cheese it, the cops!

what about the collective?

i am incredibly tired of all the attempts to create and enforce collective consciousnesses. races, classes, nations are supposed to be historical agents. for example, generations are just ridiculous fictions (as i have often said, across any given population, people reproduce continuously, not all at once every twenty years), but all of these have, let's say, fictional elements: they are ontologically problematic at best. i am even weary of genders and sexual orientations conceived in terms that give them personalities: women think this; men want that; men are from michigan; women are from yonkers, and so on. right and left in politics are becoming collective agents. now, you might think that individualism is tearing us apart, and you might yearn to be as one with somebody or even everybody. but think for just one second about whether thinking of ourselves in terms of races, nations, generations, classes, political parties has united or divided us, whether collective consciousnesses and agencies have created unity or conflict.

i can hardly read dubois and his descendants anymore, for example, because races start doing things and deciding things and have talents and failings and personalities and so on. someone made that shit up, i'm telling you. (in fact, pale people made it up in an ecstasy of self-congratulation.) collective agencies are real to the extent that they are enforced: black people, let's say in 1900, are poor, lazy, ignorant: you might be too if you were enslaved, prohibited from various kinds of employment, excluded from literacy by law, etc. the fiction of the collective agent is made quasi-real by itself; it creates the agencies it then purports to describe. the structures by which genders, etc are enforced or made actual might be a little more subtle, but these are all artifacts of exclusion in one way or another. the french are busy enforcing frenchness, in language, dress, and so on, and then confirming empirically what they invented. it all has the same structure as, say, anti-semitism: 'the jew does this and that; the jew wants money; the jew has no nation. the jew the jew the jew. well, the american thinks that; women need x, y, and z; millennials believe this; the greatest generation was courageous, etc. solidarity and exclusion are the very same thing.

maybe we can't just ditch out of this kind of thinking instantly and entirely. but we can think about it critically every single time it comes up, or try to work our way out of it slowly. because it's liable to be fatal to our species. our species doesn't want that; or actually, our species is pretty murder/suicide-oriented.

the right sort of politics

here's an encyclopedia-type article on 19th century american anarchism, intended eventually for a 'companion to anarchist philosophy.' i'm proud of this, which i think is a pretty definitive account, reflecting decades of engagement with the topic. there are people i love inordinately in here, like william lloyd garrison, lucretia mott, josiah warren, thoreau/emerson, voltairine de cleyre, emma goldman. one thing i will say: until you get to the very end, with people like goldman and berkman, the left-right spectrum makes no sense of these positions at all.

best of, live

the fact that i never saw b.b. king is the cause of some regret, and it does have me thinking about the people i am glad to have seen, and also the very best shows i've been present for. i worked as a rock critic for many years for many publications, so i saw a lot, though for other reasons too. alright, i am very grateful that i saw tammy wynette, george jones, waylon jennings, bill monroe, earl scruggs, ralph stanley, charlie louvin, muddy waters, john prine, loretta lynn, buddy guy and junior wells, james cotton.

some of the shows i remember as the very best: as a teenager i went with my dad several times to see the original seldom scene at the red fox inn in bethesda. as i said in how to escape, those shows had brilliant, loose virtuosity, incredible momentum, and ravishing beauty. can't do a whole lot better than that.

 

i saw the original pretenders and the second version several times: what a great rock band, with a great singer and songwriter at its heart. the other best arena-size shows i saw might have been the stones circa '78 and prince at the meadowlands in the early 2000s with a killer funk band featuring maceo parker. i have some reservations about prince; he can be gimmicky and the repertoire is a mixed bag. but man he just killed. oh also grateful dead/allman brothers at rfk stadium: '74? i did see the dead a number of times; it all really depended on garcia's chemical composition at that moment. anyway, i always thought they were kind of a mediocre country act, but people had religious experiences all around me.

 

one event that i always remember when i'm remembering is vince gill, alone with a guitar in a little bar in nashville. i think it was a benefit for a local arts organization or something. what an utter master of the guitar, and just a heartrendingly beautiful singer. he was loose, but every single note was exactly right. (also i recommend his 43-cut superset [not a greatest hits] these days.) i saw kim wilson in a similar context. i play blues harp but man that boy about killed me: he did sonny boy, little walter, big walter and everyone and everything else, and there have been few better white blues singers. i saw a very young patty loveless at the warren county, va, fair, before she even hit, though she was already doing 'timber, i'm falling in love', e.g. and she destroyed me on multiple levels. dailey and vincent and iiird tyme out have slayed my ass at bluegrass festivals over the last decade or so.

 

on several occasions in the 70's i saw bonnie raitt in dc, touring with buddy and junior. man those were fine shows by a fine woman. i went to a soul blues festival in birmingham, al, in maybe '91. i went by myself as my marriage fell apart and felt at once worse and so much better after taking in bobby bland, millie jackson, and clarence carter in an all-black audience. speaking of which, some of the go-go shows in dc in the '70s, with acts like trouble funk and chuck brown, were really unique experiences. i'm sure more will occur!

 

probably the show i saw that freaked me out the most or changed my sense of music the most was minor threat, ontario theater in dc in '81. not the best show, at all, but the most extreme.

 

 

executed in self-defense

 

i saw the end of the judge's presentation in the brelo case in cleveland. now, maybe there is a point to the idea that, in a situation where 12 officers are riddling a car with bullets, you can't tell which shot was fatal. i would think that's a good argument for prosecuting them all, actually. but judge john p. o'donnell quite gratuitously exonerated all the officers (though only one was on trial) by the end, saying that they all had an objectively reasonable belief that they were in immediate danger. offhand, that seems ridiculous to me: they were no more in danger than any other firing squad engaging in an execution. then again, it doesn't take much to make cowards feel endangered.

 

i know what you did last summer.

one thing to bear in mind as congress fails to stop universal surveillance: the nsa has their communications. i think that, down the line, senators should plead blackmail: that's a better excuse than not being able to read the constitution they have sworn to uphold, or quite intentionally and globally violating it. no need for explicit arm-twisting; all the intelligence dickheads have to do is blandly raise an eyebrow at a senator, or not even that. 

speaking of birth certificates, only one u.s. senator is an american, as i understand what that means: rand paul. the rest are chinese politburo members or iranian ayatollahs.

chains, knives, guns, and clubs

now that there are hundreds of violent bikers in custody in tx, i have suggestion: give them back their weapons and airdrop them into cannes.

not to be unfair, however: i think it may turn out that most of the people killed in waco were shot by police.

unstrategic communications

i do not understand what everyone from kerry to the military mouthpieces think they're accomplishing by pretending all day every day that everything is going fine against isis, even as they get their ass kicked again and again. truly, perhaps they are deluding themselves in order to enhance their self-esteem? or perhaps they have taken on board the profound postmodern insight that appearance is everything, that confidence wins the battle, and that the world outside their fluffy little heads is a story that they can win through re-narration. isis prefers munitions. or perhaps they think that acting like they live in a hallucination will win them public support. no, on the contrary, they ought to be painting a dire picture instead of waving off massive defeats as little setbacks. that really might martial some public support if they intend to continue at all. meanwhile, they are degrading and defeating themselves, as well as talking jive all day.

the strategy is entirely incomprehensible: they are sending in iran with air support to re-take ramadi. it's quite as though they are trying to touch off a sunni/shia war to engulf the whole region, which is what is actually happening. i would like to hear what the government of saudi arabia is saying about this, and it would hardly be surprising if the saudis are more or less supporting isis in various ways. they have to read this as part of iranian expansion through the whole region and they have to be working on stopping it. one would think that the saudis are pleased if aqap controls large swathes of yemen, e.g. meanwhile the us is blowing up iran with "war rhetoric" as they also try to negotiate a deal on nukes with them and use their "militias" as the shia ground force to conquer the sunni bits of iraq. there is nothing - really, nothing - in this scenario that could count as a victory. they are fucking themselves from all angles at once (sorry, i've been watching veep), and their strategy is to act like they're enjoying it.

now i realize that it is a difficult situation, presenting no obvious solution. but this is just insane. the goal appears to be total defeat by definition and maximizing total corpses. seriously, what counts as winning? iran de facto taking anbar and killing everyone? their actual strategy is only to yap in a positive mode. but even these people with their pollsters and communications experts are going to be broken, thoroughly and deservedly, by reality.

!

blurb in new york review of books for plankton, by christian sardet (university of chicago press):

'Wow! Simply splendidly wow! Christian Sardet has found that sweet spot where science meets art. The stunning images are a feast for eyes and the fascinating information is a feast for the mind. This is a book that will gather no dust - it is just too beautiful to put down!"

Lisa-ann Gershwin, author of Stung!

wholesome slaughter

there's something almost wholesome in america today about the sort of slaughter you get from a war of biker gangs. a battle between cossacks and bandidos at a 'bikini bar' seems relatively comprehensible or traditional, as opposed to just arming up and mowing down schoolchildren or moviegoers for no reason at all. 

i want to express my admiration for ian mckewan, who gave the commencement address at dickinson yesterday. he only had one theme: a foursquare defense of free expression, including the right to offend. he directly criticized the people who protested charlie hebdo getting an award from pen. now, my colleagues with some reluctance stood up in their caps and gowns and hoods and applauded when he was done. but i can't imagine that most of them actually would agree with him when push comes to shove. like most academic institutions, we're beset by pc prisses and baby censors of various sorts.

banned for life from music

the washpost has this headline on their obit for b.b. king: 'life of a grammy winner'. many people start with that or at least mention it. even the very greatest artists in musical history apparently need validation by little statuettes or committees of record-company executives or whatever. you might as well say he was a great musician because he drove a jeg-you-ar. some grammy winners for best album: billy joel, christopher cross, toto, lionel richie, phil collins, u2, celine dion, arcade fire, mumford and sons. maybe you think b.b. king is legitimized by being in company like that. if so, you really should be prohibited from listening to music. people overall are more interested in meaningless indications of prestige than anything substantive.

On the value of making it explicit as opposed to implied

 

 

I strongly recommend political junkies and philosophy fans take a look at Anat Belitzki's The Stone column in the this morning's New York Times, Making It Explicit in Israel. Excellent piece by an Israeli philosopher about the implications of the stark differences between the incoming government and the way Israel has portrayed its intentions toward the Palestinian community.  Not particularly optimistic, except that only by making underlying issues explicit can we begin to deal with them. Perhaps the reason yesterday's solutions do not work is because they never were solutions so much as bromides.

Belitzki is a professor at Quinnipiac University here in the US and at the University of Tel Aviv, and has a record of activism in Israeli civil rights. She references the work of American philosopher Robert Brandom who believes that it is possible to use language to make explicit what is real and implied in our social, cultural and political norms. For example, in Israeli-American dialogue, the two state solution is a given, and we're just discussing means and implementation and guarantees.

Bizetzki says that just isn't true, and that the most recent Israeli election shows that very starkly. She writes:

The government that will be formed this week is the most clearly articulated, narrowest, most right-wing, most religious and most nationalistic government ever assembled in Israel. A combination of the fundamentalist Orthodox clerical parties with the nationalistic chauvinism of the Jewish Home, led by Naftali Bennett who makes no attempt to hide his annexation plans, has been orchestrated by Benjamin Netanyahu in no uncertain terms. Along with Likud, Netanyahu’s home, which is the largest party in Israel today, and Kulanu (All of Us – a breakaway of Likud), this whole bloc is unambiguous in its Jewish, nationalistic agenda. (Emphasis added)

She believes that this explosion of truth into what was basically polite lies and cocktail conversation between Israel's leaders and the world was foreshadowed and made inevitable by the two month long attack on Gaza by the Israeli army in July-August 2014. The implicit issues between the US understanding of the agreed path forward -- Two State Solution, Camp David Accords, etc. -- and what Israel's government intends is pretty well illustrated by the odd mis-translation of the name of the operation. Operation "Tsuk Eitan." was announced to the world as Operation "Protective Edge" which has a somewhat defensive tone; she says that a more accurate translation would be "Firm Cliff" which has a vaguer yet more threatening tone. My use of a Google translator resulted in "A Rock"  which opens a wide range of possibilities. Perhaps "Perhaps Operation Masada" or "Operation Stoning" would have been more appropriate. 

forced choices

people act like they are literally forced to vote for, say hillary clinton. when push comes to shove, are you going to vote for hillary or jeb? lesser of two evils, etc. no one else can win.  but in this and in some other cases, you really are voting for exactly what purport most to repudiate, for exactly the hierarchy you say is the problem, with a slightly different rhetorical patina that somehow engages your social identity, though with no sincerity.

another thing that's supposedly forced in this system is that candidates - and again hillary is and will be an extremely clear case - have to, really have to, float with the polls, or the polling of the party base in the primary process. i am telling you, none of this is forced at all. or: hillary has no choice but to raise billions; she needs to do whatever she needs to do to accomplish that. people who suddenly found gay marriage when it hit 52% in the polls - oh, barack and hillary, for example - will then pay tribute to the memory of martin luther king, an example of moral courage for us all, etc. but you did not have to be a king to endorse gay marriage in 2008, you just had to not be a complete moral coward. they're ready to march over the edmund pettus bridge now that there's absolutely no risk involved. back then, they'd have been telling you that king was too extreme. they try to put passion in their voices so as to inspire you with the fierce urgency of let me focus-group that.

i think people want to feel forced in order not to make even a mildly hard decision. voting third party is not an excruciating choice with terrifying consequences. really it's not. it obviously is not if you live in a state that is clearly going one way or the other, which is most states. and of course it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that just makes it impossible to effect any significant change through the electoral process at all: it makes democracy nothing, really. and then, the idea that obviously a candidate can't possibly honestly represent their real beliefs places extraordinarily low moral standards on politicians. no, guess what: they can say whatever they like. i think in some cases they might be surprised by a good response to that. but if not, then the worst that happens is you lose the election. that is not an unfaceable personal calamity. it's not like a choice where you're picking who has to die or something. anyone can decide to do that anytime they like, and i hope that you expect better than that from any neighbor, colleague, spouse, etc.

also don't let anyone tell you that a vote for a third party is a vote for the republican (or the democrat). i really did prove that false mathematically long ago. and any way you look at it, a vote for, say, bernie sanders in the democratic primary cannot be a 'wasted vote' any more than a vote for hillary clinton, no matter who wins. indeed, if she's going to win no matter who you vote for, a vote for her is certainly wasted. and really, if you vote for a person whose real positions or whose persona you don't believe or believe in, or in the worst case whose positions or persona you on reflection repudiate, you are certainly wasting your vote.

 

passionate commitment to the void

nothing is emptier or of less value than, let's say, mainstream american 'progressivism'. here's arianna huffington, celebrating a decade of hypocrisy with lloyd blankfein. arianna's stance is hillary's, explicitly. so say you are a progressive because you're supposedly, or verbally, concerned with things like income inequality, racial injustice, and so on. and then, election after election, all you want to do is vote for goldman sachs, although sometimes you make a detour to citigroup. say you vote for people or listen to people who just hire treasury secretaries straight from the citigroup board room, over and over. say you vote for someone who raises billions of dollars for her campaign from wall street, or is rocking davos on behalf of the poor, or rather, herself. say you want to put your children's education, and mine, and the kids' of west baltimore's, in the hands of the the richest man in america. say that in your quest to uplift the underprivileged, you vote for the very most privileged people in the world. in what way, except that you mechanically utter certain sentences that you don't actually believe, are you on the left? you're probably supposedly verbally worried about capitalism. i don't think you have beliefs, even though it sort of sounds like that at the dinner party. i think you have social affiliations.

in particular, i don't think you actually believe what you're saying when you passionately express your commitment to human equality. i think your commitment is to maximum human inequality, and that's obvious. or maybe, like a clinton, you don't believe anything at all. i think you're just sipping chardonnay and talking jive in unison. i'm ready for a female president. really i am, and i could be tempted to vote for elizabeth warren, say, despite extreme disagreements on policy etc. but i think that to be the first female anything, you would have to be something, or that nothingness does not have a gender. i can't make you believe something rather than nothing, but i do request that you stop talking as though you have political commitments. anyway, please don't come to me after an interminable hillary term and wonder why inequality keeps getting worse, ok white girl? because i am just going to stare blankly into your eyes.

speaking of honkies

 

i do pay attention to new releases in country, and i would say that the best new album i've heard this year, or perhaps the only really certifiably excellent country album, is chris stapleton's traveller. (we're in an awful patch on country radio right now overall. i am not against all commercial country, and some of my fave artists in the history of the genre - miranda lambert, kacey musgraves, the band perry, ashley monroe - are commercially potent contemporary artists. they're between albums.)

chris stapleton is completely the real deal, he's from kentucky; a veteran of the killer bluegrass band the steeldrivers; he's had many great hits and album cuts as a songwriter. he does exactly what i think needs doing: he is at once unmistakably traditional and unmistakably contemporary. if i had to characterize the sound, it's somewhere between jamey johnson and the zac brown band, or maybe i'm just bewildered by the beards (no i'm not). really a killer set of songs, and the man has great range as a singer, from waylony to pure melismatic soul, as on the current (thank god) hit, tennessee whiskey. man he blows like a hurricane on that 'parachute' thing. there is no better singer in country music. falling feels like flying til you hit the ground.

 

 

(someone in the comments for that one mentions travis tritt. that's right.)

i worry about any artist i love whose main theme is substance abuse, but there it is. 

 

 

surveil this

you'd have to say that this and this are promising, though relatively small, smackdowns of the surveilance state. nothing has ever been more obviously unconstitutional. nothing would more obviously make george washington go fetch his flintlock, raise an army, and engage in violent insurrection, as he did in the good ole days. 

chase and render

To some, the bigoted nature of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons is clear. “It’s a racist publication,” Ms. [Francine] Prose, a former president of PEN, told The Nation last week. “Let’s not beat about the bush.” (nytimes)

since when is islam a race? not to beat around, or even about, the bush, but i always thought it was a gender.

i do think that shooting people over cartoons is a sort of hyperbolic pc: they kill you for caricature; we just exile you for using the wrong phonemes, thug. but people really do confuse being offended with being assaulted, which would indicate that, unaccountably, they have never been assaulted. no one has a right not to be offended, or else each of us has a concomitant duty to maintain absolute silence. christ i'm offended all day every day, for example by the words 'impactful', 'relatable', and 'proactive'. it feels like an attack on my family and my identity: i come from a long line of prose stylists. consider the latest ad for microsoft robotics: 'the real question that needs to be aksed is, what can we do that is impactful?' fetch me my club, b, and i'll show you. 

 

 

5

10:20 cnn reporter miguel marquez, getting pushed away by police from people who are getting arrested: "are we under martial law? we have a right to work." "i think the constitution still applies." " this is a curfew, not a police state."

10:10 one possible issue: the police might be angry. put down the fucking sticks.

10:07 baltimore is interesting tonight. the curfew itself has become the issue, and it would really be a shame to straight-up provoke a problem in a fundamentally happy city by sheer military-style occupation. the occupiers are themselves the issue tonight; the massed national guard, the horses, and so on. i don't think that curfews in general can be constitutional, for one thing. but if things go bad tonight, they have only themselves to blame.

it is turning out to make a difference, i think, that the political and legal leadership of baltimore is black. sometimes it hasn't seemed to, in various cities. but here it has.

here's marion winik on d. watkins. honestly, i wish i could report a teaching moment like that. not that she could have lived it or written it (though she's a hell of a writer), but it is a powerful thing to help someone get to the point where they can do what d. is doing now.

a cult of marilyn mosby is emerging. i see why. i have never seen something like this. cops might be the rioters tonight.

when someone texted me "cops charged" i assume she meant that cops charged protesters somewhere. like everyone, i assume, i am surprised. and i do think that this will calm things down immensely. also i think it's pretty damn obvious that a crime was committed, so that it's not just a matter of calming stuff down, but also a legally appropriate or legally urgent response.

how to fix black people

how can we fix our inner cities? everyone has a prescription: david brooks prescribes 'social psychology'. (well, psychologists can definitely help with the torture). or yet another round of education reform. more welfare. less. 'jobs'. build housing projects. implode housing projects. decades of failure with all these plans makes no impression at all. here's my prescription: stop trying to fix black people. supposing that you should, or that you know how, is just more racial hierarchy. right? fix yourself, honky. you don't know how folks live, and your picture of how folks ought to live is just that they ought to live like you. work on your own racial attitudes, your arrogance, your presumption that you are yourself the norm,  and let people figure out how they ought to live, how they ought to unite in a community, how they ought to raise their children, etc. stop diagnosing people, which is just dishonest, self-congratulatory sneering.

education is the key! however, re-educating black children, or instituting mind control in pre-school under compulsion, is the grossest idea of all. and it would be evil - like kidnapping american indian children and putting them in boarding schools - even if it were effective. but decades of this shit have left you here (my god, d. watkins is everywhere). and here is exactly where my junior high in dc was in 1971. it has left you doing real evil to real children under coercion; it has made our society a prison camp. let go.