The Most Significant Thing That Happened Yesterday Politically By Far...

...was wingnut-enabling self-described "moderate" Republican Maine Senator Olympia Snowe's unexpected retirement announcement. If Dems can scramble and find a decent candidate they have a two week window in which to change the very bad, also terrible, math for retaining the Senate into something like the math for regaining the House. Needless to say, apart from cementing in the Affordable Care Act and appointing Supremes who aren't authoritarian whackjobs (neither of which is exactly small potatoes actually) the second Obama term is ashes without a Congress able to partner with the White House to solve actual problems. Since T-Paw abandoned the GOP race I have more or less regarded the White House an Obama lock as much as Presidential politics and the vicissitudes of history permit of such a thing, and my concern has been whether the likely Obama victory would have the coattails to regain the House and retain the Senate. That's still the game as far as I can see. And after many betrayals, at long last, Olympia Snowe has managed to do something for her President that contributes substance to what is in fact the only game in town. I suspect just getting out of the nuthouse of the GOP caucus will be reward enough, but I raise my glass anyway.

Tabitha Needs To Take Over the GOP

That's what I learned from my tee vee this evening.

Teaching Day

It's Roland Barthes' Mythologies in Critical Theory today. An effortless lecture that tends to go over well, but I always get this nagging feeling that I should shake up the reading completely whenever I get too comfortable in it, even if I can't really fault the reading in any way otherwise...

Today's Random Wilde

We all look at nature too much, and live with her too little.

People Who Work For A Living Don't Want To Live In Mitt's World

Reading Presocratics

I'm starting to prep in earnest for my undergraduate course this summer at Berkeley on ancient rhetoric. I usually teach rhetoric since the Thirty Year's War so I'm doing a lot of brushing up. I teach Aristotle and Plato all the time, but I'm digging back into fragments from Enheduanna, Sappho, Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon, Isocrates, Demosthenes, getting ready next week to pore over the second sophistic, Cicero, Horace, Quintillian, Libanius. Some of this stuff I haven't looked at for a quarter of a century! I'm not going to lie to you, it's a pure joy. Believe when I tell you that the predictable antics of Movement Republicans and Robot Cultists aren't exactly a comparable draw, so blogging may be a bit low for the moment. Teaching three courses and prepping for the three I'm crashing into this summer the moment I hand in grades for Spring is keeping me busy! More to come as the killer clowns and robo-priests manage to crack me up as they always do sooner rather than later...

What Do Futurologists Do?

Futurologists are a science fiction fandom pretending to be philosophers and policy wonks in a bid for attention and, for a few, for money. Training in any real field of study provides a substantial expertise and unique analytic vocabulary out of which a circumscribed foresight worthy of attention emerges, but since futurologists are not trained in any real field of study at all the unmoored and overgeneralized “foresight” they perform for the public amounts either to the prophetic or gossipy utterances of a priestly pop guru maintaining a predatory relation to uncritical enthusiasts, or to the marketing and promotional noises of a pseudo-professional maintaining a parasitic relation to unscrupulous corporate-military elites. Futurological “scenarios” are usually just science fiction stories bereft of clever plots, interesting characters, or sustained themes. Indeed, most futurological “scenarios” amount to little more than stipulated settings of a scene (hence their name). Inevitably, these settings are borrowed from actual science fiction writers, and given the plausibility that attaches to the familiar, futurologists will tend to put a premium on precisely those settings real writers would disdain as cliches.

More Futurological Brickbats here.

Robot Cultist Declares Need for Holiday Counting Chickens Before They Are Hatched

We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. -- The Amazing Criswell, in the unforgettable opening lines of Plan 9 from Outer Space

Very Serious Futurologist Ben Goertzel bemoans the fact that most holidays commemorate actual events or actual accomplishments that actually have come to mean something to actual people, and proposes that we set aside a day to celebrate in advance instead future "events" and "accomplishments" that preoccupy the fancies of Very Serious Futurologists even though they have not happened and even though certainly many will never happen. The name of his proposed holiday, predictably enough, is Future Day.

As it happens, in the hours approaching and after New Year’s Day there is already a holiday in which friends and strangers celebrate together the experiences of our last shared circuit around the Sun and offer up toasts and make resolutions to our hopes for the next. In our New Year holidays we discern and celebrate the abiding reality of our open futurity, the present opening onto the next present, the fragile futurity arising at once out of the finitude but also out of the diversity of the human beings who share in the present the making of the world at which we are always arriving.

But of course “The Future” of the futurologists is not the same thing as the open futurity I am speaking of. You would think the Stock Exchange would be more than enough for those who want to blow time and energy and money indulging this sort of nonsense, but futurologists like other religionists really do seem keenly to feel the need for public rituals that will clothe their pet faithly cravings in the apparent substantial reality of shared True Belief.

As I write in my Futurological Brickbats:

Futurity is a register of freedom, "The Future" another prison-house built to confine it. Futurity is the openness in the present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of calculating, contending, and collaborative stakeholders who struggle to make and remake the shared world, peer to peer. Futurity cannot be delineated but only lived, in serial presents attesting always unpredictably to struggle and to expression. "The Future," to the contrary, brandishing the shackle of its definite article, is always described from a parochial present and is always a funhouse mirror reflecting a parochial present back to itself, amplifying its desires and fears, confirming its prejudices, reassuring its Believers that the Key to History is in their hands... To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms... Futurologists keep confusing making bets with having thoughts... When I hear the word "trend," I reach for my brain... In coming to terms with the present, especially in grasping the meaning of what has taken us by surprise, we understand and, better still, become understanding. In predicting the future, especially in proposing coinages that would work as spells to dispel being taken by surprise, we become ever more susceptible to fraud and, worse still, become frauds. Where thinking is concerned, this is a variation on the difference between investment and speculation.

As if to emphasize my point, Goertzel admits that his initial imagination of Future Day would involve "costume parties with SF movie themes … school essay contests on futuristic themes … humanoid robots giving speeches in the town square." That futurologists think there is a virtue in confusing science with science fiction is a truism. And, true to form, there are no humanoid robots that actually exist to "give speeches in the town square" unless you decide that pressing "play" on a tape recorder in the town square with a human being's speech on it means the tape recorder is somehow "giv[ing] speeches in the town square." All of which is just to return to Goertzel's initial suggestion that for some reason on "Future Day" one might want to dress up in costumes inspired by Science Fiction movies.

Now, I am the last person in the world to denigrate cosplay or SF con masquerades as celebrations of fan enthusiasm and creativity, but it really does take a Futurologist to re-invent that wheel and then try to peddle that tired appropriation as a window onto novel insights. Ask yourself to what extent dressing up in campy cat suits or Robbie the Robot drag would ever have connected anyone in any meaningful kind of way with those futures past that have already come and gone as presents past. I daresay people have connected to actual problems and possibilities to come in the years since the Earth Day holiday was proposed and celebrated than anything likely to arise from Goertzel's futurological "Future Day." Although I doubt this is his intention at all, I think one of the best ways to understand what is wrong with Goertzel's "Future Day" is that it would substantially function as a containment and circumvention of what "Earth Day" is about.

"Celebrating and honoring the past, and the cyclical processes of nature, is most certainly a valuable thing," Goertzel declares. "But in these days of rapid technological acceleration, it is our future that needs more attention, not our past." Of course, we cannot devote attention to "the future" because it has no existence to attend to, and certainly "the future" lacks special "needs" self-appointed futurological pseudo-experts need to direct our attention to. The task of understanding is quintessentially a matter of coming to terms with the unexpected present arising out of the complex dynamism of our pasts, but futurologists are forever seeking to disdain that demand and substitute for understanding phony prophetic utterances always only amplifying the parochial prejudices of the present in the form of wish-fulfillment and apocalyptic fantasies of "the future" and selling them to the rubes.

However typical the claim, it is worth noting that Goertzel's glib insistence that "these [are] days of rapid technological acceleration" is patently false. For one thing, there is no such thing as "technology in general" that is monolithically advancing or not, in an accelerating way or not. Certain technoscientific domains of knowledge advance while others stall and others vanish from our concern, sometimes to re-emerge in changed forms; -- techniques improve, mature, combine with others, become obsolete; -- artifacts answer to changing needs, sometimes better, sometimes worse. I have long suspected that the falsifying mystification of "accelerating change" especially beloved of California Ideologues and superlative futurologists like the transhumanists, singularitarians, techno-immortalists and so on, in whose company Goertzel is respected as nowhere else, is mostly what the destabilization and precarization and financialization of neoliberal global developmentalism feels like to those few who are either its beneficiaries or who identify (whether that practically makes sense or not) with its beneficiaries.

Goertzel declares that "in the more technologically advanced parts of the world, we are entering a regime in which material scarcity is less of a problem than attentional scarcity." I suppose we can set aside the obvious facile falsifications mobilized in constructions distinguishing "advanced parts of the world" from less advanced ones -- "advanced" in what way? longer healthier average life-spans? more equitable distribution of authority? better at exploiting the vulnerable? more wasteful? higher suicide rates? what? What I find myself flabbergasted by is that there are still people who want to pretend that material scarcity is less a problem in notionally representative plutocratic extractive-industrial-petrochemical societies (I assume this is the suicidal madness Goertzel means by "advanced") than what he calls "attentional scarcity."

In a world of conspicuous catastrophic climate change and neglected treatable diseases and rising human and arms trafficking it is hard to believe anybody is still shilling this sort of digital utopianism. I propose that Goertzel and his fellow futurologists dig deeper into the present that besets them (resonating with its pasts and open in its futurity) in an effort at understanding rather than disavowing that threatening and promising present for the fraud of "The Future." Goertzel does say, however, that "Future Day" is a big hit on Second Life, so maybe his digital focus makes a certain sense. Here in First Life, fewer folks are buying what the futurologists are selling after all.

GOP Sees Future

Whether it's the latest "tea party event" or a Romney campaign event, this is what you get: A smattering of whiny old white guys in an empty stadium.

Futurologists Anticipating Arrival of Japanese Space Elevator Advised to Hold Their Breath

Although "carbon nanotubes" do figure prominently in the usual, more or less magical, manner in the most recent Space Elevator cartoon, er, scenario, er, scheme, er, scam, io9 voices skepticism.

You see, if the latest proposal involved actual Very Serious Futurologists, they would also assure us the space elevator would rise from a free market paradise archipelago of off-shore oil platforms and luxury cruise-ships tethered to an orbital space hotel cum launch pad for a fleet of asteroid mining robots (ka-CHING!).

Space would obviously need to be provided in the scenario, either in an undersea base or possibly on the lunar surface, for the sooper-geniuses coding the history shattering Robot God AI arriving "sometime in the next twenty years," and one hopes 3-D printers would get into the mix there, too, even if multi-purpose programmable room temperature self-replicating nanobotic everything machines would be suavely nudged off onto a more distant horizon as a concession to hard-boiled futurological "realism" -- after all, Drexler is so nineties never gonna happen futurism rather than two-thousandsies never gonna happen futurism, don't get it all twisted!

This Time Libertopia Will Be Different!

Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot, in response to my Dispatches from Libertopia, one Roderick T. Long seeks to assure me that

Libertarianism -- and I mean free-market libertarianism -- is essentially an ANTI-corporate, ANTI-capitalist movement. Libertarians understood this in the 19th century and lost sight of it in the 20th. But we're back. Your attacks on the version of libertarianism that is thankfully dying don't address the more authentic version of it that's being reborn.

To this I replied:

You can stipulate all you want to the contrary, but the results are in.

You know, this isn't exactly the first time -- nor even the thousandth -- that libertopians have contemplated the world of shit enabled by their ideology and then disdained all responsibility for the result only to magically rediscover "the truer true truth" that would be magic and not shit and then demand a do-over, this time gooder and harder and for-true, only to arrive in the shit once again as night follows day, after the usual scammers indulge the usual fraudulent skim, natch.

Just so you know, what it actually looks like when people really learn lessons like the one you are claiming to have learned is that you act differently as a result of learning it. You don't just double down on all your articles of faith and re-embark immediately on the same madness expecting a different result this time, this time, this time! -- of course, the truth is you libertopians just want to dream your dumb feudal dream and learning and understanding doesn't come into it.

We're onto you.

Also, too, is your name really Long Rod or is that just your porn name?

Friday Wilde

Sleepwalking over to the Dogpatch campus, lecturing on Oscar Wilde, Earnest and Soul of Man.

Magic Turns Out Once Again to Be Crap

Faster than light neutrinos appear to have been an artifact of crappy wiring and pop-tech hyperventilation. Science fiction is still not the same thing as science, something fans of the one and champions of the other should celebrate. Everyone should pat the head of a Robot Cultist who has a sad.

Graduation Day in Crazytown University

Adapted and Upgraded from the Moot:

I think another underappreciated thing is that post-2010 GOP overreach has actually provided some real world education for many hitherto "low-information" voters (not jobs but Union-Busting, not jobs but state-mandated nonconsensual transvaginal probe rape), and that this provides some inoculation against phony sales pitches and framing over substance approaches (whether of the wingnut Luntz variety or the lefty Lakoff variety). I'm not proposing that complacent couch-potato Americans have seen the light or that the Citizen's United money avalanche will have no impact (obviously, it already has), but I do think GOP crazytown has started running up against some you can't fool all the people all the time hard limits.

Bretton Woods Gott DAMN

A long lost eight hundred page real-time transcript of the Bretton Woods conference has been found. Although Keynes advocated the creation of the "bancor" world currency and an international clearing union incomparably more progressive than the IMF, the Bretton Woods system is often wrongly characterized as a Keynesian triumph rather than the best compromise Keynes could wrangle, and it is much to be hoped that this wrangling will now be more visible, since accounts of Bretton Woods have hitherto been highly interested even when interesting secondhand recollections rather than the sort of first hand accounts a transcript should provide. Is it wrong that I am so excited?

More Like This

PolitcalWire:

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) has lost a hair stylist thanks to her position against gay marriage... Antonio Darden, a popular stylist who runs Antonio's Hair Studio in Santa Fe, said he cut Martinez' hair three times, but that's it -- unless she changes her mind about gay marriage. Said Darden: "The governor's aides called not too long ago, wanting another appointment to come in. Because of her stances and her views on this I told her aides no. They called the next day, asking if I'd changed my mind about taking the governor in and I said no again."

Don't Be Afraid

For years I have been repeating over and over that the left already won the culture wars (for example, here and here) and that our politics should reflect that reality. My point has never been to underestimate the damage that can still be done by the reactionary right to women's health, lifeway diversity, science-based policy and so on -- but just to insist we engage in these struggles in ways that reflect the actual terms at hand, understand for instance the disciplinary power that accrues to desperate losers, grasp the complacency that lulls victors out of proper vigilance, takes up opportunities that present themselves only for a moment to re-write inertial institutions in the image of actually prevailing secular multicultural views.

It is from this vantage that I am reading Digby's recent warnings against those (I am one) who think the raucous recent Republican return to culture war issues is benefiting the secular left and partisan Democrats in particular. She keeps pointing out that all this "religious hoo hah" can indeed get real traction and do real damage. And of course that is true. Anyone who actually cares about women's healthcare has been observing with horror and rage the generation long circumscription of abortion rights and family planning services by a thousand small cuts by the patriarchal champions of forced-pregnancy and forced-birth. For years, feminists have pointed out that anti-abortion rhetoric was the iceberg tip of an anti-contraception anti-women's health constituency while a majority of Americans pretended that their secular multicultural and pro-healthcare attitudes were prevalent and that the realities of the anti-choice organizing were absurd and marginal. Although I agree with Digby and every other sensible decent person that the spectacle of Republican religionist women hating is highly dangerous and distasteful, the fact is that I already knew all that, I was already plenty disgusted, I already understand the real damage being done, I already knew the gains stealthy anti-choice organizing were making in the country.

And now, because of the right-wing influence that briefly inspired the Susan G. Komen Foundation to attack Planned Parenthood, then the all-male presumably celibate in fact pedophile-enabling Catholic Bishops' attack on the Obama administration's policy to limit their imposition on pro-choice Catholics and non-Catholics alike their own bias against family planning, then the right-wing Virginia state government's efforts to mandate the de facto rape (nonconsensual vaginal probing) and then harassment (medically unnecessary or even dangerous and highly costly and inconvenient waiting period) of any woman seeking an absolutely legal and reasonable medical procedure (the wanted or needed termination of a pregnancy), then the highly public denunciations by all-male Congressional panels or by old white guys seeking the GOP Presidential nomination of contraception practices that have been fully normalized and approved by the overwhelming majority of everyday Americans as part of their everyday lives for decades, because of all that awful nonsense, now students of mine who have refused to describe themselves as feminists (which has annoyed me to no end for years) are now affirming the label, people who dismissed knowledgeable warnings about the anti-woman extremism of Republican and religionist forces in this country have observed the evidence to the contrary with their own eyes, people with ugly, evil, ignorant views and intentions who would have had these views and intentions whether we are talking about it or not and would be acting on them whether we are talking about them or not are now exposed in their evil and their ignorance and we are talking about it, talking the talk out of which will emerge the mass education, agitation, and organization without which this necessary battle for women's health, women's dignity, and the legal and moral standing of a diversity of non-patriarchal gendered lifeways can flourish.

Although it is true that not all battles are won, and it is true that losses in these battles are truly horrifying, it seems to me beyond question that the battle is afoot whether it is visible or not, that however ugly the spectacle it is better for bad views to be exposed to scrutiny the better to be targeted for righteous destruction on their actual terms, and that, frankly, we are winning this battle and that we will win this battle and that this is a battle worth winning, so let's actually have the goddamn battle and win it.

If I may appear to change the subject for a moment, I notice that another brilliant and reliably progressive commenter David Sirota is now making an argument that re-enacts Digby's concerns in slightly different terms:

Among progressive[s]... there seems to be a consensus that the longer the Republican presidential primary continues the better for progressives. The idea is that Republican infighting weakens the ultimate nominee and exposes just how radical all of the GOP candidates are. As the domino theory goes, that will help more Americans see the ugly truth about what the Republican Party really is, which will subsequently convince more Americans to vote against the GOP, which will eventually force the GOP to moderate its politics. Straightforward as this hypothesis is, I don’t buy it -- I believe the longer the Republican primary battle continues, the more the GOP’s most extreme proposals are given a mainstream platform, the more their ideas are granted public credibility and the more conservative propaganda is invisibly woven into our most basic political assumptions.

Again, I find it very hard to understand what practical implications we are supposed to draw from this sort of line of thinking. Do progressives think they are right or not? If they think they are right, then do they want to struggle for what is right or not? If they are up for the struggle, why on earth would they prefer the wrong and dangerous views they oppose to play out in secret rather than in the light? How can we fight the feudal social and cultural views of Movement Republicanism at all if the actual terms of the fight are invisible or distorted? Of course it is true, again, that when a battle is actually afoot it is not always the good guys who will win every skirmish and losses are indeed awful in the lived consequences for the vulnerable. But these losses have already happened, are already happening -- David Sirota's whole career is premised on the recognition of such realities. Why shrink from them now?

In both Digby and Sirota I sense the worries of people who are not quite changing with the times. Of course, it is often the steadfast resolution of our indispensable truth tellers and standard bearers in dark times that makes them less flexible in the face of opportunity when dark times offer a faint suggestion of the dawn. I think we cannot overestimate the significance of the fact that majorities of Americans affirmed the policy outcomes advocated by progressives even during the catastrophic generational consolidation of Movement Republican politics, from Reagan, to Gingrich, to W., to the Teavangelical mid-term wave. White-racist and heterosexist Culture Wars divided people who work for a living from their shared interests. But -- crucially -- demographic shifts and liberalizing attitudes toward queer folks have undermined that strategy fatally. An institutional structure of corporate media fed by pseudo-intellectuals on wingnut welfare subsidized in the phony-Academy of ubiquitous deceptive PR firms and "think tanks" (the result of the turn to organized politics in the aftermath of the New Deal by two hitherto non-partisan constituencies, big business and evangelical religion) shouted down popular pro-equity pro-diversity pro-democracy voices and marginalized practical policy proposals reflecting such values. But -- again, crucially -- progressive peer-to-peer formations, think-tanks and media outlets have emerged and gained enormous audiences over the last ten years, to undermine Movement Republican attacks, disinformation campaigns, arguments (such as they are), frames, and so on.

In the wholesomely browning, diversifying, secularizing, planetizing real America, giving white-racist, woman-hating, gay-hating, war-mongering, climate-change denialist "most extreme proposals... a mainstream platform" means giving them a high concrete platform over an empty pool for them to leap into to their death. The institutional terrain "grant[ing] public credibility" to unpopular nonsensical right wing views and weaving "conservative propaganda... invisibly... into our most basic political assumptions" no longer exists in the form it so long has done, ThinkProgress and MediaMatters provide pithy rapid response to reactionary proposals and attitudes, YouTube clips circulate progressive democratizing MSNBC, CurrentTV and Comedy Central exposes and satirical bits to millions upon millions of Americans. What was invisible is now visible, what was a monologue is now a scrum, what was a stealth offensive is now an open battle and a call to arms.

The battle is on whether we like it or not, the battle is worth winning, we're on the right side of the battle on the merits and with the numbers, the institutional hurdles that long bedeviled our side are crumbling. Fight the damn battle.

Don't be afraid.

"The Grigsby Episode"

In my graduate seminar Friday I will be teaching "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" by Oscar Wilde along with his "Phrases and Philosophies for the Instruction of the Young" and his defensive "Preface" to his novel Dorian Gray. The latter pieces are strings of gem-like paradoxes without any of the conventional scaffolding of evidence, inference, framing, transitions to elaborate their arguments. It is intriguing that this is the highly unorthodox form of argument with which Wilde chooses to defend his scandalous novel, given the stakes, and the vulnerability of this intriguing choice is all the more conspicuous when we consider the way the exactly equally paradoxically aphoristic "Phrases and Philosophies" were taken up by the prosecutors in Wilde's Socratic indecency trials and used against him at the witness stand (the most relevant trial transcripts are here).

In my reading of Wilde's "Soul of Man" we discern much the the same argumentative strategy, even if the piece appears more conventionally essay-like, and we discover at once Wilde's masterly deployment of paradox -- eg, "A community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime"; or, "The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes" -- as well as the collapse of his larger argument (which begins by demonstrating that we are universally enslaved by the possessions we pretend free us but ends by re-erecting this same enslaving possessiveness in the relation of artists to their works) into a self-consuming paradox the moment Wilde's threatening queerness comes into the picture. (A rumbling in the background that only becomes fully evident in what otherwise might seem the anticlimactic last line of the essay -- "The new Individualism is the new Hellenism." -- but which in fact presses the key to the piece in our hands in the end.)

As with all the works of political economy and aesthetic philosophy we've been reading this term I've been assigning roughly contemporaneous mannered comedies for the seminar to read -- prosaic spectacles like "The Man of Mode" and "The Way of the World," created as of-the-moment documents of their time's conspicuous follies and foibles, focused as they are on social and cultural details that tend to zero in symptomatically on precisely the problems and anxieties attested to in the political and economic theory we are also reading, resonating with the emerging categories and recurring subjectivities of liberalism/neoliberalism.

The special pleasure for the seminar in reading Wilde is that for once the same author pens both the theory and the play (there are precursors, by the way, Congreve, Steele, but the seminar is moving too swiftly to more than scratch the surface of these details). Anyway, while preparing my lecture notes I came upon a YouTube clip from Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" in which the director has chosen to re-introduce a scene that is rarely but occasionally performed. You may know that Wilde's original four act play was subsequently re-written as the three act work we now know and adore. Many lines were cut, but almost none of them are especially to be missed. But one scene, known as "the Grigsby Episode" was somewhat more substantial and, more to the point, is playing with themes and legal details that matter to the way my seminar is reading mannered comedies as political economy and aesthetic documents, its frenetic farcical plots and character lampoons incarnating developing relations between aesthetics and politics as bourgeois capitalism and then postwar consumerism and corporate-military globalism emerge (the seminar moves on to Noel Coward, Joe Orton, and Jennifer Saunders as we move toward our own political quandaries).

Anyway, these are the things on my mind at the moment. Here is the clip from the production I mentioned including the "Grigsby Episode." If you don't know the play, I would actually recommend you acquaint yourself with the canonical version first, before enjoying this curious little supplement.

Blogjam

While it remains true that Republicans are all crazytown fascists and that futurologists are all hucksters peddling pseudo-science at best and Robot Cult pseudo-faith at worst, I just am not feeling particularly inspired at the moment to point this out over and over and over again. No doubt my hilarity or outrage needle with twitch again and propel me soon enough into writing on my usual themes, but, I dunno, today...? I got nothing.

It's Off To Work We Go

Today in my Critical Theory survey course it's psychoanalysis and especially the fabulous Dr. Schreber, come on down!

The Pitch of Ru's Pitch

Not a comment on Ru Paul qua pitcher, have no fear.... it's just that Eric and I were watching Dragrace and Untucked this evening and we were chuckling about how Ru's self-promotional ubiquity on the show (her portrait everywhere, the name-dropping and snippets of her singles continually, the ready-to-hand product placement in every nook and cranny) really does put even Tyra to shame, and yet somehow neither of us are the least bit annoyed by it, whereas the self-promotional flogging of nearly every other celebrity we can think of is like fingernails on a chalkboard even when it is far less incessant than Ru Paul's. I wonder what might account for that? It isn't just that we find Ru Paul comparatively likeable and appealingly intelligent as celebrities go, though we do, since we like, say, Jane Lynch easily as much and yet find her shilling fairly unbearable; and it isn't that Ru Paul manages to market herself in a satiric sort of way since of course lots of celebrities try that sort of winking nudging mode of self-promotion and manage only to seem smarmy and awful (even Kathy Griffin, and we love her anyway). Maybe it is the specifically camp dimension of Ru Paul's marketing schtick that makes it palatable -- certainly I fondly recall to this day Carrie Donovan, Morgan Fairchild, and Magic on one of the few actually successfully campy commercial series, for Old Navy (often imitated never duplicated, including by Old Navy). I think camp must be hard to do in marketing because it is not sarcastic but ironic, not ambivalent but fully invested, not opportunistic but aggressive in its enjoyments. Almost all advertizing is kitsch, but camp probably feels like a very threatening aesthetic for the suits and pocketbooks.

"Let the Market Decide" Always Means "Let Rich People Decide"

More Dispatches from Libertopia here.

Kenyan Muslim Socialist Global Warmism

The momentary controversy over a Santorum spokes-shill slip-up today slotting in canned nonsense criticism of Obama's "Radlical Islamic Policy" rather than canned nonsense criticism of Obama's "Radical Environmentalist Policy" (brrrpp! -- Andrea Mitchell is MSNBC not FOX, please make a note of it, brrrrpp!) has not yet taken in what struck me as more odd by far than scrambled deceptive talking-points. What is this business of Obama being accused (pre-mix-up and presumably pre-controversial) of adhering to a theological doctrine called "Global Warmism"? As though documented rising planetary temperatures is some kind of kooky cult with an online manifesto and a secret handshake and membership dues, rather than, you know, a matter of being aware of well substantiated facts and concerned about their consequences.

Full disclosure: I am a dues-paying member of the "Water Is Wetism" and "World Is Roundism" faiths.

But You Can Always Put A Gun In Your Mouth or Vote Republican Which Is Much the Same Thing

Newt Gingrich "Let me start from a simple premise that Oklahomans will understand: you cannot put a gun rack in a Volt."

Programming Note

Rather preoccupied with school things at the moment, blogging appears to be a trickle. Sorry about that.

Long Teaching Day Ahead....

It's Marx day in my grad seminar... and since the fetishism of commodities sets the scene for our subsequent readings of Benjamin, Adorno, Lukacs, Althusser, Debord, and Naomi Klein, it's an important lecture to get just right. Then we're taking up Gay's Beggar's Opera, which is a bright bitter pill to swallow. My MA thesis workshop later in the afternoon looks to be more than usually intense, since it's getting to be crunch time for some of the students with still unresolved argumentative or writing issues this year. And the framing of all this with the hour-long slog through cold musty trains near rush hour is sure to be the usual treat. I wanna go back to bed!