Paradise City

The Swiss Disease: "Oh Won't You Please Take Me Home?"

Since the election, I have searching for the thread to pull that unravels the event and reveals the exigence;  certainly, the material realities for the working class in this country was a big factor, and to some extent, racial and gender paranoias that handed the victory to Trump, despite polling, indicating a Clinton victory in a national example of the Bradley Effect.

South Park's 20th season has, thus far, been a meditation on nostalgia; Mr. Garrison, as a Trump style candidate, becomes President in part due to a toxic nostalgia in the form of addictive member berries.   While Parker and Stone are not the first to observe nostalgia as a narcotic, what is interesting to me is that nostalgia, out of our usual usage, was considered a medical condition until the twentieth century.

Given that we now understand addiction as not a moral failing but a brain disease, I am not sure the torpor of nostalgia shouldn't garner a similar re-evaluation.

True, I am no addiction specialist, nor a medical doctor;  I am nothing but a struggling academic, writer of occasional philosophic/philologic soy bombs, and rubbernecker at the self-immolation of the American Dream as Dumpster (Trumpster?) fire.   So feel free to disregard this assessment of the current zeitgeist as the quintessence of nostalgia:  Matthew 5:14 is Paradise City.

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There are studies that show conservatives are predisposed to racism and lower I.Q.s, and while that maybe true, it is also the confirmation  bias of the smug liberal attitudes about conservatives, and is one of the reason we are all forced to inhale the burning milk carton smoke that is Trumpster Fire administration; the lazy reliance on essentialism.

People did not vote for, nor elect Donald J. Trump, because they were biologically determined to vote that way.   It was not because of some variety of  cognitive impairment; the numbers tell a different story.  College educated whites, people making over 70 grand--all voted for Trump.   This doesn't fit the "deplorables" narrative of  rednecks as Trump's base.  

Further contradicting the narrative is the unsurprising generational oppression factor; Baby Boomers voted for Trump.

The hell, you say?

The hell.

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As far as generations go, the Baby Boomers suck.  They fought for Civil Rights, only to "grow up" and fight against Civil Rights.   They protested the Vietnam War, and saber rattled us into Iraq. They turned self-expression into selfishness, individuality into individualism.  For all the hippie ethos and Woodstock nation horseshit, when change didn't come easy, they cut their hair and ran into the arms of the Establishment.   Instead of reforming the Establishment from the inside, they gutted it, and replaced it with a all-consuming obsession with personal freedom (theirs) as the hegenomy.  They may have read Ginsberg in college, but they offered themselves to Moloch by the eighties.

Ironically, in terms of social safety nets, organized labor and infrastructure, the real liberals were their parents, who actually lived through real hardship.   All the Boomers had do was make sure women, homosexuals and black and brown people had equal access to these things.  That's it.

Instead, they decided to do "their own thing, man."  The "we" became the "me".   Remember the eighties?  Remember Reagan?  America as the shining city on the hill?

We built this city. On Rock N Roll!

The "we", of course, is in the royal sense.

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In my 42 years, I've lived through the eighties at least twice: the first time, from the first grade until the ninth grade under St. Reagan of Santa Barbara, with all the terrible hair, fashions and gated drums and synth horns, not to mention the Cold War, Iran-Contra and the inflation of the bubble to burst twenty years later;  the second time, at the turn of the Millennium, with Bush and the simulacra of the first era--which is funny, because the eighties were, in many ways, just the simulacra of the fifties, really, with some of the sixties and seventies that had been distorted from self-expression to self-regard.  The eighties--and the oughts, were reactionary.  After the upheaval of sixties, the disappointments of the seventies, and the post coke and disco malaise of the late seventies, America wanted its wubbie, and regressed to the jingoism, perceived moral absolutes and safety of the Boomer mediated 1950s, when men were men--unless they were black or brown or into other men--and women didn't utter the letters "ERA" unless they were asking their husbands about Fernando Valenzuela.

The second times, the reactionary wasn't baked into the election of 2000 and was not the zeitgeist, though it quickly became reactionary at September 11th, and re-regressed to the jingoism, adding received moral absolutes of the War on Terror (which, pronounced .by Bush, sounded like "Terra", as in, Earth, but whatever).  Certainly, by this point, women, the LGBTQ community and Black and Brown people were pushing back against the reactionaries, as were youth seeking a more inclusive society.  This push back came in the election of our first African American President.

But let's be clear; each period of reaction ideologically doubled down on the last.  Reagan made Eisenhower look like Roosevelt, Bush made Reagan look Carter.  We are entering another period of reaction, with an evident doubling down on ideology of the last.  Thought Bush Cheney raided the treasury, appointed no-nothings, and promised dangerous incompetence on an epic scale?  Have you been paying attention to the transition?


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A Washington State woman, born during Truman's second term, voted for Trump because she "gave up on hope" after Obama failed to fix four hundred years of capitalist-racist exploitation, again demonstrating why those of us in Generation X and younger think the tales of the Woodstock generation are mostly a dodge along the "I didn't sell out, I bought in" variety to justify how "do your thing" became "do my thing", how individual expression became rugged individualism, how "we" became "me"--or the royal "we", as it were.

Hollow as Jerry Rubins hocking vitamins.  Yippie!

Hollow as David Horowitz "Academic Bill of Rights".  O'er the Ramparts he watched.

I didn't sell out; I bought in.

When you buy in, you wanna protect your investment, ya see?  And what could be safer than a return to when that investment was absolute virtue.

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The term "nostalgia tour" is self-evident, when applied to the reformation of classic bands for the a victory lap and cash grab.   The boomers invented this concept as a way of entrenching a cultural hegenomy ("classic rock", rather than "oldies", because, hey, Grandma still wears Birkenstocks and rocks out to The Cream, so she's not "old", but "classic".  I'd argue there's nothing more classic than Jerry Lee Lewis, but then again, I am a sullen Gen X'er, so what do I know?) as well as exploiting the glory days for money (The Eagles got this started with a reunion and ticket prices only those with means could afford, but now, its a given).  The announcement of the Guns N Roses "Not in this Lifetime" tour, with three-fifths of the original line-up seemed like nostalgia served up for X generation.  This was the first band that "felt" like my band, so I was kind of excited, but too fucking broke to afford a ticket.

Anyway, GN'R could have--and probably do-- relied on the pumping middle aged fists wasted on 
Member berries during the third verse of "Paradise City"--a verse rife with longing for return:

Captain America's been torn apart
Now he's a court jester with a broken heart
He said "turn me around and take me back to the start"
I must be losing my mind "are you blind?"
I've seen it all a million times

The Trump supporter might assert that diversity, "PC" culture, feminism, Black Lives Matter and the usual bogeymen have torn apart Captain America, and that "the start" was the time before all of "this nonsense".   Try the Member berries--they are delicious, imported from Switzerland, apparently.

Yet this song was written during Reagan, and longs for time before the Reagan era's Ozzie and Harriet mediated past, but something else--perhaps not for past that ever was historically, or a mediated past that exists as subsequent simulacras, but the creed erasaed by mediation and simulacra.

In that case, it is not nostalgia at all, but a wistful remembrance of what could be, and the work we still have to do.

It's worth noting that  GN'R are, demographically, on the bubble between Boomers and X'ers, so maybe that blows up my whole point.

Or maybe it doesn't.

The Fault is Not in the Stars

So the worst happened.
And still we live.

As I process the uncertainty, grieve the future, and puzzle at the present,  I keep circling around to my basic sense of self;  my relationship to the Democratic Party has been difficult.   I left in the nineties because of Bill Clinton's triangulating hippy punching neo-liberalism.   I did not vote for a Democratic Presidential candidate until the manifest disaster of George W. Bush in 2004, when I backed a flawed candidate.  It was Barack Obama who made me feel that the party was something I wanted to fight for, even as I then began to wonder why these policies didn't seem to be for me--not really.   I can't really afford the health insurance on what I make trying to tread water in the career Sea of Sorrow.   As I wrote before the election; I get it.

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Gimme Fried Chicken!

"Look, I know we've had our differences, The_Wizard, and you've said some pretty mean things about me in the past--some of it was true--and this kind of dynastic thing seems kind of undemocratic . . .but let me ask you:  What the fuck ya gonna do?"

     1.  One Vision

It's amazing how language and musical accompaniment can change our perceptions.  For example, the above Laibach classic is actually a cover of another classic.   Holy shit, right?

Laibach's continuing musical project is to reveal Fascist undertones in Western Popular Music by rearranging the music and imagery into something that would be comfortable in Triumph of the Will. Queen drummer Roger Taylor has said that his lyric for "One Vision"was inspired by the decidedly not-a-Fascist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but the arrangement, as with all Queen songs, is over the top, with soaring vocal harmonies, guitar harmonies--everything you would expect from the squillionaire legends.  Switch the title to "Birth of a Nation", sing the lyrics in German, and change the music from Queen's signature pop/ heavy rock stylings to something all together more martial, more strident, more, frightening.  The lyrics, about a utopian vision of "free at last" racial harmony becomes recast into a National Socialist volksreich, civil rights into might makes right, the benevolent civil rights leader into a malevolent fuhrer.

That was the point, of course.  As the great band Living Colour sang, all leaders are, potentially, a cult of personality.  It all depends how the you frame it.  It's like I tell my students about arguments; the introductions are not just thesis containers, conclusions are not just the "almost done" perfunctory paragraphs;  they are the "frame" of the argument.  They orient the reader to the body of the argument, the evidence, the explanation of the evidence.  They give the argument purpose and meaning.  Frames, in circumscribing the argument, shape it.   Phenomenologically, the frame and the argument are one in the same.

     2.  Narratio

In thinking about these two candidates, neither candidate's arguments seemed particularly inviting to me.  I--and my family--are Sanders people (disappointingly, some Sanders people became Bernie or Bust, despite his admonitions, and despite his crafting the platform, Sanders had the cult of personality foisted upon him, and his message of reason and humanity became ideology, and the busters ideologues sharing Breitbart stories and Hillary for Prison memes). Clinton was not my candidate (here, here) because of her centrist instincts, her hawkishness, and the panoply of unforced errors that envelop them like a fart in a car.   A lefty by disposition, the GOP offers me little, and actually seems to go out its way to tell me to "go fuck myself".  This time, beyond the "go fuck myself", they actually seemed to pivot to something altogether more dark: a populism that recalled the worst in human history (here, here) while displaying an absolute disregard for even tenuous truthiness into absolute delusion, pouring gasoline on smoldering class and race resentments, effectively burning down facts for his follows and replacing it with a political ideology that is unconcerned with fact, unconcerned with discourse, unconcerned with anything other than aggressive rage and its own inchoate will to power.   The rise of the Alt-Right, with its thin veneer of irony and the humor only a meathead could chortle to, is altogether a different animal than the Klan, and the usual right wing suspects.  Beyond John Birch, we find ourselves looking at a preppier-troll version of Derek Vinyard, yet, I wonder how many of these trolls will go all in, with the rhetoric and the ideology, and become street soldiers. "Go fuck yourself" will most certainly become "Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker", if they have their way (and my online interactions, as well as crawling through the sewer of comment sections, see to indicate this maybe the case).

     3.  Adulting is no fun

During this last administration, I lost my appointment through Ohio collegiate restructuring (fuck you very much), and watched the pathways to baccalaureate degrees disappear for the poor and working class students.  During this period, there were brief periods of respite (a Visting Instructor position that only lasted a year--fuck you very much) and a whole lot of teaching at practically every higher education institution in three states for half the pay.  I have realized that whatever trappings of the middle class I had obtained are slowly disintegrating.  Deeply in debt, and struggling to pay bills, skipping meals, I am grateful for my wife and certain that we will be okay once she starts kicking ass for the people as a defense attorney.  I understand the frustration, the sense that, for the son of an autoworker, the scales have been thumbed the whole time.  I feel that, after doing the right things--college, pursuing a career that is not lucrative but necessary and in demand--that the ladder has been pulled up as it always has been, and should just have known my place and stayed where my people had always been: in the factory.  Except the factory closed, and that job is gone, too.

There.  I said it.  I feel class resentment.  I feel exploited.  I had a full time appointment, was moving up the ladder, getting great evaluations, contributing to all levels of the university, and by the stroke of a rich and prominent man's pen, it was all gone, and I'm now here, hustling every day for scraps, trying to get by on the hope that the institution will remember its mission, and I will be restored to my career.  Good luck with that.

I am one of the forgotten, wondering how the fuck all this happened.

Here's what is doubtless: None of this was ever the fault of Black people, Latinos, the LGBTQ community, Feminists or Hollywood.  No vague notions of walls, or "America First", or "Greatness" will fix this.  No unfocused rage, no amount of trolling will fix this.

People like Trump did this to me, moneytizing everything.  Trump wants to end the Department of Education, costing nearly 500000 teachers their passion and livelihood.  What do you think will happen to me, with no contract and no representation?

People like Trump want the WASP male restoration to permanent hegenomy. What do you think will happen to my students who are not WASP males?  Back to the ghetto, back in the kitchen, back in the closet.  Know your place.

On a roll here.

People like business hippie Gary Johnson did this do me.  He has the practically same education policy as Trump, costing nearly 500000 teachers their passion and livelihood.  I realize, of course, I will be free to spend that time contemplating the irony for a working class person is that the prescriptions in Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is literally the road to serfdom.  But hey, weed will be legal!  And I'll be to broke to enjoy it.  Freedom and shit.

Okay, what about the Greens?

The Greens didn't do this to me; that is true.  And they would likely improve the country a great deal. Call me when they get a serious candidate.

     4.  The Frame

My candidate didn't win the nomination, but he did win the platform.  There is a roiling,robust liberal-left coalition dragging the Democratic party left (no, not the GOP talking point "left", which has recently included, get this: John Kasich), but to an actual, people's, New Deal Loving Left to keep the corporate and centrist Democrats in check.

We need a New New Deal.  I've been saying it for years.

What is the best, most realistic chance for this: Hillary Clinton.

Why?

Because I am sure that, give the choices, she is closest to that point of view, as the nominee of Roosevelt's party.

And?

I don't want to jailed as a political prisoner by the Fascist Trump and his followers.

Anything Else?

That, in my 42 years, I have voted for the first Black President, and then, the first Woman President, is pretty radical.  Not in the 80's, Point Break  "Warchild only lives to get" sense. No.  It is rad-i-cal.  Which is why the reactionaries, the authoritarians, the alt-right and the cranks are losing their shit.  Good.  The National Creed is coming to pass, slowly but surely.  The arc of the universe bends toward justice.

     . . .
Well, shit.

Tears of Medusa: Feminism and Reactionary Agency

Should be blindfolds, really.  Or am I being a dick?

“I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement.

The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny…”. Helene Cixous, from "The Laugh of Medusa".

Barring a coma, everybody is now aware that this election is total horrorshow;  Trump exhorting the sad, the powerless and the paranoid with howls of execration under the guise of a people's movement,  while the Establishment, Our Institutions and everybody who clings to the notion that human understanding, empathy  and compassion queasily bears witness to this Fascist Demogogue's temper tantrums (At the risk of getting Godwin flagged half the distance to my own ethical goal line, Trump's wee hour Twitter paranoid  shitstorms are starting read like what I would imagine Hitler's meth bunker Tweets would be like in the moments of relative lucidity between rug chewing psychotic episodes and being passed out).  To write that "of late, they seem to focus on accusing women" would be an understatement, but to assume this is recent would be a mistake.

Previously, I have written here about authoritarian personalities (Trump supporters) and Dictator (Trump the Fascist); a theme, while not spelled out, is the degree in which the authoritarian personality needs the ideology, becomes the True Believer.  This is true in left and right authoritarian personalities.  I would draw the distinction in whether the Dictator is a True Believer; Stalin and Hitler, and their respective party officials, believed their respective ideologies by acting as both avatar and protector: reality and ideology were the same.   Fascism--the merger of corporate capitalism with government--cannot, in my mind, produce Dictators who are also true believers because capitalism--the root--is mercenary and opportunistic, the supremacy of profit, and the any means to profit become the alpha, even if it results in the omega.  If you will sell the rope by which you might hang, you are a Nihilist, and that doesn't square with True Believer.   Pasolini would agree.

This juxaposition between the pic and the epigram is needfully provocative, needfully decontextualized, because it speaking exactly a twisted form of female, if not feminist, agency.

Women's agency--to act and think freely, in accordance with their world view--means that the above women are acting as fully conscious agents within their worldview and articulating that agency through this kind of "oh yeah? Fuck You!" political speech.  The woman in the center is certainly "writing herself" with the homemade shirt, and certainly "into the world...by her own movement."   Given the rhetoric of Trump supporters and the candidate himself, they see campaign as revolutionary movement, a freeing of "the future" from the "past".

 However, it is likely that these women, and the the woman front and center in particular, would identify as "feminists" (though this writer claims Trump is a Feminist) even as they might agree with the decontextualized quotation above, or broadly, that women and men deserve equal justice and pay equity.  Essentialist feminism, with its emphasis on biological determinism, could find an easy place among the "traditional values" crowd, who tend to also favor literalism in the understanding of both sacred and civic texts, and perhaps even provide cover for Trump's creepy pronouncements as "boys will be boys".

Yet, as CisMale Feminist, I find myself knotted up by the juxtaposition in the picture, as I try to understand what I consider to be ideologically reactionary, not revolutionary (Trump's program is a program of reaction) and thus, the agency is reactionary.  That much I am certain,

The knot is this:

1.  If the agency is reactionary, is it still feminist, or can be understood in feminist terms?
2. Given that it is reactionary, is agency still possible for women?
3. If agency is circumscribed by ideology, to what degree am I participating in the patriarchy by questioning these women's agency?

Because I vehemently disagree with these women politically and ideologically, I could easily and self-satisfyingly drop Stockholm syndrome here, and say that the Patriarchy has warped their minds, that their politics or ideology make it possible to square the dissonance of being women supporting chauvinist troglodyte like Trump (and the less obvious, but not less troglodytic Pence), but am I the troglodyte, too, for assuming these womens' agency is that of ideological automatons, rather than a considered set of material and social concerns?    And just because it is reactionary, and reactionaries tend to limit agency to the few who tend to be white and male, agency, however self nullifying, is still agency--these women choose this and act for it?   Finally, because reactionaries are anti-feminist, for the most part, is that vocabulary even appropriate?

"Fuck Bernie": [GOP] Death Throes and the Middle of the Road

The low hanging fruit that is the wit and wisdom of Chris Matthews, the corpus of which is solemn moaning  “Tip O’Neil” while waving hands on the corrupted skull of St. Reagan of the Ranch, invoking Daniel Patrick Moynihan or “Puddy-Catting” at top volume over anyone in the room, or anyone watching the room via the ever creeping irrelevance of MSNBC and the clattering death rattle of its “liberal” bonafides .

Truth is, MSNBC was never liberal; it only appeared liberal when compared to FAUX News, and only really during the Bush years did it climb out of Lake Ersatz, and by it, I mean Keith Olbermann tainting the rest of Scarborough country with something appearing to be centrist.

And let’s be clear on the what “centrism” is; in the wake of St. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush pulling the country right, the center is mediated as Linc Chafee—Liberal Republican —which makes sense, since the media is a commercial enterprise.    A positive, Up With People type front,  Don Draper’s AmWay utopia of peace, love and carbonated beverages.

About a month ago, Tweety  absurdly suggested that Hillary Clinton, the anointed one who’s coronation was eight years delayed by the Kenyan Muslim usurper Barack Obama, who made her Secretary of State (where she performed admirably while pulling some completely avoidable Clintonian bullshit that is currently haunting her candidacy.  It’s always something with the Clintons) select John Kasich as her running mate.  As asinine as this suggestion is, it speaks to the kind of bi-partisan, centrist (right wing) bullshit that had sent media hearts aflutter for a proposed McCain-Lieberman ticket.  True to his craven heart, McCain backed off of that idea with disastrous consequences for his candidacy in the short term,  his party in the long term, and for everybody but Yukon Barbie and the rest of her clan, who were only in it for the money anyway.

When a Sunday Morning fits the paradigm of a hangover song of regret, or more pertinently, you find a can of reliably GOP beer your best friend in lieu of the ringing church bells of Christ’s promotion to glory, a few things become clear while you listen to John Coltrane—and aside from the Velvet Underground sounding better than ever— you begin to ascertain certain paranoid, ignoble truths, if you will, about reality of two party system as it is constituted now; more specifically, Team Blue:

The first second ignoble truth:  the party establishment seem hellbent on reminding you of the first ignoble truth until you sit down, shut the fuck up, and love Hillary Clinton.  

The second ignoble truth is the sneaking suspicion that your politics, which you had understood as All-American, communitarian, New Deal-y, are ostensibly, radically, and irreconcilably at odds with the will of the Democratic Party establishment.   

The third ignoble truth:  corporate media demands dramatic narrative, and will force a narrative superstructure to gin up ratings.  Both parties will reliably, but idiosyncratically, oblige, either with a Coke commercial or Folger's Commerical (or the Rubio cover).

The fourth ignoble truth: to quote Mario Savio, sorta, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose".  Or something like that.

The triangulating Clinton machine has long waited for its perfect moment, the culmination of a lifetime of scheming, deal making, prevari—and—equivi-cation, pandering and a nearly constant fog of unforced, almost pathological errors, the appearance of inpropriety and general bullshit that exhausts.  Even recalling the Clinton years makes me exhausted, as does a nostalgia for the 90's, which aside from three years at the beginning of the decade, which may have just been an extension of the late eighties, the nineties are more Sugar Ray and Smash Mouth than Nirvana:  "Hey now, you're a fly now, we party with tattoos now. Drink Coke."

Yet, as I have previously written, the other party is in a pitched battle for its very soul, between the, craven,  rugged cross platitudes of Glenn Quagmire flesh avatar Ted Cruz promise of a New America that looks and feels like town from Footloose, and Donald Trumps (not so) crypto-Fascist view of government as business, Trump branded border wall and general "blame the _____" nativism. Assuming this act of self-immolation, inevitable since the Southern Strategy courted the racist Dixiecrats and Christianists, reaches its horrifying climax in Cleveland, the Republican Party as a big tent, as we understand it, will be over.

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Hillary Clinton's campaign playlist is revealing , as was the syrupy shit sounds from 2008; its the kind of middle of the road shit calculated to appeal to the kids, as opposed to something that connects with the soul she presumably had at some point, and as politic, and rhetoric, it's custom built hollow optimism, no doubt knicked from an intern's iPhone, or assembled by a PR firm.  Maybe I'm being just being pissy here, but I have a hard time imaging Hillary--or even Chelsea--listening to Katy Perry unless they thought they could get something out of it...

Naw, I'd imagine Hillary to be more Thirtysomething in her taste, perhaps the pensive poetry of Bruce Hornsby, or the reflective middle (of the aged and road) majesty of Mike + The Mechanics as being the newest editions to her collection; if my druthers had any bearing (and not that they would--ever), I would have recommended the dulcet tones of the Climax Blues Band, because I'd bet a Tall Boy she owns this on 45:

"Time was drifting, this rock had got to roll

So, I hit the road and made my getaway

Restless feeling, really got a hold

I started searching for a better way

And I kept on looking for a sign in the middle of the night [road]

But, I couldn't see the light, no, I couldn't see the light

I kept on looking for a way to take me through the night

Couldn't get it right, couldn't get it right..."

Maybe Sugarloaf's "Don't Call Us (We'll Call You).

The New York Primary is in the books, and the saavy, metropolitan, international progressives of the Empire State  Big Apple (and, to be fair, the equally sexy metropoli of Buffalo, Rochester and, et tu? Syracuse?) resoundingly and thunderously spoke:  We Loved the Nineties. 

Let's be clear:  so far, Hillary, though coat tailing riding the no doubt consequential and historic presidency of liberal-ish centrist Barack Obama (who is only a "socialist", if you are the sort of dittoheaded shit for brains that would vote for the Fascist Trump or the Tedocratic Cruz) who is only "liberal" because of how far right the line has been dragged, has proposed little that is different than her failed to-the-right 08 campaign:  more of that "middle of the road" neo-liberal horseshit that fast tracked us into the Reaganomics meltdown and Great Recession.  No Money Down on another Cow Colored Box of Voodoo Economics!

 "Fuck Bernie" is the new "Sit down and shut up, Hippie" Or:  I didn't sell out; I bought in.

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Well, that escalated quickly.   Bring it on...

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A quotation often and questionably attributed to Winston Churchill (whose missing bust has London mayor and The Donald coif biter Boris Johnson in a tizzy) is instructive because Hillary Clinton, like Bill Clinton, is a quintessential political animal of the E Pluribus Unum variety (though certainly more "ME" rather than "We"):  Americans will do the right thing after they have exhausted all other possibilities.  And, if polling is to be trusted Clinton will likely reach an insummountable delegate lead, and be able to victory lap her way to the coronation long denied to her.  And it will be a historic moment--both when she accepts the nomination, and when she wins in November.   I suppose if somebody wants to be the first at something, and is as tireless in the pursuit of that goal, then it is little surprise when they achieve it.  Congratulations.

But over the course of this campaign, I have come to realize something that the Junior Senator from Vermont has been telling us, and will likely remind us again:  it was never about him, because there is no singular hero to ride into town and set things to right, no political messiah to fix this fucking shitmire of graft, grift and the sort of brain laziness usually reserved for the board rooms of General Motors....

It was always about THE IDEA.

The idea that "general welfare" in the Constitution means "ALL OF US",  that we are better when we are ALL better, that the corruption of moneyed interests poisons our society, and that we can do better if we want to.

And the Sander's campaign has shown that.  A New New Deal is possible, if we DEMAND IT.

That's the thing to hold on to, folks;  the disappointment and the butthurt pure ideological proclamations must give way to this realization:  we already won.  This is our party now, and the vestiges of the old order must reconcile themselves to the new reality.  Secretary Clinton will, if she wants to win, have to contend with a new, robust left, who are loud, proud, and unafraid and she, craven as ever, will, ironically, govern left rather than paying lip service. She may not be ideal, but if she form a coalition that will keep the Fascists and the Theocrats out of Executive Power, the vacuum from the GOP's self immolation will create space unimagined since Roosevelt for a truly Left Progressive agenda.

Theology: Bowie, Barthes and Blackstar

Joe Coscarelli wrote in the New York Times four days after Bowie's death:

"Like most children of the 1950s, David Bowie considered Elvis a mythic figure. The pair, who would go on to share a record label, RCA, in the 1970s, also happened to be born on the same day. 'I couldn’t believe it,' Mr. Bowie said.  'He was a major hero of mine. And I was probably stupid enough to believe that having the same birthday as him actually meant something.'

Following Mr. Bowie’s death on Sunday, the search for meaning in his own final works — the album 'Blackstar,' which arrived on Friday, his 69th birthday, and the musical 'Lazarus' — has led back to Elvis. On this week’s New York Times Popcast, the philosopher Simon Critchley, whose book 'Bowie' was released in 2014, points to the rare Elvis song “Black Star,” an alternate version of 'Flaming Star' from the 1960 Western of the same name.

The lyrics speak for themselves:

Every man has a black star/A black star over his shoulder/And when a man sees his black star/He knows his time, his time has come/Black star don’t shine on me, black star/Black star keep behind me, black star/There’s a lot of livin’ I gotta do/Give me time to make a few dreams come true, black star

'It must be a clue,' Mr. Critchley said. 'At the very least, it’s a fitting cosmic coincidence.'"

There is little to say or write about David Bowie that hasn't already been said or written, including this:  I am still processing a world without David Bowie.  I listened to *Blackstar* in its entirety only after Bowie left this world, though the provocative long video "Blackstar", with its Kenneth Anger imagery and eerie jazz--something music very much haunted my psyche:  I was not sure what I had just seen or heard, but I was enthralled.  I couldn't stop thinking about it.  The melody is utterly possessive.

A few days later, I found the above Coscarelli piece, and found myself utterly fascinated, turning the connection over and over again.  A relatively obscure Elvis song about Death chasing a Cowboy, the "Black Star over his shoulder" becomes a reference to the Bhagavad Gita "I am a *Blackstar*" as "I become Death".  But Bowie, who apparently recorded this thinking he had beat the cancer (some have interpreted the title as a reference to Bowie's own cancer lesion), must have been the Cowboy as well, with "a lot of living to do".

I remember reading somewhere that Bowie had written "Golden Years" for Elvis, so there's that.

The other day, while continuing to ponder these things--Bowie, Death, Elvis, Death, Bowie, Elvis, Death--I thought about the unknowable nature of both Bowie and Elvis.  Elvis became unknowable because the man receded, and then succumbed, to the celebrity. What ever Elvis thought or felt authentically, even as we feel connected to him, through is music, is not there for us to access and understand, and likely, had not been there for the man for too many years.  All we have, he had, was E-L-V-I-S.

Bowie seemed to grasp intuitively at first, and later compulsively, the illusory and elusive nature of celebrity and stardom, creating himself as an enigma, leaving fans and writers flummoxed, grasping for something authentic.  Bowie wasn't interested in being "authentic" in any way aside from a compelling, challenging artist.  He once said in an interview that there is no "real" David Bowie.  Certainly, someone as well read as he understood that his authorship was negated through the interpretation of his music by his fans.  Roland Barthes, in his "The Death of the Author", denies the personhood of the Author as a knowable, asserting instead that the idea of the Author is a historical construct.   Bowie knew that who he was is who his fans thought he was, and his various personae were zeitgeist, performance and meaning making on the part of his fans, attempting to grasp a "theological meaning" that simply did not exist.   Bowie, as fan of music, also knew how important the illusion of "knowability" is because music is so profound in changing moods, changing lives, that we need it, and the artists who produce it, to be "real".  Perhaps the teenaged David Jones felt this, as so many did, with Elvis.  To quote Barthes:

To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing [...] [However] by refusing to assign a 'secret,' an ultimate meaning, to the text (and the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law...

*Blackstar* is...a summation of a career?  A self-conscious last word. Self-Eulogy? Finnegans Wake?  A limitless text, refusing neat meaning.  All of the above/None of the above...

David Bowie must have died a long, a long long time ago.  Now, I understand that was the point...

Suck it Haters!!!: "Friendly" Fascists and American Authoritarians

                                               Doctored to protect the stupid, with minor commentary.



I was an undergraduate back when Grunge was King, and by the end of my Sophomore year (1995 ish), my disappointment in Bill Clinton as a craven opportunist had festered into a betrayal of the ideals I had voted him in for in the first place.  Certainly, I was naïve when I cast that first vote, thinking that the good guys had defeated the nightmare of the Reagan years, and surely, sanity and fair play would follow--of course, I was not prepared for the move from betrayal to the utter disillusionment that made me leave the Democratic Party, returning only provisionally, and usually holding my nose--first voting Libertarian in 1996, and then, finally finding  (for me, anyway) the Democratic Socialist Green Party in 2000.  And yes, I kind of regretted that vote in hindsight, because what happened next-- but I voted in Indiana,me and the other 18 grand Greens would not have made a goddamned bit of difference--was an utter disaster, but may only be the prelude.  But enough with the preamble.

Anyway, I was fully engrossed in critical and political philosophy, reading Marx and Bakunin, pivoting from the malaise of teenage nihilism to a journey of Existentialist (ah Simone!) discovery, and generally trying to make sense of a world that seemed fucked up.  I need a hermeneutic for the world.  One that I discovered was Bertram Gross's Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (excerpted here).  Gross argues--in 1980-- essentially that Fascism becomes inevitable as Capitalism becomes more unfettered, concentrating wealth at the top, it will necessarily adapt to the people and times.  Consider the following:

Despite the sharp differences from classic fascism, there are also some basic similarities. In each, a powerful oligarchy operates outside of, as well as through, the state. Each subverts constitutional government. Each suppresses rising demands for wider participation in decision making, the enforcement and enlargement of human rights, and genuine democracy. Each uses informational control and ideological flimflam to get lower and middle-class support for plans to expand the capital and power of the oligarchy and provide suitable rewards for political, professional, scientific, and cultural supporters. . .

A major difference is that under friendly fascism Big Government would do less pillaging of, and more pillaging for, Big Business. With much more integration than ever before among transnational corporations, Big Business would run less risk of control by any one state and enjoy more subservience by many states. In turn, stronger government support of transnational corporations, such as the large group of American companies with major holdings in South Africa, requires the active fostering of all latent conflicts among those segments of the American population that may object to this kind of foreign venture. It requires an Establishment with lower levels so extensive that few people or groups can attain significant power outside it, so flexible that many (perhaps most) dissenters and would-be revolutionaries can be incorporated within it. Above all, friendly fascism in any First World country today would \ use sophisticated control technologies far beyond the ken of the classic fascists.

In 1995, 1996 I was able to see this in action on TV, newspapers and radio, and was always alarmed by the "meh" attitudes of so many.   Of course, I knew while people were getting some drippings from the lords' table, they'd be satisfied until their ship came in. 

At that time, the Internet was just emerging on a mass scale, and I was excited for the future; surely, the democratization of information was an obvious good, and certainly, a new world was coming.

I was expecting Star Trek;  I got Star Wars instead...


*********************************************************************************


The hangover of yesterday's Trump victories, and my ever increasing fear and dread for the future occupies my mind, leadening my heart with the feeling that Gross's text may have been prophecy, or even the blue print for the cagey motherfucker to more effectively and efficiently shill the rubes.  Bad tidings from the Louisville Trump Rally involving avowed White Supremacists assaulting people has only depressed me more.

I find comfort in knowledge, and ideas.  Amanda Taub's report "The Rise of American Authoritarianism" does little to assuage, but much to explain.   Citing Heathrington and Weiler, she asserts:

Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which "activated" authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.

These Americans with authoritarian views, they found, were sorting into the GOP, driving polarization. But they were also creating a divide within the party, at first latent, between traditional Republican voters and this group whose views were simultaneously less orthodox and, often, more extreme. . . eventually, authoritarians would gain enough power within the GOP to make themselves heard.

At the time, even Hetherington and Weiler did not realize the explosive implications...looking back now, the ramifications of their research seem disturbingly clear.

Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.

A candidate like Donald Trump.

The Bush-Cheney years were characterized by dog whistle jingoistic atavism built upon a sand castle shining city on the hill as the foolish lack of national self awareness.  What changed after 9/11 was not Bush and Cheney--they'd already stole the election and had the opportunity to ignore critical intelligence--but our willingness to sacrifice civil liberties under the illusion of security, despite the warnings of our earliest and greatest citizens (who we either ignore, or misappropriate, to suit our ideologies).   To say that George Bush, or even Darth Cheney, were Fascists, is hyperbolic.   To say that some Americans were "activated" into becoming Authoritarians cannot be disputed, and to say that these Authoritarians were more often than not Republicans or became Republicans as a result of 9/11.  

The same is undoubtedly true in the wake of the Obama presidency, for the same reason: Humans cannot stand ambiguity, cannot tolerate deviation from a perceived norm; that is inertia.  However, most humans can critically think, understand, and find their way to tolerance difference.  Authoritarians cannot, and feel these things more deeply.  The threats become more real, more immediate, and somebody has to do something.

Like Donald Trump.

The "Moran" above is searching, and finding, the aspirational candidate in Trump, like many of us were in Obama--somebody who is ideologically coherent, and thus, the guarantee of a country set to right.  The difference is she grew up uncritically among authoritarians in an in an emerging  (emergent?) crypto-fascist society where mass media is social media.  For many, demography determines identity and, this person, like so many others, a complex of empty signifiers of what one consumes, whether it is slogans or cola.  Capitalist ideology, taken to its logical conclusion, must become Fascist for its own survival, because Fascism is the only way to the eliminate contradictions which threatened its hegemony.   The "Moran", like so many others supporting Trump, are inseparable from that ideology, and become perfect, unquestioning Fascists, living vicariously through the wealth and privilege of someone like Trump, and applauding policies which are self-negating.

It is important to remember that this is a mis-led person, and that minds and hearts can be changed through self-reflection and critical awareness that ones humanity can, and should be separated from ideology, that we are more than empty signifiers of consumption.  I fervently hope this person experiences such a satori.

Unfortunately, it is also important to remember that this person is also a authoritarian partisan, and is actively supporting a candidate who will suppress the process by which ideologues become humans.  While she is treated as a means to an end, she understands this--all of it--as the way of the world. She is now eliminating contradictions from her view, objectifying the rest of us as enemies to be disposed of, a process of dehumanization in service of safe, coherent worldview.

In the Fascist-Authoritarian World View, even under the American Flag, it is a short hop from "Suck it Haters" to "Up Against The Wall, Mother Fucker".