Thursday, August 16, 2012

Embers

I really should not be alive right now.

It should've ended in 2003. I should've been another statistic. Metal burned into rock. Blood outlasted by stone.

The thinnest of margins. Like becoming your own ghost. Abyssal void of the shadow-world. Formless, immiscible. 

Rescued by accident. An outsider to the empire, looking in, saw value in my words. More than value: the gleam of a horizon.

Like other sensitive souls, I could sense the death of the Empire, but could not name it, put the thing into words. Like most intellectuals, I blamed myself. Despair compounded by imperial hubris, replicating each speculative spiral of the shadow banking system with the egoism of a shadow concept-system. Baudelaire named the contradiction, without understanding it: "mon semblable, mon frere", the false equality proclaimed by the Second Emperor, the fiat identity-currency of imperial Orientalism.

Not the route I chose (or was chosen by).

What I have left are the memories of that despair. Still faintly glowing, like embers. Wreathed in ash, but they still burn to the touch. Waiting for the moment to spark anew.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Employed Again...

...it's part-time, but I no longer have to worry about physically starving to death. Now I can go back to Second World problems like electricity and rent and being an overeducated debt-slave in a dying empire.

For comic relief, today's triple-header illustrates how Louisiana's plutocratic elites are destroying public education, or what can be termed "charter-bombing". Read (in order) Diane Ravitch, CenLamar, and American Zombie.

No wonder David Simon delayed the latest season of Treme to rework some of the stories - these days, the material practically writes itself.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Candles in the Neoliberal Darkness

In the Ice Age of Neoliberalism
there were those
who resisted.


(With love and respect to Kiran Rao, Aamir Khan, and the entire team behind Satyamev Jayate.)

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Sinking

Being middle-class in the US these days is like experiencing a shipwreck at ultra-slow stop-motion speed. Each day, you can see the floor tilt a little more. Hull panels start to protrude, then water trickles in at the glacier-like pace of one centimeter per day. Week after week, the floor buckles, the walls hang awry. Every month, another lower compartment is gone.

Eric Auld has this cautionary tale of how bad things are. Note especially the comments at the end of the piece, and the smug, self-satisfied cretins who throw garbage at graduate school and higher education. They are neoliberalism's homegrown "shabiya" -- the ideological equivalent of the "ghost brigades", a.k.a. rented thugs of Syria's murderous and dying dictatorship.

When the ship of empire sinks, the rats bare their teeth.

This is not a counsel of despair -- the decent folk vastly outnumber the shabiya, both in Syria and here.

But their existence is a warning that we must not become like them. We must remember that every day is a fight to retain a scrap of dignity. A fight to live less desperately and hopelessly. A fight to not become just another monster of the total system.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Things To Do While Waiting For Hours Only To Discover Your Foodstamp Benefits Have Been Revoked

1. Listen to Bolivian rap group Ukamau Y Ke's fire-breathing 2007 album Para La Raza
2. Calculate how many millions of taxpayer dollars Jamie "Tapeworm" Dimon steals per hour, minute and second.
3. Plot destruction of transnational capitalism -- then decide not to bother, because the monster is liquidating itself with commendable alacrity, Marx be praised.
4. Dream up "WWFBD" ("What Would Fran and Balthier Do") memes.
5. Play entire sound-track of Final Fantasy 12. Twice.