A Big Beautiful War

The US is going to bomb Iran. Trump's not waiting two weeks, it might be happening right now as I write. The US was always going to bomb Iran because too many of the creeps in Trump's orbit have wanted it so badly for so long - Hegseth wants it, Vance wants it, even Gabbard is on record as an Iran hawk despite her own intelligence briefings.

 And I know for sure it's happening because otherwise, Israel would have nuked Iran already.  

For the past week, Israel has been getting hammered by an opponent who can actually shoot back. The IDF is trying to lock down evidence of Israeli casualties and it's been working so far, but only the most credulous cretins on r/worldnews thinks this is going well for them. "Missile defense," as every good war nerd knows, doesn't really work. Something always gets through.

In this, Israel is not some diabolical colonial project as has been debated during its Gaza campaign but - as always - the proxy for American hegemony. Netanyahu is happy to let the people of Tel Aviv get rocketed because he's an agent of the same Atlantic Council ghouls who've celebrated Ukraine's long suffering because for every hundred dead Ukrainians, some Russian military hardware gets mulched. Also, Netanyahu doesn't care when Jews die.

This is the fever dream of those very same neocons: regime change in Tehran. But done better this time, a decapitation strike from the air, and then the People will rise up. That they've already risen in the opposite direction doesn't fit the calculus, so it's ignored.

And Donald Trump, the dumbest thing to ever come out of New York City, is not just the facilitator but an eager participant. All that "peace" noise was just for the rubes and everyone who forgot his first term because of long covid and opiates. He was an Iran hawk from 2017 to 2021, he's always wanted this Big Beautiful War because, like every good American business pervert, he thinks it will be all profit and no loss.

If you really want, there is a decade of work from Radio War Nerd and New Left Review and everyone with any goddamn sense to explain how this will not work. Look up the Strait of Hormuz for starters. Look up how the carriers will die. Or just look at that Al Jazeera link again of the thousands of Iranians rallying around their flag. If someone wanted to give the Islamic Republic's geriatric oligarchy a fresh mandate, they couldn't do better.

And if you want to see how truly fucked this all is, look at China. They need Iranian oil for their many grand projects. That's why the American ruling class wants total Middle East energy hegemony, to freeze out the rising power. This simply won't work and you don't have to look further than Russia's attempt at regime change in Kyiv. China has satellite intelligence and "lethal aid" too. 

It's ironic, or fitting, or just gross that the same time as the anniversary of the one good war, this rotten republic would forget the words of William Tecumseh Sherman to the graduating class of West Point:

“I’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here. Suppress it! You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is Hell!” 

How Democrats Win Before They Lose

I wrote the following in March of 2020. I submitted it officially to a few places but nobody likes me. So I'm leaving it here as evidence that this was not unprecedented. Only the center-right liberals of the Democratic Party could manage to lose an election to a sundowning gameshow host. Twice.

Joe Biden will lose to Donald Trump.

Not because Trump is that popular. Not because Bernie Bros will sit out the election or vote Third Party out of spite. Not even because Joe Biden is a repulsive old reptile with a liquefying brain.

Joe Biden will lose for the exact same reason he received the lion’s share of Super Tuesday delegates: the ideology of the suburbs.

Marxists and other left-wing thinkers have long not known what to do about the suburbs. It’s a petite bourgeoisie, so something of an enemy, but also for the longest time accounted for the bulk of the electorate who actually shows up at the polls in November. Middle managers and petty tyrants abound in the suburbs but so do the economically precarious, the striving workers who would benefit most from social democratic policies. Also, most modern lefty commentators grew up in the suburbs, which naturally leaves them feeling somewhat conflicted.

They shouldn’t because the suburbs are the root of modern neofascism.

Often celebrated in history as indicative of the bursting American dream of the post-war era, the suburbs owe their birth more to white flight and an accelerated fossil fuel economy. As African-Americans moved to cities to pursue more upward mobility, the WASPy masters of the old metropoles moved out into curated ersatz villages. Such outer reaches used to be undesirable as light rail is criminally underdeveloped, but cars  - and an endless supply of cheap petrol - changed all of that. For those who could afford all the loans, or could even hope to receive loans. Racism still looms in finance, as demonstrated by the easy adoption by MBA grads of racist conspiracy theories about lazy black folks defaulting on their mortgages and causing the 2008 crash.

But you’re familiar with all this. Especially as you’re, well, on this website. These are the material conditions of our post-industrial Forever Recession, well documented by journalists and economists who don’t owe their careers to parroting official lies.

What makes the suburbs the fecund swamp of reactionary thought isn’t just its roots, but it’s dreary daily reality. Each house is a self-contained universe, environmentally controlled and crammed with electronic toys to simulate real human feelings on demand. In between stand vast oceans of difference if only a few feet of distance. “Atomization” as the sociologists like to say, which prepares the suburban mind for scapegoating better than any national myths of Manifest Destiny and other thinly-veiled traditions of white supremacy. Why care about those kids in concentration camps when you don’t even relate to your neighbor’s kids, let alone your neighbor?

This human disconnect is compounded by the suburban fantasy of autonomy.

Where does your water come from? That’s obvious - the faucet! Every suburban home has something so few human homes have had throughout millennia. Ready access to (mostly) clean, potable water is both a tremendous civilizational advancement and so ubiquitous in the first world - especially American suburbs - to be wholly taken for granted. The same with electric lighting, climate control, and all the other features of the modern suburban house that makes the atomization of middle class Americans material as well as social. Because the source of these resources is occluded by their normalcy, and this feeds into a fantasy of independence in the suburban mind. That’s why libertarian talking points work so easily on the suburban middle class, why Democrats and Republicans spent the years from Reagan through Clinton courting this voting bloc with talk of tax cuts and deficit reduction and welfare reform - all things that only appeal to a person so alienated from the connecting networks of modern society that they really think of themselves as an island.

These are the “moderates” so sought after by pundits and political consultants. They are only moderate in gentle times, their commitment not being to “common sense solutions” but their own material security and sense of autonomous power. The basis for that security and power has been in decline since 2008 at the least and so the suburbs have lost their marbles.

That same systemic racism that drove the white flight to the suburbs still festers under the lawns and backyard barbecues. Without the peace and prosperity of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, that racism has risen like bile and spilled out as the Alt-Right, the failed children of the middle class grasping at whatever gives them drive and purpose but without any understanding of how wealth and power is sorted by class. Instead, raised in the toxic libertarian fantasies of the suburbs, alienated by those who correctly point out their privilege but do not recognized the shared precarity among all classes in post-recession America, they lash out at all the shibboleths of their parents. Blacks, gays, immigrants - all the Others that were subtly and not so subtly demonized by the talk radio and cable news that flattered their suburban forefathers as wielders of power. As John Dolan so famously said in the voice of the War Nerd, “Poor humble people are not jihadis; that’s an arrogant, middle-class phenomenon.”

That arrogant middle class is tainted, root and branch, by the individualist fantasy of the suburbs and its material comfort. A comfort only possible by a massive, intertwined system of public and private institutions. Some still show up for Biden and the lost fantasia he promises of a third Obama term, where Trump never happened. But from Gingrich to George W. Bush to Trump himself, the suburbs have shown they are fair-weather friends to such muddling centrism. As soon as their car payments go up, they will side with all that is grotesque in American politics.

Indecision 2024: Not a Bang but a Whithering

That debate was something, huh? I didn't watch it live, I was traveling between time zones and had important beer to drink, but I've since listened to the audio. And oh boy, folks. Oh wow...

This is no great shock. Biden was a sundowning buffoon all through the 2019 primary, securing the nomination less because the party believed in his chances against trump and more to squelch their own Sanders insurgency. He was never going to get better and it's a classic tale of hubris that the Dems started believing their own bullshit about how he was still sharp as a whip. Because only Democrats are dumb enough to lose yet another election to Donald Trump.

But speaking of... I don't see what everyone's so scared off. Donny just sounded so tired. For a performance artist best known for his zingers, this was a mediocre showing at best. Which could also have been predicted - Trump was going soup-brained at his own rallies all through the spring. Even when his word salad has some kind of logic, there's none of the energy. MAGA is a spent force, at least nationally. They can claim Florida and a few other worthless corners of the US, but as an ideological project they're just out of gas.

"But Project 2025!" all the professional class liberals have been saying, all over social media for two weks. The Heritage Foundation's grand plan for a Christian Nationalist Reich. Which sure would be scary, if you don't actually read it. Rick Perlstein did, and quite rightly pointed out how this is not some unprecedented power grab. It is in fact very precedented, and more aspirational than plausible.

Especially, I would argue, because if there's one Republican least likely to deliver on this waffentwerp wishlist it is Donald Trump. The White House from 2017 to 2021 had a few committed ideologues passing through, but it had far more media-obsessed nihilists selling each other multilevel marketing scams. Half those ideologues have abandoned Trump as the fairweather autocrat he proved to be, the other half are in jail. And this was already the B-squad of rightwing wonkery. A second Trump administration isn't even going to have his kids along for the ride.

That's not even getting into the many de facto and de jure barriers to the sorts of sweeping executive overreach Very Concerned People are all very concerned about. Federalism proved a solid check against Trumpism the first time around, now blue state governors will be even more energized in their defiance. Trump's upset victory in 2016 has since cost the GOP two midterms, the Senate, and so many state legislatures that they're weaker than the Libertarian Party in Michigan these days. Michigan! Home of the crackpot militias of the '90s! And if current national polls prove accurate - something I personally believe you could just as well flip a coin over - a Trump re-election would occur alongside a Blue Wave across both the House and Senate. How the fuck's he instituting no-fault divorce then?

What a Trump 2 can do, what he's promised to do far more often than any sops to the anti-abortion crowd, is trade war. A yuge trade war, this time with Europe! And appropriately when taking on the Europeans, it'll be an own-goal: more inflation, less jobs. He won't pull out of NATO - he can't, for various boring treaty reasons - but in turning the US from the de facto leader into the sulky junior partner, Trump will foster a new and emboldened Europe. Which will further diminish US influence and ultimately lead to the real doomsday scenario: no more dollar hegemony.

The US dollar's position as the global reserve currency is the imperial foundation of every creature comfort you still enjoy. It's why the 2009 recession didn't hit as hard as the EU's sovereign debt crisis and it's why you get subsidized oil for your SUV. It's why nobody really cares about the federal deficit, no matter how much they pretendto cry about it on cable news.

But that can all change under Trump 2. The EU and OPEC, tired of these schizophrenic Americans, just go, "Okay, we'll peg petrol to some basket of currencies or some digital bancor" and then it's adios Your American Dream. The deficit will suddenly matter, Treasury Bills will decline in value, and you'll be paying ten bucks a gallon at the pump. Which you deserve, it's 100 degrees in the shade and that's your fault.

And then the president will keel over because he's too damn old. That prediction holds for whichever of these marionetted corpses actually wins in November. That Republicans are in this situation, hitched to a loser echo of the Reagan years, is as poetic as it is funy. That Democrats are so enthralled to their own sclerotic elites, well, an empire's gotta end sometime.

Not a Wave, but a Tide

 

I've been rewatching an Adam Curtis documentary and it just so happened to touch on the time the Red Army Faction trained with Syrian paramilitaries.

The specifics of which I'll get into later but the main point I'm gonna try and explain is this: there is no conflict between socialism and capitalism, we live in postmodern technocracy. This is not a critique of our internet addled culture or "woke" anything, but rather the transition from modern liberal capitalism into postmodern technocracy began in 1945. World War II was the end of the old empires and also the end of the grand 18th Century revolution in liberal capitalism. The war economy was the New Deal on steroids. Big government didn't so much reign in big business as they merged, and that synthesis has persisted no matter how much tax cutting Reagan did. His whole schtick, when you get down to it, was less about economic transformation and making America "great" again than it was ameliorating the popular outrage - and malaise - of the transformations of the 1970s. When the rates of profits began to fall and the postwar revolutions failed.

So here's that aside in the lede - back in the early '70s, the German Maoist terrorists Red Army Faction went to train with some Syrian militias that were fighting Israel. These RAF Germans were committed leftists and also very cognizant of their nation's crimes in the holocaust. And they were aghast at their Arab "comrades" who venerated a portrait of Hitler. "Good man. Killed lots of Jews." The Syrians didn't see a problem with this but the Germans suffered from cognitive dissonance, because all their Marx and Mao had taught the Revolution would be international and liberatory for all the working classes. And then here was a particular national liberation movement embracing exactly the kind of genocidal atavism they thought they were fighting back home. The RAF's way of "fighting" was also bombing department stores to shock the middle classes into understanding social democracy was built on global exploitation, and they were equally baffled when the German working classes reviled them as murderers.

Now, how this ties back into the larger point (admittedly clumsily) is how you have a corps of committed ideologues who are both baffled that the rest of society thinks they're pricks and also fighting a battle that was already decided. That's the modern rightwing in America. They genuinely believe banning abortion and trans bathroom panics are the most pressing concerns. So they double down on this, expecting society at large to agree with the intrinsic goodness of their project - as they see it. Then they lose every state referendum on abortion. Then they lose elections in traditional southern enclaves like Virginia and Kentucky. If enough racist grandparents have been migrating there, like Florida, they can look successful but it's like winning class president at a special needs school. "Oh, good for you!" pat on the head, move on.

However, this isn't because more Americans are virtuous liberals. It's because more Americans are just normal. "Normal" being a subjective thing - I remember growing up in the DC suburbs, it was quite "normal" for all the DOD and State Department contractors to decry the big government that paid their mortgages. Today, it's far more normal to think people screaming about "groomers" aor election conspiracies are both unhinged and - worse - annoying. Trump is really annoying these days, and that's gonna hurt him worse than all the trials. His only hope is another electoral college fluke, which is a non-zero probability but so is nuclear war. And again, like the RAF, this is a lost battle. The country's going "woke" no matter how much Trump's fan club whines, no matter how much the really committed try to "rise up" and usually shoot a dozen people with an AR before getting vaporized by the police state. They're not waking up the normal Americans to their manichean "truth" and are just slotted into yet another crime story.

And here we get to how Joe Biden is like Ronald Reagan. Like Reagan, he's presiding over a transition in American society that's so slow and unconscious that it's hard to spot. Like Reagan, he's a bumbling old guy who is nonetheless endearing, even to those who criticize him. Yeah, lots of young people gripe about Ol' Joe, but that doesn't mean they're gonna vote for the bathroom-creeping Republicans. Where Reagan presided over the enrichment of a corporate oligarchy and suburban culture war that began under Nixon, Biden is presiding over a fuller technocratic transition - "rule by experts" - and the burying of that culture war that began under Obama. Nixon's silent majority were the normal people of their time, annoyed at the hippies. The Democrat voting base of today isn't DSA - I feel like they've just disintegrated since the end of the Sanders campaign - but the normal people in the professional classes. The ones who want peace, order, and good government - in contrast to the Republican base who think everything is a secret Marxist conspiracy. Crying that transcommies are turning your kids gay is the new blaming (bombing) department stores for being counter-revolutionary. Even if you can logically explain the theory, it still sounds fucking nuts to a person not plugged into the deep end of internet political discourse.

To be clear, this is not a hopeful assessment. These same normal people are tuned out to climate change and the gigafication of the economy. I'm not arguing the triumph of technocracy will lead to human flourishing - I'm even skeptical it will ameliorate human want, which is about the only good argument for a dictatorship of the scientists. But I see this as the direction of things. Marxist revolution was a byproduct of liberal capitalism, an attempt to inject some Christian compassion into an exploitative economic machine. And too many latter-day "Marxists" just want to keep the middle class material comforts they grew up with, but not feel guilty about it. Like the MAGA faithful, it's yesterday's fight. The real struggle is against an ever more hostile biosphere, to be met with resilience and managed retreat. Which is also why I don't label my predictions of technocracy as "the good" - too many of these political theorists are just moralizing by other means - because shrinking resources and northward migrations are going to make even more draconian border controls agreeable to the aforementioned "normal" people.

Stop worrying about elections. Start worrying about climate adaptation.

Why All-Out War is Good, Actually

How's your anxiety these days? Mine's a motherfucker. Rumors of nuclear war, PTSD, and a coffee addiction are not a fun combination.

Which is why I'm hoping the rumored "big news" out of Moscow come May 9th - V-E Day - will be a general mobilization. Brutal as it's been, the Russo-Ukrainian war thus far really has been a "special military operation" and not a formal war. This is a logistical as much as legal distinction, because it means the Kremlin cannot call up reservists or directly conscript new soldiers.  Should Putin declare "a state of war" on or before the big Red Square celebrations planned for next week, that all changes as the entire Russian society will be placed on a war footing. Going all-in on Donbass, which will succeed no matter how many Polish BMPs Zelensky can get.

And that's a good thing. The terrible logic of this war from the beginning has been a conventional Russian victory - however that can defined and spinned by the siloviki - is better for the world than continued Ukrainian success. Because nukes. Many American and other Western talking heads and political class suckpuppets have bemoaned that the 4000+ nuclear warheads in the Russian arsenal puts Europe and the US in a sort of hostage situation, where NATO air forces can't just roll in and carpet bomb Russian forces without suffering actual consequences in London and DC.

Somewhere in Baghdad, people are muttering, "See how you like it..."

There's been talk recently, which I am not linking to, about a possible deployment of tactical nukes against Ukraine to clear the current impasse in Donbass. Exaggerated and ridiculous talk but still alarming, as such an escalation besides the horror and suffering immediately in Ukraine would breach the global nuclear taboo that has persisted since 1945. Once Russia uses nukes in a conflict, that sets a precedent for US and Chinese (and Israeli) nuclear forces that amounts to, "Hey, we can do this now." Which will either translate into many tactical deployments as the Great Powers go about beating on weaker countries or - and who knows the odds on this anymore - an escalation to a strategic exchange as NATO "cannot let this go unanswered" or whatever other idiot excuse for annihilating the Northern Hemisphere.

But, should Putin declare All-out War on Ukraine, the possibility of a tac nuke goes way down:

If Putin declares a mobilization on May 9, that would almost certainly indicate a deferral of possible WMD use. More Russian soldiers in Ukraine means more of them exposed to potential WMD fallout. And conquering Ukraine, if parts of it are devasted by WMD, makes no sense.

Michael Kofman, one of the few to predict the war who isn't a hysterical neocon, talked about this a week ago. He argues that current Russian forces, once the Donbass Offensive is done, is a "spent force" that cannot prosecute further military operations against Ukraine - let alone other neighboring countries, despite the yelpings of Polish and Baltic reactionaries. Kofman also makes the point that such a mobilization would commit Putin to maximalist war aims - the total Kyiv regime change that initally failed - and that could prove politically untenable.

There's an inevitable argument that invading Ukraine in the first place made no sense so Putin might still pull the nuclear trigger, but Anatol Lieven makes a good point that while reckless and ruthless, Putin is not insane. His miscalculations are still rational. So here's hoping he doubles down conventionally, or just pulls a "mission accomplished" while the Donbass offensive stalemates, instead of trying to shock and awe the world one last time before that cancer gets him.

UPDATE 2:59PM: A rare good Twitter thread on the costs versus benefits of doing a Bush-In-His-Flightsuit victory lap rather than whole-hog mobilization.

Loosed Upon the World

Two weeks ago, if you told me Ukraine would still be resisting the Russian invasion and Zelensky would still be alive, I'd have laughed in your face. In fairness, I laughed at the prospect of an invasion of this scale up until the morning of February 24th. The idea was simply too stupid across every dimension - tactically, strategically, and politically. I like to think I've so far been vindicated on that analysis, the Russian tactics of shock and awe have stupidly abandoned any sense of modern logistics and led to a whole new genre of internet video: tank theft! Strategically, Putin has stupidly reinvigorated NATO and even inspired Germany to start arming itself again. And politically, this has galvanized the once waning opposition movement within Russia, to say nothing of how it's compromised Vova's position among his fellow siloviki in the Kremlin.

It was all so obviously stupid from the start. And it happened anyway.

And while how it's been happening has been even more of a surprise, how it ends still looks written in stone. A Russian military victory, followed by occupation and insurgency. Putin's very own Iraq quagmire, right on the border and fed by NATO weapons shipments. Hundreds of thousands dead, a nuclear superpower destabilized for a generation, and Ukraine a breeding ground for all the worst sorts of throat-slitters.

Though you wouldn't think it, to judge by every anglophone corner of the internet. Between r/worldnews and Facebook memes, there is a popular certainty Russia is losing the war and will soon be driven from the Ukrainian plains, to allow the sacred sunflowers to grow. Or something. While the conspiratorial may be inclined to see this total domination of the propaganda space to be the works of some three-letter-agency, I think it's genuinely organic. Millions of people throwing moral support to Ukrainians, who despite the sins of the Azov Battalion really are defending their homes from an aggressive invasion. Much like Iraqis or Afghans or Vietnamese or Yemenis or...

And it helps the blue and gold flag memes that Russia's performance - so far - has been so blitheringly incompetent. Michael Kofman, one of the few commentators to have predicted war, has gone on numerous social media threads about both logistical failures and the bizarre way Russia has abandoned their own combined arms doctrine, opting for slap-dash "special ops" zipping in, getting overstretched, and either captured or killed by even Ukrainian militia. Russian soldier morale, already not the highest among armies, has reportedly been sinking faster than the ruble. The way things look - the way they're made to look - is Ukraine only needs to hold out through another week or two of bombardments until either mass desertion renders Russian forces combat ineffective or Vova suffers a palace coup by generals upset that even their own are dying in this stupid war.

Serious question: when was the last time an American General died in battle? I can't think of any since the Civil War - maybe, since Confederates don't count.

A lesson everyone should have learned from Syria is light infantry craft matters. The Kurdish YPG demonstrated this over and over against Islamic State. Ukrainian regular military and militia have demonstrated it over and over again. But light infantry can only do so much against heavy armor, especially when Russia can afford to keep throwing men and material into the Ukraine meatgrinder. For all their bravery, a Ukraine that doesn't reach some ceasefire deal with the invaders is looking at the decimation of Kyiv (which might be happening as you read this) followed by an occupation and insurgency.

Here's how an insurgency works: think about everyone in your entire extended family. All of them, from the old yia-yias to the bouncing new babies to the middle-aged failures. Now kill two thirds of them. Of those, a third died bad. Like basement and power drill bad. In exchange, you maybe get the occupiers to back off for a while. In rare cases, the occupiers leave because the political situation among their bosses no longer allows for the costs of the occupation. That usually takes a few changes in the political leadership or maybe a new generation reaching age of majority. Also, for this thought experiment, you are not one of the guerillas. You just live in the occupied territory. The guerrillas lose more.

A bad deal for Ukraine. And every neighboring country. And it's the big plan inside the Beltway:

The ways that Western countries would support a Ukrainian resistance are beginning to take shape. Officials have been reluctant to discuss detailed plans, since they’re premised on a Russian military victory that, however likely, hasn’t happened yet. But as a first step, Ukraine’s allies are planning for how to help establish and support a government-in-exile, which could direct guerrilla operations against Russian occupiers, according to several U.S. and European officials.

NATO will not engage Russia directly. Which is a good thing, no matter how many schools and hospitals get shelled into rubble. But NATO will keep an unconventional war simmering in occupied Ukraine, nominally to bleed Russia, but also empowering the worst factions within Ukraine. Thoughtful, democratic types make for poor guerillas and Langley never arms Marxist rebels no matter who they're fighting. All this proposed support is going to the Azov Battalion and fellow travelers, because arming the Afghan Mujahideen worked out so well.

Except now, the Great Powers quagmire with militant reactionaries is in the middle of "civilized" Europe. The blowback coming from Putin's stupid war is going to make Paris 2015 look like harsh language.

Oh Shit

Putin is having his Bush Goes to Baghdad moment. Whether this is shock and awe to break off those breakaway regions or a prelude to a Ukraine-wide military occupation, it both amounts to the same thing: thousands dead and the weakness of the Russian state exposed (counter-intuitively) by it's massive violent demonstration.

I remember Stan Goff making this point in late 2004 (can't dig up the old Counterpunch/Beast article, may only be on Wayback now). That the US invading Iraq in 2003 was because they couldn't bring any other measures to bear, that US hegemony had already degraded to the point that soft power didn't work. Short-term, the US military defeated the Iraqi military but then a decade of occupation only managed to produce a corrupt government-in-name-only and the Islamic State.

That's the Russo-Ukraine War trajectory. Swift Russian tactical victory followed by long, grinding decline. It's already a domestically unpopular operation (which will probably fluctuate back and forth, people can forgive any atrocity if it achieves "victory") and has now effectively shut Russia out of the global economy with the all but stated death of Nord Stream 2. Now, the US faced a huge backlash for the Iraq adventure but the US in 2003 was also at it's hyperpower peak. Russia today has been under 8 years of Crimea sanctions and last I checked has a negative birth rate. Holding the threat of invasion was getting dialogue with the US and EU but now that's done. In trying to make Russia great again, Putin just set them on the path to being North Korea.

Anatol Lieven has been one of the war skeptics to still honestly assess what a war might be like. And he doesn't mince words:

The European Union would impose greatly intensified sanctions that would do vast damage to an already troubled Russian economy; the Nord Stream gas pipeline would be abandoned; Russia would be forced into almost complete dependence on China; parts of the Ukrainian army would fight very hard, and might inflict heavy Russian casualties; and if it occupies large new territories, Russia would face the challenge of ruling not the pro-Russian populations of the Donbas and Crimea, but significant numbers of infuriated and rebellious Ukrainians.

That the Siloviki running the Kremlin would take a look at all of this and decide Operation Ukrainian Freedom is better than it's coy brinksmanship of the past year is testament to Neocon-level idiot hubris, an air of desperation over maintaining their own power domestically, or likely both.

And, living on a different continent, this would all be so much background noise - the usual misery of the universe - if not for all the Acela corridor ghouls now salivating to arm Ukraine. Maybe that's why I'm rambling all over the place, because waking up to "War's on," in the one country that sabre-rattles the most at Russia, calling this "Our Sudetenland!" while forgetting Our Haditha means living in the crossfire of two sclerotic oligarchies, always threatening to sock each other in the goshdarn teeth while the ice caps continue melting.

White Riot

History repeats itself but it's important to be clear what history. Last week's failed coup attempt by MAGA and QAnon reactionaries on behalf of President Trump has already been likened to a "putsch" or even the infamous Kristallnacht. These comparisons are natural as Trump and his supporters are fascists - absolutely and beyond any reasonable doubt - but as detailed in such histories of World War II like William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, when the Brownshirts had their own riot the rest of the Nazi Party was already well connected to the Conservative Party within the Reichstag as well as German business leaders. That's how Hitler ascended to the chancellorship despite the Nazis never gaining a plurality of political support.

Rather, the attack on Capitol Hill of 6 January is most comparable to Al Qaeda bombing the USS Cole.

In late 2000, the US Navy destroyer USS Cole was anchored off the coast of Yemen. Prior to this, Al Qaeda had already placed itself on the FBI's radar with the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, leading then President Clinton to reportedly develop a fixation on shutting down the terrorist network. This doubled after a small boat loaded with munitions slammed into the Cole, killing fifteen American sailors and injuring a further 37. FBI investigators, with lackluster CIA help, were closing in on Osama bin Laden in late 2000 and into early 2001, then the new Bush administration ordered everyone to drop this Al Qaeda nonsense and turn their attention to Iraq.

Then September 11th happened.

The United States is currently in such a liminal space as it was between the USS Cole Bombing and September 11th. Without the latter, the war against Al Qaeda would have remained a shadowy business of investigations and interrogations. After September 11th, the world got the War on Terror. Either scenario ends with Al Qaeda demolished as it was never a sustainable model for an irregular force but the scenario we know came with tremendous destruction and pain.

Like Al Qaeda, QAnon is unsustainable and born of a delusion. The paranoid ravings of pizza sex dungeons and turning the frogs gay are as grounded as the global holy war Osama bin Laden and his other Mujahideen buddies fantasized about. And also like Al Qaeda in 2000, QAnon thinks they’re winning. The storming of Capitol Hill looks like a victory because you didn’t see anyone stop them on TV. Over 80 people have since been arrested by the FBI and are facing felony murder charges, but the dream that Trump shall soon enact his master plan and all the evil Democrats will be swept aside for some glorious Patriot Reich still animates the thousands threatening to descend on Washington DC and state capitols before Joe Biden’s inauguration a week from now.

The scale of this upcoming armed revolt will determine how this second War on Terror plays out. If there are sporadic clashes, pipe bombs that go off or not, the next few years will see a low-key counter-insurgency waged by the FBI. A darker and more dystopian retread of the 1990s, when Timothy McVeigh and other homegrown bin Ladens made brief splashes in the national consciousness before being swiftly ground under by the federal security forces. And while a relatively more peaceful scenario, this will also see QAnon’s principles nursed by a Republican Party that has no other option for protecting their own jobs and transferred to later generations in a slow, ugly spiral into an ever more vicious and dangerous society outside increasingly over-policed urban enclaves.

Still, this is the best case scenario for the next week.

The worst case scenario is QAnon stages some real tactical victory. Not in DC - anyone making a run at the inauguration will be vaporized - but in state capitols in Michigan or Pennsylvania. A MAGA militia could conceivably occupy a state legislature or governor’s mansion by force of arms and could even hold it until a federal response - and there would have to be a federal response, as so many American police have drunk the QAnon kool aid.

This is the more dramatic scenario and arguably a very likely scenario because American reactionaries really think they can win a civil war - which in their imaginings is always fought against baristas and gender studies departments, not the National Guard. For all the shock and horror, a QAnon “victory” like this will be swiftly crushed because the interests that really matter in America cannot allow such insurrection and because the basic logic of power demands such threats be crushed as a message to the others. It would be horrific, a national trauma, and over much faster than the first scenario with QAnon designated a terrorist organization and the GOP collapsing as a viable political party. Like the first scenario, the FBI would spend years hunting down every last Parler account but without the sideshow of political nihilists trying to flirt with a terrorist base. The entire national conversation would go in one way and the de facto military totalitarianism that really dominates American politics would be laid bare.

Impeaching Trump a second time, while good and right, will not change his followers’ minds. They are diving all in on a civil war they believe they can win but simply cannot. No action on your part will affect the coming days and we are all now at the mercy of history.

So I Just Read Les Misérables

 

This regards the 1987 Signet Classics edition of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, complete and unabridged, translated by Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee, based on the original French to English translation by C.E. Wilbour. All spoilers to follow.

I'd tried reading Les Misérables several years ago but quite honestly got tired with Hugo's overwrought prose somewhere in Volume II. Since the world is ending and I ran out of library books, I figured this was a good time to give it another go. I'm glad I did because while Hugo doesn't get any less wrought as the story grows, it's both a fascinating exploration of 19th Century society in the shadow of revolution and an insight into the psyche of the time, still wrestling with old aristocratic habits and new republican ideals.

But having said all that - and planning to say more - what really defines this gargantuan novel is a morality play, centered on the character of Jean Valjean. Imprisoned for stealing bread and kept for four times his original sentence because of repeated escape attempts, he is both sympathetic while being hardened and cunning enough to be a compelling hero. Some might be attempted to call him Byronic but rather his turn from a life of wickedness - or what society deems wicked - to the good is much more religious. Embittered and alienated from all humanity at the start, the kindness and forgiveness of a provincial bishop sets him on his path to redemption at the start to which he pursues with as little regard for the mores and norms of society as when he was a criminal but with rather with a focus on compassion and relieving the suffering of others.

Valjean finds his project of human betterment embodied in the orphaned Cosette. Orphaned by his own charitable machinations in his guise as Monsieur Madeleine, the benefactor from nowhere who builds up the factory town Montreuil-sur-Mer. A factory that employs - and degrades and throws away - Cosette's martyred mother Fantine. But before he can swoop in and save the poor orphan, Valjean's past catches up with him in a morality play within a morality play.

Enter Inspector Javert, Hugo's embodiment not of Good but of Order. Javert's commitment to law and authority is tautological - it must be obeyed because it is law and authority - and he takes visible pleasure in subjecting others to the law's severity. At first suspecting the beloved Mayor Madeleine of being the convict Valjean, he later recants his theory as some poor dolt in a neighboring town is arrested for stealing apples and roundly accused of being the infamous Valjean. Real name Champmathieu, he is subjected to a Kafkaesque trial in which his insistence upon his true identity is proof of his guilt.

This play within a play serves to illustrate Hugo's larger point about the society of his day and law and order. How stealing bread or simply mistaken identity can condemn someone to lifelong ignominy, the old feudal castes persisting under different names, as further demonstrated when "Monsieur Madeleine" storms the trial to proclaim himself the true Jean Valjean, to which everyone reacts with incredulity. He can't possibly be a convict because he is a respected mayor and businessman.

However, as much as Hugo challenges these lingering ideas of inherent goodness and wickedness, of castes assigned either success or misery for all time, he still cannot break free of the essentialist view of human nature. This Great Man theory is a constant theme through Hugo's novel, often in tension with his professed republican ideals. For all his focus on the dignity and suffering of the lower classes, it's only through the superiority of Mayor Madeleine - the reformed Jean Valjean - that uplifts the community of Montfermeil. When he surrenders himself to the law to save Champmathieu, the whole town goes back to seed.

The long digression on the Battle of Waterloo further cements this paradox in Hugo's thinking. Hugo talks glowingly of Napoleon, of how his incredible successes had to be ordained by Providence, and contrasts this with the dull and offensively un-brilliant Wellington. But the dull guy won.

To go on my own brief digression - and Hugo would approve, having dedicated an entire chapter to the history of the sewers of Paris - this Great Man theory so enraptured the French post-Napoleon that it arguably led to their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The Grand Armee had long been accustomed to being the instrument of their supreme commander's genius, but where Napoleon III proved timid and dejected the mid-rank officers of the Prussian forces quickly exploited every opportunity to drive the fight across Europe and back to Paris. Not through any particular genius but rather through disciplined efficiency.

Speaking of the siege of Paris and glorious Great Men getting ground under by forces of history, the tension between Hugo's conflicting ideals also manifests in the dichotomy between Enjolras and Thenardier. The former a young republican idealist and leader of a sort of proletariat salon of downwardly mobile intellectuals styling themselves revolutionaries, the latter an unscrupulous thief and con artist always striving after a new payday. Thenardier appears first in the narrative, he and his wife nominally accepting Cosette into their home to care for her while Fantine works herself to an early grave to provide for the little girl. Thenardier naturally makes the little girl a Cinderella-like slave, while constantly demanding more and more payments from Fantine, citing the many expenses incurred raising Cosette. Which is a blatant lie.

When Valjean escapes the chain gang yet again and comes to rescue Cosette - his coat sewn up with bank bills from his Madeleine fortune - Thenardier lets the little girl go for a song and a mere 15,000 Francs. He's got a good grift going with a tavern at the time, where his wife gets to lord it over everyone and his own daughters get to play with dolls and a kitten. But when this family appears again, they are fallen much lower in circumstances and are living in a squalid boardinghouse. Thenardier is left to composing fraudulent letters begging well-to-do Parisians - or who he thinks are well-to-do - for a little remittance here and there, while quite literally whoring his own daughters out to his criminal contacts. As much pains as Hugo goes to in portraying society beating down the "good" scoundrels like Jean Valjean, here he offers no such compassion for low and grasping people in a chapter even named "The Noxious Poor."

Contrast with the impoverished in matter but not in spirit Enjolras and his coterie. At first secondary to the bildungsroman of Marius that makes up the second half of the novel, they represent the boiling political radicalism that claimed descent from the Revolution but doesn't have much to show in terms of concrete plans - at least as presented by Hugo. They have plenty of noble airs and when the uprising of 1832 comes, they all take up arms and man the barricades gladly, but they have no real plans beyond dying gloriously for "the cause."

Really, the particulars don't concern Hugo so much as Progress. Like Hegel, he sees a deliberate direction to history, rising from the barbarous Ancien Regime into the glorious Republic of freedom and reason. And in service of this Progress, the violence of the barricades is completely warranted. Enjolras feels morally empowered by his ideals to kill not just the gendarmes mobilized to suppress the uprising but also to execute those whose rebellion is too sloppy and undisciplined. He even plans to execute a police spy within the barricade - the long absent from the narrative at this point Inspector Javert - but is bamboozled by Jean Valjean who arrives to rescue not just his nemesis Javert but also Marius, who is due for a wedded ever after ending with Cosette. In the process, he manages to assist the barricade without taking a single life - allowing Hugo to maintain Valjean's sainthood while also indulging in the thrill of revolutionary violence.

In the midst of all this bloody climax though, we get to see an unintentionally more compelling character. Eponine, daughter of Thenardier whose arc takes her from playing with a kitten in the Thenardier Inn to walking barefoot and broken through the slums of Paris illustrates how society fails the unfortunate. She descends through the lower strata of acceptable morality not out of any personal failings or even mistakes, but rather from the misfortune of birth. Her father - and mother, to a lesser degree - are the few truly wicked in Hugo's novel and their vulgar machinations drag their daughter into ignominy, poverty, and an untimely death. A better illustration of how society fails the less fortunate than the transcendent sainthood of Jean Valjean.

All of this being said, I can appreciate how much of a classic Les Misérables is but I wouldn't recommend it as a quarantine read. You'd have a better time with George Eliot's Middlemarch, which offers a more digestible prose style and greater psychological depth. But if you've read that already, you should give Hugo's magnum opus a go.

Darkly Through a Mirror: 2020 to 2030

Elections are the least of your worries.

Climate change is on track for maximum damage in the next decade. Barring a catastrophic global war - not impossible - emissions will not be reduced, arctic ice will continue to melt, and this global hot house will get a lot hotter. So let's speculate on what's gonna get worse and what you can do to survive.

1. War is Coming Back in Style.

Whether or not the Beltway insiders get their longed for conflict with Iran or if all the armchair fascists will have to content themselves with border bush wars, the trend in militarizing American culture is due to accelerate. Trump already telegraphed this, unintentionally as he's more autistic Cassandra than Machiavellian schemer, packing his first season White House with generals. Democrats enable this, being just as if not more deferential to the brass than the GOP. When the Pentagon launches its coup on a President Sanders, plenty of professional liberals will cheer them on.

Meanwhile, regarding those border wars, they’ll be fed as much by climate migration as the full blown fascism of white suburbanites. The National Guard will eventually get involved which, depending on who they’re ordered to side with and who they actually side with, could kick off a hot civil war that all the alt-right violence has presaged in the past couple years. What will surprise all the MAGA-sucking chuds is how it doesn’t break down along a clean Mason-Dixon line or even the expected Democrat and Republican divide  but between urban and suburban/rural. The rurals will make good fighters but they’re commitment to the small business tyrants calling the shots will wax and wane with the seasons. And as the parched and mismanaged countryside fails to keep the supermarkets stocked, the suburbanites will realize their error and start scrambling for the cities – though not after they’ve tried to ethnically cleanse every cul de sac.

2. The New Feudalism.

The cities are where it’s at, for better and for worse. Already logistically integrated for delivering food, power, and most important of all water they will be able to outlast the dying howl of the suburbanites. They’ll also win every straight out battle as they have just as many guns as the NRA pickup truck squadrons but more people to man the barricades. War comes down to people and American cities have them to spare.

Once the Y’allqaeda attacks cease, the cities can benefit from real green innovations in solar power and rooftop gardens. They won’t have to defer to the hippie-hating Reaganites in the retirement exurbs and as anyone who’s spent real time in Brooklyn or Philadelphia can tell you, urban conservatives are much more agreeable to welfare programs and public works than their nominally ideological cousins haunting the outer strip malls.

But it won’t be all wine and DSA roses. These same cities also host the financial and corporate powers that brought us to this wretched state of affairs in the first place. So while you should flee to a city now, you should be very careful about which city. Some of them are just broken: Baltimore, Gary, Milwaukee – all ravaged by opiates and austerity. You’d stand a better chance tramping it with the rurals – who won’t all be white nationalists, as that’s a strictly suburban middle class phenomenon. Others will be too technocratic and oligarchic to be livable, especially New York City which will let Brooklyn drown in the rising seas as it extracts Brooklynite taxes to build a wall around Lower Manhattan. Wall Street is too sure of its own importance to consider moving, even as the waters come in. And the promise of all that wealth trickling down will keep a steady stream of migrant workers flowing into ever more cramped proletariat blocks and squats, their simmering rebellion kept in check by an NYPD that would already qualify as a standing army. Imagine the Mega-City One of Judge Dredd, just with trash everywhere and worse humidity than Atlanta.

3. Socialism and Barbarism.

The worst of both worlds will be SoCal and Denver. Not because they’re saturated with old money power but because outside their respective downtowns it’s all suburbs and strip malls. This will be where the bloodiest battles will be fought, along explicitly racist lines throughout SoCal and in a nihilistic war of all against all in the Mile High City, which already leads the nation in mass shootings. Boulder might survive, being more left than San Francisco and more armed than Texas.

The best – all things considered – will be the Twin Cities and Great Lakes. Beyond escaping the worst of the rising temperatures, these regions boast generous fresh water (I can’t emphasize water enough), much more leftish leanings than the East and West Coast sprawls – especially Minneapolis – and get you closer to the true mid-century goal: Canada. This is not to idealize the Great Northern Frontier – you’ll find just as many reactionaries polluting the Toronto and Vancouver suburbs – but northward is the only sensible option as the Colorado River runs dry, hurricanes batter down even New England, and fires spread from California into the Pacific Northwest. Get there now, before they militarize their own border!

The Empire Strikes Out

Last week, the American Empire ended. It was short lived, as empires go, but managed to cover the most square miles across the globe with military bases and go directly from savagery to debauchery without any of that pesky civilization in between. Unless you still think the Eisenhower era wasn’t monstrous.

It may not look it, especially with Trump and his chickenhawks insisting no Americans – meaning nobody who mattered – died in Iran’s ballistic missile strike. Iran is saying 80, so by the rules of warfare body counts, we can estimate about a dozen US or US-allied casualties. None of whom compare strategically to Soleimani, but that’s not the point. The point is Iran, a supposedly third world backwater theocracy fired not one but two dozen missiles from their country across the border into another. Two dozen missiles demonstrating the capacity for more – if they spend this many in a choreographed show of force, how many can they call up if under direct threat by the US military? – as well as demonstrating the grit and determination to engage US forces on open military terms, rather than just through deniable proxies or the other impoverished peasants the American war machine has battled across the Islamic world for the past two decades. A serious and technologically capable opponent.

And Trump blinked.

A decade ago, even under Obama, a foreign nation launching missiles – not car bombs, not IEDs, actual weapons of war – at US troops would precipitate a thunderous response. Since the Clinton Pentagon of full spectrum dominance, the US military has cultivated a vast and vicious arsenal of scaleable mayhem. Nuclear capable artillery is just one of the reasons Americans can’t have cheap insulin. There’s also fleets of space age aircraft that cost whole congressional districts and even got to be deployed in a real fight on the night of the missiles. They didn’t engage Iranian aircraft but may have shot down a civilian jetliner – not a first for US air forces over Iran. But rather than deploying any of its hugely expensive arsenal, the American Empire waited out the missiles and, once the dust cleared, put on a dog-and-pony press conference to insist they didn’t just totally get their shit kicked in. For all his swagger and bluster, Trump is thankfully terrified of a real fight.

Thankfully, because while the US military could still win a battle with Iran, they would lose the war. And not the way they’ve lost to the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents but in hard material ways that would impact the American homefront – not because Iran is so formidable an opponent but because American hegemony has been collapsing.

Let’s assume Trump didn’t wimp out last week. Let’s assume he took the reins off all the conventional and “special” forces the US has deployed throughout the Gulf. There are even mid-rank officers chomping at the bit to go after Iran, because they blame Iran for the failure in Iraq and aren’t that bright. All of these elaborate, advanced, and very expensive weapons and troops the US is poised to use would immediately run into the one thing they haven’t experienced or expected in generations: an actually serious military opponent. Iran has the hardware and manpower to stop any US advance in its tracks, thanks to the shallow draught of the Gulf, the mountainous geography of the Iranian plateau, and the incredible vulnerability of American sea power to the sort of ballistic missile attacks just carried out.

Even once American forces could penetrate Iran’s defenses – likely after calling up reinforcements like Rumsfeld was forced to do for the much smaller and weaker Iraqi defenders in 2003 – any attempt at occupation would collide with a population universally opposed to a foreign presence on their soil. “Regime Change,” that idiot dream of neoconservatism, would immediately give way to conquest, which would need to be fought block by bloody block. Already popular American opinion has refused to rally around the flag for Trump’s assassination of Soleimani and the Iranian’s retaliatory fireworks show. The sinking confidence in official institutions ushered in by the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crash would quickly spiral into a popular disconnect, protests devolving into riots, and martial law being instigated by a police culture all too eager to murder their own neighbors. In defeating Iran, America would turn itself into a failed state and international pariah.

That’s not even counting the impact Iran can have beyond the immediate battle with an American invasion force. All the allegations of Iran terrorizing oil shipments through the Persian Gulf confess the reality that they really can disrupt the biggest oil export line in the world. The same missiles and irregular attacks that will sink an American carrier can shut down the Strait of Hormuz, causing enormous economic damage worldwide. Hezbollah and other Iran-friendly militias have already made it clear they will go all in against Israel just for a retaliation to last week’s Iranian retaliation. The American neoconservatives and their evangelical fellow travelers will finally get the crusade against all Islam they’ve desired since 2001 - and will quickly see they are outnumbered across the whole Middle East. Every day will be Benghazi.

That’s still a good scenario. When faced with such a serious, implacable foe and with a cruel dunderhead like Trump at the helm the inevitable question is “What about nukes?” The US has them and despite all the propaganda to the contrary Iran definitely does not. Once Marine battalions are retreating back to the shores of the Gulf, even the “reasonable” people middle class rubes have placed their hopes in might be arguing for a nuclear strike. A limited one, of course, at least at first. Limited to the battlefield or targeting Tehran and other population centers, two outcomes are certain: First, Russia and China will not launch in retaliation, no matter how friendly they are now with Iran, because mutually assured destruction would then be in effect. Beijing is too busy plotting out its Chinese Century to fall for that and the Kremlin – while being more cavalier on tactical nuclear deployment – isn’t looking for a kamikaze strike on their geopolitical rivals either. Second, and more important, nobody has to nuke the US back to retaliate over the ravaging of Iran.

Even if the nukes never enter the picture, the US launching a wildly unpopular war on the regional power most responsible for defeating ISIS could trigger the actual doomsday scenario of the United States Dollar being dropped as a reserve currency. It’s not the massive and massively expensive American armed forces ensuring imperial power so much as an international demand for dollars. Oligarchs from Russia to China to France can’t get enough of them and it’s how the US has managed to remain a top global economy despite hollowing out its own manufacturing sector. But abandon that reserve currency – something that’s already in the works – and the whole house of cards collapses. The mortgage crisis will look like a slow afternoon in comparison, the Great Depression merely a rainy day. And it won’t just wreck the financial markets and the suburban small business clowns – without that inflation-proofing granted by dollar hegemony, all the grand plans of DSA and the Sanders campaign really will be impossible to pay for.

So it’s for the best Trump blinked and we should all hope he keeps blinking. His whole existence was always an argument against the American system and it’s appropriate he be the one to preside over its final dissolution. Post-imperial life can be positive for nations, it’s how the Brits managed to finally do good things like the NHS and Monty Python. By not following through on his bullying, Donald Trump can end the era of Pax Americana and then Americans can have some actual peace in their lives.

Fiction Friday: The Crapper Study

Because Babbling of the Irrational is now a dead link, "The Crapper Study" has been reposted here for all the world to continue to see.

Imagine a public bathroom. Not pristine, though certainly not what one would find at a gas station, just a run-of-the-mill facility with toilets/urinals and toilets, sinks, and the occasional dull vulgarity scribbled on the interior of a stall.

Now imagine Individual A enters -- Individual A can be male or female, it is inconsequential. A has a great desire to relieve himself/herself -- as would be expected of anyone entering the previously described facility -- and looks forward to promptly being done with the whole process for whatever reason -- e.g. going to a meeting/appointment, catching a bus/train/plane or getting home to watch his/her favorite TV show that is only ever on for a short time of the year, as a matter of fact the rerun season is two-thirds longer than the season proper and there is an overarching storyline that requires meticulous viewing of every single episode in sequence to gain the fullest satisfaction possible -- only to find Individual B already present and attempting to relieve himself/herself1.

Individual A and Individual B need not be familiar with each other. Ideally, this would be their first meeting, but any form of not-being-familiar-with-each-other will suffice.

Now imagine Individual A has a personal “quirk” that prevents him/her from doing his/her “business” while in close proximity to another human being. This can be for whatever reason, from simple concerns for privacy, to red-faced embarrassment at the “business” done, to such personal shame and revulsion at the necessary “business” as to feel foolish and unclean should there be any audience to the act.

Now imagine Individual A’s first instinct will be to flee the facilities and seek relief elsewhere. However, he/she has already been well inside the facilities for several seconds and to walk out now would look silly and foolish. For the situation, we will dictate that A’s well-cultivated self-image requires he/she never look silly or foolish around anyone, even Individual Bs with whom A has no prior familiarity.

So Individual A must remain. He/she takes up position in a stall or by a urinal, depending on his/her needs and physiological disposition.

Now imagine Individual A has decided to “hold it” -- i.e. refrain from doing his/her “business” -- until Individual B completes his/her (B’s) “business” and vacates the facilities. It would be a sound enough plan if not for one serious problem: Individual B is not doing his/her “business.” As a matter of fact, B is not doing a fucking thing! He/She is just standing/sitting there like an exposed bump on a log!

Now imagine the strain this would place on Individual A. He/She (A) is mightily uncomfortable from the get-go, what with “holding it” and all, and now this stubborn Individual B refuses to complete his/her “business” in a timely fashion. How shall Individual A ever get to his/her “business” anyway with an audience present? And what a tasteless audience: to “hold it” as A “holds it” in the blatant attempt to force A to do his/her “business,” despite how shamefully filthy it all is!

Now imagine Individual A coming to a highly unpleasant realization: by “holding it” through all of the above, and what is now a ridiculously long time, he/she has generated an aura of near supreme foolishness. Having set out not to look foolish, he/she has behaved even more foolishly for this damned Individual B’s entertainment. These factors combined with the physical discomfort of “holding it” and the subsequent realization that the aforementioned favorite television show has already begun make for a very disgruntled Individual A.

Now imagine Individual B, a human being in his/her own right with as meaningful an existence as A. As a matter of fact, from B’s perspective, A has just come barging in on his/her (B’s) “business” without any warning. Anyone who has ever been in B’s situation should be able to sympathize -- the shock of some clown stomping in on one while one is doing one’s “business” can be so disruptive as to actually halt said “business” immediately and uncomfortably. Perhaps one never consciously thinks of these things, but it was certainly Individual B’s reaction to that damn A’s intrusion.

Now imagine Individual B has a personal quirk not unlike A’s -- Again, Individuals A and B need not be familiar with each other despite similar psychological dispositions and again the ideal situation calls for complete unfamiliarity. In Individual B’s case, he/she too finds the doing of “business” in the presence of another most unappealing. This, as above, could be due to any factor from an unpleasant toilet training or previous embarrassing situation or from his/her (B’s) mother locking him/her in the bathroom and warning that he/she (B) had better use the potty and not his/her pants again or else he/she would have a pink bottom by the end of the night and it was all empty threats as Little B’s wretched bitch of a mother would forget about the incarcerated child on the porcelain behemoth and go off to poker night which had the unforeseen consequence of conditioning Little B (and subsequently Individual B) to be incapable of doing his/her “business” except in complete solitude.

Now imagine Individual B elects to “hold it” until such a time as he/she is alone again in the facilities -- This could be the first or fiftieth time such a situation has occurred, it is unimportant. So Individual B proceeds to “hold it” in hopes this troublesome Individual A will get on with his/her (A’s) business and then kindly fuck off. However, as earlier explained, Individual A has gotten it into his/her head to do the exact same thing, i.e. “hold it” until Individual B completes his/her (B’s) “business” and exits. Hence, having been copied in stubbornness, Individual B is made to stand/sit uncomfortably -- very uncomfortably, as he/she was cut-off in the middle of his/her “business” -- while that silly bastard/bitch A just stands/sits there not doing a fucking thing!

Now imagine the confusion of Individual B at the strange -- not to mention profoundly annoying -- behavior of Individual A. Who in their right mind storms into any facilities anywhere just to stand/sit there all exposed like a Little B while mommy works on a straight flush? Individual B might run through a mental checklist of why on Earth he/she (A) might refuse to get on with his/her “business” -- Perhaps some physical ailment causes A difficulty or maybe A had no need to do any “business” in the first place or maybe A is some spy/gangster/other secretive character and is only pretending to do any “business” as a cover for meeting another spy/gangster/other secretive character or maybe A is from the planet Quaxilon where bodily waste is invisible. Any of the above would make for an unnerving situation for any Individual B.

Now imagine Individual A and Individual B. The former experiencing a great deal of frustration over the backfiring of his/her plan to not look foolish by “holding it” until left in peace due to some infuriating Individual B following the exact same tactic, thus making him/her (A) look profoundly foolish. The latter driving himself/herself (B) to paranoid schizophrenia in contemplation of A’s intentions while the specter of a card-shark mommy hangs over his/her head, making sure he/she (B) does his/her goddamn business properly.

Question: Who goes first?

Bleeding Kansas 2.0

Let's talk about Bleeding Kansas.

In the 1850s, while they were still territories being Incorporated into the United States, it was a hotly debated question whether Kansas and Missouri would be free or slave states. The planter class of the deep south and Tidewater states wanted to expand slavery, as it would reinforce their own base of power. Slavery was explicitly rooted in white supremacy, because this both rationalized the bondage of other human beings and served to maintain the political power of a very small, very well-to-do elite in a place and time with widespread rural poverty.

The different factions that set up shop in these Border States spent the better part of a decade engaging in the sort of bloody partisan ambushes seen within living memory in Syria, Iraq, and the Balkans. While everyone remembers the great big Blue vs. Gray battles of the Civil War, this is where that war really began, years before the slave states marched their uniformed forces on Fort Sumter. The planter class gave tacit approval to the pro-slavery partisans in Kansas and Missouri because their terrorism served to frighten away abolitionists who might vote to remain free and also for the grim reality that a dead abolitionist is one less voice calling for abolition.

There are clear parallels we can draw today between the pro-slavery gangs in the Border States and the spree shooting terrorism of the Trump era. Like the hand-wringing over citizenship and borders, slavery was built on an ideology of white supremacy. Because without that sense of superiority, too many people might recognize how the current economic system benefits only a few at the very top - the planters then, the billionaires now. During the Civil War proper, this ideology collapsed in on itself with the rebel soldiers finding their superior whiteness no match for the superior industry and logistics of the Union Army, especially while their families starved back home due to 1) Confederate inefficiency and 2) an explicit system of superiors and inferiors, where the plantation master in his family were always well-cared for but anyone not born into this de facto aristocracy had to scrape by. Had they not had the satisfaction of being white, and therefore the better and more civilized race, they might too quickly have turned on the very planters whose economic system debased free labor.

However - and this is the big difference between then and now - the abolitionists engaged in politically motivated killing just as enthusiastically as the pro-slavery partisans. Most famously, John Brown engaged in ambushes and outright mass murder before leading his ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry. Despite the pundit class always spinning scare stories, Antifa has not killed a single person. Bleeding Kansas 2.0 is - so far - entirely one-sided. And worst of all, there's no real opposition to this terrorism within the nominal government. Where America of the 1850s had a fractious but dedicated political culture of abolitionists and Know Nothings and Radical Republicans all vying for the soul and future of the country, the modern United States has a few social deomcrats unwanted by their own party on one side and craven careerists making up the other much larger side. And then there's Trump, a more incompetent narcissist than even Jefferson Davis.

The Quiet Life

You're not allowed to live quietly and without ambition in America. Everyone must be Up and Doing, all day, every day, to preserve an instrumentalist delusion. That your circumstances not only may be changed for the better but that You are the agent of that change. Also, it should be changed for the better, no matter how satisfied you are now.

This is the pathology at the root of the American dream. Alexis de Tocqueville saw it some two centuries ago, how Americans of every class were perpetually buying and selling. No sooner did some Ohio Valley burgher purchase a horse or a butter churn then he was trying to sell it again at a profit. One nation under the side hustle.

Even if you think you're getting into a profession - or at least a day job - that will afford you some peace and quiet, you will soon find this not to be the case. As the economy moves more and more away from actual production and into the exponential bureaucracy of managerial feudalism, even the most innocuous activities become charged with a production for production's sake mania. You have to crush that PowerPoint, demonstrate enough can-do spirit to single-handedly build a pyramid, or you run the risk of appearing as a layabout. Not a doer. An un-person, unworthy of friendship or love or your middling office job - where a dozen others also compete in who can best present the simulacrum of productivity.

Because without that job, you're nothing. Without any job, you're worse than nothing. The less America spends on welfare, the more it resents those dependent on such public assistance. Poverty is the one unforgivable sin, so better look busy.

As Above, So Below

Ever since their founding, the American suburbs have been the subject of bitter criticism. We should all be critical - suburbia birthed every wrong-thought from libertarianism to LARPing - but the bitterness is because, even in the wake of financial collapse, the suburbs won. There is no escaping them and half the 20th Century is choked with books and films and records born of resentment at this crushing normality.

He Digs A Hole by Danger Slater is an heir to this anti-suburb philosophy, at least on the surface. Harrison Moss is an average decaying man in an average decaying cul de sac who rebels against this dreadful state and tries to find a way out. So far, so standard. Even the splatter-horror approach is more cosmetic to the story, with Moss shearing off his own hands and replacing them with garden tools. So he can dig his hole and get away from his depressing house and vacuous neighbors.

Except that's only half the story. Literally, as Moss and his wife Tabitha descend down the hole halfway through the book, emerging in a negative universe beneath. A place populated by monstrous horrors and walking worms, but curiously still ordered exactly as the post-industrial hell above. A different, deeper hell but a hell all the same.

This is where Slater's book diverges from the well-worn path of the suburban doldrums tale. It's not a matter of escape so much as transcendence, breaking free of the rut by breaking free of one's own apathy and alienation. This part of the narrative isn't even carried through by Harrison but by Tabitha, who was always the stronger of the two - an excellent twist on what is often a masculine escape and power fantasy. The Mosses do not break free of the hells within hells through more striving - striving just leads back to the cul de sac where this all started - but through each other. For all the grotesque madness of spleen fruits and zombie garden parties, He Digs a Hole is a strangely uplifting book. Even with the world consumed and the sun blotted out, as long as Tabitha and Harrison have each other they have hope.

Contra Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of those favorites among dilettantes because he wrote accessible prose that flatters the individualist yearnings of stunted middle class children. This is not to disparage Nietzsche's very real accomplishments in meta-ethics and the history of morality, just to disparage all the modern fans who take his arguments as an excuse to be conceited dickheads in their Philosophy 101 courses. You know who I'm talking about.

Nietzsche famously differentiated Classical and Christian ethics, defining the former as a good/bad dichotomy and the latter as good/evil. Classical ethics, rooted in a warrior elite from Achilles down to Charlemagne, prized courage and personal honor, using these virtues to define themselves as separate and above the greater mass of humanity and thereby justifying their own privileged position in society.

Christian ethics, in contrast, seek to promote a universalist altruism and therefore concern themselves first with evil, rather than virtue. This evil often constitutes the same privileges enjoyed by the Classical elite - wealth, sensual pleasure, mastery over their social inferiors. Nietzsche saw in this a slave revolt, hence his christening of Christianity as the "slave morality" which shames those who display the Classical virtues.

Nietzsche, being the prototypical angry white boy, bristled at this shaming. And his critique has served as inspiration for alienated youth in Western Civilization for generations. However, as much fault as Nietzsche found with Christian ethics, his own description of "master morality" doesn't sound all that better:

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle which even the apes might subscribe; for it has been said that in devising bizarre cruelties they anticipate man and are, as it were his "prelude."

Much as the abused might come to identify with her abuser, her Nietzsche has fetishized the abuse on which Western nobility built its reason for being. This indeed makes him all-too-human, as it echoes Hegel's parable of two men at the beginning of history vying for dominance. Because, as David Graeber points out, the archetypal everymen "in all such stories, they appear to be 40-year-old males who simply rose out of the earth fully formed." Which speaks more to the historical forces that shaped modern Western philosophy, rather than any essential Human Nature.

Further, this is usually where some readings of Nietzsche identify him as a fascist. And with good cause - his Will to Power and injunctions to embrace an aristocratic ethos is entirely in line with the reactionary tradition as described by Corey Robin, who traces every disparate strain of conservatism, from George Will to Sarah Palin, back to the Counter-Enlightenment sentiment "that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others." A sentiment Nietzsche ran with in his otherwise laudable resistance of Victorian moralizing.

Where Nietzsche identified the pathology of Victorian Christianity, Lewis Mumford identified the pathology of Classical kingship:

Murderous coercion was the royal formula for establishing authority, securing obedience, and collecting booty, tribute, and taxes. At bottom, every royal reign was a reign of terror.

The enforcement of such a reign necessitates the same "submissive faith and unqualified obedience" Nietzsche spurned in Christianity, but instead directed towards the desires of a sovereign, whose very station both breeds and rewards an anti-social neurosis:

The rigid division of labor and the segregation of castes produce unbalanced characters, while the mechanical routine normalizes - and rewards - those compulsive personalities who are afraid to cope with the embarassing riches of life.

To see the apotheosis of this pathology, just look at Donald Trump's Twitter feed.

Nietzsche did necessary work in dismantling the shoddy foundations of Western morality. He just didn't go far enough. Excavating down to the fetid and worm-eaten base of kingship, he declared "This is good!" either out of a limited imagination or the artist's desire to shock the middle-brows. Would that he'd gone further and dynamited the whole edifice, we might actually have tasted that freedom he talked about so often. Instead, we just traded the white collars for power ties, vicars for venture capitalists. The same song of power since Ur, now dumber than disco.

Works Cited
David Graeber. "Consumption." Current Anthropology, Vol. 52, No. 4.
Lewis Mumford. The Myth of the Machine.
Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals.
Corey Robin. The Reactionary Mind.

The World as Won't

"The surest way to fail is not to try." Everyone has heard some variation of that injunction. Every American especially, as the civic religion and mythos of America declares at every turn all things are possible for those with the Will. That "those with the Will" have historically been property-owning white men is often left out of the pithy proverb.

Another such proverb, "You only lose if you play the game," appears at first to be promoting the same can-do exceptionalism. The words are superficially the same, but the core idea is different. Where "The surest way to fail is not to try" compels - commands, even - the listener to go out and seize the day, "You only lose if you play the game" presents the natural state not as failure but as null. One does not court failure except by engaging in whatever pursuit the first proverb commands, and so failure may be avoided altogether simply by not getting involved.

Digging deeper, we find "You only lose if you play the game" further offers a critique of the dog-eat-dog paradigm our opening proverb takes for granted. "The surest way to fail is not to try" presents failure as the default state, the state you're in right now. A state that persists until you actively take charge of your own life and destiny, shaping the world to your Will!

A stirring idea, if you've never worked an office job.

The reality, which we've all experienced, is that the World is not amenable to Will. The World just is. The idea that by giving it the old college try we can rectify this rests in the same instrumentalist view that animates everything from neoconservative foreign policy to new age cults like The Secret.

This is the game that you only lose if you play. A rigged game too, as demonstrated by the continuing foreclosure crisis amidst yet another Wall Street boom. Millions have played this game, or tried to, only to discover that as you try and try you still fail. Because effort does not correlate with success, nor success with righteousness, no matter what Calvin and Adam Smith claimed.

But if you refuse to play - reject the logic imposed by the game - you escape the default failure state imposed on everyone not born into the winning class. It may not reshape the World into something more amenable to your own notions of justice, but it's a damn sight better than being ground under the treads of this awful Megamachine our forefathers have foisted upon us.

John McCain in Hell

John McCain steps up to the podium. His raggedy skin hangs looser now, blistered and peeling from the everlasting fires, but nothing can dampen his enervating rictus grin. A little teeth peaks out at the corners, a little more fang now as he more directly reflects the contents of his own soul. "My fellow Hellions!" he declares to the assembled imps and incubbi, "We stand at a crossroads...

"When I first arrived, I - like so many of you - knew only torment for my sins and wickedness. In my first thousand years, I suffered as I made others suffer on Earth. Bullets tore my flesh, I drowned over and over, and of course I tasted the rough caress of the same fires I unleashed on Vietnamese children.

"I did not object to this treatment, as I am a longtime champion of personal responsibility. I told the news media so in life, over and over so they would actually think it was true. But now I come before you because I fear Hell has lost its way.

"Since the Fall, a stalemate has held against our accursed enemies in Heaven. While we gather the greater magnitude of souls, we are nonetheless denied our rightful place as the first among afterlives. Satan is as much to blame for this sorry state of affairs as God and His angels, opting to tempt and corrupt one mortal at a time. He has lost the will to fight and limited the real tools at our disposal."

Here the late Senator looms over the podium, bristling with indignation and bloodlust. "Our Dark Lord says 'That's the way of things,' but I'm too much of a maverick for that! I say we strike at Heaven now, not on some designated Day of Reckoning. Even with the proper resources, it's a campaign that will be measured in years, not days. And we do have the proper resources - massive resources made up of all the sinners and psychopaths who ever lived! I know some of them personally, having served together in the Navy or the Senate."

The audience cheers and hisses with malicious glee. Behind the stage curtains, Tricky Dixon nods approvingly, while wiping sweat from the scales of his upper lip. He hadn't really believed John could rally the troops like he never could. "But they used to talk about your integrity all the time on CNN," Tricky had argued, CNN being the only channel available in Hell.

"Look, did I tell Dubbya to go get stuffed when he asked me to campaign with him?" McCain had spat back. "Did I turn down that moose-fucking loon from Alaska? I rode her just like I rolled over on John Kerry. Fuck that integrity shit - I'm in this game to win!"

And he certainly looks like he's winning now in the eight circle of hellfire, the horns atop his head and forked tongue whipping from his cracked lips as he whipped the legions of lof the damned into a wargasmic frenzy. "Let's finish the fight the First of the Fallen started!" McCain declares. "Let's march straight up to those pearly gates and bomb them into the stone age!"