All posts by Joseph

Political Rants

Plague times.

Greetings from my corner of our national COVID-19 quarantine. As someone who is not unaccustomed to a certain amount of social isolation, I can say with confidence that this new normal has even me a bit more than creeped out. When I was in my teens and twenties, I wasn’t a big believer in psychology, but perhaps the only real advantage of advancing age is that it gives you an opportunity to discover the things you were wrong about earlier on – for me, one of those items was the fact that psychology is a thing that affects me. So, while my life is not all that different from the way it was before this crisis, I feel a lot different … and not in a good way.

Part of what I find disturbing about this pandemic scare is the degree to which so many people in my community are acting out of fear. I don’t mean to single central New York out in any way – similar effects are being seen all over the country. But when I go to grocery stores now, in particular, the evidence of panic buying is all around. I went to the supermarket at 7:30 a.m. last Saturday – half an hour into their business day – and there were gaping holes throughout the inventory. Because it’s kind of a white-dominant bedroom community, the missing items read like Ozzy and Harriet’s shopping list: iceberg lettuce, white bread, cans of tuna fish, jars of tomato sauce, canned soup, frozen vegetables, etc. Of course, paper products were cleared out entirely … 30 minutes into the business day!

Trump's empty America.

Weirdly, it didn’t seem like there were all that many people in the supermarket. And people didn’t seem frenzied, and they didn’t appear to be buying any more than I would have expected to see in their carts on an ordinary shopping day. Strangers were even interacting with me, in a friendly way, which was encouraging. And yet … the shelves were bare, as if Visigoths had marauded through the place a half hour earlier. Like the Coronavirus itself, panicked citizens seem like an invisible menace; you seldom actually see it, but you can see its effects. Then, of course, there are the follow-on effects: when people know their neighbors are buying everything in sight, they then go to the store and stock up before the goods are all gone. Selfishness starts to rule the day as people compete for consumer items suddenly in short supply. This is what late-stage capitalism looks like: very similar to the capitalists’ own distorted stereotype of socialist privation – empty shelves, desperate consumers, valueless scrip.

Of course, now that capitalism is in crisis (businesses shutting down, the stock market crashing), it’s time again for socialism! Trump and the Republicans, along with corporate Democrats, are reaching for massive state intervention in the economy, cutting billions of dollars in checks to individuals, back-stopping banks with enormous credit guarantees, dumping public cash into enormous, well-connected private corporations. All of the television austerians have come to their collectivist Jesus, much like they did in 2008-09. (Elect a Democrat, and trust me, they will be deficit hawks once more.)

So, no, you’re not hallucinating. This is all actually happening. Please stay safe, wash your hands, etc., and don’t freak out. We rely on each other to keep our heads – that may be the most effective thing we can do right now.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Keeping distance.

2000 Years to Christmas

Okay, closer. A little closer. I said a little! Right, so push the tray this way. That’s good enough. Great, thanks. Now get away from me, you scavenging ghoul!

Oh, hi. I should have thought someone would be reading this blog today, as there is precious little else to do now that we live in plague times. (I’m sure someone out there is doing something more useful, like writing their own latter-day version of the Decameron.) Frankly, this is when it pays to live in a podunk town. New York’s governor has banned events with audiences of 500 people or more. While that’s a huge problem down in Manhattan, that’s like falling off a log up here. Hell, there aren’t even 500 people within five square miles of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Safe as houses! It pays not … to get paid.

Here inside the hammer mill, we’re taking drastic steps to respond to this crisis. Well, maybe “drastic” is too strong a word. Big steps. We’re stepping bigly, particularly when we see someone coming towards us. In other words, we’re practicing social distancing. In a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has determined the precise distance we need to keep from other human beings in order to remain safe from COVID-19. That’s 47.5 inches. Kind of a problem, as our corridors here in the mill are about seventy inches wide. So to remain on the safe side, we’ve adopted a single-user hallway policy for the foreseeable future. That means everyone walking in the same direction, like those mysterious figures in that M.C. Escher drawing, ascending and descending, except all one way.

That's it, guys. Stay in your lane.

Unfortunately for anti-Lincoln, the local St. Patrick’s Day parade has been canceled. That said, I think he fully plans to roll down main street in his log cabin float made entirely from bricks of expired government cheese. He’s agreed to fly the Big Green banner as a way of signalling that he’s not just some random crazy person, but in fact an antimatter ex-president from the nineteenth century representing a bunch of random crazy people. In the meantime, Anti-Lincoln plans to wear his float around the mill as his own version of social distancing. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been recruited to serve as his flag man, so that he doesn’t keep crashing into the hallway walls. Hey, we all cope as best we can.

So no worries, folks – we’re not sick yet. At least not in that respect.

Political Rants

Berned.

It was a rainy Tuesday, and the revolution didn’t show up … again. Turns out revolutions are hard, even the electoral ones. As I said last week, these primaries are about proof of concept: if there’s a massive constituency for change, as Bernie Sanders has suggested, it should be mobilized enough to carry him into the presidency and to drive his agenda forward in the years that follow. There was no evidence of such a movement this week, and I don’t intend to denigrate the thousands of hard-working people who have powered Bernie’s campaign from the beginning – they have done remarkable work. But they are merely the vanguard – we need to hear from the masses. It is they who have the real power, and thus far they are not showing up.

Building a future, not just a campaign.

As someone who has been on the left all of my life, I am no stranger to political losses. Leftists tend not to be easily discouraged, and it’s a good thing. Make no mistake about the Sanders campaign – we are attempting to elevate to the presidency someone who has never taken part in the Nixon/Reagan conservative framing that has dominated our politics for decades. That is unprecedented in the modern era. It’s a heavy lift, and we should have no illusions about that. But as Bernie himself pointed out on Wednesday, his campaign represents majority positions within the Democratic party. It also reflects the priorities of a large majority of our young people – and by “young”, I mean 45 and younger. There is no question that that is where the party is going, not to some chewy center represented by people like Biden.

The fatal question for us as a society, though, is can we afford to wait another decade or more to see this new progressive majority emerge? I would say that the climate crisis has already answered that question. But I want to emphasize that the most important component of our response is in the organizing and the mobilization. Yes, Bernie Sanders is the only remaining candidate who, if elected president, would need little or no convincing to take on the enormous task of turning this fossil-fuel driven society around. But if we don’t achieve that maximal objective (and we should most definitely try to do so), we will still need the organizational institutions to push policy forward on whomever ends up in power next January. Short of Bernie, it would be better to have Biden than Trump; but either way we have to have mobilization. The Sanders campaign is like a progress indicator on the movement – the degree to which it succeeds is some rough indication of how well we’re doing on the ground. Yes, we’ve made progress over the past few years, but we have a long, long way to go.

My recommendation is simply this: don’t lose heart. We can still win this nomination. But even if we don’t, the effort is not wasted so long as we build on the foundation of this campaign.

luv u,

jp