You may have seen this whatever it is and you may not. It's taken a few lumps already. I don't feel a need to lash out. Far be it from me to say that I've seen pictures of the author, who brags about turning his house into Wakanda, and he really shouldn't be inviting comparisons to Chadwick Boseman.
In its way it's honest. There is a lot of rudeness out there, although the idea that one race is behind it is dodgy at best. But it's revelatory of something else, which is becoming a hobbyhorse of mine.
When across-the-board lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic started about a year ago, media support for it was unanimous in the way that seems to only happen with really bad ideas. And it took months for any kind of dissent to work its way into mainstream discussion, to the extent that many still seem unaware that there is any.
All this support comes from and through the media, of course. And it's no secret that you get a lot of media workers are better able to earn while working from home than the average fellow. But there's more to it than that. A lot of them are―or consider themselves to be―activists. And a certain kind of activist is apt to support quarantine for the express reason that it depersonalizes.
When people are free to congregate where they like, with whom they like, social groups mix. You are apt to be in proximity to people superficially unlike you, maybe even conversing. It promotes a sense of common humanity. But if your ideology rests on the absoluteness of group differences like, say, race, this can all seem intolerably reactionary. The more people only interact with each other as abstractions on a screen, the more chance you have to convert others.
A theory, yes, but backed up by experience. Are black people getting more hostile toward whites? Based on my daily interactions with people in 3D space, I'd say that's a pretty resounding "no." Most people are just trying to get by, and they know you're trying to do the same. It's only in looking at media, social and otherwise, that I might get the opposite impression. Which is why journalists coming up with pseudoscholarly ways to say "Fuck I hate crackers" wouldn't bother me in the context of a healthy and vibrant democratic society. Which we don't have.
And on that topic, here's something else I read today. The kind of institutions that need to function if the idea of democracy is going to be a bad joke are mainly local in nature, and it's these that have been most devastated over the past year. Along with the apparently irrelevant lives of children and other common folk.
Feel like I'm running a little long here but there's another article that suggests ways of fighting back, or at least holding out. See what you think.
2 comments:
from jerry:
as far as the first article: i had, indeed, seen this yesterday. &, yes, for the first several paragraphs, at least, i remained open to the possibility that it might just be parody. the idea of judging an entire race based on the behavior of a single, somewhat discombobulated elderly member of that race? funny, eh?… but no,...
from his nation bio: “Mystal is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, a former associate at Debevoise & Plimpton, and a lifelong New York Mets fans. One of those things is not like the others. Prior to joining The Nation, Mystal was the executive editor of Above the Law. He’s a frequent guest on MSNBC and Sirius XM. He will resist.”
“he will resist”. one has to ask: having graduated both harvard college & law school, having worked at debevoise & plimpton, & having served as executive editor of above the law, "he will resist" when, exactly? & what, exactly?…
i’ve been noticing a definite proclivity on the part of certain members of my age group to suddenly reveal themselves, in this brave new world of ‘follow the science’, critical race theory, intersectionality, diversity, ad nauseam, to be someone other than who they have apparently been pretending to be all this time, someone whom, now, they are finally comfortable revealing to all…
for me, the most glaring instance of this has been the transformation of the 2 people (yves smith & lambert strether) running naked capitalism, a news aggregation site we’ve supported for over a decade. a site who’s moderators have, over the course of the last year, revealed themselves to be germophobic sociopaths, & which’s now become a 24/7 support group for the zero covid movement, & a virulent spreader of covid-related fear, uncertainty, & doubt (to the point where they’ve come to believe that morbidity/mortality figures are no longer even relevant, & that what it’s actually really all about is ‘long covid’ & the bajillion known & unknown, & potentially deadlier than deadly, ‘variants’. i kid you not! in brief: they are through moving the goalposts, & have basically just removed them from the field)…
what these ‘boomer 2.0s’ have in common is, like the members of the media you refer to, the luxury of freely detaching themselves from the meat world & relocating themselves in cyberspace as need be, something they’d already been both dabbling in & enjoying for years. lambert, for example, who’s always been obsessively involved in doing endless amounts of internet-based analysis/research regarding politics/finance, has simply redirected this energy (by linking to & excerpting from, over the course of 12 months, at least 2 dozen plus related ‘studies’) to becoming the world’s most enthusiastic authority on all things, um, ‘spittle’:
"As readers know, I stan* for aerosol transmission as the primary tranmission mechanism for SARS-COV-2; that is, singing, shouting, talking, even breathing, all of which give rise to small virus-bearing particles that float indefinite distances (aerosols), as opposed to coughing or sneezing, which give rise to larger particles that fall, pulled down by gravity (droplets), after travelling one or two meters (and also accumulate on surfaces, which are then to be wiped)…
"So it was with great interest that I received the following mail from alert reader Chi Gal in Carolina, saying that the CDC had finally updated its guidance to support aerosol transmission...
"OMG! Happily and excitedly, I went to the CDC website…"
(*cuz he's hep, baby!)
yes, you heard that right: in much the same way that, say, little red riding hood might ‘happily & excitedly’ make her way to grandmother’s house, lambert, a man my age, made his way… to the cdc website…
smh...
That's the kind of thing you see a lot these days. Pieces that initially seem like they could be intentional self-parody, but when you dig in they think they're serious...or at least think they are. Methinks it's the result of people with very little self-awareness writing for those with very little discernment.
Good (and funny) question on what and when Mystal will be resisting. For many people who have achieved prominence the answer seems to be "Donald Trump." I mean, that's where the Resistance meme came from. It's a rather narrow object of struggle, but you can focus on it for years. Practically make it your whole personality.
One thing that seems apparent to me is that for at least the last 2-3 generations rebellion has been a highly prized, desirable quality. Standing up to authority, "speaking truth to power", maybe just being a general pain in the ass. Except not really. Rebellion is only valued to the extent that it's redundant. When authority becomes overwhelming and really starts asserting its interests, those who go against it are considered foolish and/or wicked at best.
This message goes out in numerous ways. It can be subtle but it certainly doesn't have to be. And the people running Naked Capitalism may have absorbed this. Are they really revealing who they are, or is this who they think--correctly in many cases, I'm sure--their readership wants them to be. They might not know the answer to that question themselves. I'm sure there are a lot of sociopaths who've been holding it in until they could be fairly sure they'd be on the winning side.
And the rhetoric has gotten very weird on a number of fronts. This obsession with spittle for one thing. It's a delayed reaction to a truth that humanity has had access to for multiple millennia, which is that life is messy. Does that mean that we should have less of it? Lambert can make that choice for himself if he so desires and I won't object. But then they want to drag all of us into that sterile room with them, or rather others just like it but far away. And kids can have less life too.
Then you get people who obsess about how people in old movies do disgusting and unsafe things like shake hands and stand around talking to each other with only a few inches between them. This is so depressing to me that I can't pay attention.
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