Choosing to be happy - terrorism and inaction

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Another glorious week in neo-liberal hell. If you know someone who would enjoy this, let ‘em know.

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These days I feel like life regularly plays out like conversations I had with my mother when I was a teenager. Unfortunately for her she's going to be cast in the role of the capital/state, but let it be said that while I firmly believe she was telling me what she thought I "ought" to do, I'm not sure there were really any alternatives - a decision without choices.

It will surprise no one that I was a moody teenager - bordering on suicidal like so many of us in the 90's (and 80's and 70's and likely all the way back to the agricultural revolution). I would fixate on the faintest societal mote to congeal an entire universe of injustice as the context for whatever depression had befallen me that day. Since I wasn't driving and was still very much living at home my mother and I would frequently discuss these hellish worlds we were all living in and complicit in creating.

I have enjoyed Nirvana and Bill Hicks for a long time, and my Dad was a yeller, so I'm sure I presented my case like I thought men did - with a tone that befit the scenario, a scenario that to me was very real and to an outsider the kind of thing that got my grandmother a lobotomy in the 40's. I'm not sure my mom knew that fact in the mid 90's.

That tension between "you're insane because X" and simply "you're insane" is a bit much for any household. But I think I principally objected to the solution that my mom had found - one of choice. You can "choose" to be happy, "choose" how you respond to situations.

When I was feeling charitable I would try to chalk this view up to some kind of sociopathic narcissistic Buddhism, but mostly I just found it infuriating.

It's unimportant why I was specifically pissed off. It was the 90's, it was like now, except instead of selling the 90s they sold the 60s with all the rough edges spit polished off. Instead of "9/11 - where were you when they took the upskirt photos of lady liberty and lemon-partied the founding fathers" it was "the 60s ended because of assassinations and Manson". Disorder ended the 60s, a disorder that was a natural byproduct of all that freedom, all that sex, all that love - I'm not even sure I mentally connected the fact the civil rights movement happened while all the white people were fucking and drugging (check out Chaos by Tom O'Neill - [https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/tom-oneill/chaos/9780316477574/]). I heard Rage Against the Machine in 1993, I believed them, so much that when I went to buy tickets for the most recent tour I flipped out when I realized the starting price for the nose-bleed tickets was $125. That expectation was on me, that level of glitter on the corpse of my youth is all on them (the band, the management, the band’s lifestyle, the A&R, Sony records, etc).

Choice in my mom's language was definitely Neo-liberalism cum psychology. And I know she had to do it for her job - school teacher from 1978-2019. To work in the belly of the collapsing welfare state, on the front line of culture wars, I'm sure you had to be a sociopathic narcissistic buddhist to survive. Like the rest of the boomers, she really seems to have internalized the requirement to choose to feel good about being exploited because if you are that's on you. The boomers went to LSD summer camp and came home brown-shirts for capitalism.

Choice and personal responsibility.

Jesus.

It's genius.

The boomers are the spoiled children of nazi hunters who grew up with the threat of nuclear annihilation and the slow commodification of the surveillance state sold as solutions for modern life as they were slowly drawn further and further into command and control structures and eventually told there would be no more unions b/c you're all pussies. And they looked down sheepishly, rubbed their mary-janes in the dirt and said "yyeeaahhhh...."

Then daddy capital whipped them with austerity and monetary policy and if you're white the threat of cops, and if you're everyone else just cops, til they brought up the millennials to conform but would whisper secrets about how it was all a dream - how they'd consented to manufactured reality.

Then the 2008 crash, massive wealth transfers to daddy capital. And once again, you shouldn't have borrowed so much kids, says the state, and they all look down sheepishly and say "yyeeaahhhh....". And now we're voting on a socialist and they're destroying the market (b/c they have so much now they can buy elections, they can buy markets) and they're going to say (b/c daddy capital is clearly an alcoholic at this point)... Loohk watt you mhade meh doo, and he whips us with austerity and monetary policy and cops (increasingly justifying piggy force not with policy and personal responsibility but their own fear of a population that they made afraid of them - again genius).

“Then there was this freedom the little guys were always getting killed for. Was it freedom from another country? Freedom from work or disease or death? Freedom from your mother-in-law? Please mister give us a bill of sale on this freedom before we go out and get killed. Give us a bill of sale drawn up plainly in advance what we're getting killed for... so we can be sure after we've won your war that we've got the same kind of freedom we bargained for.”

- Dalton Trumbo, *Johnny Got His Gun*, 1939

The real Picasso (including sex-pestery) of Neo-liberal capitalism has to be Bloomberg. He does it all with the authoritarianism of a "great man", and the physical presence of a joke. He's the kind of man every single reader could physically beat, bloody and shame, and yet this he’s arrested 400K people for pot. (We'll have to talk about this post-modern Crassus another day - slender man vs Scrooge vs Hoover - calling trans people "it").

You can choose to say all this shit is champagne - but when you do it you're selling out everyone else who knows the truth - selling out the real for the imagined for a reward, the reward of surviving another day (and maybe ONLY today - ask Christine Quinn - or this insane and amazing blog).

But the poor can't make that choice, the victims of capital can't make it, only the just barely privileged enough can (and this describes me), because up from me are the beneficiaries of capital and they ain't gotta choose - alternatives are truly "unthinkable".

When the end of the world comes, the poor will die first and be spared the worst of it, I'll die in the plague from all the dead poor folks, but after all of us are gone, Bloomberg and his ilk will die from the plague cloud that will cover the earth and blot out the sun so that they can slowly choke on the stink from all of us rooting in their fossil fuel ruined hell. Sucking on gas masks like sinners felching god.

My mom quit teaching for the last time a few weeks into the Fall 2019 school year. The year before she had been a roaming arts teacher going around and teaching kids how to express themselves and interpret art (and more things I'm not doing justice to now). She loved it, she lived near her work, she lived near her grandkids and she loved her students and her job.

During the summer, budget cuts came through and lots of teachers were let go, my mom was given the choice of teaching 5th grade or leaving the school which effectively meant taking a severance and leaving. She wanted to hold out for a few more years to pay off her house so she said yes to the 5th grade spot. Along with an already overcrowded class, she had an autistic child with no school support and a Spanish-only child again without school support. I can imagine her trying to say "this is fine, it’s just one year" and then crying and I begged her to quit and just be a grandmother and I guess it finally came down to it being impossible to accept the situation, to paper over the the administrative chaos and political nihilism, and that ultimately 30+ years of service don’t earn much, so she left (no severance, no cakes, nothing).

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Big thank you’s to Luca Salerno and Jason Crye for the edits.

And thanks to all the paid supporters, these folks sent me links (you should send me yours too): D.B.Rouse.

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