Don't watch the news

Everybody's got a job to lose

I never watch TV news. We don't have a tv, for one thing, but I don't stream tv news either.

It may be that not watching tv news gives one a different take on politics, beyond ideology. I have my take cause I have certain lefty ideas. But I also have my take because my filter for the news is delayed, and in print.

My impression from everything I have read about the news media is this: that it is dominated by rich white men. They are the decision makers, they edit and report the news, and the picture they make pretty much reflects the world of rich white men. It is also the case that the demographic that goes most strongly for Republicans consists of rich white men.

Perhaps this explains a curious phenomenon among my liberal friends: an exaggerated sense of Trump's political popularity. I ran into this a lot at Christmas dinner this year. Although the last two years have been the worst for the GOP since 2006, the persistant belief is Trump ueber alles.

Obama, it must be said, was terrible for Democrats, and good for himself - thus, during his administration, the Dems lost something like a thousand seats on the state and national level. Trump has had a similar effect on the GOP. When the GOP can't even win the governorships of KY and LA, you know Trump's pull is limited. However, in contrast with Obama, who won quite handily in 2008, Trump won the electoral college by the merest hair in 2016. In the three key states, MI, PA AND WI, he won over HRC by something like 120,000 votes. What that means is that he starts out from an extraordinarily weak position. Still, to credit the big Orange idiot, he also spent half of what HRC spent on the election.

He definitely will outspend the Dems this time. But the configuration is really against him. He hasn't expanded his base. Not an iota. Those who voted for him last time will vote for him this time. If the Dems pursue the illusion they are going to lure Trump voters back, they are going to be in trouble.

But the Dem base is larger. And the potential for getting votes for those who stayed home in 2016 is enormous. Why, then, is this confidence not shared among the Dem elite and my liberal friends?

Frankly, most of my liberal friends are white. And many of them do watch the tv news. Their filter for what is happening is through Trump's most ardent demographic. More, I feel like the division between working class culture and upper middle class culture, which has become enormous under neoliberalism, works to make it the case that few upper class liberals that I know really know any working class people, white or black.

Trump is in it for the excitement. Thus, he allowed Pompeo to put him in an incredibly stupid position. But he also has a very injured sense of being pushed - which is why he got rid of Bolton. I have no idea what will come next, but I am still betting against a war with Iran and that Trump will run within his bubble. I argued against the war with Iran business in 2007, and I still think the argument holds today. Also, I don't think Trump wants to borrow the 400 billion dollars he would need to do this. He wants to run on a great economy.

And racism and misogyny, of course.

In any case, remember: old white guys are grossly overrepresented in the media machine that "reports" on the U.S. Never let that fact fade from your watching life. My two cents for the day.

two chamisso poems

Lucy's the boss

She loomed over my childhood
like a divorcee's vocation:
Lucy says put your hands on your head!

Philistine muse, crabby femme fatale
your schopenhauerian trick with the football
a mean koan.

Later she might have produced a line like:
I am big.
It is the pictures that got small.

Her choric darkness
Snoopy's anarchic daybreak
locked in eternal struggle.

I wrestle with Butler
under the table.
Dog germs! dog germs!

My barbies wait in a box
car crash odalisques
for her summons.

Lucy's the boss! Lucy's the boss!
so when did I stop wearing
my Peanut's gang pyjamas?

Moose agonistes

André Breton and Bullwinkle
set sail on a pea-green sea.
It was all a stunt, set up by a committee
to attract attention to a worthy cause.
Bullwinkle was uncertain. He was into the mob for a certain sum
which is why he took the gig. Usually, he had
a more certain sense of the perimeters,
what was expected of him. The bit with the rabbit
and the hat. The bit with the squirrel.
He and the squirrel hadn’t spoken for years –
it was a legendary quarrel. Supposedly, the squirrel once
even bit Bullwinkle, hard. Credits, money, usual
star vanity bullshit.
Bullwinkle put a poster up
in his dressing room: Beware of rodents!
it said, an X over a squirrel-like silhouette.

Breton, well afterwards everyone said
he’d misread the invitation.
Bullwinkle? he thought it said Bulgakov
an old Troskyist companero from Mexico City.
When the storm struck, the boat in which the camera crew
had set up was parted from
the Bullwinkle boat. The last anybody saw it
was through a fog, a moose silhouette surmounted
by a surrealist, the latter waving his arms.
Rocky, at the memorial service, broke down:
He was my best friend, he wailed.
Was it of the moose he spoke?
- Karen Chamisso

letter to mary shelley

Letter to Mary Shelley

Letters to the dead, or their conversations

No longer thrive among the literati.

We’ve all grown I-bound here, and no other demonstration

Is wanted, but only a sort of lyric potpourri

- which captures our moods and days

And is put quite nicely in quaint sachets.

I’m not complaining – I turn out my quire

And sometime make a little genius patter

Illuminating the soft and hard wires

That make up my neural personal matter

According to all the best popsci bestsellers

Apparently we’re just haunts in genetic cellars.

You were born to the royal anti-royal blood

the little red riding hoods of the revolution

but grew up, Gretel-like, to brood

on the wolf that might solve your family situation.

Then he came, dressed in robes of poesie

- which is how you eloped with the romantic agony.

I should tell you, Mary, we no longer brook

long letters written with that manual drolery

- letters as long as the chapters in your  book

in the tradition of epistolary -

rather we jerk out an email or fifty

under the burden of being short and nifty.

But what is a poet if not an anachronism?

a creature lost among  capitalist feeders

and accused of practicing onanism,

irrelevant,  being at best a loss leader

a prestige item with a hushed voice

on NPR, bloodless and choice. 

In other words, a downer. In other words, a monster.

so you see how much it’s in my line

to stir your shade, to disinter

you from the vaults of the gothic sublime

as you predominate in the culture

that has turned away from the bigwigs of literature.

You’ve had a husband. I’ve had too.

Why do we burn ourselves in the futile quest

to find a mate who is not askew

and will live and love beyond time’s test?

Yours,  his heart consumed in a barbecue

and mine, who I would have liked to have done the same to.

But you are thinking, you woke me up for this?

Couldn’t you bitch to some living friend?

I have other fans, who follow their bliss

by dreaming up quasi-pornographic ends

for me and my creature, a jumble anatomy

all cooked up for fan-fic fuckery.

I dig your objection, or my projection

(shades and shadows, death and the double)

girl – aren’t we the girls who’ve made

our project to cause a lot of trouble

to nitpickers, naggers, and no-nothing butts

who tend to write letters addressed: stupid sluts?

But I have a reason – here we come

Into, technically, the finis of this discourse

this insinuato – for unlike some

I’m keen on rhetorical resource

You, who learned the ancient Latin and Greek

will recognize of what I speak -

Okay, enough, incipit the story:

A friend who is always discovering the bizarre-est

Paris, Fragonard’s ecorchés,

or  sketches by some necrophile symbolist

invited me to the Hôpital St. Louis

where plaster casts from the nineteenth century

are exhibited to the select who ask

for tickets, a dwindling group it seems.

Physicians in training once had the task

of noting horrors that appear as though in dreams

of the worst that can happen to the human skin:

the 19^th century payment for each sin.

The crowding, hovels, debauchery and then some:

Hence the lesion-ridden penis, tumerous nose

adenomas, sarcomas, in a waxy gum

painted then and signed – it’s art I suppose

from which I’m sure that you can learn a bunch

by peering closely – just ask Edvard Munch.

The painter visited here, with some acquaintance

In the 1890s, when  nihilism was the rage

and then painted The Inheritance

where a syphilitic child lies like an open page

on his mother’s lap, diseased to the bone

- it obviously fed Munch’s  misogynistic jones.

The modern Prometheus – we never got it right

did we? In each vitrine a tragedy

 beauty and labeled deformity fight

out the issue of  transcendent agony -

limits imposed by the messes we are

and get into, on this tiny star.

This agony, it isn’t romantic

- these casts do not display the noble body parts

that went into the making of your maniac

a monster science born of the modern arts

mixed with the superstitious  – that was clever!

But these diseases are of another weather.

Frankenstein’s head – via James Whale –

would fit right in here: green skin, thick brow,

forehead scar, the morphine user’s pale

eyelids.

               How

the doctors and the casters would have loved to see

Frankenstein in the clinic for an advisory!

Did you approve from your heavenly perch

The cinematic annexing of your IP?

I’m sure you recognized in the monster’s lurch

through that landscape your demi-divinity

- “so dusk, so obscene and blind”

this untrammeled product of the human mind.  

  

Myself, my head would not fit here

- my fault is beyond this wax, God’s truth -

though I’ve seen diagrams that make clear

that the HOX proteins have failed to induce

the inhibition process that would lend opacity

– undermining the bod’s ombragenous capacity.

Yes, I’m the girl with no shadow. You missed

a subject so subdued to your dyer’s art,

no shadowless girl in some dying fire hissed

its matter into your gothic heart.

A monster me –  and not a faker

writing lit’s greatest monstermaker!

I’ll wrap this up – it has grown quite a size

- just I thought the scene of me here was for you.

I’m sure it has given you a surprise

that out of all of Percy’s crew

You are the studied, the referenced celebrity:

Quite up there with Byron, Keats and Percy.

My friend and I left the hospital grounds

and went for coffee to dissipate

the horrors that made their circus rounds

in my dreams, which I won’t relate:

it’s morning here, time to work, and so

sincerely, Karen Chamisso.

analogy fallacy

The analogies between the UK election and the upcoming American one remind me of the analogies that used to be tossed around in 2003 between occupying Germany after ww2 and occupying Iraq. They are analogies that simply ignore all the salient factors. In the UK, there is a genuine grievance among Labour's working class constituency about how the EU works, which led to Labour having the impossible task of trying to straddle a fundamental issue, becoming a house divided against itself, running against a flamingo fascist who had been in office all of two months by having to run on the flamingo fascist's chief issue.

In the U.S., on the other hand, there is no Brexit. There is an impeachment that lays out Trump's corruption, which - destined to defeat in the Senate - can provide delightful issues to hammer the Republicans indefinitely. There's the fact that, after four years in office, Trump appeals, massively, to Republicans, and not very much or at all to anybody else. Bush was re-elected with a very respectable 35 percent Hispanic vote, according to exit polls. I doubt Trump gets 20. The local elections earlier this year prefigured Labour's massive defeat, while the local elections this year are a clear signal that the electorate is riled up, and will vote against the Dems - as happened in the Governors' races in KY and LA, and in the Democratic triumph in Virginia, among other races.

The elites in the press have long turned into neolib fanboys. Culturally, this means they really, really despise workers. And fear them - this is a meme that goes way back in the history of capitalism. The neolib trick is to try to meld together, say, LBGT issues and NAFTA, or an economic policy favoring the plutocrats in all things with a cultural shift to the "left" allowing trans-"transgressive" artists space in the Style section. It turns favored marginals into entertainment objects which are mulled over by the kinds of people that worry, otherwise, that the Democrats are getting too "radical". In France, the same chemistry is at work - the "deuxieme" gauche, which isn't gauche at all - the type of "lefties" who accepted minister positions with Sarkozy and now fight to please Macron - has broadly the same op-ed beliefs.

Anyway, given the media peeps that try to "run" the narrative in America (all singing the same, Trump is uniquely awful real Americans love him! song), the Johnson analogy will come out heavily over the next media cycle, but I don't think it will make too much of a difference. The disconnect between the political establishment and the grassroots in both parties is deep and getting deeper. My advice: don't believe the hype!

Here's what I wrote in November, 2003

Historical analogies cannot take the place of historical analysis - Leon Trotsky

Jay Bergman, in an fascinating article on Trotsky published two decades ago in the Journal of the History of Ideas, noted Trotsky's borrowing of terms and phrases from the French revolution, and the way the neurotic recapitulation of this reference misshaped and ultimately falsified his analysis of Stalin. It is Bergman's thesis that one of the intellectual causes of Trotsky's failure on the level of practical politics was his habit of casting the contemporary history in terms of the French Revolution. Marx had already mocked the French revolutionists habit of clothing their every act in the language of Republican Rome, as if they could exchange their button up trousers for togas. Bergman has some fun in showing how the scare-word 'Thermidor' was thrown around in the early years of the Russian Revolution. The Mensheviks, in exile, poked at Lenin's NEP as a pernicious backsliding to capitalist norms. For them, here's the proof that Bolshevism was descending into its Thermidor. When Trotsky was still close to the center of power, he dismissed the analogy out of hand. However, once he was clawed out of the center of power, the old black magic of analogy appealed to his mind like that last pipeful to a pothead. Suddenly, the the Thermidor analogy seemed golden. This was a product of the fateful historical experience of the counter-revolution, i.e. Trotsky's being kicked out on his can, in the Soviet Union. One should always ask, when an historical analogy is offered, who benefits -- for usually it aggrandizes the image of its maker in some way. In any case, as out of Thermidor grew the context in which Napoleon emerged, so too, in Russia, out of the counter-revolutionary bureaucratic forces within the Bolshevik party grew the context in which the Soviet Bonaparte, Stalin, emerged.

There are serious problems with treating Stalin as a species of Bonaparte. Stalin himself thought he was a species of Ivan the Terrible. What is most interesting about the analogy, perhaps, is that both Bonaparte and Stalin came from peripheral cultural zones - Corsica and Georgia - to dominate the hegemonic center. So did Hitler, for that matter. But such insights into historical states of affairs afforded by analogies have to shuck off the analogic form in order to become serious. In other words, suggestion has to cede to hypothesis, and hypotheses are brutal.

Bergman is damningly succinct about Trotsky's problem.

"Trotsky, desperately seeking for something from the past that would make sense of the present and promise vindication in the future, failed to recognize (except on rare occasions) that historical analogies, especially inappropriate ones, can often obscure more than they clarify, particularly when the object of one's analysis - in Trotsky's case, Stalinism - proves to be far more rooted in a nation's history and culture than any transnational comparison or analogy might suggest. Indeed, the categories Trotsky borrowed from the French Revolution - Jacobinism, Thermidor and Bonapartism - were too much the product of one historical epoch and national history to be useful in explaining, or even in helping to explain, the evolution of another."

Given the way in which analogies are usually imperfect or completely fallacious guides to the future, their use as a justification for strategic choices is where the metal hits the road and buckles, crashing the plane into the schoolbus. Bremer, in Iraq, famously disbanded the Iraqi military under the premise that it was exactly like the occupation authorities in Germany disbanding the Nazi army. The insanity of this kind of justification will, I am sure, run rampant in the shop offices of the D.C. election consulting firms. We'll see what Democratic candidate suddenly decides to revamp according to the formula that Trump, like Johnson, is the heavy favorite. 

macronery overreaches!

From Willetts: http://willettsmag.net/macron-overreaches/

From a strategic pov, the Macron/Eduard Philippe proposals are curious. After all, the points system seems both so blurry and so technocratic that its real meaning – the gradual abolition of state support for the retirement of most of the working class, and the debauching of public service (conservative governments make th

eir case against government by the slice and dice method – they underfund state services, the services go to crap, then they say, justly, look at how crappy government is) could be achieved, and then they could creep towards the goal of raising the retirement age, and voila. But no: they decided to front and center what Philippe, comically, called “working just a little bit longer”. Hence, the crossing of the “red line” – the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64 – and the turn of the moderate union, the CFDT – against Macronery. According to Le Monde, the house journal of Macronery, this has “shook up” Macron’s party – all of them, apparently, are pacing around their 800 thousand euro apartments in the 5th and 6th arrondissements going, we thought we had an understanding with the servants!

Historically, when a President of France is going to take a big dump on the population, he sorta disappears in Olympian fog, and his Prime Minister appears as the big target. This happened when Chirac tried this shit with Juppe, and it is happening now with Philippe. I suppose what is in it for the pm is that he gets a shot, latter on, as the candidate for president. But in fact, it is rarely a good position to be in. Juppe never recovered from the disaster of 1995. Philippe is now the face of “work just a little bit longer” – a phrase that will hang around his neck, I think, for the resgt of his career. Now that the Macronists have created an undreamt of unity – among the unions – in opposition to their quest to make France like Thatcher’s UK, what happens next is very uncertain. If the miners union under Thatcher had been able to leverage support from other unions and bring on a true general strike, who knows if Thatcherism would have recovered from the blow? But the Thatcherites were smart, and stuck to a divide and conquer policy.

The Macronists aren’t that smart.

the strike in France

There is no more telling symbol of my lackadaisical – my bobo – leftism than the fact that as I write this, I am enjoying a manifestation in the little sidestreet near us in the Marais. Enjoying it, in fact, from our terrace. Adam, my boy, home from school because of the strike, and I have enjoyably stamped around the terrace swinging our arms and shouting Macron démission! I have a strong suspicion that the little group of militants, who are stopping the traffic on the Charlot, have slipped the cop net. Adam, who is convinced that all manifestation end in the throwing of lachromygene by the police, is expecting this denouement. Myself, I am not,  since driving a crowd up a narrow street is an invitation to disaster, but it is always possible, given the ultra-authoritarian tendencies of Macron’s horrible interior minister (the cop minister), Christophe Castaner, surely the worst cop minister since the dark days of the early seventies, when Raymond Marcellin declared war on the “ultra-left”. The Macronist theme of casseur, which, in my opinion, was a threat meant to bring out casseur and discredit the gilets jaunes, is waved around time and time again as Macron attacks social security in France, radically shifts the tax burden to the working class, and in general views himself as a Thatcherite modernizer.

Talk to any French conservative and they will tell you that France is a conservative country. This counters the image that dances in the heads of American lefties, dreaming of the Commune and such. But there is a great deal of truth in it, enough truth that it works against the liberal fantasies of the Thatcherite modernizer. The French like government subventions, they like vacations, they like social security, national healthcare, and free higher education not because they are leftists, but because they are a national inheritance stemming not just from the Popular Front 30s, but from the dirigiste Gaulliste 60s. Mitterand, that political chameleon, sealed the deal. True, the 35 hour work week is dead – but it was never very alive even after it became law. That desire to “keep your stuff” is working against Macron, whose contempt for the attitude, even as his stuff is the typical Davos crowd stuff, keeps his approval rating pretty low. In fact, I would not at all be surprised if Le Pen gave him a much bigger run for his money in the next election. Le Pen has tapped into the conservatism of the French vis-à-vis the dirigiste state – and we now know that Macron wants a sort of Gaullist foreign policy and a Thatcherite domestic one, the first of which has an appeal or interest only to Le monde’s editorial functionaries, and the second of which is the sure road to unpopularity, already gone down by Juppé in the 90s.

As I am finishing this up, the militants are still chanting in the cold December street. So far, so good.

No time for Political Nostalgia

The GOP won’t vote for impeachment ever, but I’m glad the Democrats have decided to expand it – cause the more infuriatingly corrupt we find Trump to be, the better for the Democrats – obviously. But it is time to see a bit into the future. If, as I expect, the Democrats elect a president next Nov., Trump is not going away. He is going to sit on Fox news and punish any republican who dares cooperate in any way with the Democratic president. I think, frankly, this is what Obama should have done to Trump, but Obama. has never really understood that underneath the racist posturing of the Republican politicians, they really are racist, sexist, and contemptuous of democracy. They are not the friendly debater Republicans he met at Harvard. Anyway, forget cooperation. It will be political warfare. So the Democratic president will have to be in campaign mode for at least the first two years of the presidency – by which I mean leveraging legislative loss into campaign issues to blow up Republican incumbents. Otherwise, it will just be a farce, and Democratic voters won’t turn out in the midterms, etc. In other words, don’t replay Obama’s disastrous bi-partisan longing from 2009-2011.

My instincts about loss and win are, I know, based on my partisanship, my idea of what would be good to do in the face of all the forces with which we will soon have to reckon in earnest – from climate change to the deathgrip of the Davos crowd on our societies. I like to think that if the common people knew their own self interest, they would vote my way. But this is an awful egotistical presumption, and not a good one to go from in judging the mass phenomena of voting. On the other hand, it is not egotistical at all to observe that voters are moving towards a new paradigm everywhere, as the old Cold War/neoliberal order splits up. And in this new paradigm, the left – even the lukewarm liberal – must throw out all the old bipartisan, unifying concepts that allowed for the postwar deal, in effect welding civil rights gains to a politics that mostly surrendered to Capital in its current form, the corporation. In neolib thinking, NAFTA and gay marriage are somehow bound up with each other, so that if you are for one, you are for the other. This arbitrary synthesis has been shattered in the popular consciousness, though not among the upper class, as reflected in the major media.  

There’s a story put out by moderate Democrats of the Joe Biden/Pete Buttigieg type that we have to “talk to each other”, reach across the aisle, etc. This feel-good vibe is based more on nostalgia than anything else. Whether moderate or liberal, the Democratic president, from her first day in office, will face a figure who has long ago trashed the ethos of compromise for the art of the dirty deal. Unless Trump dies, no Republican politician will be able to escape his power in the party, and he will blatantly exercise that power. The old days are dead and gone. The last president who refused to go away was Teddy Roosevelt. He briefly split the system, but the Republican party recovered. This time, I don’t think things will be so simple.

The idea that the Democrats can find a way of governing with the Republicans is as dead as NATO. Only the Republicans get what they want under the current system. Vicious and continuing partisanship is being thrust upon the Democrats, under a leadership that hates it. I think that the Democrats should take a look around them, at, for instance, the Socialist Party in France, and realize something: they can easily dissolve after a presidential victory. Governance has to give precedence to partisanship before governance can actually happen, in the current circs.