To dress like a respectable middle-aged person in a Western country is not to dress for the heat: too much fabric and not enough ventilation.
The whole sartorial system meant that all summer long you were subtly humiliated, overinsulated, or both. And, thanks to global warming, the summers would only heat up! Just as global capitalism meant that the cult of youth and beauty would grow ever more extreme as the population aged and put on weight! We in the West were going to get hotter and hotter at the same time that we became less and less hot.
Society is distinct from the economy in that no direct monetary rewards flow from participation. Being popular may help you make money, and having money may in turn make you popular, but no one is paid a fee for his personal popularity, nor can I pay people to like me. The autonomy of society is limited but nevertheless real.
The images on TV were among the worst I’ve seen, and I didn’t even deliberately look, just glanced for a second in a bar.
My days are probably least different from yours on occasions of special public horror: another gun massacre, a bombing on American soil, the deadly explosion of a fertilizer plant. And like nearly everyone else I was angry and upset all last week, if not always for universal reasons. On Monday morning I read testimony in the Times from one of the hunger strikers indefinitely detained, so far without trial, at Guantanamo Bay, about his painful force-feeding.
According to Adorno, in psychoanalysis only the exaggerations are true. If you wished to characterize the Democrats and the Republicans in terms of true exaggerations, you might say that the Republicans have become the Party of Psychosis while the Democrats have become the Party of Neurosis.
We might consider whether beyond coal and natural gas there lies a third choice.
And all of us know perfectly well that our fossil-fueled civilization isn’t built to last; we also know that we need to effect a deliberate and graceful transition to another energy regime or suffer a chaotic and violent interregnum. The ignorant as well as the informed know this. You could write a Walt Whitman-style poem about this obvious thing that everybody knows.
Oh, it’s like how it almost makes you glad to’ve had the nightmare, now that you’re awake and safe, you know? And God, it has been such a, literally, such a stupid . . . I mean, where’s the dignity—terrorized is probably too strong a word—but where’s the dignity in being literally annoyed to death by. . . ?
