I wish it were possible to pay for a service, leave a generous tip, and then not receive multiple messages and phone calls asking me to leave an online review.
I organized an event in the community. It was a great success. A large attendance, excellent food. A husband of one of the colleagues came with his 3 friends. These are men in their seventies who have been friends since kindergarten. Seventy years of friendship. Seventy years of witnessing each other’s lives, putting up with each other’s BS, pranking each other, celebrating, sharing meals, working on each other’s cars, watching games, having drinks. Seventy years and counting. The energy from these dudes when they were together was like nothing I ever experienced.
I don’t have that. My life is too neoliberal. I tore myself from a group of very dear friends when I went to grad school. Then another group when I left grad school. I made a close friend here and then she moved. And now it’s simply too late for me to have a 70-year-long friendship with anybody. The capacity to be with people throughout their lives when they aren’t family members is atrophied in me. This is one of the terrible costs of neoliberal lives.
Kharkiv, the city where I grew up, gets bombed every night with actual bombs. But it’s more livable, looks prettier, and has more life in it than St Louis. It doesn’t look like this:
Mind you, these images are not from the site hit by the recent tornado. This is how parts of St Louis always look.
In Kharkiv, people come out after every bombing to clear out the rubble, plant flowers, repaint. They dress prettily, they beautify their spaces.
In St Louis, it’s neighborhood upon neighborhood of this complete despondency. Precious Victorian buildings crumbling down. Abandoned churches. What was done to these people that they are more hopeless and have less will to live than people in an actual war of invasion?
Downtown St Louis is dead. On weekends, it’s completely empty save for the drug-addled homeless. You can hear the sound of your own footsteps anywhere in the downtown area on a Sunday. No cars, no tourists. Even the parts that aren’t bombed out ruins are empty. The roads in the center of the city are catastrophically bad. The whole feel of the city is dead, decaying, miserable. There are a couple of wealthy neighborhoods that look very pretty but they are enclaves in a sea of decay.
Now imagine New York given over to this malignant force that sucks life out of cities. Folks, it will be literally less destructive to invite Putin to bomb it for a year. These Mamdanis are that dangerous. They don’t just kill the buildings and the roads. They kill the spirit of a place. Putin invaded Ukraine against the will of Ukrainians. Are we going to give ourselves willingly to destruction when we don’t even have to?
The Mamdani win is typical class war. He is a leader of the wealthy (and wealthy wannabes) who want to destroy the workers and the middle class. The goal is to have everybody live in a slum while a small coterie of rich Mamdanis enjoy extreme opulence and use the plebs for medical experiments and betting games.
“I watched the heads of these countries get up. And the love and the passion that they showed for their countries was unbelievable. I’ve never seen quite anything like it. They want to protect their countries. And they need the United States. And without the United States, it’s not going to be the same. It was really moving to see it. It was great. And I left here differently. I left here saying that these people really love their countries. It’s not a rip-off. And we’re here to help them protect their countries,” Trump said.
I spent the day reviewing an article of an academic who believes we should fight neoliberalism by defending “free circulation of human bodies.” Before you freak out, he meant mass migration and open borders. But what a way to put it, eh? Dude couldn’t be more neoliberal if he tried. Imagine the absolute mess of these people’s brains.
It’s every single one, people. Every starving individual in these news stories looks like they haven’t met a Japanese chicken they didn’t immediately stuff in their faces:
I’ve recently taken to studying the nutritional content of food served at the university cafeteria. There’s something called “Japanese chicken” that has 68 g of carbs. This is just the chicken. The rice comes separately and brings its own carb punch.
What do you need to put into chicken to make it so carby? And how is it Japanese? I never perceived Japanese food as being into gratituous carb bombs.
Something called “Philly steak” is 87 carbs. Plus a garnish, plus a beverage, plus a dessert. This is all beyond that initial 87. That one meal is a walking heart attack.
She’s 28, rich and successful in business. But her personal brand is that of a stupid little girl. Not because it’s attractive to anybody. But because a neoliberal self always infantilizes. A mature individual can’t pivot and transform every 15 minutes. Only childhood is malleable and adaptable. Neoliberals playact at childhood because they can’t market themselves otherwise. Adulthood gives them existential angst.
This is also why they are scared of having children. They want to be children, not take care of any. They are as attentive to their own feelings as mothers are to their babies’.
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