Send in the Drones -- Don't Bother, They're Here

Where O where has the week gone?  I was going to write this post by Tuesday at the latest, and now it's Friday.  If only I were as good at other things as I am at procrastination.

Anyway, I begin with something I meant to include in Sunday's post about moderates.  I've been reading Stuart Biegel's book The Right to Be Out: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in America's Public Schools (Minnesota, 2011), which included this information:

Dr. Karen Franklin’s groundbreaking research, for example, sampled the attitudes and experiences of approximately five hundred young adults in the late 1990s and identified four distinct motivations for anti-LGBT aggression: perceived self-defense, enforcement of gender norms, peer dynamics, and thrill seeking ...

This research goes a long way toward illuminating the complexity of anti-LGBT animus and identifying reasons why it persists in so many places. A key conclusion of the Franklin study is that anti-gay aggression – whether in the form of physical attacks, verbal assaults, failure to intervene when in a position of power, or even silent complicity – "can be seen primarily as an extreme manifestation of pervasive cultural norms rather than as a manifestation of individual hatred …. [P]eople who have assaulted homosexuals typically do not recognize themselves in the stereotyped image of the hate-filled extremist" [xviii; emphasis added]

(The article Biegel cites is excerpted here.)  On one hand, it's nice that someone did empirical research into the attitudes of queer-bashers.  On the other, I couldn't have asked for a clearer expression of the intellectual and moral dishonesty surrounding extremism and moderation that I've written about so often.

There are several problems here.  One is the word "stereotype."  Stereotyping is always a bad idea, of course.  But who's doing it?  It seems to me "the stereotyped image of the hate-filled extremist" is most often invoked by apologists for bigotry, like Michael Kinsley defending Ben Carson.  Sure, Kinsley protested, Carson engaged in some intemperate antigay rhetoric, but he's not a monster.  On the whole, I believe, this move attacks an imaginary opponent, which I might describe as the stereotype of the Politically Correct Extremist, who sees monsters every time some upstanding citizens beat a fag to death, or blow up a Birmingham church with four young girls inside, or protect sexually predatory clergy from accountability.  Sensible, moderate people know that the real monsters are those who call for the impeachment of presidents for starting illegal wars, or who defend servicemen who reveal classified information about military or government misconduct to the press, or who objected to Ben Carson's addressing graduation ceremonies at Johns Hopkins.

Oddly enough, there's another side to this liberal defense of bigotry.  As Franklin says, bigoted violence "can be seen primarily as an extreme manifestation of pervasive cultural norms rather than as a manifestation of individual hatred."  Politically Correct Extremists have been pointing this out for a long time.  When school administrators and faculty not only avert their gazes but justify and even actively participate when a student is being beaten up in a classroom, it becomes absurd to speak of "individual hatred."  (Biegel, for the most part, prefers to speak of "individual hatred" anyway, throughout the book, ignoring the cultural norms that underpin the attitudes of individuals.  It's one of the major weaknesses of The Right to Be Out.)  When the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy not only refused to discipline sexually abusive clergy but protected them by moving them to new dioceses, the problem ceased to be deviant individuals and became a corrupt institution.  When the military refuses to punish rape of its personnel by other personnel, the problem is not individual rapists but a systematic Rape Culture.  But recognizing the institutional forces that drive, perpetuate, and protect bigotry and violence is also a very serious no-no, a major thoughtcrime of Politically Correct Extremists who would have you believe, for example, that racism is endemic in American culture, rather than the personal flaw of aberrant individuals.

But let's accept for the sake of argument that queerbashers are not "hate-filled extremists."  Fine.  What shall we do about them, then?  It's hard to see the point of this move.  Kinsley, for example, accused Ben Carson's critics of wanting to send "in the drones to take him out", instead of merely laughing off his "nutty remarks."  No one, as far as Kinsley showed, had advocated killing Carson with drones; but that was, according to Kinsley, the only alternative to laughing him off.  But is a person who makes "nutty remarks" a desirable commencement speaker?  If so, why not invite nutty old Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at commencement?  Just laugh off anything he says about the Jews.

Invoking the straw man of the monstrous "hate-filled extremist" is pretty clearly an attempt to prevent rational discussion, not to advance it.  It's also meant to forestall any action against physical bullying and violence against people our culture regards as acceptable targets.  Jamie Nabozny, a gay youth who was verbally harassed and physically attacked almost daily for five years in his Wisconsin public school district.  As Biegel writes,

In addition to reporting these occurrences to faculty and staff as soon as they happened, Nabozny and his parents met formally with school-site administrators on six or seven occasions over time.  At these meetings, the officials always promised to do something, yet no discipline of any consequence appears to have been administered.  Instead, the message from these educational leaders was that “boys will be boys,” and that Nabozny should expect this sort of thing because he was gay.  Not only did there appear to be no remorse on the part of school officials, but the record indicates active complicity by faculty and administration in the pattern of mistreatment.  Teachers themselves called Nabozny a fag, and on numerous instances over time – in both private and public settings – the administrators in charge blamed Nabozny for bringing all this on himself by being out [11].

Nabozny's experience was not unique; Biegel reports some other similar cases, and others have documented pervasive adult permission of antigay violence in schools.  As an adult Nabozny sued his school for failing to protect him.  The first federal court to look at the case rejected his suit, but that judgment was overturned, and eventually a jury found the school officials liable for failing to protect him.  "Before [the] jury returns to determine amount of damages," according to Lambda Legal, "officials offer to settle with an award of nearly $1 million."  (Notice the "boys will be boys" line: those who complain that schools nowadays are hostile to boys' just being themselves like that phrase, and moves to rein in boys' aggression toward girls and other boys is one of their bogeys.  They will deny that they endorse such violence, but they regard any constraints on it as emasculating for boys.)

What should be done about people like Ben Carson, then?  He hasn't, it's true, engaged in antigay violence; he's merely expressed some stupidly bigoted opinions about gay people, nothing all that unusual in American culture, though of course it's considered bad form to be caught saying such things publicly.  Genteel bigotry is the standard. I think that bigots should always be called out and criticized, preferably publicly and on the spot.  (This isn't limited to antigay bigotry; I feel the same about racism, misogyny, and other "pervasive cultural norms.")  Even verbal reproof of bigotry is generally unacceptable to moderates, though, except when they feel like indulging in it themselves.

I just did some searching to see what I could find about the critic Brendan Gill's claims that his late friend Joseph Campbell was a virulent anti-Semite, racist, sexist bigot.  Those claims first surfaced in the New York Review of Books in 1989, and I remember the controversy vividly.  It was fascinating how even anti-racist, feminist friends of mine were reluctant to take the allegations as seriously as they would about someone who they didn't admire for other reasons.  If his bigotry didn't affect his work, they said, it shouldn't matter to their appreciation of his work.  I can agree with that, but I'd never found Campbell's work worthwhile in its own right.  (Nor am I alone: see this critique, for example.)  I managed to watch just one episode of his popular PBS program The Power of Myth before giving up in disgust at his vacuousness.  It looks like the fuss eventually died down, thanks largely to the indignant and often vacuous denials by his advocates that Campbell could have been a bad man; after all, he inspired Star Wars!

The most interesting defense of Campbell I found turned up in several places, including his Wikipedia page (which itself obscures the substance of Gill's article):

Stephen and Robin Larsen, authors of the biography Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind (1991) and members of the founding board of advisors of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, argued against what they referred to as "the so-called anti-Semitic charge". They state: "For the record, Campbell did not belong to any organization that condoned racial or social bias, nor do we know of any other way in which he endorsed such viewpoints. During his lifetime, there was no record of such accusations of public bigotry".

The Larsens' defense is irrelevant.  Brendan Gill did not, as it happens, claim that Campbell did belong to "any organization that condoned racial or social bias"; his accusations of racism were based on things he said in private conversations.  Quite a few people backed Gill up, including the director of a university press who reported Campbell's "vexation" over the admission of black students to Sarah Lawrence College, where Campbell taught.  It would be difficult to come up with clear examples of such statements, though more and more of them were reported after Gill's article appeared.  But enough statements were reported that I don't think they can be dismissed out of hand.

On the other hand, such statements were probably common among old-guard faculty at good colleges, and even not-so-good ones.  Remember that Ivy League schools in Campbell's youth had maximum quotas for Jews, and probably for other groups as well; this reflected the "pervasive social norm" of American racism in the first half of the twentieth century.  When the norm began to change, many faculty men of Campbell's generation were unhappy about it, but even then they knew well enough to use code in public.  (See the passage about Carl Bridenbaugh addressing the American Historical Association in 1962, which I quoted here.)  Privately-made racist statements like those attributed to Joseph Campbell would hardly have been noticed by his peers, who would also have wanted to protect his reputation, even after he was dead.  Besides, the term "racist" brought to mind "the stereotype of the hate-filled extremist"; "anti-Semite" meant jackbooted Nazis; Campbell was a gentleman, and didn't "belong to any organization that condoned racial or social bias."  The Larsens say that during Campbell's lifetime there were no accusations of "public bigotry."  Again, Gill didn't say that there were: the bigotry was private.  I wonder if the Larsens were consciously trying to mislead by that wording, or if they were just sloppy.  But their defense of Campbell falls into a familiar pattern.

We're All Moderates Here

A couple of different people I know passed this along on Facebook this weekend. 

I was with Ms. Yasira Jaan until she put "Islamic" in quote marks. (The No True Scotsman move.)  But she's probably right: Most Christians use the Westboro Baptist Church to make themselves look moderate by comparison, and so no doubt do most Muslims about Islamists.  Jerry Falwell called WBC pastor Fred Phelps "a first class nut," and fretted, "I found it almost impossible to believe that human beings could be so brutal and vicious to a hurting family."  (This was the same guy who said to a hurting country a few days after September 11, 2001: "[T]he pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way--all of them who have tried to secularize America--I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'")  Returning Christian love for Christian love, Phelps picketed Falwell's funeral.  Was Falwell a moderate?  Phelps also denounced Pope Benedict XVI for protecting sexually predatory priests; was Pope Rat therefore a moderate?  My Right Wing Acquaintance RWA1 loves to post links to stories detailing the offenses of the man he calls "the demon-possessed preacher."  I certainly am not surprised if Muslim "terrorists" play the same role in the mainstream Muslim imaginary.

In saying this, I don't mean to say that all Muslims are the same, or that Ms. Jaan secretly makes donations to al-Qaeda.  It's just that using Phelps or al-Qaeda as the pole star of extremism leaves self-styled moderates a lot of wiggle room.

My comment to this effect displeased one of the friends who'd posted Ms. Jaan's tweet.  He replied, "Your comment would seem to suggest you consider moderation a meaningless term."  Well, yes, I do, as a matter of fact.  "Moderate" has no content whatever, especially if the self-styled moderate is permitted to set the extremes -- which they usually do.  Many people confuse moderation of tone with moderation of content, but neither one means much.

People can and do define just about any position as moderate if they're allowed to choose the extremes. Was Jerry Falwell a moderate? Was Pope Benedict a moderate, just because Phelps denounced him?  The classic statement on moderation is in Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from the Birmingham City Jail"; check it out. He didn't have much use for moderates either:

... I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I don't know anything about Ms. Jaan's political or other opinions, but I notice she wears a headscarf.  Of course that tells me that she is a moderate.  An extremist at one of the spectrum would wear a chador or burqa; an extremist at the other end would walk around immodestly bare-headed.  Lest anyone accuse me of attacking women who choose to cover their heads of their own free will, let me point out I too am a moderate, because I agree that women should be free to wear the hijab if they freely choose to.  There are extremists who would ban Muslim women from wearing headscarves; at the other extreme there are those who would force them to do so.  The friend who posted this tweet to Facebook, by the way, is also a moderate: he regards Barack Obama's presidential offenses as a "disappointment," between extremists of the Right who cheer on drone strikes, NSA data mining, cutting Social Security, etc.; and extremists of the Left like me, who see them as grounds for impeachment.  Isn't moderation wonderful?

Extremists to the Right of Me! Extremists to the Left of Me!

Speaking of Tabloid Friend, he linked to this image today:
With this text below it:

Register residents to vote, get out the vote and insure that there is a high electorate turnout in 2012 because President Barack Hussein Obama needs to be re-elected, 70 democratic U.S. senators and 300 U.S. representatives need to be elected to perform the "People's" work.

The 112th U.S. congress will go down as the worst congress ever, thanks to the republicans and T.E.A. republicans that would rather insure that Obama is defeated than legislating for the majority while protecting the rights of our minorities.

Replace All republicans, T.E.A. republicans and some democrats with those individuals that will work for America and NOT for the special interests and their respective political party.

Of course, we'll be so much better off with moderates in Congress and the White House -- nice, murderous, warmongering, public education-undermining, Social Security-eroding, indefinite detention-craving, Wall Street-dependent moderates.

So, let's see: Obama will need seventy Democrats in the Senate and three hundred Democrats in the House to do anything? Would you like a new iPod and a pony to go with that? Odd; Bush was able to destroy the economy, shred civil liberties and invade Iraq with far fewer Republicans. But unless the economy takes a sudden and drastic upturn, I think stasis is the best Obama and his worshipers can hope for.

Fannie Mae Landed on Us!

Yesterday I had a phone conversation about the Presidential campaign with another old friend -- not the same one I wrote about in the previous post, but one I've known for almost as long -- that clarified something I'd evidently been confused about.

My friend (another ambivalent Obama supporter) explained to me that whatever Obama might actually stand for or believe, he has to come across in his speeches and in the debate with McCain as a "moderate": he can't be too harsh, too critical, he can't actually call McCain on his lies, or he'll be perceived as an Angry Black Man. So he has to take a "centrist" position, he can't go too far to the left. A little light went on in my head, and I realized what was going on, not just in my friend's mind but in the minds of many other Americans. My friend was confusing "moderate" political positions with "moderate" personal presentation, or "image."

So I tried to explain this to him. In the first place, of course, Obama is not going and has never gone "to the left" at all. He'd have to swing sharply to the left even to be a centrist. His positions, as I argued here yesterday and earlier, are significantly to the right of the majority of Americans. In the course of the campaign he has made this more and more explicit.

Obama's political success, however, depends on his image, that of a black man who doesn't want to make white people feel guilty or otherwise bad about themselves, who denies that white racism is deeply rooted in American society, who is hopeful and upbeat and optimistic and will bring about the change 'we' need without seriously inconveniencing any white people. I told my friend that I don't expect Obama to do a Malcolm X imitation (he laughed at this and quoted Malcolm's "Plymouth Rock landed on us" line); it's not his style and image that I object to -- it's his political positions, the things he says he will do, that concern me.

As I've said before, this is one reason I find it useful not to watch TV or video clips of Obama's performances: so that I'm not swayed by his manner, but can attend to what he's actually saying. This puts me beyond the political pale, I know. Most Americans, despite paying lip service to "the issues", really don't seem to care about anything but the personalities (as they come across in the media) of the candidates. (Or of anyone else: I've often encountered respectable academics, for example, who respond to the careful arguments of their colleagues' publications in terms of their personalities. One, for example, dismissed a book by saying that it sounded to him as if the writer were struggling with mid-life crisis.) Because Obama has diligently crafted this non-threatening affect, both his fans and his enemies see him as liberal, even far to the left. I have to suppose that for many people, that's what "liberal" and "left" mean -- and remember that I'm talking not about the uneducated people so many liberals love to despise, but about college-educated, often professional people, including media professionals who supposedly are qualified to guide our country through the twenty-first century.

On the other hand, I suspect that if Obama (or anyone else) did occupy a real "left" position purely in terms of issues and policy, he would be perceived as an Angry Black Man no matter how gentle and mild his presentation. Case in point: Martin Luther King, Jr., a consistent advocate and practitioner of nonviolence, nevertheless scared the living shit out of most white Americans while he lived. After he was safely dead, however, even the most reactionary whites reimagined him as Mr. Sweetness and Light, who never wanted to make white people feel guilty or otherwise bad about themselves, who denied that white racism is deeply rooted in American society, who was hopeful and upbeat and optimistic and sought to bring about the change 'we' need without seriously inconveniencing any white people.

(Bill Cosby can indulge in denunciatory rhetoric without being branded an Angry Black Man, probably because his polemic is directed at his fellow African-Americans, not against whites. His earlier -- Sixties and Seventies' vintage -- criticism of white racism has been forgotten, not least by himself.)

Another case in point would be Ralph Nader, who (from the few video clips I've seen of him) isn't particularly angry or threatening in his presentation. Certainly his actual positions are threatening to the corporate interests that dominate the US political scene, but personally he's not a raving maniac. His political positions, of course, are virtually unknown to most people, but they know he's just an egomaniac who cost Al Gore the 2000 election, who doesn't care about anything except making a public spectacle of himself at the cost of the well-being of the body politic and his own dignity. It's not surprising, I guess, that people would prefer to caricature people they disagree with in this way (though I don't see how they know that they disagree, given their carefully-maintained ignorance about the others' opinions), but it says something that they choose to do the same with people they like: if I like you personally, your opinions, whatever they are, must be good ones. What would good opinions be? Who knows? Only an angry extremist would even think about such things.

This morning I found the problem well-described by M. Ioz:

Consider our situation. Barack Obama won last night's debate by speaking clearly, fluently, and like an adult about things that were palpably untrue, while John McCain kept implying that I am his friend. Obama terrifies me: an intelligent, thoughtful, well-prepared, capably extemporaneous man ascribing a future holocaust to some sort of non-existent, fantastical, steroidal Iran; talking about unsanctioned cross-border incursions into Pakistan because we found bin Laden, or some such, and must "take him out"; warbling around about "main street" while, in a lawyerly, circumlocutory way signaling that he's ultimately going to get behind hundred-billion-dollar cash bailouts to institutions that ought to be dismantled, destroyed, scattered to the wind. He wants GM to make electric cars. He wants the American people to know that he will appear before them to make extravagant xenophobic declarations in order to assuage their insecurity about the rise of other competing economies. He does this all in a calm, perfectly reasonable manner, with a convincing boardroom demeanor, and judging by the reactions of my liberal friends, with whom I listened, this was basically pleasing to them.

McCain is of course out of his mind: forgetful, vicious, reactionary. And his ideas are even crazier than BO's, but there's a certain comfort in the fact that their insanity is laid so plainly and mercilessly bare by the grinning psychopath's delivery. He provides no quarter for those who want to convince themselves that by Killing People for Their Own Good we are not actually killing them, or that by suborning corporate malfeasance we are combating it, or that by desperately seeking to maintain the geography of radial sprawl and the automobile we are seeking "energy independence."

That pretty well sums it up. I'd only stress once again that if Obama didn't express those lunatic and highly dangerous opinions, but expressed sane and constructive ones in the same calm, well-modulated boardroom manner, he'd be denounced immediately by Ioz's liberal friends (and by the corporate media, and by the Democratic leadership) as a angry man, a crazed egomaniac wacko like Ralph Nader or, say, Noam Chomsky. But not to worry: a candidate who advocated sane and constructive policies would never get past the first few primaries. I have to conclude that Americans don't want such people in politics. Once again I'm reminded of the broadcast pundit who said after the 2004 Kerry-Bush debates that Americans don't watch the debates for the candidates' stands on the issues, but to get a feeling for which one they'd want to invite home to dinner. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, we're doomed.