My first impression of Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help A Decade of Rebellion, Reaction, and Morbid Symptoms was that I feel like I am absolutely the wrong person to appraise it’s worth. I have only experienced most of the things touched upon in this collection of essays by Jarrod Shanahan from a distance and only ever as a spectator. I like to picture myself as some sort of agitator or dissident but found that I need to reexamine that idea after the reality check of reading this book.
Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help takes us on a ground-level tour of almost every social crisis of the last ten years, touching on Shanahan’s first hand experiences in Black Lives Matters, his incarceration at Rikers Island Prison, going undercover in the Alt-Right underground and an in-depth overview of the events of Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020. There are even a few pop culture detours along the way. I can see hints of Hunter S. Thompson’s brand of gonzo journalism in his in-the-trenches approach and the sardonic humor peppered throughout his reporting on the wilder sides of our current dilemmas. Much like him, Jarrod did not write a book of solutions, instead it is all about cultural excavation. It’s about discovery and education. It’s obvious that he approaches the material from a leftist/anarchist point of view but that isn’t the point. Humanity is and it’s made most clear where things could have easily veered into caricature or the broad generalities of the more mainstream media approach but didn’t.
I read a lot, across a broad variety of genres and mediums, and share my thoughts on those I find interesting or important. I try not to be a critic and strive to use my humble platform here to advocate for the best stuff. I feel like it’s vital to do that in times like these, when certain viewpoints are overshadowed by the establishment or obscured by generative slop and we find that truth has become relative while integrity has become cringe. Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help overshoots my standards by a country mile. It may not hit in the same culture-altering ways as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man but its breadth of curiosity and unwavering pursuit of knowledge makes it stand out to me as something worth spending time with.
Shanahan writes earnestly and with a deep understanding of the broad range of subjects that he covers. His prose is intelligent but doesn’t talk down to the audience and suits the subject matter perfectly. I was pleasantly surprised to never feel overwhelmed, especially with how heavy a lot of the material is, and the tone felt more akin to listening to a coworker or comrade than someone trying to hammer you over the head with an overly intellectual dissertation of our current political milieu.
There is a passage that struck me profoundly in the afterword. Shanahan says of his current situation:
Approaching middle age and starting a family, I am struck with the growing sense of being a character of the distant past, a great-grandfather whose entire life plays out in the first thirty pages of an epic novel, after which time he is intermittently remembered, before being forgotten altogether. Politically, I think this means understanding our present not as the terminus of a received political history, but as the prehistory of a new one.
As an older man and father myself, I sometimes wonder where my place might be in our current struggles and perhaps Shanahan has found it and shed a spotlight on it for the rest of us. He became a witness, not so that we can sit back and let others do the heavy lifting for us, but instead so we can see what is going on and hopefully move the needle, even just a little bit, and help cultivate and clear the path for those who will fight for change today and in the future. We fight so others know that they can or even should. The title is fitting because it’s true and it’s up to us to foster that flame as best we can, just as Shanahan did with the essays collected in this book and with a life lived with a clarity of purpose that I both admire and covet.
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