CRACKPOTS 11: NEW YEARS RESOLUTION (Patreon)

My New Year’s resolution: Try to be less lousy and miserable.  But I’ve never cared about resolutions, though I'm sure I make them every year. I lose track of them quickly. They freeze and shatter sometime in early January and I turn away from the stupid puddles they make. I never think about them again! So I bet my lousiness and misery will continue to weigh me down as I plod into the tenebrous future....well but hey I really need some speed these days, the future's coming up fast after all...may as well clean all these heavy stones out of my pockets…

It’s December in a year of loss and mayhem in a millennium that has contained nothing but defeat—no wonder I feel so melancholic!

Last thing Liz wrote for this had me go back and read Walter Benjamin’s essay on Left-Wing Melancholy, his critique of the poetry of Kastner and the petit-bourgeois outlook which informed it. That reminded me to re-read Nihal El Aasar’s essay Left-Wing Melancholia (actually what made me think of that was the speed in which the SAA dissolved and the ignominious end to Ba’athism) which lead me to re-read Wendy Brown’s Resisting Left-Wing Melancholia (which inexplicably pissed me off), which led me to discover there is a whole sub-industry of academics writing on the subject of left melancholy which made me so melancholic I nearly jumped out the window. 

It's too much to really get into. Go read them yourself.

The fact is, I also have a petit-bourgeois outlook in many ways (did Benjamin not? Doesn’t Brown? Is that the doom of critics…like enslaved magicians, forced to draw Tarot cards, sometimes describing events with astounding clarity but sometimes just providing a distraction, a little exercise in useless wonder...). Am I melancholic? I have continued to engage in political work but that engagement has waned as the show has progressed and I have become increasingly busy with work…this is what Benjamin says in his critique of Kastner…

Kästner’s poems are for the higher income bracket, those mournful, melancholy dummies who trample anything or anyone in their path. With the rigidity of their armor, the slowness of their advance, the blindness of their action, they are the rendezvous that tank and bedbug have made in man. These poems teem with them like a city café after the stock exchange closes. Is it surprising that their function is to reconcile this type to himself and to establish that identity of professional and private life which these men understand by the name “humanity” but which is in truth the genuinely bestial, since authentic humanity — under the present conditions — can only arise from a tension between these two poles? In this tension, consciousness and deed are formed, to create it is the task of all political lyricism, and today this task is most strictly fulfilled by Brecht’s poems. In Kästner it has to give way to complacency and fatalism. 

Am I evading the tension between the two poles or grasping it? Anyways, enough of that…I have many things to consider...My thoughts this month (my whole life, really) are all over the place...

—

Anyways, I’m quite sure you’ve seen the videos of suicide drones killing soldiers in Ukraine.  They’re very common now. Both the videos and the drones. You know what I’m talking about: A cheapie drone, hobbyist level or just above, fitted with a small camera and lethal payload, piloted from a distance, gliding over a brutal landscape of rent earth. Just for fun let’s freckle the place with some destroyed tanks, annihilated defensive positions and perhaps a corpse or two. The drone constructs an establishing shot. Then, delightfully, we glimpse our star: A man practically drowning in a bulky winter uniform, helmet askew on his head, with a droopy face of lower middle age, loping along at an impossibly slow pace, you can tell he's tired but he knows if he stops for a moment he'll be obliterated. Sometimes we witness this desperate flight from the perspective of the killer drone, other times from another nearby hovering UAV. The movies mostly end with the soldier's body exploding. 

I watch these guys running and think Christ, I bet they feel like they’re sinking and they’ll drown if they don’t shed it all right this second but all the same they must consider: Does the unbuckling waste more time? And meanwhile their lungs are on fire, their temples are beating, this makes these sorts of decisions impossible. And amidst all of this, part of them must just be thinking, hey, this is ridiculous, I’m in a dirt field, what are the odds…

Most of these videos have the same plot and climax; they’re indistinguishable (don't ask why I seek them out...I think because I'm afraid of big and small drones, though they weren't in heavy use when I was under arms. I don’t like robots in general. ISIS had these little drones that could drop grenades but that was nothing compared to this new method). But occasionally one has stuck with me.

Like this one: Two gentlemen lie on a devastated hillock. One we can make out clearly: He looks to be about 50, but he could be 17, this is a war in Eastern Europe after all…whatever his age, he’s nestled on his back, smoking a cigarette, gazing up at us in our little drone. We are currently hovering above his comrade; I cannot describe this one because he is balled up, weeping, huddled. The smoker points to the huddled man as if to say: Take him! Who knows why—maybe they hated each other, perhaps the other man would’ve done the same. We’ll never know. We in the drone annihilate the huddled man with some dropped explosives…now we move on to hover over our smoker…he knows we’re up here, and he stares befuddled before realizing that we intend to honor his comrade’s sacrifice by reuniting them in short order. Grasping the danger, he gets up slowly,  he seems exhausted and resigned, as if he knows he has the means to escape but doesn’t really feel like it—and he too is blown to smithereens. 

Which is worse: to run from a suicide drone or a man prepared to shoot you with a gun? Is there more dignity coming your way when a guy closes one eye and tries to wink you out down the sight of his rifle versus him being in some van 1000 meters away with a remote control? Is it absurd to ask for a dignified death when for all of human history to this very day the vast majority of those toiling on this earth don't even get a dignified life, there’s people who haven’t even had a dignified meal for God's sake, and anyways are all these questions just a symptom of the diseased vainglory of the petty bourgeois mind???

What a year, what a decade, what a century! Crazy decadence…entire nations built, just to be torn down…100 years ago, Lenin’s death, revolutionary fingers groping Europe, explosions across the great capitals, the toiling masses of the East beginning to awaken…but things change, I guess. Now you can pay a service to get an AI girlfriend that will send you naughty pictures for 8.99 a month…a computer can do your homework. When tanks roll into the village square, you can bet safely they’re driven by the enemy. The sharper workers are bought off or maybe the sharper ones are asleep, in any case the American’s have been put to bed for generations now…sure they murmur restlessly in their sleep, but so do sick guys with a fever so high their brain is melting…the rest of the world burns on and off, dependent on the alignments of a warlords humours  or the price of gas in Philadelphia.

I think maybe we are like the pair of soldiers under the FPV drone, except our sluggishness is the result of battles fought and lost before many of us were even born. We are both the weeping soldier and his betrayer—every kind of pathetic.

Most of the time the people running from the drones have dropped their rifles. Even if they found the strength to turn around and take aim at the descending bomb, they couldn't; they’re unarmed (and isn’t that like us too?). But, very occasionally, a man retains his weapons and will shoot down a drone. I don’t care what side those guys are on. I can’t even tell. I salute that victory. But is it a victory if what follows is defeat? Is individual heroism on this level proletarian, bourgeois, somewhere in the hazy middle? 

Sinwar’s final moments were captured by a drone, a frozen man, he looked like he was dead, shaking loose for an amazing though militarily futile small defiance before his annihilation by Israeli firepower. It was amazing because it was an act of vitality in a world that has broken the vitalism of the regular man like cobblestones under tank treads. I think, too, that’s why so many were drawn to Mangione… glimmers of heroism that burst through the “complacency and fatalism” of the petit-bourgeois framework that has seen widespread adoption by the working classes ever since the invention of the credit card allowed people to buy Gucci belts…“Though death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.”

Let’s call a spade a spade: Our side is a cobbled together patchwork of sometimes totally unaffiliated or even at-odds organizations and movements around the world that attempt to challenge the US-led world order that is losing quite badly. 

October 7th has resulted in the total desolation and complete physical destruction of Gaza and the genocide of its people. The leadership of Hezbollah and Hamas have been decapitated, the blitzkrieg downfall and discrediting of the Syrian government a prelude to the further invasion of the country by the Turks, the US, and Israel. Iran has found itself in a position of retreat. The Kurds are squeezed between their ill-chosen benefactors in the US, a collection of former ISIS thugs backed by Turkey, and a shaky new state attached to all those mentioned so far; they will likely make extreme concessions or be militarily annihilated.

The US election saw a competition between two pigs. Trump won, but Kamala at least let the people who constantly discredit themselves discredit themselves once again. Europe is a mess; every parliament is a camp of bums. Russia is a mafia state. Africa is exploited for treasure or used as a frontier for foreign military operations. South America is the domain of madmen and thieves. Venezuela's continuing slide in a dismal trajectory sure to be hastened by the election of Trump. China continues its policy of non-interference and adherence to state institutions, seeking to be the sane—though never revolutionary—pole. Let’s face it: Most people are not even fighting for Communism (most people aren't fighting for anything), and we’re essentially rooting for other people fighting discrete battles against the primary capitalist country, or more commonly just against US interests and allies. 

The outlook is not rosy. Well, so be it. Look at failures, mourn them, but more importantly learn from them and apply the facts of the past to the facts of the present.

 Some of my further resolutions, then: Take stock honestly then keep it moving. Adapt and expand. Never let anything get to you too much, but never be detached. Don’t make predictions (god, I should have learned that years ago). Never play-act or drape yourself in other people’s victories—seek out your own. And finally I'll crib from a Trump t-shirt: Never surrender!

 It’s a New Year! Challenges compounded. That's OK. Melancholy can be comfortable but it's an expensive luxury, and besides you can only spend so long time hanging around the graveyard before your funky ass becomes a ghost.

Happy New Year!

Brace