sound the alarm

One thing I've noticed from arguing absolutely blue in the face with really intelligent and well-informed middle-class liberals is their pretension to reasonableness and rationality. Of course, they also pathologically load their arguments with non sequiturs, hyperbole, and, (who can forget?,) all those oh-so-hushed tones of moral outrage. But, even at their best, you know, even when they follow arguments to their logical conclusion, and they do all the requisite "fact checking," they always end up clinging to the "incremental" securities and sensibilities of their "pragmatic" and "progressive" (read: craven and pompous) politics. And that's a fucking problem! 

So even when you call them out on the flabby presumption they categorically make when arguing in the spirit of lesser-evilism and Compromise that the country is at least on the better track 'cuz the Democrats are winning elections and stuff, and that it will take time, they will never accept how intellectually and morally bankrupt that presumption - as well as the ostensibly acceptable options their phony Realpolitick has dictated for you - truly is. The world is not headed in the right direction! But they'll never get around to sounding that fucking alarm! They have their elections, their Congress people, their micro-politics, their petitions, and their alibi, i.e., those evil, obstructionist Republicans, and so they'll easily forgo more structural and comprehensive political criticisms. They will absolutely never think to use political language to reshape context; they'll never consider tapping into the hopes, dreams, and fears of ordinary people, much less indict the minimalist framework charted out for them by the bipartisan lock on political discourse. They'll never understand how urgent it is that we shed the banality of DC bubble-talk to fight for ideals that have been lost. And so, they'll never really win 'cuz they'll never really risk losing.

I've been thumbing the pages of my Eichmann in Jerusalem lately, and always come back to the usual passages of "thoughtlessness," "lack of imagination," or where Arendt described those who "commit (their) crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for (them) to know or to feel that (they) are doing wrong." (Penguin paperback, Revised and Enlarged Edition, p. 276) All of which makes me wonder: so much lesser evilism = compromise with evil = the banality of evil albeit in a newer form?

This passage from L'Hôte, says alot of what I've been thinking: 

 Nowadays I'm as likely to evaluate people based on their language as anything else: what percentage of their statements of principle come before the word "but"? "I don't like drone strikes, but..." "I don't like that Obama put social security and Medicare in play, but..." "I don't like that the administration has been aggressively going after medical marijuana dispensaries, but..." Last night, when I reflected on the people I've been fighting with, it occurred to me that I couldn't recall the last time they expressed a moral principle that wasn't just a setup for an argument for why it had to be violated. Yes, I know, it's an imperfect world. But at some point, if you want to claim a principle, you actually have to stand for it itself, and not use it as a chip to be traded on, to be given away. Surely the fact that everyone must sometimes compromise is not an argument that every compromise is principled, or benevolent, or fair. I have asked my various antagonists many times, and in as specific and frank a way as I know how: where is the limit? What is the boundary beyond which you will not compromise? I've never received any answers.

Married to the notion that you must compromise your beliefs in the pursuit of partisan politics or else be worthless is the proud acknowledgment that partisan politics will likely bring you little anyway. The furor with which people argue that politics happens only within the boundaries of Democrats and Republicans is, somehow, married to an admission that we cannot achieve truly moral ends with those means. So what you end up with is a perfect lockbox of acknowledged impotence and aggressive enforcement of same. This stance has the virtue of an impregnable defense. Unlike the activism vs. partisan politics debates of my youth-- I always tried to do both-- the debate is now not between people arguing how best to improve the world. The argument is rather against those who have walled off every avenue to effect that improvement. As I said, that's an easily defended opinion, because the cynicism of "it cannot be done" speaks volumes in an age defined by reflexive retreat to the presumption of failure. The problem is that people are suffering, are dying, and they don't have the luxury of a showy disbelief in the ability to create positive change.

Only the comfortable could insist that there are no politics but partisan politics while they simultaneously acknowledge that partisan politics will not stem our violence or our cruelty. Only those who have never suffered could assert that impotence with pedantry and with pride.

After a few hours, during the first night the lights went out, it became increasingly difficult - impossible even - to stay indoors huddled around candles, eating dried guava. So minus a flashlight I ventured out my front door, and walked slowly down my block to the corner in utter darkness. At the risk of resorting to the most available cliche, the experience was, at least for me, nothing short of apocalyptic. Not only were the streets pitch black. The wind continued to howl. The rain gently fell. And it was incredibly silent. There were a few other stragglers out, a number of them with cameras on top of tripods, aided only by the flashing red lights of cop cars that occasionally passed. Knowing, of course, how words fail to describe the experience of the fallout from Hurricane Sandra, at least as I humbly experienced it, (i.e., no loss,) its easy to understand why someone would be brave enough to go out taking pictures in the darkness. I just had to go out and experience it for myself. What I remember most vividly that first night was seeing shopkeepers on guard in my West Village neighborhood from behind their shop windows looking out for looters. As they silently watched me walk down the middle of Bleeker Street I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time: that it was ok to love my city again. It was jolted back, helplessly, to some primitive makeshift of humanity. I swelled with tears. I also knew I couldn't leave by going uptown to stay with friends where city lights blazed on in full, albeit normal, glory. I didn't want to lose or let go of the fear.

But my anger and contempt for this beloved city would shortly return. As I write, (now after a full day and a half of having electricity restored,) there are still countless others in the Rockaways and Staten Island who not only still lack power but are having to endure hunger, looting, cold, and probably worse. There have been some informal reports via email and Facebook attesting that various forms of aid is finally arriving, (after nearly a goddamn fucking week!,) including The National Guard, FEMA, Occupy Sandy & a legion of other charitable souls. But I am still astounded at the lack of outrage - especially during the homestretch of a Presidential race - over the delay! "When are we gonna get some f%@#ing help?" as one resident from the Rockaways put it to the Mayor. Or as another more mainstream source explained more generally of the Rockaways: "Residents said they had not heard from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, nor have they seen a single representative of the Red Cross or the city." And so, the public infrastructure would fail us once again - this time only more flagrantly. Is this only a more banal occasion of Disaster Capitalism? A "mini-Katrina," as one local representative put it. According to another assessment: "The crisis in the Rockaways remains severe, and it's looking less and less like a natural disaster and more and more like a failure of the state."





While it was clear from the first night after Sandy hit that NYPD would never be far from sight, as it drove by in cars or idly stood by on street corners, Herr Kelly and Moneybag$ Bloomberger couldn't seem to muster the forces to even start directing traffic in any coordinated sense with red flairs and those yellow reflecting jackets.... until Thursday!People were starting to grow impatient but they still remained remarkably calm. But how long would it last?

Price gouging by local merchants was pretty rampant, whether it be with batteries, egg sandwiches, or cauliflower. A few were nice enough to allow me to charge my cell whenever I had the energy to schlep to midtown for bananas, pasta, and drink. I repaid the favor with a purchase and change. Something similar has been said of a particular Chase Bank branch as well of the W Hotel on Union Square. Wholefoods was also nice enough, at least on one afternoon, to give away free apples and pears outside their store on 23 St., thus attracting a small mob of some odd thirty people. Of course, there were far more hideous sights, like two elderly people one afternoon going through a garbage can, one drinking the remains from Johnny Walker Red, as a young woman jogged by with complete utter fucking indifference. Dumpster Diving has been reported as well. I also remember seeing an old woman with a bloody nose being helped into a chair on a Chelsea street corner after having fallen in the dark in a bodega; as well as watching an uppity young couple with a small child walk being led out of their building in the morning by their ingratiating doorman who went about hailing a cab for them as they ambled in utter oblivion of their neighbors who gathered in the building's lobby.

What is it that makes people avert the eyes of others? What is it that makes us avert a glimpse of darkness? Are we still capable of surprise? More specifically, what would New Yorkers take away from this experience ultimately? Perhaps an interest in Climate Change? Perhaps no longer a denial of the importance of both environmental politics and public infrastructure? Of how powerless we are? Maybe we'll have a greater awareness of each other even?

Despite the shitheads and moments of despair there was also occasional romance in the air. Friends and neighbors ventured out into the night with flashlights and their survival instincts to gather intimately in bars & restaurants that were illuminated only by candleight and their imaginations. I happened to catch Francois Moutin, Anne Sila, and Lew Soloff @ Bar 55 for some of the best unplugged jazz I've ever heard. I also happened to come across a makeshift Halloween parade consisting of over a hundred people with marching band. As you can imagine, it drew the attention of NYPD in no uncertain terms. The ballsiest move by zombies and ghosts I've seen yet!

So the lights are back on! Warm showers too! And the election is tomorrow! And if there is anything that could get this city & country back to business, back to normality, if not a good marathon, its a good election! Go Jill Stein!   

    

  See Nick Sherman's photo stream on Flickr.

shorter presidential debates...and just as tedious

The business and power of the state take place not in representational assemblies - and certainly not in the vapid spectacles of partisan pandering - but in the deeper and more encompassing structures of state bureaucracies, (i.e., public and private,) which imbricate one another - and dictate the conditions of who you vote for and how you live your little life.      

The exercise of this kind of power is not even acknowledged because on a very fundamental level it presents no overt conflict to behold. Just like in a magnetic field which alters the motion and positions of objects susceptible to magnetism, powerful forces dominate from the periphery, from unseen or unknown coordinates, by simply structuring the very parameters of the field of operations as well as the rules of engagement and the possibilities for direction and movement. Of course, albeit these powers easily do away with more unpredictable irritating factors from appearing altogether, conflict still appears - if one chooses to call it that - but only within the acceptable confines of engagement. Contests, like official Debates, are thus dramatized to heighten differences, and hide unspoken accords and presumptions. "Coke vs Pepsi," for example, effectively distracts you from how similar their ingredients are. And elections are staged precisely to feed you bullshit & make you stupid by inflating and twisting your mind while garnering the halo of legitimacy.

Of course, to avoid boredom most of us end up drinking some form of kool-aid anyway. Moreover, our suspension of disbelief enables us to exaggerate the differences between the actors, and take sides. We even try to push and pull in some directions against or at the expense of others. We even sometimes even place bets or look to influence the field in some banal, trivial way. But we can't. Those few however who are capable of coordinating the field given their institutional positioning and financial clout don't like being bored either - and so they do some bidding bidding of their own. And so it goes.