Hindenburg Moment

Cenk Uygur is running for U.S. Congress in California. Good for him … I guess. Racehorse politics don’t actually interest me, at least as a topic for a blog post, but his decision to enter the electoral fray poses some curious issues. What follows is some context and unsolicited advice, the latter exceptional for me since I’m not a political advocate and don’t reside in Cenk’s district (or even state).

Unlike many who heap unwarranted praise of our interrelated systems of government and economics, or who subscribe to some version of Churchill’s quip that democracy is the worst form of government yet preferred over all the others, I regard representative democracy and capitalism both as dumpster fires in the process of burning out. Good ideas while they lasted, perhaps, but they consumed nearly all their available fuel and are now sputtering, leaving behind useless ash and detritus. As a journalist and political junkie commentator, Cenk Uygur may be sensing his Hindenburg moment has arrived to jump onto the sinking RMS Titanic (mixing metaphors of doomed ships), meaning that a serendipitous right-time-right-place opportunity presented itself. Omigawd, the humanity! Others who had their unique Hindenburg moments and made good include Rudy Giuliani in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (only to spiral down ignominiously) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC, elected to the U.S. Congress in 2018). Dunno about Cenk Uygur. His campaign website linked above rather conspicuously omits his surname (couldn’t find it anywhere). Maybe like AOC and Pete Buttigieg, it’s just too challenging for folks. Curious choice.

I have mostly disregarded Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks (TYT) for some time now. They are part of the new media formed and distributed (primarily?) on the Web, though I’m doubtful they (and others) have yet established a useful revival to supplant traditional broadcast journalism (TV and radio) that have become sclerotic. How their business models (and the inevitable distortions those models introduce) differ is unclear. The main reason I ignore him/them is that TYT adopted a breezy, chatty, unscripted style that is less about reporting than interpreting mostly political news on the fly. They are essentially programming their viewers/subscribers with progressive talking points and orthodoxy, a form of narrowcasting. Onscreen “reporters” have come and gone, but none are as boorish as Cenk Uygur, who labors under the impression that he can outwit others with logic traps but really comes across as incoherent, unfocused, and ideological. TYT has also aired their dirty laundry in the form of beefs with former “correspondents.” None of this serves my political and/or intellectual interests.

The tone of TYT puzzles me, too, considering the utter seriousness of political dysfunction. Commentators appear to enjoy being in front of the camera for verbal jousting matches with each other and guests or simply to riff on the news. Another journalist clearly in love with being on-camera is Rachel Maddow, who has been pilloried for promulgating the Russiagate story relentlessly. Maybe anchors who relish (a little too much) being in the public eye is a collateral effect of news bureaus having been folded into the entertainment divisions of media conglomerates and being forced told to put forward a smiling face no matter what horrors are reported. If I want to see politics served up as jokes, I watch Jimmy Dore (who provides an alarming level of insight). If I want to watch people having entertaining fun, I watch movies or stream TV. I do not watch ideological news shows or political debates (if I watch at all) to be entertained but rather to be informed. While TYT commentators endeavor to be scrupulously factually correct in their opinions, they offer too little signal alongside the noise.

So here are a few recommendations for Cenk’s campaign, worth a couple cents at most:

• Recognize that politic decisions voters now face are no longer merely left/right, progressive/conservative, who-gets-to-hold-office binaries. Rather, it’s now whether we should track further down the path of authoritarian rule (e.g., a fascist national security state) masking itself as populism (but instead serving the plutocracy) under any political banner or instead serve the interests of the American people (best as able) as empire and industrial civilization sputter out.
• Recognize that logic and reason are poor substitutes for good character and clarity of vision when the public (i.e., the great unwashed masses) responds more readily to jingoism, emotionalism, and empty rhetoric.
• Zingers, gotchas, and takedowns are gladiatorial exploits that require more than mere accuracy to hit their marks and inflict damage. Take care not to indulge without considerable preparation and nuance. Some are obviously better at this than others.
• When answering questions and/or giving interviews, do not mistake the exchange as a speech opportunity and dominate from one side (boorishness). Riffing, having fun, and sucking all the air out of the room are the attributes of TYT but wear thin in campaigning. Listening is just as important, maybe more.
• Align your tone with the gravity of other’s suffering rather than your enjoyment of the applause and limelight. Your personal circumstances are not the proper locus of emotion.
• Politics is deeply intertwined with wealth, power, and corruption and accordingly creates distortion fields that threaten to undo even the purest of hearts when compromise and/or betrayal are offered as lures. It’s an inevitability, a basic feature rather than a bug. Know that it’s coming. No one is incorruptible.

Admittedly, I’m not a campaign strategist and have no access to polling data. Accordingly, this post will likely be neither read nor its recommendations heeded; I’m not a political playah. Think of this as the undesired Christmas gift so valueless it can’t even be returned for store credit.

Offered Without Comment 02

From They Rule: The 1% vs. Democracy (2014) by Paul Street, which I’m just starting to read:

The contemporary United States, I find in this volume, is neither a dictatorship nor a democracy. It is something in between or perhaps different altogether: a corporate-managed state-capitalist pseudo-democracy that sells the narrow interests of the wealthy business and financial elite as the public interest, closes off critical and independent thought, and subjects culture, politics, policy, institutions, the environment, daily life, and individual minds to the often hidden and unseen authoritarian dictates of money and profit. It is a corporate and financial plutocracy whose managers generally prefer to rule through outwardly democratic and noncoercive means since leading American corporations and their servants have worked effectively at draining and disabling democracy’s radical and progressive potential by propagandizing, dulling, pacifying, deadening, overextending, overstressing, atomizing, and demobilizing the citizenry. At the same time, American state and capitalist elites remain ready, willing, and able to maintain their power with the help from ever more sinister and sophisticated methods and tools of repression brutality, and coercive control.

Squatter’s Rights

I’ve grown rather tired of hearing the financial 1% to 0.01% (depending on source) being called the “elite.” There is nothing about them most would recognize as elite other than their absurd wealth. As a rule, they’re not particularly admirable men and women; they’re merely aspirational (as in everyone thinking “wish I had all that money” — the moral lesson about the corruptions of excessive wealth rarely having been learned). The manner in which such fortunes are amassed pretty much invalidates claims to moral or ethical superiority. In the typical case, “real” money is acquired by identifying one or more market opportunities and exploiting them ruthlessly. The object of exploitation might be a natural resource, labor, a product or service, or a combination.

Admittedly, effort goes into exploiting a market niche, and it often takes considerable time to develop and mature (less these days in overheated and overvalued markets), but the pattern is well established. Further, those who succeed are often mere beneficiaries of happenstance from among many competing entrepreneurs, speculators, financiers, and media types putting in similar effort. While capitalism is not as blind as rock-paper-scissors or subtly skilled as poker, both of which are designed to produce an eventual sole winner (and making everyone else losers), this economic system tends over time to pool increasing wealth in the accounts of those who have already “won” the game. Thus, wealth inequality increases until social conditions become so intolerable (e.g., tent cities across the U.S.) the masses revolt. How many resets of this deplorable game do we get?

Meanwhile — and here’s another thing I can’t grok — billionaires seem discontent (alert: intentional fallacy) to merely enjoy their wealth or heaven forfend use it to help others. Instead, they announce their ambitions to rule by campaigning for high office, typically skipping the preliminary step of developing actual political skills, because (doncha know?) everything worth having can be bought. Few sane people actually believe that a giant fortune qualifies someone for high office, except of course them who gots the fortunes and have gone off the deep end. They’re so use to being fawned over by sycophants and cozied up to by false admirers that it’s doubtful anyone is ever bold enough to tell them anything resembling truth about themselves (notably including major character deficiencies). So the notion enters the noggin that the next big project ought be to squat on high office as though it’s a right bequeathed specially to the ultrarich, whether one is Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Cuban, or (gasp!) that trailblazer who demonstrated it’s possible: 45. In a pinch, mere millions will have to suffice, as most congressfolk and senators can attest.

According to Anand Giridharadas, author of the book Winners Take All, seeking political office and practicing philanthropy is not at all the public service or “giving back” it pretends to be. Rather, it’s an attempt to maintain the status quo (funneling money upstream to those at the top), thus forestalling one of those nasty resets where the rabble overwhelms their betters with a fury known in past centuries to get quite out of hand. A few supposed elites riding herd over the great unwashed masses sounds rather passé, no? The bygone stuff of barbarian hordes and robber barons? But it describes the current day, too, and considering these folks are basically taking a giant dump on billions of other people, sorta gives a new, inverted meaning to the term squatter’s rights.

Offered Without Comment 01

In my preparations for a speech to be given in roughly two months, I stumbled across a prescient passage in an essay entitled “Jesuitism” from Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) by Thomas Carlyle. Connect your own dots as this is offered without comment.

… this, then, is the horrible conclusion we have arrived at, in England as in all countries; and with less protest against it hitherto, and not with more, in England than in other countries? That the great body of orderly considerate men; men affecting the name of good and pious, and who, in fact, excluding certain silent exceptionary individuals one to the million, such as the Almighty Beneficence never quite withholds, are accounted our best men,–have unconsciously abnegated the sacred privilege and duty of acting or speaking the truth; and fancy that it is not truth that is to be acted, but that an amalgam of truth and falsity is the safe thing. In parliament and pulpit, in book and speech, in whatever spiritual thing men have to commune of, or to do together, this is the rule they have lapsed into, this is the pass they have arrived at. We have to report than Human Speech is not true! That it is false to a degree never witnessed in this world till lately. Such a subtle virus of falsity in the very essence of it, as far excels all open lying, or prior kinds of falsity; false with consciousness of being sincere! The heart of the world is corrupted to the core; a detestable devil’s-poison circulates in the life-blood of mankind; taints with abominable deadly malady all that mankind do. Such a curse never fell on men before.

For the falsity of speech rests on a far deeper falsity. False speech, as is inevitable when men long practise it, falsifies all things; the very thoughts, or fountains of speech and action become false. Ere long, by the appointed curse of Heaven, a man’s intellect ceases to be capable of distinguishing truth, when he permits himself to deal in speaking or acting what is false. Watch well the tongue, for out of it are the issues of life! O, the foul leprosy that heaps itself in monstrous accumulation over Human Life, and obliterates all the divine features of it into one hideous mountain of purulent disease, when Human Life parts company with truth; and fancies, taught by Ignatius or another, that lies will be the salvation of it! We of these late centuries have suffered as the sons of Adam never did before; hebetated, sunk under mountains of torpid leprosy; and studying to persuade ourselves that this is health.

And if we have awakened from the sleep of death into the Sorcerer’s Sabbath of Anarchy, is it not the chief of blessings that we are awake at all? Thanks to Transcendent Sansculottism and the long-memorable French Revolution, the one veritable and tremendous Gospel of these bad ages, divine Gospel such as we deserved, and merciful too, though preached in thunder and terror! Napoleon Campaignings, September Massacres, Reigns of Terror, Anacharsis Clootz and Pontiff Robespierre, and still more beggarly tragicalities that we have since seen, and are still to see: what frightful thing were not a little less frightful than the thing we had? Peremptory was our necessity of putting Jesuitism away, of awakening to the consciousness of Jesuitism. ‘Horrible,’ yes: how could it be other than horrible? Like the valley of Jehoshaphat, it lies round us, one nightmare wilderness, and wreck of dead-men’s bones, this false modern world; and no rapt Ezekiel in prophetic vision imaged to himself things sadder, more horrible and terrible, than the eyes of men, if they are awake, may now deliberately see. Many yet sleep; but the sleep of all, as we judge by their maundering and jargoning, their Gorham Controversies, street-barricadings, and uneasy tossings and somnambulisms, is not far from ending. Novalis says, ‘We are near awakening when we dream that we are dreaming.’ [italics in original]