Community Lip Service

Last year, my firm-- an above average place to work-- added a new item to its menu of benefits.  This one comes in the form of time.  Specifically, it is an optional extra day of paid time off each year.  It comes with a catch: the time must be spent performing some act of community service.  In a recent recap of the kickoff year, some highlighted participant activities included serving lunch at a food bank, sorting diapers for a legal aid initiative, replanting saplings for a boy scout camp and participating in an event to commemorate the sacrifice of war veterans.  One more thing: of course, your supervisor needs to approve your time off.  Not an unreasonable condition of course.  Oh, and of course the committee that regulates the benefit must approve the organization for service activities.  It is noted in the announcement that 65 organizations have been pre-approved.  Should an activity already performed not be approved for this benefit, pay would come out of the employee's own leave.

Service to what community?  The dozen or so that the firm is situated in, naturally, but also in these unprecedented times of work-at-home, the much larger pool of them that comprise the home communities of the firm's employees.  Beyond that, in theory, any community for which service could be provided would almost certainly count.  It's inconceivable to me that an employee who happened to be in, say,  Iran on firm business who chose to take their community service day to help out at an orphanage in Tehran would not be approved.  One could imagine a scenario in which at some point in the future an employee who could be beamed to Mars for a day could get approved for a day terraforming that community.  I don't think it's the community that matters as long as it could in the eyes of the community service committee be viewed as benefiting however modestly from the service.

Could an employee get approved for blocking access to an abortion clinic?  Probably not at my firm.  Would participating in organized actions on behalf of antifa or MOVE be service that could be approved of?  How about painting signs to be carried in protest of the planet destroying activities of one of its many environmentally iffy clients?  These could all be rejected categorically as political activities as distinct from service to the community.  While I would argue that political activities are perhaps among the best service one could give to one's community, as a rule, the firm has made clear that a line exists beyond which the employee whose idea of community service is at odds with the "values of the firm" must surely tread on his own dime.  Consequently there's a built-in anodyne flavor to the type of service for which the firm would be willing to spring for 8 hours. 

Who benefits from this benefit? We presume employees who take advantage of it get the satisfaction of contributing to activities that benefit "the community."*  And for employees who regularly volunteer a portion of their off-hours to acceptable causes anyway, compensating 8 of those hours once a year is perhaps the least the firm could do.  What does the firm get?  The firm gets the better society it is modeling by offering such a benefit to its employees. Ok, now that we've all had a good laugh, of course it gets materially nothing from the pittance of service that it enables in ostentatious dribs and drabs by doling out the redirected labors of an employee for approved public service one day per year at a time-- and neither does society!  What it gets is really all that anyone could be expected to get from it which is the sort of easily conjured false liberal cred for itself that is so common these days among the meritocratic class of obscenely powerful and wealthy people at the helm of successful commercial concerns.  It gets to imagine (and in any case to claim) that it has mitigated to a miniscule degree some of the harm it causes in its normal day-to-day year-to-year pursuit of profit. And not unimportantly, it gets to do this, as it does nearly everything, by the sweat of its employees.  

My firm should not be singled out for hypocrisy. It's not like it's out on a limb paying human resources professionals handsomely to devise pretexts for marshaling its workforce in benign extracurricular activities that accrue to its own glory and wishful image of itself in a way that can plausibly be packaged as a benefit (without really doing anything that would threaten the existing social structure).  Indeed, every firm should be singled out for hypocrisy.  But as any subject of a modern first world neoliberal economy is already aware, hypocrisy is one of the many gears that drive the wheels of society.  It seems to be the sine qua non of participation in it.

~~~~~

* Is it too cynical to think that working 8 hours in a food bank once a year "helps the community" by providing cover for the way that the community is structured in favor of those who partner in firms and who own companies that pay those partners for services that contribute to outcomes that create so many hungry people in need of a meal to begin with?

Sinking Feeling

From Wikipedia: "Ancient Greek lead sling bullets with a winged thunderbolt molded on one side and the inscription "ΔΕΞΑΙ" ("take that" or "catch") on the other side."

___________

It all makes sense now: 

Climate Change Denialism.  The American Health Care System.  Trickle Down Economics.  The Student Loan Crisis.  Criminalization of Gender Affirming Care for Children by State Legislatures.  For Profit Prisons. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.  Ayn Rand.  Sean Hannity.  The Clintons.  The Magic Bullet Theory. Glenn Youngkin.  Q.  Dancing with the Stars.  

Let me face it: My Own Sad Life.

It comes down to 2 letters: Pb.  Not peanut butter, Fool!  Plumbum!  For you non-Latin speakers, that's Lead! Civilization tumbling, intelligence sapping Lead.  

From the 1920s to 1996 in the US (slightly earlier or later elsewhere across the planet), lead was a common ingredient in gasoline in the form of Tetraethyllead, an anti-knock and performance enhancing additive whose utility, ready availability and cheapness was discovered, patented, produced and promoted originally by a joint venture of Standard Oil and General Motors but adopted universally by the automotive industry across the globe.  Despite health warnings raised from the very start, its use became standard in fuels around the world.  Regular leaded gasoline was cheaper than unleaded, and as its use in cars and aircraft (above and beyond its use in paint and in plumbing) proliferated, the concentration of lead in the air and soil increased.  Encountering it in the environment became in many parts of the country for an extended period of time inevitable.  

Every schoolchild of the time learned that the downfall of Rome could be attributed to the lead pipes that carried its water, but there's apparently a reason we were too stupid to draw a parallel between Rome and what was happening in our own atmosphere due to the automotive explosion of the last century.  Per a recent study published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) website:

During the peak era of leaded gasoline in the United States, which ran from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the average blood–lead level (BLL) for the general US population was routinely three to five times higher than the current reference value for clinical concern and case management referral (3.5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood). Consequently, millions of adults alive today were exposed to high levels of lead as children. While these exposures were deemed harmless at the time, animal studies and epidemiological evidence accrued in the intervening years reveal that such exposures likely disrupted healthy development across multiple organ systems (particularly the brain, bone, and cardiovascular systems), resulting in subtle deficits to important outcomes, such as cognitive ability, fine motor skills, and emotional regulation, that may influence the trajectory of a person’s life (e.g., their educational attainment, health, wealth, and happiness). These deficits largely persist across time and, in some cases, worsen and are now hypothesized to put individuals at risk for difficult-to-treat chronic and age-related diseases, including cardiovascular disease and dementia.

 The upshot:

A total of 824,097,690 million IQ points were lost because of childhood lead exposure among the US population by 2015. This number equates to an average of 2.6 IQ point deficit per person.  

According to the study, "More than 90% of those born between 1950 and 1980 experienced BLLs in excess of 5 µg/dL, the threshold considered “safe” for children. The legacy of early life lead exposure will stay in the United States for decades to come."  

I don't put much stock in IQ.  Then again I'm one of those idiots born during the era of peak lead emissions during which an average of as many as 5.9 IQ points per person were lost.  Because of its ubiquity in the air, in the soil, in the infrastructure upon which the nation was built, the banning of lead from gasoline alone was not enough to eradicate its predicted effects for  generations of Americans to come.  As demonstrated by the water crisis of Flint, Michigan* that started in 2014 and is not yet fully resolved, in which austerity impositions on a public works project resulted in lead from ancient piping leaching into the water supply of over 100,000 mostly poor residents causing demonstrable health and cognitive issues in children,  we have not learned anything.  But maybe now we know why we have not learned anything.

 ~~~~~

* The most famous of the many lead incidents since 2000 that have been and will continue to be repeated elsewhere.

Slow to revolve

On 9/11/2001, everything changed.   Forty days later, on October 23, everything changed again when Apple introduced the iPod.  It took a bit longer for the second change to reach me.  I didn't get the big deal until my firm gifted me with an iPod shuffle for "employee appreciation day" 3 years later.  Even then it took months of looking at the thing before I figured out what to do with it.  Was it just a glorified walkman for playing 45s of your favorite songs?  Meh.  When I learned it could be played over the car speakers with an auxiliary cord, it dawned on me, "It's a re-configurable mix tape!" Once I had made my first playlist for a long car trip, there was no turning back. By  2006, I was so ensnared in the iPod web -- which unlike traditional music accumulation could only be fed sitting on my ass in front of the computer, meeting me where I lived-- that when I heard that Tower Records was closing, I felt personally responsible.

I had a similar slow uptake with the mobile phone: I want people calling me when I'm on the toilet?  No thanks.  But my wife was the influencer on that technology.  Needless to say, when the iPhone first appeared (changing things once more no less) I had the luxury of pitying the first adopters as hopeless saps.   Two years later, looking for a replacement for my deceased Razr, I took the iPhone plunge and became a hopeless sap myself.  

With me, it was never about telecommunications.   In fact, who could have predicted an explosion in personal portable communication devices would spell the death of the phone call?  I use my phone as a phone maybe twice a week.  I have 233 unlistened to voicemails.  With my phone on silent mode, I ignore easily 90% of those who try to reach me. Nonetheless as it is with so many people, my phone is attached to my hand.  In an effort to be with my phone as frequently as possible, I acquired as many habits as I could-- crossword puzzles, language learning, star gazing, ocarina playing.  Mostly, I read books on my phone to such an extent that I can sense the same thing happening to Barnes and Noble that I perpetrated on Tower Records.  The more exclusively I read on my phone, the less and less Barnes and Noble is a book store than it is a tchotchke emporium.  I do still visit book stores, but it's mostly to find titles to search the iBooks* store for for my phone.

As the iPhone is to phone calls, so the iBooks app is to reading.  In the early days of the pandemic, my Books app one day out of the blue following an automatic update started notifying me when I had reached a daily reading goal I hadn't set. The default goal of  5 minutes could be met just by leaving the app open while doing something else.  As I discovered last year, reaching the annual goal required turning the final page on just three books in the span of 12 months.  Though I have no incentive to be honest and absolutely nothing is stopping me from cheating, I don't cheat.  I met the quota last year in February.  When the app began tracking my habit for me unbidden, the laughably low bar of accomplishment struck me as being possibly Apple's way of keeping my reading to a minimum, I imagined for nefarious capitalistic purposes.  But to maintain a streak of daily goal meeting requires a steady pipeline of books.  By year's end, I had read 24 books on my phone, old and new on a variety of topics.  But as I look back at the titles I read in unbroken succession from January to December, I ask myself: What does it mean to say I read a book?  

I read the Brothers Karamazov in one day when I was 18. Do I remember anything about it other than what everyone knows about it?  I remember it had a lot of pages.  And that was a physical book that I have carried with me and have had to find a place for with every move for nearly 5 decades.  What about these electronic books that are designed to conjure the page turning sensation of reading but that unlike a book can't be remembered to the touch in the way that is so useful for finding passages you'd like to read again in a physical book?  eBooks can be searched so easily; they can be highlighted and bookmarked.  But for practical purposes I find that there is only one direction in an eBook and that is onward to the final page.  I like to think that I am accumulating some kind of experience with each book, that intellectual absorption is an inescapable force of the mind, but as I look back over a lifetime of reading, it occurs to me that reading requires more activity, less passivity than an attention-deprived brain such as mine can elicit.  Have I read Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes?  I purchased it last year;  I narrated its text word-for-word to myself for weeks over the summer until I was done with it; while it consumed my time, I thought about it, was moved by it, let it argue with me and inspire me; my iPhone Books app tells me I finished it.  Somewhere in there is that book-- if you quizzed me on specifics, I am not sure offhand whether my ability to respond would surprise or disappoint me.  I have read it something like the way I saw La La Land 5 years ago and yet could not on my own begin to tell you what it was about.  So have I read Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes?  We may need a decision from the judges.

~~~~~

*iBooks, Books, whatever!  By dropping the i- prefix from its app, Apple is helping you to forget that reading books on the phone and "buying" books for the phone are not the same as owning those books.  Don't forget, as I so often do that the purchase of an eBook buys you merely heavily termed access to material that could be-- and in some reported cases has been-- rescinded by Amazon, Apple and other purveyors of digital readers without warning to unsuspecting readers.  Your digital life is yours only at the will of the big tech providers of it to you, not because they have found a loophole to proprietorship, but simply because the technology allows it.

Countdown to Oblivion

Paul McCartney was 24 in December of 1966, the month that the Beatles recorded When I'm Sixty-Four, their romantic nostalgic anticipation of a golden sunset still far in the future, for the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Its public debut on vinyl was a long-time coming.  The Beatles had been playing it live for years.  McCartney was not even a larval Beatle when he wrote it as a barely budding songwriter long before he met any of his bandmates, at age 14. 

I was 4 when the Beatles first played the Ed Sullivan show and I tell myself I remember it vividly, but what I remember is undoubtedly my older siblings' excitement at the time and subsequent viewings of footage of the event.  Irresistibly fun and subversive from the beginning, the Beatles' own growth musically schooled a generation in what it was possible to do with a pop song and with fame.  Their progressively rarer appearances were thrilling and each seemed to herald something unprecedented for their fans and the public at large to deal with.  As adventurous as they were with their music and their image, they seemed to bring the culture with them.  

Hearing Walter Cronkite spill the news in April, 1970 that the Beatles were breaking up was like learning the world was ending, and my heart resisted the news for years. As time passed and post-Beatles reality revealed itself to me I became less and less confident that the head-scratchingly unappealing post Beatles output of the 4 dispersed members could be cured if only the crazy mop tops would just get over themselves and get back together, but while my Beatlemania was frequently in remission over the years, I continued to experience periods of recurrence for decades.  The cure was probably reading Jonathan Gould's 661 page song-by-song biography of the group, Can't Buy Me Love which came out in 2007.  After many years of scrutiny, I was already aware of the individual Beatle's humanity and foibles, but something about seeing it in all that day-to-day detail heightened the tedium of even these most privileged of lives.   By the end of the book, the sheen had come off of even their music for me.  I was saturated.  Everything once new becomes a cliché with too much exposure. While for many they were undoubtedly a gateway drug to far more experimental and radical music, there was always something genuinely unthreatening about the Fab Four.  For all their iconoclastic expansion of the public's mind, this is after all still the band that only ventured into political topics with the grumpy libertarian rant  of "Tax Man" and a wet blanket thrown on you who "say you want a Revolution."  

We could not have known that only 2 of the Beatles would live to see the age they sang about in that Sgt. Pepper track.  Sir Paul turned 64 in 2006 the year before Gould's book appeared.  Unparalleled wealth and fame have made his post productive years exceed his naïve adolescent vision. Sixty-four is still more than a year away for me, but it's closing in, and my consciousness of its approach has moments of hyperactivity.  Once I got the message that nothing (with the possible exception of war, the Simpsons and neoliberalism) lasts forever-- which got through to me far too early in my adulthood-- sentimentality has not particularly reverberated for me.  Which may explain why news of the 8 hour Beatles documentary series Get Back released in November crossed my consciousness without raising a ripple of curiosity.  It wasn't until I learned that my brother thirteen had succumbed, signing up for a Disney+ trial in order to see it and reporting Beatlemania-like symptoms, that I recognized the dearth of interest news of its existence had aroused in me.  

I wanted to relate this somehow to my own approach to that golden age sung about in the young Beatle's song.  I had planned to talk about how in spite of my customary alienation from my cohort, I have found myself entertaining the notion of indulging in some perquisites of age*-- e.g. excusing lapses of taste especially on the basis of sclerosis of the aesthetic sense.  I think I could be forgiven for going the way of the PBS audience from time to time and reminiscing about when entertainment was different, meaning  actually good,  No one but me has a problem with it.  I do in fact occasionally indulge an age old guilty pleasure or permit myself a guilt free binge of threadbare favorites every now and then and it's not entirely out of the question that someday should an opportunity, the time, and a mood to see Get Back converge under the right alignment of stars, I might.  But truthfully, most of the time I'm not done being excited by the new.  It's a habit I fell into long ago.  I think I was 4.

~~~~~

* I hasten to add - I don't consider the impulse to latch onto, dominate and refuse to yield an ounce of political, economic or judicial power a perquisite of age as so many of our current power elite seem to. On the contrary, I think that's a disease of age.  It's one thing to fight to the end alongside comrades of every age for a world better than the one you came into and quite another to hang over things like a toxic windless smog because you can and because that's all you're capable of.

Hate is Hate

From Newsweek, some next level analysis of the situation in Eastern Europe this week from two familiar names: 

Steve Bannon, former advisor to ex-President Donald Trump, said Americans should support "anti-woke" Russian President Vladimir Putin because of Putin's long history of anti-LGBTQ politics.  Bannon praised Putin several hours before the Russian leader launched an invasion of Ukraine. His commendation followed accolades for Putin from Trump and other conservatives. 

"Putin ain't woke. He is anti-woke," Bannon said to private military contractor Erik Prince during the Wednesday broadcast of War Room, Bannon's show on Real America's Voice, a right-leaning media network.

"The Russian people still know which bathroom to use," Prince replied.

"They know how many, how many genders are there in Russia?" Bannon asked.

"Two," Prince answered.

"They don't have the flags, they don't have the Pride flags outside of their—" Bannon continued.

"They don't have boys swimming in girls' college swim meets," Prince responded.

"How savage. How medieval," Bannon added.

Let's divide the world into "the nice" and "the not nice."  Steve Bannon and Erik Prince are not so nice. 

The nice "play fair", they try to say what they mean and mean what they say.  They are not nihilistic and cynical.  They are sincere.  They are willing to learn and to grow and to be informed by diversity (as long as it doesn't mean they have to give anything up).  They have flaws and think bad thoughts but they do you the favor of trying to cull them from the conversation (not always successfully).  Very often they are nice because niceness is the world they want to live in-- and this does create blind spots in the most dogmatically nice (who are as a rule the least nice of "The Nice"); blind spots such as knee-jerk liberalism, extreme conventionality, a lack of questioning of authority or of the status quo.  But in discourse, they like to at least pretend to give you a modicum of respect and the benefit of the doubt on the theory that you will return the favor.  

The not nice couldn't give a shit what you think.  The nice and fair person's most carefully constructed argument, pruned of emotion and fallacies and unsupported elements as a service to you until its composition is 100% streamlined to its most coldly precise and deeply truthful form, is like a house built of graham crackers to the not nice person's brutally wielded chain saw of indifference.  The right wing pundit is the abject cynic whose single-minded motivation to win precludes any sense of shame in naked pandering to the not nice, factually indifferent, middle.

Niceness was also in scant supply on a recent Diet Soap video on the topic of whether the Left should support the Canadian trucker convoy-- actually a conversation between Ashley Frawley a contrarian Marxist academic who makes regular appearances on the UKIP friendly GB News network in Britain coming at anti-woke, anti-nannying discussions from the left-- and an expatriate Canadian trucker and twitter gadfly named (what else?) Gord.  It's an hour long but you can probably get the gist in the first ten minutes or so.  Of course, being a Diet Soap junkie, I watched the whole thing double speed.

The guest is not the interesting part of the interview.  With his rolled-up-brim straw hat, his beer, his cough and his amalgam of half-baked libertarian alt-right bro catchphrases and tics, he is a meme that gets tiresome within five double speed minutes.  His overuse of the term "thought-cancelling cliché" as a dismissive characterization of what he imagines are the criticisms of the Trucker's intentions was an apt demonstration that "thought-cancelling cliché" is the pinnacle of thought-cancelling clichés.  What kept me interested was the search for anything to glom onto about what the ostensibly leftist presenter might have wanted a skeptic to glean about her position.  Somewhere between the video player and my brain,  coherence could find no purchase.  It’s all reflexive and reactionary.  

Right wing messagers like Fox, GB News and Bannon learned long ago that if you tell people there’s nothing wrong with them for hating what they hate, they’ll follow you anywhere.  This is how they got the petit bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat-- well represented among the engine idlers on the streets of Ottawa these past few weeks.  Now they’re very successfully seducing the horseshoe left the same way.  As the video demonstrates, now the seduced are producing their own seduction.  The number of people who would prefer a better society is being consumed by the number of people who will leave you alone if you’ll leave them alone.  (You being the owners).  It’s hopeless anyway.  If you can’t beat ‘em—and apparently you can’t -- join ‘em.  The people clinging to left-right politics are just in the way.  Fortunately they can still be distracted by letting them think there are culture war battles to be fought and won.  And even if only the snowflakes can win those battles, it’s entertaining for the wisened-up freely hating masses to engage the snowflakey left in combat over them.  

I myself know what it’s like to reactively hate something that my enemies cherish and to cherish what they hate because I remember how it was back before my cerebral cortex fully formed.  I'm not a fan of the petit bourgeoisie, but I’m not against them or against the lumpenproletariat.  In fact I’m fascinated with the question of how do you motivate people who don’t have a taste for being on board with what’s good for people—who reflexively reject what could be objectively in their best interests (and work damn hard for the opposite of it-- participating in convoys, attending rallies, interrupting school board meetings, tweeting at the behest of influencers who do not have their interests at heart to impose a petty parochial concept of “freedom” on those who never asked for it, "freedom", say, for those most able to do something about it to ignore the common threat of global warming , "freedom" to restrict unflattering ideas from discussion in public school curricula or to ban behavioral precautions for the sake of public health) because it’s easier to blame their own misery on an imagined coalition of self-important coastal elites and the underclass of people darker, poorer, gayer, more foreign and more pitiful than themselves, who reject a common good because there's never been one within the memory of their lifetimes, and they don't particularly want anything in common with anyone anyway, who reject learning because their experiences with teachers and school were so bad, etc. etc.  It’s a fascinating, exhausting topic.  

Is the answer pandering (or at least acceding) to the underdeveloped tastes and interests of these people because there are so fucking many of them?  Maybe?  What kind of world do you get by doing that?  Maybe one that’s good enough for the lumpen masses even if it's ducky only for their masters.  I’m not ready to be on board with it but it holds my attention every now and then.  And anyway, it's looking less and less like I get to have a say.

~~~~~

Postscript: Three months later, I disown a lot what I've said here particularly about what I refer to as the lumpenproletariat, but I will let it stand as a monument to my own capacity in this very confusing age for reflexive reactionary rambling from time to time. 

Spewing for the Balcony

While you were watching Super Bowl ads on network TV last night, six grown-ups publicly vomited in front of each other in the course of 2 half hour shows on HBO (The Righteous Gemstones and Somebody Somewhere).  From a viewing perspective, I think 6 vomits in an hour was a personal best for me, but that's just a gut feeling.   I can't say with certainty because I have noticed that sometime over the course of I would say the past 10 years, vomit has become a universal device for expressing the inner emotions of a character in movies and on television.   

The Gemstones do nothing by halves and the communal distraught emesis of four of them in front of the hospital where the patriarch lay in a coma from injuries sustained in a crash after an ambush by machine gun toting cycle riding gunmen at the climax of last week's show, involved spectacular fountains of effluvia.  But the Gemstones is the kind of show that would have its characters vomit satirically. The shared vomiting of sister characters in the more gentle and realistic Somebody Somewhere that followed is more typical of what I'm talking about.  One sister, on learning from the other that her husband was cheating on her with her best friend emoted emetically onto the floor of the barn where the two were sheltering from a brewing tornado, upon which the sister who had struggled with having to be the messenger of such bad news followed suit.  

Impressive as it was, the second show suffered a bit from having its puke act have to follow the spew-laden spectacle of the former.  

I could have done without any vomit, but unless I'm very much mistaken, somehow the stress-puke has become an inescapable trope in dramatic entertainment.  It is the go-to deus ex machina for terminating an emotional scene--the signifier of the heightened seriousness of a plot point, in case you hadn't gotten the message from context.

As a very small child, nothing displeased me more than vomiting. By the time I was seven I had developed flawless mastery over the reflex with the result that until I discovered the social lubricant and control inhibiting qualities of alcohol in my late teens, I threw up exactly 0 times. It became my superpower.  An inability to control myself with liquor made my late adolescence a minefield of puke, but once I learned by age 24 not to binge drink,  even having had stomach flu on more than one occasion since, I have somehow managed to avoid vomiting all but one time in my adult life-- and it was as unpleasant and traumatic as  I ever remembered it being.   And needless to say, I have never once thrown up merely because something really stressed me out. So perhaps I'm living in a dream world, but I'd like to think people vomit not remotely close to how frequently they now do in movies and on television shows.  Then again, most of our lives are generally not an escalation of cliffhangers or an arms race of tortuous plot twists designed to be worthy of water cooler conversation the next morning.

It wasn't always like this on tv.  In the 60's, when I was forming my expectations about television, vomit was one of many taboos to the precious sensibilities of the sponsors who brought entertainment into our homes.   Toilets didn't exist on TV at all until All in the Family broke the barrier in the Nixon administration.  Until the special effects revolution in the 70s, it was extremely rare to even hear so much as a retch on the big screen.  The Exorcist was perhaps the Apollo program for cinematic vomit, but aside from an occasional gross-out in a horror movie or outrageous comedy (Terry Jones' gluttonous blow-out in Monty Python's Meaning of Life is perhaps the Everest of gag inducing comedy), vomits on screen remained relatively rare.

How did it become such an appointment TV cliché?  I assume there must have been a template-setter for the trope. It must have occurred to some primordial screenwriter that drama could be telegraphed effectively, or a punchline fashioned, with a suspenseful lunge for the commode.  Whenever the original archetype debuted, I imagine it made some kind of a stir.  While typical audience members no doubt set down their popcorn and covered their eyes, the critics and awards givers must have sat up and taken notice.  Perhaps the novelty pushed a performance over an Oscar or Emmy finish line.  Whatever engendered it, it seems to have caught on among the scriptwriting caste like a stomach virus, because by now it is ubiquitous.  Screenwriters as a class may not be the most innovative bunch on the whole, but when it comes to on-screen vomit, they are lemmings.  In COVID lockdown, I have seen characters vomit their emotions in show after show-- to use just some of the HBO shows I've seen over the past year or so as an example, characters vomit expressively in episodes of Succession, Silicon Valley, Search Party, The White Lotus, The Flight Attendant, Hacks, and Euphoria.  While some of the aforementioned are among the best TV I've seen recently and most are sparing with the prop vomitus,  I gave up on Euphoria when characters had "dram-ited" three times by the 5th episode of Season 1.

While I know news of this phenomenon can't come as a shock to anyone still watching mainstream movies and television, I've been sitting on it for a while. So thank you for listening.  For it is only through acknowledging and talking out loud about the problems that we as a society face today that we can begin to address them.

Endtimes Confidential

I can't decide whether I reject the mantle of "guru" for myself because I reject the authority of anyone, including myself, as part and parcel of my philosophy, or rather, because I somehow understand on a fundamental level that I personally have no business instructing anyone on anything.  Faced with the current global pickle, I want to think of a way out.  But who am I to say what to do?  This is why it amazes me that so many people out there have so much to say about it unreservedly.

On the matter of progress, it’s a well established principle that we’re not good enough to actually have anything nice.  The more logical it is,  the better it sounds for us, the less likely we’re ever going to get it.  The more sane and desirable it is, the more likely a right wing think tank has already worked out the talking points to murk up the waters around it with the result that regular people are going to actively (or at least passively but effectively) work against making it happen. "They're going to take away your right to have whatever damn health insurance your boss wants to give you!"  "They want a healthy environment even if it spells death for American business!"  "They want to change the rules and abort the life terms of the supreme court justices your president picked as was his constitutional right!!1"  "They want your senator to have less of a voice than some socialist from Vermont!1"  "They don't want you to be rich because you're white!1".  We should prepare for this kind of attack, but we ain’t prepared to prepare.  This is what they do basically.  The left doesn’t really have anything comparable in terms of effective tactics.  Our standards get in the way.

Somehow this reminds me of the end of a recent interview of Alex Hochuli (Aufhebunga Bunga podcaster and Zero Books co-author of The End of the End of History which has informed a lot of my thinking since I read it last summer) by Emma Vigeland on Majority Report a while back.  It was a good conversation, and it gave me warm and toasty feelings to see two of my worlds colliding so agreeably for such an extended chat-- like an opening for a rapprochement between warring sides of my own personality-- but there were inklings of a clash of paradigms only in the last 5 minutes or so.  Hochuli had a kind of provocative closing statement, provoked himself a tad by an opening Vigeland attempted to make for Hochuli’s take on the Jimmy Dore / Tucker Carlson / Glenn Greenwald axis of dissent.  Hochuli didn’t rise to the bait but instead urged those on the left to be open to rebellion, revolution, dissent taking unexpected forms.  His basic premise, in his words, “The good news for the left is that things are even worse than you think they are.” The end is near for liberalism, and as such there are frantic attempts to try to stuff the genie back into the bottle, and  the left should be careful to land on the right side of those attempts if they sincerely want to see change for the better. 

Another thing he said at one point was something Glenn Greenwald said to Ben Burgis about the culture wars in an interview of the latter by the former at the beginning of the summer: The left won that war.  As the youngsters say: Yeah, no. I don’t believe that for a minute.  To me the culture war is a never-ending war over nothing that is designed to have no winner.  Deciding who is the arbiter of victory in the culture war is a deadly battle in itself.  In addition, Hochuli said the right is weak.  He made clear he was talking not about say the Koch bros, et al, but about the movement among real people.  It’s smaller in number, doesn’t have a lot of firepower.  I think that’s a distinction without a difference.  That side is winning—the aims of that side are being met-- by force it seems to me.  It seems to me that when the right is actually owning the left, it gives cover to those who want the glamour of the left without the commitment, hence the Kochs pass themselves off as anarchists rather than the neoliberals they truly are and thank goodness one of them is dead.  But I think in short, Hochuli's point is, it is not how it seems to you, silly person.

Sounds great, but I have qualms about the thesis.  The part of the right that gets things done is strong.  Meanwhile, the splintered left wins disparate battles which it rallies to when the right threatens to suppress something, but on the whole, the whole war is seemingly impossible for it to win, because while it was dicking with knobs here and there to put out fires set by the right’s agents of chaos, the grownups on the right seized the engine.  (And actually all those little legal battles the left won are now threatened by virtue of being legal.)

It’s also worth remembering that the mission of the right of course is not to capture the engine, but to re-capture it, to spray it for cockroaches.  To them it’s not winning history, really, it’s trying to put a stop to it.

The left won the culture wars.  The right is weak.  Therefore the left is strong?  I do think Hochuli thinks it’s stronger than I think it is.  While I don’t believe what replaces neoliberalism is necessarily going to be an improvement, Hochuli seems to be saying stay open.  Stay loose.  Whatever is coming is going to come with opportunities so let it come.  He really thinks neoliberalism is on its very last legs, and that what comes after will be better.  

He could just be wrong, of course.  

If you want to know what I think.  I think the planet or at least the species is on its last legs, but neoliberalism, which is why, is going down with it.  I too could be wrong.  I could just be depressed.  But could that be why I’m depressed?