Mississippi goddam!

 Rejoicing! Scott Colum has won it! The NYT's lead is that the last time Mississippi elected a black senator, it was under Reconstruction, and he left office in 1881. What the NYT doesn't say is the last time New York State had a black senator was exactly never. Since 1789, never a black senator in the state with one of the largest concentrations of African Americans in the country.

I hope this makes Nina Simone smile up there in heaven. Mississippi goddam!

nemesis and the hyperborean Left: the case of Corey Robin

1. I think that, generally, Corey Robin has been an excellent guide to the political culture of the last couple of years.

So I think it is very interesting that lately, he has made the turn to what I think of as neoliberal "leftism” A turn defined by making the idea of “retribution” secondary to that summary of things one could call good governance. Don’t prosecute, don’t impeach, don’t investigate. Rather, pass a host of good bills that will meet this moment of economic anxiety and foreign policy shpilkes. This will cement the popularity of the Left, inasmuch as the Democratic party can be a proxy for the “Left”.

This, I think, is the strategy adopted by the Obama and Biden administrations. Under Obama, it was called nudgery. Under Biden, it was called the Green new deal.

Myself, I think it is at the heart of the so called Left in neoliberalism. It is the idea that Nemesis has withered away. Or, to put it another way, it accepts too big to fail as an immutable rule, and takes governance as a network of work-arounds and improvements that are the best we can do. Nemesis is too hard, too retrograde, too distractive.

Now I think all of this is dead wrong. The reason the gains of the Democrats in the U.S. are so easily overthrown is that the left, giving up Nemesis, IS giving up justice, undermining the very legitimacy of work arounds and improvements. It disperses the impulse of justice in bits and pieces and substitutes.

After all, what is justice to a college graduate who just wants to pay back her student debt? An ornament. She’ll never be “richer” if we investigate and prosecute, say, Elon Musk for massive violation of our shredded but still standing campaign contribution laws.

Richer is the key word here. Money is, in one way or another, the only measure that is going to count in neoliberal culture. It is a form of money idealism. Money gives us equilibrium, it gives us a means and an end.

I think this notion ignores the mass of data showing that instead of wealth alone, people are driven by, among other things, a thirst, a raving thirst, for fairness. Or justice, if you will. My contention is that Nemesis has not been put into suspended animation, or euthanized. My idea is that Nemesis is still a live and fierce force in politics, and ignoring it will lead to a politics of work-arounds and failing programs and further leaps to the reactionary right.

2. Economists call it the Ultimate Game. James Surowiecki gives a good description of it:

“Take two people. Give them a hundred dollars to split. One person (the proposer) decides, on his own, what the split should be (fifty-fifty, seventy-thirty, or whatever) and makes the other person a take-it-or-leave-it offer. If he accepts the deal, both players get their share of the money. If he rejects it, both players walk away empty-handed.

The rational thing for the second person to do is to accept the offer, whatever it is, since even one dollar is better than nothing. But in practice this rarely happens. Instead, lowball offers are almost always rejected. Apparently, people would rather throw away money than let someone else walk away with too much. Other experiments illustrate the same idea. Essentially, people are willing to pay to punish those they think are free-riding or acting unfairly, even when doing so brings them no material benefits.”

The Ultimate Game has been known since the period when of our agricultural, warring, kingmaking polis-es first dotted the rivers, the Nile, the Indus, the Tigris. Among other things, the Iliad might be considered to be a poem about the Ultimate Game. In some myths, Nemesis was, even, the mother of Helen. Sunk costs and the wooden horse, yo. Nemesis has two sides: Adrasteia, or implacable necessity, and Fortuna, the distributor of fortunes, the goddess of the wheel.

I use “neoliberal” as a shorthand for our socio-economic state all too often. However, following the thread of Nemesis, we might also call this order, following Pindar’s Tenth Pythian elegy, the order of the Hyperboreans. Here’s a description by Christopher Brown

“THE CENTRE-PIECE OF THE TENTH PYTHIAN is the account of Perseus' visit to the land of the Hyperboreans. In lines 27 ff. Pindar reflects the limits imposed on the human condition; he then presents an example of a mortal who succeeded with the help of a god (45) in transcending the ordinary restraints and travelled the thomasto odos – [the fabulous way] - to the land of Hyperboreans.

According to Pindar's portrait, the Hyperboreans enjoy a special felicity in the presence of Apollo and the Muse. In this myth Pindar seems to picking up the theme of beatitude… “

To quote the translation from Anthony Verity:

“At their merry feasts they bind golden laurel in their hair; disease has no place among that holy people, nor ruinous old age, but they live without toil or battle, avoiding Nemesis’ severe judgement.”

So, what does this mean? Some classicists take the phrase “avoiding Nemesis’s severe judgment” to mean that the Hyperboreans are immortal. This identifies Nemesis with death. Brown, however, thinks this is unlikely. Brown argues that everything depends on the “fabulous road”. The Hyperboreans, at the end of this way, have earned a dispensation – or rather, are the lucky beneficiary of a dispensation – making them exempt from the Nemesis that rules over the ordinary human being.

The Hyperboreans, in other words, have not done anything to earn the dispensation, which has been made arbitrarily. But that arbitrary cosmic gesture has consigned them to the echelon of the immune, the unpunishable.

3. It is pretty obvious where I am going with this. The Hyperboreans exist in a zone much like the zone inhabited, under our current ancien regime social arrangements, to the politically and economically powerful. The Epstein class, the class including Trump who will avoid all punishments, the class that can only be, humbly, taxed. We can raise, by some micromanaging of committees, the amount that the hyperboreans pay to the state. That is the limit of our power.

Well, I say fuck that. They Hyperboreans of the neoliberal order are, in fact, those who have captured that order. The "too big too fail" judge, from their seats in congress, or from their positions as judges and attorney generals, that they are themselves too big to fail. They lunch and dinner with their fellow hyperboreans. They all go downstairs to the Senate gym.

Is this a virtuous circle – or a vicious one – decreed by fate? As far as fate has a contemporary proxy, I imagine that would be public opinion. The later I take to be the opinions held by the majority of the top 30 percent income group. These are of course the ruling class. Certainly they rule our media. There are exceptions to the rule, and there are tweets and what have you on the social networks which emerge from the subhyperborean underground. The circle of the fire-able, the circle of the punish-able. Public opinion is group that is merciful to the malign welders of illgotten gains, the tech boys or the Sacklers, et al. It is merciful to the frat rapists, it is merciful to the pollutor, to the builder of data centers, and so on. It is the group that, on the other hand, is awfully horrified when a stray Luigi Mangione comes along and kills one of the illgotten gamers of the health insurance game. This, as the Biden regime in its dying days put it, is "terrorism" - not a label of course to be hung on such as Trump.

In the subhyperborean realm, the realm of “ordinary mortals”, the ultimate game is still vital, still in their nature. They will still pay to make sure that the too big to fail will fail. However, from the hyperborean view, this shaming inclination to primitive retribution - to envy and the evil eye - is something that we can bribe away. They want so little.

The ordinary people notice that the Epstein circle consists of people who are never punished for being in the Epstein circle, just as Trump was never punished for an act of treason that in ordinary cases would have put him in jail for life. The idea among the hyperboreans is that lack of punishment, impunity, doesn't really upset the order. And I have a horrible sentiment that the notion, all rational and best case, of the Corey Robins is going to be taken up and used by the Democratic establishment to, once again, draw the line between the ordinary mortal and the Hyperborean overseer.

That would, in my opinion, be a serious misreading of this moment.

And here's the cheat sheet on Luigi Mangione

Lakesha Womack for President, 2028!

 

Lakesha Womack is my favorite candidate for president in 2028 on the back of this one sentence. Womack was just elected over Republican Tom Moore in a North Carolina district.

Here's the quote:

"Sitting in the lobby of a building on Capitol Hill on Sunday as newly elected members descended on Washington for orientation, Ms. Womack said in an interview that she had continued to work full time throughout her campaign and attended events after hours and on the weekends.

She received few national endorsements, but she also did not seek them.

“I don’t really seek outside validation,” she said. “I think validation is for parking.”

Lakesha 2028, people. All of you hobbyists, you amateurs, you lovers of old books, you weekend ceramicists, you cell phone photo artists, you seamstresses on odd hours, you geniuses at crossword puzzles - all of us who collectively form Ellison's little man at the Cheehaw station - it is our time! We are at the gates! Let's make this happen!

The political journalist fallacy

 Long distance predictions made after some event, like the Dem sweep this week, tend to isolate the event from the rest of the events that are causal factors. To predict how the 2028 primaries are going to go falls under the same rule. Call this the political journalist fallacy. Until we know the nexus of causes, we can't predict events. Although under my rule is the prediction of events now - they too are a causal factor. I imagine the predictions that were very sweeping in January 2025 -the Dems are finished, DEI is dead, long live the MAGA reich - had much to do with the GOP sense of immunity that seemed to be the bubble they have lived in even as the world around them soured.

I remember thinking this a lot in 2001 and 2002. We had an election with a debate about foreign policy between Al Gore and George Bush on TV that was about the pronunciation of cities in the former state of Yugoslavia. Hard as it is to believe, there was no mention of Osama bin Laden. Not one. If we were to elect on the basis of that debate, we would have expected our winner to put all his time into the Serbian and Bosnian question.

There are few times in American history where the future came out of the sky as decisively as on 9/11.

Now In logic, a set can't be its own element. In the structure of ordinary life, sets are treated as their own element all the time. Predictions about the future bend the future to those predictions, one way or another. A problem for the ethnography of logic.

In my humble opinion, the next year is going to be a rough economic year. I can't see the structure of self-dealing loans between AI companies as anything other than this decades' MBS-es. I'm no prophet, I'm no economist, I'm a writer in retirement relying on my memory and sensorium. So there you go.

No Kings aftermath, and the psycho-scatological-pathology of Trump

 I'm a strong believer in social movements as the necessary component to the political constitution of any democracy. Parties themselves are para-constitutional - the founders were all extremely allergic to factions (those readers of Machiavelli and Locke!) - and had a small polis view of an elected leadership (saving the Senate). However, the small polis was a terrible model for the United States.

As well as parties, the ante-bellum states were rife with social movements, sometimes religious, sometimes ethical, sometimes economic, and all of them a case of a content in search of a form.

This is why I think anyone who cast a real look at the No Kings movement, the much disparaged No Kings movement (which drew less than stellar coverage from the NYT, who devoted more ink to the fascinating insights of blue collar white racists in typical diners in Youngstown OH, marvelling over the permanent vibe change brought about by Trump) and that prefigured the general media inability to envision what came about on November 4. The key thing about No Kings, in comparison to, say, the Occupy movement was that it was very dispersed. And that was key.

A social movement operates on the collective psychology by disinhibiting popular opinion. After 2024, there was a palpable fear out there of MAGA and Trump. Especially in Red Areas of the country, those who were repulsed by MAGA also felt they were fighting against an irresistable force. Hence, when a number of mostly middle aged and older people came trickling out in costume on No Kings days and waved flags and funny signs, the effect was to poke a hole in the idea that MAGA had a death grip on the countryside. It was much more important that No Kings had demonstrations in Gulfport Mississippi than in NYC. If you compare a map of where No Kings demonstratins took place and you look at the changes at the state legislative level, as well as the national level, to a map of the Blue Wave, you will see a lot of correspondences.

Although the mass media reported on it as a flash in the pan, I think the signal was picked up by Trump. At least, his most psychoanalytically interestinng AI vid came out of it.

Freud, in his analysis of the so called "wolf boy", understood, through a dream recounted by his patient, a whole interlocking system of phenomena that were at work in that patient's life. In a strong sense, Trump's video, showing Trump in a plane, wearing a gold crown, dumping shit on the protestors, sez a shitload about Trump's mental condition.

This is a man whose flatulence during his trial in New York could not be concealed. He was 78 then, and he is 80 at the moment, and surely the anal death drive elements in his psycho-sexual makeup are surfacing as he feels, daily, the shit mounting up.

An incontinent Don Juan (as he feels himself to be), or elderly rapist, is in a peculiar position. The wound that his lack of control over his defecation deals to his narcissism is evident - there is a reason behind that bizarre fixation on male asses that he went on about during his rallies. The muscular ass would surely allow him control, once more, over his own digestion! The golden crown and the clean jet dumping his shit over his enemies turns that shit - his enemy - into a weapon. A little boy's toilet training dream, from which the media deflected its gaze, calling the dropping of shit "sewage". The gentility complex that refuses to name the object r - racism - or the object s - shit is connected to Trump's pscyoscatological state.

That this was stirred up by the No Kings movement is an indicator that, contrary to the poobahs of public opinion, the collective unconscious won't be mocked.

So: congrats No Kings People! Keep it up.

Friends don't let friends doomscroll

 I'm wondering about the group of doomscrollers who for the past two years have predicted, with dead certainty in their voices, that Trump was going to abolish elections and we would never have another one. I imagine they have put that in the amnesia hole.

In one sense, doomscrolling has a certain progressive element - waking people up, calling for action. But in a larger sense, it is a calll to wallow in despair, a sort of "I'm smarter than you" theme which becomes its own purpose. And there it is radically reactionary.

I'm all about prophecy - about the Elijahs and Isaiah's among us who are visited by the word and the vision, and see the larger harms, the larger vices. But the story of Jonah is also in the set - the prophet who could not accept that his warning was heeded. Who fell in love with his own negativity.

And that combination of narcissism and the death drive leads to certain bad things. Don't do it, I sez. I haven’t admittedly received this word from the burning bush, but probably from my Mom, encouraging me after Church league baseball practice. Good enough for me.

The second time around as farce-ier

 Since we are approaching election day in the U.S., everybody is making predictions about the results. I have no idea. But I do have a bit of a prediction for next year. The AI borrowing spree, I think, will start to melt down, and the important issue will be how much the Fed borrows and makes up cash to help the poor tech sector stockholders, giddy from buying stock where the price to earnings ratio has been replace by the price to burning money like it is party time on Epstein Island.

The appeals will come. Serious people will call for seriousness. Suddenly, Trump's chucklehead Secretary of Treasure will be listened to as a veritable oracle. The Centrist dems will appear on all channels, assuring people that the credit of the U.S. government has never been better.
Yeah, just replaying Bush's last year. The first time as farce, the second time as even more farce.