Author: stevekuusisto

Over the past few months I’ve been using the term dip shit frequently. It’s never been a place holder in my vocabulary like “insensate” or (my favorite) “sub-Cartesian” (the latter so perfect it squeaks.) One chooses to not think and adopts the corresponding identity. It’s more than an insult, it’s a fact; a dessert mint, a breath mint…. But nowadays I’m hobbling with dip shit.

Americans are adept at self-inflicted insults and if you prowl for dip shit in the Urban Dictionary you’ll find in addition to meaning a contemptible or inept person it’s used to demean working class folks, the tortured souls who work at the Department of Motor Vehicles, receptionists, fellow motorists, etc.. If you pronounce everyone willfully vile you can be assured you’re the brightest bulb in the grimy marquee.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once said people in the United States are so downtrodden they’ll actually shout “here goes nothing” when jumping out of airplanes. Our brand of capitalism relies on crushing any hope of achieving self worth. So we walk about without health insurance, adequate social relief, access to good and affordable housing, education, public transportation—and we call the most oppressed dip shits.

I know the history of dip shittery.

What I’m now describing is the New Dip Shittery. It comes from a belief floated by the Tea Party and then the entire GOP that “the elites” are the principle problem in America. Why, so the thinking goes, if you can just rid the nation of professional politicians, experts, egg heads, smart women, and all pesky purveyors of nuance and scruple (tip of the hat to William Safire) why then we’ll be in business! The New Dip Shittery is self contempt not on steroids but on amphetamine—its a neurological highjacking—the new Dip Shitter doesn’t have time for the instructions, true journalism, a book, or for that matter to follow public health advice. The new dip shitter is the revenge of the old dip shitter. Poorly paid, unappreciated and exhausted people decided that the American political system wasn’t doing much for them. Of course Hilary Clinton would have done more for them than Trump but that’s a thought that takes too much time to reckon with.

Americans are proving they don’t have time to think about anything. Reality is too inconvenient. Trump is betting his re-election on this. His daily pressers are designed with the New Dipshittery in mind. Every expert is to be distrusted; every fact is too much to acknowledge; that woman reporter is a really nasty person. “Trust me,” says Trump, “I’ve never been elite.”

The New Dipshitters will vote for Trump though America leads the world in Coronavirus deaths.

What can you tell me about remedy? When you get right down to it the very word is the foundation of distrust. Snake oil salesmen and authoritarians in white coats—we don’t trust ‘em. The damn varmints! Herman Melville saw them. So did Voltaire. Jesus. BTW there’s no evidence in the dead sea scrolls that Jesus charged for medical interventions.

For profit medicine in the US isn’t built for remedy, it’s built for alleviation. This is why not everyone can have a medical test; not everyone gets the proper treatment. If you’re one of the not chosen you know all about it. You see, in a cruel system “remedy” has no ethics attached. We will “remedy” you of the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the weak.

The root of “remedy” is “to amend.”

Only 15 per cent of American medical offices are accessible to wheel chair users.
The deaf-blind can’t get treatment in the ER. Are the disabled to be amended unto death?
Alleviation isn’t for everybody. Just ask the African-American communities being hit hardest by the Covid-19 virus. Just ask indigenous people. No tests; no ethics; no hope; but you can have all the poisoned meat you like.

I’m writing because it’s early. No church bells. My neighbor who walks his imaginary dog is the only person on the street. Take advice or do not take it, your heart keeps pumping.

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I’ve always loved Racine. “Thank the Gods! My misery exceeds all my hopes!”

It’s a game I play, “Thank the Gods”—thank the Gods my guitar still has a string!” Thwacka thwack.

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Of course the gods don’t care what we do with our miseries. Their guitars have all the strings.

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Rain in a tin dish.

I’ve been a keeper of notebooks since my undergraduate days at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. In graduate school at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop the habit became a practice. I didn’t like graduate school very much but I could joke to my friend and classmate Ken Weisner that Iowa City was a good place to drink tea and write on scraps of paper. Ken grew up to be a wonderful poet and teacher and I’m still largely a jotter of notes. Once upon a time I co-edited a volume called “The Poet’s Notebook” which is still abailable from W.W. Norton. Poets are all collectors of scraps.

Notebook, notebook, who’s the fairest of them all? Forget it. Paul Valery said: Love is being stupid together. Oh notebook I love you! You don’t mind that I think Karl Marx was only right about history or that I genuinely hate the fashion industry. You admit my fidelity to provincial cultures.

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For a notebook to be any good at all it must glint like the scissors I dropped in the grass.

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Merz.

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Merz is a nonsense word invented by the German dada artist Kurt Schwitters to describe his collage and assemblage works based on scavenged scrap materials.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/merz

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Does the notebook stink, like old Kurt Schwitters who gladly stuffed his overcoat with objects from the gutter? Yes. The notebook is pungent and sweet like the dead thing in your wall.

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Of course you copy things you like. I like the phrase: “the vital motions of Venus’ hair.”

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What’s the difference between the notebook and rhetoric? The latter must be organized. The notebook is an unmade bed. Aristotle didn’t know about eiderdown.

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My grandmother used to sing to a stuffed bird.

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Lady Macbeth is part Hecate, part Medea. Hecate is her nicer part. In love with moonbeams.

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I like the word “snaffling” as its about domestic thievery. I shall snaffle some of Norbert’s cherries.

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There was the month in Iowa City when I played the same record by Odetta, over and over and read nothing but Catullus. Sweet and sour, laugh and cry. Spring rain at the windows.

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I’ll take Shakespeare even on a bad day:

“O comfort-killing Night! Image of hell!
Dim register and notary of shame!
Black stage for tragedies and murders fell!
Vast sin-concealing chaos! Nurse of blame!
Blind, muffled bawd! Dark harbour for defame!
Grim cave of death! Whisp’ring conspirator
With close-tongued treason and the ravisher!”

Excerpt From: Jonathan Bate. “How the Classics Made Shakespeare.” Apple Books.

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Since poetry says so, I bring my father back from the dead and then my mother with her broken laugh. My brother, gone since infancy, he comes along, though not in human form, he’s like the northern lights. “There’s nothing to be astonished about,” I tell them. “Let’s leave off where we were.” So we fall together like leaves in wind and sweep across the velvet ditch of fictive life—you know, the one we imagined we’d live and live.

George Orwell had a higher speed of mental respiration—mentation—he’d develop immunity to ideologies of the left and right more quickly than the common western intellectual. This is called “facing” and in his masterful book “Why Orwell Matters” Christopher Hitchens describes it this way:

“I knew,’ said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, ‘that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.’ Not the ability to face them, you notice, but ‘a power of facing’. It’s oddly well put. A commissar who realizes that his five-year plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact. So, for that matter, may a priest with ‘doubts’. The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’. Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of an evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoubling of efforts to overcome the obvious. The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.”

It’s the self critical faculty that matters—the growth of consciousness is unpleasant but beating the obvious has its up sides—one may say its virtues—for leaving a clotted meeting of self appointed utopians of any stripe is always a relief. Not long ago I attended a memorial event honoring a poet whose life had been devoted to the study and practice of Buddhism. The people who came were among the most covetous and egotistical souls imaginable. It was enough for them to say they were selfless and then quite literally strip the paintings from the dead man’s walls. I saw I didn’t like them; moreover I didn’t have to.

One dislikes supernatural propaganda when confident. Overcoming the obvious is how you build that confidence.
Resisting evasion is everything. Example: the Frankfurt School imagined late stage capitalism drifting toward nihilism and exhaustion. But the obvious drift of history disproves this—one can scarcely argue with the Cato Institute’s response that culture has grown more sophisticated and diverse as a consequence of free markets and the availability of niche cultural texts for niche audiences. Do you understand this is not a rah rah for capitalism per se—at least on my part—but a resistance to not putting one’s preference as a free thinker to the test.

And I’m in mind of this tonight now that Donald J. Trump has told the American people that they might cure themselves of the coronavirus by injecting bleach into their veins. This is Trump’s method for confronting an unpleasant fact minus courage.