The Flint Crisis and the Neoliberal Model

What to do with the extraneous population of the dispossessed once the sources of its livelihood have been systematically plundered, de-skilled, downsized, outsourced? 

In the neoliberal model there are two steps. 

First, the criminalization of what remains of the lives of those within this population and then the consignment of as many as possible to a burgeoning for-profit incarceration system so another layer of profit can be scraped off it. 

Secondly, those who remain are condemned to a--quite literal--slow death by depriving it of the infrastructure necessary to its health and longevity. 

Death by economic deprivation, ethnic cleansing by another means. Capital tidying up its "externalities" in the wake of its "creative destruction." Utterly disposable cities inhabited by dark-skinned people slowly ablated from the map.

On Trump and Fascism

I recently read somewhere that Donald Trump keeps a volume of Hitler’s speeches on his nightstand. If true I find this amusing, because it shows that Trump is not a very quick study. By all accounts Hitler was an electrifying speaker; there exist, for those who care to look for them, pictures of him rehearsing his speeches, and they show he was a master of the dramatic, messianic gesture. Though his trail through history was evil and blood-soaked, as a political orator Hitler was hard to match.

Trump, by way of contrast, comes off as nothing so much as a poor man’s Shecky Greene; there are the wild, spasmodic gesticulations, the repetitive “what gives?” shrugs, the constant shooting of the sleeves. Trump thinks he’s smart because he’s surrounded by people who tell him so, and watching him speak is like watching a drunken man performing at an open mike night at a strip mall sports bar, cheered on by his friends who’ve told him how funny he is when in fact he’s not clever at all. He’s not witty; he has no insight into the human condition that might prompt introspection or amusement; as a nominally “political” figure he was no vision beyond his vacuous platitudes about “greatness.” He’s all flash and no fire, and the impression he leaves behind him has all the permanence of the hoarse shouts of a corpulent carnival barker at a county fair. A more unlikely leader of a political movement is hard to imagine. Trump’s “substance” is only at the level of surface appearances, a kind of empty “bigness” of presence with no heft at all. He’s a vehicle for superficiality.

In short, to compare Trump to Hitler actually manages to do a disservice to Hitler, and not only at the rhetorical level. Hitler had a kind of demonic intelligence behind his eyes; he was quite adept at Machiavellian maneuvering; he had a worldview, detestable though that view was; and he had a program. Mein Kampf was an evil book by any measure, but despite history’s righteous judgment of it Hitler actually wrote it. The book represents his ideas and the lines of thought that lead to them, no matter how vile and twisted and obscene they were. In other words, Hitler was “thoughtful” in his own way, as evil as these thoughts were. 

Try to imagine Trump writing a book (by himself!) about his political philosophy. It’s truly impossible, because it’s clear he’s never spent a moment thinking about politics. He has no political values or allegiances or ideology, no policies, no theory of governance, no proposed legislative priorities—nothing, nothing at all. This is not to say that the rest of the GOP field is comprised of people of big ideas, but at least they occasionally talk in some detail about this policy or that, wrongheaded though they usually are. Jeb Bush’s eyes reflect his haughty sense of entitlement, Ted Cruz’s betray his utter cynicism, Carly Fiorina’s are alight with the gleam of opportunism, and so on down the line. Even Ben Carson has thoughts, bizarre though they are, struggling to free themselves from something like a thorazine haze. The eyes of the stricken George W. Bush often had the cast of the wares of a fishmonger at the end of the day, but one could sense that neurons were firing somewhere in there, out of sequence perhaps, but firing nonetheless.

Now look into the dull pig-eyes of Trump. There’s no light back there at all. One imagines a skull full of dead, rotting, ground beef, incapable of generating any performance of cognition. On this reckoning Trump is a kind of mutant political creature. I’ve come to think of him as a walking, gesturing, animated mouth that constantly moves and makes sounds without the benefit of thought, but which somehow senses the resentments of its audience and then gives amplified and unapologetic voice to them. In this, the candidate Trump is the logical outcome of decades of overt and covert GOP pandering to racists and xenophobes; he’s the once barely suppressed id of the party base, finally burst forth and unleashed at a time of acute economic crisis and significant demographic shifts within our body politic. He’s quite happy to stir up the roughly 30% of the electorate which basically came unhinged after the election of a non-Caucasian president, and which are yearning for a return to “golden age” of unchallenged white, male, Christian privilege. 

Yet Trump is no member of the Lumpenproletariat; the resentments he channels are not his own. It’s important to remember that he’s a creature of television, the medium of surfaces and superficiality. His oxygen is attention; he needs it to survive; it’s the only thing he craves. And if that means he has to demean women, or call all Mexicans rapists, or demonize BLM activists, or call for a pogrom on all Muslims, that’s what he’ll do. It’s just his nature, given the kind of creature he is. I’ve often wondered who was more morally despicable, racists and xenophobes who at least have the courage of their twisted convictions, or politicians who pander to these convictions out of political expedience. With Trump we have a third option: someone who will pander to such base emotions for the sake of ratings and clicks on social media—making him an especially execrable sort of creature.

I learned long ago not to make predictions when it comes to US politics; for the last thirty-some odd years it has only grown increasingly unpredictable. I can’t say for sure that Trump will not win the nomination or the presidency, though even at this stage I doubt it. I will say, though, that he’s no Hitler, nor a fascist, nor an ideologue. He is, however, a demagogue of a most peculiar kind, though a demagogue we in the US deserve: stupid, moronic, unapologetic. This is not to say Trump is not dangerous. Whether his is a serious bid for office or not, real, live people will suffer as a consequence of his repulsive antics; in fact, the suffering has already begun. Thus we must loudly repudiate him at every opportunity, and steadfastly stand with his victims no matter the cost.

On the Death of Michael Brown

The only way to think of Michael Brown’s death as a tragedy is to studiously ignore the tragedy of the American present and the American past.  

The killing of a young black man in a small city in middle America rarely makes national headlines, and I suspect that the only reason we know Michael Brown’s name is because of social media and the loud protests following his shooting. But it is a tragic fact that young black men in this nation are routinely detained by police at the slightest pretext (or no pretext at all), far more likely to be killed by police, and even more likely to be incarcerated in our massive prison system that is mostly populated by non-Caucasians. These facts represent but a few symptoms of our peculiar culture, where every problem foreign or domestic is almost always addressed though coercion and violence. Witness a near constant state of warfare lasting six decades, a bizarre idolatry of firearms that costs 30,000 lives a year, and an increasingly aggressive style of highly militarized law enforcement that when given a choice between the safety of officers and the safety of the public they are supposed to protect and serve almost always chooses the former. Needless to say, it is predominantly communities of color that bear the brunt of this more bellicose policing. Add to all this the effects of the social violence generated by persistently segregated communities, schools, and opportunities, and witness a body politic torn asunder. We can see these effects most acutely in the very city that surrounds us, which was turned over to a racial minority historically barred from political power to govern in the midst of its era of economic decline. Anyone aware of this country’s long, tragic history of race relations—the genocide of whole peoples, the coerced “immigration” of slaves, a civil war fought over slavery, the terror of the Klan, Jim Crow, etc.—cannot possibly be surprised at the cheapness of non-Caucasian lives and livelihoods on our streets and in our cities. In an age of a superfluity of information, ignorance is no excuse.  In fact, it is unforgivable.

But all of these tragedies are compounded a thousand fold by the persistent denial of racism’s persistence, and racism persists because we hide it out of sight both geographically and psychologically. Historically, the term “ghetto” denoted the place where a society’s majority consigned those arbitrarily prejudged to be inferior, undesirable, unwanted, inconvenient. So segregated from our modern ghettos of inner cities, rural cell blocks, and distant reservations, the majority far more easily forgets the burden that race places on some while remaining blithely unaware of the ways in which their own race privileges them. For example, I’m a white man who lives in a majority black city, but despite my minority status I’m far less likely to be subject to state violence or coercion—the statistics prove it. The different hues of different skins plays favorites, colors lives, and shapes destinies.

Of course on the long perspective race relations in this country have improved, but no one can deny that racism still exists. Congratulate yourselves on electing a black man as president, but never forget the hysterical vitriol he has faced as a consequence of his race. Praise your generation for being far more tolerant than my own, but recall that we still live in a nation where football fans privilege the plainly racist mascot of their team over the sensibilities of the peoples practically extinguished by our ancestors. Treasure your friends of color, but ask yourself perhaps the most pertinent question on this topic: why don’t they live near you, or you near them?  And always bear in mind the sobering thought that in the world they live in they could well be the next Michael Brown.  

Academe Contra Logic

Every professor decries the lack of "critical thinking" skills in their students yet collectively they cannot settle on a rigorous definition of what the term means. Therefore they continue to complain and very few of them teach these purportedly essential skills. And for good reason! Classrooms of students schooled in elementary logic would routinely embarrass their professors!

This Is Your Society on Austerity

This is your society on austerity. Cash-starved on the promise of a bounty that never comes, every public good weakens and begins to dissipate. Eager physicians step forward with a certain cure--privatize! But they are fakes and charlatans, and to place public goods into private hands is to let poison into the blood for certain. Society is kept alive only so long as its energy can be leached off and consumed by its pretend benefactors. Every limb is methodically cut off in the name of the cure, the blood is slowly drained away, every vital organ harvested one by one until the body politic dies, and then the flesh is eaten and the marrow sucked dry, leaving behind nothing more than a skeleton that rings hollow as noble savages wander dazed in the cage of its bones.

What College Is For

From my friend Chris Nagel:

"I think often about what college is for. If it is not a gateway to professional career and prestige—which it never really was, especially not for students like ours at CSU Stanislaus—, and not a means of increasing individual wealth, then what? In brief, if all the (mainly crude) economic justifications for higher education are not true, what could be a good reason to go to college?

"I reject the citizenship rationale, because not only do very few of my students aspire to this in any meaningful way, but it is not clear what citizenship would mean, and whether developing citizenship would be good for students (unlike the economic rationale).

"I think I can say honestly that I believe the following.

"College education is the best way to learn to understand how knowledge, information, and power work at the level at which they work to control the world. What college educators can do is explain how knowledge functions as a shape of power, how knowledge shapes social institutions and practices, and how it shapes us. The practical use of understanding all this is to be able grasp how the people who own knowledge use it, and what they do to manufacture reality with it.

"Yes, there are people who own knowledge and information. These are not your teachers, but the people who, ultimately, determine what your teachers teach. They are not researchers at Stanford or Cal Tech. Instead, they are the owners of knowledge, information, and power in our society. For instance, the research professor at an R1 institution must get funding for research, and competes to get it, from those who have a vested interest in that research—the funding agencies, which are government and corporations. They own the products of that research. They literally own it. They control to a great degree whether the researcher can publish the research, profit from it, make changes to it, develop it along new lines, or anything else. In grant contracts, this is laid out specifically: who owns and controls this new knowledge. The Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, Monsanto, Dow, and Chevron use this knowledge to maintain and increase their power. This is not power wielded repressively on us, not power that coerces us by threats of violence. This is power wielded by controlling the shape of the world, the shape of reality—and by controlling reality, the people who own knowledge shape everything that anyone can do in the world.

"Knowing how this happens means you are more free, because you understand what your own choices and actions in life mean, and what they don’t mean; what you can and can’t do; and what could matter and might not matter about what you do. Knowing how knowledge, information, and power are distributed, and how the owners of them build the world we live in, makes it possible to consider strategic options for living in that world."

The Oldest Problem

The problem is as old as Plato, for whom the only blameworthy ignorance is not knowing what one doesn't know. And given the hyper-rich social media of the present day ignorance spreads much more quickly and at such a high volume from so many different sources that people tend to cluster around "facts" already congenial to their own world views and prejudices, rather than subjecting them to critical scrutiny. In such an environment strong convictions trump wisdom, resulting in the manic stupidity we witness at the highest levels of our public discourse. And the situation is barely better among our higher educators, I'm afraid. The future looks very dark.