“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris
I believe it was Num Skole who first debased a perfectly straightforward (if not to everyone's taste) concept, well worked out, called "the public sphere," by calling it "the public square."
(Num Skole is my anagram of a well known very irritating person.)
You've lost a dimension there, pal, in more ways than one.
So when I read this in The Guardian:
"Skye Perryman and her progressive coalition are preparing to fight in court and in the public square against Project 2025 and other foes"
I don't want to read further.
The degradation of a philosophical concept to a pseudo-empirical image of a town square is ... really depressing.
And town squaresvery much what we don't have, with people yelling insults at one another at light speed without consequence.
Of course I was never ever so fond of the "public sphere" theory, preferring to use less geometrically hierarchical terms such as milieu. Squares have a front and a back and a center and edges; I guess spheres just have centers and edges so they're up on the deal but whatever.
One Foucault scholar I remember mistook a translation of "milieu" as "sphere" as a Foucauldian Deep Thing about the geometry of social space, with predictably meaningless results. It was to say the least disillusioning to fact check the original French, live, while they were speaking.
Suffice it to say, I really hate "public square." It's right up there with "deliverables."
Media is full of it now. And it's BS. It's designed to divide us, and we need solidarity like never before. It's an easy "elite" versus "popular," mapped onto "middle class" versus "working" class, mapped yet more sinisterly onto "Black" versus "white." As if anti-racism were expendable in an emergency.
The immaturity of some leftists in the USA as they eagerly contribute to this "debate" is staggering.
So here's Timothy Snyder laying it down very very nicely for you:
Isn't the new cover just great? I mean, really great?
That's Julian of Norwich's hazelnut. I got fed up of the Blue Marble and Earthrise. In fact I spoke to NASA on the subject with Pharrell Williams in 2016. If you ask me, that Blue Marble (and furthermore that Pale Blue Dot) are sadistic images, conjuring an evil gaze from the viewpoint of a total vacuum, indifferent to or oblivious of or contemptuous of terrestrial affairs. The point is the "universe of harmony" (Shelley), a common trope in the literature of the radical Enlightenment that boosted the white supremacist concept "Man."
Much better is Julian's vision, in which God placed in her hand a hazelnut, telling her it was everything that ever was, is or could be. Has a sense of humor for a kickoff. Just look at this lovely new cover. It's much more multidimensional than that Blue Marble. And there's a necessary spiritual or even mystical element in there.
The book contains all new material for us poor Americans. It was supposed to be for us, but I got so busy when the book came out, mostly with two hyperobjects exhibitions, I didn't have time to promote it right. So I'm incredibly grateful to Beth Clevenger and the MIT team for redoing it with me.
The country, nay the world, are the grip of a highly contagious personality disorder that spreads from anti-charismatic leaders such as Donald Trump and affects how we think, how we behave, even if and when we are thinking and behaving in a way to oppose the guy. Think of how the mainstream media has totally failed us. Think of the narcissistic self-attack on the left.
Bandy Lee, fired by Yale for speaking out about Donald Trump--silenced also by the mainstream media but enjoying a massive resurgence thanks to Anthony Davis and the Meidas crew (more of whom in the next post), is someone you should pay attention to.
Not just for understanding and defeating Trump, but for a vision aligned with mine on how to live the hyperobject: how to manage in a world of politics and culture at planet scale.
She's made not many, but enough, posts on her own site since the election, and this is a really good one that she's just released. She's been talking about the danger of Trump to our individual and collective psyches for years, and has had brilliant ideas for how to cope and deal with and confront the difficulties.
How come? She's a psychiatrist who deals with manipulative psychopaths of Rikers Island. If you can do that, you can See Things. Watch it, most definitely:
Mercy-wear: “I won't hurt you,” an orientation to the future
In Hell I argue that COVID and Black Lives Matter (simultaneous!) are (not just were) planet-scale political awareness being born. Living the hyperobject. Elad Nehorai has written something very important about this.
I feel them. You feel them. Others feel them but they might not know. The might not grok the magnitude. “Structure of feeling” is an under-theorized Marxist concept in the work of Raymond Williams which I have sharpened in my recent work to mean proto-ideology, ideology (how we live our world) from the future. Black Lives Matter and the concurrent COVID vibes were and are structures of feeling that literally shaped or structured how people voted. Around the world, people threw out existing governments in the wake of COVID.
This essay, recommended by erstwhile NAACP LDF director Sherilyn Ifill, really really gets to this. Ifill has penned the most significant essays on why Kamala lost of all, so if she's recommending something, it's good. Period.
Read this and then watch what I also take to be a related and very important approach, that of Bandy Lee and her World Mental Health Coalition, which I'll embed next.
Here are links to my reading of Ifill's brilliant essays:
I thank my friend Andy Wilson for helping me think about this these last couple of days.
The Deeper Reasons Democrats Lost by Elad Nehorai
It wasn't just that Trump got more votes. It wasn't just that Harris had lower turnout. A deep dive into the psychological, existential, and systemic reasons Harris and Democrats didn't win in 2024.
Two days before Thanksgiving, Texas Governor Greg Abbott jetted around deep South Texas to brag about his border security bonanza and pose for pictures with soon-to-be federal deportation czar Tom Homan, as the two served National Guard members and state troopers turkey, bread rolls, and cranberry sauce out of cafeteria-style containers. For the agencies of the soldiers and police, this was the fourth Thanksgiving of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star.
Before the grub, Abbott and Homan served up a generous helping of anti-immigrant bravado inside an Edinburg aircraft hangar.
“This is an unprecedented attack on our country,” Abbott said, misleadingly portraying immigrants as criminal invaders. “There’s help on the way, help unlike what any of y’all have ever, ever seen before,” he said, as Homan stood behind him, dressed in an olive-green windbreaker decorated with a Punisher skull patch bearing his surname. “The cavalry is here.”
As this so-called cavalry—the massive immigration crackdown pledged by President-elect Donald Trump—arrives, a question has emerged for Texas taxpayers. For the last decade, state Republicans have flooded the Texas-Mexico divide with border security spending, but could the financial tide finally turn under Trump 2.0?
Tom Homan at the November event (Francesca D’Annunzio)
Abbott has signaled willingness, once the incoming administration ramps up its own border militarization, to cut security expenditures under Operation Lone Star, the governor’s $11 billion multi-agency border scheme. At a press conference last month, he told reporters that Trump will provide Texas the opportunity to redirect funds: “It could be for education, it could be for property tax cuts and sending it back to the people in the state of Texas,” Abbott said, as reported by the Dallas Morning News.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick echoed the same sentiment in a WFAA-TV interview last month. “We’re going to be able to take a lot of that money now and put it back to our taxpayers, for roads, for water, for education, for health care,” he said.
But some doubt that will happen, or hope it won’t. Operation Lone Star has boosted the budgets of local law enforcement agencies, and it has proved especially popular with leaders in smaller, rural counties, where cops have to serve communities across large swaths of land, police budgets are more modest, and local governments have more difficulty bringing in revenue.
Roy Boyd, the sheriff of Goliad County, which sits about halfway between Laredo and Houston, is one such leader who opposes cuts to border security spending. He has his eyes set on policing projects beyond the borderlands.
“If we secure the borders and fail to secure the interior, we will have wasted our time and treasure,” Boyd told the Texas Observer.
Boyd, a Republican, is the chair of a multi-county drug interdiction task force named after and funded by Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, which now foots some of Goliad’s bill for major expenses like personnel costs. Using border security funds, Boyd said his office employs five deputies who largely focus on “investigative services specifically directed at transnational criminal organization activities.” His deputies do this work not only in Goliad, Boyd told the Observer, but for any of the 52 member agencies of the Operation Lone Star Task Force when asked. Not only does Operation Lone Star fund personnel, but it has paid for surveillance tech too: Last year, Boyd’s department acquired a software that can track cell phone locations without a warrant, which he said the department uses for drug and human trafficking investigations.
Some Democratic sheriffs feel the same, in part because their departments also benefit from the influx of border cash. Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber, whose jurisdiction has been the crown jewel of Operation Lone Star and been thrust into the international spotlight over the growing militarization of Eagle Pass, does not want to see changes to Operation Lone Star funding. If Texas cuts border security spending, Schmerber said, “It’s not very good news for me.”
Some opponents of Texas’ ballooning border security industrial complex would support a spending decrease—but they’re skeptical.Agency appropriations requests and bills filed ahead of the 2025 legislative session, two experts told the Observer, suggest Texas is unlikely to actually slow down.
“Judging from the bills filed as is, we’re going to spend an enormous amount of money on so-called ‘border security’ efforts,” said Jaime Puente, director of economic opportunity at the progressive think tank Every Texan.
The governor is asking lawmakers for roughly $3 billion for Operation Lone Star over the next biennium, mostly for building border barriers and migrant busing operations, according to his office’s legislative appropriations request. “Until the border is secured by the federal government, the Office of the Governor believes that overall funding for border security should not be decreased,” his office wrote in the request. “During the 89th Legislative Session, the Office looks forward to the Legislature weighing in during robust conversations on how to best keep Texans safe as we work together to determine the necessary funding to achieve this paramount mission.”
The Department of Public Safety (DPS) and the Texas Military Department (TMD) are the two main agencies at the forefront of Operation Lone Star. In its current appropriation request, DPS is asking for around $1.5 billion for “OLS and Trooper Deployment” and “Border Transportation.” TMD is requesting about $2.3 billion for “State Active Duty – Disaster,” which is the funding source used for Operation Lone Star. TMD did not respond to an Observer request for comment.
Altogether, these requests would amount to a similar or greater level of border security spending than what legislators budgeted in the previous biennium.
Plus, significantly cutting spending wouldn’t make sense for Republicans’ goals, Puente said: Texas has already built up a massive infrastructure for border policing and mass deportations. “For the time being, at least in this upcoming legislative session, I do not expect the governor or members of the House Appropriations or Senate Finance [committees], budget writers, to back off at all on what they have already planned, what they’ve already been doing for so-called border security,” Puente said.
Homan poses for a selfie. (Francesca D’Annunzio)
Abbott’s Operation Lone Star came on the heels of other border security spending spikes in Texas. Over roughly the last decade, these outlays increased ninefold. And, over the course of the first Trump administration, this spending only increased.
“Operation Lone Star has always been about politics for Gov. Abbott, not about solutions. The project has been a billion-dollar strain on our state for years with few verifiable results,” state representative Armando Walle, a Democrat from Houston, told the Observer in a written statement.
“I’m not optimistic about the future of border spending under another Trump Presidency, but I hope that next session appropriators and legislators in the state Legislature are able to work on common sense solutions and provide resources to the local governments and community organizations in our border counties.”
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...It's not just the perfect storm of rich and famous and chip on shoulder. It's not just the pathology that resembles a corporation's psychopathic narcissistic nastiness.
It's the fact that T came out of the TV like a demon in Twin Peaks.
The only real opponent strong enough to beat him would be a cartoon character like Bugs Bunny.
If we could get Bugs Bunny out of the tv and into this world he would have a chance. "He don't know me vewy well" ZONK BANG BONK CLAMP
A character from African legend mediated by American cartoon world would do it
Trump is cartoon like, like the Thing. He can reconstitute ...
No one should ever feel bad they or someone they supported didn't succeed in defeating him.
I was confused for a while. (Talking pure aesthetics here, the nonsense level, not policies etc: whoever controls the nonsense controls the world.) Kamala clearly came out of the disco and that first meme of her as Eowen ("I am no man") convinced me. Disco could beat tv.
!!! Thank you to Lexi, the family genealogist. And in celebration of that fact, here's friend Seamus Perry in conversation with Mark Ford about his work.
So much to say. I teach him all the time. “Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist.” For a Jesuit this is not bad at all: “it is a dreadful thing for the greatest and most necessary part of a very rich nation to live a hard life without dignity, knowledge, comforts, delight, or hopes in the midst of plenty—which plenty they make...”
And my next 101 class (What Is a Fact?) now has 48 students in it! I'm so pleased.
This term it was my how to read literature class (Prosody Narrative Drama) and an undergraduate ecology and culture class. Next term will be the graduate version!
It's a wondrous text in its own right, the kind of thing that you'll want to read whether or not you read my book:
Retipped Arrows of Desire (Vala Redux) by Andy Wilson
My review of Tim Morton's Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, from the recently published Vala #5, journal of The Blake Society. You can download Vala #5 here.
I've trying to figure this film out, compulsively, since 2012. I can't tell you the sense of relief as it finally slotted into place. I had to create Christian ecology to figure it out. There's no way I could've done this 12 years ago.
I must confess I hated what I saw as the bleak anthropocentric nihilism of the film. Good news. It doesn't really exist.
I'm going to be writing and lecturing about this for ages.
As a survivor I see art as weird potentially dangerous beings that I have to figure out. Interpretation is a compulsion not a choice, like for Doctor House.
The Devil as Pop Star: My Dad's Favorite Character in His Favorite Film
Listen up good, said the son of a very handsome and compelling psychopath who was in movies and hypnotized his kids: THE DEMOCRATS AND KAMALA did NOTHING wrong.
Listen up. Stop the self attack. Stop it. This is narcissistic self attack based on, the abusive father is harder to attack than oneself. Trust me. My dad was a handsome compelling psychopath and was in movies and in a massive crime syndicate. (The Kray Twins.)
Bernie--shut the eff up. No one screwed up by not talking to class (instead of gender and race) enough. You tried that already. The Communists tried it already in 1933. Guess what happened. It's BECAUSE of this very fact--that you don't see that race and gender are FOUNDATIONAL--that you and others screw up against this stuff.
Listen, like my dad his followers got slightly abused (or a lot) as by a pick up artists and the horrible thing is, because of patriarchy and white supremacy and punching down, they LIKED it. Sadism.
So don't do it. DON'T. Liam, don't. It's masochistic self-loathing which is what got us INTO this jam. What always does.
If my dad had been rich and had a TV show HE would now be the most successful dictator ever. He's the most successful ever, now, isn't he?
Kamala found the RIGHT chemicals. She DID propaganda. It WAS effective. Dancing, joy, humor, smile, Tim Walz's truck.
But by then, WWF media with its ableist fetish (hence Biden is a loser) had messed us up. And America is fascist-ready (Adorno). And the Civil War. And we were already a concentration camp (slavery).
So DO NOT for one frickin SECOND do this attack thing to yourself and other people. Stop it. STOP IT.
It is on occasions like these that I remember why Ripley is my favorite, as she is Kamala's.
My friend whose mom was a terrible and terrifying NPD was crying on my phone on the night saying she must be stupid and naive. This is what this does.
He's a gigantic MADMAN with a tv show and lots and lots of money.
Hey, stop it--I saw you about to chew your own arm off there.
Fun fact: Bernie was the first person to yell "All lives matter!" -- a stupid mistake that was instinctive given his prejudice that class underpins race and gender (hint from theory class: it's the other way around, jerk). This was the slogan the right used to hurt us, shortly after. But it was BERNIE who yelled it first. How freaking dare you, one day after she loses to that monster.
