I am just a lowly blogger, not a master savant like David Foster Wallace (pdf). Yet, I think he identified what I don’t like about much of the liberal blogosphere. I am not saying that I am a paragon of sincerity, but I am totally disinterested in ironic finger-pointing. When I snark on the right, I’m not doing it because I am above it all. I’m in the arena, not the stands.
“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.”
Also, I imagine that Foster Wallace would take great pleasure in flunking Dana Milbank and, to a lesser extent, Chris Cillizza. Both of them strike me as exactly the kind of writers that Foster Wallace was railing against. Both use the artistic tools of the counterculture (detachment, condescension, irony, scorn), but seem to lack any core convictions. What master are they serving? Who likes the smart-alecks in the Peanut Gallery?
It’s twenty years on since Foster Wallace wrote E Unibus Pluram and I could discuss it all day. I’d love to see someone look at the same issues from the perspective of today’s young writers, trained not so much by television as by their smart phones. What realistic novel would contain any dialogue today? Or even eye contact?
Or, how about the advent of reality television and its relationship to Don DeLillo’s barn-watching? Paris Hilton starring as THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA! as told by a too-cool-for-school hipster and his silent friend.
Who can look at the state of our government and culture and not adopt an attitude of cynical detachment? That seems to me to be the core problem progressives face, and it relates back to what I always talk about, which is overcoming our countercultural roots. What was bedeviling Foster Wallace twenty years ago was the way that television had become countercultural (probably starting with Saturday Night Live, if not the Watergate hearings), which created a kind of closed circle impermeable to artistic sincerity. To be sincere was to be naïve. To actually believe in anything, you’d have to be an idiot.
But that’s fiction-writing in the early 90’s, while I’m concerned with progressive politics in the 10’s. I think we’ve all become convinced that the whole rotting edifice is beyond hope- our elites have just failed us on every conceivable front. So, the response is to keep watching, but to watch with more and more detachment, as if we aren’t even on the playbill.
One reason I, unlike most progressives, actually like Cory Booker is because I care less about his friends in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street than I do about his can-do attitude. He doesn’t have time to carry around a SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND BULLSHIT placard, and nor should we.
I used to say that we don’t want to be the counterculture anymore; we want to be the culture. But that’s kind of happening by demographic inertia (see: gay rights). What I want to say now is that we need progressive anti-rebels who dare to back away from ironic watching and actually move into the picture where the action takes place. We need people who dare to take the ridicule for actually believing in this country.
Man, you have hit the nail on the head relative to my own personal struggles and as to whether I should listen to all the naysayers around me, who seem to have decided that they are simply waiting for that WTSHTF moment, so they can all scurry to their bunkers with their collections of high powered weapons, stockpiles of ammo, freeze dried food and copies of The Anarchist Cookbook; because that is the attitude of many. They look at me like I am crazy when I actually express the viewpoint that this is the system that we have. And the only way to succeed is to try and work within it, using the best tools that we have available. You talk about ridicule, that is something that someone like me has to deal with on a daily basis, whether I am trying to gather signatures for a state constitutional amendment protecting voting rights, or working to guarantee that gays have the same rights that all the rest of us have.
There is so much in our current system that is major fucked up. But to allow cynicism to get the better of you, and just throw up ones hands and surrender is simply madness, in my estimation. But there are a hell of a lot of people, on both sides of the aisle, who seem prepared to do just that. And it drives me crazy.
70% of the time, I’m fairly sure that the system we have is broken and would be better replaced rather than patched.
That said, the good people would probably suffer and the pigshit people would probably thrive, so I do my best to patch the system.
By the way, I think what we’re witnessing now is the last gasp of the pigshit people. They know they’ve lost the social issues and now they’re going to try to hurt as many people as they can before they thankfully all fucking die.
So, it’s about surviving the pigshit people’s last power play of hurting everyone economically. Once the pigshits have died out, then we can “repeal and replace” this broken-ass system the pigshits have broken over the past 40+ years.
I think you need to engage with the fact that any policy that is enacted is enacted purely because elites want it. The will of the people is irrelevant according to the data.
So, what?
Give up?
Become a tea party terrorist and fight the federal government?
I don’t get what options are still on the table if everything is hopeless, because telling people that they don’t matter and that the only policy that will ever be enacted is what the elites want is touting hopelessness as the only option.
Again, that’s just the facts. The point is actually to convince the elites to support the position and then support THEM. Absent systemic changes its the only way to enact policies. For populism it probably IS hopeless, but maybe not other issues. Even there you can try to make the populism today heads off revolution tomorrow.
At this point I think fighting is actually the only way to enact systemic change but that has a very low chance of sucess and tremendous potential to backfire. So basically I don’t know what to do except acknowledge the period of democracy as a historical aberration and we are simply reverting to human norms.
I feel the same way most of the time, but short of moving away or stocking guns like tea party terrorists for the apocalypse, I have to assume that while things may look absolutely terrible now, that can change.
Looking back at the beginning of the 20th century, we had a guilded age that looked like it was going to continue on…and then progressives of their era did a lot of good…and bad.
When I look around now, especially after Occupy, I see the many, many instances of people finally waking up to the class warfare that has been waged against them. I think the more we can highlight it whenever and wherever we can, the better.
I don’t expect a lot of the pigshits to abandon their shillery status, or opposition to progressive ideas, but there are a whole lot of people out there that are apolitical/pseudo-conservative who have literally never been exposed to contrary political ideas.
I’m a northerner from Cincinnati (a southern city) who now lives in Atl. I’ve met a lot of people who were apolitical/pseudo-conservative (mom and dad are conservative, they’ve never heard anything else) who upon talking to them, aren’t actually conservative.
I don’t know. I’m young-ish, I don’t mind putting my views out there, even here behind enemy lines, and ultimately, I think 2016 could be a good year for progressives, even if HRC, oligarch extraordinare, is voted in. In fact, if Progressives USE the shit out of HRC to get progressives in small-town office, state-wide, etc, then it doesn’t really matter that the Emperor is still an Emperor.
Unless we’re just going to burn the entire system down and hope for the best, we have to work to change it as much as possible…even if it is just making it less terrible for when it does finally get toppled.
Or, to put it another way, even if you think that the whole damn thing is rotten and needs to be replaced, it behooves the good, decent people to try to pull the current system to a place where it isn’t ready, willing and able to systematically put down any future change with absolute violence.
You’re where I was in 2008. Though I am a pessimist by nature.
I mean how do you retain any kind of belief in agency after reading this?
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/princeton-scholar-demise-of-democracy-america-tpm-interview
Wish we could edit but IMO it doesn’t matter if people wake up, or shortly won’t thanks to technology.
Booker is smart.
Look we are the party of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and all those other places. Those entities bought us gay marriage and use their wealth and power to win the culture wars for us. They are going to get us immigration reform as well.
Granted, the result is the utter destruction of populist politics but so the fuck what? Our base is the urban elite. We have the education, the votes, the money, and the power to win the cultural war because of them.
We can either win on social values or alienate the people who buy our wins for us for a chance to win on economics. I’d say doing that is as racist and sexist as anything the right has done.
We need to pick, socially liberal or economically populist, we cannot have both. The great social democracies of Europe became that way only after massive warfare and with a far less diverse society than ours. Our very diversity and the lack of an invasion that destroys us means that we will never be like say Norway, it’s not in the cards.
I choose social liberalism, which means that I choose plutocracy to get there. I have no problems with it, it’s who we are.
Dis you get lost? Your comments belong in the Wall Street Journal. It’s people like you I’m fighting my hardest against.
He’s a CIA plant, pay him no mind.
Disagree 100%
First, we use the oligarchs’ money to beat the shit out of social conservatives.
Then when we’ve “won” the social issues, we redistribute their stolen wealth back to the people.
Sounds like a plan!
Watch your ass up there in glorious DC once we the people are done using your Masters. It might not be pretty.
Yes, thanks for posting this. I’m distressed at the level of fact free name calling that’s going here, but maybe it’s because proceeding in a constructive fashion is confusing and difficult. anyway, contra Nicolas, I’d say calling the system “broken” hides the complexity of what needs to be addressed since it suggests “fixing” it. a lot of things are changing right now and the broken/ fixed polarity obscures the complexity of what is happening. my 2 cents.
I could say “conservative bigot” instead of pig people.
Change anything?
Not really. Some people just don’t like calling a spade a spade – and are so busy internet policing the thoughts of others that nothing can ever be said (much less done!) because somehow reality never quite reaches the perfect level of harmonious painlessness that they require in their “truths”.
Martin Luther King got it right when he nailed the “white moderates” of this world:
“Over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”””
You should read Driftglass if you don’t already.
His targets are the “centrists” who basically enable the pig people…oh, wait, the conservative bigots, by giving credence to their sheer fucking idiocy, because, well, BOTH SIDES!
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/
If you’re talking about me you obviously missed the point of my comments. Great that you posted the MLK Jr text – take a look at it; is there a single insult in that text? no. he makes points of substance. that’s the writing of someone who wrote to, and did, accomplish something, not someone who wanted to feel good by tossing insults
TBH the only person I see being this way is Atrios. Just about everyone else is trying. But trying to fix things is different than believing in a country that doesn’t deserve it.
Sincerity flows from having a real stake in generating emphatically positive outcomes.
Unfortunately, emphatically positive outcomes flow from sincerity.
How do we build anti-rebels? I suspect that one way is to encourage purism. Purists tend toward enthusiasm. But that means instead of saying, ‘where’s the public option? show me the votes’ we have to start saying, ‘Fo public option! Go single payer!’ even when the votes aren’t there.
Incremental, marginal improvements in a dysfunctional, painful system will never lead to widespread, engaged sincerity.
The opposite is equally true:
No need for “anti-rebels” when no authentic rebels exist. Plenty of poseurs with their personal narcissistic causes crafted by “think-tanks,” Wal-Mart, etc.
What was this “counter-culture” that has been trashed by the right, left, and center since the 1960s? The spirit was in FDR’s Four Freedoms Enough with racism, sexism, and homophobia and an economy based on war and profligate consumption of fossil fuels. Trashing that “counter-culture” has been good business for the banksters and oligarchs and their necessary handmaidens. Devastating for the “have nots” throughout the world.
It does not take a genius to know what needs to be done…we need to push to get ALL people to vote. This country is in a desperate situation. We can put this country back on a positive path to greatness again, but what we need is for large numbers of voters to recognize that their vote for a Democratic Party member is vital to save this country.
Apathy, despair or unwillingness to stand up for your right to vote is not a choice! Those that choose to act this way, had best realize that by not showing up to vote, they are actually voting for the GOP and ALL of their stated policies! That folks is called consequences for choices and it can hurt this country terribly.
There’s no reason to believe that there’s a vast silent army of naturally progressive non-voters out there.
They tilt left, and loved Obama – – though they didn’t vote for him. But they don’t tilt left enough to generate a revolution…
Here is the critical analysis of postmodern policy to parallel Foster Wallace’s criticism of postmodern philosophy, epistemology, and aesthetics.
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory
Also see his recent My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization, which reportedly has some significant analysis of neighborhood organizations in LA.
IMO, the current moment is a post-awakenment one in which activity is concentrated at the local level and state level and Cory Booker is irrelevant to the change that needs to happen because he is unavoidably captive in a dysfunctional federal and party system that cannot be changed at the federal level or through normal political party activities. If those change at all, they will be consequences of the changes at the local and state levels.
There is a fierce urgency to ensure food security, clean water, and energy at the local level through distributed systems and local coordination. Waiting for global solutions is not going to happen; too many large institutions have jammed the avenues of the sort of massive change that we saw in the New Deal and the Great Society eras.
Trust and sincerity, old or new, are going to be necessary assets in order to get the job done.
Disclaimer: Ed Soja was my masters degree advisor many long years ago.
All too intellectual for me. However, I am pleased to announce that although my oldest grandson has a five figure debt and no degree, he has finally found work serving at a pizza parlor. Hey, it’s a job.
Ah, yes.
College. Possibly one of the last bubbles that hasn’t entirely burst.
History is basically a story of intelligent “middle class” people getting shafted by the elites because they don’t have the connections to move up in the world.
A history lesson for oligarchs and aristocrats: hold your betters down, and then end up holding you down in the end: head first in a wooden contraption, with or without wheels, depending on how much work it needs to do.
“Real rebels, as far as I know, risk disapproval.”
Jesus H. Christ, that is a blindingly stupid sentence.
You are all living in a dreamworld.
Here is what’s really happening. (Emphases mine.)
Yet here on The Leftiness Tribune I continue to see people saying things like:
“…the only way to succeed is to try and work within [the system], using the best tools that we have available.”
“Sincerity flows from having a real stake in generating emphatically positive outcomes.”
“…we need to push to get ALL people to vote.”
Yer dreamin’, folks.
The fix is in.
Deep.
Deep State deep.
All your votes and all your theories don’t mean shit to the controllers. They just shrug yoiu off and do what they damned well want to do.
Do you really want to “do something?”
If so, you are going to have to go out in the streets and truly frighten the plutocracy. And you are going to have to do it better…longer, more consistently and in a more effective manner…than it has been done over the last several years in smaller, simpler, more easily observed plutocracies like Egypt.
I see no chance of that happening here. Not from the center-left middle class, for sure. I went on this site last week lauding the courageous anti-Deep State actions of a group of mostly white working class country people in Nevada during the BLM/Bundy land use brouhaha, and alI I got from this cross section of leftinessism was howls of classist outrage about “…white supremacists, misogynists [and] 2nd amendment assholes.”
The so-called “progressive left” simply does not have the courage of its convictions, and the controllers understand that fact full well. The center of the electorate has no real convictions whatsoever so it votes in whichever way the predominant media winds blow. Labor is in full retreat. Minorities are so frightened of going totally broke…a fear that has plenty of reason to exist considering that the heretofore untouchable white middle class is having similar fears…that they dare not tweak the nose of the PermaGov. The only people with any stand-up remaining seem to be rural, predominantly right-wing white people. Too bad. If the same kind of pressure was coming from the left as well maybe the controllers would get at least a little…discomfited.
But NOOOOOoooo…
Instead it’s “…the only way to succeed is to try and work within [the system], using the best tools that we have available.”
Not a clue.
Bet on it.
All talk, no walk.
Of course…it’s not all bad. At least you have a preznit who’s like you.
WTFU.
Over and out…
AG
E Unibus Pluram (pdf) should be required reading for anyone advocating a MEDIASTRIKE!!! or trying to understand how television controls culture or vice-versa. You should know that document chapter and verse.
It’s a lot easier and less time-consuming than reading Infinite Jest, and much easier to understand.
It’s also a rather direct challenge to your cynicism. If I could copy and paste from the pdf, I’d point you to some particularly challenging elements.
Since I can’t, I’d just type out a sentence that you will probably enjoy:
I’ll go there, read that.
Meanwhile, you quote from it:
The “idea of rebellion against corporate culture” can only “stay meaningful” if…one person at a time, to start with…people begin to ignore the heretofore quite successful co-opting tactics of the Corporate/Government Media Complex. The is the very point of an idea like MEDIASTRIKE!!!. I for one do not recognize the slogans in that quote because for a long while I have invariably simply switched off the sound and looked away during all advertisements, both on the occasional TV I watch and on the internet.
AG
You write:
That seems eerily reminiscent of the sorts of arguments I used to hear and read from a subset of anarchists – usually associated with the remnants of the old punk/hardcore counterculture – a little over a couple decades ago. The things that these folks would say about Ruby Ridge, the Branch Davidians, and so on. Some of the same folks would be arguing in favor of joining the NRA. Some of this crap would grace the pages of Maximum RocknRoll, back when that rag was still supposed to have some relevance in punk circles. At the time, I wondered if the writers were agents provocateurs for the John Birchers. One thing these folks making these arguments had in common: they were white, upper-middle-class males. And other actual leftists viewed these folks as wackos back then.
A case can be made that the US is teetering on the precipice of being a failing state (if not already there), and a similar case can be made across the EU. However, in struggling for change that might have some hope, however faint, of being more egalitarian, less exploitative, etc., we need to be selective in who we support and why, and we have to be selective in the tactics we employ, based on a reading of the material conditions of the time (or facts on the ground, if you prefer). Your own track record of supporting right-wing Republican politicians does not help your own credibility. And I would be willing to wager that if you were to go to blogs and message boards advocating the same message you do here, you would be tossed out so fast your head would swim, but not without getting a lot of virtual ink spilled laying out what is wrong with your approach. Seriously, go to reddit r/communism or r/socialism and try your schtick out there. Those are folks who have no use for the current ruling elites – I just don’t think they’re going to buy any glowing treatises on the Pauls, Bundy, etc. Maybe I’m wrong, and you’ll have yourself a brand new set of Paulbots. Let us know how it works out for you.
The utter incompetence of the deep state is made evident by the fact that Arthur Gilroy is not only not in custody somewhere undisclosed, but that he is still free to post on the internet.
Unless the deep state wants it that way — for its own nefarious deep-state purposes.
Here’s a real progressive!!!
Thanks, DXM. You make my point for me. And…you made my day. I can see why you might vote the straight PermaGov ticket.
AG
Ineffectual faux radical wankers like Arthur are infinite in their tiresomeness and, as you point out, the Deep State allows them to run free because they are so totally inept as to constitute a danger only to their allies.
Their intended targets, not so much.
And should a revolution ever break out, after liberal reform has been strangled with the more or less intentional assistance of the wankers, we can be confident that Arthur and his cronies will be the first to sell out the Movement in hopes of saving their sorry asses. It’s not like we haven’t seen this movie before.
I’m terribly cynical and disillusioned about america. I remember the moment when I first understood how awful it was… Way back during the first gulf war I heard Rush Limbaugh say that democrats wanted there to be lots of casualties so they could claim the war was wrong. That was the first nail in the coffin. Then years later the second nail came with the revelation of Clinton’s affair with the intern. Impeachment, Y2K hysteria, the 2000 market crash, 9/11, Iraq, torture, the housing bubble, the financial crisis, the tea party, GOP opposition to all things Obama, the 2010 election catastrophe, Obamacare hysteria, Newtown massacre, NSA spying, assassinations by a liberal president… all nails in the coffin containing my optimism, patriotism, and compassion.
Sure there were a few good things along the way. None of them, however, flowed from politics or culture and certainly nothing good has come from mass media.
Cynical detachment is not only warranted, it is entirely proper as the only workable strategy to wall off the political and media craziness from your real life. Those of you who believe in this country deserve ridicule… and pity too.
None of this nonsense actually affects me (for now). It’s all just an occasionally interesting but mostly infuriating reality TV show. You shouldn’t take it seriously either.
Thank you for writing this. While I enjoy reading many bloggers, very few writers have challenged me to examine my beliefs and attitudes as you have. It is so easy for me to be cynical and to be in despair. But when I think about people in American history who fought for freedoms and legal and economic justice, such as Civil Rights activists, Women’s Suffrage, Unions, I feel that I betray them and their sacrifices if I allow myself the luxury to feel hopeless or powerless. The older I get the more I realize how much I don’t know or understand. Thank you again.