I worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign but I have major issues with the Bernie movement. They are the same issues I have with much of the left. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is not a hero of mine but she would be one if she dressed up like Victorian heriess, speaking with a fake posh southern English accent, and satirically spoke about how much she wanted toddlers in the sweatshops to increase their work hours. Why do we just have Burning Man at Burning Man, the left should be fighting for a society where dressing in costume and playing is something adults do. I am a member of the far-left for many reasons but one of them was being against the societal expectation that people live mundane lives.
In recent articles, I have talked about revenge fantasies and interpersonal hatred. We live in a society where hatred is normal but dressing up in a furry costume as a capybara and reciting beat poetry in Tamil and anything as weird as that is frowned upon. We should live in a society where hatred is frowned upon and weird shit is normal. At worst, the contemporary left are Twitter vigilantes and people hell-bent on demolishing the lives of people for the slightest offense and, at best, is a book club on NPR. The left should be the refugee camp for the poor, the marginalized, the broken, the weird, and the fucked-up whose motto is the Lazrus Poem and is an attempted utopia of peace, love, and creativity. The spiritual lovechild of Burning Man and the Calais Jungle.
That is not the sentiment or message Rachel Maddow, Michael Moore, or Noam Chomsky sends. It doesn’t matter how far to the left the person is, they aren’t going for the bleeding heart of Bruce Springsteen with the cultural jungle of the song “La Vie Boheme” (minus the BDSM). Not only a jungle of the innocent but weird but also one with literary depth. I don’t believe in Rawls’ thin-good, of course, and believe depth, intelligence, and moral should be rewarded in art over the lack of it. A world where The History Channel does history, Bravo does the high arts, and everyone is a participant in the weirdness, the richness of culture, and is an aid worker in the universal refugee camp that society would be. Like I mentioned in the previous article, society should be Jane Jacobs-y New Urbanist and TND communities with a Rouseau-style civic religion and it should also look like Burning Man and should be a metaphorical RMS Carpathia.
Reflecting on the recent rages about cultural appropriation. My view is that people, for the most part, should be able to express themselves however they wish and it is the responsiblity of others to welcome and accept them for who they are. If a woman wants to wear a Filipino barong, an Ottoman fez, an 18th century British redcoat jacket, and a kilt, they should be able to and be accepted for who they are because in the words of Bono “The right to be ridiculous is something I hold dear”. Not just as a right in a liberal society but something that should be actively encouraged and people who do it should not only be tolerated in the Rawlsian sense but celebrated and accepted. The concept of cultural appropriation inhibits the God-given right to be ridiculous that must be exercised for people to be happy.
I worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign and try my best to advance the cause of liberal social democracy but the Bernie people nor the rest of the left represents what the left is supposed to be. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is very pretty, of course, and preferable to most members of congress to observe but I still like watching Majorie Taylor-Greene more because MTG is a crazy person. To paraphrase the NRA about guns, the only way to counter bad crazy is good crazy. The left invented hippies. We are the homeland of good crazy. Make the left ridiculous again!
The Autistic Resistance 