Welcome to the dark beyond, where reason slumbers.
You have been invited to Flesh/Markets, a newsletter by David Z. Morris.
You are invited to Flesh/Markets – a newsletter about capitalism before the abyss. It is, for the time being, invite-only, so congratulations on being cool.
About Flesh/Markets
Our world is ravaged by horrible diseases.
The mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic has sent America into an economic death spiral of entirely unprecedented proportions. America’s systemic racism, built through brutal state violence and legalized theft, leaves millions exceptionally vulnerable to death and disease. And even that broken system is not enough for our ghoulish overlords, as the powerful creative dynamics of capitalism are perverted into a web of scams and grifts waiting to entrap the most vulnerable and suck out their very living essence.
It all sounds like a horror movie. But it’s real.
This is not just, or even mainly, a question of the Trump administration. If nativist know-nothingism has poured jet fuel on American decline, it was the raving madness of trickle-down economics that started the fire. And over the last 30 years it has been Democrats more often than Republicans who were tasked with fitting our society to the slope of Laffer’s napkin-scrawled curve.
As for the sudden resurgence of malicious racism … if you’re surprised, you haven’t really been paying attention. Not to history, and not to recent leaders of the suddenly eulogized ‘decent Right.’
We are now living not in some radical break, but in a conclusion whose logic is as clear as the plot of a slasher film.
The near-total confusion and absent leadership we wring our hands over is, to look on the bright side, the fallout of success: our broadened postwar economic comfort seemed eternal, its conditions entirely natural. Even after the Cold War, it was only the guy below us on the ladder getting eaten by the crocodiles of greed and corruption and hate. There wasn’t much need for real politics, or self-control, or insight. There was TV to watch.
But the crocodiles have suddenly gotten close, no matter who you are. Right-minded people must pull together and offer everything they can to fix this mess before things go terminal. We need boots on the ground and aid to the most desperate. In a way that feels newly urgent, we need every possible idea we can muster about what the hell is happening, and how we will escape it. And finally we must – as inconvenient as many regard this core moral truth – protect the weak.
What you can expect to read in Flesh/Markets:
Commentary on possible grifts and scams, particularly Ponzi schemes, deceptive MLMs, and fake cryptocurrencies.
Debunking the new (old) race science.
Excursions into philosophy, particularly psychoanalysis, particularly Lacan.
Outtakes from my coronavirus reporting.
Thoughts on why markets are the greatest communication technology ever devised – and why they have clear limits.
Vicious personal attacks on American fascists.
Tidbits from the history of racist authoritarianism as a governing philosophy in America.
Short reviews of and commentary on old, new, and upcoming horror and speculative fiction books, films, etc. Coming up first: Lovecraft Country.
The Truth of Living Horror
That’s right, horror. Mind-melting, abject fucking horror.
Horror, as a fictional form, is wildly diverse. But more often than not, what lies at the heart of a good horror story is a reminder of the fragility of our bodies and minds against unknowable, indifferent nature. After a 20th century that felt like a smooth ramp away from that fundamental cruelty, we have had it thrust back in our faces.
Some Americans – largely white and affluent – have been driven mad by this resurgence of the real. They are flailing against it with all their might, convinced that if they simply demand hard enough, a virus will bend to their will, and history will be erased.
They have not learned to respect monsters.
This denial of the monstrous has been a pleasant delusion for white, middle-class America for more than half a century. The sudden failure of America’s effortless dominance is terrifying not just because of the material death and destruction that has followed, but because it reveals a fundamentally darker world than many have allowed themselves to see.
Luckily, some prophets have always known this was coming – this failure of reason, this resurgence of monstrosity, this return of things that wait in the shadows, and beyond.
And there are those who have never had the privilege of ignoring reality. The oppressed have instead had to fight their way through the cruelty not just of nature, but of other humans. They have learned not only to endure, but to fight back against, the horror of reality. These are often the people who need and deserve the most help through this crisis. They are also repositories of knowledge about how to live in a world whose forces are arrayed against you – how to endure the unendurable, while remaining human.
And so we go, together in the nightmare.