The Race Is Not To The Swift

A few days ago I wrote "White supremacists have historically regarded everyone who isn't 'white' as 'black,' and the N-word has been flung at people of many backgrounds."  I was a bit vague because although I knew I'd seen it, I didn't have any examples to hand.

The next day I began reading Ruined City, a 1938 novel by Nevil Shute, who's best known nowadays for his 1957 post-nuclear war novel On the Beach.  Ruined City is about a successful English banker named David Warren whose life is derailed when he learns that his wife has been having an affair with an Arab prince.  Everyone refers to the prince as "black," including Warren, who in a fit of anger drops an N-bomb but then corrects himself.  "In that he was unjust, and he knew it; among the six or seven strains that went to make Prince Ali there was no negro blood."  That's actually funny - as if it wouldn't be unjust if Ali did have "negro blood" - but I don't think Shute meant it to be.

This terminology is, I believe, more common in British writing than in American, and it's why it's often difficult to tell which race/ethnicity a character is meant to be - for example, Othello - because the writers are sloppy and don't care.  The scientifically-minded Shute (he was an aeronautical engineer and several of his novels deal with flying machines) cared enough to be exact in his labeling, but that led to comedy, as it still does.  (Are "Hispanics" a "race"?  Are Sunni and Shi'a Muslims "ethnicities"?)  Most scientists in Shute's heyday held beliefs about race/ethnicity (and sex/gender) that are considered embarrassing today, but they are still with us in slightly different forms. 

Although many people, and I include scientists here, are desperate to preserve race as a valid category, I've yet to see any persuasive case made to do that.  I can't find the public-radio program that touted BiDil, a handsomely-funded drug for heart failure that claimed to be more effective for "patients who identify as black."  It was boosted even before the FDA approved it in 2005, but it bombed, for several reasons. One, it was overpriced, and since it was just a combination of already existing generics, insurance companies substituted the generics.  Two, "in every study, however, the amount of variation within each racial group was far larger than the differences between the between the groups ... As a result, 80 to 95 percent of all black and white patients will likely have indistinguishable responses to each medication.  Although racial differences might exist, they are irrelevant for the majority of patients" (167).  "Whatever the causes of its failure, NitroMed laid off most of its workforce and stopped marketing BiDil in January 2008 [165]."

Despite this, BiDil continues to be touted as a road not taken, if only in principle; GoodRx, the drug discount site, still recommended it as late as 2023.  "Some Doctors Want to Change How Race Is Used in Medicine," this NPR podcast reported in 2022, surprised that some doctors don't want to change, because they believe that there are black kidneys and white kidneys.  It's tempting, and comfortable for many people, to see racism as a problem only among ignorant hillbillies, but that notion doesn't stand up to scrutiny.  Many highly-educated people, not all of them white, won't give up their belief in racial difference until you pry it from their cold, dead hands; and even then, a new generation takes it up.

I don't object to treating "race" as a scientific category because of "political correctness," or even from scientific correctness, though it has been debunked enough times that if you believe in Science you shouldn't rely on it.  What I want to know is how it's a useful category, and by "useful" I don't mean "useful for making a billion dollars by repackaging existing generics."  I mean something like what bearing it has on any issue of scientific significance.  (See the quotations from Noam Chomsky in this post.)  What I've seen so far is a complacent assumption that it must be significant somehow, even if no one has any idea what or how.

* David Jones, "The Prospects of Personalized Medicine," in Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense, ed. Sheldon Krimsky & Jeremy Gruber (Harvard, 2013), p. 163.  Future page numbers refer to this article. 

Let's Go, Bunnies!

I've complained before about the quality of public discussion, and I'm going to try to go a little deeper this time.

The historian Seth Cotlar linked to this article about a 1959 controversy inspired by a children's book, The Rabbits' Wedding by Garth Williams. (The article is paywalled, but as a subscriber Cotlar could share it on Twitter.  If the link from here doesn't work, try clicking through to his tweet.)  Williams is most famous as the illustrator of E. B. White's Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, the Little House on the Prairie books and many others; but he also wrote the text for The Rabbits' Wedding. The book is out of print, shamefully enough, but maybe the article will spur enough interest for a reissue.

According to the article, The Rabbits' Wedding is about a black rabbit and a white rabbit who meet, fall in love, and marry.  Unsurprisingly, the White Citizens' Council organized a nationwide campaign against the book, trying to get it removed from libraries in Alabama, which (just as unsurprisingly) boosted its sales.  The author played coy:

Williams’s wide-eyed innocence mimicked that of his rabbit characters: “I was completely unaware that animals with white fur, such as white polar bears and white dogs and white rabbits, were considered blood relations of white human beings. I was only aware that a white horse next to a black horse looks very picturesque.” He averred that his motivations were innocuous, just craft and thrift: A black-and-white book, with occasional pops of yellow, would cut production costs.

His biographers told the Times

that the artist was gregarious, well connected and vaguely progressive, but no activist. “His first response to attacks on ‘The Rabbits’ Wedding’ is ‘I’m just an artist,’” James Wallace noted. He added that Williams also said he “hopes children enjoy the book and that the voices of hate will never overcome the kind of togetherness ‘The Rabbits’ Wedding’ represents.”

"No activist" and "vaguely progressive" is praising him with faint damns.  "Just an artist" reminds me of the Noble Engineer Robert Heinlein, who liked to claim that he was just an entertainer, a hard-working hack who wrote for money, and that art shouldn't contain a Message - when he wasn't feuding with his publisher to keep the militarist and rugged-individualist messages he'd put into his juvenile SF novels.  He had, he insisted, a right and a duty to educate the young. (He was also anti-racist in his way, so I imagine he would have sided with Williams if he heard about this controversy.)  As the SF writer and critic Joanna Russ wrote, "it seems absolutely impossible to write anything without immediately making all sorts of assumptions about what human nature is, what good and bad behavior consists of, what men ought to be, what women ought to be, which states of mind and character are valuable, which are the opposite, and so on."  Just about everybody who says art should be message-free soon shows that they don't mean it; their messages aren't really messages at all, just Common Sense.  And to be fair to Garth Williams, he initially reacted by "rage-writing a 30-page response to criticism of his picture book," before "settl[ing] on the high road in a statement" to the effect that we should all love each other.

In the climate of late 1950s America, taking the high road was probably a smart move.  Anyway, opinion pieces fought the battle for The Rabbits' Wedding openly and enthusiastically.  But that was then and this is now, and what unsettles me just a wee bit about the article and Cotlar's commentary is that it feels disingenuous.

One commenter on Cotlar's tweet said it out loud: "It was an innocent child's book. They saw what they wanted to see. The hatred that they harbored distorted everything. Unfortunately, that still hasn't changed." This is an example of doublethink that would qualify for the 1984 Hall of Fame. Of course the book was "innocent," whatever that much-abused word means. "(Decades later, Williams would dryly remark, 'I didn’t say that they went to bed together.')"  Children's publishers especially were always hypervigilant about the content of their products, so it's not plausible that they didn't know that they were publishing an allegory about "interracial" love and marriage. (That hypervigilance makes it all the more revealing about the kind of content that they allowed, such as the racism in some of Dr. Seuss's children's books.)  The racists who attacked the book didn't just imagine it: The Rabbits' Wedding was a slap at their beliefs and values, and that was a noble and proper gesture, then and now.  Why pretend otherwise, especially now?

"Innocent" in this context presumably means an absence of explicit sexual content. Think of the critic Joan Acocella, who wants more than anything else to believe that Willa Cather was "innocent," meaning that she died a virgin.  Or the online movie reviewer who wrote a few years ago about Disney's The Fox and the Hound 2 that

In these post-Brokeback Mountain days, it is hard to see Copper and Tod's friendship—their playful wrestling, their longing looks at one another, their efforts to create satisfying relationships with other characters to substitute for their inability to be together—in a completely innocent fashion. But that is neither here nor there.” Is it? Pinsky was saying that because of Ang Lee’s successful film, he could no longer see the frolicking of two talking animals in a children’s animated cartoon as “completely innocent.”

The racists who called The Rabbits' Wedding "salacious" weren't the only ones who saw what their personal obsessions drove them to see. Considering that some adults today are adamant that a marriage is "innocent" -- meaning no exchange of bodily fluids, even in theory -- sexuality clearly makes them uneasy.  I'm reminded of an exchange in the IU student newspaper a couple of decades ago: they published a letter from a bigot fulminating about sodomy, and then a reply from a young woman who cried, "My gay friends would never do something like that!" I've always wondered how she reacted when she learned that in fact they do. Attempts to stir up antigay revulsion by describing our disgusting sexual practices continued into this century, as did indignant denials that respectable Homo-Americans would do such things. And at least one compassionate Christian divine prefers the word "homosexual" to "gay" because the former word "has the advantage of speaking with sharp particularity to the actual issue at stake", probably meaning buttsex.

There's a lot less anxiety around "interracial" relationships than there was sixty years ago, but it hasn't died out altogether. I was surprised by how much it was in evidence in a famously liberal and diverse city like San Francisco. (Which is not to say that all San Franciscans are racist, only that I found more racism than I expected.)  People may talk blithely about color-blindness and not judging others by the color of their skin, but actual differences are another matter.  The same goes for straight liberals (usually male) who are fierce supporters of gay marriage but are pruriently horrified by sodomy.

This curious inability, in 2023, to face the brute reality of controversies found a recent echo when a high school in Howard City, Michigan required two students to remove sweatshirts bearing the motto "Let's Go, Brandon."  Their mother filed suit in support of their First Amendment rights.  For those lucky enough not to know, "Let's Go Brandon" become a "not-so-secret handshake" among MAGA Republicans after a reporter misheard NASCAR fans at Talladega chanting "Fuck Joe Biden."  As a secret, it's on a par with "420," but I suppose that's part of the appeal.  The ACLU and FIRE are on the kids' side, and rightly so.  I might say more about that in another post, but I mention in this one because this time the Right is taking the position of The Rabbits' Wedding's partisans - Hahaha, it's just an innocent allegory! -- and the liberals are fuming that though seemingly clean, the sweatshirts are "salacious"! Think of the innocent children being led astray, their minds polluted by filth! 

I think a better response to "Let's Go Brandon" is to congratulate the MAGA in question for supporting Chicago's new mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, a progressive black Democrat of the type that makes right-wingers foam at the mouth.  The real question ought to be how people in a free society should respond to deliberately provocative expressions, whether they be children's books or t-shirts, and I'll try to take that up soon.

What's Sauce for the Right Is Sauce for the Left

I found this tweet in Alan MacLeod's Twitter feed, and while I'm trying to be fair, I can't see any excuse for it.  By juxtaposing two images and an older tweet from another source, it aims for plausible deniability, but I think it misses the mark.

At first blush it's bluntly racist: the claims of the Wall Street Journal commentator (behind a paywall, sorry) can be evaluated by his name and ancestry.  Ditto for the person referenced in "Jane's" tweet below the images, though I confess her mockery of her target's name is mildly witty.  Remember when an American right-winger could say that you could tell that Obama is a terrorist because of his name, and we all jeered?  Remember American right-wingers' giggling that FDR's real name was Rosenfeld, nudge nudge wink wink?  But that was different.

Some of the commenters showed that Barents-Von Hohenhagen is a thoroughgoing right-winger, but he could be that while possessing black hair, olive skin, brown eyes, and a name like Guaidó or Bolsonaro or Fujimori.  What counts is his stance and his arguments, which appear to be standard corporate-media alarmism.  It also appears that he and his family have longstanding ties to right-wing circles in Germany.  I believe the local library carries the Journal, I might take a look at the piece when the library re-opens after its holiday break.

The same goes for Blanca von Buren Green, the other blond whom Jane mocked.  It's true that the great majority of Venezuelans are poor, usually brown people, and that many of the right-wing Venezuelan opposition are blond and blue-eyed.  But as the example of Juan Guaidó shows, many of them aren't.  What counts is their politics, which are determined by history, not by their "race."  So yeah, at second blush, this stuff is bluntly racist.

It's the accompanying photo of Chilean President-elect Gabriel Boric that threw me a bit off-balance.  I wondered if "Ewan" meant to contrast his dark, even swarthy appearance with Barents-Von Hohenhagen's name, as a badge of Chilean authenticity.  I remembered reading that he's Croatian by ancestry, and I was right.  According to his Wikipedia entry, his forebears arrived in Chile in the late 1800s, but they and he retain ties to relatives in Croatia to this day. He's leftish enough to give the far right conniptions (no great accomplishment), but he's no Chavez or Morales.  But y'know, he looks like he could be Chilean, as indeed he is. I doubt that Ewan or Jane or their granfalloon would defend him if he couldn't pass as non-white, at least to their eyes.  I can't say for sure, though, because the matter didn't turn up in the comments.

What Boric will actually do as President will have to be seen.  Maybe if he disappoints foreign leftists like Jane and Ewan, they'll start dragging up his Croatian ancestry to explain it.  They knew all along he wasn't really Third World.

What generally is overlooked in discourse at this low level is that colonialism in the Americas didn't begin with the US.  It began with Spain and to a lesser extent Portugal.  It's entertaining when Spanish-speaking creoles complain that they're colonized by the Yankees, but it must never be forgotten that they are colonizers themselves. (They're like colonial North American slaveholders who complained that the British Crown was enslaving them!)  The rise of indigenous movements in Latin America, exemplified by Chavez, Morales, and Castillo among others, are a reminder of this, and I'm a bit mystified by how often the US left forgets it.  But then, we have a rather limited range of attention; I'm not sure I'll ever get over how US progressives ignored the South Korean candlelight marches of a dozen years ago, even though that movement should have been on their radar.  The massive grassroots movement that led to the fall of then-President Park Geun-hye in 2017 got somewhat more attention here, but the US left still seemed not to recognize its significance.

I'm most concerned right now with the left's racialization of these issues.  People who freely deplore Trumpian deplorables still make inadvertently hilarious assumptions about religion and culture -- that the Bible was written by "white guys," for example; that there's something funny about a white female Zen master in the US; that a toxic-masculine Afro-Caribbean god is a model that white Christians should learn from; or that Muslims aren't white.  The specifics of the racism differ, but the errors that drive it stay the same.

Is the Gaze White?

Rush Limbaugh has assumed room temperature.  For years I've looked forward to using that term on his decease; it was one he used to be dismissive of the deaths of people he disapproved of.  (I learned while looking it up that it was also used by R. Emmett Tyrrell, another cigar-sucking, arch-rightist provocateur.)  I considered writing more on the topic, and maybe I will later.

But for now I want to discuss another media personality, generally regarded as a sort of anti-Limbaugh.  Dick Cavett became well-known as a more cultured, intellectual kind of talk-show host years before Limbaugh won notoriety. I watched his show in those days, and while I appreciated the range of people it featured, I was usually left unsatisfied.  I think some of this was due to the limits of spoken versus written discourse, but I also think it was due to Cavett's limitations.

This video, from 1972, confirmed my suspicions.

Jones is tremendously tactful with Cavett, resulting in a sort of jujitsu where Cavett keeps throwing himself in the dirt.  He knows that the conversation isn't going as he expected it to, but he keeps wading into the fray and falling on his face over and over.  Cavett saw himself as a liberal, superior to gross rednecks like Lester Maddox, but like many white liberals he assumed a chumminess with black people that he hadn't earned.  He fully expected Jones to agree with him that Ellen Holly's objections to Anthony Quinn's proposal to play a Haitian were merely "silly."  It's a safe bet that Cavett caricatured her letter, as liberals love to do to this day, but I should see if I can find it.  It doesn't appear that Quinn ever made that film in any case.

Anyway, Jones declines Cavett's invitation to play a round of "Ain't It Awful?", and throws several curveballs that leave Cavett confused.  He keeps insisting on nuance, for heaven's sake!  He might have pointed out -- he seems to hint at it, at least -- that a Hollywood historical epic costs a lot of money, and in 1972 there were few if any black stars that bankable.  Sidney Poitier, perhaps?  It's also hard for me to believe that a Hollywood script about a Haitian emperor in 1972 would have been any good at all; I wonder if Holly's script was ever produced.

Jones also mentions his own desire to play Beethoven, which gets a nervous laugh from the audience and silence from Cavett.  The points Jones mentions wouldn't be such obstacles: his hair (a wig could fix that), and as for his skin color, we now have a hit Broadway play, Hamilton, which plays with such casting issues very freely.  After that Cavett returns to insulting Ellen Holly, which Jones brushes aside more firmly.  I wonder if Cavett could watch this clip now without cringing.

He hadn't learned any better by 1985, when this interview with Richard Pryor aired.

It's the same damn thing all over again.  Pryor just sits there, staring steadily at Cavett, until the latter realizes how nonsensical he sounds; then tries again and again, he just won't let it go.  It's not just the question he's asking -- can white writers write for black performers? -- but the larger assumption that white people can expect to define black people in the arts and elsewhere.  Borrowing Laura Mulvey's speculations about the male gaze in film, the audience for Hollywood films -- which, remember, not only played to non-white customers in the multiracial US but were marketed around the world -- was assumed to be white.  In these clips, Dick Cavett finds black people gazing back at him, and he finds it very disorienting.

We've come a long way since then, though we haven't arrived.  I'm not sure what the ideal should be, but for me it includes a variety of Mulveyan gazes, with women looking back at men, people of color looking back at whites, and the rest of the world looking back at the United States - but also looking at themselves, unconcerned about how they might look to men, whites, America.  There's nothing wrong per se with the male gaze, the white gaze, the USAn gaze, only with the assumption that any of these is objective and should be the norm.

Send in the Drones

There have been several more killings of black people by police since the police murder of George Floyd, and I think the only reasonable conclusion is that these attacks are displays of defiance.  The police are letting us all know that criticism just makes them madder: they will continue to execute black Americans.

I've been seeing more online complaints from people who have police officers in their lives - spouses, partners, family members - who, they say, are good people sincerely dedicated to serving and protecting all citizens.  They may well be telling the truth, but if so they're talking to the wrong people. They should be angry at the supposed bad apples, the insular, violent police culture that kills without feeling anything.  Their loved ones in uniform should also be speaking out, though admittedly that would be more dangerous for them.  As bad as stereotyping is, killing innocent people -- declaring oneself the judge, jury and executioner -- is much worse, a deadly serious problem that Americans have known about for a long time but not tried to correct.

The same is probably true of the lesser racist incidents that we're hearing about.  The people who are behaving like this know what they're doing, they know it will be widely disapproved, but they do it anyway.  Remember when Ben Carson got in trouble for comparing homosexuality to bestiality and child molestation: I noticed then that bigots always get in trouble for saying such things, but they keep on saying them.  I suggested that it may be some strange compulsion, but I think it's also entitlement.

A day ago, someone posted this on a local Facebook group, including a pretty picture of a lake surrounded by mountains for some reason:

After reading some exchanges between people I knew from my hometown a long time ago, I struggled with how to respond. Then I also saw positive signs, and this came to me:

During these times of uncertainty, conflict, and diverging perspectives, a heartfelt Thank You:
To those who are listening more than talking (or shouting).
To those who acknowledge with peace that there are perspectives other than our own.
To those who understand that history cannot be changed,
and to those who understand that history must be reckoned with,
and that history is much more about people than it is about dates.
To those who can disagree without denigrating or dehumanizing those with whom we disagree.
To those who understand that strength is not always found in force or violence.
To those who can begin a sentence with, “I could be wrong…” and mean it.
To those on “the left” who seek common ground with those on “the right” for a greater good, and to those on “the right” who still see the humanity in those on “the left” for a greater good. And vice versa.
To those whose minds are open enough to understand that there is more than one side to the story on CNN, FOX, NBC, OANN and of course, Facebook or Twitter… as well as what our friend told us.
Thank you
To those who are being intentionally kind and positive, because we’ve seen those who have become hardened in their negativity toward others.
To those who are being kind to those who have become hardened… because they need it, too.
To those who believe that Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter, because we recognize they do not have to be exclusive statements; that they (WE) are intertwined more than we might understand, and that each has the right to raise their sign and be heard.
And Thank You to those who believe in causes that lift up the Humanity in all of us.
And to those who continue to offer the best of ourselves, because right now we need our Best Selves.
Peace and Grace to all, including those who may disagree…

This is very well-intentioned.  My first response was that I appreciated it, and I could be wrong, but I sometimes think that "seeking common ground" is a problematic idea. Both-sidesing Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, and Blue Lives matter is problematic because All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter aren't meant to find common ground but to deny it.  And I could be wrong, but I think I'm just looking at a version of what Ellen Willis mocked forty years ago: "The male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior to men.  The feminist bias is that women are equal to men.  The unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in between."

"Common ground" is a tactic of the lazy. Too much ground has been ceded to racists and other bigots all along. "Oh, that's just how he was raised." "She didn't mean any harm." "He doesn't see himself as a racist, that's so harsh." "You don't want to sink to their level." And so on. The result has been that half a century after I graduated from high school, we have an open white supremacist in the White House. Racists and other bigots aren't interested in finding common ground except with each other.

Bigotry doesn't "lift up the Humanity in all of us," and I know this poster didn't mean to imply that it does; but they need to remember that we're dealing with attitudes that deny the humanity of all of us. We've let them go unchallenged for far too long. I never forget the humanity of bigots, and that is why I won't let them get away with it. Bigotry is a lifestyle choice; you're not born that way; you can change. Change is often difficult and painful, and well-meaning platitudes will only delay it.

That was the easy part.  But on reflection it's even clearer to me that I, at least, am addressing two different tasks.  One is engaging with people whose views I disagree with in varying degrees, from disputing facts to distaste to outright enmity.  I am capable of great patience with someone who wants me to explain why I don't agree with them, and over the years I've put a lot of effort into listening to opponents and trying to keep the emotional temperature low.  I don't always succeed, but then neither do they.  One difficulty, of course, is that so many people don't know how to have a serious, reasoned discussion.  As I've noticed often before, they believe that simply declaring their opinion is as far as a discussion can go, when it's really only the beginning.  They tend to get upset when someone rebuts them, because real discussion is beyond their comprehension.  I do my best to help them learn, though.

But when someone says, as someone did in the same group yesterday but in a different thread, "Who cares about the niggers anyway?" -- then I see no point in worrying about their feelings, seeking common ground, trying to see things from their perspective, being kind and generous.  That person is old enough to know what they are saying, and if they still think that racism is acceptable or cool, it's unlikely that any amount of considerate explanation will change their mind.  If such a person wants to have a discussion, I'm willing to give it a try, but they almost never do.  The first thing I want them to know in the meantime is that I will not tolerate bigotry, I will not pretend to respect them or their views, I will shun them if I can and urge everyone else to do so.

I admit that this isn't satisfactory.  Since 2015 we've known that millions of Americans have been seething for decades over the official liberal rejection of racism, and they welcomed the rise of Donald Trump as a license to let their bigotry run free.  Just telling them they're wrong, they're bad, and shunning them will not change their minds.  There has been a hope that bigotry is generational, and that as older generations die off, so will bigotry.  First, I doubt it - my racist peers are of the younger 60s generation that we hoped would leave racism behind. Second, we can't wait.  If someone is beating a child, you don't hold off and hope that the assailant will change over time; you stop the assault.  It's not unfair, after you've removed the victim to safety, to ask the assailant what they thought they were doing.  Dialogue can happen only after the power to harm has been taken from them.

But another factor that must also be addressed is the nice, superficially reasonable person who tries to deny or minimize bigotry, like nice, liberal, but insane Michael Kinsley, who tried to paper over Ben Carson's bigotry; or nice, sensible, but craven Wes Alwan, who defended Alec Baldwin's homophobic raving; or the godly white moderates who urged Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement to wait a few centuries until racism withered away by itself.  Such people are part of the problem.  They are more concerned with protecting bigots than the targets of bigotry, and they should be called out and challenged, even attacked (verbally) no less than the Ben Carsons, the Alec Baldwins, the White Citizens Councils they serve and protect.

Time's Up!

Someone posted it yesterday somewhere on social media, I don't remember whether it was Facebook or Twitter:  "You can't change people's minds overnight."

It's the first time I've heard it in a long while. The last time I remember must have been around twenty years ago, when it kept cropping up on a diversity program on the community radio station.  The host was a liberal white professor of sociology, I think, and the guest was a minister from a nearby city that has a bad reputation for racism.  (Bloomington, Indiana, where the radio station is located, has a better reputation for not being racist than it deserves, because of the university.)  This would have been before all the station's programs were digitized and archived online, so I doubt it's accessible, but I made some notes on the episode at the time for a letter I never sent, which I was able to find on my old computer the other day.  (Or did I send it?  I'm honestly not sure.  If I did, I didn't get a reply.)

There had been another incident in a long series recently, where fans and possibly players of the high school basketball team had yelled racist abuse at players of a visiting team. The host and the minister clucked indignantly that people shouldn't stereotype a whole town over such things.  The minister insisted that many black people lived contentedly in the city, and reported that his daughter had met a young black man at college who assumed she was racist when he found out where she was from.  That was bad, though I wished I had a version of the story from a more reliable source.  And they repeated, several times: You can't change people's minds overnight.

I began to feel I'd gone through the looking glass: was this an anti-racist program, or a racist-apologetics program?  Our neighbor city has been lamenting its racist reputation for decades, usually when another unfortunate incident occurs.  But the funny thing is that "You can't change people's minds overnight" assumes that the people in question are racist.  I kept waiting for the diversity-educator host to ask how long the night could be allowed to last, but no dice.  They spent the whole segment congratulating each other on how enlightened and reasonable they were.

I'd already noticed in the 90s that forty years after Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, thirty years after the passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, thirty years after the eruption of Second Wave feminism, twenty-five years after the Stonewall riots, the lessons they should have taught had not been learned by large numbers of people, including significant numbers of the people who run our government at all levels.  Some version of "You can't change people's minds overnight" has been an ongoing refrain throughout those decades.  And I thought I was good at procrastinating.  It's been one hell of a long night.

And you see, here we are.  Various people from the very small town where I went to high school were fuming about anarchists and rioters and looters in the pay of Soros coming there, and they'd be ready to defend their property with their Second Amendment rights.  I remember hearing this crap before, in the 60s.  After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, my mother was afraid that Negroes were going to flood into our rural area from Chicago (a hundred miles away) or South Bend (25 miles away) and burn it to the ground, and she wasn't the only one in our very white area.  It probably was spread on the radio by right-wing commentators.  Fifty-odd years later, the same bigotry is alive and well, all the more furiously resentful because it was partially stifled for a few years in the 1960s.

(I just remembered that northern Indiana is very Roman Catholic, and I wonder how many of the parents of my peers grew up listening to the pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic Catholic priest Father Coughlin in the 30s.  I wonder if my mother did.  Coughlin was based near Detroit, close to where I grew up.  He had forty million listeners around the country before he stopped broadcasting in 1940, and continued to publish Nazi propaganda until he was shut down by the Feds in 1942.  It seems likely that he had fans in South Bend - home of Notre Dame University - and my hometown.  I should ask around on Facebook.)

Maybe twenty years ago I decided that my motto for the future would be No Safe Space for Bigotry.  Now I want to update it: Time's Up.  White racists have had a very long time to get over their refusal to share the world with non-white people; male supremacists ditto with regard to women; antigay bigots with gay people; and so on.  They don't get to delay any longer.  Time's up.  When your racist aunt or uncle or grandpa or grandma starts to attack the blacks, just say No.

Inappropriate Appropriation

I'm not sure why this cheered me up, but it did.

It seems that Elizabeth Warren's campaign recently announced an "Interfaith Advisory Council" made up of religious leaders of various stripes, and almost immediately took it down.  Even the Wayback Machine can't seem to find the original tweet, but the press release yet lives.  It drew criticism and mockery because the list included fourteen Christian clergy, a rabbi, and a partridge in -- no, a Zen Buddhist teacher from North Carolina.

The thread I found on Twitter included a lot of boyish tittering because the Buddhist sensei is an apparently white American woman.

I don't know if that reply is accurate or just a snarky allusion to Warren's now-abandoned claim of Cherokee ancestry, but it doesn't matter, because Buddhism, like most religions, is not a race or even an ethnicity.  (Guess what, guys - Roman Catholics are not all, or even mostly, Roman!)  Buddhism isn't racially homogeneous even in Asia, and though it originally came to the United States with Asian immigrants in the 1800s, by the twentieth century Buddhist missionaries were coming here to bring enlightenment and salvation, yea, even to white people.  Before long they were ordaining clergy among the "natives."  (Just as Christian clergy in Asia are now usually Asian.)  The assumption that Buddhists aren't white is racist to the core.

This one too:

So, Matt, how about those Korean and Japanese Catholic bishops?  Are they "appropriating" Western culture?  (Of course not: they're just dupes of the imperialists!)  How about "Asian" Americans who speak English?  One person had the sense to point out: "I don't know who she is, but if she was legit ordained by a Zen master she has more right to wear those clothes than the average Japanese person."  This led to more discussion among people who don't know that "Christian name" used to, and sometimes still does refer to the new name converts adopted on baptism.

Or think of Malcolm Little, who first changed his surname to X when he joined the Nation of Islam, then adopted the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz after his pilgrimage to Mecca.  Adopting a new name for religious reasons is not exactly an obscure practice, even in the US.  Of course a atheist like Matt LP may not feel it important to know such superstitious drivel, but I think that an atheist who wants to comment on religion should be at least as knowledgeable as his targets - especially an atheist who claims that "Constructive criticism and knowledge is my forte. A better world is possible if we fight for it. #NotMeUs".  (Notice: not his aspiration, but his "forte.")  It would also be good not to be bluntly racist, but that's probably too much to ask of an American.

Yes, it is hilarious that Warren's campaign rolled out such a half-assed initiative.  One would think that a little more thought would have gone into a project by a well-funded, professional organization made up of educated people; I thought white liberals had tokenism down to a science.  Instead Warren got something like Pete Buttigieg's ill-starred attempt to inflate his support among African-Americans in North Carolina without bothering to consult the people whose names he, um, appropriated.  But then some of Warren's critics made equally big fools of themselves.

P.S. This was yesterday, but it fits:

As Jake and several commenters chortled, quite a few of those canonical Western artists were not straight.  (Many of the names named are 'known' to have been gay by gossip, not history, but never mind.)  Nor were the famous Eyetalians, at least, white by modern scientific-racist standards.  But aside from that, even as a canon-revisionist myself, it occurs to me that much of the attitude alluded to in that quotation is wrong-headed.  Yes, students should be exposed to and instructed about art from outside the Western traditions, and an introductory survey is one good place to do it.  But would they criticize, say, a class on Japanese art history for being overwhelmingly Japanese, let alone male?  As the Feminist Press found when they assembled textbooks on writing by women outside the West, they encountered not just resistance but outright denial that Chinese, Indian, or East Asian women had ever written anything.  And I don't think it was only because the indigenous academics involved had often been trained in the West.  A lot of culturally-sensitive discourse turns out to be as knee-jerk uninformed and blinkered as the traditions it opposes.

The R-Word

I'm rereading Molly Ivins's You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You, a collection of her writings from the 90s. (Once again, if you've forgotten what was going on in those days, or are too young to remember, Ivins's books are a fun, relatively painless way to jog your memory.) This struck me funny, in a 1995 piece on Timothy McVeigh and the novel that radicalized him, The Turner Diaries:

The funniest part of this book is that Turner keeps getting indignant when 'The Enemy,' which intends to turn us all into 'a swarming horde of indifferent mulatto zombies,' calls the Order 'racist.' When the Order is decried by the media in this book as 'racist and anti-Semitic,' Turner considers it unfair.

That of course is how you know the book is fiction, because in the real world the media would never call an American fascist "racist and anti-Semitic"; they'd call him "the rough-hewn, articulate regular guy who's challenging PC orthodoxy" or something like that. But what I liked was the reminder that racist snowflakes get all indignant when they're called racist. This baffles me at the same time that it amuses me. They come up with all kinds of PC euphemisms ("race loyalist," "racial nationalist," etc.) to try to ward off the R-word.  I suppose eventually they'll try to reclaim it, but really, what is the problem?  You can call them almost anything else and they'll laugh it off, but "racist" somehow gets to them.  All the more reason to use it, then: the right tool for the job.

Where Do You Draw The Line?

I want to return to the culture-wars, civility, etc. topic from what I think is a slightly different angle.

What I have in mind is a story that recently spread, about Jimmy Latulipe, the white co-owner of a bar in South Carolina who reassured a white hipster musician who might perform there that "he shouldn't worry about playing there because [the owner] is going to keep the 'nigs' out of his place."

“I was dumbstruck and thought I must have misheard him. I incredulously asked him to repeat himself. I believe my exact words were ‘What the F- did you just say??’” [Don] Merckle continued. “And [bandmate] Brian, sure of what he heard, immediately told him that was NOT ok. Jimmy, sensing his error, immediately tried to back pedal. He apologized then added ‘…but you know what I mean.’”

I think that everyone interested in the issue should ask the civility purists they know what Merckle should have done.  Was it uncivil for Merckle and his bandmate to tell the guy that his racism was "NOT ok"?  Should they have simply swallowed their virtue-signaling Social Justice Warrior heresy-hunting, let the guy retract his words, and agreed to play at the Main Street Public House anyway?  With or without the black member of the band. Should they have gotten all snippy and uptight and Politically Correct and insisted on bringing him along for the performance, or should they have chilled out and let Latulipe have his traditional Southern business values?  But noooo, Merckle spread the incident on Facebook.  (Sarcasm alert, please note.)

I'm laying it on pretty thick here, despite my efforts to be restrained, but this is the issue: just how civil am I expected to be to racists and other bigots? Do I have to do business with them, lest I be uncivil?  Must I let them come to a party I give in my home, ignoring the discomfort they may cause to my other guests -- let alone to me?  (Back in the days when I gave regular parties, I sometimes had to tell friends not to bring with them individuals I knew to be bigots.)  Must I vote for them, lest I be a New McCarthyist, punishing them for disagreeing with me?

There's already too damn much of this kind of "civility" around, both in private and public life.  We're taught not to challenge our bigoted older relatives, no matter how foul the opinions they express.  We're not supposed to Make Trouble, not supposed to Upset Anyone at family gatherings -- a consideration that doesn't apply for some reason to the bigots.  (For some time now I've been pointing out that many of the white people who are supposedly too old to have heard that racism is bad in fact grew up during the Civil Rights era, and must have been aware of it.  If they are still racist after the past fifty or sixty years, it's because they like being racist.  Let them see if they can go on liking it when they get in trouble for it.  And what about those, like me but also many many others, who are the same age, lived through the same era and rejected racism?  Age is not an excuse.)  We're taught that religion, sex, and politics are improper topics at genteel gatherings, and never mind that bigots are mysteriously exempt from that prohibition: just shut up, swallow your objections, and hope that they'll either doze off or pass out before long.

In the public sphere, for example, it's extremely bad form to call a racist a racist, a bigot a bigot.  It's not how they see themselves, it's truly hurtful, it's just not who they are, the accusation of racism is one of the worst things anyone can call you in public life so even if it's true it's completely unfair to say it and only a bad person would do so.  Or: so a distinguished surgeon equated homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, why not just laugh it off because he's really quite a nice bigot, they don't make homophobes like they used to?  Or: in the eyes of  many decent people, same-sex marriage is a religious issue not a civil-rights issue, so they should be allowed to demand that everyone else see it as they do, it stings them to be considered bigots.  Or: so a nice liberal gets mad and spews out a bunch of antigay swill, am I defending the indefensible if someone attacks those who call him a homophobe?  Or: it's tolerable if a reality-TV star indulges in antigay rants because a lot of people believe as he does, but it's not tolerable if the same guy indulges in nostalgia for the days when the Colored were contented in their subordination.

One noteworthy thing here is the way that civility fetishists equivocate, with dazzling facility really, between denying that a bigot is a bigot on the one hand, and conceding on the other that the subject is a bigot but why make a big deal about it?  And if you're going to make excuses for bigots, why not be even-handed and make the corresponding excuses for people who are mad at bigots? But no, our social norms are set up to protect bigots, and to inhibit anyone from expressing disagreement with them, confronting them, opposing them.  I've mentioned before the gay-bashers who, when blocked from beating up their victim by a self-defense group, and unable to get to their car, protested, "Look -- we don't want no trouble."  Ganging up on a solitary faggot wasn't "trouble," but stopping them from doing it, and stopping them from escaping, was.

Yet these distracting tactics have surprising viability even in liberal discourse.  I just reread Molly Ivins's Nothin' But Good Times Ahead (Random House, 1993), and it includes this: "To understand the fears of fundamentalists is to understand their foolishness. But they get precious little understanding, not to mention empathy or sympathy, from those who pride themselves on their compassion" (213f).  There is a tiny point here; I've often noted that the gay and liberal Christians who denounce the supposed "preaching hate" are big haters themselves.  In the rest of that article Ivins engages in some sloppy and ill-founded stereotyping of "fundamentalists" herself; maybe I should devote a post to that.

The issue here is "the fears of fundamentalists."  I do understand their fears.  I also know, as Ivins does, that not all fundamentalists are bigots, and that many non-fundamentalists are bigots.  So I don't equate fundamentalism and bigotry.  I criticize fundamentalism when it's relevant to do so, when religion itself is the issue, but I attack bigotry when bigotry is the issue.  And that's considered unfair.  When religious bigots are criticized for their bigotry, they tend to defend themselves by claiming that they're being criticized for being Christians.  Antigay bigots claim that they're being criticized for being heterosexual, racists claim that they're being criticized for being white, male supremacists claim that they're being criticized for having a penis, warmongers claim that they're being attacked for being Americans.  This tactic often works, if only by distracting the critic for a while.  We need not to fall for it.

Yes, bigots do have fears.  Corey Robin wrote in The Reactionary Mind (Oxford, 2011), "Loss—real social loss, of power and position, privilege and prestige—is the mustard seed of conservative innovation" (location 3585 of the Kindle edition)  Their targets also have fears.  Why are the bigots' fears privileged in mainstream discussion?  Because the bigots represent the status quo. Of course opposition to them is upsetting, not just to the Right but to much of the Center, which is why liberals are as hostile to "political correctness" as conservatives are.  It's okay to silence antiracist activists, feminists, gay liberationists, labor activists, etc. -- because they're troublemakers, upsetting the apple cart; it's not okay to silence bigots, because they're the norm.

The trouble is, we also need norms.  Almost nobody wants a totally unstable society, though some pretend they do. What I believe most people want is stability that lets them earn a living, raise  a family, and plan for the future.  This is a stability that has always been denied to large numbers of people, and it's always under attack.  I've always believed (though I could well be wrong) that there is enough wealth in the world to allow that stability to everybody, not just to some; some might end up with more than others, but nobody would or should have less than they need to thrive.  (That belief is what was always touted as the American Dream, right?)  If I am wrong about this, then we need to figure out some way to arrange things so that no one has to go without the necessities, because allowing large numbers of people to live in misery is not a recipe for stability for those who have enough.

So the next question is, how should people of good will and determination counter bigots and celebrants of injustice generally?  It should be clear by now that countering them will distress and infuriate them.  They will deny that they are racists, even as they confirm it in their next sentence, and there are many other people who will defend their right not to be distressed.  This will require a good deal of careful thought and organization, but one of the starting points is certainly that we must reject the claim that we are behaving illegitimately when we speak up against them.  We must continue to challenge them firmly, and organize to constrain them from hurting others.

After that we have to use good judgment, and be ready to discuss options, accepting some, rejecting others.  For many people all over the political spectrum, this takes all the fun out of being woke.  Identifying someone as the opponent is a license to go hogwild.  In this they're the mirror image of the people they're attacking, and they use the same distractive tactics the bigots use: What, you're telling me I shouldn't call those reichtards up and make death threats?  You're saying I shouldn't burn their house down and drive them back in when they try to run out?  You must be secretly on their side; you must think they should just be left alone to spread their hate.  You want them to take over!  I don't hate anybody, I am full of love!

For example, under the article which reported that the Main Street Public House has closed temporarily while things are getting sorted out, someone commented:

Tangent to this incident: There is a Divine Street Publick House located in the same city and it’s catching Hell online for what the Main Street Public House did. They are not affiliated at all. The Red Hen in DC is still catching shit for what the Red Hen in Virginia did to Huckabee.  I just want people to @ the right places to troll.  

Oh well, too bad, but let's partayyyyy, right?  Does anyone else remember how, right after the murder of Trayvon Martin and the arrest of George Zimmerman, Spike Lee posted the phone number of Zimmerman's parents online?  Even if you believe it's okay to take out the terrorists' families, there was a little glitch: Lee posted the wrong number, so somebody else got all the abuse and death threats.  And get this: Lee "got in hot water" and was "cast as a villain" in his elderly victims' lawsuit against him!  Oh, the humanity!  Even though he apologized and paid for the costs of their having to leave their home, he was still made out to be the bad guy, for an honest mistake that anybody could have made!

Lee told Oprah (who else?):

"I don't know what my intention was," Lee told Winfrey. "But angry is not a justification for stupidity.

"There's nothing I can say that can defend what I did. It was stupid."

That was at least better than the usual bogus apologies made by public figures when they've fucked up seriously.  But First, do no harm remains a valid principle, not only for doctors but for activists who want to build a better world.  Lee would have been stupid even if he'd posted accurate contact information for Zimmerman's family.  I think that what the commenter above called trolling -- anonymous attacks by phone, letter, or electronic media -- is cowardly and despicable, as most people realize when they are the target.  Confronting bigots face to face, especially bigots we know personally and/or are related to, is harder, scarier, but it's how change gets made.

The same goes for the people who play the "Why don't we kill fascists now, like we did in World War II?" card.  Leaving aside the fact that Our Boys killed fascists overseas, not here, at home we put innocent citizens in concentration camps because of their ancestry.  It wasn't that the government or many American citizens hated fascism, it was that Japan and Germany had the poor judgment to declare war on us.  I suspect that if that hadn't happened, we and our business community could have continued to co-exist with the Axis for a good long time.  But I don't see how starting an internal war now would solve our problems.  We know how well that worked out a century and a half ago, with no long term resentments and hatreds afterward.

So I hesitate to make specific recommendations about how to stop bigots now.  The Civil Rights movement used large-scale nonviolent means in the fifties and the sixties, with some backup from armed defenders, and were demonized as Communist troublemakers.  They made some gains, which are now being rolled back.  The various Black Nationalist groups took up arms, and ended up largely dead or in jail.  Their long-term effectiveness is still being debated.

Still, I feel pretty confident that people confronting people -- friends and families and co-workers -- which made some progress for gay people in the 70s and after, is a viable approach.  By coming out to those around us (as well as publicly in media) we changed the way Americans and others saw and treated us.  That struggle is far from completed, let alone won, but then no struggle is ever completely won.  As Don Merckle decided, though, white people have to stop letting racism slide.  Everyone needs to stop letting bigotry slide.  Merckle says he was stunned to find that Jimmy Latulipe took for granted he was a fellow racist, simply because he was white.  I find this tremendously naive, and I'm not alone in that (see the comments under the first article).  But the important thing is that he decided to let Latulipe know he'd made the wrong assumption.  Everybody needs to do that when we can, and not let ourselves be intimidated into continuing the collaborative silence that protects and perpetuates bigotry.

The Old Balancing Act

I've been ruminating about a post on the Rosanne Barr / Samantha Bee foofooraw, and I may yet do something more extensive.  But the AV Club had a post yesterday, about Jon Stewart's reaction: "Jon Stewart Says the Samantha Bee Outrage Was Bullshit."  Stewart says that the Trump administration

"don’t give a shit about the word cunt,” Stewart said of the Trump administration, adding that he expects Trump himself “say that instead of ‘please.’” That comes from The Daily Beast, which says Stewart also implied that Bee should never have apologized, saying that the phony outrage game conservatives love to play is a “strategy” and “it’s working.”

Well, he's entitled to his own opinion.  What interested me was what the AVC writer, Sam Barsanti, had to say, namely that "it should be clear to everyone that saying something racist is worse than saying a bad word."  This, I think, indicates a what liberals / progressives fail to get about a lot of matters.  "Cunt" is not just "a bad word," it's a misogynist insult, fully as nasty as a racist epithet, and Samantha Bee used it as a misogynist insult.  She doesn't get a pass on it because she's a woman.  I'm a bit bemused by the way so many women see the word as ultimately, soul-destroyingly horrible in any context, but that too has to be taken into account in evaluating Bee's remarks.

Sally Field got it right, I thought:

(If you want to groan and bang your head against something, though, read some of the angry responses by Rosanne Barr fans to Field's tweet; the first one is typical.)

Should Barr's show have been canceled?  Should Bee have apologized?  Should she have been fired?  I've been thinking and writing about questions like these for a long time now, and I am no closer to answers than I ever have been.  I don't think there is a simple answer to the questions of when someone should lose their TV show or their job and when they shouldn't, of what is going too far, and the like.  But I also think that most people, regardless of their political affiliation, jump to demands that whoever offends them should be fired, and that alone is a good reason to reject those demands on principle. 

I'm inclined to say that Bee was not only indulging in misogynist abuse, which in itself is certainly free speech and therefore protected, but incredibly tactically stupid.  Calling Trump a cunt was self-indulgent, but it also played into the hands of the Right, and pandered to widespread misogyny among liberals.  I don't believe she should be fired for that; I do think in addition to pandering to specific audiences' prejudices, we need more rational discussion of just about everything in politics today, and that neither Bee, Stewart, Comedy Central, nor the media in general are interested in that.

Faith Is the Substance of Things Hoped For

There's a good new article at Politico on how people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who voted for Trump feel about him now.  The headline pretty much says it all: "Johnstown Never Believed Trump Would Help. They Love Him Anyway."

There's nothing surprising in the piece, but it's worth reviewing anyway.  The first thing I noticed was that the defenses his fans offer for Trump are exactly, word for word, the defenses Obama voters made for him.

“I think he’s doing a great job, and I just wish the hell they’d leave him alone and let him do it,” Schilling said. “He shouldn’t have to take any shit from anybody.”

And:

“Everybody I talk to,” [Del Signore] said, “realizes it’s not Trump who’s dragging his feet. Trump’s probably the most diligent, hardest-working president we’ve ever had in our lifetimes. It’s not like he sleeps in till noon and goes golfing every weekend, like the last president did.”

Reporter Michael Kruse speaks up:

I stopped him, informing him that, yes, Barack Obama liked to golf, but Trump in fact does golf a lot, too—more, in fact.

Del Signore was surprised to hear this.
“Does he?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
He did not linger on this topic, smiling and changing the subject with a quip. “If I was married to his wife,” Del Signore said, “I don’t think I’d go anywhere.”

He added: “Some of these things are like that thing he said to Billy, Billy Bob, Billy Bud”—searching, unsuccessfully, for the name Billy Bush—“on the bus, that comment he made.” Del Signore shrugged. “He’s a human male. I’m glad he wasn’t saying, ‘Hey, I like little boys.’ You know? So he’s not perfect.”

That's how you do it: when you're confronted with an inconvenient fact, make a joke, change the subject.  (Barack ended the wars!  No, he didn't.  He fixed the economy!  No, he didn't.  Well, those Republicans keep picking on his wife and kids.  And he got Bin Laden.  Sure, he's not perfect; sure, he's a bit of a disappointment.  But at least he's not Bush.)

“They always say they want to bring the steel mills back,” Frear said, “but they’re going to have to do a lot of work to bring the steel mills back.”

He hasn’t built the wall yet, either. “I don’t care about his wall,” said Frear, 76. “I mean, if he gets his wall—I don’t give a shit, you know? But he has a good idea: Keep ’em out.”

He also hasn’t repealed Obamacare. “That’s Congress,” she said.
And the drug scourge here continues unabated. “And it’s not going to improve for a long time,” she said, “until people learn, which they won’t.

“But I like him,” Frear reiterated. “Because he does what he says.”

As she has already admitted, Trump doesn't do what he says.  But she likes him, just as Obama's fans like him, and that's what matters.

Next to Bala was a gray-haired man who told me he voted for Trump and was happy so far because “he’s kept his promises.”

I asked which ones.

“Border security.” But there’s no wall yet. “No fault of his,” the man said.

What else? “Getting rid of Obamacare.” But he hasn’t. “Well, he’s tried to.”

What else? “Defunding Planned Parenthood.” But he didn’t. “Not his fault again,” the man said.

I asked for his name. “Bill K.,” he said. He wouldn’t give me his last name. “I don’t trust you,” he said.

As Kruse says, "They don’t mind his intemperate tweets. They don’t mind the specter of scandal, which they dismiss as trifling nonsense. They don’t mind his nuclear saber-rattling with North Korea, saying they feel safer under Trump than they did under Obama."

Of course they don't mind those scandals, if they were real -- which they claim not to believe, because of the Fake News, but I think they believe them and like them just fine.  The sexy stuff is okay because it proves he's what they consider a normal man, a real man, but the scandals are mostly about money, and a rich guy who cheats and lies and gouges to get ahead is fine with them, as long as they can believe he's on their side -- and they'll believe it no matter what.  Even his failure to come through on his promises is not so bad, because they have plenty of bad guys to blame, and their sense of grievance is stoked some more.  (We've seen the same pattern with Clinton apologists for the past year: it's not her fault, it's the Russians, it's the she-devil Sarandon, it's Bernie Sanders the rootless cosmopolitan, it's the sexist Bernie Bros, it's traitors stabbing her in the back just to make a buck.)

So many people in so many other areas of the country watch with dismay and existential alarm Trump’s Twitter hijinks, his petty feuds, his penchant for butting into areas where the president has no explicit, policy-relevant role. All of that only animates his supporters here. For them, Trump is their megaphone. He is the scriptwriter. He is a singularly effective, intuitive creator of a limitless loop of grievance and discontent that keeps them in absolute lockstep.

That counts for even more.  Trump speaks for them, especially at his most obnoxious.  When liberals are outraged by his antics, his fans are delighted, not just because he said what he said, but because he made the Politically Correct liberal snowflakes mad.  Just as liberals got all excited when Obama did a little strutting and posturing on the campaign trail, or when some Democratic pol or pundit says something that shuts down the GOP, eviscerates them, schools them; when the Stupid Rethugs are angered and offended by hearing The Truth.  It's why they crow with joy over homophobic anti-Trump jokes; jokes about the size of his hands and the supposedly corresponding tiny wee-wee; jokes about cheese and orange and bad hair and how mentally ill he is.  If Obama was mostly more subdued, his fans put that down to how classy he was, but secretly they wish he had gone on Twitter and put the Rethugs in their place.  If he had, they'd be as thrilled as Trump fans are when Trump says something naughty, something provocative, something a schoolteacher would paddle him for saying in fourth grade.

I know that feeling too, and I'm not immune to it.  What disturbs me, as I've said before, is not so much the transgressive "humor" as that neither side has anything better to offer after they've let off steam.  And that won't help anyone or fix anything.  So, for example, it was educational -- I was totally schooled -- to read the comments under one of Marcy Wheeler's tweets yesterday.

Observation: A year ago most Dems swore all massive leaks from unknown sourcing were bad.

Care to reconsider in light of Paradise Papers?

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) November 6, 2017

Though she went on to clarify, "Do think there is difference bt ICIJ & WL. Not clear there is between ICIJ & Intercept. But people should have some basis for distinguishing", many of her commenters ignored it and attacked Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, confused the Paradise Papers with the Panama Papers, and generally dodged her request for a workable distinction between good leaks and bad leaks.  They also quibbled over how many Democrats had objected to Snowden, often claiming that Wheeler had said "all" instead of "most" Democrats.  (I don't know about even "most" Democrats, but I do know that both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton condemned Snowden, mostly dishonestly.)  And so on: these steely-eyed, reality-based types, probably well-educated and well-informed compared to the average American, could not grasp a simple question because it might have required them to engage in some self-examination.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose tweet led me to Kruse's article, remarked "Re: Trump and economic insecurity..."  I admit, I'm not sure what he meant by that.  It's true that Kruse found a fair amount of open racism among the Jonestown Trump voters he talked to.

Schilling looked at her husband, Dave McCabe, who’s 67 and a retired high school basketball coach. She nodded at me. “Tell him,” she said to McCabe, “what you said the NFL is …”

McCabe looked momentarily wary. He laughed a little. “I don’t remember saying that,” he said unconvincingly.

Schilling was having none of it. “You’re the one that told me, liar,” she said.

She looked at me.

The NFL?

“Niggers for life,” Schilling said.

“For life,” McCabe added.

That's just about exactly as funny as a joke about Mike Pence "taking a knee" for Donald Trump.  (What's funnier is Maggie Frear, who told Kruse, "if I was the boss of these teams, I would tell ’em, ‘You get your asses out there and you play, or you’re not here anymore.’ They’re paying their salaries, for God’s sake."  Those NFL players are not supposed to be playing when they're taking a knee, nor does Frear want them to: she wants them to genuflect properly to the holy flag, which has nothing I can see to do with playing the game.  Del Signore, whose remarks follow Frears', has equally irrelevant complaints.)

But here's the thing: Kruse also details the extent of "economic insecurity" around Jonestown, which is felt by the Trump voters he talked to.  Unemployment, for example, is relatively low, but still higher than the national average.  The heroin crisis is in full swing too, with 94 overdose deaths last year in the county.  Significantly, given many whites' complaints about entitled, lazy blacks,

Some of the later-in-life blue-collar workers who are still here can be loath to learn new trades. “We’ve heard when working with some of the miners that they are reluctant because they’re very accustomed to the mining industry,” said Linda Thomson, the president of JARI, a nonprofit economic development agency in Johnstown that provides precisely the kind of retraining, supported by a combination of private, state and federal funding, that could prepare somebody for a job in [Bill] Polacek’s [manufacturing] plant. “They really do want to go back into the mines. So we’ve seen resistance to some retraining.”

Bill Polacek, the manufacturer mentioned in that paragraph, told Kruse,

“Right now, if I could find 150 people, I’d put them to work,” ... He needs machinists. He needs welders. “But it’s hard to find people,” he said—people with the requisite skills, people who can pass a drug test.

“We just don’t have the workforce,” said Liston, the city manager. “If they are employable, and have a skill set, basically they already moved out of the area.”

I don't think I quite believe Polacek here: his complaints are typical for employers trying to excuse their failure to provide jobs, but in context his excuses seem reasonable enough.  So yes, racism and economic insecurity are in the mix.  I'm not sure how liberal/left homophobia relates to economic insecurity; maybe its apologists would like to make a case.  I don't think it's that hard to condemn the racism while trying to do something about the economy, but as Polacek indicates, it's not as simple as one could wish to fix the economy.  Trump has no interest in doing it, but neither did Obama or Clinton, except for themselves and their wealthy donors and cronies.  Just like the Trump voters, Democratic apologists were full of excuses and distractions, not to mention mere misrepresentation of Obama's record -- when they didn't just shoot themselves in the foot by touting record corporate profits and stock prices as evidence of Obama's economic greatness.  So it's not exactly surprising that even many working- and middle-class whites who'd voted for Obama decided they wanted a change; their self-deception is not greater than that of Democrats.

Doing a Joyful Jig

Jon Schwarz has a new article at The Intercept about a fascinating short documentary film about a pro-Nazi rally in New York City's Madison Square Garden in 1939.  Jon gives the historical background in the article, and links to the film so you can watch it from there.

I'm not nearly as horrified by the film as Jon says I should be.  For one thing, I am pretty sure I'd heard of this "Pro-American Rally" before, and I'd certainly heard of the pro-fascist Roman Catholic priest Father Coughlin, whose wildly popular radio program publicized the rally and helped fill the Garden.  I also know something of the popularity of Nazism in this country: of the stalwart working Americans who would rather have lost the war than work next to Negroes, and of the leading American politicians and business figures who found fascist dictators strangely alluring, both before and after World War II.  More recently I can hardly help being aware of white Americans who are not at all bothered by neo-Nazis' draping themselves in Old Glory and the Stars and Bars along with the swastika, defending Confederate memorials in the name of the White Christian Reich.  The people who do so probably wouldn't call themselves Nazis, but they're clearly willing to make common cause with them, just as their grandparents were.  Or maybe not -- I don't know how their grandparents felt.  But these people are standing now in the American Nazi tradition, which goes back to the 1930s.

I have a few quibbles with Jon's article, though.  At one point he writes:

This is a ferocious, simian exhilaration that can only be felt by someone who is emotionally a child. But there are always many chronological adults waiting for someone to give them permission to lay down the burden of an individual adult’s consciousness. To tell them: We’ve located the culprits causing all your frustration and pain. They look like us, like humans, but they’re not. They’re wearing a disguise. Dissolve with us into this howling mass of protoplasm, and you will be responsible for nothing.

Whether Jon or I like it or not, those people are human -- that's just the problem.  And he knows it, since in the very next sentences he write, he says: "This has happened, at various scales, innumerable times in our species’ history. It’s more profoundly a part of us than anything we think of as “politics.”  So it's not only human, it's "profoundly" human.  And pretending otherwise is not only demagoguery, it's racist: Othering human beings by denying their humanity is how racism works.  As Walter Kaufmann wrote, not only is the criminal like you, you, alas are like the criminal.  We've located the culprits causing our humiliation and pain: they were in Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939, in Charlottesville in August 2017, and so on.

Acknowledging my common humanity with Nazis doesn't mean that I don't oppose them, that I won't criticize them, that I don't see them as dangerous.  (Nor does defending their right of free speech mean that I support them, as many crypto-fascists on the left will claim.  It's the same claim made by fascists on the right, of course: if you defend the rights of homosexuals, you must be a homosexual; if you defend the rights of black citizens, you're a nigger-lover.  Yet both factions see themselves as fundamentally different from each other.)  It means that I know I can't defeat them by assuming they're not human.

The passage I quoted above refers to an incident at the rally:

Then one man, 26-year-old Isadore Greenbaum, rushes the stage. Kuhn’s uniformed minions immediately and beat him. At some point, as the New York police grab Greenbaum and hustle him offstage, his pants are pulled down. Kuhn [the main speaker at the rally] smirks, and the audience erupts in glee...

Perhaps the central moment of “A Night at the Garden” is a shot of a young uniformed boy on stage. He is maybe 8 years old, and part of the Bund youth; he appears smaller and slighter than the others. As the crowd humiliates Greenbaum and drags him away, the boy looks around for affirmation that he is not alone. Then he does a joyful jig, rubs his hands together, and performs his dance again.

This is repugnant, of course, but I couldn't read about it without thinking of liberal Democrats indulging in similar eruptions of glee when some right-winger gets his comeuppance, or even when some smirking hack like Stephen Colbert makes a fag joke about Donald Trump.  Or when a white racist, arrested for assault, or even just fearing arrest, bursts into tears -- if his pants had been pulled down, there'd be joyful jigs by liberals and progressives all over social media.  As there are today, over the first indictments handed down by Robert Mueller, by people who are overestimating how significant they are.  But it doesn't matter: what matters is Bam! Boom! Oh, burn!  As if politics were a spectator sport, our team against their team, which I have to admit it is.  And when they think a right-winger has been humiliated, eviscerated, shredded, why not dance a victory jig, even nothing has been achieved.

Which is why, although I'm disgusted by the mistreatment and humiliation of Isadore Greenbaum, I question his good sense in jumping up onto the stage.  As I've asked before about protestors who fantasized that they, one man or woman, would take Trump down by speaking out at one of his campaign rallies, what did they think they were going to achieve if no one had molested them?  It's another resort to politics as pure spectacle.  Would Clinton fans have felt that she had been decisively defeated if some Trump fan had jumped up onto the platform of one of her campaign rallies?  Far from it: they'd have been outraged by the white patriarchal assault on a strong woman, and on all women.  If someone depantsed him as he was dragged away, there'd be joyful jigs all over social media.

Lest someone try to say so, this is not about "moral equivalence."  The principle of free speech is not about the moral content of your speech, though people all over the political spectrum have immense difficulty grasping this elementary idea.  You can, and should, criticize the content of other people's speech -- though you should also be self-critical about your own.  Freedom of expression makes no guarantees that what is said will be good.  If anything, it guarantees that much of what is said will be bad.  It just means that the State is not allowed to to regulate it.  (We badly need some legal limits on the power of private entities to regulate speech.)

One commenter complained in that direction: "With your rhetoric on shutting down nazi events surprised you don't condemn Isadore Greenbaum, Jewish man who rushed the stage".  Well, that's the question.  If it's okay for him to do it, or for a woman to shout "Black Lives Matter" at a Trump campaign rally, then it's okay for a Trump supporter to yell "Hitlery" at a Clinton rally.  The issue is consistency: what one side is allowed to do, the other side must also be allowed to do.  If liberals condemn the Right for fostering a climate of hate, they are not allowed to foster a climate of hate themselves.  Boasting about your own hypocrisy is even worse: it's exactly what Trump supporters do, so you're congratulating yourself for sinking to their level.  I don't "condemn" Greenbaum; I just don't think he was very smart.  I don't believe he was thinking, and we can't afford not to think -- not in 1939, not now.