My Politics is Departure

To win, you have to lose for awhile.

You will never win the argument, they will never change, you will never get the apology you hope for. Depart.

Yes, the inmates are running the asylum.

Yes, everyone has lost their mind.

Yes, the falcon can no longer hear the falconer.

Depart.

My politics is departure. Like the politics of my opponent, it is quasi-religious. However, it is more aligned with the Eastern tradition. My practice requires a kind of meditation, letting go, allowing myself to drift from the illusions of the samsara produced by my ego and the frail corpus of what remains of the nation state. It is not a religion of absolution, confession, accusation, or flagellation. I need not proselytize, in fact doing so is against the tenets of my quasi-religion politics. This very post borders on heresy. But there is no inquisition to punish me.

The politics of departure requires that I let go of the idea that I “have a voice.” That there is a “political process.” That I “participate” in governance. I do not. I save energy. Voting wastes precious calories, and it will be needed in the years ahead when me and those like me are banished to the cold winds of the cursed earth, while those who claim absolute moral supremacy revel in the warm abundance of their utopian vision. We will see their fires from the distance as the wind howls and we shiver in our rags wrapped tightly around our heads. One last look, and then we depart.

Have you not felt the desperation? The mad sadness? Do you not almost approach that feeling of excitement when you watch a youtube video or hear a political speech or read a headline that confirms one of your sentiments, only for you to suddenly remember that it doesn’t matter? Like having a dream of “the one that got away” and then waking up and looking over at the crushing reality of the one who didn’t.

I think about my father. A long-suffering republican convinced of every thing they’ve ever wanted him convinced of. He downloaded Twitter to watch Tucker. He had me teach him how to follow people. He thinks that Donald Trump winning the election will change anything. He thinks that the presidency can change people’s minds or shift culture. I feel sad for him. I wish it were true. Most likely, if Trump is elected, things will go from insane to hyper-insane. Not from anything Trump does, but because of what people are able to convince themselves that he will do.

Why will that happen? I sort of know, but also I don’t even feel like thinking it through. I think that there is nothing more to say about that. It feels unfair to me, as if it cannot mathematically make sense, and yet I know it’s true and I think you know it’s true too. But what do we do with that knowledge? I think it must be cast away, and we must simply depart.

I know it seems like giving up. I know it feels like surrender will only make things worse. But these are considerations for those who play the short game. It is always those who play the short game who are most doomed to be crushed by the long game. The “win” you seek is one that does not exist within a one year span. It likely does not exist in a decade. Anything that even feels like a win before then is most certainly going to be a temporary reprieve at best, or at worst will be the thing that the ghouls will use to bury you.

They will never stop their dramatic overstatements of harm, their near-euphoric claims of victimhood, their invocations of “the right words,” their obsessive neuroses that can only be quelled by you - some random person who looks how they feel - to do exactly what they say to do exactly when they say to do it. They will never stop their disturbing insistence on both sexual liberation and sexual cauterization, their endless litany of injustices that they experience while sitting on their couch, their plausible deniability they enjoy whenever they shove something grotesque in our faces and wait for our recoiling that serves as the evidence of our narrow-mindedness. They can’t even admit that a man who does not remember his birthday or his wife’s name or how to tell a knock knock joke from start to finish is fit to run a country. How do you expect someone with a cognition that warped will ever see your point of view on something like “maintaining a robust public discourse.”

These are feral people, if they can even be called that. They are wanton disgusting creatures and greedy for sensations. They want to feel so many pleasurable things as often as they can, and anyone who gets in the way hates happiness and loves all the worst things. The old knowledge, knowledge so old it was told to young people back in Sumerian bodegas, that tells us that “happiness is not to be found in ephemera” has been discarded and replaced with “it might be found with enough ephemera.” Their whole existence revolves around the accumulation of ephemeral things, fleeting qualia and sensuousness. They love sensations, and changes in body chemicals, and the only reason they have any traction today is because technology and the economics perils it creates allow for them to have lots of packaged goodies and along with those goodies the illusion of a life without decay.

The decay is why I can’t let it go. So many well-meaning people tell me to “just let it go,” as if I don’t want to. As if I haven’t tried convincing myself that my age has given me over to paranoia and dour skepticism. They tell me to focus elsewhere, that what I think and feel is a product of neurotransmitters or chain emails. You know I actually consider this every time it is suggested to me. I do a whole moral inventory just to make sure. I want so bad to believe it. But I can’t, because even if I did, I would still see the decay.

I see it everywhere; a rot that grows on a civilization that almost became something. I’m no idiot; I know that writing this is a luxury that I couldn’t have done 700 years ago because I would have been too busy having an axe sunk into my skull. Things were not perfect, but we were working toward something, we were doing our best, and there was something kind of nice to look forward to. History had lessons, and we tried to avoid repeating them, and we tried to curtail the worst parts of human nature, and we didn’t always succeed. But we allowed for that fact that going to a better place takes time and that most people are trying their best and you should only punish someone for their opinions if those opinions were coupled with stabbing. Otherwise, opinions alone were insufficient evidence to convict someone of mouth crimes.

I still see the edifices erected during that time - they never went away, and nothing new was built over them. The feral creatures do not build things, they just grow things on top of stuff that was already there, like an Obama Chia Pet. They plant invasive species on statues built by a thousand men, and then they dump all the water they can on top, until it is utterly overgrown and infested with tangles of vines and mold and bugs, and then they leave. Then they tell you to look how rotten that statue is, and then they tip it over and throw it in a river. Presto, now it’s cleaned. Right? Thank god the rot isn’t there anymore…whoever put it there.

But I know that rot. I know who put it there. I see the possibilities we had, and I see them now trapped like a dying animal under a net, struggling to breathe, bloated and pustulant and necrotic from strangulation. We look at each other. It is too tired to talk, but its eyes asks me why and - though i have no answer for it - I have at least the respect to hold its gaze. I can read its question: “why did I once stand so tall only to be toppled and strangled by people who have don’t even have anything to build in my place?”

I am sorry my friends, that I let you fall.

How can I let things go when I see this rot choking a ruined world that I once believed in?

“The Departure” (1837) Thomas Cole

The instinct would be to fight harder. To make stronger arguments. To call the banners together. But it does not matter how much you sharpen a needle, you will never be better at stinging than a scorpion. They were born with their needle, and from their very own body do they manufacture the poison that covers the sharp end. When it comes to pettiness, cruelty, and ignoring blatant hypocrisy as easily and as quickly as a blade sweeps across a jugular and opens the carotid to “brand new experiences.” They have won for now, and the more we struggle, the more get stung. It is paddling a boat with one oar. It is struggling against quicksand. It is doomed. No matter how smart we are, they are sicker than we are smart. They will always win this game, and this is not a game we want to get better at. So the only choice is to depart.

---

I would like to say something you already know: everything that makes the world work involves competence. Competence is earned through refinement. Refinement is earned through feedback. Feedback is earned when people are generous enough to give it and not afraid to have it misinterpreted. If your job is anything like mine - you know that there is no longer anything close to feedback or generosity or refinement going on. It is a place of imaginary metrics told by imaginary experts through imaginary stories where imaginary interventions overcome imaginary evils. They declare victory by improving that which cannot even be measured, and then assign their own made-up rewards in a circle to recognize their amazing made-up achievements.

Every day I work so hard for my students because I cannot help it. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like to let people down. I try to do the best I can without asking for help. Unlike many people in my position, I actually like these students and find that most of the horror stories about them are made up. Most of the actual evil in academia - as it was in healthcare - is created by those at the top who play SJW (Shitty Jerkoff Wargames) with wage workers. I try to minimize my interaction with these actual literal devils at the top who are responsible for funding the horror that is “the current thing.” I loathe them from the very marrow of my bones, and they are the only people I hate. The ideas that poison students are injected into them by syringes filled and paid for by these monstrous psychopaths.

But sometimes I can’t move on in a process without help. So every now and again, I play Sisyphus and ask a VP or Director or Vice-Provost to help me with something or let me do something or give me resources to accomplish something. The answer is always uncertainty; a sort of “intervention of speculation” that asks more questions than it answers. “This is certainly a big process issue and something I’m glad you brought up H.P. because we should definitely have a conversation about this at some point.” Everyone else in the email then tags on their own little notions of ideological alignment, and at the end of it, I have no idea what I am supposed to do, nor have I received any help, and that conversation will never happen.

This uncertainty would not be so alarming if it weren’t the fact that their ambivalence somehow disappears the moment they send out a missive on a “trans day of visibility” or "bravely making a radical alignment in our company values toward the goal of anti-racism.” You know why this stuff sounds like a wad of sticky shit in my ears? It’s not because I’m a rightoid or a fascist or a bigot as many would love to believe; it’s because I’m competent. Because I am part of the small group of people who still know how to run the farm. I am part of the crew of people who turn the dials and tighten the wheels and calm the customer and know where the key for the boiler room is and prepare for hardship just out on the horizon.

Without me, and people like me, it all falls apart. Good. We want it to break. Either way, it will break eventually. But if we leave, it will break even faster. And more hilariously.

Depart.

Departure is a politics that does not engage the argument, consider the point, give a rebuttal, or take the bait. It does not even hear the question. These are all the tools that they give us, and as the saying goes “you cannot use the master’s tools to disassemble the master’s house.” So departure does not use the tools. It does not listen or relent or “come to the table.” It does not even get mad at the hypocrisy. It just nods silently, smiles placidly, saves up resources, and then - without a single notice or regret - leaves.

So many of the competent ones are already dead or retired, meaning that most of these organizations are running on a skeleton crew of competent people. Multi-billion dollar industries are running on the fumes of those who know how to do the thing that is the actual intended core output of the organization. The more of us who leave, the less scapegoats who remain, the more quickly they will be forced to confront the reality that they don’t know how to do the one thing they are actually supposed to be doing. Water reclamation will no longer know how to reclaim water. Police forces won’t police. Hospitals won’t cure. Mechanics won’t fix.

Departure will be difficult initially. Even if you are calm and patient and understanding, it will be difficult to resist the call of your ego when one of the people whose entire existence is buttressed and sustained by people like us claims that our departure is an act of “irresponsibility bordering on malice.” You must ignore the temptation to defend yourself, when one of these people who is endlessly sadistic, selfish, and corrupt accuses you of sadism or selfishness. But taking the bait is what gives them power. There is nothing you can say to win, because their food is our resistance. They will draw energy from us like batteries, and they are charged up every single time we give them the performance they have baited us into. And why are they so good at this?

Because they have labeled most of the best parts of us - the tendency to protect, the urge to be fair, the moral imperative of listening and hearing someone out - as our evil. They re-purpose our kindness and generosity and understanding as weakness, gullibility, and triteness. So we will let them have it. Let them make the whole year a pride parade. Let them give keys out to any Kia of their choice that is not theirs. Let them give each other reparations and stop requiring them to turn their assignments in on time and stop being mad when they don’t have to pay for things and stop yourself from being upset every time an old woman is punched or a store window is smashed in and it’s explained away as “kids being kids.” Let these blue-haired professors write their theses on why white suicide is a form of “re-centering the narrative on the white body.” Don’t be stressed. Just depart. Their shit won’t work without us.

It will be hard for a time. All stops will be pulled out to lure us into a debate, to frame us as the villain, and perhaps even to find novel ways to justify our incarceration or even violence against us. Maybe they’ll kill us. But a total departure cannot just be one of separation; it must be a shunning. We must no longer hear their words. We must no longer turn our heads in their direction when they call our name. We must stop watching videos and listening to podcasts and reading essays that are written just to make us feel right. Let us be wrong. Let them have the whole thing. Let them institute their insanity, the policies they have called us bigots for not agreeing with. Let them replace police stations with gardens, close the prisons, have students decide when school starts and when lunch is, have children report their parents to gulags for (trans) re-education through labor. Let them do it all. Wish them luck. Let the rot grow and grow and grow and eventually it will cover everything.

And when that happens, when the parasite has sucked every nutrient from the carcass, when the silence eventually returns, then - at long last - the departure can be over. We can come back and pick up where we left off, before the psychosis took hold. I will see you there. We can smile at each other and wave and not be afraid that the other person sees it as anything more than a friendly wave. Which is really the only thing we ever should be working to create in this world.

I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken, and that’s the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death…All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can’t judge if it’s simple, but I know it’s true.”

~ Camus, The Plague