Clarissa's Blog

This is a brilliant insight. I’m putting it here because I want to keep thinking about this.

It’s also a great illustration of how to let go of outdated arguments and leave the quagmire of circular thinking. Everybody – including me – has been repeating how the word fascism is being misused by the left to brand all opposition as pure evil. We say it and say it and say it. “They are the real fascists!” OK, so what? We’ve said it, and it’s true, but now what? And then one random online person finally says, “OK, but what is it they call fascism? What do all these things have in common and where do they stand in relation to the neoliberal mentality?” And we have finally moved towards a fresh insight.

Here is why moving towards nationalized healthcare AT THIS POINT is a gigantic mistake:

This is not about COVID. Forget about COVID for the moment. Every illness, especially the ones that are expensive to treat, can be traced back to some wrong choice you or your parents or your great-grandparents made some time in the past. It’s very easy to deny care to anybody if virtue, as defined by government authorities, is the price of admission.

We are now in the grip of neoliberal mentality. Things that worked a decade ago are now irrelevant. Everything has changed. The state used to make sure there were enough healthy workers for the capital to use. Providing healthcare made sense, so it was provided. Now the state makes sure there are not too many superfluous humans that hinder the free flow of capital. Providing healthcare no longer makes sense. Keeping people healthy no longer makes sense.

You can dismiss this Lehmann woman as a dumb hysteric, and she is. But that doesn’t matter. Her “structure of feeling” is neoliberal. What she says speaks to many people because theirs is, too. This is the continuation of “defund the police.” The state no longer keeps us healthy, educated, and safe because capital doesn’t need that many of us anymore. And many of us are cheering it on because we have either absorbed this mentality or are incapable of noticing that things are changing. We keep groping this elephant from different sides and trying to figure out what we are touching using an entirely outdated conceptual framework.

You don’t say. We’ve only been repeating this for months and have been banned and ridiculed for it.

And it’s the same thing with every COVID topic.

“COVID isn’t dangerous to kids.” Conspiracy theorist! Mass murderer! Science hater!

“School closures don’t help.” Conspiracy theorist! Mass murderer! Science hater!

“You can’t stop the spread with lockdowns.” Conspiracy theorist! Mass murderer! Science hater!

“Vitamin D deficiency and obesity increase risk.” Conspiracy theorist! Mass murderer! Science hater!

A few months later, everything that the “mass murderers” have been saying becomes so clear that even Pravda CNN can’t deny it.

And. . . here we go again. Klara’s daycare is closed because they are having a COVID outbreak. We are heading back home tomorrow but nobody is going back to work or school for another week. And this is all before the seasonal wave starts in November.

Maybe lock them up, as well, because otherwise it’s just not sinking in.

Found a great poem here:

White skin. White flesh. White Breath.

White devil. White Trash. White Privilege.

White eyes. White fear. White tears.

White wash. White out. White adjacent.

Wipe out “Whiteness.” It’s a sin.

Ostensible socio-political adjudication erasing,

replacing, “I am,”

With a totemic religion’s peripheral glance.

What I am, not who, but what, in accordance

With billion-dollar dogma, doctrine, buzz-word fresh,

is something less than

human.

When I go places with my kid, strangers are always happy to see us. There are rare exceptions in the form of mean old ladies who hate moms and kids. Obviously, it’s a tiny minority of old ladies. Most old ladies are amazing. But if there’s going to be a hater, it’s never an old gentleman, a teenager, a 30-year-old, etc. It’s always a 75+ woman. The rest of the people light up like Christmas trees when they see us.

When I go around with 3 kids and people assume they are mine because they are hanging off me like ripe pears, the amount of love from strangers multiplies greatly. It’s actually quite overwhelming. One day, we dressed Klara and her same-age cousin in matching outfits, so everybody assumed they were twins. I’d never felt so loved by the world as when I strutted them around pretending they and the older cousin were mine. And I tend to feel extremely loved by the world normally. It’s an overwhelming feeling.

My university is searching for the top administrator to substitute for the one who recently retired.

The job qualifications for the candidates include “a proven record of actively promoting and enhancing anti-racism.” Unless we have all gone suddenly senile, we should be aware that “anti-racism” is a very recent fad. Nobody heard of it until 15 minutes ago. Nobody can have a proven record of promoting something that was only just invented.

So what can we conclude? Everybody knows it’s a travesty but everybody is pretending not to know out of fear that masks as indifference or ignorance. We are trapped in a web of these seemingly little, unimportant lies, forfeiting our right to remain fully human.

Whenever I mention to anybody here in Florida that I’m from Illinois, the reaction is, “Ooh, it’s so cold over there!” It’s been 10-15 degrees hotter in Illinois than here during my entire vacation. I’m practically only here to escape from the heat. But people seem to think Illinois is somewhere on the North Pole.

Yes! This book is available in English! And it’s really good!

Latin America has been, from the start, “a laboratory of neoliberalism.” It’s a place where the most advanced neoliberal strategies are tried out before being exported to the US and Europe. Piñeiro’s novel describes a reality that already existed in Argentina in the early two thousands but that we are only starting to experience now. The extreme inequality, the dwindling upper middle class hiding behind the walls of gated communities as the lumpenproletariat loots and destroys whatever it can, the terror of losing one’s place in the shrinking elite and joining the plebs.

The writing is absolutely delicious. The book is gossipy, entertaining but also, in places, quite deep. People have been asking if they can read crisis literature in English. This is crisis literature in English. It’s in translation but American writers aren’t likely to get their heads out of their butts and start writing about anything real for the next 20 years, so what can you do?