Oedi-Politics

Oedi-Politics is the intrusion of patterns of behavior and thought characteristic of family dramas – specifically those characteristic of the bourgeois nuclear family – into the realm of the political. It is the adoption of maternal, paternal, and filial roles by political actors and the determination of future courses of action by the relationship between these roles. In short, when people should be coming to agreements, making compromises, working through problems, they are instead defaulting to playing house. Everything else becomes secondary, and poisoned by this.

Living in the Burn Down

The world is burning down around us, and we’re going to work. We’re going to the grocery store and the laundromat and watching Netflix. We have no ability to productively imagine what we have to do in this situation, because the obvious option – taking to the streets, going on strike, making actual demands – are things that we have been conditioned not to do. We continue on as we have been, because the alternatives are either outright unimaginable or are the objects of horror and anti-fascination.

The Hollow Men: On the American Right Wing

The Republicans are playing a different game. Their game, charitably, is whatever game Lucy was playing in Peanuts where she yanks the football out of the way at the last moment. Or at least it was. I think Susan Collins still thinks that’s the game they’re playing. Their game has transitioned over to the cruel “game” of pulling the wings off flies.

Political, AnalysisCameron SummersSeptember 23, 2020Politics, America, 2020 Presidential Election, Right-Wing PoliticsComment

How Exhausting It Is To Live Through History (Time of Monsters, #3)

I’ve been thinking for a while that society is a machine for transforming the raw material of time into history. A way to process the steady drip of seconds and the slow slosh of the seasons into a record of things that have happened. Before we had history, we had legend and myth, but with the advent of written records we had history. Even as those written records have declined in importance and acknowledgment, they are still there, still produced by those who see the benefit of knowing what went on before.

Breaking The Sheepdog Delusion: On Forming a Society of Solidarity

It’s often called the “sheepdog mentality” but I prefer to swap out “mentality” for “delusion”: The basic idea is that there are three types of people: the vast majority of people are sheep, (fundamentally harmless and fairly useless) who are preyed upon by wolves (bad people) and must be protected by sheepdogs (“good guys” who are willing to use violence.)