TJ 2010 - Part 1 of 5

[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. 

This is a long, long piece written while I was in pretrial detention but is not actually notes about pretrial detention. I quite preposterously labeled it as autobiography. However, the first 36 pages are missing, and so are the years 1978–May 1982. sch 5/4/2026] 

TJ's Mom graduated college with me. She had quit high school when she married. She graduated high school with TJ. Her mother was a sweet woman. That she will be disappointed by my recent misdeeds saddens me, even though I have not seen her in almost a decade.

I did not go to my college graduation. I have some regrets about that now, but that is probably just sentimentality considering how drunk I got the night before graduation. My graduation party was in Yorktown, with me being late. It was a tense thing, with me being late and Mom and Dad facing off. Baby sister lived with Dad by then, so did my oldest sister, who was married then, and me not living at home; the gloves were off between Mom and Dad. They were polite, of course, but that does not mean the air was not full of tension. Mom had not liked it one bit when Dad took me out the year before on my twenty-first birthday.

 I decided to take a year off before pursuing my plan for law school. The law became my goal during my first year at Ball State, but going year round since the Fall of 1979 had left me burned out on school. I took a job with one of TJ's brothers-in-law. I never got paid as much as I was told to expect. It would not be until 2009 that I missed a rent payment again. That job of working for a landscaping company ended effectively in August of 1982, and I found myself hip deep in Mr. Reagan's depression.

 A friend's mother found me a job at an Indianapolis Sizzler restaurant as a management trainee. The good thing was staying again with my Aunt Elsie, but I missed TJ and hated the job. The manager hated me. I got fired for the first time.

 TJ and I talked, and I went back to Ball State for a Masters in history. We talked about teaching at the college level, as I lacked any semblance of the patience needed for any other sort of teaching. I did not take my Masters seriously enough. If I had, I know my life would have been different. TJ, if you should ever read this, you were correct about what I should have done with my skills.

Sweet and kind, TJ had a temper and will of her own. We had our arguments. I did go out with a few other girls when I got mad at her. I spent a lot of 1981/1982 drinking Jack Daniel's with a redhead from Elkhart. Actually, we drank a lot of Jack Daniel's. What TJ never believed was the lack of sex - too much Jack and too much guilt. The redhead returned to Elkhart after telling me I was too much in love with TJ.

By the Fall of 1982, TJ had found me a job in Muncie working at a bar, The Island. I knew the place from my college years for its wet T-shirt contests. Mom pitched a fit at me working at a bar until I told her the wage was $4.00 per hour plus tips. Considering minimum wage was then a bit above $2 an hour, she muted her criticism.

I stayed with that job until July of 1984. While there, I learned a few things. I learned how much I liked dry martinis made with Absolut vodka and Rusty Nails and that I did not like being around drunks. I had my first experience with cocaine and cokeheads. (I walked into the tiny men's room to find one of the regulars standing there with a sheath knife in hand. I stopped wondering what the hell he was doing; he had cocaine on the knife blade, and he said, “Want to try some?” I decided best to do so. The bookkeeper extolled the virtues of cocaine to me with a voice sounding like she had found God. I was unimpressed, having been baptized at age seven. I was off to law school when I heard she could no longer control her nosebleeds.) I also learned how to evaluate and work with strangers in very different situations. (When I was hiring secretaries, I preferred those who had experience waiting tables because they really knew what it meant to work with the public.) I was happy to leave that job; the stress was horrible.

[Continued in TJ 2010 - Part 2 of 5. sch 5/4/26.] 

 

5/5 -5/7/2026: Anderson to Muncie to First Thursday

 Tuesday, I drove over to Anderson. 

I met with first K, went to Allan's pawn & Jewelry, saw a few things I had not seen in other trips, and had a chat with my mother. There was about the same number of homeless as Muncie, but more than Anderson would like. Speaking with one of the proprietors of Allan's there was a little discontent with home the city was dealing with its problems. I suspect it is inertia; they are still thinking of Anderson as it was 50 years ago. The Wing On Inn is gone, but Wawa is on its way. I am not sure if it is an improvement.

J and I went out to eat. We wound up at Thai Divine. This is the first Thai restaurant in Anderson. Anderson does not deserve this good of a restaurant. Stylish surroundings, grand food, and good service. Since I cannot copy and paste, here is what we had to eat as screenshots.

My order: 

J's order:
 

We were stuffed. J carried about half of her order home.

Probably the most fun I have had with two women on a rainy day in ages. I know it was the most I had laughed for a long time. Probably not since the last time I talked to either K or J. 

Then I came back to Muncie to St. Barnabas for the festival of St. George. 

I got home around 8:30. Problems came along later, so I did not get as much sleep as I wanted and missed Matins again.

Wednesday, I did some writing before the writer's group meeting and then back here after the meeting. I got some blog posts done but they took so long. Ice packs-R-us.

Thursday has been one of those days when I was so tired I did not really wake up until after 5 pm. A walk down to the convenience store did not help. A blog post or two done, but not any serious writing. Then I went downtown for May's First Thursday (full listing).

I wound up buying enough stuff for dinner: a loaf of sourdough bread, Lebanese olive oil, a meat pie, a slice of lemon cake, and a cookie. 

I made it to two studios at the Murray: Dunckel Haus Photography and, I think, Cassie Dunmyer. I chewed off the ears of the Dunckel's - a very charming young couple - but I was taken with their black and white photos. Some of which are online here. Ms. Dunmyer impressed me with her being 34, and having a good and inventive mind. I would have dropped a lot of money in either place at another time in my life.

I also stopped in at the ECAP Gallery. Better things than I was doing at their age; I was much better at detroying things than making. 

I caught the bus home, arriving here around 7. MW and J both called me tonight. Then I started on this post. I am tired, so I do not think I will be doing more writing. Therefore, I will close with a link to Do you say 'wash' or 'warsh?' Here's where the pronunciation comes from (NPR) and political commentary from YouTube.

 

 

sch

Still Thinking About Indiana's Political Parties

A bit of me floowing up on my And Republican Hoosier's Got On Their Knees For Trump.

Here is what comes from reading more than the headlines. What caused this post was Indy Democrats weather test to establishment (Indy Mirror). Which had these two paragraphs buried down towards the middle of the story.

But some political observers are cautious to draw too many conclusions from the results, given that only about 15.8% of registered voters in Marion County actually voted in the primary. While that was the highest percentage since at least 2010, it’s still a small sampling of the electorate.

“We’re still talking about a small percentage of people that chose to participate,” said Gregory Shufeldt, associate professor of political science at the University of Indianapolis. “That’s with a competitive congressional primary and a lot of money being pumped into races throughout the area.”

 One takeaway would be the disengagement of Indiana voters. Except  this is a primary election wherein party candidates are chosen.

I read it as a lack of party affliation. My opinion may change after November if the percentage does not change.

Indiana politicians and those running the parties can rest content with control of their political duopoly. They can put forward any candidate on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, lose or win, and still keep their jobs. Whatever good that does for the people of Indiana is an open question, in my mind. 

What if we had a truly open primary, what I think is called a jungle primary? Well, those in power of both parties might find their jobs at risk.

I have held onto this piece for too long, and while its relevance might be slim to the preceding, it is not non-existence.

OPINION: Micah Beckwith’s un-Christian, un-conservative crusade (Indiana Daily Student)

Beckwith’s has been the Trumpist response. This means it is, by origin, neither Christian nor particularly conservative, as President Donald Trump far more closely resembles Nero than St. Louis IX the king of France and a reactionary populist than a steward of this country’s traditional institutions. The form of public discourse Trump has innovated is new and beyond the old pale. 

Why, then, have so many self-described conservative Christian politicians throughout the country, especially in Indiana, adopted this way of addressing their opponents? 

Contrast this approach with that of St. Francis de Sales. The 16th-century Catholic bishop and theologian — and patron saint of journalists — reconverted, according to tradition, 72,000 people in a hostile territory. His region of southern France had recently, and enthusiastically, embraced Calvinism amid a time of fierce, and bloody, religious conflict. Yet de Sales won so many people to his cause through small virtues: gentleness, temperance, modesty and humility. 

There is a tradition of Christian thought that would resist the reduction of Christianity’s public relations to gentleness alone, that would insist the faith must sometimes wield muscle, even state power, in addition to meekness. This tradition is found in St. Thomas Aquinas: False beliefs obstruct our enjoyment of the common good, so the state, whose job it is to foster that good, has a valid reason to curb such beliefs. Presumably, Beckwith might place himself in this tradition. 

But the difficulty is that Beckwith’s actual relationship to the tradition seems nonexistent. The belligerence that characterizes Beckwith’s rhetoric is not Thomistic. Nor is it clearly the product of theological reflection over St. Thomas. Instead, it appears to have been absorbed from a post-Trump politics that favors the social media attack, replete with all-caps and bad-faith assumptions, as its foremost method of expressing grievances. Christian vocabulary like “demonic” is thus fitted onto a form that postdates it, is unrelated to it and degrades it. 

De Sales’ practical counsel, written five centuries earlier, serves well as a response to this trend. 

On language, de Sales warned against impolite words. Even without poor intentions, those who hear them may interpret them differently. The problem with Beckwith’s use of the word “demonic” is thus not only that it is uncharitable but that it prevents the conversation Beckwith should want. Rather than persuade, he performs disgust that only confirms, in the minds of band kids, that Christians are exactly what their naysayers have long suspected them of being: intolerant prudes. 

I was thinking today as I walked down to the convenience store that it seems politics have become a team sport. It is the winning that matters. But politics is what is good for the community; what enables people to live better with one another. Therefore, current politics substitutes the rightness of its victory as being good for the whole, and a loss as the destruction of the community. Viciousness replaces persuasion. It is an either/or proposition imposing a totality on human beings rather than a unity. It allows the loudest, most vicious to gain power. Such certainty in one's political views seems to have substituted the theological for partisan social views. This theological view of one's political views stifles the imperfections of human life. Sooner or later, death to the enemy becomes the only political slogan.

I do not know if a jungle primary will undermine the idea of politics as warfare; I have a deep, abiding distrust of simple answers, of one size fits all. I do think it will be a start. Perhaps we can restore reason by requiring crackpots like Beckwith to persuade rather than blather, by making them try to explain themselves rather merely bluster.

 

sch 5/7 

Springsteen & Mellencamp

 I have seen Springsteen twice in Indianapolis and I saw Mellancamp only once. I would have liked to have seen Mellancamp more, but never was lucky to do so.

Bruce the Builder - Mike Pesca (The Dispatch)

The disappointment in not reaching our national ideals is, to baby boomers, a promise unmet, a dream that, though not currently coming true, is nonetheless not a lie. Still, Springsteen builds. He does so, in the figurative sense through his music, through the conscious construction of his backup band as a community, and through the connection with his fans. But I also mean that Springsteen has a commitment to building and to physical buildings. The people of Springsteen’s generation believed in building. They believed in structures. Their landscape is one of edifices, their monuments were of the concrete and steel variety, not the conceptual or the electronic. This is why Springsteen has sung about: towers, churches, jails, tunnels, skylines, reservoirs, bridges, trestles, risings, mansions (of glory, of fear, on the hill), sidewalks, roads, streets, avenues, boulevards, girders, promenades, railroad tracks, rafters, and in at least three different songs, refineries. If Springsteen’s catalog were an infrastructure bill it would bring down unemployment to the Fed’s target of 2 percent. This is a performer who has mentioned “highways” more often in song lyrics (406 times according to SpringsteenLyrics.com) than there are highways in New Jersey (117 active state highways according to Wikipedia).

The people who built our country, according to Springsteen, are to be praised for their industry rather than decried as despoilers or thieves of stolen land. Springsteen himself is a sometimes disappointed but never cynical citizen of an America that builds. He is a steady purveyor of a message that might not always be uplifting, but is always, sometimes literally, constructive. He is an artist whose function is not to convince you to tear it all down, but to craft the case that there is a reason to believe. 

Scott Ramsey moved to Anderson; I met him in Tenth Grade. He introduced me to Springsteen by way of Born to Run. You would think that Springsteen would have been more popular in Indiana, but he was not. The first concert I saw was during The River Tour. Indianapolis was the only show of the tour not to sell out. Rush sold out a month later. Springsteen turned up the lights at the end and played on, and people danced in their seats. Based on bootlegs I heard, I'm of the opinion that he never gave Indy one of his better shows but gave us shows deserving of the audience. He lost me when he ditched the E Street Band (as Seger did when he moved away from The Silver Bullet Band).

John Cougar Mellencamp Will Fight You: On the Rock ‘n’ Roll Rise of a Combative Heartland Leftist (Literary Hub)

Mellencamp grew up modestly but comfortably in the idyllic town of Seymour, Indiana, the son of a mother who was an artist and nascent beauty queen, and a father who worked a white-­collar job with a local electrical contracting firm. Like much of his heartland rock cohort, Mellencamp wrote from his life—­the people and places of his formative years burrowing into his lyrics as an adult. Though Mellencamp had a comfortable upbringing, he saw the hardship endured by his extended family and rural neighbors, the farmers and other laborers. If Bruce Springsteen’s greatest gift was mythologizing the existential open graves swallowing up blue-­collar workers, Mellencamp’s was his piercing ability to at once celebrate and dismantle agrarian fantasy. 

I agree with the piece about Mellencamp up to a point. It may be a bias of mine that the following song from the John Cougar album set out what he was really about and remains. But then it was a favorite of me and my friends as soon as we heard it. This was the Indiana we knew. 

 What really changed was his sound. “Great Midwest” is like many of the songs on his first album that I would like to hear played in his later style.

When I was in New Jersey, it was rare to hear anything of his music past “Hurts So Good,” and that was sad. He has continued to push himself in a way that I do not think that Springsteen has. It may be Bruce is a little more affable than John.

But then these songs may undercut that opinion:

 

 

sch 5/4

And Republican Hoosier's Got On Their Knees For Trump

I will admit that I did not vote in yesterday's primary elections. Although I have now lived in Delaware County for almost five years, I still do feel I know enough to vote in local primary elections. But this is my sermon the Republican primaries.

I have a bias against Southerners who came to live in Indiana.

It is one I inherited. I believe that slavery imprinted on the white Southerner the desire to obey. No one in the slave-owning slave was free or wanted to be free - except the African-Americans.

Indiana let too many of the Southerners into the state to work in the now-vanished factories. That their descendants perpetuate their slavishness within our borders is proven by their obeying Trump's command to get rid of our state Senators voting against the Orange Fool's redistricting plan.

GOP incumbents fall to Trump-endorsed challengers in Indiana (Axios Indianapolis) 

The eyes of the country were on Indiana last night.

 And Indiana Republicans failed to show any spine. 

Trump Is Happy. But So Are Dems. (The Bulwark) 

In Republican primary elections across Indiana, Trump-backed challengers deposed five Republican state senators who had helped block his wished-for gerrymander of the state’s congressional districts. A sixth race was too close to call. And the incumbents who lost were conservative Republicans, albeit of a more traditional type.

The only real issue in the races was loyalty to Trump. As NBC News noted, in central Indiana’s District 41, for example, where Trump-backed candidate Michelle Davis challenged a 20-year incumbent, one ad from American Leadership PAC on behalf of Davis mentioned Trump’s name four times in fifteen seconds. Davis won, 59 percent to 41 percent.

So Trump is happy, putting up celebratory posts on Truth Social. He’ll be happier still if he succeeds ten days from now in knocking off incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) in the GOP primary, and then if Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) goes down to defeat three days later, on May 19. The first result seems likely, the second quite possible.

Key takeaways from Tuesday’s primary elections in Indiana, Ohio (The Hill)

“Big night for MAGA in Indiana,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) said in a post on the social platform X, as results were still coming in Tuesday. “Proud to have helped elect more conservative Republicans to the Indiana State Senate.” 

The senator took a significant interest in helping to oust the state senators, and two groups affiliated with Banks reportedly spent several millions of dollars in the races.  

Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith (R) told CNN that even three wins made a statement for Trump.  

“It was really that battle between the old-school Republicans of the Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence, George Bush era, versus Donald Trump and the ‘America First’ era,” Beckwith told the network, nodding to two former Indiana governors and the former president. “And Indiana — at least the Republicans — are saying, we want to be the ‘America First’ party.” 

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is pushing up gasoline prices while making America a fool on the world stage: What’s in the US’s 1-page proposal for Iran peace deal?  (The Hill)

The restrictions have resulted in the price of oil increasing around the world, with gas prices stateside also rising. On Wednesday, the average price of a gallon of regular gas in the U.S. exceeded $4.50 for the first time since 2022, according to AAA. 

Why does the deal Trump is now proposing sound so much like the Obama deal that was thrown away by Trump?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Tuesday that if Tehran wants a “civilian nuclear program,” then it is free to pursue one.

“They could have that if that’s what they wanted, but they’re not acting like that’s what they wanted,” Rubio said in the White House briefing room. “They’re acting like they want a military nuclear program. That’s unacceptable.”

Under the memorandum of understanding, Iran would also agree to inspections by the United Nations on its nuclear program, while the U.S. would gradually lift sanctions and release billions in frozen Iranian funds, according to Axios. 

 Indiana Primary Results Prove It: The GOP Is Still a Trump Cult (The New Republic)

The good news is that the results of Indiana show that the Republican Party is really a cult of Trump—so Republican candidates will be reluctant to distance themselves from an increasingly unpopular president and therefore might lose winnable races this November and in two years.

The bad news, though, is that the results in Indiana show that the Republican Party is a cult of Trump—so Supreme Court justices, governors, state legislatures, congresspeople, and even rank-and-file GOP voters will keep falling in line with the whims of our wannabe dictator. 

Trump-backed candidates romp to wins in Indiana Senate races (The Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Bray said Tuesday night that he would seek to remain as the Senate’s leader. He said the primary results showed the impact of the unheard-of $10 million-plus that national organizations spent on defeating the incumbent senators.

“The amount of money that was spent in Indiana is material, it matters, and that was very, very difficult to overcome,” Bray told the Indiana Capital Chronicle. “We worked really hard. Our candidates worked really hard to get their message out, but the voters spoke, and we’ll deal with that in the coming days and months.”

***

 That unleashed a torrent of broadcast ad spending that reached $13.5 million for the primary campaigns — a nearly 5,000% jump from the roughly $250,000 spent in 2024 on state Senate races, the ad-tracking service AdImpact posted Tuesday.

All I can say about this analysis by the winner of one of these primaries, Jeff Ellington of Bloomfield, is what drugs are you on?

“I think President Trump does but, really, I think it is all about what the decisions of the voters want, and it shows they want change and they want small communities to be listened to,” Ellington said. “They want job creation, they want investment and they want their taxes lowered while making government more efficient.”

None of the defeated were for no investment, for raising taxes, or for expanding Indiana's government. 

 

Besides showing a lack of principles to local government and self-respect, the failure of Indiana Republicans endangers the Republic.

 Gerrymandering is poisonous enough, but now we are ignoring the Constitution. The Democrats have had to follow the Republican lead just to save themselves, and perhaps the Constitution, too.

But it also seems to me as bad politics for the Republicans. We have also seen Chief Justice Robert's goal of eviserating the Voting Rights Act met with the assistance of Justice Alito. Black voters may turn out in November as they rarely do in midterms. Perhaps Black conservatives will finally realize the Republicans have run out of uses for them. Might the Republicans who voted to keep their state Senators understand the true RINOs wear MAGA hats. After all, Trump is losing support among Republicans and independents.

 Jake Tapper on Trump CNN poll claim: ‘Nope’(The Hill)

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office earlier Tuesday about the supposed poll, suggesting that “I am at, according to CNN, 100 percent approval within the Republican Party,” adding that he thinks “the people that did that poll probably got fired.”

“Nope,” Tapper responded in a post on social platform X and included a link to the CNN story.

“In this story from today, we see Trump support among Republicans from 3/25 to 3/26 has gone from 90% to 80% and strong support from 64% to 43%,” he wrote. 

 I have spent time (probably too much time) looking through the Indiana Secretary of State's site looking at information on the 2024 election. What I wanted to find was the difference between votes cast and the total number of voters in each race. I could not find any records showing the votes in state legislative races.

I did find General Election Turnout and Registration. Yes, there might be enough voters to make a difference in a close race; this may also be an illusion.

There is also STATEWIDE VOTER COUNTS BY COUNTY AND STATUS.

 So, I am trying this:

Donald J. Trump 1720347

Kamala Harris 116360 

Which totals to 1,836,707. The total of registered voters: 4,674,413 (as of January 2, 2024). The difference is 2,837,706.  Therein lies enough voters to have made a difference. There might be enough voters in Indiana to change the Republican hold on us. sch

 

 

 

Cultural Marxism, Eugenics, Cocaine, The Middle East

 The Los Angeles Review of Books dropped several essays today that drew my attention. I thought to share them with you.

Red Specters and Right-Wing Fever Dreams by Alexander Billet reviews The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West by A. J. A. Woods. Verso, 2026.

So it is with “Cultural Marxism.” Over the past 15 years—in particular the last decade—the concept has become so overused by the American Right that we almost tune out when we hear it. The same can be said for so many Trumpian talking points—“DEI,” “radical Left,” “Trump derangement syndrome”—that we brush it aside. As with anything so overused, we forget what made the idea potent in the first place.

This, naturally, is the point, and it ultimately works in the Right’s favor. Of course they see Marxists around every corner, we tell ourselves. It’s ridiculous. And it is. But when the ridiculous idea is believed and promoted by the most powerful man in the world (he who is currently and enthusiastically bombing Iran on the flimsiest of pretenses), what does its “truthiness” matter? If, eventually, you are forced to publicly declare I am not a Marxist just to sidestep the furor, haven’t they already won?

Against all this, A. J. A. Woods’s The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (2026) offers a welcome corrective. The short book—Woods’s first—traces the genealogy and evolution of this right-wing bugbear. Of course, Woods points out, Cultural Marxism isn’t real, at least in the way the Right thinks of it. The idea that Marxists have taken over the educational and cultural apparatus of the United States, of the entire world, is ludicrous on its face. The real question, as Woods frames it, is what kind of society, what course of history, makes it possible for such a flagrantly silly idea to take root and spread so thoroughly?

 I never met a Marxist. I am certain that none of my professors at Ball State University were Marxists. The only book by Marx that I ever read was The Communist Manifesto; that took about thirty years. That history was a speeding train towards the dictatorship of the proletariat. It sounded too much of the Calvinism I had already come to distrust, if not despise. But my spotty education about Marxism left me knowing enough that the blather about cultural Marxism was bullshit.

This paragraph gives me even more reason for the hysterical yapping about cultural Marxism:

Before the war, the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research had been dedicated to answering why the socialist revolution hadn’t succeeded in Germany. Answers weren’t going to be found only in political economy or revolutionary strategy but also in culture, in psychoanalysis, in the shape of everyday life itself. After the institute’s thinkers—all Marxists, almost all Jewish—had fled the Third Reich, their original preoccupation began to move in tandem with an attempt to understand the success of fascism, and how it might return. Echoes of fascist domination were woven into the fabric of postwar consumer capitalism, and the Frankfurt School sought to highlight these in their research, their scholarship, their philosophical work, and their cultural criticism. This purpose is plain to anyone who reads Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason (1967), or Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964). 

Ooh, might not the Frankfurt School scare the fascists by exposing their machinations of acquiring power?

One could argue that this conspiracy theory has come a long way from its LaRouchian origins, but as Woods writes, all iterations and uses of the Cultural Marxism trope contain a core characteristic. For all their anti-elitist rhetoric, for all their appeals to tradition and “human nature,” their ultimate aim is to simply replace one elite with another: a multiracial elite with a white one, sex-positive consumerism with the patriarchal family, a “woke” capitalism with one that has entirely given up any pretense of social equality. 

***

Misbehaving students weren’t what really scared the establishment, though. It was the potential that their ideas might spread beyond their ranks. The 1960s are too commonly thought of as just a student thing, a wave of kids rebelling against their own privilege. But the “hippies” versus “hardhats” dichotomy was never as cut-and-dried as it’s been made out to be. The further you fell down the income ladder, the more likely you were to oppose the Vietnam War. And high rates of poverty and deprivation drove many people of color to support groups like the Black Panthers or the Brown Berets.

Nor was Marcuse—by then just about the only member of the Frankfurt School worth a damn to the New Left—quite as dismissive of the working class as caricatures of his work would lead us to believe. His Essay on Liberation (1969) explicitly states that the students couldn’t do it on their own, that the working class is essential to any meaningful revolution. If they, the people most able to materially shut down the flows of capital, could be won over, then what Marcuse called the “new sensibility”—the collective aspiration for utopia—might gain more widespread hold. And thus people might stop fighting for their own servitude as if it were their freedom.

The essay uses a term of which I have not heard:

The logic behind this impulse is, if anything, even more pressing in the current moment. It almost seems as if, before addressing anything like Cultural Marxism, we first need to reckon with cultural capitalism. Today, the ideologies that create consent and even enthusiasm for capitalist domination are kept alive by a cultural-technological infrastructure more complex, more diversely ramified, and more subtly influential than ever. At the same time, those who hold that infrastructure together are acutely proletarianized, subjected to a precarity that bears more resemblance to the conditions of itinerant industrial workers in the 1900s. We need only look to striking writers, casualized university professors, and traumatized content moderators to see as much. And this doesn’t even begin to address the devastations that AI is beginning to exact on these occupations, or the ecological impacts on many communities.

Do we really want to be serfs of the tech bros? Do we really want to build a caste system? 

And a caste system can be read into Natural Election by Jonathan Basile. This essay reviews Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness by Kathryn Paige Harden. Random House, 2026.

Harden’s book has been published at a moment when eugenicist and hereditarian thinking inform the ascendant Far Right, particularly through its preoccupation with the “Great Replacement” theory. This conspiracy theory explains demographic decline among white populations by imagining a globalist Jewish elite manipulating everything from immigration to gender nonconformity in order to dilute and disempower “the white gene pool.” Indeed, every political project implicated in the rise of fascism in the United States today—including the “America First” economy, abortion bans, the dismantling of DEI initiatives, attacks on queer and trans people, ICE’s campaign of terror against immigrants and their communities, and the undermining of any international environmentalist response to climate change—can be understood as an emanation of, among other things, this ideological investment in eugenics.

Harden would consider herself opposed to all such political projects. Indeed, much of Original Sin consists of anecdotes and asides that check the right boxes to affirm her political leanings as a Good Liberal. Her project, in brief, is to argue that liberals, in order to accomplish progressive goals, must accept the existence of innate genetic predispositions toward scholastic achievement and criminality. This tactic mirrors a broadly adopted political strategy: appealing to liberals to argue that their political aims can only be realized by embracing the current obsessions of conservatives.

I have read a little on the history of eugenics - one of America's contributions to Nazi race law. It was a pseudo-sceince, and it remains one. The review does not really address what I think is its great error: a self-fulfilling justification for elite classes to retain power. It does say this:

In fact, the stratified society being prophesied already exists—the children of the wealthy already live in a world apart. Everything from their healthcare to their schooling and experiences with the criminal justice system are fundamentally different from the realities of those with fewer resources. At no point in the present or future will maintaining this stratification require the wealthy or their children to be inherently healthier, more intelligent, or more virtuous. Hierarchy is a function of power, amassed within social, historical, and political structures, and resistance requires challenging the belief that social elites are truly the Elect. 

 What applies to the wider world also needs to be applied in this country. 

 To name this asymmetry is not to abandon the possibility of universality; it is to refuse a counterfeit version of it. The real question is no longer whether the Global South can see the structure clearly—we have long lived inside its consequences. The question is whether those who claimed custodianship of that order can imagine a world where law is not another name for managed inequality, and where justice is not postponed the moment it approaches the imperial archive. We are not outside the old language yet, but we are listening as its authority falters, sentence by sentence.

The Grammar of Exemption: How the West narrated its own history as a savior, even while treating the rest of the world as its laboratory by Elias Wondimu. 

Eugenics, with its fake scientific predestination propping up a hierarchy justifying its control of politics, needs to go the way of the dodo. The censorship of ideas under the banner of Cultural Marxism needs a stake driven through its heart; otherwise, the American creed as written by Jefferson faces a death threat.

CC has disappeared from my life, but her problems keep surfacing. We were talking about homelss meth-heads after church today. Seeing the link to Aaron Bornstein's interview/review, Beyond a Theory of Irresistible Desire of What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction by Hanna Pickard, I thought, What the hell? Which always leads to me reading.

 Of course, there are differences between drug use in addiction and ordinary, day-to-day drug use. In the book, I argue that the crucial difference rests on whether, on balance, drugs are, or are not, good for a person. In addiction, drug use can come to undermine a person’s well-being, which creates what I call the puzzle of addiction—the task of explaining why a person would nonetheless keep using drugs. But the crucial point is that, even when the costs ratchet up, the value of drugs is not eradicated, which is part of why people stay stuck. We therefore need to recognize that value in order to help them. Reckoning with the idea that drug use is not black-and-white but gray is part of the core project of the book.

And in these paragraphs, I see an explanation of much of what I saw running with Muncie crackheads: 

So, by engaging in this imaginative feat, you generate in your own mind an alternative hypothesis to the brain disease model. It’s not the power of drugs that made the rats press the lever for cocaine to the point of death. It’s the fact that they were alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine. In other words, it’s the barrenness of their environment and its impact on their psychological state that explains their behavior.

***

I am simplifying, but the take-home message from decades of animal and human research is that if you give rats or people meaningful alternatives to drugs, they take them. Addiction is associated with backgrounds of severe adversity, limited socioeconomic opportunities, and additional mental health conditions. In other words, being alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine is an apt metaphor for the life circumstances faced by many people with addiction. 

And the interview gets at what is wrong with treatment: moral police or moralistic police.

Presumably, it’s not offered for political reasons. A lot of people would love for science to be “apolitical.” But in the case of addiction science, we don’t have that option. It is hard not to see a connection among the hijacked brain model, dehumanizing public discourses, and addiction policies. The connection drives ideas around “superpredators” or “meth zombies,” as well as, here in California, “CARE Court”—a dystopian name for a process whereby people diagnosed with a substance use disorder can be sentenced to mandated treatment (which rarely works) and, if they don’t comply, imprisonment. These policies take the paradigm to its logical conclusion. How might a shift to a humanistic and heterogeneous paradigm change this dynamic?

I wrote the book in part because I wanted to make a difference. Your question challenges the scientific community to address these dehumanizing forces instead of cleaving to a paradigm that is nothing more than dogma—not a theoretically coherent model with a solid evidence base. That science is apolitical is a pretense. We need better and more honest science. I think the brain disease model of compulsion has failed people with addiction and served only to entrench certain forms of stigma and discrimination. It is bad science. This does not mean that brain science can’t illuminate many aspects of addiction. Of course it can. But we won’t properly understand addiction if we continue to focus so narrowly on the brain. We need a paradigm that is interdisciplinary, integrating the natural sciences with the social sciences, the humanities, and, crucially, the voices of people who themselves live with addiction.

The Shaping of the Modern Middle East – Dr. Roy | Museum of the Future: Lessons from the Past

 

I did not notice anything that jarred me with his presentation of the history presented, In fact, the presentation is superb. Would that other teachers of history were this good.

sch 5/3
 

Videos: Religion, Chaos, Indiana, Lincoln, Politics

 Some videos I think are worth sharing.

 I suspect people today have even less of an idea what Lincoln said at Gettysburg:

 

Ian Hunter interviewed - a singer/writer almost forgotten and ought not be:

 Indiana's punk and new wave women:

Immigrant's speech:
 

 

Questions about slavery:

 Greatest speech ever made?

 Chaos in New York:

 Defence of Christianity:

 Foreign affairs:

Explaining Indiana:

 sch 5/3