August 4, 2024

what to expect

My father grew up in a military family; his father an orphan, his mother could barely read. As a teenager, he wanted to become an air force pilot but he failed the eye exam. A few years later, he was an insurrectionist. Then, a political prisoner.

When I was around 8 or 9 and my father told me: “Just because a person is wearing a police uniform, that doesn’t mean they’re on the right side of the law.”

What you expect is what you get.

Most American liberals of my age – my friends, classmates and colleagues, with whom I am fortunate to break bread – understand power as a thing to be preserved; “hang on to the house,” “protect Roe v Wade”, “purple states.”

They grew up in a rare period of geopolitical stability and in blissful ignorance of American political violence.¹ But the norm – the American way – is very, very different.

One of our best history books is the novel Blood Meridian. There’s our “norms”.²

(Why a novel? Because power is phantasmagorical. It disregards the letter of the law because it writes the law. It exceeds the boundaries of fact because history is most certainly written by the victors.)

What you expect is what you get.

I sat down this morning to rewrite this letter and out my window I saw a man walking with everything he owns on his back. A refugee from our past.

If you want to live in a world where you don’t have to look the other way as your brothers and sister suffer, you have to account for the way violence undergirds our everyday lives.

The Trumpists and their fellow travelers – the broken billionaires and legion corporate officers who kowtow to them –  know exactly how violent America is.

When they say “law and order”, they very much mean the violent suppression of equality, the relentless maintenance of a regime of privilege and access that benefits a few at the expense of most.

No public schools, no public libraries, no public land. This is how you kill the public body – so that private interests can feast on its corpse.

The consequences of such nihilism are always tragic. But as Bill Barr said: they’ll all be dead by then. It’ll be someone else’s problem. To deal with the wasteland.

There is, of course, another way.

You can expect more public schools. More public facilities. More public services. You can expect – God forbid, you can demand, out loud, in public – more government employees bound by standards far more rigorous than your most beloved consumer brand.

Or you can get what the nihilists expect.

There is no center. There is no third way. You can either be a radical for equality – the basis of democracy – or you can get what those who fear their fellow man (woman and child) expect.³

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not… the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice.

I’m sure you’ve come across that quote before, from the commie public enemy whose birthday became a US federal holiday in 1983 (except for Arizona, which relented nine years later, because of the public ballot.)

Here is the full text of his meditation; note especially his pain when confronting the cowardice of organized religion.

He wrote those words in jail; a political prisoner. An insurrectionist.

When it comes to equality there is no such thing as a moderate. You are either a radical or a fascist.⁴

Sorry, not sorry!

It gets even more cringe, as the kids say.

Tell me: why have we allowed housing to become a scarcity that artificially props up the wealth of the middle class? Would we do the same with food? Of course not.

Look at the growth of our agricultural yields:

Now, look at the inverse, our shelter yields:

The supply of housing units does not keep up with demand; that drives up the price of shelter which deforms what housing is built.

Can you imagine looking at mass food shortages across the USA and saying: well, at least the servings for those who get to eat are getting bigger.

We are one of the most dynamic societies to have ever emerged in human history. We are building artificial intelligence and have eradicated diseases. We have avoided the perils of central planning while reaping the unimaginable rewards of central banking.

We don’t have to create mass suffering to be happy.

THE WEALTH CREATED BY AN ARTIFICIAL SHORTAGE OF SHELTER IS AN ILLUSION. DERIVING WEALTH FROM HOUSING PRODUCES WIDESPREAD VIOLENCE. IT also THREATENS OUR DEMOCRACY.⁵

Postscript

Two weeks ago a friend asked me how it was that I always seem to be ahead of the American political commentariat.

I replied: Because I’m a refugee from the future.

For four decades, I have encountered USA-ians who think Cuba is somehow the past.⁶ That Mexico or Guatemala or El Salvador or Syria or Sudan, etc and so on, are “stuck in the past”.

Really now?

Of course, places like Cuba (or, say, Venezuela) are also alternate futures. And the people fleeing those futures represent one of the essential pillars of the USA as a laboratory for human freedom.⁸

(Is it any surprise that the Republican Party of Lee Atwater, Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump, the so-called Conservative Movement of Mitch McConnell and Leonard Leo, the GOP of the CEO – wants to end birthright citizenship? Why? Because they are driven by fear. A fear of their own mediocrity in the face of human greatness. And, yes, they’ll cut off your nose to spite their face.)

Movies

The oldest finally watched Alien, the brilliant and beautiful 1970s political thriller disguised as a Hollywood blockbuster. So we followed it up with the 1986 Aliens, written and directed by James Cameron.

I’m a huge fan of The Terminator, which to me is pure cinema. But Aliens is, at best, a dress rehearsal for Avatar, and at worst, predictable.

So what? Movies are really, really hard. Like soufflés made on a life raft in the middle of a hurricane. Every mediocre movie is a minor miracle.

And yet… last weekend, I made a 30 foot cyclorama for the Apple Vision Pro in a half hour and laughed out loud like a child when I first encountered it.

Some 12 years ago I wrote that psychonautics felt inevitable. It’s coming sooner than I expected.

A consumer version of the Apple Vision Pro will likely be released next year. (Not coincidentally, it will probably plug into your iPhone.)

But even if it’s delayed, meta’s Oculus will pick up where Apple has left off.

Either way, our chances of encountering the infinite within very finite means of production are multiplying.