Sometimes I read the news and all I can do is just fume with irritation both with what is being reported and the reportage itself. I can’t find it myself to compose any longer reflections because each item is an aggravating revelation of how far our political culture and our wider world are from some plain common sense, relevance, and basic justice. There’s nothing to say sometimes besides that’s so goddamn wrong and indulge some rants following that lead.
The war in Ukraine feels like that so often. Sure, I can drift into wonkery, into armchair generalism, into thinking about the deeper tides of history. But the first and last feeling I have is just fury: fury that something so profoundly unnecessary and destructive has happened, fury that there is anyone with power in this world who can decide to voluntarily ruin so many lives for such nonsense reasons. All of them are nonsense, whether you’re going to trot out shopworn realism or argue, I think correctly, that Putin is working from an ideology about what he thinks Russia is or ought to be.
Caring about Fetterman’s recovery from a stroke just seems fucking moronic. I can’t even stand that thought that this is an actual issue for any actual voter, considering that the difference in terms of what the two candidates will do in terms of voting and advocacy is as wide as the Grand Canyon. If I met someone who said that was the issue that determined their vote, I’d assume they were either a spectacular liar or a delusional weakling that lets the blah-blah-blah of social media and talking heads tell them what matters. Sure, I can imagine someone who votes relentlessly for the person they believe to be most cognitively capable and nothing else, but you know what? That hypothetical voter does not exist. Democrats don’t vote that way, Republicans don’t vote that way, independents don’t vote that way. The fact that we just had an election for President between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is proof enough of that. The fact that Chuck Grassley and Diane Feinstein are Senators still is proof enough of that. The fact that Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert are Representatives is proof enough of that. And it’s been that way for a long time, well before our current partisan intensity. Fetterman is fine and he’s recovering and he’s a guy who can use assistive technology in the meantime. Even as such, he’d be more articulate and certainly a vastly better and more ethical thinker than most of the rest of Congress. If we’re talking impairment, Oz’s lack of a conscience is the real problem: there’s no device that can help a person who had his ethics surgically removed decades ago.
The idea that any US official thought they had a deal with the Saudis in the current regime—or even in the past—that they are shocked was not kept is one of those NYT stories where I generally assume the Times reporters are in on the sick joke and they’re just doing some inside sources a favor by letting them pretend to be surprised. There are days where most of the mainstream press in the US and the EU reads like this story does, where the reporters are either confessing (along with their sources) that they’re unbelievably naive or they’re serving as public relations flacks for officials who believe (perhaps accurately) that there is enough of a chattering-class public out there who need to reproduce the same laughably phony spit-takes to cover their own culpability as experts that they can drum up a few panel discussions at the Wilson Center or the Kennedy School to clothe the Very Serious Naked Emperor People on all sides of the thing. Golly, who knew that MBS wouldn’t keep a promise?
Does the Constitution guarantee the right to vote? Sure, let’s treat that like it’s a serious question, in an era where completely insane kinds of “originalism” are busy paving the way to a peculiarly American sort of theological authoritarianism. Treating it like a serious question doesn’t do any harm, does it? Golly. I mean, people are asking, amirite or amirite.
And oh my god throwing soup on paintings. It’s like renting a billboard in Times Square that says: climate action is a First World luxury, a fashion statement. It’s anti-politics. You get attention for doing it because that feeds the belief of Very Serious People. that climate activists are not Very Serious. They love that message: they will be glad to put the soup throwers on Page One for as long as there is soup and paintings to be brought together.
Can’t even start on Elon Musk, except to say that I’ve found Twitter useful and interesting at times but I’m more than ready to move on, as I often have done in a long life online. Musk and Ye can compete for who owns the most irrelevant social media platform, and the rest of us can ignore them.
Image credit: Photo by Nsey Benajah on Unsplash
Yes. Yes. Yes. I still think I dropped in from some timeline that didn’t contain Elon Musk before 3-4 years ago because I absolutely have no memory of his “rise” to power. And the soup/potato stupidity. That we should even have to give a tiny bit of bandwidth to that.
Thought you were getting at your close to a proposal to adjoin Elon and Ye to Viktor Bout so we can bring Brittney home.