<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div>This long biographical post is one of the most useful things I have read this November. Thanks for the honesty.<br><br></div>The position of the middle-aged not-so-middle-class white guy is one that I share. The possibilities for a motivational narrative decline because a; the avant-garde is happening in different demographics; b; the revolution has not kicked off after all (not on your side anyway); and c; the nation-state that has been such a pain in the ass for your whole life is now obviously in decline and you along with it.<br><br></div>Now the long-neglected area of mainstream politics raises its ugly head. How does the couch potato find a side to be on?<br><br></div>Middle-aged not-so-middle-class white guys don't like to comment on the economics of their own lives because there are so many other people whose opportunities have always been worse for chrissakes. On the one hand this reserve is tactful, and let's keep it up dudes. On the other hand it's kind of a stumbling block on the way toward a viable position.<br><br></div>Social democracy works like this: you draw a line around a set of people, who are the included, and you strive to create an enlightened substantial democracy for those people. They become literate, numerate, have access to the arts and to self-expression, get health-care benefits, unemployment insurance and a retirement fund, and also get to take some responsibility for the complexities of the world through the complexity of their job. This allows them to accept a technocratic form of rule which by its nature cannot be understood in every point at all times. Germany is still more or less the image of this system today. However, there is just one problem with it: you cannot open the borders to what an unfortunate French minister once called "all the world's poverty," or the good ship welfare is likely to sink (as it has done in France).<br><br></div>Neoliberalism works like this: you give in to the pressure of the internally excluded and open up the economy, not only to all citizens, but also to pretty much anyone in the world. If they have education, they come in at the high end and end up making policy in their own interest; if they have nothing, they come in at the low end and do the dishes. You encourage intense competition at all levels of society while gradually eroding every element of so-called privilege that was built up in the attempt to make an economic democracy for the formerly included. You focus particularly on transforming the educational system so that it will no longer produce people who seek justice (or even just a better chair for their fat white middle-class ass). You offer bank credit as a means of access to a revocable prosperity. After about three decades of this treatment the population really is much more manageable. The US during the liar-loan boom of 2004-06 offers a high-resolution image of neoliberalism. One of the big advantages of this policy is that the problem of being responsible to complexity just vanishes! Another advantage is that the most powerful pressure group that could oppose it, namely the white male former majority, and especially the educated sector of it, has developed the nagging belief that it should not do anything, because other people deserve the limelight and the possibilities.<br></div><br></div>Populism: well, now we know how it works. The frustrated anti-intellectual middle-aged not-so-middle-class white guys take over identity politics for themselves and before you know it, they are talking about immigrants and religion and natural hierarchies and guns and police, along with some other much more passionate things that are coming, who knows when, maybe in a week or two. This system is designed to destroy even the memory of social democracy through a permanent outburst of explosive violence, which is not only directly physiological but also psychological, rhetorical, spectacular, national, international, military and ecological. One of the advantages of the this system is that you can simultaneously forget about and prepare for the coming state of civil war as the system collapses internally and its closed borders are overwhelmed by failed state/climate-driven migration. Another advantage is that if it works, you enter a tunnel in which everything becomes inexorable and no light penetrates for decades if not eternity.<br><br></div>My position, which appears to be lacking the fiery radicalism of my trend-setting youth (or wait, was that early middle age?), is that intellectuals, artists, educated people and professionals of all stripes should realize that we need an organized collective effort to face and overcome the imminent breakdown of the developed capitalist societies, maybe not in Asia, but definitely in the old core. To do this we would need the institutional relays of a somewhat more selfless version of social democracy than in the past. The vanguard prestige that formerly accrued to the most spectacular break with convention might have to be shifted a little towards a kind of loyal-oppositional social service model of which neighborhood activism can provide such good examples. Art might explore, say, a little less narcissistic sexuality and up-market electronic alienation, and a little more the tragic beauty of survival and solidarity in the face of violence and death, for which I guess we could invent some new aesthetic forms. Philosophy could trade in its apocalyptic fascination with savage anomalies, hyperobjects and total refusal, for the more pragmatic question of how (or through what form of organization) you can become responsible to the complexity of the world when you don't have the means to do so. Social theory would of course have a tremendous and long-overdue renaissance, but it would have to dump the Hegelian exaltation of historical negativity and master-slave reversals, and find a way to replace the dubious statistical positivism of the postwar years with some kind of ecological calculus that actually helps solve problems rather than creating more of them. Finally, political science would have to come up with a new accounting logic to replace inclusion/exclusion, along with the hard binary of open/closed border. All these and many more branches of active thinking/doing would need to learn to admire each others' efforts rather than spitting on them, as we fiery radicals of former times sadly liked to do.<br><br></div>There are a lot of middle-aged not-so-middle-class white guys with time on their hands, learning to be couch potatoes by watching Fox and Prison Planet, or maybe even Democracy Now! when they can get it. What if these folks were to do what middle-aged women on the left appear to be doing, namely getting politicized and getting organized? Well, the old farts would not be able to claim they were doing it for any kind of liberation, which has been the high-value claim since 1968, so they would have to quietly organize a new narrative and hope that in maybe a decade they could have something to be proud of and trumpet about in their curmudgeonly fading years. Hopefully this could be done using different keys, different instruments and different orchestrations than the ones that are currently on display.<br><br></div>Seriously, guys, gals, young, old, black, brown, white, lesbian, gay, trans, and everyone, we have our backs against the wall right now. The solution is not going to be the same for everyone. If we are just honest about our situation, well, it's interesting but it leads either to a butterfly-effect bubble of hopeful hopefulness, or to a conclusion already reached by Occupy: "Shit is Fucked-Up and Bullshit." Aren't there some better ways?<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 1:09 AM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:p@voyd.com" target="_blank">p@voyd.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
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<div class="m_3619190798675900041userStyles" style="font-family:Arial;font-size:12pt;color:#000000">I Understand Trump Supporters<br>
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I wanted to give a personal account of my life under the effects of Neoliberal America. These are only (largely negative) moments that are a sharp edit referring to the effects that Robert Reich cites in Inequality for All.<br>
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You know, I get it, Really. I'm from Akron-Canton, Ohio, and I get it - why Trump was elected. (If you don't know where that is, it's the place where The Daily Show went to a Trump rally and a man said Hillary had AIDS because of Bill contracting it from Magic Johnson...)<br>
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In 1985, I was a Unix Systems Field Engineer for Tandy Computers in Canton Ohio. In the late 70's my parents saw my love for my Atari 800, and they said I should go into Electrical Engineering (Instead of Computer Science like I should). I had a few years in my backward home town, I was part of a Star Trek fan club with a lot of people who would become professional, but something happened.<br>
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I noticed that I had not gotten a raise in 4 years, and our facility has being downsized. Efficiency needed to be raised to meet projections, and repair need to be regional. A few months later, the automated troubleshooting of motherboards and complexity of them turned me into a board-swapper and network engineer. I saw the writing on the wall, and eventually went into sales, which lasted for a while until I met the woman who would be my wife for 20 years. <br>
<br>
(Retraining I)<br>
And being that she demanded that I be geographically independent, I quit and followed my dream of art and design - I started a small firm and freelanced around the country, first doing graphic design, then screen design. That was the 90's (Clinton) and they were pretty good. NAFTA came about, but I never really felt it. We cried when the former Yugoslavia blew up, but things were fairly good. <br>
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And then Y2K came, which outsourced a lot of computer work to India, and the Dot-Com crash from the tech sector. My business imploded, and I took the time to finally get some severe cataracts out - I was still hopeful, but my wife was having some issues in her professorship in the South from institutional pressures tied to a chronic illness, and i left to go to graduate school in 2004 (little did I know that I would continue to leave in 2010; I honestly thought I was goign to come back and support her)<br>
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(Retraining II)<br>
Grad school in Bowling Green Ohio was bucolic, we worked, set fire to the fraternity rock monthly and did all those art school things, graduated at the top of my class, and got a tenure track job in Chicago. Things were OK, but I saw Detroit crumbling and the rank-and-file people in the rural areas were starting to hint at Appalachia at times. Still, I was optimistic.<br>
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Chicago was good, but the administration kept talking about the lowering of scholarships and the raising of tuition, and for a number of years, I had a decent salary, but it flattened out too. And with my department's increasing emphasis on Jobs and Outcomes, a massive internal scandal gave the moment to go entirely professional, and artists or theorists were not welcome, which I see as an outcome of the de-humanitization of Higher Ed in the US.<br>
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I divorced my wife because I felt the economy was never going to reunite us. My 90 -year old dad, who bemoaned the emergence of LGBT culture in my Unitarian church, died. I took another position.<br>
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I spent a couple years in Milwaukee under Scott Walker and saw the Walker/Koch engine attack the Wisconsin Proposition for higher education, and my initial offer coming to Milwaukee was <em>half</em> what I made in Chicago for nearly twice the work. The position I got was not even a professorship, but a lecturer position that had been created from a denial of tenure the year before. Ironic. My place was a dump compared to Chicago, and I went bankrupt due to some expenses that the flattening of my wages had allowed to build up, and the absence of two incomes. For two months, I ate rice one week a month and took a side gig woodworking chopsticks. My cat died. Milwaukee was abject. I decided to leave the US.<br>
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(Retraining III)<br>
So, I took a one year position at the American University of Sharjah - wow. Had no idea what I was doing - the culture, going cold into a RISD-style environment as an artist teaching Interaction Design; I did OK. Culture shock, workload, Middle Eastern Students. Still the work came out all right, and -<br>
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I spent the remaining summer in Canada with the sizeable net egg that I had and expanded my VR/AR skills to come back to Dubai the next year at Zayed. but I saw a lot of things in Canada, the real emergence of BLM, postcolonial discourse (which was a shock, as discussion of gender politics in the UAE is, 'far more restrained'), the emergence of racial tensions in Milwaukee (not really emergence, but the unsheathing of hostility that I saw when going to the West Side). I was also told by a friend of mine on search committees at OCAD that I had little or no chance of getting in because of age, race, gender, and orientation.<br>
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Being that I am currently in the year at Zayed, I won't say much except the colleagues are good, pay is decent, the Emirati students deeply respect you as a professor, and research is encouraged. However, one evening when I was contributing to my friend Vikram Divecha's (this year in the Venice) portrait project, I found myself just rattling off the most colonial, racist, condescending Trump-like stuff during our session, and I realized that the American, middle aged, middle class white zeitgeist had set up shop, and I was appalled. It wasn’t the first time I had done something like that, and I won’t say when, or who; I’ll just state my regret. The election was one month off, and I had felt marginalized, diminished, afraid for my precarity, on, and on, and on.<br>
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But then I realized like the United State becoming another country, I realized that as a middle-aged white man, my privilege had died, and I was just another person. T<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:16px">he American, middle aged, middle class white zeitgeist had set up shop, and I hadn't really realized it.</span><br>
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Then I cried. Not in any selfish way for myself, but for the situation of things. <br>
For the oppressed who have never gotten a good deal (relatively) for hundreds of years, if any.<br>
For the ones here that have a warped sense of the American Dream here, only to work for $300/month.<br>
For the ones who are being vectorially exploited in Central Asia and Africa.<br>
For the ones I cannot talk about for any number of reasons. Yet.<br>
For the Nigerian cab driver in Abu Dhabi for not understanding that just because Trump's rebellious, he isn't the best choice.<br>
For, honestly, decent Middle-Class and Working Class people who have been ground down in the USA from the Greatest Generation to create the Trump Nation. <br>
And only a little for myself for having allowed to be sucked into it for a while without realizing it.<br>
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I get it, and having that Batailleian knowledge is useful, but not pleasant.<br>
I feel like knowing what I know has put a splinter in my soul the size of a nine inch nail.<br>
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(Retraining IV)<br>
And I am starting a PhD soon.<br>
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I feel as if I will never be able to live in the US comfortably anymore,<br>
nor ever return to my home town.<br>
In creating this soft civil war (and that is what it is right now), in which families are only hoping for the return of Jesus to reunite them, I have a deep pathos and melancholy for the American Dream, for what parts of it actually existed, and try to exist. Burroughs’ Thanksgiving Prayer comes to mind.<br>
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It is for this reason I try to project the world I want now, regardless of whether I live in it. I have to live in a bubble of strength, kindness and egalitarianism for nothing else than my own well-being, in hopes that I might make a Butterfly effect.<br>
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Trumpettes? I get you; you're wrong, but I get you.<br>
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ALAN SONDHEIM REPLIES:<br>
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I agree with you totally here; as you know, I think; I'm from the northern reaches of Appalachia, with all its problems - Wilkes-Barre PA and actually a subset of that, Kingston across the river. And I've also tried to move to Canada - I've tried for years, my brother and sister live in Victoria and Toronto, but I haven't been successful for precisely the same reasons. And what you say about not being able to live in the US comfortably, again the same; we feel as if we're in a foreign country, with a proto-authoritarian for a lead, but not my leader, and so forth. I also get the Trumpettes (good word); I knew from the moment he came on the stage of the primaries, that he was going to win. And what I fear now the most is what will happen to the really poor, for whom, say, tax breaks for healthcare lead nowhere, for whom there is no hope! T. pays no attention at all to that class; there is nothing for them. I wish BLM was also Black Votes Matter; that might have made a difference.<br>
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Much as I like, now, the camaraderie and actions on the left, I fear so much that they won't make any difference at all. And the problem, fundamental problem, is how quickly the U.S. changed - inconceivable! A few months ago we felt there was some sort of progress being made...<br>
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