There are three main things I use to distract myself from the things my best self really wants to practice and accomplish.
One is, let’s speak it obliquely and civilized, Eros.
The second is gaming, and this one is weird. I have lots of video games filed away, barely even installed, but I only ever play one of them. It was released twenty-five years ago. It’s called ‘Alien Crossfire’, which might make a good title for my memoirs. I usually have a game in progress, a save file to go back to–it’s a postmodern chessboard sitting in the corner of the sitting room. I open the file and study the board intermittently.
The third is politics. Specifically, watching smart opinionated people comment on Our Situation, agreeing and disagreeing with them, hashing around in my mind the rights and wrongs and lefts, and formulating The News into something that resembles a philosophy, in that Voltaire way. Eventually, taking all that and using it to feel superior in some stupid way to the great masses of sheeple. (Whatever, dude. Go do your wobbly art instead. Get a job! Or something.)
Central to my politics this year has been studying the way late-stage capitalism has begun to slowly and surely morph into fascism. Not the goose-stepping imagery, not the aryan supremacy with swastikas, not the hurled epithet of ‘fascist!’ that every side uses to try to smear the other as the Bad People. Real fascism, as Mussolini envisaged it: the merger of the corporations and the State.
I have been particularly critical of the Empire I grew up in for gliding carefree down this dark path. Within the Empire, I have been particularly critical of the faux-leftists, the libtards, the Democrats, because they should be the ones standing against this blind blithe drift into real Darkness–Often their words try to claim that they do, but their words are lies, and they don’t even try hard anymore to get you to believe the lies. Partly because they don’t have to try, because the brainwash of the general populace is so complete … but I digress.
Sure I’m happy to criticize right-wingers and Repubs, but there’s hardly any sport in making fun of dangerously disturbed rubes like the Orange Man or the Florida Man.
I’d much rather make fun of Dems who think Liz Cheney might be a valuable ally, or who fawn over the childish paintings of the addled war criminal who was her father’s puppet for eight years.
I’d rather make fun of people who think it’s a good idea to ship billions of dollars halfway across the world to fund proxy wars of colonialism and imperialism, whether it be in Korea or Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq or Ukraine or Yemen or Somalia, while their neighbors and countrymen suffer for it every day as a direct result. Black fun, gallows humor.
This has resulted in some unpleasant moments for me in some quarters.
Like many a pro-human leftist (for lack of a better term) that have come before me, I’ve looked on with interest at the projects of the enemies of my enemies. Are they friends?
The fact that newly empowered countries like Russia and China are actively working on solutions to the hegemony of the petro-dollar and the unipolar Empire does make me smile at times. This tentatively approving little smile is what has led to the episodes of unpleasantness. I’ll listen to people snarling at Trump’s latest antics, Putin’s latest antics, and I’ll take the part of the Advocate of the Devil; take it with joy.
Today whatever joy I’ve taken in it is turning colors like a fresh bruise.
I didn’t mind when Putin ‘recognized’ the independent micro-states of Donetsk and Lugansk, the underdogs in the Ukrainian civil war. I thought, still think, that it was a rational response to a brutal situation. When he took Lysychansk back, I cheered in perfect silence. By all means, recognize the Donbas oblasts. By all means, help them to defend themselves against the western interests that greedily sought to colonize them.
Today in particular, the joy is long gone and the smile is fading into black sobriety.
The enemy of my enemy is demonstrably not inevitably my friend.
Putin annexed the two revolutionary oblasts, and a couple of more besides.
In so doing, he made the puny hypocritical arguments of his critics seem quite a lot more plausible.
Annexing … is a counter-revolutionary move. I can’t find a way to justify or be okay with it, even though I’d prefer to.
What it says to me is that placing any faith in him to effect real change, or to create a real and slightly better (less worse) alternative to the rapacious Atlanticist colonizers, is now just rendered a foolish position to hold onto.
It all just comes back to, in the durable words of Midnight Oil, corporate criminals playing with tanks.
I give up. On Republicans, on Democrats, on the empire run out of northern Virginia and Brussels, and yes, on the one run out of Moscow and Beijing too. It’s all just greed and power taking different forms and shapes.
It’s the ordinary people of the world, the ones that are still more or less human, that have suffered for it ever since we came down out of the hunter-gatherer hills and settled in the valleys. Grain piling up means surplus, silos, rats, tetanus, plague, kings and war.
Surplus tends to amplify the worst in us, and the worst in us now owns everything and rules this mortal coil with a iron fist, sometimes in a velvet glove, and sometimes not.
Sometimes we at the bottom become obvious distasteful underclass slaves to the wage, and sometimes we become collaborators in the fundamentally rotten system as part of the managerial class. We become secretaries of the state, or god help us: professors.
“Oh, but the poor are always with us,” we solemnly intone, but the real emotional reason for saying it is to try to distance ourselves from those poors. Nicer haircut, nicer car, nicer house, pedicure, organic wine in pretty bottles, better coffee or cigars or cameras.
Success. Surplus.
The ragged truth is that you and I have more in common with the bum asking us for quarters than we do with any Condoleeza or Elon or Volodymyr of the ruling elite. It’s a terrifying thought and one understandable impulse is to push it away with vehement denial. The impulse is the Stockholm Syndrome–to identify with our oppressors.
Fuck those fieldhands! I, at least, am a house Negro!
Malcolm told it true before I was out of diapers, and they killed him for it of course, but the killing didn’t make it any less true.
East, or West. Black, or white. Then, or now.