Limited, Inc.
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
Tuesday, July 08, 2025
The Global War on Terror is gone - Al qaeda is still here
Saturday, July 05, 2025
Drifting. A song for the 4th, sorta
1.
Comes a time when you’re drifting, sang Mr. Neil Young in 1977.
Or was it 78?
I thought about that line this 4th.
The news about the slow downfall of secondary education at
the state and private levels since January hasn’t really surprised me that
much. When the jewel of American culture, the amazing college and university
system that arose post-WWII, was at its peak, it seemed pretty obvious to the
right that this was a very bad thing. The protests about the Vietnam war, the
coddling of leftwingers among the teachers, and the idea that the children of
the mob could study Shakespeare and write poetry instead of learning how to
optimize their movements on the assembly line – this simply and absolutely went counter to the
tradition-based view of society. The solution, which started in Reagan’s
California and became the norm, was to raise the price of education. But as the
mob still wanted in, the compromise with the liberal-center was to keep raising
the price while at the same time making it easy to get loans for that price.
Thus, out of the jewel we extracted a mashup of the system of indentured servitude
and the system of liberal education. But mashups are not syntheses. Eventually,
they come apart.
Thus slowly, slowly, one of the great features of modernity –
a feature that has roots as much in the medieval city and the culture of pilgrimage
as in the breakup of the old patriarchal household, in which the extended
family all lived together – the period of drift, fell prey to the new norms of
debt and continuous labour.
Hard workin’, as Democratic candidates like to say. Hard
working families. They work hard. Hard hard hard. It is hammered in with nails.
Because the master always wants the serfs to work hard. And in that hard work,
you fill in the space of drift. It is an offense and also leads to crime and
drugs!
2.
I look at myself as a relic from that older era.
At that time Mr. Young was singing his line about drifting,
I was a young sprout and I was drifting. Like many another young sprout, patched
and peeled in the suburbs and spit out into the great America that I
romanticized through numerous books and popular songs and movies.
I thought of it then, because I did recognize this was
drift, as a necessary phase, especially
for a young buck who wanted to become a writer. To me, a writer was attached by
every thread to experience, and experience was an adventure. The Wild West was
not some historic fiction, it was right outside, you could walk into it any
time. Everything about the America of
the sixties and seventies encouraged the thought that drifting and experience
were all balled up together. Ishmael’s feeling was mine:
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;
whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself
involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of
every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an
upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from
deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats
off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
The period of drift was made extraordinarily easy for me and
my kind by the wondrous archipelago of colleges and universities across the
Grand Old Country. You check in, you check out. And even while I was taking
classes, I was working in all kinds of jobs.
I worked as a washer in a pizza place, a carpenter’s
assistant, a parking lot attendant, a janitor in a Sears Warehouse in
Shreveport, Louisiana, a clerk in a hardware store, a furniture maker and
deliverer, a landscape crew manager. I worked in a bookstore, I worked in a library,
I worked in a diner. And I quit. Oh, quitting was one of the greatest pleasures
in the world. To quit – who has ever sung the song of quitting? I remember, for
instance, one summer when I was on a crew building a warehouse, and because I
was too afraid to work on the roof, which required walking on crossbars yeah
wide while carrying tools with the ground 30 foot under, I was put under the thumb of a young thug, the
pup of the owner of said warehouse, who would make me get in the cab of a lift
that would take me up those thirty feet.
The thug would juggle me for a joke there, lowering and raising the cab. I took
it for a week, being this idiot’s assistant. And then I quit. I think that day,
the day I quit with no job in sight and no mowhney to pay the rent on the lousy
little attic apartment I had at that time in Atlanta, was one of the happiest
days in my life.
This could only have happened in a culture that preserved,
reluctantly, a social space for the drift. Almost all my friends drifted, at
one point or another. When I worked in the pizza joint – a place called Jaggers
cattycornered from the entrance of Emory University, where I’d learned, for
instance, all about Dilthey from a professor named Rudolf Makkreel, I fell into
a crewe consisting of a lesbian cook who wanted to be a rabbi and goat breeder,
a Gay Rights advocate waiter and Don Juan, a long haired, rather short punk who
turned me on to Captain Beefheart, and the genial husband of another waitress
who took me out to his favorite strip joint. I remember scrubbing the pizza pans,
black iron pans, with steel wool, and how I’d get little splinters in my
fingers. I remember throwing out the garbage, so much garbage, in the dumpster
in the parking lot. I remember feeling this is it: the Wild West!
3.
And such was drift for one middle class white boy. But it
would be a huge mistake to think that drift in America, a country founded by
drifters, expanded by drifters and killers, and immigrated to, hugely, by
drifters – it would be a mistake to think this was some privilege of my race,
class, and gender. My aspirant rabbi friend, the Wiccan who I was afraid of who
lived across the street from me there in Atlanta and sold drugs, the gay rights
activist, the woman who I worked with at the hardware store who alternated
between berating her husband, the fireman, and cheating on him with an obvy
lowlife, the manager of that store who eventually went to prison for dipping in
the till to pay for his gambling losses – this whole glorious collective that I
can only call “my” life with a distorting simplification, so much was it ours –
this was all within the drift.
And nobody hated the drift so much as those whose distant
ancestors were all drifters. The whole of post 70s politics and social science
was dedicated to eliminating, once and for all, drifting. And replacing it with
debt and a policed underclass. Drifting moved to the Style section of the NYT,
and was strictly for Nepo celebs. Who business planned and selfied their whole
drift.
4.
When this is over, when the Chinese century has buried the
brief time of the American hegemon, I think that drifting will reappear. It is
structurally part of the revolution in social time that took place when the
patriarchal house disintegrated, and though that house is being put back together,
thirty year olds are now living with their parents and the age at which people
marry is going up and up, I am certain this will fail. The stocks will fail.
The tech companies will fail. The AI will fail. The climate will fail. The attempt
to reinstitute racism, homophobia and misogyny will fail. The attempt to
negotiate a centrist racism, homophobia and misogyny will fail. The housing
market will fail, the police explosion will fail, the borders will fail.
And drift will remain. Thank God. Happy fourth!
Thursday, July 03, 2025
Plath
I was a bit afraid when I read the byline: Patricia Lockwood. Who, perhaps unfairly, I have defined as the London Review of Books putdown artist.
Saturday, June 28, 2025
Trump's Gleichschaltung
The NYT gave us a splash of its usual ideology-washing prose yesterday regarding the resignation of the UVA president, which came about as one of the Trump administration's demands:
"The extraordinary condition the Justice Department has put on the school demonstrates that President Trump’s bid to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which he views as hostile to conservatives, is more far-reaching than previously understood."
This construction is a sentence of such moderate-centrist bothsiding excess that it could have come from Stephen Miller himself. It invokes the oft expressed idea (in the NYT) that the universities are not "safe" spaces for conservatives, but are packed with lefties. Oddly, that the oil industry from the CEOs to the mid managers are packed with raging rightists has never provoked any demand for an ideological righting of bias by forcing EXXON to hire socialists. Must just be overlooked. Guys, since the oil industry has so lmuch influence in the world, is it right that it is hostile to liberals and leftists?
Ah, a question that the NYT would never ever ask.
Now, how could they have reported this latest bit of Trump thuggery? There was a nice little German word that cropped up in 1933 and afterwards: Gleichschaltung. The party that came to power in 1933 (the name of which is left up to the reader to find out) used the word to fire Jews and Leftists in academia and bring about a synchronization of the makeup of the Universities with the makeup of the party in power.
Which is what we are seeing the Trumpies do. The Civil rights department is much concerned about the civil rights of whites. You might not know it, but whites, poor rich whites, are descriminated against by DEI. Blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, etc., have long been underrepresented or not represented at all in the U.S. and the name for that is systemic racism. A name that makes the NYT editors and all their country club buddies bristle.
So remember this term. Gleichschaltung. Because that is what is happening.
Not that you will ever read about it in the paper of record.
We live in dumb times.
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Hearing the past: Michelet and the French school of historiography
In his book on Michelet, Brahami points to a little revolution in method that follows in the wake of Michelet’s metaphors. Michelet, who was as close to skin, bone, blood and sex as any nineteenth century bon vivant, did not like the idea of the historian looking at history through a telescope or a loupe. Brahami goes outside of his strictly historical work, and finds in such texts as “The People” and “The Bird” the key to Michelet’s method – a auscultation of history. Michelet work as a historian was contemporaneous with the instrument invented by his contemporary, Laennec. He uses the image in a rather charming way in The Bird: the woodpecker « ausculates to see how the tree sounds, what it says, what it is in itself. The procedure of auscultation, so recent in medicine, was the principle art of the woodpecker for millenia. It interrogated, sounded, saw by hearing. »
This is a rather fascinating out of the frame metaphor. The British and American historical method was a sort of junction of positivism and epic. But the French school, from Michelet to Foucault, has always been directed by another metaphoric, a combination of folksong and positivism, if such a thing is thinkable.
Brahami quotes the preface from Michelet’s The People:
“Thus, I closed my books and I placed myself in the people as much as I could ; the solitary writer plunges into the crowd, he listens to the noises, notes the voices.” The opposition between the book and the crowd, here, may be a little rough – but even in the book, the books that contain the noted voices, the popular media, there is a sort of historiographic listening that is extraneous to the spirit of the British and American schools, until recently. The failure of historians in the U.S. to use the amazing material of the slave narratives gathered after the Civil War was a failure due to both racism and a predominantly visual sense of history, as if we could “see” the past better than we could hear it.
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
A sigh
If what the paleontologists say is true, homo sapiens has
been walking around on this planet a pitiful 350,000 years. Of that amount, I,
at 67, have been here 0.00019142857 of that time. It ain’t much. When I raise
my eyes and look at the politics of my time, or the past 200 years or so (0.00057142857),
I notice that I have been, except for certain exceptional periods, pretty much
on the losing side of all political battles.
At one time, working class leftist politics was animated by
the idea that it was inevitable. The working class, being the productive class,
would eventually realize its power and overthrow the aristocrats and plutocrats
and institute the reign of plebocrats – democrats.
That, I should say, defined politics in the supposedly “short”
twentieth century.
The working class decisively lost. The plebocrats, it turned
out, were bureaucrats from the Party. And on the other side of the wall, after
a number of concessions were made after WWII and up until the sixties, the Free
World reverted to the old capitalist order in which those who succeeded in
maximizing their wealth a thousand and ten thousand fold more than those who
produced the wealth held all the power and made all the decisions, although, as
is right and proper, through various representatives who could claim to
represent not only the interests of the richest but also, on marginal things,
the interests of the rest.
Working class leftist politics, in my time, shifted its
focus: it became a matter of those who had the most cultural capital. A wholly
untrustworthy group, blind for the most part to their socio-economic function
and retreating to a Left of the Mind. Not that I am bitching – I’m a camp
follower of that group.
At certain points in my life, I have said, oh fuck it and unplugged
from reading about politics – the politics of the 0.00019142857 of the time
that homo sapiens have been here – because it was so frustrating. I was at a
mook’s distance from any real power. I understood the non-voter better than the
voter, really. Alas, I’ve grown old and no wiser, and here I am again, a wee
little American pea, raising my voice against war, atrocity, and the bestial
stupidity of the ruling class. I know in my bones what happens, having seen it happen
over and over – the current crop of idiots will fall, and power will once more
return to the technocratic representatives of the plutocrats, who will make
little deals for us all, to an extent. The poohbahs of the left, with their
cultural capital, will alternatively bitch and tell us all that our very lives
are at stake if we don’t elect a buncha oatmeal to “fight” for us. And so on.
Well, what was I, a 0.00019142857-er, expecting?
And the prep school boy says: I didn't wanna be mayor anyway! Cuomo' bows out
Perhaps the oddest thing about the whole Cuomo race is the end of it - or at least this phase. He did not give a concession speech shouting out to his hardworking campaign workers, his voters, etc. He ended it like a prep school boy who did not get accepted at his fourth choice on the list of Ivies. No biggie, he didn't want it anyway!
The Global War on Terror is gone - Al qaeda is still here
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