March 21 Friday roundup

The podcast episode this week looks at how to use your fury for fueling useful things, and closes with three common sayings about authoritarianism that I ask listeners to think about in a new way. You can watch it on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

Lately I’ve been thinking about Steve Albini and the economy—which might very well be a sentence that will never appear anywhere else in the course of human existence.

In case you don’t know, Steve Albini (who died last year) made his name in hyperaggressive ’80s noise bands like Big Black and Rapeman before becoming a legendary engineer, recording albums for some of the most celebrated cool-kid rock darlings like the Pixies, Nirvana, the Wedding Present, and PJ Harvey. He was a very big deal among record-store employees during the very years I, in fact, worked at a record store in Washington, D.C.

Albini was famously a difficult guy, dedicated to not selling out and against any effort to court or even accept popularity. He sang crude lyrics from the point of view of disaffected losers, sometimes using slurs to shock listeners.

After he took up engineering, he slagged even the musicians whose work he recorded. He was very deliberately an asshole in public, with the apparent aim of never letting anyone believe he wanted their approval. His every action was laced with sarcasm, but a number of his fans swallowed what he’d served up as if he’d sincerely meant every word.

In 2021 on Twitter, Albini acknowledged, “I'm overdue for a conversation about my role in inspiring ‘edgelord’ shit.”

“For myself and many of my peers,” he wrote, “we miscalculated. We thought the major battles over equality and inclusiveness had been won, and society would eventually express that, so we were not harming anything with contrarianism, shock, sarcasm or irony.”

“If anything,” he said, “we were trying to underscore the banality, the everyday nonchalance toward our common history with the atrocious, all while laboring under the tacit mistaken notion that things were getting better.”

To his credit, Albini made clear that he’d been wrong. And he never made excuses for himself or asked anyone else to explain away what he’d done. In fact, he felt that “I and others of my generation have not been held to task enough.”

What, you might be asking yourself at this point, does Steve Albini have to do with the economy?

Glad you asked. Any number of people have pointed out that for the last several decades, traditional U.S. economic indicators have been strong under Democratic presidents, while the economy has suffered under Republican leaders.

It’s my belief that this pattern has gone on long enough to become a cyclical one, a situation that Republicans in the U.S. have used to avoid responsibility for governing while taking advantage of Democrats’ ability to clean up the messes they’ve left behind.

And now we have a Republican president in near-absolute control of both houses of Congress. Trump is the natural outgrowth of his predecessors while also being unlike any other U.S. president in history. In tandem with Elon Musk, he’s currently destroying the federal government.

People in Trump’s cabinet and in top positions understand perfectly well what they’re up to as they help demolish the institutions that—at their best—protect everyday people. The third-raters now in charge are shredding institutions in ways that will let them profit in terms of both money and power.

But I suspect that Trump himself, along with many members of Congress, doesn’t yet understand just how much damage he’s doing to the economy. He’s accustomed to someone else fixing his disasters, has no understanding of consequences for anything, and is likely incapable of realizing that he’s putting the country on a road to experiencing the kind of ruin that can’t be cleaned up by anyone in just a few months or years.

And my sense is that those Republican members of Congress who won the 2024 culture war currently believe they’re on the right side of history—that they’re golden, and everything will go their way. They’re being assholes not in order to destroy the economy, but because, like Steve Albini as a teenage punk, they think their side won, and there’s some guaranteed stability to the system.

Without intervention soon, the economy is likely to careen far out of control. At some point, those Republican representatives in Congress, and perhaps even Trump, may see the error of their thinking—that the economy cannot take infinite abuse and does not automatically recover on its own.

Even if they come to this awareness, they’re unlikely to admit the wound they’ve inflicted on their fellow humans with anything approaching the grace shown by Albini, who realized how fragile the whole system was, recognized that he had been an asshole, and called himself out on the harm he had done.

Many voters likewise believed that our institutions and system as a whole were more robust than they’re now turning out to be. Realizing the cost of all this can be staggering, whether you’re a person who helped bring about the current situation in some way, or whether you did as much as you could to prevent it.

But despair, like the ironic fury of small-label bands with devoted followings, has become too expensive. We can no longer afford either one. Giving up would be just another form of assuming someone else will clean up the mess. It’s time to take up the hard work of stopping those who would inflict more trauma, and begin to set things right.

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