U.P. is a reference the great Joycean work, Ulysses. Dennis Breen receives a postcard with just those letters. It excites his madness. Perhaps it is a reference to in ability to satisfy his wife in husbandly manner. Perhaps it's a reference to You urinate, You're no good, You put your fingers up your anus, and You can't get it up any more. Or simply, a reference to Ulysses and Penelope. IOU.
I don't think we are on different pages, but I think it's important to show how Buckley helped create the space for MTG to emerge.
Buckley was a master of hiding his real beliefs in liberal language. By doing so, he was able to slip fascist beliefs into the public discourse. There were some who knew they were lying and called him a crypto fascist. But many did not and his arguments penetrated deeply into the populous. Do much so, that you see Democrats sincerely taking up his talking points during the decline of the great society Democrats and the ascendancy of the neo liberal Democrat.
When these policies failed to deliver to the Democratic base, the base left. Buchanan, Gingrich, and others were lingering in the shadows for years, but lack the emotional skill to vibe with them. But Trump was able to feel their hopelessness and channel it into rage. He was speaking a truth the neo liberals never were able to voice and channel.
They lifted him to the presidency and stuck with him removing any elected official who challenged him. He found the power hungry politicians and they fell into line saying anything they needed to maintain power which means saying anything that made Trump look good.
The articulate liars created the sincere rube. The sincere rube created the hopeless masses. The hopeless masses platformed the charismatic carpet bagger. The charismatic carpet bagger attracted the sycophants.
Hitler is worse than Hindenburg, but fuck Hindenburg.
National pride can be a dead end in liberation or, when, as Otto Bauer argued, applied rationally towards the end of liberation, a means by which the proletariat of the nation can gain access to and ownership of the national wealth.
"Scholarship is able to explain to us the emergence of the national sentiment from national consciousness, the emergence of the curious national form of evaluation from the national sentiment. But it is also able to criticize this national evaluation. And this is a task of no little significance. For it is only the critique of national ideology that can produce the atmosphere of sobriety that alone makes a fruitful examination of national politics possible."
A national consciousness emerges when we meet people from other nations. We then become aware of that feature and gain a national sentiment or pride. An evaluation of the national form creates a good member of the national. This can, without critically or rationally evaluating it, lead to racist thinking or blaming certain groups for the nation's ills. However, a class evaluation can prevent this and a rational critique of the nation can give the proletariat access to the full cultural wealth of the nation which had only been previously reserved for the elites.
Atomism existed for millenia before we investigated this possibilty to such a degree that we were able leverage that concept to change the world. Its goes back to the 8th century BCE in India and the 5th century BCE in Greece. In both cases, people engaged in it imaginatively and thinking was applied. But its reach was small and only effected a small group who weren't able to make a large societal impact.
Even in the 17th century, when there was a revival of interest in epicurean atomism, it was actively competing with corpulism. Hell, Mendelev, creator of the periodic table, didn't believe in atoms. That's sort of crazy to me!
Dalton, whose atomic weight was leveraged by Mendeleev and the rest rejected, posited what later became the basis of modern atomic theory. Einstein further developed this with Brownian motion describing how atoms effected the seemingly random movements of pollen. Perrin later verifies this experimentally in 1908.
So more than just the idea, it's the culture of inquiry, debate, skepticism, investigation, and, eventually, experimentation that is important. Not just the idea. I guess, if I were to preserve anything, it would be that culture. No sentence can do that. But people's radiance can.
Disclaimer: this is a quick gloss of a long timeframe. A lot of details were omitted.
Yeah... I don't know if they'd care. Honestly, giving myself slack and accepting this as part of who I am right now has been such a life changer for me. The sad part, though, is it limits opportunites for which I might otherwise be a good fit.
Listening to the FT's podcast Swamp Notes was infuriating. I get who your audience is, but if you're going to have the guy from the center right think tank on and the establishment technocratic reporter talking with him, at least have some progressive on to defend his views.
The worst part is how they infantalize him and his views.
Can't tell which people hate more, the art, the artist, or the admirers of the work.