Je ne regrette rien

Albrecht Dürer 

Just in time for my monthly deadline, I saw a Tweet today in my vicarious twitter wanderings* to the effect of, "Do you think the ppl who voted for Biden are regretting it?"  I didn't see the context, but it's not hard to imagine it was occasioned by Biden's failure to extend a national moratorium on evictions in spite of an alarmingly high number of people -- "millions" by most accounts-- who are likely to be screwed by his passive permission of it, aided and abetted by a do-nothing congress, immediately upon the lapse of the current moratorium-- i.e., tomorrow.  The most easily avoided and therefore excessively disappointing of a series of disappointments since January 20.

Predictably, the facetiously raised possibility of regret among Biden voters was met by a cynicism-affirming chorus of "not those heartless bastards" by followers of the account. It's clear based on the wording of the question that the tweeter did not seek or expect an honest appraisal from anyone willing to admit they had voted for Biden in November.  I am, as I say, running out of time to meet my July quota, so I will volunteer.   Mind you I am not a casual Biden voter, and I have never been a fan let alone a True Believer-- and I don't much care for the implication that the "Biden voter" is an identity that can be spoken for in the response to a tossed off rhetorical question. 

Am I happy that Biden has moments that exceed the bad that I thought he was going to be?  Of course not.  Did I expect that he would when I voted for him?  Absolutely.  Do I regret voting for him then?  No I do not.  Regret implies an aching for an alternative.  In the matter at hand, there was only one other possibility-- and no, I do not regret that Trump did not win re-election.  Do I believe presidential politics matter in our broken system. Sadly I still do.  (In line with the twitter user's question, it must somewhat matter or the voter would never have cause to regret their vote.)  As for myself and the previous election, I still do believe the tiny margin of better for the vast majority of us and for the planet that we are getting from Biden compared to Trump-- or to put it more accurately, the margin of worse that we avoided by electing Biden matters.   Both Trump and Biden are faux populists, Trump to a more sexily spectacular extent.  Both are in fact perpetrators of the dreadful status quo who act primarily at the behest of the excessively rich and powerful (and in Trump's case, the self).  Trump's politics are worse.  Is Biden still bad?  Yes.  It's complicated.  But on the question of regret, I have a long way to go to be convinced that Biden winning was of the two vastly more likely outcomes of the November election the regrettable one.  I just don't buy it.  

No question at all that presidential politics is a cesspool of pain, disappointment, irrelevance in material ways to most people.  This is the nature of this sickening duopoly that we live under.  But stewardship of this ridiculously over important office is perhaps the least anyone can do as long as we do not yet have a dictatorship of the proletariat.  

I would not rise to the bait of this question if I weren't a bit irritated by how perfectly it illustrates the tattered state of the left since the end of the Bernie Sanders' campaign a year and a quarter ago.  It's yet another example of some asshole on twitter purity trolling.   My single vote did not elect Joe Biden (hence perhaps nothing to regret) but was done for my own mental health, in good conscience, with eyes fully open about the flaws of the candidate and in hopes that it would aid in an outcome that would not be regrettable.  Disqualify me on that basis from participating in building an alternative to our debased system, but I am certain I'm not alone.  Are we really going to require confessions and repentance from our brothers and sisters before we can accept their solidarity?  Doesn't sound like a winning strategy to me.  Then again, it's just Twitter.

~~~~~

* I am not a member, but I latch onto twitter accounts for lols when I'm invited to.

Sans Souci

Peggy Lee sings Sans Souci-- a recording that begs to be the soundtrack of an awesome claymation:

This was the B-Side of a 45 produced in 1952.  (The A-Side was River River.). The Sonny Burke tune with lyrics by Lee was arranged by Gordon Jenkins, whose stamp on mid-20th Century American popular music is a bit more etched than his name recognition might indicate.  Among other highlights of a long career, he wrote Crescent City Blues, unmistakably the source material for Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues.  

It's a beautiful iconic tune, but it's the over-the-top exoticism of his arrangements such as the above that really gets under the skin.  For instance, dig Jenkins' unhinged 1960 exotica arrangement of Duke Ellington's Caravan featuring Marshall Royal on alto sax (a recording memorably used in a first season episode of Mad Men):

 

Jenkin's arrangement for Frank Sinatra of  It was a very good year, a sweet tune first recorded by the pop folk group the Kingston Trio transformed it into a transcendent epic of a particularly American longing.  Amazingly footage of the actual recording with an audience in attendance and Gordon Jenkins conducting one Los Angeles evening in late April 1965 is available, providing a glimpse into the casual way that Sinatra and his collaborators tossed together an essential of  American music.

Free to choose

plaguedoctormasks.com

We have been on vacation in another state again.  The state we visited has had no statewide requirements for the wearing of masks as protection against COVID since May 24.  Nationally, as of this writing a few municipalities still have requirements in place, but although some elected officials and bodies have either banned requirements all along or lifted them as early as March, most provincial health departments concur, voluntary mask wearing for the unvaccinated is recommended.  In the state we visited, in public retail and dining establishments, most but not all workers wore masks and few to no customers did.  Coming from a state that still had some requirements, we at first erred on the side of caution and kept covered but, being vaccinated ourselves, were soon seduced by entreaties to forgo masking if we desired.  I confess, I desired.

In the two fairly rural counties of the state we visited where we spent most of our time, more than 70% of persons had reportedly had a least 1 dose of a vaccine.  The one we spent our nights in has as of this writing a somewhat more than 50% rate of full vaccination.  This is comparable to the large suburban county we live in, where mask wearing is similarly voluntary for the unvaccinated, but still quite de rigueur we noticed on our return, even though the state mask requirements have been lifted since July 1.  Even having tasted freedom and breathed free on vacation, I comply.  When in the suburbs, I do as the suburbans do.   Moreover, our county was hit particularly hard in the thick of the pandemic, has struggled to come out of it and has had an uneasy relationship with the capitol from the outset during the crisis.  I understand the reluctance to trust that everything is back to normal just because the governor says it is.

I'm never on the vanguard of fashion.  I resisted making the transition to mask wearing last spring but when the CDC's recommendations finally gelled into coherence, I had the confirmation I needed that wearing a mask like a doofus was warranted.  Now that I've been fully vaccinated since the end of May, I'm likewise not about to pioneer free-facing it.  As always, my motivation is selfish and stupid-- I don't want to stick out.  But while I know that interaction with me is safe for an unvaccinated person, they don't know that, so as long as the prevailing winds are with precaution, I'm down with it.

Looking through the status of mask mandates by state, I'm reminded that not everyone has health as a priority in setting public health mandates.  It's a pretty thoroughly politicized thing in this country, reflecting the polarization that is a hallmark of this precarious era.  At the base of things, I can't help but think we've got to be much more alike about this than our divergent attitudes, which fall along very predictable faultlines bordering the expected shades of the political map, would indicate.  Nobody having gone through what we've just been through wants to end up dead from the fucking thing.  But by the same token, neither should anyone look askance at those who cast a leery eye at the Professional Managerial Class that monopolized information about the disease as a means of orchestrating a coordinated national response to the threat it posed to the status quo.  Banning common sense requirements of mutual protection by edict in the throes of a pandemic is clearly a contradictory and asinine response to the notion of safeguarding public health.   But if you're wearing a mask as a pussy hat for the face, you're doing it wrong, too.

Playing at war

Glenn Greenwald is turning into a huge pain in the ass.  Always a bit of a sour puss, he used to at least be relevant.  Lately, he has been lurking at the turnstiles of the Intellectual Dark Web looking longingly in, usually on a tear against political correctness, often popping up at the center of a Twitter storm of his own making, churning up indignation among the bros at the latest outrage from whatever figure on the left has inadvertently stepped into it.  

In a recent discussion with Ben Burgis the title of whose new book, Canceling Comedians While the World Burns no doubt caused involuntary drool to form at the corner of Greenwald's mouth, Greenwald took issue with Burgis' proposition that the propensity of some on the left to reflexively police any perceived infraction of a rigid code of social justice was counterproductive to the project of increasing leftist power by arguing that on the contrary, the left had never been more powerful-- with socialists winning seats in Congress, making tremendous progress in presidential politics in the form of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and in fact victorious in the Culture War as surely evidenced by the sheer dominance of Cancel Culture.

Here's something it surprises me that the guy who facilitated the data dump of Edward Snowden and the release of Lula da Silva from Brazilian prison doesn't appear to know: The culture war is not a real war.  There is nothing to win in that war. It is a distraction.  It is a very successful distraction because it never fails to draw people away from actual struggle.  The result is that actual struggle is undermined; real revolution is stalled.  What this means is not that the left is bad because it is engaged in mere culture wars.  Wars have two sides.  One of the sides is often an aggressor.  It is my view that the aggressor in the culture war, which is an old struggle which has origins in the first stirrings of the John Birch society and has continued decade after decade since is in fact the right.  Like most of the wars originating on the right these days, it is a never-ending war.  Its perpetuation depletes the left and engorges the right.  And the left, which should to the greatest extent possible ignore these attacks (take as your mantra, "Sticks and stones may break my bones..."), takes the bait and engages.  And being composed largely of very clever, expensively educated, sensitive types, its defense becomes a moist spectacle that both titillates its opponents and drives normal people, who would otherwise be much needed potential allies away. 

As the late Michael Brooks pointed out in a video on the topic of an earlier Greenwald controversy, we should not confuse Glenn Greenwald's project with that of the left.  The left Brooks reminds us is properly concerned with advancing the cause of the working class against the capitalist class usually in conflict with whoever is in power, including Democrats; Greenwald's project is always the exposure of corruption wherever he finds it.  His mission coincides with that of the left when it challenges authoritarian regimes and institutions; when it is focussed on the American power structure, as it has been primarily for the past several months, often appropriately enough in appearances on Tucker Carlson's Fox show, it is arguably consistent with his anti-corruption mission, but more and more lately diverted to irrelevant tangential beefs with the left.   

Inasmuch as Greenwald's critique is appropriately directed at the soulless leadership of the democratic party, I find it useful and justified.  The premise that a few progressives in congress or the unprecedented success of Bernie Sanders in drawing attention to progressive policy goals in the past 2 presidential primaries represents the victory of socialism and therefore the justness of opposing it  as if it were a mere component of the neoliberal power structure, or that a reflexively woke Twitter user is an exemplar of the corruption of the left, to be a jaw-droppingly juvenile conflation of leftism with the democratic party that not only invents corruption where it does not exist, but plays perfectly into Carlson's ultimately repressive and authoritarian agenda.   

The chimeric victory of the left in the unending Culture War seems to be behind Glenn Greenwald's current derangement.  But don't be distracted by his distraction.