Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment. ___________________________________________________________
“Wine is sunlight, held together by water.” – Galileo
In 2000, Wall Street Journal ‘Tastings’columnists Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher started the first ‘Open That Bottle Night,’ encouraging their readers to open a symbolically significant bottle, and then share their stories, making the wine itself the subject of the celebration. They are also the authors of Love By the Glass: Tastings Notes from a Marriage, which is a memoir of their marriage, their careers and their love of wine.
CPAC had some actual, unintended Deconstruction unlike Bannon’s riff on nationalist deregulation
“Bannon is a near-constant presence every time cameras cover a Trump press conference or follow the president into the Oval Office. He has gained a place on the “principals committee” of the National Security Council, elevating him above the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the director of national intelligence.”
Kumbaya in the bunker …Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus appeared in a joint interview at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Washington, D.C. and the former provided a glimpse of the crypto-fascist mentality that informs POTUS45* and his White House.
It was quite unlike the pageant queen’s interview segment where “world peace” was the main goal for a winner or her runner-up.
Lord Dampnut is now clearly a cipher for Bannon’s Fourth Turning / Clash of Civilizations mania and functions as the national CEO in between rounds of golf. POTUS45* is Bannon’s alternative, alt-fact, media factotum, available to cut the ribbon at the launching of any car dealership.
Bannon’s goal: a Mad Max economy
President Bannon’s racist minarchy aims to forward an American version of the “End of Times” in Alexandr Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory. Crony capitalism and kleptocracy will benefit from the chaos and catastrophies that result from implementing those theories.
Bannonism is more about deregulation rather than deconstruction
Bannonist nationalism privileges one ethnicity over all others and is based on an anti-scientific ignorance based on primitive supremacy of the sort promulgated by neo-fascist political parties. It specifies a permanent war between Dominionist and Islamic caliphates.
Bannonism projects a similar economic model of racial conflict onto nationalist trade wars which oversimplifies bilateralism in order to benefit ruling class wealth. It does so at the cost of social welfare that would be more optimal under multilateralism. Advantage is never comparative.
The result of destroying rather than deconstructing the administrative state is designed to profit from its destruction while advancing the goals of (ad)venture capitalist warlords. It is Malthusianism complete with prepper bunkers.
This is less creative destruction than a misanthropic chaos designed to return the global economy to some infomercialized feudalism. Bannonism’s fatal flaw lies in misunderstanding the political goals of deconstruction and enslaving it to a totalized discourse of racial superiority, resembling some defeated historical models. Since his goal is short-term capitalist profit, Bitcoin is even more of a deconstructive economic program than what Bannon wants to achieve, making his prescriptions in their reified form, crypto-fascist in its goals.
It’s not deconstruction as much as it is appropriating institutions, aided by demolishing (via deregulation) their income-distributional mechanisms for greater class wealth resulting in greater inequality. With undeconstructed profit it’s like starting a riot to disguise a bank robbery. Corporations will survive the deconstruction, so it’s no deconstruction as it is re-centralizing the administrative state for totalitarian control.
More interesting will be the first RW pundit to denounce Bannon as a “Cultural Marxist” precisely because he has adopted a “deconstructive” position on the administrative state that cops a cue from the Frankfurt School.
Lord Dampnut, his junk food, and nuclear trigger are on a perpetual golf vacation punctuated by ceremonial moments celebrated by mass media but with little relevance to the diminution of public policy and in favor of the privatizing the greater good.
Please take this week’s title as a warning. If you find profanity offensive, this installment of Word Cloud is one you may want to skip.
An article I skimmed for this week’s post was called Poets Nobody Reads, which isn’t entirely true, but certainly Carolyn M. Rodgers (1940 – 2010) is no longer as well-known as she was at her controversial zenith, from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s.
At a time when many male African-American writers were being praised for their use of ‘Black English,’ Carolyn Rodgers was being told to “tone down” the very language that had first brought her attention. And it seems that most of her poems that are laced with cuss words are not available online, while her books of poetry have become rare enough that prices have skyrocketed.
A few of her poems strike me as uneven, not because she uses black idioms, but because they read to me like second drafts, promising ideas not quite finished. However, the majority of her work passes Garrison Keillor’s test of a good poem: “Stickiness, memorability, is one sign of a good poem. You hear it and a day later some of it is still there in the brainpan.” __________________________________________________________
This is a young poem, about that frustrating and difficult process of self-discovery.
Breakthrough
I’ve had tangled feelings lately About ev’rything Bout writing poetry, and otha forms Bout talkin and dreamin with a Special man (who says he needs me) Uh huh And my mouth has been open Most of the time but I ain’t been saying nothin but Thinking about ev’rything And the partial pain has been How do I put my self on paper The way I want to be or am and be Not like any one else in this Black world but me
“Today, enemy of the people is still deployed. But mostly, you hear it from dictators. (Heads of former Soviet countries are particularly fond of the construction. Old dog, new tricks, etc.) It’s never before been uttered by the leader of the free world. One more way in which Trump’s presidency truly is unprecedented in U.S. history.”
because … love and jealousy and revenge
“What (reality TV) does do really well is interpersonal relationships — is taking big themes like love and jealousy and revenge, and boiling them down to conversations between two people.”
There is a real enemy of the people and that is anyone who cannot follow the rudimentary ethics of reciprocity as well as a trust implicit in the social contract.
This notion covers those who would deny their own existence and rationalize inhuman actions in everyday life (see Milo) or who would deny the existence of others and rationalize the possibility of global conflict without considering its consequences (Lord Dampnut).
This narrative of a popular enemy runs through Lord Dampnut’s reason for ruling, because he knows nothing of governing. And he never laughs.
“If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
“One study found that large newspapers’ use of anonymous sources dropped dramatically between 2003 and 2004. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research group found use of anonymous sources dropped from 29 percent of all articles in 2003 to just 7 percent in 2004.”
Milo and his “daddy”
Now that Infowars has decided to serve as the “White House plumber” proxy in accusing alleged WH staff leakers by name— we could now decide to challenge @roguePOTUSStaff as a news source, or even rank entertainment.
As if giving press credentials to pseudo-journalists like Breitbart and others giving RW pervert hand signs gave them any additional credibility than someone taking the official WH tour. When they go to the WHCA dinner they’ll be the first to be mocked, because rented prom tuxes.
The site has been useful primarily as a check on external events and never as a single source although the absence / presence of data was useful during the early days of what now has become Biglygatetm.Because there are now so many twitter sleepers. spoofers, and trolls like NAMiloBLA, it is possible that @roguePOTUSStaff was always compromised, perhaps by Bannon and even staffed sub rosa by Breitbart in terms of authorship.
As indicated earlier it was interesting to get a fragment of new insights on the disaster that is Lord Dampnut’s manor. No one is leaking classified material and it isn’t WikiLeaks.
The website associated with @roguePOTUSStaff at least provides one level of credibility, but as one looks at the tweets and without extensive content analysis, there are some issues that allow us to be entertained, but only by fragmentary “alternative facts”.
The problem of online texts is that they are are always multi-voiced even if an utterance is transcribed just like any dubbed video is never as authentic as unedited reality television (aka actual live news). This heteroglossia is in all digital texts, even the non-novel. Online “journalism” now suffers that fate when very little can be verified and everything can be photoshopped.
The site has been useful primarily as a check on external events and never as a single source although the absence / presence of data was useful during the early days of what now has become Biglygatetm.Because there are now so many twitter sleepers. spoofers, and trolls like NAMiloBLA, it is possible that @roguePOTUSStaff was always compromised, perhaps by Bannon and even staffed sub rosa by Breitbart in terms of authorship.
Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 