Hippies vs. Punks: The Road Film Score (2009) by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis

The United States fought a civil war 150 years ago that has shaped the politics of this country ever since. We are taught that the war was about slavery, but it was really a result of the breakdown of the political system; this at least is the Michael Holt thesis: Political parties became sectionalized as the Whigs were replaced by the Republicans, temporarily but chaotically destabilizing the duopoly.

The energy and movement in U.S. politics over the last 50 years has been about the Republicans gobbling up turf that once belonged to the Democratic Party. The GOP from Goldwater forward has remade itself as the party of Dixie.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Goldwater and Reagan are not the party heroes of this narrative of transformation; rather, it should be George Wallace and Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who initiated the Dixification of the Republican Party with his embrace of Kevin Phillips' "Southern Strategy."

Simply put, Phillips saw the political puissance of Alabama Governor George Wallace's third-party run for the presidency in 1968, based as it was on a thinly veiled Negrophobia and Hippiephobia pitched to a belligerent white working class, and decided to appropriate it for the GOP. The rest as they say is history.

Fast forward to yesterday's piece by Nate Cohn, "Donald Trump’s Strongest Supporters: A Certain Kind of Democrat," which argues that Donald Trump, though ahead across the board with all slices of the Republican demographic pie, has his greatest support among less educated members of the working class in the South and industrial North who are registered as Democrats:

He is strongest among Republicans who are less affluent, less educated and less likely to turn out to vote. His very best voters are self-identified Republicans who nonetheless are registered as Democrats. It’s a coalition that’s concentrated in the South, Appalachia and the industrial North, according to data provided to The Upshot by Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm.

In other words, a repeat of George Wallace.

It was encouraging to see the writers over at FiveThirtyEight at least acknowledging ("The Meaning Of Donald Trump") the similarity of the Trump phenomenon to that of George Wallace in 1968, though they stick to mainstream talking points of why Trump won't win the Republican nomination (without providing any insight into who will). As I've mentioned before, these talking points usually reduce to a faith that the infrequent voters who provide the bedrock of Trump's support will not show up to the polls in 2016; that, and the unstated proposition that the American political system is not truly democratic, that it is a private enterprise administered by two exclusive clubs that can bar entry to whichever candidate it chooses.

The touts at FiveThirtyEight fail and fail miserably because they see history as nothing more than a big, flat data set. (For instance, they bat about Buchanan '92 as being on the same level as Wallace '68. Poppycock! Wallace '68 created the current GOP Congressional majority.) But history isn't flat. History has a distinct shape. And if that shape taking form shows Trump to be similar to Wallace in 1968, then analysts would be wise to look again.

Well, you will say, "No worries for the GOP. Wallace didn't win. Tricky Dick won in a nail-biter. Who is to say that this doesn't augur the same for Ted Cruz?"

The difference is that Wallace, a Democrat governor from the Deep South, ran as a third-party candidate. Trump isn't running as a independent or third-party candidate. Trump is running as a Republican, and he is running ahead among Republicans, even the wealthy ones.

The other huge blind spot in the conventional wisdom, and something that I was surprised to see go unmentioned by the FiveThirtyEighters, is the failure of the Obama presidency. This is never accorded the weight that it deserves. Obama was elected in two landslides as an avatar of hope and change. The promise of his presidency is that we are all in this together, that we are a community; that America stands for honesty and peace and prosperity. We bought that ticket. And it didn't bring us to the promised land; at the end of the Obama road was just the same old Bush-Cheney killing floor.

People are mad. They want to shatter the system because the system doesn't work. Trump is the vehicle to bring this about.

The Road (2006) is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by the great Cormac McCarthy. It is a story about a father and son surviving in a brutal post-apocalyptic landscape. The book was made into a less than successful film starring Viggo Mortenson. But the film score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is a good one. Listening to it last week, I realized that movie soundtracks have been an important feature of my sonic landscape the last five years. I have probably listened to Robbie Robertson's soundtrack to Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010), not to mention the more recent film score to The Rover (2014) by Anthony Partos, as much as any record. 

I think a good film score is an ambient register of the soup we swim in, sort of a sonic amniotic fluid. The Road, Shutter Island and The Rover all point to very difficult bitter times ahead.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #51

Dark as dusk near midday with the rain pouring down. Earlier this morning out on run, most if not all passersby geared up with Seahawks hats and jerseys, I suddenly became concerned about the emotional impact a loss this afternoon would have on the collective psyche of the city. We are attached by heart and hip to this football team -- to Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman and Russell Wilson and Golden Tate and Earl Thomas. Our suffering will be immense if they falter.

Speaking of suffering, I dropped a table on the top of my foot the other day setting up for a safety training at the local. It hurt so much I entertained the thought that it might be broken. The monkey mind starts chattering away, and you have to apply the higher mind. The higher mind was saying, "Look, simmer down. If the foot had a break, I wouldn't be walking. Plus, it would be swollen so much it would hurt to be wearing a shoe." But the monkey mind keeps on chattering, "You don't know that! There are a lot of bones in the foot. And it'll probably swell up tonight. Why not at least go get an X-ray?"

I stopped off at the grocery store last night to get my shopping done for the coming work week. When I got home I noticed that my computer was powered down. Unusual. I always leave my computer on; I let it go into sleep mode. When I tried to boot it up I had difficulty. After a long while it did start up, but I could not access my accounting software -- Quicken -- nor my iTunes. I ignored it. Then before going to bed I decided to restart the computer, which it would not do, staying perpetually in "Shutting down . . ." mode.

I went to bed and left the computer running like that. Around 1 AM I was awoken by a young man-young woman dispute taking place on the street below. The guy was repeating this torrent of words punctuated by the word, "Now!" I could not make out the others words in the torrent. Just the cadence ending with "Now!" Over and over again he repeated it like some kind of black-magic incantation.

I took the opportunity, being up at 1:30 AM, to try to reboot my PC, which was still stuck on the "Shutting down . . ." screen. This time it would not boot. I tried to remember how to access the BIOS screen and the process I went through a couple of months back when I have was having problems, but I was groggy and couldn't remember much.

Finally, after going to my filing cabinet and determining after a halfhearted search that I hadn't saved the instructions to boot to the BIOS screen, I decided to power down the computer one more time and just let it sit all night trying to boot.

By the time I got back to bed, I heard another voice down on the street. Apparently a resident of my apartment building, a guy my age maybe a little older from the first floor who I didn't recognize, was not so tolerant of the ongoing dark arts lovers' street quarrel. He had gone to the street in his rain gear and intervened. He was telling the guy to leave the young woman alone. I guess the young guy had grabbed the young lady. So the young guy and the rain-geared neighbored argued, with the neighbor yelling to a woman -- (his girlfriend? his wife?) who must have been at the window of their apartment -- to phone the police. I was about to get dressed and go down, debating the wisdom of adding my voice to the drama, when I saw the young woman take off down the street, and then shortly thereafter another young man came up from out of nowhere in a black t-shirt and took the aggressive young man by the arm and led him away.

And with that quiet returned. And lo and behold! In the meantime my PC had booted. I went back to bed and slept soundly.

The letter below, from more than a quarter-century ago, is addressed to my father, with whom I have a good relationship to this day. I visit him twice a year at his Solano County home, and we run a road race together.

In college I was a Kantian, but one who was seduced by Hegel's revision of Kant, that noumenal knowledge was possible. At the time my father and I shared the Hegelian seduction, this Beatnik idea, as expressed by Dean Moriarity in On the Road, that "we know time." (I was also, as you can see, heavily influenced by Paul Virilio.)

Now I am a Kantian of the type expressed by Jacobi when he said that the rationalism of Kant's critical philosophy ends in nihilism; he thereby coined the term. I do think we can know time, but I don't think that offers any liberation from the idea that the unknowable, systemically, always remains unknown.

Nihilism is the province of fathers and sons. It is no coincidence that nihilism was first popularized in an 1862 novel by Ivan Turgenev which was translated into English with the title Fathers and Sons. The great Cormac McCarthy's last two novels -- No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006) -- both enormously successful critically and commercially, explore this connection between nihilism and fathers and sons. Nothing says it better than the Sheriff's dream at the end of No Country for Old Men, delivered by Tommy Lee Jones who played Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in the 2007 movie version of the novel:

Autumn 1988

Well Dad, I tell you, I forgot the exact point of this correspondence. Did it have something to do with the car? I remember the bike(s) and the missing box information, but that's it. So anyway, I bought a Casio watch today. I was getting sick and tired of the gold dandy that uncle Boo-guy gave me; it made for a left hand (because of the wedding band) that was a little too ostentatious for my palate; and you had to wind it regularly, making life run five-minutes fast or days slow. The digits on the Casio don't leave any room for doubt, and the unostentatious black speaks to my heart. But this shift raises an important question: the shift -- my personal shift -- from circular time to linear time. The old conception of time, the circular one, was something I definitely had to live under for a spell, and it did me an unquantifiable sum of good. But I always had the itch to return to linear tine, and today I did. If I start to notice those ill effects I have come to attribute to the Casio scheme of things, I'm going to have to go back to the gold dandy, at least for a couple days a week.

[Weeks passed] Ashley is doing just fine. Midterms are i.n about a week. And thank goodness for the A's. I've almost given up on the 49ers. They don't televise the games out here very often, though I did enjoy the early season 4th-quarter conquest of the pompous Giants.

[Weeks passed] Well, needless to say, I'm back to the 49ers now. The World Series left me shattered for a while. Everyone needs their salvation. So I'm back to my old status of blood and guts for the red and gold. The squeaky stallion is gonna make at least one more gallop on the Western trail, to the land of Hegel, champion of the Occident. Hegel's schtick was that we know time, and by me that's just about the hippest, most optimistic thing a person can come to; so I don't shy away from all the bad raps he gets as a rigid Trinitarian dialectician Prussian apologist. His core, heartfelt insight was that the noumena, the unknowable element in our world, is a product of time, and is revealed through time. Hey, that's okay. Because of you and mom and whatever you two we're going through, I got a taste of the Sixties explosion and a heap of the Seventies confusion. I did the Eighties myself. But knowing time is a dangerous thing. It's what Nietzsche talked about in THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY; it's the opiate of looking backwards, of resting on one's rotten laurels (what the old Christmas tree looks like on the first day of spring). Knowing time always has got to be coupled with a philosophy of speed, of shooting forward and taking on the accidental; otherwise, there isn't anything to ruminate historically about. In Hegel's scheme, the accidental (what he calls Nature) steps up, transmogrifies, evolves through the dialectic into the rational (Geist, spirit). So the accidental is essential fuel for the old thinking machine. 

I send along a picture of one of my hearts, which you know well.

Two by Rick Remender: Captain America #2 + Secret Avengers #35

Rick Remender's imagination is rich, febrile.  I was introduced to Remender by reading Punisher during the "Dark Reign" and "Franken-Castle" storylines.  Remender has an edge. Now he's working on the radical, new Captain America run -- a Kirby homage set in the phantasmagoric Dimension Z.  Check out this page from Captain America #2, penciled by John Romita Jr. and inked by Klaus Janson; it's obviously influenced by Cormac McCarthy's dystopian The Road.  The scanned page that follows it is from Remender's Secret Avengers #35 where he's been exploring the idea of the domination of biological life by artificial life; the art is by Matteo Scalera.

The Planetary Emergency

Reading "The Planetary Emergency" by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark in the current Monthly Review the consensus is that irreversible climate change sets in with a rise in temperature of 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), which corresponds to one trillion cumulative metric tons of carbon emissions.  We're going to hit the one trillion metric ton mark in 2043.  Three decades.

The answer?  We've got to stop growing.  But capitalism is based on growth, on constantly increasing consumption, on the American ideal of every Chinese family owning a car or two and eating meat three times a day.  So get ready to rumble.  Conflict is coming our way, either in the form of dealing with the catastrophic effects of climate change (imagine being a character in Cormac McCarthy's The Road) or in the many politically necessary battles required to radically change the status quo.  It's more than likely that we'll be dealing with both at the same time.