Jenersky’s Thesis

got as far as feb 11, 2024 in my photo roll before it got too depressing

"If anybody had asked me a year ago to head this movement, I tell you very honestly, that I would have run a mile to get away from it. I had no intention of being involved in this way... As I became involved and as people began to derive inspiration from their involvement, I realized that the choice leaves your own hands. The people expect you to give them leadership. You see them growing as they move into action, and you know you no longer have a choice.'" — MLK

King loved the same thing in Hegel that Du Bois caught in graduate school—the notion that Spirit uses the passions of partly unsuspecting individuals to fulfill its aims of self-consciousness and freedom. King embraced Hegel's idea that truth is the whole, habitually thinking afterward in Hegelian triads yielding a synthesis. — Garry Dorrien, American Democratic Socialism

Back at home, right after the funeral, Molly immediately returned to decorating cookies, and Nora stuck around, too, putting herself to work by doing random chores around the house to try to help, while I went into our bedroom to lie down. After a while, Molly came in and said Nora wanted me to come into the living room and let her do a guided meditation for spiritual healing, just the two of us, though I'd already explained multiple times how all I wanted to do was be in bed. Maybe I'd change my mind, Nora told Molly to tell me, and she'd be right here if I did, refusing to take no for an answer, much less a hint. Feeling the pressure, and with zero tact on Molly's end to intercede but as a messenger. I snapped and told Molly I wasn't going to do it, that had no will. Wasn't it it obvious that I wouldn't want to mediate right now? How many ways would I have to say it before it stuck? Fine, Molly said, cold as a stone, and went out to inform Nora and take her back to her hotel. For a while, the house went silent, far away, hot pools of acid in my body buzzing and unfurling underneath the numbness. I wished that I could be held, hugged, allowed to cry, but instead time kept passing on, as on a treadmill, with little room to mourn, much less be solaced. Once she got back, I approached Molly at her worktable in the kitchen, already intently refocused on her icing. You're such a selfish piece of shit, she screamed back soon as I spoke, back turned, tool in hand, refusing to hear anything I had to say—that it wasn't that I didn't like her mother, but that I missed mine; that we were both on the same side, or were supposed to be; that if I couldn't take care of myself today of all days, when would I ever? In return, Molly took my fire and fed it sarcastically right back, saying she knew my mom was a saint and hers was trash, okay? Nora had been like this her whole life, unable or unwilling to think of how others felt in times of need, and that was her problem, not mine— isn't that right? Right, you motherfucker? Having said her piece, beyond retort, she said she had to work now, and I should fuck off and go away. A line in the sand, of sorts, I realized, standing there in shock over how this day of all days had become twisted. I felt maybe as small as Molly had herself once, quite long ago, having grown up immersed in this irrational, unbending form of love, or whatever else filled in where love might have, where it didn't matter what you felt, and all you had left to soothe yourself was your own. — Molly, Blake Butler

Commercial music is truly the snake oil of adolescence, and, given the absurdity of what the bottle dispenses—the music itself—its broad application would be comic were it not meant to salve the most legitimate and urgent needs a person may have.

Displaying a bracelet of charms and skulls, the barely composed music—much of it dissociated ballad and erotically dramatized repetition—verges on the imaginatively neutral while the aggressive expansion of the music’s economic organization is systematically predatory almost beyond imagining. — Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance

The citizens whose lives are split between business and private life, their private life between ostentation and intimacy, their intimacy between the sullen community of marriage and the bitter solace of being entirely alone, at odds with themselves and with everyone, are virtually already Nazis, who are at once enthusiastic and fed up, or the city dwellers of today, who can imagine friendship only as “social contact” between the inwardly unconnected. —Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment