Left Of Lenin

It’s December 31st, 2023–the year I un-fucked my life after the Law School/childhood dream fulfillment fiasco of 2017. Finances still not great, car still shit. But there’s a strange optimism for the future in my life right now–one not present since 2017, frankly.

Continuity and rupture are the objects of focus in this topic. A million little ruptures and one main continuity seems to be the state of human existence, but the specific ruptures and continuties with the past can be illuminating.

Continuity is easy enough to dispense with: I’m still Trevor, unfortunately. Spent roughly 3 years getting high and pretending this wasn’t the case, but getting out of the cooler definitely made that acceptance process easier. I’m this guy. I will change a bit more before dying, but this is what–who–I am. Still irony poisoned, still a wounded romantic at heart, still a wild-eyed revolutionary extremely uncomfortable with the realities of violence. A mess of contradicitons, in other words–that’s my continuity.

Ruptures?

I don’t work in a physical labor job anymore. I am slowly advancing on a career track (a rupture, in itself) that doesn’t involve my words or politics in the slightest (the more major rupture, to be honest). I have excised (hopefully) the ghost of my Big Bad Ex with a (frankly insane) transcription project.

So, what’s for next year? Quitting smoking is the first goal, in my book. New car after that. Then maybe I date again? Still feels kinda unfair to any potential romantic partner, but I have to get back out there, eventually, right? (No, you don’t; you CAN just die alone, many do.) Get back into listening to new music as it’s released? Well, let’s not shoot for the stars.

(Side note: “We Looked Like Giants” cover by Car Seat Headrest might be the only track released in 2023 I’ve listened to more than once. Hence: Song of the Year 2023.)

Maybe set a real goal for next year. (As though quitting smoking isn’t a major achievement.) Here’s one: one fiction piece published. You know you can do the polemic, the opinion, the historical analysis. That’s easy. Bare your soul, you coward.

The transcription process reminded you how much you amuse yourself with your rhetoric. So, just keep playing with yourself! You’ve been doing that since 2018 anyway, sad sack! (Ow, self. Ow.)

I guess this technically counts as a New Year’s Resolution post. Well:
1) Quit Smoking
2) Publish Something
3) Car?
4) (…Fine) Date Again

This seems eminently reasonable. Can’t wait to find out how I’ll fuck it up when I’m back here a year from now.

I’m sitting here, in a bedroom slowly being readied for a move-out, naked and slightly chilly. I’m listening to one of the greatest albums of the 90s and considering the notion of pop-cultural “correctness”.

Bad Religion was one of the most “correct” bands of the 80s and 90s. The most correct, I’d wager, is Rage Against the Machine. That group may well be the most correct of all time, even if most took them neither seriously nor literally at the zenith of their influence. Our loss! (Free Leonard Peltier.)

“Progress” is playing while I do what I’ve done for the last few days: I get angry in the morning about the state of Israel and their brutal apartheid. I gape and gawk at my tax dollars blowing up apartment buildings in Gaza. I nearly work myself to tears thinking about the base injustice and inhumanity of it all.

And then I scroll Tinder for a bit, never intending to do anything other than scroll. Maybe I masturbate afterward because I became sufficiently horny from the mere thought of maybe one day dating again(?), maybe I don’t. I probably should. My mom’s dad and my dad’s dad both had prostate cancer, after all.

I get out of bed and try to forget that I live in a fallen world, a late-life convert to gnosticism without a shred of spirituality. I experience intermittent success.

“You” is also a very good track. “You”–>”Progress” is a very good two song block. Everyone should go out and buy a copy of “No Control”.

5 stars

There are no lessons to be drawn from 2020 other than depressing lessons.

The Failure of Bernie

We lost! We lost hard and there’s no moral victory to be derived!

The Capitalist Meat Grinder and COVID

They would rather we die and accidentally stop consuming than live and intentionally stop consuming! This sucks!

The Biden “Win” and the Negation of Politics

Face it: that this man won this year in the manner he did proves that politics is more or less untethered from actual material concerns and is now a contest to see who gets owned the least. We all get owned, though.

Lockdown Instagram and the (sadly temporary) Death of FOMO

For a brief moment, Instagram was good. Why was it good for that short stretch?

George Floyd’s Black Posting Boxes

Ah, yes, when it got bad. The liberal buys indulgences from Robin DeAngelo and learns and feels nothing. They scream abolish the police when taken as a public matter AND they loudly and proudly support Biden and Harris. They are histrionic morons with no real political commitments and they are more dangerous than annoying.

QAnon aka Thule 2.0

I remember* when people laughed at how ridiculous the beliefs of the Thule Society were. Well, how did that turn out, folks?

The American Christian Democratic Party

The centrists of both parties, the Bidens and Kasichs of the world, got their wish: a Popular Front against Trump (and, let’s be real: Bernie) winning the Presidency. Now, let’s see how they govern with this coalition.

It’s been a week since I turned 29. One miserable, aching week. Every day I wake up, pretend that I’m even treading water (as opposed to slowly sinking), and go to work in an abattoir of American capitalism. There is little hope, less future.

It is before 7 am and snow is falling. I will risk my life to get to work this morning. No one will care that this is the case and if I crash they will only wonder why I am late.

I will get to work and hear one of my three managers loudly and proudly proclaim that “this tissue won’t protect me from getting sick” despite having the utility of the mask explained to him several times. He is a shithead and I hope he dies of COVID for his arrogance.

I will make it to the afternoon and I will have an ache somewhere in my right knee, perhaps even my left if I should be so lucky. I will duck and dodge dozens of customers. I hate customers.

They will come to the grocery store, and they will act like we are vending machines–liable to be kicked when an improper product (or no product at all) comes out of the coils. They will never consider that many of us live in constant anxiety, having reframed any and all physical proximity (let alone touch) as a viral transmission risk. They will get annoyed at us for our rudeness and they will buy their bread and leave.

I will go out for my second smoke break and I will consider hitting my THC pen. I will refrain from doing so because, even considering all the above, it still bothers me when I don’t do my job well. I will never make a living wage for doing this job well.

I will go back inside, try to clean my area for the next person, and I will clock out. I will likely clock out ten minutes early because I want to leave more than I want to be paid for 10 minutes of my time.

I will wake up the next morning and do it all again. Until one day, I won’t. Hopefully that’ll be because of a better job, with better pay and regular weekends and actual benefits. At this point, it looks nearly as likely that I’ll just kill myself.

Colorado Public Radio could have solved this by just giving me a fucking job in Feb. 2019. If I kill myself, blame them.

No one is reading this, so it’s safe to ramble for a while. Ramble until I stumble upon something new and real, at least.

It’s been 4 months since the COVID shook this shit up and I still don’t have a proper grasp on What Is Going On. The atomization of individual little American monads has made a society-wide action feel alienated and lonesome; despite the knowledge that it sucks for everyone and sucks in a similar way for everyone, I feel more alone than I’ve felt in years. Perhaps more alone than any time since Freshman year of college.

Personal shit aside, it’s been interesting to live through the dying gasps of an empire, the global hegemon. Looking around at the patchwork reaction, the federal abdication, and the people themselves (there’s a whole piece to be done on the COVIDiot), we are a failed state. But we’re a failed state with nukes. So.

On the people, oh la peuple. If I could abolish them, I would! Selfish… gonna elaborate on that

I just spent 2 1/2 months in the cradle of American elitism and I have some takes.

First Take: “America” is not long for this world and I welcome our collective demise. “We” are a federation held together by myths of slaveholder apotheosis and a constitution that acts more like a suicide pact in the face of climate change. The position of global hegemon insulates from the nagging fear that what is here today may not be tomorrow, but that doesn’t change anything. The Soviets had a term for this. Look up the Adam Curtis documentary; I’m not explaining it right now. The collapse can still come, regardless the education-by-empire that the inhabitants of the imperial core possess. And I’ll be goddamned if the experience of door knocking isn’t one of the surest fire ways to peek into the political id bred by imperial education. You know what we learned from the door? The boomers will burn us for fossil fuel before they change their lifestyles. And millennials? We’re too broken down to even vote. And it’s so fuckin easy to vote. So, yeah, apathy plus catastrophe minus a generation that ever had its hands on the levers of power before the prior generation relinquished control equals a collapse that could potentially end this union. My prediction for the final triggering moment is water shortages in the American West. Then we’ll splinter and balkanize and race to seize the nukes in WY, SD, and ND. RIP America. Good riddance.

Second Take: radicalism will not come from the Blue States of our rich American coasts. The comfortable, smug liberals who made up my candidate’s base convinced me. Oh boy, did they convince me. They’re too fat and happy at the apogee of American empire. They have no incentive to change–barring PRESIDENT CHEETO occupying the thing they think was portrayed by The West Wing but was in reality created: the honorable presidency. I’m not going to do my pet history lesson again–the one where I show that American labor struggle was 99% between Chicago and Reno–but the liberal (not left) assumption that CA, MA, and NY would be able to do anything is perhaps partially correct. They’ll ban plastic bags and straws. They’ll create renewable energy standards. They’ll even start to consider pricing carbon! They’ll also vote down pro-union ballot measures, vote down pro-worker ballot measures, vote down pro-tenant ballot measures, and vote for Rockefeller Republicans who will maintain the status quo (and marginal tax rates).  I used to think it was a problem of the machine politics of those states. Now I know better. MA Dems LOVE Charlie Baker. NYS vote overwhelmingly for Cuomo. CA didn’t pitch Feinstein. These people like what they’re getting. So fuck ’em. The elevator pitch version of my history lesson is this: successful American radicalism used to come from flyover country, and goddamn we’re gonna have to get back to that.

Third Take: running as an unabashed progressive is always, always better than running scared. I’m not gonna elaborate on this one. It’s self-evident. Authenticity is key. Medium, message, and all that shit.

Hoity-toity title, eh? But I do love that alliteration.

So, it’s Oct. 29th. 8 days remain before election day. Because this blog is at least semi-private, I’m not gonna go into the identifiable specifics. I’m managing a campaign in a part of the country two time zones removed from my own. That’s it, that’s all–at least as it applies to my whereabouts and current occupation.

Haha, wait, occupation typically denotes pay. I’m not getting paid. Trust me, we’ll circle back to that.

Anyway, I’m miserable, folks. Bolsonaro won, the fascist right is now using political violence, and I’m here trying to win a goddamn State Rep. campaign in a fuckin’ retirement community.

There’s nothing, NOTHING better at showing the inherent limitations of electoral politics like watching repeated rhetorical compromises on baseline social democratic policies at the doorstep while actual fascists are proliferating and killing and winning elections. Granted, part of that is the basic demographics of the electorate (these people are old and these people are white and they are extremely both of those things). But, goddamn if–as usual–working electoral stuff has disenchanted me with the possibilities of that politics.

Fact is that what’s coming can’t be answered by “voting blue no matter who.” Climate change disregards the ballot box–so, too, does fascism. What is actually needed is a radical street politics, the likes of which have not been seen in over 85ish years in the USA. What is needed is an acknowledgement that voting is the bare minimum–a necessary but wholly insufficient condition.

People are gonna have to get used to the idea that getting arrested is political action. People are gonna have to adjust to a world where placing your body between an agent of an increasingly out fascist state and a stranger is not only rational, but required. People are gonna have to accept that violence is a reality of politics in times of flux and chaos. People are gonna have to change.

But people don’t change.

A lot of (extremely nosey) people ask me why I dropped out of law school. After my faux-nebbish dissembling, about half the time I’ll give about half of the overall story: got there, figured out I couldn’t do what I set out to do, and started to hate law school and myself. That’s half true.

Sure, there was one case that made it easier: BMS v. Superior Court of CA. Between May 25th when I got my (overly, mystifyingly) generous scholarship package and August 28th when I started class, the ground upon which I’d made my calculation to go to law school had shifted. Without going in to the boring legalese for a paragraph or two, I’ll summarize: BMS made it impossible for me to do one of the three things I wanted to do. I had a theory of a way to essentially kamikaze the big petrol companies without regard for my potential disbarment. And after June 19th of 2017, that path more or less disappeared.

Now, that’s one avenue of analysis pertaining to why I got the fuck out, but it’s mainly an entry into the main idea: I wanted (want, let’s be real) to punish motherfuckers (primarily oil fuckers) and I quit because I figured out I couldn’t do it as quickly as I could taking other avenues.

Going in to law school, I thought that my passion was protecting the weak and voiceless. I really had some naive, insane internal image of a legal paladin, valiantly cutting swathes through a corrupt (but not irredeemable) legal system. Well, turns out that, uh, no: I like to attack and uh, no: the legal system is going to be closed off to people on my side of the divide for 30, maybe 50 years.

I want to attack–and bring low–the large and powerful. I want to see them embarrassed, sundered, broken. Justice is a fiction, but it’d be real nice to inflict our play-acted, preschool ideal on the obscenely rich and powerful men who have made the world into the hell my generation will try (and fail) to improve. But that’s not defense. That’s not becoming a public defender, or working with immigration law practices to ensure that people scooped up by ICE have the best possible* legal representation.

And the system is broken. It’s no coincidence that I return to finish this draft in the FBI-granted grace period for GOP senators to brainstorm reasons they’re going to confirm Justice Brett (BRETT!) despite his being an alcoholic rapist. Trump did what I hoped Obama would do in 2012 when I cast my first “Dems suck, but…” ballot in my life. (I wanted him to fill a bunch of judicial vacancies. Trump is outpacing him, thus far. We live in Hell.) You want change? Don’t look to the courts.

Mostly, law school taught me that I was wrong. Wrong about a great many things, including things I had taken for granted about myself. But the number one thing I learned I was wrong about was “how bad it’s actually going to be.” My whole law school thesis was based on three premises proved wrong in quick succession, but even if those had remained, I’d likely end up in the same place. Physics cannot be reasoned with; hydrology doesn’t care what your educational credentials are.

The interior west, and my home in particular, is fucked. There’s not enough water and there’s too many people. That’s the facts, ma’am, and there’s no way out. But in the process of coming to this conclusion, I started to look back at what I wanted to do in law school. I wanted (again, want) to punish the fuckers. They deserve it, and I want to be the one to give it to them.

At the time it may have been unspoken, but I now recognize a climate fatalism in the “punish the fuckers” thesis. Before I immersed myself in the true danger of the irrigation and agriculture of the Colorado River Basin, my Green Leftist take was “expropriate and go green” or some nonsense like that. I don’t even say that anymore, unless I’m in mixed company. I just don’t believe it can happen; the only thing we can get is punishment. It won’t fix anything, but goddammit it’ll make the people moving their lives 20 miles in from the coast or 100 miles closer to freshwater, or the people who remained from a deadly climate catastrophe, or the people who baked to death in the hot, ever hotter sun just an iota happier, I’d like to think.

And, honestly, who cares if the punishment doesn’t solve anything, if we’re so fucked that there’s no coming back? They deserve it.

(Originally written June 2017)

So, since I’ve last checked in, it seems as though the world was made anew, kind of.

Corbyn’s dramatic, unexpected, and unironically cool and good showing has changed the political calculus, and the brave new horizons presented by the furthest (non-Scandanavian) penetration of actual radicalism in parliamentary socialism are still being sorted as I type. Jezza’s feat* shall be remembered for decades, centuries if this is actually the pivot point when the green, social democratic milennial generation manages to wrest control of the political levers of power from their selfish boomer betters (*no, not Labour’s feat, considering the Blairites who’ve had their twitter replies filled with constituents reminding them that they voted for Jez and the manifesto).

So, so, much of my Canadian-American brain that craves analysis and synthesis from smashing my two nationalities together, what with all of the attendant comparisons and contrasts between the two, has been outsourced back to the fatherland since June 8th. Because, inasmuch as I’m Canadian, let’s be real, I’m Welsh.

My Nan and Bampi lived that real life Horatio Alger story, the rags to riches American dream. It’s just that, in a brilliant twist that would fortell the fates of the two North American children of England in the century moving forward, that American Dream was more accessible, durable, and holistic in Canada.

But that is a concept and a thought from another day. It’s where they came from before landing in Sault Ste. Marie (ON not MI) that interests me since the events of June 8th.

Wales. Cymru. Land of my fathers, land of song, land of Red Dragons, dragons lying dormant until all Saesneg can be driven back east, behind Offa’s Dyke, back to Lloegr. I am Welsh, and ever since my Bampi made clear to me the distinction between English, Welsh, and British in 2002 (probably because I was cheering for the Three Lions and he wanted to put a stop to that shit), I’ve held that component part of my identity close and cherished.

Even as I drifted ever leftward, dispelled all manner of social conditioning designed to divide and conquer for the purposes of splitting those groups abused by power, I could not let go of the extremely romantic notion that I was, in essence, a Dragon–and Red at that.

At the same time, I was (and am) firmly committed to the ideal of a world without borders, without walls. The walls and the borders, as constructed, simply exist to impede freedom of movement in order to control more thoroughly a local proletariat. It is simple to understand, and it is from this thesis that makes dismissing any appeals to nationalism, even if benign, much easier.

And yet, I want an independent Wales. I want an independent Scotland. I want a unified Ireland, an independent Catalonia, and a Brittany that takes whatever form the Bretons so choose. I believe in the right of all peoples to self-determine, and it is in this impasse–the absolute right of self-determination and the inherent truth of a global working class oft divided by synthetic national distinctions to keep them weak–that I find my thoughts swirling around an interminable eddy.

This wasn’t an issue until recently. Not that it wasn’t a logically-inconsistent position, one that inherently causes cognitive dissonance, but it just wasn’t materially important. Especially as it applied to the realm of solely Parliamentary Socialism. Vote Plaid in assembly elections, vote tactically in Westminster elections but make sure that you send either Plaid or Labour, depending on the constituency. Wasn’t altogether difficult to reconcile.

But it is in the True Trot analysis that I bring to the situation, coupled with Y Ddraig Goch literally tattooed in my body, that I must find the nugget of truth that allows me to keep the useful bits of both.

There is the thought I had, a thought that this 20th and 21st century variation on nationalism that the Celtic nations are stoking is substantively different. For instance, going back to the election results that sent me down this thought rabbit hole, take a look at the respective nationalist parties. Scotland’s SNP is nominally social democratic (though there’s a debate to be had there, folks), Plaid Cymru is a fusion between a green and social democratic party (which is beautiful and makes sense and warms me heart), and Sinn Fein* is… well, Sinn Fein. You know what they’re all about, and we here at Left Of Lenin are wholeheartedly pro Gerry Adams (*N. Ireland, because, as makes sense, this thesis doesn’t hold once you take it out of the UK; Ireland can have multiple political takes on Irish Nationalism). So, on a surface basis, each of the main nationalist parties representing the constituent nations of the U.K. are social democratic, at the very least. This is a good start.

But, strip away the policies for a moment, strip away the personalities, and the current material conditions, and everything that one should take in to account in making a political analysis. Simply regard the history, and then regard the parties. Bereft of everything that actually makes a hard Lefty like myself sympathetic to their nationalisms moreso than I rightfully should be, the modern Celtic Nationalisms are peculiar in one respect: they are reactive. Most nationalisms that we recognize sprouted up from events or timeframes that codified a regional or religious or ethnic distinction into a national one. The Celtic variant is interesting to me because, in reading their rhetoric and platforms, theirs is more of a reactive notion of what they are not: English. So, while there is an obvious spatial element, there is no other clear dividing bright line of connection to the nationalisms of the past. There is no American Indian War or ANZAC participation in WWI for the comparable English holdings’ nationalistic geneses. There is no great single event of rupture with the sovereign–after all the Miners Strikes didn’t solely emanate from South Wales.

I can (and will, later on) expound at greater length and in greater detail what a “Welsh” nationalism can even mean when even self-identifying and proud Welshmen have probably 50% English DNA and filial backstory. But at the moment, allow me to put forward a thesis: This expanding Celtic Left Wing Nationalism is the convergence of many strands of Celtic culture, English treatment of its subjects, and the material political moment. But it is potentially one of the first variants of nationalism in a long time–perhaps even since Ireland–that has a chance to do the rare and beautiful thing: to channel the inherently dangerous and insanely powerful force of nationalism into a project of liberation.