Zombie Liberalism

Last night I watched the 2016 Korean film Train To Busan, newly out on video.  I'm not a fan of horror movies, let alone zombie movies, but I've seen my share of each type, and this one made an impression on me.  Though it wasn't intended to be, it worked as an allegory of Trump's America.  (But don't worry, it's primarily a fast-moving action film; I'm just imposing my post-modernist, deconstructionist mindset on it.)

So someone I know liked a post on Facebook, and it showed up in my feed.  The writer is a woman of color; her post in full:

I'm so sick of de no slut shaming Melania shit Michelle Obama had to have degrees many of them let's face it if she were a model or an escort or a hooker or sex worker or gold digger or whatever it would never have happened nada nothing no Obama Black Presidency-zilcho. Anyway I saw Hidden Figures tonight and I'm feeling empowered ????

Bigots are always "so sick of" being told not to bigot.  If you have any exposure to right-wing opinions, you've seen the same complaint from them many times.  If this is an example of the "empowerment" that comes from seeing Hidden Figures, then Cthulhu help us.  (I haven't yet seen Hidden Figures, but I read the book, and it's excellent.)  And it's far from the only example I've seen in the past week from liberals justifying behavior they attacked, rightly, when Republicans indulged in it.  But now they invoke Republicans as role models, and they're imitating them very well.  I can hardly tell the difference; only the names of the guilty have been changed.

Someone else responded to my criticism on this point:

You can criticize my guy all day because regardless of your opinion about how the country is run, the results can be quantified. The same can't be said about asking when an 11 year old is going to get her first abortion. If that make me a hypocrite, well, Hi, Hypocrite, party of 1.

That was exactly what I'd said.  You can, and should, criticize and attack Trump on his policies and behavior -- it's not as if he hasn't given potential critics plenty of fodder for criticism -- without slut-shaming, fat-shaming, being racist, being misogynist, etc.  It's not really that difficult.  Plenty of people have done so, from ordinary citizens to published writers.  That many liberals and self-styled progressives prefer to fall back on these old reliables says a lot about how deep their principles go.

Now, I don't know this latter person, so she may be an exception, but in general I have not found that liberals are okay with criticism of their guy on his policies -- very much the opposite.  This may be partly because they're as ignorant of their guy's policies as any Tea Party Republican.  The best that can be said is that they are really comfortable with abusive personal attacks on their guy and his family, because they know how to react to those: Oh, how can you say such awful things? You're a terrible person, etc., followed by abusive personal attacks in kind.  Like their right-wing opponents, they're on comfortable ground here because it requires no knowledge, no ability to construct an argument, just ragegasms.  Confronted with principled criticism of their guy from the left, they are helpless, assume the critic is a Republican, and fall back on what they know best, namely personal attacks.  As I said of the right after Obama's election, personal attacks are the best they have to offer.

Ironically, this stuff is proliferating just a few days after Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  Many of the same people who piously celebrated King's legacy are now pissing on it. (Well, they have a good role model for that in President Obama, after all.)  It's perfectly legitimate to reject King's legacy, of course, to repudiate his methods and style; but paying lip service to him while behaving in exactly opposite ways is not.  (I can imagine people replying that King lived in a different era, and faced different obstacles and dangers.  That's true: the America he lived in was even more dangerous for people of color than the one we live in now.  Yet King took the high road, instead of wallowing in pigshit with the White Citizens' Councils.)

The word "unprecedented" turns up a lot in liberal discourse about Trump.  I'm not so sure of that myself, but what I want to point out is that the same word was common coin in Bush and Obama's War on Terror: We face an unprecedented enemy, so we cannot be bound by outdated scruples and limits on our conduct of this war.  This trope was used to justify torture and other crimes against humanity, though of course the US was never really constrained by those supposed scruples and limits before anyway.  It seems to me that invoking "unprecedented" with regard to Trump has a similar function: to excuse and justify unethical, irrational, dishonest speech and behavior by his liberal opponents.  I would have thought, when I was younger and more naive, that if you face an unprecedented threat, the proper and natural response would be to think carefully and rationally rather than to panic and resort to abusive, destructive methods from the past.  Now I know better.

I was impressed by the international women's marches that took place around the world this weekend, but I wonder what will come of them.  So does Ian Welsh, who wrote today:

Trump doesn’t need to be popular with everyone. It doesn’t matter that the women’s march produced more people than his inauguration, despite his squealing about it: it is irrelevant because those people couldn’t produce enough people in the right states to with the election AND, as with previous great protests, nothing appears to have been built on top of the protests. It’s nice they all showed up, but they aren’t being asked (and organized) to do things that matter in the future, for all the talk of “the resistance”. If you wanted power, you’d want to be able to get one-fifth that crowd to show up when needed to oppose specific bills and actions by Congress, for example.

Mass demonstrations are useful for producing a feeling of community, that one is not alone, and they can be used to build organization.  But they're also old-fashioned, reflexive responses -- basically, they are religious revivals -- and if Trump is an unprecedented threat, shouldn't people be coming up with unprecedented tactics and strategies to fight him?  I've become skeptical of the actual usefulness of such demonstrations since I saw how ineffective the South Korean candlelight vigils were in stopping the corrupt neoliberal regime of then-President Lee Myung-bak several years ago.  And that was in a society with plenty of organizations at all levels, where the mass protests really represented groups that could worked after the protests were over.  Vigils on the same breathtaking scale have taken place to call for the removal of current President Park Geun-hye, whose corruption and lawbreaking have been even more egregious than Lee's.  It remains to be seen if the prosecutors will be able to follow through.

For example, how's the abolition of the Electoral College coming along?  A few weeks ago liberal Democrats were up in arms about it, but I haven't heard much lately.  The last I saw on Facebook was a political cartoon of the Founders deciding to set up the EC in order to prevent a "fucking moron" from becoming President; the person who shared it thought it was very clever, though they apparently overlooked the small detail that by their standards, the Electoral College had just put a "fucking moron" in the White House.  I don't blame people for having short attention spans, or for lacking the stamina for hard, day-to-day political work; that's me to a T.  But the posturing and strutting, the waving around of words like "Revolution" and "Resistance" by people who think that wearing pink "pussy hats" for a day in Washington DC is a revolutionary act, doesn't make me feel hopeful.

Heaven for Me, But Not for Thee

I don't get it:

If there is one thing many fundamentalist Christians are known for, it is their blatant hypocrisy. I have heard liberal Christians and even some moderates say that they believe virtually everyone will go to some sort of heaven as long as they are not terrible people who commit serious crimes.

Not so for the fundamentalists. For them, the only path to heaven is through Jesus. Like the woman in the cartoon, they are quick to condemn all other religions as false while generally refusing to critically examine their own.

This makes no sense at all, because it mixes two different complaints together incoherently. First there's the claim that fundamentalists, but not liberals, condemn the beliefs of others "while generally refusing to critically examine their own." I don't agree -- in my experience and observation, liberal and moderate Christians just draw the line in a different place than fundamentalists do. David Fergusson, for example, dislikes fundamentalists as much as Atheist Revolution does, but he sees "faith" as a phenomenon beyond question, and chides militant atheists for being so harsh and negative and disrespectful. Even among fundamentalists there are degrees of strictness; at my job I used to overhear ladies from the Church of the Nazarene saying complacently that they weren't as strict as the "Pentycosts." And it was true: Nazarenes' hemlines were an inch or two shorter than Pentecostals', they were allowed to cut their hair, they could have a TV in the house to watch Christian broadcasting. Anything more would be going too far.

The second complaint is that fundamentalists are so extreme: liberals and moderates will let almost anybody into heaven, but fundamentalists require proper credentials. There's nothing hypocritical about this. The real trouble is that nobody knows what the criteria for heaven are. Maybe the liberals are right, maybe the fundamentalists are, maybe they're all wrong, but it's not up to them to decide. If heaven and hell existed, then it would be important to know just what the entrance requirements are, not to brush the question aside with platitudes. It won't be settled by halving the difference between the extremes and sitting down in the middle.

It would also, according to the principle of critical examination, be appropriate to ask whether it can be right or just to condemn anybody, no matter how terrible his or her crimes, to eternal punishment. How many people are you allowed to kill before you deserve Hell? How much pork can you eat, how many illicit sexual partners are you allowed, how short a skirt can you wear, how many lies can you tell? Can you be a 'terrible person' in your heart even if you don't commit any serious crimes, so that being terrible is by itself enough to consign you to the flames that are not quenched? What end is served by eternal torture anyway? This is not a trivial question in a country where literal torture is used by my government to "defend" me. It works in both directions: if some people deserve to be tortured forever in the afterlife for being "terrible," then a little waterboarding and electroshock in this life is not a big deal by comparison; if there are people who deserve to be tortured (and some prominent atheists are not willing to condemn the practice absolutely), then belief in eternal damnation is not an evil belief even if, in fact, Hell doesn't exist.

Maybe the idea is that I'm supposed to feel grateful when a liberal Christian allows that I'm a good person in her eyes, so I won't go to hell? No doubt their tolerance speaks well for them, but I'm an atheist, so hell is rather low on my list of worries. I don't see them as a different breed than fundamentalists; they remind me of the Cossacks who, because they respected Leon Trotsky, denied that he was a Jew: "He's one of us!" Being assured that I am so fit to eat with the hogs does not win me over. I've noticed that a lot of people enjoy working themselves into a snit because some Bad Christian believes that they will go to hell. Not, it seems, because they think that nobody should go to hell, but because they think that they shouldn't. (Not me! Julia!) And those who say they like Christ but not Christians need to explain why Jesus, who according the gospels was pretty free with threats of damnation, is preferable to a fundamentalist in this respect.

One important question is being begged here too: the Atheist Revolutionist seems to assume that atheists, or maybe most atheists, are people who stopped believing in gods because they subjected their beliefs to critical examination, and they continue to do so. Not from what I see. We atheists have our own traditions, our exalted if not sacred writers and scriptures, which, especially on first encounter, we tend to take on trust (which is one of the meanings of "faith"). That's why so many bad arguments and misinformation circulate in atheist writings and oral lore. The advent of soundbyte atheism is not, in this light, a positive development as far as I'm concerned.

In his 1958 Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Harper & Brothers), Walter Kaufmann wrote a dialogue between Satan and a Christian, which concluded (chapter 59):

Christian: You always harp on hell.

Satan: There is no place like home. And you might as well get used to the idea: haven't you been told that I enjoy the company of those who cannot answer me any better than you?

Christian: But I don't understand at all. Only hysterics think of going to hell themselves.

Satan: I know: good Christians consider hell a place for others. But don't you realize that if you are right about everything, you, and those like you, are undoubtedly headed for hell? Don't you see how immeasurably you stand to gain if Christianity is untenable? It is I that bring you glad tidings. Believe me and you are saved. That God exists, that is a ritual phrase, charged with emotion and a thousand connotations: some sheer superstition, some myths, some true, some false, and most of them vague. But here is the truth that shall make you free: I do not exist.

Christian: If Satan does not exist, I must have dreamed. So I can go on believing what I have always believed. But what exactly do I believe? That is the question.

See you in Hell, folks!

Hoist with Her Own Petard

This gem by Andrew Sullivan by way of Homo Superior:

Where there is Christianism, there is usually hypocrisy, corruption and abuse. From Haggard to Maciel, from the Vatican to the Swaggarts, from Rove to Limbaugh, the sheer gulf between their public moralism and their private failings is vast. That's because they're human; and they deserve compassion and understanding, the compassion and understanding they always, always deny to others.

This caps a link to a story about a reactionary, bigoted Irish politician, Iris Robinson, who had an affair with a 19-year-old boy she'd known since he was 9. She is around forty years older than he is. To add to the fun, Robinson funneled money to her boy toy from local developers to fund a business he wanted to start, and got a 5,000 pound kickback into the bargain. As Sullivan wrote, such behavior is only to be expected from someone of Robinson's opinions, and not because they're "Christianist," but because they're human. I'd say that hypocrisy and corruption will turn up anywhere there are human beings, and in a weird sort of swerve, Sullivan even concedes as much. But the way he sets up this paragraph, it's clear he thinks that "Christianists" are especially prone to it. I think it's just more fun to make fun of them when they get themselves into trouble.

But two things occurred to me. One is that Sullivan could just as easily have included his own name in his list of Christianist malfeasants. Back in 2001, queer gossip writer Michelangelo Signorile attacked Sullivan for advertising for bareback sex on the Web. Sullivan used the term "power glutes" to describe his own mighty haunches. (At around the same time, Signorile was getting mileage out of his own adventures without condoms, flagellating himself for his lapse -- these Catholic boys! -- but also attacking the gay community for somehow making him do it.) It's often hard to keep up with Sullivan's changes of mind -- he reinvents himself as fast as David Bowie -- but he'd become notorious in the first place as a gay Catholic moralist who scolded other gay men for their tomcatting, and advocated same-sex marriage on the ground that it would civilize us. Somewhere along the line, though, he got into leather, testosterone injections, cruising, and other fun stuff, and decided to keep touting marriage while enjoying what we laughingly call the benefits of gay men's culture. So, of course, when the news broke, Sullivan whined about other people's "Sexual McCarthyism." Eight years on, even his fans equate "power-glutes" with Sullivan, not least because he keeps the phrase alive himself.

Second, I read Virtually Normal and have read stray bits of Sullivan's writing over the years, and I can't remember ever seeing him exhibit any compassion for or understanding of anyone. If he changed his mind on gay men's sexual culture, it wasn't because he began to empathize with men who inhabit a different world than he, it was because he moved into it and adopted its customs and language himself. Similarly, as David Talbot wrote at Salon in October 2001, after George W. Bush took office and the 9/11 attacks made frothing superpatriotism the hysteria du jour, Sullivan lashed out at anyone who didn't meet his standards of (what else can you call it?) Political Correctness. Four years later he was still at it. At some point he changed course again, and wrote an essay condemning torture that even I find difficult to fault, but that's another of Sullivan's distinguishing traits: he reacts first to any problem with reactionary ideology, condemning "the left" with gleeful self-righteousness, then does a little thinking and crabwalks to a more sensible position -- but without, as far as I've seen, ever conceding that the leftists he used to condemn were there first. This makes him an effective media brand, a gay Catholic Limbaugh, but it doesn't make him much of a thinker.

(Red Velvet Jesus from -- or via -- The Gay Librarian)