A Word About the Month of June (Patreon)

I try to keep this space generally restricted to film, with the occasional whiny excuse for why I have failed to write about film for a particular span of time.

There are a lot of reasons why I don't particularly feel like expounding on the current social unrest in the United States. For one thing, I am not entirely sure it's my place to do so, or that I would have anything meaningful to add to the conversation. But mostly, I think that anything less than a doctoral dissertation on the subject would be painfully inadequate, and as it happens I'm already tasked to write one of those at the moment, about a separate (but related) topic.

In my younger days, I had a lot more certainty about things. I knew what I wanted the world to look like. Now, I find that I have less and less of a positive ideal for how I think things should be. I think direct democracy has as many flaws as representative democracy, and a parliamentary system would cure only a few ills of our present small-r republican model. I think Marxism is an essential form of sociology, but an oversimplified political theory and an even worse basis for economics, although its basic tenets are fundamentally correct and must be adhered to as a guardrail against exploitation. Hell, I don't even know if art is especially useful anymore, art criticism even less so.

But I know that people are being extrajudicially executed by rogue police with intolerable regularity, and almost all of them are black. And I know that our current phase of global hyper-capitalism insures an ever-increasing emiseration of the majority of human beings, the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny few, and the police have been conditioned to see themselves as the guardians of that elite. They think that in protecting those select few and their property, they are defending "America."

So anyway, I wanted to tell you that I will be donating my Patreon money for the month of June to various groups who are offering bail and legal aid to protesters and activists who have been arrested in the various protests around the country.

However, I recognize that when you subscribed to this Patreon, you were making a decision to support my writing, and not my politics. And I do not want to exploit that good will. So if you would prefer not to donate this month, please let me know and I will happily refund this month's pledge. No harm, no foul. We all have our differing viewpoints, and I respect that.

And as always, thanks for reading. Take care of yourselves.