Festive Abattoir

don't brain, worm people

I find myself speechless, but let’s try to work through it.

When he was the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti was stunningly creative. He appointed an ambassador, the only city diplomat in America, and set her to the bold task of deepening the city’s foreign relationships. He appointed chief sustainability officers in every city department, to be overseen by a central chief sustainability officer. He named a deputy mayor for innovation, assigning her a portfolio that included not just equity but even “digital equality.” And he thought in sophisticated ways about the Los Angeles of the 22nd century, not merely the century in which he had been chosen to lead.

Also, the parks were filthy, the homeless population exploded, the sidewalks were covered in shit and trash, the streets were potholed and dangerous, and only the sustained political efforts of public employee unions stopped Garcetti from closing a bunch of fire stations. Way back when, in the days when we still lived there, I sent the patrol commander in our local LAPD division a picture of a homeless drug addict passed out on the sidewalk with a starlike pattern of stains — shit, piss, vomit — spreading from his body, and he apologized but said that change was unlikely. He had a young patrol officer, he said, who was a Syrian immigrant; she frequently noted that Syria was a lot cleaner.

I thought of the brilliant innovator Eric Garcetti this morning because his hair-gelled sociopathic doppelganger bro is spending the week in China, being brilliant and innovative with his brilliant and innovative partners in the Chinese Communist Party.

And it’s not just words, okay, he’s not just talking — he also signed an agreement with China to jointly control the climate of the planet, China and California boldly marching arm-in-arm into the bold future that they have the boldness to build together, boldly! (Insert own wall poster here.)

I drove up the 110 freeway over the weekend, from Pasadena toward downtown Los Angeles, and watched a half-naked man wandering across the opposing lanes, nearly being hit several times by cars that suddenly happened upon a pedestrian at 70 miles per hour. He didn’t seem to notice, and finally made it to the cover of his cardboard home on the shoulder of the freeway. About those freeways, by the way:

The putatively sophisticated symbols, the dismal reality. Watching how easily the narrative-focused world pivoted, this month, from tortured families and the indescribably shameful mass murder of unarmed people at a dance music festival to a story in which Israel is attacking Gaza for no discernible reasons — they must just be very mean! — I see that story triumphs over the physical. Real things, move to the back. Queers for Gaza! Reproductive justice means free Palestine! Abortion is Hamas, and Hamas is abortion, and Hezbollah is presumably transgenderism, something something social justice. ISIS is the morning-after pill, Nazi! I’m torturing kibbutzniks to protect DEMOCRACY!

I don’t know how to analyze any of this — it’s like thinking about the meaning in a string of vomit.

In major cities and on college campuses, it’s been extremely important to remove pictures of kidnapped Israelis from public space.

Seeing the wrong images is supporting genocide. The claim isn’t that the posters don’t show something real; the response involves the problem of telling the wrong story, so the story has to be stopped. None of the performance has meaning. None of the pieces form into a coherent whole. The point is just to vomit anti-stories, to be against.

And you can’t argue against this completely empty arguing against, because you just find yourself living in the emptiness of the reaction to a reaction to a vague sense of narrative intent that doesn’t connect to any form of reality. And then your position becomes so bizarrely nonsensical that you risk being elected to public office in California.

So. Against this moment, I find myself speechless. I’m working on it.