Songs in the Key of Life

Please don't try to be "right" about what's happening. If some people are shocked and you think that's uncool, I'm afraid you have to let those people look uncool to you and let them go through the shock, which is a necessary stage of figuring out what is *actually happening.

Please let us not eat each other, my left buddies. Labour in the UK almost destroyed itself that way after Brexit. 

Please don't talk about this in the key of guilt. Guilt is a substitute for thought and guilt makes this be all about individuals and "choices." But it isn't. 

We all have to get over the agricultural religions in our heads (yes they are still there, especially when we say to ourselves that they aren't). These religions promote competitions about whose big bad god is bigger and badder. 

Or whose critique is bigger and badder. 

Or whose paralyzing cynical reason is stronger. 

There's only one thing to do, right now. Forge a massive, unstoppable counter-force using the readily available solidarity that is part of the symbiotic air we breathe. 

Everything else is irrelevant or harmful. 

*****

Without doubt, the counter-force is automatically affiliated with nonhumans at this point--symbiosis like I'm saying--so it would be best to be conscious of that too.

*****

The only reason Britain didn't go Nazi in the 1930s is because people like my grandfather fought the Blackshirts in the Cable Street riots, getting trampled by the police horses. No one wasted a second on pimping their guilt.

*****

As anyone who likes Deleuze and Guattari should know, what they transmit of Theweleit's Crowds and Power is that the initial accurate reaction, as capitalism metastasized into nazism in the 1930s, is "I can't believe they're getting away with it." Jews were shocked. Non-Jews were shocked. 

There has been an outrageous, obscene rip in social space. 

Don't make the paralysis worse by making anyone feel guilty. The point is to experience the shock and then start to move.