One-dimensional chess.
“No amount of brute force can hold the neoliberal order together—and Trump is not trying to hold it together. Rather, he and his fellow nationalists aim to ensure that the conflicts that succeed the neoliberal order will play out along ethnic and national lines rather than uniting everyone against the ruling class he represents. Case in point: the Iranian government, threatened by massive unrest scarcely two months ago, can now use the escalating conflict with the US to legitimize its authority domestically.” —CrimethInc.
A bad memory of policing in this country.
“But it changed our family, even if we never discussed it. We no longer spoke Farsi in public. My mom stopped saying hello to our neighbors as she got the mail. My dad lowered the Persian dance music from his car stereo before turning onto our street. My brother, Sohrab, began to go by ‘Rob.’ And I borrowed the interests of my white peers: Lunchables, cheerleading and country music. I changed the way I dressed to fit in with the Abercrombie & Fitch girls in my class. I chemically straightened my thick, curly hair until it flowed straight down my back in sleek strands. I second-guessed the food I ate at lunchtime: Persian stews served with rice were swapped out for PB&J sandwiches in brown paper bags.” —Farnoush Amiri
“It doesn’t matter that we started it”
Over on the Twitter, Lili Loofbourow reminds us of this cracking David Graeber essay, on bullying, and power:
Here I think it’s important to look carefully at how institutions organize the reactions of the audience. Usually, when we try to imagine the primordial scene of domination, we see some kind of Hegelian master-slave dialectic in which two parties are vying for recognition from one another, leading to one being permanently trampled underfoot. We should imagine instead a three-way relation of aggressor, victim, and witness, one in which both contending parties are appealing for recognition (validation, sympathy, etc.) from someone else. The Hegelian battle for supremacy, after all, is just an abstraction. A just-so story. Few of us have witnessed two grown men duel to the death in order to get the other to recognize him as truly human. The three-way scenario, in which one party pummels another while both appeal to those around them to recognize their humanity, we’ve all witnessed and participated in, taking one role or the other, a thousand times since grade school.
The application of which to our current moment is made historically clear from the jump—
In late February and early March 1991, during the first Gulf War, US forces bombed, shelled, and otherwise set fire to thousands of young Iraqi men who were trying to flee Kuwait. There were a series of such incidents—the “Highway of Death,” “Highway 8,” the “Battle of Rumaila”—in which US air power cut off columns of retreating Iraqis and engaged in what the military refers to as a “turkey shoot,” where trapped soldiers are simply slaughtered in their vehicles. Images of charred bodies trying desperately to crawl from their trucks became iconic symbols of the war.
I have never understood why this mass slaughter of Iraqi men isn’t considered a war crime. It’s clear that, at the time, the US command feared it might be. President George H.W. Bush quickly announced a temporary cessation of hostilities, and the military has deployed enormous efforts since then to minimize the casualty count, obscure the circumstances, defame the victims (“a bunch of rapists, murderers, and thugs,” General Norman Schwarzkopf later insisted), and prevent the most graphic images from appearing on U.S. television. It’s rumored that there are videos from cameras mounted on helicopter gunships of panicked Iraqis, which will never be released.
It makes sense that the elites were worried. These were, after all, mostly young men who’d been drafted and who, when thrown into combat, made precisely the decision one would wish all young men in such a situation would make: saying to hell with this, packing up their things, and going home. For this, they should be burned alive?
—our “current,” eternally returning, horizon-closed, Groundhog-Day’d moment.
And sure, tell yourself Trump’s the bully, and we’re the witness, the audience, but Trump is also very much the audience, being appealed to by Pompeo and the Fox Newsocracy as they ’it ’im again—the soul of our nation (such as it is), the lives of thousands if not millions of people, will be battled over by our very own self-inflicted Haw-Haw, and Tucker fucking Carlson, and I’m not sure where Chris Hayes fits into this trialectic—
—but he works for an organization that fired Phil Donahue for far less reason than they ever had to fire Matt Lauer.
This is difficult stuff. I don’t claim to understand it completely. But if we are ever going to move toward a genuinely free society, then we’re going to have to recognize how the triangular and mutually constitutive relationship of bully, victim, and audience really works, and then develop ways to combat it. Remember, the situation isn’t hopeless. If it were not possible to create structures—habits, sensibilities, forms of common wisdom—that do sometimes prevent the dynamic from clicking in, then egalitarian societies of any sort would never have been possible. Remember, too, how little courage is usually required to thwart bullies who are not backed up by any sort of institutional power. Most of all, remember that when the bullies really are backed up by such power, the heroes may be those who simply run away.
Terrifyingly serious, casually bigoted, deliberately absurd:
“Since the murder of Heather Heyer by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017, I’ve been regularly watching discussion boards on 8chan and the neo-Nazi website Stormfront to better understand what I call ‘8chan Medievalism.’ I wanted to examine how the worst people in the world talk about the Middle Ages within their own Internet safe spaces. What I’ve found is that the problem has gotten worse online, even as 8chan medievalism has shown up in the writings of mass-murdering terrorists and would-be terrorists.” —David M. Perry
High turnover, low inventory, mostly cash—
a Sunday afternoon seminar in money laundering (twitter; threaded) that starts with a weed dealer and a sub shop, and ends with the bulk of the wealth of the world. Your basic TL;DR: “If we were serious about crime, we’d take most of the cops off the streets and replace them with accountants. Taking down the financial underpinnings of a criminal enterprise is way more effective than busting their entry level contractors.”
He said, he said.
People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
—a senior advisor to Bush fils, as interviewed by Ron Suskind
No. When you have power, you don’t take responsibility for abusing others. You enjoy the power. That’s the way it works in reality.
—Terry Gilliam, as interviewed by Alexandra Pollard
Resolution.
“The Decade from Hell has put us further down a path toward both national and planetary ruin. It has, however, also offered numerous stories that can guide us in a new direction—stories about the power of ordinary people coming together to present the moral cases for change and demand that the powerful act on these cases. There is no substitute, even in this digital age, for direct action. The best remedy for business as usual remains making business as usual impossible.” —Osita Nwanevu
The war that will end war.
We’re a fifth of the way into the 21st century, and Chris Teso, founder of Chirpify.com and guest-columnist for Oregonlive.com, wants us to end our war on cars. —I used to have to commute in a car, and am thankfully blessedly once more in the position of NOT HAVING TO, of being able to catch one of the regular busses that stops just about right outside my house, or even when the mood takes me walking leisurely over the river and into downtown to get to work, and this is a luxury, I know, but one I’d share with everyone I could, and I stare perplexed at those who think they’d willingly turn it down for a chance to sit ensnarled in choking traffic: who does that? (People who seem to think having to sit next to a stranger on a bus is somehow an invasion of privacy, but we digress.) —I’m glad folks elsewhere took note of this entitled little screed, and took issue with its faulty logic and framed statistics, because damn: we’d do so much better to actually fight a war on cars, instead of all our wars for cars—I mean, can you believe this old bumper sticker is still searingly fucking relevant?
Fuck death.
It hit me hard when Howard Cruse went and died, but I’d had no idea Tom Spurgeon was already gone—
Offensively impeachable.
“Ultimately, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney seemed to have been able to talk the President out of closing the port of El Paso […] After the President left the room, agents sought further advice from their leaders, who told them they were not giving them that direction and if they did what the President said they would take on personal liability […] ‘He just wants to separate families,’ said a senior administration official […] ‘At the end of the day,’ a senior administration official said, ‘the President refuses to understand that the Department of Homeland Security is constrained by the laws’.” —And this, more than the election interference and the emoluments and the graft and the et cetera (though those too!) but THIS, this nightmare is why he has to go, and go now.
Catastrophic injury and sudden death have been known to occur.
Those Go Army commercials they’re showing all the time on Hulu now, there’s the one where a fire squad or a platoon or whatever crashes their choreographed way through an otherwise empty neighborhood troped up to read as GENERIC MIDDLE EASTERN HOTSPOT, firing guns at everything but each other, or the other one, where a cavalry unit of jeeps encrusted with soldiers charges across a field, and helicopters keep pace overhead, and every gun held or mounted shoots rapidly repeatedly wildly ahead at something we never see, stitching the sky with Star Wars light, and all the while in both commercials this calm cool collected authoritative voice stirringly intones platitudes of altruism and sacrifice, of service to those in need, of the best America has to offer, it’s all just as completely dizzyingly incoherent as those other commercials they show on Hulu all the time, full of people out living their best lives, smiling with ostentatious magnanimity as they forego this or that limitation previously imposed by implied, otherwise unseen conditions, and all the while this clipped and business-like authoritative voice rapidly monotones the endlessly specific side effects of whatever miraculous pharmaceutical it is that makes all this wonderment possible; “Do not take Qurac if you are allergic to Qurac.” —The hard power, and the soft.
Mister Blue Sky, please tell us why.
“Teens and young adults are in the midst of a unique mental health crisis,” we are told, and of course we’ve got to go and blame it on their use of smartphones and social media, tsk tsk, and not the fact that, say, nobody older than them seems to give a shit that we’re literally burning the clouds away.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single person in possession of a billion dollars must be in want of dismantlement.
“It is always a little sad to see what the people rich enough to have everything actually want,” says the article, and truer words; truer words.
Just wrestle me.
“For such a physical sport, some men may express concerns over applying force on a woman or pressing against a female opponent in the era of the #MeToo movement,” says the article, and what bizarre creatures, these men-who-may, who seem utterly bereft of concepts of context and consent…
“This was back in 1945.”
Well, I was working in a dental office on Lexington Avenue for two brothers, JD and JL Burke, and all morning long people would come in and say there seems to be rumors that the war is ending. And since I wasn’t very far from Times Square, I could just walk over there and see for myself. And so after my bosses came back at 1:00 from their lunch hour, excuse me, I went straight to Times Square where I saw on the lighted billboard that goes around the building, V-J Day, V-J Day, and that really—that really confirmed what the people have said in the office. And so suddenly I was grabbed by a sailor, and it wasn’t that much of a kiss, it was more of a jubilant act that he didn’t have to go back, I found out later, he was so happy that he did not have to go back to the Pacific where they already had been through the war. And the reason he grabbed someone dressed like a nurse was that he just felt very grateful to nurses who took care of the wounded. And so I had to go back to the office, and I told my bosses what I had seen. And they said, Cancel all the appointments, we’re closing the office. So they left, and I canceled all the appointments and went home.
—Interview with Greta Zimmer Friedman, August 23rd, 2005
SARASOTA—George Mendonsa hasn’t even been buried yet, but a statue depicting the World War II veteran kissing a woman in Times Square to celebrate the end of World War II has been vandalized in Sarasota.
The sculpture called “Unconditional Surrender” was spray-painted with #MeToo graffiti, indicating the movement founded in 2006 to help survivors of sexual violence.
While the statue—which came to Sarasota in November 2009—represents nostalgia and a level of unity and pride, some consider the act a sexual assault by today’s standards.
—“#Metoo” painted onto “Unconditional Surrender” statue in Sarasota
Greta Zimmer Friedman:
Well, we met in Times Square in 1980.Patricia Redmond:
But who invited you to Times Square then?Greta Zimmer Friedman:
LIFE Magazine.Patricia Redmond:
Okay. And?Greta Zimmer Friedman:
And we sort of—I didn’t want to reenact the kiss. First of all, my—well, no, my husband did not come with me, but his wife was there.Patricia Redmond:
Mr. Mendonsa’s wife?Greta Zimmer Friedman:
Yes.Patricia Redmond:
Well, she was there the first time.Greta Zimmer Friedman:
Well, I didn’t know. Well, it wasn’t—it wasn’t my choice to be kissed. The guy just came over and kissed or grabbed.Patricia Redmond:
This was back in 1945.Greta Zimmer Friedman:
Yes.Patricia Redmond:
Okay. So now we’re in 1980, and we do a reenactment of the kiss.Greta Zimmer Friedman:
Yes. I told him I didn’t want to redo that pose.Patricia Redmond:
Well, we have—we have the picture here.Greta Zimmer Friedman:
It’s sort of a—Patricia Redmond:
And it’s kind of the pose, and it says—and the sign, this is Times Square.Greta Zimmer Friedman:
Right.Patricia Redmond:
It says, what does it say on the sign?Greta Zimmer Friedman:
It says, “It had to be you.”Patricia Redmond:
Okay. So that makes it pretty official, doesn’t it?Greta Zimmer Friedman:
I would guess.
—Interview with Greta Zimmer Friedman, August 23rd, 2005
City of such Roses.
I mean, it’s never a good day to be a white writer of an abashedly Eurocentric “urban” fantasy set in one of the whitest cities in America—but it’s not a good day to be, etc.
