The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman

Hours and hours of podcast on the subject of a relationship that began barely over three years ago in real time, and which is now in the hands of lawyers, judges, and assorted other Authorities.

Some interesting facts that might or might not shed additional light on the story.

–Gaiman by his own account has been a promoter of classically liberal ideas, including feminism, for decades.

–The primary creator of the podcast is the sister of Boris Johnson, very much a conservative and former Prime Minister of the UK.

–The concept of ‘neurodivergence’ comes up more than once here in connection to both the author and his accusers.

–Gaiman’s parents were high-ranking Scientologists when he was growing up. He himself got through several of their levels or grades at an early age, and worked for the organization as a young adult before he became a well-known writer and apparently quit.

–Not only is he an extremely talented creative artist with tons of hip cred, but married one as well, namely Amanda F- Palmer of the Dresden Dolls.

Palmer is named in the lawsuit as well, but is only mentioned briefly a few times in the reporting of these episodes. She did manage, in my view, to sum everything up neatly in a single bright and characteristically poetical phrase:

“Insidious Cultural Sickness”

To be fair, she was using it in a very limited sense in the days of Me-Too, to describe the horrifying state of the relationship between the genders.

But her intentions in the moment aside, she couldn’t be more right, about everything in civilized modernity.

From our food supply to our economics to our sex to our politics and to the finest works of our best and brightest and beyond …

It’s insidious sickness as far as the eye can see.

***

When I look back over the choices I’ve made and the paths I’ve taken in this life, and compare them to those made by anyone and everyone else I have known or admired or loved or hated or heard of …

I see, or feel, a pattern.

I am inevitably and deeply a product of the Sickness.

I have pretty consistently, though not always effectively, fought bitterly against it.

So there are days when habitually doing that helps me feel like a true noble warrior.

Then there are other days when I am sick as a dog, and completely overwhelmed by that very omnipresent and insidious sickness, and do nothing but shiver under the covers.

The nature of the battle has shifted considerably.

I no longer harbor any ambition about curing the disease, or imagine that such a thing is even possible.

All I know how to do, can do on the bad days, is to rip sweat-soaked sheets from my body, fling them to the corner, go make another pot of coffee, and maybe just maybe fight back hard enough to get them laundered and made back into a proper bed before the moon returns and night falls once more.

On a few rare days when there is enough sun and not too much wind, I can walk five miles.

I can speak out and tell the you that isn’t there about what I see, probably spitting through the narrative in frustration because it seems so fucking obvious, thus rendering the attempted communication from consciousness to consciousness intermittent and broken.

This is the life and world we’ve collectively chosen.

The best we can do.

Under the circumstances.

We are American Gods.

That is the pattern.