Those populating the vice president’s joy-and-vibes crowd can pretend to celebrate a state of elation while acquiescing to their candidate’s approval of mass murder.
Balloons fall after Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech at the Democratic National Convention last month. (Chris Bentley, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
Many commentators have attempted to describe the astonishing devolution of Democratic Party politics into sheer marketing: Kamala Harris as product, “new and improved” like a laundry detergent or a frozen dinner.
Vanessa Beeley calls it “cartoon theatrics,” and it’s as good as I’ve seen. In two words the British journalist captures from a useful distance the infantilism of the Harris-for-president campaign and the Hollywoodization of American politics.
I thought I’d seen everything in this line until a few days ago, but in this, the most unserious political season of my lifetime, it is incautious to make any such assumption.
There is always more — something worse — another step down into a sort of political nihilism that leaves the electorate stupefied as the imperium conducts its violent, illegal business.
A truly vulgar graphic artist named Kii Arens now gives us a Kamala Harris campaign poster that is a beyond-belief case in point.
This is “Kamala” against a pastel field, no surname necessary, the presidential candidate as a striding figure out of the 1960s counterculture, an heroic hippie. I hope you are ready for the tag line. It is “Vote Joy 2024.”
My mind was on other things when I first came across this poster. And it landed abruptly as an assault and an insult all at once.
Just glance at it for now: This is how some Democratic voters, and I suspect many, want to imagine a candidate who supports and advances, among various other late-imperial crimes, a genocide of world-historical significance.
The imagery seems, somehow, an almost criminal violation of human intelligence.
“There is always more, something worse, another step down into a sort of political nihilism that leaves the electorate stupefied as the imperium conducts its violent, illegal business.”
Kii Arens makes his living doing pop-art graphics — logos and such — for a lot of show business people and credits Saturday morning children’s television as his primary inspiration. Out in California he owns and runs the La La Land Gallery, which seems about right.
Kii Arens seems to take himself very seriously indeed. And it goes this way: Either Kii Arens has overestimated the gullibility, self-delusions and unconsciousness of liberal voters, especially those who consider themselves “progressive” or “left,” or I have underestimated the same.
I fear Kii Arens may have me on this one. “People are really excited about this poster,” he said in a brief video interview after giving away copies of it at the Democrats’ convention in Chicago. “People are connecting emotionally to my art.”
When I first saw the “Kamala” poster it was via a social media message Katrina vanden Heuvel sent out, with cheerful approval, on “X.”
Vanden Heuvel, as many readers will know, is the editorial director of The Nation. It is important to take note. In “Vote Joy 2024” we find the denouement of the long, pitiful story of what has become of the American “left” and why this term now requires quotation marks.
I have long thought politics can be usefully read as an expression of antecedent cultural and psychological phenomena.
Psychic Journey
This is how I view the Kii Arens poster and why I think it merits careful scrutiny: It is a window, or maybe a Rosetta Stone, in which we can read the coded interiority of the “left’s” psychic journey from the honorable commitments of earlier times to… to what?… to a state of willful political and intellectual immaturity.
Now study the poster for a good few minutes.
I JUST launched my Kamala print this morning! Here’s the link if you would like one… https://t.co/9gbF659uOi ??? pic.twitter.com/uLu5qsLPfF
— Kii Arens (@kiiarens) August 30, 2024
There is Harris, of course, in her standard pantsuit and pearls — the political candidate with whom we are familiar. She is serious and altogether credible, but wears that having-fun, sorority-sister smile that endears her to many Democratic voters.
There are the flowers splashed across the whole of the graphic. These are essential to the overall effect. They are the kind of flowers you see on the walls of grade-school art classes.
And they are “flower power” flowers. They bathe Harris in an aesthetic of innocence, with a subliminal suggestion of a childlike guiltlessness. Note Harris’s stride in this connection: It is purposeful, but with the air of a carefree girl walking in a garden.
And then the typefaces. The “Vote Joy 2024” in the lower right immediately draws the eye. It is subtly but unmistakably a reference to the posters associated with the late – ’60s rock scene — a variation on Psychedelic Fillmore West and Psychedelic Fillmore East (which, believe it or not, are two recognized typefaces).
Kii Arens has added a couple of small touches I must mention for the sheer fun of them. He has inscribed a faint paisley pattern into Harris’s presidential pantsuit. Paisley. Dwell upon paisley for a sec and see what you think this means.
And beneath the pantsuit he has Kamala Harris wearing canvas sneakers — those flimsy black Converse things favored by young people who are, to put it charitably, casually dressed.
Sheer fun: and if you think about it, a very pure case of pointedly manipulated imagery.
If I were a certain kind of columnist, I would say the poster Kii Arens has made to express his enthusiasm for the Harris campaign (which he now sells for $47, extra for framing) is, as was just shouted to me from across the room, “a complete mind-fuck.”
But I am not that kind of columnist. I will not say this poster, with all its flower power iconography in behalf of a warmonger, is a complete mind-fuck.
I would say the physiologically ambitious intent of this poster is to perform the act of love on the cerebral cavity. Way more acceptable for a family publication such as Consortium News.
I do not know whether the Harris campaign commissioned this thing. I suspect they like it well enough but did not order it up. In the video interview mentioned above, Kii Arens comes over as an averagely guileless, averagely indoctrinated liberal with no clue of the diabolic cynicism with which the Democratic Party is inventing Kamala Harris of whole cloth.
My read: “Vote Joy 2024” comes straight out of Kii Arens’s unconscious, and this is what makes it interesting. It is fair enough, and useful, if we think of Arens as the id of those “progressive” and “left”–inclined voters the Harris campaign must seduce if “Kamala” is to win in November.
I do not know how many Democratic voters buy into the various signifiers Arens has inscribed into his poster. I suspect he speaks for very many — someone should check his sales — but let us set this aside.
His work is certainly a disturbing measure of the extent to which those who could well propel Harris to the White House in November are prepared to delude themselves into seeing things in Kamala Harris that are simply not there.
“My art is supposed to reflect positivity, hope, and joy,” Arens says in the videoed interview. There are a lot of Democrats looking for just these things in the figure of Kamala Harris. But this is not the remark of an aware or self-aware American in the late-summer of 2024. It is the remark of someone who is determinedly neither.
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Kii Arens has slathered on the semiology in his “Vote Joy 2024” poster with a trowel. Semiology is the science of signs, of significations. In what signs is Kii Arens trafficking?
As an aesthetic object the Arens poster is crude, but this is of no matter. It is dense with many-layered signifiers, and these are what matter.
There are important insights to be gained as we examine these layers and discover what, taken together, they have to say — about the long regression at the left-hand end of America’s politics, about liberal and “left” voters’ fears, fantasies, and failures of nerve.
Here is the Brittanica definition of “flower power.” It is a good place to begin.
“Flower power: the belief that war is wrong and that people should love each other and lead peaceful lives — used especially to refer to the beliefs and culture of young people (called hippies) in the 1960s and 1970s.”
Instantly we learn something.
We have heard daily talk of “joy” and “vibes” since the Democratic Party’s elites and donors undemocratically imposed Kamala Harris as their 2024 candidate.
And now we find, via an admittedly goofy but probably representative Harris voter with an amateur gift for social psychology, that beneath all this compulsive “positivity” there seems to lie a strong streak of nostalgia.
Why, the obvious question, do the liberal voters for whom Arens speaks, or to whom he speaks, or both, indulge in a nostalgia for a time they never knew?
Why is it important that they identify so strongly with those whose political and cultural commitments, however gauzily recalled, gave the 1960s the reputation the decade has in the public consciousness.
Nostalgic Retreat
Harris at a campaign rally in Glendale, Arizona, in August. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Why the historical reference? Answer this and we can see into the strange dynamic driving the wave of enthusiasm for the Harris campaign as it floats along on puffy clouds of joy and good vibes.
Nostalgia, I have long argued, is at bottom a symptom of depression. Nostalgists are those who retreat into the past as a refuge from a present they find in one or another way unbearable.
And here I offer a corollary thought: The sensation of powerlessness is a primary cause of depression. Any good psychiatrist would confirm this.
With this in mind, think about all those people “connecting emotionally” to Kii Arens’s iconography, and then all the others who may not have not seen it but would similarly identify with it. That these people are in some inchoate way nostalgic is beyond argument.
The follow-on conclusion seems to me equally evident: All the talk of joy and vibes is at bottom a mask for a more or less prevalent depression people cannot admit to themselves they suffer.
As the Britannica notes in its stuffy, wooden fashion, “peace” and “love” were among the totemic terms that characterized the 1960s counterculture Arens unsubtly references. But you cannot, plain and simple, walk around today talking of either and expect to be taken seriously.
Ours is not a polity that gives any credence to notions of peace and neighborly love. This is absolutely out.
Propagandists and ideologues have long since transformed mainstream American culture — since the Reagan years, I would say — into a culture of war and animus.
And so we return to joy and vibes. These are excellent terms for those given to fantastic readings of Kamala Harris.
To stand for peace and love 50 or 60 years ago was to challenge what people used to call “the establishment.” They had meanings, however angelic were those professing these things.
“Joy” and “vibes” have no meanings. This is why they have caught on like fires in a dry forest. They do not signify challenges to anything; they license an extraordinary flinch from everything.
Everything: American participation in a genocide, the proxy war in Ukraine, the incessant and increasingly dangerous provocations of China, the brutalizing sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, and all such serious matters of policy.
“’Joy’ and ‘vibes’ have no meanings. This is why they have caught on like fires in a dry forest.”
There is no need to think about any of this. There is, indeed, an unwritten code that the crises of our time, America’s leaders responsible for all of them, are neither to be thought about nor mentioned.
It is brilliant, I would say, this mutilation of logic and reasoning. There is something for everyone in it.
For the Harris campaign the childish nonsense of joy and vibes is a diabolically effective blind. Behind it Harris’ people — and Kamala Harris is nothing more than the sum total of her advisers — can commit to the imperium’s foreign policies without the bother of public scrutiny.
Just leave all that to us: This is the message the Harris people have as they flatly refuse to take up any of the questions that matter most to the imperium’s citizens.
And for those subscribing to the joy-and-vibes ethos, from Katrina vanden Heuvel on down, this is a twofer.
They can persuade themselves they will stand against the established order by voting for the established order. Tell me you know anyone who has deceived himself or herself so cleverly as this.
And while arranging the wilted flowers in their hair, those populating the joy-and-vibes crowd can pretend to celebrate a state of elation while acquiescing to their candidate’s approval of mass murder.
This is important to these people, for they must at all costs avoid facing their utter powerlessness, and so their subliminal depression, as they succumb once more to voting for an evil it is a stretch to consider the lesser of anything.
Sacrifice & Risk
One question lingers as I glance again at the Kii Arens poster. What under the sun happened to the American left between its years at the barricades in the service of honorable causes and this, its time of weak-minded gutlessness?
When did it pass from left to “left”? There is a book in the answer to this, the interior history of several generations, but I will keep this brief.
One of the remarkable features of the antiwar and anti-imperialist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, along with the principled feminists of those years, was the willingness of so many people to accept the necessity of sacrifice. Sacrifice and risk, I would say.
“What … happened to the American left between its years at the barricades in the service of honorable causes and this, its time of weak-minded gutlessness?”
Such people understood: If you cannot stand for what you think is right and accept all the consequences attaching to being authentically who you are, your thoughts and being are of no use. You understood the necessity of living beyond the fence posts, having concluded nothing of worth could get done within them if your intent was to work for genuine change.
And so one gave up well-paid employment, or life in a good neighborhood, or holidays along the coast of Maine, or whatever else comprised one’s version of middle-class privilege.
A certain precarity often accompanied these choices. Your car was a clunker. The heat pipes clanked.
Gradually over many years, the energy and commitment — the commitment to committing, let’s say — faded.
I saw this in people younger than I as early as the mid–1970s. People wanted to think of themselves as “activist,” as “committed,” as standing for “change,” as — totemic word here — as “movement.” But careers came first. The thought took hold that one could get the worthy work done inside the fence posts and without taking any risks.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1939. (Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Deitrich Bonhoffer, the celebrated German pastor who paid with his life for his resistance to the Reich, used to speak and write of cheap grace and costly grace.
The former means, in secular terms, the pretense of an honorable life without sacrifice. The latter is the opposite: To earn costly grace means to live and work honorably and paying whatever price one must for it.
I am talking about the difference between the two as this came to be at the left-hand side of the garden over the past 50 or so years.
A book I began reading last spring bears very well on this question. Anne Dufournmantelle, a greatly respected psychoanalyst who died tragically at 53 in 2017, published Éloge du risque (Payott & Rivage) in 2011; Fordham University Press brought it out as In Praise of Risk eight years later. After sitting on my shelf for several years, this has made its way among the most important books of my life.
We cannot live authentic lives unless we accept the constant presence of risk, Dufourmantelle argued over the course of 51 brief chapters (which do not have to be read in order).
She means the risks inherent as we make all our choices — risks in relationships, risks in our victories and surrenders, risks in our public lives as well as our private, the risks altogether in how we live.
And the greatest of all risks, Dufourmantelle writes, is the first one we must take if we are to take all the others. This is the risk we take when we overcome our fear of life and determine to live.
It is, she says, “the risk of not dying.” And by not-dying she means refusing the death in life to which most people succumb as they surrender to conformity, or to inaction, or to our paranoiac addiction to total certainty.
And so to my concluding point.
Kii Arens is merely a product of his moment, not to be singled out as anything more. His poster is a cultural text. This is testimony to the vulgarization of American public discourse, but it nonetheless — or maybe for this reason — bears interpretation.
Among other things, the iconography of his poster reminds us that the Harris-for-president campaign is in considerable measure a psychological phenomenon.
I read “Vote Joy 2024” not as a celebration of the Harris-for-president project but as an implicit admission of what is absent from it. It is a document recording, in the simplest terms, the regret of those who have refused the risk of not dying while envying those before them who took it.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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I am a Jungian psychodynamic psychotherapist myself.
In 2015 I had a dream where Carl Jung was speaking to an audience and was saying the following thing: “It pains me to see how Americans who cannot express their pain turn to madness”.
This dream stayed with me, specifically after Trump was elected and with all the madness that followed it: from the one-sided bonanza of chaos present in Trumps’ policies and actions to the downright authoritarian elements present in the Democratic Party while in cahoots with FBI and other intelligence agencies.
Patrick Lawrence is right: nostalgia is a symptom of depression (and pain). While Anne Dufournmantelle is absolutely right in her take surrounding risk, there is one more element that brings about a functioning healthy psyche and that is suffering honestly.
Suffering honestly means staying with the powerlessness and pain one feels. This can be in reference to anything, including feeling powerlessness in one’s political beliefs (one can find out the one’s political beliefs don’t have a solid ground to stand on).
Staying with one’s powerlessness, vulnerability and pain is one of the most hardest thing one can do and for most people is almost impossible to do.
That is why shunning powerlessness, vulnerability and pain brings about a state of madness. In a flurry to not feel the pain, one is tempted by power and nostalgia – the perfect elements of a mad society.
Excellent comment. And to me it feels that we are living at a time of historical crisis, where there are strong, accumulated forces creating currents beyond our limited ability to influence. Climate, population, and global industrial capitalism, to name a few. And a global empire struggling to stay on top of the world. It’s healthy to acknowledge that one’s power is limited and to suffer honestly.
These people did not shun their “powerlessness”, they stayed with it.
It led to madness.
“The concentration camp was never the normal condition for the average gentile German. Unless one were Jewish, or poor and unemployed, or of active leftist persuasion or otherwise openly anti-Nazi, Germany from 1933 until well into the war was not a nightmarish place. All the “good Germans” had to do was obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, avoid any sign of political heterodoxy, and look the other way when unions were busted and troublesome people disappeared.
Since many “middle Americans” already obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, are themselves distrustful of political heterodoxy, and applaud when unions are broken and troublesome people are disposed of, they probably could live without too much personal torment in a fascist state — some of them certainly seem eager to do so.”
-Michael Parenti
Fascism in a Pinstriped Suit
That poster encapsulates the concept of hyperreality, in that it’s a simulation of something that never existed. Done by one of those elite artist-types too young to actually remember the era he’s depicting. Although the callback to the 60’s is interesting because that was the last world revolution and we now seem to be heading into the next one.
Shame on Katrina V. and shame on The Nation for where they’ve sunk.
Katrina’s late husband is rolling in his grave, after all Harris is presiding over as number two in charge an insanely dangerous proxy war on Russia’s border.
I don’t think Biden or Harris “preside” over anything. Both are hapless stooges. That’s what I think. No wonder Biden craps his pants, and Harris cackles so hilariously.
In the US when voters do not vote for the lesser of two evils, they end up with presidents like Nixon who killed hundreds of thousands or W Bush, who invaded Iraq. I believe it’s imperative to vote for the lesser of two evils.
Oh come on. Nixon didn’t start the Vietnam war. Kennedy and Johnson had just as much blood on their hands, but you don’t hear too many liberals criticizing ‘Camelot’ or the man who got the ‘Great Society’ passed in a bipartisan vote. In fact, Nixon was the guy who got the ball rolling on ENDING the war.
Like all American presidents, Nixon had his fair share of blood on his hands, but pretending like he was some kind of uniquely greater evil is hilarious.
You are quite right. Jones is ignorant.
When USians DO vote for the “More Effective Evil” (per the late great Glen Ford), they get Vietnam’s 2-3 million dead, Iraq’s 500,000 dead children due to sanctions (as admitted per Albright), Libya’s restored slave trade, and the current genocide in Palestine and egging on of potential nuclear war in Ukraine.
“It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.”
Eugene V. Debs
Thank you.
Thank you Patrick! Ginsberg said it best about Reality Sandwiches:
A Naked Lunch is natural to us,
we eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
Don’t hide the madness.
Allen Ginsberg, On Burroughs’ Work
Burroughs himself wrote that “The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”
Kamala poster–>> DOES NOT HIDE THE MADNESS–>>GENOCIDE on the end of every fork!
I, LeoSun, 2nd, the “Shout-Out!” [Kii Arens poster IS] “a complete mind-fu.k.” 100%!!!
….. AND, IMO, this is f/golden, “I would say the physiologically ambitious intent of this poster is to perform the act of love on the cerebral cavity. Way more acceptable for a family publication such as Consortium News.” Patrick Lawrence
Kii Arens is a “Patsy” for paisley. Obviously, paisley does NOTHING to conceal Biden’s-Harris’ spots, i.e., thuggery, fakery, phuckery! Biden’s-Harris’ “$pots” will NEVER fade! The DNC’s Karens & Patsys nka “Influencers” posing as creative DEMOCRATS aren’t f/human!!! Fugg ‘Em!
……“Among other things, the iconography of his poster reminds us that the Harris-for-president campaign is in considerable measure a psychological phenomenon.’ Patrick Lawrence
Just like Biden-Harris, 2020, is $candalous, then & now, Harris-Walz!!! IMO, it’s by design. It’s an act of mind control. The science of thought control. It’s straight-up f/brainwashing, for reason, i.e., “Que Mala, la Kamala.”
…… “Brainwashing, [white-washing, sugar-coating] also known as mind control, menticide, coercive persuasion, thought control, thought reform, and forced re-education, is the controversial theory that purports that the human mind can be altered or controlled against a person’s will by manipulative psychological techniques.” For Example, “Sheer fun: and if you think about it, a very pure case of pointedly manipulated imagery.” Patrick Lawrence
”Sometimes we can’t see anything straight Sometimes everybody is on the make. Sometimes we cry. Sometimes we cry.”
….. “Well, we’re gonna have to sit down and think it right through. If we’re only human what more can we do? The only thing to do is eat humble pie. Sometimes we cry.” * Van Morrison & Tom Jones
No doubt, Biden-Harris, Blinken, Sullivan, Austin, the DoJ, Congress, the DNC are squandering precious time phkn around, identifying who the flock they f/be. When it all catches up w/Biden-Harris, Blinken, Sullivan, Austin, the DoJ, Congress, the DNC, will they cry? Absophknlutely, NOT. “Some humans ain’t human.”
What’s the Democrats plan to Save planet Earth b/c there is NO Planet “B.” Remember, Reduce the Toxins. Do Not Recycle Biden-Harris 2020 repotted in Harris-Walz 2024!!! “Don’t drink the water,” Harris-Walz, “There’s blood in the water.”
Just say, F/NO! NEVER, again, Comma La Harris! Shut the Front Door! TY. Sincerely, The Opposition, “Planet Earth.”
* Van Morrison & Tom Jones, “Sometimes We Cry,” hxxps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BT48uu7bxKg&pp=ygUfTW9ycmlzb24gam9uZXMgc29tZXRpbWVzIHdlIGNyeQ%3D%3D
A pop quiz as to how much you know about Democracy:
First Question: How many votes did Kamala Harris receive while winning the nomination of the Democratic Party?
Second Question: On what day does the term of office of the President of Ukraine expire?
Bonus Question #1: Who was Kamala Harris’ opponent for the Democratic nomination, and how many votes did they receive?
Bonus Question #2: What percentage of members of the US Congress will face a contested election in this cycle? Lets say ‘contested’ means they win by less than 7 difference in percent of the vote. Example :53-47 is contested, 54-46 is not, for this bit of trivia.
Tie Breaker Question: Give your estimate for what is the total amount of money that will be spent ‘influencing’ these Federal elections? Total spending by everyone who wants you to vote for or against anyone or anything? Closest guess wins any ties.
The US has never been a democracy, which is a government of the people, by the people, for the people. The US Constitution established government of the states, by the states, for the states. That’s how Trump won in 2016-Hillary received almost 3,000,000 more votes. Most Americans live in political dead zones where we understand that if we were to possibly get another hundred thousand for our preferred candidate, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. I live in Utah and this state was called several years ago.
Can anyone possibly explain the value of voting in an election which has already been called?
LOL
And how are those state governments elected?
Democratically.
The electoral college only impacts one office in American government (POTUS). Would you rather have a parliamentary system where the voters don’t get to vote AT ALL on who will hold the highest office and it’s decided by political bosses of whatever party got the most seats in parliament? Or where a party that wins about a third of the vote can take two-thirds of the seats in parliament? Every political system has it’s own quirks and flaws.
On the whole, I prefer the American system, though I would like to see the two-party stranglehold on American politics get shattered.
You think who will hold the highest office is NOT decided by political bosses? Ha ha ha ha. Who is the fool here?
If Trump did nothing else, he proved that the proles can over-rule the party bosses if they really want to. Jeb! was the choice of the party bosses. They really wanted that 3rd Bush in the Oval office. But Trump smartly ran against the party bosses and appealed to the unwashed masses who despised them. His Republican nomination would have been the end of the story if the Democrats hadn’t anointed a widely reviled blood-soaked neoliberal ghoul as his opponent.
And now it seems history is repeating itself, as the Democrat party bosses did away with that annoying voting thing altogether and just handed a crown to the darling of the donor class. And like with Hillary before her, I suspect Harris is the ONLY person who could actually lose to Trump. After her initial Joy! sugar high, it appears her numbers are sinking back to Biden levels. Trump once again has a lead in national polling, and is starting to pull away in swing state polling.
I’ll also add a post-script. Trump isn’t the only one who defeated the party bosses. Obama did the same thing in 2008, when he ran against the same blood-soaked ghoul in the primary and thumped her despite party bosses and donors being in her corner, then knocked off an even bigger blood-soaked ghoul in the general election. So no, I don’t think political bosses always choose the candidates. They certainly have a huge influence, but at the end of the day, the people can make a different choice.
The two-party system in America will end when the Constitution is abandoned. Which will happen after the next civil war. Until then, there is no way to add a third party. That will require a parliamentary type of government.
I dunno
Ross Perot was a pretty effective 3rd party candidate back in the 90s. If he had spent some of his money on funding congressional candidates that aligned with his vision, a ‘Perot-ist’ party could have wielded quite a bit of power. If he could have won 19% of the congressional seats instead of 19% of the presidential vote, then any legislative agenda from either side would have had to run through them. Unfortunately, he chose to go the POTUS route instead and wound up as a trivia answer rather than a political force.
The problem with 3rd parties right now is, their agendas are stale and their candidates are just as bad (if not worse) than those of the major parties. Even if you like the libertarian or the green party, nobody has ever looked at Jill Stein or Gary ‘What’s an Aleppo?’ Johnson and thought, that right there is a potent leader.
Sound like trick questions. LOL
Hello, Aaron,
I like your Pop Quiz. TY for the opportunity to answer, What the DNC’s “Democracy” looks like:
1) Answer to your First Question: 4,563 Delegate votes rcvd following a “VIRTUAL ROLL CALL” aka *five (5)-day online voting process.”… “A total of 52 delegates in 18 states cast their votes for “present,” the ONLY other option on the ballot.
By the DNC’s “DEMOCKRACY,” HARRIS WINS by VIRTUAL Roll Call. “As with in-person roll calls going back decades, the OUTCOME of the vote was ESSENTIALLY KNOWN LONG BEFORE the first vote was cast. Immediately following Biden’s withdrawal from the race, an AP survey indicated that delegates [OVERWHELMINGLY] coalesced behind Harris to [REPLACE BIDEN] on the ticket, leaving little suspense heading into the online vote.”
the DNC’s “DEMOCKRACY” in action, “The convention will feature a ceremonial roll call vote, [MIMICKING] mimicking the look of a traditional convention roll call. Harris will still deliver an acceptance speech on the last day of the convention”
THE DNC’S “DEMOCKRACY” FACILITATED A *FIVE (5) DAY ONLINE VOTING- They participated in what the party called a “virtual roll call,” filling out electronic ballots from their homes, offices or vacation spots more than two weeks before the first delegate steps foot inside Chicago’s United Center.
2) Answer to your Second Question: MAY 20, 2024
3) Bonus Question #1, Answer: JOSEPH ROBINETTE BIDEN
4) Bonus Question #2, Answer: NOT Enough ‘Em. I presume that the Geriatrics in the $enate will be there until “death do US part,” i.e., Strom Thurmond, Dianne Feinstein, Joesph Robinette Biden, Schumer, Grassley, Maxine Waters, Stoned Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, Dick Durbin, Virginia Fox, etc., the list is long.
Answer to the, Tie Breaker Question: THIRTEEN (13) BILLION U$Ds ($13,000,000,000).
BTW, “Delegates used an electronic voting method the [PARTY OF JACKASSES] says was similar to one used to tally virtual roll call votes in the [DNC’s PROJECT 2020] convention, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the [PARTY OF JACKASSES] to conduct much of its official business remotely.” The DEMOCRATS Project 2020-2024, “lives.”
Patrick Lawrence’s question: “When did it pass from left to “left?” My answer, when “that Cowboy, from Texas, started his own war in Iraq.”
Indeed, agreed, Kamala Harris is a product. Harris is Thing 1 of Thing 2, of their, Biden’s-Harris’ L.A.R.P.ing, “Live Action Role Playing.” “The new and improved” IS anything but. Kamala Harris-Tim Walz are products of the Old & Toxic, hazardous to all plant, animal & human life, i.e., “Don’t drink the water,” Harris-Walz “there’s blood in the water.”
…. “Following the certification of the virtual roll call vote, Harris officially nominated Walz as her running mate. Delegates [DID NOT CAST VOTES] to ratify HER choice. Instead, the “NEW & IMPROVED” convention rules allowed convention chair Minyon Moore to certify Walz as the vice presidential nominee.” —- Democrats’ “DEMOCKRACY “2024.
In August Everything, After, “what we fear in the night, comes to call in the day, anyway.” Adam Duritz-Counting Crows
Pro-Test!
VOTE
FOR
Democracy
NOT
democr‘antics’ of
JOY
Party
How valuable Patrick’s articles are, as well as the contributing comments. How close we are coming to having neither available to us. Kamala just gushed over blood red Cheney’s endorsement. Joy has become hate, and hate, joy.
Your last sentence is the anthem of our time, sadly …
The election trail has become the circus but wait until enough people run out of bread.
My personal favorite in the soulless emotional sloganeering for Harris was the guy who tried to make ‘Ka-MALA’ a thing, where the last four letters of her name formed the Trumpian slogan ‘Make America Love Again’. He was so proud of himself …. until someone pointed out to him the hilarious similarity of Ka-MALA’ to ‘Que Mala’ for Spanish speakers.
Brilliant piece. Thanks.
Very good psychological and cultural study, Patrick Lawrence. When you quote Bonhoeffer to such devastating effect, you are almost guaranteed to be on the right track in your assumptions. I’m not a Trump supporter either, but if the Democrats win, you’ll see crushing dissent as the first law of the land. That, and of course supplying arms to kill innocent people, so that everyone feels more comfortable knowing deep inside that they are probably next in line. Nostalgia could very quickly become a hard pill to swallow.
hxxps://www.newsclick.in/sites/default/files/styles/responsive_885/public/2020-10/fasicm%20capitalism.PNG?itok=2LbjhlSg
Colorful flowers and balloons on upbeat posters give you joy and make you forget that you lost your job, live in a tent under a bridge, cold and hungry, and shit on the street.
Ah, the great nostalgia for eras not actually lived through and only superficially understood. For R voters, the ’50s. For Ds, the ’60s, shorn of any connection to anything disturbing. Never mind how the hippies overlapped with the radicals and both groups fought for an end to racism and to war. I know because I was there. I also witnessed that by the end of the ’70s, the neolib Ds had dumped the New Deal and abandoned labor. Not so feel-good for us, the invisible working class majority.
Apparently this is the New Age vision of the D elite. No problem with race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation… well, as long as you’re of the Ivy League or equivalent. People of the “meritocracy” who have earned their right to happiness. Read //The Secret// the latest version of Positive Thinking. Just do it–it’s all luv ‘n’ lite if you make the effort.
Look at those flowers closely. There’s nothing to suggest the blatant sexual parts real flowers have. And no roots, nothing that connects them to the nurturing Earth, to the messy complexities of real life. Instead, they’re abstractions; blips of color meant to elicit safe, cheerful feelings in minds the equivalent of gated communities.
I was there, too Rafi. I’m 75 years old. The 1960s are not ancient history to me. I was a teenager in the 1960s. I was 20 in 1968 and lived those experiences, tear gas and all.
Harris’ campaign is certainly a statement about the current state of the American mind. How is it possible that the most powerful country on Earth has a population that is so disconnected from reality. I have friends who are annoyed when they find out that I’m not aware that the US Open is going on, while they don’t acknowledge that we are participants in a genocide. We are not a serious people. I’m more than convinced that our press is little more than PsyOps experiments, with absurdities like the “Chinese Spy Balloon” as test of the degree of our gullibility. I think the success of the spy balloon narrative had to have showed even the most cynical of propagandists that we are off-scale as suckers.
“We are not a serious people.” Indeed. That much is very clear. Americans have, for a very long time, thought that not knowing or caring about the world (including their own country) is their exclusive right.
Strength Through Joy!
hxxps://engines.egr.uh.edu/sites/engines/files/images/page/kraftdurchfreude.jpg
Mao’s Words Bring Joy!
hxxps://i.pinimg.com/originals/c2/13/63/c2136348a1b358637d77e54c23093f76.jpg
Of course, the fact checking industrial complex will tell you that appeals to joy have nothing to do with totalitarian regimes by getting pedantic about the rest of the words surrounding ‘Joy!’ not exactly matching the Nazi and Maoist slogans weaponizing Joy! for authoritarian messaging. Oddly, they never seem to split hairs when Trumpian slogans fall close to but not exactly on historic totalitarian slogans.
hxxps://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harris-strength-through-joy/
But alas, no matter what spin they put on things, historians have long noticed that brutal totalitarian regimes weaponize Joy! for their own purposes. They had better get busy rewriting history to memory-hole books like this one from 1972.
hxxps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/200594.Strength_Through_Joy_Sex_And_Society_In_Nazi_Germany
Thanks for writing this convincing analysis of the Harris campaign. It seems so tragically on point.
This poster, a vile, repulsive inversion of reality is the epitome of the upper middle class NPR crowd. This poster warms their soulless hearts.
When you make multiple six figures a year it’s easy to Vote Joy. Their joy will be abundant as they watch their stock portfolios continue to rise and their Party of Wall Street continue to slaughter people around the world for imperialist gain while pressing their jackbooted heals harder on the throats of the working class at home, the working class who can’t afford the price tag of that Joy.
Excellent post!
You’ll appreciate this. My grandfather was a Wobbly, an admirer of Eugene V. Debs. As a rank and file blue collar union activist, I was trained in the late ’60s-early ’70s by people who’d been C.I.O. labor organizers in the ’30s. They told me: “liberals are the ones who leave the room when the fight starts.” And they did.
Wow. Well said, to put it mildly. This incredibly astute, hard-hitting, inspirational blast of cultural/art/political criticism is a well-timed slap-in-the-face to lesser-evil-istas everywhere. Deserves to be published in any and all “left” and art-world publications. Share it widely. Resist publicly. Burn some meaningless bridges.
Genocide Joy is no better than Genocide Joe.Or Genocide D.J. Schmoe. Vote FOR Jill Stein!!!
Joy? For plutocrats and war, not for Palestine and peace.
My first degree is in art, and what screamed to me looking at that poster is the emptiness of Harris’s suit, the negative space, so viewers can fill her with anything they want. The flowers and 60’s theme, sans peace sign, says psychedelic drugs to me, as if one must be drugged or just plain delusional to feel the happy “vibe.”
Harris herself often seems drugged. Or perhaps drunk, like Nancy Pelosi seems to be sometimes.
Interesting point; made me think about the implications. I’m a Pac NW Indian (Native American) artist and woodcarver. The northern styles, like AK and upper BC, are constructed by means of a formline. Whereas the designs of Salish art (southern BC, western WA, etc.) are defined by their negative spaces. What isn’t there defines what is.
Soma for All !
“One may smile and smile and be a villain.”
–Shakespeare
The Bard knew.
Both Donald and Kamala came out of Hillary’s rear end. Our choice is genocide.
Hillary smiles and smiles. It’s more like a smirk. Trump was one of her Pied Pipers. Hillary had to have an absolutely appalling opponent– and STILL LOST.
‘The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously down stairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself he cannot hear the screams of pain. That is the model of an unhampered capacity for happiness.’
-Theodor W. Adorno, 1944
You disapprove of Strength Through Joy, Mr. Lawrence? Perhaps you are in need of….reeducation……
Does anyone else notice that in this Democracy, the Democrats no longer talk to people.
President Biden did not hold Press Conferences, or held them at the frequency of total solar eclipses. Now Kamala has been the nominee for nearly a month. No press conferences. One interview and with only the state media. Public appearances are strictly controlled. Invited and approved audiences only, more as a prop than anything. No showing up in town and being outside the factory gates at 6am to talk to the first shift workers arriving and the third shift workers leaving.
This was a candidate picked without any voter input at all, in a course to the nomination that can only be described in modern terms as ‘bizarre’. But I guess it was ‘historic’ in the lack of democracy in the process. One would thing the natural thing to do, on at least two counts would be to get the candidate out to the people. Both to try to shore up the democracy-free process that got her the nomination, but also to show the difference between the New Improved Candidate and the Old White Man.
A Democracy where the candidate does not talk to the people. Where the candidate does not show any opportunities to listen to the people. Very Interesting, I suppose in a Spock-eyebrow sort of way. And yes, I suppose Historic.
Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter walked down Pennsylvania Ave on Inauguration Day. Can you imagine Kamala and her husband, Walmart’s corporate lawyer, getting out of the armored limousine?
Back in the day, Rolling Stone, I think it was, termed punks “the mutant children of our failed revolution” but this monstrosity is Mutation writ large. Some years earlier there was a European regime which promoted a “Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude)” program among its working people. I grow weary of the endless false comparisons of our circumstances to theirs, but this is one coincidence that stands out in a way I really wish I could un-see.
Psychedelics aren’t necessarily ‘joyful’ as neither were the Eleusinian mysteries. They often deepen and darken – just like the times we are living through.
The ‘narrative’ being pedaled by the Democratic Party is an attempt to offer a way out of these depths – like an anti-depressant.
“People are afraid and confused –
and their brains have mismanaged with great skill
All they believe are their eyes
and their eyes – they just tell them lies.
Who’s gonna take away their License to Kill?
B. Dylan
Morning in America.
And yes, that is a slogan from the Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Ronnie Raygun campaign machine, that first perfected the Politics of Hate here in America. And yes, the Democrats today would consider Reagan to be a California Lefty who could not be trusted with power. Do you know he actually tried to get rid of nuclear weapons when given a chance? Can you imagine today’s Democrats even considering such a thing? Nope, they are too busy cutting domestic programs to instead spend $billions ‘fixing’ nuclear weapons by making them ‘usable’. The ‘War on Poverty’ has become ‘The War for more Poverty’.
I could not vote for Reagan when it was Morning in America. IIRC, I cast my first 3rd party vote in that election. But I’d gladly vote Reagan as a far lessor evil than Genocide Kam here in America’s Dusk. But, since Ronnie Raygun won’t be on the ballot as a Lessor Evil Candidate, I guess I’ll vote 3rd party yet again. Although, if we really counted, I’m pretty sure who I vote for won’t be in the top 3 or 4 or probably even 10.
Dick Cheney has publicly endorsed Harris – that is a clear sign that the deep state machine is on board.
And many Dems see this as a good thing, his endorsement along with his vile daughter’s, Liz being a real darling of the Dems.
Dick Cheney endorsing Harris should chill the soul of anyone who still has a heart.
Why would any R have a problem with, as Cheney put it, “using lies and violence to keep himself in power”? I suspect the real reason is that Trump “can never be trusted with power again.” In other words, the neocons don’t find Trump sufficiently pro endless wars of empire and aren’t too sure they can control him. Unlike the reasonable and reliable Cheney trained PNAC acolytes running the Biden Dept. of State. Seems the neocons are sure they’ll be dominant in a Harris administration, too.
So…how can any of us mere voters know who the lesser of two evils is? With the dual aspect uniparty, heads they win, tails we lose. Of that we can be sure.
As a member of more or less the same generation as Mr Lawrence (BA degree in 1969), I have seen what he describes happen to most of my friends, and then – albeit somewhat later – to me. We ended up with a car or two, a kid or two, and a house… yes,in some cases two houses. We did jobs we threw ourselves into with vigor and enthusiasm those jobs often didn’t deserve, or did deserve but were overseen by people who lacked our vigor and enthusiasm, and also lacked the belief that we still held, intact, as we came out of our youth: that people are fundamentally good and that there was an alternative to the evil we saw our country engaged in when we were young, and that that evil behavior would change if only everyone held on to that belief.
Then Trump came along, and we allowed ourselves to be persuaded that he and those who support him are the source of all that evil – indeed, that he is the very embodiment of the evil -, and that if only we can protect ourselves from Trump, the chance is still there that the evil our country does can go away. We were so eager to believe it that we were prepared to accept anything in exchange for getting rid of Trump.
I suspect that that nostalgia, as Mr Lawrence so well points out, is indeed strong enough for us to actually hide our eyes behind the flowers that once stood for peace and love and blind ourselves to the horrors that are still being perpetrated in our name and on our dollar under the Democrats, the very party we rallied to in our youth.
Nobody who is 70-some wants to have to go out into the streets and squares again and denounce the evils of a government bent on continuing the US’s domination of the planet through violence, only so that a tiny minority can continue to concentrate their wealth. But we need to open our eyes to the fact that we are about to perpetuate that very same government – the very same one we raised our voices against when we protested the horrors of Vietnam – when we vote Harris into power. We all need to stand up and be counted now, and make it clear that now, our eyes and ears are open.
Much too polite: “political and intellectual immaturity”
more like an “immoral depravity” stinking to the high heavens.
Voice of the poster: “dry forest” as T.S. Eliot’s “rat’s feet
over broken glass” (“The Hollow Men”), are now the voices
of the Democratic Party and its “left.”
I enjoyed your article because you ask the critical question of what happened that caused the left to morph into the “let” and I think you sort of answered it. The reason the real left faded and turned into a cartoon of the left and, in reality, is now deeply conservative and right wing. In short there isn’t anything remotely left about the “left” other than identity politics which did rear its ugly head as early as the late sixties with the “black power” (which I saw, directly, discouraged black radicals from having anything to do do with white radicals) and “feminist movements” (which, sadly, ended up as women getting jobs in corporate America) which many of us saw, but were afraid to admit, was one of the building blocks of the disintegration of the real left. Another major problem the real left faced in the 70s was genuine repression particularly COINTELPRO and the usual local stuff (Fred Hampton comes to mind). Finally, the real coup de grace was the moral weaknesses behind the radical movement, i.e., hedonism that displayed itself as the need to go to grad school and make shitloads of money to buy houses, have kids, go on vacations, and have “fun” and, indeed, why not? Of course I missed out on all this becuase, in part I saw the death of the left coming since I advocated then and now that the only way power can be accumulated by any group is to be an interdependent group with alternative institutions to serve it rather than the “System” which my generation of radicals mainly did. I saw in the late sixties that there was probably no way to reform the system, rather, we had to find a way around it. You may remember, that, at one time, it was possible to be relatively poor, aka “genteel poverty” reserved for artists and others. Today, that is largely impossible if you have a family. Now two people have to work to even feed themselves and these young “artistic” or real left-radical types (I’m thinking of a young friend) have nothing but the SysItem to rely on. I’ve done what I can, but the economy has really hurt our business.
It was possible to do quite a lot of radical things in the 60s and 70s but now the door is closed to the bottom 70% or so who aren’t doing well and have no wiggle room alond have to work in service jobs at relatively low wages.
But thanks for calling out the “left” as living in obvious fantasies just as much of the right actually is. We live in a post-rational society where, in the end, democracy cannot flourish and will die out even de jure where some national emergency will be declared and the joyful ruling elites will happily whip us into shape.
How painful to hear that even The Nation’s Vanden Heuvel is falling for the “anybody but Trump” trope. Would that be her position if her late husband, Russia scholar Stephen Cohen, were still alive?
Nice: criminal violation of human intelligence
The entitled never engage in sacrifice and risk, but Lawrence is correct that it is essential for victory. The Pro-Palestinian university students in the spring took enormous risks, which resulted in significant sacrifices. Let us take a lesson from them. It is too easy in this country to stay comfortable – and ignorant – and not take risks.
The 2008 Obama campaign paved the way with award-winning superficiality. Consider the iconic poster: a color-stylized portrait of Obama, with versions featuring the word “Progress,” “Hope” or “Change,” leading viewers to insert their personal vision of what constituted progress, hope or change. Brilliant in its messaging vacuity.
I thought of the Obama poster while reading this article as well.
The transformation in US of the Left into the “left” occurred at some point during his two terms of office.
It occurred long before that. It occurred beginning with Reagan in 1980.
Don’t put down the late 60’s counter cultural revolution, the anti Vietnam war protests, civil rights movement, and women’s liberation movement were nothing to sniff at.
Thank you. We keep on fighting.
Do you like Ike better? hxxps://www.britannica.com/video/174137/Dwight-D-Eisenhower-I-Like-Ike-television-1952
Brilliant article, Patrick! Every paragraph, particularly in your descriptive analysis of the poster, filled with zingers that, entirely apart from CN being a family publication, are all whang in the gold. It describes the same kind of mind set of a dedicated Harris supporter who replied to a comment of mine opposing the Harris circus: “Shut up, shut up, shut up” (without punctuation). Ye gods.
There it is, the scream of the butterfly piercing through the heavy air of that gone world where thought and action defined a prominence of contempt for just such duplicity we see continually before us today.
Daily, as I stream “Democracy Now,” I keep asking out loud: why are the streets of the USA USA USA not teeming in rebellion? We are experiencing the dance of the dead 21st century style. Lawrence has a clear view from a time was into a global present of induced fear which grips the psyche of another silence.
You need to stop watching “Democracy Now”. Amy Goodman went over to the corporatocracy a long time ago. Read what Patrick had to say about her in his latest book.
Good call Carolyn. Also Common Dreams, Roots Action and other so-called left outlets are merely bait-and-switch artists for the oligarchy: we MUST vote Joyful Genocide, to “save democracy” and “stop Trump”. They give hypocrisy a bad name.
FYI. I tried to sign into your patron account but it would send me a code. I hope it is only my lack of tech skills or some benign reason and not part of this ongoing uppression of principled journalists.
Patrick, your eloquent writing soothes my troubled soul. I wish I could give you a hug. To put it in story, Kamala stars in the leading role in “Serial Mom”, a John Waters 90s black comedy, while I and others who left the Democratic Party in disgust have been banished to District 12 in “The Hunger Games.”
Dear Mr. Lawrence,
Do you believe the Invasion of our Borders and the related chaos of our Republic is beyond the ability of one man, even Trump, to control ? Should he have more than support from individuals or the federal government ?
Do you believe if state legislators/governors see our borders as an “actually invaded or imminent Danger” situation, they have an option of a declaration of War ? Ref: Article I, Section 10, clause 3. Could they activate National Guard units, put machine gun nests on location with night vision and drone surveillance, with instructions or remote control/programmed digital control, and use lethal force for any territorial violators ? The causalities, after the initial confrontation, will be far less than that from fentanyl and rape. Temporary apprehensions at airports, if allowed to land, would dream for retention, and food, as nice as J6er’s receive.
A declaration of WAR would appear to establish martial law and suspends access to civil law due process. It is also assumed to suspends federal authority. Ref: Amendment X.
Invaders who have invaded residences could possibly face National Guard SWAT team elimination.
Seizure of assets by government via CBDC appear to be manifestations of invasion and subject to martial law prevention. Failure to do so would appear to violate Amendment XIII.
Martial law applied to the invasion’s corruption of voting could expedite correction. Garland has even informed the public that Russia, a foreign invader, will be blamed for Trump’s winning to void Trump’s election. States must work to secure valid elections.
The invasion’s infringement on Free Speech is a companion and result of the Invasion and is subject to State prevention. Declarations of Truth, issued by a coalition of States, are difficult for an Invasion to distort.
It is further possible such State legislators could consider examining the authorization of officers stationed at any military installation within their jurisdiction. Any officer that cannot evidence a State approved identification as an officer would be given 24 hours to abandon the territory of the State or face a charge of impersonating a federal officer pursuant to Article I, Section 8, clause 16. A Standing Army is an essential tool of a tyrant and is Constitutionally forbidden. Clause 12.
Is the above a realistic course of action for the States ?
Respectfully, Jim
Joyful Genocide
Going from Genocide Joe to Genocide Joy.
An excellent analysis of our present psycho-social predicament. There is no organized opposition to the current economic-political system. There is no opposition to capitalism, but only an effort by progressives to make it more humane. The idealism of today’s progressives takes the view that, to make the world a better place, it is just a matter of pruning away wrong behavior, wrong attitudes, and wrong thoughts. It is a kind of idealism taken to the extreme, to the point that it denies objective reality. And it seems to revert to a world-outlook of Pure Good vs. Pure Evil, which is infantile and at the same time very traditional to the Abrahamic faiths.
At times it just feels like I’m watching a slow-motion train wreck, while sitting in the observation car of the same train. It’s a challenging time, so I try to remain open to the moment and to keep an open heart. I do not fear the present nor do I yearn for the past.
Thank you, Mr. Lawrence, for helping me to keep it in perspective.
“When did it pass from left to “left”?” On one level it didn’t. I stopped subscribing to the Nation in the early 1990s because it was no longer left, but liberal, promoting cruises in place of analysis and working class solidarity. Other publications similarly changed decades ago, Mother Jones, the Progressive, New Republic, or else went belly up, Ramparts, The Guardian (not to be confused with the British newspaper).
OTOH, such publications I continued to subscribe to, including Counter Punch, and Z magazine, never left the left, and, I am sure, need our support.
BTW, my name is Joy, and I do not authorise the use of my name in that poster.
My experience is similar. Now I get my news from the World Socialist Web Site, Consortium News, The Grayzone, the Duran, Ben Norton, Richard Medhurst, the Electronic Intifada, and many other independent journalists. The Socialist Equality Party is the real left, and runs candidates for President and Vice President in every election. I only vote for them. The last time I voted Democrat was 1992. Never again. Ever.
“I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise.”
-Daniel Berrigan
This is true and beyond depressing. How has our country come to a choice between Trump and Harris?
Answer: they are not the left. They are neoliberals – ID politics and being a culture warrior does not a leftie make, AOC. Clinton sabotaged any last pretence the Democrats and their supporters harboured of economic reform for a fairer society. Ever since they’ve been gaslighting their supporters. Perhaps they’re also getting them high on something, because you need magical thinking to believe this bullshit, above all joy! I’ve just read that Gates and Big Pharma are seeing a big opportunity for vaccinology with the growing polio epidemic in Gaza. That kind of joy?
Brilliant article. Thanks, as ever.
Pastiche diminishes to AI scraped superficiality; deformed fingers
Flower nostalgic as The Constitution. Still American Dreaming
Thank You Patrick
The Joy of Genocide.
Thanks Patrick. I would note that I was a teenager back in the late 1960s and early 1970s and identified with the political, anti-war left. Just so you know that all people on the “left” now are not Kamala clones, my political leanings remain the same, I am anti-war, anti-unregulated capitalism, and I still want comprehensive National Healthcare, free college educations, and want a drastic reduction in military spending. I would no more vote for Harris than I would for Trump. So please understand that there are many on the “left” that want nothing to do with modern Democrats (or Republicans). You just don’t get to see posters adorned with flowers about us, or hear our voices in the Corporate-Owned-News (CON). But we are here, and we are very angry.
This article resonated with me. I always enjoy reading Mr Lawrence’s work. However, this piece went beyond positing an idea that had already occurred to me, and no doubt to others. It is obvious, or ought to be, that the “Democratic” Party’s candidate is being promoted like a bar of soap or some other such product, where we are to focus on the packaging and not on its contents.
But Mr Lawrence has transcended a mere recitation of the obvious. He has provided a deep analysis of significance and meaning behind the “Politics of Joy” as represented by the poster. This is what I believe makes the current article especially brilliant.
It occurs to me that much could be gained by a comparative study of the iconography associated with the other “major party” candidate: Flower Power Politics of Joy contrasted with Defiant Fist in the Air Politics of Anger. In both cases there is an effort to touch an emotional nerve. But they differ in that there is much to be angry about, while there is very little reason for joy. I must acknowledge, though, that when it comes to at least some of the most important current foreign policy matters, neither candidate offers anything to be happy about.
Truly great analysis of the 1960s vs. now.
“The necessity of sacrifice” knocked me off my chair. Complainers today are too busy watching Netflix to organize, get out in the street, and tear the oligarchy down. If they even think about it — “between the goal posts” in Patrick Lawrence’s terms — it is somebody else’s job. And it is somebody else’s job to govern us, the whole idea of self-government being such an imposition when one’s mission in life is to be entertained. Or famous.
They put a screen in everybody’s hands and hypnotized the masses. Convenience captured everyone who can afford a smartphone. Amazon goes to the store for you. We are brains in tin cans. Of course there is no one you can talk to anymore. What everyone thinks is packaged like breakfast cereal and as devoid of nutrition.
It really is funny in a depressing way what “the left” has been reduced to. Identity politics and pronouns. Because there is no pushback by the empire about those things and they are actually encouraged. Black faces in high places works for the oligarchs. Hire a few house Negroes and you don’t have to do anything for the rest. Amazing how rare it is to meet someone who understands this.
Then there are the wars. Amazing anyone buys the narrative, it contradicts itself so often and is so totally at odds with history. No one knows history anyway. No one knows how finance works either, what rent-seeking is, why everything in the U.S. is falling apart, why so many people are homeless, why no one can afford the rent.
Patrick’s analysis of the Joy poster is really great. Best essay of his I have read so far.
Oh, Patrick, what apropos timing you have. I just finished watching a PBS fund-raising special about a late-60s rock concert with the anti-war themes of that period so antithetical to PBS’s current establishment narrative tone and thinking how well it was capitalizing (just the right word) on the nostalgia value of that time despite its discord with the average PBS viewer’s manufactured attitude today.
While I had no interest whatsoever in following the DNC farce I do understand that it’s your unappetizing journalistic job to report on it so that people like me won’t have to watch it and I thank you for doing so even though it causes me to think about how many people I still love but have lost some of my respect after having succumbed to the relentless manipulation of the last half century just so that they can get on with their lives because politics is just too damn complicated to deal with at other than a personal level.
So Kii Arens is an Abstractionist.
Hieronymus Bosch would have given us a Succubus dancing on a carpet of Palestinian skulls.
‘Make America Hip Again’
‘We’re All Hippies Now’
This a very important article.
And so, as Einstein said, we drift towards catastrophe.
I’ve noted the parallel between the 1968 Politics of Joy of Hubert Humphrey’s campaign – – as police were bashing heads of peace demonstrators in Chicago, and bombs and slaughter going on in Vietnam. And the nauseating grin of Harris plastering over genocide in Gaza, and indeed in Ukraine, which has lost half its population to prison, exile or the meat grinder.
Lawrence eloquently captures the real feeling of denial.
Gramsci urged us to Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will.
Lawrence himself knows the risk of speaking Truth.
Wow this is an amazing piece thank you!
If you take the two “ii”s out of his name, you end up with “Karens”.
I get the Paisley significance. But wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise.
And the Tshirts are €43,95. Framed posters are €258,95. (Conveniently converted into euros, just in case anyone in europe might want to purchase this non-consequential piece of tat.)
However, $10 from each poster sale goes to the Harris/Walz Campaign.
How benevolent.
From the article:
“And the greatest of all risks, Dufourmantelle writes, is the first one we must take if we are to take all the others. This is the risk we take when we overcome our fear of life and determine to live.
It is, she says, “the risk of not dying.” And by not-dying she means refusing the death in life to which most people succumb as they surrender to conformity, or to inaction, or to our paranoiac addiction to total certainty.””
And how right Mlle. Dufourmantelle is. A lot of people die, long before they are dead. And what kills them is this terrible weight of unused life.
Thankyou Mr. Lawrence for this realistic opinion.
“Vote Joy 2024” – Mass delusion. (You know it makes sense.)
Trump and Co. are busy demonizing Harris as a blithering idiot smiling all the time and totally inept as a serious prospect as president. Surely. they are very happy with this “joy” poster that Patrick is taking on so seriously. I hope I’m not reading into Patrick’s comments a view that the time it reflects was as sentimentally stupid as this Kii Arens product. “All we need is love, love” felt good but I don’t think anyone who sang along with it failed to recognize its irony. In fact that time was very grim, as much so if not more than now. So what we’re seeing here indeed is the marketing of a candidate in terms opposite to the pallid old hunk of meat previously being served up. Nothing more. And if the Kamala people want to acquisition this imagery for their campaign the Trump people will probably fist-bump appreciatively.