Ghost Towns

Many years ago, at a time in my life when the future seemed more possible, I sat in a class taught by an old grump who seemed the perfect stereotype of the liberal-arts college professor, tweed and beard and bourbon and all. The class was on Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway, and as one of our texts, we read Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night."

Hardly hip reading, and generally considered a second-fiddle player to Gatsby, complete with a corny-as-fuck title. But it has moments of absolute transcendent beauty, all revolving around the central thesis of the dying world of the French Riviera as the pall of the Great Depression settled over the world, and the protagonists, an alcoholic couple, almost acting as a stand-in for the horror of Fitzgerald's contemporary world, as well as the alcoholic miasma that Fitzgerald was settling into, that would eventually take his own life.

I don't know why these are the lines I remember best:

"The chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a self-appointed guide, and the resplendent names--Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo--began to glow through their torpid camouflage, whispering of old kings come here to dine or die, of rajahs tossing Buddha's eyes to English ballerinas, of Russian princes turning the weeks into Baltic twilights in the lost caviare days. Most of all, there was the scent of the Russians along the coast--their closed book shops and grocery stores. Ten years ago, when the season ended in April, the doors of the Orthodox Church were locked, and the sweet champagnes they favored were put away until their return. 'We'll be back next season,' they said, but this was premature, for they were never coming back any more."

And many years later those were the lines on my mind as I traipsed through the largely boarded-up beach towns of Southern Thailand -- first Chaweng on the island of Koh Samui, followed by Kata, towards the south of Phuket.

I had gone south to use up vacation days I couldn't use in the annus horribilis of 2020, to escape the confusion and drudgery of my urban life. After all, don't the movies so often provide a sense of reconciliation, of future, by having the protagonist run down to the sea? I went to do a quick journalistic assignment, to spend a happy week or so swimming and sunning and drinking elaborate rum cocktails and possibly sharing my (heavily discounted!) resort room with a nice woman. 

It was not to be.

From day one, I was plagued by sickness, technological failures, heavy rains, vicious rip tides, attempted scams, trying to figure out if I was being scammed by listening in on the people around me but being stymied by their incomprehensibility, given their speaking in the harsh seagull squawk that is the Surat Thani accent, a couple screaming at each other and smashing glasses in the next room ("I do fucking everything for you, you fucking bitch!"), services canceled, and above all else, the absolute lassitude of the place.

Everywhere I went were the signs of what once was, 90 percent of shops closed. There were the shut-down hotels, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, souvenir shops, tailors, massage shops, health spas, travel agencies offering cheesy elephant tours and GoPro rentals for your sea kayak, convenience stores (not a single 7-11 or Family Mart left open in Kata). There were the signs -- in Hebrew ktav ashuri, Chinese characters, hangul, katakana, and Cyrillic -- indicating the people who were once here and would likely not be back for a very long time.

The few shops open in Chaweng seemed mostly Indian-run -- the upcountry Thais seem to have had the good sense to pack up and go home, but given the current desperation of India and their possibly questionable legal status in Thailand, they found it best to stay on and weather the storm. They smiled at me, offered Hawaiian shirts and garlic naan. 

Perhaps saddest of all, there were the remnant sex workers, "masseuses" in black cocktail dresses and blush awkwardly smeared on over their pancaked foundation, doing their best attempts at a sexy dance to pounding mor lam music in front of massage parlors where fluorescent light illuminated the peeling floral wallpaper in the reception area, pouting their best at me and tutting "pai nai?!" as I refused their come-ons.

I did my best to enjoy myself, truly. I swam many long, happy hours in the South China and then the Andaman Sea. I drank strong mojitos at one of the few "beach club"-type bars still open where they were for some damn delightful reason playing the club bangers that my 20 year old self obsessed over, Glass Candy and Kavinsky and LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends," I ate (with sheer joy at the weirdness of it) a violently spicy (true South Thailand spice, for those in the know, with an obscene amount of still-green black pepper ground up into it, the copious coconut cream doing nothing to blunt the spice levels) sea-anemone curry. I read the gloomy anarchist philosophy of Max Stirner and the optimistic Marxist science fiction of China Mieville. I gathered branches of many species of coral that had washed up on the beach on my long walks.

And yet inevitably, I ended every evening with a sighing solo beer, staring out at the crashing waves, the eerie green lights of the squid boats flickering along the water.

The last night in Kata before I was due to fly back to Bangkok, I decided to stop in one of the Russian restaurants that were still open (it's called Veranda, by the way, shout out if you're on Karon or Kata Beach, dope-as-hell food), and the only one that seemed to have a fair number of Russian customers, seemingly the last on the island -- young men who looked like MMA champions and their girlfriends with pulled-back blonde ponytails, roots exposed, in awkward ballerina dresses, and their elders, men looking like Ohio highway patrolmen with short-cropped blonde hair effortlessly fading into their sunburned neck fat.

The meal itself was excellent, a nice chilled bowl of okroshka made with proper kvass and bittersweet radishes for the hot weather, followed by chicken-mushroom croquettes, all washed down with plenty of vodka. But as I sat back at the end of the meal, saw the signs of neighboring restaurants fading across the road, the chalk menus offering an "ekzotika" menu of weird local meats and fishes that were probably no longer even kept in the walk-in, the white lattice and fake flowers evidencing a still-Brezhnevian aesthetic sensibility, that I thought again about Fitzgerald's lines again.

And then I realized the inevitable sadness of tourist towns, even in peak season -- that they are inevitably defined by people who are generally not there.

And I was one of those people who was generally not there. And 12 hours later, I was there no longer.

Amanda Gorman's Shitty Poetry: An Intervention

Generally speaking, I despise culture-war issues, and consider them to be a needless distraction. If you actually care about a potato-headed toy losing its gendering, you are quite likely an idiot.

But sometimes when something hits near and dear to my heart -- in this case questions of poetry, translation, and meaning -- I feel the need to intervene.

It was reported in the Guardian, among other sources, that the Catalan translator of Amanda Gorman's debut book of poetry "The Hill We Climb" was being removed from his assignment on the grounds that he was not a young, black woman -- remarkably, the second such row over the translation of this one book in Europe. Oh dear.

Even if you accept the shaky-at-best premises of standpoint epistemology, what connection is there between the experience of a black Catalan, likely a first- or second-generation Subsaharan African, and a black American, beyond being subject to systemic racism, when even the systemic racisms they experience are pretty fucking different? Does this very presupposition -- that the translator of a work needs to share a similar set of demographic characteristics as the author -- negate the very idea that a work is translatable, understandable, or communicable across societies, and if you carry the idea to its logical extreme, even between individuals? Doesn't this reduce the nature of an artistic work to the author, in complete ignorance of every lesson and every intellectual debate of literary theory in the 20th Century, from the New Criticism movement and the Frankfurt School on through thinkers as diverse as Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, and Harold Bloom?

All of that being said, I'm not surprised. Ever since I saw the clip of her reading her poem at the Biden inauguration, her work was, fully and completely, reduced to her personhood. The quality of the poem didn't matter -- it was the media image of a young black woman with a Harvard education reading a poem, something that, in the American liberal imagination, functioned as a negation of the state-sponsored racism and crass vulgarity of Trump and Co.

I had vaguely remembered the video, and that I'd watched it and not been impressed. But I figured, what the hell, let me look at it as I would any other poem.

It fucking sucked.

To be fair, so does inauguration poetry in general, all the way back to John F. Kennedy having middlebrow fave Robert Frost give a reading. I get it, it was shared widely on social media, and largely by people who would consider themselves educated. If you look at the text, its substance is no more sophisticated than a motivational poster ("We've braved the belly of the beast / We've learned that quiet isn't always peace" -- pretty sure I heard a pimply white kid read that at a slam poetry night freshman year). But here's the thing -- it sounds poetic, in that it sounds like the idea of poetry in a world in which poetry has been all but expunged from the public sphere.

It's a point I belabor a lot. A lot of the "intellectual discourse" in the contemporary English-speaking world is really an illusion of discourse. People are drawn to Ben Shapiro because he sounds like he's debating, when he's really just yelling and invoking the concept of logic rather than actually deploying it. People are drawn to Jordan Peterson because he invokes a near-astrological conception of personality and uses it to provide fatherly advice, and this seems like psychology. People are drawn to Robin D'Angelo because white liberals prefer to engage in performative, self-flagellating mea culpas rather than admitting the ways in which capitalism props up the white supremacist order.

All of that being said, I can't blame individuals -- I really, really try not to -- because people really are deprived of a humanities education, given the way that testable metrics have become the focus of the American educational system and the system itself is largely taken over by disaster capitalists (see the near-complete dismantling of the public school system in New Orleans), leaving little room for the subtleties of perception and interpretation.

In an era in which information is so omnipresent in our lives, to the point where it's overwhelming, it would seem obvious to me that it's these perception and interpretation skills that are necessary for sorting it out -- failing that, you are likely to get a bad case of Joe Rogan brain.

For those of us who put great stock in the humanities, it's a massive fucking bummer.

But when you find contemporary cultural products that still resonate -- recent works by Jarett Kobek, Ben Lerner, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Celeste Ng coming to mind, as do the media-studies texts of Evgeny Morozov, as did David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" -- it's a revelation. Those are the moments when, staring at the page, there is a hand on your shoulder. You are not crazy. You are not alone.

On Music and Writing

In December, I began a standard ritual. It's a ritual I've been doing for over a decade – going through Pitchfork's year-end top 100 songs and listening to them, in order, from number 100 to number 1.

I'm not going to comment on the music itself. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad. Much of it is in-between. Some of it might be good, but it is not for me, or for people of my general inclination, but there are still reasons to qualify it as by and large good. These are not the issues I care to write about. After all, is there anything more tedious than an aging hipster bitching about contemporary music? (Answer: yes, there is, and it's an aging hipster glomming onto contemporary music in a pathetic attempt at youthful enthusiasm).

What I wish to write about, rather, is the writing about the music.

Consider their commentary on their number 1 for 2020, Cardi B's “WAP” (and Ben Shapiro's song-that-must-not-be-named, a fact which will forever be hilarious):

“...a Cardi verse somehow tributes the unsung uvula amid an imposing tour de force of lecherous metaphors.”

Really?

To a certain degree, I have a sympathy for the writers. If they want to say that a song is a banger, there are only so many ways they can. There are only so many descriptors, so many adjectives, especially when it comes to pop music that has its appeal in groove and hook more than anything else (credit where credit's due, Cardi has had some very clever lyrics in her day, albeit in other songs). When a music critic tries to review a DaBaby song, say, there's only so much you can milk out of the repeated phrase “I'm a young CEO, suge” before getting to the point where there's more analysis in your review than in the song itself. There's a reason that the absolute most common album review I hear referenced in conversation is a Pitchfork review of a Jet album that was just a link to a monkey peeing in its own mouth.

Furthermore, lyrical complexity doesn't really make the critic's task any easier, because the lyrics are inextricably embedded within the music. It's hard to think of a dumber Nobel literature prize than that given to Bob Dylan, because no matter how much 16 year old boys in Middle America (spotlight casually falling at my feet) would like to claim that Dylan's lyrics are poetry, they would be absolutely godawful if they were actually written down as poems. Consider Desolation Row:

“Ophelia she's 'neath the window

For her I feel so afraid

On her twenty-second birthday

She is already an old maid

To her, death is quite romantic

She wears an iron vest

Her profession's her religion

Her sin is her lifelessness.”

See? Just awful, high-school creative writing class shit. But in Dylan's voice with his spare guitar, it's heaven.

And when you think about those songs that form the soundtrack to your life, it's rarely the song in and of itself that you think of – it's the context. It's where you were, both geographically and in your life, it's the nostalgia of old friendships, first loves, long drives.

Yet in another era – not too long ago – poetry was itself a form of music. It was meant to be remembered and recited, with a rhythm akin to that of what we have formalized as music, and in oral cultures, there is very little distinction between poetry and music. A time before those of us in the industrialized world didn't have to deal with the shattered remnants of a dead God. When the stained-glass windows of Chartres were the most radiant thing one would see, when the emperors were still descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu.

And while such things are but distant memories, their residue is all around us.

We still seek the transcendent, and it is so often that that transcendence cannot be reduced to words.

It hits you as see the afternoon light moving across the corners of your room.

Survivor's Guilt

I try not to watch the news from America anymore. The abject horror simply becomes too much, and I've come to realize that basically, the country that I still, at least in a formal sense, call home, has completely given up. I saw, like a lot of people, the chart where four of the deadliest days in American history were in the previous week – exceeded only by 9/11, the 1903 San Francisco Earthquake, the Battle of Antietam, and the (weirdly forgotten) 1900 Galveston Hurricane. Which apparently excluded Gettysburg and the Spanish Flu, but point taken all the same. Meanwhile, my Iowa hometown has frequented among the most pandemic-ridden places in America, and thereby on Earth.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting poolside with a cucumber Italian soda, reading A Dance to the Music of Time, wondering whether to go to the little French bistro with the white tablecloths, now that it's the season for game and white truffles, or whether to keep it simple and just go to the sushi place down the street. And darling, do we have enough Campari for a round of Negronis?

It might (will) sound melodramatic, but I imagine that this is not too different a feeling from that experienced by the great wave of European intellectuals who wound up in Los Angeles in the years leading up to World War II, ready to be recruited by Hollywood and by the newly wealthy universities of the West Coast. Their home countries were ripped to shreds and turned to headlines, even as they had martini-lunch meetings with MGM.

I'm in this weird blank spot on the planet that's been relatively unaffected, despite a recent outbreak in a distant industrial suburb. My job continues unabated. I actually lost weight during the lockdown. Sure, I can't travel, and that's something of a raison d'etre for me, but really, how much of a complaint is that? Does it have any validity? “What a DRAG, I can't go to Sri Lanka this year...” This is where I'd tell myself to fuck right off.

So I tell myself to feel gratitude. But the flipside of that is that with everything I'm grateful, for there is an inevitable sense of survivor's guilt.

I've often been accused of fatalism, owing to the fact that I generally believe that we as individual, atomized humans are tossed about by grand physical, biological, historical, and economic forces that we have more or less no control over, and that the true horror and despair occurs when we are forced to confront our own essential powerlessness.

Meaning that even though I myself have escaped unscathed, what does that mean, when I look around and see nothing but prospects getting progressively dimmer and dimmer? If I were to return to America anytime soon – as I'd been seriously considering before – what would there be to return to? A diseased, economically depressed landscape, riven with political strife, operating solely for the enrichment of a callous ruling class. And then, this is compounded with the horror and the sneaking suspicion that most places aren't that much better off right now.

I try to donate to decent causes, to perform random acts of kindness. All of which ultimately feels less like I'm expressing any kind of agency and more like I'm paying indulgences.

And then I go back and repeat the cycle. I fetch my towel and my sunglasses, and my copy of A Dance to the Music of Time. Iced Americano, this time, though.

I close my eyes, the patterns of the tropical sun dance around beneath my eyelids. The sun's fangs drip with blood.

Ozymandias at Arecibo

It's remarkable how much of my education I can attribute to my childhood/teen habit of watching late-night television. Before the Internet, this was where the mystery lay.

I was seven or eight years old, watching the X-Files – a habit that helped instill in me a lifelong love of the weirdness and darkness lurking around the American fringe. There was a lot of snide talk about “little green men,” a lot of cagey dialogue, gray sky.

Agent Mulder ran along the edge of what was identified as the Arecibo Radio Observatory – white guy-wires criss-crossing the elegant curve of a massive, concave satellite dish, precise lines contrasted against the verdant Puerto Rican jungle.

 

Nothing seemed more indicative of the modernist idea of the future. It was the same impulse I'd registered in old atlases from the 1950s and 1960s, with their breathless prologues proclaiming exploration as the... dramatic pause... destiny of man, at a time when such grand notions could be contemplated. I'd registered this impulse in diagrams of orbital paths, the ocean depths, cloud patterns. Nothing seemed to be a purer representation of the human will to enter communion with the stars.

On December 2^nd, as I scrolled through the headlines of the day – continued political fracas and pandemic spread across America (expected, miserable), the transitioning of a pint-sized Canadian actor (and pausing to wonder, over my coffee, if any nerdy dudes were no longer able to masturbate to Kitty Pryde) – there it was.

My childhood image of scientific progress lay there shattered,the jungle lurking beneath the cracked concrete.

 

In 1960, construction began on the Arecibo Radio Telescope, designed to study the ionosphere as part of a DARPA project to allow for more effective scanning of ballistic missiles. As with so much American science of the mid-20^th Century, the spirit of discovery was facilitated by Cold War interests. And yet it became known not for any defense against the ICBMs that never came, but for its pivotal role in astronomical observation. This was where solid evidence of the neutron star was found, where the binary pulsar was first observed, and where, in 1974, Carl Sagan and others transmitted a radio frequency towards the Hercules Global Cluster in the impossible hope that some alien species would find it, decode it, and nod towards us as an intelligent species.

That kind of optimism seems, in 2020, to be so damn naive. And it's not just the fact that it's been a shit year (not helped by Facebook Boomer “2020 duhr huhr huhr” memes). It's the fact that this was a once-mighty site of scientific endeavor, slowly defunded as the American public sector was strangled to death by increasingly fiscally hawkish governments over the '90s and '00s, until it was a mere shell of its former self. In 2016, Arecibo lost its position as the world's largest single-aperture telescope to the new Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou Province, China, and in 2017, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, leaving millions of Puerto Ricans without power and water for months, even years, fully revealing the colonial nature of the island's relationship to the mainland. Cracks had begun to appear, and by the time Arecibo collapsed, plans were already underway for decommissioning.

It would be a hack metaphor if it was in a movie, wouldn't it be? The proud American institution crippled by the neoliberalizing state, before final humiliation by Chinese competition, a hurricane in all likelihood exacerbated by climate change, before finally giving up the ghost. Insert undertones of militarism and colonialism that existed since the beginning.

But if there's one thing I've learned over the last year, it's that things that would be hack metaphors in sci-fi movies are depressingly close to the reality we have, the reality of deepfake videos, Silicon Valley choked in orange haze, major news leaks coming through Tiktok, the Internet being dominated by clips of braying idiots demanding their right to not exercise pandemic protections at Yankee Candle, and Belle fucking Delphine.

Perhaps that's why I mourned Arecibo more than expected.

And perhaps that's why Sagan's hopeful message of 1974 seems more like a retelling of a certain Shelley poem:

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Pyrrhic Victory

“If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”

- Pyrrhus of Epirus after the Battle of Asculum, as reported in Plutarch's Lives

I have learned, over the past few years, to brace myself for the dumbest possible outcome in the world of politics. This isn't, I should stress, the worst possible outcome. It is the dumbest. If the worst possible outcome is goose-stepping fascists and a highly motivated cabal of elite operators relentlessly assassinating dissidents, the dumbest possible outcome is a neoliberal government in which austerity is accompanied by vague hand-waving towards social justice issues and performative identity politics, and some fat piggly-eyed pasty fuck with delusions of military grandeur in an improvised flak jacket spraying Sunday shoppers with automatic gunfire in an act of stochastic rage at a suburban CVS.

And this is what my crystal ball has been telling me for months – a wave of blue mail-in votes, followed by a wave of red votes on election night itself, followed by a narrow, tooth-and-nail Democratic victory. Presumably to be followed by weeks of protracted court battles, bursts of occasional right-wing violence, and four years of utter fecklessness (not to mention a probable repeat of the Republican backlashes of 1994 and 2010).

A summation from someone more educated than I:

“Right now, what we are facing is a catastrophe. A Republican Senate, a narrow Democratic house majority, and a Democrat president who did not win by a big margin, who will be reviled for various reasons from day one by Trump supporters and adherents to the opposite side, who has conservative instincts, who will now have both a scapegoat in Mitch McConnell for his refusal to do anything that might move the country to the left, anything that might improve the lot of the most vulnerable in this society, should he even have that inclination. Not only provide a scapegoat, but he will also have the opportunity to enforce what could be a brutal austerity regime in the midst of a continuing pandemic in the midst of an economic crisis. I mean, before this election, I had pretty much no hope for the Democratic Party, and after it, it's pretty much the same deal.” 

- Virgil Texas in conversation with Briahna Joy Gray, Bad Faith podcast

We live in a time when more Americans than ever before believe in, at least to some degree, what I believe in: universal healthcare, some form of UBI, a higher minimum wage, an end to military misadventures, the overhaul of the criminal justice system, a Green New Deal, and support for unions and worker co-ops to help resolve the contradiction between labor and capital. Let us be reminded, that no matter what the mealy-mouthed editorial boards of the New York Times and Atlantic tell you, it was pro-Medicare for All Democrats who managed to carry swing House districts, and that while Florida went for Trump, Florida also went for a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage.

And yet the gap between political will and political representation has rarely been starker. The ostensible party of the left is led by a senile puppet for the donor class and a fucking cop, advised by all manner of Wall Street cronies and liberal war hawks – people who would have been called “Rockefeller Republicans” in another era (and even Nelson Rockefeller was in many respects more liberal than these fucks). While the world burns. Literally.

OK, I voted for Biden, regrettably. It seemed like it wouldn't hurt, and I didn't see how a Biden presidency could be worse than a Trump presidency, even if I doubted it would be much better. A bit like the French communists in the Chirac-Le Pen election of 2001, who walked into the polls with clothespins on their noses.

I'm sure plenty of nice center-lefties would tell me – and I hear this dull wording again and again – that Biden had “the most progressive platform of all time.” Well, were his policies anywhere near memorable enough to excite voters? Or were they the sort of means-tested nonsense pushed by DC wonks? Were there even any attempts to convince anyone of these policies, or was the sole form of messaging “not Trump”? Do you even trust this putative platform? Or should I believe that Biden's and Harris' records speak for themselves?

And so we're left, as I said at the beginning, a serious case of the dum-dums. The notion that those of us on the left can in any way “push” Biden leftwards or have any leverage to do so (versus a well-organized apparatus to maintain the Democratic Party in its post-Clinton form as a neoliberal entity, and one willing to capitulate to Republican excess instead of actually building working-class politics) is absurd.

I'm sure I'll get people saying that this sort of doomer mindset is a product of my own privilege. To which I respond that standpoint epistemology is pearl-clutching masquerading as empathy, and is indicative of a gray-faced Protestant ethos suffused with late-capitalist narcissism.

So what is to be done? I really don't know. Fuck.

Death in the Age of Twitter

When I first heard about the not-untimely but decidedly time-unfortunate death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I did the worst possible thing – I went to social media. This is akin to checking WebMD when you experience an innocuous discomfort of one kind or another, and come out thinking you have lymphoma.

A depressingly large number of Twitter liberals' automatic response was (natch) to blame the left. The name “Jill Stein” was trotted out yet again as a reason for why the world sucks (much like Nader back during the Bush years), because instead of actually, you know, interrogating why people don't trust a party that has walked back every attempt at economic justice it's made by cozying up to Wall Street. Because if there's one thing you need in an election year, apparently it's by wagging fingers and alienating potential allies. If Trump is reelected, I'm fully expecting the Blame Bernie Brigade to come back in full force, and I'm expecting to be nagged for my lack of party loyalty.

And of course there were weird, angry takes (second stage of grief and all that). One that struck me as particularly bizarre was a seemingly widespread finger-wag against people using the phrase “rest in power” for white people. If you believe this, you have a stupid opinion. I hold you in a certain measure of contempt for having that opinion. Your entertaining this opinion and other associated flavors of histrionics and umbrage is a symptom of a broader problem with the American left. You might still be a lovely dinner guest though.

But ultimately, the depressing fact is that the Supreme Court was already lost for a generation ever since Brett Kavanaugh slithered his way into the chamber.

I also had to ask myself what Justice Ginsburg really did for the left, and I suspect many of her most ardent supporters would be hard-pressed to name actual policies she pushed through during her tenure (there were some of note, but they were relatively few). Rather, people are more familiar with her jeremiad dissents, which while eloquently phrased statements of purpose, are at the end of the day the rallying cry of the defeated.

And this is perhaps mirrored by the fact that, given the recalcitrant American right, the center left's response has been to less eloquently screech “THAT'S NOT FAIR!” at every repugnant thing McConnell and Co. do.

At the end of the day this is another reduction of politics to bien-pensant aesthetics. Lacking real victories, nice American liberals have simply been content over the past 20 years to rest on their own smugness. I remember the feeling of paralytic horror at watching The Daily Show in my teens, during the Iraq War, and the general attitude of “Well, look at THOSE dumbasses” towards the local yokels baying for Arab blood while ignoring the fact that the New York Times editorial staff and their colleagues (Frum, Friedman, and the rest) attempted to provide intellectual scaffolding for imperialist idiocy. At my most cynical moments, it's an attitude that seems to represent an almost Weimar-level phobia of and disgust towards mass politics, with results that invariably bite liberalism in its ass.

Putting one's faith in an unelected court is cheering on your champions rather than taking part in the process of mass politics (not that I'm a model, I just do my best to fund where I can when I can... oh, and join the DSA, folks). Indeed, Ginsburg herself was critical of the process of Roe v. Wade, pointing out that by settling the matter of abortion in the courts during a time of liberalizing abortion laws rather than in the democratic sphere, a backlash was invited without sufficient public consensus to act as a counterbalance. Unsurprisingly, Jacobin published a fair amount of good analysis on this subject.

But to be a leftist is, unfortunately, by and large, setting yourself up for disappointments. Consistently. As someone who believes that working towards a socialist society is the necessary fulfillment of the mission of the Enlightenment, I have to accept that I will be unhappy more often than I am happy with the world at large, and it's because I know how much better it could be.

Political engagement is, to a certain degree, an utterly quixotic mission that will drive you fucking insane. Even those conservatives who have scored so many global victories over the past several years can't escape. Their worldview is fraught with a wild loathing of the world as it has become, as it has transformed into something that deviates from their myopic perspectives. At the ground level, American conservatives seem in particular seem far more occupied with stomping their feet at the perceived transgressions of liberals and socialists (and being completely unable to differentiate the two) than actually forming anything like a coherent perspective.

A sheriff, spitting through his mustache: “You know if you'd told me 20 years ago I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair, bones in their noses, I just flat out wouldn't have believed you.”

Tommy Lee Jones: “Signs and wonders.”

And so my conclusion is that an old lady who worked hard and did some good things has died. She will doubtless be replaced by some cross-clutching fuckwad who in any decent society would be stripped of their judicial power and forced to walk the streets wearing a barrel with shoulder straps holding up a sign saying “Will adjudicate for food.” But I can't perceive it as the apocalyptic event that so many liberals perceive it to be.

At this particularly stupid time in history, that baseline annoyance is to a certain degree something I expect. I had thought Trump and Hillary were the two worst presidential candidates of my lifetime. Nope, Trump and Biden. It can always get worse. I know that I will have a materially worse life than my parents. That sucks. But as it is something I have no control over, I accept it.

My only irrational hope left is that things will get better before the seas rise... too much... and that I can leave the world with it pointed in a different direction. Somewhat.