Category Archives: Nihilism

Early in his career, Pete Buttigieg worked for 2-1/2 years as a management consultant for McKinsey & Co. That history is being mined by Mayor Petes lefty opponents to create dishonest attacks that exploit peoples lack of understanding of how providers of professional servicesconsultants, lawyers, accountantsactually work.

Media outlets and some of his criticsespecially his rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Elizabeth Warrenhad been demanding that Buttigieg release a list of the McKinsey clients he worked for, and he has done so. The list includes Best Buy, an insurance company, a supermarket chain and several federal agencies.

Buttigiegs work for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan has generated the most attention. Ten years ago, the insurer raised premiums and laid off 10% of its workers. But those decisions can hardly be pinned on a nerdy junior associate whose three-month assignment, according to Buttigiegs campaign, involved analyzing things like rent, utilities, and travel costsespecially since the layoffs occurred two years after Buttigieg left McKinsey.

Still, the outrage machine cranked up immediately, and a Politico headline captured the unscrupulous nihilism of the whole imbroglio: The left nukes Buttigieg over McKinsey work. Wrote a blogger on the progressive site Common Dreams, Buttigieg helped an insurance giant increase profits at the expense of workers. According to The New York Times, the client list is likely to provide ammunition to those in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party who have sought to tag Mr. Buttigieg with the pejorative Wall Street Pete.

Many people believe a clients conduct should be imputed to any lawyer, accountant or consultant who works for them, and Mayor Petes critics are doing their best to stoke such misconceptions. But that is not how business works. Entry-level associates in particular have little control over their assignments and clients. You work under a partner, who has the authority to make actual decisions and recommendations. As another former McKinsey associate wrote on the website MarketWatch, You have absolutely zero power and very little influence.

To be fair, Buttigieg once touted his McKinsey work for the insights it gave him about management and problem solving. He probably overstated the scope of his experience.

Contrast Mayor Petes low-level McKinsey work with Warrens longtime side hustle while she was a well-paid law professor, earning almost $2 million representing some of the same types of corporate interests she now rails against. Unlike Buttigieg, Warren had complete freedom to choose her projects and clients, and, owing to her stature, more power to influence their behavior.

When I was an associate at a large law firm, I was assigned to write a brief arguing that a lawsuit against our client, a railroad that had contaminated some land, should be dismissed. I did not choose the client, and the argument I developed involved a perfectly legitimate application of relevant law. Yet if I ran for office today and the matter came out, the line of attack would be (cue ominous music and stock video of toxic waste), Sanders believes dirty, disgusting polluters shouldnt being held accountable.

And so it goes with Mayor Pete. From the snarky attacks and indignation, you would think he had ordered those Blue Cross layoffs personally.

These portrayals of Buttigiegs short, wonky, unglamorous stint as a management consultant are irresponsible. They demonstrate that some on the Democratic leftwho demand ideological purity and scorn the more analytical, pragmatic politics of someone like Buttigieghave the same situational relationship with facts and candor as the Trumpian right. Progressives should be better than that.

__________

Sanders is professor of law at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington. Send comments to [emailprotected]

Continued here:

Steve Sanders: Mayor Pete, McKinsey and dishonesty on the left - Indianapolis Business Journal

How much trauma can you take? To what degree can an individual change society for the better? What would that change even look like? Is the world, increasingly chaotic and painful as it seems to be, worth living in? These are all questions posed by the fourth and final season of Mr. Robot, which will provide a cultural gavel bang for the 2010s with its last ever episode on Sunday.

A drama about a hacktivist group called fsociety whose goal is to erase the worlds debt, Mr. Robot began as nihilistic commentary on late capitalism; Fight Club for the Anonymous age, striking a similar balance of psychological distress and revolutionary ideas communicated through medicated monologues about why we should fuck society. Its less topless and self-serious than Fight Club, which is primarily a critique of male violence. Instead, Mr. Robot is concerned with the human cost of wealth inequality on all sides.

Its a fitting show to wrap up the decade. Airing from June 2015 to December 2019 just before the US presidential election put Donald Trump in the White House to just after the UK election that gave Boris Johnson a landslide majority Mr. Robot has overseen the Wests greatest lurch towards the right since the 70s. Whether its a rise in the number of billionaires, the near total eradication of the welfare state, the fact that our collective heads of state look like a sentient piece of Bristolian street art or the culture of distrust fostered by clashes between social and traditional media, the 2010s has been entirely reflected and in some cases foreshadowed by Mr. Robot.

For the first two seasons, the show seemed to align with reality in terms of the stakes. Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), a cybersecurity engineer and the leader of fsociety, spends his spare time hacking pedophiles and miscellaneous strangers he views as deserving of comeuppance. He also hacks his therapist, who accuses him of playing God without permission, and his childhood friend Angela in an attempt to cancel her student debt. Elliot suffers from social anxiety disorder, clinical depression, delusions and paranoia.

Carly Chaikin as Darlene. Photo courtesy of USA Network

Its later revealed that he has an alternate personality known as Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) seen on screen as a separate character assuming the form of his dad. His sister Darlene (Carly Chaikin), also a member of fsociety, is equally damaged but not delusional, making her the more reliable narrator. In the beginning, the stakes seem pretty low: a small group of lonely hackers against the most powerful forces in the world, but they rise over the course of the series, eventually transcending the battle for wealth equality entirely and entering more philosophical territory.

Fsocietys ultimate goal is to set in motion the single biggest incident of wealth redistribution in history by targeting E Corp an international mega-conglomerate that owns 70 percent of the global consumer credit industry. The hack, referred to as Five/Nine, was designed to destabilise the financial markets, destroy all financial records and redistribute wealth in America. They pull it off at the end of season one, but things immediately go to shit. E Corps EVP of Technology shoots himself in the head on live TV after stating the situation is hopeless. Everyone involved in fsociety is picked off by the FBI, leaving only Elliot and Darlene.

Mass unemployment, homelessness and civil disobedience turn New York City into a ground zero of tents and burning rubbish. Hard cash becomes obsolete and the Chinese government bails out E Corp to create a digital currency called Ecoin, making people even more reliant on E Corp than they were before. Anger leads to destruction which leads to chaos. Most anarchist narratives depict the struggle to throw off the old world order. Mr. Robot goes beyond that to wrestle with the even greater problem of starting over.

After Five/Nine ostensibly makes things worse, fsociety shifts their focus onto the Deus Group an elite cabal of billionaires run by Zhi Zhang (BD Wong), the Chinese minister of state security. The plan this time is to target the groups members individually and transfer everything out of their accounts. Again, they manage to pull it off. In episode 10, Darlene sits on a park bench and transfers all the money they stole from Deus Group to the public, like Robin Hood in heart-shaped glasses (trust me when I say it brought a tear to my eye after I watched it approximately ten minutes before looking at the UK exit poll).

When the money gradually pops up in peoples Ecoin wallets, Dom an FBI agent initially tasked with investigating Five/Nine, whom Darlene becomes involved with looks at her phone and asks: Did everyone get this much? What started as nihilistic commentary on late capitalism eventually becomes a utopian fantasy. While season two showed us the consequences of quite literally blowing up one target and hoping for change, season four showed us what it would be like to actually win.

Of course, its not quite as straightforward as that. Winning becomes an increasingly confusing prospect as the concept of heroes and villains, good and bad, collapse in on each other. The most significant sub-plot running through Mr. Robot is that of Zhi Zhang, who is the public-facing persona of Whiterose a transgender woman who leads the Chinese hacker group the Dark Army. Long positioned as the final boss, Whiteroses cause becomes more sympathetic as Elliot goes increasingly off the rails (Whiterose refuses multiple times to kill Elliot off while Elliot seduces a Deus Group-adjacent woman, who then tries to kill herself, in order to pull off the final hack). Eventually, they meet in the middle.

BD Wong and Jing Xu as Zhi Zhang and Wang Shu. Photo courtesy of USA Network

The penultimate episode features an emotional conversation in which Whiterose and Elliot exchange worldviews. Whiterose believes she is acting out of altruism. Forced to live publicly as a man her entire adult life, she sacrifices everything including her partner to bring order to the worlds chaos. Elliot, on the other hand, is a lone wolf motivated by his own fear of people. Whiterose believes people are inherently good, trying their best when theyve been dealt a bad hand by a world unfit for us. Elliot believes they are mostly bad, saying people that Ive loved, people that Ive trusted, have done the absolute worst to me. Ahead of the finale, were left with a blue pill / red pill conundrum. If you were offered everything you thought you wanted stability, sanity, a timeline in which you were not hurt by the ones you love would you take it?

Generally speaking, most decades tend to be responses to the ones before them. In reaction to 90s counterculture full of nihilism and slackers, the 00s doubled down on aspirational lifestyles and the fetishisation of wealth. The most watched shows were teen dramas like The O.C., Dawsons Creek and Gossip Girl, or reality shows like The Simple Life, Big Brother and Jersey Shore (et al): total escapism in the lives of the rich and famous, or the spectacle of working class people elevating themselves into those lifestyles.

Watching a show like The O.C. back today is a wild ride, with any common ground felt with Bright Eyes-loving Seth or tragic Marissa melting into the background of their huge fucking mansions and people writing half-a-million dollar cheques like theyre handing over 2.50 for a McMuffin. If the 00s were about escapism, then the 2010s were the decade reality caught up. Relatability previously a valueless currency as people watched TV either to look up or down is now the only thing that matters.

Rami Malek as Elliot. Photo courtesy of USA Network

The growing divide between the one and 99 percent has been baked into post-Occupy American TV this decade, to the point that Vogue coined an inequality entertainment trend in 2015, citing shows like Silicon Valley, High Maintenance and Show Me A Hero alongside Mr. Robot. Sadly the same cant be said of the UK, where were still stuck on the middle-class whimsy to poverty porn binary. A few shows like Derry Girls, Chewing Gum, This Country, My Mad Fat Diary have worked to subvert that, portraying average people with comedic empathy, but they operate within narrower contexts. By and large, we dont do wider commentary on wealth inequality. Im not sure how much that actually matters (although it's worth saying that, with politics and the media being the way they are, there is a greater need for pop culture to communicate ideas that help people make sense of things). A TV show won't make radicals of us all, but its certainly the most tapped into the zeitgeist. In that sense, it often feels more comforting than escapism at a time when turning a blind eye seems to be the bewildering default.

In a 2017 interview, Sam Esmail, the shows creator described Mr. Robot as a period piece of today, which rings true. The world is so heavily influenced by technology and it has started to feel like its not on solid ground, he said. The world has become unreliable, unknowable. Facts are vulnerable and things you have come to rely on are no longer there. Its an overlap that Im not going to be so bold as to say I predicted, but that was what I was thinking about when I constructed the character of Elliot.

As always, its hard to know what exactly will happen in the finale on Sunday though Esmail has said the clues have been there all along, and the Mr. Robot subreddit has gone into hyperdrive trying to piece everything together. But either way, the point has largely been made already. In the penultimate episode, Elliot counterbalances his hatred of people in his monologue to Whiterose with a call to arms: Were all told we dont stand a chance, and yet we stand. We break, but we keep going, and that is not a flaw. Later in the episode, when it seems like Elliot about to die, his final words are Its an exciting time in the world.

That might be hard to believe at the moment, especially in the UK. In a post-election blog for Verso, Lorna Finlayson writes: It is difficult to hope now. We knew the system was closed. It was more closed than we knew. But if theres any broad takeaway from Mr. Robot, its that change doesnt happen immediately with a bang. You cant change society unless you change people. Its unclear what the general public in Mr. Robot actually want, but its interesting that the show has moved away from anger and towards more empathetic dialogue when reality has done the opposite. Regardless of what happens in the finale, the overall tone of Mr. Robot been one of galvanising optimism. Even when faced with the most insurmountable demons, both internal and external, the central characters doggedly pursue their convictions.

Even if you dont buy into its earnestness, you cant argue with its bittersweet irony. As much as Mr. Robot is the definitive show of the decade, its also an apt parting message that the revolution is something to be observed from the couch, as streamed on Amazon Prime.

@emmaggarland

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'Mr. Robot' Is the Defining Show of the 2010s - VICE UK

What comes after extinction? In After Extinction, editorRichard Grusin brings together contributors to address this question by considering extinction within cultural, artistic, media and biological debates. This is a timely contribution to contemporary discussions regarding the future of our planet, writesAnda Pleniceanu, that will leave readers with a renewed perspective on the relevance of the humanities to understanding our present environmental and humanitarian predicament.

After Extinction. Richard Grusin (ed.). University of Minnesota Press. 2018.

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After Extinctionis a timely contribution to contemporary discussions regarding the future of our planet. The volume, edited by Richard Grusin, comprises nine papers from a conference inspired by the question of what comes after extinction? While many of the contributions are informed by ecological discussions, in the book the notion of extinction is treated more broadly and includes the extinction of languages, cultures and many non-material aspects of life on Earth.

Due to its connections to fields outside of ecology, the notion of extinction becomes strongly associated with that of the archive, making possible a more substantive inquiry that leaves the reader with a sense of scope that the repeated slogans of disaster, prevalent in popular culture and media, do not provide. In fact, I would argue that, besides the obvious topic of extinction, the question that runs through the book is this: what can the different fields of the humanities contribute to the present environmental and humanitarian context? Or, to put it in utilitarian terms, what do the humanities have to offer to a world in crisis?

As this book is based on an interdisciplinary conference, the above question comes with its very own supplement, an unspoken deliberation on what the humanities actually are in the twenty-first century. Each chapter, I would argue, offers a distinct approach to answering this inquiry, and, in the end, the reader is left with a renewed perspective of the humanities, of their continued relevance and of the power of critical, interdisciplinary and historical research, but also of some of the limitations that inevitably appear when the boundaries of knowledge are pushed.

Although the contents of the book are not partitioned into sections, the nine chapters could be split into two groups, with the first five offering a more speculative examination of the different aspects related to extinction and the last four providing a more dissecting approach, with each chapter based on a specific and current area in scholarship. The two sections complement each other, and overall the book is useful for both those who are only starting to get to know the field and those who are already familiar with it and looking to engage in more depth.

The first article, by William E. Connolly, criticises the gradualist, linear and human-exceptionalist aspects of sociocentrism. Instead, he proposes a nonlinear, contingency-based model of entangled humanism that opposes both aggressive nihilism the conservative and belligerent reaction to any evidence that threatens faith and familiarity, resulting in carrying on with business as usual and passive nihilism incapable of taking any counter-action whatsoever due to an excess of doubt, which also results in business as usual. Connolly is insightful in articulating the problems that appear when evolution is projected along a continuous and gradual line of development, which leads to species extinction events being conceptualised in terms of the anthropic principle. If humans are taken to be the crowning glory of the evolutionary line, then extinction events are merely meant to reinforce the supremacy of the survivor. To counter this view, Connolly looks at two extinction events one 250 million years ago that wiped out the majority of life on Earth, and the more recent extinction of the Neanderthals to put into perspective our current era of climate change.

Combining elements of object-oriented ontology and posthumanism, with a pinch of Deleuzian spiritualist enchantment, Connolly calls for human agents to recognise an entangled and fragile world by expanding our capabilities to experience said world. This is to be achieved by, for example, becoming attuned to the vultures in India, whose population is endangered:

Their extinction will shut down a symbiotic relation whereby humans provide cattle for them [the vultures] to scavenge, the scavenging protects the populace against disease, the cleaned bones provide the poor with items to collect and sell as fertilizer, and the feral dog and rat populations are kept within manageable limits (18).

It would be an understatement to call this argument problematic, as it fails to consider that when issues of class, race and gender are taken into account, the rhizomatic assemblage becomes knotted rather than smoothly entangled.

Jussi Parikka asks what kinds of time imaginaries sustain our understanding of the extinction horizon, or how we conceive the future in temporal and political terms. The chapter draws on the Finnish artist and philosopher Erkki Kurenniemis vision of a post-planetary future as a grand archival project where the Earth-dwellers become fixed curiosities as well as on the book The Collapse of Western Civilization by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. Parikka relies on the device of the chronoscape, whereby the concept of the posthistorical refracts into multiple historical and temporal ecologies that are not merely linear directions but atmospheres of time (39). It is unclear, however, what this device is supposed to achieve in more concrete terms other than, echoing Connollys article, a supposedly rejuvenated imagination via a totalising entanglement of everything.

In the third chapter, Joanna Zylinska compellingly draws the event of extinction closer to the present. She juxtaposes photography and fossilisation as two practices of impressing softer matter onto a harder surface and describes photography as containing an actual material record of life rather than just its memory trace (52). The author then considers what happens to human thought and art if we take extinction not only as real and present, but also, in light of the material traces it produces, as generative.

Zylinska cautions against a view that ends up smuggling back the (usually white, straight, male) human into the debate under the umbrella of its supposed nonhuman perspective (53), which, in my opinion, comes at the right time in the book and offers a balancing perspective after the first two chapters. Zylinskas exploration of photography as nonhuman technicity, while poetic and speculative, is well-grounded in theory and in examples taken from the works of four contemporary photographers who also explore the different aspects of extinction.

Joseph Mascos contribution to the volume provides a critique of the currently popular practice of conceptualising the planetary future using the geological term Anthropocene. He remarks that this concept has had a great impact on the humanities over the past few years, where it has been used both as an era and a qualifier linking water, air, land, society, culture, the humanities, Schelling, feminisms, megafauna, and bats as Anthropocenic subjects (74). While recognising the concepts significance, Masco raises multiple concerns, noting that the geological term rings somewhat uneasily when used in the humanities. One of his most discerning points is that, as we lack the understanding and the narrative to conceptualise the current environmental crisis, the tropes used for dealing with climate change are often drawn from the era of the Cold War and its nuclear imagery, which is a complete misrepresentation of the slow yet cumulative development of industrialism and its consequences.

Cary Wolfes text is an inspiring deconstructive exploration of extinction based on a series of photographs of fourteen dead California condors who perished due to lead poisoning. The photographs were part of Brynds Snbjrnsdttir and Mark Wilsons exhibition Trout Fishing in America and Other Stories (201415). I was very sceptical when, at the beginning of the chapter, Wolfe laid out the main themes in a personal (and characteristic) fashion: I felt a powerful resonance between Derridas explorations of death, mourning, responsibility, and the concept of world [] and the condor photographs (109). However, this is one of the most moving chapters in the book as Wolfe, by the magic that is Derridean spectrality, turns the perspective of the reader from a personal engagement to an expanded sense of the world and the archive as a scene of responsibility. Reading this chapter, one is left thinking that supposedly dated fields in the humanities, such as deconstruction, have at least as much to offer as the most cutting-edge approaches.

Opening the books second part, which focuses more directly on the political, Nicholas Mirzoeffs contribution identifies the Anthropocene as a term rooted in the history of slavery and colonialism. He starts by asking: What does it mean to say #BlackLivesMatter in the context of the Anthropocene? (123) Echoing Zylinskas criticism of the so-called neutrality of the nonhuman and universalist turn in the humanities, Mirzoeff cautions against turning away from issues of race and colonialism. His argument is that the scientific notions of the geological era, and the Anthropocene in particular, are largely determined by another natural concept that of the distinction of races among humans and the colonial history that is often erased in discussions of humanity, the world and the planet. Mirzoeffs argument is convincing and troubling: it shows the importance of proceeding with a lot more caution when naturalising discourses of extinction and negating, or at least sidestepping, their bloody histories.

Claire Colebrook starts her chapter by noting that the idea of extinction implies the questions of what life is worth living? and what is worth saving? She connects the notion of extinction with that of disability, arguing that humans intrinsic dependence not only determines existence but informs and orients extinction as well. Criticising the utilitarian aspect of liberal politics and tracing its origins to the Greek idea of the rational and capable subject, Colebrook argues that the very question of whether a life is worth living is offensive in the military sense of the term, as an attack aimed to exclude those who do not fit a narrow idea of the normal (153). Extinction and its salvation, by having to measure the importance of those who die and live, itself becomes associated with genocide. Colebrooks chapter is lucid, compelling and clearly argued. I would urge everyone to read it, whether theyre familiar with the philosophical language deployed by Colebrook or not.

Ashley Dawsons contribution shows a few ways in which mainstream environmentalism uses the extinction crisis towards neoliberal ends. Dawson paints a grim picture, whereby extinction narratives are co-opted by biocapitalism further strengthened by Silicon Valleys California Ideology (185) that celebrates the emancipatory potential of Big Data and Big Tech in its acceleration towards infinite growth and expansion. While the intensifying exploitation of natural resources is ongoing, Indigenous populations (Dawson specifically discusses the peoples of the Amazonian Basin) and, generally, the populations of the Global South suffer the brunt of the damage wrought by biocapitalism. As a solution, Dawson argues for an anti-capitalist movement against extinction, one that must be framed in terms of a refusal to turn land, people, flora, and fauna into commodities (195). While offering a sobering analysis of green capitalism, the chapter falls, towards the end, into generalised talk of anti-capitalist resistance, reminiscent of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negristyle rhetoric. As previous contributions in the book point out, totalising concepts are the easiest to co-opt, often to the most violent ends.

The closing chapter by Daryl Baldwin, Margaret Noodin and Bernard C. Perley analyses the problematic aspects of extinction discourse from the viewpoint of endangered language communities and the colonial histories that brought them to the brink of extinction. The authors show that extinction, as related to these communities and their languages, has behind it a long and violent history of displacement and invasion, and that languages suffer enormous harm when their natural context is destroyed. They argue that, in order to address the extinction crisis of Indigenous languages, documentation is not enough; rather, linguistic and cultural revitalisation must take place. Instead of documenting frozen language fragments, the authors propose the concept of emergent vitality, which focuses on diversifying and expanding language and culture by reintegration and continuity. This concept brings the focus back to the community of speakers and their wellbeing rather than isolating morsels of language after its extinction.

In the end, After Extinction offers not only an expanded understanding of the concept of extinction, but also provides an excellent overview of the state of the humanities today. While cutting-edge approaches to scholarship that intend to reinvent the entire university along with the whole world (of which speculative realism-inspired research is only one example) have their place to stimulate and renew theory (and, perhaps, the imagination), we should not be so quick to dismiss the methods and scholars of the past. Dated approaches, from old-school critical debunking of popular discourse to hermeneutics and deconstruction, still have relevance today, as clearly shown by the chapters in this collection. By combining the old and the new, the speculative and the historical, the humanities have the capacity to provide insights that are not available via quantified, empirical and naturalised explanations. In the face of possible extinction, a variety of intellectual weapons to oppose the forces of reckless capitalism and reactionary politics can only be a welcome development.

Please read our comments policy before commenting.

Note: This article gives the views of theauthors, and not the position of USAPP American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.

Shortened URL for this post:http://bit.ly/390qQkr

Anda Pleniceanu Centre for the Study of Theory and CriticismAnda Pleniceanu is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism in Ontario, Canada. Her dissertation project attempts to rethink subjectivity via the concept of radical negativity.

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Book Review: After Extinction edited by Richard Grusin - USAPP American Politics and Policy (blog)

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In the most recent season of the hit Adult Swim animated series Rick and Morty, the mad scientist Rick Sanchez and his teenage grandson Morty Smith face off against one of Rick's deadliest creations: a sentient super-robot that has synthesized the plots of every twisty heist movie ever made. The out-of-control "Heist-o-Tron" can predict and out-maneuver nearly any attempt to defeat it, with maximum efficiency. At one point, it executes an especially clever con as an evasive maneuver, and in the process obliterates an entire planet.

That's one grimly funny gag like slapstick comedy on a global scale. But it's not wrong to consider the joke horrifying, too. It's an example of what the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum once called the trend in post-Star Wars action movies toward treating human beings (or aliens, in this case) as "garbage to be gleefully fed into a garbage disposal," as the plot demands.

Then again, the push-and-pull between no-holds-barred comedy and all-consuming nihilism is (pardon the pun) what animates Rick and Morty. This astonishingly imaginative, ruthlessly hilarious science-fiction parody which airs the mid-season finale of its fourth season this Sunday has always framed flippancy as a kind of enlightenment.

Co-created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, Rick and Morty had its origins in one of Harmon's pop culture incubator projects, Channel 101. Initially conceived as a filthy, juvenile parody of the movie Back to the Future, the show's concept was refined once Roiland and Harmon drew interest from Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming bloc. The writers developed it into a savvy, smart-aleck riff on classic science-fiction themes, steeped in knowing cynicism.

It's the "knowing cynicism" that has sometimes gotten Rolland and Harmon into trouble. The series is ostensibly about Rick's casually monstrous selfishness, as he drags his grandson across time and space, often over the objections of Morty's mother Beth, who's never quite recovered from growing up with a warped genius for a dad. Rick embarks on these missions in part just for the hedonistic pleasure of using science and technology to dominate others, and in part to persuade Morty that life is meaningless.

Rick and Morty fans differ on what message Roiland and Harmon expect viewers to take away from the heroes' picaresque misadventures. For some, this series is just a font of especially edgy humor, not meant to be taken too seriously. But for others, it represents a coherent and reasonable worldview, one which implicitly rebukes any "social justice warriors" who want genre fiction to advocate for real-world change.

The creators have pushed back against the faction of their fan base that has embraced Rick Sanchez as a truth-telling antihero. In an interview with GQ last year, Harmon called that phenomenon "a huge bummer," adding, "Once the title of your show becomes a way of describing a demographic, that is toxic."

Still, it's hard to argue that the lead character is intended to be a bad example or to embody a critique of anything in particular. Rick and Morty stories by design push familiar science-fiction and fantasy plots to their logical ends. They're grand "what ifs." What if the most powerful man in the universe was a bored old man, with no particular moral code and no overtly villainous inclinations?

Roiland and Harmon haven't backed away from their show's central premise, no matter how much they've been criticized for fostering a "nothing matters" attitude and at perhaps the worst possible time in the world's history, too. Global warming, spreading economic disparity, the rising tide of authoritarianism: To Rick and Morty, loss and misery are just inevitable parts of existence, so why do anything?

This perspective isn't just potentially damaging to impressionable Adult Swim viewers, but in a way to storytelling itself. So many Rick and Morty plots (including the aforementioned heist parody, credited to writer Caitie Delaney) are like that famous scene in the movie WarGames where a super-computer rapidly runs through simulations of tic-tac-toe, chess, and global thermonuclear war, until it realizes none of these "games" are winnable.

Roiland and Harmon and their talented writing staff keep running their characters through new scenarios and coming to the same conclusion: that the universe is cruel, and that heroism is more or less a waste of time. The Rick and Morty creative team will keep following its cranky muse, so long as it results in entertaining, popular television. (Which, I should reiterate, it does.)

Harmon has been here before. He created the cult favorite NBC sitcom Community, which started as a kooky college comedy and then became more sophisticated and self-aware, commenting on the mechanics of network television itself. And at a certain point in the show's run not long before Harmon was fired it took a turn from playfully meta to somewhat despairing, as the characters pondered the limitations and even the ultimate pointlessness of TV. It's like Harmon can't stop his mind from wandering in this direction.

Granted, Harmon and Roiland haven't shied away from Rick's destructiveness or his vulnerabilities. Superman can be bested by Kryptonite and magic; Rick Sanchez's mental acuity is affected by his alcoholism and by his need to keep Morty as a sidekick. Many of the duo's missions start with Morty wanting to try something cool he read about in an old pulp fantasy novel, which Rick goes along with because he gets desperately lonely without his grandson tagging along.

In a more conventional TV show, Rick's dependence on Morty would soften him, allowing him to see the wonders of the universe with fresh eyes. Here, the opposite happens. Rick indulges Morty's whims in hopes that the boy will see firsthand that the awesome things he wants to do aren't really worth doing. Rick and Morty is the kind of show where an episode opens with a friendly alien getting shot through the brain while helping Morty retrieve a rare artifact for his grandfather, who then tosses the object aside because it wasn't quite what he wanted. Perhaps the best word to describe this is "pitiless."

Even in the heist episode, it's eventually revealed that everything that happened from the activation of Heist-o-Tron to the demolition of an entire world has been part of Rick's elaborate plan to burn Morty out on the very concept of heists, so he won't abandon Rick to follow his dream of becoming a screenwriter. That is bleak. If this show weren't so great, it'd be awful.

All of that said, it's undeniably refreshing for a television comedy to have such a confident and consistent point of view and especially one that's so unapologetically dispiriting. Too much popular entertainment panders to its audience's desire for comfort. Rick and Morty stubbornly refuses to do so.

That's what makes this show so fascinating: the extremes to which Roiland and Harmon will push their premise, even at the risk of exposing their own weaknesses ... or of inspiring a generation to be smugly apathetic. They've constructed an astoundingly intricate machine, and they've set it in motion, knowing full well what it may destroy.

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The refreshing awfulness of Rick and Morty - The Week Magazine

It's about time that disaffected teenagers get the credit they've long deserved and never wanted. Sure, they can be kind of frustrating, with their hair-trigger eye-rolling reflex and grunted monosyllabic responses to any possible question, but they're also likely single-handedly keeping the French-poetry-collection and black-coffee industries alive. (And if there's a thriving black market for now-banned clove cigarettes a staple of depressed and pretentious teens back when I was one of them they're probably responsible for that, too.)

They are, by nature, solitary people, but they also have a way of finding one another. That's the case with the coterie of teens in Lars Iyer's delightful Nietzsche and the Burbs, a novel about young friends who pass the time in their sleepy town by drinking, playing music and wishing they were anywhere else. It's a hilarious book that also manages to be a genuinely moving look at the end of adolescence.

Chandra, Paula, Art and Merv are four young adults in their last year of secondary school in Wokingham, a suburban town west of London. It's a pleasant enough place to live, which drives the teens crazy: "The worst thing about Wokingham is that it smiles back at your despair. Wokingham hopes you'll have a nice day in your despair." They don't fit into any of their school's cliques not the popular "beasts" or the spoiled "trendies," so they've formed their own group. "All we have in common is that we have nothing in common with anyone else," Chandra explains.

When they're not in school, they spend their time at band practice (they play something Art calls "tantric metal"), drinking, philosophizing and regaling one another with made-up songs ("Supertwink" for Merv and "Fly Lesbian Seagull" for Paula). Mostly, though, they complain about life in the suburbs and the people who call it home: "They have no lightness. No life. No laughter or irony. They're heavy as suet."

The four friends are intrigued when a new student shows up to school, one who's not unlike them he's quiet, composed and has "NIHILISM" written across his notebook. They try to befriend him, infatuated with his uncurdled intellect: "His intelligence is not crabbed, like ours. It's not turned in on itself. It hasn't been squandered on music trivia. On the ranking of favourite albums and films. His intelligence hasn't been frittered away in insults. In banter. In ways of surviving the boredom."

They recruit the boy, whom they've nicknamed Nietzsche, to sing in their band, and are pleased with his performance: "Is Nietzsche a channel? Is Nietzsche an antenna? Is he casting a spell? Are these the words of some conjuration? Is this a suburban hex?" Meanwhile, they count down the days to the end of school, wallow in existential despair and giddily experiment with drugs.

Nietzsche and the Burbs isn't a plot-heavy novel; it's more of a character study told through a series of darkly funny conversations among the four friends (and, to a lesser extent, Nietzsche, who doesn't talk much). That's not to say it's boring at all Iyer's dialogue is so funny, and rings so true, that it's something of a challenge not to read the whole thing in a single sitting. In one scene, Paula explains to her friends that books make her miserable. "But you read a lot," Art responds. "I like being miserable," Paula says.

Disgruntled teenagers are famously hard to know, but Iyer depicts them accurately and with a real sensitivity, never mocking or condescending to them. He captures their adolescent bravado beautifully: "We infuriate them because they fear us. Because we think and they hate thought. Because we feel things, and they have declared war on passion, on daring, on life. ... Because we're half mad with nihilism, and the lack of meaning in their lives hasn't driven them insane."

Crucially, though, he also captures the moments when they let their guard down, when they forget to be disaffected for a few minutes and open themselves up to happiness. In one incredibly moving scene, the friends find themselves at their school's prom, which they fully expect to hate, but find themselves unable to resist the lure of pop music: "Even we're dancing to Abba ... Are we dancing ironically? Is this real dancing? Are we dancing or not dancing? Are we dancing as not dancing? ... We've dropped our sang froid ... We've dropped our mutual disdain ... We've dropped our normal distance."

The scene is Iyer at his best: observant, funny and compassionate. It's obvious that he loves his characters, and his enthusiasm for them is contagious it's impossible not to root for these hard-edged but sweet kids, even as they practically beg you to disdain them. Nietzsche and the Burbs is an anthem for young misfits and a hilarious, triumphant book about friendship, which Chandra beautifully describes thus: "It's being with people. It's a mind-meld. It's holding onto something. It's bearing something in common, when the word just wants you to scatter. It's keeping something safe."

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Kids These Days ... Are Reading Nietzsche In The 'Burbs' - WFDD

Max Deeb December 18th, 2019 - 12:00 PM

Listening to Clippings third full-length studio album, There Existed an Addiction to Blood, is reminiscent of getting hit in the face with a twenty-five-pound bag of uncut diamonds. Its both extraordinarily special and utterly brutal. It is a form of abuse the average hip-hop head may not be accustomed to the first time around. However, the undeniable lyrical skill of frontman, DaveedDiggs, is enough to silence even the toughest critic. Diggs purposeful delivery and infallible rhyme structures act as the perfect vehicle for his wild and nightmarish imagination. Primarily surrounding the concepts of death, horror, blood, violenceand deep within it, a much-needed sense of self-reflectionDiggs lyrical foundation ultimately drives this record forward through the discordant wreckage that provides the albums rhythmic underpinning. From the albums intro to its conclusion, each track brings listeners deeper within the gut-wrenchingly vivid universe that Diggs creates alongside producers and fellow group members, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes.

Aside from the heavily Deathgrips-influenced arsenal of distortions and white noise that Clipping fans have grown accustomed to over the course of their previous releases, Hutson and Snipes introduce bite-after-bite of eerie and unnerving sounds, ranging from the seemingly monotonous to the heavily industrial, to a sound that can truly only be described as bees in a seashell within the albums second interlude, Prophecy (Interlude). Hutson and Snipes paint a blood-curdling backdrop to Diggs spine-tingling fables, providing listeners with a truly immersive experience into the carnage filled madhouse that is There Existed an Addiction to Blood.

However, there are times at which this album can tend to feel a bit more like an art project than a full studio length album. Take, for example, the albums culminating track Piano Burning. Look no further for fancy wordplay or metaphorical depth, because this appropriately titled track consists of exactly what its title states, a piano burning and its a bit of a slow burn, clocking in at just over 18 minutes. While the energy and talent are definitely there, this project sometimes loses the essence of hip-hop and leans more toward the realm of the abstract noise music. Yet, with a runtime longer than that of their past two projects Face (2018) and Splendor & Misery (2016) combined, there is definitely room for experimentation.

What ultimately stands out most throughout the weighty and turbulent vibe of this album remains Diggs lyrical and rhythmic presentation. While tracks like Nothing Is Safe, La Mada and Run for your Life offer, what some might consider, a more traditional approach to hip-hop production, Hutson and Snipes incorporate very few actual beats into this 15 track album. The primary source of rhythmic drive tends to stem from a mixture of drooling staticky tones, various soundbitesand Diggs own lyrical pacing. Through several tracks, including Intro and He Dead, Diggs proves that his stylistic approach to lyricism does not necessarily require a beat and instead showcases that you need nothing more than a Michael Myers-esque breathing snippet and a swelling pipe organ if the raps are indeed tight enough.

All in all, this album primarily acts as a showcase for Diggs incredible storytelling capabilities and the groups shared artistic vision of nihilism and destruction. Despite its flaws, this album is proof that genres do not have to define artists. Music is an art form, like any other, that welcomes creativity and innovation. So, while There Existed an Addiction to Blood may not be for everyone, it is a pool of warm blood that everyone should consider dipping a toe into.

Link:

Clipping There Existed an Addiction to Blood - mxdwn.com

WHOS UP

Annette Quijano

The Chair of the Assembly Judiciary Committee captained her own legislation the creation of a second tier of drivers licenses for residents of New Jersey who lack documented status- out of committee.

Pat Diegnan

The Chair of the Senate Transportation Committee ran a highly effective meeting on Thursday to get the Joe Vitale senate version of the drivers license bill through to the next stage of its gestation period. Appropriations committee next.

Cosecha, Lets Drive NJ and Make the Road

The drivers license for undocumented workers advocacy groups had reason to celebrate this week after Assemblywoman Quijano and Senator Diegnan successfully moved their versions of the bill out off their respective committees.

Ronald Rice

Theres no one in Trenton who better embodies the quality of citizen lawmaker than the independent-minded, hard-nosed pro from Newark, who gave his backing to the drivers license bill only after he secured a commitment from Senate President Steve Sweeney on bills changing the laws pertaining to drivers license suspension and other priorities.

Doug Steinhardt

Even though he didnt actually say nihilism, we applaud him for appreciating the concept. In any event, the Chairman of the State GOPs unsparing, razor-sharp elbowed but lawlerly take-down of the Democrats Trenton agenda was one of the best pieces of oration in recent memory.

Phil Valenziano

Steinhardt this week announced his choice of Valenziano as the new Executive Director of the GOP State Committee. The former Jay Webber for Congress campaign manager will replace Theresa Winegar who is moving on to serve as Tom Keans campaign manager for Congress in New Jerseys 7th Congressional district.

WHOS DOWN

Cory Booker

The junior Senator from New Jersey failed to qualify to make the next debate stage in his quest for the presidency. From The Associated Press: While Booker has hit the grassroots fundraising threshold to qualify for the December primary debate, his campaign acknowledged it doesnt expect him to meet the polling threshold. He would need to draw 4% support in four qualifying polls by midnight Thursday, and he currently has none. But its worse than that, really. Booker may have to hobble along as a participant in the presidential race through South Carolina (and maybe beyond) not in hopes of winning, but to keep the bottleneck of New Jerseys political establishment intact and Phil Murphy unbemirched by the prospect of having to pick another horse. Its not about the country. Its about New Jersey. The sooner Booker pulls out, the sooner the Phil Murphy-detesting forces will use the presidential contest as a way of further alienating the governor. Theyll go one way. As long as Joe Biden is still standing, theyre likely to go with him. Theyre South Jersey-centric and determinedly centrist, and Biden a Delaware and Pa. guy fits the narrative. Murphy himself might be predisposed to Biden for numerous reasons, including his own ties to Obama World as the former Ambassador to Germany. As long as Biden continues to do well with the African American community, theres also a prime fit for the NAACP-friendly New Jersey Govrnor. But he has to keep an eye on the always easily offended progressive movement, his base, in fact, which sees big banks-enabling Biden as not much better than Trump. Where will Murphys local security blanket Ras Baraka go? Will Working Families NJ follow the national organizations lead and back Elizabeth Warren? What about NJ 11th for Change? Its hard to picture that group getting excited about Biden. Lets posit for a moment a world in which John Currie the Governors choice for the job -defeats Leroy Jones for the state chairmanship. His victory would occur with the significant backing of progressives including most precisely a progressive narrative interpretation of New Jersey politics. Then they turn around, with the governor eyeballing Essex County and his own reelection potential and back Biden. It would be a hard pivot for progressives to endure. Lets say Murphy zigzags to Elizabeth Warren. Now its another battle front in a continuing full-blown war with the South Jersey-Middlesex-Joe DiVincenzo establishment. Lets say he backs Biden. Is it merely a cynical play to Bidens best general election chances and the governors optimal play for a treasury job or another ambassadorship? In short, his most obvious escape route from the merciless morass that is his adopted home state? What it comes down to is this: Booker in the race prevents the immediate wailing exorcising of these demons, these Jersey devils, if you will, which await his exit at the gate for a new round of political diversion at the Governors expense, conceived at its core on the principle of division. Of course, Booker has his own Senate race to think about this year, and will, prior to the April deadline, have to pull out and focus on his reelection to another six years in the U.S. Senate. It may finally fall to inside knowledge-possessing Booker advising the rest of the state on where to go in the prez contest. After all, it will be Booker on the ticket directly underneath the partys candidate for prez, and a potential for a testament to his powers of love and unity, derided on the national trail, to bring together the broken pieces of New Jerseys political classes behind the best shot for the party at the presdiency.

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WHO'S UP AND WHO'S DOWN: Week of the Debate Debacle - InsiderNJ

Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal

The geologic pace, the sepulchral growls, the humorless countenance: Funeral doom is a subgenre defined by barriers to entry. On The Sadness of Time Passing, Finnish quintet Profetus indeed growl inscrutable curses and grind through themes at a glacial tempo, dutifully nodding to progenitors Thergothon and Evoken. But listen for the way an organ traces every contour or how the slyly harmonizing guitars twinklethey frame this prevailing darkness with a hopeful glow, the way the suns corona reminds us that light still exists during a total eclipse. Grayson Haver Currin

Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal

The Oakland anarcha-feminist metal duos 2019 EP was inspired by a poem from early 20th-century anarchist heroine Voltairine De Cleyre, and its lone two tracks trade off doomed tension and moments of stark beauty. There is a shoegaze influence that melds seamlessly with the songs atmospheric black metal, and the vocals alternate between bright and harsh. There is a fragility in their sound, but that vulnerability is not masked by distortion; rather, it is amplified. The gods are silent, but Ragana still roars. Kim Kelly

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Sunn O))) spent the bulk of this decade living like a legacy act, indulging in fantasy collaborations, commemorative reissues, and festival-headlining status. But in 2018, Greg Anderson and Stephen OMalley put on the robes, huddled with engineering wizard Steve Albini, and reemerged with their most absorbing music in years. Life Metal, the first and best of two complementary 2019 LPs, is a master class in controlling something bigger than yourselfin this case, walls of sound bent with the superhuman skill of a Richard Serra sculpture. These four pieces are overwhelming and affirming, 70 minutes of cleansing amid a very messy year. Grayson Haver Currin

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal

After three years of inactivity, Teitanblood reemerged with The Baneful Choir, a frenzied and bestial churn laced with chilling ambient interludes and dense walls of articulated fury. Spains blackened death metallers glory in savagery, but they subvert war metals simplistic bone-headery; Teitanblood is ugly and chaotic, yes, but also smart. The album is blessedly well-produced, and tracks like Inhuman Utterings show off the virtuosic command of their instruments. They might have a taste for blood in their mouths, but this is no banal sop to the nuke-obsessed hordes. Kim Kelly

Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal

A major trend of metal in the 2010s has been old-school death metal revival. Taking the gurgling nihilism of the subgenres heyday and bringing it to more dynamic, spiritual places, bands like Horrendous and Blood Incantation have steadily expanded their subgenre. Among those bands, Torontos Tomb Mold began as the most reverential; their pivot toward atmospheric territory began with last years Manor of Infinite Forms, but it fully comes alive on Planetary Clairvoyance. Their voyage through the cosmos is filled with brilliant riffs, inventive song structures, and ambiance that seems to signal the strange visions to come. Sam Sodomsky

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal

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The Best Metal Albums of 2019 - Pitchfork

Two weeks of testimony this month in the U.S. House, seeking clarity on whether to remove Donald Trump from the presidency, has given us proof positive.

Not just that Trump is suffering from uncontrolled chaotic thinking, but of something much worse: that the American people are in decline due to systemic elite failure.

We are not alone. The same plague has overtaken the English. Just consider Brexit.

In 2016, the morning after citizens of the U.K. voted 52% to 48% to leave the European Union, I called my friend Lord Daniel Brennan, the former chair of our Caux Round Table, and asked: Dan, what happened?

Without hesitation he said: Elite failure.

I replied: The same thing is happening in my country. And in due course Trump was elected president.

The elite that has failed and continues to fail is the managerial class raised up by industrialized society. It is most easily defined by its system of recruitment (higher education); by its social function (providing regulatory technical expertise); and by its culture and mind-set of privilege and entitlement.

Such an elite reigns in all modern societies communist, national socialist and capitalist.

The first social theorist I am aware of who exposed the inherent danger of this elite was Julien Benda in his 1927 book in French, La Trahison des Clercs Treason of the Scribes. For Benda, the scribes were the intellectuals who produced both communism (Lenin and his party cadres) and fascism (Mussolini and his party cadres) and similar avant-garde activists in democratic societies.

Their treason involved turning against truth to champion nihilism, which made them loyal to emotional parochialisms. They were, Benda alleged, replacing civilization with the law of the jungle, which could only lead to war and oppression of the weak by the strong.

Bendas critique has been dismissed by successive generations of clercs who have finally risen to fully control our educational institutions, many of our churches, our high-tech corporations, our media and our government.

When reflecting on our impeachment struggle, it is essential to note that both Adam Schiff and Donald Trump belong to the ruling class of those criticized by Benda for their disregard of truth Schiff from the left and Trump from the right.

Lets now ask: Who are the anti-elitists in todays America? Who stands against the clercs who dictate our cultural norms, run our politics, and benefit most from our economy?

First there are the working-class deplorables who support Donald Trump and Tulsi Gabbard.

Second there are the Bernie Sanders die-hards who wont support Harvard Law School Prof. Elizabeth Warren though she agrees with Bernie on almost everything.

Third, all the everyday Americans who just spent $300 million to watch the movie Joker.

Taking them all together we most likely have a majority of Americans who are not at all happy with where the clercs are taking us.

We can predict with near certainty that these anti-elitist Americans have no empathy with the Democratic Partys desperate insistence on impeaching Trump. The anti-elitists were no doubt among the many millions of Americans who did not watch any of the impeachment hearings and dont give a damn about anything to which Schiffs carefully chosen witnesses testified.

And why should they? The witnesses brought before the public were, each and every one, highly educated professionals. Each was a clerc, one of those who lead the daily prayers in our modern Cathedral of Enlightened Thinking.

Listening to George Kent, William Taylor, Andy Vindman, David Holmes, Fiona Hill and especially Adam Schiff was to hear the secular clergy for our modern elite excommunicate Trump from their fold for his presumption, his vulgarity, his childish prejudices and, most of all, for his refusal to listen to them his intellectual betters.

Of course the testimony also confirmed the shallowness of Trump, his acting wittingly on stupid prejudices about people who live in or come from s---hole countries like Ukraine, Somalia, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, and about the worth of nihilistic ubermenschen like Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Boris Johnson, Bibi Netanyahu, Saudi Arabias Mohammed bin Salman, and, maybe, Navy SEALs who like to pose with dead bodies.

These leaders, and others like Nicols Maduro and Narendra Modi, seem to fit well within Bendas typology of clercs in that they rule their countries based not on truth but through intellectualized emotional parochialisms, in most cases a rule propped up mostly by state police powers.

Among our Democratic Party leadership, the Trahison des Clercs has produced the Trump Derangement Syndrome, a willing suspension of fair procedures and the rule of law, in order to lash out in fury and rebellion against a coldhearted world order that rejects rule from the top by those who consider themselves entitled to power.

Having given up the search for truth and having no humility, the clercs who seek to run our culture, society and government have only their own personal truths, their own narratives, their own prejudices with which to govern all of us. They can easily become deranged when they dont get their way.

Derangement is a descent into interpersonal hell; no good can come of it. Any form of derangement is not a good frame of mind. If the powerful become deranged, all is lost.

Again, ancient Greeks saw this coming. One said, Whirl is King, having driven out Zeus. Another wisely observed that those whom the Gods would destroy, they first ruin their minds.

Several years ago, in Singapore, Lim Siong Guan, then chairman of the governments investment fund, told me that history holds few examples of a people becoming great and remaining so for more than 250 years.

America was founded 243 years ago.

Stephen B. Young, of St. Paul, is global executive director of the Caux Round Table, an organization dedicated to promoting ethical capitalism.

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OPINION EXCHANGE | Lesson from impeachment hearings is that elite failure, not just Trump, ails us - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Rick and Morty recently returned for its fourth season.

Like a lot of successful and beloved pop cultural phenomena, it can be hard to separate Rick and Morty from the noise around it. It is entirely possible that people might only have heard of the series through the controversies generated by the more extreme elements of its fandom like the debacle surrounding a McDonalds promotion or the harassment of its female writers.

This is a shame because Rick and Morty is worthy of celebration on its own terms. The premise of the show is a disarmingly simple riff on the familiar framework of beloved properties like Back to the Future or Doctor Who: Rick Sanchez (Justin Roiland) is a brilliant and nihilistic inventor who embarks on a series of adventures with his grandson Morty Smith (also Roiland).

As one might expect from an animated television series co-created by Dan Harmon (Community), Rick and Morty is impressively pop culturally literate. In some ways, it feels like the perfect television series for the internet age; like Steven Moffats Doctor Who or Sam Esmails Mr. Robot, it is designed for viewers with an understanding of how these kinds of stories work so it might play with them.

Episodes draw on inspirations as ubiquitous as Jurassic Park (Anatomy Park) and as niche as Zardoz (Raising Gazorpazorp), including nods to directors like David Cronenberg (Rick Potion No. 9) and even casting Werner Herzog (Interdimensional Cable 2). Even the interdimensional Council of Ricks seems to have been drawn from writer Jonathan Hickmans Fantastic Four run.

While it might be possible to position Rick and Morty close to the riff on pop culture template of Seth MacFarlane projects like Family Guy or American Dad, it is attempting something slightly more nuanced and intriguing. It takes familiar genre elements and then twists them in a variety of interesting ways to play with underlying assumptions.

A large part of the appeal of Rick and Morty comes from its application of a cynical view of human nature to these familiar genre templates. Over the course of the shows first three seasons, Rick and Morty develops its two leads from the familiar archetypes suggested by the premise through subtle but committed character work amid high-concept comedy.

Ricks cynicism and nihilism is portrayed as toxic and damaging to both himself and the people around him, with the show repeatedly emphasizing how empty and hollow his worldview truly is. This is perhaps most explicitly articulated in the third season standout episode Pickle Rick, which paired the mimetic joke of the title with an insightful family therapy session.

Simultaneously, Morty finds himself increasingly traumatized by these weird episodic adventures, as each madcap journey inevitably culminates in an absurdist high-stakes drama requiring a horrific resolution. Over the shows three seasons, Morty has suffered a tremendous amount. While the show has a loosely episodic format, it never loses sight of the cumulative nature of that trauma.

With its title characters, Rick and Morty isnt just playing with genre archetypes, but exploring them. Rick is a deconstruction of the jaded genius archetype, while Morty is a humanized peril monkey sidekick. A lot of the comedy and a surprising amount of insightful, humanist pathos arises from the juxtaposition of that character work with ridiculous science-fiction plot elements.

Of course, it helps that Rick and Morty is consistently funny. Over its 30+ episodes, the series has developed its own rhythm and language. It has developed an impressive supporting cast and a reliable catalogue of recurring jokes. More than that, like the best television series, it has found a niche that makes it unique in the television landscape.

This gets at the beauty of Rick and Morty. There is nothing else on television like Rick and Morty, even if the shows strength comes from its unique approach to tried-and-tested genre elements. The show consistently uses familiar elements in new and interesting ways, pushing them in strange directions to fascinating effect.

Its good to have it back.

The fourth season of Rick and Morty is currently airing on Adult Swim on Sundays at 11:30 p.m. ET. Previous seasons are available to stream on Hulu in the United States and on Netflix internationally.

Read more:

Rick and Morty Is Nihilistic, Self-Destructive, and Still Hilarious in Season 4 - The Escapist