Horseshoe theory is stupid and is promoted purely to elide an uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to admit: the "far-left" and "far-right" draw their followers from the same base of young people who have been completely fucked by neoliberalism and Reaganism.
I remember Occupy Wall Street. I was a huge supporter of it and participated in Occupy Syracuse and Occupy Burlington as a fringe observer. It was a truly beautiful moment: people who had been screwed by the status quo coming together to burn the house down.
Occupy Wall Street was a big fucking deal. It scared the corporate bigwigs and their libertarian whores. It represented everyone putting aside their differences to take back the future that had been stolen from us by 30 years of deregulation and financial chicanery.
Wokeness and identity politics were the wedge that neoliberals used to destroy Occupy Wall Street. The "progressive stack" was a COINTELPRO maneuver designed to divide people and take the focus off of what mattered: taking down the banksters.
The wave of corporate genuflection towards minorities and LGBT that occurred after Occupy Wall Street ended was no accident. It was designed to get people to accede to plutocracy, make them support corporate domination so long as sassy LGBT women of color were holding the whip.
Whichever side of the divide you ended up on was based on how you reacted to wokeness. It was all by design: carving people up into the "dirtbag left" and "alt-right" and setting them at each others' throats, while the neoliberals sat back and continued to exploit us all.
I and many of my mutuals ended up on the right-wing side of the divide, but I have a tremendous sympathy for dirtbag left types because I know that I could have ended up part of the dirtbag left with a few molecular tweaks in my life history.
We're only just finding out that these conflicts have been inflamed by bad actors like Jeff Giesea and George Soros who profit off of the people they exploit training their ire on each other and ignoring the 800-pound billionaires in the room.
The 2020 election will likely herald the end of identity politics as an effective wedge between the "far-left" and "far-right." Trump's reelection in the wake of his failures and the coming recession will drive home to everyone that we are fucked and the system is going down.
You can't care about wokeness when you're destitute. You can't quibble about privilege when everyone in your age group is some degree of fucked. Young people are going to want to bring down neoliberalism and they won't care who they have to ally with to do it. I certainly won't.
Everyone who invested in inflexible identity politics (e.g. wignats, the woke dirtbag left) will be left out in the cold. The dream of Occupy Wall Street---young people uniting to bring an end to neoliberalism---will become reality.
I can't wait.
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You'll learn a LOT from writing reams of material you ultimately end up discarding. Some stuff just isn't meant to see the light of publication, but looking back on it, you'll glean ideas and concepts that you can use in better works.
This is particularly useful if you're writing memoirs or autofiction. If something crazy/significant/worth writing about happens to you, I don't think it's a good idea to publish something about it ASAP. But writing about it ASAP solely for your own edification? Smart.
Example: ten years ago, I decided to hitchhike across the U.S. I went from my hometown of Syracuse, New York to Portland, Oregon and saw and did a ton of crazy shit along the way. I blogged about it extensively and also planned to write and self-publish a memoir when it was over.
I've always neglected my health. When I moved to Mexico, it became REALLY bad. At the end of last year, I tipped the scales at 270 pounds. That's embarrassing. And borderline life-threatening. I'm also getting older. I had to do something about it.
For most of my life, I haven't owned a car and I've lived in cities where I had to walk everywhere. In particular, in Budapest, I lived in the city center and rarely took the metro/buses/trams. So I had to engage in a minimum amount of physical activity that kept my weight down.
Mexican cities are laid out like American cities, however: spread-out, suburbanized. So I need to take a cab if I want to go anywhere other than the convenience store. I also rely a lot more on delivery services here. End result: a far more sedentary lifestyle.
Clearing out more junk from my brain as part of the writing process. Cycling back to my odd habit of moving from place to place as an adult.
I do not like my hometown. At all. I wouldn't say I hate it, but having to move back there for whatever reason would be hellish.
I grew up in Syracuse, a small Rust Belt city in upstate New York whose most famous cultural exports are Tom Kenny and Bobcat Goldthwait. It was sustained by GM and Carrier: when those plants closed in the 90's and 00's, the city sunk into a pit of poverty and hopelessness.
Further adding to the misery of living there is the weather. It's overcast most of the year and the city is the snowiest one in America owing to its location near Lake Ontario at the confluence of two major storm currents. Getting up at 5:30 to dig your car out of snow is common.
NEW AT TERROR HOUSE: "In both, Moloch seems to be a harsh, industrial demon who wants our souls and imaginations, and overcoming him is the goal." - new analysis/criticism piece by Leslie D. Soule terrorhousemag.com/hunting-moloch/
If you enjoyed this piece, be sure to check out Leslie D. Soule's poetry chapbook MY MENTOR, DEATH!
JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
BEAUTIFUL LOSERS by Leonard Cohen
FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID by Philip K. Dick
PLEASANT HELL by John Dolan
THE ART OF SEDUCTION by Robert Greene
WHORESON by Donald Goines
IN MY SKIN by Kate Holden
(cont'd)
BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
MEMOIR OF A RUSSIAN PUNK by Edward Limonov
ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE by Eddie Little
DO TRAVEL WRITERS GO TO HELL? by Thomas Kohnstamm
THE ATOM STATION by Halldór Laxness
HEART KILLER by Andy Nowicki
SNOW by Orhan Pamuk
(cont'd)