more complaints

[Ryan Whyte]

I smoke too much, watch too much tv, flat broke, depressed about politics,
smoke pot to relax, tired all the time, fully aware of the addictions,
isolated, wonder why art history matters at all, just want a job to allow
me to write or survive for that matter. The prof in my dept. with the most
career clout happens to be a transplanted newt gingrich republican; I've
never met anyone more obsessed with the conventionalization of the
discipline, toe the line! If it's not him it's these ridiculous marxists
who make academia into a weird trotskyite time machine. Elsewhere the
discussion is how the publishing industry is failing and how many hoops
have you jumped through; no-one remembers how to talk about ideas. Who
should give a shit about painting for crying out loud, the irrelevant
obsessions of dusty david and ingres, although napoleon can teach us a
thing or two. Idiot marxists like tom crow, who feed into that corpse-like
October crowd, still think that modern painting began with david and
wasn't he a great proto-marxist revolutionary, just like michael fried
still thinks that 18th-century french painting was the origin of
anglo/american modernist sculpture. Why won't formalism and marxist
wish-fulfillment die already? David was by all accounts a scary son of a
bitch, and can we move on for fuck's sake. Bush learned from napoleon,
whom david loved, that you can use referenda to obtain absolute power;
just scare the shit out of everyone. Lincoln and bob marley were wrong;
you _can_ fool all the people all the time. Bush learned from clausewitz
who learned from napoleon the monstrous distortion that 'war is the
continuation of politics by other etc', which everyone smugly mouths. War
is the failure of politics, and diplomacy is not the same as foreign
policy, the latter requires consistency and some sense of moral purpose.
'Bringing democracy' confuses war with politics and foreign policy with
diplomacy. The French revolution taught that democracy grows out of
endless struggle, paranoia, persecution, the evisceration of women and
children, and all manner of stupid failure, and violent transition begets
more of the same. People are a product of their environment. Here's a way
to bring democracy: move to canada. Don't bring freedom to the people,
bring the people to freedom. Meanwhile what's happening with these lists,
why don't we all just post our resumes and give up talking to each other
altogether? Poetics is an academic handjob, and if anyone mentions
dada/l=anguage etc etc etc again I'm going to barf (re. dada I make
exception for Meikal whose work I admire), nettime is equally
conventionalized electronic wacktivism. I love the energy of Morrigan and
Alan and Ana and the regular posters here, let's form our own nation
somewhere beyond the illusion of community, beyond stillborn ideas and
soundbite politics and poverty of all kinds, and the sun is coming up here
and on the screen the dusk is casting silver, silver.