Living in the End Times

Amos and Ex are today joined via phone by our friend Joe, who lives in Alaska and was asked to speak to the Todd Phillips film Joker (2019). Is the film for reactionaries and incels? Is it a Leftist film? Is it an Antonin Artaud biopic? And why can’t Joe afford a 9-volt battery for his only smoke detector? Also discussed: the corporate media’s response to Joker and the life and times of G.G. Allin.

Amos celebrates his burfday by musing on the likelihood that we’re living in a simulation. Plus: humans as quantum beings, entanglement, uncertainty, black holes in our own solar system, and life on Mars. As you might imagine, all of this is a different way of describing the American two-party political system and the chaos of our current political moment.

Sick! Since one of us can barely speak, please enjoy this truncated episode discussing Greta, Trump’s emerging Ukraine situation, and a bit of the early rock ‘n’ roll.

As Brian returns from Boston, the gents talk about eastern North Dakota's own “Yankeedom.” Also discussed are all things Turkey: Paul of Tarsus, Kojin Karatani’s theory of  “isonomia,” and Kurdistan as both the seat of this century's decentralized model of political organization and the source of a new theology. Why? Because as with the Christian Church, it's unlikely that the nation-state will make it out of this century without a similarly egalitarian and decentralized pivot left.

We’ve already called for the disenfranchising of the Boomers, so why not Generations X and Y as well? As Greta Thurnberg and her allies demonstrate, only the current generation of high schoolers and activist teens (e.g., Parkland, Florida’s, Emma Gonzalez) really matters. Everyone else is just in the way, yours truly included. Plus: Standing Rock, Occupy, decentralized organizing, and critiquing the humanitarian-industrial complex.

Rough week. Jair Bolsonaro burns the Amazon to the ground and Boris Johnson suspends Parliament. The acceleration is accelerating. As A&E are almost literally speechless in terms of how to respond to these events, this be a shorter episode. Good thing Greta Thurnberg is on her way to the U.S., offering us a smidge of hope. Also, Jeremy Corbin, Bernie's Green New Deal, and Extinction Rebellion.

Amos and Ex go all IDF-after-reading-Deleuze and spend the hour discussing the Left’s failure to weaponize its own critical/cultural/media theory. But guess who has instrumentalized this stuff since at least the 1990s? The Right. Put another way, we came up with the ideas--rhizomes, psychoanalytic criticism, the hyperreal, the propaganda model, and encoding/decoding--but News Corporation, Facebook, the military, and the American President put it to use in ways not even the Left attempted to do, to the world’s detriment. But possible ways out of this conundrum include not only taking our own theory seriously, but self-produced projects like Chappo and Red Scare.

Cleansing the Temple: as it was with Jesus so it may be with Pres. Bernie. But if so, who’s this moment’s John the Baptist? Marianne, duh. And Andrew Yang is this new Church’s Peter--the Rock--right? As the second democratic debate in July demonstrated, the “theological” angle to the current crop of candidates is emerging in interesting ways, argue Amos and Ex. Plus: Toni Morrison and Abdullah Ocalon.

In the face of ecological collapse, which is bound to be interpreted in messianic and otherwise theological ways, it makes sense to envision a way out through the creation of a new mythology. For as we have seen in examples such as caged children at the border, the industry-made opioid crisis, and capitalism’s commodification of human life, we’re already (or still) living in what can only be described as a primitive era. So let’s reimagine the civilized future we want for ourselves--which just might serve as the basis for a new storytelling--and bring the story to life.

Abortion. The (Christian) Right has for decades made restricting reproductive rights the core of its increasingly militant mission. But why this issue above all? Theology aside, it is because they recognize that controlling not only women’s autonomy but their access to health care services is the key to preventing the fall of all the subsequent dominoes the Right fears, such as Medicare for All, fighting income inequality, greater access to education, real climate activism, and on and on. Amos and Ex discuss.