We talked recently about how a disruption in bonding with the mother in infancy/early childhood results in people who can’t bond with places and other humans. These individuals won’t form families easily and will always be on the move. The perfect neoliberal workforce.

Obviously, mothers incapable of bonding with their infants always existed. But what if they became mass-produced? What if something happened to make the mother who is capable of bonding an exception and the one who can’t the norm?

A child is formed by the mother’s gaze. A new mother always keeps the child in her line of vision. Their communication is very intense. At every moment, the mother soothes, reassures, and nourishes physically, emotionally and intellectually without needing to say anything. Even when she sleeps, the mother keeps the infant within the focus of her attention. If you are a mother, you know exactly what I mean.

The attention, the focus, the sustained, unbroken concentration – this is what’s needed to make the bonding happen. (And a functioning endocrine system to start it all up, obviously).

OK, so how’s your focus been lately? Honestly? In all likelihood, as shit as everybody else’s. There’s now an obstacle between mother and child. Look around, it’s everywhere. Child stares at mom, mom stares at a screen. I know it’s a huge taboo topic because mothers can do no wrong but seriously, when’s the bonding supposed to happen?

But hey, it’s all good. It’s better to be lonely, isolated, easily transportable, and drugged to the gills anyway, right?

Americans have some weird sense of inferiority towards Europe. I keep hearing that “Europeans aren’t parochial like we are, they speak languages, they are interested in what happens in the world, I heard everybody in Europe speaks several languages.”

But that’s not true. I’ve never met people who are collectively more interested and engaged intellectually with the world than Americans. When I was in Spain last month, literally nobody evinced even 5% of the interest in Ukraine that I routinely get in the US. The guy who works at a local Dollar Store knows enormously more about the situation in Ukraine than all the academics I spoke to in Spain combined. This is a young fellow who has such complex, interested view of foreign relations that I haven’t seen in many Spanish professors. And Americans over the age of 60 are better informed than many European political commentators. I’m talking about regular people, not scholars or politicians. I get more enjoyment from talking about foreign policy with my plumber than any academic from Germany, the UK or Spain.

And it isn’t only the war in Ukraine. Americans ask more questions, they are more curious. And more likely to modify their views when they receive new information. They are excited to get new information like nobody else.

American position of leadership in the world is a direct result of this curiosity and openness.

And by the way, most people in Europe (like everywhere else) speak only their own language, and not extremely well at that.

“How is your fish?” I ask Klara.

“If a fish could be as delicious as you are nice, that’s how it would taste. Amazing!” she says.

Here’s more fun info from yesterday’s talk by our chief administrator.

At the beginning of the fiscal year, we had an 18-million budget shortfall. As a result of creating an enormous, unwieldy bureaucracy around hiring and crippling Advisement, Admissions, Library services, graduate programs etc with worker shortages, we saved a little over 400,000. Which is next to nothing if we take into account the entire shortfall. This happened because huge gaps in workforce ended up costing more, in many cases, than was saved. Also, student counts dropped as students can’t take the courses they need at convenient times. So money was actually lost as a result.

What did the administration do when it received this data?

It decided to plough on with the exact same bureaucratic hiring procedures.

It’s not about money, folks. Marx was wrong. Many things – most things, actually – aren’t about money at all.

I don’t want to be a boring old fart who constantly bitches about the younger generation. So I’ll just relate the facts.

The neoliberal administrator is giving a big talk today. He announces a tuition hike, and major additional cuts in personnel, course offerings, and every single service we offer. Really brutal stuff. The union leaders, the faculty respond trying to explain why this is a terrible idea.

Then a student gets up to speak. Given that I’m a naive, sweet summer child with retardation-level ingenuity, I thought she’d say, “Excuse me but why should I pay more in tuition to get less in return?” Our students don’t come from wealth. They don’t even come from solid middle class. They all work, they all carry college loan debt. So you’d think they should care about tuition hikes.

Well, ha ha.

The student says, “I don’t mind paying more in tuition but not if I keep being exposed to hate crimes on campus.”

Which hate crime has this young, white, female student experienced on our campus?

The visit by a local preacher who usually shows up around Easter to talk about Jesus in front of the library.

This is the first time the neoliberal administrator is giving a talk since last June, and this absolute tool is wasting the very limited Q&A time to bleat about the bloody preacher. I mean, you know? Obviously, the administrator seized on the subject of this atrocious hate crime with glee because he doesn’t want to answer real questions. Now his argument that students don’t mind austerity has proof.

And I’m thinking, you know what? I already have every degree I wanted. I have zero debt. My family has an excellent income. My kid is guaranteed free college tuition anywhere in the state. And a good college fund for out of state schooling. I’m sitting pretty by any measure. Why should I care about these people when they don’t care about themselves?

I got up and left. Let them boil in outrage over the preacher as they get robbed. I received a big translation order, so I’m going to go work on that, make more money. It’s impossible to keep caring for people who are so deluded.

Russians release videos of atrocities they commit at strategic moments. The atrocities are a daily occurrence but the release of the videos is always timed.

Here’s what explains the explosion in torture and beheading videos right now:

The Russian offensive that started in November failed. It failed so badly that even domestically it can’t be sold as anything but a mega defeat. The only person on the planet who still believes this offensive can be turned around is Tucker Carlson.

Now Ukraine is preparing a counteroffensive. Russians are terrified of it. All they talk about on their propaganda TV is this counteroffensive. So they engage in psychological warfare to sap Ukrainians’ psychological resources by releasing these videos. Ukrainians get angry, they feel devastated, and leek energy.

There’s a lesson in this. People who want to take away something important from us always try to sap our energy first. They do outrageous things, we react angrily, and then they are in a stronger position to go after what they really want.

Imagine, a virus that hits some ethnic groups while mysteriously sparing others. Sounds completely unbelievable, doesn’t it?

Twitter changed its algorithm and now boosts people who get into “conversations” instead of those who get likes and retweets:

This is very bad for users because it rewards nasty bickering.

There are other news that are good. Links in tweets are no longer penalized and images aren’t rewarded. Read the thread for more.

Writers who are immigrants tend to be wounded people. Their wound is immigration itself, and as writers they are complex enough to feel the wound.

I’m not saying that every immigrant necessarily perceives immigration as catastrophic. There are exceptions.* But look, we all agree that moving house or having a friend die is major life trauma. So why shouldn’t moving country, abandoning your language, and having your whole country die to you not be an even bigger calamity?

This is why there are so many woke immigrant writers. They hate their new country but don’t know why. So they latch on to the explanation provided by the newspapers and TV. Immigration can’t possibly be a bad thing, so it’s got to be structural injustices that are causing the pain. These poor people rave against racism-sexism-somethingphobia because it’s easier to attribute their suffering to the ills that matter to the locals. It makes

So far, I’ve only seen Eastern European writers manage to avoid this form of dishonesty and grieve their emigration as it deserves to be grieved. Grieving, by the way, doesn’t mean that you are sorry you did it and that you want to go back. It simply means that people aren’t vacuum cleaners, and you can’t switch them off by pressing a button.

I felt an immigrant’s grief not when I moved from Ukraine to Canada but when I went from Canada to the US. It was very hard. The buildings were ugly, the sky hung in a crooked way, the air smelled disgusting, everything was wrong. I now love this country but it took years to figure out how to do that. I wouldn’t blame anybody for failing. Not because this is a bad country – it’s a wonderful one – but because it’s really hard to disgorge a country and ingest another one instead.

Vesna Goldsworthy has spent a couple of decades writing about immigrant grief. In her novel The Iron Curtain: A Love Story, a young woman called Milena leaves Serbia in 1985 to come to the UK, and she just absolutely hates it. The reason why the Iron Curtain makes an appearance in the story is to explain why the protagonist can’t go back. But all the Soviet-bloc stuff in the novel is uninteresting. It’s all been done a million times, and Goldsworthy has nothing new to add. It’s the description of the immigrant malaise that makes the novel.

Milena’s disgust with the UK seems exaggerated and lacking in motive. But the reason why her suffering seems spurious is because we aren’t used to linking emigration and grief. It’s convenient to have a highly mobile workforce that can be dragged around at will. So we pretend that immigrants can only be upset about not being able to get shuffled around faster and more easily. What else can they possibly be unhappy about? Everybody piled on Trump when he said the quiet part out loud but deep inside we all think that nobody can possibly be attached to the shithole countries that immigrants come from. If only it weren’t for structural racism and patriarchy, our widely accepted narrative goes, all immigrants would be blissfully happy.

Multiculturalism passionately despises culture precisely because it believes culture is extremely easy to leave behind. It’s an oxymoron to have “multi” and “culture” joined in one word.

* Children of cold, insensitive, almost sociopathic mothers tend to be such exceptions. N is an example.

A writer who grew up in Socialist Serbia and ended up working in British academia:

Daughter of a self-managed workers’ paradise, I excel at my job. I criticize and self-criticize, I censor and self-censor, I compose self-assessment sheets about self-managed time, I sit on teaching and research committees, I attend meetings and take notes, I know that literature has hidden and insidious meanings. […] My communist upbringing, my upbringing in communism—to be able to live with myself without believing in anything I say, to be able to accept things without asking too many questions—has certainly stood me in good stead throughout my working life.

In the art of the long meeting, British university workers easily outdid anything I’d encountered in my socialist upbringing. The sessions were often longer than the communist plenaries, the acronyms just as plentiful, the put-downs just as complicatedly veiled in oblique metaphor, the passions just as high, even if the stakes were often infinitesimal.

Vesna Goldsworthy, Chernobyl Strawberries

Obviously, she’s exaggerating but there’s definitely something to the analogy.