This could not possibly have taken place in an intersectional space, since now everyone knows what a DSA convention looks and feels like -- a crushing, joyless, humorless, brutally cerebral, anti-corporeal scold-o-rama. No clapping! No loud noises! No strong scents! No touching of any kind without continuous affirmative consent! No talking without adhering to a million micro speech codes! No friendly informal addresses like "hey guys"!
It had to be some place where normies congregate in order to tackle real, material problems facing the entire collective -- labor unions, churches, local schools, anything but an incestuous narrow clique of weirdos making a culture war of foisting their individual deviances onto the collective.
The cerebral radlibs at Current Affairs -- who have been concern-trolling Bernie throughout his campaign to "keep socialism weird" -- are trying to obfuscate about the Left promoting dancing, when they're the number one social pressure against corporeality in general and boy-girl touching in particular. "The man leading the woman's physical movements? Uh yikes, violation of her autonomy much?"
it matters that pete buttigieg won't do the high hopes dance. as emma goldman said, if there's no dancing it's a shitty revolution. a willingness to dance is a willingness to let yourself be human, vulnerable, free. bernie leads by example. https://t.co/1AyPaE7kY9— Current Affairs (@curaffairs) November 24, 2019
From a comment I left to a recent post on the topic of dance music, corporeality, and the puritanical Left:
The real sexual repression in 2019 is not from Christian fundamentalists toward gay furries, but from irony-poisoned leftoids toward thicc-booty cuties who just want to get their groove on.
"Trance-inducing dance music -- yikes, horny on main much?" Shut the fuck up puritan. You're just jealous that your nerdy little body has no rhythm (you're bad in bed).
Dancing is not going to the opposite extreme, though, of slutting it up in defiance of the horny police (whether on the left or right). It's corporeal, even ritualistically sexual, but not actually sexual. It channels the libido and allows for catharsis after the night is over, all without having to "have sex".
The volcels have already promoted weightlifting and exercise -- now it's time for them to reclaim dancing in order to live a proper full life, neither puritanical nor debauched.
Current Affairs has also got the nature of dance completely backward, framing it as something that is liberating of the individual, when it is fundamentally a subordinating of your very bodily motions to something beyond yourself -- the rhythm -- and having your movements bound up with those of another person, whether you're dancing one-on-one or within an entire group, as in a circle dance.
Dance is part of a broader class of kinesthetic activities that are designed to de-individuate the participants and promote group cohesion, along with military drills and marches, the wild movements of a spirit possession cult, "the wave" and "stomp stomp clap" to "We Will Rock You" among a team's fans in a sports stadium, and so on and so forth.
Far from heightening an individual's autonomy, they are about surrendering self-control to the will of the superorganism. That's why every liberal individualist who makes up 99% of the current Left feels awkward and downright frightened when they find themselves in such a situation. "It was so fashy, all those normies pressuring me to join their mindless mob!" In contrast to these SJW-ists, true socialism (populism) demotes the individual values of liberty, autonomy, etc. since they conflict with solidarity, cohesion, and other interpersonal and collective values.
That's why there was a more thriving collectivist dance culture during the Great Compression / New Deal era -- from the Jazz Age and swing, to disco, new wave, and Latin freestyle / breakdancing -- unlike today's thoroughly neoliberal culture of posting videos of you dancing by yourself to the internet for virtual validation. Today is terrifyingly like the first Gilded Age of atomized laissez-faire subjects joylessly watching exploited sex workers dance on stage in some fin-de-siecle red light district.
During these dark days of the second Gilded Age, would-be realigners must always keep the focus on making populism or socialism both fun-loving and normie-friendly, and prevent the scolds and weirdos from hijacking any mass movement. The proto-socialism of the Midcentury resulted in wholesomeness, not degeneracy, which was instead the result in the libertarian Gilded Age. We can still see that legacy in the labor solidarity dance with an old-school socialist, and we ought to follow his lead.
Amber Frost is a dancer, and she's anti-woke and willing to engage the non-left. (Her recent analysis of the professional-managerial class was at American Affairs, where Angela Nagle's "Left Case Against Open Borders" came out a year earlier.)
ReplyDeleteWhen she still had an Instagram, I recall her posting a request for recommendations for dance studios to practice in, with an image of her in tights, a leotard, and pointe shoes, leaning against a barre.
No wonder the libs and leftoids hate her so much -- I mean, she's just the female version of a jock!
Kinesthetic / scientific socialism vs. cerebral / utopian socialism.
BTW, another point in favor of her ethnic background being African. All the people saying she looks like an Arctic hunter-gatherer are ignoring that she's a corporeal dance machine, meaning those epicanthic folds are more likely linked to African background.
In the post on the ethnic composition of the anti-woke left, I said that, while unique, she looks closest to an albino African (except for the dark hair).
Of course Bernie is cool and a dancer, anyone who loves Simon and Garfunkel that much has to be, ha ha! I don't know why this is true, but it is.
ReplyDelete"No wonder the libs and leftoids hate her so much -- I mean, she's just the female version of a jock!"
ReplyDeleteMen? Other women?
Musicals were more dance-centric during the Great Compression. Wikipedia's history says little about dance being incorporated during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, and only coming to the foreground during the 1920s, then peaking in the Postwar period. Still plenty of dance-y musicals into the '70s as well, like Chicago. But not so much after that, once the New Deal was over.
ReplyDeleteSo it was not just the demand for dancing that the audience themselves would participate in, but also for entertainment where they're just the passive spectators. Lots of Midcentury musical movies featured choreography, not just characters singing.
I'm allergic to musicals, only have gotten dragged there every once in awhile by family. But maybe I was just seeing the neolib-era ones like Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Les Mis, etc. I do remember enjoying Chicago -- really stood out from the rest, especially for how much dancing there is.
That was made back when choreographers weren't 100% gay -- nor were photographers, painters, or ballet dancers. The era of "gay men as the arbiters of taste" is the neolib shithole / bourgeois degeneracy era since the '80s in high / middlebrow culture.
But I was under the impression that even the gays themselves prefer the older Golden Age musicals. I.e. they know they need to be saved from their own self-destructive behavior, and that heterosexuals need to be put back in control of cultural production?
Speaking of, Alison Balsam reminds me of Audrey Hepburn's role in Funny Face. A cute, subcultural bookworm who works at an eccentric used bookstore, who comes off as superficially grouchy but it's only because she's a fun-lover frustrated by her environment. And who reveals herself to be quite the dancer! Not all bookworms are introverted awkward nerds.
ReplyDelete"Chicago" where anti-woke left women call male tormentors bourgeois narcissists on Tucker's show, and get locked up in Twitter jail by the DSA discourse cops. They'd have to re-name the musical "Brooklyn".
ReplyDeleteCanceled Bloc Tango
So I said to him, I said
"You play footsie with Jeet one more time..."
And he did
So I took the screenshotter off the wall
And I fired two warning caps
Into his mentions
He had it comin'
He had it comin'
He only had himself to blame
If you'd have been there
If you'd have seen it
I betcha you would have done the same
Looks like the 'centrists' are cannibalizing each other just like the Republicans in 2016...maybe Bernard has a shot after all
ReplyDelete