The motive behind the post-truth hoax

The first thing to be said about our post-truth moment is that it is complete bullshit that we are having a post-truth moment. The idea that somehow, uniquely in the last year, American politicians and propagandists have started lying systematically, ignores the entirety of American history. The idea of ‘post-truth’ is generated from a completely scewball, neo-liberal view of American history – and, indeed, of world history – in which America was not the country that declared its independence because the British weren’t killing enough Indians, and that incorporated slavery in the constitution. It is not the nation of Jim Crow, the Sand River massacre, the long war between labor and capital in which unions were attacked by national guards as a regular thing. It is not the America that dropped two atom bombs and proceeded to test nuclear weapons above ground for more than a decade, with the official scientific community, colluding with the executive branch, lying through its teeth about the mortal dangers of fallout – which a scientific committee in 2006, hobbled by the congressional requirement that it only consider Iodine isotopes, decided was probably the cause of at least 200000 thyroid cancers. It is not the America of bogus drug laws, enforced with exemplary racism, that took back many of the promises of the Civil Rights era.

Instead, it is disneyland, where a perpetually cool tinkerbell, who knows the latest euphemisms, is a little burst of rainbow. In other words, post-truth analysis is based on a lie. The lie is called American exceptionalism, or various phrases of that type.   Once you begin with a view of American history that can only be held by a member of the upper class (a class that is overwhelmingly white), who has distinct views about helping the “poor” (a sociological category that has its roots in charity) while despising the working class (which is a sociological category that has its roots in socio-economic struggle), you will quickly miss and misinterpret the American grain.

The post-truth meme was created in order to be scolded, and provide a soapbox for editorial lecturing. In reality, the lies of Trump are simply easier to spot. Trump has not bothered to find collaborators in the mainstream press, those willing volunteers who like to weave glamor around our monarchs – hence the awe evoked by so piddling a figue as George Bush.  This is, I think, a huge mistake. But it isn’t some troubling new facet of our society. There is no post-truthiness, and its hour has not struck. I don’t want to use the occasion of clueless sex offender Trump to tell liberal seeming white lies about our country.  That would be missing the moment. 

Between funny ha ha and funny peculiar: Trump and the incarnation of the american grotesque

In No Go The Bogeyman, Marina Warner takes, from the mouth of (very English) babes the distinction between “funny ha ha” and “funny peculiar”. It is an inherently unstable disjunction, having the structure of a booby trap or a slapstick routine. Between Punch the puppet and Gacy the clown serial killer, between “locker room talk” and sexual assault, there exists a subsurface resemblence, a vicious hilarity, to which we are both drawn and repelled. Warner’s book is about the large social region of the grotesque that is minimized by social scientists and made a footnote by literary critics, but that actually intrudes in our lives in a big way. The grotesque is generated by funny ha ha and funny peculiar, much as the two ends of funny pull at each othe.r

I’ve heard many people say that they can’t believe that the president we inaugurated today is really the president. That unbelievability is cousin to the grotesque, and haunts the seriousness of the ocassion. Downfalls are rarely so much like bad jokes. Rep. John Lewis called Trump an illegitimate president, which is a nice beginning, but hardly goes through the entire career. Trump is illegitimate as a public figure in every way: he’s a bogus businessman, a bogus playboy, a bogus politician, and a bogus reality tv star. He’s bogosity on a monstrous scale, sort of like some sexting Paul Bunyan, some underground comic marrying kitsch and obscenity. And in this he is an apt symbol of the American moment post – neoliberalism, post Iraq, post post –racism.  It is as if Robert Coover’s The Public Burning leaped off the page and realized fiction in cold fact. We are inaugurating a dirty joke, and we will all carry a little flake of that dirtiness with us as Americans. Between “make America great” and “America is already great”, we have chosen the compromise of making America a great horselaugh.  

That’s what the statue of bigotry says. Drop the mic.  

toy story 2 and the communist manifesto

Not having children in the 1990s, I looked down with complete disdain at kid’s movies. Or, actually, I didn’t look at them at all, but I’m sure I would have shown some sort of snickering adolescent attitude towards them, and covered it up with a buncha five dollar words.

Now, of course, I am immersed in children’s movies, videos, tv shows, and general Youtubealia. Which brought me with a bump of recognition to Toy Story 2. I promised Adam we’d watch it, and we did, Saturday.

It surprised me. Talk about a savage attack on capitalism!  For those who haven’t seen it, the toys are dream figures of the proletariat. On the one hand, for capital, represented in the movie as white kids and parents, toys are lifeless. Whenever the gaze of some parent or adult is present, the toys fall into a dead faint, in poses characteristic of toys that are scattered across the floor on a Saturday evening (insert here picture of our floor after Adam has finished with it). In reality, though, they have a separate life of their own, a life of precarious solidarity.  Yet that toy life is riven by the attitude towards Capital.

Interestingly, in the 90s, the upper administration decided that the work force needed the inspiration of new age therapies and Harvard business school lingo to “incentivize” them.  In the Working Life, Joanne Ciulla cits a study  which polled managers about the most efficient incentives for building employee commitment: "The researchers found that most senior managers believed that celebrations and ceremonies and non-cash recognition were the best incentives for non-managers... But for senior managers, they responded that the best incentive was cash rewards tied to quality performance." The heartbreaking thing about celebrations and ceremonies is that they substitute for an intangible yet evident cure for alienation that long frustrated Marxists in the 20^th century: employees really do become loyal to their companies.  As witness the phenomenon of 401ks, in which employees, given choices to invest across the spectrum, have a distinct preference for investing in the companies they work for – in touching contradistinction from their CEOs, who as often invest betting against their companies, if they aren’t loading them up with debt in order to LBO them. Similarly, the toys confess to each other that when they are selected by the kids, when they are “loved”, they feel alive. Of course, the only time they are alive is when they are with other toys. Such are the cultural contradictions of late capitalism.

Two sequences in particular have a startling realism. In one of them, Woody the cowboy toy is torn by his “owner” – in much the way say Monsanto carelessly poisoned its asbestos workers, then sold that division to haliburton. Woody’s owner is bummed about the torn arm: he drops Woody to the floor, and all sick at heart, leaves him behind as he goes to Cowboy camp. Which, it is easy to see, represents Davos. Woody, falling asleep, has a terrible dream in which his owner – Capital – tosses him in the garbage, along with all the other wounded toys, who drag him under as he is calling to his owner. Of course, here, in living color, is the whole reserve army of the unemployed,  demonized by Capital and viewed with loathing by the same workers who are simply a drop away – a profit loss away, or an “efficiency” away – from joining them.

The second sequence even gets a song. Here, the gender note is struck. Jessie the cowgirl lived in perfect love and harmony with her owner, Emily. Obviously, she thought of them as bound up forever, such is the burden of the song. But Emily turns out to be intent on cracking that glass ceiling. Yes! Instead of shaking up the patriarchal order, she’ll simply assume a higher function in it and pretend that this is equivalent to shaking up the patriarchal order. In order to make cruelly clear how this works, Emily doesn’t just throw Jessie away – she stores her in a box labelled “donations”. Of course, it is a good work, giving little Jessie to charity. One imagines Jessie will be one of the lucky “poor” people uplifted by our trade treaties so that she can go to a dangerous factory, work 16 hours a day for 18 cents an hour, and whip inflation now in these here states. This sequence is such a painfully accurate satire of Clintonism that I am surprised the film made it past Pixar’s censors.

When the film was over, Adam pronounced it his favorite movie. Mine too, for the moment.  

slaves of the map, arise!

I like my friend Seth Grossman's crusade to modify the electoral college - but my heart belongs to another vision of America in which we redraw the friggin' states. During the French revolution, districts that had a much more historically concrete identity as Duchies, former kingdoms, etc., were broken up and redrawn. I think the goal should be to enclose that comprise around 11 million people OR to enclose areas that comprise around 2 million people - to create many more districts or many fewer. But all of the districts should be about equal in terms of persons. This would, at one stroke, abolish the absurdity of a senate in which 2 members from California with forty million people meet on equal terms with 2 members from South Dakota, which has ten people and a goat. The problem with the electoral college is, of course, the same problem we have with the Senate. The senate has already been reformed once, when at the turn of the century we abolished the system of Senators being appointed by state legislatures and instituted direct elections. If we had, say, one hundred states with two hundred senators, or thirty states with sixty senators, or x states, all of about equal population, with x x 2 senators, that would all work fine. Even finer would be discarding the states as the basis for senator representation at all. We could continue with the states as they are, with their reps, their petty state capitals, and their corrupt state legislatures, and keep the House of Representatives as it is. The senate districts, then, could transcend state borders - basically, they would be imposed on the grid of the US to create equally populated districts. This last idea, which wrenches the federal government away from its captivity to states that are, mostly, platforms for the movements of different people within the US, would be the best.

read, digest, throw up

Trump's America will look like, unfortunately, what America has looked like for some time. This article, in which an ex drugdealer pins his hopes tenderly on Donald T. as he attempts to inject people with BMPEA through his supplements, looks both forward and backward . The ex drug dealer, Jared Wheat, the owner and CEO of Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals, is confident that his expensive slander suit will discourage others from investigating him, even though he lost it. He told the FDA to just piss off when they told him to recall several products. True, Hi-Tech is a piker in the industrial effort to poison America. We all remember that Syngenta has outfaced studies about atrazine by presenting their own funded studies, and that nobody is too concerned, in DC. about a statistically abnormal excess of birth defects in Iowa, where atrazine is used to kill weeds in the cornfields. What's a birth defect compared to Syngenta's bottom line? Even pre-Trump, the old idea about American history that emphasized such milestones as progressive legislation against patent medicines and the like has to be changed: the trendline has reversed, and the courts and legislators could care less about the health of the less useful population of mere people.

Read, digest. throw up: the three stages of information processing in America

weird scenes in the update of Suetonius' history, American version

The reaction to Buzzfeed letting us ugly and obscure people read what the glitterati in DC are reading - Donald Trump's Smutty Vacation in Russia - has produced more of the same from the prep school journalism crowd. The writers for the waPost and the NYT. You know the guys. The ones who watched, during the election, as a tape was released showing Trump uncautiously talking about groping pussy - and who asked not one question relating to that at the press conference, as Trump lectured the assorted sycophants about how clever he is in avoiding being tape recorded or videoed surreptitiously. I guess said sycophants didn't want to get into locker room talk. It is so not serious! This from the corps of journalists who, at the NYT, held a symposium about Mariah Carey's woes after her New Years fuckup.

Well, these are the people who carried water for the CIA after the intelligant agency was accused, correctly, of covering for coke dealers in the illegal Nicaragua affair. Who bent over collectively for Goerge Bush and licked his little Texas asshole till it was nice and shiny. Those folks.

Weirdly, though, the poobahs have been joined by other people, professional placers of the turd in the punch bowl. People like the Intercept crowd.

Who've decided it is all the Deep State attacking la Donald.

My gut feeling is that this crowd was, correctly, suspicious of the neo-con Putin hate nights lately staged by Clintonites and McCainites, singing in perfect harmony. But not wanting the cold war to start shouldn't mean covering up for Putin, who is a monster on the George W. Bush order. Chechnya, the false flag Moscow bombings, the hatching from the rotten vulture's nest of Yeltsin's horrible clan - it is all true. It is also true that whoever hacked the DNC did a good thing. If Clinton wanted her fuckin speeches kept private, she shouldn't have run for the presidency. And if the DNC under the thumb of establishment Dems had decided not to put another heavy thumb on the scale for Clinton in the primaries, there wouldn't have been any scandal about their doings - such that Debra Wasserman Schulz had to resign. On the same Procropian principle that secret history is what the cops and judges cram up your asshole if you don't watch it, Buzzfeed did us a service releasing that dossier. Now we know much more about what it contains, who commissioned it, and how it was constructed than we do - well, about the FBI - CIA report about the hacking of the DNC.

As for its "bizarreness" - as one of my twitter opponents phrased it this morning, dissing Buzzfeed - are you kidding me? Did the sexual assault stories, the headlines about Trump for the last thirty years, his delight in birddogging and cheating, just slip the collective media mind? Given Trump's M,O. and his sense of safety in Moscow (where he's touting the Miss Universe pageant - hey, page up those reports from Miss Universe contestants about what the son of a bitch was doing), Trump orgying with prostitutes seems pretty plausible - much more plausible than Trump becoming president of this big balled up nation.

I'm pleased to see that there is some pushback pro Buzzfeed. Not enough though. And the press, which has a huge gender problem (hence their inability to even check and see whether Trump had bit parts in Playboy movies, when I am sure as shit that if Clinton had the smallest bit part in a Playboy movie it would even have interested the moribund NYT), is going into covering an administration in which Trump and his minions will continue to pretend they are in Hugh Hefner's mansion - and they bring to this scene the morals of a Victorian judge guarding the public decency. Gonna be interesting seeing them in full sycophant mode, pretending this isn't going on. And getting shocked when internet news sites, clickbaiting away, put this shit up for Mr and Mrs. America to swing to

No, voxers, exploitation is not a virtue

There's a well meaning but infuriating meme going around among liberals, which is that if Trump "expels" illegal immigrants, we won't have anybody to harvest our foods. It is well meaning in that it gestures towards immigrants as part of the community. It is infuriating because it replicates the usual neo-liberal gesture of turning exploitation into virtue. In fact, the harsh reality it gestures to is an industry that depends on underpaying its labor force and providing it with not benefits. When you read that, for instance, sugar cane growers "can't find" americans to harvest sugar cane, you should read: sugar cane growers are unwilling to either pay a living wage or ameliorate conditions of labor and provide healthcare insurance for their laborers, because they are sucking off the top in enormous profits for fat cats. Under the guise of "tolerance" what is being tolerated is 19th century working conditions. To hell with that! If Pres Fuckface tries to expell illegal immigrants en masse, oppose him on human rights grounds, and then remember that we need strong labor laws that abolish exploitative work practices both in the country and the city, on the farm and in the coffee shop.