Working Not Working

Spent yesterday putting together teaching requests for next academic year (a nicely bolstering conceit, the thought of me teaching theory to students from around the world in an art school over a century old in San Francisco overlooking the Bay, next year, in a school, a City, a country, a world still managing to exist with all of us still on it...) and prepping my Freud lecture for next Monday (ditto). Today, I meant to read work from my thesis students today and start prepping discussion of texts assigned in cyberlibertarian ideology for my digital anti-democratization course... but I find myself drifting, disgusted, demoralized, dreading what comes next. The Kavanaugh hearing is unbearable, the brazenness of the power-grab, the baldness of the hypocrisy, the spectacle they are making of their eagerness for revenge, their salivation at the prospect of dismantling rights and protections is truly terrifying (and no, I am not "surprised," this isn't an expression of surprise, this is, as I said, an expression of disgust at the disgusting, one in a long line like everybody else's long line, this is why I don't really blog anymore...). Anyway, feeling grossed out and scared for the millionth time these last few years. When I was younger, these feelings would have activated me, made me sharp and loud and ferocious, but now I just feel exhausted and anxious and so sad. I truly fear the upcoming mid-terms are the last comparatively easy chance we have of turning the tide or beginning to turn the tide within our living generation in the ongoing cold civil war of deadly extractive white supremacist cisheteronormative corporate-militarism against the rising sustainable equitable democratic multiculture to a hot war of the utterly disenfranchised majority against fascists and their collaborators. The last chance before that was the election of the flawed, dreary, historically encumbered but conspicuously preferable HRC over the obviously bigoted, incompetent, authoritarian criminal Trump and we failed that one, so I'm not nearly as confident as some seem to be that we will pass the test of the mid-terms any better than the last one (especially given that unprecedented levels of disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and foreign interference will mean privileged white voters, a majority of whom obviously cannot be trusted to vote for decency and sense, will have a disproportionate say in the outcome as usual).