KENTUCKY MEAT SHOWER #23: EVERYTHING SO DEMOCRATIC AND COOL

After I Left--Everything So Democratic and Cool--"1985" by Bowling for Soup

About a week after I left I started walking around the city at night. It was all I could do. There was too much to think about. I had left, after all, and it was like the block of wood got kicked out from under the table. I looked for things to take pictures of. I didn’t find a lot. Instead I walked around Richmond, thinking about how two years ago it was the site of a struggle, how for a moment a new world might burst out of the old one’s skull, and how it didn’t, and how I was disappointed enough it was a pretext to why I left. 

Something odd. Each night I went out, I came back and I had messages from numbers I didn’t recognize. They were, of course, spam texts. I didn’t receive any buzzes on my walks, or maybe I was too focused on something else to not notice them. 

I do not know why I responded to them. The spam texts all spoke of various issues: sick cousins, mothers from the old country looking for lost sons. The chief takeaway I got from every text is that everything was in a constant static hum of anxiety everyone felt but you had to attune your ears to. I knew they were all fake, but everything I think that gets put out into the world has a truth to it even in its lie. It was a sort of experiment, I suppose, to talk to all of these scammers and see if I could try and get them to get to the truth of why they were doing this. But more often than not, I prolonged the conversation, roping the dopes into a facsimile of understanding and then when they made the inevitable ask I blocked them. I had dreams of their problems and awoke to more texts from other numbers.

I wondered if, like the call centers I worked in, somebody was watching them with a clipboard, seeing if they were behind on their stats. "It has now been 0 days since we've given a sucker an even break," reads the white paper flip board at the end of their rows. I imagined each of their Funko pops looking at them vacantly as they typed onto their cell phones and some man in a vest and a pikachu t-shirt watched everything they do, a gallery of dead black eyes reflecting screens. I could smell their break room, its constant stink of pepperoni. Perhaps it was a recognition I once walked these places as well, though I took phone calls about insurance and didn’t sit in endless rows texting people looking for suckers to think my mom was sick of hammertoe. 

After a point, the number of texts began to choke all my life. I would see texts by friends go unresponded, making me look rude. I replied to them and just then, I would get another text, not from a friend, but from one of the many numbers that asked me for a variety of things, these remora-like sirens. I decided I could no longer play their games. I decided to ignore them. 

It was when I ignored them, when I took my time away, that the voices all converged at once. They told me they understood, that I needed to step away from our entanglements. That I needed the time for myself. These messages, however, did not stop: there was a torrent of therapy speak, vague homilies that behind them pretended they had compassion for me. I told them I knew nothing of their problems, that they all seemed randomly generated and that I’d block every number. Things were quiet for fifteen minutes. 

I walked away and started making a simple roast fish and sweet potato dinner. My phone was on the counter playing Lee Scratch Perry when the phone calls started. It was like all the calls happened at once. One would start and as I’d end another would come in. The numbers, nine digits that told a genealogy but were given to these voices like costumes , all regurgitated from the depths of these festering dead halls of beige onto my screen. I kept hitting decline, but the calls poured on and my phone was growing hot in my hands. In addition, I have a terrible ringtone (a melted bossa nova sounding thing so I’ll either decline or answer the call quickly)  I’ve never changed and the music was loud, sending the midi sounding bossa nova sound throughout my house.

I answered a call. A voice, with a pinched scratch, answered. “Excuse me?”

“Quit calling me. I’m not interested in whatever you all are selling. Or whatever shit you’re up to. Just stop.”

“Excuse me?” The pinched scratch returned. 

“Leave me alone. Leave me the fuck alone.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m going to hang up.”

“That’s just like you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Excuse me?”

I hung up. The phone calls started again. It was at this point I grabbed my phone and threw it down the hall. The bluetooth speaker picked up. The scratched voice returned. “Excuse me?”

“What?” I screamed out loud.

“Excuse me?” It said. I unplugged the bluetooth speaker. “Excuse me?” It said. “That’s just like you.” It repeated these phrases. I took the speaker to my room and picked up my phone in the hall, the screen now splintered, calls continuing to come in. I turned the phone off and vowed to get a replacement.  Through the walls of my house, I could hear the repeating drone of the two phrases. I began to walk towards my room.

My next memory is of street lights and a dim alley. I walked forward, holding the blue tooth speaker. The alley, with a few lights, looked like some long mouth. Now on the speaker new voices came through, a clambering cacophony, all laying on me their level of disappointment, their indignation. And after a point: they began relaying to me my worst failures. It seems that when i was trying to analyze them through their texts all along all I was doing was allowing myself to be analyzed and my analyses of them had revealed my own anxieties to them. With every scratchy replication of these anxieties I stumbled forward more.

I reached a clearing, where a few power lines crossed in a pattern. I stood in the middle of them all and looked up. The wires fell down and began to grab me by my wrists and my ankles, pulling me in every direction. The screaming of anxieties grew louder, but not louder than the tearing I heard.

Welcome to Kentucky Meat Shower.

EVERYTHING SO DEMOCRATIC AND COOL

I.

 When Twitter lit up with the news that the interstitial governing body of the Democratic Socialists of America, known as the National Political Committee, had voted to dissolve the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions working group, I started calling friends to tell them I was leaving. 

In 2017, right around the org’s revival from a small, irrelevant survivor of the New Left to an organization with surging life, a group of young DSA members banded together in the Left Caucus, a hard left big tent grouping that would orient the organization towards its youth, including a specific emphasis on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.  At the convention that year, the traditional chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” broke out on the floor when the DSA, as a body, affirmed its commitment to Palestinian liberation. Five years later, we sold out, and the people who voted to disband BDS are as much children of the Left Caucus as I am, and I have left. 

Why the National Political Committee made this decision is for a footnote in history: Representative Jamaal Bowman voted to fund an Israeli short range missile system known as the Iron Dome. The Iron Dome was designed to intercept the threats “Israel faces from short and medium-range rockets and mortar shells fired from Gaza”. It’s inarguable that there are short and medium-range rockets being fired from Gaza, but that’s the result of a series of pressures and decisions from a far-right Israeli government that treats Palestinians as second class citizens.

There were calls from the BDS working group to sever ties with Bowman, who is both a “member” and an endorsed electoral official. In November, there was a vote to decide if they would. The NPC did not. The working group criticized this. The working group was considered to be, in that word that hacks deploy quicker than anyone, “wreckers”. So they were squashed. The group was disaffiliated, their twitter turned off, and leaders in the group were banned from leadership in other working groups. 

Footnote or not, it was disastrous for the DSA. For  the popular idea that good enough candidates beating a bunch of bad ones spelled progress, it spelled a death blow, whether its proponents realize or not. And with midterms coming in November, they won't. 

When you're running an insurgency, divisions are fatal. The issue is this: some people realize they're in an insurgency, and some people think they're in government. The promise the entryists gave us is that we'd have the best of a propaganda unit that could enact both progressive and socialist policy change at the same time, with progressive policies being the trojan horse to be opened to reveal a bevy of red flags. In this view, the more social democracy you have, the closer to socialism you are. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, like history, just need a push. The promise was designed to please the insurgents, interested in having official mouthpieces and necessary reforms, and the little ministers, who believe those reforms are the final step, and if there’s paper they get to push, even better.

 But giving the game to Jamaal Bowman means that progressivism, in its advances and its faults, has won, and socialism has lost. Everyone can make their appeals to Marx, Lenin, and Luxemburg all they like, but you meet an example or you don’t. Their socialism is no deeper than a t-shirt featuring Castro with a lamp on his head emblazoned Communist Party, as hollow as a Christmas ornament. 

The Palestine issue is a specific slap in the face when you consider that the Squad, outside of Bowman, have navigated the issue with decent panache. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have managed to not buckle on Palestine. Had they done so, we’d have had a debate about it. Why are we allowing somebody who’s broadly considered to be a part of the Squad to buckle on an issue when we know it’s not necessary? If they can’t do what they were put there, why are we dealing with them? Why are we shying away from the politics that lead to our revival?

Bowman should have been expelled without a second thought. If you can’t expel him, you have to orient the organization to appease politicians, which waters down your ability to make demands of those politicians. Which is what politics, last I checked, are about. This doesn’t even get into the fact that Jamaal Bowman serves a district in New York, not even a state. If ever there were a disciplinable man, it’d be Jamaal Bowman. You can’t let someone who doesn’t have that much pull big dick you, because it tells everyone big and small you’ll eat their shit and smile. 

If the organization were the mailing group it is accused of being and at its worst it behaves as, I would have left long ago. But I was the sitting chair of Richmond’s chapter because I believed the organization could live up to the socialist ideal, including towards internationalism.  BDS is a rational solution that aids the Palestinian cause in the face of irrationality: either Israel changes or feels the vice grip. Putting pressure on the United States government to divert money away from the Israeli government, to break their colonialist caste system, is humane and necessary, if the least of what the legionnaires of Tel Aviv deserve. For what is inhumane and ignorant, I have no time. 

Why stay in an organization that supports someone who funds something like Operation Breaking Dawn? Based off of a supposed planned attack by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), anywhere between seven and fifteen Palestinian children died. When the PIJ shot back, they had a 20% success rate firing in to Tel Aviv in response to a preemptive attack by the IDF. The Iron Dome, according to the IDF, had a 97% success rate intercepting the PIJ’s rocket attacks, and all casualties were the PIJ’s rockets. Either way: if the children were killed by PIJ misfires, somebody fired first. If they were killed by the IDF’s airstrikes, then once again, we prove that the value of air strikes is the destruction by the indiscriminate bombing. Speaking with the Middle East Eye, Meron Rapoport summed it up well: "The bottom line is that after Israel allegedly tried to prevent Islamic Jihad attacks, it is now receiving rockets that apparently would not have happened if Israel did not attack first.” 

Despite all this: given a chance to rectify the vote, the NPC voted to reaffirm the ban on BDS Working Group Steering members from leadership roles in the organization. I haven’t regretted leaving yet. 

II.

People who support the decision to disband all ties with BDS may cry “democracy” and “majority rule”. After all, 9 members elected to make these decisions. But anybody in a country who just elected Donald Trump should be careful about screaming “democracy” and should also figure this: the NPC decision was made by nine people for the entire destiny of an organization. Another fun fact: the NPC is the interstitial governing body. In other words, it does the job of the member convention when the member convention isn’t in order, is elected by the convention, and answers to the convention.

For an organization so obsessed with attaching “democratic” to socialist (while my conception of it figures in democracy quite heavily, I don’t really care about making myself seem more cuddly), you have a Supreme Court making the decisions the House of Representatives should make. The majority supporters will look at the Supreme Court disbanding Roe v. Wade and, in between seeing a fundraising opportunity, will tweet, “NORMAL COUNTRY”, never once thinking NORMAL ORGANIZATION.

III.

There are people who want to win nothing more than to sleep at night and will do anything to get it. There is not a progressive force in human history that hasn’t had mediocrity clinging to its fur.  The human problems of organization will always exist but compared to 2016, when you could form a coalition to make coherent enough social democratic demands against the barbed wire policies of Donald Trump, the possibility of a mandate is gone. 

During this time, there were beautiful victories, ones that stoke fire. Civil resistance was always around the corner, the examples of the airport protests stopping the Muslim Ban, the Women’s March, and Charlottesville fresh in everyone’s minds. Those moments aren’t created by faith alone, but by realities that can be provoked. In the early days of the Trump administration, battles were pitched on whether Trump’s Lazy Boy fascism had a mandate to enforce its will. Where this fascism did succeed and is succeeding is in the continued worship of our ability to lock a door. Haitians were whipped at the Mexican border by immigration officials on horses under Trump, but there is no reason to believe border agents under Biden have given up their horses and whips, especially with Kamala Harris barred out and purring “Don’t come”. All that has changed in a floating fortress nation that shoots on sight is the turret gunners.

What has changed is our ability to intervene: the DSA needed to build the ability to intervene in crises that did not come once every November. While intraorganizational knife fights aren’t the most interesting thing to talk about, broadly, socialists who pushed for local campaigns based on the analysis of local pressures were in a fight with those believed reform was the path to what they wanted, that sooner or later you reform and reform enough you get a new society. The ministers told everyone that direct actions and small mutual aid projects are on their own, because the long game’s victory comes at the expense of the early first steps. 

The continued elevation of crises that the organization has not built capacity to respond to reveals the bankruptcy of this focus.  In the hell of Covid, which picked clean all skeletons, that capacity was used to keep the lights on, with tool kits dispersed to keep members engaged, not fed, comforted, or even given a purpose. If the moment of Trump hatched fledglings ready to discard their bourgeois shells, the pandemic encouraged an extended moment of grief for the shards left in the nest. Keeping the lights on is necessary, but disappearing from national consciousness during the pandemic was ruinous. For the mass that would be crucial for the viability of any socialist project in the United States, the organization had to seem more like a club or even worse: completely invisible. For the people in small chapters, dedicated organizers with jobs, stressors, and lives outside the NGO constellation, the pandemic put chapters which were healthy and building back to year zero. 

In the insurrectionary fire of George Floyd, the organization found itself tailing another moment it could have acted in greater concert with. In that moment, the mass found itself aching for other avenues to explain why police continue the Faces of Death franchise going with every slaughter of a loosie salesman or a young woman in a no knock raid. There was a Black Lives Matter protest in Norton, Virginia, not 10 minutes from where I grew up. While the DSA’s official line did speak to defunding the police, a worthy goal when we see inflated budgets and every day cruelties constantly inflicted, it remains that the lessons we learned in 2015, that the power of the state was weaker than it seemed, was forgotten. Faced with a moment where crisis was obvious, the organization was not built to teach working class people to take advantage and claim ownership to build something that benefits the multitude, not the few and their collaborators. People aching for an answer to the deep vexation see their lives through a scrim of tears, conscious to their alienation with no one to comfort them and remind them of the the prophecy delivered by Karl Marx in the Principles of the International’s Constitution, that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, that the struggle for the emancipation means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of class rule,” unless it’s a Tuesday in November.

In August, the convention came. Smear campaigns ran rampant. Several people running for the NPC dropped out. The official channels the organization have to combat harassment suddenly became weapons of political machinery to defeat enemies. An ancient DSA proverb about your enemies goes as follows: unlike (xyz), I actually do the work. When it came time to win a line fight, the people whose entire egos are built on being a trademark of a Socialist Organizer couldn’t organize and had to go to the principal. Regular policy fights, for instance, the Internationalism debates, were laced with venom: proxy wars for who would get control of the organization, the point missed entirely.

The most notable thing about convention to me: the organization elected to not make housing a priority during an economic catastrophe. But according to some members of the NPC, tenant organizing isn’t an effective pathway to power, probably because Washington thinks nothing of it.

Over the pandemic, the homelessness rate in Richmond rose 30%. 

IV.

It’s not a matter of political ideology, because opportunism is a lack of. When a dog chases a car, you don’t say they’re a Doggist. The difference between who think it is possible to transform the Democrats and the people who strangle in cradles what could be is one group of people are looking for a club and the others are people mistaken.  The thirst for an invitation exists suspended in a sort of liquid privilege, a morphine drip of belonging, bonhomie given by vicious creditors whose interest rates only climb. For some it is that they’ve never considered it never had to be this way, for some it is the belief it’s the only way it can, for some it is the simple fact that convincing yourself there is a way to access some hidden inner circle, some magazine feature that will calm the ever growing sense that they’ve spent these hot years the parts in a reality show, some minor victory that will lead to a banging after party down the line, not knowing one day all that moths eat their way through gowns and tuxedos; these revelers are unaware that if the movement does not win, the stakes are our mutual death, their skeletons clad in evening wear and cobwebs in an abandoned ballroom and everyone else dead in ditches. These people think they’ll live forever but they make the decisions someone who believes their death will be a delivery from misery would make. If I were going to live forever, I’d act different.

These people are not motivated by anything other than the chase, and once they get ahold of the bumper they never know what to do and more often than not they get thrown into the undertow of the road, a rolling whirl of hair, teeth, and blood, and tossed in the same ditches they littered with us. For some principles are medals you wear while you mop up the dissidents. That the politics are warmed over trade union social democracy, but with the rigid historical amnesia of every Stalinist ratfucker in history is not a contradiction so much as it reveals the truth about these tendencies and the true emptiness as the people who espouse them. With every person who bans members who dual card in organizations that they don’t like, with every person whose job gets called and their managers tattled to, with every person who drops their involvement because of harassment, with every person who takes credit for victories they can’t even be a part of it, it becomes apparent: victory is not a necessity but just a pretext for the recording a victory for the purposes of their own flattery.  You cannot be in a fox hole with them for fear of a bayonet in your side. 

Even the fifth column of American society has not been enough to cause a reassessment.  The world we live in now is our failure. In the country left over after George Floyd, a rancor and reaction has come that the DSA’s right wing cannot conceive of: patriarchal contras that strip bare the possibilities of better lives for women and queer people. Across the countryside there are whispers of some grand solution needed. With Libs of Tiktok playing Der Sturmer, we are seeing a return to the public sphere, the apotheosis of right wing spectaclized violence. Photographs of lynchings were once on postcards. On the internet, where this spectacle’s power is compounded infinitely, the entire world sings propaganda together, by sharing, discussing, and disseminating it. The twitch stream inside that Buffalo Tops, the cops in their tactical gear checking their phones in Uvalde, these serve as reminders of the enemy’s vast power, its ability to deliver into these events an aura that fogs the eyes. There is nothing stopping that violence being visited en masse against what the right has decried as the cells weaking the body. The right wing has control of politics in this country, and in response to the violent static in the wind, the largest socialist organization in the country finds itself captured by a class that does not understand that something beyond the oafish soft power grabs of Trump has grown into their assassins. One day they’ll find themselves surrounded, calling for reinforcements that will never come, because there are none. They banished them.

V.

Karl Marx said when the train of history hits a curve, all the intellectuals fall off, and his most famous student, Vladimir Lenin, repeated this as well. In his infinite melancholy, Benjamin said that  ‘Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake’. A cousin of his angel of history the train is one of many documents of barbarism. For prisoners, the train was a symbol of a world that would pass them by and one day deliver them home. In the meantime the whistle of the train split open a silence between the imprisoned world and the free one. 

Socialists who adopt the train now as a countercultural symbol have turned the definitive advancement of the 19th century into something as meaningless as a Che Guevara shirt you can buy at Gap. Their revolutions are a train ride through the countryside, looking onto the prisoners of the world and wondering what they’re thinking. The train is going to a destination, now undecided, and they have accepted that they will just be deposited at the station. But soon the realization has to come that there is no station. It was never built. All there is at the end is a straight drop onto rocks and water. The bodies wrangled and left to submerged graves are of no mind to them. 

After the NPC voted on their decision, an open letter calling for signatories circulated supporting the decision, crying “Unity, Not Unanimity”. The timing of the letter was circumspect, and there was a lot of scuttlebutt that it was written to get out in front of the BDS decision, written with full knowledge of the decision, knowledge none of us had. As it currently sits, another letter, titled “For An Internationalist DSA”, written against the decision, has 31 pages of signatories. The NPC couldn’t even make a popular decision.

But some people would like nothing more than to die in a sleeper cars. Here are some of their names. 

“1985” by Bowling for Soup

I was inside of a Wawa buying breakfast and some power steering fluid when this song came on, and I almost caused a public incident. I survived being 12 already, the last I need to do is be hit with the recollection of this chili-cheese dog smelling group of losers and their biggest hit. Color me surprised it’s actually a cover, but anybody who made “1985” their biggest song probably is doing the best they can, and it takes all kinds on Noah’s Ark. 

If you’ve never heard this song, click on it and send me $5.00 for making me feel guilty that you’re that big of a sucker. It may clarify the following. 

What surprised me, though, was my knee jerk reaction wasn’t based entirely around my hatred of pop punk, or the noisome vocals. It was the depiction of nostalgia through music that struck me as most dishonest. Our 1985 aspiring lead character, a woman whose goal is to be an it-girl of some kind, loves Duran Duran and Wham. But the song doesn’t respect her enough to speak of her predicament in her language. Rather it places her in the constellation of U2, Blondie, Springsteen, and Madonna. If you read the lyrics carefully, there’s a split: direct description and mockery. We get the hint that she doesn’t like Limp Bizkit, but that’s the end of her personality: her aspiration to be a star and actress get boiled down to shaking her ass on the hood of Whitesnake’s car. If you wanted to be really uncharitable, you could say pop punk is what happens when you let meatheads try to wrangle punk from its promises. But as much as we like to think of time as an ocean, mostly we are all existing in small tributaries feeding off from a main river, and if you’re going to comment on the water quality of one, you better know the parameters. If you’re going to be mean to an middle aged woman, do it right. Why would a new wave girl want anything to do with Whitesnake? No matter what mockery Bowling for Soup throws at its Prozac slugging protagonist, she can always shoot back, “At least I’m not in Bowling for Soup.” 

But “1985” is absolutely a product. Coming out in 2004 you can see the math in Butch Walker’s head. “I have Bowling for Soup here. They keep sack tapping each other and breaking my cabinets. And they suck at music, but we can work with that…what’s that one song by that one band I produced that was better than these guys that is named after the year that, if you subtract 20, is 20 years ago? Oh yeah! 1985!” And as a product, it has to try and capture their entirety of time by going to every tributary with a fish tank, grabbing some moss from one bank and water from each to the point you have a representation of the river. Which is how you get the dichotomy between the music the main character likes, and the music the Greek chorus of Bowling for Soup throws at her like dead fish. 

However, there’s not much anyone can do to stop that the times before us are best understood in small, caricaturable chunks, and when we look at the sitcom depictions of the times we were in, we inevitable feel like the time we experienced was nothing like it was. As imperfect as our memories are, nothing is as cruel as the alienation we feel when the time is rendered to us as a parody, if we are in the throes of nostalgia. But even outside it’s grasp, if we’re in the position of Bowling for Soup, looking at the person in love with their nostalgia, sooner or later we have to fight against our urge make our historical pasts a pastiche, to not call small aquariums full of time from every tributary history. Otherwise, something real gets lost.