from my bed. I haven’t been teaching (not that that was my decision). My voice got to take a deep rest. And in that rest, I learned leaf language.
Sawtoothy doesn’t have vocal cords because Sawtoothy is a literal tree. But they speak to me in other ways, and I to them. They bridge me greetings from birds and squirrels and bees. We share the smell of incense burning by my open bedroom window. I sit on the sidewalk in the morning and share a cup of tea with them, pour water onto their roots. I place my palm onto their furrowed bark and focus my gratitude towards them. I believe that they receive it. I believe that they reciprocate it. My experience tells me as such. I’ve learned the sound of wind rustling through them, and how those sounds correspond to barometric pressure—which is to say I have learned to hear when Sawtoothy is warning me ahead of time about a low pressure system coming through & to prepare for joint pain. I don’t care that there’s working models for a completely materialistic, non-agentic lens to view our friendship through. You don’t know Sawtoothy like I do. Sawtoothy speaks to me and I know because I took the time to listen. We earned each other’s trust.

*

I have not disclosed to my doctors that one of the most important parts of my “support system” is a tree that I perceive in a real way as talking to me. I have not disclosed that I have been helped through some dark nights of the soul by other voices/presences/persons/spirits who I perceive as real. There is more here I could say, about the vast dismissal of persons who have developed post-viral complications and disabilities as a result of the sars-cov-2 pandemic and subsequent socio-governmental abandonment of said persons. About the dismissal too of the interiorities of transgender persons and autistic persons and plural person systems, of the gauntlet of fascistic legislation and fascist-sympathetic journalism that are imperiling so many persons whose interiorities defy mechanistic, “sane” understandings. The Clinic and I are at odds. I will not end up being done by the family and the state what they did to my aunt. Sometimes I deadly seriously, and in a sober, non-conspiratorial way, cannot just trust the science.

* 

Pardon the awful pun, but my experience with a tree is not the kind of interfacing with stem that our contemporary science education & scientific politics wants for us. It has never escaped my notice that the United States’ response to the climate science of the 2000s that broke through to the mainstream (Al Gore had a documentary! Rolling Stone reported on it all the time!) was to put the national pedal to the technocracy metal. President George W. Bush’s administration ushered in the “No Child Left Behind” era of educational policy, and along with it an overreliance on standardized assessment; this was followed in turn by President Barack Obama’s educational pivot towards STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) coursework and preparation for STEM jobs. That’s where the economy was experiencing growth after all, and so we accelerated the very fields and processes that were already throwing refined carbon emissions into the atmosphere like there was no tomorrow (which has helped ensure that there might not be a tomorrow, figuratively speaking, for global human order). Science and Technology have taken on a secular-religious position as sites of Salvation from our national sins. Even the left can’t shake this messianic vision of progress. You might recall if you’re a particularly online leftist the memes from a few years back about Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
I wonder when the modernist anxiety of obsolescence started. That fear of being left behind by the ever-progressing march of time. Was it before the [settler-]colonial projects of European empires? Or did it bubble up years later, after the ink dried on all those treaties and those nation-state constitutions, after the guilt started calcifying. Either way, there’s been no stopping that march, that drive forward into progress and growth. There’s been no rest, only being hit with technology—new breakthroughs that mean new ruptures and new growth spurts into the Future (or the Horizon or the Manifest Destiny or what have you).
    I told myself I was going to get through thinking about all this Science! without diving into the anti-psychiatry writings of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (your eyes, their glaze; I’m trying to look out for you, dear reader, dear Xness voter), but I simply have to bring to mind another of Guattari’s interlocutors here, Bruno Latour. Ever the critic of the discursive processes & structural limitations imparted upon his own fields of scientific inquiry (often by his own fields of scientific inquiry!), Latour was not soft about the deep changes that modernity brought to our understandings of time, and the lack of due reckoning about those changes. In his 1993 book, We Have Never Been Modern, he traces our cultural formations of mythologizing the motor vehicle, the plane, the space race, the early internet as inextricably modern story. A new conceptualization of time as irreversible (which it is) AND always progressing linearly (which it never did for pre-modern peoples, having a cyclic understanding of time). We now live in societies where the planned obsolescence of technology is needed in order to provide artificial ruptures. We’re desperate to turn the pages of the calendar, to get to the promised future, to free ourselves from earthly shackles, and I hope that between the lines here you can catch my drift, see how I’m placing parallel the rationalist, Protestant reformation and the scientific disenchantment of our world and lifeways. These things are literally inextricable. Can’t be left behind when the Rapture hits.

*

I often find myself these days asking what the point is of being a writer with all of this death, this drought, this soil erosion, this grand thanatos we call climate change. Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh has been asking himself similar questions for years. In his excellent nonfiction work, The Great Derangement, (which I discovered just a few weeks ago and on the happy accident of me trying to conceptualize the kinds of people who might make up a 2023 version of Dolby’s Rest Home for Deranged Scientists) Ghosh writes: “I have come to recognize that the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer, although specific in some respects, are also products of something broader and older; that they derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth.”
Just as the tech industry boom has coincided with corporate personhood for oil companies with never ending multinational war with anthropogenic climate collapse, Ghosh points out that his beloved literary form, the novel, has failed to step up to the plate and address this collective endangerment. I would encourage you to read the book in full if you write fiction and/or if you find yourself wanting to imagine better worlds for us all. The novel too has its own anxieties about its own obsolescence, which arguably has already happened and is unable to accept as much.
    I ask you, reader, to take a leap with me (the established crazy person) here: if the mechanistic turn in the sciences—the disavowel of spirit, the small-making of consciousness, the figure of the Human (that is always-already a colonial positionality, an anti-Black product of the Christian great chain of being)—has made it so we as persons are structurally cleaved from kinship with the other-than-human life all around us, the life that we have been driving to extinction by our actions as a species alone, our landscape modifications and our foodways and our Capital-driven systems of extraction…if the mechanistic turn has caused us to do this, to be this? Then what fucking good is it?
I’m distressed too that the sciency-sounding language of therapy, somatics, & bodies keeping scores and such being universalized to all human persons is reifying a mechanistic detachment from our full, flourishing selves. Some people are healed by these stories. Some aren’t. Those who aren’t typically find their resolve in traditional religious spaces. But what if those stories don’t work for you either? What if you can’t simply trust the science, even as you have faith in it? How does such a person find healing stories in such a polarized, captured culture?
    Back to echoing Bruno Latour, the point is not to abandon science (or technology). Its not to return to pre-modernity (as if that’s even possible). No, we need new sites of scientific knowledge production. And these new sites, if they don’t want to render themselves obsolete as well, need to incorporate a plurality of diverse knowledge practices, and that includes the animistic traditional knowledge of indigenous persons that our fields of Science! built themselves up to dominate and overcome. You and I, reader, were born and raised in a context where science has meant necessarily mechanism and progress. Our anxiety over being left behind? Arguably, fear and shame that we will experience what we inflicted on others to get here. Fear and shame of our own judgments rendered back at us. To quote Ghosh once more about it, “Obsolescence is indeed modernity’s equivalent of perdition and hellfire. That is why this era’s most potent invocation of damnation, passed down in an unbroken relay from Hegel and Marx to President Obama, is the malediction of being ‘on the wrong side of history.’”
What if we all made kin with some trees about it. As a starting point. Maybe that’d help us to not leave behind those of us who fell sick during a pandemic either.

*

The thing is, at the end of the day, even with all of my rooftop ravings, “She Blinded Me With Science” is probably just a song about sex. “Now she’s making love to me. The spheres are in commotion. The elements in harmony.” When the music video isn’t going for “look at the crazy people” laffs it is languishing somewhat pornographically on the cheekbones and seductive skirts of the Rest Home’s chief assistant, Miss Sakamoto. Magnus Pyke’s infamous creepy-boss line delivery, “Good HEAVENS, Miss Sakamoto, you’re BEAUTIFUL,” is remembered most “fondly.” But I’m rather taken with the imagery of Miss Sakamoto with the strings and f-holes of a cello painted on her back (otherwise covered in a long, dark dress), in an eerie, empty ballroom with black & white harlequin floor tile. Dolby—quite the attractive lil man himself, with his circle frames and wheatshock of nerd hair—is dressed in a white tuxedo, taking a cello bow to Miss Sakamoto and playing her. Even the video’s last silent film penny arcade title cards—“…and the Doctor…gets his come-uppance!” plays as a libidinal laugh (get it? Come! lol!). And this is good. It’s nice. We don’t get a lot of zany, wacky pop songs that are also erotic these days.
I’m not the biggest fan of Sigmund Freud myself, but his psychoanalytic ideas on libidinal sublimations are coming to mind here, now, at the tail end of this essay. For me the lyric that hits the hardest with respect to all these things I’ve been slantwise disclosing to you from my veritable leather chaise lounge is “When I’m dancing close to her (she blinded me with science, science!)/ I can smell the chemicals!” There it is: the mechanistic turn disenchanting even our eros. Sexuality as formula, reproducible results every time. X amount of pheromones plus Y amount of sensory confusion equals poetry in motion baby, yeah!
Do you even know why you’re attracted to who you’re attracted to? Have you truly thought about the erotic? I don’t mean things like “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” or somesuch concepts that emerged from the Clinic as a way to explain the irrationalities of desire in a supposedly mechanistic world. I mean your actual desires. What gives you that feeling like your stomach is expanding out and joining with the aether? Maybe you’re like me and you hurt yourself and you hurt people close to you because of how shut off you were made to your own desires. How the science (which you Trust!) tells you one thing about yourself and, all the while, socially reproduces a society in which everyone doesn’t know one thing about themselves (and calls “crazy” those who try to know & assert their knowledge). How it hits you with technology.

Camellia-Berry Grass is trying to live. Presently in Philadelphia, she is the author of Hall of Waters (2019, The Operating System). A 2019 nominee for the Krause Essay Prize, her essays and poems have been widely published. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama, and has taught most recently in the MFA program for creative writing at Rosemont College. She’s trying to blog more. Sawtoothy says “Hi!”

DON’T TURN AROUND: JENDI REITER ON “DER KOMMISSAR”

The year was 1983, or 1601, or 1890. The place: New York's Lower East Side, but actually Buckingham Palace, or fin de siècle Vienna. Anywhere but here, anytime but now.
Growing up in a three-member Victorian re-enactment cult, I didn't have MTV. I owned three non-classical music cassettes: Madonna's debut self-titled album and Like a Virgin, and Huey Lewis's Sports, which I didn't actually like once I'd listened to the whole thing, but couldn't admit my misjudgment, or else my mother might never let me buy another pop album.
I had briefly owned and loved Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual, but my mother made me return it to Tower Records. I don't know why. It was one of those arbitrary diktats that justifies its authority by the lack of alternatives, like why we didn't have a toaster, or the size of the paper that prisoners can write their letters on, or why liquor is legal and LSD isn't.
The culture that awaited on the other side of childhood was full of such mysteries, which only multiplied, attended by fear and not-always-unpleasant trembling, when I was allowed to have my first portable radio. That little silver brick, lousy with static, was my treasure. Memory tells me the first song I heard on it was Prince's "Raspberry Beret", but memory is wrong. The Internet dates this raunchy ballad from 1985 but I feel that strap around my 11-year-old wrist, picture myself carrying the box of voices from out there through the conspicuous solitude of middle school.
Did we understand anything, before we could discover its backstory and 1,000 variations by typing a few words into Google? My 10-year-old son engages with music in a way that would have been both satisfying and terrifying, and certainly unimaginable, to me as a tween. He veers from his classmate's history skit about Rasputin, to the Boney M. disco song, to the endless YouTube remixes featuring bongo cats or Minecraft zombies or a dancing cut-out of Vladimir Putin, and finally to conversations about the Ukraine war and the Trump-Putin autocratic alliance. I'd say he's drowning in context, except he doesn't seem overwhelmed at all.
As for me in 6th grade, I was aware that the Cold War existed because my parents let me read their Robert Ludlum spy thrillers (shout-out to the bonkers scene in The Holcroft Covenant where the Nazi has hot sex with his sister and then kills her—like that didn't confuse my hormones at all). But I was uninterested in political developments that occurred after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The clothes were less attractive. The problems were too real.

*

Before "Der Kommissar" was a one-hit wonder performed by a band that fell apart almost immediately thereafter, it was the creation of Austrian pop star Falco (Johann Hölzel), who composed it with songwriter Robert Ponger and recorded it in December 1981. The German-language version of "Der Kommissar" charted at number one in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan.
Wikipedia's entry for Falco claims that it was one of the earliest successful rap songs in Europe. This genre designation surprised me. The well-known melodic hook is so strong that I had misremembered him singing the verses, when he actually speaks them over the background music in a hard-edged rapid patter. My preconceptions and, let's face it, my prejudices wouldn't have let me stretch "rap" to encompass a video so white and European, Falco's slicked-back hair and white suit an aesthetic throwback to Elvis or the Bright Young Things of the 1920s, rather than the Reagan-era urban ferment that our family tried to pretend we weren't living in the middle of.
The story that Falco's lyrics tell is disjointed—okay, maybe some of that is Google Translate filling in for my half-forgotten undergraduate German 101, but still. Two, three, four, eins, zwei, drei/Es is nichts dabei. "Two, three, four, one, two, three/There is nothing there." He meets a young woman whose heart is rein und weiss (pure and white), but not in the way that you might think. We're talking about cocaine: ihre Nase spricht dafuer (her nose speaks for it), Den Schnee auf demn wir alle talwaerts fahren (The snow we all ride down the valley on). A better translation that was probably not written by a robot still leaves some of the song's references obscure. What is the nursery rhyme about? Why are they scraping the walls?
Are the lyrics oblique and full of disorienting subject changes in order to mimic the experience of being high and paranoid on the subway? Or because Falco himself was (reputedly) often stoned to the point of incoherence? Or is it the coded language of life under the Stasi, the dreaded secret police of East Germany's communist regime?

Dreh dich nicht um—oh oh oh
Der Kommissar geht um—oh oh oh

*

When I was a child, I didn't know how to lie, but I was forced to do it all the time. My family depended on me to deny something that everyone around me knew to be true.
Roberta, the woman who drove me to and from school, attended all my parent-teacher conferences while my mother put me to bed, and was always at our apartment on the rare occasions I had friends over—this woman could not be named even in our own house as my second mom (because my mother could have no other gods before her), nor as my mother's partner (because butch Roberta might be gay, but my high-femme mother wasn't, you see).
My moms moved in together in 1977, the same year that born-again pop singer Anita Bryant founded the first national anti-gay activist group, Save Our Children. Like the Right's current rhetoric about trans folks and our allies as child-abuse groomers, Bryant and her ilk spread the myth that gays and lesbians "recruited" children into perversity. Based on this argument, California State Senator John Briggs crusaded for a ballot measure that would let school boards ban gay teachers. Though activists like Harvey Milk defeated the initiative, it cast a shadow long enough to touch my parents, two elementary-school teachers in the NYC public school system.
Without ever hearing a word of LGBTQ history, I understood I had to deny that Roberta lived with us, and call her my "babysitter" long after I was too old for one. Sometimes, it's what we don't know, that teaches us to be afraid. I didn't have any friends, imaginary or otherwise, with same-sex parents. There were no out lesbians in Anne of Green Gables or "The Love Boat" or Cricket Magazine.
What I did have was camp. Not the kind you do in the woods with sticks and marshmallows. The kind with glitter and tragedy. Mannered facial expressions and hot pink clothing and a throbbing backbeat that hinted at cruel pleasures. I had 80s music.
After the Fire's "Der Kommissar" didn't make me as horny as The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams are Made of This," but it scared me in the same fascinating way. Someone with power was watching me. He was sophisticated, implacable, villainous. Or what was worse, I wanted to be the watcher. I was aroused by wielding that power of surveillance, which had only ever tormented me when I was on the receiving end (a/k/a all the time). I wanted to wear a uniform—preferably something outdated, with a frock coat and brass buttons—and hurt a man who would enjoy it. Which was not something I could ever admit, so I went to the ballet in my calico dresses and bought Gibson Girl paper dolls and cut their heads off.
In my unrecognized little trans-boy heart, I had re-invented Tom of Finland.

 *

If only I could find a way of changing what I am
Maybe that's what I need to know?
But would it go and complicate some vast eternal plan
To re-direct the way I want to go?

—After the Fire, "Signs of Change"

"Der Kommissar" was the only big U.S. hit, and the last single, of British pop band After the Fire. According to their official website—because no band is too obscure to have a surviving fandom in the Internet era—the original group formed and disbanded in 1972, was relaunched two years later by keyboardist Peter Banks and drummer Ian Adamson as a contemporary Christian music (CCM) group, and went through a dizzying number of personnel and stylistic changes over its remaining eight years.
A video of ATF performing their 1979 song "One Rule for You" certainly looks like a band having an identity crisis. Lead singer/guitarist Andy Piercy goes full Carnaby Street in round sunglasses and a long black coat adorned with costume jewelry, while the keyboardist sports a bad teenage mullet and a T-shirt, and the bass player wears a motorcycle jacket. Drummer Ivor Twidell seems to be pretending he's a children's birthday party clown, switching between a multitude of silly hats and pulling comical faces.
So perhaps it makes sense that their most successful song should be a cover. (A March Faxness and March Fadness two-fer.) From start to finish, ATF was trying and not quite succeeding to pull together a coherent self from pieces of other bands.
Here's where not-knowing can be a gift, the space that an untutored imagination populates with a more creative and alluring scene than the one that my peers who could afford cable TV were watching. Beause ATF's video for "Der Kommissar" is, frankly, weak.
Whereas Falco took an enigmatic, minimalist approach in his video, sing-speaking the entire song in a barely furnished studio between drags on his cigarette, ATF acted out the lyrics. The scene: an elegant, old-fashioned nightclub meant to evoke a European cabaret or the kind of hotel bar where spies exchange secrets. A tarantula crawls across the table—wrong climate, surely? Piercy sips his aperitif at a table. A femme fatale saunters over and slips him a matchbox labeled DER KOMMISSAR.
But as with their "One Rule for You" video, the mix of vibes is all wrong. The background characters' teased hair and heavy eyeshadow scream "1980s teenager," a jarring anachronism in this setting. Piercy's bored expression clashes with the words he spits.
The bar is transported to the inside of a train car where the characters continue drinking, quite calmly. Don't turn around, oh oh oh. But they don't need the warning. These aren't people whose desires are unnameable, who self-police their gestures. The song is still supposedly about cocaine, but there isn't a sniff in sight.
Yet, a few moments in the video hint at the campiness of repression, the artistry of the secret life, that which gives the Kommissars of our imagination their erotic charge. The spoken refrain Alles klar, Herr Kommissar? ("Is everything all right, Officer?") is lip-sync'd in the male singer's voice from the mouth of the femme fatale, and then by a woman in male formal wear like Marlene Dietrich. The femme fatale puts her makeup on in reverse, her lipstick behaving like an eraser that wipes the red off. In a drab overcoat and librarian spectacles, a don’t-look-at-me aesthetic like a pre-transition Elliot Page, she returns to the same bar to retrieve a Walkman with orange foam headphones. Re-costumed, or closer to genuine? Don't ask. Clarity isn't queer.

*

My mother didn't vote. Her stated reason was that she didn't want to get called for jury duty. Roberta did whatever my mother made her do. So she didn't vote either. If Roberta were sequestered, she wouldn't be around to clean the house, cook the meals, and dodge the occasional picture frame thrown at her head if the aforementioned chores weren't carried out satisfactorily.
In their political quietism, I discern an ancestral memory of Jewish survival skills, the necessity of being invisible to the State. I may have cared more about whether Richard III killed the Princes in the Tower than the Iran-Contra scandal, but I knew my immigrant history. I read Escape from Warsaw and The Endless Steppe. As a family, we read Isaac Bashevis Singer and Anzia Yezierska, saw "Fiddler on the Roof" on Broadway, and kept our passports current in case we had to emigrate to Israel. Cossacks, Nazis, Soviets, or American racists—take your pick, anyone might kill us. We could never be at home in this world, so why not pretend we were Victorian debutante girls?
These images of the Holocaust and pogroms were the background I brought to "Der Kommissar" when it dominated the airwaves in 1983. What with my portable radio's poor reception and the vagueness of the lyrics, the song's storyline was an enigma that I filled in with my own shadowy anxieties about the Kommissar's identity. He was a Kafka-esque archetype of the authoritarian forces that could come at us from any direction, the past or the future.
However, the dance-party music that accompanied those lyrics took the edge off the menace. If "Der Kommissar" was a Nazi, perhaps he was only the kind from "The Sound of Music," or if we were really lucky, "The Producers"—danger leavened by buffoonish incompetence. An unstable mix that had to be watched carefully, like the moods of a mother who could say to her six-year-old "You're my reason for living" and "A door has closed in my heart to you" on the same day.

And if he talks to you and you don't know why
You say your life is gonna make you die

*

I would have been disappointed to learn that "Der Kommissar" was merely about avoiding cops so you could get high. This was not the work ethic that enabled Fievel to escape the Cossacks in An American Tail. Your boi was going to dissociate productively. Friendship with the stoner boy who gave me a Pink Floyd mixtape would not catapult our family from the ghetto to Harvard. Writing an 80-page paper about T.S. Eliot over summer vacation, on the other hand, just might.

*

Last summer, shortly after my 50th birthday, my husband and I spent a weekend clearing some boxes from our basement that had been in storage since the Berlin Wall fell. They turned out to contain lots of cut-out and coloring books from my childhood. You're looking at the only Gen-X'er who had both Rudolf Nureyev and Rudolph Valentino paper dolls (#transitiongoals, am I right?). I was struck by how thoroughly my tastes had been merged with my mother's. Not that I didn't genuinely like 19th-century advertising posters and Princess Diana, but that I was shamed out of any other interests—paintball, "The Jeffersons," MAD Magazine—that didn't appeal to a middle-aged white lady with class insecurity.
Before I was a person, I was a cover band.

He's got the power and you're so weak
And your frustration will not let you speak

*

Where are they now? Falco is dead. A few days before his 41st birthday, he fatally crashed his car into a bus in the Dominican Republic, where he had been living as an expat while he tried to re-launch his musical career. His fan site alludes discreetly to drug and alcohol addiction and an acrimonious divorce.
ATF lead singer Andy Piercy returned to his CCM roots. According to his website, "Andy Piercy: Investing in Worship," from 1993-2006 he was the music director at Holy Trinity Brompton, where Rev. Nicky Gumbel started the globally successful ALPHA Christian education curriculum. If you can imagine such a thing as an Anglican charismatic megachurch, Holy Trinity Brompton is it.
Roberta is a queer film archivist in the lesbian capital of America. Our homes are a 15-minute walk apart. In 2011 we went no-contact with my mother, who's now in a nursing home in Riverdale. (The one where the Russian Embassy to the U.N. is, not the one where Archie takes off his shirt every week.) There's a whole other essay to be written about the playlist for that breakup, and how hearing the right song on the radio at the right moment can literally save a battered woman's life, and you might get to read that story if Kelly Clarkson's "Breakaway" is ever a March Xness pick.
By the time March Fadness 80s Edition is down to its Final Four, I will (knock wood!) be recovering from top surgery. Please keep voting for "Der Kommissar" in case I am too stoned to do so.
"Der Kommissar" isn't a great song, but it's one we can't forget. Like my childhood. And maybe yours too?

Jendi Reiter is the author of the novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016), the short story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press, 2018), and five poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022). Their awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for Poetry, the New Letters Prize for Fiction, the Wag's Revue Poetry Prize, the Bayou Magazine Editor's Prize in Fiction, and two awards from the Poetry Society of America. Two Natures won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction and was a finalist for the Book Excellence Awards and the Lascaux Prize for Fiction. They are the editor of WinningWriters.com, an online resource site with contests and markets for creative writers.