the no alternative bullshit

There is something comic about a politician standing up before God and man and free will and mouthing the phrase “no alternative”. Except in the case of Moses and the ten commandments (and even then the first draft was broken on the way down from the peak of Mount Sinai), no politician in history has ever mouthed anything, ever represented anything, except an alternative. No politician has ever produced the inevitable.  And so it was with the Thatcher line, with the wrecking crew of Austerians in Europe, and with the current nosedrip discourse of the moderate Dems. These Dems think that alternatives to the most expensive and aggressively unequal healthcare system in all the “freeworld” are just no-goes. They think the billionaires actually made their billions – instead of having their billions made for them by the workers, in the traditional way. They think actually doing something about climate change disaster – doing something that isn’t a mild carbon tax – is undo-able, cause where are we gonna get the money?

The no alternative line goes back to the end of history line in the nineties. In those days, with the wall down (which made Iggy Pop want to sing Louie Louie), oil prices low,and shock therapy turning a totalitarian communist state into a funloving mafia state, specializing in exporting prostitutes and oil, neoliberalism was celebrating its springtime. Its pamphleteer and poet,  Tom Friedman, came up with one of an image struck out of the poetry of the business inspirational racket (which is the only poetry acceptable under neo-liberalism): the golden straightjacket. Friedman was quite enthused about the triumph of democracy everywhere, as long as democracy didn’t go overboard and put power in the hands of the people. To prevent this, God gave us central bankers and Milton Friedman. Neo-liberalism, back then, advertised itself as so realistic that we all had to eat it every day and every night and never ever dream we had a choice. It dreamed of a world in which there was infinitely increasing returns on investment (oh, what joy to live in the Information age!) and the business cycle was road kill.  But road kill reanimated and pissed all over the New Economy in 2001. Still, for six years the pretense held that a credit system that indebted a population that engrossed none of the increase in productivity that they actually created could replace what used to be called, quaintly, a “raise”. Until the house turned out to be bankrupt, and the elites had to scurry about in 2008-2010, doing what they do: using the power of the government to prop up the power of capital. Or, in populist terms, the state chose to simply give the upper .01 percent throughout the developed world hundreds of billions of dollars. They did not chose to give the 99 percent money – no, the 99 percent were assured that they were making distant money, since their pension funds and other investments (which represented a pathetic substitute for the retirement that social democracy used to hold out)  would eke their way across the bleak landscape, as long as we could foreclose on the losers, lower those labor costs even more, and hike up the price of social goods.

            In Europe at the moment, we are definitely on the edge of a recession. After the mildest lift possible, after the great shortfalls and stumbles of the 2008-2012 period. In fact, if money had flowed like Keynesian wine back then there would actually be more employment, more productivity, and more satisfaction with life than there is now, when there isn’t a satisfied population in sight: pissed off is the new black. The no alternative world is looking shabbier every day. And when the shabbiness is questioned, the same chorus answers: we owe so much money! In fact, tons of fake money are owed all the way around. But in this time of little faith, people are beginning to ask who they owe  the money to, and why. That is, why did the elite which led us into the no alternative cul de sac make the choices it did; and why the choices, when they all went to shit, had no effect on… the elite.

personalism and the left: Morales and the coup

If we look at the Left from the the perspective of a 120 years, one anomaly really stands out: the curious case of personalism.

I’ve been thinking of the “cult of personality”since Evo Morales fled Bolivia. Of course, what the right is doing in Bolivia is a coup. There’s no doubt that the right has long sought to make Morales, a democratically elected president, into a ‘dictator” figure, something that is then pawned off on a compliant press in the U.S. and Europe.

What was “dictatorial” was Morales attempt to more justly distribute economic gains. Bolivia, unlike other primary products countries, has had a remarkable growth trajectory over the past 14 years, since he has been in office. His record is in shining contrast with his privatizing predecessors.

However, the real mark of political success, that is, the emplacement of a party that can robustly represent the interests of the workers, is structural. Here, Morales, like so many leftist leaders (one thinks of Castro and Chavez) has miserably failed. When he went into exile in Mexico, it was a loss for the Left. However, it wasn’t a loss for the programs he had nurtured. That loss, politically, came about because his vice president, Álvaro García Linera,  also resigned. In fact, all those in Morales’ party who were in line to become president resigned, thus leaving the post to a far right Christian,  Jeanine Anez.

A question has been lost in the reports about this coup-ish transition of power: why did the officials from the Movement toward Socialism party – the MAS – resign?

My opinion is: they resigned because Morales fled. They were more loyal to Morales than to Bolivia. This is what personalism is about.

Of course, it is an old story. When Lenin came to power in 1918, there was already abundant evidences of a cult. Lenin himself was an adroit politician, and surely thought of the cult as a tactic for imposing Bolshevik rule on Russia. It is, though, a dangerous tactic, with a tendency to take over the program entirely. When Lenin died, there was, briefly, an interval in which the party seemed to retract from the total monopolization of the political space – but this moment quickly ended. It was a moment attached, in true personalist style, to Trotsky, who lost to Stalin. Stalin’s personality cult was modeled on Lenin’s and Trotsky’s.

The more Bolivia descends, predictably, into a chaos that brings out the army and a decade of rightwing repression, the more one should think about the costs of personalism – and resist it. Because it sacrifices real advances for the working class to romanticism and a rather skewed individualism, with the individual being the leader.

autofiction and the prime of Muriel Spark

Write what you know is the advice of the writing class. Write about who you know is the mantra of the gossip column. Surely these two maxims are meant to meet – and the meet will be cute.

The name for it now is “auto-fiction”. Its great predecessor, always wheeled out to impress the rubes, is Proust. And who can deny that the Marcel of In Search of Past Time bears a striking similarity to that man in the cork lined room at the end of the line, caught in his web of words?

There’s an amusing story in the New York Times about the autofiction feuds of Norway. Norway is the featured country at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, and this has produced a thin stream of stories surveying the literary scene in that country of 5 and a half million people. Not a lot of people up there, clustered around the fjords, but there are many writers, including international star Knausgaard, the king of auto-fiction if there is one. The story is, thank God, not another warm-over of the Knausgaard story, but instead features a  bookish shootout going on between two sisters, one of whom wrote an auto-fiction about growing up with an abusive father and the other of whom responded with a novel about growing up with an abusive drunk for a sister. In other words, look who’s talking.

One year after the publication of her novel “Will and Testament,” the Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth was at home with her two daughters when she received a surprising email. Hjorth’s widely read 2016 book, which tells the story of an Oslo woman who accuses her father of sexually assaulting her as a child, and which was seemingly inspired by elements of Hjorth’s own life, had spurred a debate in Norway about the ethics of adapting real events into fiction.

The email informed her that her younger sister, Helga Hjorth, was publishing a novel of her own. The sister’s book focused on a woman whose life was upended by the release of a dishonest sibling’s autobiographical novel, and seemed to be an answer to “Will and Testament.”

“The older sister in that novel is an awful human being, very cruel, narcissistic, alcoholic, psychopathic,” Vigdis Hjorth, 60, said in a recent interview. “And, you know, as bad as she was, I thought, ‘This is good for me.’”

This is good for me – that’s the spirit! All of this is extremely pleasing to my current mood. I’ve just finished Loitering with Intent, a Muriel Spark novel that skates circles around the auto-fiction device before it even wore that name. It is, if you will, a meta-auto-fiction, a tendril from the great root of Don Quixote, in which, as is well known, Don Quixote has to struggle with the fake Don Quixote conjured up by some other author after Cervantes had published the first volume of the work. That characters walk abroad in this world is no news to novelists, but is a perpetual surprise to journalists. While she was writing the novel, Spark said in an interview that it “sort of sums up my life”. She didn’t say it was autobiographical however: the summing up of a life comes in different disguises, as every tax accountant knows.

I’d put Loitering with Intent on the shelf with At Swim-Two-Birds – they form incongruent counterparts, like the left and right hand. 

The rest is at willettsmag. 

cancelling excitement culture

I have lately been feeling pity for the word “excite”. The origin of the word is respectable, and even stuffy – from cite, or move, come forth. Cite appears in English first, as a legal term: a summons. Excite is a summoning too, but one that was connotatively associated with the body. When I learned French in high school, one of the things we were told that made us giggle is not to use “excite” in French, since it was vaguely sexual – a summoning of the libido.

To me, as an American, exciting is associated with more innocent things, or at least libidinously compensatory activities. “Isn’t this exciting” was inevitably ironic, for high schoolers. It was the type of thing the Sunday School teacher said about some dreary game meant to amuse us and edify us biblically.

Exciting still carried that whiff of the bogus, that eyeroll quotation marks, into the eighties. But at some point – perhaps when business schools overtook the humanities as the degree of choice – exciting was revived, a gadget for the new age of Babbitry. It was not only revived, but it started its march towards omnipresence. You could not announce you were taking a dump without saying that you were “very excited by the opportunity to take this dump.” If you were freelancing, and you have, as you must, a twitter account, you must always announce your feeblest initiative by saying how excited you were by it. Trevor Noah, for instance, wants you to know that he is “excited to announce my new 2020 tour dates!” Just to announce the dates! As a tv personality, you would think that he would be a bit blasé, but not Trevor. Bill Gates is “excited” about everything: about Boston Mills new “innovations” in steel production, about technology to “fix” flaws in photosynthesis (a big agro-business moneymaker that is “exciting” because it will, of course, help “poor people”), he’s excited all over the place about innovation. Anybody who has anything to announce nowadays – that they are taking a job or quitting a job, that they are going to school or just that they are one degree above comatose – must be “excited” to announce it. They are never sad, or indifferent; they are never simply announcing, telling, whispering, purring, etc. No, they are always excited. We live in a population that is carbonated on excitement, with bubbles of excitement entering their blood stream every second. You can hardly nail us down – so much are we jumping for joy.

All this excitement leads to a curious letdown feeling, in actuality. It is as if we have exhausted surprise itself, and nothing is exciting, since everything is. I do not deal in predictions, since I am so bad at them, but still, I’m excited to announce that I think excitement is about to take a turn for the less frequent. In the future, people will not be excited to announce anything. They will be, perhaps, ecstatic, orgasmic, or on the edge of their chairs; they will be cool, they will be beady eyed, they will be stoic, they will be anything but excited. This might seem impossible. It might seem like excitement and excited are set in stone, and that the seven habits of highly excitable people will follow us to the flooding of the coastal cities and beyond. But change is possible!

And I’m so excited about it!