Julia Kent: Gardermoen

From her 2007 album, Delay (video by YouTube user allthingsbigandsmall):

 

Quality Time

Say, I forgot to mention I finished reading How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr which I started not long after we went into quarantine.  You might be thinking, “You’re still reading that?”  (No I finished it! ^_^)  but seriously folks, a while ago I’m reading my book on my phone and after a little bit I get a notification from the eBook app itself completely unbidden to the effect that I have reached my daily reading quota!   I confess that, Dumas that I am, the news that I had made a daily reading quota without breaking a sweat stroked my ego.  The unsolicited notice began appearing daily each time I picked up the book,  and in almost 0 time became the signal to me at each session that I was done reading for the day.  

The first day it seemed effortless. The second day I may have been on the lookout for it enough to realize that it was not my imagination that my daily reading goal was hella easy to reach.  By the third day I figured out that the quota had nothing to do with pages or anything related to my own idea of how much effort one should ideally put into book reading each day (I’m always certain I’m way under par) but instead was some default setting that amounted to 5 minutes.  

That’s right the ebook app was rewarding me for sticking it out for a full 300 seconds.  It didn’t matter that I thought that that was an absurd standard; what happened was that I used the appearance of that little notice as my get-out-of-jail free card and I’d say to myself, “Welp!  Goal met!  Quota read!”  and I’d set the book down for another day.  

The weird thing is that I greatly enjoyed the book.  It was not a chore at all.  So why did I permit myself to have my reading habits dictated to me by this impersonal default configuration that just appeared without my asking for it on my phone one day and began on its own proffering an opinion (a super mediocre if not inferior opinion) on my reading habits?  Why did it not occur to me that this unsolicited default low bar of achievement might be Apple's way of discouraging a daily ad-free habit among its multitude of users of keeping oneself informed and intellectually sharp?  A service to its entrepreneurial class and not to the consumers of its products. Because it was making me feel good about myself.  'You're a good reader!' it lied to me.  I didn't even have to ask for its opinion!  But truth be told it stretched out my reading of this book by many extra weeks, and telling you about this, I’m ashamed of myself.   

That would be the end of the story except my next challenge was Rick Perlstein's 1120 page true crime book Reaganland.  I know how it turns out but it's too good to put down.  If I want to live to see the end of it, though, I've got to read it the hard way, under my own steam.  I can't bring myself to turn off the daily affirmation from my phone about my superior reading habits, but vanity only gets you so far-- about 4 tiny e-pages, mere gulps of this vast ocean of words-- and I have a long, long way to go.  Now, if you'll excuse me I have some reading to do.

Notes from Underground

I've seen some surly and depressed leftists in the past few weeks since it became clear that Trump, despite the pains his people are taking to forestall acknowledgement of it, failed to stave off failure at the polls with the consequence that Biden actually squeaked out a victory this time.  Some of the mournful are purists I presume who may genuinely rue the outcome of the election -- I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they'd be almost equally unhappy if Trump had won-- but some I imagine are apprehensive about the prospect  that the lesser evil might actually be demonstrated to produce less evil, belying their admonitions to fellow leftists about the consequences of participation in 2020 presidential electoral politics.  I don't read minds and it's way too early to gloat.  But I've also accepted and preferred the chances with sleepy Joe and I'm hopeful; not that the best is yet to come but that the worst has been averted-- for now.  For myself, on the whole I am feeling a bit beaten down by the state of the world and prospects for change which surge and ebb unpredictably.  Since the outcome of the election has been settled, they aren't exactly surging but the ebbing has possibly ebbed. 

Following the conclusion of the Sanders campaign, I found myself loading up on leftist journalism and podcasts and scouring the usual sites for activity and discussion on what's to become of the left.  My conclusion is that the snooze button has been hit. Until the primary I was feeling very optimistic about a movement building and expanding beyond its borders.  Bernie’s defeat was a serious blow to the momentum.  I haven’t seen anything rising in the past few months anyway  in its place.  The vast majority of Sanders supporters who voted I'm sure followed Bernie's lead and voted for Biden to try to prevent Trump 2 in spite of active ostentatious alienation on the part of the rest of Biden's team as a measure of courting the white centrist suburban vote.  In Bernie's primary loss, the left was dealt a blow that I don’t quite see how it can recover from while we try to prevent needless suffering and further horrors in the meantime.   I console myself that Biden is probably too weak to actually preside.  Who knows.  My point though is that I felt I was able to vote for Biden without actually voting for Biden.  Yes we do get Wall Street in the mix which is terrible but we stanch judicial hemorrhaging perhaps, probably greatly improve things at the border, maybe grab COVID-19 by the germ balls.  The bullshit doesn’t end, but it is diminished appreciably right  off the bat.  The alternative was Trump, not some leftist movement that was going to rise up to do what Bernie was not able to.  Bernie was the guy who could have done it and we didn’t let him.  The left had its chance in Bernie and they blew it.  (Yes there were DNC shenanigans and corporate funding and suppression and media insanity but that wasn’t supposed to matter, right?)    

 I might also feel a bit inadequate in my ability (and my record) at participating in making change happen.  And frustrated that people like Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel and Neera Tanden and the Clintons and Pete Buttigieg and Barack Obama  and money people and  media people and etc. are still actively working to wreck those chances and may be successful at this time again as they always have been to date, and their supporters probably don’t know what the shit is happening or they’d be Bernie Sanders supporters.  Seeing the beauty of the vision of a system that works for everybody that nobody else seems capable of being seduced by is flustrating as shit, am I right?!  

Not knowing what else to do with myself, I attended a DSA meeting this summer.  It was so easy to participate in Bernie’s campaign; socialism is work.  I didn’t really participate to a full extent.  I joined with my camera off and my mike muted and only unmuted it to give a brief self-intro (name, town, favorite revolutionary work--  i.e, book, film, artwork, play)  (eight; the suburbs; bugs bunny.)  (I kid on the last one.  I fortunately did not go first because I didn’t have (and still don’t have) a favorite revolutionary work of art that I could name.  I took a cue from someone who went before me who mentioned a Noam Chomsky book I’d never heard of to mention the only nonlinguistic one I could remember, which I hadn't read but which I did once watch a documentary about.  Then I listened to everyone else having a meeting.  I had a daffy notion going in that it was going to be more like a Bernie Sanders meeting—i.e., a bunch of folks not knowing what exactly they were doing but compelled to try to figure out something to do, and I suppose it was, but the caliber of people trying was at a far far higher level than I was anticipating.  I, a naturally timid person, was intimidated.    When it came time to exchange email addresses I procrastinated so long that the meeting ended before I could.   And I fully supported the major initiative that came out of it which was to email a list of demands to our county taskforce on policing in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, all beautifully drawn up unsolicited by a first time attendee informed by his job as a public defender.  I felt very superfluous.  I was definitely the odd man way out.  People were of all ages but everyone was already actively engaged in the revolution.  Thank goodness for them, but afterward I got to thinking, if I feel this way, how is there any hope of bringing my neighbors, coworkers and family along? Is there a place in the revolution for the atrophied and slothful and timid?  If not, how does it happen?  I am unusually, egregiously timid and slothful, so perhaps it’s just that there’s no place for me in the revolution.  As long as it doesn't mean the revolution dies without me, I can live with that.  While I wait for it, it's not inconceivable that some extra-financial way for me to contribute will yet occur to me.

I've been reading Rick Perlstein's chronicle of the rise of the right starting with the shaky if scary first steps of Goldwater '64 and reaching its apotheosis in the crushing success of Reagan '80.  In the intervening years, those guys and gals were creative and disciplined, often taking their cues in strategy and tactics from the earlier improbable successes of their mortal nemeses the Communists.  In 1960, 30 years on from the New Deal, the only success mainstream Republicans had had for decades was in proffering candidates promising  Roosevelt-light in a way similar to how Democrats have adopted Reaganism as an iron lung to keep the party alive in these times.  The rightist response to Eisenhower Republicanism was a well-organized, well-funded, innovative long game in which personal diverse sometimes conflicting agendas were sublimated to the long term goal of advancing the political cause of conservatism until it swept the country (including Third Way democrats) from the 1980's on.  And this was with an agenda that objectively stank for most people.  Contrast this with the current state of the left in which virtue battles, infighting, cynicism and genuine contempt for ideological impurity keep us from advancing the cause of rescue of the planet from the ravages of rampant capitalism perpetrated against it by a tiny fraction of lopsidedly powerful assholes.  I get the reverence for individualism and free thought and identity exertions and what not but might our mutually exclusive eccentricities and antipathies be keeping us marginal as a whole?  Might we not find more success in setting aside the piddly ass squabbles for just a bit in order to lefticize this motherfucker for a change?  Seems impossible considering the preciousness of certain factions' priorities.  And also the sense that I can’t fight your struggle so I won’t do jack squat for it.  Perhaps we as a whole do need a bit more inclusion.  Not I, if you will so much as We.

Where have I heard that before?

It has to be said

Joe Biden has won the 2020 presidential election. That's the boring part of the story.  

The most amazing thing about it is that Donald Trump has lost the 2020 presidential election.  Nobody realizes this.  In fact, he hasn't just lost the 2020 Presidential election.  He lost it in the biggest way that anyone has ever lost an election.  No one in the history of the world on either side has ever had such a tremendous loss as Donald Trump has had in the 2020 presidential election.  People are amazed by this

Actually I take that back.  Donald Trump is not the only one who has lost a presidential election in such a bigly bigly way.  Mike Pence has also lost the 2020 Presidential election.  But he was really just along for the ride.  It's really Donald Trump who gets most of the credit for this one.  People can't believe how big an achievement this is.  Trust me, it's huge.  They're going to be talking about this for a long, long time because no one has ever seen anything like it. 

How did he do it?  Part of how he did it is that he told every one that he was going to throw out every vote that was counted after November 3.  This was how he made sure that everyone voted early.   And let me tell you, a lot a lot of people early voted.  Huge numbers all over the country.  They did this because Donald Trump told them what he would do if they didn't.  No one would have thought of this. 

People have elections.  They try to win.  Sometimes it happens.  I don't think Donald Trump has ever not won.  The biggest hugest loss in election history is a pretty big win.  And against sleepy, creepy Joe Biden, too.  I mean, come on, man!  Am I right?   I'll be honest, I don't think anyone could have done it except for Donald Trump.  Well, Mike Pence did it too, but he was just taking advantage of Donald Trump's political strategy.  Good job, Mike.

Some people think I'm going to miss hating Donald Trump now that he's lost the biggest election anyone could possibly lose.  I think I'll manage.