For some reason the other day I woke up thinking about Bikini Kill’s 1992 rager “Feels Blind.” It’s mostly a cri de coeur about the cultural pressures of femininity, but it’s an inspiration to anyone who’s trying to break free from something but can’t quite imagine what’s outside of it. How do you even know what you don’t know?
If you were blind and there was no braille…
If you could see but were always taught
What you saw wasn’t fucking real yeah
How does that feel? It feels blind …
What have you taught me? Nothing
Look at what you’ve taught me
Your world has taught me nothing
And it’s clear we’re at a tipping point, where the old rules are falling away. Which ones do we need to keep, and which ones do we need to discard? Trump got booed at the memorial for Ruth Bader Ginsberg and lots of people said it was inappropriate to heckle a mourner at a funeral. But it’s clear to me we’re way past the point of inappropriate. Last night should prove that. Norms and politeness have gotten us nowhere.
Columbo-based writer Indi Samarajiva has an illustrative Medium post this week titled “I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There,” about what it’s like living mostly normally while the structure of society shakes and rattles around you.
If you’re waiting for a moment where you’re like “this is it,” I’m telling you, it never comes. Nobody comes on TV and says “things are officially bad.” There’s no launch party for decay. It’s just a pileup of outrages and atrocities in between friendships and weddings and perhaps an unusual amount of alcohol.
Perhaps you’re waiting for some moment when the adrenaline kicks in and you’re fighting the virus or fascism all the time, but it’s not like that. Life is not a movie, and if it were, you’re certainly not the star. You’re just an extra. If something good or bad happens to you it’ll be random and no one will care. If you’re unlucky you’re a statistic. If you’re lucky, no one notices you at all.
Collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit, most of it happening to someone else. That’s all it is.
Or, as the (naturally, Russian) proverb has it:
Last night, I was talking to my dad and telling him I was concerned that 2021 would make us miss 2020. He responded with a Russian saying I’d never heard before: “On average, we live pretty well: worse than last year, but definitely better than next year.” — Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) September 28, 2020
Lee Drutman, writing in Foreign Policy, notes that this sort of cultural and political upheaval happens in the US fairly regularly, due to our voting system tending towards that strong two-party system. He suggests ranked-choice voting may be necessary to build future stability. I hope that works. I hope it’s not too late.
Remember: In the past 27 years, Republicans presidents have been in office for 12 years, but have won the popular vote only once. 2/3 of Republican time in executive power has been fundamentally illegitimate, and that’s only if you discount the fact that George W. Bush would never have won a second term if the Brooks Brothers Riot hadn’t bullied him into his first.
Or take it from Jeet Heer:
Thinking a lot about the USSR in the 1980s, a decrepit gerontocracy, unable to meet the basic human needs of many citizens, trapped in a nostalgia for its achievements in World War II while mired in a futile conflict in Afghanistan. How does a nation end up like that? — Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) September 25, 2020
Rhetorical Question
Kind of illuminating that you can’t actually tell what the original rhetorical question was about:
(i mean racism is why but it’s a rhetotical question) — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) September 24, 2020
In this case, it’s about new rules that propose to deny 4-year student visas for people from dozens of countries, notably including Afghanistan and also most of Africa. But really it could be a footnote to any “what’s the reasoning behind this Trump administration policy?”
Except for the part where they stifled a report on electrical grid improvements because improving the grid turns out to be helpful for renewable energy generation and bad for coal plants.
Spoils the Whole Barrel
Here’s a lovely video of a cop deliberately crushing someone’s head with a bicycle.
The government of the City of Portland, OR issued a statement repudiating right-wing paramilitaries, and the District Attorney’s office has defended the first amendment rights of protesters. In response, the city police department arranged to have huge numbers of officers deputized as US Marshals, to help raise the usual trumped-up charges to the level of federal felonies.
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Driven mad by quarantine, a woman who re-enacts scenes from Sex & The City, playing all the parts except Samantha, who is played by a cat.
Joy
There is no joy.
Secretly Ironic 