We're Going To Need Steam Control

Steam will be released, one way or another. 

It’s something American elites need to learn now. Not in the next presidential cycle and not when the Democrats – the only party remotely interested in offering tiny improvements around the edges of American life – take back control of one or both chambers of Congress. The lesson needs to be internalized today, right now: Steam, a righteous steam – as Tom Wolfe writes about in Bonfire of the Vanities –  has collected in the hearts of working people in the United States and it’s going to spill over in the form of unspeakable acts or it's going to be slowly and carefully released by those with the power and means to control the steam. Those are the choices.

Wolfe writes eloquently about “steam control” in his 1987 novel about the dirty inner workings of New York City and all the obscene greed, eye-watering corruption, systemic racism, and class warfare of New York in the years before it was made into a pristine tourist destination. Wolfe writes of a righteous steam – a righteous anger – that can and will take the form of violence, both random and targeted – take your pick – if it is ignored long enough. 

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The water of American life reached its boiling point during the bank bailouts of 2008, a breaking point in U.S. history that has delivered not one, but two presidential terms to a man who opposes representative democracy. Those hot little water molecules have since gained enough energy to break free from their liquid state and now threaten to burn anyone at any time, and maybe – with enough of those molecules transforming into furious water vapor – all the piping bursts all at once. Maybe there are more superheated molecules in our neighborhoods and cities and counties and states than we can know.

We saw that steam spill into full view this week in the hours after an assassin shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the middle of Manhattan, the casings of his bullets reading “deny,” “defend,” and “depose,” legal tactics insurance companies use to reduce liability or reject claims from people begging for healthcare from a healthcare system designed to withhold healthcare at any cost. 

The killing itself was only part of the steam being released into the open air. The real steam – the shit making the shaking pipes beg for mercy – was seen in the public reaction to Thompson’s killing (I'm no advocate for political violence and I think we're entering an extraordinarily dark period if this sort of act is glamorized, especially in the eyes of young people with no economic prospects). The steam streamed out in the form of untold millions of laughing emojis on social media platforms. It showed itself in social media comments from otherwise well adjusted people saying hey, this is what happens when you push folks too far, when you deny them basic human rights like access to a doctor. The steam could be seen in people openly celebrating Thompson’s murder, daydreaming online about more killings of prominent healthcare CEOs who had made themselves and their golf partners fabulously wealthy by using artificial intelligence to deny millions of requests for basic health services. 

Capitalism Is Coming For Your Kids

There’s an accelerational aspect to capitalism that – quite conveniently for capital – is invisible to people living within the system. It is as felt by the subjects of capital as it is unseen. It is destructive, yet unopposed. The acceleration is not toward the future, not toward something better and

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

The steam was everywhere on Wednesday, spilling out of any crevice with so much as a millimeter of open space. We got a glimpse of the unbridled and yes, righteous, anger that has animated 21st century life and brought us to the precipice of authoritarianism. American business elites and politicians better buck up and learn a little something about Reverend Bacon's steam control because what we saw from people in the wake of the Thompson assassination, both political and apolitical, working and middle class, chronically online and relatively offline alike, was only a gust of steam. There’s so much more where that came from. 

“I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick," a TikTok user wrote hours after Thompson was killed, according to the New York Times. "I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all of those patients and their families.”

“This needs to be the new norm," another TikTok user wrote as news broke of Thompson's death. "EAT THE RICH.”

The New York Times described the reaction to Thompson’s killing as “morbid glee” and shamed readers who might not take time to mourn this healthcare CEO. This – along with finger wagging in the direction of folks saying they're not all that sad about Wednesday's murder – misses the point entirely.

That there are so many Americans radicalized by a healthcare system that has taken their money and rejected so many of their requests for care is the takeaway here. That there are so many people who have watched loved ones get sick and die because they either can't afford proper care or can't access it through the labyrinthian channels designed to discourage use of health services or go broke and lose their home and their car and maybe their family because they fall headlong into a shit pile of medical debt, a horror that does not exist in most of the developed world – that's the real story of this week's steam release.

It's not that people are being mean online; it's about why otherwise normal people have been made into monsters.

I have what you might call "good" health insurance through my wife's work with the county government. The deductibles aren't terrible and the copays don't make me drop to my knees in the middle of CVS, though both have steadily risen over the past few years. This "good" insurance didn't save me and my wife from setting aside an hour or two almost every day for two weeks to contact the insurer for details on how exactly to cover medication and therapy my son needed.

My wife and I sat patiently through extended phone wait times, were told to call different numbers at different times with different information. We were told to arrange a call between the doctor and the insurer. We had to email and even fax documents detailing our kid's recommended medications and therapy. The insurer said no time and time again. There was always a new and inventive reason to create another loop through which to jump. The goal of this whole charade was terribly clear to us: The insurer wanted us to give up, to stop trying to use our "good" health plan for the benefit of our son. Their reason for being was to deny healthcare to the very people sending them money every month.

We eventually figured it out. That doesn't mean we didn't want to quit the whole fucking effort a hundred times, and we wondered what it was like for families with "bad" health insurance. How much worse could it get?

Investing In Steam Control 

The Reverend Bacon, a fantastically corrupt and powerful preacher in Bonfire of the Vanities, deals in what he calls “steam control.” It’s Bacon who tells New York City officials and police after the hit-and-run killing of a young black man that he can and will control the steam that pours forth from the Harlem community in the aftermath of the tragedy. If city electeds and cops want a face full of steam, the good reverend can make that happen. If they want that steam gently released in other, safer, nonviolent ways, he can do that too. 

When Bacon is asked by city officials to account for $350,000 given to his church for a new daycare center that was never built, the reverend implies that money was a down payment for his efforts to control Harlem residents and how they express their displeasure with the city and those who run it. 

“If you people were worried about the children, you would build the daycare center yourself,” Bacon says when asked about the missing $350,000. “No, my friend, you’re investing in something else. You’re investing in steam control. And you’re getting value for money. Value for money. So what I’m telling you is, you best be waking up. You’re practicing the capitalism of the future, and you don’t even know it. You’re not investing in a daycare center for the children of Harlem. You’re investing in the souls…the souls…of people who’ve been in Harlem too long to look at it like children any longer, people who’ve grown up with a righteous anger in their hearts and a righteous steam building up in their souls, ready to blow. A righteous steam.”

We’ve seen outbursts of steam for the better part of 16 years now, starting with the Occupy Wall Street protests, the first anti-capitalist movement in at least a generation to spill into public view and dominate mainstream political discourse in the months after the worldwide economy melted down because bankers wouldn’t stop hitting on 17. The steam continued with the empowerment of an explicitly right-wing congressional majority in 2010 that pledged to stop the gears of democratic norms and rig the system so Democrats could no longer govern like Democrats even when they won. The steam poured forth in the closing months of the 2016 presidential cycle, when the anti-system candidate clearly had an outside shot to climb atop the system and reduce it to ash (that he didn’t do this is another matter entirely).

More steam would be seen during the 2020 racial justice uprising following a series of public police executions. Less than a year later, the steam of an insurrection – made possible by bad actors who hate the United States – enveloped us all.

The American zeitgeist over the past decade and a half has been rich with examples of people's disgust for capitalist excesses. Probably they wouldn't use that term, or even know to refer to capitalism, but they know something is off, something is wrong, in this age of yawning inequality that now features a foreign-born billionaire as shadow president. I wrote in November 2023 about popular TV shows serving as spine-stiffening symptoms of this seething public anger. All you have to do is watch.

We love to watch the rich in their insulated worlds of obscene luxury and comfort because we want that for ourselves, though we know we can never have it. So we develop a hateful fascination with the wealthy and their shoes that cost more than our car and their purses that we’d have to finance for ten years and the designer drugs and the plastic surgeries and hair replacements and rich folks’ proximity to the fountain of youth, however mutilated and half-human they end up looking. We watch because we love and hate it in equal measure. We are detached, for none of it seems real. And our envy and resentment could power the Las Vegas strip for a hundred years. ... I would implore congressional Democrats and their staff members to turn on a streaming service now and again to place their fingers on the pulse of an increasingly angry electorate. That anger is pushing some (many?) doomer zoomers away from the left and toward either apathy or the far right, which is all too eager to embrace young folks sick and fucking tired of capitalism and all its horrors. The right, of course, will do fuck-all to ameliorate the suffering of working folks, but that doesn’t matter. They’ll rope you in, infect you with their red-pilled nihilism, and off you go down the fascist rabbit hole, never to be seen again. This is the future of our politics if Democrats don’t get more serious about the class war.

Everywhere you look, there’s steam leaking from the pipes that can no longer contain the boiling hot vapor. And so we see it again this week, with an executive from a health insurance company infamous for denying claims at a stunning rate gunned down in the middle of the street. Respectability politics never entered the picture afterward. There was only the bleakest, most blackpilled outpouring of joy anyone has ever seen. Happiness animated the online discourse of the Brian Thompson murder; even UnitedHealthcare’s Facebook post about the killing was roundly laughed at by those who said in one voice: We will not feel empathy for someone who has so readily contributed to our suffering. There would be no tears or feigned sadness for the head of a company that exists to deny people life-saving medical care. 

There have, of course, been half-assed attempts at steam control. Think back to the weeks and months after the COVID pandemic shut down society and threatened to plunge the world into unprecedented economic turmoil. To save the markets from such a fate, American politicians banded together and sent some cash to working families who might be low on funds with workplaces shuttered as morgues overflowed with the COVID dead. The child tax credit instantly reduced child poverty levels across the country during the early part of the pandemic. European-style social welfare had come to the United States for a fleeting moment before corporate supersoldier Senator Joe Manchin, reflexively lying about low-income parents using the tax credit to buy cruise tickets and pot and booze, helped congressional Republicans end the program and put holes in the bellies of poor kids once more.

The Affordable Care Act was a good-faith try at steam control. Barack Obama used eight years worth of political capital to barely get a right-wing healthcare plan through a Congress with overwhelming Democratic majorities. The ACA, naturally, lacked the ultimate in steam control: A public option for those who wanted to avoid the high costs and Kafkaesque tangles of private healthcare insurers. So-called Blue Dog Democrats – known more commonly as Republicans – killed the ACA's government option because everyone knew Americans would flock to it and tank the vampiric insurers whose bottom line is bolstered by human suffering and only by human suffering. The watered-down ACA did precious little to control the public steam.

The elites who lined up behind Trump in the final weeks of the 2024 election need to log on and read the comments about Thompson's murder. They have to internalize the public's unchecked fury about not getting so much as a crumb knocked off the master's table in this new and awful Gilded Age. I hope they will, and I know they won't. They have a lot of faith in the pipes' capacity for steam.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social