America Has Always Been at War with America

I've been dithering on whether to write about the protests of the murder of George Floyd and the retaliatory police riots spreading across the country.  There's a lot of information flooding the media, corporate and otherwise, and I can't keep up with it.

On one hand I've been seeing white hipsters cheering on the People's Violence from a safe distance.  I think they've been playing too many dystopian video games, among other fictional media: one usually sensible guy on Twitter wanted to compare real life to V for Vendetta. I like the graphic novel, but it's not reality.  I suggested that the guy look at real-life parallels, such as the successful history of protest and resistance in South Korea; and I went back to reread my own coverage of the candlelight vigils there from 2008 onward.  (Which reminded me that I was unable to interest leftish bloggers and independent media in those events at the time.  Not as exciting as V for Vendetta, I guess.)

"Let's You and Him Fight" is one of the creepiest things I see on the white left, especially when it buys into the Right's narrative that the protests are predominantly violent.  It's hard to say for sure, but it appears to be the other way around. No one has access to the opinions of all African-Americans, but I see indications that the community is not united behind burning it all down.  I'd be surprised if it were. Those whites calling for more destruction are doing so, not because they stand with black people, but because they enjoy fantasizing about it.

The mutual aid and support, the caring for each other that is turning up everywhere - sometimes looted by the police -- are to my mind much more newsworthy than the violence, wholly justified though it is, and the mutual aid is not going to get the same amount of coverage by the corporate media.  There's also the near-certainty that a lot of the violence is being incited and committed by police agents provocateurs, just as we've seen in the past.  But you can't eat violence, you can't live on bricks, and nobody on the ground or in the streets wants a permanent diet of tear gas and pepper spray.

Except the police, of course.  Even the corporate media are recognizing that, as they are targeted for harassment and violence by the police.  The spectacle of heavily armed gangs of racist goons prowling the streets, assaulting bystanders and driving their SUVs into crowds, is going to get harder and harder to frame as keeping the peace.  So now the police are unlawfully ordering reporters to stay off the streets, to hide their criminality.  I'm not optimistic about how this will turn out.

What That Word It Means To Me

Disrespect invites disrespect, violence invites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.

There's been a lot of predictable kvelling by liberals about Meryl Streep's denunciation of Donald Trump at the Golden Globes last night.  I haven't bothered to watch the video or read a full transcription, because frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.  Just as predictably, the Right has responded by telling Streep to shut up and act, though they're just fine with right-wing actors and other celebrities expressing their opinions.  As Glenn Greenwald tweeted today:

Why are actors less qualified to comment on political issues than, say, cable TV or talk radio hosts? Never understood this rationale.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 9, 2017

Of course, the content of actors' and other celebrities' opinions is open to criticism, just like cable TV or talk radio hosts, or corporate media pundits for that matter.  Someone posted a meme on Facebook quoting Streep's words that I quoted at the opening of this post, and I thought, Oh, really?  Where were you, Ms. Streep, when Barack Obama joked about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones?  When Obama and his toadies mocked gay people who protested in Washington about the antigay policies he clung to for most of his first term?  When they denounced his left-wing critics as "fucking retarded" and drug-addled losers?  When his goons were harassing and beating protesters at various public events?  When Obama was not just joking about killing people, but actually killing them, as he has been doing for his entire time in office?  Did it bother you when Obama bragged about being the first two-term war president?  Do you worry about the consequences of Obama's fondness for mass killing and high-tech violence, either directly or through proxies?

By all means, pick on Trump; he deserves it and will continue to deserve it.  But I'll reserve my respect for people who speak out against disrespect and violence committed by Democrats no less than Republicans.

Longing for Community

Today at the library book sale I picked up a book called Confessions of the Critics, edited by H. Aram Veeser, published by Routledge in 1996.  Apparently it's a collection of writings by academic critics on the use of "autobiography" in academic criticism.  A number of people I like contributed, so I bought it.

I didn't even notice at first that Gerald Graff was one of the contributors.  I like Graff's work a lot, and I identify strongly with some of the things he wrote in "Self-Interview," like this:

Q. You became known as a polemicist in your early work, and now you're associated with the idea of "teaching the conflicts."  So would you say that combativeness is a deep personal motivation of your work?

A.  Partly but not entirely.  People think I must like conflict because I promote it as a pedagogical and curricular strategy.  In fact I dislike conflict as much as anybody.  In an odd way, my interest in conflict and polemics has always been tied to a longing for community.  I just don't think a democratic community can be sustained by papering over its divisions.  "Teaching the conflicts" for me is a way to get beyond the conflicts.  My assumption is that the more we avoid confronting conflicts the uglier they can only get [97].

Exactly: I could have written that myself.  I'd add that those who object to teaching the conflicts -- which is just another term for "critical thinking," which many people love to preach but not practice -- or who think I like to pick fights, love to see someone else get trashed.  It occurs to me that the difference is that I like to see debate, which ideally is a form of dialogue, while most people seem to prefer an unbalanced fight where a Good Guy (preferably from Our Side) beats a Bad Guy (from Their Side) into the ground.  This is something I ought perhaps to write about at more length someday, drawing on movies like Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, in which one character in an argument will deliver a line that in most movies would end the conversation -- but then the other character ripostes, putting the first character on the defensive, and they go back and forth for quite some time.  That's dialogue.

Later in "Self-Interview" Graff visits some of that same territory.

Q. Your call for community makes you sound at times like Jane Tompkins, who has been writing ... about the competitive individualism and lack of community in academic institutions.

A. Yes, and I share Tompkins' complaint up to a point.  But I'm not attracted to the kind of community Tompkins seems to want, which is emotional or physical rather than intellectual.  For Tompkins intellectuality -- argumentation, debate, analysis, reasoning -- seems to be inherently selfish, competitive, and antithetical to the emotions and the body, part of the problem rather than part of the solution.  For me the antidote to Damrosch's academic anticommunities lies in reconstruction rather than abandoning intellectual community, which need not and should not exclude emotion and the body.

Q. What about the view of some feminists that that model of aggressive argumentation is essentially male?

A.  It's interesting that those feminists don't hesitate to use aggressively "male" argumentation in asserting that view when it suits them.  Like Tompkins, such feminists (who do not speak for all feminists by any means) assume that community and intellectual argumentation are inherently incompatible.  As if to make the critiques of demagogues like Christina Hoff Sommers look respectable, this thinking produces touchy-feely classrooms in which students get in touch with their own "voices" instead of learning to analyze, criticize, or make an argument.  Teachers who practice this species of feminist pedagogy (which again must not be confused with feminist pedagogy as such) are in effect withholding from their students the cultural capital of argumentative discourse that they themselves command.

Q.  But haven't women's studies programs established alternative models of community to the isolation you attack?

A. They've made a start, to be sure.  But unless women's studies programs themselves are put into regular dialogue with other sectors of the university, they become another of Damrosch's anticommunities, closing themselves off from threatening outsiders.  It's unfair, however, to single out women's studies and other new "revisionist" fields for "separatism," since these new fields are merely copying the time-honored, respectable separatism of established academic departments, whose maxim has always been: consolidate your own turf and wall yourself off from anybody who might disagree with you.  In other words, my problem with the new politically oriented fields is not that they're acting like subversives but that they're acting like traditional academics [101-2].

He took the words right out of my mouth.

You See? I Told You

Damn! I should have spent more time on yesterday's post.

It turns out that US media have reacted to the revelation that the Oslo attacks were apparently the work, not of al-Qaeda, but a right-wing Christian fundamentalist Nordic farmer, by continuing to claim that al-Qaeda did it, or Muslims in general.

Before the dust had cleared, the Only President We've Got agreed (via), though cautiously as is his wont:

“I wanted to personally extend my condolences to the people of Norway,” Obama said at the White House after meeting with New Zealand Prime Minister John Key. “It’s a reminder that the entire international community holds a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring. We have to work cooperatively together both on intelligence and in terms of prevention of these kinds of horrible attacks.

"This kind of terror" doesn't explicitly mention Muslims, but who else could be implied in his references to "the international community" and the cooperative gathering of "intelligence"? Unless Obama already knew about the suspect's international ties to right-wing anti-Muslim circles in the US, but I think we can safely doubt that.

From the same article, a reminder that it's about us, always and only about us.

The State Department issued a similar statement and said it had no reports that any Americans were hurt in either attack.

Anyway, what I neglected to write about yesterday was something I noticed but didn't bother to look for again and quote, namely this bit from the New York Times report:

There was ample reason for concern that terrorists might be responsible.

Blogger Richard Silverstein noticed and wrote about this, in the same post that showed the suspect's role as a guest blogger on an American anti-Muslim site. According to Glenn Greenwald, earlier versions of the Times article put "Islamic" in front of "terrorists," but the implication remains the same: "terrorism" is violence perpetrated by Muslims who aren't in the pay of the US. Any other violence isn't terrorism, by definition.

That Terrorism means nothing more than violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes has been proven repeatedly. When an airplane was flown into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, it was immediately proclaimed to be Terrorism, until it was revealed that the attacker was a white, non-Muslim, American anti-tax advocate with a series of domestic political grievances. The U.S. and its allies can, by definition, never commit Terrorism even when it is beyond question that the purpose of their violence is to terrorize civilian populations into submission. Conversely, Muslims who attack purely military targets -- even if the target is an invading army in their own countries -- are, by definition, Terrorists. That is why, as NYU's Remi Brulin has extensively documented, Terrorism is the most meaningless, and therefore the most manipulated, word in the English language. Yesterday provided yet another sterling example.

Another of my Facebook friends recovered quickly: "Whaddaya know - a Christian fundamentalist. No surprise - in the next decade, I expect them to become the new Islamic fundamentalists - including on US soil. You listen to some of their rhetoric and it's not much different from what's coming from Al Qaida..." And: "It surprises me that the Phelps haven't become domestic terrorists... I guess they're too high-profile?" His friends agreed: "There's a reason Markos Moulitsas has consistently referred to the Christian Right in the U.S. as the 'American Taliban.' Different religions, same crazy-ass bullshit."

Of course Christian terrorism has a long respectable history in the US, there's nothing "new" about it. And wholesale secular state violence based in the political center has killed far more innocent people than retail religious-based terror, whether Christian-fundamentalist or Islamic-fundamentalist. For that matter, I don't see much -- well, any difference between the reactions of the people I'm quoting here (and I could add many more) and the hysterical kill-all-ragheads response of many Americans to the September 11 attacks, by people who expect to cheer from the sidelines as the bad guys are executed publicly.

Speaking of which, RWA1 linked on Facebook to an op-ed in the right-wing Economist which declares confidently that Chávismo is dying, like the man himself, and that the Brazilian collaborationist model of "Brazil’s Lula, a fellow-leftist but a democratic one," is the wave of the future. (Remember that in this discourse "democratic" means "rule by multinational corporations, enforced by the American military.") The op-ed itself is oversimple and dishonest: it may be more or less right about Venezuela's problems, but overhopeful about the failure of Latin American resistance to US domination, since "leftists" there continue to win elections. But it's RWA1's comment that is relevant here: "May he meet his reward quickly, and let some sanity return to Venezuela." ("Sanity," of course, means "democracy," as previously glossed: a dictatorship, military if necessary, on the multinational corporate payroll.) One of RWA1's friends chimed in in comments: "By 'reward' I hope you mean the circle of hell reserved for socialist dictators. And by 'quickly' I hope you mean 'suddenly and painfully.'" As with RWA1's earlier hope for "trouble and turmoil" in Venezuela, the human fellow-feeling these guys express is touching.

P.S. As to why "There was ample reason for concern that terrorists might be responsible," Richard Seymour at Lenin's Tomb writes:

I don't mind telling you that I think this was wish fulfilment. That is, I think that these pundits and their employers largely would have liked nothing better than for it to be an Islamist attack, because then they have a set of responses that they can energetically put into motion, and a pre-determined narrative around which they can cohere those responses. Far right racists murdering young leftists, on the other hand, is not a subject on which they can rapidly form plausible responses.

The BBC post I linked to yesterday is a good example of the "pre-determined narrative" Seymour had in mind, I think. I wonder if RWA1 will find any useful links related to the attacks. ("Useful" for me, that is.)