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How to explain - if Alice wasn't taking a class, if she wasn't otherwise engaged, that meant her terrible job, her terrible apartment, suddenly carried more weight, maybe started to matter. The thought was too much to consider squarely.
on dead-end jobs and the extremely "capitalist realism" idea that we must always be hustling for a better life, as opposed to trying to make our jobs better right now
There was no one ahead of him, there was no one behind, but still: there was waiting. A condition so chronic, so Messianically anticipant, that its trappings didn't matter. [...]
there's something weirdly poetic about this in a very religious way that i can't quite unpack but still like
[...] the flights were almost always full, booked far in advance, bought out by the sovereign wealth funds of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, China, and Hong Kong, as well as by corporate partners, the latter tricky at first, many corporations at first resisted - they had stockholders they were accountable to, they couldn't be spending millions on luxury travel - but soon it became clear that certain favors were being granted, playing fields tipped, regulations loosened or disappeared, sabers rattled more or less virogously, so that in numerous ways, plausibly deniable and otherwise, those in the Zeppelins were accruing certain advantages [...]
too real (also very DFW)
[...] another thumbs up to the YouTube livestream audience, to all those watching, those who still had internet, those still alive, and in the situation room, among and between all the generals and the members of the deep state and now even Trump's private security apparatus, a certain humming awareness, a panic that they were watching, just watching, the world end, and wasn't there something they could do, but there were too many, too many different strategies, they were each locked into their own roles, and Trump had already announced it, the big option, right there on the livestream, to the whole world, to all our allies and enemies, and around the world protocols and contingency plans were going into effect, there just wasn't any time, just no way to wiggle out of the moment, to say sorry, to say stop, to say we fucked up, nothing to be done, or rather, thy could do the big one, or just nothing, sit passively, hemmed in by life and by all the possibilities they couldn't quite dream into the real, and they understand that to play was to lose, but not to play was something worse [...]
good god
'I hated you at times. I saw all of your weaknesses, like your disease or your come face and, and at moments, I believed that's all you were,' I say.
'Likewise,' he says, very sweetly.
wow
[...] Those in the western sector don't see our gains though our actions do end in deaths - the deaths of their people - but since they are not united and lives are not purchasable, they do not see the deaths as theirs. They buy new panes and clothing and attempt to ignore us. [...]
love this
'I don't understand why anyone would want to stay in Gotham City. It's a stupid place with all these crazy motherfuckers walking around killing people and blowing shit up. Why don't they just leave?'
I laughed when he said it because I was too young to understand that Edwin was serious, that he was beginning to rework an idea our families had latched onto, fought for, years before, when they'd dragged Ghana-must-go bags onto the shores of this strange new land. You shouldn't stay somewhere that isn't working.
think about this in the context of "staying & fighting" vs the right to leave (as a refugee etc)
[...] The delusion and fantasy of the ruling classes kept pace with the wishful thinking of idealist. The edifice of established order practically tesselated cracks. And most of them were cosmetic, sure, but it only took one fatal line of distress. When the structure came down, it would come down in a hurry. History taught s much. It would come down fast and unexpectedly and later we would say, inevitably, looking back and seeking to restore our faith that behind history sat a governing narrative logic. First though people would need leaders, answers, and a program. They would need the idea of a future to strive into. So strange, wasn't it [...] that a world built on stuff, on the gross practically of the human body, in fact rested on a background webbing of ideas. Ethics, theories, ideals. On a vast immaterial buy-in, our collective faith in an order we never more than half-consciously espoused - its reality, inevitability, and justice. [...]
'[...] you're also describing, or supposing, a world in which people are more self-serving, narrow-minded, and fearful than I believe they are. And yes, you might say they've become this way, overworked and undereducated and cut off from the forms of association through which we find meaning and common cause. Or you might say the world has changed and new technologies have introduced new degrees of top-down control, distraction, or isolation -'
'Or that things are good enough? People don't want to jeopardize the life they have? Perfect is the enemy of the good, and so on.'
'And you'll find no shortage of people who agree with you,' Topel said. 'And not just conservatives and mainstream liberals, but class collaborationists. Labor leaders, unionists. The descendants of Debs - of Laski and Attlee in Britain ... But the question is for whom are things good enough? For how many? You assume that a revolutionary movement needs a disaffected bourgeois class. This isn't even a vanguardism Lenin or Trotsky subscribed to. Mao saw the peasantry as the revolutionary wellspring. Maybe history tells a different story so far, but recent history has also written a fairly bleak epilogue to the labour movement. To the whole collaborationist notion that leftist movements can work within democratic and capitalist systems to advance human rights, legal protections, and broadly shared wealth. What I see instead is that we keep drifting to the brink of catastrophe and pulling back. Drifting and pulling back. For many in this world, life is already one long catastrophe. And in this situation one of two things happens, I think. Either we drift too far one day and can't pull back. Or we come to see the insanity of this yo-yoing - which, let us be clear, is by no means natural or inevitable, but simply profitable. For a tiny minority. The misery we see everywhere we look is rooted not in scarcity, but in greed.'
like i said, kinda heavy-handed, but a good discussion
[...] The lineage of the control and ownership of land traced back invariably to violence. Behind possession of any sort: dispossession. Today's notion that wealth testified and attached to merit - to the quality of ideas and tenacity of labor - made an attractive but thin veneer on the true store of wealth accumulated in earlier dispossessions. It was this capital, after all, that invested in the good ideas and profited from the hard work of others. We held out hands to catch the crumbs falling from the master's table and called it meritocracy. [...]