O Tempora O Morons

Still wiping the crap off of my glasses, it doesn't seem to want to come off it's so thick, I thought I would share with you some of the thoughts of another guy who sees no reason for academics to be tethered to that inconvenient thing called "real life", one Seth Abramson.   Abramson is listed at his home, Huffington Post this way,

Seth Abramson teaches at the University of New Hampshire. He is also an attorney, editor, and author.*

Reading what he wrote, On Bernie Sanders and Experimental Journalism, all I can say is I'm glad my mother isn't around to see what kind of writer can teach at her alma mater these days.  If you can spare enough time and risk enough of your faculty of reason, if you read the whole thing you'll find it hard to believe how bad it is, how, actually, insane it is.

It takes him a long, long, oh, so long time to get going so skipping to what comes no where near being the chase, here's what he has to say about the real reality of Bernie Sanders campaign and his characterization of his supporters - keep in mind Abramson is a huge Bernie Sanders fan, this isn't someone making fun of him and his supporters.

I’ve been a metamodernist creative writer for many years now, but had not seen an opportunity to bring this earnest, optimistic, and loving art practice into my professional writing activities until Bernie Sanders came along. Not only do I fully support and endorse Senator Sanders’ agenda, I see in his political methodology evidence of the metamodern, just as I know for certain when I hear Clinton’s cynical incrementalism that I am in the presence of a postmodern political ethos. The reason we think of Bernie Sanders as impractical or even naive is that he is; what most fail to see, however, is that his is the “informed naivete” of metamodernism. He sees that our economic and cultural markets are in a terminal state of deconstruction, and yes, this makes him angry and “negative” in a certain respect, but he sees too that the opportunity this deconstruction affords us all is a moment in which we can reconstruct everything we’ve known in a way that better reflects our values.

Draw up blueprints for the impossible and you find, in time, that individual pieces of an impossible plan become first improbable and then merely unlikely and then even odds and finally, at long last, possible. Repeat that procedure enough times and universal wavelength function tells us that the very fabric of reality can be altered. In simpler terms, when Bernie Sanders tells Hillary Clinton that universal healthcare, universal higher education, and a living minimum wage are human rights, she may not realize it but that’s the end of the consequential part of the conversation. The long-term details of how these things are achieved pale in significance to the far grander and more audacious act of naming the impossible as possible in the first instance. Clinton demanding that Sanders compare his policies with hers as to these topics is so beside the point as to make the Secretary seem foolish; if I tell you I have the power to fly and in time will find a way to manifest that power to you in real time, your first response isn’t to ask whether I agree that all proposed flight plans should be pre-cleared with the FAA.

Bernie Sanders’ “political revolution” is political only inasmuch as thought is political. What he is really asking us to do — or, rather, because he knows how many Americans grew up with postmodernism as their mother’s milk, what he is asking young people not so jaded to do — is participate in a metamodern Enlightenment that is, at base, a philosophical revolution. What he is saying is that, yes, a $15-an-hour minimum wage is absolutely impossible at the federal level right now, but if enough people adjust their perception at the local level to briefly imagine this impossibility as a possibility, suddenly Seattle can pass a $15-an-hour minimum wage. Then Los Angeles and San Francisco. Then New York City and D.C. Then smaller towns — perhaps a town like the one in Ohio that just passed, effective forthwith, six months’ paid maternity and paternity leave for all municipal employees. That’s an idea that has no place whatsoever here in America — that is totally foreign to the intellectual infrastructure we’ve developed — but when you find fertile soil for the impossible it really doesn’t matter how large a plot of land you’re working with. By the very nature of things — we might call it perceptual entropy — the impossible, once perceived, enters a chain of causation whose natural conclusion is realization.

It’s hard to believe that no one’s noticed yet that Sanders’ entire political agenda is a thought experiment — an instance of long-term ideation rather than immediate satisfaction. The idea that Sanders supporters will all, en masse, blindly vote for Hillary Clinton in the fall, or that Sanders attracting more than 40 percent of all Democratic hearts and minds means anything other than that the Democratic Party is about to fracture, is based on the fallacy that Sanders and Clinton represent political philosophies whose differences are in degree rather than in kind. In fact, when and as Sanders chooses not to lay out a policy in furtherance of an ambition; when and as he does offer a policy, but its implementation is murky; when and as he chooses to inspire emotion rather than a model UN-like legislative plan, it is because he sees that Washington is broken and knows that the only national politician worth a damn in that scenario is one who shows us each individually how we can act locally (not, or not yet, nationally) to reimagine the possible.

And it goes on and on and on with one shovel full after another after another....

I got to Abramson through a piece by Molly Ball at the Atlantic which sums up so much of what I'm reading all over the place, blogs, even the allegedly responsible magazines of the alleged left.  I'm exhausted from reading the nonsense so I'll let her sum it up.

Sanders and his people have their own sets of rules. All you have to do is unskew the delegate counts, they explain, take out the superdelegates, imagine they all vote for Sanders, imagine certain primaries had been conducted according to different rules. Angry memes [sic.] about missing votes and stolen precincts ricochet around social media. Did you see what happened in Nevada, when the party, Sanders’s supporters claim, changed the rules to keep them from getting more delegates at the state convention? The game is rigged!

The Sanders movement has become impervious to reality. Some have even called into question the nature of reality itself: “Bernie Sanders’ ‘political revolution’ is political only inasmuch as thought is political,” a self-described “metamodernist creative writer” named Seth Abramson wrote in the Huffington Post a few days ago. “By the very nature of things—we might call it perceptual entropy—the impossible, once perceived, enters a chain of causation whose natural conclusion is realization.” By this logic, Abramson reasons, Sanders is actually winning. It’s, like, the Matrix, man, or something.

I would recommend that reading Molly Ball's piece might save your sanity if you read the first link.

You might have thought before his campaign this year that Bernie Sanders was a far more serious man than his wackier supporters - something that you can hope for pretty much all candidates - I'd certainly have asserted that as late as February of this year.  But I don't think that anymore.  His campaign is encouraging the same self-indulgent fantasy and irrationality that informed some of his "youthful writing" only, like Henry Hyde excusing his affair, Sanders wrote them into his forties.

For a decade in which I've had to reassess so much of what I believed before, things informed by the relative paucity of information available through the U.S. Mail, in print.  It was through the magazines of the left, the Boston Globe and the New Hampshire and Maine media that I formed my image of the heroic Bernie Sanders.  That image was an illusion, something that his over-exposure this year has shown to have been the result of favorable PR and a very selective presentation of him by favorable media.  That Bernie Sanders is one I'll never believe in again.  It was a false front, he's really not that much different from other politicians and media figures.   And he's still got the most willfully deceived snowed with it.  It is a cynical and cruel campaign he's running.  And an irresponsible and dangerous one.


* His extended CV at HuffPo:  A graduate of Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Abramson is the author of six books, including An Insider's Guide to Graduate Creative Writing Degrees (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2018); DATA (BlazeVOX, 2016); Metamericana (BlazeVOX, 2015); Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013), winner of the 2012 Akron Poetry Prize; and Northerners (Western Michigan University Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Poetry & Prose. His poetry and prose have appeared in The Washington Post, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Philadelphia Review of Books, Fence, Best New Poets (University of Virginia Press), and elsewhere. An essayist and film/TV reviewer for Indiewire, he is also Series Editor for Best American Experimental Writing, whose third edition will be published by Wesleyan University Press in the fall of 2016.

How decadent does someone have to be before they can't get a job teaching the young at an accredited university?   My guess, it's the friggin' Harvard Law thing, even more so than the Iowa Workshop.   I suspect if he didn't have Harvard in his CV, he'd be leading creative writing classes at a particularly hard up and unfortunate adult ed program.