Episode 1427
Psychedelic inequality / Roberto Lovato
Jan 19 2022
The actual stated demands of the protests may not necessarily be met or be successful. I think of things like the Occupy Wall Street protests and others where the idea of reforming how Wall Street works or maybe putting more breaks on the way in which income inequality occurs in the United States. Like those goals of course never really happened or materialized out of some of those protests. I think people getting disillusioned that you go to a protest like No Kings and it's large and you feel good and you feel the sense of community. But then the next day this hasn't really moved the needle on policy. It hasn't moved the needle on the practice of governance. And I think that's where in the book I try to push people a little and say, ‘Well, yeah, that's because it can’t. It can't end there, right?’ That and the same with elections, right? People of course get disappointed and disillusioned with the way elections have gone and the way even when supposedly better candidates win things still don't change either. I think one of the points of the book is that you have to kind of drive past those two traditional techniques for social change when they're not really doing the job that you need to create a more inclusive and sustainable society.
Writer and researcher Sasha Davis speaks to This Is Hell! to talk about his new book “Replace The State: How To Change The World When Elections And Protests Fail”, published by University of Minnesota Press. The book talks about bringing new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have found success by unconventional, and more direct, means since elections and protests might have become stagnated in regards to bring forth societal change.
We will have new installments of Rotten History and Hangover Cure. We will also be sharing your answers to this week's Question from Hell!... read more
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Jan 12 2022
Posted by Matthew Boedy
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the curse that is the drink.
I’ve been feeling pressure to be optimistic lately. My friends encourage. A listener, a communist mailman in New Jersey, insists. Henry Giroux opines. My mother sent me a book by Jane Goodall called, “Hope.” It’s a lot of heat.
I have no choice but to go to my happy places to seek out this elusive optimism. The happy places in my mind, of course. I can’t bring you to my happy places in the material world. I could so endeavor with words, but those words would be the product of the experiences of my happy places cycling through my mind as I compose them. So, one way or the other, you’re stuck with the happy places in my mind.
Here’s an amusement: a friend told me, “People can now eat pig hearts or get them as transplants, but they must choose only one of the above.”
I replied, “What if you get the transplant, dine for a couple years on aromatic herbs, truffles, and oils, and then have it removed, prepared, and served to you?”
He suggested that some scientists, more hungry than ethical, have been urging pig-hearted transplantees to eat a lot of basil and to be sure to leave their organs to science. He also said that the restaurant he’s creating the new menu for wanted to do a pig heart dish, but due to the new demand for pig hearts the price has skyrocketed.
Hearts are notoriously rubbery and full of cartilage. He and I once made calf’s heart soup in a medieval convent converted to a residence for social workers in Kilkenny, Ireland, and that sucker took hours and barely became remotely chewable. As for his restaurant menu, I told him he’d be better off with a softer organ. “Although that’s not what she said,” I quipped at the end.
Speaking of tender organs, recently a friend of ours, an old writer almost exactly twenty years my senior, by the name of Jay Wolpert, passed away. He wrote the 2002 version of “The Count of Monte Cristo,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean, the Curse of the Black Pearl.” He loved cinematic sword fights in a swashbuckling vein. He was a big fan of Stewart Granger in 1952’s “Scaramouche,” which he screened for us back when he still could remember who I was. I don’t know what a swashbuckle is, and I don’t think he ever told me.
I met him in the last few years of his life. We... read more