Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help

A decade of American society coming apart.

Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help collects a decade of reflections on recent US struggles— Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Rebellion— alongside accounts of the rise of Trumpism, the alt-right, an apocalyptic shift in popular culture, to paint a dense and complex portrait of a decade of protracted social crisis. Jarrod Shanahan reports from the ground. On the streets in 2014, from the depths of the Rikers Island penal complex, inside the alt-right underground and the carnival of Trump rallies, and in the line of fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020, among other scenes that Shanahan accessed not as a credentialed observer but an active participant: prisoner, infiltrator, activist. The resulting essays outline the pitfalls and opportunities facing those seeking to reverse the suicidal course of capitalist society and build a liberated world.

Introduction, by Andy Gittlitz
Part 1: Rupture
1.       The Old Mole Breaks Concrete
2.       Some Bullshit
3.       Noel Ignatiev, 1940– 2019

Part 2: The Rock
4.       Checking Out
5.       Days Spent Doing Too Much of Fucking Nothing
6.       The Secret Lives of Rikers Island Jail Guards
7.       The Surreality of Rikers Island

Part 3: Morbid Symptoms
8.       Death to the Walking Dead
9.       Friday the 1312
10.       Zoomers Go to Hell
11.       Hybrid Moments
12.       The Future Belongs to the Mad

Part 4: Looking Right
13.       Three Months Inside Alt-Right New York
14.       Thankful for President Trump: Thanksgiving with Stop the Steal
15.       The Big Takeover
16.       Iowa Bluffs

Part 5: Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help
17.       Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help

Afterword: Toward Something Else