Countdown to Oblivion

Paul McCartney was 24 in December of 1966, the month that the Beatles recorded When I'm Sixty-Four, their romantic nostalgic anticipation of a golden sunset still far in the future, for the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Its public debut on vinyl was a long-time coming.  The Beatles had been playing it live for years.  McCartney was not even a larval Beatle when he wrote it as a barely budding songwriter long before he met any of his bandmates, at age 14. 

I was 4 when the Beatles first played the Ed Sullivan show and I tell myself I remember it vividly, but what I remember is undoubtedly my older siblings' excitement at the time and subsequent viewings of footage of the event.  Irresistibly fun and subversive from the beginning, the Beatles' own growth musically schooled a generation in what it was possible to do with a pop song and with fame.  Their progressively rarer appearances were thrilling and each seemed to herald something unprecedented for their fans and the public at large to deal with.  As adventurous as they were with their music and their image, they seemed to bring the culture with them.  

Hearing Walter Cronkite spill the news in April, 1970 that the Beatles were breaking up was like learning the world was ending, and my heart resisted the news for years. As time passed and post-Beatles reality revealed itself to me I became less and less confident that the head-scratchingly unappealing post Beatles output of the 4 dispersed members could be cured if only the crazy mop tops would just get over themselves and get back together, but while my Beatlemania was frequently in remission over the years, I continued to experience periods of recurrence for decades.  The cure was probably reading Jonathan Gould's 661 page song-by-song biography of the group, Can't Buy Me Love which came out in 2007.  After many years of scrutiny, I was already aware of the individual Beatle's humanity and foibles, but something about seeing it in all that day-to-day detail heightened the tedium of even these most privileged of lives.   By the end of the book, the sheen had come off of even their music for me.  I was saturated.  Everything once new becomes a cliché with too much exposure. While for many they were undoubtedly a gateway drug to far more experimental and radical music, there was always something genuinely unthreatening about the Fab Four.  For all their iconoclastic expansion of the public's mind, this is after all still the band that only ventured into political topics with the grumpy libertarian rant  of "Tax Man" and a wet blanket thrown on you who "say you want a Revolution."  

We could not have known that only 2 of the Beatles would live to see the age they sang about in that Sgt. Pepper track.  Sir Paul turned 64 in 2006 the year before Gould's book appeared.  Unparalleled wealth and fame have made his post productive years exceed his naïve adolescent vision. Sixty-four is still more than a year away for me, but it's closing in, and my consciousness of its approach has moments of hyperactivity.  Once I got the message that nothing (with the possible exception of war, the Simpsons and neoliberalism) lasts forever-- which got through to me far too early in my adulthood-- sentimentality has not particularly reverberated for me.  Which may explain why news of the 8 hour Beatles documentary series Get Back released in November crossed my consciousness without raising a ripple of curiosity.  It wasn't until I learned that my brother thirteen had succumbed, signing up for a Disney+ trial in order to see it and reporting Beatlemania-like symptoms, that I recognized the dearth of interest news of its existence had aroused in me.  

I wanted to relate this somehow to my own approach to that golden age sung about in the young Beatle's song.  I had planned to talk about how in spite of my customary alienation from my cohort, I have found myself entertaining the notion of indulging in some perquisites of age*-- e.g. excusing lapses of taste especially on the basis of sclerosis of the aesthetic sense.  I think I could be forgiven for going the way of the PBS audience from time to time and reminiscing about when entertainment was different, meaning  actually good,  No one but me has a problem with it.  I do in fact occasionally indulge an age old guilty pleasure or permit myself a guilt free binge of threadbare favorites every now and then and it's not entirely out of the question that someday should an opportunity, the time, and a mood to see Get Back converge under the right alignment of stars, I might.  But truthfully, most of the time I'm not done being excited by the new.  It's a habit I fell into long ago.  I think I was 4.

~~~~~

* I hasten to add - I don't consider the impulse to latch onto, dominate and refuse to yield an ounce of political, economic or judicial power a perquisite of age as so many of our current power elite seem to. On the contrary, I think that's a disease of age.  It's one thing to fight to the end alongside comrades of every age for a world better than the one you came into and quite another to hang over things like a toxic windless smog because you can and because that's all you're capable of.

Hate is Hate

From Newsweek, some next level analysis of the situation in Eastern Europe this week from two familiar names: 

Steve Bannon, former advisor to ex-President Donald Trump, said Americans should support "anti-woke" Russian President Vladimir Putin because of Putin's long history of anti-LGBTQ politics.  Bannon praised Putin several hours before the Russian leader launched an invasion of Ukraine. His commendation followed accolades for Putin from Trump and other conservatives. 

"Putin ain't woke. He is anti-woke," Bannon said to private military contractor Erik Prince during the Wednesday broadcast of War Room, Bannon's show on Real America's Voice, a right-leaning media network.

"The Russian people still know which bathroom to use," Prince replied.

"They know how many, how many genders are there in Russia?" Bannon asked.

"Two," Prince answered.

"They don't have the flags, they don't have the Pride flags outside of their—" Bannon continued.

"They don't have boys swimming in girls' college swim meets," Prince responded.

"How savage. How medieval," Bannon added.

Let's divide the world into "the nice" and "the not nice."  Steve Bannon and Erik Prince are not so nice. 

The nice "play fair", they try to say what they mean and mean what they say.  They are not nihilistic and cynical.  They are sincere.  They are willing to learn and to grow and to be informed by diversity (as long as it doesn't mean they have to give anything up).  They have flaws and think bad thoughts but they do you the favor of trying to cull them from the conversation (not always successfully).  Very often they are nice because niceness is the world they want to live in-- and this does create blind spots in the most dogmatically nice (who are as a rule the least nice of "The Nice"); blind spots such as knee-jerk liberalism, extreme conventionality, a lack of questioning of authority or of the status quo.  But in discourse, they like to at least pretend to give you a modicum of respect and the benefit of the doubt on the theory that you will return the favor.  

The not nice couldn't give a shit what you think.  The nice and fair person's most carefully constructed argument, pruned of emotion and fallacies and unsupported elements as a service to you until its composition is 100% streamlined to its most coldly precise and deeply truthful form, is like a house built of graham crackers to the not nice person's brutally wielded chain saw of indifference.  The right wing pundit is the abject cynic whose single-minded motivation to win precludes any sense of shame in naked pandering to the not nice, factually indifferent, middle.

Niceness was also in scant supply on a recent Diet Soap video on the topic of whether the Left should support the Canadian trucker convoy-- actually a conversation between Ashley Frawley a contrarian Marxist academic who makes regular appearances on the UKIP friendly GB News network in Britain coming at anti-woke, anti-nannying discussions from the left-- and an expatriate Canadian trucker and twitter gadfly named (what else?) Gord.  It's an hour long but you can probably get the gist in the first ten minutes or so.  Of course, being a Diet Soap junkie, I watched the whole thing double speed.

The guest is not the interesting part of the interview.  With his rolled-up-brim straw hat, his beer, his cough and his amalgam of half-baked libertarian alt-right bro catchphrases and tics, he is a meme that gets tiresome within five double speed minutes.  His overuse of the term "thought-cancelling cliché" as a dismissive characterization of what he imagines are the criticisms of the Trucker's intentions was an apt demonstration that "thought-cancelling cliché" is the pinnacle of thought-cancelling clichés.  What kept me interested was the search for anything to glom onto about what the ostensibly leftist presenter might have wanted a skeptic to glean about her position.  Somewhere between the video player and my brain,  coherence could find no purchase.  It’s all reflexive and reactionary.  

Right wing messagers like Fox, GB News and Bannon learned long ago that if you tell people there’s nothing wrong with them for hating what they hate, they’ll follow you anywhere.  This is how they got the petit bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat-- well represented among the engine idlers on the streets of Ottawa these past few weeks.  Now they’re very successfully seducing the horseshoe left the same way.  As the video demonstrates, now the seduced are producing their own seduction.  The number of people who would prefer a better society is being consumed by the number of people who will leave you alone if you’ll leave them alone.  (You being the owners).  It’s hopeless anyway.  If you can’t beat ‘em—and apparently you can’t -- join ‘em.  The people clinging to left-right politics are just in the way.  Fortunately they can still be distracted by letting them think there are culture war battles to be fought and won.  And even if only the snowflakes can win those battles, it’s entertaining for the wisened-up freely hating masses to engage the snowflakey left in combat over them.  

I myself know what it’s like to reactively hate something that my enemies cherish and to cherish what they hate because I remember how it was back before my cerebral cortex fully formed.  I'm not a fan of the petit bourgeoisie, but I’m not against them or against the lumpenproletariat.  In fact I’m fascinated with the question of how do you motivate people who don’t have a taste for being on board with what’s good for people—who reflexively reject what could be objectively in their best interests (and work damn hard for the opposite of it-- participating in convoys, attending rallies, interrupting school board meetings, tweeting at the behest of influencers who do not have their interests at heart to impose a petty parochial concept of “freedom” on those who never asked for it, "freedom", say, for those most able to do something about it to ignore the common threat of global warming , "freedom" to restrict unflattering ideas from discussion in public school curricula or to ban behavioral precautions for the sake of public health) because it’s easier to blame their own misery on an imagined coalition of self-important coastal elites and the underclass of people darker, poorer, gayer, more foreign and more pitiful than themselves, who reject a common good because there's never been one within the memory of their lifetimes, and they don't particularly want anything in common with anyone anyway, who reject learning because their experiences with teachers and school were so bad, etc. etc.  It’s a fascinating, exhausting topic.  

Is the answer pandering (or at least acceding) to the underdeveloped tastes and interests of these people because there are so fucking many of them?  Maybe?  What kind of world do you get by doing that?  Maybe one that’s good enough for the lumpen masses even if it's ducky only for their masters.  I’m not ready to be on board with it but it holds my attention every now and then.  And anyway, it's looking less and less like I get to have a say.

~~~~~

Postscript: Three months later, I disown a lot what I've said here particularly about what I refer to as the lumpenproletariat, but I will let it stand as a monument to my own capacity in this very confusing age for reflexive reactionary rambling from time to time. 

Spewing for the Balcony

While you were watching Super Bowl ads on network TV last night, six grown-ups publicly vomited in front of each other in the course of 2 half hour shows on HBO (The Righteous Gemstones and Somebody Somewhere).  From a viewing perspective, I think 6 vomits in an hour was a personal best for me, but that's just a gut feeling.   I can't say with certainty because I have noticed that sometime over the course of I would say the past 10 years, vomit has become a universal device for expressing the inner emotions of a character in movies and on television.   

The Gemstones do nothing by halves and the communal distraught emesis of four of them in front of the hospital where the patriarch lay in a coma from injuries sustained in a crash after an ambush by machine gun toting cycle riding gunmen at the climax of last week's show, involved spectacular fountains of effluvia.  But the Gemstones is the kind of show that would have its characters vomit satirically. The shared vomiting of sister characters in the more gentle and realistic Somebody Somewhere that followed is more typical of what I'm talking about.  One sister, on learning from the other that her husband was cheating on her with her best friend emoted emetically onto the floor of the barn where the two were sheltering from a brewing tornado, upon which the sister who had struggled with having to be the messenger of such bad news followed suit.  

Impressive as it was, the second show suffered a bit from having its puke act have to follow the spew-laden spectacle of the former.  

I could have done without any vomit, but unless I'm very much mistaken, somehow the stress-puke has become an inescapable trope in dramatic entertainment.  It is the go-to deus ex machina for terminating an emotional scene--the signifier of the heightened seriousness of a plot point, in case you hadn't gotten the message from context.

As a very small child, nothing displeased me more than vomiting. By the time I was seven I had developed flawless mastery over the reflex with the result that until I discovered the social lubricant and control inhibiting qualities of alcohol in my late teens, I threw up exactly 0 times. It became my superpower.  An inability to control myself with liquor made my late adolescence a minefield of puke, but once I learned by age 24 not to binge drink,  even having had stomach flu on more than one occasion since, I have somehow managed to avoid vomiting all but one time in my adult life-- and it was as unpleasant and traumatic as  I ever remembered it being.   And needless to say, I have never once thrown up merely because something really stressed me out. So perhaps I'm living in a dream world, but I'd like to think people vomit not remotely close to how frequently they now do in movies and on television shows.  Then again, most of our lives are generally not an escalation of cliffhangers or an arms race of tortuous plot twists designed to be worthy of water cooler conversation the next morning.

It wasn't always like this on tv.  In the 60's, when I was forming my expectations about television, vomit was one of many taboos to the precious sensibilities of the sponsors who brought entertainment into our homes.   Toilets didn't exist on TV at all until All in the Family broke the barrier in the Nixon administration.  Until the special effects revolution in the 70s, it was extremely rare to even hear so much as a retch on the big screen.  The Exorcist was perhaps the Apollo program for cinematic vomit, but aside from an occasional gross-out in a horror movie or outrageous comedy (Terry Jones' gluttonous blow-out in Monty Python's Meaning of Life is perhaps the Everest of gag inducing comedy), vomits on screen remained relatively rare.

How did it become such an appointment TV cliché?  I assume there must have been a template-setter for the trope. It must have occurred to some primordial screenwriter that drama could be telegraphed effectively, or a punchline fashioned, with a suspenseful lunge for the commode.  Whenever the original archetype debuted, I imagine it made some kind of a stir.  While typical audience members no doubt set down their popcorn and covered their eyes, the critics and awards givers must have sat up and taken notice.  Perhaps the novelty pushed a performance over an Oscar or Emmy finish line.  Whatever engendered it, it seems to have caught on among the scriptwriting caste like a stomach virus, because by now it is ubiquitous.  Screenwriters as a class may not be the most innovative bunch on the whole, but when it comes to on-screen vomit, they are lemmings.  In COVID lockdown, I have seen characters vomit their emotions in show after show-- to use just some of the HBO shows I've seen over the past year or so as an example, characters vomit expressively in episodes of Succession, Silicon Valley, Search Party, The White Lotus, The Flight Attendant, Hacks, and Euphoria.  While some of the aforementioned are among the best TV I've seen recently and most are sparing with the prop vomitus,  I gave up on Euphoria when characters had "dram-ited" three times by the 5th episode of Season 1.

While I know news of this phenomenon can't come as a shock to anyone still watching mainstream movies and television, I've been sitting on it for a while. So thank you for listening.  For it is only through acknowledging and talking out loud about the problems that we as a society face today that we can begin to address them.

Endtimes Confidential

I can't decide whether I reject the mantle of "guru" for myself because I reject the authority of anyone, including myself, as part and parcel of my philosophy, or rather, because I somehow understand on a fundamental level that I personally have no business instructing anyone on anything.  Faced with the current global pickle, I want to think of a way out.  But who am I to say what to do?  This is why it amazes me that so many people out there have so much to say about it unreservedly.

On the matter of progress, it’s a well established principle that we’re not good enough to actually have anything nice.  The more logical it is,  the better it sounds for us, the less likely we’re ever going to get it.  The more sane and desirable it is, the more likely a right wing think tank has already worked out the talking points to murk up the waters around it with the result that regular people are going to actively (or at least passively but effectively) work against making it happen. "They're going to take away your right to have whatever damn health insurance your boss wants to give you!"  "They want a healthy environment even if it spells death for American business!"  "They want to change the rules and abort the life terms of the supreme court justices your president picked as was his constitutional right!!1"  "They want your senator to have less of a voice than some socialist from Vermont!1"  "They don't want you to be rich because you're white!1".  We should prepare for this kind of attack, but we ain’t prepared to prepare.  This is what they do basically.  The left doesn’t really have anything comparable in terms of effective tactics.  Our standards get in the way.

Somehow this reminds me of the end of a recent interview of Alex Hochuli (Aufhebunga Bunga podcaster and Zero Books co-author of The End of the End of History which has informed a lot of my thinking since I read it last summer) by Emma Vigeland on Majority Report a while back.  It was a good conversation, and it gave me warm and toasty feelings to see two of my worlds colliding so agreeably for such an extended chat-- like an opening for a rapprochement between warring sides of my own personality-- but there were inklings of a clash of paradigms only in the last 5 minutes or so.  Hochuli had a kind of provocative closing statement, provoked himself a tad by an opening Vigeland attempted to make for Hochuli’s take on the Jimmy Dore / Tucker Carlson / Glenn Greenwald axis of dissent.  Hochuli didn’t rise to the bait but instead urged those on the left to be open to rebellion, revolution, dissent taking unexpected forms.  His basic premise, in his words, “The good news for the left is that things are even worse than you think they are.” The end is near for liberalism, and as such there are frantic attempts to try to stuff the genie back into the bottle, and  the left should be careful to land on the right side of those attempts if they sincerely want to see change for the better. 

Another thing he said at one point was something Glenn Greenwald said to Ben Burgis about the culture wars in an interview of the latter by the former at the beginning of the summer: The left won that war.  As the youngsters say: Yeah, no. I don’t believe that for a minute.  To me the culture war is a never-ending war over nothing that is designed to have no winner.  Deciding who is the arbiter of victory in the culture war is a deadly battle in itself.  In addition, Hochuli said the right is weak.  He made clear he was talking not about say the Koch bros, et al, but about the movement among real people.  It’s smaller in number, doesn’t have a lot of firepower.  I think that’s a distinction without a difference.  That side is winning—the aims of that side are being met-- by force it seems to me.  It seems to me that when the right is actually owning the left, it gives cover to those who want the glamour of the left without the commitment, hence the Kochs pass themselves off as anarchists rather than the neoliberals they truly are and thank goodness one of them is dead.  But I think in short, Hochuli's point is, it is not how it seems to you, silly person.

Sounds great, but I have qualms about the thesis.  The part of the right that gets things done is strong.  Meanwhile, the splintered left wins disparate battles which it rallies to when the right threatens to suppress something, but on the whole, the whole war is seemingly impossible for it to win, because while it was dicking with knobs here and there to put out fires set by the right’s agents of chaos, the grownups on the right seized the engine.  (And actually all those little legal battles the left won are now threatened by virtue of being legal.)

It’s also worth remembering that the mission of the right of course is not to capture the engine, but to re-capture it, to spray it for cockroaches.  To them it’s not winning history, really, it’s trying to put a stop to it.

The left won the culture wars.  The right is weak.  Therefore the left is strong?  I do think Hochuli thinks it’s stronger than I think it is.  While I don’t believe what replaces neoliberalism is necessarily going to be an improvement, Hochuli seems to be saying stay open.  Stay loose.  Whatever is coming is going to come with opportunities so let it come.  He really thinks neoliberalism is on its very last legs, and that what comes after will be better.  

He could just be wrong, of course.  

If you want to know what I think.  I think the planet or at least the species is on its last legs, but neoliberalism, which is why, is going down with it.  I too could be wrong.  I could just be depressed.  But could that be why I’m depressed?