I believe in Crystal Light
You finished the sentence in your head.
“I believe in Crystal Light because I believe in me.”1
It’s a genius turn of phrase: how can you doubt this artificial drink and look yourself in the mirror?
It is, of course, a diet drink. For women. Who must regulate their bodies to perform in an economy of mind vs. body – the minds belong to men, the bodies… well, they belong to men, too.
But ownership is slippery. It requires faith as much as force.
Haliey [sic] Welch, the young woman who just a few months ago became famous for sounding out how she spits on a penis before giving head, pumped and dumped her way to infamy last week with a cryptocurrency scam (redundant, I know, but clarity demands patience) that fleeced an unknowable number of marks some millions of dollars.
I’d like to say: “See! The [gambling] tables have turned!” but Ms. Welch was most likely taken for a ride herself. Though a much more leisurely ride than the one all of America is now aboard:
I think we are in a crisis of hegemony moment: neoliberalism is dying, but its replacement is yet to be born. And, as in pre and post-hegemonic times, the field of politics is fragmented and incoherent, there’s no hegemonic class or portion of a class that’s able to lead, so everything reverts to “the economic-corporate phase,” when different social interests seek their own short-term benefits rather than coalescing behind a vision of social development.
The incoming administration, for which Trump is the Trojan show horse, is wildly enthusiastic about pump and dump schemes because it is, above all, a triumph of nihilism. That is gangsterism.
You fight it with faith. You fight it with “No.”
Every single person who supports Trump implicitly – let alone explicitly – is declaring themselves too lazy to do the work required of citizenship: faith, loyalty, forbearance, sacrifice.2
I imagine my neighbors the collaborationists rationalize themselves as players in Casablanca, just trying to get by, playing the cards they were dealt. In reality, they’re giving the Orson Well’s speech in The Third Man, coded in LinkedIn-ese.
How do you answer the devil? With “No.”
“Maybe” is for cowards and congresspeople.
There are 535 members of Congress and 335 million US Citizens. For the 99.0002% of Americans who are not obligated by professional oaths to fight corruption with politicking, the choice before us is quite simple.
Speak the truth. Keep the faith.
The alternative is not “live and let live”, it’s death and destruction.3
The road to hell is paved with short-term thinking.
I often quote Bill Barr in these pages because the degenerate grifters who have taken over the Republican Party, and now the American Republic, could only have done so because Barr and his blue blood, patrician ilk had already thoroughly debased both.
From five years ago:
Many times over the last two years I’ve recalled this tag line from Slate’s Will Saletan: “The GOP is a failed state and Trump is its warlord.” Now this half applies to the country at large. It was a remarkably prescient line. It explains and illuminates so much.
Warlords rule by force rather than by law or consent. But what makes them warlords rather than state builders – steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king – is that their power does not just originate in state failure. Its perpetuation depends on it.
These are all analogies of course. The failed state model applies more to the GOP than the US at large… In this sense he has made the US not a failed state but a failed politics. And thus, here we are.
There’s a fancy name for people who believe nothing can be done: nihilists.
Faith is expensive. Faith is humbling. Faith is a bad investment.
But faith is what has kept us from tearing ourselves to pieces.
Last night, as we were leaving our temple, our oldest asked me what INRI stands for and I explained it was the epithet the Romans put over Jesus’ tortured, desecrated body as he hung to death, a warning to the hoi polloi:
“The king of the Jews.”
I further explained that a writer named Nietzsche, who “hated” Christianity, understood it best: a religion for losers.4
To be a loser you have to try to win. And if what you’re playing for is peace and justice, may you lose a million times over.
It’s from 1984, literally but also figuratively. ↩
Ask the people of Sicily how well pragmatism has worked for them. ↩
Consider, for example, the unholy union between the literal and figurative apocalypse:“Ron Dermer, Israel’s former ambassador to the US… argued in 2021 that the Jewish state should prioritize Evangelical Christians over American Jews as its key allies in the US.” ↩
I, for one, am not tired of winning. ↩