Love notes

This is going to be a post about love, sex, and relationships.


I know, the thought of reading such a thing, from me of all people, makes you groan. Depending on your inclination you've probably got the appropriate canned response ready. Who wants to listen to another entitled male nerd whine about what he's owed by women? Why doesn't this gross old man realize his failures at life ruined this part of human experience for him.


Well listen, you aren't wrong. The genesis of these micro-essays is my wrestling with, on the one hand, doubt and embarrassment, and on the other, my longstanding commitment to the principle that everyone has a valid claim on the human desire to love and be loved.


It's an internal argument that hits so many broader personal insecurities and doubts on its way down. Surely, being single in my mid-30s is just a thing someone should learn to live with; I'm not special, I should tell myself, there are many people like me, and they've accepted this, so why can't I? Every new disappointment brings with it some Sometimes I only half-jokingly wish for the sweet release of a painless and affordable castration; if I can't mentally discipline myself to accept the consequences of my life choices, then let Father Biology do his thankless work.


We've heard the glib mantra “everybody needs love” in so many song lyrics and popular romances that the real egalitarian idea behind this sentiment is mostly not taken seriously. It isn't a luxury, or the exclusive property of young adult book cover models. It includes the awkward, the anxious, the ugly, the dissenters, the experimenters, the naive, the simple, the unsteady. To say, I exist, I have a human need for sex and intimacy, and I will express it no matter if it makes you groan or gag to imagine it, is a defiant act.


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There is a certain perspective that comes with being a poorly-seeing virgin in your mid-30s. Not all of it is melancholy; most of it isn't, in fact. There are a lot of things that most of my compatriots would find utterly quotidian by now that still are full of wonder and curiosity for me.


Two of these are the peculiar multi-tiered reality in which people exist to me, and its relation, the visceral immediacy of close physical presence and human contact. I prefer to take most of my human interaction through text; a method where I'm more comfortable, being freed of the strains of insecurity and time to explore the depths of whatever imagination and personalty I have. It's also where other people become liberated from the weight of keeping up appearances to say and write material they might not have intended someone like me to see. I've always believed in the idea that a person's digital presence is something more akin to their real selves; a place where they'll reveal more of their private thoughts than what their low regard for me would typically warrant.


As I go about my daily life in public, most people I interact with are people I can't really see. I am aware they are there, only insofar as I see the few identifiable signs I've come to use to distinguish them from the other mental files I keep of the few people I know. But I can't look them in the eye, and after they're out of sight whatever subtle features they might have to really differentiate them, to make them truly unique, are lost to me. No one comes close enough to seem like flesh and blood, just temporarily opaque sheets of skin stretched over the keystrokes they'll eventually spill out into the digital realm.


What does it mean when your body has no memory of physical intimacy? The obvious consequence of course is that fantasy becomes something of a chore; images and dreams have only so much power when there's no spark or friction that can be conjured; like persistently tipping a glass of water into your mouth that's long since been sucked dry of its contents. But it also means the simple act of human touch is still an explosion of magnificence, indescribable, otherworldly to you. The human body has a unique irreplicable tension and temperature; its weight atmospheric even when inches away. This is where people become real, the word—to steal an appropriately scriptural phrase—made flesh. It is fitting that we would never grow bored with it.


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The paradox of romance for me has always been this: People seem to generally expect two things from a relationship social companionship, and physical intimacy. But the former seems intellectually irrelevant; if you have a circle of acquaintances and friends to act as confidants, why do you need a partner? But this leaves us with the alternative which most people will steadfastly resist, that their relationships are predicated first and foremost on sexual gratification. Myself included, since if I can dismiss my feelings of loneliness as a mirage, overcoming lovesickness should be a breeze, since surely I can prove myself to be driven by more than thirst alone.


This is far too simple of a dichotomy, as everyone knows. There's nothing shameful in enjoying the fruits of carnal sin with a partner, and the social and emotional connections we have with a lover are more expansive and intricate than the ones we have with friends. Those connections themselves push all kinds of biological buttons inside of us, so it's fallacious to suggest there's any real separation between these ideas at all.


–


It wouldn't be fair to write this post without taking a pass at the evergreen question “what does love mean to me?” I think it's a rather profound exercise, actually. Inspired by the documentary “Love Me” about mail-order brides, I've become piqued by the idea of some kind of oral interview project where I pester couples about their relationship, how it started, what it means to them, what they think their life would be missing if they didn't have it, and so on.


It's very easy to think about love in terms of what you're getting from or giving to someone else. And there's a lot of merit to these things about vulnerability, support, connections, sharing, and so on that you've doubtless heard thousands of times before. All of these are things we want, and want to do, and of course it's important to satisfy ourselves, but they don't seem quite sufficient. For me, the most remarkable thing is that, with a partner, we get to live two lives at once, and that's a thrilling, frightening, transcendental thing to experience. We envelop each other; more talents, more responsibilities, more feelings. How can we be in multiple lives at once? It makes sense humans have been seeking some supernatural explanation to explain it for millennia.


--

I am often taken by the idea of another person spending their time thinking about you while you aren't near them. Of course, there is an element of self-flattery here. We like the idea of being important enough to someone else, that we've captured their imagination to such a degree that they spend part of their day thinking of what we might do, or how we might react to a given situation.


But I'd like to think there is something a little more transcendent about this. In our own body, we're self-contained. We've explored most of the depths of our personality, our whims, the levers and pulleys that animate us now seem very mechanical in our own observation. But when someone else, someone special to us in particular, creates an image of us in their own mind, it's a renewal of our existence, an extension of our humanity. We are experiencing life with them, helping them, inspiring them, in a fashion that's entirely new, because a unique individual has made us for themselves.


–



I've realized recently that, if I'm really honest with myself, I don't keep chasing romance because I have any genuine belief there might be a person someday who wants to spend a lot of time together with me. The combination of my choices and circumstance just makes that nearly impossible. I do it because it's still a rush of excitement to imagine the possibilities, however unlikely. Is it healthy? Possibly not. The constant rejection can be mentally draining, and skews my personal social perception into even more insular self-consciousness. But I do it, primarily I think, because it makes me feel like part of the human experience, and that, if I gave up, I'd be surrendering part of my humanity to the forces of self-doubt and social conformity.

Always on the sunny side

This election has been magnificent. What more could you possibly ask for? When Bernie Sanders announced he was running for president last spring, how many people could have imagined this was how it was going to play out?

Oh sure, winning would have been nice. But winning was never in the cards. And there's the unpleasant business of degenerate oligarchical rule getting much worse before it gets better. Look, though, at what we have seen.

We've seen bourgeois liberalism laid bare before a generation and openly confess its class interest and full commitment to managed decline.

We've seen a desperate, failing party elite gloating because its anointed candidate has managed to survive the onslaught of a 74-year old secular Jewish socialist with zero institutional support.

We've seen liberals who, in 2008, wrote poetically about the blossoming prospect of America's youth embrace conservative tropes about deluded, over-idealistic young people.

We've seen a campaign with a populist message win support from working-class white voters without backtracking on social issues, which liberals have long insisted was impossible.

And, of course, we've seen left-wing critiques of the American political and economic system gain a widespread audience for the first time in possibly decades. And that's pretty good day.

This isn't the end of the fun, of course. There's still the general election, where establishment Dems will do the best they can to pretend none of this ever happened. How much longer can they gleefully trample over their party's future? And what will be the impact of blaming young people for their losses in 2018 and 2020, as is the traditional Democratic playbook?

Asking the important questions

Here's something I wrote back in 2012.

The problem with lesser-evilism, though, is that, while you may get less evil now, you will surely get more evil later. Because your tepid, center-right New Democrats won't win every election. This is still a balanced, two-party system, and the public's preference inevitably swings back and forth from one party to the other. Talk of a permanent majority, of shutting the other party completely out of power for a generation, doesn't work. It was a fantasy when Republicans were kicking around the idea in 2004; and it was equally so in 2008 when some Democrats were crowing about the complete obliteration of the old Republican Party, and how that party would have to reinvent itself to survive. It did reinvent itself, of course, by driving even harder to the right and coming back to win the midterm elections in decisive fashion. 

While most of what I've written in my life has been, and continues to be, really dumb, I'm gonna pat myself on the back for the moment in claiming prescience on the Republican Party nominating an bona fide quasi-fascist clown for president, although it has come much faster than even I would have dared predict. In that environment, who knows who or what is sweeping into the White House four years from now? My money is on Nancy Reagan's severed head. Put me in, Nate Silver, I'm ready!

I will now save you the trouble of living the next four and a half years

Hillary Clinton will win the Presidency primarily on the virtue of being Not Donald Trump in a bizarre campaign between two candidates who are deeply disliked by their own party but squeezed out the nominations with the support of rabidly loyal factions (it's interesting to compare Trump and HRC in this regard, since the most common comparison by serious media pundits is between the "angry populists" Trump and Bernie).

Her presidency will be a lame duck from day one, as once in office being Not Trump isn't going to paper over the dim view most people have of her.. One of the most unpopular major figures in US politics (her own party flirted with nominating a 74-year old secular Jewish social democrat over her) she'll have no grassroots support for a political agenda and will be facing a opposition-controlled unmotivated legislature which sees her, correctly, as an easy mark in 2020. By which time they are likely to coalesce around a less-clownish but equally horrifying ghoul of some creation.

You may want to start drinking now, so you'll be prepared for January 2021.

Politics are mostly about values

One thing you start to notice listening to economic commentators--or, to use the preferred parlance of the day, wonks--is that, no matter whether they are libertarian goldbugs, Paul Ryan-ite conservatives, or neoliberal consensus sorts, they all adopt the same familiar posturing. Whichever fiefdom they swear allegiance to, they are all equally convinced that their interpretation of economic law is a branch of the hard sciences; an indisputable, irresistible manifestation of the natural world. As such, giving any non-adherents the keys to the economic franchise will just as surely bring down untold disaster, dried-up rivers, a plague of blood-soaked locusts blotting out the sun, that sort of thing.

So if you're like an everyday kind of bloke that doesn't have an economics Ph.D or the luxury of memorizing the Scriptures of whatever you've been told is the arbiter of Right Thinking, this can make you feel pretty powerless. Sure, anyone can figure out that a platform of giving every citizen $1 million and a unicorn isn't a realistic plan; but what about, say, a basic platform of redistribution centered on a higher minimum wage, universal healthcare, free college tuition, and so on?

This is, you may recognize, the backdrop over which the Democratic primary is currently being contested, with liberal policy wonks attempting to paint Bernie voters who support the latter as haplessly, naively advocating the former.(This has led to the amusing sideshow of supposed liberal leading lights sneering at "entitlements," mocking Bernie's "free stuff" like proper class-conscious conservatives). But, as the blog Interfluidity writes:

Paul Ryan’s various budgets haven’t been wrong because they require giant magic asterices to make the numbers add up. They have been wrong because the interests and values Paul Ryan represents are wrong. The magic asterices don’t reflect dumb mistakes, but smart politics. The problems of our polity do not arise because one faction or another is too stupid to do high quality science. If your interests are the interests of the fossil fuel industry, and you are unwilling or unable to transcend the narrowness of those interests, then confusing the public about the science of climate change is a mark of intelligence, not stupidity. Being smart is great. You may be proud of your GRE scores, your PhD, your Nobel Prize even. And deservedly! But raw intellect is not scarce, and no faction holds anywhere near a monopoly.

Liberal technocrats would deny that they have any ulterior motives at all; they are merely driven to report empirical fact, namely that it's impossible for us to meet everyone's basic needs through redistribution. (Call it the liberal argument for full socialism; perhaps we should take them up on the offer!) Alas, we probably don't need to believe them. As good middle-class climbers, liberals support meritocracy over egalitarianism, a tepid amelioration of the worst excesses of capitalism to assuage their consciences while still rewarding the proper winners and losers. Or, in the words of the late great Utah Phillips, "the difference between a liberal and a conservative is a liberal will hang you from a lower branch."

As Mike Konczal writes, there will always be a necessity to have policy experts:

I think the wonk analysis is an essential part of the ideological work currently being done and is capable of advancing the progressive project in crucial ways. Working the numbers and the specifics creates clarity, and it forces people to put their cards on the table. 

In this specific moment, the work of the wonk forces one to justify constraints, lets you know if you are looking in the correct places, gives you a sense of whether the scope and scale of your changes is sufficient, and lets you know the obstacles and enemies you’ll face. 

 Politics are mostly about values. Voters who think work should pay a living wage, or health and well-being shouldn't be decided on the ability to pay, needn't fear intimidation by prophets preaching ideology masked as science. That is, if we believe in "government by the people" after all.

Age old blues

Last week on the internet the kids with their tubetubes and their memeboxes were briefly obsessed with this image macro "Bernie or Hillary." While all memes inevitably stray from their original intellectual origin, the broad point of this macro and its variations was to lampoon Hillary Clinton's perceived inauthenticity to young people. She's portrayed as pandering and out of touch; someone attempting to speak to young people through a focus-group translator, while Bernie is portrayed as someone who is a genuine enthusiast for whatever topic the meme-maker has chosen.

A lot of pundit clatter has been expended on the Democratic Primary analyzing demographics; can Hillary win young women voters? Can Bernie improve his standing with non-white voters? Will I be able to make a baby with a sex robot? But, in its purest form, this primary is a replay of an often-seen showdown among left-of-center Americans for the past couple of decades, the centrist technocrats butting heads with the populist progressives. And, while Hillary Clinton took a pounding in New Hampshire Tuesday, there's still one demographic she can count on.

It's important to understand that, for the centrist technocrats who make up Hillary's base, her inauthenticity isn't a bug, it's a feature. They understand nothing that's said during election season has any bearing on the business of government; pandering is merely an inconvenient chore that needs to be dispensed with before government can be returned to the hands of neutral, ideology-free experts to which it properly belongs. Hillary's waffling and attempts to outflank Sanders on anything from LGBT rights to criminal justice reform, to anything technocrats actually care about like healthcare and finance; everything is purely theater. They know better than to believe any of it, because they know exactly what they are going to get.

After the past week and a half the liberal pundit class has been in a growing meltdown trying to discern the the reasons for the eye-popping numbers Bernie is putting up with the youth. They are naive and unrealistic! It's campus PC-ism run amok! The girls are trying to hook up with hot Bernie Bros! They aren't likely to find a satisfactory solution. In 2008 when Obama was winning the youth vote by 30 people said "wow, this guy is really popular with the youths!" Bernie Sanders is winning under-30 voters by 70. It would be easier at this point to find a dentist who doesn't recommend Crest(TM) than a Hillary-supporting millenial.

In reality, Bernie isn't a pied piper who's leading innocent, naive children into ruin. He's a 74-year old white man who's been preaching Cold War social democracy for 40-odd years. Kids don't think that is cool. And yes, while millenials are more left-wing than their predecessors, saying "it's all ideology" alone isn't enough to explain Bernie's immense popularity. But he is also not a blank slate for young people to project themselves onto, as Obama was. He's a politician with a long record that reflects his ideas, at least some of which have hit home with a lot of young people. And that is what presents the biggest threat to the liberal technocrats, who have long relied on encroaching middle age and the ascension to the middle class to blunt the fervor of youth (and the latter is becoming harder and harder to attain for today's twenty-somethings anyway). Bernie is merely the developing manifestation of the id of a generation that can resist.

Bernie prose

(Boy is it ever dusty in here)

Back when this blog was still going hot in around 2006 or so, and I was young and full of vigor, I found myself fascinated by a little-known Congressperson from Vermont named Bernie Sanders. "Wow," 2006-me said "that guy should've run for president, I would've loved to see how the Democratic Party establishment would deal with a genuinely eloquent populist and defender of social democracy."

Turns out, I am a genius.

So when Sanders announced he was running for President as a Democrat, I rubbed my hands together gleefully. Of course, he was a virtual no-shot against the Clinton juggernaut, but I allowed myself a smirk at the pundits who believed he'd merely be a Kucinichesque distraction squeaking short-lived endorphins into the Democratic Party's leftmost wing before quickly petering out.

And, lo and behold, while Sanders remains an extreme longshot to actually win the Democratic nomination for president, he has rudely stolen the media spotlight away from Hillary Clinton and, albeit temporarily, called a halt to the coronation. Despite facing unprecedented, near-total opprobrium from the Democratic political machine, Sanders has made it a race, virtually splitting the vote with Clinton at Monday's Iowa caucus. And, despite being a 74-year old white guy with a Brooklyn accent, he has built his campaign engine around millennials, winning the under-30 vote in Iowa by an almost-impossible 85-15 margin.

Bernie is so fascinating to watch for a number of reasons, a few I'll touch on briefly here. Firstly, despite not meeting the most particular definition of the term, Sanders nonetheless openly describes himself as a socialist. Even though he wouldn't need to, Bernie dons the mantle of a term which has heretofore been considered as good as instant suicide in American politics. Yes, ultimately Bernie is selling an un-revolutionary, social democratic agenda of redistribution. But, in an American political and economic system that's been so thoroughly corrupted, that's as good a place as any to begin selling socialism. The longer Sanders can stay on the stump preaching his message, the better it will be for the long-term prospects of socialism in America. And that is the hopeful long-term benefit to this (probable) losing effort.

Secondly, Sanders has confounded the liberal opinion-making establishment. For many elections the liberal pundit class has assured its left-sided counterpart that, no, you'll have to accept our deeply-compromised, business-friendly candidate, because no social democratic candidate could ever reach anything like a critical mass of popularity. But Bernie has shown remarkably by slowly, if unsteadily, rebuilding what used to be the Democratic coalition; broad, cross-racial support from poor and working class voters, and young people.

Which brings us to the third point. Sanders, even in defeat, could represent a victory for solidarity politics over liberal identity politics. Liberal pundits, in an attempt to erode Sanders' support among young people, have concocted a caricature of his enthusiastic backers as "Bernie Bros," supposedly crude young white males who support Sanders only out of a desire to keep a powerful woman from the White House. Polls showing Sanders to be even more popular with young women than young men have so far not dissuaded them. Young liberals are often stereotyped, sometimes with merit, as over educated "PC" brats obsessed with personal identity over everything. That they would get behind a broadly old-fashioned campaign of economic populism (though one that has certainly been modernized to the realities of racial and gender inequality) has been rewarding and pleasantly unexpected.

This, of course, is a longstanding favorite liberal smear of the left; that it is merely the province of out-of-touch, comfortable White Male (always writing off left-wing feminists and people of color as irrelevant). They point to Sanders lagging behind among Black voters as evidence of his unfitness, though even there he is slowly making inroads. Bernie picked up three important endorsements from black public figures in South Carolina in the past week. And he's long enjoyed the support,of, among others, critically-acclaimed rapper Killer Mike, who has become one of Bernie's most prolific public advocates.

What a time to be alive!