One could see the trend for decades, getting traction on St. Ronnie’s watch. Triumph of financialization over basic economic stuff. Reduced wages and benefits substituted with cheap debt, reduced prices from offshoring and public assistance. All allowed by bought’n’paid elected officials.
And now it’s the relatively poor locking into power the most unfit elected officials. And then there’s SCOTUS crippling free elections, greatly reducing the power of the federal government and limiting states rights to policies of which the GOP approves.
All I can think of every time I see that name is those commercials from WPIX back in the 80s for "Beautiful Mount Airy Lodge". There are probably important parts of my brain taken over by useless crap like that jingle.
Doing a road trip: the Mrs. goes to a couple Pearl Jam shows, then we do a blues pilgrimage to Memphis and Mississippi, then homeward bound via Blue Ridge Parkway. She got a positive Covid test so bagged a few of the shows and we bagged the blues pilgrimage and there we were staying overnight in Mayberry.
Did spend a few nights in Philly tho, with maybe another on the way home.
Actually Lodi was not so bad the night we hopped in the Riv and skidded it around the levees with the winery promoter's wife handing out everso many free samples...
This must have been what being a Highlander during the Enclosures must have felt like--what was once common is now being fenced off for a few. Except you're not being driven aboard ship to North America to fight the native tribes. Yet.
Thank u sir for making this connection -- it's exactly why the bunny imagery makes more sense. Rabbits were raised in warrens, artifical dens with enclosures, & then harvested for food. At the same time as many of those illustrations were created, peasants were finding their long-enduring livelihoods evaporated by fences, forced to move to find work -- reduced to penury "until they had nothing to sell but their own skins" as Marx says in a characteristically tidy phrase.
I feel my need to know more intensifying. Odd that.
And No, as a matter of fact I do not want to live forever. Thanks for asking.
Edit to add: Speaking of replicants...
Edit to add: Never mind, tho I gotta say, when the stack says "Something went wrong" and provides a button I can push that says "OK" that is kinda cute...
There are these lovely manuscript marginalia illustrations of bunnies chopping off the heads of hunters, or carrying off a few trussed by the ankles over their shoulder. We can look at this & assume "how whimsically fresh" & not get that these are imaginings of a word where one's aristocratic "betters" have reaped what they've sown & the oppressed take over the world. What could be more meek than a bunny? Except when u fuck with a bunny...
This is just another reason why I would love to have a little REBID face-to-face sometime. Everyone bring their funky little skillsets and some beer...
One of the things I've seen is that you (our generation) could go to a medium state school, in my case the brand new Wright State University in Dayton, and the degree seemed as useful as an east coast legacy school. Not anymore.
Our generation seems to have gone out of our way to screw the next few generations over. Doesn't seem like a good idea in the long run.
I think it's that we're being told that the only real path to success now is entrepreneurship and start-ups (because working for someone else is just going to lead to a life of being continually fucked-over) and getting your start-up started depends on having relationships with rich people, and that's the real distinction between Enormous State University and the Ivies. ESU probably isn't going to give you the opportunity for bonding with the wealthy that comes from helping a millionaire's son's hold his head over a toilet.
I had a relevant conversation with a friend who graduated from and teaches at ESU. She pointed out her Ivy friends all get acculturated with "You're all so special, and pay attention to everyone around you in this special place, as they are also super special!" So those kids turn into adults who promote each other out in the world. Meanwhile, ESU kids do the work, head down, have a few laughs, and then fuck off into the world to succeed as individuals. Now the clubby thing has its downside, obviously! But her point was that we can't make those amoral toffs at the Ivies less clubby, so if we want to level the playing field, the ESUs need to reinvent their own culture to compete. Sounds hard, right? Not really! Another friend of mine who works on a campus says: In a college setting, it only takes two years to make a tradition.
I am descended from a clan of individualists (not that they'd have characterized themselves as such). No one ever suggested that it might be OK to ask for help. So whatever I figured out once free of the classroom tyranny, I figured out on my own, by sifting thru competing versions of reality that swirled around me. Which was OK – I was stuffed pretty deep inside my own personal head. I never got free of that – it was so ingrained that it was only much later that I even understood how offset I was. But then, I was never a joiner...
So the communitarian, clubby life model is foreign to me (he said, wistfully*).
*Antonym: wistlessly...? Who comes up with this stuff? Some wist isn't enough? You're wistful or wist-free? Buddy, can you spare summa that wist? 3am and I'm not sleepy...
Sep 21, 2022·edited Sep 21, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
Yes, I like yours better. I assume they're one of those teams who "play within the 40 yard lines" which multiple political analysts have assured me is a guarantee of success.
In school half a century ago we would live in run-down old off-campus housing with bits of shabby furniture and brick & board bookcases, all very funky and in satisfying contrast to our bourgie backgrounds, particularly when visiting parents flinched at the squalor. I’m pretty sure, though, that all of us were aware on some level that we were slumming, that whenever the scene got old we had the easy option of resuming our places at the high table. It didn’t hurt that as we made those first steps out into the post-college world, our gaits were unhobbled by the shackles of student debt. If only today’s feckless youngsters had those qualities of self-reliance and grit!
I do not begrudge Bernardine Dohrn or Steve Ayres their post-prison success, but they are an example of the privileges of whiteness, class, and generational wealth. They certainly fell off the train of history, but their privilege enabled them to eventually find another ride to secure their upper-class destiny. They're both retired professors now, from U-Chicago and Northwestern.
The first few funky shared dwellings I lived in felt like slumming, but it only took a few years to realize that having fallen off the train, I might be meeting my real destiny. Being white, knowing how to read, and being reasonably adept at picking up social cues (i.e. blending in) has been what kept me out of squalor. My shabby little life is pretty secure, and I am unironically (or unsardonically, or unsarcastically) happy it has turned out like this. Very fortunate, I am.
Hey my state school has better starting salaries for its graduates, and an excellent placement rate, than Harvard. Plus, we have a much better team nickname, and costs relatively little. Sure, you have to be an engineer
Another first-rate banger, Roy. Glenn Beck is a great example, and I think it mostly has to do with the death of shame.
If I’d ping-ponged back and forth between torches/pitchforks and singing Kumbaya in pursuit of the almighty dollar as many times as Glenn Beck has, I’d only rarely go out in public and I’d wear a paper bag over my head when I did. But the rightwing grifters not only are not ashamed, they are loud and proud.
And of course no one in the world of media/journalism mainstream holds their feet to the fire. They can pivot 180 degrees and are met with “oh, OK” as a response, never “wait, what the fuck is this now?”
I amuse myself by thinking that Beck's new "Colonel Sanders Without the Herbs & Spices" look is actually the Bizarro-world Glen Beck -- who happens to be just as shitty as ours.
1.) It is possible to reinvent oneself even if you're not rich. As someone who has HAD to do so several times in this life, I can tell you it is possible. Extremely difficult, gut-wrenching, and fraught with danger--but possible.
2.) The serial "reinvention" of Glenn Back and all the others like him is enabled not by their wealth but by the incredibly short attention spans of Americans coupled with the fact that, collectively, this country has suffered way too much brain injury. So Beck can call for the mass murder of Democrats this morning, embrace universal love and brotherhood this afternoon, declare himself a servant of Ba'al in the evening, and go right back to licking Donald Trump's sweaty asscrack tomorrow morning. For his followers, there isn't a smidgen of inconsistency in any of this--it's all one seamless flow that makes perfect sense.
Thus can Donald Trump push for the "warp speed" development of covid vaccines, then encourage his followers to NOT take those vaccines, then make bland public statement about how important those vaccines are, then go right back into the full Q-Anon "vaccines are micro-chipped" nonsense. Point out any of those statements to a Trump follower and you'll just be accused of blind Trump hate.
Take your point, but "extremely difficult, gut-wrenching, and fraught with danger" is never going to be for everybody or even much of anybody. It's bootstrap philosophy -- great for highly-motivated and talented people, but worthless to the rest of us. And the implied message is that reinvention is only for the chosen few. Which it might be, though I don't think so.
I should add that a significant factor is luck. While I was forced to do the reinvent thing many times, the degree of luck involved in each success was enormous. Had I not stumbled into the right circumstances, I have no idea how any of these things might have turned out good.
I would like to think that reinventing oneself is not restricted to the elect few, but I know that's more wishful thinking than reality these days . For most people, their circumstances severely limit the realistic options. Having kids and a mortgage with not much of a financial cushion makes it essentially impossible to go from being a middle manager at a manufacturing firm to becoming a successful freelance writer if your job evaporates. Hell, even the much-touted "learn to code" is impossible if you only have 6 months of money fir a transition that takes 2 years.
Hearted for "While I was forced to do the reinvent thing many times, the degree of luck involved in each success was enormous. Had I not stumbled into the right circumstances, I have no idea how any of these things might have turned out good."
Because, while I did not reinvent near so many times, when I did, I was every time buoyed by luck and adjacency thereto. And luck of the original draw, surely also too.
It's not just that they don't really believe anything they say, it's that they don't believe that ANYONE believes ANYTHING they say. Sure, the Libs SAY they care about migrants, but just you wait and see what happens when we drop a whole bunch on their doorsteps!
There are no real beliefs, just pretend beliefs that people take on to show they're better than other people, or to get a reaction from the Other Team. As Roy said just the other day, there's really nothing left but the trolling.
Glenn Beck has always been perfectly consistent in that I hated him then and I hate him now, and for people whose only metric is "Do lib'ruls hate 'im?" that's a perfectly straight through-line.
The first time I saw Beck (on Headline News?) I had never heard of him. For fifteen seconds I thought, Okay, yeah, he makes sense. And then he not only ran, he plunged off the rails, and I thought, "Wait--what? No. No. Just no. This guy's horrible." Around the year 2002 or thereabouts?
Good point, the CPI was about 17 in 1930, now it's about 300 (with 1983 as the baseline year). So that's about 18 times. So how did the rich get a THOUSAND times richer?
And, bringing it back to Looney Tunes cartoons, the top tax rate in the 30s and 40s was up around 90%, which is why all those plots where someone inherits a million dollars and ends up with $4.95. Funny how people insisted on trying to become millionaires anyway.
There's a bit in High Society where Grace Kelly tries to get Frank Sinatra interested in the Plight of the Rich, forced to sell their mansions for conversions to boys schools. Brings me to tears every damn time.
Good one, Roy. If privilege means anything it's this: Having the choice to reinvent yourself and having the luxury to fail. I was able to get in the van for 20 years and not fall off the ladder. No trust fund, no checks from home, but a helluva lot of fun. For the the kids' sake, I hope those days aren't gone forever.
On the other hand, if you're poor and don't mind staying that way, it's not too hard to reinvent yourself. The biggest obstacle is often, as Roy notes, a job. It demands a certain consistency.
The second biggest is the internet. You can reinvent yourself, but someone's gonna look you up sooner or later.
Also it's getting harder and more expensive to legally change your name, and I suspect this is largely gatekeeping trans people which I'm sure they think is a win, but is also conveniently making it harder for everybody to get away from bad lives, and that's a bigger win.
My wife would occasionally assist nuns in legally changing their names when they joined an order. Getting things straight with Social Security et al. are not easy.
I've done a few legal name changes for various reasons, mostly because I like to think I'm an enigma or something. It's getting harder, and the easiest one ever was getting married. I can really only live this way as long as my partner will humor me. I'm unbanked, and until a couple months ago I didn't have the ID necessary to walk into a pot shop in this state. I still don't have what I need to travel home if I enter Canada. I'm unhireable on my records alone, never mind the disability. Faking my own death, medically speaking, every ten years or so and starting with all new diagnoses is no longer possible. My major alias is, owing to poor thought, associated with an actual person if not a legal name that belongs to that person.
I couldn't do it again, I don't think.
But, I've been like this all my life. I've torn up pictures and destroyed records and for a long time I didn't have a library card in my legal name, and I still have an iphone and a credit card now. It's really hard to not only reinvent yourself but disappear. If someone wants to find you, they'll find you, and imagine who that benefits. I don't want to go all SovCit, but there's some of that shit about who owns your personhood where, they're not wrong. Then they go on to want to own someone else's personhood, of course.
I was pointing out the other day that I used to change my nickname at school monthly and nobody ever sent home a note about it. (Maybe they should have, it was a red flag of child abuse, but in my case, as many abused children's cases, it would not have been enough to actually stop the abuse, and might have made it much worse.)
This isn't a Won't Someone Think of the Cishets, but considering how few transphobes have actually known anyone who's trans, it might be reasonable to treat this as a part of a general revocation of bodily autonomy for anyone who's not rich enough to get around the system.
I dunno. It's a coalition of ratfuckers, and they've all got their eyes on a specific rat.
and yeah, this: "considering how few transphobes have actually known anyone who's trans, it might be reasonable to treat this as a part of a general revocation of bodily autonomy for anyone who's not rich enough to get around the system."
The Church of the SubGenius has been warning about the Conspiracy's war on weirdos for over 40 years now. OBVIOUSLY ours is a joke religion, but the more I'm thinking about it the less funny it's looking. We're all being funneled into little boxes of Normalcy by Church, State and Corporation. Want even a marginally decent life? Here's your straitjacket for the next 50 years, don't worry, after a while you won't even notice it. Money has always been a refuge for "eccentrics" but now it seems to be the exclusive realm of the odd. Go into space! Explore the Kaballah! Give your kid a mathematical equation for a name! Sell "Sex Dust"! Do ANYTHING YOU GODDAMN WANT and people will shrug and talk Very Seriously about your nobility and purity and munificence. Hell, Elon could go trans on a whim and not lose a single Twitter follower, not that that'll happen but my point stands. The Conspiracy did not like even the bits of individual liberation we've managed since the Sixties, and they're working on bulldozing us back to the Conformist 50s but turned up to 11.
Well, I don't do Spotify. Mommie is Doug MacMillan's, who is lead singer of The Connells (a great late 80s-early 90s indie rock band), band. His 6-year old son Charley did the lyrics to Dumptruck
Even "Bob" himself (PBUH) would have trouble now. He, famously, is in "Sales," and that means working for The Man. And don't get me started on what Connie has to do to help make ends meet.
And this reminds me of the women's magazine industry after WWII. Chock-full of endless wife & mother material - 365 Dinner Menus Your Family Will Love; A Delicious Valentine's Day Chocolate Fudge Cake With A Surprise Ingredient; Your Best Slimming Plan Ever; Here's What Simplicity Patterns Has In Store For You; Don't Discard Those Broken Household Items - Make Them Into Fun, Interesting DYI Decorations; Make-Up Secrets To Transform You From So-So to Wow!
All diversions to keep them busy busy busy so that maybe they won't think about the money they used to earn during the war, the machines they ran, the airplanes they flew, the independence they had, and had to give up. It's no wonder so many women found themselves on the road to Miltown.
In the 1970s Vivian Gornick had (in Roy's alma mater,the Village Voice) a great piece about surburban women, mentioning how they were marooned in houses, with nothing but housekeeping and motherhood to occupy them, at the expense of all their other abilities. She referred to their "frustrated energies." I read that and thought, "She's talking about my mother."
"Don't Discard Those Broken Household Items - Make Them Into Fun, Interesting DYI Decorations" instead of cranking up the mill and replicating the broken piece, then pulling out your welder and piecing it back together like you used to do at the factory.
The death of the Queen reminds me that I would LOVE to live in a world where "republican" meant "favoring the abolition of the Monarchy" and absolutely nothing else.
You know, Roy, sometimes I I dip my cup of soup back from a gurglin' cracklin' cauldron in some trainyard ... through cupped hands 'round the tin can I pretend to hold you to my breast, and find that you're waiting from the backroads by the rivers of my memories, ever smilin' ever gentle on my mind
I read Roy’s column in a discarded newspaper I found in the Hooverville beneath the 59th Street Bridge while I was splitting a can of beans with Godfrey
Never paid attention to Glenn Beck, though I have relatives who take him seriously and Roy to take him on critically. I don't know whether he serves as the best example of positive liberty, but the subtle call to class warfare is appreciated. It doesn't have to be violent if the rich aren't treating other people as "looters" and "moochers" and take their reeducation meekly to understand the people are reclaiming their rights
In no particular order but super brief:
One could see the trend for decades, getting traction on St. Ronnie’s watch. Triumph of financialization over basic economic stuff. Reduced wages and benefits substituted with cheap debt, reduced prices from offshoring and public assistance. All allowed by bought’n’paid elected officials.
And now it’s the relatively poor locking into power the most unfit elected officials. And then there’s SCOTUS crippling free elections, greatly reducing the power of the federal government and limiting states rights to policies of which the GOP approves.
But don’t get me started...
Too late!
What’s too late, Maestro?
Brain not working too good. Stuck in Mt. Airy with insufficient caffeine ☹️
Too late not to have gotten started
Mount Airy? You’re from Philly?
That's what I was thinking -- it'd be much more fun to argue with MM in person... >:)
All I can think of every time I see that name is those commercials from WPIX back in the 80s for "Beautiful Mount Airy Lodge". There are probably important parts of my brain taken over by useless crap like that jingle.
Five Eight Eight, Two Three Hundred, EMPIRE
We went to the Mount Airy Lodge for my senior trip, lol
Mt. Airy is also a suburb of Philly, where the awesome band called,
Pieces Of A Dream made a killer instrumental - Mt. Airy Groove.
I play it at all of my gigs, check it out!
https://youtu.be/TWe6CO6DsyY
Actually, I go back to Charley Weaver; long before Mt. Airy I the Poconos.
Charlie Weaver! Spawner of Arquettes galore!
I remember Charlie Weaver! The Arquette patriarch!
Doing a road trip: the Mrs. goes to a couple Pearl Jam shows, then we do a blues pilgrimage to Memphis and Mississippi, then homeward bound via Blue Ridge Parkway. She got a positive Covid test so bagged a few of the shows and we bagged the blues pilgrimage and there we were staying overnight in Mayberry.
Did spend a few nights in Philly tho, with maybe another on the way home.
Could be worse – could be Lodi (back when Lodi was not the capital of really good zinfandel)...
Let’s leave it at Mt. Airy being hugely disappointing.
Fair enough.
Actually Lodi was not so bad the night we hopped in the Riv and skidded it around the levees with the winery promoter's wife handing out everso many free samples...
LOL
No surprises
Hearted heartily, but enviously, because that is exactly what I was gonna say before I saw you already done posted it.
This must have been what being a Highlander during the Enclosures must have felt like--what was once common is now being fenced off for a few. Except you're not being driven aboard ship to North America to fight the native tribes. Yet.
Thank u sir for making this connection -- it's exactly why the bunny imagery makes more sense. Rabbits were raised in warrens, artifical dens with enclosures, & then harvested for food. At the same time as many of those illustrations were created, peasants were finding their long-enduring livelihoods evaporated by fences, forced to move to find work -- reduced to penury "until they had nothing to sell but their own skins" as Marx says in a characteristically tidy phrase.
Back to Coney Island with the lot of them!
Marx ain't looking so wrong these days...
My googly shot brought this:
"Is there evidence that Bugs Bunny was directly influenced by Marx?"
OK, ok. I left out "Groucho", but still...
Make a new life in the off-world colonies!
Would you like to know more?
Goddamn replicants stealin' our jobs.
I feel my need to know more intensifying. Odd that.
And No, as a matter of fact I do not want to live forever. Thanks for asking.
Edit to add: Speaking of replicants...
Edit to add: Never mind, tho I gotta say, when the stack says "Something went wrong" and provides a button I can push that says "OK" that is kinda cute...
Good analogy.
I'm sorry to say my first reaction to "Highlander" involved swords and immortals.
There are these lovely manuscript marginalia illustrations of bunnies chopping off the heads of hunters, or carrying off a few trussed by the ankles over their shoulder. We can look at this & assume "how whimsically fresh" & not get that these are imaginings of a word where one's aristocratic "betters" have reaped what they've sown & the oppressed take over the world. What could be more meek than a bunny? Except when u fuck with a bunny...
Ask Elmer Fudd.
Exactly -- and as our esteemed colleague Little Pig would remind us, Fudd started out as an out-of-touch blueblood, "he owns a mansion & a yacht."
[Heh -- now Fudd's hardly in the 10% these days...]
or Beatrix Potter
Also, I used to do a great comedy routine called Elmer Fudd sings The Beatles. I thought it was pretty funny. Particularly my bad Fudd impression
This is just another reason why I would love to have a little REBID face-to-face sometime. Everyone bring their funky little skillsets and some beer...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozSLrhGZCDY
huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh
That was... interesting.
"Thank you for that nightmare" says Anya.
I feel seen
One of the things I've seen is that you (our generation) could go to a medium state school, in my case the brand new Wright State University in Dayton, and the degree seemed as useful as an east coast legacy school. Not anymore.
Our generation seems to have gone out of our way to screw the next few generations over. Doesn't seem like a good idea in the long run.
I think it's that we're being told that the only real path to success now is entrepreneurship and start-ups (because working for someone else is just going to lead to a life of being continually fucked-over) and getting your start-up started depends on having relationships with rich people, and that's the real distinction between Enormous State University and the Ivies. ESU probably isn't going to give you the opportunity for bonding with the wealthy that comes from helping a millionaire's son's hold his head over a toilet.
Oopsie! His head slipped again!
I had a relevant conversation with a friend who graduated from and teaches at ESU. She pointed out her Ivy friends all get acculturated with "You're all so special, and pay attention to everyone around you in this special place, as they are also super special!" So those kids turn into adults who promote each other out in the world. Meanwhile, ESU kids do the work, head down, have a few laughs, and then fuck off into the world to succeed as individuals. Now the clubby thing has its downside, obviously! But her point was that we can't make those amoral toffs at the Ivies less clubby, so if we want to level the playing field, the ESUs need to reinvent their own culture to compete. Sounds hard, right? Not really! Another friend of mine who works on a campus says: In a college setting, it only takes two years to make a tradition.
I am descended from a clan of individualists (not that they'd have characterized themselves as such). No one ever suggested that it might be OK to ask for help. So whatever I figured out once free of the classroom tyranny, I figured out on my own, by sifting thru competing versions of reality that swirled around me. Which was OK – I was stuffed pretty deep inside my own personal head. I never got free of that – it was so ingrained that it was only much later that I even understood how offset I was. But then, I was never a joiner...
So the communitarian, clubby life model is foreign to me (he said, wistfully*).
*Antonym: wistlessly...? Who comes up with this stuff? Some wist isn't enough? You're wistful or wist-free? Buddy, can you spare summa that wist? 3am and I'm not sleepy...
Not those of us who aren’t in positions of power, we have always been screwed in the worst ways, and it’s never ending.
My alma mater is Medium State. "Go Average!"
And the football team is The Fightin' Mediocrities?
Not the Happy Mediums?
Yes, I like yours better. I assume they're one of those teams who "play within the 40 yard lines" which multiple political analysts have assured me is a guarantee of success.
"It's not a punt, it's a regression to the mean."
But it was middling good!
Everyone on the team aspires to be a middle linebacker...
!
And the college newspaper, the Daily BothSides
And they sell only half 'n half in the cafe...
And none of the students are above average.
They don't call it "Middle C" for nuttin
I'm imagining the ongoing existential debate:
Glass half empty or half full?
Whole volumes of theses...
Regarding my education: "Eh, it was all right I guess."
In school half a century ago we would live in run-down old off-campus housing with bits of shabby furniture and brick & board bookcases, all very funky and in satisfying contrast to our bourgie backgrounds, particularly when visiting parents flinched at the squalor. I’m pretty sure, though, that all of us were aware on some level that we were slumming, that whenever the scene got old we had the easy option of resuming our places at the high table. It didn’t hurt that as we made those first steps out into the post-college world, our gaits were unhobbled by the shackles of student debt. If only today’s feckless youngsters had those qualities of self-reliance and grit!
Grits is pretty much all they can afford these days.
I do not begrudge Bernardine Dohrn or Steve Ayres their post-prison success, but they are an example of the privileges of whiteness, class, and generational wealth. They certainly fell off the train of history, but their privilege enabled them to eventually find another ride to secure their upper-class destiny. They're both retired professors now, from U-Chicago and Northwestern.
The first few funky shared dwellings I lived in felt like slumming, but it only took a few years to realize that having fallen off the train, I might be meeting my real destiny. Being white, knowing how to read, and being reasonably adept at picking up social cues (i.e. blending in) has been what kept me out of squalor. My shabby little life is pretty secure, and I am unironically (or unsardonically, or unsarcastically) happy it has turned out like this. Very fortunate, I am.
At least you exhibit the Wright Stuff these days.
Hey my state school has better starting salaries for its graduates, and an excellent placement rate, than Harvard. Plus, we have a much better team nickname, and costs relatively little. Sure, you have to be an engineer
Another first-rate banger, Roy. Glenn Beck is a great example, and I think it mostly has to do with the death of shame.
If I’d ping-ponged back and forth between torches/pitchforks and singing Kumbaya in pursuit of the almighty dollar as many times as Glenn Beck has, I’d only rarely go out in public and I’d wear a paper bag over my head when I did. But the rightwing grifters not only are not ashamed, they are loud and proud.
And of course no one in the world of media/journalism mainstream holds their feet to the fire. They can pivot 180 degrees and are met with “oh, OK” as a response, never “wait, what the fuck is this now?”
I amuse myself by thinking that Beck's new "Colonel Sanders Without the Herbs & Spices" look is actually the Bizarro-world Glen Beck -- who happens to be just as shitty as ours.
I love how Tom Tomorrow has it set up so "Parallel Earth" is where people actually behave normally and sensibly, and WE'RE the crazies.
Don't be too sure on Baltimore. They've taken the harbors (generic glass condo buildings chock full of AMENITIES) and they're creeping inward.
Does the Inner Harbor still smell like the contents of an Iowa State Fair Porta-Potty?
That is a confluence on which I think I'll take a pass.
Meh.
1.) It is possible to reinvent oneself even if you're not rich. As someone who has HAD to do so several times in this life, I can tell you it is possible. Extremely difficult, gut-wrenching, and fraught with danger--but possible.
2.) The serial "reinvention" of Glenn Back and all the others like him is enabled not by their wealth but by the incredibly short attention spans of Americans coupled with the fact that, collectively, this country has suffered way too much brain injury. So Beck can call for the mass murder of Democrats this morning, embrace universal love and brotherhood this afternoon, declare himself a servant of Ba'al in the evening, and go right back to licking Donald Trump's sweaty asscrack tomorrow morning. For his followers, there isn't a smidgen of inconsistency in any of this--it's all one seamless flow that makes perfect sense.
Thus can Donald Trump push for the "warp speed" development of covid vaccines, then encourage his followers to NOT take those vaccines, then make bland public statement about how important those vaccines are, then go right back into the full Q-Anon "vaccines are micro-chipped" nonsense. Point out any of those statements to a Trump follower and you'll just be accused of blind Trump hate.
Take your point, but "extremely difficult, gut-wrenching, and fraught with danger" is never going to be for everybody or even much of anybody. It's bootstrap philosophy -- great for highly-motivated and talented people, but worthless to the rest of us. And the implied message is that reinvention is only for the chosen few. Which it might be, though I don't think so.
I should add that a significant factor is luck. While I was forced to do the reinvent thing many times, the degree of luck involved in each success was enormous. Had I not stumbled into the right circumstances, I have no idea how any of these things might have turned out good.
I would like to think that reinventing oneself is not restricted to the elect few, but I know that's more wishful thinking than reality these days . For most people, their circumstances severely limit the realistic options. Having kids and a mortgage with not much of a financial cushion makes it essentially impossible to go from being a middle manager at a manufacturing firm to becoming a successful freelance writer if your job evaporates. Hell, even the much-touted "learn to code" is impossible if you only have 6 months of money fir a transition that takes 2 years.
Hearted for "While I was forced to do the reinvent thing many times, the degree of luck involved in each success was enormous. Had I not stumbled into the right circumstances, I have no idea how any of these things might have turned out good."
Because, while I did not reinvent near so many times, when I did, I was every time buoyed by luck and adjacency thereto. And luck of the original draw, surely also too.
Difficult, Gut-wrenching, and Fraught is my bankruptcy attorney firm.
It's not just that they don't really believe anything they say, it's that they don't believe that ANYONE believes ANYTHING they say. Sure, the Libs SAY they care about migrants, but just you wait and see what happens when we drop a whole bunch on their doorsteps!
There are no real beliefs, just pretend beliefs that people take on to show they're better than other people, or to get a reaction from the Other Team. As Roy said just the other day, there's really nothing left but the trolling.
EAIAC
Glenn Beck has always been perfectly consistent in that I hated him then and I hate him now, and for people whose only metric is "Do lib'ruls hate 'im?" that's a perfectly straight through-line.
The first time I saw Beck (on Headline News?) I had never heard of him. For fifteen seconds I thought, Okay, yeah, he makes sense. And then he not only ran, he plunged off the rails, and I thought, "Wait--what? No. No. Just no. This guy's horrible." Around the year 2002 or thereabouts?
Just shows littlebrains like you can't follow the imaginative leaps that make Glenn Beck a genius.
I remember growing up all the toffs were millionaires and Boy Howdy , was that ever something to be!
Now all the real swells are billionaires.
I explain to people that a million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years.
Most just shrug their shoulders and say
" Inflation - whatya gonna do? Fuck Brandon, eh " and go back to thinking "When I win the lottery I'm going to buy a gold toilet of my own."
Good point, the CPI was about 17 in 1930, now it's about 300 (with 1983 as the baseline year). So that's about 18 times. So how did the rich get a THOUSAND times richer?
And, bringing it back to Looney Tunes cartoons, the top tax rate in the 30s and 40s was up around 90%, which is why all those plots where someone inherits a million dollars and ends up with $4.95. Funny how people insisted on trying to become millionaires anyway.
There's a bit in High Society where Grace Kelly tries to get Frank Sinatra interested in the Plight of the Rich, forced to sell their mansions for conversions to boys schools. Brings me to tears every damn time.
Geez. I better go rewatch that classic of worker struggle. Worth it for Louis anyway...
The rich make the rules. It's what we get for having a representative Democracy
Good one, Roy. If privilege means anything it's this: Having the choice to reinvent yourself and having the luxury to fail. I was able to get in the van for 20 years and not fall off the ladder. No trust fund, no checks from home, but a helluva lot of fun. For the the kids' sake, I hope those days aren't gone forever.
Superb.
On the other hand, if you're poor and don't mind staying that way, it's not too hard to reinvent yourself. The biggest obstacle is often, as Roy notes, a job. It demands a certain consistency.
The second biggest is the internet. You can reinvent yourself, but someone's gonna look you up sooner or later.
Also it's getting harder and more expensive to legally change your name, and I suspect this is largely gatekeeping trans people which I'm sure they think is a win, but is also conveniently making it harder for everybody to get away from bad lives, and that's a bigger win.
The trans thing is a connection I did not intuitively make and I'm kicking myself. It's absolutely related.
My wife would occasionally assist nuns in legally changing their names when they joined an order. Getting things straight with Social Security et al. are not easy.
This sounds like the germ of a Best Short Fiction of <fill in the blank year>
Agencies love it when aging nuns take male saints’ names as part of their legal name.
This story is getting better and better!
Brother Glenn or Sister Glenda?
Among others there was literally a Sister James with a nursing home named after her. But I guess it’s nothing new: think of Julian of Norwich.
I've done a few legal name changes for various reasons, mostly because I like to think I'm an enigma or something. It's getting harder, and the easiest one ever was getting married. I can really only live this way as long as my partner will humor me. I'm unbanked, and until a couple months ago I didn't have the ID necessary to walk into a pot shop in this state. I still don't have what I need to travel home if I enter Canada. I'm unhireable on my records alone, never mind the disability. Faking my own death, medically speaking, every ten years or so and starting with all new diagnoses is no longer possible. My major alias is, owing to poor thought, associated with an actual person if not a legal name that belongs to that person.
I couldn't do it again, I don't think.
But, I've been like this all my life. I've torn up pictures and destroyed records and for a long time I didn't have a library card in my legal name, and I still have an iphone and a credit card now. It's really hard to not only reinvent yourself but disappear. If someone wants to find you, they'll find you, and imagine who that benefits. I don't want to go all SovCit, but there's some of that shit about who owns your personhood where, they're not wrong. Then they go on to want to own someone else's personhood, of course.
I was pointing out the other day that I used to change my nickname at school monthly and nobody ever sent home a note about it. (Maybe they should have, it was a red flag of child abuse, but in my case, as many abused children's cases, it would not have been enough to actually stop the abuse, and might have made it much worse.)
This isn't a Won't Someone Think of the Cishets, but considering how few transphobes have actually known anyone who's trans, it might be reasonable to treat this as a part of a general revocation of bodily autonomy for anyone who's not rich enough to get around the system.
I dunno. It's a coalition of ratfuckers, and they've all got their eyes on a specific rat.
OOF.
and yeah, this: "considering how few transphobes have actually known anyone who's trans, it might be reasonable to treat this as a part of a general revocation of bodily autonomy for anyone who's not rich enough to get around the system."
Pardon me while I get religious.
The Church of the SubGenius has been warning about the Conspiracy's war on weirdos for over 40 years now. OBVIOUSLY ours is a joke religion, but the more I'm thinking about it the less funny it's looking. We're all being funneled into little boxes of Normalcy by Church, State and Corporation. Want even a marginally decent life? Here's your straitjacket for the next 50 years, don't worry, after a while you won't even notice it. Money has always been a refuge for "eccentrics" but now it seems to be the exclusive realm of the odd. Go into space! Explore the Kaballah! Give your kid a mathematical equation for a name! Sell "Sex Dust"! Do ANYTHING YOU GODDAMN WANT and people will shrug and talk Very Seriously about your nobility and purity and munificence. Hell, Elon could go trans on a whim and not lose a single Twitter follower, not that that'll happen but my point stands. The Conspiracy did not like even the bits of individual liberation we've managed since the Sixties, and they're working on bulldozing us back to the Conformist 50s but turned up to 11.
"My bulldozer goes up to eleven!"
Everybody needs a dumptruck
to move the dirt around
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZSLZBZdMU8
Man. Your spotify must be awesome...
Well, I don't do Spotify. Mommie is Doug MacMillan's, who is lead singer of The Connells (a great late 80s-early 90s indie rock band), band. His 6-year old son Charley did the lyrics to Dumptruck
Well I'm proud that I was able to bump a tenth of a thousandth of a penny Charley's way.
Even "Bob" himself (PBUH) would have trouble now. He, famously, is in "Sales," and that means working for The Man. And don't get me started on what Connie has to do to help make ends meet.
They might get Larry Summers to confront the issue directly. "Slack is wack!"
And this reminds me of the women's magazine industry after WWII. Chock-full of endless wife & mother material - 365 Dinner Menus Your Family Will Love; A Delicious Valentine's Day Chocolate Fudge Cake With A Surprise Ingredient; Your Best Slimming Plan Ever; Here's What Simplicity Patterns Has In Store For You; Don't Discard Those Broken Household Items - Make Them Into Fun, Interesting DYI Decorations; Make-Up Secrets To Transform You From So-So to Wow!
All diversions to keep them busy busy busy so that maybe they won't think about the money they used to earn during the war, the machines they ran, the airplanes they flew, the independence they had, and had to give up. It's no wonder so many women found themselves on the road to Miltown.
In the 1970s Vivian Gornick had (in Roy's alma mater,the Village Voice) a great piece about surburban women, mentioning how they were marooned in houses, with nothing but housekeeping and motherhood to occupy them, at the expense of all their other abilities. She referred to their "frustrated energies." I read that and thought, "She's talking about my mother."
There's a beer I haven't tried but admire fiercely simply for the name – Mama's little Pils
"Don't Discard Those Broken Household Items - Make Them Into Fun, Interesting DYI Decorations" instead of cranking up the mill and replicating the broken piece, then pulling out your welder and piecing it back together like you used to do at the factory.
'...they may have to be dissolved as a class.' Hear hear. Cue sound of multiple pig-kissings, but we can only try.
Not as catchy as "Liquidate the Kulaks" but it'll do.
I used to Eat The Rich but generally find them to be too stringy.
Have a little priest?
It's all the Peloton.
really? I find most rich to be too fatty
Sure we'll "promote marriage" -- REPUBLICAN MARRIAGES! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_marriage
The death of the Queen reminds me that I would LOVE to live in a world where "republican" meant "favoring the abolition of the Monarchy" and absolutely nothing else.
Been awhile since I had that last pint. Leave us repub.
"dedicated hobo sherpas and artisanal Sterno"
So good.
You know, Roy, sometimes I I dip my cup of soup back from a gurglin' cracklin' cauldron in some trainyard ... through cupped hands 'round the tin can I pretend to hold you to my breast, and find that you're waiting from the backroads by the rivers of my memories, ever smilin' ever gentle on my mind
Careful now...the royalty police gonna gitcha!
I read Roy’s column in a discarded newspaper I found in the Hooverville beneath the 59th Street Bridge while I was splitting a can of beans with Godfrey
Slow down, yer movin' too fast. Got to make the last little shred of humanity last.
ARTISANAL STERNO…MY NEW BAND NAME!
Never paid attention to Glenn Beck, though I have relatives who take him seriously and Roy to take him on critically. I don't know whether he serves as the best example of positive liberty, but the subtle call to class warfare is appreciated. It doesn't have to be violent if the rich aren't treating other people as "looters" and "moochers" and take their reeducation meekly to understand the people are reclaiming their rights
Re the latest from Glennbeckistan:
Das reno ist nicht gut!
Apologies to anyone who knows German (unlike me).
Ach! Du sprechst nicht Deutsch?
Correctamundo I do not.