Yesterday I met someone formally for the first time (we’d crossed paths a couple of weeks earlier). And he told me some background about the person in charge of a current campaign that helped me see recent events in a new light. Without getting into libelous details, suffice to say that sometimes people are using – consciously/unconsciously/whatever – popular discontent as a way of getting more attention – attention that they hope to turn into votes and a place at the ‘top’ table.
This will come as a giant shock to you, I am sure.
Anyway, it put me in mind of something I once saw outside a Friends Meeting House. Now, I do like the Quakers (in principle more than practice perhaps?). One their favourite ‘why can’t we all just get along’ concepts, the one I saw, goes like this.
Yeah, Buridan’s ass with a clone.
Anyhoos, it’s all nice “hold hands and sing kumbaya”, but what if one of the donkeys just will not – cannot – back down? And the other does?
What if ‘grass roots’ and ‘non-hierarchical’ groups/networks etc are harvested by narcissists who are simply not capable of (or interested in) the kind of patient ‘capacity building’ that is a necessary but not sufficient element of ‘movement-building’ (which everyone claims they are – proper empty signifier/motherhood-and-apple pie term that is these days).
“What if?” Well, look around you, mofos. You are starring into the abyss, the hole left where civil society used to be. You are staring into Buridan’s ass hole.
marchudson.net 
Although, given the topic (and calling it “a topic” doesn’t quite carry the weight the moment requires), but given the topic, nevertheless, I’m enjoying the heck out of your sense of humor. It’s absurd to realize (or, rather, the absurdity is realizing) that a sense of humor may survive until the very end, which was the one thing we didn’t have enough of (especially about ourselves) at the start. The question is whether this is frivolous, narcistic humor or the kind of humor that heralds sincerity. And I think yours is the latter. And “what good will sincerity do?” is the other question that the insincere inevitably ask. And I have an answer, even if it’s wrong: Sincerity is the reversal of what got us here. We owe it to the earth, who will after all recover someday and have learned something maybe. At the very least, throw fewer bananas and more wrenches at the monkeys next time.
[Ed: this was a somewhat frivolous comment by itself, but there is something needed here. The need for sincere humor is sincerely needed. The smallest shift in our orientation will alter any course of recovery, with or without us. So, I’m a new fan of yours. Thanks].
Thank you!! Just beginning to look at your posts.
“And this means we’re breaking now and then into a kind of impersonal point of view, where my sense of Self, my wooden character, my public persona, is seen to be coming apart at the seams. And this is good news, but it makes for a very chaotic person, who takes things personally, like a puppet of reactivity, in one instant, and then impersonally, and with unflustered bemusement in the next.”
Nails it. Bravo!!