Trying To Talk Politics With Pre-Political Libertarians

It's never easy to talk about politics in fundamental terms since we are so apt to mistake custom for nature, rites for rights, contingencies for givens, but with libertarians of especially the anarcho-capitalist sort this difficulty becomes next to impossible since theirs is an essentially pre-political outlook that has come to be treated as a political one and in many respects even, disastrously and flabbergastingly enough, as political orthodoxy.

It is conventional for libertarians to identify the state with violence and to treat advocacy of government reform, even reform to address violence and abuse, as always only an advocacy of violence. It is crucial from the beginning to recognize that the mighty always may abuse and prey upon the less mighty or less lucky, and also that the beneficiaries of abuses are ever prone to rationalize might as right. But all of this inheres in the sociality of the human condition. It is not brought into existence by the state, but tyrannical governance can amplify these ills just as democratic governance can ameliorate them.

What libertarians fancy as a desirable demolition of government violence (and so, too, those Republicans who advocate the endless shrinking of government without indicating its proper function, who advocate deregulation without end, who advocate "starving the beast" through the elimination of ever more tax revenues) would neither disincline the mighty from violence nor disinvent the implements through which they engage in violence. Defensive and predatory associations would persist in their bloodymindedness, hierarchical fiefdoms presided over by brutal or charismatic leaders would persist in their misconduct all the while retro-actively rationalizing it all to themselves and to others whenever the occasion permits, mighty powers and organizations would rise and fall in a clash of muscular violence in their interminable gory pageant. It is not democracy that creates this state of affairs of course but seeks to respond to its waste and violence by creating alternative mechanisms for the comparatively nonviolent succession through regular elections of social leadership across many co-operating jurisdictional layers, just as courts create comparatively nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes but in so doing hardly bring disputation as such into existence.

It's true of course that state institutions -- legislative, judicial, administrative -- may rely in extremity on the violent potential of warden or police or army to abide in their legitimate work in the face of disruption or threat. Nevertheless, to treat the presence or absence of legitimate courts to which citizens may make equitable recourse with a reasonable expectation of justice as no different in respect to violence, or to treat the presence or absence of periodic elections of citizens to posts to which majorities are eligible to hold office by citizens majorities of whom are eligible to vote as no different in respect to violence is to treat with indifference differences that make all the difference in the world.

The issues extend deeper and wider than you might think. Public goods that are described as non-excludable (which roughly means they are accessible to all) and also non-rival (which roughly means they are not immediately consumed in use) like public utility infrastructure or a healthy, educated citizenry, and also common goods that are described as non-excludable but rival, like a stressed atmosphere or aquifer, can only be profitably privatized through the externalization of social costs in what amounts to a second order register of violence or abuse rendered visible only through the emergence of civic institutions, a register of violence and abuse that is equitably adjudicable only through their socialization. Of course, there's no reason necessarily to treat the overwhelming abundance of excludable goods as anything but private, whether as commodities for sale or products freely offered under other arrangements. But what matters here is that the private ownership of commodities will depend on the maintenance of a context of public and common goods that are not commodities and cannot properly be privatized at all, and that the socialization and public administration of these goods is still a matter of the creation of alternatives to violence and injustice (even if the connection are less intuitive, arising as they do in the context of complex civic arrangements).

So, too, I will add, do the provision of basic healthcare, education, reliable information, income, equal access to law and opportunity function to ensure that when one consents to the demands, risks, costs, terms of private enterprise, that the scene of that consent is actually informed and non-duressed, and therefore legitimate. In the absence of such guarantees (and they have never been more than partially fulfilled hitherto in history), and precisely to the extent that they are lacking, "consent" is all too prone as we well know to be an empty ritual concealing wage slavery and military conscription via poverty and precarity of a kind continuous with forms of human trafficking we pretend to be long behind us. Again, what matters here is that those who bemoan as a kind of "enslavement" the provision of welfare via a taxation that curtails their extravagance fail to grasp that this provision is indispensable to the scene of consent on which we all depend else we risk enslavement ourselves.

In other words, the provision of the sorts of public and common goods that are often denigrated as "positive" supplemental artificial extractive liberty as distinguished from "negative" neutral natural spontaneous liberty actually are continuous with one another, together delineating what is never more than a contingent artificial ritual production of a space of liberty all too easy to treat as spontaneous but all of which is a collective and historical accomplishment depending first of all on good government.

So long as many on the left glibly identify property as theft and taxes as the price of civilization, and so long as many on the right glibly identify taxes as theft and pretend the maintenance of public goods could be left to charitable generosity it will be difficult to be clear about the crucial differences that separate the categories of prices, taxes, charities, their different functions and what they differently depend on, and political discourse will remain profoundly confused and incommensurable by the pet "clarifying" analogies deployed on all sides.

Prices tend to arise in the give and take of private enterprise enabled through the public maintenance of international treaties, trade regulations, reliable banking and insurance institutions, commercial norms, material and ritual networks of transportation, information, and communication; -- taxes tend instead to reflect the arbitrary distribution of benefit from this public infrastructure in order to maintain equitable private recourse to it; -- while voluntarisms offer pleasures that are not reducible to the satisfactions conferred by the consumption of commodities available for sale at a price nor accomplished in commodity exchange but through signals of community belonging.

None of this is easy to telescope into a sentence or two, and there's plenty of reasonable dispute around the edges and on matters of detail. But "libertarian" formulations often turn on elisions or confusions on these matters in particular.

Now, to provide nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes among a diversity of stakeholders (via courts, elections, the maintenance of a scene of informed nonduressed consent) or an equitable reconciliation of the diverse aspirations of those stakeholders (via representative governance and the social administration of public and common goods) demands the investment of institutions that administer justice and welfare with clear jurisdictional authorities to which all can make equitable recourse in their diversity.

While this enables people to circumvent much strife and abuse, it also creates opportunities for strife and abuse and corruption at the level of the governance itself, in response to which political theorists and policy makers have experimented with a number of institutional arrangements. Among these are the horizontal separation of powers, meant to redirect tendencies to corruption inhering in government's necessary monopoly recourse to force instead into the competitive internal policing of corruption and abuse of force; vertical federalism, meant to facilitate the solution of shared problems at the most local level adequate to their demands; regular periodic election of representatives and officials by the people over whom they have jurisdiction, trial by jury, yoking the revenue on which governance depends to representation, all meant to ensure government remains accountable to the people in whose name it governs; and the administration of oaths connecting public office to the defense of a written Constitution circumscribing its powers and to the support of an open-ended bill of delineated human rights.

To respect these arrangements is to support good government not to abhor government as such. Liberty, after all, is a collective accomplishment enabled through the support of good government, and those who venerate liberty should surely be moved by that veneration not to smash the state, but to democratize it.

I find too many libertarians prone to declare whatever I say, however genial or persuasive in tone, to be essentially hateful, "contaminated" by its defense of a democratic governance they reduce to violence, willy-nilly, indifferent to the different forms government can assume, and all the while declaring market exchanges non-coercive by fiat whatever the real terms of inequity that may articulate them. Again in sublime indifference to realities on the ground, too often they refuse to address negative real-world impacts of arguments and policies by Republicans and conservatives that were conspicuously inspired by libertarians or often even when they are proposed by self-identified libertarians, declaring bad outcomes always the result of inadequate zeal, declaring their advocates always to be impure or phony libertarians, and yet they continue freely to use these arguments and this label even when their usage in the world includes and depends on wider applications they claim to refuse.

Politics is not engineering, it is not theology, it is not morals: it has a real, distinct content, it corresponds to real, unique experiences, and it has real problems and propositions proper only to itself. To reduce politics to the terms of another domain is to distort it, often beyond recognition, and to forget its content, experiences, problems and propositions may be to lose them, one fears beyond reclamation.

From all this, I can think of at least three key insights indispensable to the grasp of the political and to the achievement of political freedom, each of which can now be captured in a slogan, and all of which libertarianism renders unintelligible and hence impossible: First, the State Only Amplifies or Ameliorates the Violence that Precedes It. Second, Legitimate Consent Requires Public Investment in a Scene that Is Equitable and Informed. Third, Liberty Is A Collaborative Accomplishment that Depends on Democratic Government.

Libertarianism is the eclipse of the political, not a variation on the political. Privatization is a privation of the public, not an alternate provision of it. To declare as non-coercive by definition all market transactions the terms of which are beholden to incumbent elites is not to advocate non-violence, but to endorse an openness to total violence. When we treat life not as lived but as a commodity available at the price of a salary to be exchanged for the satisfaction of consuming still more commodities, we are dispossessed by our possessions, distracted by the mirage of satisfaction from the freedom of emancipation.

Queer Projector: An Honor (and Dishonor) Roll of Queer Film Recommendations

I recommend films to students all the time, among them queer kids who seem to have little sense of history (perhaps after the demolition of the closet this doesn't matter so much) and who have what I take to be much too high a regard for the relentlessly transparent freshly scrubbed bourgeois romantic comedies and issue films that comprise so much "gay cinema" today. That stuff is fine as far as it goes, I suppose, and I enjoy a little cheer mixed with soft porn and a "serious examination of issues of the day" in an after-school special kinda sorta way as much as the next homo after a long tiring work week and so on. But these films offer something more -- and, sometimes, something indispensably less.

For students who are looking, whether they quite realize it or not, for a queer sensibility that attests to something more tragically aspirational, something more promisingly subversive, something more perversely beautiful it seems to me that there is still plenty to value in the queer screen articulated by the paradoxical dynamisms of the closet's open secrets, radical ironies, and testaments to suffering and joy.

The stratification of the scene of consent by the antinomies of equity-in-diversity and the demands of history and luck provide dilemmas to which queerness still vibrantly attests in culture in my view, and you better believe that while the ongoing demolition of the closet and the ongoing struggle to include queer folks in normative institutions is indeed a work of democratization, there are far more radical democratizing demands and struggles afoot which queerness might still differently feed if we let it make its play. Well, that's what I think, anyway.

And so, here are many of the films that I do recommend to folks as queer in some sense or other (also there are a few, a very few, television series I simply couldn't resist), whether in what they say for themselves or in what we like to say of them.

Some are documentary, some are camp, some are underground, some are just gorgeous or gorgeously awful or gorgeously awe-inspiring. I can't explain why I include all of these, I can't explain why I forgot some you would include (remind me what I have missed, or make a case for inclusions of your own, by all means, I admit that I have omitted many B-movie sword and sandals and space opera films that feel to me to deserve inclusion but it opened a can of worms that seemed too exhausting, especially given how quickly the list became how sprawling), and I admit that the list is very much my own, so sometimes my exclusions are matters of taste I feel I am perfectly entitled (no, I didn't forget "Queer As Folk" or "Jeffrey" or "Trick," I excluded them, and cheerfully so).

I am neither a film scholar nor a queer ethnographer -- well, I dabble -- so I have no pretensions of providing a canon here. The list goes by decade, and I begin with the thirties, because that seems to be more or less where my sense of these things begins as well. The 1895 Edison experimental clip "The Gay Brothers" is the place where scholars begin such canonical lists, but for me the story begins with Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo and that hardly seems like something one has to apologize for…

The Thirties

1930 Morocco
1931 Maedchen in Uniform
1932 Grand Hotel
1932 Blond Venus
1932 Freaks
1932 Trouble in Paradise
1933 Our Betters
1933 Queen Christina
1933 Christopher Strong
1934 The Gay Divorcee
1934 The Scarlet Empress
1935 Top Hat
1936 Craig's Wife
1937 Stage Door
1938 Bringing Up Baby
1939 The Wizard of Oz
1939 The Women

The Forties

1940 The Philadelphia Story
1940 Rebecca
1941 The Shanghai Gesture
1941 The Maltese Falcon
1942 Casablanca
1942 Arabian Nights
1943 Shadow of a Doubt
1944 Lifeboat
1944 Cobra Woman
1945 Brief Encounter
1945 Picture of Dorian Gray
1945 Rome, Open City
1946 Humoresque
1946 Gilda
1947 Black Narcissus
1948 The Red Shoes
1948 Rope
1949 Puce Moment
1949 Siren of Atlantis

The Fifties

1950 All About Eve
1950 Sunset Boulevard
1950 Un Chant d'Amour
1950 La Ronde
1950 Rabbit's Moon
1951 A Streetcar Named Desire
1951 Quo Vadis
1951 The Browning Version
1952 The Importance of Being Earnest
1953 The Earrings of Madame de…
1953 Calamity Jane
1953 All I Desire
1953 How to Marry A Millionaire
1953 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
1954 Johnny Guitar
1954 Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
1955 Lola Montez
1955 Summertime
1955 All That Heaven Allows
1955 Rebel Without A Cause
1955 To Catch a Thief
1955 The Trouble With Harry
1955 Queen Bee
1956 The Man Who Knew Too Much
1956 Giant
1956 Written on the Wind
1957 Funny Face
1958 Auntie Mame
1958 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
1959 The Best of Everything
1959 Pillow Talk
1959 North By Northwest
1959 Some Like It Hot
1959 Imitation of Life
1959 Suddenly, Last Summer
1959 Ben Hur

The Sixties

1960 The Fugitive Kind
1960 Peeping Tom
1960 Rocco and His Brothers
1960 The Flower Thief
1960 Spartacus
1961 Splendor in the Grass
1961 Viridiana
1961 The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
1961 Victim
1961 The Children's Hour
1961 Lover Come Back
1962 Sweet Bird of Youth
1962 Dr. No
1962 Jules et Jim
1962 Gypsy
1962 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
1962 Mamma Roma
1962 Lawrence of Arabia
1963 Flaming Creatures
1963 Normal Love
1963 Blow Job
1963 Cleopatra
1963 The VIPs
1964 Scorpio Rising
1964 Straight-Jacket
1964 The Yellow Rolls Royce
1964 Marnie
1964 The Night of the Iguana
1964 Goldfinger
1964 Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte
1964-1972 Bewitched
1965 Sins of the Fleshapoids
1966 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
1966 This Property Is Condemned
1966 Hold Me While I'm Naked
1966 Seconds
1966 Chelsea Girls
1967 Valley of the Dolls
1967 Belle du Jour
1967 I, A Man
1967 Bike Boy
1968 The Lion in Winter
1968 The Bride Wore Black
1968 Teorema
1968 The Killing of Sister George
1968 Funny Girl
1968 Barbarella
1968 Lonesome Cowboys
1968 Flesh
1969 Sweet Charity
1969 Satyricon
1969 The Damned
1969 Midnight Cowboy
1969 Hello, Dolly!
1969 The Milky Way

The Seventies

1970 The Boys in the Band
1970 Entertaining Mr. Sloane
1970 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
1970 The Music Lovers
1970 Trash
1970 Multiple Maniacs
1971 Pink Narcissus
1971 Death in Venice
1971 Decameron
1971 Sunday, Bloody Sunday
1971 Diamonds Are Forever
1971 Women in Revolt
1971 The Devils
1971 Harold and Maude
1972 Cabaret
1972 Pink Flamingos
1972 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
1972 The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
1972 X Y & Zee
1972 The Poseidon Adventure
1972 Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?
1972 Heat
1972 Loot
1973 Andy Warhol's Frankenstein
1973 The Last of Sheila
1974 Female Trouble
1974 The Night Porter
1974 Andy Warhol's Dracula
1974 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
1975 Mahogany
1975 Fox and His Friends
1975 Grey Gardens
1975 A Boy and His Dog
1975 Salo
1975 The Naked Civil Servant
1976 The Ritz
1976 Carrie
1976 Sebastiane
1977 Outrageous!
1977 I, An Actress
1977 Nasty Habits
1977 That Obscure Object of Desire
1978 In a Year With 13 Moons
1979 La Cage Aux Folles
1979 Moonraker

The Eighties

1980 Xanadu
1980 Flash Gordon
1980 Can't Stop the Music
1981 Mommie Dearest
1981 Clash of the Titans
1981 Diva
1981 Lola
1982 Victor Victoria
1982 Veronika Voss
1982 Tootsie
1983 The Hunger
1983 The Dresser
1983 Yentl
1984 Dune
1984 The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
1984 Another Country
1984 Dark Habits
1985 Pee-Wee's Big Adventure
1985 Legend
1985 Kiss of the Spider Woman
1985 The Color Purple
1985 My Beautiful Laundrette
1986 Mala Noche
1986 Parting Glances
1986 Desert Hearts
1986 Matador
1986 Caravaggio
1986 Labyrinth
1987 Maurice
1987 The Princess Bride
1987 Bagdad Cafe
1987 Prick Up Your Ears
1987 I've Heard the Mermaids Singing
1987 The Witches of Eastwick
1987 Law of Desire
1988 Hairspray
1988 Heathers
1988 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
1988 Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
1988 Big Business
1989 Looking for Langston
1989 Steel Magnolias
1989 Slaves of New York

The Nineties

1990 Without You I'm Nothing
1990 Postcards from the Edge
1990 Paris Is Burning
1990 Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
1991 Poison
1991 Thelma and Louise
1991 Young Soul Rebels
1991 High Heels
1991 My Own Private Idaho
1991 Thanksgiving Prayer
1991 Edward II
1991 Madonna: Truth Or Dare
1991 Salmonberries
1992 The Living End
1992 Medusa: Dare To Be Truthful
1992 Death Becomes Her
1992 The Crying Game
1992 Orlando
1992-2004 Absolutely Fabulous
1993 Wittgenstein
1993 Blue
1993 Kika
1994 Super 8 ½
1994 Wild Reeds
1994 The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert
1994 Hudsucker Proxy
1995 Welcome to the Dollhouse
1995 Safe
1995 The City of Lost Children
1995 Showgirls
1995 Clueless
1995 Carrington
1995 Cold Comfort Farm
1995 When Night Is Falling
1995 The Flower of My Secret
1995 To Die For
1996 Irma Vep
1996 Lilies
1996 Crash
1996 Bound
1996 I Shot Andy Warhol
1997 Boogie Nights
1997 Happy Together
1997 Bent
1997 The House of Yes
1997 Wilde
1998 Velvet Goldmine
1998 Torch Song Trilogy
1998 Gods and Monsters
1998 Welcome to Pleasantville
1999 All About My Mother
1999 South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut
1999 Fight Club
1999 Beau Travail
1999 An Ideal Husband
1999 Skin Flick
1999 Mansfield Park
1999-2000 Strangers With Candy

The Naughts

2000 Bring It On
2000 Best in Show
2001 Hedwig and the Angry Inch
2001 Gosford Park
2001 Mulholland Drive
2001 Burnt Money
2001 The Royal Tenenbaums
2001 Pearl Harbor
2001 Wet Hot American Summer
2002 Gerry
2002 Talk to Her
2003 Angels in America
2003 Bright Young Things
2003 The Dreamers
2003 A Mighty Wind
2003 Elephant
2004 Bad Education
2004 Kinsey
2004 Mysterious Skin
2004 Raspberry Reich
2005 Brokeback Mountain
2006 The Devil Wears Prada
2006 Marie Antoinette
2006 Volver
2006 V for Vendetta
2006 Shortbus
2006 Le Marais
2007 Starbooty
2008 Milk
2008 Otto; or, Up With Dead People
2009 An Englishman in New York
2009- Glee
2010 Howl

Upsetting Libertopianism's Enabling Pieties

Updated and adapted from the Moot, "frankania" declares, more or less precisely in the manner I anticipated in the post immediately prior to this one, in opposition to the sentiments expressed in my Dispatches from Libertopia that:

libertarians are NOT republicans. We libertarians do not trust reps or dems or any "big govt" types. We can clearly see that govt, even well-meaning govt, does things in an inefficient and usually counter-productive manner. Thus, we trust individuals and sometimes VERY local govts who we know and can watch and interact with to govern us. No wars except strictly defensive, no handouts to ANYONE, corporations, charities, other countries, or individuals. Individuals and private groups can of course help anyone, even other countries, they want, using their own donated money and efforts. And, of course, we don't want big-brother telling us what not do ingest, or not to gamble except on govt lotteries or pay for consensual sex, or what we can't do on Sunday etc. etc.

On all this, permit me a word or two in answer if you will.

First --

There are many Republicans who identify as market libertarians, whether you are offended or not by that fact, and there are many more Republicans who make anti-tax and anti-government arguments and policies that are shaped by precisely the same texts with which libertarians identify. That is simply true, whether you take responsibility for the results or not.

Second --

You will forgive me for lacking sympathy for your arguments about inevitable government inefficiency when those arguments keep cashing out in the real world as support instead for vast bloated corporate bureaucracies and crony capitalist profit-taking, especially in a world where the monumental legacies of public infrastructure investments are all about us, including where they are no longer maintained and have been left to crumble because they have been looted and privatized by people inspired by magical market thinking of the kind in which you are now indulging.

Third --

Again, you will forgive me if I refuse to share in your contempt for "well-meaning" citizens seeking to collaborate through the legitimate agencies of representative governance to solve shared problems when the alternative on offer instead is so often at best the neglect of such shared problems or at worst their creation or exacerbation by those who are not well-meaning at all but only interested in parochial profit-taking. That may not be how it plays out in Ayn Rand novels or Friedmanian fables, but back here on planet earth the results on the ground are far less coddling of your fanciful assumptions.

Fourth --

While I am happy to hear that your libertarianism has made you personally skeptical of war-making, you must forgive me yet again when I declare those who fancy the world a war of all against all make unsteady allies in anti-militarism I fear, especially to the extent that war-making is so profitable and so many "market libertarians" declare profit-taking the key to both ethical and instrumental optimality. Again, it is not that I disbelieve you, but I mistrust you. If you are as appalled by war as I am, as you say that you are, you will no doubt respect such a sentiment.

Lastly --

To declare taxes a kind of involuntary charitable donation is, I fear, to testify to so profound an ignorance or confusion about governance that it is hard to know how to proceed in a discussion with you. The nonviolent adjudication of disputes, including disputes as to what counts as violence, fall to institutions different in character from for-profit ventures or loving intimate ones, for they must be equitable in the face of the ineradicable diversity of the peers who share the world.

We are born in societies that precede and exceed us, speaking languages which speak us as much as we do them. We do not choose to care about choosing, we do not decide to value autonomous decision-making, we do not hit upon our individuality individually, but in company and in concert with others, upsetting though that may be to you. We are interdependent beings whatever our independence, we none of us are capable of making the world on which we depend ab initio, we none of us could form alone the conception that we would be better off in solitude. We are none of us the sole authors of either our treasures or our tragedies. We rely on the collective heritage of our history, on the shared resources of our planet, on the sustaining effort and investment of our colleagues peers and fellow citizens.

If you would speak seriously of politics you really must set aside these facile intuitions of a worldly rugged individuality, of competition yielding optimal political outcomes as though they were engineering problems, you much cast off these absurd analogizations of national economies to household economies, of public investments to private charities, of well-informed non-duressed consent to whatever passes for a market transaction according to incumbent elites at the moment. To indulge in such consoling fancies is to speak as a child, it is not yet to assume a place at the table where politics as a distinctive discipline with a distinctive substance and distinctive problems are discussed.

I realize that here in America you can get away with talking such nonsense, given the debased state of our public education and public discourse, heck, you can talk like that and be counted a paragon of clarity to those who are in denial of the civic, fiscal, and environmental problems that beset us or who parochially benefit from our distraction from these problems -- but that is because Americans are very anti-intellectual and long insulated from the consequences of their unjust and wasteful behavior and are terribly superficial and lazy in consequence.

That all this ignorance and arrogance and sloppy-thinking truly matters after all is quite clear by now from the catastrophic state of paralysis we are in even when solutions are so clear at hand as well as in the debased state of our discourse even when so many so clearly want seriously to participate in matters of public interest. Until you either see sense or, failing that, can be marginalized into comparative harmlessness "frankania," I fear you are not just not part of the solution -- though your country and your planet could sure use you right about now -- but you are a part of the problem. That is why I do this.

UPDATED, with another exchange from the same Moot with "frankania."

[HE] Well Golly, Dale, You sure convinced me. From now on I will pay my taxes, avoid doing anything that is against the law (all 120,000 pages of laws) stop smoking grass, stop playing poker with my buds, apply for food-stamps and move back to the USA (which I left in 1988). Good luck, amigo!

[ME] Thanks, good luck to you, too. Democrats struggling to end the racist war on (some) drugs could use your assistance on marijuana legalization (about which I have written here several times). My partner and I fortunately remain gainfully employed for now, unlike so many victims of the deregulatory corporatism of Reagan and Gingrich and Bush, who spent more time talking like you do than not. In consequence, we have no need of food stamps yet -- although I do understand macroeconomics enough to know that the material transportation/energy/education/communication infrastructure and legal/normative infrastructure of law on which I do depend cannot arise or be maintained spontaneously from parochial for-profit calculations. As for playing poker, I believe that is played across the USA even under Obama's skeery islamofemicommunazism. If the nice homophobic science-denialist anti-government GOP keeps at it, we may have soon to join you in some more sensible foreign country, but I for one would prefer to make change here where I was born, where I am a responsible citizen, where our vast resources render even a last minute effort at planetary problem-solving worth serial humiliations and frustrations in the meantime. Again, best to you, d

Please Go Galt

I really do wish the right-wing mean-jesus fundies and fraud-market fundies would just stop already with their interminable whining about having to live among homogays and wanton women and uppity negroes and Big Gu'ment meddling, and go ahead and build their Galt's Gulch or Republic of Gilead in some benighted county in Alabama or Arizona or whatever and pull up the drawbridge behind them. All their threats and bragging about their moral superiority and economic indispensability really are getting profoundly stale, one wonders why they never put their money where their mouths are and leave us to degenerate into Sodom or the Gulag as we deserve. Just think, they can wallow in self-congratulation among the like-empty-minded like pigs in shit, and it's certainly not like any of us will miss any of those lousy skimmers and scammers and bullies and know-nothings. It's a win win proposition, if ever I heard of one. And once they all die in the inevitable septic sewer or bloodbath we can just cover the ruins in cement like Chernobyl and go on with our lives. What's not to like?

The Deep Anti-Ecology of the Futurological "Geo-Engineers"

The White Guys of The Future over at the Very Serious futurologist IEET think-tank (not to mention stealth transhumanist-singularitarian-technoimmortalist Robot Cult outfit) have posted another piece of paint-by-the-numbers advocacy for the greenwashing policy-via-neoligism of "geo-engineering" this week. The author this time around is one R. Dennis Hansen who is, we are told "a planner for a federal resource management agency in Utah" and "member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association" (very confidence-inspiring, I must say).

Hansen frames his bit of futurological flim-flammery with a question that both opens and closes his essay: "Who says we can’t do anything about the weather or the climate?" And I for one suspect it might be quite revealing to think about the actual answer to that question.

There is, of course, a consensus among climate scientists and environmental activists that human industry is affecting the climate, that is to say, that we are palpably doing all sorts of things already about the weather or the climate. Presumably, then, those who say we can't would first of all refer to those who deny anthropogenic climate change altogether. Given that Hansen's "geo-engineering" proposals are addressed in the first place to those who do accept the consensus of climate science and who also share at least some of the concerns of environmentalists, it seems to me that this is not an essay addressed to anybody at all who doubts we can anything about the weather or the climate.

Now, to be sure, many climate scientists and environmentalists are increasingly frustrated at the apparent incapacity of our law-makers to craft effective environmental regulations, support conservation and reforestation programs and the like, legislate lower carbon emissions standards, scrub industrial soot, zone for more dense walkable urban neighborhoods, educate their citizens about relevant health and climate issues, create structural incentives like bike-lanes and petroleum taxes and rebates for energy efficient technologies to facilitate more sustainable collective behavior, invest in renewable energy systems like solar rooftops, windfarms, tidal farms, residential geo-thermal pumps, intercontinental and urban mass transit systems, support smaller-scaled organic agriculture, appropriate polyculture, and permaculture practices, and so on. But it is crucial to grasp that these frustrations imply first of all that those who are frustrated think there are in fact an enormous number of practical things that can indeed be done about weather or climate, namely the very sorts of things just listed among many others, but that they are not being done enough yet or by enough people to do the good work reasonably and righteously expected of them.

To grasp that environmental policy proposals are not now being implemented adequately is far from declaring that they will not ever be, nor even that they cannot be implemented in time, that climatic or cultural tipping-points cannot change a long intractable status quo for the better should environmental education, agitation, and organization keep the pressure up long enough. Certainly such frustrations are the farthest imaginable thing from endorsements that more conventional environmental proposals like these should be jettisoned for altogether different proposals, especially wild-eyed epic-scaled mega-engineering proposals involving, when they actually offer any real details at all, proliferating questionable scientific and engineering and political assumptions.

Hansen "defines" geo-engineering as "large-scale technological interventions in the earth’s climate system." Of course, it is hard to see why the regulative and facilitative interventions into mass-behavior advocated by conventional environmentalists (encouraging consumers to switch to solar heating, or electric cars, or white rooftops, or building intercontinental high-speed rail or reforestation projects, say) are not "large-scale" enough to be considered "geo-engineering," then, or, if they are, just why it is useful for futurologists to have introduced their pet neologism "geo-engineering" into the discussion in the first place.

One needs to grasp the essentially gizmo-fetishistic distortions of futurology to understand why white paint, heirloom tomato seeds, landscaping swales, wind-turbines, and comparable techniques and appropriate technologies wouldn't count for a futurologist as "technology."

Instead, Hansen fixes his attention on what I have described as the usual "ramifying suite of mega-engineering wet-dreams," including with robotic predictability "‘[f]ertilizing’ the ocean with iron to encourage the growth of carbon-capturing phytoplankton… Building ‘artificial trees’ to absorb carbon dioxide… Spraying ocean water into the atmosphere to produce sunlight-reflecting clouds… Launching trillions of reflective disks into the upper atmosphere." In other words, the same endlessly discredited handwaving as always.

Note that each of these proposals involve a verb, "fertilizing… building… spraying… launching…" and that the agencies corralling collective will and mobilizing the resources actually involved in these verbs would demand the introduction into these proposals of all the political dynamisms that bedevil environmentalism already.

The primary function of the "technological" in "bio-engineering" proposals -- especially given the hyperbolic scale and superlative cadences of the speculative technoscience preferred by futurologists waxing rhapsodic about "geo-engineering" technofixes -- is precisely to disavow the political agency indispensable to the worldly facilitation of sustainability, as well as to distract attention from the actual agents (the usual corporate-military elite-incumbent bad actors) who would most benefit from the implementation of "geo-engineering" proposals.

Behind all the can-do enthusiasm, the shiny gizmos, the technobabble, the "geo-engineers" are indulging in a profoundly reactionary anti-environmental discourse directed less to the usual opportunistic greed-heads and climate-denialist know-nothings most anti-environmentalism caters to, but directed precisely to those who are already concerned about anthropogenic climate change and respectful, at least in a rough and tumble sort of way, of technoscience as a site for the practical address of shared environmental problems, those otherwise likely to number among the ones doing the most good.

Just as I have been pointing out the real-world implications of deceptive hyperbolic futurological discourse playing out in the present in skewed assumptions of today's policy-makers (futurological fantasies of genetic enhancement and techno-magical longevity therapies providing uncritical rationales for catastrophic immiserating proposals to raise the retirement age and dismantle indispensable Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security entitlements), so too it is crucial to grasp the anti-environmentalist impacts of the futurological faux-environmentalism of the "geo-engineers" are no less likely to play our in present-day distractions, displaced priorities, deranged policy proposals, and skewed budgets.

Reactionary Fruits of Futurology, "Geo-Engineering" Edition

The pernicious contribution of futurologists to environmentalist discourse is, in a word, just a word: "geo-engineering."

While the futurological enthusiasts of "geo-engineering" resent the accusation to no end, it remains as true as ever that their discussions of the "geo-engineering" topic tend to devote themselves much more to defeatist resignation about real-world environmental activism and policy and to very broad brushstrokes handwaving about mega-industrial behemoths of a kind that have no reality apart from the splashy covers of pulp-sf novels and CGI-animations, than they do to substantive discussions concerning, for example:

[one] How these proposals conceptually connect to one another to explain their subsumption under the term in question?

[two] How these proposals differ substantially from existing proposals to explain the necessity to introduce the cherished neologism in the first place?

[three] How the costs and risks that multiply upon the least contemplated contact of these proposals with actual eco-systemic and engineering realities still justify these proposals over others?

[four] How the political processes (funding, oversight, labor conditions, safety concerns, jurisdictional disputes) to which such proposals would need to be answerable to their stakeholders escape the political dysfunction that typically resigns their advocates to "geo-engineering" rather than standard environmentalism demanding regulation, education, structural incentives, and public investments to address climate change and resource descent in the first place?

[five] And why on earth we should choose of all people the very corporate-militarist bad actors who most benefited and still benefit from anthropogenic climate change to take charge of solving it as most of these mega-scale geo-engineering proposals just so happen to require?

I've written on this topic many times before, of course, and many of these posts are collected under the heading Futurology Against Ecology over on the sidebar (probably the best posts are also the most widely read ones, "Geo-Engineering" As Futurological Greenwashing and "Geo-Engineering" Is A Declaration of War That Doesn't Care About Democracy).

To the extent that futurology is really just an extreme edge of conventional corporate marketing and promotion discourse, it shouldn't be surprising that the coining of a phrase or the introduction of gimmick label would be imagined by futurologists to constitute a substantive contribution to environmental politics.

After all, re-packaging the given and treating the result as the "new and improved" the better to peddle the status quo as progress, and distraction as deliberation is the essence of advertizing. It is only the masquerade of futurologists as "experts" in an actual subject and their "think-tanks" as quasi-academic sites that makes the identification of their fraudulent and hyperbolic peddling of corporate-militarist incumbent-elites as straightforward promotional discourse more difficult than it would be otherwise.

Once again, it may be useful to think of "geo-engineering" proposals as a kind of macro-greenwashing correlated with the micro-greenwashing of consumer/lifestyle-green proposals, rather as macro-economics and micro-economics correlate in the literate post-Keynesian economic imaginary.

"The Future" Is Not Fairly Distributed

Futurologists have been masturbating about sooper-longevity gene therapies and anti-aging pills for years and years in their saucer eyed pop-tech Best Selling books and the fraudulent position papers of their Very Serious think-tanks.

The result of all that futurological hyperventilation is certainly not that the world is the least bit closer to tank-grown replacement parts or fine-tuned genetic enhancement therapies or designer robot bodies or any of the rest of that nonsense, but only that the very rich, very pampered, very insulated inside-the-beltway politicians and pundits who shape the healthcare policies with which we have to live our actual lives in the actual present always have widely-disseminated, perfectly-legible, false-but-familiar, phony-but-plausible media narratives and images to call upon when they are scouting for justifications to raise the retirement age or voucherize and eliminate healthcare benefits for the overabundant majority of the American citizens they claim to represent.

Of course, we are a nation of non-millionaires represented by multi-millionaires whose access to the best available healthcare is utterly alienated from everyday reality, just as we are a nation of hard-working stressed-out laborers employed in jobs that could not be more different than the working lives of career politicians and lobbyists and members of the commentariat who think phone calls and quorum calls are stressful, who are lavished with attention and favors all their lives and not only see no need to retire at sixty-five from their labors such as they are but typically cling to their positions well into their seventies and beyond right up until the moment they literally collapse unconscious into stretchers and get carted off from them they enjoy them so damned much.

While the futurologists continue to spin scenarios that cash out in fanciful Hollywood action thrillers and Paul Ryan Ayn Rand wet-dream blood-baths of anti-government looting, it remains as true as ever that technodevelopmental gains in economic productivity over the last thirty years have larded the richest of the rich with greater profits and highest of the high end wealth concentration while the buying power of average salaries has flatlined or declines, it remains as true as ever that new medical techniques have created splashy high-end successes while the life expectancy past the relevant age of sixty-five for the average American have scarcely improved an iota.

Seinfeld and Stasis

Returning home late yesterday from teaching, with bag in hand from the local Taquería and already longing a little for my bed tho' it was not even fully dark out yet, I was struck by an episode of "Seinfeld" my remote strayed onto while I munched my cheese quesadilla.

The episode was nearly twenty years old and yet seemed absolutely contemporary -- the layout and gadgets in Jerry's apartment, the attitudes and conversational rhythms of the principals, the pop culture references, even the haircuts and outfits (including Jerry's bland bourgeois duds and Kramer's vintage oddball numbers), literally everything could be directly transplanted into the present day with the same intentions and nobody would blink an eye at any of it.

I do not mean to minimize the skill of the writers in saying this, but I think it indicates far more the utter deathly stasis of American culture over the last quarter century than some luminous prescience on the part of Larry David that "Seinfeld" feels so perfectly contemporary to this day. Even the finest smartest slickest most forward-thinking sit-coms from twenty-years before last night's "Seinfeld" episode first aired, would have felt dated and skewed to "Seinfeld's" audience were it re-run that same night, however much they might appreciate its artistry and chuckle at its jokes, arriving from the alien shore of an America long past.

"Seinfeld" could debut today little changed and achieve an identical popularity and identical accolades for its innovations. Nothing has happened but paralysis and decay in America since "Seinfeld" (and, face it, what "Seinfeld" was remains little more than that rarest of things, a network sit-com that simply doesn't completely suck, which is a good thing to be, but a far cry from an attribution of greatness).

Hearing the sampled, covered, cloned music pouring out of the radios of indistinguishable automobiles on our crumbling roads suggests the same stasis.

Seinfeld symptomizes our stasis, and warns us about the dead-end road we are traveling as a nation. It will take more than a laugh track to make paralysis feel like progress for long.

Stupid Societies Die When Their Luck Runs Out

With interest rates at historic lows and unemployment at historic highs it could not be more obvious that government spending right about now would stimulate the economy as nothing else could while at once addressing in an actually substantive way the looming catastrophes of climate change and resource descent that will define our generation or destroy our world.

Notice that I said, "right about now." Mine is not a declaration that government spending is always more stimulative than so-called "private sector" alternatives, but that it is when a national economy is caught in a liquidity trap such as our own is now, an extraordinary but occasional circumstance that Keynes and his heirs provided and refined the analytic tools to grasp and cope with for those with working brains. To deny this case -- until the models are proven wrong, and they simply have not been -- is to be a macroeconomic illiterate, plain and simple, while to pretend those making this case are treating it as a universal or a panacea is to be a liar.

This explains why Republicans so regularly make both these sorts of claims. All the austerity and tax-cut talk, to the extent that it is earnest and not just greedy opportunism, is the talk of people who are macroeconomic know-nothings, either embarrassingly ignorant of or outright denialist about. For a party which provides a home for climate-change denialists and anti-Darwin creation-"scientists" and abstinence-only follies it can scarcely be surprising that one finds laissez-faire dead-enders among Republicans in droves -- the GOP is, indeed, the largest and most powerful Flat Earth Society on Earth's curving surface.

As for the lies -- well, if the GOP didn't lie about what they are doing they would never be elected for anything, because they mean to enrich a small minority at the cost of majorities and no majority would let them get away with it if they were honest about it in even so notional a democracy as our own. Telling lies is second nature to Republicans, as lying to themselves is first nature.

Now, shifting from our oil, coal, and nuclear energy infrastructure to a renewable solar-wind-tidal-geothermal energy infrastructure, and also shifting from our car culture to a continental mass-transit infrastructure, and also shifting from our soil-eroding energy-input-intensive industrial agriculture system to a smaller more localized decentralized organic permaculture system, and also shifting our zoning priorities to enable dense walkable urban neighborhoods and preserve the ecosystem-services provided by wetlands and watersheds and green spaces would revitalize our economy.

The key tools to facilitate these shifts are regulations, public investments, tax policies -- certainly not micro-greenwashing boutique lifestyle consumption, nor macro-greenwashing "geo-engineering" marketing fantasies. We will not shop our way out of this crisis. We cannot expect the elite-incumbents who profited from the engineering of this catastrophe and thrive in it still to save us from the devastating results. There is no spontaneous order that will crystallize sustainability if only we deregulate out of its way.

The indispensable governmental regulations, subsidizations, investments, and shifts we can and must implement would facilitate the necessary return to a production rather than immaterial-neoliberal financial/promotional consumer-debt pseudo-economy. They would also provide social conditions for the revitalization of organized labor and hence renew the middle class (this time demographically diversified and more multiculture-competent) as a definitive democratizing force in public and civic life. And they would give the human race a chance to survive and possibly even flourish amidst the already-ongoing catastrophically-upcoming global warming and weirding of climate change (superstorms, pandemics, climate refugees in the millions) and resource descent (water wars, mass starvation, rare-mineral-dependent high-tech infrastructure failures).

Although we know what to do, we are not doing it. In fact, things have been getting worse, far worse, and getting worse ever more rapidly, the more we know more clearly what should be done and how do-able what must be done actually is.

Incredibly, our economic catastrophe has actually created excellent conditions for coping with our climate catastrophe: the best way to stimulate the economy is to invest in infrastructure and precisely such investments are indispensable to shifts into renewable energy and mass transportation systems, the greatest obstacle (apart from ignorance and Industrial-Ag lobbying) to a shift into smaller scale permaculture is its higher labor demand at a time when high unemployment happens to be our greatest, and to our everlasting shame our most neglected, economic priority.

My point isn't to propose that easy fixes are available, but just to say that it is hard to imagine a more congenial complementarity of crises, when what must be done is so well understood and the means for doing it solves so many problems at once. It is extraordinary to say the least that in the face of such urgent problems, such obvious solutions, such available means that the institutions of governance are so dysfunctional that we are doing nothing at all when there is so much to do that can so readily be done, especially when to do nothing is literally likely to do us all in.

Government is the indispensable institutional register capable of organizing the agency to address the catastrophes at hand -- and so, this is no time for anarchist day dreams, or narcissistic indulgences in lifestyle retreats. America's incredible resources as well as its unique historical and geographical situation make it the exceptional player in this drama, like it or not, actually capable in its dysfunction of destroying the world and also capable, were it to arrive even late to functionality, of saving the world -- and so, neither is this the time, especially for American citizens like me, to renounce our responsibilities and our power, such as it is, in despair, cynicism, or disgust.

We must educate, agitate, organize, contribute, and vote -- and I am sorry to say that this largely means engaging in a highly partisan effort for Democrats, imperfect, compromised, insufferable though they may be. You go into battle with the army you have, not the one you wish you had.

Third party bids are functional spoilers given the actually-existing system, and reforming the system to change this is harder and would take longer than pushing the Democrats left from the inside. That's just the way it is if (as I believe) the timetable for renewable infrastructure investment is shorter than the time it will take to get publicly funded elections and instant runoff voting. And all that means we have to push for renewable infrastructure investment at the most congenial actually available site: which is clearly the Democratic party.

The Republican party is -- in its present Movement Conservative phase and in this historical moment of interlocking financial and environmental crises -- the single most dangerous and destructive organized force in the world, since it is poised to do the most damage at the American site at which the most devastating and possibly irreversible planetary damage can be done.

I am far from believing that most Democrats are equal to the task at hand, just as I am far from denying that no Democrats are active forces of dysfunction and damage. But the Republicans are now defined by the project of plutocratic profit-taking at public expense and indulge in loud misinformation about sound economics and climate science in short-sighted short-term service to elite-incumbents to the ruin of the world. These Republicans must be defeated and marginalized utterly, then (perhaps the better to reorganize and re-emerge in a more sensibly conservative form), and more, and better, Democrats prevail if there is to be a chance for this world.

It is wholesome, even necessary, to pressure Democrats to reflect better the actual urgencies of the moment. One would have all Democrats embrace absolutely and consistently the politics of people who work for a living over the demands of the rentiers, the politics of public investment for all over private profit-taking for few, the politics of equity-in-diversity over parochialism and plutocracy, the politics of democratic expression and assembly over elite-incumbency, the politics of sustainability over extraction, the politics of consent over exploitation.

But it is crucial that these efforts to push Democrats from the left to the left always do so in ways that also directly empower Democrats as a governing party against the efforts of Republicans, or at any rate never -- even in the short term, since the short-term defines the span in which the address of so many of our urgent problems takes place -- actively disempower Democrats relative to Republicans.

It is better to elect a comparatively compromised Democrat in a district whose politics are backward and so increase the governing majority of Democrats -- among whom are much more progressive voices who can do something useful, even if less often than one might like, with such a governing majority -- than to allow a Republican reactionary to win and hand Republicans the majority that renders progressive voices altogether mute. Likewise, it is better to challenge an incumbent Democrat in a reliably Democratic district when their politics are less progressive than their constituency is, the better to push the party as a whole from the left to the left. So, too, it is always good to make progressive cases to one's representatives and to the community of her constituency to amplify the progressive case in the representative's hearing, and to encourage and actively support representatives whenever they act in ways that reflect progressive priorities. Again, this helps push Democrats from the left to the left.

This is slow-moving, painstaking, exhausting, compromised, frustrating work, and I realize that I am asking you to hold a whole lot of different things in your head at once that cannot be communicated easily in a tweet. But if you would imagine yourself ethically righteous or politically engaged -- and you should -- then it is your responsibility to make this effort.

Politics is not performance art nor is it a philosophical symposium.

To expect stakeholder politics seamlessly or even comfortably to align with one's own ideals would be perfectly ridiculous even in a system considerably less corrupt and plutocratic and ill-informed as our own. To expect it here and now and upon discovering it does not, to pout and stamp and retreat into purist abstraction or punitive inaction when the stakes are so high and our responsibilities so clear is almost unfathomably infantile and irrational.

Stupid societies die when their luck runs out. America is unbelievably, indeed, almost unbearably stupid right now, and I'm not sure we should be counting on luck at a time like this. It is time for good people of good sense and good will to do our best and do our duty for the good of us all.

Those Faddish Futurologists

It's funny -- and not just funny ha ha, though of course it is also that -- to observe just how thin the line can be between Very Serious futurological flim-flam artistry and the earnest pitching of fad diets, New Age narcissistic psychobabble, and manic exercise scams. On they go, the futurological circus barkers, peddling their wares: immortality via robot bodies! freezing your head! nanobots in the bloodstream! "uploading" into virtual paradise! sooper genetic tweaks! and always just twenty years away! But the tune can change on the turn of a dime, they pause in the chorus of techno-sublime and suddenly instead they're peddling paleo! Atkins! alkaline water! positive visualization! Vegas pill-popper fairs! muscle confusion!

I suppose the most conspicuous illustration of the phenomenon is also the most influential of the superlative futurologists, Raymond Kurzweil himself, who cheerfully indulges his theo-futurological id in handwaving techno-whizbang volumes like The Singularity Is Near when he isn't being the Raymond Kurzweil who indulges in punchy little food fad numbers like The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life: How to Reduce Fat in Your Diet and Eliminate Virtually All Risk of Heart Disease and Cancer (you just gotta love that "virtually").

Although the straightforward credulity continuum connecting junk science, food fads, and self-promotional psychobabble is not exactly hard to fathom, I would also point to the ways in which these forms of kidding yourself for cash can also complement and enable one another in futurological sub(cult)ures like transhumanism, singularitarianism, and techno-immortalism.

As witness George Dvorsky, one of the Very Serious White Guys of the Future over at the futurological "think-tank" IEET: Seized by the momentary realization that all the usual Robot Cult preoccupations are no more available after twenty years of boosterism on their behalf than they were when they were being hyperventilated on the pages of OMNI, Mondo 2000, Great Mambo Chicken, and Extropy way back when (but in twenty more years, man, watch out, it'll be FAI, VR, SENS, Drextech, the whole nine!) the futurologist always has more proximate flim-flammery ready-to-hand, there are always thigh-masters to scrunch and livid green spirulina bone marrow shakes to gulp in those moments when one despairs at the absence of a buckyball-spiderthread space elevator on the horizon but still aches like crazy (and I do mean crazy) to accentuate the hyper-positive. Quoth Dvorsky:

Look, it’s 2011 and it’s glaringly obvious that we’re still quite a ways off from achieving the much heralded posthuman condition. The sad truth is that all interventions or augmentations currently available are fairly low impact by any measure…. So what’s a transhumanist to do? … An increasing number of transhumanists are taking matters into their own hands by working with what they got. And by doing so, they’re pushing the limits of their genetic potential.

He goes on from there to extol the virtues of the usual Cross Training regimens, Paleo Diets, and even the rather dubious Four Hour Body by guru of the moment Timothy Ferris.

While I am far from discounting the virtues of fitness and nutrition in a flourishing life, so long as one remains modest and moderate about the business, I can't help but comment on the body-loathing and hysterical death-denialism that seems so often to connect those who strive with punishing exertions after the Body Beautiful and who daydream about immaterial "selves" digi-immortalized and released into cyberspatial paradise... the strange sort of permanent adolescence that seems so often to connect the serial enthusiasms for hype-marketed crap-gadgets forever on the "bleeding edge" and an endless ego-churn of diet, exercise, lifestyle fads... the conspicuous lack of critical standards that seems to drive desperate futurologists away from consensus science time after time into hyperbole and junk (cryonics, old school AI, Drexlerian nanotechnology, geo-engineering, offworld migration, designer genetics, and so on) as well as into so many self-help self-hate self-improvement scams.

Just what is it with these foolish, facile, faddish, futurological fanboys anyway?

Iron Law of Celebrity

While it may be possible to become a celebrity without being a sociopath, it is next to impossible to remain one for long without being a sociopath. Now that our politicians are also celebrities, it pays to remember this law from time to time.

This post is very grumpily dedicated to Anthony Weiner, with thanks for the reminder.

From "The Great Stagnation" to a Great Awakening

Tyler Cowen made quite a splash for a few months with his "Great Stagnation" thesis, proposing in a book (but here's a succinct op-ed precis) that technical innovation and improvement of quality of life are now slowing down, contra the cheerleaders of silicon capitalism about accelerating progress forever right around the corner.

Part of Cowen's argument is that the dizzying transformations we have come to associate with "modernization" represent what he calls "low-hanging fruit," and that technical breakthroughs of comparable transformative scope may simply be harder to come by from here on out. I question that phrase a little since it is hard to square with the fact that it took millennia for humanity to stumble onto these apparently low-hanging fruits, for one thing. But also I disapprove of the metaphor because I think there are differences that make a real difference among these "low-hanging fruits."

Hitting upon a petrochemical reorganization of production (a reorganization that definitely transformed more than you might initially think of, not only our energy and transportation infrastructure but also our disastrous petro-fertilized industrially-irrigated globally-dispersed agricultural system and our plasticized material environment, for example) represented a kind of hyper-bubble, an organizational cul-de-sac, toxic to the touch and catastrophic to the atmosphere, in finite and dwindling supply, neither desirable or even possible to emulate as a developmental pathway in nations that have not already taken it up, leaving those that did stranded in a poisonous junk-heap.

Strictly speaking, I am not sure it is right to describe the recognition that we have been misdiagnosing as "progress" an actually unsustainable and poisonous petrochemical bubble and that we must now change course as "stagnation" rather than as a hard lesson that will either destroy us or provide the knowledge and wisdom from which real and sustainable progress may arise.

Certainly, I would want to distinguish the siren-song of the dead-end short-cut of petrochemical modernization as "low-hanging fruit" from that of the elementary hygienic and therapeutic discoveries that provided a leap forward in life-expectancy over the last century and a half (especially to the extent that this results from the address of infant mortality, malnutrition, and cardiovascular disease), elementary techniques that could and should be available sustainably and equitably to all. While futurologists may get starry eyed about imaginary nanobots scouting out and zapping cancer cells, Mike Davis (in Planet of Slums) brings us back to earth when he declares the ultimate "miracle drug" to be, quite simply, the availability to all of clean water.

When Cowen goes on to deride those who pin their hopes for continued or even accelerating progress on innovations in the computer sector, saying they represent a "different kind of innovation," I certainly agree with his conclusion, but possibly would differ from him in my analysis of it. Digitization and networked organization has simplified certain tasks and lowered certain costs, but while the stories we have been telling ourselves about these changes have tended to make recourse to metaphors and narratives of "de-materialization" and the "abolition of distance" and the widening of "participation," the lived realities of digital networked mediation and organization have been acutely material and geopolitical, involving the facilitation of financial fraud, the displacement of exploited labor onto invisible distances, and the implementation of more intensive and intrusive modes of marketing and surveillance.

Rather than a different kind of innovation, computers have actually amounted to conventional innovation, ambivalent and contingent in its impacts, but experienced culturally through the distortive lens of relentless, nearly ubiquitous, hyperbolic promotion and futurological framing. Futurological day dreams of nanotechnological cornucopias, renewable energy too cheap to meter, declarations of "geo-engineering" war on climate change, immersive virtual reality cyber-heavens, post-human or even post-mortal genetic enhancement, and so on (some of which Cowen genuflects in the direction of himself more than he should) should be grasped by way of that example of computer innovation: just as Moore's law is not a magic carpet ride into a rapturous singularitarian end-of-history even if computers and digital networks do indeed make many tasks incomparably easier and cheaper, so too nanoscale biochemistry and genetic science will continue to provide useful innovations in medicine and materials without ending scarcity or mortality, so too a renewable energy infrastructure and agroforestry/permaculture techniques might make our energy and food systems sustainable as they are not now, but only if these techniques are embedded in sociocultural changes in our pathologically wasteful, inequitable, frivolous consumer lifeways.

It is well known that the security, quality of life, and buying power of the middle class has been declining for generations even as costs of production have decreased and profits increased, that the so-called epoch of "accelerating change" and "the Long Boom" and "innovation unto infinity" about which futurologists have been handwaving so ecstatically for years has actually been an epoch of unprecedented disparity between a fraction of the richest of the rich and the intensifying precarization of ever wider majorities.

Setting aside the obvious distortions introduced into this discussion by the pervasive deceptions and hyperbole of marketing discourse, and the metaphors and narratives of the futurological imaginary at its extremity, it seems to me crucial to recognize that what Cowen characterizes as contemporary "stagnation" is better regarded as a crisis of and for politics, rather than something demanding "technical" or "scientific" address in some facile de-politicized understanding of the technoscientific.

This anti-democratizing anti-civilizing concentration of wealth, that is to say this profoundly inequitable distribution of the costs and benefits of innovation and production, has not happened because of generically diminishing technodevelopment (the very idea of which should, but doesn't, strike one as incoherent on its face) but through the particular forms of technodevelopmental social struggle that have articulated innovation and production.

The market-ideological deregulation of enterprise has lead inevitably to abuses, the market-ideological dismantlement and prevention of general welfare programs has lead inevitably to insecurity, the market-ideological attack on organized labor has lead inevitably to the immiseration of the middle-class, the market-ideological cutting and regressivity of tax-revenues has lead inevitably to inequity and injustice, the market-ideological organization of corporate lobbying and campaign spending has lead inevitably to the corruption and paralysis of the political system, the market-ideological proposal that money is speech and that corporations have human rights has lead inevitably to plutocracy and serfdom. (You can be sure, Cowen himself would disagree emphatically with much of the substance and emphasis of what I am saying here.)

To raise the general standard of living, champion human equity-in-diversity, render civilization sustainable, and incubate innovation and expression requires better informed and democratically passionate technodevelopmental social struggle, progressive political campaigns, good old fashioned education, agitation, organization pushing from the left wing of the possible. Treating scientists as a priesthood or corporate CEOs as gurus or Commentariat hacks for incumbent-elites as "thought leaders" is an utterly misguided misapprehension of what our present "stagnation" materially consists and of what brought us to this imbecilic and perfectly avoidable pass.

In my view, the provision of a universal non-means-tested basic guaranteed income (or the approach to such an income via vastly expanded general welfare programs), paid for through steeply progressive income (including capital gains) and property taxes, would be the best way to subsidize real democratic participation, including -- as Erik Olin Wright has pointed out -- the subsidization of democratic labor organizing by providing a permanent strike fund, and frustrate the current regime of unpaid domestic labor, outsourcing of domestic production onto overexploited regions of the world, and the crowdsourcing of the culture industry via digital networks, and would subsidize research and innovation through grants to freely available knowledge and frustrate the current regime of circumscription and capture and piracy via regressive intellectual property rights.

Bill McKibben has written about social research suggesting that the lives of people in extreme poverty are reported almost universally to be materially improved by an increase in income right up to a certain point. Adjusted for inflation and cost-of-living disparities the amount is roughly ten thousand dollars a year. But, contrary to our probable expectations, beyond that point reports of satisfaction and well-being are no longer universal at all but become profoundly ambivalent and confused, beyond a certain point people are often stressed and oppressed by increasing incomes quite as much as they are satisfied by what those increasing incomes afford them. Even if McKibben is oversimplifying his case or overstating the force of his point, it is obvious that this insight provides yet another set of possible reasons to approve the radically democratizing politics of a basic guaranteed income. But it also provides another angle of view on Cowen's "Great Stagnation" thesis.

I have already suggested that it might not make much sense in the final analysis to describe by the word "stagnation" what amounts to our learning (or not) the hard lesson that the wasteful, toxic cul-de-sac of petrochemical production constitutes an epochal civilizational bubble phenomenon rather than a narrative of triumphal progressive modernity. So, too, it may be that beyond a certain point the productivist/consumerist standards on the basis of which we have sought to measure human well-being and satisfaction have been profoundly misleading, such that it might not make much sense in the final analysis to describe as "stagnation," either, our discovery that we are no longer be able to interminably fulfill let alone amplify their actually pathological terms.

I do not mean by all this to deny the conspicuous and demoralizing failure of our long cherished and celebrated public institutions and system to continue to provide solutions to shared problems, or to provide security and satisfaction in most of our lives, or even manage not to destroy the very planet on which we depend for our survival and flourishing. Nor do I mean to deny that increasing knowledge and technique has an indispensable role, as always, in solving those shared problems, in facilitating that security, in providing that satisfaction, in finding our way to a sustainable and equitable civilization.

But I do think that it is wrong to describe as a general "stagnation in technoscientific innovation" what is in fact a complex of crises most of which arise from political failures and will demand political struggles (including technodevelopmental struggles that should not be mischaracterized as apolitical technical problems) and many of which amount to belated recognitions that we have mistaken panic for progress, hysteria for happiness, waste for worth, recognitions that are the furthest things from "stagnation" but look instead like the possible beginnings of wisdom.

To Affirm Belief In God Is Not Yet to Affirm Much of Substance

According to a Gallup poll that has attracted some interest today, 92% of Americans declare that they believe in god, significantly, presumably, just a smidge fewer than did in 1940.

Of course, people hear many different questions in the question whether they believe in god, and people mean many different sorts of things when they declare they believe in god. Among these questions and answers people hear or try to answer when asked "do you believe in god?" are the questions, Do you think you are a good person or try to be a good person? Are you part of a community of like-minded people who help and comfort and support one another? Are you the kind of person who rocks the boat? Do you think there is more to life than making money? Do you still value things your parents or teachers or others you respect told you or seemed to think were important to them?

Further, many people who affirm a belief in god go on to conduct themselves in ways so utterly indifferent to this belief, or in ways that so contradict the more particular articles of their faiths it is hard to treat any 92% affirmation of belief as more impressive than, say, the 92% of selfish short-sighted people who decry selfishness and short-sightedness.

And then, just as strikingly, among those who really do take seriously their belief in god it is quite apparent that so many people are willing to die or to kill over the endlessly many different ways they embed this broadly affirmed belief in radically different spiritual practices and institutional commitments, specific creeds and communities, it is hard to pretend even the well-nigh universal affirmation of belief in god -- even setting aside the hypocrites and liars and rationalizers making this declaration -- expresses any kind of coherence or unanimity, or even anything much more than a near vacuity.

I have been a cheerful confirmed atheist since I was a teenager myself, over a quarter century by now, but I am enough of a pluralist in matters of warranted belief to sympathize with and find some measure of inspiration in ethical or in aesthetic terms in many human lifeways that have been shaped conspicuously by forms the belief in god takes in some people, even as I am horrified by others in which that belief provokes or justifies authoritarian or moralizing rages for order, promotes cruelty or parochialism, closes off self-criticism or critical inquiry.

To be told that someone "believes in god" does not yet tell me much of anything about what form that belief takes in the life of that person or what sort of person they are in consequence. To be told that 92% of Americans "believe in god" does not yet tell me anything of substance, and to treat it as a substantial claim seems to me to lose sight of almost all the differences that make a difference in the very matter at issue.

Certainly it seems rather obvious to me that the differences among believers are often incomparably more decisive (both to them and to me) than their differences with an unbeliever like me. And I must admit I find it a bit frustrating when polls and studies and discussion like that of the Gallup poll pretend "belief in god" actually means something monolithic to those who affirm the belief, when clearly nothing could be farther from the case, and on that basis go on to treat my own non-belief more marginal than forms of belief more marginal than mine.

Is there really anybody who believes that it matters more that nearly as many people will assert in 2011 the near-vacuity of an uncharacterized belief in god as would do so half a century ago than it matters how much more (or less) secular our public institutions have become now since then, how much more (or less) diverse the landscape of organized religiosity has become now since then, how many more (or fewer) people participate actively in regular church attendance or engage in religious/spiritual practices like prayer or meditation or proselytizing now since then?

Worse than the fact that the poll result that "92% of Americans believe in god" really tells us next to nothing important is that it pretends to tell us something very important indeed while keeping us from understanding almost everything important about the substantial life of beliefs in the world.

Twelve Basic Political Assertions

1. Politics is not morals.

2. Politics arises from the recognition that the people with whom we share the world are ineradicably different from one another, and that we can co-operate or not to resolve shared problems including problems arising from co-operation.

3. Morals arises from the recognition that the people with whom we identify in the world share similarities that seem to us worth the real costs of maintaining them.

4. Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them.

5. Progressive democratization is the struggle to enable ever more people ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.

6. Democracy values equity and diversity above all, but since the absolute aspiration to equity can so threaten diversity and the absolute aspiration to diversity can so threaten equity the democratic struggle to implement and express equity-in-diversity is finally interminable.

7. Democratic politics as an arena of self-expression can be an end-in-itself but progressive politics succeeds as such only when it is actually democratizing, that is to say when it is enabling ever more people ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.

8. There is no democracy without a legible scene of consent, a scene that is more legible as such the more it is rendered ever more informed and ever more nonduressed through the work of institutional organizations.

9. There is no democracy without the maintenance of alternative institutional organizations for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes including disputes as to what properly constitutes violence.

10. Progressive politics is always organized, and even if networked organizations are different in important ways from the professional and authoritarian organizations of industrial modernity none of these differences are of a kind that would annul the prior recognition that progressive politics is always organized.

11. Progressive democratization is always substantially a matter of education, agitation, organization to resist anti-democratization, and education, agitation, organization to implement democratization, that is to say, equity-in-diversity, peer to peer.

12. The desire to smash the state is always ultimately anti-democratic, since democratization is always the democratization of the state.

Contextualizing the Think-Tankification of the Academy

St Petersburg Times:

A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting "political economy and free enterprise." Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they've funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom. Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control.

Permit me a few scattered comments, most of which could be fully-fledged on their own if I felt an inclination to elaborate them, but which taken together in this more fragmentary state actually better reflect my reaction to this news item:

First, and I suppose most obviously: In the aftermath of the New Deal big business interests overcame their antipathy to and ineptitude at organized political activity (the priorities of profit-driven enterprise tend to be more parochial, proximate, opportunistic, competitive rather than co-operative) and began funding an archipelago of foundations and think-tanks spewing useful propaganda to counter the inconvenient results emerging out of universities. Now, in the present epoch of the pernicious corporatization and for-profit precarization and dumbing-down of the academy, Koch's purchase and control over university hiring and content begins (really, amplifies the long ongoing) re-writing of the academy itself in the image of the think-tanks that originated to combat the academy itself.

Second: Despite their incessant whining to the contrary, of course, it was never the left-wing bias in intellectuals they were combating in creating these alternate institutions (these intellectuals, after all, tend to come from privileged backgrounds or are engaging through their education in a process of upwardly-mobile professionalization, all of which tends to be forcefully prejudicial in the lives of even well-intentioned and progressive-identified people in countless ways, subtle and gross), but what has come jocularly to be known as Reality's "left-wing bias." And so these think-tanks busy themselves with the discounting of consensus scientific results whenever these support the case for regulations in the public interest that diminish profits, peddle faux-populist plutocratic "free-market" nonsense directly to lobbyists, elected representatives, and through mass-media outlets, engage in relentless marketing and promotional discourse selling or at any rate reconciling majorities to policies that benefit incumbent-elites, mobilizing and canalizing deep American currents of white-racism, sex-panic, anti-intellectualism, social distress in the service of voter disenfranchisement, mass-media distraction and disinformation, the maintenance of the plutocratic central economic planning and welfare for the rich programs misleadingly denominated "defense spending," and so on.

Third: That factual reality would have a left-wing bias, all joking aside, derives in a general sort of way from the converging tendencies of contingent universalization that happen to characterize both the publication and testing processes through which consensus science arrives at warranted beliefs as well as the democratization and consensualization processes through which ever more people arrive at ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them through the provision of an ever more informed and nonduressed scene of consent coupled to ever more equitable access to ever better legitimated alternatives for the nonviolent resolution of disputes.

Fourth: Koch's move isn't unprecedented, actually, but reminds us of the reaction of the Robber Barons to the radical populism of massively best-selling author Henry George and the popular movements his writing inspired (in the company of the extraordinary early influence of Marx and organizing labor, as well as "free men, free labor, free land" Republicanism in post-Civil War America), that is to say, their creation and endowment of formal economics departments in universities across the United States, devoted to the creation and dissemination of laissez-faire sophisms as an official discourse. Of course, this backfired when in the context of the academy this orthodoxy was overturned by the Keynesian Revolution. Hayek and Friedman then began the long slog to re-impose that discredited still-nonsensical laissez-faire orthodoxy, a painful story summarized by the word "neoliberalism" (actually, that is a no less painful oversimplification of the story, but, after all, so was the use of the phrase "Keynesian Revolution" to summarize the no less complex convulsive narrative that preceded it). Anyway, Koch's infiltration is not only the latest episode of the tragic story of neoliberal re-imposition of laissez-faire orthodoxy as plutocratic official discourse but an episode that re-stages the inaugural scene through which that official discourse was first installed as such.

Fifth: When I speak of the dissemination of a phony congenial right-wing alternative reality through the hijacking of the academy, through the combating of the academy by way of the phony scholarship of the bought-and-paid-for pseudo-academy of the think-tank archipelago, and through the opportunistic mass-mediation of right-wing spin, denialism, know-nothingism, social discontent and cultural violence, it should be noted that this critique is not the same thing as nor even properly subsumed under the critique of the Culture Industry by Adorno and the critical theorists or of the Spectacle by Debord and the Situationists (or of Barthean Mythology before them). No, were the academy to regain its autonomy from the parochialism and corruption of profit-making and competitive-military imperatives, were media monopolies broken up and media co-operatives set up to reflect the diversity of experience and expression of communities as well as shared problems and general interests, still the tendencies to reconcile majorities to exploitation, to naturalize the bourgeois status quo, to distract people with pseudo-needs critiques by Adorno, Barthes, Debord and others would remain in force. Right-wing think-tanks, Fox News and right-wing hate-radio, and Movement Republican efforts to privatize, marginalize, commandeer University departments have far more specific historical contexts and effects, they are playing out at a level of concrete specificity which is not the level at which critiques of the fetishized commodity form, the Culture Industry, Benjaminian "Aura," the Situationist Spectacle, and other comparable key Marxist/post-marxist critiques are pitched and it is crucial to grasp and respond to these developments in their actual specificity. (This is not to deny the continued vitality of these more fundamental critiques in their proper precincts, of course.)  

Sixth: Like the return corporate-militarists get for campaign contributions to elected officials (sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in such investments yield billions upon billions in subsidies and profitable deregulation at taxpayer expense), it really is flabbergasting to see how cheap it really can be for incumbent-elites to buy what amounts to a University Department in today's precarized academy with which to indoctrinate a generation of paid shills to champion feudalism in the midst of notional democracy.

Seventh: The organized futurology with which I tend to be preoccupied in this blog should be viewed as of a piece with the right-wing think-tank archipelago. Of course, the really bonkers extremities of superlative futurology that I tend to deride as a Robot Cult archipelago often have more in common with the organizations and subcultures associated with Scientology or Randian Objecitivsm, but sometimes even these extremes have their comparatively well-heeled well-funded facets (Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute is an example of what I mean by comparatively well-heeled superlative futurology, Singularity University is an example of what I mean by comparatively well-funded superlative futurology). Of course, the still techno-fetishistic but more prevalent futurological corporate-militarist foundations and think-tanks peddling neoliberal "development" schemes, liberal eugenic "bioethics," "geo-engineering" diversions, network and robotic "security" measures and so on are the truly dangerous, truly anti-democratizing point of intersection between my anti-futurological arguments and my concerns with the Movement Republican anti-academic institutionalization of a phony congenial right-wing alternative reality.

Reactionary Robot Cultists (Again)

Some folks in the Moot and elsewhere are expressing surprise -- others, who've been around longer, are expressing amusement -- at the drift into conventional reactionary politics in the statements of certain high-profile Robot Cultists who, however silly the futurological moonshine they've been peddling, had at least seemed (or at any rate protested in public places to be) more reasonably progressive in their political viewpoints.

In my view, futurological discourses are best understood as hyperbolic variations on mainstream neoliberal corporate-military "developmentalist" rationalizations and amplified variations of the conventional norms and forms of marketing and promotional discourse (in the most extreme superlative variations of futurology I deride as Robot Cultism that amplification of advertising hype actually takes on transcendentalizing and hence quasi-theological tonalities), and it really shouldn't be that surprising to stumble onto structural affinities of such discourse to right-wing rhetoric after all.

As one of my Futurological Brickbats puts the point more brutally: "To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms."

A few years back, I elaborated some of the structural connections between futurology and anti-democracy here, for those who are interested or need reminding.

Of course there are a handful of self-identified radical leftists with a high profile in the Robot Cult archipelago, poor things, but I must say it takes a rather dim bulb (or perhaps an especially desperate person, afraid of death, eager for attention, happy to be in on the scam for once, whatever it may be) to mistake what amounts to an epic-scaled late-nite boner pill ad for a utopian vision of the revolutionary left.

Just to be clear, for the millionth time: Advocating for the "rights" of software doesn't put you on the cutting edge of a civil rights movement, it expresses sociopathic disdain for actually existing, actually exploited and precarious planetary peers -- Pining for a Robot God to End History and solve all our problems for us is straightfoward authoritarian navel gazing -- Dreaming of nanosanta overcoming the impasse of poverty isn't a form socialism but of rank acquiescence to the bloodstained status quo -- And handwaving about your "geo-engineering" wet-dreams is a particularly egregious form of corporate-militarist greenwashing, hardly a more radical and hardboiled realist variation of environmentalism.

To pretend otherwise is at best pathetic, at worst, outright pernicious.

Queer Manifestations

There are queerer things in heaven and earth, Gay-Ratio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Here I've corralled together many posts I've written over the lifetime of this blog that tend toward queergeekery and genderfuckery (with some additional odds and ends)....

Snowball’s Chance in Hell (Holiday Cackles from the Balcony), December 25, 2004

Conservative Wants to Enslave Women to Make More Gay Babies, February, 2005

The Random Wilde ("The Queen Is Not a Subject" -- Redux Edition), March, 2005

Technoprogressive ARTs, October, 2005

Technology Is Making Queers Of Us All, March, 2006

Keep Your Laws Off My Body, March, 2006

The Real Scandal is that the Scandal is About Sex Rather Than Torture , October, 2006

Cackles from the Balcony: San Francisco Uber Alles Edition, January, 2007

"Post-Gender" or Gender Poets? April, 2008

Honoring Service, Because Freedom Isn't Free, November, 2008

Marriage? No, Thanks! The Right to Marry? You Bet I'll Fight for It! December, 2008

Obama's Gay Pride Parade from Hell, June, 2009

"Same Sex", December, 2009

The Populist Politics of Expressivity, Right and Left, and the Equitable Left Since 1968, January, 2011

Can Queer Radicalisms Be Enabled by Gay Assimilationist Politics? February, 2011

Gay Assimilation, Queer Emancipation, and the Dialectic Demolition of the Closet, March, 2011

Marriage Equality Tide Sets Stage For This Year's Pride, June, 2011

Queer Projector: An Honor (and Dishonor) Roll of Queer Film Recommendations, July, 2011

Every Jock Is A Puke... And Why This Matters, August, 2011

Transhuman Transsex, September, 2011

"Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again," May, 2012

Using Queer Strategies to Overcome the Violence and Misinformation of the Anti-Abortion Zealots, July, 2012

Prosthetic Sex/Gender and Healthcare Politics, December, 2012

What Is Patriarchy? December, 2012

Anarcho-Anti-Sexist Robot Cultist Decides Feminism Is Too Hard, Declares Himself A Robot, December, 2012

The Coming Gaybagger Wave, April, 2013

All Patriarchy Is Eugenic, April, 2013

Uploading As Reactionary Anti-Body Politics, January 10, 2015

The Parade Passes By, June 28, 2015

I Don't Understand Anything

Mobs of ecstatic weeping cheering flag-waving Americans are appearing spontaneously in front of the White House and at the World Trade Center site and who knows where else.… I am hearing people say that a chapter has ended for the American people, a whole generation is turning a page, that America is united in celebration….

I have to tell you, I cannot even begin to grasp how people could be declaring, as they are doing, one after another, that the death of bin Laden is the most important moment in the Obama Administration. Even granting the obvious symbolic momentousness of all this, freighting as it does the eighth anniversary of Bush's declaration of "Mission Accomplished" and so on and so forth, I have to say I personally think that there have been at least dozens of legislative victories and defeats that seem to me incomparably more significant, in terms of the effects that will be felt in the lives of millions and millions of people….

Pundits are proposing that it is now possible as it hasn't been before to leave Afghanistan and Iraq in earnest, and if that is true of course that is all to the good. And if long-suffering people can truly begin to heal the wounds opened in and by our recent painful history of terror, war, and occupation, then of course again I am happy that is true.

I am hopeful that the mourning to which Obama referred in his brief speech tonight may begin to do its long-deferred healing work, re-opening Americans in our shared vulnerability as human beings to connection with the fellow-sufferers among Americans of all parties and persuasions and among those denounced for so long as nothing but enemies as well....

But I cannot claim to understand why this is the night for such possibilities, why this is the event that renews this hopefulness, why this is the Presidential announcement that would unlock these possibilities, why this killing, however justified it might be, would unleash these howling ferocious unifying celebratory energies….

There are times when I am proud of the effort I have taken to understand what is happening in the world and the understanding that effort has rewarded me with, but on a night like this I have to admit I don't think I understand anything at all, I don't understand my fellow citizens at all, I don't understand what is going on in people's heads.

9/11 was terrible, but so was America's reaction to it, and I feel it again tonight, whatever the manifold complexities in play, there is something truly terrible in this night, and I for one feel nothing so much as confusion and fear….