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For those keeping track, this is where I started laughing out loud.

“I resent my own humanity and don’t feel anything real anymore,” one “starter pack” meme reads above a collage of White Claw, Xanax, vapes, succulents and streaming-platform logos.

DGMW: It’s a wonderful article (I’m not finished yet, but it’s a really good take on Oblomovism-in-America) which thinks hard, from a lot of angles, about the tendency (the author claims it’s a tendency – I’m not so sure), under the unrelenting stimulation of consumer capitalism, to pull away into no sensation, few possessions, the thinnest sort of personhood, nothingness… But when I got to this sentence, which rolled up into a little ball all the latest ennui products PLUS a Dostoevskian Girl Scout pledge (I promise to do my best to resent my humanity and feel nothing, so help me God.), I sorta lost it.

But let’s see… Let’s see what else this essay, which appears in the fat glossy New York Times Sunday Magazine, awash in splashy double-page ads for gigantic apartments in gated waterfront communities, has to say.

It says that a pandemicky insurrectiony landscape has driven us inward, escapeward, and we are using the free time to meditate on the meaninglessness of all things.

****************

Me, I see it as a much simpler panic-response to L’Age du Trump — Trump, who embodies the apotheosis of grasping, grandiose consumer capitalism.

Grotesquely fat, grotesquely tall, and obsessed with tallness, hebephrenically acquisitive, a vapid psychotic braggart with a tall vapid clotheshorse cantering alongside him, the Late Builder (let’s call him) assortatively mated with a skyscraper in order to produce a super-skyscraper. In the ironic way of well-laid plans, he made an almost seven foot tall teenager. Similarly, Trump wanted world-historical power and got slow hours on golf courses in the blinding sun, followed by regal waves to gatherings of the insane and stupid at Florida intersections. Anyone would be horrified by this fate, and much of America, as the NYT essay rightly notes, is sprinting, horrified, in the opposite direction.

Even the Mar-a-Lago membership is skedaddling from Ma and Pa Ubu’s palace.

Trump neatly, fully, in a chilling, cautionary way, conveys that wanting shit is stupid (our mad loathed Trumps du jour, Cruz and Hawley, want shit), so people don’t want shit. Even Trump’s exemplar and bromantic partner, Putin, might be beginning to understand this, as photos of his palace complex on the Black Sea appear in the Russian press and rouse the populace (see 1917).

One reason I doubt the whole NYT thesis has to do with something the author doesn’t mention – all them dogs everyone’s getting. In the last year, rates of dog ownership have gone through the woof. And unlike no-maintenance succulents, dogs are way-high maintenance, and I mean emotional as well as logistical. It’s only one trend, to be sure, but you can probably think of others equally at odds with existential/affective minimalism.

Anyway. My faith in my country’s earnest godly greed – the very foundation of the America dream – remains strong. You don’t want to get Americans too close to philosophy, because with all the drugs available here, plus our brittle naive Gatsby idealism, we take one glance at philosophy and collapse into a heap of accidental overdose. You don’t resent your own humanity; you resent the clownish/tyrannical non-humanity of the Late Builder. Do not panic; you are nothing like him. He has been shat out (with great groaning effort) from the body politic, and we’re going to be okay.

Margaret Soltan, January 24, 2021 7:57AM
Posted in: democracy

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3 Responses to “For those keeping track, this is where I started laughing out loud.”

  1. factcheck Says:

    disappointed that such a trite excuse to namedrop pop culture references made it into the nyt mag. shoddy premise as well. flotation tanks and retreats have been around for a very long time.

  2. Gordon Young Says:

    What I’ve come to realize is that – except for those graceful spots of time when we forget about ourselves and just engage with people and the rest of the natural world – everyone constantly is in the process of drawing lines (carefully gerrymandered lines) attempting to put themselves and a comfortable set of companions on the right side. See; I just did it – I’m one of those enlightened people who recognizes the inevitability of such line drawing. I’m not saying it’s bogus or that such line drawing is always, in some sense, based on an incorrect moral or aesthetic judgment etc. I’m saying that, like breathing, it is just inevitable for living humans. So I hate large segments of the political right, but for reasons x,y,z they deserve it, and so it is ok. And in this case I do believe that, in fact, my side of the line is superior. But this practice spreads out into all areas of life, and the relentless drive to do it means that often, though by no means always, it is a means to snobbish pleasure or practice of self-comfort. I drive beyond the speed limit, but I’m a good driver – that guy drives way too fast period. House sizes from modest, academic bungalows to garish tract mansions: some on the positive side of my line of approval, others across it. Here again I do trust my aesthetic judgment a lot, but, noticing the ubiquity of these judgments and their various motivations, perhaps I am beginning to be more thoughtful about making making judgments in general. Oops that draws a line between those careful and not so careful in making judgments, and of course puts me on the right side.

    How much to renounce or embrace the world, including stuff? Spoiler: I’m going to conclude for balance and sanity, however successfully or not, drawing one of those lines mentioned above. I once read a Robert Wright book in which he discussed meditation. He meditates a lot and concludes that he’d like to do much more. I like very long meditations too, but I’ve always been interested in the balance (time allocation) between being in that other worldly place and being in the world itself. I was pretty sure that he had kids and I went looking to see if he addressed the balance problem. My recollection is that he didn’t in any calibrated way, but the book made it clear – I think in the acknowledgments – that time in the world with family was very important to him. So balance question unaddressed, not that that was part of his project. But it’s the balance question that often floats up into my head. There’s the world in order of profundity and importance from people you love, being good to others in a wider way, nature, art, enjoying how you feel after exercise, good food, stuff from Amazon that gives you pleasure. Then there is that other-world serenity in which you care about nothing else but you, floating, for however many minutes. How much of each? Another line to draw.
    I don’t believe in free will in any robust way, but I also understand the importance to good mental health of forgetting that conclusion, as if I could do otherwise. Likewise it would be exhausting and fruitless to cut back on the stream of judgments in some major way. But I do try, whatever that means, to be more aware in making them.

    Ps Yellen’s autobiography out to be titled “Too Short for Trump.” Robert Reich might write a good brief introduction.

  3. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Gordon: Much in your comment to think about. But as to this:

    So I hate large segments of the political right, but for reasons x,y,z they deserve it, and so it is ok.

    For me – a fan of C. Hitchens – judgment, and harsh judgment at that, isn’t about people and groups deserving it; it’s about contributing even very modestly to a more humane and rational world by attacking the inhumane and irrational. Opposition is true friendship, said Blake; and in my take on that statement, you’re not making friends with your enemy by attacking; you’re trying to make friends with the world.

    And judgment is certainly not about a self-pleasuring sense of superiority – it’s about clarifying and vivifying the location and the nature of destructive vileness. I’m wild about The Lincoln Project, and I believe that vastly, nakedly judgmental project helped get rid of Fuckface.

    I’m not about making friends with enemies horrible enough to be worth attacking with vigor, simply because it’s very unlikely enemies bad and strong enough to attract serious and ongoing angry attention are capable of reform. I don’t bother with them. Let priests worry about their immortal souls. I bother with the world upon which they inflict suffering.

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