Existential Anxiety

Reading fiction as a distraction from our current depressing Situation was working pretty well for me until, at 2AM, I encountered this passage from Keiichiro Hirano's novel, A Man:

...Kido saw his life as composed of several stages linked together by a shared name, with himself as their culmination.  A significant portion of the life given continuity by the label "Akiro Kido" that had once lain ahead had already been relegated to the past, and so his identity was in large part already determined.  Of course there might have been other paths he could have taken and therefore other people he might have been.  Perhaps an infinite number.  It was in the light of such considerations that he confronted his former question anew.  The problem was not who he was in the present but who he's been in the past, and the solution he sought was no longer supposed to help him live but to help him figure out what sort of person to die as.

Hirano wrote in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed Fukushima — an event just as arbitrary and unforeseen as a pandemic, and just as likely to provoke a little existential anxiety.  It's a common human condition, albeit most humans can't put a name to it when they feel it.  We respond by immersing ourselves in the present, focusing on some current, less transcendental outrage.

That's why I'm having a problem this time around: I seem to be suffering from outrage fatigue.  I've been outraged so often recently that it's become hard to work up a good surge of anger anymore.  My head has been bombarded by the corruption and the inequalities and the classism and the blatant lies and the manipulations of reality.  Where the hell is that revolution I wanted fifty years ago, and that I never stopped wanting?

There.  That feels much better.  I'm back! :)

Cairo, Illinois?

I know that nobody reads Karl Marx anymore, but just in case you happened to glance at the Cliff Notes, let me point out something interesting: the bourgeois revolution finally has arrived in Egypt.

Like almost all the Middle East, Egypt never quite managed to emerge from the Middle Ages. It was kept marking time by a series of native born and colonial rulers who hogged up all the wealth and power, and distributed it to their families, friends, and toadies with little regard for the country as a whole. Granted, Egypt's last king (Farouk I) and his British enablers were deposed by the military in 1952, but new strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser merely transferred the graft and related goodies to new favorites, while distracting the populace with pan-Arab nationalism and military campaigns against Israel. His successor, Anwar El-Sadat, figured out that there was more money to be had by cooperating with the United States and making peace with Israel than in remaining recalcitrant.

Anyway, Mubarak has followed in Sadat's footsteps for almost thirty years. Presumably, it was the uprising in Tunisia that inspired the current uprising in Egypt, and both Tunisia and Egypt seem to be following the same pattern — the middle class, tired of being cut out of the loop for acquisition of the really big bucks, has finally had enough.

Egypt's is not a revolution arising from political discontents; the young people in the streets couldn't care less about creating a "democracy." It also has nothing to do with Islamism; the Muslim Brotherhood may be hitching a ride, but the movement, at its roots, is secular.

The problem, as always, is economic — unemployed and underemployed Egyptian youth, mostly children of the middle class, want a chance to make lives for themselves. If the resurrected zombie of King Farouk could guarantee them decent jobs and a chance to move out of their parents' basements, they'd follow him. They've been joined by many older workers who have gone years without opportunities to use their skills, and even some of the poor — although most of those abandoned all hope years ago. (Popular revolutions always begin with the middle class.)

So, that got me to thinking about this other country with an entrenched plutocracy; large numbers of young people unable to move out of their parents' basements; middle class college graduates working in temp jobs and unpaid internships; and older workers apparently doomed to structural unemployment for the rest of their lives. Is it time for a popular uprising?

Probably not, unless you're willing to count the Tea Party. Just the same — in case any of you are interested and connected to the social media — allow me to suggest Cairo, Illinois as an initial rally site. It just might help get the point across.

Correction to the previous post

In yesterday's post, I said that liberals "don't believe in violence." What I should have said is that they "don't believe in violence at home." History shows us that they don't especially mind exporting violence to other countries, especially in the developing world, and especially if they can dream up some "moral imperative" for doing so — or can sign on with some conservative think tank's "moral imperative" so as to avoid appearing weak or unpatriotic.

If some of the yahoos who think they are "conservative" (because there's nobody to tell them they're just working class heroes co-opted by the corporate cabal) decide to go out shooting liberals, there would be little of value to mourn. If the liberals shot back with guns instead of columns in the Washington Post and interviews on MSNBC, I might hold them in slightly higher regard — not much higher, but slightly higher.

Maybe I've said this before, but here it is again, perhaps in a slightly different format:

• If you support the Republicans and you are not rich, you are an idiot. They've been promising you those socially conservative "reforms" for decades, but they never come through.
  
• If you support the Democrats and you're not on Chuck Schumer's speed-dial, you're wasting your time. They've been promising you those liberal "reforms" for decades, and they haven't come through since the Johnson administration.
• If you move your vote back and forth between the corporatist parties based on their policy pronouncements, I feel sorry for you. Policy pronouncements, even in the short run, mean nothing.
• If you move your vote back and forth based on your perception of the personality characteristics of the candidates, you're an idiot. They're all lying to you — not just words, but faces and body language as well. Haven't you figured that out yet?
  

I don't own a gun, mostly because I don't want to be tempted to blow out my own brains (and I haven't been a happy camper for quite a while, if ever.) Comes the revolution, though — if it ever comes — I guess I'll head out to a gun show in some NRA compliant state and buy myself some unregulated firearms. Probably I never could get anywhere near anybody I'd really like to shoot, but without the appropriate armaments there's no chance at all.

Where is the Class War?

We hear people on the right yelling "class war" with a boring regularity. Those of us who have been paying attention are inclined to believe the class war is over, and that the working and middle classes have lost.

There still are plenty of warriors out there, though, often quite well armed. There are hunters, rifle clubs, militias, street gangs, and no shortage of individual angry paranoids — many with combat experience. They could stir up some extremely severe civil unrest if they got it into their heads to just start shooting in a concerted way, but except for the drug gangs shooting each other and some of the paranoids shooting their families, co-workers, and the occasional abortion provider, things are unnaturally quiet.

To a large extent, the liberals have to take the blame. They have perpetuated the ridiculous belief that we can get what we want and need by voting, and that shooting our corporatist oppressors and their toadies is just not done. The ones most likely to shoot anyone for political and economic reasons don't even have a clue whom they should be shooting, and dream about taking potshots at immigrants and Democrats.

Okay, some Democrats might deserve it, but not for the reasons their assassins would have in mind.

The main thing that keeps a perfectly justifiable class war from happening is that there's nobody left to tell the people with the guns who they ought to be shooting. They won't get it from their corporatist media, their corporatist drug cartels, nor their supremely corporatist NRA. Organized labor — what remains of it — has been co-opted. "Progressive" campus groups were suckered into working for corporatist Obama, and now they've gone back to their keggers.

The so-called "left" has fragmented into feminists, environmentalists, "free speech" advocates, gay rights activists, anti-war activists, immigration reformers, and scores of other single-issue ax-grinders, incapable of recognizing that their common enemy is world corporatism — and that fascism, over six decades after World War II, has triumphed. The other problem with the "left" is that they're liberals, and "don't believe in violence." Where are the goddamned Communists when you need them? Is everybody who owns a gun and understands that "the man" is not his friend in prison on drug charges?

Oddly enough, I think the best chance for class warfare might be in China. New to capitalism, their elites haven't learned to hide their corruption as well as ours do.