cheese it, the cops!

what race is

the way i think about race is that it's a series of generalizations based on a bad taxonomy. that is, there is no basis in reality for distinguishing people into races. but then once you have it's not precisely that the generalizations you make are necessarily false: for example you detect real voting patterns among the races, real income levels, educational levels, incarceration rates. not only that, but a lot of actual stereotyopes are true. that is what race really is: race is a series of technologies designed to make the antecedent taxonomy real.

this happens again and again: so the stereotype is ignorant, godless savage. then you actually pass laws making it illegal to teach black people to read. right? black women are oversexed or whatever, not like your wife; then they are free game for rape. see? racism tries to manufacture a world that matches its conceptuality, with mixed success. the stereotype is violent, criminal, so then you start filling up prisons with millions of black men. you are just enforcing the law; no, you are enforcing the law in reflection of a problematic taxonomy that the result of that enforcement confirms. now we see that there are astonishing rates of crime among young black men, precisely because it is enforced on them, and it is enforced precisely because of the antecedent set of categories. one makes the structure of categories or the typology true and then finds it to be true in experience. one helps create what one then detects, as though quite intentionally.

and we are so so stuck in the taxonomy, cannot even conceive ourselves without it: just listen to the ways every pundit starts by breaking us down into racial groups in order to understand us politically, and simultaneously how racial groups polarize toward certain parties or positions. race becomes ever truer as it mutates. but it does matter that it's actually false.

or, race is and is not false: it's the sort of social construction that is massively enforced and hence becomes a massive fact; it's not merely imaginary, sadly. start by thinking about the way it articulates the way bodies are distributed in space. it is always being enforced and naturalized. but then precisely because it is actually false it is always falling apart and always being enforced anew. the fact that it is enforced - in large razor-wire enclosures or on the streets - shows that it's not true; if it were not enforced it would cease to exist; it has to be held in reality by force. in some sense if we stopped thinking about each other this way it would disappear, but that's not under anyone's power because of the centuries-long history of the concept's enforcement on people's bodies; it's impossible to the extent that it is a reality external to each of us. race shows the power of our social constructions and also the lurid flimsiness of our self-serving fictions.

today's playlist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

scream, blacula, scream

apropos of demonic faces and white policemen, i draw your attention to this baudrillardian pre-enactment and pivotal moment in the history of cinema, starring my distant relation william marshall.

 

[he is my mother's step-mother's, er, nephew? ps there are a lot of far-lefties where i come from, and later a rich history in the blaxploitation industry. so i'll always have those to fall back on.]

one of the aspects of white privilege is that we often don't have to be aware that we are under occupation by the government. there are many places where that is easy to know, though. however, we too are under occupation, and as per usual, privilege is difficult to distinguish from fantasy. i guess what i wonder, though, is how there is not much more black anti-statism.

what's gone wrong with physics

in my continuing quest to kill physics, let me speculate about what has gone so terribly wrong and led to routine claims such as these.

reality is observer-dependent

the principle of non-contradiction is false

the universe has every possible history

truth is what works in prediction

the unobserved past is indefinite

and so on. not that every physicist accepts these particular claims, though they are all asserted by hawking, e.g. but it is also the style of the claims: metaphysical, entirely non-empirical, sweepingly philosophical, wildly paradoxical, and so on. i am going to flatly assert this: no experimental data and no mathematical equation can serve as any evidence at all for any of these claims. you did not get to these claims scientifically; you could not have, and that is obvious.

i speculate that a lot of the super-genius physicists of the twentieth century had a philosophy course or two before they decided on their major, and i speculate that these were often taught by last-gasp german neo-kantians or late-blooming hegelian idealists. these were big metaphysical doctrines that they brought to their research.

then they presented their research as supporting these claims. on a generous reading, they are trying to express difficult science and reaching for big metaphors or something. and what i'd suggest there is: go back and develop another vocabulary, one that more literally or flatly or without hyperbole expresses what you're observing, perhaps. gravitate toward the minimal rather than the maximal formulation, the clearest rather than the coolest statement; surely this is what your own supposed method would supposedly suggest?

but they were also creating a sensation. every kid who has been exposed to these interpretations of quantum mechanics or string theory has thought that is so super-cool and trippy!  and the claims cannot be challenged, because you supposedly have to be a mathematical super-genius even to understand how they got there. but i would propose to demonstrate this, prove it every which way and as decisively as anything can be proven: they didn't get there at all, couldn't have. 

here's what i might mean by my claim that i can prove these things false or unmeaning, or demonstrate that you do not have evidence for them: when i'm done you will have to revise them extremely; you will quickly reach the point at which you will admit, perhaps with a tight smile, that you never meant any such thing, and that once we re-interpret all the terms in which the claims are couched, they turn out to be, for example, meaningful and internally coherent, which, as they stand, they so palpably are not. that, to anticipate the endgame, is what i mean by refutation; you couldn't defend what you said, or you didn't mean it at all because then you'd be talking nonsense. if you mean something else, then i will have go at that, but something tells me that just here things are going to sink into deep obscurity. what at first seemd bold and wild and clear will suddenly be shrouded in mathematical murk. at this point it will turn out that we just don't understand what you're saying, but we should rest assured that, if we did, we'd see something or other. just not the sort of stuff you hooked us with.

it is no wonder that people have connected twentieth-century physics to taoist or buddhist mysticism, for you are going to have to shatter your rational mind for good and all even to take a stab at believing it. on the other hand, one very badly misunderstands taoism if one thinks it holds that space and time are forms of consciousness or whatever it is that heisenberg declared. however, dropping a cat in a box and then asserting that it's neither alive nor not alive and both alive and not alive and neither dead nor not dead and both dead and not dead does have the quality of koan. one purpose of a koan is to break your affiliation with reason completely. you'd think it would be hard to keep doing physics after that repudiation. and then, your zen master is going to break open the black box of your skull with a stick and let the cat out.

i don't doubt that the universe is wild and surprising; i just doubt that it is so wild and so surprising that it is logically impossible. but once you've proven mathematically that it is, you have surely relieved yourself of the task of inquiring into it empirically. pick up your nobel and go home, bro.

one thing that i think will end up being a theme when we look back on the intellectual history of this period is that people really did start doing 'science' a priori. to discover continents or planets people had to move around and look. to conclude that there are 11 dimensions or infinitely many actual histories or exactly 44 universes, it's now enough to sit at home scribbling symbols. i wonder whether, looking back on it, we will believe again that actual universes can only actually be discovered through exploration out there. perhaps we just went through an ironic period in physics, an anti-scientific period. "abstract considerations of logic lead to a unique theory that predicts and describes a vast universe", write hawking and mlodinow. now, that is an example of the sort of approach that had to be overcome in order for science to be possible. also i don't think the logic is workable.

really it is quite amazing how smoothly this has apparently gone down for a century; when fichte made such claims, schelling refuted him 48 hours later. but plenty of people who could not possibly believe this stuff or even understand what it would mean to believe it, just start nodding along as soon as you say 'physics'. the super-specialization of the hands-on scientists and the genius image of the high-end theorists kind of stupefy dissent: they know what we cannot. it is a bad epistemic situation for people like hawking: there really isn't enough of an external critical community to put a check on the flights of fancy.

in particular, it is shocking that the great analytic philoosophers of the period just looked at sentences like that and tried to nod along. when heidegger issued gnomic triple-contradictions or t.h. green traced the whole universe to mind or something, g.e. moore and a.j. ayer gave them nothing back but ridicule: look here are pseudo-propositions addressing pseudo-problems that vanish like a poisonous mist if you start clarifying the terms. but they'd look at the same sentences produced by physicists and defer to their degrees. hawking has declared philosophy dead. awww, sometimes you just don't want to talk smack. 

stephen hawking, the takedown and against physics and more

 

mmmm, squishy

so, mumbai is a horrendous mess, driven by the 'politician-builder complex' which is destroying all neighborhoods and dominating all space and charging out the wazoo, etc. some form of this has torn apart many or most major modern cities: robert moses's projects in nyc come to mind. now: what is the left's solution to this problem? more government regulation of the space? you are being very silly. okay how about the right's: well, we need to give more scope and autonomy to the builders. don't y'all see how stuck you are? and also: don't you see that you are on the same side? you are recommending the same thing under different names, and that has led to what we actually have.

buryin mary

dc is my home town, as you may know, and i grew up there during the emergence of the formerly alive marion barry. i recall him even as a young pseudo-blackpower leader. i wish i could say something other than that marion barry was a charlatan, a buffoon, and an embarrassment.

now, statistics show that 86.4% of the men who rose to political power during the golden era of patriarchy were in public service for the poontang and blow, so he was not alone in that, and definitely not alone in that in dc. and i can forgive someone for being an addict; i do it all the time. but what i won't forgive marion barry for is coming out of rehab, using the rhetoric of recovery as a way into the terrible problems of dc in, say, the early 90s, and just continuing with the crank and trim all the while. once it became clear that this was the situation, it also became clear that this was about the most repulsive imaginable reflection on barry the person and on my native city: in my world, recovery is sacred, and dc as a whole was in a terrible addiction spiral from the early-70s heroin epidemic to being one of the world centers of crack and hence murder in the barry administration and beyond. for so many people, that recovery thing was obviously life and death on any given day. and yet barry just fed it into his hypocrisy machine and rode it back to some semblance of political power. he really was a metaphor for dc like that, in every dimension from congressional and cabinet and defense contractor to back-alley ghetto: the marble edifice. the seething corruption within.

in 1991, the year his first 8-year run as mayor ended, "the murder capital" hit its top end with 479 homicides in a city of about 800k residents. this was due to the drug industry that was also supplying marion barry. as barry rolled through the district's sex workers, dc generatesd one of the world's worst rates of hiv transmission. you can't blame mb for all this, but you sure can't exonerate him either; he was the problem he portrayed himself as trying to solve.

throughout the barry mayoralty - and before and since, to be fair - the district of columbia had an entirely dysfunctional, useless school system: a famous intractable laughingstock. for example, neither the superintendant nor the mayor knew how many people the school system employed, nor could they generate a plausible number even with years to do so, or a list of employees. don't get me started; i was raised up in the very bowels of the unbelievable idiocy. barry famously created a 'black middle class' in dc and started cleaning up the u-street corridor etc. he created this class by creating tens of thousands of city jobs, and there were thousands of people who owed their jobs to him, which is one reason that he could not be kept away from power. many of these people moved to prince george's county, which is part of why inner-city neighborhoods collapsed in his era. yet even with this mass of employees, or in many cases because of it, the barry administration could not deliver basic city services effectively in any part of the city.

i have been hearing tributes to marion barry's charisma. i never met the man; apparently it was a religio-sexual experience. and yet as marion barry mumbled his way through a speech or a press conference at any stage of his career, his ineluctable personal magneticsm was likewise indetectable. he was briefly inspiring in the early 70s as an alternative to the uncle-tommy-seeming old commissioners who ran the place on behalf of congressional segregationists, such as barry's predecessor walter washington. but man alive other than that it was all drawbacks.

 

 

obama was good last night, and i am strongly in favor of not deporting millions of people, and of assuring them that they will not be deported. indeed, if it weren't for first and second-gen immigrants, my section of rural pa would be in a major economic depression, and would mostly be abandoned. now, i wish i was as sure that the executive is not legislating in this case.

president warren

this here shows why we need a big old dose of elizabeth warren. also i think she is running for president. also i think she can beat hillary clinton. it strikes me that no one outside the top 1% of the 1% has any reason to vote for hillary other than her gender, and in this respect elizabeth warren is her equal. forecasting the hillary campaign: it will be boring and empty to a point that is euthanizing. believe it or not, i think that it might become so evident so early that hillary is going to get smacked again like she did in 2008 that she never actually announces. obama will be a millstone. hillary has no convincing way or reason to run away from him. warren, as that huffpost piece shows, already is, and already is doing it effectively and for principled reasons. hillary is hauling so much baggage from every period of her life and career that it is almost absurd.

also a million things have to unfold but it is not impossible that elizabeth warren could be elected president.

to my way of thinking, a randpaul/lizzy campaign would be a renaissance of american political discourse. both of them say something, which has to be the starting point. hillary clinton says nothing and means nothing and, in public space, is nothing. and obviously warren could beat rand on a given november day, though rand is a surprisingly good politician and on another november day might beat her. (rand i think, has a less plausible road to the rep nomination than warren to the dem.) i like her against christie too, though i don't think christie will be the nominee. she makes a good contrast in a number of ways to jeb bush, whereas jeb and hillary are indistinguishable. 

harvard prof is a problem. but she has been campaigning like mad and she is getting better and better on the stump and in putting across her common touch. i think the populist/egalitarian thing translates to some pretty concrete economic proposals, and i think you might be surprised how well such a program might play even in parts of the south. she could stage some interesting red-state invasions, as rand the other way round.

i think people may be overestimating money as a factor just because the entire system is swamped in infinite cash: any given ad means nothing; even the mid-term just sank into interminable incredibly stupid slop that no one could possibly pay attention to. warren or paul or whomever will have plenty of money and plenty of wealthy supporters; there just will be billions of money in this campaign no matter who the nominees are. but rand and liz could also raise a lot in small amounts from everywhere, which would be some little victory in itself.

 

hatest grits

i thought perhaps i'd hit you with some of my own greatest hits, in my own opinion:

nypress (later a version in harper's): al gore and nothingness

creators syndicate/latimes: the spirit of exploration lives on (in the same vein, latimes/all things considered: marshall tito puente)

philly inquirer: headless human clones

reason: gigantism

latimes: the genocidal killer in the mirror (this seems to be reprinted in writing textbooks? i get email about it from teachers and students every year). also the soul of the terrorist

philly inquirer: mathematical proof that the stones are better than the beatles (got me on howard stern, cnn, etc: my 15)

manifesto of sartwellianism and the atlantic, against consensus

nypress: if i were a murderer i'd want to be joanne

stephen hawking, the takedown and against physics and more

fall

 

ethical security

it would be very wrong for someone to stomp on the information infrastructure of the american security state as though it was a hissing cockroach. and yet one must, as a citizen and a patriette, be concerned about its vulnerabilities. can you imagine how bad their security actually is? those big hierarchical staffs and such? the giant lists of procedures and rules? i am worried that they entirely lack creativity, and that there is a hacker out there somewhere who can quite think rings around slavish little bureaucracy boys. we should also, as a nation, probably be concerned that we have created a situation where a person inside or out might reasonably conclude after careful reflection that it was a moral obligation, his duty to his country and his god, to stomp if he could. y'all might fix that part first.

gruber

the jonathan gruber/obamacare scandal is devastating. in this era of incredibly stupid partisanship, the fact that it more or less unfolded on fox news makes it invisible to half the population, while making nothing else visible to the other half. the coverage by msm outlets other than fox has been unbelievably pathetic, discrediting to them, quite substantiating 'left-wing media' as a phrase encompassing, say, the new york times or the atlantic. i am telling you that you must watch some fox during a democratic administration, or you are just getting barraged with propaganda and nothing else, as this scandal shows. but it is truly as though most of the people i know are physically incapable of watching fox even for a moment. 

really what emerges is a portrayal of the way washington works now. so, gruber - mit prof/white house consultant/important source of the plan itself - starts the ball rolling by saying they'd never have got the thing through if the american people knew what was in it, that they depended on our stupidity. then it turns out that he was functioning simultaneously as an extremely well-paid consultant, and an independent authority. they took his advice on policy and on pr, then appealed to his material specifically as independent academic analysis of the aca's effects. he was writing op-eds presenting himself precisely as an independent authority, with bio squibs that did not identify his inside role. then he went out and made perhaps millions helping states with their exchanges, as pelosi and many others routinely appealed to his 'independent' research and 'mit' as evidence for the costs and benefits of the program. there were many utter disasters among the state exchanges, of course. simultaneously with this whole process, gruber was, according to himself, thinking to himself 'we've got to pull the wool over the eyes of the american public to get this thing passed and implemented'.

he was enriching himself and certainly compromising his own academic integrity and that of mit continuously. it is a very disturbing portrait of interlocked political parties/operations and academic institutions/experts, where the professors give the political positions credibility or an air of objectivity or even science, while also cashing in and moving back and forth between government and academia, one way or another. i think this should make any rational person doubt the credibility of mit professors. if you looked at the intersection of harvard, wall street, and the obama admin, you'd see the function of expertise in squishy totalitarianism, and the disturbing way that money and power flow through academic institutions, controlling every aspect of the way they are administered, who they hire, what sort of research they fund and pursue and tenure, and so on.

what you'd want to look at are things like contributions and expenditures in the endowment; uses of the research output by partisan politicians; migration of faculty into the state and migration of officials to the faculty and thence to the investment banking industry or lobbying; the ideological diversity or the reverse of the faculty; direct federal grants for research and the backgrounds of the faculty funded and the uses of research in justifying federal programs or partisan hobbyhorses, including the funding of the grants themselves; where they send their graduates. 

maybe you think that, since all harvard profs are liberals and vote democratic, they are egalitarians. well, it is time to stop listening to their yap and start attending to their actual effect: who they are and whom they hang out with and whom they are funded by and whom they serve and what they really want, which is only an ever-ascending prestige and the ascendency of their like in the various hierarchies. that the harvard or stanford administration or faculty are enemies of privilege: surely no one can possibly think something like that? withering skepticism of the research is appropriate in this situation. (ladies and gentlemen, the vast faculty of the kennedy school of government.) and i'm telling you that even humanities professors at these institutions are interlocked with the admin and political parties, and of course with the ways their own positions are funded and ways to enhance their salaries or collect the junkets or get that pic with michelle obama.

but it's the depravity of the sales strategies by the white house and the democratic party that really sticks: the condescension, the contempt for us and for the truth and for democracy, the routine miserable lack of integrity or decency in our political process, the total dedication to manipulation, the underlying incompetence.

when i figure out how to get it and embed it, i'll post the special report panel from tonight with goldberg, fournier, and krauthammer, with a report that gives a very clear account of events. obviously it's a report produced by an organization that wants to focus scepticism on the administration. but that's what we need, with regard to every administration. it's reaching the point where the nytimes is going to have to cover it, and not just cover the fact that fox is covering it as a way to discredit the story itself. to do that, the only relevant thing is to throw specific doubts on specific parts of the reporting, correct?

Giving Crispin a hand here...

Besides being a frustrated card counter hanging out in Atlantic city on weekends -- he counts the cards ok, but the cheating makes him break out in hives -- Mr. Sartwell put himself through various levels of education by alternately stealing hubcaps and vandalizing heavy construction equipment or writing rock and roll criticism. 

Having an actual philosopher who actually knows something about the subject teaching American popular music to a college class is pretty amazing; usually this is done by musicologists who are tired of not getting the difference between a rondo and a fugue across to a composition class; or, someone who majored in "American Studies" and is just scavenging around the edge. So it's cool...good for him, and good for his students. 

Of course, all is not well. Crispy responds to a comment below indicating that the students seem alienated and bored. Well shit, man, they expected that you'd just have them listen to the Clash for a semester. Anarchist philosophy prof who lives in an old schoolhouse -- what the hell else would they expect? 

Anyway, there's this...

Here's another example: 

The original by some teenagers from Detroit in prom dresses:

 

And then about 15 years later, there was this, recorded in Cobo Hall, Detroit:

 

Compare, contrast and evaluate listing influences and examples...

Here we go round again...

 

 

Ray Davies is touring, Dave Davies is touring and the Kinks are supposedly going to do a reunion tour which sill be interesting since everybody else in the band is dead. 

And, for the second time in 20 years, a bunch of mouth-breathing troglydytes are babbling about impeaching the president, this time for exercising his constitutional powers. 

So, it seemed like a good time for this. 

 

left behind

i do love a commie. the approach is to prevent people from buying and selling staple goods in tiny quantities on the street, which they are doing because the gov can't get them into the shops.

“These right-wing contraband groups are still at work, with their anti-national and parasitic spirit, riding on the backs of the people and sucking their blood,” Maduro said Tuesday, assuring TV viewers that the government “had neutralized the perverse effects of the economic war”.

we had a hundred years of this dreck. why is maduro pursuing this? to help ordinary people. 

anyway, the 'thinking' is a problem, but what i will never forgive the communists for is the rhetorical bilge. to this very day, the worst rhetoric in the world is produced by the communist party of china and north korean state media. back in the day they poured it out from capitals and party offices all over the world in heaping helpings, 24 hours a day, at their captive populations and at the world. it's a grim attempt to manipulate people, incessant, a dead sea of drivel, infinite in expanse. and yet the only thing it shows - and it shows this with crystal clarity - is the moral and intellectual level of the people who utter it. it makes their mindlessness and slavishness and murderousness evident to anyone who is listening anywhere at any time. no one believes or supports whatever might be clothed in the gibberish: i have no idea what that would even be like. all anyone ever did was capitulate or try to resist. people seem to be nostalgic for this idealistic moment. i'm afraid i can't understand who you are, or why, or how.

or, let me speculate. it seems impossible that anyone could want to produce language like that emitted by communism through the 20th century, or want to hear it, and if no one did, how could it happen at all? i think perhaps what it promised was an erasure of subjectivity, a cure for loneliness. if we all talk the same way at the same time, we will join together into a single subject, stomping with our giant feet into the future. this unity of all and erasure of each is actually the rapture for many political tendencies, left and right. but it's not enough to yearn to be one thing altogether. i think you'd better think about what sort of thing that is. in this case, it's a collective subject who talks like someone suffering simultaneously from paranoid schizophrenia, extreme stupidity, and murderous rage. it hardly matters though because then i won't be alone.

one of the central places we experience one another as subjects, and hence a place at which we experience both our own distinctness from one another and the various real dimensions of unity, is in linguistic communication. so i think the idea might be that if we all say the same words in unison, we would really have become one person. both the desire and its practical outcome should be critically examined, and what it amounts to on the ground is a simulation of unity achieved by the merest coercion. that draws people away from, not toward, one another.

i think totalitarian collectivists, left and right, thought that they were in a war against subjectivity. they experienced the idea that there was a private sphere of interiority as a threat, and they often denied that there coukld be any such thing. this in turn might suggest that there is no good distinction between sincere belief and external enactment, a position explored in many flavors of philosophy and psychology in the same period. (turning test; behaviorism; pragmatism (belief means 'willingness to act'); wittgenstein; various flavors of economic or materialist determinism; some forms of social constructionism that focus onn language as the site of the reality.) but then there is no real distinction between a bunch of passionate people all chanting a slogan they find compelling at a demonstration, and a huge mass of persons, forced to attend, chanting the the officially prescribed slogan under the eye of machine-gun emplacements. communism transitioned without apparent self-consciousness from one to the other. it is not necessary to believe in an integral or private self in order to reject this whole line of thinking. indeed, i hardly know where to begin to refute it, or why to bother, really; it is a sequence of howlers and unexamined metaphysical assumptions.

we might try a genealogy. on the level of intellectual history, we might say that both left and right collectivism - like the left and right themselves - emerge out of and reject romanticism in various ways. so, a clear early version of leftist collectivism is rousseau; on the right we might try herder. (we might focus on the emerging sites of general will or collective consciousness as essential to the left/right distinction: class and nation (the class is not in rousseau, quite).) but romanticism emerged in part out of a rejection of the enlightenment project, which did have elements of collectivism: for example it focused on rules of inquiry that we could all defer to. and a main thrust of romanticism as it emerged was the most extreme individualism ever articulated, an attempt to carve out an authentic sphere of subjectivity. here we might mention emerson, fuseli, poe, carlyle, kierkegaard, caspar david friedrich, baudelaire.

in addition, philosophy even of the enlightenment had been busily enclosing consciousness. we only know our own ideas: descartes, hume, and schopenhauer were agreed on that, anyway, and man did it get bad in german idealism. but also german idealism was always searching for a way out. the basic problematic in kant is how to get a world out of representations in consciousness, though i think he just made the problem more intense. hegel did find it in forms of collective consciousness, marx in a return to an actual external material world knowable by science: an enlightenment epistemology with a romantic and post-romantic politics. for the romantics were also characteristically apocalyptic and also yearning for justice. here we might go second great awakening, evangelical abolitionism, utopianism a la owen or fourier. hegel's philosophy anticipated the end of history; emerson kept hinting at it; nietzsche seemed to think that we were about to be transfigured. 

what 20th-century totalitarian collectivism of both left and right brought forward was an extremely complex response to this material. you couldn't have real collective identity in a worldthat for each person consisted in that person's representations. so it took the form of disenclosing consciousness, or opening it to the social, the nation or class or race or whatever it may be (i wish it had consistently also placed the social i  the wider world). but it was responding not to our primordial enclosedness; we are not enclosed; but to the philosophical dead end of hyper-intense individual consciousness found at the height of romanticism. both the self-enclosed idealism and the erasure of individuality entirely were fantasies, though: we've never not been distinct and non-distinct from one another and the rest of the world. the representational theory of mind was false, and the solutions assayed were quite the over-reaction.

this would all be but an interesting series of ideas or mistakes or whatnot were it not for the millions of corpses.

you and i are exactly as isolated from people and exactly as joined together with them as ever: both can be problems. no amount of coercion can ameliorate this, but i understand that everyone will keep trying. for god's sake get better writers next time round, though.

they tried to make people write novels in that key, or poetry, or symphonies. they tried to base university curricula on its shining exemplars. in the words of elvis costello: maybe they should be hung by their tongues.

  

an infinite stack of subordinations

 

 chris hayes and francisco goldman talking about the situation in mexico

goldman argues that the government and the drug cartels have merged, fully, and are dumping children's corpses into rivers. it is funny watching statists suddenly completely bewildered by the howling contradictions, infinite regresses, and so on that have always obviously been inherent at the essence of their position. oh my god! says hayes, if the government is the drug cartels, what can be done? there must be a force sufficient to hold the government to account, says hayes, as he looks completely flummoxed: the only thing this smart person can envisage is creating a new, more powerful state to control the old corrupt state. so then when all those segments in turn merge, you will be facing an even more impossible-to-constrain force. and then who will constrain it? you really do need god. after that, you're gonna need mega-god. this may well be the origin of monotheism, which never helped anything.

 

the usually extremely thoughtful goldman, too, is completely at a loss as to what even conceptually could possibly be done: someone, something, must impose the rule of law! he asserts, in answer to the question of what practically might improve the situation: he seems literally to be invoking athena, or deciding to believe in some force or other by a sheer kierkegaardian leap of faith. something, someone, somewhere help me. this, intellectually and practically, is where your own commitments led you: you have advocated the force that creates this monstrous oppression; suddenly you realize you can't even face the rudimentary entailments of your position: you started on this road by constituting a power capable of controlling the powers that existed already. that was the most general solution, and yet it entails an infinite repress. 

the conceptual and the practical problem, remakably, are exactly the same in this case. you wouldn't think someone could miss both simultaneously, but there it is.

the merging of a government and a drug cartel is a pretty typical scenario, and is just one version of squishy totalitarianism. you are not going to keep economic and political power apart, you dorks! it's quite as though the us government were not distinguishable from the oil companies, or j.p. morgan/chase, or blackwater. fortunatley, those aren't vicious or violent, unlike a drug cartel. they'd never kill you to preserve their territory or market share, or just because, would they?

seriously, a state-leftist solution - the only one envisionable in that structure of thought - would be to nationalize the drug cartels or make them public utilities: just straight-up to endorse the merger you find intolerable and are trying to solve. it is already a socialist system on the ground: that is, a merger of state and economy. that is supposed to be an egalitarian formula.

words are weapons

we have a clearly defined mission: to degrade isis.

consider this a bid for the contract. alright...we're pitching the defense dept: shall we say 100k per insult? dude i am very talented. i'll submit sheafs of devastating book and record reviews and stirring testimonials from my ex-wives. i'm bonded, and i certify this: every insult will be profoundly degrading yet sickly hilarious, devastating yet poetic, concise yet with broad ramifications. this will be no mere persiflage, no good-natured badinage or idle chaffing. each element in my campaign of ridicule will be wholly or at least sort of original, and can be precision-targeted at the leadership of the so-called islamic state, its fighters, their mommas, their equipment, non-combatants, your co-workers, or whomsoever you may designate.  

on the other end

you know i have loved lucinda williams a lot for a long time. but not every single time out, and i guess i am just not feeling the new one, down where the spirit meets the bone. her virtues are related to her vices, as with so many of us. so first of all, sometimes she just tells you very flatly. this has worked great. here it often flops. 

You got the power to make this mean ole world a better place.
You got the power to make this mean ole world a better place.
People say they hate you, try to kill you, while they're grinning in your face.
You got the power to make this mean ole world a better place.

Before you can have a friend, you gotta be one.
Before you can have a friend, you gotta be one.
You gotta do the right things, gotta jump on in and see that it gets done.
Before you can have a friend, you gotta be one,

she sings on 'everything but the truth'. um. 'have compassion for everyone you meet. for those you encounter, have compassion'. sometimes specifically when she's not on, lyrically or melodically, she seems to compensate with length, as on the unfortunate 'something wicked this way comes'.

but here's my specific complaint, and it applies also to her album little honey (2008): she sounds depressed and bitter, almost throughout, which is one reason all the inspirational-style lyrics ring false. she almost tries to reproduce 'sweet old world' in 'i look at the world', but the amazing affirmation that stopped the heart the first time is just gone.

judging from her lyrics, lucinda williams has devoted her life to romantic love. nothing is greater or truer according to her songs, even as she suffers again and again. maybe now she's suffered too damn much from romantic love, and anyway, it is hard to know how to deal with these things, quite, in your sixties. not like a princess twirling around in a new dress, that's for sure. she seems to have followed this thing down the road to despair. i can understand how that happens to someone around our phase of life, but i don't necessarily like to listen to its incessant product. for example: "burning bridges" (one of the better songs); "east side of town" ("you wanna see what it means to suffer, you wanna see what it means to be down, then why don't you come over..."; well, when you put it like that... it's about a whining contest; she's literally arguing with her ex about who is more miserable); or the desperate slog through "cold day in hell"; etc.

 

[she's recycling her melodies here too, as elsewhere.]

it was predictable, because lucinda always devoted herself to love on the dark side: the guy was always ecstasy, then agony: a junkie, a suicide, a faithless but beautiful poet. it just could not end well. so the question is, now that it hasn't: watcha gonna do, sweetie? because you need to really reconcile yourself to your life now, or really learn its joys, if you are going to do your best work, and i really want you to do your best work, because your best work is the best there is.

"i need protection from the enemy of rock and roll", she sings. right. find your joy again, the joy "he took". and i would suggest that this joy is not going to be a young man anymore. maybe it never was. if you try that approach again, you will be even more embittered by the next album in 2016, if that's possible. the great stuff always came from you, lucy, not from your male muses. on the other hand, love could still be possible, and a question is: what can it be now, for your veteran's heart and ageing body? you're not alone in that dilemma; maybe you could speak for us. you are not going to fix the lucinda of 1980.

Recent visits to the Abyss Scenic Overlook...

Since I write for several sites, it can get painful to have to reformat for each site because they all use different software and variations on HTML. I guess from a Geek point of view, there are religious reasons for using Typepad over Word Press or something else over Typepad. As a guy with thick fingers and neck, this is frustrating.

  

You know what else is frustrating? People. They're also fascinating. Two recent pieces I published at Veterans Today show that the United States is in genreal not falling into any sort of standard deviation pattern in terms of populace. Nobody should claim to have cornered the market on truth, and yet I keep finding readers who do, often from a population who should understand the idea that reality is complicated. 

First piece is a pre-review of General Dan Bolger's new book on why we lost the global war on terror. You can call it whatever you want to call it, but his focus is on the actual war. Believe that the Israelis, the CIA, the Reptillians and Insectoids blew up the world trade center, fine; has to do with how we got invovled in two wars in Asia simultaneously but has little to do with why we screwed the pooch so badly. Bolger was concerned about fighting the damn war he was given based on the operational and strategic goals he was assigned. And, he's pretty sure that from an operational point of view, we screwed it all up. If the study of military disasters intrigues you, read my piece and/or the book. But, if you're curious about who the Tea Party's more disaffected constituents are, read the comments. I'm amazed.

The second piece was my post mortem on the post mortem of the post mortems of why Barrack Obama and the Democrats blew it. As they did, in great detail. The lack of moral courage, conviction and adoption of a Republican light strategy resulted in taking the US into the pits for two years while the world runs around the track. Accusations of Putin feeling up the Chinese President's wife aside, it's like the US is headed toward the height of irrelevance. Caligula famously sent a legion to the English Channel and had them invade the ocean and gather sea shells as a sign of their conquest. Obama and the Dems are marching to the sound of the Caligulan rhythm section...but, Caligula had an excuse, he was fucking crazy. If there was a way to throw out an incredible political advantage after pissing on it and insulting us all, the Dems did it. Scipio McConnell and Scipio Minor Boehner left a wasteland, but they figured to have won...whatever the hell was left.

 

 

blank space

taylor swift turned out to be just as divisive at the art institute of chicago as she is on instagram, where you have to choose up sides between taytay and katy. so here's a great video for an excellent song. one thing is that it kind of elaborately updates and complexifies the fairy-tale romeo-juliet situations she used to write about in high school. like i say, i think the project all along has been autobiographical, and in its own way i read this as both a mythologization of herself and a sincere and pretty self-reflective and self-critical memoir. it's also a cultural commentary, about the blank space of american privilege and its aesthetics and what love can possibly mean in that context, about the diva figure and what it's like to live in a britney/lindsaylohan bubble, and so on. just introducing cell phones to the fairy-tale wasp mansion works well in this regard, and the man is just, as it were, a blank space filler. his face is great, his personality meaningless; he could be any dude that sort of looks like a kennedy. is she becoming a blank space too? she is asking herself, and the only way she avoids just mutating into a mannequin, the only way she holds onto something human, is by going mad. her memoir and the cultural commentary can coincide perfectly, because right at this moment she is the culture.

 

zurbs

i had quite an amazing time at the art institute of chicago, talking about "the art all around us" at the 'lived practice symposium'. it is an astonishing museum, but the painting i come back to york springs pa remembering is this crucifixion by zurbaran.

this is one of those things that just cannot be shown on the screen: it is monumental in scale, for one thing. i do think zurbaran is a bit undervalued, and even the card at the aic really suggests that he's derivative of caravaggio. alright, obviously caravaggio is in there, as he was for rembrandt, say. but that does not look like a caravaggio: zurbaran extremely is a distinctive and original stylist, though there are many elements in the vocabulary. the spiritual atmosphere is entirely unlike caravaggio. the drapery is very distinctive and graphic and just virtuosic. i prefer him to his contemporary velazquez. the still lifes of zurbaran are real treasures too, and don't look like anyone else's.

german idealism as laughing gas

just rummaging around in james's varieties of religious experience, as i prepare to teach a slice. in the chapter on mysticism, james famously connects intoxication to mystical experience, and reports his own experience with nitrous oxide. "I feel as if it must mean something, something like what the Hegelian philosophy means, if only one could lay hold of it more clearly." and on james's account, the effects of chloroform turn out to be even more like the effects of hegel's philosophy, an observation with which it would be frivolous to cavil.

ima ass-ass-inate ya

i've heard of some useless terrorist operations, but the idea of assassinating queen elizabeth is about as valueless a concept as one could readily generate. i feel that terrorists lack the vision thing. i do think that anarchists owe a debt to islamists, though. terrorism used to be our thing, and we were deleting kings, presidents, and prime ministers all about, and throwing bombs semi-randomly here and there. this discredited the whole position, which i can quite understand, and now we're all peaceful and shit. well, this might be a lesson for you. for one thing, you are working incredibly hard to discredit your own religion. you've been extremely effective there, anyeway.

another sentence we all say together

we are constantly barraged by information. more and more all the time. who can make sense of it all? 

this is one of those cliches that everyone spouts together for a few years. then they move on to something else. i sort of don't see how you utter sentences like that without being aware of your redundancy, or boring yourself to death. personally, i don't feel barraged by information. i like information, overall. and if i'm not in a mood to be informed, i just turn the thing off or stop reading or something. really, 700 channels is better than 3, but there's still nothing on. do you think people really experience this as a crisis of some sort? i'm trying to figure out how this might mess me up or even annoy me, really.

and actually, the world has always barraged each of us with infinitely more information, or things that might be experienced, than we can possibly take in. if the information doubles every week - somewhere in hard drives or on the net - how does that damage or bewilder or even affect me? i can't take in any more than i did last week, but i might possibly find something interesting by rummaging around if i'm in the mood. somehow instagram has to turn out to be a moral crisis, i guess.

abandon shit

frank luntz among many others, argues that the election was an expression not of enthusiasm for republicans, but of extreme disaffection with the way we are governed. "People say Washington is broken and on the decline, that government no longer works for them — only for the rich and powerful." in order to express that, they voted republican. it's like you expressed your happiness through extreme despair. next time around, you'll be able to express your continued alienation by voting democrat. you can show how much you hate power and privilege by voting for hillary clinton.

this situation is entirely absurd. we're completely trapped. there's no way to express our disgust, apparently, but to redouble and encourage all that disgusts us. so: the two-party system must be destroyed. i would like to see the democratic party die by asphyxiating on its own vomit. no hope for even vague democracy until the republican party bleeds out. start by abandoning and ridiculing your own party. the platform is bullshit anyway, i can tell you that, and the people you are voting for are dedicated primarily to their own privilege and that of their little group.

say you vote democratic because you are concerned about income inequality. how has that gone during the obama administration? if you think the situation would improve under hillary, you are quite immune to the empirical. now, in the voting booth, i could only express my disgust for the way democrats concertedly advocate equality and pursue economic inequality on behalf of their billionaire donors and friends by voting for jeb bush or mitt romney. in this situation, you're going to try to persuade me that it's my civic duty to vote. you have lost my mind.

that's the political problem, but the substantive problem is this: economic inequality is simply going to continue to get more extreme, and there is no way to ameliorate it through the mechanisms of our democracy. that's a reductio ad absurdum either of democracy in general or of the claim that this is a democracy.  

chris christie this morning described obama's leadership as 'vapid'. have to give it up: rarely does it matter to a politician to find just the right word like that.

american political racialism of the left and right

watching all the election analysis, last night and this morning, i am struck above all by the racialism of american politics. every polling expert, consultant, and even politician, on both sides, basically conceives the american population in racial terms. so, people always win or lose because of the black vote, or the latino vote, or the white vote. every demographic analysis starts with that, and every campaign everywhere works a racial strategy. indeed, the dem party's long-term hope is entirely cast in racial terms, as we become 'majority-minority' etc. congressional districts are basically articulated in racial terms, which ends up being the content of gerrymandering. when push comes to shove and it's get-out-the-vote time, people are scouring the streets for racial types; it's all profiling; we've got to get out the black vote, or we've got to get out the older whiteguy vote. then, those are the constituencies you represent; that's your base. it is a racial base, and it begins to look like the inkatha freedom party vs the national party in apartheid south africa.

there are many ways that the population might be split or conceived, and in my opinion any demographic segment of similar size could be represented as decisive in any election no matter how they vote. if our whole political system conceives the racial categories to be the most important categories, racial differences the most important differences, that shows who we still are, what we still obsess about. and operating politically under the assumption that racial differences are the most important differences has its role in freezing all the categories and segregations in place. i really do think dems and reps do this equally.

simplified scenario: take a situation in which the black vote is 13%, which goes 90% dem, and the republican loses by 5%. a pundit will draw the obvious conclusion: the black vote was decisive. had the rep gotten half the black vote, he would have won, for example. but let's say white men ages 55-74 also form 13% and vote 90% rep. had half of them voted dem, the dem would have been elected. they are decisive in just the same sense and to the same degree. now say left-handed people form 13% and split their vote. had they voted 90% republican, the republican would have won. that is, the left-handers were decisive in just the same sense as the black vote. no one group is ever decisive, or all always are, but the question is: who can we break off and appeal to as an integral audience, with their own media, etc. then your whole strategy both mirrors and redoubles a basically segregated social and political terrain.

you might want to pause for a moment in your project of getting elected and ponder the devastating question of who you are. 

here is a good and typical example: the diane rehm's show election debrief this morning, with nia-malika henderson, doyle mcmanus, and ron elving. you would really think that the election was primarily about race. it's both the way people conduct the campaigns and the way pundits or experts analyze them. in neither case is this a forced move, or even plausible as a primary explanation. but the conduct of the campaigns and the analyses are mutually reinforcing.

 

focus-group this, bitch.

nothing could be easier than for any politician to stop muttering a string of focus-grouped phrases, or mumbling sentences in unison with members of his own party, or taking positions based on the advice of pollsters and consultants. all he has to do is decide, and try to say something true. there's no one to blame but yourself if you yap like that. except under very rare circumstances, we are responsible for what comes out of our own mouths. for example, polling never forced anyone to do anything in a sense that would relieve someone of responsibility for talking nonsense. we should resolve to pay no attention whatever to anyone who does not make the decision every day to speak for herself and say what she believes. really, no resolution is needed, since paying attention to the other sort is physically and intellectually impossible. if there is no one to vote for who doesn't take this approach, there's surely no reason to vote; i will not be voting today. if you want to represent the people, you might start by becoming a person.

america chooses

goldman or sachs? people have died for your right to...etc.

playlists

i'm teaching a first-year seminar on 'american popular musics'. it is a great time to teach a course like this because everygoddamthing is on youtube. it's amazing the footage you can have instant access to through a casual search. so anyway, i guess i've been building a sketch of the history through playlists.

blues (blues harp) (blues piano) (blues guitar)

swing; (i had a pre-swing jazz list; seem to have misplaced it); the idea of improvisation

bop; post-bop

early country; bluegrass; 60s country; 70s/80s/90s country; recent country

early rock

 more to come in rock and hip hop.