The Democratic Party is now loudly concerned that insurgent progressives running under the Democratic Socialist banner are hurting the party. As if the party isn’t hurting itself just fine.
Where to begin? Two years ago, instead of intervening, telling Biden he shouldn’t/couldn’t run for the nomination, holding a real nominating contest, and selecting a strong and charismatic candidate to defeat Trump…we know what happened. And then, as Trump set out on a mission to demolish democracy—and the White House East Wing—the Democratic Party tried to figure out what it was and how to respond. One-and-a-half years later, it is still dithering, trying to decide. When newer and younger leaders emerged, with ideas the party found too bold and risky, the party could not suppress them fast enough.
Leading to two things. One, Democrats, that is the remaining people still willing to be included in that group, are disaffected beyond disappointment, and are showing their lack of enthusiasm in a way the party understands, as donor support is cratering. Two, those newer and younger leaders are catching fire, no matter how much the party tries to put that fire out.
America desperately needs an effective opposition party in this existential crisis. The Democratic Party, as now established, is not it.
Did German citizens tell jokes about Hitler during the Third Reich? Actual jokes like this:
Hitler and Göring are standing on top of the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on the Berliners’ faces. Göring says, “Why don’t you jump?”
Were these people punished? Did the jokes have any effect?
Contrary to a common myth, targeting Hitler using quips and jokes didn’t undermine the regime. Political jokes were not a form of resistance. They were a release valve for pent-up popular anger. People told jokes in their neighborhood bars or on the street because they coveted a moment of liberation in which they could let off a bit of steam. That was ultimately in the interests of the Nazi leadership. Consequently, the Führer and his henchmen rarely cracked down on joke-tellers and if they did, the punishments were mild – mostly resulting in a small fine. In the last phase of the war when the regime felt threatened by “dissenters,” though, this changed. A handful of death sentences were handed down to joke-tellers, though the true reason for this was rarely their actual “crime.” The jokes were taken as a pretext to remove blacklisted individuals – people the Nazis feared or detested because of who they were rather than because of what they had done. Among others, these included Jews, left-wing artists, and Catholic priests. As I show in my book, a staunch party member could walk free after telling a joke, whereas a known “dissenter” was executed for exactly the same quip.
We can’t deny the significance of laughing and humor during the hardest times, personal and social. Jokes, like other subversive art, have a way of digging deep and even encouraging change. There is the example of the king’s fool, who was allowed to say things that others feared to say. But make no mistake, when the king was unhappy, not even the fool was protected from retribution and punishment.
Philosophy is embedded in all that we do, believe, and is done to us. It often goes unrecognized and unattended. Among other places, it appears in our religious traditions, though we receive the philosophies of God, the founders and the wise people as givens which we follow and practice. The same goes for calls to patriotism, nationalism and war.
There are those whose lives and careers are devoted, in whole or in part, to philosophy. Some are in the academy, some are outside. If philosophy is important, and it is, it should be front and center. If media reports regularly included philosophical notes or discussions with philosophers, events and issues could go far and deep beyond “He said, he said, this country attacked, this country fought back, these children were killed, the killing is unfortunate but excusable.” Like that.
Philosophers don’t come more forward, or out at all, for many reasons. Some philosophers, brilliant and insightful as they are, are not easily comprehensible to ordinary people—including other philosophers. This lack of communicative clarity keeps media from regularly including philosophers in their interviews and round-tables. When issues are hot and controversial, as they are now, it is risky for philosophers to offer any insights, especially when the very higher ed institutions they work for are under investigation and assault.
Nevertheless, we need to dig deeper into war and the death of democracy, or the dozens of other issues we face, beyond black and white, good guys and bad guys. Philosophers can do that, as they have always done, when they are given a platform and can make themselves understood.
Between the rational and the irrational is the place that so many traditions point us to, though not all who follow want to go. It is not in the middle, in the sense of being halfway in between, or to applying each one half the time. It is the entire space, with the wholly rational and irrational merely on the outside borders, a thin outline.
This does not sit well with many, who want to have it one way or another. Extreme rationalists frequently work hard to make ordered sense from evidence, rejecting the rest, and particularly vexed by those apparently too lazy or heedless to see how essential the rational way is. Extreme irrationalists may be driven by visions that may be delusions, or by personal preferences, and may indeed avoid the rational because it is hard work or because it may not suit their needs.
This plays out on a bigger social scale. With increasing frequency, the irreligious base their perspective on a loosely rationalist view, not only because there is no evidence of and for the religious, but because the religious seem to discard or ignore the rational in a disordered and possibly self serving way.
No one is right or wrong here, in the sense of winning an ultimately unwinnable argument. Instead consider the field where all things grow, neither rational nor irrational. The place, if we listen to the best of the traditions, where we are born and where we die.
The post below is from April 2017. That unnamed new CEO had only been in his new job for three months. Was he fired? He lost the job for a while, but astonishingly got his job back. Still has it.
He thought the job would be easier.
We are praying. Constantly.
Imagine that you hired a new CEO for your very, very big company (annual budget: $3.8 trillion). The job he takes is universally considered the most difficult job in the world.
Imagine that not all the shareholders approved him. In fact, the shareholders were very, very divided on his being hired.
Imagine that in his early days, he demonstrated some serious gaps in his knowledge and ability to do the job.
Then imagine the new CEO is interviewed and says this:
“I loved my previous life. I had so many things going. This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite.” –William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Aldous Huxley used this quote for the title of his 1954 essay, The Doors of Perception, about his experiences with mescaline.
It is commonly, if simplistically, thought that psychedelic experiences open the floodgates of perception and cognition, control valves that in everyday life are regulated and closed down to allow our lives to go on in a relatively orderly and productive way. The response to those experiences may be happy delirium (Oh wow!) to scary delirium (Oh shit!), and levels in between and with variously lasting impact. One might conclude, as Blake, Huxley and others have, that one will have experienced infinity—whatever that might be.
It is mentioned here to suggest what may be one of the biggest overall problems we now face—and it is not psychedelics, though strangely related.
We are living in a time when in some ways the floodgates of perception and cognition are wide open 24/7. Just as most people, despite their confidence in their balance and stability, are not ready or able to handle 24/7 psychedelic experiences, or at all, so are most not ready or able to handle the flood of everything we seek or is thrown at us. This is not to say that most people are walking around tripping, though that imagined scene is intriguing. This is to say that with those floodgates of perception and cognition open, keeping balance is an overwhelming challenge.
Immediately some will point out that this analysis fails, because so many are still engaged in productive and constructive activities. That would be impossible if, as is posited, everyone is going around, doors cleansed, experiencing infinity all the time.
That misses the point. We can find a way to handle this flood, which for the moment seems inevitable and unavoidable. Just as, from the earliest days of psychedelics, there are those able to manage the flood beneficially, so that they become or remain balanced, stable and sane.
Since we are now drowning in media and thinking, this is not going to be easy. So much stuff. If we want to extend this possibly tortured metaphor, we need to pay attention to our dosage. Whether or not is good for us, here it is, not going away, just growing everywhere all the time.
There may be a bit of confusion about the above image, so a clarification.
No, this is not him as the Buddha, unlike images that appear to claim that he is Jesus. This is an image of him in Buddhist meditation.
No, he is not sleeping, although meditation has been known to lead to that, and he is known for spontaneous sleeping. This is an image of him in Buddhist meditation.
It would be good for America and the world if he followed any of beneficent traditions. By his own admission (sometimes) he is not much of a Christian or anything else. Whatever faith he may hold seems to include heaven and hell, since he has said he does not expect to go to heaven.
If he doesn’t want to adopt an entire Buddhist view, just sitting in meditation daily could do wonders for him and for all of us.
The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men. The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit. The desert was the region in which the Chosen People had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone. They could have reached the Promised Land in a few months if they had travelled directly to it. God’s plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone.
The desert was created simply to be itself, not to be transformed by men into something else. So too the mountain and the sea. The desert is therefore the logical dwelling place for the man who seeks to be nothing but himself—that is to say, a creature solitary and poor and dependent upon no one but God, with no great project standing between himself and his Creator.
This is, at least, the theory. But there is another factor that enters in. First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the “wilderness of upper Egypt” to “wander in dry places.” Thirst drives man mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence—lost because he has immured himself in it and closed out everything else.
So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage….
The desert is the home of despair. And despair, now, is everywhere. Let us not think that our interior solitude consists in the acceptance of defeat. We cannot escape anything by consenting tacitly to be defeated. Despair is an abyss without bottom. Do not think to close it by consenting to it and trying to forget you have consented.
The Avalanches are bent on filtering their all-encompassing record collections through sampling and original instrumentation that owes most to hip-hop. The Australian group truly arrived in 2000 with Since I Left You. An expansive suite in the lineage of sample-based landmarks such as Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, and DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….., the album distinguished itself with an unbridled sense of joy — exemplified not only by the sound of whinnying horses — and minimal original vocal content, left to ingeniously recontextualized voices from disparate sources. Even in the wake of numerous awards, sales certifications, and the attainment of a global following, its stature continued to heighten through the release of the group’s long-anticipated 2016 follow-up, Wildflower, a more collaborative effort that offered new shades of psychedelia and topped the Australian album chart. We Will Always Love You, another wide-ranging set filled with imaginative pairings of featured artists, returned the group to the Top Ten. They reappeared in 2026 with “Together,” an ecstatic dancefloor collaboration with Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza, and Prentiss.
Before the Avalanches took shape in 1997, core members Robbie Chater and Toni Di Blasi, along with fellow founding member Darren Seltmann, were in the Melbourne-based noise-punk band Alarm 115. The deportation of drummer Manabu Etoh prompted a new project, the making of a sample-based demo — utilizing scores of used records…
In the works for over two years, a period lengthened by sample clearances and other business matters, Since I Left You, the Avalanches’ first album, was issued first in Australia in November 2000. A continuous hour-long collage pieced together with thousands of samples, it received a response from critics and the public similar to its glowing quality. The group even had the blessing of Madonna, who allowed them to use the bass line from her early hit “Holiday.” Beggars Banquet offshoot XL issued the album in the U.K. in May 2001, and a U.S. edition on Sire followed that November. “Frontier Psychiatrist” and the title track charted in Australia and were Top 20 hits in the U.K., where the album reached number eight. Remixes from the select likes of formative inspiration Prince Paul, Stereolab, and Cornelius enhanced the Avalanches’ image. The album led to four ARIA awards and was eventually certified platinum in Australia.
Admiration for Since I Left You seemed to intensify with each year that passed without a follow-up. What early supporters and converts got instead was a handful of scattered remixes for the likes of Belle and Sebastian, Wolfmother, and Franz Ferdinand until 2007, when the group seemed to disappear entirely, leaving only rumors of a potential second album. In truth, they had started banking material that over time grew to 40 songs. Nothing resembling an album was ever finished, though, as the Avalanches devoted surplus energy to other projects, like scoring a King Kong musical and working on an animated film that never saw the light of day.
The silence ended in July 2016 when the Avalanches — essentially Chater, Di Blasi, and De La Cruz — made their proper return with Wildflower. The trippy album drew from their interim projects, and while it boasted its own lengthy list of sample sources, it also featured numerous guest instrumentalists and vocalists across the fields of left-field rap and underground rock, from MF Doom and Danny Brown to Jennifer Herrema and David Berman. Warmly received by listeners and critics, Wildflower topped the Australian chart, went Top Ten in the U.K., and entered the Billboard 200 at number 27….We Will Always Love You, was released in December 2020 and entered the Australian chart in 2020.
It is never too late to discover previously unknown-to-you creators and creations, whether you’ve missed them for decades or centuries. Where there’s life there’s listening.
I just discovered The Avalanches, their first album released twenty-six years ago. It is like unwrapping a gift that has been under the tree all this time.
Above is a good description, though reading about music you haven’t heard is a poor substitute, especially when it is a kind of music you have little reference for. When The Avalanches music emerged, not just using samples but mostly composed of samples, the term “plunderphonics” was used. (However, the samples are all cleared, not stolen.) Like creating a mosaic out of found objects, it could be a mess, but if you are artists, it could be a masterpiece.
I know this music is good, not just because I like it or because of the reviews and regard, but because when it was playing this morning, a very discriminating and picky listener passed by and said, “good music.” It is. Up. Lifting. Listen.
Sometimes it is done with Patti Smith. She (along with Zen masters, along with other musicians like Kurt Cobain) is in the lineage of the Beat Poets, who faced with a crazy world, talked crazy. Or so it seems. Songbird inmates of the asylum. Don’t try to get out; you were never in.
This from Space Monkey on Patti Smith’s Easter:
Space monkey, sign of the time, time Space monkey, so outta line, line Space monkey, sort of divine And he’s mine, mine, oh he’s mine
A stranger comes up to him Hands him an old, rusty Polaroid It starts crumbling in his hands He says, “Oh man, I don’t get the picture This is no picture, this is just, this just a, this just a”
“This is my jack-knife, this is my jack-knife This is my jack-knife, this is my jack”
Bob Schwartz 