High & Low

Brooklyn is now the place for writers, if you hadn't heard, and that was the theme of sorts to the recent Brooklyn Book Fair. I skipped the main event, having suffered through enough readings of the same meandering yuppie angst, but I attended two events that gave a good picture of where this whole publishing thing is going.

Look! A metaphor!

First up, a panel of agents and editors in a big-box bookstore. A crowded, chummy affair with the Big Boys - who were mostly girls. Old girls, either young Boomers or aging Gen Xers. One complained that Brooklyn was so totally not the place for writers because she'd finally gotten a Manhattan apartment. MCing the whole affair was one of those professors you find in English departments who encourages you to put bad words in your essays and kinda looks like Stevie Nicks. She freely announced that most of the audience were her students - a collection of much younger girls with the stink of affected bohemianism and Jane Austen novels.

They went back and forth, sharing the little "secrets" about publishing that any fool learns in the first year of this dismal art. Be respectful, be professional, research where you submit, crap like that. It was the nuances that really stood out to me, the subtle nods of a class identity - like one editor who explained how he got into the industry by recounting his time at some Radcliffe internship as a student. "You pay five thousand dollars and get a job." And he hadn't worked at anything else since.

Then there was the disdain they held for anyone outside the guild. Meaning anyone who wrote and published outside their little Manhattanite world. I'd encountered the snobbery of literary agents before - a bunch of parasites who exist more out of tradition than any usefulness - but when someone brought up electronic self-publishing the panel turned cold. "I think there's a reason it wasn't published in the first place..." one of them said, dismissing the idea that an indie could ever get signed to one of the big presses. They clung to that stigma for dear life.

But more than anything, I came away with a sense of the careerism infecting everyone, panel and audience alike. Not the drive to get your stuff read - that's a healthy and natural sort of mania - but the settling into a job with prescribed dos and don'ts. Do submit the same tired yuppie dithering to all these fine New York publications with "New York" in the title! Do get yourself an agent and a ghost editor and all these other people who get paid to do what you as the writer should be doing already! Don't for the love of God have anything new or interesting to say!

Which was really driven home when Professor Nicks-a-like pointed out a success story sitting right there in the audience. A student who submitted essays to one of the muddling New York journals and was now signed to release her memoirs. We all look over - and she can't be more than twenty-three. How do you write a memoir when you're only twenty-three? Why would you write a memoir when you're twenty-three and why would anyone with any self-respect read it!?

Now the next event - self-published authors in a poetry shop. As soon as I walked in I started having flashbacks to Zinefest but this crowd proved much better than those neo-luddite screwheads. For starters, they all bathed. And more importantly, they were all driven to be read by more than the same homogeneous peers over and over again. The crowd was decidedly more mixed, in age and race - this panel even had a black person talking! A sharp contrast to the white and gray of the previous event.

They had just as much disdain for the upscale crowd too. I heard "gatekeepers" thrown around a lot and it was impossible to miss the feelings of bitterness among the panel. Still, they didn't sit around kvetching in a coffee shop at the injustice of it all - they just went ahead and got their books out! Of the two available on a table next to me - alongside stacks of gay erotica - were a YA novel about Icarus' girlfriend and a courtroom drama re-imagining of the three little pigs. The latter by the aforementioned black lady, Marie Guillame, who displayed an admirable mad-on for marketing - "Facebook! Twitter! I read my own book on the subway!"

While there's a grasping desperation to the self-published crowd, they're also the only ones I encountered concerned with the actual craft. Writing is an entire life to them, something they eat and breathe and shit every day. The Big Boys are all careerism, about as adventurous as Mormon accountants. And any claim to meritocracy is undercut by the fact that it was this crowd that published everything from James Frey to Snooki.

But more importantly, seeing such extremes of modern publishing really highlighted how homogenized the mainstream publishing world has become. It's made up of people who all went to the same workshops at the same colleges and are now all on a first name basis with the same agents and editors. It's a closed world that can't produce anything new or interesting and more importantly doesn't want to. The New York Times Book Review will never be a place of divisive ideas - whether in the books or the reviews - because then neither writer would get invited to the right parties. This isn't an all-consuming passion for them, it's just a lucrative bourgeois day job. 

Give the indies their due. As terrible as a lot of self-published books can be, the people behind them mean every misspelled word.

Trevor Kroger is the author of One Nation Under God, another indie self-published novel you should buy from Amazon or Smashwords!

An Inside View from an Outsider

"People are the same all over." It's one of those truths that's much more hideous than you'd think. You have to get into the specifics - "People are shameless all over" is a good one, or "People are clueless all over." And it's as true as only the really horrible stuff can be.

Take the recent mayoral campaign. NYC is looking for a new mayor, if you hadn't heard. I sure hadn't until I got here but New Yorkers have this delusion that everybody cares about them. That's for another time though... See, there's a bit of a fuss being made because the winner, Bill de Blasio, has a black son. Not the usual sort of fuss - usual by "Real America" standards - but everyone is whining that Little de Blackio is the only reason his pop won the primary.

This isn't surprising coming from the local Republicans, whose whole deal is just straight up hating blacks. I'm serious, they ain't shy about it up here. But what's surprising is how popular the black son meme has gotten over the past week. Outgoing mayor Bloomberg himself even accused de Blasio of running a racist campaign - because you know white billionaires are the experts on these sorts of things. Never mind that de Blasio emphasized labor rights in a town that still has unions worth mentioning. Never mind his opponents were an alienating technocrat and Carlos Danger-Dong. He only got votes because his black son appeared with him in a commercial!

And that's cheating!

"People are idiots all over!" I hear you say. Well yeah, and that's their argument too. "People" - implicitly black people - are so dumb they fell for de Blasio's trick. Because if people were rational they would have voted for [insert preferred candidate here].

Now on a substantive level, there was something to recommend both de Blasio and Christine Quinn. Where the former sounds better on labor rights, the latter has solid experience in government rather than just in activism. But the Quinn campaign was run like an afterthought, sending volunteers on hikes around the Burroughs with pamphlets to hand out regardless of actual ability. It was a very closed affair and if you wanted to be in on the higher levels you had better have been there to begin with.

The de Blasio campaign, in contrast, went out and engaged. His people talked to the voters like they were people and his campaign managers encouraged that sort of dialogue. Come election day and more people have a better immediate experience with de Blasio then Quin and you can fill in the rest...

"People are idiots" is a popular refrain when things don't go your way. Just don't forget that you're "People" too.

Attack of the Well-Meaning Morons

How stupid is America?

That's the real question we should be asking concerning Syria. Not whether Assad gassed people - he probably did and it killed way fewer Syrians than guns have the past two years. But just how stupid will an American response be?

It's been pretty stupid so far, but only stateside. A hollow gesture from House Republicans and a few Democrats, making a show of demanding to be in on the war planning without actually canceling their vacation plans. And a good number of them cheered on the much costlier Iraq invasion, after they voted to give the President first strike powers in 2001.

So typical American politics - lots of noise about "principle" without even getting off the couch.

But that's not where the stupid ends. Oh no - we've got the New York Times op-ed exploding with saber rattling! International law professor and damned idiot Ian Hurd actually wrote in the paper of record "Bomb Syria even if it is illegal!" A long whinge on the morality of bombing the shit out of people who kill in an arbitrarily unacceptable way. Hurd isn't the only one pitching this ludicrous course of action but he does it so badly you really have to wonder how hard it is to become a law professor these days...

And then there's the American people, the bedrock stupid. While there's no real enthusiasm for attacking Syria, it ain't because of some newfound collective conscience. Mid-East war is a bummer now, thanks to Bush, and "Thou shalt not impose a bummer on the American people!" is the only moral precept followed in this country. That's why rather than opposition or even honest indifference, all the polls show Americans want Obama to get the Just War stamp from Congress first. Because legalistic dithering matters more to you morons than cold imperial strategy.

The thing is, even if Assad was deploying weaponized ebola, attacking Syria would be the worst kind of stupid. It would antagonize Russia and Iran, wouldn't do a thing to stop the Syrian civil war, and would make the US allies of Sunni jihadis whose biggest ambition after killing all the Alawites is killing all the Americans. Dennis Kucinich, the last honest human being to serve in Congress, put it best - "What are we now, al Qaeda's air force?"

So it's just stupid all around. The only thing dragging Obama into it is all the rhetoric about "red lines" and bourgeois guilt over brown people dying somewhere. Every idiot trying to look compassionate is hand-wringing over the "ordinary" Syrians caught in the middle, despite that not being the case at all. This is a threeway blood feud and anyone who wanted no part of it has long ago been stood up in front of a pockmarked wall in Damascus or Aleppo.

You can see  Obama doesn't want any part of that mess, but he made the mistake of trying to lead a very stupid nation. One that will hound and despise any elected leader who does not reinforce our cherished cultural delusion that we can save the downtrodden by bombing the shit out of 'em.

The Useful Idiots of Oligarchy

It's telling that those who make the most noise about liberty in this day and age are so utterly clueless about the subject...

Case in point - Edward Snowden. Yes, it was very brave of him to reveal the total information orgy the NSA was engaging in. Yes, it was a principled stand against a creeping surveillance culture that cares more about control than security. No, it does not make him a good person or even necessarily a very clever one.

That's the conclusion I've finally come to on the whole Snowden thing - he's a fucking moron. Idealistic yes but absolutely clueless as to the ugly workings of the world. Surprising, considering he used to work for a three letter agency...

Because being a spook, or at least one of their support techs, should have clued him in that Russia might not be the best place to seek asylum if personal freedom is high on your list of priorities. Putin is one of the last dictators to do it with style but he's still a dictator and Russians face a level of oppression and invasive surveillance that Americans can't - and won't - imagine.

Yeah, all you shmucks know Pussy Riot. How about Roman Dobrokhotov? The late Anna Politkovskaya? The gloriously mad Edward Limonov?  These people have dealt with real oppression, real imprisonment, real violence - murder, in the case of Politivskaya - all for daring to say that life under Putin is kinda unpleasant.

Then Edward Snowden pops up in their country, praising their blood enemy's commitment to human rights. What a sooka! Look, either Snowden is shamelessly grabbing at an alliance with a rival superpower to protect his own hide or he's adopted the Greenwald Consensus that America is in the grips of super-fascism. And I don't really think it's the former, since he went and exposed himself in that interview with Ol' Koch-Sucking Camel Face.

And none of you smug, bourgeois loafers will call him on it because this sort of dumb - libertarian dumb - is the new normal. The only thing that differentiates it from the old neocon dumb - where we just assumed the entire Middle East wanted to be converted into white-collar suburbs - is the false piety. When it used to show up at all, it was all this guff about spreading the twin goods of democracy and capitalism. Now it's some nebulous concept of "freedom" that no one's too clear on but is heartily promoted by corporate bagmen and GOP dirty tricksters.

Like Bruce Fein, lawyer to Papa Snowden and a Reaganite turned libertarian. He even did a tour with Greenwald, some College Libertarian Hoedown, funded by everyone's favorite pair of vampires. I remember college libertarians - they are, without fail, comfortable white guys primarily concerned with weed, video games, and not having to do anything for anyone. Ever. They oppose welfare and war for the exact same reason - they don't want to be called upon to make any personal sacrifice for whatever reason. Thanks to Fein, Greenwald, and the Paul clan, these degenerate lackwits have been able to dress up their pathological self-absorption in fancy freedom talk.

Which brings us back to Edward Snowden. Whatever credibility he had from exposing the US surveillance superstate is safely shot, now that he's sold out to the Kremlin. Who are paying him to set up a brand new PRISM for the Putin regime. All he managed was to encourage anti-government sentiment in America, where such sentiments only ever serve the interest of Wall Street, Oil companies, and all the other oligarchs who really run things. Snowden, Greenwald, those Ron Paul potheads - all of 'em, just tools of the modern robber barons looking to keep Obama from raising their taxes.

Bully

I don't like teenagers. Not even when I was a teenager. They're all self-righteous blowhards who can't hold their liquor or screw properly. The only humane treatment would be to administer some series of intelligence or aptitude tests and promptly euthanize all the failures.

And that's why I think Bully is just so darn neat. Sure, the acting is a joke, the directing is absent, and the editing is stroke inducing, but it portrays kids as the vile shitheels they are. It's a nice antidote to sugary pap like Juno - which I refuse to see on the grounds that it does not end with an abortion.

"Wooo! We have no redeeming qualities!"

Bully is the story of this screwy, kinda gay kid named Bobby who beats on his moron best friend, watches gay porn, and has ugly sex with some girl. She later claims rape because she was just cranky that he wanted to watch the gay porn while they did it, leading up to a really horrible pun about penis envy and encouraging a less discerning viewers to assume false rape claims are something common. Because movies don't lie...

This is all slapped together within the first thirty minutes to show just how terrible a bully this Bobby is. Except he's only bullying a bunch of deadbeat white kids who spend their whole lives high as balls. Whatever message the film may have been going for about how bullying screws kids up - a very necessary message, one that school administrators and parents still need to understand - all these kids were utterly screwed to start with, making Bobby just another muddler in the grand asshole parade. And to top it off, Bobby is the shown to be the only one of these clowns to have enough brains to take a shot at college and a future!

Like I said, it's a mess...

Unfortunately for Bobby, Moron's dopey "I'm so in love! And pregnant!" girlfriend decides they should kill him. And she's just stupid enough to see it through. Not to worry though, as she's just stupid enough to bring along half a dozen people including this one goon she insists is a mafia hitman despite living with his parents and scoring weed from his own little brother. Naturally the murder is a huge fucking mess, people running around screaming and only Moron, his clumsy hands guided by some dull-witted sense of injustice, manages to deliver the real killing blows.

"Me have element surprise on you!"

So the only interesting character is dead. Not to worry, because they crank up the stupid for the remaining twenty minutes with the little hooligans running off to tell all their buddies about how they, like, totally murdered this guy and stuff! Preggers Girl again proves to be the mental vacuum of the film as she brags about her bloody deed to a friend in that giggly, sweaty way so common to people who would sooner sniff glue then spend one minute straight. Then she asks if her friend will help her move the body because she's a goddamn idiot.

Naturally they all get caught, and naturally they all wind up in jail for the better part of their lives. The Opey-looking "mafia" guy tries to blow tough rhetoric out his ass, probably because it's so obvious it's about to get stuffed. The girlfriend eventually lays her egg, but no word on whether the kid is adopted or left in the prison daycare. They say Moron gets the chair, we can only be so lucky.

Go Egypt Go!

Egypt has got to be the most fun subject in Middle East war news since ever. From the charge of the Camel Brigade to the military crackdown on their own local Wahhabbis - without the approval of Washington! - Egypt is proving to be the true meth lab of democracy for that whole region.

I went to some DC yuppie party in Feb '11 and they'd hung a big Egyptian flag in the window. For "solidarity" if you can believe it. The limousine liberals were oh so happy Mubarak got ousted and I couldn't stop worrying about my best friend's mom, a rich lady in Sharm and a natural target for revolutionaries. She's fine, in case you're wondering. Point is, those DC yuppies were bananas for the first stage of the ongoing Egyptian Revolution but they'd rather not talk about its current state.

Well I would! I remember this photo from when it started -

"Hey, Hosni! Take this job and shove it!"

See, when the army's against the dictator like that, it means he's going down. And really, is there anything more cheering than seeing the soldiers joining in the protest? That ain't just solidarity, that means the people fighting the system finally have some firepower on their side. Wish that would happen in this country for once, damned gun-phobic liberals...

 And it's really been the army running Egypt since, thank Christ. In all the hand-wringing over Morsi's ouster, Western folks are forgetting what a reactionary dildo he was being. Or maybe they just weren't paying attention since "Yay! Democracy!"

I sure was paying attention. I remember when Egypt's own Jon Stewart got hauled to court for daring to make light of His Holiness Mullah Morsi. Not to mention the ramped up pogroms against Copts that went on while the Muslim Brotherhood ran the show.

And really, I have to ask - didn't you idiots catch on that "Muslim Brotherhood" might not lead to a cozy Jeffersonian Democracy? I know I've said a free election won by theocratic wackjobs is as legitimate as an election won by the urbane Levantine intellectuals those DC yuppies like to pretend exist, but I never argued that made it good.

I'm not really arguing for the good of this either. But I like watching it. And as the rest of the Middle East goes through its own Thirty Years War with the whole Sunni VS Shia blood feud, it's nice to see a militaristic nationalism taking place at the fringe. One that the western powers are right now too impotent to strangle in its crib.

God, imagine if this grew into something like a real modern, secular republic? And then imagine it steamrolling across the rest of that medieval mess, like France did to all of Europe in the 19th century. Those French citizen-soldiers, chanting "Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité! Ou la mort!" did way more to spread democratic thought throughout the continent than all of Jefferson's scribblings.

Theory of the Leeching Class

"The thief or swindler who has gained great wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small thief of escaping the rigorous penalty of the law..." ~ Thorstein Veblen.

You're not allowed to criticize capitalism in polite company these days, despite its abysmal record. Of course, by "capitalism" we really mean business. And as Thorstein Veblen so eloquently put it, business is a parasite.

For proof, look no further than your own bank. Thanks to a court decision in favor of retailers, banks don't get to pick up a third of all plastic card transactions anymore - which should be cause to celebrate. These shadow charges have been the real inflation squeezing your resources, as it necessitated everyone from Sachs to 7-11 to mark up prices just to maintain their own balances.

So this decision would be a good thing... Except banks will now screw you more directly. Higher overdraft fees, higher minimum balances, more and more hidden charges that spring up on you right when you think you've got enough for bills. Because the logic of American business, as demonstrated time and again, is "Fuck the consumer!"

"With a rake!"

It's anti-consumer bullshit on a level also seen in the more and more degenerate console gaming industry - gauge customers at every opportunity and then punish them for the vagaries of the market. The only way it's not economic suicide is because there's no real competition. Every bank is doing it, all the time.

It's really the market loving libertards who should be up in arms about this. They're not, of course. They have much more pressing concerns, like jacking off to Atlas Shrugged or sputtering at irrelevant bloggers. Because they've not only internalized the Veblen critique of business, they're thick enough to think it's a good thing -

"However important the independent owner of property may be for the economic order of a free society, his importance is perhaps even greater in the fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs." ~ Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich Hayek repeated verbatim exactly what Veblen sneered at in his Theory of the Leisure Class - that the whole point of the elite is to accumulate expensive things, reinforcing that they are expensive (regardless of actual utility) and making the elite look worthy of their station. Except he presented it as the desirable state of things, being a reactionary opposed to full exercise of positive freedom by the common workers.

"Filthy peasants..."

And libertarians, dupes that they are,  accept this as a moral imperative - "Of course the banks can screw us, they're rich!" The wealthy have the right, by virtue of all their shiny knickknacks, to set a moral standard regardless of how patently immoral it is. It's a disgustingly servile mentality, a rationalization of loserdom. And it's coming from the people loudly campaigning for freedom of the individual.

How can you support a "free market" if it makes you a slave?