I, A Woke, Found Me Here; or, All Things to All Persons

Last week I saw this definition of "woke" by Tyler Austin Harper, an African American academic I read sometimes on Twitter: 

An attitude prioritizing identities related to race, gender, and sexuality over class identities, and which reduces politics to ritualized performances of correct language use and self-examination that are designed to purge one’s inner bigot without requiring material sacrifice.

I understand where he's coming from, but he's wrong.

First, what he's describing here is what used to be called "political correctness," though that was as much of an aggravated misnomer as "woke" is now.  I wonder what it was called before that.  Despite its association with liberals and the left, a fixation on correct terminology over content can be found all over the political spectrum, and probably throughout history.  Today's American Right has its own totems, from "DEI," "CRT," "grooming," to "Merry Christmas," "There are only two genders," and "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."  And while I understand his formulation, it's composed in language that only an academic could love, and a left-wing academic at that: MAGA would see language like "class identities" as paradigm wokeness.

Second, while he's describing a recognizable attitude, it certainly isn't what Leadbelly meant when he advised his listeners to "stay woke."  Nor, at the other end, is what the Guardian writer I quoted in my previous post on this matter meant by the term.

But woke is at its most powerful, and valuable, when it is lived and not mentioned. When it’s not viewed as a quality to be smug about. Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Biko and Angela Davis didn’t declare themselves activists – they didn’t have to, their actions defined them. Woke people know not to, and need not, describe themselves as woke. 

That's the beauty of such words, I suppose.  They allow you to deride and dismiss people you disagree with -- or think you do, since you don't have to listen to or understand their actual views; with luck, they don't understand their views either, they're just using different shibboleths.  I've often gotten pushback from people I challenged to clarify their positions, because they couldn't do so and didn't see why it mattered.  They thought I was being sophistical, or "showing off," though throwing around "woke" is showing off one's moral superiority if anything is.  I ask them about this when it becomes obvious that they are talking past each other, assuming that they mean the same thing by a key word ("woke," say, or "God") when they don't.  Using these words can produce an illusion of agreement, but it's only an illusion.  True, it's easy to get bogged down while trying to sort out what you mean or believe, but that doesn't seem any worse to me than flailing around in mutual incomprehension because neither of you knows what the other means.

Although Harper is correct to criticize the attitude he does, it's not as if he's the first to do so: he has plenty of predecessors who denounced "political correctness" for decades before him.  Since he's defining a part of the problem as if it were all of the problem, he's coming close to the irrational people Sartre criticized in his essay on anti-semitism, who "know that their statements are empty and contestable; but it amuses them to make such statements: it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words. They have a right to play. They even like to play with speech because by putting forth ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutor; they are enchanted with their unfairness because for them it is not a question of persuading by good argument but of intimidating or disorienting. If you insist too much they close up, they point out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed."  The "one superb word" in this case is "woke."

Someone tried to brush aside this problem in another context recently by pointing out that words change their meaning over time.  It's true, they do, but usually by adding new meanings that co-exist with old ones, which leads to the confusion I'm talking about here.  By "woke" do I mean merely "alert," with Leadbelly, or politically and morally enlightened, like the Guardian writer, or virtue-signalling, with Harper?  The most common meaning in the US today, I would argue, is none of these: it's the MAGA meaning of any and all opposition to bigotry and injustice, with (as with "political correctness") the smug assumption that their comfort with bigotry is itself truly correct and woke.  They try to sell their sloganeering as "common sense" rather than "woke," but "common sense" is another virtue-signalling evasion of thinking.  

If Harper thinks that right-wing opposition to "wokeness" has anything to do with a sophisticated class analysis that rejects mere theatrical posturing in favor of a thoughtful, informed stance, he's tripping - but I don't think he took the actual right-wing stance into account.  While I appreciate his take to some extent, I see it as part of the problem, not a step toward a solution.

Vagabond Scholar's Jon Swift Memorial Best of 2024

Once again, Batocchio has posted his annual Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, carrying on the good work of the late satirist and blogger Al Weisel, alias Jon Swift.  Bloggers choose their own favorite post of the year, and Batocchio links to them.  Have a look, and see what you think. 

The True Christmas Spirit

Christians of a certain bent don't seem to get much comfort, let alone joy, from their faith.  It's not enough for them to believe that unbelievers will be tortured for eternity, which is at least Christlike: they want them to be punished now.  Not only far-right Christians feel this way, either: liberals also fantasize about violence befalling right-wing Christians.  (I linked to several examples from that thread in this post, but I find that some of them have vanished since then, gone to Internet Heaven I guess.)

The image above comes from a thread I saw on Facebook yesterday.  A popular response to those who criticized it was If you don't believe in Christmas, then why don't you work on Christmas instead of taking the day off?  I've heard that one before, and as I said then, I wouldn't mind working on Christmas in the least.  My job, in university food service, required me to work on numerous holidays.  The university closed down for semester break, which included Christmas and New Year's Day, so working or not wasn't an option.

.... Except, I realized, for campus police, maintenance, and other functions that don't observe holidays.  This extends beyond special cases like universities.  The gas station / convenience store across the street from my apartment is open today, for example.  Workers for airlines and other travel industries are at work today, as they are every other day of the year, making it possible for those who aren't working to enjoy their time off in travel.  Radio, TV, and other media are still functional.  (Do Christian radio and TV take Christmas off?  Why not?  I believe they even operate on Sundays.)  Police, firefighters, and the like are at least on call.  Society slows down for Christmas, but it never stops altogether, and most of the people who keep it working are surely Christians.  So the Christmas warriors' snarky question is based on the false assumption that believing in Christmas gives everyone a day off, and we infidels are hitchhiking on the benefits Christians legitimately enjoy.

The term "essential worker" comes to mind, and from what I remember, there must be considerable overlap between those people who throw tantrums over "Happy Holidays" and those who misunderstood what "essential workers" were during the height of the COVID pandemic.  They expected others to risk serious illness in order to serve them, and to do so quickly and efficiently.  Nor should they have to wear masks in crowded stores -- that was communism.  I especially recall a local woman who threw a tantrum on Facebook because her curbside pickup at Walmart was delayed a few minutes due to staff shortages.  She demanded to know why people didn't want to work.  That they might fear for their own health, or for the health of their families at home, didn't even occur to this person, or to many others.

Although empathy for others is at least implicit in the teachings of Jesus, many Christians manage to ignore it.  They demand empathy for themselves, though.  And some, like the guy who posted the image I swiped for this post, glory in their lack of empathy.  That's fine with me.  There are reasons why Christian churches are bleeding members, and the War on Christmas probably isn't the most important.  But it helps.

The Power and the Glory

This news item caught my eye recently, partly because the vandalism happened in a nearby city I have ties to.  Someone broke into a Catholic church, played with the fire extinguisher and trashed the place,  destroying numerous objects there.  As far as I can tell, no one has been arrested yet.

What interests me is this comment by the parish priest:

"If you think about a statue that's been in a church for well over 100 years, the amount of devotion, the affection, the prayers that have gone up to heaven through the intercession of St. Joseph, it really is a loss for the community," said Father David Kime.

I'm not in favor of iconoclasm, whether sectarian or freelance, but this seems strange to me.  Will the "devotion, the affection, the prayers" disappear, or be invalidated, because the images they used were destroyed?  That question should be directed to the vandal too, though I doubt they hoped to achieve that; I speculate that they were unleashing some of the "wild male energy" I used to hear so much about.  

Catholics have often been accused of idolatry for their use of images, though the difference between them and even the most iconoclastic Protestants is a matter of degree, not of kind.  It's proper to deplore the malicious destruction of property, whether it belongs to a church or not; but I don't understand tying the non-material devotion etc. to the material objects.  Can't St. Joseph intercede for Catholics if his physical image isn't present, or has been destroyed?  I've asked similar questions before, with regard to Native American religion.

This doesn't mean that I don't sympathize with lay believers who find it hard to distinguish spiritual practice from the material objects they associate with it.  But admitting its importance seems to me to confirm my atheistic insistence that religion is a human invention and construction.  Apologists will, I think, counter that because of human weakness, many or most people need to refer to embodied symbols and concrete images. If only Christians were as understanding of the principle as applied to the "pagan" use of images!  I understand both groups, but I think understanding and sympathy can co-exist with rejection.

A Zen story comes to mind: an outsider observes a Zen master bowing to an image of the Buddha.  "Why are you doing that?" the outsider protests.  "It's just an image, an illusion, not reality.  I can spit on these statues."  "Okay," replies the master: "You spit; I bow."  I do neither, but I think that spitting on a religious image, no less than smashing it, indicates how much power that it still has over the vandal.  Of course images have power, because human beings assign them power.  I doubt we can ever escape that, but we can be aware of what we're doing.

Paradise by the Firelight

Speaking of Korea (and if you haven't heard, the ruling party blocked Yoon's impeachment), this video turned up on YouTube this week.

 

I'm fond of Park Hyo-shin's music, and I'm happy to see that he's still active - it was his name on the video that drew my attention.  I should be ashamed that I didn't recognize Kim Tae-hyung's name.  He is, of course, a member of the internationally popular K-pop group BTS, but I've never found them or their music interesting, and his name rang no bells for me.  I'm gratified that Kim, also known as V, decided to record this duet with Park; it will boost Park's visibility both in Korea and around the world.  (Reminds me of Elton John recording "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" with John Lennon.)

But what is going on here?  Two music videos have been released to promote "Winter Ahead."  The other one shows him in a theater, then blowing out birthday candles, and then in a European mansion nuzzling a sculpture of a naked woman which later comes to life, carrying a teddy bear through a European street, and back at the birthday party, dancing chaotically in a crowd of Westerners.  It has little if anything to do with the sloppy English lyrics, whose refrain is "Lie with me" and "Paradise."  I'm not sure who wrote "Winter Ahead"; the videos credit just about everybody except the songwriter.  I'm going to suppose Kim wrote it.

But this video, the one I embedded here, shows Kim and Park sharing a Western style steak dinner by candlelight with plenty of wine, singing the song to each other.  That wasn't clear to me at first, but this making-of video shows them rehearsing the lyrics for the shoot, deciding how to play it.  I wondered as I watched it, more than once, if they understood what they were singing.  Sure sure, this is homosocial male bonding, and Korean men can be very affectionate with each other, but "Lie with me" takes it further than that: the song is about erotic desire.  There was a time when Koreans could pretend not to know that homosexuality exists in Korea, but the popularity of BL* graphic novels in Korea, as in the rest of Asia, should have changed that.  I think the generational change is apparent in the making-of video: Kim and Park hug each other in greeting early on, but Kim (28 years old) is visibly more relaxed about it than Park (43).  Koreans traditionally aren't big huggers, but evidently it's caught on among the young, like so many Western customs.

I'm not suggesting that Kim and Park are gay, or boyfriends. (Years ago I enraged some Park fans who thought I'd said he was gay.  Not this time either, kids.)  Yes, it's a video, but what is it meant to depict?  Just in Korea times have changed, and with BTS' international reach they aren't even trying to be "pure" Korean, whatever that would be.  No matter what Kim and Park and their collaborators on the video had in mind, people outside Korea (and probably inside too) are going to see two cute guys singing "Lie with me" to each other, with the indication that it will be Paradise, and they'll read it as a love song.  Surely someone on the creative team would have noticed it.   I wonder how many BTS fans also love BL media? I'll bet a good many of them. They won't consider it an accusation to see this video as a date between two male stars, they'll see it as a celebration.  That's part of the cultural world BTS operates in, and they must know it.

But then the other video, the Pygmalion one, depicts Kim as a heterosexual.  That's as much a performance as this video, but how many apologists are going to insist that Taehyung isn't really straight, he's just acting?**  Anyway, my main question here is what Park and Kim are performing in the intimate dinner video.  It seems obvious to me, but maybe I'm misreading it.

------------------------------------------------

*BL = Boy Love, but most of the manga and dramas I've seen involve sexual relationships between high school boys, college students or even older men, into their thirties.

** As I once wrote about Shakespeare's sonnets, some of which are addressed to a young man and some to a woman:

No one seems to suppose that in the "Dark Lady" sonnets, Shakespeare was merely indulging in conventional rhetoric about a heterosexual passion that he didn't really feel. No, those poems are assumed to be transparently autobiographical, referring to a genital relationship replete with exchanged bodily fluids. It is the "Fair Youth" sonnets that are assumed to be "innocent", obviously intended to express no erotic feeling whatever -- unless they are appropriated for heterosexual use, in which case they are obviously erotic. (No one seems to have got in a snit over the [hetero]sexualizing of the "Fair Youth" sonnets in the movie Shakespeare in Love.)

Has President Yoon Suk-yeol Learned His Lesson?

Most of the US coverage of Yoon Suk-yeol's attempt to impose martial law on South Korea still looks predictably bad, though "chaos" has largely given way to "What can we expect?" Will Yoon resign, will he be impeached, what does this mean for future US relations with South Korea, etc.  The Washington Post headline I've screencapped above takes the cake for tone-deafness, though. "Misstep"?  That fits, of course, with the Beltway media fondness for saying that the United States "stumbles" or "blunders" into our many wars.

There has been some speculation from Koreans about what Yoon thought he was doing, though speculation is all it is.

The left-ish South Korean newsmagazine Hankyoreh ran this cartoon:

Speculation is fun, but I doubt we'll ever know why Yoon made this power grab.  His own political party, which voted to reject the order for martial law, has announced that they will not vote to impeach him, and he has his supporters among the populace - as I've said, there's a sizable base for authoritarianism in South Korea.  The country's largest labor union has called a general strike in support of Yoon's removal, and the South Korean police are investigating whether he can be charged with insurrection.

The best thing I've seen has been this long article by Tim Shorrock, an American journalist who knows Korea and its history well.  This is why I've relied heavily on independent and usually left-wing sources for news since the late 1960s: they're much more accurate than the mainstream, let alone overtly right-wing media.  I remembered former ROK president Park Geun-hye's failed attempt to impose martial law to avoid impeachment in 2017, but now I learned that "Yoon's gambit began at 11:00 pm on Monday night, when Army Chief of Staff General Park An-su, a four-star general, issued a decree of martial law" - that was an hour before Yoon went before the cameras to justify his move.  

I also learned more about Yoon's collaboration with US President Biden in military alliance with a re-arming Japan.  (Of course Biden likes to have a toady like Yoon in an important client state.)  Far from the "stability" the US prattles about, these moves destabilize northeast Asia.  So it's not surprising that the US Embassy in Seoul did not condemn Yoon's attempted coup, posting that his "announcement to end martial law is a crucial step" - as though martial law just appeared of its own volition and Yoon boldly moved to end it.  (Was it a coup, given that it was bloodless and failed almost immediately?  Yes.  Arnaud Bertrand is wrong to call it a "self-coup," since most coups are internal.)  Shorrock's article is long, but it's packed with information you need.

We're living in interesting times, aren't we?

I Gotta Get Out of This Bad Neighborhood

Wow.  A lot has happened in South Korea in the past twelve hours.  I hesitate to post this, because I don't know what the next twelve hours might bring, but for the moment things are looking up.

First President Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law in South Korea, vaguely blaming supposed pro-North Korean elements active in the South.  He did this at midnight Korean time, perhaps hoping it was a good time to spring a fait accompli on the nation.  But thousands of protesters hit the streets, including hundreds of members of the National Assembly, who pushed their way past police and soldiers into the Assembly building.  They then voted overwhelmingly (CNN says unanimously) to overturn the decree; this included not only the opposition but Yoon's own party.  A few hours later, at about 5 a.m. Korean time, Yoon backed down, saying that he would retract the declaration as soon as his cabinet could meet to confirm it.  As I write this, it appears that the cabinet has met and martial law has been lifted.

US and other Western media have reacted predictably enough.  CNN titled this Youtube clip "Yoon backtracks after plunging South Korea into chaos with martial law order," and the word "chaos" appeared in the reports of some other networks.  But it doesn't look to me like there was chaos, not even in CNN's reporting.  The protests were orderly, the assembly members pushed past the cops in an organized manner, and voted Yoon's declaration down.  At about that point, the military trucks dispersed.  But you know, the corporate media hate it when the rabble talk back to their betters: they can't see it as anything but chaos.  (Or CHOAS, as this outlet spelled it. P.S.: they've corrected the spelling in the thumbnail, but the Internet is forever.) 

The reporter in Seoul knows some of the history at least, and I give him credit for acknowledging the ROK's history of dictatorship and resistance to it.  This was the first time martial law had been declared in South Korea since it was lifted in 1980, but there have been times when it seemed close, as in 2008, when then-President Lee Myong-bak cracked down on protesters and media who objected to his authoritarian ways. Lee also accused his critics of being in league with the North, but that was normal South Korean right-wing politics then.  (I was in Seoul at the time.)

CNN's analyst wasn't bad either, in an Old-Asia-Hand way.  The anchors, on the other hand, were dreadful, spouting every cliche they could think of.

CBS' coverage was about the same, a mixed bag leading off with the obligatory reference to "chaos."  Their reporter, a White House correspondent traveling with Joe Biden in Angola, reads a preliminary NSC statement announcing America's "serious concern" about Yoon's action.  Yoon hadn't notified either Biden or other elements of the US government of his intention, and caught them by surprise. Biden said he was still being briefed.  The reporter, Willie James Inman, evidently has some experience in South Korea, but is more concerned to boost Biden's diplomacy in northeast Asia.  He says that South Korea "isn't necessarily in the best neighborhood" and mentions the "storied history", with "tense moments" between Korea and Japan.  That's an interesting way to describe the thirty-five year occupation of Korea by Japan,  of notable harshness and cruelty, including a serious attempt to eliminate Korean language and culture, but hey - time constraints.

I have the impression that corporate-media coverage of Korea has improved in the past couple of decades, but it was so desultory and ignorant before that that's not saying much.  At the moment I'm just relieved that this crisis seems to have been resolved so quickly. Our reporters speculated about Yoon's political future: can he stay in office?  He was already very unpopular, even for a South Korean President; again, comparable to his right-wing predecessors like Lee Myoung-bak and Park Geun-hye.  (Despite South Koreans' determination to preserve their democracy, they still keep voting in dangerous right-wingers every other term.  Korean democracy is counterbalanced by Korean authoritarianism.) There have already been calls for Yoon's resignation, and since his own party stomped on his overreach this time, he may not be able to stay in office. Or maybe he will; I'm not going to predict or even speculate.  My main concern, again, is the people of Korea, which includes numerous friends of mine, people I've known for decades.  It looks like they've dodged a bullet, and I'm very relieved, though probably not as relieved as they are.

What Did You Do in the Woke Wars, Grampa?

This is another post I should have written long ago, but unfortunately it's still timely.

The derogatory use of "woke" in our public discourse shows no sign of abating, and Trump's victory probably ensures that it will be with us for a long time to come.  It's another depressing example of the Right's dexterity in seizing on liberal / left slogans and using them more effectively than their predecessors ever managed to do.

Remember "fake news"?  That one came from liberals and the Hillary Clinton campaign, and it was bogus at the time, for reasons the blogger emptywheel explained early on.  Used with some care, the concept might have had some use, but few people (especially in the media) use terms with any care, and it was really just an emotive slogan anyway.  The nominally liberal media that pushed it were in no position to cast the first stone.  Then Donald Trump and MAGA picked it up and ran with it, and here we are.

As for "woke," I always took it for another case of white hipsters adopting (or appropriating) African-American vernacular to feel cool.  When the Right adopted it, liberals and leftists delighted in showing that they couldn't define it, as if that mattered to the Right.  As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of anti-Semites (quoted here), the Right "know that their statements are empty and contestable; but it amuses them to make such statements: it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words."  The fun part was that liberals and leftists couldn't define it either.  They differed widely on where it came from: this writer who dated it to a 2008 Erykah Badu track was typical, but it was soon established that it was a lot older than that.  

Even then, few if any noticed that two meanings of the word were being confused.  The older one, exemplified by the blue singer/songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, who in a 1938 song warned "of the dangers of a racially prejudiced justice system and conclude[d] ‘best stay woke’."  In context, he was close to the literal meaning of the word: you're in a dangerous place, so stay alert.  That sense quickly expanded to the more metaphorical one of "awakened" or "enlightened," as in the Guardian article I linked to before:

But woke is at its most powerful, and valuable, when it is lived and not mentioned. When it’s not viewed as a quality to be smug about. Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Biko and Angela Davis didn’t declare themselves activists – they didn’t have to, their actions defined them. Woke people know not to, and need not, describe themselves as woke.

I noticed that most quotations from people like King didn't use the vernacular "woke," but "awake," and that makes a difference.  If white progressives used "awake," they wouldn't be allusively tying themselves to the Civil Rights movement, which I presume is the reason they use "woke" instead.  No matter who uses it, I object to the stance that someone is awake or enlightened, because it postulates that once you've awakened, opened your eyes, etc., you don't need to learn or think any more, and nobody can make such a claim. Right-wingers are also fond of this conceit, by the way: many social-media posts begin with the exhortation to WAKE UP, AMERICA! regardless of the political position of the poster.

In a fair-to-middling essay on the pejorative use of "woke," Nathan Robinson wrote:

If we are to make progress in having sensible discussions about the problems with contemporary social justice activism, we’re not going to get there with an imprecise “boo word” like woke. That leads in the direction of absurdity, like Tucker Carlson’s condemnation of “woke M&M’s” and a Wall Street Journal columnist suggesting that Silicon Valley Bank had “gone woke” by having a Black board member. I cannot imagine any sensible discussion in which the pejorative use of woke plays any constructive role. 

I largely agree, but I would add that the positive use of "woke" doesn't play any constructive role in sensible discussions of important issues either.  It's demagogic in the way Patricia Miller-Roberts warned against: it postulates an Us/Them division between people, based on the assumption that We are enlightened and have the answers.  This sort of self-stroking gets a discussion off on the wrong foot from the beginning.  True, people have epiphanic experiences that affect how they see conflicts and controversies, but such experiences should mean the beginning of hard rethinking, rather than its end. To quote Sartre again:

The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful; he never knows too well where he's going, he is "open," he may even appear hesitant But there are people who are attracted by the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth.  And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not suspect but the very form of the true -- that hinge of indefinite approximation.  It is as if their very existence were perpetually in suspension. They want to exist all at once and right away.  They do not want acquired opinions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found, in which one never becomes other than what one originally was ...

Much of what passes for public discussion involves trying to "own" the other side: saying or writing something that definitively schools, owns, destroys, shuts down the opposition.  Owning makes for catchy memes, but it usually turns out that the opposition, like a monster in a horror movie, is not actually destroyed but, now that your back is turned, is on its feet for another shot at you. People are always surprised by that, for some reason.

A better way (not the best, I'm open to suggestions) to deal with accusations of wokeness is to ignore them and move on to addressing substance.  I try not to be too attached to particular words, especially slogan-words.  The trouble with Nathan Robinson's call to stop using "woke" as a pejorative is that he issued it in his own avowedly left-wing magazine, Current Affairs.  That's like denouncing atheism in the pages of Christianity Today.  True, some on the left use "woke" as a pejorative, but if they all stopped today, the Right (and not only the MAGA Right) would continue to use it, happily confident that they were owning the libs.  As I've said before, fussing about the Right's provocations only tells them that they've hit their target; it's worse than ineffective, it's encouragement.

P.S. For more on "woke," see this, written several days later.