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.
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