Here’s to Lee Siegel, falling off a bridge.
Only privileged people like Lee Siegel praise their morality when they can afford to break the law.
The Department of Education makes it hard for you, and ugly. But it is possible to survive the life of default. You might want to follow these steps: Get as many credit cards as you can before your credit is ruined. Find a stable housing situation. Pay your rent on time so that you have a good record in that area when you do have to move. Live with or marry someone with good credit (preferably someone who shares your desperate nihilism).
This is Siegel’s horrible sense of humor. See, he’s basically confessing what he can afford to do and what he’s done and giggling about it--presenting it as tongue in cheek almost--and somehow has the nerve to refer to it as desperate nihilism. He’s posing. It’s an aesthetic.
The man writes social criticism about popular culture and social politics; he’s published five, successful books. He’s a professional writer. He’s not hurting financially. By any stretch of the imagination.
Here’s the publisher’s description of his book Against the Machine:
Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It’s become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn’t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we haven’t yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products—such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the “bourgeois bohemian”—have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused “self-expression” with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine—that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity. Siegel’s argument isn’t a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but rather a bracing appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Dazzlingly erudite, full of startlingly original insights, and buoyed by sharp wit,Against the Machine will force you to see our culture—for better and worse—in an entirely new way.
Pseudo-intellectual VOMIT. He wrote a book criticizing liberals once, too. Touche.
This guy is a self-satisfied rich man who won’t admit his wealth.
Am I a deadbeat? In the eyes of the law I am. Indifferent to the claim that repaying student loans is the road to character? Yes. Blind to the reality of countless numbers of people struggling to repay their debts, no matter their circumstances, many worse than mine? My heart goes out to them. To my mind, they have learned to live with a social arrangement that is legal, but not moral.
He’s defaulted because he can afford to default. (And I believe he’s relating a past time because he’s likely settled by now. He’s surely financially secure.) But look at the ease with which men like this see obvious social contradictions, not just visualize them, but represent contradictions in ways that self-valorize their own person, their own choices, their own status. “To [his] mind,” my emphasis, “[we] have learned to live with a [situation] that is legal, but not moral.” Great. Lee Siegel sees our lives of desperate contradiction and he has seen his own way out. And now he’s writing a book about it and generating buzz by writing about what’s likely a central theme, a social contradiction.
What a fucking asshole.