What do we want? When do we want it?

Comrade with me

From the end of the Carter administration to the birth of the Obama era, Sunday mornings were an occasion for readers of the New York Times to engage with the linguistic persnicketiness of columnist William Safire in the pages of the weekly Magazine.  Safire, an ad man from way back, wet his political feet writing speeches for the Nixon White House, producing most memorably the improbable phrase "nattering nabobs of negativity" written for the mouth of Nixon's Vice President, the subsequently disgraced and dismissed grifter, Spiro Agnew to speak in a speech criticizing the press for slacking on the propaganda front in its coverage of the Vietnam war and Nixon presidency.  The New York Times hired Safire following his departure from public service in the spirit of demonstrating its conservative bona fides as the culture wars of the Carter era were heating up.  In acknowledgement of the popularity of Safire's frequent strategy of critiquing the views of political foes by roasting instances of poor word choice from their public utterances, he was given the weekly "On Language" column in the Magazine which ran from 1979 until a month before his death in 2009.  As a prominent exponent of prescriptive grammar with his weekly column, Safire did a great deal of damage to the image of linguistics in popular culture.  For one Sunday only I'd like to revive the tradition.  

Because I don't have enough to do with my time, I recently watched a 3 hour debate and discussion on the agita surrounding the recent Force the Vote controversy that has been fracturing the left (over whether Progressives in Congress should have leveraged support for Nancy Pelosi's re-election as Speaker of the House in order to force a floor vote on Medicare for All or faced cancellation from the online left).  The participants were Sam Seder, host of the Majority Report and critic of FTV and Briahna Joy Gray former press secretary of Bernie Sanders 2020 and current host of the Bad Faith podcast on the pro-FTV side.  Gray's co-host Virgil Texas served as ostensible moderator and comic relief.  At the outset of the debate, Gray cautioned the partisan frequenters of the podcast to tender questions in the spirit of 'camaraderly' debate. I knew what she meant and wouldn't have given it another thought if the word hadn't returned for 2 more appearances, once by Seder and once more late in the podcast by Gray.  Seder's use which came minutes after Gray's first was telling - he paused and visibly agonized as he hunted for a synonym, came up blank and gingerly mangled the word, placing it in a context that made clear he was using it as a noun ("there was a spirit of ... you know... camaraderily" he says at around the 3:12 mark).  In contrast, Gray used the word both times as an adjective.  I didn't know if it was a word, but I felt if it wasn't it needed to be.  Sure enough, googling it, I discovered it is a word ... in German:  kameradschaftlich.  

In English, not so much.

The difference between William Safire and me (setting aside ideology, success, fame, bank account, vital signs, etc) is that while he would use the occasion to proffer correct alternatives to the neologism (I imagine his list might include amicable, friendly, sympathetic as possibilities, providing him with an opportunity to discuss the shades of meaning of each) I would advocate for Briahna Joy Gray's coinage. Moreover, I would suggest a feature of it would be the flexible orthography that its nascence lends itself to: is it camaraderly? Camaraderily? Comraderly? Comraderily?  You decide and we'll promise not to mock your decision in a spirit of comraderily.

As for the debate itself, ironically, it didn't take long for the camaraderliness of the proceedings to degenerate into a bit of open-fisted brawling.  I am a fan to varying degrees of all 3 of the participants.  I confess my sympathies going into the proceedings had gelled a bit more firmly on the FTV skepticism side of the debate.  After listening to the discussion, I am, if not persuaded, a bit more understanding of the FTV side as I'd hoped.  In terms of the performance of the participants, the mere effort to meet face to face was perhaps the winner of the evening.  Seder started out strong but I felt got bogged down in making a case for abstaining from the FTV effort on the basis of its ostensible leader and mascot, the irascible bad faith actor, Jimmy Dore with whom Seder has a history.  In truth, Dore's centrality to the FTV side was like it or not a polarizing distraction from the aims of the campaign. The necessity of confronting one's feelings about Dore at the surface of things was, to those who find him an overbearing ignorant prick, a deterrent to conveying its mission of grappling appropriately with the urgency of action on public healthcare.  Seder likened participation in FTV to getting into a car with a reckless drunk driver behind the wheel.  To Gray, the anti FTV side was, instead of replacing the driver, advocating destroying the car.  Seder floundered a bit at length on the matter of the "ask" of FTV (the spinning sound at the use of a verb as a noun is coming from William Safire's grave), suggesting that rather than confirming that Medicare for All would lose in a floor vote, progressives could have demanded a laundry list of procedural changes and committee appointments-- things likely to produce results in the right direction.  Gray reiterated that FTV came with a list of demands other than Medicare for All which included much of the wonkish arcana that Seder was proposing.  Seder was also not able to fully articulate the negative consequences of Pelosi calling the progressives' bluff should they follow the FTV strategy.  On the whole Seder offered little but weak tea in answering the question of what to do to get healthcare for 15 million who have lost it since the outbreak of COVID-19.  (It's not his fault. No one knows how it will happen.)

Where Seder excelled I think, is in telling the news that we have recent history demonstrating that Centrist Democrats do not pay any price for opposing Medicare for All -- its name is Joe Biden (and Kamala Harris) and it was inaugurated on Wednesday.  This being the case, there is a flaw in the original logic behind Force the Vote which was supposed to shame progressives into forcing action on it,  thereby forcing centrist House Democrats into either voting for it as polls show close to 70% of their constituents want or exposing their opposition and thereby opening themselves up to punishment at the polls in 2 years.  As Seder suggests, given the certainties that a floor vote would fail and an already clear idea of who the opposition would be and the price they would likely pay for it (i.e., nada) it's not clear that forcing the vote would succeed at being anything other than performative theater.  This is not to say that Medicare for All is doomed; merely that potentially eroding the growing progressive base in the House by opening progressives to electoral vulnerability over their unwillingness to perform under FTV pressure in districts where their very support of Medicare For All was instrumental in getting them elected in the first place might not be the most effective way of making it happen. 

 This fine point highlights a fundamental difference in orientation that seems to separate a good portion of the FTV side from the skeptics.  Many FTV-ers, Dore and Gray among them, advocated abstention from voting Democratic in November as a way of punishing the Democrats for collaborating to defeat Bernie Sanders in the primaries when he was surging, and Biden in particular for his repeated promise to veto Medicare for All if it should come before him as president.  To this point, the discussion turned at the end to Seder's objections to 3rd Party Presidential politics, in particular the Green party strategy.  Here I think Seder demolished the Greens, chiding them for squandering millions of dollars in small contributions from their members to run foolhardy serially unsuccessful campaigns at the presidential level that serve mostly as outlets for disgruntled progressives rather than focussing first on winning local or congressional elections to build actual power on the left.  There's a striking, tragic parallel in Gray's support for FTV and for Green party presidential candidates in the last two elections following Bernie Sanders' campaign suspension in the primary of each: the willingness to fail performatively whether in presidential politics or quixotic hacktivism for the benefit of Democrats who could not care less and seem to do just fine in spite of it. 

I've said it before and I'll say it again, if FTV or its contrarian offshoots make Medicare For All happen, I'll be thrilled to be proved wrong about their prospects.  As for the Gray - Seder debate, at the end of the day, there did appear to be a camaraderly meeting of minds about the need for different prongs in the progressive pitchfork.  The will to permit another actual prong to exist on both sides is, alas, at the present moment, as yet forthcoming.

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*It should be noted that Dore, a Bernie Bro in 2016, backed Tulsi Gabbard in the 2020 primaries when Sanders declined an invitation to kiss Dore's ring with an appearance on his YouTube program. Gabbard, who opposed Medicare for All,  eventually dropped her candidacy and fell in line with her Biden endorsement along with the rest of the field when asked. 

TV or not TV

In some respects my brother thirteen and I-- twins-- are on reverse complementary trajectories.  Formerly fit in my 30s and 40s, I occasionally teased him about some weight that he had put on in those same years.  I came to regret it when the shoe was on the other foot.  He chided me for voting for Nader and not for Gore in 2000; in 2016, we had some words over my tepid attitude toward Jill Stein and okayness with voting for Hillary.  He frequently introduced me to exotic entertainment like Spongebob Squarepants, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Daily Show and Colbert Report.  I lived most of my adult life somehow without ever subscribing to a cable service. I'd take him up on some of his recommendations with rentals from Blockbuster.  He had to practically twist my arm to get me to try Netflix.  Netflix is where I got addicted to Mad Men at the end of Season 4.  By the start of season 5, I took advantage of an upgrade to my internet service by adding cable so I could watch it in real time.  When I proudly announced my life change to my brother, he informed me that I was bucking a trend away from cable; he had coincidentally just dropped his cable provider to go totally a la carte with his entertainment.

I experienced Mad Men as something like a dream, as though someone had made a visual representation of my 1960s childhood fantasy of what adulthood was like as I leafed through oversized issues of Look and Life magazine losing myself in the cartoon glamour of the ads.  Furthermore, it captured some of the gothic drama of suburbia that I absorbed by osmosis of a working class version of it.  It read like a thick juicy Pocket Book edition of Mailer, Cheever or Roth.  I was curious whether it would evoke similar feelings in my brother.  I made a pitch.  I could not interest him.  By this point, he and tv had mutually turned each other off.  

To watch or not to watch became a periodic topic of conversation for us.  Not just about Mad Men but about television in general.  His view was that tv which should be a public commodity was in our culture a cheap manipulative stolen medium that was designed to hypnotize the masses in order to line the pockets of motherfuckers and to cheapen everything it touched. Mine was that while this was no doubt true, given the ubiquity of it and the oceans of time that had to be filled with programming some of which had to be produced by creative, intelligent, hopefully occasionally subversive people, some it was bound to actually be worth a watch every now and then.  After a while I could hear myself dog paddling to justify my complicity in the theft of the commons by broadcasting leeches.  After all, TV is really the IV, the delivery system of the opiate that keeps most of us distracted from alternate possibilities, acquiescent about the lives our lords and masters prefer us to lead, drained of passion that isn't directed toward some desired object of consumption: a car, a detergent, a celebrity, a politician.

I overheard Matt Christman recently talking about appointment tv as a poor but essential substitute for literature in this hypoliterate age.  The bottom line in publishing and the monopolization of bookselling has perhaps priced out risky, challenging books, and ensured a tiny fractured audience for those that still get produced. Yet people still want what we once got but no longer get from literature, and appointment tv has become the delivery system for it.  This could explain why so much tv is artistically and aesthetically aspirational by design.  While the model for the production of television is prohibitive to the possibility of true art actually coming out of it, it's better than a kick in the head.  In my experience there has been a proliferation over the past 20 years or so of television that dazzles the eyeballs, manipulates the heart rate, provokes the sensibilities and then evaporates within seconds of turning off the appliance that conveyed it to you. 

In the spirit of this, I humbly urge you, since I know it's pointless to urge my brother thirteen, to please avail yourself of the entertainment services of the Netflix television series, Love starring Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust, Produced by Judd Apatow and created by Apatow, Rust and his wife Lesley Arfin.  I was skeptical going in, but I think I saw a charming interview with Rust somewhere at the start of season 2 and it inspired me to give it a try.  We all know that it being appointment tv it is incapable of succeeding at being literature, but I confess that it does things to my brain as I'm watching it that feel very much like nourishment.  It is a comedy, a hilarious comedy presented by very talented comedians, by a producer who has been very successful at capturing a young, male audience for bursts of non-threatening, non-challenging fun.  And it is fun.  But maybe the writing is above average.  Maybe the chemistry of the cast is exceptional.  Maybe the aspirations are aimed at the viewer's head as well as at the groin.  For whatever reason this show is rich in nougats that feel almost nutritional in value.  Netflix, don't just thank me, pay me.

The Fragments are Fragmenting

What happens when you gut public education and glut police budgets

As I'm writing this, an army of big circle-bearded lunks have breached a thin blue line and swarmed the US capitol just in time to prevent outgoing Vice President Mike Pence from certifying the November election of Joe Biden as President No. 46.  The invaders were sent to the capitol by their cause célèbre, outgoing President Donald Trump whom they had come to support on his fictional quest to overturn the election, and who after exhorting his supporters to go to the capitol to see what would happen had made himself scarce with a hasty retreat to his COVID palace at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  When the protestors about nothing got to the capitol, the police put up a struggle but as they had never properly prepared for how to handle rioters who are big, pasty, circle-bearded and covered in Blue Lives Matter patches, they were swiftly overcome. 

The hand to hand combat between 2 groups (police and lunks) usually associated with the right and with each other made me temporarily forget an analogous rift raging on the other end of the spectrum (or by some visualizations a small hop from one pole of the horseshoe across to the other).  That squabble though fierce is taking place mostly on our smart phones and computers, and while it had threatened to consume my soul as recently as this morning, it looks rather insubstantial compared to the specter of some creep in a Trump beanie mugging dopily for the cameras as he walks off with the actual lectern from the Senate Chamber.  The excuse for the firestorm-- a disagreement over whether the Squad should be cancelled for not threatening Nancy Pelosi's* reelection as speaker of the house unless she put Medicare for All up for a symbolic, performative and most certainly doomed floor vote-- seemed rather quaint juxtaposed with the image of AOC, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib (who used the occasion of Pelosi's re-election to successfully push through a limit to Pay-Go rules in certain cases-- a prerequisite for any sort of sweeping legislation such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal) suddenly spirited away to a hidden location for their safety in the bowels of Congress. Perhaps we'd better figure out what the hell is going on before we start purging allies from the cause for lack of purity. 

It's almost too easy to go after these people who stormed the capitol today -- these men-- these boys-- for their stupidity.  There is a side of me that wants to see what's going on with them as an extremely misdirected outlet for extremely justified rage.  They are after all citizens of what's left of America.  They have not escaped the wealth inequality that is home grown here.  If they get shot in their oil lord's wars, do they not bleed?  If their livelihoods were undercut,  outsold and squeezed dead by a monopolistic global monolith or if their jobs were moved overseas to sweeten a corporation's profit margin, do they not starve?  If COVID ravages their lungs, do they not die and their surviving family members get stuck with the loss and the bill?  If a diet of Fox News and right wing media distract them from the squalor of the future laid out before all of us with irrelevant outrages like the petty gall of transgender rights, black lives matter, feminism and the war on Christmas, do they not get distracted and outraged?  Whiteness comes with special blinders that makes patsies of us all; some of us identify with the masters rather than face the fact that they have enslaved us too.  The lords wanted to separate us from each other to save their own necks and the proof of their success is in not just the intactness of their necks, but the bottomless supply of circle-bearded jerks willing to make asses and fodder of themselves publicly in the service of their lords (yet again).   A sort of emblem of their stupidity - while their brothers in arms were rampaging through the halls of congress, looting, vandalizing, taking selfies from the senate floor where Pence had just been speaking, some outside draped giant TRUMP banners over the railings as though rebranding the capitol for the object of their wet dreams, the outgoing dumbass in chief.  Poor dumb fucking saps!

I've been reading about the rise of the right in Rick Perlstein's multiple volumes (with volumes of pages) series on the topic, most recently Reaganland, and have come to think of it as something  deliberately manufactured by clever scoundrels out of certain people's inchoate outrage and  their susceptibility to abandon solidarity and to blame their discontent on the neighbor in front of their face rather than on the owners hidden from view who actively immiserate them. Something manufactured and as such something that can be disassembled.  The laws of entropy dictate that the dismantling will be more difficult than the assembly.  But in the spirit of this thought, to anyone on the shallow right who wakes up from this moment as if from a bad beer-and-wine drunk and finds that maybe they aren't all that averse to the idea of putting our heads together to figure a way out from the bleak future that global capitalism has in store for all of us, let's talk.

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Lastly, a little meditative musical antidote that is perhaps in keeping with the theme of the day:

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* Something the left and right can agree on: Nancy Pelosi is a tool.