Living in the End Times

What’s your American healthcare system horror story? We’ve all got one. Amos and Ex discuss theirs in the service of advocating for Medicare for All. Also discussed are how the existing health system cannot be described as anything but disciplinary and how both the Right and the Left seem to be exhibiting suicidal tendencies in the face of climate change and a declining social order. As such, we also touch upon Sigmund Freud’s 1924 essay on the “Economic Problem of Masochism.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal drops her Medicare for All bill (HR 1384) in the U.S. House with 106 co-sponsors. Amos and Ex discuss. Also bandied about at length are Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and his 2010 book Living in the End Times, which gave this podcast its title. Spoiler alert: capitalism is dying and as such the West is in the throes of the initial stages of Elisabeth Kubler Ross’s five stages of grief, namely denial and anger. Next comes bargaining, of which Medicare for All and a Green New Deal (we hope) are the beneficiaries.

Are you ready for a brand new beat? Summer’s not yet here, but Amos and Ex are talking the evolution of pop music from often radical to largely benign and the significance of Bernie Sanders’s announcement of a second presidential campaign. Other topics include labor organizing in North Dakota and elsewhere, gas fracking, and the power of public opinion in American politics.

This wide-ranging discussion moves from talk of baseball in the 1990s (and how and why former Minnesota Twins player Kent Hrbek, whom we love, remains a cheater) to the much-needed “whistleblowing” of AOC and Ilhan Omar in the new Congress to corporate media consolidation and Noam Chomsky’s and Ed Herman’s classic text Manufacturing Consent, which was made into a now-classic film in 1992.

Amos and Ex are staunch supporters of Dave Matthews Band. Your move, haters. After spending a good deal of time talking Green New Deal and the necessity of nuclear power to help end the climate crisis, A&E spend the remainder of this episode chatting about how professional wrestling both serves as a barometer for political consciousness in America and in some ways even anticipates the future of discourse.

With our longtime friend Scott A. joining the conversation, Amos and Ex riff on the Alex Garland film Annihilation (2018) and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Also discussed are R Kelly, Jonah Hill’s directorial debut Mid90s (2018), and American skate culture.

In between discussions of the Coen Brothers, D.H. Lawrence, William Gass, and political theology, Amos and Ex talk the best films of 2018. No, not the film about Freddie Mercury's band, but First Reformed, Mary Magdalene, and Come Sunday, among others. Oh, and The Death of Stalin (late 2017).

The first of two discussions about your co-hosts’ respective book projects. Today we discuss Ex’s punk and postpunk’s literary history Lusty Scripts (Indiana University Press, 2017), which connects punk music to not only Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, but Dostoevsky, Burroughs, Henry Miller, Kafka, Genet, and Philip K. Dick. In detailing the punk bookshelf, Ex contends that punk’s literary and intellectual interests can be traced to the sense of shame and horror its advocates feel in the face of a shameless market economy that not only preoccupied many of punks’ favorite writers but in many ways generated the entire punk polemic as neoliberalism reared its ugly head in the middle-1970s.

In this first episode of 2019, Amos and Ex continue their discussion on “apocalypse” (or at least radical social critique) in television and film. In addition to talking about memes and news from Washington--Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, etc.--the films/programs discussed today include Pump Up the Volume (1990), Fight Club (1999), Memento (2000), and Mr. Robot (2015-2019).

In this final episode of 2018, Amos and Ex chat about the apocalypse as imagined by Hollywood. Best and “worst” end of the world films, from zombie apocalypses to more serious science fiction films like Denis Villenueve’s Arrival (2016) to the Coens’ No Country for Old Men (2007) are explored. Also discussed is the notion that American film, as a artform, has come to an end.