Of course Jimmy isn’t all bad. Nobody is beyond redemption, not even the last man out of Saigon represented these days by the spark that Peter Thiel once was. But the artist formerly known as Prince has long since had his shot and these days gets his kicks by being a mild annoyance to me.
What is a bit surprising is the stifling out of all flame, as if a lighter flicked backwards in time. Like a feminine judgement, which is rare to say the least. Much as he is personally revered around these woods, the powerlessness he represents is matched only by the tall claims he once made, that could in essence, stand the test of time for any lie one may conjure.
If everyone knows the moon landing was fake, and nobody brings it up in polite company, does that take away from the facade we feed off of? This in essence is the thielian tragedy, the deception one uses as a political mask consumes the very face it hides.
The theater knows no company but misery. A droll lampooning of misfits, by misfits. In other words, bullshit proper.
It is difficult to write about the liminality that now sucks in from every direction all sorts of bush-league ideas and half-assed executions. Difficult because even politically, the lusture is lost, the zeal conquered, the satisfaction promised inherently in the “american dream” and the foolhardy penchant for the frontier (aka the american way) has all been delivered unto the diminishing returns of time.
Into the resulting poticial and historical vacuum have rushed in all kinds of non-sequituers and dangerous ideas that feed off the chaos in the swamp. The absolute, knock-on-wood decree of a people asserting themselves against the next onslaught of fear, doubt, paranoia, the devil himself has all been dissolved into a heap of hopeless, powerless, paralysing jumble of everyday actions which have neither grounding in theory, nor are confirmed by any aspirational practice.
The sewer isn’t leaking, its jammed and desperately needs to burst, if not at least leak into the surroundings. But just like Peter Theil, it will neither explode nor leak - therein lies the only extant justification of our times, the penultimate reason of the downfall and the ultimate tragedy.
Surely in his humility Thiel would downplay this angle, but end times are characterised by fatalist characters. The German determination that was supposedly absolute has, pardon the pun, petered out of the system.
This is where things start to get cartoonish. Things are either overdetermined or undetermined to the point of chaos. Tariffs, for example are one end of the spectrum, being a tax-on-tax, a “cowards’s diplomacy”, whereas on the other end, we have an economic system that stands only on a self-aggrandising, self-perpetuating vacuous loop memeified.
Realism in international relations isn’t self-sustaining, it stands on the shoulders of, among other things, fundamental values like identity, culture, sovereignty etc. Primus inter pares among which is identity not only because it comes from the bottom-up and thus is naturally the most grassroots of all other values, but also because it permeates through all structure and superstructures.
Identity is a uniquely thielian game, in that it is “revealed”, as if a snake shedding its skin. There is a fatalism that comes parcelled into the emergence, like a poisonous sap oozing from an otherwise edible fruit. In that identity not simply light or dark, good neither bad but both, and needs both self-aggrandising and self-censoring measures in order to be successfully brought to fruition as fully-formed, balanced. The dialectic is the structure of the emergence, this revelation.
But mere emergence does not justify the hold of culture, nor by extension the permanence (end of history) of realism.
To the extent self is a recursive “relation”, there seems to arise no question of inquiry, but since it is a “revealed” structure, identity that is “difference as a resemblance” is the product of this emergence.
What is a prerequisite however, for any resemblance, is prior knowlege, so self is knowledge of self, which justifies capitalism, you need money to make money. The revealed structure reverberates across the universe without our really knowing the inner workings and therein lies the tragedy, which is to say the American identity has revealed itself to be beneath the necessary threshold of this frame of self-referentiality required for basic capitalism to occur, and as a result, things have stalled.
It is always difficult to establish causation in such grand matters, but beyond capitalism what identity does Jimmy have? Christianity has all but left the land, or to be sure was never really a priority. Forget the standard pains and tantrums thrown around by every empire hence and since, because none of it helps, and none of it stops the decline. It is actually so bad that the only solution is slowing down, sans which, this may well be peak technology and the fag end of kali yuga.
The promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has produced fetterred zombies pursuing only each other. There will be no revolution moving forward, nor war outside the occasional skirmish and foolhardy adventure, history has sublated into a flattenning comparable only to the heights of skyscrapers. The new american dream is a dream of words the dreamer dare not utter. As for the rumblings of a civil strife, they don’t give enough credit to the wisdom of the masses. George Floyd ain’t coming back no matter how much Jimmy jerks off in the streets.
But wait, there’s more, the decline has been emergent since Tony Soprano called it out, but has only now begun to reveal the conjunctive blindspots leaning against each other, and in full public view.
Lastly, end times are characterised by a flavourful nostalgia and a yearning to return, or at least have someone return to the past, if not from it. Nostalgia is a more powerful drug than paranoia, paranoia that just isn’t buttering any parsnips anymore because the tacit understanding seems to have dawned upon Jimmy that the “enemy ain’t Saudi, the enemy around me”. This rupture from within, this negative frontier is an endlessly fascinating edge of history we will dive into next.