And then, despair. Despair which is, I suppose, the best word I can summon with which to describe that suffocating sensation of a certain familiar combination of anger, frustration, and helplessness. Despair like a reoccurring dream in which you feel like you want to hurt somebody, like you want to hit somebody, hard, but at the same time know even before you try that all your blows will be glancing. Or – the other side of the coin – like after a punch to the gut, when all you want to do is the one thing you can’t do, which is breathe. If you have been following the news out of Wisconsin – the state that, though I have not lived in it for over a decade, I stubbornly insist on continuing to call “home” – then you probably know already that the recent State Supreme Court election, which pitted incumbent justice David Prosser against a former Assistant State Attorney General by the name of JoAnne Kloppenburg, was more than just that. Indeed, because it was framed this way by the media, and by tens of thousands of riled activists, and by the in- and out-of-state interest groups that poured millions of dollars into run-up advertising campaigns, it was also something of a referendum on newly elected Republican governor Scott Walker’s ongoing efforts to sterilize the state’s public employees’ unions by stripping them of their right to bargain for anything other than base wage increases commensurate with inflation, which it to say, for anything at all. Prosser, it so happens, was not only Republican Speaker of the State Assembly in an earlier incarnation, but today counts himself (and is counted) as one of the governor’s political mentors. Kloppenburg, on the other hand – well,...

As I compose these remarks, the latest news from Japan is that over 6,000 people are now officially confirmed dead with over 10,000 others still missing – most of them presumed dead, as well. More ominous still is the specter of nuclear holocaust, with a full-scale meltdown happening, or about to happen, or having happened already, depending on whom you ask and who answers, at the Daiichi nuclear plant, 150 miles north of Tokyo. Radiation released by damaged reactors at the Daiichi plant has been detected in the United States, but it has not reached and, we have been assured, will not reach, dangerous levels. But how, in that case, to explain the uncannily incandescent madness that seems to have taken hold of some among us in the wake of the tragedy? Consider the case of rapper 50 Cent as one example. On the morning of the earthquake and tsunami, he took to Twitter to quip: “Look this is very serious people I had to evacuate all my hoe’s from LA, Hawaii and Japan. I had to do it. Lol.” Shortly thereafter, as though realizing the genuine gravity of the situation, he backtracked from those glib comments, tweeting: “Nah, this is nuts but what can anyone do about it. Let’s pray for anyone who has lost someone.” But moments later, as though seized by an almost pathological indecisiveness, the rapper retracted his retraction, writing: “Some of my tweets are ignorant I do it for shock value. Hate it or love it. I’m cool either way.” Not long after, and also by way of Twitter, came a series of half-baked one-liners from comedian Gilbert Gottfried, including the somewhat illiterate “I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, ‘They’ll [sic] be another...

Assuming its intent was to provide a kind of push-back, heading into the midterm elections, against the right wing momentum generated by Glenn Beck’s Rally to Restore Honor, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s pre-election Rally to Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive served as a useful reminder that the discourse of fear is not one that favors the left. But it doesn’t seem to have served for much more than that. John Boehner – yet another Republican whose name reminds us of a sexualized part of the human anatomy – is the new face of political power in the United States, which is bad news for progressives unless they happen to be of the smarmy t-shirt making variety (and for those who are, I offer up the following t-shirtable slogan, free of charge: “Put a Dick and Bush together and what do you get? A Boehner!”). As for the part of things the Stewart/Colbert rally seemed to get right, the reasons for this are effectively and polemically synthesized in Alain Badiou’s recent book on France’s rich, xenophobic dickhead of a president Nicolas Sarkozy, The Meaning of Sarkozy. In remarks delivered during a seminar just after the aforementioned rich xenophobic dickhead’s election in 2007, and later rewritten as the second chapter of the aforementioned book, Badiou offers an “analysis of the electoral context” in France that could just as easily be applied to the recent electoral context in the United States. “[T]he situation,” Badiou writes of the campaign cycle that ended with Sarkozy’s triumph, “was one of a conflict between two fears, an original fear and a derivative one. The original fear belongs to the section of the population who dread something happening that will precipitate their decline, and it is, Badiou writes, “focused on the traditional...

Strange that I would feel motivated to compose a defense of Facebook, of all things, n precisely this moment – strange for at least a couple of different reasons. Strange, first of all, because I have not seen, nor do I plan to see, The Social Network, the much-ballyhooed new movie about Facebook’s founding father, Mark Zuckerberg (ex-CNN talking head Rick Sanchez would likely point out, at this point, that with a last name like that, the guy’s almost certainly a Jew). Not just because the movie seems perhaps a bit too timely to strike me as worthy of critical attention, but also owing to more personal matters. Zuckerberg, billionaire at the precocious age of twenty-six, with his signature jeans and t-shirt (or sweatshirt when its chilly) non-outfits that some in the fashion world have declared the epitome of the new banker chic – the look that goes with access to and control over the movements of large quantities of capital – and his penchant for computer programming, reminds me of my cousin Andrew. Like Zuckerberg, Andrew spent his time in college less on schoolwork (I think he was a psych. major, but I’d have to double check that) than on partying with friends and, more importantly, fiddling about with computers. Like Zuckerberg, Andrew signifies to the world the – from my perspective – enormous quantity of money to which his person corresponds not by wearing expensive, designer clothes but, precisely, by not wearing expensive, designer clothes, and instead wearing whatever the fuck he wants (and nothing says “I’m wearing whatever the fuck I want” like jeans and a t-shirt). As for the money itself, the precise figures are, naturally, a carefully guarded family secret. But a secret is not carefully guarded unless it is...

In the hours and days after the messianic histrionics of Glenn Becks Restoring Honor Rally, most in the media seemed to find themselves inspired to analyze the proceedings in terms of a turn toward God, on the part of this supposed newsman turned newsmaker. A rather flimsy analysis, I thought, for it only parroted Beck’s own pronouncement, during the rally—drenched in the adoration of his followers—that “today is the day America turns back to God.” Perhaps history will show him to have been prescient. But the question, while we wait, is: to just what God might Beck, or even America, have been turning (or turning back) on the day Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was forever contaminated? As a Mormon, of course, Beck himself probably doesn’t understand what God, or gods—or, according to some accounts, aliens—he worships, or is descended from, or is in the process of becoming. As one of the unquestionable leaders of the increasingly politicized and, therefore, increasingly dangerous turn-of-the-century American evangelical movement, on the other hand, there can be little doubt that the God to which Beck referred during his Dream Day rally was the Judeo-Christian one to which that movement traces itself (in reality, of course, it is just one of what are surely an endless number of bastard children of 1980s televangelism). Perhaps, however, things aren’t as obvious as they appear—or, in any event, as Beck and his cabal of cohorts would like them to appear. Despite a Bar Mitzvah (a year later than is typical, for reasons I won’t get into here), I am no theologian. Nonetheless, I did once read the Book of Job (in its English translation) for a seminar on tragic literature taught by a middle-aged French moral philosopher who shall...