A Snowball Headed for Hell

In which I dump the junk drawer upon the kitchen floor

Granted: “When a girl could still cook and still would” is a laughably dated little morsel of sexism on par with airlines trading on the implied promise of those old itsy bitsy sexy stew uniforms of yesteryear, but Merle Haggard’s “Are the Good Times Really Over” is still, in the immortal words of Bunny in Oliver Stone’s magnum opus, Platoon, a bad jam.¹ Moreover it hits differently when heard amidst what looks increasingly like the terminal decline of these so-called United States, so if I might get in on the whole government by decree fad, Thou Shalt Give it a Listen, if you haven’t before.

If you were looking to me to feed you with clever wordplay and some kind of cohesive critique of the moment in which we now find ourselves, Merle is probably going to have to do. I’m wrestling with writing a bit these days—I can’t bring myself to lounge in the comfort of light topics, nor can I muster the tentacular attention that is required to read the New York Times rather than simply staring a hole through a series of grisly headlines, each a variation on “Massive Organ Failure at the Department of Things We Used to Care About.” I’m not sure it pays to have a point anymore anyway. Listicles are the thing: five or six points of digestible length, none of them particularly interesting—the perfect genre for the Age of A1 Slop.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to write a listicle. But I am going to write a junk drawer.

Speaking of A1 slop, I can’t believe I forgot to share this in my last post. This is how Google’s A1 describes my band:

I mean, it’s funny, but it’s also the perfect counter-argument to anyone who thinks the time is ripe to hand over all human decision making to these silicon parrots. What if your life depended on your knowledge of the names of the guys in the Front Porch Session Players? Imagine sitting on the floor of a damp basement, lit by a single bare light bulb, a ring of cold blue steel pressing against your temple as you shakily recite the words you learned from a datacenter in exurban Virginia, “Clint Clark-Duke.” You tremble. A bead of sweat rolls down your forehead. “Zphrisms.” Your mouth is dry and sticky. “6stringbeliever.” You’re home free. You breath a sigh of relief.

“Andrew.” And that’s it. You’re fucking dead. Andrew plays the ocarina!

I think it’s starting to become abundantly clear how awful the A1 revolution is going to be, and you don’t need me to add yet more words to the matter—I’m sure you could get Microsoft Copilot to write a sonnet or two about how gloomy the future looks. It’s solutions that are the challenge. A reader of this very serial recently asked me, in response to my last post, how one cuts a path outside of the stultifying A1 culture our tech gods are attempting to foist upon us. The question knocked me slightly askew—when it comes to matters social and political I generally prefer griping to actual problem solving.

It’s hard enough to refuse as an individual: If you withdraw from the social experiments Silicon Valley would like to perform upon you, but you would still like to participate in online life, which let’s face it, is an upsettingly large part of all life now, you will wind up being slowly deprecated—one API at a time—out of existence. Now I’m not going to say that that would be the worst fate that could befall an individual, but people arbitrarily becoming a digital exiles is hardly a cure for a social ill. Like any social ill it requires some kind of coherent mass action to address, and that in turn requires organization and organization requires leadership and I’m sorry but we’ve left the sphere of things I feel competent to address.

The same is true of politics of course, and here I think a lot of us feel like flotsam on the tide. Like a lot of living room activists, my mind whirls with visions of nationwide general strikes, but inevitably the next thought in my mind is something like, hmm, shall I print up a few dozen flyers and dutifully staple them to all the telephone poles within a 1000 meter radius of my house? What percentage of “nationwide” will that cover?

It’s no shame to be bad at a thing for which you have neither talent nor any particular interest. It would be weird if I was a really effective community organizer, but that doesn’t mean I’m a sentient meatloaf or something. My talents simply lie elsewhere.

But there are good organizers and somehow or other, through the exercise of their dark arts they have managed to conjure up several sizable nationwide and international protests, taking place simultaneously in hundreds of cities. Like many of you, I got emails and I saw Instagram and Reddit posts, and, much in the same way that Mothers’ Day dawns slowly upon my perception under the weight of a torrent of ads for chocolate or flowers or oil changes or adult diapers or I really don’t know quite what, one becomes aware and one goes and one waves a sign along with 20,000 other people. Magic.

Of course you can also exercise a modicum of agency and join an organization that, er, organizes, and advocates and informs and so forth. That’s what all those talented organizers are trying to get you to do after all: join their organization.

So what are some of the organizations doing battle against artificial stupidity? Well I haven’t a single clue. Maybe there aren’t any. But I reckon nobody ever finds out about these sorts of things without a bit of communication, so at this point that’s what I’m looking for. If you have a point of view on this and know something folks could do that would be helpful in anyway, let’s chat. I prefer to bring it up over a beer but if we aren’t beer-ing friends you can drop a comment on this post and who knows, maybe this time next year we’ll be sharing a good Belgian triple.

In the mean time, I can recommend giving some of your spare money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF isn’t exactly what I’ve got in mind but they do yeoman’s work defending peoples’ rights and privacy online, and as such they do important work in this very area.

If your boss is pushing you to find a use case for ChatGPT or whatever, I feel for ya. It can make for a very soviet atmosphere, in which everyone is tripping over themselves to demonstrate what brilliant things they are doing in the great rush to be more cutting-edge than the guy in the next cubicle. Sense has gone completely out the window. It’s like someone just discovered Silly Putty and everyone is trying to figure out how to use it for home defense. Unfortunately for me I’m too emotionally clumsy to deal with this with anything other than contempt and sarcasm. These are perfectly cromulent behaviors, but I reckon a lot of folks lack the latitude for anything more than, at best, belligerent compliance.

Hang tough. I think there’s a chance the fever will pass one day, but if not take solace in the fact that life isn’t a permanent affliction. And of course, always ask yourself: What would 6stringbeliever do?

On the subject of bosses, I’d like to make a quick viewing recommendation, prefaced on a glut of disclaimers and rounded out with a Braveheart-style exhortation to man the barricades.

A “boss”

The recommendation is Generation Kill, currently streaming on HBO Max. Let’s get right to the disclaimers: if you’re like me, you’ll be ready to check out about halfway through the first episode. The characters seem uniformly abrasive, jingoistic jarheads incapable of completing a sentence without larding it up with the most ghastly bits of sexism or racism or homophobia they can rummage from their well-stocked pantry. Testosterone seems to drip from the corners of the frame.

I stuck with it mostly out of complacency. I kept checking the credits to confirm that it really had been created by David Simon, known for Tremé and The Wire—which a lot of people, myself included, consider one of the best series ever created. I think it was at the end of the third episode that I was stirred from my torpor by the audio over the end credits. Every episode has this — a sort of mini-story, usually but not always a radio communication for some military purpose, maybe five minutes in length, playing out over the end credits. This particular one entailed a soldier calling in an airstrike. There was something weirdly dancelike about the strict protocol and the long series of numbers that comprise most of the conversation. It’s banal and inhuman in its terse, functional language, but one can hear mixed in the exultation of the soldier in his grim business, expressed always in the clipped, technical terminology of modern war. I found it wildly fascinating, and I was struck by a sudden realization: there’s more going on here than I was aware of.

I finished the series, then watched it again. Then I inflicted it on my wife.

Generation Kill is an adaptation of a book by Rolling Stone writer Evan Wright depicting the time he spent embedded with the 1st Marine Reconnaissance Battalion during the second Gulf War. The marines which are its subject slowly emerge slowly from the identical uniforms to reveal individuals with wide-ranging, distinct, and often startlingly incisive views on the task in which they are engaged. The series focuses a lot of attention on of problems of leadership within a rigid hierarchical organization, and over the too-short seven episodes we watch as those problems reemerge up and down the chain of command, crippling the efforts of the profane but devoted souls actually putting their flesh on the line. It’s a devastating indictment of the U.S. military and government, given poignancy by the dawning recognition in the faces of the characters who don’t yet realize what’s happening but are beginning to ken to it.

Check it out if you can. You might find it offensive, but I don’t think you will find it uninteresting.

The show is burbling up in my mind right now for the simple but devastating lesson it offers: putting someone in a position of authority does not guarantee they’ll rise to the occasion. It does not guarantee they’ll make good choices. Authority conveys authority, not wisdom.

Worth remembering as the authorities in various of our institutions continue the pattern of compliance that’s been the rule since, well shit, late last year if we’re being honest. What is mystifying to me is how people entrusted with the stewardship of so many large and important organizations can be so lacking in imagination. One doesn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to spot the pattern of behavior we’re seeing: Our petulant, Big-Mac scarfing apricot-colored dictator issues some absurd threat, waves one of his decrees around, and the target calculates that if they’re just very, very nice, that Trump will be happy and they can go back to milquetoast reporting or doing supposedly totally non-political research or whatever. But in due time Trump always comes back to exact further humiliation. He’s like a vampire—invite him in and you’ll be a bloodless corpse by morning. By contrast, those who tell him to get bent are finding that he will often do just that.

And yet, people keep choosing to let the fucker in.

Knowing that your boss is full of shit is not the same as being able to tell them they’re full of shit, and that’s not the same as being able to convince them they’re full of shit. But it’s not nothing. Just don’t buy into the myth that they became boss because they have some deep well of experience of this totally unique moment in history. And don’t let them off just because they think they’re doing the right thing. Just ask the passengers on the Titanic if you don’t buy what I’m saying. Your judgement about what is right has value, so stay tough and speak truth to power whenever you can. And if you can’t find the words, I’m sure that datacenter in the wilds of Virginia will pluck them from the literature for you.

1. “Okie from Muskogee” in that case; also a Merle Haggard tune; also a bit out of sync with the modern world; also a bad jam. The response from Bunny’s interlocutor, Junior—owing to its concision and brutal precision—is worth reprinting in full: Redneck noise, dude, that's all it is. Make about as much sense as you do. All them chumps be talkin' about how they losin' they ho, and ain't got no bread for beer. Fuck that honky shit.