White resentment put Donald Trump in the White House. And there is every indication that it will keep him there, especially as he continues to transform that seething, irrational fear about an increasingly diverse America into policies that feed his supporters’ worst racial anxieties.

Oh no. What will keep him there is Twitter, the Rachel Maddow show, the “resistance”, the sheer enjoyment of discussing “white resentment”, this very article, etc. In short, the culture of spectacle. 

People are having way too much fun to let the fellow go. 

I had something similar but much worse happen to me once. I found it hilarious and forgot about it in under 20 minutes. Do you, folks, think the author is a mentally ill person? Scroll through the afterword especially. 

The glamorization of introversion is one of the favorite mechanisms of neoliberal ideology.

The greatest mass murder in the history of the world.

This is simply sad. By the way, St Louis has a very impressive institute of psychoanalysis that could really help these poor kids by treating their parents. But the parents would need to lift their lazy asses off couches and go do some work. And it’s always easier to reconstruct a kid instead. 

There is this restaurant nearby that everybody adores. It’s so popular people line up for over an hour for a table, even on week nights. The popularity is mostly due to the owners marketing themselves as Californians, and everybody seems to think being from California is the height of chicness. N and I are not that crazy about the place because it’s quite pricey for what you get. We haven’t been back there since Klara’s birth, but we went today, for variety’s sake. 

“Hey, where have you been?” the waitress exclaimed. “I haven’t seen you in such a long time!”

“We have a baby now,” I explained. “She’s almost 18 months old.”

“Oh, congratulations!” the waiter beamed at N.

After a short pause she turned to me and asked, “He is the father, right?”

It was kind of fun to be confused for a woman who dates a guy, then has a baby with somebody else, then goes back to dating the previous guy. Made me feel young and altogether somebody else. 

Please meet my new favorite theorists, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval. The European Union, they say, is built on the deranged idea that independence from citizens is the best guarantee of the pursuit of the general interest. Unless this entire principle is revoked, the EU project is hopeless.

What interests me in the study of neoliberalism isn’t the economic practices (which have been studied ad nauseam and are not my field anyway) but neoliberalism as a source of subjectivity, of a certain mode of relating to one’s self. 

At the very least, I should have enough author’s copies of my book to give them as gifts to the (very few) people mentioned by name in the Acknowledgements. Now I will have to buy my own book. I get a 50% discount but it’s still a shitload of money.

Saturday mornings are mother-daughter times for us. Today, we’ve been to the farmers’ market (which held absolutely nothing of interest) and then on to the French bakery for coffee and macaroons. Klara loves going to adult places. 

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) supports the outlandishly bad bill that would make supporting BDS a felony. This is so sad. McCaskill is local (from across the river in Missouri), and I used to like her. What, what could possibly possess a good, normally intelligent senator from Missouri to support this disaster of a bill? This is the measure that gets bipartisan support, really?

I’m sure most people with a functioning brain realize that this bill is about a whole lot more than the BDS. To paraphrase Bauman, the only freedom that you don’t have in neoliberal societies is the freedom not to shop. The space of politics is now almost entirely colonized by monetary transactions. The anti-BDS bill strives to make a refusal to shop into a crime. Because there is nothing that neoliberalism detests more than defective consumers who, for whatever reason, abstain from buying. 

What’s with this weird habit of referring to one’s kid as “stinker”? Even if it was cute at some point (which I don’t think it was), it gets old after months of consistent use. 

“Where can I take my 21-month-old stinker in this weather?”

“My stinker is only 3 months old but we have the same problem.”

I knew I’d hate moms’ FB groups. 

Folks, did you hear that Dunkin’ Donut will be dropping the Donut part? Because they want to be like Starbucks and concentrate on just coffee. How weird is that?