You Gotta Be Fucking Kidding

The First Transmission Scream of Timotheodoradorno

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. (Romans 8:26 (NIV))

Joy was a strategy, and pain is also a strategy. Sunshine—and rain, as Frankie Beverly puts it. Elemental. Fresh. Part of this Earth. Growing from it; humans as extension of the biosphere, a phrase in Marx (not quite in those exact words) that he never elaborates, which is a shame—it’s the most important thing he ever wrote but he was too gaslighted by anthropocentric Hegelianism to notice.

In the horror movie, the first person to scream enough with horror is most often the person who survives or even defeats the supernatural terror. Ripley’s visceral recoil at Alien is part of her brilliant intelligence.

Ripley is a favorite of Harris and myself, a survivor of severe sexual abuse at the hands of a London crime syndicate. I know what I’m talking about.

It is the pseudo intellectual who insists on a difference between reason and emotion, a difference that is merely the output of the duality of master and slave.

Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia provides a wonderful model for how anyone with a pulse should proceed in these times of damaged life. Editorial-length masterpieces of dialectical twistery without being twisted, they are at once plangently emotional and acerbically intellectual. The profound opposite of “think pieces,” a name whose stupidity is entirely accurate. 

We are at a moment when all think pieces are Joe Rogan meatheadery, especially the ones that sound intelligent or wise. All, unless they try, however clumsily—and everything appears clumsy in the fascist searchlights—to articulate real feelings.

When John Carpenter’s Thing sprouts spider legs from a melted-off upside-down head and prances slowly towards the exit, one of the survivors of the Antarctic base looks at it like a hallucination in a bad trip and goes, “You gotta be fucking kidding,” then the team hoses it with the flamethrower.

One of the Recent Cabinet Appointees

It is the emotional apex of the film. Such a reaction is indeed indicative of true thought. Only a deluded fool, perhaps a cruel one, would have kept such a phrase from sliding out of their mouth. The minimal humor here—this would be a joke if it wasn’t so awful, and it is a joke precisely because it IS awful—is evidence of a mind able to hold contradictions, to tolerate them, to have a sense of irony, the feel of the noncoincidence of thought with its object, even when utterly accurate.

As we learn to think and act in the new almost unbreathable air of post election reality, I have developed a protectively thin skin for media. I have only been able to watch ten minutes of my favorite MSNBC show, The Weekend. And that was last week. I won’t do so again. Not yet. Everything else is gone. The New York Times was gone in June. I left Twitter then too. Withdrawing from the dopamine glow of one’s favorite TV people half validating one’s thoughts was rather horrible at first, embarrassing to say. But now I sit here listening to ragas and composing this, the first of my missives here in my new guise of Timotheodoradorno.

This thin skin reacts with horror both to the atrocities occurring at Mar-a-Lago and to the mediation of them on TV, in the press, and in the growing online commentariat.

It is the latter in which I have sought refuge since the election. Everywhere else is contaminated. But today some lines in the sand which had become clear yesterday have become still clearer. To wit, there’s Meidas Touch, and there’s everything else.

And there it is. From the one person I can still just about tolerate, on a good day, Steve Schmidt: “Biden Saves His Son at the Cost of His Character.”

ANY think-piecing now begins to sound like Joe Rogan meathead-ism.

Even Timothy Snyder—at least when he tries for historicist cynicism, as if mapping what’s happening onto the past will make us feel cleverer about our dire predictions, and that this “cleverer” is a good substitute for wholesome rage and panic.

As opposed to the unadulterated screams of Meidas Touch, which ironically begin to look like the most carefully and brilliantly mediated responses to incipient fascism.

I was almost tired of Meidas Touch BEFORE the election. I wanted context, I wanted talk, I wanted intellect…

I wanted a buffer against the coming inevitability. I wanted NOT to have to think. I wanted to to be swaddled in thought-like gossamer.

This week Meidas Touch overtook Joe Rogan as the most viewed podcast. And people on the left and on the “left” are seeking a “left Joe Rogan.” Well they won’t find it. And they got it. Just not how they wanted.

Meidas Touch, because everything Trump touches turns to shitty gold. Or just because it’s a nice pun on the Meiselas Brothers’ last name. Or because the only way to out-Meidas Meidas is not to mediate (Meid-iate) but to touch, with a scream. To turn gold into screaming.

Everything they post turns everything that happens into this scream, just as Meidas turns everything to shit.

Adorno writes that philosophy should ideally be a bloodcurdling shriek rendered into perfect balanced prose with footnotes, without losing any of its bloodcurdling shrieking qualities.

At this time most mediation becomes propaganda immediately. It all stinks to high heaven, an editor or an opinionator inserting themselves between thought and the fascist reality to come.

Just to scream and yell on YouTube as the Meiselas Brothers do now seems like the most resonant response. All other reactions are different modes of lying. To think straight, one has to shriek.

Think about it. In the Gas Chamber, would a Steve Schmidt have been fun? Contextualizing it all with appeals to Germany’s lost greatness and heroism?

And Schmidt is the one commentator I can tolerate the best, because quite some time Schmidt has understood the magnitude and gravity of the situation at hand. He has not shrunk from calling out the media, most recently his wonderful assault on Morning Joe’s craven submission.

I can’t bear it. But there are degrees of stink. It’s less shitty of Schmidt to put it this way (“saves his son at the cost of his character”) than how flatulent minded fool Bret Stephens puts it in the New York Times (“a disgraceful pardon”).

These reactions are all of a piece with the wildly popular masochistic narcissism by which the left eats its own fingers off in the manner of an abused child hurting their siblings rather than attacking the molesting parent.

I gave up on center-right-ish The Bulwark long ago when they opined that Harris had brought it all on herself by “letting Trump define her” (as a Black woman).

I had relied on The Bulwark the same way a good English lit scholar relies on Jane Austen—a Tory, most definitely, but precisely because of that able to take note of the transition of Enclosure during which the last scraps of the feudal system with its largesse towards the poor was erased from England’s green and unpleasant land.

Again, the most advanced commentary at this point is simply to yell “OUCH” at the top of one’s YouTube lungs.

Along with thinking “would this have applied in a death camp?” I now put thoughts through the “Calvary Test”: would they have sounded good if Jesus had said them going up that hill.

“Don’t worry—this is just me adhering to the rule of law. The same law should apply to me as it applies to you,” said Jesus. “It looks better that way. I’m trying to avoid disgrace.”

According to Schmidt, God should’ve not resurrected Jesus on the third day for this would’ve been at the cost of his character, or for Stephens, a disgraceful swampland behavior.

The fact that the sentence “God Saves His Son at the Expense of His Character” is in fact a lovely description of what is GOOD about Christianity is lost on these stink-piece compositors.

Such behavior henceforth begins to reveal itself as the pseudo-intellectual abomination of fascist apology, the “you brought this on yourself” of a misogynist judge at a rape trial. Biden had lost a wife and daughter AND son and now wants to do what he can to save his remaining son, whose life is very much in terrible danger.

No one had EVER been punished to this level for the crime of which his son had been convicted.

Cries of pity, like cries for mercy, or cries of love…and the spontaneous peace of the quietness found even within groaning (in which the Holy Spirit prays for us), a peace whose minimal expression is hesitation during the act of harming…exude from the human body as an outgrowth of its biosphere. Such expressions of the human being as Divine Image (Blake) are what thought must do its very best to preserve as it navigates the chilly waters of carefully constructed sentences.

Evangelist David French, whose Black daughter has been stalked and threatened, who has had sent to him images of Trump gassing his daughter in Auschwitz, decried the pardon as not adhering to the rule of law. Do we now expect French to let them arrest him and torture him in front of his daughter before they kill the daughter in front of him? If you can imagine it they might do it. Look at who they’re appointing.

Steve, who gives a monkey’s about “character” right now? Who cares how we look? I thought you weren’t into optics. I thought that’s what you hated about Joe and Mika of MSNBC. When everything other than abject screaming looks like a lie, aside from the scream of joy, when every cat and mouse game of cuteness with the incoming terror appears as collaboration, the most precisely intellectual response is to be in one’s feelings.