Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Having felt thoroughly beaten down politically for the past 30 years or so, and lamenting the dearth, or death (?), of leftist activism, I am left now with small acts of kindness and subversion, until I figure out my next move. That and rooting for Team Wisconsin, Team Egypt, Team Libya, and hopefully soon, a refreshed and fortified Team Gaza.

There is a power, I've discovered, in giving up hope. In just chucking it all away, and ridding one's self of delusions. You'd think this means hopelessness and despair, but something else emerges. "Stop me before I vote again" sounds like negation, but I sense it's something else.

Go Badgers!

Glad you highlit that concept, Al. Been listening to old-time and bluegrass all day. Somehow, it goes together for me.

Relating to chomskyzinn's first comment:

The other day I was back at the Unemployment Office for Round 67 of their latest drawn-out mindfuckery.

One guy administered their crappy-ass, wheezy "skills analysis" via a vintage 1983 Dell. Then he told me it was okay to wait in the testing mini-cube for another records keeper to call my name-- so long as I was comfortable.

So long as I was comfortable.

As you can guess, I have heard nothing remotely like this phrase in the past month or so of dealing with Unemployment.

Five minutes after he left, one of his co-workers marched over and barked at me that I had to leave the cube immediately and go wait across the room. She dumped me into a pile of extremely bored-looking H.S. students, who probably wondered where an old fart like me learned to mumble so many cuss words.

I looked back a couple of times again afterward, and saw exactly nobody moving into the vacated space to use it.

Something tells me that it's the first worker who routinely gets flipped a ton of shit from his overlords.

Ms. Xeno, something tells me you're right. I hope the students acquired a vocabulary addition that's useful and relevant to their lives. Otherwise the day sounds like a wash.

Jack, that's a serendipitous tie-in. Amongst the dispossessed and dispersed, the "low" culture becomes a means of hanging on to a footing from which to face the world, a way to become articulate enough to fight back.

Chomskyzinn, there's a lot to that and I'm running out of steam. But at some point I want to reopen this:

There is a power, I've discovered, in giving up hope. In just chucking it all away, and ridding one's self of delusions. You'd think this means hopelessness and despair, but something else emerges.

Agreed.

I take it, in letting go of one's delusions, you include the intellectual bulwarks we build up around ourselves, like Marxist or anarchist or social democratic theory. Since reality is always in flux, and much bigger than any thought system, these are useful hypotheses for navigating it, but dead-ends, both theoretically and personally, when taken as absolutes.

I haven't been reading comments sections as regularly as I used to, thanks so much, Al, for highlighting these, and thanks, chomskyzinn, for writing them in the first place.

Senecal, I was referring to, but not necessarily limiting my comment to, delusions that the US is more than simply a plutocratic, aggressively imperialistic menace. I used to believe that voting matters, for instance, and that the electoral system could somehow address and ameliorate problems like growing inequality and the vast suffering of the working class or poor. Old habits of mind and inculcation die hard.

Ethan, thanks.

P.S. One another delusion: That the US is in any way a democracy. The conflation of voting with democracy is deeply ingrained.

The conflation of voting with democracy is deeply ingrained.