Heaven in Disorder by Slavoj Žižek

My review of Slavoj Žižek's latest book, of shorter essays, Heaven In Disorder, now up at SPLICE TODAY:

 

 

The Management of Savagery by Max Blumenthal

Now up at SPLICE TODAY, "Blind Liberation,"  my book review of Max Blumenthal's The Management of Savagery, in which he details how U.S. foreign policy under both Republicans and Democrats led to the rise of Trump:

Open letter to the Pacific Greens

Dear Pacific Greens,

What's going on? Because I'm barely hearing anything from you, and I was a paying member.

I've been on board with the Green Party at the national level since 2000. The Green Party simply is for everything I am, both domestically and in foreign policy. Most recently I was very much behind Jill Stein, and her running mate Ajamu Baraka, in the last presidential campaign, and especially enjoyed the walk-out at the Democratic Convention. I continue to follow both of them on social media and they're doing stuff.

But where are you guys? I was paying you a monthly amount, and follow you on social media, including Twitter and, more locally, Facebook, but I almost never hear from you. I did receive an email a month thanking me for my donation, and that's it. There was one time when you held some kind of convention, in Lake Oswego, Oregon. The email I received was not an invitation to participate nor, when I went to to website, was there any invitation to anyone to attend, never mind the fact that Lake Oswego is the center of rich white conservative people in the Portland area, and not easily accessible (by design) to poor people from Portland, even by public transportation. The message I was left with was that the Green Party, at least locally, is being run by elite rich white people.

By way of comparison, the Democratic Socialists, of Portland and nationwide, are doing an excellent job of both messaging, and involving members, as well as recruiting members. I'm tempted to just go with them except for their insistence in emphasizing antifa and identitarian politics (which is another letter). And they do things, like letter campaigns and joining other groups in actual protests.

There are many people like me, fed up with the Democratic Party and their oligarch overlords, looking for a third way, a third party, one not paid for by corporations and the rich. This is the time. Jill Stein was hugely visible during that last election period, the Green Party always has been in the last two decades, yet at the local level, nada. Either this is incompetence, and/or maybe your FBI infiltrators are doing their job well.

My suggestion is to open up your messaging to multiple people, so that no one person is in charge of any Twitter or FB account: the more messaging the better. Take a stand, spread awareness about things going on in the Pacific Northwest. Go after the Democrats. Be a presence, get swag out, get t-shirts and stickers out to people. Recruit. Involve. Make alliances with the DSA and the People's Party and the Working Family Party—all these groups have much in common, don't siphon off votes by competing—make deals: they run a state senator in one district, we run one in the other. Maybe don't call yourselves the Pacific Greens? Maybe just be the Green Party? of Oregon? and Washington?

Make me feel like the Green Party and the Pacific Greens are doing something. People want an alternative, and they want what the Green Party is for. Recruit big names: get Tulsi and Bernie when the DNC screws them over (and they will). I'll give you money again, even though I'm poor and I wasn't giving much, when I can see you out in the world doing something. Do it now. Do it quick. Make me feel invited to participate.

Sincerely,

John

PS-Update: Jesse Ventura for Pres on the Green Party ticket would be fire. Fight populism with populism!

America: The Farewell Tour by Chris Hedges

America: The Farewell Tour

by Chris Hedges

Simon & Schuster 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5267-2 (hardcover)

Chris Hedges doesn't mess around in his new book America: The Farewell Tour. He believes fascism is already entrenched in America, that it may in fact be America. And while this thought comes, surprise to no one, as a reaction to the election of Trump, Hedges is one of those troublemakers from the far left (like me) who thinks Trump is an effect, not a cause. He's also not unsympathetic to the working poor, and non-working poor, Trump supporters that Democrats have abandoned. When most writers might put their solutions at the end of the book, Hedges is already offering some general ones in his first chapter, "Decay", while discussing Antonio Gramsci, and Italian Marxist philosopher:

Gramsci would have despaired of the divide in the United States between our anemic left ad the working class. The ridiculing of Trump supporters, the failure to listen to and heed the legitimate suffering of the working poor, including the white working poor, ensures that any revolt will be stillborn. Those of us who seek to overthrow the corporate state will have to begin locally. This means advocating issues such as raising the minimum wage, fighting for clean water, universal health care, and good public education, including free university education, that speak directly to the improvement of the lives of the working class. It does not mean lecturing the working class, and especially the white working class, about multiculturalism and identity politics. We cannot battle racism, bigotry, and hate crimes, often stoked by the ruling elites, without first battling for economic justice. When we speak in the language of justice first, and the language of inclusiveness second, we will begin to blunt the proto-fascism embraced by many Trump supporters.

Hedges earned a degree from Harvard Divinity School, then ended up becoming a foreign war correspondent for the New York Times, earning a Pulitzer along the way. The author of many NTY bestsellers, he teaches at the university level, hosts a show on the RT Network and somehow finds the time to teach in prisons. His style sounds like someone who has come out of a divinity school: When talking with his subjects there's a slight though compassionate detachment. Hedges only occasionally inserts himself in scenes, usually with a pointed question, but there's a warmth and obvious sympathy, and at least an empathy with what might be considered unsympathetic people: he's very aware that the poor white Trump supporters he's talking with are hurting, economically and sometimes physically, from an economy that has left them behind.

America: The Farewell Tour collects a series of ethnographies, a 'tour' of different towns across America, interviewing people feeling the effects of American decay. And at times just seeing the effects on people, is powerful enough. Hedges generally gives little judgment, acting more as a witness, though including historical and cultural context from experts in the related fields. Sometimes though, Hedges provides a little argument, ways he thinks people on the left could be doing things better. His sympathies are definitely from the left, but just as definitely not with center-left Democrats. As a whole, the chapters form a larger, depressing, though honest picture of what's going on in (i.e. what's wrong with) America. That is, what's been wrong with America for a while.

Hedges is at his strongest when he's basically just listening, letting people speak, but when he does have an opinion, he's made some enemies on the left for it, especially with the antifa movement, which he discusses in the chapter "Hate". I'm sure readers are familiar at least with the basics of the group, that they're 'anti-fascist', and that they are an aggressive response to the white supremacist demonstrations, like the one in Charlottesville when Heather Heyer lost her life.

Hedges was on the ground at the protest, talking to the white supremacists, who don't come off well. But neither do the antifa protesters. Their basic argument is that they need to wipe out the neo-nazis and white supremacists in these smaller rallies before they get bigger, that if people had just done that back in 1930s Germany, the Nazis would never have come to power. But Hedges, being a good historian, points out that in fact people did try to do that back then, and it was fear of militant, an violent, leftist protestors that drove people to the apparent stability and strength of the Nazis. Hedges fears the same here. Also, aside from the basic arguments about the right for anyone to have free speech and free assembly (meaning especially people who you don't agree with) guaranteed in our Bill of Rights, he argues that using any kind of violence during protests is actually an ego-trip that becomes more important than what people might be protesting for. Hedges uses a quote from another Italian writer, Ennio Flaiano, to sum it up: "There are two kinds of fascists: fascists and anti-fascists."

For making argument like this, his classes are protested and disrupted by the antifa folks. This left vs. left infighting reminds me of the Marvel Civil War comic book series, when Captain American and Iron Man and their respective teams fought while the Green Goblin took over. Except we have the Orange Goblin.

The irony is that for Hedges, in America: The Farewell Tour, it's already too late. Fascism, in all its forms, is already thriving in America, a view which he shares with his antifa protestors. I'm not sure. Maybe I'm in denial, but the fascism scare here reminds me of the whole Russia scare that's been going on in the MSM. The difference, of course, is that the liberals/democrats who talk of fascism and the Russians stealing our elections do so to distract and avoid blame for their own destructive and/or lame policies. Hedges isn't trying to distract, he really believes it, and believes the democrats are complicit, which is why he's not otherwise embraced by the mainstream media.

Hedges' ethnographic approach works less well when he delves into sex, and pornography, and prostitution, in the chapter titled "Sadism". His cause-and-effects are weaker, at least between the sex and everything else. He begins this part of his tour of America taking a couple classes on kinky sex at the former headquarters of kink.com in San Francisco, which Hedges plays/writes straight, just regurgitating what the 'instructor' says, though I'm not sure if his intention is to shock or amuse. But that's not even the (unintentionally?) funniest part of the chapter, which is when he writes a couple play-by-plays of scenes in porn movies. I wish David Foster Wallace was still around to handle this stop on the tour.

Hedges tries to tie the classes at the kink.com building to the porn that was filmed there, and to porn in general, which leads, always apparently, to prostitution and viewing child porn. I wish Hedges could have devoted an entire chapter to each of these subjects, because the line from people who like kink (Hedges is apparently not) to people who like to watch porn involving kink, to prostitution deserves more time, because the implication is that those of us who do like kink are guilty of forcing women into human trafficking. Hedges only ends up interviewing two porn actresses, neither of whom I've never heard of. He, and they, are pretty graphic about why/how they're not, and it's not pretty. But I would have liked him to interview more people who seem to have done ok in the industry, like Belladonna or Nina Hartley (who he actually mentions briefly for her role as a Hillary Clinton lookalike in a porn film). I would have liked, too, that he interview some sex/porn-friendly writers and critics like, say, Suzie Bright or Kate Bornstein. You don't have to be a prude to think prostitution and human trafficking are horrible.

The powerful part of the chapter is about those subjects. Hedges, though, downplays/negates his previous cause-and-effect for what I think, and I think he really thinks, is the real cause of prostitution, which to nobody's surprise is economics: poor women, and some men, end up in prostitution as a way to make money, because they don't have any other options in our beloved American (non)welfare system, though as Hedges shows, convincingly, no one knows how bad it can become, and they can/will be lied to and forced to do horrible things.

I don't deny that many porn actresses end up in prostitution, and porn itself can be/is prostitution—sex for money—but Hedges seems unwilling to believe that some normal real-life women actually like pain and humiliation with their sex and seems to believe, from the one 'expert' he interviews, that modern day porn has warped our minds such that we now only think in kink, and can only get aroused by extreme situations. An otherwise good historian, he could have, since this chapter is in fact called "Sadism", gone back to the writings of the Marquis de Sade, considered a literary hero en France, to see that humans have been perving out for a long time. Perhaps his divinity school-ness betrays him here.

Though America: The Farewell Tour does depressingly feel like a farewell, to perhaps literally the existence of America and at least to the idea of America as a great nation and certainly to the idea of America as a respected power in the world, Hedges has some hope, detailed in his final chapter "Freedom", with activist groups such the Catholic Worker Movement, Earth Quaker Action Team, Hands Up United (in Fergeson, Missouri), The Free Alabama Movement (organized by prisoners within the prison system) and the Standing Rock Water Protectors:

The resistance by the water protectors at Standing Rock provides the template for future resistance movements. It was nonviolent. It was sustained. It as highly organized. It was grounded in spiritual, historical, and cultural traditions. It grew organically out of community. And it lit the conscience of the nation.

The key word there is community, and not the kind you find online: Hedges doesn't have much faith in internet activism. Nor for mainstream politics. Despite what people would have you believe, especially after the 'blue ripple' of the mid-term elections, voting is not what will effect true change:

Resistance...will come from outside the formal political system. It will not be embraced by the two main political parties or most institutions, which are under corporate control....We will have to build new, parallel institutions that challenges the hegemony of corporate power. It will not be easy. It will take time. We cannot accept foundation money and grants from established institutions that seek to curtail the radical process of reconstituting society. Trust in the system, and especially the Democratic Party, to carry out reform and wrest back our democracy ensures our enslavement.

This process of institution building permits organizers and activists to eventually pit power against power. Politics is a game of fear. Those who do not have the ability to frighten power elites do not succeed. All of the movements that opened up the democratic space in America—the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists, and the civil rights movement—developed a critical mass and militancy that forced the centers of power to respond. The platitudes about justice, equality, and democracy are just that. Only when the ruling elites become worried about survival do they react. Appealing to the better nature of the powerful is useless. They don't have one.

HUGE Power Podcast #2: Saudi Arabia in US Media, the Backbone of Democrats, and Political Fiction Writers

Excited once again to be part of the HUGE Power Podcast with my friend Reagan M. Sova. Episode 2: Saudia Arabia in US Media, the Backbone of Democrats, and Political Fiction Writers.

Available on Soundcloud, and itunes.

The Courage of Hopelessness by Slavoj Zizek

My review of Slavoj Zizek's The Courage of Hopelessness: A Year of Acting Dangerously, now up at ENTROPY:

Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle

 Kill All Normies:

The online culture wars

from Tumblr and 4chan to the alt-right and Trump

by Angela Nagle

Zer0 Books 2017

ISBN: 978-1-78535-543-1

Irish writer Angela Nagle has gone to the dark side of the Internet to research Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan adn Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, delving into toxic online cultures and websites of the conservative misogyny and racism. I can't imagine what spending what spending a lot of time in the /b/ section of 4chan, looking at "things you can't unsee" could do to anyone's pysche, but Nagle did it, and wrote a series of articles for, among other places, The Baffler, in which she comes to the conclusion that Trump's victory is, at least in part, due to the 'alt-right', and therefore the Right, winning the culture wars.

Her theory is based around the idea of transgression, the over-steeping of societal mores or morality for sexual pleasure, and/or to rebel against authority, and/or for the simple pleasure of irreverence for its own sake (or the 'lulz'). Since maybe the Marquis de Sade up to the 1960s, Nagle claims that transgression has been the domain of liberals, but that starting in the 90s, liberal concern with political correctness and identity politics (rather than actual politics), conservatives have moved into the role of the transgressors online. The problem, according to Nagle, is that this, or rather these (and she goes into various of them and how they sometimes don't get along) subcultures have not only ended up influencing the mainstream conservatives, like the conservative website like Breitbart, run by Steve Bannon, who went on to support and advise Trump for a while, but that they're (liberals) are making conservatives look like the voice of reason to regular people, or at least Trump voters.

My favorite 'chapter', which originally was an essay, "From Tumblr to the campus wars: creating scarcity in an online economy of virtue" in which she skewers identitarians, sometimes simply by quoting, at length, some of their ideas about gender choice, and reminding readers how some of those demanding respect and the right not to be 'triggered' are the very same who shout down free speech and even physically attack those who think differently.

I'm with Nagle, I share her progressive politics and her disdain for the so-called liberal identity politics and its disdain of free speech, its disinterest in, say, our country's economic policies, and, say, that the Democratic Party's foreign policy isn't much different from Republican foreign policy, i.e. we're invading other countries with impunity and killing people. But Kill All Normies is just not, unfortunately, a good book.

Kill All Normies is short, 120 pages, making it more like a pamphlet, and collects essays by Nagle, some of which appeared at The Baffler (and which you can find for free online if you want). I had thought that the book would expand on those esssays, but no. They're in slightly different form, but not much. And, while they touch on interesting ideas, and introduce us to interesting-if-horrifying people involved in the alt-right movement, they, and the book, read more like what in graduate school is called a 'lit review,' which is the first stage of writing a longer thesis, in which you summarize a source in a paragraph or two, collect these summaries in one document, with the idea of expanding on the sources later, of adding more, especially of one's own ideas and thoughts. Instead, in Kill All Normies, all of the chapter/essays paragraphs and ideas go by quickly, sometimes (many times) with no real context or connection to the paragraphs around them. I'd quote a paragraph here, except it would only appear as it appears in the book, without much context.

In addition, Nagle doesn't seem to care about citation too much. Quotes and summaries and even unique ideas are used and, while she will give a person's name, she often will not tell us who that person is, or why they're an expert, or even which text of theirs she's quoting from. Nor is there any kind of Works Cited or References page, nor even an index. Plus, when she's talking about a text, she annoyingly uses the past tense rather than the traditional present tense (unless they do that in Ireland?) Which is partly on her, though also partly on her publisher, Zer0 Books, which claims to want its books to be "intellectual without being academic." That's fine, but not having some kind of way for readers to check sources is intellectual sloppiness.

In addition, Nagle seems not to understand certain texts and writers except through the lens of alt-righters, nor even to have even read those texts. For example, she states more than once that the animated tv show South Park is conservative, maybe picking up on a Time review a few years back that claimed the same thing, but it's not, it's just irreverent: the writers of South Park with make fun of everybody, conservative or liberal. Nagle could use that in her argument that the alt-right has co-opted the use of irreverence, and therefore anything irreverent nowadays is concervative, but she doesn't.

Also up for critique by Nagle, slightly, kind of, are the philosopher Nietsche and the book Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (though I swear she never actually cites his name in talking about it). Her argument being, because again I don't think she's read them, that if/when the alt-righters quote from them and/or espouse an anti-mainstream/anti-the-masses attitude, doing so must means that those texts must be conservative, when an anti-mainstream philosphy/attitude is shared by those on the far Left, like me, and, I thought, her. And if I'm wrong about that, well, this is where Kill All Normies would have benefitted by a more detailed, and longer, analysis.

Is Kill All Normies still worth reading? Yes, even if as a sort of lit review of sorts, as a way to explore this huge topic (or, topics), though you'll have to do your own research to find some of the texts and people she talks about. Nagle's main idea, discussed above, is important: conservatives are winning the culture wars, and those who control culture control politics. She offers no solutions, but you'll get a glimpse into at least some of the reasons how and why Trump won (Hint: it's not Russia).

Angela Nagel's Baffler essays

Zer0 Books Kill All Normies page

Operation Ajax book review

My review of Operation Ajax: The History of The CIA Coup That Remade The Middle East went live last week while I was up at the tower:

CitizenFour—movie review

My righteous review of CitizenFour now up at Psycho Drive In. Click on Snowden to go:

Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast

I was enjoying my summer, blissfully not following current events and not feeling I was missing anything...and then I picked up Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse from the library, and feel into deep despair. What to know what really happened in Iraq? Want to know how Republicans stole the 2000 and 2004 elections. Try this. Warning: may cause you to feel all is hopeless.