Greetings y'all! I know it's been a while, and I apologize for the lack of posts about music (check out Cameron Winter's new solo album "Heavy Metal" if you haven't already. He sounds like beautifully discordant and spastically sonorous Gen-z Bill Callahan). Life has a way of forcing you into adulthood, despite your best efforts to avoid it, and pretty soon you're left having to prioritize certain things over others (and sadly blogging about music for free was one of those things that had to fall to the wayside). However, if you enjoyed my posts, and dare I say my writings, then you might be happy to know that I wasn't just growing old and selling out. I was actually pursuing other creative pursuits all these years of absence - including writing. In fact, that's the reason I'm here posting, because I finally self-published one of the books I wrote a few years back (because unfortunately it is once again relevant). It is available as both an eBook and a paperback here and I would really appreciate your support!
Here's some more info on the book (in case the title is too off-putting lol):
Make Armstrong Great Again was originally written during 2017-2019, and was inspired by the fact that I was teaching high school at the time. Being part of a high school campus as an adult feels like you're an anthropologist doing field work. It is as joyous and beautiful, as it is terrifying and confusing. You can't help but marvel at the rawness of that age. The passion, emotion, apathy, and authenticity constantly churning throughout. It is a land of contradictions. All of it hanging together by a thread, or rather the thin facade of order, tradition, and consequence.
Post-2016, I saw and felt a lot of parallels between a high school campus and our political reality. Here was the US, the global hegemon, and purported democratic beacon and moral compass of the world, coming to terms with the fact that our political institutions were nothing but a facade based upon crumbling notions of propriety, fairness, and consequence. All of which was meant to cover, obscure, and mystify our underlying economic/social reality.
Now I'm not one to subscribe to the "Great Man" theory of history. I think everyone, regardless of the power they wield, is more or less a prisoner to our underlying social/economic systems, and therefore confined to a limited range of actions and possibilities. However, I do think that every now and then, certain historical figures happen to resonate with a moment, and therefore have a little more latitude in their ability to actually respond to systems and shape reality.
Sadly, I believe Trump is one of these figures. The combination of his wealth, social capital, and personality allowed him to embody the moment, which in turn led to him (consciously or unconsciously) recognizing and breaking through the thin facade of our political order. In doing so, he forced everyone else to recognize the facade and stare into the abyss, and ever since that realization we have all been collectively going insane, trying to channel or numb all of our anger, fear, and desperation.
Whether its class de-alignement, Qanon, cottage-core fantasies, Russia-gate, clinging to empty institutions, compensatory nationalism, opiate epidemics, pointless impeachments, our ever-expanding forms of spectacle and entertainment, the circular firing squads of the left, more and more blatant racism and anti-LGBTQI+ sentiment, or just a general sense of nihilistic doom, we have all been trying to come to terms with the fact that reality no longer has any safe guards or guarantees.
This is terrifying (but also potentially liberating), and since the levers of politics are completely controlled by moneyed interests (and therefore out of our reach), all of us are incredibly alienated and have no meaningful form of social organization, and we are up against the ticking clock of ecological destruction, we end up turning on each other and using the most vulnerable as scapegoats. We do this because it's easy, and because attacking and blaming symptoms seems like the only option available. We are all so busy, tired, atomized, and disempowered that we can barely imagine, let alone muster up the will, sacrifice, and wherewithal to do what is hard and organize so that we can actually struggle against the root material causes of our misery. And so instead, out of sheer desperation, we direct all of our energy, focus, and emotion into chasing the phantoms and ghosts of a culture war. Suffocating more and more in the process, and growing more insane all the while.
Anyway, all of this is to say, imagining our politics in the context of a high school was strangely illuminating. On the one hand, it is incredibly fitting. And yet, at the same time, it feels completely out of place and exaggerated even amongst oft lambasted and demonized hormone-addled teenagers. Situating our politics in the context of a high school somehow managed to highlight its absurdity all the more. The plot of this book seems fully fictional, and yet it's the context of our very real, and very adult, reality. In fact, much of the tweets and debate/speech dialogue used throughout are direct quotes from the 2016 campaign (with some necessary contextual changes). And of course, perhaps most absurd of all, the ultimate result of it all is the same.
That's the book. In all its entertaining, infuriating, and devastating glory. No one escapes unscathed. It's different from my usual style, but it was nice to take a break from my more "conceptual" work and practice writing in a different way (though for better or worse my verbose and overwrought philosophizing still finds its way into the novel). Anyway, if you want a copy, it is now available both as an ebook and a physical paperback via the link in my bio. Hopefully it provides some sort of catharsis as we buckle up for these next four years.