Wasted

 

I am oddly proud of the fact that I lived about a bicycle ride away from ground zero of the start of the second Drug War.

That war started in a birthday party in Decatur, Georgia. in his book about the drug wars of the Reagan era – which stretched into the Clinton era, until the pharmaceutical companies got seriously into getting Americans wasted -  Dan Baum makes the claim that it all started with  Ashley Schuchard, the thirteen year old daughter of an English prof at Emory, whose invitees to her birthday party in 1976 all got stoned, shocking her mother:: “During Ashley’s birthday party, Schuchard was amazed to see twelve and thirteen year olds stumbling around red-eyed, giggling, and obviously stoned. She saw the flicker of matches in dark corners of the back yard. She could smell burning reefer.”

Carter was elected president that year. As Baum puts it, drug enforcement was a low priority for the Carter administration. In general, the middle class, or the upper middle class that controls the discourse in the U.S., was generally unconcerned about marijuana and much more concerned about sex – watching it, getting it, reading about it, and undergoing a great long bubble of divorce that often involved it. Xavier Hollander, a D.C. madam, was the celebrity of the season.

Sex went with drugs. In 1976, for instance, when I was a freshman at Tulane, my entire dorm room floor was either stoned on weed, high on acid, or kicking back with cocaine. The speeches my roommate would make to me when he was snorting cocaine! Fortunately, I have forgotten them all.  I have a vague sense that they were about fucking while running on coke. Wasted and fucking. His suggestion for all mankind.

Schuchard went on to found a parents organization that lobbied politicians to do something about the spectacle of 12 and 13 year olds getting wasted, but for a while it looked like decriminalization of marijuana and a general relaxation about cocaine was in the works. This, as it happened, didn’t happen. Schuchard and other parents across the country began to organise against drug tolerance. This was picked up by the right – Reagan, among other things, had no tolerance for any libertarianism about marijuana or cocaine. Although, of course, once in office the country was flooded with cocaine, and a bit of the profit was siphoned off to the Contras. U.S. intelligence agencies have long carved out their own domain in the global commerce in drugs, for their own purposes.

They torture, they profit from drugsales, they overthrow governments. We don’t what they do, we don’t know what they did in Korea in 1951 or what they are doing now. American democracy, man.

In my high school, I was a pretty good buddy of the local “pusher” – although he was less of a pusher than a pothead who chose selling pot and cocaine – which was beginning to get popular, especially with the football team -  over a newspaper route, as he could never afford the amount of pot smoke he lived in  via working the latter.

The name for his usual condition, and the name for the condition every boy in my class aspired to at least on certain weekends, was wasted.

The term wasted existed long before the riotously funny ad, put out by the Just say no groups under Nancy Reagan, showed “your brain on drugs”.  It is a measure of the distance between the establishment (in its charity mood) and the rest that a play on the term wasted went right over their heads. Wasted was considered an honorable estate, an all around excuse, a modest brag. Man, I was wasted, was not the confession of a boy ashamed of the chemical injuries to which he had submitted his brain. There was no shame in wasted.

It did play the role of an excuse, though. Being too wasted meant that you could not be responsible for whatever shit you did.

I myself was never wasted. I never touched marijuana until I was almost nineteen. I went through high school a virgin.

But, as per my friendship with the school drug supplier, I was ever ready to extend my tolerance – or perhaps it was just an early display of my gift for enabling. Enabling, tolerance, two sides of the same coin? Always a big question.

Waste, etymologically, is part of a network of words having to do with devastation and spoiling. Words that have a menacingly military aspect. To lay waste. To be wasted and to kill – waste – someone track together in the common American tongue. To waste a village, such was the war in Vietnam, where being wasted and wasting were joined at the hip.

The time of “wasted” might be passed. The kids today might say trashed. Wasted has acquired a certain retro aura. At the same time, wasted is a pretty good macromood word for neolib culture, as it ends in heatwaves and fascism.

We were all wasted.

 

 

 

The Romantic agony in a cocktail lounge lady’s room

 

 

I searched my heart, the street, my ex-‘s habits, my family

I searched them all for opportune  neuroses

That I could jot down for my poetry

And calm my nerves and hide the focus

 

Five fathoms deep in  something posy sounding.

For after all, don’t I claim to be

Some seashell bard, some grounding

Mama, some prophet of the salty sea

 

Minus the albatross around my neck

(come to tell you all)?

-          No?  I’m here to sample wreck

I’m here to smear the large and small

 

Until disproportion proposes

That we go for a little walk, you and I,

A little walk with pretty poses.

A little truism, a little lie,

 

Logos burning a hole  in my pocket

“Like her fair eyes, dude,  the day was fair”  

I was going up like a rocket

A perfect movement in the down and dirty  air

 

And heard myself gibbering like a bat

while the air grew ever more blind

and thick with those who  flew, shrieked and shat

panting for the breath we’d left behind

 

 

until at last I found the perfect  line,  filled with blood

and sucked it all dry and fell and understood.

-Karen Chamisso

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What's next? A nostalgic look at 2007 bullshit, and where we are now (in the ongoing catastrophe)

 

In 2007, Prospect Magazine, always looking for hits, did a survey of big thinkers. Here’s the way they phrased their question:

“We asked 100 writers and thinkers to answer the following question: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? The pessimism of their responses is striking: almost nobody expects the world to get better in the coming decades, and many think it will get worse.”

 

Admittedly, the thinkers they asked seemed somewhat random. David Brooks gets his say, and Joe Boyd, a music producer, gets his, and apparently what qualifies one to have a view of the next one hundred years best is to work for a bank or business or write an opinion column. There were no H.G. Wells, that’s for sure, and few seemed to disagree with the premise of the question.

Well 16 years on, the answers seem all too predicably concentrated on what the 00s held to be the most important issue since some peasant invented bread: terrorism.

Nobody, oddly, questioned the premise. Left and right did not define the twentieth century. The century was defined, in our view, by two things: first, the treadmill of production – that system which is falsely defined as capitalist because one of its surface characteristics is the market system – which emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th century, followed out its logic in all systems (communist, fascist, liberal capitalist) on a world wide basis, having laid the foundations in the 19th century (the development, for instance, of the terror famine in Ireland and India by the British  surely provided  models for Stalin's agricultural policy) and collapsed the agriculture-based culture that humans had lived under for the past 12,000 years. That was surely the most significant thing that happened in the 20th century, and no ideology led it, no ideology opposed it, and no ideology even envisioned it.

The anxiety naturally attendant on the end of civilization – which happened at speed in the early 20^th century - created a macro feature, which I’d call the dialectic of vulnerability – basically, that process by which populations, feeling ever more vulnerable even as they became ever more affluent developed systems meant to render them invulnerable – that is, an ever more threatening war culture, with an ever greater destructive reach – which, of course, rendered them ever more vulnerable, an irony that was not rhetorical, but systematic. When we think back on that 9/11, which we do less and less, it  was so critical, in part, because it was a moment in which the nakedness of the system was revealed – a system that could, theoretically, respond to ICBMs traveling over the poles, couldn’t respond to 19 half educated men with box cutters and homemade bombs. And… of course it couldn’t.

Defense is a collective fiction, which is its function – being a fiction, there is never a limit on the amount of money one can spend on it. It is, theoretically, inifinitely expensive, while its payoff, as a defense system against all threats, is nearly zero – it will never defend against all threats. That’s ever, with a big fucking E.

The intersection between the treadmill of production and the war culture shaped the 20th century. The division between the right and the left were epiphenomena of that dynamic. It is, of course, impossible to predict the next five years … but in a sense it is probably easier to predict the next 100, since prediction here isn’t about particulars but long, long trends. H.G. Wells was so great because he had a novelist’s instinct for the life of those trends. LI doesn’t – in 1985, when we entered Grad school, we would never have predicted the cultural triumph of Reaganism, for instance. It would have seemed utterly implausible that the combination of endebtedness, meanness, and libertarian logic that flew in the face of reality would ever survive the end of the Gipper. From our inability to see what was in front of our nose, we took a lesson: never underestimate the Death Wish of a culture. It struck us in the 00S  as, frankly, insane to frame the next hundred years in terms of terrorism or the “battle of civilizations” between Islam and the west. For one thing, among threatening issues, terrorism ranks way below, I don’t know, highway safety as a real issue. And definitely, in America, below mass shootings. The instinct to make mass shootings terrorism – the terrorism of rebels without a cause – aligns them, I think, with a mission that provides a last second justification for what is really an act of despair. I’d align them with the rise in suicides and overdoses, and take the apotheosis of the gun, in American culture, as a gesture that points to the dead end of the treadmill of production – we can produce everything but a reason to live. And if you have no reason to live, others either don’t or, more enragingly, do.

The early 00s were a time where, in the States, there was a felt  need to feed the war culture; terrorism is an invention that has no enemies – it is a win win for all participants, giving an excuse to the war culture’s governors to continue doing what they want to continue doing anyway, and thus guaranteeing that a little place will always be set aside for terrorists – sort of like in the movie Network, where the tv network discovers the audience pull of terrorism, and puts the unorganized groups of guerillas on a business basis. As for Islam, again, the use value of Islam is not in Islam per se, but the way it operates as a wonderful two-fer – dark skins that aren’t Christian! Is there a more perfect enemy? Really, Milosovic should be hailed as a prophet – his ideology has now become standard on the Right, and will no doubt be more and more embedded in the policy of the American state as we drift from disaster to disaster.  

Yet the argument that wasn’t had in the 00s was decisively won by those who think America should spend in all around 800 billion a year on the military. For those who want to trace the consequences of that, look at Biden’s foreign policy – or in general the foreign policy of the US since the golden days of Bush.

Nobody, in 2007, had discovered that delightful distraction, AI, which is now the hottest thing ever to argue about as the climate goes seriously crazy. And as the inequality in wealth has become institutionalized to an extent that talk about democracy almost anywhere is absolutely hollow.

Never have the nabobs of the opinion racket been as bad at their business as they are today. As for me, I have taken stern measures not to believe what seems to be happening right before our eyes as a matter of spiritual health.I can’t believe the NYT is so bad, I can’t believe Twitter still exists, I can’t believe that, after all the bullshit, we are watching the rights of women to corporal sovereignty just go down the toilet, I can’t believe that peeps outside of France don’t understand that you don’t let the government destroy the more than half century legacy of social democracy because otherwise, you are heading towards serfdom.

Willed belief. I try to live like I’m reading a novel – instead of being in one.

 

Critical criticism after my dejeuner

 

1.

There is a famous passage in Marx and Engel’s Germany Ideology, which was written in 1846, set aside, and published in 1932. It reads:

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. “

There are two schools of interpretation about this passage. One reads it as a genuine attempt to imagine a society in which the bonds of the division of labor are lifted. The other reads it as satire.

Myself, being Mr. Split the difference, I read it as a comic bit with a serious nub. In other words, I view this as a typical example of Marx’s romantic humor – a post-Hegelian humor which he shares with other disillusioned romantics of the 1840s, like Kierkegaard and his future enemy, Herzen.

This humor is, above all, gleeful. It exaggerates. Exaggeration holds within itself a truth, or a fact – and in this it is opposed to the lie. The lie, to be successful, conforms to the informal rules of plausibility – while an exaggeration, to be successful, flouts those rules. In particular, it takes a fact out of the plausible and subjects it to a field in which we have lost our grip on proportion. Proportion, which we tend to assume, is of course only as good as the other assumptions with which it is bound. Although we all know now, from pop science books, that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause untold changes in the universe – one of those “truths” of complexity theory – this knowledge can’t really be felt, even by those who are at the extreme end of the paranoid spectrum. In this sense, the credo of the new atheist/rationalist crowd – that facts don’t care about your feelings – gets things completely backwards. Without feelings, a whole spectrum of them, facts would not make any sense – they’d be unavailable to you.

Glee, which was taken up by romantics like De Quincy – or even pre-romantics, like De Sade – is thematized as “agony” in Mario Praz’s famous book, The Romantic Agony – which is still worth reading, although I’d bet my De Quincey that it is not on the curriculum for most grad students in literary studies.  Anyway, Marx was fully conversant with that form of humor – like Heine, or like the Russians, Gogol and the early Dostoevsky.

There are complex truths stuck in Marx’s squib. One of the lesser ones is that criticizing is on the same plane as hunting or harvesting. It is one of the structures of a liberal, developed economy – although it is far more important in an underdeveloped, backwards economy like Germany’s in the 1840s than it is in a fully developed one. Still, in a fully developed economy, on its way to a social democracy that allows a certain equality of the quality of life – measured exactly by its freedom from the slavery of the division of labor – there is and must be room for speculation.

Or to sum this up in a good, 1950-ish way: Man is the speculative animal.

2.

I’m a fundamentally bad lego man. I always put my weightiest bits on the top of the column, and the lightest underneath.

So, sue me.

Anyway, I take criticism and literature as important functions in a “developed economy” – which may well be simply a self-justifying gesture that helps me think, well, I am doing my bit. Perhaps my bit is meant to be spent organizing demonstrations, etc.  After all, I am living in the slops of the twentieth century, in a society that seemingly hasn’t budged since the 1980s. The social neurosis is killing us.

However, it is at just such times – times much like the 1840s – that glee becomes charged with lightning. One has to have a strong streak of gleefulness to read today’s newspapers or social media, turning hatereading into exaltation, and one’s enemies into involuntary dance partners. Repulsion, to the gleefully morbid mind, is half of attraction.

This is, I think, where Marx as a dialectician sometimes outsmarted himself. As a publicist and writer, though, he knew his strengths – which is why he ultimately shoved the German Ideology project aside and went on to other projects. The importance of the German Ideology, to me, is that it presents a sort of stylistic key to Marx. Like all the 1840s romantics, glee and dialectics remained his rock n roll, but he was careful with them. He knew that they might open up the world – de-proportion the proportions – but that they were only steps to get back into the world as a struggle.

So I like to think that, through social media, we might, if we overthrow those social conditions that are handily summed up in the term “neoliberalism” – we just might – might – criticize after dinner. Or, as I am doing now, here, after lunch.

Institutional malingering: something is rotten in the States

 

In the British Medical Journal, September 13, 1913, John Collie, M.D., J.P., authored  a note on “Malingering”, which he connected, like any sensible English utilitarian, with the recent debate about the costs of some sort of National Insurance – just the kind of taxpayer fund that the working class would target with all their illnesses:

“The question of feigning or exaggerating illnesses has of late attraced considerable attention in this country, but it is a mistake to suppose that the condition is of recent origin. Those who have to advise insurance companies know that exaggerated and fraudulent claims are, at any rate, as old as the accident laws.”

Malingering became one of those twentieth century occasions to battle it out about what, exactly, we are to do with diseases of the soul, once we have painlessly and scientifically proven that the soul doesn’t exist. Tricky, that.

I think the twenty first century problem is not the malingering of individual patients: it is the malingering of institutions. In particular, the Democratic party in the U.S. seems to have come down with a nasty case of it. If feigned illness could lead to real death, the Democratic party would be dead by now. It isn't: it is merely zombified. Symptomatically, the party is now presenting its loyal voters with the cute notion that a senile Senator, in a state of health where her best option is to prepare her soul and stay in contact with her loved ones, has no special reason to resign her seat, even if she will never again be able to fill it properly or do her duty. Now, we must preserve her place in the committee that votes on judicial nominations because we don't know what else to do. Otherwise, we would have to work, which would mean appointing a bunch of judges which would destroy the millionaire order that has richly benefitted us all! Besides, really, is it that important, judges  – those petty things that can, for instance, decree the criminalization of the abortion pill. Which we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about!

Institutional malingering should be of as much interest to social psychologists as malingering has been to psychology in general. How is it that the twenty first century consists of chickenshit parties ruling over decayed republics and unable to do any useful thing to avert the catastrophes that are eating up the young and creating suicidal conditions for the old? How is it that the U.S.A., from which I sprang, that country which, while deathdealing on a global scale, also produced a culture within which civil rights movements actually produced change – that unevenly democracy-tending place – how is it that malingering and malice have become its face to the world? From the legalized lynching of the homeless to the tyranny of lunatic judges on the dumbest Supreme Court ever assembled from the hayseeds that invest our law schools, all we see is bad shit.  The political structure is crap, and everybody knows it. The energy to fix it seems to go, instead, into an infinitely self-satisfied establishmentarianism that is all about why we can’t fix it.

Things go bad in small ways at first, and then in large ways, and then all at once. Fortunes collapse, nations go rotten. And we go around with the taste of the institutional malingers in our mouths. This is not how life is meant to be lived.

The gerontocratic spectacle

 

When Charles was on the brink of thirty, he made a speech to the Cambridge Union in which he said: My great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is.’  The coronation, which I saw – to the length that any tv watcher could stand it – was in line with that statement.

I don’t think I have seen a tv spectacle that was at once so “spectacular” and so heart numbingly boring since the great OJ chase of the nineties, when television discovered that large numbers of people would watch hours of traffic as long as it was accompanied by commentary and celebrity. OJ, at least, in his prime, did experience beauty. Watching documentaries of his great time as a running back for the Buffalo Bills, even a non-fan of the game such as myself could see that here was twentieth century art, to put up against any ballet or modern dance. The OJ who was chased, the bloodstained golfer and future author of If I Did It, was the aftermath of that transcendence – a flat figure, a NPC.

Charles has brushed up against transcendence, but from his horrendous upbringing to his horrendous marriage to his crowning, at the age of fucking 300, he has always been a non-playing character. In Rosemary Hill’s LRB piece about Charles and Camilla, she notes that throughout his career, the word used about Charles is “sad”, or “terribly sad”. As she also notes, nobody pitied Charles as much as he pitied himself. In this, if in little else, he matched his first wife – a flat figure who was meant to race around with seedy Eurotrash trust funders, but ended up, much to her disgust and his, with a Euro-non-trash trust funder.

The ceremony we saw emphasized how very much we are run by a global gerontocracy. Their messenger boys – the Prime Minister of the U.K, the president of France – are greasy with the task of fucking us all over, which they engage in with business school discipline. From the doddering Archbishop of Canterbury (who, at one point, must kneel to pray some kind of prayer, creating the one drama of the whole tedious scene – would he manage to get up on his feet by himself?) to the closeups of Charles, peering seedily around him under those untrimmed eyebrows, this festival in the retirement home of Westminster Abby begged for some, any ironic counterpoint. Instead of getting what we should have had - a series of torch songs of increasing melancholy – we got a thousandth iteration of tween choral music. In order to retain the innocence of those angelic voices, one noticed that Prince Andrew was not present.

In the end, as much as I hate the monarchy and the spectacle of the monarchy, I ended up feeling sorry for Charles. What a waste of middle manager potential, this guy who, if he had not had a fascoid prince of a father and a mother who clearly didn’t like him and wouldn’t die, could have had a happy life as, say, the VP in charge of petrodollar accounts at some City bank! He’d be retired with Camilla in Spain by now, indulging himself with the local vintages and participating in the gentle art of tai chi!

The song that should have been performed, Ithink, is the cover of the Tears for Fears song from Donnie Darko. But it wouldhave spoiled Charles’ one happy day.

 

The silly and the soulful

When Adam was in maternal – kindergarten for those of you in the States - in Santa Monica,  the teachers keep a running file on his moods that included such things as angry, interested, lethargic, etc. One of the great categories was silly.
 
Now Adam is in the fifth grade, and, alas, the seriousness of life is settling in. Not for him or his classmates, not yet. But the teachers now are down on silly like a gardner is down on weeds. Say what you will of the dandelion, we don’t want it among the carrots.
 
And isn’t life just carrots?
 
Well, no.
 
I’ve been silly my whole life, if nothing else. But I recognize the powers that be.
 
The oxford english dictionary comes down pretty harshly on silly. Their primary definitions are “Ridiculously trivial”, “lack of common sense” – such is the voice of the scold, disguised as a lexicographer. But some of the first instances of “seely” means worthy or holy. In the fifteenth century, “sylyman prob. has the sense ‘goodman, husband’.In “late Middle English (in the sense 'deserving of pity or sympathy'): alteration of dialect seely 'happy', later 'innocent, feeble', from a West Germanic base meaning 'luck, happiness.' “ Seele is of course soul in German. Now, the tarot of accidental etymological encounters is no positive science, as the German philosophers say, but one of the forms of pataphysics. Still, I like this now dead meaning, which connects having a soul with having fun. Artificial intelligence, such as is displayed by the newspaper opinion writer and the middle manager, does not recognize this connection. But, to be all radical and silly about it, there is no intelligence without fun.
 
Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it.
 
To have soul, in the colloquial sense, doesn’t mean being silly –or at least that is not one of the emphasized facets. However, anybody who has ever listened to Sun-Ra knows that there is a deep cousinship between silly and soul. There is a “deep silly”.
 
What does a man gain if he trades his silly for the world? Nothing. As Ralph Ellison once said, winner’s lose.