I sometimes wonder
if I should write a Substack (if only to pay for all the other Substacks I subscribe to). but that has a heavy air of futility and obligation hanging around it.
And superfluity. So many voices yammering, opining. The din fills the ether. Rising like smoke, like prayers, polluting the noösphere. Another effluent of this swarm.
Thoughts are just a kind of excretion of futility. You can think yourself bloody against the iron wall of power.
Meditations on the beginning of the end
from a journal
Am I pretending to believe conspiracies I don’t? Or am I beginning to … well, again, “I’m not a believer, I’m an entertainer,” and I do entertain them. Anything seems possible today. There is a belief out there that the elite are actively trying to depopulate the earth for themselves. How much difference is there between that and them thinking it would be unfortunate, but convenient if a lot of us died? (That wish is right there in The Lathe of Heaven, my all-purpose prophecy. I’ve thought it myself, but believed nature, or human nature [war], would take care of it.) The thousands of fires in food processing plants, Bill Gates amassing farmland … there’s not a lot of difference between the very wealthy trying to push the earth to the edge to try to hasten its purging and its being pushed to the edge by reckless greed and wanton poisoning of the environment, except in the second case we’re all to blame for having eagerly bought what “they” were selling. And now we’re caught between people who want to keep up the destruction because it’s short-term profitable and people who want to take it all under control and create a techno-feudal totalitarian world where the wealth is not shared by the peasants, whose numbers are to blame for an unsustainable lifestyle. There’s blame to throw around as the whole edifice begins to totter. More subjugation of nature, which alone can save us, one way or the other. Beat nature to death, nature mandates our deaths, we’re going to create a “better” world for the delectation of the few and the doping up and dumbing down of the many, the factory farmed human herd. How did this all metastasize so fast? I can’t fault any attempt to figure that out, even if a nefarious central plan is one of the more primitive explanations. Engineering, opportunism, or some of both—the results are the same.
The transhumanist shit is particularly terrifying. These techlords are literally trying to become gods. That always ends badly. What fools these mortals be—thinking they can become immortal. Shakespeare to the rescue.
There was an aerial view of the Quebec fires winking on in a synchronized arc (or was it a repurposed video of a controlled burn somewhere?) and pouring their smoke downwind, like tributaries feeding a wavefront of smoke.
***
Watched a video last night about “false heroes” (basically, any billionaire or celebrity—he even called Gandhi a messenger of the elite “swarm,” a transmitter of their shaping message to the masses). He himself (a Desi) pitched himself as a sort of regular-guy messiah, and I thought of Sabbatai Zevi, and the ghost dance. We all sense that something is going horribly wrong. That our consumer-cheer American lives with all their distractions and attractions have become a hollow shell, the skin on a cauldron, and that last façade could be whisked away at any moment now by the cook’s spoon. We cling to the vestiges of “normality,” as always before a war.
They can have their psyches as well as their persons pampered, the rich. Ayahuasca, facelifts, young blood. They make idols of themselves. Bored gods.
***
I spent a lot of yesterday “escaping” into anxious reading about the state of the world and how to get out of the trap and back into what one self-appointed guru calls “the lost timeline” that was severed by the assassinations of the ’60s. Obviously I’m susceptible to this, but I’m very wary of overidealizing the Kennedys, or believing that star power offers salvation. Humans do have a need or weakness for charismatic figures to inspire and galvanize us—to embody our wishes, hopes (and fears—we need charismatic villains too) and condense them into an action plan. But they have to wade into the dense, resistant snake pit / trash dump of the world, and there efforts can lose momentum, get fragmented and whirled away. The Dump absorbs all and goes on festering. And they also have their temptations, weaknesses, limitations.
Funny, in the image of the Dump that occurs to me, if it had a face it would be the face of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, sitting up to his neck in a heap of mud like a character in a Beckett play. That mad glee. There’s a vitality and defiance in its unconquerable festering. If you could just tap into that perverse primeval fermentation, you could fly to Alpha Centauri. It’s the pond scum on the void, the first layer from which all complex life arises and on which it feeds. And it’s unreformable, below the grasp of morality. It oozes between morality’s fingers. It’s the simmering of cells.
***
My body and my energy are running down. Housecleaning, carrying stuff upstairs, hauling cats to the vet (which I haven’t done yet but need to), my work, all are daunting and exhausting to contemplate, though less so to actually do. I dread them, particularly cleaning house for a cat sitter and preparing to travel. That my savings are also running down is a subliminal, background drain. And not least that the world is coming undone, starting to rot even though it didn’t die yet. If the world were in place, I would be much less tired. There is some kind of subliminal background effort for all of us of “holding it together,” or at least trying to make some kind of sense of the disintegration. That’s what “conspiracy theories” are, a desperate attempt to understand. There must be an agent. At the very least, there are rather suddenly too many of us, and the strong and cruel* are hell-bent on being the ones to survive. We all know there’s going to be a die-off, or waves of them, whether nuclear, famine, disease, natural disaster(s), or just people preying on each other. Wait for it.
*the “strong and cruel” today are the rich and conniving. They wouldn’t last 30 seconds in an alley fight. But they have alley fighters on their payroll along with the accountants, investment managers, and lobbyists.
Jeffrey Sachs on the roots of the Ukraine war
I am committing the breach of copying and pasting a part of Glenn Greenwald’s interview with economist Jeffrey Sachs, because I think it is so important that people see it who would not ordinarily be exposed to points of view in the alternative media, and who may even feel it is unsavory, kooky, or dangerous to go there.
Jeffrey Sachs is an insider turned class traitor, Davos man gone rogue, a fallen angel from the philanthropy–diplomacy empyrean, a whistleblower on neocon meddling. I can’t emphasize enough that he was there in 1989 and 1990 when one thing was said and another set of things began to be done.
Jeffrey Sachs: I posted a piece on Common Dreams, which people can take a look at, to gather a lot of hyperlinks and a lot of the underlying data and evidence but this story really goes back 34 years. It goes back to 1989, 1990, the U.S. and Germany were both very clear to Gorbachev – who was a godsend for the world, by the way, because he really was a man of peace, and I was profoundly honored to try to help him on the economic side, though, the White House was having none of it at the time – but in any event, Gorbachev believed in peace and he unilaterally disbanded the Warsaw Pact, which was the Soviet side NATO and Baker and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister, repeated, time and again, to Gorbachev, and in many, many different forms, and so did the NATO secretary general and others: “We will not move NATO one inch eastward. We won’t do it.”
I spoke to a wonderful historian who is working on this right now, who tells me that in the archives he’s come across, in 1992, not only the plans for NATO expansion, but Ukraine was already on the list for NATO expansion in 1992 when supposedly, in the public, there is no such thing as NATO expansion at all. But remember, in 1992, that was Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld in the Bush senior administration. I thought: what could be worse? Well, we kept learning things can get worse even. And then in the Democratic Party, the love affair with the so-called ‘liberal hegemony,’ I don’t know what the liberal part is, but I know what the hegemony part is. That has been Nuland’s thing. And of course, her husband, Robert Kagan’s thing, for decades. This has been underway since the early 1990s.
The Russians have been saying, and Gorbachev said, Don’t move eastward, we want peace, we want openness. I was actually an adviser to Gorbachev. I was an economic advisor to Yeltsin. I was an economic adviser to Leonid Kuchma, the first president of independent Ukraine. I’ve seen all of these people. Do you know what they wanted? They wanted normal life. They wanted to stop the Cold War. They did not want crazy things. They wanted normalcy and we wouldn’t give it – what we said: Normalcy? Yeah, that’s U.S. hegemony. That’s U.S. indispensable power. That’s the U.S. “We do what we want anywhere, we want when we want it.” And that has been the story all along. And frankly, I couldn’t imagine it at the time because I was watching with my own eyes as a young guy. Suddenly, the world had a chance for peace – and peace didn’t mean U.S. global hegemony, peace meant normal cooperation – but we couldn’t accept the deal of just being normal and cooperative. We had to say, “Now we lead” on everything. And that’s been the story since the beginning.
There are many steps to it. Clinton was the first violator of the promises, and Clinton was so inconsistent on everything. But this is one of the things he was inconsistent on. So, the first NATO expansion took place under Clinton and that was Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic; the next NATO expansion, seven countries by Bush Junior in 2004 – Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria on the Black Sea. So, you had the Baltic states, you had Romania and Bulgaria. You’re starting to right up against Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Putin says, in 2007, stop, already, “Stop,” he says it in a famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. We don’t listen at all. 2008, Bush says “NATO is going to enlarge to Ukraine.” The European leaders, by the way, were aghast, and one of the European top leaders at the time called me, and said, What is your president doing? Of course, European leaders don’t say any of this publicly, but they say it privately, “This is crazy.” “This is so dangerous.” But of course, they were quiet. Bush pushed this through in 2008.
Then there was a reprieve for Ukraine. The reprieve was that the president, Viktor Yanukovych, said, look, we’re in between two giants. We don’t want to be smashed in the middle. We take neutrality. But neutrality was a red flag for Victoria Nuland and her friends. And so, at the end of 2013, when demonstrations against the decision that Yanukovych had made to postpone signing an agreement with the EU started protests, believe me, the U.S., covertly and overtly in every other way, stirred that up massively. But in January and February 2014, they supported a violent insurrection that overthrew Yanukovych. And of course, notoriously Nuland was caught on tape, something we don’t talk about. But anyone go listen to it! […]
G. Greenwald: She picked the next leader! She picked the new leadership.
Jeffrey Sachs: She’s planning the government weeks before the overthrow, calling exactly who would be the prime minister, by the way. It’s amazing. But the whole thing is amnesia – Don’t talk about any of this, though it’s so obvious!
I had a weird experience personally, which was that when the government was overthrown and Yanukovych fled and Yatsenyuk was prime minister, just as Nuland said, I got a call: ‘Yatsenyuk wants to meet you. It’s a deep economic crisis.’ Okay. You know, I actually respond to those things when a government says we’re in a very deep financial crisis. So, I flew to Kyiv and I had an NGO brag to me about the role they played in the overthrow. And it was ugly. It left me shaking, you know, the kind of thing you just want to wash off. Don’t tell me this awful stuff, you had no business being part of a violent insurrection, but that’s the role we played. I went home. I didn’t go back. I was disgusted by the whole thing. But it was obvious then we were on a path toward war. This didn’t start with an “unprovoked invasion” on February 24, 2022. This started in February 2014 and it started with the U.S. participation in a coup.
After dreams
It’s funny that I can identify some of the random real-world ingredients that went into these scenarios and characters; but, as in writing fiction only even more so, how and why the creating mind chose those bits and transformed them as it did is an unknowable mystery. It’s actually awesome. The creative power is infinite and, in dreams, effortless. All the work of creating awake is heaving the dull concrete of ego out of the way.
(“ego” meant not so much as self-promoting arrogance, though that can follow, but as the executive of our days, the negotiator with survival-simplified “reality.” “What it takes to survive” is an enforced social convention, like gender roles, based on something dimly real, but heavily filtered, interpreted, and then set in stone. It’s also a private superstition based on what we thought it took to survive in our early families. Ego mistrusts imagination because the new can fail.)
(Yet there are people who survive recklessly, seemingly by magic. We sometimes call them “dreamers.”)
Thoughts on “Everything Everywhere All the Time”
Crazy movie, reflective of the times. Infinite multiple universes is sort of a clever, diverting explanation for why nothing makes sense and it’s all coming at us too fast—less depressing than information overload and societal collapse. The survival skills required—fast reflexes and split-second ingenuity—are cleverly compared to superhero skills. You have to act without understanding—not only is there no time for understanding, but it’s not forthcoming. Variations on “But it doesn’t make any sense” are the most repeated line in the film.
The movie combines the popular genres of superhero special-effects action film and romantic dramedy. There’s quite a lot of family pain in it—any mother trying to save a self-destructive, alienated teen-age daughter from drugs or suicide will relate—as well as economic precarity and the struggling immigrant’s fear of Authority and women with unexpressed talents and dreams, and the more universal feeling that you’ve wasted your life and your potential. Everything everywhere packed into 2 hours. And the truism (verging on banality) that only love and kindness can make the lion (IRS agent) lie down with the lamb and bind all the shattered fragments together. I burst out laughing many times and also cried—couldn’t help it—it was sort of reliably wrung from me the way a vibrator makes you come whether you’re in the mood or not. Hollywood movies are engineered for that. The best part of the movie was the absurd humor. (An everything bagel has become a black hole. Rolly-eye stick-ons become power-conferring bindi dots.) The most interesting part was the acid-trippy strobing of one’s actual past and infinite possible selves.
So is it “good”? I’m not sure a movie can be “good” without a clear, strong storyline. But that dates me. That relic of a bygone era (the Newtonian storyline?) has been blown out of the water by . . . technology, which makes too much possible all at once and has scrambled both our world and our brains. At least the movie finds a way to represent that.
But does it deserve the Oscar?
It’s interesting that the IMDb reviews are so split. Some people really got it (especially the emotional subtext) and loved it. Others hated it. Not much in between that I could see.
My favorite image for the unraveling of it all remains Ursula K. LeGuin’s in The Lathe of Heaven, where the force undoing everything emanates from the black hole at the heart of a Bill Gates–like world-perfecting world-destroyer. And after that process is heroically stopped, what’s left is a lovable, highly imperfect jumble of all the worlds that have been tried.
P.S.
Here is another take on the movie, specifically from an immigrant-family perspective. The alienation between generations is hardly exclusive to immigrant families—given rapid technological and cultural change, different American generations inhabit different worlds, period—but that tension is ratcheted up a couple of orders of magnitude when the generation gap spans space and language as well as time. (One thing I loved about this movie is the seamless mixture of Chinese and English Evelyn and Waymond speak and, for sure, think in. You overhear countless conversations lie that on the streets of New York.)
Things too Dangerous to Say on Social Media
I put here, on the assumption that very few people will tear themselves away from Twitter, etc., long enough to look. (Not that I have anything I can be canceled from. Obscurity confers freedom of speech.)
Woke totalitarianism:
Maybe the main thing wrong with it is that there are too many white people running it. Again!
“Wokeness” began as raised consciousness of two truths: 1) racism profoundly, multigenerationally, deliberately deprived and damaged people of color, economically and psychologically; 2) present racism persists, insidious and poorly hidden, alongside the lingering effects of past, cruder racism.
“Woke totalitarianism,” however, seems largely driven by white people wanting to get out ahead of what white people perceive as “guilt” and “blame” by bullying other white people.
Why don’t white people just stay out of it and let people “of color,” with their very diverse views and ideas, hash out among themselves what is in their best interests?
WTF WTF
If I could vomit up a lump of industrial slag it still wouldn’t be an adequate depiction of the chaos, the crisis, the detritus, the deformity, the goya monsters gagged up out of crude oil slime pits.
The situation is so absurd, not only mine but everyone’s. Human being has become unworkable. We’re all suffering from nonsense. We’ve created a world that doesn’t align with our own needs. It’s made from our craving, boredom and greed. Nature and its extensions into culture which used to cool and channel all that has become occluded, crippled. We’re destroying our own support system, not only physically but psychically. We don’t know how to live in this world of our own creation because it’s nonsense. Hubris has unmoored us.
Pregnant People
I have two reactions to an article about COVID and “pregnant people.” (It was funny to see that article slip back into “pregnant women,” only to yank itself out of that lapse of attention and get the right words in the display window again. Editorial regression.)
1.) Are there really a lot of non-women “pregnant people,” or are we just scanning the horizon anxiously for offense we might give, inadvertently wounding or excluding a few? White, straight people belling themselves like cats, to walk jangling with warnings, “Here comes a predator”? Of course, probably more than there are pregnant trans men (is that common? what effect do male hormones have on a fetus?), there are people we might call “women” who would call themselves nonbinary “they”s out of “solidarity” (what a solemn, stilted language we speak with a Twitter gun to our heads) with “obligatory” nonbinary people and out of a desire to revolutionize what’s regarded by conservatives as “human nature,” but what is really a jumble of nature, habit, history, custom, prejudice, and inertia. With the latter I have some sympathy, but utopian projects always run up against . . . something. The aforementioned jumble, like the barriers of debris left by a receding flood. Don’t underestimate the power of inertia—thousands of years of it, propelled by no-longer-existent survival conditions—or confuse it with nature. It was a selective shaping of nature to begin with.
“Human nature” is code for “the way we used to do things” when we had much smaller populations under very different threats. There are differences—maybe greater between individuals than between sexes—but we don’t really know what they are, because they’re obscured by what we’ve made out of them. It’s like trying to learn about ore by studying an airplane.
So while I’m turned off by the goose-stepping enforcement and the absolute humorlessness of self-appointed victim-advocate-bullies, the gender revolution has a point—a point which as usual, we’re turning into an intolerant caricature and a new conformity, when it was supposed to increase freedom.
My other reaction is much simpler:
2) Thanks for finally admitting that women are people!
Drugs and me
Comments I wrote on this Freddie de Boer post about falling out with marijuana. It’s worth reading the post and the comments, where all sorts of varied insights are shared.
I know two people who may well have been tipped into schizophrenia by [marijuana]. Apparently it’s known that multiple genes are involved in the susceptibility. There almost should be a “don’t smoke [lots of] weed” genetic test.
Privilege and Sacrifice
Much of my time in Chicago has been spent rereading the journal and letters of my uncle,* Alan Gottlieb, who died in a Naval Air Force training accident in Vero Beach, Florida, in 1943, two months to the day before his 23rd birthday. (I had read them decades ago, but remembered only highlights.) My mom wants to include his voice in an appendix to her memoir, the very purpose of which is to gather the lost—including two suicides, whose names were never spoken again per Jewish tradition—back into the ongoing family.
Alan’s death has been handed down as a tragic accident and a noble, if wasteful, sacrifice. To my surprise, as I read his thoughts and his voice danced to life in me, I came to see it, instead, as both a totally routine budget item of war and a kind of heroic, quixotic suicide. I wrote in my journal about his.
I went through Alan’s journals almost word for word, inhabiting his lively voice and immersing myself in his living presence to the extent that I began to struggle in protest as I was pulled toward the inexorable falls of his fate, No! No! Don’t extinguish this light! but it already happened almost 80 years ago! Mom grieving it again as if it was something I accompanied and comforted her in rather than something I instigated (at her behest, to get Alan’s voice into the memoir). I typed out passages into the new computer, and there were things missing that I remembered: a kinesthetic description of standing on the pedals of a dive bomber during a run; a paradox about the “constructively destructive” use of his new skills in war. I rummaged in the disorganized files (so like mine) and found both, one among letters a girl friend (not girlfriend) had given his mother, the other on file cards typed out by Dad, perhaps the best saved of faded or damaged letters. (How did he do it?)
Two things became clear. One was that if Alan hadn’t died as and when he did, there’s a high chance he would’ve died as a dive bomber pilot working off a carrier, the role he was training for. Those guys were the next thing to kamikazes. Even dying in training as he did was commonplace; he’d lost several friends in crashes before his. I told David it was as if they (the masters of war) were just throwing handfuls of flesh into a spinning fan blade. . . . The second is that Alan chose this self-sacrificial role. If his death was in part the Navy’s fault, it was also his own. He was being groomed for leadership and could have saved himself for that role. Should he have? He would have been a liberal leading light, a Jewish Kennedy, surely a senator, maybe even the first Jewish president—he was WASPy-looking enough. 😜And, in the supremest of ironies, he might well have been assassinated. His loss was anyway an early falling spark in that arc that led us to this dark place.
It’s easy to fall into fantasies of “the best and the brightest,” to flatter oneself that the loss of a sensibility so gently reared, so cultivated and self-cultivated, was a bigger loss than the closing of any anonymous consciousness that never was incubated in the Ivy League or singled out by the spotlight of Eleanor Roosevelt’s attention. But that was exactly what Alan felt obliged to escape. He had an early sense of the injustice and also of the emasculation of “privilege.” He felt he had to put himself at physical risk both to purge himself of that and to stretch himself, to break out of that coddling and self-congratulatory confinement.
I can relate.
The biggest paradox of all for me is that *he could only be my uncle dead. If he had lived for however much longer, the world would have been shifted the millimeter or more it took for a different sperm to meet a different egg at a different time and place, and someone else would exist in my place—in all our places.
It might have been better that way. But this is what we’ve got.
Ambiance 