Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I take it living in a hut on the beach enjoying the primitive folk mores of the local colorful natives is not your end all of existence, either?

right u are sir

i say plunge into the stanic marl
swim in the muck of today's
everyday

join the to-ing and fro-ing

to
when the boss fro's
and fro
when he to's

lay waste your powers
on the installment plan
battling the ex-class elements

personal salvation
(let alone
questing for
personal fulfillment)
is strictly for
re-actionary prats

I think Joe is basically right about a lot of things. For one, he's nailed it when he talks about widespread identification with a magical "middle class". And here, ah!

The only real middle class is that thin layer of commissars, lawyers, teachers, journalists, and other caterers to the empire, those people necessary to manage it and count the beans, dumb down the kids and lock up enough people to keep the privatized gulags in business.

Truer words would be hard to find.

He's also right when he says people are looking to purchase adult political individuation. That's not commodification of it, per se. It's loneliness and a desire to be with people on a non-threatening, non-mindfuck basis. The only reliable interactions on a large scale, with any understandable ethics, all come from pseudomarkets. They're easy to bail from when things don't work out. There's always another within a short distance. Our remedial or progressive institutions are almost useless. The petty power struggles in them make attendance an exercise in futility and participation a dull, neurotic, control freak joke. The virtuous non-smokers, with something to live for, have even dipped the loving, nurturing tentacles of the iron nanny state into the bars they'd never go to, not even as undergrads. There's nothing too picayune for Mother Clinton's brood.

Now I don't think he's going to get any distance from the corporate administered life in a shack in Belize. The raw face of power doesn't bother with niceties where there are no weeping mini-aristos for the cameras. Those accessible remote places are where you get shot or get endocrine disruptor toxins poured into you when a rational maximizer takes an interest.

Give him a break, please do, Owen. He's trying to teach our yuppie brat supervisors how to play nicely with the help. Who knows? They may even work up the courage to fund the NLG properly after reading his book.

"He's trying to teach our yuppie brat supervisors how to play nicely with the help"

absolutely correct sir
a call
to observe their
hideous self reflection

but dash it all
who
even listened to voltaire and rouseau

often ....too often
it takes a choppin block
to get the full attention
of any old regime's classy winners

and i agree
joe's prose
nicely if not concisely
bright lines
" the thin layer "of meritoids
the YBS
is dead on

btw
very fine comment in general

especially this gem

"the only reliable interactions on a large scale, with any understandable ethics, all come from pseudomarkets "

the line
makes me jealous
of its mighty bolt cutter finality

--------
so what then
is my deepest bug on badge ???

i guess i hate his appealing
brand of wised up futility

like i hate lapham's

to "heartfully"
understand
is not
enough

let's brake
the big bills down
to pocket size
make change rain down
out of capital's paper prison

and oh ya as lord brian notices
there's joes self banishment

i revulse at his go go go gogant flight
to the nearest farthest
imperial periphery

joe
the trailer park coriolanus
shouting with his feet
"no rome i banish u "
t'is
a bogus swamp frog of a croak

i even prefer melville's ahab

and there i suspect
dear sir
we two
obviously differ in spades

so i'll just
go suck
a municiple drain pipe
as penance