Parenti’s Yellow Lecture
never be sad :')
Alison Flora, Feu de Joie, 2022
At lunchtime today I told my friend David this newsletter doesn’t represent what I want to write, not the subject nor tone nor quality. I’m not a scholar, I’m not qualified to write about politics or economics. I have no interest in advice columns or expository prose, and would prefer to work on my version of Street of Crocodiles or Too Loud a Solitude.
Further, as a person with whatever brain malfunction under whatever significant long-term stress, I’m not level-headed; I don’t trust my opinions, I don’t have opinions, I’ve lost interest in my opinions; I don’t know and perhaps have never known how to parse current or historical events.
My thoughts on increasing political and climate instability need only a short paragraph: spend more time in the world than on the internet; diversify your income; save some of your money and give some away; grow some food; learn some bushcraft and herbal medicine; use state resources with gusto; expatriate to a country with social services; engage in anti-authoritarian activism of your choice; if you don’t have a robust network of supportive friends and family, consider an intentional community. That’s it, I’ve nothing more.
My thoughts on right livelihood: do something you enjoy with people you like. If you can’t do something you enjoy with people you like, do something of service. If you can’t do something of service, do something from which learning and wealth of experience outweigh degradation and drudgery. That’s it, that’s all I know, and I certainly have no idea how to achieve any of those outcomes in the current job market.
It’s mid-afternoon, I watch Michael Parenti’s “yellow lecture.”
“The Bolsheviks are wanting in political virtue; they would preach to the ordinary man that he might elevate himself through political means rather than by dint of hard work.”
Uh oh! God works in mysterious ways.
It’s imperative that ordinary people, besieged by media and corporate propaganda on all fronts, muddle towards the truth of how resources are taken and allocated. It’s imperative we remove elites from power and forge systems by which free food, housing, education, healthcare, and transportation are distributed.
No one reading is part of the ruling class (if you are, please upgrade to a paid subscription), so we all have the strongest possible vested interest in overhauling our economic system. The only solution to climate change is using less. Much less. Our economy is predicated on using more. Much more. It doesn’t compute. Certain castes (the bourgeoisie? idk) within developed nations find themselves in pockets of comfort that seemingly preclude the need for revolutionary change. Watch out! The ruling class hopes you’ll fancy yourself the ruling class and parade about in imitation. But they haven’t got strings attached to their arms and legs, while we have. Other castes fear what little they have will be taken from them. After all, it’s come to light that the land is ill-gotten, the infrastructure ill-gotten, the food ill-gotten.
Books and art and movies don’t depose the ruling class. They’re devotional practices, reasons for living, but they don’t depose the ruling class. The impulse comes over me to turn away, slide into a warm bath of fantasy and diversion. I’m not an activist, I’m not a scholar. The impulse swells. I’m tired and broke. Set me free to be unfree. We can’t do it all! We can’t work all day and foment all night. Lenin is bad. Stalin is bad. Mao is bad. The tedium of all these details after the tedium of a day’s work.
If the system topples, if we work to topple the system, will there be roads? Will there be supermarkets and hospitals and cell coverage? Will we live in joyless Soviet apartment blocks with one brand of cigarette? Will doctors work in factories and lawyers in fields? Will VICE News film a segment about how much vodka we drink?
“Just remember who has the source of power...these great generals and dictators and presidentes who sit there in their big palaces with their corruption and their bayonets and their guns and their spies—they get thrown off just as a stallion throws off a little fly. Speak truth to power, mobilize, organize, never be sad, remember what the great Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci said: have a pessimism of the mind, but an optimism of the will...the future itself depends upon it.”
I’m one of those who skipped the war sections of War and Peace. I’ll take peace and more peace, tea parties, bouffants, and fripperies. Is the only way to have perfect peace to have nothing to defend? Somehow we find ourselves back at the foot of the great religions.
Take this as an account of human confusion. I’m pretty well clear on the what, why and wherefore, but the how has never been more darkly obscured.
Alone is The Bachelor on a glacier. Whether trapper hats or evening gowns, they’re decorating nihilism with a garland of homilies.
Žižek said in some video I watched and now cannot find, real utopia would be life going on just as it always has, forever.
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