The Complete Guide to "A Complete Guide to 'Hipster Racism'"

"Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom."

--Anatole France.

I've noticed a bit more race talk floating around cyberspace these days...and one thing I've observed is how the standard line of white guilt isn't working quite as well as it used to. See: I always thought white guilt was a pretty dumb idea. I didn't do hardly any of the terrible things white people are accused of doing, and further, I don't think other races or groups are much more morally sophisticated. White atrocities are a matter of means and opportunity, conquerors having better weapons and more resistance to certain diseases than the people unlucky enough to run into them. When whites showed up in America a lot of the natives just plain died from contact (John Winthrop took this a sign of God's favor, which is perfectly consistent with both a YHWH-istic [and, regrettably, Darwinian] view of history); when rooineks went deeper into S.A., they had more guns than the equally aggressive and expansionistic Zulus. We are not the only group of conquerors, slavers, exploiters, expropriators, and murderers to exist. Bad behavior will be with us for the duration. Life feeds on life. (This is not to excuse the Transatlantic Slave Trade and related evils, but it's always good to have some perspective).

History and generalities aside, this is a bad article about race. In it, Miss Lindy West, who writes for Jezebel and a few other publications, tackles the pressing issue of so-called "ironic racism," the "more insidious cousin of a hick in a hood." The chief problem is literary: the author affects "gee, look at how cute and funny I'm being while I give you a stern lecture about humanist virtue"-tone, which is quite grating to my ears. Maybe it's because modern American liberalism is currently in the "dead cat bounce" phase of its existence, and I have little to do with it: they can't actually bother to get us jobs, bennies, free college, or any of that other boring stuff, but they can purify our thoughts. Like proper gnostics, they believe that all we have to do is internalize the correct admixtures of sensitivity and understanding, and the rest will...do what? I'm not sure. We'll be "good people," and that's the only thing that matters. (I relate this in my mind to the "Iraq: we meant well" train-of-thought that so many hawks seem to buy into).

Other than matters of tone, there are a few lines worth discussing:

Race is one of the least complicated issues that there is, because it's made up. It's arbitrary.

Not really. Scientists can determine a person's self-reported race ("white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic") genetically with a 99.86% success rate. Physical anthropologists these days can get pretty freaking specific in terms of a person's probable ancestry by looking at haplogroups (a concept that I don't understand very well, but I tend to trust the hard sciences). Also, you can often tell by looking at people (but not always and it's usually not relevant; so keep your mouth shut)...So race is a "thing." Sure, it's arbitrary in the sense that all human knowledge and constructs are complete fictions generated in the harried brain of a frightened animal as it painfully makes its way from a violent birth to an ignoble death--but therein lies nihilism!, and most Americans just plain don't have the chops for that (and PC lefties like Miss West are usually just Unitarians-sans-church, and really can't tolerate the "hard truths").

Of course, we're all one human family (despite never seeming to take that into consideration, and instead acting like gangs [can I say "gangs?"] of scavengers hunting each other for sport on a crowded planet). We're also primates, mammals, animals, and Earthlings. It's about layers of description: I'm a white, but I'm also tall, a male, an atheist, a left-hander, a Scots-Irish, an American, a hedonist, a semi-cripple, a 20-something. Those all exist as much as anything can be said to exist. We do not inhabit a world without qualities...I really hope the whole "post-economic" neoliberalism deal isn't riding on people being undifferentiated blobs, in which it doesn't matter what they think, feel, or are. If that's the case, we have a non-starter. People are different. We come in all shapes and sizes, and with a variety of capabilities. Some of us are breathtakingly beautiful, smart, charming, or athletic, but most of us are pretty mediocre. The important thing to remember is that differences are infrequently a justification to act ghastly toward one another. We can't wish away differences, but we can do our best to appreciate them, and at the very least, try not to shoot each other (sorry, if it sounds like I'm painfully spelling this stuff out, but this point is often missed).

Moving on, Miss West claims that "ironic racism" is:

[The] domain of educated, middle-class white people (like me—to be clear, I am one of those) who believe that not wanting to be racist makes it okay for them to be totally racist. "But I went to college — I can't be racist!" Turns out, you can. People benefit from racism—hell, I benefit from it every day—and things that benefit powerful people don't just suddenly get "fixed"

Speak for yourself, sweetheart. I'm sick with few job prospects, and I'll probably spend the rest of my life making barely enough money for ends to meet (or I'll just die in alcoholism and destitution). I have quite a few advantages over the average black or hispanic male; I don't get randomly stopped and harassed by police (and people aren't afraid of or threatened by me [which is a mixed-bag; there is something to be said for being feared]). Thankfully, the Drug War has missed my neighborhood. (Pro-tip for people trying to resurrect "real liberalism": the DEA has got to fucking go). I'm very grateful there are no cops in my life, and I was able to go to good schools (it was still hell), but whites in this country are not a homogeneously privileged group. It probably looks that way to Miss West since she needs some way to explain her own affluence, but I think she'd find that if she left Seattle, and went out to "Deliverance Country," there are quite a few places where hope plain died (but it's OK to make fun of those "hicks" since they're "ignorant," un-PC, broke, and stupid).

Speaking of going places (and actually talking to people instead of just trolling twitter), she chides people for "recreational slumming":

Wherein privileged people descend for a visit inside the strange, foreign spaces of othered groups.

How exactly are people supposed to overcome barriers if mingling is covert racism? (I guess I was being a secret hater when I performed in an all-white anarcho-atheist rap group in front of majority black audiences in Baltimore, or cleared 5,000 miles of sub-Saharan African roadways in a low-rent Toyota)...maybe she would prefer it if whites don't refer to "black things" at all:

[With] wide-eyed acoustic covers of hip-hop songs, suburban white girls flashing gang signs, and this Tweet from Zooey Deschanel: "Haha. :) RT @Sarabareilles: Home from tour and first things first: New Girl episodes I missed. #thuglife." See, it's hilarious, because we aren't thugs—we are darling girls, and real thugs are black people who do crime!

Some black dudes are thugs (can I call them "dudes?"), and some parts of thug culture are indeed pretty stupid (the misogyny, homophobia, and anti-intellectualism to be specific). So what? I guess her point is that whites, even though we listen to rap music, watch the Boondocks, and maybe even talk to a few blacks in our daily lives (without somehow destroying the whole encounter through unfettered white privilege and secret race-hatred), shouldn't deign to comment on or even acknowledge black culture (the good and bad parts) since minorities are so fragile that a single hashtag might as well be Jim Crow.

Actually, it's worse than Jim Crow:

[At] least sincere racism isn't running around Brooklyn wearing artisanal suspenders and masquerading as enlightenment. Give me sincere racism or give me no racism at all, but enough with this weaselly shit.

Ah, brownshirts and knight riders are preferable to some jokes...what is this, I don't even? Well, maybe she doesn't mean she wants to talk to or fight insane fascists, but rather people who openly acknowledge that they're racists (very few people, for obvious reasons, are willing to do this). Of course, in West's view, a racist is anyone who thinks that race is a real quality of people and groups, which I do, so I guess that makes me a "real racist." However, my commitment to seeing that other people are treated OK is not a flimsy edifice like whatever Miss West believes, not based on pseudoscience, strict factual equality between persons, thought purity, wishful thinking, cheap rhetorical flourishes, hucksterism, or any other failing so I'm not worried ("From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," or does no one give a shit about that anymore?). I'm worried about her though, her and her friends. In their perfect world, all humor and probably all human interaction would be weighed and likely found wanting. A utopia without laughter. I shall not go.

+MC

#MoralClarity2012

"No beaver, swallow, or bee wishes to know more than its predecessors. All these creatures are happy in the place they occupy. All are degraded, but are ignorant of it; man alone senses it, and this feeling is the proof at once of his grandeur and his misery, of his sublime prerogatives, and his incredible degradation. In the state to which he is reduced, he has not even the sad satisfaction of being unaware of himself: he must continually contemplate himself, and this he cannot do without shame; even his grandeur humiliates him, since the understanding that raises him to the angels serves only to show him the abominable tendencies in himself that degrade him to the brutes. He seeks in the depths of his being some healthy part without being able to find it: evil has stained everything and man in his entirety is nothing but a malady." --Joseph de Maistre.

About this Kony fellow. First off, allow me to disabuse a few notions: all of you who claim that violence is "senseless" and "insane" are indulging in the worst, most loathsome form of spiritual pride. It almost makes me wish that you took religion a little more seriously. We're all fucked up. Not much provocation is needed to transition from normal, "well-functioning" wretch to serious blood-letter. Second, the men at the top of any hierarchy are all the same. What sort of person wants to be a "leader?" The worst sort. In the West, all our violence is hidden so it's easier for us to feel good about ourselves. The killings happen overseas or in prisons. Our serfs are in Malaysia and Bangladesh (and farms throughout the U.S., but you don't have to see that part at the grocery store check-out counter): bone-breaking labor for several cents an hour with no protection, no benefits, and no names or faces. We can look up at the President, Congresspeople, Captains of Industry and think that things are OK. "We're not savages. It's been like 100 years since we abolished the direct ownership of an entire race. We only came within minutes to total nuclear war with the Soviets like 5 or 6 times"...Third, stop saying that Kony is a bad guy. No shit? Using child soldiers and massacring people is...bad? Do you need to keep reminding yourselves that killing people is wrong? Ah, that's right. You're all "righteous killers", regime-changers, democratizers, moral pornographers, liberal interventionists, war-addicted goons, humanitarians, feeling junkies, perverts, modernist do-gooders, little jerks or otherwise morally compromised so you need to keep repeating the same humanist litany of crimes and transgressions over and over again to separate the "good kills" from the "bad kills"...which piles of molten human remains are good, clean democracy and which are bad, awful tyranny. Which fascist sleazes are "our guys," and which ones are our bitter enemies? Is anyone keeping score?

Many of these conversations are concerned with status, showing off, posturing. "I stand with the people of Uganda." No, you don't. You want to be seen supporting the people of Uganda because it's a nice thing to do. It's fine to want to feel good about yourself (I guess), but it doesn't usually cost anything to feel one way another. It's also easy to tell people in other countries what to do. We don't have to live with the consequences of our "good intentions." Personally, I find this sort of liberal scolding distasteful. I don't know what it's like to grow up in a place like Uganda, to live through the various civil wars and succession crises, to have to put up with the colonial loansharks at the IMF. For all I know, that sort of thing might drive me totally nuts, and I'd end up joining a rebel group or militia just for a way out of my awful life, or to avenge some dead family members. Maybe I'd hack someone to death, or steal shit, or rape people. I don't know. I'd do what seemed like a good idea at the time. "B-b-but, that's cultural relativism." No, it's just sanity.

Americans like killing "the boss." We think of a lot of our wars this way: kill Saddam, OBL, Hitler, ze Kaiser, Milosevic, whoever, and things will get back on track. The people are OK--they're just brainwashed, following orders, or misled. This is all right out of Robespierre: "Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil." Look at the oft-cited Milgram experiment (which people never quite seem to get). You know the drill: experimenter in lab coat tells test subject to use a device to deliver a fake "shock" to an actor at increasing volts; test subject, despite some reservations, does what he's ordered and eventually the actor "dies" from a seemingly lethal shock, thus proving that people will do all kinds of awful shit when following orders. Except that's not what happens. During the experiments, whenever people were ordered to go all the way ("you must continue"), they refused. What can I say? People don't like being pushed around. People administer the lethal shock when they're able to talk themselves into it, when they think it's the right thing to do. Things like the Holocaust don't just happen unless a lot of dudes are on board, not "brainwashed," but down with the program (that's much more depressing--no wonder we read Milgram the wrong way).

Getting back to Kony: he needs to pay for his crimes, but he never will. You shoot him, and the human biocomputer switches off forever. You put him in prison, he sits there for a while, and then the human biocomputer switches off forever. It's much easier to be Evil than it is to be a victim. We like to tell ourselves fairytales about the pain of being a Sinner, but that's all pious cant for timid people. At the end of the S Korean revenge flick "I Saw The Devil," the protagonist, a cop who has spent the last half of the movie elaborately torturing the serial killer villain, asks the perp if he, after all the broken bones and maimings, finally feels any remorse, pain or regret. The murderer then proceeds to stage a breakdown in which he cries and begs for his life, only to pull the curtain back at the last minute: No, he doesn't feel anything, and most likely never has...so the cop chops his fucking head off. 

What's the right thing to do? Well, we're in luck: Obama already has guys looking for Kony so the decision has been made for us. I don't really care, and neither did most of you till you saw that stupid video. I'm not trying to criticize people for just discovering the LRA. You have busy lives...Uganda's far away. That being said, I will criticize you incessantly for going from "no knowledge" to "a little knowledge" and then from a "little knowledge" to "action plan." Stop. Think. Not everything requires an intervention, guns blazing. Most people don't want our help. They resent foreign troops barking orders more than they resent their corrupt leaders. There is nothing intrinsically sacred about voting or democracy, not everyone is on a steady march from savagery to Rotary Club membership. People have their own ways of choosing leaders, settling scores, and hating their neighbors. Most importantly: People are jerks. It doesn't matter what system is in place. They'll find ways to upstage the assholes down the street, hurl insults, form factions, brag, scapegoat, act superstitious, tell lies, cheat each other, follow corrupt strongmen, antagonize the weak and defenseless, self-aggrandize, vilify women, worship power, establish double-standards, rationalize shortcomings, develop awful taste in music, mindlessly consume...God. Who am I talking about again?

+MC

Market Forces

There is not a single thing which a human being can do or feel, or think, whether it is eating or sleeping or drinking or fighting or killing or hating or loving or grieving or exulting or working or playing or painting or inventing, which cannot be either sick or well. --Lawrence Kubie.

A few quick notes about the recent Rush Limbaugh shit-show:

1.  Contraception--this whole issue is insane. Sex is a basic drive, and like any drive it can be sated healthily or abused. While Good & Evil have been more or less overthrown (except for in the minds of simpletons, which is to say that it is still very much with us), good & bad will always be here: We're talking about basic organismic functioning, being-human, navigating the flesh prison. "Bad" is "poisoning, intoxication, relational decomposition [...] indigestion"--what causes us to break down and be enslaved.¹ This can be any old thing, and when we're talking about sex, you're dealing with a boring, machinic impulse that is fetishized, misinterpreted, scandalized. I'm a libertine because I don't think sex matters much. By placing the nuclear family (that awful death-trap) at the center of human relations, and mindless fecundity as the end of human existence, the Monotheist is setting a huge trap for himself. "We can't have queers, or jerking off, or safe sex, but sex is good..." It's the sort of thing that will drive people crazy. You show gay porn to a homophobe and he starts to get aroused ("For sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, seduced me and by it killed me"²)...the fewer rules you have, the less tortured you tend to be (and the less you go out of your way to torture others). A few Christians realized this, and were executed for their trouble.
2. The "episode" of Rush calling a young woman a "slut" and a "prostitute" and then suggesting that she make him a sex-tape tells us a few things. Hatred or fear of sex and the resulting sexual repression are common undercurrents in "reactionary nonsense." They are the last redoubts of American Conservatism. Once flimsy social, economic, and political arguments fall away, over-management of the "libidinal economy" becomes the final stand (can you imagine Christianity or any of the other Abrahamic faiths without relentless Bronze Age agrarian sexual neurosis?). "We will not tolerate pervesity." Anyone who says this has immediate respectability as a defender of "our way of life" (and can use that as a lever to get to managing the real business of the modern state, which is to enrich campaign contributors and break the human spirit). Rush is indeed a defender of "traditional values" insofar as he conceives of women as property whose sexuality is to be controlled for the purposes of producing a knowable line of sons and an orderly process of inheritance. Of course, these dweebs only ever think of half the story. Most so-called "guardians of culture" would instantly transform into bleeding-hearts if they encountered our other great "cultural practice": roving Männerbunde, drunk and on drugs, burning villages to the ground and engaging in all sorts of casual sadism, before dragging the salable women and children off into slavery. Maybe there's a reason we try not to live like that anymore. To give a more recent example, impugning a woman's honor by calling her a "prostitute" would be grounds for a duel or, at the very least, a serious shit-kicking. I wonder if Rush would show. Of course he wouldn't. We only adhere to tradition when it allows us to pick on people, not when it would cause a person's scariest male relative to fly off the handle.
   
   All this is not to say that Free Love or any of that other bullshit is the solution to all of our problems (I think we tried that already). To quote French writer Michel Houellebecq: "In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude."³ There is no perfect state that will free people from the human condition, just ever-shifting (sometimes gentler) forms of tyranny. From Nietzsche: "Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more harmful to freedom than liberal institutions [...] As long as they are still being fought for, these same institutions produce quite different effects; they then in fact promote freedom mightily." ⁴ It's the struggle that defines us. The end is always pain and death.
3. Negative connotations of "prostitution" should end.
4. I just read that some advertisers are giving up on Mr Limbaugh, not wanting to be associated with a cowardly, woman-hating hypocrite. This is important: the bourgeois have no particular use for any moral system other than that which allows them to accumulate capital. Many industrialists, businessmen, and bankers abhor the hick'ish preoccupation with sexual purity. That's why these issues are so great. What you do with your sex organs frequently has no impact on the bottom line as long as you show up to work and do your job. Their great value lies in their ability to form wedges between people, and get us to square off against each other in these stupid, little Culture War battles. They get us to hate each other. Not like we need much provocation.

+MC

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Footnotes

¹ Deleuze, G. Spinoza, practical philosophy
² Romans 7.11
³ Houellebecq, M. Whatever
⁴ Nietzsche, F. Twilight of the Idols

Old Tropes

All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
--William James. 

Lo, from the British magazine New Statesmen comes a new article on New Atheism (or "neo-atheism" as they call it on Knifecrime Island): "The God wars."  The dateline reads "28 Feb 2012", which should make it fresh and cutting-edge, but in truth, there has only ever been one article written about New Atheism, and every time people have nothing better to say, it is republished. At this point, you could really just stop at the subheading: "To hardline atheists, it is now unreasonable and 'dramatically peculiar' to argue that religion is not altogether evil. How did such intolerance become acceptable to rational minds?" Get it? Some atheists are mean.

If you chose to continue on, you will find that the article is an exercise in name-dropping, centering around a dinner scene with a few of the Old World's middlebrow "men of culture" who, as it turns out, have had problems with "neo-atheists" in the past (except for Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the only member of the group who seems to have produced some genuinely interesting ideas--a coincidence I'm sure). After a few paragraphs of "horror stories", detailing the many appalling things "atheist hardliners" can say to people (emphasis on the word "say"--if you want examples of people doing bad things, you'll need to find some other "militant" group), we come to the essential argument, which is an appeal to Non-Overlapping Magisteria (abbreviated "NOMA"): "Science has its place, religion has its place. You can't reduce the wondrous and varied Human Experience to a few equations, man." This is one of those lies that comes up over and over again. There's hardly anything mysterious about being human. A very small percentage of people seem to be capable of vivid, rich internal experiences. The rest of us are more or less trapped in uninteresting, worldly concerns--bodily sensations, brief emotions, dull daydreams of whatever chores we have to do on a given day. Not exciting. Modernity has, for the time being, destroyed all the old illusions and sacred spaces, and even most religious people know this whether they admit it or not.

But science can only do so much (or so we're told), and for this reason, atheists should lighten up: "Whatever helps you make it through the day...Jesus was a great moral teacher...there's 'something' out there." Religion without claws. Of course, this is all dinner conversation among rich people. I'm sure they'd feel the same way if we dropped them off in the Bible Belt, or one of Iraq's many "liberated" cities. Taleb, if you'll notice, is not given anything other than a brief mention (most likely because he is the most famous and successful of the group). He was born in Lebanon, lived through the Civil War, and has seen the True Face of Religion. He most likely has the sort of real experience with genuine fanatics that always seems to ruin these self-indulgent "principled discussions." For the others, life is...primarily a Lesson in Civics (not an irredeemable hellhole or pitiless battleground as Darwin and other brave souls definitively showed quite some years ago). There are no religious extremists at a Greek restaurant in a happening part of London, just memories of rude atheists.

According to the late Douglas Adams: "In England we seem to have drifted from vague, wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague, wishy-washy Agnosticism - both of which I think betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much." In America, things are a little bit different. Compared to the rest of the Western world (which has pretty much given up on God in all but name), here in the States we have incorrigible religious nutcases. Approximately 50% of the population isn't quite sold on "Darwin's theory," and another sizable portion is convinced that the world is coming to an end sometime real soon. Everything is an uphill battle with these people, and it always has been. This isn't a joke, or a mild nuisance. We have people running for President who believe that Satan is an active force in American Higher Ed, and in case you've forgotten: The President has the Football, the Nuclear Fucking Football. The Enlightenment still matters here...Ah, but that's all too serious. When faced with "hardline atheism," the patronizing, mass-market philosophes retreat into vague notions of "poetic spirituality," a gentle world where people don't actually mean what they say and where every middle American is a well-meaning, centrist Liberal beneath the layers of spite, ignorance and bigotry.

There is also the problem of poetics. If we are to accept the NOMA of science & religion (and there are a few good reasons to do this), then it seems to me that the spiritual side of life becomes a matter of aesthetic taste, and I tremble at the thought of the sort of leisure class soft profundity the "distinguished guests" like to indulge in--a safe, shallow world without blood, hatred, or magic...or in the words of John Dolan (one of my favorite writers): "a slow, elderly courtship of the Deity via European high culture as interpreted by a man of limited intellect." Same goes for the seriously convinced Monotheist. We're not dealing with heavy stuff here: "God is the Light, and the Light is the Word, and the Son is (wouldn't you know?) also the Light, and we're all Light, blah blah blah." Most religious language makes for lousy copy, and YHWH, taken on his own, is one of the least sympathetic characters in all of literature--a sadist and a braggart, the transparent projection of untold numbers of greedy, old perverts. Practically any wicked act imaginable has incontrovertible scriptural support ("Oh, but there are a few lines about being nice to people here and there").

For the "soft-atheist roundtable," I guess it really doesn't matter. Europe is over, and has been for 50 years. Let dead men have their civility. America is very much alive and armed, and for that reason, all illusions must be crushed.


+MC

How To Raise a Nation

There is no form of life more loathsome than the good old American patriot. --John Dolan

A few notes on the recent viral video of a father shooting his daughter's laptop with a full magazine of hollow-point .45 rounds because she allegedly wrote some snotty things on the internet:

1. I couldn't watch the whole video. I get physically sick listening to long-winded self-righteous folk indignation. I assume people from "those parts" have been saying more or less the same shit for about 300 years--"respect", "our way of life", "perfidious yankees", etc.. Also the phrase "teaching someone a lesson," which occurs in the video's description and 90% of its comments bothers me...In my experience, people who are fixated on "teaching lessons" rarely have anything of value to say or impart. More often than not, it's nothing more than a vehicle for pointless sadism (which is to say that it is functionally identical to most other "moralizing" activity).
2. It's always important to maintain disbelief when watching stuff on the internet. All we see is some cartoon-character-looking dude with his cigarettes and ridiculous cowboy hat ramble on for 6 or 7 minutes before shooting a laptop. For all we know, this video is a total fake. There could be no "incident," just a guy trying to get "internet famous." I did some more research into the "man behind the lesson", and I think this video is probably legit. That being said, my constant doubts highlight something important (which I've been going on about for a little while now): we're in the "Beyond Parody" Age. There are no possible "caricatures" of rightwing pathologies available that don't involve the behavior or characteristics of at least 15% of the population. Distortions or exaggerations are not necessary. As the anti-democratic reactionaries warned us, people really are just that crazy and stupid.
3. Look, I'm not a coastal liberal elitist (I'm just an elitist). I don't care what "the people" do in their fetid backwater hell-towns on their own time--shoot their guns, pretend to read the Bible, over-eat, teach each other all sorts of awful lessons, go on and on about the nobility and virtue of whatever "sacred basketweaving traditions" constitute the "local culture." To me, the most disconcerting part of that video was how many comments it was getting (and how quickly--I watched it get up to like 10 a second), and how overwhelmingly positive almost all of them were. That's where the sinking sensation began for me. The mob, οἱ πολλοί, all "out there", gathered in front of their tiny screens feasting on hatred and loathing for their entire lives. "God, they'd probably want to 'teach me a lesson' if they had the chance. Oh fuck. I bet you some of these people vote. And they're all armed. Ah, and they've probably gotten dumber and meaner as the years have gone by. Help! Help! Someone get me out of here!!"

And that, folks, is one of the many reasons we'll have another century of poverty, misery, and war.


+MC

On Earth As in Heaven

(pictured above: the Iron Law(l)s of History).

Christopher Hitchens died at around the same time American forces were making their final exit from Iraq. This is a sign of something, but I'm not sure what--if I had to guess it would be that God kept poor old Hitch alive long enough to see the very end of a preposterous, neo-colonial war he found himself supporting for largely careerist reasons, and now that that war is over, God has pulled the plug. Based on these previous statements, you might think that I don't like Hitch, but I do. Like him, I don't have heroes, and I don't feel the need to spare anyone for any reasons even if they've just expired (as he so memorably demonstrated during his treatment of the passing of that bloated old fraud "Rev" Jerry Falwell when no one else in the American press was willing to call him anything more than "divisive" or "controversial"). He's an atheist. I'm an atheist. The TV set in his brain has been switched off, never to be re-lighted, and in a few generations he will most likely be forgotten (or be poorly recalled by whatever desperate souls inhabit the post-carbon fuel, AGW hellscape we are in the process of bequeathing to them).

Kim Jong-Il died recently also. "He got what he deserved." Yeah, right: getting smashed on Cognac every night before visiting his extensive harem. I'm sure he was "dead on the inside" or that he "suffered greatly at the end" or whatever other pious falsehood you need to tell yourselves to distract you from the never-ending carousel of horrors that is modernity and life (being a 99%'er almost always sucks to varying degrees). After his passing was announced, NK TV showed people weeping in public at the thought of being without their Dear Leader. Some of the mourning seemed to be more acting than anything else--you don't want the new regime to interpret an absence of grief as being "insufficiently patriotic" at some point down the line. Some of it seemed to be genuine though. It was amusing to see the American Beigeist establishment try to puzzle through that one: "Why are people upset over the death of a brutal dictator? I thought people hated tyranny and loved freedom!" For an embattled state, monarchs make people feel safe (and people prefer concrete security to nebulous freedom). Most people conceive of leadership this way even in the best of times (except for Freedom-Loving Americans, of course, 80% of whom believe in an Invisible Monarch, constantly intervening in world affairs and shielding them from harm).

People sometimes try ministering to NK defectors, only to be rebuked: the Eternal Earthly Paradise of God and His Chosen Son sounds suspiciously like what those poor souls were trying to run away from ("I had enough of that in the Old Country, thank you.") Hitch really seemed to get a kick out of this:

[Religious belief] is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you - who must, indeed, subject you - to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life - I say, of your life - before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? [...] I've been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president, Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He's not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. [...] It's one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea!

And we do die. All of us. It's like deep dreamless sleep or being in a coma. The person you were 10 minutes before is gone permanently, and the people who knew you will also eventually pass on. Murdering tyrants, drunken writers, nameless peasants end up the same. It's not exactly fair, but in a universe like ours, it's still something of a miracle.

+MC

Leftwing Insults

When I was in HS, I had a long-term sub for my Spanish class. Don't remember the guy's name, but one of the things he said that stuck with me was his claim that English has comparatively few curse-words and insults. We have "the 7 words you can't say on TV" and a handful of insulting phrases, but compared the wider world, we're amateurs. I'm not sure if what he said was true, but watching an American try to insult someone is frequently one of the saddest sights on the planet--we have no shortage of ill-will, but rarely the good sense or vocabulary necessary to really take someone down. There are a few reasons for this:

1. Americans mistrust language and "rhetoric." 
2. Americans discourage people from looking into the "dark side" of things (it's so depressing).
3. Americans like consensus, the Center, compromise.
4. Americans are idiots.

These interrelated phenomena pretty much explain our current crisis. Idiocy mixed with a preference for (completely disingenuous) "straight talk" allows for the Center to shift to right of Hoover's Treasury Secretary, and no one wanted to be the "downer" and point out how the whole enterprise was going steadily off the rails. That last part has changed a bit recently, though: now, we have corporate-backed rightwing stage pieces prating on about Socialism and the End of America and Small Government (Small Government with a massive military, secret military, prison system, drug war, and regressive taxation scheme, that is), and more recently we have concerned citizens taking to the streets to protest Wall St malfeasance (among other things).

"What do these protesters want?," was the initial rallying cry of those members of the press corps who have dedicated their entire adult lives to protracted immersions in Bad Faith. I dunno, guys--maybe it has something to do with those Tough Economic Times everyone keeps going on about, or maybe since they're calling it #OccupyWallStreet, it has something to do with, um, Wall St...or maybe since you guys are, you know, reporters, you could try asking people what they think. What do you want? The story written for you? Sheesh. Everyone wants a hand-out these days. I guess we'll have to pass a new law that compels every new social movement to type up a few ppt slides detailing every one of their grievances in addition to a concrete action plan that way reporters won't have to go through that tiring business of actually having to develop a story.

On top of being willfully thick, we had insults, or should I say "insult" because there was essentially only one: "hippy." Seriously. It's been almost 50 yrs, and the Right has innovated not at all. Sure, some of the protesters probably fit that description, but is that honestly the best the "intelligentsia" can come up with? The absolute nadir was a twitter exchange between Alsion Kosik and Erin Burnett. Both work for CNN, and from what I can tell, Burnett's entire "journalistic" career consists of composing paeans to Hedge Fund managers or something equally pathetic and repulsive. Here's the offending post:

 

Bongos, eh?...are you seriously calling them beatniks? Christ, my grandparents were beatniks. What will you complain about next--jazz music? Of course, it didn't stop with Ms Erin, either. Other tepid dorks insisted on referring to the presence "bongos" (the Dullard Consensus being such fertile ground for interesting observations), and it got to the point where I had to just take the rest of yesterday off. It's like when you see a really sad and deep movie, and just need to sit around and think for a while: "When did it become socially acceptable to be so unreflectively lame? Maybe it always was this way, or maybe it has something to do with guys like Rush Limbaugh giving voice to all those spite-ridden Hysterical Protestant Sectarians and 'Self-Made Libertarians' in Middle America...it's not just them, tho. Some of those guys are positively weird. It's also those Beigeists in NY and DC who have corporatized everything, financialized everything, and ruined everything with their smug, transparently destructive and pernicious 'post-ideological' neo-liberal bullshit. I can hear them now: 'Hm. If only those college kids weren't such woolly-headed idealists, and realized that the culmination of modernity and the true expression of human potential is to give control of every aspect of life over to a bank...'"

I think one of the real reasons people are upset about #OWS is that it (along with related movements across the country and around the world) is doing something that many Americans just plain haven't seen before: reclaiming public space. Matt Stoller over at NakedCapitalism calls it a "church of dissent." It's not protesting a specific issue or looking for a handful of tweaks to the current system (although some of its participants are certainly motivated by such); it's taking private horror and making it a public spectacle, which cuts against all sorts of American aversions: the idea that there is a "public," that anger and displeasure might be ends in themselves, that we shouldn't just sweep our failings under the rug, but rather make our stupid, sold-out lives a source of unity and strength.

The financial crisis (which in my view is a permanent crisis--and will be till substantive changes are made to how we handle money and credit) is difficult to perceive. You can't see debt. A foreclosed house looks much the same as one "legitimately" owned. The millions of lines of credit, the derivatives, mortgages, loans, CDOs, MBSs, that shrank and shot off in all directions through the financial universe like a quantum wrecking ball, that shattered wealth and ruined lives--they're all invisible, fictitious. Humans don't even make trades anymore. The recipients of government largess who got bailed out and awarded themselves hefty bonuses: we know a few of them, most of us couldn't recognize them on the street. We don't have faces to put to crimes. We call them "thieves," but thieves have to go through the trouble and risk of getting in your face and robbing you. A few buttons are pressed and your future might disappear and the person who did it will make tons of money. Who on Earth would be upset by that?

+MC