I Want to Burn This Place Down: Essays

by Maris Kreizman

So here I am coming out as a late bloomer, a fortysomething former “good Democrat” who got angry and became radicalized and is stronger for it. Who finally has more faith in mutual aid than in government assistance. Who will never again donate to a national political campaign when there are people right outside my door I can help directly. Who is still actively choosing every day to break away from the self-centeredness of rugged individualism in favor of community and solidarity.

My CGM updates every five minutes. There is always new information to take in, and I’m addicted. How many times a day did I look at my phone before this app? It can’t have been a flattering figure. How much worse has it gotten with my CGM? What percentage of my time is spent checking its readings? Great, more numbers running through my head as I try to calculate how risk-averse and bad at breaking routines I was to begin with, and how much more severe those tendencies are now. I wonder if it’s still called doomscrolling if it’s not social media you’re looking at.

I’m fourteen, so I can’t entirely articulate what, specifically, needs changing in America, but what I do know absolutely is that Republicans, who’ve had a lock on the presidency for years, are evil and only care about other rich people and villainizing the poor. My parents have great faith that Bill Clinton will be the one to change all that, and I believe them. He’s young and handsome; he’s a Rhodes Scholar but also a man of the people; he’s hip, or at least hipper than the Bushes. Tomorrow will be better than before, according to Clinton’s campaign theme song, “Don’t Stop,” and I believe Fleetwood Mac, too.

Good Democrat that I am, it doesn’t occur to me that trusting America’s largest corporations to care about the well-being of others is like trusting Hannibal Lecter to be satisfied by a dinner of a veggie burger with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. What could go wrong?

is when I meet some of these future kings of capitalism that I begin to consider what serial killers and CEOs really have in common: the American imagination gives them far too much credit for being diabolical, makes them out to be far more intelligent than they actually are. It is here where I learn how central mediocrity is to Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil.

In fact, the first draft of our report now brings to mind that old David Foster Wallace chestnut from his essay in the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus (2004), where he calls out people who use the word “utilize” when the word “use” is simple and direct and works just as well. Trip is a utilizer, delighting in making language more complicated than necessary in order to make his thoughts sound more complex. And yet the same guy who couldn’t take proper notes radiates authority when making our presentation. So while I assume the pose of a dutiful executive assistant, Trip is all charisma, with no hint of stage fright. He almost makes me want to invest in Kohl’s myself. Trip’s performance requires an entirely different skill set from the ones I’d been trying to develop. A good work ethic is nothing compared to the inner confidence of a man who has never been taught to doubt himself and has no reason to consider that he might ever be wrong. (It is not until the year 2023 that I will hear the term “nepo baby” and it will all make sense.)

With controlled rage, Joan and Peggy finish out the meeting, but it never really gets back on track. All of their efforts will be for naught. Later in the elevator, Peggy attempts to keep it casual. They’ve kept up appearances so far. “So, should we get lunch?” In response, Joan simply says, “I want to burn this place down.”

I watch these men thrive after having broken the most basic rules of decency, and all I see is entitlement. These are the men who get to feel as if the world is still full of possibility no matter how many times they fuck up, and who get to experience few or no consequences when they do. I have no use for these men or their politics, no matter whom I may have once revered.

I found out the hard way that the only thing hard work guarantees is unpaid overtime.

I didn’t really have to reckon with the book publishing world’s complicity in spreading hate and lies at the time. Even though I was battling printers during the day and eating bar nuts for dinner, I was still lucky, so lucky that the content of hateful books produced by the industry in which I was complicit didn’t directly impact my life. So it was easy to keep focus on the daily drudgery and not big-picture concerns. Then Trump was elected. Then children were separated from their families at the southern border. Then over a million Americans died in a global pandemic, then Roe v. Wade was overturned, then there was a massive uptick in books being banned in school libraries. I watched the dehumanization of trans people become a right-wing talking point that was then often validated by centrist Democrats. Every single day I would scroll through Twitter and find some new devastating consequence to, among other things, publishers’ role in elevating bigots.

What a profoundly fucked up—and profoundly American—thing to say: I found health insurance because I got lucky.

“You can’t love anyone else until you learn to love yourself first,” said every women’s magazine I’ve ever read, and later, RuPaul. As if I had to spend months or years working on all of my shit before I could subject another person to my messiness. I need to fast-forward here and remind you that I am now very happily married, and I still don’t love myself all that much. Both things are true at once. Women really can have it all!

I have entire mixtapes devoted to some dude I went on two dates with and who then never called me again, delighted to equate my own insignificant dilemma with the big feelings of Fiona Apple and Liz Phair. At the college bar karaoke night I’d sing a ballad—“Angel of the Morning” is a favorite—that’s meant for one oblivious patron in the crowd who would absolutely not get the subtext. I’m concocting a whole psychodrama, and he probably won’t even get the main text, too busy chatting with his friends or ordering another beer, or worse, hitting on someone else entirely. Later, in the grand tradition of angsty white women who find solace in books, I would see myself in Sylvia Plath’s journals: “There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.”