Our final reward
In the waiting room
Consider supporting media that doesn't lie to you.
None of my favorite podcasts know yet.
What a strange feeling this is. This sort of purgatory.
No that's not the correct term. Purgatory is at least meant to be temporary. A place where those who have died in a state of grace are purified before moving on to their final reward. We never lived in grace in the first place and in any case this is all moving in the opposite direction. The whole thing tipped upside down. An interregnum before punishment.
We're going to receive our final something I imagine I just don't know exactly what it is yet.
Maybe it's purgatory in the Lost sense. No one knows what the fuck is going to happen next but everyone sure has a theory on how we got here and what it all means.
One of the many reasons I never really liked being a newspaper columnist – besides being made to always fight with your left arm tied behind your back – and one of the main reasons this newsletter has never come out on a set schedule is that sometimes there is nothing new to say. Indeed today I have nothing new to say besides what I have always said and which I will say once again. But when you are lashed to the mast of a routine publishing or TV time slot schedule on the other hand you must necessarily produce something that at least seems new. You must always be saying something. Saying it with confidence. And so we have been subjected to ten thousand election postmortems delivered by people who have determined the real culprit in this loss. People like these fucking Democrat hacks who – as Jack Mirkinson writes – "have simply invented an alternate universe out of thin air" in which the chief reason for Kamala Harris' loss was her supposed left wing campaign.
You and I are not paid to lie nor are we paid to raise money to lose elections every few years in perpetuity we are just some guy so naturally this reads to us as patently absurd nonsense. Indeed "Kamala Harris ran as right-wing a campaign as any Democrat in living memory" Mirkinson writes.
I can't believe I felt an iota of shame this past week. How great it must be to walk through the world unencumbered by anything resembling a conscience like most of these guys do.
He goes on:
For instance, this is what “Democratic strategist” Julie Roginsky told the network:
"When we are too afraid to say that “Hey, college kids, if you’re trashing a campus of Columbia University because you aren’t happy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning, that that is unacceptable.” But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we don’t know what to say."
That quote landed so well that Maureen Dowd cribbed it for her Sunday New York Times column. But, again, there’s a problem: the world in which Democrats shied away from criticizing student protesters does not exist.
In the real world, Democrats relentlessly attacked the Gaza campus protests. The White House said that Columbia students were engaging in “hate speech” and condemned their occupation of campus buildings. Biden warned that “dissent must never lead to disorder.” His press secretary compared the protests to the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville and defended the crackdown on the encampments. And Democratic officials across the country happily sent police onto campuses, where they crushed the encampments with brutal force.
You aren’t happy about "some sort of policy."
I do believe that had Harris run the supposed lefty campaign that they have invented for her she would have won. I could be wrong of course. Who knows anything! But it has become clear that running as Republican-light does not do anything to pull in wayward Republican voters because they already have a party of their own called the Republicans. It would be like the Yankees striking out on purpose every game in order to win over Red Sox fans. (Which they should do by the way.) What their campaign did as best as I can tell is demoralize voters on the left and infrequent voters who might have been activated by promises to improve their lives materially and also – this is very important – by someone telling them repeatedly over and over that they plan to do so. You could even lie about it if you wanted to! Trump sure does. Yet they couldn't even bring themselves to do that.
As a result both groups seem to have reacted to the campaign's indifference with a resounding "Fuck me? No fuck you."
I know I said no one knows anything but I do know this and I swear to you that it is true:
A better world than this is possible.
There is enough to go around and no one needs to suffer or go without as they so routinely do.
This is further what I believe:
Every single person by default deserves a home and healthcare and an education and a job that pays them enough to live and enjoy leisure and equal rights and dignity and safety regardless of gender or race or birthplace and an end to the perpetual war machine and I'm so fucking sick of being told this is radical by my supposed coalition partners.
Unfortunately there is currently no party in the United States who also believe in this self-evidently moral but also politically viable worldview. Instead we have professional Democrats once again blaming the left for their own failure as Adam Johnson writes:
Understandably, the blame game for who was responsible for this collapse is quickly underway. But, just like with the post 2016 recriminations, the very same people driving the narrative of who is responsible are themselves largely responsible — or at least in and of the same media and political class as those who are. As a result, with rare exception, those being blamed are not Democratic Party elites, liberal media institutions, or the corporate consulting world they operate in—but outside economic forces, transgender people, immigrants, and a host of either powerless minority groups or vague-to-the-point-of-meaningless generalities.
Put another way: the name of the game for the top Democratic brass is shifting the blame from the powerful to the powerless and whoever comes up with the most ass covering, vaguely plausible scapegoat wins this week’s spin cycle.
...
That Democrats are bleeding working-class voters from all demographics is indisputable, so a guilty party has to be found. Obviously the solution cannot be a sustained discussion of economic left populism, as this would challenge the class interests of donors and corporate consultants. So the only culprits that will be discussed in our discourse, again fueled by the very same people responsible for the historic collapse, will be “headwinds,” faceless cohorts of voters who we are told can’t have their minds changed, and vulnerable groups without the political or economic power to defend themselves.
Gabriel Winant explains this all very well in one of the best post-election autopsies I've read yet:
In our time, there are entrenched institutional liberal forces, not only in formal politics but in the universities, the press, the legal system, the nonprofit sector, and even the corporate world, that intone the threat Trumpism poses to democracy and the rule of law, yet work every day to defeat their own internal left-wing challengers: student protests, labor struggles, “woke excesses.” When they raid encampments (student or unhoused) or bust unions, they do Trump’s work for him, remaking Americans in authoritarian ways. The phenomenon that Trump represents can only be defeated when liberal institutionalists cease trying to quash the insurgent left in the name of protecting democracy, and instead look to it as an ally and a source of strength. This is not because the ideas of the left already represent a suppressed silent majority—a fantastical, self-flattering delusion—but because it is only the left that has a coherent vision to offer against the ideas of the right.
Eoin Higgins was good too:
Cleaning house doesn’t appear to be on the agenda, at least not yet. Facing down the danger of an ascendant far-right Republican Party, Democrats are throwing the most marginalized members of their coalition under the bus. The reason for this is two-fold: inherent reactionary politics just under the surface for most liberals and the iron law of institutions. The reactionary politics are self-explanatory; faced with catastrophe, people tend to withdraw and indulge their most fear-based, angry politics.
But the iron law of institutions — Jon Schwarz’s idea that people in power within institutions will act primarily to protect their position at the expense of the institution — is the exact type of loser mentality that has brought us to this point. You can see it in how Democratic thought leaders are flailing around to attack whatever marginalized group they can rather than face up to internal failures, and how they would rather blame powerless political factions like the Green Party instead of looking at the sclerotic party leadership that brought us to this point.
And sorry to relitigate this – we have as you know been cursed to live inside of an eternal 2016 – Bernie Sanders gets it as well:
And what do the Democrats have to say about the crises facing working families? What is their full-throated explanation, pounded away day after day in the media, in the halls of Congress, and in town meetings throughout the country as to why tens of millions of workers, in the richest country on earth, are struggling to put food on the table or pay the rent? Where is the deeply felt outrage that we are the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care for all as a human right while insurance and drug companies make huge profits?
How do they explain supporting billions of dollars in military aid to the right-wing extremist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has created an unprecedented humanitarian disaster in Gaza that is causing massive malnutrition and starvation for thousands of children?
In my view, the Democrats lost this election because they ignored the justified anger of working class America and became the defenders of a rigged economic and political system.
Bernie obviously repeats himself over and over again because what he says is the truth and the truth is worth screaming until we are blue in the face. People are getting fucked. You are getting fucked. Trump can say this as well – we know he obviously doesn't actually care – but people hear him saying so and it resonates with them because it is inspiring to hear something true. They are in fact getting fucked. He and his class are the ones doing the fucking sure but much like how Democrats couldn't hammer him on his Jeffrey Epstein friendship because then they'd have to take a look at Bill Clinton most Democrat politicians can't reliably use this message because so many of their donors still want to be able to get in on the fucking.
Instead we get this period of waiting. This fear. Unsure of the specifics of the hell that awaits us in the near future but also apparently without anyone even willing to do anything about it. No elected party coming to save us or put up more than a perfunctory fight. No one but ourselves. And we will save ourselves. It just may be a little longer wallowing here in the abyss than we had planned.
Oh man speaking of centrist left-punching turds here's the first laugh I've had in a while.
lol. lmao
It is Kurt Vonnegut's birthday and Veterans' Day (yesterday when I wrote this actually) which used to be called Armistice Day as he wrote in Breakfast of Champions:
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.
He returned to the subject in the 1991 collection Fates Worse Than Death :
On the subject of how casual technology had made us about war, I should have called attention to the transmogrification of my birthday, November 11, from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. When I was a boy, all human activity in Indianapolis (except for fucking, I suppose) stopped for one minute. That was the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that same minute back in 1918 when World War I stopped.
(It wouldn’t start up again until 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, or maybe in 1931, when the Japanese occupied Manchuria. What a mess!) On Armistice Day, children used to be told how horrible war was, how shameful and heartbreaking, which was right. The proper way to commemorate any war would be to paint ourselves blue and roll in the mud and grunt like pigs.
But in 1945, Armistice Day became Veterans Day, and by the time I was preaching in St. John’s, the message of November 11 was that there were going to be lots more wars, and that we were ready for them this time (were we ever!), and that not just boys but girls, too, should want to grow up to be veterans (don’t be left out!).
Vonnegut repeated himself a lot too but he also happened to be saying things that are true.
I guess I must have been influenced by him for this line in one of good old Hell Worlds:
Luke O’Neil
Back over by the flags large groups of tourists were posing for selfies and taking pictures to post to Instagram so people would know that they had been there to see a symbol of something. There was a merry-go-round spinning right next to the flags and the kids on it all seemed happy waving their little arms around like bugs riding a horse.
What do you caption a selfie in front of a sea of death metaphors?
The flags look beautiful I have to admit but I don’t know why we make war memorials look good they should look terrible. Each of those flags is supposed to represent a noble spirit ascending to Valhalla or whatever but it’s really 37,000 individual deaths in the wet mud. A war memorial should be a guy with his guts hanging out crying for his mother or a guy without a leg getting denied mental health services at the VA.
If you want to read a piece I did on the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis a few years ago here it is.
Luke O’Neil
I shared this one the other day on Blusky – you should sign up and follow me there it's getting quite good! – and people really liked it so might as well toss it back in here for people who never read it. One of my favorite short stories from ACWF.
Luke O’Neil
How after you cry for an hour or two over a loss and then are like alright cut the shit. This caring isn’t going to thwart a single thing. Not one single thing will change due to this caring. www.welcometohellworld.com/the-harvest/
— Luke O'Neil (@lukeoneil47.bsky.social) 2024-11-10T23:23:37.555Z
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OK see ya later buddy! We're gonna be ok. Right?