Bleary

Given yesterday morning's post, you will be unsurprised to hear that I slept thirteen hours last night, and woke up with a rat's nest on my head, no good for anything but watching Cranford DVDs all day.

Long Night's Journey Into Day

Ended up pulling an all nighter editing thesis drafts from my MA cohort, and now face a long teaching day at the Dogpatch campus, teaching the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, thinking Hobbes as precursor to Mill's homo economicus and talking about Rochester and the Man of Mode in my graduate seminar and then meeting individually with my MA students all afternoon. I'm not feeling too tired at the moment but expect I'll be fending off exhaustion on the train back home hours and hours from now. It would seem that college life simply imposes these follies on one occasionally, however one plans or prepares. I've been turning in all-nighters since I was an undergraduate, writing papers and later grading them, nearly thirty years now, even though I'm a veritable geezer ill-suited to their exactions these days, I'm afraid.

Atheist

Personally, I do without god. Isn’t that what "a-theist" means, anyway?

“I’m Running for President, for Pete’s Sake, I Can’t Have…”

I’m the furthest thing from surprised that an American multi-bazillionaire like Mitt Romney employs transparently inequitable but legal tax dodges and loopholes and shelters to insulate his ill-gotten gains from being taxed in a way that would make such a beneficiary of American norms and infrastructure pay his fair share to support them.  Obviously, all these rich guys do most of that crap. But I must say it really is a little perplexing that when such a multi-bazillionaire also happens to spend more than a decade running for President he doesn’t polish and prune and fumigate the most damning details of these financial shenanigans long before they would attract the inevitable scrutiny of actual primary contests as his party’s frontrunner.

I mean, quite apart from the hypocritical unpleasantness of caring so conspicuously and so opportunistically about optics over substance every single moment, from moment to moment, whatever the soul-pretzeling demanded by that in the first place, what the hell was Romney thinking just leaving all these blatantly obvious landmines lying around all this time? Have all the competent professionals just left the GOP in despair, preferring to work with people who, you know, appreciate science and aren’t bigots? Is Romney just so insulated by privilege that he dismisses efforts to connect him to the perceptions and problems of people who work for a living without whose votes he cannot win the Presidency he so covets?

And if I can be forgiven a sudden topical veer, since I’m pointing out perplexities rather than the usual disagreements about policy and facts, just why is it that Romney so covets the Presidency anyway? Why keep fighting for it famously in the face of so much antipathy from his colleagues? Why invite so much scrutiny, especially given how obviously uncomfortable it makes him personally? It’s not that he’s on some kind of crusade, given his flabbergasting flip-flops on issue after issue. I’ve still yet to understand why he even wants the job so desperately… because it’s there? To kill time? To check off a box on his superrich white guy bucket list? Is it like W. again, some sick rich asshole inflicting his Daddy issues on the whole world via the GOP party apparatus? Honestly, what is it with this guy?

Scientist Discovers Deathly Hallow...

...but cautiously urges the sensationalist press that even with the Invisibility Cloak in hand two more Hallows must still be found before she can reasonably expect to be considered for a Nobel Prize or declared Master of Death.

Newt’s Loony Lunar Promise

Presumably, Newt Gingrich’s futurological declaration today about a Moon Base within a decade was not meant as an admission of his eagerness to frak and drill and deforest the earth into a dead moonscape dotted with military bases, but was just a symptom of his usual grandiosity as he became momentarily distracted with daydreams of a Glorious Gingrichian Golden Age within his grasp at last, at last! This becomes even clearer when we discover that Gingrich offered up a number of other futurological promises in the speech which remain as yet under-reported, among them a promise to migrate the White House into an L5 torus from which asteroids would be tossed to smite his enemies, a promise to end the recession by unleashing programmed nanobotic swarms that will transform America’s Blue States at a molecular level into self-regenerating multi-ton layer cake archipelagos that can be had and eaten, too, and a promise that all who believe in him will have everlasting life once he uploads what he described as their "data-souls" into cyberspace (which he also promised would be heaven and not hell despite bugs, crashes, surveillance, and spam).

More Evidence That Both Sides Are Equally Crazy!

It has been widely discussed that Republican State Senator Ralph Shortey of Oklahoma City introduced Bill 1418 yesterday, prohibiting "the sale or manufacture of food or products which contain aborted human fetuses." But less well known so far, no doubt due to Liberal Media Bias, is that here in the Bay Area Democrats have expressed their San Francisco Values by introducing a Bill the very same day to reclassify aborted fetuses as vegetables so that even vegetarian liberals can continue to eat the fetus flesh we all so desperately crave.

Nancy Pelosi's Secret Plan to End the Whore

Contrary to right-wing conspiracists -- who seem to have a dread of Nancy Pelosi bordering either on the psychotic or the supernatural, depending on the flavor of their particular wingnuttery -- everything that the once and future Speaker of the House "knows" about why Newt Gingrich will never be President is knowable by anybody who cares to spend ten minutes skimming the public record, as Greg Sargent patiently elaborates, and not for the first time, here.

The Grumpy Old Piss-ants Party Is Mourning In America

 As far as the nation is concerned, it would seem that the Republican contribution to the President's stirring practical fair-minded State of the Union Address last night amounts to the image of Eric Cantor's supremely sour facial expression throughout the speech together with the decline and fall narrative and austerity for all but the already rich prescriptions of Mitch Daniels' dreary Republican Response providing the caption.

While critics deride the conspicuous exhaustion of the GOP's Gipper Pep and delusional can-do Zazz (Is that weepy John Boehner I hear in the background, with his "Hell, no you can't!" banshee howl?), I think it is only fair to point out that Republicans are not demoralized by phantoms, after all, but by palpable realities: the wholesome demographic diversification of the nation has stolen the racist Southern Strategy and gay bashing culture war flogging away from them at last.

With less hate to divide the people who work for a living from one another and provide cover for their pro-plutocracy activism the GOP finds itself at the margins of an ever more secular multiculture, and is forced to appeal precisely to the most desperate dwindling dead-end extremists and know-nothings in their coalition for organizational energy at the cost of ongoing accelerating self-marginalization. When Republicans rail about decline it is not America's but their own they are testifying to, and the decline is real, as is their pain.

The Republicans have plenty to be grumpy about. You see, they are right: the mean parochial white racist America they love is going, going, gone for good, and they are not ever going to get it back. They lost the culture wars, they are losing the political wars, they are on the verge of losing the social wars, and either they will lose or in winning we will all lose the sustainability war.

I'll Give Daniels This, Though --

His little speech was less robotic than Mitt Romney would have been, and less demonic than Newt Gingrich would have been, while differing from neither of them very much on the likely substance -- if substance is a word one can apply to such nonsense.

Pick One UPDATED

In the official Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address, embattled Indiana governor Mitch Daniels said we can no longer afford to fund the safety net and yet called for more tax breaks for the rich. Quite apart from how obscenely skewed are the priorities expressed in such a vision, how does it make any kind of sense to declare we can afford to blow trillions giving handouts to the already rich while we cannot afford providing basic security to the vulnerable majority who work for a living to the benefit of all? America is an unimaginably rich nation and Democrats know we can indeed afford to provide security and equity for our people in our diversity. Republicans say we cannot afford anything while at once bellowing to lard billionaires with more of the money they say we cannot afford. For heaven's sake, pick one! Daniels revealed that even at their most reasonably modulated, Republicans in this moment of their utter debasement offer nothing to the country but incoherence in the service of injustice.

UPDATE: Steve Benen patiently elaborates the deceptions and absurdities in Daniels' address.

Emma Lazarus

But Al Gore Is Fat

Frakking is bringing earthquakes to the mid-west, and carbon pollution is bringing tornado swarms to the South in January. Sounds like it's high time for more tax cuts for the rich!

Law and Order

Always there, on some channel, in some incarnation, stalwart, steady, and true, when you sit down on the couch with your sandwich. Easy to figure out even if you arrive in the middle of the episode, always easy to turn off when you’re done whether the episode is over or not, always engaging enough while you munch away when MSNBC is in prison mode or Joe Scarborough is on.

Dueling Pedants: Vulture Capitalist Edition

I realize that vultures actually perform a vitally important role in the ecosystems of which they are a part and that, hence, describing enterprises like Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital -- which swoop in on local communities, engage in leveraged buyouts, shut down plants, ship jobs overseas, sell everything that isn’t bolted down, restructure businesses often deliberately into bankruptcy, sometimes devastating whole communities so that a handful of already filthy rich predators can take the money and run -- as “vulture capitalists” is deploying a metaphor which ecologists know to be, stricto sensu, inapt. However, as a rhetorician (who also happens to teach environmental politics) I must say that what matters at least as much as this particular mismatch is that “vulture capitalist” sounds almost the same as the “venture capitalist” Mitt Romney falsely claims to be, a serendipitous euphony that provides a rare occasion for a lethal and memorable pun, instantly replacing Romney’s self-congratulatory fraud with the image of a very scary skinny predatory bird not exactly dissimilar in appearance from Romney himself and redolent with precisely the associations of gorging on death one would want people to think of when they think of Bain Capital. While one must concede the ecologist their point, I daresay it is not unreasonable to propose they focus on the wholesome project of doing justice to the ecological role of the vulture at some other time than the entirely unrelated moment when pundits and politicians are trying to score quick points against evil assholes who are destroying lives with predatory financial schemes and then expecting to be celebrated for it as job creators? So, I see your Nelly Olson and raise you one Henry Higgins.

Mahjong

I realize I've gone more than a whole day without blogging at this point, and you deserve to know that the entire reason is that I've been obsessively playing Mahjong Titans on my new computer instead. Confessing this in public is my penance for lamely blowing my weekend in this way.

Newt! Newt! Newt! Newt!

For anybody who wants Democrats not only to keep the White House in 2012 but wants a Democratic administration that can actually implement the agenda it has a mandate for with Democratic partners in the Senate and Congress, today is a very good day. Stupid bigots of South Carolina, I salute you!

Who Is Gingrich Really Putting In Their Place?

Newt Gingrich is surging right now because a whole lot of Republican racists think Gingrich is putting black people “in their place” through his slurs against the work-ethic of hard working Americans like Juan Williams (whose betrayal by the GOP serves him right and which he was quite foolish not to expect) and through his misleading sloganizing against food stamps, an indispensable program in hard times like these on which more struggling white Americans than black ones currently depend.

Newt Gingrich is surging because a whole lot of Republican patriarchal pricks think Gingrich is putting women “in their place” when he calls his ex-wife a liar because she pointed out that he is a serial philanderer who has demonstrated a distressing tendency heartlessly to divorce his wives whenever they become sick or vulnerable and actually need him, despite his pious grandstanding about his family values and his leading the charge against a popular sitting President for philandering even while he was doing so himself (the Clinton marriage, by the way, remained intact).

Newt Gingrich is surging right now because a whole lot of Republican crybaby paranoids (the same ones who think themselves to be relentlessly tortured victims in their perfectly normal unchallenged Christianity just because different people than them also happen visibly to exist) think Gingrich is putting a phantom liberal media “in its place” through his declarations that it is outrageous to point out perfectly well-substantiated and already widely known instances of his misconduct, hypocrisy, deception, and corruption.

Newt Gingrich is surging right now because a whole lot of stupid Republicans think Gingrich is smart just because he is shameless and unscrupulous (Republicans do this a lot, it is the reason Karl Rove is considered a genius rather than simply a sociopath for example), and because they fantasize that he will deploy his stunning genius in debates to “put in his place” an African-American President they think to be a Teleprompter-dependent welfare-case rather than the consummately brilliant, accomplished, competent, inspiring, likeable reality of Barack Obama.

All this is just to say that right now, right before our eyes, an ignorant inept mean-spirited hysterical out of touch white racist woman-hating gay-hating war-mongering Republican base is putting itself in its proper place… as an utterly ugly dysfunctional neo-confederate rump at the margins of a nation that is wholesomely promisingly browning, secularizing, democratizing, socializing, ecologizing more and more with every passing day.

The GOP Is Not Re-Staging the 2008 Obama-Clinton Primary Contest

Many GOP consultants are now trying to spin this recent turn of their primary contest from coronation to bloody slog as a positive development, comparing this toxic train wreck with the 2008 competition between Obama and Clinton. What I have to assume is that these consultants are hoping nobody notices the difference between a competition between two brilliant, talented, historically epochal, base-mobilizing candidates like Obama and Clinton whose skirmishes sharpen their abilities and strengthen their organizations, as against a competition between profoundly (even shockingly) flawed candidates whose skirmishes highlight differences that also happen to expose and exacerbate deep (and demographically soon to be fatal) fissures in their party’s coalition and between its base and establishment.

Does anybody in their right mind imagine that a President Romney or Gingrich would invite their palpably despised rival into the highest imaginable place in their own administration and with a comparable expectation of the finest service, as Obama rightly expected of Clinton? Of course not. But, then, nobody really expects any of these killer clowns actually to win the White House either, now, do they? Nor should they. Emperor, meet your new clothes.

Obama Is the Big Winner Three for Three

A week ago I was feeling rather disappointed that South Carolina looked to represent a three and three coronation for Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee for President. Today I am rather pleased to see South Carolina as the state that looks to be the threshold into a months-long primary competition, with three different winners in the first three states, and the prospect of the still-inevitable nominee Romney arriving at his convention bloodied beyond recognition and resented beyond bearing because of attacks and critiques from other Republicans which Obama surrogates will go on to reprise devastatingly in the general, but now with the imprimatur of bipartisanship and without any implication of “going negative” in an already entirely negative environment. Heck, if in the general Obama continues to draw the contrast with Romney in the deft and understated manner being previewed so far even his negativity may read as positivity compared with the ugly toxicity of the GOP knife-fight and festival of resentment.

Long Teaching Day

Fridays are my long day this term. I'm off to the Dogpatch campus to teach my graduate seminar (What Now? Aesthetics and Politics Between Past and Future) from nine to noon, then a bit of a break followed by workshopping three hours with my MA Thesis cohort. Shouldn't be too bad, tho', I'll usually manage to be home before dark at any rate. I can already tell that the greatest hurdle in the way of my Fridays is the one-two punch of sweet distraction that is Project Runway All-Stars followed by 24 Hour Catwalk the night before to interfere with course prep...

I Would Rather Fight Romney

I understand why Democrats rub their hands together in glee contemplating a Gingrich or Santorum nomination. Like the imbecile Cain, the secessionist Perry, the dot-eyed loon Bachmann, Gingrich and Santorum are so damaged, so inadequate to the Presidency, so utterly divisive the prospect of a race between any of them and Obama inspires visions of a Goldwater style landslide victory with the kind of coattails that can deliver the House and Senate and give Democrats another bite at the apple of enacting the policies the Obama mandate already afforded but which the unprecedented obstructionism of incompetent, deceptive, traitorous, bigoted, bought and paid for Republicans has restrained.

The thing is, apart from his Mount Rushmore of a head, it is hard for me to see why anybody thinks the universally disliked, awkward, flip-flopping, liberal Massachusetts, serial political failure, richy rich vulture financier, Mormon, creator of the healthcare reform on which was modeled the healthcare reform detestation of which defines Republican hostility above all else is by any available measure a better or stronger candidate than any of the other killer clowns on offer this time around.

I personally prefer Romney as the candidate with whom Obama competes for the Presidency, simply because Romney is so conspicuously the candidate representing the 1% that his nomination best ensures Obama runs more explicitly as he should as the candidate representing the 99%. This means that the 2012 Presidential Campaign can actually provide a tutorial on the utter failure of the neoliberal paradigm and an opening for a renewal of the social democratic impulse imperfectly discerned in the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society.

The other candidates with whom Obama might otherwise spar all provide juicy target-rich environments of bigotry, know-nothingism, extremism, and volatility that might dilute the message that the conspicuous contrast of Mr. One Percent Romney versus President Obama of the People Who Work for a Living makes well-nigh inevitable.

Obama will still win as surely as he would with Santorum or Perry, indeed, we may still be granted our righteous empowering landslide. But above all a battle with Romney continues the lesson begun in Wisconsin through Occupy Summer, and that is a lesson America needs to learn if we are ever to take up in earnest the necessary national task of collaborating with the rest of the world in the building of a sustainable, equitable, diverse, democratic planetary civilization.

I Agree With Kos

Politico on PIPA and SOPA:

Leo Hindery [has warned] Obama might have reason to worry about his entertainment industry fundraising base... The television, movies and music industries donated more than $9 million on Obama last election, according to Center for Responsive Politics, and more than 70 percent of the industries’ donations to federal candidates from employees and political action committees have gone to support Democrats in recent years.

dKos replies:

[H]ow many people are lining up behind the pro-PIPA/SOPA forces? How many regular Americans are fighting alongside the studios? How many petition signatures has the MPAA and RIAA gathered from its customers? The answer is none. There isn't an industry more disdainful of its audience than these self-styled "content producers" (as if they're the only ones producing content). And [when] they aren't busy trying to kill new technologies like the VCR (and the internet), or pre-accusing their customers of being criminals by flashing that insulting FBI warning before every video that they've bought, or suing teenagers and parents for posting videos of their babies dancing to commercial music, then they're working the congressional backrooms to screw the broader public.... Here's the deal, Mr. Fucking Hollywood—don't donate more money. Take your $9 million and shove it up your ass.... Hollywood dinosaurs can whine and cry about how "unfair" it is that everyone hates your fucking guts, and you can weep about how the issue has become "political," as if it wasn't already political the moment you demanded PIPA and SOPA in exchange for millions of dollars in political contributions. Hollywood isn't alone in demanding services for campaign contributions. The Republicans, after all, are owned outright big Big Oil, Pharma and other major corporate interests. But I don't expect good responsive government out of the Republicans. I do expect it from our side.

Here's to the real content providers, the internet Occupied the Media ages ago, peer to peer! All the creative people, all the funny people, all the imaginative people are already on the side of the Democrats, who gives a shit what the suits think in their sinking ships? dKos can raise nine million in a couple weeks, fer cryin out loud! I agree with Kos, it's high time for the Democrats to tell the self-appointed elite-incumbent "content providers" (skimmers, censors, middle-men, vulgarizers, falsifiers all) to shove it if their contributions come with the usual corrupt strings attached. Contact your congress critters if you have not already done so and insist they repudiate PIPA and SOSA. Believe me, even Big Media will be fine without it.

Syllabus for My Graduate Seminar This Spring at SFAI

What Now? Aesthetics and Politics Between Past and Future

Critical Studies 500-1, Spring 2012

Third Street Lecture Hall, Fridays, 9.00-11.45

Instructor: Dale Carrico; dcarrico@sfai.edu

Course Web-Site: whatnowbetweenpastandfuture

Approximate Grade Breakdown: Attendance/Participation 25%; Precis/Co-facilitation 25%; Symposium Presentation 10%; 25pp. Paper 40%

Provisional Schedule of Meetings:

January

Week One | 20 Course and Personal Introductions.

Week Two | 27 Fontenelle Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns | Hobbes, excerpts from Leviathan on Power, Wit, Equality -- Poems by Rochester, all posted on the blog | George Etherege, The Man of Mode

Supplemental: William Temple, On Ancient and Modern Learning, Jonathan Swift, "The Battle of the Books," Luc Ferry, Rights: The New Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns

February

Week Three | 3 Kant Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, What Is Enlightenment? | Willian Congreve, The Way of the World

Supplemental: Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy

Week Four | 10 Schiller, Aesthetic Education of Man | Richard Sheridan, The School for Scandal

Supplemental: Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

Week Five | 17 Engels "Marx as the Darwin of History" on blog, Marx on the Fetishism of Commodities | Adam Smith: excerpts from Wealth of Nations and John Stuart Mill on Homo Economicus, all on the blog | John Gay, The Beggar's Opera

Supplemental: Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature

Week Six | 24 Oscar Wilde, "Soul of Man Under Socialism," and The Importance of Being Earnest, including the cut "Grigsby Episode" on the blog; Preface to Dorian Grey, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, Transcripts of the Wilde Trials.

Supplemental: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process

March

Week Seven | 2 From Aesthetics and Politics, Presentation I, Ernst Bloch Versus Georg Lukacs, Presentation II, Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, pp. 9-99; Fredric Jameson, Reflections in Conclusion, pp. 196-213 | in class screening of Noel Coward, "Hands Across the Sea"

Supplemental: Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline, Paul Gilroy Postcolonial Melancholia

Week Eight | 9 From Aesthetics and Politics, Presentation III, Adorno Versus Benjamin, pp. 100-143 | Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility | Horkheimer and Adorno, Culture Industry; Adorno Culture Industry Revisited | Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto | Joe Orton, The Good and Faithful Servant

Supplemental: Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, Dreamworld and Catastrophe

Week Nine | 16 Spring Break

Week Ten | 23 Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses | Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, "Preface: The Gap Between Past and Future," pp. 3-14, Human Condition: Action (handout) | Kafka Before the Law, and on the blog "Give It Up!"

Supplemental: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Week Eleven | 30 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, and also the Preface to the Third French Edition | Joe Orton, "Entertaining Mr. Sloane"

Supplemental: Roland Barthes, Mythologies

April

Week Twelve | 6 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style | Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp

Supplemental: David Lloyd, Paul Thomas: Culture and the State

Week Thirteen | 13 MFA Reviews

Week Fourteen | 20 in-class screening of Todd Haynes' "Velvet Goldmine," videos on blog by David Bowie, Pet Shop Boys, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga, and others.

Supplemental: From Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, from Jameson,Postmodernism, Bruno Latour We Have Never Been Modern

Week Fifteen | 27 Naomi Klein -- Introduction to No Logo One and Two, and Patriarchy Gets Funky | Claire Bishop Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics -- in-class screening of AbFab episode, "Doorhandle"

Supplemental: David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Saskia Sassen Territory, Authority, Rights

May

Week Sixteen | 4 Symposium
Hand in Final Essay no later than May 8.

Course Objectives:
1. To think the "now" as a modernity substantiated in serial quarrels of ancients and moderns, as a vantage from which offer up aesthetic judgments, and as a provocation to change implicating the aesthetic in the political.
2. To think the relation of aesthetics and politics -- in our own "now," construed as the consummating moment of Neoliberalism -- via a survey of mostly post-marxist aesthetic and cultural theory.
3. To contemplate some of the ways in which cultural/political subjects have made spectacles of themselves for audiences of themselves, especially on stages and screens, roughly concurrently with the ways in which they have struggled to think themselves along the way.
4. To grasp some of the fraught relations of the cultural and the social to one another through the indispensability to each of the state and of the state itself to the states of culture and society.

I'm Not Saying Much These Days

...back to school, bit busy, back soon, boo SOPA, boo PIPA, here's Nico.

Back to School!

First day back teaching, a critical theory survey (here's the syllabus if you're curious). Friday is my intense teaching day this term, today should be quick and painless, administrivial mostly. Still, blogging may be low today -- especially if, as I hope, my new desktop arrives today (my first new computer in over a decade, not counting the hand-me-down Eric gave me a few years ago when he upgraded). No, if you're wondering, I'm not a Mac.