The Rush To Surrender

Whenever I read about our new capitalist overlords gutting each other over who gets to profit from the rabbit-out-of-a-hat tricks of large language models, I have to laugh. Here are a handful of quotes that will give you some idea why:

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I don’t believe this is necessarily intentional, but no machine that learns under capitalism can imagine another world.

—@kat@weatherishappening.network, from a Mastodon thread about ChatGPT

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Und so wie gesellschaftliche und technische Entwicklungen zuvor die Unantastbarkeit Gottes in Zweifel zogen, so stellen sie nun die„Sakralisierung” des Menschen zur Disposition.

And just as social and technical developments once cast doubt on the sanctity of God, so they now subject the sacralization of humanity to renegotiation.

—Roberto Simanowski, Todesalgorithmus: Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz (Passagen Thema)

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Der tiefere Sinn der Singularity-These ist die technische Überwindung kultureller Pluralität.

The deeper meaning of the singularity-thesis is the triumph of technology over cultural plurality.

—Roberto Simanowski, Todesalgorithmus: Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz (Passagen Thema)

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Die Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.

The Enlightenment is the emergence of humankind from its self-inflicted immaturity.

—Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung

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Remember, imbeciles and wits, 

sots and ascetics, fair and foul, 

young girls with little tender tits, 

that DEATH is written over all. 

Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul 

they are so rotten, old and thin, 

or firm and soft and warm and full— 

fellmonger Death gets every skin.

All that is piteous, all that’s fair, 

all that is fat and scant of breath, 

Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair, 

is Death’s collateral: 

—Basil Bunting, Villon

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Say what you will, it’s clear to me that the Pax Americana, and more generally humanism itself, with all its honorable striving, are both well and truly done. Contemplating what passes for virtue and wisdom among those so eager to feast on the leftovers would make even the gods laugh.

Damnatio Memoriae

Despite its birth in slavery and genocide, there was always some hope that the United States would one day live up to the aspirations of its founders rather than continue to turn a blind eye to the evils inherent in some of their political compromises. Even when we were certain we wouldn’t live to see that day, we had reasons not to feel like fools when looking forward to its eventual arrival.

Today, as Trump and his sycophants begin gleefully making plans to burn our books and chisel our names off the nation’s monuments, we should take a moment to remind ourselves what will inevitably become of them once their political orgasm has spent itself. Winning won’t magically make them any less ignorant, any more capable of coping with anything more complex than their own appetites for self-aggrandisement. While they’re busy gloating, grifting, and genuflecting to their preposterous version of the Christian god, the Chinese or Russians may very well show up to eat the lunch so cluelessly laid out for them, or what is even more likely, climate change may finally turn Arizona into hell with the fire out, and blow down or drown everything in Florida from Mar-a-Lago to Tallahassee.

In the meantime, we should mind how we go. Remember that they don’t own the future—many of their children will come to hate them soon enough, especially their daughters. Ignore the taunts, save the bullied wherever and whenever we can, and never, ever forego an opportunity to pour a cup of virtual sugar into a coal-roller’s gas tank.

As it is written, so let it be done.

The Last Taxonomer, Part One

Part Two has been in progress for a painfully long time, but the future is proving to be an even more elusive beast than I thought when I first began this somewhat speculative apologia….

In its issue of April 4, 1994, the New Yorker published an article by Nicholson Baker, Discards, which called into serious question what he was convinced was an unwise rush by libraries to replace traditional card catalogs with a computer-based approach to information access and retrieval. Baker’s article was widely read in academic library circles, not only because it was critical of the work librarians were doing, but also because it had appeared in the New Yorker. Specialists working in fields as obscure as technical librarianship aren’t normally accustomed to reading such critical assessments of their work from outside the profession, especially when those assessments turn out to be as accurate in their details, and as forthright in their judgments as Discards was about our bibliographical stewardship.

When I first took up Baker’s article that April, I admit I found myself wishing that it hadn’t been quite so accurate, or quite so forthright, and for good reason. At the time, I was employed in the Cataloging Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara Library, where for the preceding ten years I’d been supervising the work of something called the Catalog Maintenance and Retrospective Conversion Section.

Catalog maintenance, the section’s traditional responsibility, meant managing the card catalog—adding new cards to the drawers as new books arrived and were cataloged, correcting errors in the existing cards, and updating them to reflect revised entries whenever the Library of Congress made changes to its subject thesaurus, or altered its preferred form of an author’s or editor’s name.

The retrospective conversion assignment had been added in the mid-1980s, at the point when all current cataloging was finally being done on our new computer system. To complete the transition from a card-based catalog to a computer-based one, we were tasked with entering the older, manually-produced contents of the card catalog into our digital cataloging database. Once that nearly decade-long task was complete, we discarded both the cards—some 10 million of them—and the cabinets which had housed them, and replaced them with public access computer terminals. Access to the new digital catalog could then be provided first on dedicated terminals within any library in the University of California system, and then, after a surprisingly short interval, to anyone anywhere in the world who had UC library privileges, an Internet connection, and a Web browser.

That was what retrospective conversion meant and what it did, and that was precisely the activity, carried out by my section from the mid-Eighties to the early Nineties, and repeated in libraries all over the world, which had given rise to Baker’s article. He thought that what we were doing was not only short-sighted, but barbarous—an offense against civilization itself—and was saying so in no uncertain terms.

Despite his obviously careful research, his passionate indictment of our project—in the pages of the New Yorker, no less—struck me at the time as being perverse, perverse in the sense that he seemed much more determined to condemn us for what he believed we were destroying than to evaluate what we believed we were creating, or our success in creating it. In Bakers’s view, it seemed, far from being the responsible stewards of the world’s intellectual patrimony we’d imagined ourselves to be, we were in fact vandals, the moral equivalent of those universally despised vandals who’d once set fire to the Library of Alexandria. Was this a fair judgment? I certainly didn’t think so, but just as I was deciding that the situation was unprecedented enough, and the outcome uncertain enough, not to take his judgment personally, on the very last page of Discards, I found this:

(U.C.S.B., incidentally, finished throwing out its main catalogue late last summer.)

Incidentally. Certainly not a word that I’d have chosen. UCSB was my library, throwing out its catalog was my job, and I could have told him, had he asked me, that there was nothing incidental about it. Arguments about intent, though, were apparently beside the point. What concerned Baker was not intent, but consequences, consequences which he was far more certain about than we were. I put down my copy of the New Yorker and recalled the end of Dr. Frankenstein’s career. Was I really a vandal? Would there be a mob of concerned citizens with pitchforks and torches waiting for me in the library parking lot after work?

Given that Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist in 1994, I really didn’t have anything to worry about. An indictment and trial of supposedly philistine librarians in the court of a public opinion generally indifferent to abstract policy squabbles was highly unlikely. Yet if Baker’s attempt at framing a public policy indictment of our work seemed perverse to me, his instinct that some sort of public policy questioning should be taking place was valid enough to be taken seriously. Indifferent or not, the public was clearly going to be affected by the technologies of the coming digital age, not just affected, but shaped by them. The disappearance of card catalogs from their libraries was, if anything, merely the thin edge of the coming wedge.

Thirty years later, deep into the age of Amazon, Google, and Wikipedia, of LLM, ChatGPT, Simon and Bard, it’s hard to recall precisely what form my testimony might have taken in the event that Baker and the New Yorker had actually succeeded in putting us all on trial. All I can remember now with any precision is my certainty that printed books were already becoming an anachronism, that libraries were already in the process of becoming museums of the printed word, and that librarians would have little future except as their curators. All of this, I was convinced, would happen sooner than even Nicholson Baker feared, and would turn out in the end to be even more radically disruptive than many of my colleagues, committed as they imagined themselves to be to our digital future, could bring themselves to admit.

I haven’t spent more than an hour or so in the UCSB library—nor any other library—since I retired in late 2003, nor have I kept up with library journals, or the professional literature in general. As a consequence, I have only the vaguest of notions what, if anything, has changed in the intervening twenty years in the mission of libraries and librarians as viewed by librarians themselves. I can’t imagine that they still think of themselves as principal actors in the digital transformation of information storage and access, but I do hope that they’ve remained principled stewards of the triumphs of the past, and skeptical about some of the more outrageous claims made those who are now in charge of the digital transformations of the 21st century. In any event, what happens now in libraries is no longer mine to judge. If there’s a problem, I’m willing to concede that I had a part in creating it. If there’s to be a solution, I’m well aware that I won’t have any part in devising it.

To be continued….

Metamorphosis/Metempsychosis

Ten years ago I was privileged to witness the emergence of a dragonfly from its nymph form. A creature that at first glance had seemed like a beetle to my untrained eye had crawled laboriously up from my back yard, attached itself to the side of the concrete step leading to the sliding glass door to my bedroom, and remained there, unmoving, tempting me to believe it had died.

I don’t remember exactly how long it remained there, but it was long enough for me to pass it a number of times on my way back and forth to the alley behind my house. Then, the last time I started to pass it, I discovered to my surprise that the back of its carapace had split open, and the dragonfly it had become was perched atop the empty shell that had sheltered it, had been it, and was now unfolding its wings in the afternoon sun. I watched until the wings, now fully dried, suddenly began to vibrate, then powered a beautiful, iridescent liftoff and arrow-like disappearance into the distance, a movement almost too fast to follow with the naked eye.

Being a child of the 20th/21st centuries, my first thought at witnessing this astonishing sequence of events was that any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic, my second that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Being a child of the 20th/21st centuries, I didn’t find those two thoughts to be incompatible. Now, ten years later, I still don’t.

The Limitations of Social Democracy

Extracts from a 2021 conversation with moderate Democrats

Here we have the farcical return of social fascism theory from the Weimar era Communists: the real enemy isn’t fascism, it’s social democracy/liberalism.

Making social democracy the enemy of true socialism certainly sounds like an ideological absurdity in the modern context, and no doubt it was one at the time. History’s not been kind to what seems to me nevertheless to have been a perfectly plausible theoretical dispute waged by a group of earnest, if relatively insignificant activists reacting to the ghastly stresses of early industrial capitalism. They can hardly be blamed for not seeing how poorly their ideas would scale. For God’s sake, did any of us see the sanity-rattling effects of Facebook or Twitter coming? Whoopee, Universal Democracy! didn’t scale nearly as well as we expected, nor did Omigod, Total Government Surveillance!

Social democracy and neoliberalism aren’t equivalent, but they are related, in the sense that neoliberalism is the clearest demonstration we’ve had to date of the reasons why the Marxist critique of social democracy was not simply a naive attempt to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Social democracies, even those with parliamentary majorities (I’d go so far as to say especially those with parliamentary majorities), are inherently weak. They cannot defend themselves against the predators among us who, when all else fails, can always blow the trumpet of xenophobia.

What should be as obvious to us good modern social democrats as it was to Marx, is that the Koch brothers of the world, not to mention the Jamie Dimons, will always find a way round our precious delusions about “equal justice under the law.” (Dear, sweet Joe Biden. Does anyone reading this blog actually think that he or the DNC have any idea why people whose great grandparents were yellow dog Democrats are now carrying Trump banners up the Capitol steps? Can nobody in Washington read German?)

But enough. The problem of the corruptions of power, of the subversion of good faith efforts to make human society less savage, won’t be solved any time soon, here or elsewhere. That’s the point of the Jacobin tweet, I think, at least if we’re willing to be charitable. If, in the end, social democracy can offer us only what Brecht once called die gerechte Verteilung der überirdischen Güter, then we really should be more charitable to our hardcore Marxist allies. Talk more, sneer less. It’s a start.

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Your reading is hardly naive, and you’re certainly not missing very much. What I’m proposing is less than an account, and very much less than a justification of historical reality. Rather I’m trying to emphasize how many more threads there are in that reality than there are in narratives such as yours —- or mine, for that matter — that purport to make some general sense of it.

When I say managerial class, I’m not insulting Marx, not in the context of this thread or any other. What I’m looking at, with a somewhat jaundiced eye, to be sure, is the evolution of the international economic and political order in the post-industrial age as examined most recently by Hobsbawm and Slobodian. Not from any great height, mind you, but from the much less exalted perspective of a kid who wanted to know why everyone around him seemed to think that getting his ass shot off in a global war to defend the ill-gotten gains of colonialism was not just the only path to an honorable manhood, but a sacred duty as well.

We all awaken in different beds, and ideology is a fickle mistress at the best of times, but I do think that there’s enough pathology in people who are sure they know where the outer boundaries of reason lie not to trust them to patrol them.

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Stalinism, as usual, has been muddying the waters here. I’ve been referring all along to the pre-1925 KPD, of course. Once Thälmann stuck his oar in, the identities of who represented the working class and who didn’t were of little real interest to anyone above the rank of corporal. As I’ve already said, this maneuvering was more or less the name of the game in the European politics of the 1930s—proxy wars of a kind less familiar to us now than those of the Cold War. To be honest, it baffles me that we didn’t recognize the latter for what they were, given that they arrived so promptly in 1947, even before all the remaining consequences of the 1930s had been decently interred.

Interestingly, these proxy wars were repeated in embarrassingly comic opera fashion in the 1960s, as anyone who was a member of the SDS or their European equivalents at the time could tell you. I have vivid memories of sitting on folding chairs in the damp cinder block basements of community centers or empty university classrooms back then, listening to emissaries from the CPUSA or SWP explaining at great length to us earnest cherubs of the New Left precisely how one recognized pre-revolutionary conditions. Sigh…. Green as we were then, we definitely weren’t that green.

Nothing for you to bother yourself about, of course. Just trying to keep the dog-eared edges of the leftist error archives all squared up for the next go-round with the forces of reaction.

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I don’t read steven t johnson’s comments, and as a result I’m not going to understand the meaning of your comment that begins with this remark unless you explain what it is that you think steven t johnson is right about.

Well, if you don’t read his comments, it must be for some reason. If the reason is that you haven’t found them worth your time, then you’ll probably come to the same conclusion about mine. Which, in the greater scheme of things, is probably as it should be.

One other thing, though. I’m happy to concede that whether or not the leadership of the KPD could rightly be called an insignificant group of activists depends on one’s perspective. Early on in this cataclysm we’ve been describing, they looked powerful enough. From my perspective, the street level characterization of their potential as a mass movement as depicted in Berlin Alexanderplatz, although somewhat romanticized, is probably accurate enough. In any event, Döblin was there, and I was not.

In the broader view, though, the backing of those who controlled the means of production went a long way toward making the NSDAP, rather than the KPD, the party of the working class. The Comintern was simply in no position to match resources with them. Similar events played out in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe. So, as an old SDSer (Students for a Democratic Society, not Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, just so’s there’s no confusion.) who still thinks the Port Huron Statement was a pretty good idea, I rate them insignificant in their effects on the outcome of the left/right battles of the 30s, not in the lingering influence of their ideas.

The left has always had the same enemies, and being able to outsmart them has rarely helped us much when it comes down to the inevitable power struggle. In that sense, the radical left of 1918 in Germany did turn out to be insignificant, as have I and my comrades of 1968. It’s a long war, though, and whatever happened during our own time in the trenches, we’ve no reason to regret the part we played in it. As insignificances go, I believe ours was very much worth pursuing. Presumably theirs was too, else why would I be here?

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This squabble over what the voting tallies revealed about which—if any—party represented the German working class pre 1933 is pretty much all my fault, and I apologize for the consternation I seem to have caused.

When I said that those who controlled the means of production were partly responsible for making the NSDAP the party of the working class, I meant it to be an ironic observation. Given the audience, I should probably have taken a little more straightforward approach. (Irony is dead, after all. It’s only the battle scars of us old curmudgeons on the left that make us shy away from assisting in the funerary preparations.) Anyway, in more detail, my view of the matter goes something like this:

a) In times of stress, the powerful in first world societies prefer the right to the left, and direct their support accordingly. This was as true of Trump, at least initially, as it was of Hitler, but we comfort ourselves with the thought that our institutions are more resilient, and our times are not as dire. So far that has proven to be true. Will it still be true four years from now, or even two years from now?

b) The Bolsheviks, most especially Stalin, considered control of European left parties to be essential to their geopolitical interests. (Which was probably not as paranoid an assessment as it might seem, given that they were still embroiled in fending off the White insurrection and its Western supporters.) If one is seeking a motive for the Comintern’s poisonous meddling in the affairs of all German parties of the left from 1918 on, there seems no reason to look any further.

c) The SPD was preoccupied with its own internal schism over the war, and was no longer the undivided voice of working class interests, if indeed it ever had been.

d) After the Hindenburg intervention, the Reichstag fire, and more particularly after the passage of the second Gleichschaltungsgesetz, there was arguably only one working class party in Germany, regardless of the private allegiances of individuals. And no, the responsibility for this outcome wasn’t directly or entirely attributable to the paranoia of plutocrats, but they were definitely a significant part of the unholy alliance that was responsible.

The moral of this story seems simple enough to me: the center, including so-called social democratic parties, invariably seeks to protect itself from the right, and the cheapest way to do this is to betray the genuine interests of the left. In desperate times this may mean making a Hawley or even a Quisling out of yourself. In times of relative stability, it’s generally safe to remain a Clinton.

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Yes, that might for the best. I am curious, though, given his pedigree and curriculum vitae, when and why you think he became a Trumpist extremist. Looking at the record, you could be forgiven for concluding he’s not likely to be a social democrat, but would you have figured him for a fascist collaborator?

As long as we’re considering metamorphoses, have a look at LBJ, the greatest American social democrat of our era. How come, do you suppose, he felt he needed to gift his enemies on the right with a colonial war? What do you make of Bill and Hillary, modest social democrats, at least by Arkansas standards? What in the name of Moloch does Bill’s welfare reform, or Hillary’s savagery toward the Honduran left have to do with the ideals of social democracy? If we skip over to Germany and look at the modern SPD’s support for Hartz IV, we could easily make the same observation. From my perspective, given social democrats like these, one might as well be a communist, assuming one is going to be a leftist at all.

You say the left is stupid to take positions that keep them from winning elections. The truth is, the beautifully reasonable with all deliberate speed folks, modest social democrats absolutely included, have led us to where we are today. Are they happy now? Is anyone?

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I’m pretty sure some people are happy now. Do you know nobody who is happy?

You say you haven’t heard of Döblin, but I’m guessing you probably have heard of Brecht:

Das arglose Wort ist töricht. Eine glatte Stirn/Deutet auf Unempfindlichkeit hin. Der Lachende/Hat die furchtbare Nachricht/Nur noch nicht empfangen.

And now I really am out of here. Thanks for all the fish….

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steven t johnson has the historical right of it here, I’m afraid. There just isn’t any sure way to reason in advance with the forces of history. You pays your political capital — to the extent that you understands it — and you takes your choice. Sometimes you end up face down in a ditch even before the issue is ever truly joined, sometimes you end up among the Trümmerfrauen, with only the vaguest inkling of what it was all about in the first place. Occasionally you survive to write an die Nachgeborenen, or establish and ordain the Marshall Plan and the Strategic Air Command.

So, okay, what have we really learned in the 100 years since Liebknecht and Luxemburg stumbled into martyrdom, and the SPD traded its birthright for a mess of nationalist pottage? Are we talking a modest reasonableness here, or sclerosis? One might be forgiven for thinking that the ship has been righted, and that we shouldn’t mess with it the way Jacobin would have us do, but I doubt even Francis Fukuyama believes that suppressing the antithesis is a foolproof guarantee that the dialectic will never trouble us again.

Did neoliberalism and the managerial class successfully navigate the end of the Pax Americana, and lead us not into temptation, but into a peaceful multipolar world order? In a word, no. Are we wrong to think that instead they gave us casino capitalism, the rustbelt, and in their zeal to eradicate anything to the left of the managerial class, the idiocracy of Trump? I think we could come reasonably close to making that case. No one wants us to, of course, who stands to lose from anything like a necessary and sufficient reform of the status quo. Sadly, this often seems to include, if not exactly everyone, almost everyone I get to talk to.

Still, we persist. I’m old, so my persistence is of less consequence than it used to be, but I do, nevertheless, make my tithe to the DSA, not the DNC, and reckon that Bhaskar Sunkara is underrated. Best I can manage under the circumstances.

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At 77, I’m hardly that young. Anyway, what my age has to do with the nature of our disagreement, I’m not entirely sure. I’m aware that many of the commenters on this blog think that stasis is the surest sign of rationality in politics — the slow boring of hard boards, and all that. A significant number of those same commenters also argue that progress is being made, however slowly, and that people of my political persuasion should take more care not to upset the applecart. In 1968, it was You fools, all you did was get Nixon elected. What I’m hearing now isn’t a lot different.

I disagreed then, and I disagree now. While the Democratic Party in the US continues doing its utmost to snatch defeat from the jaws of its occasional victories, I say this: Unless you’re prepared to lose in the short run, and use the loss to sharpen your arguments, you’re just part of the enemy’s baggage train.

In my more cynical moments, I also wonder at how rarely these putatively moderate positions are taken in good faith. (For the record, I don’t think that was true of LBJ. I agree with Halberstam’s assessment — and yours — about the honesty of his political calculations. Nevertheless I disagree that his was the wisest course possible at the time).

In the case of those Democrats, however, who are consistent in warning us that unless they behave like Republicans, they’ll never be able to govern, and we’ll all suffer for it, I wonder if it’s really the people’s suffering that’s motivating them, rather than the size of the rewards they’ll personally reap from their demonstrations of docility once they leave office. Whose ox is being gored? is always a legitimate question when listening to a politician’s rhetoric. As I look back to 1992–2000, for example, the most charitable thing I can find to say about the Clintons is that they both did their damndest to make sure that come what may, it was never going to be their ox that got itself gored.

As for pointless moral stances, consider the apocryphal quote, supposedly from Gandhi: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Consider Martin Luther King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, or my observation that in the face of a threatened putsch by at least half of the Republican Party, Biden, like Obama, is still pursuing the chimera of national unity.

So no, you can’t govern if you can’t get elected, but there’s also little point in getting elected if you can’t accomplish what is needful once you do.

Time To Speak Plainly

I’ve given up sniping at Republicans. The misanthropic lunacy which has finally overwhelmed their politics has absolved me of any further need either to reason with them or laugh at them, Frankly, I have better things to do than wrestle with the category errors that any engagement with them and their idiocies would invariably entail. In any event, we’ll all find out together in November whether they’ve finally achieved their long sought after political orgasm, or instead are forced to subject us all to yet another decade of disgusting foreplay.

I can hardly wait.

Yeah. Okay. Fine.

Kamala. She’s not Trump. I get it. More importantly, she’s overcome the obvious disadvantages, even in California, of her race and gender, and like President Obama before her, she’s visibly ambitious, with the talent, the intelligence, and the courage to realize those ambitions in a system designed to discriminate against people like her. Also like President Obama she seems to have managed to steer her way through the myriad corruptions set out in our system to trap the ambitious without succumbing to any of them as thoroughly as many of her peers.

Given the limitations of the Presidency, she’ll do. She’s got my vote. What would be nice, though, is if we’d all stop for a moment and look beyond the hagiography and see that we’ve been beating a dead horse politically for decades now with no resolution in sight. Kamala won’t help us with that. She can’t. She owes things to people, and we aren’t those people. We’re the people who can’t survive the decadence, the corruption, the cluelessness about the future that both parties are obliged by their true allegiances to defend, the hostages they’ve all given to fortune to get where they are today. Politics is not a consumer good, it’s a slow motion conflict about who gets to decide how we approach the future. We forget that at our peril.