My Doppelganger Adventure
Of Mountains, Mirrors, and Moguls
❤️ Tap the heart if you’ve ever looked at someone you love and wondered how you ended up living in different worlds.
Is it the zeitgeist or is it me, I wonder? Yes, the times are surely strange, but this I did not expect. Upon reading comments in my last Substack (called Enough Already), I discovered my doppelganger.
My double or “other” is my old friend Shirley, who challenged my thinking, my facts, my story. I was tempted to ignore it at first. Then I became intrigued, especially after a couple of readers came to my defense. How do you deal with conflict, especially when it comes out of left field, and from a long-time friend?
I had to revisit what I’d written. I wrote about teaching skiing, a high altitude, mostly happy, sunny world that we both love (she lives and skis in Alaska). I said some of my students were spending their vacations offline, away from their usual news sources. “But the news has a way of finding us anyway,” I wrote. “A mother in Minneapolis is murdered…It feels like a war is underway, and until the locusts move on, the front is in Minneapolis.”
This followed:
A practitioner of the martial art and philosophy of Aikido, which sees conflict as an opportunity for transformation, I did not, at, first, react. Aikido tries to see where the attacker is coming from in order to redirect their energy for the good of both of you.
My challenger was is so like me, after all. Our demographics match. We are both femmes d’un certain age with matching life stories: Ski racing on Mt. Hood (she won), running marathons (she’s faster) and getting PhD’s (hers in Psychology and mine in American studies). We backpacked together in Idaho and Washington, even getting giardia from the same lovely but polluted stream. Getting giardia is real solidarity, let me tell you.
We once bumped into each other in the Alaskan wilderness in Denali, both alone together. To be accurate, it was a foggy August afternoon near Wonder Lake and we ran into each other at the only outhouse within ninety miles. “What are you doing here?” we both gasped.
Let us now revisit that question.
What are we doing here?
How did we get to this particular moment in American life, standing on the same metaphorical mountain, breathing the same air, and yet inhabiting what feels like entirely different realities?
For answers, I turned to Naomi Klein’s — oops, I almost wrote Wolf’s — brilliant book, Doppelganger. Klein’s case is even more bizarre than my own since her own doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, shares the same first name. And if that weren’t enough, Klein knew Wolf in earlier years, when Wolf was the darling of the feminist movement. Similarities run amok: they are both Jewish, PhDs, best-selling authors, professors, and thought leaders with large social platforms.
Her followers couldn’t believe it when Naomi Wolf turned up with Steve Bannon, appeared on Fox News, and wrote that COVID-19 vaccinations were infiltrations by actual computer programs used to control people. Naomi Klein writes that “the other Naomi” has become “one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many of our most urgent crises.” After people consistently confused her with her alias, Klein was driven to post: “Please keep your Naomis straight.”
Yet Klein believed that “if she was going to understand her [Wolf] and her fellow travelers,” who she describes as “now in open warfare against objective reality,” she had to immerse herself in the ecosystem that produced them. In other words, she followed shows with names like QAnon and Conspirituality in an attempt to see how underlying systems could have wrought this strange new world.
In other words, we might look beyond the persons to the systems that entrap us all. For example, I’ve long thought that much of the chaos is really just the “last gasp of the patriarchy” but then I’ve been thoroughly wrong. Now I read philosopher Kate Manne writing about the new, late-capitalist patriarchy a la Epstein (exhausting, I know).
What is it I am supposed to be learning from my very own doppelganger? How do I see where she’s coming from so that I can see my own global/personal place in This World of Ours Today?
I suddenly remembered a trip to Versailles, and how unsettling it was to walk into the glittering Hall of Mirrors, where the World War One armistice was signed, which also set the stage for World War II, because the winners’ hubris translated into humiliating terms for the loser, Germany. So much bright reflection, so much dizzying distortion. How to know, in a hall of mirrors, what real and what is not?
Did that mother in Minneapolis really have nothing to do with me? Who am I to pollute my nice mountain “monologue” with my bigger questions?
On this too-warm ski day, I hear Walt Whitman’s words ring in my ears: “I am large; I contain multitudes.” From the actual viewpoint of my day job, I see mountains upon mountains, stretching all the way to blue Colorado, just as Versailles has mirrors upon glittering mirrors, reflecting back the deeper selves we strain to recognize.
My doppelganger is perplexing because she is both me/not me. The last gasp of the patriarchy, which I’ve been predicting for some time now, is something I’ve been wrong about. Instead, we have it appearing in new guises. Philosopher Kate Manne frames it as the “new late-capitalist patriarchy,” something I won’t get into because I’m supposed to here on a mountain, teaching people how to ski big bumpy, “moguly” terrain.
First, I try to break the fear cycle, by my usual methodology—bad jokes because we are all afraid of being afraid. “Those bumps” I say, “are like dogs. They can smell your fear.”
I imagine one student rolling his eyes under his Ray Bans. “So if you act afraid and lean back and fight this terrain you’ll be buying a ticket to the rodeo. Soften your edges; go with the flow, one challenge at a time. We’re here to play, not to fight.”
Thank you, Shirley, for helping me remember.
How do you live alongside someone you love who inhabits a different reality than your own?
The patriarchy is not on its last legs because we women haven’t dealt with the internalized misogyny. Its downfall has hardly begun. We have been proclaiming the end for at least 50years.
You are too kind. Your friend is nuts.