by Sid Holt
There’s a suspicion in some corners that West, who has recently begun making appearances on Keeping Up with the Kardashians, may be borrowing another idea from his wife’s family by starting a church. Churches, these days, can be a glossy business proposition. Hillsong, best known for its celebrity-packed Los Angeles congregation—its pastor, Carl Lentz, famously baptized Justin Bieber in the NBA player Tyson Chandler’s bathtub—pulls in more than a hundred million (mostly tax-exempt) dollars per year. In 2009, Kris Jenner, West’s mother-in-law, cofounded the California Community Church, which operates mostly out of a Sheraton hotel in Agoura Hills. The California Community Church is led by a pastor named Brad Johnson, who resigned from his previous pulpit after revelations that he’d had an extramarital affair. Jenner tracked Johnson down at his subsequent job as a Starbucks barista, persuaded him to lead her new church, and got him to officiate Khloé Kardashian and Lamar Odom’s wedding on TV. (When Johnson later married the woman with whom he’d had an affair, Jenner officiated.) The California Community Church, which has already got into some tax trouble, asks congregants to pledge either a thousand dollars per month or, as is typical of many Christian churches, ten percent of their income. In old interviews, Kardashian West has reiterated her commitment to tithing. (“Every year. Absolutely,” she told Piers Morgan.) In 2013, she sent her mother’s church almost fifty grand.
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Perhaps West is dipping his toe in these waters. It also seems possible that Sunday Service fills a deeply personal need. Though he announced a few years ago that he was fifty-three million dollars in debt, West lives in extremely rarefied circumstances these days—presumably thanks to his wife, whose net worth is estimated to be three hundred and fifty million dollars. A recent Vogue video shows their house to be a cavernous, white, near-empty, museum-like edifice; Kardashian West describes it as a “minimal monastery.” It is a stark contrast to the Sunday Service videos, which, if nothing else, are loud and full of people.
On the live stream from Coachella, West had purple hair to match his T-shirt. He didn’t enter the picture until about forty-five minutes into the performance, and he didn’t take center stage until close to the end. The choir ran through gospel standards and through gospel versions of West’s music; Chance the Rapper, who speaks and raps often about his Christian faith and shares snapshots of devotional books on Instagram, danced atop the hill. “Jesus Christ is Lord!” Chance shouted into the microphone, rapping his incandescent verse from “Ultralight Beam,” which includes the couplet “I made ‘Sunday Candy,’ I’m never going to hell / I met Kanye West, I’m never going to fail.” In the middle of the song, West started crying, and Kid Cudi comforted him. DMX, who, earlier, had said another prayer, wrapped the rapper in a hug. West seemed off while performing—a little slow, a little cloudy. After “Jesus Walks,” he sank to his knees in the grass and closed his eyes for a long time.
Like West, I grew up in a community where Christianity was presented as a mandate. I spent years, when I was younger, wishing that church could be wordless and strange; I felt the presence of God more profoundly when I was in a crowd of people listening to music—rap, in particular—than I did while listening to a pastor speak. I also saw, after a decade inside an evangelical megachurch, how quickly a genuine hunger for salvation and community could be converted into cash and self-aggrandizement. West’s audience—his curated guests, his festival acolytes—has been primed by our cultural moment to overlook the deep bleakness of invite-only worship, of a 225-dollar bleach-stained sweatshirt that’s supposed to promote God and Kanye at the same time. But, even worse, many of them are surely drawn to Sunday Service out of some sort of meaningful longing: these young people who can afford to pay four figures to behave badly and photograph well in the desert are pursuing absolution, too, in their way. So many things today seem, upon reflection, like a cry for help disguised as a demonstration of cultural capital. At his most courageous, West has seemed hallowed because of how purely he expressed a real hunger. In 2008, he recorded a live album in London, with an all-female string orchestra, called Late Orchestration, which includes a rendition of “Jesus Walks.” I’ve been rewatching that performance. It’s sublime and agonized, and full of the sort of miraculous devotion that I used to hear about in church.
Love, Death, and Begging for Celebrities to Kill You
The first time I noticed that quite a lot of people on the Internet seemed to be begging celebrities to kill them was a couple of years ago. “Can lana del rey step on my throat already,” one person tweeted. “Snap my neck and hide my body,” another announced, when Lady Gaga posted a new profile photo. Taylor Swift could “run me over with a tractor and I’d say thank you and ask her if she wants to do it again,” another wrote. If you performed a cursory search, you’d find hundreds of such messages, mostly lobbed by young millennials and members of Generation Z. There was an emphatic queerness to much of this discourse, whether or not the person tweeting identified as anything but straight. Many of the messages were about women and sent by women; the subset of men who attracted these tweets tended to be girlish, in a boy-band way. There were lots of appeals to sweetly handsome Korean pop stars, lots of “harry styles punch me in the face” requests, lots of wishes for the still-babyish Justin Bieber to run people over with his car. Nowadays, on Twitter, every hour brings a new crop of similar entreaties.
One takeaway from all this is that young people really love celebrities. Another is that we’re craving unmediated connection so desperately that we would accept it in the form of murder. It’s also possible that we simply want to die. Earlier this year, at the Cut, in a piece about the upswing of “run me over” tweets, Gabriella Paiella observed that the popularity of these jokes can’t be separated from the ambient fatalism inculcated by attention to actual real-world problems—“the fact that we’re living during a time when we’re constantly being reminded that the Earth is going to be virtually uninhabitable by the end of the century, that capitalism is wholly unsustainable, and that we’re just one push of a button away from perishing in a nuclear war.” Paiella talked to the writer Brandy Jensen, who had recently tweeted that her primary reaction to seeing a hot person was to think “back over me with a truck.” Everyone, Jensen said, seemed to be constantly posting about how they were horny and how they wanted to die; it was natural that the two would converge.
Devotion, by its nature, tends to invite agony. “Love has brought me within the reach of lovely, cruel arms that / unjustly kill me,” Petrarch writes, in Robert M. Durling’s English translation of “Rime Sparse,” a set of poems written in the fourteenth century. Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” published in 1593, describes Venus as a maiden who “murders with a kiss.” In the early seventeenth century, John Donne famously begged, “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” (A degraded Internet-era version of the poem, “Holy Sonnet 14,” might involve the impassioned poet pleading with God to choke him.) But this language appears to be spilling over. It may originate in a sort of erotic consecration, but love and pain, joy and punishment, seem increasingly convergent, at least in the ways that people express themselves online. Love may be timeless, but the half-ironic millennial death wish has become an underground river rushing swiftly under the surface of the age.
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Earlier this month, I got on the phone with Mistress Velvet, a dominatrix in Chicago with a day job in social work, to ask her what she made of all this. She’d started noticing the prevalence of punch-me-in-the-face talk in 2011, she told me, when she was first coming into her queerness, in her early twenties. “Saying that I’d ‘literally let her stab me’ was a way of linguistically valuing my queer relationships over my heterosexual ones,” she said. “But I’ve also become interested in it in the context of BDSM.” Mistress Velvet told me that, when clients came to her with this sort of intense sacrificial devotion, they often were seeking replacements for powerful people who were absent from their lives. “It reminds me of when I transitione
d from Christianity to atheism,” she said. “I was suddenly afraid of death—I was nihilistic—and I had to find something else that could fill that gap.”
That parallel had never occurred to me, I told her.
“I mean, if we’re thinking of it,” Mistress Velvet said, “Jesus died for our sins, and believers are supposed to give our lives back to him. My clients sometimes talk to me like this. They’d let me run them over with a truck. I’m like, ‘That’s not even what I want! Your life is sacred!’ ”
“Right,” I said, suddenly dazed. “Maybe it’s a dream of mutuality—of sacrificing yourself for someone in such a way that they would then be permanently tied to you.”
I messaged a seventeen-year-old Harry Styles fan whose social-media bio included the sentence “harry can run me over, use my crumpled corpse to wipe his car off and then use me to avoid puddles on the street.” She’d been on “stan twitter” since 2012, she explained, and “us stans have always been pretty harsh with expressing our love.” (A stan, as the Oxford English Dictionary now recognizes, is an obsessive fan of a celebrity; the term comes from the 2000 Eminem song “Stan,” and it can be used both as a noun and a verb.) “I say these kinds of things because … it would honestly be an honor for Harry to run me over,” she wrote. An eighteen-year-old whose Twitter bio was “tom holland could run me over with a truck and I would say thank you” told me, “Even just being near him or in his presence would make me sooo happy, even if it meant he was running me over with a truck.”
After perusing the ample and growing archive of tweets in which people ask Cate Blanchett to step on their throats, I messaged a twenty-four-year-old woman who’d posted a photo of Blanchett with the caption “she’s so tall pls step on my throat ma’am.” Step-on-my-throat language, she wrote back, was all about “the LGBTQ people who just love to love and support women, and get more creative every passing day. its our safe place.” Plus, she added, “It’s Cate freaking Blanchett, you’d do anything she wants you to do.”
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But not all run-me-over tweets direct their sentiment at an object. Plenty of people on Twitter are begging to simply be run over, stepped on, punched in the face. The Twitter user @alwayssaddaily, whose name is stated as simply “Anxiety,” recently posted a series of emoji snowflakes that formed a giant “F,” followed by “UCKING RUN ME OVER.” It received twelve hundred likes. “I honestly feel that this new trend of expression is because people in society as a whole these days are becoming more and more numb to life and are losing perspective on the physical part of reality, which in turn causes the brain to react and express things a certain way in order to satisfy the need for feeling in our bodies,” the twenty-year-old woman behind the account told me. “Life is becoming increasingly redundant, which makes me iterate these thoughts out loud to myself—hit me with a car, fucking kill me—for psychological satisfaction.”
In Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, Freud wrote about the unconscious sense of guilt he attributed to his patients, who tended not to believe what he was suggesting; it was hard to become conscious of being unconsciously guilty. “In order to make ourselves at all intelligible to them,” he wrote, referring to the approach that analysts took with such patients, “we tell them of an unconscious need for punishment, in which the sense of guilt finds expression.” In this framework, masochism is the ego’s desire to atone.
In my life—which is mostly, I would say, a vibrant and happy one—this masochistic tendency surfaces constantly, in a sidelong way. About a month ago, while spending a rowdy weekend at a music festival on the beach with nine other people, I started counting the jokes we made about walking into the ocean and dying together. A friend and I kept talking about drowning each other “as a bit.” For me, the capacity to experience such unfettered pleasure—the fact of having the time and capital and freedom required for it, at a time when we know that so many people’s lives are worsening—is often what instigates the murmur of guilt. I do deserve to be run over with a dump truck, I think, at home, opening my delivery packages, thinking about how much plastic I have put on this planet, how much labor I have exploited for the sake of my own convenience. Longing and guilt intertwine every time I think about having children, who, if they exist, will exist in a world defined by manmade crisis and natural disaster. On the beach, flooded with joy, I felt the tug of that familiar undertow. “Fucking kill me,” I thought, suddenly desiring a sensation strong enough to silence itself—which is, I suppose, one way of defining love.
E. Jean Carroll’s Accusation Against Donald Trump, and the Raising, and Lowering, of the Bar
One of the things I have feared most since the night of the 2016 election is the inevitable hardening of my own heart—and what such hardening might lead to, especially if it were experienced by many other people as well. Specifically, I feared that the Trump era would bring a surfeit of bad news and that I would compartmentalize this bad news in order to remain functional and that this attempt to remain functional would itself be so demoralizing that it would contribute to the despair and distraction that allowed all this bad news to occur.
When I imagined specifics, back in November 2016, I pictured something like last week—or part of it. I imagined that undocumented families would be openly and cruelly persecuted in America and that there would be plans of mass raids and internment and that as this was happening I would not be rioting in the street as I ought to but depressively checking things off my Google Calendar to-do list and probably writing a blog post about a meme. What I didn’t imagine, though—and what actually occurred last week—is that a respected and well-known writer would accuse the president of raping her and that I would be so sad and numb, after years of writing about Trump’s many accusers, after watching Brett Kavanaugh get confirmed to the Supreme Court in the face of credible sexual-assault allegations, that I would not even have the courage to read the story for days.
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E. Jean Carroll, now seventy-five years old, is a longtime advice columnist for Elle. Her approach to life is distinctive: brisk, stylish, tough, compassionate. Her columns provided an early and crucial model for me—when I was little and waist-deep in the mistake of trying to understand life through women’s glossies—of never giving my personal problems more weight than was absolutely necessary. The essay that she published last week, in New York, titled “My List of Hideous Men”—it’s an excerpt from a forthcoming book—performs the tremendous and awful feat of bringing her sharp-edged breeziness to bear on a story about being raped. Carroll’s “hideosity bar is high,” she writes. A boy who shoved a stick or rock up her genitals when she was a girl doesn’t make the list. Hunter S. Thompson, slicing her pants off with a knife in a hot tub, doesn’t make it either, because, she writes, “to me there is a big difference between an ‘adventure’ and an ‘attack.’ ”
Carroll goes on to detail multiple sexual assaults: by a college suitor, by a boss who chased her down a hotel hallway, by the former CBS president and CEO Les Moonves. (Moonves denies the allegation.) “By now, Silent Generation aside, the question has occurred to you: Why does this woman seem so unfazed by all this horrible crap?” she writes. “Well, I am shallower than most people. I do not dwell on the past. I feel greater empathy for others than for myself. I do not try to control everything.” Plus, she adds, she’s a born cheerleader: she was a cheerleader in grade school, in high school, and was even the winner of a competition called Miss Cheerleader USA. For years, in her advice columns, she cheered for each correspondent to “pick herself up and go on.”
But there are two men, she writes, whom she wishes she’d spoken about sooner. One is a camp director who repeatedly molested her when she was twelve. The other is Donald Trump. The incident happened in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996, she writes. She and Trump ran into each other at Bergdorf Goodman; Trump convinced her to help him shop for a present in the lingerie department; Carroll—“and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity,” she
states—went into the fitting room with him; Trump shoved her against the wall, unzipped his pants, and forced his penis inside her. Eventually, Carroll fought him off and ran away. She still carries around the shrapnel of this encounter, myriad pointed details lodged in her mind—such as the fact that, at the beginning of the struggle, she was so shocked that she was laughing. There is a limit, for everyone, to the uses of compartmentalization. Whether it’s “my age, the fact that I haven’t met anyone fascinating enough over the past couple of decades to feel ‘the sap rising,’ as Tom Wolfe put it, or if it’s the blot of the real-estate tycoon, I can’t say,” Carroll writes, closing her essay. “But I have never had sex with anybody ever again.”
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A lot of hearts seem to have hardened not just in response to Carroll’s story but in the long lead-up to it. When the piece appeared online, there was an immediate unspoken sense, I thought—although it’s certainly possible that I’m projecting—that it would tell us only what we already knew. Trump accused himself of sexual assault, on tape, in 2005, while filming Access Hollywood, and we found out about it just before the election, and, because any man who boasts about grabbing women by the pussy is likely to have done so and worse, repeatedly and with no compunction, it’s all been extremely, deadeningly predictable from there. The White House said in a statement that Carroll’s story was “false and unrealistic” and was “created simply to make the President look bad.” Trump later stated that Carroll was just trying to sell books and claimed that he had never met her, despite New York running a photo of the two of them talking at a party. “It is a disgrace and people should pay dearly for such false accusations,” he said. On Monday, in an interview with The Hill, Trump, deploying a blatant grotesquerie that was surely intended to play to his base, said, “Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened.”