Tag Archives: Life

Post-democracy America

July 1, 2021 4:53 pm

As I watch corrupt sham democracy eat each big new hole in the remaining shell of representative democracy, I always feel a tension any more between dismay at how fast it seems to be happening and the lessons of experience about how long zombie systems can shamble along anyway.

Aside from the lessons of America itself over the past couple of decades, I think again on re-reading Gibbon recently, and on how long the Roman Senate existed after the Roman republic ended. This notoriously pathetic zombie institution (the use of which by America’s framers as an explicit model for our government was really Asking For It from the very start) lingered on for centuries after it had surrendered all power to autocratic emperors. The Roman Senate outlasted the republic, its own purpose, and even the Roman religion, by centuries.

That’s a powerful corrective to any expectation of a near-term catharsis, of any kind.

So I’m stuck, usually, with the expectation that things will get worse and worse, but, while some kind of explosion(s) are probably somewhere ahead, even they may not really alter America’s zombie-shuffle very much.

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Self-employed 15 years

May 14, 2021 8:30 am

Fifteen years ago tomorrow, I was fired from what remains my last “real job.” I have now been without a full-time employer for nearly three times my whole salaried career—and while part of the time since included extended temporary/contracting roles, it has been most of a decade since I last commuted to the office for anyone.

I have no real regrets about this. I like this arrangement, and while I suppose that some alternate career path might have been better, I don’t feel that I lost out on “climbing the corporate ladder.” It is also extra interesting to reflect on this as America picks at established assumptions about how much autonomy, dignity, etc., is reasonable to trade off in return for “a job.”

Beyond this, it is difficult to know what I should think or feel. Celebration of what I have, and realism about the modest achievement it represents, pose something of a dilemma.

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Late-stage Pandemic

April 28, 2021 10:37 am

It’s the last week of April, 2021.

It’s five weeks since my first COVID-19 vaccine shot, and one week since my second.

It’s daylight hours in a Groundhog Day limbo, in which time no longer seems to have any meaning beyond the wheel of dawn to noon to dusk to night, a repetitive loop which it’s impossible to define as having any ending or beginning.

That last one might be a dramatic exaggeration, but the feeling is certainly not just me; on Monday ProPublica began an official e-mail with the words “In an era in which time has grown increasingly hazy…”

Yesterday, the CDC made a confusing announcement blessing a few limited unmasked activities for fully vaccinated people, all of which activities people have been doing without masks or vaccination.

Everywhere it seems like this has all just outlived our capacity to sustain it, at least in the sense of an acute crisis during which we sort of hold our collective breath. There are many many caveats here, the most important being that I’m not an expert in virology or public health and you should seek one out if you want expert guidance on the COVID-19 pandemic. For the personal reflections of one 42-year-old mostly vaccinated Very Online American, read on.

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Reality and self amid the maelstrom

April 20, 2021 5:59 pm

Thinking lately about what’s real and what’s important—neither of which overlaps completely with the other—and how to hold onto them amid all the dysfunction, real dangers and misleading indicators.

I have been writing plenty about the false and misleading, this year. Every day seems to be a downpour of dishonesty, delusion, wrong directions and la la land pretending. I can see this, and while it’s a struggle to go against the grain when hardly anyone else seems like they’re going to, I think I can make it that far.

But where am I going to, and where can I go to; what revised expectations of real and important should replace the old?

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Vaccines and HyperNormalisation

March 26, 2021 8:10 pm

Personally, things are going okay at this moment. On Wednesday I got the second half of my two-part “$2,000 check,” and the first half of my two-part COVID-19 vaccination. I’m doing some work for clients. Cleaning up around the apartment.

I can’t deny a feeling of emergence, especially because of a personal feeling of emerging from something like a five-year fugue state. I have written a number of times about a similar feeling, after recent elections, as though I had somehow been absent from my own life during extended preoccupation with campaigns, then one day came back to find months had gone by. This feels something like that except for years instead of months.

The end of the 2020 election and its long overtime, plus winter, plus social distancing, plus perhaps the slow start to 2021 campaigns, kind of put me in a place to slow down and reflect for more than in years. But browsing some blog posts from 2015 (like this or this) really made me realize that in terms of thinking about my life, the place I’m in lately is a lot like one I reached five or six years ago. Then activism and related activities began to mushroom, pushing me out of that place for five years. For all the ways that transformed my life, and probably my self, it is now like I’m back confronting very similar deep questions.

Also shit is still just on fire around me which does complicate things.

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Outlook March 2021

March 16, 2021 6:56 pm

Strange moment, not that they aren’t nearly all strange anymore.

A little over a year since America’s shit-just-got-real moment for a COVID-19 pandemic, it looks at last like we can see an end to our long plague year. It isn’t here yet. But with functioning national governance restored (just barely, for now) and vaccine distribution in high gear, it seems possible that we can avoid another severe case surge. As of today I have hopes of getting scheduled for vaccination soon, several weeks ahead of my previous expectation. This amid a yo-yo few days, which of course have involved ups and downs, but feel overall discouraging of enthusiasm or effort.

So what now?

While I am not completely sans interest in resuming various suspended activities, I reject “back to normal” as a general theme for either society or myself. The former should not really require explanation. As for myself, I have not really had a plan or even a strategy for years. This seems like as good a time as any to explore the idea.

How, then, do I “build back better?”

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#TheResistance 2016-21

January 20, 2021 12:45 pm

For my personal purposes, a public protest on Nov. 18, 2016 is probably the clearest beginning of “The Resistance,” out of various arbitrary options. It was a strange evening, within which the strangest moment was the inclusion among more expected chants of the phrase “I am my brother’s keeper.”

That has stuck in the back of my mind, ever since, and I’ll come back to it.

As the Trump nightmare bubble ends in anticlimactic deflation, time has come to look back on the whole four-years-and-change of The Resistance, for the movement and for myself.

Of The Resistance writ large, it seems more than anything else like a big missed opportunity.

Here was a momentary disruption of the steady slippage toward dystopian oligarchy. Here was a wake-up call, not only sounded but heard. Millions got off their butts in more than 500 cities for the first Women’s March. People were ready to take action. What followed?

What followed was mostly a vast demonstration that in a crisis, institutions do the same things as usual, just more—and that this observation of Robert Cringely applies to large informal blobs as well as to discrete formal institutions.

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Black Lives Matter protests

June 7, 2020 10:02 am

It is difficult to summon up what I really think about everything happening. Is that because stress hinders brain function, or because the pattern of events going back a long ways suggests that the only reliable expectation for the months ahead is centrifugal forces growing stronger?

Is there a practical difference between the two?

It’s weird to watch all of this from home. Not that I’m just watching. I’m making my contribution with related activism.

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Twenty Years

May 7, 2020 6:35 pm

I missed the 20-year anniversary of my college graduation by a day, but under the circumstances, you know. You’ll have that.

Twenty years ago I got a graduation ceremony—in fact I got two of them, one for the College of Design and one for Iowa State University Class of 2000 as a whole—whereas this year’s graduates get a webcast.

Halfway between then and now, I wrote about assorted life lessons at another blog.

Now we are living through a greater unraveling, and, yeah.

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2019 Year in Review

December 31, 2019 6:10 pm

It was an eventful year, as they have become. So, an “official” year in review for 2019, in addition to the summary version as well as the decade in review which I have already posted recently.

Kind of like in 2017, this year included a single insane week in autumn which distills a lot. Within several days, in September:

  • I spoke up on behalf of facts when a candidate for office started repeating totally made up things on campaign literature—and then I experienced all kinds of blowback
  • I produced a crazy amount of work for candidates so that I could get away for an extended weekend
  • Flew out to San Francisco for said extended weekend, had a lovely time
  • But while there, not only was I fielding calls and e-mails and things, also the news blew up with revelations about a Ukraine edition of presidential wrongdoing
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