there upon the threshold stood the uninvited dusk
half in the house of guns and gold
its husky whisper like a last intermission
gloaming on worlds of blistered vinyl

whereupon a window speaks across a bed of green
half in a house that bleeds and creeps
fetching its ledgers at minutes to dinnertime
penning accounts on the edge of fear

they were anatomic skulls, sat with burning pages
the bulls of Baal in plastic chairs
chewing the softened marrow of marginal lies
folding the origami walls

alligators on trampolines falsified the names
half in a house of dead desires
clean autographs in the dens of deafened crosses
lost on the long electric wind

half across the threshold lay the syncopated lies
half down, half done, they press ahead
caught in the twilit expectations collecting
the tongue-tied wilting dusk

on far plain a jackal fell upon a wounded girl
with coffee eyes and sunset hair
aloft, and blinded by the blue shattered thunder
dying for love in the shunned river

1947.

The year Chuck Yeager piloted the first plane that “broke the sound barrier.”

Since then, many of us have heard supersonic jets achieving that velocity and making that signature ‘“sonic boom.”

Prior to the flight, this “barrier” was a dark mystery. Some speculated that Yeager would disintegrate when he crossed over from than 1,224 to 1,125 feet per second; but many soldiers, even the old ones, had they thought it through, would have been skeptical of those fears.

Every battlefield, in every skirmish, since the nineteenth century, and especially into the twentieth, has introduced its combatants to something called the crack-and-thump. The crack-and-thump is what a soldier hears when a supersonic bullet tears past. The crack sound—it’s a crack, not a whizz or a bang—is a miniature sonic boom. The thump that follows is the muted sound of the rifle report arriving afterward at the speed of sound. Supersonic crack, then sonic thump.

These human creations had broken the sound barrier—without passengers aboard, of course—well before Yeager’s historic flight. It they’d thought about it, the soldiers that is, the bullets didn’t disintegrate in flight, so why would crazy Chuck Yeager disintegrate inside his jet?

The fearful and speculative intuition, of course— totally justified—was that speed, in and of itself, has the capacity the shift an increase in quantity into into some actual change in quality. It does with bullets, because it does things to the flight of the missile. We won’t even talk about things that supersonic ammunition does on impact—what’s called “terminal ballistics.” If you don’t know, you don’t want to know.

The “improvement” of ammunition was part of the “improvement” of war technology, the science of which then permeates society at large as progress. It’s remarkable how many “progressions” are about making things faster.

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Alienation & Idolatry

“The whole concept of alienation,” wrote Erich Fromm in 1961, “found its first expression in Western thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry. The essence of what the prophets call “idolatry” is not that man worships many gods instead of only one. It is that the idols are the work of man’s own hands—they are things, and man bows down and worships things; worships that which he has created himself.”

I’ve been following closely the evolution of techlash—the backlash against “technology.” The first reference I found to the neologism on a cursory search was in 2019: “A Policymaker’s Guide to the “Techlash”—What It Is and Why It’s a Threat to Growth and Progress,” published by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

The paper didn’t mention alienation as one of the factors driving the backlash—and why would they? But it is somewhat remarkable, to me at least, that so few other sources, including those most opposed to the rise of these technologies, mention alienation either. The articles and studies and polls are full of concern about misinformation, divisiveness, privacy, exploitative practices, and the rise of a tech lord overclass. All legitimate concerns, of course, but all issues nonetheless which are theoretically subject to “correction” by agitation, organization, policy, even law. Even those who are experiencing alienation at the hands of the virtual are unwilling, or more likely unable, to express this alienation because the public at large doesn’t really have alienation in its vocabulary. It’s absent from the popular conceptual tool box.

Complicating matters is the elasticity of the word itself. Something something something to do with separation.

The Constitution talks about “inalienable rights,” meaning these political fictions are attached to us with superglue. We can’t be separated from our rights (I guess we’re seeing how badly mistaken we were about that).

I’ve groused here before about the notion of a propriety body, of body-as-property and how this raises the thorny question of who—in the absence of a body—exactly is the owner . . . because to “own” something by definition means it is alienable—you can sell it or give it away, for good, you can separate from it. But people can’t really—in the material realm at least—continue to exist separate from “their” bodies.

“Illegal aliens” are separable from the body politics, which ostensibly “citizens” are not.

Space “aliens” are notional Others—separated from us by thousands of light years.

Fromm—whose head was full of Freud and Marx—was on about something else.

Alienation, in both the psyhoanalytic and Marxian senses, is felt. It’s experienced. There’s both an intra-psyhcic and an inter-subjective dimension to it. It can feel at times like a separation of the self and at other times like separation from others—sometimes both at once. In either case—or both—it feels bad, like an absence or a loss.

Psychoanalysis (while we’re on that) tells us that we’re often motivated to do things based on unacknowledged and unrecognized needs, lacks, and desires, even though we fail to recognize these (subconscious, subterranean) needs, lacks, and desires as the prior motivations.

We all know from plain experience that people also think and say and do things that “come out sideways.” You’re mad at your spouse, and you yell at the kids. Your boss has made you feel vulnerable and powerless, and you take it out on some anonymous retail clerk. We project, redirect, sublimate, rationalize (and yes, punch down) . . . all the sly little evasions that can only be overcome by self-knowledge, strenuous ethical effort, and self-discipline . . . and even then, never with perfect success.

We do it with alienation, too. We project our feelings—often inappropriately—because we’re experiencing a thing for which we have no language. We know something’s missing, but we misidentify what exactly that is . . . we try to fill the hole with things that sink into the hole or evaporate.

Alienation is part of the “educated” idiom, even though—as Fromm pointed out regarding the Marxian version of alienation—it was recognized in another idiom millennia ago as human subjugation to things which are themselves made by humans.

In Marx, it was being transformed into an attachment to a factory machine, severing the felt connection between human producers and those things which they produced. An artisan woodworker or a cook or whatever . . . they sit back and take a kind of pride in what they’ve made. That factory worker comes to hate the products rolling off the assembly line to which he or she has been subordinated.

Regarding techlash, how many of us have come to hate digital technology as something that now lords over us, captures us with its tedious permutations, lashes us through its soulless proliferation of procedures, compels us to buy the next “generation” of techshit?

In the associated psychoanalytic (or phenomenological) sense, in what ways do we feel that this generalized “machine” is fragmenting both our personalities and our relationships?

What’s going on with us and—in this case—those technologies that lead to alienation—to the ways we “feel bad,” but can’t quite put our finger on it? What’s the substance of it?

Paul Virilio, in a 1994 interview with Louise Wilson, said

The true problem with virtual reality is that orientation is no longer possible. We have lost our points of reference to orient ourselves. The de-realized man is a disoriented man.

Paul Virilio goes further, or deeper, into this combined intra-psychic and inter-subjective alienation—into what I’ll call alienation-plus.

Virilio thought of this as a spiritual crisis, though he doesn’t challenge his readers to cross that line. He takes us right up to the line, then leaves us to make up our own minds. (I’m going to do the same and stay just this side of the line.)

Virilio, Tov & Ra

Paul Virilio is known—among those few Americans who do know of him—for his theses on speed—on velocity and acceleration . . . how the speed of things, life, technology affects us. In one essay, he spoke about Yeager breaking the sound barrier as a watershed moment, succeeded by the most transformative and catastrophic watershed of all—the digital age, technologies that move “at the speed of light.” We live now, he said, in a period of “instantaneity.”

The speed of light as quantity shifts into the quality of instantaneity—something radically different. With this difference, we transition from the alienation of Marx, Fromm, et al, into what we’ve marked off here as the digital age’s alienation-plus.

Virilio was an architect by trade, and an “urbanist.” He attended Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on phenomenology. He made his mark as well as a theorist of cinema. He grew up during World War II in France (in spite of his Italian surname). His father was an in-migrated Italian Communist. Paul was drafted at a young age for the Algerian War. He called himself, like his mentor Jacques Ellul—another French thinker whose thought was shaped by the war and the German occupation of France—a Christian anarchist. Ellul was a Reformed Protestant. Virilio, the red diaper baby whose experience with the Nazi occupation had turned him off to futurist authoritarianism of any kind, had converted to Catholicism at the age of eighteen.

I said that Virilio took us up to the line of alienation (and alienation-plus) understood as a spiritual crisis; but it was a pretty soft line. He employed a kind of extended midrash on the Book of Genesis as a metaphor (or prophecy). His Virgil was the twelfth century mystic Hildegard von Bingen.

‘Mankind, look at yourself, you have in you the sky and earth,’ the poet Hildegard von Bingen divined, confirming, before Francis [of Assisi], the unison of measure and excess. She concluded that: ‘Man is the enclosure of God’s marvels.’ [Homo Est Clausura Mirabilium Dei] Any man is thus not so much the center of the world as the end of the world. Everywhere he passes the desert spreads. (Virilio, City of Panic)

(I am grateful to Micheal Morelli, who sent me his book on Ellul and Virilio, for introducing me to Virilio’s thought on Genesis.)

In Genesis, there are two forces, Manichean to our ears, named tov and ra. Not forces precisely, so much as agonal inclinations. Tov is the inclination toward “conformity with God’s desire for creation and creatures.” (Morelli, 120) Ra is nonconformity with God’s desire, associated often with a human desire for godlike control. Virilio applies tov and ra to his own theses on speed, or what he calls dromology.

Speed . . . the lust for speed . . . is anti-Sabbatical. Driven by envy, power, competition . . . these dromological phenomena come to supplant contemplation, relaxation, creative participation. For Virilio, dromology finds its purest expression, it perfect manifestation in war.

I stated the same thing here, in an essay on war as the principle and inevitable driver of industrialization and capitalism. L. M. Sacasas wrote a wonderful short essay on Virilio back in 2014.

In Speed and Politics, Virilio walks us through the story of Cain and Abel—the mythological first murder.

[T]he conqueror, the warrior claims a function that seems to be a perversion of the priest’s. For the Judeo Christians, everything is said from the very first pages of the Bible: the warrior is a perverted priest. In fact, the first murder revolves around the means of occupying and exploiting productive soil, and especially around the rent received by God in exchange. God willingly accepts the sacrifice paid by the shepherd Abel but refuses that of the farmer Cain. The image of the first killer of men bears a direct relation to the rent paid on the earth, and here again everything is said in several lines: the suffering of the soil “opening its mouth’‘ and crying out as it drinks human blood for the first time—the blood of the territorial body as it slips away. (It shall no longer yield to you its fruit, says God . . . you will be a wanderer crossing over and invading the earth.) Deterritorialized farmer, the first killer of men is immediately designated a builder of cities. (111)

The farmer becomes the murderer becomes the builder of cities. Virilio’s “revelatory mythical origin” elucidates “the deeper tendencies within humanity that drive it away from tov and toward ra. In this case, the deeper human drive toward ra [a sort of original sin] produces a strong tendency toward the speed and power of modernity, its technologies, and its worship of the war machine.” (Morelli, 120)

Hildegard: “Man is the enclosure of God’s marvels.”

Accidents

Benjamin H Bratton, author of The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, wrote in the Introduction for Speed and Politics (Marc Polizzotti translation) . . .

Paul Virilio’s modernity is logistical. It doesn’t directly deal with war, but with everything that makes it possible. Logistics is the preparation for war through the transfer of the nation’s potential to its armed forces in time of peace as in times of war. [The development of the internet was in preparation for nuclear war. -SG] Modernity is a world in motion, expressed in translations of strategic space into logistical time, and back again. It is a history of cities, partitions, trading circuits, satellites, and software; of a political landscape governed by competing technologies of surveillance, mobilization, fortification and their interdependent administrations. It begins as an archaeology of naval routes, strategic techniques and urban distributions, and becomes an integrated world of events reduced to shapes and symbols, viewed and manipulated instantaneously on screens. In Virilio’s narrative, architectural regimes become computational, and vice versa. Both are logistical media for mobilization and its administration, technologies that consolidate territory into logistical fields and enable a Modern governance based on the abstracted calculation over omnidirectional spaces and surfaces, from open oceans to shared spreadsheets. This comprehensive technologization of the globe signals for Virilio both integration and disintegration, both control and accident. And it is finally through the accident, the realization of the imminent, irreducible risk that logistics hopes to contain, and not through control, that the strongest bonds of the polis are formed. For Virilio, they are an exceptional condition already contained within, and rigorously predicated by the invention that made them possible.

There are elements of tov and ra in all human endeavors. There are elements of improvement and catastrophe in “progress,” about which he was even more suspicious than me (if that’s possible). The reference to “control and accident” are key to understanding this duality, and to eventually discerning what he was getting at with regard to what I’ve called alienation-plus. “The invention of the ship,” he famously quipped, “was the invention of the shipwreck.” L.M. Sacasas best summarizes Virilio’s concept of the accident.

Virilio has long argued that the “accident” is an intrinsic element of technology. Virilio’s use of the word “accident” is meant to encompass more than the unplanned happenstance, he alludes as well to the old philosophical distinction between substance and accidents, but it does take the conventional accident as a point of departure. Virilio does not, however, see the accident as an unfortunate deviation from the norm, but as a necessary component.

The accident is the “mirror” and the “shadow” of the speed-power-technology nexus. In his remark on “THE invention of the ship and THE invention of the shipwreck” the definite article belongs to the act of invention—or we could say, “the enclosure of God’s marvels” . . . what Carolyn Merchant might call the Baconian turn, the murder of nature.

Whether one thinks of Chernobyl or software viruses or deepfake porn, these were built into the technologies, latent from the outset. In a sense, this falls into the war categories of “acceptable casualties” and “collateral damage.”

Control, on the other hand, is that thing which casts the image in the mirror, the shadow on the ground.

On a global scale, Virilio warns of . . . no, predicts . . . the “integral accident,” by which he means global accident . . . like the 2008 financial meltdown. (Virilio said that “globalization” and speed-of-light “virtualization” were two faces of the same technological coin.) Climate catastrophe. Global war.

Flows & Velocity

Virilio was synthesizer and a phenomenologist. He studied consciousness and perception. His interests in architecture, war, the built environment, photography, cinema, and technology were merged into his constitution of the subject. Like Ivan Illich and Barbara Duden, he was also an historian of perception. Like Michel de Certeau, he was a student of the city as a topographical sociology, as an architecture of control.

In Virilio’s biblical midrash, the essence of ra is the Baconian desire to control God’s creation. Control as the conjoined lust for speed and power which leads inevitably and paradoxically to its own loss of control—a dynamic that seeks its own perfection in war, and—as we are seeing with the US-Israeli defeat at the hands of Iran—finds its own chaos at the end. Virilio traces modernity from the two pivots of Classical antiquity and the Industrial Revolution, but he locates the drive underwriting both in Genesis 4.

For most of its enthusiasts, trusting in progress would come down to believing in a beyond of good and evil—not so much that of a late Nietzscheanism, as the tov and ra of Judaeo-Christian Genesis and its old—more tribal than moral—laws. This would explain the appearance of new popular heroes capable like the scientific hero, of destroying themselves by spectacularly flouting any prohibition, any limit, any law. From the eighteenth century onward, these standards would be offered to the credulity of the public by the young industrial press, and the adulation of the masses would go to the revolutionary abnormality of a new kind of men and women with, at the top of the hierarchy, the record breakers in every field: sportsmen, soldiers, adventurers, engineers, sailors—all those who make the front page of the tabloids by showing themselves capable of extreme performances. (Virilio, Ground Zero, 23)

I’ll let readers marinate on that one, written in 2002.

Then, I suggest readers return to L.M. Sacasas’s essay, “Technology, Speed, and Power,” for a primer on the Tofflerian futurists and fascism.

There’s a new book going around, which I haven’t read, that’s apparently “connected” with the public’s techlash: The Nerd Reich—Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, by Gil Durán. We’re coming back to that, too, so put the pin in it.

Cain became the builder of cities.

It’s worth our time to look into Virilio’s “urbanism,” alongside which I’ll introduce a bit of De Certeau (and my own book Mammon’s Ecology). It’s all about boundaries, flows, exchanges, and (again) control. The first cities, we should remind ourselves, were built as regulated communities inside war fortresses.

I’ll begin with a sub-section excerpt from Mammon’s Ecology, titled “Nodes and Flows,” as a kind of metaphysical baseline.

A node is a point of interchange.

Every hour a healthy adult casts off in the range of 30–40,000 dead skins cells from the stratum corneum, our outer layer of skin. The stuff is raining off of us all the time, drifting around us in little clouds, depositing itself in our clothes, making maps of itself on our beds. We breathe these in from ourselves and others, ingest it from our food, and massively exchange it during intimacy.

All day long, we exchange atmospheric oxygen for metabolically produced carbon dioxide and gaseous water, with an average tidal volume of 500 milliliters per breath. If you brightly backlight two people having a conversation, you will see whole sprays of breath, material otherwise invisible. The subjects, like all of us who have face-to-face discussions, are actually steaming and spitting—storming steam and spit—onto each other.

We drink around 2 liters of water each day, which is exchanged everywhere throughout our bodies for metabolic wastes. The water is then run through a couple of complicated filters called kidneys just underneath our inferior-posterior ribs, whereupon it is mixed with other filtrates, like urea, and passed back out of the body again at a rate generally corresponding to the fluid intake.

We take in fuel (energy) from the sun every day, which has been stored in plants, and from plants eaten by animals. We eat the fuel, or food, which is then converted into biological maintenance materials and usable energy. The parts unused for maintenance or energy are consolidated into feces, which is then passed out of the body and into the surround again, where it breaks down and is reincorporated into other materials. To aid in the digestion of that food, there is a megacity along the walls of your gut of around 100 trillion various bacteria, about three pounds worth of living things that are not technically you, making trillions of little exchanges per second, without which you would die.

The stuff coming off of you all the time is so uniquely mixed that for a good tracking dog it might as well be a fingerprint or a DNA sample. You leave behind molecular clues about your past whereabouts in such profusion that large hounds, the kind with three million scent receptors, can find you ten miles away and three days later if you are moving on foot.

A human being observed as a location is the hub, or node, of multiple exchanges; flows of materials in, and flows of changed materials out. We are mixed into our environment, a part of it and not apart from it. If we could simply see the invisible gases moving through a person, respiratory and otherwise, a crowd of people would appear to boil in front of us, each person another bubble rising from the bottom of the pan.

A family domicile is such an exchange node, too. Things flow in. Things flow out. Think of what happens when flows are disrupted. What an emergency when the electricity fails! When the sewer pipe becomes obstructed, or the water shuts off, or the trash haulers go on strike! Disrupted flows, many of those flows that we take for granted, are crises—times of difficulty, disorientation, and even danger. This is true of a cell, a body, a home, a community, a biome, a watershed, an ecosystem, or a nation.

This is also true of technologies. The car that supports the family and the family’s dwelling can also be seen as an exchange node. gasoline fuel, other fluids, and lubricants go in; heat and work (movement of mass) come out. New parts replace old ones that flow into a trash bin, and from there into a landfill. New paint and epoxies are needed to fix damaged spots that have disappeared with rust. The machine is not a thing-in-itself any more than we are. In its own way, on its own timetable, it eats and excretes, or it will slowly dissolve.

The car gets you to a grocery store, where that most common of exchanges takes place, money for food, carried back to the car, and by car back into the input stream for the household, where the metabolic flows are maintained for all those warm bodies.

You get the picture, but you also probably realize that this is not how most people think, in this case, about cities.

We tend to think of things, not flows, and among things, we have a preference—both biological and cultural—for things that can be seen. I’ll break this down into two parts then—flows and vision—about which Virilio has a good deal to say regarding both. But let’s start with De Certeau.

Urban Neurology

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel De Certeau has a chapter called “Walking in the City.” Follow the link to read it, and I’ll just hit the main points here.

He starts in New York, from the upper stories of the World Trade Center—an ominous beginning for those of us who lived to see these structures brought down by the world’s first great postmodern war strategist, Osama bin Laden. From these commanding heights—and I use the adjective quite deliberately—he calls himself a kind of chimera, part god, part voyeur. Risen above the warp and woof of everyday life in the city, he sees it as a texture and a map—something enclosed by planning.

“Is the immense texturology,” he asks, “spread out before one’s eyes anything more than a representation, an optical artifact?”

It’s the god’s eye view of control, planning, the regulation of flows and nodes. Far below, the walkers—the controlees—are being guided to and fro by streets, signals, walkways, gates, doors, and—now—observed by a network of surveillance cameras. We’re not done with Certeau, but we need to return now to Virilio.

If velocity is power and acceleration progress, and if power needs to be concentrated for control, then the velocity and direction of Certeau’s pedestrians . . . so to speak . . . has to be regulated. The architectures of control do so passively. The city (Cain’s domain) is a regulatory architecture. It tells you where you can go, where you can’t go, when you can and can’t go, what you can and cannot do. Machinic control.

The powerful have technologies of exemption. When Donald Trump was merely a rich rapist New York slumlord, he rose above the traffic in his helicopter.

There are controllers and controlees.

The powerful can go fast. The rest are speed governed. Alf Hornborg once said that the powerful expropriate—before anything else—time and space. Even ghettos serve this regulatory function, as a kind of human buffer zone, where police work mostly along their boundaries, leaving those inside the buffer zone to contend for themselves.

The pedestrians—and I don’t mean that in a literal way, because many “pedestrians” are now trapped in cars—are not automatons, and—as Foucault spent many pages pointing out—they must have internalized control for it to be effective. It’s not possible to dictate to large populations at the granular level.

People will do what they want, even if they have to cheat (or Certeau would say, “poach”), and at times people will do things that are utterly indiscernible . . . just for the hell of it. Some people will buck against something just to buck.

That’s why architectures of control are supplemented by propaganda. According to Virilio, our meta-propaganda is “the propaganda of progress.” Much else is downstream. The propaganda of progress is underwritten by a more visceral propaganda, one of fear. Among Virilio’s many texts was one called The Administration of Fear.

Returning to Certeau, he said that the city’s “rational organization must thus repress all the physical, mental, and political pollutions that would compromise it.” (94) And Virlio . . .

If municipalities rent out space at top dollar and slap surcharges on windows and street-side facades, it’s because all these architectural details of the bourgeois dwelling traditionally carry the possibility of commerce and information. The display windows of Dutch prostitutes still reproduce today the old “bow windows” whose curvature allowed one a panoramic view of what was coming and going. The spectacle of the street is traffic, the “pilgrim’s progress” movement of progression, of procession—at once voyage and improvement, a movement likened to progress toward something better, a pilgrimage that dominated the Middle Ages. The street is like a new coastline and the dwelling a sea-port from which one can measure the magnitude of the social flow, predict its overflowings. The doors to the city are its tollbooths and its customs posts are dams, filtering the fluidity of the masses, the penetrating power of the migrating hordes. The old, swampy, unhealthy beaches that surrounded the fortified city, the “congo plains” of the American slave, the old fortifications, the outskirts, the shantytowns and favellas—but also the poorhouse, the barracks, the prisons—solve a problem less of enclosure or exclusion than of traffic. All of them are uncertain places because they are situated between two speeds of transit, acting as brakes against the acceleration of penetration. [italics added] Located from the outset on paths of terrestrial or fluvial communication, they will later be compared to sewers, to stagnant waters, the end of fluidity (progress), the sudden absence of motivity, ineluctably creating a quasi-organic corruption of the masses.

“Neutral spaces, spaces without genre,” writes Balzac, “where every vice, every misfortune in Paris takes refuge.” This is the origin of the suburb, at once the province of interdiction and a linear and temporal distance—in other words, the depot and “trans-shipment” of the social matter as of the merchandise, provisions and livestock to which the “beery” proletariat has been likened for centuries: essentially wild animals become beasts of burden, warhorses or pack animals. The conditions of the proletarian masses’ exploitation, furthermore, illustrate perfectly the definition that Geoffroy Saint Hilaire gives of domestication: “To domesticate an animal is to accustom it to living and breeding in or near men’s dwellings.”

The “right to lodging” is not, as was claimed, the “right to enter the city.” Like the inorganic mass of wild animals, the proletarian horde carries a menace, a load of unpredictability and ferocity. It is allowed as “domestic” to gather and reproduce near the dwellings of men, under their watchful eye. The problems of human habitation properly speaking are absolutely differentiated from those of the proletarian cattle, of its lodgings in the barnyard of the castle, in the outskirts of the fortified city. As with the stable or enclosure, the temporary lodging of the migrating masses implies their relative distance from the dwellings of men, in other words from the city. The bourgeoisie will get its initial power and class characteristics (which, of course, were not at all peculiar to them; we all know the capital role played by monasticism, chivalry, etc., in the areas of banking, industry . . . ) less from commerce and industry than from the strategic implantation that establishes the “fixed domicile” as a social and monetary value [italics in the original]—from real estate speculation as the sale and trading of fixed property, the right to reside within the ramparts of fortified cities, the right to security and preservation within the perilous migration of a world of pilgrims, barges, soldiers and exiles moving onward by the millions. (Virilio, Speed and Politics, 33-5)

Virilio went beneath Marx’s class contradictions focused on money and vulgar production. Velocity and acceleration are essences unseen and unaccounted for in their essentiality by perception restricted, by our training, to the reific and optical—to things . . . that can be seen. The psychological (if you’ll permit me this modern vulgarity) and the built/environmental are inextricable, not only in time and space, but in their formative evolutions. They reflect and reproduce one another.

The city is a high-velocity environment. Power has to regulate the masses’ velocity in such a way as to maximize the benefits (production, profit, service) while disallowing, or decelerating, the more threatening forms of proletarian velocity.

Customs and immigration are designed to regulate the flows in and out. A rapid flood of refugees, as a familiar example, can throw a monkey wrench in the machinery. The Israelis recently used such a refugee flood in Cueta to monkeywrench the Spanish government for its opposition to their genocidal project.

Evolution & Revolution

Virilio answers the question that plagues Marxists about why the beaten-down proletarians are never the agents of The Revolution™. Marxists assume the proletarians have been insufficiently conscientized, but the reality is that the regulated proletariat moves too slowly.

The “1917” Onion headline read: “Pretentious, goateed coffehouse types seize power in Russia.” But this is precisely why actual revolutions—including the French Revolution that so preoccupied Marx—are planned, led, and driven by urban non-proletarians. The speed of social intercourse—including political intercourse—sufficient to foment rebellion is only possible in the city, and only among the least regulated.

The other question plaguing Marxists was why always Trotsky’s Thermidor—the “reaction” against so-called “revolutionary principles.” Bonapartism—strongman leadership that cracks down on the masses.

Virilio locates this in the gravitational force of the built environment, the regulation of action and velocity. It’s no “reaction” at all; it’s inevitable without the total destruction of the preceding order down to the last brick . . . and the last mind—an idea that drove Pol Pot in his bloody quest to produce Year Zero. The existing architectures design the flows, the use of those architectures continue to require surveillance, traffic management, cops, and propaganda. Each and all built into one another. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

In every revolution there is the paradoxical presence of circulation. Engels remarks in June 1848: “The first assemblies take place on the large boulevards, where Parisian life circulates with the greatest intensity. “ Less than a century later, Weber says of the disappearance of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (as if he were talking about the results of a car crash) that “they called to the streets, and the streets killed them. “ The masses are not a population, a society, but the multitude of passersby. The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed.

For the mass of unemployed, demobilized workers without an occupation [after the French Revolution], Paris is a tapestry of trajectories, a series of streets and avenues in which they roam, for the most part, with neither goal nor destination, subject to a police repression intended to control their wanderings. For the various revolutionary groups, as for the Apaches and other shady populations of the city’s outskirts, it will be less a matter, when the time comes, of occupying a given building than of holding the streets. In 1931, during the National Socialists’ struggle against the Marxist parties in Berlin, Joseph Goebbels notes, “Whoever can conquer the streets also conquers the State!”

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Can asphalt be a political territory? Is the bourgeois State and its power the street, or in the street? Are its potential force and expanse in the places of intense circulation, on the path of rapid transportation?

As Goebbels again writes about the battles for Berlin, “The ideal militant is the political combatant in the Brown Army as a movement . . . obeying a law that he sometimes doesn’t even know, but that he could recite in his sleep . . . Thus we have set these fanatical beings in motion . . .”

He then scientifically compares the transcripts of his various speeches, made first in the provinces and then later in Berlin, and notices that the “amorphous sociological conglomerate” of the capital required the invention of a “new language for the masses”:

“The rhythm of the metropolis with its four million souls throbs like a burning wind through the declarations of propagandists . . . Here a new and modern language was spoken, one that has nothing to do with the archaic forms of so-called popular expression. This is the beginning of an original artistic style, the first form of expression to be truly animated and galvanizing.” (Speed and Politics, 1-2)

One might counterpoise the early Maoists, but this is a longer tributary discussion (and I think Virilo still holds up).

Speed and the competition for speed drives production, consumption, the collection of rents. Accumulation through rents is faster that production. Accumulation constitutes power. These were all accounted for with regard to 2008, but without speed as a prime driver. When Obama took office, the financial accident was on its way. When Obama took office, he cracked down on whistleblowers and transitioned from the lost war in Iraq to drone strikes as a new form of warfare. By 2026, another financial accident was in the making, and drone warfare was handing defeats to the US and its proxies in NATO and Israel.

In this same year, too, the American public rose up against data centers, AI, and surveillance cameras.

Techlash.

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Seeing & Watching

“The twin phenomena of immediacy and of instantaneity,” Virilio wrote, “are presently one of the most pressing problems confronting political and military strategists alike.” This was thirteen years before Obama’s drone-war presidency, and twenty-one years before Trump tweet-trolled his way into the Oval Office.

“Real time,” said Virilio, “now prevails above both real space and the geosphere. The primacy of real time, of immediacy, over and above space and surface is a fait accompli and has inaugural value (ushers a new epoch).”

Nazi Germany installed the first CCTV (to watch its own rocket tests) in 1942. The US installed its first in 1949. In the 1960s, some European governments were using CCTV to monitor traffic. In 1965, a town in New York was the first to use them as crime-prevention monitors . . . and as replacements—a la automated check-outs in today’s stores—as a substitute for hiring more humans to be police. It wasn’t until the 1970s that recording equipment was added. By the 1990s, CCTV was becoming digitized. There was a boom in sales for both police surveillance and home security.

Anyone who’s watched police procedural films and television has seen how many crimes are solved by collecting the CCTV footage. In fact this is overstated. The evidentiary success of CCTV is pretty unimpressive, but it makes a great sales pitch (it’s for your own safety, it’s essential for “justice”). Studies show that fewer than three percent of crimes are actually assisted in their solution by CCTV. A British study estimated that it takes around a thousand CCTV cameras to acquire one piece of criminal evidence.

The real advantages of CCTV have proven to be (1) hiring fewer humans as cops and (2) the assumption of deterrence. Everyone knows that no matter where we go now, there’s a camera recording.

Felonies are seldom unraveled by CCTV, but one form of misdemeanor is well-assisted by cameras. Speeding. (So, we’re back to controlling velocity.) Speed-trap cameras that are fitted with a radar. You pass through above the limit, they snap your license plate, and a computer sends you a ticket. They’re everywhere in Europe, and in many US cities now as well. Again, they’re replacing personnel, which is one of the things that most concerns many people about so-called Artificial Intelligence.

People hate these things. Truly.

Copaganda productions would have us love CCTV for its crime prevention . . . it’s for our own safety. And it’s true that in Chinese cities, where these things are ubiquitous, people are very safe . . . but many other cultural and political factors are left out of this narrative.

Spy satellites orbit the earth. In the 1980s, I was in a “special” unit in the Army. When we were staging in the RAF base in Cyprus for an operation in Lebanon in 1986, we had certain hours of the day when we had to remain inside the hangars so the Soviet satellites that were passing overhead wouldn’t spot us sunbathing in our tighty-whiteys while we waited for the call. Soviet space voyeurs.

Women now have to worry about hidden cameras watching them in showers and toilets or from the walls of a lover’s bedroom.

Some rich people do as well, as the Epstein saga has taught us. Careful where you rape.

Virilio, like Illich, was a student of perception, especially of vision. We talked about the enculturated bias toward things which can be seen, and how this bias circumscribes our consciousness. There are three sides of vision—seeing, watching, and being watched—and the latter two have powerful phenomenological effects on us as persons.

We know from experience that our eyes do a lot more than material perception—light hitting retinas and all that, seeing. Our vision—for that majority of us who are sighted—searches, discriminates, organizes . . . and voyeurizes. We don’t just see, we watch. Watch-sight is an invisible and concupiscent hand reaching out and grasping. If you’re interested, I did a film study of Silence of the Lambs here, in which the director makes the grasping gaze one of its main characters.

Knowing this somewhat sinister aspect of vision, we are ourselves attuned to the fact that when we are seen by others, there is more afoot than mere seeing.

Sartre wrote about the feeling of being swallowed up by the other—the way the mere presence of another changes us.

I remember when the Bush administration accessorized its war with embedded reporters. The war was made into a reality TV show. I also remember thinking about how these reporters, these outsiders with their cameras, were distorting the actions of the troops—like mass bending light—turning them all into posers and performers. I see it, too, in “true crime” television, where one can sense the way that interviewees switch from everyday being into performance, whether they want to or not. Cameras change us. Being watched changes us. The way we know that we ourselves watch is why we are so affected by being watched.

These visual prostheses—cameras—make a virtual reality that can eclipse material reality. “[E]yesight and direct vision,” Virilio wrote, “have gradually given way to optoelectrical processes, to the most sophisticated forms of ‘‘telescopic sight.’’’ (War and Cinema. The Logistics of Perception, 69)

Virilio wrote The Vision Machine in 1988.

We’ve encountered this word, logistics, more than once now, because it’s essential in Virilio’s philosophical vocabulary. This isn’t my first post on Virilio, and in a prior one—here—we go into some depth on the question of logistics. Vision—said Virilio—ever since these prosthetic interventions began, has been progressively logisticized. There’s a technical supply chain.

The Torah’s ra aspect of this virtualization, its concupiscence, is the disordered desire for omnivoyency—root word voyeur. The desire to see everything. It’s a double-edged sword in a double sense: (1) (a) we can see a hell of a lot, and (b) it overwhelms our ability to make sense of what we see, and (2) the (a) technological (prosthetic) access to seeing everything is (b) being seen . . . too damn much.

The telescope, that epitome of the visual prosthesis, projected an image of a world beyond our reach and thus another way of moving about in the world, the logistics of perception inaugurating an unknown conveyance of sight that produced a telecscoping of near and far, a phenomenon of acceleration obliterating our experience of distances and dimensions. (Vision Machine, 4)

Some of the same people who want to destroy Flock cameras (don’t give me a magic staff, or I’ll destroy the entire digital infrastructure) will also use “smart” phone cameras to record the abuses of ICE, for example, or other “law enforcement” agencies.

Prosthetic Disenchantment

Virilio’s “vision machine,” the cultural and technological entirety of prosthetic vision, has (is) a voracious appetite for visual enclosure. Nothing is to remain hidden.

Barbara Duden referred to pregnancy sonograms as “skinning women.” As prosthetic invasions, as voyeurism of women’s innards.

The other interesting observation from Duden was the transition from images as illuminatio to facsimile. In studying images relating to pregnancy that accompanied the texts of Hildegard von Bingen in the twelfth century, these illuminatio were designed as what Duden calls ideograms — pictures that illuminated text as a “kind of adornment [which] encouraged the imagination.” An intrauterine glow from the mother’s belly “was meant to elicit a response, not only from the eyes in the forehead but from all five inner senses, which were simply taken for granted . . . Unlike the illustration of a fact, a graphic analysis done from the writer’s perspective, the iconogram of the ‘child’ in the womb in medieval miniatures glows in its own light.” As opposed to facsimile light which intrudes from the outside into the naturally opaque, but now flayed, inner-body.

It’s a desire for conquest, for control. It’s ra. I also recommend Thoughts from the Shire’s post on Illich, “Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show,” in which Illich periodizes the gaze:

1. The Classical Gaze: In antiquity, vision was active and participatory. The gaze radiated outward, connecting with objects and “fusing” with their colours. As Illich explains, “The gaze radiates from the pupil to embrace an object, to fuse with it, so that the eye is dyed the object’s colors.” This tactile understanding of vision treated the eye as a bodily organ directly engaged with the world.

2. The Scholastic Gaze: During the Middle Ages, vision became associated with extracting “universals” or abstract truths. This era’s illuminated manuscripts and Gothic windows reflect a “transcendent gaze” that linked sight with metaphysical understanding. The eye no longer united with the object but served to interpret its symbolic meaning.

3. The Renaissance Gaze: The Renaissance introduced linear perspective, transforming vision into a mechanized act. Painters like Alberti and Dürer developed tools and techniques that framed the gaze within geometric constructs. Illich describes this as the “union of the picture and the gaze,” where the eye became “an instrument on the model of what we know as a camera.” Vision was reduced to the creation of accurate representations.

4. The Modern Gaze: Around 1800, a fourth regime emerged—the “age of show.” Vision became mediated by screens, diagrams, and instruments. Illich lamented that “the eye becomes dependent on interface rather than imagination,” turning vision into a passive act of consuming representations detached from the tactile and embodied presence of earlier epochs.

[Fishing Story]

For a time—I’m an angler—I used a cheap fish finder on the boat. My motivation was time. If I had unlimited time, I could do what I most enjoyed about angling from the boat . . . what you might call fucking around—looking down into the water, plumbing the underwater topography by watching my line, goofing on birds, counting as my rig fell, drawing up bits of vegetation, watching the sky, thoughtlessly taking in the light show of the water’s surface . . . physically working and mentally relaxing while putting together an idea in my mind of what was going on down there in that mysterious unseen. And the surprise of getting hit.

It’s addictive, this random reinforcement. One becomes a patient addict, because there’s a lot going on that’s relaxing . . . and fun.

But temptation got the best of me, and I bought the fish finder “to speed things up” and quit “wasting time.” It had all sorts of bells and whistles that I couldn’t figure out (and didn’t really want to). Marking points for future reference (“waypoints”), and who knows what else (there are a hundred things in my phone about which I haven’t a clue, and there are apparently more than 71,000 emails I haven’t answered). Even the images that meant “fish” were kind of unreliable, because they didn’t say much about whether the fish were biting or what, and a lot of what I was still catching was obscured on the screen by aquatic plants.

Then one day, my granddaughter and I were “fucking around” by driving the boat through a place that was very shallow and twisty—we even had to duck to go through a little tunnel under a road, which was cool—to get to a tiny adjacent lake (a pond really) that wasn’t fished much. It tore off the transponder on the bottom—accident!—and the fish finder was kaput. (We caught like fifty shellcrackers in that little hole.)

I’ve never replaced the transponder. I found I was enjoying my time on the water more without it because I wasn’t having my attention drawn back to that screen any longer. I like not knowing what’s in the water and where. I like the surprises. (I catch as many fish or more since I quit using the fish finder.)

Turns out, I also like wasting time.

People who compete in fishing tournaments spend tens of thousands of dollars to gear up so they can see under the water. They don’t want the surprise. Angling for them is a different thing than it is to me. They want control, domination. They fish as fast as they can. All about the speed. ← fuck that

Sorry, that whole thing just occurred to me while I was reading The Vision Machine.

[End of Fishing Story]

“Omnivoyance,” wrote Virilio, “Western Europe’s totalitarian ambition [The whole world’s now it would seem] may here appear as the formation of a whole image by repressing the invisible. And since all that appears, appears in light—the visible being merely the reality-effect of the response of a light emission—we could say that the formation of a total image is the result of illumination. Through the speed of its own laws, this illumination will progressively quash the laws originally dispensed by the universe: laws not only governing things, as we have seen, but bodies as well.”

He was writing about political terror. Think about it.

Alienation-plus & Loss

I should try to wrap this up. I’m trying. Bear with me. Please.

Omnivoyance has costs—big ones.

Memory & Dyslexia

Our memory is the first casualty. An aspect of alienation-plus. Memory requires attention, focus, discrimination, contextualization. When one’s bombarded with sights, these memory functions are overwhelmed—scrambled.

He invented the terms “visual illiteracy”to describe the inability to remember and “visual dyslexia” to describe this scrambling.

These are losses.

Teachers have been saying for a long time now that the last few generations have great difficulty understanding what they read because they are incapable of re-presenting it to themselves.... For them, words have in the end lost [emphasis added] their ability to come alive, since images, more rapidly perceived, were supposed to replace words according to the photographers, the silent film-makers, the propagandists and advertisers of the early twentieth century. Now there is no longer anything to replace, and the number of the visually illiterate and dyslexic keeps mutliplying.

Here again, recent studies of dyslexia have established a direct connection between the subject’s visual abilities, on the one hand, and language and reading on the other. They frequently record a weakening of central (foveal) vision, the site of the most acute sensation, along with subsequent enhancing of a more or less frantic peripheral vision—a dissociation of sight in which the heterogeneous swamps the homogeneous. This means that, as in narcotic states, the series of visual impressions become meaningless. They no longer seem to belong to us, they just exist, as though the speed of light had won out, this time, over the totality of the message. (8-9)

Alienation of the Senses

When we’re assaulted—think of it as a drone swarm—by visual stimuli, not only does it subvert out natural vision and scramble our thinking, it atrophies those other senses. Pornography shows sex, making us voyeurs. But real sex, the kind that is best in my memory as an old man, is far better in the dark. It’s a time for all the other senses to take over without the distractions of vision. This visual takeover—the show—is a loss.

Involuntary Exhibitionism

The inverse alienation is loss of the ability to be alone. We are under constant observation; but we need at times to be invisible. Some things need to be hidden from view. Everything should not be visible. Secrets are important as secrets.

We’ve been transformed into unwilling exhibitionists.

Substitution & Split Reality

We might be tempted, those who are familiar with Baudrillard, to confuse Virilio’s hypervisuality with Baudrillad’s hyperreality. Don’t. Virilio speaks—as we saw above—about something called the “reality-effect,” an aesthetic term for he details that create the atmosphere of a narrative without directly impacting the narrative. (another subject)

Wiki describes hyperreality as “a condition in which, because of the compression of perceptions of reality in culture and media, what is generally regarded as real and what is understood as fiction are seamlessly blended together in experiences so that there is no longer any clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.” Without going to far afield, Baudrillard’s thesis was predicated on simulation.

Virilio said in 1994 that Baudrillard simulacra thesis understated the issue, that Baudrillard saw a progression, where in fact there had been a break—a real phase shift, an accident the scope of which we’d only just begun to appreciate.

“I disagree with my friend Baudrillard on the subject of simulation,” Virilio said in an interview.

To the word simulation, I prefer the one substitution. This is a real glass, this is no simulation. When I hold a virtual glass with a data glove, this is no simulation, but substitution. Here lies the big difference between Baudrillard and myself: I don't believe in simulationism, I believe that the word is already old-fashioned. As I see it, new technologies are substituting a virtual reality for an actual reality. And this is more than a phase: it’s a definite change. We are entering a world where there won’t be one but two realities, just like we have two eyes or hear bass and treble tones, just like we now have stereoscopy and stereophony: there will be two realities: the actual, and the virtual. Thus there is no simulation, but substitution. Reality has become symmetrical. The splitting of reality in two parts is a considerable event which goes far beyond simulation. (1995)

Not hyperreality, but split reality—another aspect of alienation-plus. Cyberspace and “meatspace.”

Another loss.

Powerlessness & Universal Accidents

I could say, were I so inclined toward self-taxonomy, that I’m “postmodern” because that’s where we live, on the cusp at least, and not because of any progress past “modernity” by philosophers or artists; but because it’s coming apart at the seams. I’ve more than once said that postmodernism, beyond aesthetics, isn’t post anything. I’m not anti-modern, but I’ll admit I bear the period and the attachment to it an ill will, and not only on account of its crimes and failure—it’s great “accidents”—but on account of its insufferable self-assured arrogance.

“I’ve never thought we should go back to the past,” Virilio told an interviewer, “But why did the positive aspect of progress get replaced by its propaganda? Propaganda was a tool used by Nazis but also by the Futurists. Look at the Italian Futurists. They were allies with the Fascists. Even Marinetti. I fight against the propaganda of progress, and this propaganda bears the name of never-ending acceleration.”

In fact, Virilio rejected the term postmodern. He was a dromologist—a student of velocity and acceleration. Of time and its appropriations and “accidents.”

Virilo called our period, during which he spent his last years during an earlier phase, hyper-modernism. About this, he said ominously,

As far as ‘hyper’ or ‘super’ modernism is concerned, I think we are not out of modernity yet, by far. I think that modernity will only come to a halt within the ambit of what I call the `integral accident.’ I believe that technical modernity, modernity taken as the outcome of technical inventions over the past two centuries, can only be stopped by an integral ecological accident, which, in a certain way, I am forecasting. Each and every invention of a technical object has also been the innovation of a particular accident. From the sum total of the technosciences does arise, and will arise a ‘generalized accident.” And this will be modernism’s end. (1999)

Generalized accident: climate catastrophe, financial meltdown, world war, institutional collapse—the comorbidities of of the generalizing accident, the terminal catabolism, of exterminism as the final stage of progress.

Universal accident. Universal loss.

The set-up for the generalized accident is the speed of time.

Three physical barriers are given: sound, heat, and light. The first two have already been felled. The sound barrier has been cut across by the super- and hypersonic aircraft, while the heat barrier is penetrated by the rocket taking human beings outside the Earth’s orbit in order to land them on the moon. But the third barrier, that of light, is not something one can cross: you crash into it. It is precisely this barrier of time which confronts history in the present day. To have reached the light barrier, to have reached the speed of light, is a historical event which throws history in disarray and jumbles up the relation of the living being towards the world. The polity that does not make this explicit, misinforms and cheats its citizenry. We have to acknowledge here a major shift which affects geopolitics, geostrategy, but of course also democracy, since the latter is so much dependent upon a concrete place, the “city”.

When the 2008 crash happened, analysts described many reasons for it. Derivatives. Lack of regulation. Casino capitalism. Few remarked on the speed of transactions. Bridge too far.

Capitalism is a worthy enemy indeed; but I’ll go out on that limb and say that capitalism is but a mere subset of acceleration—its logical outgrowth, an offspring.

This is the loss of the promised future, and the loss of our sense of continuity, of love and life before and after, of children and grandchildren.

“Choking of the senses.” Loss.

The Loss of Orientation

In 1994, Virilio described what was then a prediction about the “vision machine,” as

. . . a machine that would be capable not only of recognising the contours of shapes, but also of completely interpreting the visual field, of staging a complex environment close-up or at a distance? Aren’t they also talking about the new technology of ‘visionics’: the possibility of achieving sightless vision whereby the video camera would be controlled by a computer? The computer would be responsible for the machine’s—rather than the televiewer’s—capacity to analyse the ambient environment and automatically interpret the meaning of events. Such technology would be used in industrial production and stock control; in military robotics, too, perhaps.

In February 2026, a US military AI targeting system guided a robotic missile with high explosives from a naval ship to a the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, killing 156 civilians, including 120 little girls. The Israeli-US war opened with an “accident.”

Alienation of the sort described by Marx or Fromm was when the things made by people came to control them. But when Virilio told Louise Wilson—and we see the word orientation again and again in Virilio—that the “true problem with virtual reality is that orientation is no longer possible,” he was describing an aspect of this other alienation, alienation-plus—the stereoscopic hell of split senses in a world with no consistently visible landmarks. He calls it a “mental concussion.”

Together with the build-up of information superhighways we are facing a new phenomenon: loss of orientation. A fundamental loss of orientation complementing and concluding the societal liberalization and the deregulation of financial markets whose nefarious effects are well-known. A duplication of sensible reality, into reality and virtuality, is in the making. A stereo-reality of sorts threatens. A total loss of the bearings of the individual looms large. To exist, is to exist ~in situ~, here and now, ~hic et nunc~. This is precisely what is being threatened by cyberspace and instantaneous, globalized information flows.

What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion. And this outcome ought to interest us. Why? Because never has any progress in a technique been achieved without addressing its specific negative aspects. The specific negative aspect of these information superhighways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding alterity (the other), this disturbance in the relationship with the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this non-situation, is going to usher a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy.

“Identity,” writes literary critic Nasrullah Mambol of Virilio’s thesis, “becomes virtual and multiple, implying movement between infinite substitutions.”

The de-territorialization of politics corresponds to so-called “deindustrialization” (in reality industrial relocation). Population control in the cities is given over to telecommunications—like CCTV that replaced living police. Markets, news outlets, and war preparation at the press of a SEND on Truth Social. Entrapment by screens. The final enclosure of the commons.

Or is it?

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Re-orientation & Revolt

Impasse

Why have some disaffected leftists end up in the camp of transhumanism?

I think it was their devotion to speed and its logistics. Anthony Galluzzo called them “the rotting remnant of the holographic left,” their first reaction to their own failure having been to become “culture of censure, censoriousness, fear, and enforced intellectual conformity.” The reaction to the reaction—failure still being evident—was migration into the transhumanist cult along the radical techno-optimist’s highway—along the route of their own addiction.

Virilio called it “the narco-capitalism of the wired world.”

The myth of progress, the enclosure of our minds by mass media, the futurist delusions . . . they’ve been around for generations; but this is something new. The sheer disorienting velocity of it!

Written when drug lords were offering to pay Colombia’s national debt, Virilio wrote,

The suggestive power of virtual technologies is without parallel. Next to the illicit drugs-based narco-capitalism which is currently destabilizing the world economy, a computer-communication narco-economy is building up fast. The question may even be raised whether the developed countries are not pushing ahead with virtual technologies in order to turn the tables on the under-developed countries, which are, in Latin America especially, living off, or rather barely scraping by, the production of illicit chemical drugs. When one observes how much research effort in advanced technologies has been channeled into the field of amusement (viz. video-games, real virtuality goggles, etc.), should this instantaneous subjugating potential—and it has been applied successfully in history before—which is being unleashed on the populations by these new techniques remain concealed?

Something is hovering over our heads which looks like a cybercult.”

Techno-optimistic leftists still want to tell us what we lack. They’re hooked; and they think we’re all hooked . . . and maybe to a substantial extent we are. Trapped inside a mental cage made of equal parts utilitarianism and control fantasy, with a cell mate called techno-optimism, the past jettisoned like so much junk, they seek distributive power with no awareness of what they, too, have lost.

Thrust and parry . . . war . . . logistics . . . acceleration.

Eventually, one gives in to the cult, or seeks to escape it altogether. I wish them luck. I wish them a sense of loss.

Recognition

During the pandemic, I discovered reaction videos—a weird way for people to overcome isolation by virtually “watching a movie together.” I’ve often thought about writing on the subject—it’s a disturbingly revelatory sociological phenomenon.

I saw a lot of young people—very young in some instances—engage with the Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy; and with very few exceptions, these young people—all probably wired to the hilt—fell into bouts of crying. I mean real ugly-face snot-fests. In this alternative world—an enchanted if dangerous one—they were confronted with things they may have never experienced, but “knew” inside already. I think their strong reactions to these things—friendship in hardship, integrity, innocence, honor, moral struggle, earned leisure, courage, simple pleasures, constancy, trust . . . points of orientation—because even having little to no experience of them, something in their very makeup as human beings recognized these . . . as loss.

Poaching, Lack, Loss, & Rebellion

There is a difference between Certeau’s pedestrians and drivers, of course, one which I obscured in that class analysis from the top of the former World Trade Center (an appropriate metaphor to be sure).

Certeau spoke of walking in the city, not driving.

Virilio—in describing what Illich called the “speed-stunned imagination”—wants us to understand how our way of experiencing, and knowing, the world is deformed by speed. In one analogy, we can think of the difference between walking past a field, then think of bicycling past it, then of driving past on a county road, then of passing it on the freeway. At each stage of increased speed, our capacity to look to the sides and see what the field is about is further compromised by not only the speed at which we pass—the blur, if you will—but by the increased hazards of speed itself—the life-and-death necessity to, as the old Doors song goes, “keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel.” The surround loses relevance as the demands of speed monopolize our attention.

This is what’s happened to our confused techno-optimists, our cyber-cult captives, our addicts.

Certeau took the view of the regulated proletarian (who we earlier called a pedestrian for keeping to the approved paths of circulation), but not the proletarian (or any other member of the 99 percent) who drives through the city—who has to keep her eyes on the road and her hands upon the wheel. The hero, or anti-hero, of Certeau’s narrative was what he called the “poacher.” The poacher walks. The poacher “hacks” the system. The poacher is the one who not only doesn’t drive by the field, s/he’s been in and around that field to a point where s/he knows it intimately. An excerpt from “Invasive species, cultural appropriation, and creolization”:

«I don’t want to confuse anyone by combining the concepts of (virtual) war and tactics. Certeau used the war terms strategy and tactics in a very different way from war planners. Strategy—for Certeau and for our discussion—is a “self-isolating calculus,” carried out from some center and wielded by pre-existing power.

I call a “strategy” the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an “environment.” (Certeau)

Tactics, for Certeau—unlike the military concept as a subset of strategy (tactics win battles to facilitate strategies)—are everyday practices that “poach” from the “strategic environment”—or the environment constructed by power and strategy.

Thus a North African living in Paris or Roubaix insinuates into the system imposed on him by the construction of a low-income housing development or of the French language the ways of “dwelling” (in a house or in a language) peculiar to his native Kabylia. He superimposes them and, by that combination, creates for himself a space in which he can find ways of using the constraining order of the place or of the language. Without leaving the place where he has no choice but to live and which lays down its law for him, he establishes within it a degree of plurality and creativity. By an art of being in between, he draws unexpected results from his situation.

These modes of use–or rather re-use–multiply with the extension of acculturation phenomena . . . of transiting toward an identification of a person by the place in which he lives or works. That does not prevent them from corresponding to a very ancient art of “making do.” I give them the name of uses, even though the word most often designates stereotyped procedures accepted and reproduced by a group, its “ways and customs.” (Certeau)

Tactics are what everyday people employ to “make do.”

By contrast with a strategy (whose successive shapes introduce a certain play into this formal schema and whose link with a particular historical configuration of rationality should also be clarified), a tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then, provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power.

It does not have the means to keep to itself, at a distance, in a position of withdrawal, foresight, and self-collection: it is a maneuver “within the enemy’s field of vision,” as von Bülow put it, and within enemy territory.

It does not, therefore, have the options of planning general strategy and viewing the adversary as a whole within a district, visible, and objectifiable space.

It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of “opportunities” and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids. What it wins it cannot keep. This nowhere gives a tactic mobility, to be sure, but a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment. It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse. (Certeau)»

In the city, the poacher—who the panopticon surveils—knows where the security cameras are. S/he’s been—as Virilio suggests about the vision-machine—denied time in the shadow, in the dark, denied the chance to be unseen. Or so they’d like to believe. He steals the unseen and unsurveilled in the same way a medieval poacher might take a few of the King’s deer. The view from the top of a tall building, the texturography of the god’s eye point of view, of the planner, knows nothing of what goes on in the dark alleys, in the interstitial unseen. Omnivoyance, as it turns out, can never be 100 percent.

There are flesh and blood people “down there.” They’ll sneak, steal, appropriate, camouflage, and trick the system. Sometimes, when they see their chance, they’ll buck.

Baudrillard, Virilio says (or so I interpret it), failed to account for the intractability of meatspace—the material world, which lays down for no one. The material world will turn off the machines one day, and before that it will kill every one of us—tech lords included. In the stereoscopic hell, we suffer, but we still see both realities—the substitutions, but also that which has denied substitution. We can’t make the laws, and we may not be able to change them, but we’ll always figure out the workarounds.

Won’t always be pretty. I admit it.

De Certeau tells us that there’re “practices” that are “foreign to the ‘geometrical’ or ‘geographical’ space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions.” That’s how they/we “make do.” Now we might be ready to come into the open and strike back.

Depends on if we can discover not what we lack but what we lost. Three of those things may be “equity, leisure, and autonomy.”

Loss of autonomy, loss of privacy, isolation, dependency . . . there’s only so much they can take away, only so far into a corner they can drive someone, before they provoke a reaction—sometimes one that escapes the architectures of control, that loses faith in the propaganda, that refuses any longer to submit. How far before those in power discover for themselves just how much “the proletarian horde carries a menace, a load of unpredictability and ferocity”?

When people know it wasn’t lack, but loss—even of what they’ve never experienced, trapped inside the progress-machine from birth—inside its perpetual demand for some vain optimization, inside what Illich called “a man-eating idol”—things could get rocky.

It would be a volatile thing if that recognition goes beyond what was lost, and becomes the recognition that there’s little else to lose.

The progress-machine began with the fragmentation of our personalities. When it achieved the speed of light, even the fragments were dispersed.

But the body—embodiment—can’t be dispersed, and so it’s an anchor—the final and irrevocable point of contact, the North Star of our re-orientation. That’s why disembodiment is so essential to this new kind of power. Nothing presents it with more peril than the rediscovery of flesh—ours and one another’s. It’s the first loss recovered.

We are alive, and the machine—the idol—is not. People make the machine. People can unmake that motherfucker. Little else to lose.

The speed of light is a wall—an impenetrable barrier, the ultimate material limit; and power—like its weapon and master, speed—always overshoots. Acceleration as a prime directive carries within itself its own destruction, its own final accident.

Alienation-plus is now experienced concretely—in the flesh. It’s dragged out now into the light. Its visibility can serve our own —forgive me—defragmentation. The conscientization of our volatile pedestrian “herd” begins with the recognition of the dictatorship of speed. This is more basic, more foundational, more universal even than the recognition of class.

It’s beginning to happen. I hope it continues. I pray for a new solidarity of slowing it all down.

With the tech oligarchs, we have someone upon whom to focus our blame and hatred.

With the data centers, we have their fortresses—our strategic targets, a place upon which we can concentrate our need to halt, then destroy utterly.

With Flock cameras, we have that vulnerability—the mechanical cop we can block and kill—what we once called in Special Forces, confidence targets—first punch, first blood—the easy targets that teach novitiate combatants the fundamentals and boost their confidence. (Once they have it, it can’t be taken back.)

The most encouraging thing I see in this nascent rebellion—not yet defeated by division and propaganda—is its sense of humor. It’s penchant for irony and ridicule.

This hits at the same time that the “AI revolution” is on the cusp of a monumental failure, the universal accident of financial ruin, just as the poachers shift into active resistance against a stumbling giant. We can already see the politicians running for the hills. This year, watch how many of them fall in line for a data center moratorium.

I can only fantasize this slogan for the deceleration rebellion, the Techlash: STFD-ELA (Slow the fuck down—equity, leisure, autonomy).

The iron is hot.

Peace.

RIP Wendell Berry

peace

how blissful to the listener
to know her dream
that showed our time
about a well-known member
of the legislative church
with hair as shiny as a grackle
his jaw unlatched at the hinge
like a rat snake stealing eggs
smiling broad as a lipstick smear
from one ear to another

he chewed a toothpick
asked if she wanted paper or plastic
lit a mosquito coil
and they rose through roof on the fumes

the vinyl terrain fell away in the flight
spreading like cream retinol
houses and marriages made of post-it notes
forests of Q-tips, streams of empty jars
logjams of plastic flatware
music risen like rattles
played by babies in the back seat
on empty water bottles

Kleenex, napkins, paper towels
rippled as snow on the ground below
from here to the Styrofoam horizon

he flicked the coffee lids like little Frisbees
spoke tomorrow in the language of suicide
seduced the light with lobster bibs
writhed on the egg cartons of time
and made his departure
on the wings of a takeout
in garments like latex gloves

stranded above in the air freshened sky
she fought for breath
and clawed empty-handed
for rot as a new messiah

Here’s a contrarian view . . .

Gothca! I was just fucking around to get clicks.

I mean, yeah, destroy them all.

Politics is an ugly business, and it dominates our thoughts because its ugliness both reflects and reproduces the general ugliness of a world fallen successively further into its fallen - ness.

We speak as if the word were discernible through intellectual disciplines, through analysis, history, data collection, patterns, economics, even psychology; but the truth is, our world is only truly visible, audible, tactile . . . by means of demonology.

Political actors—many and the most impactful—are mere Renfields. Evil indeed—or should we say the loathsome captives of the malignant shades? These “leaders”and their aspirants, they are the mere servants of the Archons, the starless angels of unchecked power. All of us—and I make no exception for myself—are likewise susceptible to to the whispers and spells of power.

Each day, we should awaken and kneel beside our beds to give thanks, those of us not cursed with great wealth and great influence, for the blessing of having neither, for we are no less weak. Don’t kid yourself.

Don’t mistake me for a metaphor-monger; I believe this with all my heart. That which is manifest is preceded by the songs of spirits, both righteous and depraved. The world, contrary to popular belief, is still enchanted. We removed the faeries and wild souls, bulldozed their habitats, and left these ghouls to flourish in the ruins.

If I seem to be sermonizing, it’s that I’m preparing myself to say what I want to say, which may sound (or read) like things I’ve said before, things you know, and many others as well; but I want my cards on the table. I want to persuade you to do things that are part of this ugliness—things that make their appearance as matters of the world, which are nonetheless truly discernible only in the realm of contending spirits, and things that present themselves to us as somehow within our power to control. I want, in other words, to lower our expectations.

A couple of days back, I caught a note from my virtual friend, the irascible neo-Romantic, Anthony Galluzzo:

We might at least clarify the hullabaloo about Woke 1.0 if people were specific about what they advocated, what they opposed, what is now considered the “crazy” froth of 2020: endless shelter-in-place, LatinXX or Y, neo-pronouns, or clapping as “ableism”?

Meanwhile, I am betting that Woke 2.0 will include a “post-human” defense of AI and its rights as another equally legitimate form of “life” while Sophie Lewis and Sam Altman join hands.

He packs a lot in this mini-tirade, which is my segue, such as it is, from sermon to substance. I resist discussions of “the latest thing,” like the current version of woke-software, because this shit makes my teeth ache . . . what’s left of them. Seventy-five circuits of the sun, and I’ve been through these mayfly imbroglios more times than I care to count. Anthony is looking beyond this one—or beneath it—at the kind of epistemic Kondratiev wave over which this particular ephemera flickers.

Progress: the myth reflecting, reproducing, and amplifying the general ugliness of a world fallen successively further into its fallenness . . . and damn, don’t it look great on store shelf!

As to me, I’m looking at this Kabuki retreat from Woke in the same moment when some people are falsely euphoric about “progressive” electoral victories. The pink wave. The Second Coming of Eugene Debs.

In fact, they’re clinging to these little dramas like bits of furniture floating on the icy waters above the sunken Titanic.

Old man: been there, done that.

I live in Michigan now. Transplanted Southern boy, missing his fried okra and catfish (but not the now common droughts with triple-digit heat waves).

This state is in a kind of spotlight now, after Abdul El-Sayed defeated AIPAC’s girlfriend Haley Stevens in the Democratic Primary for the US Senate nomination. Yesterday, I caught two separate political podcasts regarding El-Sayed.

One was about the sleazy tactics of his opponent—a greasy little toad named Mike Rogers, whose ads (likely paid for by proxy from AIPAC) are now claiming that podcaster Hasan Piker was El-Sayed’s “running mate,” then featuring a deceptively edited bit from Piker that falsely suggested Piker is a violent anti-Semite. This appeal to ignorance and Islamophobia is hardly surprising, but even jaded old me was taken slightly aback by the claim that Senate candidates have “running mates.” Then I thought to myself, yep . . . that’ll play . . . because people really are that fucking ignorant. Americans love ignorance. We revel in it. We lionize it.

One podcaster was a bit upset that El-Sayed responded with a tweet (or something) that merely reaffirmed his opposition to anti-Semitism. No correction of the record regarding Piker, who the right, in concert with the Zionist Democratic establishment, is trying to render radioactive. El-Sayed, then, was “backing down,” passively throwing Piker under the proverbial bus. Not sure why anyone was surprised about this. Politics is inherently tactical and manipulative and therefore inherently dishonest. Show me the exception. I’ll wait.

The other podcast was regarding a Fox News interview of El-Sayed by Jesse Watters, who cornered the Senate candidate with a question about “trans athletes.” Should men be allowed to participate in all-female sports? El-Sayed, frankly, was made a fool out of, as he dissembled and deflected. El-Sayed is a Rhodes Scholar, a very smart man, and he’s studied these issues—especially this one, which “progressives” and liberals handed to the right as a cudgel; because 75 percent of Americans oppose “trans-athletes” (men) competing in women’s sports.

After El-Sayed was shown dodging the question in the most cringe worthy manner, the “progressive” podcaster and many of the followers then loaded up in his defense. He was right to refuse to answer the question, because “it was not a serious question.”

That one pissed me off, and I was provoked to write a response:

It’s not an unserious question . . . it’s progressives lashed to an ideology that has real consequences—not good ones—that the so-called left, who has fallen for this gender bullshit hook, line, and sinker, has offered to the right as a fucking layup. This is an albatross, and it’s not going away, because people have daughters and sisters and wives and partners, who are women—natal biological human females—who are having their single sex spaces invaded and their sports nullified by the competition of men, based on some unscientific and frankly insane shit called declarative gender. I say this as a socialist, who, like other socialists who would dare to call this nonsense what it is, would be shunned and cancelled posthaste by the gender Stasi. Dismissing this as “culture war” is some disingenuous bs that a child can see through . . . and in this regard it makes the left look just like the neoliberals (who love the fuck out of some gender ideology). Welcome to perpetual defeat.

I left out the chemical castration of minors and some other things, but there it was and there I am—cancel away. The podcaster and the El-Sayed fans just couldn’t admit that (1) this albatross is more than an invention of the culture war and (2) that El-Sayed was indeed made a fool of. He was hurt by that interview, and hurt more by his dissembling response. Denial, denial, denial. Dismiss what’s actually important to a hell of a lot of people as unimportant to justify your silence. Keep doing it and watch your little victories turn to vinegar.

I don’t believe being against the State of Israel makes me an anti-Semite; and I don’t believe that opposing an anti-feminist ideological agenda based on some academic superstition is tantamount to hating any actual person who calls him- or herself “trans” or tantamount to calling for their destruction. I hate few people, and none of them are “trans,” but I don’t think my granddaughter who is looking at a soccer scholarship as a way to attend college should be pitted against a bigger, stronger male who has declared himself a woman. I not only don’t call for anyone’s destruction—or even exclusion from non-gender-specific spaces—I’m a pacifist who opposes all violence, full stop. There’s a real parallel here between Israel apologists and the gender Stasi, which the latter, among whom there are many avowed pro-Palestinians, would be loathe to admit. Anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism. Anti-child-sterilization and the protection of women’s spaces = a wish for the destruction of all who “identify as trans.”

The reason the “progressive” podcaster had to go along is because (1) he actually believes in declarative gender, (2) he has doubts, but would be ostracized if he were to express them, and-or (3) he wants to evade the issue just like El-Sayed did. The “left” is now saddled with this belief and its true believers, without which they’d lose what little strength they’ve accrued. The same strength that’s now circumscribed by it. It wants to refocus on economic issues, but there’s this thing . . . a dead albatross hanging around its neck. It won’t Woke 3.0 out of it. (Democrats in general are likewise saddled with it.)

At any rate, this was yesterday’s tempest in a teapot. That excursion and editorial intervention was yet another segue to the larger business of the midterm elections—as ugly and inescapable as the are.

I’d come in exhausted after a day of fishing yesterday, and after putting the gear and my boat away, cleaning fish, and showering, I’d plopped down in front of a TV, where I opened up YouTube. The podcasts scrolled before me as I surrendered to my torpor.

After the ones on the Michigan Senate race, I spotted a thing called “Let’s Talk Elections,” which purports to be a polling news site, but appears upon closer inspection to be some kind of Democratic or Democrat-adjacent organ. I checked its history, and it seems insistent on relaying any kind of news that shows Trump and the Republicans losing ground. In other, words, it’s an optimistic program.

Looking around further, it wasn’t hard to find several such reports, even in the mainstream media. Things look bleak, it would seem, for Republicans in the midterms . . . and why shouldn’t they. Trump runs the Party, and he’s broken or poisoned or stolen everything he’s touched. Only a deeply indoctrinated cult member would possibly stay on with Trump, whose numbers are plummeting . . . but. Twenty percent of America is still in the cult. More to the point, Democrats’ approval ratings are pretty much the same.

El-Sayed was projected by polls to win by double-digits. He barely squeaked a victory in the actual Primary. Let me remind all the Trump-is-going-down Pollyannas . . . Democrats always underperform the polls. I’ve heard of this mythical blue wave before. So have you.

When it doesn’t materialize, we’ll blame all the things we already know are there, and which we pretended—for one brief glittering moment of transient victory and false hope—weren’t. Power games. Dirty tricks. Like those aren’t constants. Russians, maybe.

If we were to “win,” let’s not forget . . . what Anthony Galluzzo said. Sophie Lewis and Sam Altman will be wed by a “spiritual” robot and we all declare our pronouns and we march hand in cyborg hand into the New Future.

In 2026, there’s a chance the Democrats won’t even take back the House of Representatives.

More to the point, if they were to take back the House and the Senate, they would still betray every promise, backtrack on every threat, and disappoint each and every one of us. They, too, are Renfields. Take that to the bank.

Yes, vote blue no matter who, but understand, this is not salvation—it’s triage.

Trump will go down, but not by our hand. The Democrats desperately need Trump (and they will assure the Senate is not taken for that very reason, mark my words). Trump is going down by his own greedy and inept hand, but that’s on the stage of US hegemony-lost and financial ruin. That’s Kondratiev stuff. It doesn’t give a damn about you and me. We’re statistics.

We won’t be the victors when Trump and Trumpism go down. We’ll be the victims.

I’ve said before that the greatest illusion held in common by right, left, and center is in the redemptive monopoly of politics. Our only salvation must be political, because we’ve eschewed all the rest.

And yet politics is the very opposite. Politics is discernible only by means of demonology. It’s to one another we have to turn.

Peace.

each sun shall be swallowed
true
both ways

may have been the ulcer on my tongue
that caused the interruption
or just those many rude muses awake
between the sixth and seventh hours
some are wide as the weather
tender and terrifying by turns
reminders of tethered days and deadnights
of when we poisoned holes in the tropics
to make and maintain our houses

I remember a dreamspace
age appropriate of course where
a big black woman with a big red dress
like a guardian or a bureaucrat
met our battered car between two lakes
a Toyota I think, but the key was funny
and seemed in search of a safe deposit box
one lake was clean, the other not
and you’d fallen in love with a past acquaintance
whose long brown hair refused to age

I got lost inside before the page
wandering anxious and alert
between a cocktail club and a church
with a priest who sat scowling at the wall
and I knew exactly where I was
where foam mounted along the plastic shore
but not the way in
or the time out

kisses that brushed and missed
caught on the corners of their mouths
then plunged into warm neck flesh
for lack of a better thought
somewhere between fear and stupor
each moment disassembling the last

it wasn’t the song lyrics that licked the plate
nor the shafts of moonlight in the basement
nor painted skulls in lightless kitchens
nor bamboo hillsides…
these were all beside the line

insects of every kind
clawed through the cotton candy
of our minds
and our flesh stretched its hands
between the prison bars
of those listless hours

there were partial disregards
woven into shadow
built by taste (and trade)
and abracadabra!
the hard ringmaster of necessity
fell asleep between the sixth and seventh hours
and the circus frolicked
in the tents of troubled visions

to die or to dream?
or walk the baneful borders cooked?

the clock face on the phone screen
speaks its atomic gesture
and makes a shaking light

Yesterday, President Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on California. Tomorrow, he’ll declare war on Antarctica. Today, he’s issued an executive order revoking the citizenship of goats.

Dear Republican officials, you all—almost to the last man, woman, and lizard—have tailed along after this ridiculous sack of pus with your lips suctioned onto his wrinkled, shit-stained ass and facilitated every fucking one of his crimes and stupidities. Thereby, you have secured your place in history as cowards. Yes, there are many other ways to describe your fealty to Trump—rank opportunism, incapacity for rational thought, thirst for power, not-so-latent fascism—but at the core it’s just been your abject cowardice. You’re intimidated by the orange blob; and rather than stand up against him, you’ve consented to become his obedient criminal accomplices in a vast con by a would-be Fuhrer, because you have all the spines and moral standing of crab lice.

But the jig is almost up, motherfuckers.

You stood by while his Gestapo terrorized American neighborhoods and started one civil rebellion, while he trashed the American economy and lashed it to data centers buildouts that are on the verge of sparking another civil rebellion, skimmed billions from his office in a transparent display of kleptocracy, fucked over supply chains and US farmers with his idiotic attachment to tariffs, alienated the country’s most long standing trade partners and allies, sent the US down a fast road to shithole-dom by denying tens of millions basic medical care and consigning tens of millions more into the ranks of the impoverished and homeless, and finally . . . putting incompetent narcissists, toadies, lunatics, drug addicts, and drunks—alongside his family members—in charge of the nation’s institutions . . . not the least of which is the US military, which has now been gutted in a military adventure on behalf of the genocidal Israelis (probably) because they have pictures of Trump raping thirteen year old girls in Epstein’s jungle room. ←This destruction of the US armed forces is my favorite, y’all, because you’ve never seen a military spending bill you didn’t love like a trashy mistress or secret rent-boy; and now the trillion-dollar-plus US military is on par with, like . . . Poland. (A good thing in my view, but that’s another rant.)

This walking, talking moral carbuncle, so far in over his head he has snailfish and amphipods nibbling his little dick, has finally met his limits not in any of you, who’ve all held the aforementioned little dick firmly between you upper and lower palates, but by other nations’ leaderships (most of the EU’s and Great Britain’s toadies excepted) and by reality—something he (and you all) have chosen to ignore yourselves. Now that intransigent terror is knocking on your doors, you pusillanimous pustules! You hitched your wagons to a star, but it was a meteor, and it’s almost burnt now upon entering the atmosphere of the real. Fuck you all to hell!

As to Democrats . . . you let this happen with hardly a ripple, calculating how to use Trump’s crimes and blunders to extend your fucking careers. You people, after all, were hand in hand with Republicans when you gave a standing ovation to Benjamin Netanyahu—a genocidal thug. You have no standing, which is why you’re seeing formerly shoo-in elections challenged by and even lost to social democratic intruders. The jig is up for you, too! Cowardice is not ringed in by either political party. Stand right over there with those Republican piss-streaks.

The comeuppance is nigh. Much shall be rued. Honest historians will consign you to the ranks of Francesco Schettino, Bruce Ismay, and the current Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Imminent rueage, assholes!

That is all.

Peace

Caught a television rant the other day regarding the abhorrent conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Performed in a key I’ve come to think of as macho-histrionics. The performer was a Professional Wounded Veteran named Joey Jones, who’s found his money-making niche in the Jingo Jungle of the Fox News Network—that fetid cesspool of Trump-fellators where our booze-and-coke addled War Secretary, Pete Hesgeth, hatched from the ooze. (Pete also rants performatively in the key of macho-histrionics, likewise tatted and pumped like an ad model for your local leather bar.)

Yeah, I’m going way off-color . . . deep into the bad taste zone, because I’m sick of this bullshit. It’s not the first time I’ve said that America’s compulsory veteran veneration can inoculate any dickhead who ever put on a uniform from criticism or consequences. I’m sorry Joey lost his lower legs to an IED—I’d say that to anyone. It sucks. Ask any one of around five thousand child amputees in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. But having “served” in the military, and even having been wounded, doesn’t wrap anyone from any political perspective—opportunistic or not—in a cloak of infallibility. It also doesn’t prevent us from lying.

Jingo Joey’s rant was leveled against the sailors who complained after seven months on a ship with zero days of shore leave—eating short rations of shit food, running out of cleaning supplies while the toilets and showers that aren’t broken are covered in mold, and working around the clock on a stupid and unnecessary mission. Jingo Joey basically called them all pussies, because Jingo Joey worked in much harder conditions in Afghanistan. ←This, my friends, is what’s called, in scientific terminology, a goddamned lie.

Joey Jones was a Marine in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was not non-stop combat. Combat was episodic and far rarer that it was in, say, Vietnam. US combat arms troops in Afghanistan put up with some austere conditions, but never for more than a few days at a time. The bases, to which combat troops returned after a few days at a time in the field, had fucking US fast food restaurants.

“How weak are you?” Joey screeched at the camera lens. “On TV complaining about tuna and noodles? I’m sorry. You volunteered to serve your country. You can come back, get out of the military, and do like all these Democrat veterans and complain about it and make a commercial and be a sellout . . .” ← The motherfucker getting paid $500 an hour by Fox News just said that. “ . . . and come up with a new way of doing things.” ←the Trump school of rhetoric. “The last Democrat that I remember that was deploying troops, Barack Obama, had the Army going to Iraq on patrol bases for 15 months at a time, eating MREs.” ←Horseshit! There were on bases the size of fucking cities. With air conditioning and gyms.

They ate some MREs in the field, but no one was on a steady diet of them. I’ve spoken with hundreds of veterans from both theaters—including two close family members. (MREs, by the way, are calorie dense and provide all the daily minimum recommendations for protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals.) The sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln—which has had its nearest supply lines destroyed—are not dealing with mere quality issues—like meals consisting of some rice and two tortillas—but actual food shortages. Sailors are losing weight because they aren’t eating enough calories to maintain normal metabolism.

Jingo Joey continues: “I’m sorry but you’re a sitting duck on a patrol base in Iraq and Afghanistan a heck of a lot more than if you’re on a fortified Navy ship sitting in the water. You have more than got bored.” ←More Trump school of rhetoric. “We did have more fun getting in firefights. I’ll say that.” You weren’t in that many “firefights.” No one over there was. In most cases, these “firefights,” that Joey would have us believe were an intense daily reality (they definitely weren’t) were, with a few exceptions, mostly running potshots during which the pot-shotters are seriously outgunned by US troops who unleash a hail of fire at people who have already run off, about which the troops go back to the base and retell the war stories. Joey Jones wasn’t wounded in a firefight, but by a booby-trap (nowadays called IEDs). Booby-traps and mechanical ambushes are specifically designed to avoid firefights.

More to the point, though, I spent several consecutive days aboard Navy vessels twice—as an Army Ranger and a member of Special Forces—and if I were given the choice between being a ground combat troop or a shipbound sailor, I’d elect for the wide open spaces. Every. Fucking. Time. Even on the ground of active combat. Ship duty sucks. It only takes about one day for that seemingly huge ship to impress upon you that you are now trapped on a floating fucking island the boundaries of which can be traversed in a few minutes. Sleeping in those tight little bunks, squeezing past one another in the narrow passageways, shitting together at a range of 20 inches, and showering—when the showers work—in a vertical coffin. You have to try this kind of “tight” living for a few days to appreciate the special kind of shit that sailors put up with. Truly, it’s a condensed experience of then Satrean claim that “hell is the other.”

“But to sit there and say,” Jingo Joey goes on, “that your your it was terrible cuz you had a corn dog and a hot dog. I woulda traded a block of C4 to the Taliban for a hot dog by about July of 2010.” Really?

“I just do not understand,” Joey shouts, “the mentality.” Fuck you, Joey. Take that Trump hot dog you carry around in your ass, and trade that to the Taliban, you bloviating moron!

“If this is a representation of who are military is now . . .” It is actually the military under your buddy Cocaine Pete. “. . . and I’m not saying it is . . .” Welp, that’s pretty much exactly what you just said, and it is set up as a premise for what comes next . . . “. . . but there’s at least enough for some of these trash rags to print about it. If this is what we are, we’re just Rome sitting there waiting to burn.” Now we agree, Joey. Rome—an overextended and dying empire with a rampantly corrupt government led by an insanely narcissistic child rapist. Pretty fucking Roman.

“We’ve got nothing left,” he says. I’m Tonto. Who the fuck is “we,” white man?”

“It makes me absolute.” Is this some philosophical shit? “It makes me fume.” Or something to do with physics? “I he sat there and said ‘we didn’t have any clean water to drink. We couldn’t take a shower.’ I mean, well, I didn’t get to take a shower for about six months.” ←Damn lie. Every honest veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan will confirm that it’s a damn lie. Every base had shower facilities, and no one ever stayed in the field for six consecutive months. Full fucking stop. “But still, you know something that has something that has to do with hygiene, or, you know, like getting sick. There was a scurvy outbreak, and, you know, the guys that were missing legs were given wooden pegs instead of metal ones, then maybe I might have some sympathy.” I’ll let readers psychologize that one. There was no scurvy among US troops. Rations—hot and field—are packed with vitamin C. Who the fuck knows where the hygiene-scurvy shit is coming from, but it’s apparently a segue into lost legs (again, I sympathize—that’s some traumatic shit) and temporary prosthetics . . . at least a bit of the real Joey in his personal pain peeks through the horseshit here. He continues hyperventilating: “But to that little kid and whoever raised him . . .” ←I know, what the fuck?! “. . . Lord, if you ever go into a hot war on the ground like a millions of Americans have. I can only think that what a World War veteran sitting there who’s lucid enough today and think about the six month journey home from fighting the toughest war we’ve ever fought for four years and listening to him complain like that, I just. The Secretary of the Navy put out his response . . .” Of course he did, as Hesgeth’s clone. “. . . that’s my response, end of story.”

Wow! Great job, Joey. You just allowed a corrupt government involved in an illegal and immoral war on behalf of of Israel to use you on its sycophant media outlet to hide its crime and incompetence behind your inoculating wounds. You just became the rhetorical hitman against your former uniformed colleagues on behalf of President Bone Spurs and his genocidal Israeli masters.

When Hesgeth gets fired—something I expect before the midterms—maybe this former Marine sergeant and self-pimping TV personality will be the new Secretary of War.

I might mention in passing before I close about those Palestinian child amputees. That’s what the war is about for which the USS Abraham Lincoln is deployed. It’s Israel’s war—Operation Epstein Fury—and I wish Joey would say something about that.

Okay . . . “thats my response,” insensitive and politically incorrect as it is, “end of story.”

Peace.

I realize that many people don’t have either the time or inclination to read really long pieces like many of those I’ve done here which touch on the touchy issue of something called race.

And I do mean long—some taking more than two hours to read. Editing’s no my forte, but writer’s block has never been one of my issues.

I wouldn’t keep writing about this thing called race if it would just go away, but we’re a long way from that yet.

Today, I just want to do something relatively brief on two concepts that reoccur in the long-form essays, which are linked below (in case you’re interested). These two concepts are “race-making” and “racecraft.”

Just the standard disclaimer before I begin: race is both a fiction and a fact of life. Technically, scientifically, empirically, the modern concept of race leaks like a chicken-wire canoe. But the reality of the idea of race and its social, political, and economic ramifications cannot be ignored.

Race-making—as the concept is adapted by Nikhil Pal Singh from Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s racial formation theory—operates in this fictional arena. It begins with a practice that becomes racially coded, then tries to make fictional race carry more weight than it can bear. Rac-ists deal in scientific fictions, for example.

Racecraft is a far more subtle concept developed by sister-academics Barbara and Karen Fields, which also implicates certain types of what I call professional anti-racists in fictional race alongside the racists they claim to oppose (and whole categories of people upon whom they project an almost innate “racism”).

As a fact of life, I don’t have to explain except to the most obtuse, who won’t listen anyway, the fuzzy concept of race has imposed itself on us by history and habit.

These two concepts—race-making and racecraft—are critical tools for navigating a route between the Scylla of phenotypic determinism and the Charybdis of credulous denial of race’s persistent social power.

The concept of race-making was an easy one for me, because I recognized it early in my life, when I was sent to Vietnam as an infantryman. I think I can make it easy for readers who may not have encountered the term itself, because its pretty visible to anyone who’s looking.

My little platoon in the 173rd Airborne Brigade was comprised—demographically—of black guys—around half the platoon—white guys—most of the rest—with one mixed race Puerto Rican and a Samoan. We were united by the uniform, the circumstance, and—with a very few exceptions—by drugs and pop music. There was an obvious phenotypic difference between us, as “diverse” as we were, and the Vietnamese.

Where any of us would have noticed on the distinctiveness of Vietnamese as opposed to this variety pack of Americans were a Vietnamese show up in our midst in the US, there may have been some racial preconceptions, but there was not inbuilt practical or structural reason for hostility.

Which is to say—let me get to the point—as occupying soldiers, we were obliged to suspect and control the Vietnamese—some of whom were combatants or allies of combatants who wore no uniform. Which meant we had to dominate them as a matter of course as well as be prepared to kill them. This is how Vietnamese became “dinks” or “gooks,” racial epithets that stripped away enough of their basic humanity to overcome the cognitive dissidence entailed by killing human beings whose names we didn’t even know.

I came to tell people back home, after my tour, that “every war becomes a race war on the ground.” War-making is race-making. For a more comprehensive look at this phenomenon—as it returns to “an hour of legibility” with the depredations of ICE—see the piece linked below, titled “Preemptive counterinsurgency,” about the militarization of police and the policification of the military.

Race-making is the racialization of an “enemy,” situated within a practice or structure. You can see it on genocidal steroids in Israeli society today, aimed against Palestinians who are phenotypically indistinguishable on the whole from Israeli Jews.

Race-making reproduces itself, once in place, by the structure or practice that makes the racial enemy recreating the enemy that calls back again now for the structure or practice.

The racism of some backward-ass Mississippi cracker today may appear to be independent of or prior to practice and structure, but ideas are sustained across generations, and the race-making was already in place during the Middle Passage. (Oddly enough, in Vietnam, while we were all racializing the Vietnamese, there was more than one backward-ass Mississippi cracker who—under these new circumstances—became close friends with some black kid from Deanwood.)

Racecraft, on the other hand, is a critique by the Marxist-inflected Fields sisters of the most popular ways the term race is used across the political spectrum.

Their book compares racecraft to witchcraft, a nod to anthropologist Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu, who once wrote, “‘Race’ is the witchcraft of our time.” Race is a fiction, they say, like witchcraft was, and we should continue aiming to deconstruct it and not reproduce its inhering essentialism in some liberal (or opportunistic) guise.

Our term racecraft invokes witchcraft, though not for the reason that may come first to mind. We regard neither witchcraft nor race craft as “just mischievous superstition, nothing more,” a position Loury has rightly dismissed as of little interest. Far from denying the rationality of those who have accepted either belief as truth about the world, we assume it. We are interested in the processes of reasoning that manage to make both plausible. Witchcraft and racecraft are imagined, acted upon, and re-imagined, the action and imagining inextricably intertwined. The outcome is a belief that “presents itself to the mind and imagination as a vivid truth.” So wrote W. E. H . Lecky, a British scholar of Europe ‘s past who, looking back from the nineteenth century, tried to understand how very smart people managed for a very long time to believe in witchcraft. He warned that it takes “a strong effort of the imagination . . . [to] realise the position of the defenders of the belief. “ To “realise,” in his sense, is to picture a bygone real world of normally constituted people who accepted, as obviously true, notions that the real world of one ‘s own present dismisses as obviously false. What if we Americans applied that “strong effort” to our present? Only if we imagined racecraft as a thing in itself worth scrutiny might we imagine ourselves outside or beyond the belief. It is impossible to understand what “post-racial” might be without first understanding more profoundly than we do at present just what “racial” is. (pp. 19-20)

My wife and I routinely refer to three of our kids as “mixed race” or “biracial,” because its an easy descriptor—often used and readily understood as descriptive and not essentialist. One is an Army warrant officer, one is former military and a consultant, and one is an office manager for a medical practice. In terms of practice, none of these likewise descriptive identifiers carries any “racial” overtones. They’re just jobs. One likes board games, one likes fishing, another likes golf. Again, same thing.

What the Fields sisters are on about is the way identity politics has transformed these simple phenotypic descriptors into re-essentializing racial fictions. There’s a parallel here, methinks, between this practice—by liberals and progressives no less—and the re-essentialization of men and women by post-1990s gender ideology.

Racecraft, say the Fields sisters, turns racism into race.

Gender ideology turns sexism into gender.

I told you this was more subtle than race-making.

Today’s talk of “biracial” or “multiracial” people rehabilitates mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, and the like—yesterday’s terms for mixed ancestry. Although they now reemerge in the costume of post-racial progressiveness, not to say a move toward “an ideal future of racelessness,”; their origins are racist. Mulatto made its first appearance on the US census in 1850, after two theorists, Josiah Nott, a physician, and James De Bow, a political economist, decided to classify and count individuals with one parent of African and one of European descent. Today’s lobbying for a new census classification, called multiracial, defines it the same way, “someone with two monoracial parents.” Does it matter that these citizen rejuvenators of obsolete racist categories cannot reasonably share the agenda of their predecessors—to validate the folk theory that mixed offspring are degenerate in mind and body? Today, some parents passionately seek a state-sponsored classification as a means of protecting their own children from feelings that enter all American children’s minds via toxic drip. “Self-esteem is directly tied to accurate racial identity,” said one mother. Whatever she thought she was saying about mixed ancestry and mental health, the very phrase accurate racial identity ought to set off sirens. Dangerous lies do not always dress the part. (pp. 2-3)

Like there’s positive essentialism that can counteract negative essentialism.

I’ll leave readers with the above link to the whole book to delve further into the Fields thesis—well worth the time. I said I’d keep this brief. My comparison of racecraft to gender ideology helps me clarify to myself and hopefully to some readers the very thing that rides like a pebble in my shoe about the whole gender business.

Just as early black freedom activists wanted a genuinely post-racial order—where the fact of difference didn’t translate into phenotypic determinism, or justify racial stereotypes and racial castes, the second wave feminists insisted that men and women are different—far more different in qualitative biological terms than any “racial” difference—but rejected biological determinism, sexist stereotypes, and sexual hierarchy.

In the latter case, we have entered a Twilight Zone. Once upon a time, not that long ago, we thought we’d accomplished the deconstruction of of male and female stereotypes as inevitable. Well, now that’s being overthrown. Now, if a three-year-old boy appears passive and gentle or a three-year-old girl shows signs of becoming a “tomboy,” they’re apt in many “progressive” quarters to be labeled—according to sexist stereotypes!!!—as transgendered, as having been “born in the wrong body.”

Perhaps this should be called gendercraft.

Okay . . . I’ve had my say. I said I’d thumbnail a couple of ideas, so there you have it

Here are some of the Molting articles that discuss race:

American black history & political strategy—part 1

American black history & political strategy—part 2

American black history & political strategy—part 3

American black history & political strategy—part 4

American black history & political strategy—part 5

American black history & political strategy—part 6

Migration

Preemptive counterinsurgency

Reparations—the case against

History, narrative, race, and CRT

Invasive species, cultural appropriation, and creolization

Autopsy: Amazon’s billion dollar train-wreck (and some stuff about race & gender)

Identity

Buffalo

Peace.

They had a bag of newborn’s names
alive in rows of bunkers
and hope in the image of a gremlin womb.
The spoons full of sex in their linen dreams
spun blender greens in apple juice
and peeled dead skin off the brink of a college.
Storms reeled through the ranks of days
dressed and covered, dripping . . . hungry. Still
in the rose-sugared Ambrose moment
he turned a screw, she washed a rag
the flicker flashed on tooth and vein.
Craving the passage of silence, they blew ghosts
onto cold windows. They pretended.
The curl of hips and thump of toes
the cling of cloth on promises
pressed prickled hope into the flesh . . .
. . . the forgotten leaves of their last winter.
Dogs tapped along the tile like broken metronomes.
Tongues muscled through semi-solid grammars.
Linen dreams and gremlin wombs held fast
against the soldier winds
as they grappled like lovers
to remember tomorrow.

This August, during the Michigan Primary, when Haley Stevens was up against Abdul El-Sayed for the US Senate seat nomination—which became a kind of replay of every contest between social democrats and the Wall Street/AIPAC Democratic establishment—the two Olde-Reliable establishment tactics employed against the social democratic challenger—around since the Sanders campaign of 2016—were (1) the claim that the social democratic challenger was not “electable” in the General Election, and (2) the sly mobilization of “the black vote” against the challenger. In 2016, the former and immensely popular President Obama actually did endorse Clinton, and in 2020, he did endorse Joe Biden against Sanders in the Primary. That was before Covid hit and things went totally to shit. This year, Haley Stevens pulled up old footage of her with Obama and put it in ads that suggested—contrary to the truth—that Obama had endorsed her against El-Sayed. She then flooded the zone—especially in Wayne County—with these deceptive ads in every medium. The killer endorsement in advance of the 2020 Carolina Primaries that blunted the momentum of Sanders against Biden was Representative Jim Clyburn, who showed up to actually endorse Stevens this year against El-Sayed. Clyburn has found his niche as the black-vote-whisperer from a deeply red state. This is a sensitive subject these sensitive days, but I decided to reprint this lengthy though piece from 2020, because . . . well, for one, it still holds water . . . and we’ll see the tactic again and again until it’s no longer effective. It has a history . . . let’s look.

—SG, 2026

In the United States, everything is about race. We are, after all, the inheritors of racial capitalism, of the racialized settler-colonization of this hemisphere, of racialized genocide and expropriation, of wealth built up on race-based slave labor, of racialized imperial expansion, embedded in a racial “progress” myth . . . and we live today with official xenophobia, stacked onto the history of the New Jim Crow of redlining and mass incarceration, of stubbornly well-sustained racial gaps on every social index.

Our public discourse is still white, phallocentric, imperial, and capitalist — this is part of what hegemony means, and why it’s so difficult to uproot. The colonizers oversee the development of land and labor; but they also oversee the colonization of our minds. White supremacy, male supremacy, imperial noblesse oblige, “social hygiene,” and the myth of progress are the epistemic architecture of capitalism past, and they echo. Historically speaking, white, phallocentric, and imperial practices underpinned the development of real capitalism.

Celebrity worship is part of that epistemic architecture, too. In a world with no afterlife, public esteem becomes a sort of desperate currency, a check written against the perceived nothingness of eternity. We worship celebrities, but also celebrity itself, something about which we can fantasize for ourselves and our kids. This is the world of modern simulation, our entrapment by modernity’s cold, sterile objectivism, and our attempt at an escape into representation.

The problem, from the perspective of some of us, is that social orders become self-organized within their hegemonic frameworks, almost like a biome wherein each organism finds its niche until the whole becomes cyclically stable. The difference being that capitalism is a biome that systematically destroys its own diversity — a slow suicide system.

When social orders are generalized across large scales, this niche-maximization (by post-subsistence people who have to seek out money to survive) becomes niche-dependency. I have my little spot, my little job, my little home, and I have to protect it to survive. In this way, I come to protect the larger social order by protecting my little piece of it, situated there in the “stable” whole.

Cognitive dissonance kicks in around the contradiction between my belief in some form of justice and my need to survive as a dependent within hegemonic structures. To live with myself I seek out narratives that seem to reconcile my actions with my sense of justice. I rationalize, extensively and elaborately, and find that I have now accepted, even naturalized and become an apologist for, the epistemic architecture of capitalism.

This phenomenon is even more powerful when we encounter actual people — who live in families, with obligations to others that further complicate the moral dilemmas of the subaltern. I could rebel, but what will that mean for my children? I think it was David Harvey who said something like, “The greatest force for working-class conformity in the United States was the 30-year mortgage.” Defy the establishment, and your children will suffer.

Within the United States, we can imagine—with a lot of caveats—that there is another nation (in the older sense of a shared history, language, and culture, not a nation-state) which we might call African America. As a whole, this nation has been very like a colony — colonies being subaltern social formations that are simultaneously politically suppressed and mined for profit.

Bear in mind that this is not a perfect analogy, and it leaks profusely with exceptions, but it serves as a thought exercise that—in spite of its flaws—provide us with insight and perspective.

World system theorists divide the world into centers, or metropolitan cores, and peripheries (colonies or post-colonies, where value is extracted under the supervision of colonial surrogates—comprador members of that same “community”—and extracted value, after the compradors are given their dividend, is returned to the cores where even the working classes can draw on an imperial benefit). There are also semi-peripheries — places like India, for example — where the colonial surrogates begin to amass enough power vis-à-vis the cores to begin building up a “middle-class” base of support for colonial and post-colonial ruling classes.

African America—as we now might imagine it—is further complicated by geography, because it’s an internal periphery (and, for some privileged few, a semi-periphery).

Peripheries adapt, and one of those adaptations is this development of liaisons between the white capitalist core and the most powerful members of the periphery—the compradors, or colonial surrogates—which develop into political alliances. There is no politics unconcerned with economy and no economy unconcerned with politics—which is why many of us refer to them both at once as political economy.

These alliances develop colonial surrogates along certain lines. In many cases, colonial surrogates become powerful in their own right. In the US, this often means “delivering votes,” in exchange for support of careers and pet projects. But again, we come back to that cognitive dissonance. If one is performing as a power-broker between the periphery and the core, that person needs a rationalization. No one, even the most cynical, believes he or she is a bad person. We can’t. We need rationalizations, and when there’s a threat to our sense of justifiable personhood, we can be quite aggressive in our own defense. People readily believe their own rationalizations.

Absolutely, one might become part of what I’ll call African American civil society for the genuine purpose of helping one’s community. The belief system of many subalterns can be aspirational. When you live in a stable biome, you seek out the niches that are available. Let me do a short excursus on this thing I call “civil society.”

Civil society has several meanings, but for our purposes, it means influencers. In capitalist society, there is a hierarchy of power. The ultimate power resides with the ruling class — the big bourgeoisie, the mega-money folks . . . in our neoliberal phase over the last four-plus decades, these are Wall Street types . . . or finance capital, to which productive capital has become subordinate. [add now in 2026, the tech sector —SG] These capitalists exist in a partnership with the state, in a state-finance nexus if you will. The state is the official arm of power with its legal monopoly on violence. So far, this class is a fraction of around one tenth of one percent . . . maybe less.

On the other end, there is the bottom 90 percent of the people have no appreciable power at all . . . unless they unite against the ruling class—the perennial dream of class warriors.

In between is civil society, or the retainer class. Civil society, this class of influencers, are in that zone between the one-percenters and the 90 percent. This civil society fraction (9.9/100?) is what stands between the tiny ruling class and that vast working class. They engage with the working class on behalf of the ruling class (knowingly or not) to prevent and-or attenuate any restlessness among the 90 percent that might threaten the ruling class. They influence the working class to accept and even embrace the existing hierarchies. Civil society does this through professionals of all kinds, and through media, universities, entertainment, think tanks, non-profits, churches, businesses, and charities.

I worked for and with non-profits for a while, and we were plugged into think tanks, other bigger non-profits, universities, churches, businesses and charities. Some do projects, some do issues. We did issues. One was money-and-politics (for which we received some of the actual “Soros money”), another was nuclear power, still another was Veterans For Peace, against war, yet another dealt with labor and environmental justice . . . all these are good things. In the current system, the only way to get the resources (money) to advance our cases (and construct a few jobs [niches] in the process) was by filing for corporate status as 501-whatevers. Availability, right? Maybe not, as we’ll see further down.

In subaltern communities — like our semi-notional African America — fewer people have the means and opportunity to get the formal education alongside the informal cross-cultural competencies of relative privilege to participate in African American civil society. Liaison with the white “core” is among the key duties and responsibilities of African American civil society, and it creates a kind of brain drain from the working class into this hazardous demilitarized zone of liberal civil society, by those of good will . . . as well as opportunists. There are many non-profits, for example, that are organized to answer real crises, crises created by the very structures whose epistemic architecture we’re obliged to inhabit.

All that to say, I am not conflating all non-profits. Some folks inhabit structures tactically for the purpose of deconstructing them. But in the larger scheme of things, where capital calls the shots, those initiatives that support capital or give it cover will be better resourced than those that don’t. The rest will be used as pressure release valves. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune.

Historically speaking, African America — from Reconstruction forward — has struggled to exist inside a white supremacist nation-state—one that retreated for a few years but now seems determined to make a comeback. During Reconstruction, African American civil society germinated among self-help groups, schools, churches, funeral societies, cooperatives, and other formations. The general belief (with some major exceptions) was that African America might be eventually incorporated into the surrounding society as equals.

As Marx might point out, with no access to the means of production, however, upward mobility was restricted. The emergent African American sub-bourgeoisie did not control banks or factories, and so could only engage in entrepreneurial activities that remained dependent on credit from white financial capital and supply chains from white productive capital. Wealth within the internal colony was accumulated by church leaders alongside retail and service enterprises — barber and beauty shops, funeral homes, corner stores, etc. Big capital cashed in from afar, concealing their presence behind black bodies, but retaining the basis of power.

These were the upwardly mobile families that learned two things: first, you have to be able to work with suppliers (white folks), and second, your credibility depends on performing white respectability. The latter emphasis on respectability (in politics now) remains powerful today. In 1998, Randall Kennedy wrote about the struggle for respectability in African America:

A . . . core intuition of the politics of respectability is that, for a stigmatized racial minority, successful efforts to move upward in society must be accompanied at every step by a keen attentiveness to the morality of means, the reputation of the group, and the need to be extra-careful in order to avoid the derogatory charges lying in wait in a hostile environment.

This kind of grasping at respectability, especially among people who are trying to “move up,” for whatever group in whatever time, is not primarily motivated by economic concerns; money is a means to an end, but the goals of making money are status, acceptance . . . and then power. Respectability has economic demands, i.e., fashion and consumption codes, which require the circulation and accumulation of money. Respectability, then, lives inside the architecture of capital, and its practical companion is consumption.

Complicating an already contradictory situation is the struggle of any subaltern community to overcome the dominant narrative of innate inferiority and its attendant self-loathing and loss of self-esteem. The fightback against these conjoined phenomena includes “proof of equality” strategies and the quest for paragons.

In a world of limitations, the most privileged, talented, and-or driven will press into whatever arena are most readily available. In the US, those available arenas for racial paragons have been entertainment — whether media or sports (often the same thing) — both of which remain dependent upon “white money.” Now, some few African Americans are now actual members of the haute bourgeoisie, billionaires, and identify with its interests completely, which means an interest in maintaining the stability of the very system where the more general economic and social subjugation of African America is built into its structures. (The mortgage bubble, for example, which grew under Obama’s first term, has a very outsized impact on African Americans; and when it popped, Obama bailed out Wall Street while African America lost an unprecedented amount of wealth.)

Politics has also become one of those arenas . . . Democratic Party politics, that is, for our day and age.

Barack Obama went to law school, worked in non-profits, and rose up as a political figure inside Chicago’s “Daly machine.” Comfortably bi-racial, with an uncanny practical political instinct, he fitted himself into that bourgeois racial demilitarized zone where the one-percent celebrates its own diversity without challenging the structures of capital still dependent on the broader stability inherited from racial capitalism.

Barack Obama became, as the first African American head of the American settler-colonial state, a racial paragon. And I cannot dismiss this . . . our own biracial children were buoyed by his victory, and it gave them — and millions of other black kids (including ours) — a refreshed sense of their own potential. Symbolism is not mere. It has material force.

Obama wasn’t only a paragon and a symbol. He fitted in with a form of African American political conservatism that is still dominant. BY that I don’t mean ideological conservatism—though there is some of that—but tactical conservatism.

Joe Biden’s candidacy is a perfect example or this. Black folks know damn well that Biden was one of the chief attack dogs against Anita Hill, that he was an apologist for racist opposition to busing, that he promoted the carceral state, that he voted consistently for war, that he peddled influence, and that he can drift into incoherence at the drop of a hat.

The political calculus — possibly from long association with the multiracial Democratic Party — is based on a linear-continuum theory of American politics. The theory goes: there is an ideological left, a center, and a right — equally populated by the white majority — and that to win against the right (read, hostile and racially malevolent white Republicans), it’s necessary (as a form of collective self-defense!) to have candidates that are marginally better than Republicans who can “appeal to the (white majority) center.” The thing is . . . Republicans really are and long have been—since Nixon’s Southern Strategy—dangerous to African Americans. This is not some irrational fear.

Black Democratic “conservatism” is a niche-protection strategy, and it’s generational. As a rule, the older we get, the more firmly we are committed to our beliefs and the more conservative we become with regard to dramatic change, or the threat of it. One thing that most, older Democratic voters agree on—white, African American, and other—is this linear-continuum theory of American politics. [←remember, written in 2020—SG, 2026] Because this was true during that generation’s most politically formative years.

The problem is that it was true only with respect to defeating the rightest right-wing electorally. This culminated with Bill Clinton, who, once elected, rode the speculative wave of the nineties to sustained popularity (a highly leveraged speculative orgy that went bust a few years later under Bush with little modification (see “mortgage bubble above), and it has not worked since.

Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton all crashed and burned.

Obama defied the trend with a powerful grassroots ground game and strong youth and African American support — riding Hope-and-Change to victory against dreadful Republican opponents who were strapped to the Bush II war legacy like a giant shit-bomb.

There’s no doubt that Obama is a skilled politician, as well as a skilled orator, and a man who, with his family, exudes respectability.

“They’re such a classy family.”

It’s a potent mix, and all of us can remember how people admired the First Lady’s social skills, civility, and decorum . . . which has come into stark relief now in comparison with Trump’s family of psychopathic opportunists, bimbos, mashers, thieves, and bullies.

The irony is that black respectability — once seen as a way of gaining white acceptance — has not won over all of “white” society except among the white liberals and white civil society that was already in Obama’s camp. As African America performed respectability all the way up into the Oval Office, the most reactionary fraction (and a big one at that) of white society has abandoned respectability altogether in favor of open fascistic intimidation and terror.

It was an easy transition, because behind the public political scenes, this intimidation and terror remained part and parcel of black life in parts of America, even with a select group of black leaders and influencers invited into the champagne rooms of the capitalist retainer class.

All of this is new and not new. There is an echo of the historic struggle within African America here, between the ideas and practices of accommodationists, separatists, and rebels — each of whom presented compelling narratives. If we think back to W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington, we can hear that echo.

DuBois embraced a race-conscious class struggle narrative. Garvey was one of several popular “black nation” separatists. Washington was an accommodationist. Of all these, it’s easiest now to denounce Washington (from this far distance) for being unmanly or whatever; but we have to bear in mind that Washington did not see the struggle as between rebellion and accommodation — as DuBois had framed it. These debates were backgrounded by waves of lynching. Washington saw the choice as one between accommodation and extermination. It’s never simple.

Right or wrong, this is the essence of tactical political conservatism. There are still black communities where this stark choice is closer to the surface than any white community can fully comprehend. White “progressives” would do well to get their teeth into this reality and not let go. There is a lot more to reasonably fear from dramatic change of any kind for subaltern communities than there is for white people drinking overpriced coffee as they discuss how they want to “build a new future,” engaging in facile and wholesale reductions of Obama to (oh, ick) a neoliberal. (Yes, he is, but there’s more to it than that!)

Surely we remain aware of the ways we who opposed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and critically supported Obama in 2008 and 2012 had to call out Obama and Clinton on their dreadful policies on the one hand, while defending them against attacks that were explicitly sexist and racist on the other.

It’s a delicate dance for anyone — especially white folks — to criticize Obama. Obama-as-paragon and Obama-as-symbol are not going away. Because, while it should not be a the only way we understand the Obama phenbomenon, it’s still crucially important. White progressives understand at some level that white people have less standing to judge on this account; but they often mistake this question of standing—because they have their own erroneous takes on “race,” a subject we’ll defer for elsewhere—for a prohibition against discussing race apart from their own (let me say, liberal) woke-takes. In fact, a deeper critique of Obama et al has to be understood and further elaborated as part of a shared, and yet unshared, political reality. Because the Democratic establishment is using the “black vote” against them, and will continue to do so.

What black and white share are a ruling class, money-dependency, and the state.

What is not shared, or partially-shared, is a great deal of lived experience.

Even in our multiracial family, the white folks have a different experience of the world outside our homes.

The background is changing. For starters, the capitalist end-game is coming into view right now — with runaway climate catastrophe less than two decades away, the house of financial cards growing higher and more precarious, and a resurgence of fascistic political tendencies (capitalism will always rely on the mailed fist in the end). The latter is mirrored by a growing anti-austerity movement around the world . . . and one growing inside the United States, embodied for the time being in the Sanders electoral challenge — essentially an anti-austerity campaign by another name. Anti-austerity — whether in Haiti or Spain or Ireland or Iraq or Sudan or Chile — means anti-neoliberal.

The present-day African American political establishment has been thoroughly incorporated into Democratic Party politics. The way up, through civil society, was a selection process. Whether through non-profits, small business, or the Academy, the way up is competitive. When I was getting paid with Soros money, we were in a cutthroat competition for grant money, even against our ideological allies . . . sometimes especially against out ideological allies. Upward mobility means pleasing the money-people, and pleasing the money-people means delivering something in return. You have to demonstrate your ability to persuade and organize a real base. You have to have influence.

It should be unsurprising that much leadership in black communities emerges from the church. Preachers are, by definition, influencers. Among black academics, business administration remains the most popular major.

Every gate upward is controlled by capital; and they make people compete with their peers to get through them. Here is a niche, if you can “earn” it. Once you’ve earned it, be aware, you can always lose it again. This demand to fit in is closely related to the respectability politics that was embodied by Obama, a veteran of non-profit-dom.

When Randall Kennedy — himself a promoter of respectability politics — described “the need to be extra-careful in order to avoid the derogatory charges lying in wait in a hostile environment,” he could have been describing what I saw in the non-profit world. Any black director was subject to the most vicious kinds of opposition research, something true in the larger political world as well. Any misstep drew glee from the right and “what a shame” horseshit from liberals. One particularly poisonous thing a friend described to me was how 501(c)(3)s that were floundering would hire a black female director. The gamble was (in the “social change” non-profits) that a token of diversity might improve fundraising, and if the already-failing project went belly-up, the white liberal funders could cluck their tongues and say . . . “What a shame,” meaning she just wasn’t ready, or some comparably insipid trope. The she would be saddled with the failure, while her white predecessors would have already been hired elsewhere.

Once you’ve earned it, be aware, you can always lose it again. That’s the white establishment’s finger trap. Remember, we can always shake our heads and mutter, “What a shame!”

All these interfolding phenomena, over time, have involved a trialectic between deterministic generalities and structures, particularistic histories and relations, and singular local realities, as well as the dominant perceptions and misperceptions of each era. Sometimes — in fact, most times — the perceptions and misperceptions are based on “legacy-thinking” that hasn’t caught up with existing reality except “at home.” Most legacy-thinking originates at home. That’s why belief systems are so generationally resilient. Our families were our first and most formidable interpreters of reality.

The power of legacy-thinking can be summed us thus:

I can describe with great accuracy what is going on in this room right now.

If I’m describing the town I live in, there are more legacy-thoughts — ideas about things I have formed earlier and not yet been disabused of — in my perception of the town’s realities.

If I’m describing the nation or the world, I have an even greater reality-deficit.

This spatiotemporal lag is something with a military analog.

In Korea, they fought using WWII tactics through serial failures, then in Vietnam, they fought using Korea tactics through serial failures, then in Iraq, they began using Vietnam ideas that resulted in serial failures, and so on. If the Peter Principle for bureaucracies says that “One moves up to his or her first level of incompetence,” then my own principle for these warfighting doctrines would say, “We always fail with the old tactics first.”

Legacy-thinking may be right or wrong; but what is right one day can be wrong the next. The antidote is more information in new interpretive frameworks.

The same thing applies more generally to us older folks — of all ethnicities — because we coast similarly into new realities with old ideas . . . new wine in old wineskins. President Obama’s popularity is based in part on this, too. Older white liberals are among the most ardent Obama-worshippers I’ve encountered. “He has such a classy family.” “He is so articulate.” (yup)

Older white liberals, however, are not in anyone’s gunsights the way black folks are in, say, today’s Arkansas or Mississippi. Their perception of Obama-as-respectable-paragon is not the same kind of paragon as he is in African America. White liberals approve of him because he is, for them, “one of the good ones,” meaning he fits white-established norms of education, polish, and respectability. He can be every white liberal’s proverbial “black friend.”

White liberals will never fully comprehend the attitude of self-defense that African America lives inside every day. African Americans cannot escape their “blackness” in an increasingly dangerous white world—especially the one dog-whistled by Trump—where the only political bunker seems to be the perfidious Democratic Party. And for white liberals, Obama cannot have the same meanings as he does for a people who are constantly bombarded with messages of inadequacy, who are starved for the counter-fact that a black man was once the chief-of-state for “the most powerful nation.”

Does all this lead to reflexive defenses of the indefensible? Of course. It’s an aspect of hero-worship that’s generalizable. On the other hand, what indefensible actions taken by President Obama were consistent with likewise indefensible actions by his white predecessors and successors? It’s a negative defense, but sometimes that’s what you have. And yes, Obama substantially strengthened the executive security-state power that Trump has now inherited.

Bringing me to our situation at the beginning of the year 2020.

We’ve emphasized race so far, but let’s not lose track of class relations. As I suggested earlier, the US ruling class is all about diversity these days. There is no problem bringing a few people of color, a few women, and a few sexual minorities into the ruling class. As long as they understand their duties and responsibilities. In fact, the more vulnerable on other accounts the better, because people are going to protect their niche . . . they will conform. They will not rock that little boat. And the boat they’re not rocking is built around a framework of structural inequality.

This year we approach a crucial election, faced in the immediate term with the necessity to rid ourselves of the self-serving pyscho-infant in the White House, and faced with the longer (but still short) term crises of resurgent fascism, climate destabilization, ecocide, mass migration, civil war, and financial collapse. (←little did I know then that the pandemic was at the door —SG, 2026)

Not everyone is aware of how immanent these crises are — in many respects they are already here. Ruling class perception managers are hard at work to provide us with the rationalizations we need to reassure ourselves that we are good people and that things will somehow work out. They’ve already been effective at convincing most of us that they are motivated by more than the desire to accumulate more, by some Pollyanna version of the common good (that only incidentally requires us to buy their shit).

The persistence of Joe Biden’s popularity among African Americans in the face of his personal history is in part attributable to his association in the popular imagination with President Obama. We already know, some of us at least, that the ruling class, embodied in part in the Democratic Party establishment, knows how to tip their spears against the left with women, sexual minorities, and people of color — how to weaponize identity. And that’s worked to a substantial extent. But just as importantly, or more so, Biden is the tactically conservative choice as legacy-thinking leads us back to the linear continuum theory of elections.

Seldom mentioned nowadays is that Obama tactically selected Biden as running mate/VP precisely to appeal to that mythical white center that leans slightly to the right. And this might suggest that it worked because of that tactic. It was not. President Obama was the beneficiary of a confluence of factors, including that phenomenal ground game, strong establishment backing, really incompetent Republican challengers, strong youth support, and record turnouts among African Americans. Given his margins of victory, that five percent that is the actual shifting white center — which includes the Obama-Trump voters. Obama-Trump voters are those who voted for Obama in 2008–2012 then switched to Trump in 2016.

The white-right-center represented by Biden was insufficient to account for Obama’s victory . . . but this 2016 defection from Obama to Trump (13% of Trump’s vote!) was determinative of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 debacle.

The reality, which flies in the face of our legacy-thinking, our old wine in the new wineskins, is that this fraction of voters, who rejected Clinton but would have substantially supported Sanders, and who finally voted with Trump, hated “free trade” agreements, had experienced decades of Democratic neglect and bullshit, and they registered their boiling resentment in a fuck-you-all vote for the Orange Baboon.

I believe to this day, as a resident of Michigan — one of those key states Clinton lost — Sanders would have defeated Trump. I believe he is the only candidate who can defeat Trump in 2020, but let me not digress. [I totally failed to anticipate Covid-19 combined with the efficacy of the “southern-wall” tactic —SG, 2026]

In 2016, Sanders may have lost to Clinton even without the DNC’s relentless cheating. We’ll never know. This year, he has a real path to the nomination. As of now, capital has no candidate. Capitalists are not cooperative. They are all spending most of their time figuring out how to seagull each other’s customers by any means necessary and drive competitors into bankruptcy. Capitalism is a blood sport.

We don’t see this clearly here, but during my many sojourns in Haiti, a nation with the population of North Carolina, this was easier to see because there were still two distinct opposing ruling classes . . . the land-bourgeoisie (grandons) and the merchant-bourgeoisie (compradors), whose rivalry actually included murder from time to time. Their very interests were antithetical. There was only one thing that could consistently unite them: assertions of popular will. Any time the great mass of Haitians became restless and started making demands, the grandons and the compradors went shoulder to shoulder in support of violent repression of the masses.

What the Haitian ruling class — divided most times against itself — feared was not (in my day) Aristide, the populist President who was elected twice and twice deposed by US-supported coups. Aristide was the point of attack, the head of the snake as they saw it; but the real fear was of all those people, millions of people seething with resentment and not a hell of a lot to lose.

What the US ruling class fears right now is not Bernie Sanders — who they do consider to be an existential threat. But their real fear is of us — a politically mobilized population. And as the social democratic rebellion expands, which it will ,being a youth-driven movement, capital’s perception of the threat will become more vivid and compelling. These insurgents, we insurgents, are already talking about wiping out insurance companies and fossil fuel industries, about breaking up monopolies.

At this stage, that has meant promoting the Biden-electability myth, the linear-continuum theory of elections and the black tactical conservatism that goes with it. They pump the bellows around this epistemic flame, and it’s holding a few lines . . . including the line in African America, especially African Americans who are over 40.

In 2020, this “Southern wall” has come up against a bloc of equal strength — the renewed movement-centric, multiracial, explicitly working class campaign/movement of Senator Sanders. The movement is heavily weighted toward the young, including substantial numbers of African American youth. (←oh, my unbridled optimism! —SG, 2026)

In February, the voting begins. If Sanders wins Iowa, then New Hampshire, he has a good chance of taking Nevada, too. Trends indicate that this is very possible. In South Carolina, Sanders has climbed to 20 percent as this is written, decreasing Biden’s lead (now at 27 percent). This is obviously the strategy of the Sanders campaign. Moreover, Sanders just broke the five million mark on individual donors in the last quarter of 2019, putting together almost $35 million in one quarter while Biden’s campaign is in the red.

In December, we saw the establishment media suddenly take notice of Sanders’ durability and strategic acumen. This is the media of the ruling class, the Svengalis of spin . . . or once they were. Even they are being hollowed out by popular exhaustion with thirty-five years of the same meaningless pap, but they still have a hold on those of us over 50 who still get most of our news from television.

Network media are kind of a barometer. That barometer just registered alarm. The ruling class is marshaling its forces. We already see a sustained and expensive campaign against Medicare For All. They are trying to figure out how to kill the Sanders candidacy without leaving their fingerprints at the scene.

This year, we can expect ex-President Obama, in accordance with all the norms of establishment respectability, to assist in the sabotage of the Sanders campaign. Big threats requite big guns. Obama is a big gun, especially on Super Tuesday when much of the South will vote at once.

Obama’s power is considerable, given his unshakable popularity among the majority of black voters and the fact that the bloc of black voters now has the limited but substantial power to select nominees and the unlimited potential power to stop the Democratic Party in its tracks. This power, however, is a based on mutually assured destruction — the Democratic Party as institution versus African America’s voting bloc . . . each can kill off the other by walking out. They are bound together, because they can no longer exist without each other, even if and when the Democratic Party establishment forgets most of African America once they’re in office.

The Democratic Party itself is an institution in deep crisis with a lengthening track record of political incompetency. Black leadership within the Democratic Party and its civil society cohort are now in the unenviable position — only years after African Americans gained real power within the party — of being locked into a room with a bomb . . . or a corpse. The real danger is that when this moribund party fails — barring a social democratic takeover and makeover — African America might be left politically homeless in an increasingly dangerous milieu.

The insularity of the ruling class translates into the ruling class perceiving “through a glass darkly.” As society becomes less stable — and we are inside a deep political crisis in the US — the old epistemic architecture shudders on its foundations. As of now, the tattered Democratic establishment (a party that is now broke and in debt) is seeking a new position — further to the right, of course, that’s their MO — alongside Bush neoconservatives. The new line is that of the national security state. MSNBC and CNN feature dozens of talking heads from the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency — a national security establishment with a long history in African America . . . as its implacable enemy. This is their answer to Trump. It’s not working. His minions do not follow the rules, and even the rule-breaking is a cause for celebration by the Trump cult — a huge rump of white proto-fascists, many of whom fantasize about race war . . . and even genocide.

Here is where the Democratic Party establishment strategy is aimed directly at another defeat in 2020 if they come to the fight with Joe Biden. Biden’s “moderate” appeal in the Democratic Primary will spin down and burst into flame in the General Election campaign. [Again, this prognostication failed . . . Covid-19 and Trump’s incompetent and incoherent response handed the game to Biden, then, in 2024. handed it back to Trump. —SG, 2026]

The electorate is not particularly political, not in the way people who read political blogs are. But as the grinding insecurity and subterranean anger of the post-2007–8 crash continues, it sensitized voters to political bulshittery. We’ve heard politicians spout glittering generalities and obvious equivocations while doing jack shit for decades. Part of Trump’s appeal, especially among that Obama-Trump voter fraction, but more generally as well, is what-you-see-is-what-you-get: that mysterious quality called “authenticity.”

Clinton failed the authenticity test in 2016. Kamala and Beto failed it in 2019. When and if Joe Biden goes up against Trump, Trump’s campaign will only have to run loops of his idiotic gaffes, punctuated by the fact that he used his power to enrich his family.

Once the Democratic Party’s stupid impeachment strategy of focusing exclusively a campaign finance violation in Ukraine — where the trail leads to Biden’s influence peddling — has been a gift to Republicans. Trump’s popularity has increased with this limitation strategy (necessary, because wider investigations open up questions about many, many Democratic party elected officials).

This strategy on impeachment will result in (1) pulling Democratic Senators running for the nomination, Sanders and Warren, i.e., off the campaign trail for the Senate trial, (2) forcing Biden to continue his indefensible defense of his own actions as a self-serving influence-peddler, and (3) giving the Trump campaign the beautiful gift of “Biden The Inauthentic” against whom they can run . . . and win. This is real, and it’s scary as hell. We are on the cusp of a dangerous war this moment because this jackass plays with the military like he’s a four-year-old general. He still has access to nuclear launch codes.

In the past couple of weeks, it has come to light that ex-President Obama’s surrogates have been linking in to the Warren campaign. As every tactic they’ve used so far to stop the social democratic rebellion in the party has failed, and as a Sanders victory becomes a real possibility, this sad vestige of an establishment has been forced to consider a retrenchment with Elizabeth Warren. Warren has repeatedly signaled that she is open to this approach.

Obama is likely reluctant to associate himself with any failed project, which is a tricky position today in the Democratic Party; but if Sanders walks into South Carolina with a big bag of delegates in his knapsack and pulls 25 percent (the split-and-share threshold is 15 percent), Obama might be tapped as the artillery cover for that retrenchment. If Biden appears to be dissolving, Obama might endorse Warren before Super Tuesday.

I’ve explained elsewhere why Warren would also be a precious gift to Trump, because — Pocahantas, Pow-Wow Chow, the beer commercial — inauthenticity. But these are the moves left for a disorganized army in retreat. I give an Obama endorsement of Warren a 50–50 chance, because a legacy is not something an ex-President wants to subject to any hazard, especially by submitting to be a cynical weapon in a losing battle — a person who might be reasonably held responsible in any degree for a 2020 Trump victory. (Yep, the Covid black swan make a monkey out of me and my prognostications. —SG, 2026)

There is only one candidate in the Democratic race right now who is most immune to the charge of inauthenticity: Bernie Sanders. He is also the Democrat who beats Trump in head-to-head polls among that Obama-Trump fraction — the fraction of Trump’s victory over Clinton. Of course, these voters are not going to the polls on Super Tuesday (with the exception of Minnesota).

Do I believe that Super Tuesday will determine the rest of the race? Yes, and no. Yes, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia are voting that day (March 3rd). African America will have a strong voice that day, as African Americans are a huge fraction of Southern Democrats. But the other states include Texas, a giant, and California, a leviathan. Sanders is very competitive in Texas and already dominating in California.

What does this all mean, apart from horse race analysis and who and what-to-others is Barack Obama? It means we have to patiently engage with our elders, white and black and other (I’ve not excluded “others,” but contained my focus to Obama and African America for this piece). We aren’t looking at just an election. We are looking for a strategic orientation that is aimed at rescuing the world from a calamity that is already a rumbling dark cloud on the horizon.

Capital will kill every one of us to stay in power, the most vulnerable first, and they will destroy a planet as well. Everything must be oriented on this. The election is only a first small but essential step, gaining a hand hold on the state.

African America is high on capital’s kill-the-most-vulnerable-first target list. That’s why I hope fewer and fewer people will listen to ex-President Obama; but we better understand his positives, his enduring status as The First, the Paragon, the Symbol. It’s not simple, and it’s never easy.

More on politics and tactics, because post-Primary election spin is getting on my last fucking nerve.

Spinning and worse . . . whining.

The powerful are exercising their power against us and it isn’t fair. Wah-wah-wah!

One of our granddaughters, at the ripe old age of seven, told her little brother once, “Life’s not fair.” (Ashamed to admit I had to suppress my laughter.) Seriously, a seven-year-old could understand this—albeit in a situation where yes she’d taken advantage of her little brother—and a bunch of grown-ass adults in the mediasphere of politics can’t seem to grasp it.

And do we have to spin? Just because the other guys do? Isn’t that just a weakened way of lying?

I know all the arguments . . . and the realities. It’s all driven by perception management and ceaseless competition. We can’t just unilaterally disarm on the psychological operations front. Blah-de-fucking-blah, blah, blah.

I mean, that’s what spin and push polls and all that other—let me just say—transparent bullshit is about. Fight for the engagement—the clicks and views and subs—to keep our propaganda organs alive. Nudge the excitement here, the “enemy’s” disenchantment there.

It’s dying down now as other flavor-of-the-day stories—weaponizing Jason Arday’s suicide is The (really execrable) Thing right now—but for a few days after the August Primaries, all we could hear in some quarters was whether Francesca Hong’s surprise defeat was a victory or a defeat for the leftish insurgency inside the Democratic Party.

Battle of the Spin.

As my dear old mother used to say, “Makes my ass wanna take a dip of snuff.” (←We Southerners says funny things . . . a really great meal might inspire us to say, “That was so good, itta make ya slap ya mama.”)

Nudge and spin affect me in that rectal-tobacco kind of way.

I understand correction and even unmasking the spin of others. But it’s like a fucking finger trap this shit. But in a way—no, not a way, in actuality—it means we have surrendered something approximating a moral high ground. We’re just as manipulative as the bad guys. ←This is how a milieu, a zeitgeist, ratchets us away from the truth . . . yeah, that little thing.

Maybe this has just revivified the ornery ops sergeant in my head, my past self who held to the more “silence and cunning” ethos.

I mean, mass manipulation reproduces and amplifies this compulsion to chatter. From a purely tactical standpoint—there, now I’ve gone and abandoned the ground truths on behalf of expedience—it’s fucking stupid. Why telegraph your punches? More to the point, why waste the energy?

I know the feminists and a few of the woo-woos are generally the only ones who ever cite Audre Lorde, the Grenadian feminist contemplative; but I read “The Uses of the Erotic” years ago (because I have great sympathy for certain feminisms), and there was some plain, let us say even thermodynamic, common sense in there.

She points out that “power,” or just energy if you will, is not infinite. Energy has to be husbanded. It takes energy to have sex, just as it takes energy to do the dishes or cut the grass. Each person only has so much of it. There’s a burnout boundary.

“This . . . requirement toward excellence,” Lorde wrote, “. . . must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others.”

I would add time as another key factor defined by its finitude.

It’s a raw calculus—as my old military calculi were. There’s this mission, stated in clear descriptive terms as a “desired end state.” To accomplish this mission, we have X number of people, with X amount of time, and X amount of various resources, in an environment that can be likewise described . . . and likewise an opposing force with its X, X, and X. There are always some unknowns and uncontrollables, which we try to minimize.

Sometimes, the initial attempts to accomplish the mission fall short. It turned out to be harder than originally anticipated. What one doesn’t do—or shouldn’t—is whine about it, or try to pass blame, and all the other shit I see on a daily basis by political commentators with their fantasies and agendas.

We used phonetic alphabet in the military, because voices are distorted on the radio, so we spelled shit out using a shared word-letter code. Sometimes we used the code along with known abbreviations. In response to someone asking if a transmission was clear, we would say “loud and clear, how me?” Only it was, “lima charlie hotel mike.” Sometimes we’d make jokes—”lickin’ chicken how’s yer mother?”

“Charlie mike” was understood as a directive: continue the mission. Subtext: “I don’t give a fuck that it’s harder than anticipated. Mission takes priority.”

Fall back, secure the rally point, assess what happened and why, change the tactics to suit the unanticipated and now known variables, make another run at the objective. As the old blues tune goes, “Cryin’ won’t help ya.” The levee’s down, figure the shit out.

Invest our energy not in spinning and whining, but for the charlie mike. Then bust out on them at the critical times with what they never saw coming.

That’s all. Just had to vent.

Peace.

FICTION INDEX

Kid’s stuff—two children’s stories

“Finding Chico”

A family’s dog disappears on Christmas.

“Sy-Ko the skwerl”

An unusual squirrel’s life near The Long Brick House.

Novels—the second is a sequel to the first.

Smitten Gate (genre—war noir)

Abner Dale, a soldier leaning into retirement, is going mad. Leaving behind a wife who’s afraid to live with him and a daughter who’s a biracial prodigy in grad school at eighteen, he’s posted to Afghanistan where he’s expected to fix a Special Forces detachment that’s become an incompetent criminal clique. Enter a frustrated and glory-seeking post commander who thinks Dale is just the right man to lead the dysfunctional team on a difficult operation. What could go wrong?

New Moons and Sabbaths (genre—detective fiction)

She’s a savant, people say. She speaks three languages and majored in philosophy at age fourteen. She’s half “white” and half “black” and dresses like a man. She’s an angler, a wildlife photographer, and a private investigator. She drives a pickup truck. Her name is Deangela Dale.

Eleven years ago, her father was killed in Afghanistan at the same time that a vengeful sexual predator destroyed her promising academic career, casting her into a dark valley of isolation and addiction. After clawing her way back to normalcy, her consummate desire is for some detached normality, a rail upon which she can ride out life’s little pleasures and disappointments without the grand dramas. As to her father, he’s gone, memorialized as a hero . . . and Deangela doesn’t want to dig up any graves.

Now she suffers another blow, the death of her beloved mentor, and she’s determined not to descend back into that well of despair. Recovering from this fresh loss, she’s approached by a hard-bitten stranger named Felix who hires her to investigate a corrupt policeman. The hitch? This cop was on the mission that killed her father. Reluctantly, she accepts; but soon enough the investigation starts turning up unwelcome questions, unwelcome answers . . . and unwelcome attention.

Felix is no mere client, the target is no mere cop, and deadly serious people in power will conceal at all costs the truth surrounding her father’s fateful mission. Felix may be walking her into another dark valley, the one from which there’s no return.

POETRY INDEX

In November 2022, I started to try my hand at poetry—something which I’ve long found intimidating. These are in chronological order of their composition. I generally spend less than a day in writing one, mostly in the mornings when I’m caffeinated up to my eyes and fresh off my own frequently disturbing dreams. (I dread sleep sometimes, and doubt I’m alone in this—it’s a terrific loss of control.)

Me the interval

After “Me the interval,” I marinated for months in my own sense of inadequacy. Picked up the quill again in October 2024.

dreamabout

Ave, the creature dying

Soteriology

Walking backwards

Flare

Daybreak

Half brother

Inkblot

haiku—first try (felt I needed some discipline)

haiku 2

2:47 a.m.

haiku 3

haiku 4

haiku 5

haiku 6

haiku 7

haiku 8

haiku 9

The Doggerel Seven

Veterans Day Song

haiku 10

it’s me

concrete feet

Robby’s girl

3-2-1

January

in all things gone

West Mountain Vega

against fear and space

it’s a good thing

America

Flood

Tomb

fallen

yours and mine and his and hers

runaway

feather

the house

jahmbi

Mayfly

abandoned San Lorenzo

jardin des rêves

in greener years

weights and measures

Private Greene

if you know

core drill

theodicy

lullaby

past present and absent

that world alive upon her

the smart ones

anesthetic

the gentle boys turned into men

Linen dreams and gremlin wombs

between the sixth and seventh hours

either way

revelation

were some we’ve seen their dimpled years
whose tears had walked across a heart
before the mocking and the fear
struck the chisel at the core

the gentle boys turned into men
burned away by joyless love
like clay subjected to the kiln
of the prior and restless sect

before the blades and troubled nights
they slumbered light in shaded glades
before the guns and fights had won
before the amputations

the sorry-songs and penalties
long from the lost and dimpled time
bossed and stripped and armored up
harmed and harming by the script

the gentle boys in graveyard lines
like noisy wraiths with strip-mined eyes
of colorblind impoverished faith
all love a dull injury

some gray old men recount their sins
they cry alone for the bending
of gentle boys turned into men
and mourn this dispossession

others still from slave to master
mothers lost like wisdom teeth
diadem imaginations
rape and ravage worn like skin

clocks and injured schemes are stalking
lads in hazy prima vistas
gazing free and licking ice cream
peril curling ’round their feet

that which is wanting cannot be numbered

we sheltered once from comfort
from listless mitigation
tending every itch forthwith
each everyday deflation
we sing now of platitude
we cry for glittered twaddle
stage our practiced attitudes
and pray into a bottle

the angel red
on metal road
robbed our rage
and keyed a code

the mislaid seasons twisted
inward of unlighted box
the flights of fancy cancelled
and yes too, the flights of hawks
sing the songs of lydocaine
cry the streams of paneled hate
grip a handled seam of chalk
pray the lines that masturbate

in resting rooms
the angel black
writes comic books
of likes and lack

these pavement days in clusters
palpated like a notion
resurrect the unseen dawns
and taste of tanning lotion
we sing with autotuners
and cry on a foamy bed
land our planes on toilet seats
and pray to the ever dead

with plastic teeth
and sanded skin
the angel green
displays a grin

anesthetic microdreams
crossing canyons clean and cool
filter screens on headshop racks
rows of hatchbacks after school
we sing the tunes of temple tarts
cry for cartoon candy love
speak so lies don’t come apart
pray into a fashion glove

the Paxil map
will aim the way
along the dreams
of angel gray

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is one of my favorite online resources. I recommend to to any and all. It has an entry on the topic of “free will,” one of those unnecessarily tortured subjects like the nature-nurture controversies which accompany it. The debates reoccur like a cold virus, season after season after season.

The reason these debates refuse to die is—as Stanford says early—the gravity of the consequences that attach to the debates. The debates are tangled up with metaphysics, ethics, and law—the latter of which deals in matters of crime and punishment, and therefore life and death.

So, free will or no free will?

Any time such a debate continues with no apparent resolution in sight, it means one of two things—perhaps both at once. Either the debaters are operating on what MacIntyre identified as terminally incommensurable premises with no language of transmissibility, or the terms of the debate are premised on one or more false dichotomies.

(Or perhaps the concept of free will is . . . leaky.)

Once upon a time, this was a religious question. I suppose in some respects it still is and always will be. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, can any of us as God’s creatures truly exercise “free will”? How can we be judged by God if we have no “free will”? You get the picture.

I’m going to back up here to will—just that, before all the “free” stuff. What the dictionary tries to boil down to three related things: will is (1) the mental faculty by which one deliberately chooses or decides upon a course of action, (2) diligent purposefulness; determination, and (3) self-control; self-discipline.

The will aims at something, so it is preceded by desire. (Here’s my little e-book on Desire.) A person, for whatever reason, wants something. Without an object of desire, the will cannot exist—and so I’m going to say that direction, aim, telos, is constitutive of will without being will’s totality.

If you dissect a human being, that person is already dead (or better be). If you try to fit will into the dictionary boxes above, you rob it of its vitality. The three definitions of will above are different uses of the word. But when we take into account that desire—which aims the will at something—is potentially infinite, a bottomless pit so to speak, unless one also exercises his or her will against certain desires, which is a choice conditioned by self-discipline, all three uses of the word are in operation at once.

Desires can be shaped, provoked, manufactured. They can be attractions and aversions. They can bubble up from one’s “unconscious.” Ask any Lacanian, and he or she will point you to a strange little chart that maps this spooky terrain.

If we know not the origin of desire, are our choices free? But we digress . . . sort of. (Lacan was describing Lacan.)

My own little old-man test when encountering leaky subjects like “free will” is to ask myself, “Self, does this leaky subject exist on its own prior to an actual subject? As in a person-subject?” If the answer is no—which in this case it is—then I take that leaky subject out of the water and patch it up by re-attaching it to the person-subject. There is, in no case anywhere ever, a free-floating will. Even God’s will, however conceptualized, still has a personalized subject. There is my will and your will and his will and her will, but never just will—”free” or not. In fact, the noun will can make one forget for a moment that will is also a verb. Instead of my will and your will and his will and her will, we might better think in terms of I will and you will and he wills and she wills.

This may strike some as a strange thing to say, given that I’ve also repeated the claim that each instantiation of individual consciousness participates in a universal consciousness that precedes each instantiation—but let’s not be sidetracked. Consciousness is not synonymous with will, even though will presupposes consciousness.

Willing—as in I will and you will and he wills and she wills (Oh Lord, I just gave myself a Little Feat earworm*)—implies intent. I penned a little thing last year about Elizabeth Anscombe—well-know philosopher of intent—with regard to crime fiction, to which I’m terminally addicted. Crime—however defined—and its adjudication always revolves around questions of intent.

Manslaughter is homicide without the element of intent.

Sorry, I didn’t intend to back into your car.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Intent is a term pregnant with moral philosophy, psychology, and law—with desire, will, and ethics; but it’s also pregnant with literature, that is, with human weaknesses and limitations. We can intend to do things without fully appreciating the likely consequences. We can take intentional actions on behalf of desires over which we’ve lost control . . . or desires we don’t even recognize.

I might be of such a disposition that I can say intentionally say something obnoxious without realizing that it’s obnoxious, and therefore without intending it to be obnoxious. It may be the only way, given my disposition, history, and formation, that I know how to state what I believe to be the truth. (This is actually kind of true . . . for me.)

“disposition, history, and formation”

We all know how different people are from one another based on these factors. How one can be “willful,” another “weak-willed,” another who was “given the advantages of a good upbringing,” another whose upbringing aimed him or her at problems early, another “unable to let go of the past,” and so forth. Which is why this “free” business is kind of like walking through the boonies and suddenly stepping off into a boot-sucking mudhole. I mean, what the hell does “free” even mean?

By now, you can see that “free will, yes or no” is a non-starter. It’s like those questions I used to mess with my grandkids: “How far is it to the moon? True or false.” Or, “What’s the difference between a duck?” (Answers respectively: “All of the above,” and “One of it’s feet are both the same.”)

Will is just conditioned by too many things to be treated of independently, and “free” is one of the most elastic and abusable words in the English language. Are you free because you can do what you want? Or can having what you want make you a slave to your desires, unfree? Another old man test: ask the questions, free from what? and free to do what?

What kind of freedom? What kinds of things condition that freedom?

The existentialists said we always have a choice, even if one of those choices is suicide. They described freedom as kind of terrible. Stark-ass people, existentialists. Oh, and they’re always talking about themselves . . . because how does this terrible freedom operate with the variously disabled, the schizophrenic, in the face of ignorance? Each person is him- or herself one of the conditions of choice or freedom. Engels said that freedom is the recognition of necessity. More stark-ass shit, but no doubt certain kinds of knowledge or lack thereof condition the degree to which this or that form of “freedom” can be exercised.

On the other end of the spectrum are hardcore determinists, who claim that at some level we’re all on autopilot (except themselves, godlike somehow). Deep down everything is running like a machine and our consciousness of choice is itself illusory.

I give this stuff pretty short shrift, not only because it’s bullshit on its face—something even a child knows better than to believe . . .

. . . but also because it’s one of those horizon propositions. Like the horizon, you can never get there, because (1) it begs the question and (2) it’s inherently non-disprovable. As soon as one challenges this thesis with facts, the reply—a sophistic regression—is that the determining mechanism operates at the next yet undiscovered level. In some ways, it reminds me, in an impressionistic and not analogical way, of the theological doctrine of predestination . . . which puts us back in the leaky boat of “free will.”

I’m going to make breakfast now. I hope this clears things up.

*I’ll leave you with the lyrics to Little Feat’s “Willin’,” written by the late Lowell George.

I been warped by the rain
Driven by the snow
I'm drunk and dirty, don't you know
And I'm still... willin'
And I was out on the road late at night
I seen my pretty Alice in every headlight
Alice, Dallas Alice
I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the back roads
So I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a sign
I'll be willin'... to be movin'
Well, I've been kicked by the wind
Robbed by the sleet
Had my head stoved in
But I'm still on my feet
And I'm still... willin'
I smuggled some smokes
And folks from Mexico
Baked by the sun
Every time I go to Mexico
And I'm still...
And I been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the back roads
So I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a sign
I'll be willin'... to be movin'

Peace, y’all.

. . . which is not to say that their gains are irrelevant, or that the Democratic establishment is justified in its war against them.

I’m a socialist (of sorts), let’s just get that out there before I add that I don’t believe there’s any such thing as socialism, and there never will be; just as there’s no such thing as capitalism. At least, not in some stable sense that can be reasonably described either in history or in any presumptive future. We’ve all seen the diagrams attempting to explain these various reifications; but in every case, I can assure you, each component can be readily destabilized if not outright debunked by actual history.

The factors that inflect, deflect, and reflect in political economies are too numerous to count and too inter-diffused to parse without sacrificing granular and even certain more general truths. More than that, they’re comprised of far more than effective causation. So, as a socialist (of sorts), I can say, and as an American of quite long standing, the appeal of this reification—socialism—has a limited reach, and when put into the driver’s seat by successful political personalities—no matter how lucky or smart—it has an unknown but inevitable expiration date. I’m sorry that this is such bad news for the managerial mindset with its perpetual delusions of grandeur, but I’ve got tens of thousands of years of history and hundreds of thousands of years of prehistory covering my six on this unpopular assertion.

That kind of control is simply not possible. Never has been. Never will be.

Let me refer to something I’ve not seen covered in public fora. It’s about the recent and meteoric rise of China.

One major reason China has “leapt forward” has less to do with which “parts” of their economy are capitalist and which socialist—state intervention has been critical, of course—and more to do with the broad historical circumstances of China’s industrialization and development.

China started late, and while the Atlantic states were still saddled with their own longstanding industrial legacies, China didn’t have to adapt the old to the new. It just aimed development—relatively speaking—directly at the newer and more efficient. Sometimes, being late to the party becomes an advantage.

The DSA and the so-called “progressive movement,” while tracing their lineages with the same strangely obsessive enthusiasm of my old military units, are nothing like the old US left from which they try to pick and choose like their browsing for lunch at Golden Corral. They are, in fact, a new thing, in a time when the legacy political formations are running low on gas—in both policies and credibility.

I which them luck as they enjoy their outgrowth, but like China—with nothing resembling that scale—the DSA buildout can only continue until it hits those non-cooperative and intransigent material and psychological limits.

Social-ISM, advertised and even believed in as some homeostatic future, ain’t happenin’. DSA has both external and internal limits which is hasn’t yet reached . . . but will.

With those broad boundaries around my thesis, I’m here to beat my deceased mount again about how and why people ought to be thinking beyond DSA et al to match some of their most valuable goals to a much wider audience. During these heady periods (of like fifteen wins), it’s far too easy to imagine that what works in New York or even the purple pissed-off Michigan Primary translates into the same kinds of wins more generally.

DSA has shown remarkable success, but only when it was hyperfocused on the practical business of elections. I’ve been inside DSA, and from the inside it’s a performative sales pitch, wrapped in ideological blankets, and sitting atop a veritable powder keg of unexploded sectarianism.

You can look at the opening picture where members are voting at a convention, then look at the leadership pictured below, and a few things stand out. The leadership’s demographics are dramatically different from the general membership. The latter is still strong-majority male and, by my best estimates, around 80 percent “white.” No doubt, many of these leaders are as competent as any DSA leaders, but I’ve seen this kind of actual versus public demographic mismatch in leftist organizations before. It serves a dual purpose: internal affirmative action and misleading public projection. I n the latter case, the hope is that by “fronting the band” with underrepresented “cis-males” (←yes, DSA uses this bullshit category) and overrepresented “people of color/BIPOC” (see my takedown of this bullshit category here), this will encourage more interest and acceptance from the very “non-white cis-males” who are in fact “underrepresented” in the membership rolls.

In fact, “socialist” ideas have always held more appeal, numerically speaking, among white college-educated men and women, with males predominating. This doesn’t make socialist ideas white, male, or “elite.” Instead, it reflects a number of realities prior to politics that lend themselves to greater or lesser exposure to socialist ideas, greater or lesser willingness to embrace “risky” or unconventional ideas, and a greater or lesser subcultural affinity for the general metaphysical outlook of people who claim to be socialists.

Just as one example that includes this author, as a Christian, which is rarity among self-proclaimed socialists. When you look at the statistics for atheism, you find it trending in the US as majority male, majority college-educated, and majority white if we except “Asians” (what kinds of Asians remains unspecified in these studies which begs a great many questions) who are proportionally more atheistic, but bent politically toward business conservatism. In my own experience on the left from a couple decades ago, East Asian phenotypes were overrepresented, with Chinese and Korean ancestry predominating—among socialists, whereas African Americans were very reluctant to join socialist formations—the exception being my last affiliation, which grew directly out of a black nationalist/socialist amalgamation reaching back onto the 1970s. ←This never demonstrated any appeal beyond its own circles to the general African American demographic; and in my own experience, higher education and Christian affinity among African Americans have a strong correspondence.

DSA is not representative of the non-identitarian category of family. DSA is remarkably single. Almost three out of four DSA members have ZERO “dependents.” This datum corresponds to the average age of DSA members, which clusters heavily between 25-35 years old. This general age group, and not just DSA—facing economic precarity and a few quite justifiable fears about the future—is putting off making babies and families.

There is nothing wrong with DSA’s actual demographic makeup—it is what it is—even though they’re somewhat ashamed of it (having copped to the white liberal guilt thing), and even though DSA detractors, like Republicans and Democratic Party establishment types, cynically cite these statistics to deflect from their own actual elites. Yes, DSA is majority white, majority male, majority college-educated, but the data suggests they are clustered among those with college-educations who are downwardly mobile. A college education today has far less chance of setting one up to support a family than a retail job did in 1968. History shows that precarious middle classes are the motors of political discontent. This is the left’s hot demographic now, just as it was and remains the right’s.

The non-demographic predisposition of socialists is a quasi-paradox—these “collectivists” are—almost to the last man and woman—non-conformists. They’re risk takers in one sense or another, with a penchant for provocation, and many are keen to display or perform their non-conformities. (←youth thing) Leaving aside the fact that capital long ago learned how to co-opt and commodify nonconformity, once one leaves the urban milieu, displays and performances of non-conformity closes the door on political persuasion before anyone tries to knock. Young people can be very attached to displays and performances for a host of reasons, among them fashion, asserting one’s individuality through appearance as actual practices dissolve into technologic and technocratic homogeneity, seeking attention (general and sexual) among one’s peers, and virtue-signaling.

When I say—as a socialist who still has some slightly provocative tendencies—that DSA isn’t “ready” and that it never will be, I mean that DSA will never—as it goes in their own insider vernacular—”take power.” Even DSA icon Zohran Mamdani who now presides over New York City has been forced by reality—and to his credit has responded appropriately as opposed to ideologically—to adopt in practice a more realistic and effective “sewer socialism,” and leave The Revolution with the trots.

When I look at Jersey DSA’s ideological tendencies—which will ultimately come into conflict with one another—especially once the current civil war inside the Democratic Party is lost or won—I know from direct experience with the left, that the sectarian tendency among almost all “socialists” always eventually cause the fault lines to become full fractures.

My best hope for DSA, and I say this as one with sympathy for them in spite of many misgivings and disagreements, is that this struggle inside the Democratic Party will last long enough to continue consolidating their practices in the electoral arena—a practice that might hopefully might chasten (and mature) them. As a student of the Haitian Revolution, I know well how the fight against the French (as well as the English and Spanish) united Louverture, Dessalines, and Christophe, who became enemies as soon as Napoleon’s forces were defeated.

I cited the example of today’s China, and how, as late starters, they encountered far less friction from legacy industry and infrastructure than their Western counterparts. This will continue until power shifts away from the West, especially the US, and re-concentrates eastward and southward in two or more new centers, with China as the industrial hegemon . . . I mean, China is already the industrial hegemon, whether anyone likes it or not.

At some point, however, the ripening of China will transition into rotting as we are now experiencing in the “developed” West; and this transition will be substantially worsened by the general and inevitably global phenomenon of ecologic collapse. (I wrote here about why international conflict forecloses in advance any reasonable hope of stopping thus collapse.) Likewise, DSA will come up against a kind of socio-ecological set of limits as well as its own internal (some might even say inhering) limitations.

I live in a small town in Southeast Michigan (20,000 more or less) an hour and fifteen minutes from Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor is home base for Huron Valley DSA, a large chapter that just had one of their own, Yousef Rabhi, elected as this college town’s new mayor. When we tried to start a chapter here in little Adrian, the meetings were small, undisciplined, and more concerned with getting a trans flag put up behind the library than they were in hitting the street to support the 2016 Sanders campaign. The chapter attempt came apart like a two-dollar shirt. Adrian’s not Ann Arbor, and the tens of thousands of Adrians—small towns of 20,000 or less and rural areas—are where more than 60 million Americans, as well as 39 million souls of voting age, live.

This is a socio-ecological limitation. The same goes for those in places where DSA has had successes. Among those who didn’t vote for DSAers, there are some who—for a variety of reasons, not all related to MAGA or the Democratic establishment—will never vote for a DSAer or a “progressive” candidate. This, too, is a socio-ecological limitation that might be overcome in municipal elections by local majorities, but not at the county, state, or federal level.

If we look at the recent successful campaign here in Michigan of Abdul El-Sayed for the Democratic nomination to replace Gary Peters’ US Senate seat, he never called himself a socialist. He never mentioned trans-activism or the several favorite (and stupid) DSA abolitions—abolish the police, abolish borders, abolish prisons, even abolish the family. He harped on four things: get money out of politics, Medicare For All, stop fighting Israel’s wars, and the one abolition movement that’s gained popular support—abolish Trump’s Gestapo-like ICE.

These are all now majoritarian positions among Michigan Democrats and Independents. Even a few Republicans! He’s a jock, a public health doc, and a personally very conservative married fella with two kids with no history of sexual incontinence. (Wrote about his challenges here.) His campaign motto? “Money out of politics, money in your pocket.” That’s some vanilla shit right there—and we outback denizens love us some fucking vanilla.

El-Sayed predominated in purple Michigan’s many non-urban areas typically ceded to the right . . . because he talked to them. (Few things here about Mamdani’s success in this regard . . . and about the DSA.)

Looking at Wisconsin, where Francesca Hong—a DSA candidate—is looking likely to win the Democratic Primary for Governor in another purple state. Hong, in my view, will have an even harder uphill slog than El-Sayed does here. A chef by trade, she’s an American-born Korean-American, with a potty-mouth by many accounts, who has spent the last five years as a Madison representative in the state legislature. She supports basically the same agenda as El-Sayed; she’s well-spoken hen she has to be; she’s calm (and more or less vanilla in her presentation). She’s adopted a strategy similar to Mamdani—wise decision.

Her drawbacks are (1) she’s fully bought-in and on the record with the politics of identity and (2) she’s an actual member of DSA—a self-proclaimed “socialist.” Any statewide race like hers or El-Sayed’s is going to be a squeaker. Winning the Primary is a different kettle of fish from winning the General. A mere thousand votes can be the difference between the road shoulder and the ditch. She’s downplaying identity and socialism in her campaign and focusing on the issues with good message discipline, but the opposition never forgets shit. Madison—another college town—is not Wisconsin; just like Ann Arbor’s not Michigan. One thing blowing in their favor for the time being is the colossal incompetence and plain reckless vandalism of the Trump administration—a conjuncture with an expiration date.

These two statewide candidates are about to test the socio-economic limits of DSA’s China syndrome (with a favorable anti-Trump tailwind). There will be cultural barriers, language barriers, education barriers, economic barriers, and deep spiritual barriers.

The thing is, Medicare For All (if it weren’t to include full-term abortion on demand and transgender “medicine”) would win this place hands down. So would campaign finance reform. And so would taxing the rich and getting out of Israel’s war. And only if it were NOT promoted as “socialism.” Which is why DSA will never be “ready” for Adrian.

DSA cannot and will not back down on unlimited abortion with which the majority of Americans disagree (most want to limit it to the first trimester).

DSA is subculturally bound to the gender insanity that would allow the further invasion of women’s spaces and sports by men, as well as the drugging and surgical mutilation of perfectly healthy young bodies.

DSA is an explicitly “socialist” organization, among which most of its members imagine some future steady state called “socialism.”

I’m a socialist as an historical and tactical necessity, and I think this is foolhardy. Moreover, if “socialism” is what many of the more Promethean socialists imagine, I’d rather live in a fucking mud hut in some godforsaken periphery than see their fully automated New Future—which is inevitably a dystopia—a horror show of shallow and compensatory consumer hedonism built on depersonalized dependency in a spiritual wasteland.

Fuck. That.

DSA’s internal/inhering limitations include most significantly its ideologically punitive subculture and latent sectarianism. Ideology produces its own blinders.

I watched Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Europe a few months back, discussing foreign policy in what was billed as her pre-presidential debut. I have seldom seen a more blatant and embarrassing display of absolute ignorance—I mean, on a scale rivaling even the Trump administration. In my piece on Political Deskilling, I wrote

Watching the recent appearance of pwog-heroine Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Munich—where presumably she was auditioning for the Democratic Presidential Primaries—I can only conclude that she’s eminently unqualified for the job. That had to be one of the most ineptly disastrous “auditions” by any candidate since Donald Trump.

Apparently neither she nor her closest associates thought it might be necessary to actually know anything about history or the current state of international relations. A few uninformed moral bromides, a lot of hemming and hawing to camouflage her obvious ignorance even of European politics—while she was in Europe!—and a ritual denunciation of Russia. No mention of Europe’s economic woes, of Carney’s speech at Davos, of China, Trump’s tariffs, the Middle East, Palestine and EU complicity in genocide, the EU’s ever more fractious divisions, finding a settlement in Ukraine, the dangers of holding American debt, how the US might mend the fences torn down by Trump, the risks of military Keynesianism . . . nothing. She came off like a high school student. It was embarrassing to anyone on the so-called left. What we saw was what we might expect from a Clinton . . . or a Trump: displacement of the practical by the performative, displacement of the actual by the virtual, displacement of discerning speech by oral-formulaic “communication.” Only delivered like a nervous freshman who was clearly out of her depth.

The DSA, in this case, is clearly not ready. There is not a single DSA poobah in the country I’d trust with US foreign policy, the possible exception being Mamdani, and that’s because he was raised by the brilliant Mahmood Mamdani, who has actually spent a lifetime studying international affairs. Ideology is the mortal enemy of practical politics! Ideology is the intentional externalization of those very unfitting realities that eventually bite ideologues directly in their collective ass.

What we need—and here I’m fantasizing again—are people who can fill the niches where DSA will never fit. Independents who might be culturally conservative without being reactionary and yet economically social democratic. In my long form article called “Political status with an idea from an old man who writes in his basement,” I wrote

The trick, it would seem, will be to craft a majoritarian platform with enough key concerns addressed—concerns which are ignored or exacerbated by the two establishment parties—to overcome doubts and resistance on less urgent issues.

As to candidacies, I suggested in an earlier article that the core party commitments avoid the non-majoritarian potential hot buttons by firewalling the program, and giving leeway to individual candidates to diverge where and how necessary on other issues based on local conditions.

Yep, you might get someone who goes all Second Amendment and pro-life who supports campaign finance reform, Medicare For All, reining in Wall Street, and staying out of wars. If that candidate ran in my Second Amendment, pro-life Congressional district, where one of the most dangerous Trump sycophants in the country is as firmly rooted as a genital wart, I’d knock doors for the fucker—even at my advanced age. Because that would be the best chance we’ll ever have here of getting local Congressional support for campaign finance reform, financial repression, and single payer health care—the three most urgent domestic policies on the table—and halting our cruel, stupid, and budget-busting foreign military adventures.

This is a place where they need free healthcare . . . urgently. But don’t package it with puberty blockers or drag queens in schools or public parades with sexually explicit pantomimes. That shit is dead in the water (as it should be!).

DSA and the Democratic Party civil war are important! I’ve said it before. Fight the DP civil war like there’s no general election, and fight in the general election as if there’s no DP civil war. There is, in my estimation at least, no reasonable alternative. Send Hong and El-Sayed money if you have it to spare.

Meanwhile, be thinking about those other socio-ecological niches. It may mean dropping the reified New Futures and the ideologies; but it seems to me that here at least there is a prayer for some damage control and step toward toppling a few thrones.

That’s all for now.

Peace.

so I’ll shoot when I’m through
with a no-tell
hands held apart to ask
what is your question

you know do you not
the New York Times built an architect
with dissimilar words
on a disparate junction
always the smart ones writing manuals
slick as ripe papayas
panties slid down over cerebral hips
making miracles out of strife
in tall offices

the brightest brains held property
to forbidden conditions
engineered vestibule utopias
as the Navy
took Mark Twain’s uterus to bed
with chocolate corporations
its warm thighs
pressed onto cold porcelain
bright, savvy, keen, and beatific

all the mechanisms rehearsed
the learned communions
and therapeutic charismas
raised up from the fallen towers
the S&P 500 smelled
dispossession gratified by a fleshlight
bohemian lust
surplus spirit sold in the tabernacles
of slick divinity
sat on the ad-man’s face
to grind a remunerative bliss

with these opulent intellects
the smart ones did a long song
as Mumford died
in Sophia’s withered arms
and bashful guardians ate meat
and Princeton spread her legs
like butter sauce
for the throbbing ontology
of full-spectrum disorder
a podcast slipping the bonds
of starry religion and faulty art

the shrewd ones there on the mantelpiece
held in a common faith
assured by the bullets of restive captivity
hungry on highways of stimulation
ran campaigns
fucked like bonobos on telepathic agony
drove Robert’s rules like bored Maseratis
harvested pallid discontents
in the Temple of the Pious Pricks
. . . these smart ones . . .
built programs with jealous bows
shined machines with blood
and fashion sense

the smart ones are always me
(you know this)
exuberant in our perspicacity
somewhat exotic in our compatibility
we can feel each other up
like sly freshmen on a bus
drink Saturday on Friday
hire art directors and issue proclamations
blandish our hair-free genitals
with the rags of proximity
master the tongues of law
to deflect and make counter-accusations
with pecuniary restraint
(of course)

ascending along a corpus cerebellum
we tour the soiled boiler rooms and litter
the plastic trash of popular adjectives
the knowing looks of fine leather
here, look at these perfect teeth
a dental Stradivarius
below a zygomatic arch
this was one of the smart ones
or so they insist
chasing sex and shrimp sauce
along the polished corridors of lack
and punctured by uninvited dreams