From the comments of an A.V. Club article smirking at the Gathering of the Juggalos, a classic example of kidding on the square:
Not Your Kind of People: A Play In Three Acts
tribalism
Sans Serif Culottes
This is far from the first time that a group of allegedly peace-loving left wing equality nerds decided to show their ugly side and gang up on another, more prominent person in the digital realm.
Oh, the digital realm. I was gonna say, that’s the strangest way I’ve ever heard the Jacobins described.
They Know Who Is Righteous, What Is Bold, So I’m Told
Predictably, Twitter was outraged. “Dear @CERN,” wrote one science buff with a taste for typography. “Every time you use Comic Sans on a powerpoint, God kills the Schrödinger’s cat. Please think of the cat.” Another groaned: “They used Comic Sans on the Higgs boson powerpoint presentation … Nope there is no hope for mankind.”
Ah, Twitter and ironic status-seeking. They go together like peanut butter and chocolate.
I recently read something Chuck Klosterman wrote in Killing Yourself to Live:
People behave this way all the time; we all sign a social contract that requires us to universally ridicule certain sentiments on principle, even though no such principle exists. When I was in sixth grade, there was a kid in fifth grade whom everyone called Ippy… Ippy was precocious and clever and popular, inasmuch as any fifth grader can be popular. He could draw exceptionally and was well known for his pencil sketches of military aircraft.
But then Ippy became a sixth grader. And then—all of a sudden and for no valid reason—everyone decided they hated him.
For the next two years, Ippy was mercilessly attacked on a daily basis. Almost nobody talked to him, unless they were trying to trick him into drinking a can of Mountain Dew that was half filled with piss. I remember two kids stealing his gym shoes and dropping them into the locker room whirlpool. People would throw half-chewed food at the back of his head while he worked on math problems. This was real horror-show, Welcome to the Dollhouse shit, and it emerged out of nowhere. He had done nothing to warrant this. Moreover, the torture ended as capriciously as it began: Halfway through his eighth-grade year, Ippy was completely reabsorbed into the junior high coolness coven.
…But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you’re sharing a reality that doesn’t exist. Every summer, Hollywood movie studios convince millions of people to see blockbuster movies they know they’re going to hate… But it’s still information they need to have. This is because those people care about something else entirely; they’re worried about the possibility of everyone else understanding something that they’re missing. This is what they’re afraid of, and this is how they deduce societal truth.
I find it difficult to believe that, were it not for the fishbowl environment of social media exacerbating natural attention-seeking tendencies, anyone but a handful of specialists would give the faintest fuck about arguing the virtues of fonts. But almost everyone cares deeply about being part of what appears to be a discerning conversation, and about being accepted by those having it. Everyone’s gotta have a strong opinion, even on ludicrously insignificant things, and everyone’s gotta express it in a more over-the-top fashion than the last person.
On the bright side, if I ever had to deal with unwanted popularity, especially from idiots like that, I could just redo the blog in Comic Sans to scare them off. Sort of a “Break Glass In Case of Emergency” option.
Nothing to Do with What You Think, If You Ever Think at All
My cousin Sherwin’s way into the snob-free zone was simple enough: care only about one’s work, judge people only by their skill at their own work, and permit nothing else outside one’s work to signify in any serious way. View the rest of the world as a more or less amusing carnival at which one happens to have earned—through, of course, one’s work—a good seat. Judge all things by their intrinsic quality, and consider status a waste of time.
…The music was terribly thin, leaving no residue, better listened to, if at all, while driving across town on an errand. But why did I have to establish my superiority to my (mildly) detested fellow listeners, even if only in my own mind? Why not simply note them and think about other things? Because, alas, the snob cannot bear to think himself a nobody, even in his own mind, and he certainly doesn’t want to think himself included in an audience of what he sees as dull people, who have, as W. H. Auden once said to Nicholas Nabokov about a bureaucratic group in the U.S. Army, the “wrong ideas about everything and belong to that group of people neither you nor I can possibly like or condone.” And rather than sit back and enjoy this concert, unmemorable as it was, I had to make plain, if only to myself, that I am a much more serious person than these people sitting around me, and serious in a way that deserves recognition, even if (again) only to myself.
Why do those thoughts play in my head at all? Why did I need to assert my superiority, even to myself, when no one was contesting it? Why cannot I, even so late in the day, grow into one of those admirable fellows–reasonable, tolerant, generous-spirited, honorable–that Jefferson called “natural aristocrats” and that a liberal arts education is supposed to form but almost never does?
I thought about this excerpt recently, seeing a couple stories go viral for seemingly no other purpose than occasioning an orgy of self-congratulation over our refined taste. I don’t begrudge anyone their honest preferences, but I do rankle over the pack mentality toward easy targets, the sad reminder that so much cultural activity is nothing but signaling, posturing, and competition for praise.
My Flag Boy Said to Your Flag Boy, I’m Gonna Set Your Flag on Fire
There are recognizable stages in the degradation of anonymous, fragmentary communication. If no pack has emerged, then individuals start to fight. This is what happens all the time in online settings. A later stage appears once a pecking order is established. Then the members of the pack become sweet and supportive of one another, even as they goad one another into ever more intense hatred of nonmembers.
…New patterns of social connection that are unique to online culture have played a role in the spread of modern networked terrorism. If you look at an online chat about anything, from guitars to poodles to aerobics, you’ll see a consistent pattern: jihadi chat looks just like poodle chat. A pack emerges, and you are either with it or against it. If you join the pack, then you join the collective ritual hatred.
…The genetic aspects of behavior that have received the most attention (under rubrics like sociobiology or evolutionary psychology) have tended to focus on things like gender differences and mating behaviors, but my guess is that clan orientation and its relationship to violence will turn out to be the most important area of study.
Mainly, I’m just tacking this on as an addendum to a recent post. But I’ve gotta say, there’s a sad irony to reading comments at Freethought Blogs, of all places, and seeing this dynamic unfold.
Raise Your Hands, You’re a Sinner
The question is not “Is Lena Dunham racist?”; it’s “Is Lena Dunham any more racist than the rest of us?”
Recently, there’s been a firestorm over the lack of diversity on Lena Dunham’s HBO zeitgeist-apalooza, Girls. I will not rehash what has previously been hashed — but if you missed it: Jenna Wortham wrote this critique of the blandness of the characters and casting of Girls; then the Twittersphere went apeshit; then Molly Lambert informed us that it’s not Dunham who’s racist, it’s all of TV.
So, now you’re up to date — except for one thing: It’s not TV that’s racist, it’s us. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: TV (especially right now) is far more of a reflection of who we are as a society, than who we ought to be.
What was Leah Dunham’s experience? I think the reality is that her experience probably was mostly white, at least from what I’ve seen in the real Brooklyn. People tend to cluster with their own group. And that’s what gets on my nerves about all the enthusiasm about diversity: it’s a massive demographic token for something which people tend not live out in their own lives even when they have the opportunity.
They’re both talking about the fact that people tend to choose to live in racially homogenous areas. Khan’s essay is interesting and considered, though, while Shapiro’s is an excellent example of the pseudo-contrite confessional genre that irritates me so much.
How does it help anything to use such a powerful term as “racist” in reference to a 25 year-old woman’s admission that she only feels convincing as a writer in creating characters who reflect her own Jewish/WASP experiences? How is it meaningful to apply the term to those of us who live in semi-rural small towns, who would have to literally seek out friends and acquaintances by virtue of ethnicity, as if they were merely tokens in a diversity scavenger hunt, in order to satisfy such standards? (What next, are we going to start unfavorably judging people by the racial content of their favorite music? Oh.) And, as Khan mentions, how many people like these, if you were to glance at their Facebook pages, would turn out to have an ethnically balanced group of friends?
Of course, the aim isn’t really to clarify anything about race in American society; it’s just a way to signal to other progressives that here, we have a cultured, thoughtful guy who isn’t afraid to get at the root of the problem and implicate himself alongside everyone else in his criticism. It may be toothless criticism, and it may appear in the sidebar of the Huffington Post right above the video of a puppy playing with a lawn sprinkler, but it makes the right people feel self-satisfied for a while, and that’s what really matters.
We Had to Multiply Ourselves
Females were “dramatically under-represented” in the United States’ top 100 grossing films last year, accounting for 33% of all characters at a time when they made up nearly 51% of the U.S. population, according to a study being released Tuesday.
The 33% figure represented an increase over the findings of a similar study in 2002, when females comprised 28% of the movie characters, said the report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.
But while there were more female characters overall, fewer of them were “clearly identifiable protagonists,” the study found — 11% in 2011 versus 16% in 2002. “Thus, while there are more female characters on screen today, fewer stories are told from a female character’s perspective,” according to Martha Lauzen, executive director of the center.
Her title for the report: “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World.”
The report mirrored a study of women’s behind-the-scenes participation that the center released in January, which found that women made up 18% of all directors, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors working on the 250 highest-grossing movies last year. That was only one percentage point higher than when the center began studying employment figures in 1998.
Lauzen’s latest report said that, on average, female characters in last year’s films were younger than the male characters, less likely to be portrayed as leaders and more likely to be identified by their marital status. It said that 73% of the female characters were Caucasian, 8% African American, 5% Latina and 5% Asian (with the rest in smaller categories, including aliens and animals).
I’m kind of conservative in the sense that I think equal rights under the law is about the best we’re ever going to achieve with regards to reducing social inequality, and even that ideal takes a lot of effort to get anywhere near attaining (and sustaining). As Richard King noted, the problem with equal rights, for some people, is that they aren’t enough by themselves to guarantee social justice. But social justice is a relative, subjective standard. Perfectly apportioned pie charts of sociopolitical identity do not naturally occur in institutional and interpersonal relationships. Imbalances of power and influence are inevitable, and yet do not predictably lead to uniformly negative outcomes. Precise fractions, mathematical means, and other such abstractions can only be imposed on human activity by diktat. Your parents weren’t just being insensitive when they told you that life isn’t fair.
Partially, I’m annoyed by the implications in such articles, that a perfect numerical balance of male and female (and why stop differentiating there?) film, pop, literary, etc. stars is necessary and, if stymied, it must necessarily be due to some nefarious -ism; attempts to appeal to standards of merit are countered with quasi-Freudianism which brooks no falsification. Partially, the annoyance is with the random bureaucratic metrics of progress, as if 50% of the fame and profit in Hollywood accruing to women will directly correlate with an increase in tips for waitresses and a decrease in domestic violence; or the apparent belief in gender/racial essentialism so similar to early Romantics like Johann Herder; post-colonial guilt rejects the attempt to reach something approximating universal ideals and experiences open to understanding by anyone in favor of cultivating jealously-guarded hyphenated identities.
But it’s also the fact that all around the web, people will link to this story, have the requisite two-minute hate of sexism, take a moment to feel the sugar rush of affirmation that comes with associating oneself with a righteous cause, and go back to posting pictures of cute animals. It’s cheap and easy, and it strikes me as cynical. Let’s fume about the insidious oppression that exists simultaneously everywhere at once and nowhere in particular, all the better to keep us from having to offer up anything like meaningful insight or a practical course of action. Behold my righteous denunciation! Somebody should, uh, do something about, you know, all the things that suck. What matters is being seen, positioning oneself as a crusader for all the right causes.
The point is to make sure the argument never stops. Injustice never sleeps; there will always be an asymmetric ratio in need of rectifying. It becomes a comfortable career, almost, crusading for impossible standards of fairness, secure in knowing that things will only change slowly if at all, thus guaranteeing a stable, reassuring identity for the crusader.
…adding, yeah, sort of like this:
There appear to be two rational explanations for this behavior. One is that Scalzi and the commenters who aped his behavior have a simply atrocious grasp on psychology, human behavior, and politics, and sincerely believed that mocking people would lead to their enlightenment. The other is that John Scalzi’s purpose was never to actually contribute to education and social justice, but rather to demonstrate his superiority to those people he claimed to want to educate, and in doing so show what a brilliant and enlightened guy he is to the liberals he is in cultural competition with.
Splitters!
It’s not very often we see this many people come together under one banner to show the nation there are a lot of non-religious people out there, and we don’t all fall into the “angry older white guy” stereotype, and we want to see church/state separation upheld, and we don’t want to be ignored anymore. The fact that we have people on the stage who hold views we find unreasonable or objectionable just shows we’re not a uniform group.
If we want to get attention for a rally like this, we need big-name celebrities to attend. We need politicians to speak. Sure, we can have a rally with PZ Myers and only the people he wants to invite, but it won’t draw the same numbers and it won’t get the same level of attention.
You can argue that the Rally needs higher “standards,” but you’re missing the point. This isn’t just about us. This isn’t just about spreading science and atheism. This is about drawing attention to our movement. This is about getting media attention. This is about getting all those people not attending the rally (or who don’t even know there are so many other atheists out there) to notice us and maybe — just maybe — get the courage to come out of the closet or attend a local atheist gathering.
Personally, I’m indifferent to the whole shebang. I might go, since I’m only a few hours away, but I’d be most looking forward to seeing Tim Minchin, if anything. My greatest fear is that it would just be hours of standing around in unseasonably warm weather, listening to live versions of those boring “Why I Am an Atheist” stories. Either way, I’m pretty sure there won’t be any historically significant, MLK-style speeches, so, yeah, some people could stand to ease up on the ideological purity tests. The atheist movement, such as it is, does not have to spring forth upon the national consciousness fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s forehead, displaying perfectly proportioned diversity and a uniform message.
The sad thing is, I happened across the link to this post on another blog, where it was accompanied by an all-too-predictable snarky comment about the number of older white guys who got invited to speak, with the obvious implication that this is prima facie a bad thing. Well, you go to rallies with the prominent atheists you have, not the ones you wish you had. The old white guys are not the issue, dude. Also, dude, old white guy is not the preferred nomenclature. Elderly Caucasian-American, please.
Seriously, if you want to protest every single injustice and inequality simultaneously, there’s probably an OWS encampment nearby. Stick to the basic rah-rah-atheism theme for this particular event, and save all the identity politicking for later.
Speaking of effective messaging, though:
If one of the Republican presidential candidates wanted to voice his support for our right to assemble, and our right to not believe in god, and his belief that we’re just as American as religious people, I hope we’d give that person a mic, too. Because more Americans need to hear that message.
Already happened, actually. Come to think of it, that guy’s schedule seems a lot more open these days; maybe someone should check and see if he’d be willing to reprise his statements. For that kind of entertainment value, I would definitely attend.
The Question Is Whether You Can Make Words Mean So Many Different Things
The difference between what Louis said, and what Rush said is this: in his apology, Rush made a point of saying that his personal attacks on Ms. Fluke, were not intended “as a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.”
In other words, when he specifically called Sandra Fluke a “slut,” “a prostitute,” and encouraged her to post sex videos of herself online so he could watch, it was not personal. It was, therefore, general. Which I, for one, believe because it fits perfectly within the larger context of Rush Limbaugh’s twenty-plus years of ad hominem attacks on “feminazis” and gratuitous comments about all female journalists as “news babes.”
With Louis, his insult was actually the opposite: it was a highly personal attack. The target of his insult, Sarah Palin, so infuriated him that he felt the need to call her the very worst name he could think of. His insult referred to a specific woman at a specific time and place.
“Cunt” is the very worst name he could think of? Well, if we’re going to take people at their word:
No words are bad, but some people start using them a lot to hurt other people, and then they become bad. They become hard to–and there’s words that I love that I can’t use because other people use them wrong, to hurt other people… like, the word “cunt” is a beautiful word. To me, there’s just beauty in that word, and I don’t–I mean aesthetically. It has–it’s like chocolatey and round on the ends. I just like the–cunt–I just like the way it sounds. And I don’t use it as an insult. I’m alone in the laundry. I’m like, ♪♪ cuunt cuuuunt ♪♪
I just like saying it. I would never call a woman a cunt, except for my mom, ’cause she likes it for some weird reason. But it’s a very misused word. It’s supposed to mean vagina, which I don’t think works at all, because vaginas are so sweet. They’re little, pretty things with little flower petal-y lips and–I hear a piccolo in my head every time I see a vagina. ♪♪ Doodle-oodle-doo ♪♪ ♪♪ did-a-liddle-loo ♪♪ ♪♪ bliddle-liddle-liddle-loo ♪♪
Even vagina’s too harsh for— they should be called, like, a falalalala. [sings pleasant sounds] There should be a butterfly fluttering around every vagina all the time. Just all the time. Little butterfly. When you go to the doctor, he’s like, “Well, the butterfly looks good, so we’re in good shape.” How do you look at something that pretty and say, “That’s a cunt!” — that doesn’t fit at all. Maybe if it was a giant vagina and it was attacking a town and throwing busses around and knocking over telephone poles. Then you could say, “Hey, somebody shoot that cunt with a bazooka!”
I guess, then, that he either meant it as a compliment toward Palin, or he thinks she’s Godzilla.
Anyway, the gist of what I’ve been seeing about this argument seems to be that people like C.K. and Bill Maher are just guilty of isolated transgressions, but Rush is a certifiable misogynist, or as one recent article put it, Rush Limbaugh obviously and unambiguously hates women. Is that true, though? It reminds me of being accused of “hating America” — it’s so all-encompassing as to be nonsensical. I mean, I’d say that, like many conservatives, he hates change, if anything. I’m sure he likes women just fine, as long as they share his politics or keep themselves confined to a largely subordinate role in society. On the other hand, liberals support general concepts of gender equality, but often have no problem using crude sexual or racial insults toward individual members of the group in question who dissent in some way. Does that make them misogynists and racists to whatever degree, or just jerks?
Or, as the A.V. Club wisely sums up:
And thus really, as always, this all boils down to who said what about whom and whether you already like them, and we’re not even going to pretend as though we don’t like Louis C.K. a whole lot more than Rush Limbaugh or Greta Van Susteren.
Never Underestimate the Power of Stupid People In Large Groups
Bill Maher famously lost his television show on ABC after outcry over commentary that one of his guests made (which he agreed with) concerning the 9/11 hijackers not being cowards, given that they were willing to kill themselves in pursuit of their mission. It was this statement that famously led President George W. Bush’s press secretary at the time, Ari Fleischer, to state that “all Americans … need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” Never mind that Maher didn’t even utter the offending statement, or that it was technically correct (suicide bombers, come what may, aren’t cowards in the strictest sense of the term), the post-9/11 “sensitivity” caused his comments to create a firestorm of (arguably) manufactured controversy that forced his show off the air even as ratings had gone up after the 9/11 attacks. And let’s not forget any number of “controversies” that were sparked during the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2002 and 2003. Let’s not forget the outcry over Natalie Maines’ comments that she was ashamed that President Bush was from Texas (which led to death threats and mass album-burning), or the politically motivated firing of Phil Donahue from MSNBC because his liberal ideology didn’t fit with the nationalistic fervor (never mind that he had the highest-rated show on the network at the time). And that’s not counting the various “scalps” that the GOP has claimed during Barack Obama’s first term (Shirley Sherrod, Van Jones, etc.). Yes, there is a difference between the above incidents, which allegedly had behind-the-scenes government support, and what appears to be a purely grassroots effort in feminist (and humanist) activism, but it’s still almost scary how fast the fire spread.
I don’t have any profound conclusions to draw from this, nor do I have any “answers.” I guess what I’m saying is that, having lived through 10 years of countless liberal/progressive or just-plain-not-crazy people being targeted and/or persecuted because they said something that was deemed inflammatory, like when Michael Moore was targeted for murder purely for making an anti-war statement at the 2003 Oscars (after winning his Oscar for making an anti-gun-violence documentary), I can only take so much pleasure with the shoe being on the other foot.
I don’t have anything profound to add, myself. I just detest mob mentality by its very nature, regardless of what the inspirational cause is. When the argument becomes about the righteous intensity of our feelings instead of what we can know, the right to free speech is just a hollow formality. Fine, you can have your megaphone. We’ll just take away your soapbox and quarantine you somewhere out of earshot.
Talk to the Hand
Everywhere we look offence is being taken, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad ones, but always in a way that seems to imply that offence is something terrible in itself.
…Increasingly, the statement ‘I find that offensive’ is taken as an argument in itself; the complainant is not called upon to justify his feelings. But without some debate about why it is that we find certain attitudes or words offensive, the quality of public debate is degraded. Indeed, we become so comfortable in our positions that we are in danger of forgetting why we are offended. This is a recipe for intellectual laziness. By engaging with other points of view, we call into question our own positions, refining them when they need refining and discarding them when they are shown to be flawed. That is why the philosopher A.C. Grayling says that the right to freedom of speech is the most important right of all because, without it, it is simply impossible to subject all our other rights to scrutiny.
To ban an opinion is to ban not only the right of a person to express that opinion but also everyone’s right to hear it. In such circumstances the claim to be offended is no more than an assertion of moral superiority—an article of political faith, which, like religious faith, will brook no challenge.
I recall a progressive political blogger once impatiently brushing off comparisons of politically-motivated boycott campaigns to more traditional forms of censorship by saying that the 1st amendment simply guarantees you the right to be free from overt government censorship. Which is true, strictly speaking. Private organizations and righteous mobs are not legally obligated to provide everyone and anyone a soapbox and a respectful silence. But it also shows that if people are determined not to listen, they’re just not going to. It’s not difficult to make unpopular views known or heard, but it’s impossible to prevent ideologues from caricaturing or simply refusing to engage them.
Sometimes these strict defenses of free speech from a more-or-less legal standpoint strike me as slightly archaic, in the sense that its defenders don’t seem to recognize that perhaps a more prominent threat to communication and understanding in consumer democracies comes not from tyrannical bureaucrats but from the freely-chosen echo chamber. Absolutists find themselves making incoherent arguments aimed at the culture of offense-taking while using the vocabulary of rights and freedom, all without taking into account that their opponents don’t see themselves as literally “censoring” anyone. Convincing people that moral indignation is not an argument and that offense is not necessarily a terrible thing is a different, and far more difficult, point to get across than convincing people to grudgingly allow an unpopular opinion to be voiced.
Variations on a Theme
Yes, in this book, I do want to explore the very specific nightmares of gay sexual/social culture, the places where hypocrisy becomes the norm and is allowed to exist unquestioned, unquestioning, unquestionable. But certainly, that translates into other areas, especially among subcultures and cultures of resistance that originally emerged to challenge dominant norms.
…So often we end up creating new hierarchies that are just as bad as the original ones we were trying to challenge—even in subcultures, or maybe particularly in subcultures, there are rules and regulations. How do we re-imagine the whole idea of belonging? Maybe belonging isn’t what we are after at all, maybe we have to create a space where no one needs to belong, what would that look like?
It’s interesting, because feminism is where all my politics start—the feminism of challenging power, not accessing power. The feminism of destroying all hierarchies. The feminism of radical dykes and outcasts and freaks and whores that I first encountered when I moved to San Francisco at the very end of my teenage years in the early-’90s.
Yes, I think that feminism has opened up more possibilities for gender, sexual, social and political self-determination. But, I think that, although gay liberation emerged from feminism in many ways—as a rejection of organized religion and the nuclear family, a rejection of police and state control over queer bodies and lives—now, there is a conscious rejection of feminism in most gay male cultures. To me, this is tragic and horrifying.
In some ways I think that gay liberation made it possible for straight people to be more fluid in their gender, sexual and social identities, while gay people are busy salivating over participatory patriarchy and Tiffany wedding bands. And so, part of what I want to do with this book is to bring a queer feminist analysis into gay culture. As an intervention.
But the show’s largest flaw is its preoccupation with translating a particular black experience for liberal white sensibilities. Its eagerness to avoid offense hangs over every tepid sketch about race, sketches already laboring under excessive gentleness and lack of imagination. In each sketch black people are impeded by their own blackness, or more specifically black men cling to an idea of black masculinity, one which Key and Peele suggest is a needless performance.
…In a recent interview, Jordan Peele said:
“Keegan and I, we’re pretty good, I think our personal taste and our personal sense of adventure doesn’t go too much across this line, we don’t like to make fun of victims. We like to make fun of hypocrites, of bullies.”
But who exactly are the bullies in “Key & Peele”? Judging from the majority of their sketches, the main oppressive force the duo faces is a certain notion of blackness, particularly black masculinity. The pressure to conform to race appropriate behavior does exist. Many people of color are familiar with accusations of “acting white,” but this pressure is a symptom of the larger problem — that they are living in a racist world full of racist ideas and are negotiating their own identification with or against that society.
Homophobic reactions from hyper-masculine men aren’t uncommon these days, from Busta Rhymes’ assault on a male fan for touching him to Jamaican rapper Buju Banton’s lyrics that advocate killing homosexuals. Williams says that within the African-American community, such attitudes have a deeper root.
“We can’t communicate to each other, so we acquaint everything with being a man [and] show no emotion and nothing weak,” he explains. “You know, a man can’t cry, a man can’t show vulnerability and we definitely can’t be gay. … We are still working on that as a black community. To love ourselves and to communicate with each other and accept each other and our differences. We are still calling an educated brother with proper diction an Oreo cookie. What I am saying [is], it is a lot deeper than the gay issue.”
These are just articles I happened across in the last day or so that seemed to be loosely related. I don’t have a coherent point to make in particular, just some random thoughts:
• The feminism that Bernstein describes sounds to me like the anarchism I used to hear people describe — an almost otherworldly, utopian naïvete. Destroying all hierarchies? Eliminating all coercion? That sort of equality is more like a mathematical abstraction than anything realizable.
• I haven’t seen Key & Peele’s new show, though I’ve enjoyed some of their sketch comedy before. But if they do approach from the perspective of challenging notions of black masculinity, the type Williams was talking about in the last excerpt, why is that a less valid racial issue? Are we talking about the same sort of crude machismo that makes so many white liberals guiltily uncomfortable with hip-hop and rap? If so, who else is better placed to address it than two black comedians? (Plus, I don’t remember Dave Chappelle ever discomfiting or threatening my white identity, so I’m not sure what she finds so edgy about his comedy.)
• Maybe I’m missing something, or maybe I’m just too hopelessly white-cis-male-heteronormative to ever get it, but I seem to recall that the Old Left radicals arrived at opposition to organized religion, the nuclear family, racial/sexual inequality and state control via an Enlightenment-derived sense of common human bonds, however utopian all that may seem now. For all the rhetoric, I really don’t see how all these balkanized subcultures are presenting any sort of alternative to the values of consumer culture; it all just sounds like cynical arguing over branding and marketing to me.
E Bellicus Unum
On Thursday, the Pentagon released a report allowing a trickle more of estrogen into the front lines, with women now officially assigned, instead of informally attached, to battalions. But despite an explicit recommendation from a panel of neutral experts, still no ground fighting, no combat infantry, no special forces. In a press release, the women veterans’ Service Women’s Action Network “regretted” the failure to lift the “unfair” Combat Exclusion Policy, which precludes women from becoming infantry members.
Will they never learn? A year ago, the lame duck Congress finally voted an end to the despised exclusion of openly gay men and women from the service, “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The same arguments – unit cohesion, unfitness for combat – that were used against open gay service now live on as the last barriers to women. For however many women are fit enough and inclined to take those hard-line jobs, as for the many dedicated gay and lesbian service members, the exclusions are an insurmountable barrier to their aspirations and a costly waste of human power for the country.
…But like the gay movement and marriage, feminism has mostly moved beyond the contention that women are morally superior or that war is always and incontestably wrong. If the society is sufficiently threatened, sometimes even liberal states must invoke the willingness to sacrifice, even life itself, for the good of the enterprise. At crucial times in Western history – classical Athens, revolutionary France – full military service was indistinguishable from citizenship itself. Why should women who can serve be excluded from this service to the state?
Merciless Mary, mother of Fuck. “If the society is sufficiently threatened.” Well, it’s not, so may we consider the rest of your blathering null and void? In fact, this particular society is downright threatening. I’m fairly sure I’ll make it to the end of my life without seeing a foreign enemy powerful enough to invade and occupy the lower 48, but I expect to see Uncle Sam setting up shop and constructing military bases in quite a few other far-flung regions of the world between now and then.
This is what I utterly despise about mainstream liberals. Like the Greenwald article stressed the other day, these scum are perfectly fine with unprecedented militarism as long as a member of their tribe is in command of it. Aggressive foreign policy is perfectly fine as long as the soldiers prosecuting it display the superficial diversity of a Benetton ad. Guilty white liberals who obsessively sanitize their language lest they grievously offend each other aren’t concerned at all with the actual death and destruction their nation causes elsewhere, and consider it the height of activism to agitate for everyone to have a chance to participate in it. Wherever there’s a fight so transgendered endomorphs can suit up in combat fatigues, they’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beating up an OWS protester, they’ll be there (cheering the cop on). Fuck every last one of them.
…adding, this seems tangentially related:
The US Navy named a new warship after Gabrielle Giffords on Friday, honoring the former Arizona lawmaker who survived a gunman’s bullet to the head a year ago.
…Mabus also said the ship’s sponsor would be Roxanna Green, the mother of a nine-year-old girl — Christina Taylor-Green — who was killed in the same shooting spree that left Giffords seriously wounded.
Under naval tradition, a sponsor’s “spirit and presence guide the ship throughout its service life,” the Pentagon said in a statement.
Well, of course. What better way to honor the victims of random individual violence than to bestow their names upon a massive instrument of state violence? There’s such a pleasing symmetry in imagining the spirit of little Christina guiding a warship on its way to help deal death to other, unimportant, nine year-old girls, wouldn’t you say?
White Corrective Politics
One of the reasons I’ve written so much about the complete reversal of progressives on these issues (from pretending to be horrified by them when done under Bush to tolerating them or even supporting them when done by Obama) is precisely because it’s so remarkable to see these authoritarian follower traits manifest so vibrantly in the very same political movement — sophisticated, independent-minded, reality-based progressives — that believes it is above that, and that only primitive conservatives are plagued by such follower-mindlessness.
I noticed the same thing on a lot of the political blogs I used to read, until I finally had trouble seeing anything there but the same tribal signifiers, the same echo-chamber shorthand, the same lazy groupthink. Eventually I took the advice I had once exasperatedly offered my brother during one of his interminable rants and decided to spend my time paying attention to things I actually enjoy. Politics just too easily brings out the worst in people, and life’s too short as it is.
Jesus Christ Looks Like Me
As someone who has spent many happy hours studying Christian theology, from Origen to Hans Kung, as well as modern scholarship about Jesus, I supposed I should be pleased by this eruption of holy fervor among the Republican candidates for the highest office in the land. But there’s just one little problem.
Jesus would have been appalled by the whole pack of them.We do not know very much about the historical Jesus. But everything we know indicates that the carpenter from Galilee would not have been pleased to learn that this pack of coldhearted, sanctimonious, wealth-exalting politicians were claiming to be his followers.
I’m not saying that Jesus would have been a Democrat. Anyone who pretends to find support for specific political policies or ideologies in the Bible is delusional. Scholars cannot agree if Jesus was a social revolutionary, a tortured mystic, or something altogether different. Even what Jesus himself believed about the most essential aspects of what was to become “Christianity’ – a religion founded not by him, but by his disciple Paul of Tarsus — is unclear. As leading biblical scholar Bart Ehrman noted in “Jesus, Interrupted,” some of the most important Christian doctrines, including the divinity of Christ, the Trinity and the concept of heaven and hell, were not held by Jesus himself: They were added later, when the church transformed itself into a new religion rather than a Jewish sect.
Ehrman told me that the authors of the four Gospels portray Jesus in such contradictory ways that there is no intellectually honest way to reconcile them. Mark, for example, depicts Jesus as doubting and despairing on the way to the cross, while Luke portrays him as calm. Ehrman argues that such contradictory accounts can only be reconciled by creating, in effect, a bogus “fifth Gospel” that does not exist.
But having said all that, we still have the evidence of the Bible itself. And one does not need to believe in the infallibility of that document to see that the Jesus who is depicted in it was implacably opposed to authoritarianism, warmongering, contempt for the poor, exaltation of wealth, conformity, and sanctimoniousness – in short, everything the contemporary Republican Party stands for.
Don’t you just love it? 1. Forcefully stated premise. 2. Immediate waffling, extreme qualification of premise and hedging of bets. 3. Forcefully re-stated premise as if step 2 never even occurred. What a fucking hack.
First of all, let’s put it plainly: who gives a fuck what he supposedly said? If you don’t believe in his divinity, what special moral authority does he hold and why would you be impressed by his fortune-cookie bromides? But anyway, even judging by said document, the guy who was “implacably opposed to authoritarianism” also told his followers that they couldn’t be his disciple if they didn’t love him more than their family members and yea, even their own life. Then there was that whole “way, the truth and the life” thing, and the odd emphasis on blind faith in him personally being the difference between salvation and damnation. You know, I think that all covers conformity and sanctimoniousness fairly well, too.
Might as well quote this again while I’m at it:
If Jesus was not the prophet of love and tolerance that he’s commonly thought to be, what kind of person was he?
I think he was your typical Jewish apocalyptic preacher. I’m not the first to say that. Bart Ehrman makes these kinds of arguments, and it goes back to Albert Schweitzer. Jesus was preaching that the kingdom of God was about to come. He didn’t mean in heaven. He meant God’s going to come down and straighten things out on Earth. And he had the biases that you’d expect a Jewish apocalyptic preacher to have. He doesn’t seem to have been all that enthusiastic about non-Jews. There’s one episode where a woman who’s not from Israel wants him to use his healing powers on her daughter. He’s pretty mean and basically says, no, we don’t serve dogs here. He compares her to a dog. In the later gospels, that conversation unfolds so you can interpret it as a lesson in the value of faith. But in the earliest treatment, in Mark, it’s an ugly story. It’s only because she accepts her inferior status that Jesus says, OK, I will heal your daughter.
But wasn’t Jesus revolutionary because he made no distinctions between social classes? The poor were just as worthy as the rich.
It’s certainly plausible that his following included poor people. But I don’t think it extended beyond ethnic bounds. And I don’t think it was that original. In the Hebrew Bible, you see a number of prophets who were crying out for justice on behalf of the poor.
Anyway, assuming such a person even existed, given how heavily the “historical” details of his life were cribbed from earlier pagan myths, and overlooking the fact that the Gospels were written as propaganda, as opposed to a scholarly attempt to preserve an accurate historical record, he may or may not have had a genuine concern for the poor and downtrodden (as long as they weren’t Gentiles). Or he could have been like many other social revolutionaries since then who masked their own resentment and powermad lust for destruction behind egalitarian platitudes. But one thing should be crystal-clear: if presented with the latest crop of Republican presidential candidates, Jesus would certainly be dumbfounded, flabbergasted and shocked speechless…that the world didn’t end in a fiery apocalypse two thousand years ago like he assured his followers it would. I’ll keep saying it again and again: the people who most faithfully embody the spirit of Jesus in the modern world are the guys wearing sandwich boards and hollering psychotically about the end of the world.
This Is What I Am, This Is What I Want—You Can Go to Hell!
The neuroscientist Sam Harris is one of America’s best-known atheists; his 2004 book, The End of Faith, sold over half a million copies. He agrees that the situation for atheists is “analogous to being gay and in the closet for many people”, and it is striking that virtually every atheist I spoke to talked the language of being “out” or “in the closet”. Nevertheless, Harris argues “it’s a losing game to trumpet the cause of atheism and try to rally around this variable politically. I’ve supported that in the past, I support those organisations, I understand why they do that. But, in the end, the victim group identity around atheism is the wrong strategy. It’s like calling yourself a non-astrologer. We simply don’t need the term.”
It’s not clear in the context of the article what Harris means here. Is he talking about identifying as an atheist per se, or is he warning about becoming one more group of offense-taking martyrs addicted to their own sense of persecution? Is he objecting on the grounds of intellectual stringency or social strategy? Is he suggesting we should just proceed as if God’s nonexistence is a sine qua non for intelligent people and talk around those who attempt to interject?
Misanthropy makes it easy for me. I don’t want to be accepted by society; I want society to forget I exist and leave me the fuck alone. But a grudging, lingering sense of social responsibility forces me to add my insignificant voice to the chorus of those openly identifying as atheist, if for no other reason than trying to help the Jessica Ahlquists of the world have an easier time of it.