If you’ve read anything I’ve ever written then you already know that I’m in awe of the absurdity of late capitalism. I particularly like news that is stranger than fiction. Events so far beyond our collective imagination that we can’t quite make rational sense as to how we arrived at our present moment.
Today I cite a few choice examples. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll look in the mirror and even ask yourself why.
Leading off is a story we’ve all heard and probably shrugged off. The GOP and Donald Trump have fallen so far into an extremist rabbit hole of grievance and feigned outrage that they couldn’t find sanity with ten rounds of electroshock therapy and an implanted defibrillator. The plan, to the extent there is one, is to elect Donald Trump then hope and pray his ego can deliver a set of policies nobody can agree on or articulate out loud for fear of alienating the sane part of the electorate. But we’ve already known all of that for a long time. What’s new is how elected officeholders, people who’ve been selected by citizens to represent them, have stopped trying to pass legislation because it may interfere with issues Trump wants to campaign on later this year. Think about that for a second. An unelected rapist, indicted on 91 criminal counts, who is now prohibited from doing business in his home state, is calling all the shots for one of the two major American political parties. This goes way beyond Nixon angling to prolong the unpopular Vietnam war so he could end it himself to something much more overt. Nobody is hiding the strategy. The GOP is kneeling before Trump, suckling at his teet, bending over for the smack of a wooden paddle on their ass, all so they can ask for another – more, again, harder – over and over again in front of the American people. It’s a party of cuckolds laid bare and many, many people can’t seem to care.
In the world of big business, despite record profits, a growing economy and stock market, and an overall favorable moment, many companies are laying off workers. Some critics have speculated that some of it is driven by a form of groupthink: competitors are laying off and getting leaner so they should as well even if they don’t have an otherwise solid rationale. I don’t pretend to know for sure. What caught my eye was one particular layoff announcement that couldn’t have been more bizarre if it was done by a robot in a satirical simulation of cold hearted realism. Anna Wintour, the Conde Naste executive and fashion tastemaker who peddles constant change in the pages of Vogue yet somehow has remained frozen in time with the same haircut and sunglasses style for decades, laid off Pitchfork staffers without taking off her said sunglasses. Maybe she fashions herself as a Marie Antoinette and this was her “let them eat cake moment.” Whatever the reasons, it defies all human logic and empathy to tell people they’ve lost their livelihood without so much as caring to show your eyes and just behave like a normal human in the presence of other humans while indoors. The extremely rich have made a habit recently of showing us how deranged and out of touch they are on social media. Elon Musk is fully through the looking glass and can’t see himself clearly. Bill Ackman has dug himself a hole so deep that anytime he posts new diatribes he gets closer to the earth’s core. Anyone in those circles who has been paying attention has learned to be as quiet as a mouse. Wintour isn’t doing much talking. Her lack of respect (or is it disdain) for people who do actual work, couldn’t be more blatant and sadly lacking in repercussion.
Every time there is a flair up of active military intervention in Israel or Palestine there is a narrative that inevitably bubbles up among defenders or all Israeli tactics that is supposed to serve as an indictment of Palestinian leadership and priorities. The argument hinges on the idea that Palestinians are more focused on investing their already limited funds into military causes than social programs. Of course there is never any mention of how social programs would accomplish anything in the face of a blockade and severely limited freedom of movement. All we have to do is look to West Bank for a case of relative peace, shrinking long-terms prospects and land. But that is secondary to the core argument, which has been debunked to a certain degree. The rockets and munitions Palestinians have been using in the current horrific fighting is actually Israel material that has been refurbished by Palestinians as a means of defending themselves. Every story up to that point has been about the tunnel system; the widespread smuggling of materials for nefarious purposes; and the idea that militants in a very crowded swath of land use civilian shields as cover. This snippet of reporting that blew a gaping hole through a lot of received wisdom mostly fell flat a few weeks ago. Nobody paid attention, or if they did, it was quickly swept under the rug. It reminded me of a Tom Cruise movie (weird, I know), called Oblivion. In the movie Tom Cruise is a robot or clone or something not entirely human as we know it, though he doesn’t know it yet, and his mission on a distant planet is to eradicate a group of people we later learn are human. The people fighting for their survival live in a series of tunnels and use parts of weapons used against them as their only defense. Hollywood action movies are always very clear about who are the good guys and bad guys. Those movies and rules they promulgate drive a lot of popular thinking, though in the case of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict somehow we’ve adopted the opposite viewpoint, justifying the oppressor at the expense of the oppressed. In Ukraine, for example, our Hollywood driven thinking is normalized. The Israeli-Palestinian situation is so politicized and rife with hyperbolic attitudes that I’ve purposely taken the politics out of this late capitalist critique. It needs to be said that I condemn all violence and killing of civilians in the name of a state, everywhere in the world.
My personal favorite is the super top secret and somehow omnipresent psy-op the CIA, NSA, FBI and every other three-letter acronym in the intelligence industry is cooking up to swing the election in favor, of, well, I guess Democrats? That’s right, Taylor Swift and her coteries of woke celebrity friends has been enlisted to form a romantic relationship with Travis Kelce, a highly regarded football player. The power of that couple, put together in a lab or PR boardroom or whatever crazy explanation people are dreaming about, is endowed with a kind of uber-celebrity with the clout to make an endorsement to end all endorsements. There are people out there preemptively attacking them for fear of what they may say politically. I’m no expert on their biographies, but I do know Swift is a mega pop star who endorsed Biden in the last election and Kelce is a vaccine proponent, just in general; he’s for vaccines as a scientific construct and also gets paid by a large manufacturer to appear in commercials. The political angle is really just the tip of the iceberg. Almost all pop stars lean left. Most football players are silent on political matters for fear of upsetting their generally less accepting fanbase. I think people are more hurt by the idea that a strain of popular cultural has infiltrated America’s favorite form of televisual violence. The knuckle dragging die hards who express a deep passion and affinity for the game feel that the equilibrium has been skewed. They think this is the opening salvo that will create a domino effect of more equitable, caring, and just culture ruining their love affair with a zero sum orgy of high speed collisions and rampant consumerism. The story is moronic and ironic because in the world of five or ten years ago this couple would probably be the American Dream personified, a stand in for the mythology at the heart of all political parties. Today it’s a crackpot tale at the far reaches of late capitalist nonsense debates and dinner table arguments.
You can’t make this stuff up. I didn’t. I just wrote it down and added my own little critical spin.
GLAZ 