The Final Solution: Quantum Politics

Large gestures of course create a lot of attention. When John McCain famously voted against the repeal of Obamacare, it was viewed as a heroic show of resistance to the juggernaut of the Trumpocracy. But few people find themselves in a position in the course of their lives to do things that have such public consequence. Most human life is actually lived on what might be called a quantum ethical scale, in which tiny moments of conscience or exercises of free will result in almost imperceptible changes in the fabric of human existence. However, these decisions on a collective scale result in what grains of sand do when they become a beach. Can the weight of such microcosmic bits of morality fundamentally turn the world in the direction of good or evil? For example, right now nothing seems to be shaking the ethical climate which is swinging out of control. Value free politics, with its Spencerian Social Darwinist inclination seems to be driving both foreign and domestic policy. 12 Republican Senators voted against the president’s declaration of a National Emergency in the face of unanimous House approval of a resolution to this effect. Nice, but no cigar. It’s as if the net effect of the ignorance of global warning was to finally puncture the Ozone layer for good—something which may indeed have already happened. So perhaps the Antichrist is not a satanic figure like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor or even Trump, but “a thousand points of dark” rather than George H.W. Bush’s "light."

www.fuckyounowandforever.com

Disney cruise boat

Here is the problem after voice recognition not recognizing your voice or any of the questions it posed to you about the past, present or future, it would like to know if you would be willing to take a brief survey. NO! Mind you, you once had a reason for calling which you have now forgotten in your attempt to negotiate all the prompts which are the Scylla and Charybdis of connecting with any organization. "We greatly value your call and will be with you shortly..." Really! Is this really a more efficient way of doing things? Under the principle of the conservation of energy, are labor hours really being saved when eventually you the consumer are taking the hit, when you're going to have to talk to a flesh and blood person anyway? If time is money the only one losing any is you and there's  no way around this since you know that the promise of being able to go onto the site at www.fuck you.nowandforever.com is an idle  one. The site is a sinkhole. It’s no better than the cave in which the Thai soccer team faced a rising tide of water. Most sites are like the Dante’s Inferno. Computer engineers have devised invidious tortures for visitors to their on-line worlds. You will hear the moans resulting from all the failed connections. Doctors offices making, breaking, confirming appointments and  prescriptions. Airlines confirming reservations, ETD and ETA.  Phone, utility or cable companies, black holes which pulverize anything which crosses their event horizon. Before you know it the few people who still use their phones to talk will be asking callers to choose options #1, 2 or 3 and finish by promising a chance to be in the lottery for free Disney cruises if only a few questions are answered about the call--which by the way is being monitored for quality assurance.

Primal Screamers

The Primal Scream was the perfect title for a mass market paperback. Arthur Janov had a built-in audience composed of anyone who had loved the Edvard Munch painting. It's an example of a timely book becoming an annuity. Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More has also sold quite a few copies, as has Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. That’s what happens when you turn a notion into a movement. Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death was responsible for popularizing Freudian “polymorphous perversity," Even a pillar of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse had his day in court with “repressive desublimation,” an idea propounded in One-Dimensional Man. Not to leave out “the banality of evil,” the marquee concept framed by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ah for Psychobabblese and its sister tongue Esperanto. What tomes will soon top Amazon’s bestseller list? The Sex Myth currently in production will reassure millions of readers who feel left out. Good at Something affirms the talent for parallel parking possessed by those who aren’t good at anything else. Petra is a forthcoming novel based on the following million dollar premise. A couple, on a trip to Israel, seek outs a famous Jordanian marriage counselor. The Person With the Golden Toilet  deals with the psychic transformation that occurs when a reality TV contestant employs the receptacle created by Maurizio Cattelan. No Monopoly on Afflatus is likely to become the definitive handbook of hyperbolic speech.

Biden Time?

photo of Joe Biden by David Lienemann

When Bernie Sanders was running in 2016, there was the theory that he could never win. You might not like Hillary but you would vote for her since she was the candidate who would coalesce Democratic voters. Now the same argument is being made about Biden. You might like Beto or Buttigieg, but why not vote for Biden who for starters is definitely going to take Pennsylvania and will probably give Trump a run for the money in some other rust belt states too? Despite some recent #MeToo problems which Biden will probably be able to survive, the former vice president looks to be heading the pack. What could go wrong? His treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings? His abortion stance which includes his once voting to let states challenge Roe v. Wade? The delay in his actually announcing his candidacy? His age? The whole question of who to vote for is a little like the Bill of Rights which favors individual considerations over the will of the majority. What if you choose to vote for Kamala Harris or Hickenlooper because you like them? Must all voting be strategic? Is the point of the election, not belief, but simply unseating a particularly odious incumbent? Does the means, ie the repression of one’s political standards, justify the ends that would be electing the lesser of two evils? Ever hear of “creative destruction,” the principal advocated by the Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter? What if it’s anarchy and everyone votes for Democratic or progressive candidates who all take votes away from the front runner? What if Trump is reelected for four more years? Could it be possible that politically speaking the pain would edge the country forward to real change or is it best to vote for Biden and stop Trump in his tracks? Biden, biding or buying time?

The Final Solution: A Chicken in Every Plot

Louis XIV and Moliere (Jean-Leon Gerome)

Moliere would have had a party with our current political climate. Right, left and center huge smoke stacks of afflatus bilge out on a 24-hour basis like the factories filled with child workers during the  the industrial revolution. Speaking of children, a child has been conscripted and lionized as an example of all that's good. Here is the speech of the 16 year old Greta Thunberg to the EU Parliament, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJAcuQEVxTY. Out of the mouths of babes. Trump makes you vomit, but then you have to endure the sideshow of liberal do-gooders, promising the world the world. Listen for instance to potential Democratic nominees at the recent CNN town hall. Elizabeth Warren is going to forgive student debt. Great idea, but what about the cost of single payer healthcare, would that to become part of the Democratic platform? When you roll out 16 year olds with pigtails evangellically intoning "if our house was falling apart," isn't anyone reminded of Nixon’s “Checkers Speech? First of all it's "if our house were." Secondly employing juggernauts of repetition is a form of noise pollution that will drive people who are sensitive to these kinds of linguistic abuses nuts. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned cynicism as a platform? Why can’t someone make a similar point to young Thunberg, by embracing greenhouse gases as the wave of the future. Remember Swift's A Modest Proposal? How refreshing to read a broadsheet about combatting famine by eating babies! Why isn’t there a candidate who will reply to questions about gun control by showing off his or her new bump stock? Human beings are imperfect. A humorist like Mark Twain reflected the values of an earlier age. The only hope seems to lie in the Ukraine, where a comedian named Volodymyr Zelensky, (whose only experience in politics is that he played the role of president on TV) overwhelmingly beat the incumbent president Petro Poronshenko.

Professor Oblivion

You naturally have your butcher, your baker, your candlestick maker, but certain professions become passé. Remember the old-fashioned knife sharpeners and the strange apparatuses they sometimes wheeled around on wooden carts. Then there’s the case of the critic, once a vibrant part of the intellectual life of the nation, but now relegated to a relatively minor position in the culture, primarily due to the death of newsprint. And what about those critics who have a second career as clowns—earning their pay by jumping up and down and bilging out tendentious nonsense rather than rendering judgments in a spirit of equanimity? Remember the humiliating fate of Professor Rath played by Emil Jannings in Von Sternberg’s Blue Angel? These are the creatures who have replaced the Edmund Wilsons, Mary McCarthys  and Elizabeth Hardwicks of another age. Sometimes its modernity that's responsible for the disappearance of certain vocations. For instance, self-service resulted in the disappearance of the elevator man who was a familiar figure in the metropolitan landscape from the 20’s right through the early 60’s. And what about blacksmiths? The need for horseshoes continues to dwindle now that horse drawn carriages are under attack--at least in New York. You can still get an operator if you are willing to wait, but now most phone companies depend on computer generated voices that in turn produce a simulated response. Similarly few receptionists are there to greet you anywhere and don’t expect to find information booths, another obsolete item. Just follow the prompts. In a few years Amazon will have finally killed off the last of the retail stores. Books, like home runs, are going going gone and that means there will be no need for printers, binders or paper for that matter. And then there’s Tom Lehrer’s "The Old Dope Peddler"who's still doing a thriving business in Fentanyl.

The Lehman Trilogy

Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy,which just completed a run at Park Avenue Armory, is an elegant juxtaposition between the industrial revolution and theatrical innovation. As directed by Sam Mendes, it’s a family drama about the emblematic decline of capitalism (as manifested in the demise of famous financial dynasty) narrated in a glass box that redounds with everything from story theater style narration to epic visual spectacles like Robert Wilson's The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud and The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. Both the economic and historical analysis and the theatricality are polished and neatly contained. It’s an old-fashioned piece bien fait, a well-made-play, in the form of a groundbreaking piece of theatrical art. These criticisms not withstanding the production creates many trenchant moments that remain with you—in particular the fact that the dramatic conclusion is never is far from the viewer’s consciousness, with the dissolution of the firm during the financial crisis of 2008 memorialized by the packing cartons which are on stage from beginning to end. There are three other historical crises which constitute important elements. An enormous fire destroying many plantations at or near Montgomery, Alabama where they had settled would facilitate, the Lehman Brothers terming themselves "middlemen" in the cotton industry. The Civil War and Black Thursday, 1929 complete the evolution to becoming that form of financial institution now known as an investment bank (at one point one of the brothers says “this is how our recipe works; the flour is money”).With several minor exceptions only three actors occupy the stage. Henry Lehman (Simon Russell Beale), Mayer Lehman (Adam Godley) and Emanuel (Ben Miles) play the original Jewish immigrants and their successors. Multiple role-playing of this kind is powerful and haunting but also leads to some degree of homogenization. And if there's a moral dimension to the drama (after all ambition and exploitation are subsidiary themes), it’s hard to really identify a sense of good or evil as it plays out in what's essentially a value-free scenario.