Sácatela

January seems so long ago.  For a year in which nothing happened, a lot happened.  And a lot of what happened was not good.  

Before moving on, let's take some time out to stop -- not to remember, but to forget.  The memory of our collective trauma will force itself back in on our consciousness soon enough.  Soon enough for what, I tremble to say.  But before we settle on wagers for what the coming year will bring, let's turn off the anxiety for just a moment and bask in the sun in the perennially temperate clime of our imaginations.

From La Femme and the French Riviera, Sácatela.

 

Recommended

Red Square podcasters ironically attend a Republican function as guests of Roger Stone (In These Times)

Few things obsess me quite like the schism on the left between those who would ally with fascists to bring the neoliberal world down, and those (e.g., me) who see fascists and neoliberals as part of the same nasty power complex.  To the "Post Left", the sincerity of my type of lefist is worse than fascist.  So much of the discourse on the left is spent attacking or defending oneself from the vitriol of other ostensible leftists that you may occasionally find yourself trying to Google to find out once and for all if Douglas Lain is on the CIA's payroll.  The permeable borders of the divide between the powerless but righteous traditional left and the monied and conspiratorial horseshoe left was a running theme in Naomi Klein's Doppelganger (probably my favorite book of the year) and it is also the subject of Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet's Losing the Plot: The Leftists who Turn Right in a recent issue of In These Times.*  For my money, Joyce and Sharlet's eminently clear-eyed piece nails the subject in a way that is readable in 30 minutes but that you will want to return to from time to time as the drama of late stage capitalism unfolds (and especially if in a trough of despair over the state of Democratic politics you find yourself nodding along to Jimmy Dore or Jackson Hinkle.) My last minute Holiday gift to you.

~~~~~

* A discussion about the article by Tina-Desiree Berg of Status Coup with Oliver Lee Bateman is here.  I am haunted by Bateman's observation that in online battles between the left and the post left, the winner is the one who cares the least. 

Nothing Happening Here

The hosts of Majority Report were recently discussing Joe Biden's 2024 prospects and the tone was grim.  A viewer had written in suggesting that Rashida Tlaib should primary the president who was trailing Trump in National Polls in the five battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona.  By a lot. And barely squeaking out a lead in a sixth, Wisconsin.  The MR crew felt Rashida Tlaib was probably more needed speaking out for Gazans in Congress, but the point was taken. The conversation went something like this (snipped from actual quotes):  "Be nice if somebody else ran though." "What if Biden just dies?" [Shuddering among the hosts -- and their listeners I'm sure-- at the thought of his mantle being taken up by Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg.]  "Somebody else should be running right now, [J.B.] Pritzker or somebody."  "That is the dilemma". "Nobody's going to want to enter in to run against Biden because they don't want to be responsible for a) Biden losing the election and b) 2028 there's not going to be an incumbent."  "This decision should have been made months ago but then again we couldn't have foreseen October 7th and the insane Israeli mass killings in Gaza."  "There's still time.  LBJ decided because of Vietnam he was not going to run and that's what Biden should do now."  "You can't just run a generic Democrat.  It has to be a person who has a name and a record and a profile". "What Pritzker has going for him is he's charismatic, he's younger, he can start a campaign as quickly as possible."   There was discussion about Biden's astonishingly low approval among Black voters (49%) and what that could be about.  Speculation included: Support for a racist genocide in Gaza, expiration of COVID era benefits, reinstatement of student debt, persistently shaky economy, astronomical rent and housing prices.  "Then there's the question of his age and mental acuity."

The rub was discussed the following day- it was acknowledged that the long term strategy of the most typically viable dems (Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois) would have to be to wait for 2028 when no matter who wins in 2024 there will be no incumbent, and Donald Trump if he is still around is even more decrepit and ridiculous. No one serious about becoming president is going to challenge Biden because they don't want to "piss off anyone who they'll need to support them in 2028."

"We have no good options.  No good options right now."

Indicative of Biden's problems (and no doubt inspiration for the Majority Report viewer's nomination of Rashida Tlaib as a primary challenger), last month DC was visited by hundreds of thousands demonstrating against Biden's support of Israel's bloodthirsty genocide in Gaza (almost 20,000 killed since the October 7 breach of Bibi Netanyahu's much vaunted Iron Dome by Hamas in which according to the current revised down official count a bit more than 1100 Israelis, most of them civilians, including hundreds of children were killed either by Hamas or in the IDF's action to end the siege.)

The MR crew appear to think the stakes of the Democratic presidential election are high.  The incumbent's re-election is in jeopardy they say because Biden is weak and there's no one challenging him.   Except that there is.  Unfortunately there is an idée fixe among the MR crew that Biden's highest polling challenger (at 13%) is not so viable as to bear naming.  Who is for a cease fire in Gaza?  Who is for single payer healthcare?  Who is for free college and the cancelling of student debt?  Who is against the destruction of a vital forestland in Georgia for the construction of a dystopian Cop City? Who is pro-union, pro-worker, pro-reparations?  Who is also running for the democratic nomination for 2024?  

The answer to all of these questions is unfortunately also the answer to these questions:  Who has worse polling than Joe Biden?; Who goes through campaign managers like Joe Biden goes through Depends for Men?  Who cannot be named on Majority Report?  

It would be great if Biden didn't run, but that by itself is not enough.  Do you remember the expression "Not me. Us."?  Does it matter how badly a campaign is run if it is the only one that represents what the people want and what we need that, by virtue of being within one of the parties of the duopoly, has a chance of  winning in November?

I've been reading some of what I was writing in private toward the end of  Bernie Sander's primary run in 2020 as COVID raged unleashed.  The topic was what was to happen to Medicare for All?  I was in pain but I think there was something informative-- or at least that rang true-- in my bitterness about the apparently coordinated orchestrations on the part of the Democratic Party establishment,  mainstream media, and a too-large contingent of Democratic primary voters to put the mostly underperforming and frequently visibly failing Biden forth as the only realistic challenger to Trump's re-election-- in spite of Bernie's to that point growing momentum and poll after poll showing Bernie beating Trump in the general election.  The following was written before Bernie suspended his campaign but after the herd of fellow contenders had dropped out and lined up obligingly behind the former Vice President.  It was inspired by learning with disappointment about Democratic friends who had expressed to a fellow Bernie supporting mutual their skepticism about the winnability of Medicare for All as an issue especially against mere anti-Trumpism.

Any average American worker who “likes their healthcare” has not thought deeply enough about the fact that their employer is under no obligation to provide a deal to them, can change it on them tomorrow to save themselves money and fuck you if it’s less coverage, could even take it away completely with no legal consequences whatsoever.  They also don’t realize they’re saying they like paying premiums and deductibles and co-payments and having to stay within network and having to fight with their insurance company from time to time or pay their doctor up front and then file paperwork to be partially reimbursed at whatever percentage the deities of the insurance company have decreed.   They also prefer paying amounts that just go straight to the profit column of the insurance company.  The profit tax.  The capitalism tax.  They prefer that to paying less overall for virtually limitless coverage.  Real smart!   Let’s encourage Americans to prefer their insurance!    It’s that or Trump!!1

I’m ignoring the fact that these hypothetical Americans who obediently like their health insurance are willing to sacrifice coverage for the uninsured and underinsured and soon to be bankrupt because of healthcare because they want a safe candidate against Trump.  We’re conditioned to tamp down our idea of what’s possible.  We’re frightened into dreaming small.  Don’t breathe on your dream or it will die (from coronavirus) (that could have been treated).  Who’s bitter?!1  Not me??!1  And I haven’t even mentioned the throwing up of hands at global warming.  When incrementalism is your only tool, even emergencies look like a thousand year plan.

It’s really telling that the cohort most on board with Biden’s non-stance on climate catastrophe and universal health care are boomers and older. "If privatized insurance was good enough for us, you’ve got to be stuck with it too.  I haven’t lifted a finger to save the planet in all my years and it hasn’t done me any harm.  Suck it up, young bastards!"

I didn’t even mention the donors, who couldn’t give a shit whether it’s Biden or Trump depriving people of health care and a future.  Above all, mustn’t upset the donors.  Right voters??!11

Voters should be much more skeptical of who the donors support and why.  We give lip service to how awful it is that Big Insurance and Big Fossil Fuels give indiscriminately to politicians they then own, we tsk tsk and have several good yocks about it with each other, but then out of panic for what losing that teat would mean for our chances we enthusiastically vote for their purchases anyway.  Meanwhile, the taint compromises the whole process to such a point that it should come as no surprise that the dubious mission of getting these people elected fails more often than not.   

I quote from my privately anguished March 2020 self to provide contrast between the unprecedented election of four years ago that convinced vast swathes of a fractured left to set aside grievances and petty doctrine for the larger cause of change that could possibly happen (and that felt good for a change until the solidarity and the dream got crushed amid the forced seclusion of pandemic) and the denouement before the first Act-- before the lights have gone down-- that is the 2024 Democratic Primary  (which is already being pre-emptively canceled in more than one state at the president's request to forestall an impression that there could be better choices for the democratic nominee).  How can we expect non-primary voters to get excited about the general election when the primary process is designed to disappoint all but the least forward thinking, most conventionally inclined partisan.  And when, thanks to more of the same since 2020, we are only 4 years closer to the catastrophes that we cannot talk ourselves into voting ourselves out of.  Consider me pre-grieved.

You Never Get It Back

At the height of its popularity in the 1979-80 season, CBS's 'newsmagazine' 60 Minutes -- a mainstay since 1968-- drew an average audience of 28 million households each Sunday night -- quite a bit more than a quarter of the US population at the time.  While it's never been lower than 26th in ratings and is still regularly in the top 20 shows each week its viewership has steadily declined in number over the years.  In this more fragmented age it now hovers around 10 million viewers a week or about 3% of the US.  Which doesn't really answer the question - who is still watching 60 Minutes and why?  I ask myself this whenever the TV drifts by accident to CBS on Sunday night subjecting me for whatever length of time to the patented 60 Minutes sterilization of whatever subject it is treating.

From the beginning, 60 Minutes stories have fallen neatly into a handful of antiseptic categories, many of them demonstrated as recently as this season.  Among the themes: You Can't Turn Your Back on them for a Second (e.g. a 2021 story on a CDC scandal around an early COVID cruise); The price of peace is war (Ukraine resistance fighters and a legless Navy SEAL mountain climber); It's a Dangerous World but We Got This (John Bolton on Iran); Explain the young people to grandma (Greta Gerwig on the Barbie Movie); My success is your victory (Sandra Day O'Connor remembrance); Gee whiz! (IA and 3D printed homes but also winemaking Georgian monks); They're not so bad (Green conservative Wyoming governor; and speaking of Green how about Marjorie Taylor Green?) and the perennial favorite Not Dead Yet (Red Hot Chili Peppers; Nicolas Cage). 

On a recent Sunday night, 60 Minutes tackled Israel's bombing of Gaza in response to the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel in its typical fashion, by talking about something else.  Anticipating the strategic distraction of the then immanent exhibition of Congress's grilling of University Presidents about reports of rising Anti-Semitism on campus, in this case it was the different ways in which the conflict was playing out at 2 Ivy League campuses, Columbia and Dartmouth.  On the larger, urban, more liberal campus of Columbia, the discussion was itself a conflict between 2 opposing student groups both against each other and against the University.  At rural, bucolic, smaller and more conservative Dartmouth, the conflict was being focus grouped by the department of Middle Eastern Studies (whose chair is notably an Egyptian-- one of 2 Arab states with full diplomatic relations with Israel) in partnership with the Jewish Studies program.  

At one point, the reporter Bill Whitaker asks the business school assistant professor leading the pro-Israeli faction at Columbia in its protests against anti-Israeli speech on campus and against the university's refusal to condemn the Hamas attacks (as it has not condemned the disproportionate death and destruction being perpetrated by Israel on Gaza) if he had been reprimanded by the university for his outspokenness; to which the professor non-replied, "I have not done anything wrong." In essence, 60 Minutes was doing what it does quite often: dutifully airing the aggrievements of the unaggrieved.

Later in the week, for participating in Congress's show with an obligingly egregious performance, one university president was sacrificed on the altar of conventional taste by being forced to resign (cancelled) from the pressure exerted on her for opting to defend free speech at her campus rather than affirming at a MAGA Congresswoman's request (posed á la "Do you still beat your wife?") that uttering a phrase-- "From the river to the sea"-- that could be disingenuously misinterpreted to be advocating for genocide of Jewish Israelis is bad.  In the middle of all this, 95 House democrats helped the Republicans pass their Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism law.  All of which is designed to stifle speech on American university campuses and elsewhere against Israel's genocidal campaign against Palestinians.

Meanwhile in Gaza...  

Can She Excuse My Wrongs?

If not, why not?

 

In Us We Trust

Is it just me or is this the strangest presidential election ever?  The clock is ticking; change is mandatory; but the country seems stuck in re-run mode. A Trump versus Biden rematch is seemingly inevitable, and for a good dose of dysfunctional nostalgia, how about throwing Jill Stein into the mix?  The sameness is not limited to presidential politics, or to the US for that matter.  The whole planet seems to be spiraling into a toilet of retrograde nationalism (at least in the parts of the world that western capitalism has not yet turned into a toilet of climate catastrophe).  To feel better about things, I could take drugs or practice my Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or I could write once again about an obvious solution to the cesspool of electoralism: universal sortition-- the random selection of our leaders for short non-consecutive terms through a scientifically equitable process from among the pool of all of us.  Scientifically randomized universal sortition is the cure because it removes money, careerism, influence peddling, partisanship and all of the myriad barriers and issues (natural and manufactured) to people's ability to vote and to get representation.  It doesn't end with selection.  Legislatures (and judiciaries and executives) selected by sortition convene to get the same non-partisan information about issues of the day, to debate and to deliberate without having to answer to parties or to donors or to special interests or to worry about re-election.

A common objection I hear from people when I raise the possibility of sortition as a replacement for the current system is that government, leadership and politics require an intelligence that random selection among people (let's come out with it, among Americans) is unlikely to find.  The complexities of the modern world make the stakes too high to be trusted with the average Joe or Jane.   By definition of course statistically the intelligence of the group will be average unlike the higher concentration of brains we presume are in a hierarchy based on achievement (or historically secured for itself by a clever bloodline).  Call me a little slow (or of average speed),  but I still think average human intelligence is much smarter than we presume and is suppressed by our measurements of it and by our expectations.  I also think the proof of the intelligence of our current elite is in the pudding.

People are more intelligent than they get credit for, though the application of this innate capacity of humans is not encouraged in public life.   A huge part of what makes people stupid about government is partisanship.  Money in politics incentivizes the cultivation of stupidity.  Every now and then  I’m surprised to learn that a very intelligent colleague has ridiculously inane politics. Doing away with partisan politics will give people much less incentive to nurture their stupid side and provide occasions to exercise their native intelligence. A society that runs on sortition will have its structure transformed.  Currently we teach people they’re stupid from a very young age to keep them from pursuing power (because we want them to work, not to lead or to own—our education is designed around this).  What if we give people the respect they deserve-- that we ourselves demand-- as human beings with human brains?  When our leadership is randomly selected among our fellow citizens, it will be in our interest to structure public education in a way that nourishes everyone's intelligence.

All of this said, the fact remains that some people are just plain stupid. But don’t stupid people get a say?  I say yes.  If everyone has a shot at non-partisan power, I believe that’s incentive for people to  be at least somewhat less stupid-- to rise to wisdom as the occasion demands.  Face to face, person to person, people will try harder I think to get it right. 

Will people still make decisions against their interest or best judgment?  Perhaps, but if we ourselves are our leaders, we will have a more direct engagement with the issues that face us.  Our experience of politics will be not merely as judges in a beauty contest between scoundrels who have their own interests and agendas and careers at heart.  We will not have the luxury of letting the professionals fuck things up.  There will be no need to appeal to greater, more gifted and advantaged authority. There is no greater, more gifted or advantaged authority to appeal to, so the lawmaker must appeal to herself.  This is the point of universal sortition.

About 1% of those selected for the legislatures, judiciaries, councils governing our world by sortition will be miserable with their loss of representation, but this is the 1% that thanks to their masterful manipulation of the electorate,  are easily 5000% over-represented now anyway.  Their representation needs to be "trued-up" to their number. The reckoning is long overdue.

About this small segment of society and its potential for mischief, I saw a discussion on a recent book about Jury trials-- the most familiar practical application of sortition already in place-- and the authors’s thesis is that basically we don’t have jury trials anymore because of plea bargaining.  They’re becoming so rare as to be statistically non-existent.  And it’s pretty safe to say that the ones that do happen are very carefully designed so that the fate or liability for damages of any Harvard dude on trial is rarely if ever going to get decided by a resentful dummy.  The point is our legal system is designed to be manipulated by the clever weasels who run it. We’d just have to make sure that clever weasels don’t get to manipulate sortition to their favor in a similar manner. 

When you get down to it, it's just a place people live

Work Life Imbalance

Because I work from home, I need to be in the house at 10:00 am tomorrow, a Saturday, so I can sign for the delivery of new equipment sent to me by the main office-- a laptop, a monitor, a usb port, a keyboard and mouse.  Making sure it doesn't get absconded with from my front porch is the least I can do, I suppose.  In return I have to send back my old laptop.  I've been using it for the past 6 years, and wouldn't you know I finally stopped hating it, but because I dragged my heels on the transition to the new equipment, I have to say a very hasty good bye to the old.  I'm sending it back, hoping everything i needed to keep from it is on the new machine and nothing I needed to vanish forever has been overlooked. 

Being required to be home for the delivery of work equipment on a Saturday is one of the many ways in which the remote office lifestyle has blurred the line between home and work.  When I was commuting everyday, though I always tended to work long hours, before "work-life balance" became one of those suspiciously ubiquitous buzzphrases of corporate speak*, I never mixed work and home life.  Once at the office, I was at the office, and at the end of the day, I never had any trouble turning off the work mind when the door shut behind me as I hit the street for home of weekday evenings.  Now that I'm remote, there is scarcely any separation between work mind and home mind.  Hardly a day goes by when something needed for home life isn't hindered by something needed for work or vice versa.  Yesterday, I needed to find time to meet via Zoom with the COO to provide some assistance before taking my dog to the vet.  I couldn't very well leave the house unshowered, so I needed to sacrifice time that could have been spent on another project approaching a deadline in order to perform my ablutions.  I've been home by myself for the past couple of weeks as the wife and daughter have been on an excursion and we hadn't talked in a few days, but I had to wait until after a weekly meeting to return a call from them.  

I'm young at heart (which is a kind way of saying stunted).  There aren't a lot of things I feel too old for but work is one of them.  Unfortunately I'm too young to retire and underwater enough that I can't stop working but beyond the age where I could look for work I really want to do; but working from home at what I suspect will be my last employment has stretched the boundaries of my tolerance.  Trapped is an awfully harsh word, but it has a ring in this instance.  This working remotely business is too appealing for a hermit to pass up, and I understand that it's a privilege not everyone can take advantage of, but there is a side of me that can't help but feel there is something really wrong with not having a door, a commute and another door between home life and work life.  Having been given the option, I couldn't refuse.  But part of me feels it might have been wrong, exploitative even, to have been given the option to conduct the firm's business within the walls of my home. 

For instance, units of time by which to measure one's exploitation are blurred. Time once spent commuting is now spent working, adding hours to the day.   The transition from work day to home life is too subtle not to miss some days.  With the end of daylight savings' time, there isn't even a slice of daylight between them.  

In order not to use up Paid Time Off I worked through COVID last year, taking not one day off.  It was my choice to do, but along with my head and chest, the clarity of what to do was clogged by the advantage that I could take of working from home.

Worst of all: there's no such thing as a snow day anymore.

Isolation from colleagues means that solidarity with co-workers happens on the company's terms.  To compensate for any tendencies of the workforce to drift from cohesion with the mission of the firm, puerile  team building activities are introduced.  In the absence of other people's reactions to these efforts against which to gauge my own I can only judge them for myself.  I was never a fan but they seem lamer now.  Even hostile.  Many of the activities center around diversity and inclusion and ways that I can be a better ally and in general feel bad about myself rather than about the inequality of the system and about the ways in which diversity overindulgence can keep us separate from each other.  They think I think they're being good but they don't realize I've read Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's Elite Capture and Catherine Liu's Virtue Hoarders.  

Among the benefits trumpeted by the firm are an array of services offered as a way of ensuring my mental health.  Grief training, individual counseling including text-based consults on demand, seminars on presence and gratitude.  It isn't like I'm not in greater need of mental health, and no question the increasing inability to extract myself from my job is largely responsible for it.  Perhaps I could at least be grateful to see some evidence of culpability on their part in the procurement of tools for addressing the insanity.  Yet something about the firm's benignly insisting insinuation into my "headspace" as some of their memos call it, puts me in mind of an unforgettably acute observation I came across in Micha Frazer-Carroll's Mad World.   She was writing about the ways in which society at large places responsibility for the causes, treatments and repercussions of mental illness on those whom its madness-making ways make mad.  But I find myself applying it here in spite of myself: 

The transformation of complex social experience into diagnostic language may mute our political realities. In the same vein, it can serve as a smokescreen for various forms of violence. When people die by suicide while waiting for benefits or for trans healthcare, suicide may be read as a result of illness that originated from inside the person’s mind. The state’s responsibility for social murder is therefore diminished. This process of medicalisation also leads the living towards overwhelmingly medical ‘solutions’ for distress; we are prescribed drugs or cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) instead of revolution.

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* The neoliberal corporation's ostentatious interest in its employees' work-life balance is a way for it to concern troll about the quality of the portion of a worker's time spent at home so that it can claim the balance.

Unsettling Preoccupation

It may be my imagination but for the past month and a half or so, it seems to me that everything I'm reading is about Israel and Gaza.  Three books in particular that had been in my queue for weeks before October 7 had eerie consonance with current events.  In early October I was reading Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, her rather epic new meditation on The Double, particularly as observed through her personal troubling experience of being chronically confused with the recently anti-vax and conspiracy obsessed Steve Bannon crony, Naomi Wolf.  As Israel began its campaign of vengeance on Gaza in response to Hamas' October 7th breach of Israel's "Iron Dome" defense which resulted in the killing of 1200 (nearly half of whom were civilians), I had reached the conclusion of Klein's book, which centers on the complicated contrast between the notion of the Old Jew as the bookish perpetually stateless victim of the Nazi holocaust and the New Jew personified by the robustly aggressive settler colonialism of the Zionist government of Israel.  Klein's reflections are profound; perhaps, the highlight of what for me is the best book of 2023 so far. (Klein has since spoken at the Jewish Voice for Peace rally for ceasefire in Gaza in Washington October 18 at which Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush also spoke and 300 were arrested.). 

Astrotopia, by Mary-Jane Rubenstein is ostensibly about the danger of the religious rationalizations behind capitalism's designs-- through the auspices of unilateral governmental support-- on space; and yet as the author explicitly states in her introduction, it bears a strong kinship to the settler colonialism of the West, and to Israel's version of it in Palestine.  

Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton is not at all about Israel-Palestine, but about Attica and related prison riots in New York State in 1970-1971.  But the parallels between Attica and Gaza are impossible to miss.  The Attica uprising was of a subjected population -- in this case a heavily oppressed prison population -- against a supremely dominant colonial power that viewed the Attica prisoners as less than human. As it was the brutal carceral state itself that created the explosive conditions that erupted in Attica, so the conditions in Gaza that fomented the Hamas attack against Israel were engendered by Israel's subhuman treatment of Gazans.  Attica was heralded as a riot-proof prison , a claim that turned out to be easily belied (much like Israel's failed "Iron Dome") by a spontaneous turnaround of an incident of brutality against prisoners on the part of Attica guards.  A guard's killing in the siege escalated and intensified the state's brutal response.  Hostages were taken, and as hostages were released in return for the granting of some demands-- not unlike reports from Hamas held hostages on their release-- they reported their treatment by their captors to be humane, even kind.  In the action that ended the siege, nearly 40 were killed by state forces, among them 9 hostages whose safety had been  exploited for PR purposes by the state as a justification for the its aggressive response but was apparently secondary to vengeance in its carrying out of the operation.

Israel it seems to me in this truly unprecedented time is losing the story.   To be sure it still has the ears of many in the media and in the governing class, including Joe Biden and the US State Department who continue to enable Israel's aggressions against the Palestinians (over 11,000 killed in Gaza since the October 7th attack as of this writing, including more than 5000 children and who knows yet how many of the 250 hostages taken into Gaza that day; low estimates place civilian casualties at 75% of the total but some estimates suggest as many as 90% are civilian deaths; 1.6 million in a population of just over 2.0 million have been displaced from their homes) under an increasingly indefensible pretense of "self-defense."  But among the people, including myself but especially the young of all ethnicities and religions, not least among them Jews, it has lost any semblance of justice in the pretext of its murderous response to the tragedy of October 7.  

Several kinks in the chain of the narrative that Israel and its intolerant-of-debate champions would like to force you to believe have snapped.  My yielding to the special pleading of Israeli on the topic of its behavior in the world has broken with it.*

Israel has a right to defend itself, they say. Perhaps, but the opportunity to defend itself was October 7 and it failed.  Its actions since October 7, in which along with the cutting off of supplies including food, water, electricity. and the destruction of thousands of homes, businesses and hospitals, so far, ten Palestinians (nearly half of them children) have been killed by strategically deployed Israeli bombs for every victim of Hamas' attack,  have  revealed themselves to be not defense, but a part of  the Netanyahu government's long criminal strategy to eradicate Palestinians from Israel after all.  Opting to indiscriminately kill the so-called "civilian shields" you'd like us to believe are pawns in your enemy's game (rather than calling your victims what they are-- civilians!) is not defense, and there is no longer any defense for it.

Palestinians engage in terror against their imprisoners because life is cheap for them, I've heard.  For Palestinians?  For a people whose autonomy has been taken from them; for a people forced into a refugee life from birth; who have been living in an open air prison for decades; whose food, water, housing, electricity, movement are strictly controlled from without?  Life is cheap for me and for you who subsist here in America and in the America like suburbs of Israel with an effort of struggle that is laughable compared to what is forced upon those in Gaza.  Life is dear for Palestinians. Its dearness has been thrust upon them.  

Never again means never again, I've heard.  And of course it does because never again should we stand by while a subject people are systematically scrubbed from the face of the earth out of the hatred stoked by the fascists in power.  But it's clear that never again for the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu-- who keep Palestinians in an open air concentration camp and drop bombs out of all proportion to the tragedy that rationalizes this response, killing innocent children and their families like shooting fish in a barrel in order to bring their people closer to extinction and out of the way of Israeli settlement-- means never again only to Jews. 

I must not criticize Israel or Zionism because that is Anti-Semitic, they say.   How convenient!  And single payer healthcare costs too much, and peace is not serious, and freedom is not free. Criticism of Israel and Zionism is criticism of Israel and Zionism-- and it is sometimes done only out of love for the Jews who take no part --and especially the pervasively large number who resist-- in the sanctifying of the crimes that Israel commits in their name, and not least of all for those who love Israel so much for the best of reasons that they must blind themselves to its atrocities-- atrocities they would not forgive if they were committed (and not merely enabled) by the US   This why the anti-BDS laws that no one asked for sprang up unbidden across the United States thanks to the stealth machinations of moneyed groups supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu's ultra-conservative anti-Palestinian government in Israel; laws that punish those caught expressing views not to the Israel lobbies' liking.   In the United States!    

What the government of Israel is doing is playing with fire.  The edifice of sacreds it has stacked up to protect itself from exposure of the rot at the core of its mission-- a rot that is very familiar to an American or a European from our own settler colonial heritage-- is falling apart.  And the violence that it has wielded to protect its rot from showing could very possibly come back on itself.  And let me be clear, that is not good. Shame on us for enabling it. 

If my tolerance of the accepted version of  Israel's mission in Palestine is broken by the genocide being committed in Gaza, what else is broken?  I don't know how this will end.  I can voice my pain but I can't control the impact of my words.  For the most part I can only watch in horror.  But I very much hope for an outcome that will quickly with as little blood as possible put an end to this brutal era, and mark the beginning of an era of true peace and autonomy and literal co-existence in the sense of existing together in the middle east and around the world.  Amein.

~~~~~

* Then 22 House Democrats who voted with Republicans to censure Rashida Tlaib for civilly exercising free speech broke me again.

Cry Little Sister

Dutch singer Charlotte Wessels covers Gerald McMahon's song written for Joel Schumacher's 1987 teen vampire flick, The Lost Boys.  McMahon wrote the song  at Schumacher's request without seeing the movie.  It's easy to see why Schumacher was pleased.  In its broody unspecificity, it manages to be one of those magical fits.

Whose moon?

William Blake, 1793.

In 1970, an anthropologist in Alaska asked the members of the Inuit village she was visiting if they were aware that NASA had landed a crew on the moon the previous summer.  As reported in a 1987 article by a colleague recounting the incident, she informed them of the mission and the artifacts that were left by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on July 20, 1969 including their footsteps, containers of human waste,  and an artificially billowing American flag (thanks to springs and wires) that had been difficult to raise and that had toppled in the blowback of the lunar lander as it rose from the surface of the moon to reunite with the orbiter.  Told of the achievement,   

[t]he Inuits began laughing, and when the anthropologist inquired why, they replied: ‘We didn’t know this was the first time you white people had been to the Moon. Our shamans have been going for years. They go all the time. . . . The issue is not whether we go to visit our relatives, but how we treat them and their homeland when we go.

In 1970 it was easier to find pockets of uncolonized peoples from Alaska to Brazil to Africa to Asia and Oceania, and we know that the Inuit reverence and affinity for the moon was not unique among those less tuned into the strains of the developed world.  But you didn't have to be an Inuit to be alarmed a few decades later at intimations from the Latrobe Brewing Company division of Anheuser Busch  that it intended to beam advertisements for its Rolling Rock Beer on the surface of the moon to be visible to all on Earth.  The feat, which at various other times has been hinted at as a PR aspiration by both Coke and Pepsi, turns out to be prohibitively expensive to engineer and may even be impossible, and the threat turned out to be the extent of it, but experience with capitalism was all you needed to feel violated by the mere suggestion that it was a corporate ambition.

The topic of Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Astrotopia is the subtitle: "The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race."  In short it is about the unacknowledged religious foundation to the impetus of certain billionaires of the Western hemisphere to turn capitalism's destructive tools toward the heavens (having nearly depleted the home planet with them).  Never mind the "for all mankind" pretext of NASA's mission statement; the space race was undertaken as much for American glory and pwning of the Soviets who with Sputnik and subsequent orbits of the earth with manned (or rather "dogged") spacecraft had caught Washington off guard in the Eisenhower years-- Rubenstein demonstrates that in this privatized age of exploration, the hobby of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and  Richard Branson (for which we are all paying thanks to generous grants to these billionaires to the tune of billions and billions of dollars on our behalf from our Federal government) is for very little mankind.  

David Gruber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything argues that the organization of human society is not an inexorable linear march to the logical conclusion of neoliberalism but rather a fluid thing that has taken turns in multiple directions and degrees of egalitarianism at every point in human history -- and is not prohibited from turning again.   But Rubenstein notes that the religious foundation of Western colonial capitalism in the first chapters of Genesis-- in which God grants those he created in his image dominion over creation-- is what fueled and rationalized European dominance of the planet in its Christian origins* and, in the absence of planetary consensus continues to justify agnostic capitalism's designs on the extraterrestrial.  In this view, the moon belongs to whoever exploits it first-- the hell with Inuit shamans, lunar relatives and the rest of us.

There have been strains of commonality in the attitude of the international community to space exploration even since Sputnik.  In 1957, the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) was founded with headquarters in Vienna, as a means of monitoring that the nascent era of extra-planetary exploration be to the benefit of all nations (if not explicitly all humans).  From the beginning, the mission of keeping outer space de-militarized was waylaid by the ongoing heating of the Space Race between the United States and Soviet Union.  Nevertheless, COPUOS in spite of periods of inactivity managed to carve out several treaties. including the Outer Space Treaty in 1967 and the Moon Treaty in 1979,  promoting peaceful cooperation between nations with emphasis on scientific investigation rather than belligerent competition in the service of commerce in whatever would come as earth expanded its reach into the heavens.  The trouble was getting signatories beyond non-spacefaring nations. 

Over the decades-- as the smog of space junk surrounding the planet and obscuring the view of the universe even to the dwindling few who remain uncolonized to the developed world has exploded to millions of objects of varying size-- the list of spacefaring nations has grown beyond the original 2 to 17, with China joining the US and Russia in sending manned craft since 2003.   India intends to follow suit with a crewed mission by 2025 and to follow it up with a permanently crewed space station by 2035 and eventually its own lunar base.  China and Europe are cooperating on plans for their own base, with the US shut out thanks to its unfriendliness toward an Asian superpower.  Privatization of Space has been on the American agenda from its origins as envisioned by  Wernher von Braun in influential popular writings about the promise of space that began debuting in the 1950's after the ex-Nazi was welcomed into the bosom of American rocket science shortly after surrendering to the Allies in 1945.  American presidents had always emphasized American superiority over international cooperation in the space race-- those were American flags it planted on each landing on the moon, not Earth flags.  But naturally it was during the Reagan era that participation of the private sector in the development of the American space program became official policy.  Subsequent legislation by Bush elder, Clinton and Bush younger guaranteed that the future of the American program lay in private enterprise, but it was  Barack Obama's Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA), a bipartisan achievement that made it law that whatever resources any US citizen was able to extract from outer space exploration was the property of the citizen that really opened up the floodgates to the ambitions of Musk, Bezos and Branson.  

The question of whose sky, moon, sun, stars and universe we see as we look upwards was answered by fiat during Trump's last year in office.   As Mary-Jane Rubenstein notes in Astrotopia, 

In the language of Executive Order 13914, “the United States does not view [outer space] as a commons. Accordingly, it shall be the policy of the United States to encourage . . . the public and private recovery and use of resources in outer space.”

In a symbolic gesture NASA has already sold you down the river with a dime.  As Rubinstein writes, 

since “practical purposes” are all that really count, NASA decided to prove space isn’t a commons by buying some of it. In September 2021, the space agency paid Lunar Outpost ten cents as a down payment for some lunar soil. Once the space-mining company gathers the regolith and deposits it elsewhere on the Moon, NASA will pay the firm ninety more cents for the “delivered” materials. As NASA explains, “this process will establish a critical precedent that lunar resources can be extracted and purchased from the private sector in compliance with Article 2 and other provisions of the Outer Space Treaty.” In other words, buying lunar resources will demonstrate that it’s possible to buy lunar resources. And if anyone objects, they can bring it to COPUOS, which will dutifully record the objection in minutes that nobody reads.

So much for the benefit of all humanity.   The best things in life may be free, but the sky and everything in it are not among them.

~~~~~

* Characterized by a brutal exploitation and extermination of otherness emulated, with unambiguous American encouragement and assistance, by the Israeli government of Binyamin Netanyahu's policy toward Palestinians and playing out in real time in Gaza before our very eyes.

Ambivalence Waltz

Before whatever upheaval occasioned Cornel West's recent exit from the Green Party presidential race to re-re-launch his campaign as an independent, I was surprised to find myself closer to voting Green in 2024 than I have been since 2000, but even that was contingent on not having to listen to actual Greens in the meantime.   

This paragraph from a substack article a Green friend shared with me is a good example of what I'm talking about:

... the voting base of the Green Party are people who identify as more liberal, more progressive, socialist, communist even, and as being to the left of the Democrats. They care about anti-imperialism more, they care about anti-racism more, they care about anti-sexism more, they care about healthcare and taxing the rich more. That is the electoral base of the Greens, so the liberal media apparatus is directly aiming fire at it constantly at all times with the line: “Don’t believe them, they’re liars, they’re frauds, they’re actually Trump supporters, they’re wolves in sheep’s clothing, we are the real liberals, we are the best you have, we are the only real left option to you.”

While there was much else in the article to agree with, the above is what stood out as emblematic of my problem with voting Green.  How is aligning with a powerless party that only does presidential campaigns every 4 years “caring more” about anything other than purity?  There is no  “electoral base” of the Greens because the Greens do not get elected.  I don’t get it.   I don’t see the value of aligning with a few people with no power and no plan to get power just because they want the best things as much as I do, versus (given our stupid fucking system) aligning with as many people as possible who want the same things I do in the hopes that with the power in that number some of those things will happen.

  

In his stated aim of bringing down the duopoly, Cornel West had found common cause with the Greens before he saw fit to reject party politics altogether with his latest reboot.  Whether the purification of his position on electoralism will sustain any support he had garnered as a Green through November of next year remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that by refusing from the beginning to even entertain a run as a democrat, instead choosing principle over mainstream political relevance, he is representing an anti-duopoly strain that is a continuing source of contention between the faction of the left that includes Greens and followers/subscribers of Jimmy Dore, Briahna Joy Gray, the Revolutionary Blackout Network and the like, and the amorphous nervous majority of pants shitters like myself who identify with the left  (and behave like it in Primary season) while succumbing to appeals to vote for the lesser evil of the two major party candidates when it comes to the general election.

I think I get the RBN critique of my kind a bit – in short my general election hangup about keeping the GOP from winning and taking everything outright appears to the RBN types (and to similar irritating types on the left) like Dem complicity, and more to the point duopoly complicity.  It is perceived as neoliberal.  And counterrevolutionary in that it contributes to perpetuating the status quo (so they think).  And even more annoying, should I express my belief in the importance to myself of not just handing everything over to the GOP, especially if it involves anything that could be viewed as exhortation of others to likewise put harm prevention (as though Dems are less harmful than GOP) above their taste for destruction, that is viewed as an infuriating counterproductive request of people who are trying to make everything come crashing down.  Only someone with low stakes would put out a fire intended to destroy a monstrosity because it could cause a fire that might cause the prison that the monstrosity is keeping us all in to burn down so long as  prison or not, it’s the roof over our heads.  

 My critique of the RBN critique of me is, if Dems and GOP are almost the same then why are you focusing only on people who hate capitalism war poverty injustice oppression just as much as you do who are in good faith trying to mitigate the harms of our system in some small way in one of the few ways allowed?  If electoral politics does nothing then why does it matter if Dems win?  If you hate the duopoly, at least you don’t have to do anything to maintain it.  If I’m just neurotic, so what?  Back the fuck off, maybe!    

I make explicit for anyone tuning in late that it’s not dems who I think hate capitalism war oppression etc just as much as RBN types but me, who is not a dem but who votes for dems on a theory of harm reduction.  I always come back to, what’s the alternative?  That’s where people like me and RBN and their ilk differ.  I realize I do a bit of taking for granted that of course dems are not as bad as republicans, and the reason for this is that in my view Republicans are actively and openly trying to destroy everything good and free for everyone who is not an owner.  Dems in my view are actively but quietly trying to preserve things for their personal selves which the GOP has pretty much made ok and a lot easier for wealthier people to do in private, while openly but much less actively validating that Republicans are bad for everybody else.  I know it’s a small difference, but republicans take away women’s right to an abortion by appointing young reactionary justices and what not, whereas dems who of course fundraise off of this but do almost nothing to mitigate it, nevertheless occasionally get someone who’s not a young reactionary on the supreme court.  I’m trying to be generous to the other side of this left-ish debate.   Let’s just say, anybody who is openly inclined or engaged in reducing harm in our government is probably there because of dems.  An effort to put a stop to Republican momentum at the polls, even if it amounts to merely a gentle tapping of the brake seems to me substantial to the extent that it prevents crashing into a wall of complete fascism.  It may not seem that way to accelerationists, but my point is, if I am engaged in what I think is the prevention of fascism and if my activities at worst fail because a GOP president/congress/supreme court succeeds anyway and accelerates the march toward fascism, or even if my efforts contribute to dem success that you think at best does nothing, I still fail to see why this disqualifies me from what those who see through my delusion would consider the left.  Especially since I really do not hear a whole lot of alternatives proposed.  I hear no alternatives proposed other than 3rd parties and rank choice voting-- perpetually stubbornly unconstructed electoral tweaks.  Outside of electoral politics, the alternative to harm reduction seems to be to let it burn.  Ok if the dems are just as bad as the GOP (or are so bad that a dem victory is worse than the GOP) then aren’t I actively contributing to the acceleration of the end of it anyway?  

Does it really need to be made clear that people like me who vote for harm reduction in the general election without reservation are only doing what they think is the best they can do given two terrible choices?  I know there are still plenty of people who parrot the mainstream liberal platitudes about how unbelievably bad the republicans are while avoiding the topic of how great the dems are --- it feels implied and I don’t doubt that many people have not given that side of the equation a lot of thought.  I happen to agree they’re not wrong that Republicans must be stopped.  But I identify with a sizeable group of people who yearn for the end of capitalism and imperialism, of inequality, oligarchy, planet destruction etc.  (i.e., same base clean slate as people who think harm reduction is asinine I assume).   This is my biggest beef with the know-it-alls who condemn harm reduction, this implication that harm reducers want to perpetuate the status quo--- no they want to destroy the status quo but without harm.  That to me is the essential difference.  My question of what is the alternative means that.  What is the alternative to harm reduction?  I fear the alternative is, Let’s find out.  People like me don’t want to find out because history does not indicate that the answer to Let’s find out is going to be good.   I’m not opposed to all my possessions and assets etc. being liquidated, meaningless, worthless.  That doesn’t scare me.  What scares me is slavery, genocide, surveillance.   

I think the rift on the left may be insurmountable for as long as each side sees the other as part of the problem.  How come people who want the same things are so irreparably on opposite sides anyway?  I don’t think it’s strictly because of doctrine.  When the RBN side flirts with anti-trans anti-woke MAGA pro-Trump shit, am I wrong to be fucking pissed to have my side called counter-revolutionary? 

To be continued (or dropped as we see fit).

Tears on my mousepad

Is there a loneliness epidemic among men?  Is there a reason to hang on for an answer?  As an inveterate YouTube lurker I am at the mercy of the algorithm.  Somehow over the past month or so, I have noticed a preponderance of videos on the subject of male loneliness.  My first thought on seeing a wave of videos on topics I didn't ask for is what did I do or say that YouTube overheard?  My family has been away for the past month and I have been on my own (with an adult male cat as my only companion.).  Did I sigh too loud one day?  Am I talking to myself too much within range of a microphone connected to the Internet of Things?  I'll admit the topic of male loneliness (even my own) does not interest me in the least but perhaps it wasn't me but some wave of interest in the culture at large that was behind the onslaught. Whatever the reason, the volume of titles wore me down to a nub and I eventually clicked on one at a moment of least resistance.  It turned out to be a meta video about the controversy that took place on Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti's cross-populist Breaking Points channel and featuring apparently the leading culprit behind the trending of the topic, one "Shoes-upon-the-head", or SUTH as I'll call her.

The first thing I noticed about the Breaking Points video is that the topic is introduced as "The Epidemic of Male Loneliness" as though it is a thing.  By way of introduction, the interview quotes from SUTH's video:

The men are not okay. ...  Men have no friends, no girl friend, no college education, no money, are breaking their legs and inserting metal rods in their bones to be a few inches taller, and listening to AI Batman to help them overcome their pornography addictions.  Turns out the society that was built by and allegedly for men has indeed let them down.  Now you may be thinking "Oh look, another boo-hoo-poor-men video from Shoes-upon-the-head."  Yes!

Apparently SUTH, who looks about 12 has been talking about this subject for nearly 10 years, or approximately since she was 2. Driven to the topic in reaction to what she describes as an anti-male pop-feminism online, she claims now that the left, which ignored the problem for years has only now become interested in response to a reported growth in conservatism among young men and the coming to light of the exploitation of male loneliness by such figures as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.  (The things and people you have to learn about to bring yourself up to speed on internet phenomena!)  Meanwhile, offering herself as a preferable alternative to the "manosphere", SUTH attributes male loneliness to exactly the same thing: women (read feminism)*.  On the culpability of women, she contradicts herself right in plain view in the Breaking Points video-- opening with a statistic pulled from the gut suggesting that 80% of the women on dating apps are picking the same 20% of men and five minutes later protesting that the backlash to her video must have come from those who never watched it since she refers to women (she thinks) only once, and only to say that they're also lonely.  Also lonely, and if you watch her video heartless cruel emasculating harpies (except for herself) who for shallow, hypocritical reasons think if a man is lonely it's because he's a bad, undesirable person.

As someone who considers himself to be on the left, I object to the notion that I've become more interested in male loneliness. I actually found my attention waning in the course of the video, but I confess,  something about this topic as presented in the Breaking Points video and in the Shoes-upon-the-head video that occasioned it cranks up the fire under the old blood boil in me.  My bullshit detector went a little bit out of control as I watched both videos.   It isn't male loneliness that irritates me (although I fail to find any fault in the friendly advice to lonely men to please maybe try to look a bit inward for answers before gunning down strangers at a mall).  I think what irritates me is the pawning off of a dishonest right wing internet grift as concern for the health of vulnerable marks.  I guess you can't really fault a gal for trying to make a living, but must we pretend the saucy dial-a-friend act is about anything other than clicks, likes and ad revenue?

Here's the thing, lonely men (and other lonely people).  Living as we are at the end of history, are we not all lonely, together?  If your loneliness troubles you, it may not feel this way now but you are not only not alone, you are really loved, valued and wanted.  It doesn't feel this way now because we live under a system in which no one is loved, valued or wanted except insofar as they can contribute to the wealth of grifters of all kinds-- not just those on the internet.  This goes for the lonely women too, and I'm talking about the lonely men and women and others of every race, creed,  age, gender, orientation, education level, economic status, ability and ideology who overpopulate our unmarvelous uncinematic universe.  You are loved by the system that we need to build together to replace our soul destroying, alienating, disparity-building capitalist neo-liberal hell on earth. Whatever your gender, your loneliness is a message.  It is an invitation to participate in the dismantling of the barriers between us that keep us from constructing a world of our making.  There is a way to begin, but it may require us to engage with each other.  

It may feel sort of good for 5 minutes to listen to the strokes of a cartoon 12 year old internet buddy telling you it's not your fault (or her fault) but theirs.  It feels good and then better and then oh god!  crazy awesome but  as AI Batman will tell you, we all know what comes after that.  To hell with the shame and the clean up.  To make that crazy awesome feeling last a bit longer, after looking inward for your own strength and your own juice, look outward for our common purpose.  You'll find it!  It's out there.  Way away,  beyond the computer screen, across the room, up the stairs and out the keyhole.  Out beyond the gates that keep you in, alone with your loneliness.  I'll meet you out there!

It feels good to be seen, but are you being seen or are you being jerked around?

~~~~~

* How is it that those who make a living reviling the identity politics of every other group on principle insist on seeing everything through a lens of straight white male identity?  It's a rhetorical question.

Home Again

I’m back from my summer up North and not feeling it today.  At all. And I’ve got so much to do.  Work required my return.  I've got one of the cats with me.  The wife, daughter, other cat and dog remain in the rustic northern house in the woods for the time being.  

The trip back was interesting.  The house we've been living in all summer and staging to sell for an ill friend went on the market while I was still there.  I had to leave the house in the morning for showings which was convenient for picking up the rental car, but then I had to come back in the afternoon after the showings to trap the cat I took back with me and load up the car so got a bit of a late start  (really about the same too late time of day as when I drove up at the beginning of summer with both cats.)  It felt weird and wrong ruining Rizzo’s day like that but it couldn’t be helped.  He’s forgiven me, thankfully.  He seems to be ok with being back.  He knows he’s back because at dinner time he leads me to his favorite dining perch, the coffee table in the sun room even though I try to feed him on the stairs which is where I’d been feeding him before the summer for reasons I now forget.  

On my drive back, I got teary listening to songs my daughter introduced to my playlist DJ’ing on the car trips we used to take to the place over the years of our long history with it. (Manu Chao's Me gustas tu, Juniore's Ça balance, MGMT's Time to Pretend are particularly evocative of some of our dawn arrivals after driving up the coast overnight), but that’s just a hint of the mood.  Crating Rizzo was easier than at the start of the summer.  He didn't know what hit him.  When I put him in the car yowling, I told my wife I felt bad about it, and she said she was sad, and then we both kind of broke down in the driveway over the approaching end of an era.  The last 3 years of hell dealing remotely with the storm damage the house had suffered in high pandemic days when the owner became ill-- we stepped up as repayment for her generosity with the place over the years-- culminating in two months of residence to whip it into shape for the market, had made us both forget that it was ever good to be there.  (And truthfully, the summer didn’t really contradict any of that). But something about the way the cats really took to it reminded us, and Rizzo’s predicament of being suddenly ripped from it with no input before his time somehow encapsulated it.  We’re losing a good thing.  It’s too expensive and decrepit to keep for any benefit that the owner who can no longer take care of it would get from it, but it’s good to remember that before it got fucked up, it was good.  

The house to the south was still standing when I got back.  The plants are all dead.  It’s insanely hot.  But I was able to get back into a groove with it. 

Throughout all this, because money was tied up in the twists and turns of the summer project, I refrained from purchasing new books and spent the summer catching up on my reading backlog.   I just finished A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Alissa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Thea Riofrancos from 2019.  It is if anything more important now, but as I dug in, I was struck by how quaint the topic feels.  In 2023, no one talks about the GND anymore.  I know there are now plenty of critics on the left, but they are stooges.  Jimmy Dore’s latest move to woo the fascists he has been tailing since 2016, is to pretend climate change is a lie that elites are using to justify oppression.  The Platypus Society's Chris Cutrone urges that the phantom struggle to bring about the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is a more pressing concern.   To the cosplaying left,  concern for climate change can be written off as a bourgeois distraction.  Too tied to the right wing electoral notions of fading left celebrities Bernie Sanders and AOC.  For his part, Biden by being the perfect dickwad demoncrap put the last nail in the coffin.  We are all doomers now by default. I know I am anyway.

What I don’t get is that the description in this book and elsewhere of the civic possibilities for the GND -- a requirement for both public support to pass it and for the public will to carry it out aside from being a vision  and a pathway for a carbonless future-- strike me as being so incredibly appealing that for climate skeptics among the 99% it should be enough to support it.  Public utilities that actually serve their customers instead of their stockholders or their donors.  Abundant fast, clean, comfortable public transportation (I took a subway from the airport where I dropped off the rental at the western terminus to my suburb three stops from the Eastern terminus.  It was a long trip and half way in it dawned on me – my inability to get comfortable in any way on the system's newest, very expensive cars was purposely engineered by somebody at some corporate bureaucrat's request.  The unyielding seats have no cushioning and while they look like they are shaped like a human back, it's the back of someone with a giant torso and very short legs.  There is no leg room in any seat that faces forward or backward.  They’ve angled the heater vents so you can’t rest your foot on top of them.  If you turn sideways and try to lean against the window for a change, there’s a recess under the window that makes an edge that sticks into your back.  I later googled,"are subway seats designed to be uncomfortable?" and some site that was no longer available did have a cached page that indicated it’s a measure to keep the homeless from riding the trains indefinitely.  I was livid and in pain by the time I got to my station.) what was I saying??  Oh yeah, short work weeks, abundant public spaces and free activities, people centered programs and works—a jobs guarantee for all who want it, housing, education and medicare for all, walkable cities with extra technology and services for those who have difficulty walking.  In short a world designed for the people who live in it.  Global cooperation.  Freedom of movement. Freedom to be a hermit.  I mean, to me it sounds like paradise.  

[Trigger warning: Massive cursing ahead] Why are people so ready to be inclined to listen only to the assholes who want paradise exclusively for themselves? The thing that pissed me off about the subway seat is that it is so fucking typical of this motherfucking world now.  Assholes who were not elected (or selected) unilaterally deciding that it’s more important to make homeless people uncomfortable on our trains than to give them shelter or to make train passengers comfortable.  No wonder houseless immiseration is up and subway ridership is down.

Although the neoliberal world is dying, we are still very much beholden to its worldview that deems corporate profits and an inflexibly elite-centric social order of higher priority than our own freedom, comfort and security.

I hear many on the left indicating that while they will vote for Cornel West in November or for Biden if he's still around (or for whomever is put forth by the democrats to defeat whoever the Republican is if he isn't), they intend to vote in the primary this coming spring for Marianne Williamson -- really the only candidate in the Democratic race with specific Green New Deal like items on her agenda among many other solitary progressive stands.  Good for them, but how are they going to vote for her if she's not on the ballot?  And why is she still polling at 10%?  This is nearly half of Joe Biden's closest challenger RFK, Jr who has recently said-- I shit you not-- "Climate change is being used to control us through fear. Freedom and free markets are a much better way to stop pollution."  For that matter why are Biden's numbers rising while his grip on reality is falling?  Leftists, it is beyond time to put your money where your mouth is and start openly proclaiming your support for the only candidate who is  talking about reparations and canceling student debt and talking to Gen Z'ers, to Cop City protesters, to Starbucks organizers.  Time is wasting.  We have a planet to win.  Marianne 2024.

Monk

Alice Longyu Gao would like a word with you:

 Are you paying attention?

Status ¿Qué?

Briahna Joy Gray had a lively-- and frequently outright tense-- debate recently with Kyle Kulinski and Krystal Ball on the topic of Cornel West, Biden and Trump.  Full disclosure, since I live in a solidly Blue State, while I intend to work for Marianne Williamson in the Democratic primary, in the unlikely event that she loses the primary and Joe Biden is ultimately renominated as the head of the Democratic Ticket next year,  with Cornel West as the Green Party nominee, I am considering voting third party for the first time since 2000.*  If I lived in a swing state, in a contest between Trump, Biden and Cornel West, things would have to be pretty hopeless with Joe Biden for me not to do my part to thwart the only other likely winner by holding my nose and voting for the Democrat.

As for the debate participants, I am a bit agnostic about the latter two.  My introduction to Gray was as press secretary for Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign, an office that I thought she excelled at.  While I ultimately did not join her in withholding my vote for Biden in the general election following the concerted effort by every Democratic rival, following Bernie's third consecutive win with his resounding victory in the Nevada caucuses, to pull out of the primary race and back Joe Biden-- ultimately succeeding in forcing Bernie to suspend his campaign prematurely as the pandemic began to rage-- I did not fault her.  But in late 2020 into early 2021 (and waaaaaaayyyy beyond) I found myself souring a bit on her political wisdom for her promotion of the vile Tulsi Gabbard backing "jaggoff" Jimmy Dore while clinging stubbornly to his failed initiative to use withholding of support of Nancy Pelosi's re-election as Speaker of the House as an opportunity for House progressives to force a floor vote on Medicare for All,  long after it fell on its face immediately before the January 6 Capitol riots.   After its failure, BJG and the Force the Vote contingent, rather than regroup on the mission of building solidarity on the left and among single payer sympathizers for applying pressure on the still narrowly democratic congress and senate to push through Medicare for all (and certainly not alone in dropping the ball),  chose to continue to use the failure of Dore's hashtag cause as a cudgel with which to club those who took issue with the tactic.  Beyond that narrow sectarian rift, although I was a huge fan of her regular Feel the Bern podcasts throughout the Bernie campaign, I began to find her obtuse debating style on her own aptly named Bad Faith podcast almost exclusively with those of the left that she disagreed with on seemingly the wrong side of almost any dumb, inflammatory, diversionary twitter controversy you could name (Kyle Rittenhouse, the courting of fascists for a red-brown alliance, the outing of a doxxing, anti-trans TikTok troll, any of many infractions of members of the squad) an almost guaranteed turnoff.

In the debate at hand, while all participants seemed to agree with each other (and with me) about Biden's lack of appeal as a candidate in and of himself (Kulinski's cataloging of leftist "wins" that exceeded his expectations, impressive as it was, still at best barely offset the extent of bad that he has effected as surely as he was expected to), Kulinski and Ball started off by asserting that, his failures and disappointments aside, what he had accomplished so far-- including near the top of his achievements unprecedented strengthening of the Labor Relations Board (never mind his selling out of the railway workers last winter) and cutting drone strikes to 10% of Trump's record while exiting from Afghanistan (before imposing sanctions on Kabul and digging in on Ukraine)-- nevertheless demonstrated an objective rationale for preferring Biden above Trump.  Right off the bat Gray lost me by actually defying Kulinski and Ball, in a field that includes Ron De Santis, Vivek Ramaswami, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Asa Hutchinson, Mike Pence and Chris Christie, to define where the stopping point would be for declaring the Republican challenger worse than the Democrat.  With the question turned back on her about how bad the Republican had to be for Gray to concede that siding with the Democrat as a means of forestalling the Republican's win would be the option most likely to lead to hoped for outcomes, Gray similarly demurred to conjecture.

The tell for me is when Krystal Ball who seemed unable to get Gray to frame electoral politics as a means of advancing one's goals rather than as a contest of voter approval of one over another interchangeable professional politician (in Ball's words, "It's not about whether you're a Democrat or Republican; it's about how do you advance your goals.") asked Gray whether Joe Biden's defeat of any Republican challenger, versus Cornel West bringing the Green party to 5% in order to secure federal matching funds in future national elections was a more important outcome for the advancement of progressive goals, Gray adamantly dug her heels into the primacy of getting the Green Party to 5%.  This is not political strategy-- this is some combination of wishful thinking and biting your nose off to spite your face. (Ball reminded us that Ross Perot's Reform Party achieved the threshold in 1996 only to have Pat Buchanan all but assure the death of the party four years later with less than 1% of the popular vote in 2000, deflating the premise).  After all, why place your eggs in the basket of a party that refuses to be built?  Why not make your goal the commandeering of a party with actual power that stubbornly clings to the outdated neoliberal habits of an aging leadership that refuses to yield its reins?  Which goal is less realistic?  Which outcome has the best chance of making change that has material benefit to the 99%?  Or is the ultimate object of electoral politics just providing opportunities for voters to express their electoral purity every 4 years?

Deep into the conversation, the crux was reached.  According to Gray, Biden's triumph over the Republican will do nothing to advance what Gray believes "will be the ultimate path for leftist progress in the United States which is breaking the corporate duopoly."†  To this end, Gray is placing her hopes with the Green Party and other third party and independent efforts outside of the two major parties, and aiming to join forces with the Libertarian Party -- to date the entity that has had the most success (and money) in advocating for and to a small extent bringing about the elaborately low-concept tweak of Rank Choice Voting§ across the country.  This the participants agreed was a prerequisite to Green politics transcending the pursuit of the elusive 5% and beginning to achieve real power.  (Building the party from the ground up by building local power across the nation rather than from the top down by mattering only every 4 years in presidential contests does not seem to be on the table.)

Asked by Kulinski and Ball how, absent Rank Choice Voting in all but the very fewest districts, focussing on achieving the modest electoral goals of parties that have no hope of winning squares with the project of advancing the panoply of progressive goals, Gray said "I do think there is a failure to recognize the extent to which there is a validation that takes place of the status quo that people are trying to negotiate as they reckon with real gains that the Biden administration has effectuated."  I will confess the accusation that those who vote for the Democrat to avoid the Republican are validating the status quo hits my ears as blaming the victim.  It cruelly overlooks the dysfunction of the system that perpetually leaves voters with two terrible choices  one of which is going to win.  Some of us on the left have had it with the dysfunction and will not be party to it.  The rest of us are working with the cards that were dealt us, and it is "not even wrong" to say that the personal choice to try to mitigate what is guaranteed to be the least optimal choice in the general election as though lives depended on it -- because they do!-- represents an acquiescence to the status quo. 

To this point in the debate, I was prepared to write Gray off and declare Kulinski and Ball the winners on merit.  But at the end of what is accessible to non-subscribers of either podcast, Ball asked Gray-- shades of 2016-- hypothetically if on election night 2024 Joe Biden wins, does she rue that it wasn't Trump? or does she breathe a sigh of relief that it's Biden?  Gray's shockingly honest answer deeply instructed me:  

I don't care.  They're not my party. This gets characterized as a privileged position, that you don't care who wins, Trump or Biden.  My experience is that people who have been taking this position -- this is just anecdotal-- tend to be people who are at the lower end of the economic spectrum who do feel that their lives aren't meaningfully different under a Trump or a Biden and who would rather rock the boat and throw a monkey wrench in the machinery if there's even a fracture of a sliver of a chance that it has some outcome different from what they've been experiencing for their entire lives.

My reaction on transcribing her words reminded me of how I felt listening to a Revolutionary Blackout episode in January of this year in which I was apprised how even my modestly non-destitute struggle in America 2023 to participate in bringing about meaningful change is counterrevolutionary to those who are fighting for their lives.  By the force of her words, my eyes were at least temporarily opened once again to the dire stakes of scores of actual people that my hermetic lifestyle, impoverished and underwater as it is, permits me to overlook.  I'm grateful for the service, because it clarifies for me what my mission truly is.  

Recognizing that my neurotic, compulsive ineffectual stewardship of our dysfunctional electoral system as though it is doing any good is anathema to those who truly seem to lose either way due to circumstances beyond my control, I make it my mission to work to somehow unite my revolution with that of Briahna Joy Gray's informants from the Revolutionary Blackout underground.  I don't yet know how to get there, and it is premature for me to ask those opposite this gulf in the left to cooperate with me in the project of a total left reunification.  But I know where I need to head, and for that I'm grateful for this most instructive debate.

 ~~~~~

* While I expect Cornel West to be the candidate who most closely aligns with my own goals in the General election, I would only use the privilege of being able to vote for him without contributing to the loss of the lesser evil of the two main party candidates-- for me, that would be Biden if it were between Biden and Trump-- as a safe way of augmenting the signal of mass disapproval on the part of the electorate of the duopoly's menu.  The fact that some voters have this privilege over voter's in unsafe districts is yet another flaw in the electoral process.  I don't fault anyone anywhere for voting for the 3rd party candidate of their choice (as long as it's Cornel West).  As for helping the Green Party get to 5% for the sake of matching federal funds -- I couldn't care less!  

† I'm bound to remind anyone who reads footnotes of long-winded blog posts in dark corners of the internet, that if the United States used universal sortition as its method of selecting our leadership, all of the foregoing would be moot.

§ From my perspective, Ranked Choice Voting does not mean the duopoly is crushed and the Green Party wins.  It means Joe Biden wins because more Greens made him their second or third choice.  Rather than dredging a majority from polling the extent of voters' toleration for the self-selected slate of choices, see previous footnote.