ranting about how shit's fucked, Brecht and big feelings, plus some recs and self promotion
hey everyone,
I hope you’re maintaining in the dumpster fire. Feels like shit’s real fucked right now. I’m finding it hard to keep that thought in my head along with the thought that there is so much deep and militant humanity being practiced in opposition right now too. Both matter, understanding both in detail matters tremendously, but it doesn’t all always fit in my brain. It’s like I’m mentally changing channels and sorta too fast, overcaffeinated channel surging or something, getting a bit of mental whiplash.
That’s a very minor distress all things considered, which reminds me, I was thinking the other day that while I dearly, dearly love the Brecht line (and the whole poem it’s from, it’s taped on a wall in my office, words to live by and I mean that), it’s something like ‘truly I live in dark times, whoever laughs has not yet heard the news’ there’s also a related but different thing not with regard to laughter but crying and worrying.
For instance, I remain sad and angry about my employer laying off two long term coworkers a year ago; I think of them and the cruel, callous way they were treated every single time I go to work. And then I think of people picking up their loved ones’ body parts in shopping bags in Gaza and think that this anger and sadness of mine has a similar relationship to the news as laughter’s relationship in the Brecht poem. In an important sense this life is impossible, and we have no option but to do the impossible.
Keeping on the gloom tip, let me recommend to you “Guiding Lights” by Propagandhi, a banger from a record full of bangers -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDWP1A8b9cc My impression is that it’s about crowds in Israel celebrating attacks on Palestinians. Without wanting to take away from the particulars there, which are massively important, I think it generalizes: the hellworld makes people in its image. It, I don’t know, it barbarizes. Another Brecht line, something like: in the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, about the dark times. That’s most of what Propagandhi’s doing, and I’m inclined to say that there’s something to singing and to music as a way to live despite the dark times, make sense of them without make them define what we mean by sensible, and to live despite the inability to fully make sense of the dark times since they are in important respects impossible. There’s also something about music and moral authority, music and music cultures as a way that moralities get reproduced and worked out that are alternative and/or oppositional to the death machine. I’d like clearer thoughts on that but don’t have them yet. (And it’s hard to be patient.)
Changing gears real quick for a sec, and one more quick short gear change coming up (this is what is known as foreshadowing, I believe?), I’ve been daunted by the prospect of trying to keep up with the covid pandemic and policy responses to it for a while now. I remain a zero covid marxist zealot, but that zealotry is harder to practice at present, has been for a while, because of compounding small obligations, some of them lovely (my kids are so cool! [and, Brecht again: I laugh so hard and often with my wonderful kids, each one of whom I love with all of my heart - love’s differently impossible, a defiance of impossibility, I have one heart but love like I have three - and many times when I laugh with them I think of people in Palestine {and in a different way people here in the US via the monsters working at ICE} losing their children, a scope of loss that hurts to even attempt to seriously imagine and I know the real loss is so far beyond that. Dark times, truly) and some of those obligations stupid bullshit. The latest shit with RFK and Bhattacharya is warped even by the already through-the-looking-glass standards of the recent past. I don’t know that I’ll ever really get a handle on it.
This might be me just trying to reach for a coping mechanism, but I had the thought yesterday or today that even if I can’t grasp the immediate concrete situation - the current instance of the nightmare surpasses my capacity to make sense of it, partly for the banal reasons of job-induced lack of time and energy (every employer a philistine, working to prevent the preconditions for creativity and thought!) and partly because an impossible situation overflows capacity for sense making to an important degree - it’s still good to keep trying to develop a framework within which to understand the context in which (or, from which is produced) the current nightmare. Put a little more simply, this all feels like a wildly tempestuous set of events. If the events can’t be grasped yet, it’s still worth parsing the broad contours of the world of which those events are part, and having concepts and analyses with which to do that parsing is an unfinished task, a worthy one. So I like to tell myself anyway.
Next and final gear change for this little post: I had an article come out today in Spectre -- https://spectrejournal.com/hands-off/ -- arguing that the impulse to define and oppose Trump by going ‘he’s lawless!’ is inaccurate and encourages some important political mistakes. Give it a look if you’re interested in writing by me (and I do assume if you’ve made it this far in this post/this lil blog o’mine then you are to some degree interested in writing by me). It’s based heavily on some work about the UK by the Marxist legal scholar Robert Knox, who I think is brilliant (pardon the brag, he’s also a friend of mine but my assessment isn’t the result of me liking him personally). I recommend his work highly to you -- https://liverpool.academia.edu/RobertKnox
I lied (we get loose with the truth when the mode gets open enough, right gang?!), one last gear change, another recommendation. Check out my neighbor’s band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTHbFy1KuGY For real, please do, I’ll consider it a personal favor. All their stuff is great and this song is a favorite of mine from their live shows that I was SO STOKED to hear recorded once they records it. It’s also my youngest daughter’s favorite of theirs, an assessment she arrived at independently, which is great. (Dark times, remembering the news, so many kids in Gaza won’t get to arrive at anything due to US bombs.) The song’s partly about wanting to quit your job, which is one of the best song topics out of any song topics. I also like some lines in it massively, like “it takes so much effort, so much time, to convince yourself to say hey, I wanna live today” and “take a breath, it’s a dark world lately, join a cause or a movement maybe.”
Alright, that’s it for me for now. Hang in there, friends.