Tonight, on a very special episode of The Plenum…
Food: Forbidden Flavor
Today I will wax poetic about one of the greatest snack foods ever known, taken from us before its time. I come not to praise the Cheez Waffie, but to bury it.
I’m not a big fan of snack foods - when I lost a ton of weight about ten years ago, it was mainly the result of exiling anything from a crinkly bag from my diet, and the habit largely stuck. Except for these delicious abominations. Cheez Waffies are the perfect marriage of a thin, crispy set of crackers and that strange, sort of grainy cheese paste that you get in the lowest quality cheese-and-cracker snack - think those little three-packs of peanut butter/cheese and crackers you used to get in a bag lunch at summer camp.
Nothing about these things should work, but they were physically addictive. So salty. So crunchy. And with just enough cheese flavor to make you remember you are theoretically eating cheese.
Cheez Waffies were discontinued some years ago, but their product pages remain up on dozens of retailers, tempting me like the malevolent ghost of an old enemy. Thank god I can’t order them from Amazon.
Politics: Permit Me To Be Whiny For A Moment
Today’s politics section isn’t about a particular story or event - rather, it’s about the rolling disaster that has been American politics for the past 23 years. I’m working on a long piece looking back at what’s become of the “Ron Paul Revolution” (tentative title - Confessions of a Ron Paul Revolutionary) 16 years after it started, and let me tell you, it’s a grim survey.
I was a mess when I got involved in the 2008 Ron Paul campaign. I had left college after two and a half years of working as hard as I could to sabotage myself (with the bonus of depression that I didn’t have the will or knowledge to treat), lived in Albany above a bar for a brief stint (selling lawn care services door to door in Albany in February was not my most rewarding job), and when things had really fallen apart, moved back home with my parents. I had been working at a gym as a personal trainer and membership salesman, but got caught up in an ill-fated attempted coup (dammit Ronnie) where we attempted to change our team’s relationship with the parent company, transferred to a location almost an hour away, and eventually quit. I found myself doing temp work at a large accounting and compliance firm, listening to Dan Carlin and watching rips of Buffy The Vampire Slayer on my Creative Zen Vision (the cool person’s iPod, thank you very much) while I tried to figure out who actually owned various holding companies and LLCs.
I was spending a lot of time online, reading Reason Magazine and other similar publications when I first got wind that Ron Paul was running for President, as a Republican. I had volunteered for some Republican campaigns and interned with my Republican Congressman, Chris Shays, and felt more comfortable in that world than with the Libertarians, who didn’t seem interested in ever winning an election.
I used the relatively new Meetup.com to schedule several Ron Paul meetups in Connecticut and got to know the existing group of supporters in New York. We raised over $1,000 at our first meetup in Stamford, and got to work doing what would now be called “street team” and “visibility” projects - putting Ron Paul literature in political philosophy books at various bookstores, creating giant stencil art on bedsheets and hanging them over highway overpasses (in retrospect, not the best or safest idea), and generally shaking the trees for people interested in freedom.
I was born with a freedom-loving streak. From the moment I became aware of the importance of politics (drip by drip, but mostly after reading 1984), I wanted to play some role in helping humanity defend and expand liberty. There were three main issues that motivated me to support him - his anti-war stance, his opposition to bank bailouts, and his general pro-freedom stance on both civil and economic liberty.
When I was hired to be a field coordinator on the campaign, I quickly learned that my concerns were not universally shared. There was a lot of concern about global government. I actually saw John Birch Society material in the wild for the first time, and was given a bespoke, personally recorded audiobook of “The Creature from Jekyll Island” from a guy who built a studio in his house to produce CDs of JBS-promoted texts. I was thrown into the world of conspiracy-tinged political weirdness that I had read about but rarely personally experienced.
There’s a lot more to tell about that experience, but here’s what’s relevant to today. Maybe policy has never been central to politics - the older I get, the more I think that politics is really more about personality and temperament than anything else, and that we pick and choose from the world of ideology to explain what we already deeply feel. But we’ve become a nation of Birchers and SDS maniacs. Our two likely choices for president, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, both constantly engage in conspiratorial rhetoric about their opponents and their supporters. Journalists are eager to portray normal political organizing as conspiratorial string-pulling, and voters appear to be overjoyed at the prospect that half of their compatriots are demonic beasts salivating at the opportunity to destroy society.
And the most perverse part of it is that people are having fun. This is the end state of politics as entertainment and intellectual parlor game - the more complex a web of conspiracy and influence you can describe, the more points you get. There are entire media empires built on connecting imaginary dots between various enemies of the people (I’m talking about cable news as well as Alex Jones), and business is booming.
When I was younger, I wished people would be more cynical and willing to ask “cui bono” when it comes to politics. Maybe I was holding a monkey’s paw - I got what I asked for, but in a mutated, cancerous form where skepticism crowds out the ability to hold on to anything stable and real. The only way back is to temper skepticism with trust, and for the institutions and people who have broken that trust to earn it back.
Music: Rodents On The Red Planet
My slightly younger friends tell me I’m dating myself when I call this sort of music “techno” or “electronica” instead of “EDM”, but let’s be real, I can’t imagine dancing to the beautifully erratic bleeps and bloops of Mouse on Mars. I had a friend at summer camp who dreamed of being a DJ, and introduced me to a bunch of TECHNO (dammit) groups like Basement Jaxx, Autechre, Aphex Twin, and the aforementioned Mouse on Mars - very much outside of my then-wheelhouse of punk, ska, Primus, and indie rock. I notice the same thing with bands like Mouse on Mars as I do with some of the more experimental post-rock and noise bands like Tera Melos or Boredoms - there’s a glut of sonic activity that seems chaotic, but if you keep listening beautiful melodies emerge, musical themes are introduced and resolved, and there’s a ton of beauty woven into the static. So stick with it and reap the rewards. Enjoy!
Hi Randolph - The last three paragraphs in the politics section is gold. It’s a perspective we need to hear more from in our national discourse.