Dasein, Substack, and Tim Walz

Melancholy and meaning in an age of falsehood, or, why write?

I was saddened a bit to read that one of my oldest Substack friends Alexandru Constantin, is having a bit of an existential crisis of late. Just today, he wrote the following:

I say all of this because I’ve become disgusted and fatigued with Substackistanian commentary. I’m tired of the childless despair merchants bolivating about all of the ills in our world. I’m tired of the faceless cowards peddling intellectual pseudo-pornography behind the safety of their anonymity. One must accept the world for what it is, a fallen, broken place, but then one must move on. You will never make the world a better place by prescribing for others. If you spend your existence rallying against the gays, the blacks, the women, the protestants, the Jews, the lizard and fish people, you will attain nothing, because the world changes with you first. Fix yourself. Every issue that our side, our people, have has to be focused on internally first, then the outside world will change. Almost all of the ills of our culture are spiritual ills, brought forth because our fathers were spiritually weak, and forgot that the world is made up of atoms on top of atoms. That one must start at the smallest unit, and for us, that is the inner self.

He is correct of course that writing in and of itself will change nothing in the world, and of course, even if one of us types some brilliant essay its energy will ground itself into inertness without some willing agent in the “real” world. But I think there is more to what happens here than mere pontificating, at least for me, and I suspect for him and many others as well. While it can be frustrating at times to see the world move on careless of our conceits as writers, reform, change, rectification- all of those are a hoped-for end that is ultimately beyond our individual power to realize. I offer that it takes away nothing from what we do should those ends not materialize, and that, as Mr. Constantin advocates, writing very much is a way of working on ourselves, a reification of our being, a Dasein for our age. The relationships between authenticity and anonymity, between simulacrum and being, and between signal and meaning, all deserve a bit of, as the smart people say, interrogation.

The current Democrat candidate for Vice-President of the United States is Tim Walz. As it happens, Mr. Walz and I have something very significant in common- both he and I have worked for many years as teachers, indeed, we have both specialized in social studies. Unlike me, he also worked as a football coach. We’re quite different in that regard, actually, though it would be more fair to say that I’m the weird one. Coaching and teaching social studies go basically hand-in-hand in America. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve sat for interviews, had the principal or dean or whoever look over my résumé carefully in my presence, and then ask me, in a tone suggesting I’d thoughtlessly omitted something, “so… what do you coach?” I have MA degrees in History and Political Science, but I’ve lost out on innumerable opportunities by virtue of the fact that, at best, I’m qualified to assist with fencing.

Even that commie Eric Foner thinks it’s getting ridiculous.

Not Walz. He knew what to do to get ahead, how to fit in, how to read the signs of the times. He did what he was supposed to do, and knew well enough to be seen doing it. As anyone who goes into secondary education knows, the professional training required to teach in a public school is a relentless barrage of leftist propaganda married to a cynical neoliberal box-checking regime of quantification and homogenization. Many members of the public imagine that teachers are themselves ideologues, but this is not really accurate. The truth is, most teachers are really just too dull for the propaganda to stick. They’ll do as they’re told if there’s some specific agenda the systems is willing to expend energy to push, but by and large the typical math teacher relates to his craft the way the mechanic down the road does with alternators; he knows enough to earn a living at his trade but is not otherwise especially interested. He’s not a philosopher, not especially political, and largely interested in creature comforts and the goings-on in his small circle of family, friends, and coworkers. They are, generally, beneath all the Paolo Freire and Franz Fanon the big state ed schools try to beat into their heads. The ones who are above it seldom go into public school teaching.

Really not typical, though terrifying nonetheless.

But there is a small subset of teachers who, while wholly mediocre, have a kind of innate animal instinct for instrumentalizing that witches brew of dogma they’re asked to partake of, who know how to play the game. They’re all outwardly unique- this one a blue-haired rotundity with a Tik-Tok announcing zir methods for teaching diversity, another a dreadlocked malcontent demanding reparations in the form of student loan forgiveness. What unites them is their wholesale commitment to towing the party line, their willingness to make whatever subtle mental adjustments are needed to demonstrate acquiescence to the system. But Walz’s shtick is truly cutting edge. He’s constructed the world’s first fully articulated hicklib skinsuit. He’d be much akin to the Terminator, if that infiltration robot’s neural net CPU was programmed by Bill Ayers instead of Skynet.

Above- Someone carrying a weapon of war in a combat zone. Not pictured-Tim Walz.

He’s a defensive coordinator; he hosts a gay club for teens. He’s a soldier and a hunter; he’s radically pro-abortion. He’s the human equivalent of those official-looking envelopes they send old people to trick them into opening junk mail, the political version of the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. He’s a shell, a dull repeater benefitting from a system of DEI so comprehensive that he’s in demand as a milquetoast old white guy.

But, one might say, he’s in the real world doing things. He’s showing his face to the nation and making decisions that have an actual impact on things, while we anons just daydream about the world we’d will into being. I doubt I have to implore my readers not to be taken in by such appearances. He is, quite simply a cipher. He is a collection of signals organized into a sequence that the liberal theorists orchestrating the Democrat campaign believe will provoke a specific response from exactly enough voters to render credible an electoral victory. He is an embodied algorithm, a slightly buggy product being beta-tested in the media. The code is being rewritten as you read this; the parts about being a command sergeant major and serving abroad tweaked into some semblance of coherence. The finished product will be expensive, boring, and overproduced, but the hope is that the legacy IP he represents will pull in enough nostalgia addicts looking for dopamine hits to carry the project into the black.

‘Member when old white guys used to run things and Minneapolis wasn’t a drug and crime-ridden refugee camp run by degenerate lunatics? ‘Member?

Yes, some might say, but so what? What does all this analysis mean in the big scheme of things? Again, I have very little doubt anyone reading this is fooled by the spectacle I’m describing. So why bother writing this when I could be working on something I can do something about, like making myself a better man?

I write this not even under an assumed name, but a mere title. My outward identity is a facade. Like Walz, I present as one thing, and am, in one sense, in reality something else. The difference between us is that while he fronts as real but is as hollow as a bell- one rung by the hands of others- I hold forth as a construct, but through that, express a core reality of being in the world.

Tim Walz traded on his pliability for power; what he got was a set of strings. At no point in his career, in education, the military, or in politics, was he his own man. He’s a vessel into which the world poured itself. What you see has a name- so does a tomb. And though that whitey sepulcher might look polished on the outside, the reality is that it’s dead on the inside.

It’s a demonstrable phenomenon of history that such men are the real force behind revolutions and tumults. It’s not the great schemes of titans that move world events, but a subtler malignancy unseen behind a hedgerow of gray apparatchiks. Consider de Maistre:

In my face job I too answer to others. Even at a private school I have to make disheartening compromises. I perform work that is very often extremely tedious and unrewarding. Teaching is exhausting; I’ve performed hard physical labor as a young man and being an educator is far, far more taxing. I have to accept that probably most of my students, their parents, my superiors, and public as a whole have little regard for what I do, and would care far more if I were otherwise coaching the offensive line.

I am the sole provider for a wife and two children. In addition to teaching in person I also work for several colleges as an online instructor. Most of that work is disconnected, rote, and alienating. It is also extremely demanding, more akin to maintaining a website than instructing a college class. It would be dishonest to say it isn’t a bit demoralizing.

I came home today exhausted. I worked for twelve hours and there’s more tomorrow. I spent all last week setting up an online class that got cancelled. I thought for a moment that I might watch some videos on YouTube and go to sleep.

But instead, I’m laying on a couch in the dark typing this on my phone. I have to hold it close to my face because my old contact lenses are starting to irritate my eyes when I leave them in too long. It gives me a headache. I could stop and go to bed, but I won’t. I could just accept exhaustion, I could rest, I could just save my energy for work. That is, after all, what everything in modern life is nudging you towards, the subtle hand, not of a taskmaster, but a lumpen HR harridan, de Tocqueville’s vast, tutelary power.

But I’m not going to do that. My job is not going to stop me. The demands the world puts upon me are not going to stop me. My body is not going to stop me. Melancholy is not going to stop me. No sense of futility, no tired grasping for words, no irritating spell-check constant rewrites will stop me.

This is a test of fortitude. It’s beyond even the readers, though I treasure you all. It’s about knowing I can hack it. When I finally put down this phone and go to sleep it will be in the knowledge that I can think and express myself and that no one can take that away from me. The world tried to stop me and I won. Even if no one reads this, I won. Other people have the particular trials God out before them. This one joined the army; this one went to prison. So many others are frustrated academics, some just bright young-and not so young- men and women. They’re here on Substack, some hesitant to put themselves out there, some suffering through feelings of inadequacy or isolation. What right do I have, as one who can set some kind of example, to be too weary to not press on as some kind of example, insignificant in the big picture that I am? Writing is my trial, my podvig, my great work, small though it is.

The world intended for me to wait tables my whole life. It wants me demoralized. Instead, I come here, to this place, and through faith and force of will, through the same plowhorse work ethic that got me through thirteen years in the hospitality industry, I write and write and write again. I make myself think. I make myself type.

My being in the world, my Dasein, is stripped to its most fundamental essence. “The Librarian” foregrounds no ostensive sex or race or class or history. I am become my ideas. Walz presents himself as a master but is very much a slave; I strive, like the anarch, to benefit from authority while never surrendering my innermost self to it. My presence here-the self I’ve made, cultivated, exercised, and held forth- is nought but the words I can form into thoughts, which can be judged apart from any other considerations one might bring to bear upon me. Only through that medium does the rest of me follow, the middle-aged white man schoolteacher with pretensions to being a man of faith. The inner world precedes the outer here. And it’s precisely that interior life, that soul, that my writing helps me to cultivate.

It’s intensely rewarding to see one’s hard work pay off in an area that means a great deal. Substack is a place where a lot of people with a lot of energy the world wants nothing to do with can come and cultivate themselves and each other. For my part, I take a hopefully justified pride, in the Johann Kurtz sense, in the niche I’ve carved out. I’m not a Ph.D like John Carter. I’m not empathic like The Starfire Codes. I lack the wistful comprehensiveness of Yakubian Ape. I don’t have the command of fantasy and sci-fi of The Brothers Krynn, nor their plucky productivity. My brain is frazzling trying to remember names to shout out that would be easy to recall were I not straining. Lisa Kuznak, I wasn’t able to finish a beta read of your book, but an Amazon review is forthcoming; I haven’t forgotten. Would that I had your power to write novels. I lack the vision and networking abilities of Constantin von Hoffmeister, who has sent so many subscribers my way. I can only admire the unobtrusive confidence of Ishmael Wallace, Kent Peterson and Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson , prolific and subtle all at once.

That said, I would say I’ve found success here in two ways. One, while everyone is better than me at something, I would put my range and versatility as a writer up against anyone. If there’s someone who writes about as many different things as me, kindly point him or her out so I might subscribe and learn something. And two, I’m very, very proud of my audience. Yes, I really do consider the sort of following one attracts to be highly significant. While I do not have as many subscribers and followers as some, I count among them some of my favorite writers here, people I admired, sometimes from before I even began. To have them in my corner means the world to me. And if you follow me, and like my work, but hesitate to start yourself, you should know that I was once just like you, an unknown haunting comment sections. If you like what I do, you should know I’m still what you are, just with more typing.

So Alexandru Constantin, I hope you recover on your family trip, and return to find new meaning in your work. And by work, I don’t mean your job so much as your calling. You’re a writer, and if I might offer some unsolicited advice, you’ll find no peace unless and until you write. I look forward to it, much as I enjoyed your latest podcast with Phisto Sobanii. Do subscribe to him, and to the others I mentioned, and all others that you can. And if you have it in you, write.

I started at 7:30. I’m finishing now at 10:30. 2,606 words, straight through, posted.

Take that, world.