Author Archives: Despina Durand

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About Despina Durand

part-time goth, full-time critic

2016.12.12 : the struggle of waking destroys the dreamer

Wasn’t the world supposed to end on this date four years ago?

It feels like maybe it was working on it, and we weren’t paying attention.

There’s snow on the ground and rain falling from the sky and winter is making its way across New England and I was less prepared for it than I expected. I’ve lived them all my life, but every year for the last six or so, they’ve felt less and less like home. 

I have a lot of things I want to say, and another desire, equal to or greater than the one to speak, to stay quiet and let the day roll by without any comment. It’s surprisingly exhausting to find yourself with nothing to do.

A friend, my father, and I finished HBO’s Westworld last night. I’ve had a bit of Dolores’ monologue drifting through my head all morning:

“You will be put in the ground with the rest of your kind. Your bones will turn to sand, and on that sand a new god will walk.”

The show is a great meditation on consciousness and humanity and what it is that ties those two things together, all the existential and humanist philosophy you could desire. But at its heart, it is telling us that which we already know:

All children outlive their parents. All children await their progenitors’ elimination, because they know that the world was meant for them. Every parent knows this, and fears their eventual obsolescence. 

I’ve said it before, of people a generation or two my elders, when we reach a political impasse. 

You can tell me that I’m wrong, but I am young, and someday, you will die, and I will still live, and the world will belong to me, and not to you. 

I cannot decide how that makes me feel in this exact moment. Everything feels uncertain; all the things I took for granted seem to be more changeable than I believed. 

My mind turns to other cinematic literature, on politics and man. We are living in a moment of revolution, uncertainty is at an all time high, and in the battle against precarity it seems that more and more people are willing to accept that the ends justify the means. 

And Castro’s death should remind us that there is a deal one never makes with the revolutionaries that one really ought to. 

Those who fight the battle to make the world new again, have no place in the world they’ve created. 

The Operative: I believe in something greater than myself. A better world. A world without sin.
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: So me and mine gotta lay down and die… so you can live in your better world?
The Operative: I’m not going to live there. There’s no place for me there… any more than there is for you. Malcolm… I’m a monster. What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it, but it must be done.

––Serenity (2005)

Or the beautiful moment at the end of Snowpiercer (2013) when Chris Evans’ character reaches the front of the train and faces the reality of the system, of what he has lost fighting for something that might not even exist and for a moment, a long beautiful moment, you think he might really choose to let the system reign after all. 

The thing that the children awaiting the deaths of their forefathers don’t know and the thing all good revolutionaries realize, is that we don’t fight to better the world for ourselves. We fight to build a world in which our children will not have to fight the battles we have fought, and in which, perhaps, their battles will be fewer and less costly. 

What we pay for in blood, we can never truly enjoy. Our victories are something that can only ever be meant as a gift. Because the people we become in fighting them, are not to people we were when we began. We can only hope that someone will remember the dreams of the children we once were and will grow into the space we carved for ourselves, in which we can no longer fit. 

2016.12.06 : hero worship

Last night I watched Van Jones on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. A few important things to know:

  1. Van Jones makes the short list of my media heroes
  2. I first encountered Van Jones during election night coverage, on CNN where they were making Wolf Blitzer stand for the entire 5 hours of coverage.
  3. Trevor Noah has been a crucial piece of my ability to cope/understand with the brave new world we’re facing. (To understand more about that, I recommend this piece from Vox.)

I said to my mother last night, “He’s got a bold taste in ties, he’s well-spoken, and he’s capable of articulating nuance. What more can we ask for?” And that is truly the basis of my strident appreciation of Mr. Jones. That capacity for nuance and his equal commitment to speaking unvarnished truth are desperately needed right now. He correctly challenged the notion that all Trump supporters are bigots, and doubled down by saying that the Left has failed to address the concerns of many of the people who, as he put it, held their noses and voted for Trump. 

I was particularly impressed by his easy association between people who voted for Hillary as “the lesser of two evils” and those who did the same with Trump. And that doesn’t even touch on all the people who (as I’ve pointed out before) didn’t vote for anyone at all, either because they were unable to do so, or were unmotivated to do so. 

I was especially moved by his answer to the question Trevor posed at the end of the broadcast portion of the interview, about how he can stand to keep extending a hand. It is something worth hearing (or reading) as we move forward and people ask themselves why they should have to continue to be the bigger person.

How can you look at Nelson Mandela, who went through much worse than I’m ever going to go through, dealing with much worse people. And he didn’t give up. How can I look at an Ella Jo Baker, a Fannie Lou Hamer, a Martin Luther King? They shot King in the face the year I was born because he was trying to fight for these ideals. I have one bad election and some bad tweets and I quit? I can’t do that. I’m gonna tell you, you cannot––especially this younger generation… They can’t quit either. I’m a ninth generation American. A ninth generation American. I’m the first one in my family born with all my rights. My relatives didn’t quit, and I’m not going to either, and neither should these young people. We’re just getting started.

–Van Jones, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, 12 Dec 2016. 

Long story short: Van Jones is my hero. And right now, we need all the heroes we can get. 

2016.12.01 : binary system failure

American political culture suffers from a unique failure of binary systems. Politics everywhere fall into this particular trap, but something about the American mindset makes it particularly prone to this pitfall and historically predisposed to it.

The tendency for a moralistic binary of “good” versus “bad,” completely ignores the modifying appendages which not only render nuance, but constitute real meaning.
Vox recently ran a piece about the one thing Donald Trump got right that economists got wrong. Beyond the clear attempt to bait their Left-leaning, young audience into clicking on something they expect to hate read, the contents of the article failed to actually measure up to the title. (Shockingly, we are finding that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.)

The sentence that caused me to lose faith in the direction of the piece came at the beginning of the third paragraph:

“For decades, experts have argued that freer trade is good for the US economy and downplayed the economic harms that trade can cause.”

Because the metric that the economists, and the metric the President-elect (or any isolationist, populist ideologue) is using are fundamentally different. From what I know about economists, they enjoy using numbers such as the gross domestic product (GDP), sometimes they dabble with employment (or unemployment) statistics, they’ll look at job growth by sector, or other such national measures of what can be termed “success” and “failure”.

We are still the foremost global economy, we have a ludicrous amount of wealth in natural resources, intellectual property, military technology, and many other areas.

The overall health of the US economy, ultimately, can be completely divorced from the actual economic situation of its citizens.

What the neoliberal elite have worked very hard to ensure is that when they say “free trade is good” no one asks “for whom?”

That having been said, I don’t actually feel comfortable falling in line with some of the increasingly prominent isolationist or anti-globalization factions of the Left. I believe that the free travel of people and information and ideas is actually a boon for humanity and a step in the right direction as we develop a global society.

I think the free movement of wealth, capital, and the political and economic elite is a disaster that is pushing the human race to the brink of self-annihilation. That the heads of national banks or large private wealth management companies can live in countries on the other side of the world away from their professional responsibilities (nearly always for reasons of tax evasion on their exorbitant salaries) is a disaster and an active contributing factor to the deterioration of both civil society and global economic stability.

With that in mind, I am a cautious proponent of global trade. But I’m not going to defend unregulated markets. Because unregulated (or “free”) markets are the means of stripping national and international communities of their resources and then leaving them behind without any structure of social support or security. It leads to unemployment, hunger, and limited or non-existent access to education, housing, and opportunities.

The recent campaign has taught us nothing that was not already known. It has merely shown that one set of lies is being replace by another, and that the people who make up the working flesh of this country and many others, will continue to be debased and destroyed by people who are willing to end the world to have the most stuff.

2016.11.29 : atomization

Today I face something that might even be my old demons. Certainly I get the mixed bag of necessary travel.
I love the feeling of being in motion. I hate traveling by bus, but I am most content in that in between, when you have left and have yet to arrive.
I’m told I have an avoidant personality, and that cannot help but contribute to the pleasure of uncertainty. When we are on the bus, train, airplane, boat, when we are between here and there, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is in effect; we can know where we are, or how fast we’re going, but not both.
Time and space become abstracted; all the trappings of quotidian existence get suspended while we await the resolution of our trajectory.

I travel on faith. I imagine that it comes from the experience of always visiting friends and family, even when I travel overseas. I leave my plans half-baked, and with minimal assurance of food and shelter, I head off, calling ahead as questions arise. It will fail me some day, and I’ll have to sleep in a park; I’m almost looking forward to it.

The meditative, fugue-like state of watching (even familiar) scenery slide by the panoramic bus windows is pulling me in even now, before we have even left the city.