Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News:
In “Vote Joy 2024” we find the denouement of the long, pitiful story of what has become of the American “left” and why this term now requires quotation marks.
I have long thought politics can be usefully read as an expression of antecedent cultural and psychological phenomena.
This is how I view the Kii Arens poster and why I think it merits careful scrutiny: It is a window, or maybe a Rosetta Stone, in which we can read the coded interiority of the “left’s” psychic journey from the honorable commitments of earlier times to… to what?… to a state of willful political and intellectual immaturity.
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Nostalgia, I have long argued, is at bottom a symptom of depression. Nostalgists are those who retreat into the past as a refuge from a present they find in one or another way unbearable.
And here I offer a corollary thought: The sensation of powerlessness is a primary cause of depression. Any good psychiatrist would confirm this.
With this in mind, think about all those people “connecting emotionally” to Kii Arens’s iconography, and then all the others who may not have not seen it but would similarly identify with it. That these people are in some inchoate way nostalgic is beyond argument.
The follow-on conclusion seems to me equally evident: All the talk of joy and vibes is at bottom a mask for a more or less prevalent depression people cannot admit to themselves they suffer.
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“Joy” and “vibes” have no meanings. This is why they have caught on like fires in a dry forest. They do not signify challenges to anything; they license an extraordinary flinch from everything.
Everything: American participation in a genocide, the proxy war in Ukraine, the incessant and increasingly dangerous provocations of China, the brutalizing sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, and all such serious matters of policy.
There is no need to think about any of this. There is, indeed, an unwritten code that the crises of our time, America’s leaders responsible for all of them, are neither to be thought about nor mentioned.