inverted vibe curve: burgertown must be defendedVerified account

For years, our political system has steadily withdrawn from pursuing serious political solutions to what could not be more obviously an urgent political problem: mass murder in public spaces.

This withdrawal of responsibility has been bipartisan, and has fostered downright amazing ideological artifacts and rationales in self-justification.

Conservatives who otherwise proudly champion repressive governance to fight "evil" (IE: terrorism) and who even might even philosophically define governance itself as inherently a kind of evil (IE: taxes) insist, on this matter, that evil cannot be "legislated."

Meanwhile far too many liberals proffer interventions that are just so much narrow technocratic tinkering, and studiously silo the problem of NRA money away from either the problem of arms industry influence broadly or money in politics in general.

The common thread in both these postures - which are products, incidentally, of regulatory capture by corporate money and the self-preservation interests of our career politician class - is the same: the withdrawal of any political responsibility for a properly political problem.

But even more crucially: this situation encourages a foreclosure of the horizon of what's even imaginable as *political possibility.* The simple absence, for example, of any mainstream blanket gun-ban voices in our political discourse speaks volumes.

(I'm not saying I agree with that position - I don't - but note how it *doesn't even really exist.* Our politics accommodates tons of extremism on so many issues, but on guns, blanket ban extremism is foreclosed from the get-go - it's basically just a RW fantasy bugbear).

In this situation, of the withdrawal of practical political responsibility, and of the impoverishment of the bounds of what can even constitute the political imaginatively, what do we get?

Well, in classic neoliberal fashion, the burden shifts to (1) the individual citizen-consumer, who is made responsible and must suffer the consequences, and (2) to private sector players, who can monetize the situation extravagantly.

(Note too how the overwhelming burden for school shootings is borne by public schools and the communities that depend on them; one wonders how different things might be if private schools were targeted on par).

But that's just (2). The other half of the neoliberal paradigm is making the people who suffer from the withdrawal of basic social protection themselves responsible for picking up the slack and blaming them for the problem (what theorists of call "responsibilization").

And so we make our kids do drills, traumatizing them, and teaching them that a rampaging murderer with an assault rifle is literally as much a part of the natural order as fire.

We seriously talk about giving teachers - whose unions we dismantle, whose salaries we slash, whom we ask to do ever more affective and material labor as therapists and test prep coaches and substitute parents - the additional responsibility of carrying guns in class.

And when shootings continue to happen (as they do inevitably, because we've foreclosed actual political solutions to a political problem), what do we do?

We blame victims and the communities themselves, for failing to adequately prevent their own murder by not working as unpaid forensic profilers and police informants (especially when, as in Parkland, the authorities obviously dropped the ball).https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964110212885106689 …

We call on everyone to perform mass rituals of affective labor - moments of silence, sending thoughts and prayers - rituals that are variously excruciatingly draining, formulaic and tokenistic, and utterly useless.

(And we shame people for rejecting these rituals - think here of the work done by the admonition in the wake of tragedy not to "politicize" them, what that actually demands: "how dare you do something other than grieving publicly in service of a status quo of depoliticization")

And finally, and this is the darkest, most twisted dimension of this neoliberal paradigm: we construct an elaborate series of rituals and performances for "honoring" the "sacrifice" of exemplary victims of senseless, entirely preventable butchery while doing nothing about it.

Please understand me here. I am not saying that these murders are not obscenities. I am not saying that the actions of so many victims is not heroic and selfless beyond imagination. They are. After each of these, the stories, they just destroy me.

I am saying that our heartbroken, anguished praise of children and teachers who are martyred holding open doors or shielding other people from gunfire indexes how normal and inevitable the demand for the ultimate unnecessary, supererogatory labor has been made in our system.

To be very clear, and I'm closing this up: our neoliberal definition of "safety," now as a matter of course involves and demands people dragooned into dying for it. The run/hide/fight mantra, the talk of "delaying" shooters?

What this means, very practically, is that we expect people to rush killers armed with military-grade weapons, to use their own bodies as barriers, to soak up bullets and force shooters to reload, to buy time and keep them localized until the authorities arrive.

And I can't imagine a more nutshell example of neoliberalism than this: demanding a nation's citizens - training our children - to throw themselves like human sandbags against a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place, but that does, because of profit. /end

(I realize, looking at the length of this, I probably could have just made it into an article for somebody. If any editors are interested in an expanded version of this, there's much more to say, and I'd be happy to write it, drop me a DM or an email).