DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

dagNotes: calling the drones home

Virilio’s arguments about the logics of perception…where the field of battle exists as a field of perception…where images, the movement of images via media, can start a conflict…

Reflecting about the liberal response to drones abroad moving to drones at home. Does this perception of war at home hurt the government? I don’t think so. It helps. It invokes a call from progressives and conservatives alike for proper governance within the current paradigm. It invokes what it seeks to distance itself from. Certainly, the masters of war know that it does.

Government gets discipline either way.

Action…Perception

You may wish to read the short blog on NRO before reading my analysis.

As we have come to learn, conservative men and women simply cannot keep their fucking mouths shut when it comes to rape, assault, and sexual harassment. They will do whatever they can to shame victims who publicly suffer their abuse and seek help. For conservatives, an innocent victim is one who silently bears their abuse and associated trauma; one who can cope while remaining a productive employee and without retribution, rehabilitation, or reparation. To speak out and to seek aid is to illustrate guilt and the trauma becomes the result of poor decision making skills that can be blamed on feminism and prurient and permissive culture.

Heather MacDonald, in her recent blog for National Review Online’s blog, The Corner, attempts to explain what occurrences of Military Sexual Trauma (MST) actually signify: that many women who are raped are feminist sluts who are nothing more than the victims of their own poor decisions.

First, MacDonald bemoans the recognition of yet another syndrome.

So now there’s a name and, inevitably, an acronym for it: military-sexual-trauma syndrome or MST. Military-sexual-trauma syndrome is that debilitating condition that befalls female service members who have allegedly been the victim of sexual assault by their fellow service members. According to the New York Times, female veterans are becoming homeless and involved in street life because of the post-traumatic stress that results from having been victimized in a military “that failed to protect them.”

Right? UGH. The medical profession in cahoots with the government is always coming up with another illness and acronym for that illness. How droll. What is it with conservative rhetoric that insists one must introduce any and all social and political arguments with a tone of disgust and ennui? Worse, MacDonald blows her progressive-mischief dog-whistle by attributing the reasons for the new syndrome to the New York Times, when it’s actually the result of work with the Department of Veterans Affairs. However, baselessly attacking veterans and their support services is difficult; it’s much easier to shit on the New York Times and its imagined readers.

McDonald, having focused her readers’ attentions squarely on liberal filth, excuse politics, and the lazy, social-welfare-loving collectivists who read the New York Times, provides us an example of one veteran who suffers from MST:

Tiffany Jackson is the Times’ lead example. She says that she was savagely raped in the ladies room of a bar in South Korea by a fellow serviceman. She held a job “fleetingly” after leaving the military, but

Two years later, she had descended into anger and alcohol and left her job. She started hanging out with people who were using cocaine and became an addict herself, huddling against the wind on Skid Row here… . She grew up in a tough section of Compton, Calif., and served as a heavy equipment operator in the Army, exhilarated by her sense of mastery in a male-dominated environment. But after the rape — which she kept to herself, not even telling her family — her behavior changed. She assaulted a sergeant, resulting in disciplinary actions. Back home, she lost her job in sales after she passed out, drunk, during a business phone call. “It looked like I really had my stuff together,” she said. “But I was dying inside.”

She served three years in prison for drug dealing and finally confided in a prison psychiatrist, who helped her see that many of her bad decisions had been rooted in the sexual trauma.

Ms. Jackson now is on full disability compensation for her MST, though she was at first denied benefits.

The framing of Tiffany Jackson’s story is clear. MacDonald is going to explain how social welfare rewards laziness and poor decisions.

Now here is a tentative alternative hypothesis: Some of these women come from environments that made their descent into street life overdetermined, whether or not they experienced alleged sexual assault in the military. To blame alleged sexual assault for their fate rather than their own bad decision-making is ideologically satisfying, but mystifying. Having children out of wedlock, as a huge proportion of them do, also does not help in avoiding poverty and homelessness:  

Monica Figueroa, 22, a former Army parachutist, lived in a family member’s auto body shop in the Los Angeles area, bathing her baby, Alexander, in a sink used for oil and solvents until, with help, they found temporary housing.

Michelle Mathis, 30, a single mother of three, has bounced among seven temporary places since returning home in 2005 with atraumatic brain injury. Ms. Mathis, who served as a chemical specialist in Iraq, relies on a GPS device to help her remember the way to the grocery store and her children’s school.

Don’t overlook the persuasive other-ing in the passage: “Having children out of wedlock, as a huge portion of them do, also does not help…”. MacDonald implements two kinds of composition in her blog. First she composes (invokes) a traditionally-ideal woman : a responsibly employed and/or married mother who is middle class and owns property. It’s easy for readers to miss this composition of an ideal American woman and the heteronormative demands such pleas make for the disgusting tone and claims of MacDonald’s argument. Explicitly, she composes victims of sexual assault and harassment who suffer MST and single mothers. Implicitly, she’s rewarding readers who identify with her.

More egregious, though, is an insensitive and silly error in reasoning. MacDonald insists, “To blame alleged sexual assault for their fate rather than their own bad decision-making is ideologically satisfying, but mystifying.” Suffering post-traumatic stress is not a fate. This stress is the result of a traumatic event that, by definition, is unnecessary. It’s no wonder MacDonald doesn’t understand MST as a result of assault and/or harassment; she believes veterans suffering MST earned their trauma as a just reward for their behavior prior to being harassed and/or raped. In other words, having a child out of wedlock earns poverty and sexist abuse.

MacDonald even projects her grotesque sense of social determinism onto veterans who suffer MST. She writes, “Some of these women come from environments that made their descent into street life overdetermined, whether or not they experienced alleged sexual assault in the military.” It doesn’t matter whether or not these veterans were, in fact, raped. MacDonald has overdetermined her position to the extent that coming from non-traditional environments is enough to earn or expect a future of victim-hood. It’s as if it’s only a matter of time for these women. MacDonald clearly doesn’t understand she creates two categories for women: women who will be assaulted and deserve it, and women who shouldn’t be assaulted.

And this is a rather gobsmacking problem with MacDonald’s argument, isn’t it? Not only does she not seem to understand what a disorder that results from persistent trauma is, she doesn’t seem to understand that she’s applying her admittedly conservative and demanding sense of propriety onto others who may or may not see the world the way she does. She really doesn’t seem to understand that a syndrome is not a made-up narrative that individuals can use to garner unearned rewards. The MST syndrome is a verifiable state of affairs that must be treated for the patients to be well. It’s clear MacDonald has never witnessed PTSD nor experienced anything traumatic in her life.

Following her alternative hypothesis that such trauma doesn’t exist but only “bad decisions” do, MacDonald flexes her con-muscles by criticizing college-campus feminists and her “tough as nails” approach to them. Basically, she knows a woman who was raped three times who doesn’t suffer trauma. So, feminism is wrong.

Feminists claim (speciously) that a whopping one-quarter of college co-eds are sexually assaulted by their fellow students in college; I am not aware of comparable claims that huge numbers of female college graduates are as a result ending up on the street. (The difference between the outcomes for college graduates and vets does not lie in the relative availability of services: College rape crisis centers and hotlines are barely used.) I am not even aware of claims that victims of stranger rape are more likely to end up dealing drugs and homeless, but that evidence may in fact be out there. (I recently wrote about a tough-as-nails, pro-police building superintendent in the Bronx who was raped three times, including by her mother’s boyfriend as a child; she is only one case, obviously, but she was not on disability benefits or on the streets.) 

I’m just going to leave that paragraph alone because MacDonald saves her worst work for last. I’m so frustrated by it that I decided to write this post just so I could get to this last bit. Everything up to this point is boilerplate conservative, anti-feminist hate. Pure contempt and smug sanctimony. You’ve all likely heard it before. But her last paragraph is simply nuts.

But let’s say that for these homeless female vets, it really was their sexual experiences in the military that caused their downward spiral into, as the Times puts it, “alcohol and substance abuse, depression and domestic violence.” Why then have those same feminists who are now lamenting the life-destroying effects of “MST” insisted on putting women into combat units? Arguably, coming under enemy fire or falling into enemy hands is as traumatic as the behavior one may experience while binge-drinking with one’s fellow soldiers or as scarring as being “bullied and ostracized” by a female superior. Are women on average going to be more able to emotionally handle the former than the latter? Isn’t there a contradiction in expecting the military to “protect” you while it also sends you out to face mortal risk? And do the feminists believe that there will be fewer of these alleged rapes in combat training and duty? Perhaps they think that with enough multi-million-dollar gender-equity training contracts showered on the gender-industrial complex, the problem will go away. Or perhaps they think that keeping before us proof that the patriarchy is alive and well is more important than protecting women from “MST,” especially if that image can serve as grounds for remaking the military.   

Apparently, there’s no editors for The Corner. First, MacDonald thinks so poorly of certain kinds of women, the them she’s referring to throughout the blog, that rape and assault is sex for them. MacDonald sexualizes harassment and assault as a characteristic of sexuality for certain kinds of women: namely, women who don’t abide by patriarchal traditional family values. It’s not often a conservative would conflate having sex—even of the loose variety that social conservatives are always whining about—with being raped, but MacDonald pretty much does in the first sentence of her closing argument. Is it so hard to imagine that a woman who is raped also has positive sexual experiences? Isn’t it a problem to define an victim of assault by the assault and the oppressive associations that have been improperly attached to it? Not for MacDonald. It’s another horrible association and assumption based in prejudice and misrepresentation that receives prominence in rhetoric over cool-consideration of facts, events, medicine, and evidence.

The rest is just hyperbole. I have no clue what female service members fighting in combat has to do with women being assaulted while on active duty. Nor was I aware of the “gender-industrial complex”. What the fuck is that? In conclusion, MacDonald’s reference about patriarchy is instructive. Nobody having anything to do with treating MST is talking about The Patriarchy, but conservative pundits like MacDonald will always bring it up because it is a sine qua non for conservative ethos.

From The Hispanic Leadership Network (American Action Network Affiliates)

Republicans recently received the following list of dos and don’ts to consider when discussing immigration from the right wing Hispanic Leadership Network.

When engaging in conversation or doing an interview on immigration reform:
Do acknowledge that “Our current immigration system is broken and we need to fix it”
Don’t begin with “We are against amnesty”
Note: Most everyone is against amnesty and this is interpreted as being against any reform.

When talking about a solution for the millions here without documentation who could qualify to get in line first with a temporary visa, then legal residence and finally citizenship:
Do use the phrase “earned legal status”
Don’t use the phrase “pathway to citizenship”
Note: This has a different meaning and can denote getting in front of the line to get citizenship – this is not true. Most Republicans and Democrats, along with 70% of Americans, support a fair system by which those who are undocumented can come forward, register with the government, pass a background check, pay a fine, learn English and get legal status first – that is earned legal status, not automatic citizenship.

When addressing securing our borders:
Do use the wording “enforcement of our borders includes more border patrol, technology, and building a fence where it makes sense”
Don’t use phrases like “send them all back”, “electric fence”, “build a wall along the entire border”

When talking about immigrants:
Do use “undocumented immigrant” when referring to those here without documentation
Don’t use the word “illegals” or “aliens”
Don’t use the term “anchor baby”

When addressing amnesty and earned legal status:
Do acknowledge that the true meaning of amnesty is to pardon without any penalty
Don’t label earned legal status as amnesty
Don’t characterize all Hispanics as undocumented and all undocumented as Hispanics

When broadly addressing reforms:
Do acknowledge that President Obama broke his promise and failed to propose any immigration reform for five years, while using this issue as a political wedge
Do talk about the issues you support like overhauling the bureaucratic visa system, creating a viable temporary worker program, a workable e-verify system, and border security
Don’t focus on amnesty as a tenet of immigration reform
Don’t use President Reagan’s immigration reform as an example applicable today
Note: That legislation was true amnesty; in addition, border security, fixing our visa system, and a temporary worker program were parts of the reform which were never implemented.

Gertrude Himmelfarb grossing us all out about her 1995 book The De-moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. If you want to know where “family values” comes from, this is the book that took Margaret Thatcher’s love for Victorian Virtues, which she referred to as perennial virtues, and traces the implementation of “family values” in the Reagan-Thatcher era. It’s a screed about the demoralization of society that really did, in many ways, mark the beginning of a renewed intellectualism in scholarship and popular culture that has as its goal a looking backward to an idealized and fictional, middle-class Victorian morality. It’s not surprising that Americans loved this book arriving, as it did, the year after one of the most violent years in contemporary US history, at the time, and following the bloviated Republican takeover of Congress.

You should all read it. It will gross you out, but will provide you one of the primary sources for most of the Conservative bullshit that we still face in the US and its attempt to sanitize history. You read this and Hayek’s social theory and you have the key to understanding much white capitalist culture.

dagNotes: Why Intersectionality Matters

dagseoul:

First, you have to do a little homework. Here’s recent research illustrating how, over the last 40 years, the US legislative process has favored the affluent classes. It’s not a matter of speculation; it’s simply The Case that our electorate and its elected officials and their actions consistently favor the rich. You’d think common sense would be enough to know this to be the case, but common sense is about denying paradox and simplifying complex discourse. It’s not simple because the problem is a result of The Bargain with White Power. It’s a result with how such a bargain works.

We can argue about this from a bicameral tradition that pits Democrats against Republicans and Liberals against Conservatives, but that would be a waste of time. Libertarians? They can’t hack this debate either because they don’t understand class; they choose to fetishize individualism vs (a) collectivism (that has never existed). And this stupid debate about the direction value can trickle is just awful. From above or from below, ain’t nothing going to change until we change the paradigm.

The fact is if we were to only examine this problem as a class problem, we’d have to bracket and ignore that it’s poor whites and their middle-class cousins who daily invest in the bargain to fund capitalist interests via legislation that maintains our free market. They have a stake in the game in spite of their lack of privilege relative to the excesses of privilege the wealthy possess. Not-white citizens also participate in the bargain, but for a variety of reasons and not with the same interests. They always already have less at stake.

Affluent Americans have nothing to lose in elections and the legislative process. They have amassed the kind of capital that no longer calls for participation in the market in any meaningful manner. To focus on the rich is a liberal ploy to cultivate a kind of capitalism that permits more people to become unjustly wealthy, unjustly ambitious. The ploy is not to alter traditional, capitalist class structure. Worse, Libertarian pleas for more liberty and more voluntarism are part of the same wish, just more grotesque. Libertarians wish we could live in a market permitting them what they want, when they want it, without having to worry about anybody else’s interests, and without ethics, and without a state, and without aggression (which means, and without being able to do something about it). The fleeting and fantastic to be free from others is a really a demand to be free from economy. All that anti-state crap is a liberalism moving to voluntarism. It’s still problematic.

We need instersectionality when examining class because it permits us to see that poor whites who want to be “self-reliant” and “upwardly mobile” “individuals” have accepted their stake in a white supremacist bargain. They may only presently own the “to be white” gift they receive for purchasing the bargain, but they want to own the “to be free” part next.

Intersectionality is not problematic. It’s a matter of welcoming something into traditional dialectics that has only been excluded because most of the white men who historically shaped the discourse were racist and sexist pigs.

Intersectionality or bust.

dagNotes: Why Intersectionality Matters

First, you have to do a little homework. Here’s recent research illustrating how, over the last 40 years, the US legislative process has favored the affluent classes. It’s not a matter of speculation; it’s simply The Case that our electorate and its elected officials and their actions consistently favor the rich. You’d think common sense would be enough to know this to be the case, but common sense is about denying paradox and simplifying complex discourse. It’s not simple because the problem is a result of The Bargain with White Power. It’s a result with how such a bargain works.

We can argue about this from a bicameral tradition that pits Democrats against Republicans and Liberals against Conservatives, but that would be a waste of time. Libertarians? They can’t hack this debate either because they don’t understand class; they choose to fetishize individualism vs (a) collectivism (that has never existed). And this stupid debate about the direction value can trickle is just awful. From above or from below, ain’t nothing going to change until we change the paradigm.

The fact is if we were to only examine this problem as a class problem, we’d have to bracket and ignore that it’s poor whites and their middle-class cousins who daily invest in the bargain to fund capitalist interests via legislation that maintains our free market. They have a stake in the game in spite of their lack of privilege relative to the excesses of privilege the wealthy possess. Not-white citizens also participate in the bargain, but for a variety of reasons and not with the same interests. They always already have less at stake.

Affluent Americans have nothing to lose in elections and the legislative process. They have amassed the kind of capital that no longer calls for participation in the market in any meaningful manner. To focus on the rich is a liberal ploy to cultivate a kind of capitalism that permits more people to become unjustly wealthy, unjustly ambitious. The ploy is not to alter traditional, capitalist class structure. Worse, Libertarian pleas for more liberty and more voluntarism are part of the same wish, just more grotesque. Libertarians wish we could live in a market permitting them what they want, when they want it, without having to worry about anybody else’s interests, and without ethics, and without a state, and without aggression (which means, and without being able to do something about it). The fleeting and fantastic to be free from others is a really a demand to be free from economy. All that anti-state crap is a liberalism moving to voluntarism. It’s still problematic.

We need instersectionality when examining class because it permits us to see that poor whites who want to be “self-reliant” and “upwardly mobile” “individuals” have accepted their stake in a white supremacist bargain. They may only presently own the “to be white” gift they receive for purchasing the bargain, but they want to own the “to be free” part next.

Intersectionality is not problematic. It’s a matter of welcoming something into traditional dialectics that has only been excluded because most of the white men who historically shaped the discourse were racist and sexist pigs.

Intersectionality or bust.

dagNotes: on personal experience

dagseoul:

I’ve been thinking about teaching a lot lately because I miss it. I love the reading and writing I’ve had and will have over the next year, but I really will be excited to get back in the classroom. As a result, I’ve been thinking about personal experience in general.

In my last post, I wrote:

you can always tell the “left-y” kids who are going to grow into thirty-something reactionary, populist conservatives. they’re the ones who find alex jones funny now and who secretly troll conspiracy sites. they’re into anything spectacular and violent.

I have over a decade of experience with this in writing, ethics, composition, and freshman-seminar courses. Young and reactionary conservatives, who are vocally loyal to their communities, churches, and/or parents often are the most willing to listen, read, study, critically think, and revise their thinking about society. I don’t know if this speaks to my pedagogical principles or my teaching style, but the conservative kids spent more time active in class, in my office, and walking campus with me talking about their anxieties, their social problems, their daily lives.

This is not to say that my mission was to turn students. Don’t get me wrong. As a teacher, I can care less. Let me put it better: Teaching to transgress is not about teaching conservatives to be left wing. I know there are teachers out there who try to teach to and do things for or against their students. I’m not like that. As a matter of fact, I tend to teach writing instensive classes, and so I really can’t do that if I’m at all focused on working on their writing and voices, no matter how much I dislike their prose, verse, and voices.

Anyway, I’m stating something I observed between 1999-2007 in my classrooms. Many of those young men—it tends to be the men, though it’s not a given—experienced transformation through transgression during their Freshman and Sophomore years in college and university. Just going to school and registering for courses that “have nothing to do with what I’ll be doing” was transgression enough to get them talking. Being able to speak in public and learning to become more articulate as speakers and more precise and graceful as writers permitted them a space to not only mature but to grow as citizens. As a lecturer and adjunct, the quiet students remain enigmas to me and I long ago learned to let them be. My job isn’t to examine students. It’s to work with them, along with them, on a project—achieving the objectives in our syllabus. I should mention, I’ve had bigots, homophobes, religious zealots, klan members even—haters of all kinds have participated in my classes. I’m not talking about the odd freak who gets caught being nasty in public.

In contrast, which is what makes it a striking observation for me as opposed to something that I’d expect everyone experiences who teaches what I teach, almost every one of my younger radical friends abandoned the cause by the 2000s for lives of moderation at least, if not entirely embracing right wing populism. I know a lot of capitalist libertarians who consider themselves socially progressive but realists who were once younger idealistic social justice warriors. (The last whimper of a social justice warrior turning moderate liberal to conservative populist is usually exhaled in the halls of victim advocacy.)

I came to college a devout progressive who was learning what it meant to study history and to want to write and to teach. I wanted to study philosophy. I felt open to the experience. I was looking for discourse. It’s important to me and to my memory of 1991, especially: an openness. I didn’t arrive knowing answers. I was dedicated to education at a young age. That said, all my dogmatic Marxist-Leninist friends, my friends who were young socialists, those who toyed with actual anarchism, moved right. Every one of them. And everyone of them seemed, back then, closed.

Moreover, and as much as I hate to admit it, the most acerbic and sour-ing—a progressive trait—voices in classroom discourse tended to come from naive social justice liberals who received much self-gratification saying “that’s not correct”, whatever it might have been, whenever the Not-Right popped up in class. I see this all the time on tumblr. Or, they sat silent and self-satisfied, smirking in their seats only to turn in poorly written, trite, cliched, and boring essays week after week that showed the least engagement in course material for the most certainty of righteousness. The worst writers are always those who already know IT. I’m almost certain this has to do with social justice rhetoric and the way the mainstream and radical social justice communities implement concepts/strategies of equality and tolerance that insist on authoritarian modes of uniformity. It’s no wonder we witness so much white supremacy in social justice communities.

In my opinion, the fuel for this problem is a refusal to reject the social order in liberalism. What’s most obscene in liberal progressive societies’ loyalty to capitalism? A rejection of history. What replaces history, what liberals and progressives insist replaces that project, is a profession of personal experience. This is always history denying in its on-going presentation, a profession that is always present-ing itself can’t possibly cope with contemporaneity never mind intention. This project instills within each individual the notion of an undeniable and justified, which means never-should-be-transgressed—private social order that lends itself more to consumerism and business activity than to social work towards a shared, non-economic (in a capitalist sense of that word) cause. Notice I did not use the language of morality here. I did not refer to a shared or economic good. 

working on this.

dagNotes: on personal experience

I’ve been thinking about teaching a lot lately because I miss it. I love the reading and writing I’ve had and will have over the next year, but I really will be excited to get back in the classroom. As a result, I’ve been thinking about personal experience in general.

In my last post, I wrote:

you can always tell the “left-y” kids who are going to grow into thirty-something reactionary, populist conservatives. they’re the ones who find alex jones funny now and who secretly troll conspiracy sites. they’re into anything spectacular and violent.

I have over a decade of experience with this in writing, ethics, composition, and freshman-seminar courses. Young and reactionary conservatives, who are vocally loyal to their communities, churches, and/or parents often are the most willing to listen, read, study, critically think, and revise their thinking about society. I don’t know if this speaks to my pedagogical principles or my teaching style, but the conservative kids spent more time active in class, in my office, and walking campus with me talking about their anxieties, their social problems, their daily lives.

This is not to say that my mission was to turn students. Don’t get me wrong. As a teacher, I can care less. Let me put it better: Teaching to transgress is not about teaching conservatives to be left wing. I know there are teachers out there who try to teach to and do things for or against their students. I’m not like that. As a matter of fact, I tend to teach writing instensive classes, and so I really can’t do that if I’m at all focused on working on their writing and voices, no matter how much I dislike their prose, verse, and voices.

Anyway, I’m stating something I observed between 1999-2007 in my classrooms. Many of those young men—it tends to be the men, though it’s not a given—experienced transformation through transgression during their Freshman and Sophomore years in college and university. Just going to school and registering for courses that “have nothing to do with what I’ll be doing” was transgression enough to get them talking. Being able to speak in public and learning to become more articulate as speakers and more precise and graceful as writers permitted them a space to not only mature but to grow as citizens. As a lecturer and adjunct, the quiet students remain enigmas to me and I long ago learned to let them be. My job isn’t to examine students. It’s to work with them, along with them, on a project—achieving the objectives in our syllabus. I should mention, I’ve had bigots, homophobes, religious zealots, klan members even—haters of all kinds have participated in my classes. I’m not talking about the odd freak who gets caught being nasty in public.

In contrast, which is what makes it a striking observation for me as opposed to something that I’d expect everyone experiences who teaches what I teach, almost every one of my younger radical friends abandoned the cause by the 2000s for lives of moderation at least, if not entirely embracing right wing populism. I know a lot of capitalist libertarians who consider themselves socially progressive but realists who were once younger idealistic social justice warriors. (District Attorney and Attorney General offices all over the US are littered with progressive burn outs. I was a public defender investigator for a few years.  The last whimper of a social justice warrior turning moderate liberal to conservative populist is usually exhaled in the halls of victim advocacy.)

I came to college a devout progressive who was learning what it meant to study history and to want to write and to teach. I wanted to study philosophy. I felt open to the experience. I was looking for discourse. It’s important to me and to my memory of 1991, especially: an openness. I didn’t arrive knowing answers. I was dedicated to education at a young age. That said, all my dogmatic Marxist-Leninist friends, my friends who were young socialists, those who toyed with actual anarchism, moved right. Every one of them. And everyone of them seemed, back then, closed.

Moreover, and as much as I hate to admit it, the most acerbic and sour-ing—a progressive trait—voices in classroom discourse tended to come from naive social justice liberals who received much self-gratification saying “that’s not correct”, whatever it might have been, whenever the Not-Right popped up in class. I see this all the time on tumblr. Or, they sat silent and self-satisfied, smirking in their seats only to turn in poorly written, trite, cliched, and boring essays week after week that showed the least engagement in course material for the most certainty of righteousness. The worst writers are always those who already know IT. I’m almost certain this has to do with social justice rhetoric and the way the mainstream and radical social justice communities implement concepts/strategies of equality and tolerance that insist on authoritarian modes of uniformity. It’s no wonder we witness so much white supremacy in social justice communities.

In my opinion, the fuel for this problem is a refusal to reject the social order in liberalism. What’s most obscene in liberal progressive societies’ loyalty to capitalism? A rejection of history. What replaces history, what liberals and progressives insist replaces that project, is a profession of personal experience. This is always history denying in its on-going presentation, a profession that is always present-ing itself can’t possibly cope with contemporaneity never mind intention. This project instills within each individual the notion of an undeniable and justified, which means never-should-be-transgressed—private social order that lends itself more to consumerism and business activity than to social work towards a shared, non-economic (in a capitalist sense of that word) cause. Notice I did not use the language of morality here. I did not refer to a shared or economic good. 

I am happily a “faggot foreigner”

This morning an angry white man in a Toyota raged at me on 94W/90W. I don’t understand Chicago drivers using the shoulder to aggro-pass traffic during rush hour. This guy attempted to force me to move a little into the middle lane to permit him a chance to use the small shoulder to pass on the right. I wasn’t paying attention, and I have to admit that I wouldn’t have moved into the other lane anyway. My window was down, and I was zoned into the traffic and talk radio. The sour guy forced his way into the middle lane and next to me. He rolled down his window, swung his car close to mine, and screamed at me.

I ignored him the best I could, and it didn’t take too long for him to realize he couldn’t provoke me. You all know what angry white guys do when they’re ignored by other white men, right? He called me an ignorant faggot. But he added to the typical abuse. He yelled, “Go home, you ignorant, faggot foreigner!” He screamed it several times: “faggot, you faggot foreigner!” In the US, boys and men expect homophobia to enter discourse when confronting other, angry men. It’s the hallmark of frustrated masculinity. I guess, this “foreigner” modified by “faggot” is supposed to be some sort of amplified insult. It’s very weak tea and not at all scary, unlike the Rav4 he was using as a weapon.

I don’t get the “foreigner” tag. I do get I’ve only been back home for three weeks. During this short span, I’ve noticed in public space and discourse that I’m sensitive and acutely tuned-in to white people talking about others as foreign(er). I hear it everywhere I go. This isn’t a US problem, by the way. The haters in France received an almost legitimizing 20% in this week’s elections. The right wing in nations where the white majority is slowly but steadily eroding has become a safe place for the racist rhetoric in white political discourse. Conservative white discourse has largely embraced impotent, reactionary political rhetoric.

My safe driving, a decision to follow traffic until my desired exit without risking accident, becomes an opportunity for an angry reactionary to insult me as “one of them”. This them, between two assumed straight white men, used to be homosexuals. Is it becoming simply to be other? After all, the other is a fluid category for those who cannot or who refuse to assimilate to the demands of white men and their business. (And it’s not really ironic, certainly not humorous, that conservative white men love to violently eroticize their slurs betraying their tea room and down-low behavior that is more often being discovered as surveilance provides more clues to what many of these men forcibly repress within reactionary and regressive white masculinity.)

Praise and I have noticed how diverse the US is. Korea is many things, but not diverse. But I still benefited from unearned privilege in Korea. In Korea, privileged foreigners are left alone as long as their labor is valuable and can leave when it no longer is valued (unlike the many oppressed foreigners who are brought to Korea to work in poor conditions and for little pay.) Korea might be the most vigorously-opposed-to-diversity place I’ve visited. The US is diverse. Upon returning, it’s impossible not see it. On the other hand, it’s also impossible to ignore the passive and aggressive inequalities that are insisted upon in public discourse and behavior by a frightened and frustrated, dwindling and conservative, white majority that enjoys illustrating itself as democratic and liberal, if not wholeheartedly progressive.

I will gladly remain a faggot foreigner if this is the case, thank you.

dagRepeat: Social conservatives do not want to regulate abortion, birth control, marriage, and families. They want to regulate bodies.

It’s not about birth control, it’s about regulating both sex and women’s bodies.

It’s not about abortion, it’s about regulating both reproduction and women’s bodies.

It’s not about marriage, it’s about regulating (hetero)sexuality.

It’s not about families, it’s about regulating fatherhood while subjugating mothers and daughters.

Do not permit your socially conservative friends to get away with ignoring regressive white masculinity, sexism, heterosexism, and misogyny.

What we can learn from Rush Limbaugh’s recent hateful ranting to Rick Santorum’s weak catechismal understanding of reproduction and sexuality is that social conservatives do not understand biology, anatomy, medicine, sexuality, and reproduction. And they aren’t interested in understanding. Don’t permit them to be authoritarian dunces when talking to them. Focus your discourse. Insist they confess their ideological demands.

dagHomework: Where is a better example of reactionary and regressive white power in public discourse but in the common plea for us to look at “factual evidence”?

HINT: Consider what someone could mean by differentiating “the evidence” from “the factual evidence”.

Yesterday, we considered the construction of whiteness and ethnicity. It’s important. To ignore how traditional white power globally defines the concept of race is white supremacist. I’m insisting we can’t bracket whiteness and white supremacy, no matter where we’re addressing what people want to call racism. In addition, I’ll always demand we permit intersectionality. As far as I’m concerned, the white power structure uses capitalism to transmit its ideological demands. Capitalism is a white supremacist practice and part of what Hayek defined as the spontaneous social order of the free market. White power is the stabilizing social force of the free market. To be a capitalist is, in many ways, to be a white supremacist.

Today, I want us to examine the demand for specific kinds of evidence in public discourse. It’s relevant considering the KONY2012 campaign—a social movement, I argue, absolutely fueled by reactionary and regressive white power that’s invested all its faith (in economics and social justice) in the imaginary free-market.

dagNotes: obeisance to tradition; abeyance of love.

Always astonished when crass libertarians and devout social conservatives grow angry, impatient, and offended after we challenge their notions about the world we live in. However, the knee-jerk offense betrays a more complex and troubling problem than a refusal to critically think about well known problems and historical events.

On “the world we live in”. I use “we” as opposed to “they” because I accept that we have an actual society in common. The actual commons is something they reject with rank reference to voluntaryism, choice, individualism, privacy, property, and coercion or force. After all, both crass libertarians and conservatives are little more than backward-gazing authoritarians yearning for a return to a fantastic gilded age that has never existed. Their time is without place outside of the published narratives they cherish. Their fantasies spring from a finite source a long ago accounted for number of claims. 

What a dreadful life to lead never believing it necessary to examine the assumptions about what we are asked to accept about everyday life—to read the literature family, colleagues, or friends offer and not once find reason to doubt the claims inscribed within. The horror living each day to labor for an unchosen tradition saying no to anything new, insisting original social difference is alien.

The obeisance to tradition and authority is the abeyance of love. The word “choice” is precise: deferential respect is a form of suspension of being in that its respect for tradition illustrates a dreadful waiting for something to happen, an always waiting for something to occur. It’s the repetition of what has ceased to change, a past moment monumented into cultural imagination—a sterile, unlovable, permanently dying moment.

It’s no wonder social conservatives and crass libertarians persistently mourn the death of history and culture.

Common Sense Nonsense: The Myth of Both Sides

angryconservative:

I feel that everyone’s discriminated against in some way, shape or form. Jocks can be discriminated against, Men can be discriminated against, it’s all the same for both sides, Black or White, Male or Female.

From the conservatives’ Bushel of Common Sense comes the Ultimate Binary: every thing or idea has two, equal sides that combine to form a whole.

It’s Authoritarianism: Window into the White Conservative Male Mind

MITT ROMNEY: Marriage is a status. It’s not an activity that goes on within the walls of a state and as a result, our marriage status relationship should be constant across the country. I believe we should have a federal amendment to the Constitution that defines marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman.

If marriage is a status, then being married is like being wealthy, being employed, being straight, being male, being heterosexual, being faithful, being corporatist, being American. I’m just thinking of Romney’s statuses. Lo and Behold! These are things Romney likes about himself, things he likely believes justify a traditional social hierarchy. In my opinion, it’s clear that his morality is corrupt and his position is the result of much unearned ambition. But that’s me talking. Let’s permit Romney’s logic to do the talking.

Romney is worrying that his status should be constant, which means protected by law. Whether he is in California, Oklahoma, or Maine, his status should be married. Now this sounds similar to the argument human right’s activists would make on behalf of non-traditional married couples, whose marriages aren’t recognized in many states. (Like a lot of conservatives, he appropriates a progressive claim and whitens it up.) Romney insists his status should be recognizable and protected anywhere in the United States. And since his status is married, that status should represent what he represents. I suppose it’s a common mistake that many conservatives make. A status is a category that defines a state of being. That’s a state, not a look. But that’s for another post.

If we’re to take Romney seriously—that he is rational, reasonable, understanding, and earnest—his statement also means that all of our statuses should be visibly constant so that they mean something to both the individuals who occupy a status and the state who regulates statuses. Remember, his claim is not about marriage, it’s about status. What’s married in Alabama is married in Ohio, as is what’s traditionally, possibly legally, male, female, wealthy, poor, employer, employee, disabled, single, etc.

Where does Romney’s sentiment come from? His desire for constancy across the country? Is it like a consumer walking into Applebee’s anywhere and knowing his nachos will look and taste the same because they come from the same place and are cooked in the same way? No. It’s much worse. The desire for consistency, for constant principles of sameness, for legally recognized status, is a desire to obliterate social difference in the free market. Romney is talking like a manager, like an employer, like a capitalist, like a Mormon.

It’s clear Romney wants to sound Democratic, but his argument is authoritarian. This is the same guy who recently remarked, “Corporations are people, my friend.” He’s a corporatist white conservative who’s earnest when he claims he believes it’s the government’s responsibility to protect and idealize his status in order to differentiate it from others’ statuses. And this absolutely means, it’s the government’s responsibility to prohibit and delegitimize the statuses that challenge the authority and righteousness of his.

In this way, Mitt Romney is not at all different from Michele Bachmann. Tim Pawlenty is jealous.

Ask a conservative what he means when he says Entitlement.

I wonder if the American right wing has any idea what they mean by entitlements.

I don’t think they understand what happens if we continue to strip the substance from social security, medicare and medicaid (among all the other “entitlement” programs.) Who is going to take care of the costs the elderly, sick and unemployed create when the government ceases to provide money for them to spend on necessary services? Their families and closest friends will bear the responsibility. In other words, we’ll create another problem: younger Americans will have less money to save for their own future retirements, less money to spend on housing and home improvement, less money to spend on travel and in cafes and restaurants, less money to spend on automobiles, less money to spend on textiles like clothing.

The Republicans should be a little more honest. Entitlement spending is a distraction. American conservatives and capitalist Libertarians want to shift the burden to individual tax payers from the government. So the tax is never really lessened because the costs are actually still there. But these costs we argue about cost less for the wealthy and more for the poor. That’s a fact.

Conservatives only have two ideas: reduce taxes and shrink government. When you reduce taxes you decrease spending on welfare and infrastructure without reducing the demand for either. Who, then, must bear the burden of the cost for both?

This is where conservative policy fails to think, purposefully misleads and is stupid and unproductive. Liberal policy is not much better, but liberals are never going to dismantle social welfare under the guise of creating greater freedom.