I Go There

Of course I don't blame voters for Kamala Harris's loss.*   But if I'm being honest with myself, I do blame you.  You know who you are.  You're the voter who voted, worked, persuaded against Kamala Harris knowing that it was either her or Donald Trump-- knowing that Donald Trump was a fascist-- as a way to demonstrate your superior disapproval of the choice, especially if you did absolutely nothing in the primary to improve that choice.  And especially if you savor the thought that your purity vote was superior to my dutiful, nose-holding obligation. You went into the election with open eyes, knowing Kamala Harris was sub-optimal but that Donald Trump was a menace.  You had one job on election day, and you chose to punish the system rather than dirty your hands with a choice you couldn't be pleased with yourself to make.  She lost because of you.  More importantly, she didn't lose because of you.  She didn't learn anything from your withholding.  You'd like to think your vote was a lash.  It was a wet noodle.  You were no help at all.

You and I rightly blame Joe Biden for enabling Israel's genocide for a full year and counting but you were in a punishing frame of mind.  I hate to remind you but Joe Biden wasn’t running any more.  We obviously have an irreconcilable difference about the usefulness of presidential politics. We both agree Presidents are not where it’s at, and yet I can’t escape a feeling of responsibility about who wins an election to what is still for now and for the foreseeable future one of the most powerful and tragically consequential offices on the planet in a contest between a seriously evil and fucked up fascist and a run of the mill characterless careerist.  You should at least be sorry she lost because we will never know how much of a difference to what’s left of Gaza (which is over now by the way) a different outcome would have made.  You don’t understand: I feel I chose better for Gazans than you did.  And now we will never know how right or wrong that feeling is. Donald Trump could surprise us.  He could force Netanyahu to step down and go to jail, the aid and offensive murderous weaponry from the US to stop, the cease fire to be permanent, hostages to be released on both sides and Gaza to be rebuilt and life repaired for Palestinians, and if he does, I will be convinced I was wrong and that the outcome of yet another stupid presidential election between two type-A American assholes really didn’t matter.  But we both knew going into election day that Trump’s going to help Israel finish the job.  

True we didn't know what Kamala Harris would do.  While she gave a bellicose speech at the convention,  I had hopes.  My hopes were based on a couple of things.  I understood that  Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's DEI Vice President had had virtually no say in his Gaza policy.  What's more, I understood she, alone among White House officials, reached out to a Palestinian American who had lost 150 family members in Gaza with condolences before she was put at the top of the ticket, the same man who Rashida Tlaib took with her to shame Benjamin Netanyahu when he spoke in front of Congress.  I understood Kamala Harris as nominee skipped Benjamin Netanyahu's Congressional address unlike the shameful number of AIPAC-bought democrats who sat there and applauded Bibi's odious speech like circus seals. So that already got my false hopes up.  I also heard rumblings about negotiations of her team with the Undecided folks in Michigan.  She in spite of her bellicose speech at the convention, did voice acknowledgement that cease fire and Palestinian self-determination are among what an end to the conflict must look like. My understanding about Kamala after she was put at the top of the ticket, after all the buzz and excitement died down, was that her solitary goal was getting elected.  I understood she was keeping policy vague on purpose.  Toward the end of the campaign I heard that she was focused on sticking to the right of center in an effort to overcome the assumed demographic strikes she had going against her. 

Now I grant I could have been wish casting but to be honest, this is the bottom line about what my hopes were for a Harris presidency:  The two possible winners of the election were Trump, a known anti-muslim fascist pig or Harris, an unknown smart lady from California.  Those were the 2 outcomes.†  Trump had a record, a history and a promise of anti-Palestinian Pro-Israel aggression.  Harris was basically an unknown.  I did not believe her when she said she would do nothing differently from Biden--- my belief was she would say anything to retain the support that Biden had and even stand next to a war criminal to increase it.  I did not believe that in the office she would be immovable, and certainly not as immovable as Trump.  I wanted to increase the chances of a movable president because to me at a minimum that was a way I could have a say in one of the most likely ways that the genocide would stop.  Do you have any other ideas?  I have asked for weeks what is the alternative and never heard an answer from anyone who refused to play the president game as their way of punishing Joe Biden (even though he was no longer on the ticket).  What anti Democrat people don’t seem to get is that some of us – I’m guessing many if not most of us voted for Kamala for the sake of Gaza.   Is it possible we would get our hopes squashed?  Of course.  We’ll never know now.  But even a shred of relief for Gaza would have been an improvement.  If Harris got Gaza aid, food and medical supplies and personnel that would be an improvement.  I never heard from anyone who refused to grant that Gaza’s chances were better with Harris than with Trump how to effect an end to genocide without her.  

I know you can say she said she would do nothing differently than Biden.  I don’t give a shit what she said.  Politicians lie all the time. I give a shit what she does as president.  Again, in my view peace for Gaza was largely going to go through the Oval Office.  (How the fuck else?)  If it was going to go through the oval office at all, it was only going to go through Kamala Harris’s oval office—not through Donald Trump's.  That was my thinking.  I don’t understand why that is so hard to see.  

To anti-demoncraps, Kamala not winning serves her right.  To me it is the death of Gaza.  Do you see how differently we experience that?  To you it’s sort of ha ha, she lost!  To me it’s the end of Gaza.  I don’t need you to see her loss that way.  Believe me it has to be better for you not to.  But that’s the rawness of the nerve the topic has for me.  Laugh if you want to.  In my ridiculousness, I still feel pain and mourn for Gaza.  (You  could console me by showing me how this outcome is better for Gaza.   What’s *your* fucking plan.   I’m not holding my breath.)

~~~~~~

* If  the vast majority of voters are innocent lambs, they were shepherded away from the muddled unknown shepherd  with the screwy technique sprung on them at the last minute and toward the lunatic pandering shepherdings of the more familiar peril they knew.  Still, while it's no wonder the innocents were lost due to what appears in retrospect to have been an incompetent gambit on the part of Harris's team, not all voters were so innocent.  The twisted irony is that those voters who knew better but refused to play the duopoly game on election day (and I reserve a special animus for the single-issue influencers who encouraged voters not to stain themselves with a vote for less harm) are more deluded about democracy than those of us who played along.  They actually thought their votes could count in this absurdly disempowering system.  I will grant it took me 13 elections to finally figure out that Election Day has nothing at all to do with Democracy or choice. It has to do with mitigation. If democracy happens at all, it's in the primary, which this year, everyone skipped.

† I know I sound like a broken record with the "2 possible outcomes" speech, but I can't help but feel that this reality is an instrumental part of what's missing for voters who knew better who nevertheless preferred to indulge in a luxury vote for nothing when the time came.

If

What if the election were held today?  I know it was already held more than a week ago, but what if that result were nullified and the election were held again?  Would we get the same result?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Maybe some of those who showed up the first time would give it a pass on round 2.  Maybe some who skipped it would take advantage of the do-over. What percentage of the repeaters would remember let alone stick with their original choice?  How many of the voters who reportedly learned in the voting booth that Joe Biden had dropped out of the race would have educated themselves a bit more on who this Kamala person who replaced him was?  Would the November 5 result inspire a pile-on against the incumbent party or a groundswell for the opposite result? In terms of the electoral college, the usual suspects would probably turn out the same-- it's the swing states where I suspect there might be some differences.  I could be wrong, but listening to the reasoning behind the last minute decisions of the sizeable group of stubbornly undecideds, I have come to the conclusion that any conclusion about the outcome of the election that attempts to explain the result is probably incorrect.  This goes for those that explain why Trump won-- which in my readings tend to be focused on the mood of the electorate regardless of the success or intention of Trump's campaign-- and those that explain why Harris lost -- almost universally faulting the campaign for failing to excite the will of voters.  Given the disastrous conduct of both campaigns, it's not hard to see why blame is the word that we want to apply to the loser whereas credit can hardly be given to the winner.

Until Joe Biden was booted from his own re-election campaign, the rematch between two geezers reeked of staleness and produce beyond its expiration date.  As unprecedented as the switch was, it made for an exciting change-up while the novelty lasted.  While the campaigns were equally rancid in their approaches, the same could not be said for the candidates.  Kamala Harris is actually younger, smarter, saner, healthier, more attractive, more normal than Donald Trump by any measure.  The fresh blood should have-- and in the opening days of her truncated time at the top of the ticket frequently did-- stir things up in unanticipated ways.  It seems to me it would only have paid for her to remind us of her youth and vitality -- and to assure us of the difference she represented from both Trump and Biden-- as frequently as she could.  When she did show up especially in contexts that contrasted her with her opponent, it tended to work for her.  There should have been more.  The counsel she received was apparently the opposite.

If there is one area in particular that is emblematic of the blame the Harris campaign can take for its loss, it is immigration.  Polls since the beginning demonstrated that on the issue of immigration, voters to whom it mattered trusted the xenophobic pandering of the Republicans on the issue more by a long shot.  When Democrats introduced tough anti-immigration legislation last year designed to fail solely as a demonstration of the hypocrisy of Republicans who dutifully cooperated in begging off, they had already ceded the issue.  Similarly, inviting the unpopular with both parties Liz Cheney along on campaign stops sent the conflicting message that you just needed to ask the Republican supporting Kamala Harris and standing there right next to her whether Republicans could be trusted.  Meanwhile, actual concerns of voters were purposefully ignored.

If only there could be a do-over, would Harris have learned that she needed to assert herself more strongly as a representative of a different more hoped for future than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump have demonstrated they are capable of leading us to?  Could she have flipped the coin of those who went with the evil they knew over the lesser evil they didn't?

My thought experiment aside, the rules of the game do not allow for a tie and are not best of 3 but that whoever wins on election day wins and takes all.  Given the increasingly dire circumstances we find ourselves in, I'm not a fan of the game.

Grappling for lessons

As much as it's a certainty that Kamala Harris' grotesque strategy of leaning in on making swing state campaign appearances with an unpopular GOP loser with deep-state war criminal ties softened enthusiasm among her base, squandering much of the good will that came with her replacement of the visibly malfunctioning Joe Biden at the top of the democratic ticket in July, it's also possible that it got her the strongest showing an unknown California woman of mixed non-European stock with a less than stellar (or particularly visible) term as doddering Joe Biden's veep could ever have wished for with the exceedingly short amount of time she had to do it.  We'll obviously never know the outcome if she had gambled on a bold break from the guy who was going to tank anyway-- if she had promised conditioning military and other aid to Israel on immediate ceasing of the genocide in Gaza and other aggressions against their neighbors, making reparations for damage they caused and facilitating humanitarian aid to the survivors of Israel's devastation;  if she had urged a quick diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine; if she had sold a case for distinguishing her position on immigration from both Joe Biden and Donald Trump from a humanitarian and economic perspective; if she had urged expansion of Medicare to cover those that Obama care lets fall through the cracks; if she had promised an aggressive approach to mitigating the climate disasters of increasing magnitude that threaten the future of the planet and frankly portend greater chaos from unprecedented weather-related events for the foreseeable future; if she had articulated a fix to the abortion crisis and thrown her support behind court stacking and term limits for Supreme Court justices as a fix to the Judicial problem that brought it about.  But it's entirely possible her doubling down on demonstrations that she was not intending to make the radical break from the status quo that the color of her skin and the femininity of her gender seemed to signal to even the very organized factions of non-white and non-male traditional voters she courted deprived her opponent of an even bigger blowout.  It was an uphill climb this eleventh hour appointment to assume the head of a badly faltering -- increasingly doomed-- ticket, and she may have done the best she could possibly have done with a larger segment of voters than she would have by focussing more lovingly on the progressive segment she took for granted.

If you want to look for blame, start with Joe Biden and his enablers.  While he still had a modicum of sense, he strongly signaled early on in his presidency that he would be a "bridge president" with a single-term administration whose mission would be to undo some the worst dysfunctions of Trump's first term, clearing the way for younger blood to speed the country away from the dark proto-fascism of the Trump era. Then he didn't restore treaties with Iran and Cuba, he doubled down on Trump's dystopian immigration policies, he wimped out on student loan debt cancellations and used excuses of parliamentary procedure to let COVID era moratoriums on evictions and child tax credits that reduced child poverty by 40% lapse. He expanded drilling and pipelining.  He publicly sided with management in the 2021 railroad worker's strike bringing a rapid end to the workers calls for sick pay and saner, safer working hours and conditions with larger crews on smaller less hazardous trains.   Then he conveniently under-responded to the subsequent colossal derailment in East Palestine Ohio that demonstrated the urgency of what those workers were asking for.  At least he finally got us for the most part out of Afghanistan-- bellicose bellyaching about it from the expected quarters notwithstanding -- with the predictable result that we had nothing to show for our commitment of years, blood, limbs and guilt in too many scores of thousands of civilian Afghani (and American) deaths.  While I applaud the withdrawals of troops and cessation of hostilities in one of too many pointless forever wars of the neoliberal era, the fault for the dubious and ultimately futile mission of democrats to retain the presidency and the senate and to win back the house lies squarely at the feet of Nixon-era perennial Joe Biden and the wimps who let him break the promise of his one-term presidency.  He won the primary by force of the etiquette that sitting presidents are not challenged, and in some cases by legalistic force itself.  By then it was too late to float alternative visions for the future. When his legendary hubris led to a national pratfall of a performance in his first debate with Donald  Trump in June, well before the Democratic National Convention, the ticking of the clock made the temptation to switch him out for younger blood too tempting for the string pullers and back channel operators to resist.  It may have been too late to organize a democratic process to pick a successor-- who, face it, would have been the one the operatives wanted anyway by hook or by crook-- but it was not too late to put forth Biden's hand selected Number 2, the untested but youthful and well-packaged Kamala Harris, who could plausibly be said by virtue of being named on ballots to have been selected in the primary.  By this point, she had no choice but to use the services of the team that graced us with Uncle Joe to run her last minute campaign.

As always, we on the left need to set aside grievances and work toward a world that isn't dependant on suboptimal periodic choices between overfunded under-imaginative careeerist politicians.  In the meantime, if you are complaining about the choices that people made on November 5, you are too late.   The opportunity to vote for change is not November 5.  November 5 is the obligation to mitigate the outcome of a choice made long before.  Being among the 2% that cast a fatuous and futile vote for change on November 5 by voting third party may boost your personal cred.  Good for you.   But if you're complaining about the rest of us, what did you do to make our actual choices better?

Where were you all in the primaries?

The Rules of the Game - Danse Macabre

A spooky interlude set to Camille Saint-Saëns's 1874 death-themed tone poem.  From Jean Renoir's 1939 classic, La règle du jeu.

Non-sequitur Bonus:  To evoke that after party feeling, you can't beat Confidence Man's 3 AM LA LA LA 

An Engagement with Reality

(Adapted from my side of a dialog with a Green of my acquaintance concerning the above video*)

A recent Minority Report segment touched on a few things I’ve been thinking about and that otherwise hit me as particularly salient re what voting does.  For instance, Sam Seder and I are 100% on the same page about why (given our ridiculously intentionally undemocratic political system) Democrats winning is always a better outcome than Republicans winning: because it relieves the otherwise relentless rightward pressure on the discourse. Bill Clinton didn’t suck only because he was a Democrat.  He sucked because he followed 12 years of Republicanism and preceded another 8 years of it.  (And that was all that was needed to get us in the fucking state we’re in.)  This fact as Sam laid out very well is ignored or misrepresented by Greens and other anti-Democrat voters on the left.  Democrat victories don’t absolve the left from activism but they make activism more liable to accomplish some of its goals.  It’s just a fact.

Beyond that, I thought Emma Vigeland was completely on point about what the task of voting is about.  To wit: “Engage with the fucking reality.”  I’ll be honest, that’s it in a nutshell.  One of two parties is going to win.  One is a major ass disappointment that is not what anyone wants.  The other is an evil anti-majority force that is exactly what the tiniest worst minority wants.  One is ineffectual and obtuse.  The other is laser focused on getting exactly what they want.  That is the choice.  That is the fucking reality we have to engage with.  You are free to vote Green to register your disapproval of the choices.  Either way, on January 20,  American foreign policy continues, but with one of the possible outcomes you didn’t have anything to do with, it continues with a misguided (corrupt even) idealism and ideology, and with the other it proceeds with a plan.  Notice I’m not saying this is good.  But one is better because it can be influenced; the other is hopeless. For those who are letting themselves off the hook for not voting for Kamala Harris because of Joe Biden's accomplice-role in Israel's genocide in Gaza, while I can't fault you for your instinct to punish,† as a way of explaining my own thinking on it, I would like to know how a vote for Jill Stein brings an end to Israel’s genocide if Trump wins. To Stein voting vote shamers of those voting for Kamala Harris, if you can’t answer that, then how will I ever be convinced not to care about the outcome of the election?  You may tell yourself that a vote for Stein is a vote against Genocide, but what good is a vote against genocide if you are convinced that you can't win regardless of the outcome?  Is it worth it if abortion rights are removed across the country, tax breaks for billionaires cut deeper into benefits for the rest of us, the Supreme Court becomes irreparably antagonistic to the non-millionaire majority for decades more to come?

Tell me this Green-voting lapsed Democrats: When you voted for Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama were you saying “go ahead, evil neoliberal sham democracy, here's my consent.”?   Were you ever in your life voting FOR the status quo, even when you vote-shamed me for voting for Nader in 2000?  I can tell you what I was thinking when I voted for Clinton—the first time it was “Die George Bush!!” I had registered as an independent by Clinton's second term because of my disillusionment with his first, but I still voted for his re-election as a way of saying “Fuck off Dole, you fuckin’ creep!”  True for Obama I, I was hopeful for change. (and eager to put a knife between John McCain’s ribs).   My point which is getting lost is, voting to me is not about consent.  It’s about engaging with the fucking reality that Democrats winning is better for the people than Republicans winning.  Always.   Sometimes just marginally, always never enough but it’s Always better.  I’ve never in my lifetime known a case when that wasn’t true.  Even in 2000, I voted for Nader but on election night when the outcome was in doubt and for the month after I rooted for Gore.  Because the reality was never going to be Nader brings down the duopoly.  I’m sure I thought I was sending a message to Democrats, but as Sam Seder often says, before the election the Greens are all about their votes sending a message to Democrats (never to Republicans for some weird reason), but when Democrats lose, no Green (least of all the Green candidate) says, “See?  We are why the Dems lost!  Blame us and learn our lesson!  This is the outcome we helped make happen!” Do you take credit for Trump’s victory in 2016?  (Because if you do, shame on you!)  Did Democrats learn a damn thing from the 2016 2% Green vote in Wisconsin?  No they did not veer left in 2020-- when Bernie Sanders won a few too many primaries in a row, they got their shit together and crammed the chronic pathologically unilateral bipartisan down our throats. But it was still better than the alternative. Again, voting is not about my feelings about democracy, it’s about the least harmful one winning.

You anti-Dem leftists who are still voting Green may think you're voting for democracy, but democracy is not on the ballot.  The truth is if you want to change electoral politics, the odds are pretty good you’re not going to be able to do it within electoral politics.  It’s not impossible but would require a groundswell – e.g., if Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic primary in 2016 or 2020 or Marianne Williamson had won in 2024.  The time for expressing yourself with your vote is the primary.  If you’re not “engaging with the fucking reality” on election day, it may feel good but you’re too late.

My bottom line on this is I don’t care necessarily how or whether people vote if they just keep it to themselves  (Personally, if you don’t want to engage with the reality, non-voting seems a bit purer of an expression to me). But if they are not advocating for the least harmful of the two possible outcomes, they better not be shaming those of us who are actually trying to actively mitigate the outcome.

A post-script about my 2000 Nader vote—I don’t know how I would have voted if I had lived in a swing state.  Probably for Gore, but not necessarily.  I was disgusted with the democratic party.  I honestly thought if Gore lost, so there.  I thought George W was a fuckup who would be a dopey one-term president.  I was obviously not looking at the big picture.  I was not looking at who would be in his cabinet and who he’d nominate to the Supreme Court.  I think we know what Emma Vigeland would say about that.

Truthfully, I don’t care who you vote for—it might be personally meaningful to you to vote Green, and that I think you’d agree is maybe a more immediate effect for you, maybe the sum total of what it does, a good in and of itself for you irrespective of what it means for anyone else, but it’s a different effect from what votes are traditionally supposed to do in an election.  That’s fine.  Here's a proposition, you don't have to apologize for your feel-good vote if  I don’t have to apologize for my nose-holding one.  

~~~~~

*The Green is the one who brought it up.  I was merely responding to his reaction to it.

† There is a precedent.  Anti-war voters punished Lyndon Johnson's Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 for Vietnam by withholding their votes for him-- and for their protest they got Nixon and Henry Kissinger and escalation instead.

The Mourning Cloak

The Wikipedia Entry for the mourning cloak butterfly (also known as the Camberwell Beauty, the White Petticoat and the Grand Surprise) reads in places like a David Lynch script.

• L. Hugh Newman likened the butterfly's pattern to a girl who, disliking having to be in mourning, defiantly let a few inches of a bright dress show below her mourning dress.
• The larvae and pupae ... respond to disturbances by twitching simultaneously.
• Newly hatched mourning cloak caterpillars can display selfish behavior, such as siblicide, by eating non-hatched eggs.
• Defense mechanisms include loud clicks when the mourning cloak flies away from a predator.
• Mourning cloaks also play dead by closing their wings tightly together and tucking their legs up against their body for protection and holding completely still.
• Mourning cloaks ... join together with other butterflies in a perch and fly menacingly towards their attackers—most often birds or other butterflies.

A widespread species, they tend to be seen in cooler more mountainous climes across Eurasia and North America, but they can be found as far south and outside their range as northern South America and Japan.  Newman, referenced above, observed that sightings of the butterfly in the UK were "concentrated around London, Hull and Harwich" all of which, being ports receiving regular shipments of timber from Scandinavia, led him to theorize that they had "hibernated in stacks of timber which was then shipped to England, and had not traveled naturally."  Newman "raised thousands for release at his 'farm' in Bexley, but none were seen the following spring. Specimens stored in his refrigerator for the winter, however, survived."

They are among the most long-lived species of butterfly.  Adults begin to emerge from their cocoons in late spring, upon which they aestivate -- the summer counterpart to hibernation-- remaining in a low energy and activity state known as torpor to weather the hottest months.  In fall, some migrate, but most remain in place.  Some pollinate, but most feed on tree sap and fallen fruit, or the "honeydew" exuded from aphids.  To weather the winter months, individuals will find a notch in a tree or rocky cliff face or nestle on the ground under bark.  Their ability to survive winter in adult form makes them among the first butterflies to appear in spring.  

Mating season begins in early April.  A non-dimorphous species, males compete for widely dispersed females over a broad range by displays of maleness characterized by domination of a desirable territory, a location "that females would want to visit," such as "sunny perches near ravines, wood margins, parks, gardens, lakes, ponds, around stream edges, or canyons in which males can perch and defend for multiple days." In this way, they attract females to themselves.  Females deposit eggs in 3 or more broods in colorful "ring clusters" on the twigs of plants, typically willows or poplars, likely to grow leaves in abundances that will nourish the hatchlings when they emerge as caterpillars. 

According to Wikipedia:

In several European countries with Germanic languages, other than Britain, the name for this butterfly literally translates to "mourning cloak", such as German "Trauermantel", Dutch "rouwmantel", Swedish "sorgmantel", Finnish "suruvaippa" and Norwegian "sørgekåpe". This suggests it is a name which came with Scandinavian or German rather than with British settlers, for whom this species would be considerably less familiar. Other common names include: Czech "Černopláštník" . "Babočka osiková". Polish "Rusałka żałobnik". Russian "Траурница" . Japanese "キベリタテハ" . Chinese "黄縁立羽". 

Having mated and laid eggs in spring and survived the year, the adults then die. 

Memoriana

Graphics above and below are from The Human Toll: Indirect Deaths from War in Gaza and the West Bank, October 7, 2023 Forward - Prepared by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins for the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, October 7, 2024

For many of us, something has changed in ourselves as a direct result of Israel's conduct of its ongoing "response" to Hamas's surprise breach of the Iron Dome October 7, 2023.  In the aftermath of the attack in which 1200 Israelis were killed and hundreds were taken hostage, as tens of thousands of civilian Palestinian bodies piled up within the open-air prison of Gaza throughout the month; as hospitals, schools, homes and apartment buildings crumbled under the force of 2000 lb bombs leaving 90% of Gazans unhoused within a span of weeks and the onslaught continued with unquestioning, ghoulishly apologetical American support and no end to the carnage in sight,  our world crumbled too.  

I remember back in October feeling very strongly that Israel had broken something it would come to wish it had not broken and that broken thing was the compact that we in the west have had (in so many unwritten words) to grant Israel the exceptional license to take reparations in perpetuity for Hitler's holocaust against Europe's Jews in whatever form it deemed necessary in how it conducted its affairs.  We agreed to grant Israel the right to arbitrate the equivalence of anti-zionism or opposition to Israel with anti-semitism.  We agreed to let Israel run roughshod over propriety and precision in how it characterized its enemies, in its right to perpetual victim status regardless of its culpability -- to grant its special pleading the power to erase its cruelty.  We agreed to look the other way as it constructed a separate and unequal life for the Palestinians it walled away, their access to food, water and supplies as tightly controlled as their freedom of movement within the homeland that Israel now occupied-- we agreed not to call it apartheid.  But it did not take the over 100,000 Gazans, the nearly 700 Palestinians in the West Bank and the growing number of killed civilians in Lebanon and Syria that Israel has slaughtered in the past 12 months , to say nothing of the hundreds of civilian Israelis similarly needlessly killed a year ago as mere collateral damage in their country's wars of choice to put the lie to the tales we let ourselves be told about Israeli virtue.  October voided that.  

As a result of Israel's self-exposure, I no longer believe that Israel's project would be rationalizable but for the unfortunate prevalence of odious conservative elements in its government, but rather that its birth out of European racism, anti-semitism and colonialism-- and especially in light of its conduct in the world to secure its dubious future ever since--should doom it.  The current ethno-state should be succeeded by a single state of egalitarian democratic rule for the current citizens of Israel who wish to remain and for the Palestinians that Israel has displaced.  I no longer accede to the proposition that the right of Israel to exist outweighs the rights of Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist in whatever peace they can forge together as equal citizens in that land, from the river to the sea.

Wicked Game

Thinking about it later, I wouldn't remember how I came to be here, emerging from a wood, suddenly surrounded by green, striding through shin-high grasses under a flaxen sky.  It had something to do with an urge for health-- a pursuit of clean air for my lungs and for the dark musty corners of a brain reluctantly coming to from hibernation after a persistent winter.  However it had come about, here among the insects springing and darting,  chirping and buzzing about me with blades of grass whipping my legs as I propelled myself forward across the meadow, it felt suddenly as though I had removed an iron shell from my back.  Where I had been weighted down somewhere back there behind me, on the other side of that forest, with the concerns of daily business, here I found myself unburdened, recreated.  

I paused midway across the clearing and surveyed the terrain before me. Which way to go?   The insect thrum was punctuated by the calls of crows to the right of me.  To the left was a sun just along a course of setting.  I proceeded north tentatively - the direction I was already heading - when I thought I caught glimpse of a flash of tawny red parting grass as it bounded away from me. I felt my heart skip a beat.  It stopped me where I was.   The creature seemed to stop as well.  Was it a fox?  Still preoccupied with my quandary about a direction, I looked away, but  something about the red-- I found myself looking back in spite of myself for another sip.  Failing to see it right away, I absently made another few steps in its direction and suddenly there it was again-- a vivid, earthy red peeking above the grass.  It bounded forward.  I stopped again to watch for a better look and again it stopped.  This was going nowhere.  I turned toward the northwest and took another step.  It seemed to alter its path in the same direction.  Before I was aware of it, I was changing my course to match its course, and heading again North, now finding myself in spite of myself in pursuit of it.  

I was on the other side of the meadow, tracking the shadows of forest again when I realized it. There was definitely something about the red-- I needed to verify what it was about the color that motivated me.   As I became conscious of it, I marveled at the growing certainty that something had taken possession of my will and that that something was the fact of the red of the fox.  I found myself trying to reconstruct the moment when it took hold of me.  I recalled the instant just moments before as I came midway across the meadow again in my mind-- the slice of time that the exquisite tawniness pierced the barriers of my perception and seeped into my brain, compelling me before I was conscious of what was happening.  But why recall when the fox was before me darting in and out of the dappled sunshine that pierced the canopy of forest and splashed the earth?  Where was that fox again?   A sudden bark told me.  I scanned the landscape before me trying to connect up once again with the possessor of that magnificent coat, but my search was in vain.  The only trace of the fox now was the skittering and scraping of its mane and the disturbance of ferns as it tunneled through the underbrush a score of yards in front of me.  It was like a hunger.  Or was it hunger?

As I came around a cluster of young fir, the unmistakable red of its coat bounded into view above the brush ahead of me.  Was it something bigger-- with the same red hair?  How could that be?  I struggled to understand what I'd seen when suddenly I came to a small clearing around a stump with a clean flat top.  Someone had hewn a tree in this wood.  Atop the stump were 3 brightly colored mushroom caps that looked freshly torn from their stems.  In my hunger they looked delicious.  I glanced ahead, and saw the undergrowth rustling where my quarry was advancing.  I picked up a cap, studied it briefly.  I took it to my mouth and gave it an exploratory tap with my tongue.  Perhaps I was paranoid-- I felt my head encircled by stars.  A barklike call brought me back to attention.  I quickly set the mushroom back from where I'd taken it and proceeded in pursuit of the red.  I picked up my pace, but the distance only seemed to grow between us.  And yet I got enough of a view now through the brush to see that somehow the red that I was pursuing was on a different form. Not the fox but on a very-fox like creature.  

Could it be?  It appeared to be running on two legs.  At times it seemed to stop and look at me as if to assure itself that I was still on the trail.  It waited for me to catch up just enough to gain some hope of closing the distance between us, and then turned and bounded away.  There came the bark again.  I was close enough to see for certain that my leader was no longer a fox, and not quite a human, but a kind of fox human.  With fox ears and what looked like a white tipped bush of a tail still trailing behind it. Still wearing a mane of luscious red. Was I the hunter or the prey?  I seemed incapable of surrendering to failure at the task of achieving an intimate encounter with the beast.  And just when my endurance seemed most eager to yield the chase altogether, there on the path lay a long flat object, black in color.  A ribbon.  I stooped to collect it and continued on my way, unable to tell by its condition how long it had been lying in the elements.  The question was soon answered by inference, as it now seemed that along the path every fifty yards or so were purposefully strewn an array of objects-- a dead sparrow, an handful of berries, a marbled stone, a hickory nut, a crudely fashioned nosegay of wildflowers, another collection of mushrooms.

These last and the berries, I again paused at, the hunger I had experienced having grown only more acute.  I consumed the berries.  The mushrooms tempted me; but again, I had only to dab my tongue on the cap of one to invoke the sensation of my head detached from my body and suspended amid the comets and satellites of space. I scanned the forest ahead of me for a sign of the creature. 

"Hey!" someone called.  It was a woman's voice.  There beyond the scrub that I was wading through, on the other side of a thicket, amid a stand of pine she stood,  a possessor of the same red hair that had set me on this detour from my solitary walk.  Was that a smile on her lips?  Was she speaking to me?  Before I could satisfy myself with an answer, she turned and ran, in the same prevailing direction that I had been going.  There was no sign of a fox, nor of a fox human, just the lovely figure of a woman, hair ablaze in the late afternoon sunlight, hurrying through the pine before me.  What was the harm in thinking it was me she had addressed with her "Hey!"

Before long I was in the same endless stand of pine, running after her on a carpet of needles.  The items I encountered on the path left were fewer and so far between and of such a random nature--  a large brass button, a scrap of colored paper, an apple--that I could not tell if I was imagining that they had been left there purposefully for me.  Still, the mere act of pausing to collect, study and ponder them slowed me down to such an extent-- and the descending twilight was a factor-- that my guide through this wood had reached a lead beyond my line of vision.  I could only hear the occasional commotion of her progress through the woods, punctuated every so often by bursts of sweet sounding laughter, and what could have been another "Hey!" or two seeming to let me know that I was going in the right direction.  By now my hunger had grown, as had my trepidation about the looming darkness.  Did I know where I was and how I would make my way back?  It seemed prudent to forge ahead in hopes that my red-haired companion would lead me to a settlement or a road by which I could find my bearings and make my way home.  The hunger was becoming unbearable.

I was no longer running, but walking as fast as my aching legs would carry me.  There she seemed to be yards ahead of me in the darkening wood.  At length, I heard what sounded like steps landing on wooden boards.  The rushing sound of water confirmed she had reached a footbridge.  I emerged from the wood to the edge of a much sparser clearing.  Across the bridge, she seemed to be waiting for me at the door of a well lit cottage.  How could this be in this forest that I thought I knew from years of childhood exploration and adult refuge?  I hurried to the bridge which spanned in an arch  over a splashing creek, and crossed it.  As I approached the house, I raised my arm in a wave.  She returned the gesture, turned away and entered the cottage, leaving open the door.  The closer I got, the stronger became the scent of something cooking.  A smell I'd never smelled before.  It was sweet, rich, earthy.  A nutty smell; almost a liqueur.  As I stepped up her front stoop, I saw her through the crack in the door, more lovely in this proximate approach than I had imagined as I made my way toward her in the diminishing sun of late afternoon.  I entered, removing my hat. I wanted to thank her for her hospitality, to ask her her name, to see if she could tell me where we were so that I could begin to plan my way back.  I opened my mouth to speak but before a word came out, she gestured at a pot steaming on the stove, the locus of those incredible smells.  She was so insistent and I was so famished that I knew I could not rest until I had tasted the contents of that aromatic pot. "Please" she said.  I nodded my thanks.  As I made my way to the stove, she turned and disappeared through a doorway and up a stairwell behind her.  Did she want me to follow her? It was clear the answer could wait.

A small bowl and a spoon lay on the counter next to the stove.  Into it I scooped ladles of a rich earth-colored mash of some kind.  A sweeter concoction I could not bring to mind.  I sat down with it at her table.  As I raised a spoonful of it to my mouth, I could sense that it had been cooling a while.  Inhaling the aroma, I took the sweet smelling paste into my mouth.  I savored it and swallowed, its substance blazing a path of delight from my tongue to my throat.  I eagerly took another mouthful.  As I did so, it suddenly seemed as though the world spun fast around me, sweeping me up into a bed of clouds and hastening me over acres of land and across miles and miles of sea to new shores on the other side of the world.  In its savoriness, I tasted the birth of civilizations.  Carts rolling, pulled by beasts of burden over mountain paths, their beds laden with the riches of the earth.  The sun, not just a star in the sky but a god, a provider.  The source and inspiration of every wondrous crop and the teller of tales of how to use them sacredly.  Letting the concoction wash over my tongue, I felt myself rising to the snow-capped peak of a mountaintop, set down at the foot of a path to the temple of the gods. Casting my eyes upward, I rose, ascended, ever higher to the gleaming auburn coat of She who walks in Light.

The next thing I was conscious of was myself lying leaned against an oak, under a canopy of stars on a moonless night, at the edge of a field I knew well was the very place where I first saw the red coat of the fox.  Amid the dewy grasses, I thought, How had I come to be here?  If I didn't die, I couldn't say whether I would be able to make my way home.  Unsure if I was breathing my last,  I distracted my mind from the pain that enrobed me by peering passively into the vast ocean of stars.  I contemplated the night and thought of her, wondering if somewhere out there amid the wisps of cloud had seeped the memories I sought in vain of how my time was spent with her.  Had I at last for even a moment been the possessor of that red?

Graphic Violence

Graphic from Many Gen Z Men Feel Left Behind. Some See Trump as an Answer, by Claire Caine Miller, NY Times, August 24, 2024.

Are Gen Z men pro Trump?  That seems to be the conclusion of a certain segment of media, perhaps exemplified, and amplified by the virality of the above graphic which appeared in the NY Times last month (and the accompanying article).  The discussions about the graphic that I've seen (e.g., a Breaking Points "debate" on the topic, to say nothing of various tweets (xeets?) about it) are eager to point out the tremendous distance between the purple dot on the left of the topmost line which represents the percentage gap between Gen Z women supporters of Kamala Harris and those of Donald Trump (i.e., Harris leads Trump among Gen Z women by 38%) and the green dot on the right-- namely the 13% lead according to the August NY Time Siena poll) that Trump has over Harris among Gen Z men.  In many of the discussions I've seen (including the NY Times articles on the topic), there does seem to be some elision of the fact that the poll is exclusively among voters in the 6 swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and that it took place after the Democratic National convention but before the widely watched debate between the candidates 2 weeks later. 

But before we get to the question at hand, can we talk about the graphic itself and the conclusions being drawn from it?  I will confess when I was originally confronted with the story I found myself too confused by the graphic to follow most of the conversations about it.  To my eyes, the most salient thing about it was not the rather typical extent to which the green dot floated to the right of the axis labeled "EVEN" for Gen Z men (about which the story screaming out to me is the exceptional rightness for Gen X-ers of both sexes aged 45 to 64), but rather the extraordinary extent to which which the purple Gen Z dot for women sits to the left.  Why then was the talk about Gen Z men?   Somehow, according to the prevailing narrative, the line represented a "Gender Gap", which according to the story was calculated as the sum of the 38% lead for Harris over Trump among Gen Z women and the 13% lead for Trump over Harris for Gen Z men or 51%.  But was this so meaningful as to warrant the discussion it got?  To me, it looked like nonsense.  We know that 38% more women support Harris than support Trump, but we don't know if Trump's support is the minimum of 0% or the maximum of 31% among Gen Z women that this number implies or somewhere in between.  Even if we knew the correct split between Trump and Harris among women, it would tell us nothing about where along the spectrum from the minimum split of 0% Harris-13% Trump to the maximum of  43%- 56% respectively that Gen Z Men's preferences fell.

The numbers appear to be related in the graphic, but that is strictly because in terms of their literal appearance they are connected by a solid line.  In fact, they have nothing to do with each other.  Does the calculation of the differences between them actually signify anything about a gender Gap? 

Fortunately we don't have to wonder.  The Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University has a helpful guide to what a Gender Gap actually is.  Contrary to the New York Times operative assumptions, it is not the magnitude of the difference between the preference of women for one candidate versus that of men for another.  Rather, it is the difference between men and women's preferences for the same leading (or winning) candidate in a race.  In that case, we do not have enough information from the graphic to determine the gap-- we would need to know who overall was leading in the poll, and then we would need to know the percentage of each gender supporting that candidate.   The difference between them is the Gender Gap.  This is simply not available from the data as presented in the NY Times Graphic.

The data that can be determined from the graphic according to the Rutgers Center are the Gen Z women's Vote (that 38% lead that Harris has over Trump for women) and the Gen Z men's Vote (the 13% lead that Trump has over Harris among that cohort according to the poll.).   Clearly it appears that Kamala Harris has an exceptionally strong lead among Gen Z women in the 6 swing states in which the poll was conducted.  It's less clear, given that the margin of error in these polls can be as high as 8%,  that Donald Trump has a lock on Gen Z men's votes.  

In fact, as John Sides notes at Good Authority, the conclusions reached at the NY Times based on its poll (and the Wall Street Journal as well as several other outlets eager to spin pleasing narratives) were contradicted by at least 2 other polls taken at the same time.  Both a YouGov.com and a Pew Research Center poll found that Gen Z men,  as much supporting data attests, actually lean toward Harris, with a much smaller gap between the genders than the NY Times Siena poll suggests.  Granted, these appear to be national polls and may not be indicative of the outcome we are in store for. But it is more in keeping with what we've learned about Gen Z in the past. I am skeptical of the enthusiasm that media outlets have about Gen Z men's susceptibility to conservative talking points.  I don't doubt a contingent of Gen Z cavemen lie in wait to succeed their neanderthal forebears on the culture war front.  I just have a bit more faith in the prevailing sense of the cohort. 

Appreciation Deficit Syndrome

It might surprise you to know (but shouldn't) that I don't have a YouTube channel.  So uninterested in having a channel am I that the only reason I know this is because it has thwarted me in the past when I have been most tempted to write a comment on a video.   My YouTube experience is that of an addict.  Most videos I quietly watch (frequently double speed if it's not music) and move on.  But every now and then, something moves or irritates or arouses me in a way that compels me to want to express myself, but merely attempting to like or dislike a comment on a video, let alone compose one, is something that requires a channel, which (for those of you not paying attention) I do not have.  As fiery as my passions can be, they have never been too fiery to perform the quid of creating a channel for the quo of commenting on or liking or hating a comment on a video.  But YouTube comments have a hold on the part of my soul that is YouTube addict.  In my daily YouTube excursions, I often find myself trying to get into the head of a person who having viewed the video I just watched is compelled to lift their fingers from their laps to record for the benefit of strangers for all time whatever flits through their brains.  I'm already ascribing more to the person than I could possibly know.  For all I know DaveinDubuque69 had been stewing about the video for a week before finally carving out the slice of time required to type: "I can't even." 

In defense of the proposition that the YouTube commentariat might not be collectively constructing the finest of human thought, has it escaped your attention that  there is a sameness to the preponderance of comments?  Given the predictability of so much of YouTube commentary, I've begun to suspect that it's a case of Pavlovian classical conditioning-- the stimulus is the moving image with sound, the response a limited number of stereotyped phrases:  "First." "Who's watching this in 2024?" "This is everything." "I am so here for this.". "Gentlemen of taste, we meet again." "Everything was so much better then."  I've noticed in the past year or two a couple of new categories.  The first seems to be provoked by vintage performance of female artists.  "Not a tattoo or a purple hair on her." And the ubiquitous "Underrated!"

For a while I've been logging every time I've come across "Underrated" by itself or in a phrase (usually "This is so underrated!" or "Criminally underrated!") in a YouTube comment.  In the past month I've seen the word used to describe the following (these are just the videos where I encountered the phrase spontaneously or where I remembered to check the comments):

Pixies' song Hey 

Pixie's song Here Comes your Man

Pixies Guitarist Joey Santiago ("must be the most underrated ever.")

Pixies Drummer Guitarist Bassist and Songwriters. (The comment got over 2000 likes and inspired the comment: "Most underrated comment") 

1959 sci-fi flick (and MST3K episode) Teenagers from Outer Space

The Netflix series Love and particularly Claudia O'Doherty (possibly true)

Gillian Jacobs

Bow Wow Wow (the song was Aphrodisiac)

Melissa Villaseñor on Stephen Colbert

New Mexico (the state)

We Both Reached for the Gun (from Chicago)

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Humphrey Bogart classics Petrified Forest, The Harder They Fall, The Caine Mutiny, The Desperate Hours, In.a Lonely Place

Swedish singer Robyn -- criminally 

Martin Short

Regina Spektor's I Cut Off My Hair 

"Listen do you smell something?" line from Ghostbusters

Goldfrapp 

Also observed in the course of gathering the above:

• Charlyne Yi's outfit for her impression of a turtle on Conan is "underappreciated". 
• Bad news for Jamie Farr: Teenagers think he is overrated.

"Underrated" is an outside-the-box adjective for something you like.  Taken at face value it's an objective datum about a thing-- an assertion that the ratings for it are low, which assumes that there are ratings about it, the amplitude of which can be evaluated.  Moreover, there is a judgment about the amplitude; to wit that it is excessively low.  Interestingly enough, there are indeed ratings that can be applied to YouTube videos.  Having watched a video, anyone (even those of us without channels) can take an extra step and register either a Like or a Dislike.  Could "underrated" refer to the ratio of Likes to Dislikes?  Maybe once, but Dislike counts are no longer public information on YouTube videos,  yet if anything the characterization of a video or its subject as underrated has mushroomed in recent years.  Could it sometimes refer to the ratio of likes to views-- an indication that the commenter considers, given the number of views, that not enough viewers have hit the Like button?   Perhaps, but in my unscientific evaluation of this possibility with the videos whose views and likes I noted above, there does not appear to be any great consistency-- the ratios range from 0.06% to 7.54%.   It also can't be a reliable datum because whereas individuals can rack up dozens of views, they are only allowed one like per video (per sock puppet account).  I certainly don't "Like" every video I come across that I "like".  Furthermore, plenty of enterprises exist out there that will sell content creators jacked up Like counts for a price. 

All of this is a bit beside the point if my suspicion about the popularity of "underrated" is correct, namely that it stands in as an objective sounding rationale for an imprimatur that the user is intending to confer upon a favorite video or its subject matter.  If the comment has any basis in numerical data, perhaps it's an assertion that a video does not have enough views-- single or repeat.  I can't help but feel that the word does a lot of work for the commenter-- elevating their own appreciation to a precious status in contrast to the expected derelict neglect of a work of art by the unwashed masses. *

There's an unintentional backhanded quality to the word, however.  Marina Diaminidis-- formerly of Marina and the Diamonds, lately of Marina-- was puzzled by how frequently "underrated" is used by her fans to describe her, saying "How big do you want me to be?

~~~~~~

* I suppose for the sake of thoroughness, I shouldn't rule out the possibility that the frequency with which I encounter the adjective "underrated" is a function of my taste for actually underrated things. 

Cry If I Want To

Although I hated Kamala Harris’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, I still hold out faint hope that it’s a strategy to get her elected, which I still support as the best of the 2 possible outcomes.  I hold out hope that freed of Biden and in office (thanks to the support of those she was wooing via her speech along with the shit eaters and nose holders) she will be freer to be non-Bidenish. Nevertheless, I went from being a hopeful supporter before the convention to a bit of a shit eater thanks to the DNC.  So you might ask, what is my resistance to the Green Party?  Third party voters do not even expect their candidates to win.  Talk about a low bar.  In other words, we are all rolling over, all of us who still participate in electoral politics when you’d think given the level of misery there might be some concerted or even chaotic move to take it back. As an example of possibility in the UK there is talk of replacing the House of Lords with a People's House of randomly selected citizens a la sortition. 

But back to American reality in late summer 2024, I’m not saying the Green Party is actually worse than either of the parties of the duopoly, just that it objectively does not have power. I think the Green party is for leftists who truly do not think it matters who is in power in this system, whereas leftists who vote for Dems truly think it matters who is in power.  It’s a fucked up system that needs to go because on balance it causes harm.  In my opinion it’s because the people in power cause harm and that’s why I’m more concerned with who those people are.  (And who are these people who are so hell-bent on maintaining a broken status quo at all costs in spite of popular and electoral desire?)

I remember in April 2020 in particular I was thinking that if the left could get its shit together and come together into a rival electoral force it would be a good thing.  I think in retrospect that would have been the time.  If it worked, Joe Biden would probably have lost to Donald Trump probably because of the 3rd party, but the 2024 primary would not have been a sham and might have actually been interesting.

But in practice, I can’t get past thinking a left unified into a new contentious third party means Republicans win every election going forward.  It feels like it would consist of existing 3rd party (legacy duopoly castoffs) plus new duopoly castoffs mostly from the dem party meaning from smallest to largest there would be this left 3rd party with barely 20% of voters, Demoncraps with about 32% and GOP with less than 48%.  I.e., diminished Dems, the same GOP, meaning GOP lock in every election, in spite of the majority of voters being to the left of the spectrum.

I really wish the left would commandeer the Dem party (and/or the GOP)   Overwhelm it with killer ideas and power and vitality.  Take AIPAC money and burn it.  Alienate the crypto-nazis and paleos and neo-libs and cons and attract the rabble rousers.  Seems less pie in the sky.  So the 20% moves into the 32% party, alienates 15% or so existing dem voters but attracts another 20-25% from among the non-voters and keeps Dems who will vote for Blue no matter who who will find a way to live with replacing the Senate with a Citizens Chamber selected by lot, executing a plan to accelerate EV infrastructure, enacting single payer healthcare, etc. if it means Blue on the electoral map.

Some might object, "They won't let the left near the reins of power."  But if we commandeer the party, they becomes us, right?  When I read the Best and the Brightest last year I was struck by how similar to third way democrats the Kennedy wing of the dem party was, but for 30 years prior it was Keynesian.  Eisenhower is the GOP analog for the Rooseveltian Era that Clinton was for Reaganite GOP in the neo-lib Era.  I mean, parties can change their focus.  They can be commandeered.

As Kamala Harris' acceptance speech demonstrated, it’s still Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s (and their donors’) party.  It’s Biden and Obama and the Clinton’s party.  But they are old and dying and the world that brought them to power is dying too.  (It’s a zombie apparently but it is flailing to maintain hegemony.  Hence all that talk of NATO and Hamas and Immigration and play by the rules economics)  That’s my punchy uneducated feeling.  My theory is a commandeered Dem party moves to the left.  I think Dem victories are good for the left.  It’s Dem losses that move Dem’s to the right.

This I know-- punishing the Dem party for Joe Biden's egregiously senile support of Israel's genocide by voting for the Green Party is about as likely to move the needle on the issue as writing in Norman Finkelstein.  If it makes you feel good, who am I to interfere?  But if you want your vote to contribute to an end to Israel's atrocity, you might not be thinking it through if you expend your vote on the Green Party.  If Kamala Harris loses because of it, it's worse than futile.  It's self-defeating.  In the meantime, Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden, but until she wins, she is working for him so don't expect her to repudiate his anachronistic support of Israel before she sees him retreating in the rear view mirror.

In a way thinking about sortition is what clarified this for me.  Electoral politics are a sham.  They are not fixable.  They are designed to keep the elite the elite.  But the evil genius of those that electoral politics serve is that they implicate those that they allow to vote in their own exploitation by forcing them to choose the marginally lesser of evils (evils being self-selected careerists from our elite institutions) to govern themselves.  The governing will always be within the bounds of what the elite deems acceptable.  It’s only become more obvious since the end of history, the age of forever wars,  the financial meltdown, big tech and pandemics  as Congress, the judiciary and the executive behave however they please in spite of clear indications that what they please does not please the electorate.  (Hence arms and military funding being sent to Israel in spite of their making possible the Gazan genocide, hence no single payer healthcare, hence no free education or debt forgiveness, hence the budget for social spending being strapped because it’s dependent on the strapped class and not at all on the owner class, etc.).  In other words, electoral politics is what it is.  We have to make the best of it until we can get rid of it.  To my mind, more parties is not making the best of it because only 1 of 2 parties will win. 

The ultimate goal is sortition.  That’s what we really need to work on.  But in the meantime, we’ll each have different ideas about how best to live with this rigged system because whatever we do will never be enough to get us what we want.  If like me you think not all outcomes are equal under this extremely bad system you try to shoot for the best or least bad outcome.

American democracy is uniquely undemocratic.  A paragon of undemocraticity. (?)  In a parliamentary or representative democracy in which the government’s makeup is determined by the makeup of the vote, it’s at least possible to form coalitions.  In the duopoly that’s impossible (except within one or the other of the two parties).  It’s designed to be us versus them.  Everything else is noise.  The best we can get to an idea of a fix for it is rank choice voting in which you can still be implicated in how things are run if your formerly unspoken second choice gets the majority on a second round.  Your second choice won!  And it’s your fault for confessing it was your second choice! But as we don’t have rank choice voting we are especially at the mercy of the two parties.  They don’t have to pander to the fringe if they don’t want to.  GOP is unusual because its politics are so fringe it has to collect the odious fragments to win so it has a higher pandering quotient and more cohesion and solidarity.  Very fuckin weird system.  It’s unusually bad and undemocratic.  The nerve of saying it’s the best democracy in the world as Kamala Harris said in her speech. We have to stop pretending this is actually democracy.  It can’t be when winner (the plurality yet) takes all and losers get nothing.

Never Swat a Fly

Marjorie White and Frank Albertson as D-6 and RT-42 perform Never Swat a Fly from the sci-fi musical Just Imagine (1930). (Music by Ray Henderson; Lyrics by Buddy G. DeSylva and Lew Brown)

For a flavor of the movie which involves an excursion to Mars in 1980, here's a montage set to another fine number from the musical, The Drinking Song:

Conventional Folly

I'm of two minds about Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the close of the Democratic National Convention last night.  On the one hand, I am genuinely impressed with how she has risen to the occasion in the 4 or 5 weeks since Joe Biden stepped aside from the campaign and threw his endorsement  for his replacement behind his Vice President.  I don't think it can be a huge revelation that I did not know she had it in her.  It’s now clear to me she has it in her.  

On the other hand, what is the it that she has in her?  I'll admit, my optimism about the difference that she would make as President has not been perfectly cautious.  My hopes had been involuntarily raised.  In that spirit, I am taking it for granted that there may be divergences from the current admin that she might have to sit on until she is sitting in the Oval Office.  But if you take her speech at face value, there was a lot in it to dislike.  Too much to dislike to really leave a lot of room for any reveling in what there was to like.  I think she was effective in making a case for herself versus Trump from the perspective of “Trump’s a dangerous nut who will make your life worse and I’m not.”  But I was turned off by a few things (and I’m not even talking about the rest of the night/convention with its absence of a Palestinian and the presence of Republicans and military wackadoodles like Leon Panetta and that sheriff from Michigan).  

But just in Harris’s speech, I hated the formulation of economic policies around the middle class and opportunity and affordability.  I mean maybe my ears have been un-tuned from that kind of talk—I don’t hear it as sweet music for the masses, I hear it as fuck you if you’re not in the middle class or if you don’t have what it takes to be.  I’ll grant she’s trying to sing to people who get horny when you talk about that stuff including our punditry and too much of our Pavlovian electorate, but to me it sounds like garbage. The domestic stuff wasn’t all bad, it was just not good enough.  The international part of the speech just sucked pretty much from one end to the other.  Why are we still talking about NATO in 2024?  Even my CNN-watching wife said she threw Gazans under the bus with her comments about Israel.  That’s pretty bad.  But the rest of it sucked too.  I hated it.  Nevertheless, again you could argue she’s not performing for me.  

The thing is she thinks she’s got me.  She thinks “The left will hate this (including the snub of the Palestinians) but they’ll eat shit.  They always do.  The AIPAC wing?  Middle-America Independents?  Suburban Republican women unhappy with Trump?  They won’t eat shit, but the left will.”  Therefore, only the left are fed shit.  Our palate for it is not appreciated, it is taken for granted.  Meanwhile, even in 2024 after all we've been through, extreme care is taken to see that not a molecule of shit pollutes the feast laid out for the small but loud asshole wing of the Democratic Party.

I would have forgiven the pandering to straw dolts (is anybody who matters really impressed by that military and immigration bullshit?) if they had let the Palestinian speak. It was a calculated fuck you really.   A performative fuck you performed for the benefit of assholes.  The thing is if they had let the woman speak (Ruwa Romman, the first Palestinian elected to the Georgia house who is on the record pro-Kamala and whose speech was perfectly palatable to all but the most sicko Zionist) it would have given a boost to the people they needed to boost.  Instead it’s now a problem that they have to either fix or let fester. As Sam Seder put it last night, finding room for a 2 minute speech “would have cost them nothing” and made a huge difference. It was a mistake.  Plain and simple.  They fucked up and made a bad choice.

Instead they chose to pander to a certain type of  Dem.  While they told those opposed to the genocide in Gaza to go to hell for a bit, the people they didn’t want to tell to go to hell are idiots who have to be told not to go to hell or else they’ll fucking do it.  I can’t help but think about a Matt Karp study of 2020 that basically confirms that they’re not wrong in a way.  The ficklest elements of the dem electorate have a thick stupid streak that responds to triggers, and yet they are needed in order for Dems to win.

Non sequitur alert: While thinking about this, my brother thirteen who has been looking for work for over a year sent me this infographic about candidates for employment:

I didn't see the point of comparing two lists nearly identical but for the ordering,  but my brother thirteen said that he discerned a decided shift away from autonomy and leadership skills in 2018 and toward obedience.  Probably requires experience with the job market in 2024 to pick up on that, but I see how he got that.  I do think a parallel can be drawn between that list and the menu of stuff at the DNC last night-- the showcase night.  The stuff that doesn't concern you except abstractly-- maintenance of American global dominance at any cost; mitigation of the fact that very poor people from the parts of the world our way of living is making uninhabitable are at our borders clamoring to do any shit work we have for them in order to live here-- we’re not really trying to sell you on, but by making it the centerpiece of our convention we are trying to emphasize that since it is the preoccupation of your government we want you to feel that we will be capable of continuing to carry it out better than the other guy.  And my point is, just as shifts in emphases on our resumes indicate our own acquiescence to losses of power in the workplace, the bar for our political support of a mainstream candidate / party might be getting lower and lower.

20 Books

I have become aware of a challenge on social media to post the covers of "20 books that have influenced your life" with no comment-- just the covers.  I'm not on social media, so I will present them here.  And I'm too lazy to figure out how to screenprint 20 covers and manageably arrange them in a post, so I'll just give title and author for most.  I might as well have not even bothered, right?  I needed a topic anyway, so be that as it may:

Chicken Soup and Rice - Maurice Sendak

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N - Leo Rosten

Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton

The House of Blue Leaves - John Guare

Blues People - Leroi Jones (better known as Imamu Amiri Baraka)

Inter Ice Age 4 - Kobo Abe

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

Canapé-Vert - Pierre Marcelin and Philippe Thoby-Marcelin

Language in Thought and Action - S.I. Hayakawa

With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker - Victor Bockris

No More Police - Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie

Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich

Orientalism - Edward Said

The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein

Democracy in Chains - Nancy MacLean

Pictures at a Revolution - Mark Harris

The End of the Road - John Barth

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I feel like I'm leaving something out.

Car Talk

In the 70's Ron Popeil invented Mr Microphone, a wireless transmitter shaped like a microphone that would play your voice over any FM receiver in your vicinity, such as the radio in your hi fi system, effectively turning it into an amp for your voice.  As the ubiquitous advertisement demonstrated, with this device, your car's radio set to FM could become a public address system, enhancing your own ability to be a public nuisance behind the wheel.  To a pubescent aspirant driver, the possibilities for enhancing the communication experience of driving seemed endless.  Imagine possessing the ability to let the other guy you were supposed to be watching out for know pre-emptively how you felt about him.  Of course any experienced driver can immediately spot the flaw in this line of thinking-- driving is the one socially interactive activity in which those who value their life can be grateful that communication is kept to the barest of minimums.

To this purpose, various methods and accessories have been devised to convey just the amount of information necessary for any interaction behind the wheel.  From the beginning, a convention of hand signals extended out the driver's rolled down window have been used to communicate one's intention to other drivers. As automobiles became more common, communication features were added to the design of cars militating against the need for drivers to risk their limbs for the cause of safety.  Turn signals on the front, rear, and now side mirrors of cars were added to convey one's intention to obstruct or impede the flow of traffic in order to exit the straightaway.*   Flashing "hazard" lights in the front and rear (aka "flashers") could be engaged to draw attention to a sudden need to reduce speed or to be temporarily stopped. Honking horns were added as an automotive way to express one's disapproval of the asses who forget to use turn signals or flashers.  

To these voluntary instruments of communication, a couple of automatic signals could be added.  First, whenever the driver steps on the brake pedal,  bright red brake lights at the rear of the car intensify as an automatic message to the driver of the following vehicle to apply their own brakes (thus initiating a chain of calls and responses that extends the length of the trail of cars behind the car that initiated the round of Telephone).† Second, placing the car in reverse engages a set of non-colored lights that unambiguously indicate to those approaching from behind the reverse direction of the car.   Trucks and some recent passenger car models accompany the lights with a sequence of warning tones or of short punctuated beeps of the horn.  The automatic nature of these brake and reverse gear signals might have an analog in human communication of such involuntary physical responses as a flushed color to signal embarrassment,  dilated pupils to indicate attraction or a yawn to convey, "You're boring me."  

Before the feature was added to passenger cars, some drivers supplied the reverse beeps on their own by means of staccato taps on the horn.  In short, the horn is the feature most commonly resorted to for voluntary communication, and reflective of this is the variety of messages that a horn can convey.  Along with the two already discussed, the sounding of a horn can mean:

• "I'm backing up!"
• "You're getting on my nerves!"
• Closely related to the above: "Move!" or "Get out of my way!"  (A shorter tap is a way of adding an unspoken "Please" to the request.)
• To forestall a collision: "I'm here!"
• As a designated driver on an outing, to avoid getting out of the car when pulling up to the curb to pick up a friend: "I've arrived!"  If  the friend takes too long to emerge: "Come on! Let's go!"
• When spotting a friend or acquaintance in the wild: "Hi! It's me!"

As to the last meaning, I don't know how common it is, but in my family there's a tradition of giving the horn 2 short blasts when driving away after a visit as a way of saying, "Goodbye!  Thanks for everything!"   As my daughter has observed, this makes a friendly toot of the horn the "Aloha" of the language of cars.  It should also be noted that some drivers use the horn as though it were a hyperspace button on a video game or a disintegration ray should they find themselves behind someone stopped  for perfectly legitimate reasons such as yielding the right of way to pedestrians.  The message seems to be "Be gone!"  Such rudeness is frequently met with a blast from the offended offender to the effect of "How do you like it!"  To all of the above, it can be added that a contextless honk of the horn can be interpreted as a general, "Hey! Pay attention!"

There is a quieter alternative to many of the horn's denotations, to wit: the flash of high beams.  While the sound of a horn can be varied to convey the emotion or urgency behind a message, there is not much you can do to add paralinguistic touches to the utterances of a high beam flash.  Nevertheless, a single flash can convey a fairly wide range of meanings.  Starting with the horn overlaps:

• "In case you didn't notice me, I'm here."
• "Coming through.  You're in the passing lane and I want to pass you"  (Rude, maybe, but better than a horn at high speeds that are probably exceeding the speed limit)
• "After you. I insist."
• "Permission to cut in front of me granted."
• "Your high beams are on."
• "You need to turn on your headlights."

Most drivers through experience know the range of meaning of a high beam flash though they might have to flip through the possible alternatives in their mind to arrive at the likelihood that the flash was directed at them and what their expected response should be.  When no context can be ascertained, making the flash of an oncoming car seem random, it's a good bet that the meaning is a camaraderly "Watch out!  Speed trap ahead!"

When it comes to automotive communication, context is everything.  And when one's meaning is in doubt, one can always resort to classic hand gestures to provide emphasis and clarification.

~~~~~~

* Turn signals have for years been designed to automatically turn off on making the turn.  When they don't,  they raise expectations, rather like a stray eyelash causing a person sitting in a bar to wink involuntarily at strangers.

† Brakes can also be tapped to convey two voluntary meanings:  1) I'm slowing down and you should too; and 2) You're following too close.  No matter how the latter is intended, it's hard not to receive it as an aggression