Literalism on the Left; or, Let Them Eat Squid

Alan R. MacLeod has done a lot of good work.  His book Bad News from Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting (Routledge, 2018) is an excellent exposé of American and British elite media propaganda against Venezuela, and his articles for Mint Press News are a very useful resource.

But nobody's perfect.  Sometimes his Twitter posts sink into schoolyard humor -- not that I'm in a position to cast the first stone -- and today he misread a corporate-media op-ed in a way that he'd pounce on if the roles were reversed.

MacLeod's target was a Washington Post piece by Max Boot, whose right-wing hackery has often been dissected by Daniel Larison among others.  "How," MacLeod thundered, "could anyone watch Squid Game and think 'the message of this is that the system is working well?'"

 

The article is paywalled, and even my university library account couldn't get me past it, but I was able to sneak a look at the first two paragraphs.  Boot acknowledges that Squid Game is a dystopian satire of unrestrained capitalism.  His point is not about the content of the series, but about the corporate machinery and international policies that made it available to US viewers. I suspect that MacLeod wasn't able to read the entire article either, but he doesn't even have the excuse that he failed to read past the headline, which states Boot's point explicitly; he just read sloppily, and wrote dishonestly.

 

That's not a defense of Max Boot.  Without being able to read the entire piece, I can't analyze his argument in any detail, but "free trade" is not what made Squid Game available in the US; not even "globalization."  The process of bringing a Korean TV drama to English-only US audiences doesn't seem to have involved "trade" at all: Netflix is an international corporation, so like much of what is called free trade, Squid Game was simply moved around within the company.  Promotions had to be repackaged and of course English subtitles had to be provided, but this is normal; Netflix must also subtitle its US products in Korean, for example, for audiences there.  Most Korean movies and TV dramas get English subtitles for DVD release, even or especially those with no US distribution deal.  There have been fan-driven organizations which subtitle TV dramas in English and other languages, including Asian languages for access throughout the continent.  Korean entertainment is very popular in China, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia. This process involves negotiating the complications of international copyright law -- remember that copyright, though defensible, is anti-free-trade -- and a huge company like Netflix has a taxpayer-supported advantage there.

 

As for "globalization," that's generally as much of a misnomer as "free trade."  Dividing the planet up and selling it off to huge corporations is something else, more like the Pope dividing the American mission field between the Spanish and the Portuguese.  Too many writers on the ostensible left forget this, often distorting the issue and letting the Right frame the discussion in a pre-emptive surrender.  We need to do better.  I just wonder if we can.

Most of the comments on MacLeod's tweet followed his mistake.  That's not entirely the commenters' fault, since MacLeod led them astray to begin with.  But that doesn't excuse the person who wrote that "The show literally proves that money is poison to friendship, just to name one of the things it has shown".  Fiction doesn't prove anything, certainly not "literally."  This has been a peeve of mine ever since I was assigned to write in high school English about how Silas Marner 'proved' that Good always triumphs over Evil.  (That commenter blocked me for pointing it out.)

 

MacLeod wasn't the only person who was confused, though.  Another commenter linked to a German media report on a labor demonstration in Seoul, in which union workers dressed as masked Squid Game employees: "They said they identified with the characters in the dystopian Netflix blockbuster."  So they identified with the executioners?  This is like anti-imperialist protesters dressing as Imperial Storm Troopers from Star Wars, and declaring that they identified with them.  Seriously, some hospitals bring in volunteers dressed as Imperial Storm Troopers to walk with children cancer patients when they go to chemotherapy: that's tone-deafness on a similar galaxy-brain level.

Then there were the Netflix executives who dressed in green Squid Game jumpsuits -- which are worn by the player-victims in the game -- for a Zoom call.  It's like Marie Antoinette and her court ladies dressing up as milkmaids, with whom they also no doubt "identified."  I know that many proles identify with the rich and brutal, from Donald Trump to Bill Gates and Elon Musk, which is part of the problem.  Maybe some in Squid Game's audience do identify with the executioners, who knows?  Americans, even progressives, don't want to identify with losers.  On the other hand, everybody -- no matter how rich and powerful -- loves to identify with victims.

Some apologists for capitalism did try to twist Squid Game's content into a condemnation of communism, but that's not what Max Boot did (this time, anyway).  MacLeod's rhetorical question, "How could anyone watch Squid Game and think 'the message of this is that the system is working well'?" has an easy answer: No one did.  At least, MacLeod hasn't shown me any.

You've Been Served: First World Problems, LGBT Activism Dept.

A couple of interesting and symptomatic passages from Dennis Altman's latest book Queer Wars: The New Global Polarization over Gay Rights (written with Jonathan Symons; Polity Press, 2016).

AIDS activism has often seemed inseparable from gay activism, and has contributed to the development of an emerging group of professional and skilled 'LGBT' activists, who have played crucial roles as brokers between communities and international institutions.  Moreover, the priorities of HIV activists, often well connected to an international movement such as the Global Future on MSM and HIV, have sometimes clashed with the needs of those for whom immediate survival is the major priority.  This is a not uncommon problem when well-intentioned activists seek to apply models developed elsewhere [46].

It's depressing that this is still a problem, decades after it was first identified.  I've been reading essentially the same diagnosis of cultural incomprehension by foreign activists since at least the 1980s, exemplified by the Mexican-born (but professionalized in the US) activist Hector Carrillo, who after only a few years away returned to Mexico totally clueless about the needs and hangups of the people he'd come to "help."  Outside of specifically gay or AIDS work the syndrome is far older.  In her 1901 novel Work: A Story of Experience, for example, Louisa May Alcott wrote about clueless "ladies" trying to organize "anxious seamstresses, type-setters, and shop-girls" in a manner that suggests that what she was describing was already a cliche -- and that was within American society, not on foreign shores.  Yet the "professional and skilled" activists are always taken by surprise, which indicates that something is badly wrong with their training.

The consequences can be worse than the embarrassment produced by patronizing ignorance, since as Altman and Symonds point out, there are countries where LGBT activism is highly dangerous for the locals, notably African countries whose governments reject "foreign" influence in the form of the gay movement, but not the equally foreign influence of Islamist and American Evangelical missionaries, let alone the weaponry and training of death squads that the American government has shared so generously around the world.

Writing of Namibia, Robert Lorway argues that the foreign-supported Rainbow Project 'not only inhibited important political possibilities, but sometimes also reinforced social inequalities'.  The emphasis of the project on law reform often seemed irrelevant to young and poor Namibians struggling to survive, while fascinated by a particular identity politics that threatened to alienate them from family and community [ibid.].

Don't these well-intentioned activists ever begin by educating themselves, by asking local workers what they need, and under what cultural and political constraints they must live and work?  For that matter, these American professionals tend to be ignorant of gay people's lives on the ground in their own country.   Professional and skilled they may be, but people skills seem to have been forgotten somewhere along the way, and that's a failure of basic competence.

I'm a bit suspicious about that passage on Namibia, though.  It treats the "young and poor Namibians" as if they were innocent, ignorant savages, just as those foreign activists thought they were: blank slates who need to be carefully taught.  It reminded me of the account of a South African workshop on "real gay" identity, described in the anthropologist Graeme Reid's How to Be a Real Gay, led by a local organizer (tainted, alas, by contact with activists in Johannesburg).  Reid was distressed that this workshop tried "to impose a standard norm on the myriad processes, performances, desires and identities that constituted gay life in the area of my fieldwork?" (Reid, page 154), but on his own account the participants, though not uncritical of the presentation, were fascinated by it.  A second workshop, on gays and the law in South Africa, was run not by a local but by professionals from Johannesburg, bored the queens and drove most of them outside.  That didn't mean they weren't interested in their legal status -- according to Reid, they brought questions with them -- only that the workshop was badly designed by people who didn't bother to learn how to communicate with non-professionals.  The conflict appears to me to be less about "East vs. West" culture clash and more about class, and to repeat, the problem lies in a basic failure of professional competence.

Still, in the West we've come to expect professionals to meet their clients at least halfway: to ask them what they need, and to listen to the answers; to try to explain without condescension what the professional has to offer.  This expectation too is a product of American activism in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically the Women's Health movement, and it's rooted not in professionals (though some professionals participated early on) but in grass-roots organizing by people who were tired of being pushed around and talked down to.  It's also a product of AIDS activism before the movement became professionalized.  That's a model that should be exported to the Third World, though it's probably already there; the Western-trained activists should respect and cooperate with it.

One more bit:

As one activist remarked of South Korea: 'Oppression is real and ubiquitous, yet invisible enough to make calls for advocating homosexuals' rights look "excessive" or "privileging"' [47].

I hope I don't need to point out that resisting oppression is always considered excessive by the oppressors, who regard any diminution or rearrangement of their status and power as an attempt to hang them all up from the lampposts, or at least to shoot a third of them.  Leaving aside the possible merits of such an approach, I've pointed out before that there's no reason South Korean or other Asian LGBT activists must model their movements on American precedents: they should take what they find useful, and leave the rest.  If a rights-based ideology and discourse aren't appropriate in a given country, that doesn't mean that gay people there have no recourse.  Every culture has its own traditions of justice and, yes, activism.  We in the West have often learned from them.  Yet even learned and experienced observers like Altman seem to have trouble recognizing that the influence has always gone both ways.

Planned Statehood

I just finished reading Building a More Resilient Haitian State, a Rand Corporation report that was published in the wake of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti. It is somewhat better than I expected it to be, since it acknowledges the destructive roles that both France and the US have played in Haitian history -- up until the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the Presidency in 1990, where it pretty much follows the US government line. But its analysis and recommendations seem fairly reasonable for the most part -- which doesn't mean I'd follow them if I were granted the power to decide what to do in Haiti, only that they're reasonable given US power and the constraints of politics.

Here's one thing that caught my attention, though. On page 73 the team writes:

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and the only country in the hemisphere formally designated a least-developed country by the World Bank. Alone among the states of the Western Hemisphere, per capita GDP in Haiti has fallen over the past 40 years to roughly one-half to two-thirds the level that it was in 1965. Not surprisingly, Haiti suffers from high rates of absolute poverty: Fifty-four percent of the population is estimated to live on less than $1 per day, and 72 percent on less than $2. Income is the most unequal in the hemisphere.

Then, on page 84, we get this:

The Haitian economy needs to enjoy a period of sustained, steady growth. Without such a period, Haitians will remain mired in poverty, with all of its attendant ills. To generate growth, Haiti will have to sustain macroeconomic stability, improve the environment for business, and capitalize on favorable treatment it has been granted by the international community. With the adoption of the HOPE II Act by the U.S. government, Haiti enjoys highly favorable access to the U.S. market for clothing. Some of Haiti’s best prospects for growth are to attract foreign and domestic investment to the garment industry. Haiti has too many people engaged in agriculture. The country is heavily populated, and more land is cultivated than is ecologically sustainable. In contrast, labor-intensive industries, such as garment manufacture, provide an attractive source of jobs and income, especially given Haiti’s competitive, low-cost labor force. However, to take advantage of the opportunities in labor-intensive exports, the Haitian government in conjunction with the international community, should implement the recommendations set forth in this section.

Notice the words I put into boldface. The reason why Haiti's labor force is competitive and low-cost is Haiti's terrible poverty, the worst in the Western hemisphere. As I've pointed out before, Haitian garment workers will only be "competitive" as long as they are poor. Once their wages go up -- as they must, because as apologists for global capitalism love to say, working in terrible conditions for a pittance is the best hope of the world's poor to escape poverty -- they will become much less attractive to foreign businesses, and even to domestic ones. What Haiti (or any other country in the same position) will do then is anyone's guess. But at the moment, Haitians still have a long way to go before they have to worry about being paid too much, even by the miserly standards of global capital.

More and Better Opposition Candidates!

From the Hankyoreh:

Merchants of a traditional market in Busan’s Saha District carry out a campaign to urge voting, Oct. 24, two days before the by-elections. They hold signboards reading, “You casting a vote is beautiful!!” “Make sure you urge others to vote!!” and “State your opinion through voting.”

An editorial from the Hankyoreh:

According to an analysis of social indicators released this past April by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), South Korea ranked dead last among the 34 member nations in its voter turnout for parliamentary elections. The 46% rate recorded for the 2008 general elections was roughly half the rates observed in the top three countries: 95% in Australia, 92% in Luxembourg, and 91% in Belgium. It was also far lower than the 70% average for member nations as a whole. Germany recorded a rate of 78%, Japan 67%, the United Kingdom 61%, and the United States 48%.

There is a tendency among South Koreans to view interest in politics as a sign of backwardness and to make it the target of cynical derision...

That's depressing; I thought Koreans had a better turnout than the US.

From another editorial, "KORUS FTA in conflict with the Constitution":

... The KORUS FTA implementation law passed by Congress contains only some of the provisions of the agreement. It contains only four amendments to U.S. law. Even these are trivial, procedural rule amendments necessary for trade, related to matters like tariffs and proof of country of origin; there is nothing that disturbs laws or systems, as in South Korea. Article 102 of the implementation law, moreover, clearly states that U.S. law takes priority in cases where it clashes with the KORUS FTA. This makes it explicit that U.S. policy will not be violated based on the agreement.

The government explains such imbalances in the treaty by saying that the U.S. legal system is different. This attitude is one that respects only the U.S.’s legislative sovereignty. The National Assembly must now eliminate unequal article in the KORUS FTA, just as Congress has done in the U.S.

This reminded me of something that has been bothering me, at first only obscurely, about a lot of what I've been reading by Americans about Free Trade Agreements. It's almost always about the effects of these agreements on Americans: "our jobs" being "shipped to other countries," that sort of thing. Even this sensible piece, which also mentions Colombia's awful human rights record:

The Korea FTA is the most economically significant since NAFTA, is projected to increase our trade deficit in key “jobs of the future” sectors such as computers, high speed trains and solar and result in the loss of an additional 159,000 U.S. jobs.

This is a perfectly valid concern, but it often leads to outright foolishness, trying to imply that the US is a pitiful helpless giant brought to its knees by hungry orientals who suck our economic lifeblood for their own enrichment. It's possible to talk about the harmful effects of FTAs on the American economy without ignoring their harmful effects on the US "trade partners."

As many people have pointed out, when we hear talk about dealings between "countries," what is meant is the ruling elites, not the overwhelming majority of citizens. The richest, most powerful people in the US, as in Korea, Panama and Colombia, will benefit greatly from the FTAs, which "have only a limited relation to free trade." Again:

I don't understand how people can talk about "free trade" with a straight face. Apart from the transparent violations of free trade built into the World Trade Organization rules-monopolistic pricing guarantees that go far beyond anything in economic history, for example-what does it mean for political entities that rely crucially on the dynamic state sector for economic development (like the US) to enter into "free trade agreements"?

The same goes for "globalization," which as we usually encounter it is a doctrinal term that refers only to a limited range of interaction among countries, instead of "international integration, economic and otherwise":

So, at some level, workers and companies agree: everyone favours globalization, in the technical sense of the word, not the doctrinal sense that has been appropriated by advocates of the investor-rights style of integration that is built into the so-called "free trade agreements," with their complex mixture of liberalization, protectionism, and undermining of popular democratic control over policy.

I wrote before that the trouble with "shipping jobs overseas" is that the jobs being shipped aren't replaced with more jobs here. It's certainly a mistake to write as though our captains of industry and finance were exporting jobs for the benefit of them foreigners over there; of course they aren't -- they're doing it to benefit themselves.

It should be remembered just how global the "anti-globalization" movement is: contrary to the caricature of the movement in the corporate media, the protests against the World Trade Organization include not only American college students and union members but people from all over the world. including workers and farmers from Asia who've suffered from "free trade" being imported to their countries. This, I think, should be the background if not the focus of criticism of FTAs: not an exclusive concern for those who will be hurt here, but with the recognition that people all over the world will be hurt by them.

We, We, We, All the Way Home

I've been meaning to write about this for some time. Then, just before the dorm closed for semester break, I noticed a student carrying around a copy of Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, edited by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV (New York: NYU Press, 2002). I asked him about it, and learned that he is a big fan of Cindy Patton (as am I), who contributed a paper to the collection. I hope to run into him again in January and ask him what he thought of it. I found it frustrating; like most such collections it was uneven. The tone was set by the editors' introduction, which began with the vacuous platitude "Queerness is now global." They then reported a small contretemps at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) conference on queer globalization at City University of New York in the spring of 1998 (pp. 3-4):

CLAGS's conference on queer globalization drew a wide array of queer activists and scholars specializing in Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, the United States, Canada, and queer diasporas. To a record-breaking audience, the speakers discussed the economic and cultural transformations brought on by global capital around the world and attempted to identify both opportunities and perils inherent in these transformations and their implications for queer cultures and lives. Yet nowhere were the perils of our present global condition more clearly signified than in a rather pregnant moment during the closing plenary of the conference. In the question and answer session, a well-meaning U.S. queer scholar of note stood up and narrated a vignette, a cautionary tale of sorts that urgently demanded a reply. He and a colleague had been strolling through the recently cleaned-up and renovated Bryant Park, across the street from what was then home to CUNY's Graduate Center, the site of the conference, when they were accosted by an ostensibly Latino man distributing literature about the liberating power of Jesus Christ. Self-possessed, the white scholar answered the Latino man that he and his friend were in fact gay and had no need for this literature. To the bafflement of the scholar, the Latino man replied that he had also been gay once until he had found the Lord. Now turning pointedly to the plenary speakers, the scholar demanded in earnest, How should I have spoken to this Latino man? How could I have made myself understood by him? How could "we" at this conference, well-meaning queer scholars like him, he seemed to imply, communicate effectively with this Latino (formerly gay) man?

There are a number of questions I wish I could pose to Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan, and even more to that "well-meaning U.S. queer scholar of note." Did the "ostensibly Latino" missionary's activity that day just possibly have anything to do with the hellmouth going on across the street, the conference center full of homosexuals full of need for the redeeming love of Christ? I'd be surprised if he was out there trolling for converts by sheer coincidence.

Aside from that, how does a homosexual grow up in the United States without having had to deal with religious nuts trying to save him? How does a homosexual academic achieve "note" without having spent some time teaching and having to deal with hostile students and fellow faculty, and having learned to answer them? The "well-meaning scholar" must also be aware of the existence of gay Christians and other religious believers, so his first riposte to the "ostensible" Latino's overtures was not especially clever. And what does the missionary's ethnicity have to do with anything, either for the scholar or for the conference, anyway?

Though I'm not an academic, living in a college town I've often had encounters with non-Latino (not even "ostensible" ones) Christian kids who go out witnessing as part of their involvement with campus Christian groups like Campus Crusade for Christ. (Every Wednesday night, after prayer meeting.) They aren't sent out unprepared, and it seems that part of the spiel they're taught includes the phrase "I used to be [insert condition here] like you, but then I was saved." I recall fondly one such kid who gulped nervously when he plugged "gay" into that sentence after learning I am gay. (On the other hand, such campus groups seem to get a disproportionate number of conflicted, frightened, queer young people, many of whom later come out.) I'd never take for granted that a missionary was telling the truth about anything, but again, what was the well-meaning queer scholar trying to prove by crying in the wilderness, "You see how These People are? What can I possibly say to Them?" (On the other hand, I'm stuck with the editors' account of this performance; to add to the fun, Manalansan told a slightly different version in his Global Divas [Duke, 2003], to which I'll return presently.)

At this point the three-day conference, which had progressed smoothly, came to a screeching halt. Our speakers had finally been stumped by one of the opportunities and perils of our present global condition: the complexity of contemporary cross-cultural interactions in our globalized world. They had finally been silenced by the white scholar's attempt to regain his sense of self-possession by wielding, in a destabilized, fluctuating world, what he thought of as a stable identificatory germ (gay) -- an attempt that faltered because the ostensibly Latino man (no longer the mythical "other" before the shining glass beads of European culture) could wield the same term (gay) with equal authority and impunity.

In other words, these fine anti-racist, anti-imperialist scholars had never, in their years of study in the US, ever encountered clueless or racist faculty, fellow students, or random citizens. As graduate student teaching assistants, they had never encountered stupid or provocative questions, and had never thought about how they might deal with them. So that a boring typical provocation like the one by Mr. White Guy could bring their conference to "a screeching halt"! If a senior faculty member makes a stupid racist remark in the hallway, a graduate student or junior faculty would probably not feel free to challenge it; but when you're on a panel at a conference, you have more freedom. Maybe the panelists were just too well socialized into American academic culture.

Or maybe not. As Manalansan tells the story in Global Divas, the panelists, who included "Geeta Patel, Norma Alarcon, Michael Warner, and Kobena Mercer," were "noncommittal." There's quite a difference between "noncommittal" and "stumped," let alone "brought to a screeching halt." Michael Warner looks pretty white to me; even if his colleagues were flummoxed, surely he could have taken on his fellow White Man. Perhaps their consternation was more of the "How do you keep walking around with nothing attached to your brain stem?" variety.

I think if I'd been on the panel for the closing plenary, I'd have asked the "well-meaning" (I think this word is meant to be sarcastic) queer scholar why he didn't just ask the ex-gay Jesus freak if he'd like to fool around a bit. (Ex-gays are notorious for not being very "ex" after all.) I don't follow the authors' claim that Mr. White Guy "faltered because the ostensibly Latino man ... could wield the same term (gay) with equal authority and impunity." It doesn't relate to what they say Mr. White Guy said, and it looks like projection to me. But if they're right after all, I can't help but wonder where Mr. White Guy has been for the past 30 years. The world I live in has plenty of ex-gays and Jesus freaks in it -- some of the Jesus freaks are gay, too! -- and they don't surprise me as they evidently surprise him.

In order to break the silence, the speakers could have redirected at this point the white scholar's question, forcing him (as Silviano Santiago, the Brazilian novelist, recommends queer scholars to do in his brief and incisive essay in the present volume) to engage with his own suppositions. In a room full of queers of color, we could have asked him not to presume that we were included in his well-meaning "we." We could have reminded him, that is, that the "other" was already in the room, and that the tendency to figure racial or ethnic difference as impermeable alterity was not so much a symptom of the other's radical difference as of its unsettling proximity.

Yes, "what do you mean 'we,' paleface?" strikes me as a useful response to Mr. White Guy, too. But they're wrong about Santiago's recommendation. His essay has some idiocies of its own (he seems to believe that the US gay movement does nothing but parade around in drag 365 days a year; see page 18), but he addresses the conference as "metropolitans" -- that is, he regards these well-meaning graduate students and faculty of color not as "we" with him, but as "you" or "them", part of the Imperialist Other. He graciously says that he won't invite them to engage with their own suppositions, because he's their guest. (Of course, that's a not-so-subtle way of telling them to do it anyway.) The authors (who are Latino and Filipino) take for granted they have no colonialist suppositions of their own -- upper-class in their home societies, students and later faculty at elite institutions in the US. When I read stuff like this, and I find a lot like it in the post-colonial things I've been reading the past several years, I always suspect that they have their own unresolved hangups to deal with. I sympathize, but their unexamined assumptions will distort the way they teach their students, and that is everybody's problem.

This anthology on queer globalizations is our insistent attempt not to answer the white scholar's query, deflecting thus his colonizing gaze. It is our ethical refusal to provide a grammar that could make the complexity and density of the cross-cultural interactions generated by our present global condition immediately transparent and universally legible. It is our refusal to fix the term "gay," and the powerful legacies of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movements, as a prerequisite for global interaction and coalition. For it is in the permutations of this term and its legacies, as they circulate around the globe, in queer organizations and gatherings, from Mexico City's Semana Cultural Lesbico-Gay to New Delhi's Campaign for Lesbian Rights and Beijing's International Women's Conference, from Buenos Aires's Marcha de Orgullo Gay to the diasporic South Asian and Latino Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade in Queens, New York, that the future of the human and civil rights of queers also lies.

Wow -- I am, like, totally deflected by the editors' courage in refusing "to fix the term 'gay'"! That refusal is of course standard operating procedure in white American queer theory, which means that they are adopting American models "as a prerequisite for global interaction and coalition." So does the claim that the "future of the human and civil rights of queers" also lies in a worldwide "gay" movement, a claim that attracts accusations of cultural imperialism when the wrong people make it. If anything, Manalansan and Cruz-Malavé are playing the same game as their well-meaning queer scholar of note: "What," they are asking rhetorically but with no detectable irony, "should we say to this ostensibly white queer scholar? You see how hopeless These People are?"

Of course, Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan don't have to say anything, to that scholar or to me; it's not their job to educate him or me. Some (many?) white American queer scholars aren't interested. I am interested, though, and I'll go on listening, trying to educate myself. But it seems to me that this sort of grandstanding is a waste of time, when there's so much to be done and learned.