On a Personal Note
And Thoughts on the Possibility of Counterculture
Lawyer’s Fees is growing at immense speed and that’s thanks to you, wonderful readers. Reflecting on its journey in a time that feels utterly unreal, writing has not seldom been therapeutic for me, and I hope reading it was no less so. A win-win publication that will remain free. However, keeping this Substack free is not as easy for me as I would like it to be. Keep reading (or scroll down) to find out more.
For the upcoming September issue of Lawyer’s Fees, I have managed to get my hands on a wonderful text from a German author who will enlighten us as to some still unresolved questions regarding the authoritarian plague state and the Left. Be excited.
And now: back to business.
I came upon this interesting piece by FoxNews Sports reporter Clay Travis: “Novak Djokovic, Kyrie Irving, Aaron Rodgers are modern day heirs of Muhammad Ali”.
Travis says that just as Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be incorporated into the Vietnam war narrative and active resistance to being drafted was scorned and looked down upon by the political, cultural, and managerial elites of his time (and even punished with a prison sentence), some of today’s decisions by men and women in sports to not get the Covid shot drew similar scorn from the establishment. Not Colin Kaepernick who managed to get lucrative PR deals out of “taking the knee” for BLM, and supported a thoroughly uncontroversial, elites-approved agenda should be viewed as a “hero”, but people like Novak who was denied entry to the US, and therefore participation in a Grand Slam tournament because of his vaccination status. That is tantamount to a professional ban. There is truth in Travis’s words. Anyone with an interest in power differentials should come to the same conclusion. Hegemonic reign needs its pseudo-resistance to feign “openness”, while the real heroes and heroines are shut out and down.
This made me think: are Novak, Kyrie, and Aaron perhaps part of a new counterculture – as Ali was in his time, to no little extent sparking the cultural paradigm shift in the 60s? And what is or could become counterculture today, with the new political realities and widespread social division we are facing? If there is counterculture, there must be culture first. But what is culture?
If we agree that “culture” is the product of different layers of understanding and interpreting one’s own social and personal environment, we are to notice several things. To understand and interpret the world, at the most primitive layer, symbols and/or slogans will do. A more refined understanding will require language. Ultimately, the most elaborate way to understand and interpret one’s environment, and thus produce what we call “culture”, would be the interested argument, the active debate. Anyone even only shallowly aware of current culture, however, would notice a dramatic lack of the latter. Present “accepted” discourse is limited to only the first layer: signs, slogans, symbols. In vain we look for language – never mind arguments or interested debate. It’s is the poverty of culture today. This becomes evident as soon as disruption to the established narrative takes place, as soon as a problem, an obstacle to the smooth stream of sloganeering occurs. This is especially true for the university-educated circles, in which the person who addresses a problem becomes the actual problem. What is at stake is tone and style, not logic, rationality, or content. That’s why “taking the knee”, the BLM fist, the rainbow and pink-and-blue flag have become so emblematic to culture today. They naturally fit into our new culture of submission dressed as resistance, where symbols and slogans replace the argument, and where the “take” replaces interested debate. “The Left can only think in slogans”, as a Twitter mutual once solemnly put it. Its humorless, self-important, and factually empty style of self-branding so prevalent in the university class has come to dominate our culture, whether we like it or not. Most regrettably, among the many genres of interested social critique, it’s the death of polemicism that I mourn. Polemics is dead, and academics have killed it.
If that is the absolute state of culture today, then what about counterculture? Let me digress a little.
The cultural reconfiguration of social life has had such a deep impact that I wonder if the Left and the Right, conservatives and liberals have not only thoroughly swapped places politically, but also in cultural codes. Long beards and baseball caps-wearing dudes today are often Republican Christians. Moms for Liberty listen to The Grateful Dead. Psychedelic drugs are far-right. Easy Rider’s Wyatt and Billy sport the looks of Trump voters today. Trump himself is of course the paradigmatic outsider. He is now mentioned in the same breath as Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King Jr, and Malcolm X as the FBI’s declared enemy, and by Nina Turner no less, who of course did not realise what she was saying.[1] Woodstock, Vietnam, the 60s student movement, the whole “counterculture” spectre from back then: aren’t the hundreds of thousands who protested vaccine mandates and the destruction of farmland (Yasgur’s farm!) for WEF profit and were not televised, as Gil Scott-Heron had it, their legitimate successors? I do not suggest that the political goals, as muddled as they were in 60s counterculture, from Hampton’s talk of “capitalist pigs” to “Make love not war” were the same as today. But they are not so different either, especially if you’ve been part of the big anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine mandate protests in a city near you. The strangeness of it all is condensed in the underground mentality of the big majority. Power still lies with an anonymous minority rule of censors and unelected “public health” leaders whom no one trusts anymore. How strange it seems, then, that the elites’ PR for an outlandish minority and their unsavoury aesthetics – think of the Wolf-human in the Matt Walsh documentary - cannot quite find an appeal with most people on this planet. Yet, at the same time we are meant to believe that we are the weird ones. And that, if nothing else, is a good sign that counterculture has now completely shifted its lefty associations towards populist uprisings, located beyond the left-right spectrum. Of which we will see many more, and bigger ones – not only in “energy-crisis”-ailed Germany that’s been lacerated by the bottomless evil represented in the current Green political class.
As announced earlier, Lawyer’s Fees, Beetroot, and Music will stay free. Never mind the fact that my new job (a normal PMC job outside of academia) had been called off one day before the official employment date. And I all too suddenly find myself unemployed. Bummer.
They did not give a reason. I can only speculate that they finally found something I published and do not like it[2], that I have become a liability to their reputation etc. I should be getting used to being cancelled, and there is a side of me that sighs relief. But having a job would be nice, too, to pay the rent and the food and the family’s expenses.
Yes, this very much feels like the Eastern Bloc, or some other totalitarian, dystopian society.
One thing, however, is sure – whatever I do for money next can’t be in hiding my political commentaries and interventions. And then one day, I hope, a window to normality will appear in the dark vault of insanity.
Cover: Video Still from Pavement’s “Range Life” (1994)
[2] It might have been this article that went pretty viral yesterday https://www.achgut.com/artikel/die_rueckkehr_desdoublethink
If you add a paid option, I would pony up. This is a great newsletter, one of the most insightful.
Aaron Rodgers is a particularly interesting character https://www.si.com/college/cal/news/aaron-rodgers-ayahuasca-use