In an addendum to my post about Bluesky CEO Jay Graber’s pathetic and unfeeling attitude toward the hurt felt by trans users from the continued presence on the site of Jesse Singal, and the unforced error of micro.blog founder Manton Reece’s praise of Graber and her CTO absent any curiosity whatsoever as to why people might be leveling critique at them, I mentioned a blog post about firefighters.

Worth, too, linking Brandon who, in a post addressing Manton’s original thoughts and ensuing defensiveness, tackles his utterly bizarre idea of who is an arsonist and who is a firefighter here.

Brandon’s original post now has a followup, and at this point I’m compelled to say a few things more—because while Brandon of course is right in the former post about the nature of firefighters and arsonists, and right that Reece is engaged in some pretty intense sophistry of inversion, I’ve some quibbles on the latter post, because I think some things are missing in its analysis of firefighting.

Here’s what Brandon says in this second post, about firefighting specifically being a public service.

One thing I didn’t tackle in my last post was how fire fighting is a public service. Firefighters don’t hide what they are doing. They don’t slink about in the shadows, bucket of water hidden behind their back, to quietly throw on the fire when no one is looking. That’s ridiculous and not just because the fire is not going to be stopped one quiet bucket at a time.

Instead firefighters are out there, for all to see, in full gear doing their best to keep people and property safe. They aren’t telling people to join in, sure. And they create lines for the public to stay behind for their safety. But in it all they are out there for us all to see. For the really big problematic fires, they’ll even call in departments from around the country and world to come and help. It’s a public service performed by those with a calling to be helpers.

This, of course, is fair and true as far as it goes when it comes to actual firefighters. What’s being described here, however, are actions that while done in service to the public, and done in full view of the public, are nonetheless performed with humility.

Firefighters don’t tend to run around crowing, “Look at me, I’m a firefighter!” They mostly just run around doing their job and occasionally riding in a parade, and sometimes you see them at your neighborhood Grocery Outlet getting cheap supplies for the local firehouse.

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Vonnegut’s identification with these civil servants was personal and deep-rooted. References to their constancy, professionalism and quiet heroics are a theme running throughout his half-century of novels and stories. Firemen symbolized for him the Midwestern ethic of neighborliness and mutual aid he had learned growing up in Indianapolis. His appreciation for the job they did was confirmed when he was a young adult, by brutal life experience. His 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, an especially popular book among the idealistic young of that decade, is built around an alter ego who evangelizes madly about the “band of brothers” who stood guard in firehouses in every city and town across the country. Like the author, Eliot Rosewater is a traumatized combat veteran of World War II. He can never forget how he had charged with bayonet drawn into a German factory complex and, in the chaos, killed three civilians—“ordinary villagers, engaged in the brave and uncontroversial business of trying to keep a building from combining with oxygen.” Back home Eliot devotes his life to coming to terms with his sense of guilt, to transforming horror into healing, in the name of the dead. His admiration for firefighters as models of good citizenship makes sense. “[W]hen the alarm goes off,” Vonnegut writes, they are “almost the only examples of enthusiastic unselfishness to be seen in this land.”

—Gregory Sumner, in “Vonnegut’s Firefighters”

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The other day on social.lol I suggested that maybe people shouldn’t use the word “imbecile”. It was a subtoot of a user there who had done just that. I hadn’t reported it because it was a reply to the owner of omg.lol, who’d seen and favorited it, so why bother.

This evening, in a DM he then deleted but not before I’d seen it, he asked if I also thought “moron” was wrong, and included a screenshot of this 2020 post where I’d used it. It was, he explained (after I’d said that yes, using that word was wrong, too, so what was the point), meant to be a kind of gotcha. I’d used an ableist slur once, too, and the receipts are right there, so how can I criticize anyone else.

(To be clear: I do apologize for the word. It and others are probably scattered throughout my twenty-five years of blogging, and whatever and wherever they are, I apologize for those, too. If you run into any other people from MindVox one day, ask them about a perfectly horrid thing I once said about a group of people purely because I used to watch M*A*S*H and was a complete fucking nimrod.)

I’ve said all along that I find the stridency with which he goes after the micro.blog crew to be unseemly This is true even when the substance of his criticism is correct, like it is in the case of Reece’s defense of Bluesky’s CEO and CTO. The problem is that he can’t let go, and he appears to be so committed to the rush of the bit that now he’s just lashing out willy-nilly for no good reason whatsoever.

No one is pure, and no one is perfect, but in the midst of a crusade against someone you say can’t handle criticism, it seems daft to go chasing after your own critics, especially those who are—or were, until becoming a target—only spending a small fraction of the energy on it all by comparison.

The intended charge against me, obviously, was one of hypocrisy (he did, in his explanation, cop to his own), but the issue isn’t ever that a critic needs to have been born pure, and previous trespass doesn’t automatically rob you of your right to criticize others later on. The issue is whether you’re spending your time and energy on the actual question or doing your level darnedest to make sure everyone knows how much better you are than other people.

Now, have I done that ever? You can bet your house on it, if you have a house. That just means I recognize it when I see it. Am I better than other people? Some of them, probably. Worse than others, too, probably. Dead even with a lot of them, for sure.

If you’ve become so in love with the idea that you’re fighting fires, though, that you begin to think of setting them in order to swoop in to put them out—and what else was this?—you need to stop and take a look at just what in the world is going on.

Some will argue the above itself is setting a fire. If so, in this case it’s meant as a controlled burn meant to stop the arson from spreading any further, lest it engulf anyone else. For whatever reason, even if he then thought better of it, he decided to come after me.

Maybe next it will be you.

I’ve no idea if I’m a firefighter. I know I’m not Superman, but I like his ideas and the way they call for us to be vulnerable—itself a form of humility. Whether calling in or calling out, the endgame is to hope more people try to point themselves toward betterment, not to receive a sticker saying Bestest Boy.

(None of this is about Brandon, in case this isn’t clear. Those posts just become a useful way to talk about what’s been going on, and what’s been going wrong.)

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While firefighting at its best—“Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives,” even Vonnegut wrote in Timequake, “they can all be saints in emergencies.”—is an act that demonstrates values, it usually does so without drawing any particular attention to itself as an exemplar of those values. That’s for others to note, if that’s how they feel. Seen this way, firefighters are, in a sense, allies and like all allies they cannot themselves declare themselves to be such.

Only those others who see them as that for their own lives and lived experiences can deem them so.

What allies do is do, but they don’t tend to talk all that much about what they do. They might, for sure, publicly profess the values to which they aspire, and contrast them with the values they see on display elsewhere. These contrasts and comparisons, along with looking at the actual results of our own actions and those of others, are how we work out what kind of values should win out in the end.

They might talk about the things they are helping to organize. They might talk about the things they’ve attended or to which they’ve contributed. They might talk about who and how and what kind of person they wish and hope to be, but they don’t declare themselves to be better for the lives of this marginalized community or that minoritized person than someone else, because you don’t get to do that. Only they get to do that. You might tout a set of values but you do not tout yourself.

Allies don’t strut.

Originally published to bix.blog by Bix Frankonis. Comments and replies [by email](mailto:bix@slow.dog?subject=On Allies) are welcome.