Plenty of stuff out there about how Remarkably Lefty our dear Joe is turning out to be. I’m nowhere near buying it and here’s why.

Wolff Responds: Evaluating Biden’s Shift Leftward

This is the most mild, Institutionally Academic critique I can have any sympathy for at all. Essentially the argument is that Biden is handwaving to the left as a tactical dance move, and that there’s no real substance behind it. Okay. Yes sure. He’s not wrong, even though I’d go further.

At some other level of blue-check shitlib corporatist Dem, they’ll tell you: yeah, at least we have the Squad to Push Him Left like we used to say before the election. But … we don’t.

At the level of pure theatrical politics, I’m out there with Jimmy and Jackson on the hopeless dirtbag fringe. But one thing is pushing me hard out even further to the margin, and that’s that I’m losing faith in the State generally and quasi-democratic electoralism specifically. I’m embracing the obvious anarchic truth as I see it, and doing so means complete alienation from the world as we know it in common-sense terms.

Out here right and left mean pretty much nothing.

There’s class and class warfare, and there are plenty of PTSD victims of this cold war saying things that sound rightish and leftish but aren’t really–they’re just hallucinatory trauma.

Kyle Kulinski noted that Caitlyn Jenner is a classic case of this. She’s running for something in Cali, governor I think. She went on Hannity to explain why homelessness there was a bad thing.

Basically she told a story about how some rich friend of hers couldn’t take seeing homeless people everywhere anymore, and so he was moving to Sedona to get away from having to drive by the plain evidence of it every day.

And that’s why we have to do something, about homelessness.

This is a take that makes no human sense at all.

This is trauma talk from a mindbroken elitist.

Most of what you hear on mainstream media outlets is trauma talk from mindbroken elitists.

Virtually all of our political discourse revolves around minor differences of opinion among mindbroken elitists.

I still care about 100 unhoused people a month dying on the streets of LA alone. I still care about cops continuing to routinely gun down poor people in the streets and almost never paying a human price for it. I still care about what we’re continuing to do the planet for sort of the same reason that I care about trying yet again to quit my own nicotine habit.

But I don’t care who you vote for next time, and I don’t care if you vote at all.

What am I doing? About people dying on the streets? About climate change?

Nothing, baby. Nothing.

Because you see, I’m trauma too. I’m mindbroken also.

I’m just not elitist, or even elite.

I’d like to think that makes me better, but I’m not sure I can legitimately claim to be either.

A long time ago I fled a bad marriage in Georgia and raced back to the healing mountains here. They saved my life.

A few weeks ago, an educator friend told me that I was morally obligated to go back to professing, because I was so brilliant at it–she knew firsthand, and she quoted some of my students besides.

I told her that I took her seriously, but that the thing I was brilliant at–teaching mostly by one-on-one or very small group interactions–it just wasn’t a thing the System was willing to pay people to do any more. It was by System standards, too inefficient and a waste of money. They wanted mass lectures because that was cheaper. I honestly suck at mass lectures, and it’s way too stressful to build even mediocre ones week in and week out.

So no way. No how. My trauma won’t even let me go back to doing shitty things shitilly. It’s the fast track to a quicker death.

I don’t know what I’ll do. But I sort of think the answer is Up.

To let the montane geography heal me again.

I hear they’re paying people some thing for it some times and in some places.

That would feel better.