16 Comments

Love this! (although must point out that the vaccine doesn't stop people getting c19. There have even been suggestions from the more paranoid and conspiratorial among us that some outbreaks, such as India, are happening *after* mass vaccinations but I haven't looked into that).

But anyway, whatever. Yes, I hope many people are laughing in the face of the death we actually think we can control, and sticking their tongues right down each other's throats :)

Expand full comment

Masks. Lehrer’s insights into the “persistence of mask wearing” come free of any journalistic facts. Instead, Lehrer tackles the topic from an aesthetic perspective, claiming that mask-wearers are “necromancers,” “masked zombies,” and the “undead masses,” as if he were reciting the lyrics of a Misfits song. It is juvenile. And while Lehrer acts impatient with everyone still wearing a mask in late May 2021, the weekend that Lehrer describes was one of the first in which vaccinated people could go without a mask indoors in New York City under revised guidance. At that time, approximately 50% of the population of New York City was vaccinated. Thus one would have expected even more people at Lehrer’s party to be wearing marks. What exactly is he complaining about?

On a broader political level, Lehrer says that COVID shows that the capitalists want to keep the “peasants” inside. But the “peasants” were outside during COVID, not inside. Indeed, it was the capitalists who pushed essential workers outside at great risk to worker safety, and the government refused to provide them with the support that would allow workers to sit it out, forcing them back into the arms of capital. This took place as white-collar workers carried on remotely from the safety of their homes, and the superrich barricaded themselves off in their own worlds. Reality does not fit his metaphor.

Lehrer references the Twitter feed of his friend Genève Campbell, whom he calls the most “purely intentioned” person on Twitter. Campbell is Georgetown University, undergraduate and postgraduate, and works at a Harvard University affiliate on grants from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Her background is, in her own words, in “democratization,” mostly science and technology policy as implemented in U.S. government-funded programs: “your general U.S.-funded regime change type of soft power stuff.” Her Leftist credentials extend all the way back to the fact that she has “never voted for a Republican.” It is laughable that Lehrer, who loves to call everything “Psyops!” and accuses everyone of being “CIA-funded,” is taking cues from a softcore regime-change specialist whose work has been “mostly” overseas. Lehrer is exactly the kind of knucklehead who would have brought the undercover FBI agent to the Panthers meeting in the 1960s.

In any case, Campbell’s Twitter life is as a COVID commentator and anti-mask influencer who leads a bevy of angry soccer parents and would-be COVID policy wonks who rail against mask mandates and the teacher’s union and demand that in-person school be reopened immediately.

While Campbell plays the role of an objective truth-teller, her tweets, retweets and threads, and those of her most active followers, all amplify the same theme. First, they note some misstep, foible, idiocy or overreaching in the area of mask mandates or vaccination; then everyone jumps to apocalyptic conclusions, talking about hostage situations, human rights crimes, how lockdowns and mask mandates are evil, and how history will judge us. Campbell likes to talk about “moral panic,” but her threads are pretty panicky themselves. And as you might imagine, there is a lot of privilege. Of all the dangers and injustices plaguing this planet, they are interested almost exclusively in mask mandates and vaccinations as an imposition on their sense of freedom and normalcy. Indeed, some are now “one-issue voters,” expressing admiration for people like Ron DeSantis. As a Leftist, I’ll pass.

Expand full comment

This post is over a year old, yet still worth reading.

For my part, I find it easier to treat people kindly in the flesh. Communicating over the net can be very dehumanizing. Depending on the medium.

Zoom and emails are the best as far as reminding me that I'm interacting with flesh and blood individuals. "Open" SM venues such as Twitter are the worst. Conversation thread forums--like this comment section--are in the middle.

Expand full comment

Psychoanalysis. Lehrer puts forward a “transgressive” aesthetic and claims familiarity with Lacan and psychoanalysis, but the text operates at the emotional level of an American college frat-boy. To pick up where we left off with the art exhibition, Lehrer was annoyed by the mask-wearers, and he ends up in a conversation with a mask-wearing woman who came with a friend of his. The woman says about some unspecified artist, “I don’t know why he has to work in the way that he does, with all the bad stuff that’s happening the world.” With this, Lehrer says he “wigg[ed] out.” He was somewhat “brutal,” he says, and he might have been more brutal if not for the presence of a friend. Lehrer told her: “So what you’re really saying is that this artist makes you feel uncomfortable, and that you feel to special to feel discomfort. You think you deserve a world without discomfort, and that we should all give up our own lives and our own desires and joie de vivre to deliver you the comfort that you believe you’re owed.” Lehrer then accuses her of being a “fetishist,” with ‘safety” apparently her thing. Lehrer wants to convince the woman to “live life deliciously” and to “seize [her] joy and take ownership of [her] freedom” so that we can all “actually reach out and touch one another” and feel “the full extent of [her] flesh and blood existence.” He imagines “nothing short of an assault on her own sensibilities.” He wants her to be a “fucking human.” Lehrer wants to free her from “[her] jouissance-laden servitude.” I bet he does. This is juvenile psychodrama, or dime-store novel, Fabio-type, misogynist bullshit.

Lehrer even tells his unconscious story in pictures. The first photograph in the piece is Spiral Tribe (1993) by Derek Ridgers, a longtime advertising agency art director who took pictures of the punk and club scenes in London and sold them as coffee table books. The photograph shows a solitary young man at a party, dancing with his head back, eyes closed, mouth open, with a look on his face suggesting ecstasy or orgasm. What is most striking in the picture is that he appears completely self-absorbed, almost still, as if in a separate world. This is Lehrer’s protagonist—the narcissist as “hero,” an empty conception of living life to the fullest. The last photograph is from UKG (2013) by Ewen Spenser, who has photographed youth culture extensively and worked for The Guardian, NME, The Face, Nike, Apple, Smirnoff, Footlocker, JD Sports, Sony, Reebok, T-Mobile, Toyota, Vodafone and Channel 4. It is a photograph of (surprise) a very young woman, perhaps Lehrer’s failed interlocuter, or some imaginary one who recognized his will to power and freed herself from her jouissance-laden servitude. But someone intervenes. A second woman comes to defends the first, and she tells Lehrer that he is cruel to pathologize and mock those who are hesitant and scared of COVID. Lehrer even adds another photograph between the first and last, showing the second woman wielding an enormous sword. It is a castration story so transparent even Lacan would blush. This is not transgressive. It is childish and misogynist.

This piece is punk rock posturing, not serious Left criticism or politics.

Expand full comment

Politics. Then there is Lehrer’s silly catchphrase, “safety propaganda.” This punk rock slogan could have come from the mouth of Malcom McLaren. Indeed, Ballard wrote The Intensive Care Unit Ballad in the mid-to-late 1970s, around the time David Bowie was doing his racist Thin White Duke and McLaren was selling Nazi iconography at his shop in London. “Cash from chaos,” McLaren called it. But for serious people, the notion that “life is real” but “safety [is] . . . an abstraction” is vapid nonsense. The poor and oppressed face all manner of threats to their safety today—unemployment, food insecurity, lack of access to healthcare, drug addition, exposure to environmental harm, threats of state violence and racist, misogynistic or homophobic violence. Indeed, it is precisely people’s precarity that is the issue today, not their safety, see Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of resistance: Against the tyranny of the market (1998), which is what makes Lehrer’s “take” so thoroughly unconvincing. Is safety an abstraction to Amazon warehouse workers? To the African American community? To the LGBTQ community? To Iraqis? To Gazans? Yemenis?

Lehrer pretends to adhere to a “proletarian revolution,” but the proletarian is nowhere to be found in his piece—it is just mediocre art exhibitions, club kids, designer drugs, British suburbs, and Lehrer’s own rantings on the supremacy of “Decadence” and “Art. What Lehrer is doing is not Left politics or Left criticism. It is Leftism as aesthetic or attitude—the performance of Leftism. Not surprisingly, Lehrer also flirts with crypto-fascism with his emphasis on “friends” and “enemies,” binary thinking, and the coming “conflict.” In Lehrer’s simplistic logic: no mask, “thus friends.” What is so incredible is that Lehrer chooses as his target the weak, i.e., those for whom life “is simply too terrifying and fraught to be endured, and sheltering inside is, for them, the rational response to the confused alienation.” Lehrer attacks them as “fetishists” who lack the necessary “vigor,” and he claims that there is going to an “elemental and almost transcendent conflict between those who want to live and those who don’t.” This stuff is thuggish on its face, but Lehrer should also know that Eco himself called out exactly these traits as indicative of fascism—“irrationalism,” “the cult of action for action’s sake,” craving “heroic” death, and most importantly, “contempt for the weak.” Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism, The New York Review of Books (June 22, 1995). Lehrer should be embarrassed at having so twisted Eco.

Expand full comment

Foucault. Lehrer does not miss a chance to cross-promote American Affairs, plugging Geoff Shullenberger’s recent piece on the potential uses of Foucault by the right. But Lehrer’s use of Foucault is superficial and self-defeating. Shullenberger makes the point that while some on the right associate Foucault with political correctness and cultural Marxism, his concepts of the primacy of individual autonomy and micro-resistance to biopower could be used by the right to justify things like resistance to mask mandates. But this has been clear for a long time. Foucault was never more than a casual Marxist, and he explicitly embraced neoliberalism in his later years, coming under the spell of people like Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (2008); Daniel Zamora & Daniel Zeglen, Michel Foucault, Neoliberalism, and the Failures of the Left, IN THESE TIMES (June 24, 2016). Indeed, as a kind of cautionary tale, Foucault’s embrace of neoliberalism came right around the same time that he was pursuing individual self-actualization and experimenting with drugs in the United States. See J. Penter, Blowing the Philosopher’s Fuses: Michel Foucault’s LSD Trip in the Valley of Death, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS (June 17, 2019). As Lehrer claims to hate liberals most of all, he is likely oblivious of all this. In any case, Foucault’s “lifestyle anarchism” and philosophy of “personal insurrection” have always been in tension with ideas of broader social revolution. See Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (1995). Like a good bourgeois critic, Lehrer expresses concern about how COVID-related restrictions might have infringed on “freedom of speech and assembly,” but he just copies a link to The Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, which tracks lawsuits brought by churches and right-wing groups to challenge coronavirus restrictions on religious freedom grounds. I guess Lehrer has been reading up on his Alito.

Expand full comment

Nietzsche, Rand and Macintosh. If you put aside his name-dropping of authors he misunderstands like Eco, Foucault and Ballard, Lehrer’s own thoughts are nothing more than bad high school poetry: “Beauty is complex, and shit . . . ,” he says, “the world . . . is equally full of splendor [and] danger.” “Accept your mortality.” “[L]ife is real!” “We must live, and remind those who have forgotten that life is worth living.” “Art. Decadence. Love. Sex.” “[L]ong for something real.” “[C]hoose life.” “[R]esistance is not futile!” “[E]very exculpation of the human spirit is now an act of resistance . . . . It’s beautiful and glorious.” “Take off the mask. Breath in the air!” “Go into a crowded bar and dance to your favorite music!” “Take MDMA and kiss someone who you think is beautiful!” “Live!”

This is obviously not serious Left criticism or analysis. Indeed, telling people to “[l]ive deliciously” or live a “zestful life” or “[g]o to the people you love and hold them tight” is the kind of trite romanticism that one might hear on a television commercial. At best, it is a bad version of Nietzsche. But the emphasis on the supremacy of individual self-expression is fundamentally privileged and not generally associated with emancipatory or revolutionary politics. See Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel (2019). And certainly hedonism and decadence are not. See Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1978). What is most disturbing is that Lehrer sounds perhaps most like Ayn Rand, with her rah-rah individualism. See if you can distinguish the two:

• “[N]ever has it been an artist’s responsibility to create work that single-handedly addresses all the problems in the world.”

• “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.”

• “Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them.”

• “The artist who expresses himself at all costs is an ally in the pursuit of freedom. More than that, he’s a hero.”

• “Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach.”

• “The people who choose to live life on their own terms in our present social political order are the heroes of mine.”

• “The person who denies the artist’s right to express himself at all costs is, yes, an enemy.”

• “A population that refuses to claim its freedom is a population that is []vulnerable to having those freedoms stripped of them.”

It is embarrassing for Lehrer to find himself in such company. This is facile, teenage rebellion dressed up as cyberpunk. Indeed, it is essentially the 1984 Macintosh commercial, with the young, attractive, athletic young woman running with a hammer and throwing it at the totalitarian computer screen, shocking the staid audience, except that Lehrer would have the “hero” of the commercial be a teenage boy. There is nothing like late stage capitalism to coopt these empty forms of rebellion.

Expand full comment

J.G. Ballard. Lehrer is enamored, perhaps not surprisingly, with J.G. Ballard’s lightweight and ultraviolent Intensive Care Unit Ballad (1977), a typically nihilistic Ballard tale that Lehrer appears to take at face value. For someone who pretends to support a proletarian revolution, the use of Ballard is puzzling.

As an initial matter, Lehrer does not seem to realize that Ballard was a bourgeois pig and British imperialist to his core. Ballard was born in Shanghai to British parents in 1930, at the end of the “fifty-year-long party that had been Shanghai.” J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1984). His father was chairman and managing director of a British textile firm’s Shanghai subsidiary, and the family lived in or around the Shanghai International Settlement, where they lived a posh colonial lifestyle, with “receptions at the French Club, race meetings at the Shanghai Racecourse and various patriotic gatherings at the British Embassy” in “the city’s glamorous waterfront area.” Ballard fondly recalled his chauffeured trips to the Country Club swimming pool in his later years. See J.G. Ballard, The real Empire of the Sun: JG Ballard on how his childhood inspired the gripping war film, DAILYMAIL UK (April 24, 2009).

During World War II, many British expatriates fled Shanghai in anticipation of a Japanese invasion. Ballard’s parents did not evacuate because, in Ballard’s words, “duty . . . counted for something [then],” with “duty” apparently referring to Britain’s duty to exploit Chinese labor and resources. Ballard has memories of bicycling through the deserted streets of the international district with empty buildings and drained swimming pools—the party over. When the Japanese invaded in 1943, residents of the district, including Ballard’s family, were sent to Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre, an internment facility reserved for European and American citizens. Ballard recalls packing up and waiting to leave for Lunghua, with wealthy expatriate families, mostly British, sitting with their suitcases around the swimming pool of the American Club, “many of the women in their fur coats,” and the men with “tennis rackets, cricket bats and fishing rods.” Ballard said that his time at Lunghua was “relaxed and easy-going.” While he mentions instances of sporadic violence by Japanese soldiers, the violence is always inflicted on the Chinese, not the Europeans or Americans. While the expatriates at Lunghua survived, albeit meagerly, their former neighbors did much worse. Ballard reminisces: “By early 1945, destitute Chinese peasants tried to enter the camp. Starving families sat around the gates, the women wailing and holding up their skeletal children.” Instead of empathizing, Ballard says in perfectly Ballaradian fashion: “The guards helped us keep them out.” The Japanese ultimately abandoned the camp and the war ended. Ballard remembers, in the last days of August 1945, when a B-29 flew over the camp and American relief supplies floated down in parachutes filled with Western consumer products: “tins of Spam, cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes, jars of jam and huge bars of chocolate.” Steven Spielberg made this imperialist nostalgia into a blockbuster movie.

Ultimately, Ballard returned home to England, went to university, attended some medical school, tried to become a pilot in the Royal Air Force, and ultimately tried his hand at writing science fiction with Freudian or surrealistic themes. For all his stylistic rebellion, however, Ballard never questioned his father or empire. He famously moved to the suburbs and described his politics as “middle of the roadism.” J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (2008). Ballard was “a great supporter of Margaret Thatcher” and “thought economic freedom was the one thing this country desperately needed”; [ . . . ] “I think her economic policies were right almost to the end.” J.G. Ballard, Dangerous Bends Ahead, Slow Down (2006). Ballard also supported Blair, and he liked to belittle the peace and environmental movements as “[h]alf-baked and inexperienced” with “no perception of the realities of the world.” He even defended the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see Duncan Bell, J.G. Ballard’s Surrealist Liberalism (2020), and famously aestheticized them in Empire of the Sun. Ballard’s favorite childhood memories of Shanghai were the American cars, and he wrote erotic literature about car crashes while maintaining a virulent hatred of Ralph Nader. See Simon Sellars, Dossier on Ralph Nader (2008). But Ballard’s real fascination was with the Iron Lady, about whom he wrote sexual fantasies and said things like: she has “the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe.” See also J.G. Ballard, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. This just screams “proletarian revolution” to me.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Lehrer is enamored of The Intensive Care Unit Ballad, a science-fiction story of a world in which humans live in complete physical separation from one another: all communication takes place over screens, and even procreation is done remotely. When one seemingly happy family decides to meet in the flesh, all of their sexual and violent urges are released, and they tear each other to pieces. Always looking for his line, Ballard writes at the end that as the father “bashes his son’s brain in,” he is “full of love” and has “never felt more alive.” This is classic British imperialist and colonialist literature: the “nasty, brutish” savage that needs to be controlled by rationality in Hobbes, the savages that lie just beyond the border of the civilized world in Kipling, and the law and order necessary to control the savage within in Burgess and Golding. It is all of a piece, and it functions as a great apologia for the British Empire. Specifically, Britain’s colonial savagery is excused because, well, the whole world is savage: it is the debased nature of man that is to blame, not the debased nature of the Empire. Somewhere in the colonial unconscious, however, their savagery must haunt them. And the colonial crimes reappear in their imagination as fantastic ruptures of violence within the civilized world, thus the drained swimming pools filled with skulls and the residents of an upscale apartment complex committing acts of unspeakable horror. In the words of Frederic Jameson, it is exemplary of how “the imagination of a dying class—in this case the cancelled future of a vanished colonial and imperial destiny—seeks to intoxicate itself with images of death.” Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005). The bleak nihilism is just a failure to imagine revolutionary possibility. Ballard “mistak[es] the end of capitalism for the end of the world.” H. Bruce Franklin, What Are We to Make of J.G. Ballard’s Apocalypse? (1979).

Even beyond all of that, Lehrer’s reading of the Ballard piece is just asinine. Lehrer approaches the story as the average American approaches a movie, uncritically inhabiting the perspective of the protagonist in the story, here the father with his pedophiliac desires and murderous urges, without any Brechtian distance. It is stunning that Lehrer would actually read the father’s comments at the end of the Ballard story as a reminder to live to “the full extent of our flesh and blood existence.” This is not serious criticism.

Expand full comment

Umberto Eco. In support of his irresponsible call to identify friends and enemies, and who really wants to live or die, Lehrer references Umberto Eco of all people, and his beautiful Waive ciao ciao to the Camera (2002), as if Eco would want any part of Lehrer’s idiotic task. To be clear, Lehrer does no real analysis of Eco. Instead, he uses phrases like “liquidity” or the “fluid temporal moment” for aesthetic effect—to make him sound edgy or intellectual. But his description of life under COVID is really just prosaic: “[P]eople were more seen during the COVID lockdowns than ever before,” he says. “On their social media accounts and Tik Tok profiles, people—utterly disconnected from each other in any traditional sense of the word—found themselves ravenous for clicks and attention in cyberspace.” This could be straight out of a New Yorker fluff piece. More importantly, Lehrer has no understanding of the actual concept of liquidity as understood by Eco or anyone else. Eco believed that in the “liquid” phase of late global capitalism in which workers are uprooted, “everything dissolves,” there are “no points of reference,” there are crises in “grand narratives,” and the “certainty of law is lost.” Umberto Eco, The Liquid Society (2017). Lehrer, bless his heart, somehow draws the exact opposite conclusion: that “it’s never been easier” to draw distinctions, that “fault lines have been drawn,” and that society was entering a period of “binary” post-Covid conflict. This is nonsense and it has nothing to do with liquidity or Eco. Lehrer even appears to have missed the point of Waive ciao ciao, where Eco describes a world of shamelessness and vanity in late capitalism, in which everyone is obsessed with being seen and being famous, and Eco hopes at the end of the piece that “some new sect” will arise in opposition to this world, whose purpose will be “concealment from the world, exile in the desert, withdrawal into the cloister, [and] the dignity of silence.” Like the picture of Eco in his library. The opposite of Lehrer’s maximalism and bluster.

Expand full comment

The Art Exhibition. The central conceit of Lehrer’s piece is his telling of a story about how he went to the art exhibition of a friend, Bradford Kessler, on a weekend in late May 2021, presumably in New York City. When he arrived at the exhibition, Lehrer surveyed the room and determined that the “crowd” was relatively “based,” with less “libtardery” than usual. Lehrer does not like masks, and he likes “having laughs at the expense of those who still wear masks” after being vaccinated. On this night, “most” of the attendees were not wearing marks, a situation that should have pleased him. But he was not pleased: he was upset by the “few” people that were. The actual reasons why they were wearing masks is never stated or explored. Maybe they had not been vaccinated, maybe they had health conditions, maybe they were being cautious for any number of reasons, including skepticism of pharmaceutical companies or captured government agencies, or the fact that they no longer felt that they could trust their fellow Americans to do right by them. Their decision to wear masks upsets Lehrer, although he can never really explain why. He talks repeatedly about how the mask-wearers hold him in contempt, but he never gives any examples. It appears to be pure projection.

Expand full comment

This piece is deeply misguided. While one might look the other way, Lehrer is symptomatic of a faction of the online “Left” that uses disillusionment over the defeat of the Bernie Sanders campaign as an excuse to embrace class reductionism and the aestheticization of politics. It is fundamentally an act. The slightest scrutiny reveals that Lehrer is just regurgitating bourgeois clichés and thinly veiled neoliberal and imperialist ideology. As in Ballard, the lack of substance is obscured by “transgressive” packaging, pseudo-intellectualism, and a quickness to shout down others. Lehrer presents himself as a Lefter-than-Left class reductionist in favor of “proletarian revolution,” but his politics actually vacillate between the bourgeois and the crypto-fascist, as seen in his love for Ballard and his fixation on separating “friends” from “enemies” and preparing for an upcoming conflict between the strong and the weak. Eco would have hated it. Lehrer’s piece does not work as COVID journalism, literary criticism or theory, psychoanalysis, or Leftist politics.

Expand full comment