.
In my dream last night, the last thing I remember saying just before I woke up was: ‘Alain Badiou says the most nihilistic song is All You Need Is Love.’
In my dream last night, the name of my band was: This Unstable Honorarium.
Last night in my dream I googled: how do you fight capitalism.
Last night I dreamt I was an arsonist: as I headed to set one last fire, I got a text saying it’s a trap, turned around, and decided to go see art instead.
Last night I dreamt the telescope was invented by aliens, who sent it to us telepathically, to put us on the wrong track.
Last night I dreamt I had writer’s block.
In my dream last night I came to the sudden realization that celebrity culture was the worshipping of false idols.
In my dream last night I read an essay that began: “We’re sick of reading books that are only men writing about their loneliness. We want to read books by women writing about their __________.” But I couldn’t make out the last word. (I had a sense that the last word might be rage.)
In my dream last night my art project was bringing two alligators to different people's houses and then letting the alligators roam free. The project was abruptly brought to an end when one of the alligator's ate someone's baby.
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September 23, 2021
September 20, 2021
The institution only cares about the institution
.
If anyone has any ideas, now is the time to try them.
Find them strange, find the difficult strangeness within each one.
We’ve undone what was done, yet it keeps endlessly redoing itself.
(People who are good at art often also have a great deal of difficulty
with many of the other parts of life.)
The aspects of life that make life worth living, how to explain
to myself just exactly what they are.
.
If anyone has any ideas, now is the time to try them.
Find them strange, find the difficult strangeness within each one.
We’ve undone what was done, yet it keeps endlessly redoing itself.
(People who are good at art often also have a great deal of difficulty
with many of the other parts of life.)
The aspects of life that make life worth living, how to explain
to myself just exactly what they are.
.
September 19, 2021
Ecological collapse is well underway...
.
Ecological collapse is well underway
and there is no future to write for
Yet one can still write to pass time
that can no longer be lived as if it were endless
One can still sit doing nothing
knowing climate grief is the grief of our time
the grief of this moment
The moment that knows capitalism
as a project to set fire to the world
a project with a definite end
.
Ecological collapse is well underway
and there is no future to write for
Yet one can still write to pass time
that can no longer be lived as if it were endless
One can still sit doing nothing
knowing climate grief is the grief of our time
the grief of this moment
The moment that knows capitalism
as a project to set fire to the world
a project with a definite end
.
September 8, 2021
I believe it is a common enough experience...
.
I believe it is a common enough experience for a writer to have finished a book and, due to any number of factors, wait a very long time before it sees the light of day. But I've always found it such a strange feeling. Almost as if one's entire being has been put on hold.
.
I believe it is a common enough experience for a writer to have finished a book and, due to any number of factors, wait a very long time before it sees the light of day. But I've always found it such a strange feeling. Almost as if one's entire being has been put on hold.
.
September 5, 2021
An excerpt from The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart
.
Christian academies soon came to depend heavily on public support. In Falwell’s Virginia, for example, state-sponsored tuition grants allowed students to take public money to the school of their choice. As religious entities, moreover, the schools and the organizations running them benefited from significant tax exemption. But in the late 1970s, following a string of court cases, the IRS began to threaten the tax-exempt status of religious groups running race-segregated schools. For conservative religious leaders, the previous decades had seemed like a long string of defeats. And now they had a chief bogeyman in the IRS, which was coming after their schools and their pocketbooks.
It would be hard to overestimate the degree of outrage that the threat of losing their tax-advantaged status on account of their segregationism provoked. As far as leaders like Bob Jones Sr. were concerned, they had a God-given right not just to separate the races but also to receive federal money for this purpose. Emerging leaders of the New Right were prepared to defend them. They began to meet regularly, to discuss politics, and to look for ways to make their voices heard in Washington. Paul Weyrich stoked the flames with sympathetic words about the unjust efforts “to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de-facto segregation." In the grievances of the segregationists, he saw the opportunity to found a movement.
The correspondence between the religious conservatives and the New Right conservatives now crackled with energy. At their meetings in Lynchburg, common ground began to emerge. As Harry R. Jackson Jr. and Tony Perkins relate the story in their 2008 book, Personal Faith, Public Policy, “At one point during the wide-ranging discussion, Weyrich is reported to have said that there was a moral majority who wanted to maintain the traditional Christian values that were under assault in America. Falwell asked Weyrich to repeat the statement and then spun around and declared to one of his assistants ‘That’s the name for this organization – the Moral Majority.’” That day, say Jackson and Perkins, “marked the beginning of a new force in the American political landscape… At the rebirth of the Conservative civic involvement in 1979, the new leaders were determined not to repeat the “sins” of the fathers. They would not shy away from controversy, nor would they yield to criticism; they would work with others to restore the moral foundations of the nation.”
But they had a problem. As Weyrich understood, building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. “Stop the tax on segregation” just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that Weyrich envisioned. They needed an issue with a more acceptable appeal.
What message would bring the movement together? The men of Lynchburg considered a variety of unifying issues and themes. School prayer worked for some, but it tended to alienate the Catholics, who remembered all too well that, for many years, public schools had allowed only for Protestant prayers and bible readings while excluding Catholic readings and practices. Bashing communists was fine, but even Rockefeller Republicans could do that. Taking on “women’s liberation” was attractive, but the Equal Rights Amendment was already going down in flames. At last they landed on the one surprising word that would supply the key to the political puzzle of the age: “abortion.”
As the historian and author Randall Balmer writes, “It wasn’t until 1979 – a full six years after Roe – that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”
More than a decade later, Weyrich recalled the moment well. At a conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by a religious right organization called the Ethics and Public Policy Center (to which Balmer had been invited to attend), Weyrich reminded his fellow culture warriors of the facts: “Let us remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially-discriminatory policies.”
As Balmer tells it in his book Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America, Weyrich then reiterated the point. During a break in the proceedings, Balmer says, he cornered Weyrich to make sure he had heard him correctly. “He was adamant that, yes, the 1975 action by the IRS against Bob Jones University was responsible for the genesis of the Religious Right in the 1970s.” It was only after leaders of the New Right held a conference call to discuss strategy, Balmer says, that abortion was “cobbled into the political agenda of the Religious Right.”
– Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism
.
Christian academies soon came to depend heavily on public support. In Falwell’s Virginia, for example, state-sponsored tuition grants allowed students to take public money to the school of their choice. As religious entities, moreover, the schools and the organizations running them benefited from significant tax exemption. But in the late 1970s, following a string of court cases, the IRS began to threaten the tax-exempt status of religious groups running race-segregated schools. For conservative religious leaders, the previous decades had seemed like a long string of defeats. And now they had a chief bogeyman in the IRS, which was coming after their schools and their pocketbooks.
It would be hard to overestimate the degree of outrage that the threat of losing their tax-advantaged status on account of their segregationism provoked. As far as leaders like Bob Jones Sr. were concerned, they had a God-given right not just to separate the races but also to receive federal money for this purpose. Emerging leaders of the New Right were prepared to defend them. They began to meet regularly, to discuss politics, and to look for ways to make their voices heard in Washington. Paul Weyrich stoked the flames with sympathetic words about the unjust efforts “to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de-facto segregation." In the grievances of the segregationists, he saw the opportunity to found a movement.
The correspondence between the religious conservatives and the New Right conservatives now crackled with energy. At their meetings in Lynchburg, common ground began to emerge. As Harry R. Jackson Jr. and Tony Perkins relate the story in their 2008 book, Personal Faith, Public Policy, “At one point during the wide-ranging discussion, Weyrich is reported to have said that there was a moral majority who wanted to maintain the traditional Christian values that were under assault in America. Falwell asked Weyrich to repeat the statement and then spun around and declared to one of his assistants ‘That’s the name for this organization – the Moral Majority.’” That day, say Jackson and Perkins, “marked the beginning of a new force in the American political landscape… At the rebirth of the Conservative civic involvement in 1979, the new leaders were determined not to repeat the “sins” of the fathers. They would not shy away from controversy, nor would they yield to criticism; they would work with others to restore the moral foundations of the nation.”
But they had a problem. As Weyrich understood, building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. “Stop the tax on segregation” just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that Weyrich envisioned. They needed an issue with a more acceptable appeal.
What message would bring the movement together? The men of Lynchburg considered a variety of unifying issues and themes. School prayer worked for some, but it tended to alienate the Catholics, who remembered all too well that, for many years, public schools had allowed only for Protestant prayers and bible readings while excluding Catholic readings and practices. Bashing communists was fine, but even Rockefeller Republicans could do that. Taking on “women’s liberation” was attractive, but the Equal Rights Amendment was already going down in flames. At last they landed on the one surprising word that would supply the key to the political puzzle of the age: “abortion.”
As the historian and author Randall Balmer writes, “It wasn’t until 1979 – a full six years after Roe – that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”
More than a decade later, Weyrich recalled the moment well. At a conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by a religious right organization called the Ethics and Public Policy Center (to which Balmer had been invited to attend), Weyrich reminded his fellow culture warriors of the facts: “Let us remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially-discriminatory policies.”
As Balmer tells it in his book Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America, Weyrich then reiterated the point. During a break in the proceedings, Balmer says, he cornered Weyrich to make sure he had heard him correctly. “He was adamant that, yes, the 1975 action by the IRS against Bob Jones University was responsible for the genesis of the Religious Right in the 1970s.” It was only after leaders of the New Right held a conference call to discuss strategy, Balmer says, that abortion was “cobbled into the political agenda of the Religious Right.”
– Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism
.
September 3, 2021
I often think about how strange it was...
.
I often think about how strange it was that, in my youth, I gravitated toward doing the opposite of something I didn’t like. Instead of simply doing something I liked.
.
I often think about how strange it was that, in my youth, I gravitated toward doing the opposite of something I didn’t like. Instead of simply doing something I liked.
.
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