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The two dominant factions among the country clubbers who lord it over the morlocks in the United States of Dreamland consist, on the one hand, of a rightwing group who spend a lot of time producing and decrying fake news, and a center-right group of Eloi who have produced a fake consensus history and spend a lot of time contrasting the present barbarians with the beautiful normality of once upon a time. The murder of 11 mostly elderly Jews in Pittsburgh has produced a lot of articles about how anti-semitism could be happening in Dreamland, of all places. But anti-semitism is, as Rap Brown might put it, as American as apple pie. A minor story this week about Trump sponsored anti-semitism gained some attention: Radio Marti, a government funded propagandastation that broadcasts to Cuba, took up the cudgels of American whitenationalists (and Hungarian anti-semites and the rightwing government of Israel) against George Soros. Soros is a billionaire with liberal leanings, and hence m

I have given much thought, in my life, to a certain intellectual history that characterizes the stages from the early modern age until now in terms of increasing rationality and the dis-enchantment of the world. This story seemed wrong to me – wrong on the level of ordinary life, at least, and probably wrong on the level of intellectual life within the epoch of capitalism – or more broadly, the epoch of industrial production. Just as the money-nexus did not replace the gift economy, but rather relies upon it, so, too, did the collapse of the belief in an enchanted realm, a realm in which the rules of causality are bent to the charisma of certain figures, happen only partially, with the forms of it still in use as a support for the administered world, the world of parity products and neo-liberalism. Read a fairy tale and watch a police series on Netflix and you will see causality bend in both cases, adhering in both cases to our greater belief in charisma than in contingency. Cause an

Salmagundi (the Summer issue) features an essay by Dubravka Ugresic, entitled Artists and Murderers, that is right up my alley in terms of being a scathing and total denunciation of the world of art and culture in the time of genocidaires and businessmen (the two types often trading positions, now collecting civilians in camps and massacring them, now setting up chains of folky fast food restaurants). It seems that in Croatia, where Ugresic hails from, the writing, artmaking and artcollecting fields, which were once overflowing with the botched, the bewildered and the bohemian, the eccentric heiress and the surrealist poet,   are now booming thanks to the participation of the usual masses of   scum: politicians, celebrities, and the whole herd of tv talk show guests who at one point or another stole, killed, defrauded, scored, screwed, lied, and otherwise made their heap out of an almost transcendental assholery. You see them in the glam magazines, they roost in the lists of the 100