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The Little Mammal Scuttles
Feb. 4th, 2025 08:35 amShortly, I must toddle off to TaxBwana, and after that, I must figure out how to swap out the propane tank—which I’m sure is a very simple operation except I have never done it before & it involves a wrench, so you know.
Anyway. Not much time for scribbling today, which is fine because I am giving up politics.
Politics makes me feel like Cassandra. Meaning I see what’s going on very clearly, and I have utter confidence in any prediction I am moved to make.
But what exactly is the point of seeing clearly? I can’t influence a damn thing.
As the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci once observed, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
I am a little mammal, & really, my only job is to stay out from under the plunging feet of the thunder lizards.
So long as they don’t start piping Zyklon-B into those Guantanamo cells where they'll be housing all those undocumented immigrants and whatevers, I’m good.
At least, this time round, I’m not the one praying someone will hide me in their attic.
###
(Antonio Gramsci, by the way, was a really interesting guy, and the originator of the theory of cultural hegemony—a polysyllabic way of saying, “Bread and circuses.” Bread & circuses is always the most effective ruling strategy—the one fly in its traditionally soothing ointment being that art often reflects the vision of individual artists, and individual artists often have antiregime tendencies.
Once AI starts writing and composing all humans’ distractions, though, regimes won’t have that problem anymore.)
###
I watched the first three episodes of the TV series The Count of Monte Cristo last night. It’s not a particularly good production, but it did kind of pull me back from the ledge.
Politics is a big theme in The Count of Monte Cristo. But the politics involves the Bonapartists and the royalists in Western Europe circa 1850.
Tell me truthfully, now: Whose side are you on? Do you give a shit about Bonapartists and royalists?
I didn’t think so.
Politics may cast a dark shadow, but it’s a brief shadow, and in the end, nobody cares about it 100 years out. What they continue to care about are the stories of individuals who lived during those times.
###
Dumas was one of my favorite authors when I was 10, 11, 12.
I have no interest in rereading him, but I do recall—with great affection—the final sentence of The Count of Monte Cristo: …all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,”Wait and hope.”
(Hope my elderly memory hasn’t mangled the quote too badly.)
Anyway. Not much time for scribbling today, which is fine because I am giving up politics.
Politics makes me feel like Cassandra. Meaning I see what’s going on very clearly, and I have utter confidence in any prediction I am moved to make.
But what exactly is the point of seeing clearly? I can’t influence a damn thing.
As the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci once observed, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
I am a little mammal, & really, my only job is to stay out from under the plunging feet of the thunder lizards.
So long as they don’t start piping Zyklon-B into those Guantanamo cells where they'll be housing all those undocumented immigrants and whatevers, I’m good.
At least, this time round, I’m not the one praying someone will hide me in their attic.
###
(Antonio Gramsci, by the way, was a really interesting guy, and the originator of the theory of cultural hegemony—a polysyllabic way of saying, “Bread and circuses.” Bread & circuses is always the most effective ruling strategy—the one fly in its traditionally soothing ointment being that art often reflects the vision of individual artists, and individual artists often have antiregime tendencies.
Once AI starts writing and composing all humans’ distractions, though, regimes won’t have that problem anymore.)
###
I watched the first three episodes of the TV series The Count of Monte Cristo last night. It’s not a particularly good production, but it did kind of pull me back from the ledge.
Politics is a big theme in The Count of Monte Cristo. But the politics involves the Bonapartists and the royalists in Western Europe circa 1850.
Tell me truthfully, now: Whose side are you on? Do you give a shit about Bonapartists and royalists?
I didn’t think so.
Politics may cast a dark shadow, but it’s a brief shadow, and in the end, nobody cares about it 100 years out. What they continue to care about are the stories of individuals who lived during those times.
###
Dumas was one of my favorite authors when I was 10, 11, 12.
I have no interest in rereading him, but I do recall—with great affection—the final sentence of The Count of Monte Cristo: …all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,”Wait and hope.”
(Hope my elderly memory hasn’t mangled the quote too badly.)
