Minneapolis burning

Minnesota, home of flat rolling plains, irate senators (on one side of the aisle at least), realignment, independence, riots, real Americans, the list goes on. One might be forgiven for thinking that the state is a microcosm of everything that makes America, well, America. It's also one of those states people tend to forget about - like Montana, Idado, maybe the Dakotas. One might be forgiven for thinking not much happens there, but peer closely and you might see a barometer for things present and future.

In 2016, the state went blue, but barely. Donald Trump came closer to winning the state than any Republican since Reagan. He pulled off a tight margin thanks to a curious little shift: those rural counties surrounding Minnesota's cities suddenly went red. It was the urbanite-suburbanite coalition that had to come to her rescue. But things are changing. In the midterm elections, Republicans held onto those new gains in and around the state's prized Iron Range. This is puzzling, if only because Minnesota has long been the site of radical ferment in its party politics. During the Depression, it was the site of one of America's few third-party takeovers in history. The Farmer-Labor Party, heir to the old midwestern populist tradition, found itself dominating state politics and sending its representatives to Congress. This lasted until the Democrats finally got their act together (it would be rather embarrassing to have a populist third party remain in power with a progressive Roosevelt in office) and successfully ingratiated themselves into the party machinery. But the state's Democratic party retains "Farmer-Labor" in its name, an homage to the voters' independence, and perhaps a warning too: We can leave any time we'd like. Well, when it turns out that the party has left you, what choice do you have?

But how does that explain the sudden movement towards conservatism? Why are the margins so tight? It's no big mystery. The parties have indeed changed. To be a Republican is no longer identical with being a movement conservative, the innovation of Bill Buckley and Frank Meyer is no more, or at least in terminal decline. What does the new Republican Party stand for? Nation, protection, law, order. It's just too bad those last two seem to be under some strain at the moment.

What has set off this newest escapade in the name of Black Lives is the murder of one George Floyd at the hands of an out-of-control police officer who appears to have had quite a few disciplinary problems during his years of service. Those in the cities are not quite like those in the country. They are similarly aggrieved, but in different ways. Tonight, they're out for blood, and no Target, Dollar Store, or passing vehicular unit is going to stand in the way of justice. One is compelled to wonder, though, how easy it really is to draw a line between those crying out for restorative justice and those opportunists, of all races, who rush into broken retailers with glee at the prospect of a new flat screen tee-vee. Who is an ally? Does everyone who participate get to be an activist? Are we all working for the cause of righteous retribution, so long as we step across the broken glass to snag the latest vacuum cleaner off the shelf?

It is very easy to generalize from personal anecdote. That is how the tyranny of blue check-marks sustains itself. A few hundred people are making quite a scene in Minnesota's capital. But how reflective is that of the population at large? And if there is so much anger fermenting across the state, why do its political demographics continue to shift in ways antithetical to the designs of the protestors? Whose justice, indeed.

And whose anger, is what seems to be the pertinent question here. Because the means by which anger is expressed appears to differ according to demographics. In the country, the angry people are voting. In the cities, they are rioting. A few months ago, I attempted to get a progressive black woman elected to county legislature (not of my own accord, I assure you). My inner reluctance to embrace careerism and opportunism never seems to stop me, but the point here is that I spent quite a bit of time in areas that would not be unfamiliar to the rampaging protestors currently razing Minneapolis or to George Floyd. Impoverished, minority-majority regions. I even once happened to interrupt a social service visit. You can imagine my embarrassment. Let me tell you what I found.

I found a district that, in its worst areas, was run-down, broken, disinterested, wrapped up in its own misery, damaged socially, houses stand empty, or blasting music, marijuana smoke wafting, clumped together, the people listen politely, certainly (poor blacks have always treated me more respectfully than rich whites), but they do it always with an eye and ear to getting you off their porch. They can't be reached via normal politics. They simply don't care. And why should they? What is being done for them? Who deigns to speak for them? There is a cadre of politically active blacks, but they seem far more interested in maintaining their positions, monopolizing power, and playing shuffle-the-office, than actually mobilizing their constituents in service of change. I wouldn't expect any more from them in that regard. Change is bad for them. Change means the game stops working (for them).

It is rather ironic and sad to consider that many of these people aren't benefiting from a culture that has gone global. The hip, urban black has long since been overtaken by the demonic 21st-century equivalent of Norman Mailer's white negro: the "wigger". Only they have discovered that, as with the subcultures they can't understand (or wouldn't be caught dead trying), they are subject to the same hollowing out. The activists coming to their defense could only stare, aghast, as hundreds of thousands of their black "allies" proceeded to spurn Bernie Sanders in favor of the career politician. One side thinks it understands the other and is consistently surprised when the other veers off in its own direction. The most perturbing thing here is the suggestion that the avant-garde black activists themselves can't reach the masses they claim to represent, not even with the mobilizing potential of "left-populism".

Perhaps some would take that as revealing the bankruptcy of identity politics as opposed to class, but I think it says something else. After all, appeals to identity work very well when made to white populations. Rhodesia lasted a while in the face of global opposition, as did South Africa's apartheid regime. And when one politician dared to reach out to the alienated here at home, those Americans attuned to that kind of message responded with great enthusiasm. Of course, the great debate over whether it was style or substance that lifted the current incumbent to the White House rages on, and I myself discerned a substantial platform in his sometimes incoherent musings, but I question whether those who took the time to attend his rallies did as well. I figure what he left was an impression, a feeling. It just so happened that the right style was complemented by the right substance - it doesn't happen often. Tricksters abound.

There is no such impression for the blacks, and there is barely a medium to transmit it. They don't care because nobody has cared for them and they don't expect them to. They riot now but they don't vote when the time comes. Or perhaps the few hundred protestors do not quite match the sentiment of the rest of Minnesota's black population. Or maybe they do, but the sentiment is silent. Whatever the case, they have not used the organizing potential they have demonstrated here to elect their preferred leaders to office in quite a while. They can't, because the people egging them on from their computer screens do not really want what they want. They can't, because they are strung along by a narrative concocted in their name but bearing little relation to their situation on the ground. They can't, because their leaders are engaged in a phony war with other phony leaders, two sides firing water guns at each other, battling each other to a standstill over semantics and issues of marginal concern to their own lives, all with an eye towards notoriety, fame, fortune, etc. The ordinary black man on the street has nothing to show for all of this. If their political behavior is anything like it is here at home, local politics is left to the few with real skin in the game. National elections are consistently marred by low black turnout. The patronage continues to flow all the same.

Alienated communities, white and black, need a common message and a common cause. A mass movement that could draw in both would be nigh unstoppable. Indeed, that is how mass movements flourish. They offer something that others cannot or will not, they break boundaries, they break rules, they appeal directly to the people whose support they need, they eschew numbers games, they toss the models, they offer the world, they speak to anger, to rage, they channel it, all intermediate institutions are eliminated, anyone who is not with them is against them. they have one goal: homogenization and subsumption. This is a small price to pay for victory. The ideological battles of the day are meaningless to the people in their broken homes, who labor under the omnipresent forces of drugs, alcohol, poverty, and Social Services. The child home alone, watching forlornly out the big window of his big house, can't understand all this, but he can be made to. He can have everything at the expense of everyone, and then no one. That's a winning platform, damn the specifics.

Trouble on the home front

Memento mori. A corollary to every thought, perched on my shoulder, or perhaps my arm. I feel it more acutely with each passing day. This spring was supposed to be a reawakening. I was supposed to appreciate, to go outside and enjoy the day(s), to see springtime budding. I have failed by any reasonable standard of success - even the meager one that I lay out for myself. I see the days pass from my window. The sun is already past the halfway mark of its journey east to west by the time I'm awake. I do not spend time, I waste it. I can't rouse myself to action. The most I can venture is a short walk down the driveway, perhaps even a languorous read on the porch. I lack motivation. I tell myself tomorrow and then tomorrow comes and I delay once more. I am a failure and I disguise it by means of minute action. An application here, a single walk there. In reality, I would sooner spend the day in bed, staring at my ceiling. It would be easier to collapse on the couch than to type this up. This is probably the best - and only - way to sustain any semblance of momentum.

I have nothing to say. I don't think I ever did. Any pretense to intelligence is lost as soon as I encounter someone more intelligent. Any claim to wisdom that can be imparted on those less-so falls upon deaf ears. Quite frankly, it would be best to throw it all to the wind. Let those with followers to chase and sinecures to procure do the hard task of pontification. Lord knows, it's worked out very well for them. I believe the worst part to be that they genuinely do have a talent and know how to exploit it, the same way a bodybuilder or pretty woman knows how to utilize their assets. If I was them, if I had followed their path, if I had that same drive, perhaps I'd be where they are and perhaps I would look at it differently. But I think there is much benefit to being on the outside looking in. But even more benefit to both. Someone on the outside and the inside has a more complete picture. Someone who has rolled around in the thickets can dismiss that path with some authority after he has found his way out. It is a matter of knowledge against envy. For now, I am lost in envy.

I am destabilized and have been for a long while. I have a fear of flying, but not of falling. Sooner or later I will have to put the breaks on, or nature will do it for me.

Culture as a geopolitical problem

I'm bored and listless. I didn't do much yesterday. I haven't done much today. I likely won't do very much tomorrow. I feel the energy seeping out of me with every passing moment. I'm finding it harder to maintain focus when it comes to the one passion I thought I had: reading. But if I can't even do that then there really is no hope left. Maybe I need a job. I applied for unemployment today, so if I don't want the state to utterly crush me, I will be forced to start looking. But that's a good thing. I was let go from my previous work about two weeks ago. I thought I had it in the bag because I have spent so much time handling phone calls and consumer inquiries in frenetic situations, spontaneous problems that needed solving have always given me more trouble than I let on, but the confidence retreated from me the moment those numbers lit up on the receiver. I did not perform admirably. I failed myself. I was sure I would fail even more. But fate intervened and I was let go before my shortcomings leapt the bounds of self-evidence and began to cause serious damage. We can thank God for that, at least.

Boredom, I find, can often be alleviated by exercises in self-flagellation. Boredom has been the primary motivator for most of the jobs I've taken on in the past 366 or so days since I graduated from college (with the exception of Rite Aid, to which I have my father's explosive rage to thank). Usually I end up regretting it within a few short days. The urge to quit strikes just as I find my bearings, but I have something of a complex about quitting. I don't mind it, but I haven't done it (yet). The only way forward is through, and so on. Besides, the shame would be too much to bear. Once you impress upon the world your inability to rise to the occasion, it becomes a permanent stamp on your own soul. In the battle between Plato's wax conception of memory and Plotinus's notion of an "active exercise", I find Plato to be the more aesthetically appealing. We like to think of our souls as lacerated by process and events, and I am no exception. Where is the demarcation between philosophy and theology? Allow me to substitute "psyche" for "soul". Those of us in the know can simply wink and nod.

Emotions are interesting because they are states of being, whatever else they might be. Or maybe states of becoming? What about states of affairs? Emotions are temporary, in flux, they shift and change with the world. How is it possible to "be" in a world of becoming? Are those feelings ever really there? Heraclitus had it easy to simply presume that no single thing can stay the same over time and change. He didn't have to grapple with the deductive power of Eleatic Truth. But this is just a restatement: is "it" being or becoming? There is no "it" in a world of becoming, at least not for long. Diogenes proposed solvitur ambulando. Sextus Empiricus distinguished between philosophical talk and ordinary speech about the same things. Those ephectics who find themselves unable to choose between arguments equipollent are better off eschewing any attempt, however valiant, to remain precise in their talk. It is simply impossible when our words are freighted with conceptual baggage. Hence the necessity of the Socratic method, which itself (in its Platonic formulation at least) often ends in aporia. We must be prepared to speak like others, but think differently. There is nothing therapeutic about ketman, but nor is there (as far as I can see) a way out of the rabbit hole. We're stuck, jammed up (at least I am) with nowhere to go. Caught between intuition and the trying formalities of rigorous thought. "All is vanity" is right. It is vain even to acknowledge that all is vain. How's that for the skeptic way?

I propose to speak like the common man, always keeping in mind the considerations that have led so many thinkers astray and into the thickets. I too have rolled around in the thickets some, and before I have even moved beyond ancient Greece I find myself wishing to leave. But I digress some ways away from my original intentions. I had intended to speak about boredom, and what it can tell us about the state of the world right now.

The answer? Much. But only if we look to see why it is that so many people aren't feeling it. A strange thing to say in uncertain times, I know. Much of the world is on lockdown. The plague is ravaging the world, you see. There is much ado about the "new order of things" and the "post pandemic" world. I was an early disbeliever in the apocalyptic prognostications that followed the Wuhan outbreak, if only because I had lived through the H1N1 pandemic to immense disappointment at its ultimate impact. I have been forced, in the face of hundreds of thousands of deaths and a severe (if self-inflicted) economic downturn, to revise my opinion somewhat. That is quite alright. I am glad to say my latest intellectual undertaking has been to extirpate all vestiges of vanity from within myself. An oxymoron indeed. Cathartic all the same.

But who has benefited from the world as it currently is, caught in this state of discordant suspension (and flux? The unity of opposites haunts us even on global scales)? Why, the progenitors of the outbreak itself. Our friends across the pond. No, not Europe. The other pond.

Much has been made about the west's dependence on Chinese imports. Less so on China's cunning and keen sense of what it is that people in the west want, how the populations in the west approach the problem of social time and just what it is that might stave off boredom when we find ourselves out of bars to crawl and parties to throw. In the throes of quarantine, and certainly before it as well, our virtuous citizenry has taken to shaking their hips suggestively on the latest video-sharing app to reach stratospheric heights of popularity: TikTok. Why? Because it's fun. Because life without it would be oh so boring without choreographed group-dances to the latest explicit song lyrics. The site was enormously popular before the pandemic. Now? Forget it. It's fun for everyone, fun for all ages. The little blonde Australian can get her start at the supple age of twelve or thirteen and amass millions of followers with a little flash of the midriff and a thrust of the rear. Why not? It's all in good fun. Nobody has anything better to do anyway.

Those older than twelve might remember that TikTok has served as the virtual replacement for the previous video-sharing champion - Vine. Vine, at least, was an American company. TikTok belongs to those same innovators who gifted the world their zoonotic pathology. Yes, much has been made about these national security concerns as well. Much like Huawei, TikTok has raised red flags for its ability to gather the digital information it receives from its users unimpeded. Given that it is a Chinese company that owns it, the concerns are obvious. The government of Xi Jinping must have few qualms about compelling the owners of TikTok to surrender that data.

But let us imagine for a moment what might happen if the central decision making apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party were to gather around in what I imagine is a very large circular table. Let us say, for argument's sake, that they were suddenly privy to all of those several-second videos that come streaming through cyberspace for all the world to see. What would they see, if they were to investigate to what use and to what ends the users of TikTok have made of the app?

They would find an enemy that has already defeated itself. Forget war, that's passe. The good peoples of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan and all the rest have done the Chinese job for them. They're an addicted culture - weaned on the latest shiny object imported from abroad, they debase themselves regularly and at younger ages too, they have no historical, literary, or scientific sensibilities beyond the vaguest notions they have picked up from passing headlines and classroom lessons half-listened to. Arrogant, haughty, but sensitive and secure in their insecurity. The latest fads - typically mimetic images borrowed from unsavory places that differ only in form and not substance - are the dominant means of communication, creating an unbridgeable divide between age cohorts that are and are not technologically savvy. But that's just fine. Populations that can't understand how they're being beaten cannot fight back. And when they subdue themselves, well, why not just roll out the red carpet? Wave the white flag?

We've paved the road to our own cultural devolution and the Chinese provided us the means by which to commit suicide faster. We are a nation of philistines and that is never more evident than when confronted by those who claim they are not. The enemy understands us better than we understand ourselves, and our ignorance has made ourselves our own enemy. They can play us against ourselves forever. And if it ever comes to armed conflict? This is not a culture that produces warriors. That's Pax Sinica for you. Give it a century and America will be revealed for the paper tiger it is. It's almost inevitable. There is too much that can go wrong. Two decades into the twenty first century and already we are straining under our second economic collapse. Any future war will not be like the USSR against the Nazi State. It will be the Empire of Japan against the Russian Tsardom.

Gore Vidal once remarked that America is a nation of amnesiacs. The corollary to that is that a nation that cannot understand itself will not survive. Already we are riven by internecine partisan warfare over issues that would not only force past generations to scratch their heads but compel contemporary foreigners to look on with morbid astonishment. We cannot understand our own breakdown. The cottage industry of books dedicated to explaining every election, not merely 2016, is a testament to that. Do the hillbillies need an elegy? Is America alienated? Why do we bowl alone? Something is happening out there beyond the Hudson and the Seine. Something is happening closer to "home" as well.

It is not merely incumbent upon us to strike the puppeteer that moves us about on strings. It is necessary to turn inward and exorcise the impulses, passions and indulgences that keep us tethered - willingly - to those strings. Those who snub their noses down at the lower classes - those members of the disenchanted masses who have continued to elect their own candidates and movements to positions of power - are frightened by what they are seeing because disinterest in their own causes offends their sensibilities. Those who have wearily made common cause with them feel the same. They cannot understand a world beyond their pet concerns. Anything and everything must be tied back to the central conflict - the war on and for free speech, the war on and for the environment, the war on and for the right to bear arms, to get an abortion, to get married, to mutilate your genitals, to dictate the terms of culture.

But the seeds of culture have been germinating for far longer than that. The results, finally, are in. Sex, drugs, violence, death, and the pursuit of happiness. Only happiness eventually circles back to the satisfaction of one of those four passions (might we add in profit as well?). Make it five then. China did not have to liberalize to find success. Nor did we, really, but we chose to do it anyway. What illiberal movement might be capable of taking on the challenges of the moment? A creative one. A movement that taps into passions hidden and locked away, turns the key, and unleashes them. A movement that looks at memory as the antidote to amnesia, vice as a path to virtue, and crisis as opportunity. Everything must go, or we will.

Can't fight this feeling

I woke up in a rotten mood today. I so often happen to find myself like this that it should be old hat, but I would be omitting the truth if I were to say that it is not trying, to carry this metastasizing lump of boiling resentment around and around and around and around. It was once again a twitter post that pushed me into indulging another blog post, but it was a tiktok bite that sent me down the road to Damascus. Inundation in the dark arts of digital magic leads one to familiar but unwelcome shores.

Perhaps that is why I find myself with such sympathy for the post-liberal turn that certain intellectual circles in the United States and Europe have begun to take. It is our erstwhile, ambitious and vigorous senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, who after all has brought conservative attention to the myriad ills, economic and social alike, that ubiquitous access to digital technology has wrought. Beyond compulsions like the campus conservative reverence for "free speech", I mean.

Something is rotten in the hearts of the youth across the developed west. Suicide rates have skyrocketed, depression diagnoses have followed them on that crystal voyage heaven-bound. The masses cry loneliness. But why should they, if the social ill is a shared one? The solution to this particular problem is located in the word "social" itself. There is certainly no acute shortage crying wolf in the vast chambers of slow-scrolling social media feeds. "Mental health" is the new byword, shared by any and all. It's a deity with a devoted cultic following, eagerly plastering its signs on campus walls and office spaces. Illness is romantic, because Difference is God and Sameness is apostasy. I don't think I need to tell you what happens when everyone is Different.

I am certainly not the first one to burrow beneath the slogans of our therapeutic culture, which begs the question as to why those far more learned than myself, who so ravenously point to its internal contradictions, would also partake in its vernacular and rituals. If I had to wager a bet, I would stake it on the simple observation that it is too tempting a morsel not to bite at least once, twice, thrice...

But why, you ask, go after such low-hanging fruit? It is easy to sit on the sidelines and take a kick at the man passing by in the street. Perhaps it is because I am so eager to see a solution to the problem as it stands, or rather, to dissolve it. People are still dying after all. Yet the cause and demographics of death seem to be different depending on where you are. In the new citadels, in our metropoles, children (literally and figuratively) hang themselves at a tweet. Concerned parents shove them into the willing grasp of an armada of professional degree-wielders to little avail. In the heartland, where job security and stable family formation were once the rule, all is liquid. Fentanyl, alcohol, suicide, poverty, and despair are the new masters. As others have noted, what were once inner-city pathologies afflicting the black underclass have transplanted themselves to inner-America, inner-Britain, inner-France, and so on. Life expectancy in the United States dipped into the red in 2016 and 2017 and remained stagnant the following two years.

Even as our meritocratic class gentrifies and insulates itself from the rural hordes it so despises, its members find they cannot escape falling victim to their own cruel inventions. It is a delicious irony to see the weapons they pioneered fall so precipitously out of control and better yet to find them used, abused and mishandled by their erstwhile opponents. It has its own logic now. Those on the coasts, in the cities, in their private chats, image boards, and feeds crying depression, loneliness and angst may truly "believe" what they feel, but we ought to know better than that.

Can I deny that there are those who live inside the shining hill-cities and want out? No, because I am one of them. But I would recommend a crash-course in a certain kind of austerity (or should I say quietism?) if they hope to tunnel out of the hole their masters have dug for them. Most are indulgent grafters, the few that can be saved have no "clout". What is to be done?

A true war on loneliness would fight hypocrisy with hypocrisy. Those vulnerable to this critique, myself included, must wake up and identify the root causes of this mass piece of performance art. Pseudo-loneliness is an in-group technique; what was once spontaneous gleichschaltung has become something closer to conscious conspiracy. We air our feelings to attract attention, to gather disciples, to pad our egos when we suffer slight alteration in the passions. We benefit from the structures we attack, but this benefit is part of a devil's bargain, a bounded choice to which we have implicitly capitulated. What's beyond door number one? A bevy of followers just waiting to catch us when we choose to proclaim a fall and reassurance that we are indeed "not like the rest". And door number two? Consignment to the dustbin of history. You would do better to take a photo with Stalin.

To save or to destroy? That is the question. Those who have been kicked through door number two might find some common-cause with those who have made door number one work for them. After all, there are many twos who might like to be ones and some of the ones might sincerely believe that they aren't what they are. This would be a mistake. Any such alliance would be asymmetrical and amount not to common cause but to co-optation, and we know all about that, don't we? The twos would do better to bring the whole rotten structure crashing down. True loneliness created false loneliness to sustain itself. Two contradictions feed each other. The "torment" of personal relations is symbiotic. Eliminate the illusions and emotion will once again run free, true, sincere, creative, uncontrollable, unstoppable. Insincerity is the cudgel of atomization. It wins by offering those morsels to its ostensible foes. You can speak, but you can't act. And why not? You win by pretending to lose. There is nothing so attractive as that.

Some thoughts on recent diabolicals

It has filtered down to my attention, as such information is often conveyed nowadays, that the transvestites have finally come for a certain streaming service. Obviously, a minority cannot successfully execute a hostile seizure of any platform without making common cause with certain elements of the reigning establishment. Of course, there is some question as to who is using whom here, and the relationship between "wokeness" and capital may not be as asymmetrical as it first appears. Capital sees opportunity, and as it did at the height of the counter-culture movement, when it appeared that anti-establishment sentiment was broad and deep enough to produce tangible results, it has chosen to co-opt what appears to them to be the zeitgeist of the moment. It is here that they have made a crucial misstep. Appearances, as any good Pyrrhonist understands, are often deceiving. But when the only clear path seems to lead straight off a cliff, why, the answer seems obvious, doesn't it?

Those on the cutting edge of the woke-spectrum are very pleased to be invited into the corridors of power, and it is much harder for me to blame them than to applaud them. They have played the game spectacularly and they have done so on the backs of those who first gave them the armaments needed to breach the gates, and whose ire they and their corporate sycophants have now aroused. The dog is not wagging them; they are wagging the dog. There is much to be learned from their efforts.

But they too have plunged headfirst off the precipice and straight into the vipers nest of cardinal error. It is my contention that a minority cannot for long dominate a majority, though this is not merely a matter of numbers or demography. I would just as soon assert the inverse. As Herodotus reminds us, human affairs are a wheel, and the wheel is always turning. Still, the minority will always have a more difficult time masking their intentions when it is clear that a majority is opposed to their program. And within the context of this sub-cultural conflict, who, exactly, is the majority?

If you're reading this, is it more than likely that you already know. The millennials are all grown up now, too busy trying to live up to their image as the cosmopolitan elite, a creative class, an urban gentry, enlightened, spiritually unshackled, the inheritors and rightful possessors of innovative, technological marvels bequeathed to them by their fathers and role-models (there is no difference). The past twenty years have had a nasty tendency to drag them back down from the heavens (those who have graduated from their more 'undesirable' pastimes or who have managed to conquer their pathologies in the name of cool a la Elon Musk). But where once they were the trailblazers, giving life, form, and money to new and exotic mediums of entertainment (video games and anime), now those who have not yet offed themselves or rendered themselves obsolete have found it necessary to hitch their wagons to ever stranger destinations: furries, trannies, and ponies. Prometheus discovers fire and immolates himself.

All well and good. Subcultures transmogrify with the times. But it is a truism that when old radicals stultify, new radicals take their place. What is born anew is often more virulent, aggressive, determined to smash old boundaries, to go where their predecessors would or could not. Now the new generation has arrived, the boundaries have been (allegedly) smashed. They have crowned themselves 'Z'. They are disciples of acceleration, they fancy themselves "right-wing" in opposition to the "progressives", they have taken the new and exciting tools of social media (inherited from their predecessors), twitch, discord, twitter, and have deployed them in service of their self-conscious performance art - or irony. They lament the loss of pure entertainment, they long for a time when social agendas were not imposed upon them, they see themselves as the aggrieved victims of something vaguely and ironically reflective of "society". Their intelligentsia pretends to read, and what filters down (always filtering) to the masses are absorbed into the vernacular and regurgitated in an eclectic blend of low and high culture: simp, cuck, e-girl, e-boy, coom, zoom, doom, gamer, pleb, patrician. Information flows both ways. These are the new kids on the block. And make no mistake, they are entirely sincere in their irony. Irony is a means to an end, the medium is the message and so on. They have goals beyond mere performance. However different they may feel, hiding on their image boards and discord groups, they know they are among friends.

All participants in an in-group need to feel that they belong and their social signaling is a reflection of that fact. Man is a political (social) animal. Their insulation is not an artifact of exclusivity but rather exclusive. They're attractive, witty, precocious (most won't admit to these things, of course), they deploy words and images that outsiders and naysayers can hardly hope to decipher. They're the new cool kids. But every in-group needs an out-group. Obvious, yes? And even easier to identify who the out-group must be, correct? It is so clearly the target of their efforts, the "establishment", which has misidentified their enemies as representative of themselves. Now, in their epochal error in judgment, they have awoken a sleeping giant.

At least, that's what we are being led to believe. That is certainly the impression that one gets. It's the one I get. But is this right? What was that about appearances again? Something in this story doesn't add up. How did the culture change? How did we get from anime and video games to ponies? Why does every insufferable twitter handle with an anime avatar seem to communicate in ebonics? The new cool kids are supposedly dissidents, but they love hip hop. Hip hop, if we can muster enough brainpower to think back far enough, was once also a dissident subculture, born in the ghetto projects, opposed to the reigning construct of "society", a voice for the voiceless. Now it's the largest and most profitable genre of music in the world, a cultural powerhouse on a global scale the likes of which history has hardly seen. Curious, that.

And where are the voiceless now? Who exactly has been forgotten in this latest manifestation of the culture wars? Those rendered obsolete by the changes in their own subcultures don't tend to find their way back. Not without changing and certainly not without matching the ferocity of those who have displaced them. Where are the basement pioneers, the losers, the geeks, the dorks, those who couldn't get a date if their life depended on it? A big show has been made of today's tendency towards atomization, but the cool still gravitate towards the cool, the in-groups continue to coalesce and build parallel structures. What of the freaks? Their institutions have been demolished. Discord replaced IRC. E-Sports replaced LAN parties. Highly organized, ideologically committed (bolshevized, in essence) cadres of opposing interests have displaced the common man. Here's a little irony for the ironists: both sides want the same thing - power and sex. There's an asymmetry there for you to figure out.

They would do well to remember that pre-2016 political debates are rather different from those post-2016. The fifteen percent bedrock support that backed Donald Trump in June of 2015 did not come from the progressive or conservative of the day. It came from the voiceless. Change tends to follow collapse, and the collapse of civil society in the American heartland is more than reminiscent of the sudden and dramatic shift in the composition of certain subcultures. An entire way of life has changed before the eyes of those who once had something to call their own. They have either grown up, moved on, or transformed into an "influencer" for either side in the battles of the new day. Perhaps it may be that some even remain. We fall prostrate at the altar of technology, at the siren call of streamers, at the ululations of the latest rapper, at the latest tweet from our obscure idols. If you're not with it, you're not "with" "it". No one spares a thought for Jimmy in the basement, alone at the keyboard, a spectator to spectacle. It's the roaring twenties after all. Things are moving quickly. Is he even there?

What does a mass movement of the forgotten look like? What are its goals, its composition, its disposition? An outline will suffice. It is honest, sincere, it is integral in that its membership acts in solidarity, it is apolitical, non-ideological, it draws its membership from the truly aggrieved and alienated, it is limitless in its appetite, it is adaptive, it sees enemies all around it and emulates them, its paranoia serves it well, it crushes those who oppose it on the grounds of some commitment to dogma, its goals are nostalgic, what has been taken must be restored, what has been lost must be regained, it will level all that is present and much of what has come before, contradiction is its strength, rage is its power.

We could hardly have known, at the meridian of the previous decade, that we were in for a paroxysm of populist grievance. Now, at the dawn of a new decade, we grow content in grievances that miss the mark. The zeitgeist may be on the side of the "dissidents", but they are phony in their dissidence and when they have felled their opponents, superficial distinctions and ostensible "goals" aside, they will quickly adopt their mannerisms. Minorities do not rule for long, especially when they believe themselves to be the majority. The wheel turns inexorably.

Reflections on a spring day

Strange tidings come upon me in the dead of night. It was a peculiar day today. It did not start off very different from the rest of them. My tendencies are rigid - rock solid - despite my every desire to strike at their foundation, they do not seem to wilt. They have been immobile for ten years.

I took a nice walk around the block. I switch my habitation weekly, and this week I'm on my tropical getaway by the shore. There's something about the verdant foliage, the way the spring light diffracts and reflects off sea, grass and blooming tree that makes everything appear so vibrant. And as I was walking, a thought struck me: How had all of this happened? A few months ago I had been working diligently, and reluctantly, on a local political campaign that shall go unnamed. I have never come closer to quitting a job than I had in that first week, but when I looked out at branches stripped of their leaves and the grey drizzle of winter sky, I made myself a promise. I told myself I would suffer it, because then I could enjoy the spring shift with satisfaction at the triumph over my grueling endeavor. Now here we are, the shift has come and gone, the trees and flowers are in efflorescence, and I could not for the life of me figure out how it had happened. When had flowers begun to bloom? When had branches grown green? Spring had snuck up on me and passed me by. I did not get a chance to enjoy it.

Now why is this? How could this have happened? I was so looking forward to it after all. I suspect I grew slack and content, and even more than that, I spent a good chunk of that time indulging in a disreputable pastime, availing myself of the services of a particular class of woman. I've just emerged from a bender of sorts, you see, and it is with great savagery that I have come to repress the impulse of appetite. I've lost more than just money to the fixations of the moment. Certain things have slid past me, and I have allowed them to do so.

I didn't have much time to reflect on that, because I got a call from a company that specializes in retail stocking. Flexible hours, low pay, the burden of travel cast upon myself. I listened politely and answered her questions. She liked me a lot; they often do. I think tomorrow I will refuse her. I'm still smarting over my latest dismissal: a two to three month gig turned into a four day venture at a local apartment complex. My morale had already collapsed by the halfway point, but still - this is a matter of principle. It was supposed to have made up for my sordid expenditures. To think now it will cover less than half the cost. And to think I continued to indulge even after being removed. Why, isn't that commitment?

I played Fortnite with an old college friend tonight. I was expecting the worst, but I came out pleasantly surprised. A decade ago I was a big fan of gaming, but that passion has waned with the years. I still do not yet know whether it was I who left the hobby or if it was the hobby that left me. I imagine it is a bit of both, with the jury out on who bears primary responsibility. When I was in college, I was often compelled by the pressures of the moment to join in on the battle royale craze, and I did not come out of it with a favorable impression. It's no surprise, of course, that an industry beset by generational and technological shifts would move quickly to meet the demands of the moment. But it was much like a blind prospect that happened to find luck - and strike gold. Fortnite rose in an environment dominated by the MOBA and the MOBA was an inevitable consequence of innovations in the business model of gaming firms - tried, tested and incubated in the innocuous realm of hats and skins. The industry has followed the rest into the knowledge economy. We are only interested in services now. Orgy porgy.

But I digress. I had fun with my friend. More fun that I had any real right to expect. I suppose this might become a regular thing. Too often I find myself dreading things I later come to enjoy. It is the classic problem of experience. More and more, I have come to believe that experience is the final frontier that needs to be cracked, those of my own and others alike, past, present and future. In them contains all questions left worth asking.

But what a vague and nebulous thing for me to say. After all, what are experiences? What experiences could I possibly mean? And what problems could possibly arise from them? I suppose those are questions for another day. A day in which I feel more like systematizing than aphorizing. I promised myself I wouldn't fall into old traps and here I am prepared once again to try my hand at taking the plunge. Maybe we should return to the question of service. I was once, after all, a worker in that vein.

Even that, dear reader, might be too much. For now I am content to consider the moment and the day that has preceded it. Reality did not quite live up to the banal expectations I had set for it. I am not sure if that is a good thing. It should be. But I don't feel much better. Maybe a slight uplifting sensation. All the same, I am determined to restore de rerum natura. Change rather takes the form of a bump in the road than a fork in it. Perhaps I should invest in a concrete mixer.

To Turn a Clock

Ecclesiastes tells us that the search for knowledge, and the hunger the compels it, is futile. Perhaps it is only when we get our grubby little fingers on it, and it slips through our fingers, that the lesson finally hits home. I am not, despite all appearances to the contrary, one to pass judgment on the truth value of propositions such as these. Though I can hardly pretend that the thought does not send a little aesthetic thrill up my aching spine. But that's just the point, isn't it? The appearance and reality don't match up. The unity of phenomena and noumena is revealed for the meretricious mendacity it really is. I am getting ahead of myself. I am not so vain as to affect noumenal reality. I am just the opposite. Words, words, words. That's all this is good for. And perhaps all I am good for is all I am.

Indeed, what good is a blog in the third decade of the twenty first century? In the time of coronavirus, I'd say there is more than a retro-thrill to the idea. It is quite like a diary, only I have never been very good at putting pen to paper as thought to digitized document. And in this roiling, hustling, bustling, destabilized conflagration of a world, in which irony, spectacle, simulacrum, "efficiency", progress and unadulterated, conspicuous consumption are triumphant, what is the use of a vertiginous pinprick, marooned on a tiny one-dimensional dot in a vast sea that has already swept up and inundated the medium? Who will see this but myself? Many such questions, very few answers.

I concede that this is an exercise in vanity. Maybe even a monumental one - an accusation I only recently leveled against a certain Irish-Libyan filibuster. We all have our vices, I suppose. I have not yet toppled a state, but rest assured the Congo remains high on my hit list - right after everything else. But even more than vanity, it is a keen sense of righteous indignation that compels me to write. "Vanity, yeah?" you snicker. Alright. I am once again on the back foot. I can shovel justifications upon myself all day. But in reality I am only amusing an audience of one. I quite enjoy the thought of that. It is much like how I imagine our President's executive time.

I am all out of pretensions to affect. All out of airs to expel. I am not looking to formalize thought, to organize and categorize, to explain and explicate. I am only here to expel and regurgitate. I see something, I say something. Isn't that how it ought to be? It is one strongly held belief of mine that there is a way the world should be. I have quite a few strongly held beliefs, although lately I have begun to question the sincerity of those beliefs. I suspect my intentions and motivations are not quite so pure as I have often led myself to believe. I have even begun to consider the possibility that it is belief itself that has led me to this state of great discontent. I don't possess a healthy stock of integrity, despite my championing of the ideal. Wouldn't we all like to be sincere, genuine, authentic and integral? No. I don't think we would, and that is a profound problem. Whether it is our own fault is maybe the biggest question that faces every age cohort as we enter the 2020s in earnest. It is certainly the one that keeps me awake at night. I am not, and have never been, particularly interested in categorization on the basis of age. When the Baby Boomers are accused of fomenting both progressive liberalism and authoritarian conservatism, my money is on neither.

And yet it is certainly no secret that we live in an age of polarization. That polarization, the fixation on ways of life, on cultural mores, on secular sacrament, on birth and death, on party, state and nation, occlude certain shared realities and tend to sidetrack even those that recognize it. The problems are bigger than any of us. It is so much easier to make a sport out of politics. Why not? A reality television star struck a home run that landed him smack dab in the Oval Office. Just as horizons have narrowed, the possibilities have ballooned. Another curious contradiction. And who is to say the analogy is just that? Politics has always been something of a sport.

The culture war bores me, but somehow it is universally considered to be the driver of political mobilization after the collapse of class politics. And as I scroll through my twitter feed tonight, I find that culture is inescapable. Contemptible subcultures are springing up at the drop of a hat. Everyone has their in-group, their good (old?) boy clubs, their secret back channels and neologisms, and I am so adrift that I have ended up writing a blog opener far longer than I had ever planned on. Sometimes the poison just has to be drained, and there is a lot of poison floating around out there.

Maybe I am the most poisonous of all. But if that is the case, then I am doing myself a disservice and everyone else a grande service by keeping myself confined under lock and key, tucked away in the bowels of a dead medium. I have turned back the clock on myself, sequestered myself behind this electronic moat. I can scream and rail and rage and all I'll get is an echo in return. Life has contracted to four walls and a chair. So be it. I salute it. I am impossibly angry. This is impossibly long. Oh, I just can't stop myself. Why should I want to?

I don't want to. So here we (I) are (am). A classic impasse. Something you might find in a dreadful western (I am currently watching Deadwood for the first time and it is very good). Perhaps I should talk about what has made me so angry on this night, but seeing as it is the same as every other night, I think we'll have plenty of time for that. Maybe time can be turned back here, but why bother when there's so much of it?