Bezt was born in 1987 in Turek, Poland. He met Sainer in Lodz during their common courses at the Academy of Fine Art. They created Etam Cru (for crew) but this art collaboration doesn’t restrict them to create on their own. With time Betz and Sainer style became similar (that might be one of the reasons they are great friends). They both combine street art techniques with more traditional oil and acrylic painting.
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Anonymous asked: Re: Yalta, do you think black separatism could ever have worked? (i.e. yielded an internally stable state with not-unusually-contested borders?)
Haiti was a country that did and does exist, if you want to talk about the U.S. in particular Liberia is a country that did and does exist. If you want to keep things to the American mainland, the Seminole - who came from fugitive slaves as much as North American autochthons - had effective sovereignty over the Florida peninsula for a while, there were other maroon colonies besides.
If you’re talking about the ‘60s wave, Amerikkka was never going to let a definitionally oppositional state establish from its sovereign territory in the middle of the Cold War, come the fuck on. (That same Cold War pressure also brought things like elite accomodation to black demands and the replacement of the draft with an all-volunteer military so as to keep eyes on the prize and not internal race war.)
I think a lot of contemporaries realized that and so the more practical enthusiasm got channelled into pan-Africanism as decolonization proceeded apace. There were GOING to be Westphalian states run by blacks for blacks, with borders and institutions, and hopes were high.
T’Challa, Marvel Comics’ “Black Panther” that’s getting some heat right now, is a daydream of those diaspora hopes for post-colonial leadership - a strong, noble philosopher-warrior-leader who drives his particular country on to technological self-sufficiency, then dominance (South Africa managed to build a modern economy, jet-set cities, and a nuclear military on a base of black labor, after all) while standing up for all of Africa as a continent and a people.
(You will remember that Rastafari, originating in the early 20th century in the black diaspora, holds early pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey as a prophet and Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie - at establishment head of the only indigenous government in Africa - as a messiah.)
In practice, the warrior leaders weren’t that noble, the philosophers weren’t that strong. Rather than standing for Africa entire, the newly independent countries engaged in border warring (that was largely Cold War shit - after the Sino-Soviet split a lot of countries got to host 3-way proxy wars, which no doubt was fun). Rather than even standing for their own countries entire, politics tended to shake out along lines of tribal identities that were meaningless in the diaspora, with at best an ideological gloss that was efficiently shed with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
All that said, I think an alternate history (or future) where this panned out, and maybe drew return migration from the diaspora is still more likely than the establishment of a black-identity state on North American mainland.
I think rather than an encompassing concept of “blackness” organically emerging from the wisdom of the native African people, this would likely involve a founder state establishing an “African” identity that’s heavily salted with their own particularity, expanding across the continent, brutally suppressing other local identities over the course of several generations in favor of this “Africanism” in a way that uncomfortably reminds of European colonialism, and that any inspirational “pull” factor on the diaspora would be matched by a “push” factor as other states increasingly consider inhabitants sympathetic with the identity of this rising power to be suspect aliens, but hey.
Position I wish anyone cared enough about to be unpopular: John Dewey’s ideas weren’t actually that important in American public education and the notion that they were was mostly a way for America to put a native, democratic gloss on remodeling itself after the Prussian system just like everyone else
During the American Revolution, printer James Rivington’s Gazette was something of a proto-NY Times: Manhattan-based, but with a broad circulation and the most international coverage in the colonies. It was also the biggest newspaper not to tilt to the rebels, first offering a platform to all factions and then increasingly Loyalist.
This was not universally well-received. Isaac Sears, the privateer-trader who organized the merchants of New York into the Sons of Liberty, pushing back against British regulation which cut into their profits and backed by the threat of mob violence, described Rivington thus:
He would appear as a leading man amongst us, without perceiving that he is enlisted under a party as a tool of the lowest order; a political cracker, sent abroad to alarm and terrify, sure to do mischief to the cause he means to support, and generally finishing his career in an explosion that often bespatters his friends.
I have known a Statute of Lunacy taken out, upon a degree of conduct less exceptionable than this I have described: If the relations of our politician, should find his estate wasted by means of his patriotism, and they choose to improve upon this hint, I assure them, it is heartily at their service.
They did not. (A “Statute of Lunacy” was the period version of involuntary psychiatric commitment)
The Sons of Liberty arranged a series of hanging-in-effigies of Rivington, complete with a poem by revolutionary poet Philip Freneau framed as a satisfying confession before the gallows, and he was arrested by the New York Provincial Congress.
This not availing, an angry mob besieged Rivington and his family, driving them to the safety of a British warship, sacked his office and press, and seized his lead type to be melted down and cast into bullets.
They then faced and wheeled to the left, and marched out of town to the tune of Yankee Doodle. A vast concourse of people assembled at the Coffee House, on their leaving the ground, and gave them three very hearty cheers.
Met a friend, checked out a botanical garden. Shoulda considered that it’s winter but a lot of it was interesting trunk forms/ferns/ground cover with a winter-blooming section. Better than when I took someone to the rose garden off-season and they were just spiky bushes.
Then she used her card to take me to CostCo and man! At first I hoped to get away being whelmed but no, I was overwhelmed.
Even for Clackamas the patrons vibed red tribe as hell I noticed that right off. Next off though I was struck this was a *very* distinct vibe from Wal-Mart, which by comparison was closer towards the old Fred Meyer in Felony Flats on 82nd
Like, snapshots:
Dad with his 9th gradeish daughter in a tie-dye sweatshirt from the regional Last Chance Cheerleading Tournament
3 Hispanic guys buying work pants and gloves in English
Old puffy guy in a Vietnam Veteran cap with his younger but not young asian wife
Mom in gingham dress pretending to spoon-feed her daughter inside the demo cedar wood playhouse
I mean I guess the membership structure favors the not-rich but with available property, long time horizons, an ability to live at least one payday out
I guess it read like a red utopia, a bunch of yeomen and skilled workers and laborers rewarded for their earnest labor, like how red tribe idealizes itself without the underclass
OOOOHHH, I got it, here’s the clever inversion, I just figured out the way it astounded me and what it reminded me of -
the distribution warehouses from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, the 1888 utopian novel that inspired a nationwide intellectual movement towards what was later called a pre-Marxist variant of socialism but his militant fandom was adamant should be called “Nationalism”
So about a year ago me and my friend Nathan were walking around the “Pick-a-Part” in Clarksville Tennessee… We were searching for car badges and a spoiler to put on his trashy conversion van. While going through the lot we found what is probably the single greatest car to ever drive on any road in the world.
You are looking at… a Dora the Explorer themed gangster car… I’ve seen spongebob themed cars, Newport themed cars, sports team themed cars, but THIS.
trumps them all.
OH BUT IT GETS SO MUCH BETTER!!!!
You see… there has to be a reason that a car like this…
Would end up in the junkyard… SO me and Nathan did some looking around and tried to figure out why…
I still can’t believe the decals on this…. wait…
HOLD ON ONE FUCKING SECOND!
OH!
OH MY FUCKING GOD!
YES! SOMEONE ACTUALLY GOT SHOT WHILE DRIVING THEIR DORA THE EXPLORER CAR IN CLARKSVILLE TENNESSEE!
And THAT, is the single greatest thing I’ve found in a junkyard to this day.
okay this is totally wild but i RECOGNIZE THIS CAR
and i actually have a picture of it from its functioning days - this is dated 2012 -
The unfortunate result of that dynamic is that a new media order that should be teeming with more vibrant viewpoints than ever is at risk of calcifying into a staid landscape, where original thought is muffled by the wet blanket of political correctness. “There’s a funny, recurring instinct on the Internet now that if you don’t agree with something someone’s written, that it’s not fair or relevant and that it shouldn’t exist,” Jezebel editor Emma Carmichael said recently on the Longform Podcast. “Online feminism has more and more rules lately.” After editing out all of the statements that could be perceived, no matter how crudely, as biased or insensitive, “There are only so many things you can say.“ Even Suey Park, the creator of #CancelColbert who has drummed up Twitter outrage and caught her own backlash many times over, appears to be questioning the social media status quo. “I myself have mistaken pile-ons for justice when oftentimes there was a small miscommunication. I would assume the worse of everyone,” she tweeted this month. “But twitter can give you tunnel vision. It’s fickle, fast-moving, and full of miscommunication and fabrications. It can be self-destructive.”
I’ve been on the internet long enough now to have seen this cycle happen many times: someone (usually someone young) gains a reputation and attention for searching out and identifying terrible things, and writing cogently about why they are terrible. They do this for several years; it becomes a profession, or at least a dedicated amateur pursuit. Then, at some point, they talk about how this practice of publicly identifying and analyzing terrible things maybe goes too far sometimes.
The conclusion we should take from any individual instance of “Twitter goes too far sometimes” probably shouldn’t be “internet outrage is about to chill out more.” People have been saying this for years, but the chill-out hasn’t happened. Instead, we should conclude that 1) people who feel comfortable and right generating internet outrage tend to lose this feeling over time, and 2) there will always be new people to replace them.
Or, to put it another way: the internet pays the young to generate outrage.
It’s not always the young, of course. But the young can more convincingly perform the sort of pure anger that online audiences most respond to, plus they have more time to find things and tweet about them and respond to tweets, etc. And the practitioners don’t always end up having doubts about it. But I think generally they do.
Which means we have a free rider problem. Online activism can have demonstrably positive effects that benefit everyone. But I gain those benefits regardless of what I do. I don’t have to do the hard work of sifting through the oceans of public statements out there to find the things that can really make a difference, if properly publicized.
If that hard work is fairly distributed (you do the work on Sterling, then I’ll take Cosby while you rest up), it’s efficient. But we know it’s not. We know the work is done disproportionately by the young, or at least those new to the game. And we know that doing this work has negative effects on the people doing it. But we rely on that labor to bring us the positive effects, whether that effect is “real social change” or “seeing someone I dislike looking foolish.”
This work seems to take more of your self than traditional reporting does. For one, the writer’s identity is often part of the vector driving the outrage, and so the writer’s identity then becomes part of the argument, something that can be debated above and beyond the case they’re making. For another, much of the work is done outside any official organ; maybe a writer gets things started with a piece on The Root, but the argument develops through the writer’s personal Twitter account, which is often understood as a proxy for your identity. This professional requirement that your private self be part of the work means that the writer’s identity is there on the table alongside their actions as a member of the media. This seems like something that, prior to social media, journalism did not systematically ask of its workers. And it asks this disproportionately of people on the outrage beat, who have less power to protest that particular condition.
I’m not sure what to do about that; I’m not even sure if it’s bad or not. (Certainly many of the people on the outrage beat would have seen interpretations of their work tied to their identity before social media, too.) But I think when you hear people who have been laboring on the internet for years talk about how maybe it’s not perfect, the conclusion shouldn’t be that the internet isn’t structured the right way. It’s that the labor isn’t structured the right way.
Well this came in a while ago, but it’s referencing something even older. Someone was archive diving, took me a while to even find that one to link. That you, lovegodsmashtyrants? morosombrero?
Eh. I don’t believe in any gods, but I do practice worship of the local gods wherever I go. Down in Echo Park I gave offerings to Santa Muerte and Jesus Malverde, when I was up in the Idaho Panhandle the whole place was clearly sanctified to Jesus so I gave thanks to him. I don’t think any divinities have established clear dominion over Portland, but the Germanic forest gods seem to have as strong a claim as anyone.
One of the (two or three) religions I’ve had it in my head to found eventually is Library Judaism.
(I grew up around Philadelphia, where the local Jewish community stretches back to colonial merchant families for whom it essentially became the Hebrew-ethnic branch of mainline Protestantism, Reform before Reform or even Mendelssohn; there was some immigration later on but the existing population set up settlement houses right quick to assimilate them lest the old guard be tainted by an association of Jewishness with yokeldom. The generation or two before me the community shifted to, and then from Freudian Judaism, by my youth the local Jewish families were mostly distinguished by taking their children seriously and having all walls of least one room of their house lined with books and I wanted in on that. Later on with more experience and further travels I encountered Orthodox [Modern and otherwise] Judaism; grievance-mongering Shoah Judaism; and the ethnochauvinist Staten Islanders, equivalent to the Boston Irish and Jersey Italians; those communities and styles impressed me less.)
The idea being that each house of worship would consist on one hand of a library, secular in orientation, housing humanistic works - a core canon plus whatever the particular congregation saw fit to focus on. And on the other hand a temple including a shrine to one particular diety drawn from any religious or representative tradition that the congregation would be named for, plus two lesser “junior” shrines.
And sects could form around one of the junior focuses and eventually calve off from the parent church, and it would be possible to use the shrines to syncretize with any existing religion - you could have a God the Father//Christ the Son/Holy Spirit setup for example, which wouldn’t be orthodox trinitarianism obviously but “imperfectly orthodox” and “new syncretic religion” kind of go hand in hand you know.
(And obviously it’s a stretch to call it Judaism to begin with, but I mean, “claiming continuity with traditional Judaism” is a pretty successful strategy for a startup religion - look at Christianity, and Islam, and Mormonism, and Adventism, or even say Reform, or even Rabbinical Judaism, to say nothing of the variants in the previous parenthetical paragraph.)
And then I thought on it a bit more, and the Google-equivalent in my brain was like
You searched for:pan-Western humanistic religion with strong elements of syncretism
Did you mean: the Roman Catholic Church?
But the thing is, I was raised Catholic, ish, enough. Taken to weekly Masses, was in CCD but kicked out before I could be confirmed which fair enough, I don’t, and didn’t, believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died, and was buried, rose from the dead, and is now seated at the right hand of the Father, in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who came upon the apostles at Pentecost, in the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting, and was honest enough that I would have told the bishop so.
And oh, well, of course that’s just the fault of the degraded post-Vatican II church that drained the mystery and magic from Catholicism, that can’t catechize for shit, yada yada yada, right?
But I honestly find all the enthusiastic traditionalist-bordering-on-sedevacantists who peddle that line a little ridiculous. For one, because the idea of communicants being so obsessed with recovering and upholding The Proper Theology in the face of a church corrupted by concessions to the fallen world is more Prot than any modern Protestantism I’ve ever encountered, which tends to focus more on charisma and the born-again experience.
For two, their obsessive hate of On Eagle’s Wings. I loved On Eagle’s Wings, it was my favorite song in church. Precisely because it wasn’t as intricate as the ~beautiful~ choral music they fetishize, anyone with no particular training could just belt it out and feel part of something. (If you had put me on the spot to guess where it had come from, I would have said maybe a 19th century Boston Protestant hymn.)
Because my father, the guy who even tried to raise me Catholic in the first place, was an altar boy back before Vatican II. He told me what those old Latin Masses were actually like - a series of posture changes set to bells, while a priest spoke inaudibly to a wall in a dead language and the real energy was in the pews, where veiled widows from the old country rocked back and forth clutching at their fetishes and wailing prayers, basically attempting to cast magic spells.
And he told me of how he and an Italian altar boy (who would later be my godfather, and operate a motel just over the Philly border known for hosting prostitutes and outlaws, with an impressive pool/gym complex in the basement that I only ever saw used by him and my father and I on Friday nights, though I hear it was open to members of the local police as a courtesy) would get assigned to all the high-tipping funeral and wedding Masses, in return for kicking back some of their share to the priest, a genial old Irishman of the drunken, gambling, whoremongering type.
Because like, that’s what “true” Catholicism always was - as a practice, thinly whitewashed peasant paganism; as an institution, a collection of corrupt local elites, no different from your typical backwater courthouse gang, only with priests for lawyers and the parish for the county.
The scholasticist tradition the neotraditionalists hark back to was never more than a sideshow (albeit one that could occasionally accomplish something when by chance a power vacuum opened up to be filled by someone who took it seriously) conducted by a bunch of ivory-tower monks and minor nobility who were looking for an alternative hierarchy they could scramble to the top of. And the whole Chesterbelloc, Inklings thing was never more than an arcadian fantasia by a bunch of podunk punks too in love with themselves to notice that the sedate, “properly ordered” rural landscape and society they loved so much wasn’t a remnant of the good old days but the very product of the enclosure and industrialization that had driven all the peasants and all the productive activity to the dirty, squalid cities they recoiled from. Nothing more than a bunch of pompous pipe-smokers smoking each others’ pipes over how wise and noble they must be for rising to the top of this backwater society when the truth was there was nothing and no one left to rule over and no one of any ambition and competence could be bothered to compete.
Contemporary reproduction of a composite gun with a “plug bayonet”. Composite guns were manufactured by gunsmiths from pieces of different weapons. In an era before mass production, if a gun broke down you couldn’t just order in replacement part 2384B. It would either need to be fixed or replaced from another gun.
Plug bayonets were the earliest type of bayonets to be used. They get their name because of the design, which requires that the handle of the bayonet be fitted inside the barrel of the gun “plugging” it.
Of course this prevents the gun from being fired, and alternatives were quickly sought.
This particular example was made by gunsmith Ian Pratt.
Culture, be it material or idealistic, proceeds evolutionarily. Each development is first assessed in light of that which came before, in a way that can easily seem odd in later on retrospect.
To us, rifles with plug bayonets are odd - you can forfeit the entire purpose of a gun in order to stab someone with it. That’s weird. At the time, they were pikes where you could remove the blade and use it as a gun. That was amazing.
I remember in the early 2000s when blogs - warblogs, even - were becoming a thing, the next evolution of the newspaper column. One of the things that aghast heritage media denigrated about blogs was that they would just drop in pictures they found from anywhere. Which from a newspaper office perspective makes sense - hiring photographers, or licensing their work was a big part of their budget, and moreover of their self-narrative.
But from the web-native curatorial perspective that was just insane. Of course there were pictures. Here’s a thing I’m talking about, and there exists in the wild a picture of it, so you can better understand it, so of course the two go together as a matter of basic competency.
But things resolved. Newspapers don’t complain about them anymore. Maybe because there’s no one left with the idle time to complain. Once as a kid I thought I might make a career getting paid to write essays, but then the internet. C'est la vie, it’s unfortunate and they did warn us about this but seriously, fuck Metallica. Those dudes are dicks.
On the other hand, I don’t see blogs, at least the Wordpress-style things that I identify as the platonic figure of a blog, linking inline photos as much anymore. We kind of accepted that the association was the relic of the newspaper, and realized that now that we have the internet instead of a printing press and trucks and newstands, there’s no reason to expect to get photography and essays from the same source anymore.
On the third hand there’s whatever the hell I’m doing, hijacking an only tangentially related photoset for the purpose of an essay.
When you talk about “Rockefeller Republicans”, I don’t know how many people today even have an idea of who the Rockefeller family were, I’m not sure how much information that name carries.
So, uh, think of the Wayne family. Bruce and his late parents. “Wayne Republicans”. Basically the same thing - urban-based dreams of social uplift through monumental programs overseen by men born into more money than God. Vague social liberalism that disdains bourgeois morality from an aristocratic direction, anti-corruption, pro-Establishment to the extent the Police Commissioner always takes their calls.
That was a big part of the Republicans during the post-War period - the conservatives were just one faction, and often a losing one. Wasn’t just titanic heirs but small businessmen (maybe equivalent city fathers to their small towns, though) and professionals - the Republicans were the party of the postgraduate educated.
The Republicans were opposed to national health care all along, Ronald Reagan dropped a spoken word album about it in 1961. Part of that was green eyeshade deficit hawkery (that was a big part of their brand, the later pivot away from this to tax cutting was understood through the framework of “Two Santa Claus Theory”, which is an actual and very important thing in postwar American politics, “Two Santa Claus Theory”). And part of it was “grr, socialism boo”. But really, a lot of it wasn’t in resistance to what this would mean for taxpayers, or patients, or even the country, so much as doctors, who were a big Republican constituency.
Because doctors were professionals – by guild understandings that predated the United States, they owned their own practices, regulated and judged each other, were granted a degree of authority over those who came to them needing something important they were not qualified to provide themselves. They resisted the thought of themselves as merchants, and loathed the thought of themselves as employees or civil servants.
A lot of the “disappointingly moderate” Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices over the years actually fit fine with the Wayne Republican tradition. Sandra Day O’Connor, first woman on the court, put there as a payoff from Reagan to the moderate faction - the Republicans arguably the feminist party, albeit a “Lean In” type. After all, if you saw a woman in an executive role before the ‘70s, it was probably in the Daughters of the American Revolution or some society gala-type charity NGO. And those “first woman to go to X school”, well, the families that would think to send a daughter off to law or medical school were a subset of the families that would think to send a child at all.
Hell, for a while, the Republicans were even the more abortion-friendly party. The Democrats were the Catholic party after all. The Republicans were the Protestant-as-humanistic-heritage-charity ones, the ones who eugenically spaced their three children two years apart unlike those grubby Papists, the ones with mistresses, the ones with bourgeois life courses to even be diverted from. Not to mention the doctors who cleaned up after amateur abortions or offered black-market ones themselves.
(But not like legalization was priority one, c’mon, Bruce Wayne’s dad was a surgeon, you think he doesn’t know a guy?)
Anyway this was what Goldwater (with his base of ideologues and country & western extractive industry - for most of the 20th century the white military middle-class paradise of California was an anchor of conservative Republicanism) was fighting against, what Reagan (California Über Alles) eventually defeated. The Wayne Republican tradition still stumbled along until let’s say Dole/Kemp ’96, that was the last hurrah and the ticket’s total failure to generate any enthusiasm whatsoever (two years after Newt Gingrich’s Congressional “Republican Revolution” breakthrough with conservative southern and suburban whites) heralded its end.
Well, you could maybe see the administrations of the two Bushes as an intermediate form, an attempt to graft the old money social uplift tradition to the religious base the Republicans cultivated in the 1980s in search of a sort of Christian Democracy. “Thousand Points of Light”, “Compassionate Conservatism”, New World Order and nation-building abroad, the ADA, NCLB, environmental laws and Medicare Part D at home.
But the bipartisan abandonment of Bush the Younger and the coalitional realignments through Obama and Trump seem to have rendered even this a dead end. As things stand in 2017, “progressive social programs paid for by taxation, sensitive to the economic interests of professionals and capital-holders” is thoroughly Democratic territory.
“I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon,” Taylor Swift said with a straight face to an interviewer from Vanity Fair while the magazine was profiling her in 2013.
No, not Taylor Swift. Not the author of songs like “Forever and Always,”
written in the wake of her relationship with former boyfriend Joe
Jonas, the better-looking Jonas brother, and featuring this lyric: “Did I
say something way too honest, made you run and hide like a scared
little boy?” Not her, who wrote/sang about her relationship with the
actor Jake Gyllenhaal, “Fighting with him was like trying to solve a crossword/and realizing there’s no right answer.”
Not
Taylor, who leaves the impossible-to-crack clues in her liner notes for
each song by capitalizing a variety of letters that spell out the
subjects in a very essential way: “TAY” for a song about ex-boyfriend
Taylor Lautner; “SAG” for the Gyllenhaal one (as in Swift And
Gyllenhaal, or that they’re both Sagittarius. I don’t know).
For
Taylor Swift to pretend that her entire music career is not a tool of
passive aggression toward those who had wronged her is like me
pretending I’m not carbon-based: too easy to disprove, laughable at its
very suggestion.
Don’t get me wrong—I say all this with utter
admiration. Taylor’s career is, in fact, the perfected realization of
every writer’s narrowest dream: To get back at those who had wronged us,
sharply and loudly, and then to be able to cry innocent that our
intentions were anything other than poetic and pure. Most of us can only
achieve this with small asides. Taylor not only publicly dates and
publicly breaks up, but she then releases an achingly specific song
about the relationship—and that song has an unforgettable hook—all the
while swearing she won’t talk about relationships that are over. Yes,
date Taylor Swift, and not only will she shit on you on her album, but
the song will become a single, then a hit, and then you will hear
yourself shat upon by an army of young women at Staples Center. And then
she’ll deny that she was ever doing anything other than righteously
manifesting her art. It’s diabolical, and for a lifelong
passive-aggressive like me, it’s made her my hero.
On about the 6th of May, 1843, a Grand Review of the Nauvoo Legion was held in Nauvoo. The Prophet Joseph Smith complimented them for their good discipline and evolutions performed. The weather being hot, he called for a glass of water. With the glass of water in hand, he said: “I will drink to your toast to the overthrow of the Mobocrats,” which he did in the following language:“
“Here’s wishing they were in the middle of the sea in a stone canoe with iron paddles and that a shark swallowed the canoe and the Devil swallowed the shark and himself locked up in the northwest corner of Hell, the key lost and a blind man hunting it.”
The next morning a man who heard the Prophet give the toast returned to visit the mansion of the Prophet and so abused him with bad language that he was ordered out by the Prophet. It was while the two were out that my attention was attracted to them, and hearing the man speaking in a loud tone of voice, I went towards them, the man finally leaving. There were then present the Prophet, Theodore Turley and myself [Edwin Rushton]. The Prophet began talking to us of the mobbings and deriding and persecutions we as a people had endured, “but we will have worse things to see. Our persecutors will have all the mobbings they want. Don’t wish them any harm, for when you see their sufferings you will shed bitter tears for them.”
While this conversation was going on we stood by his south wicket gate in a triangle. Turning to me, he said, “I want to tell you something of the future. I will speak in a parable like unto John the Revelator. You will go to the Rocky Mountains and you will be a great and mighty people established there, which I will call the White Horse of peace and safety.” When the Prophet said, “You will see it,” I said, “Where will you be at that time?” He said, “I shall never go there. Your enemies will continue to follow you with persecutions and they will make obnoxious laws against you in Congress to destroy the White Horse, but you will have a friend or two to defend you and throw out the worst parts of the law so they will not hurt you so much. You must continue to petition Congress all the time, but they will treat you like strangers and aliens and they will not give you your rights, but will govern you with strangers and commissioners. You will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed. It will hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber.” At that time the Prophet’s countenance became sad, because as he said, “I love the Constitution; it was made by the inspiration of God; and it will be preserved and saved by the efforts of the White Horse, and by the Red Horse who will combine in its defense. The White Horse will find the mountains full of minerals and they will become rich (at this time, it must be remembered, the precious metals were not known to exist in either the Rocky Mountains or California). You will see silver piled up in the streets. You will see the gold shoveled up like sand. Gold will be of little value then, even in a mercantile capacity; for the people of the world will have something else to do in seeking for salvation. The time will come when the banks of every nation will fall and only two places will be safe where people can deposit their gold and treasure. This place will be the White Horse and England’s vaults. A terrible revolution will take place in the land of America, such has never been seen before; for the land will be left without a Supreme Government, and every specie of wickedness will be practiced rampantly in the land. Father will be against son and son against father; mother against daughter and daughter against mother. The most terrible scenes of bloodshed, murder, and rape that have ever been imagined or looked upon will take place. People will be taken from the earth and there will be peace and love only in the Rocky Mountains. This will cause many hundreds of thousands of the honest in heart of the world to gather there, not because they would be Saints, but for safety and because they will be so numerous that you will be in danger of famine, but not for want of seed, time and harvest, but because of so many to be fed. Many will come with bundles under their arms to escape the calamities for there will be no escape except only by escaping and fleeing to Zion. Those that come to you will try to keep the laws and be one with you for they will see your unity and the greatness of your organization. The Turkish Empire of the Crescent will be the first power to be disputed, for freedom must be given for the Gospel to be preached in the Holy Land. The Lord took the best blood of the nations and planted them on the small islands now called England and Great Britain and gave them power in the nations for a thousand years and their power will continue with them that they may keep the balance of power; and they will keep Russia from sweeping her power over the world. England and France are now bitter enemies but they will be allied together and be united to keep Russia from conquering the world. The two popes, Greek and Catholic, will eventually come together in their decline and be united. The Protestant Religions do ot know how much they are indebted to Henry VIII for throwing off the Pope’s bill and establishing the Protestant faith. He was the only monarch who could do so at that time and he did it because the nation was at his back to sustain him. One of the peculiar features in England is the established Redcoat; a uniform making so remarkable a target to shoot at, and yet they have conquered wherever they have gone. The reason for this will be known to them some day as red is seen in a different color threading through under all history. The lion and the unicorn of England comes from there being so much blood of Israel in the nation. While the terrible things of which I have mentioned are going on, England will be neutral until it becomes so inhuman that she will interfere to stop the shedding of blood and history will be more properly understood. England and France will unite together to make peace, not to subdue the nations. She will find this nation so broken up and so many claiming government, till there will be no reasonable government. Then it will appear to the other nations, or powers, as though England had taken possession of the country. The Black Horse will flee to the invaders and will join them for they have fear of becoming slaves again; knowing that England did not believe in slavery, they will flee to them that they believe will make them safe. Armed with British bayonets, the doings of the Black Horse will be terrible.” Here the Prophet said that he could not bear to look longer upon the scenes as shown to him in vision and he asked the Lord to close the scenes.
Continuing, he said: “During this time the Great White Horse will have gathered strength, sending out elders to gather the honest in heart from among the Pale Horse, or people of the United States, to stand by the Constitution of the United States as it was given by the inspiration of God. In these days which are yet to come God will set up a Kingdom never to be thrown down, but other Kingdoms to come into it, and those Kingdoms that will not let the Gospel be preached in their lands will be humbled until they will.”
“England the Germany, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Holland and Belgium have a considerable amount of the blood of Israel among the people which must be gathered out. Those nations will submit to the nations of God. England will be the last of the nations to surrender, but when she does she will do it as a whole in comparison as she threw off the Catholic power. The nobility knows that the gospel is true, but it has not pomp enough, and grandeur and influence for them to yet embrace it. They are proud and will not acknowledge the Kingdom of God or come into it until they see the power it will have. Peace and safety in the Rocky Mountains will be protected by the Guardians, the White and Red Horses. The coming of the Messiah among his people will be so natural that only those who see him will know that he has come, but he will come and give his laws unto Zion and minister unto his people. This will not be his coming in the clouds of Heaven to take vengeance on the wicked of the world.”
“The temple in Jackson county, Missouri, will be built in that generation. The saints will think that there will not be time to build it, but with all the help you can receive, you can put up a great temple quickly. You will have all the gold, silver, and precious stones you need, for these things will only be for the beautifying of the temple. Also, all the skilled mechanics you want and the Ten Tribes of Israel will help build it. When you see this land bound with iron, you may look forward to Jackson county.”
At this point, he made a pause, and looking up as though the vision were still in view, he said: “There is a land beyond the Rocky Mountains that will be invaded by the heathen Chinese unless great care and protection be given.” Speaking of the heathen nations, he said: “Where there is no law there is no condemnation; this will apply to them. Power will be given to the White Horse to rebuke the nations afar off, and you obey it, for the laws go forth from Zion. The last great struggle that Zion will ever have to contend with will be when the whole of America will be made the Zion of God. Those opposing will be called Gog and Magog. The nations of the earth will be led by the Russian Czar and his power will be great, but all opposition will be overcome and this land will be the Zion of our God. Amen.”
UHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Well, my mind’s been buzzing a few days and I’m sure I’m a little sleep-deprived from the insomnia, it would be pretty classic to crash this run into honest-to-god prophecy and possible Mormon conversion
But you know I can kind of speak as a divine channel when I’m like this, or when I was coming down from LSD
And I have been able to commune with something since I came to Oregon, I feel it especially when I ride the motorcycle out into the country, stronger as I went east to Missoula, it felt like America.
Coming back Northern Idaho clearly felt dedicated to Jesus, which I wasn’t as comfortable with as America, and the guy in my Sandpoint story was convinced that it was divine providence that brought us together.
And I do regularly read the future, and find myself proved right.
So I may as well take a shot at interpreting this as if it were true and apposite and about to happen (which is how you’re supposed to interpret prophecy, obviously). So.
“I will drink to your toast to the overthrow of the Mobocrats,” which he did in the following language:“
“Here’s
wishing they were in the middle of the sea in a stone canoe with iron
paddles and that a shark swallowed the canoe and the Devil swallowed the
shark and himself locked up in the northwest corner of Hell, the key
lost and a blind man hunting it.”
So, Prophet and Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s being period-political. (The mobs being those clowns in Congress or the literal mobs that chase him out of town, I dunno.) But then, prophecy:
Your enemies will continue to follow you with persecutions and they will make obnoxious laws against you in Congress to destroy the White Horse, but you will have a friend or two to defend you and throw out the worst parts of the law so they will not hurt you so much.
Friends being Supreme Court Justices? Senators? Presidents? Deep state operatives?
You must continue to petition Congress all the time, but they will treat you like strangers and aliens and they will not give you your rights, but will govern you with strangers and commissioners. You will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed. It will hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber.
“strangers and commissioners”
At that time the Prophet’s countenance became sad, because as he said, “I love the Constitution; it was made by the inspiration of God; and it will be preserved and saved by the efforts of the White Horse, and by the Red Horse who will combine in its defense.
The hell is the Red Horse? Natives would be one option. Together the White and Red Horses form the new indigenous Americans?
The White Horse will find the mountains full of minerals and they will become rich. You will see silver piled up in the streets. You will see the gold shoveled up like sand.
The federal government owns a huge chunk of the mountain and western states and keeps them relatively reserved from development and extraction, this is a huge issue in the region behind the Sagebrush Rebellion and recent actions by Cliven Bundy, a Mormon who claims to be acting in accordance with revelation to prevent civil war
Gold will be of little value then, even in a mercantile capacity; for the people of the world will have something else to do in seeking for salvation
::sigh:: Bitcoin?
Labor-hours? Piety? “Something to do”. Other than spending gold?
The time will come when the banks of every nation will fall and only two places will be safe where people can deposit their gold and treasure. This place will be the White Horse and England’s vaults.
Yes, Brexit Britain would need to do something to reclaim its financial supremacy. Opening its vaults to all as a refuge sounds about right. Or is it just that those are the only places without ruinous inflation?
A terrible revolution will take place in the land of America, such has never been seen before; for the land will be left without a Supreme Government, and every specie of wickedness will be practiced rampantly in the land.
huh
Father will be against son and son against father; mother against daughter and daughter against mother.
A generational war, not a war between brothers
The most terrible scenes of bloodshed, murder, and rape that have ever been imagined or looked upon will take place.
huh
People will be taken from the earth and there will be peace and love
only in the Rocky Mountains. This will cause many hundreds of thousands
of the honest in heart of the world to gather there, not because they
would be Saints, but for safety and because they will be so numerous
that you will be in danger of famine, but not for want of seed, time and
harvest, but because of so many to be fed
Refugees, but only 6 figures worth? “In danger of famine”, though. Saved because of the Mormons’ extensive personal and communal food stocks?
Many will come with bundles under their arms to escape the calamities
for there will be no escape except only by escaping and fleeing to Zion.
Those that come to you will try to keep the laws and be one with you
for they will see your unity and the greatness of your organization.
The refugees are peaceful and appreciate Mormonism as social technology
The Turkish Empire of the Crescent will be the first power to be
disputed, for freedom must be given for the Gospel to be preached in the
Holy Land
Does that mean Turkey - the Crescent on the flag? Or another successor of the Ottomans? Saudi Arabia, the Crescent as “Islam”? ISIS or Iraq, the Fertile Crescent? What’s the Holy Land - Jerusalem? Mecca? America?
Turkey and Saudi Arabia have been disputed lately, the Turks might consider the overthrow of Kemalism as “freedom given for the Gospel to be preached”. I hear the guy who just couped Saudi is liberalizing it and allowing non-Muslim religions.
The two popes, Greek and Catholic, will eventually come together in their decline and be united.
The Archbishop of Athens and all Greece is currently Ieronymous II The Ecumenical Patriarch, in Constantinople, is currently Bartholomew I The Catholic Pope is currently Francis I
Francis has moved on reuniting with the Orthodox churches, Bartholomew I was the first patriarch since the Great Schism to attend the papal installation ceremony since the Great Schism of 1054.
One of the peculiar features in England is the established Redcoat; a uniform making so remarkable a target to shoot at, and yet they have conquered wherever they have gone. The reason for this will be known to them some day as red is seen in a different color threading through under all history.
The God-chosen task of England was to… address… communism? That’s the red with a meaning other than blood that starts threading through under all history after this prophecy.
While the terrible things of which I have mentioned are going on, England will be neutral until it becomes so inhuman that she will interfere to stop the shedding of blood and history will be more properly understood. England and France will unite together to make peace, not to subdue the nations. She will find this nation so broken up and so many claiming government, till there will be no reasonable government. Then it will appear to the other nations, or powers, as though England had taken possession of the country.
So England will be neutral as the rest of the world falls apart? Or just America and everyone else goes off the gold standard and devalues without dollars as reserve currency? And as America becomes a failed state England ultimately intervenes in coalition with France to “stabilize” it, scare quotes in the original revelation.
The Black Horse will flee to the invaders and will join them for they have fear of becoming slaves again; knowing that England did not believe in slavery, they will flee to them that they believe will make them safe. Armed with British bayonets, the doings of the Black Horse will be terrible.” Here the Prophet said that he could not bear to look longer upon the scenes as shown to him in vision and he asked the Lord to close the scenes.
So, England (raking in gold as an independent island safe haven in a chaotic world)… sponsors an American race war? The Black Horse - African-Americans as a nation? People somewhere else who were slaves once before? Being used to resettle the wrecked America? They’re the front line of a brutal occupation? Extermination? British colonialism often used previously underdog tribes as agents to rule over former dominant ethnicities, sometimes it dropped tribes from Colony A to occupy Colony B, like the Gurkhas.
Continuing, he said: “During this time the Great White Horse will have gathered strength, sending out elders to gather the honest in heart from among the Pale Horse, or people of the United States, to stand by the Constitution of the United States as it was given by the inspiration of God. In these days which are yet to come God will set up a Kingdom never to be thrown down, but other Kingdoms to come into it, and those Kingdoms that will not let the Gospel be preached in their lands will be humbled until they will.”
So the Pale Horse are American normies? The ones white enough but not as white as the White Horse/Mormons (Utah disproportionately of English ancestry, BTW) The worthy will be gathered from them, and the disunified states that attempt to bar evangelists will be pressured to yield. The popes reuniting, and the Mormon emissaries go out, those are the only things that seem to be clear prerequisites left here to judge if this is coming true, everything else is vague description or arguably fulfilled already.
“England the Germany, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Holland and Belgium have a considerable amount of the blood of Israel among the people which must be gathered out. Those nations will submit to the nations of God. England will be the last of the nations to surrender, but when she does she will do it as a whole in comparison as she threw off the Catholic power.
“England the Germany”, I don’t know if that’s an error, or introduced where. “England and Germany” from a poor OCR scan or human transcription error would make perfect sense. “England the Germany” could be understood as “Anglo-Saxon England”, maybe. The only Google hit that’s not just an artifact of sentence construction and punctuation is this, about the English national football team giving the Nazi salute to honor Hitler in 1938, and that clearly should have been an “and”.
So the northern European Protestant countries submit to… well who are the nations of God here? Is that Zion, the White Horse/Red Horse/Not Because They Would be Saints refugee coalition? Is it “the nations that still believe”, which today could be the Muslim nations or maybe the Visegrad nations.
One reading is that these countries go Muslim, and the old stock populations will flee to the Rocky Mountain white ethnostate. Another is that this was an alliance that joined France/England and they surrender to Zion/Team White+Red. Another is the EU gets shattered from the east while it’s trying to maintain this trans-Atlantic occupation.
England will do it as a whole, as she threw off the Catholic power. Like all at once? Or like as a united unit? The English Reformation overlaps with the incorporation of Wales and Ireland so it could include the entirety of Ireland, or maybe lose Wales. It wouldn’t be united with Scotland yet.
And is England still allied with France and the Black Horse at this point?
The nobility knows that the gospel is true, but it has not pomp enough, and grandeur and influence for them to yet embrace it. They are proud and will not acknowledge the Kingdom of God or come into it until they see the power it will have.
The American nobility - 1%ers? The coastal elite? won’t join the Mormons ‘cause they’re too low-status, until it’s clear they’ll win out. Or this is referring back to one of the previous scenarios, the NW Euro nobility refusing to join Visegrad or Islam but giving in for power?
Peace and safety in the Rocky Mountains will be protected by the Guardians, the White and Red Horses. The coming of the Messiah among his people will be so natural that only those who see him will know that he has come, but he will come and give his laws unto Zion and minister unto his people. This will not be his coming in the clouds of Heaven to take vengeance on the wicked of the world.
Are “The Guardians” the White and Red horses together, or a third thing? The redoubt stays peaceful, a messiah quietly appears to refound and consolidate the nation with no revenge. I mean, that’s one take. “So natural”. Maybe “natural” had different valences back then? Nature boy? He comes on the internet but only IRL people notice?
The temple in Jackson county, Missouri, will be built in that generation. The saints will think that there will not be time to build it, but with all the help you can receive, you can put up a great temple quickly. You will have all the gold, silver, and precious stones you need, for these things will only be for the beautifying of the temple.
The Mormons maintain an empty lot for this purpose. Presumably, they have materials and equipment stockpiled and crews on standby, that seems like their thing.
Also, all the skilled mechanics you want and the Ten Tribes of Israel will help build it. When you see this land bound with iron, you may look forward to Jackson county.
Manufacturing comes back? Skilled labor immigrants? The midcentury middle class? And who are the Ten Tribes of Israel here? Jews living outside the State of Israel? Black Israelites? Is this where the black part of Mormon America centers on? Someone else?
Does “land bound with iron” mean unfree? When you are unfree, look to this midwestern Mormon outpost, an advance from the Rocky Mountain redoubt? Does it mean there are railroad tracks laid? Is it a legend guiding refugees? When you see this look forward, that’s the way to Jackson County?
“There is a land beyond the Rocky Mountains that will be invaded by the heathen Chinese unless great care and protection be given.”
California? Cascadia? Korea? Japan? They must take care? The Zion-state needs to preemptively form an alliance to defend them? Or would that be an aggressive move showing a lack of great diplomatic care?
Speaking of the heathen nations, he said: “Where there is no law there is no condemnation; this will apply to them. Power will be given to the White Horse to rebuke the nations afar off, and you obey it, for the laws go forth from Zion.
Hm. Is “heathen nations” overseas or the post-American states? They won’t be punished for atrocities they committed in the chaos? But the reconstituted America DOES go to war in the far abroad?
The last great struggle that Zion will ever have to contend with will be when the whole of America will be made the Zion of God. Those opposing will be called Gog and Magog. The nations of the earth will be led by the Russian Czar and his power will be great, but all opposition will be overcome and this land will be the Zion of our God. Amen.
“Gog and Magog” are the traditional enemies in the apocalypse, sometimes they’re individual people, sometimes peoples or lands, they tend to range around Iran, Syria, and the post-Soviet states. With strong Russia at the head.
What the hell is the Red Horse, though, that makes all the difference.
Okay, as I’ve established, I think Taylor Swift is a supergenius writer, the only one I consider my clear superior. But, I mean, have you heard those lyrics? Come on, right?
Okay, yes the vocabulary and grammatical structure is pitched at an eighth-grade reading level; her work is pitched at an eighth-grade audience. But that’s hardly to say there’s no depth to her lyrics, it’s just that a lot of it relies on semantic overloading, and particularly semantic overloading that specifically plays on her bridging of popular music genres. To simplify, pop-rock lyrics tend to set a mood while country lyrics tell a story, but Taylor Swift lyrics tend to craft an atmosphere in which individual lines suggest a story or multiple stories (which listeners can fill in, according to the specifics of their own lives or daydreams), which can in turn be taken as literal or as metaphors.
(A lot of her themes have traditionally been about the stock female coming-of-age, but they shouldn’t be taken as coming from personal experience - which makes them even more impressive. Remember that she spent her teenage years not going to school and dating but home-studying and establishing her career because, contra Fifteen, she knew exactly what she was going to be. And she does venture afield of this - Never Grow Up and The Best Day are about the experience of watching your child grow, and Innocent is about a 32 year old woman looking to distance herself from the things she’s done - “Taylor Swift lyrics as explications of manosphere/redpill themes” would be a pretty impressive series in its own right.)
Like, Mean, from Speak Now. It’s about bullies, right? That you’ll escape from when you leave this one-horse town and live in a big old city?
Or is it about abusive parents? I mean,
some day I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me
Girl bullying isn’t really a “hitting” thing, plus
I bet you got pushed around, Somebody made you cold, But the cycle ends right now, cause you can’t lead me down that road
Or is it about critics, such as critics of pop-country star Taylor Swift?
Or yourself and in your insecurity, as your own biggest critic? (cf. Tied Together With a Smile and A Place In This World from the debut)
The answer, of course, is “yes”.
And that’s not even adding in the reading where it’s about her and Kanye West at the VMAs - because Swift can wield her public celebrity tabloid persona to add more reading and layers of valence to her songs, in part through encoded messages in her liner notes. Like, the liner notes code isn’t hard to figure out - just take the letters incongruously capitalized. Because she’s pitching at an eighth-grade audience. And she’s pitching that audience encrypted intertextuality.
Okay, let’s look at another song, Long Live, from Speak Now.
For one, it works a sequel to “Change”, from previous album Fearless, with its blended imagery of supporting a relationship partner, general teenage pressure, and literal revolution (released two months after the first Hunger Games novel came out and shifted the dominant tone of YA from Twilight-era “supportive relationship” to “youth insurrection”).
It’s about triumph, in a supportive relationship, over general teenage pressure (with an aside about high school relationships not being long-term things, in a much more optimistic tone than the similarly themed White Horse and Fifteen), is it metaphorizing that through the recurrent imagery of a coronation, or is it telling a literal story about being named Prom King & Queen, and the answer of course is “yes”. And then the recurring line “bring on all the pretenders”.
Or not. I mean, Hamlet was the protagonist, right?
Chuck Palahniuk’s writing style consists of ejaculating on the wall and seeing what sticks.
“Dracula” isn’t a real person, “Commissioner Gordon” isn’t a real person, but Gary Oldman DOES count for both.
“man does it suck to get nuked, people who nuke people are total assholes”
(And this is neither here nor there but all the interior decoration guys have frosted tips and a lilting, mincing patter, which, like, 1994 called and it wants its total fucking stereotypes back.)
When I was growing up you were supposed to laugh at the rubeish naivete of the 1950s “Our Friend the Atom” stuff, but now that I think of it we never got nuked but I’ve known a lot of people who’ve had radiation therapy or MRIs.
The main advantage of such a gap between election and inauguration is it’s too long to maintain a peasant army.
If you’re crazy and you know it, self-aware! If you’re crazy and you know it, self-aware! It’s chic to be insane, just go meta with your brain If you’re crazy and you know it, self-aware!
Oh man, you know what I just remembered? That time in the ‘90s when some guy went on an interstate murder spree and disappeared, and then while he was an active news story on the Ten Most Wanted list he emerged to finish it off by killing Gianni fucking Versace and people still don’t know what that was about
That drew me to this September 1997 article, which fascinated me in its own right because there’s something here I want to draw your attention to. Two things, actually.
First, I assume Vanity Fair still commissions some decent longform, but look how fucking lush this is - 12,500 words, people even tangentially related to the subject interviewed across several states, 16 months in development and published a year after the last bodies were cold.
I’m not gonna say this was the norm, but the norm was still a bit off in that direction back then. Newspapers and TV news would deliver their first draft of history the next day, and a spry reader might subscribe to a few weekly magazines, but past that things just developed at a slower pace. Or, rather, things developed on their own and a while later you’d hear a reasonable account of what happened.
I suppose CNN was already disrupting towards a constant news cycle though, MSNBC and Fox News had launched as me-toos in 1996.
(As point One-and-a-Half, notice how in a pre-Internet world how much social power Cunanan acquires just by reading a lot, remembering things, and other people being unable to check or refute his claims)
Second, another “look into a lost world” in this 20-year-old article is just how natively fluent everyone is in a psychiatric idiom. It’s not really Freudian per se, the old man was already musty in 1997, but a thoroughgoing sense that you can explain someone by reference to the development of their psyche, that they pursue this desire this way but encounter this obstacle and that warps them this way in response…
Some of the cops come from the FBI profiling tradition so fair enough. (Should note the idea of the “serial killer” only dates to the 1980s and the concept of “profiling” got a lot of attention in response I suspect as much as anything as a way for the state to reassure the citizenry that in a relatively un-surveilled, pre-computerized, pre-DNA testing world, they had some defense. This was the context for Silence of the Lambs.)
And maybe it was the author who chose that angle for the piece but geez, her interviewees sure gave her a lot of quotes to work with, it’s really striking how people with even limited contact with Cunanan feel confident talking past observed actions to the nature of his character, on to inferred internal motivations and placing their experience in the context of a narrative or character arc.
Now this was all gay culture in the not yet normie mid-90s, where you might expect people to have a more complex sense of the relationship between interiority and social performance than the average bear. But remembering back it’s just like the writing - this was maybe an outlying case, but things in general did used to be noticeably more like that, now that I think of it.
And maybe that could be done poorly, and even done properly it wasn’t ~scientific~, a bit of Freudian speculation plus a bit of residual Christian “spiritual development”, each put through a few washes of folksy popularization before combining and then put through a few more. “Scientism” wasn’t as strong as it is now, I really have the sense it was more accepted that if some social or hard science expert made a claim about human experience and supported it by reference to math or scientific consensus it was much further “in bounds” for a humanities expert - a reverend, an analyst, a Foucauldian critic - to rebut them by reference to their own traditions.
This was what Alan Sokal was peeved about, and are we better for living in his world now? Honestly I think maybe when a guy who’s intense into hard S&M bashes a guy’s face in with a hammer as part of a murder spree we should consider “huh, maybe he’s a sadist, what’s that about?”
(I have seen a bit of a spike in essayistic psychoanalysis lately with people trying to explain the 4chan/alt-right nexus but you can tell they’re just equipping polemic arms, clumsy in their mouths, not the idiom they see their own lives through)
The flip side of all this, of course, is I’m reading through this whole psychological profile of an article, noting all the times Cunanan varied between reclusive or despondent to life-of-the-party, five-figure spending sprees, sudden intense violence and I’m wondering when they’d speculate he was bipolar. (Actually, I was wondering if it would still be “manic-depressive” back then.)
And the answer is… never. And you realize that “having X mental condition” as a way to understand yourself or others was not yet the thing it now is, the big breakthrough of that narrative into mainstream culture was in 1993-4 with Listening to Prozac and Prozac Nation (I once intended to borrow the latter from the library and picked up the former instead, which was not as bad as the time I intended to rent Steel Magnolias and got Magnolia).
Now I’m not suggesting Eli Lilly created “chronic depression” to match Prozac in the same way Listerine created “chronic halitosis”. But I am saying a consequence of bringing their breakthrough blockbuster SSRI to market was the cultivation of a narrative with a constituency by which you took the drug and were your self, whereas before you had been under the influence of something that was in hindsight distinct from your self. And this narrative matching experience, and being socially validated, in a way Valium or Halcion weren’t.
And that this was not always a typical way to think of the self, even when sympathetically thinking of imperfect or damaged selves. And that reading this 20-year old article, by a writer who debuted in the ‘70s, and then looking up to this blue website, it’s really striking how much older ways of discussing the self have faded away and the Prozac experience seems to have been generalized to bear that weight.
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
Urban Contemporary Art by BEZT
