Hello Fake Friends,
Let me me begin with the cash-grab. Today is October First, a Friday. (2021)
It is also Bandcamp Friday, which means, if you were to go over to there to purchase this:
all of the monies would go into my pocket. That is, Bandcamp (which is really a pretty great company slash service) waives all of their fees on this special day. That was the cash-grab. Roll it over in your mind.
On the horizon, I will be releasing a new record on the last day of the October, Halloween 2021, exclusively on Bandcamp. This will be an album of demos called “A Revenge Fantasy.” I’ll talk more about it on another day. This guy will be on the album cover:
Now to the politics. I should point out that I get most of my news/analysis from the New Yorker and Harper’s, which puts me left and slow, as far as news goes. But I read a couple of articles recently that really got my mind turning.
In the back of my head, I think of the Q Anon people, and I tell myself, as tempting as these people make it to do so, I should not dehumanize them—even if they have already dehumanized me, as a libtard or a snowflake, say. These people need help. They are not well. And they have been around forever.
So the three articles that I read, that I encourage you all to read, which kind of dance around some of this stuff are:
1. https://bostonreview.net/politics/nicolas-guilhot-bad-information
2. https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
3 https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad-news-selling-the-story-of-disinformation/
Notice the second of these pieces was written in 1964. And yet, it shines a light on what’s happening today. Check these out. I felt a better sense of context when contemplating dehumanizing the other. Which I am trying really hard not to do.
To close, it is October, when squishy things get crisp. Enjoy the change, and keep on living according to your own sense of poetry.
OX&C,
Faux Jean