When I first started this blog, I made a point of writing something, anything, every day, even if it was really short, in order to get into a rhythm and establish something that I’d regret walking away from. Now I’ve sort of petered out, but I’ve done too much to let it drop. However, I’m much less ambitious, so I’m going to try to write something everyday even if it’s fairly trivial, but I’m only going to commit to a month.

I was surfing on the internet earlier and saw a video that made me think, “Ah, that’s why I’m not a lesbian.”

I’m probably too lazy.

Sometimes, in conversation, people make a reference to their sexual orientation. They’ll say, “As a straight person…” or “As a gay person…” or whatever. Then some point will come when I feel that a reference to my own orientation seems appropriate and I’ll choke a bit. I’ll be about to say, “As a bisexual….” Then I’ll think to myself, “Who are you kidding. You haven’t slept with a woman in years.” Especially with all the claims of special status for minorities, which makes me feel uncomfortable. I don’t really want people to judge what I say based on identity unless I’m speaking about my own experience. Then, I’ll be about to say straight, and I’ll think to myself, “Wait a second. You’re single. What if a really hot woman who’s into you hears that?” So, finally, I’ll say, “bisexual,” but not without feeling like I’m putting too fine a point on it.

But in the end, I sleep with men far, far more often than women. Why that is is answered in the following video at 3:57 and it made me laugh. (Also, I had that haircut in college.)

This exercise is not exactly going as I hoped since I really don’t want to write today. It’s supposed to be getting easier, not harder!

I’ve got all these things mixed up in my head and I’m not really sure I want to talk about any of them.

About a decade ago, I had a boyfriend from France. He said to me one day, “I can’t figure out which party in the U.S. represents the working people.” I said, “Neither.”

From the time of FDR until the era when Bill Clinton was running for office, the Democratic Party was more closely associated with the working class. Bill Clinton, however, courted Wall Street and financial interests in a way the Democrats hadn’t until then. Some segments of the working class had already notoriously broken with the Democrats when Reagan ran for office. The would become known as Reagan Democrats. However, Reagan was a union buster and many of the unions, and their members, continued to back the Democrats. The unions backed Clinton, too. Still, he had made an important change. I’m working from memory, by the way. If this was a regular post rather than one of my experimental days, I’d want to look up that and check it. That would take a lot of time… and then this would become yet another abandoned post.Still, that is how I remember it. Before Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party could be said to be the party of the working class and after Clinton it was not.

The working class, broadly defined, is inevitably the largest group of people in a given society. So, for twenty years a significant sector of society has lacked any real political voice. You know what they say: “Nature abhors a vacuum.”

I only have a typical high school education regarding U.S. History and none at all regarding U.S. Political History specifically.  There was an article today on Politico, “Why Hasn’t the Republican Party Collapsed?” which had the subtitle, “We shouldn’t be asking whether the GOP is falling apart. We ought to be wondering why it isn’t.”

The writer has one truly terrifying suggestion:

Geography and state representation still play a role in the American political system. But when the first conventions were held, New York had a population of about 200,000. A system developed today might do even more to represent Americans by age, gender or ethnic background (the parties have adopted reforms to ensure delegate representation along some of these lines), and to take into account the differences between Americans who live in urban and rural areas.

Wow, that would turn politics in the U.S. into a Hobbesian nightmare. The idea that you band together with your concitoyens to work for the common good would be entirely blown to bits. The vision that springs to my mind of collectivities with no motive for compromise. What the French call “communautarisme.”

So, basically what the writer is saying is that the two political parties in the U.S. have been around for a long time and that they struggle to put new ideas in with the old alliances. She calls the Democratic Party “party of process.”

The early party included members who disagreed on slavery, westward expansion and tariffs. Yes, they had policy commitments—originally centered around limiting the federal government’s influence—but they were more a pragmatic alliance than an ideological crusade.

From another source:

Yet by the 1850s, the issue of slavery divided the party even further. Northern Democrats, like Stephen Douglas, believed the slavery issue should be decided by popular sovereignty. The more conservative Southern Democrats like John C. Calhoun, however, insisted that slavery was and must remain a national institution. Many Northern, antislavery Democrats flocked to the Free Soilers coalition and joined Northern Whigs to form the Republican Party, whereas Southern, pro-slavery Democrats coalesced to form the Southern Democratic Party. As a result, the Democrats became almost entirely a Southern party platform, alienating any existing Northern supporters who were largely antislavery.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, has long been a party of ideology, created in the 1850s with a much more specific guiding principle in mind: stopping the expansion of slavery. Ever since, that difference—one party, a pragmatic alliance; the other, an ideological one—has meant that the Republican Party is more prone to ideological fights blowing up into potential existential crises.

As America becomes more unequal, it also becomes less Republican.

As long as all Americans were becoming better off, few cared that some Americans were becoming better off than others. But since 2000, something has changed. Incomes at the middle have ceased to rise. The mood of the country has soured. Conservatives who disregard the mood of unease may forfeit their power to defend the more open and productive American economy they did so much to build.

It’s widely understood that abundant low-skilled immigration hurts lower America by reducing wages. As the National Research Council noted in its comprehensive 1997 report: “If the wage of domestic unskilled workers did not fall, no domestic worker (unskilled or skilled) would gain or lose, and there would be no net domestic gain from immigration.” In other words, immigration is good for America as a whole only because — and only to the extent that — it is bad for the poorest Americans. Conversely, low-skilled immigration enriches upper America, lowering the price of personal services like landscaping and restaurant meals. And by holding down wages, immigration makes the business investments of upper America more profitable.

Middle-class Americans surely share in the cost-lowering benefits of immigration. But the middle class also pays the higher local tax bills that can result from immigration. Immigrants do not qualify for many federal benefits, but they do use the roads, schools, hospitals and prisons supported by state and local property taxes — the taxes that fall most disproportionately on the middle class.

I think it’s day five. I’ve lost count.

So, it’s late, but I wasn’t procrastinating today. I was trying to accomplish other things. As I mentioned at the start of my free association exercise that the point of the exercise is to become more fluid in my writing. To be able to get my ideas out more quickly. If you’re any of the people who talks to me on the phone or communicates with me via email, you know that I’m always referring to that post I’m going to write on some subject or another which I somehow never get to. Unfortunately, rigor and speed are often at odds. Still, I’d like to increase the speed.

Okay, now I’m blanking.

I’m not really blanking. I have three threads going in my head at once. One is about the contemporary fondness for physical fitness among the upper middle class. The second is a photograph I recently took of myself and the fact that I keep most photos of myself offline. The third was what I was writing about writing itself.

I mentioned at the start of this exercise that I had taken a writing course and writing your thoughts as the came into your head was a technique that was highly recommended for getting around writers block. However, what this current exercise doesn’t take into account is that the next stage was rereading and revising things. It wasn’t supposed to stay in that raw state. This is one of the conundrums of blogging. Blogging by its nature is speedy. It is a different literary beast from a well-developed article. I allow much more of what I consider “slippage” in a blog post than I ever would have allowed in an article I might have submitted for publication or written for class. In those cases, often several times more time is spent on the revising than on the rough draft. Trying to eliminate every spelling error and every grammatical error is seen as an attainable goal, if not in every article, then at least in the vast majority. When I first started blogging, I held myself to a similar standard, but I soon realized that that missed the point. Spending that much time revising and correcting was not a possibility if one wanted to publish with the sort of speed blogging implied.

So, how to improve quality in blogging?

I’m such a nasty, judgemental bitch. Really. I think I’m so superior to everyone. Sometimes, I annoy my own self.

Getting back to the “contemporary fondness for physical fitness” that I mentioned before, I saw a post about “sporn” selfies, pictures men take of themselves working out at the gym. Some academic wrote a paper about it. Now, I should qualify what I am about to say with the fact that I didn’t read the paper itself, I only read the coverage of it on a website. However, the parts they quoted made the academic who wrote the paper sound like someone who is entirely ignorant of any history. I looked him up and he apparently has a Ph.D. in “media studies.” The part that was quoted sounded so stupid, then I felt snotty, superior and like and asshole. There’s a side of me that wants to rip the guy’s ideas apart, but then there’s a side of me that pulls away from doing that because I don’t want to be mean.

Anyway, the reason that the sporn selfie thing interested me at all was because I had recently mentioned Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites. Now, he draws some parallels between the behavior of the elites in the current day (although he was writing in the mid nineties, the social trends he noticed at that time have only increased since then) and the behavior Jose Ortega y Gasset noticed among the people he called “mass men.” (It is probably worth pointing out that Ortega believes that the “mass man” can appear in any strata of society.)

(An aside: My high school American History I teacher used to make us, when taking notes about an event, write down what events led up to it and what events resulted from it. It is always tempting, indeed, it may be necessary, to break history into eras and chunks. Yet, in the end, it is one stream. Where does the era described by Ortega end and our own begin? Indeed, ours is in fact, an outgrowth of the previous ones.)

One of the commonalities Lasch notices between the mass man of the 1920s and the elites of the 1990s is the fondness for physical fitness. Lasch summarizing Ortega’s description of the mass man writes:

His attitude toward the body was severely practical: He made a cult of physical fitness and submitted to hygienic regimens that promised to keep it in good repair and to extend its longevity.

This appears in a list of several other qualities, including no use for obligation, no feeling for history, incapable of submitting to direction, lacking an understanding of “the fragility of civilization or the tragic character of history,” a lack of romance or interest in erotic love. In conclusion, Lasch writes:

It was, above all, however, the “deadly hatred of all that is not itself” that characterized the mass mind, as Ortega described it. In capable of wonder or respect, the mass man was the “spoiled child of human history.”

Lasch then continues:

All these habits of mind, I submit, are now more characteristic of the upper levels of society than of the lower or middle levels.

Further down:

They [the working class] understand, as their betters do not, that there are inherent limits on human control over the course of social development, over nature and the body, over the tragic elements in human life and history. While young professionals subject themselves to an arduous schedule of physical exercise and dietary controls designed to keep death at bay – to maintain themselves in a state of permanent youthfulness, eternally attractive and remarriageable – ordinary people, on the other hand, accept the body’s decay as something against which it is more or less useless to struggle.

For now, the gentle side of me will win out. I will only recommend that Jamie Hakim read Ortega y Gasset, as well as Christopher Lasch, and look for other historical treatments of his theme.

Before I go, I’d like to throw out a quote from an article in The New Statesman about Pierre Bayle, someone with whom I trust all my freethinking friends are familiar.

When a clergyman questioned him about his religious views, he supposedly replied that he was a good Protestant, “in the full sense of the term”, because “I protest against everything that is said, and everything that is done”.

I’m not entirely sure why. I was very sick a couple of weeks ago and I’m not entirely over it. I still have a tight feeling in my chest.

I wrote about giving a man my phone number, and he never called, so there’s that. When I asked if he wanted it, he seemed happy in a way that’s hard to fake, so, although I usually try to take such things in my stride, I did expect that he would call. I’ve actually stopped dating because dating has mainly moved on-line. I have much better luck with men in person than online. I suspect I appear better in person than I do on paper. There’s also something I call the R. Mutt theory of life, but that probably deserves its own post.

I have a strange lack of concentration at the moment. There are a couple of books sitting on my coffee table, but five minutes at a stretch seems to be all I can give them before getting antsy.

Another possibility is a sudden cessation of activity and company. Normally, I spend lots of time alone and am fairly used to it. However, the past two months have been odd since I took the trip to China and the trip to California, which was to attend a convention-type thing for a week. Therefore, until a few days ago, I was a very busy person, doing lots of things, mostly with other people around. Usually, I pride myself on never being bored. I wonder if this odd feeling is boredom?

Finally, there’s the weather. We’re having a heat wave, which is predicted to continue until nearly the end of the month. I hate heat. A heat wave like this is the equivalent of a month of rainy days or freezing cold. In a way, it’s worse because I’ve been keeping the blinds drawn to block out the sun and I feel like I’m in a cave. I’m getting a little stir crazy and there’s no relief in sight. Making things worse, the temperature doesn’t drop much at night.

It’s all pretty petty stuff, but I’ve been feeling this for a few days now, so I thought I try writing it down to see if it helps.

In a little bit, once the sun is fully up, I’ll go take a jog or a walk. If I want to get out, this will be the coolest it will be all day, although the humidity is 68%.

I know this is all a lot of whining. Except for the tightness in my chest, all of these are problems in my own mind. I feel like I’ve been trying to solve the loneliness problem for about four or five years now. It doesn’t get worse, but it doesn’t get better either. I was able to temporarily alleviate it for a week, but now it feels like it’s come back even worse.

I just read about the attack in Nice about an hour ago and I felt absolutely nothing. Am I becoming inured to this?