Higher Ground

To an outsider the Correspondents' Dinner in which the President cracks a few jokes seems utterly mystifying. Of course, that is how power works: by mystifying (Kadare's Successor is good on this). To show the human face of power, to, you know dude, not take politics too seriously ("it's all a game, lighten up for Christ's sake!").

At which point you're simply told to sit back and enjoy the show, fawn over the charm and wit of the performer, marvel at how superior democracy is to your own crummy system of failed, miserable and humourless politicians, how the west's system is so transparent and open that it can stage a ritual piss-take of those in power. What, exactly, is the point of the Daily Show when everyone's a comedian? 

The Master of this kind of buffoonery was, of course, Walker. You were always left wondering if he was a genuine old time fool, the kind of prankster or joker in the pack who'd be taken on a hunting expedition to keep the others entertained or if it was, after all, only a ruse, the great act of a clown in a small-town play, holding up a mirror to society's idiocy, or maybe it was a pure Machiavellian strategy for confounding his opponents? The jokey, all-too familiar slightly dumb-assed shenanigans of a gullible teenager brat who never really grew up or the wise fool who rules by becoming everyone? And then the troubling questions would follow: did it make any difference which it was after all, and how did someone like that ever get to the top in the first place?  

And still the anachronistic 19th century view persists: satire and irony are ways of challenging and diffusing power (Je suis..). Except, of course, that power these days relies precisely on disarming people by convincing them they're free (as long as they have a choice of 21 yoghurts in the superstore), and that that freedom consists, precisely and exclusively, in questioning everything, taking nothing seriously, going with the flow, imagining another shade of grey, the ability to bring about a political revolution through your i-phone.

There is no higher ground, there are no second spaces..this is as good as it gets. Deal with it!

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Well, the world has always been going to hell in a hand cart so why not simply withdraw from life altogether and focus on something like, I don't know, why the biographical details of an author in a book's back flap are so futile and sterile. Or better still, keep up the pretense of a heroic stoical detachment with the help of a few choice words from some poet or the other.

It goes without saying that the latter has always been something that appealed to you, which explains the superficiality of this blog. It's all in line with the fakery of the higher ground of "the life of the mind" and really just a subtle way of exercising control: whilst the plebs are kept entertained by bread and circuses the self-styled intellectuals are kept preoccupied by trivial and marginal problems, their minds so narrowly focused and abstract that to see any issue in the context of a larger historical, political or economic frameworks is next to neigh impossible. It is not surprising that the very word 'capitalism' has been expunged from the language of economics and why, as Tony Atkinson once noted, here's been the strange disappearance of Welfare Economics (as well as the history of Economic Thought) from economics departments. 

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Meanwhile, back in the jungle...

Ground zero is right here, right now. 

'There's one area where Trump's experience could be invaluable..closing down Guantanamo. Trump knows a thing about or two about running waterfront properties into the ground.' 

{Photos courtesy of Tom}