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Radio War Nerd EP #520 — Day (After Day) of the Locust + World of Wars: Yemen, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan (Patreon)

Published:
2025-05-07 01:11:29
Imported:
2025-05
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Content

Recorded: May 6, 2025

First: We discuss the World of Wars: Yemen, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan. (Trump's deal with the Houthis was announced during intermission; however, India rudely decided to commence bombing Pakistan shortly after we finished recording).32:40 - Music interlude by Brendon Anderegg. Check out music from his group Mountains here34:40 - We talk about Nathaniel West's novel Day of the Locust and its grim relevance today

Total time: 1:06:59Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

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Sound production by Telescope Audio

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Files

Comments

Matt

Looking forward to the India Pakistan emergency pod if y'all can wrangle it.

NYCM&AHole

Day of the locust sounds like a good metal band name

Fivey

Re: the genocidal stratum, it could be illuminating to reintroduce the term "bourgeois nationalism" into the discourse.

William

I say give Brendan the power to play orchestra music if a topic goes too long, or a loud buzzer sound

William

If I get what you’re saying, there was room for error from about 55-75; in the 30s and now, there seems to be incredibly little room for error

William

Like, economic conditions force people to be pragmatic to the point of alienating their humanity

William

The body thrives on stimulus- the changing of the seasons, the cold, the hot; I can see how the Groundhog Day nature of the weather in California makes you go crazy. Its solitary confinement of a sort

William

I think the “being tricked” is the gap between what people feel they were promised as a reward for playing their role in the economy and society for so many years. I don’t think they consciously realize they’re dupes and that they fell for the advertising, the stump speeches; the false promises given to them by a craven moneyed class. They just get the gold watch and realize everything they thought would be great tastes like ash and instead of having an ounce of introspection they double down and say “it would’ve been great if it weren’t for X”

Leland Alvarado

I don't if John reads these comments, but in case he does: You should invest in an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). These things are big batteries that are especially useful in places where electricity can be spotty. Just plug in your router, modem and computer, and you should be fine for at least a few hours.

a clash of purple

It's not hard to trick people when they *want* to believe the lie.

a clash of purple

It's an interesting point John raises about the left being unable to understand the rage of the petit bourgeoisie. It actually reminds me of something Carl Zha said on the show about the way the PRC manages crises, long ago; their first solution is always to try and apply money to the problem. Eradicating poverty and building infrastructure isn't enough. There's a malignancy in the bourgeois heart (or whatever they have in place of a heart), and the lesser specimens are often even nastier and more resentful than the big ones. I donno. I don't view the bourgeoisie as human. Certainly they're not any vision of humanity I want to be a part of. I don't understand them, and I'm not really sure I want to understand them.

Niklas Krogerus

Only place I ever heard 'Hooray for Hollywood' is at the end of 'The Long Goodbye', a great 70's movie about being frustrated in LA... Though I don't think Elliott Gould's character has much in common with the heroes of 'Day of the Locust'.

Michael Cousins

This reminds me of the documentary Paris is Burning where a haggard old drag queen is staring into the mirror doing her makeup talking about her life and she says “When you’re young, you want to be a real big star. You start out thinking you’re gonna be a big glamorous somebody. Then you get a little older and you start to lower your expectations a bit, and then you get even older and you lower your expectations even more; until finally, when you get to be my age, you think; If you just manage to survive, you’ve really done something. And if a shot of heroin gets you real high, well hooray for you. “ Incidentally, years after the documentary when that drag queen died, it came out that she had a dead body wrapped up inside a trunk in her closet of someone that she had killed 30 years before, some abusive lover.

Karl Childers

man as a lifelong middle class california loser i really have got to read this book. the prose particularly nailed that bizarre acclimation to weather so good you actually begin to resent it, but only so that when the weather isn't good you resent it even more.

Nate Wood

why the concern with going too long? is it cos you guys don't have time or because you think we don't want to hear you talk? As far as I'm concerned I would like to hear as much as you have to say about current events as you can muster

Christian Walter

Great ep. On drones - maybe you can get Roland Popp on the show. He is a Swiss military historian who has from the beginning said we should not underestimate Russia. Basically "Maybe it's not a smart idea to start a war of attrition with the world champion, especially right on its border when logistics are not in our favor." He was ridculed for that but managed to remain a voice of reason. I found him via Almut Rochowanski. Recently he was also taking about drones and he had a different take. He basically said, it's hard to know what's really going on but the pictures from the front that show all these trees wrapped in fiber optic cable suggest that both sides have a handle on electronic counter measures and that the importance of drones might be exaggerated. He also said that the operator has an electronic footprint the size of a horse. So spotting those is probably something both sides have gotten really good at. The drone footage is good propaganda, it's attractive but maybe artillery remains the most deadly thing on the battlefield.

Turdferg24

I don’t think “many” American Jews have condemned Israel, it’s a very small vocal minority and we need to stop acting like it isn’t

Sam Zeng

The RWN curse

Philippe Duhart

John’s point about family ties and Houthi internal security is on point. It’s why ethnic insurgencies have always been difficult to infiltrate. Even in Western Europe: ETA generally and the Provisional IRA in rural areas recruited from well-established familial and local networks whereas leftwing groups recruited from transient networks in universities or fringe radical political milieus that were easy to penetrate.

Ollin

The episode hasn’t started yet for me I’m just commenting cos it’s been on my mind yall DEFinitely need to do a full Kashmir episode

Schaeffer Mallory

We're in the same cultural cesspool as the 70's, we just now live in Warhol's prophecy of "everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes"

Yairo Martis

Vlekke Hond is spotted/speckled dog in Dutch.

a clash of purple

It's a minority, but I don't know about "very small." I think it's more accurate to say that attitudes vary a lot depending on age and denomination. It goes back to something Dolan has said multiple times: most older white people in America are violently racist against Arabs. To a majority of Americans, Arab lives aren't worth much. (And Israel is seen as an implicitly white nation surrounded by a sea of browns, even though that isn't really accurate, but that's a whole other issue.) Massacres and atrocities committed *by* Arabs, especially against victims perceived as white, have always terrified whites. Massacres and atrocities inflicted *against* Arabs don't even register as such.

William

Right, which makes the denouement all the more bitter

j

Great episode… hard for someone to understand who’s biography fits in the grapes of wrath. However the fear and loathing of mediocrity can become a ferocious force for those who are susceptible to the infection. Unbridled the force in the best of instances destroys the individual, in many cases family and friends. The worst of cases entire society’s.

a clash of purple

Brevity is the soul of wit. Which is to say, I imagine they want to be more disciplined about staying on topic and avoiding tangents and non-sequiturs. This is theoretically a podcast intended to inform and educate, not one of those streamer channels where they post 20-hour vlogs of them rambling about nothing. If nothing else, it's good practice for when they're interviewing guests.

a clash of purple

But some people *do* become real big stars. So what does that say about the rest of us? If it's just down to random chance, then really you should never give up chasing those dreams, because one day you might just get lucky. And if it's down to skill, or talent, or hard work, or networking, then it's your fault for being a loser if you don't make it big.

a clash of purple

I think lots of people (most of them?) just cling to the lie harder than ever the more it's proven false. I donno. I see the point Dolan is trying to make about Day of the Locust and Trumpies, but I'm not sure I agree with him. For one thing, it overlooks Trump's rock-solid support from evangelical Christians, who love him for some inscrutable reason that only makes sense to their diseased brains. That demographic are definitely *not* the down-and-out resentful lower middle class Dolan is imagining. They're more of an apocalypse cult crossed with a MLM scam. Israel (and its powerful lobby) also worship Trump; as he said half-jokingly once, he is the king of the Jews. I think for a lot of other Trump supporters, they love him because they are incredibly stupid. Stupidity is a major factor in current American politics, to an extent that people probably aren't comfortable thinking about.

ben s

Not even room for error. There even less and less room to be unremarkable. For the first half of his adult life, my uncle worked part time, and bought a modest house and has lived out his life there. He bounced from factory to bartending to working in stores. He had zero ambition and minim work ethic, but was far from scraping by. Vacationed regularly. Had short lived interesting hobbies. Never married but had a lot of close friends who also did some version of what he did. He retired relatively comfortably. Maybe the other shoe will drop in the form of insurmountable healthcare bills or something at some point but he seems to be a fulfilled 70 year old. I don’t even know that you could live the life he did as a full time salaried worker anymore.

Graham Isom

I would argue "many" is fair to say, certainly "most" would be inaccurate but jews are fairly over represented among certainly elected officials who have called for a ceasefire or arms embargo.

JoR

They're old lol

JoR

Man we need an in character episode with "Gary", even if it's just one. The interviews John did as Gary on YouTube are crazy funny lol

julio

Thanks for the discussion, didn't get the chance to read it. Have you read Dorothy Thompson's "Who Goes Nazi?" From a 1940s issue of Harpers. would be interesting to compare the personality types she describes to the types in Day of the Locust.

julio

I would disagree that "being nothing" is the right diagnosis for the contemporary period. I agree it has to do with what you guys call attention and think it is valuable to distinguish between the tangible material assets/wealth and the intangible assets of attention and what we could call social recognition. But I am not sympathetic to the idea that, today, Trump supporters (of the petite bourgeois variety we are discussing here) should be regarded with sympathy for their loss of attentional recognition. i worry this concedes too much to the inner narration of people who are essentially fascists. Second, we are talking about a context where such resentments over attention occur relative to a baseline expectation whites have that, no matter what, they will not be worse off than people of color. Du Bois calls this the psychological wage of whiteness, which is an element missing from this story. Numerous studies show that whites view gains for nonwhites as a loss for themselves. Inserting the usual condemnation of liberal performative wokeness here, we can see how that could generalize to the resource of attentional recognition as well. In effect, the libs made it worse for nonwhite Americans because they pretended to make it better (even tho they in fact were of themselves making it worse anyway). Combine these two and the contemporary counterparts to the characters are not sympathetic losers, but something much uglier !

Alejandro Pepsi

Great episode, but... Mark, we need a Maine coon update! Our Maine coon is a month and some change older than yours and we just had our "holy shit" growth spurt. He makes our whole house seem small. And he still has so much to grow!

David Gyllenhaal

The asymmetries in what gets filmed, which heavily favors drones, makes it extremely difficult to gauge real effectiveness, though there is no doubt that that they have had a pretty transformative impact. The other major issue is which drones we are actually talking about, since there is a lot of sloppiness here, and there is DRAMATIC variability in how easy it is to devise an effective counter that restricts a given drone type to a smaller role. 1. Bayraktar-sized drones, for instance, turned out to be fairly simple to counter with well-fielded legacy air defense, and we don't hear much about them anymore. 2. FPV drones are clearly a huge deal, but the speed of move and countermove makes me suspicious that they will remain an apex-predator for any serious length of time. ECM is getting more difficult to deal with, but more saliently, you can shoot them down with bullets, and there is already a lot of stuff in the pipeline (millimeter wave radar, smaller thermal vision systems, automated targeting systems, TROPHY systems) with potential to shrink their role dramatically. Not a guarantee, but I wouldn't be hasty in declaring them the new king of the battlefield. 3. The big one that I think is not going to go away is small surveillance drones. I have a very hard time thinking that sufficiently effective counters will be found that armies can restore the fog of war and enable tactical and operational surprise. To my mind, that is by far the most likely to be the enduring transformation. AFV's might well field highly effective counters to FPVs within a decade. But I suspect the transparent battlefield is here to stay.

aqueous_steve

As someone who also grew up in the Bay I really appreciate when they wax poetic (if critical) about what that place is like cuz it gives me a lot of context growing up their in the 90s and to my parents lives as young adults

David Gyllenhaal

I really appreciate that you guys are so candid about the astonishing abundance of mid-century life—the way that stable middle class jobs and assets sagged down like fat citrus fruits over the middle of the boulevard. It's hard to overstate how surreal it is for most millennials and Gen-Zers to hear Boomers and older Gen-X just narrate the bare elements of the their life path. It always sounds like "yeah so I followed this band around that I really liked until I was about 28, then I tried grad school and didn't like it, so I went into insurance and once I got my footing I started flipping houses." The disconnect with how high the barriers to entry have now become for even basic middle class stability is hard to overstate. A normal conversation with people under 40 is more like "well thankfully I realized two years in that I had made a bad bet with this degree and I figured that coding was probably saturated so I started looking at certification programs in [gobbledygook]-analysis I could do at nights—the cert was six months of 80 hour weeks and then it took about six months to land the first job but it's going ok, I just started renting a two bedroom and if I can keep to the budget I should be able to clear the residual credit card debt by October of next year." It's worth underlining that for people my age and younger, unless you are in a very specialized sector, your material working reality is experienced as 'empirically' Marxist, whereas precisely the opposite was the case with the Boomers. A big part of the insane generational divide that has emerged in politics is that I think a ton of older people are incredibly angry with 'the kids' for not just getting it together and being prosperous, but also have a vague feeling that something horribly wrong is going on all around them that they don't understand, like agoraphobes living in cliffside mansion whose foundations are rapidly eroding.

Miko

Recent convo on social media about comfortable retirees in Germany that were lurching rightward in their now over-free time, similar to how the boomers OD'd on fox news and similar in the US. Terribly bored with the prosperity they take for granted. In general it seems the only one or two generations in all of history that got to retire and enjoyed the most prosperity ever, took it as a given and then burned it to the ground for their children.

a clash of purple

It's almost like capitalism doesn't work for the winners any better than the losers... I think knowing, if only subconsciously, that your comfort is paid for by the alienation and hyper-exploitation of others creates a cognitive dissonance which expresses itself in a nihilistic death drive. It actually connects to RWN's ongoing American Civil War series: I think a big part of why the slavers were so insane comes from similar psychology. If your freedom comes at the price of others' slavery, and your wealth means that others have to live in poverty, then it's all going to be ashes in your mouth. Even physical pleasure becomes torturous, in a way, for the upper classes.

a clash of purple

So when are we finally going to reach the promise of the future from the Simpsons? "The wars of the future will not be fought on land or sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In any case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. Your duty as you go forth from here today is to build and maintain those robots. Thank you."

Sean Enright

That’s an interesting metaphor for California, oranges losing their novelty to the point of being disgusting. It’s also used in the historical fictional novel Riven Rock about the sexually psychotic scion of the McCormick family having his own asylum built for him in what became Montecito, CA.

Sean Enright

One of the fictional protagonists is a worker on the estate whose plans to strike out as a farmer on his own decay with his taste for oranges.

xnfec

Day of the Locust sounds like early onset narcisism. I think they made a film of the book. Maybe you could get Eileen Jones to come on and discuss it further?

Mac Robertson

The problem is that taking this subject seriously leads to dekulakization, and that is something utterly anathema to the American worldview

CR

They will die before accepting that they are the soft men creating hard times

Poseyma2

JEANTY MENTIONED

Mark Ames

Well ours is a mix, turns out. Part domestic, part Maine Coon, part Norwegian. Loven’s got the coat of a domestic, tail of a Norwegian, ears and paw tufts of a Maine… but jfc he grew huge! Like Jack’s beans! Also, he fetches small plush balls, chases frisbees, loves the leash, licks my face. I don’t know what’s going on.

Alejandro Pepsi

That's so cool, he has an inner dog too. Hugo is part Highlander, but just the ears. The rest is fluffy mountain lion, I think. His mixed breed had us questioning whether he'd grow just big or BIG big. He grew not all that much larger than a normal cat, but then he became Huge Hugo almost overnight. The vet says he could keep growing for 2 or so more years, that's insane!

Jason Thompson

Thanks for talking about “Day of the Locust,” which I had never read. If anyone else is interested, it’s out there on YouTube as an audiobook, it’s only about 4 1/2 hours long (but watch out for the tacky AI audio version that someone uploaded).

JoR

It’s always a good episode with a Raiders mention

Cade Jameson

The classical social science theory of the far right, which we got from German social scientists fleeing fascism, is that it is a movement of the old middle class (independent proprietors as opposed to the new middle class of professionals and public sector employees), and that it reflects their status anxiety, the fear of being squeezed by workers from below, big business from above, and the loss of social esteem to college educated liberal types. This theory fell out of fashion with all forms of class analysis, but I think it’s correct. It’s the Piketty Brahmin liberal vs Merchant Right dynamic that dominates politics in affluent nations because there is no one to represent the interests of working people. The theory was misapplied by Cold War liberals to attack the American populist movement of the late 19th century, but that’s because (capital P) Populism was misunderstood as a right wing movement.

Dissipatio

If you had stayed in Berkeley what would you be doing with the money, planning the next cruise or checking Machu Picchu off the list? Sorry, but I probably wouldn't like you. Here's the last line from Tony Hoagland's poem "Here in Berkeley": "No matter how you feel, you have to act like you were very popular with yourself, very relaxed and purposeful, very unconfused, and not like you are walking through the sunshine singing in chains."

xnfec

That quote reminds me of Lem's The Futurological Congress