Sundry Notes: May

An unlocked essay, identity politics during economic collapse, a garden update, and the problem with realism,

I. Un-Fucking the Left

I’m quite humbled by the amazing response I’ve gotten for my new series, “How the Left Got Fucked.” As I mentioned at the beginning of the first of the essays, I started writing it after a several-month hiatus from thinking of leftist politics triggered by a single essay I read. In order to explain why that essay had such a profound effect, I needed to give a lot of background as to how the left was affected and influenced by external forces.

When I wrote my 2023 book, Here Be Monsters: How to Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other, I included almost none of that. That’s at least partially because it all sounds a bit crazy or conspiratorial. But also, I think I falsely imagined that reasoning one’s way through the shift from class to identity on the left would be sufficient to show how things went wrong.

Amusingly, even that overly cautious approach was met with attempts to silence the book by people associated with the very publisher who commissioned it. I don’t know what might have happened had the book been more direct about the spectres haunting leftism.

As you probably know, Here Be Monsters will be getting an update and re-release, this time through Sul Books. And it will include much more than the previous edition, including the threads of external sabotage discussed in How the Left Got Fucked.

The entire series is for paid subscribers, but I’m now unlocking the first of the essays for free subscribers, which is on the CIA’s well-documented but still rarely-discussed shaping of American leftist thought:

And also, you can get an annual subscription for 20% less right now to read all of it.

II. “Let Them Eat Pronouns”

A bit of a tangential matter to this is what’s happening in the tiny country in which I live, Luxembourg. It, like every other European nation, is starting to run out of money and facing a catastrophic demographic crisis. But, rather than facing these problems directly, it’s following the American neoliberal model of identity politics.

Let’s call it the “Let them eat pronouns” trick, which was incidentally the name of one of the chapters in Here Be Monsters. Luxembourg’s government has announced several significant cuts to its social programs, including raising the retirement age and cutting housing benefits.

Accompanying this has been a series of articles in all major news outlets discussing why such things are “obviously” necessary, along with other stories that seem to be preparing the public for other cuts. For instance, there have been multiple articles about how Luxembourg’s free public transportation is too costly and actually not good for people. One article explained how it’s bad for public health since people who might walk a few blocks will now jump on a bus, while another explained that regular riders don’t feel “safe” now that people who couldn’t normally pay get to ride, too.

Wilder still has been the appearance of government-funded videos and ads created by NGOs pushing identity politics. One in particular caught my attention because it fits precisely the US Democrat party’s strategy. It’s a social media campaign, boosted as an advertisement, for a video in Luxembourgish explaining how biological sex doesn’t actually exist and those who think otherwise are too dumb to understand science.

In other words: don’t get angry about having to work an extra few years at the end of your life in order to retire. Don’t get upset at skyrocketing housing prices, or failing infrastructure, or how the buses and trains you fund with your taxes are constantly cancelled without explanation, or how food prices keep going up, or how violent crime has increased, or how there’s suddenly a lot of homeless people. Instead: here’s a lesson on pronouns and how not all women have vaginas and not all men have penises and how stupid you were to think otherwise.

Before anyone gets angry about what I just said, let me be clear on my point. Identitarian social justice is a weapon in the hands of the neoliberal capitalist class, not a liberating politics that gets the working class anywhere. And worse, it will lead to the same kind of backlash here as we’ve seen in the United States where a rightist regime then turns around and makes those same people “protected” by neoliberal politics their first victims. Regardless of what you personally believe about sex and gender and race and disability and transness or any other identity category, when a capitalist government starts pushing an ideology that was supposedly liberating, it’s manipulating you.

III. News from the garden

While I’m sure most of you reading me aren’t doing so just to keep up on my garden, I can happily report that we now finally have a greenhouse.

It was a gift from my sister and brother-in-law to my husband for his work helping them design the interior of their house. Languishing unbuilt for months because neither he nor I had the time to assemble it, it’s now finally up about half of the scores of plants I’d started indoors in anticipation of it are now inside. I can take almost no credit for its completion, though, as we agreed beforehand that my renowned clumsiness around glass really wouldn’t be beneficial to its construction.

Inside so far are heirloom tomatoes, two kinds of peppers (with two more kinds still in the house), red epazote, basil, cucumbers, watermelon, and a host of trees (two lemons, a tea tree, a sassafrass, multiple eucalyptus). Also, there are some of the medicinal herbs I’m growing (the rest are elsewhere in the garden), several vetiver grasses, and a patchouli.

Related to those plants, I’ve long wanted to distill my own oils in order to make incenses and fragrances. I’ve already started the second of these, having made my first perfume (“cologne” in American English) with benzoin, vetiver, bergamot, patchouli, and a few other trace oils. Eventually, I’d like to grow all the plants from which I make medicine, fragrances, and incenses, especially since global trade seems due for a series of constant disruptions in the next few years.

In fact, if you use certain essential oils for anything more than just an occasional whiff, it’s a really good idea to consider growing the plants they come from yourself.

Vetiver oil, in particular, has recently gotten quite hard to get. Its price has more than doubled in the last ten years, and the European suppliers I’ve dealt with are constantly out. If you’re not familiar with vetiver, it’s a grass with a very deep root system, and the oil comes from those roots. It’s incredibly easy to grow and propagate (as with any grass, you just split it to grow more) but it doesn’t do well in areas with long freezes.

Its price inflation is primarily due to its omnipresence in perfumes, very often the base or heart note. Especially, it has an incredibly rich warm-yet-cooling effect, like walking into a forest at the hottest part of a summer day. For ritual or magic purposes, in my experience it’s extremely helpful for anything requiring heavy grounding into the body and a gradual calming after extreme experiences.

IV. Realists of A Larger Reality

Anyone who knows me well knows I love to cook. And I’m insanely good at it, and this isn’t bragging. I like my cooking so much — as does my husband — that we almost never eat at restaurants since we know we’ll be disappointed.

You may know I was a professional chef during a nine-year period of my life that feels quite like an entirely other life altogether. But back when I cooked for a living, I didn’t do much cooking at home and, when I did, it was often something plain and a bit boring. It made sense that this happened: I didn’t really make the same time to do what I was doing for work during my non-work time.

The same unfortunately has happened to me for reading. There was a fifteen-year period of my life where I read about 50 books a year. When I became a writer, this went down to about 20. And now that I’m also constantly reading and editing manuscripts for work, I only read two or three books for pleasure each year.

This has meant that I also don’t have much time for reading other substack writers at the moment, so I apologize if it seems I’ve missed some amazing essays of yours lately. But I did happen to read one of the most profound lines I’ve ever encountered about the problem of “realist fiction” by the previously-mentioned author of A Demonology of Desires,

Joe Grim Feinberg

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The fundamental error of realist fiction is not that it tries to be realist, but that it usually avoids examining the conditions of the real.

And further, Feinberg discusses how this matter of “realism” applies just well to economics:

… the whole discipline of neoclassical economics can be read as a literary world-building effort, meant to establish the rules that govern the stories that pro-market politicians tell.

This is, in fact, what political theology also is. Every political order is first of all a theological order — whether or not it centers divinity on a singular god, a plurality of gods, a divine “will of the people,” a group of founders, a dictator, or a sacred document. And if a political order is a theology, then it is also a story that must take hold in the minds of those who accept it.

This also reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s point about becoming “realists of a larger reality,” again a theme I took up in the first edition of Here Be Monsters.

While that’s not Feinberg’s primary point, his essay is full of lines that trigger thoughts and then cascading epiphanies in the very same way his book does. I’d highly suggest you read them both.