Of Two Minds (top photo)
Hello dear friends (and skeptics and critics also). This is another one of those big unwelcome but also important ideas, which gave me a very hard time.
My aim is to show a clear and objective basis for hope – even in this angry and chaotic moment. My second theme is to clearly describe and then object to pretend-caring – the idea that treasuring one’s own upset – especially anger – has the same value as sustained efforts in the world to build lasting good for others.
The really funny thing is that I am myself (as a news and history junkie and a concerned caregiver) so personally upset right now, that my first few attempts to render this piece took the form of me seeking to justify my own anger as a kind of caring! (Which is to say – I mean no high-and-mighty preaching here – I’m talking about qualities and vulnerabilities millions of us share).
But I had a nice conversation today which reminded me – the most important point I am trying to make is about love and what it needs. So rather than getting distracted by all of the supporting ideas, I think I should start there and work outward toward them instead (so you’ll know why the extra bothersome parts are worth it, in advance).
To start I want to paraphrase a very beautiful idea (which I think comes from Gabor Mate). “Many parents state fiercely that they would die for their kids – but what if the kid doesn’t need fierceness? What if what they need is patience, or kindness, or understanding?”
Love is a thing that we build with caring, trust, honour and respect – all of which flow from being able to put our petty self aside, in favour of another.
We could make a simple and powerful argument that every vital spiritual tradition proceeds in a similar way – overcoming the petty self to become a helpful part of a greater perception, built on mutual trust and aspirational vision.
But even that is a very big hurdle for a lot of skeptical moderns. Love is at least, something we can imagine having in our own lives.
The tragic thing is that the more we live inside our heads (and screens, which are all-projection and no-contact) the more we train ourselves to be less and less capable of setting aside that irritable and petty self, which stands in the way of that first crucial step of getting over ourselves to love. Which then blocks us also from all of the more advanced attainments along the path of love. Growth of heart, spirit and capacity to be of great value to others. (Pretty much everything beautiful a life can mean or be for)
For many, we end up in a position where we feel angry or upset by representations of events, and because we don’t have enough love, people and direct human contact in our lives, we believe that abstract upset feeling is “caring.” But it is not – and confusing these two very different things (caring about our feelings about the world, versus caring about the world itself by actually doing for others) leads us into all kinds of trouble.
True (adult) caring only comes AFTER that step of getting over ourself and seeing who the other actually is – the lazy approach simply makes use of other people’s lives as representations of our own internal emotional dramas.
Without the learning stage which allows us to make the reality of the other person more important than our impressions of them, we really care only about ourselves. The weird thing about this widely upset moment is that millions of deeply alienated and inward people are now outright in love with their own anger about abstractions – Full Navel straight-Jacket – and yet they are absolutely sure that they care the most about everything!
When you grow up in a cult, you know one thing for sure. Actually, as Buckminster Fuller observed “Unity is plural, at minimum two”. This two things which are really one goes – the people in the commune are the good people – and – most people aren’t in the commune. Not just us and them, but a version of it which has paranoia and hostility to outsiders built right into the structure.
The cult I was part of, ran from the mid sixties to the early eighties – a time when almost everything was being questioned – sometimes helpfully and sometimes really not. Naturally, I’ve been studying similar projects and disastrous psychological ideas around the world for my whole life, trying to better understand. RD Laing makes especially curious reading to me, because he questions the family with such hostility that it becomes in every case a prison – and yet his poetry is outstanding and quite unique – an absolutely precious voice.
Like many post war psychologists, he developed his theories by working with the vast numbers of veterans from world war two who were left severely damaged by their experiences (and the scale of this is incredible – fully fifty percent of those evacuated from front line combat were sent back for mental help, rather than visible physical injury).
But he was also part of a dominant (and faulty) view, that most of what the soldiers were distressed by, was repressed childhood trauma, which had been called forth again and then magnified by the shock and horror of their experience of war.
I say faulty there, only because it is important to qualify pretty much every one of the trends in psychology of the last century – because almost all have claimed to be more complete and explanatory than any have proven to be, when tested.
But here’s one of those things where it is true enough that we must incorporate it – but also so incomplete that we must not ever stop there and allow it to obliterate other crucial insights.
A ton of families are messed up – especially in the west. If you like people in a way that makes them trust you, you will hear more and more painful stories of prolonged interpersonal cruelty, the older you get. Heartbreaking stuff.
There are also a lot of philosophical strains which start from generalizations like the idea of the family as a trap, or torture chamber. Perhaps the most fascinating clue here is the difference between the feminist texts of women who had healthy marriages and sons, and those who were childless or never stopped hating their fathers. One loves and understands rebirth and renewal, the other often angrily denies it – by staying proudly locked inside the rationalizing petty self forever.
If the family is a trap then love isn’t real and all we are left with is the individual stripped of all place and belonging – one of the most pathetic versions of humanity imaginable. Sadly – this weakened degraded alienated beast is also the most profitable variant.
Here’s the thing though. Love is not only real – love is THE MOST REAL. And the nourishment of loving family is still the best thing any kid can have (a thousand times more valuable to their humane future, than any measure of wealth or advantage, delivered in a sterile loveless setting). Talking about encouraging an emotionally abundant setting like this for all children isn’t right-wing, it is the basis of a compassionate society. Of course we must rescue the wounded – but we must also be fostering our next cohort of healthy builders and rescuers without fail.
The cult I was raised in deliberately smashed families left and right – so outrageously and damagingly, that to this day it feels like calculated sadism on a vast scale. When I consider the damage done to my own family and to my young friends, I can’t help but hate with deep abiding passion. Dozens of shameless psychotics who managed, advocated and sustained this child and family torture should burn in hell for it.
You know the truly amazing thing about the world though? They don’t just feel no remorse, despite being the active brownshirts for the lifelong scarring of dozens of innocents – they f@cking teach – using lies about that time of mass damage as if they were credentials!
So if you find my critiques of the boomer generation (or so-called “leaders”) a bit caustic sometimes, you have to bear in mind, I start from personally witnessing them as shameless unapologetic abusers and destroyers of lives. Not an abstraction – first-hand stuff (and I will leave it to you to attempt to guess the freight of fury this has left me with – and tasked me to overcome, in order to make my own progress on the love path).
But there’s a nasty problem with the whole thing. Was it just Adolph? Was it all the fault of one chief crazy person? Were all the other Germans completely innocent, duped, or just following orders? No one else responsible?
Put in very different terms again – of course rich psychotics screw the poor – that’s what makes them rich psychotics, and people like that have existed and done damage in every period of recorded history. The question isn’t how can we learn to whine hard enough to make those to whom we bow, whip us more sweetly – the question is – how do we who are eternally screwed-over by the powerful, organize OURSELVES to join our small bits of power into a big enough positive force to get all of us out from under the thumb of those demonic exploiters and manipulators?
And just to be clear here (though a bit simple, for now) the name of the answer to that question is POPULAR FRONT. That is, learning how to organize vast majorities for the simple shared (usually economic) goods and rights, from which all of our smaller participating communities can then build culture as we wish, to suit our established and our new emerging needs.
Which requires – wait for it – getting over our petty argumentative selves – learning to put honour trust and fairness ahead of ego and faction.
So wait – am I saying that the exact same very difficult and yet also simple thing is key to solving every social psychological spiritual and political problem?
YES.
But wait – there’s more!
First – to be very clear – the key force which messes us all up is consumerism and advertising culture – our truest western religion (very expensively designed as such, quite deliberately, after the second world war – to ‘keep us out of trouble’)
All day long, every one of us is bombarded with advertising triggers which are brilliantly designed to push the selfish petty asshole version of ourselves. The one that lusts for riches, resents the achievements of others, loves a great put-down.
Why? Because they really know how to make that jerk buy (and buy into) stuff. Simple as. Thoughtful people are a hard sell, and people filled with love don’t care about consumerist junk at all. Making true happiness an outright threat to their idea of economic growth!
The question is – are we willing to organize ourselves, mentally, in order to decide where our own limits are – in effect, how much of ourselves, we will allow that manipulative and destructive world to take.
Comes down to attention, really – which is where it gets a bit scary, especially since the pandemic. Compared to just ten years ago, under forties now spend 12 to 15 hours less with humans every single week! – but all of us are suffering-sad.
This means it is all too easy to spend less of our time than ever training ourselves for self-overcoming, patience, love, honour, wonder, challenge, curiosity and joy – and fall instead into training for loneliness loot-lust and avarice, all day long.
But we only build the muscles we use – and we only get the years we get for love.
I have written at length about the left being split in two in the sixties, and the intelligentsia drifting further and further away from respect for the working class ever since. This has now got so extreme, that many who have outright overt contempt for the people who build their houses make their food and clean up their garbage, proudly call themselves “left.”
I’m not saying this to be a jerk – but just because, despite my reading habits and vocabulary, I’ve spent my entire working life on the garbageman side of that equation.
I also wrote about some alternate ways of seeing the culture split, which say more about our time than the now meaningless labels of left and right. The idea of centres and peripheries is especially strong, and fits with the idea of knowledge workers, too.
In big cities, huge numbers spend their entire lives specialized in abstraction. Their work can be creative, marketing, educational, financial, managerial, explanatory or deceptive (or shockingly often, a deliberately baffling combination of both at once). The dominant narratives of modern culture all cluster with this crew of theorists (and of course, flatter their emotional prejudices shamelessly), and they like it that way.
Problem is, they have become so disconnected from that old practical part of the working class, they have come to believe in insanities, and far worse still, these Eloi believe their own ignorance should be made mandatory, by the full weight of state power.
Back in the eighties, the professorial side of the left still felt shy whenever union side intellectuals took the podium. Now, with the production unions mostly obliterated, the ever practical and grounding voices of workers simply aren’t heard (or invited).
Working as a repair man in a retail environment for decades taught me the same stuff it teaches every retail veteran. Workers who produce repair and distribute, understand respect and limits – but idea people live inside words, which can always be teased and played with – and so frequently try to claim personal exceptions from thermodynamics itself, as to be kind of hilarious (if only they eventually realized their mistake and could laugh at themselves like the rest of us, instead of throwing tantrum after shockingly oblivious tantrum).
Sometimes a mental map or model is very helpful – but sometimes what you need is to hang a shelf so it is nice and level, and stays up for years. Those two skills are no longer often found in the same person (which is tragic, because we can all be so much bigger than any one of us is encouraged to even try to be, nowadays). A normal person used to be able to raise a crop, build a house, write a letter, balance books, even compose a nice song or two. As Heinlein so brilliantly put it “Specialization is for insects!”
And still it would be fine – specialization (and micro-cultural disdain) are common and probably unavoidable, at our level of hyper complexity – if only the people with the least practical visions, weren’t insisting their narcissistic blindness be made outright compulsory.
Again – because I actually know it, and because it isn’t actually hard (yes hard to stomach, but not to understand), I’ll just say it. The urban classes who specialize in abstractions are being manipulated, played like dumb pawns – because the powers that want vast sums (with compound interest) to go to the shareholders of energy and weapons companies, instead of going to housing health care and social advance (as overwhelming majorities would support – if ONLY WE COULD TALK AND TRUST AND ORGANIZE POPULAR FRONTS), understand very well that this snobby in-turned clique are so much more proud of their hatred and disdain for those beneath them, than they are devoted to self-overcoming, honour and respect – that they will obediently dance (and smite) whenever they are fed the appropriate morsel (or hear the bell that goes with).
The old socialist in me can’t help but interject here – being a running dog lackey of the imperialists (or a snarling sickly lapdog, for that matter) absolutely disqualifies you as left and always has! No freakin’ Pasaran!
And then we come back to the question – even if you have calibrated your hatred perfectly, on a worthy and deserving target – so what? Unless you really are the centre of the universe, how does that even begin to help?
Particularly when compared with overcoming self and hatred, in order to organize broad democratically effective majorities, with many disparate others.
Now let me do a little bit of “Applied” – jump in with both feet here, see if I can add to a few spots where arguments have been frozen in fantasy for yonks.
And of course I know I risk getting myself in all kinds of trouble with everyone, but I always like examples – and I hope they offer some encouragement to other love-first skeptics.
Children all around the western world suffered catastrophic life-altering damage from the way our governments handled covid lockdowns. Not just to their learning and career path either, it hurt them emotionally in a profound way.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory or a controversial assertion in any way – there is no serious study of the well-being of our youth which shows otherwise.
This means we did it wrong, and MUST QUESTION AND LEARN LESSONS SO WE NEVER DO THAT MUCH HARM TO KIDS AGAIN.
Coming to any other conclusion is flat-out endorsing mass child abuse – utterly insane (and absolutely unforgivable – to our descendants and the historical record both).
But here’s the amazing thing – millions of un-ironically self-describing “Progressive” people are still all-in on the idea of instant social discrimination against the poor and underclasses. It was always people of colour, the poor and trauma victims who were most vax-hesitant by proportion – and thus most harmfully excluded by passports – the right was just loudest about it, their early non-compliance in practise was actually marginal. This group also remain quite shameless in their ongoing support of policies which led us directly to incalculable lasting harms to children.
Why do they think in this (to the working class, obviously bonkers) way? Because they are deeply in love with their hatred for a freakin’ game show host, who could have been rendered completely irrelevant by mere competence, before he ever gained any traction at all. The problem is, simple representative competence and awareness of the populace was never once tried against him – and despite all their desperate flailing since, they still refuse to go there – hence Cornell West and Marianne Williamson, RFK – hell, even Jill Stein is now back in the ring (and rather wonderfully, she remains the sanest, most rational responsible and presidential voice in town by a mile).
Now here’s another really important thing which the more practical (and poorer) people among us all see very clearly (even where they would much rather be able to come to another conclusion).
If you spend years and years in a row, practising being so pathetic that your finest statesmen and women cannot defeat a game show host, without dirty tricks collaboration with the worst elements of the endless war on credit club (and I mean that literally – Biden’s Dems have recruited the entire evil staff of PNAC “Project for a New American Century” the hyper violent ultra racist think-tank which lead the US into eternal shame and multi-generational economic ruin in Iraq), you might end up actually becoming so morally corrupted and functionally pathetic that you really can’t defeat a game show host. I know some insist the majority of Americans (including the change seeking millions who voted for Obama, and then Trump) suddenly went utterly insane and just hate all the good things of the world now.
But seriously – was there something positive for them to believe in? And to be clear I mean something REAL – not a beautiful scary or otherwise compelling abstraction. The bar has never been lower – and still they fail to clear it.
Instant peace overtures with China and treaties with Iran would have been a no brainer positive distinction – almost effortless too – since both parties were very eager to return to old diplomatic norms..
Another big win would have been ending the persecution of citizen whistleblowers who expose government wrong-doing (Obama was not only worse on this than Nixon – he persecuted more journalists under the insane repressive laws that KKK-fan Woodrow Wilson first enacted to persecute left wing war objectors, than all other presidents in history combined), lowering the temperature of relentless state invasion of privacy, putting the bankers back under sane clear moderating limits – so their gambling games no longer threatened everything every human on earth relies upon for sustenance – seriously – there was so much low-hanging policy fruit to be picked, a clever freshman class could have outdone Biden’s team on foreign policy in the first two weeks in office (with a throbbing hangover).
But instead they told all the symbol-people that a riot at a national symbol-place was “an insurrection” – which, to anyone who has read more than ten pages of history, was always insultingly obviously outrageously stupid (and yes, as a lifelong faithful reader of history, I said so very clearly, at the time). The word insurrection was of course chosen from the start (by CIA) because it appears in the constitution, in a place which seemed highly promising for later legal leverage – provided we could all be conditioned to repeat and then accept it as a reality. Thing is, anyone who thinks this precedent will only go one way, and that leftists wont be going to jail and having their lives ruined in the thousands very soon, based on these exact same malign distortions of events, abuses of law, and conflations of mismanaged protest with insurrection, is completely ignorant about the entire course of leftist history (we always get a double dose of anything repressive in the end – it’s just built into the script somehow – not my idea of fun – but it’s in there, trust me).
Now let me be super clear. I FREAKIN’ HATE TRUMP. But I LOVE the rule of law, and the press of say, a quarter century ago, before they all sold out en masse (please don’t forget) to became a self-congratulating cohort of snivelling servile promoters of (always) racist war. And yes, in fairness to my American friends, the Canadian involvement in war in Afghanistan corrupted our media voices two full decades ago, no less grotesquely than it did yours, despite our (shrill, empty and) much vaunted pose of superior ethics and multicultural awareness.
Okay – is everybody mad yet? Sorry, but I have been saving the best bit for last – the place where all of this turns into hope again (after one last bracing chilly plunge).
Thirty years ago – we in the west began to pretend we were recycling plastic. As I noted before, in my own jurisdiction, this change came with a change to the law about recyclable bottles for soda pop. The moment Coca Cola put up a few hundred thousand for blue boxes, Ontario stopped requiring them to sell the bulk of their soda in (always recyclable and always recycled) glass bottles. Glass is very imperfect – heavy, and you can only reuse it so many times before you have to smash it and re-melt it. But you know what glass absolutely does not do? It doesn’t wreck the environment, long term. Sharp and nasty in a playground, to be sure, but erosion will look after it in the long haul – take it back to the silicates (sand) from which it was originally made.
Plastic on the other hand – which the soda manufacturers were suddenly free to make way way way way more of – is absolute poison to the earth. We knew that much long ago – but more recently we’ve also become concerned about plastic micro particles – turns out that erosion makes plastic more and more dangerous, the smaller it gets. We find it in antarctic ice now – and the cells of newborn children too. But how exactly did that happen? What’s the mechanism? Haven’t we been recycling for thirty years already?
No we have not – just no, folks. We do paper medium-well, glass a bit less well than we used to before “modern recycling” was ever introduced, and plastic almost not at all. The vast percentage of the plastic waste we consume is not repurposed into fleece jumpers or made into kayaks, it is loaded into ships and sent overseas to countries so poor that they literally cannot even afford sewer systems for their own population, where they mostly leave it around to be subject to erosion (reduced to the most dangerous possible particulate state). They say they will recycle it – our officials pretend to believe that is possible, even though we know for an absolute fact that it is not, and then they come back to the people and say – WE HAVE RECYCLED – PAT YOURSELF ON THE BACK FOR DOING GOOD.
Hard no – we have been colonialist racist capitalist scumbag pigs – and just dumped our responsibility on poor others, who would of course refuse it, were they allowed to vote on the matter, only they aren’t, because their governments need the money so very badly.
Symbol people think food comes from a package, and putting that package in a recycling bin makes it recycled. This is the single clearest example I know of, where symbol people are believing in crazy fantasy, and thus doing massive damage to the world.
So now let me state this very very clearly. Caring about our feelings about the world is a way to make sure there is a little micro-plastic inside every living thing from now on – omni-violence at a cellular level. It is a way to make poor people even poorer and increase their suffering, and a way to make sure war fires for profit keep burning forever (and keep burning through all the cash that should be building housing schools and hospitals instead) as we stay locked in denial.
The people who are famous for caring about our caring (who feed our vicious and internationally predatory narcissism) want to sell off the last few bits of the world and pocket the cash, just before they deliberately burn the whole thing to the ground. If our international institutions were serious, they would be doing serious work. They have not, are not, and will not. At a certain point, you have to LOOK – and not just wish and believe.
What we have instead are Government ministers introducing legislation to subsidize the cost of feedstock that may (theoretically) lower the rate at which cows burp (I wish I was joking, but this is real). Which is to say, more subsidizing of agribusiness with taxpayer money in a way they absolutely wanted to do anyhow, while screwing small famers with more competitive disadvantage (at every turn, relentlessly) and then shrugging when that pesky thermometer explodes on schedule anyhow.
What am I saying? WE aren’t doing our job as citizens. WE aren’t insisting on effective policy, instead of emotional flattery. WE aren’t insisting on fair dealing with others around the world, or clear talk about our costs and our fundamental moral responsibilities.
So how the hell does all of that translate into hope? By breaking the sleepwalk of doom!
In two ways actually – that are so big, they will probably take awhile to sink in.
First way – all the people that these false representatives (always selling division, war and debt, no matter what they might seem to be about) told you were subhuman zombie maniac hordes? They just aren’t. Most of them are your natural allies, you’ve just been too lazy to get over your own damn self and learn enough respect to find that out so far. That can change any day you decide to open your mind, and the world will keep getting bigger and more hopeful, the more often you do that.
Second way – and this is huge – think of poor panicky Noam Chomsky and the vast numbers who believe as he (as I used to myself) – “the crisis is too big and close, there is no time to build new institutions, we have to use the ones we’ve got.”
No guys – sorry – ABSOLUTELY NOT. The ones we’ve got said “Our dealer (Saudi) did it (9/11), but we’re still pathetic junkies and he’s a great dealer (oil), so let’s beat up the guy down the street (Afghanistan) instead.”
WE let them get away with that for twenty years (in our name).
They said “German bankers (who commissioned outright fraud, knowingly) are very important and must be made whole, even if the entire country of Greece must be devastated for generations.” (and of course, pushed hard toward instability and radicalism)
WE let them get away with that. Deliberately wounding an entire nation, just for foreign profit.
The people of Ukraine elected Zelensky because he promised to sign the Minsk accords, meaning peace with Russia, no more border changes, and guaranteed neutrality for Ukraine. It was Ukrainians from the far right who changed his mind, not the citizen majority.
And still he came back to the table in March 2022, when the stakes finally became clear. So then why did Boris Johnson and representatives from the US intervene to outright prevent Ukraine from signing that second (similar), last minute peace treaty, which both sides had sketched out a year and a half ago, before the war ever rose to such a hyper violent tempo? Both Turkish officials and former Israeli PM Bennet, who helped in the negotiations, have talked openly about this – and their frustration that this much needed peace was blocked by great power interference.
For that matter, why did Angela Merkel admit in two famous interviews that even years before, the Europeans were planning to force outright war in Ukraine, and they only participated in the Minsk negotiating process to stall for time, so they could arm and train their forces better?
Because caring is what they say they do – what they want us to ‘feel’ they are about – what they actually do is manipulate our caring so that corporations can rip off citizens, violently if necessary, and make insane amounts of money doing it.
And WE let them get away with it.
You might not think there really are any capitalists so evil that they would be willing to set in motion the death of hundreds of thousands of people and devastation of an entire country, just to change the way energy and money flows in the world. But then you would also have to explain why American troops are still in Syria (I’m afraid Trump was right about this one – “to steal the oil”), in a way that somehow comes out looking like philanthropy, wouldn’t you?
The same posturing blowhards who keep saying “green” over and over, are one hundred percent invested in mass murder for corporate profit (remember Libya). Was “Mutti” Merkel building out the German power grid, to tolerate the loss of Russian gas that her own secret policy guaranteed? Nope, even though the Germans were fully invested in sabotaging peace years back, so that from now on, American companies will make huge profits from selling European consumers ruinously expensive gas, they also utterly failed to make sensible energy plans – hence – emergency speed coal plant construction from the supposedly ‘Green’ party.
Increasingly, it appears as if they didn’t blow up that pipeline (the single worst disaster-release of greenhouse gas in human history – mind you) in order to win the war. But rather, they forced the war (and all that death) mostly so they would have an excuse to blow up that pipeline. That is how sick and murderous these energy hegemony scumbags have been for more than a century now (I know it melts a lot of brains to consider this – but yes, they’ll even kill white people). And please be very clear about this – Ukrainian voices in number are now saying all of this stuff (I read every side of everything, continuously). Now that it is far too late to go back to that thwarted peace, and all the promises of easy victory and genuine practical support have proven empty (American corporations honestly don’t know how to make items anymore – just market-gaming profit), they finally understand that the EU and Americans have betrayed them terribly, and were using them right from the start. As Kissinger famously said, (with a creepy smile, of course) “Being America’s enemy is dangerous, but being America’s friend is frequently fatal.”
My friends, the expert class who screwed all of this up so badly, now insist that we citizens are too dumb to be allowed to judge and freely discuss it for ourselves. Democracy is “above our pay grade” and should be “left to our betters” (hilariously-often actual aristocrats and spies) to supervise for us.
I say yes, we obviously were all very dumb, the proof is that we picked such creepy and self-serving leaders and experts, and then believed we could look away, do our own thing, and just trust them to do good things in our name (and with our money and reputation, also).
We were clearly very wrong about all of that, and we can’t do that ever again and pretend we are doing good – the evidence is in, these ‘caring’ representatives are absolute psychopaths – not self overcoming helpers, and even less saviours.
But we can do better – do it for real, not for shareholder profit – all of us – workers and idea people together. And not only will we learn to build and hope way faster that way, we’ll also have way more fun in life, as we’re doing it!
All we have to do is stop venerating the tantrum fury toddler inside our very own heads and instead finally get (and get it) together.
Simple-simple (never said easy, did I?)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Now, just because I understand this particular steaming pile ‘has legs’ (is still believed by many otherwise sane people) I have to re-state this key reality – Trump was not ever Putin’s man – still believing that at this late date makes you dumber than the dumbest follower of Q Anon. PLEASE read (or at least read about) the Durham report, it is very restrained, and still leaves no room for doubt whatsoever. There never was cause to say it, it was concocted smear-fiction from day one, and absolutely everyone knew it – they just liked the way the story felt, so they kept it in the air forever. Calling Trump a Russian agent was always deliberately racist and outright war-mongering McCarthyist shite – Nikki Haley strength – destructive to the nation the news and the polity, and this nonsense has distracted and endangered the security of the world for long enough.
Internationally speaking, Hillary’s refusal to gracefully accept her own election loss did at least as much damage as the game show host’s own unsettling version. (Again, do not ever mistake volume or apoplexy for principle, let alone a genuine constituency).
And please note – WE LET THEM GET AWAY WITH LYING TO US ABOUT THIS FOR YEARS – INSTEAD OF ENGAGING AND OPPOSING TRUMP’S CORE POLICY WEAKNESS – which would have also meant learning and better understanding that the working class is seriously mad with good cause. Not because they are deplorable or miss some vanished nonsense-supremacy (what year is this?) – but because they used to have dignity, jobs, savings, holidays and mortgages, and now they’ve mostly got oxy and food-banks – and theories – lots and lots and lots of bullshit theories.
And WE did that – because we love being mad, way more then we care about actually making the world work (Q.E. freakin’ D.)
And seriously – apologies all ’round for high elbows, folks – but we cannot build anything real until we all agree to prefer the real, to the phantom which both flatters and infantilizes.
