Like I won't say that absolutely everything about the USA was bad, necessarily, and I of course have my own biases at play here... But the point sparing the details is really just like, I've spent the past month thinking practically every day about how every single US-based communist really must be working in incredibly trying circumstances, if even just visiting had me feeling lethargic and kinda wanting to go home within a week. Now that I'm back home again, that time in the USA is already starting to feel like a strange dream again.
So, uhh, what are your secrets, basically? Like I'm sure that all the nonsense of the USA feels like less of a burden to put up with if you grew up with it and have spent little to no time in other parts of the world, but still. I honestly do not think I could live in the USA until it is decolonized, but when that happens, it wouldn't be called the USA anymore, anyways.
To mirror @Ithorian@hexbear.net, rage, continuous varied education (both self and institutional), weed, and the fact that when I talk to people they usually agree with me, even if it doesn't always stick for them or proceed towards a greater understanding and comprehension of the material world for them.
The incoherence of the average American's politics chiefly lies in the fact that the inescapable propaganda (it literally starts from before school) around them constantly lies and obfuscates reality, something that cannot be avoided, as even if you personally do not watch it, that would also mean cutting out every person in your life that is susceptible to propaganda who then repeats it as if it is fact.
Specifically the incoherence comes from that fact that despite this bedrock and ocean of propaganda we live in, lived reality cannot help but assert itself for the majority of people, and the contradictions between what we are told we will experience v.s. what we experience and how we are told to process those experiences v.s. how we actually process those experiences are quite large. However, because most people do not have any experience or knowledge of critical theory, for them there is no formalized way of making sense of those contradictions, leading to an incoherence and contradictions within their own grab-bag explanations. Ultimately what this means that you can cut through it, but it is incredibly difficult to make it stick. They have to be interested in doing it themselves. My usual social goal is to encourage that formalized exploration.
American's politics chiefly lies in the fact that the inescapable propaganda (it literally starts from before school)
Someone made a mistake turning "paw patrol is copaganda" into a joke. Kids cartoons today can't go five fucking minutes without
- Sudden fucking police car
- Stripe-wearing thieves
- Cops investigating thieves
- Locking thieves in prison as they beg for mercy, followed by laughing and pointing protagonists
- Families comprised of thieves, basically races of inherently thieving people
- Another sudden fucking police car
It is FUCKING INSANE. I used to watch Sesame Street and sure, they'd have some cop trot up to talk to Elmo or whatever, but very occasionally. Now it's literally a given that children's programming is OBSESSED with police arresting and punishing people. People really really believe that cops are a basic element of childhood itself, I mean on the level of eating your vegetables, share, woof woof look at the dog, ooples and banoonoos, ABC 123, shit like that. Cops throwing people in jail is right in there.
we are a deeply sick country
Interesting. I wonder what the best pedagogy is for encouraging this kind of formalized exploration of the experienced incoherence. List flaws in propaganda narratives? Share some background facts about social structures? Point out material contradictions? Assist in analysis of class interests? Explain dialectical thinking? Explore how we got here with historic materialism? Give them space to share limit-situations and encourage limit-acts (like Paolo Freire)?
I didn't try all that, but what kind of worked for me in the context of Palestine is to give very good friends theory home work. But this needs a lot of good will from their side and they have to be leftish leaning all ready.
I mostly point out material contradictions, discuss the idea of class analysis, discuss history generally, and talk about dialectical thinking. I usually let their interests direct the conversation.
Edit: Also, people are receptive to Marxist thought, just don't immediately pit them against their boss, especially if they work in tech or at bars. It's gotta be more esoteric, like in terms of financial crap.
My secret is living in the woods, working from home, and finally making enough money to at least not worry about basic survival. I have a lot of sensory issues I wasn't entirely aware of until recently, so living in a city was horrible for me. Sometimes I miss it being easy to go to a store (30+ miles away now), but being able to walk outside and see a forest, wildlife, and not have to hear my neighbors fucking or fighting is worth it.
However, this existence is almost impossible under normal circumstances. We got an incredible deal on rent because the landlady is kinda okay and we live in an old detached garage that's been converted into a cabin, so it's not exactly up to code. But our rent now is the same as it was in a smallish west coast city for a cheap 1br apartment, except we get access to 50+ acres of forest, a creek, etc.
I still exist in a constant state of depression because I know what the world is like outside of this bubble my partner and I have managed to create for ourselves.
I just started dating a person from the US, who has really cool politics, a compassionate point of view, and is just a nice person all around.
When I met them I was like "damn how did you make it this far". I know many of y'all are from the US, and you're wonderful people. But it hits different when you see it in person.
what are your secrets
Rage just pure rage. From the smoldering every day anger to straight fury at the whole system. Probably not a healthy way to live but it's what I got.
Also lots of weed.
Makes you wonder how many potential Luigis are stoned out of their mind right now instead of doing the right thing
curious if you could elaborate on what elements gave you this insight? bad food, the depressing built environment, just bad vibes generally?
I just learned I'm going to have to visit LA by car next year and that has me feeling
If I weren't so tired, I'd list every specific experience that I thought to jot down in my journal — there were many different things — but really it's those things you mentioned and more. I'll mention a few specific illustrative examples of things I noticed.
First Anecdote—
I was going to get food somewhere, and I saw a sign outside with a stern anti-loitering message. Now most people I'd reckon don't think twice about a sign like that, because these signs are so common that they just fade into the background. But I see that sign and I think about what its implications really are.
Because the unspoken meaning of "no loitering" is basically "fuck homeless people, and also, police can harass anyone who looks 'suspicious' if you catch my drift" — and homelessness is widespread in Seppoland among other reasons to make an example of people, showing everyone what will happen if people fight back, with a cruelty necessary to uphold bourgeois rule in the very heart of empire. Furthermore these types of "broad license to harass" laws have a long history of being used to facilitate the effective enslavement of Black and Indigenous people.
Los Angeles is incidentally a very good example of precisely this: the United States never signed any treaties with the Tongva people, and with the beginning of the Septic occupation of Tovaangar — the Tongva homeland — the native Tongva people were widely made homeless. Many Tongva were then arrested for "loitering", and made to do construction work as penal labor — and these Tongva were paid, of course, in alcohol, with public drinking also being illegal, only exacerbating the situation. So the Tongva were in other words forced out of their homes, and immediately forced to build new homes for their own "replacements".
The city built by these Tongva slaves would eventually become the world-famous seat of the Septic film industry, with its "thirty-mile zone" profiting from the ideal natural scenery and climate of Tovaangar and surrounding Native homelands, which I cannot emphasize enough were never legally ceded to Seppoland, because even the treaties that Seppoland did sign with native Californians were never ratified.
This Septic film industry, in turn, is a cornerstone of Seppoland's soft power worldwide, used to push the lines of the country's ruling class all over the world, sanitizing and glorifying the Septic military, encouraging immigration to the "land of opportunity", making "American" synonymous with "cool", and peddling all sorts of bourgeois ideology.
So in other words, I saw that anti-loitering sign in the Twin Cities, and I remembered all this history, and I thought about how this history is not only comparatively recent, but that its impact is ongoing. Then after I got back to where I was staying, and ate, I watched a movie with my relatives.
Guess where that movie was filmed!
Second Anecdote—
I was staying with an older relative, who is politically conservative, and so she would sometimes leave her TV on, playing Fox News. One day I overheard Fox News covering Edison in Lenapehoking banning the Septic flag from town meetings due to the flag's use as a "prop". And Fox News' infamous talking heads were all blab-blab-blabbing about how outraged they were that the national flag would be given a designation as pedestrian as "prop" — why, the flag is practically a holy relic, isn't it!
One of the talking heads said something to the effect of, "I'm sure the soldiers who risk their lives to protect this country's freedom, to protect that flag, would not approve of it being called a prop." — another talking head said something like, "I think any government official who would call the flag a prop should be removed from office, in fact anyone who calls the flag a prop should frankly be deported from this country."
Calling a military whose sole purpose is to terrorize the imperial periphery, "protecting the USA's freedom", is certainly bold to say, unless the real meaning of "the USA's freedom" is "the US bourgeoisie's freedom" — and the platitude about "freedom" being immediately followed by an open call to deport anyone who isn't deferential enough to a piece of cloth, is certainly ironic, that Seppoland's freedom includes the right to hoist the flag but not the right to call the flag whatever you want.
That the talking head's rhetoric is seen as acceptable enough to air on national TV in the middle of the day, and is nodded to by a wide section of Seppoland's public, indicates to me that Seppoland is a society constantly paranoid about its own collapse. "National defense" means keeping other countries down to Seppoland, and anything questioning the common wisdom is a dangerous foreign element that must be removed.
Threats of deportation are yet another cruel act used to uphold bourgeois rule, in a lot of countries including Seppoland. I have myself experienced someone saying I should be thrown out of Norway for not being anti-Putin enough, so I don't want to act like this is a phenomenon entirely unique to Seppoland. The talking head's call for deportation, though, is rooted in a deep xenophobia running through all of Septic society, and this xenophobia is again rooted in the settler-colonial nature of Seppoland: xenophobia is all a part of making sure that immigrants are aiming to move "up the ladder" towards the platonic ideal of whiteness, towards the maintenance of the settler-colony rather than opposition to it. A colony is at its core always unstable, after all. All that paranoia in Seppoland about threats both internal and external is a survival mechanism of a system with numbered days.
And flag worship would of course be a part of the aforementioned "platonic whiteness", it's practically a litmus test for settlerism: planting a flag in the ground is a common way to assert a territorial claim, so it's no wonder that a society built entirely on stolen land would see a need to fly its flag outside every home, hoist giant flags outside malls, pledge allegiance to flags in schools, symbolically claiming and reclaiming day in and day out all year round the land the country stole. You need to constantly be reminded that the United States of America is a real country with a legitimate claim to its land, that should continue to exist, that the "American experiment" ultimately amounts to something that makes all the cruelty worthwhile.
all great observations. the flag-worship-as-compensation is especially salient. it jumped a ton after 9/11.
unless the real meaning of "the USA's freedom" is "the US bourgeoisie's freedom
Genuine question from a european: What’s the “Seppoland” thing? Never seen it before.
Seppo from "septic tank" which rhymes with "Yank" as in Yankee, in other words Seppoland is "Yankee-land", i.e. the USA.
I was told that this term "Seppo" originated as a derogatory Australian term for US soldiers stationed there, and was from there expanded into a general term for "US-Americans". "Seppo" is today used in a number of different English dialects but remains most common in Australian English. I don't have any personal connections to Australia myself — my own first language is American English and I've lived in Europe my whole life — but I still try to refer to the USA as Seppoland if I feel like this wouldn't cause any confusion. There are a few reasons why I favor the name Seppoland when I can, the most important of which has to do with my views on American national identity.
It’s a weird mix of resignation, anger, sadness, and depression most days, but sometimes you’ll have an off-the-cuff conversation with someone and they’re a lot more clued in than you’d expect. Stuff like that keeps you going.
At my old apartment I used to run into my 70-ish year old neighbor every few weeks or so. His main source of income was from selling scrap metal he’d scrounge from dumpsters around town. He still believed in the Democratic Party, but had sharper analysis than I think a lot of people would give him credit for, just from looking at him. He definitely had some real class consciousness.There’s opportunity for agitation out there, but I think ultimately a lot of us are relatively comfortable and have a lot to lose, which stifles a lot of potential activity here in the belly of the beast.
I’d like to add that I do union work as well, and that’s about the biggest source of sustenance in my day to day life. At work I can barely have a conversation more than a few minutes without turning it to wages, our benefits, and general working conditions. A lot of people are pretty receptive, although often hesitant (tying into the comfortability I mentioned above). Homelessness is bad in my city and it’s definitely functioning as a threat to a lot of people (as I think it’s pretty much intended).
Shit, you should have come hiking in Colorado. The American West is stunningly beautiful. The only way I keep my sanity here is by retreating into the Rockies and forgetting that other people exist.
People here are really libbed up in my experience. Especially in Boulder, where they’ve destroyed the real left wing culture it had decades ago and replaced it with full on ravenous lib culture, celebrating pricing out the workers and hand wringing over meaningless gestures. The nature is beautiful for sure, but the class consciousness is lower than other parts of the country I’ve visited. Still a lot of internalized racism from living in what is basically a segregated state too.
I don't mean to endorse Colorado's politics at all. Sociopolitically it's a deeply flawed place with a demonic history, and it's those Front Range politics I'm escaping in the mountains. But when a flatlander visits I take them to somewhere like RMNP or James Peak Wilderness and they see something worth defending from Americans. The one redeeming thing I can think of for this country is the unimaginably beautiful landscape it pollutes by its existence. My political activism is becoming increasingly rooted in natural stewardship because everything beneath that wilderness is pretty much fucked but I can at least plant a tree which might outlive the empire.
they legalized weed and now my mind is pacified when I'm not working
It's all I know, really. Does hoping I die in my sleep every night count as a secret to putting up with it?
Around the 1800s, I don't remember exactly when, a French diplomat visited America and wrote about we are all fucked up and stressed all the time. Nothing has changed. We just keep pushing forward till we die mostly.
Ahh, good point. I thought it was the late 17s. I haven't bothered to rememebr properly I guess. Thank you.
That is pretty much exactly it. You get used to it. More specifically, you get resigned about no healthcare, insurance and healthcare that can wipe out savings, being among the most overworked people in the world.... Eventually you are forced to psychologically adapt by forcing yourself to become more or less emotionally callus to it, in order to survive with your faculties mostly intact.
So, uhh, what are your secrets, basically?
Spite. Spite at such a high temperature that it cooks into hatred for all colonizers, really. If not for the spite running through my bloodstream, these crackers would've got me to neck myself for them already.
Finding lots of like-minded people, and articulating a vision of how to operate a shadow/parallel economy in little progressive pockets. If you can make your neighborhood or city a safe and kind and prosperous place, it doesn't matter so much what the opposite corners of the country think. It gives me lots of joy to be around my autonomous communist comrades in any of the spots we're concentrated in, and my life is an aspiration to build those milieus until they stretch continuously all across Turtle Island and until their people have no substantial dependence on the government.
"If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem." -Stokely Carmichael
Also, I really don't see it as a paradigm of "you pick someplace to live off the menu". I'll bloom revolutionary flowers where I was planted. Every place is going to need anti-capitalist approaches adapted to its particular context.
Drugs. And some of this country is magnificently beautiful (I happen to live in a section that would qualify as such) which makes up for the absolutely shit people who run it.
