Thursday, July 28, 2022

Space Cowboy

Reading about spatial statism, which was supposed to disappear with globalism, and then about populism and what that's about, I suddenly realize my life's work. Or I realize what it would have been did I have a life or could I have had any kind of life's work. Fortune favors the accommodators, and I'm not one. 

Sour grapes!

Anyhow, as I read about how populism works, or doesn't, I realize that the mythical and vaguely enchanted nation which our domestic brand of populists yearn for is itself a commodified capitalist concoction, which realization only stacks irony on top of irony for me. 

In other words the Trumpers hate the very people who gave them their image of what America really is. Because they buy it, hook, line and sinker. And here I thought that I was the one who hated Reagan and Nixon and even Clinton, but certainly Dubya and all those shills for capitalism's glories who've ever graced the White House. You can't hate the elites and still love this fictitious nation and that fictitious Jesus. Especially not when you mix it all up in a Trumpian blender.

My reading also lends clarity to what's up with China. Pompous West Point Pompeo gave a speech the other day (pick a speech, any speech, they're all the same), wherein he conflated China and Russia as what threatens not really our way of life, but our supremacy. Must idiots be always in charge?!? Even Biden using China as his foil feels the way I feel when chalk is squeaked along a blackboard. Or is it fingernails. Or do you even know what a blackboard is?

Guns and exceptionalism and Steve Bannon bizarrely seeing himself as some cowboy in the films he loves, and it all makes sense. 

Thing is that China actually does have a genuine nation to crow and write home about, in the culturally/racially defined people sense of the term. Everyone who is anyone claims to be of the Han ethnicity there, and they have an absolutely fabulous continuity in written lore and myth and wonder to claim as their own, no Hollywood invention required. Too bad they treat the Uighurs about the way we treat blacks, only maybe they're just a tad nicer about it. 

So, China never did need no stinkin' populism. Well, you know, after Mao, sort-of. Now I wonder how that's related to their eschewing, at least by lip service, capitalism. And how is this related to Russia, culturally defined always in opposition to what Europe has tried to build for itself. 

Well, you know, China also concocted its nation. First it had to unify the language, and that forcibly. They shoehorned the written Chinese character into automated typography, which then took off once the computer keyboard and predictive typing became ubiquitous. Believe it or no, Ripley, it's actually easier and faster now to type Chinese than English. It took a long time from when China already had it to when we figured out how to deploy predictive typing. Weirdly, ours constricts what we write to what anybody would write, since we predict more than Chinese prediction of set character combinations. 

Of course, the trouble is that motor-memory for calligraphy is destroyed, which might mean that the Chinese character (I think that I mean the national character, not the written character) has also been destroyed. But at least they're not destroying the ability to write the way that we are.

When I pick up my Microsoft Surface now, I realize that converges in most ways to the usage of my iPhone. Is this intellectual property appropriation? Is money changing hands? Or is it just simply the inevitable fact that people like things that they pick up and use all the time to feel familiar? Or at least familiar enough. 

So as China struggles to maintain state control over lending and thus over the usage of money, it must also grant the look and feel of what American-style capitalism looks and feels like. You know, that vibrancy which beat the pants off the old Soviet Union. Creativity, inventiveness and all the stuff which we accomplished to global recognition just a brief century after our founding. And across a civil war. China's on the same fast track, without the requirement to look like something entirely new.

The drama of this whole affair now is whether the global economy will just melt down in such a way that merest anarchy is more decisively loosed upon the world.

For me, our constitution has been so debased and twisted and abused that anarchistic rebuilding from bottom up seems preferable indeed to submitting our state the way that it is conducted in my name now. The good news is that upon the instant that we became the actual evil empire, we began our descent. The bad news is that our tentacles extend across the globe.

Cultures are familiar everywhere. Populist cheering jeering and occult angry masses invent themselves all over the globe at the same time. Each of our three counterbalanced branches of government has almost utterly lost the public trust. Or we should say that they've systematically squandered our trust.

Our constitution has been abused in almost precisely the same manner as the Bible has. No, it is utterly precise, since it's the very same process.

This is all the kind of thing which makes a swabbie glad not to have ever had an actual life.

And here's the kicker: I'm a doer, not a thinker. I like to tinker and fix things, which is also evident in my writing. Nothing's ever quite finished, though I know when enough is enough. But I remain ready for just a while longer. I'm ready to join the crowds of us when we've had enough of privatized public property. When we've endured as much as we can of the criminal enterprise of Finance, Insurance, and Real-Estate. We're on FIRE in every dimension, and our climate-change-ignoring government is more addicted to SUVs and monster trucks than even we are; as a dodge from what they know they should be doing.

So in my conclusion, I'd say that private property has already been moved in the direction of public ownership. Taxes are rent as they should be, and you too shall be expropriated of your air and mineral rights. You shall not be allowed to despoil my air and water. All you fucking rent-seekers shall be displaced by we the people; pitchforks against your blackhawks. Because the earth demands that of us, and Earth is on our side. 

But wait, there's more! The Supreme Court has already started to dispossess us of our very bodies. Privacy, what?? Due process. Equal protection. No, the state, which now stands in for God, must have our unborn children, though it cares nothing for those already here. It must have our poor to fight its wars, there being no other employment on offer. And it nearly privatized our very genes. How selfish would it be to keep our assets to ourselves. 

This serpent is eating its tail. Built on private property rights and individualism, and recently transmuted from industrial capitalism to an unholy finance capitalism, our oligarchs intend to make slaves of all of us, in the name of their rentier growth. And all we know how to do is to cry "free speech," which makes us the ready pawns of the pawns of the oligarchs who we elect to office.

And now, naturally enough, perhaps given the example of Elon Musk, though they never say so, these strangely non-individualistic brothers want to open a new market on individual futures. Of course they grew up in Russia. As in China, when thought is repressed you learn to think some crazy thoughts and call it freedom. The headline suggests that they want to give those without social capital a chance. Instead of indebting them, which seems to burden futures, one could earn investment on and toward ones future. Is it me, or does that just sound like a new high-tech reversion to slavery? Sort of in the way that Airbnb has helped to push up the cost of real-estate, by realizing the unused value of surplus housing. 

Right, and I've got a deed in space to sell you. Here's how it works. You have no value here on earth, but if you accept Elon as your one and only master, the market will give you value in outer space. On Mars, say. Sure, if you earn your investors' money back, you may return upon maturity. If you're still alive. 

As if poor black folk can demonstrate the value on the futures market that white techno-kiddies can. Black folk already have imprinted what it feels like to be put up on the auction block and reduced to the animal value which all that humans truly have in common. All expenses paid to good employment on Mars. All you have to do is what you're told.

We must enclose that commons too! Space, the final frontier! Right.