The Gutter Art Critic

While we may have been wrong and unnecessarily hopeful about Bernie Sanders the presidential candidate, there is perhaps one ‘good’ outcome from the fiasco that has become the Sanders presidential campaign, The Myth of Bernie . Long story short, the myth suggests that it is better to be a failed presidential candidate (with its mythical and fantasmatic core preserved) than a failed president. The unfulfilled potential of the candidate cannot be taken in the same light as the unfulfilled promises of an acting president. We may now forever sit and debate ‘what would’ve been’ had Sanders won. The mythmaking process was kicked off properly in 2016 on the heels of the Democratic National Convention when Bernie Sanders was effectively pushed out by the Democratic party to make way for Hillary Clinton (herself a mythologized figure inside the Clinton supporter camp). The recent events saw a replay of 2016, though the Sanders campaign was, from the very beginning, already much weaker than it

Why is the US so in love with its military? Following the first Democratic debate, the name Tulsi Gabbard became the most searched keyword on Google.   Why?   The first obvious answer is that she is new, doesn’t appear to be in the pockets of some elite corporation, yet, and did really well rebuffing her opponents’ ridiculous claims about Afghanistan, the Taliban and 9/11.   She was also smart or savvy enough to appear on Joe Rogan a few weeks ago, garnering millions of views..   So why is it that despite all this attention she also appears to have no answers to the issues of class, income inequality, the wealth gap, student debt and the massive credit debt, among other pressing mainstream issues like the environment, race and gender issues, and so on.   Her answer seem to be a rather flat, ‘I’m military, I know what it’s like to be in the military, protracted wars are silly, send everybody home.’   Granted, the trillions the US spends on proxy wars is precisely one of the bigg

In 1950 Hannah Arendt wrote these words in the preface to her book The Origins of Totalitarianism “Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena – homelessness on an unprecendented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth. Never has our future been more unpredictable, n