cheese it, the cops!

make america okayesque eventually

as i travel this amazing land, i meet many people just like you -- in fact precisely, uncannily like you. they ask me, 'senator sartwell, what would you do to restore america's greatness?' 

but let's not get ahead of ourselves. if elected, i will strive to make america mediocre again, if indeed we have ever risen to mediocrity in the past. you can't get from here to great without passing through mediocre, and of course you can't get to 'great again' at all, more or less. let's work on second-rate; i realize that is utopian in itself, but i am a congenital optimist! some of our least obviously suckass days may well possibly be ahead of us, unlikely as that seems.

from time to time the question arises as to what, if anything, it means to be an 'american philosopher', or even whether i, personally, am an american philosopher. then i guess we'd have to define 'america', haha! rorty is pretty funny in the film, he's all like: forget it, it's uninteresting, whatever. that is the essence of rorty right there, and i say it's just because phil mcreynolds was kind of relentless on that question, and rorty habitually just tried to undercut or shrug off the underpinnings of any question. at another moment, he'd go all passionate about being an american, and so on, even while of course being 'anti-essentialist' about it. 

anyway, i could say that first off, i feel extremely american. i could only happen here. i live in an andrew wyeth calendar, except that most of the residents are now mexicans: what's more american than that? i identify with many dimensions of american culture, and i'll tell you what, the blues and country and hip hop could have happened nowhere else, and in general the rest of the world does not understand popular music, which is my most important, say, cultural repository. american slangs, sub-cultures, television, sports, politics, and so on: i am so it, even if i'm repudiating little bits of it. i like some aspects of our mythology, and i'm still showing you clint eastwood movies, bugs bunny cartoons, and making you read self-reliance.

but also, i do feel a deep affinity to many figures in the american tradition, and i do see my work as continuous with theirs in some way or responsive to it. this is not only true of americans, and for example i have been grappling with kierkegaard and chuang tzu for decades. but i really do feel an intense affinity for figures in the american tradition, a kind of immediate recognition. i might mention jonathan edwards, the 1776 revolutionaries, lucretia mott, emerson, thoreau, william lloyd garrison, josiah warren, poe, james, emma goldman, mencken, marcus garvey, malcolm x, abbie hoffman, and w.v.o. quine, to begin with. i associate the american political tradition with individual rights and limitations on state power, notions i endorse. our central political concept, to my way of thinking, is liberty.

in a menckeny way, i sort of love/hate our culture, and though you can try to understand trump as a berlasconi or something, you only get him in america. i sort of love our hustlers, or even our charlatans, and sometimes it gets to be art, like say in zora neale hurston or notorious b.i.g. or glen beck. or shonda rhymes. we make quite a spectacle. i love many parts of our physical country, from the cities of baltimore and philadelphia to the rural deep south, where i've lived and explored. i'm telling you my connection to my place is felt continually; i work on it, fo real.

but that, like many commitments, is a selection from a smorgasbord. there are no positions one has to accept in order to be an american thinker or whatever. in particular, the notion that the pragmatic theory of truth is our central identity or something is eminently rejectable, and i do hold that it is a terrible theory. and i don't know that it's particularly great and amazing to be an american, as opposed to a kenyan or whatever, philosopher. and 'american' is an excruciatingly problematic concept or identity, which we can try to wrestle with if you want. 

i am and am not 'proud' to be an american, and in a way i feel a sort of patriotic loyalty to my culture, or my roiling world of sub-cultures, but of course none to my government. the shining city on a hill etc is the worst sort of bullshit; we've been no better than average, and are even now a terrifyingly oppressive force with regard to much of the world and ourselves. we've built on death, pain, exploitation, like many cultures. ok? guess what, for better and worse, in resistance and in collusion and self-interest, all that is in me too.

by the same token, writing let's say as a white man in the middle of a powerful country, in a world-dominant language, lends a kind of effortless yet suspicious cosmopolitanism. it's easy to feel central, maybe especially for those of us who grew up in dc as the american empire grew to fruition and found limits too. we felt ourselves to be at the center, unlike many previous generations of americans who were characteristically anxious about american and hence their own provincialism. anyway, i/we speak - in philosophy and elsewhere - from a kind of privilege that is effortlessly pleasurable and useful but also a problem.

jeb?

i think it's possible that jeb bush might drop out before iowa. it's humiliating to drop out now after having run such a miserable campaign, but it's also humiliating to get thrashed in iowa and new hampshire - like get 3% of the vote and finish sixth - and then drop out. surely that reality is setting in. i think the bigwigs of the republican party, if there are any, probably have as much access to him as anyone. now, i think rubio is indeed proving himself too callow. it's certainly not going to be kasich or huckabee. i think under such circs bush might endorse christie, but on the other hand christie might not want him to. however, the bushes obviously can raise money. but at any rate, i think we might narrow to christie, cruz, and trump. then christie has a problem as the thing swings south in late feb, but potentially cruz and trump split their vote, leaving a three-way race with a damaged but alive christie. (i also think you might see carson do a sudden duck even before any primaries, and retool for next time round. on the other hand he might still be pinning hopes on iowa.)

so, if there is a 'republican establishment', one thing they're asking themselves is who could possibly, like imaginably, go to verbal/twitter war with trump? only christie. obviously bush is completely helpless. i think rubio gets smashed in that contest. and by the way, i think hillary does too, but sanders has something you can't kill on twitter.

every time hillary plays the gender card, trump should play the bill card. memo to trump's oppo research team (yo, corey lewandowski) i'd match up the schedules over the past fifteen years of bill clinton and dominique strauss-kahn. when were they hanging out at the same time in dubai or davos, and who was working as a maid in the hotel or an escort in the region and has the vid? now, that's not hillary is it? but then you just ask people if they think that's the way a feminist conducts a marriage, or just ask whether she knows women have been victimized all these decades while she defended her husband, or ask what she's willing to put up with to gain power, so who is she really, or ask whether you want bill in the white house, etc. you bring up huma and anthony and just go into a stand-up routine on the whole thing until these people are the objects of ridicule, living in an atmosphere of privilege without principle, just kind of gross. a single email showing her awareness etc would be enough, and even that is not really necessary.

if only i could consign you to a different world

as we continue to polarize politically by region, demographics, etc., it's often said that people on the left and people on the right 'live in different worlds.' a few bald assertions: no they don't. all of us live in precisely, exactly, entirely, the same world. for example, all and only the same facts obtain in the world in which i live and the world in which you live.

if people want to argue about that, i'm into it. let's try this: a leftist and rightist, or a man and a woman, or a black person and a white person, a realist and an idealist, or ted cruz and elizabeth warren, or paul krugman and a redneck motherfucker, stroll arm in arm onto interstate 95 as a truck approaches at 70. in each case, they both go pop just the same, no matter what world they think they live in. this applies, for example, no matter what your subjective experiences may be, no matter what language you speak, etc. the 'myworld/yourworld' notion registers the basic insight of philosophical modernism: the world is in your head, or is created by our words: a truly bizarre, unaccountable, obviously wackily false position that no one actually believes, but that is asserted by, say, descartes, hume, kant, rorty, whatever. 

no the problem isn't that left and right live in different realities; it's that the consciousness of neither is connected to reality at all. ideology in this sense is a form of psychosis. but people believe because they want to agree with their friends, because they want to sneer at people not like themselves, because they want people like themselves to control people like them, etc. they really want just to say the same sentences as paul krugman or whatever, and hence the same sentences as each other.

or really, the basic principle of human belief-generation seems to be 'believe whatever enhances my (our) self-esteem.' next time you read the billionth timothy egan or michael tomasky column about how insane and stupid republicans are, hear what they're really saying. every sentence means this: i am so smart, so sane, so normal, so good. someone who wants to spend a whole career or life saying that to themselves is pitiable. it would be merely pitiable, except that it leads to myriad practical fuck-ups all the time. for example, it would be just darkly amusing if it didn't do things divide the united states into two ideological/demographic segments that conceive themselves to live in different countries.

none of these procedures for generating beliefs - agree with people in your race, income segment, profession, region; believe what enhances your self-esteem, etc. - is connected to the truth of the beliefs, which is how both left and right generate hallucinatory 'worlds.'