What's This About

The name of this blog takes its inspiration from a song by an 80s punk rock band, the Crucifucks: “Democracy Spawns Bad Taste.” Not wanting to rip them off directly, I had to modify the title. The idea was fertile enough in my mind, though. The song was a cheesy anti-U.S. government, anti-jingoistic patriotism tune, whether of at least some attention by lefty, hardcore punk kids trying to put their disgust with Reagan-era U.S. militarism into words. That’s not the direction I’m going in here or the idea that sprouts in my mind when I think about the title.
Approaching from the political far left, it is easy to get cynical and Nihilistic not only about American politics but about the direction of politics and economics in Western societies in general. In this respect, Occupy Wall Street and the reactive popular protests against EU/IMF-imposed austerity in Greece feel like manifestations of fading optimism (or, at least, a struggle against unbridled pessimism) that something can be done collectively to resuscitate the project of social democracy against capitalist globalization and all its negative consequences. I hold out hope, even if I think that the obstacles to achieving the objectives, however nebulous, are too steep to overcome. In general, I put a lot more faith in networking small entrepreneurial projects to build non-capitalist alternatives than I do in efforts to change government policies or reign in the power of global finance. But devising a solution to the problems of capitalist globalization is not my purpose here. My problem is with culture.
There is nothing especially new in what I am attempting to argue here – I’m just another leftist complaining that the corporate media are contributing to a rightwing shift in the conversation of politics, economics, and culture and that the only reason they can do so is that they have so many resources, especially money capital, to play with to get their messages out. In other words, I’m abandoning myself to pessimism about the possibilities for cultural democracy – for the collective dissemination and internalization of ideas about the world in a way that every idea counts as part of a collective, participatory struggle over what ideas matter and why. When oligopolists hijack the free market of ideas and use it to smash smaller players/independent free thinkers into submission, what space is left to contest the going wisdom on civil liberties, state power, free market capitalism, religion, morality, sexuality, and basic philosophical presumptions on truth?
I always try to answer my own problems, and the problem here isn’t really a problem at all (or, rather, it’s a personal, psychological problem instead of a social problem) – it’s the problem that the blogosphere and alternative media ends up solving everyday. There is no corporate oligopolistic force big enough to saturate virtual space and crowd out all the free thinkers. When it comes down to it, I’m only here because I felt left out of the solution. I stopped voting after it became clear that my vote for Obama was never going to generate the kind of social change that I hoped for. In general, the process of political democracy in the U.S. looks more to me like a sham, financed to reproduce the domination of a small political and corporate economic elite. I needed to fight my own cynicism and pessimism with some sort of a social response, to make a space for my own freethinking. Suffice it to say, this a space for me to ramble needlessly on practical and theoretic problems whether or not anyone is actually going to be out there listening.