Racism Never Dies, It Just Fades Away for Awhile and Then Returns

I decided to read Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, by Professors Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, after Ta-Nehisi Coates recommended it, and so far, a hundred pages in, I'm very glad I did.  Just about every page has something instructive on it.  For example:

One of the present authors some years ago tested the limits of the free market in racist ideas.  A crotchety yet likable right-wing colleague approached, looking disquieted and in need of moral support.  He was "having trouble" with a certain black student in his bio-psychology class.  What was wrong, he wondered, with saying that "black people may, or (mind you) may not, prove to be intellectually inferior to white people?  In science, you frame a hypothesis, devise an experiment, find out."  The student raised her hand and, when recognized, blasted him.  "Do you know So-and-So (the student in question)?" asked the bio-psychologist.  (The author did happen to know the student in question, an eighteen-year-old single mother of twins who was as bright as they come and not one to brook insult.)  "Why can't she grasp that there's a scientific approach to things, blah, blah?"  Finally, the author put a question, "If, as you say, there is no hypothesis that science excludes, why not try this assignment?  Let your students pick any white ethnic group and any stereotype commonly applied to it, greedy, mendacious, dumb, drunken, gangsterish, and so on then formulate a hypothesis, design the experiment, find out."  The colleague's face froze.  [page 47 of the e-book]

Sounds like a great idea to me!  As it happens, I'm "multiracial" myself.  From what my parents told me when I was a kid, I am a mix of Teutonic, Celtic, and Mediterranean races.  I wonder what my fellow Irishman Andrew Sullivan, who likes to whine that Political Correctness has inhibited 'scientific' research into intelligence and race, would say to research investigating (and thereby legitimating) the link between the Celt and drunkenness, criminality, etc.  After all, we must follow Science wherever it leads, and in the good old days when (as Sullivan fantasizes) research into intelligence hadn't yet been "politicized," the mental and moral inferiority of certain white ethnic groups was considered not merely a suitable subject for scientific inquiry, but a proven fact.  And as Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in a 1988 essay, ''In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites."

Racecraft isn't just entertaining, though: it shows the persistence of racist notions that I'd thought were abandoned, such as the "racial" classification of blood, which the Red Cross revived in 2010, and which has been championed by Project RACE, a group that seeks a US Census classification of "multiracial" because, it claims, it would "help to prevent mistaken diagnoses and thus 'save lives.'  In the early 1990s, a researcher repeatedly asked activists how a state-sponsored racial classification could possibly accomplish any such thing.  No one proffered an answer.  Indeed, no one seemed to have thought much, if at all, in terms of workaday cause and effect" (page 65).  And that reminds me of a white liberal pundit I read a few years ago (blessedly I've forgotten his name) who declared race is "as real as nappy hair."  Most of the people to whom I mentioned that absurdity couldn't see anything absurd about it; they thought it was obvious that hair texture is a "racial" trait.

Probably I'll have more to say about Racecraft soon.

Lo, I Am With You Always, To The End Of The Age

The late Terry Pratchett's final Discworld novel was published last year, and I read it last month.  I must say, with regret, that I'm glad I didn't buy it.  If you haven't read it and intend to, be forewarned of Spoilers to come.

In an Afterword to the novel, one of his assistants explains that Pratchett wrote -- or rather dictated -- The Shepherd's Crown while his health was failing rapidly and he knew it.  I admire his determination to go on writing to the end, but the struggle shows.  I didn't read the Afterword until I'd finished the novel, but I could tell as I went along that The Shepherd's Crown was not merely one of his lesser efforts, but noticeably inferior to everything else I've read by Pratchett.  I'm not blaming him, mind you, just saying that it often doesn't even feel like Pratchett's writing.  (According to the Afterword and various online sources, the series will not be outsourced posthumously, not even to his daughter, who's also a writer; so I don't suspect that anyone else is responsible for the inadequacies of The Shepherd's Crown.)

So: Tiffany Aching, the young witch who's been the protagonist of several Young-Adult Discworld books, some of which I enjoyed well enough, is back.  She's still learning her job (as healer / midwife / etc.) as a witch, and when the great witch Granny Weatherwax dies, she names Tiffany as her successor, leaving her house and territory to her.  This complicates Tiffany's life considerably as she tries to cover both her own Ramtops territory and Granny's in Lancre; she begins by commuting between the two regions, but that stretches her too thin.  To provide the requisite narrative complication, the Elves (defeated by Granny in Lords and Ladies) are starting to invade Discworld again.  Of course Good triumphs and Evil is defeated; that is what fiction means.  I don't object to the outcome, but to the path which takes the reader to the outcome.

I've noticed before that each Pratchett book contains a brief passage I feel compelled to copy out and ponder.  In The Shepherd's Crown I found several, though less because they were ponderable than because they were annoying.  Tiffany's countrymen, Pratchett editorialized on page 107,

had a dialect that creaked, and they knew the names of all the songbirds throughout the valleys, and every snake and every fox and where it could be found, and all the places where the Baron's men generally didn't go.  In short, they knew a large number of things unknown to scholars in universities.  Usually, when one of them spoke, it was done after some cogitation and very slowly, and in this interlude they would put the world to rights until a boy was sent to tell the men their dinners were going cold if they didn't hurry.

That final sentence undercuts the anti-intellectualism of the one I emboldened, and maybe I should read that sentence as Pratchett's report of the countrymen's view of themselves, rather than his own view.  I think it's a combination of the two.  Pratchett's Unseen University, the wizards' academy, has always served to mock the ivory-tower cluelessness of academics, and it continues to play that role in The Shepherd's Crown.  Pratchett's often mocked the foibles of his farmer folk, but there's less of that balance here.  I've often criticized academics, but I never forget that they also know a large number of things unknown to the people of the land, the common clay of the Ramtops.  And what they know is not always irrelevant to the lives of most people.

Would that this passage were as annoying as it gets.  An important thread in the book is its "repulsive whiny sexism," as I put it in my notes, basically a version of Men's Rights Activism with elements of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement of the 1990s.  Pratchett had Nanny Ogg mock this tendency gently in Lords and Ladies: "I always reckon a man's got to be a man, even if it is sissy."  In The Shepherd's Crown it's all about men -- mostly older men -- suffering the petticoat tyranny of their wives as they prepare to fight the elves.

They had spent most of the evening carousing and telling stories of the days when they were all young and handsome and healthy and didn't have to pass water far too often.  They had managed to make their wives give them a ticket of leave, and said wives had been given to believe that their husbands were just in the barn for a few drinks and reminiscences.  The wives, as wives do, had festooned their menfolk with big scarves, mittens on strings, and woolly hats with, alas, pompoms on the top [243].

Oh, the humanity!  True, Pratchett mocks them gently, but of course it is unthinkable that men could take care of themselves, let alone that they might grow up instead of insisting that their wives play the role of surrogate mother.  (I remembered Tasha Robinson's justified grumble, in her review of one of the Long Earth books by Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, about their "expressed belief that women run society and most men haven’t figured it out yet.") 

It gets worse.  After one geezer echoes Winston Churchill ("We shall fight them on the mountains", etc.), we get the big Lancre battle scene, fought by the old men and the witches against the elves.  In its glorification of war and bloodshed, it doesn't sound like Pratchett at all.  I'm not the first to notice that a benefit of fantasy fiction is that you can have bad guys who really do deserve to be killed without compunction.  Pratchett's elves are evil personified and therefore fair game; they were driven back in Lords and Ladies too.  But this part of the book goes beyond that into an old-fashioned pulp glamorization of war itself, the sort of thing I associate with someone like Rudyard Kipling.  "On this day of days, the old boys were younger than they felt" (247).  And even the most obnoxious of the witches redeems herself.

"This lady is not for turning!" Mrs. Earwig boomed.  She rose among them like a whirlwind, and as they were floored, Long Tall Short Fat Sally became very fat and heavy and sat on them, bouncing up and down...

When it came to it, the battle for Lancre was over quite swiftly.  Queen Magrat had all the surviving elves brought before her.  "Even the goblins are smarter than you -- they work with us these days," she told them, standing tall and strong in her spiked armor, the wings on her helmet silvered in the moonlight.  "We have had enough of this.  You could have had it all.  Now, go away to your forlorn spaces.  Come back as good neighbors -- or not at all." ...

Nanny Ogg said seriously, "It seems to me, girls, that it goes like this. We fight the elves at every turn, and they is always comin' back. Perhaps it might be a good thing? To keep us on our toes, to stop us from gettin' lazy. To put us on the anvil, so that we remember how to fight. And at the end of time, living is about fightin' against everything" [247-9].

The old men come "marching down the lane.  And they had a new song now, one that began, 'Ar-sol, ar-sol, a soldier's life for me!'  And with each verse, with each step, they were standing straighter and stronger."  Not for the first time I notice the curious erotic obsession many straight boys have with buttholes.  "And those who had wives, kissed them -- the wives hadn't seen their husbands so frisky in years -- and then they set off down to the pub to tell their mates all about it" (260).

I'll spare you the battle Tiffany fights for the Ramtops.  In the end, she resolves her problems and realizes that Granny Weatherwax, though dead, "was, in fact, and always would be, everywhere" (269).  So Granny becomes a Christ figure, with her disciples until the end of the age.  Odd for a Village-Atheist type like Pratchett.  I've pointed out before that in his disdain for the Christian Bible, he overlooks its power as story -- odd in a writer so obsessed with Story himself.  But it seems that as he lay in his deathbed, the Christian myth crept up behind him and imposed itself on his tale.  Which doesn't reassure me.  Granny Weatherwax is one of my favorite characters in literature, one of Pratchett's most powerful creations, but I'm not interested in seeing her deified.  Once again Pratchett had forgotten one of my favorite exchanges between Granny and Nanny Ogg, from Lords and Ladies:

"I don't hold with paddlin' with the occult," said Granny firmly. "Once you start paddlin' with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you're believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble."

"But all them things exist,” said Nanny Ogg.

"That's no call to go believing in them. It only encourages 'em."

I don't hold Pratchett fully responsible for this book.  He was dying, his powers were failing, and as his assistant writes in the Afterword, he wasn't able to finish revising it as he'd have liked to do.  I wonder, though, how different the book would have been if he'd had more time and strength; he'd become progressively preachier in his later years.  Luckily for me, Pratchett's best work will always be there; having unburdened myself this time, I don't have to concern myself with his worst.

How I Spent 2015

I wrote fewer posts here last year than I have since I started the blog in 2007  I don't know why; partly it was the feeling that I was repeating myself and had nothing new to say, which made me disinclined to push against the writer's reluctance to face the keyboard and the blank space.  Other than that, who knows?

But it wasn't all that unproductive, and enough people seemed interested in what I did write to make it worthwhile to continue.  Here are the posts that got more than 200 views this year, in ascending order of views:

11. Fake Barry Quotes (206).   If you're the good guy, you can just make stuff up!

10. An Inordinate Fondness for Flesh-Eating Bacteria (208).  Some of his fans decided that Pope Francis said something that, properly interpreted, meant that their pets would go to Heaven.  (From where, I presume, they would get to watch the torment of their owners in Hell.)  But what about the bacteria?  All are precious in His sight.

9. Pride and Prejudice (210).  I don't see as many people calling for Straight Pride as I used to, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.  Here I call for gay people to organize in support of our straight friends, relatives, and enemies.  I want to be parade marshall in the next Straight Pride March!

8. When Death Threats Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Make Death Threats (251).  On freedom of speech and rational debate, as defined by Victim Masculists.  I followed up with another post as the discussion at another blog continued.

7. An Area Which We Call the Comfort Zone (254).  Two subjects here.  First, the Culture of Therapy and its vacillation between demanding that no one be uncomfortable on one hand, and that everybody be uncomfortable on the other.  Second, the relation of comfort zones to the books one chooses to read, starting from K. T. Bradford's controversial but confused challenge to everybody else to read outside their comfort zones, after she'd decided to read only within her own.

6. Only I Get to Decide Which Criticisms of Me Are Valid  (256).  In which I grapple with one of the axioms of Diversity Management and the various movements (including my own) fighting bigotry.  It followed on my discussion of the perils of medicalizing bigotry, with a focus on the confused concept of "homophobia."

5. Your Mama Was a Bulldagger (272).  As a longtime fan of Alison Bechdel's work, I'm amazed and delighted that her memoir Fun Home has been so successful.  The book became a best-seller and won a lot of prestigious awards, and the musical (!) based on it went to Broadway and won several Tony Awards.  It's all the more gratifying because Bechdel has always been thoughtful and analytical about the stories she tells.  She's also ambivalent about her work's present success, because she has always resisted being mainstreamed.  But what if critical, analytical, yet human-hearted thinking about stereotypes, desire, and eroticism became mainstreamed?  I don't think it will happen either, but in this post I discussed Fun Home and stereotypes of sex/gender and eroticism.

Onward, Christian Soldiers (281).  I decided not to count this one, because its numbers got a boost from being listed in Batocchio's Jon Swift Memorial Roundup.  On the other hand, I was writing about something I consider important here (that's why I submitted it), so I'm including here as an unnumbered entry.  Related to it, with much less traffic, is Be Here Now, Then Be Somewhere Else Later, about the historical connection of Buddhism and state violence in the twentieth century, and that implications of that connection for Westerners who think that Christianity (or the Abrahamic religions generally) are uniquely and inherently imbricated with violence and the state.

4. #NotJustRichCollege Kids (322).  Here I discussed the problem of what do about offensive things people say.  I didn't get around to the deeper discussion I intended on this subject; maybe this year.  But apparently what I wrote here interested some people a little.

3. Meeting Cute (329),  I'm surprised this post got so much attention.  It's about Joshua Speed, Abraham Lincoln's former bedfellow and lifelong friend.  I didn't go deeply into the question of whether they were boyfriends, because I was more interested in Speed's transformation from a slaveowner to a supporter of the Union and a vocal critic of American racism.

2. Constitutionally Incapable (373).  Everybody talks about the Constitution but nobody reads it.  Except me.

1. Triumph of the Trump (414).  I'm worried about Donald Trump's continuing popularity among American fascists, but one reason I'm worried is that his opponents don't seem to have any idea how to oppose him except by running around in circles and yelling about how awful he is.  The latest embarrassment, to put it gently, is a new attack meme made from sexy pictures of his skinny young wife -- when you get tired of making fun of his hair, try slut-shaming his wife!  I've tried to avoid writing much about the man, but the generally inadequate responses to him by people who are nominally on the same side as I am worry me.  I'd like to think that Trump can't win the nomination, let alone the election, but I am increasingly pessimistic about everything.

Before wrapping up this post I want to draw your attention to some other posts from last year that I'm proud of, but didn't get as much attention from readers.

Spock Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It was written soon after the death of Leonard Nimoy, when memes featuring Nimoy-as-Spock were proliferating on the Internet like a radioactive virus, under the mistaken impression that they constituted some kind of tribute to him.  I've always been disappointed by the way Star Trek depicted Spock as a logical person, and I talked about that here.

Some of My Best Friends Are Putzes deals with some stupid remarks by the sex advice maven Dr. Ruth, but takes off from there to investigate her claim that the Talmud backed her up.  It doesn't seem to, but the rabbis who indignantly rebutted the Doctor turned out to be as wrong as she is.

The notorious new atheist Sam Harris tried to bring Light to the notorious old atheist Noam Chomsky in a debate/not a debate conducted in e-mail and then posted by Harris to the web.  Because My Heart Is Pure was my take on the event.

I wrote a couple of posts on the hit movie Ex Machina, its take on Artificial Intelligence and its recommendation that we should welcome our coming Robot Overlords and Overladies:  Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Robot? and Sometimes I Feel Like a Fatherless Child.   Related to this was a post on an overheard conversation about how the "evolution" of computers would inevitably lead to their becoming smarter than humans, which inspired a small epiphany for me that I hope will also be useful to the reader.

Also related was my displeasure with The Imitation Game, the biopic based on the life of the gay mathematician Alan Turing, one of the fathers of the digital computer.  I wrote two posts explaining why I thought the film was not only historically inaccurate but antigay in a way that is depressingly familiar to observers of Hollywood's treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender characters. The more it changes, the more it stays the same.

Speaking of LGBT matters, there was a brief fuss over a new study purporting to show that homosexuality is "genetic" and detectable with a saliva test.  It inspired some discussion about the ethics of such research, which of course was way off target until I took my turn.

I also did some posts on the question of human nature, inspired or incited by a rereading of Mary Midgley's book Heart and Mind.  Writing these clarified a lot about that issue for me; I hope they'll also be useful to others.

But the year had its upside: I discovered a few writers new to me, though they worked in the middle of the twentieth century: the Irish Catholic Kate O'Brien and the Maine regionalist Ruth Moore.  Both were evidently lesbian, but that's not what made their work stimulating to me.  I also started reading the work of April Sinclair, an African-American writer of impressive autobiographical fiction.

All the Sade Young Men; or, Kill for the Love of Killing

I've been reading a bizarre novel from the late 1960s, The W.A.S.P. (Bantam, 1968) by Julius Horwitz.  "Bizarre" doesn't mean bad, mind you; it's a serious work about blacks and whites in mid-century America, perhaps all the more interesting because it was written by a white man.

Julius Horwitz (1920-1986) doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, but there is a Facebook page dedicated to him, maintained by his younger son.  He wrote eight novels, and The W.A.S.P. is the first I've read.  He was a welfare case worker for New York City between 1956 and 1962, and that experience probably informs The W.A.S.P.

The novel begins with the narrator, John Brooks, attending the funeral of a liberal white lawyer, Samuel T. West.  Brooks is an expert on the welfare system, and he (along with everyone else, it seems) anticipates the arrival at the funeral of Thomas Emerson, a black friend of West's, who dropped out of Yale Divinity School and plunged into the most impoverished parts of New York City.  At the time the novel begins Emerson is running a storefront church which mainly functions as an afters-school activity center for troubled Harlem Youth.

Emerson arrives and delivers a twelve-page eulogy of West, describing the blight of poverty in New York City and recounting the dead man's good works, which ended when he went to Harlem to inform the mothers of two young black boys that their sons were in jail for bludgeoning to death an elderly white couple in their apartment building.  He was only able to tell one mother about it, because when she heard the news she began to scream, and West had a heart attack and died in his tracks.  This was the first sign for me that The W.A.S.P. was something other than a realist exposé.

Brooks tells the reader about his friendship with West, who introduced him to Emerson.  West, like the other white characters, was fascinated by Emerson; he saw him as one destined to become a murderer (another sign that the novel was moving into phantasmagoria) because as an aware black man in America, he could have no other destiny; and as an Ivy-League-trained minister, Emerson was in some obscure fashion the One, who by becoming a murderer would bring about some kind of apocalypse:

"Emerson knows murder," West said.  "He's seen murder in the children he works with. We need a murder. I mean America needs a murder. Not a Leopold-Loeb vase, which was sensational because it invoved money, murder and homosexuality.  We need a murder that will make us stand in awe of everything that we call justice.  We need a murder committed by a man who knows why he is killing, why he is taking a human life, why he chooses to kill a man at a particular point in his life.  A murder that threatens all of us, that alerts all of us at the same time.  The ancient human sacrifices were such murders.  The priest killed at an exact time to achieve an exact effect.  We need a murder to open our eyes.  The murder I might commit or that Brooks might commit or Emerson might commit if we believed that murder could accomplish what we couldn't accomplish by law or logic" [65].

This isn't just West talking; almost everyone in the novel talks like this, including Brooks, Emerson, and the professional participants at a conference on the welfare system that occupies pages 82 to 98, the junkie who rhapsodizes on heroin for three pages, the young Southern white woman, Jenny Beal, who is fascinated by Emerson -- all are demented bullshit philosophers in love with their own nihilistic voices. It's often difficult to tell just which character is speechifying at any given moment. (Notice the reference to homosexuality in the passage I just quoted.  The novel is mildly obsessed with homosexuality.  As the Kirkus review blurbed on the back cover of the paperback kvells, "Atrocities, murder, addiction, rats, homosexuality, right down to black babies being tossed out of Harlem windows -- it's all here.")

".... I had one boy that I used to give a quarter to run out and buy me cigars.  He was picked up by a detective for hustling, selling his fourteen-year-old ass to the homosexuals on Riverside Drive.  The boy called me because I was the only person in the world whose telephone number he had.  I got him a lawyer and he beat the charges.  I gave him money to go to Cleveland, where he had an uncle.  He got a job with a cousin of mine and now he's making a down payment on a house within three minutes of Shaker Heights" [The W.A.S.P., 111-2].

West showed Brooks the long letters that Emerson had written to him, describing the horrors of poverty that he'd observed.  A sort of friendship grew up between Brooks and Emerson, and eventually, divining that Brooks was reading the letters, Emerson began directing them to Brooks instead.  Emerson shows Harlem to Brooks, and when the story circles back to West's death, eventually Emerson finds his victim.  More than that I won't say, in case the reader should want to find out personally how it turns out.

I don't believe it diminishes the enormity of poverty and racism in America to say that the horrors Horwitz describes and lists are not really important in the novel.  If anything, The W.A.S.P. diminishes them by using them to work through the author's apparent obsession with ultraviolence, sexual and otherwise.  I happened on a review of Horwitz's earlier novel, Can I Get There by Candlelight?, published in 1964. That one concerns an American soldier stationed in London toward the end of World War II, and according to the review it involves "alcohol (consumed with a relentless dedication), orgies (a few), and fornication (lots)."  (I'm tempted to read it to see what the "orgies" look like.)  It sounds as if Horwitz had his Big Theme and looked for settings that gave him an excuse to write about gang rapes, people thrown from the tops of buildings, old people clubbed to death by feral children, heroin, and so on, rather than being moved by a situation that needed to be addressed.

To be fair to Horwitz, there was a lot of this kind of rhetoric in the air in America in the Sixties.  Horwitz's older contemporary William S. Burroughs loved to fantasize apocalyptic violence, for example, and I was reminded of Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream as well.  It has roots in American sensational fiction, such as George Lippard's 1845 best-seller The Quaker City, which in turn is descended from the apocalyptic works of antiquity.

It happened that I read a little further in Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, 2002) today.  After discussing David Hume's demolition of natural religion and the Argument from Design, Neiman moved on to the Marquis de Sade.

Sade longed to be more criminal than he was.  Indeed, he longed to be more criminal than was conceivable.  For he often noted, with a mixture of rage and pleasure, that true crimes against nature are improbable.  If the impulse to crime is natural, mustn't nature cooperate in any urge to its own destruction?  There may be a way around this objection, and Sade sought it without rest [170].

Neiman noticed Sade's ambivalence, which probably had multiple functions.  It's a lot like Burroughs' ambivalence; as I wrote of him: "It is never clear to me whether Burroughs actually considers this debauchery noxious or not. Sometimes he seems to disapprove, even while he is cataloguing the practices in enthusiastic detail."  This fits with what I've read by Sade, and I think it also fits Horwitz's outraged yet voyeuristic catalogues of sex and violence.

"... The girl had a big belly filled with a baby.  She had the needle in her arm when I kicked open the door.  The needle dropped. She fell down on the toilet floor like an animal.  She started licking the stuff, licking it off that toilet floor.  Get out, I screamed at them.  Get out and kill yourselves."  Eaton said one day that I should get Harris up to the Foundation for a lunch [The W.A.S.P., 103-4].

In one of his letters Emerson tells of a visit to a police station, where a lawyer tells him this story.

He said, I've got to hang around this court because some white pig accused my client of rape.  One look at the pig would tell you that she couldn't be raped.  But my client is black and the pig is white.  He was driving home from work, the nut, when he stopped for a red light in Chelsea.  This pig opened the door to his car.  That should have been a cue for him to slam the door shut and take off against the light.  But the pig was white, young, looked attractive, at least in the time he had to see her while the light was changing, and she said it would only cost him twenty dollars.  He said, Move in.  When she got into the car they looked for a place where she could go to work.  He didn't want to take her to his apartment, for a very good reason -- he lives in a middle-class project with his wife and three children.  Finally he said to her, Maybe we'd better call this thing off.  He made the mistake of not giving her the twenty dollars or at least a five-dollar bill  The pig called the police, gave them a solid description of my man and the car and said she had been raped.  He has no defense unless the yellow sheet proves the pig is a whore [The W.A.S.P, 143-4].

Emerson "couldn't understand why he was telling me, a complete stranger, the details of his case, unless it was his way of telling me that the Part 1A court didn't exist, wasn't real and he had to confide in me to keep his sanity as he waited for the case to come up" (144).

Why did Horwitz tell his readers, complete strangers, the details of this fictional though perhaps not entirely unrealistic case?  He certainly told me something about himself -- that he didn't believe a "pig" could be raped (only hot babes can be raped) or that a whore could be raped (if she's selling it it's okay to steal it from her) or that in the world of white liberals the word of a john of any color is to believed over a whore of any color.  Perhaps he thought he was being extremely daring by making the whore white and the john black.  (If it had been the other way around, I wonder which one he would have sided with.)  Granted, the story is filtered through the words of the defense lawyer, but Horwitz invented the lawyer too.

Of course I don't know anything about Julius Horwitz as a person, and I'm not saying that he was a sadist who wanted to rape women or throw babies from a rooftop.  A writer, like anybody else really, is not his or her fantasies.  He was probably -- no sarcasm -- a nice person with a social conscience, and working in the welfare system surely must have given him good reason for anger and despair, which (being a nice person) he expressed through writing fiction and advocacy nonfiction instead of through violence.  Or something; I am not sure what he thought he was doing.

I don't think The W.A.S.P. works; the message gets shoved aside by the subtext.  The few quotations I've typed in here probably don't get across the cumulative effect of the descriptions of poverty and violence, which fails for me because Horwitz and his characters don't really seem to care about the victims.  Emerson is really the only black character in the book; the others -- children, gangbangers, mothers -- are disposable, extras, there to suffer and die.  All of Horwitz' spokespeople are hopeless about them: the children are feral, barely human, and it seems pointless to try to help them, unless you can get them away from the Homosexuals in time and send them to Cleveland.  As though there were no homosexuals or prostitutes or drugs in Cleveland.

I See London, I See France, I See Donald's Underpants!

Ah, commenters.  Right after I wrote the previous post I read this comment under a post by Daniel Larison:  "America is not in the third grade, and the world is not a playground, so beating everyone up unless they give you their lunch money is not the winning strategy here."  America isn't in the third grade?  You could have fooled me.

In general, Larison's commenters are pretty intelligent, maybe because the comments are moderated.  But some are historically uninformed, or at least selective in their view of the world.  Well, who isn't?  But the tunnel vision leads to some significant distortions.

For example, under a post by Larison arguing that the world is mostly at peace these days, contrary to the alarmism practiced by many politicians and pundists, commenter collin wrote:

When thinking about constant wars in the Middle East, it is VERY useful to remember the near constant Civil Wars in South and Latin America in the 1960s through 1990s. I remember in the 1980s, the successful/unsuccessful coup in South America was an everyday news back then. Constant Civil War was just accepted reality. The constant battling in El Salvador and Nicaragua was Cold War politics at its worst. And then with the collapse of the Soviet Union and lack of US interest proved that these nations can develop if they were left alone. (I think you missed most of these 1970 and 1980 news stories but Civil Wars felt constant back in the day.)

The examples collin gives (coups, Nicaragua, El Salvador) all appear to be cases of US "leadership."  Nicaragua's problems in the 80s, for example, consisted of a terrorist war fought against the Nicaraguan population by US-supported (which means, trained, armed, and paid) thugs.  Nor did the US lose interest in Latin America after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  (I wonder if collin believes that the Salvadoran rebels, for one, were supported by the USSR.  They weren't, though the Reagan administration tried to make that claim.)  We continued to support coups against turbulent presidents long after the Cold War supposedly ended, and there are still obstacles to "development" throughout Latin America.

The same for RR's remark about Islamic extremists: many if not most of them were formerly on the US payroll, and many still are (the Saudis, for example).  And let's not forget the US role in encouraging Israel's efforts to destabilize the region.

Beijing Expat's reference to Muslim "drama queens" too.  If you want to see drama queens, look at most US presidential candidates, as DL does. You could usefully start with JFK's fraudulent missile gap in the 1960 campaign, but he wasn't doing anything new.  And is it really being a drama queen for a Muslim to notice that her country is being bombed, starved, gassed, maimed, and tortured by the US or its proxies?

But who cares?  Let's make fun of Donald Trump's hair again!  And don't forget -- Michael Moore is fat.

How Far Down Do You Want to Go?

I just saw the second meme today that said "If Bill Clinton's past is 'fair game' so is this", referring to Donald Trump's gamy sexual past.  I'm not going to link to it or post it here; you can probably find it with an online search if you want to see it.

Now, first: way to go, Democrats, sinking to Trump's and the GOP's level! If you object to their atttempts to lower the discourse, the right response is not to mimic them.

Second: Democrats prefer it that way, because the last thing they (or the Republicans) want is a serious, rational discussion of Clinton's policies and actions as President (or Hillary Clinton's policies and actions as Senator and Secretary of State). That would be going too far.

Third: this version of the meme consisted largely of several naked or nearly naked pictures of Trump's wives/girlfriends. So it's not really Trump's past they're interested in -- they want to slut-shame the women in his life. (And probably to look at naked pictures of women -- it's a win/win!) Which establishes these Dems as the lowest kind of scum, right down there with Trump himself. (Some of the comments on the previous sharing ranted about "skanks" and such. Stay classy, Democrats.)

Most fun of all, the person whose share put this meme where I'd see it is a vocal feminist, highly vigilant about such issues on her own account.  But she didn't notice the slut-shaming or didn't care as long as it was aimed at women associated with an official enemy, but who are not running for office themselves and have no impact on policy. Sort of like the slut-shaming we saw, some years ago, of a young woman named Monica Lewinsky -- not only by the Republicans but by Bill Clinton himself, trying to save his worthless ass.

See why I feel like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place? There is a dime's worth of difference between the parties, but a dime doesn't buy much these days, and the Democrats are hellbent on being as sickening as the Republicans.

The Birth of Propaganda

I had a very interesting exchange on Facebook the other day.  Someone had posted a link to a PBS News Hour story about six US soldiers killed, and two more wounded, by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.  Judy Woodruff reported, "Defense Secretary Carter said the Bagram attack is a 'painful reminder' of the dangers U.S. troops face in Afghanistan."

I regret the deaths, though they're far fewer than the "More than 90 Afghan soldiers [who] were killed in Helmand in two days of fighting" at around the same time, to say nothing of the Afghan civilians we're killing with abandon.  But we could get out of Afghanistan. We have no business being there. There's no good reason for US troops to "face danger" there.

I said so in a comment, and got this reply:

Actually, we did have business there. We were part of a UN assistance mission that the was sent in to help the Afghan government deal with the Taliban. We sent additional troops, with the UN's blessing, at around the same time in order to go after bin Laden. He was in Afghanistan at the time. The operations merged and the UN is still there, according to their website. So is the Taliban and they sound like they're just as bad as they were 20 years ago.

That's quite a nice distortion of history, and it's not even ancient history.  It was written by someone around my age, who's old enough to remember the actual course of events.  Bush's invasion of Afghanistan was his own decision, based on the pretense that the Taliban were responsible for the September 11 attacks because some of the al-Qaeda leadership were based there.  The Taliban had offered to extradite Bin Laden if the US provided evidence of his guilt, an offer the US spurned.  Who did these ragheads think they were, calling for due process?  The United States is above all law.  The UN was brought in to ratify his agenda, though the US' main allies were the Northern Alliance, Islamist fanatics so vicious that the Taliban had at first been welcomed as liberators when they defeated them.  (The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan was founded in March 2002, after the US invasion.) The US installed Hamid Karzai, whose government is the one the other commenter had in mind that needed help "deal[ing] with the Taliban," but he only came to power after the Taliban had been defeated.  At which point the Bush regime lost most interest in Afghanistan and Bin Laden as Bush moved to invade Iraq.  Despite the Obama regime's escalation of the war after his election, the Taliban have gained back much of their territory and their influence.  True, they are as bad as they were twenty years ago, but the takeover of Afghanistan by Islamists in the first place was largely the work of the US, which supported them in overthrowing Afghanistan's Soviet-backed secular government and then fighting against the Soviet forces who really were asked in by the government for help against the jihadists.  Even after Gorbachev withdrew Soviet troops, that secular government managed to fight on against the Islamists for some time before it fell.

I pointed out to the other commenter that her fantasy version of history was rather like the distortion involved in the US invasion of Vietnam.  The more I thought about it, I realized that it was virtually cut from the same mold.  The propaganda justification for the US invasion of Vietnam had been that the government of Free South Vietnam, under attack by Communists in the pay of Moscow and "Peiping," had asked for our help to defend Vietnamese freedom.  This was a complete lie: the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem was installed by the US in 1954 to keep an anti-Communist foothold there, and US support including weapons, money, and American "military advisors" had grown steadily ever after, years before North Vietnam got involved after 1960.  Before then, the rebellion against the Saigon regime was almost entirely fought by Southerners, with no external support.  When Diem finally became interested in negotiating with those rebels, the US had him removed -- so much for the claim that we were standing by our allies.

Out of curiosity I looked at the other commenter's own Facebook page.  One of her recent posts claimed that Thanksgiving celebrates "the arrival of a group of people who were fleeing religious persecution. They were refugees, just like the people from Syria who are fleeing violence and oppression, looking for a new lives in new lands."  Thanksgiving isn't about the arrival of the Pilgrims, it's about their survival, celebrating a successful harvest.  But the Pilgrims were not refugees: they were refugees in the Netherlands, where they lived before they decided to try the New World, but they had freedom of religion there.  What they wanted was a place where they could be the persecutors, and they got one -- ironically enough from the same British government that repressed them at home. And there the parallel breaks down totally, for the Syrian refugees have not been granted land in the US by the Assad regime to start their own colony.  I credit the lady for having her heart in the right place and defending the acceptance of refugees in this country, but her distortions of history are not innocent.

It's hard for me to understand how someone who lived through the past fifteen years as an adult could have produced such a garbled version of US involvement in Afghanistan, but I'm not really surprised either.  And maybe "garbled" is the wrong word: her version was coherently written, it was just false.  I'm mostly intrigued that the propaganda narrative she'd absorbed was structured so much like the one used to justify the war in Vietnam, though I suppose most invaders and aggressors have used similar stories.  The United States often has.