Designed to Lose

Overheard on one of many podcasts I hear over the course of a week (paraphrasing): “the Democratic Party does not strategize in elections (and governance) for the purpose of winning but instead for the purpose of maintaining control over the party.” Maybe it’s to prevent the party from moving left. These statements suffer from the intentional fallacy, namely, the idea that motivation and/or intent can be reverse engineered through either actions or results. But I have to ask: who enters into the difficulty and overexposure of a political campaign with the intent of losing? Third-party candidates need not answer that question. (Also, who seeks a career marked by electoral success followed by continuous evidence of incompetence and failure?) This is distinct from having an unrealistic assessment of one’s chances of prevailing and is similarly distinct from being designed to fail a/k/a planned obsolescence. Fragility of things like panty hose and long-stemmed wine glasses purposely designed to break or fail so that consumers must rebuy regularly (or do without, one must suppose) afflicts a wide range of consumer goods. Is there an advantage to losing an election on purpose, like throwing a boxing match while betting against oneself? I don’t yet see it.

Considering the staunch refusal of the Democratic Party in particular to develop policies and projects that appeal to people (i.e., refusing to move left), thus garnering votes not already theirs by default, the question remains. Republican Party policies possess a dark, cynical appeal based on a potent mixture (not all elements present in every Republican) of racism, scapegoating, fearmongering, Schadenfreude, and irrational faith in American exceptionalism. If presidential debate(s) between Trump and Biden actually takes place (still a big if), those are the two basic characterizations we’ve been primed to expect. Democrats: we’re not them, so vote for us. It’s obvious who them is. Republicans: the world is a scary place full of others seeking to destroy us, so vote for us. The subtext is found behind who counts as others and us. Furthermore, the malingering media promises new bombshells will be exploded that adds something worthwhile to the mountain of information already available regarding these two, um, candidates. Really, at this late date, debates are just gladiatorial games for ratings, and viewers love them some blood.

Frauds and scams perpetrated on the public (see this giant, expanding list of “-gates” scandals) have ceased bothering to hide their activities in behind-the-scenes obfuscation but have come out into the open (or been shoved there by Wikileaks and others) for everyone to see in all their brazenness. So, too, do we now recognize the Democratic Party not even pretending anymore to try to win votes or elections.

Addendum. The debate went forward as scheduled after all. Curiosity got the better of me and I watched about a third before turning it off in disgust. No new information was presented in either the portion I watched or any of the takeaways offered by the press in the aftermath. Voters should be unimpressed or turned off like I was. Indeed, the constant interruptions and harangues only reinforce the notion that no one is campaigning for votes but are instead busying themselves with rhetorical warfare. What’s the point? Lastly, it was Biden’s debate to lose — not in the sense that he had it in the bag and could only lose if he did himself in but rather that no one expected him to stand up to the demands of the task at hand. My impression is that he acquitted himself better than expected (maybe he’s not quite so far gone yet), but neither candidate spoke with eloquence or coherence. Both kept up a constant stream of half-statements, self-interruptions, redirects, and stammers to disallow the other to cut in. Equally bad on that account.

Not Found on My Bookshelf

/rant on

I recently shopped at a media store that sells new releases as well as second-hand copies of books, music, movies, video games, and tchotchkes. Remember those? Amazon killed off most of them. Lots of costumes this time of year, too, which is to be expected given proximity to Halloween. The rather forced reintroduction of pumpkin spice into foods items has already appeared, but I haven’t yet seen the annual, heavy marketing swing toward the Christmas engorgement buying season. Let’s hope it’s muted this year. Somewhat predictably, given my eclectic tastes, I found nothing of interest to buy but did see of a row of bins offering vinyl (LPs, if you prefer) for sale, which were displaced by CDs in the 1980s except for used record stores. Funny how vinyl has come back ’round. My vinyl collection dates me and probably makes me a curmudgeon, not a hipster.

I keep up with neither new fiction nor the latest “this is what just happened …” exposé authored by someone given a book deal (and presumably a ghostwriter), typically on the heels of some very recent event or job loss. A cottage industry seems to have sprung up along these lines without my having noticed. Curiously, one thematic bin/table/kiosk sold titles mostly by conservative pundits and operators to whom I award little or no attention (obviously not keeping my ideological enemies close). Here’s a brief list of the ones I can remember (no links):

• John Bolton — The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (2020)
• Karl Rove — Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight (2010)
• Candace Owens — Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation (2020)
• Michael Eric Dyson — What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America (2018)
• Sarah Huckabee Sanders — Speaking for Myself: Faith, Freedom, and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House (2020)
• Bill O’Reilly — The United States of Trump: How the President Really Sees America (2019)
• Sean Hannity — Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink (2020)
• Jeanine Pirro — Don’t Lie to Me: And Stop Trying to Steal Our Freedom (2020)
• Michael Cohen — Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump (2020)

The cluster appearing in Fall 2020 suggest their publication was timed to influence the presidential election. It’s also safe to say (based on prior acquaintance) that these authors are worthless highly polemical. None of these titles will be found on my bookshelf, not even temporarily as books borrowed from the library. I saw only one title that might be categorized as originating from the opposing political perspective: Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018), with a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson. (How did Dyson’s contribution escape my attention? Oh, I know: I absolutely refused to read it, especially after Matt Taibbi’s withering review.) Accordingly, the accurate charge of liberal bias in the academy, in media, and on newly censorious social media platform’s such as Twitter and Facebook might be inverted when it comes to book publishing. I admit the evidence for such an assessment is purely anecdotal.

My reading habits have shifted during covidtime. Whereas I used to commute to work and spend some time on a train or bus reading print from the page, I now find myself (half a year now and counting) working from home and drawn lazily to my computer screen, no longer having one or two reliable, daytime blocks away from my electronics. (I have steadfastly successfully refused to use my smartphone as my central vehicle for connectedness to the public sphere or adopted any sort of e-reader.) As a result, my reading, though not diminished in quantity, is somewhat more directed toward the hot, daily news cycle rather than the cool, more prosaic monthly (magazines) and yearly (books) time frames of print media. Daily newspapers, a legacy media product, also no longer serve me because they, too, have become polemical and thus abandoned the objectivity and truthfulness that made them worthwhile in the project of sensemaking.

/rant off

Align Your Ideology!

Fantasies and delusions rush into the space
that reason has vacated in fear of its life.
—James Howard Kunstler

Since I first warned that this blog post was forthcoming, conditions of modern American life we might have hoped would be resolved by now remain intransigently with us. Most are scrambling to adjust to the new normal: no work (for tens of millions), no concerts, no sports (except for events staged for the camera to be broadcast later), little or no new cinema (but plenty of streaming TV), no school or church (except for abysmal substitutes via computer), no competent leadership, and no end in sight. The real economy swirls about the drain despite the fake economy (read: the stock market a/k/a the Richistan economy) having first shed value faster than ever before in history then staged a precipitous taxpayer-funded, debt-fueled recovery only to position itself for imminent resumption of its false-started implosion. The pandemic ebbed elsewhere then saw its own resumption, but not in the U.S., which scarcely ebbed at all and now leads the world in clownish mismanagement of the crisis. Throughout it all, we extend and pretend that the misguided modern age isn’t actually coming to a dismal close, based as it is on a consumption-and-growth paradigm that anyone even modestly numerically literate can recognize is, um, (euphemism alert) unsustainable.

Before full-on collapse (already rising over the horizon like those fires sweeping across the American West) hits, however, we’ve got unfinished business: getting our heads (and society) right regarding which of several competing ideologies can or should establish itself as the righteous path forward. That might sound like the proverbial arranging of deck chairs on the RMS Titanic, but in an uncharacteristically charitable moment, let me suggest that righting things before we’re done might be an earnest obligation even if we can’t admit openly just how close looms the end of (human) history. According to market fundamentalists, corporatists, and oligarchs, Socialism and Marxism, or more generally collectivism, must finally have a stake driven through its undead heart. According to radical progressives, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa, fascism and racism, or more generally intolerance, deserve to be finally stamped out, completing the long arc of history stalled after the Civil Rights Era. And according to barely-even-a-majority-anymore whites (or at least the conservative subset), benefits and advantages accrued over generations, or more generally privilege, must be leveraged, solidified, and maintained lest the status quo be irretrievably lost. Other factions no doubt exist. Thus, we are witnessing a battle royale among narratives and ideologies, none of which IMO crystallize the moment adequately.

Of those cited above, the first and third are easy to dismiss as moribund and self-serving. Only the second demonstrates any concern for the wellbeing of others. However, and despite its putative birthplace in the academy, it has twisted itself into pretzel logic and become every bit as intolerant as the scourges it rails against. Since I need a moniker for this loose, uncoordinated network of movements, I’ll refer to them as the Woke Left, which signifies waking up (i.e., being woke) to injustice and inequity. Sustained analysis of the Woke Left is available from James Lindsay through a variety of articles and interviews (do a search). Lindsay demonstrates handily how the Woke Left’s principle claims, often expressed through its specialized rhetoric called Critical Theory, is actually an inversion of everything it pretends to be. This body of thought has legitimate historical and academic lineage, so it’s arguable that only its most current incarnation in the Woke Left deserves scorn.

Two recently published books exemplify the rhetoric of the Woke Left: White Fragility (2018) by Robin DiAngelo and How to Be an Antiracist (2019) by Ibram Kendi. Although I’ve read neither book, I’m aware of numerous scathing reviews that point out fundamental problems with the books and their authors’ arguments. Foremost among them is what’s sometimes called a Kafka trap, a Catch-22 because all avenues of argument lead inescapably toward guilt, typically some form of original sin. Convinced they are on the righteous right side of history, Woke Left protesters and agitators have been harassing and physically threatening strangers to demand support for the cause, i.e., compliance. What cause is a good question, considering a coherent program has yet to be articulated. Forcing others to choose either side of a false binary — with us or against us — is madness, but that’s the cultural moment at which we’ve arrived. Everyone must align their ideology with some irrational narrative while being put at risk of cancellation and/or destruction no matter what alignment is ventured.

If things go south badly on the heels of contested election results this fall as many expect — the pump already primed for such conflict — and a second civil war ensues, I rather expect the Woke Left to be the first to fail and the other two, each representing the status quo (though different kinds), to be in an extended battle for control of whatever remains of the union. I can’t align with any of them, since by my lights they’re all different kinds of crazy. Sorta makes ya wonder, taking history as an indicator, if a fourth or fifth faction won’t appear before it’s a wrap. I don’t hold out any hope for any faction steering us competently through this crisis.

Running a Failed State

Our society fixates on Nazi Germany with such masturbatory fascination because it allows
us to pretend that horrific mass-scale evil is just something that was inflicted in the past, by someone
else, in another part of the world, and not right here and now by our own government.
—Caitlin Johnstone

Johnstone continues to impress with her ability to concentrate a variety of ideological traits and behaviors into a succinct aphorism, though the one above isn’t especially short. Nazis are the canonical example of fixation, of course, but perusal of recent history indicates any number of others standing in today for yesteryear’s Nazis, e.g., Soviets/Russians, Islamofascists, and Chinese. U.S. thought leaders are sloppy that way. Fixation on others functions as an acute distancing (from ourselves) and distraction mechanism to avoid any discomfiting self-examination we might undertake, as well as to provide scapegoats for negative identity that drives American psychosis. We’re not alone in that regard.

National identity is not the primary subject of this blog post, however. It’s how the United States (in particular, but the rest of the world in the wake of its example) has become a shit show of mismanagement and dysfunction, or put another way, how the U.S. has become a failed state. Quite an accomplishment considering that, for at least a little while longer, the U.S. is the world’s hegemon.

Have a look at this list of the federal executive departments and their chiefs:

• Dept. of State — Secretary Mike Pompeo
• Dept. of Treasury — Secretary Steven Mnuchin
• Dept. of Defense — Secretary Dr. Mark T. Esper
• Dept. of Justice — Attorney General William P. Barr
• Dept. of Interior — Secretary David Bernhardt
• Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) — Secretary Sonny Perdue III
• Dept. of Commerce — Secretary Wilbur L. Ross, Jr.
• Dept. of Labor — Secretary Eugene Scalia
• Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) — Secretary Alex Azar
• Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) — Secretary Ben Carson
• Dept. of Transportation (DOT) — Secretary Elaine Chao
• Dept. of Energy (DOE) — Secretary Rick Perry
• Dept. of Education — Secretary Betsy DeVos
• Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) — Secretary Robert Wilkie
• Dept. of Homeland Security — Acting Secretary Chad Wolf

Budgets for these departments range from just under $10 billion to nearly $1.3 trillion, covering most of areas of American life outside of entertainment (including the arts, sports, games, and what some argue is the preeminent art form during lockdown, streaming TV). Of those chiefs above, the most infamous ones are known because they’re embroiled in ongoing controversy or were appointed to dismantle the department itself — a cynical Republican strategy to ruin, not run, various government activities. A blurb behind each one demonstrating its most abject failure would be relatively easy to compile, but I demur. Instead, here’s a cogent example: James Howard Kunstler’s assessment of the death of education. Another example is a YouTube video called “Seattle is Dying,” a local news documentary from March 2019 (well before the pandemic) about how homelessness is ruining Seattle. People literally living and dying in the streets had been in mind when this was published a couple days ago:

Clearly, the situation in Seattle (and indeed, every American city) is poised to get very much worse. The U.S. is a failed state, yet our elected government is driving it further into the ground. As bad as everything is now, amidst a global pandemic, unemployment and homelessness spiking unprecedentedly, debt being piled onto taxpayers to keep asset prices high (read: to keep the wealthy whole), and what Caitlin Johnstone calls a slo-mo war against those few countries not yet absorbed into the U.S. empire’s power nexus, there is still that other looming catastrophe going largely ignored: climate change. Xray Mike came back to life at his blog (where I used to post as well) to remind that things around the world are still every bit as awful (and worsening) as one could imagine:

As governments stared glass-eyed at what was unfolding in China earlier this year, the fragility of modern life’s interconnectedness was soon to be laid bare by a microscopic organism. Within a couple months of the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, airline travel from China had spread the novel virus to more than 60 countries. Despite decades of warnings about the inevitability of such an event, politicians had paid about as much lip service to preventing the next pandemic as they had to dealing with climate change. As has been warned by health experts, the best we can hope for is to blunt the effects of the COVID-19 disease on the global population; eradicating it will be futile. Something similar could be said of the legacy effects of our CO2 emissions which will haunt life on Earth for time immemorial. [underlying links removed]

We are not just a failed state but a failed civilization. But hey, vote for one of the two stooges offered by the failed two-party system in the sham presidential election in two months. How could it possibly get any worse?