is it tuesday already?
LikeThe Problem with that Gillette Commercial
If you pay much attention to the news, you will almost certainly have concluded by now that everything is ruined. You will be certain that even if this is not the very last week of human civilization (which obviously it is), that we are, at least, in one helluva tailspin and things haven’t been this bad since the plague. You can be forgiving for feeling this way.
I mean, goddamn. We’ve got genocides going in, like, five or six countries as you read this. The largest economy in the world is unwilling to pay its most vulnerable employees. Native American women are still disappearing at an unbelievable (and barely reported) rate, 15,000 refugee children have been separated from their families (and two have died in custody), and Americans are finally more likely to die of a drug overdose than in a car wreck. Hell, there are even inches left over to report on the whole Jayme Closs thing, which, wtf.
Then there’s fact that most of the large-scale human tragedies confronting the planet now have direct roots in two things: a legacy of imperialist fuckery and global warming. We, as humanity, haven’t demonstrated that we’re all that interested in changing any of that stuff, and have more or less agreed that the next best thing is to just make a lot of money not solving anything. Like, by building walls, and arresting children, and things like that. It should make us all feel pretty queasy that we look to a shaving cream company with a history of “literally false” advertising and price fixing convictions as a beacon of morality.
Because at its most basic root genocide, toxic masculinity, and corporate impunity all stem from essentially the same premise: me first. Ultimately, it sort of comes down to whether or not we believe that we should be able to do whatever we want whenever we want to. Obviously the dynamics of power come in when start looking at what it is we can get away with, but the basic issue is the same: should everyone else just go fuck themselves?
And how we answer that question speaks volumes to where we land on issues like human migration, the #MeToo movement, white supremacy, etc. An earnest effort to understand and address the problems facing our communities, nations, and species must stem from the basic assumption that other people matter.
The reality is that pretty much everyone reading this is in no danger of ethnic cleansing, and we’ll all be dead at least a few years before a warming climate touches off a human extinction. The relatively new public embrace of conversations surrounding racial, gender, and sexual equality represent the fact that we’re just now acknowledging that our families and neighbors matter. Nevermind people we’ve never met.
We’ve got plenty of runway left for self-serving people to manufacture problems for which they are selling a self-serving short-term solution. We can lie to ourselves about “clean coal” eight years at a time. Bloviating about a useless/impossible border wall is a great way to not talk about actual solutions to actual problems. Let’s be honest, it’ll take a lot of genocides before there aren’t enough people left on earth to buy razors and keep Proctor and Gamble profitable.
Meaningful change can only grow from a true, honest belief that other people’s lives have meaning. Of course we’re behind the ball there, having embraced a political/financial system with a robust record of placing profitability over humanity, and if we’re honest industrialized communism doesn’t have the best track record for human rights. While a violent leftist revolution would feel really good, it probably wouldn’t solve all of the issues we’re facing today.
And that’s probably a good thing, because a violent revolution sounds like it would make a real mess and besides, really, it’s the right-wing extremists that have all the guns.
No, I think that we can get a lot done without burning down the White House. But the trick is that we actually have to care. Gillette made a great marketing video about toxic masculinity, but grooming products targeted at women cost 50% more than those marketed to men. That hybrid Suburban drips with self-satisfied sex-appeal when you take your kids at Montessori school, but it’s not doing a damn thing to make sure there will be glaciers in Glacier Park when those same kids go to college.
A Green New Deal sounds like a great way to motivate a liberal base, and represents a good start, but the fact is that we don’t need to ask Congress for permission. The same tools and forces that have given the oil and gas industry carte blanche to write US policy (foreign and domestic!) are available to effect meaningful change. Our #1 contributor to greenhouse emissions is transportation. Don’t like it? Stop buying gas. Saw a heart breaking video about orangutans? Great. Drop the palm oil and imported beef. The only trick is that you actually have to do it. Posting on Facebook isn’t enough.
The greatest issue confronting the left is not Donald Trump. It is not right wing extremists. It is not even global warming. It is the uncomfortable reality that the tools for change are readily available, and that when the rubber meets the road we are, perhaps, not quite so resolute in our convictions as our bumper stickers say.
LikeI Guess We’ll All Just Have to Deal: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the tyranny of outrage
Two years ago, when our current President was just getting situated and the extent of this dumpster fire/lucid nightmare was only beginning to become clear, there was a distinctive murmur from the left. In addition to legitimate (and now realized) fears about specific policies and issues, the more general concern that we would need to stay focused, that he would try to drown us in a sea of distractions, headlines, and controversy to mobilize his base and obfuscate any really organized dissent.
Well, it has happened, and it has worked.
Right now we’re wading through the morass of a government shutdown and the negotiation behind it. We all have our (strong) feelings about the issue, but no one is really all that surprised that we’re here. This is, now, business as usual.
But for context: Imagine, for a moment, what would have happened if President Obama declared our broken healthcare system was a National State of Emergency and raided the Defense Department budget to establish a single-payer option. Now let it sink in.
Hunter Thompson said that it is impossible to have an honest discussion of where “the edge” is, because anyone who truly knows has already gone over it. And we, like slowly boiled frogs, don’t really understand quite how bizarro this bizarro world is.
Yet in this 24-hour cycle of manufactured controversy one non-story managed to surface for a moment with the promise of discord only to be received by both the left and the right with a collective shrug: freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, apparently, danced in a college booster film, or something.
Ultimately the whole thing kind of just wound up being a meta-contraversy, where both sides point to an objectively innocuous thing and claim that the other side is outraged. Smells Russian. But anyway, it is probably the first instance of something that we are going to see a lot more of.
Consider that Ocasio-Cortez is the first Congressional rep who came of age with the internet. She is the first of what will be many federal representatives whose youthful indiscretions have an unprecedented chance of being documented online. I’m going out on a limb here, and guess that none of us would like to be judged forever by our goth phase in high school, or that night we got pretty drunk and threw up in the dorms.
It has been historically easy for us, communally, to sweep these things under the rug, to move on, to ignore them. Boys will be boys, right?
From here forward, we will be confronted with the choice of either electing representatives who are so robotic, connected, or anti-social that they somehow never made an awkward Instagram post, or we will collectively have to decide that we just don’t care that teenagers are idiots.
And a part of not caring that teenagers are idiots is thinking rationally about boys being boys, or, whatever. Getting popped for underage drinking high school is different from raping an unconscious woman, and being uncomfortable or offended is different from being unsafe.
As the Democratic party, and progressives in general, do our soul searching in coming years it’s probably worth considering that the best candidate will offend us. The best candidate will have said or done something stupid, irresponsible, or illegal, on video, on the internet, and they’re still the right person for the job.
And this will be hard for us, but it’s for the best. We will have to swallow a bitter pill now again again, and concede that universal health care is worthwhile even if the legislation is sponsored by someone whose sorority hosted an awkward Cinco de Mayo party. Or they were rude to an Uber driver once. Or whatever.
Humans are fallible, and while the publicity of our shortcomings will make for some awkward campaigns, I wonder if we wouldn’t all be better off if Roy Moore had had SnapChat growing up.
LikeHappy New Year!
Happy New Year! This is, of course, the day of the year picked arbitrarily and more or less accepted as the opportunity for a new start. A fresh beginning. The holiday is our general consensus that self-reflection and self-improvement are worthwhile pursuits. Good for us, I say.
New Years, really, is a western attempt at practicing mindfulness, where we embrace our impending mortality and recognize how quickly life can slip away if we do not take a moment to reflect on where and who we are, were, and wish to be. New Years self reflection is a beautiful concept, really, and as we all have so much room for growth it never stops to puzzle me that we celebrate these new beginnings by donning diapers for a party and embarking on this brave new year with a hangover.
But at least maybe it’s honest. Resolutions, of course, are up there with extravagant birthday celebrations as among our dumbest traditions. But it’s not that the impulse to take stock and improve our lives and habits is silly, but that abandoning our resolutions is as much a part of the cliche and the tradition as making them. “I should lose weight,” or “go to the gym more,” or “be better with money” are not ignoble goals, but are simply terribly defined. It fails to consider scale.
Meaningful lifestyle change needs to step from an earnest interest in making it. And an earnest interest in effecting that change will take shape when it is time, not on January 1st. A ceremonial embrace of a present and improved self, one which swirls around a single day, should center on a single, discrete action.
That doesn’t mean this thing you decide to do can’t be meaningful. Ask for the raise. Reach out to an estranged friend. Or just kick of 2019 with a perfectly clean refrigerator. And then go on with your year and make yourself better or don’t, but let’s stop standing on ceremony so we can all take each other a bit more seriously.
LikeHappy Christmas
coffee and old pie
onion and fried potato tortilla with chard
oysters and snail butter
christmas manhattan
maggie’s beans and spanish rice
roasted pork shoulder in mojo
flourless chocolate cake
happy christmas!
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