Hey, we're going to meet in an hour, and I wanted to remind you about it and also remind you of the things we read.

This week I linked to a couple of pieces to give us a short break from Theory of Water:

• "The Invaders" by Séamus Malekafzali for Equator
• "Cop Cities Mock Cities" by Stuart Schrader for The Los Angeles Review of Books
• "Reservoir Hogs" by Christopher Ketcham for The Baffler
• "Mike Davis, the Trucker and Meatcutter Turned Marxist Legend" on the 'Time to Say Goodbye' podcast

I'll email sometime this week to announce a co-listening session for the podcast, so keep an eye out for that email, but don't sweat it if you can't join us.

After reading "The Invaders" and "Cop Cities Mock Cities", I went into reading "Reservoir Hogs" and (listening to) the Mike Davis interview thinking about how the strategy the state has taken with so many things has not been to introduce stability by meeting people's needs, but to take away stability or inject chaos and destruction into settings in order to disorient and destabilize people. Rather than building a safer world, the United States destabilizes regions until they're unable to mount a defense; rather than addressing people's demands to invest municipal, state, and federal resources in basic human needs, governments at various levels embrace paradigms of destabilization and disorientation by way of cop cities as mechanisms to model and develop the strategies to "minimize uncertainty".

I was surprised by the effect the podcast had on me, hearing the voices of people in mid-2020 as they were going through the early days of the pandemic. Hearing about the anxieties of organizing in-person and listening to the hosts and Davis joke about destroying surveillance cameras, hearing Davis struggle to convince his own kids to hold their breath and vote for Biden. Once again, mid-2020.

I loathe to say that I felt nostalgic about mid-2020; I think it's rather that I feel a slight pang of nostalgia for the brief time when it felt like people had been zapped by the uncertainty of life, and realized - very fleetingly - that we desperately need to incorporate a sense of shared fate into our political visions and futures. Distressingly, that sense faded, and it feels like the lesson some people have learned was to never lose sight of one's own interests.

By the way: A few days ago, the CDC announced that people on a cruise with the hantavirus outbreak don't need to quarantine and can go about their regular business.

video chat details

In about an hour (at 5p ET, or 9p UTC) let's get together¹ and chat about whatever we've read this week. The link to join is here (if that doesn't work, the url is below)

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

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