Your Agony and Ruin Are a Wonderful Foundation For Our Warm Togetherness

in my mental symbolworld

Let’s connect two things that won’t appear to be connected.

During the worst days of the Los Angeles wildfires, Mayor Karen Bass was generally radiant (except for a few glitches, like that one time when she went offline at the airport so her mental program could reload). Her happiness filled every room. She had a whole bucket of warm smiles, and she poured them onto everything, like Johnny Appleseed, to grow the seeds of togetherness in the hearts of the people. Here she is greeting people at a disaster recovery center, and also look at the faces behind her:

Here she is at a fire department command post:

Here she is at a Red Cross center, and again, look at the facial expressions in the background:

And here she is talking about the recovery, in one of the strangest moments you’ll ever see from an elected official. Click the link to watch the video, but here’s my favorite screenshot, with magnificent captioning:

This:

So this:

It was such a warm moment, such a positive moment, such a moment of togetherness and friendship. It was a moment for Los Angeles to come together and grow and thrive!

The celebratory theme has been everywhere in Los Angeles, as city, county, and state officials have spoken together at “One Voice” briefings to share the warm story of their courage and strength. It was a time of grief — and that’s why it was tremendous that everyone in government was so wonderful.

To borrow the insight, no one saw the barn. They weren’t talking about families who lost their homes and everything inside them; they weren’t talking about the old and important communities, Altadena and Pacific Palisades, that have been substantially destroyed, and will remain substantially destroyed for years, and will never be rebuilt in a way that captures what they were. They were talking about their moment to shine. They were talking about being in the spotlight, about being leading figures in a national story. They were talking about their political futures, and the need to shape the narrative. They were talking against the problem of what happened, a category their discourse carefully sought to evade. They were producing word-pictures to reshape and redirect, not to describe.

So.

“There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families. Some who fear for their lives.”

What do these sentences mean? There are gay and trans children who fear for their lives: whole communities of four year-old lesbians who wonder today if they’ll be shoved onto the boxcars to be shipped to the death camps. “As a third-grade leather daddy, I feel that I’m staring into the very pit of a mass grave.” Can transgender toddlers even take pleasure in their juice boxes, knowing that the transatzgruppen are on the march?

1. gay, lesbian, and transgender children

2. fear for their lives

Parse this. Describe the depth of sexual expression and gender consciousness present in the mind of the average kindergartner, say for example. Explain precisely the categories: lesbian child, transgender child. Then explain, with data and in a structured, logical argument, the sources and meaning of the fear among children that they’ll die because of their sexual identity. Give names. “Theodora Doe, a six year-old trans lesbian, worries that she/they will be shot by a firing squad because of her/their feelings about her/their girldick.”

Bishop Budde, squinting virtuously with the pained expression of a woman whose bunions are hurting, is using — as clergy, as someone whose entire social function is to use language to provide meaning — words that have no meaning, in formulations that are designed to produce the absence of clarity. Like Karen Bass, she doesn’t see the thing she’s describing. There is no child’s face present in her mind: six years old, into hot man-on-man action, and fearful of immediate violent death because of Donald Trump’s executive orders. The person she purports to describe doesn’t exist, even for her. From the pulpit, she’s expressing…nothing. She’s saying nothing, about nothing, while thinking of nothing, for the manipulative purpose of eliciting an emotional state on the basis of an evasion and an empty expression.

We are pushed and pulled and prodded and nudged by public expression that has no meaning or substance, all day, every day, by people who are carefully evading a discussion of anything real, or by people who don’t have a “real” that they’re able to discuss. The Society of the Spectacle, an analysis that proceeds from Marxist foundations but makes current sense:

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation….The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

We’re living in a relationship with “the non-living,” with the rhetorical negation of life itself. The darkness of a Bishop Budde can’t be exaggerated. She’s the abyss. Stay clear. Live in life and the real, and hold onto it with both hands. Look at faces. Hear voices. Go outside.