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.

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!

No Fate But What We Make

One of the more obnoxious things about contemporary literature is how every MFA grad thinks they're the first to break the fourth wall or mix philosophy with satire. You can probably find a best-seller in Barnes & Noble right now, celebrated by all the respectable rags for being bold and experimental when really it's an overwritten shaggy dog story that does the "Dear Reader..." thing you forgot Dickens put into every single novel he ever wrote.

Truth is fiction has always been much more wild and experimental than the best-selling beach reads. Case in point: Denis Diderot. A contemporary of Voltaire, you didn't hear about him in AP English because his philosophy is too complex and self-critical to fit as neatly into the American "common sense" dogma. Also he's French and Americans have long failed to appreciate the nation that midwived their own.

"Eyy!"

What sets Diderot apart from more acceptable thinkers like Voltaire are two things antithetical to American sentiment: his material atheism and his determinism. Now this might seem contradictory on the face - how can a totally godless cosmos still be determined? - but that confuses determinism with Fate.

Determinism simply posits that A leads to B leads to C. That cause leads to effect. Fate, on the other hand, holds that a certain outcome has already been pre-determined. Or rather pre-ordained, as Fate can only exist in a metaphysical framework as posited by religion, whether modern iterations or the pagan pantheons of the Axial Age.

Thus, a Deterministic cosmos is compatible with a metaphysics of material atheism, however this framework is still incompatible with Fate.

The debate between Fate and Determinism matters because both imply - indeed require - their own ethos that are fundamentally opposed to one another. If Fate, the Will of Heaven, then there is comfort that even misfortune has a good reason but also implies said misfortune may be deserved. Illness and poverty are divine judgements, or at the very least tests, and mass political action to alleviate this suffering becomes a defiance of that same conscious, almighty Will. That is in fact where the Protestant Work Ethic comes from - Calvin's doctrine of predestination and Adam Smith's Invisible Hand are opposite sides of the same idea that there is an order, a purpose to the world which is reflected in material wealth.

However, if events are determined but not pre-determined, if there is still a reason but not a transcendent or at least benevolent one, the ethical implications change entirely. Misfortune is not a test or punishment but a hazard of existence faced by all. This raises the issue of how a people or a society should manage these misfortunes, a moral imperative in a deterministic cosmos that can turn on all of us.

Diderot communicated this Determinism through comic vignettes, often to the point of self-parody. The title character of Jacques the Fatalist argues that all is pre-determined, written up above on a great scroll ("tout ce qui nous arrive de bien et de mal ici-bas était écrit là-haut") but his examples from his own life are all clearly the products of his own foolishness and incompetence. Fate would make a great comfort to a fool, as it absolves him of the moral responsibility for his own foolish actions.

But can the fool still be held accountable under Determinism? Does he bring the angry cuckolded husbands on himself or is it again the indifferent cosmic winds? That's a question no physicist can answer so it falls back to the philosophers and there is indeed a long philosophical tradition of grappling with how to improve the human condition. Karl Marx himself even cited Diderot as his "favourite prose-writer."

Because if the world is Determined but not ruled by Fate, we can shape the causes to gain beneficial effects. We can "hack" our lives, in the jargon of douchebags, achieving greater happiness and tranquility. But only if we can get over the primitive prejudice that Fate makes you rich or poor.

The Most Important Book of the 21st Century

Climate change is not coming. Climate change is here and it's a motherfucker.

That is the single undeniable truth at the core of Loosed Upon the World, a science fiction anthology in the best tradition of the genre. Writers from around the world exploring possible near futures on this rapidly warming world, some more optimistic than others, but all grounded in very harsh realities.

Rains are a common motif. The entry by Kim Stanley Robinson begins with a flooded Washington DC, punctuated by a light political joke which doesn't keep with the overwhelming new normal of the District swallowed by the Potomac. Rain is desperately prayed for elsewhere, such as in the parched Amazon Basin of Vandana Singh's "Entanglement." We're already experiencing this reshuffling of the rainy seasons, with droughts across the hot countries while the wealthy Nor'east drowns.

Smog makes an appearance too, especially in stories by Chinese authors. Sci-fi is a growing thing in Chinese lit, from Cixin Liu's space opera to Ken Liu's silkpunk (no relation), but "The Smog Society" by Chen Qiufan is as much about the alienation of modern cities. A toxic atmosphere, both literal and metaphorical, chokes the life and joy from everyone, depression fueling sickness in a feedback loop similar to the one increasing particulate matter and necessitating the face masks that are already so popular in China.

And then there's the plain weird and gross speculations of a future world closer to Earth's primordial era than are temperate modern world. The aptly title "That Creeping Sensation" by Alan Dean Foster postulates a world where rising carbon dioxide energizes soft plant matter - like kudzu - causing a spike in the oxygen percentage in the air. We only breath about 20% of the stuff now, more being both flammable and discombobulating. And it makes insects grow larger. Foster's post ice cap world doesn't just feature wildfires and humidity, but footlong wasps and dog-sized cockroaches - all desperately culled by an elite US Army exterminator division. It's a losing battle, though, especially as the ants - already organized - get big enough to start making plans...

Gross-out shock stories like this are good fun - and drive home the horror of global warming far better than rising sea levels - but let's return to Singh's "Entanglement." It goes well beyond the dried Amazon, looking in on an arctic researcher and a Texas widow-turned-activist, among many others. All united in a mission to make the world more livable for one another and future generations. Of all the stories here, it best contextualizes the global nature of global warming by presenting a global response. Not the technocratic geo-engineering of Robinson and other hard SF guys - and yeah, that's always guys - but through an international solidarity that puts every socialist movement to shame. More than a vision of the future, Singh's single work of fiction provides a blueprint for facing down the biggest existential threat to human civilization.

And there's so much more here. Not since the most pessimistic fiction of the Cold War has fiction been so close to fact. And so necessary.

What A Lovely Day

Mad Max: Fury Road is an opera wrought in fire and chrome. A delirious western at the end of the world, with more nuance and intellectual rigor than anything to be celebrated by the Academy Awards in at least a decade. And best of all, it utterly takes the piss out of all the macho crypto-fascism poisoning modern culture.

The connections to the previous films is tenuous at best. It begins with Max still driving his suped up muscle car from the first film and a half, only to have it wrecked in the first few minutes and find himself a captive of the War Boys. Max doesn't do much for the next half hour or so, as director George Miller has a far vaster story to tell than the angst of one shell-shocked survivor.

Enter Immortan Joe, one of the greatest film villains since Peter Ustinov's Nero. A warlord bedecked in medals and a death's head mask, commanding the War Boys and leading them all to Valhala. Ruling the Citadel with an iron fist, doling out water rations as he deems fit and using women as livestock, either to breed his degenerate sons or slaved to industrial milking machines. An impotent, incompetent old hag who throws away everything in the doomed pursuit of his escaped wives.

The very first time the audience sees Joe is in all his scabrous and flabby mortality, being bundled into armor that never sees real fighting anymore. "Immortan" Joe is a walking corpse, kept alive by the suffering and sacrifices of the poor and desperate who crowd around the Citadel - an aquifier he seized through conquest back when he could walk without a cane. Even his iconic mask is nothing but a respirator, doing the breathing for him.

*wheeze* *hack* *wheeze*

Alongside the Bullet Farmer and the People Eater, Joe is the apotheosis of everything wrong and stupid in the world. A saber-rattler, emboldening the gullible to ugly and meaningless death from the safety of his Citadel. A self-absorbed whiner who goes to war to preserve his nightly booty calls, Joe sees everyone and everything as his own property but cannot see his own impermanence in the world. After he's gone, his empire comes apart faster than that of Alexander.

Fury Road marries visuals and music in a way rarely seen outside the films of David Lynch. Hammering drums and grinding guitar surround the extended chase sequence that forms the core of Fury Road, often accompanied within the film by the ludicrous Doof Wagon - a military truck decked out in war drums and a post-apocalyptic Buckhethead thrashing away on a flaming guitar. That's not hyperbole, it's a literal goddamn flamethrower!

"TROGDOR!!!"

This is the drummer boy of Immortan Joe's army. The bagpipers who play the War Boys into battle, keeping their spirits up. That it's a horrible waste of resources for people trying to survive in the wasteland is entirely the point, as are the yearning strings that constantly rise above the doof metal in the film's score. Everything about the War Boys is extreme, over the top, and pure artifice. For all their macho bluster, it is the softness of humanity that triumphs in both the story and the music.

Much has been made of the film's feminism. Much should be made, as it's both readily apparent but not preachy - Joe and his War Boys are every macho stereotype in a muscle car and drinking Jägerbombs while Max and Furiosa work together in more of a buddy cop formula with no romantic or sexual tension at all. But even more revolutionary is the implicit contrast between Max and Joe, between the nomad and the warlord.

A good analogy would be that Immortan Joe is Leonidas, leading his 300 War Boys to glory. Max is the Scythian, the nomad of the Steppe, hardened and confident from a life in the wilderness. While Joe needs to dress up in his medals and skull mask, needs to rule the Citadel and lay with only the choicest females, Max simply gets what he needs to survive and keeps moving. And so Joe's insecurities and grasping desperation are laid bare through contrast with the elegant simplicity of Max.

"..."

Just as the quaint and old fashioned violins of the chase music endures more than the thunderous electric guitar, so do Max and the many free women of the film endure better than Joe and his screeching adolescents. They endure not through some innate superiority or deus ex machina, but rather through working together. In this way do we see the single greatest and most important contrast between the two male leads - Max changes while Joe remains static.

Max doesn't even change all that much, but just enough to recognize the common humanity between himself and Furiosa and the wizened biker grannies - another Steppe nomad analogue. His plan to charge back through the pursuing war bands and take the Citadel is presented calmly, with no rousing talk of the "glory of battle." War is a serious matter that requires sober consideration, as well as cooperation. Max, Furiosa, the wives and the Scythian grannies are all keenly aware of their mortality, all desire to live and find some little bit of peace in this world of fire, and the film clearly argues that only by working together can they hope to achieve any of that. You may call that socialism but I call it survival. And so does Max.

And survival is really the defining theme of Fury Road, just as it's been for every Mad Max movie. Joe and his orcs are a tempest in a teapot when placed against the awesome, unconscious forces of nature. Which George Miller does frequently, in shot after beautiful shot. Fury Road presents a world after climate change, where all the denials and excuses are so much pissing in the wind. The world is bigger than you and doesn't care about your feelings.

"Fuck you." ~ Nature

Against such forces, an individual is just so much paste. Joe rages against this reality in everything he does, more petulant child than bold warrior. His boys do the same, being paint-huffing screwheads with more testosterone than brains. Max accepts the reality of the situation, and so accepts the aid of Furiosa because he knows he can't win all by himself. What could he "win" in this blasted hellscape anyway, other than a few more precious days of life?

Mad Max: Fury Road is the greatest film of 2015 and the greatest film of George Miller's career. In all its bombast and fire, it tells a very human story with more pressing concerns than whatever happened in the last seven Marvel movies. And best of all, it eschews the sterile computer animation so endemic to modern action films in favor of good old fashioned pyrotechnics. Go see it twice.

La Mer Avait Embrassé Moi

Living in New York can make you forget about the realities of this country. It's a different culture here, more like medieval Germany with all the little ethnic enclaves at each others throats all the time. It's an honest antagonism, so different from the flat homogeneity of the suburban sprawl that makes up the majority of this country. Seeing it all again like I did this weekend brings the existential wretchedness of American existence into sharp focus.

And it made me finally understand the appeal of big budget noisefests like Transformers and The Avengers. Because it's a noisefest and because it's so very different from everyday life out there in the barren suburban landscape. It's two hours of being forcefully plucked out of the all-American drudgery that you can never admit to in this country. Escapism that doesn't allow you any thought or ironic distance, because such things might lead you to really think about your own nothing life in a nothing town where not even your petty tyrant of a boss has a future.

Which brings us to Noah.

Better learn to swim...

It's as big and loud as any other blockbuster, but it's loaded to the gills with real thoughts and ideas. Russell Crowe's Noah isn't the kindly bearded gentleman from those Catholic kid's books, he's a hard scrabble survivor with more questions than answers concerning the Creator's grand plan of purging the world. There's little about this fiction that's "inspirational" as it's called by publishers. Noah views his work as a grim duty, all the more so as he listens to the screams of those still clinging desperately to the outside of his ark or on nearby mountain tops. The film follows a confusing and challenging morality, much like that suggested in Kierkegard's Either/Or. Noah, as the antecedent of Abraham, is presented with the Will of God and must fight his own moral instincts to obey. Depending on your point of view, he ultimately fails.

Much has been made by the Fox News crew about all the liberal bias and evulz of the film and like a stopped clock they're right. Noah is absolutely environmentalist, presenting conservation and sustainable living as not only good but Godly. Noah and his family are even strict vegetarians, because killing and eating animals is presented as defiling Creation - a view shared by some Egyptian Copts, if you didn't know. If that weren't enough, the climate change analogy is inescapable, though unlike many other parables on the subject it offers no easy out. Man has defiled Creation and shall now be destroyed by the elements, forces beyond the scope of the Will to Power so celebrated by Ray Winstone's snake-eating villain.

All of this is delivered in a visually brilliant manner. From the swirling sky to the to the industrial blight of the cities of Cain to the endearingly grotesque fallen angels, Aronofsky's Noah is both familiar and alien in a way not seen in fantasy film since Army of Darkness or Willow. And even with its grim thesis, it champions above all the human capacity for love. Noah believes the Creator intends for all of humanity to die, believes that he and his were chosen to preserve the innocent beasts not because they are any better but simply because they can get the task done. But when presented with the continuation of humanity in the form of his own grandchildren, Noah cannot bring himself to "do what must be done" because of love. And in keeping with its own self-critical morality, it's because of love that the inconstant Ham slays Tubal-Cain and likely starts the cycle all over again. Humanity is purged but not cleansed and the film makes clear Man can still be as much a detriment to creation as a steward, the latter only possible not through blind duty to some inscrutable deity but through compassion for one another and a humble acceptance of our limitations in contrast to the infinite cosmos.

A stirring film... And utterly lost on the audience. Outside the theater where I saw this were four places serving bacon cheeseburgers and a Cold Stone. The people who left the theater stuffed their faces with easy fats - the only legal pleasure allowed in this wasteland, besides petty malice - before driving massive money-hole cars back to their depreciating homes, Aronofsky's work just one more spectacle to distract from the flatness of their lives. Another day spent growing fatter and sicker and meaner.

The rains can't come soon enough.

Slow Burn

So the big news this week has been that Alex Jones is cracked. I also hear there's this "sky" thing over us...

And speaking of, while the sky isn't exactly falling it may as well be. 2012 is officially the hottest year on record, just like the year before that and the year before that. If you can spot the pattern then you get a gold star for the day.

'Cause it sure seems like no one else can spot it. At least no one who matters. Global temperatures are rising, which is having real and nasty effects on every living thing. In the case of the 2011 heatwave, it stopped quite a few people from living.

What's that? Heat death don't do it for ya? Well we get more tornadoes too. And floods, making a rare foray into the Midwest. That's just going to get even worse at the current rate the ice sheets are melting.

New Yorkers being the optimistic sort respond with, "Ay! Suck it, Venice!"

And nobody cares. Because climate change isn't something that fits into the comfortable Red vs. Blue either/or false dichotomy we call politics. And  like a Todd Solondz film, it doesn't have a happy ending. So Americans pretend it just doesn't exist.