“They’re getting increasingly pissed off; rightfully so, because we’re bullshitting them … and … no one cares.”
–Andrew Yang, author of The War on Normal People, on a podcast
The podcast is Useful Idiots, and the linked page has what looks like a verbatim transcript though it’s not. Some of the best bits, like the one above, got chopped. So it’s worth listening to the whole thing in my opinion.
The accompanying article has this note:
“(Yang) talks comparatively little about Donald Trump, saying things like, ‘He got the problems right [but] his solutions were the opposite of what we need’.”
It’s interesting, because I feel a version of this about Yang himself. He is triple-better than Trump will ever be about diagnosing the problems–this interview is a whole school in what’s wrong. As for his solutions, they are definitely not ‘the opposite’ of what needs to happen, but they are for sure untested and very different from more ideology-driven prescriptions like Bernie’s (which I would say are broadly tested, as in the Roosevelt years).
Contrast ‘put more value in people’s hands’ with ‘this is not an anti-corporate message’ and you have the conundrum. All in all I remain a Bernista for this reason.
Even so, just based on the fresh takes (and leaving aside whether his fixes will work), he’s moved into a clear second choice for me.
***
I woke into Friday after three-four hours of decent sleep that ended abruptly in a troubled dream, of the sort that tormented me for many months, but milder. I turned on the second half of the podcast, which I’d left paused, and the quote at the top happened for me, in my realspace, right off. It was anodyne to my wounds. To stay with the theme, it wasn’t a fix, but it diagnosed perfectly.
My own worries are ultimately born of the disconnect between who I am and the world I live in. Yang had a piece about how suicides and overdoses are now the number one cause of deaths in many segments of the population, and that aging men are especially hard hit. I’m not addicted to anything that is going to bump me off abruptly, and I won’t be. I’ve never been the suicidal type, and even at the very darkest I was not tempted by the idea at all. I’m not violent. I still have limited and contingent hope, if not for the world then at least for my own situation in the shortening term …
But my more serious problems, and my less-frequent but lamentably still-present bad dreams–they really do have much the same origin as with more typical manchild cases. There’s the economics of the situation near the core. These are wrapped in a whole societal and historical matrix of ugliness that this culture has built on purpose and for specific reasons that benefit a few at the expense of the rest of us.
Sometimes the good small enterprise is swallowed whole by a larger competitor and co-opted into irrelevance. Sometimes, as in the case of higher ed, the co-opting blooms from within in stupid response to pressure from without. I’m sure there are a lot of other stories in situations I’m not as familiar with, all pointing in the same doomed directions.
My real job right now has nothing to do with the things they pay me poorly for.
My job is to find the tenuous path through the falling rock walls of this mad and broken system, the one unlikely course that doesn’t end up with me crushed by the gravity boulder of destruction one way or the other.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll … tell you about the cat.