I enjoyed this book

Not an interesting read. Self-inflated yet still dull.

I know I sound contemptuous of Occupy Wall Street. I am. I resented the idea of hanging out in a corporate office park on a doomed mission to found some new utopian society while the real world went on with business as usual. I wanted everyone in the real world to have healthcare, housing, decent work, and time off to go to the doctor (or just to fucking relax). I believed then, and still believe now, that these things require not a community, or a process, but the democratization of the economy, something that’s historically been advanced by organized labor, not a bunch of downwardly mobile middle-class kids playing revolutionary commune.

Dirtbag is far far better than the previous [b:"dirtbag-left" book|38531606|The Chapo Guide to Revolution A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason|Chapo Trap House|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1518576678l/38531606._SY75_.jpg|60164430] but I would fall short of an outright endorsement. I would actually recommend reading this book for a millennial reminisce, but don’t take Frost’s word for what happened.

Be ready to feel old

However . . . if I was perhaps a little more ruthless, perhaps a little more ambitious, or merely the sort to get off on intra-social, pseudo-political BDSM ... well, I could have been a tyrant. I won't say I have never been tempted.
And those piggies would have loved it.

Dirtbag definitely contains the millennial touchstone of trying to enter into an uncertain economic market post 2008. The reflections on Occupy Wall Street are also interesting, if not exactly new, in that reporting at the time picked up that the consensus approach to decision-making had major issues. COVID gets one essay that covers a singular experience at a Californian vaccination station but it is very strong and worth reading on its own. Frost’s writing style can be meandering but I personally find it engaging, even when she is on tangents.

Frost’s politics are clear – she explicitly describes herself as a socialist and believes in reinvigorating American industry. She dislikes identity politics and is dismissive of mutual aid... ...which, whatever, I do not have strong opinions either way. Further, whether the liberal media were jealous of us, or whether Corbyn and Sanders were shanked by their respective establishments is not really a big deal to me – Dirtbag provides a record of how a certain group perceived reality. Maybe they are even the closest to the “truth”!

That Frost’s politics have a psychosexual component to them is least insightful statement I could ever make:

A corpse can't laugh at your soft dick or look at your soft belly with disgust ... or call you a pussy-ass little college boy bitch.

Nonetheless, Frost is cogent enough about her substantive arguments that I can let it slide as a quirk, much like the fake redacting of names and places where the redactions are right by citations that reveal those names and places. The accuracy of Frost’s recollections of “Weird Twitter” is open to debate but it does read as a millennial nostalgia for a time and place that perhaps never existed, which does make it valuable for how a millennial sees the past, regardless of accuracy. It is not the voice if the generation, but worthy of reflecting upon as we approach two decades past it.

Facts matter

That election proved that the future wasn’t written, that anything could happen, that the plans made in the halls of power could still be sabotaged by popular will, or even upended by a little bit of chaos.

Dirtbag does flirt with being an unreliable narrator style, in that its just one person’s experiences and who knows how accurate they are in all things. My tendency initially was to give Frost a pass on most of the political analysis stuff because my critique is from the viewpoint of a mostly uninformed non-American opinion. However Dirtbag does have a (sometimes intentional) looseness with facts that undermines Frost’s points.

Frost’s opinion on Gamergate is an example of an unforced error. I get that she primarily sees it as irrelevant. However, she still weighs in on it and gives a recounting that is so catastrophically wrong that ruins any conclusions she drew from it. The “journalist” (Frost’s choice to put in quotation marks, which is such a microcosm of how Frost tends to provoke conflict in petty ways) did not review Depression Quest, nor did their relationship with the game designer start at the time relevant to it. It is Frost at her near-worst, lazily chucking out opinions without doing the proper reading. Fine if she sees the focus on Gamergate as a waste of time but to have such a bad foundation for that opinion means I will treat it as worthless.

So where is Frost at her worst? Abortion. In terms of her personal experiences, she is good – great even – I believe there is an understandable tendency for both sides to go to extreme examples and her relatively banal (but still unnecessarily complicated for her) incidents seem more authentic to a significant proportion of situations.

The issue is when Frost uses it to neutralise the biggest problem around the “dirtbag-left” continuing to resist Hillary in 2016 after the primaries on the basis it was of limited impact which party won. While "Fascist Trump" might be an easy strawman to knock down by waxing on about how Trump did not go to extremes during his term, his Supreme Court appointments directly led to the overturning of Roe v Wade. Frost baldly pretends that certain positions Clinton and VP nominee Tim Kaine held at different times reflected the totality of where they stood in 2016, leaving the reader to infer that only Bernie would truly have protected abortion. Trump's Supreme Court picks goes unmentioned even though they are critical to where the law went – a clear consequence of Clinton losing. It is just simply not plausible that Clinton would not have picked judges that would have at least upheld the existing law.

I do not believe Frost and her anti-Clinton ilk made a material difference to 2016 (funnily enough there’s a line which you could interpret as her thinking they did!), but I do hold that Frost knows that that group were wrong on the inconsequentiality of the 2016 election and that Frost is willing to create a fantasy world where they are not. I think it would be too much to expect a mea culpa, but the lack of reflection does not sit well with me. I also consider seeing Trump’s success in 2016 as proof that Sanders could succeed as kind of... ...unempathetic to those who were adversely impacted by Trump.

That point on abortion also leads into the issue of Frost's likeability, something that I have previously considered non-essential for a good [b:book|57145833|My Body|Emily Ratajkowski|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1646821613l/57145833._SY75_.jpg|89438978]. The issue is that is something with Frost's writing and opinions that rubs more raw than with Ratajkowski - that Frost explicitly enjoys bullying. I don't think it necessarily damns Dirtbag, but I would not feel compelled to argue with anyone who disagreed with me.

The math doesn’t lie; we can’t evade class conflict by slicing meagre scraps thinner and thinner. That’s just sharing a boiling pot of stones.

I could have rounded this book up to a four, mainly because Frost does share stimulating points, regardless of whether I agree with them. What holds me back is that I just cannot get past the slackness or straight out deceit on certain facts.

Sometimes harsh, but never cruel; often flippant (in a way I frequently found hilarious) but fights hard to remain honest and self-aware; irreverent to a T but doesn't undermine the stakes it lays out with a gradual, subtle, but hard-won vulnerability. This is a juicy, swift, sharp, and smart exemplar of what Terry Eagleton memorably characterized as "hope without optimism".

Burt read my mind when he wrote his review: "I’ll admit I don’t know who Amber A’Lee Frost is and have never listened to her podcast (which apparently has a loyal following). Maybe it’s good that I don’t know who she is because I didn’t go into this book of essays expecting to love it...I guess she sees socialism as the solution, yet she never proposes exactly how or why it would solve anything. I was open to learning why Frost thinks [this b]ut she doesn’t appear to know herself..."

[read his review in its entirety here]

A heartfelt thanks to St. Martin's Press for sending this book's ARC in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own, unless otherwise cited.