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Cahier des charges: notre système économique ne marche PAS! (at an HSBC)

About a month ago, I quit Facebook. I didn’t delete my account, nor do I never log in; I have obligations that keep me returning to the site (namely in the form of having people use the message feature to contact me–people whose email addresses I don’t have). But I don’t write on walls, poke, like, comment, rsvp to events, or update my status. Facebook Connect and the API have guaranteed that my profile gets updated with stories (like this post, which will appear either as a notification or in a little box under my profile photo or both).

My point is that doing so wasn’t that big a deal. In fact, I’d speculate that anyone who would have noticed didn’t notice precisely since, first, other lines of communication (email and AIM, mostly) have remained up, and, second, most of my communication has always followed those lines. However, I earned a lot of time back, and I feel less weird about the whole enterprise that is Facebook. In its “spend hours on the site” mode, Facebook always felt a bit stalky to me, and that feeling has only increased since I’ve jumped ahead six time zones to currently see 0% of my Facebook friends on an even monthly basis. In fact, then, given that difference, it felt like a necessity. Like stopping calling one’s best friend from home every night for three hours your first few weeks of college, one has to separate, move apart. It’s just odd that I felt to do so with Facebook. I would not have imagined that the site had begun to embody my US social life.

But the reason this all comes up here, now, is since I decided last night to also unsusbscribe from all of my politics feeds on Google Reader. OK, I kept two “political” feeds, Rootless Cosmopolitan and The Belgravia Dispatch. Both are very low-traffic, well written, and tend not be about US domestic policy.

There are two reasons why purged these feeds, and both are related to my story about Facebook:

1. Time. Keeping up, even correcting for duplicate analyses, took up a good part of my Google Reading time. It would usually take me at least a half hour a day just to skim the Politics folder, picking out highlights to read at a later day. Given blogging’s obsessive linking, one article could lead to several, serveral others. I abandonned my subscription to The New Yorker for similar reasons: too much time was being given to each issue at the expense of other things.

2. Mental health. This is by far the more important reason, and it’s a shame that it’s come to this. Frankly, though, reading the U.S. political press is starting to depress the hell out of me. I’m not so naive to have thought that the Democrcatic Congress and Democratic President would bust out magic wands and let workers take over the means of production or anything like that. I learned those lessons the hard way in 1993. (The War Room is a great movie for building up expectations on this front.)

Just about a year ago, I wrote about my ambivalence about all of this, so despite some Obamaesque excitement during the campaign, I was ready to be let down. I had low expectations. I hoped, just, that the grassroots movement that had formed around Obama would continue to work outside of him to pressure him to do more.

And yet, the President and Congress have not even met my low, low expectations. They’ve managed to be not even good politicians. This is far more fundamental than “Obama hasn’t been the commie fantasy I hoped he’d be.” I never had that hope. I knew he wasn’t. I just hoped that he’d be notably better than Bush, and I’m not even sure that’s the case. From what I gather, he has only managed to be a good Executive, in that he’s consolidated power in the Executive branch. He hasn’t been a good President, Leader of Americans, and he hasn’t even managed to be a good Democrat. And the Congress has fucked itself into a knot that would make a pretzel blush. For the first time in my life, I’m entertaining notions of supporting the doing away with a bicameral legislature. (Well, I mean, before the installation of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, of course.) We’re on our way to being a failed state, wrote Krugman in the post that maybe encouraged my unsubscription.

This is a weird place to be in. It’s not like I’m some kind of huge activist or frantic blogger, such that my unsubscriptions would be some kind of astonishing GBCW post. I’m just a guy who read a lot of the political press, made an effort to vote every couple of years, and threw a few dollars at a few candidates. In short, I’m exactly like that growing mass of Democrats who feel disinclined to vote in 2010. I’m alienated not only from the politicians I support(ed), but also from the very process, from the very meaning of action.

Just riding my bike.

It helps, of course, that I’m in France, so, hypothetically, I’m “immune” to US domestic policy. But that’s a fantasy: I still pay US income tax and have US health care. So I’m still bailing out Wall Street and participating in the most cynical form of class warfare ever perpetrated in a democracy: killing the poor by restricting their access to health care. I should be engaged, then, but it just doesn’t work. Maybe this is where, precisely, my previous disinterest in activism is what paves the way for my disconnection.

But there it is. And I understand the privilege of being able to act this way (“Alienation’s for the rich,” correctly sing They Might Be Giants). But, again, there it is. Maybe I’m not so alienated as I’m unfeeling, inert, beaten into a retreat in an impervious shell. None of the political outrages of the past year surprise me, after all. But they do underscore the futility of my dreams, and of my own hopes for change.

Here’s where I would have posted a link to LCD Soundsystem’s “Yr City’s a Sucker.” It kind of captures the feeling here.

Tags: alienation, Barack Obama, dictatorship of the proletariat, facebook, google, Google reader, lcd soundsystem, New Yorker, They Might Be Giants, Tony Karon