Entertaining Forgiveness

I ain't no freakin' monument to justice.

The past few years have been notable for their official egregiousness.  They have also been marked for me by two major sources of alienation, both of which have origins in the dismaying state of global affairs.  Israel's enormous response (in the pedantic sense of outside the scope of what could be considered normal) to the Hamas attack of October 7  2023 forced sides to be taken in what had been an uneasy truce between those with Zionist sympathies and those of us (myself included) increasingly questioning our tolerance of Israel's privileged exemptions from claims of special pleading and double standards for its treatment of the Palestinians whose homeland it has occupied.  I'm thinking in particular of artists I had an uncomplicated admiration for, whose recalcitrant Zionist stance post Oct 7 has complicated my admiration.  To be sure, plenty of assholes I had no feelings for have come out of the woodwork to bear down hard on their Israel chauvinism and they get the brunt of my unhesitant irritation.   But its always disappointing to learn (or have suspicions confirmed) that someone I'm a fan of is on the wrong side of an issue with such devastating consequences.

A bit closer to home-- ever since Bernie Sanders conceded the 2016 Democratic Primary to Hillary Clinton, a dismayingly large number of former Sanders allies have cordoned themselves off from those on the left who so prefer to take their chances with Democratic politicians / presidents as opposed to Republican ones that they will actually continue to vote for them.  These post left leftists will readily admit that the system is structured so that only one of two parties will win; that one of those parties -- corrupt and entrenched and elitist and venal though it is-- wreaks less havoc on the rights and needs and futures of the laboring majority of people.  They disavow electoral politics while at the same time participating in ways that hinder the least harmful outcomes and they think absolve them from the worst. Many of them are otherwise very intelligent people who on the issue of electoral politics are basically idiots.  To me, harm reduction isn't a political strategy, it's a survival mechanism.

The time has not come for forgiveness.  That will not be possible in the first case until an Israel/Palestine with a fully restored Gaza becomes a democratic non-apartheid state in which residents of all religions and ethnicities live in equality and peace.  In the second case, some corner must be turned in which all who value freedom, peace, equality and a society in which needs are treated not as privileges but as rights begin to work together to turn the tide against fascism, capitalism and oligarchy.  It shouldn't be the case, but as of this moment, it's easier for me to imagine forgiveness of the first category of transgressors than of the second.

In the meantime, I guess I still have a capacity to be horrified at acceptance of the fascist outcome.  This is a winner take all system we’re living under (against our desires).  In 2024, either Joe Biden’s DEI VP was going to take all -- she who was very likely taking a sloppy tack of promising continuance of Biden’s legacy in her campaign in order to try to overcome the perceived multiple handicaps of her ethnicity and gender  as well as her lack of cultural currency as a political brand (thanks to being sheltered away in the vice president’s residence for four years by the senile fart who very openly let voters know he was only using her ironically enough for the youth, ethnicity and gender he lacked in order to overcome his own decrepit racist and sexist brand).   Or the Fascists were going to take all.   The Biden tack failed with low-information Biden haters—it was a bad strategy based on the typical bad dem notions about the electorate as bars on a bar graph.  But even high information voters, including single issue voters did not seem to me to take the care that they needed to with the history changing differences in the two outcomes this time.   Because of that the Fascists won all.  Is this not what we are dealing with?  By the slimmest of majorities among the fraction of the electorate who actually voted, Donald Trump got it all.  I don’t think because of political wisdom or honor.  I think because people with the same information as me projected an image on Kamala Harris that was tainted by her association with Joe Biden.  People didn’t want to give Joe Biden the satisfaction, even though he wasn’t running.  You projected continuation of Biden’s administration onto her.  I projected a break from Trump and Biden.  Neither of us knew which way things would go with a Harris administration, but frankly KH was not Joe Biden.  She had resentments.  She had secret disagreements.  She was movable.  She was a different person who would I felt very probably want her own legacy.  I saw signs of the difference in the beginning before the Biden team and Jill and Joe Biden got to her.  She and Walz clammed up at one point, and I think it’s because she was advised very badly and given the limited amount of time she had available she trusted the pros. And note—I am not saying she would have been a great president.  She undoubtedly would have sucked.  But I don’t think she would have kept up a Joe Biden continuation façade, and I know we would not have the big beautiful bill and cracker racists kidnapping our neighbors and Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi and Hegseth and Kennedy and the Trump-Kennedy Center and the Trump court and Congress rolling over and playing dead.

I agree we need a new political system—Trump is the proof of that.  But what are we supposed to do in the meantime?  Watch families get ripped apart?  Watch Gaza get razed to the ground while Trump gets the Peace prize for it (Because Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his DEI mascot and therefore she had to be punished because he was no longer around to be)?  Pretend the planet is not dying because Trump doesn’t believe in climate change?  Watch reproductive rights and civil rights and voting rights and other social gains drift away?  All of those are hostage to the political system we’ve got.

The leadership of the dems has said it: For every vote they lose among the working class or the radical left, they pick up two more in the republican suburbs.  And I believe that strategy actually worked for them once so they expect it work everytime regardless of whatever else is going on. (And these are the evil soul-less neolibs I’m talking about.)  That’s why they don’t view lost voters as teachers and lesson givers but rather as ballast necessary in order for the statistics to come together for them—the spaces they leave in the democratic constituency just make extra room for the multiples of suburban professionals coming on board in response.  The ones who need the lesson don’t get the lesson.  They haven’t learned anything new since 1992.  That’s the problem.  And then the fascists win and their response is not – gee maybe if we were only more palatable to the working classes and the radical left.  It’s more like, “Maybe if we offer fascism lite we’ll attract even more Republicans.”  They are worthless.  This is actually what makes them preferable to Republicans every time.  Because the Dems are at their very worst (which sucks I agree) feckless.  But the Republicans will deliver on the fascism that they promise because they mean it.  This is a glorious, glorious time for them. And the Dems did not even learn their lesson.

I resent having to be the one to help the unsexy loser Dems keep the fascists at bay.  I resent the shirking that people whose politics (and distaste for corporate dems) I share, who winkingly give each other permission to shirk. who winkingly excuse themselves from blame for the fascists winning because the Dems, being feckless fools, can be agreed upon by them to be at fault.

At least Zionists own the havoc they wreak.

The Relations of Order

I finished Cedric Robinson’s The Terms of Order a short while ago.  T.b.h., it was a bit of a struggle but I think I finally came to terms (no pun intended) with the notion that it may have been a slog on purpose.  I came down on feeling that the book was essentially a critique of political theory using the language and canon of political theory. Robinson had a hard time getting awarded his Ph.D. from Stanford. He grew up in Oakland and was a major autodidact as a youth reading his way through the stacks at the Oakland public library system.  His depth of scholarship shows, but some members of his committee at Stanford quit saying they could not understand his thesis.  After three years of unsuccessful persuasion, he ultimately had to threaten litigious action to get the Ph.D. in 1974  and then he published the thesis as The Terms of Order.  I was feeling a bit sympathetic with the committee quitters for long stretches of the book, but every now and then his project crystallized for me, especially toward the end.  

In using the canon and language of political theory to critique it, he was essentially saying political theory is often a mythology of how society is organized politically which too often overlooks the role of violence and force.  He criticizes political theorists large and small for hammering their conclusions into a tacitly pre-agreed upon framework.  There are bits and pieces here and there that he doesn’t reject outright, but even those he caveats. In particular, he spends a lot of sympathetic time on anarchy and mutual aid.  But he contrasts all of western political theory and organization with the Stateless societies of primitive people which he says grow organically out of a mutuality in the project of survival that is missing from the hierarchical structures of the so called developed world.  

As an undergraduate, Robinson got suspended from the University of California at Berkeley for his participation in student protests there.  On getting his Ph.D. at Stanford he went on to teach African American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara  and to head the department of Black Studies there as well as the Department of Political Science.  He ultimately founded and directed the Center for Black Studies Research from which he retired in 2010, though he continued to teach Emeritus until shortly before his death in 2016.  After publishing the Terms of Order he went on to write his chef d'oeuvre Black Marxism in which he was the first to describe what he called Racial Capitalism, emphasizing the mutually bound origins of Capitalism and Racism (which he recognized manifested in Europe as exploitation toward European minority populations in parallel with the customary American exploitation of indigenous, African and Asian workers as well as the waves of non-WASP immigrant huddled masses yearning to breathe free).  

The best part of the reading experience for me was in the last chapter, as Robinson is wrapping up his discussion of western political theory by talking about the unintentional value he found in reading about quantum theory – he indicated that although the theorists likely didn’t intend it, he found value in describing ideal order as being organic from the interdependence of all matter on all other matter—the notion that relativity implies the relatedness of everything to everything else.  This resembles the political theories of Carlo Rovelli, the Italian quantum theorist who wrote Helgoland which I read last summer.  It was kind of a beautiful resonance.  (I seriously doubt Carlo Rovelli has read The Terms of Order, but Cedric Robinson definitely read the same quantum theorists that Carlo Rovelli did.) 

Having discovered The Terms of Order only recently (it was mentioned in Palo Alto), I think it’s a good thing to be aware of this rather amazing book. 

Supraliminal Seduction

Is it just me or are you too getting YouTube ads for say Carpet Cleaners that are-- how shall we say? --hard core pornographic in nature?  They aren’t video ads, they show up at the top of the recommendations whilst a video is playing and just sit there kind of like print ads, but are linked to (we presume) the carpet cleaning business.  The graphic of the ad is generally a poorly veiled image of a lady ingesting a thick cylindrical member—tinted unnaturally or otherwise obscured only enough for some vague plausible deniability but not enough that you’d be ok with it showing up in say a sharing of your screen in a zoom meeting or a visit from a child.

 When I was in junior high school in the seventies, a bestseller among my classmates was a paperback ostensibly written for adults called Subliminal Seduction.  The author was Wilson Bryan Key, a writer and associate of Marshall McLuhan specializing in mass media and communications who in this title stumbled upon a thesis that captured the pubescent imagination and gave its author his career.  The premise was that just below the threshold of consciousness, advertisements were rife with barely detectable erotic suggestions that were doing the heavy lifting on persuading the consumer to have to have the product.  Many copies of the book were worn out by being passed between the hands of middle schoolers taking turns leafing through the generous supply of illustrations to stare at the configuration of ice cubes in a whiskey glass or the haze of smoke from a cigarette or the reflection of studio lights on the paint job of a new car to try to spot the images of naked bodies supposedly floating barely below the level of detection.  

The jury is still out on whether something extra nefarious was actually going on with those images (above and beyond the nefariousness of the normal activity of the advertising business) or whether the eagerness to see them was merely an epiphenomenon of the hyperactive pareidolia of pubescent middle schoolers.  The "science" on which Key based much of his thesis has been found by other researchers to be flawed.  Nevertheless, the sleazy nature of advertising invited the hopeful scrutiny of the prurient, and the advertising business has never minded the heightened attention of the public.

Sex has always sold, but in the sixties of my youth, advertising was largely known for its bland caution.  Over the years, however, the temptation for an advertiser to hide a powerful suggestion below the radar of the viewer has been obviated by relaxed standards that appear to have kindled an arms race of open lewdness and scatology, from Big Ass Fans to country western songs about diarrhea to bears who "enjoy the go."  Entrepreneurs frankly discuss the loci of every odor and secretion of the body and invite viewers to elide the aptness of a blue pun with the body part or intimate act it's meant to conjure.  Outright pornography is a frontier I hadn't expected advertisers to cross in my lifetime, but these are unprecedented times.

After seeing 3 variations of these ads, I did report it to the YouTube authorities.  I mean how far do I extend my tolerance for such things?  If I were to post a video with that image as my thumbnail I’d probably be banned.  It’s ok if some random “business” does it?   I don’t know if I succeeded in nipping a bad YouTube trend in the bud but since reporting it I can’t seem to conjure up an example to show you but if I come across one, I’ll share it if I think of it.  Unless you too have already seen enough.