Sam's Back.
In last week’s musing, I noted that I had some sense that the State Department had designated Democratic Socialists of America a terrorist organization, but hadn’t been able to find the source. This week, Emma Vigeland of The Majority Report interviewed journalist Ken Klippenstein and the interview confirmed that I had INDEED seen something to that effect - although “to that effect” is doing some heavy lifting here. The primary source is the State Department’s Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism (they forgot to hyphenate the adjectival “21st-Century”), released on July 20. Glancing over the document, the framing seems histrionic, although I recognized a lot of the facts they were laying out. But the Klippenstein interview does a good job of contextualizing the report in terms of how it is setting the stage for state repression and is certainly an important look-see.
In my college activism days, I was thoroughly embedded in the networks the State Department lists as subversive elements (I like how they include the Presbyterian-founded Pastors for Peace), and I just joined Democratic Socialists of America, so… yeah. That’s fun. But of course, if you’re not taking real risks, you are not resisting authoritarian regimes. And although I am ambivalent about the legacy of President Obama, one of my favorite things about his presidency was his thawing of U.S. insanity with regard to Cuba. But insanity reigns in every aspect of our lives now.
It’s also worth noting that in this regard, Marco Rubio - who’s tried to position himself as one of the remaining rational Republicans - is perfectly happy to put zero daylight between himself and Steven Miller in this regard. Just putting that out there.
Otherwise, looking back on the week, it feels disjunct. Lots of different directions smothered under just enough heat to make everything feel fuzzy. Since I live right by the ocean, I shouldn’t complain about the heat too much, but I do notice that it’s been the source of an off sleeping cycle for both me and my mother.
Perhaps I’ll stay with where we started - The Majority Report. Yesterday, Sam Seder returned from his vacation/moonlighting gig and I was reminded that while I like Emma Vigeland’s analysis, there’s no substitute for Sam’s particular sense of humor. [I just caught myself typing “it’s not just” and was reminded that we live in an era where “it’s not just this, it’s that” is an AI tic, but sometimes that tic is useful, so…] It’s not just Sam’s politics that draws me to his show, it’s his personality. And here I remember how in college, I really wanted structural analyses of ideology to do all the work, but by the time I took Native American Religions with Kay Read, I was talking to her about how I was starting to recognize that individuals do make a difference. She noted that I was just going toward a balance of looking at systems and individuals from the other direction than most Americans. Certainly, in my early years of college, I would not have understood Elizabeth Warren’s adage that “personnel is policy,” but just getting a reminder of how thoroughly different the Majority Report is without Sam’s presence was a deep reminder of that fact.
But it was also noteworthy that while I was happy to see Sam back, since joining DSA, I have a sense that I’ve found my people and online parasocial relations are just less compelling and emotionally necessary than they’d become over the last few years. Last Sunday, my intention was to go a DSA coffee hour and leave early to log on to Quaker worship. I got there at 10:00. After what felt like an hour, I asked someone for the time - “11:50.” The two hours of great conversation had flown by, so I missed worship. On Wednesday, I participated in an online DSA Study Hall, and one person I’d had a conversation with at a previous DSA event threw “DIRK!!!” into the chat as soon as I logged on. Since friends have moved away in the last years, I’ve been searching for community in Long Beach - I tried a Gay Men over 40 group that I could not really connect with - so that sense that I have a social circle again is a blessing. That that social circle includes pissing off the current administration is icing on the cake.
Someone at a previous DSA gathering had recommended the movie Burn! It’s a 1969 movie featuring Marlon Brando, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, best known for his previous movie The Battle of Algiers. After writing in a letter that I haven’t been watching enough movies this summer (I’ve only seen ten movies all year - including a short), I thought, “I’ll take the time to watch it.” The movie was a slow burn, initially feeling kind of stilted, but Brando’s performance was stellar. The movie takes place in the 19th century on a Caribbean island colonized by the Portuguese. Brando plays a British agent who foments an insurrection, and then turns against the rebel leader he had fostered. What the movie brought home better than anything else I’ve seen is the dynamics of small nations dealing with the contest of imperial forces. I’ve long drilled into my students that that is the fundamental context for the Bible - the ancient Israelites were a tiny people at the mercy of a series of empires. (I always tell who ask me about the Bible to start with Jorge Pixley’s Biblical Israel: A People’s History - yet another book that is out of print.) But I will be assigning the movie in my class next semester to set up discussion of the Bible and it will be interesting to see how the students read the text differently after being presented with more of a felt sense of what it is like to be caught between different imperial projects.
By way of contrast, on one of the week’s hot nights, I gave up trying to sleep and put on my new recording of Sigmund Staden’s 1644 opera Seelewig. Even with my prescription glasses, I couldn’t read the CD booklet, so I couldn’t get a synopsis or follow along with the words. So, I could only catch snippets of dialogue in the singing and had to be content with just hearing the flow of sounds. I came away thinking, “oh this is STANDARD seventeenth-century music.” Much music of the seventeenth century is so tied to words for its coherence - Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancrdi e Clorinda is a particularly clear example of music that makes perfect sense if you are following along with the text and makes no sense if you’re not - that not having the a sense of the words put my listening at a major disadvantage. Without the words, the music could have ended at practically any point, and the final ending point felt completely arbitrary. At some point, I’m going to need to get a stronger prescription for my glasses and go back to it. But the listening session was a good way to reconnect with a phase of my life that my teaching load has pulled me away from and it felt significant in that respect.
Burn! and Seelewig could not be more different from each other, but they’re both relatively obscure cultural documents, and that coupled with the fact that Pixley’s Biblical Israel is an out-of-print text reminds me of one last event of the week I’ll reflect on. I was aware that AI techlords had destroyed millions of books in their quest to digitize existence itself. What I hadn’t been aware of is the fact that they have been deliberately buying up rare book collections to destroy.
One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.
The level of rage I felt on reading this - words fail. I found myself wondering how one can run around with such a disdain for life. The destruction of historical legacy goes hand in hand with a literal desire to pave the planet with datacenters, to achieve “post-biological” intelligence. (One of the links in last week’s musing goes to an interview with someone who explicitly advocates for a post-biological digital utopia.) Living through an era of pure destruction, whether at the hands of the administration’s wrecking ball to the constitutional order, or the technological overlords war on life itself, or simply the pressure of tectonic plates giving signs that they are ready to wreck real damage - it’s depressing. But it is a reminder that all is temporary and fragile, and it’s in caring for a world we know will pass that our connection to value takes root. The particulars of Sam Seder’s personality, the contours of my DSA chapter, a very standard opera from the seventeenth century - these will all pass, but they show what makes the moment worthwhile.