Bernie Sanders

Coronavirus Against the Day

Egon Schiele Photo 1

by Guy Walker

There’s a famous photo of a man mowing his lawn with an enormous tornado looming in the background. It’s inanity in its rawest form, but also a biblical representation of our own broader calamity as a species. I went surfing a couple mornings ago, fraternizing with friends on the bluff’s edge, smoking weed together, laughing about the skyrocketing divorce rates now that couples have to spend time with one another amidst this global lockdown from coronavirus. But our collective scenery was hued with the grim residue of history’s past epidemics. We all knew, without acknowledging it seriously, that everything was up in the air.

Slavoj Žižek called the panic surrounding coronavirus a “Kill Bill”-esque blow to capitalism. Populations are now realizing directly that insurmountable debt, rent payments, and meaningless jobs were just made-up hobbies for the rich and powerful to keep us dithering in the sludge of tomorrow. And it might be more difficult to pack us all back into the paddocks of servitude once this blows over. Suddenly all of Bernie’s ideas and Andrew Yang’s ideas aren’t so crazy after all, and the economic survival of a people is tantamount to global riots. At least for a shotgun-fart of a moment, some politicians seem to be prioritizing the decency and welfare of its electorate over the riches of war. I’m not being cynical. There are real fragments of governance that deliver the morning fog of optimism.

But the universal hope now seems to be for things to go back to normal as quickly as possible. We’ve seen it in the Democratic primary race that has all but dwindled into the rearview of reality tv reruns. Joe Biden’s entire presidential campaign is resting on the belief of the return to normalcy. He doesn’t believe in anything—except for immaculate gleaming fangs for dentures, and pocketed hair plugs that camouflages the emulsified rot of his skull, and aviator sunglasses that promote some vague sense of youth, he has never shown us through policy that he cares about the betterment of the people. Now this fiendish poetry of hell actually makes Joe Biden the best candidate for president: we can all return to normal, whatever our pallid impression of that is.

The implication of this taxpayer bailout, mortgage and eviction suspension, free medical treatment, etcetera, is that this is only temporary. Those of us who survive the virus (and more concerning, the panic around the virus), will have to return to our obligatory suffering once this is all over, scrambling to collect money to pay rent on time, stressing into our own cauldrons of disease because the banks are demanding their loans back. A return to normalcy is a return to self-immolating idiocy. Wading knee-deep through the binary fusion of human filth, our excrement killing everything in its frothy wake. Most certainly, things should not go back to normal. This experiment of killing the planet for a fucking smashing good party wasn’t a good one.

Rahm Emanuel, in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, is credited with saying you shouldn’t let a good crisis go to waste. (Obviously he did let it go to waste. Or whatever. The bankers never went to jail, they only got richer.) But he didn’t coin the phrase anyways. It was Winston Churchill amid the second World War, and the collective mobilization for a greater good. Franklin Roosevelt used the Great Depression to deliver a massive overhaul of our economic and social systems for the better. It may sound trite, but this is indeed our opportunity to rework so much that has been broken for so long.

There will always be a humanity, a decency, out there in the streets, however feral it becomes. I walked by a homeless man early this morning standing in the same place that I walked by him last night. It was still dark and he was shivering uncontrollably, and still had the decency to say “How’s it goin’ brother.” I went back to my apartment and gave him a huge warm coat and a thermos of tea. And for one reason or another, his bedraggled state made me emotional. There’s sixty thousand homeless people here in Los Angeles, and this guy moved me. But now I ask myself if I unwittingly gave him the virus that will eventually kill him in the cold. I surely didn’t, but the pandemic of fear has seeded that thought.

I am a young single healthy male living at the base of the Hollywood hills, so I inadvertently speak about this arrogantly. But this is good for us Americans. The terrible swine flu that swept through China months ago; the charred blizzard of locusts ravaging many parts of Africa; the flooding of distant island nations—these are all things that happen to strange people in stranger lands. Our gaudy celebration of rose-scented farts was make-believe all this time. It’s good for us to remember firsthand we are bags of rotting infectious meat scurrying frantically on this flooded rock, spiraling around an enormous fireball.

Someone on the Internet tweeted something about the need to eat some peyote and speak to the pangolin in these strange times. This is that time, for all of us. Eat peyote, and speak to the pangolin will become my mantra. This isn’t working for any of us. I don’t believe we have to always be the saboteurs of all life. There’s something beautiful inside us somewhere. When we are free from our quarantine, we should have sex in the tall prairies, drink whiskey by the bottle with our grandmother, kiss one another’s cheeks like the French do, swim in the sea, rub ourselves with handfuls of moss and soil, drive motorcycles out to the desert, fall madly and briefly in love.

For now though, Žižek believes we should look to the five stages of trauma while dealing with this crisis: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. But in the final stage of acceptance, he notes, we should look to the social uprisings in France and Hong Kong for a more conclusive trajectory: “they don’t explode and then pass away; rather, they stay here and just persist, bringing permanent fear and fragility to our lives.” This, I believe, is most necessary. We should accept we are being presently dragged through the mud into this new reality, and move forward with collective solidarity. Not the fear, but the new reality. Žižek continued that when we are being ravaged by one of nature’s vast reservoir of viruses, it’s “sending our own message back to us.” A virus just reproduces itself stupidly, without reason, identical to the way we humans do. We have barbecued the green terrariums and waterfalls and loamy beds of mushrooms and mosses into a bubbling scab, like a frat party that left half the town dead. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Charles Baudelaire wrote a great deal about the existential gore of our species. Flowers of Evil is a masterpiece of our collective sin of being bored amid this blaze of life.

At my side the Demon writhes forever,

Swimming around me like impalpable air;

As I breathe, he burns my lungs like fever

And fills me with an eternal guilty desire.

After all this panic, we might compulsively return to the “wilderness of Ennui”. Because we’ll think that’s how it always was—we had a few good years in this viral circle jerk of modernity, driven by a maniacal lust for more bricks and concrete and plastic toys, our swollen genitals releasing like the last rains of winter. But we believed this movie was the sharply bordered tapestry of life, that this is just how the whole fucking thing hummed along and would continue to hum along. Baudelaire said he wanted to write poetry that would fire a cannonball into the future; and somewhere under our panoply of barbarism, we’re all poets, and can do the same.

The internet isn’t real. A whole culture industry structured around going viral, groping at the melancholy storm above to magically deliver our drooling, spluttering ego across the globe. We want to be seen; we want strangers we didn’t even know existed to catch the disease of our personalities. Now, some bat in some market in some village in China, gave this virus to another animal, and then to a human, and then to all of us, killing scores of the old and weak, sending the stock market into free fall, directing everyone home to sit behind their screens to make ironic quarantine-themed Tik Tok videos that will go viral. The toilet paper hysteria is purely viral, snowballing on its own momentum.

Richard Dawkins popularized the word “meme,” to mean “viruses of the mind,” in which cultural frames inhabit themselves in our minds, only to infest on the emulsified rot of our habits. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote at length about what they termed the culture industry, in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The factory production of popular culture is now facing a burden in this virus. Normal popular culture will survive, of course, but hopefully morph into something more meaningful.

As far as social isolation is concerned, the virus hasn’t really achieved anything out of the ordinary. Quarantine, self-isolation, a chronic loneliness that has blanketed the frontier. British journalist, Sam Kriss, notes that it’s only amplified what we were already practicing en masse anyways. Stay home; binge watch made-for-television series until your eyeballs rot from their stems; post clever memes on the internet, and then scroll frantically to tally who saw it, who might be impressed now by your isolated wit and sheltered charisma during these dark times; watch porn; smoke weed, eat edibles, eat food; shelter yourself behind childhood forts of toilet paper, lather your genitals in Purell disinfectant; buy things from Amazon you don’t need. Young people who say they love to read, but the only writers they can name are Bukowski and Hunter Thompson.

Adorno wrote elsewhere that “Distance is not a safety-zone but a field of tension. It is manifested not in relaxing the claim of ideas to truth, but in delicacy and fragility of thinking.” The technology of today allows us to not really reap the benefits of this isolation. I want to believe we are collectively introspecting on the acute parochialism of this haphazard arena-of-gore we’ve made for ourselves, and how we will design a better one. But until the power and wifi goes out on all of us, and we can’t take refuge in Youtube self-help tutorials, or FaceTime our ex-girlfriends from a decade ago, we won’t be joining any mass meditations. “Only at a remove from life can the mental life exist, and truly engage the empirical.” We have tethered ourselves to life with evangelical fury. There’s no escape.

What about the prisons? The homeless? The nursing homes? More people are dying by the day from climate change, and yet something about the immediacy of coronavirus makes it more of a threat than the growing severity of flood and fire, or storm clouds of locusts ravaging through entire continents. And as bad as this pandemic is, it’s going to be remembered as incredibly tame compared to the next one. Many public intellectuals have called it a dress rehearsal for the next one. Or, what it could be, what another pandemic inevitably will be at one time or another. There is already a great deal of concern when some super-predatory anthrax melts out of the carcass of a woolly mammoth from under the permafrost. This will happen. And coronavirus will be remembered as another era of quaint naiveté.

I couldn’t imagine having children who are dependent on me, with bills to pay, and no money coming in sight. Yet still, things aren’t that bad comparatively to what could be. Imagine the so-called Big One—the earthquake, not the frozen pizza company—hits Los Angeles tomorrow. Or up in the Pacific Northwest. It’s entirely possible—we’re something like a hundred years overdue. Or, this panic and virus carries on through to fire season, sending hundreds of thousands fleeing from their homes like diseased roaches.

The canals in Venice, Italy have already been returned with swans, dolphins, and fish, as the murky death-blended smoothie of canal has cleansed itself to a pristine shimmering postcard; reports estimate the lockdown in China likely saved 77,000 lives just from the reduction in pollution alone; oil stocks have plummeted to possible unrecoverable lows. An invisible lifeless bug did in a few days what us environmentalists have been trying to achieve for decades. There’s part of me that wants to believe this is only one of a multitude of nature’s self-correcting mechanisms to get back on course. SARS, like corona, came from the wild animal trade—from a civet, the enigmatic wild quadruped. AIDS came from eating wild bushmeat. Lyme disease comes from our disruption of New England forests. Maybe it’s only metaphor, and therefore not real, but sometimes I think nature’s trying to say something. English scientist James Lovelock introduced his Gaia hypothesis to the scientific and popular world, in that the earth functions like a single living organism. Or rather, more mundanely, like a self-regulating system. It was initially mocked as hippie science, but it’s since evolved into widely accepted scientific theories, now known as earth systems science.

Whatever the case, this will of course go far beyond coronavirus. When we open our curtains and unlock the deadbolt from our doors for the first time since this quarantine, pale and naked, squinting into the feral daybreak, we’ll scan if everything’s back to normal. The clouds will darken. A butterfly will land on a man’s balls. Stock markets will crawl upwards. And we’ll drink whiskey with our grandmothers.

The Bloomberg and Trump Debate

Animal-Cat-Painting-Cat-fight-780x604

by Guy Walker

[MICHAEL BLOOMBERG and DONALD TRUMP lumber onto a sprawl of twenty asphalt basketball courts all packed neatly together, the summer sun rotting into its lava crest until black tumors split open and hiss like miniature volcanoes. Hundreds of folding chairs tossed haphazardly on the ground. The supporters of DONALD TRUMP are only furries without their costumes; they stand around in their underwear, the festering scars of their deep belly-buttons throb in the heat. MICHAEL BLOOMBERG’s supporters consist of a few rodents rummaging through a garbage heap of fast food to-go bags. A opossum waddles by with a slice of pickle still on its forehead. BLOOMBERG has wrapped his face in Saran Wrap in an attempted facelift, and wears a hammer in his trousers, displaying an uncomfortable outline to all who look at his crotch. TRUMP is wearing his long trademark red tie that hangs like a dog’s tongue dead from exhaustion. But no shirt, and no blazer. His meaty, porcine tits and face are painted in some indecipherable team colors like he was a drunken fan at a football game. They are both sweating profusely.]

MODERATOR: Thank you. Yes, thank you, please take your seats everyone, this isn’t a casual gathering. I’m very pleased to announce this debate between two distinguished professionals. On my right is Donald Trump, famed celebrity host of the game shows How Many Turds Is Too Many, Do These Pants Make Me Look Like A Man, and of course, The All-You-Can-Eat Mac ’n Cheese Eating Contest. And Michael Bloomberg, who narrowly won the Democratic nomination after Bernie Sanders was stopped and frisked, and discovered to not have marbles in his coat pocket, thus proving that the old geezer really lost his marbles this time. Congratulations Mr. Bloomberg.

[BLOOMBERG flashes some gang signs with his hands, and forces a smile.]

MODERATOR: We’ll begin with you, Mr. Trump. This election has been criticized as being too absurd, as a kind of malevolent degeneration of American politics. How do you respond?

TRUMP: I simply don’t agree.

[At this, one of the human furries has started humping a raccoon, rubbing the length of its prickly unconditioned fur across his genitals.}

BLOOMBERG: [pointing to the profane bestiality] This is what I’m talking about. My opponent just attacks, attacks, attacks. We need to unite the American people as these two magnificent beings have. Because we are all Americans, in need of the same thing.

TRUMP: Sir, my supporters are literally fucking yours to death. You are roadkill. This is what Adorno meant in Minima Moralia, when he wrote, “Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.” You should no longer resist this obvious truth.

BLOOMBERG: Now look, let’s not get carried away with this who’s-fucking-who business. I’m a business man, and this is no business for us to get tangled up in. I started the practice young, raised by my father, taught me how to write my first check. And so forth. You see, my very first business, I sold cheese balls. I rolled up these little balls, and you would have about fifteen or twenty of these white cheese balls floating around in a bag of water, you see, and the water gets almost a milky hue to it, from the balls. It’s just amazing the things a kid learns. My opponent here, has he ever made cheese balls? I bet you he couldn’t tell you the first thing about cheese balls. I do. You roll them around between the palms of your hands, very gently like this, you see.

TRUMP: What Mr. Bloomberg is trying to insinuate, is that he’s a pervert. Now, as we all know, Kierkegaard wrote a great deal about the Absurd, especially in his journals. You have asked about the absurdity of a game show host being your president. This is not at all the point, and completely robs the Danish philosopher and his successors of their original intent. But this is of course a truly sisyphian nightmare, is it not? To explain the point of something in a meaningless world? Kierkegaard, as you all know, believed the interpretable pre-Socratic paganism was as correct as Jewish idolatry, in that, we are all indistinguishable beings brought into form by the eternal truth. We act in accordance to the absurd, meaning we act upon faith. When Kierkegaard correctly noted the example in the Old Testament, when Abraham is told by God to kill his son Isaac, and he did not because an angel interfered, this action of inaction was by virtue of the absurd. Now I ask you, when the Son of Sam was told by his neighbor’s dog to kill all those people in New York in that scalding hot summer, where the heck was his angel? I’ll tell you where: there was no angel, because it was hotter than hell! Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Oh boy, I really crack myself up. Excuse me, really. But no, seriously folks, this is exactly why, when you get to the voting booth, and have to decide between that monstrous scoundrel and I, you could very well choose one or the other, it doesn’t at all matter. But you will be at a standstill if you reflect upon it too much. We are the same. But it is in this godly bestowed faith, by virtue of the absurd, that you will vote for me. It’s not the reasonable choice because this is a completely unreasonable world, and therein lies the beauty.

BLOOMBERG: Now wait just a minute. We are not the same, and that is completely unfair to assert we are. He only had two phone numbers in Jeffery Epstein’s black book. You know how many I had? Four. When he hires a prostitute, he invites them over to watch Shark Week in his bathrobe. Like a fucking eight-year-old. When I hire a prosty, I tie a chain around her neck and toss it over the rafters. I have eaten the corpses of children. When he watches porn, he only watches the initial build-up storyline—plumber-coming-over-to-fix-the-pipes type of thing. And then he closes his laptop before their clothes come off, and cums into a dirty sock. Don’t believe his dithering crap about Kierkegaard and the absurd. I have eaten hot dogs from street vendors in order to look relatable, goddamnit! You want some fucking philosophy? R.L. Stine, in his esteemed classic Say Cheese and Die!, wrote, “The next day, Greg is so large that he cannot even ride the car to school because he can’t fit in the car.” Close quote. I would drop the mic if there was one. But there’s just these bendable antenna ones. But you get the idea.

[TRUMP has started eating a taco bowl. Strands of shredded iceberg lettuce are getting caught in his blonde chest hairs. A few granules of burger meat sprinkle the melting crust of asphalt, and the naked furries and rodents scramble on all fours, snarling for their share. Trump smiles, and gives the deserted tarmac a thumbs up.]

TRUMP: Look at them. They love me, I can’t help it. This is exactly what Beckett had intentioned when writing Endgame and Waiting For Godot. His servant characters, Clov and Lucky, in their respective plays, symbolize the inevitable and irrational devotion we have for others. These are, of course, absurdist plays. But now we are speaking of a different kind of absurd. When Lucky is writhing in the tangle of an imaginary net, it is of course a nod at Vladimir and Estragon who are trapped in their own imaginations of the Godot character. Godot is not coming. He’s not going to save them of their own boredom. We know that, but it wouldn’t be a play if they suddenly realized it on the first page of dialogue. Is this not analogous to our own situation here? Between Bloomberg and I saving this present hellscape? Are you not all writhing in invisible mania, hoping some fictional savior will lift you from your daily peasantry.

BLOOMBERG: Oh fuck off. I’ve seen you play tennis in shorts.

TRUMP: Look, in Godot, Lucky cannot think or speak without his bowler hat. Estragon keeps taking on and off his shoes, and Vladimir his hat. The point is, we are condemned to our meaningless props. It’s why people smoke cigarettes outside of bars—they don’t know what to do with their hands. You have turned Mr. Bloomberg and I into props, like dirty siphons for your chronic turrets, because you’re all animals, you don’t know what to do with yourselves. You’ve committed yourselves to this delirium where you simply cannot speak about anything unless you’re speaking about us.

BLOOMBERG: Let me be frank. Well, let me be Michael, but as the expression goes, let me be frank. I’m still a pretty hip guy. I still put potato chips in my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, because as I like to say, “it provides a little crunch in my lunch.” Ha ha! You should try it. In fact, within my first one hundred days in office, I will pass a mandate that all sandwiches will have potato chips in them. It will be fun, and we are fun goddamnit! I will get all you fucking bloodsuckers—I mean, excuse me, my apologies, I mean, I will bestow the good fortune of crunchier Wednesdays for everyone.

MODERATOR: We have just a couple minutes for closing remarks.

TRUMP: What do you think my red tie is all about? It’s not a sexual noose, I promise you. I swear to god, it’s not. I use props just like all of you imbeciles. You disgust me. Vote for me, Donald Trump, and your problems will dry out like a scab in this heat.

MODERATOR: Thank you Mr. Trump. Mr. Bloomberg, any closing remarks?

BLOOMBERG: Look, I would never brag. But I have a Coachella sticker on my Jeep Wrangler. I started an Instagram account for my cat, Mr. Fickle Feet. Because sometimes they run, but sometimes they sleep. My opponent on the other hand, is a coward. You can see it, it’s written all over his loose baggy face. Ned Beatty has more of a jawline than him. His face looks like the fried chicken he eats straight from the bucket. How can you trust a man who eats fried chicken? I’ve always said we should lock up anyone and everyone who eats fried chicken. And watermelon of course. Is that too much? Nevermind. But a man who has turned into a fried chicken, my god, what do we do? We elect him as our Commander in Chief? I make the promise to you today, if you elect me as your president, I’ll lock all of you up and brush my teeth with your blood. Bloomberg: fight for me and die!

[BLOOMBERG’s face is melting under the wrapped plastic. TRUMP’s face and body paint drip from his nipples. His neck sags like a blood-packed gizzard. Visible steam rises from the garbage heap, where the entire audience is now spreading it about with their snouts, looking for the last edible crumbs. TRUMP and BLOOMBERG join in, snarling on all fours, the sun burning their skin to a boiling crisp. At last in unison, under the same sky, after the same dream.]

Is Martin Shkreli the Face of Beauty?

by Guy Walker

Every time Martin Shkreli answers a question for an interviewer on television, he smiles creepily before the camera shuts off. It’s not a smile of attempted benevolence, or an inflamed erection of his forced humanity, but more of a grim praetorian spasm, a sociopathic twitch. There’s something unsettling in his comfortable insanity. It reminds us of Patrick Bateman peeling off his mask in American Psycho, or Robert Durst confessing the murders under his breath in the HBO miniseries The Jinx. For a flash there, we see Martin Shkreli the man, the pomaded madman who masturbates to videos of pigs squealing and glaciers melting, his nostrils flaring, his mouth contorting as he pulls nearer to ejaculation. Everything else is just theater.

When the 32-year-old founder and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals skyrocketed the price of Daraprim, the out-of-patent drug from the early 1950’s used to treat toxoplasmosis, AIDS, various cancers, and malaria, from $13.50 per tablet to $750, the Internet shit itself. Overnight, he went from being a banal rich kid to “the most hated man in America.” Initially, Shkreli seemed to welcome the controversy like a bit of unexpected fanfare, replying to tweets with a sardonic in-your-face sense of victory. When asked how he sleeps at night, he replied, “You know, Ambien.” When a journalist tweeted, “I think the hole you’ve dug is deep enough,” he simply and beautifully replied, “uh, f u.” He said the medication was still underpriced, offering cheap puns about him making a killing from the slowly dying. But in the days since, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) disassociated themselves with him, and Presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and even the orangoutang fuckery of Donald Trump have ridiculed Shkreli’s actions. Every media outlet, every politician, every alcoholic blogger has made a point to vilify Martin Shkreli as this week’s whipping boy in our paradise of storm and hell.

And for good reason. Shkreli is clearly vilifying the sick, capitalizing from an already crooked system, and should be condemned by the masses of Internet automatons, counting their Facebook likes on their most recent Shkreli meme. This public outrage crops up every now and then, as if we need to point to someone, and yell “Him! It’s his fault! It’s his fault the world is fucked! It’s his fault my love life is horrible!” But eventually the clamor fades, and that person returns to his or her damp morsel of life. Walter Palmer, the lion-killing dentist lasted a minute, and has since returned to picking out the plaque from 13-year-olds’ fetid mouths. The Kim Davis controversy is fading away, as she is now shuffling around her office peacefully again. Bill Cosby has returned to making weird faces to himself in the mirror. Darren Wilson is somewhere. George Zimmerman is selling his paintings of Confederate flags in an anti-Muslim gun store. Josh Duggar is touching Barbie dolls. And eventually Martin Shkreli will return to his quiet grotesque desert, gnawing on a bloody steak, nothing ever changed in his beige empire of dick.

When the media obsesses over figures like Shkreli for a day or two, or this past week when Pope Francis visited the United States, thus monopolizing all media attention, it seems as though the Syrian refugee crisis is no longer a crisis, or Russia’s involvement in Ukraine and Syria is of little public importance, or climate change is no threatening us at our front doorstep. It’s the media’s own attention disorders, or maybe it’s our own.

In a way, it looks as though this time it’s different, that the public has gained a bit of ground, as Shkreli recently said he would reduce the price-hike to a lower undeclared amount “in response to the anger that was felt by people.” One may even argue that if the public rallies hard enough, if it writes enough inflammatory blogs, or posts enough memes, that it will pressure bad men to make good choices, that there will be some sort of vague democracy, that all our indistinct clicktivism will bring about another chance at decency. After all, Internet activists released Shkreli’s OK Cupid profile, his home address, his telephone number. His ex-girlfriend posted his messages he wrote her five years after they were separated, saying he’d pay her $10,000 to lick her pussy. $10,000 for a bit of wet nostalgia. This is revelatory in itself—it shows the shadow of the insane, another symptom of the power-and-slave dialectic. Nietzsche’s concept of kraft versus macht in his Will to Power, is, as everyone knows, where Martin Shkreli has failed. Humans’ will to power is the central motive to our lives, scrambling for the highest position in life, in which kraft is an agent’s primordial animal strength and is then channeled or overcome by the Self, the finesse of power known as macht. But for Shkreli, he is all macht and no kraft. He flexes the body he doesn’t have, like a madman with Klinefelter syndrome. He wants to control the world but he is a desperate teenager who can’t get girls.

Noam Chomsky called today’s GOP—of which he hesitates to call it a party—a “radical insurgency.” We know the madness of today’s GOP at least partially stems from a religious fanaticism, from a rejection of the constitutional separation of Church and State. Martin Shkreli and the cult of the sociopath are a little different.

When madness, hysteria, and misery creep in through a shadow, and somehow fester and copulate until they are as normal as ugly people in the Mid West, when the incest of paranoia tramples the landscape, then groups of people who once governed with reason and decency become the occupants of the madhouse. Martin Shkreli is not one of the rare awful fucks of human beings to hold power (and in this case the health and lives of thousands of people), but merely a single member of the huge scale of madness and gluttony.

Based on varying studies, anywhere from one percent to four percent of Americans are psychopaths—unable to empathize with others, increased risk taking, superficial charm, and skilled manipulation of others—whereas an estimated ten percent of those in the financial service industry are psychopaths. Then of course there is the steep increase of almost psychopaths—the darker shade in the continuum of personas. No one has officially diagnosed Shkreli as a psychopath, but it doesn’t really matter. His actions are clearly without empathy for human life.

Demonizing Shkreli is important only because it gives a face to the problem, because we can identify the features of the guilty, because it is not enough to discuss Foucault’s Madness and Civilization or the constructs of commodity fetishism. It’s not enough to say “dismantle capitalism” over and over again, but it’s not enough to demonize only Martin Shkreli himself. Eventually, we will forget about him, and others like him will pop up in their various perversions of power, commanding the sick or the gay or the black or the women to bow before them and suffer. And we will remember Martin Shkreli, offering his ex-girlfriend $10,000 to lick her pussy, tweeting privately to his mother: “I am under attack [frustrated face emoji]. I need inspiration. I need inspiration to create the empire of AIDS and cancer and micro dickpics I’ve always wanted. But most of all, I also need thinspirations for my yoga body. btw, I cheated and got extra croutons on my Caesar salad. [wink face emoji, girl dancing emoji].

And Martin Shkreli bashes his head into the padded white walls, asking for more soup.

The Dawn of Fetishism

by Guy Walker

This man wants to rule the world.

After the initial depression-induced hilarity fades from watching a Republican Governor who is running for President do push-ups in a miasmic display of retarded cryptofascism, and you are left wondering what obscenity did you just witness, wondering if you should call your children to come inside and lock all the doors, if you should drink a handle of whiskey immediately, if you should punch a wall, or even worse, post it on your Facebook page . . . after all that fades, you are still left wondering, How did we degrade the body politic into such an androgynous ass of failure? How did this man (if what he is can be called a man) corral the masses to elect him as their guardian and governor?

I wonder sometimes if Jefferson and Paine feared the inevitable collapse of Reason, if they knew the Dawn of Fetishism was near the horizon. My elders tell me it’s always been bad, we’ve always been dissatisfied and antagonistic towards the State, that my despondent routine is nothing original . . . even Plato believed all existing governments were cheap corruptions of virtue, and beyond redemption. In Greek, The Republic can also be translated as The Ideal State . . . Plato was a philosopher of idealism, of unachievable Arcadias, unmolested landscapes for Pan. Given this pretext, humans are flaccid emerald-nutted slaveholders, dressed as clowns, twirling in their tents. Bobby Jindal doesn’t have a chance at winning the presidency. But his cruel attempt at trying to be fun and relatable isn’t the exception. Ted Cruz did impressions of characters from The Simpsons; he also grilled bacon wrapped around the barrel of a machine gun as he fired it, saying that this is how Texans grill bacon. Donald Trump hailed his elephant-killing sons as great Americans. Jeb Bush sung “Slow Jam The News” with Jimmy Fallon, as The Roots played the harmonies and Jimmy Fallon did his predictable almost-laughing side-act, in a sort of new-age nostalgia for dystopia.

The cartoonish perversion of politicians’ attempts at being fun and relatable through social media is the caliginous simulacrum of retardation. They treat us like children from the 1990’s, sucking on popsicles in front of Nickelodeon. Are we supposed to laugh? Are we supposed to turn to our girlfriends, and discuss how his relatability now outshines the entire GOP’s misogynistic platform? But then again, Jindal and others are speaking directly to us; they are articulating a very sullen modernity of performance and fetishism, projected through Buzzfeed videos and emojis. Guy Debord calls it “the principle of commodity fetishism” that dominates our society. The tangible real world of women, men, poverty, heartache, literature, police killings, Sibelius, death, incest, enormous fields of wild flowers, they are all exchanged for this awful fraudulent world of viral videos and listicles. Videos such as this impose themselves onto our reality, like a cave of shadows and shackles. But they are self-imposed. More Huxlian than Orwellian, a kind of self-imposed fetish with stupification and apathy. Every time I open Facebook I regret it. Another video of a raccoon eating grapes at the dinner table, or a cockatoo screaming into a cup. The world disappears into a sempiternal feed of viral commodity, of tufted caricatures flexing their Botox brawn. The man smiling like a pedophile and then doing push-ups against Buzzfeed employees is no longer the man who hates gays, hates women, hates Mexicans, defunds public education, requires schools to teach intelligent design, refuses government funds to expand Medicaid, votes to extend the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (rejecting provisions under the Geneva Convention), among various other fascist attempts of governing. He is no longer that man. He is an intangible abstract détournement who has nudged the United States a little further towards the edge, into the Abyss of Fuck. Jindal isn’t even interesting enough to talk about. He, like Trump, is so ugly that it has caused him to hate the world. But it is interesting to examine how far we have come: Howard Dean was ruined when he screamed a little too flamboyantly back in 2004, whereas today, Donald Trump can call Megyn Kelly “bleeding from her eyes, bleeding from her wherever,” and somehow get away with it. This is the man who owns Miss Universe. When he called Rosie O’Donnell a fat pig and a disgusting animal, the attendees of the debate roared with enthusiasm. They loved it. In the secondary GOP debate, with the lower-polling candidates, one of the questions was to describe Hillary Clinton in two words—a question that can only serve baseless name-calling. It’s a performance of cruel perversions, like the rape of Reason under a melancholy dawn.

The principle of commodity fetishism is the force on the other side. It allows insane men and women to come to power, to become fascists, to star in viral videos as they do it. There is nothing real anymore. Modernity itself seems fraudulent. Even sex is becoming a sordid wet humping, a pornographic imitation of what we saw on PornHub. Fake people with fake profiles ensue. A girl who I apparently slept with made a fake profile on Facebook and contacted at least several women I’ve slept with recently and told them to no longer fuck me. My love life totally sucks now, and I totally want her back, whoever she is. But this is the sort of unprovocative simulation of lust and ownership that Baudrillard wrote about, in that symbols and signs are now the content of the world, and they act and react merely as a simulation of reality. There are no actual bodies doing anything, no mad mad dancing in the middle of the night . . . just a peasantry of emojis and asses on Instagram.

Bernie Sanders is right, in that it’s the billionaire class that needs reform, it’s the bankers who were never prosecuted, it’s the blatant assault of wealth and power in this country that has ruptured stability in America. And the growing momentum of support for Sanders is coming from people’s awareness of this. There is more awareness that Hillary Clinton is a fiscal conservative, and always has been, that she has accepted bribes from the fossil fuel industry and terror regimes around the world. Even Eric Holder has now returned to a job at the corporate law firm Covington & Burling. And the everlasting War on Terror follows the One Percent Doctrine that Cheney established, in which he described if there were even a one percent likelihood of Pakistani scientists helping al-Qaeda develop a nuclear weapon, US intelligence has to treat it as a certainty, and respond accordingly. This thinking has spread to all forms of conquest and threat. If a cop fears there is a one percent chance a black man has a gun, he sees fit—necessary even—to shoot him dead. In contrast, it’s been reported incessantly that 97 percent of scientists agree with anthropogenic climate change. That number is in fact false. Of the 69,406 authors named in the peer-reviewed scientific articles regarding climate change, a total of four of those authors rejected any human influence. Less than one one-hundredth of one percent. It’s an assault on reason, yes, but the force from the other side, the force that makes any of this possible, is that of commodity fetishism. Bernie Sanders can’t say people are terrible for their obsession with the trite and shallow. And he can’t advocate for any barrier against this freedom. Because we are free to worship the trite, and no freedom of this sort should be taken away. But I know of no reasonable explanation why hard work is so hard, why it’s easier to gaze at butts on my phone or at the strip club than it is to write a symphony. But so it is.

No one said it better than Louis-Ferdinand Celine:

“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”

The TPP is a World of Shit

by Guy Walker

I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night,

Taught by the heav’nly Muse to venture down

The dark descent, and up to reascend…”

John Milton, Paradise Lost

On these typical days in late Spring, before the sun burns the geraniums, before the squirrels bark at me for their morning ration of peanuts, before the school children run off with their huge backpacks and their quivering knees, I rub my eyes awake and sigh deeply, wishing my kitten was still alive. It rained a long violent storm last night, soaking the brittle hills, knocking off a songbird’s eggs into the garden, making the midnight couples feel extra cozy and romantic. A SWAT team invaded an old lady’s house during the thunder. A raccoon had babies, and tried to keep them warm under a large rosemary bush. An overweight businessman drove to a motel to see his mistress. And the sky cracked, pouring over all of Los Angeles. But the morning was a flirtish scenery of gold coruscating air, every flower petal on ecstasy, my regret of alcohol fading away because at least I had a garden. I walk out onto the patio in my Christmas underwear, drinking a lukewarm Americano, and I play my turns on a few different online chess games I’m playing on my smartphone. I scroll through my Facebook feed. I scroll through my Instagram feed. I sigh again, eat three slices of bacon and lick the dust from a Rolls Royce mirror, and I read through the World News and Today I Learned and the Ask Historian’s section on Reddit. Mad Max: Fury Road is opening. I wish I had hair like Bernie Sanders. But one story has caught my attention: the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It is going to fuck everyone and everything . . . every cornflake-infested child will either become a beggar or a nihilist because of it.

I used to blame my alcoholism on my ex-girlfriend breaking up with me, then I blamed it on baby seals being mauled to a pulp in the Arctic, then I blamed it on hydraulic fracking poisoning our water supply, but now I blame it on the TPP. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, the worst so-called free trade agreement in the history of mankind. It threatens every environmental, health, climate, and labor policy in the Pacific Rim, and therefore the world. This isn’t an opinion piece, it’s all fact.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a proposed so-called free trade accord between the U.S. and eleven other Pacific Rim countries, encompassing 800 million people, about a third of world trade, and nearly forty percent of the global economy. It’s larger than NAFTA, larger than the WTO, and it wants to fuck everyone harder than all previous so-called trade agreements ever have. Most of the content of the agreement has been discussed behind closed doors, between more than 600 corporate adviser’s, from such decency as Boeing, Monsanto, Halliburton, and Lockheed Martin. Congress itself is more or less left in the dark on what exactly the TPP fully entails. For example, members of Congress are allowed to read one chapter at a time (there are twenty-nine chapters in total, only eight of which actually discuss trade, the others of which involve limitations regarding environmental and climate policy, food safety, financial regulation, or the ever-changing corporate power structure), of which they may not take notes, photos, or even talk afterwards about what they read. In contrast, in 2001 during one of several NAFTA expansions, the Bush administration published the full draft of the agreement on the government’s official websites. The Obama administration is pushing to “fast track” the measure, meaning very limited debate on the House floor.

The Nobel Prize winning economist, and former Chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, Joseph Stiglitz, is one of the most important opponents of the TPP. He was a champion of NAFTA, and has since denounced that it was ever a good idea in the first place. Regarding the TPP, he explains:

“Fundamental to America’s system of government is an impartial public judiciary, with legal standards built up over the decades, based on principles of transparency, precedent, and the opportunity to appeal unfavorable decisions. All of this is being set aside, as the new agreements call for private, non-transparent, and very expensive arbitration. Moreover, this arrangement is often rife with conflicts of interest; for example, arbitrators may be a “judge” in one case and an advocate in a related case.”

What Stiglitz is referring to is a section in the draft known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), which allows corporations to directly sue governments—including the U.S. government—if a government’s regulatory laws limit a corporation’s profits. The example most often given is cigarette laws. If cigarette’s are labeled with a warning that they may kill you, Philip Morris or any other may take suit, with the claim that they lost future profits because of a country’s labeling laws. This “investor-state” system has already forced taxpayers to pay more than $440 million to corporations for various profit obstructions, including toxic bans, water and timber policies, and land-use laws. At the same time, more than $34 billion remains pending in corporate claims or suits in the U.S. alone. If this isn’t fucked up enough, in the secret tribunals where these lawsuits made by the corporations against the countries take place, typically three corporate attorneys act as judges and then may rotate in the next case as the prosecuting attorneys. Of all the praetorian fuckery that haunts this awful planet, a corporate-run justice system is the fetid leaking ulcer of fairness. The TPP is a more caliginous girning character than the Old Testament god . . . it doesn’t even have a face when it smites you for liking dolphins or wanting a glass of drinking water that won’t kill you.

Everyone knows that corporations are obviously people now, but they’re faceless demonic people with heavy constipated breath. Just this week, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, and the Royal Bank of Scotland, will pay more than $5 billion in a settlement for pleading guilty in a currency rigging scandal, but no actual person with a face and sociopathic tendencies will ever face a day in prison. Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive, was given a 74 percent raise to $20 million after he fucked everything up back in 2008. Just this week, the GOP blocked legislation presented by Senator Elizabeth Warren that would require public disclosure of the trade agreements before they get “fast track” status. You might ask yourself why anyone would want to block transparency of a trade agreement that promises jobs and money and stuff. But then you laugh with a nearly empty champagne glass in your hand, and remember that everyone on Capital Hill is 69ing with the banks and the corporations. The Intercept reported on this a little more articulately, exposing one of many revolving doors between business and policy:

“— Sharon Bomer Lauritsen, the assistant U.S. trade representative for agricultural affairs, recently lobbied for the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group for biotech companies. Lauritsen’s financial disclosure form shows she made $320,193 working to influence “state, federal and international governments” on biotech patent and intellectual property issues. She worked for BIO as an executive vice president through April of 2011, before joining the Trade Representative office.

— Christopher Wilson, the deputy chief of mission to the World Trade Organization, recently worked for C&M International, a trade consulting group, where he represented Chevron, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, British American Tobacco, General Electric, Apple and other corporate interests. Wilson’s financial disclosure shows he made $250,000 a year, in addition to an $80,000 bonus in 2013, before he joined the Obama administration. Wilson left C&M International in February of 2014 and later joined the Trade Representative’s office. C&M Internationalreportedly lobbied Malaysia, urging it to oppose tobacco regulations in Australia.

— Robert Holleyman, the deputy United States trade representative, previously worked as the president of the Business Software Alliance, a lobbying group that represents IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and other technology companies seeking to strengthen copyright law. Holleyman earned $1,141,228 at BSA before his appointment. Holleyman was nominated for his current position in February of last year.”

What the Trans-Pacific Partnership could do here for example—because Sharon Lauritsen and Christopher Wilson both worked for biotech companies—is actually restrict the government’s regulation of drug pricing, as well as create new rules that would inhibit generic lower-priced drugs from entering the market. Creating a monopoly essentially on an entire industry. Akin to when Texas banned the sale of Teslas. Here are some of the most fervent advocates of the free market actually killing the free market through a highjacking of the legal justice system. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume writes, “public utility is the sole origin of justice.” Government, Hume argues, is not an agreed upon social contract, and by no means is built from an instinctual moral obligation to act on what is best for the people, but rather through force and submission it achieves its order. Why do the extremely rich and corrupt want even more of it, why they aren’t yet satisfied in their cold hell. If all values are derived from the passions rather than from reason, as Hume argues, than the despondent fuckery of collecting immeasurable wealth is an unadulterated passion for the 600 corporate executives in charge of the text of the TPP, almost as much so as taking selfies is for James Franco. Any virtue, as Hume argues, must be “useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others.” A painful sense of guilt or disapproval evokes a vice, and therefore an injustice. But Wall Street clearly doesn’t have a utilitarian sense of economy. Their definition of virtue is a violent skullfucking of the planet. We are turning the clock back towards a more feudal desperate time, a time before Napoleon, before the social contract was declared for the common good.

As everyone knows, Napoleon legalized divorce, established legal equality (forbidding legal privileges based on one’s birth), allowed one’s freedom of religion, abolished feudalism, and established the now very popular Napoleonic Code, finally repealing all royal law. But none of those customs or laws are actually worth anything. You can’t sell freedom of religion quite in the same way that you can sell fraudulent loans.

The only thing left of Napoleon’s legacy is his penis. It’s true, Napoleon’s penis still taunts us, above ground, behind the dark fog, on this terraqueous masterpiece of human tragedy. Nearly two-hundred years after his doctor cut it off during his autopsy and gave it to a priest in Corsica, and after it has passed through the hands of several purposeless human beings as the temporary owners of the now shriveled scab, the chewed-up jerky that tried to hump its way to an already meaningless victory, Napoleon’s penis lies isolated from the man’s achievements, it’s present owner fielding offers as high as a hundred thousand dollars. Through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, we are returning to the feudal state, erecting the corporate advisers as the royal family. The once bold achievements of our leaders from the past—who paved the way for a democratic and free society—are dying. All that will remain are global trade agreements, orphans, dead whales, and Napoleon’s severed penis. And the sun will finally set.

Sources:

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/4/a_corporate_trojan_horse_obama_pushes

http://www.citizen.org/documents/press-release-fast-track-introduced-april-2015.pdf

http://www.citizen.org/tradewatch

http://www.citizen.org/investorcases

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/16/tpp-revolving-door/

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/30815-the-trojan-horse-president

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/why-wont-obama-go-after_b_4661086.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-01-24/dimon-gets-74-percent-raise-after-billions-in-fines

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30947-matt-taibbi-world-s-largest-banks-admit-to-massive-global-financial-crimes-but-escape-jail-again