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.

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* 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! (AI 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...