The Post-Alito Online Liberal

Of course it happened. Of course in the wake of Justice Alito's memo regarding his plan to eviscerate reproductive rights in America, I made the mistake of looking at social media. And of course what I saw was an army of liberals screeching at anyone who didn't vote for Hillary in 2016 – you know the type, all the “you did this” and what not. I would put up some screenshots here, but they are kind of self-evident.

Because if there's one thing that Democrats should be doing going into a midterm election, it's blaming individuals rather than actually examining and going after systems of power.

Unfortunately, in contemporary American liberalism, this isn't a bug, it's a feature. Having given up hope of any form of solidarity or collective action, having reduced every behavior to the level of the atomized individual whose personal moral value is, in Protestant fashion, to be weighed, in perfect lockstep with the neoliberal forces submitting all human life to the cruel logic of market capitalism – save for a few bare, viciously means-tested remaining fragments of the mid-century welfare state – the only thing left to do is to turn to individual actors, and to blame, hector, nag, and whine.

Of course this is amplified by the Internet in all the worst possible ways – all the armchair Ukraine experts and Kremlinologists on Twitter and Reddit have transformed into constitutional-law scholars who are fully able to ascertain the impact of the memo they read half an article about on Politico before rage-skimming on the Loving and Griswold decisions.

So I will take this opportunity to provide a corrective, and, being a good leftist who, as the late great Michael Brooks put it, seeks to be ruthless with systems and kind to people, I will direct my line of questioning at the structures and the persons who hold high ranks within them.

How many of the people who stayed home in the 2016 election in vital swing states were those much-feared but few-in-number Bernie bros who couldn't plug their nose, and how many were people disengaged from the political system after the losses of good union jobs and the destruction of communities in the wake of the free trade programs that the Democrats enthusiastically endorsed?

How many people didn't vote, and don't generally vote, because they suffered under Bill Clinton and Joe Biden's 1994 Crime Bill, people who overwhelmingly come from poor backgrounds, who are predominantly black and brown, whose family members were forced into a carceral-industrial system propagated by both parties, whose very voting rights were in many cases stripped away, and as for the remainder, how many of them realized that they and people like them were going to be fucked no matter what the electoral process was?

How many people had their brains permanently broken by the right-wing media that emerged like mushrooms after the rain in the wake of Bill Clinton's 1996 Telecommunications Act, and have emerged thinking that anyone to the left of Mitch McConnell is taking part in a child grooming cult, permanently alienated from reasonable discourse?

How many laws weren't passed to help enshrine abortion rights, instead resting upon a Supreme Court precedent that even the center-left's yass-qween champion Ruth Bader Ginsburg called a dangerous overreliance, especially at a time when 80 fucking percent of Americans are in favor of at least some access to abortion. 

Simply, how many were just checked out because they had never, in their lives, seen any meaningful response to their abject misery, administration after administration?

And really, you're yelling at us jaded leftists?

By the way, I did pinch my nose. I did vote contra Trump, twice. But I won't judge people for not doing so, because a big part of what it is to be a socialist is to recognize that our political system is broken.

To the social media ninnies, I feel you too. You're at the bargaining stage of grief. All of that being said, while I won't judge individuals for their political action or inaction in a complex environment, I will judge individuals for actively being dicks. So fuck you for that. But let's move on.

Once I helped a nice young woman get an abortion once (none of my DNA involved, by the way). Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to find a way to buy some pills for some nice ladies in Texas to terminate their pregnancies, and I encourage you to do the same. And if you want to do some deeper questioning, come and join. We on the populist left are more than happy to welcome fellow travelers.

The Island of Serendipity

There is a fable, most likely over 1000 years old, that goes like this. To teach his sons the value of practical experience beyond their ivory-tower education, the King of Serendib sent his three sons overseas, to the Sassanid Empire. They came to the traces of a missing camel – lame, blind in one eye, missing a tooth, carrying honey on one side and butter on the other. When Shah Bahram V heard about their claims, he immediately accused them of theft. In their defense, the three princes demonstrated thusly: only three hoofprints in the sand indicate a leg being dragged, the grass was eaten on the side of the road where it wasn't as green as the other, demonstrating a blindness in one eye, clumps of grass the size of a camel's tooth remained, showing one missing, and flies were drawn to the honey spilled on one side of the road, and ants to the butter spilled on the other.

To the Enlightenment philosophes, this was a perfect example of the triumph of reason, of the power of inference. And yet their homeland – Serendib – gave rise to another idea, the idea of serendipity, something completely determined by accident, by fate.

Serendib was what the ancient Persians called an island off the south tip of India.

And after that, it was Ceylon, a name that conjures up images of the twilight years of the Raj, sighing tea planters and pith helmets and cricket whites.

And since then it has been Sri Lanka. And what is in that name?

To those of us living in the post-Internet age, it is a name that evokes elephants and glittering beaches, perfumed jungles, travelers with mandala tattoos looking for enlightenment and cheap beer. Yet for decades before, the name “Sri Lanka” conjured up a sequence of horrors, purges and inter-ethnic violence, machete hacks and suicide bombings at crowded railway stations, panic in the stifling tropical humidity, weeping mothers and bloodied headscarves and crowds of men chanting slogans.

Where does the truth lie?

What I can only say is what Sri Lanka was for me, from the moment I arrived at Bandaranaike International Airport to the moment I departed from it.

It started with that standard third-world cab ride into the city, the first encounters with the heat, with the local accent, then passing houses in rural clearings, nighttime palm fronds, Honda motorbikes illuminated by insect-swarmed fluorescent lights, railroad tracks with barking dogs, tiny mobile phone shops with pictures of local celebrities, all with vaguely Europeanized features, promoting the various local 4G networks, billboards in English for housing developments aimed squarely at the anglophone elite, embassies behind heavily guarded perimeter walls. The forms repeat themselves from country to country. It is only when you emerge from the taxi that the subtle contours of locality emerge.

One comes to understand a country not through its monuments and landscapes, but its incidentals. To get a beer to enjoy before bed in my hotel room, I have to go to a “wine shop” with the vibes of a methadone clinic and wait in line with a couple dozen other exclusively male and restless-looking customers, before a cashier in a banker's cage hands me a bottle of Lion Lager from the fridge. To get around, I take a tuktuk plastered with slogans, from anodyne self-help – “don't be a worrier, be a warrior” – to confusing manifestations of global phenomena – the bizarrely common “Red Indian,” and here I was thinking I was in feather-not-dot country – to the WTF – a naked woman and the caption “The unknown. Who know this?”

But the incidentals were accompanied by moments of absolute loveliness.

There were the long strolls around the lake at Kandy, a city supposedly brought into glory by the Buddha's tooth in the central reliquary of the Sri Dalada Maligawa, and up into the hills, to be followed by a drink at the antique bar at the Queen's Hotel where Lord Mountbatten acted out his role as Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, and it's hard not to imagine the place full of David Niven types with pencil-thin mustaches, sipping pink gins and smoking Dunhills as they gesture towards detailed relief maps of parched Burmese hills – you see their forms like ghosts in the hazy orange sunset, floating between the bougainvillea blossoms. There was the long hike up to the top of the sacred rock of Sigiriya, wondering how humans could have possibly thought to built something like this in such an improbable and difficult location. There was the sheer joy of staring out at a landscape of layered mountains and cloud forests and plantations of tea, cinnamon, and cardamom as I sipped my masala chai and samosas, leaning back in my slow-moving train carriage. There were the long happy swims in the turquoise seas of the south coast, where I ate freakishly large crustaceans, and chatted with whoever came by, a surfer on a trip around the world, a few local longhairs with their arms around tatted-up British PAWGs, while I sat with my notebook and my arrack drink and my shirt buttoned down, trying my best to channel some combination of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Mitchum, and Miki Dora, and in all likelihood failing miserably. And I walked the cobblestone streets of Galle, the city on a little peninsula littered with the ruins and remnants of a dozen or more empires, where couples posed for pre-wedding photos, where schoolboys ran along the seawalls that futilely held back the waves of the Arabian Sea. The end of the earth – because from here there was nothing, all the way to Antarctica.

My reception among the locals was largely positive, and it always warmed up as soon as I said I lived in Thailand. This had the function of identifying me as a fellow tropical – someone who could cope with the heat and crowding, who could appreciate the spicy food, i.e. not a total Western dumbfuck. This carried more currency than I would have suspected, and it was only later that I realized what it actually was – a recognition that I also recognized the neocolonial fuckedness of things in countries below 25 degrees of latitude.

Because the fuckedness was everywhere. It was in the power cuts that beleaguered my stay – first eight hours a day, then ten, then twelve. In the food that, while tasty, so largely consisted of colossal portions of starch and fat, with minimal protein, bombarded with spice to make it flavorful. In the metal detectors and bag searches at the entrance to every shopping mall, and the abundance of armed guards in the most innocuous of locations. In the way that conversations with locals largely began with their disgust with the government of the Rajapaksas, a family that currently occupies the positions of president, prime minister, and nine cabinet-level ministers, whose abysmal mismanagement, including a harebrained attempt to make all farming organic, has led to food price shocks, a full-on Chinese debt trap leading to a loss of control over the Port of Colombo, and the increasing likelihood of the velvet glove of the IMF disguising an iron fist of austerity, which, when combined with global fuel-price spikes, has led to a country doing its cooking by candlelight.

As we wait for a generator to hum to life, a couple waiters at a nice seafood restaurant bum a smoke off a Russian tourist. They don't smoke with him, but pocket the cigarettes. That's not a good sign.

Which again leads me to flashbacks of those earlier images – of bombed libraries and targeted assassinations, of invocations to the serene Buddha, to peace being upon the prophet Mohammed, to the infinite beatitudes of Ganesh and Parvati in the name of Kalashnikov fire and the burning of corrugated-aluminum shacks.

Along with the cardamom plantations, seawalls, and gentle surf lapping at my bare feet.

One's experience of a place, as a tourist, consists of glimpses, ephemera, hazy memories triggered by smell and sound, the vague reminiscences when you look at the little lacquered box you bought at a faraway market.

And accordingly, each of these things is a trace. A clump of grass with a tooth-sized piece left intact, honey and butter spilled on the sides of the road. Dogs howling in the darkness as we wait for the lights to turn back on, the long views across the verdant mountains as I take a sip of soursop tea. The camel itself is much more elusive.

Under Stalin's Mustache

To most of the world, the Republic of Georgia is a cipher, a nation not easily found on a map, with a population so small it's eclipsed, in the international imagination, by a subnational division, and I would routinely have to tell people that I wasn't going to the Georgia that's home to Gucci Mane and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And when clarifications were made, that no, I was not going to be within firing range of the rockets landing on Kherson and Kharkiv. That I was instead going to a little nation neither truly European nor truly Middle Eastern, pinched between the old Russian, Persian, and Ottoman Empires, about which I knew awfully little, about which most people know awfully little.

And thus it was that I found myself, two long flights later, traveling abroad for the first time since the pandemic, walking the snowy streets of Tbilisi, trying to figure out the pay-to-ride elevator and dysfunctional locks in the commie block where I was staying, riding terrifyingly deep metro lines built to withstand Los Alamos-designed bombs, walking past the sad and ancient men selling off the military regalia of a country that no longer exists, with proud emblems of wheat sheaves, on blankets and park benches, to hapless tourists like myself.

Like many countries, it was not an easy place to get around. Buses were often unmarked minivans, touted by men shouting many-consonanted names – Mtskheta! Mtskheta! Sighnaghi! Sighnaghi! – and one wondered, as one got in, whether human trafficking was in the offing. Yet I made it through, despite an avalanche blocking one of my major objectives, despite the wild dogs that surrounded me on a snowy mountain. I rode funicular railways and I got rides in falling-apart Ladas from thick-necked, possibly drunk taxi drivers who chain-smoked skinny cigarettes as they wildly accelerated down country lanes.

And when I settled down, I walked for many happy hours among tumbledown walls and vines hanging from ornate balconies, past castle walls and art nouveau theaters and Brezhnev-era mosaics of men in fur hats drinking from rams' horns and plaques indicating the long-forgotten violinists who had lived in each residence. In the town of Gori, I visited the little house where an ambitious shoemaker's son with a thick mustache and a memorable attitude about the death of one man versus the death of a million, taking the requisite selfie with the man himself. In Tbilisi I went every day to the metro station at what was once called Lenin Square, and before that, Beria Square (gulp). I entered basilicas thick with incense where babushkas wept before icons of golden saints and where priests sang incantations in a guttural language as they blessed babies by holding them before images of Saint Nino and Queen Tamar.

And I step out into the street and see the evening passeggiata, the street cellists and the booksellers and the hookahs and ballerinas and the slender form of the old synagogue against the March sky, an old woman with darkly penciled eyebrows yelling and shrugging out a second floor balcony.

Because Georgia is one of those rare places that, at least to my eyes, there is still a sense of what was once called the exotic. It is found in the cuisine, soups of chicken and marigolds, giant flatbreads stuffed with cheese for a dollar a piece, veal offal sausages, lamb and green plum stew, charred skewers of trout, soup dumplings filled with assorted meats. And of course I spent my evenings sampling the infinitude of Georgian wines, made in the same fashion, skins and seeds and all, in a clay-pot qvivri in the same fashion since the time of the Egyptians. There was the dry and pomegranate-scented Saperavi, and its variants, the velvety and sweet Kindzmarauli, and my favorite, the oak-finished and pinot-like Mukuzani. Each session was to be followed by a shot of chacha, the indigenous grappa fashioned from pomace or peaches or persimmons, to be accompanied by a little plate of walnuts, before my stumble home through steep streets. 

I sat with my glass of wine, and I talked with whoever came through. The war was on, and as in most of the world, blue-and-yellow flags were on display, although for Georgians, it seemed a bit personal. It was only in 2008 that Putin's army was here too. But strangely, most of the people I encountered were not Georgians, but indeed Russians – Russians who had semi-permanently settled in Tbilisi, given the ease of visa access and the fact that most Georgians speak Russian, as well as the more recent arrivals, programmers and graphic designers who were watching their country crumble, fleeing a regime that crushes dissident behavior with ruthless efficiency and also fleeing the sanctions that, if anything, encourage a gaudy and grotesque nationalism and isolationism, and which mostly serve to punish ordinary people. “I no longer have a country,” a woman tells me, “nor do my children.” I went to a jazz bar to watch performances by men who were old enough to remember a time and a place where playing jazz had still been a revolutionary activity.

Georgia's most internationally famous artist was the deliberately primitivist Niko Pirosmani, but I truly fell in love with the paintings of Shalva Kikodze. His work is deliberately dreamlike, somehow utterly 20^th Century modernist and deeply primeval at the same time, brimming with joy and terribly melancholy.

 

And I think the reason the Kikodze paintings resonated so much is that this felt, more than any other place I've been, like the last old-world country, a glittering little fragment of a more romantic era. A remnant world that is still out there. If you go looking for it. And if you're lucky enough to find it.

The Fable of Jonah Peretti

It's an inevitable product of aging that one starts to wonder what the representative cultural products of the present era will be, what will be remembered, what will be reflected upon. And when thinking about the 2010s, I'm sure I'll be suspected to some nostalgia film in 10 years in which the bride and groom dance to Happy or Blurred Lines or Get Lucky at a wedding.

And few organizations captured the ethos of this time more accurately than Buzzfeed, to the point where it became almost a shorthand for the preciousness and stupidity of the decade. And a brief glance at it, as of a recent date, revealed itself to be the same sort of bullshit they've always done, to the point where it's almost a portal to 10 years ago. "This Couple Had a Sensory Friendly Wedding and I Could Almost Cry at How Beautiful It Is." "33 Products That Work So Well You'll Be Taking (sic) About Them All Year." You know. Clickbait bullshit for people who want to have weddings at Disneyland. Barf. Pass. You'd have thought we'd have moved past this sort of thing in an era where the problems of the world have become that much sharper.

But what is fascinating to me is the story of its origins and of its founder, Jonah Peretti, who, aside from being the dude with the most white-California of all possible names, had a decidedly strange arc, one that reflects the shifting priorities of a century.

Like so many Gen-X'ers, he came of age in the heady days of critical theory, in which American theorists willfully misinterpreted their French masters to make correlations between particle physics and Lacanian psychoanalysis (which another Gen-X'er theorist, Joe Rogan, would later extend to a connection to his DMT trip in the desert), and he even published a piece heavily informed by the theories of Deleuze and Guattari in one of the at the time very au-courant, pre-Sokal Affair journals that adopted a purely "cultural" anticapitalism at the end of history, Negations.

To wit:

"My central contention is that late capitalism not only accelerates the flow of capital, but also accelerates the rate at which subjects assume identities. Identity formation is inextricably linked to the urge to consume, and therefore the acceleration of capitalism necessitates an increase in the rate at which individuals assume and shed identities." 

A sensory friendly wedding. Almost crying at how beautiful it is.

Several years later on his bildung, Herr Peretti entered a room with a former follower of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh named Arianna Huffington and a plucky young Brentwood posh lad with a passion for uppers and thinly veiled fascism named Andrew Breitbart to start a certain news aggregator site that would come to be known for its quippy responses to the foibles of the Bush Regime.

And from that particular smug vomitorium came the worst of the American political culture that has dominated discourse within my own country, and owing to cultural imperialism, the world at large ever since. It's been a while since I'd even thought about HuffPo, but it laid the template for Breitbart and Buzzfeed, and Internet discourse more broadly.

The thesis was set forth in the "Breitbart Doctrine," that politics lies downstream from culture. Despite the right-wing origins, this is a sensibility that has come to dominate both liberal and conservative approaches to ideology. And it reflects the fact that both Perretti and Breitbart -- as representatives of a certain generation and a certain upper middle-class caste -- drank from the same streams, those of cultural studies, in which the legitimate insights of Western Marxism and the mid-20th Century "cultural turn" were placed in the service of late-stage capitalism.

A brief overview: the dissident Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci came to realize that a major part of what kept people in a state of false consciousness was "cultural hegemony," whereby the institution and powers that be insinuated a deep-seated ideology of which the subject is not even aware, which is normalized as common sense. But Gramsci and the Frankfurt School philosophers further north sought to articulate a truly emancipatory path for human development beyond the failures of capitalism and orthodox Marxism-Leninism. But when this program is applied without a strong critique of capitalism, the end result is disastrous.

Peretti and Buzzfeed largely mirrored the tone of the Obama years. The voice the editorial board championed was cheery, triumphant, inclusive, effusive. For a reference point, think about Parks and Recreation. Sure, all is far from well in Pawnee, Indiana, but Leslie Knope and Co. want to do their best to put people on the right path. Things were going to get better. And the vibe of Buzzfeed matched this, hoping that by giving people the right culture, they would give them the right politics. Never mind the economic recovery that wasn't.

Well, let's see how that turned out.

Meanwhile, Breitbart and friends, funded by an increasingly cantankerous right, managed to capitalize, conversely, on a visceral disgust, which is of course a much more powerful emotion. The 2016 election demonstrated that the culture that the liberals had tried to foster had failed to produce a downstream politics of any meaning, given that the political message was essentially "cheer up and be grateful, we've got it covered." To which the right responded by producing rage responses, which helped, in its way, to pave the way to a rage-response presidency.

What you see are two attempts at placing culture downstream from politics. In the first, a kindly, liberal culture fails to produce a kindly, liberal politics. In the second, a negation of culture feeds into a political worldview based entirely around antipathy. To put it in less academic terms, it's the Wario version. Wantonio Gramsci.

Something tells me that this color-inverted Gramsci will be less likely to be a friendly and rather goofy opponent in tennis- and kart racing-themed games.

Perhaps it should be no surprise, as well, that Buzzfeed laid off 43 journalists in a mass purge of actual news in 2019, followed by another 47 without warning -- most of them unionized -- in 2021, via a virtual meeting using the insanely on-brand password "spr!ngish3r3."

What I am reminded of, more than anything else, are the haunting lines at the beginning of one of the masterworks of cultural theory, Theodor Adorno's 1951 text Minima Moralia. Subtitled "notes on a damaged life," Adorno, in these strange little micro-essays, traces the ways in which all hope had been extinguished, made impossible in the shadows of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, made all the more personal to Adorno through his own exile, through the ways in which his closest of friends were subject to expulsion at best, gas chambers at worst.

"The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that since time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter's conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy, and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own."

And I see the sighs of this long-dead German reflected in this engine of meaningless content. In the horror of the screen glowing in the dark.

Liminal Spaces

 It seems to be an inevitable consequence of the rush towards the modern -- there will always be the lure of the lost. There will be vampires' lairs and Gothic castles, there will be Roman ruins romantically crumbling, there will be stone idols with jeweled eyes in perfumed jungles, there will be Addams Family-style Victorian houses gnawed at by a century and a half's termites, there will be petroglyphs carved into desert rock, depicting the creation myths of indigenous societies long-since extirpated. All of the Ozymandian reminders of the things that once were.

But what happens when those things are not the remnants of long-lost civilizations, but the remnants of something familiar? What if, instead, of widows' walks and parapets and flying buttresses, we have industrial carpet, fluorescent lights, a world fully delineated by economic feasibility studies, electrical diagrams, environmental impact assessment reports, legal due diligence, linear programming charts?

It's something that's long since bothered me, ever since the first time I remember seeing a fully modernist building abandoned -- I was 12 or 13, and I wondered what could have happened. And there was something far more sinister about that bit of 1950s postwar optimism left to rot, covered in a mix of anarchy symbols counter-argued with swastikas, than anything that Piranesi or Poe could have ever dreamed up.

Which is perhaps why the Internet phenomenon of the liminal space has drawn me in.

Some reflect the machinations of commerce:

 

And others a mirror-maze reflection of the domestic:

 

 

And with all, a terrible sense of emptiness and loneliness:

 

In his 1909 text Rites of Passage, Arnold van Gennep described the liminal state as a particular moment within the rite, in which the subject of the ritual has passed through symbolic death but has yet to pass through symbolic rebirth, via a treacherous in-between space in which actions and words must be highly scripted to ensure safe passage.

A memory: a summer program for gifted elementary school students at the one high school in my hometown, empty for the summer save for a few of us little nerds and some assorted burnouts, several years older, roped into summer school (it was the late '90s -- they were still all about the flannel, as I recall), complaining about how bad their munchies were. Empty corridors. The sound of R.E.M.'s "Man on the Moon" on the local rock station reverberating from a janitor's distant boombox. The endless rows of lockers painted in primary colors, the sheen of distant fluorescent light on industrial tile floor was to be expected. But the darkened halls of the newer wing of the school, painted with the more abstract murals of art students -- those seemed to possess a stillness and a darkness that was beyond terrifying. 

Another: it's winter. I'm in a building in our little downtown that had once been a department store, split up before I was born into an assortment of small businesses and a few apartments, a little bookshop, a hairdresser, a deli, and most attractive to me, a store selling baseball cards and collectibles. I remember the walk-up with its smell of carpet long since left to mold, even over the long Upper Midwest winter still somehow moist, mixed with a bit of cleaning fluid and the oily fryer-grease smell left on dry December days when all other smells are purged from the air, the ancient windows shivering in their frames in the gales that blew down from Alberta. I walk into an empty unit, the door left open. Maybe it had been an office, maybe a dwelling. Detritus had been left there from a previous tenant, or maybe just some other wanderer like myself. A crushed up Whopper wrapper, a trade paperback with a spiderwebbed spine, the corpses of last summer's yellow-jackets facing heavenward, never swept away. With chipped electrical outlets and broken thermostats, cheap off-yellow paint on the wall, industrial carpeting curling at the corners, it was someplace in between use and disuse, between past and present. 

What was it that I experienced as a child? And what is it that is making its way around the Internet?

Perhaps -- and this is a first thought -- it is something that speaks to the human psyche itself, a discomfort with the in-between places, something that finds a comfortable analogy in the discomforts of the uncanny valley. And that very uncanniness is overlaid onto the banality and familiarity of these scenes. The once familiar -- something that we walk past every day, and are more than happy to ignore -- is caught in still frame. And when you look at it in focus, you realize on some level that you're not supposed to focus. That these are places designed to be functional and at least a little bit invisible. By being rendered from the functional into the aesthetic, their in-betweenness becomes more glaring, and all the more compelling.

And there is a social level as well. These places are the detritus of advanced industrial society, a society in which market logic triumphs above all else. The Soviet cartoons of piggish Western industrialists in Monopoly-man outfits with dollar signs for eyes got it wrong -- the purest elucidation of American industrial capitalism is, au contraire, a Comfort Inn just outside Peoria. And to see that representation of the animal spirits of some long-forgotten entrepreneur transformed into something naked and shivering reveals the disconnect between the material and the image, everything laid bare.

Or perhaps -- on the opposite end of the spectrum -- it's more personal, something ensconced deep within memory. Perhaps it's the memory of the alley you always avoided on the walk home from a school as a kid, with its trail of trash leading out of the dumpster, crumpling in the autumn rain. The time you woke up in the middle of the night and snuck down to the den and caught a viewing of The Shining on cable, the repeated carpet patterns and the domestic lighting mirroring your own environs, seeing yourself in the child pedaling his Big Wheel through empty corridors. The cold light of a gas station on a family road trip, a pockmarked cashier ringing up full tanks of premium unleaded and cans of Skoal, the way he snarled "you gonna buy something?" as you wondered whether or not to pocket a Snickers, as if he could read your young mind. The way you clung to your mother in a parking garage in early winter, unseen enemies lurking behind every Cutlass Ciera and Caprice Classic.

Regardless, the result is the same as the Gothic ruins that inspired the imaginations of the romantics -- what once was has become, in some way, no longer.

American D... Well That Word Got Flagged... Pills

Days go by, and the stream of content is endless, the vast majority of it passing without comment, like the infinite flow of trillions of neutrinos through your body at any given point in time. And then sometimes -- much like the occasional neutrino that pings an electron, thus creating an observable reaction in an underground observatory -- you see some dick pills, and these dick pills seem to say something. Something important. 

 

Every little detail is a goddamn masterpiece, isn't it? The dopey name, SWAG, complete with this being the "platinum" edition (memories from my middle school years of Big Tymers' "#1 Stunna" and the video with Bernie Mac selling them platinum rims, along with platinum everything else), the stick figures with crotches on fire looking like something a 5th grader in a ketchup-stained t-shirt he's been wearing for the past three days would get in trouble for drawing on the inside of his Trapper Keeper, the fact that "SWAG" apparently also stands for "sex with a grudge," implying that these are being sold not so much as dick pills but as rape pills. Although if we take the milder interpretation of sex with a grudge, the idea of interrupting a screaming couple-fight hatefuck -- "Fuck you bitch. Oh wait, let me take my SWAG, it should kick in in a few minutes..." -- is just terribly, terribly sad.

SWAG. American flag emoji. Made in USA!

It's apparently available at gas stations and online. For a population that finds its masculinity and purpose and hope for a brighter future stripped away by deindustrialization, wages stagnated for the past half-century, penises numbed by opiates and SSRIs, sapped of energy by morbid obesity, still vaguely imagining the total chads they could have been, the Chris Evans and Channing Tatum characters who seem to embody everything they're not. You imagine the gas station smelling of burnt coffee and nacho cheese in the first flurries of Ohio winter, the solitary man going through the selection of aggressively marketed dick pills stacked with "herbal" extracts, hoping for the equivalent of Monster Energy Drink shot right into their genitalia, itself a recapitulation of late '90s XTREME! marketing, praying they can use it for something other than a two-hour marathon of the greatest hits of Riley Reid and Mia Khalifa.

I wrote all of that before I learned that the actual compounds of SWAG include ant extract (you read that right, which is apparently common?). It was before I learned that the FDA had actually issued warnings for the product because it contained Sildenafil, the active component of Viagra, which I guess means it might work, but which also means that it is a controlled pharmaceutical being sold over the counter under the guise of "herbs." And it was before I learned that fake versions were being widely distributed, and the idea of a man looking for Chinese fakes of gas station dick pills on eBay at a marginally lower cost made me even more terribly, terribly sad than the pausing of a hatefuck to take the aforementioned dick pills.

Because it's the starry eyed yearning that makes it sad. 

Because if you want something that's less sad, and more just pathetic, I draw your attention to the upper middle class equivalent, Hims, the Viagra with a millennial-pastels Squarespace website complete with pictures of dashingly handsome and clever-tattooed young men of all races, advertising itself as a positive masculinity lifestyle brand, dick pills for men who don't want to admit that they need dick pills, and need it wreathed in obnoxiously precious therapeutic prose (direct quote: "an open and empowered male culture that results in more proactivity around health and preventative self-care," barffffffff), who feel guilty about their desire for masculinity, and think it can be fixed with an app. 

Jesus, if that's the other option, give me the damn gas station anger-sex pills. But it shouldn't be.

We live in a time when maleness has found some weird goddamn outlets, whether that's the parasocial relationship that Americans have to their military, as evidenced by the hideous flag-waving at any sports game, or the legions of mini-Rittenhouses who LARP as elite defenders of the American way, or the attempts by horsefaced tittybaby Josh Hawley (R-MO) to attempt to become an avatar of the American male. When really Josh Hawley is a beta soy cuck who lacks the courage to simply be a beta soy cuck.

It really is an almost perfect pairing, like pinot noir and duck breast, to the shrillest elements of the prudish phony "left," who embody a bourgeois feminism braying about centers and margins and bodies and spaces -- one that calls itself "intersectional" but fails to honestly examine the intersections and prefers to focus on victimhood, not solidarity -- that Simone de Beauvoir or Rosa Luxemburg or Emma Goldman would have proudly squirted fem-jizz all over in contempt.

Personally, I've never felt too attached to masculinity, because I'm not too big on identities of any sort. I mean, I have a cock, and enjoy fucking women with said cock, so I pretty much fit the cishet box, but I'm also pretty effeminate in a lot of ways, and am fairly proud of that, because it would be far too boring to live a gender stereotype, and because, hell, no matter what chaos my adolescence brought me, I was always pretty confident in who I was, even if I wasn't confident in vocalizing that. Maybe I would have identified as some flavor of non-binary if I'd been born 15 years later, but then again probably not. Because why should my love of home scents, my expressive and borderline campy communication, or my nasally West Coast-inflected vocalizations say anything about my gender identity, in the same way my love of football and straight bourbon doesn't, in the same way my aggressively grayscale/a few shades of blue wardrobe doesn't. Call it the David Bowie attitude. A woman I once loved asked to draw a portrait of me, and she drew me as a naked woman in shibari sneering in contempt, a glass of wine in hand. It is the most accurate portrait of me ever drawn.

So I can't say that any of these mediated narratives have ever appealed. But my advice to any young man seeking a guide for the perplexed would always be the same -- chill out, you be you, abandon all labels, be unafraid to love, be unafraid to abandon your ego, live tough and smart and graceful, read and travel and learn different languages, and find those times where you can actually throw a middle finger to the system and stick it to the man, and do it with pride. And do not trust, for a goddamn second, anyone who tries to turn a profit on the myriad holes that inevitably exist in your heart.

Scenes from an Izakaya and the Joys of City Life

I tend to use the phrase "the joys of city life" ironically. The screaming drunk bankers with Home Counties and New Jersey accents ruining your favorite bar? The joys of city life. The traffic jam caused by a pointless motorcade? The joys of city life. The homeless dude lying across the bus shelter bench at midday jerking his cock with abandon? The joys of city life.

But as of late, as we emerge from a multi-month lockdown here in Bangkok, I've come to use the phrase unironically. At a time when I'm reminded of everything I adore about living in a place I share with 15 million people, somehow managing to live cheek by jowl in relative harmony, lives intersecting, people working together, living together, eating together, drinking together.

Sure, at my worst moments, I trudge through the city under an umbrella, repulsed by every goddamn thing I see. But at my best moments, I practically dance through it, engaging with the rather old-world cafe society elements of it, how everyone kind of knows everyone within a certain negroni-swilling caste of which I am a member, sighing as the afternoon light dances off the river.

And there is no better venue to experience those true joys of city life than a good izakaya.

The izakaya is Asia's only real competition with the English or Irish pub as an institution of social and gustatory life, and unlike those two, the food is actually good. Furthermore, there's a far smaller market for phony izakayas -- whereas every college town in America has Irish pubs seemingly fitted out by the same wholesalers -- and so you're far more likely to get the genuine article, someplace that would be at home in a quiet out-of-the-way chome somewhere in Tokyo.

However, there are always signs of a good izakaya outside Japan. The lighting should be at just the right level of gaudiness, and generally I find marquis-style single bulbs to be a good sign. Furniture should be shabby and seemingly made from cast-off beer crates and things of this type. Specials should be written on long strips of paper on the wall in Japanese, even if virtually none of the staff and a minority of the customers actually speak Japanese. Paper lanterns advertising Japanese breweries and distilleries are a must. There should be at least one large smoking section with cheap aluminum ashtrays, possibly hidden on an upper floor, probably in complete contravention of local laws. No more than one TV screen is allowed, and it should be playing some highly stylized NHK cooking show involving mackerels being effortlessly filleted, or a baseball game, and if there are only two Japanese customers, they should be two middle-aged men cheering on the Hanshin Tigers or the Yakult Swallows.

So I sit down at my favorite table at my preferred izakaya -- certainly not the one with the best food, or the tastiest beer, but one with a good location and the atmosphere of this seat is unbeatable, right by the window. I nurse my beer, look at the infinite mix of reflected lights at sunset over the city.

This is my human aquarium: signs in Thai, English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and more, headlights and taillights, the parade of people coming home, going to night shifts, on their way to dinner and drinks, the couple in a tuxedo and ballgown on this perfect cool-season evening, 23 degrees celsius and breezy, the three (presumably) Burmese migrants, probably no more than 19, young men with fuck-you smiles at the city as they ride in the back of a pickup truck, the same look of defiance and adventurousness you see on any young man out to beat the odds far from home.

And at the tables around me, I'd forgotten what it was like to simply people-watch at the restaurant. Here's a young couple, a guy in a shell jacket with a corporate logo -- maybe he's a warehouse worker or a motorbike courier -- with a gold earring and a Ron Jeremy mustache, and his partner a chubby girl with a blonde streak who claps and gets out her phone to take a video when they bring out the pickled mackerel and blowtorch it, filling the dining room with the strangely tantalizing aroma of seared fish fat, both of them clinking their gigantic beers.

And over here, at first I thought she was a sex worker given the combination of gold sequined skirt, killer body, and fat old white dude accompanying her. But then the two are joined by an almost pathologically normal looking halfie girl of 18 or 19 in black plastic glasses and a Supreme shirt (his daughter? definitely his daughter) and my theory is thrown out the window. Guess this is just dad's new girlfriend... always awkward.

The next couple over is a bit more predictable, the Thai woman in her early 30s on her #grind living her #bestlife working on her laptop in her workout clothes as she drinks a highball, more than happy to ignore the highly replaceable hot French boyfriend of the sort replicated at a factory somewhere near Lyon to be the reference points for shitty partners for women around the world.

And directly in front of me, a rather fugly local couple, maybe 32 or so, ordering girly fruit-flavored beers and clearly, obviously each other's absolute soulmates in stupid love with each other, as wholesome as a strawberry milkshake down the shore.

There's another solo Westerner here, a man with a sticker-festooned Macbook, some marginal creative, maybe a graphic designer, maybe a video editor, someone working in the blurry world of "content" who washed up on this particular fatal shore -- although it might as well be Saigon or Sao Paulo, and it might as well be the same card flip of shaven head or manbun to hide the male pattern baldness.

He briefly makes eyes at the group of office girls feeling just a bit naughty, bitching in whiny tones about all the calories they're going to be eating, but still screeching with joy when their drinks and their giant hotpot come, all anxieties disappearing in the frothing beer foam and steaming dashi.

One of the women looks at me, wondering who the fuck this guy is with a giant notebook -- my giant Thai taxman's notebook in which I do all my writing -- on a Friday night at an izakaya in Central Bangkok. Not out of any romantic or sexual interest, mind you, but just out of perplexity. And I can see it in her eyes that she kind of wants to ask me, but she doesn't want to bother me. Eye contact is made, and she quickly averts.

And so I smile just a bit and take a sip of my drink and return to my notebook, and look out at the flash of lights and turn up My Bloody Valentine as loud as it can go on my earbuds.