Author: Dack Rouleau

“I have seen the future, and it is death.” This gloomy truism, though it be as irresistible as the flow of time, never resonates for me, never really rings, until the suffocating freeze of winter makes its annual descent upon New Hampshire. Only in this state of seasonal paralysis, when those who are not thwarted by the snow will split their own skin in the sadistic winds blowing them back, is death a tangible force, even as it remains an abstract concept. We steel ourselves against the lethal chill and remind ourselves we will survive it, but so, too, do we ask ourselves: “For how much longer?” The year, at least, will not endure for more than a number of weeks, and with the end of this year, we will see the demise of more than one presidential campaign.

With so many Democrats competing for their party’s blessing, it’s been tough to keep track of who has dropped out, even among the bottom tier. A week ago, I was stunned and somewhat queasy to learn that John Delaney is still in the race, even after twenty-eight months of existential irrelevance and the shocking absence of pretended principles, even. I was much less surprised, but also much more disgusted, to learn that Michael Bennet was still in the race as of Saturday, December the 7^th. While Delaney is a crude caricature of the sexless Washington sleazeball, his incurably awkward manner seems to have stopped everyone from buying into his scam. Bennet, on the other hand, has mastered the art of pretending to be one of the people, evincing a convincingly gregarious warmth that is associated exclusively with the down-to-earth. He swindles people, even those who know he and Delaney stand the same chance of becoming president.

Certainly, Bennet isn’t the first politician to don inexpensive threads, slump his shoulders, and try to pretend he’s an average joe. This populist masquerade, while obscenely disrespectful to middle- and working-class citizens who lack Bennet’s $16 million net worth, did not begin when this man set foot on the floor of the United States Senate. Nor is he the first millionaire to pose for ridiculous pictures in front of mountaintops to play the role of a rugged commoner; as a New Hampshirite, I am all too conversant with this cheesy practice. Nevertheless, I have an exceptional contempt for Bennet, not because there is anything unique to his chicanery, but because he distinguished himself in the mass persecution of Julian Assange.

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Imagine my good fortune, discovering Joy Reid’s bizarre presentation on the inspiring strength—and tragic victimization—of Kamala Harris on Monday, December the 2^nd. In a baffling dialogue with several faithful spokespersons for the establishment, Reid insisted that Harris’s presidential campaign was far from finished and scolded her competitors in the corporate media for penning Harris’s “obituaries” prematurely. As we have come to learn, they were delivered just a few days early, for Harris has quit her battle for the powers of the presidency. While I seldom indulge in the pleasures of sadism and schadenfreude, I can make an exception in this case, relishing the national humiliation of a right-wing authoritarian disguised as an Aunt Tammy, one who had sent innocent people of color to death row and who would have allowed our military to murder innocent people of color overseas. If my delight in her political and personal devastation is uncouth, then consider it an antidote to the tasteless toxicity of the lachrymose eulogies delivered in the press.

We will change the channel from MSNBC and turn to CNN, where Kyung Lah could not conceal her own heartbreak. Reflecting wistfully on the righteous “hope and promise” of the lost campaign, she described Harris as the destined redeemer, one who would deliver the progressives to the land of justice and splendor. She saw her as “somebody who represents the coalition, the candidate who potentially could string together black voters, college educated women, potentially the working class, left and right.” A broader organization of Americans I can’t imagine, but Lah does not define the constituency as such. Rather, she begins with the reflection and works her way backwards: “What the Democrats were looking for was someone who looked like them.”

In a single sentence, the entire intellectual power of progressivism is reduced to an expectation of appearance! We don’t care about who the candidate is, or what she stands for, or what she resents; we care only about what she looks like. Now, it would be reckless and crass, not to mention nakedly racist, to accuse left-wing voters of harboring such shallow sentiment collectively, but isn’t it time for us to acknowledge the predatory tendency of the neoliberal media to exploit the superficiality of identity politics? The commentators of cable news commend their consumers for trusting Harris, even in the midst of overwhelming proof of her moral rot. These viewers were ordered to maintain their faith, not because of anything Harris ever did, but because she “looked like” them—or, if the viewers were white, then she “looked like” something wholesome.

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Joy Reid accuses the author of a Politico article that was published on 11/15/2019 of placing too much emphasis on a Quinnipiac poll that was released on 11/26/2019.

Good fortune is common enough, even in the protracted misery of human life, but serendipity falls upon us only rarely, and, for some people, never at all. It is delightfully fitting that, in the United States, it usually begins with losing your job: a new opportunity is suddenly presented. Therefore, we must never be so crude as to mistake good fortune for serendipity, or vice-versa. We have the good fortune to be alive today, when we are afforded such a spectacular view of the decline of the American Empire. But it was an act of blessed serendipity that the producers and showrunners of MSNBC chose to mount an obscenely racist defense of Kamala Harris on the same day that I read the closing section of Soul of Ice, a collection of essays by Eldridge Cleaver.

Eldridge Cleaver’s name and literature have been concealed, if not buried, by the architects of our collective amnesia. A black man who was raised in Arkansas, but who grew up in California, he was arrested on a charge of possession of pot at the age of nineteen. While imprisoned, he placed a poster of a woman in his cell, and was shocked when one of the guards destroyed it—not because he disliked pornography, which abounded in the prison, but because the woman in the poster was white.

This incident, as well as the incessant psychic trauma that is the distinction of the thoughtful as well as the clueless, inspired Cleaver, upon his release, to become a serial rapist targeting white women. Unfortunately for Cleaver, the presiding judge did not approve of his approach to racial retribution, and he was delivered to prison once again. Upon his release, for which several female intellectuals campaigned, Cleaver became a prolific critic of the American culture, writing several essays on the subjects of race, sexuality, and group psychologically. If his writing never reached the scope of grandeur of the best of Dubois, still it was much more credible and poignant than anything that has been said on the subject of race relations since—including by the wealthy pundits appearing on cable news.

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Are we wrong to reduce Mein Kampf to a commentary on the Trumpish Age? I think not, though this question places itself before me and the page every time I write another one of these articles, which are really more like diary entries than formal essays. There is probably no other way for us, the people living and working and politicking today, to approach Hitler’s autobiography except as a commentary on our own present. Sometimes, there is a narcissistic motivation in our reading of the present in the past, or the past in the present, but we will be free of this prejudicial error in the case of Mein Kampf, provided that two conditions are met:

• We do not believe the political state of America in the year 2019 is any more “important”, for lack of better word, than the political state of Germany in the year 1925.
• We promise to revisit Mein Kampf twenty years from now and discover what it says about America

Come to think of it, the most recent Houghton Mifflin edition of Mein Kampf, the only one readily available in American bookstores, was published twenty years ago. Its release must have inspired at least one historian to write a contemporary interpretation, possibly by contrasting the widespread poverty of early-twentieth-century Germany with the ubiquitous wealth of late-twentieth-century America. Wealth is still omnipresent in America today, but poverty is, too, and the coexistence of these extremes has come to define our cultural schizophrenia.

Hitler recognized a comparable dynamic in the Germany of his time, and the elemental hypocrisy of a society that tolerates it. “The environment of my youth consisted of petty-bourgeois circles,” he recalls, “hence of a world having very little relation to the purely manual worker.” His affluent upbringing shielded his eyes from the upper classes’ excesses and the lower classes’ struggles, but his ignorance ended in adulthood, when he was forced to make his own way. Many of us who grew up in the abundant luxury of late-twentieth-century America, who were pacified and pampered by its artificial riches, have been traumatized by our inability to sustain that degree of comfort in our working lives.

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As soon as we establish, however tentatively, our “right” to read Mein Kampf, we are called upon to answer questions without end pertaining to our motivations and intent. Why do we want to read Mein Kampf and what do we hope to get out of it? We might respond to this with some questions of our own: “Who wants to know? What makes you ask? Why do we have to justify ourselves?”

Noticeably, it is not the neo-Nazis who keep us from the book, interested though they would be in protecting Hitler’s word from the distortions of graceless outsiders. Au contraire, our interrogator is the self-declared mortal enemy of all things fascistic, racist, and totalitarian—literary censorship notwithstanding, maybe. This alleged angel of pacifism guards the library doors and observes our every move, lest we hurt someone with one of the books.

All right, enough of the euphemisms. The people who want to stop you from reading Mein Kampf are social justice warriors. Now, in pursuit of objectivity, let’s examine this issue from their point of view. They want to halt the spread of fascism, yes? If that’s the case, and if Mein Kampf is one big instruction manual for aspiring fascists, then does it make sense to them to halt the spread of that book, too?

It doesn’t make sense to Abraham Foxman, the scholar who wrote the introduction to the Houghton Mifflin edition of Mein Kampf. While I strongly disagree with his cheerful belief that “our societies have taken promising steps” to acknowledge political evil since the Second World War, I applaud his conclusion that it is “our responsibility”, the responsibility of those who take the time to study books like Mein Kampf, “to ensure the continuing progress of that civilizing trend”. How can you understand that which you are unwilling to learn? How can you achieve enlightenment and clarity when you are trapped before the blinding light of fear?

You can’t, of course, which is why censorship inevitably fails: to ignore a problem is not to solve it, yet the social justice warriors claim to be the only people able to solve the problem of modern fascism. They compare Trump to Hitler, sometimes unfavorably, but deny themselves the greatest chance to furnish proof of their charge—if such proof exists. And in their ignorance, they forfeit any claim to credibility: no one would expect to be cured of a disease by a doctor who refused to learn about it. At the very least, the SJWs make themselves vulnerable to spurious interpretations of the book—by their enemies and allies alike.

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As I was driving on the freeway, I noticed a “Bernie 2016” bumper sticker on the car before me. For a second, I wondered why the driver hadn’t replaced it with a sticker for “Bernie 2020”, but then I thought he didn’t have to, because the old sticker implies support for the current campaign, too . . . or does it? Is it possible that the driver changed his mind in the last four years? Might he have moved on to another presidential candidate, another progressive? If so, then I want to know what made him change his mind. Was he swept up in the wave of faux feminist hysteria and turned towards a symbol like Warren? Did he submit to the procrustean pragmatism of the old left and fall behind a classical actor like Biden? Wherever he went, I can only hope he abandoned Bernie Sanders because of the scandalous revelations of the summer of 2016.

In the summer of 2016, we learned that none of the votes for Sanders actually mattered, that all of the canvassing and contributing and campaigning comprised a colossal waste of time, action, and thought. The totality of energy, physical as well as psychical, had been negated long before the first spark. Under the direction of Hillary Clinton, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her henchmen had infiltrated the Democratic National Committee, dismantled it, and rebuilt it. Their blueprint was simple: to open every passage leading toward a primary victory for Clinton and to close every channel accessible to any other candidate. It didn’t matter how many people voted for the other guy—or, more to the point, how few voted for Clinton. Every possible scenario ended exclusively in Clinton’s victory; no possible scenario ended in her loss.

You really have to admire the attention to detail, the comprehensive strength of this system of pure authoritarianism. It is respectable because it maintains for the plebian the illusion of choice, the delusion of democratic freedom! If historians are true to their intellectual conscience, then Clinton will someday take her place among the great tyrants of time. For now, historians are too squeamish even to look on this scheme, short-lived as it was, and to accept its meaning. Are they blind to the thousands who gathered to see Sanders march us into a new progressive age? Are they deaf to the roars of these same thousands as he shouted to the degenerates on Wall Street, “Your time is up!” Are they unable to repeat these same thousands’ damning words when they realized that all of their work had been in vain, that they had been forcibly and directly prevented from accomplishing their goal?

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Graffiti outside the bar where the Tulsi Gabbard debate watch party was held in Manchester, New Hampshire. Not a poor illustration of the political process, either.

Before we commence the seventh devastating round of these masochistic Democratic debates, we really ought to identify the eponymous masochist in this televised orgy of political sodomy. Is it the shameless politician who prostrates himself before a national audience, vowing his submission to the most ruthless desires of an insatiable electorate? Is it the voter who yields to the candidate’s lust for power, his machtgelüst, and makes himself the vessel whereby the powerbroker achieves his righteous climax? Or is it you, the reader, who, in your obsequious affections for Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, or Bernie Sanders—let us not pretend you are hard-hearted enough to support any of the other contestants—have emerged from the romantic depths convinced that your beloved will inevitably triumph?

Alas, even at their most humbling state, none of these could be as pathetic as I. While the politician degrades himself in the present, he does so only in the pursuit of a dignified future; and although the voters volunteer themselves for another’s service, they, too, do so in the belief that their work will eventually redound back unto them. I, on the other hand, stand to gain nothing at all from my continuous immersion in the squalor, in the swampy spectacle of wealthy warmongers squabbling like drunks at the bar—and not unlike drunks at the bar, bullying the few intellectual adults out of the discussion. Why do I subject myself to such bitter inanity when I lack even the foolhardy hope that good will prevail? Must I do so only out of a suicidal penchant for the grief that poisons my heart? Ridi del duol che t’avvelena il cor? Or is the grief laughing at me?

Masochism remains an unfathomable neurosis. Self-preservation is a straightforward instinct, but to take pleasure in the most convoluted, melodramatic, and unnecessary pageantry of this instinct betrays a depth of suffering that never can be measured. Even my own masochism bewilders me. Is it my way of preparing myself for the worst, a rational pessimism readying me for Gabbard’s inevitable electoral loss? It can’t be, because I take no pleasure in the slow political execution of Gabbard through the hemlock of shadow blocking, and in any case, I know whence this rational pessimism stems: I learned it from my own misguided, ill-fated confidence in Ron Paul’s campaign eight years ago. Meanwhile, the source of my masochism remains a mystery.

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