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? Astronaut (corpseinorbit) profile picture

About

Twitter: @corpseinorbit

Author of some books, among which you can buy

... And Egypt Is the River (Skylight, 2013),

Lyrics of the Crossing (Fugue State, 2014), and

The Scenarists of Europe (Dalkey Archive, 2016).

?'s Recent Comments

From: Cum Town - Ep. 154 - I cant wait to die
Adam "Bad Food Restaurants" Friedland
From: Death Is Just Around the Corner - #74: Was heißt der Faschismus? (feat. Matthew McConaughey)
I should've been clearer, then – I don't think it's what he had in MIND at all (I mean, it pretty objectively wasn't), just that it's a dangerous possibility
From: Death Is Just Around the Corner - #74: Was heißt der Faschismus? (feat. Matthew McConaughey)
The reason it all came up this way in this particular episode, as I recall, is that I was reacting to a spate of conversations among youngish leftists trying to work their way thru various problems, ideological & pragmatic, who were then interrupted by dogmatists quoting Marx chapter & verse and denouncing anyone and anything that departed from the party line, which, I will maintain, is quite as absurd as doing the same thing with Freud or Darwin in 2018.
From: Death Is Just Around the Corner - #74: Was heißt der Faschismus? (feat. Matthew McConaughey)
Can't answer this a great length right now, unfortunately, but part of what I'm trying to DO is to "take the failure of left political movements through the 20th century very seriously," and part of that, I think, is to be honest about the fact that Marx can be – doesn't HAVE to be, but can be – the groundwork for an authoritarian regime, just like a million other political thinkers. My support for Allende's regime in Chile, Chavez's in Venezuela, the YPG, and (especially) the Zapatistas is on record here and elsewhere, and the focus on the Kennedys is not to bemoan the loss of managerial liberalism but to provide an index to the precise time and place at which the United States lost its chance to be anything but an essentially fascist power. Had they lived, I think it's entirely conceivable that we could've seen a democratic socialist government in this country by the late 1960s.
From: Death Is Just Around the Corner - #74: Was heißt der Faschismus? (feat. Matthew McConaughey)
You're right on that first point – I kind of compressed the complexities of the electoral history – but as for the latter, I would argue that it's not so much a matter of *accepting* Stalin's version of Marxism as simply noting that Stalin's version keeps happening over and over, whatever the alleged theoretical affiliations of the regime in power.
From: Death Is Just Around the Corner - #74: Was heißt der Faschismus? (feat. Matthew McConaughey)
... plus, that whole notion, no matter how judiciously orchestrated, leaves a whole lot of room for the sort of "permanent revolution" rhetoric that ends in show trials and State terrorism – if no one can ever say definitively when the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established or made secure, then all possible means toward those ends are always justified, and so on, and Pol Pot ain't so far away.
From: Death Is Just Around the Corner - #74: Was heißt der Faschismus? (feat. Matthew McConaughey)
Thanks for listening, and as to the point on Marx: that's exactly my problem, that it THEORETICALLY refers to the negation of capitalist conditions, etc., etc., but virtually always coincides with the appointment of some nominal administrative caretaker who ends up deciding that he's the incarnate will of the proletariat. I haven't yet seen anyone give an adequate account of how "the proletariat" can hold power save thru some manner of proxy or liaison, and that proxy will tend to get pretty grandiose about himself.
From: Death Is Just Around the Corner - #74: Was heißt der Faschismus? (feat. Matthew McConaughey)
My sincere thanks – I wasn't sure how well this would work as a standalone episode, but there was just too much material to do it in one shot, and I'm glad it seems to have gone OK.
From: Death Is Just Around the Corner - #70: Lose Extra Pounds of Brain & Bone the John Kennedy Way, pt. 2
Movie pitch: they've been on top of the world and left for dead in the gutter, consulted by presidents and hounded by cops, and now Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt are going out for one last ride
From: Death Is Just Around the Corner - #72: Lose Extra Pounds of Brain & Bone the John Kennedy Way, pt. 4
Wow, I didn't know that about Barry Seal, and fuck!, I knew I should've looked that up – confused the Beatles covering Perkins's "Matchbox" with "Act Naturally," which is, as you say, by buck Owens.
From: Death Is Just Around the Corner - #71: Lose Extra Pounds of Brain & Bone the John Kennedy Way, pt. 3
Probably not what RFK meant to do, but christ almighty, what was the last win for labor after that 1962 U.S. Steel showdown?
From: Death Is Just Around the Corner - #68: Thomas Pynchon and the American Reconquista, pt. 2
Right, and in the case of Kaczynski, for instance, I don't think they particularly meant to create a killer – I think they were interested in the results of the study for their possible application to torture and interrogation scenarios, and they didn't give a shit about the victims, one of whom happened to have something to say about it.
From: Death Is Just Around the Corner - #67: Thomas Pynchon and the American Reconquista, pt. 1
Always good to have an old trouper back on the squad. Your instructions will be waiting at the Boston Back Bay station in the storage locker with the Donald Duck sticker on its door.
From: Death Is Just Around the Corner - #68: Thomas Pynchon and the American Reconquista, pt. 2
In the sense of having irreparably damaged the minds of some people who later went on to commit crimes (or, in Sirhan's case, to take the fall for a crime), yeah, that's true; I was referring more to the sci-fi "Manchurian Candidate" scenario in which they can flip a switch, say a codeword, and turn somebody into a SEAL sniper.

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Death Is Just Around the Corner