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Tactics v. Strategy, an ongoing series

So… who ever thought The Cossacks Work for the Czar would become a literal trope? If you are keeping score at home, and really should be, the skullduggery looks like this. A campaign received election assistance from a foreign government, discussed potential policy changes as recompense for the successful assistance [ON TELEPHONE CALLS THAT WERE MONITORED], publicly complimented and assured the leader of the same foreign government, and blames enemies and the media (Venn diagram available) for existence of, as well as attempts to call out, this treason.
Not unrelated, continued efforts in the only actual work the administration is currently pursuing consists entirely of working the refs:

While the administration is battling a large swath of the media, the fight with CNN has special intrigue because its parent company has a massive piece of business awaiting government approval: a proposed $85.4 billion sale to AT&T Inc. Messrs. Kushner and Ginsberg, who have been friends for a decade and whose discussion covered a variety of issues including Israel and the economy, didn’t discuss the merger in their recent meeting, said the people familiar with the matter.

If you know where to jump in here, please do. In the trumped up [ugh] dispute with CNN, its president’s relationship to the reality show that launched this whole fiasco is only mentioned in passing. But there it is.
Image: Painting by Ilya Repin, The Zaparozhe Cossacks Writing a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan

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Front Lines

For a long time, I’ve thought that living in Republican-dominated states, especially in the South, was a form of being on the front lines – of racism, of anti-union sentiment, of hostility to immigrants and civil rights broadly construed. Even the lesser evils of being among people who feel over-taxed, persecuted for their (in every sense dominant) religious beliefs, sub-par infrastructure (no mass transit and the promotion of personal automobiles as priority transportation concerns) and general discomfort with the world as more people deservedly take their places in it, you are confronted with this it all up close. You know what it’s like and grow accustomed to fear and self-loathing as it leaks out everywhere among the shiny automobiles and neat, though increasingly sad [and appropriately named] subdivisions. After not too long, you begin to sense among the dominant political persuasion an uneasiness that borders on paranoia. The lack of confidence about the way things are going, despite the fact that they are in charge, is unmistakable and results in all kinds of frantic attempts to standardize and codify the fear. But it’s not normal and doesn’t sell easily. It’s not inevitable that these attempts fail, but often enough, people seek allies and gain them in the smallest way. Smiles and nods turn to conversations and simple shared affinities on this side of the line. You have every opportunity to reinforce your own convictions and/or assure others, in any way you choose. And to choose not to. You can also nod along, turn attention to more temporal concerns. Get along. Move along.

The new administration is simply this dynamic writ large; the anti-everything good and decent now has an official imprimatur that is the rushing the worst people and measures out front with great haste and uncut distrust. But the unease is the same, if broader. They know they are somehow on the wrong side, hence the anger and lack of confidence.
For this side, people have discovered the streets again. Attention has been gained by atrocious indecency, a willingness to loot not just the treasury but the national moral character itself. We don’t have laws against this stuff, to stop those depraved enough to endanger everyone. And again, it’s not inevitable that the nominal Our party will be able to seize the moments and string them together into a coherent future direction, foment the positive and give people in the streets a reason to overwhelm the polls when it comes time again.
But we’re all on the front lines now, and we have been for a while though not everyone is fighting, yet.

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A Specific Case of Sometimes

There exists a misunderstood or mischaracterized mantra, if we will, that you cannot really succeed without the possibility of failure. And it would seem to make sense, though it is often enough forgotten how much trouble the very rich have over-compensating for the fact that they don’t feel legitimate in their own eyes. (There is a very good novel idea in there somewhere, and you get to it before me, good on you). There is also a specific case of sometimes, if green means that you win even if you lose, how were you ever going to be able to prevail?

Turns out that Robby Mook was the perfect campaign manager for Hillary Clinton after all. He’s just like his boss: can’t win an election, but can get rich giving revolting speeches afterwards.

Buzzfeed reports that Mook has, thanks be to god, landed on his feet after failing to defeat a racist clown who may well devastate countless lives before his term is done. Mook will be teaming up with Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s (failed) campaign manager, to “offer a future-focused look at why Trump won” in front of any audience willing to pay enough for their presence. How fun!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We were all naive, of that there is no doubt. But he wasn’t looking into the abyss we were, or are now. This is first-rate corruption, even to my tender eyes. Golf clap from the hedge-fund gallery, but please let’s awaken, all you little Saint-Justs everywhere. In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

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First Day of the Rest of Your

How long will this last? How much can you take? Do you have a line that won’t be crossed? Do you have a budget for direct action?
Even within the sanitized discretion of our modern parlance the questions, and the situation, bring to mind the passionate, confused, committed young man Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just. As this article notes, and you might read about him and his extended, late-eighteenth century moment,

When Victor Hugo in his 1862 novel, Les Misérables, described the young student Enjolras, who leads the climatic fight on the barricade, as having ‘too much of Saint-Just’ about him, his readers knew what that meant. A few years earlier, Hugo’s contemporary and fellow countryman, the great republican historian Jules Michelet, described Saint-Just as ‘the archangel of death’, a phrase that encapsulated the legend of the unnaturally beautiful and cold-bloodedly terrible Saint-Just.

So the question may be, do you have enough Saint-Just about you?

Image: Saint-Just in a portrait by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, 1793. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon

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See It Now

First of all Happy New Year and apologies for going blank for a while. We were hacked! And I’m not naming Russians names, but THANK YOU to someone special for getting this thing back up and running.
So… when the FCC gave licenses to stations to broadcast advertisements beginning in July 1941, they negotiated public service programming commitments as a requirement for a license. These were initially 15-minute current events recaps. But when Pearl Harbor was bombed later that year, the national emergency gave way to extensive special reporting that led to everything form newsreel theatre to interview and expose shows – John Cameron Swayze and Camel News Caravan to, eventually Edward R. Murrow himself and See It Now, the first program with live simultaneous transmission from coast to coast.
So the public affairs arena became profitable and something happened to it. We can connect other phenomena, and we should (the advent of Pop art), but all this happened in a way that seemed positive, fortuitous and in many ways divine. But we weren’t nearly savvy enough to keep the news boring enough to keep ourselves informed long enough to figure how we should treat these new information delivery systems that were so engrossing we would just sit down and watch… anything.
Now they have become useless for informing us – but they didn’t start out that way! The diminution has been deliberate, but informing people could be a viable business model! But, and this is serious, the quarterly profit expectations will have to be vastly curtailed. And this is only part of the problem. But let’s begin.

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Let’s Have the Debate

galileo_galileiThere is no silver lining for what’s coming down the pike, so don’t mistake this for any semblance of that. The lining is all sh*t, with 5,000-count sh*t thread lapels and sh*t-stuffed pockets and 5-karat, sh*t-gilt buttons.

Atrios is surely correct: there is no real reason for climate denial at this point other than tribalism and pissing off liberals. Apocalypse Cult, check. But they don’t even believe the denial. It’s a classic shakedown.

Scientists are incredibly careful, despite the alarmist rhetoric with which they are tarred. If anything, they are too careful and measured. With so many colleagues among their ranks, I understand why. But here’s a prediction. The ascendance of fake news is going to force them to become less so. There is no answer to irrationality and scientists will be forced to become less afraid as a consequence. The tone, like the planet, is going to become hotter. It’s time.

Image: Galileo showed the Doge of Venice how to use the telescope (Fresco by Giuseppe Bertini)

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People in suits

dochollidayMaybe like some, I’ve been reluctant to act on or even write much about my perspective on the recent election, beyond sharing brief descriptions. The compulsion to hold onto that anger for a while longer, allow it form something useful, while at the same time reaching out personally to many who instantly became more vulnerable, has seemed to me the better course. Doing this, however, we risk a certain changed countenance and I indeed do feel differently about several things in many ways, my naiveté about many of our fellow Americans prime among them. But about other things, I do not feel differently, and in fact, my convictions have only grown stronger, and they offer guidance on how to proceed, which led me back to something by the great John Gardner:

The poet-priest had two functions: lawgiver and comforter. He had to know what laws to give, what comfort to give, what comfort to withhold as false. The poet has far less power now, but the job hasn’t changed. He must affirm, comfort as he can, and make it stick. Let artists say what they know, then, admitting the difficulties but speaking nonetheless. Let them scorn the idea of dismissing as harmless the irrelevant fatheads who steal museums and concert halls and library shelves: the whiners, the purveyors of high-tone soap opera, the calm acceptors of senselessness, the murderers. It is not entirely clear that these people are not artists. They may be brilliant artists, with positions exactly as absolute as, say, mine. But they are wrong.It’s not safe to let them be driven from the republic by policemen, politicians, or professional educators. Officialdom would drive out all of us, which is one reason that when we come out shooting we should all talk with dignity and restraint, like congressmen, and wear, like Doc Holliday, vests and ties. Let a state of total war be declared not between art and society – at least until society starts horning in – but between the age-old enemies, real and fake.

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Disastrophe

When I started writing this blog back in 2008, it included no small measure of wise-acre impatience with how green sustainability was quickly becoming just another fashion in marketing trend. Sure, ‘sustainable’ is an unimaginably low bar, but it had a kind of odd staying power – people though they understood it, even if they ignored it. Maybe it allowed them to ignore the greater crisis, so thoroughly did it couch the entire concept in ‘meh’. Why be alarmed? You/they didn’t come up with an alarming word. Sustainable. It seemed to infer, ‘We’ve got plenty of time.’
Well, now that the alarm has taken the shape of an iridescent human, it has brought with it a slew of other factors that must be ignored first, before we get back to ignoring the great existential thing we’ve been trying to ignore all along. Excusing and thus normalizing racism, sexism, homophobia, classicism, fascism and treason have now re-presented as the ante quod nihil of dealing with any of this planetary crisis business.

Remember, Tking-tides-globeides,
global warming is a hoax.
Exemplary measures,
equaling at most
a dollop
of time. Before we wade and watch.
Instead of just watch.

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On Bullshit

a-burial-at-ornansOne week from the election, disagreement as political argument has taken a very wide arc around the truth:

Why should we remain beholden to facts? They are, as etymology tells us, not some sort of raw material that we simply find, but rather are the sort of thing that must be actively made — or, to use the Latin past participle, factum. Propagandists, whether Jesuit, Bolshevik, or Rovean, are those people who understand that facts, or at least social facts, are the result of human activity, in part the activity of inserting new ways of thinking and talking into the public realm — and that when this is done effectively, the public, sometimes, can come to a new understanding of the truth.
This, again, is not what Trump is doing. He is a mere bullshitter, and what comes out of his mouth has more to do with pathologies of personality than with any real vision of how the world, or America, ought to be brought into line with some super-empirical truth to which he alone has access.

Trumpism is, however, being helped along by master propagandists who understand very well that, by treating facts as something to be actively made, one may eventually change the way truth is understood. (Let us not, here, consider the specter of social constructionism, of whether changing the way truth is understood is the same thing as “creating a new truth.”) The activists of the so-called alt-right have been working for years to change public discourse through a concerted campaign of internet trolling. Their goal has been the creation of “meme magic,” that moment when an idea that they have promoted online makes the leap from virtuality to reality.

Also, ensorcelled. Image: A Burial at Ornans, by Gustave Courbet, 1851

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Descent in Joy

The continued protest by Native people against the DAPL leads me to Camus and his Myth of Sysiphus:

sisyphus

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward tlower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

Happy [reading] Friday.